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Representing the unnarratable: “feminist terrorism” and the problem of realism in the novel

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Representing the unnarratable: “feminist terrorism” and the problem of realism in the novel

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Content REPRESENTING THE UNNARRATABLE: “FEMINIST TERRORISM” AND THE
PROBLEM OF REALISM IN THE NOVEL

by
Pamela Grieman

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Pamela Grieman

ii

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude goes to David Lloyd, whose incisive comments helped me
see the larger theoretical concerns of this project, and whose warmth helped me through
the rough patches. I also wish to thank David Román, who continued to support the
project even after it changed course dramatically and whose penetrating questions helped
me clarify my assertions. I am similarly indebted to Elinor Accampo, whose excellent
suggestions contributed to the further refinement of my ideas and terms. I am grateful
also to faculty members Tania Modleski, Joe Boone, and Meiling Cheng, whose early
encouragement and suggestions were invaluable. The fellowships offered by USC’s
English Department and the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, as well as the travel
support offered by The Graduate School at USC facilitated the completion of my
dissertation, for which I am grateful. I must also mention the generous assistance of Karl
at Kersplebedeb Books, a publisher of hard-to-find anarchist books and revolutionary
treatises. Most of all, I wish to thank Eric Marin, without whose unstinting moral support,
companionship, and sense of humor I could never have finished.
iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abbreviations iv

Abstract v

Preface vii
Preface Endnotes xiii

Chapter 1
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Endnotes 32

Chapter 2
“The Grim Invisible Fates”: Futile Resistance 39
in The Princess Casamassima
Chapter 2 Endnotes 78

Chapter 3
Reclaiming the Monster in Irish “Troubles” Fiction 84
Chapter 3 Endnotes 115

Chapter 4
Blood and Family in American Woman and Great Neck 121
Chapter 4 Endnotes 148

Chapter 5
Rupturing Reality in Almanac of the Dead 155
Chapter 5 Endnotes 181

Bibliography 186

iv

Abbreviations

AIM American Indian Movement
BLA Black Liberation Army
BPP Black Panther Party
BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs
COINTELPRO Counter-Intelligence Program (of the FBI)
EZLN Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional)
IRA Irish Republican Army
M19CO May 19th Communist Organization
Provos Provisional Irish Republican Army
RNA Republic of New Afrika
RYM Revolutionary Youth Movement
SDS Students for a Democratic Society
SLA Symbionese Liberation Army
SNAP Student Non-Violent Action Program (the loosely disguised
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC)
WUO Weather Underground Organization

v

Abstract

This project examines the portrayal of leftwing female and feminist “terrorists” in
English-language realist novels, narrated from an insider perspective, within the social,
political, and historical contexts from which the novelists derived their material. The texts
under study depict the actions of fictional and historical women who were active
participants in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army,
the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, and other groups that advocated
armed struggle against the nation-state and that espoused an international socialist,
anticolonial, anticapitalist, cultural nationalist, and feminist ideological platform. Taking
a transdisciplinary approach, I draw from narratological, historical, and feminist
methodologies to analyze the ways in which such insider realist novels are complicit to
varying degrees with the disciplining function of normative standards governing
women’s behavior.
The primary novels under study include Henry James’s 1886 Princess
Casamassima, Morgan Llywelyn’s quintet of novels about IRA violence, Marion Urch’s
Dark Shadows, Susan Choi’s American Woman, Jay Cantor’s Great Neck, and Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. In using the term realism, I am following the
practice of recent theorists who define realism, or realisms, as an evolving narrative mode
which adapts to changing historical realities. Deploying Todorov’s concept of
verisimilitude and the narratological tool of focalization, I show how the cultural taboo
against the representation of feminist violence results in the fictional inscription of
appropriately “feminine” maternal and nurturing values onto the female protagonists,
vi
leading to a rupture in the underlying structure of the realist form. I argue that
politically violent women who engage in what Walter Benamin calls law-making
violence are ultimately unnarratable within the formal structure of the realist novel due in
part to Hegelian associations of women with familial piety.
 
 
vii 

Preface

This dissertation emerged from what I believed to be a straightforward desire to
analyze the fictionalized representations of women who engage in acts of political
violence against an established state, whether a colonial power or, in the case of the
United States, a government that was perceived to be unjust in its treatment of workers,
peoples of color, and other marginalized peoples. Living in a post-September 11 world, it
seemed to me that Americans tended to view the militant, or “terrorist,” as Other—if not
as Middle Eastern, then as someone from another country or of another nationality.
However, white working-class and middle-class women have historically been quite
active in militant groups such as the Irish Republican Army, the Weather Underground,
the Black Panther Party, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and I reasoned that there
would be a sufficient number of English-language literary texts on which to draw for this
project. I was interested in examining how such texts made a moral and legal case for and
against violence, how they both constructed and delimited the figure of the female and
feminist “terrorist,” and how issues of gender intersected with the political cause around
which the militant group was organized. For this reason, I searched for works that
positioned themselves as “insider” accounts of a given revolutionary group in which a
woman played an active role in the group’s acts of violence. This criterion thus excluded
the vast number of novels (mostly pulp fiction) that framed the story from the perspective
of a policing agent whose mission it was to prevent the violence. I further excluded
futuristic or speculative works in order to explore the representation of fictional
characters based, however loosely, on real events and people.
 
 
viii 
After conducting extensive research, my initial literary finds included two
plays, two June Jordan poems, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, and two
performance pieces. The paucity of materials begged the question: why were there so few
literary texts that portrayed women who participated in acts of political violence from an
insider perspective? And, as a corollary, why are there no relevant mythological
archetypes—a Promethewoman—that could serve as a model for works of literature?
Medea’s and Clytemnestra’s violence is intrafamilial and arguably revengeful rather than
politically calculated. And although Antigone serves as the model for political resistance,
her actions fall within the acceptable codes of familial piety; moreover, as Judith Butler
points out, Antigone’s agency is undermined somewhat by her adoption of the voice of
the father: “Her agency emerges precisely through her refusal to honor [Creon’s]
command, and yet the language of this refusal assimilates the very terms of sovereignty
that she refuses. . . . thus her autonomy is gained through the appropriation of the
authoritative voice of the one she resists, an appropriation that has within it traces of a
simultaneous refusal and assimilation of that very authority,”
1
The original question
evolved as a few novels that fictionalized the acts of historical revolutionary women
began to be published in the mid-2000s. Eventually, with the 2008 publication of Morgan
Llywelyn’s fifth historical novel about the nationalist and republican struggle for a
republic of Ireland, I had collected a sufficient number of texts in which I could trace
similar patterns in their portrayals of revolutionary, or “terrorist,” women. Because my
critical gaze was attuned to investigating the ways in which a text may subvert its own
narrative effort to elicit the reader’s understanding of (and sympathy for) the issues
motivating the primary protagonists—whether due to misgivings about violence in
 
 
ix 
general or women’s violence in particular—the texts that fit my criteria primarily took
the form of realist novels that fictionalized historical events.
In this study, I argue that the narratological strategies deployed to make
revolutionary women palatable to a reading public undermine the very form of the realist
novel itself. My original “why-not” question therefore morphed into a question that
asked: Why is a female and/or feminist “terrorist” essentially an unrepresentable figure in
English-language realist novels? As Irish scholar David Lloyd stated in a discussion
about this project, “There’s no reason in principle here why a more politically informed,
and sympathetic, novelist should not be able to tell the tale of a violent female
revolutionary within the framework of realism/naturalism.”
2
The “reason” for this lack
forms the subject of my dissertation. Part of the research, therefore, involved reading a
variety of twentieth-century English-language political novels that featured women in
some capacity as actors in a political drama, but whose delineation did not meet the
criteria I established: active participation in violence against the state, substantive
treatment in the text, concurrent feminist struggle (a term I use in a qualified sense to
denote the fight against gender-based inequities both within and outside the militant
organization, insider positioning, and engagement with the legal, moral, and ethical
issues that inevitably arise in a narrative that can be interpreted as sympathetic to the use
of political violence.
It is, I suppose, a bit “dangerous” to generate a study of fictionalized political
violence that refrains from condemning violence on principle. What, readers will want to
know, is the author’s personal ethical position regarding real acts of political violence,
whether performed by men or women? The answer is an unavoidably contradictory one.
 
 
x 
Although I am convinced by Ted Honderich’s argument (parsed in the introduction) that
neglecting to fight against institutionalized violence in actuality can result in far more
deaths than the resistant violence of subversive groups, I understand that this argument
may seem specious to those who stake out an absolutist moral high ground against any
form of violence. After all, how can I justify my personal opposition to the death penalty
while seeking to understand and suggest as politically necessary the deaths that result
from what can be considered justified subversive violence, within the parameters outlined
by Honderich? While it is my personal belief that severely oppressed militant groups who
have exhausted other means of enacting change should target military and other
representative agents of hegemonic repression, it is unfortunately true that innocent
civilians frequently become victims of subversive violence as they do of state-sponsored
counterinsurgent violence. And while I agree with Honderich’s claim that civilian
members who refuse to act against a government that uses both institutionalized and
overt violence against a minority are not entirely “innocent,” I am unequivocably
opposed to the deliberate targeting of civilians. At the same time, I recognize that in some
cases, violence is necessary, as history has shown that the superior arsenal and resources
of the government render it unlikely to alter the status quo unless compelled to do so.
State-sponsored violence is disproportionately greater than that of resistant groups and
takes the form not only of brutality on the part of police and the military, but also of
institutionalized violence that is less visible. In an interview, a major in the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation, Ana Maria, articulates this point:
The government has its Army. It is not true that the Army has military autonomy.
That it’s [sic] job is to defend the Mexican people, defend the nation; this is not
 
 
xi 
true. They are in favor of a few. . . . It is not just that the Army massacres its
own people, its own race, the same people as they are. So we said, “No, to defend
ourselves we have to take up arms, as well.” If not, how? They will continue
killing us like that. They kill us with hunger. And if we struggle to survive, we
look for land that is not being used, they order us killed by the Public Security.”
3

Violent resistance is often successful. The state of Israel exists today, in part, due
to the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel by the militant right-wing Zionist group,
Irgun (Ha'Irgun HaTzva'i HaLe'umi BeEretz Yisra'el). The hotel housed the offices of the
British Mandate government over Palestine as well the British military headquarters, and
almost one hundred people were killed. The bombing led to a reaction against the
occupation among the British population, the tenor of which was articulated in an
editorial in The Manchester Guardian which suggested that "British firmness" with
respect to Palestine had increased the level of terrorism and aggravated the political
situation.
4

The ethical complexities underlying both the state’s and the militant group’s
justification for the use of political violence have been explored by numerous political
theorists and philosophers. Here, I will point to one theorist’s evolution in political
thought as an example. In the 2002 publication of Welcome to the Desert of the Real,
Slavoj Zizek articulates a forceful rejection of moral relativism on the subject of violence,
whether it is state-sanctioned or insurgent violence. About the September 11 attacks, he
wrote, “the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims. The
ethical stance proper is replaced here by the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror,
which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and
incomparable.”
5
He refers to the actions of Israeli military members who refuse to
participate in the day-to-day humiliation of Palestinians as “an authentic ethical act. . . .
 
 
xii 
We should be unashamedly Platonic here: this ‘No!’ designates the miraculous
moment in which eternal Justice momentarily appears in the temporary sphere of
empirical reality.”
6
More recently, Zizek has criticized what he characterizes as “false
anti-violence” (constituted as those who combat subjective violence but commit systemic
violence) and endorses what he calls “emancipatory violence.”
7
His recent thought rejects
moral absolutism, when he argues that to condemn violence outright as bad is an
“ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering
invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.”
8

As I demonstrate in the following chapters, the gendered mystification of
ideology is alive and well in works of realist fiction. I hope that readers of this study will
energetically undertake the task of proving me wrong by exploring novels that I may
have overlooked in my research.

 
 
xiii 

Preface Endnotes
 
1
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 11.
2
Personal correspondence, 9 September 2009.
3
“Interview with Major Ana Maria of the EZLN,” Women in the Zapatistas (Montreal:
Kersplebedeb, 2000), np. The interview was recorded 28 February 1994 inside the Cathedral at
San Cristobal during the Zapatista gathering in 1994 to demand the demilitarization of the region.
4
Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 1999), 48–52.
5
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates (London/New York: Verso, 2002), 51-2.
6
Ibid., 116.
7
Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 174.
8
Ibid., 174.

1

Chapter 1

Introduction

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the figure of the female “terrorist” began
to emerge in media accounts of militant suffragist, anarchist, nihilist, socialist, and
nationalist movements.
1
English-language media reports offered sensationalized portraits
of female Russian socialists, anarchists, and nihilists—Emma Goldman in America and
Sophie Pieoffsky (arrested for the assassination of Alexander II) in England, to name the
two most infamous—as exoticized and monstrous others, whose violence was frequently
attributed to defects of race and gender. Newspaper accounts of the late-eighteenth to
early-nineteenth century frequently emphasized the women’s foreignness, their low-class
status, and their perversity. One typical account of anarchists, for example, described
them as “depraved, diseased, diabolical” aliens who follow “the Jewess” [Emma
Goldman] who issues “blood-curdling utterances.”
2
By emphasizing the foreignness of
anarchists and the “apostles of destruction” (the Nihilists), much of this early reportage in
the London and New York Times implicitly and explicitly contrasted the “half-crazed”
Russian and Jewish women to the civilized Anglo woman at home who eschewed public
life and focused her energies more appropriately on domestic duties.
3
And, though less
overt, this sort of gender stereotyping continues today. Just as early newspaper accounts
cast the militant woman as aberrational, as a perversion of normative standards of
femininity, so do US and British newspaper accounts today fetishize the veiled Muslim
woman terrorist as an exotic other in implicit contrast to the more civilized Western
woman.
4

2

The media’s tendency to portray women’s political violence as the work of
“others,” and common assumptions that political violence is the terrain of third-world
countries, prompted me to focus on the representation of political violence of women in
English-speaking countries—for the purpose of this study, the United States, Ireland, and
England—as a counternarrative to the story of violent woman as other. The history of
women’s participation in political violence in these countries is long, though until fairly
recently historical and fictional publications about this history have been scarce.
5
Women
in Ireland have played an active role in Irish national and republican movements since the
latter part of the nineteenth century. From the turn of the century until British women
received the vote in 1921, suffragists embarked on an increasingly militant campaign to
get the vote, from smashing windows to bombing symbolic targets to committing suicide
(in at least one instance). And during the 1960s and 1970s in America, women joined
radical organizations such as the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation
Army (SLA), the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the Black Liberation Army
(BLA), the underground wing of the Black Panther Party (BPP), participating in
bombings and shootings alongside their male counterparts. The American groups forged
alliances with Third World militant groups, developing similar internationalist militant
socialist policies and asserting solidarity as colonized peoples within the United States,
especially AIM and the BPP/BLA. The predominantly white SLA and WUO members
sought solidarity with marginalized groups in the United States by supporting and
attempting to collaborate with AIM, the BPP/BLA, and other nationalist militant groups
organized around race.

3

In spite of this substantial history of political violence, Hegelian notions positing
women as the moral guardian of the family, as the keeper of “family piety,” have proved
to be remarkably resilient, spanning class, racial, and historical boundaries.
6
Women who
engage in premeditated political violence disrupt normative standards of feminine
behavior that idealize women’s roles as care-givers, mothers, wives, and victims (rather
than perpetrators) of violence, and destabilize economies that rely on women’s unpaid
work in the home. Laura Sjoberg’s and Caron Gentry’s analysis of contemporary media
accounts of female violence suggests that conventional notions about biological
determinism inform much of the reportage: “Most of the work on violent women
attributes their motivation to a problem with a woman’s biological make-up and rarely
deals with a woman’s intellectual capability to make deliberate choices, or the socio-
political context in which those decisions are made.”
7
As David Lloyd has argued in his
analysis of terrorist women in The Crying Game, insurgency is understood “as
repressively and atavistically masculine or patriarchal and correspondingly destructive of
a femininity generally associated with motherhood and passivity. Within such terms, it is
impossible that a feminist project should be linked to violence or that a woman could find
in armed struggle a legitimate locus of agency.”
8

Even in the twenty-first century, with women fighting in wars and heading
corporate firms (though in far fewer numbers than men), mainstream media and
government spokespersons frequently portray women who participate in political
violence against the state as gender outlaws: unnatural, masculine, immoral, and/or
psychotic.
9
While such epithets are not levied overtly against women who fight in the

4

state-supported armed forces, gender stereotyping informs the rhetoric and function of
war. Louise Ryan suggests that war is “both informed by and informs constructions of
masculinity and femininity,”
10
while Chris Hables Gray points out that war—whether
sanctioned by the state or waged against it—has traditionally been a key element in
defining masculinity and in justifying men’s domination of women. In the discourse of
warfare, he argues, weapons are associated with men, while the “inferior and hated
enemy is feminine.”
11
Sjoberg and Gentry find the same mother-monster-whore
stereotypes deployed in stories about military women who torture (at Abu Graib), women
who become terrorists and/or suicide bombers (in Chechnya and the Middle East), and
women who commit genocidal acts (in Yugoslavia and Rwanda). Their findings indicate
a deep-seated cultural anxiety about women who engage in political violence, whether in
war, terrorist activities, or other forms of militant actions.
Gender stereotypes are also a factor within terrorist or revolutionary organizations
themselves. Though various factions of the Irish Republican Army, the Symbionese
Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground, to name just three radical groups,
posited equality between the sexes, intragroup dynamics were often animated by
behaviors that did not conform to the group’s stated ideals; furthermore, those ideals
evolved and devolved as the political context changed.
12
Thus, while male comrades-in-
arms have long accepted women as supporters of guerilla warfare and of other
movements that advocate violence against the state, the figure of the woman fighter is a
highly vexed one, a contested site of competing rhetorics between resistance movements
and the government forces that seek to contain them. Both sides seek to claim the higher

5

moral ground in support of their positions, with the ruling powers justifying their use of
force as sanctioned by the authority granted by law, while the radical groups justify their
acts of violence as necessary to prevent the deaths, killings, starvation of the
marginalized populations institutionalized by the policies of the leaders. Because a given
battle is as much a rhetorical (for “hearts and minds”) as a physical fight, each side
struggles to control the story that is told to the larger populace through pamphlets,
manifestos, radical newspapers, and fiction writing. Thus, the widespread belief in the
Hegelian idealization of women’s ethical mode as the standard bearer of piety renders the
female “terrorist” a key figure in the claim to the moral high ground.
Terrorism is, of course, a slippery term, exploited for multifarious political
purposes and applied to a variety of militant actions. Virtually every study of the subject
agrees that its definition varies according to the political views of the person defining it.
13

The FBI labels those who fight the ruling powers as terrorists: “Terrorism is the unlawful
use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government,
the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social
objectives.”
14
Radical groups define terrorism as the tool of a repressive state, as in this
example from the Weather Underground: “Terrorism is perpetrated by the ruling class
and its government on the people. Terrorism is black children shot down in the street. It is
SWAT in Los Angeles and search-and-destroy in Vietnam. It is the daily brutality of life
for millions of Americans and the even harsher brutality for those whom imperialism
exploits in the Third World.”
15
Zulaika and Douglass, among others, argue that the
distinction between state terrorism and other forms of terrorism is a matter of power,

6

legitimacy, and weaponry: “Similar manipulations of what constitutes war apply to
‘terrorisms’: if practiced by a lawful state it is legitimate self-defense, if practiced by a
substate group it is terrorism. Again, we are obviously dealing as much with who has the
power to label as to level their adversaries.”
16
Scanlan points out that the term “includes
pro-state groups . . . as well as the familiar revolutionary groups; it describes acts ranging
from hijacking and hostage-taking to the destruction of public property to street fighting;
what it does exclude are atrocities, such as the bombing deaths of refugee children,
committed by legitimate governments.”
17
However, it is precisely the state’s tautological
assertion of legitimacy based on its claim to the monopoly on violence that so-called
“terrorist” groups challenge. In a discussion of violence in Irish historiography, David
Lloyd cities Walter Benjamin’s conception of violence to argue:
Violence is understood as an atavistic and disruptive principle counter to the
rationality of legal constitution as barbarity is to an emerging civility, anarchy to
culture. In one thing, both tendencies concur: the end of violence is the legitimate
state formation. By the same token, the end of history is the emergence of the
state. From such a perspective, violence is radically counter-historical, even
against narrative, always represented as an outburst, an “outrage,” spasmodic and
without a legitimating teleology. Violence is always without the law.
18

Lloyd’s insights into Irish historiography can be usefully applied to the representation of
women’s political violence, or terrorism, a point I will take up later.
Because of the rhetorical fluidity of the term, I will avoid excessive use of
terrorism in this study, encasing it in quotation marks to indicate its contested status as a
signifier.
19
Rather, I will deploy the term political violence interchangeably with
terrorism in quotation marks to connote collective calculated political violence that is of
sufficient scale to harm other human beings, whether intended or not, and which is waged

7

against symbolic or representative targets of a repressive government to right the
perceived wrongs engendered by the state.
20
This definition therefore excludes militant
groups that attack military or governmental targets solely, as these are more aptly called
revolutionaries, not terrorists (however, if they also attack innocent bystanders, state
representatives, or other unarmed targets, they are terrorists). I also exclude the individual
who kills to prove a philosophical principle as Raskolnikov does in Crime and
Punishment as well as the individual who acts alone, as did the Unabomber, as I am
interested in the gendered dynamics of the radical group and the group’s rhetorical
justification of violence. I further exclude eco-terrorists because of their almost exclusive
focus on property, as well as religious terrorists and right-wing female terrorists because
most are motivated primarily by race hatred and/or conservative religious beliefs that do
not challenge the traditional discourse on women’s place in the home. Thus, they are not
feminists and so are not included in this study.
21
In short, I have limited my study to the
portrayal of left-wing “feminist terrorists,” using the term to include female members of
militant groups that considered themselves feminists even if they did not actively fight
for feminist issues, and who targeted human beings directly or engaged in acts of
violence that could had the potential to cause unintended deaths.
Rom Harré has argued that “structural” revolutions—those that change the
“macrostructure of the social worlds”—fail because of the “persistence of micropractices
demanded by local narratives,” that, in fact, structural political change cannot take place
until one changes the “implicit and taken-for-granted conventions according to which we

8

jointly produce the social world.”
22
In other words, Harré believes that narrative precedes
political and social change, and that to enact change, one has to change the discursive
conventions that govern the everyday stories that are told. I endorse Rom Harré’s belief
that fictional stories have real-life consequences and thus have chosen to study the
representation of politically violent women in realist “historical” novels narrated from a
sympathetic insider’s perspective, rather than in history.
23
Zizek and other scholars have
pointed out that it is extraordinarily difficult to perform an act that truly transforms or
changes social life,
24
what Benjamin calls a “lawmaking” act.
25
Because transformations
of social realities require collective support—not only from radicals but from everyday
citizens—radicals who wish to effect change not only engage in militant action but
attempt to influence the larger cultural conversation in the social, political, and legal
realm through multiple means, including fiction, television, journalism, and radio.
Fiction has the ability to permeate multiple fields of investigation—history, law,
and cultural studies—to name three that are key to my analysis of narratives of political
resistance. Just as fictional tropes are deployed as analytical tools in fields such as
historiography and law, so too, the converse holds: It has been well documented in the
critical literature that social science scholars employ fictional devices in the production of
academic papers and books.
26
Hayden White’s Metahistory, for instance, examined the
narrative tropes employed to frame the telling of history. And, in the field of law Peter
Brooks points that “‘Conviction’—in the legal sense results from the conviction created
in those who judge the story,” but the rhetorical basis of legal decisions in criminal cases
is repressed by a field “that wants to believe that . . . it proceeds by reason alone.”
27

9

Tzvetan Todorov warns against such conviction, pointing out that “To win the trial, it is
more important to speak well than to have behaved well.” He argues that verisimilitude in
texts can serve as a “system of rhetorical methods tending to present these laws as so
many submissions to the referent,” in other words, as a mask which serves to uphold the
status quo.
28
In realist and/or naturalist literature, verisimilitude functions as the reader’s
perception of what is probable, rather than what is possible, and as such, serves to
universalize the particular or to frame it within normative conventions.
29
This
universalizing function has serious ramifications in the study of novels that portray
militant female and feminist combatants, or “terrorists,” if the author further seeks to
engage the sympathy of the reader. As I will demonstrate in the following chapters,
verisimilitude requires the conjunction of woman and familial piety in order for her
actions to be read as both probable and understandable, or sympathetic. The distinction
between sympathy and verisimilitude is crucial: while it seems probable that a
psychopath would kill someone, she would not necessarily elicit the reader’s sympathy or
understanding. It might be equally difficult for a dedicated militant white feminist former
WUO member who participates in an action that leads to the death of two policemen to
engender much sympathy as she is violating both the state’s laws against law-making
violence and cultural norms governing women’s acceptable behavior.
Few realist English-language novels have examined the moral and semantic
complexities posed by the depiction of female/feminist terrorists. While many texts take
terrorism as their subject, most do so from an “outsider” perspective, that of policing
agents who demonize revolutionaries and who set out to capture and punish the criminals.

10

John Carlos Rowe argues that “the American novel has served a conservational purpose
in the American ideology: mystifying and idealizing the material circumstances of our
history in the name of art, myth, and symbol,”
30
while Barbara Melchiori finds that the
Victorian “dynamite novel” likewise adhered to conventional social and narrative codes:
“Dynamite found its way into fiction but did little to disrupt either the form of the novel
or the social mores with which it was dealing.”
31
In his study of “Troubles” fiction in
Great Britain and Ireland, Irish Republican Army member Patrick Magee (one of the so-
called “Brighton Bombers”) distinguishes between popular and “literary” fiction,
pointing out that publishers of the latter sometimes challenge hegemonic fictions,
whereas mainstream publishers, broadcasting stations, and other popular media self-
censor in capitulation to the tastes of the general populace, which are conditioned by a
prevailing culture of “manufactured consent.”
32
Such manufactured consent can also be
said to govern the publishing world of America’s own “troubles” fiction—the spate of
novels published on 1960s and 1970s political violence, written (if not published) in what
Benjamin Kunkel refers to as “the long 1990s” (1989-2001).
33
As Daniel Harris writes,
“Terrorist fiction is almost invariably anti-terrorist propaganda.”
34
Lloyd charges the state
apparatus with controlling narratives and thereby monopolizing the field of possibilities:
“The state does not simply legislate and police against particular infringements, it
determines the forms within which representation can take place. Access to
representation is accordingly as much a question so aesthetics as of power or numbers.”
35

11

In this study, I examine the ways in which “insider” realist novels are complicit to
varying degrees with the disciplining function of normative standards governing
women’s behavior. I undertake a narratological analysis of encoded arguments that seek
to regulate and contain political resistance and to perpetuate and/or subvert normative
models of femininity. One primary goal is to determine how Magee’s concept of
manufactured consent evinces a form of a priori censorship which Judith Butler identifies
as “foreclosure,”
36
and what Robyn Warhol has termed the “unnarratable,” that which
must be left out of a narrative due to social and/or formal convention.
37
Two of Warhol’s
four categories of the unnarratable are germane to my reading of realist novels: the
antinarratable—that which “shouldn’t be told” because of social convention or taboo—
and the paranarratable—that which “wouldn’t be told” because of formal convention, as
when women are either killed or married off in novels, whereas in “real life,” they lead
much richer lives.
38

The unexamined terrain that constitutes the unnarratable masks a moral
incoherence of liberal assumptions about representing violence itself and, more
particularly, about women’s engagement in political violence. This results in formal
problems with focalization that prove fertile ground for interrogating and uncovering the
gendered assumptions that regulate what writers write. At the same time that violence is
posited as a political necessity and a moral case is made for “terrorist” violence serving a
greater good by preventing more widespread state-sponsored violence, formal constraints
against representing female and feminist violence result in radical texts attempting to
engender sympathy by relegating violent feminist protagonists to a more domesticated

12

role. Thus, at the same time a text espouses women’s equality, it frequently undercuts its
own assumptions by a regressive appeal to the Hegelian conjunction of femininity with
familial piety. But this association neglects the darker side of Hegelian conjunctions of
woman and family. Because of the exclusion of women from the political, thinking
realm, women are instantiated as the guardians of family ties, conceived of as blood ties,
both in the sense of kinship, as well as of blood feuds, their protection of the family
against the state, as in the case of Antigone. By virtue of their association with the family,
they are thus ethically conditioned to oppose the state and therefore man. Thus, they are
always and by definition a potential source of irrational violence.
39
This understanding of
women as the unstable conjunction of women as guardians of the family and therefore
opposed to the state is perhaps the cause of unease with women who violate gendered
standards. The unnarratable, in other words, positions the female and feminist “terrorist”
outside narrative’s laws.
As I illustrate in the following chapters, even among the most radical of the
novels conventional gender roles are valorized, though to a lesser degree than the
portrayal in mainstream “outsider” novels. Radical novels that mount a philosophical
case for overthrowing an unjust government frequently emphasize purity, exceptionalism,
and sacrifice as a means of engendering readerly sympathy, depicting male terrorists as
heroic and sensitive, while the women are made sympathetic by an appeal to their family
instincts—their role as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. The contour of the
narratives follows an edenic metastory, positing an original or naturalized purity that is
tainted by colonialism, by greed, by women breaking out of established roles (Irish

13

regaining pre-Anglicized language and customs; Native Americans eliminating whites;
1960s-70s activism as a form of collective anticapitalist purity) even at the same time that
it distrusts totalizing narratives. In contrast to many pulp or mainstream novels, the plot is
generally one of always-deferred action—especially in cases where the real-life political
struggle is still unsatisfactorily resolved at the time of writing, a sense that the work is not
yet completed. This deferred action, however, can represent foreclosed possibilities, as in
The Princess Casamassima, or, in more recent novels, as a state of evolving radical
possibility, as in Marion Urch’s Violent Shadows and Morgan Llywelyn’s quintet of
novels on “the Troubles” in Ireland.
This study takes as its premise Foucault’s notion of the subject as a construction
of historical, social, political, legal, and literary discourses. The analysis draws from
feminist, postcolonial, and narratological critical fields to analyze the narrative strategies
used to produce the female “terrorist,” to advocate and delimit feminist agency, and to
interrogate the moral and legal justification for political violence. It examines the
fictional representation of women radicals—historical figures in some cases—who
engage in acts of political violence against the matrix of internationalist politics,
nationalism, and colonization to uncover the gendered assumptions governing the
portrayal of female and feminist political violence in realist novels. What must remain
unspeakable in order to perpetuate the status quo, the systemic inequalities that many
women in their roles as leftist terrorists are trying to overthrow?
To date no book-length studies have focused exclusively on the analysis of
representations of woman terrorists in fiction, although analyses of the gendered

14

representations of nonfictional accounts of violent women in history exist as do scholarly
studies of terrorist groups. Thus, in addition to the memoirs, political treatises, and
biographies written by members of various republican groups in Ireland; of the Black
Panthers and Black Liberation Army; of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese
Liberation Army, and of international terrorist groups, the majority of the texts that
provided background information and that helped formulate my theoretical approach fall
into three general groups: historical accounts of women’s involvement in terrorist
activity, including interviews with politically violent women and analyses of media
accounts of female terrorists; scholarly studies of “terrorist” literature, some of which
include women characters but as a subset of larger concerns; and philosophical theories
justifying political violence.
A key text that provides useful empirical evidence of the ways in which biological
determinism continues to influence much of the discourse about women’s political
violence—whether state-sanctioned or resistant to the state—is Laura Sjoberg and Caron
E. Gentry’s Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. The book
demonstrates how mainstream media stories about women’s political violence: (1) deny
women choice, rational thought, and agency; (2) categorize women’s actions according to
three paradigms—mother, monster, and whore; and (3) “other” violent women in order to
maintain myths of women’s fragility, purity, and gender subordination. The authors’
preliminary outline of a feminist theory based on relational autonomy theory—which
exposes the ways in which journalistic accounts of women’s violence are gendered not
only in conformity with transcultural stereotypes about women’s function as life-givers

15

rather than life-takers, but are deliberately deployed to accomplish geopolitical goals—
can be fruitfully applied to other fields of study. The authors’ contention that larger
geopolitical issues underlie much of the discourse about women’s political violence is a
basic assumption of my examination of novels and nonfiction writings written by those
ostensibly sympathetic to the political goals of the main protagonists.
40

There are many studies of Irish women’s participation in violent politics, and
while the events discussed are particular to the political, historical, and social climate of
Ireland during its respective periods of armed struggle against British dominance, the
gender issues raised are germane to women’s experiences in resistance groups in America
and elsewhere. Among the texts that have informed my understanding of what Eileen
MacDonald, applying Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” to politically violent
women, calls the “awareness . . . of being a double victim, with oppression having to be
fought on two fronts,”
41
is Margaret Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and
Irish Nationalism. Ward’s study analyzes Irish women’s involvement with militant
nationalism in three women’s organizations between 1880 and 1940: the Ladies’ Land
League, which formed in 1880; Inghinidhe na hEirann, one of the few Irish groups that
combined feminist and nationalist goals; and Cumann na mBan. She addresses the
gender-based disparities in the treatment of nationalist women, pointing out, for instance,
the differential treatment endured by jailed Ladies’ Land League members who were
treated as common criminals rather than as political prisoners (as the men were), as well
as the difficulties nationalist women had in attempting to introduce a feminist agenda into

16
their organizations.
42
Ward expanded her study to examine Irish women’s role in
militant nationalism from the 1600s to the 1900s in a volume co-edited with Louise Ryan
entitled Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and Wicked Hags. The
latter text extends and deepens the analysis of nationalist women’s experiences during
both major periods of the Troubles, the second decade of the twentieth century and the
1970s-1980s, illustrating how periods of republican revolutionary activity which included
equal rights for women were followed by “counter-revolution” with respect to gender
issues (as occurred after the founding of the Free State in 1922).
43
The authors argue that
“there is no access to real Irish nationalist women in realist fiction and film,”
44
and,
though they hope for a transformation of gender relations to take place during the current
(at the time of writing) period of transition in the North of Ireland, they conclude that
“The need to confront and resolve the continued sectarian divisions existing in the North
of Ireland has meant, and continues to mean, that gender equity sits far down the political
agenda.”
45

In her ethnography of nationalist women in Northern Ireland entitled Shattering
Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland, Begoña
Aretxaga also focuses on the nexus between feminism and nationalism and/or
republicanism, noting that republican newspapers in the north held up certain nationalist
women from the early part of the century as ideals (Maud Gone and Countess
Markievicz) while ignoring feminist nationalists like Hanna Sheehy Skeffington.
46
Her
documentation of the women’s reports of their interactions with republican men is
particularly insightful in exposing the deep discomfort men had, and still have, with
women’s bodies, particularly when the republican women jailed in Armagh joined the

17

“dirty protest” in solidarity with the republican men.
47
The deep unease with menstrual
blood, with motherhood, is an issue that surfaces in many nonfiction and fiction books
that deal with women radicals worldwide who insist on participating in violent actions
equally with men. Allen Feldman’s book, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the
Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, though it focuses on republican men, also
provides useful insights into the men’s attitudes towards the women’s dirty protest—
drawing similar conclusions to Aretxaga’s concerning the discomfort with women’s
bodies.
48

Eileen MacDonald’s interviews with women from several countries both currently
and formerly active in terrorist groups for her book, Shoot the Women First, offers an
interesting thesis. She states that women are perceived by some, if not most, anti-
terrorism experts to be more dangerous, less repentant, and more resilient than men,
suggesting as an explanation that women’s sacrifice is greater, their sense of oppression
is more acute, or that they have to prove more.
49
MacDonald argues that power is crucial
to women’s decision to engage in violent political actions and concludes that feminism is
important to all of her interviewees except for Miss Kim and Leila Khaled despite their
different beginnings: “It seems that in the nationalist struggles—Irish, Basque,
Palestinian—women not only set out to be combatants, they also hoped to win an equal
role for their sex in the new society they were fighting for. As a result of their activities,
they came to realise that they were certainly equal to men on the front line.
50
However,
MacDonald’s contention that women “terrorists” are seen to be more ruthless than men
are appears to contradict much of the analysis of gender stereotyping discussed by other

18

researchers who argue that the differential treatment of women is based on perceived
notions of inferiority, passivity, and femininity, among other reasons. Brigitte L. Nacos,
for instance, whose examination of US and non-American print and broadcast news led
her to conclude that the persistence of “gender clichés” in the media allow terrorist
organizations to exploit stereotypes about women as “less suspect and [less] dangerous”
than men allows those groups to use women to greater advantage in violent activities as a
result.
51
Nonetheless, MacDonald’s suggestion that the fear of violent women is due to
male anxiety over their perceived loss of physical superiority over women who are
violent is, I believe, valid.
52

The line of feminist theory that flourished in the 1980s positing women as being
more nurturing than men I found to be unsupported in oral interviews conducted by
MacDonald, Aretxaga, and the contributors to European Women on the Left: Socialism,
Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present.
53
One
example of this theoretical approach can be found in Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover:
On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York/London: W. W. Norton, 1989), which posits
that women join radical groups to impress their demon lovers, that terrorism “is the
logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world.”
54
The ethnographic
evidence does not support this assertion, nor do the novelists under study impart this
motivation to their female characters.
55

The second category consists of the few studies of literature and political violence
that exist. In Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, Barbara Arnett Melchiori analyzes
the “dynamite novels” of the late nineteenth century, finding, not surprisingly, that the

19

novels did little to experiment with form or content: “money, social position and a ‘good’
wife are the status symbols awarded to those who stand firm against the attacks on
society, while the dynamitard, as often as not is hoist with his own petard.”
56
Melchiori’s
study supports John Rowe’s contention that, at least in America, the novel serves a
“conservational” purpose. Jeffory A. Clymer’s book, America’s Culture of Terrorism:
Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word analyzes Henry James’s The Princess
Casamassima in the context of newspaper accounts to show how his novel reflected the
values promulgated by the London Times, that women under patriarchy, including the
Princess “are accorded only a negative choice, the ability to say no to an offered proposal
rather than the option to follow through on an active desire.” Thus, even though it is the
“sheer force of art’s beauty [that] prevents social revolution, women “are made the
unwitting agents of this conservative movement”; this includes Hyacinth, according to
Clymer, because he “is also gendered feminine.”
57

Alex Houen’s Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran
Carson examines literature in relation to thermodynamic theories. Houen abstracts the
secret agent in Conrad’s novel of the same name as a thermodynamic force, with “the
movement of physical mass suggesting new potentials of social movement.” Houen
deploys Kant’s equation of the sublime with masculinity and beauty with femininity to
illustrate how, “with the large involvement of women in ‘terrorist’ groups in Russia,
feminism and political subversion were closely allied.” He cites Richard Stites, who
argues that in the 1870s, “‘the vocation of revolutionary was the only one open to women
which would greet her as equal, allow her talents to unfold, and permit her to rise to the

20

top’” and that “it was the sex as much as the violence of female radicals that was deemed
a threat to social order more generally, and male hegemony in particular. Every time a
nigiltska fired a pistol it was not just the autocracy but the rights to heroic subjectivity
that were being challenged.”
58
Houen’s insights into the fears engendered by politically
violent women is supported by MacDonald’s and others’ studies on women’s politics and
violence.
Margaret Scanlan’s Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary
Fiction argues that writers of what she calls the first terrorist novels at the end of the
nineteenth century depicted their society as a “Foucauldian nightmare.” She cites as
examples the description of London in The Princess Casamassima as a “vast impersonal
city that overwhelms James’s would-be terrorist and ignores his suicide” and what she
characterizes as the assassins’ confusion about “whom to assassinate.”
59
Scanlan’s
insights are crucial to my investigation of the transition from modernity, subject to
Foucauldian control, to postmodernity, where schisms appear to open in the wall of
surveillance and constraint.
Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier’s Arms
and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1989) offers insightful feminist analyses of women in relation to
conventional war; however, the contributors write primarily about war prior to World
War II, and women as victims of war, and thus do not analyze women who actually
fought in war or in resistance movements.

