Cruelty and Sensibility: Emotions in Women's Narratives Written during the United Irish Rebellion of 1798

Cruelty and Sensibility: Emotions in Women's Narratives Written during the United IrishRebellion of 1798Author(s): WILLEMIJN RUBERGSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 42 (Summer 2010), pp. 1-14Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20750124 .

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CrueLty^ridh^^sibUity: Emotions in Women's Narratives Written

during the United Irish Rebellion of 17981

WILLEMIJN RUBERG

Research into the history of emotions has encountered several problems.

Firstly, the inevitable nature-nurture debate: are human emotions

timeless and unchanging or do they differ according to time, place and cul

ture? Secondly, and relatedly, there is the problem of sources. As has been

pointed out by historians, emotions have a representational character; they are mediated by a text or an image.2 Accepting this representational charac

ter might lead to a postmodernist definition of emotions as purely cultural

constructs, disconnected from any personal, genuine experience.3 As

Michael Roper has recently argued in regard to the history of masculinity, 'the psychic is elided into the cultural', meaning that the view of emotions

as cultural constructs has replaced any approach of emotions as 'real' or bod

ily felt. Although I do not agree with Roper's proposal of resorting to

psychoanalytical approaches in the study of emotions, I do appreciate his

point that 'the complex mechanisms that operate and which mediate

between individual subjects and cultural formations' often remain unex

plained.4 It is exactly these mechanisms that operate between individuals

and their surrounding culture ? between a bodily felt emotion and the

expression of that emotion in writing ? that I wish to study by analysing

how a number of Irishwomen negotiated the existing emotional discourse

in their diaries and memoirs during a period of major social and political

upheaval - the United Irish Rebellion of 1798.

The Irishwomen who composed diaries and memoirs were mostly Protestant middle to upper-class women. They either supported the loyalist armies or took a neutral position, like the pacifist Quakers. They were eye

witnesses of the short, but violent, United Irish Rebellion that took place in the spring months of 1798. The United Irishmen had a vision of non

sectarian, democratic and inclusive politics and were influenced by the

RUBERG, 'Cruelty and Sensibility', Irish Review 42 (2010) 1



impact of the American and French revolutions. In practice, rebels often

fought for different causes, varying from secular republicanism to the

amelioration of social and religious grievances. Recent historical debate has

largely revolved around the question as to what extent the rebellion was

sectarian in motivation and action.5 Both the loyalist armies and the rebels

committed atrocities, but the loyalists seem to have been the cruellest.6

They burnt rebel houses, executed rebel leaders and were known for

specific kinds of torture, like pitch-capping (although rebels also used

pitch-capping). Catholic women were the victims of rape by invading

English and Hessian armies. Loyalist women suffered less in comparison, since they, especially those from middle and upper social ranks, received

official protection. Loyalist women and the Quakers were regarded as non

combatants by the United Irish leadership, whose soldiers were instructed

not to violate them, an order that was mostly respected.7 This essay will analyse how these Protestant women shaped their emo

tional responses to these acts of cruelty in their personal narratives. To keep in mind the representational character of feelings and yet not lose out on a

subjective or individual perspective on experience, William Reddy's notion

of emotive may be helpful. Reddy defines emotives as 'emotion statements ... in which the statements referent changes by virtue of the statement'.8

Reddy focuses on the performative aspect of emotions. In his view, emo

tional utterances have a transformative capacity: they change either the

emotion or the individual. When, for example, a person is asked whether he or she is angry, and answers 'yes',that answer ? the emotive ? can cause the

person to become even more angry. Emotives can be used as tools for arriv

ing at desired states. Their effects, however, are unpredictable. Rather than

confirming the state described, they may produce the opposite effect.9 As

Joanna Bourke put it in regard to fear, the very act of narrating emotions

formulates and changes them. This means that the act of speaking or writ

ing about fear might create or change that sensation.10

By using Reddy's term 'emotive', I want to emphasize the performative function of writing about emotions: people often have certain (conscious or

unconscious) motives for writing on emotions, and this writing has certain

effects on the writers and readers of their personal narratives. The following

analysis of the emotional language in Irishwomen's diaries and autobiogra

phies and of their writing practices will serve to make two points. Firstly, I

shall argue that the Irishwomen appropriated existing emotional discourses

like the language of sensibility and chivalry (as part of the language of

politeness) and to a lesser extent a gothic mode. These discourses functioned as 'filters' to express their own emotions. Secondly, I want to point to possi ble ways in which writing practices might influence the expression of

