Vol. 26, no. 2 - Vol. 27, no. 1 || Emigration and the Anglo-Irish Novel: William Carleton, "Home Sickness", and the Coherence of Gothic Conventions

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Emigration and the Anglo-Irish Novel: William Carleton, "Home Sickness", and the Coherenceof Gothic ConventionsAuthor(s): Jason KingSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 26/27, Vol. 26, no. 2 - Vol. 27, no. 1 (Fall,2000 - Spring, 2001), pp. 104-118Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515353 .

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JASON KING

Emigration and the Anglo-Irish Novel:

William Carleton, "Home Sickness", and

the Coherence of Gothic Conventions

Abstract Examining selected fictional works of William Carleton, this article argues

that the theme of migration is either marginalized or absent. When it is found, emi

gration is not presented as the solution to the tumult of industrialization but rather

one of its symptoms. Carleton signals the onset of the resultant social tension and

class conflict, as well as anxieties about emigration, through recourse to the con

ventions of Gothic fiction.

Resume A partir d'ceuvres de fiction de William Carleton, I'article avance que le

theme de la migration chez cet auteur est soit marginalise, soit absent. Quand elle

est evoquee, Immigration n'est pas presentee comme solution au tumulte de ^in

dustrialisation, mais bien plutot comme symptome. En recourant aux conventions

de la fiction gothique, William Carleton signale {'apparition des tensions sociales,

des conflits de classes et de I'anxiete engendres par Immigration.

"Emigration was an epic," writes David Doyle, that involved "more active participants than any other

conscious mass-movement in Irish history, [yet] strangely it has found nei

ther Irish nor Irish-American literary figures equal to its scope ? unlike the

Scandinavian, Italian, German, and Jewish migrations" (684). "Irish writers

of fiction for the most part," adds Patrick Duffy, "seem to have abandoned

their emigrant characters at the boat. They disappear silently over the hori

zon, out of sight, out of mind and out of the story... Emigrants, who in real

ity belonged to a large and nameless collectivity of peasants, had little role

to play in the plots of these writers" (33). Yet, given that migration was a

pervasive social phenomenon in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, and that

the topics of systematic emigration and colonization schemes were widely

discussed as potential remedies for endemic pauperism and rural conges

tion, one might expect that emigration would feature more prominently and

KING EMIGRATION AND THE ANGLO-IRISH NOVEL 105



provide a convenient form of narrative resolution in contemporary Irish fic

tion, that Irish novelists would seize upon it as a plot device even more

readily than their counterparts from other nations.

Nevertheless, in William Carleton's Black Prophet: A Tale of the Irish

Famine (1847) and The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848), two of the most

socially engaged novels of the Famine period, what is perhaps most con

spicuous about his treatment of migration is its marginalization and

absence. For the theme of migration features only incidentally in The Black

Prophet both to furnish and remove minor characters in accordance with

the plot's development; it is then explicitly denigrated in The Emigrants of Ahadarra as the proper domain of politics rather than art. Indeed, in the

preface to the novel, Carleton eschews "any political details upon the sub

ject of Emigration," because he deems it his "business as a novelist" to

refrain from turning his "fictitious narrative into a dissertation on political

economy" (v, 86). Accordingly, while the emergent social reality of mass

migration is registered in both novels to the extent that it is thematized as

a malignant societal pressure that must be resisted rather than embraced,

it features only obliquely as an instrument of closure.

By contrast, Raymond Williams has explored a set of British realist

texts from the mid-Victorian period in Culture and Society (1959) that offer

"vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society" (87), what he

terms 'industrial novels' (also see Brantlinger, 109-125): for example,

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Dickens's Hard Times (1855), Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), and Charles

Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). In each of these narratives, Williams con

tends, a common critique of industrialism emerges, but they all retreat

from any political implications their story lines might offer through recourse to highly contrived, narrative solutions "far removed" from the

very debilitating social conditions they had set out to examine (91). More

to the point, the plot device of emigration frequently functions in these

industrial novels as a vehicle of closure. In both Mary Barton and Alton

Locke, for example, the protagonists ultimately escape their socio-eco

nomic plight in industrial England through migration to Canada and the

United States, leaving their problems behind them but the English indus

trial landscape still untransformed. 'Canada' and 'emigration' thus become

part of a metonymic chain of signifiers for retreat from intractable social

and political problems that have their structural equivalence in the 'fortu

itous legacy' (North and South), the 'opportune marriage' (Sybil), or the

escapism of the circus in Hard Times. "A solution within the actual situa

tion might be hoped for," says Williams, but instead these narratives offer

only a form of resolution through displacement, a mere "canceling of the

actual difficulties [encountered] and the removal of the persons pitied to

the uncompromised New World" (91).

106 CJIS VOLUME 26 NUMBER 2, VOLUME 27 NUMBER 1



Emigration, then, provides a standard vehicle of closure in the

British industrial novel that engenders no form of social 'action' but only 'withdrawal' and escape (109), whereas in the Anglo-Irish novel of the same

period it fails to function as a convenient or plausible form of narrative res

olution. For unlike their British counterparts, Carleton's Anglo-Irish novels

treat emigration not as a solution to the tumult of industrialization but

rather as one of its symptoms.

My intention here is to examine the impact of emigration upon the

development and shape of William Carleton's Anglo-Irish novels, as well as

his transfiguration of its established literary conventions to remonstrate

against continuing population depletion from Ireland in the Famine period.

My argument is twofold. First, I want to examine Carleton's class politics in

the wake of the Famine and in light of his anxieties about continuing mass

migration. Much recent criticism has centered on Carleton's identity as an

Ulster writer (Vance, 136-153); his responses to the Famine (Morash, 162

168; King, 1996 811997; Hall, 50-55); his treatment of sex and gender, espe

cially in his gendering of Famine victims (Kelleher, 29-39); and the fraught interconnections between his misshapen literary forms, tenuous realism,

and bourgeois politics that outline a prescription of reformed landlordism

to quell Irish unrest (Lloyd, 128-141; Eagleton, 206-214). David Lloyd, Terry

Eagleton, and Chris Morash, in particular, have all commented upon the

social cleavage apparent in Carleton's fiction, and his championing of the

interests of Ireland's agrarian middle class at the expense of its landless

labourers and wandering poor.

I would like to extend this argument somewhat further, however,

and suggest that Carleton's class politics also inform his treatment of

migration, to the extent that he explicitly identifies Ireland's lower orders as

a destabilizing influence that effectively uproots the agrarian middle class

and ultimately drives them out of the country. For Carleton's texts, accord

ing to Morash, "clearly identify wandering, landless labourers as the source

of the 'violence and crime' which threatens the family farm" (168), that is, as a locus of instability to threaten more affluent agrarian Ireland's securi

ty of tenure and capacity to remain on the land (Morash, 165-166). Carleton's novels therefore demonize a succession of figures of'wandering

poor' ? the eponymous agitator in Rody the Rover (1845), the crippled

Irish-speaking poteen maker Tim Phats in The Tithe Proctor (1849), the wan

dering prophet Donnel Dhu in The Black Prophet (1847), and the travelling 'tinker' Philip Hogan in The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848)

? as uprooted

antagonists who orchestrate a series of conspiratorial plots to implicate and expropriate, in turn, the more settled figures of an independent Irish

yeomanry (Morash, 165). The plight of Ireland's internally displaced and more affluent poten

tial emigrants is revealed, in other words, to be not only dissimilar but also




inversely related. For it is precisely in the social confrontation between the

two, between idle vagrancy and genteel migrancy, that the uprootedness of

the Irish middle class originates: the very circulation of Ireland's internal

emigres directly precipitates strong farmer displacement unto the emigrant

ships. This distinction between "emigration" and "internal displacement"

might not at first appear to be of great significance to the extent that both

phrases neutrally denote different Irish "migration" patterns; but in

Carleton's fiction these different conceptualizations of Irish mobility become

socially invested and associated with a specific form of class conflict

between middle-class respectability, on the one hand, and stigmatized forms of itinerancy and vagrancy on the other. "Emigration" as a concept, in

