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Joyce and Victorian Perceptions of the Irish
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Vincent J. Cheng |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
An acute awareness of his national identity was central to James Joyce's psyche, whose works are shot through with questions regarding Irishness, race and prejudice. Joyce was also aware that the image of the Irish which prevailed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was often less than flattering. Why the Victorians should have regarded this attitude not as springing from prejudice but as based on sound scientific racist theory is here explained by Vincent Cheng of the University of Utah. |
 he case of Robert Knox, MD, serves as a particularly illuminating case study of the racializing of Irishness; in 1850 Knox published his study of The Races of Men, a comprehensive evaluation and classification of all known human races. Knox was an English anatomist and a popular lecturer about race who believed, like most Europeans of the time, that race was the greatest determinant of behavior and character, in his words that "Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it" (Robert Knox, The Races of Men, 1850, p. 7); like other scientists of the time, he engaged in pseudo-scientific speculations about cranial measurements and the superiority of white races over darker races. But he seemed to have particular phobias about the Jewish and the Irish "races." |
 His anti-Semitism, like his Celtophobia, repeatedly and illogically mistakes physical circumstances and history for inherent essences: "two hundred years at least before Christ [the Jews] were perambulating Italy and Europe precisely as they do now, following the same occupations--that is, no occupation at all"; "Wanderers, then, by nature--unwarlike--they never could acquire a fixed home or abode. Literature, science, and art they possess not. It is against their nature--they never seem to have had a country, nor have they any yet"; conveniently, Knox concludes that "they are becoming extinct" (Knox, The Races of Men, pp. 131, 138, 140). The power of his essentialized image of an unalterable "Jewishness" is such that it can produce such astonishing reasoning as this: "in the long list of names of distinguished persons whom Mr. Disraeli has described as of Jewish descent, I have not met with a single Jewish trait in their countenance, in so far as I can discover; and, therefore, they are not Jews, nor of Jewish origin" (Knox, The Races of Men, p. 140; Knox's emphasis). |
Celtic inferiority
But it is "the barbarous Celt" who most discomfits Knox: |
the Celtic race does not, and never could be made to comprehend the meaning of the word liberty ... I appeal to the Saxon men of all countries whether I am right or not in my estimate of the Celtic character. Furious fanaticism; a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous, uncertain: look at Ireland. (Knox, The Races of Men, p. 27.) |
Once again, such logic leads inevitably to a justification for refusing the Irish the right of self-government: "As a Saxon, I abhor all dynasties, monarchies, and bayonet governments, but this latter seems to be the only one suitable for the Celtic man" (Knox, The Races of Men, p. 27). |
 In asserting that the Irish are the lowest form of "what is called civilized man" ("Civilized man cannot sink lower than at Derrynane"), Knox makes the same insupportable claim about the Irish that he did about the Jews: "As a race, the Celt has no literature, nor any printed books in his original language ... There never was any Celtic literature, nor science, nor arts" (Knox, The Races of Men, p. 218). Finally, there is this astounding passage of Celtophobia: |
the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts ... The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England's safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for the clearing the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts. (Knox, The Races of Men, pp. 253-54.) |
This is nothing short of a recipe and justification for racial genocide. Knox's book and ideas are such that we are tempted today to dismiss them as the radical quackeries of a racist madman; unfortunately, the frightening reality is that his book (reprinted in 1866) and his theories were among the most respected and influential of the century, helping shape contemporary understandings of race; as Michael Banton acknowledges: "Previous to his time, little or nothing was heard about Race in the medical schools: he changed all this by his Saturday's lectures, and Race became as familiar as household words to his students, through whom some of his novel ideas became disseminated far and wide" (Michael Banton, Racial Theories, 1987, p. 59). |