2 RUBERG, 'Cruelty and Sensibility', Irish Review 42 (2010)



emotion. The writing practices may also have changed the emotions - hence

my definition of the act of writing as performative. The last part of this essay will therefore focus on explicitly stated and hidden writing motives, espe

cially in connection to the genre conventions of memoirs and diaries.

The Expression of Fear Through Available Emotional Discourses

What exactly the women feared varied: death, rape, murder and the loss of

property. The contents of terror were mediated by gender, class and religion. For example, many upper-class loyalist women were afraid that their servants

would rise against them and that the class structure of society would be

overturned.11 The gentlewoman Elizabeth Richards (1778-1863) wrote that

she dreaded forced conversion (to escape the violent Catholic rebels) more

than 'either death or madness'.12 In general, Irish Protestants believed the

rebellion was prompted by a 'popish plot' to clear the country of Protestants.

They feared a sectarian massacre and hence extirpation of the Protestant

faith.13 In addition, the fear of being raped by soldiers was particular to

women. Rape is never explicitly mentioned in these women's narratives,

although a few authors hinted at it, like Isabella Brownrigg (1768-1804),

daughter of an attorney: 'The prospect of immediate death is horrible (as I

can tell) but that was little to the horrors every woman must have dreaded.'14

Jane Adams, who ended up in a street where thousands of pike men marched

and she was the only female, merely remarked on her fear of being watched

and talked about in an indecent way with no gentlemen around to protect her.15 Elizabeth Richards implied rape of rebel women by stating that 'All

the morning we listened to the shrieks and complainings of the female

rebels.They almost turned my joy to sorrow'.16 However, she did not spell it

out. Obviously, writing about rape was a taboo.

Nearly all of these Protestant and Quaker women used a similar vocabu

lary when writing about fear. Their descriptions are characterized by three

features. First, the sensation of fear often had bodily components. Jane Barber, daughter of a tenant farmer, draper and the owner of a small textile

factory, whose family was loyalist, though moderate, wrote in her memoirs

of 1798 about people not only being 'stupefied by fear', but fear also lead

ing to the loss of appetite and suffocation.17 Isabella Brownrigg wrote about

the torture of people by the rebels:'Their yells of delight at the sufferings of

their victims will ever, I believe, sound in my ears. To describe what we all

suffered wou'd be impossible. I never shed a Tear, but felt all over in the

most violent bodily Pain.ns Jane Adams wrote that she 'could scarcely breathe with terror' and that she was 'frightened almost to fainting'.19 In

nearly every narrative, fear is accompanied by (near) fainting.




A second characteristic of the discourse surrounding fear is that it may lead to madness. Fear was often thought to lead to the loss of health and

reason. Isabella Brownrigg asked: 'Is it not amazing that no one lost their

senses from joy? Several had done so from terror.'20 The Quaker diarist

Mary Leadbeater wrote:'I now perceived that my memory, which had been

uncommonly good, was much impaired, and I imputed it to the series of

repeated shocks which my mind had sustained. Such shocks had deprived

many of health and some of reason, and we who were spared both had

additional cause for thankfulness.'21 Third, the women state in their person al narratives that they lack words to depict their feelings of terror, like

Barbara Lett who noted: 'scenes of death and desolation so terrible that I

know not how to describe it. . . . The smell was so overpowering I was

affected with the sensation of sickly horror and often on the point of faint

ing. My gallant deliverer supported me with a protecting arm.'22

The term 'horror' in particular, and the paralysing effects of fear in gen

eral, remind us of the gothic novel, in which fear, often bordering on the

sublime, played an important role. Although originally a literary genre, the

Gothic influenced daily life as well.23 Two of the women's narratives display

gothic influences. For example, Elizabeth Richards, as Kevin Whelan notes, 'records with gothic sensibility the sheer horror of the Rebellion'.24 Also,

