Abstract
The Rose of Innisfree boat trip around the famed isle of W. B. Yeats’s poetry departs from directly outside Parke’s Castle in Co. Leitrim. As the boat circles Lough Gill, which straddles the Sligo and Leitrim border, the guide George narrates the tour, punctuated by recitations of Yeats’s poetry and George’s own thoughts about the atrocities committed on the surrounding landscape by the Celtic Tiger architectural boom.1 The one exception to these twin aims is a recording of Thomas Moore’s “The Song of O’Ruark” that plays over the sound system as the boat departs from the shores of Parke’s Castle, affording passengers a panoramic view of the flat-topped mountain known as O’Rourke’s Table. The views of O’Rourke’s Table, the Lake Isle of Innisfree, Lough Gill, Parke’s Castle and St. Angela’s College reveal a landscape of multiple literary and historical intersections.2 Now a Heritage Ireland site, the seventeenth century Parke’s Castle is built upon an earlier sixteenth century holding of the O’Rourkes, the structure of which was uncovered in excavations in the 1970s.3 Though both miles and centuries divide Parke’s Castle from the actual site from which Dervorgilla was abducted, the playing of Moore’s ballad accomplishes a kind of poetic sleight of hand for the boat passengers, transposing Parke’s Castle in place of the medieval abduction site.
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Notes
Cf. T. B. Barry, The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland (New York: Routledge, 1988) 189.
Cambrensis writes that O’Rourke leaves his wife “in a certain island of Meath.” Giraldus Cambrensis, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis: Containing the Topography ofIreland, and the History of the Conquest of Ireland, trans. Thomas Forester (London: George Bell and Sons, 1905) 184. The Song ofDermot and the Earl appears to suggest that Dervorgilla arranges her abduction from some secret place, telling Diarmuid by letter “Where she should be in concealment, / That he might freely carry her off.” Orpen, The Song of Dermot and the Earl (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1892) 7. The Annals of the Kingdom ofIreland records only that Dervorgilla was “brought away” but does not indicate from where she was taken. John O’Donovan, ed., Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, 2nd ed., vol. II (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., 1856) 1103. In Gibson’s Dearforgil, Dervorgilla is imprisoned in a castle on an island of Loch Ri. Charles B. Gibson, Dearforgil (London: J. F. Hope, 1857) 92. Atkinson writes of Dervorgilla as “safely secluded in the wild fastness of Breffny” at the time of her abduction but also refers to O’Rourke’s discovery of her abduction upon his return to his castle at Dromahair. Sarah Atkinson, Essays (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1896) 368.
Cf. “Graveyards and Bones: The Irish Grotesque” in William Williams, Tourism, Landscape and the Irish Character (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) 46–47. For a recent and fascinating example of the power of narrative to transform objects through making them meaningful, see Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, eds., Significant Objects: A Literary and Economic Experiment (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012).
“Perhaps I ought to have written nothing but these short comedies, but desire for experiment is like fire in the blood, and I had had from the beginning a vision of historical plays being sent by us through all the counties of Ireland. For to have real success and to come into the life of the country, one must touch a real and eternal emotion, and history comes only next to religion in the country.” Lady Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965) 91.
Cf. Judith Hill, “Finding a Voice: Augusta Gregory, Raftery, and Cultural Nationalism, 1899–1900,” Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies 34.1 (2004).
Writing in 1890, Justin McCarthy invoked both Helen of Troy and Shakespeare to contextualize the damage done by Dervorgilla, lifting extensively from the language of Moore’s ballad: “The whole story of Irish subjugation and its seven centuries of successive struggles begins with the carrying-off of Dervorgilla, wife of Tiernan O’Rorke, of Brefny, by a dissolute, brutal giant of some sixty years old—Dermot Macmurrough, King of Leinster …. But Helen was not more fatal to the Greeks and Easterns than Dervorgilla, Erin’s Helen, proved to the neighboring islands that lie along the Irish Sea. Through ages of bondage and slaughter her country has indeed bled for her shame. There is a grim ironic mockery in the thought that two nations have been set for centuries in the bitterest hatred by the loves of a lustful savage and an unfaithful wife. One might well paraphrase the words of Shakespeare’s Diomed in Troilus and Cressida, and say that ‘for every false drop in her bawdy veins an English life hath sunk; for every scruple of her contaminated carrion weight an Irishman been slain.” Justin Huntly McCarthy, An Outline of Irish History: From the Earliest Times to the PresentDay (New York: United States Book Co., successors to J. W. Lovell Co., 1890) 24.
