'I am older than the Old Woman of Beare': Patrick Pearse's Mother Ireland allegory in his literary works

This thesis examines the literary works (short fiction, poetry, and drama) of Patrick Pearse with a particular focus on the influence of the Cailleach Bhéarra (Hag of Beare) on Pearse’s version of the Mother Ireland allegory. The old woman is a significant figure for Pearse in personal, creative, and political terms. His childhood relationship with Margaret Brady, his maternal great-aunt, was the starting point in his personal life of particular interest in the role of older women as representatives and conduits to younger men of Irish culture and identity. She was a formative influence on Pearse and the impression that she made on him informs his adaptation of the Cailleach Bhéarra into the central archetype in his literary and political philosophy. Women, and especially older women, in Pearse’s literary oeuvre have not received the same amount of scholarly attention as have his male characters. For much of the twentieth century, masculinity and the theme of blood sacrifice seemed to many to loom larger in both his life and work. After Pearse’s execution in May 1916 his stories, poetry, and plays were well-received. Beginning in the 1920s and up to the present day, Pearse’s writings have appeared in Irish school curricula. He has, however, never been considered a literary artist of the first calibre. Beginning in the 1960s after the half-centenary of the Rising, a more critical note began to be sounded. And recent literary scholarship is generally not as favourable towards Pearse. The eroticisation of young boys in some of the poems has drastically complicated the question of his work as an educator of children and as a poet. His depiction of women has been criticised for being one-dimensional and uninteresting. In the 1970s, Ruth Dudley Edwards wrote in her revisionist biography that Pearse only allows women to grieve and to cry. Philip O’Leary, writing a few years later, deems Pearse’s stories to be overly sentimental and too romantic. In the 1980s, Eavan Boland critically rewrote his ‘Mise Éire’ in the process of discarding his feminine and nationalist metaphors. Even as recently as within the last decade, Michael G. Cronin has argued that Pearse only allows his women to be mothers. Still, Pearse’s efforts to modernise Irish language literature have been noted positively, particularly by Louis de Paor, who wonders what else Pearse might have contributed to the literary world had he not been executed. Róisín Ní Ghairbhí and Eugene McNulty have paid particular attention to Pearse as a playwright in their editorial and scholarly work. Attitudes to Pearse’s version of the Mother Ireland allegory have also shifted very noticeably since that semicentennial in 1966, in a process that mirrors the changes in women’s lives in Ireland over the same period. Pearse might have been intrigued. He was himself constantly looking back into Ireland’s past in order to rejuvenate its present and future. His ideal relationship in life and art was between the old and the young. The dust has not settled on his troubled reputation, and now, over one hundred years since the Rising, it may be a good time to take another look at his literary work in the larger context of his life and ideas. The Old Woman and the Cailleach Bhéarra are at the very centre of Pearse’s imaginative life as it manifests itself in his literary work and in his cultural, professional, and political life. It is from that past that he pulls the Cailleach and brings her into the present as a representation of the future Ireland he hoped to create. The creation process for Pearse, however, shifted dramatically from the cultural nationalism to which he devoted much of adult life towards the militant republicanism, in which his old woman becomes closely identified with violence and bloodshed. The purpose of this dissertation is to draw attention to a clear failing in contemporary Irish literary scholarship to acknowledge a more complex relationship between Pearse, his writing, and the figure of the woman. Pearse’s portrayal of women is worthy of reconsideration in light of the multilayered and intersectional influences that inform them. They are not ‘just’ mothers nor are they undeserving of further investigation. They are, like Pearse himself, complex, multifaceted beings.

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University of Galway

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CC BY-NC-ND

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)