Jane Barber seems to have appropriated gothic elements in her narrative, when she described a naked man rushing down the hill towards her in the

bright moonlight. She thought he was a ghost: 'I felt my heart die within

me, for I thought it was no living being.'25 The gothic genre was very pop ular during the 1790s and often depicted terrors and horrors of

transgression in order to reassert social values. Political texts of the 1790s

used gothic tropes, like Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in

France (1790), in which the description of revolutionary excesses as a terri

fying monster served to define the threat and thus contain the exclusion of

the revolutionary terror. More generally, emotions evoked by terror could

be purgative, in the sense of removing the object of fear.26 The gothic

description of fear in the Irishwomen's narratives may have had a similar

function: by writing about ghastly fear and their own terror, these authors

may have tried to contain the revolutionary threat and restore the old

boundaries and hierarchies.

Sensibility, Politeness and Chivalry

Apart from the gothic elements in the Irishwomen's narratives, several of

the features of the vocabulary of fear correspond to the so-called 'cult of

sensibility', mostly popular in fiction from the 1740s to the 1770s, in which




sentiment, pathos and the communication of common feeling to the reader

or audience was of central importance.27 In particular, being lost for words

to describe feelings, the description of sudden and violent emotions and the

connection between fear and bodily effects like fainting and mental illness

may be considered as typical of the discourse of sensibility. For example, Barbara Lett wrote: 'our hearts were too full to give utterance to words; we

gazed on each other and burst into tears. They were tears of bitter, heart

rending sorrow.'28

Jane Adams also mentioned vehement feelings when visiting her brother, Reverend Roger Owen, in jail. He had been taken prisoner by the rebels,

pitchcapped, and then suspended outside the top-storey window of the

market-house there, an experience that drove him to the point of insanity:29

I could bear his madness no longer; I endeavoured to restrain my feelings before him, but finding it no longer possible, I walked from the window and went into the first door I found open. There I burst into the most

frightful fit of screaming, which I had not power to stop, & instead of

being relieved, it agitated me to such a degree I was wholly deprived of

the use of my limbs for near an hour.

Adams here hovered between a mental and a physical description of emo

tions, but was clear as to the catharsis achieved by her emotional outburst, which 'relieved me more than medicine could'.30

Sympathy and the sharing of feelings, a central element of the cult of

sensibility, were noted down by Mary Leadbeater in her diary after her

daughter had died from burns sustained in a domestic accident:

[Y]et I thought no sympathy reached my heart so fully as once when I

raised my eyes from contemplating the lovely remains of my child, and met those of a poor neighbour woman fastened upon me in silence,

large tears streaming down her cheeks, her countenance filled with the

deepest concern. She was a coarse-featured, strong, rough woman, and

had forborne any expression by words of what she felt.31

Again, bodily communication was more important than words, and emo

tional communication could override class divisions. Similarly, Elizabeth

Richards appreciated the sympathy of her servants:'[T]hey wept for us. The

marks of attachment they showed us made me cry too.'32

Besides the expression of emotions, especially of sympathy, another fea

ture of the cult of sensibility was the reform of manners. Refinement of

feeling ('delicacy') was supposed to indicate civilization. The opposition between 'barbarity' and 'civilization' is encountered often in the Protestant

women's narratives, the rebels' cruel acts indicating 'barbarity'. Isabella

Brownrigg displayed her disgust: 'What ferocious savages then appeared,




intoxicated with Whiskey and victory, one woman brandishing the Sheath of

a Sword and boasting of her exploits!'33 Brownrigg defended her harsh crit

icism of the rebels' behaviour to her readers:

I have been near a week endeavouring to write the account of their

Execrable Barbarity, and can hardly now prevail on myself to undertake it. Yet I think I ought for my own sake; if ever you think me unjust to the