21

In the third category are the texts that offer a theoretical, ethical, and/or legal
justification for political violence, including the classic essays to be found in any
terrorism reader: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings; Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence; Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth; René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred; Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison; and Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation, all of which are
well-known to scholars of political violence so that I need not gloss them here. (I exclude
writing by those, like Hannah Arendt, who oppose political violence.) Of the more recent
texts that provide a theoretical grounding for my study, three written by political and
cultural philosophers are particularly salient. Ted Honderich makes a legal case for
principled political violence, what he calls “terrorism for humanity,” by outlining a
“principle of humanity,” which he argues is the moral goal for human endeavor. Its
primary end is “to make well-off those who are badly off, by way of certain policies”;
these policies include transferring means from the better-off, reducing the necessity of
inequalities, and allowing necessary violence.
60
In his justification of political violence,
or terrorism, Honderich’s key points are: (1) no doctrine offers an effective refutation of
the use of terrorism for humanitarian purposes; (2) failing to act to stop an atrocity is
morally wrong, an omission which functions as an act that is just as wrong as are “certain
awful acts”; (3) terrorism serves ends that are fundamental to the practice of democracy;
and (4) certain, carefully calibrated political violence “serves large ends of freedom and
equality.” He concludes that there is a moral justification for “some democratic
terrorism,” in particular terrorism that has the aim of liberating a people from invasion

22

and occupation.”
61
This philosophical justification—that resistant violence is made
morally necessary by the greater violence perpetrated by the state—is a key argument in
many of the novels and nonfiction writings I examine in the following chapters.
Although I am less interested in Slavoj Zizek’s exploration of the Lacanian Real
in his analyses of violence in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, I find his insights into
what he terms “emancipatory violence” pertinent to my investigations. Whereas in
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
Zizek argues against political relativism, suggesting that there is some sort of absolute
ethical compass by which people guide their actions,
62
in his more recent book, Violence,
Zizek reinterprets the universal as a destabilizing force within particular cultural
identities. Thus, there may not be a universal value that binds people together, but there
is, he argues, a shared intolerance which can unite people in their struggles:
The formula of revolutionary solidarity is not “let us tolerate our differences,” it is
not a pact of civilizations, but a pact of struggles which cut across civilizations, a
pact between what, in each civilization, undermines its identity from within, fights
against its oppressive kernel. What unites us is the same struggle. A better
formula would thus be: in spite of our differences, we can identify the basic
antagonism or antagonistic struggle in which we are both caught; so let us share
our intolerance, and join forces in the same struggle. In other words, in the
emancipatory struggle, it is not the cultures in their identity which join hands, it is
the repressed, the exploited and suffering, the “parts of no-part” of every culture
which come together in a shared struggle.
63

What is most relevant to my study is Zizek’s insight that the absolute condemnation of
violence is an “ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in
rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.”
64
This mystification, under
the guise of morality, forms a deep metastory in conformance with the strictures of

23

verisimilitude that underlies and structures most accounts of political violence. In stories
about women’s terrorism, it results in the foreclosure of feminist agency and an
antinarrative of women’s political violence.
The third philosopher whose ideas inform my analysis is Antonio Negri, whose
writings on a “post-socialist” program of radical resistance to what he views as the
emergence of a postmodern Empire, provide both a historical and theoretical frame for
the novels included in this study. In an essay entitled “The Political Monster: Power and
Naked Life,” Negri presents a genealogy of the philosophical discourses of eugenics that
influence philosophy from antiquity to modernity, from modernity to postmodernity. He
argues that the Greek language itself inscribes hierarchical value, that
to speak of arché is to speak at the same time of “origin” and of “command”—in
the universal and/or in the essence are simultaneously inscribed the beginning and
the hierarchical order of being. Aristocratic blood, good birth are constantly the
causal source of a hierarchical order. . . . In classical philosophy, the universal is
always interlocked with eugenic values, and only those who are good and
beautiful, eugenically pure, are entitled to command.
65

The opposite of the aristocrat is the monster, a figure that Negri seeks to
recuperate as a being who manifests potenza, that is, the power of the diverse and mobile
multitude.
66
What Negri refers to as the “monster” in this essay is elaborated more
broadly as the “multitude” in his book Empire and Beyond, where he reconstructs the
multitude—now existing in a globalized, mobile, postmodern, diversified, labor force
(encompassing all forms of labor, from intellectual work to manual labor)—as the
opposition not only to aristocratic notions of the good and beautiful, but also to organized
power, empire, and capital. Negri posits that the world is entering a period of

24

postmodernity “beyond Empire,” marked by a Deleuzian mobility, diversity, uncertainty,
and borderlessness that offers the labor force potential for radical resistance. He argues
that the waning of modernity, with its imperialist agenda—marked by a commitment to
the power of the nation-state and its boundaries as well as by a boundary among its
citizens—ushers out the old Hegelian dialectical system and ushers in a more fluid world
with much potential for radical change.
67
Negri’s ideas about borderlessness and fluidity
in the political world have a bearing in narratological field; in the final chapter of this
study, I argue that the realist form of the novel cannot contain the monstrous (in Negri’s
conception of the word), radical, “feminist terrorist” with full agency. Rather, the form
breaks down, yielding greater possibilities for representation.
As I disclosed in the preface, I am in agreement with Honderich and Negri that
violence is sometimes necessary to force intransigent governments to negotiate and to
institute reforms, but I am skeptical about the latter’s mission to overthrow capital
through revolutionary means, as outlined by Negri. When beginning this study, I
searched for a positive archetypal paradigm for the rational, determined woman who
opted to engage in violence to achieve a political aim. I scoured insider novels in search
of an archetype other than the vengeful, crazed, histrionic, or psychotic figure represented
by Medea, by the femme fatale, by Robin Morgan’s “demon lover,” by the “Vampira”
figure analyzed by Jayne Steel, or by the mothers, monsters, and whores examined by
Sjoberg and Gentry in mainstream texts. While I could not uncover a Promethewoman in
the realist novel, I have discovered gestures towards this figure recuperated as a leftwing
“monster” in a few of Morgan Llywelyn’s novels about the IRA and in Leslie Marmon

25

Silko’s novel, Almanac of the Dead. This figure of the monster must be distinguished
from that investigated by Sjoberg and Gentry. Negri traces a trajectory of the recuperated
monster: (1) from its demonization and exclusion from the economy of being in classical
thought, with its eugenic notions that only the good, the beautiful, the aristocratic could
rule; (2) through early modernity when the monster was readmitted into the philosophical
order as a metaphor for political purposes; (3) to the return of a eugenic exclusion with
the eruption of nationalist and socialist imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
68
The recuperated twenty-first century monster figure is diverse, diffuse,
permeable, and “biopolitical,” and thus offers a way out of the eugenic racism of
classicism and the dialectic trap of modernity.
The arc that Negri outlines, from the revival of eugenics in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to the still-in-progress shift to postmodernity can be seen in the novels
I have chosen to analyze: the nonfiction and fiction writings produced by and about
women terrorists during two periods of political upheaval and violence: one, the Irish
struggle against England for self-determination prior to partition in 1921, which both
engaged and rejected the militant suffragist movement in England; and, two, the
resurgence and expansion of that conflict in the late 1960s through the early 1980s to
include internationalist-socialist goals that also inspired American revolutionary groups
during the same time period. In the latter period of revolutionary activity, radicals in the
Provisional Irish Republican Army and in the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black
Liberation Army, the underground arm of the Black Panther Party, and the Weather
Underground sought to forge political links with Third World anticolonial struggles by

26

applying a New Left ideology that encompassed feminist, socialist, anti-imperialist, and
antiracist rhetoric to the political situation on their respective home fronts. Thus, there
was an interplay and exchange of ideologies that attempted to transcend national
boundaries and local prejudices, but did not succeed. Finally, I examine how the
American Indian Movement and the latent Zapatista movement attempted to differentiate
their aims from the universalizing ideology of socialist revolutionary groups to articulate
a nativist claim to sovereignty and the reclamation of American lands. Silko’s Almanac
incorporates Marxist ideas in its depiction of a spontaneous uprising of the multitude—
not defined as a class of workers but as a classless group of indigenous and spiritually
attuned peoples.
For this study, then, I propose to undertake the sort of excavation to which David
Lloyd dedicates Ireland After History—that is, retrieving “the alternative conceptions of
culture and of social relations that account for [historically marginalized cultures’] virtual
occlusion from written history”
69
—in this case, excavating the fictionalized
representations of female terrorism in English-language realist novels whose subject
includes historical events or terrorist groups. I eliminated science fiction because it is by
definition futuristic and addresses the possible rather than the probable, even when the
plot addresses current social and political tensions, and because it deserves a book-length
study of its own. I’ve included both literary and popular texts that position themselves as
insider texts, that is, as sympathetic to the radical cause that is the novel’s subject. All of
them grapple with rhetorical problems confronted by authors of radical fiction who strive
for a wider, mainstream readership: that is, how to frame the political aim as a moral

27

right, how to make it appear realistic, how to portray political violence as necessary
rather than expedient, and how to make the characterization of a gun- or bomb-toting
woman sympathetic. These aesthetic and rhetorical problems at the textual level are then
analyzed in relation to discursive systems that seek to foreclose radical feminist agency
and in relation to the historical and political context from which the novelists draw for
their material.
Chapter 2 presents a close reading of Henry James’s Princess Casamassima,
along with references to other early texts and Joseph Conrad’s later novel, Under Western
Eyes. Having serialized it in 1885 to 1886, James revised the novel substantially for
republication in the New York edition in 1908, which corresponds to a time period of
increasing political violence in Ireland and labor violence in the United States. Although
the claim for The Princess Casamassima as an insider novel is a bit tenuous, considering
that James only imagined his characters’ lives without conducting in-depth research, I
included it for several reasons. First, the narrative positions itself as an exposé of the
inner workings of an unnamed militant organization in London and attempts to explore
the causes of what James saw as an imminent uprising among the working-class
discontents.
70
Second, it is one of the earliest English-language novels to feature
sympathetically a female radical as a primary character. Despite the sensationalistic
reportage on Russian women nihilists in English-language newspapers during the 1880s
and despite the active involvement of Irish women in the Land Leagues, few novels
portrayed women political actors. Two later novels touch only briefly on the subject of
women terrorists. Conrad’s portrait of Sophia Antonovna in Under Western Eyes presents

28

only a Mephistophelean figurehead of a woman terrorist, and Liam O’Flaherty’s novels
primarily feature men, with only The Martyr offering a brief glimpse of a woman fighter.
Thus, The Princess Casamassima in a sense serves as an antidote to the erasure of
women revolutionaries from history. Third, The Princess Casamassima prefigures the
central problems of any novelist who writes for a mainstream audience about forces that
wish to subvert the social order as those readers know it, illustrating how the rhetorical
strategies used to gain sympathy for anti-state violence, or terrorism, are subverted by
constraints imposed upon the portrayal of feminist political violence in the realist novel.
Finally, the novel, one of the first English-language fictional texts to portray a radical,
upper-class American-Italian woman, is also one of the last of the serious or literary
novels that adhere unabashedly to the classical eugenic ideal of the good and beautiful.
Chapter 3 examines several novels authored by two writers of Irish heritage,
Marion Urch and Morgan Llywelyn, who spent months each year of their childhood in
Ireland, but were raised in the United States and England, respectively. Urch’s novel
Violent Shadows subverts in part the antinarrative of feminist terrorism; that is, the lead
protagonist rejects her lover’s decision to renounce violence, and the novel ends with her
active involvement in IRA violence. However, in training for her active service, the
protagonist is described as taking on male physical characteristics, in what I argue is a
form of gender stereotyping. I will also examine the series of five novels about the
Troubles, both early and late, written by Morgan Llywelyn, which trace the republican
tradition as initially conceived in the second decade of the twentieth century by Padraic
Pearse and the other signers of the 1916 Proclamation to the signing of the power-sharing

29

agreement in Northern Ireland in 1996. Llywelyn’s work manifests elements of both the
dialectical construction of women as care-giving yet also as capable of reasoned,
premeditated, principled political violence. She subverts eugenic notions of the good and
the beautiful; one of the most sympathetic characters is lame and later gets cancer; one
active IRA woman is a former prostitute; all are accepted, as these are seen to be a result
of British colonialism, brutality, and greed. I have also included comparative references
to the earlier novel The Troubled House by Rosamond Jacobs and nonfiction writings,
histories, and autobiographies by women involved in the 1916 Easter Rising and the
Troubles in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Chapter 4 examines 1960s-80s America in novels closely following historical
events. Susan Choi’s American Woman, a fictional reconstruction of the “lost year” of
two Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) members, is narrated from the perspective of
the Japanese woman who sojourned and was captured with Patricia Hearst and remnants
of the SLA. Jay Cantor’s Great Neck explores the underground merging of the most
radical remnants of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. Other
texts include the nonfiction writings of Assata Shakur and other members of the Black
Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, as well as of the Weather Underground and
other radicals of the era. These novels, and the nonfiction writings, trace the attempt of
privileged, mostly white, college students to construct a radical politics based on
solidarity with Third World anticolonial struggles, with international socialist struggles
against capital, and with marginalized peoples within the United States.

30

The novels document the radical women’s struggle within their chosen
organizations against attempts to dominate them, or to relegate them to a secondary role,
and raise moral questions about the ethical and/or justifiable use of political violence. As
I intend to show, the rhetoric of the texts is intertwined with dialectical binaries that
situate mid-to-late-twentieth-century women’s roles as tied to family, even though these
texts have moved away from the eugenic model of what is good based on class, race, and
gender.
Chapter 5 analyzes Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in the context of
Native American oral histories that prophesy the destruction of the white “destroyers”
and the resurrection of indigenous control over the Americas. The novel depicts the
complete moral and ethical breakdown of Western society in North America (including
Mexico) and the spontaneous uprising of indigenous peoples. While the novel inverts
Negri’s notion of the multitude as monster to characterize the white hegemonic Western
society itself as monstrous, Almanac of the Dead fully embraces Negri’s Deleuzian vision
of postmodernity as spontaneous revolt, inclusive of all marginalized peoples, though not
of white colonizers (and, indeed, what happens to white colonizers is left unaddressed at
the end).
In conclusion, I undertake this study of the fictional representation of women who
engage in political violence to explore a seeming taboo in literature against depicting
rational, thoughtful, intelligent, and committed female guerilla fighters. Miranda Alison’s
study of women combatants in Indonesia and Northern Ireland offers empirical evidence
to dispel lingering notions of women as somehow more “inherently or ‘naturally’ more

31

peaceful and peace-loving and less violent than men.”
71
By focusing on realistic “insider”
narratives—for my purpose here, narratives that tell the story from the perspective of the
radical women and that attempt to portray their actions sympathetically and rationally—I
uncover the deep ambivalence about women as perpetrators of violence and the ways in
which realist novels seek to overcome this taboo by emphasizing the women’s maternal
links and caring natures. The narrative strategies designed to produce the caring guerilla
fighter reveal gaps and a moral incoherence of liberal assumptions about political
violence in itself and in representing gender. It appears that the representation of a female
or feminist guerilla fighter who is logical, self-determined, capable of killing in the
service of an ideal yet not fanatical, and a free agent is improbable, unrepresentable in a
novel governed by the strictures of realist verisimilitude, thus revealing a paradox of the
form. Although more recent fiction eschews the mother-monster-whore paradigms
uncovered in news reportage by Sjoberg and Gentry, as well as the eugenic ideals
promulgated in earlier fiction, contemporary realist fiction nonetheless has not resolved
the question of how the representation of women as rationally violent can attain to
verisimilitude.

32

Chapter 1 Endnotes

1
I use the term terrorist here anachronistically to apply to acts of political violence that have the
potential to harm non-military human beings even if the intention is to harm only property (as
when advance phone calls are made to warn of an impending bombing). I discuss the semantic
and political ramifications of this choice later in this introduction. For a history of terrorism, see
Walter Liqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1977; 2001);
and Jay Robert Nash, Terrorism in the 20
th
Century (New York: M. Evans), 1998.

2
“Anarchists Mild as Lambs,” New York Times, 23 August 1893, 1. See also “Anarchy’s Dingy
Stronghold,” New York Times, 22 August 1893, 1; “Emma Goldman in Court,” New York Times,
12 September 1893; “Anarchists Were to Blame,” New York Times, 19 September 1893 (all
articles accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers). The same sort of coverage was attributed
to Marie Ganz and other labor agitators in the first two decades in the United States. See in
particular the radicalized account of the crazed (Jewish) women tearing apart chickens to protest
food prices on the west side of New York in “Riots in Poultry Markets,” New York Times, 23
February 1917, 1-2 (accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers). During the period of the
agrarian agitations in Ireland, journalists and editorialists frequently alluded to the Irish people’s
greater propensity for drunkenness and crime: John Polson, for example, provided statistics of
Irish crime in Ireland, America, and England to “prove” that the Irish were more prone to
criminal activity in a letter to the editor, “Terrorism in Ireland,” London Times, 4 August 1887,
F3. For an account of the archbishop’s condemnation of the Ladies’ Land League, see “Ireland:
The Land Agitation,” London Times, 17 March 1881, F7.

3
“What the Nihilists Have Done,” New York Times, 14 March 1881, 4 (accessed via ProQuest
Historical Newspapers The New York Times, 1851-2005). For a study of Victorian comparisons
of Irish domestic space to animality, see Amy Martin, “Irish Racial Difference in Victorian
Critiques of Capitalism,” Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-
Century Ireland, ed. Terrence McDonough (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 186-211.

4
For an analysis of the fetishizing of violent Middle Eastern women, see Laura Sjoberg and
Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London:
Zed Books, 2007).

5
In Ireland, for instance, Margaret O’Callaghan argues that once independence from England was
attained in southern Ireland, there was a deliberate attempt to erase women’s involvement in the
nationalist struggle: “The trope of the nationalist harridan or ‘the fury,’ first clearly articulated by
O’Leary and in slightly different form by Sean O’Casey, was to be a powerful weapon for
dismissing all female political involvement on both sides of the civil war divide, and in other
political formations, after independence.” See Callaghan’s introduction to her edited chapter,
“Women and Politics in Ireland, 1921-68,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing V, Irish
Women’s Writing and Traditions, ed. Angela Bourke, Siobhan Pinfeather, Maria Lady, Margaret
Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirin Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills,
(Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press, 2002), 123.

6
Hegel argued that the physical differences between men and women had a rational basis with
ethical and intellectual consequences. He wrote that “man has his actual and substantive life in

33

the state, in learning and so forth, as well as in labour and struggle with the external world. . . .
Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the family and to be imbued with
family piety is her ethical frame of mind.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M.
Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); see Third Part: "Ethical Life" 166, 114. Such
views underlie Victorian notions of the “cult of true womanhood,” which relegated woman’s
sphere to the home, her duties circumscribed by domestic chores and child-rearing, and, as
Sjoberg and Gentry show in Mothers, Monsters, Whores, continue to the present.

7
Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores, 15.

8
David Lloyd, Ireland After History, Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays (Indiana: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 73.

9
In addition to Sjoberg and Gentry, several feminist critics have analyzed the portrayals of
“terrorist” women. Jayne Steel analyzes the way in which Irish Republican Army women are
portrayed as vampires. See Jayne Steel, “Vampira: Representations of the Irish Female Terrorist,”
Irish Studies Review 6:3 (1998): 273-284. Eileen MacDonald’s review of newspaper accounts
suggests that feminist terrorists are masculinized as lesbians or as feminists “gone mad” in Shoot
the Women First (London: Fourth Estate, 1991), 5. Robin Morgan, a former Students for a
Democratic Society member, suggests that women join revolutionary groups under the influence
of their “demon lover” in The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1989).

10
Louise Ryan, “Drunken Tans: Representations of Sex and Violence in the Anglo-Irish War
(1919-21),” Feminist Review 66 (Autumn 2000): 73.

11
See Chris Hables Gray, Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict (New York: Guildford
Press, 1997), 40.

12
See Morgan, Demon Lover, 164; Begoña Aretxaga’s Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism,
and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp.
76-79; and the conclusion to Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish
Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 248-263. This point will be examined more closely in
each chapter by reference to memoirs and political treatises written by members of the Weather
Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and the Irish
Republican Army.

13
Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1977; 2001);
Jay Robert Nash, Terrorism in the 20
th
Century (New York: M. Evans), 1998; Alex Houen,
Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Cambridge: Oxford
University Press, 2002).

14
Terrorism Research Center, “FAQ,” Retrieved 1 September 2003.
[http://www.terrorism.com/modules.php].

15
M. F. Beal and Friends, Safe House: A Casebook Study of Revolutionary Feminism in the
1970’s (Eugene: Northwest Matrix, 1976), 128.

34

16
Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of
Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 81.

17
Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 6.

18
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput
Press, 1993), 125-6.

19
Some international relations theorists use the term combatant. Miranda H. Alison, Women and
Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (London: Routledge, 2009),
3-4.

20
Political philosopher Ted Honderich makes a case for using the word terrorism not only as
what he views an inevitable capitulation to popular usage, but also in a recuperative act that
defines terrorism as justifiable resistance to state-sponsored violence in certain circumstances: for
instance, as “an ongoing reply to state-terrorism, self-defence, defence of a homeland, freedom-
fighting, liberation struggle, personal self-sacrifice in the hope of gaining great goods for others,
defence against ethnic cleansing, a struggle of a people for their survival, terrorism for
humanity.” However, I am not convinced that the term can be entirely reappropriated for usage in
texts that explore the underlying causes of political violence. See Ted Honderich, Terrorism for
Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 5; originally published
as Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1989).

21
Feminist is a label that I use in an inclusive sense. Whether the militant women and characters
included in this study have called themselves feminists or not, whether or not they have joined
explicit feminist causes, this study examines the representation of women who violate cultural
norms positioning women as nurturing, care-giving, and inherently averse to violence. Thus,
while some characters are not feminists in a strict sense of the word, their refusal to limit their
political roles to actions dictated by conventionally gendered stereotypes is a form of resistance
that I call feminist.

22
Rom Harré, “How to Change Reality: Story v. Structure—A Debate between Rom Harré and
Roy Bhaskar,” After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, ed. José López and
Garry Potter (London: Athlone Press, 2001), 26-28.

23
Again, I must qualify my terms. By “historical novels,” I mean novels that fictionalize real-life
people’s actions, even if fairly recent in history; I do not mean novels set in distant time periods.
This dovetails with the definition promulgated by the Historical Novel Society on its website,
which states that “To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least
fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the
time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).” See
http://historicalnovelsociety.org/definition.htm, accessed 12 December 2009. For a history of
women’s historical novels that contests Lukács’s timeline, in which he posits the origin of the
genre as beginning with Scott’s Waverly, see Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel:
British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

24
Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), 174-5.

35

25
Benjamin writes, “All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays
claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity.” See Walter Benjamin, Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 287.

26
Hayden White underscored the narrative underpinnings of historiography in the 1980s with his
groundbreaking insistence that historians—as opposed to chroniclers—rely on the structures,
tropes, and methods of fiction in order to convey meaning. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1973), 7; 4. Similarly, Peter Brooks suggests that the field of law represses the knowledge
that it fundamentally relies on narrative to determine guilt and innocence. See his “Narrativity of
the Law,” Law and Literature 14:1 (Spring 2002): 4.

27
Brooks, “Narrativity of the Law,” 3-4.

28
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977), 80, 84.

29
As I state in the preface, I define realism as a narrative mode that creates its own structures of
reality as a result of changing historical realities.

30
John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984), xii.

31
Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom, 1985), 222.

32
Patrick Magee, Gangsters or Guerrillas: Representations of Irish Republicans in ‘Troubles
Fiction’ (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 2001), 210. In his study of more than 480
popular novels dealing directly with “the Troubles” in the North of Ireland since 1969, Magee (an
IRA member who received his doctorate while imprisoned) demonstrates that the overwhelming
majority exemplify a pro-British view which depicts the composite Irish republican as “a Mother
Ireland-fixated psycho-killer” (2). He attributes this bias to the dictates of the marketplace (15-
16), as well as to the predominantly middle-class writers who have not experienced the Troubles
themselves (216-7).

33
Benjamin Kunkel, “Dangerous Characters,” in New York Times Book Review, 11 September
2005, 14. In his review of the American terrorist novel throughout the twentieth century, Kunkel
echoes Magee’s conclusions that both popular and literary novels treat their terrorist protagonists
contemptuously (15).

34
Daniel Harris, “Fictional Terrorism: Psychology not Politics,” Book Forum VII:4 (1986): 6.
Harris points to the ways in which novelists—most of whom lack any close connection with
proponents of political violence—produce caricature, arguing that even writers who base their
novels on historical events depoliticize their works, an apolitical maneuver that “locate[s] the
motivations of [a] character’s extremist behavior in personal frustrations” (Harris 5-6).

35
Lloyd, Anomalous States, 6.

36

36
According to Butler, foreclosure is a function of a preexisting social order that compels the
subject to prohibit herself from speaking “what must remain unspeakable for contemporary
regimes of discourse to continue to exercise their power.” Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 141, 139.

37
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, A Companion to Narrative Theory (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005), 221.

38
Ibid., 222.

39
Because women are conjoined to family, according to Hegel, they, like Antigone, are already
predisposed to acting against the state, or what Hegel calls the ethical order. See Hegel,
Philosophy of Right, 115.

40
Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores.

41
MacDonald, Shoot the Women First, 232.

42
Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, 248-63.

43
Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward, eds., Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women
and Wicked Hags (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), 200.

44
Ibid., 100.

45
Ibid., 201.
46
Begoña, Shattering Silence, 146.

47
The so-called “dirty” or “no wash” protest arose out of the struggles of republican males in
Long Kesh prison to be restored to political prisoner status, which meant that they could wear
their own clothing and congregate freely. When the prisoners refused to wear the prison uniform,
they first went “on the blanket,” wearing no clothes but a blanket. When they were subsequently
harassed by guards en route to the shower or the toilets, the prisoners refused to go to the toilets,
first emptying their buckets into the hallways and out windows, and when those openings were
blocked by guards, the prisoners began smearing feces on the walls so that it couldn’t be thrown
at them. The women in Armagh joined the men in solidarity, against the wishes of the IRA
leadership, but to the mess of urine and feces was added menstrual napkins. For more information
about the women’s experiences in prison, see Begoña Aretxaga, “Dirty Protest: Symbolic
Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence,” in States of Terror: Begoña
Aretxaga’s Essays, ed. Joseba Zulaika (Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada),
57-74; and Mary Corcoran, “‘We had to be stronger’: The Political Imprisonment of Women in
Northern Ireland, 1972-1999,” in Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and
Wicked Hags, eds. Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), 114-
131.

48
Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in
Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

37

49
MacDonald, Shoot the Women First, 236-41.

50
Ibid., 232.

51
Brigitte L. Nacos, “The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns
in the News Coverage of Women in Politics and in Terrorism,” in Female Terrorism and
Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization, ed. Cindy D. Ness (New York: Routledge, 2008),
232.

52
MacDonald, Shoot the Women First, 239.

53
Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds., European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and
the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press,
1981).

54
Morgan, Demon Lover, 33.

55
Alison, Women and Political Violence.

56
Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, 222.

57
Jeffory A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written
Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 89, 98, 95.

58
Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 49, 60, 61.

59
Scanlan, Plotting Terror, 4.

60
Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity.

61
Ibid., 192, 144, 169, 165.

62
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 104.

63
Zizek, Violence, 133-4.

64
Ibid., 174.

65
Antonio Negri, “The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life,” in Cesare Casarino and
Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 193.

66
In Italian, the English word power has two meanings. Potenza is defined as a power that
“resonates often with implications of potentiality as well as with decentralized or mass
conceptions of force and strength,” as opposed to potere, which refers to the “might or authority
of an already structured and centralized capacity,” such as power (Casarino and Negri, In Praise
of the Common, n22, 274).

38

67
Negri, Empire and Beyond, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 2008).

68
Negri, “The Political Monster,” 194.

69
Lloyd, Ireland After History, 18.

70
Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980), 146.

71
Alison, Women and Political Violence, 2.

39

Chapter 2

“The Grim Invisible Fates”:
Futile Resistance in The Princess Casamassima
Henry James published The Princess Casamassima in serial form from September
1885 through October 1886 during a time of much political turbulence: Russian nihilists
had assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881; international socialist workers’ movements
were advocating the violent overthrow of capitalism and other inegalitarian forms of
government; Fenians and other Irish nationalists were engaging in a bombing campaign
in England as well as assassination attempts against British leaders in Ireland; and the
bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square was turning into a witch hunt against foreigners
and suspected anarchists in America. The late nineteenth century also ushered in a period
of increasing feminist activism, when women in England and the United States continued
to fight for the right to vote, and when women, primarily Russian, were attaining
notoriety for their participation in political violence. London newspapers and magazines
were filled with titillating reports of female Russian Nihilists who attempted to
assassinate political figures,
1
while in Ireland, women formed the Ladies’ Land League to
take over the duties of the imprisoned male members of the Land League (loosely
affiliated with the Fenians), which fought against the dominance of absentee British and
upper-class Irish landlords on Irish territory.
2
Although agrarian violence lessened after
land reform laws were passed in Ireland, women’s participation in radical groups that
agitated for home rule in Ireland, in groups that called for equality and suffrage for
women, and in groups that advocated labor reform, among other then-radical issues,

40

continued to dominate the news when James revised the text for republication in 1908 in
book form (as the New York Edition).
As James’s letters showed, he viewed the political unrest in England as inevitable,
as evidence of an emerging democratic tide, which he characterized as Huns and Vandals
rising up from the “black depths of . . . enormous misery” to tear down a “rotten and
collapsible” aristocracy.
3
In The Princess Casamassima, James sought to capture
realistically that liminal moment between the impending collapse of the Old Order and
the onrush of the democratic hordes, between the conforming delicacy of the True
Woman and the convention-defying demands of the so-called New Woman. The
imminent collapse of Old World hegemony, the novel suggests, is concomitant with the
emergence of the modern woman, represented among the working-classes by Millicent
Henning, the unapologetic consumer and opportunist, and among the aristocracy and
quasi-aristocracy by the eponymous Princess Casamassima (the former Christina Light of
Roderick Hudson), a would-be assassin who has married into her title.
Though she is a secondary character (the novel is narrated primarily from the
point of view of Hyacinth Robinson), the Princess is the catalyst that initiates the central
dilemma posed by the novel: the conflict between the duty to fight against an oppressive
social order and the fear that overthrowing the existing social order would result in the
destruction of art and culture. She introduces Robinson, a poor bookbinder who
associates with a radical socialist group, to the beauty, comfort, and art available to the
privileged and wealthy, for which he develops a deep appreciation.
4
The novel stages the
ensuing conflict between Robinson’s sympathy with the agitation of the working poor

41

against entrenched privilege and his respect for the artistic achievements which that
aristocratic privilege made possible. Unable to resolve this dilemma, unable to fulfill his
vow to assassinate an unnamed duke, yet unwilling to renege on his pledge, Robinson
commits suicide. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has construed this portrayal of the Princess’s
function in the novel as indicative of a conservative fear of women’s emergence into the
political arena, of what she calls “sexual terrorism . . . women’s anarchic disruption of
socio-sexual norms and codes.”
5
But while the novel evinces a deep unease about
women’s increasing demands for a public voice, its foregrounding of the stultifying
nature of societal restraints on women displays an understanding of and sympathy for the
problem of patriarchal authority.
In addressing the modern problems of political violence and the New Woman,
James attempted to embrace, in part, the aesthetic of the French naturalist writers in order
to depict scenes of urban poverty realistically. James wrote in the preface to the 1908
revised New York edition of the novel that he wished to “report with truth on the human
scene,”
6
and several critics point to James’s letters and preface as evidence for the
author’s intent to produce a naturalist novel.
7
The critics disagree, however, on the degree
to which James succeeded in a naturalist portrayal. Om Prakash Grewal calls The
Princess Casamassima a “fable” whose author seeks “a retreat from the uncongenial
‘modern’ social conditions.”
8
Martha Banta considers its “metahistorical” examination of
anarchism a mark of its poststructuralist tendencies.
9
Lionel Trilling makes the case for
the novel as a work of “moral realism,”
10
while Margaret Scanlan sees The Princess
Casamassima primarily as a realist novel, but one that is constructed of a “melange of

42

plots and genres, at times having ‘strong overtones of pastiche’” with its allusions to
Dickens, Turgenev, and several other novelists as well as to fairy tales, naturalism, and
popular spy fiction.
11
Millicent Bell reads James’s comments about his naturalistic
methods as ironic and his language as “at once suggestive of the naturalist method and a
denial of it.”
12
Bell suggests that James filtered his naturalist observations through the
grist of his own consciousness to examine the limits of perception itself, a supposition
upon which Bell makes a case for the novel as an impressionistic work.
The novel’s resistance to generic classification makes a convincing case, I
believe, for it to be viewed as a work written in an impressionistic-realist mode, rather
than as a generic object. James’s impressionistic narrative mode privileges the writer-
artist as one whose superior powers of observation entitle him to claim not only that
imagined events and observations form a cohesive narrative whole but also approximate
lived experience in some mysterious way, even without the famed journalistic “notes”
championed by the French naturalists; rather James’s “notes” are his impressions. In the
1908 preface, James describes his method of writing Princess as resulting from his
numerous walks in London:
My notes then, on the much-mixed world of my hero’s both overt and covert
conscious-ness, were exactly my gathered impressions and stirred perceptions, the
deposit in my working imaginations of all my visual and all my constructive sense
of London. . . . If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the
human scene, it could be but because “notes” had been from the cradle the
ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy. . . . I recall pulling no
wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for no “authentic” information; but I
recall also on the other hand the practice of never missing an opportunity to add a
drop, however small, to the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of
being able to dip into it. To haunt the great city and by this habit to penetrate it,

43

imaginatively, in as many places as possible—that was to be informed, that was
to pull wires, that was to open doors.
13

On one level, James’s remarks constitute a defense of his principle that imaginative
observation could render truths about “the human scene” against early critics who faulted
The Princess Casamassima—a critical and commercial failure when first published—for
its unrealistic portrayal of anarchists and revolutionaries. English critics in particular
attributed the fault to its author’s utter lack of either knowledge or experience with “real”
revolutionaries, his political conservatism, and the work’s stylistic flaws.
14
Yvor Winters
called it “ludicrous” and equated its attempt to invoke terror in the reader to “a small boy
under a sheet on Hallowe’en.”
15
Even after W. H. Tilley published his 1960 study
showing that James borrowed many of his characters and plot points from the London
Times and other popular magazines,
16
critics such as John Lucas asserted that “the
ignorance of the characters too often suggests the ignorance of their creator.”
17

On another level, the preface appended to the New York edition of The Princess
Casamassima can be seen as James’s legitimization of the primacy of imagination, of the
belief that observation transmogrified through the imagination (of a sufficiently sensitive
observer), in one sense equaled lived experience and could result in a novel that achieved
an aesthetic reality, or verisimilitude, if not a lived one. The use of colonizing language—
to “penetrate,” to “pull wires” and “open doors”—implies self-legitimizing insight into
the lives of “others,” in this case, the poor and the fringe radical elements of London
society with whom James had little actual intercourse. But as prescient as his narrative
was in addressing pressing social issues of his time, James’s attempt at verisimilitude, at
delivering characters that were acceptable to readers, resulted in a rather conventional

44

denouement, which ultimately consigned the female characters to the protection of their
families.
In keeping with the Jamesian emphasis on psychological impressionism and also
as a way of engendering readers’ sympathy for the latent “Huns and Vandals” in English
society, The Princess Casamassima aestheticizes the political as a crisis between
Robinson’s tortured uncertainty between his radical leanings and his bourgeois
appreciation of art. This crisis is in part, as Margaret Scanlan, among others, claims, a
mirror of James’s own internal conflict between writing about social ills and doing
something about them.
18
But it is not merely evidence of James’s conservatism, as
Grewal suggests in his claim that “James feels for the poor and wants an alleviation of
their misery in any possible way that does not involve a threat to the established order of
the society.”
19
Rather, the novel’s intervention in the cultural conversation of turn-of-the-
century radical politics, particularly in relation to the “woman question,” both illuminates
larger social questions and, at the same time, reduces those problems to individual
shortcomings and a social determinism that was outmoded even in James’s time. Thus,
while it opens up the narrative to subversive ideas, its insistence on the power of
imaginative vision over actual observation, on impressions versus “notes,” results in
significant occlusions in the text. Such blind spots, I argue, reveal what Robyn Warhol
has termed the “unnarratable,” that which must be left out of a narrative due to social
and/or formal convention.
20
Despite the narrative’s tackling of two extraordinarily
incendiary and subversive late-nineteenth-century phenomena—the increasing violence
against repressive regimes and the entrance of women onto the underground political

45

stage—I suggest that the tale of a successful revolution is antinarratable, a story that
“shouldn’t be told,” particularly taboo in an era of increasing social unrest, while the tale
of women “terrorists” is paranarratable, a story that “wouldn’t be told” because of the
threat it represents to the social order.
21
In both cases, subversive agency is foreclosed.
A major problem with the novel’s aim for truth, especially for a writer so attuned
to psychological nuance, is its failure to delineate adequate philosophical rationales for
the characters’ beliefs. James refers to the group’s politics as “militant socialism” in the
preface, but the statements uttered by various characters are an allusive, fragmented
hodgepodge of socialist, anarchist, and Marxist ideas.
22
The novel is divided into those
who advocate violence but are too lazy, old, or stupid to be effectual (the working-class
denizens of the Sun and Moon, excepting Robinson and Muniment); those who advocate
violence and are potentially dangerous (Muniment, Hoffendahl, the Princess); those who
support the status quo (the upper-class Madame Grandoni and the Prince, as well as the
working-class Pinnie and Muniment’s invalid sister Rosy); those who believe in reform
rather than overthrow (the musician Anastasius Vetch), and the tormented Robinson who
is torn between his desire to do something for the “groaning, toiling millions . . . who
have been cheated and crushed and bamboozled from the beginning of time” and the
rapture he experiences upon encountering the art and architecture made possible by
military might and aristocratic and royal privilege.
23
This failure undermines the readers’
efforts to analyze the ethical positions of the various characters and thus serves to
undermine the rationale for the characters’ motivations.

