The myth of Ascendancy

The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Representation by Jacqueline Genet, Brandon Books, £20.
IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the Protestant Ascendancy began its slow exit from Irish history. By way of compensation it began to invent myths about itself, one of which was the very myth of "Ascendancy": a generous, ill-fated nobility, facing its demise with unflinching, stoic dignity.
Another myth was that of the Big House. With its antique grandeur, "escutcheoned doors" and manicured lawns, the trope of the Big House was an image of order and repose to counter an increasingly unruly present. As such, it was more intelligible in terms of contemporary history from which it turned in protest or flight than the past.
If for Yeats, Lady Gregory's plain Georgian house was assimilable to the court of an Italian Renaissance duke, then this enabled him to feel aloof from the "rant" of a new democratic Ireland.
Questions as to the accuracy of such an image are largely incidental. As a useful fiction, what it represented was less the historical reality of big houses than the fears and fantasies of their increasingly menaced occupants and hangers on.
This book's title, its selec tion of illustrative photographs and its format (half historical, half literary essays) all suggest that comparing images of history with the real thing will be the rationale of the anthology.
In fact, there is no clear rationale. The editor's introduction has some cursory remarks on the history of the "Big House"; but there is nothing on the genealogy of the Big House as an Idea: as though its reality was self evident.
Because the collection lacks a centre, the result is merely eclectic. An essay ostensibly on the Big House theme in John Banville dissolves it into the "inevitable fictionality of all texts".
A piece on Derek Mahon speaks in generalities of the pastoral convention, but misses the specificity of the Big House. The editor's account of Years is disappointing: a baggy series of anecdotes about the poet's visits to Coole Park.
Geroid Cronin's essay on Elizabeth Bowen is perhaps the most impressive analysis of the Big House as a literary trope. Cronin demonstrates how Bowen produces a whole poetics of space in which the merest descriptive detail has a dual life as a metaphoric vehicle and marker of some larger class-consciousness. The great high windows of the House at once suggest Enlightenment, the cool eye of the aristocrat, yet they are typically curtainless, subject to incursion from without.
The demesne is well cultivated, walled and enclosed, embodying certain enduring values of privacy and order.
But this neat closure contrasts embarrassingly with the poor open landscape of the peasantry and tenant farmers outside the gates, heightening the sense of alienation. All around the demesne, in Bowen's Last September, the "orange bright sky crept and smouldered", like some coming revolution. The Big House became the focal expression of an Ascendancy increasingly menaced by the empowerment of Catholic Ireland.
The genre of Big House literature, awash as it is with intimations of blood and violence, was never really a version of pastoral a convention which typically reflects a class at ease with itself, reposeful in its mastery.
In W.B. Yeats, the aristocratic order of the Big House is inevitably tense with some oncoming violence, a conflagration just waiting in the wings, swans drifting on a darkening flood. This tension between order and violence issued in a quasifascist politics and some of his most taut poetry.
Indeed, what this anthology at least illustrates is just how much remarkable literature can come from the mouth of a dying way of life.
MARK BOWLES