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Geopolitics and the Sight of the Nation: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September

2007; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436920601174495

1545-5866

Beth Wightman,

Travel Writing and Literature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See Grubgeld 43–44, Krielkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel 144, and Lassner 44. See also Innes, Krielkamp's The Anglo-Irish Novel, Lee, and Tracy. On the rise and fall (and rise) of ocularcentrism in philosophy, see David Michael Levin's The Philosopher's Gaze, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, and Sites of Vision. See also Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity." See Brennan 57. In a somewhat ironic twist of literary fate, Bowen herself was involved in scribal intelligence during World War II, compiling reports about Irish neutrality for the British government. Bowen would also enter the aesthetic fray of verbal espionage in The Heat of the Day (1948). Marjorie Howes has made a similar observation in her analysis of James Joyce's work. See "'Goodbye Ireland I'm Going to Gort': Geography, Scale, and Narrating the Nation" 322. See Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return 1–16. See Blair, Rose, and Soja. In the last fifteen years, Irish scholarship has witnessed a vigorous and productive debate about the multiple forms and formations of nationalism in Irish history and culture. Luke Gibbons's "Identity Without a Center: Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism" insightfully surveys (and critiques) this debate. Other significant contributions include David Lloyd's Ireland After History and Joe Cleary's "'Misplaced Ideas?' Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies." Nonetheless, Bowen's novel figures Irish nationalism in the binary terms described above. In Julian Moynahan's words, "The deepest failure of the big house was its failure to provide a vital center for a community" (241); in his view, this failure marks the clearest distinction between Irish and English country houses. Article 3, the basis for much of the North-South conflict in the twentieth century, asserts that "[p]ending the re-integration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the Parliament and Government established by this Constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole of that territory, the laws enacted by that Parliament shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws of Saorstát Éireann and the like extraterritorial effect" (Bunreacht 4). This tendency is, to some extent, beginning to change. Hosam Aboul-Ela's recent work, invoking Walter Mignolo, also takes on Bhabha's assertions as it makes a similar claim for specificity in discussing Latin American postcolonial thought; see "Comparative Hybridities: Latin American Intellectuals and Postcolonialists." See also his "The Politics of Peripheralization: Faulkner and the Question of the Postcolonial." Cf. Gillian Beer's discussion of how the island functions in English cultural mythology: "The island has seemed the perfect form in English cultural imagining, as the city was to the Greeks. Defensive, secure, compacted, even paradisal—a safe place; a safe place too from which to set out on predations and from which to launch the building of an empire" (269). I suspect that geographically based ideology informed debate about and the result of the recent citizenship referendum in Ireland 2004, which overturned previous laws that conferred Irish citizenship on any child born on the island. Citizenship is now restricted to children born of at least one parent who has been legally resident in Ireland for at least three years. Exit polls suggested that the 80 percent of voters who approved the restrictive referendum did so based on the perception that immigrants have "overwhelmed" Ireland. In Postmodern Geographies (published in 1989 Soja , Edward . Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory . London : Verso , 1989 . [Google Scholar]), Edward Soja, an academic geographer and urban planner based in Los Angeles, coined this term as he traced the ways in which academic scholarship had begun to recuperate spatial study. Soja argued that Marxist criticism in particular came to privilege the temporal forces of history at the expense of the spatial forces that both underwrote and presumably undermined historical "progress." Theorists in the 1970 Wotton , Sir Henry . The Elements of Architecture . 1624 . Amsterdam : Theatrum Orbis Terrarum , 1970 . [Google Scholar]s, including Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, began exploring how space itself produces culture, even as that culture produces and modifies spatial forms. The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a notable increase in humanities scholarship's incorporation and deployment of methodologies from this "new geography," otherwise known as cultural and/or human geography. Timothy Brennan reviews the critical genealogy indicting nationalism in "The National Longing for Form" (57). Luke Gibbons traces the problems of applying European models of nationalism to Ireland in "Identity Without a Center." Vera Kreilkamp has also noted this particular union; see "The Persistent Pattern" 454, 456. See also Margot Backus, The Gothic Family Romance. This scope is relative; as Bowen herself points out in an essay, very few of the so-called "Big Houses" were all that large compared to their English counterparts ("The Big House" 196). Elaborate houses and estates like Powerscourt in Co. Wicklow represented exceptions rather than the rule. Martin Jay's discussion of "Cartesian perspectivalism" describes how Alberti's artistic (as opposed to architectural) writings also engender this kind of visual hegemony (4–11). See Kenny. I am concerned here with the written body of architectural theory, rather than with pattern books or with the actual buildings of practicing architects like Inigo Jones or Colen Campbell. Wotton's main project in his treatise initially appears to be summarizing Vitruvius's and Alberti's ideas, but, halfway through, he begins to compare the Greek and Roman and Italian houses constructed according to their principles to English versions. Wotton explains the necessary modifications English architecture has had to make and (to some extent) the reasons behind those modifications; see 70ff. In this sense, Wotton's treatise represents the origins of a specifically English architectural theory. Palladian and more generally Neoclassical houses were popular in eighteenth-century Anglo-Ireland (see Harbison et. al. 132–38); and James Gibbs's Palladian designs, for example, have been traced to plantations in the Americas (Kruft 241–42). See Colley. On Bowen and the Irish Gothic novel, see Backus, Eagleton, Ellman, Madden-Simpson, and McCormack. Like Corcoran, I find the mill the most unambiguously "Gothic" space in the novel—a repository of repressed sexuality, politics and economics. Anglo-Irish ghosts clearly reside in the mill, where "feelings of terror and horror … sexual and violent aspects of human experience [are] … linked" (McCormack 831). C. L. Innes has noted that unlike W. B. Yeats's Coole Park and Tower poems, where "the house or tower is a site from which to view and order the surrounding world … [and a] single point of view dominates the landscape, … [i]n The Last September, the [viewing] perspective is constantly shifting" (174). The novel's underlying structure might be described as a web of watching that occurs within and around the house and its grounds. See Lassner 43ff. Recently, Corcoran has demonstrated how, as aporia, Lois unites Bowen's famously "elliptical" style of writing with the Gothic elements that pervade Bowen's oeuvre; see The Enforced Return. For a gender-neutral reading of the "lack" that pervades the novel, see Lassner, 43ff. See also Gillis 22. For a discussion of this ideological paradigm, see Kiberd, "A New England Called Ireland," Inventing Ireland 9–25. British literary history self-consciously and repeatedly calls attention to that geographic fact. See Bennett. This tradition includes William Harrison's Description of Britaine in Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's Richard II and Cymbeline, Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, among others. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBeth WightmanBeth Wightman is assistant professor of English and director of the English Honors Program at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches twentieth-century British and postcolonial literature.