*Bowen's Court* and the Anglo-Irish World-System

Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System Matt Eatough n recent years the transnational turn has changed how scholars look at literary productions from the first half of the twentieth century. Increasingly, they recognize how profoundly national literatures are embedded in international contexts.1 And the temporal, spatial, and vertical expansion championed by the new modernist studies has brought previously marginal locations and texts into dialogue with the canonical figures of Euro-American modernism.2 Both comparative and postcolonial work often stresses the networks of circulation and exchange bind- I Perhaps the most sustained attempt to conceive a national literature within a global context can be found in Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Such studies have been greatly influenced by theorizations of world literature, in particular Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 2 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737 – 48. The more influential of these studies include Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth- Century Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); and Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005). 1 Modern Language Quarterly 73:1 (March 2012) DOI 10.1215/00267929-1459724 © 2012 by University of Washington 70 MLQ March 2012 ing locations together. The goal for all these works has been a nuanced map of global space capable of conceiving its systemic aspects while preserving the contingency of its individual productions.3 One model of global space that has elicited both innovative scholarship and skeptical responses is world- systems theory. While Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, among others, have constructed ambitious profiles of international literary space using terminologies and methodologies indebted to world- systems theory, many have been justifiably hesitant to endorse projects that seem to pit a core EuroAmerican zone against a global South.4 However, although Moretti and Casanova draw on economistic perspectives, they both treat literature largely as its own world- system, abstracted from its material conditions.5 In contrast, world- systems theory as elaborated by its most famous practitioners, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank,6 envisions the center of the capitalist worldsystem as a network of nation- states competing for socioeconomic hegemony over one another and over their peripheries.7 Far from setting up an antithesis between center and periphery that is reminiscent 3 David Palumbo- Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi elaborate on this goal in their introduction to the edited collection Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 4 Such equivocation has been especially prevalent in discussions of Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See Harsha Ram, “Comparative Futurism: Nationalist Polemics in the Transnational Avant- Garde: Paris, Italy, Russia,” and Susan Stanford Friedman, “World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity,” both in Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 5 Casanova claims outright that literary space is autonomous from economic considerations (40 – 44). Moretti’s work is much more nuanced in its treatment of material networks, but his emphasis on “distance reading” often obscures the sociological role of genres in particular national spaces. For examples of Moretti’s “distance reading” see Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005) and Atlas of the European Novel, 1800 – 1900 (London: Verso, 1998). 6 See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World- System, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 – 2011); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); and Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 7 Casanova adapts the idea of rivalry to her model of international literary space but insists that these struggles take place through one central location, Paris (87 – 91). Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 71 of deconstructive readings of European imperialism,8 world- systems theory insists that European dominance was always more tenuous than its adherents wanted to admit: its geopolitical position rested on commercial interests, cultural institutions, and military obligations requiring the consent and active participation of the governed. From this perspective Britain’s dominance looks less like an integrated, uniform undertaking and more like what John Marx calls “the new dream of a decentered network of peoples described, analyzed, and managed by a cosmopolitan cast of English- speaking experts.”9 World- systems theory offers literary studies new insight into the transnational networks of a global capitalist space and into the class blocs supporting them. My essay concerns one location that has often been prominent in literary- critical accounts of the early twentieth- century world- system: Ireland. Due to Ireland’s “metrocolonial” status and important contributions to modernist literature, numerous critics have used Irish literature to test theories about global cultural capital, the relationship between metropolitan and colonial literatures, and the connection between socioeconomic modernization and literary forms.10 But Irish participation in transnational networks was uneven, with certain 8 E.g., Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post- colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 9 John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. For a similar view that traces this network perspective back to the mid-nineteenth century see John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World- System, 1830 – 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10 Joseph Valente coins the term metrocolonial in Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Fredric Jameson uses Ireland as a synthetic space for his Hegelian reading of modernism and empire, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 152 – 69. Likewise, Casanova uses Ireland as her most extended example of a peripheral literature struggling for autonomy. Within Irish studies, the postcolonial turn initiated by Declan Kiberd, Seamus Deane, and David Lloyd in the 1980s and 1990s positioned Ireland as a representative decolonizing space with clear parallels to Indian and African nations. More recently, globalization has led many critics to assess Ireland’s role in a changing world economy. See Peadar Kirbe, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, eds., Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy (London: Pluto, 2002); and Joseph Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2006). 72 MLQ March 2012 classes relying on them to a far greater degree than others. Foremost among those who did so were the Anglo-Irish. Indeed, while nationalist historians have often portrayed them as a feudal aristocracy slowly declining into impotent obscurity, the Anglo- Irish actually played a vital role in mediating between a rural, agrarian Irish economy and an urban, industrialized British economy. By exporting their agricultural produce to Britain and purchasing British-made luxuries, the protagonists of the Protestant Ascendancy molded their uncertain position as a foreign landowning class into the foundation of asymmetrical social, economic, and cultural exchanges between the two countries. When viewed as the outgrowth of a transnational social bloc rather than of a fading aristocracy, Anglo-Irish modernism looks very different from its canonical interpretations. As one of the most sophisticated midcentury defenses of AngloIreland, Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court (1942) provides an ideal opportunity to evaluate the impact of transnational networks of exchange on literary texts. Bowen’s memoir attempts to rehabilitate her class’s social mission by investigating one of its most representative spaces, the Big House. Synonymous with aristocratic activities like fox hunting and lawn parties, country mansions anchored the Anglo-Irish neofeudal ethic of polite sociality and paternalistic responsibility. They became the favored objects of the fictional worlds through which Anglo-Irish writers sought to legitimate their culture to English and Irish society. Whereas nineteenth- century Big House novels typically feature a gothic atmosphere, Bowen’s history treats her Anglo-Irish ancestors less like gentry than like members of a professional class: isolated, individualistic, and committed to impersonal institutions. Specifically, Bowen’s narrative reflects the impact of Irish economic isolationism during the 1930s. As the British world- system transitioned from the family-run ventures of nineteenth- century capitalism to the multitiered, professionally managed corporations that characterized German and American production, the Irish government found it necessary to close off networks of exchange between itself and Britain in the hopes of developing its own corporate industries and professional class. Though on the surface it boded ill for the Anglo-Irish, Bowen embraced professionalism as an alternative mode of transnationalism that was more amenable to Irish national autonomy than a gothic narrative of neofeudalism. Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 73 To make her claim, Bowen constructs a cyclical form of history that attributes changes in the leanings of the Ascendancy’s class position to its affective dispositions. Many critics have noted the attention that Bowen’s English novels pay to the minutiae of distinctions among classes and class lifestyles.11 But her Irish works have generally been read separately and through different lenses.12 I propose to read Bowen’s Court as a linking work, pulled between an overemotional economy that binds Bowen’s class to the land of Ireland and a commitment to impersonal ideals that is associated with British professionalism. These dispositions are coconstitutive of Bowen’s Anglo-Irish as a transnational bloc. Though gothicized emotionality injures the Ascendancy, it also instills in them a collective desire to build national institutions. The professionalism that then subsequently — and fleetingly — emerges proffers a more forward-looking narrative but also breaks up Anglo-Ireland’s class solidarity and prevents the development of necessary socioeconomic structures. For Bowen, then, the secret to saving the Anglo-Irish from imminent decline consists in pointing their emotions in the right direction. The most extended analysis of Bowen’s representation of class can be found in Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 12 Feminist criticism has focused overwhelmingly on Bowen’s English novels, arguing for their inclusion in the British canon, while Irish studies has concerned itself almost exclusively with the vexed issue of her nationality and her place in Irish literary history. The key feminist studies of Bowen are Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1989); and Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981). The best of a large body of Irish scholarship on Bowen includes R. F. Foster, “The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen,” in Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (New York: Penguin, 1993), 102 – 22; Foster, “Prints on the Scene: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of Childhood,” in The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 148 – 63; Declan Kiberd, “Elizabeth Bowen — the Dandy in Revolt,” in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1995), 364 – 80; and Seamus Deane, “The Literary Myths of the Revival,” in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880 – 1980 (Winston- Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1987), 28 – 37. For one attempt to bridge the divide between Bowen’s Irish and English fiction see Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). 11 MLQ 74 March 2012 The Consolations of Professionalism Bowen published her first work of fiction, Encounters, in London in 1923, during the heyday of modernism. Though she was Anglo-Irish by birth, her well-received fiction admitted her to several exclusive English literary circles, including the Bloomsbury Group and the Oxford set of Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, and Cyril Connolly. Because of her experimental techniques and her London residence, scholars initially read Bowen’s work as exhibiting a feminine strain of late modernism (Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen; Lee, Elizabeth Bowen). However, the critical focus has recently shifted toward Bowen’s Irish heritage. For all that she lived and moved in the London literary scene, Bowen always considered herself Irish, and her regular use of Irish settings testifies to their key role in shaping her social and literary sensibilities. In particular, Bowen’s Court has become a touchstone for scholars contesting or hoping to establish her Irish literary and intellectual heritage.13 Written between the summer of 1939 and December 1941, Bowen’s Court departs in important ways from Bowen’s experimental fiction, eschewing the convoluted syntax and elliptical narrative of the latter in favor of a realistic, linear depiction of Big House life. Built primarily in the eighteenth century, these Georgian mansions had by Bowen’s time become emblems of Protestant hegemony. But house burnings during the Irish War of Independence created doubts in many minds about how long Anglo-Ireland could endure. Bowen’s Court escaped destruction, but Bowen and her mother permanently emigrated to England when Bowen was twelve, and the ensuing exile reinforced her fears that her gentry class was in permanent decline. “[The] Protestant Ascendancy . . . had become . . . a ghost only.”14 Credited by many as a uniquely systematic theorization of the Big House, Bowen’s Court follows Bowen’s ancestors from their settlement in Farahy, County Cork, through the turn of the twentieth century.15 In The most thorough examination of the relationship between Bowen’s Court and Bowen’s Anglo-Irish nationality can be found in Foster, “Prints on the Scene.” Though Foster emphasizes the element of fantasy that enters into Bowen’s family history, he notes its Irish provenance to defend her against those who would see her as inauthentically Irish. 14 Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (New York: Ecco, 1979), 430. 15 Critics who treat Bowen’s Court as a theoretical reflection on the Anglo- Irish condition include Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse, 13 Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 75 the process, Bowen posits a close analogy between her family members’ innermost thoughts and feelings and the evolution of Anglo-Irish society as a whole. Referring somewhat tongue-in- cheek to her forebears with pseudomonarchical titles ( John II, Henry V, etc.), she endows their personalities with a typicality reminiscent of that given to the “Elizabethan” or “Victorian” era. Significantly, Big Houses themselves mold this analogical relationship by shaping similar psyches among distant people through their architectural peculiarities. “A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen’s Court,” writes Bowen. “Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen’s Court has made all the succeeding Bowens” (32). As with Bowen’s Court, so with all Big Houses: “I know of no [such] house (no house that has not changed hands) in which, while the present seems to be there forever, the past is not pervadingly felt” (19). The Big House thus distills Anglo-Irish history into the perspective of a single representative family. Clearly indebted to earlier fictional portrayals of the Big House, Bowen’s Court nevertheless displays great skepticism about the Irish gothic tradition as related through Maria Edgeworth, Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker.16 Emerging just after the 1800 Acts of Union, which dissolved the Anglo-Irish – led Dublin Parliament, early Big House narratives replaced political with aesthetic rationales for Ascendancy rule. By describing country life in ideal terms, they stressed how neofeudal social forms could weld landlords and tenants into an organic community. For example, in Edgeworth’s Absentee (1812), an early progenitor of the Big House form, the young Lord Columbre abandons his parents’ hedonistic London life and returns to his Irish estate, Clonbrony, as a responsible landlord. In a reversal of causality, his tenants’ happiness after his arrival legitimates his prior ownership of Clonbrony and effaces the long history of dispossession NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 141 – 73; Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 76 – 78; Kiberd, 364 – 80; and Corcoran, 21 – 30. 