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• Title: It is in the Cottages and Farmers' Houses That the Nation is Born': Ae's Irish Homestead and the Cultural Revival (Pseudonym of George William Russell)
• Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
• Release Date : January 22, 2003
• Genre: Reference,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 402 KB

Description

The Irish Homestead, the organ of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, was a paper deeply embedded in the ethos of the cultural revival movement. Consequently, as editor of the paper from 1905-1923, AE's approach to agricultural co-operation manifested a fundamental contradiction. While Irish agricultural co-operation may be read as forward-looking and concerned to mould Irish society in a way which placed the farmer competitively in the nexus of world trade and commercial competition, it is necessary simultaneously to recognize within AE's view of co-operation a nostalgia for an idealized hierarchical past. This sentimental yearning for a hierarchically ordered world can be interpreted as one of the Anglo-Irish responses to the social, economic, and political changes which had relegated them to the fringes of Irish society by the early twentieth century. In this essay I will argue that agricultural co-operation, as preached by AE in the Irish Homestead, was an attempt to halt the full-scale implicati ons of the growth of democracy and the rise of the new middle classes in Ireland. This was to be achieved by providing an alternative leadership role for the Anglo-Irish as a newly reconstituted cultural aristocracy. To fully understand the early agricultural co-operative movement in Ireland it must, therefore, be placed in the context of the cultural revival and not assessed solely using economic criteria, as has largely been the approach. (1) The ideological underpinnings of the cultural constructionism engaged in by AE in the Irish Homestead can be located, I will further argue, in his theosophical beliefs. As a theosophist AE would have been immersed in a belief system which looked to the past in the shape of occult tradition and allied itself with future-orientated programmes for the betterment of human life in the form of feminism and socialism. (2) When AE came to consider the social and economic shifts in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century, he believed that imagination was the key to coping with change. The artist and mystic in this way were linked; both had the necessary power, as the character Conaire puts it in The Avatars, to create 'some vision of the lost Eden', to fashion a spiritual vision of Ireland as an alternative to the materialistic values associated with the rise of the middle classes in Ireland. (3) Accordingly, the manner in which AE's theosophical beliefs structured and made meaningful his work in the I.A.O.S. as well as informing all his literary work is central to understanding the multiplicity of intersections which informed the discourse of Irish renaissance at the turn of the century. (4)

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