This reference to weaving may foreshadow Dervorgilla’s silencing by forces beyond her control. In literary imaginations of Dervorgilla, she regularly works on tapestries: “Weaving regularly appears in ancient literature as a form of feminine writing substituting for the voice that has been silenced.” Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) 5. Alternately, we might consider here Helen of Troy’s tapestry as well as Penelope’s tapestry, which she weaves and unweaves to stall her suitors. Following her rape and mutilation by Tereus, Philomena weaves her story into a tapestry which she then sends to her sister.
Given the unquiet dreams suffered by Yeats’s dead, the incorporation into the Abbey Theatre of a section of a former morgue is particularly fitting. Owen Dudley Edwards, ed., Conor Cruise 0’ Brien Introduces Ireland (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1969) 163. Nicknamed the “Dear Old Morgue,” the space was rumored to be haunted. Cf. J. S. Post, “The Dear Old Morgue,” The Capuchin Annual (1964). In his 1907 theatre journal, Joseph Holloway records that in a production of “Riders to the Sea,” “a label bearing the legend, ‘National Theatre Co.’ [was] pasted on the side of the shaft of the stretcher on which the body of ‘Bartley’ was borne.” John P. Harrington, ed., Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, 2nd ed. (New York: A Norton Critical Edition, 2009) 457.
Neil Mann notes several Yeats citations of Cambrensis in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and shows that Yeats was citing from Cambrensis in 1897 (the same year that The SecretRose was published) and in 1914 in a note on Tir na nOg for Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, and William H. O’Donnell, Later Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994) 278. In addition, there has been ongoing scholarly debate over the character of Gyraldus in Yeats’s A Vision, who Richard Ellmann identifies as Giraldus Cambrensis. Ellmann notes that “in January 1918 Yeats asked Edmund Dulac to cut a medieval-looking woodcut of Giraldus Cambrensis, which would really be a portrait of Yeats, and later used this as a frontispiece for A Vision.” Richard Ellmann, Yeats, the Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan Co., 1948) 237.
Cf. Wayne Chapman, The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
The W.B. Yeats Papers at Emory University contain an edition of Two Plays for Dancers (1919) with textual revisions that show Yeats striking out the following sentence and writing the word “Omit” over it: “P.S. That I might write ‘The Dreaming of the Bones,’ Mr. W.A. Henderson with great kindness wrote out for me all historical allusions to Dervorgilla.” W.B. Yeats Papers, MSS 600, Box 1:56. In the July 1920 preface to his Four Plays for Dancers, W. B. Yeats acknowledged his indebtedness to W. A. Henderson for providing the historical context for The Dreaming of the Bones but sublimates it to his thanks to Mr. Edmund Dulac teaching him about the beauty of the mask: “That I might write The Dreaming of the Bones Mr. W. A. Henderson with great kindness wrote out for me all historical allusions to ‘Dervorgilla;’ but neither that nor any of these plays could have existed if Mr. Edmund Dulac had not taught me the value and beauty of the mask and rediscovered how to design and make it.” W. B. Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921) vii.
An examination of Henderson’s scrapbooks reveals the prevalence of dating the English colonial presence in Ireland to the twelfth century. A clipping on the O’Rourke coat of arms contains the following example of Zerubavel’s “emplotment”: “It was upon the elopement of Tighearnan Ua Ruarc’s wife in the 12th century that the English inaugurated that policy of plundering this country which has lasted, with few interruptions, from 1169–1910.” Other clippings include an image of Daniel Maclise’s The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife accompanied by an analysis of Maclise’s work, articles that contextualize historic Irish ruins such as the Abbey at Ferns founded by Diarmuid Mac Murrough and the Abbey at Mellifont, and a number of critiques of Cambrensis as a hater of women and for his influence on the English perception of Ireland.
Cf. B. Mac Carthy, ed., Annals of Ulster, vol. II: AD 1057–1131: 1155–1378 (Dublin: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Alex. Thom and Co., 1893) 143.
Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn: The History ofIreland from the Earliest Period to the English Invasion, trans. John O’Mahony (New York: P. M. Haverty, 1857) 613–14.
John O’Donovan, ed., Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters from the Earliest Period to 1616 1103–04.
John O’Donovan, ed., Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, 2nd ed., vol. III (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., 1856) 97.
