Performing Patriarchy

Abstract

As articulated previously, Ireland as a nation, like other post-colonial nations, was conceived through the metaphoric use of gender. In Ireland’s case it was conceived specifically through a series of female tropes, such as the Róisín Dubh (the Black Rose as metaphor for a nation for whom one would die), or the Aisling (a vision in the form of a woman). Both of these women-tropes were performed in popular and political song with romantic nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile in the theatre the concept of the Aisling figure indelibly linked the form to the nationalist project in Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s 1902 play Kathleen Ni Houlihan. In the play she is embodied by a rootless Poor Old Woman who has been dispossessed of her four green fields (as an overt symbol of a colonized and specifically Irish nation with its four provinces). She appears onstage and asks the young male patriots of Ireland to forsake their families and to fight on her behalf. So if Ireland as nation was conceived as a woman metaphorically it was so in opposition to the patriarchal colonizer of Britain.