16 Bowen often expressed a critical interest in this tradition. Her thoughts on the gothic can be found in introductions to Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 100 – 113; and The House by the Church-Yard, in People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 169 – 75. MLQ 76 March 2012 underlying his rule. In addition, by locating modern consumerism in London, Edgeworth insulates Clonbrony from modern capitalist labor and champions rural Ireland’s feudal status. But like any aesthetic production, a Big House novel never completely resolves the ideological contradictions it sets out to manage, and misgivings over landlords’ leadership failures on the national level introduce a gothic strain to these works. As Vera Kreilkamp explains, Big House novels represent the Anglo-Irish gentry as a dying class, even as they reproduce its ideological justifications, by drawing on such stock tropes as a decaying house, a degenerate aristocratic line, and a deracinated landowning class (20 – 25). Hereditary lines and impregnable mansions encode decline as solipsistic and intimate that neofeudalism collapsed from internal debility, not through English policy or tenant unrest.17 The gothic undercurrent to Big House novels encouraged the view, endorsed by later writers like W. B. Yeats, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, and Molly Keane, that the violent emotions instilled by country solitude explained the increasingly constrained social position of this class. Bowen certainly was not averse to admitting gothic elements into her fiction, and Margot Gayle Backus, W. J. McCormack, and Neil Corcoran persuasively place her novels in a tradition of “Irish Protestant Gothic.”18 But the trajectory of the gothic fit poorly with her hopes for an Anglo-Irish renaissance. In an article written for Sean O’Faolain’s journal the Bell in 1940 (see Lee, Mulberry Tree, 25–30), Bowen proposed that broadening the demographic base of Big House social forms could renovate the culture they supported into a modern institution. The Big House “idea,” she writes, “was at first rigid and narrow — but it could extend itself, and it must if the big house is to play an alive part in the alive Ireland of today. What is fine about the social idea is that it means the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal. In the interest of good manners and good behaviour people learn to subdue Kiberd draws this connection in Inventing Ireland, 69 – 82, 364 – 80. See Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and W. J. McCormack, Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats, and Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). The term Protestant Gothic comes from Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 149. 17 18 Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 77 their own feelings” (29). In keeping with her optimistic — one might say fantastic — belief in the long-term viability of Big House culture, Bowen distances her family history from gothic tropes while acknowledging their conventional presence in Big House literature. “There is no ghost in this house” (28), she insists enigmatically, not more than ten pages before tracing the origin of Bowen’s Court to Colonel Henry Bowen, the first Bowen to settle in Ireland, and his demonic appearance before his God-fearing third wife and their children. A confirmed atheist, he was reputed to have materialized before her and spewed vulgar, antiChristian invectives at her as he did so. Bowen calls attention to the fact that Colonel Bowen was still alive at the time of the Apparition (an oddity that earned him a place in Richard Baxter’s Worlds of Spirits, a study of early modern witchcraft) and that it took place in Wales, not in Ireland, where the children of his second marriage would become the Bowens of Bowen’s Court. “I cannot but be glad,” reflects Bowen, “that we County Cork Bowens descended from the second marriage, not from the haunted third” (48). By locating the Apparition among a defunct line, Bowen jettisons many tropes common to gothic histories and frees herself to associate the Bowen family’s evolution with the professional soldiering of the living Henry Bowen. In contrast to accounts that defend the Anglo-Irish as a benevolent, if decaying, aristocracy,19 Bowen emphasizes that her family’s lands were attained through professional aptitude, even if it was deployed in a flawed cause. While the many differences between hereditary elitism and professionalized egalitarianism encapsulate antithetical positions on social mobility, access to education, and state interventionism, Bowen consistently focuses on their affective discrepancies. Where under a hereditary class system one’s emotions are invested in proximate personal, familial, and class ties, professional society rests on “looser, half- formed relationships” to impersonal bureaucratic structures and an abiding belief in the “common good” of collective welfare.20 In this regard, professionalism entails a sort of antisocial 19 Yeats was the most well-known and influential figure to hold this view. Deane traces the impact of Yeats’s representations on later generations in “The Literary Myths of the Revival.” 20 Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4. 78 MLQ March 2012 sociality that places pleasure in one’s work and commitment to distant persons above immediate, personal demands.21 Thus, when recounting how Colonel Bowen earned the land on which Bowen’s Court would be built through military service, Bowen stresses that he demonstrated no deep emotional attachment to either of the parties for which he fought during the English Civil War: running afoul of the king’s party while in Ireland, he simply took up with Parliament’s army. As Bowen puts it, “I doubt whether Henry Bowen ever cared much for either King or Parliament: he may hardly have distinguished between the two” (39). According to Bowen, Cromwell’s arrival in Ireland changed the Civil War from “a barons’ war” fought “with fierceness and with virtuosity” to a “very businesslike” conflict (61). For his fellow officers Colonel Bowen holds no special affection — his hawks were “the only creatures, perhaps, with which he was intimate” — but his abilities as a “useful fight[er]” entitle him to substantial compensation (67). Secretive, antisocial, and atheistic, he lives in self-imposed isolation from the rest of the Cromwellian army but prospers nevertheless because of his professional demeanor. Bowen traces the peculiarities of her family’s history and the history of their Anglo- Irish class from Henry. She uncovers a drive to professionalization in several ancestors, from Henry III’s “vocational” devotion to the construction of Bowen’s Court, to Henry V’s disinterested pursuit of road building, to Robert Cole Bowen’s “business”oriented management of the family’s estate, and finally to her father’s dual commitment to the life of a solicitor and Bowen’s Court’s landlord (167, 289, 316, 375). In the process, Bowen uses her family as a template to analyze the rise and fall of professional management among the Anglo-Irish gentry as a whole. Early Bowens’ dreams of fantastic wealth, far from a family failing, reflect the self- centeredness of their class in its infancy; Henry III’s construction of Bowen’s Court stems from their embrace of rational tactics of organization and national leadership during the mid- to late eighteenth century; and Bowen’s father’s descent into mental illness symbolizes the failure of elite managerialism and the slow decline that it inaugurated for Anglo-Ireland (129, 158, 248). Bowen’s family can act as a stand-in for the Ascendancy as a whole because “isolation is innate” to this group, which embraced 21 Lisa Fluet details the antisociality of professionalism in “Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class, and Affect,” Novel 40, no. 3 (2007): 265 – 88. Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 79 “abstract ideas,” discarded “the bonds of sex and class and nationality,” and pursued individual accomplishment instead of a collective mission (20, 173, 125). Thus each Bowen’s idiosyncrasies reflect the lack of communal structures tying together the Anglo-Irish: their drift into isolated estates restricts classwide generalizations to representative readings of individual figures. However, isolation had resonances beyond the local ones Bowen gives it. Jonathan Cape found Bowen’s Court too pro-Irish and “subversive” to print in light of disputes over Ireland’s protectionist economic policies and its wartime neutrality. Cape’s hostility to “isolation,” “independence,” “secrecy,” and the “hope” for “an undivided Ireland” may sound excessive now, but these were loaded terms that implied sympathy for Sinn Féin and its ethic of “ourselves alone” in the late 1930s.22 In “Eire,” a contemporaneous piece in the New Statesman, Bowen describes the “abnormal isolation” imposed by the declaration of neutrality as Ireland’s “first independent act,” echoing Sinn Féin’s belief that Ireland must develop outside English influence (Lee, Mulberry Tree, 31 – 32). But on account of her English audience, Bowen eschewed the nativism of most Sinn Féin – influenced ideas and suggested instead that autonomy would help disinterested professional institutions flourish. The need to “look to herself only for necessities” would erode “the idea of privilege” and class antagonism and erect in their place impersonal bureaucratic organizations: parish councils, the Local Security Force, rationing services, and agricultural societies (34 – 35). Bowen’s Ireland looks suspiciously like England in this reading, with wartime rationing, gasoline shortages, health epidemics, and industrial production all managed by an enlightened government and its civil service. Most important, professionalized institutions would heal the bitter divisions and violent emotional attachments familiar to Ireland’s recent history and to gothic fiction alike and replace them with what she calls in the Bell “the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal” (29). But Bowen’s idealistic narrative of professional development falters in the face of Anglo-Ireland’s tragic rise and fall as a socially and politically relevant class. After the 1800 Acts of Union, she remarks, the John Hayward to Frank Morley, June 1942, quoted in Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure? Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 114. 22 MLQ 80 March 2012 Anglo-Irish, who considered their class “on the decline,” succumbed to “Gothic feeling” and retreated “back upon a tract of clouds and of obsessions that could each, from its nature, only be solitary” (258 – 59). Yet the failure of the Anglo-Irish leadership facilitated the emergence en masse of a professional class. For now, according to Bowen, physical separation gave way to psychological and social barriers — a state of affairs that she attributes to the rise of “democracy” (258). Gothic and professional histories appear to supplement each other as Bowen vacillates between belief in professionalized, egalitarian progress and regret that Anglo-Ireland was abandoning its responsibilities as a social elite. The two historical narratives are bound together by their concern with emotion, whether of the tragically expressive gothic variety or of the subdued professional sort. Ultimately, gothic and professional traits rectify each other’s deficiencies but cannot sublate the contradictions into a stable set of social structures. Why this is the case, and how Bowen attempted to resolve this dialectic through a cyclical historical narrative, becomes more clear if we turn to Anglo-Ireland’s position in the British world-system. Caught between Two Economies: The Anglo- Irish in Global Perspective The first step in approaching Bowen’s Court’s convoluted temporal framework is to explain how narratives of gothic decline and professional development relate to economic and cultural modernization. Though professionalism has long been associated with modernization and in particular with discipline- forming specialization, the gothic has typically been viewed as treating spaces outside or at the margins of modernity (Backus, 15).23 But in the context of a capitalist worldFor various articulations of this view see Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995). For studies that trace the rise of professionalism to the early modernist period see Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989); Marx; David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Lisa Fluet, “Hit-Man Modernism,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 269 – 97; and Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, eds., Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 23 Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 81 system, gothic narratives seem to participate in modernity. Indeed, Moretti’s “Dialectic of Fear” suggests that the gothic actually expresses, rather than retreats from, the dynamics of modernity, arguing that Frankenstein and Dracula reflect “the terror of a split [capitalist] society” that nineteenth- century industrial capitalism had produced between capitalists and workers.24 Following Moretti, Stephen Shapiro relates gothic fiction to the capitalist separation of laborers “from any means of production (agricultural, crafts- oriented) that might sustain them outside of or in tension with a system that produces commodities only for their profit- generating potential,” especially when a new distribution of power within the “core-zone” (i.e., Euro-America) generated new means of accumulation and unexpected capital flight.25 For Shapiro, gothic fictions surge in popularity during transitional moments, giving them an internal generic periodicity with which to chart imaginative responses to changes in global capitalism. But Anglo- Ireland’s unique position in the world economy led to the dominance of gothic conventions in Anglo- Irish fiction from the nineteenth well into the twentieth century.26 As numerous worldsystems theorists have explained, transnational networks of financial and commercial exchange make possible transitions between systemic “cycles of accumulation,” since they allow different economic systems to communicate and, eventually, to translate their capital from one organizational logic to the next (Arrighi, 1 – 27; Shapiro, 35 – 40). The Anglo-Irish did not merely participate in these networks; they lived in them as a condition of their very existence as a class. After the Acts of Union, Irish agriculture began to split into two spheres: a subsistence sector maintained by the Catholic masses and an export sector catering to British demand.27 Like elites in other plantation-house economies 24 For another astute reading of gothic narratives as attempts to grapple with new developments in capitalism see Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 467 – 93. For a more local analysis of Stoker’s tale that attributes its narrative oddities to the “metrocolonial” condition Stoker inhabited as an Anglo-Irishman, see Valente. 25 Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World- System (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 30, 35. 26 For a quantitative analysis of gothic popularity in 1790 – 1810 and 1870 – 1900 see Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 12 – 20. 