LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Essay, 1996

Duncan I. Hasell

Literature 5734: Cross Cultural Texts in Dialogue

Dr. Craig White July 25, 1996

The Secret Scourge: Metaphors of Hybridization and Contamination

between the English and the Irish

The history of the relationship between Ireland and England prefigures and predates much of the colonialist and postcolonialist literary theory and figures of today. In fact, in many ways the history of these two nations defines colonialist/postcolonialist thought. The stereotypical Irishman of English Literature possesses many of the characteristics of the archetypal colonial/postcolonial subject: an oral tradition, the distrust of science and rationality in favor the occult and emotion, a reputation for disorderliness, drunkenness, sloth, and savagery. In addition, the feminization and relegation to a childlike/subaltern position of the colonized people by the patriarchal colonizers, the accusation of cannibalism, the question of race, are characteristics of the history of Ireland and England.

However, I realize that making Ireland a stand-in for other postcolonial nations commits yet another act of imperial appropriation. I justify this appropriation in hope of (do not all colonizers have their noble causes?) further exploration of the conflicts or compatibilities rising from a dialogue between these two nations. There are two factors which make Ireland and England unique in their colonial relationship: history and language. The history between the two countries is more than 1000 years. In many countries the cycle of colonization and decolonization occurs in the last 300 years or less, but the Irish seem to be stuck in slow-motion. They were first colonized by the English in the 12th century and declared a "free state" finally in 1923 (although this is still a contentious point). The Irish "free state" then begins some 25 years or more before many of the nations of Africa, the Caribbean, and India gain the status of nationhood. More than any other country, Ireland has had 800 years as a colonial subject and, in the 20th century, at least 25 more years of postcolonial experience. Secorid, for the most part, the language of both the colonizer and the colonized has been the same for many years. This is not to downplay the importance of Gaelic, and I may be betraying an English bias, but I believe that there are enough Irish who speak Gaelic (and too many Irish that do not) that something of importance would be translated into English. I am we'll aware that I have no way of knowing whether this belief is unfounded or not. The issue of a lost language is one with which many postcolonial critics continue to wrestle. Despite this long history and commonality of language, neither country has destroyed or absorbed the culture of the other. Each country has maintained separate identities and values and offers a unique arena in which to investigate writing's mediation of cross-cultural dialogues.

This commonality of language and the length of history between the two nations makes for a rich, indeed somewhat overwhelming, choice of texts and authors. Even individually, Edmund Spenser and William Butler Yeats, the two authors I have chosen, present large bodies of work and are subject to a great deal of critical thought as well. Focusing a close textual analysis on certain portions of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and A view of the present state of Irelande and W. B. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" and expanding the terms Bhabha's concept of "hybridization" (34), I intend to demonstrate how nationalism and myth are reciprocally linked to the repression and feminization of the "other.")

Homi Bhabha defines "hybridization" as:

Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different--a mutation, a hybrid. (34)

The "process of splitting as a condition of subjection" can be thought of as more than a benign separation; this "splitting" is an act of violence. A "hybrid" can be viewed as the contamination of a "purebred", a "half-breed." Combining the violence of "splitting," the sexual contamination implied by "hybridity," with the feminization of colonial subject ) then           are confronted with a figured gender reversal. At the same time it is a "mother culture and its            bastards," we have the rape of the feminine colonial by the masculine colonizers. The point of this is that these role reversals, splits,      and recombinations are also, in a sense, that broad             concept of history or even storytelling and myth. If origin stories tell us about where we are from, then what do they say about where we are going?

