Chapter 13 - ‘Brightest Wits and Bravest Soldiers’: Ireland, Masculinity, and the Politics of Paternity

Summary

The eighteenth-century Irish gentleman was, according to Samuel Madden, an ‘amphibious animal … envied as an Englishman in Ireland, and maligned as Irish in England’. This sense of ambiguity had repercussions on the gendering of Irish men, as manly norms were increasingly defined by British imperialism. This chapter analyses the representation of Irish masculinity, using William Chaigneau’s The History of Jack Connor as a case study which negotiates gender, nation, and political relations. If Jonathan Swift laments the toxic effects of army morals and English effeminacy on Ireland’s political class, Chaigneau invokes patriarchy and paternity to explore and to ramify the affective bonds between the two nations. Analysing Chaigneau’s representation of a cosmopolitan Irish soldier, this chapter examines how the novel creates a modern martial masculinity which legitimises the authority and potency of Irish Protestants, creating an imaginative dynastic filiation between Britain and Ireland.