Catholics or hard-hearted towards them, remember what follows, and

you will not condemn me.34

Although the author here stated that her motive for writing was to

record essential memories for her community, as well as for her own mental

well-being, a subconscious motive might have been the wish to present herself as a sensitive being. When she described a 'poor fellow' being 'most

barbarously murdered' by the rebels, she added: 'To give a minute account

of this hellish Scene is beyond my Strength, nor cou'd any one desire to

hear it. No Savages ever put their prisoners to more deliberate Torture as I

heard but indeed did not look at them.'35 The incapacity to verbalize cruel

deeds, frequently attested to by these Irishwomen in their diaries and mem

oirs, indicated their (sought-after) delicacy. In this way they fashioned

themselves as sensitive creatures, befitting the cult of sensibility. For

instance, Barbara Lett, by describing 'a scene of horror which I could not

bring myself to look upon', also attracts attention to her own decency:

The mangled remains of Mr John Pounden of Daphne lay there, I was

told, in a state of nudity, surrounded by his murderers who were yelling fearfully and exulting in the barbarous act. Mr Pounden was a person of

exemplary character, kind-hearted, humane, and benevolent, indulgent to

his tenantry and possessed of every virtue which constitutes the sincere

Christian. But the good and virtuous were the victims of our blood

thirsty enemies.36

Part of the cult of sensibility was the emphasis on benevolence and civi

lization, the opposite of barbarity. The Irishwomen often praised benevolent behaviour in their accounts, regardless of its source. Jane Adams

wrote about a rebel who showed her 'compassion of countenance' and met

another man 'of great humanity, tho' a rank rebel'.37 Lady Roden, a loyalist

refugee aboard a ship, paid tribute to the ship's captain: 'our poor Captain, who I believe to be one of the best hearted creatures in the world, showed

us such kindness and feeling as one could only have expected from a much

higher style of education.'38 The word 'humanity' is used by several diary writers to denote men's civil behaviour.39 This emphasis on humanity, civil

ity and benevolence can also be interpreted as belonging to a language of

politeness, as opposed to a discourse of sensibility. It is usually argued that




from the mid-eighteenth century the ideal of politeness was superseded by the cult of sensibility In contrast to the language of sensibility which

emphasized genuine sentiments like sympathy charity, morality and gen

erosity, the ideal of politeness revolved more around a 'superficial' art of

pleasing in company Politeness denoted the display of ease and naturalness

which was based on self-discipline and regulation of passions.40 By the mid

eighteenth century authors of sensibility criticized the excesses of the ideal

of politeness as giving rise to hypocrisy and insincerity. However, recent research has emphasized that the replacement of the

language of politeness by the cult of sensibility was neither straightforward, nor immediate. Both languages often existed simultaneously, as a quotation from the memoirs of Mary Leadbeater confirms, when writing about her

childhood c.1780 in the small village of Ballitore, County Kildare:

[T]here was a degree of singularity in our education, in consequence of our ignorance of the manners of the world, the simplicity of our profes sion, and our situation in a retired village; for though our parents

encouraged no confined ideas in us, and taught us a cautious observance

of truth we forbore to disguise our sentiments of any kind, and I think were too little skilled in the rules of good-breeding, that charming

accomplishment, which, whilst compatible with sincerity, teaches young

people, I will not say disguise, but to suppress their sentiments . . .41

This provides support for Philip Carter's observation that

the language of politeness continued to be used during the 1760s, 1770s

and 1780s - the high point of sentimental culture - and was often appli cable to this new, enhanced attention on moral virtue . . . Sensibility is

therefore best seen less as a break with politeness than as a phase within a

broader eighteenth-century civilising process dedicated to the bonding

of manners and moral virtue.42

Furthermore, Michele Cohen has recently argued that politeness ceased

to be a dominant social ideal for men in the late eighteenth century Politeness became feminized since it was incompatible with a masculine

national character and was replaced by a revival of the ideal of chivalry, a

form of masculinity that did not run the risk of being qualified as 'effemi

nate' and that was more truthful than the dissimulation regarded as

belonging to the ideal of politeness. Chivalry was associated with 'manli

ness, bravery, loyalty, courtesy, truthfulness, purity, honor and a strong sense

of protection toward the weak and oppressed'.43 Thus, it seems that the lan

guages of sensibility and politeness continued to co-exist during the late

eighteenth century and that for men the chivalrous aspects of the ideal of

politeness were emphasized.