other words, concerns itself primarily with one-directional flows out of

Ireland, social depletion, and loss, whereas "internal displacement" is asso

ciated in Carleton's fiction with the more nomadic figures of the "wandering

poor" whose collective interests appear mutually exclusive with those of his

middle class protagonists because their perambulatory movements are

imagined to destablize and unsettle Irish society as a whole. "Emigration" and "internal exile" hence are not two sides of the same coin in Carleton's

fiction but directly opposing social forces; for Carleton, the root of Irish emi

gration lies as much in this idea of class conflict and the vagaries of a per fidious underclass as in landlord neglect or the political connection between

Great Britain and Ireland. Finally, in taking cognisance of this, I wish to

extend the argument further again and, in the second half of my article, sug

gest that Carleton signals the onset of social tension and class conflict in the

wake of the Famine, as well as anxieties about emigration, through recourse

to the conventions of Gothic fiction.

In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980), Eve Sedgwick reconceives a traditional Psycho-analytic approach to Gothic fiction, one

that privileges "the spatial metaphor of depth... to represent a model of the

human self" (11), in terms of an alternative spatial metaphor of displace ment ? a theoretical innovation that more readily connects the Gothic to

other explicitly spatial narratives of displacement writ large, like stories of

migration. The very coherence of Gothic conventions, she argues, resides in

a form of separation anxiety, whereby "it is the position of the self to be

massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access... The lengths there are to go to reintegrate the sundered elements,"

she adds "? finally, the impossibility of restoring them to their original

oneness ? are the most characteristic energies of the Gothic novel" (13

14). William Carleton, then, turns to these conventions of Gothic fiction to

stigmatize emigration as a social force that massively blocks off Irish indi

viduals from their homeland to which they ought normally to have access.

At its most pronounced, this sundering between self and native soil, even

the very apprehension of emigration, in Carleton's fiction takes on the form




of what he terms "Home Sickness": a sinister wasting illness that enervates

its victims even as they envision their detachment from Ireland.

Carleton's turn to the Gothic to register displacement, and tension

between affluent emigrants and wandering poor, is first apparent in the

second series of tales from Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, espe

cially "Tubber Derg"; or, the "Red Well," first published in 1842. At root,

"Tubber Derg" is the story of the decline and fall of a strong farming family, that of Owen M'Carthy's household, all of whom are reduced to wandering

paupers, and then their tenacious effort to regain a foothold on the land. It

is thus a narrative of destitution and restoration, in which the M'Carthy fam

ily oscillates between Carleton's vaunted "independent class of yeomanry"

(404) and the "vagrant poor" (384): a homily, therefore, to perseverance

(Hayley, 148) as well as a concerted polemic against absentee landlordism,

subdivision, and "the absence of poor laws [that] takes away from the poor er classes one of the strongest incitements to industry" (383). Carleton

calls for the implementation of a Poor Law in Ireland (something he would

later come to regret; Morash, 162-163) both to supplant the moral economy that impoverishes Ireland's yeomanry with the financial burden for suppli cant distress, and then also to arrest the spread of vagrancy by providing a

means of "support [for] the inconceivable multitude of paupers, who swarm

like locusts over the surface of the country" (384). In the absence of any other means of support, the M'Carthys "set out to beg... in some distant

part of the country, where [their] name and family are not known" (384).

Thus, several years after they are first dispossessed, the M'Carthys become

cottiers (395), and then following a long period of sustained exertion and

hard work are finally able to claw their way up the social scale and purchase a farmstead near their lost home at Tubber Derg, rejoining the ranks of the

middle class. They return to a state of comparative affluence, after years

spent in internal exile, in a restoration of the normative social order that

seems characteristic of the narrative arc of realist fiction.

The middle class to which they are restored, however, appears

severely depleted, and Irish society itself fissured by the onset of emigra tion that also disturbs the conventions of realism in the narrative. For the

onset of emigration does not guarantee the stability of the established

social order in Carleton's fiction, but rather maximizes disharmony by

removing from Ireland the one class capable of securing national equilibri um. Thus, after his long period of internal displacement, Owen M'Carthy

?

