Sitting on "The Outer Skin": Somerville and Ross's Through Connemara in a Governess Cart as a Coded Stratum of Linguistic/Feminist "Union" Ideals

In her study of the West of Ireland and Irish identity, Catherine Nash notes the increasing pervasiveness of "the West" in popular travel accounts of Ireland throughout the boom years of the professional tourist industry during the 1880s and 1890s. The late Victorians' "growing taste for the primitive" fueled interest in the region, and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel accounts of Connemara that Nash details are further seen to take part in a process of romanticization whereby the West became an almost barbaric but tantalizingly exotic "other" both within and without Ireland. (1) This overt primordial gloss, however, becomes dynamically problematic when viewed within its discursive framework of travel-writing's British entrepreneurial imperialist values. In his preface to an anthology of travel narratives on Ireland from 1800-2000, Glenn Hooper notes that: an ever increasing number of travel accounts reflected the discourse of British imperialism of the early and mid-nineteenth century, a discourse which was to flower supremely in the 1880s and 1890s. The nineteenth century was stamped by the rhetoric of empire, and many of its trav ellers mirrored, and in some cases passionately articulated, empire politics. (2) The idealized purity of Ireland's western corner was posited by ensuing travelers as a unique representation of untainted Irish authenticity that was simultaneously celebrated by the Irish-Ireland movement and patronizingly denigrated by British empire politics. The West exuded Irish authenticity for the educated traveler and avid tourist alike, largely bypassing the ever-increasing cultural split between the "sensitive traveler" and the "vulgar tourist." (3) Moreover, the common iconic fodder employed in both political and cultural circles gradually encouraged the establishment of an authentic discourse on the West of Ireland. This textual dialogue was inscribed in the travel writing of the period, and Melissa Fegan suggests that travel writers "appeared to see themselves as successive editors of the text Ireland" and that the assumed stability of this text "produced diachronic generalisations more often than synchronic truths." (4) As a result, the travel book became a "palimpsest" that was "over-written by succeeding travellers" who preserved and added to its "anachronistic interpretations." (5) Subsequent to this layered narratorial process Martin Ryle argues that by the early twentieth century the West of Ireland was decisively recognized both as "a unique place within Ireland, and as quintessentially Irish." (6) Its cultural status had become so time-honored and anchored in its physical geography that any exposition on the subject was deemed almost redundant. It was into this maelstrom of cultural certainty that Somerville and Ross launched their own definitive account of Connemara in 1893, arguably attempting to reverse the trajectory Fegan describes above. In this light, Through Connemara in a Governess Cart becomes an endeavour not only to re-write but also to re-fashion the ubiquitous images of the West of Ireland extolled in popular and commercial travel writing. (7) It was Ross's evident abhorrence of an "intolerably vulgar guide to Connemara" published in Dublin in the early 1880s and detailed in a letter to Somerville in 1889 that provided the extra stimulation that she and her writing partner needed to embark on their own travel narrative of Ross's native Irish district. (8) The two travel writers' retaliatory tactics against the perfunctory Dublin guide, The Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland Tourists' Handbook: Through Connemara and the West of Ireland, continually push against the grain of the nineteenth century's kitsch and colonial image of Ireland as preserved in the many popular commercial accounts of the region. Interactions with local people in these largely factual and functional guides, such as Charles and Adam Black's and Thomas Cook's, are few and far between. …