27 Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780 – 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Denis O’Hearn, The Atlantic Economy: Britain, the US, and Ireland (Man- 82 MLQ March 2012 (the American South, the Caribbean, the system of Spanish haciendas), Ascendancy landlords thrived on transnational networks of exchange, selling agricultural commodities produced in a racialized, neofeudal system of labor to fund lavish expenditures in metropolitan consumer economies.28 Within this scenario, capital flight and alienation from agricultural modes of production did not constitute a momentary phase but were the very raisons d’être of the Ascendancy’s socioeconomic position. Absenteeism became a hotly debated subject in the nineteenth century precisely because the spectacular consumption of British luxury items in London made visible Anglo- Ireland’s liminal status in two separate economic systems. Though defenders like Yeats and Somerville and Ross stressed the feudal aspects of landlordism, the revenue generated from these estates was spent almost exclusively on British luxury goods, among them clothing, furniture, and carriages.29 But as George Moore makes plain in his late nineteenth- century novel A Drama in Muslin (1886), nonabsentees spent their incomes on the same dresses, books, and social activities, only in Dublin shops instead of through London- based merchants. Indeed, since Irish industrial manufacturing was minimal before the twentieth century, the sole outlets for Anglo-Irish wealth during these years were Britain’s consumer markets.30 Thus the Anglo-Irish were caught between a “split society” of Irish workers and British markets, an agricultural economy and an industrial- consumerist one. World-systems theory differs from national-oriented historiography in how it analyzes class across national borders and in relation to discrepant economies. In nationalist narratives the Anglo-Irish appear at best as a marginalized minority of former landowners and often, in Bowen’s chester: Manchester University Press, 2001); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783 – 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 445. 28 For a sustained analysis of “plantation modernism” see Mary Lou Emery, “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary,” in Wollaeger. 29 Kreilkamp provides an excellent history of Anglo- Irish feudal mythology (16 – 20). 30 Both Eagleton and Marjorie Howes (Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History [Dublin: Field Day, 2006]) argue that an appreciable urban industry did not exist in Ireland until the twentieth century, with the result that modernity was often localized in the countryside rather than in the city. Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 83 time, as a cancer on Irish political sovereignty;31 world- systems theory, in contrast, links colonial ruling classes into a coordinated network of international exchange that possesses a holistic organizational logic. In the late 1930s, when Bowen was writing Bowen’s Court, the world-system was in the final stages of a half- century-long reorientation. Increased competition and the consequent waning profitability of traditional small family firms favored German- and American-style corporations that handled their own distribution and sales along with production, leading capitalists to abandon mining, shipbuilding, and textile production for corporate businesses (Arrighi, 277 – 308). The greatly expanded ranks of professional managers needed to run these multitiered businesses “laid the foundation for a global class of specialists linked more securely to their overseas colleagues than to their home countries” (Marx, 22); this specialist class then displaced colonial class structures once seen as “mirror images — sometimes reflected, sometimes refracted, sometimes distorted — of the traditional, individualistic, unequal society that it was widely believed existed in the metropolis.”32 The move toward corporatized professionalism hit the Anglo-Irish hard, especially when the Irish government reduced international trade through protectionist tariffs in the hopes of mitigating American and British hegemony and freeing a space for local industries to grow in 31 See Padraic Pearse, “The Sovereign People,” in Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Talbot, 1966), 344 – 45, for Pearse’s endorsement of Wolfe Tone’s belief that “the gentry” (i.e., the Anglo-Irish) “have uniformly been corrupted by England, and the merchants and middle- class capitalists have, when not corrupted, been uniformly intimidated.” Sean O’Faolain, The Story of the Irish People (New York: Avenel, 1982), rejects historical narratives that, like Pearse’s, portray the Anglo-Irish as “an alien and detached strain in Irish life,” but even O’Faolain views them as “too few, too disgusted, too dispirited, or too indifferent to take part, as a body, in political life” (107, 167). Revisionist historians have challenged this triumphalist narrative, but they too have treated the Irish nation as their object of investigation. See Conor Cruise O’Brien, Writers and Politics: Essays and Criticism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965); F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890 – 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600 – 1972 (New York: Penguin, 1988). For a fine analysis of revisionist scholarship’s role in the field of Irish history see D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London: Routledge, 1996). 32 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xix. On the role played by corporate hierarchies in developing a professional class see Perkin, 17 – 26. 84 MLQ March 2012 (O’Hearn, 113 – 19). Ireland was not alone in erecting barriers to outside trade during the 1930s, the Great Depression having made many nations wary of globalization.33 Nevertheless, Éamon de Valera’s goal of a “self- sufficient” Ireland attacked the networks on which Anglo-Ireland’s wealth and elevated social status had depended, and this goal — along with an aggressive policy of Catholicization and Gaelicization, including new statutes against contraception (1935) and divorce (1937) that Yeats and Samuel Beckett famously lampooned34 — encouraged one-third of the Anglo-Irish in the south of Ireland to emigrate during the interwar period (T. Brown, 130 – 34). The emigrants to Britain often took advantage of their internationalist outlook to find new roles in the world economy that also looked outward. A number of Anglo-Irish writers found the international orientation of British intellectual life amenable to their tastes. Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis, to name only the two most famous, settled at an early age in England and established high reputations in professional literary circles.35 Relocated to England and educated at Downe House, Bowen associated herself with the Bloomsbury Group, which by the 1930s had outgrown its early family-like solidarity and functioned as a cosmopolitan fellowship of professional intellectuals with shared cultural views and artistic styles.36 Nor was professionalization confined 33 For a sustained analysis of the rise of protectionism across Europe and the United States see Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 34 Yeats attacked the statute against divorce in a speech before the Irish Seanad on June 11, 1925 (see The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce [London: Prendeville, 2001], 78 – 92); he also condemned the Censorship Bill in “Censorship in Ireland,” Manchester Guardian, September 22, 1928. Beckett’s objections to the same measures appear in “Censorship in the Saorstat,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 84 – 88, and in his satirical novella First Love. Patrick Bixby provides a thorough overview of Beckett’s hostility toward this legislation in Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8 – 19. For a survey of Anglo-Irish dissent over the governing of the Irish Free State see Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 – 2001, rev. ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 91 – 125. 35 The best accounts of MacNeice and Day Lewis’s involvement in the so- called Auden coterie are Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12 – 35; and Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: Pimlico, 1976). 36 John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 246. Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 85 to literary figures: C. Day Lewis’s father brought the family to England with the aim of climbing higher in the Anglican ranks than the dwindling Protestant population of Ireland would allow, and Iris Murdoch’s family crossed the Irish Sea for her father to continue his career as a military bureaucrat.37 Despite sharing a transnational perspective, gothic and professional narratives offer very different orientations and make nearly opposite legitimation claims. Gothic fiction thrives on the disjunction between profit- generating enterprises and alternative subsistence economies: in traditional Big House novels the Ascendancy’s connection to a global capitalist economy undermines neofeudal rhetoric by representing the ideology it supports as degenerative. On the other hand, professionalism assumes as a matter of course an advanced capitalist economy capable of organizing large corporate businesses and adequate training facilities for their employees. While the gothic is connected to transnational forces exclusively through exchanges of money and commodities and remains locally rooted in ideology, professionalism fashions a cosmopolitan class out of isolated individuals having in common only their education, career, and socioeconomic position. From the vantage of professionalism’s commitments to abstract institutions and occupational accomplishments, the gothic’s obsession with neofeudal social structures seems archaic, while for the gothic the loss of local authority and social solidarity appears just as troubling. Bowen differentiates these competing genres in Bowen’s Court on the basis of their participation in distinct affective economies. Raymond Williams shows how “structures of feeling” organize social experience for particular classes in lieu of advanced institutions, for instance during the “rise of a class” or a “mutation within a class.”38 The Anglo-Irish were more stable as a class than Williams’s examples, but their position between two class systems meant that affect could supply them with a connection to contradictory social structures. In letters and reviews Bowen characterizes herself as a member of a “non-group group” joined by “vague affinities” to more noticeable “coteries” (a euphemistic term, 37 Peter Stanford, C Day- Lewis: A Life (London: Continuum, 2007); Peter J. Conradi, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch (New York: Norton, 2001). 38 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 134. 86 MLQ March 2012 in Bowen’s writing, for upper- class assemblages), claiming simultaneous membership in an (Anglo-) Irish gentry and a rising class of professionally oriented Britons.39 With greater nuance Bowen’s Court equates loose groupings with a tendency to value affective social formations over ideas. The Bowens inherited “the received ideas of their class,” but “character — ruling passion, innate predisposition — stays a long way below the level of ‘ideas’ — such a long way that often no connection exists. Where ideas were concerned, the Bowens tended to show themselves fractious and changeable — they did not really care much for them” (277). Two points stand out among these observations: first, the family history does not strictly conform either to the gothic’s regressive narrative or to professionalism’s evolutionary one but traverses drastically different forms (or “ideas”) that reflect a constant submerged presence; second, affect (“ruling passion, innate predisposition”) is the “deep” undercurrent that can explain the changeable surface of “ideas” throughout Bowen’s narrative and whose faintness makes it a long-lasting response to structural social impasses.40 While the British and native Irish possessed clear ideological platforms — the empire and laissez-faire free trade for the one, home rule and tenants’ rights for the other — the absence of a guiding idea differentiates Bowen’s AngloIrish from these two potentially antagonistic classes. With no innate ideas, the Anglo-Irish are free to declare themselves at one moment “Irish in being,” at another “no more than England’s creatures” (129, 223). But, underlying these shifting loyalties, the “style” with which the Anglo-Irish lived, the way that they felt and responded to transient ideas, remained constant over generations of Anglo-Irish rule: “Like Flaubert’s ideal book about nothing, it [the Anglo-Irish Big House] sustains itself on itself by the inner force of its style” (21). To explain why her family, like the Anglo- Irish generally, failed to live up to their professional aspirations, Bowen employs the gothic tropes that for most of her history she carefully avoids. She reports a 39 Bowen calls herself a member of a “non- group group” in a letter of May 6, 1958, to William Plomer, in Lee, Mulberry Tree, 208 – 10. The rest of the quoted text comes from Bowen’s afterword to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, in Lee, Mulberry Tree, 131 – 36. 40 For an assessment of how faint emotions attempt to work through social impasses see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 1 – 37. Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 87 recurring “fantasy” about a treasure buried in their in-laws’ estate at Kilbolane that was rightfully theirs and that threw the Bowen finances into disarray on account of the court costs and lawyers’ fees incurred to wrest control of it (100). Bowen here uses an economy of hysteria to diagnose both the successes and the failures of an export- oriented, neofeudal transnationalism. As a gothic fantasy of wealth literally buried in the soil, the “Kilbolane obsession” reflects what Bowen elsewhere in the book calls the “inherent wrong” of Irish landlordism — that is, the wealth and privilege gained from dispossessing the “old” Irish — but it does so at a level of affect-induced powerlessness (353). Here the need to convert landed assets into money overcomes any rational control on the Bowens’ part. The neofeudal myth that the Anglo-Irish have a contractual right to their property under British law and that profitable estate management legitimates ownership is unmasked as a desire for hard cash and the British luxury items it can purchase. Hysteria, then, marks the location where Anglo-Ireland traverses multiple economic systems. At the same time, Bowen acknowledges one advantage that hysteria has over professional decorum. Because the Ascendancy had dispossessed the native Irish, “to enjoy prosperity one had to exclude feeling, or keep it within prescribed bounds” to cope with the injustice of Anglo-Irish affluence (248). But the heightened feeling that hysteria lent the Ascendancy enabled its proponents to begin to share sentiments with each other and with the native Irish. To mitigate the hysterical element of their feelings, the Anglo-Irish turned from “exploitation” to “development,” showing “at least a wish to organize, to better things and to rule” (158). For Bowen, the classic example of this movement is Grattan’s Parliament, the short-lived Irish Parliament (1782 – 1800) that represented the high point of accountability for the Anglo-Irish. Their active leadership in forming “responsible” institutions fostered a collective sense of themselves as a race and a class and established an alibi for Anglo-Ireland’s transnational position:41 while continuing to monetar- 41 For Bowen, responsibility is one of the keywords that indicate her neo- Burkean conservatism. She uses it frequently in such pieces as “Eire”; “Ireland Makes Irish,” in Hepburn, 155 – 61; “How They Live in Ireland: Conquest by Cheque-Book,” in Hepburn, 161 – 64; and Bowen’s Court. 