Irish modernism and the politics of sexual health

This thesis explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish modernism. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, the New Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Reading the work of canonical authors (W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien) and less often discussed figures (Oliver St John Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O’Brien) in conversation with a range of contemporaneous medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, this thesis catalogues and interrogate the ways in which an increasingly medicalized and politicized conception of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading the work of these literary figures alongside the more polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history – the Parnell Split, the "Playboy" riots, the passage of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act – contributed to and were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. In doing so, this thesis offers both a reconsideration of the history of sex and its regulation in Ireland, and a new paradigm through which to understand modernism’s engagement with sex, health, and the body. Part One examines the role of sexual health discourse in two of the most significant controversies in the cultural and political history of modern Ireland: the Parnell Split and the "Playboy" riots. In both cases, it reveals the ways in which nationalists and modernists were united in their use of a shared rhetoric of sexual pathology to diagnose the perceived ills of Irish political and cultural life, by which they typically meant one another, and to articulate often conflicting models of personal, cultural, and political autonomy. Part Two explores how figurations of venereal disease, accounts of its aetiology, and campaigns to regulate its spread were used by figures such as Joyce, Gogarty, Griffith, and Gonne to critique British militarism in Ireland. At the same time, it reveals the ways in which Joyce was to distance himself from the more chauvinistic deployments of this rhetoric, particularly where they concerned Ireland’s Jewish population. Part Three addresses arguably the most significant point of intersection between debates over sexual health and modernism in Ireland: the Censorship of Publications Act and its infamous prohibition of printed material relating to contraception, birth control, and abortion. Where conventional accounts of the Act’s passage and operation have framed the responses of Irish modernists such as Yeats, Beckett, and Kate O’Brien as ethically valorous and politically subversive rejections of sexual repression and state-mandated philistinism, this section of my thesis reveals the ideological pitfalls and tensions that could attend such opposition, particularly with regards to eugenics. Part Four explores the legacy of sexual health as a focus of social and cultural debate in 1960s Ireland, using the late work of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, etc) to highlight the increasing exhaustion of Irish modernism’s iconoclastic engagement with a topic which nevertheless remained culturally and politically urgent.

Keywords: W.B. Yeats
George Bernard Shaw
Oliver St John Gogarty
venereal diseases
G.B. Shaw
Parnell split
modernism and sexuality
Myles Na Gcopaleen
Irish politics (20th century)
Irish politics (19th century)
modernism and eugenics
literature and medicine
birth control (Ireland)
Irish studies
Irish independence
modernism and sex
new modernist studies
degeneration theory (Ireland)
Kate O'Brien
Oliver Gogarty
playboy riots
William Butler Yeats
Samuel Beckett
Irish unionism
Flann O'Brien
history of sexuality (Ireland)
censorship of publications act (ireland)
fertility politics (Ireland)
eugenics (Ireland)
Irish nationalism
Irish modernist studies
social history of medicine (Ireland)
J.M. Synge
sexual health
James Joyce
Charles Stewart Parnell
modernist studies
modernism and gender
modernism and birth control
Irish modernism
Brian O'Nolan
John Millington Synge
Advisor: Dwan, D