The Irishwomen's narratives also testify to a mixture of the languages of

sensibility and chivalry. For example, Barbara Lett noted the polite behav

iour of two officers when she and her husband were attacked by loyalist soldiers who took them for rebels:

Terrified beyond description & breathless with horror, I looked wildly around me and at that moment beheld two young officers approaching on horseback. I flew to them for succour in that moment of peril &

briefly told them our danger & cast myself on their humanity for mercy & protection. One of them seemed to regard me with an eye of pity &

politely alighting from his horse, asked in what manner he could be of service to me.

After this officer had rescued Lett and her husband from the 'enraged sol

diers' he was termed by Lett 'Our gallant deliverer, with that humanity which ever distinguishes the truly brave'.44 Elsewhere, Lett spoke of'acts of

chivalry performed by the rebels upon our suffering yeomen' and 'their

undaunted courage'.45 Similarly, Isabella Brownrigg combined the words

'gentlemanlike in both appearance and manners' with 'humane' to describe

the polite attitude of United Irishman Matthew Keugh.46 Finally, in her

diary Mary Leadbeater employed words like 'humanity','courage','benevo lence', 'civility' and 'compassion' in regard to men.47

In short, the languages of sensibility and chivalry, as part of the language of politeness, co-existed in these Irishwomen's narratives. It is generally

argued that by the 1790s, sensibility had become severely criticized as

effeminate and excessive in England, whereas in America and France it was

still used, for example, to interpret revolutionary events.48 Although more

research should be done into this, it seems that in Ireland the discourse of

sensibility was still used in and after 1798, and was mixed with the discourse

of chivalry, at least in regard to the description of male behaviour.

Writing Motives

The languages of sensibility and politeness thus functioned as media of

emotions in women's diaries and memoirs. In addition to the adoption of

available discourses, the function of writing practices may also clarify how

emotions are represented in writing. As signalled already, self-fashioning

might have been one (either conscious or subconscious) motive for writing these narratives, the Irishwomen presenting themselves as sensitive females.

This emotional self-fashioning is a process described by the sociologist Hochschild, who coined the term 'emotion work', meaning that individuals

adapt their expression of feelings to the normative cultural ideal in regard




to the display of emotions. Hochschild distinguishes between two types of

'emotion work' required to observe the 'right' emotional rules: 'surface act

ing', purposeful body language like crying, and 'deep acting', the

construction of feeling itself.49 If we try to transfer these notions to writing about emotions, we might draw a distinction between conscious and sub

conscious writing about emotions.

Some of the authors explicitly articulated their writing motives in their

texts, while others did not comment on their reasons for composing their

narratives. Most of the diaries were written during the Rebellion, but sev

eral were revised afterwards. For example, Elizabeth Richards commented

on her 1798 diary entries in 1831,1832 and 1835, and supplemented them

with background information and explanation, ostensibly for her children

but possibly for other readers. Some of these remarks attempted to

improve her image as it was presented in her diary (which was only pub lished in 1999).50

Several of the women wrote and published their accounts decades after

the Rebellion. Dinah Goff, born in 1784 into a family of Quaker gentry, dictated her account in 1850 to a friend, and in 1856 she prepared a revised

edition for publication, to which several paragraphs were added that

emphasized her religious stand. The text was used to show her Quaker faith

and patience and it was finally distributed as a Quaker pamphlet.51 Barbara

Lett (1777-1867) noted down her life story in 1859 at the age of 82, but stated she was 'aided by a sketch drawn up' in her youth.52 Obviously, the

boundaries between the genres of memoir, diary and even the letter were

permeable. Jane Adams' text, for instance, seems to have been part of a letter

to a friend. This is one of the reasons why recent research into personal nar

ratives has started using the more general term 'egodocuments'.53 What

exactly these women and their editors altered when they revised their

diaries seems to have depended on the purpose of publication. As a result, the effect of their revision practices on their emotional language is also

variable. In the case of Mary Leadbeater her revision of her diary into her

memoirs turned it into a more succinct, coherent and literary narrative, aimed at evoking an emotive viewpoint in both author and reader.54

Several of the features of these women's narratives are well known in the

history of women's writing; for example, the use of a male editor to revise

their texts for publication. It is also noticeable that a motive often men

tioned by the women is that of writing for their children and

grandchildren, to provide them with life lessons and to keep the memory of

past experiences alive. The moral lessons being taught were often of a reli

gious nature, the narratives providing examples of faith in divine protection. For example, Alicia Pounden (1772-1861), married to a magistrate and




mother of six, meant her narrative as an example for her children, to

strengthen their faith:

In this transitory life where every day evinces the uncertainty of our stay here, I would wish while time is allowed me to address some lines to my dear children, with the view of assisting them in bearing the innumer

able trials and disappointments they may meet in this world. The best

plan I can pursue is to give a small sketch of my own life, which has been

marked with the most trying events, but I have with humanity acknowl

edged the necessity of attaching my mind and thoughts to a better

World, and at the same time learned in whatsoever state I am in, there

with to be content.55

The motive of writing for children or grandchildren might be genuine, but

could also have been used as a modesty trope during a period when publish

ing by women was not wholly acceptable. This view is exemplified by T.

Croften Croker, who included Jane Adams' story in his Researches in the

South of Ireland (1824) and felt the need to state that Adams' account was

'written without any view to publication'.56 Of course this statement also

touches on the emphasis on the truthfulness of these accounts. For a similar

reason, Jane Adams concluded her text with the words: T have written every circumstance just as they occurred, and really the incidents followed exactly as I have stated them, tho' were you reading a novel you would say they were

previously arranged.'57 Jane here admitted there were some similarities

between her story and a novel. It is indeed probable that these Irishwomen

looked to (sentimental and gothic) novels as models for their writing, espe

cially since not many diaries were published in the eighteenth century that

could have served as models. Only from 1777 the first complete novel

diaries appeared in print. The diary as a public and published form belongs more to the nineteenth than to the eighteenth century.58 However, the

Irishwomen never explicitly alluded to their stories as equivalent to novels, even though they might have had a private or public audience in mind.

The Performative Function of Writing about Emotions

Besides stating that they wrote for their children, several women wanted to

teach themselves or potential readers religious resignation. Lady Anne

Roden, for instance, used her diary to arrive at a certain religious state her

self. Beatty, in his edition of Protestant Women's Narratives of the Irish Rebellion

of 1798, has only published those few pages of Anne's diary that discuss the

revolutionary events of 1798. However, study of the complete diary casts

new light on her use of an emotional vocabulary to describe these events.




Lady Anne's husband, the first Earl of Roden, died in June 1797, six and a

half weeks before her first diary entry Her whole diary is permeated by the

struggle to be resigned to his death. Through writing, the widow fights

against her melancholy and desperation. She quotes with evident approval the views of Daniel Waterland, Archdeacon of Middlesex, who stated that

[r]eligious melancholy, generally speaking, seems to be nothing else but a

disordered imagination, owing to some ill disposition of the blood, or some distemper in the nerves, or in the brain, the centre of them. . .

There seems to be nothing in all this but a bodily indisposition, which indeed is a misfortune, but no fault of the person suffering under it.59

Again, a mental disposition is explained in physical terms, thereby con

necting psychic and bodily processes. In this case, the diarist seeks to

apologize for her melancholy by redefining it as a disease, for which she is

not responsible. Anne's wish for resignation suffuses her very brief descrip tion of the Rebellion, which forms only one minor obstacle on her path towards that state of mind. Here, Reddy's notion of the emotive may be

helpful. Lady Anne's writing practice may be termed performative (or an

example of conscious emotion work), since she tries to cope with her feel

ings, and at the same time transform them, while writing:' [B]y the mercy of

God may I be directed to humble my heart in unfeigned penitence and

perfect resignation. The grief that fills it is still often very great, though the

cause of it ought to be matter of thanksgiving. [. . .] I have been very blameable in faults of temper, sadly so; surely such sorrow ought to soften, or it is not like humble resigned grief.'60

Anne asks the Lord to pardon her grief and tears and strives for self

control and calmness, assisted by reading Hugh Blairs sermons.61 This all

seems to point more to a stoical ideal than to the cult of sensibility. The last,

however, was not completely absent when Anne wrote: T mean, calming all

irritability of temper, and endeavouring to form my heart to unbounded

kindness and feeling for everything human, divested of prejudice or partial

ity, that the spontaneous feelings of my heart may be tender affections to all

human nature, and disinterested ones as to myself.'62 Anne used her diary to

examine the progress she had made in the overall project of bringing her

feelings under control.

Similarly, the diary of Elizabeth Richards functioned not only as an account

of her intimate feelings, but also as a means of changing them. Elizabeth, who

married a Dutch count in 1802 and moved to the Netherlands in 1821, tried

to come to terms with her melancholia, her bad relationship with her chil

dren, her husband's lack of affection and a number of other emotions in her

diary. One of the character traits she found important when judging her




children's development is whether they were sensible or 'full of feeling'.63 Elizabeth Richard's diary is one of the few in which the literature (books, ser

mons and poems) she read is noted down.64 Unfortunately, she did this only for the years after 1798, so we cannot state conclusively that these works influ

enced the emotional language she used to write about the Rebellion.

However, it is probable she had already read some of these earlier than the

moment she mentioned them in her diary, and thus they may well have influ

enced her ideas on emotions. For instance, she noted that her husband read

Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) to her, a novel that may be considered to be part of

the cult of sensibility. Moreover, she considered Edmund Burke (1729-1797) a

genius. She also cited the evangelical poet Cowper (1731-1800). Furthermore, like Lady Roden, she read Blairs sermons, which might be qualified as stoic.

The views expressed on emotions are quite diverse in all these works; the only common thread being the importance that is attached to emotions, and

whether these should be stimulated or contained.

It might therefore be concluded that although these Irishwomen were

influenced by different emotional languages at the same time, what stands

out in all their diaries and memoirs is the importance of emotion work

through writing. Writing practices functioned to control feelings with the

help of existing emotional languages, and at the same time seem to have

had (real or imagined) bodily and mental effects. The aim was often to

attain a state of mental equilibrium65 or, in the case of sentimental self

fashioning, to be perceived as a sentimental creature. The depiction of

barbaric 'Others' helped in presenting the authors themselves as civilized. In

any case, the act of writing fixed and changed bodily-felt emotions, shaping them into a culturally accepted narrative. It is these mediating mechanisms

that deserve more study in Irish autobiographical writing.

Notes and References

1 I would like to thank Adriana Craciun, Michael J. Griffin, Kevin O'Neill and Odette McCormick for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

2 P. Burke, 'Is there a Cultural History of the Emotions?' in Representing Emotions, eds. P.

Gouk and H. Hills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 35-47. 3 J.W. Scott,'The Evidence of Experience', Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991), pp. 773-97'.

4 Michael Roper, 'Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History', History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), p. 58.

5 For an overview of recent literature, seeT. Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a Bicentenary Perspec tive (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). See also T. Dunne, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and

1798 (Dublin: LiUiput Press, 2004). 6 One infamous exception was the burning of a barn in Scullabogue by the rebels, killing

hundreds of innocent people (Dunne, Rebellions, pp. 247-64). 7 J.D. Beatty,'Introduction' in idem (ed.), Protestant Women's Narratives of the Irish Rebellion

12 RUBERG, Truelty and Sensibility', Irish Review 42 (2010)



of 1798 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 10; D. Keogh & N. Furlong (eds), The Women of 1798 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998).

8 W.M. Reddy, 'Against Constructionism: the Historical Ethnography of Emotions',

Current Anthropology 38 (1997), p. 331. 9 W.M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 128, 322. 10 J. Bourke, 'Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History', History

Workshop Journal 55 (2003), p. 121. 11 Catherine O'Connor,'Women and the Rebellion, Wexford 1798', History Studies.