Carleton editorializes at length ?

ascertained one important fact, which we will mention here, because it produces, in a great degree, the want

of anything like an independent class of yeomanry in the country. On inquiring after his old acquaintances, he

discovered that a great many of them, owing to high rents, had emigrated to America. They belonged to that

class of independent farmers, who, after the expiration of their old leases, finding the little capital they had

saved beginning to diminish, in consequence of rents which they could not pay, deemed it more prudent, while




anything remained in their hands, to seek a country where capital and industry might be made available. Thus

did the landlords, by their mismanagement and neglect, absolutely drive off their estates, the only men, who,

if properly encouraged, were capable of becoming the strength and pride of the country. It is this system,

joined to the curse of middlemen and sub-letting, which has left the country without any third grade of decent

substantial yeomen, who might stand as a bond of peace between the highest and lowest classes. It is this

which has split the kingdom into two divisions, constituting the extreme ends of society ? the wealthy, and

the wretched. If this third class existed, Ireland would neither be so political nor discontented as she is; but on

the contrary, more remarkable for peace and industry. (404)

Between 'the wealthy, and the wretched', 'the highest and the low

est classes', the members of the M'Carthy family remerge from penury to

straddle this social division and become "decent substantial yeomen". On

the surface, then, their fate would appear to belie Carleton's withering social commentary here. For their restoration to social respectability would seem to represent the path to "peace and industry" through incre

mental ownership of property that provides the foundation for the "bond

of peace" deemed so elusive to fasten Ireland's competing factions into a

cohesive social unit. By the same token, the M'Carthy family seems to

become exemplary "independent farmers," for whom a "political and dis

contented" nation appears inimical to widespread prosperity and commu

nal well-being.

Their social restoration to land ownership, however, would seem an

aberration in contrast with the editorial thrust of Carleton's narrative. For

their "escape" from penury is achieved only through what Norman Vance

terms Carleton's "fantasies of benign paternalism" and "the good landlords

of his liberal pipe dream" (148,149), not any significant transformation of

social relations or the land holding system that impoverished them in the

first place. Thus, it is against the continuing backdrop of landlord neglect,

rapacious middle-men, increasing rents, subdivision, and the destabilizing influence of the vagrant poor that the M'Carthys are restored to rank and

fortune: they are the beneficiaries of a narrative regime of tenuous realism

in which strong closure is imperative, rather than the "representative or

exemplary figures" (Lloyd, 137) of a normative middle class for the rest of

the nation to emulate. Emigration, in conjunction with all of these indices of

social distress, in other words, militates against the establishment, or at

least the security, of any such normative middle class that might function as a stabilizing influence in Irish society. Rather, migration becomes a means

of Assuring Ireland that "splits the kingdom into two divisions," depriving the Irish body politic of that class most "capable of becoming the strength and pride of the country."

In the absence, then, of a normative middle class beyond the

anomalous and improbable example of the M'Carthy family, Ireland lacks the very standard bearers whose economic activities might engender sta

bility and disarm class conflict to the extent that they represent the possi




bility of acquisition and widespread diffusion of property-ownership

throughout the nation at large. For in the end, the very middle class to

which the M'Carthys are restored appears severely depleted precisely in

proportion to the swell of paupers from whose ranks they have just

escaped. They, in turn, are only preserved from emigration by their long

period spent in internal exile.

Emigration and internal exile thus remain in Carleton's fiction

inversely related social phenomena. Both of them come together, how

ever, as opposing social forces that have the same repercussion in terms

of consequence and cause of genteel displacement. The point, then, is

that Carleton's fiction offers a concerted polemic against genteel migra tion in particular, not any form of expatriation from Ireland. In The

Emigrants of Ahadarra, for example, he even explicitly endorses an

assisted migration or colonization scheme to preserve the Irish middle

class, arguing that

unless some wholesome and humane principle of... colonial emigration... shall be adopted, [Ireland's indigent] will continue to embarrass the country, and to drive out of it, always in connection with other causes, the very class of persons that constitute its remaining strength (ctd. in Sloan, 234).

