play. On an occasion talking about Carthaginians, when being asked the Yeatsian question “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?,”19
McGuinness humorously replies that “Not in the slightest. You don’t think I’m as stupid as Yeats, do you?” (“The Tomes of Donegal” 13). Carthaginians is a play that memorizes the Catholics in Bloody Sunday, but what Dido does through his
homosexuality and campy qualities is to problematize the kind of Irish nationalism at Yeats’s time.
The flexibility and mutability of Dido’s sexual and national identity demonstrate a more tactful way to deal with the Irish question than the other characters. Queer aesthetics becomes a very important medium through which binary and essentialist nationalism is deconstructed. David Cregan views Dido’s campy qualities as “a type of cultural resistance that challenges meaning and reality” and as “a queer prism through which the inconsistencies and untruths of Bloody Sunday are revealed”
(“Camping in Utopia” 27). Dido “queers the gendered binary that constructs
colonizers as male and colonized as female” (Cullingford, Ireland’s Others 120), and thus “homosexuality is privileged in a confrontational way” (Jordan 77). By
19 Yeats asked himself this question when Easter Rising broke out shortly after the staging of his Cathleen ni Houlihan.
deconstructing the violence-provoking binarism in Catholic nationalism through sexual analogies, the queer character Dido, according to Hiroko Mikami’s conclusion,
“exhorts us always to strive for life, efforts and hope” rather than for conflicts and death (50).
In Observe the Sons and Carthaginians, McGuinness proposes a new post-colonial relation between Catholics and Protestants through allegories of sexuality. To put it more specifically, McGuinness’s Ireland is not based on binary essentialism of gender, sexuality or nation but based on multiculturalism. The replacement of modern nationalism with multiculturalism is the result of
“post-colonial globalization,” as some historians call it.20 In Donegal, earlier dramatic attempts by Brian Friel and his Field Day have shown the signs of multiculturalism, and though McGuinness is not always a patron to Field Day,21 his plays reflect the multicultural tendency in Ireland as well – in a way McGuinness takes up Field Day’s goal of “the Fifth province” or “a pluralist Ireland.” In his Northern Ireland political plays, McGuinness brings to the front stage the horrors of militancy and violence to such an extent that Catholics and Protestants in Ireland are equally vulnerable minorities and victimized by their own nationalism. In Observe the Sons and
Carthaginians, the two religious communities in Ireland, which for many years are
antagonistic to each other, are actually on the same boat in the war against death, and thus the conventional boundaries between nations and ethnicities no longer tell much20 A. G. Hopkins distinguishes four phases of globalization in his edited Globalization in World History:
archaic, proto, modern and post-colonial. Hopkins’s “post-colonial globalization” refers to the period of cultural and political development after imperialism, generally dated from the 1950s, when colonizing and colonized nations come to constitute a global and international world with democratic multicultural politics, transnational corporations, inter-industry trade, etc (9-10).
21 McGuinness’s Observe the Sons was actually rejected by Field Day for reasons unknown to the public and then re-scheduled for performance in Peacock Theatre. McGuinness’s Carthaginians is originally accepted and scheduled to be produced by Field Day, but McGuinness withdraws his play two weeks before the rehearsal. McGuinness’s reason for his withdrawal of Carthaginians is that Field Day then is preparing for the staging of Carthaginians and Stewart Parker’s Pentecost at the same time and therefore the resources given to Carthaginians are insufficient – there is neither a director nor a cast two weeks before the rehearsal (Lojek 115). Despite these mishaps, however, McGuinness is friend to Brian Friel. In the February of 1999, McGuinness as a friend and a fellow Donegal man presents the Special Tribute Award to Friel, describing Friel as the playwright who had
“tormented and challenged me [McGuinness]” (McGarry 7). McGuinness’s adaptation of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya is staged by Field Day in 1995.
difference. McGuinness’s plays suggest that there is no need to continue the sectarian conflicts in Ireland and that it is time to think beyond essentialist nationalism, also mirroring the result of the referendum for the Belfast Agreement in 1998, in which Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland agree to decommission paramilitary arms and to solve their disputes without violence.
To see the full significance of McGuinness’s plays, we must situate him in the changing milieu in Ireland during the 1990s. The discussion of the nexus between modern nationalism and sexuality in McGuinness’s plays, therefore, should be extended to a broader concern about the cultural turns brought about by globalization in contemporary Ireland. If we put McGuinness’s plays in the history of Irish
literature, McGuinness’s deconstruction of modern nationalism through sexual allegories can be one of the instances for the rise of multiculturalism in the age of globalization. This argument will be specifically focused in Chapter Four, which begins with a general account of the rise of multiculturalism in Ireland and then explains how modern nationalism can be transformed by globalization through sexual allegories in a post-colonial context.
In view of the violence taking place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, scholars such as Richard Kearney have been trying to propose multi-cultural versions of Ireland. Published in 1997, Kearney’s Postnationalist Ireland advocates “the fifth province: between the local and the global” and urges people to “think otherwise”
(100, emphasis original). To think otherwise in the Irish question means to transcend modern nationalism and to find non-dualistic choices. Published three years after the Agreement, Edna Longley and Declan Kiberd’s co-authored Multi-Culturalism: The
View from the Two Irelands offers local observation of Ireland’s trajectory from
“mono-culturalism” toward multiculturalism, albeit there still exist some definitional controversies and practical obstacles in the move toward a heterogeneous Ireland. The recent multi-cultural disposition in Ireland is one of the consequences of globalism, which is exemplified in the formation of European Union, wherein Britain and
Republic Ireland are both members. This mode of Anglo-Irish relationship in EU is also what Kearney resorts to as his model for “the Fifth Province” (Kearney 104-105).
Just as queers often challenge and transgress fixed boundaries, the claims for a multicultural Ireland encourage the transgressions of essentialist national, ethnic, and religious boundaries as well. We have seen how homosexuality in Observe the Sons and Carthaginians achieve this end, and in two of McGuinness’s recent plays,
Someone Who Will Watch Over Me and Dolly West’s Kitchen, we can further see how
global influences and homosexuality conjoin in the making of a multicultural Ireland.In Chapter Four, textual evidences from the four plays will be discussed to show how the phenomenon of postcolonial globalization can be observed in the interactions of nationalism and sexuality.
Conclusion
Nationalism plays an important role in Ireland, while gender and sexuality play an important role in nationalism. Many established gender stereotypes in Ireland, especially stereotypes about women, can be traced back to the colonial legacy passed down from Britain to Ireland. Under gendered and hetero-nomative national
ideologies, Irish queers have ambivalent relationship with the Irish nation. On the one hand, queers problematize the binary norms of sexuality within nationalist agenda. On the other hand, the emphasis on masculinity in modern nationalism provides one of the best cradles for male homosexual eroticism. Frank McGuinness’s plays give us many textual evidences to examine gender and sexual politics in post-colonial Ireland.
While dealing with identity politics in Northern Ireland, McGuinness’s Observe the
Sons and Carthaginians explore the complicated nexus of gender, sexuality and
nationalism in Ireland as well. McGuinness and many of his characters can be identified as queers because, in addition to being homosexuals, they take delight in crossing the fixed borders of gender, sexuality, nation, and religion, therefore bringingforth a multi-cultural blueprint of Ireland and a new relation between Catholics and Protestants.
While feminists begin to revise the gender history of Ireland, discussions about sexuality are still rare and not yet fully explored even till now.22 There are many plays dealing with the Irish question in the 20th century, but few of them are
concerned about the importance of homosexuality. As McGuinness points out, there are only two Irish plays in the 20th century dealing with homosexuality before McGuinness himself begins to put gay characters onto the Irish stage (Curtis 35).
Rethinking the Irish question from the perspective of sexuality indeed provides a chance to think otherwise and to imagine a new relationship between the two communities in Northern Ireland, and with the coming of globalization, it is time to assess their interactions to date. “The play within a play in Ireland is Ulster. […]
Writing a play is the opposite of throwing a bomb,” an anonymous art commentator puts in an article published in The Economist (“Repairing Ireland” 83), and Frank McGuinness’s plays can be a good gloss to this witty saying.
22 The presidency of Mary Robinson (from 1990 to 1997) is the time when feminism and gender studies in Ireland begin to thrive. When analyzing gender in modern Irish culture, many critics tend to draw examples from the 1992 court case of Miss X followed by the 1992 Dublin campaign against legal abortion, the 1995 divorce referendum, the discrimination of gays in the Republic parliament, Mary Robinson’s self-avowed feminism, women’s participation in elections, or governmental reports about birth rate, as many of the contributors do in the essay collection Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland edited by Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis.
Nationalism and (Homo)Sexuality in Frank McGuinness’s Observe
the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
1Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse, and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse (Joyce 112).
Observe the Sons Marching Towards the Somme (shortened as Observe the Sons hereafter) is Frank McGuinness’s third play put into performance, premiered in Abbey Theatre, 1985.2 Like many of his other plays, McGuinness’s dramatization of
Protestant unionism in Observe the Sons is closely related with issues of gender and sexuality. Unionism, as one of the various forms of modern nationalism, is presented in this play as a patriarchal nationalism, without the presence of any female characters.
Besides, the play contains an implicit homosexual subplot, along with numerous witty dialogues on many thorny issues of masculinity and femininity. In such a highly politicized and gendered setting, the nexus between nationalism and (homo)sexuality is therefore of great significance to the theme of the play.