46

The three primary revolutionists—Robinson, the Princess, and Muniment—seem
to be motivated by vague notions of equality as a justification for their belief in the
violent overthrow of the government. Robinson is the romantic who yearns to sacrifice
himself for a lofty cause, as well as a sensitive observer who responds to beauty and what
he deems to be noble passions. He speaks of his meeting with the “sublime” Hoffendahl
as having seen the “holy of holies” in the “innermost sanctuary” (276). Unlike Muniment,
who is pragmatic and skeptical, Robinson romanticizes the coming revolution as a
mission to rectify the miseries of the poor. He tells the Princess:
“Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there’s an immense underworld
peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. . . . People
go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance, and make money and make
love, and seem to know nothing and suspect nothing and think of nothing; and
iniquities flourish, and the misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary
evil,’ and generations rot away and starve in the midst of it, and day follows day,
and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds. All that’s one half of
it; the other half is that everything’s doomed! In silence, in darkness, but under
the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful,
immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics.” (276)

His desire to be part of something larger than himself, the great “immeasurable trap,” and
his sentimental feeling for the poor, lead him to issue a formal vow to undertake whatever
mission is assigned him. Robinson is ultimately abused of his romanticism, which is
intended to render tragic his noble refusal to renege on the vow that leads to his suicide,
but, as I will discuss in more detail, the portrait of a naïve aesthete burdened with the task
of assassinating a duke is, if not ridiculous, inconsistent, and questions the novel’s
portrayal of the all-powerful Hoffendahl’s wisdom for giving this task to someone who
has probably never handled a gun before.

47

The equally fervent Princess takes a radical noblesse oblige position that the poor
must be prodded and assisted in overthrowing the existing system: “‘But what do you
propose for the thousands and hundreds of thousands for whom no work—on the
overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven—is to be found? There’s less and less work
in the world, and there are more and more people to do the little there is. The old
ferocious selfishness must come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must
be assisted’” (494-5). In the original manuscript, the Princess is more forceful—“‘They
won’t come down gracefully, so they must be smashed’”; some critics attribute the New
York Edition revision to James’s attempt to make the Princess more capricious.
24
While
her appeal is to pity and fairness, her motivation is later shown to be a personal quest for
meaningfulness and diversion from the privileged life that bores her.
Muniment—the laconic, shrewd, and presumably the most involved member of
the underground radical movement—does not reveal his opinions to others. The narrator
merely states, from Robinson’s point of view, that Muniment “knew the day had come
for a forcible rectification of horrible inequalities” and that the group leaders sought to
“frighten society, and frighten it effectually; to make it believe that the swindled classes
were at last fairly in league” (241-2). Muniment represents the coolly calculating
opportunist who uses people to achieve his ends. It is he who introduces Robinson to the
leader of the unnamed radical group, the German revolutionist Diedrich Hoffendahl to
whom Robinson makes his vow of “blind obedience” (279). It is he who involves the
Princess in mysterious nighttime activities that are presumed to be revolutionary but are
never elaborated, primarily to ensure her financial support. Though closemouthed, his

48

position can be inferred by his response to an exchange at the Sun and Moon when a
shoemaker expresses an anti-private property position and a desire to smash shops.
Muniment replies, “‘Ah no; no smashing, no smashing of any valuable property. . . .
There are no wrong places—there are only wrong uses for them. We want to keep them
standing and even to put up a few more; but the difference will be that we shall put the
correct sort into them’” (237). Muniment’s politics, then, are not those of the
revolutionary socialist desire to abolish private property, nor of the anarchist desire to
abolish leadership positions; rather, Muniment supports the preservation of valuable
property but with a change of leadership. His vision would entail supplanting the current
power structure with the “correct sort”—presumably, someone from the working class
like Muniment himself.
For all three, then, the primary philosophical justification for violent revolution
appears to be that (a) privilege is entrenched and complacent; (b) the comfort of the
privileged relies on the oppression of the poor; and (c) therefore, the poor must of
necessity rise up to overthrow the rulers, aided by a few well-meaning people from more
privileged classes. No anticapitalist, Marxist, or other economic arguments are deployed
as a justification for revolution, other than general laments about injustice; in fact, as
Grewal points out, “the action contemplated by the malcontents gathered in the ‘Sun and
Moon’ is against the bakers, butchers and grocers, not against the big industrialists,” a
plot element that he attributes to James’s political ignorance.
25
Neither are there
antigovernment statements that would support an anarchist point of view.

49

While many critics have attributed this lack of concrete argument as evidence of
James’s ignorance of radical politics, it appears to entail to some degree a willful refusal
to engage radical philosophy seriously, considering the existence of published anarchist
and socialist texts in the nineteenth century. At least two anarchist journals were
published in London during the 1880s, The Anarchist (1885-88) and Freedom (1886-
1927).
26
In addition, the writings of Marx and Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, and other
anarchists were available in French, German, and English, all languages that James could
read.
27
But James patterned the story, the various characters, and the ambiguous ideas on
accounts published in the London Times from 1882 to 1885 and other popular
magazines.
28
Tilley argues that James did so to make his novel credible,
29
but its failure
to distinguish among anarchist, socialist, Marxist, and revolutionary Syndicalist ideas
resulted in a conflation of all radical thought into a vague idea of violent overthrow
unsupported by historical, legal, or ethical arguments with which a reader could engage.
30

Though Millicent Bell’s point that the portrayal of not knowing is precisely the subject,
31

that the narratological imprecision merely presumes and perpetuates the ignorance of its
middle-class audience,
32
it positions the reader in league with the various narrators’
disdain towards the masses (represented by the habitués of the Sun and Moon) and
enables even the uninitiated reader to read with scorn the characters’ often-ludicrous
statements. Below is a description of a typical conversation at the Sun and Moon, a pub
where the self-professed revolutionaries meet and drink, narrated from Robinson’s point
of view:

50

Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping
the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to
constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying,
“Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to—
what I say I stick to”; and others who perpetually inquired of the company, “And
what the plague am I to do with seventeen bob—with seventeen bloody bob?
What am I to do with them—will ye tell me that?” an interrogation which in truth
usually ended by producing a ribald reply. (230)

This passage displays Robinson’s disdain for the very “people” that the ostensibly
militant socialist group he joins wishes to help. The vast majority of the workers are
portrayed as crude, ignorant, unrefined, and lazy barstool radicals who drink and
complain constantly but who do not act. Thus, the scornful portrayal of the potential
radicals undercuts the fear that James claimed he was intending to produce; in the preface
to the revised New York edition, James wrote that he wanted to render the effect of
“society’s not knowing” about this vast underground conspiracy in order to diffuse the
sense of terror (xxii).
The point is not simply that James, like Conrad and other writers, reveals his own
low opinion of revolutionaries and the working classes; rather, if the desired effect is
verisimilitude, as James claimed it was, then the dialogue has to convince the reader of its
potential truth, yet the lack of real debate among any of the characters in the novel
renders their radicalism itself unbelievable. By contrast, other novelists contemporary
with James incorporated intelligent debate about radical ideals into their works. For
instance, the anarchist Louis Lingg (one of the Haymarket bombers of 1886) is idealized
in The Bomb by Frank Harris as a person of high morals and adherence to principle.
Lingg explains to the first-person narrator, “‘Anarchy is an ideal . . . and like all ideals is
of course full of practical faults, and yet it has a certain charm. We want to govern

51

ourselves, and neither govern others nor be governed by them; . . . We start from the
truism that no man is fit to judge another. . . . Why not treat our moral patients [those
suffering from “incurable moral faults”] as well as we treat congenital idiots’ [in
hospitals, with books, exercise, and superb care].”
33
Granted, the conversation does not
take place in a pub, as it does in The Princess Casamassima, but the reader is presented
with an argument that can be accepted or rejected on ideological grounds, even if the
author is idealizing the character. And while Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer portrays
the lead character (the informer) engaging in foolish and drunken dialogue in the pub
scenes along with other unnamed characters, the committed, almost fanatic members of
The Organization articulate their positions intelligently. However, like James, O’Flaherty
makes class distinctions, with the third-person narrator of The Informer insisting that the
pub habitués who actually took part in intelligent arguments were “of a better class”;
34

the point I wish to make here is simply that when none of the characters in The Princess
offers a clear rational for their respective positions, verisimilitude is rendered impossible,
and a rupture appears in the realist form.
The novel implies that the very real poverty and the dangerous working
conditions are in part self-inflicted, due to a lack of conviction, fortitude, and self-
discipline, a concept later embodied in the character of Mr. Verloc in Conrad’s The
Secret Agent.
35
Moreover, none of the more intelligent and experienced radicals—
Poupin, Schinkel, and Muniment, for instance—appear to follow the newspapers,
pamphlets, and other publications that were a staple to disseminating ideas, whether
conservative or radical. Though much of the pamphleteering and distillation of economic

52

philosophical thought appeared after the initial serial publication of The Princess
Casamassima, the writings of the foundational thinkers who articulated what came to be
called Marxist, socialist, and anarchist thought were readily available in the 1880s. Two
passages quoted below illustrate the arguments then in circulation in support of, first,
socialism, and, second, anarchism, both of which had been published in English at the
time of James’s writing. The first is Marx’s Communist Manifesto (translated into
English in 1850) in which he provides a rationale for a workers’ revolution as a
historically inevitable means of abolishing unfair social distinctions and economic
disparity. The following brief passage precedes a series of steps that must be followed to
ensure equality, including expropriation of land, centralization of credit and
transportation, free education, and a right to work (steps which, Marx allows, would vary
from country to country):
The first step in the workers’ revolution is to make the proletariat the ruling class,
to establish democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy in order,
by degrees, to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all the means of
production into the hands of the State (this meaning the proletariat organized as
ruling class), . . . In the first instance, this can only be effected by despotic inroads
upon the rights of property and by despotic interference with bourgeois methods
of production; that is to say by measures which seem economically inadequate
and untenable, that have far-reaching effects, and are necessary as means for
revolutionizing the whole system of production.
36

Granted, the manifesto is a political treatise, whereas James is writing pub dialogue, but
as we’ll see in the next chapter, pubs in Ireland served as meeting places for many
radicals who discussed complex ideas intelligently.
Another political treatise available in the nineteenth century was P. J. Proudhon’s
legal justification of anarchism, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right

53

and of Government, translated into English in 1876. In it, Proudhon puts forth nine
propositions to prove that property is physically and mathematically impossible because:
(1) it demands something for nothing; (2) production costs more than it is worth; (3)
production is proportional to labor, not to property; (4) it is homicide; (5) if it exists,
society devours itself; (6) it is the mother of tyranny; (7) in consuming its receipts, it
loses them; in hoarding them, it nullifies them, and, in using them as capital, it turns them
against production; (8) its power of accumulation is infinite and is exercised only over
finite quantities; and (9) it is powerless against property.
37
Both Marx’s and Proudhon’s
texts offer arguments that were debated hotly by radicals.
And certainly, Irish and other British newspapers published debates about the
militant activities of the Young Irelanders, the Fenians, and the Land League, among
others.
38
For instance, in defense of armed action, the Young Irelander Thomas Francis
Meagher wrote in 1846,
I do not abhor the use of arms in the vindication of national rights. There are
times when arms will alone suffice, and when political ameliorations call for a
drop of blood. . . . [F]orce must be used against force. The soldier is proof against
an argument, but he is not proof against a bullet. The man that will listen to
reason, let him be reasoned with; but it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that can
alone avail against battalioned despotism. Then, my lord, I do not disclaim the use
of arms as immoral, nor do I believe it is the truth to say, that the God of heaven
withholds his sanction from the use of arms.
39

Meaghan then uses a religious appeal to make his point that the use of arms is not
immoral.
If James’s concern is moral rather than political, verisimilitude rather than
documentation, the novel’s inconsistent portrayals of the rabble as ludicrous yet

54

somehow dangerous, of the internationalist radicals as inactive yet somehow on the brink
of overthrowing the British empire, fails to produce credible characters. Robinson later
rejects the Sun and Moon barstool-radical scene as a “hopeless sham” (274), though he
continues to revere the commitment of those who at first impress him: primarily
Hoffendahl, Muniment, and the Princess, and to a lesser extent, Eustache Poupin and Mr.
Schinkel. However, the latter—though more grammatical and more committed than the
Sun and Moon rabble, similarly indulge more in rhetoric than in action, as exemplified in
the passage below. The first speaker is Mr. Schinkel, a German cabinet maker described
as having an “unhealthy” face and “greasy hair” (235):
“We’re not serious.”
“Pardon, pardon; for myself I don’t admit that!” Poupin [a French exile
who fled the Republic] replied, striking the table with his finger-tips several
times, very fast. “If I’m not serious I’m nothing.”
“Oh no, you’re something,” said the German, smoking his monumental
pipe with a contemplative air. “We’re all something, but I’m not sure it’s anything
very useful.”
“Well, things would be worse without us. I’d jolly rather be in here, in this
kind of muck, than outside,” remarked the fat man who understood dogs.
“Certainly, it’s very pleasant, especially if you’ve your beer; but not so
pleasant over there at the Docks, where fifty thousand people starve. It’s a very
unpleasant night,” the cabinet-maker went on.
“How can it be worse?” Eustache Poupin asked while he looked at the
German as to make him responsible for the fat man’s reflexion. “It’s so bad that
the imagination recoils, refuses——!”
“Oh, we don’t care for the imagination!” the fat man declared. “We want
a compact body in marching order.”
“What do you call a compact body?” the little grey-faced shoemaker
demanded. “I daresay you don’t mean your kind of body.” (235)

This passage is representative of the inane bantering engaged in by the denizens of the
Sun and Moon who drink and complain vociferously but who never act. It also poses the
central concern of those who, like James, value art: if an existing government were

55

overthrown, what would happen to its cultural and artistic artifacts? Do, or can, the
uneducated working classes (represented by the fat man) appreciate art and the
imagination, or would they destroy art with their compact marching bodies in order to
feed their bellies? In 1884 William Morris wrote a treatise advocating a revolutionary
socialist program that would abolish luxury and assure all human beings of (1) work that
was honorable and fitting, and which produced functional and/or beautiful art; (2) a
healthy and beautiful house; and (3) full leisure for “rest of mind and body.”
40
Initially,
Robinson seems to represent an idealized Morrisean figure, an aspiring socialist and a
craftsman who takes deep pleasure in creating beautiful book bindings. However,
Robinson’s skepticism of the multitude, the faceless “Huns and Vandals” alluded to in
the preface renders him unable to resolve this crucial question and leads to his suicide.
The novel ultimately rejects Morris’s notions of socialism through art; the “rabble”
appear preoccupied with mundane matters and lack discernment; the Princess rejects art
as the privilege of the wealthy; and Muniment—highly regarded by Robinson—has no
inclination to works of art.
Not only are political and ethical ideas largely unarticulated in the novel, the
occasional descriptions of the poorer sections of town are more atmospheric than actual.
In effect, the novel represses scenes of abjectness in order to foreground its preoccupation
with art and culture as markers of social status and of an inherited predilection to
refinement. As Robinson becomes more sophisticated about the world—possible, the
novel suggests, because of his heredity—he becomes disillusioned with the radicals. The
narrator-as-Hyacinth registers his increasing disdain of the pub-goers after he’s been

56

introduced to gracious living and great wealth at Medley, the Princess’s lavish country
estate: “There was plenty of palaver at the ‘Sun and Moon; there were nights when a blast
of imbecility seemed to blow over the place and one felt ashamed to be associated with so
much crude fatuity and flat-faced vanity” (230). This passage serves to distinguish
Hyacinth’s more refined nature—due to his mixed heredity—from that of the coarser
working-class malcontents. Born of a poor French prostitute who murders his aristocratic
English father, Robinson is a “duke in disguise,” according to Muniment (379), who has
the “appearance of nobility” in Madame Grandoni’s view (252), and who speaks without
“a vulgar intonation” or “common gesture,” according to the Princess (283). Robinson’s
refinement, intelligence, and pride, the narrative suggests, derive from his aristocratic
father, while his sympathies for the poor and his facility with speaking French (despite
his lack of formal education) from his French mother. The narrative manifests an
outmoded social determinism in its rendering of artistic sensibility as a result of lineage,
depicting the sensibilities and tastes of most of the characters in the novel as determined
by social position. The low-born Rosy’s taste for gewgaws is seen by Hyacinth as vulgar,
for instance, whereas the Princess’s taste is impeccable.
In fact, the narrative suggests, it is not possible for the higher born to “pass” as
lower born because of their innate taste. This point is highlighted in a passage between
the middle-class Princess who has married into the aristocracy and the working-class
Muniment. The Princess sells many of her possessions, moves to a working-class
neighborhood, and tries to recreate a representation of a working-class home. When
Muniment tells her that she has a lovely home, she replies: “Lovely? My dear sir, it’s

57

hideous. That’s what I like it for.” Muniment responds that he would “‘give [his] nose for
such a place” (387). Thus, Muniment does not have the sensibility or discernment that
Robinson’s aristocratic lineage, refined by his trip to Europe, has imbued him with.
Those with taste recognize tastelessness: Robinson refers to the Princess’s abode as a
“vulgar little house” (357), while Madame Grandoni points out that the way she lives “‘is
not poverty, and not even a good imitation of it, as she would like it to be’” (440). The
focus on taste and sensibility poses a dialectic split between those who exemplify taste,
eugenic beauty, and delicate refinement against those who are crudely ignorant,
unattractive, and potentially violent but too lazy to rectify their situation.
The narrative structure further ignores the specific causes, reasons, and
ideological underpinnings of nineteenth-century political life in London. The plot
progresses primarily through allusion and dialogue rather than through action, and the
degree of each character’s commitment to the “cause” is alluded to but not revealed, as in
the following examples: (the Princess to Robinson): “You can’t believe I’ve already gone
so far? Why not? I’ve given you a certain amount of proof that I don’t hang back” (275);
(the narrator in Robinson’s point of view): The Princess “had told him more, at Medley,
of the manner in which she had already committed herself, and he remembered with a
strange perverse elation that she had gone very far indeed” (339); and the following
exchange between Muniment (who speaks first) and the Princess:
“You’ve got everything so handy I don’t see what interest you can have.”
“How do you mean, what interest?”
“In getting in so uncommon deep.”
The light in her face flashed on the instant into pure passion. “Do you
consider that I’m in—really far?”
“Up to your neck, ma’am.”

58

“And do you think that il y va of my neck—I mean that it’s in danger?”
she translated eagerly. (427)

These assertions of a deepening involvement lend a sense of progression to the plot,
suggesting a pending radical and violent denouement, but the political plot remains
stagnant while the psychological drama develops. The assertion of action substitutes for
action, and the resulting stasis parallels Robinson’s ultimate indecision. In the fictional
world, however, nothing has changed. The characters assert their deepening involvement,
but other than Hyacinth’s sense after his own ideological retreat that the Princess and
Muniment have moved “beyond” his level of involvement, the characters at the Sun and
Moon continue to repeat their inanities, the Princess and Muniment make their
mysterious nighttime excursions, Robinson continues to vacillate between his duty to
fulfill his vow to assassinate a duke and his increasing appreciation of Old World art and
architecture following his trip to Paris. The stasis extends to the two purportedly most
engaged revolutionaries who appear in the novel: the Princess and Muniment. Their
beliefs and their actions remain just as shrouded in mystery at the end of the novel as they
are at the beginning. The narrative of incompetence thus evolves into a narrative of
inertia, and an endless deferment of any real threat to the ruling order, at least from the
masses, to become an antinarrative of subversive activity.
The primary exception to the dismissive treatment of the would-be “terrorists” is
the misogynistic and invisible Diedrich Hoffendahl, the very mention of whose name
invokes awe in the listeners. As the iconic representation of knowledge, power, and
heroic masculinity, the Master, as the Princess refers to him, does not appear in the text,
but rather is only narrated—incompletely—by others. Hoffendahl “appears” through the

59

reverent retelling of his exploits throughout Europe and his seeming omnipotence. In the
underground, radical parallel to the normative social world, he functions as the signifier
who sets the law, but the “law” in the revolutionary circle rather than in the circle of
dominant power. The narrative conveys the sense of Hoffendahl’s power by the danger
he presents to others, by his ability to inspire others to pledge their lives to his mission.
Hoffendahl has power over Robinson’s (and others’) life and death. He withholds
knowledge from the Princess to neutralize her efforts, as he doesn’t trust women, and
later from Muniment, because the latter is tainted by his recent association with the
Princess. Peggy Phelan has argued that visibility—associated with the female being
“marked” (as opposed to the male who, being the norm, is “unremarkable”)—“summons
surveillance and the law” whereas a state of invisibility can confer unremarked,
omnipresent power.
41
Hoffendahl’s invisibility, his awe-inspiring, audacious actions, the
reverence he inspires by virtue of his ability to withstand torture and to keep silent, marks
him as a symbol of masculine power, the primary figure in the novel of a genuine
challenge to the ruling powers especially if he holds the loyalty of disciplined, rational
people like Paul Muniment. Nonetheless, his power relies on the willingness of others to
enact his plans, and the plot assures the reader that the main action will be constantly
deferred.
The emphasis on the male actors and on Hoffendahl’s distrust of women begs the
question: Why name the novel The Princess Casamassima? James makes it clear that she
is secondary not only in conception as part of the story but in function; she is the means
by which Robinson learns to appreciate the finer things in life, an initiation that

60

precipitates his crisis of loyalty. He is the naïf, characterized by sensitivity and a desire
for sublimity; she is the world-weary sophisticate whose main desire is to escape banality
(xix). Most critics concur with Clinton Oliver’s assessment in the introduction of the
Princess as a “destructive force.”
42
Frederick Hoffman argues that “[t]he center of
James’s criticism is the Princess herself. Women are always the focus of his moral
criticism.”
43
According to Hoffman, the Princess violates her own value systems first by
marrying a man she did not love and then by “defiling” that marriage.
44
Eileen Sypher
correlates James’s desire to probe radicalism to the desire to confront the “new woman”:
“The female is being invoked not as an individual but as an ‘Other,’ as a vehicle for
collecting otherwise unmanageable fears and desires. . . . The woman as angel is also,
inadvertently, the failed woman: the femme fatale, the terrible mother (Winnie) [from
Conrad’s Secret Agent]; the unfaithful wife (the Princess). Their failures can be read as
inciting the males’ anarchist acts.”
45
Carolyn Miller posits women as “the real source of
terror and anarchy in this novel,”
46
arguing that the murder of Robinson’s father by his
mother is “an act of sexual terrorism: a domestic assassination magnified to a broader
political scale through parallels with revolutionary activity.”
47

But such criticism takes an overly narrow view of the Princess’s role in the novel
and the way the novel subtly involves the reader in critiquing the Princess through the
social codes of the late nineteenth century. Though Robinson is inspired to greater actions
by the Princess’s interest in him (he refers to her as “his standard of comparison, his
authority, his measure, his perpetual reference,” 322), her influence is only one of several
that propel him towards his tragic denouement. Pinnie’s fantasies about his aristocratic

61

relatives eventually claiming him cause him to dream of a higher station in life from a
young age. Poupin first introduces him to the radical group and to Muniment, whom
Hyacinth is eager to impress.
48
In the company of Poupin and Schinkel, Muniment
introduces Robinson to Hoffendahl, to whom Robinson pledges his commitment before
he has experienced the luxury of his sojourn at Medley, the Princess’s country estate.
Finally, Robinson’s trip to Europe, which awakens his latent love of Old World art and
architecture and cements his rejection of militant socialism, is paid for by the money he
inherits from Pinnie and the money given to him by Mr. Vetch. Indeed, the novel seems
to suggest what is overtly expressed by the monarchists (the Prince Casamassima,
Madame Grandoni, Godfrey Sholto): that the real danger lies in the crossing of class
boundaries. Madame Grandoni warns Robinson not to stay too long at Medley: “‘It’s
better not to be lifted up high like our friend [the Princess, who has married into her title].
It doesn’t give happiness’” (252). Madame Grandoni tells Captain Sholto: “‘It’s too
terrible to spoil him for his station,’ . . . ‘How can he ever go back?’” and Sholto replies
“‘. . . if he pays for it he deserves to pay. He’s an abominable little conspirator against
society’” (295). Yet, the narrative implies, Robinson is only capable of transgressing
class boundaries because of his “blood”: “There was no peace for him between the two
currents that flowed in his nature, the blood of his passionate, plebeian mother and that of
his long-descended, super-civilised sire” (407). It is the admixture which, the novel
implies, culminates in his ultimate dilemma, the instability and contamination wrought by
permeable class boundaries.

62

Although the Princess’s influence has contributed to Robinson’s choices in the
novel, I suggest that, more than a destructive force, the Princess embodies the currents
that are breaking apart the old regime. The novel’s title serves as a synechdochic
representation of class-crossing: the middle-class Princess has not only married into her
title but was born out of wedlock. Idealized initially as the embodiment of grace, beauty,
and goodness, she represents the newly emerging modern figure who contaminates Old
World values by a destabilizing dissatisfaction with rank in the social order. Furthermore,
she, along with Millicent Henning, represents the new woman’s challenge to social
constraints on women’s place and resistance to institutionalized attempts to rein in
nonconforming feminine behavior. Initially, we view the Princess only through
Robinson’s and Captain Sholto’s stereotypical adulation of her feminine taste, cleverness,
and beauty. Sholto speaks of her in the superlative, calling her the “most charming” and
“the most remarkable woman in Europe” (143); Robinson first describes her as “fair,
shining, slender, with an effortless majesty. Her beauty had an air of perfection” (147).
The narrator-as-Prince says, “She had always, wherever she was, the most charming
room in Europe” (187). But this classical eugenic notion of the aristocrat as good and
beautiful is resisted by the Princess herself and is ultimately undercut by Robinson’s
increasing sense of superiority over the radicals. The Princess flouts gendered
conventions and proprieties, having left her husband to pursue her own enthusiasms, and
invites working-class tradesmen (Hyacinth Robinson) to stay at her country estate. She is
willful, unconventional, brilliant, and desirous of helping the poor. Yet she is unable to
forge her own destiny, primarily due to the mistrust she elicits among the powerful male

63

radicals; the novel foregrounds the forces arrayed against a woman entering into politics,
especially those advocating violent tactics. She has met with Hoffendahl and volunteered
her services, and she wishes to perform the assassination of the duke in Robinson’s place,
but as the alpha male who thinks little of women’s capabilities, as the exemplar of radical
law, Hoffendahl has rejected her offer.
At the same time that the novel foregrounds sympathetically the obstacles
confronting women who violate normative codes of feminine behavior, it participates in
the curtailment of feminist agency by its reduction of the feminist issues it raises to those
of a sort of biological psychology. While the Princess represents danger to others, it is the
sexualized danger wielded by the allure that beautiful women have over those who are
attracted to her charms. In other words, though she has the conventionally feminine
power to captivate Robinson, Sholto, and other romanticized characters, this is the only
power she attains, and that is gradually diminished as she ultimately lacks agency and the
ability to gain the trust of the serious male radicals. It is a mark of her visibility, her
femininity enforced upon her equally by her husband, her companion Madame Grandoni,
and the members of the radical group. Muniment tells her “‘You’ve everyone in your
power’” to which she replies: “‘Every one’s no one’” (426). While the text makes it clear
that she poses no serious danger to the state, the danger the Princess represents—by
consorting with the lower classes and the radicals, outside the oversight of her husband—
is akin to the danger that female inappropriate sexuality represents to the individual and
the family. It is her transgression of social mores, her unwillingness to take up the mantle
of family piety, that leads to her containment. In one sense, as much as she flouts

64

convention, the Princess is as much a victim of Victorian mores as she is a corrupter of
Robinson. Other women in the novel who step outside the bounds of strict feminine
propriety are not “punished” as is the Princess because they eventually conform to their
expected roles. Millicent Henning, though strong-spirited, desires nothing more than to
find a man with money, hence her implied dalliance with Captain Sholto; Lady Autrey,
after she is rejected (or ignored, rather) by Paul Muniment, dons her party hat and seems
to reenter the aristocratic circle of parties she had heretofore been rejecting.
A woman, however, who violates too deeply the social mores that are expected to
govern her behavior cannot, the text suggests, be trusted. As the novel progresses,
Robinson begins to share the other male characters’ cynical view of the Princess’s radical
intentions, and gradually, the reader begins to share Hoffendahl’s and Muniment’s
distrust of what Grewal calls “her parlour-anarchy,”
49
as we learn of her various
misrepresentations. For instance, in her new house in a working-class district of London,
the Princess utters various untruths and partial truths, asserting, for instance, that she no
longer has servants and that she has given up all worldly possessions for the cause, but
Madame Grandoni reveals that the Princess has saved some of her prized possessions and
retained one servant (356-7). She claims never to lie, but she does so to prevent Mr.
Vetch from visiting Muniment and asking him to spare Robinson from acting on his vow
(401). In short, she has made sacrifices for the cause—restricting her dinner to bread and
tea (357, 359) and giving up her carriage (352), but the reader is encouraged not to take
her commitment seriously when Robinson points out that the tea she served in her poorer

65

digs was “not inferior to that of which he had partaken at Medley” (360) and that she
hadn’t parted with her “immaculate gloves” (349).
The modal shift from sincerity to irony, which occurs once Robinson becomes
skeptical about the Princess’s radical transformation, enacts a narratological
retrenchment. Once her nighttime excursions and forays into radical politics are scorned,
the probability of revolution becomes farcical, leading to a foreclosure of female or
feminist political agency. The Princess’s claims to superior knowledge are always
qualified by the narrative: Hyacinth “knew her to be in communication with strange birds
of passage, to have, or to believe she had, irons on the fire, to hold in her hand some of
the strings that are pulled in great movements” (italics added, 414). Robinson excuses her
inconsistencies in gendered terms of emotionalism rather than intellectual rationalism:
“The Princess was an embodied passion—she was not a system: and her behaviour, after
all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to relieving others” (405). Women,
whether quasi-aristocratic like the Princess or working-class like Millicent Henning, are
the passionate, inconsistent beings whose social and sexual transgressions must be
scorned and neutralized, while the alpha males such as Hoffendahl and Muniment exert
control over others and over themselves. Robinson as narrator later views her not as
duplicitous or entirely insincere, but as a victim, never as an actor in any political plan.
The narrative adopts a condescending tone when Robinson wonders whether the
Princess:
were seriously entangled, were being really exploited by plausible outlaws,
predatory adventurers who counted on her getting frightened at a given moment
and offering hush-money to be allowed to slip out—out of a complicity which
they themselves of course would never have taken seriously; or were merely

66

coquetting with paper schemes, giving herself cheap sensations, discussing
preliminaries that could have no second stage. It would have been easy for him to
smile at her impression that she was “in it,” and to conclude that even the
cleverest women fail to know when they are futile. (414-415)

The only evidence of her commitment to the underground cause is her own assertions,
Madame Grandoni’s tale of international letters and strange visitors (359), and
Robinson’s and the Prince’s observation of the Princess slipping off with Muniment late
at night. Rather than demonstrate how societal constraints prevent the Princess from
fulfilling a political role, the novel discredits the Princess’s character. By remanding her
to the care of her husband at the end, the novel reveals a discomfort with the conjunction
of sexuality and violence as well as a deep disease with political violence itself. All of the
female characters, in fact, are in a sense dispatched to the care of the patriarchal family;
pursuing political goals, the novel suggests, is a futile aim for women and unnarratable in
the realist novel.
Ultimately, The Princess Casamassima upholds conventional notions of
masculinity. The secrecy and furtiveness marking the Princess’s movements later in the
novel do not shield her from surveillance; both the Prince and Robinson observe her
slipping off into the night with Muniment. Her continued visibility even as she attempts
to hide, underscores the ways in which the structures of power and knowledge, of
visibility and invisibility, of volubility and secrecy, are gendered. It suggests that those
with knowledge have power, and control the dissemination of knowledge to others—even
to those who seem to be “in so uncommon deep.” But even though only males have
access to such power, those males who do not adhere to rigid codes of masculinity are
disempowered. Muniment, for instance, is not informed when Robinson is given orders to

67

assassinate a duke, even though he is an intimate of Hoffendahl. Muniment is tainted by
his recent association with the distrusted Princess and the mission to deliver the letter is
given to Schinkel. What is paranarratable, what “wouldn’t” be told, is the actuation of
calculated political violence by women (which excludes emotional, irrational violence
such as that represented by the killing of Hyacinth’s father by his mother). Thus, the
disruptive potential of female violence is contained by patriarchal forces: by the all-
powerful Hoffendahl who doesn’t trust women, by Robinson who is enchanted with the
Princess’s beauty and nobility but skeptical of her usefulness to radical causes, by
Muniment who uses her for her husband’s money but is scornful of her ideological
commitment. Hoffman suggests that the novel “portrays violence within the social forms
which ordinarily contain it. But its hero is in this case sacrificed so that the forms may
continue” (144). Yet it is not only the class-based social system which is preserved, a
story that “should” be told; the constrictions against women on their own is also
preserved. The Princess does not need to be “sacrificed,” merely trundled back to her
husband and the constraints that his royal position places on her. It is her deviance from
gendered social norms that renders her a dangerous force.
Bell suggests that the vagueness of the text is intended to stress the unknowability
of truth.
50
However, the omission of logical arguments, the muddied ideological
positions, and the lack of descriptions of the conditions of the poor effectively elevate
authorial impressions, if aesthetically plausible, as a stand-in for a form of truth. John
Carlos Rowe argues that “The vagueness of the anarchists is less James’s refusal to
specify, to provide ‘realistic details’ and documents, than part of the very ideology of

68

their form. Hoffendahl’s vagueness, like the Princess’s capriciousness, is a means of
maintaining rule.”
51
Where Mark Seltzer’s analysis suggests that power relations are
maintained by a complicated web of surveillance that empowers the looker,
52
Rowe
suggests that it is a sort of Foucauldian invisibility, a Derridean shiftiness, that imparts
power in the novel. If I may be allowed to extend Rowe’s argument to the author, the
author’s much-noted aesthetic of ambiguity,
53
while serving in part to cloak his own
ignorance of radical thought, is not so much a failure of knowledge but a manipulation of
it. Ambiguity conduces to irony, which is the trope of aesthetic and ethical superiority.
Thus, rather than “penetrating” the underbelly of radical life as claimed in the preface,
James’s deliberate use of ambiguity, irony, and indirection serves as a means of
perpetuating on a literary level a similar sort of uninformed fear-mongering about
anarchism, terrorism, and the emergence of the “new woman” that was being
promulgated in popular magazines and in the London Times.
54
James’s reliance on
incendiary and exaggerated accounts of “Irish dynamiters” and Russian anarchists and
nihilists dominating the popular press reveals more about cultural anxieties associated
with women and political violence than it does with political realities, movements,
ideologies, or goals.
55