For the most part though, emigration is tainted in Carleton's fiction

by its association with superfluous classes and unsavoury characters. For

example, it is represented in his novel The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848) as

in his short story "Tubber Derg" (1842) as a threat to the bourgeois social

order rather than as a means of securing its comfort and independence.

Moreover, as in "Tubber Derg", it is only through the aegis of landlord

benevolence, in place of any significant transformation of land holding

practices, that the protagonists in The Emigrants of Ahadarra are restored

to their farmstead, and the established social order reaffirmed. Thus, by the

end of the narrative the only characters who have actually left Ireland are

the transported 'tinkers' of the Hogan family, and the disgraced antagonist

Hycy Burke, who suffers an early death in Montreal, "where it appears he

expired under circumstances of great wretchedness and destitution, after

having led, during his residence there, a most profligate and disgraceful life" (309). Emigration, in other words, provides a fitting end only for iniq uitous libertines and the vagrant underclass, not Carleton's prized inde

pendent yeomanry.

Throughout Carleton's narratives, however, it is not only a middle

class spirit of acquisition and instincts of the proprietor, but also a super natural anxiety of displacement characteristic of Gothic fiction, that roots his

protagonists in their native soil. For underlying the realist arc of Carleton's

fiction, ostensibly designed to inculcate a sense of social harmony, there

appears a distinct inclination towards the more outlandish tensions of a

Gothic aesthetic. It is less social ambition than a "rather maudlin" (Hayley,

KING EMIGRATION AND THE ANGLO-IRISH NOVEL ill



149) premonition of the afterlife, for example, that motivates Owen M'Carthy to return to his homeland in "Tubber Derg". For "there", Carleton writes,

lay the burying place of the M'Carthys, in which slept the mouldering dust of his own "golden-haired" [daugh

ter] Alley. With them ? in his daughter's grave ? he intended to sleep his long sleep. Affection for the dead is

the memory of the heart. In no other grave-yard could he reconcile it to himself to be buried; to it had all his

forefathers been gathered; and though calamity had separated him from the scenes where they had passed

through existence, yet he was resolved that death should not deprive him of its last melancholy consolation; ? that of reposing with all that remained of the "departed," who had loved him, and whom he had loved... the

assembly of his own dead; for there is a principle of undying hope in the heart, that carries, with bold and

beautiful imagery, the realities of life into the silent recesses of death itself. (398)

Herein, then, lies a series of affective ties to a community of the

dead, rather than more immediate economic survival strategies or the

desire for greater security and comfort, that returns the members of the

M'Carthy family to their home parish. "Affection for the dead," in other

words, takes precedence over "the realities of life," to create an undying

"principle of attachment" (Emigrants, 88) to one's native soil where the pull of the "departed" becomes the ultimate object of one's repose. For the

M'Carthy family, this sense of connection towards both their native soil and

their "golden-haired" daughter literally comes together in the singularly Gothic image of her "mouldering dust," one that forever roots them to the

place of her demise. Moreover, within her cherished "mouldering dust"

resides a synecdoche for both the family and the nation that carries with it

metonymic associations between familial and national ties, each of which

are quite literally grounded in the same plot and 'principle of attachment'

to one's native soil.

Against the M'Carthy family's "principle of attachment", however, befalls the "calamity that separated" them from the scene of their native

soil and her demise ? namely, the spectre of migration, whether it takes

the form of poverty and internal displacement, or equally, the prospect of

emigration from their homeland. Note, then, that within Carleton's terms of

"attachment" and "separation" can be traced subtle spatialized metaphors

for integrity and displacement that illustrate the coherence of Gothic con

ventions (as outlined by Sedgwick) underlining the central conflict in his

narrative. Thus, the M'Carthy family's feelings of affinity towards both

departed kin and their original home "have a proper, natural, necessary

connection to each other" that is suddenly and violently sundered, "creat

ing a doubleness where singleness should be" (Sedgwick, 14). In a similar

vein, their ensuing anxiety of displacement, whether it be in the form of the

death of loved ones or detachment from their community, represents a

"calamity of separation" from which sundered ties can only be restored "to

their original oneness" (Sedgwick, 14) through their eventual return, in

either case, to the place of their native soil.