The particular threat that the Irish pose for Edmund Spenser is that of cultural pollution. He writes in the opening paragraph of A view that some "secret skourge" (39) may come back into England from Ireland to destroy the English if the Irish are not dealt with properly. Spenser argues in A view that the culture of the Irish has led to the degeneration of those exposed to it. This threat is exemplified by the Anglo-Irish, those early English settlers that had intermarried freely with the native Irish, adopted Irish "traits", especially the language and customs, and therefore ceased to be really English. (Cairns 5)

Spenser is of interest not only because he is a great poet but because, for much of his life, he lived in Ireland. He was there in what would now be considered the bureaucratic or administrative service to the Queen of England and her appointees. Spenser was the son of a tailor, yet through scholarship, he managed to receive a Cambridge education. Although not an aristocrat, his education at Cambridge and the connections he made there were his qualifications for government service. In Spenser's time, poetry was considered more of a gentlemanly hobby than an occupation. Spenser is notable for trying to be one of the first to make it a career and to seek patronage at the Court of Queen Elizabeth.. (Helgerson 6761 Spenser was unhappy in Ireland and wished to join life at Court in London. His situation is analogous to the modem government functionary on assignment in the "sticks" trying everything he can to return to "headquarters." This is not to belittle Spenser's work. The

Faerie Oueene is one of the greatest poems in the English language; but many have noted the "encomiastic" qualities of the poem (Cairns 5). Edward Said, writing about another colonial author, Kipling, has a valid point about literature in general, and if I may paraphrase and substitute Spenser for Kipling:

We are naturally entitled to read the [poem] as belonging to the world's great literature, free to some degree of its encumbering history and circumstances. Yet by the same token, we must not unilaterally abrogate the connections in it, carefully observed by [Spenser], to its contemporary actuality. (38)

The Faerie Queene is an origin myth, told in the genre of Christian allegory. It takes place

in a fantasy landscape, peopled by giants, witches, demons, and angels. It is not readily

grounded in its "contemporary actuality" and this can be read as another type of split. In contrast, A view of the present state of Irelande is extremely grounded in its "contemporary actuality." Spenser lays out the current Irish "customs, laws, and religion" (39) and discusses their origins and uses in current Irish society. Although he is often wrong, sections of A view read like a modern anthropological study. Based on his observations, Spenser (in the form of a dialogue) considers and rejects alternatives until he develops very specific strategies for the successful subjection of the Irish to English rule. He is so specific as to make recommendations for the number of horsemen and infantry required, estimate their cost, and even recommend specific locations and strengths tor the garrisons. In many ways A view is prescient of the cost-benefit analyses produced for the Pentagon during the Vietnam war. It also matches with the same "knowledge and power" motif seen in more recent colonial texts.

At first, it was very difficult to reconcile the split between poet of the FQ with the Machiavellian author of A view. Then I recalled the "report" that Kurtz wrote in The Heartof Darkness for the "International

Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs." (50) Marlow speaks of the report as "soaring," a "magnificent peroration," and a "moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment. "(50) However, Marlow's complaint is its lack of any "practical hints" with the exception of the post cript. This postscript is the only quotation from this text within a text that Marlow/Conrad offers the reader. It is "scrawled evidently much later in an unsteady hand," and reads "Exterminate all the brutes!" (51) Like the split nature of Kurtz's report and its postscript, the FO and A view are two sides of the same coin. What explicit in A view is implicit in the M. The implication here is that great art can have, hidden beneath its surface, subjection and oppression. In order for it to maintain itself as great it must be involved in a violent, if necessary, oppression of the "other."

To make the FO more explicit, the landscape of the poem, at the same time it is Faeryland and the England of ancient myth, it is also Spenser's contemporary Ireland. The open plains, the mountains, the wild and rocky seashore, and the forests, are features more of Ireland in Spenser's time than the already developed English countryside. The first narrative action of the FQ is the Red Cross Knight's encounter with the dragon, allegorically named Error. The knight has been sidetracked form his true mission because he was "full of fire and greedy hardiment." (I.i.14 ) He enters into Error's cave, with sword drawn, to find the dragon: "Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, / But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine / Most loathsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine." (I.i.14) Note that it is ambiguous whether it is e dragon or "womans shape" that is "loathsome," etc. Error, half-woman and half-snake links to Eve and the serpent in the garden of Eden as well as to other classical images. The sexual implications of this scene are obvious. Allegorically, the knight, distracted by lust and pride, is on a mission of sexual conquest. What is not so obvious is that it is a mission of colonial conquest as well. One of the features of Spenser's writing is that the allegory can work on several different themes at the same time. The dragon allegorically stands for Ireland. At one point Error spews on the knight:

Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,

With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,

And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:

Her filthy parbreake [vomit] all the place defildd has." (FQ, lj,20)

The notes to my edition Identify the "bookes and papers" as Catholic anti-Elizabethan propaganda, and the "frogs and toads" as referred to elsewhere as lying agents of the Pope. It would be appropriate for these figures to have their come by way of a dragon allegorically figured as Ireland. Ireland is the most immediate Catholic country to Spenser's experience. At one point in the battle (whose outcome in the knight's favor is never in doubt) the knight is wrapped in the coils of the dragon. Although, Ireland is famous for its lack of snakes, it fits with the allegory that the entwining coils represent the English situation ensnared with the Irish, unable to leave but not seriously threatened.

The passage does not end with the knight finally defeating Error (one cannot defeat error in allegory). The knight severs the head of the dragon and her offspring, the "toades and frogs," return and gorge themselves on their mothers blood until they literally burst. Again, allegorically this works with one of the recommendations of Spenser in A view to let the Irish people fight among themselves until they starve. As in Bhabha, we once again have the mother and her bastard offspring, but his time they represent the colonized through the eyes of the colonizer rather than mother culture. While the act of violence may not be a rape, there is the penetration of the cave, and a good deal of "spewing" and the spilling of blood.

In A view there is an interesting corollary to this story of Error and an early accusation of cannibalism for the Irish, a charge used later on many other colonials. Spenser writes that the

gauls used to drink their enemy's blood and to paint themselves therewith. So            also they write that the olde irishe were wonte And so have I seen some of the    Irishe do but not their enemies but friendes blood as namely at the execution of a notable Traitour at Limericke Called murrogh Obrien I sawe an olde woman which was his foster mother take up his heade whilste he was quartered and             sucked up all the blood running thereout saying that the earth was not worthie             to drinke it and therewith also steped her face, and breste and torne hair Crying and shrieking out moste terrible. (113)

The Irish are so savage they not only drink there enemies' blood, they drink their friends'       blood, and even their offsprings' blood. As in Err ®r/s cavern, we have a severed head, and a             mother and her offspring (bastard v foster?). But look at these reversals and bodily splits; it        is the son who die5not the moth Olere is not just the severed head but the quartered           mother drinks the blood of her offspring. The knight in the cave of Error is a defining story of the hero and his quest. The story of the traitor's execution is a tale of dehumanization of not only the victims but also the victimizers. The drinking of the blood seems almost a noble act when compared to the medieval execution by quartering. We are never told the nature of the treasonous act. The raw emotion this scene develops in just a few lines is very powerful yet the narrator seems so cold.

Jumping ahead, William Butler Yeats wrote the poem "Leda and the Swan" (1924) specifically to thumb his nose at the new censors of the "free" state while he was a Senator in the Irish Parliament. It is one of the great ironies of his life that Yeats, a man who had fought for the establishment of a national identity, a man who had striven to identify and define Irishness, a man who had been called the national poet of Ireland and who was in many ways responsible for the country's liberation from England, should find himself cast in the role of the "other" by the Irish Free State he helped to found. Yeats was an aristocrat, one of Spenser's Anglo-Irish, of Protestant roots. Yeats, who had played such a large role in establishing Ireland when the country was a colonial subject now found himself cast as not "pure" Irish and judged unworthy of the identity he had helped to create. It is a commonplace of Yeats criticism to write that Yeats was too Irish for the English and too English for the Irish. To paraphrase Chakarabatty as I did Said earlier:

[Yeats] finds himself in this double bind through which the subject of [Irish] history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed unity called the [Irish] people that is always split into two - a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be-modernized peasantry." (383)

"Leda and The Swan" is a direct product of this split in Irish society, and the split is embodied by the immediate reception of the poem within the new Irish Republic. This poem presents a pagan or mythic origin, the union of woman and god, for the Irish people as opposed to the Catholic imagery of the Virgin Mary. Rather than a story of purity, it is a story of contamination and hybridization and violence as the source of history: "A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead" (Yeats 9-11) "Leda" can be read as Ireland raped by God in the figure of the English, engendering all of Irish history. If for Spenser, the English define themselves against the Irish "other" then for Yeats the Irish define themselves against the English "other." But no one can willing accept the permanent self-definition as victim, there must be a rebirth. "Did she put on his knowledge with his power ... ?" (13) is the wav Yeats states this in the poem.

