Sex, Gender and the Death Penalty in James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the 1916 Generation

Ebury, Katherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_6

Katherine Ebury³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights ((PSLCHR))

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Abstract

This chapter facilitates a dialogue about gender, sexuality and the death penalty theorised through psychoanalytic writing on masochism and evidenced through letters and poems produced by participants in the Rising and by involved Irish modernist authors such as James Joyce and W. B. Yeats. Through consideration of nationalist concepts of blood sacrifice and Catholic Christ-like iconography, Yeats’s theory of a ‘vertigo of self-sacrifice’ and gendered ideas of women’s fidelity to their executed men beyond the death sentence, the chapter assesses representations of the death penalty as a source of masochistic pleasure in the context of Irish national struggle. A coda highlights key aspects of the changing role of the death penalty through the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War and as far as the Emergency (the Irish name for World War II).

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Notes

1.
In the aftermath of Casement’s death sentence, his diaries were copied and shared with prominent people in England, Ireland and the US to discourage them from linking their names to his reprieve campaign. The authenticity of the diaries was challenged in the 1930s, but they are now accepted to be genuine. They are best read alongside his ‘White Diaries’, a more public record of his political activities: Roger Casement’s Diaries 1910: The Black and the White, ed. by Roger Sawyer, London: Pimlico, 1997. For an excellent reading of Casement, nationalist heroism and contemporary representations of Irish American gay and lesbian identities, see Kathryn Conrad, ‘Queer Treasons: Homosexuality and Irish National Identity’, Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2001): 124–137. For an understanding of Casement’s legacy within and beyond modernism, see Lucy McDiarmid ‘The Afterlife of Roger Casement’, The Irish Art of Controversy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005, and Alison Garden The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.
2.
Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers et al. Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–1953, REPORT, Presented to Parliament by Command of Her Majesty September 1953 (also known as Gowers Commission Report), London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1953, paragraph 18, page 5.
3.
Gavan Duffy, who defended Casement, summarised in the autumn the legal controversies involved in in-camera trials in an October 1916 letter which aimed to prevent any more executions and preserve the rights of those imprisoned and interned (George Gavan Duffy, ‘Letter from George Gavan Duffy to Messrs Corrigan & Corrigan, 4th October 1916’ Letters of 1916 (Schreibman, Susan, Ed.) Maynooth University: 2016. Website. [Accessed 19th June 2018]).
4.
For example, during a House of Lords debate, Lord Charnwood, though supportive of the government’s response to the Rising, argued against the secrecy of these trials and executions (‘THE SINN FEIN REBELLION’, House of Lords Debate 11th May 1916 Vol. 21 cc1002–36 (1014)).
5.
See National Archives, Courts Martial Proceedings, for example, WO 71/350 (Macbride , John. Offence: Armed Rebellion), WO71/345, (Pearse, P. H., Offence: Armed Rebellion) or WO71/349 (Plunkett , Joseph. Offence: Armed Rebellion). Hansard gives the figures of those punished in the immediate aftermath of the Rising as 14 executed, 2 sentenced to death but not executed, 73 sentenced to penal servitude, 6 imprisoned with hard labour, 1706 deported/interned (‘NUMBER OF EXECUTIONS’, House of Commons Debate 11th May 1916 Vol. 82 cc886–7).
6.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX, trans. by Strachey et. al, London: Vintage, 2001: 159–172 (170).
7.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1929]), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XXI (1927–1931), trans. by Strachey et. al, London: Hogarth/Vintage, 2001: 59–148 (119).
8.
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 121.
9.
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 136.
10.
Freud, ‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XXI (1927–1931), London: Hogarth/Vintage, 2001: 175–196 (178).
11.
Reik and Freud, ‘View on Capital Punishment’ (1926), in The Compulsion to Confess, New York: Grove Press, 1961: 469–474. Freud would include an exchange of letters with Reik about the essay in subsequent editions of ‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’.
12.
Lucy McDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2015, 91.
13.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland 2nd edn, London 1974, 247. For a broader summary of the historiography of Irish political violence, see Ian McBride, ‘The Shadow of the Gunman: Irish Historians and the IRA’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (2011): 686–710. For a literary studies examining similar texts and contexts to this chapter, see Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, as well as Sarah Cole, ‘Cyclical Violence: The Irish Insurrection and the Limits of Enchantment’, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012: 131–197.
14.
R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923, London: Penguin, 2015, iv.
15.
Maureen Hawkins, ‘The Dramatic Treatment of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran’, Women in Irish Legend, Life and Literature ed. by S. F. Gallagher, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983: 125–137 (130).
16.
Tice L. Miller, Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007, 88.
17.
Dion Boucicault, ‘Robert Emmet’ (1884), Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault, ed. by Colin Smythe, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987, Act IV: Scene II, 387–388.
18.
Boucicault, Robert Emmet, Act IV: Last Tableau, 396–397.
19.
Hawkins, ‘The Dramatic Treatment of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran’, 128. See Deirdre McFeely who has recently argued that this play is too violent and nihilistic for Boucicault to have had a substantial role in the authorship (Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 169–172).
20.
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume II ed. by Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon/trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 67.
21.
Foster, Vivid Faces, 135–136.
22.
David Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty in Britain and Ireland, 1939–1990’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 54 (2015): 703–722 (704).
23.
Doyle, ‘Republicans’, 705.
24.
Caitriona Kennedy, ‘The Names that Stilled Her Childish Play: The Women of 1916 and ‘98’, Conference of Irish Historians in Britain, website, n.pag. [Accessed 13th June 2018].
25.
Casement, ‘The Prisoner’s Speech’, The Trial of Sir Roger Casement (ed. by George H. Knott) Edinburgh and London: William Hodge & Company, 1917, 205.
26.
Casement, ‘The Prisoner’s Speech’, 198.
27.
Casement, ‘The Prisoner’s Speech’, 204.
28.
As Derrida reminds us that even within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) ‘the right to life, liberty, and security of the person’ allowed the death penalty to sit alongside it. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume I (trans. by Peggy Kamuf) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 81.
29.
Garden, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 89.
30.
Michael G. Cronin, ‘Pain, Pleasure and Revolution: The Body in Roger Casement’s Writings’, The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture ed. by Fionnuala Dillane, Naomi McAreavey and Emilie Pine, Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2016: 135–148 (142). See also Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Remembering Pleasure and Pain: Roger Casement’s Diaries’, Perversions 2 (1994): 4–22.
31.
Lucy McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy, Ithaca and London: Cornell, 2005, 175.
32.
McDiarmid, Irish Art, 176–178.
33.
W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Allan Wade, New York: Macmillan, 1955, 870.
34.
Kathryn Conrad, ‘Foreign Bodies: Representations of Homosexuality and the Irish Body Politic’, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, 21–63 (29).
35.
See National Archives, HO 144/1637/311643/141 for details of this prurient extra post-mortem conducted by Dr Percy R. Mander (Medical Officer of Pentonville) for Sir Herbert Smalley (Medical Commissioner of Prisons) and kept thereafter in Home Office files.
36.
Susan de Sola Rodstein, ‘Back to 1904: Joyce, Ireland and Nationalism’, Joyce: Feminism, Postcolonialism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998: 145–186 (148).
37.
Tracey Schwartze ‘“Fabled by the Daughters of Memory”: Roger Casement, James Joyce and the Irish Nationalist Hero’, Memory Ireland Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory ed. by Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014: 79–94 (92).
38.
Garden, ‘“Piously forged palimpsests” and the “pelagiast pen”: Casement and Finnegans Wake’, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement: 136–145.
39.
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, London: The Bodley Head, 2002, 12.1542–1550.
40.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1481–1492.
41.
Patrick R. Mullen The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 111.
42.
Richard Robert Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, London: The Catholic Publishing and Bookselling Company Limited, 1860, 455.
43.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.1111–1117.
44.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.1283–1294.
45.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.454–501.
46.
Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume II, 94.
47.
R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 46.
48.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 46.
49.
Danielle Quinodoz, ‘Chapter 11: Vertigo in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein’, Emotional Vertigo: Between Anxiety and Pleasure, London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 136–151 (137).
50.
See John M. Hoberman, ‘Kierkegaard on Vertigo’, International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987: 185–208.
51.
Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War, London: Routledge, 2003, 578.
52.
McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 578.
53.
The National Archives, HO 144/1636/311643/45.
54.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, note 28, 683.
55.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 47, 49.
56.
Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition ed. by Richard Finneran, New York: Scribner, 1997: 182–184 (183).
57.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 63.
58.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 63.
59.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, 63.
60.
Sarah Cole, ‘Cyclical Violence: The Irish Insurrection and the Limits of Enchantment’, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012: 131–197 (145).
61.
