Suffering Rebellion: Irish Gothic Fiction, 1799–1830

Abstract

Towards the end of John Banim’s novel, The Boyne Water (1826), Grace Nowlan recalls how she witnessed her lover and child being burnt alive by her own brothers: ‘I heard the little cries of my child — the hissing of flesh and the crackling of bones, until my hoarse shrieks died away in mute madness, and hell — real and eternal hell was round me, and I thought it was my doom and punishment to see, and hear, and suf- fer without a tear or groan’.² She does not, however, continue to suffer in silence. Seemingly driven insane by this horrific sight, her screech becomes a leitmotif of the story, heard whenever something particularly ghastly or dramatic occurs to the two families — the Protestant Evelyns and the Catholic M’ Donne lis — at the heart of the novel. Grace’s per- sonal trauma ultimately manifests itself as a ‘mute madness’, but the trauma of others induces a gothic screech. In Irish gothic, the appropri- ate response to one’s own suffering and guilt is silence. For most of the novel, Grace Nowlan is known only as ‘Onagh of the cavern’, a mys- terious Sibyl who plays a prominent role in imbuing The Boyne Water with a supernatural and gothic atmosphere. Abandoned by her lover, Donald M’Donnell, and then punished by her own brothers, Nowlan vows revenge on the remaining M’Donnell family by frustrating their attempts to marry.

A storm without doors is, after all, better than a storm within; without we have something to struggle with, within we have only to suffer.¹