The widely disseminated power of such an insidious discourse and cultural construction is reflected in the hegemonic dominance these ideas had over even well-meaning and liberal-minded English people. For example, even socialists as progressive and committed to liberal causes as Sidney and Beatrice Webb could write during a visit to Dublin in 1892: "We will tell you about Ireland when we come back. The people are charming but we detest them, as we should the Hottentots--for their very virtues. Home Rule is an absolute necessity in order to depopulate the country of this detestable race" (quoted in L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, 1968, p. 63). Thomas Carlyle had an equally peremptory and racialized answer to the "Irish Question": "Black-lead them and put them over with the niggers". |
 Perhaps the most famous case of such Negrization was the infamous remark made by Lord Salisbury (who is mentioned in Ulysses 7.558)--the Opposition leader during the Home Rule debates of 1886: "You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots for instance." In the process, Salisbury also disqualified the Oriental nations and the Russians, concluding that only the "Teutonic race" was suited to self-government. However, as Curtis remarks, "his audience and posterity remembered only the Hottentot allusion": "Although he had not actually called Irishmen Hottentots, as most Home Rulers charged, he had drawn a painfully close analogy, and the friends of Irish nationalism rushed to join in the outcry against this racialist slur. In the resultant hue and cry no one seemed to care about the aspersion cast on the Hottentots, or on the Russians and Chinese" (Curtis, Anglo-Saxons, p. 103). |
Black-and-white vision
Another influential race theorist was John Beddoe, president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and respected author of The Races of Britain (1885). Beddoe believed that hair and eye color were keys to ethnic and racial identity, and he developed a specious formula he called the "index of nigrescence," which supposedly quantified the amount of melanin in skin, eyes, and hair--in the process assuming that one end of the nigrescence scale was clearly preferable to the other. He used this index of nigrescence to "prove" that the Irish were darker and more Negroid than the English. As Curtis relates: "Just how white-skinned were Irishmen? Who were the so-called 'black Irish,' and where did they come from? How close was a prognathous and nigrescent Celt to a Negro? Such questions were implicit and at times explicit in Beddoe's work; and the implicit answer was that not all men in the British Isles were equally white or equal" (Curtis, Anglo-Saxons, p. 72). Speculating on the African genesis of what he called "Africanoid" Celts, Beddoe's index of nigrescence provided the scientific justification for racial hatred of the Irish as an inferior race. It was but the logical next step in such racist/ethnocentric reasoning to consider the Irish as subhuman apes. |
This in fact had already been happening; by the 1860s the popular image of the Irishman in both popular cartoons and in written discourse was an anthropoid ape. L. P. Curtis's Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971, p. 2) convincingly documents how Victorian cartoons and illustrations transformed "peasant Paddy into an ape-man or simianized Caliban ... by the 1860s and 1870s, when for various reasons it became necessary for a number of Victorians to assign Irishmen to a place closer to the apes than the angels." The English, of course, reserved the designation of angels for themselves, frequently punning on angels, Angles, and Anglo-Saxons. Joyce comments ironically on such contrasts and puns when, in Exiles, Richard Rowan asks Robert Hand if he found Richard's son to be a child or an angel, and Robert answers, "Neither an angel nor an Anglo-Saxon" (Exiles, 1951, p. 81). Earlier, in Stephen Hero, Joyce had problematized the possibility of either race being angelic by having Stephen Daedalus respond to a question by Madden thus: |
[Madden:]--You want our peasants to ape the gross materialism of the Yorkshire peasant?
[Stephen:]--One would imagine the country was inhabited by cherubim. (Stephen Hero, 1959, p. 54, my emphases.) |
The timing of this culturally created image (of Irish apes) was again not accidental, for it was when the Irish turned to political activism and agitation in their demands for Home Rule that Punch and other periodicals began to "picture the Irish political outrage-mongering peasant as a cross between a garrotter and a gorilla" (Curtis, Apes, p. 31). Furthermore, the choice of the ape to represent a derogatory bestiality now politically convenient to assign to the Irish was most likely suggested by the coincidence of Fenian agitation with the debate over Darwin's Origin of Species, and fueled by the specters Fenianism conjured up for the English, such as mob rule, "Rome rule," republicanism, anarchism, and revolution against the Empire. |
Caricature or racism?
 Bolstered by such scientific, anthropological reasoning as Beddoe's nigrescent and "Africanoid" Celts and Daniel Mackintosh's data claiming that the heads of Irish people were characterized by absent chins, receding foreheads, large mouths, thick lips, melanous and prognathous features, it was inevitable that Anglo-Saxonist racism would turn the "white Negro" into a simian Celt. As Curtis argues: |
The price paid by Irishmen for increasing political activity and agrarian protest was the substitution of epithets like Caliban, Frankenstein, Yahoo and gorilla for Paddy ... By the 1860s no respectable reader of comic weeklies--and most of their readers were respectable--could possibly mistake the simous nose, long upper lip, huge projecting mouth, and jutting lower jaw as well as sloping forehead for any other category of undesirable or dangerous human being that that known as Irish. (Curtis, Apes, pp. 22, 29.) |
The simianization of the Irish was part of the larger racialized discourse behind the "Irish Question," and was not just limited to the visual media of cartoon and caricature. An 1860 visit to Sligo provoked a troubled Charles Kingsley to write: |
I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe ... that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours. (See Gibbons, "Race Against Time," The Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991) p. 95, and Curtis, Anglo-Saxons, p. 84.) |
Historian James Anthony Froude had already, in 1845, described the people in Catholic Ireland as "more like tribes of squalid apes than human beings" (Curtis, Anglo-Saxons, p. 85); Anglo-Irish novelist Edith Somerville could now replicate the hegemonic demotion of Irish Catholics to apes in her fiction, referring to "The Wild Irish--as who, in later days, should say The Gorillas" (Curtis, Apes, p. ix). And Punch could depict characters such as "Mr. MacSimius," a hirsute Irishman, saying: "Well, Oi don't profess to be a particularly cultivated man meself; but at laste me progenitors were all educated in the hoigher branches!" (Curtis, Apes, p 57). |
But the most prevalent manifestations of the equation of the Irish Celt with an ape appeared in the popular cartoons of the day, in English periodicals such as Punch and Judy, in which any character with a prognathous jaw and simian features was readily recognized as representing an Irishman without any need for further identification. Joyce reveals his pained awareness of such derogatory stereotyping in Stephen Hero, when Madden (Davin in Portrait) speaks of those "old stale libels--the drunken Irishman, the baboon-faced Irishman that we see in Punch" (Stephen Hero, p. 64). To illustrate Madden's point, I have included a small but striking selection of such cartoons here. They depict Anarchy as an Irish agitator with repellent features evoking simianness ; an "Irish Frankenstein" described by Punch as a bestial "Caliban in revolt"; and St. Patrick's Day as a stereotyped "shindy" or "donnybrook" involving Irish-Americans in the form of gorillas bashing each others' heads. |
The last example is perhaps the most striking: Paddy and Bridget, as the essentialized Irish pair, are portrayed as living in their native habitat, a shanty; the rather Wakean title of "The King of A-Shantee" connects the Irish Celt with the African Ashanti, and Paddy's clearly ape-like features imply that he may be the "missing link" in the evolution between the lower species of apes and Africans. |
This "missing link" between "anthropoid apes" (a term Stephen Dedalus uses in Ulysses 15.2590) and the Irish was spelled out in 1862 by Punch, in a narrative fantasy titled "The Missing Link": |
A gulf, certainly, does appear to yawn between the Gorilla and the Negro. The woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example of any intermediate animal. But in this, as in many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they would readily find if they sought for it at home. A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of the Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.
(Punch, October 18, 1862; the latter description brings to mind Tim Finnegan.) |
Such offensive racial typing, however fanciful and whimsical, suggests an ethnocentric pathology within the dominant culture of the English empire. |
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