On 1 August 1915, thousands of citizens and uniformed Irish Volunteer, Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and Irish Citizen Army (ICA) members gathered at Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetary around the grave of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, a Fenian hero who had been accused by the English of plotting rebellion in 1865, sentenced to penal servitude, and then lived the remainder of his life in exile in the United States. Patrick Pearse delivered a graveside oration claiming that the dead body of O'Donovan Rossa revealed the truth of English oppression, a speech that he hoped would unite public opinion in accordance with his revolutionary ideals. Like other Irish nationalists, Pearse understood that the emotional affect generated by the funeral of a hero might be harnessed into political action, that collective mourning, focused through the construction and veneration of a national martyr, might construct a national community. 1 According to Pearse, the spectacle of O'Donovan Rossa's funeral not only exposed the ways in which the English persecuted the Irish, but also galvanized the Irish public against their colonizers: "The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half . . . but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead." 2
If Pearse spoke for O'Donovan Rossa and defined the role of the "Fenian dead" for the Irish public, it was Terence MacSwiney, the poet-playwright and Lord Mayor of Cork, who created and then disseminated the fiction of how O'Donovan Rossa represented the ideal Irish hero worthy of this role. 3 In 1915, MacSwiney wrote a memorial pamphlet commemorating O'Donovan Rossa. In it, he makes no mention of O'Donovan Rossa's condemnation of the Catholic Church, and there is no acknowledgment of the rumors that before his death O'Donovan Rossa had reconciled with the British and condemned the Germans. Instead, MacSwiney's Rossa is a forthright champion of Irish nationalism, a hero whose demeanor reveals internal virtue. MacSwiney recounts, "I, myself, saw Rossa in his old age going to his Easter Duty in the Cathedral at Cork; and the picture I have in mind of him. . . makes for me a perfect picture of the consistent life." 4 Likewise, MacSwiney's Rossa speaks forthrightly, a characteristic supported by the real-life O'Donovan Rossa, who famously defended himself against treason at his English trial simply by asserting, "I believe in God, but I defy the Devil" ("R," 14). MacSwiney champions this defense by insisting, "If we all have as pure a faith as Rossa's and act up to it with as fine a constancy, Ireland shall have no need to despair" (ibid.). The abstract values of "faith" and "constancy" become material and visible when MacSwiney locates them in the body of a specific individual. Those who celebrated O'Donovan Rossa's death could read his words as "literal truth" because of his well-established constancy, the torture he endured at the hands of the English, and his final assertion that certain clear terms must remain in place—love God, hate the Devil; love the Irish nation, hate English tyranny. When MacSwiney insisted that "we all" can share in O'Donovan Rossa's faith and "act up to it," he presented Irish citizens with a means of salvation for the nation. The public body of the dead hero, as described by MacSwiney, provided the Irish "we" with a model of reliable moral behavior.
In his five-act drama The Revolutionist , written one year before O'Donovan Rossa's funeral, MacSwiney set forth a similar message: the Irish public could be consolidated and inspired by the funeral of a hero who had displayed his authenticity to a public. The play's central character, Hugh O'Neill, is a revolutionary hero who offers the Irish public his straightforward brand of nationalism in an attempt to rescue them from the secret political societies that pervade Ireland following the institution of Home Rule. 5 Hugh refuses to align himself with his revolutionary colleagues who long for secret societies because he believes Irish nationalists must keep "the t straight and consistent" (RAP, 11). He fears that secrecy will divide the Irish public and encourage them to t among themselves, rather than to work together against the English. According to MacSwiney's characterization of Hugh, the Irish hero must maintain a consistent private self, which he can then display in order to keep the terms of the battle between the Irish and the English visible. Throughout the play Hugh searches for a way to reconcile the increasingly fragmented Irish publics and expose the "truth" (a term MacSwiney never clarifies) to them; in doing so, he realizes the fantasy of death may be the best means by which to unite the Irish. He insists that Robert Emmet, the executed Irish hero of the 1798 rebellion, had the proper notion of how to draw the public together. Referring to the speech Emmet delivered immediately before the British executed him for treason, Hugh claims that "Emmet's last words move us more than any possible oration he might have delivered as first president of the Irish Republic" (RAP, 92). In this speech, Emmet represented himself as "the sacrifice," a hero who inspired the Irish through his martyrdom and his famous final words: "Let no man write my epitaph . . . until other times and other men can do justice to my character." 6 While the political rhetoric of the living Emmet may have failed to inspire his audiences, Hugh insists that "Men standing by a premature grave are apt to reconsider their hasty judgments and indolent lives" (RAP, 92). Again, MacSwiney celebrates the notion that "other men" can perform Emmet's brand of Irish heroism, particularly if they are inspired by a communal celebration of heroic martyrdom—a truth made evident when Hugh dies in the service of the nation. Through his self-sacrifice, Hugh publicly verifies his true private nature as an embodiment of the heroic ideal to "be faithful forever" (RAP, 136). By viewing his corpse at a national funeral, MacSwiney claims, the Irish public will see the merit of Hugh's "open" and "straight" nationalism and therefore will subscribe to his beliefs.
In both The Revolutionist and his pamphlet for O'Donovan Rossa, MacSwiney forcefully argued that the public display of the heroic martyred body was the most effective means by which to consolidate a national citizenship. Through self-sacrifice, he insisted, The Revolutionist's fictional hero and the real-life O'Donovan Rossa both used their bodies to announce their heroism, which was revealed through the display of their congruent public and private integrity in the face of English deception. But MacSwiney did more than simply renovate literary and historical tropes of heroic death for a contemporary reading public. During the Anglo-Irish War, he took on and lived out the heroic role he had created for Hugh O'Neill and ascribed to O'Donovan Rossa. On 12 August 1920, soon after he had assumed his duties as Lord Mayor of Cork and Commandant of the First Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, MacSwiney was arrested by British authorities during their raid of a Volunteer meeting at the Cork City Hall. 7 To protest his arrest he began a highly publicized hunger strike that culminated in his death in London's Brixton Prison seventy-four days later. By modeling and then reworking the long history of heroic martyrdom across cultures and religions, he offered his own emaciated body to the mass public as a means of displaying the moral superiority of the Irish to the English. The international press obsessively reported on each new development in his hunger strike, which MacSwiney and his compatriots represented as a purifying ritual that would shed the light of truth on British oppression and thus motivate the Irish and international publics to support the revolutionary cause.
I describe MacSwiney as a modernist martyr because the discourse surrounding his death—a discourse he helped to create—reveals that Irish nationalism, while deeply invested in traditional modes of thought, was also committed to the deployment of modern practices to free Ireland and to construct a cohesive national identity for its people. Although MacSwiney celebrated traditional modes of heroism, his use of his own body as a text through which to manipulate public opinion marks him as a savvy manipulator of modern, mass cultural modes of expression. Theorists of modernity and embodiment from Walter Benjamin to Allen Feldman have noted that with the advent of mass culture, images of the body become ubiquitous—as Michael Warner claims, to be public in the West is to have an "iconicity," or a body whose image can be displayed to the masses through print and visual media. 8 Through mass culture the body becomes a text upon which messages can be inscribed, literally or ratively, and then disseminated to the public. Like many of the res involved in the Irish Literary Revival, MacSwiney merged tradition and modernity when, by displaying his iconic body through press statements made by family and acquaintances, he offered his model of heroic subjectivity as a "style of publicity" available to a modern, international public.
In many ways, MacSwiney's self-sacrifice appears to be an act lodged firmly in the historic and mythic past. He based his style of Irish heroism on traditional models of subjectivity, drawing from examples provided both by religious and political martyrs and by the self-unified Enlightenment public subject. 9 By choosing self-sacrifice as his weapon, he invoked the long political, religious, and cultural legacy of the hunger strike to t the colonial government. His self-sacrifice resonated loudly with events in the Gaelic history and literature celebrated by the Irish Literary Revival, it evoked Catholic and Protestant iconography, and it pointed to a long legacy of Irish rebellions. Thus, his martyrdom powerfully engaged with a broad spectrum of tropes that defined Irish nationalist culture, which relied heavily on the past to represent the Irish as primitive and spiritual in contrast to the modern and corrupted English.
