Introduction
In Seamus Heaney’s allegorical lyric, ‘‘Act of Union’’ (), the coup-
ling of England and Ireland issues in the conception of ‘‘an obstinate
fifth column,’’ ‘‘the heaving province’’ of Ulster.¹ Identifying the mascu-
line position with English imperial power, the poem links the colonized
Irish land with the feminine, carrying a fetal body that will never be
born into separateness; even as it marks the geopolitical site ‘‘where our
past has grown’’ (), Ulster is itself a product of the past that has survived
into the present, cleaving to the mother from whom it cannot be
divided. With a heart that throbs like ‘‘a wardrum / Mustering force’’
(–) and ‘‘ignorant little fists’’ () that ‘‘Beat at your borders’’ (),
this angry child of Union punishes its mother from within and threatens
its father, too, ‘‘across the water’’ (). The ‘‘legacy’’ () of force and
violence, the poem suggests, is more of the same: the crossing of two
cultures under conditions of imperial masculine dominance and colon-
ized feminine subordination produce only a bitter fruit, with Union’s
offspring – both a part of and apart from its parents – signifying Union’s
enduring brutality.
Now, more than thirty years after the renewal of ‘‘the troubles,’’ it
may be difficult to read the ‘‘legacy’’ of the Act of Union in any other
way. The terms that Heaney’s poem deploys, however, should make
feminist readers suspicious – not of the fact of conquest the poem
describes, but of the sexualized and gendered binary it superimposes on
the colonial relation, and of its attendant use of rape as a metaphor of
imperial exploitation. When I teach Heart of Darkness, I must often
remind students that to equate the Euroconquest of Africa with hetero-
sexual rape is to engage rhetorically in a version of the act they liberally
claim to condemn. Similarly, Heaney’s poem aims to demystify, to
reveal that the heart of an immense darkness is beating still, not just in
London, but in Dublin, Derry, and Belfast as well. Yet we might better
understand the gendered rhetoric of the poem as itself a product of

and ethnic, the ‘‘I’’ of the poem may be seen to occupy a discursive
position within a system of representation historically produced largely
by English men. Enda Duffy suggests in a reading of another Heaney
poem that ‘‘what is seen is always now seen partly through the op-
pressor’s voice and that vision is spoken always, partly in the oppressor’s
language and forms’’:⁴ today this discursive position is also potentially
available to any one of us to appropriate, perhaps, or ironically to
reverse, even if the different locations we occupy will differently nuance
our uses of it. Thus my first reading of the poem in terms of a simple
gender binary is challenged not simply by Heaney’s biographical status
as an Irish man, but by his speaker’s cross-cutting identifications with
both positions, (feminine) colonized and (masculine) colonizer. No bi-
 Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing
nary can adequately articulate the complexity of the poetic and political
situation: a point those in or from the North may know especially well.
Perhaps the poet has succeeded in leading me to misread because he has
learned so well the trick of throwing his voice; or maybe it is because the
gendered rhetorics of the imperial indeed inhabit us all in various ways,
and have at times deafened us to colonial accents. Heaney’s uncanny
ability to mimic the ‘‘imperially / Male’’ colonizer suggests that even as
the poem grounds itself in a hierarchical opposition between English
man and Irish woman, it also invites us to question the fixity of the
positions it represents and to historicize the relations it maps. Finally,
then, it is less a matter of misreading than of rereading this poem, of
returning to texts that have seemed to say one thing, and one thing only,
and listening to them with a different ear, or from another position.
One thing I have especially listened for in the course of my reading
and writing, as a feminist postcolonial critic, is the gendered idiom of
marriage and family, which operates in the nineteenth century as a
mode of constructing difference and likeness in the relation between

resistance in the narrative forms and political arguments they deploy.
And it means, too, that I am concerned less with an oppositional Irish
culture of dissent than with a liberal English discourse dedicated to
producing ideological fictions through which Irish disaffection from
English rule could be rhetorically minimized, managed, or resolved.
While ongoing Irish resistance clearly poses a central problem for the
writers I study, from Edmund Burke to Matthew Arnold, I especially
emphasize the ideological production of liberal tropes within an English
framework that may contest or enforce Ireland’s political inequality.
Historical hindsight pronounces that all efforts to legitimate Union were
doomed to fail, due in no small part to the growth of cultural and
political nationalism among the Irish, which Union itself arguably
facilitated; that it did not appear this way to nineteenth-century English
liberals is one of my points of departure.
Liberal English fictions about the English–Irish relation consistently
assume, rather, that Ireland could be and indeed should be effectively
ruled by England. Instituted in , the Act of Union was understood
as necessary for the political security and economic well-being of both
nations; geographical proximity required the larger and more powerful
to extend its ‘‘protection’’ – for feminists, a conspicuously gendered
term – to the smaller and weaker, even if only for the sake of protecting
itself. Yet liberal English discourse about Ireland, as I argue throughout
the book, is not simply or unambivalently a tool of domination. In my
view, liberal discourse also functions in some instances to critique
England and Englishness itself, even as it also persistently returns to the
question of how the English nation should conceive of itself in an age of
imperial expansion.
In the post-Union novels by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson
that I consider in Chapter Two, for example, the marriage plot allegori-
cally suggests the ideological need for altering England’s historical