University of Limerick History Society Journal 4 (2003), p. 5. 12 The Diary of Elizabeth Richards (1798-1825), ed. M. de Jong-IJsselstein (Hilversum:

Verloren, 1999), p. 37.

13 J. Kelly, "We were all to have been Massacred': Irish Protestants and the Experience of

Rebellion' in Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798, pp. 312-30. 14 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, p. 112.

15 Ibid., p. 174. 16 The Diary of Elizabeth Richards, p. 50. 17 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, pp. 77, 80, 81-5.

18 Ibid., p. 107.

19 Ibid., pp. 160,169. 20 Ibid., p. 112.

21 Ibid., p. 230.

22 Ibid., p. 137. 23 L. Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and Irish Culture (Galway: Arlen House,

2004), p. 10. 24 K. Whelan, 'Elizabeth Richards and the Wexford Rebellion (1798)' in The Diary of

Elizabeth Richards, p. 11.

25 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, pp. 83, 88.

26 E Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 7-8. See also L.

Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime 1750-1850

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27 J.Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1-9. 28 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, p. 135.

29 Ibid., p. 156.

30 Ibid., pp. 177-8.

31 Ibid., pp. 227-8.

32 The Diary of Elizabeth Richards, p. 34. 33 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, pp. 93, 97.

34 Ibid., p. 106.

35 Ibid., p. 107.

36 Ibid., p. 122.

37 Ibid., pp. 168,176. 38 Ibid., p. 236.

39 Ibid., pp. 114,137,192,202. 40 L.E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in

Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1?

4,81-6.

41 M. Leadbeater, The Leadbeater Papers: the Annals of Ballitore. vol I, ed. M. Luddy (London:

Routledge 1998, reprint of 1862 ed.), p. 112.




42 P. Carter,'Polite "Persons": Character, Biography and the Gentleman', Transactions of the

RHS 12 (2002), p. 345. See also C.L.Johnson, Equivocal Beings. Politics, Gender, and

Sentimentality in the 1790s: W?llstonecraft, Radcliffe, Bumey, Austen (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1-29.

43 M. Cohen, 'Manners Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of

Masculinity, 1750-1830',Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), p. 326. 44 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, p. 137.

45 Ibid., p. 129.

46 Ibid., pp. 113-14.

47 Ibid., pp. 202,207,228,230. 48 S. Knott, 'Sensibility and the American War for Independence', American Historical

Review 109 (2004), p. 1-24. 49 M.Tomhave Blauvelt,'The Work of the Heart: Emotion in the 1805-35 Diary of Sarah

Connell Ay er , Journal of Social History 35 (2002), p. 577. 50 The Diary of Elizabeth Richards, pp. 70, 99. 51 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, p. 51.

52 Ibid., p. 118.

53 R. Dekker, 'Introduction' in idem (ed.), Egodocuments and History. Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), pp. 7-20. See also

M. Hewitt, 'Diary, Autobiography and the Practice of Life History' in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. D. Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 21-39.

54 See B. Hughes, 'Negotiating Identities in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The

Autobiographical Writings of Mary Leadbeater and Dorothea Herbert' (MA thesis, University College Dublin, 2003).

55 Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, pp. 146,152.

56 Quoted in ibid., p. 157. 57 Ibid., p. 193. 58 Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth

Century England (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 24. 59 The Diary of Anne, Countess Dowager of Roden. From 6th August 1797, to 11th April 1802

(Dublin, 1870), pp. 5, 6. 60 Ibid., p. 239.

61 Ibid., pp. 8, 26-29.

62 Ibid., p. 31.

63 The Diary of Elizabeth Richards, pp. 53, 57. 64 For the literature that Mary Leadbeater read, see K. O'Neill, 'Mary Shackleton

Leadbeater: Peaceful Rebel' in Keogh and Furlong (eds), The Women of 1798, pp. 137?62.

65 John Beatty has pointed out that Barbara Lett employed her story to give vent to the

bitterness she experienced at her family's mistreatment, in which case the act of writing

might have provided some emotional relief (Beatty, Protestant Women's Narratives, p. 118).




Documents

Cruelty and Sensibility: Emotions in Women's Narratives Written during the United Irish Rebellion of 1798