A timid man is innocently enjoying an evening of socialising with his friends and toasting the end of another working week. Little does he realise that he is being stalked by a monstrous figure who suddenly alights upon him much to his horror and shame. She grabs him by the scruff of his neck and unceremoniously hurls him to the floor in front of the assembled crowd. She demands of him in the harshest of terms that he immediately return home to rock the cradle of their twin babies until they are fast asleep or else, she concludes menacingly, “I’ll crack your thick skull with the soft end of a brick”. As he rushes off home in abject humiliation, she, conversely, settles herself in the seat that he has recently vacated intent on an evening of drunken debauchery.
This scene was played out in countless theatres across the United States of America to rapturous laughter and applause from audiences. The female figure around whom the action revolved was the “henpecking Irish wife”, a construction of Irish female identity who featured in sketches by some of the most popular acts in American vaudeville entertainment in the last three decades of the 19th century. Invariably played by a man in grotesque drag, the “henpecking Irish wife” ruthlessly emasculated her unfortunate, pathetic husband at every available opportunity and the emotional and physical abuse that she inflicted was always presented as comedy.
There was undoubtedly a nativist inclination among established Americans during this period to mock and undermine the men and women of other nationalities who had recently arrived in the States in their millions. And yet perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the “henpecking Irish wife” trope was that some of the most prolific performers of these sketches, including The Four Mortons and Sullivan and Sheehan, were themselves of Irish heritage and had significant Irish-American fanbases.
It is surely no coincidence that the specific, relatively brief period in which the “henpecking Irish wife” experienced her meteoric rise and huge popularity also saw those in the burgeoning American suffragist movement direct considerable ire in their writings and rhetoric towards men in the Irish-American community. Their particular dislike for Irish-American men was based not only on the assertion that they oppressed their wives with unusually brutish force due to their constant drunkenness but also on their outrage that even men of such immoral character and low intellect were enfranchised when not a single woman in the country was.
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In the context of this antipathy between suffragists and Irish Americans, the “henpecking Irish wife” performs the dual function of rejecting the notion that Irish-American women are oppressed within their marriages and of cautioning against allowing women to wield any power for fear of what they might do with it.
Whilst particularly prominent in vaudeville entertainment, the “henpecking Irish wife” also infiltrated legitimate theatre, popular music, journalism, and prose fiction during this period. As the new century approached, she featured in collections of Irish mythology and folklore that were deliberately marketed at members of the increasingly substantial Irish-American communities in cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Presented as the perfect vehicle through which Irish Americans and subsequent generations of their families could access their unique cultural heritage and a profound sense of national identity, these texts were not always as ancient and untouched as they claimed to be but rather were interspersed with references to the era’s popular culture.
The bestselling Irish Wonders by DR McAnally Jr alludes so often to the “henpecking Irish wife” trope, for example, that the overall tone is most accurately described as consistently and unapologetically misogynistic. In stories such as The Henpecked Giant and The Defeat of the Widows, human female characters are as Othered and unknowable as the various supernatural entities that feature in the collection such as pookas and leprechauns and must be ultimately conquered. The narrator also interjects at one point to assert that fairy marriages are generally harmonious because, unlike mortal marriages, “married life in fairy circles is regulated on the basis of the absolute submission of the wife to the husband”, an observation that has no basis in authentic Irish folklore but wouldn’t have been misplaced in a “henpecking Irish wife” sketch performed in 1888, the year in which Irish Wonders was first published.
This problematic, persistent trope proved to be a major influence on another author of Irish heritage writing in the United States during this period whose work was also inspired by and rooted in Irish folk belief and tradition but, rather than embrace the “henpecking Irish wife”, Herminie Templeton Kavanagh offered a complete and utter renunciation of her and the misogynistic ideology that underpinned her.
Kavanagh’s 21 children’s stories, which were originally published between in 1901 and 1926, are best-remembered for the characters of Darby O’Gill and King Brian Connors and for serving as the source material for a sometimes-beloved but also much-maligned live-action Disney film of 1959. Arguably Kavanagh’s greatest achievement as an author, however, is the radical, proto-feminist conclusion regarding female equality and autonomy that she reaches in her deconstruction of the “henpecking Irish wife” by whom she surely felt besieged.
Kavanagh may well have felt that the “henpecking Irish wife” had been stalking her throughout her adult life. Kavanagh’s first husband whom she married in her early twenties was the vaudeville performer and theatrical manager John Templeton for whom she left New York City, which had been her home since emigrating with her family aged 11. As she travelled around the country supporting him in his vaudeville career during the last two decades of the 19th century, she encountered the “henpecking Irish wife” on multiple occasions.
After she settled in Chicago in 1893 following her estrangement from Templeton and the death of her only child, Kavanagh became determined to supplement her income as a stenographer by writing stories for children that engaged with Irish folklore and specifically targeted an Irish-American readership. She read Yeats, who was fully entrenched in his Celtic twilight phase at that time but, inevitably, she also turned to the most successful indigenous text from this new literary subgenre of American Celticism. In among the pages of Irish Wonders, she met the “henpecking Irish wife” again and again and again.
The genius of Kavanagh’s handling of the “henpecking Irish wife” trope is that, rather than not representing this type of behaviour, she reconstitutes “henpecking” as a necessary and admirable quality in a conscientious and loving wife. Darby O’Gill’s wife Bridget is dominant and forceful and the domestic space that she shares with Darby and their eight children is rendered combative by her attitude towards her husband. This attitude is entirely justified in the text, however, because Bridget’s counsel and assistance is required by Darby as he negotiates his way through life. The disharmony arises from Darby’s inability to acknowledge this aspect about his relationship with Bridget, even though he is proved wrong in the matters which bring him into conflict with her.
The social pretensions about which Bridget chides Darby in one story eventually bring him misery through the supernatural comeuppance visited upon him by the leprechaun. Meanwhile, Darby’s failure to heed Bridget’s warnings about allowing a suspicious character called Bothered Bill Donohoe to ingratiate himself with the family - as he will lead them into mischief - has the exact outcome that she shrewdly predicted. Whenever Bridget places her hands on her hips, narrows her eyes and stands in front of Darby as though she is about to engage him in single combat, a stance reminiscent of the “henpecking Irish wife”, Kavanagh ensures that the reader sympathises with her plight, celebrates her indomitable spirit and admires her for wielding the severely limited power that she holds. Exasperating yet well-intentioned Darby is not the enemy. The patriarchal society in which Bridget is operating without even the whisper of either equality or autonomy is.
The much-later film adaptation of Kavanagh’s stories is not nearly as progressive as its source material and, whilst it doesn’t resurrect the “henpecking Irish wife”, it replaces her with another problematic construction of female Irish identity. The film’s main female character is a “feisty Irish colleen”, a superficially liberated yet ultimately conservative figure who dominated Irish-themed mainstream American film in the post-second World War era and reached her apogee with Mary-Kate Danaher in The Quiet Man.
Bridget O’Gill is neither a “henpecking Irish wife” nor a “feisty Irish colleen” and she shares this distinction with all of the other complex, full-rounded female characters in Herminie Templeton Kavanagh’s brilliant Darby O’Gill children’s stories. The fact that these stories were written more than 100 years ago is truly remarkable.
Dr Brian McManus has edited and written an introduction for a new edition of Darby O’Gill and the Good People by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh, which is available now from Mercier Press.
