Independent or a Slave to Ideology?

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1916 Easter Uprising, Bulmer Hobson, Helena Molony, Irish history

I am happy to welcome fellow Fireship Press author M.J. Neary to Outtakes. In her excellent book, Never Be at Peace, Marina features Irish revolutionary Helena Molony. I called Helena independent in my review because she didn’t rely on a man to solve her problems. Here, Marina explains there is more to true independence. – Kim

By M.J. Neary

“No man has the right to risk the fortunes of the country to carve for himself a niche in history.”

With those words Bulmer Hobson (1883-1969) issued a cryptic warning to his fellow Irish Volunteers several days before the Easter Rising of 1916. His appeal was addressed to a clique of revolutionaries who were planning an insurrection. At the time, there was a division among the Irish nationalists. Some were in favor of an armed rebellion, even though it did not stand a chance of being a military success, and others, like Hobson, considered it a frivolous waste of human life.

Helena Molony (1884-1967), Hobson’s former comrade and love interest, was in that first camp of dreamers who believed in the symbolic and redemptive power of blood sacrifice. Over the course of her long and troubled life, Molony had worn several hats. In addition to being a radical revolutionary, she was a trade unionist and an actress. To this day, she is venerated in certain IRA circles as an emblem of self-destructive martyrdom.

How often does this seemingly noble desire “to be a part of something bigger” have selfish origins? Sometimes these self-proclaimed champions of greater good are merely seeking attention, fame, and validation. The noble cause is merely a vehicle to the pedestal. Where is the line between a legitimate freedom fighter and a terrorist? Can one person shift between the two roles?

The ambiguity of intention has been the topic of my last three historical novels, all of which deal with the Irish nationalistic movement of the early 20th century. Helena Molony appears in all three, but in the last one, Never Be at Peace, she is the central figure. I find it peculiar that many of my readers define her as “independent.” And on the surface it seems like an appropriate way to define a freedom fighter, right? Not necessarily. Let’s take a closer look at the word “independent” and how it is used in the context of historical fiction.

No costume drama, be it set during the Regency, Victorian, or Edwardian era, is complete without a bodiced torso on the cover and a heroine who is described as “witty, thoroughly unconventional, and fiercely independent.” Having read countless blurbs in my life, I have developed severe allergies to the word “independent.” It’s a very dirty, misleading commercial word that publishers use.

To me, that word evokes a certain stock image: a fidgety duchess (or a shipping heiress, etc.) who “does not want to settle into the stifling conventional roles designated to them by society” and “dreams of a life outside _____ (the palace, the shipping yard)” and “explores her burgeoning sensuality in the arms of the _____ (starving artist, ruddy-faced gardener, French tutor).” Once you read the blurb, you don’t need to read the novel. I understand, there is a robust audience for such literature, and publishers have to keep the lights on, so they keep pasting these generic blurbs on the covers, even if the content is serious. Simply put, in every novel there needs to be a chain to be broken.

One must remember, that in order to declare independence, you need to have a starting point, something to break away from, something to rebel against, something to lose. When we meet Helena for the first time, she is an orphaned teenager roaming the suburbs of Dublin, a truant without direction or any strong family attachments except for her morose brother, Frank. She just happens to meet the legendary Maud Gonne, who informally adopts her and turns her into a fervent nationalist to the point of obsession.

A child who is deprived of love and discipline is a prime candidate for becoming a fanatic in the hands of the right mentor, and fanatics by definition are not psychologically independent. They are slaves to their idea. So while Helena is fighting for Ireland’s independence, she herself is not independent. Rather, she is a weapon in the hands of another being.

Interestingly enough, Maud Gonne herself abhorred violence. Perhaps, she was a little terrified of her pupil’s enthusiasm for physical combat. By 1916, Maud was not the dominant authority figure for Helena. By that time Helena, already in her early 30s, was under the spell of James Connolly, a passionate champion for the working class, whose dream was to have a republic of free workers. It was his ideology that propelled Helena to participate in the Easter Rising. She basically moved from one idol to another.

When the Ireland she had envisioned and fought for did not materialize, Helena turned to drink. It was the devotion of another woman, Dr. Evelyn O’Brien, a much younger psychiatrist, that had saved her from stepping over the edge.

Patriotically-minded historians tended to brush Helena’s alcoholism, depression, and bisexuality under the rug. Such vices did not seem to fit with the image of the spunky and heroic tomboy in a country where morality was still dominated by the Catholic Church. Many facts did not emerge until recent decades. Now, in the 21st century, we have the freedom and the privilege to examine various historical figures as human beings with all their psychological intricacies, not mere emblems.