Bell and Shlomith Rimmon point to Jamesian aesthetics to make the case for a
more democratic interpretation of the text. Bell suggests that James’s use of an
impressionistic (what Rimmon calls ambiguous) narrative style engages readers as
participants in the process of meaning-making.
56
But the subversion of aesthetic
conventions does not translate into the subversion of cultural norms; a “democratic” or

69

experimental aesthetic does not ipso facto result in a progressive narrative, as Slavoj
Zizek has forcefully pointed out.
57
Christine DeVine stakes out a position that James’s
aesthetic experimentations imbue the novel with radical ideas that radiate to the political.
She argues that his deployment of a center-of-consciousness narrative technique
questions narratorial authority, resulting in a “fiction that embodies a more democratic
worldview.”
58
However, she conflates aesthetics (the subversion of narrative authority)
with point of view (a presumed subversive attitude towards hierarchical political
systems), without addressing the underlying story that is being told. DeVine employs a
comparative analysis to make her point; compared to other so-called dynamite novels of
the time, The Princess Casamassima “gives revolution a dignified, sympathetic face.”
59

And this is certainly true if one compares James’s more sympathetic treatment of radicals
to the scornful treatment heaped on anarchists in Conrad’s later novels The Secret Agent
and Through Western Eyes, in which the characters are inept caricatures and the sole
female terrorist in the latter novel is demonized by repeated allusions to her
“Mephistophelean” eyebrows and intimidating demeanor.
60

However, The Princess Casamassima ultimately asserts the primacy of the
patriarchal code that governs women’s behavior in keeping, I argue, with the codes
governing the treatment of nineteenth-century female characters in fiction: they are
usually either killed off or married off. Once the Princess’s husband discontinues her
income, nullifying her usefulness to the radical cause, Muniment states that she will
return to her husband. Once her companion, Madame Grandoni, leaves her household,
social, political, and economic necessities require her to return to the patriarchal fold,

70

however unwillingly. Certainly, James’s novel is sympathetic to the plight of nineteenth-
century women stuck in unhappy marriages, whereas other English-language
contemporary novels concluded with far more conventional sacrificial endings. Oscar
Wilde’s 1880 play Vera; or, the Nihilist has the Nihilist Vera killing herself rather than
her intended target, the czar, out of love and to “save Russia.” George Eliot’s 1866 Felix
Holt ends with the female protagonist, a nonviolent dissenter, marrying the hero, while
George Sand’s 1837 Mauprat imagines a bloodless socialist revolution, one in which
women gain equality by educating, domesticating, and socializing brute males. By
contrast Turgenev’s 1877 Virgin Soil, which James reviewed for the Nation in 1877,
emphasizes class distinctions: the upper-class Marianna who dabbles in radical activity
ends up living with Nezhdanov in “chastity,” while the lower-class Mashurina’s
underground activities continue to be cloaked in secrecy—it is she, the novel suggests,
who is the true revolutionary, while Marianna is a reformer, a more socially acceptable
model for middle- to upper-class feminine behavior. If one asks what story is not being
told in English-language realist novels, it is clearly that of the rational, clear-thinking,
independent woman who is free to choose her own mates as she sees fit and who works
equally alongside men to fight against an unjust government. If she were depicted, she
would appear improbable in the realistic mode of narration; this is the paradox of realist
verisimilitude.
As several critics have noted, James cast the leaders of his group of malcontents
as internationalist socialists/anarchists/communists even though mid-1800s London saw a
number of Irish nationalist (“Fenian”) bombing campaigns and assassination attempts

71

within Canada, Ireland, England, and other British territories.
61
Poupin has fled the
Republic in France; the Princess is an American who married an Italian; Schinkel is
German, as is Hoffendahl. DeVine argues that the sensationalist reporting of these
bombings by the London Times “helped to spread a fear of democracy, characterizing the
political reform movement as dangerous by associating it with terrorism and anarchy,”
62

so that even articles detailing bombs planted by Irish nationalists were suggestive of
internationalist class warfare.
63
It is possible that the fear which James intended to invoke
was based on the public’s knowledge of the then-current Irish Republican Brotherhood
bombing campaign, that he displaced the “cause” of the violence onto contaminating
ideas from international thinkers rather than on legitimate anticolonial agitation on the
part of the Irish. Certainly, many of the denizens of the Sun and Moon are cast in the
same stereotypical mold as were the Irish (particularly after the so-called Fenian
uprisings of 1867): drinking, coarse, ignorant, and ineffective. In a letter cited by Leon
Edel, James referred to the Irish as “an inferior and third rate race, whose virtues are of
the cheapest and commonest and shallowest order, while their vices are peculiarly
cowardly and ferocious.”
64
On one hand, then, James seemed to share some of the
negative attitudes toward the Irish that the English had carefully cultivated in order to
justify their hegemonic supremacy in the imperially conceived Great Britain. On the
other, James seemed to believe, reluctantly, that the time was due to grant home rule to
the Irish: “They [the Irish] have been abominably treated in the past—but their wrongs
appear to me, in our time, to have occupied the conscience of England only too much to
the exclusion of other things.”
65
At the same time, then, that the novel enacts this vision

72

of the latent power of the multitude, it diminishes that power by insisting that the
multitude is the rabble: drunk, ignorant, and lazy.
The purpose of this chapter is not to point out the tired idea that James was a
product of his time, exhibiting the very biases he seeks to critique, but rather to
investigate the ways in which creative writings work to contain violence and radicalism
in stories by providing normative narratives that delimit individual and collective agency,
particularly of the working classes and of women. What, precisely, is the story that is
being told? That the majority of radicals are harmless boozers? That actions and
limitations are, in a sense, fated? That women—at least upper-class women—are
ineffective, or “futile,” as Robinson states of the Princess? This latter idea would have
been refuted by the newspapers James read, with respect to Sophie Pieoffsky, a noble
Russian nihilist charged in the assassination of Alexander II, but not sentenced to death
because the Russian authorities wished to hide from the public and the world at large that
many conspirators against the regime were of high birth.
66
As much as the Jamesian
aesthetic relies on minute psychological analysis to advance the plot, a verisimilitude that
privileges art and the artist as the arbiter of taste and moral judgment, it also subjects the
plot elements to a fatalistic biological and historical determinism. The assumption is that
the minute and highly individual movements of psychological analysis are at odds with
the statistical aggregates of politics. Equally important, what story is not being told? That
those who seek to overthrow power might have a legitimate cause?
Ultimately, the novel upholds a racialized, gendered, and hierarchal social system,
seeming to suggest that the various sorts of admixture introduced by the democratization

73

of a social order lead to that order’s destruction, both from the “top” and the “bottom.”
When the aristocracy is contaminated by impure blood (as with the Princess) or by
dissoluteness (as with Captain Sholto) or when the working classes are goaded into
rebelliousness by gross inequities so that even tradesmen whose skills enable them to
make a modest living will resist (James does not deal with the unemployed poor), that
order is doomed to crumble, the novel suggests, through some vague force of historical
determination. But women who wish to break free of restrictive standards imposed on
feminine behavior lack the agency to enact such changes. The novel ends with the
consignment of the female characters to their respective families, whereas Hoffendahl
and Muniment are still on the loose. Thus, the threat of terrorism from committed men is
real, though any sort of upset to the social order is deferred to some unknowable future
date. Yet, at the same that James asserts the necessity of changing the old order, he does
so with a nostalgic nod to the beautiful forms created by corrupt political bodies. In other
words, while it is fair and necessary that women, workers, the Irish, and other oppressed
peoples rebel against their particular colonizers, there is a concomitant loss of order and
beauty. Though the novel displaces the potential violence of anticolonial Irish activity
and of homegrown labor dissatisfaction onto an internationalist underground, James’s
nineteenth-century readers would be aware of violence closer to home.
The Princess Casamassima is perhaps the seminal work of “feminist-terrorist”
fiction in the English language due to its prescience in constructing a fictional radical
female terrorist in late-nineteenth-century genteel England, and in highlighting the
institutionalized constraints against women’s agency. James was a well-known writer, so

74

the novel was assured of review in the major journals of the time and of a more general
readership than real-life radicals would have had. Other than the titillating newspaper
stories about Nihilist/terrorist women in Russia, few women radicals were written about
or published. (The radical actions and writings of feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst
in England and anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Marie Ganz in America were yet
to come.) One exception was in Ireland, where women jointed the Young Ireland
movement in the mid-eighteenth century and published poems in support of anticolonial
violence. Antoinette Quinn credits Irish nationalism with giving women a voice in the
public forum,
67
and their publications and participation in the Young Ireland movement
conferred a celebrity which had been forgotten and/or deliberately erased by subsequent
generations until the publication of the Field Day anthologies.
68
It is unlikely that James
would have followed nationalist Irish newspapers, which is unfortunate, because his
novel certainly could have engaged a more thoughtful argument had he paid more
attention to the actual arguments used by radical groups. As an example, it is instructive
to note the rhetoric used by one woman who openly advocated political violence. Below
is a passage from an 1848 editorial in the United Irishman, written by Ellen Mary Patrick
Downing:
A horror of bloodletting appears to be regarded as the feminine virtue in Ireland.
Alas! dear friends, will you lose your true virtue, God’s divine charity, to set up
this false idol in its stead? What harm is there in blood, if it were not the type of
pain?—and will ye not in this prefer the type to the reality? It were most womanly
to choose great blood-letting and small pain, rather than avarice of blood and
prodigality of suffering. Is it cruel that the wronger should suffer for the wronged?
Lest the rich be hurt, must the poor be tortured? Do you believe famine to be
milder than the sword? . . . Ladies of Ireland, who walk smiling over the desolate
land, and shrink horrified from the coming struggle, lest it lose you a husband or

75

child, listen to the wail of the widow and the orphan shrieking through the isle—
behold the father watching the death throes of his starving children—and then,
reflecting in your hearts, pronounce is it your womanhood or your selfishness
cries out against this war. . . . Remember, I beseech you, that to preserve this
peace which you prize so dearly, millions must perish by famine and disease.
69

In this passage, Downing makes three key arguments: (1) that deploying violence to
prevent greater violence is a moral act; (2) that it is unjust to spare rich people from pain
if poor people must suffer more (thus, by reverse logic, it is just to engage in violence);
and (3) that it is “womanly” or appropriately feminine to advocate violence in order to
prevent greater bloodshed. She does not advocate the participation of women in violent
acts.
Downing’s arguments correspond to a detailed philosophical justification made
by Ted Honderich, a political philosopher, for principled political violence, what he calls
“terrorism for humanity.” Honderich outlines a “principle of humanity,” which he argues
is the moral goal for human endeavor. Its primary end is “to make well-off those who are
badly off, by way of certain policies”; these policies include transferring means from the
better-off, reducing the necessity of inequalities, and allowing necessary violence.
70
In his
logic-based justification of political violence, or terrorism, Honderich’s key points are:
(1) no doctrine offers an effective refutation of the use of terrorism for humanitarian
purposes; (2) failing to act to stop an atrocity is morally wrong, an omission which
functions as an act that is just as wrong as are “certain awful acts”; (3) terrorism serves
ends that are fundamental to the practice of democracy; and (4) certain, carefully
calibrated political violence “serves large ends of freedom and equality.” He concludes
that there is a moral justification for “some democratic terrorism,” in particular terrorism

76

that has the aim of liberating a people from invasion and occupation.”
71
Downing is
citing a specific case in Ireland, where the people were starving in large numbers due to
the policies of the British and pro-British landlords, which meets Honderich’s
philosophical justification for political violence. This principle of a higher moral
authority is what many radicals use to justify their actions, an argument that escaped
Henry James completely.
The most credible oppositional viewpoint to violence as a means of overthrowing
a current government is articulated by Mr. Vetch, a former radical who believed as a
youth that politics “had been invented on purpose to throw dust in the eyes of
disinterested reformers and to circumvent the social solution” (309). By the age of sixty-
five, however, he has renounced his youthful ideas:
for what was any possible change in the relations of men and women but a new
combination of the same elements? If the elements could be made different the
thing would be worth thinking of; but it was not only impossible to introduce any
new ones—no means had yet been discovered for getting rid of the old. The
figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies and superstitions
and stupidities of man, and their position with regard to each other at any given
moment could be of interest only to the grim, invisible fates who played the game.
(310)

Vetch’s invocation of the word “constitutional” indicates that he has reversed his
youthful position and now believes in reform, or “politics.” But he is jaded and
ineffectual; his ruminations serve as a cautionary warning against the Muniments of the
radical world who may replace the current leadership but be no better than the old. His
statement suggests that the ability to wield power itself is corrupting, directly challenging
Muniment’s view that a “correct sort” exists that would rule fairly. Thus, it is an

77

argument for the status quo as a default safety measure, and his invocation to the fates
suggests that, therefore, resistance is futile.
This, the immediate answer to Zizek’s metaliterary question—what is the story
being told?—seems to be the familiar cautionary tale about a flirtation with dangerous
antisocial and/or unconventional mores, which leads to the containment of not only
female and feminist radicalism, but of apparently necessary political change itself. Even
with the somewhat open-ended conclusion that seems to keep open the possibility of
future armed struggle (when Schinkel reflects to himself that Robinson’s revolver “would
certainly have served much better for the Duke,” 511), the novel ultimately upholds the
status quo both politically and aesthetically. The lack of arguments for and against
violence that would lead to an understanding of the issues or the ability to make an
ethical judgment renders the novel as a self-contained, de facto arbiter of taste and moral
judgment. The novel in a way is parallel to its characters’ fates: reduced to a more or less
conventional ending, an uninspired reading, a veiling of the real-life radicalism that was
soon to engulf England on several fronts, primarily from Ireland. Irish writers, by contrast
to James, do indeed invoke anticolonial rhetoric to buttress their support of political
violence, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

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Chapter 2 Endnotes

1
Jeffory A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 86-8; W. H. Tilley, The Background of
The Princess Casamassima, University of Florida Monographs: Humanities 5 (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 1960), 50-1.

2
Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto
Press, 1983), 4-39; Anna Parnell, The Tale of a Great Sham, ed. Dana Hearne (Dublin: Arlen
House, 1986).

3
Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980), 146, 217, 253.

4
James refers to the group as militant socialists, but the characters’ conversations reveal an
ignorance of some of the basic tenets of socialism. I take up this point later.

5
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, “The Inward Revolution: Sexual Terrorism in The Princess
Casamassima,” The Henry James Review 24 (2003): 147.

6
Henry James, Preface to The Princess Casamassima Vol. 1 New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
([1886]; 1908), xxi.

7
Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 90; Lyall Powers, Henry James and the Naturalist Movement (East
Lansing: Michigan State University, 1971), 92-3; Clymer, America’s Culture, 73-4.

8
Om Prakash Grewal, Henry James and the Ideology of Culture: A Critical Study of The
Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima and the Tragic Muse (Delhi: Academic Foundation,
1990), 3:78, 83.

9
Martha Banta, “Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess Casamassima,”
The Henry James Review 3:2 (1982): 107.

10
Lionel Trilling, “‘The Princess Casamassima,’” Henry James’ Major Novels: Essays in
Criticism, ed. Lyall H. Powers ([1948]; repr., East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1973),
127.

11
Margaret Scanlan, “Terrorism and the Realistic Novel: Henry James and The Princess
Casamassima,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34:3 (1992): 394.

12
Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991),
156.

13
James, Preface to Princess Casamassima Vol. 1, xxi-xxii.

14
Frederick James Nies, “Revision of ‘The Princess Casamassima,’” PhD diss., University of

79

South Carolina, 1985. See Appendix A, p. 1096ff for an overview of contemporary criticism and
Nies’s claim that the novel was viewed as “blighted from its 1886 launching until late in the first
half of the twentieth century” (867). English critics complained of defective characters and “fatal
prolixity and minuteness of detail” (871); American critics called it a “cock-and-bull yarn” (Carl
Van Doren); “comic opera” (A. H. Quinn); “mad dream” (Rebecca West); and a novel with “little
form” in it (Yvor Winters). Also see Kevin J. Haye, ed., “The Princess Casamassima (1886),”
Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews, American Critical Archives 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 175-95, for reprints of the mostly negative British reviews as well as
several positive reviews written by American critics. The anarchist presses scoffed at it. As one
reviewer writes: “To describe and comment upon the actual plot of the novel would be to dignify
it quite unjustifiably.” Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, http://katesharpleylibrary.net/
literaturenotes.pdf, accessed 21 October 2007.

15
Yvor Winters, Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism
(Norfolk, CN: New Directions, 1938), 205.

16
W. H. Tilley, The Background of The Princess Casamassima (University of Florida
Monographs No. 5, Fall 1960), 53.

17
John Lucas, “Conservatism and Revolution in the 1880s,” Literature and Politics in the
Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), 173-219.

18
Margaret Scanlan argues that James uses irony to examine his own fears and anxieties, and that
when he was unable to construct an omniscient perspective or adopt a political stance, “he had to
negate everything in the political world.” See Scanlan, “Terrorism and the Realistic Novel,” 295,
297. Paul Hollywood suggests that the “true” subject of the novel is the “position of those
consciously outside of, or alienated from the political scene.” See Paul P. Hollywood, “The Artist
as Anarchist: Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima and the Prospect of Revolution,” in
Conrad, James and Other Relations, ed. Keith Carabine and Owen Knowles (Lublin, Poland:
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, 1998), 291.

19
Grewal, Henry James and the Ideology of Culture, 104.

20
Robyn R. Warhol, “Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and
Contemporary Film,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J.
Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 221.

21
Ibid. As discussed in the introduction, the antinarratable refers to that which “shouldn’t be told”
because of social convention or taboo, whereas the paranarratable signifies that which “wouldn’t
be told” because of formal convention, as when women are either killed or married off in novels,
whereas in “real life,” they lead much richer lives.

22
James, Preface to Princess Casamassima, xviii. Tilley attributes this mélange of ideologies to
James’s reliance on the Times’ characterization of radical thought, which exhibited a similar
confusion of terms. See Tilley, Background, 24.

23
Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, intro. Clinton F. Oliver (1886; New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1959), 110. Subsequent page references will be inserted parenthetically in the text.

80

24
In his examinations of the various revisions James made in the text between the first serial
publication and the New York edition, Tilley suggests that the change from “smashed” to
“assisted” is intended to make the Princess sound less fervent. This is in keeping with Nies’s
conclusion in his comprehensive study of James’s revisions that in the New York edition, the
Princess is more glamorous, less sweet or soft, more ironic, and more calculating. See Tilley,
Background, 50; and Nies, “Revision,” 1073-75.

25
Grewal, Henry James and the Ideology of Culture, 95.

26
William R. McKercher, Freedom and Authority (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 183.

27
Though published secretly in German and French in 1848, the Communist Manifesto, for
instance, was more widely available by the time it was translated into English in 1881. Similarly,
Marx’s Das kapital: Kritik der politischen oekonomie was first published in German in 1867, was
translated into French in 1875 (Le Capital), and was available in excerpted form (as Extracts from
the Capital of Karl Marx) in English as early as 1875. Anarchist writings were available in
France: between 1840 and 1875 Proudhon published several books outlining his views on
property and revolution, and an anarchist journal was published in France from 1858 to 1861.
Bakunin’s God and the State was published in German in 1872, in French in 1882, and in English
in 1883. Paul Hollywood suggests that James had access to the works of Stirner, Proudhon, and
Bakunin. See Hollywood, “The Artist as Anarchist,” 293-94, 301.

28
Tilley, Background, 53.

29
Ibid.

30
Tilley, Background, 24; Christine DeVine, “Revolution and Democracy in the London Times
and The Princess Casamassima,” The Henry James Review 23:1 (2002): 55.

31
Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 160.

32
Tilley, Background, 24.

33
Frank Harris, The Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1909]; 1963), 180-1.

34
Liam O’Flaherty, The Informer (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1925), 147.

35
Mr. Verloc’s primary trait is his laziness, while one of the anarchists he contacts is described as
follows: Michaelis was “no good in discussion” because “the mere fact of hearing another voice
disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once—these thoughts that for so many
years, in a mental solitude more barren than a waterless desert, no living voice had ever
combated, commented, or approved.” Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1923), 59.

36
D. Ryazanoff, The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1963), 53.

37
P. J. Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government,
trans. Benj. R. Tucker (New York: Humboldt Publishing, 189-?).

81

38
Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850-1892
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999). See especially chapter 10, “The Newspaper Business, 1880-
92,” which reports that an 1886 survey of the provincial newspaper scene throughout the British
Isles demonstrates steady growth during the previous fifty years and lists the various newspapers
in publication.

39
Thomas Francis Meagher, speech against the Peace Resolutions, Conciliation Hall, Dublin,
originally published in The Sword, 28 July 1846. Rpt. In Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,
Vol. II, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 123-4.

40
See, e.g., William Morris, William Morris on Art and Socialism, ed. Norman Kelvin (Minneola,
NY: Dover Publications, 1999).

41
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 5-6.

42
Clinton F. Oliver, Introduction, The Princess Casamassima Torchbook Edition (1959), 14.

43
Frederick J. Hoffman, “The Princess Casamassima: Violence and Decorum,” Henry James’s
Major Novels: Essays in Criticism, ed. Lyall H. Powers (East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 1973), 140-1.

44
Ibid., 141.

45
Eileen Sypher, “Anarchism and Gender: James’ The Princess Casamassima and Conrad’s The
Secret Agent,” Henry James Review 9:1 (1988): 2.

46
Miller, “The Inward Revolution,” 147.

47
Ibid., 149.

48
For the homoerotic implications of the text, see Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism, 95,
where he argues that the narrative possibilities in the novel “make it clear that Hyacinth,
according to the narrative’s logic, cannot be allowed to be a terrorist because he is also gendered
feminine.” Millicent Bell suggests that Hyacinth Robinson is cast “as the romantic heroine of his
own text”; see Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 103.

49
Grewal, Henry James and the Ideology of Culture, 113.

50
Bell states that “‘Not knowing’ is his very subject.” Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 160.

51
John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984), 186.

52
Mark Seltzer, “The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35:4 (1981): 506–34.

53
Shlomith Rimmon attempts to resolve the critical debates over Jamesian ambiguity by
formulating a theory of narrative and verbal ambiguity, narrowly construed “to cover only the

82

relation obtaining between mutual exclusives,” in order to provide “a detailed demonstration of
the irresolvability of the ambiguity of these works, in the hope that such a demonstration will stop
the endless debates among critics, debates motivated by a compulsion to choose between
mutually exclusive hypotheses, when the very phenomenon of ambiguity makes such choice
impossible and undesirable.” See Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity—the Example of James
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xi-xii. Ambiguity is a feature of James’s
autobiographical work as well. Leon Edel points out that, in Notes and Sons, James writes of an
“obscure hurt” he suffered during the Civil War, but was so vague that one could not discern the
nature of the hurt. Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James Volume I: 1843-89 (New York: Penguin
Books, 1977), 145-8.

54
DeVine, “Revolution and Democracy,” 55.

55
For an analysis of James’s sources, see Tilley’s Background and DeVine’s “Revolution and
Democracy.”

56
Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 354-5; Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity.

57
Zizek offers an example from an interpretation of what he considers the conventional fairytale
storyline found in Shrek as “potentially ‘subversive’ and . . . as yet another ‘site of resistance.’”
He argues that critics must recognize that through all these displacements, “the same old story is
being told. In short, the true function of these displacements and subversions is precisely to make
the traditional story relevant to our ‘postmodern’ age—and thus to prevent us from replacing it
with a new narrative.” Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 70-71.

58
DeVine, “Revolution and Democracy,” 57.

59
Ibid., 66.

60
Secret Agent features no female radicals, but Under Western Eyes demonizes the female
terrorist by repeatedly alluding to Sophia Antonovna’s “Mephistophelean” eyebrows. See Joseph
Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, [1911]; 1963).

61
I offer a few examples: several Londoners were killed when a bomb planted by the Fenians
exploded at Clerkenwell Prison in 1867; The Times offices were bombed in 1883; Lord
Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke were murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1882; and on 24
January 1885, Westminster Hall, the House of Commons, and the Tower of London were
dynamited. For a more complete history of Fenian, or Irish Republican Brotherhood, activities,
see Michael Laffan, "Violence and Terror in Twentieth Century Ireland," in Social Protest,
Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Europe, ed. W. J. Mommsen and
Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: Berg, 1982), 156; K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-
American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979); John Devoy,
Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York: Chase D. Young, 1929), 185–234.

62
DeVine, “Revolution and Democracy,” 55.

63
Ibid., 54.

83

64
Quoted from letter to Grace Norton. See Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James Volume I: 1843-
89 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1953), 763.

65
Edel, Life I, 763. James’s attitude towards the Home Rule bill was one of reluctant acceptance:
“I can’t but feel that some sort of home-rule measure is destined to come sooner or later, by the
irresistible march of things.” Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters Volume III 1883-1895
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1980), 125. “The violence of party division and party hatred is
beyond any point it has ever reached before and it is beginning to ravage society in the manner in
which it has long done so in France. People don’t speak—don’t see each other. The Home Rulers,
socially, and judging by London, are nowhere. This doesn’t alter my conviction that the gain of
their cause is a certainty of the future” (Edel, Life, 217).

66
New York Times editorial, 15 April 1881, 4; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York
Times.

67
Women’s support and indeed the support of the larger community was needed to thwart the
British, who were far better armed than the working-class Irish.

68
Antoinette Quinn, ed., “Ireland/Herland: Women and Literary Nationalism, 1845-1916,” in The
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, Vol. V, ed. Angela
Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní
Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills (Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press, 2002), 895-
900.

69
Ellen Mary Patrick Downing, excerpt from the United Irishman (1848), in The Field Day
Anthology of Irish Writing, 60-61.

70
Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (London: Pluto
Press, [1989]; 2003).

71
Ibid., 192, 144, 169, 165.

84

Chapter 3

Reclaiming the Monster in Irish “Troubles” Fiction

In this chapter, I will focus primarily on novels dealing with Irish nationalist and
republican groups that advocated equal rights for all Irish citizens and armed resistance to
English rule.
1
During the second decade of the twentieth century, to which I’ll refer as the
“early Troubles,” one such group was the Irish Citizen Army, which formed in 1914 and
later merged with the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and members
of other groups to form what was later called the Irish Republican Army.
2
Its platform of
equal rights, civil and religious liberty, armed resistance to foreign occupation, and
suffrage for women was outlined in the 1916 Proclamation, which proclaimed the group
the provisional government of the new republic of Ireland. In the latter part of the
century, beginning in 1969 and ending with the peace accord in 1996, to which I’ll refer
as the “later Troubles,” the primary IRA group that adopted this earlier platform was the
Provisional Irish Republican Army, or Provos, as they are commonly called. The Provos’
stated goal was to implement the Proclamation of 1916, and, though there were
ideological disagreements and evolving policies within the organization, particularly with
respect to socialist ideals and the constitutionalism-versus-armed-struggle debate, they
nonetheless formed an ideological and etymological link with the early republicans’ fight
for an Irish Socialist Republic and gender equality, though the latter was not stated
explicitly in the IRA Constitution.
3

Gender in Irish discourses of resistance is particularly salient because Irish
women have long been actively involved in the fight against British rule while, at the

85

same time, some of the key symbols deployed by republicans and nationalists to assert
the difference of the Irish from the English—for instance, the invocation of “Mother
Ireland” as the repository of all that represented true Ireland, with its Gaelic culture and
language, as well as Catholicism—served to define women’s roles in conventionally
stereotypical ways.
4
Thus, throughout the most violent periods of struggle against the
British, women were alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) recruited into active
fighting roles and yet later subjected to attempts to erase and diminish their importance.
The historical record suppressed the crucial roles that women played in the fight against
the English, beginning with the agrarian struggles of the mid-1880s; coalescing during
the 1916 Rising, the 1919-1921 Anglo-Irish War (or, War of Independence from the Irish
perspective), and the Irish Civil War which followed; reemerging in the North during the
1970s’ period of increased violent resistance to British rule, and continuing through the
peace agreements in the 1990s.
Numerous accounts relate this contradictory treatment. According to historian
Maria Luddy, eighteenth-century farm women “assaulted tithe proctors, executed arson
attacks, intimidated individuals and even committed murder.”
5
Luddy contends that
women played an active role in agrarian secret societies until a shift in late-nineteenth-
century gender expectations—occurring around the time of the Land League—caused
men to denounce “riotous” women.
6
An excellent account of this problem is related in
Anna Parnell’s 1907 memoir of the late-nineteenth-century agrarian struggles entitled
The Tale of a Great Sham, which details the work of the Ladies’ Land League—formed
at the male Land League’s request in anticipation of internment—and exposes the

86

conflicts that arose between the two groups once the men were released from prison.
Parnell’s book criticizes the compromises of the original aims that the men, led by her
brother, Charles Parnell, wanted to make, and the conflicts that ensued, culminating in
the men’s attempt to suppress the Ladies’ Land League by refusing to pay their League-
related debts unless they agreed to disband legally yet continue to do support work for the
men.
7
Perhaps because the book was highly critical of her illustrious brother, Parnell was
unable to find a publisher and the manuscript was thought destroyed until it surfaced in
1959 addressed to Helena Molony, who similarly was unable to find a publisher. The
memoir was finally published in 1986.
8

During the early Troubles, the Irish Citizen Army, the most egalitarian of the anti-
British groups which served as the paramilitary arm of the Labour movement, actively
recruited women fighters and trained them to shoot as well as to learn nursing skills.
Constance Markievicz, for instance, was second-in-command at Stephen’s Green during
the 1916 Easter Rising and, along with Margaret Skinnider, served as a sniper. Both
continued to fight during the Anglo-Irish War and the civil war of 1920-22 on the side of
those who opposed the treaty that partitioned Ireland. Skinnider carried detonators for
bombs from Glasgow to Dublin and boasted about the accuracy of her aim—“More than
once I saw the man I aimed at fall”—and claimed to have seen two British soldiers “drop
to the street” after Countess Markievicz fired at them.
9
But even among the Irish Citizen
Army, whose proclamation asserted that the newly established Republic “guarantees
religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens [Irishmen
and Irishwomen],” conflicts arose over the degree to which the women would engage in

87

the fight.
10
De Valera reportedly would not allow women fighters under his command,
11

and there was differential treatment within the units that did accept women.
12
Skinnider
relates how Commandant Mallin would not authorize her plan to bomb a hotel from
which British soldiers were shooting because he did not want a woman to run this risk.
Skinnider writes that she retorted, “My answer to that argument was that we had the same
right to risk our lives as the men; that in the constitution of the Irish Republic, women
were on an equality with men.”
13
Dissuaded nonetheless from the bomb plan, she was
assigned to burn two buildings during the execution of which she was shot in three places
(and survived).
However, following partition and the establishment of southern Ireland as the
Irish Free State, concerted efforts were undertaken by de Valera’s government to
expunge the historical record of women’s roles and to delimit women’s sphere of
activities; these efforts culminated in the 1937 constitution which affirmed the Catholic
Church’s “special position” in Ireland and relegated women to the home.”
14
In their
analysis of women’s involvement in the early and late Troubles, Ryan and Ward
conclude, “If the experience of world war and nationalist uprising in the early years of the
last century [the twentieth] succeeded in transforming gender ideologies, it was a purely
temporary transformation.” They argue that the transfer of control from British to Irish
representatives resulted in a “counter-revolution that followed the formation of the Free
State [which] re-established traditional gender relations as an immediate priority and
developed institutional arrangements that mirrored those they had initially fought to
reject.”
15

88
Militant women in the latter twentieth century faced similar double standards
and subsequent erasures of their contributions. A key symbol invoked by nationalists and

republicans to distinguish Ireland as an autonomous entity is that of “Mother Ireland,” an
allegorical image that encompasses the young and beautiful maiden, Roisin Dubh; the
mother/old woman, Shan Van Vocht; and the Virgin Mary. In her study of republican
men’s autobiographies, Louise Ryan argues that this iconic symbol was intended to
construct appropriately feminine roles— as sacrificial, mourning mothers or selfless
young assistants to the men—at a time of increasing female involvement in militarism.
16

Jayne Steel defines Mother Ireland as an image that is “both marginal yet mainstream,
extimate yet intimate, good yet bad, and frequently the abject maternal.”
17
The constant
invocation of iconographic constructions of women’s roles within militaristic groups
underlies many of the gender issues that vexed intragroup relations.
18
Thus, images of
and rhetoric about the Virgin Mary, motherhood, and the motherland imposed
contradictory standards on republican women, who were sometimes held to traditional
views that proscribed women from engaging in any sort of politics, much less violent
ones, against the republican necessity for community support which required the active
participation of women in violent activities. Indeed, at the time of writing their study in
2004, Ryan and Ward saw distinct parallels between the possibility for real social change
in the second decade of the twentieth century as in the first decade of the twenty-first.
However, while they believed that Ireland is in a similar transitional period, they evinced
skepticism: “Again, the final outcome in terms of transformation of gender relations
remains uncertain.”
19
The pattern of women’s increased visibility in the political realm

89

and on the battlefield being followed by periods of retrenchment, as occurred in the early
to mid-twentieth century, they suggest, remains an open-ended possibility.
Many of the women involved with the IRA participated in numerous radical and
reform groups, and arguments surfaced over priorities pertaining to feminist, socialist,
and nationalist goals from the beginning of Irish women’s involvement in nationalist and
republican struggles. After 1912, according to historian Rosemary Cullen Owens, a
breach between suffragists and nationalists opened up (similar to that in the United States
between abolitionists and suffragists) when nationalists grew concerned that too great an
emphasis on getting the vote for women would derail Home Rule bills and other
nationalist and republican goals. Constance Markievicz blamed England for enslaving the
Irish and wrote an editorial under her pen name of Baca, stating that “the first step on the
road to freedom is to realize ourselves as Irishwomen—not as Irish or merely as women,
but as Irishwomen doubly enslaved and with a double battle to fight.”
20
However,
Markievicz later directed her energies solely to the republican fight, believing that once
Ireland won its freedom, its constitution would assure equal rights for women, while
other prominent feminists argued that women must be granted equal rights before Ireland
could become an independent nation.
Such debates continued during the later Troubles, the key arguments of which are
succinctly articulated in a collection of interviews conducted in the North of Ireland by
Elizabeth Shannon. To the question of an internationalist socialist feminism that would
eschew national boundaries, or even ownership of land, Marie Mulholland, an Irish
Catholic nationalist insists on the right of the Irish to “make [their] own mistakes,” that

90

the connection between feminism and nationalism is inseparable and therefore feminism
under British rule was unthinkable.
21
In an uncited quotation on various nationalist
websites, Mairead Farrell echoes that sentiment: “I am oppressed as a woman, and I’m
also oppressed as an Irish person. Everybody in this country is oppressed, and yet we can
only end our oppression as women if we end the oppression of our nation as a whole.
22
In
an interview with Shannon, Farrell insists that she planted a bomb “because of [her] own
ideology,” not because of pressure by men in the IRA, yet admits that, in the 1980s, few
republican women held leadership positions.
23
Indeed, as the history of the two periods of
Troubles shows, attitudes among republicans towards women fighters varied greatly over
time and at the time of need.
24
Furthermore, in recent years, feminists have criticized
theory itself—singling out both cultural criticism and postcolonial theory as masculinist
constructions of nationalist identity that exploit and repress women.
25

The attempts to erase the history of women’s involvement in the Troubles, early
and late, was duplicated in fictionalized writings by and about republicans. Until quite
recently, few novels were published that depicted women IRA fighters from an insider
perspective. Just as Anna Parnell had difficulty publishing her account of the Ladies’
Land League, the Protestant nationalist Rosamond Jacob could not find a publisher for
her fictional account of the Anglo-Irish War, The Troubled House: A Novel of Dublin in
the ’Twenties, which features a mother of three sons, all anti-Treaty nationalists and
republicans (though one is a pacifist), who espouse intelligent, nuanced, and differing
views on the ideological spectrum regarding political violence in Northern Ireland.
26
It
was finally published after she paid the printing costs herself in 1938.
27

91

While several factors bear on publishing decisions, the novels that were published
depicted women in the conventional dialectical opposition between angel and demon,
nurturing mother and bad mother, virgin and whore, part of the unstable conjunction
between the woman-as-nature thematic that is convergent with the woman-as-destroyer
thematic in the Hegelian representation of woman as the locus of blood and kinship. One
early work of fiction depicting women in the IRA from an insider perspective is Liam
O’Flaherty’s The Martyr, whose portraits of two key female characters illustrate this
point. Angela Fitzgibbon, the cold and beautiful republican (thus, eugenically pure), is,
like the Princess Casamassima, from a wealthy upper-middle-class family, described as
an “angel” (albeit a dark and fallen one), and as a whore. She has many lovers, but is
beholden to no one; her “unfathomable” beauty is fatally alluring, bringing death to
whatever leader is enslaved by her.
28
She makes even the saintly Crosbie (the martyr of
the title) lust for her. Thus, even though her character is humanized and idealized by her
reputation among the lower-ranking members of the IRA as the “tragic queen of Irish
legend, the beautiful dark Rosaleen in mourning for her country’s serfdom”
29
—another
key trope used in Irish writing to cast women as victims—it is her whorishness that
“explains” her single-minded, unrelenting commitment to the anti-Free State fight.
By contrast, Kate McCarthy is also a full-fledged fighting member of the IRA, but
is depicted as serving only out of love for Tracy. When he is injured, she nurses him and
stays with him, exemplifying the faithful woman. She makes Tracy “want to be nursed
back to health, to be petted and fondled like an ailing child in its mother’s arms.”
30
Thus,
The Martyr falls into the paranarratable paradigm: the story that shouldn’t be told