Cullingford, citing Bakhtin's "complex appreciation of the way in which 'the grotesque is formed through a process of hybridization or inmixing of binary opposites, particularly of highs and low,"' notes the hybrid form of the poem, the "high" form of the sonnet and the "low" form of the sexually explicit diction.(149 While "Leda" can be read as an elitist liberal entry in the discourse of defining Irish identity, "no one questions whether this liberalism justifies the graphic depiction of a woman as violently raped by an animal." (15 0) The poem, in a public discourse that was nearly exclusively male, was either condemned as pagan or championed as a classical myth. The female voice, loud during the Irish revolution, is now repressed and even Yeats does not seem to realize it.

Not surprisingly, given the length of the FQ, Spenser mentions the same "Leda" in the FQ. Britomart, the female knight of Book III sees in a tapestry in the House of Busyrane depicting the loves of ancient gods the scene:

While the proud Bird ruffing his fethers wyde, And brushing his faire brest, did her invade:

She slept, yet twixt her eyelids closely spyde,

How towards her he rusht, and smiled at his pryde. (III.xi.32)

What is most notable is Leda no longer resists and even seems to welcome the rape. This seems a typical colonial repressive male fantasy. To be fair to Spenser, he may only be depicting the subjection of women in art and it is presented through the mediation of the female knight. Yeats apparently was not conscious of this poem when he composed "Leda" but he probably had read it many years earlier. (Melchiori 1131

Spenser takes a monolithic view of history as English explicitly in A view and implicitly in the FQ. He may on occasion be open to different voices, but perhaps because he is so locked into the Spenserian stanza in the FQ, it is difficult if not impossible for the other voices to be heard although their repression is not openly evident. In A view the oppressive voice of the colonial imperialist is painfully evident. Spenser had no concerns for about being topolitically correct" in the modem sense for his audience, but in fact he was "politically correct" in terms of Elizabethan England. Yeats is more open to a "polylithic"(?) view of history, although he is conscious of the of the role of imperialism in self/nation definition. Yeats tries and ultimately fails to move beyond imperialism to get other voices heard but at least he tries.

I am acutely aware of the colonial appropriation that is involved in the creation of this text. The text itself is a hybrid that involves the splitting of texts from other texts and contexts and their recombination. While I may not have made the texts speak in dialogue between themselves, I hope I have communicated the mosaic pattern of culture and interrelationships that these texts have communicated to me.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Bhabha, Homi. "Signs Taken for Wonders." Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 29 - 35.

Cain, Thomas H. Praise in The Faerie Oueene. Lincoln: UNP, 1978.

Cairns, David & Shaun Richards. Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History." Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 383 - 388.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. (1902) ed. Robert Kimborogh. Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed. New York : Norton, 1988.

Cullingford, Elizabeth B. Gender and HistoEy in Yeats Love Poeta. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Helgerson, Richard. "The New Poet Presents Himself. "(1983) Edmund Spenser's Poetly. Ed. Hugh Maclean & Anne L. Prescott. 3rd ed. New York : Norton, 1993. 675 - 686.

Melchiori, Giorgio. The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into poetly in the work of W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Said, Edward. Introduction. Kim. By Rudyard Kipling. New York: Penguin, 1987, 1989.

Spenser, Edmund. A view of the presente state of Irelande (1596). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1949. The Prose Works of The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum. Edition. 5 vols. 1949.

The Faerie Queene (1590 & 96). Edmund Spenser's PoeLry. Ed. Hugh Maclean & A L. Prescott. 3rd ed. New York : Norton, 1993.

Yeats, W. B. "Leda and the Swan." (1924) The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Def. Ed. New York: Macmillan, 1956. 211 - 212.