5 - “Some Neglected Children”: thwarted genealogies in colonial history

Summary

“The history of Ireland repeats itself from age to age with such a mournful rhythm, that Moore's poems find as quick a response in the hearts of the people now as when first published. Each generation goes through the same phases – resistance, defeat, despair. The new generation follows with hopes as brilliant and resolves as bold, again to try, again to fail. And so the sad trilogy is acted from age to age, while the nation can only helplessly mourn, as victim after victim falls dead in the dust of the arena.”

Lady Jane Wilde, Notes on Men, Women, and Books (1891)

While the focus of the previous chapter was the use of the gothic to represent imperial territorial possessions as insensible, the texts considered in the present chapter use the narrative conventions of the gothic to represent colonial time as stultifying, repetitive, and fragmentary. In Morgan's “Absenteeism,” Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and Denis Florence MacCarthy's “Afghanistan,” the insensibility, and general unresponsiveness, of imperial power and its agents forestalls the progress of colonized peoples. The romance structures of imperial history that were generally written from the metropole are reworked on terms commensurate with gothic conventions to subvert that history's ideological claims and tacit reassurances. Morgan takes a long view in her writings on Irish history to suggest, anticipating Jane Wilde, that English governmental practice “repeats itself from age to age” on terms that produce the same Irish “response in the hearts of the people” (see epigraph, above).