88 MLQ March 2012 ize agricultural produce for British luxury items, they cast themselves as mediators between British modernity and “traditional” Ireland by importing modern political institutions from Britain and using them to develop Irish autonomy.42 By representing this connection as an even exchange of wealth for institutional paradigms, Bowen locates institution building as a fortuitous by-product of a hysterical affective economy and as a legitimating ground of Anglo-Irish hegemony. Professionalism abandons the collectivist mentality underpinning the gothic, imagining instead a group of accomplished individuals released from emotional ties to nation, class, and family. Though sharing with Bowen’s gothic discourse an interest in institutions, professionalism values institutions’ abstract standards as a way to limit local ties. When recounting a conflict between her father and her grand father over her father’s desire to study law, Bowen suggests how incompatible these two frames are, despite the verbiage common to both: “Robert [her grandfather] felt — and in this he was not unreasonable — that one cannot have two professions. Fate had selected Henry’s [her father’s] profession for him: he was to be Henry Cole Bowen of Bowen’s Court, landowner” (375). To Robert, Henry’s choice to pursue a career in addition to landlord was a “betrayal” of his hereditary “role” for “accomplishment” in law (375). Bowen emphasizes the semantic gap between “role” and “accomplishment,” with the first indicating holistically personal and public life and the second limiting one to “lonely reflection” about occupational issues (375). The argument between Robert and Henry over “role” versus “accomplishment” is presented as a choice between two modes of being wholly dependent on affective orientation, not on global processes in relation to which they are merely passive respondents. In effect, Bowen domesticates British professionalism to Irish circumstances: the professional modes of affective disposition that form the guiding operational logic of British capitalism in the 1930s have been available in Ireland in one shape or another since the seventeenth century. Of course, such a perspective leads one to ask why protoprofessionalism never emerged into a full-fledged professional society. This problem, I suggest, is in essence the obverse of the gothic historical form that Bowen tries to avoid in her narrative. By 42 In Bowen’s Court Bowen cites “the new wish in the new Irish to see Ireland autonomous” (160). Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 89 internalizing gothic and professional narratives to Anglo-Ireland via their affective economies, Bowen plays them against each other, so that the failings of one cause a corrective swing to the other. In doing so, she constructs a historical form capable of relativizing Anglo-Irish setbacks within a cyclical longue durée. Affect and Periodic History Both Bowen’s Court and world- systems theory regard history as conforming to a cyclical pattern. However, Bowen’s desire to reimagine her class in the terms dictated by Ireland’s isolationist economic policy led her to attribute periodic repetitions to developments internal to Anglo-Irish life, not to the global capitalist processes that world- systems theory investigates. As Arrighi explains in The Long Twentieth Century, systemic cycles occur because capitalism alternates between two basic models, “cosmopolitan imperial” and “corporate national,” neither of which can expand indefinitely without supplementation by the other. The deficiencies of the “cosmopolitan imperial” frame — an inability to properly coordinate exchange on a mass level, as seen in the failure of small-firm capitalism and the ideological limitations of neofeudalism — are overcome by “corporate nationalism’s” larger-business model, while “cosmopolitan imperialism” guards against increasing atomization in national and professional spaces. But the dialectical progression between these models worked less easily for the Anglo-Irish, who were wedged between discrepant economic systems in a spatial, rather than a temporal, manner. Indeed, since Irish protectionism was dismantling transnational networks during Bowen’s time, she found herself having to rationalize her class’s socioeconomic role, and its oscillating social ethics, without alluding to extra-Irish affairs or global transitions. Affect, for its part, provided the medium through which she could do so. Bowen constructs her chapters around seven periods of Anglo-Irish history: the Cromwellian conquest and the early Bowen settlers, the first generations of Bowens born in Ireland, the era of Grattan’s Parliament, the first decades of the Union, the years leading up to the Great Famine and its aftermath, the Irish Land War, and the present day.43 The nar43 Bowen’s Court has ten chapters: one introductory, one on how Colonel Henry Bowen earned his Irish estate (which could easily be combined with the subsequent 90 MLQ March 2012 rative frame oscillates regularly: the Cromwellian conquest, Grattan’s Parliament, the Famine, and the present day demonstrate tendencies toward protoprofessional development, while the other chapters follow a gothic narrative of class and familial decline. In her afterword to Bowen’s Court, Bowen attests that this rhythm was a self- conscious choice: because the “aspect of their [the Bowens’] behaviour that interests me the most” was the “involuntary, or spontaneous” workings of emotion, she could describe “the pattern they unconsciously went to make” only by “suggest[ing] a compulsion they did not know of by a series of breaks, contrasts, and juxtapositions” (452). Bowen attributes apparent discontinuities to the turbulent nature of affects, which can slide between different relative states. Because emotions possess internal regularity and elude conscious control, they enable her to explain historical reversals without sacrificing Anglo-Irish self-possession. Far from being passive respondents to economic realities, the Ascendancy dictated its own cyclical history. To explain the consistent rhythm of gothic decline and professional development, Bowen presents each affective economy as having inherent deficiencies balanced by the other. For example, she emphasizes how each wave of professionalism comes about after, and partly as a result of, a moment of obsession, serving as a corrective to mass hysteria. Both “step- down[s] in power” (i.e., gothicized declines) carried with them a “romantic phase” that destroyed the Anglo-Irish’s previous class solidarity and replaced it with a “dire period of Personal Life” (399, 359). Unable to cope with the obsessions troubling their class position, the Anglo-Irish retreat into individualistic occupations to manage their agitations. While professionalism does not entail a complete withdrawal from affect, it does allow Bowen’s ancestors to displace debilitating emotions toward house and road building, technocratic management of their estates, or legal studies. Like “only children,” the Anglo-Irish “are sterner in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all” (419),44 but the only way that Bowen’s ancestors can mitigate their tenchapter on John Bowen I as an account of “early settlers”), one on Bowen’s Court’s construction, and seven on these historical periods. 44 For an extended analysis of the role that only children play in Bowen’s fiction see Elizabeth Cullingford, “ ‘Something Else’: Gendering Onliness in Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 2 (2007): 276 – 305. Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 91 sions is to disperse them throughout the institutional structures they erected during periods of class solidarity and neofeudal governance, in effect disciplining their emotions by transferring them from personal expressions to impersonal institutional systems.45 But professionalism cannot persist indefinitely. Insofar as the Anglo-Irish retreat into individuated professionalism, they lose coherence as a recognizable social class, abandoning both the political power and the institutional infrastructure associated with their position. At the same time, as professional- style management restores the gentry to their fortunes, class sentiment and a desire to function as a political leader once again begin to fuse the Anglo-Irish into a collectivity. When “human feeling” heightens, “latent energy” develops their childish attributes into adult responsibility, and “the Anglo-Irish [become] aware of themselves as a race” (158). The change in valence from childlike professionalism to responsible engagement with adult institutions shows just how reversible Bowen’s terminology is. While isolated individualism (and its association with childhood) is offered as the palliative for gothic decadence, Bowen also views collective adulthood as a corrective measure for the hedonistic pursuit of wealth and pleasure.46 Indeed, by ignoring their sociopolitical role as benevolent landlords, the Anglo-Irish gentry abandon not only the neofeudal ideology underpinning their ownership of the land but also the institution building necessary for the self- sufficient development envisioned by both de Valera and Bowen. Ironically, this leads Bowen back to where she began: professionalism’s inability to foster a social ethic induces a return to feeling and to collective institutional association, the latter made possible, in turn, by the managerial proficiencies that the Anglo- Irish acquired through professional advancement. In this regard Bowen’s narrative oscillates between collective institutional structures and indi45 On the difficulty of transferring affects from the personal to the institutional, as well as the role of distance in constituting particular affects, see Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Robbins, Upward Mobility; and Robbins, “Blaming the System,” in Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, 41 – 63. 