The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

Abstract

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.

Keywords::

• Henry James
• Act of Union of 1800
• Irish Home Rule
• marriage-as-political-union trope
• “The Modern Warning” (1888 story)
• Scots-Irish/Scotch-Irish
• Scottish independence referendum

Notes

^1. A first draft of this paper emerged from an informal presentation to the Fellows in November 2012 during the year I spent as a Faculty Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI). I would like to thank the other fellows, particularly Chris Clark, and then UCHI Director, Sharon Harris, and the Associate Director, Brendan Kane, for their suggestions. A revised and expanded version of the UCHI presentation was delivered at the Irish Seminar at NUIG (National University of Ireland, Galway) in February 2013, and I would also like to thank the organisers and attendees for their valuable input.

^2. For an example of a text that contributed hugely to this kind of thinking, see Ralph Waldo Emerson'sEnglish Traits, which was published in 1856 and remained influential for decades.

^3. See the implicit conflation of Scots-Irish and English immigrants in Eliot, “Five American Contributions to Civilization,” 445.

^4. Thernstrom, “Irish,” 528, 897.

^5.Doyle, “Scots Irish or Scotch-Irish,” 151–70; Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity; Hale, Making Whiteness.

^6.Fitzpatrick, God's Frontiersmen, 261. During 1912, a crucial year for the anti-Home Rule movement in Belfast, there were mass demonstrations in support of the Ulster cause in American cities with large Scotch-Irish populations such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

^7.Tóibín, “Henry James in Ireland,” 16.

^8. In an assessment of James's fiction published in 1905, Conrad states: “As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences” (see Conrad, “Henry James,” 106).

^9. Both synopses are taken from http://www.henryjames.org.uk/modernw/synop.htm (accessed May 10, 2013).

^10. The Mac Cárthaigh Mór, the senior branch of the MacCarthy dynasty, reigned for centuries as Kings of Desmond, a region corresponding to the current-day counties of Cork and Kerry. Florence MacCarthy (1560–1640) was the last credible claimant to the title of MacCarthy Mór before the title was suppressed by the English crown. MacCarthy's involvement in a major late sixteenth-century rebellion against English rule in Ireland led to his arrest, and he spent the last decades of his life imprisoned in the Tower of London. The offshoot MacCarthys of Muskerry and Carbery waged war on the Norman FitzGeralds, Earls of Desmond. For a full account of the MacCarthy family's complicated relations with the English crown, see MacCarthy, Life and Letters of Florence MacCarthy Reagh.

^11.Reaney, Origin of English Surnames, 237.

^12.MacLysaght, Surnames of Ireland, 110. “The name of two unconnected Norman-Irish families; one of the same stock as the Burkes of Mayo, the other of west Munster whose head was the White Knight.” The White Knight was one of three hereditary knighthoods in Ireland dating from the Norman period.

^13.James, “The Modern Warning,” 393–4.

^14. In terms of class background, the Grice siblings were more likely to have espoused pro-Home Rule sympathies. The United Irish League of America, a pro-Home Rule organisation founded in 1901 by Irish Home Rule leader John Redmond, “attracted members primarily among upper- and middle-class Irish Americans […]” However, Irish-Americans were not always made alert to the various gradations of Irish nationalist sympathies: for instance, Home Rule leaders speaking to Irish-American audiences “deliberately blurred distinctions between home rule and Irish independence […] [making] speeches sufficiently militant to attract a wide spectrum of Irish-American support […]” (Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 541). Of course, it might be argued that the story's failure to elucidate the exact nature of Macarthy's Irish nationalist sympathies reveals the author's indifference as much as it does the protagonist's ignorance.

^15.James, “Some Notes on the Theatre,” 122–6.

^16.Connolly, “Writing the Union,” 180.

^17.Corbett, Allegories of Union, 6.

^18. James, “The Modern Warning,” 386.

^19. Ibid., 398.

^20. Ibid., 403–4.

^21. In post-Union fictions by Irish novelists Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson,

[T]he marriage plot allegorically suggests the ideological need for altering England's historical relation to Ireland: the heroes of both The Absentee (1812) and The Wild Irish Girl (1806) must themselves undergo or undertake some transformative work before they can become fit partners for marital/political Union. (Corbett, Allegories of Union, 4)

^22. Ibid.

^23. Ibid., 5.

^24. James, “The Modern Warning,” 420.

^25. Ibid., 424.

^26.Kaplan, Henry James, 293–4.

^27. Henry James to Grace Norton, February 7, 1886, qtd in Kaplan, Henry James, 294–5.

^28. Quoted in Henry James and Philip Horne, Henry James, 213.

^29. “The Modern Warning” received its final title when it appeared in the collection entitled The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning, published by Macmillan later in 1888.

^30. For an extended discussion of James's deployment of silence, see Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality.

^31. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 535, 545.

^32. Patrick Smyth, “Irish Seem Lost for Words on Scottish Independence,” Irish Times, July 18, 2014, www.irishtimes.com (accessed January 2, 2015).

^33.Daiches, Scotland and the Union, 194; Deuel Pead, “The Honour, Happiness, and Safety of Union,” 15, qtd in Martin, The Mighty Scot, 18.

^34. Nicholas Watt, “Scotland Will Face ‘Painful Divorce’ Says David Cameron in Emotional Speech,” Guardian, September 15, 2014, www.theguardian.com (accessed January 2, 2015).

^35. Lizzie Dearden, “Scottish Independence: ‘We Are Already a Proud Nation’, Gordon Brown Tells Scots in Rousing Pro-Union Speech,” Independent, September 17, 2014, www.independent.co.uk (accessed January 2, 2015).