Yet the discourse surrounding MacSwiney's death reveals that his intended audience differed radically from the audience sought by the historical martyrs to whom he was likened. In particular, his choice of the hunger strike foregrounded the differences between historical martyrdoms and his own modernist version. Throughout history, individuals had fasted in order to gain the attention of an autonomous higher authority, to demand favor from a monarch or from God. In the mythos of ancient pre-Christian Ireland, the code of law—the Senchas Már—allowed that an aggrieved person could starve on the doorstep of his oppressor to redress an injustice, an edict Yeats dramatized in The King's Threshold . The oppressor was required either to feed the injured party or, if the starving individual died, to pay compensation to the victim's family. In Christian tradition, Christ and various saints had engaged in prolonged fasts for a variety of reasons, most often to gain God's favor. With the advent of modernity, however, it becomes clear that the intended audience of the fast had changed. MacSwiney's hunger strike was represented as an appeal for intervention directed neither toward God nor the English government, but toward two audiences of his peers: the national public, who in modern times articulate their opinions through the press and shape policy through the electorate, and an international public, who helped to fund and publicize the Irish quest for freedom. As his brother Peter MacSwiney insisted, "He is dying to bring all these atrocities before the people of the world." 10
MacSwiney was well aware that the suffering Irish body might be displayed before Irish and English publics for political efficacy; it seems he might also have been aware that the mass circulation of accounts of his body's sufferings might influence the world's perception of the Irish community. By scripting his own pure death and then successfully following that script to the letter, he provided the mass public a more disciplined and less contentious sacrificial model than was offered by the rebels of the Easter Rising. 11 His hunger strike also resonated with the infamous strikes staged a decade earlier by the English and Irish suffragists. By affiliating himself with these women, who had aggressively publicized their sufferings under the English constabulary, MacSwiney reinforced the perception of the English government as oppressing innocent (and starving) victims ting for their political rights. In addition, his hunger strike reminded the public of the government's enforcement against the suffragists of the duplicitous "Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act" (the "Cat and Mouse Act"), thus reinforcing the perception of the English government as tricksters practicing the "English lie" ("R," 3). He thus engaged the sentiment of those moved by these renowned injustices while simultaneously reinforcing the image of the Irish as passive victims of English abuse. His intensely visible body, whose masculinity was insisted upon at every turn, provided a public text on which contesting messages could enrich rather than deplete each other. He was both religious icon and secular, political martyr; the passive, feminine victim, but also the active, masculine hero.
MacSwiney's hunger strike also offered a revision of the Irish revolutionary Thomas Ashe's famous hunger strike, which had been staged three years earlier. Ashe's death from force-feeding by the British was regarded by the Irish as a murder, and his funeral presaged a new wave of Irish militancy, which the English responded to by sending the notoriously brutal Auxiliary forces and the Black and Tans to Ireland. 12 Both the English and the Irish press closely covered the atrocities these forces wrought; that coverage, in conjunction with the lingering resentment from the Easter Rising and the English desire for peace following World War I, meant that by the time of MacSwiney's death public opinion had undergone a tremendous change. 13 Worldwide public opinion was now largely in favor of a truce between the Irish and English. In many ways MacSwiney's death, which fell during the bloodiest phase of the Anglo-Irish War, can be regarded as a canny public relations move that responded to and helped create this shift in public opinion by offering a widely circulated image of Irish death as a "bloodless conquest." 14 Because his death was clean and direct, his body could be understood as a hieroglyph of passive resistance and nonviolent force against the English. His only weapons were his body and his sheer force of will.
Above all, his martyrdom must be understood as a promise to the mass public that the Irish hero was a role any citizen could perform, a promise that offered diverse individuals equal access to his valorous persona. Many early-twentieth-century politicians and writers affiliated with the Irish Literary Revival had argued that "Irishness" was predicated on an authentic Celtic or Gaelic racial identity; they represented Irish national identity to their audiences as an imperishable essence embedded only in Irish citizens. 15 In contrast, modernist thought, according to theorists like Stuart Hall, represents cultural identity as "free floating . . . disembedded from specific times, places, histories and traditions." 16 MacSwiney's martyrdom worked to reconcile the essentialist ideology of identity offered by revivalism and this "free floating" ideology of identity offered by modernism. On the one hand, he propounded a revivalist sensibility that declared wholly congruent selfhood—a private, authentic nobility that registered publicly—to be a crucial aspect of authentic Irish heroism. Both O'Donovan Rossa and The Revolutionist's Hugh are described by MacSwiney as self-unified men whose self-sacrifice further reveals their inherent heroism—thus their bodies can serve as symbols of Irish national spirit. In an essay entitled "The Secret of Strength," MacSwiney insisted upon this brand of congruent Irish heroism when he asserted, "You cannot take up such a [heroic] character like a garment to suit the occasion: it must be developed in private and public by all those daily acts that declare a man's attitude, register his convictions, and form his mind." 17 However, he simultaneously insisted that heroic martyrdom achieved through self-sacrifice was a role any Irishman could perform through appropriate public and private action—a "fiction" of heroism that the "non-fictional" accounts of his own hunger strike and death then supported. This is the key to MacSwiney's modernist martyrdom: on the one hand, the martyr offers an essentialist mode of heroism located in the distant mythic time that preceded colonization, and through his self-unity publicly bears the marks of a heroic subjectivity specific to the religious and political tenets of Irish nationalism; on the other hand, this mode of heroism serves as a garment that can be worn as the Irish "style of publicity" by those who follow the terms so clearly described by MacSwiney's "brand."
Because it successfully negotiated the tensions between these opposing models of identity, the Irish public could identify with MacSwiney's particular mode of political agency. The real power of his martyrdom rested on the notion that he had constructed and performed a traditional heroic role available to modern citizens. Ireland's nationalist press, literary res, and politicians colluded in representing MacSwiney's sacrifice as a role available to all citizens. As The Irish Independent reported following the death of the "Patriot of Plain Men," MacSwiney "set the standard for the generality of men. For though but one man in a generation—and it seems even as if he must be foreordained for it—may aspire to be a Pearse, it is in all of us to become a MacSwiney, dare we but put away as he did all self-seeking and insincerity." 18 Similarly, in his autobiographical account of being a young "rank-and-filer" for the IRA, Sean O'Faolain recalled guarding MacSwiney's body during the Cork lying-in-state. For O'Faolain, the real power of MacSwiney's death was the way in which it asserted that "There was only one thing that every one of us knew he could do well, and must do well if called on to do it, the least active rank-and-filer, the humblest citizen. If arrested and condemned for any or no reason, each man knew that he could die—'For Ireland!'" 19 In America, the Irish politician Eamon De Valera praised MacSwiney's hunger strike in a speech worth note because, although De Valera was well-fed and traveling freely throughout the States, he could claim that
my role here to-day is that of one speaking for a man who is dying, but who, like the great champions of American liberty in their day, had decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and who, when he is ready to die for these principles, wants, at least, that the world should understand the motive which is prompting him to give up his life. I am speaking here to-night as I would like, if I were in MacSwiney's place that someone would speak for me. 20
MacSwiney is no longer a single embodied referent in the material world; instead, his abstraction by the public and the press allows anyone to ventriloquize him. Here, De Valera "speaks" for the imprisoned MacSwiney so that "the world" might better understand his motives. Just as MacSwiney scripted and then performed Hugh's sacrifice for the nation, now De Valera, the Irish populace, and even Americans could assume that same role and help to publicize MacSwiney's political principles.
