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I have a new muse and her name is Maud Gonne. Maud came at me like some demented Mary Poppins, off of the pages of books about the history of Ireland. And for me, Atlantan that I am, she resonates like a half sister of Scarlett O'Hara in her determination and her raging femininity. And both women - somehow - held the hands of others to navigate, with some victory, the civil wars which raged around them. Sometimes they call Maud the St. Joan of Ireland; she is one of the mothers of that modern land whose truth still eludes us in the mysteries of leprechauns and the IRA.
Understand that Maud is the exact opposite of Scarlett. Scarlett is a pirate and Maud is a soldier of Napoleonic aspirations. Of course, you could say of Scarlett that she had her own Napoleonic traits, but hers were the tendrils of self interest. While Scarlett was swearing that she would never go hungry again, Maud was swearing the same thing for the children of Ireland. Contrast and compare, as my teachers used to say.
In order to comprehend Maud Gonne, you have to really look at the big picture:
In 1175, the Brits (English, Normans - whomever they were exactly) decided that that piece of land next door should belong to them - and it became a British obsession. But the Irish held them down tight for centuries to Dublin and the surrounding area, know as "the pale." For a British man to travel beyond that territory was to go "beyond the pale." Over the centuries, wars have gone on "beyond the pale" whose tales read like The Lord of the Rings. Was Tolkien writing about Ireland? I'm beginning to think so.
But at least, in the beginning, everyone was Catholic.
Then along comes Henry VIII, and the ugliness goes into a whole new gear. Because Henry, as we all know, started the Church of England and demanded that all of his subjects - well, that they couldn't be Catholic. Which seems to have worked in England and Scotand, but Henry fancied himself the King of Ireland as well, and Ireland was one of the most ferocious Catholic European nations of the moment. Henry had no luck, Catholic fires were fanned and began to burn with a fury and this was going to mean trouble.
Now this is where we come to the interesting connection to the Old South. Plantations.
You see, the problem passed on to Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I - and when I learned what happened next, for the first time in my Anglo Saxon life, I looked at Elizabeth I as a villain.
The British invaded Ireland in a really bizarre take over that still was rarely effective and they set up PLANTATIONS (that's the word used in the documents drafted on the matter) and then turned the Catholics into slaves, and when I say slaves, I mean that in the exact economic sense that we understand to have been the situation in the American South. An Irish Catholic girl taking care of Protestant children would most likely have enjoyed far less respect than Mammy does on Tara.
Ireland was a trip down the rabbit hole, to say the least. Was Lewis Carroll writing about Ireland?
I'm beginning to think so.
And the plantation owners, who were chiefly English aristocrats, didn't even live on these estates, which were then run by a fascinating management system of agents. And the agents were generally Irish folk who, in retrospect, "sold out" to the system - like Southern overseers. And they abused the slaves, who were the Catholics.
It was even against Anglo-Irish law for the English to dress in the Irish fashion - but you know, when a man sees a coat and likes a coat and it fits and it works for him, he might just put it on and here comes a problem - all those randy young British soldiers and invaders and all those beautiful Irish women. Watch out. Soon it came to be said that the English who acculturated were "more Irish than the Irish themselves."
Meanwhile, there comes along a class in of Irish born non-catholics who eventually style themselves The Protestant Ascendency. Some of them own Plantations and other estates in Ireland, but it's trendy to hang out together in London. Let's say that at this point - well, for a long time really, lets face it - London was to Dublin, what New York today is to Atlanta. Or Birmingham. Or Greenville.
Some very serious "English" writers were actually Irish - especially George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde - but we tend to identify them as English because they made their careers in London, for much the same reason that an actor or a composer today might not see the point in staying in Tupelo if they could manage to live and work in New York.
But just like Atlanta, Dublin has this explosive mystery of it's own and Maud Gonne and her generation were about to blow the lid off of things - sometimes literally.
Maud was an interesting case from the outset, because her father was one of the 19th century English administrative troops that were sent in to occupy Ireland on behalf of royal interest. Maud was born in England, but she became a child in Ireland, and whatever wonders childhood brought her, were the product of Ireland. Maud was a protestant - Protestant Ascendency, remember, which I think for women was the Irish equivalent of the Atlanta Junior League - who became a Catholic, an actress with a short resume, a mother in Paris, a rebel in London, an angel in Ireland and the great muse of Ireland's most revered poet, W. B. Yeats.
But that's another story, and one which we look forward to sharing with everyone this fall, when Charity Spencer and Jason Burkey take the stage in Gonne/Yeats.
Come to Nashville and Go to the Theatre.
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