92

because of formal convention is of the “good” woman ending badly; she survives along
with her man with the assumption that they will be married. The “bad” woman is let
loose after the soldiers capture her because she has more value as a symbol—the captured
Dark Rosaleen—than she does returned to a world in which there is no return to
acceptance and fulfillment. The civil war is ending, she is an outcast among her own
class, and she has no man by her side. Indeed, women’s goodness seems to be a condition
of their marriageability: the unnamed “girls” who participate in the IRA are described as
“plain and unattractive virgins caught up in this unseemly profession of war by the lack
of exciting swains.”
31
The Martyr clearly upholds Hegelian notions of women as the
keepers of familial piety and suggests further that not only are single women the only
women willing to engage in political violence but that somehow the willingness to
engage in political struggle is some sort of revenge for not having a man. As such their
association with “blood” lines devolves into an association with blood lust, an unstable
position that can only be represented as irrational anger or revenge.
Patrick Magee’s conclusion that “manufactured consent” resulted in pro-British
stereotypes that portray the republican male as a “monosyllabic bigot thug” and the
female as a “temptress terrorist” led him to call for Irish republicans and loyalists to write
their own stories about the Troubles.
32
Since the publication of Magee’s 2001 study of
Troubles fiction, several historical novels have been published from what Cathal Liam
calls “the Irish perspective,” that is, from the perspective of a colonized nation fighting an
occupying force (at least in the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland).
33
However, the
consent manufactured even in novels that seek to portray the early Troubles

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sympathetically seems to require diminishing the role of women in the wars and
concurring that violence may have been historically necessary but unfortunate. Liam’s
Consumed in Freedom’s Flame (2001) depicts the events leading up to the 1916 Easter
Rising and the Irish War of Independence from 1919-1921, while his sequel, Blood on
the Shamrock (2006), covers the ensuing civil war from the perspective of his pro-Treaty
fictional character.
34
Liam’s first novel never mentions any of the women who fought
during the Easter Rising; in fact, in 406 pages, only one woman is mentioned who serves
as a republican—as a courier—whereas, historically, several women served as couriers,
nurses, and food preparers inside the Four Courts area of Dublin where the uprising took
place, and at least nine fought in the Irish Citizen Army column that marched on Dublin
Castle.
35
And the sequel, whose lead character joins the pro-Treaty side, only mentions
the women as so many chattering parrots of de Valera’s anti-Treaty position. Such
elisions of women’s history contribute to the nationalist mythology promulgating tales of
the heroic republican fighter who has wrested autonomy from the mighty British, and
perpetuate the collective forgetting of women’s agency that formed part of the
increasingly Catholic and conservative Irish Republic, as represented by the 1937
Constitution. Cathy Spellman’s 1985 novel, An Excess of Love, explores the familial
connections that form the basis of two sisters’ involvement in the IRA. Based loosely on
Constance Markievicz (neé Gore-Booth), the author borrows details from the life of the
Gore-Booth sisters to explore the interwoven, generational obligations and complications
of the conflict as well as Spellman’s own relations with her sister.
36
Roddy Doyle’s A
Star Called Henry (1999) and Oh, Play That Thing! (2004) feature an active member of

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the IRA, Miss O’Shea, but only as seen through the eyes of her student cum lover cum
husband Henry Smart. Smart is an apolitical assassin for the IRA who is duped into
killing people who may not be guilty of the betrayals with which they’re charged; the
novel thus implicitly and unequivocably condemns assassinations and other forms of IRA
violence. The majority of such novels, then, generally focus on women’s familial and
romantic connections rather than their political actions.
In this chapter I examine closely two writers’ works that fit the definition of what
Barbara Harlow calls “resistance literature”—novels that “seek different historical
endings [whose] endings are already implicit, contained within the narrative analysis and
construction of the conditions and problematic of the historical situation itself.”
37
The
novels of both Morgan Llywelyn and Marion Urch delineate the political arguments and
historical conditions which motivated the faction of the IRA that evolved into the
Provisional IRA in the 1970s, eschew any notions of eugenic purity, foreground women’s
involvement in those struggles, and end inconclusively, with the sense that the struggle
continues, rather than with packing off the women to their husbands, as in James’s novel.
Llywelyn’s five-volume fictionalized history of the Troubles (entitled, respectively,
1916; 1921; 1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State; 1972: A Novel of Ireland’s Unfinished
Revolution; and 1999: A Novel of the Celtic Tiger and the Search for Peace), begins with
the sinking of the Titanic and ends with the signing of the peace accords in Northern
Ireland in the mid-1990s. The novels foreground women’s involvement in the earlier and
later Troubles in both the physical fighting and the support activities: nursing the
wounded; carrying messages, guns, and supplies; harboring fugitives from the British

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and, after partition, from the pro-treaty “Free Staters.” Urch’s Violent Shadows (1996) is
a political-historical bildüngsroman detailing a woman’s preparation to join the Irish
Republican Army in the later period of the Troubles. The novel eschews the sweeping,
almost epic, terrain that is Llywelyn’s canvas to focus on 1981, when ten republicans
died while on hunger strike. Widely credited with radicalizing fence-sitters, the period of
the hunger strikes generated enormous support for the republicans, even from people who
didn’t support their violent tactics.
38

Both novelists were born out of Ireland to Irish parents (Llywelyn in New York,
Urch in England, moving around throughout her childhood), both spent much of their
childhood in their ancestral villages, and both became deeply immersed in Irish culture
and history. All of Morgan Llywelyn’s novels stress her insider access to unpublished
materials and private interviews to establish historical legitimacy, as opposed to imagined
truth, or verisimilitude. She returned to Ireland in 1985 and became a citizen; there she
conducted ethnographic research for her novels. To signal the truth of the history she tells
in her novels, Llywelyn opens each book with an acknowledgment of her vast number of
informants, most of whose names must remain anonymous, in addition to noted citations
and a reference section at the end of each novel citing the historical reference. About the
early Troubles, she writes, for instance, “Family members of participants in the events of
1920-1923 gave generously of their time and memories, even allowing access to personal
papers that may never be published” (1921, ix).
39
In the later Troubles: “The author
gratefully acknowledges the immense contribution made to this book by a number of men
and women who took part in the events depicted. . . . Last but not least, I owe a huge debt

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to the real ‘Séamus McCoy.’ You know who you are. This book could not have been
written without you” (1972, vii). As in many published memoirs dealing with political
violence against the state, the secrecy is necessary to protect those still subject to the law;
in addition, it provides a convenient trope that lends both a sense of suspense to the tale,
but also an air of authenticity requisite to the production of a realistic historical novel.
Marion Urch similarly asserts inside knowledge based on family and researched
history to relate a plausible tale of Irish resistance to colonial control in her novel, Violent
Shadows.
40
She approaches the historical novel somewhat impressionistically; although
she heard family stories and researched the subject thoroughly, she writes that “the art of
fiction (perhaps) is to combine the real and the imagined in order to shed new light on
abiding themes.
41
Although her connections to the IRA were through research and
community stories rather than through direct interviews, she was involved with Irish
groups in London, where she worked as a legal caseworker at the Irish Centre, and she
organized the Green Ink Irish Bookfair (which dramatized a short story by Gerry Adams
while Sinn Féin was still subject to government censorship).”
42
Her family is from North
West Leitrim, close to the border between north and south, which serves as the location
(though renamed as Mullinamore) for most of the novel’s action. Though
unacknowledged, this insider/outsider positioning grants both novelists the freedom to
write about republican politics and actions without fear of reprisals, yet with the family
connections that facilitates access to people at the core of the organization.
Llywelyn’s quintet of novels is committed to nationalist causes, which functions
as a bridge between modernity and postmodernity in its emergent focus on the power of

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the multitude, as conceived by Negri—fluid, diverse, ubiquitous, though a minority—to
challenge British hegemony. Llywelyn’s novels emphasize the poverty of the resistance
fighters as a signifier of the injustice of British hegemony; IRA members are primarily
the workers, not the landowners or wealthy businessmen, though there are exceptions
(such as Markievicz). But within the IRA depicted in her series of novels on the
Troubles, class distinctions are abolished and normal conventions are inverted: women,
the lame, the cripple, the poor farm boy who has proven his mettle—all can become
leaders based on personal commitment, courage, and merit. This plays into the heroic
republican motif and serves to heighten the portrayal of the more noble democratic Irish
by comparison with the condescending, vicious British. Furthermore, while the fight is on
one level nationalistic in its overarching focus on establishing a self-governing republic
and eliminating the border between north and south, on another, it is also international,
with the Irish in England and the United States contributing arms, money, and fighters to
the IRA’s cause. (The IRA also secured arms from the Germans during World War II and
from Libya in the 1970s.)
43
This international support operated outside of England’s
surveillance and punishment capacities, and permeated boundaries that England tried to
cordon off.
Violent Shadows also reveals the porousness of the borders that England tried to
maintain between British and Irish territory in its depiction of the ease with which the
England-born Irish—the main protagonist Tara Donnelly and Kevin, a former soldier she
recruits to the IRA—can cross those borders to participate in IRA bombing campaigns.
Most of the action takes place during the hunger strikes of 1981, when ten political

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prisoners incarcerated in the HM [Her Majesty’s] Prison Maze (commonly known as the
Maze or the H-Blocks) struck to the death in an attempt to regain political prisoner
status.
44
With the strike as a backdrop, the novel traces the increasing radicalization of
Tara, an Irishwoman who grew up in Leeds, England, who had been conscripted by her
Belfast lover Michael to serve as a low-level messenger for an IRA bombing attack there,
and who returns to “lie low” with her aunt and uncle in Mullinamore, her ancestral home
near the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
45
Separated from Michael,
who is in hiding after the bombing, she secretly trains for greater involvement in the IRA,
runs several miles daily, unearths her grandfather’s ancient rifle from its decades-old
hiding spot, where he’d hidden it during a decades-earlier crackdown on nationalist
violence, and teaches herself to shoot. At the same time, however, that the novel traces
the trajectory of Tara’s increasing militancy from the initial low-level action that begins
the narrative, to her self-imposed fitness and arms training, to the fast-forwarded ending
that depicts her engaged on a mission in a seaside English town four years later, its
narrative arc illustrates the circularity of history which is one of its subjects. On her
return to England after three months in Mullinamore, determined to seek out the IRA to
offer her involvement using Michael’s name, she meets the same soldier she’d snubbed
on her arrival: a young Irishman born in Leeds, working as a soldier for England (his
status is never identified). On her return, however, she discovers that Kevin has gone
AWOL, that he’s tempted to join “the other side,” and she knows instantly that she will
recruit him.
46
In a sense, she meets her prior self, and four years later, they are an IRA
team. The journey by ferry into Ireland serves to radicalize both herself and Kevin,

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bookending their political growth, and carries them into England where their English
accents help them disguise their radical activities.
Unlike Henry James, these two novelists—though equally concerned with moral
judgment—stress the political, social, and historical context as a matrix of excessive
colonial violence that gives birth to a corresponding counter-violence, in what Sartre calls
a “boomerang” effect” and what Fanon characterizes as a “skin reflex.”
47
But where
Fanon sees the violence of the “native” as a sort of Nietzschean inherent will to violent
resistance (“The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the
persecutor”),
48
both Urch and Llywelyn emphasize the fight as part of a historical
continuum passed on through the family, from mother to daughter, father to son, sibling
to sibling, as a result not of historical determinism, revenge, or political dysfunction, but
as a justified (qualified somewhat, but ultimately necessary) response to the greater and
more atrocious violence of the colonizer due to its self-legitimizing access to arms, the
legal system, the economy, and other resources. Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the
IRA corroborates this view in the assertion that republicanism in Northern Ireland in the
later Troubles “tended to be an inherited rather than an acquired activity.”
49
Thus, among
more traditional values associated with women, “familial piety” in a republican home
often includes the instillation of republican sympathies and a duty to support, if not
participate in, the struggle against British rule in the north and south.
In Violent Shadows Tara’s return to Mullinamore illustrates the ways in which the
colonial past is imbricated in the present: in the landscape blighted by concrete borders
and walled-off roads between North and South, in the presence of armed guards with

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blackened faces who threaten locals on both sides of the border, in the bodies of the
poverty-stricken locals who barely scrape out an existence in the rocky soil, in the
displacement from the land centuries ago, in the memories, in the soil. When Felix, scion
of a British colonial, returns to his family mansion in Mullinamore to write a history of
the region, his sense of history and the locals is that of the quintessential colonizer,
viewing women as exotic fruit there to be sampled: “as automatically as he sampled the
local seafood, throaty resinous aperitifs or the juices of bloody meats thickened with red
wine” (59- 60). The voraciousness of his appetite for “bloody meats” parallels the
voraciousness of his ancestors in bleeding the local populace of its lands and livelihoods.
Felix sees Tara and village people as more primitive beings who possessed “an almost
clannish, pre-individualistic view of the world” (62) as opposed to the abstract, hyper-
education of his own privileged lineage. Felix’s linear vision of history, summed up by
his mantra, “Reprocess, redevelop, reinterpret, move on” (61), is a stark contrast to the
locals’ grounding in the material rather than the abstract.
Tara’s vision of history is physical and economic: “Two girls. One living in
poverty because any profit went in rent to the other girl’s family—who did nothing
whatsoever to earn it, except think they had the right to it. Of the two girls it was the one
with mud on her feet that Tara could see. A permanent sense of cold, the warmth of
animals. That’s what history is, she thought. Not dates and battles. It’s what we ingest,
it’s thick in our pores, ingrained in the very texture of our skin” (81). History to Tara and
to the villagers is an inseparable component of the present: in the three months Tara spent
in Mullinamore, she “had seen stories come alive in front of her, the past become a

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living, breathing element within the present. . . . The key that reanimated the past was the
hunger strike; the point of ignition, the black flags across the hills” (planted by the locals
to express solidarity with the hunger strikers) (201).
Furthermore, Irish history, in Tara’s cosmology, structures the psychological
makeup of the people themselves, who for centuries have enjoined their children to
silence to prevent them from inadvertently exposing IRA members wanted by the British
police or military. This secrecy in turn constitutes the method of the narrative: the
unnarratable as unspoken acknowledgment of subversive activity. Michael’s withholding
of information about the London bombing, Tara’s aunt and uncle’s silence about the
involvement of her grandfather in the IRA, and the author/narrator’s exclusion of any
details about Tara’s activities after she leaves Mullinamore and Michael to join the
underground wing of the IRA do not represent a lacuna in Irish history or storytelling, but
rather the evidence of the continuation of the struggle. To the attuned listener and/or
reader, the silence, the refusal to speak, represents a tangible reminder that the struggle is
ongoing, that even if independence is won, the scars are too monumental to be
articulated, partly due to the legal ramifications of the assassinations and other actions
committed by IRA members. When Tara decides not to kill Felix and instead joins the
collective family of the IRA, she recognizes the distinction between individual and
collective terrorism that Trotsky identified, refusing to engage in individual vigilantism to
acknowledge the greater authority and legitimacy of the group.
50
However, as Tara’s
uncle states upon learning that she has unearthed her grandfather’s rifle, “‘People tell
stories when the story’s over and this one isn’t. That wee boy [the hunger striker] has

102

died now up in the North. Not much has changed, has it?’” (198). The grandfather’s
secret, Tara’s secret, intuited by her uncle, remains the story of the ongoing fight against
England, what David Lloyd argues is primarily an anticolonial, guerilla war.
51

Narratologically, the textual silence effectively suppresses the presumably bloody details
of Tara’s actions in order to gain the reader’s sympathies.
While the novel seems to take for granted that armed resistance is natural,
justified, and ubiquitously supported by the locals, it probes the moral rationale for
political violence. At the same time, for instance, that Tara claims that “‘Violence is the
voice of the voiceless,’” she also admits that “Violence begets violence” (205), and in an
internal disquisition, she concludes that “Violence is the instrument of repression but also
its child. Before the injustices of the past can be forgiven, they have to have stopped”
(205). And, as we understand implicitly from her Uncle Conrad, the story can’t be told
until English hegemony is overthrown. Violent Shadows sidesteps the ethical problem
that the latter proposition leads to—that is, the ratcheting up of violence leading to more
violence as well as the loss of the moral high ground when both parties commit attacks
against noncombatants—by insisting that violence is only an intermediary phase on the
path to autonomy. Tara states, “The expression of anger, violent or otherwise, was a stage
along the way. . . . A violent reaction to violence can break the victim mould, open up
possibilities, make sure things will never be the same again” (205). This perspective on
violence is not challenged; in fact, it is implicitly upheld in the depiction of the ravaged
countryside, the constantly invoked memories of historical injustices, the continuing
economic oppression of the Irish populace, in the rationality and discipline of the IRA

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members, and the willingness even of Irish soldiers fighting in the British military to
defect to the resistance. Written in 1996 as the peace accords were being enacted, though
set in 1981, the paranarrative thus foretells the story that violent actions were not only
necessary to force the British and Unionists to the negotiating table, but that they were
successful in leading to a cessation of violence. The moral of the story, then, to respond
to Zizek’s overarching question about the story that is really being told both explicitly
and implicitly, is that while violence initially leads to more acts of violence, it ultimately
opens up an avenue of peace and thus it serves a greater good.
Violent Shadows presents terrorist violence as an inexorable, almost mechanistic
response to political oppression, a determinism that drives the multitude to resist. After
Tara’s lover Michael renounces violence, she leaves Mullinamore and Michael to work
with the IRA in England, where her English accent is her greatest asset: “There had been
no time for reflection, just the inexorable movement onwards. Conflict has its own
momentum, its own internal logic. That’s what Michael hadn’t understood. It applied to
individuals as well as to events. She couldn’t have stopped when he’d given her the
chance, even had she wanted to” (211). The family history, the landscape, past and
present political events, the town’s location on the border between north and south, all
conspire to produce the feminist-terrorist Tara, whose personal history, the novel
suggests, is inextricable from the political reality.
By contrast to Urch’s narrative, primarily told from the perspective of the lead
protagonist, LLywelyn’s novels display the sort of Bakhtinian heteroglossic multivocality
that presents a multiplicity of opinions about political violence—albeit from the

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perspective of a colonized people whose desire to be free of British rule is justified by the
violence and discrimination inflicted on them by the British in the South prior to partition
and in the North (as well as by the northern radical unionists) at least until 1999, when
Ireland enters the European Union. Therefore, even though the plot line follows the anti-
Treaty lineage of republicans, the novels include several opposing voices to allow a
reader to draw her own conclusions. Llywelyn’s novels offer not so much a revisionist
history as an excavation of an incompletely told story-history. Unlike Urch, whose
protagonist does not narrate the violent acts she undertakes (other than her unwitting part
in the bombing that takes place in the beginning of the novel), Llywelyn’s novels portray
a nuanced range of nationalist, republican, and reformist actions and ideas represented by
various characters (but only superficially expressing the pro-Treaty or unionist
perspective).
Ned Halloran represents the unrelenting, single-minded, hard-core physical force
man whose loss of his equally committed wife, Síle, to the violence of the Black and
Tans and other life experiences render him unfit for any existence except the physical
fight. The journalist Henry Mooney represents the constitutional nationalist who believes
in going through political and legal channels to attain the goal of a united Ireland free of
British control. A friend of Ned’s, he is the most neutral character, appearing in all five
novels, covering the Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence (or Anglo-Irish War),
and the civil war, after which he emigrates to the United States. His significance vis á vis
the underlying question of the novels—what is the most effective and most ethical
method of attaining statehood?—lies in his admission that the constitutionalist method

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may not work. After the League of Nations declared Ireland an appendage of the British
empire in exchange for England’s support of the League, Mooney tells Síle, “‘There
aren’t any proper channels, not for us. The door’s been slammed in our faces’” (1921,
152). As a moderate, he proposes to Ned that they support the more pragmatic pro-Treaty
approach taken by Michael Collins and others, stating, “‘Idealism got us as far as 1916,
Ned, but it didn’t win the war. Mick Collins is a realist, and that’s what we need now. I
used to agree with Griffith’s [reformist] philosophy, but I’m beginning to think politics is
just a more subtle form of violence—a way for those who have power to exercise it over
those who don’t’” (1921, 183). Thus, Henry is a stand-in for the radicalization of the
ordinary Irish citizen—in that he supports the republican fight against the British,
acknowledging that violence is necessary to force the British to negotiate, but is willing
to attempt constitutional methods as a path to Irish autonomy.
Not only in Ireland, but in many countries where leftist guerilla and/or terrorist
groups gained a foothold, a commonly discussed problem was that of mobilizing the
moderate, relatively comfortable working and middle classes. Some radical theorists
argue that the moderates have to be radicalized before violent actions are begun, while
others argue that leftist revolution is a vanguard movement and that once the vanguard
takes action, the disaffected masses will follow. While this line of thinking clearly failed
in 1960s and 1970s America and appeared to fail after the 1916 Easter Rising, the issue
is complex and plays out differently in different historical, sociological, and geographical
spaces. For instance, the majority of the Irish people at the time of the 1916 Easter Rising
were opposed to the actions of the nascent IRA. However, after the British exerted

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excessive zeal in executing the leaders, public opinion began to change, and sympathy
shifted towards the rebels. Shortly thereafter, from 1919-1921, the Anglo-Irish War or
War of Independence led to the British granting autonomy to the southern twenty-six
counties of Ireland, a victory by some accounts, a failure by others (in partitioning
Ireland).
52

The attempt to rouse the moderates has led to charges of excessive violence on
both sides. In the fictional world, Henry muses about the intentions of the British: “‘By
arresting that great pacifist, Arthur Griffith, Dublin Castle has gone a long way toward
silencing the moderate voices in republicanism that urge constitutional political solutions.
Is this the British intention? In a plan worthy of Machiavelli himself, does Lloyd George
mean to reduce us to such extremes that any method of suppression is justified?’” (1921,
275). Ed Moloney outlines the ruthless strategies used by Gerry Adams during the later
Troubles to gain converts to the IRA organization and to exert control over its leadership.
In one case, for instance, he held back the Belfast Brigade from helping the local
Catholics who were being burned out of their homes by unionists and Protestants during
the Easter riots of 1970 so that the larger populace would become inflamed and join the
IRA.
53
In another, he castigated “militarists” in the organization after a botched
kidnapping in order to remove a rival from a position of power.
54

Though Llywelyn’s quintuplet of novels features multiple voices and
perspectives, the primary narrative voice is that of the nationalist journalist, with Henry
Mooney occupying that role in the first three novels, and Barry Halloran, grandson of
Ned and son of Ursula, the adopted daughter of Ned and Síle, picking up the role

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beginning with the fourth novel, 1972: A Novel of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution,
although Barry begins as an active IRA member. Like Tara in Violent Shadows, the
matrix of Irish history, the pro-IRA town, and Barry’s family’s radicalism compel him to
join the IRA, which he does at the age of seventeen. However, he kills a man on one of
his first actions and is haunted by that act, and though he remains committed to armed
struggle, he asks to be given some task other than going out on raids, whereupon he is put
to work as an explosives expert. However, he ultimately withdraws from armed struggle
(although he does not renounce violence as a tactic) in his decision to publish the
atrocities committed by the English to the rest of the world through the medium of
photojournalism. The reader views most of the violent action of the later Troubles
through Barry’s photos and writings, as she did through Henry Mooney’s reporting in the
earlier struggles.
Unlike numerous other novels that depict the Troubles, early or late, Llywelyn’s
novels foreground the role of women. The first prominently featured fictional militant
female is Síle Duffy, an impoverished woman who becomes a prostitute who serves the
cause by reporting on her British clients to Tom Clarke (a historical character) of the IRB
Army Council. She becomes an IRA courier and takes up the dropped Luger of another
Citizen Army woman fighter who is killed in the 1916 battle. Síle’s conversion to
radicalism, she proudly states, derives from her family connections: “Do you think only
men can be patriots? I come from a Fenian family that goes back generations. The British
took everything from them but their longing for freedom” (1916, 312). She fights
alongside Ned whom she later marries; they adopt an abandoned girl they name Ursula

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but familiarly call Precious. The narrative frequently depicts and invokes historical
women to foreground the important role that women played in the actual fight. Henry
states, for instance, “‘Countess Markievicz would be delighted to hear you classify her
with the men. I hear she’s furious because she wasn’t executed with Pearse and the
others. Next thing you know, Madame will have the suffragettes demanding she be
allowed equal rights to face the firing squad’” (1921, 43). Henry functions as a
protofeminist of sorts, recognizing women’s equality in the fight: as he admires
MacSwiney, he compares him to a virtually sanctified pantheon of Irish republican
fighters, male and female: “There it is again, that wild light that burns in only a few.
Pearse, Connolly, Countess Markievicz . . . Síle” (1921, 205).
Several ethical justifications are deployed in the ongoing argument about the
moral justification of armed resistance. The first is the originary and excessive violence
of the British, articulated in the fictionalized voice of General Macready who evinces the
sort of dehumanization of the Irish engaged in by the English to justify their brutal tactics
against the Irish. In voicing his opposition to a truce with Ireland, opting for martial law,
the fictional Macready states, “‘The civil authorities must be prepared to shoot down
rebels like the mad dogs they are’” (1921, 256). This view is not exceptional, nor is it an
example of atavistic racism; rather, it continued to inflect the editorials and newspaper
reportage in England and elsewhere as well as the private letters of leading literary
figures such as Henry James throughout the history of the troubles.
55
Patrick Magee (an
IRA member who received his doctorate while imprisoned) demonstrates that the
overwhelming majority of fictionalized accounts of Troubles fiction exemplify a pro-

109

British view which depicts the composite Irish republican as “a Mother Ireland-fixated
psycho-killer.”
56

A second justification for armed violence deployed by Irish republicans was
based on legal classifications. The early IRA, composed of the IRB, Irish Citizen Army,
and the Volunteers, waged an open war in 1916, taking over various offices and buildings
in downtown Dublin and hoisting the tricolor in strategic locations. Padraic Pearse read
the Proclamation of the Republic, declaring themselves the provisional government,
outside the General Post Office (the headquarters of the Irish battalion). Based on a
conception of the group as a provisional Irish Republic, in 1921, during the War of
Independence, the fictionalized character of Michael Collins argues that the shooting of
Pearse and the other 1916 leaders by British forces was equivalent to shooting a head of
state. Therefore, Collins’s countermeasures, including assassinations of collaborators and
informers, were justified as acts of war. When Henry protests, “‘In our case . . . the
British called it execution. For treason,’” Collins retorts: “‘Well then, we intended to
execute the lord-lieutenant of Ireland. For tyranny’” (1921, 181). When Henry follows up
with a question about the possibility of making murder palatable, Collins refuses to
engage the end-justifying-the-means argument and declares: “‘We’re just paying the
British back in their own coin. I’m not bloodthirsty, though, and I won’t allow my men to
be. They’re only sent after selected military targets, such as spies in the pay of Dublin
Castle’” (1921, 182). Throughout most of the novels, the narrative consistently
emphasizes that the IRA members deploy violence against military, police, or other
“legitimate” targets. Henry, in his role as moderate spokesperson for the average Catholic

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Irish person, wishes to retain the moral high ground, but feels a “secret fierce joy” at
“seeing his own people outmaneuvering the ancient enemy’” (1921, 182). MacSwiney
condemns England as an imperialist nation that “‘has no scruples about seizing our land
or taking the food out of our mouths or shipping us off to be cannon fodder in their wars.
We’re just a commodity to Britain, something to be used up’” (1921, 204). Such
comments dovetail with Violent Shadow’s depiction of Felix’s and his ancestors’
colonialist approach to Ireland, plundering its food, women, housing, and the landscape.
But where Llywelyn’s novels stress the importance of women to the fight, no
matter their class, their piety, or their connection to family, Violent Shadows ultimately
seems to suggest that terrorist violence engaged in by women and/or feminists is
unfeminine. Throughout the novel, Tara is described in increasingly masculine terms:
“Taut and lean, with small breasts and narrow hips, her body gave an impression of
permanently flexed muscles and restless energy. . . . It was femininity, a softening of the
body and the mind, that she was terrified of” (37). Felix “noticed the high muscular curve
of her buttocks, her wired-up, boyish form” (70). While the physical description mirrors
the shrinking bodies of the dying hunger strikers—in a passage, for instance, in which
Tara, after running daily, is explicitly compared to a hunger striker: “Tara’s breasts
became smaller, her stomach lost its curve [as the striker’s stomach ballooned], there was
no more softness in her” (88)—the description seems a denial of femaleness itself. The
narrative reveals that Tara “was pleased” when her period no longer arrived (88),
suggesting that to fully engage in militant activity a woman must become more
masculine, an argument that Robin Morgan and others have made.
57

111

Thus, while accepting the historical inevitability of violence, the novel reveals its
discomfort with women engaging in acts of violence. At the same time that the novel
foregrounds women’s active roles in engaging in legitimate political violence, which
includes terrorism, it can only figure a feminist-terrorist as a masculinized being who has,
in a sense, unsexed herself, both bodily and psychologically. It ends with Tara and Kevin,
the AWOL soldier she recruited, engaged on a mission, but her desire to work for the
IRA has replaced her sexual desire. Whereas she was a passionate lover with Michael,
with Kevin she is an ally, sister, and soul mate. The narrative suggests that the IRA
family and a shared heritage replaces sexual desire, at least for women (212). What
remains unnarratable is the uneasy conjugations between love/sex and violence as well as
the details of IRA violence, perhaps to avoid the risk of “losing” the reader’s allegiance,
but also due in part to conventional gender expectations governing women’s behavior.
Llywelyn’s novels, on the other hand, feature a range of nationalist women and
historical IRA members who devote themselves to (heterosexual) lovers/husbands,
family, and IRA duties. Though Síle and Ned are passionately married and have adopted
an abandoned child, Síle juggles her activities as a wife, mother, and active member of
the IRA; she is killed trying to defend herself and a host family against the Black and
Tans. Ursula, the adopted daughter of Síle and Ned, is a republican but not an active
member of the IRA who never marries, has a passionate affair as the result of which she
gives birth to one child, Barry. She gives him her father’s rifle when he turns fifteen and
is fearful yet proud when Barry joins the IRA. What can’t be narrated by the novels,
however, is the realization that the familial piety typically associated with women by

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virtue of their blood is what produces the Irish “feminist-terrorist”; loyalty to the family
means loyalty to the republican cause in many cases,
58
and membership in the IRA, in
turn, serves as an incubator of sorts of feminist ideas. The monster, what Negri identifies
as the multitude, emerges from the family to join this collective that challenges one of the
greatest Western powers on earth.
However, as with Urch’s treatment of Tara, the problem of representing militant
women with verisimilitude is complicated by descriptions of Síle as something of a
harridan—she charges the Black and Tan with “the fury of a hunted animal” (1921,
249)—as well as with language that masulinizes her: she drinks whiskey “like a man”
(1921, 124) and can “‘shoot as well as a man’” (1921, 143). As David Lloyd has pointed
out,
[T]he figure of the terrorist-woman recurs in a transformed genre of terrorist film,
not as the simple figure of domestic salvation, but as the aberrational figure that
splits from proper femininity to threaten the well-regulated domestic space. This
aberrational splitting of the feminine image legitimates the excessive violence that
is required to expunge her . . . . Crucial to this set of representations, especially
within the liberal imaginary to which a film like The Crying Game speaks, is the
understanding of insurgency as repressively and atavistically masculine or
patriarchal and correspondingly destructive of a femininity generally associated
with motherhood and passivity. Within such terms, it is impossible that a feminist
project should be linked to violence or that a woman could find in armed struggle
a legitimate locus of agency: the complexity of activists like Mairead Farrell
becomes virtually unthinkable; Jude can only be a virago or a bitch.
59

Furthermore, she functions as representative of all aspects of women’s
experience, loyal wife and mother (though her daughter is adopted) and former prostitute;
a fighter willing to kill, and a victim killed by vicious men. However, her casting as a
former prostitute is not a capitulation to the whore narrative identified by Sjoberg and

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Gentry in journalistic accounts of women militants,
60
but rather an outcome of British
colonial brutality and greed. But even as abject prostitute, Síle subverts British
domination, serving the republican cause by reporting information she gleans from her
British clients to Thomas Clarke (a historical figure) (1916, 312). Nonetheless, such
contradictions render her portrait unbelievable and she is killed off, as is the woman IRA
member from whom Síle first got her gun. The women who survive are the pacifist,
though fierce republican, Ursula, and the temperamental, capricious, and apolitical
American, Barbara, who marries IRA member Barry Halloran.
As much as Llywelyn’s and Urch’s novels portray the women as partial agents of
their destiny, as part of the collective resistance which can encompass the lame and
mixed races, genders, and creeds, the primary taboo underlying these novels seems to be
a ban on narrating homosexuality. No openly gay people are depicted in any of the five
novels, a capitulation to the marketplace, perhaps, which (1) “proves” that terrorist
women could fit into heterosexual norms; (2) doesn’t offend a conservative Catholic
readership, both republican and not, by depicting what might be interpreted by
conservatives as perverse behavior; and (3) maintains a singular focus on republican
politics, identity, and tactics. More importantly, perhaps, it reifies traditional notions of
republican men as manly and heroic, and republican women as capable of violence when
called upon to help the larger community but as nonetheless still possessing an inherent
maternal instinct (even the determinedly single Ursula has a love affair and a child).
Unlike Violent Shadows, Llywelyn’s series ultimately qualifies to a certain degree
its central insight that violence is a crucial step in the path to political autonomy. In the

114

final novel of the series, a note written by the diehard republican Ned Halloran,
discovered after his death, reads: “‘De Valera was both right and wrong. So was Collins.
So were we all” (1999, 492). Thus, Llywelyn’s fifth novel ends on a cautious note of
hope for a collective recognition of culpability and its concomitant, forgiveness, for the
peace accords, and for the entry of the Republic of Ireland into the European Union as an
equal partner, not as a subjugated arm of the British Isles. The open-ended conclusion of
Violent Shadows, on the other hand, represents the inconclusiveness and expansiveness of
the struggle for Irish rule in Northern Ireland, even though whispers of peace talks are
alluded to. The conclusion of each novel recognizes that history writes the next chapter;
there is no complete closure. However, neither is there a rendering of the gun-toting
woman who can state, as real-life IRA member Maria McGuire did:
I spent a year working with the Provisional IRA. I believed in its aim of a new
Ireland, free and we hoped united. I also agreed with the Provisionals’ methods. I
agreed with the shooting of British soldiers and believed that the more who were
killed the better. . . . I accepted too the bombing of Belfast, and when civilians
were accidentally blown to pieces dismissed this as one of the unfortunate hazards
of urban guerilla war.”
61

Although McGuire left the Provisionals for personal reasons (her distrust and dislike of
MacStiofain), her memoir fully upholds violence as a legitimate military tactic. In the
novels’ adherence to the strictures required by verisimilitude, which entails the
conveyance of both probability and sympathy, the realistic narrative mode ultimately
undermines the political arguments which appear to be the aim. Thus, what can be said in
an autobiography cannot yet, it seems, be narrated in the realist historical novel.

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Chapter 3 Endnotes

1
For the purpose of this chapter, I will use the term republican and nationalist to refer to
members of groups that advocated violence as a necessary step toward the creation of an
independent republic of Ireland, including the North of Ireland. As readers familiar with Irish
history know, there are multiple factions within the broader republican groups, with some groups
advocating gender equality, some espousing Marxist philosophies, some focusing solely on the
violent overthrow of the English, others in the early part of the twentieth century unconcerned
with the labor and gender status quo but desirous of working through the legal system as it
existed to attain home rule. At crucial moments in the struggles against English hegemony, some
of the various factions joined together, as in the early Troubles, when the relatively moderate and
middle-class Irish Volunteers (who supported home rule but had been infiltrated by the Irish
Republican Brotherhood, a violent group dedicated to the creation of a republic), joined the Irish
Citizen Army, a socialist labor movement also committed to the establishment of a republic, in
the 1916 Easter Rising. My focus does not include pro-British paramilitaries in the North—even
though their violence was outside the law—because their focus was on the status quo, on
preserving the connection to England.

2
The Irish Citizen Army did not advocate armed resistance when it initially formed in 1914, but
many of its leadership were secretly involved with the militant Irish Brotherhood whose leaders
planned the Easter Uprising of 1916. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to this early mix of
groups as the IRA.

3
For an account of the split between what became the “Official” IRA and the “Provisional” IRA
over the socialist platform, see Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (New York: Penguin
Press, 2002), esp. the “Roots” chapter, 37-73. Appendix 3 in this book outlines the changes made
to the 1986 IRA Constitution after the 1996 convention, 502-8.

4
Fanon has analyzed the phenomenon whereby resistance to colonial rule frequently causes
“natives” to don visible markers of their difference from the occupier; in the case of Algerian
women, it included wearing the veil both as a signifier of their religion and as a means to avoid
detection when aiding the resistance. See Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in The New Left
Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 161-85.

5
Maria Luddy, “Women and Politics in Ireland, 1860-1918,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, Vol. V, ed. Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather,
Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary
O’Dowd, and Clair Wills (Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press, 2002), 69.

6
Luddy, “Women and Politics,” 70.

7
Anna Parnell, Tale of a Great Sham (Dublin: Arlen House, [1907]; 1986).

8
Ibid., Tale, Introduction, 9-10.

9
Margaret Skinnider, Doing My Bit for Ireland (New York: The Century Co., 1917), 137, 114.

116

10
See Ruth Taillon, When History Was Made: The Women of 1916 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale
Publications, 1996). The third and fourth paragraphs of the proclamation, taken from page xvii of
Taillon’s book, read:
“The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and
Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal
opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of
the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and
oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a
minority from the majority in the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent
National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrage of
all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil
and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.”

11
Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto
Press Ltd., 1983), 110.