By consistently describing MacSwiney's struggle as a kind of theater, press accounts of the hunger strike reinforced the notion that his heroism was a dramatic role any citizen could perform before an audience; in doing so, these accounts stressed that public display was a crucial component of modern self-sacrifice. The London Times titled one account of his death "A Political Tragedy," while the New York Central News insisted of his sacrifice, "Call it folly, call it madness, there it is just the same—a gesture of deep tragedy on a stage where all mankind looks on." 21 The Irish Independent stated on the day of his death that "The last act of the Brixton tragedy was enacted yesterday morning with the death of the heroic prisoner." 22 Of course, the invocation of theatrical metaphors to describe MacSwiney's martyrdom threatens the essentialism upon which Irish national identity rests; with it arises the anxiety that somehow there will be inauthenticity and deception, the putting on of Irish identity as a costume. Thus, Irish press accounts of MacSwiney's heroism aggressively compensate for the ambiguity that accompanies his martyrdom by stressing his self-unity—the same strategy that MacSwiney deployed in his own constructions of Irish martyrdom. For instance, an account of MacSwiney's final days that appeared in The Freeman's Journal, remarkably entitled "The Drama of Brixton," invokes theatrical metaphors to describe his sacrifice, but at the same time insists that his invisible spirit will triumph, that his real victory cannot be seen:
strength and comfort come to him in ways not seen of the objective eye, for as the body dies the spirit approaches to the world of the spirit, drawing sustenance from its native element, till the doubts and fears and hesitations born of the clay vanish in clouds of roseate hope. . . . [T]he torture of the body is forgotten in a great, ineffable peace of the soul. 23
While such accounts may invoke theatrical metaphors, they simultaneously stress the congruence between MacSwiney's private and public selves, his honesty, and his love of Ireland.  God save Ireland." 24
In his assessment of his recently martyred friend, Daniel Corkery summarized what made MacSwiney so powerful to the Irish:
Any great movement towards a spiritual end, such as Ireland's present push for freedom, obviously endows itself with creative power, as if otherwise it could not progress; it takes the most diverse types and unifies them, as all who to-day walk the streets of Ireland must openly acknowledge. The explanation is that in such movements men like Terence MacSwiney act out the desires of their souls, express those desires in living matter, the dearest that is, flesh and blood. Such men we speak of as master-spirits, master minds, outstanding res, commanding personalities—all good words, if none be quite the right word. 25
Corkery insists on the capacity not just of MacSwiney himself, but also of "men like Terence MacSwiney," to "act out the desires of their soul." The power of those who take on the role that MacSwiney imagined and performed is that they display in "flesh and blood" the "spiritual end" that seeks freedom for Ireland. By using mass culture and by letting mass culture use him, the modernist martyr displays his integrated self to the international public; he "takes the most diverse types and unifies them."
Thus far, I've argued that the iconic body of the Irish martyr held a tremendous amount of political potential because of its capacity both to offer citizens a widely available and readily inhabitable heroic subjectivity and to present the modern mass public with a traditional model of citizenship that enfolds them in the "imagined community" of Ireland. Often, however, theorists represent these modern publics as bodiless phantasmagorias. Warner claims that "the mass subject cannot have a body except the body it witnesses," and Benedict Anderson describes his "imagined communities" as limited, sovereign political nationalities where only "in the minds of each [citizen] lives the image of their communion." 26 The funerals of MacSwiney—which gathered together hundreds of thousands of mourners in Ireland and across the globe—allow us to ask an important question about modern communities: What happens when these national abstractions and imaginings appear as audiences that come together in a shared space and time? To answer this question, I will examine the three major funeral processions that celebrated MacSwiney's sacrifice: the funeral procession and lying-in-state in London; the corpseless funeral procession in Dublin; and the funeral procession, lying-in-state, and burial in Cork.
From Thursday, 28 October to Sunday, 31 October 1920, the citizens of the British Isles were described as a homogeneous public. In accounts of each of these three funeral processions, observers seem astounded by the ways in which diverse audiences came together peacefully in shared public grief for this Irish hero. During the London mass held in St. George's Cathedral in Southwark, for instance, the mourners were described as representing "all classes and conditions of Irish people in London . . . [along with] large numbers of persons who could lay no claim to Irish birth or descent, but . . . who preferred death to the abandonment of a great principle." 27 During MacSwiney's Dublin funeral celebration, the press described a public united in what The Freeman's Journal labeled "a day of universal sadness and mourning" in which, The New York Times asserted, "The inhabitants turned out virtually as a whole for the occasion." 28 During MacSwiney's funeral and burial in his native Cork, a similarly diverse community formed. The Freeman's Journal described the mood: "It was as if the whole community was spellbound in a single calamity. The entire population of the city, swelled by crowds of mourners from beyond its limits, knelt at the graveside of Terence MacSwiney and there dedicated themselves to the hero-martyr and pledged his name and fame and sacrifice to immortality." 29
Just as MacSwiney had imagined in The Revolutionist and his pamphlet on O'Donovan Rossa, the display of his corpse did in fact consolidate the Irish. At the Cork lying-in-state, for instance, The Freeman's Journal expressed astonishment at both the diversity of the public and its unified response to the body. It extolled the immediate, face-to-face encounter between mourner and corpse offered by traditional funeral rituals when it remarked, "the wonder was where the people, men, women, children, old and young, well-to-do and poor, clergy and laymen, came from to make up the inexhaustible stream that ever circled and flowed round the coffin holding the body of the chief magistrate, without fear, without reproach." 30 Strikingly, another report illustrated how MacSwiney's body had become a mass article through the wide circulation of his image, when it celebrated the way in which his lying-in-state allowed the public to "gaze once more straight into the features, now, alas, sadly familiar to millions of Irish eyes." 31 This account acknowledges that mass culture has disseminated MacSwiney's "features" to "millions of Irish eyes," suggesting that these "Irish eyes" might reside in bodies located outside of Ireland. While The Freeman's Journal described the oscillation between the real and imagined Irish community, another press account noted the slippage between the "real" MacSwiney and his fictions of heroism. As the commentator "Jacques" wrote in The Irish Independent, the intimate encounter between mourner and corpse in Cork resembled the model of heroic martyrdom MacSwiney celebrated in The Revolutionist: "In one fleeting moment I recalled the death of Hugh, the Hero of MacSwiney's historical drama 'The Revolutionist.' I remembered how, in the final tragedy of the troubled career of that indomitable re, the author pictured Hugh in his last sleep, just as now I saw Hugh's creator—fearless and calm with the look of the conqueror." 32 MacSwiney's martyrdom provided an iconic body that served as a palimpsest for models of heroic protest, traditional and modern, real and fictional. It also provided a device to consolidate a public that was both traditional in its capacity to gather people together in shared time and space and modern in its capacity to shape an imagined, international community in the "millions."
Ironically, despite the thousands who gathered, MacSwiney's funerals appeared to generate little immediate political action. By offering the public myriad points of identification, the display of his corpse allowed ostensibly antagonistic citizens in England and Ireland access to a shared feeling of Irishness and of loss—even as these citizens directly encountered other individuals who bore the markers of radically different political, social, religious, and gender categories. A close study of the funerals staged in London, Dublin, and Cork reveals that the press, literature, religious ritual, and a variety of institutions—traditional and modern—explicitly worked to repress the revolutionary power that might have erupted during the public celebrations of his martyrdom. The accounts of these funerals also establish that the technologies of mass culture turned their attention from MacSwiney's iconic body, which during his hunger strike had come to represent revolutionary defiance, to the bodies of the Irish public who mourned him. By doing so, mass culture served both the English and the Irish causes. It defused the funeral of its potential to generate immediate violent retribution against the English while also representing the Irish as a cohesive and well-behaved national community.
Press accounts of the London funeral celebration staged on 28 October suggested that a funeral by definition can not only draw together the Irish public, but can also link that public with their sworn enemy. Repeatedly, these accounts insisted that the Irish and English publics, rather than being divided by national or political affiliations, formed a community bound by shared sentiment. Such assessments appear to support the claim that Joseph Roach makes in his reading of Afrocentric funeral rites in Louisiana, in which he utopically announces, "Such a performance event opens up, with its formal repetitions, a space for play. Its genius resides in the very expandability of the procession: marchers with very different connections to the deceased (or perhaps no connections at all) join together on the occasion to make connections with one another." 33 By looking closely at MacSwiney's funeral in London, we can discover the particular conditions that allowed for the glossy and fantastical union between the English and the Irish publics. First, the funeral was consistently recounted in ways that acknowledge its power as a ritual embedded in a religious and folk tradition; this ritual not only requires a demonstration of respect for the deceased, but also generates authentic bonds of feeling among its celebrants. As The Irish Times noted, even English policemen were observed "wearing black gloves as a mark of respect to the dead, standing at attention when a coffin, covered with a flag they would call rebel passed by." 34 Second, the communal mourning in the London streets was attributed to the familiar and abiding sense of grief that characterized England during the interwar years. Having lost six million young men in World War I, the English were familiar with bereavement and well accustomed to granting death its public and ceremonial recognition. 35 These two conditions encouraged the Irish and English publics to regard themselves as in accord against an unsympathetic English government. As The Freeman's Journal reported, "The English people, recognising how callous and shocking was the final torture inflicted upon the victim, felt ashamed of their government and angry with it that it should have persisted in the blood-sacrifice and should have thrown away the last hopes of a better feeling between two neighboring peoples to gratify the self-esteem of petty and posturing politicians." 36
Perhaps this unanimity is best explained by accounts that represented the funeral as a spectacle in a world rendered ocularcentic by technologies ranging from print and film to the telescope, a performance (not unlike MacSwiney's heroic sacrifice) in which all individuals might participate. Consistently, Irish journalists invoked visual metaphors to describe the funeral as, for instance, "a remarkable spectacle [that] created a profound impression in the English capital. Rich and poor and different creeds and classes united in the tribute of respect." 37 The funeral elicited an inherent sense of community among diverse peoples and created a "profound impression" largely because it was a striking visual scene. The distinctly modernist Wyndham Lewis, who was residing in London at the time, described MacSwiney's funeral in terms similarly focused on spectacle:
During the martyrdom of the Lord Mayor of Cork I had several opportunities of seeing considerable numbers of irish [sic] people demonstrating among the London crowds. I was never able to distinguish which were Irish and which were English, however. They looked to me exactly the same. With the best will in the world to discriminate the orderly groups of demonstrators from the orderly groups of spectators, and to satisfy the romantic proprieties on such an occasion, my eyes refused to effect the necessary separation, that the principle of 'celtism' demanded, into chalk and cheese. I should have supposed that they were a lot of romantic english-people pretending to be irish people, and demonstrating with the assistance of a few priests and pipers, if it had not been that they all looked extremely depressed, and english-people when they are giving romance the rein are always very elated. 38
Lewis describes the mourners as a single community because these individuals "all looked extremely depressed" so that in a crowd, they "looked . . . exactly the same." He removes himself from the affect of this scene, allowing himself—if not the London crowds—the relief of "necessary separation" from mourning. While fascinating for many reasons, this narrative signals a peculiarity that recurs in other accounts of the London funeral celebration. Lewis attributes his inability to distinguish between the English and the Irish in part to the fact that the mourners "were a lot of romantic english-people pretending to be irish people." I have argued that this "pretending" is one of the pleasures afforded by the ambiguity that characterizes MacSwiney's martyrdom. Here, we see the ways in which the public sought to identify with this heroic subjectivity without having to endure its particular suffering. The English and Irish mourners pretended to be not the heroic martyr himself, but rather a romanticized version of the antimodern Irish folk. In Lewis's account, this "pretending"—the way in which both English and Irish people perform an idealized version of Irishness, along with a supporting cast of priests and pipers to enhance the authenticity of the scene—seems a fairly harmless moment in which the public can imagine itself taking on the identity of romantic Ireland, dead and gone.
The coverage of the funeral by The London Times exposes how these theatrical terms can be used, not simply to encourage unity among a heterogeneous public but also to defuse the threat to the crown represented by these crowds. Faced with MacSwiney's revolutionary body, the English depicted the bodies of the Irish public according to distorted cultural stereotypes. In one account, the Times described the crowd attending the procession thus:
In one respect, however, both men and women were wonderfully alike. Both presented a great variety of Irish types. The Irish peasant was there, with broad face and uptilted nose; the lantern-jawed, mystical Irishman; the swarthy, dark-eyed Irishman, own brother to the Spaniard. These and others could be recognized from their prototypes in Irish story, drama, and art. Even the Irishman who is said to exist only in the Englishman's imagination was to be discovered without much search. 39
Obviously, the particular physical "types" described here limit the availability of the abstracted heroic Irish identity. Instead, these descriptions reassert that the Irish community, while homogeneous, is assembled from the demeaning comic types found in the English popular theater. Just as in MacSwiney's fictions of the heroic Irishman, Irish identity can be constructed and then filled by real individuals. However, according to this account the English, not the Irish, determine the fictions and realities that define the Irish public. In doing so, they emphasize the physical characteristics of these types, disparaging rather than celebrating the bodies found among the Irish public.
Press accounts of the London funeral procession revealed the logic that allows for harmony among this cosmopolitan mourning public. It could occur because Irish and English observers were able to rewrite the procession as wholly unthreatening. This was done by theatricalizing the crowds, but also by describing only those bodies that lacked political power. Irish press accounts focused not on the virile young Irishmen who marched in this procession, but instead on "the immense amount of women who participated in its ranks" and the "extreme youth of the men taking part in the proceedings, apart from the priests." 40 Not surprisingly, The London Times's description of the funeral most egregiously represented the mourners as distinctly apolitical, stressing the crowd's "aloofness from all political feeling." 41
This account also feminizes the mourning public, further distancing the marchers from the heroic man they grieve:
Now and then came a woman of good physique who held her head high, as with defiance. But near her might be a poor old grey-haired creature in shawl and bonnet, obviously and sadly battered by the stress of life, and hardly able to go on putting one foot before the other. A band of girls whose smiles said that politics had not banished other interests from their heads, would restore the balance a little. [ibid.]
Here, the female mourners clearly embody and display the weak nature and easily distracted attention of the Irish.
The same account reveals that the English represented this political spectacle as nonthreatening by focusing on the bodies of the Irish public rather than on the martyred body of MacSwiney. In an interesting twist, the English press described the marchers' bodies in parts, remarking that "The mouths that smiled ever so faintly were, however, rare. Most were hard set, and not a few were writhen" (ibid.). This is a battle of expression, where a "hard set" or "writhen" face becomes a weapon—but not a powerful or threatening one—in the war between the English and the Irish. This same account did eventually turn its attention to the male mourners in the procession, reporting that the Irish men wore their hats in a similar fashion and therefore "might have been called uniformed" (ibid.). Thus, while acknowledging the effort to subvert the English ban on Republican uniforms, this report simultaneously stresses the nonthreatening nature of the "uniform," which consists of "soft" hats worn "over the eyes." Consistently, the mourners are described as weak and struggling, a description that reflects the accounts of MacSwiney's body during his final days. In their identification with this martyr and his withered corpse, the Irish public represented their struggle as one that culminated in a national public "sadly battered by the stress of life" and ultimately without a voice or the energy to do battle—much like MacSwiney himself.
In the Dublin funeral procession held the next day, 29 October, the struggle to define the iconic body of MacSwiney and the bodies of those who mourned him continued. From London, MacSwiney's remains and the mourning party were to travel together to Holyhead, Wales, then on to Dublin, where Sinn Féin had planned an extensive funeral celebration. As the corpse and the family arrived in Holyhead, however, a surprise decree from the English government announced that MacSwiney's corpse was to be shipped not to Dublin but directly to Cobh, a port downriver from Cork. According to a letter hand-delivered to MacSwiney's family at the docks, English authorities feared that "the landing and funeral of the Lord Mayor in Dublin may lead to a demonstration in a political nature." 42 The Irish mourners tried to resist this change of plan, with MacSwiney's sisters crying in defiance, "You have murdered our brother and you are not going to arrest his body." 43 But English railway officials and policemen roughly pushed the mourners aside; the body was then seized by Black and Tans, placed by harbor crane on the English steamer Rathmore, and transported directly to Cork accompanied by a cadre of English soldiers.
The battle over the corpse in Holyhead, which was photographed and reported in detail by the international press, suggests that at this moment MacSwiney's body provided the public with a super-charged political sign. The Irish and English struggled to define the social and political messages that MacSwiney's corpse would exhibit to the mass public. For the Irish, it displayed evidence that the English government was so excessively brutal and corrupt that, in the words of The Freeman's Journal, "Poor Terence MacSwiney was indeed being harassed, even in the casket enclosing all that was left of him." 44 Meanwhile, the English government, by wrapping the coffin in sackcloth and surrounding it with Black and Tans, hoped to label this hunger striker a criminal and thus prevent his corpse from becoming an illustration of Irish heroism. In an effort to wrest back the power to define the meaning of MacSwiney's body, Sinn Féin proceeded as planned with MacSwiney's Dublin funeral on Friday, 29 October, the day the corpse was shipped to Cork. The corpseless funeral in Dublin revealed the ways in which, following their loss in the battle over the body at Holyhead, these Irish mourners reasserted their moral superiority over the English and thereby created an ideal Irish public whose representations could be circulated across the globe.