Born, nurtured, and warped in the radioactive swamps of Eastern Europe, M.J. Neary is a living proof that even an ugly girl can win a beauty pageant and seduce a handsome Irishman if she does her makeup right. Her literary career revolves around various disasters in Anglo-Irish history such as the Famine, the Land Wars, and the Easter Rising of 1916. Her mission is to bust stubborn ethnic myths, tell the untold stories and illuminate obscure figures through her irreverent iconoclastic style.  If you are interested in Irish history and have already read everything by Morgan Llewellyn, try something different and pick up one of Neary’s novels: Brendan Malone: the Last Fenian, Martyrs & Traitors: a Tale of 1916 (both 2011, All Things That Matter Press) and Never Be at Peace: a Novel of Irish Rebels (Fireship Press, 2013).

The Great Hunger Inflames a Hunger to Tell Ancestors’ Stories

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Great Hunger, Irish history, Potato Famine

Today, I am happy to welcome fellow Fireship Press author Cynthia Neale to Outtakes as she makes a stop in her blog tour to promote Norah: The Making of an Irish-American Woman in 19th-Century New York. Here she explains how The Great Hunger in Ireland spurs a different kind of hunger that may never be satisfied—the one to tell the stories of her ancestors. ­—Kim

By Cynthia Neale

The hunger to write stories has been within me since I was a young girl. I believed that if I had nothing but books, a notebook, and a pen, I’d be able to survive.  I came to this conclusion during long summers in the wilds of upstate New York when Jo in Little Women was my companion and I identified with her hunger to be a writer. I hungered with Pip in Great Expectations to become uncommon and to live beyond groveling limitations.

But little did I know that I also possessed the memory of The Great Hunger, the Irish Famine, within me.

Engraving of Emigrants Leaving Ireland, 1868, Henry Doyle

I studied English literature and struggled to write novels, but it was when I was dancing one evening in an Irish pub and peered at an Irish dresser in a poster that a new hunger made itself known to me.

Where would a young girl in the midst of starvation in Ireland in 1846 go for solace and hope? Where would she go with her own hunger? As I danced, I envisioned the cupboard of an Irish dresser becoming her hiding place and eventually a place of escape to a new land.

As a writer, I knew I needed to write this story. Their story, my story, our story.

After The Irish Dresser, A Story of Hope during The Great Hunger (An Gorta Mor, 1845-1850) was published, I learned there had been a real Norah McCabe who came from Ireland in 1847 to New York City. From that time, I’ve never doubted I’m writing about a real person who once lived on this earth.

I then wrote Hope in New York City, the Continuing Story of the Irish Dresser and thought I was finished with Norah McCabe (and with hunger), but it wasn’t so. It was then I understood on a deeper level, in my genetic makeup perhaps, that the hunger will always be with me. The hunger to tell the story of the Great Hunger of Ireland and to address hunger issues today.

I wrote Norah: The Making of an Irish-American Woman in 19th-Century New York and again thought it was the final book about Norah McCabe. I had already started writing another novel about a Native American woman after years of research. But after a few epiphanies and the advice of my readers, I knew there was yet another novel. My working title is The Irish Milliner and is set during the Civil War period in New York City.

Famine memorial in Dublin

Eaven Boland in an anthology titled Irish Hunger, writes: “The repressed past does not simply let go of us on command. The hidden scar is transmitted, invisibly and unconsciously across generations.” We have become, she says, “‘the present of the past,’ inferring the difference, but unable to feel or know it. We have not healed from these repressed horrors; it is as if unmarked Famine graves are in each of us.”

As a young girl, I did not know my hunger went beyond my need to write and escape a rural childhood, but as I reflect back, I see that hunger manifested itself throughout my life. I baked cookies for the poor country kids in my high school. I went to India to work with the poor and hungry. I worked at soup kitchens, participated in hunger fasts, and had a tea catering business. And I’ve donated a percentage of my book sales to hunger organizations.

I cannot write for the marketplace. I write for the ancestors and for hunger.

Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons.

Cynthia Neale is an American with Irish ancestry and a native of the Finger Lakes region in New York. She now resides in Hampstead, New Hampshire. She is a graduate of Vermont College in Montpelier, with a BA in literature and creative writing. Norah is her first historical novel for adult readers. For more about Cynthia, visit cynthianeale.com.

About Norah: The Making of an Irish-American Woman in 19th-Century New York

Once she was a child of hunger, but now Norah McCabe is a woman with courage, passion, and reckless dreams. Her story is one of survival, intrigue, and love. This Irish immigrant woman cannot be narrowly defined! She dons Paris fashion and opens a used-clothing store, is attacked by a vicious police commissioner, joins a movement to free Ireland, and attends a National Women’s Rights Convention. And love comes to her slowly one night on a dark street, ensnared by the great Mr. Murray, essayist and gang leader extraordinaire. Norah is the story of a woman who confronts prejudice, violence, and greed in a city that mystifies and helps to mold her into becoming an Irish-American woman.