The 1798 Rebellion: Gender Tensions and Femininity in the Irish Gothic

The year 2018 marks the 220th anniversary of the Irish rebellion of 1798. As Susan B. Egenolf points out, this short-lived but devastating conflict between Irish insurgents and Loyalist soldiers was felt as an attack on domesticity, as rebels and loyalists alike 'invade[d] private homes'. Several scholars have already discussed the (re)writing of such a traumatic event in Protestant women's narratives, shedding light on how these women filtered their emotions with the languages of chivalry, sensibility, and the gothic. Indeed, the gothic is generally seen as a polymorphous prism through which one can apprehend anxieties, tensions and violence. This paper seeks to confront the dynamics of genre and gender through the depiction of violence (be it domestic or national) in Irish Gothic texts using the 1798 rebellion as a contextual backdrop. In Maturin's The Milesian Chief (1812) and Mrs Kelly's The Matron of Erin (1816), the (Protestant) female gothic heroine exposes her body to private and public religious and political violence.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.