While the accounts of the London funeral relied on theatrical stereotypes to defuse the power of the Irish mourners, the Dublin accounts employed a different stereotype of Irishness, that of the spirit—an ideal consistently deployed by authors and politicians during the early years of the Irish Literary Revival. As the contemporary critic Terence Brown points out, spiritualism was important to the revivalists because it provided "an image of a universal principle in the Irish world . . . the manifestation of an objective, communal reality." 45 In part, the revivalists imagined this poetic and religious abstraction might help to unite diverse Irish individuals into a homogeneous national public. For instance, following MacSwiney's death, De Valera asserted before yet another American audience the ease with which the Irish public could inhabit MacSwiney's heroic role. He insisted that the Irish could identify with the iconic body of MacSwiney because all Irish share the same essential spirit. As he claimed, "Terence MacSwiney did not die to put spirit in his own people. He knew that they had spirit; that they were waiting to make sacrifices as he did. . . . There are thousands ready to follow him that the conscience of the world may be aroused." 46
The nation of the spirit offered a salient rallying point because the pure Irish spirit was consistently represented as the antidote to the rational, mechanized, urban, and contaminated modern world, a world that was often coded as English. By invoking this spirit as the ideal, Irish nationalists could reimagine every loss as a triumph that would supersede any material victory in life. MacSwiney himself invoked this logic in his pamphlet on O'Donovan Rossa when he imagined that Rossa had joined other Irish heroes who had fallen in battle. He called on readers to "think of. . . the noble spirits of the earlier years—the martyrs of many a persecution, and the heroes of many a field—we can imagine them gathering together to await the issue of the last t. Why, then, pray either to stand or fall, when either way we are happy?" ("R," 16). This seems in many ways to be a fatalistic way of imagining the nation—Ireland may achieve independence, but real triumph can be found only in the spiritual afterworld. MacSwiney propounded this belief throughout Battle-Cries , his collection of poetry. In poem after poem he insisted that each defeat at the hands of the English actually signaled ultimate victory for the Irish. As he wrote in his paean "To the Dead at Eastertide ":
'Twas God broke the plan, letting the spirit have sway.
Ah, how the spirit rose on its wings, and its flight
Gleamed in the dark, and challenged, and put to affright
The power material, holding our land in its chains,
Till the voice of the many, who trembled, that power disdains. 47
While the Easter Rising revolutionaries may appear to have failed in their endeavor to free Ireland, according to MacSwiney they succeeded because their legacy inspired "the many" to revile the English. The real payoff of sacrifice was not a military or political victory, but the inspiration offered to the public when the spirit was released from the body.
In Irish accounts of MacSwiney's death, the spirit was repeatedly invoked to represent his starvation as a victory that transcended the ability of the English to capture and imprison him, to determine the route his corpse must take, and to control the mourners. England might win a battle of bodies and guns, they might have the material resources to seize an Irish martyr's corpse and transport it as they wish, but the Irish could retaliate by insisting on their spiritual superiority and their belief in MacSwiney's tenet of "no compromise." De Valera assessed the impact of MacSwiney's hunger strike by claiming, "It is the only field of battle where we are England's match. It is the spiritual field, and England's brute force may manacle MacSwiney's body, and they may torture it, but MacSwiney's spirit will triumph in the ultimate victory of the cause for which he is dying." 48 After death, the body is mere detritus and, without the body to shackle it, the spirit can t more effectively for freedom—an important message to convey as the English sailed with MacSwiney's body across the Irish Sea. Following MacSwiney's death, one Irish nationalist paper included this quotation from a Spanish paper:
England cannot even say that she has at least one enemy less. For this enemy—apart from the spiritual life beyond the grave—lives henceforth in the memory of his fellow-citizens, with a life more active, more effectual, and far more to be feared than his personal life which has closed. The corpse of MacSwiney, mummified by his seventy-four days' fast, will be for England an adversary more terrible than an army of robust and well-armed athletes. 49
In this passage, the sacrificial removal of MacSwiney's body from the community gives spiritual life to the community—a life that exists in the bodies of those who wish to t England. And the mass publicity of this body, of the corpse that signifies the spirit's new life, transforms MacSwiney into a more powerful force than even the live bodies of "robust and well-armed athletes."
This invocation of the spirit suggests that the corpse holds revolutionary potential primarily because it is an indexical sign that MacSwiney's triumphant spirit has been released. However, when this spiritual ideal was deployed in Dublin, it appears only to have repressed the energy generated when the Irish mourners and the English authorities came into conflict while in Wales. The revolutionary energy that this press report suggests his "fellow-citizens" might distill from MacSwiney's spirit—the spirit that would endow them with "a life more active, more effectual, and far more to be feared"—in fact revealed itself through the widespread harmony among the mourners. Rather than rise in protest, the public appears here to have embraced the revivalist sense of the spirit as a tool that can unite and pacify an otherwise fractured community. The Irish nationalist paper Young Ireland insisted upon the primacy of this kind of spirit in the following passage:
The empty hearse passing through the City of Dublin was even more symbolic of the heroic spirit of Ireland's dead than anything else could have been. In the empty hearse, Dublin and Ireland visualised the spirit of Irish nationality—his mortal remains were in charge of the English forces, but his spirit was in the hearts of the Irish people, beyond the touch of English defaming hands. 50
With the loss of the body, it seems, the Irish gained a nonviolent means of demonstrating their animus toward the English.
Only the English press stressed the absence of MacSwiney's body in the Dublin procession, insisting that "All the arrangements which had been made for the reception of the body were carried out punctiliously. Only the central re was absent." 51 For the English, the absence of MacSwiney's body mattered in a way it appears not to have mattered to the Irish. There are subtle signs, however, that his body did in fact hold an important role in the Irish imagination since, as seen at Holyhead, it was the very device that displayed the injustice of the English government. While the shell of MacSwiney's soul was not the only component that could gather a live public, its trace in the form of a hearse or the sight of the mourning family could bring Dubliners into the streets. The Freeman's Journal described the crowds as though they had assumed the body of their suffering hero:
Dublin remained one quivering nerve of pain and horrified, though courageous, emotion. The great spirit of the people seemed somehow to have gone out to keep vigil over the ashes of their dead patriot and to have left behind it a want, an absence, a strangeness. One felt a tension brooding over all too deep a source and too long suffering to display in outward grief. 52
Like MacSwiney himself, in this account the Dublin mourning public suffers pain and horror, its spirit flying out of its body. While in London the Irish public was described as embodying a theatrical mourning public on display, in Dublin their suffering was described by the Irish press as too intense "to display in outward grief." The Irish papers engaged the rhetoric of spectacle not to create a homogeneous mourning public, but to indicate the difference between the Irish and the English. The Irish Independent recounted how MacSwiney's family was treated during the Dublin funeral mass by noting, "An English crowd would have gawked. It would have watched its every movement. Afterwards it would have a tale to tell. Grief even is not sacred from the profane eyes of such people. But Ireland knows sorrow and respects suffering." 53 In this account, the English merely watch suffering and sorrow in order (like Wyndham Lewis) to produce a tale, while the Irish are able to use spectacle as a means to engage authentic emotion.
In The Revolutionist, MacSwiney constructed a narrative in which Hugh's funeral unites the Irish public and exposes to them the truth that Home Rule conceals ongoing English oppression. In the early acts, however, Hugh does not immediately recognize that the nation requires the public sacrifice of a hero to inspire its citizens. Instead, he is convinced that oratory will persuade the public to support his political tenets. Armed with this belief, he embarks on a public speaking tour of Ireland, apparently presuming that his audiences will be inspired by his political doctrine if he regresses to a theatrical model of political display. In doing so, he relies on the feudal mode of publicity that Jürgen Habermas describes as "the public sphere as publicity of representation," a space wherein the virtue and authority of the state were displayed through the body of the nobleman. 54 But this older model of representation fails to unite the modern Irish public, and Hugh's travels result only in ravaging his body, the medium by which his political stance is conveyed to the audience. Hugh's friend Fan insists he stop this campaign of political display because his efforts effect little change among his audiences. Upon his entrance, she insists, Hugh's audiences "immediately become restive and after a while the usual trouble begins" (RAP, 117). Hugh disregards Fan's advice and travels to Cork so that he might inspire another politically enervated audience. When he returns home, he immediately dies of exhaustion. He unintentionally sacrifices his life to a fantasy public that he believes can be swayed by theatrical display, when in fact it becomes clear that the audience will immediately disperse and not use the energy generated by his public oration in any meaningful way.
MacSwiney then posits that the death of the Irish hero and the display of his body can reveal the "truth" of nationalism to the public and therefore can unite them in struggle toward a common goal. Hugh's bereaved wife Nora insists that when all look upon the "beautiful" visage of his corpse, they will see "the look of the conqueror" and subsequently understand "'Tis we who are troubled and frightened. There is no fear on his face. . . . Those who doubted must come and see him dead" (RAP, 135). The fears that, according to Hugh, were provoked be secret revolutionary societies and the Catholic church are not visible on the face of the single dead hero; consequently, it is possible for his corpse to inspire the public to behave with a similar type of bravery. As Nora insists, "We must leave him uncovered that everyone may look on his face, that men may wish to be like him in death—" (RAP, 135). The mourning public relates to Hugh's dead body in a very different way from the public that attended his speaking engagements. Rather than creating "the usual trouble" as they did at Hugh's speeches, the audience can now identify with his ideals and retain "his memory always beautiful" (RAP, 136). In MacSwiney's fantasy of death, the display of a corpse unites Irish citizens in a more permanent and powerful way than the display of a living political body. The permanent "wish to be like him in death" engendered in the mourners presents a stark contrast to the transient friction the audiences experienced when they were exposed to his mortal, speaking body.
The funeral celebrations and burial of MacSwiney in his native Cork, which were held on Sunday, 31 October, initially seem to support the notion that funereal display can magically unite an otherwise fragmented public. Accounts of the Cork funeral described the same peaceful formation of community that attended the rituals in London and Dublin—with one notable exception. The London Times mentioned the arrival of MacSwiney's body in Cork late Saturday afternoon, suggesting that the corpse would somehow engender rebellious activity among the mourners by noting that an "air of apprehension throughout the city over what may happen on the day of the funeral of Lord Mayor MacSwiney seemed to have superseded the restrained attitude with which the populace received word of the incident at Holyhead." 55 The mood in Cork was tense, and when low tides meant that the delivery of the body might be delayed, according to The Irish Times, "People then began to speculate unkindly about the movements of the ship." 56 But any tension was thwarted at this particular moment by the church's capacity to channel political energy into the passive ritual of prayer. As this report continued, "Speculation was checked, however, with the call to general prayer, when the churches were unable to hold their congregation anxious to join in supplication for the repose of the soul of their first citizen. On all sides business was suspended, and the city assumed a solemn Sabbath air" (ibid.).
This moment at the dock, wherein public conflict is suppressed in the interest of prayer, is important because it foregrounds the way in which the church actively participated in the disciplining of the Irish public. Anger over the treatment of MacSwiney's corpse was channeled into prayer for the dead hero's soul. This type of ecclesiastical discipline was evident throughout the events surrounding MacSwiney's death. At the moment of his death, MacSwiney's chaplain, Father Dominic, immediately sent a telegram to the Deputy Lord Mayor of Cork. He advised the city's citizens to "maintain the same calm, dignified, and noble bearing which they exhibited on the assassination of [the previous Lord Mayor] Thomas MacCurtain." 57 Notably, Father Dominic alluded to the murder of MacCurtain and his peaceful funeral, rather than to the death of Ashe, which as noted earlier, prered great violence in Ireland. The Irish Times reprinted this letter from Father Cohalan, a Roman Catholic Bishop of Cork, which similarly stated that
for the moment it might appear that the Lord Mayor had died in defeat. This might be conceded if there were questions merely of the individual, but it is not true where the issue of the nation is concerned. We are the weaker nation in combat. Sometimes we tire of the conflict. Anyhow, the questions of Land, of Local Government, of Housing, of Education, for a time engage our attention. But periodically the memory of the martyr's death will remind a young generation of the freedom of Ireland. 58
This letter asserts once more that MacSwiney and the nation are conflated in the national imagination, but in a way that gives emphasis to the frailty of Ireland and resonates with the London newspapers' earlier insistence on the weakness of the women and children who composed the Irish public. Memory here is merely to "remind" the public of freedom—not to inspire that public to t for freedom.
MacSwiney's fantasy, that the mere display of a heroic corpse would somehow organically unite a fragmented public, revealed itself in Cork to be only part of the story. In fact, not only the Catholic church but a variety of institutions consciously worked to manage the behavior of the public during the funeral celebrations. The most evident source of discipline was, of course, that of the English military forces. As discussed, the English government decreed where the body could and could not go. The government also forced the family to accept the body on their terms when "A threat by Government officials to take charge of the body. . . and bury it in the barracks yard here led to the family finally accepting delivery of the remains after they had lain for several hours on the Customs House dock here tonight." 59 In addition, The London Times reported that the English government sought to control the bodies of those who mourned MacSwiney, noting that "the competent military authority will take steps to ensure that no military display is made, such as the wearing of uniforms or Republican armlets or badges, or movement in form of bodies, or drilling of any kind. . . . [The funeral] procession must be kept down to a reasonable length—not longer, it is suggested, than a quarter of a mile." 60 Even more powerfully than the colonial military forces, the tradition of the bourgeois funeral served as a disciplinary device that superseded religious, racial, and political affiliations and that called for the formation of a homogeneous mourning community. In one of the many press accounts of respectful mourning, The Freeman's Journal reported that when MacSwiney's remains passed through the city, the Black and Tans and the police saluted in deference to the dead. 61
It is not particularly surprising to discover that the Catholic church, the English government, and middle-class mores worked to discipline the mourners. More remarkable is the fact that Irish nationalists also helped to pacify the Irish public. Irish nationalists faced legitimate anxieties regarding the impact of bad behavior on the celebration of MacSwiney's death, anxieties that were realized at Holyhead. In London immediately following his brother's death, for instance, Peter MacSwiney had expressed fears that Republican demonstrations might prevent the English from allowing the corpse to return to Ireland at all, only to find those fears almost realized. But even when the Republicans had the body in tow, they continued to insist that the Irish mourning public behave in an orderly and peaceful fashion. Members of both the Irish Parliament and Sinn Féin asked the public to refrain from violence, while voicing a concern that "the younger element" or the IRB might disregard these orders. 62 The nationalist press also colluded in enforcing this kind of discipline. The Cork Examiner insisted that "Good-citizenship connotes amenability to discipline and order, and respect for the dead for whom the community mourns ordains that the last solemn rites shall be conducted in a manner befitting the man and the country for which he died." 63
The international press represented the mourning public as homogeneous in their respect, but there were in fact disruptions: against English orders, a number of Volunteers mourned in uniform; after the London funeral, MacSwiney's brown habit was replaced with his Republican uniform; a Gaelic inscription on the coffin bore a staunchly political message, claiming MacSwiney was "Murdered by the Foreigner"; and across Ireland, civilians were arrested for displays of Republicanism. But these ruptures were small and few. Consistently, descriptions of quiet and orderly behavior attended the vast crowds who watched the processions staged in London, Dublin, and Cork. While the Irish and English had overtly restrained these crowds, clearly MacSwiney's iconic body, a text inscribed with self-discipline and a refusal to compromise with the English, had become a point of identification for the Irish public. The Irish saw themselves in his martyred corpse and exploited that identification to their political benefit. The mass circulation of the images and accounts of the orderly Irish public at the funerals challenged one of the powerful binaries by which the English justified their occupation of Ireland. No longer could the English government claim it was obligated to enforce order in a land troubled by the deviant behavior of the "Wild Irish." 64 On the contrary, the Irish public was represented as civilized and restrained in the face of England's barbarity.
Throughout MacSwiney's funeral celebration the Irish were portrayed not as an unruly mob, but as a well-behaved community. In his widely read 1901 essay, "The Battle of Two Civilizations," the Irish journalist D. P. Moran cited one of the great anxieties of the Englishman as a concern over manners. He claimed, "it is difficult to get the Englishman to admit that there is any civilization in the world other than British. . . . When he talks of morality, he thinks only of the British variety, of liberty, progress, good taste, and so on; he shows somewhat more intelligence on the question of manners, for here he allows himself to be haunted by the suspicion that his may after all be only second rate." 65 The funeral allowed the Irish to display their good behavior before an international public and therefore to exacerbate these anxieties. The funerals also allowed for a display of manners that spoke well of Ireland's capacity to govern itself. The good behavior of the crowds could be attributed not only to the innate self-control and respect of the civilized Irish people, but—perhaps more distressing to the English—this behavior could also be attributed to the discipline and order enforced by the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Independent claimed that "the vast crowds were kept back by cordons of Volunteers, who maintained splendid order throughout." 66
It is crucial to note, however, that the English were accomplices in creating MacSwiney's cohesive mourning public. They had cleverly used the funeral to defuse the revolutionary energy generated by the events that followed the Easter Rising. When the English government executed the men involved and then prohibited any funeral celebrations for them, the Irish public—who had initially been somewhat frustrated by the dramatic and futile rebellion—transformed these poet-rebels into martyrs and their futile resistance into heroic rebellion. The moment MacSwiney died, a reporter for The London Times recalled that "the Republican 'heroes' of 1916 have become already landmarks in Nationalist Ireland's struggle for freedom"; thus, the correspondent announced, "I understand that [in MacSwiney's case] the executive authority are disposed to allow legitimate scope for the expression of public sympathy." 67 By allowing the Irish public to mourn, the British correctly sensed that they could stifle further revolutionary sentiment and political insurrection. They may also have been responding to the dangers presented by the mass cultural dissemination of MacSwiney's modernist martyrdom since, as The Cork Examiner noted, "interference with the funeral arrangements would have done them no good with the English public, and would have outraged the opinion of every civilised country." 68
The widespread celebration of MacSwiney's funerals may have offered the English an even subtler, but equally pernicious, means of reinforcing their power over the Irish. At his burial, the nationalist and elegiac rhetorics surrounding his martyrdom asked the Irish public to identify further with MacSwiney, to recognize that each of them might be called to sacrifice for Mother Ireland. Like MacSwiney, with whose heroism they had explicitly been asked to identify, each Irish citizen would eventually become a corpse that, as the eulogy proclaimed, "reposes in the Irish earth of his Motherland." 69 For all of the changes that modernity had wrought, there remained one inescapable truth in the religious promise, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Perhaps it was the pervasive display of this inescapable truth that most potently repressed significant revolutionary action among the Irish during the funeral. Rather than promising a radical break from the past, MacSwiney's iconic body, his mass-circulated heroic corpse, may have signaled that there can be little change in certain essential truths. If the Irish had deeply internalized their subjection at the hands of the English—a subjection enforced over centuries—then perhaps MacSwiney's martyred body served to display once more that the inevitable march of progress—be it biological, industrial, or imperial—could not be stemmed.
What then was the final revolutionary outcome of the messages MacSwiney's
iconic body wore before the mass public? By internationally distributing
images and written accounts of his death and burial, mass culture
presented his sacrifice as evidence of Irish victimization at the hands
of the English. As MacSwiney had imagined in The Revolutionist
and in his panegyric for O'Donovan Rossa, the Irish heroic corpse
not only exposed English oppression, but also consolidated the Irish
public. Through their identification with MacSwiney's self-disciplined
body, citizens of Ireland, England, and even the United States came
together both as an "imagined community" and as a real audience of
mourners in shared time and space, even if only for a few days. His
martyrdom preceded the English execution of the young Irishman Kevin
Barry, the events of Bloody Sunday, the IRA's flying column attacks
on the Auxiliaries, and the burning of Cork by British forces. These
violent events, all of which occurred in the days and months following
MacSwiney's death, drove the English to the bargaining table, so that
by December 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty mandated the creation of an
Irish Free State of twenty-six counties. In the midst of the violence
of the Anglo-Irish War, the accounts of his martyrdom offered the Irish
and international public an alternative mode of revolutionary action. By
presenting Irish bodies as registers of self-discipline in the face of
English oppression, a new form of heroism was established. MacSwiney's
modernist martyrdom meant that his self-inflicted death could be
interpreted not just as another in a transhistorical legacy of sacrifice
for a noble principle, but also as a public relations coup bringing the
Irish closer to independence.
1. This fantasy was in no way original to MacSwiney or the Irish nationalists. In their analysis of death rituals, the anthropologists Peter Metcalfe and Richard Huntington insist that any death unites a community, but that historically the death of a royal person—or here, the Irish nationalist hero—fuses a community even more strongly because the funeral may be regarded as "part of a political drama in which many people have a stake." See Peter Metcalfe and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 134. If, as Lauren Berlant argues, the living body of a celebrity urges individuals to shed their own bodies (see note 8), then a royal funeral takes this one step further because, according to Metcalfe and Huntington, "a royal funeral, ef, or corpse becomes a highly condensed set of symbols directly representing every one of the deaths of all the people of the realm" .
2. Patrick Pearse, "O'Donovan Rossa: Graveside Panegyric," The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 2:294.
3. Like many nationalists in early twentieth-century Ireland, MacSwiney's political and literary careers were intertwined. He was one of the founders of the Cork branch of the Irish Volunteers, and he was to have been second in command of the Easter Rising in Cork and Kerry. When Thomas MacCurtain was killed by British soldiers in March 1920, MacSwiney took his place, both as Lord Mayor of Cork and as the head of the Cork Brigade of the IRA. As a literary re, he helped form both the Celtic Literary Society in Cork and the Cork Dramatic Society; he authored Battle-Cries , a book of poems dedicated to the "Dead at Eastertide"; and he published four plays. Furthermore, MacSwiney's work in Fianna Fail, the revolutionary newspaper he edited, reflected his commitment to Ireland's cultural and political life. Biographies recounting his martyrdom and the political career that preceded it reveal his striking investment in the body as a means through which to display revolutionary political ideals before a live public. See Moirin Chavasse, Terence MacSwiney (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1961); Francis Costello, Enduring the Most: The Life and Death of Terence MacSwiney (Kerry: Brandon Books, 1995); P. S. O'Hegarty, A Short Memoir of Terence MacSwiney (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1922); and Charlotte H. Fallon, Soul of Fire: A Biography of Mary MacSwiney (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1986).
4. Terence MacSwiney, "Rossa" (Dublin: O'Donovan Rossa Funeral Committee, 1915), 14. Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.; hereafter abbreviated as "R."
5. Terence MacSwiney, The Revolutionist: A Play in Five Acts (Dublin: Maunsel, 1914); hereafter abbreviated as RAP.The Revolutionist, though published in 1914, was first performed after MacSwiney's death, in February 1921, at the Abbey Theater. Upon publication, it received a lukewarm reception in the Irish Citizen, which claimed the play would "keep the puzzled reader in a mood of dissatisfaction and needless obscurity." See L. C., review of The Revolutionist,Irish Citizen, 29 August 1914, 115. Likewise, following MacSwiney's death, Yeats bluntly labeled The Revolutionist "not a good play," but went on to insist that the Abbey should stage it because "the last pages will greatly move the audience who will see the Mayor in the play's hero." See Letter #34, Lennox Robinson Papers, SIU; cited in Bernard G. Krimm, W. B. Yeats and the Emergence of the Irish Free State 1918-1939: Living in the Explosion (Troy, N.Y.: Whiston, 1981), 23. Krimm offers an excellent account of the Abbey's decision to stage The Revolutionist and of Yeats's decision to rewrite the conclusion to The King's Threshold in response to MacSwiney's hunger strike.
6. W. H. Maxwell, History of the Irish Rebellion with Memoirs of the Union, and Emmett's Insurrection in 1803 (London: Bell and Daldy, 1866), 432.
7. MacSwiney was charged with a variety of crimes, including the possession of a Royal Irish Constabulary cypher key that allowed the Republicans to decode British messages and documents (pledging allegiance to Dail Éireann) that were "likely to cause disaffection to his Majesty." See Chavasse, Terence MacSwiney, 145. He was tried on 16 August and was found guilty and transported to Brixton Prison the following day.
8. Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993) 242. In addition to Warner, I draw on these theorists for their work on the body, modernity, and the mass public: Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street" and "A Berlin Chronicle," in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985); Lauren Berlant, "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life," in The Phantom Public Sphere; Bill Brown, "The War Game: Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest," in The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992).