Joseph Plunkett, The Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett, ed. by Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1916, 62.
62.
Cole, ‘Cyclical Violence’, 145.
63.
Plunkett, The Poems, 59.
64.
Joseph Plunkett’s sister wrote in her memoirs that she had witnessed Grace experience a miscarriage (McDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution, 127–129).
65.
Yeats, ‘The Rose Tree’, The Poems, 185.
66.
R. R. Madden The life and times of Robert Emmet, Esq., Dublin: James Duffy, 1847, 269–270 and Thomas Sherlock, Robert Emmet: The Story of His Life and Death, Dublin: T.D. Sullivan, 1878, 28–29.
67.
Madden, The life and times of Robert Emmet, Esq 269–270.
68.
H. C. Mangan, Robert Emmet: A History Play in Three Acts, Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1904.
69.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.658–669.
70.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1156–1164.
71.
For a broader focus on Joyce’s specific investments in betrayal, see James Fraser, Joyce and Betrayal, Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2016. For a response to the question of the Blooms’ marriage plot, see Peter Kuch, Irish Divorce/Joyce’s Ulysses, Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2017.
72.
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume II: The Plays, New York: Scribner, 2001: 307–316 (314).
73.
Claire Nally, Envisioning Ireland: W.B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism, Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010, 209.
74.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.676.
75.
Joyce, Ulysses, 15.1137–1174.
76.
McDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution, 2015.
77.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.658–669.
78.
Herbert O. Mackey, The Life and Times of Roger Casement, Dublin: C.J. Fallon, 1954, 134.
79.
Mackey, The Life and Times, 135.
80.
The National Archives, HO 144/1636/311643/7A.
81.
Robert Emmet, ‘Letter to Sarah Curran’, Women of ’Ninety-Eight ed. by Helena Walsh Concannon, Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1919, 273.
82.
Roger Casement. ‘Letter from Roger Casement to Nina Casement, 25th July 1916’ Letters of 1916, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Maynooth University, 2016. Website. [Accessed 20th June 2018].
83.
The National Archives, HO 144/1637/311643/182.
84.
Anne Clare, Unlikely Rebels: The Gifford Girls and the Fight for Irish Freedom, Cork: Mercier Press, 2011, 145.
85.
Joseph Plunkett, ‘Letter by Plunkett to his fiancé Grace Gifford’, National Library of Ireland, NLI.MS.20.858.
86.
Thomas MacDonagh, ‘Typescript of last letter and will of Thomas MacDonagh, 2nd May 1916’, Letters of 1916, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Susan, Maynooth University, 2016. Website. n.pag. [Accessed 20th July 2018].
87.
MacDonagh, ‘Typescript of last letter and will of Thomas MacDonagh, 2nd May 1916’, n.pag.
88.
MacDonagh, ‘Typescript of last letter and will of Thomas MacDonagh, 2nd May 1916’, n.pag. Pearse, ‘Letter from Patrick Pearse to his mother Margaret Pearse, 3 May 1916’ Letters of 1916, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Maynooth University, 2016. Website. [Accessed 19th June 2018]. My italics.
89.
Seán Mac Diarmada, ‘Letter from Seán Mac Diarmada to John Daly, 10th May 1916’, Letters of 1916, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Maynooth University, 2016. Website. [Accessed 19th June 2018].
90.
J.J. Heuston. ‘Letter from J.J. Heuston to Mr. E. Walsh, 7th May 1916’, Letters of 1916, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Susan, Maynooth University, 2016. Website. [Accessed 19th June 2018].
91.
Michael Mallin, ‘Appendix 1: Michael Mallin’s last letter to his wife Agnes, Kilmainham Gaol, 7th May 1916’, Michael Mallin: 16 Lives ed. by Brian Hughes, Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2013, 231.
92.
Mallin, ‘Appendix 1: Michael Mallin’s last letter’, 232.
93.
The Catholic Bulletin Vol. VI, No. VII (July 1916) 399 and Vol. VI, No. XII (Dec. 1916) 700.
94.
Mallin, ‘Appendix 1: Michael Mallin’s last letter’, 231.
95.
Mallin, ‘Appendix 1: Michael Mallin’s last letter’, 233.
96.
Piaras F. Mac Lochlainn, Last Words: Letters and Statements of the Leaders Executed after the Rising at Easter 1916, Dublin: Stationery Office, 1990.
97.
Brian Hughes, Michael Mallin: 16 Lives, Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2013, 184–185.
98.
Amber Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, New York: New York University Press, 2014, 103.
99.
Anon. ‘CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN IRELAND: Strong Opposition’, The Manchester Guardian May 7, 1925, 9, my italics.
100.
Yeats, ‘Ireland 1921–1931’ The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews, ed, by Colton Johnson, New York: Scribner, 2000, 487.
101.
Gavin Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class and Conflict, Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2015, 5–6.
102.
David Doyle and Ian O’Donnell, ‘The Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland’, The Journal of Legal History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012): 65–91 (68).
103.
Doyle and O’Donnell, ‘The Death Penalty’, 68.
104.
Anon. ‘CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN IRELAND’, 9.

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Katherine Ebury

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Ebury, K. (2021). Sex, Gender and the Death Penalty in James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the 1916 Generation. In: Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_6

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