12
Although in her letters, Constance Markievicz wrote that the “considerable number of I.C.A.
[Irish Civilian Army] women” were “absolutely on the same footing as the men,” members of
other groups that ultimately amalgamated with the Irish Republican Army held more traditional
views of women’s place. Constance Markievicz, Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz (London:
Virago Press, [1934]; 1987), 37.

13
Skinnider, Doing My Bit for Ireland, 143.

14
Article 41.2, Subsection 1 states: “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the
home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”
Subsection 2 states: “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be
obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”
Article 44, Sections 2 reads: “ “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic
Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the
citizens.”

15
Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward, Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and
Wicked Hags (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), 200.

16
Louise Ryan, “‘In the line of fire’: representations of women and war (1919-1923) through the
writings of republican men,” in Irish Women and Nationalism, 45-61.

17
Jayne Steel, “‘And behind him a wicked hag did stalk’: from maiden to mother, Ireland as
woman through the male psyche,” in Irish Women and Nationalism, 108.

18
For additional analyses of mother imagery in Irish literature, see e.g., Catherine Lynette Innes,
Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880-1935 (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1993); Andrea Christina Bobotis, “Mother England, Mother Ireland: National Allegory and
Maternal Authority in Anglo-Irish Literature and Culture, 1880-1922,” PhD diss., University of
Virginia, 2007; Karen Margaret Steele, “Rocking the Cradle, Rocking the System: The Cultural
Representation of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Ireland,” PhD diss., University of Texas at
Austin, 1996; Marti D. Lee and Ed Madden, Irish Studies: Geographies and Genders (Newcastle:

117

Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Megan Sullivan, Women in Northern Ireland: Cultural Studies and
Material Conditions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); Laura Elizabeth Lyons,
“Writing in Trouble: Protest, Literature and the Cultural Politics of Irish Nationalism,” PhD diss.,
University of Texas at Austin, 1993. For a critique of the trope of Ireland as the mourning
mother/widow, see June Elizabeth Dunn, “Troubled Houses: Irish Women Writing the Great
War,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2005, esp. 2-7.

19
Ryan and Ward, Irish Women and Nationalism, 200.

20
Rosemary Cullen Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Movement
1889-1922 (Dublin: Attic Press, 1984), 103-5. Originally published in Bean na hÉireann, April
1909, 104n8.

21
Elizabeth Shannon, I Am of Ireland: Women of the North Speak Out (Boston: Little, Brown,
1989). 192; see especially the chapter, “Beyond Politics,” 189-195.

22
Míchealín Daugherty, “Mairéad Farrell,” Ireland's OWN: Women Freedom Fighters,
http://irelandsown.net/Mairead.html, accessed 7 June 2009. Also see Arm the Spirit, “Women In
The Irish National Liberation Struggle,” Radikal 145, February 1992, http://www.hartford-
hwp.com/archives/61/291.html, accessed 7 June 2009.

23
Shannon, I Am of Ireland, 122, 128.

24
For accounts of women’s involvement in the 1916 Easter Uprising, see Margaret Ward,
Unmanageable Revolutionaries; and Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female
Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
Ruth Taillon details the rank of the nine fighting women in the then-called Irish Citizen Army,
pointing out that Margaret Skinnider was in charge of a squad, Constance Markievicz was second
in command, and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen was a sergeant. Taillon, When History Was Made,
50-76. For firsthand narratives, see Helen Molony’s account of her involvement in John
Connolly’s company’s mission to attack the “age-long symbol of British tyranny in Ireland—
Dublin Castle” in “Excerpt from An Phoblacht (16 May 1936),” The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, Vol. 5, 111-2; and Markievicz, Prison Letters.

25
For a summary and analysis of some of the key arguments, see Emer Nolan, “Postcolonial
Literary Studies, Nationalism, and Feminist Critique in Contemporary Ireland,” Éire-Ireland
42:1-2 (2007): 336-61.

26
Rosamond Jacob, The Troubled House: A Novel of Dublin in the ’Twenties (London: George G.
Harrap, 1938). Taking place in 1920 shortly after the death of Terence MacSwiney as a result of a
hunger strike and in the midst of the Irish War of Independence, the novel provides a superb
exposition of the various perspectives a citizen might take given the political situation in Northern
Ireland. It is told from the perspective of republican Maggie Cullen, wife to a pro-Union man and
mother to three sons—a pacifist, an IRA member who takes part in the 1920 assassinations of
British informers, and an underaged son who carries messages for the IRA. Each articulates his or
her position with intelligence, subtlety, and respect, although the narrative is weighted on the side
arguing the political necessity for IRA violence given the greater violence of the British against
Irish subjects.

118

27
Damian Doyle, “Rosamond Jacob (1888-1960),” in Female Activists: Irish Women and Change
1900-1960, ed. Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2001), 187.

28
Liam O’Flaherty, The Martyr (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1933), 63.

29
Ibid., 163.

30
Ibid., 216.

31
Ibid., 82.

32
Patrick Magee, “Arts: Do They Mean Us?” The Guardian (London), 3 September 1997, T12,
accessed online 19 April 2006 via Lexis Nexis.

33
Cathal Liam, Consumed in Freedom’s Flame: A Novel of Ireland’s Struggle for Freedom 1916-
1921 (Cincinnati: St. Padraic Press, 2001).

34
Cathal Liam, Blood on the Shamrock (Cincinnati: St. Padraic Press, 2006).

35
Taillon, When History Was Made, 50-76.

36
Cathy Cash Spellman, An Excess of Love (New York: Delacorte Press, 1985). In Spellman’s
words, she used the Gore-Booth sisters (Markievicz’s maiden name) “as a jumping-off place” for
her own inventions, 526.

37
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 79.

38
David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989).

39
The five books written by Llywelyn will be cited parenthetically in the text by the year that
appears in the title followed by the page number. The five books are: Morgan Llywelyn, 1916
(New York: Tor Books/ Tom Doherty Assoc., 1998); 1921 (New York: Forge/Tom Doherty
Assoc., 2001); 1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State (New York: Forge/Tom Doherty Assoc.,
2003); 1972: A Novel of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Forge/Tom Doherty
Assoc., 2005); and 1999: A Novel of the Celtic Tiger and the Search for Peace (New York:
Forge/Tom Doherty Assoc., 2008).

40
In a 21 September 2009 email, Urch writes, “One book I remember finding useful was Only the
Rivers Run Free. Northern Ireland: The Women’s War. Eileen Fairweather, Roisin McDonough
and Melanie McFadyean. Pluto Press. 1984, though it may be difficult to get hold of now.”

41
Email communication with author, 21 September 2009.

42
Brandon Books, Co. Kerry, Ireland, http://www.brandonbooks.com/
authors.php?authors_id=143, accessed 18 September 2009.

43
See Ed Moloney, A Secret History. For other histories of republican resistance to British rule in
Ireland in general, see, e.g., J. Bowyer Bell, The IRA, 1968-2000: Analysis of a Secret Army

119

(London: Frank Cass, 2000); Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (London: HarperCollins, 2000); A. R.
Oppenheimer, IRA, the Bombs and the Bullets: A History of Deadly Ingenuity (Dublin: Irish
Academic Press, 2009); Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA
(London: Serif, 1997) and M. L. R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the
Irish Republican Movement (London: Routledge, 1995).

44
Political prisoners could wear their own clothes and congregate freely; furthermore, they were
exempt from duties forced on criminals.

45
The name of the location was changed for the novel. Email correspondence with the author,
Marion Urch, 21 September 2009.

46
Marion Urch, Violent Shadows (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1996). Subsequent
references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

47
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press,
1963), esp. Jean Paul Sartre’s introduction, 20. Ibid., 73.

48
Ibid., 53.

49
Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2002), 41.

50
Leon Trotsky writes that “individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role
of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their
eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his
mission.” See Trotsky, “The Marxist Position on Individual Terrorism, Leon Trotsky The Marxist
Position on Individual Terrorism, ed. Will Reissner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), 7.

51
David Lloyd,. Ireland After History, Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays (Indiana: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

52
The partitioning led to major divisions in the IRA and in families, leading to a civil war that
lasted for several years.

53
Moloney, A Secret History, 86-89.

54
Ibid., 242.

55
See the reference in Chapter 2 to James’s letter to Grace Norton in Edel, The Life of Henry
James, 763.

56
Patrick Magee, Gangsters or Guerrillas: Representations of Irish Republicans in ‘Troubles
Fiction (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 2001), 2.

57
Morgan, The Demon Lover.

58
Many memoirs and interviews with IRA members mention their upbringing and family
sympathies as primary reasons for their participation in the IRA. Mairead O’Farrell, for instance,
states, “My family are republicans and we were always politically aware. They weren’t always in

120

agreement with me, but they believe, like I do, in a united Ireland,” in Shannon, I Am of Ireland,
122. Nora Connolly, the daughter of executed 1916 Easter Uprising participant and Irish Citizen
Army leader James Connolly is another famous example from the earlier Troubles.

59
Lloyd, Ireland After History, 73.

60
Sjoberg and Genry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores.

61
Maria McGuire, To Take Arms: A Year in the Provisional IRA (London: Macmillan, 1973), 9.

121

Chapter 4
Blood and Family in American Woman and Great Neck
Unlike the agrarian roots of Irish women’s militancy against colonialism,
American women’s feminism emerged out of the early- to mid-eighteenth-century
abolitionist movement, when many middle-class (as well as a few working-class women)
began participating in speaking tours against slavery primarily in northeast cities.
1
The
appearance of women speaking in public spaces to mixed audiences of men and women
sparked violent reactions, and newspaper editorials castigated the woman who violated
gender norms by “exhibiting herself in a position so unsuitable to her sex, totally
disregarding the doctrine of St. Paul, who says ‘Is it not a shame for a woman to speak in
public?’”
2
In one instance, after a mob burned down Pennsylvania Hall where the women
had spoken the previous day, several of the ensuing reports in the Philadelphia U.S.
Gazette blamed the female abolitionists for inciting the mob violence by virtue of their
appearance on stage in what one editorial stated was “so misplaced, so at variance with
sound opinion and sure experience, as when displayed on the broad arena of public
disputation—of political gladiatorship.”
3
Thus, to speak in public was to invite violence,
to instigate violence, and to constitute an act of violence in itself.
4
The equation of speech
with violence has been theorized by Judith Butler as a performative speech act because,
she argues, the body is inseparable from the speech act: “speech, precisely because it is a
bodily act, is not always ‘knowing’ about what it says. In other words, the bodily effects
of speech exceed the intentions of the speaker, raising the question of the speech act itself
as a nexus of bodily and psychic forces.”
5
This insight was especially true for abolitionist

122

women and early feminists whose political speech acts so inflamed some listeners that
those listeners resorted to violence in an attempt to silence public-speaking women who
violated gendered codes delimiting “women’s sphere.”
6

Abolitionist women who refused to be intimidated used the power of their bodies
against the mob when, for instance, they deliberately put themselves into potential danger
by shielding well-known abolitionist speakers from waiting mobs with their bodies.
7

Such experiences, and in particular the Pastoral Letter that denounced the Grimké sisters
for speaking in public, caused many abolitionist women to address gender inequities and
thus to undertake feminist causes, especially after the Seneca convention in 1848.
8
The
“Pastoral Letter,” sent to all New England clergymen in July 1837, denounced women
“who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and
teachers,” and exhorted them to abide by their “appropriate duties” which consisted of
“promoting piety” and “benevolence”; it warned against the “shame and dishonor”
ostensibly brought about by speaking in public and discussing “things which ought not to
be named,” insisting that women’s power derived from their “dependence” on men.
9
Just
as the involvement of Irish women in nationalist and republican struggles led to an
increased awareness and attention to the struggle for women’s rights, so too did criticism
directed against active abolitionist women propel many white female abolitionists into
recognizing their own shackled status in society and into working to liberate the woman
as well as the slave from their marginal status. Women’s intervention in the political
debate of the antebellum period thus served as a catalyst and training ground for feminist
activism for both white and black women abolitionists whose public appearances were

123

intended to “challenge, and disrupt” through “mimicry,” to use Luce Irigaray’s terms,
“[phallocratic] philosophical discourse.”
10
Such women challenged not only the
sociopolitical strictures that silenced their voices, but also the notion that woman’s place
belonged solely in the home. Labeled everything from “indelicate” creatures to “mannish
women, like hens that crow,”
11
feminist-abolitionists both white and black had to prove
their “membership” in the “cult of true womanhood” even while working to “disrupt and
modify” such restrictive definitions.
12
The editorials, especially in mainstream
newspapers, were able to ridicule the women speakers in part because the newspapers did
not publish the full text of the women’s speeches.
13

Similar violence was waged against women who protested for the right to vote,
for labor rights, for any legal issue that led to an increase of women’s and workers’
rights. By contrast, women who advocated humane reforms in more traditional realms
presumed to be women’s dominion—such as hospitals, schools, and/or prisons—or by
denouncing alcohol, gambling, or other social issues were tolerated to a greater degree.
The distinction between reforming (yet maintaining) institutions and overturning unjust
laws is one made by Walter Benjamin: the state fears all violence that has law-making
potential, and law-making is only possible, he further postulates, through violence.
14

Though the US suffrage movement was not as militant as was its English counterpart,
women who protested for the right to vote were subject to violence and harassment.
15
In
1913, for instance, a parade organized by Alice Paul degenerated into a riot when
thousands of hostile male spectators broke into the ranks of the marchers and tried to
block their passage. Troops had to be called in to restore order, and hundreds of people

124

were hospitalized. Later in 1913 Paul organized the Congressional Union (subsequently
called the Woman’s Party), which picketed the Wilson White House. When many of the
demonstrators were arrested and jailed, they went on a hunger strike and were force-fed.
In both cases—the 1913 parade and the brutal force-feeding of jailed women in 1917—
the abuse suffered by respectable middle-class women outraged public sympathy and
elicited sympathy for the suffragist cause.
16
The same sympathy was not accorded early-
twentieth-century labor activists such as Marie Ganz when they were attacked by mobs;
Jewish and from a working-class background, Ganz’s speeches and the abuse heaped
upon her were frequently ridiculed in the press. In one instance, Ganz was pushed from
the rostrum of the Franklin statue in New York’s Park Row, a popular spot for orators to
speak to crowds, and “roughly handled” when she attempted to speak against the
America’s plans to enter the first world war.
17
White, middle-class suffragists were able
to engender sympathy when handled roughly, and indeed to use their bodies to protect
male abolitionists from abuse, not only due to their privilege of class and race/religion,
but also to the paradoxical attitude towards gender. The women who spoke publicly
violated such social codes and thus were perceived to invite violence, but at the same
time, social codes against manhandling women (at least in public) afforded middle-class
and white women some protections.
The deep ambivalence about women and violence, and the ingrained attitudes
about women’s place were major factors in the next massive period of women’s political
activism and violence, for the purpose of this study beginning in the late 1960s and
ending in the early 1980s. It is a commonplace in studies of political activism that

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violence begets greater violence—and, as discussed in the case of the IRA, many political
activists cite the greater, systemic and institutionalized violence of the state as a reason
for taking the violence underground and/or for engaging in guerilla actions. Although
there isn’t a clear trajectory between militant feminism in turn-of-the-twentieth-century
America and its resurgence during the 1970s and 1980s—as there so clearly is in the
Provisional IRA’s adoption of the 1916 Proclamation—I propose that the earlier activism
functioned as an educational, inspirational, and experiential springboard for the later
activity. Even though the issues and tactics had expanded from those that animated the
nineteenth-century feminist-abolitionist, the emphasis on fighting oppressive laws against
people of color and women remained primary for the mid- to late-twentieth-century
feminist members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Weather Underground
Organization (WUO), and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the three most
notorious militant groups that operated between the late 1960s and 1981.
18

With respect to the women members of the SLA and WUO, I further suggest that
the insistence on physical combat, weapons training, and active engagement with human
targets (police) grew in part out of the protected “skin privilege” that all whites, and
particularly middle-class, educated white women, historically held.
19
Having once used
her body as a human shield to protect abolitionists from mob violence, the militant
woman member of these three groups used her body to engage in physical combat with
police and as a sign of solidarity with Black Panther Party (BPP) members who were
frequently beaten by police. Although the ideologies of the BPP and WUO evolved over
time, all three groups espoused policies of radical internationalism, Third World

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solidarity (a term that includes nationalist movements within the United States), anti-
imperialism, socialism, feminism (unevenly upheld), and armed struggle. All three at one
time saw themselves as the vanguard of a revolution that would follow once ordinary
working-class civilians were shaken from their complacency and shown that armed
resistance was possible.
Before I analyze the historical novels that fictionalize actions taken by the three
groups, a brief history is necessary in order to understand the intersections among them.
The BLA and the WUO underwent several transformations and name changes; their
histories are complex, so the following outline serves only to highlight their theoretical
conjunctions. All three espoused an antiracist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist
ideology; all three advocated armed resistance; and all three specifically recruited African
Americans. The Black Panther Party served as the model for a legitimate working-class
armed-resistance force, one that included the lumpenproletariat, and the WUO and SLA
courted Panther involvement in joint actions. Started in Oakland in 1966 by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale to protect local community members from police harassment
and brutality, Black Panther Party members openly carried guns, established a program of
armed resistance, and patrolled black neighborhoods to challenge police brutality.
20

While Newton was imprisoned for a shootout during which a policeman was killed,
Eldridge Cleaver (who had joined the party upon release from prison) organized a “Free
Huey” campaign that brought widespread support and thousands of new members to the
party. Beginning around 1968, Newton and other leaders expanded the party’s
philosophy to embrace socialist ideals, formulating a ten-point program that set out both

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its revolutionary anti-capitalist policies as well as its social-reform programs.
21
However,
as the party began initiating more social programs—free breakfasts for children, free
medical clinics, and an ambulance service, among others—several radical members
became unhappy with Huey Newton’s shift to reformist politics and his vision of
“revolutionary intercommunalism,” a global network of interdependent socialist
communities that repudiated nation-state formations (and, therefore, black nationalism
itself).
22
The New York-based Panther 21, arrested for a wide-ranging list of attacks,
wrote a public letter praising the Weather Underground’s bombings, suggesting that the
BPP should be moving in this direction; Eldridge Cleaver’s followers were eager to
continue the militant confrontation with police in the streets; and the Los Angeles
chapter’s defense minister, Geronimo ji Jaga (Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt), argued for the
development of a vast underground network in opposition to Newton’s attempts to
develop broad-based community support by shifting the focus away from violence. Thus,
tensions existed among the aboveground and underground elements of the party, and
these tensions were exploited by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program
(COINTELPRO), which was designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or
otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists, hate-type organizations [virtually
any group that threatened the status quo] and which functioned by sending false letters
and phone calls intended to sow discord and distrust.
23
When in 1971 Newton expelled
Pratt—the minister of defense for the Los Angeles chapter who had been recruited by
Cleaver—members of the New York, Los Angeles, and other chapters who wanted to
continue pursuing strategies of armed resistance (primarily against police) broke away

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from the West-Coast-dominated BPP and went underground, his exodus marking an
increase in the ranks of the Black Liberation Army. As escaped BLA prisoner Assata
Shakur writes, “An aboveground political organization can’t wage guerilla war anymore
than an underground army can do aboveground political work. Although the two must
work together, they must have completely disparate structures, and any links between the
two must remain secret.”
24
The black-nationalist underground had been formed in late
1968, early 1969,
25
but greater numbers moved underground due to increased FBI and
police harassment and arrests. Scholar Akenyele Omowale Umoja argues that it was the
conjunction of counterinsurgency harassment driving BPP members underground and the
increasing friction among various BPP chapters that increased the underground
movement and activity.
26

Several scholars and former BPP members attribute the increasing tension among
BPP leaders during the 1970s to COINTELPRO,
27
which targeted the BPP, famously
referred to as the “most dangerous threat to the internal security of the country” by J.
Edgar Hoover.
28
Others blamed Cleaver’s influence—who had recruited followers while
Newton was imprisoned and was deeply involved with ji Jaga in the Los Angeles
chapter.
29
However, it is clear from even the ambiguously worded sections of the
memoirs of Elaine Brown, the former chairman of the BPP while Newton was in exile in
Cuba; from David Hilliard, former BPP chief of staff; from Safiya Asya Bukhari, a
member of the black nationalist and separatist New Afrikan Independence Movement;
and Assata Shakur that violent altercations with police—sometimes in defense, other
times in deliberate ambushes—were taking place simultaneously with the reform

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activities, that the underground coexisted with the public social-reform activities.
30
In
interviews, ji Jaga has stated that the concept of the Black Liberation Army, a coalition of
various revolutionary black organizations that joined together to engage in specific
actions, was broader than and preceded the BPP.
31
The 1971 split led to violence and
killings between the two factions, signaling the “beginning of the end of the Black
Panther Party as a national organization," according to historian Peniel Joseph.
32

While the BPP continued its aboveground social-reform programs and
disintegrated during the 1970s, the underground BLA continued attacks on police and
continued to appropriate funds by robbing banks.
33
Shakur defines the BLA as “various
organizations and collectives working out of different cities, and in some of the larger
cities there were often several groups working independently of each other.”
34
Some of
the factions, such as the Republic of New Africa, were separatists, seeking to carve out a
separate republic from five southern states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia,
and South Carolina. According to the separatist New Afrikan Freedom Fighters unit of
the BLA, their stated purpose was to “defend Black people and to fight for Black
people’s liberation”;
35
according to the police, their mission was to murder policemen.
36

A BLA manifesto printed in 2002 states that the organization views all crime in capitalist
societies as class- and race-based, that black people live illegitimate lives as a result of a
corrupt system, and therefore the organization recognizes the “legitimacy of all
revolutionary violence against the capitalist corporate state, its ruling classes, and its
institutions”; thus, it doesn’t advocate race-based attacks but it does view class-based
violence as legitimate.
37
It can organize complementary actions with white workers’

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movements, but its primary goal is to establish a separate state for black people. In 2002
the BLA published a pamphlet outlining its key principles, reaffirming its commitment to
Marxism adapted to specific historical and political situations, to feminism, and to
collaboration with other militant organizations, including primarily white groups. (Both
the Black Panther Party and the BLA had been heavily criticized for working with white
groups.) Its three key tenets state:
1. That we are anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist.
2. That we must of necessity strive for the abolishment of these systems and for
the institution of Socialistic relationships in which black people have total and
absolute control over their own destiny as a people.
3. That in order to abolish our system of oppression, we must utilize the science
of class struggle, develop this science as it relates to our unique national
condition.
38

As I will show in the analysis section of this chapter, the ideal of gender
egalitarianism was unevenly met. A case in point is that the BLA booklet includes
separate sections with headers that deal with each component of their philosophy—race
and class, revolutionary internationalism, the dialectic of revolutionary violence, law, and
reformism, but not with anti-sexism.
39

One of the groups with which the BLA collaborated was the May 19th
Communist Organization (M19CO), made up of former members of the WUO. Members
who collaborated under the general umbrella of the BLA called themselves “The Family”
to signify the interconnectedness of their actions and ideologies. The event that signaled
the end of BLA and May 19th activity was a Brink’s truck robbery undertaken in
conjunction with white former members of the Weather Underground Organization who
began working with the BLA when the WUO dissolved in 1977. This bank robbery is

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covered in Jay Cantor’s book Great Neck, and is therefore worthy of a brief
recapitulation. During a Brink’s truck robbery on 20 October 1981 conducted jointly by
the BLA and M19CO in Nanuet, New York, to “expropriate” funds, a guard was killed.
The plan had been for the masked black BLA members, who conducted the armed
robbery, to switch into cars and a U-Haul driven by the white M19CO members
(including David Gilbert, Marilyn Buck, Kathy Boudin, and Judith Clark), for whom
police would not be searching. The switch to other cars was witnessed and called in to
police, who promptly stopped the U-Haul. Six BLA members hiding in back came out
shooting and killed two policemen. One of the getaway cars crashed, after which Gilbert,
Boudin, and Sam Brown were arrested. The known BLA members (other white and black
collaborators remain unknown) included Kuwasi Balagoon (Donald Weems), Solomon
Bouines (Samuel Brown), Cecilio "Chui" Ferguson, Sekou Odinga (Nathaniel Burns),
Mutulu Shakur (Jeral Wayne Williams), and Samuel Smith. By 1986 all of the known
conspirators had been arrested and convicted.
40

The aboveground/underground split also occurred within the primarily white and
middle-class Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when, in 1969, radical members of
a bloc within SDS known as Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) walked out of a
meeting and forced a (successful) vote to expel the Maoist Progressive Labor members
who opposed nationalist conflicts such as that waged by the Panthers and reduced all
conflicts, even colonial ones, to issues of class exploitation. The group changed its name
to the Weathermen and titled its position statement after the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s song
“Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the

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wind blows.”
41
Published in New Left Notes, the position statement called for a "white
fighting force" to engage with other US anticolonial forces in the struggle that the group
considered primary: “between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles
against it”—particularly the Black Liberation Movement.
42
The group trained to fight and
deliberately provoked fights with the police in its infamous “Days of Rage” in
preparation to form small combat units underground that would set off bombs. The
various units planned strategic bombings of corporations that supported the Vietnam
War, of military organizations, and other symbolic government buildings, and was on the
verge of bombing policing forces themselves when a bomb the New York chapter was
working on accidentally went off, killing three members.
43
This bombing caused some
WUO members to renounce violent tactics and precipitated the move underground of
others who had been planning for such activity.
Unlike the BLA, which was a looser coalition of black nationalist groups, the
WUO had a strong central leadership that kept in touch with the various combat units.
Once underground, the small splinter groups were visited by the central committee of the
“Weather Bureau”—the leaders of the organization—so that the various combat groups
were kept apprised of policies, though each group was free to plan and conduct its own
actions. The groups followed the Marxist practice of self-criticism, working to refine its
philosophy, and engaged in symbolic bombings of government and corporate targets,
phoning in warnings and taking care not to injure civilians.
44
Once the Vietnam War
ended and the anti-war fervor diminished the ranks, the group realized it needed an
aboveground committee to distribute its ideas. Called the Prairie Fire Organizing

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Committee, chapters were opened throughout the United States, and the leadership
published Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism which laid out its
internationalist Marxist-Leninist position statement.
45
The name came from a quote by
Mao Tse-tung, "a single spark can set a prairie fire,"
46
and the book identified the group
as a guerilla organization of communist women and men. Its primary aims, as set out in
Prairie Fire were to disrupt the empire, to engage the enemy (US imperialism), to
encourage the people to join the struggle, and to forge an underground base from which
to attack.
47

Throughout its aboveground and underground existence, the WUO sought
affiliation with the Black Panther Party to legitimize its claim to represent marginalized
peoples of the world and the United States. Although Eldridge Cleaver and the New York
chapter of the “Panther 21” publicly praised WUO actions, however, others—including
Bobby Seale and Fred Hampton—were highly critical of the WUO’s earliest actions in
deliberately courting violent altercations with the police. Analogous to the split within the
BPP between reformist and militant politics, when the central committee around 1975-76
began applying dialectical-materialist analysis to all struggles within and outside the
United States—in effect, subsuming black nationalist, feminist, and other identity-related
struggles to issues of class status—the rank and file of the WUO rebelled, many of whose
members having joined to fight on behalf of oppressed minorities.
48
This ultimately led to
the ouster of the central committee, a resurfacing aboveground of many underground
members (few of whom served prison time for the bombings after unknown parties broke
into an FBI office and published records detailing the illegal activities engaged in by the

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FBI in its COINTELPRO operation), and an aboveground presence in the form of the
Prairie Fire committees. Members who chose to stay underground and engage in militant
activities joined other groups. This chapter focuses only on those who joined the May 19
th

Communist Organization, which joined with the BLA in robberies, or expropriations of
funds, as outlined above.
The Symbionese Liberation Army was relatively short-lived and unsupported by
much of the New Left.
49
The SLA grew out of an alliance between a group of mostly
white radicals who worked for a literacy-in-the-prisons program called Unisight under
the umbrella of a radical left-wing group called Venceremos Organization (made up of
former members of the Bay Area Revolutionary Unions, which in turn had derived from
the 1969 disintegration of the Students for a Democratic Society, in conjunction with a
prison-based group called the Black Cultural Association.
50
After Donald DeFreeze, one
of the Soledad prisoners active in the Black Cultural Association who had transferred to
Vacaville, escaped, he sought refuge among Venceremos members and eventually
formed the SLA along with other white members of the prisoners’ rights workers, calling
himself “Cinque” after the leader of the slave rebellion on the Amistad. The SLA,
however, was unable to attract broad-based support. Ron Jacobs attributes the lack of
support in part to “the fear-ridden climate at the time,” stemming from the revelations of
the FBI’s counter-intelligence program. He claims that the “heightened paranoia
prevalent amongst leftist political and counter-cultural activists in 1974-76” could be
traced to public awareness of repressive tactics that were coming to light.
51
In fact, the
only widely published statements of support for the SLA came from the Weather

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communiqué of 24 May 1974, in which the WUO urged the left to support the SLA.
However, the WUO singled out one action that it disapproved of: the murder of Oakland
schools superintendent Marcus Foster for the questionable “offense” of agreeing to
introduce identification cards into Oakland schools.
52

The SLA is famous, of course, for its 4 February 1974 kidnapping of Patricia
Hearst, and for Hearst’s later conversion (induced by brainwashing, she would later
contend) to SLA philosophies and guerilla actions. The group had initially kidnapped her
to exchange her for two SLA prisoners (Joseph Remiro and Russell Little) who had been
convicted of the murder of Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster (the action that
alienated the New Left and that even the WUO criticized, even though it praised the
kidnapping).
53
When that plan failed, the group requested ransom in the form of a free
food distribution with which Hearst’s parents complied. Nonetheless, just a few weeks
after the kidnapping, Hearst began releasing tapes denouncing her family and espousing
SLA ideology.
54
Just two months after the kidnapping, on 15 April 1974, Hearst joined
the SLA in robbing the Hibernia Bank. The image of “Tania,” Hearst’s nom de guerre,
holding a gun during the bank robbery became iconic, as did the fiery 1974 shootout in
Los Angeles, where the group had moved to find more recruits, having been largely
shunned by the New Left in the Bay Area.
55
A botched shoplifting attempt on the part of
William Harris, which led to Hearst shooting up the sign of the store so that the two
Harrises could escape, led to the discovery of a parking ticket that tied them to the SLA
safe house. This in turn led the police to the house where the remaining six SLA
members engaged in a shootout that resulted in the house exploding in flames, killing all

136

six members (non-members managed to escape). Hearst and Emily and William Harris
were not in the house during the shootout; they fled to the San Francisco Bay Area where
they recruited Wendy Yoshimura, Kathleen and Steve Soliah, James Kilgore, and
Michael Bortin as new members. On 21 April 1975, Emily Harris, Sara Jane Olson,
Michael Bortin, and James Kilgore robbed the Crocker Bank in Carmichael, California,
during the course of which one customer was accidentally killed. Hearst testified much
later that she and Yoshimura served as getaway drivers, while William Harris and Steven
Soliah served as lookouts.
56
Hearst was captured with Yoshimura in September 1975.
The year and a half that Hearst spent with Yoshimura after the shootout (the “lost year”)
forms the fictionalized subject matter of Susan Choi’s American Woman.
The remainder of this chapter focuses on novels that fictionalize historical events
in which women actively engaged in bombings, bank robberies, and other actions that led
to the death of civilians through their membership in the Weather Underground, the
Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Liberation Army. All three groups
advocated equality for women, freedom from conventional mores that governed sexual
practices and drug-taking, espoused revolutionary Marxist-Leninist principles, sought
internationalist influences and models, and foregrounded race, siding with various
nationalist movements within the United States, as a central tenet of their plan to
overthrow the existing power regime. As with the novels analyzed in previous chapters,
silence, disjuncture, and moral inconsistencies mark the narratives. However, unlike
James’s Princess Casamassima, in which the gaps signified a lack of knowledge and
interest in radical politics, the two novels that I analyze closely in this chapter as well as

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the vast number of memoirs written by former members of the BLA, the WUO, and other
militant organizations, deliberately exclude information that would lead to the arrest of
former colleagues.
57
The novels stitch together their stories from highly biased accounts:
the memoirs and autobiographies of key members on the one hand, and the police reports
on the other, as well as from journalists and historians who interviewed key actors. On
one level, verisimilitude requires historical accuracy insofar as certain information has
already been reported in the press, confessed to police, or told in personal narratives. On
another, it requires conformity with expectations of probability and readerly sympathy; as
has been pointed out, such expectations uphold normative standards delimiting
appropriate female and/or feminine behavior.
Both American Woman by Susan Choi, a fictional reconstruction of Patricia
Hearst’s and Wendy Yoshimura’s “lost year” as Symbionese Liberation Army fugitives,
and Great Neck by Jay Canto, a sprawling tale of a group of Jewish friends and Black
Power activists who join the civil rights movement, were published in 2003. Both novels
present arguments parsing the ethical justification for political violence. And while both
acknowledge the historical inevitability of violent political resistance, they ultimately rely
on conventional paradigms governing women’s place in the home and as keepers of the
family flame in order to humanize their female protagonists. American Woman deals
solely with the SLA, while Great Neck addresses the conjunction between the WUO and
the BLA.
Narrated from multiple perspectives, American Woman imagines the story of a
Japanese American fugitive, Jenny Shimada, whose character is based on Wendy

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Yoshimura, the fugitive captured along with Patricia Hearst in 1975. Choi’s excavation of
the closemouthed Yoshimura is parallel to that of the fictional journalist in the novel who
is assigned to write about Pauline but is obsessed with Jenny, even though she repeatedly
points out that “Jenny still isn’t the story. Jenny’s nobody’s story.”
58
Rather, Pauline,
who has “always been a story, from the time of her birth” has “totemic power” by virtue
of her class and race (315). The novel’s attempt to tell “nobody’s story” foregrounds the
erasure of peoples of color from history. In contradistinction to newspaper accounts of
the time, which focused almost exclusively on Pauline/Patricia as the vulnerable heiress-
cum-brainwash victim-cum-terrorist, Choi exposes the way in which America’s racist
history is imbricated in the resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Pauline’s
lineage is traced back to her grandfather, a newspaper magnate and wealthy landowner
known for his “yellow” journalism, which deliberately fostered hatred against Japanese
citizens during World War II.
59
Jenny/Wendy’s parents were interned at Manzanar during
that war. A fictional reimagining places the mistress of Pauline’s grandfather in the hills
near Manzanar, where she is frightened by incendiary newspaper accounts of a group of
rampaging teenagers who have escaped from the internment camp, one of whom is
Jenny’s father. The later pairing of Jenny and Pauline is an outcome of their intertwined
histories, but their friendship is made possible only by the original kidnapping. The novel
thus suggests that the depredations of one generation, coupled with the unpredictable
permutations of history, create the conditions of resistance in future generations, much
like colonialist violence in Ireland marks the land with the scars of its battles, imprinting
them on locals’ memories.

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While the dialogue and philosophical musings are rendered naturalistically, the
narrative is pieced together of fragments of memories, lies, stories, and experiences in the
same way that, the novel suggests, history and meaning are constructed. The fugitives
never finish the manifesto they are commissioned to write, as they constantly bicker over
the authenticity of the version they choose to tell, a veiled acknowledgment of the
fictional construct of autobiographies and the impossibility of narrating the fugitives’
lives and beliefs with any degree of truth or verisimilitude. Juan (the William Harris
stand-in), for instance, wants Pauline to excise the references in her narrative to being
blindfolded and locked in a closet because this "fact” belies the message the group wishes
to promulgate. When Pauline insists that what she writes is true, Juan states, “‘It’s not
true to the point of the story. There’s things that are facts that in context don’t help make
the point’” (169). In other words, Patricia/Pauline couldn’t have been coerced; rather, she
recognized the truth of the group’s ideology. In a tape that Patricia Hearst recorded for
her parents, she covers for the frequent starts and stops as a means for her to gather her
thoughts. In the struggle for the moral high ground, then, the SLA survivors recognize the
discursive power of fashioning their own radical narrative, a rhetorical battle that is
equally as important as the military fight for which they train daily.
Conscripted to aid the fugitives after the shootout that killed all but three of the
original SLA members, Jenny maintains her opposition to violence against human beings
throughout her sojourn with the reconstituted group. She makes a distinction between
criminal acts such as robberies and assassinations, to which she is opposed, and
bombings of symbolic targets for the purpose of ending the war, which she supports.