In positing this form of narrative tension, then, as paramount over

the restoration of social equilibrium, emigration in Carleton's fiction

becomes the domain of a Gothic rather than a realist aesthetic. For whereas

emigration in the (predominantly British) realist narrative and the industrial

novel functions as a solution to intractable social and political problems by

removing its protagonists to the undefiled sphere of the New World, in

Carleton's fiction, on the other hand, migration lies at the very root of the

problem of social and political conflict by depleting the middle class most

capable of ensuring Irish stability, and by sundering his protagonists, in

Gothic fashion, from their native environs, wherein they feel most integral. Carleton also employs a Gothic aesthetic to envision the Irish nation

itself, metaphorically, as an organic entity, for which emigration represents

the expiration of its life force. Throughout his literary works, Ireland's steady loss of people is imagined as a form of degenerative illness or social hemor

rhaging in which the nation itself is massively blocked off from the optimal

population level that would sustain its 'health' and the 'strength of country'. The Emigrants of Ahadarra, for example, combines each of these corporeal

metaphors in descrying first "the contagion for emigration" (269), and then

America as an "overgrown cupping glass... drawing [out] the best blood of

our country" (252). Likewise, in his preface for the novel, Carleton seeks to

staunch "the unparalleled tide of emigration which has drained, and is still

draining, this unhappy country of its best blood and strength". His conflation

of migration here with both a form of illness, its malignant remedy of blood

letting, and a receding tide involves what the Cognitive Theorists Lakoff and

Johnson term "complex coherences across metaphors" (97-104). For

although such metaphors for migration as 'illness', 'blood-letting', and an

"unparalleled tide" "do not provide us with a single consistent concrete

image, they are nonetheless coherent and fit together" to the extent that

their "overlapping entailments" (105) each figure migrancy as an abnormal,

aberrant, and unnatural social condition. In other words, Carleton resorts to

a series of affective images and organic metaphors of fluidity that provide

powerful Gothic sanctions against further departures from Ireland, rather

than imagining it as a routine social phenomenon.

Carleton's employment of Gothic conventions in The Emigrants of Ahadarra is also closely aligned with his class politics, to venerate the

strong farmer at the expense of Ireland's wandering poor. He specifically

laments, for example, the loss of Ireland's "best blood and strength," in

effect, the 'life-blood' of Irish nationalism. For although Carleton himself

was neither an Irish nationalist nor a Roman Catholic except in the most

tenuous fashion, his novels invariably feature the affluent, agrarian Catholic middle class that would spearhead both O'Connell's Repeal Movement as well as the Young Ireland organization in their opposition to

the Union and Anglo-Irish rule.




Population depletion for Carleton is thus especially a tragedy of

class dislocation. It is the sectional migration of what he terms in The

Emigrants of Ahadarra "a respectable and independent class of Irish yeo

manry" (86) that most imperils the well-being of the nation's body politic.

Especially grievous for Carleton, then, is the spectacle of "the industrious,

moral, and respectable portion of our countrymen abandoning the land of

their birth and affections" (88); "this, indeed," he writes, "is a kind of

depletion which no country can bear long" (86). Hence, once again, in The

Emigrants of Ahadarra (1848) as in "Tubber Derg" (1842), Gothic metaphors of blood-loss and hemorrhaging predominate, as Carleton outlines the

plight of "the decent and respectable farmer... who, loving his native fields

as if they were of his blood, would almost as soon part with the one as the

other" (Emigrants, 89). On the other hand, "the great mass of pauperism"

(89), landlord neglect, onerous legislation and taxation for Famine relief, and ultimately the political connection with Great Britain itself, all "lie like

an incubus upon the energies of the country" (89). "Like Frankenstein in the

novel," Carleton concludes, this confluence of social, economic, and politi

cal forces, once "conjured up," must "press heavily upon the independent class of farmers and yeomen" until they either need leave Ireland or are

"unquestionably destroyed" (168). He thus explicitly employs a Gothic reg ister to isolate Ireland's 'lower orders', along with the Union, as major pre

cipitants rather than unwilling participants in emergent mass-migration. Monstrous images of blood-loss, an 'incubus', and finally Frankenstein all

accumulate to mystify emigration as a supernatural agent of adversity rather than a rational response to economic distress.