9. Oliver MacDonagh has argued that Irish political culture is defined by its efforts to conflate the past and the present, by its allegiance to "the contemporaneity of the past." See Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of the Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 9. Similarly, Terry Eagleton argues that Irish political culture blends "the archaic with the absolutely contemporary." See Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 279. In his discussion of Irish modernization, Luke Gibbons argues that "idealizations of rural existence, the longing for community and primitive simplicity are the product of an urban sensibility" and thus mask the real modernizing influences in nostalgia. See Luke Gibbons, "The Myth of Modernization in Irish Culture," in Transformations in Irish Culture (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 85.
10. "Peter MacSwiney's Views," The New York Times, 26 October 1920, 7. During the early twentieth century fasting had become a tool for modern mass political purposes and was a particularly salient one for MacSwiney in light of the long shadow cast by the Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. According to Joseph Lee, this famine was the moment in which the Irish recognized themselves not as powerless objects of God's will, but as modern political subjects oppressed by the English who could exert influence over the government through their vote. Evidence that the modern public perceived hunger strikes as efficacious acts of resistance may be found in the series of well-publicized strikes staged in England and Ireland during the early twentieth century. This revisionist depiction of the hunger strike—as an action directed toward the mass public in order to elicit agency from them—was so powerful and pervasive that the nationalist paper The Watchword announced, "From the earliest times the hunger strike has been made use of for the purpose of bringing public opinion or odium to bear on cases of injustice." See "The Hunger Strike in History," The Watchword, 23 October 1920, 3.
11. Patrick Pearse and the other rebels of 1916 offered the public a sacrificial model that embodied Cuchulain and other heroes of Gaelic mythology, Christ (in ultimate victory through self-abnegation), and the Fenians oppressed by the English (Wolfe Tone, John Mitchel, Thomas Davis). For helpful accounts of the Easter Rising, see Revising the Rising, ed. Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (Derry: Field Day, 1991); Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Dublin 1916, ed. Roger McHugh (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966); James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin (Dublin: Maunsel, 1916); and William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, 1916 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
12. In 1917, Sinn Féin strengthened the link between nascent political consciousness and hunger by celebrating the death of Ashe, the president of the IRB who was imprisoned for his involvement in the Easter Rising and died at Mountjoy Prison. Ashe's funeral procession drew over 40,000 people and successfully turned their attention from the failure of the Easter Rising and Sinn Féin's lack of an articulate national policy to English oppression. His funeral was imagined as a covert display of native military presence, an opportunity for the IRB to demonstrate that they were a military force to be reckoned with, a message conveyed through the succinct eulogy that Michael Collins offered after a volley of gunshot was fired at Ashe's graveside: "Nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make over the grave of a dead Fenian." See Ulick O'Connor, Michael Collins and the Troubles: The Struggle for Irish Freedom 1912-1922 (New York: Norton, 1975), 122-7.
13. F. S. L. Lyons notes that the Liberal press in England (e.g., the Daily News, the Manchester Guardian, the Westminster Gazette, and the London Times) "did much to create a sympathetic public opinion for the Irish cause." See F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), 413. For an account of English public opinion regarding Ireland during these years, see C. L. Mowat, "The Irish Question in British Politics (1916-1922)," in The Irish Struggle 1916-1926, ed. Desmond Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
14. "A Fitting Tribute," The Sinn Feiner, 15 November 1920, 2.
15. The body of work that addresses the question of Irish identity in the early twentieth century and examines its construction as "anti-modern" is too large to cite here in whole. Recent work that has been particularly influential on this includes: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Oxford: Bloodaxe Books, 1994); F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); and George Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O'Casey, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994).
16. Stuart Hall, "The Question of Cultural Identity," in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 622. Theorists of modernity have claimed that as social life has become mediated by world-wide mass communications and other technologies, identities have become less fixed. See also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990) and David Harvey, "Modernity and Modernism," in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990). Of late, postcolonial theory has demonstrated the ways in which the fluid identities that characterize modernity both reinforce and resist colonial stereotypes.
17. Terence MacSwiney, "The Secret of Strength," in Principles of Freedom (San Francisco: Rank and File Press, 1920), 73.
18. "Sketch of Terence MacSwiney," The Irish Independent, 28 October 1920, 4.
19. Sean O'Faolain, Vive Moi! (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1993), 138.
20. Young Ireland, 9 October 1920, 1.
21. The London Times, 27 October 1920, 10. The Central News (New York), 26 October 1920, 8.
22. The Irish Independent, 26 October 1920, 3.
23. Red Hand, "The Drama of Brixton," The Freeman's Journal, 23 October 1920, 4.
24. The Irish Independent, 26 October 1920, 5.
25. Daniel Corkery, "Literary Career," quoted in O'Hegarty, A Short Memoir, 194.
26. Warner, Phantom Public, 250. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (New York: Verso, 1991), 6.
27. "Scene at the Cathedral," The Freeman's Journal, 28 October 1920, 5.
28. The Freeman's Journal, 30 October 1920, 5. The New York Times, 30 October 1920, 2.
29. The Freeman's Journal, 1 November 1920, 5.
30. Ibid., 6.
31. The Cork Examiner, 1 November 1920, 4.
32. "Ireland's Day of Sorrow and Pride," The Irish Independent, 1 November 1920, 4.
33. Joseph Roach, "Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World," in Performance and Performativity, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 59.
34. The Irish Times, 29 October 1920, 4.
35. See David Cannadine, "War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain," in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New York: St. Martin's, 1981), 187-242. Also see Alan Wilkinson, "Changing Attitudes to Death in the Two World Wars," in The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal, ed. Peter Jupp and Glennys Howarth (New York: MacMillan, 1997), 149-63.
36. "London Letter," The Freeman's Journal, 26 October 1920, 4.
37. The Cork Examiner, 29 October 1920, 5.
38. Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 322.
39. The London Times, 29 October 1920, 9.
40. The Irish Independent, 29 October 1920, 4. The Irish Times, 29 October 1920, 4.
41. The London Times, 29 October 1920, 9.
42. The New York Times, 29 October 1920, 1. See also The Freeman's Journal, 29 October 1920, 5.
43. The Irish Independent, 30 October 1920, 4.
44. The Freeman's Journal, 30 October 1920, 6.
45. Terence Brown, "Cultural Nationalism 1880-1930," in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 2:520.
46. The New York Times, 1 November 1920, 1. De Valera spoke before a crowd of 40,000 at Manhattan's Polo Grounds, the city's largest amphitheater, while another 10,000 waited outside.
47. Terence MacSwiney, "To the Dead at Eastertide ," in Battle-Cries (San Francisco: Rank and File Press, 1920), 54.
48. Young Ireland, 9 October 1920, 1.
49. Young Ireland, 6 November 1920, 1. The article attributes this quotation to El Debate, a Madrid newspaper.
50. Young Ireland, 11 November 1920, 1.
51. The London Times, 30 October 1920, 10.
52. The Freeman's Journal, 26 October 1920, 3.
53. The Irish Independent, 30 October 1920, 4.
54. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 5-14.
55. The New York Times, 31 October 1920, 1.
56. The Irish Times, 30 October 1920, 5.
57. The Irish Independent, 26 October 1920, 5.
58. The Irish Times, 30 October 1920, 6.
59. The New York Times, 30 October 1920, 1.
60. The London Times, 30 October 1920, 10.
61. The Freeman's Journal, 30 October 1920, 5.
62. The New York Times, 26 October 1920, 7.
63. The Cork Examiner, 30 October 1920, 5.
64. For a discussion of ways in which British stereotypes represented the Irish as dirty, violent, and subhuman, see L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, Conn.: Conference on British Studies, 1968) and Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971). In his recent collection of essays, R. F. Foster argues that Curtis fails to account in his study of Punch for the equally acerbic and demeaning caricatures of the English in this publication. He also notes that Curtis limits his focus to simple racial prejudice, failing to acknowledge the role of class and religion in English prejudice. See R. F. Foster, "Paddy and Mr. Punch," in Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, 1993).
65. D. P. Moran, "The Battle of Two Civilizations," in Ideals in Ireland, ed. Lady Gregory (London: Unicorn, 1901), 26.
66. The Irish Independent, 1 October 1920, 5.
67. The London Times, 26 October 1920, 10.
68. The Cork Examiner, 30 October 1920, 5.
69. The Cork Examiner, 1 November 1920, 4.


Act I, Scene I
A ghost , perhaps belonging to the Late King Hamlet appears. Horatio wants Barnardo and Marcellus to investigate
ArcherCraft


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