46 Jed Esty also associates Bowen’s ambivalent attitudes toward childhood with Ireland’s contradictory place in British imperial capitalism in “Virgins of Empire: The Last September and the Antidevelopment Plot,” Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 2 (2007): 257 – 75. 92 MLQ March 2012 vidual professionalism, each of which supplies the inadequacies of the other but also lays the foundation for its reemergence. For Bowen, the eventual rehabilitation of the Anglo-Irish gentry depends on the dialectical movement between neofeudal institution building and individualistic professionalism, and in particular on the resistance of this movement to any attempt to sublate its alternating stages into a new mode of production. In contrast to many classic accounts of British class history, which have stressed the gradual movement from agricultural to industrial modes of production and from amateur entrepreneurialism to professional corporatism, Bowen insists that the Anglo-Irish gentry always evidenced a protoprofessional element. But she also suggests that it never evolved into a full-fledged “professional society” because of Anglo- Ireland’s connection to multiple economic systems. By translating their transnational position into a historical account, Bowen constructs a prehistory for the institutional autonomy and individualistic professionalism that together seemed to spell irreversible decline for the Anglo-Irish, a prehistory internalizing such threatening developments as expressions of Anglo-Irish emotionality. The key point is that Bowen’s institutional prehistory operates through an extended metaphor comparing Irish socioeconomic circumstances — the emergence of national, Anglo-Irish – led institutions and protoprofessional individualism — to transnational ties between Ireland and Britain. Just as Anglo-Ireland swung back and forth between moments of collective action and individualism, so too did the economic system in which the Anglo-Irish precariously balanced: the Cromwellian invasion and the Acts of Union strengthened links between Britain and Ireland, while Grattan’s Parliament and the Land War pulled them apart. (The parallel associates Grattan’s Parliament with later Irish separatism — a dubious claim in light of Anglo-Irish loyalties.) In turn, this dynamic sets up a strict isomorphism between protoprofessional labor and Irish isolationism, and Anglo-Irish political structures such as Grattan’s Parliament establish a clear national precedent for the autonomous institutionalism that replaced transnational imperial networks in the 1930s. Ultimately, Bowen proposes that these two modes of organization cannot coexist: professionalism tears apart the class unity of the Anglo- Eatough Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System 93 Irish, while Anglo- Irish collectivism is frighteningly self- destructive, subject to hysteria and infighting. But her insistence that Anglo-Irish affects explain the cyclical oscillations transfers the responsibility for this turbulence from an ominous global market to a national context in which the Anglo-Irish can continue to mediate between Irish agricultural production and neo-British consumerism. No longer buoyed by British support for their hegemony, but also no longer bound as tightly to Britain, Bowen translates the contradictions of Anglo-Ireland’s transnational position into a historical narrative that internalizes these features within an analysis of the affective foundations for periodic booms and declines in Anglo-Irish social and political ascendancy. By delineating an internally consistent field that treats Anglo-Ireland’s history rather than its overlapping material connections to Britain or Ireland, Bowen focuses on collective emotions and their role in producing and maintaining institutional infrastructure. In this manner she locates classwide, generational fluctuations in temperament, providing a powerful image for short-term oscillations within Anglo- Ireland’s relative standing. Contradictions emanating from Anglo-Ireland’s transnational position become in Bowen’s narrative paradoxes internal to group affects, and this shift in perspective refashions Anglo-Ireland’s historical role in terms of Irish autonomy. Bowen envisions Anglo-Ireland not as some alien class for whom Irish self- sufficiency foretells imminent decline but as a community whose independence parallels that of the young Irish Free State. According to Bowen, the ups and downs of Anglo- Irish social, economic, and political power have little to do with global flows of commodities and finance capital. Instead, the symmetry between Anglo-Ireland’s postindependence decline and its collective fantasy-induced withdrawal from social leadership is accidental, a failure on Anglo-Ireland’s part to reconcile professional management adequately with collective institution formation. In developing this historical imaginary, Bowen shows a fascination with cyclical time that many of her modernist predecessors share. But where figures like Yeats and T. S. Eliot used mythic cycles to endow early twentieth- century life with cultural continuity, Bowen suggests that it was the more proximate workings of affect that caused Anglo- 94 MLQ March 2012 Irish history to move in a repetitive manner.47 Bowen’s text is closer in this regard to those of her Bloomsbury associates, who valued individualism and personal ties more than monumental cultural forms. Yet Bowen departs from Bloomsbury aesthetics by assigning a central value to collective action and impersonal social structures. While many in the Bloomsbury set had begun to engage with a collectivist sensibility prior to World War II, their projects tended to represent national communities as bound together by a common culture.48 Given AngloIreland’s tenuous position as a transnational class, Bowen could not take for granted the same isomorphism between nation, culture, and geographic locale as other modernists, and so she presented her class as united by the concrete institutions they established and the common emotional dispositions these fostered. In the final analysis, the value of Bowen’s Court to the study of early twentieth- century literature may be how it extends discussion of certain prized modernist tropes — cyclical history, individualism, affect — to the social and institutional formations that most canonical modernists foreclosed in their works. Matt Eatough is a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University. His dissertation, “Affective Transnationalism: Writing Anglo Decline in the Afro-Celtic World-System, 1880–1980,” investigates the changing representations of declining colonial classes in the late British Empire. His work has appeared in the journal Literature and Medicine. 47 Eliot’s most articulate explanation of cultural continuity appears in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Nicholas Allen documents how cultural cycles provided Yeats with a sense of stability in his Vision in Modernism, Ireland, and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66 – 88. 48 See Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).