140

After Pauline manipulates her into serving as a driver for a robbery during which
someone is accidentally killed, Jenny reevaluates her support of violent tactics. She
concludes that all violence is wrong—because no matter how careful one is to prevent
harm to other persons, there is no certainty that someone won’t be injured. When
accidents occur, as they did in the group’s robbery, innocent people get killed—much as
they do in the military: “Bombing a building that ‘ought’ to be empty was not so different
in type, if very different in scale, from bombing a village that ‘ought’ to house only the
enemy and not any civilians” (351). Thus, Jenny concludes that if moral certainty is
dependent on “dumb luck,” it is better to avoid violence altogether (351-2).
American Woman initially seems to suggest that the deep friendship which
develops between Pauline and Jenny after they’ve fled their comrades is a “true bond”
(352). During their cross-country odyssey, their “Thelma and Louise-style lost weekend,”
as the Village Voice called it,
60
Jenny and Pauline merge into each other’s histories. After
they are captured by the FBI, however, Pauline denounces Jenny as “nicer than most of
the people I met—but still a terrorist I lived in fear of” (356), using the terrorist label to
cast herself as a victim in contradistinction to the “criminal” Jenny. This betrayal is
described by the omniscient narrator as “the first true heartbreak of [Jenny’s] life” (350),
more so than the loss of her lover William. In its resolution, the novel seems to suggest
that groups formulated around political ideologies do not provide strong enough bonds, at
least for women: that, in fact, it is the blood family that ultimately claims and “reforms”
the radical gesturings of the feminist-terrorist protagonists, perhaps because it is only
within the socially acceptable confines of the family “bloodlines” that “blood” can serve

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as a bond. If women’s blood connection, inextricably linked to the Hegelian conjunction
of woman/blood/death and violence, is “allowed” outside of the familial connection—in
other words, is not confined to familial bonds—that “blood” connection can be a
radically endangering force when extended to “sisterhood” groups or “the family” in
militant resistant groups.
In the novel, once the imprisoned Jenny realizes that her father needs her, and
once she recognizes that she wants a child one day (though a man is not necessary), she
relegates William and her activism to the past. The omniscient narrator of American
Woman is thus a bit like the Voice of History, serving as a philosophical muse on the
transitoriness of the power of love when blood is not involved. This is the reason that
Pauline betrays Jenny; she returns to her own bloodlines, her own race and class. The
Hegelian sense of blood as being aligned with death is unexplored in this novel, but is
key to Great Neck, which addresses racism and militant politics in the context of the
BLA/M19CO Nyack robbery of the Brink’s truck, which, one could argue, brought the
black nationalism and radical left movement to a grinding halt—at least until the
resurgence of green-related activism.
Like American Woman, Great Neck is narrated from multiple perspectives, self-
consciously addressing the grand questions of justice, religion, god(s), and morality
through the experiences of a group of privileged Jewish friends in New Jersey who as
teenagers form a pact to “do justice” after one friend is murdered in Mississippi. The
killings are based on the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murders of three civil rights workers (James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) during the “Freedom Summer”

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voter registration drives in Mississippi and they serve as the catalyst that simultaneously
inspires the friends to commit their lives to social justice and instigates the repudiation of
nonviolence in the Black Power movement. The novel itself ultimately centers on the
women who begin as reformist protestors and end up as part of the BLA-type militant
movement.
Great Neck focuses its moral lens on the shift from nonviolent to violent tactics
by factions of the Weather Underground and SNAP, a fictional organization based on the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Liberation Army, as
exemplified by the actions of two characters, Beth Jacobs (modeled on Kathy Boudin of
the Weather Underground) and Jacob Battle (a composite figure of African American
civil rights workers and BLA members). The narrative shifts between time and place,
tracing the increasing militancy of the primarily white and middle-class Weather
Underground and the Black Power movement as the latter emerged out of Mississippi.
The worlds of Great Neck, New Jersey and Mississippi converge in the figures of Beth
and Jacob, both of whom join the underground Black Power movement (the
“Downstairs”) to serve as getaway drivers for a Brink’s truck robbery—modeled on the
historical 1981 robbery, during which three people are killed.
61

The novel’s dialectic mode of investigation stages a debate between the tenets of
nonviolence, as propounded by Martin Luther King, and those of armed resistance, as
articulated by Malcolm X. One premise underlying the nonviolent movement is based on
the Enlightenment ideal that human beings are essentially good: After Miles Davis and
Dick Gregory visit Mississippi in support of sharecropper rights, for example, Joshua

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Battle sees it as the beginning of change, what he calls “the universe actualizing itself as
the movement toward freedom.”
62

Counterposed to the quasi-mystical view of the universal will to justice is the
realist view of (in)justice as it is meted out by governmental policing forces. From the
retelling of Beth’s father’s horrific experiences in the Nazi death camps, to the Ku Klux
Klan beatings and murders of black people in the Deep South, to the violent police who
beat protesters of all races and who break Jacobs’s neck (as the police broke Sam
Brown’s) during an interrogation, the novel depicts the disciplinary apparatus of the state
as an amoral, impregnable force and implies that law-abiding citizens are powerless to
change things. Leading a busload of Freedom Riders to Mississippi, Willard “Sugar”
Cane (a composite of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Huey Newton) warns the
riders to expect firebombs and beatings with clubs, bottles, bats, and billy clubs from
citizens and police alike.
The proponents of the various sides of the nonviolence/violence debate seek a
moral justification for their respective positions. Prior to his trip to Africa, Sugar Cane
had exhorted the Freedom Riders to “remember that the man who beat them into paste
was also like them, a fellow sinner who would one day see what his hands had done and
weep with shame” (133-34), prompting Beth’s father, Leo, a Holocaust survivor, to think
“how right he’d been to warn his daughter about the insanity of nonviolence. What this
Cane had said to the riders about the murderers’ being ‘fellow sinners’ was dangerous
Christian nonsense” (134), since “‘Gandhian protest will not matter to men without a
conscience’” (113). After Sugar rejects nonviolent protest as a dangerously ineffective

144
tactic, he repudiates Christianity, telling his followers: “‘You people have to learn
that the Ten Commandments, they’re laws for slaves’” (593). Beth chooses the ideology
of internationalist-socialist revolution as her ethical guide, telling her father, “‘I can’t be
part of this charade you people call justice, . . . What I did, Dad, is I worked to make
justice for the oppressed. So there will never be another Auschwitz’” (653).
In rehearsing the tenets of nonviolence and depicting the resultant slaughter of
unarmed peaceful protestors, the novel appears to weigh more heavily on the side of anti-
reformist theories promulgated by political philosophers such as Sorel and Honderich,
who advocate armed resistance under certain conditions. Honderich argues that adhering
too doggedly to the democratic process is “morally insupportable” in view of the greater
violence inflicted on the powerless by the state.
63
In Honderich’s view, everyone who
chooses not to act is implicated, contending that armed resistance is more democratic
than refusing to act, that what he terms “terrorism for humanity” will result in “fuller
realisations of democracy.”
64

Great Neck reveals the epistemological vacuum at the core of moral, political, and
social theory, paradoxically suggesting both that the adoption of terrorist tactics is partly
justified by institutionalized racism and the vacuum in the rule of law and that violence is
nonetheless inherently immoral. In support of the first half of this paradox, explicit
connections are made between Nazi Germany and the Deep South; just as Leo says there
was “no judgment and no judge” in the Nazi camps (311), that “There was no God, no
whole, no logos. . . . The world is chance all the way down” (686), SNAP organizer
David Watkins says, “how empty the instruction of religion was and how hollow the law.
For where was the judgment, where was the Judge? There was no Judge in Mississippi”

145

(154). However, the counterpoint to the argument for armed revolution is expressed by
Sugar Cane’s white lawyer. When Sugar quotes Fanon’s statement that “Destroying our
opponent makes us into men,’” the lawyer responds, “‘That . . . sounds to me like a
Marine recruiting poster’” (293). And the lethal fallout from the Brink’s robbery compels
a reexamination of the principles of armed resistance on the part of all but the most
committed revolutionaries.
Two characters serve as moral touchstones by which the others can judge their
actions. One is Chuck Taylor, a black spiritual leader at the periphery of SNAP who tries
to inculcate a message of self-esteem without violence. The other is Jesse, a lawyer from
the Great Neck group of friends, who defends death-row inmates no matter how
despicable their crimes, including one who claims to have raped Jesse’s wife. He
searches for a universal moral code and articulates the central quest of the novel:
“Somewhere there had to be a Law that said people shouldn’t take vengeance” (515).
But, unable to uncover such a law, Jesse represents a problematic though positive legal
figure, whereas in the spiritual realm, all religions fail the adherents: Christianity, Islam,
Yoruban, and Judaism.
The deep structure of the narrative seems to support the tribal view uttered by
Beth’s father and by a Mafia member that “The world is tribes and families, small,
parochial loves” (223, 422). This supposition is borne out by Beth’s decision to abandon
the political defense taken by her cohorts in order to plea-bargain so that she can care for
her beloved, aging father and her child. While this idea is presented as a sincere option
for those who lack an ideological standpoint, the sophisticated reader must be skeptical:

146

“the family” being slang both for Mafia members and for many of the black members
who comprise the membership of the BLA.
In holding up the family bond as the most important link between humans, both
American Woman and Great Neck gesture toward and away from “telling the same old
story.” Both novels spurn the traditional love story: more important than the love between
two adults is the blood tie of the parent-child relationship, and what humanizes the
female militant is her conformity to a normalizing standard that values her duty as a care-
giving daughter and mother as a means of rescuing her from the association with blood as
violence/death. Verisimilitude requires the acknowledgment of the connection, to lend a
sense of the “real,” but adherence to readerly expectations in the absence of a
renunciation of political ideals (which the “real-life” BLA/May 19
th
groups refused to do)
requires an exculpatory affirmation of life-giving connections. The disjunctions in the
Great Neck narrative derive in large part from the Jewish mysticism imposed upon the
narrative, which posits that Beth (a Kathy Boudin stand-in) finds ethical justification in
Jewish mystical traditions: “Ready if the driver wouldn’t open the truck, and they had to
drop [kill] the guard? Well, if they had to, they had to. This is the way to Edom, to Esau,
Jacob Frank had said, the way to life” ( 597). The narrative inconsistency becomes
evident between this Jewish mystical underpinning which was not part of the Marxist-
Leninist ideology of the late BLA movement. To be fair, the real-life Boudin’s father was
not a Holocaust survivor as was the fictional Beth’s, but to posit Jewish mysticism as a
motivating factor undermines the belief system of the radical New Left, which was by
self-description areligious. Similarly, in American Woman, to make sense of, or excuse,

147

seemingly normal, middle-class women who join “extreme” radical groups, the narrative
loses consistency between its alternating disdain for the dogmatism of “Teko” and
“Yolanda” (Bill and Emily Harris) and the attempt to be sympathetic to radical politics.
Teko and Yolanda are ultimately portrayed as ridiculously beholden to rigid political
codes of which they have little understanding (their laughable attempt to speak like
working-class people is one instance).
The pathos in both novels derives from the realization of the imprisoned
daughters, sole children, of their love for their aging widowed fathers and their desire to
care for them. While this plotline goes back at least to Shakespeare’s King Lear, it does
not represent a narratological desire to return unruly women to the home or to the grave,
as it does in The Princess Casamassima. Nor does it resolve, though both novels raise,
the ethical paradox posed by institutionalized, state violence versus terrorist violence—
that is, to what extent does not acting make you complicit in state terrorism? Rather, both
novels retreat to the personal, suggesting that individual agency is limited, and is morally
compromised by the use of violence, justifiable though it may be on political grounds.
One could say that both novels trace the transformation of the would-be Antigone of the
heroic age into the life-affirming daughter of the humanist tradition.

148

Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
See, e.g., Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Lillian O’Connor, Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the
Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); Shirley Yee,
Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1992); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and
Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1993); Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers
in the North (1830–1880) (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

2
Boston Gazette, 9 March 1838; quoted in Gerda Lerner, The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké
(New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11n18.

3
A mob attacked Pennsylvania Hall while Angelina Grimké was speaking at a meeting of the
Female Anti-Slavery Society and burned it down the following night. See Samuel Webb, History
of Pennsylvania Hall, which was Destroyed by a Mob, on the 17
th
of May, 1838 (Philadelphia:
Merrihew and Gunn, [1838]; New York: Negro Universities, 1969), 117.

4. For a brief history of such verbal attacks against women, see Claire Kahane, Passions of the
Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850-1915 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 6.

5
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997),
141-2.

6. The nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” relegated woman’s sphere to the home, her
duties circumscribed by domestic chores and child-rearing. Reform activities were socially
acceptable as “long as woman confined her efforts for reform to prayer, attendance at prayer
meetings and at sewing circles, and to contributions of money.” Lillian O’Connor, Pioneer
Women Orators, 23. In Black Women Abolitionists, Shirley Yee discusses the contradictory
effect, both liberating and racist, that the “cult of true womanhood” had on black women (4, 84).

7
One account details how Elizabeth Buffum Chace helped form a human shield to protect Henry
C. Wright from a mob. See Elizabeth Buffum Chace, "Reminiscences of Childhood," (1897) in
Virtuous Lives: Four Quaker Sisters Remember Family Life, Abolitionism, and Woman Suffrage,
ed. Lucille Salitan and Eve Lewis Perera (New York: Continuum, 1994), 113.

8
Gerda Lerner argues that “the petitioning activities of antislavery women in the 1830s and 40s
were of far greater significance to the building of the antislavery movement than has been
previously recognized. Moreover, these activities contributed directly to the development of a
contingent of local and regional women leaders, many of whom were to transfer their political
concerns to feminist activities after 1848.” Lerner, Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, 189.

149

9. Reverend Nehemiah Adams, “Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Massachusetts to
the Congregational Churches under their care,” July 1837, New England Spectator, 12 July 1837,
qtd. in Elizabeth C. Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage
I (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881–1922), 81-82.

10. Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine," This Sex
Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1985), 74. In her examination of the ways in which “there is no possible place [in the logos of
phallocratic representation] for the ‘feminine,’ except the traditional place of the repressed, the
censured,” Irigaray argues that initially the only path “historically assigned” to the woman is that
of “mimicry”: that is, “to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to
thwart it.” Irigaray, This Sex, 76.

11. For a brief history of such verbal attacks against women, see Kahane, Passions of the Voice,
6.

12
Such criticisms were directed against middle- and upper-class white women. Shirley Yee
argues that “Black women’s participation in moral and social reform raises questions regarding
the mutability of the ‘true womanhood’ model. For middle-class white women, moral superiority
was equated with intellectual inferiority and served as a justification for excluding women from
the male world of business and politics. In the free black community, however, such an equation
was potentially dangerous: to have adopted this logic would have undermined attempts at
dispelling stereotypes of black inferiority” (Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, 84). She elaborates
the problematic conjunction of race and femininity: “On the one hand, images of women as
morally superior, physically delicate, and submissive to their men actually liberated black women
from racist stereotypes of black female sexuality, which depicted them as physically strong and
sexually promiscuous—but on the other hand, the adoption of ‘true womanhood’ ideology in the
free black community only imposed white standards of inequality. Furthermore, ideas about what
constituted ‘ladylike’ behavior reflected illusions about female respectability that were narrowly
applied only to native-born, white, middle-class women” (Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, 4).

13
Lillian O’Connor argues that “The files of the leading metropolitan newspapers contain no
complete texts of addresses given by women. Moreover, there was an apparently deliberate
omission of any news concerning the public-speaking activities of women.” See O’Connor,
Pioneer Women Orators, 127n9.

14
Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter
Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 283-8.

15
Interestingly, sources from the early twentieth century attributed the lack of militancy to the
American male’s more tractable nature, and to a greater degree of support of militancy among the
population due in part to the purported greater accuracy of the American press. (Of course, the
moderation of the press may be correlative to the moderation of the militancy.) For two such
accounts, see Mary Winsor, “The Militant Suffrage Movement,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 56, Women in Public Life (November 1914): 134-
42, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1011988, accessed 12 November 2009. Also see Eunice Dana
Brannan, “The Suffragettes: Mrs. Brannan Gives an American Suffragist’s Judgment,” New York
Times, 15 April 1913, 10.

150

16
There is an abundance of scholarship on the history of women’s voting rights in the United
States and elsewhere; therefore, this list offers only a sampling of scholarship published during
the past two decades. For an excellent overview of the American women’s struggle for the right
to vote, see Jeff Hill, Women’s Suffrage (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2006); and Marjorie Spruill
Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale,
OR: NewSage Press, 1995). For essays documenting continuing struggles, see Mary Frances
Berry, Karen McGill Arrington, and William L. Taylor, eds., Voting Rights in America:
Continuing the Quest for Full Participation (Washington, DC: Leadership Conference Education
Fund, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1992). For essays addressing the voting
rights of various constituencies in the United States, see Donald W. Rogers, in collaboration with
Christine Scriabine, eds., Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the History of
Voting and Voting Rights in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Richard M.
Valelly, ed., Black Vote: The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (Washington, DC: CQ Press,
2006); and Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American
Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).

17
“Mob Woman Talker Who Decries War,” New York Times, 24 April 1914, retrieved from
ProQuest.

18
While the BLA was not well known, the BPP was constantly in the headlines, as were the SLA
and WUO. Among the New Left, militant tactics were much discussed. In a critique asserting that
the WUO was a “settler” group not truly committed to revolutionary politics and armed resistance
(unlike the BLA, which was truly revolutionary), E. Tani and Kaé Sera write that “While the
Weather Underground (WUO) was doubtlessly the most publicized organization of this tendency,
it actually had organized and directly led only a small percentage of the whole political current.”
It is also possible that J. Edgar Hoover’s singling out of the two groups as particularly dangerous
added to their mystique. Tani and Sera cite Hoover’s 2 March 1972 testimony before Congress
which “raised the WUO to the threat level of the Black Panther Party” in his claim that “‘Urban
guerrilla warfare by black extremist organizations such as the Black Panther Party, by white
radical groups, such as the Weathermen, and by other organized terrorists, is a serious threat to
law enforcement and the entire nation.’” Both quotes are from E. Tani and Kaé Sera, “The Birth
of Euro-Amerikan Anti-Imperialism,” False Nationalism False Internationalism: Class
Contradictions in the Armed Struggle (Chicago: A Seeds Beneath the Snow Publication, 1985),
np., http://www.urbanguerilla.org/weather.php, accessed 1 January 2010.
19
Indeed, Dan Berger argues that one significant accomplishment of the Weather Underground
was its success in taking the pressure off Third World nationalist groups (a term that includes
ethnic minorities within the United States). See Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather
Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 277.

20
For a concise outline of key events in BPP history, see David J. Garrow’s review of six
histories of the BPP, “Picking Up the Books: The New Historiography of the Black Panther
Party,” Reviews in American History 35.4 (2007): 650-70. For an in-depth history of the BPP
based on oral history and interviews, see Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the
Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,
2006). Many memoirs have been written by former leaders of the party, several of which I’ll draw
from in my analysis. Since my focus is on women in this chapter, here I will list some of the

151

autobiographies by former male leaders of the BPP, who provide additional perspectives to the
ones I analyze in this study. See, e.g., David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The
Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1993); Huey P. Newton, with the assistance of J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the
Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970); Flores A. Forbes,
Will You Die with Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party (New York: Atria Books, 2006); and
Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

21
See “October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program,” in Liberation, Imagination and
the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and their Legacy, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and
George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 285-6.

22
For a brief definition, see Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the
Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 23.

23
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s
Secret Wars against Domestic Dissent (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

24
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 227.

25
Jalil Muntaqim, On the Black Liberation Army (Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press & Arm the
Spirit, 2002;1997), 1.

26
Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and
the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black
Panther Party, 8-11.

27
See, e.g., Shakur, An Autobiography, 225-33; and Safiya Asya Bukhari, Coming of Age: A New
Afrikan Revolutionary (Chicago: Spear & Shield, 2005), 8; rpt. from Notes from a New Afrikan
P.O.W. Journal #7 (Spear & Shield, 1979).

28
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made this public statement on 15 June 1969, and an FBI
spokesperson confirmed that view three years later. Paul Delaney, New York Times News
Service, “Black Panthers Replacing Gun with Ballot as No. 1 Weapon,” Register-Guard (Eugene,
OR), 24 August 1972, 8D. Also see Reginald Major, A Panther is a Black Cat (Baltimore: Black
Classic Press, 2006, 1971), 300.

29
See, in particular, Hilliard and Cole’s This Side of Glory.

30
In her memoir about her involvement in the BPP, Elaine Brown writes that when she took over
as chairman of the party after Newton fled to Cuba, she announced to representatives from all the
gathered chapters that she “will lead our party both aboveground and underground.” Elaine
Brown, A Taste of Power (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 4. Hilliard and Cole also relate
covert and overt activities in This Side of Glory. In addition, see the statements from two women
who went underground: Safiya Asya Bukhari, Coming of Age, 8; and Shakur’s Autobiography.

31
Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 3.

152

32
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in
America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 267.

33
The terms used are, of course, political. From the police perspective, BLA members rob banks.
From the BLA perspective, they expropriate funds from an exploitative capitalist system. See,
e.g., Coordinating Committee Black Liberation Army, Message to the Black Movement: A
Political Statement from the Black Underground (Toronto: Arm the Spirit, 2002); and Meg Starr,
“Enemies: An Introduction,” in Enemies of the State (Montreal: Solidarity Publishing, 2001), 1.

34
Shakur, An Autobiography, 241.

35
Kuwasi Balagoon a Soldier’s Story: Writings by a Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchist
(Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2003), 13.

36
Jaxon Van Derbeken and Marisa Lagos, "Ex-Militants Charged in S.F. Police Officer's '71
Slaying at Station," San Francisco Chronicle, 24 January 2007; Dan Berger, “Rescuing Civil
Rights from Black Power: Collective Memory and Saving the State in Twenty-First-Century
Prosecutions of 1960s-Era Cases,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3:1 (2009), 8-9.

37
Coordinating Committee Black Liberation Army, Message to the Black Movement, 34.

38
Ibid., 9.

39
For histories of the BLA contingent of the black nationalist struggle, see: Charles E. Jones, The
Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998); Shakur, An
Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987); and John Castellucci, The Big Dance: The
Untold Story of Kathy Boudin and the Terrorist Family That Committed the Brinks Robbery
Murders (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), to list only three. For published policies written by the
BPP, see the “Appendices” in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation,
Imagination, and the Black Panther Party.

40
For a detailed account of the robbery, see Castellucci, The Big Dance.

41
For detailed histories of the SDS and the various permutations of Weather members, see Ron
Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (London: Verso, 1997);
and Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity
(Oakland: AK Press, 2006).

42
Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 51-90.

43
For insightful histories of the Weather Underground, see Harold Jacobs’s Weatherman;
Berger’s Outlaws of America; and Ron Jacobs’s The Way the Wind Blew. For documents and
essays written by members of the Weather Underground, see Prairie Fire: The Politics of
Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism: The Political Statement of the Weather Underground (San
Francisco, Communications Co., 1974). For comparison with European radicals, see Jeremy
Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and
Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004).

153

44
However, San Francisco police have reopened a 1970 case in which a bomb exploded in a
police station, killing one sergeant. Two witnesses had implicated the Weather Underground. See
Peter Jamison, “Time Bomb,” SF Weekly.com, 16 September 2009, http://www.sfweekly.com/
2009-09-16/news/time-bomb/1, accessed 1 June 2010.

45
Weather Underground Organization, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-
imperialism: Political Statement of the Weather Underground (San Francisco: Communications
Co., 1974?). Subsequently cited as WUO, Prairie Fire.

46
Maoist Documentation Project, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” Selected Works of
Mao Tse-tung, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-
1/mswv1_6.htm, accessed 1 January 2010.

47
WUO, Prairie Fire, 1.

48
For a sustained critique of the shifting emphases of WUO policy from a militant left
perspective, see chapter seven in Tani and Sera, “The Birth of Euro-Amerikan Anti-Imperialism,”
False Nationalism False Internationalism.

49
Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006), 179-180.

50
For histories of the SLA, see: Vin McLellan and Paul Avery, The Voices of Guns: The
Definitive and Dramatic Story of the Twenty-two Month Career of the Symbionese Liberation
Army, One of the Most Bizarre Chapters in the History of the American Left (New York: Putnam,
1977); and Leslie Payne, Timothy Findley, and Carolyn Craven, The Life and Death of the SLA
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1976). For a collection of documents written by and about the
SLA, see Robert Brainard Pearsall, The Symbionese Liberation Army: Documents and
Communications (Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1974); History Will Absolve Us: A Statement from
the Underground (San Francisco: Dragon, 1976); and M. F. Beal and Friends, Safe House: A
Casebook Study of Revolutionary Feminism in the 1970’s (Eugene, OR: Northwest Matrix, 1976).
By far, the majority of the biographies of SLA women are of Patricia Hearst. See, e.g., Marilyn
Baker, with Sally Brompton, Exclusive! The Inside Story of Patricia Hearst and the SLA (New
York: Macmillan, 1974); William Graebner, Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); John Maguire and Mary Lee Dunn, Patty
Hearst: "From Heiress to Revolutionary" (North Miami Beach: Success Publications, 1975); and
David Boulton, The Making of Tania: The Patty Hearst Story (London: New English Library,
1975). For a biography of Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson, see Sharon Darby Hendry, Soliah:
The Sara Jane Olson Story (Bloomington, MN: Cable Pub, 2002).

51
Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew, 149.

52
Browder, Her Best Shot, 179-180.

53
Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew, 150.

54
Pearsall, The Symbionese Liberation Army, esp. 88-93. Also see, Beal, Safe House, 88-93.

154

55
Beal, Safe House, 65. In addition to distrusting the rhetoric and tactics espoused by the SLA,
several left groups suspected DeFreeze of being a police informant. See Ron Jacobs, The Way the
Wind Blew, 149-50.

56
Sarah Brown "America's hippy extremists," BBC, 17 January 2002, accessed 01 January 2010.

57
To date, none of the SLA women have published memoirs or autobiographies. For insider
perspectives on the WUO, see, e.g., Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times
as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007); and Susan Stern, With the
Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman, ed. Laura Browder (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). For a critical perspective from a former member
who rejected militarism and embraced feminism, see Jane Alpert, Growing Up Underground
(New York: Morrow, 1981). Several women who were active in the BPP and/or BLA have
written personal accounts of their experiences in the party, including Elaine Brown’s Taste of
Power and Assata Shakur’s Autobiography, as cited previously. Other women who wrote about
their experiences include Fred Hampton’s widow, Akua Njeri, My Life with the Black Panther
Party (Oakland: Burning Spear Publications, 1991); and Kathleen Cleaver, Memories of Love and
War (New York: Random House, 1999).

58
Susan Choi, America Woman (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2003), 319. Subsequent
page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text.

59
Indeed, the term yellow journalism originated with William Randolph Hearst in the so-called
Newspaper War between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer during the 1890s. Words@Random,
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20011004, accessed 28 May 2006.

60
Joy Press, “I Was an Asian American Fugitive,” in Village Voice, 8 August 2003,
http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0333,press,46174,10.html, accessed 28 May 2006.

61
“Upstairs” refers to the legal activities of the group; “Downstairs” is where the violent activities
are planned and carried out. This upstairs/downstairs terminology is analogous to the split in the
Black Panther Party caused by Eldridge Cleaver’s televised castigation of Huey Newton’s
reformist efforts.

62
Jay Cantor, Great Neck (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 147. Subsequent page numbers
will be cited parenthetically in the text.

63
Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (London/Sterling,
VA: Pluto Press, 2003), 164.

64
Ibid., 169.

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Chapter 5

Rupturing Reality in Almanac of the Dead

In previous chapters, the anti-state struggles fictionalized in representative novels
engaged both nationalist and internationalist ideologies, from the anticolonial fight for a
united republic in Ireland to the cultural nationalist struggles in the United States in the
first instance, to the socialist theories adapted to particular historical, political and social
situations and a claim to solidarity with Third World struggles in the second. This chapter
introduces a third claim to legitimacy in the fight against colonial power: the American
Indian struggle to reclaim stolen lands and treaty rights in the United States.
1
Such claims
are based not on a moral or legal justification under US law that as an ethnic group
American Indians have been oppressed (however true), but rather on a legal claim that as
members of sovereign nations who signed treaties with the United States, they have been
denied lands as wells as hunting, fishing, and other rights that have been contractually
agreed upon. While not all tribal groups signed treaties, this concept of sovereignty—that
American Indian peoples within the United States exist as nations within a nation—is
central to every indigenous struggle in this country. Thus, native peoples do not consider
themselves an ethnic subgroup of the dominant American culture but rather as original
inhabitants with legally guaranteed, sovereign rights not held by other Americans.
2

Allied with the claim to nation-within-a-nation status is the struggle over
international borders that divide traditional Indian lands and inhibit members of border
tribes from freely visiting hunting grounds and ceremonial sites and the abodes of family
members.
3
Many cross-border tribal groups that traditionally roamed from hunting

156

ground to food-gathering ground to ceremonial sites to extended family outposts did not
(and some still do not) recognize international boundaries, such as the Kumeya’y band of
Mission Indians who roamed between San Diego and Baja, and the Yaquis, who figure
prominently in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Almanac of the Dead. The members of the
Yaqui Nation moved north to the Tucson area during the dictatorship in Mexico of
Porfirio Díaz, who persecuted the Yaqui after one of their leaders named José María
Leyva (in Yaqui, Cajeme, “he-who-does-not-drink”) tried to unite various Yaqui
settlements and establish a republic in the Yaqui Valley. After Díaz accused the Yaquis
of separatism, war broke out, which the Yaquis lost, after which many fled to Tucson,
Arizona, where they remain today. In Silko’s novel, Tucson provides the northern (i.e.,
US) geographical and culturally heterogeneous axis where various cultures collide and
self-destruct; Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, serves as the nexus of degraded traditions in the
south (Mexico).
Implicit to the fictional world of Almanac is the history of colonization by the
Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Americans versus the resistance of “the people” (most
tribal names consist of the indigenous language’s term for the people) to colonial power.
The resistance narratives in the novel emplot the fabula from the mystical nineteenth-
century Ghost Dance movement, setting the uprising in Chiapas (before the Zapatista
uprising of 1994) where the Mayans, having been so marginalized by the dominant
culture, never lost their language or their customs. Additionally, although Almanac
doesn’t reenact the events staged by American Indian Movement (AIM) during the
1970s, the novel assumes an understanding of the Red Power activism of which AIM was

157

a part. As in virtually all Native American texts, an understanding of the history and
culture is indispensable to understanding the text; therefore, a brief history of the Ghost
Dance movement and AIM is crucial to an exegesis of Silko’s most political novel.
4

The Chiapas resistance movement depicted in the novel enacts the promise of the
nineteenth-century Lakota Ghost Dance (active in 1870 and again in 1890), which
asserted the return of the land in the Americas to the Native American peoples who
inhabited it in precontact America.
5
A religious movement, the historical Ghost Dance
had both pacifist and militant manifestations, but its core belief predicted the return of
indigenous dominance over the Americas and its core practice was the round dance. It
spread widely throughout the western United States after several tribes sent
representatives to Nevada to observe and listen to the Paiute (Numu) prophet, Wovoka,
credited with initiating the 1890 Ghost Dance movement. Although Wovoka preached
that the peoples of all races would live in harmony once the land was restored to the
native peoples through peaceful means, it was interpreted by the Lakota Sioux to mean
the obliteration of all the white people.
6
In this more militant version of the Ghost Dance,
the participants wore Ghost Dance shirts that were believed to protect the wearer from
bullets.
7
Some versions predicted the return of all the dead to the earth; others did not, but
in all instances, the historical Ghost Dance engendered such fear in white populations and
the military when it spread beyond the Lakota peoples, the military ultimately massacred
more than 150 people, most of whom were women and children at Wounded Knee Creek
in South Dakota in 1890, the originary event that sparked the occupation by AIM in

158

1973. This massacre effectively ended the Ghost Dance religious movement, though the
round dance is still practiced.
This militant legacy was reinvigorated in the 1970s when Dennis Banks and
others founded the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis. Like the SLA and WUO,
AIM was inspired by the confrontational methods of the Black Panther Party, particularly
its early policy of confronting police abuse by establishing armed patrols in the poorer
black neighborhoods of Oakland. And in the spirit of the late 1960s-early 1970s radical
Republic of New Afrika’s claim to five southern states as reparation for slavery
(Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina), AIM occupied lands
and buildings integral to American Indian culture and precontact history. The militant
group’s most famous actions included the seizure of the replica of the Mayflower on
Thanksgiving Day in 1970, the occupation of Mount Rushmore in 1971 (on Sioux land),
the "Trail of Broken Treaties" march that culminated in the takeover of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1972, and the occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge
Reservation in 1973, leading to the infamous shootout with the FBI that left two FBI and
one AIM member dead.
8
The land claims were based on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty
(also called the Sioux Treaty of 1868), which ended Red Cloud’s War and granted land to
the Lakota Nation.
9
However, with the gold rush, this treaty was violated, and when,
more than a century later, the US government tried to pay the Lakota for the land after
losing a court case in 1980, the tribes refused, insisting that their land be returned.
10
As
with the nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island (from November 1969 to June
1971) by members of AIM and other activists, these actions were not symbolic. Rather,

159

they were intended to publicize the history of violence against Native Americans, and
their actions did produce some material results.
11

Like the other militant groups of the 1960s-70s, the Red Power movement
consisted of various factions, with some groups insisting on an entirely nationalist land-
based agenda and others incorporating socialist philosophies into the struggle to regain
lost lands and cultural rights. While AIM focused on treaty rights within the United
States, some Native American activists pushed for a more global indigenous solidarity on
the grounds that indigenous groups around the world are subject to similar forms of
displacement, violence, marginalization, and usurpation of hunting, fishing, and
subsistence rights.
12
A key activist during the 1950s and 1960s, Wallace “Mad Bear”
Anderson (Tuscarora), traveled widely to Cuba, Canada, and Latin America, seeking to
unite indigenous peoples in the Americas and serving as the national director of the
Indian Nationalist Movement of North America in 1975.
13
In the 1980s, Russell Means,
an early leader of AIM, supported the 1985 Miskito claim of forced relocation against the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua (which resulted in the withdrawal of support from
AIM and US leftist groups that supported the Sandinistas against Reagan’s undercover
support of the Contras).
14
However, AIM members were themselves divided; as some
factions crafted a political platform based on nationalism, anticapitalism, antiracism, and
gender equality, Means articulated a broad-based indigenous anti-imperialist politics that
disregarded borders imposed by Western governments. At a conference, he stated: “I do
not support the racist policies of the United States of America and I do not support the
racist policies of Nicaragua. . . . I have a record of fighting against the imperialists. . . .

160

I’m going to go home, get a hundred AIM warriors, return to Nicaragua with a shovel in
one hand, a rifle in the other, and the sacred pipe of peace in my heart. It will depend on
the Sandinistas which hand we use.”
15
However, the AIM leadership, forging allies with
socialist and workers’ rights groups, quickly condemned his statements and his actions.
16

Recent decades have seen many debates between the nationalist school of Native
American studies theory, which asserts that only those with intimate knowledge of
American Indian culture should be able to write about native peoples, versus the inclusive
groups that form alliances and share ideologies with other marginalized groups.
17
In the
political realm, this translates to a privileging of indigenous issues above other
ideological formulations, with many scholars devoted to the assertion that Marxism and
Native American cultural theory are not compatible. Again, Means articulates how a
Marxist revolution would continue to exploit American Indians:
Let’s suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that
it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalist
order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be
a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the
Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is
true as far as it goes.
But, as I’ve tried to point out, this “truth” is very deceptive. Revolutionary
Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very
industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to “redistribute” the
results—the money, maybe—of this industrialization to a wider section of the
population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in
order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the
power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again
the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will
remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from
the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution.
18

161

It is not within the scope of this study to analyze these two broad ideological
positions; rather, what is crucial is Silko’s attempt in Almanac to appropriate Marxism for
an indigenous teleology.
19
Hers is not an attempt to bridge indigenous worldviews with
Marxist theory, but rather to appropriate and subsume Marxist insights to an indigenous
postcolonial radicalism. Almanac of the Dead can be seen as the fulfillment of an earlier
Lakota prophesy, published both in Silko’s first novel, Ceremony, and in the later
Storyteller, regarding the dominance and complete annihilation of American Indian ways
of being resulting from the encroachment of the white-skinned destroyers. The prophesy
is uttered by a witch as a story within the story:
Long time ago
in the beginning
there were no white people in this world
there was nothing European.
And this world might have gone on like that
except for one thing:
witchery.
This world was already complete
even without white people.
There was everything
including witchery.

……………………

So anyway
they all got together
witch people from all directions
witches from all the Pueblos
and all the tribes.
They had Navajo witches there,
some from Hopi, and a few from Zuni.
……………………

[The witches show off, and then one begins to tell a story, warning that if she begins to
tell the story “it will begin to happen.”
20
]

162

Caves across the ocean
in caves of dark hills
white skin people
like the belly of a fish
covered with hair.

Then they grow away from the earth
then they grow away from the sun
then they grow away from the plants and animals.
They see no life
when they look
they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them
the trees and rivers are not alive
the mountains and stones are not alive.
The deer and bear are objects
they see no life.

………………….

They will fear what they find
They will fear the people
They kill what they fear.

Entire villages will be wiped out
They will slaughter whole tribes.

………………..

And those they do not kill
will die anyway
at the destruction they see
at the loss
at the loss of the children
the loss will destroy the rest.

……..........................