Accordingly, Carleton's disaffection towards migration, predilection for 'strong farmers', and invocation of Gothic imagery all coalesce in the

plight of the affluent M'Mahon family, the eponymous Emigrants of Ahadarra.

As a representative example of "honest industry, enterprise, and independ ence" (88), they epitomize middle-Ireland in their tenacious effort to remain on the land despite intense social and economic pressure to leave. In their

struggle to reconcile an innate "principle of attachment" with a "strong ten

dency to emigration" (88), they embody a much larger social tension that besets the Irish nation as a whole. For, as Carleton explains at length,

There is not, in any country in the world, a population so affectionately attached to the soil - to the place of their birth - as the Irish. In fact, the love of their native fields, their green meadows, the dark mountains, and the glorious torrents that rush from them, is a passion of which they have in foreign lands been known to die. It is called Home Sickness, and we are aware ourselves of more than one or two cases in which individuals, in a comparatively early stage of life, have pined away in secret after their native hills, until the malady becom

ing known unfortunately too late, they sought once more the green fields and valleys among which they had

spent their youth, just in time to lay down their pale cheeks and rest in their native clay for ever those hearts which absence and separation from the very soil had broken. (264)




Emigration thus is explicitly identified in the form of "Home

Sickness" as a supernatural agent of pathology, to the extent that it even

becomes a physiological condition. Moreover, once again, the terminology of "attachment" and "separation" is introduced to represent "Home

Sickness" in the form of a sundering of 'integrity' or 'wholeness' through a

means of displacement, both of which terms draw on the clash of spatial

metaphors that provides the foundation of Sedgwick's understanding of

the coherence of Gothic conventions.

However, this metaphorical construction is further reinforced by the

lurking figure of vampirism, in the guise of a fetishized 'attachment to the

soil' or one's 'native clay' that can only be sundered upon pain of a myste

rious wasting illness, marked by its youthful victims, symptoms of gradual social withdrawal, and an increasingly anemic and pallid complexion. In

effect, emigration in the form of "Home Sickness" becomes symptomatic of

a much larger degenerative condition, one that would seemingly equate the

fate of the nation with a string of Gothic heroines spanning from LeFanu's

Carmilla to Bram Stoker's Lucy Westrena and Mina Harker in Dracula.

Indeed, it is precisely such a fate that would appear to befall Carleton's

young heroine Dora M'Mahon in The Emigrants of Ahadarra: for after she

learns of her own impending departure from Ireland, "a deadly paleness settled upon her face" (230). "From the moment she felt assured that emi

gration to America was certain," Carleton writes, "she manifested a depres

sion so profound and melancholy, that the heart of her brother Bryan, who alone knew its cause, bled for her" (269). By the same token, the

elder patriarch of the M'Mahon family, on the eve of a "long voyage across the Atlantic," literally expires from "Home Sickness": "his death...

exhibiting as it did, the undying attachment to home which nothing else

could extinguish" (305). What each of these figures have in common,

then, is a degenerative condition that is not only a symptom of migration but also a metaphor for displacement, a manifestation of the national con

dition in each of their respective, personal spectacles of withering away. For

in the end, it is impossible to dissociate Gothic convention here from social

commentary, as Carleton's sensational plot contrivances and remon

strances against migration become increasingly intertwined. The M'Mahon

family would appear to embody the fate of the prostrate Irish nation itself,

losing its lifeblood before the spectre of migration.

It should be evident, then, that Carleton's metaphorical use of "Home Sickness" as a symptom of displacement invokes Gothic conventions to buttress his anti-colonial politics and an anti-emigration aesthetic. Through their manifestations of "Home Sickness ", his characters embody the pathology of displacement and suffer vio

lent symptoms, even death, from the mere pressure exerted upon them to emigrate from Ireland, without ever

actually leaving home. They remain utterly parochial, stationary figures, and rooted in one place, as the

denizens of Carleton's version of the Anglo-Irish novel that appears profoundly localized in contrast with its




British realist counterpart. His Gothic novels of emigration invariably feature a single townland in place of a

national milieu or more sweeping surroundings.

If we turn to the form of the novel in general, Georg Lukacs argues in the Theory of the Novel that it arises as a literary genre precisely in con

junction with the breakdown of what he terms "integrated civilizations" and

a totalizing world view that was previously encapsulated in epic literature.

Perhaps the absence of the "epic themes of discovery and conquest"

(Brantlinger, 109) in Irish migration writing can be attributed, then, to this

breakdown of a totalizing world view and "integrated civilization" brought about by the impact of emigration upon traditional nineteenth-century Irish

society before the onset of modernity and industrialization, the socially transformative effects of which "cut too deep" (Doyle, 684) for Irish or Irish

American writers to represent adequately in a traditional epic form. Unlike

the epic, on the other hand, the novel, according to Lukacs, reflects the

alienated "condition of the modern western mind": that is, "secular but

yearning for the sacred, ironic but yearning for the absolute, individualistic

but yearning for the wholeness of community,... [and] fragmented but

yearning for 'immanent totality'" (Torgovnik, 188). Moreover, it is the rise of

the nineteenth-century realist novel, in particular, Lukacs adds, that best

reflects this process of emergent alienation and disillusionment to ulti

mately culminate in a mind-set of universalized displacement: "for the

novel form is, unlike no other," Lukacs declares, "an expression of this tran

scendental homelessness" (41). While there is insufficient space to conjecture more specifically

upon how the social processes of emigration and colonization might con

tribute to this breakdown of a totalizing world view or notion of an "inte

grated civilization", and while Lukacs himself has little to say about the

distinction between realism and the Gothic as literary genres, or about

the British realist as opposed to the Anglo-Irish novel, I do think that his

concept of "transcendental homelessness" provides us with a useful

measure of displacement to help distinguish between these two literary forms. Unlike the "problematic individual" of the realist novel, Carleton's

Anglo-Irish characters are not 'transcendentally homeless' figures but all

too prone to "Home Sickness", the privation of a Gothic as opposed to a

realist aesthetic that centres on a profoundly localized pathology and not

the universality of displacement. Moreover, unlike its realist counterpart,

Gothic narrative is insular rather than expansive in its orientation,

grounded in the excess as opposed to the inculcation of a civilizing mind

set, the multiple accretions and ruins and corruptions of an Old World cul ture that has become decadent to the point of dissolution, even if in

Carleton's fiction this applies more to the land holding system than a fas

cination with 'Big House' decay or 'mouldering' castles.

It is this sense of the Gothic, as the sundering of affective ties and




an organic nation, that conditions Carleton's depiction of emigration, pro

viding powerful emotive sanctions against further departures from Ireland

that nevertheless register its increase. Ultimately, then, Carleton poises his

localized incidents of "Home Sickness" and the pathology of displacement from particular communities and an unchanging Irish social milieu against the backdrop of a more universalized condition of exile and "transcenden

tal homelessness": one that is reflected in the rise of the "problematic indi

vidual" and the form of the British realist or industrial novel. Carleton's

protests against emigration from Ireland are thus more in keeping with the

conventions of Gothic fiction than a British realist aesthetic, precisely to the

extent that he envisions migration in withering rather than salutary terms

as an underlying cause and not a remedy for Ireland's social, economic and

political distress.

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n8 CJIS VOLUME 26 NUMBER 2, VOLUME 27 NUMBER 1



Documents

Vol. 26, no. 2 - Vol. 27, no. 1 || Emigration and the Anglo-Irish Novel: William Carleton, "Home Sickness", and the Coherence of Gothic Conventions