William Hennessy, ed., The Annals ofLoch Ce. A Chronicle ofIrish Affairs from AD 1014 to AD 1590, vol. I (London: Longman and Co., 1871) 145.
For the most thorough treatment of this pattern in Yeats and Gregory’s relationship, see Deirdre Toomey, Yeats and Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).
Cf. Benedict Anderson’s “Memory and Forgetting” for more on the political project of “speaking for” the dead, in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2002). In the Irish context, see Kevin Whelan, “The Memories of ‘The Dead,”’ The Yale Journal of Criticism 15.1 (2002). Also Seamus Deane’s “Dead Ends” in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Cf. Christopher Eagle, “‘Our Day at Triv and Quad’: John Ruskin and the Liberal Arts in Finnegans Wake II.2.” James Joyce Quarterly 46.2 (Winter 2009): 321–40.
Cf. José Carlos Redondo Olmedilla, “The Modern Middle Ages in James Joyce: From Medieval Bestiaries to the United Field in Ulysses.” Papers on Joyce 9 (2003): 69–79.
Cf. Roy Benjamin, “Creative Destruction in Finnegans Wake: The Rise and Fall of the Modern City.” Journal of Modern Literature 30.2 (Winter 2007): 139–50.
Cf. Fran O’Rourke, “Joyce’s Early Aesthetic.” Journal of Modern Literature 34.3 (Winter 2011): 97–120. Coral A. Norwood, “Dante in Dubliners: The Theme of Romantic Hopelessness.” In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 12(1–2) (Mar-Sept 2003): 193–99. Sara Sullam, “°Inspiring Dante: The Reasons of Rhyme in Ulysses.” Papers on Joyce 9 (2003): 59–67. Lucia Boldrini, “Ex Sterco Dantis: Dante’s Post-Babelian Linguistics in the Wake.” James Joyce and the Difference ofLanguage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 180–94. Jennifer Margaret Fraser, Rite ofPassage in the Narratives ofDante and Joyce (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002). Gian Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). Gian Balsamo, Rituals ofLiterature: Joyce, Dante, Aquinas, and the Tradition of Christian Epics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004). Gian Balsamo, “The Necropolitan Journey: Dante’s Negative Poetics in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead.”‘James Joyce Quarterly 40.4 (Summer 2003): 763–81. James Robinson, “Uneasy Orthodoxy: The Jesuits, the Risorgimento and the Contexts of Joyce’s First Readings of Dante.” Anglia: Zeitschrift f’ur Englische Philologie 130.1 (2012): 34–53.
Cf. Vern Lindquist, “Sir Edward Sullivan’s Book ofKells and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.” Eire-Ireland: A Journal oflrish Studies 27.4 (Winter 1992): 78–90. Sean V. Golden, “The Quoniam Page from the Book of Kells.” A Wake Newslitter: Studies in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake 11 (1974): 85–86. See also Guillemette Bolen’s essay in Lucia Boldrini, ed., European Joyce Studies 13: Medieval Joyce (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002).
For a more extensive analysis of how this medieval narrative interpolates “The Boarding House” in Dubliners, cf. Julieann Veronica Ulin, “Fluid Boarders and Naughty Girls: Music, Domesticity and Nation in Joyce’s Boarding Houses.” James Joyce Quarterly 44.2 (2007): 263–91.
Cf. O’Brien’s chapter on housing in Joseph V. O’Brien, Dear Dirty Dublin: A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Cf. Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Irish Academic Press, 1998).
Cf. Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1904 (MDCCCCIV): 686–87. Thom’s lists the number of tenements of one room as well as the number of people living in a single room for each province. In Munster in 1901, of 193,804 inhabited houses, 17,141 were of first class, 120,170 were second class, 53,191 were third-class dwellings, and 3,302 were of the lowest class, consisting of mud cabins or houses built of perishable material with only one room and window.
Cf. Catherine Hall on the separation of home and public, in which she treats the idea of the ideal home as a haven from the hostile world outside. “The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology,” in Sandra Burman’s Fit Work for Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
“Take Yeats, for example, he is a true mediaevalist with his love of magic, his incantations and his belief in signs and symbols, and his later bawdiness. Ulysses also is Mediaeval but in a more realistic way, and so you will find that the whole trend of modern thought is going in that direction, for as it is I can see there is going to be another age of extremes, of ideologies, of persecutions, of excesses which will be political perhaps instead of religious, though the religious may reappear as part of the political, and in this new atmosphere you will find the old way of writing and thinking will disappear, is fast disappearing in fact, and Ulysses is one of the books which has hastened that change” (Power Conversations with James Joyce 93).