They will take this world from ocean to ocean
They will turn on each other
They will destroy each other
………………………. (Ceremony 135-8)

163

Of mixed Anglo/Laguna Pueblo ancestry, Silko grew up on the edge of the
Laguna Pueblo and identifies most strongly as Laguna.
21
Both Ceremony and Storyteller
consist of a narrative interspersed with traditional Lakota stories of Yellow Woman, the
Twins, and other familiar Keres (one of the seven Pueblo tribes in New Mexico) figures;
in addition, Storyteller includes autobiographical stories of Silko’s relatives, narrated in
the first person. The narrative is not linear, nor are the stories introduced by the narrative;
rather, the stories are juxtaposed against, as opposed to interwoven within, the narrative
in what Edward Huffsetler and others have defined as a “dialogic” process, a “‘nexus of
exchanges’ between cultures” that results in an “ongoing cultural polyphony.”
22
There are
multiple storylines, ranging from decadent Argentinean aristocrats who traffic in
mutilation pornography, to the coke addict Seese whose newborn has been kidnapped and
who seeks the help of a mestizo Yaqui psychic, to the mestizo Yaqui border-crossing
drug-smuggling family, to the mafia south of the border whose activities intersect with
the porn and drug traffickers, to a corrupt governor in Mexico City who engages in
bestiality and who maintains his power through brutal violence, to the burgeoning
resistance movement in Chiapas headed by Angelita La Escapía, to the mestizo Yaqui
twin sisters who have been charged by their full-blood grandmother Yoeme (the Yaquis’
name for themselves) to piece together the fragments of the Almanac of the Dead
(loosely modeled on the Popul Vuh), the history of the Yaqui people. The Almanac refers
to the last five hundred colonial years as constituting the Reign of Death-Eye Dog, where
the destroyers have triumphed over all civilization, and predicts its end (“I have told you

164

the stories on each day and year / so you could be prepared / . . . this world is about to
end,” 135).
Under the Reign of Death-Eye Dog, virtually every relationship—mother-son,
lover-lover, sibling-sibling—is debased and destructive, in a manifestation of the
prophesy of the destruction wrought not just by whites, but also by people of color who
participate in the western culture of greed and destruction. Silko does not simply blame
western culture, however; as Almanac suggests, it is the Destroyer clan in precontact
America who “‘called down’ the alien invaders, sorcerer-cannibals from Europe,
magically sent to hurry the destruction and slaughter already begun by the Destroyers’
secret clan” (475). The invasion of the European decadent “civilization” forecloses any
possibility of love; there is only manipulative and degrading sex; there are no responsible
mothers; there is no protection from the police—in fact, the police sell videos of their
interrogation sessions, in which they torture the victims, to entrepreneurs who market
them quite profitably. Mother-child relationships are poisoned; heterosexual as well as
homosexual relations are manipulative and destructive, even lethal; childbearing is
dangerous; the entire western (white) and western-dominated mestizo world exists in a
state equivalent to Dante’s hell, to use a western allusion.
23
The very few decent
characters are too damaged to function in a community: Seese, a coke addict, searches for
her missing baby who has been kidnapped, she discovers later, by Beaufrey, the lover of
David (Seese’s lover and the father of the baby), who has had the infant slaughtered on
videotape to be marketed to perverted appetites; Sterling, a Lakota who is perhaps
unfairly banished from his tribe for his inability to prevent a Hollywood film crew from

165

filming a newly discovered sacred snake; and Eric, a friend to Seese, who commits
suicide because he is vulnerable and decent, and thus a helpless pawn in a homosexual
triangle of “destroyers” who are beyond any sort of human compassion. The juxtaposed
storylines constitute the twentieth-century manifestation of the Lakota prophesy,
signifying the decay of the dominant white, corporate narrative of greed and destruction.
Before I turn to an analysis of the narratological and rhetorical strategies used, I
wish to point out one caveat in any study of gender in indigenous societies: precontact
American Indian groups constituted family and gender relations quite distinctly from
each other, and traditions varied immensely from region to region and from tribe to tribe.
Some groups were matrilineal, others not; furthermore, gender relations have evolved
over time and across cultures. However, when examining gender relations, scholars and
tribal members often state axiomatically that Native women have always been “strong,”
and that some tribal groups find it unnecessary to claim that “‘Our women are powerful’”
because it is so obvious.
24
It is one way of distinguishing the minority culture from the
hegemonic group.
In his account of the occupation of Wounded Knee, for instance, Russell Means
points out that the majority of the Oglala Lakota occupying Wounded Knee in 1973 were
women, stating that “most Indian women in those years [i.e., of his grandmother’s age]
. . . were strong,” that because they understood the “female-male balance,” they felt “no
need to be publicly anointed with leadership.”
25
In their comparative study of Native
women and power in North American tribal groups (excluding Mexico), Klein and
Ackerman dismiss the two primary stereotypes of American Indian women as portrayed

166

in Euro-American media: that of the “squaw” (a drudge and inferior to her husband) and
the “princess” (a royal person who, in overtones of eugenic constructions of the good and
the beautiful, must reject “the standards and traditions of her people for European views
of morality and romantic love”; in other words, “a ‘good Native woman’ cannot be
perceived as truly Native”).
26
Their study claims that gender in native North America is
not rooted in biological determination but rather in behavior and, furthermore, that gender
relations are not expressed in terms of authority but rather in political terms.
27
Their study
finds four arguments concerning women and power (defined not only as political power)
in native North America (excluding Mexico):
(1) arguments for egalitarian gender relations in societies in which hierarchical
relationships in general are noticeably weak (Plateau, Basin, parts of California,
and the eastern Subarctic); (2) arguments for female power in societies that
allocate comparatively high degrees of informal or even formal power to women
(Iroquois, Cherokee, Hopi, Navajo); (3) arguments that male power is culturally
limited even in societies usually characterized as dominated by male authority
(Arctic, Northern Athapaskan, Plains, Creek); and (4) arguments that even very
hierarchical societies may not use gender as a major dimension for the distribution
of power and prestige (Tlingit).
28

Each chapter of the book makes the case that women in specific geographical regions had
more power than generally acknowledged.
29
While one cannot accept uncritically these
broad distinctions regarding power, what is germane about native women’s power to the
cosmology of Silko’s novel is that people in the north, both native and non-native, have
become so corrupted by a corporate, soulless, culture of greed that revolutionary and
spiritual rejuvenation must come from the southern, rural tribes in Chiapas and elsewhere
where traditions haven’t been so thoroughly lost by exposure to western corruption, and
where resistance to the confiscation of lands began in the 1970s.
30

167

And even though Mayan women traditionally suffered both gender and racial
discrimination, many women who participated in the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) report dramatic change in gender relations within the family as well
as incremental improvements in their political situation after the EZLN’s acceptance of
the Zapatista Revolutionary Women’s Laws asserting equal rights in 1994.
31
The majority
of the firsthand accounts relate how the women’s participation in the EZLN as soldiers
provided the catalyst to more equal treatment. Comandanta Esther, for instance, states:
As Zapatista women we’ve made a little progress. We saw that we didn’t have
anything and we asked ourselves, Who is going to give us anything if we don’t do
anything? . . . Before, women didn’t participate in meetings, in the assembly,
because their husbands wouldn’t let them. The men understand now; women can
go to meetings, and men can stay at home taking care of the animals. Now if men
see that there’s a lot of work in the kitchen, they help their wives or their
compañeras. They didn’t do it before. Now they do. There’s change.
32

In a speech before the Mexican Congress, Esther remarks that she knows that the
legislators expected Subcomandante Marcos to make the first address from the Zapatistas
in Congress rather than “a poor, indigenous, Zapatista woman,” but pointedly asserts her
own authority by stating that she and the others were comandantes and “Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos is that, a Subcomandante.”
33

Also excluded from Klein and Ackerman’s study are the Yaqui, a group that, in
contrast to the Mayan women, embodies Silko’s revolutionary message in Almanac
because of their reputation as unconquered warriors and their longstanding resistance to
the Mexican government.
34
In a dialogue that took place at the 2006 Feminism and War
conference in Syracuse, New York, Eli PaintedCrow, a Yaqui woman who served in the
US Army for twenty-two years and who worked with Iraq Vets against the War and Code

168

Pink, posits the equality and strength of Yaqui women, making a distinction between a
warrior (a way of being, or life path) and a soldier (an avocation). Citing her lineage on
her mother’s side as a Mexica Apache who fought with many other soldaderas (female
soldiers) against the Spanish in the Mexican Revolution, PaintedCrow asserts the equality
of the women, at least in times of war:
It’s just that we forgot our history and because the history of the Mexica women
is not considered a part of America, so now there’s this whole new thing about
women in combat. That’s not a new thing for my people. Yaquis are very fierce,
they’re known for being the most savage in battle of all nations, of any tribes
because they just didn’t give up. . . . They hadn’t surrendered and that’s why as a
Yaqui I am able to be on a rez [reservation] in Arizona and cross the border into
Sonora, Mexico, and have equal status there too because we moved over to
Arizona but that was just a safe haven. We hadn’t given up our land in Sonora.
We’re still fighting with the Mexican government there. And so this thing that we
talk about “equality,” it’s not that it’s not there. We’ve just surrendered to
someone else’s definition of equality and because we surrendered to that, now
we’re fighting to get it back. And the thing about it for me is that we don’t have to
fight to get it back, we just have to light the fire in us. We are already equal. We
have to act like we are already equal for it to manifest. . . . As far as a woman
warrior is concerned, the idea of a warrior is so much different from the idea of a
soldier. Because this country uses “warrior citizen,” “weekend warrior,” that’s
one of the illusions for Native people, I think. And I can’t speak for all Native
people, I can only speak for my own experience. And I’m not being the voice for
all Native people because I haven’t sat down with every nation and asked for—I
don’t want to ask for permission, I’d rather ask for forgiveness. It’s my point of
view and it’s nobody else’s. But it’s my point of view as a Native woman, as a
Native who comes from a history of battles, from my people with my people. That
hasn’t really changed for them in a lot of ways. But, a warrior is a path. It’s what
it is. It’s a path where your heart says, this is the right thing to do and it’s
something that I’m willing to die for.
35

However, in Silko’s novel, the Yaqui woman warrior tradition is represented by
the twin mestizo sisters Zeta and Lecha, both gifted with powers and both charged by
their full-blood grandmother to piece together the fragmented Almanac of the Dead (a
fictional almanac based loosely on the Mayan Popul Vuh), yet both damaged by western

169

decadence and greed. The psychic Lecha, hated by her son whom she abandoned when he
was just a child, is addicted to drugs and dying of cancer, while Zeta is deeply involved
in cross-border drug- and gun-smuggling. When Lecha’s assistant Seese injects her with
Demerol, Lecha’s son Ferro grabs his gun and leaves, saying “the needle slips in like a
lover’s prick and shoots the dope in white and hot. That’s why Lecha wants them all to
watch her get off, Ferro says, but he doesn’t watch junky orgasm not even for his own
mother” (20). Here, the focalizor is an external agent, situated outside the narrative, but
throughout the novel, it slides into and out of character’s perspectives rapidly even within
paragraphs, providing multiple levels of viewing. In three paragraphs, the focal gaze
shifts from Seese, who is gathering up the remnants from administering the drug to
Lecha, to Lecha who points to the room, to the external focalizer, which pans across the
room, pointing out that there is “No food anywhere. Pistols, shotguns, and cartridges
scattered on the kitchen counter, and needles and pills all over the table. The Devil’s
kitchen doesn’t look this good” (20), to Ferro’s disgusted comments and departure, to
Zeta’s disapproval, to Paulie (Ferro’s sidekick and admirer) turning on the display button
to the panopticon-like video monitoring system in order to watch Ferro skidding down
the driveway. The multiple layers and levels of viewing this scene of drugs, guns, and
familial hatred distances the reader from the characters, and the focalizer acts as a
camera, illustrating in a microcosm the method of the novel at large, like the Ghost of
Christmas Future showing the reader the evil ways of the present. Even when the point of
view shifts to one of the characters, the reader sees from the perspective of the external
focalizer; this distance is maintained throughout the novel.

170

The function of the focalizor as camera is encapsulated in the scene after Eric,
close friend to Seese, and (unknown to Seese) lover to Seese’s lover, David, commits
suicide out of love for David. David, a photographer, on the scene immediately
afterward, delays calling the police for several hours while he photographs the corpse.
When Seese, hungover from champagne, “with a camera where her head should be”
(105), discovers the prints in the darkroom, she thinks initially that she is looking at a
“field of peonies and poppies—cherry, ruby, deep purple, black” with a “nude nearly
buried in blossoms of bright reds and purples” (106). Instead, what she is seeing is the
suicide scene, Eric’s body sprawled against a white bed; the red and purple blotches are
his blood, brains, and bones spattered on the walls and bed. Looking at the photographs,
Seese sees David photographing the corpse “Police Gazette style,” focusing “with
clinical detachment, close up on the .44 revolver,” setting up the lights so that the blood
appeared “as bright and glossy as enamel paint,” and developing the prints in high
contrast to emphasize the black tar of the blood against the white chenille bedspread
(106-8). Additional levels of watching are invoked in Beaufrey’s accusation that David
had watched Eric commit suicide for his art; and the gallery showing of the prints which
drew a steady stream of viewers, who, like the critics, were outraged yet fascinated. A
lawsuit from Eric’s family only served to authenticate the reality of the photographs and
to secure the fame of the show. Death and destruction are thus the subject of a depraved
fascination in the art world, just as Beaufrey’s mutilation-video customers exhibit a
depraved fascination in their desire for greater and greater stimulation, which compels
Beaufrey to go to increasing depths of violence to satisfy their appetites. This raises the

171

question of Silko’s readers, who are the ultimate viewers of these scenes of depravity,
and the purpose of the focalizing camera.
These themes are repeated in the border town of El Paso, in the north, and south
of the border in the town of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, in congested cities.
The mountains and rural areas in Chiapas that have been largely untouched by western
influences, by contrast, are the spaces where older cultural traditions and traditions of
resistance to invaders survive. While the western-influenced world self-destructs
according to the prophesy, an emergent resistance movement gathers force in Chiapas led
by a Mayan woman, Angelita La Escapía, the colonel in the Army of Justice and
Redistribution. La Escapía embraces Marx’s ideas but rejects European and Cuban
communism, as well as Stalin and Mao. She interprets Marx’s view in relation to native
storytellers, “the old people’s” views: “This man Marx had understood that the stories or
‘histories’ are sacred; that within ‘history’ reside relentless forces, powerful spirits,
vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice. No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said,
history would catch up with you; it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the
changing, were inevitable.”
36
In this passage, Silko seems to endorse a form of historical
determinism, one based not on Hegelian dialectics, but on Native American prophecy that
warns of the imminent destruction wrought by the “destroyers,” broadly conceived as
those participating in and worshiping western capitalism and eschewing all moral,
ethical, and spiritual codes (figured as the most extreme depravity in the novel),
regardless of their ethnicity.

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In Silko’s construction of an indigenous teleology, the feebleness of philosophy,
considered to be any construction of purely human rationality, is inadequate a construct
either to change the world or to understand it. El Feo, a twin imbued with sacred
responsibilities, articulates the question that stands in for the nativist questioning of
communism: “Wasn’t communism godless? Then how could history so full of spirits
exist without gods?” (317).
37
The assumption that spirits are present in everyday life is
essential to reading Silko’s texts critically, as she deliberately situates the reader within a
world that adheres to Keresan ways of knowing, and the careful critic must be wary of
imposing etic views. Huffsetler suggests that the novel has suffered from “rather curious
criticism” because “the Indian nature of the spirituality is not fully understood by many
readers,” stating that “at stake in this discussion is the very authenticity of Silko’s vision,
of Native American fiction in general, and . . . Indian sensibility itself.”
38
Susan Baringer
has argued that one problem in interpretation of Almanac is “the tendency to read it from
the perspective of a realist tradition in American literature,” suggesting that because of its
elements of speculative fiction and the inclusion of a “rich tradition of Pueblo (Keres)
oral literature,” the novel evinces elements of a folkloric text which Baringer associates
with women’s writing.
39
Baringer is alluding here to an early critic’s (Sven Birkerts)
frustration with the novel’s apocalyptic vision and stylistic clutter; a passage cited by
several critics as a negative reference point from which to launch their own analyses.
40

Sven Birkerts’s review states that Silko’s “promise of revolutionary insurrection
is tethered to airy nothing. It is, frankly, naïve to the point of silliness. The appeal to
prophecy cannot make up the common-sense deficit.”
41
Birkerts’s appeal to common

173

sense invokes the readers’ expectation of verisimilitude, and he singles out the possibility
of revolution as singularly unbelievable, which, according to western models of the
probable, is not surprising given that the depiction of characters speaking to macaws, of
stones that drip blood, of the imminence of revolution defy western definitions of
“common sense.” Common sense privileges the everyday ordinariness of life, as
experienced within one’s own socioeconomic, political, and cultural community. Thus,
critics maintain certain assumptions about what constitutes reality from a hegemonic
western position that fails to take into account indigenous cosmologies. What seems
beyond the bounds of “common sense” is that revolution could happen in the United
States.
42
However, common sense evolves with the cultural conversation of a given time;
the sense of imminent revolution described by members of 1960s-70s radical groups as
well as historians of the period seems dated today.
Almanac of the Dead seems to create as much generic confusion as James’s
Princess Casamassima. Carlton Smith calls it a “fantasy chronicling the demise of the
postmodern ‘Americas.’”
43
Bridget O’Meara offers a Marxist reading of the text which
she situates within the “emergent international movement(s) for social and ecological
justice.”
44
Others eschew labels to describe the function of the text. David Moore
suggests that Almanac interpolates the reader as narrative witness: “The interactive
dynamics of Silko’s oral tradition structure this literary process of witness, so that author
and reader witness, elude, and neutralize destruction.”
45
Brewster Fitz makes a similar
argument, suggesting that the novel “is the enactment of a wish-fulfillment scenario”
both in its depiction of the desiccation of western culture and the retaking of Indian lands,

174

and in its construction of language as justice. Almanac is “destined to produce not the
apostasy but the syncretic melding of monotheist, individualist cultures of exclusion and
hierarchy with pagan and animist cultures of inclusion and equality everywhere.”
46

Such generic confusion is caused primarily by two factors: one, the resolute
assumption of western models of what constitutes the probable, or reality, and, two, the
shift in narrative mode toward the end of the novel from what I call a nativist-realist
mode to a visionary mode. Nativist-realism accepts visions and signals from the animal
and spiritual world as normal; eschews western binaries between mind and body, spirit
world and material world; and conflates the past, present, and future, whereas the
visionary mode makes physically manifest—through the production of the book—the
old-time prophesies. However, the realist mode involves co-opting the reader’s
skepticism: the twin Tacho expresses the skepticism of the reader when he muses that “95
percent of supposed witchcraft and sorcery was superstition and puffed-up talk” (478).
My reading of the novel argues that Silko’s nativist-realism incorporates elements of
postmodern aesthetic sensibilities (the juxtaposition as opposed to interweaving of
multiple story lines, the pastiche of genres, the distancing effects of the focalizor), but
that even the inclusive nativist-realist form is ultimately unable to contain the narrative of
a revolutionary woman without rupturing.
La Escapía, the leader of the Mayan revolutionary forces defies, normative
standards of conduct within her community as well as the stereotype of Mayan women as
submissive to their husbands.
47
She chooses her lovers at will and sometimes for political
expediency, she speaks multiple languages, she is sophisticated and intelligent—able to

175

parse Marx’s meanings with more nuance than the Cuban Marxist Bartolomeo—she is
ruthlessly committed to her political ideals, and she is a superb strategist. She uses the
colonizer’s fear of the “native” to supply the guerilla army. Her secret to success in
fundraising to arm the People’s Army
had been simple: the world over—from foreign governments to multinational
corporations—they all wanted to be called “friends of the Indians.” They had just
witnessed the bloody end of European control in South Africa. They had watched
the tribes of Africa retake the land from Europeans; in the Americas they might
have another fifty years or even one hundred, but time was running out. The
Indians had risen up in Peru with the Shining Path. (471)

The guerillas organize defense units in the villages disguised as baseball leagues, which
enables them to request donations of uniforms and dynamite from “Friends of the
Indians,” purportedly to clear land for baseball diamonds in plain sight. Some of the
guerillas’ tactics are more fanciful, but express the indigenous connection to the earth and
other living beings. El Feo captures wild pigs and turns them loose in the jungle in
preparation for the revolution, so that when soldiers, hearing the boars crashing through
the underbrush, chase them into the swamp, they can “‘easily be picked off by a few
snipers’” (470). Although the older people in the community, who support
wholeheartedly the revolution, distrust La Escapía’s espousal of Marxist thought and her
sexual alliance with Bartolomeo, the Cuban communist, they admire her ability to secure
guns and support for the imminent revolution. The handsome El Feo (named the Ugly
One to fool Keresan spirits) knows that she sleeps with Bartolomeo to gain access to
funding sources for the revolution. When La Escapía claims that “an Indian woman on
television made white men feel less afraid than if they saw a handsome devil such as El
Feo” (477-7), El Feo ruminates, “If that was what white men thought, then whites were

176

fools; because a woman such as Angelita was more deadly and fierce in battle than many
men” (478). This ruthlessness is confirmed by La Escapía’s later command to execute
Bartolomeo, whoe is condemned to death for his cultural insensitivity and refusal to
subsume his beliefs to the People’s Army’s aim to retake their land. As leader, La
Escapía is resourceful, earthy, fierce, sexual, and dangerous. El Feo describes her in what
are both typically Hegelian and nativist terms as a “dark angel,” while his twin Tacho
defines her by association with objects—“diesel generators, minivans, and dynamite”
(477). Both quasi-idealized and resolutely material, La Escapia serves as a new paradigm
for the militant woman. There is no narrative attempt to make her more sympathetic by
attributing more conventionally western feminine values or attributes.
The building sense of impending violence shifts suddenly, however, towards the
end of the novel when thousands of people converge on Tucson for the International
Holistic Healers Convention. A debate commences in which a series of indigenous
speakers proclaims either violence or nonviolence (or removal to another planet) as a
solution to the problem of colonization. The macaw spirits inform Tacho, who as a twin
is endowed with certain powers and who is called Wacah in his spiritual capacity, that
there needed to be no violence in the revolution, that all the gathering thousands of
people had to do was walk north and the spirits would protect them: “A people’s army as
big as theirs would not need weapons. Their sheer numbers were weapons enough. A
people’s army needed food” (710). And though El Feo agreed with La Escapía that
without weapons the US government would probably slaughter all of the marchers, as a
twin imbued with special powers, he had to agree with his brother Tacho/Wacah that the

177

US military and police would throw down their weapons and join the marchers, while the
Europeans would all “suffocate in their burning cities without rain or water any longer”
(711). The realist La Escapía expresses the doubts felt by the skeptical reader that
spiritual change can take place overnight and stocks plenty of shoulder-mounted rockets
to protect the marchers. “Angelita heard from spirits too—only her spirits were furious
and they told her to defend the people from attack” (712). The focalizor briefly enters
into El Feo’s point of view when the narrator states that “El Feo had agreed with Angelita
La Escapía, his comrade-in-arms:
the U.S. government might not wait for the twin brothers and the people to reach
the border. The unarmed people would most likely be shot down before they even
reached the border, but still they must have faith that even the federal police and
the soldiers would be caught up by the spirits and swept along by the thousands.
(711)

This debate between the pragmatic actions of the guerillas on the ground and the
spiritual messages of the various speaker-prophets takes place at the holistic healers’
convention. The debate over tactics ends with the speech of the Barefoot Hopi, who
preaches patience and pacifism. He echoes the words of Wovoka, the nineteenth-century
Ghost Dance prophet:
48

“All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans
and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will
devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. Entire coastal peninsulas
will disappear under the sea; hundreds of thousands will die. The west coast of the
Americas will be swept clean from Alaska to Chile in tidal waves and landslides.
Drought and wildfire will rage across Europe to Asia. Only Africa will be spared
because the anger of the spirits has already been appeased by the rivers of blood
in the great war that freed South Africa.” (734-5)

178

In other words, guns and rockets are not necessary; the spirits will use the elements to
destroy oppositional groups so that the prophesies will be enacted. The Barefoot Hopi
further discusses the peaceful changes that would take place after more Indians became
US citizens. After this speech, La Escapía speaks with conformity to the message
delivered by Wacah and the Barefoot Hopi, that the change was already taking place, that
nothing could stop it, that “guns and bombs would not stop them” (736)—a reference to
the shirts worn by the Ghost Dancers said to protect the wearer from bullets. However,
Lecha notes that “Angelita suspected the truth: there would be no elections; great
struggles were about to sweep all through the Americas as far north as Alaska and
Canada. . . . She only pretended to agree with the twin brothers and their followers”
(739).
The outcome of the revolution is left unnarrated; masses of people gather for the
march north; the serpent returns as foretold by Yoeme and the Almanac; and Zeta,
recognizing that a new world order is coming, kills her racist gun supplier. The march
begins, and it is unclear whether the peaceful vision promulgated by the twin brother’s
reading of the macaw spirits will prevail or whether La Escapía’s realist vision of
massive struggles and bloodshed will begin during the march. Coincidentally, the
Zapatista Revolution erupted just three years after the book was published. In keeping
with the visionary mode of the last few chapters of the novel, this historical event might
be interpreted as the physical embodiment of the written word, the completion of Silko’s
Almanac in conjunction with Zeta’s and Lecha’s own work on the Mayan almanac, but
this interpretation violates all of the rules of empirical literary critical studies.
49
The

179

novel’s visionary enactment of the old prophesies, coupled with its portrayal of a vital
and successful feminist revolutionary, must relegate the novel to the formal critical
basket of non-realism, what Huffsetler suggests might be called a “virtual revolution.”
50

Silko’s novel recognizes that the western or Euro-American worldview will reject the
spirituality as it historically refused to recognize the land. Various elders in the novel
comment on the whites’ spiritual vacuum, their “blindness to the world” (224); the
Barefoot Hopi states that Europeans do “not listen to the souls of their dead. That [is] the
root of all trouble for Europeans” (604). In his articulation of a “theology of sovereignty,”
George Tinker writes that “Indian politics and spirituality are . . . wholly intertwined.”
51

At the very least, Almanac serves as a warning as well as, perhaps, an educational tool to
the uninformed that, from Zeta’s perspective, “there was not, and there never had been, a
legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not
even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be
established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had clear title” (133). As Carlton
Smith suggests:
Like Sterling and La Escapía’s representations of “reality,” . . . Silko’s Almanac
ultimately calls into question what constitutes history. In its fusion of myth,
fiction, alternative and straight “history,” Native American spiritualism into what
might be considered a postmodern pastiche of history, it implicitly suggests that
from within the margins of these generic categories, a different history is possible.
Almanac raises the issue of agency, its text suggesting that narrative authority is
always a question of power. For Silko, the silencing of the Indian voice, reflected
in the violence confronting the ghost dancers, is coextensive with discursive
traditions that have denied indigenous people agency within colonial historical
narratives.
52

That the Zapatista uprising was quickly and violently suppressed, and that the
Zapatistas now adopt a reformist approach does not undermine the fact that what is

180

possible, or probable, varies from community to community in the real world, but
perhaps not so fluidly in the world of realist fiction. The portrayal of feminist
revolutionary subjectivity may be possible in novels that eschew realist conventions, but
will there be a future date when realist fiction can represent the figure of the feminist
“terrorist” without resorting to a fictional refeminization? It seems possible, perhaps
probable, as forms and genres evolve with changing historical realities. But the question
remains: is there something inherent to the production of the realist novel itself, at least in
the mainstream publishing industry? This question can only be answered by a similar
investigation in other fields: film, theater, performance.

181

Chapter 5 Endnotes

1
In this chapter, I use the terms Native American and American Indian, or shortened versions
thereof, to refer to the indigenous peoples of the United States in aggregate. Indigenous peoples
of Canada are generally referred to as aboriginal or First Nations peoples, while I will use the
term indigenous to refer to the original inhabitants of Mexico. When referring to a specific group,
I use the specific tribal affiliation.

2
It is perhaps ironic that Native Americans would stake an exceptionalist political claim based on
treaty rights, considering the common charge of American exceptionalism rendering the United
States uniquely unsuited for a socialist governing structure. For a discussion and refutation of the
main claims to American exceptionalism, see, e.g. Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of
Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), esp. ch. 1,
“Are American Workers Different?,” 3-14.

3
For discussions regarding the vagaries of US border policy vis à vis transborder tribes, see Eric
V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007); Eileen M. Luna-Firebaugh, “The Border Crossed Us: Border
Crossing Issues of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,” Wicazo Sa Review 17:1 (2002): 159-
181; and Ralph Santiago De Unamuno, “Fight for the Line: The Struggle for Pass and Repass
along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006.

4
For a brief history of indigenous resistance in the Americas, see Gord Hill, 500 Years of
Indigenous Resistance (Oakland: PM Press, 2009).

5
See Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian
Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and
Rani-Henrik Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2008).

6
This point is contested by scholars. Early ethnographic accounts argue that the Lakota
considered the ghost dance both a religious ceremony and a preparation for war. See, e.g.,
Michael Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, ed. Don Lynch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1997); Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity, 168. A recent study argues that it was the press
and excitable Indian agents who made the claim that it was a war dance and that either Sitting
Bull or Kicking Bear brought this interpretation to the Lakota people. See Andersson, The Lakota
Ghost Dance of 1890, 272-83.

7
Although Black Elk took credit for introducing the Ghost Dance shirt to the Lakota,
ethnographer James Mooney identifies Kicking Bear as the originator. For firsthand descriptions
of the Ghost Dance, oral records of Wovoka’s ability to alter the weather and to withstand bullets,
a discussion of Mormon parallels to Ghost Dance beliefs, and a synthesis of several ethnographic
records, see Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, 82-8.

8
For a history of AIM, see Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The
Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996). For a history of

182

radicalism among American Indians, see Frederick E. Hoxie, Peter C. Mancall, and James Hart
Merrell, American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850 to the Present (New York:
Routledge, 2001).

9
For a casebook on the legal claims made during the Wounded Knee trials, see Wounded Knee
1890 1973 (St. Paul: Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, 1973); John William
Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials (Delanco, NJ: Notable Trials Library,
1997; 2001); and Edward A. Milligan (He Topa), Wounded Knee 1973 and the Fort Laramie
Treaty of 1868 (Bottineau, ND: E. A. Milligan, 1973).

10
For a discussion of treaties, see Frederick E. Hoxie, Treaties: A Source Book (Chicago:
Newberry Library, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, 1992).

11
For a brief list of changes that occurred as a result of the Wounded Knee occupation, see, e.g.,
Donna Hightower Langston, “American Indian Women's Activism in the 1960s and 1970s,” San
Francisco Bay Area Indymedia, 21 March 2006, http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/
03/21/18095451.php, accessed 12 January 2009. Langston writes that “a top aide to President
Nixon later cited at least nine major policy shifts that resulted from the occupation of Alcatraz,
including passage of the Indian Self Determination and Education Act, revision of the Johnson
O'Malley Act to improve Indian education, and passage of the Indian Financing Act and an
Indian Health Act, and the return of Mount Adams to the Yakima in Washington State as well as
the return of 48,000 acres of the Sacred Blue Lake lands to Taos Pueblo in New Mexico,” 121-2.
More recently, the takeover of the BIA headquarters led to the discovery of BIA mishandling of
trust funds collected for the payment of mining, grazing, and oil and gas production rights. This
discovery eventually resulted in a class-action lawsuit, the parties to which settled and which is
now in the hands of Congress. Joel Dyer, “Billions Missing From U.S. Indian Trust Fund,” The
Albion Monitor, Issue 178, February-April 2009, np, http://www.albionmonitor.com/0902a/
default.html, accessed 12 December 2009; Kevin Freking, “Senators Urged to Approve Settling
of BIA Trust Case, News from Indian Country, 10 January 2010, http://indiancountrynews.net/
index.php?option= com_content&task=view&id=8138&Itemid=1, accessed 10 January 2010.

12
See, e.g., Duane Champagne and Ismael Abu-Saad, The Future of Indigenous Peoples:
Strategies for Survival and Development (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center,
2003).

13
Doug Boyd, Mad Bear: Spirit, Healing, and the Sacred in the Life of Native American
Medicine Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

14
Russell Means, with Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of
Russell Means (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 459-76.

15
Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread, 463.

16
Ibid.

17
For an informative breakdown of the various threads of these debates, see Jace Weaver, Craig
S. Womack, and Robert Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2006), which, as its title suggests, falls into the nationalist
camp, as does Craig S. Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism

183

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). An outspoken critic of the nationalist camp
is David Treuer; see Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (Saint Paul: Graywolf
Press, 2006); and Virginia Kennedy, “Interview: A Conversation with David Treuer,” Studies in
American Indian Literature 20:2 (Summer 2008): 47-63.

18
Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread, 549.

19
For a counterargument, see Tamara M. Teale, “The Silko Road from Chiapas or Why Native
Americans Cannot Be Marxists,” MELUS 23:4 (1998): 157-66. Also see Ward Churchill,
Elisabeth R. Lloyd, and Glenn T. Morris, Culture Versus Economism: Essays on Marxism in the
Multicultural Arena (Boulder, CO: Indigena Press, 1984).

20
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1977), 135. Subsequent page references
will be cited parenthetically in the text as “Ceremony” and the page number.

21
Robert M. Nelson, “A Laguna Woman,” Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Louise Barnett and James Thorson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999),
15-22.

22
Edward Huffsetler, “Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers: The Dialogic Nature of American
Indian Resistance,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 14:4 (Winter 2002): 3. Also see
Arnold Krupat, “The Dialogic of Silko’s Storyteller,” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse
on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1999), 223-44; and David L. Moore, “Decolonializing Criticism: Reading
Dialectics and Dialogics in Native American Literatures,” Studies in American Indian
Literatures, Series 2, 6:4 (Winter 1994). Huffsetler draws on Moore’s distinctions between the
dialectic and dialogic; Krupat draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, and Moore
draws on James Clifford’s opposition between dualism and dialogism.

23
Critics have noted the problematic depiction of the gay characters in the novel, as all but one
are among the most murderous and depraved characters. See, e.g., Janet St. Clair, “Cannibal
Queers: The Problematics of Metaphor in Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 207-21.

24
Laura F. Klein and Lillian A. Ackerman, Women and Power in Native North America
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 4.

25
Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread, 265.

26
Klein and Ackerman, Women and Power, 5-6. The editors do not explain why they exclude
Mexico from their study of North America.

27
Ibid., 231.

28
Ibid. 232.

29
Ibid., 231. The collection does not address domestic violence within various tribes. For
accounts of personal experiences, see Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, and Carrie A. Martell, eds.,

184

Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (Lanham: AltaMira Press,
2008). Also see Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York:
HarperPerennial, 1990). Although Crow Dog blames it on the effects of colonization, she writes
that “among Plains tribes, some men think that all a woman is good for is to crawl into the sack
with them and mind the children” (5). She also warns that “it is not always wise for an Indian
woman to come on too strong” (4), hinting that her closest friend Anna Mae Aquash, a Micmac
who packed a gun (120), “got high up in the councils of AIM” and helped set “movement
policies” (191), and who was present at every major AIM action, may have been killed because
she was too outspoken.

30
Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement, trans.
Laura Carlsen with Alejandro Reyes Arias (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008).

31
Teresa Ortiz, Never Again a World Without Us: Voices of Mayan Women in Chiapas, Mexico
(Washington, DC: EPICA, 2001).

32
Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen, eds., Dissident Women:
Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 29.

33
Ibid., 16-17.

34
For a history of the Yaqui, see, e.g., John J. Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation
of American-owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008); and John E. Kicza, ed., The Indian in Latin American History: Resistance, Resilience, and
Acculturation (Wilmington: SR Books, 2000).

35
Setsu Shigematsu, “Aftermath: Feminism and the Militarization of Women's Lives,”
International Feminist Journal of Politics 11: 3 (2009): 424,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616740903017752, accessed 4 December 2009. PaintedCrow’s
assertion of unproblematic border-crossing is contested in Luna-Firebaugh’s “The Border
Crossed Us,” 176, 173-4.

36
Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, 1991; 1992), 316.
Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

37
Twins are considered special beings in Lakota cosmology: in some cases sacred, in others
harboring the potential for evil.

38
Edward Huffsetler, “Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers,” 9-10.

39
Sandra Baringer, The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth Century America (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 105.

40
Carlton Smith refers to the novel as a “counter-narrative,” what he calls “narrative anarchism”
in which “all principles of unity are disarranged.” See Carlton Smith, “Dancing with the Dead:
Ghost Dancing, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” in Coyote Kills John Wayne:
Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 2000), 48-9.

185

41
Sven Birkerts, “Apocalypse Now,” New Republic 205 (4 November 1991): 41.

42
Indeed, this refusal to consider the possibility is part of the aura of American exceptionalism.

43
Carlton Smith, “Dancing with the Dead,” 39.

44
Bridget O’Meara, “The Ecological Politics of Leslie Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” Wicazo Sa
Review (Fall 2000): 63-73.

45
David L. Moore, “Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: The Circulating Witness in Almanac of the Dead,”
in Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L.
Thorson (Albuquerque: New Mexico Press, 1999), 150.

46
Brewster E. Fitz, Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2004), 155.

47
Mayan spokespersons are quite vocal on this subject. The EZLN leader Comandante Ramona
stated that because “women have been the most exploited,” they took up arms. See the discussion
of how women’s participation in the EZLN resulted in a greater degree of equality in their home
life in Women in the Zapatistas (Montreal: Kersplebedeb), 2000, np; originally published by Red
and Black in Australia, http://www.geocities.com/loveandrage_2000/, but is no longer available
online.

48
Only one written Indian version of Wovoka’s doctrine exists. Called the “Messiah Letter” of
1891, it has been translated differently. The Cheyenne delegate to Wovoka’s address at the
Arapaho and Cheyenne delegation wrote that Wovoka predicted that whites would be removed by
a large earthquake. Sitting Bull reportedly said that the ground would swallow white people.
Other versions stated a large flood would take the white people away. The Barefoot Hopi’s
speech encompasses these reports. See Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity, 167-71.

49
In addition, Fitz points out that Silko’s novel has “vaguely ‘foretold’ the discovery that Michael
Coe made about the Madrid Codex [that it included Spanish writing] after the appearance of
Almanac”; Fitz, Silko: Writing Storyteller, 183.

50
Huffsetler asks whether Almanac is the “ultimate postmodern novel, complete with a virtual
revolution”; see “Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers,” 9.

51
George E. “Tink” Tinker, “Historic Pain and the Political Present: Pointing to a Healthy
Future,” American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
2008), 1.

52
Carlton Smith, “Dancing with the Dead,” 52.

186

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Asset Metadata

Creator Grieman, Pamela (author)

Core Title Representing the unnarratable: “feminist terrorism” and the problem of realism in the novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 02/22/2010

Defense Date 01/20/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literary terrorism,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Ireland (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lloyd, David (committee chair), Accampo, Elinor (committee member), Román, David (committee member)

Creator Email grieman@usc.edu,griemonster@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2859

Unique identifier UC1209697

Identifier etd-Grieman-3485 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-298257 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2859 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Grieman-3485.pdf

Dmrecord 298257

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Grieman, Pamela

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu