Speranza and the Limits of Literary Nationalism

Speranza and the Limits of Literary Nationalism Karen Steele (bio) over the long, seemingly interminable Decade of Centenaries, Irish feminists have persistently noted the exclusions and disparities in the way the Irish nation remembers its past. From #WakingTheFeminists, which sounded the alarm about Fiach Mac Conghail's Abbey Theatre centenary program and evolved into a public forum on gender imbalances in contemporary Irish theater, to the All Island Commemoration Network, which assembled academic feminists to confront and redress the gender inequalities of the original Decade of Centenaries commemoration program, the last few years have witnessed welcome interpolations, corrections, and complications about the meaning of Ireland's revolutionary years. And yet, as Oona Frawley, founder of the All Island Commemoration Network, has recently observed, "The Irish mnemonic context has long been marked by 'oblivious remembering'—a form of remembrance that lacks awareness of or dismisses the systemic biases present in its institutional and/or official approaches to the past."1 This "oblivious remembering" extends well beyond public history. For example, in an overview to "Women and Literary Nationalism" in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Antoinette Quinn reclaims women's nationalist writings as art, salvaging from the dustbin of literary history many influential if forgotten feminine bards of Ireland. As Quinn offers an incisive theory for the erasure of female literary nationalists from the Irish canon, however, she also inadvertently diminishes the merit of this body of work that she has only just recovered when she describes women's nationalist [End Page 35] writings as "a continuing and esteemed female presence in nationalist literature rather than a tradition" (emphasis added).2 As an intervention in the "oblivious remembering" of Irish women's nationalist writings, this article advances an alternative model: a genealogy of women's engagement with nationalist journalism. Tracing this genealogy allows us to understand the remarkable growth of Irish women's cultural achievement and political agency in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mary O'Dowd has observed that "women journalists played a key role in the development of Irish public discourse in the modern period."3 Less well understood is the way that this public discourse, especially when articulated in nationalist journalism, helped shape the development of Irish women's cultural production. These women writers—poets, essayists, dramatists, polemicists—used the nationalist press to make influential and lasting contributions to cultural nationalism. Although some of this writing, such as the poetry by Mary, Eva, and Speranza of the Nation, was more often characterized by the kind of work lamented by Eavan Boland as "a fusion of the national and the feminine which seemed to simplify both," the growing visibility and celebrity of such women opened up new avenues for women writers to explore both in literary artistry and in political engagement with the state.4 While Irish nationalism has proved to be notoriously recalcitrant about the challenges of gender equality, the nationalist press was a surprisingly receptive venue for women writers in the nineteenth century. If women writers rarely advanced the cause of woman in the way that they advanced the cause of the nation, the nationalist press nevertheless proved to be a generative space for women to develop their literary and political skills. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women such as Mary Kelly ("Eva"), Ellen Mary Downing ("Mary"), Jane Elgee ("Speranza"), Olivia Knight ("Thomasine"), Elizabeth Willoughby Treacy ("Finola"), Ellen O'Leary ("Eily"), Fanny Parnell ("Aleria"), Rose Kavanagh, Maud Gonne, Alice Milligan ("Iris Olkyrn"), Anna Johnston ("Ethna Carbery"), Constance Markievicz, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Helena Molony, and many others used the nationalist press as a primary textual location in which to articulate and refine an explicitly feminine and, later, feminist engagement with the nation. As Jane Elgee (then writing as [End Page 36] Lady Wilde) later explained, "Nationality was certainly the first awakener of any mental power of genius within me."5 Several decades later, we can trace a reversal of influence, when feminism had a sufficiently developed foundation that would inspire a new generation, exemplified by women such as Constance Markievicz, to commit to an active engagement in the militant struggle for an Irish socialist republic. The suffrage press afforded her...