The years chosen have led to critical speculation, and critics have noted that the rape of the Abbess of Kildare by Diarmuid Mac Murrough’s forces occurs in 1132. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Books, 1999) 391.
Murphy notes that The Annals of Clonmacnoise has numerous pages missing from being burned by the Danes or used as measuring strips by tailors. Denis Murphy, ed., The Annals of Clonmacnoise from the Creation to AD 1408 (Dublin: University Press, 1896) vii. The Annals of Loch Ce contains a thirtytwo year gap from 1138 to 1170. Hennessy, ed., The Annals of Loch Ce. A Chronicle of Irish Affairs from AD 1014 to AD 1590 140–41.
In his use of smell here to connect the remote past with the present reader of “the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds” (FW 13), we might recall his conversation with Power about the temporal divisions between the modern and the medieval in which Joyce remarked that “The mediaeval, in my opinion, had greater emotional fecundity than classicism, which is the art of the gentleman, and is now as out-of-date as gentlemen are, classicism in which the scents are only sweet, he added, but I have preferred other smells.” Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (The Lilliput Press, 1974) 95.
Arthur Power recalls Joyce recommending the study of the Book ofKells as a model for his own work: “You can compare much of my work to the intricate design of its illuminations, and I have pored over its workmanship for hours at a time in Dublin, in Trieste, in Rome, in Geneva—wherever I have been, and I have always got inspiration from it.” Ulick O’Connor, The Joyce We Knew (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967) 106. Power also recalls Joyce speaking of a church which reminded him of his own work and which led him to believe that his work would be better understood in an earlier period: “There is an old church I know of down near Les Halles, a black foliated building with flying buttresses spread out like the legs of a spider, and as you walk past it you see the huge cobwebs hanging in its crevices, and more than anything else I know of it reminds me of my own writings, so that I feel that if I had lived in the fourteenth or fifteenth century I should have been much more appreciated.” Power Conversations with James Joyce 92. Cf. O’Connor The Joyce We Knew 105.
Roy Benjamin’s description of Dublin as a simultaneously medieval and modern city and Finnegans Wake as likewise diachronic in its planning and in its “streets” is well worth considering with respect to Joyce’s entire oeuvre: “When the Wake follows a path ‘by my sevendialled changing charties’ (FW 551.32) it is implied that there can be a coexistence of the modern ‘strate that was called strete’ (110.33–4) and the pre-modern ‘straat that is called corsksrewed’ (491.9–10). Joyce was able to accommodate both aspects. His intermediate position between ‘medieval man, nostalgic for an ordered world of clear signs and the modern man, seeking a new habitat’ allowed him to inhabit both the closed world of the medieval square and the open world of modern thoroughfare. The Wake itself is a great thoroughfare open to traffic of every description.” Roy Benjamin, “Creative Destruction in Finnegans Wake: The Rise and Fall of the Modern City,” Journal of Modern Literature 30.2 (2007): 145. The internal quote comes from Umberto Eco, TheAesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 3.
In the catalogue of love, Joyce returns to this story: “Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor” (Ulysses 12.1499).
“Mrs. Mooney’s nickname The Madam makes explicit the continuities of her various businesses. The boarding house is analogous to the bordello and the butcher shop because in each a profit is made out of the body and its necessities: the home is turned into a business, the sexual body is turned into a business, the animal body is turned into a business, and shelter, sex, and food are transformed from natural necessities into commodities. But Mrs. Mooney clearly carries on more than one business at a time, and if her boarding house is a prix fixe affair (‘fifteen shillings a week for board and lodgings [beer or stout at dinner excluded]’), she carries on, like her son, a little gambling on the side.” Margot Norris, Suspicious Readings ofJoyce’s Dubliners (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) 101. See also Bruce A. Rosenberg’s treatment of “poor Bob Doran” in “The Crucifixion in ‘The Boarding House” and Hugh Kenner’s exploration of the prostitution angle in Dublin’s Joyce (London: 1955).
Cf. Mary Butler’s “Womanhood and Nationhood” series in United Irishman January 3, 1903: 6; January 17, 1903: 6; January 24, 1903: 6; January 31, 1903: 6.
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Ulin, J.V. (2014). Medieval Cycles. In: Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297501_3
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