Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston's excellent Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health is an important contribution to scholarship on modernism, the Irish literary revival, and twentieth-century Irish politics and culture, enlarging and complicating ideas about how Irish modernist writers engaged with cultural and political discourses around sexual health. With chapters focused on W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Kate O'Brien, and Flann O'Brien, Houston offers illuminating new readings of familiar texts, with often intricate and revelatory discoveries of the ways in which writers typically perceived by contemporary critics as iconoclastic and progressive wrestle with tensions around questions of sexual purity, heredity, and eugenics. Houston questions the critical consensus that Irish modernists are ineluctably progressive and subversive, and that their modernism necessarily embodies a frank sexuality always in opposition to pro-natalist nationalist pieties and conservative Catholic discourse. Instead, Houston offers a nuanced rereading attuned to the way these writers at times reproduce—intentionally and not—eugenic narratives and conservative, at times even racialist and anti-Semitic, forms of thinking.
If the texts of Irish modernism covered here are mostly canonical, the broader relevance of Houston's book is expansive, and will enrich readers in Irish studies, medical humanities, and literary and cultural studies: its secondary terms, “the politics of sexual health,” generate an interdisciplinary, richly researched, and urgent way of thinking about sexual health in the twentieth century, in the contexts of both specifically Irish and broadly European biopolitics. The connections Houston locates between political and social events, journalistic debates, and literary texts reveal the mutual influence of medical and sexual health discourses on one hand and Irish nationalist discourses on the other, while also suggesting a more complex intersection with modernist writers who engaged them. The book's first three sections cover intersecting but distinct ideas: hygienic virility and autonomy; venereal disease and national identity; and contraception, “race suicide,” and eugenics. A fourth section turns to the eventual exhaustion of the metaphoric and cultural relevance of these concerns, outlasting in their literary production (in Beckett, Kate O'Brien, and Flann O'Brien, particularly) their cultural frisson. The writing throughout is lively and admirably clear, even amidst complex arguments navigating paradox and contradiction.
In part one, “Scandalous Autonomy,” Houston focuses on the idealized version of Irish masculinity that dominated early twentieth-century political and cultural life: a paradoxical combination of radical chastity and intense (even “throbbing” [41]) virility positioned in response to imperial discourses of Celtic femininity (a topic Joseph Valente also addresses in The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 [2011]). This male “hygienic virility” seemed to both annoy and intrigue modernists like Yeats, Joyce, and Synge, especially in its embodiment in the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell, the archetypal Home Rule leader at the center of so many modernist texts. Yeats's famous directive to Synge to “give up Paris” and go to the Aran islands is, Houston observes, congruent with this trope of virile self-control: a turn from European cultural decadence and sex towards a more celibate Irish experience, “a concern for health and purity that is only partially metaphorical” (99). In a reexamination of the controversy around Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907), Houston adds nuance to the standard argument that the riots surrounding the play were about the perceived slight to Irish women's purity, instead suggesting the true alarm was the shock of “the degenerate state of Irish manhood” (97).
The focus on manhood in part one may risk eliding the mirror image of the virile but self-controlled male; that is, the insufficiently pure (pregnant and unmarried, or otherwise nonconforming) Irish woman, tens of thousands of whom were incarcerated in mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries for contravening the logic of Irish sexual health as determined by church and state throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, the Irish architectures of containment, as James Smith describes these institutions, hover at the edges of the book. It is welcome, then, that in part two, “Hygiene and its Discontents,” Houston begins by foregrounding women's experience by reproducing a letter from a female sex-worker to the “Dr of the Lock Up Hospital, Dublin.” As Houston notes, the English-born woman's experience in a Dublin rife with sectarianism, militarism, misogyny, and venereal stigma resonates with the ways Irish modernists depicted sexual health. The chapter's bravura analyses of the politics and literature of venereal disease include an acute rereading of Joyce's short story “The Sisters” that attends to how Joyce's final revisions amplify its syphilitic connotations: a critique that ultimately suggests a degenerative affiliation between the Catholic church and normative heterosexuality, undermining precisely the Irish Ireland version of moral purity that Joyce always rejected.
Part three, “Heredity and Fertility,” includes chapters on Beckett and Kate O'Brien, both of whom wrote amidst the censorship of the Irish Free State, and particularly the Censorship of Publication Act of 1929—an attempt at “the hygiene of the mind,” as one epigraph notes (143)—which disallowed mention of contraception. The discourses that claimed the economic and physical health of the nation required its unfettered fertility were at odds with those of personal autonomy, but Houston also sees in Beckett's Premier Amour/First Love and O'Brien's Without My Cloak (1931), The Ante-Room (1934), and Pray for the Wanderer (1938) unsettling, unsettled engagements with regressive eugenic discourse, ironically aligned with the progressive push for women's reproductive autonomy.
Part four, “Sexual Health and Exhaustion,” accounts for Flann O'Brien's backwards-looking 1961 novel The Hard Life in both formal and socio-political terms that ultimately indict the “zombie rhetoric” of a depleted trope—that of Irish sexual purity—that ironically and parasitically sustains “the social and political conditions it apparently seeks to critique” (263). As Houston notes, it is somewhat confounding that O'Brien is set on looking back, just as truly boundary-breaking work is being made—and censored—by Edna O'Brien in The Country Girls.
Houston writes in their conclusion that this work is an invitation for further research, and indeed, that work is urgently needed—particularly given the literal unearthing, in the present moment, of unmarked bodies from Irish sites of sexual penance. Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health provides a crucial picture of the intensity of gendering biopolitics that informed political discourse, narratives of heredity and health, and literary production during a formative period of Irish history. Moreover, it establishes an excellent framework for scholarship, both within and beyond modernism, to examine in literature and history the horrific, buried realities that the discourses discussed here helped to create.