England’s progress into modernity; or as a racialized other that embo-
dies its historical and/or biological difference from England as a func-
tion of its national character. These metanarratives indeed seem de-
signed to stabilize the meanings of Irishness in a static, subordinate
position. Although elements of such grands re´cits are everywhere present
in particular narrative and political representations of Ireland, I don’t
believe that they invariably issue in the same fixed meanings in every
context; indeed, most of the narratives I work with contest fixities in
charting the dynamic processes of contact. Novelistic representations,
for example, are both shaped by and sometimes resistant to such
metanarratives, as in Anthony Trollope’s rewriting of Malthusian dis-
course in his depiction of the great famine in Castle Richmond (),
which I analyze in Chapter Four. And because I tend to read plots very
closely, for what they do and do not say, my findings here suggest that it
is to the particulars of plots and plotting that we should look if we want
Introduction
to challenge the conventional wisdom about English colonial discourse
on Ireland.
This book thus analyzes both continuity and change in patterns of
plotting, considering as well the variable uses of those plots, which
respond to ideological and political shifts in England, in Ireland, and in
the relation between the two. Among the various narrative modes I
examine, family plots – narratives of cross-cultural marriage and mix-
ture, as well as those that chart Irish family histories over time and
across generations – have an especially important place in English
writings about Ireland. Because the familial so often operates as a
metonym for the social, a broken or ‘‘degenerate’’ Irish family – such as
Edgeworth’s Rackrents or Trollope’s Macdermots – allegorically sig-
nifies the unsettled state of Irish society. Because efforts to legitimate
English rule in Ireland so often involve disputed rights to land and

culture and politics. In affiliating my project with postcolonial studies, I
assert that Ireland does indeed have, or should have, a place on the new
map being drawn by scholars working to revise our understanding of the
history of English colonial discourse. In contesting the absence of Irish
questions from English studies, I challenge the ongoing scholarly pro-
duction of separate and unequal histories. And in establishing a specifi-
cally gender- and race-conscious framework for reading English repre-
sentations of Ireland, I aim to reorient postcolonial Irish studies by
making gender and race central and linked categories of analysis. My
effort to reconfigure the questions that we pose, and how we pose them,
constitutes the basis for the way in which the arguments of the book
unfold; in what follows, I sketch some of these scholarly contexts for my
work as a way to open a conversation among them.
Articulating the relation of Ireland to England in the nineteenth century
as colonial has been made possible for me largely through the use of
postcolonial tools. In my view, the insistent concerns of theorists and
critics working in a wide variety of specific contexts – the creation of
otherness as a material agent of imperial rule, the place of language as a
site of both domination and opposition, the deployment of racial
stereotyping in securing the subordinate status of the colonized – have
clear applications in analyzing the discursive production of nineteenth-
century Ireland in colonial terms. Yet there is little or no consensus on
using either term – colonial or postcolonial – to describe the historical or
contemporary relation of England and Ireland. How to proceed when
there is so little agreement on what the terms themselves mean and on
how to use them?
Some scholars maintain, for example, that Ireland never was a
colony, while others claim that it was, and still is, at least in part; on this
question, the debate has taken place primarily among the historians, as
part of the larger controversy surrounding Irish historical revisionism.⁵

to assert that nineteenth-century Ireland is a special case, being ‘‘at once
a European nation and a colony,’’⁹ then Hall points us toward another
way of understanding the postcolonial, as an analytic tool for rethinking
the meanings of national, imperial, and colonial formations. From this
point of view, the proliferation of scholarly studies of specific historical
and material situations, taken together, demonstrate that every case is in
some sense a special case: there was or is no one way of being ‘‘colonial’’
or ‘‘postcolonial,’’ no paradigmatic and unchanging relation of colon-
ized to colonizer, no single unified program of domination that pro-
ceeded in the same manner in every instance. In the words of Catherine
Hall, ‘‘the different theatres of Empire, the different colonial sites,
constructed different possibilities.’’¹⁰ So that even if some English dis-
cursive projects for representing Irishness in the nineteenth century
overlap in very significant ways with imperial rhetorics deployed else-
where, as I believe they do, the character of the historical relation
between England and Ireland also makes for specific and local differen-
ces from other colonial projects which we cannot, should not, ignore.
 Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing