A portrait of the chief as a general paralytic: rhetorics of sexual pathology in the Parnell split

Abstract

The O'Shea trial and the ensuing fall of Charles Stewart Parnell occupy an epochal position in accounts of the sexual politics of Victorian Britain and the development of Irish nationalism. This article examines how the 'Parnell myth' came to serve (and was constructed from the outset) as a symbolic edifice within which anxieties concerning the relationship between Irishness and sexuality could be foregrounded and negotiated. In particular, it will analyse Timothy Healy's influential post-split denunciations of Parnell, and the rhetoric of sexual contagion through which they were conducted, a campaign which set the discursive terms of twentieth-century mainstream Irish nationalism. Through an analysis of Healy's post-split journalism, contemporary political memoirs by T.P. O'Connor, and a range of nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric texts, this article will highlight the ways in which discourses of sexual health were used to reshape Parnell's public persona at the level of gender and ethnonational affiliation. In doing so, it will illustrate how a sensitivity to the history of medicine can enrich critical understandings of a crucial moment in the political and cultural history of Ireland, and shed fresh light on the vexed collocation of Irish identity and sexual purity which the Parnell split reinforced.

Parnellites, Playboys, and Pathology: Irish Modernist Drama and the Politics of Sexual Health

“…As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere (Houston 2017), Parnell's public persona was carefully calibrated to balance these imperatives, exemplifying precisely the mode of hygienic autonomy which underpinned late nineteenth-century European conceptions of good sexual health. Prior to the O'Shea divorce scandal in 1890 and the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party to which it gave rise, 1 Parnell's muchvaunted combination of volcanic passion and preternatural self-control found its sexual correlative in a mode of virile celibacy rooted in a symbolic marriage to Ireland (Callanan 1996, 284-85;Houston 2017, 473-75).…”