Agents of national memory revisited: Women writing prison in the Irish Civil War

Abstract

This article investigates how the role of archival texts as agents of memory requires memory scholars to expand the concept of agency beyond human agency. Revisiting Aguilar’s and Budrytė’s concept of human individuals as ‘agents of memory’, it draws on actor–network theory, colonial archive studies and book history to track the shifting ‘memory capital’ of forgotten archival texts. Taking as its case study the jail writings created by female prisoners during the Irish Civil War, the article contends that taking into account archival texts – as well as their creators – as agents of memory can provide a richer understanding of how cultural memory is created, stored, forgotten and – sometimes – reanimated in the wake of national conflict.

This article investigates how the role of archival texts as agents of memory requires us to expand the concept of agency beyond human agency. Over two decades ago, Paloma Aguilar coined the term ‘agents of memory’ to describe how republican and nationalist Spanish Civil War veterans with disabilities drew on different memory frameworks to commemorate their past conflict (1999). Just over a decade later, Dovilė Budrytė (2010) re-used this term to analyse the memory work of female former deportees who utilized their public platforms as politicians in post-Soviet Lithuania to highlight their experiences of deportation. Since both Aguilar and Budrytė are primarily concerned with survivors of conflict whose stories have been sidelined in the creation of official state narratives on the past, both focus on human ‘agents of memory’. ¹ What if we expand the term’s application to include the texts produced by these human agents? How do texts ‘survive’ national conflicts? And how do they, as well as their authors, gain agency and exert it in the shaping of national memory?

Ever since Maurice Halbwachs (1925) argued for the social constitution of individual memory, the question has been open as to how different agents disseminate memory through a given social group. Spurred by developments in the cognitive and social sciences, this question has received renewed attention in recent years. For instance, Jenny Wüstenberg (2020) analyses human memory agents (be they individuals or groups) in conjunction with the ‘structures that confine and enable them in turn’ (p. 3). In a similarly dualist vein, James V. Wertsch (2004) defines collective remembering as ‘a matter of agents using cultural tools, especially narratives’ (p. 2; see also p. 51), suggesting that ‘narrative tools “co-author” what members of [. . .] communities think and say’ (2021: 29). Indeed, as far back as 1932, Frederic Bartlett (2003 [1932]) was already suggesting that we go beyond the human individual as memory agent, stating that an ‘agent’ involved in the act of remembering could be a ‘man [sic], animal, or social group’ (p. 297). ² More recently, Ann Rigney (2021) has argued for ‘the agency of the artistic’, contending that ‘the arts can be seen as actants in a network that involves both human and non-human agents’ (p. 14; emphasis in original). Rigney draws here on the actor–network theory of Bruno Latour (2005), which considers non-human alongside human agents as actors constituting the social field, as well as the colonial archival theory of Ann Laura Stoler (2009), who regards archival documents as ‘active, generative substances with histories, as documents with itineraries of their own’ (p. 1). Book historians too have been exploring similar concepts with regard to cultural memory. For Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (2014), printed books are ‘material agents: path-makers for the circulation of ideas and discourses and, as such, makers of history in the bargain’ (p. 9; emphasis in original). But texts can only make history if they are disseminated beyond the archive and made legible in the public sphere. In other words, these textual actors’ ‘memory capital’ – defined as ‘the accumulation of value arising from mnemonic labour’ (Reading, 2019: 301) – functions according to the degree of cultural and other forms of capital available to them at a given time, such as the accumulated labour involved in getting texts published or performed (see also Pine, 2020). ³

To tease out how such capital accrues to different agents, and to make the case for archival texts alongside their authors as agents of memory, this article will focus on accounts of imprisoned women during the Irish Civil War (1922–1923). This was a bitter conflict between pro-Treaty forces supporting the peace deal signed with the British government in the wake of the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and anti-Treaty forces who opposed it. During this conflict, 645 women were imprisoned in Ireland’s capital, Dublin (Matthews, 2012: 257), accounting for just over 5% of the estimated 12,000 prisoners incarcerated by the Irish Free State during the war (McConville, 2019). ⁴ But for much of the twentieth century, it was as if these women’s experiences of imprisonment did not exist at all. Instead, their stories were ‘latent in the archive’ (Rigney, 2018: 243; see also Assmann, 2008), ‘important enough to be preserved, but not important enough to be duplicated and publicly disseminated’ (Huff, 2000: 509).

At around the same time as the Irish Civil War prisoners were returning to public life, Halbwachs (1925) made the influential case that social frameworks are at the heart of collective memory, with the frameworks of family, class structures and religion the dominant drivers of how memory gets created and shared in society. In early twentieth-century Ireland, such frameworks were so strong that they occluded those, like female ex-prisoners, whose lives and work challenged these established frames. The marginal position of their writings is thus exemplary of Ernest Renan’s (1882) argument that forgetting is at the heart of nation-building (pp. 7–8), an argument which he applies to the violent unification of France in the Middle Ages, but which is relevant to other post-conflict societies too. Just as the Irish society lacked ‘conceptual and lexical vocabularies’ (Stoler, 2016: 128) to discuss revolutionary accounts of sexual violence (see Matthews, 2010: 266–282; Aiken, 2022; McAuliffe, 2022), Irish revolutionary women’s accounts of imprisonment went largely unpublished and unread throughout the twentieth century.

To illuminate how these women used their agency to create texts, and then had that agency stymied and blocked, my primary case study is the jail writings of Dorothy Macardle, who was imprisoned for 6 months during the Irish Civil War. Macardle was arrested and brought to Mountjoy Prison in November 1922 for her anti-Treaty propaganda work, transferred to Kilmainham Gaol in February 1923 (DMJJ3: n.f., 5 February 1923), ⁵ and then again to the North Dublin Union on 30 April 1923 (Macardle, 1923; Moynihan, 1923: 64) before her release on 9 May (see Moynihan, 1923: 70). A brief resumé of her subsequent record in public life shows Macardle’s significant contributions to post-revolutionary Ireland. In 1926, Macardle was on the founding executive of what would become Ireland’s most powerful political party, Fianna Fáil, and with the publication of The Irish Republic in 1937, she became the preeminent anti-Treaty historian of the revolutionary years. She was also a celebrated journalist, fiction writer and playwright (see Lane, 2019; Smith, 2007). It is even more noteworthy, then, that her prison writings have only recently been explored, particularly given the importance normally granted to such writings in Irish nationalist culture. For instance, William Murphy (2016) has shown how a prison record became ‘an important qualification for public life in Ireland’ at the turn of the century (p. 9); Diarmaid Ferriter (2021), discussing male politicians’ careers after the Irish Civil War, goes so far as to state that ‘imprisonment during this period by default ensured a solid political future’ (p. 201). But such qualifications, and the futures they ensured, were not equally open to women, who struggled to get their work published in the decades following their imprisonment.

As Síobhra Aiken has demonstrated, silence surrounding women’s narratives of Civil War imprisonment needs to be seen within a broader context of an unwillingness to listen to stories of the conflict. There was a plethora of Civil War accounts, from both pro- and anti-Treaty viewpoints, circulating in the early years of the new Free State. The problem, as Aiken (2022) presents it,

was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ reluctance to speak, but rather due to the unwillingness of the architects of official memory – journalists, historians, politicians – to listen to the testimony of civil war veterans. (p. 2)

Aiken (2022) goes on to demonstrate the additional difficulties that female writers faced finding an ‘attuned witnessing audience’ for their revolutionary narratives ‘in a commemorative environment that privileged men’s accounts of revolution’ (p. 71). This applied to stories from both sides of the Civil War divide, while those on the anti-Treaty side had further difficulties living their lives in a state whose very existence contradicted their political aims. Such difficulties were compounded for women, like Macardle, who sought to render their revolutionary activities in writing: her short story collection, Earth-bound, which she composed in prison, was turned down by the Talbot Press, publisher of many canonical accounts of male revolutionaries, because they felt there was no market for these stories (Aiken, 2022: 95). Published instead in the US by the Harrigan Press (1924), and in Ireland by the smaller Emton Press, Earth-bound has since become the best-known text of Macardle’s prison period. ⁶ However, the jail writings as a whole – in which some of the Earth-bound drafts can be found – lie as ‘hidden transcripts’, James C. Scott’s (1990) metaphor for the ‘fugitive political conduct of subordinate groups’ (p. xii), here made literal in the buried material of the archive. Building on the research of Leeann Lane, who has used the prison writings as key sources in her biography of Macardle, I will here examine Macardle’s prison writing as an example of one such hidden history, which has, in contrast to her canonical history writing, lain latent in archival holdings. To tease out this dynamic, my analysis first focuses on Macardle’s male prison predecessors, who haunt her jail writings and have shaped the way we scholars study her work. I will then examine the publication avenues granted to Macardle’s history writing, which again reveals a heavily gendered process of memory-making when contrasted with the fate of her ‘hidden’ prison writings. As much as Macardle railed against the sidelining of women from the public sphere in post-Civil War Ireland, her jail writings – perhaps inevitably given her position when writing them – inherited some of the key precepts of masculinist Irish nationalism, including a disregard for the suffering physical body as it is transmuted into a nationalist symbol. ⁷ My closing section gathers together the threads of this complex tapestry of cultural memory by exploring her complicity in the erasure of the body from nationalist accounts of hunger striking.

Inheriting carceral memory: Macardle’s prison predecessors

One of Macardle’s allies in her anti-State propaganda work was the activist–typist Kathleen Clarke, who was well-placed to comment on the importance of Kilmainham Gaol to national memory during her brief imprisonment there. Clarke (2008) described Kilmainham as having ‘terrible memories for [her]’ due to the execution of her husband, Tom, in the jail for his part in the 1916 Rising against British rule (p. 275). As with many other revolutionary leaders, Tom Clarke’s execution on 3 May 1916 solidified his place in national memory, and this reputation was greatly strengthened by the publication of his prison writings. These writings first appeared in 1912, serialized in the radical nationalist newspaper Irish Freedom, which Clarke edited along with militant republican colleagues (see Glandon, 1985: 75, 272). Then, in 1922, they were published in book form as Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life (Clarke, 1922). In later testimony to the Bureau of Military History, Macardle (1950) recalls working on a ‘little cyclostyled paper[]’ entitled ‘Irish Freedom’ when she was arrested during the Civil War (p. 2); in fact, Clarke’s newspaper title is here super-imposed upon her own, Freedom. ⁸ In an incident which encapsulates the broader cultural forgetting of Macardle’s work, the author herself – or the transcriber of the interview – here misremembers the name of the paper she edited because of the influence of her male prison predecessor. ⁹ Whoever was responsible for this error, Macardle would certainly have been aware of Tom Clarke’s writings during and after the Civil War. Indeed, she even claimed to have been aware of him as a child. In a 1956 radio broadcast for Raidió Éireann, Macardle attributed the growth of her childhood nationalism to Clarke’s 1898 release and homecoming from prison in Britain, where he had served 15 years on dynamiting charges (Macardle, 1956: 3–4). ¹⁰ However, unlike her subject, Macardle did not hold the ‘indelible place in the memory of the Nation’ that was attributed to him (O’Hegarty, 1922: xviii). Crucially, too, Macardle did not own a newspaper in which to disseminate her prison writings after release.

Macardle’s other major prison predecessor also used a newspaper he owned to disseminate his prison writings. In 1854, Young Irelander John Mitchel serialized his Jail Journal in the Citizen newspaper, which he had established for Irish American audiences in New York upon his escape there from a convict sentence in Australia, where he had been sent by the British government on charges of inciting rebellion. Jail Journal was reissued in 1913 with a preface by Irish nationalist leader – and inveterate newspaper founder – Arthur Griffith, and has since become a staple of nationalist prison literature, with one scholar describing it as ‘Perhaps the most widely read of the narratives of confinement written by an Irish rebel’ (Murphy, 2009b: 161). It was certainly known to Macardle, who quotes from it in her chapter of The Irish Republic that deals with the Fenians (see Macardle, 1965 [1937]: 48; Mitchel, 1913: 6). ¹¹ Indeed, Macardle’s fellow female inmates framed their imprisonment ‘as a continuation of [this] male, nationalist tradition’ (McAtackney, 2015: 111), as shown by the nickname ‘the Young Irelanders’ that a group of them were known by in Mountjoy Prison (DMJJ2: 66), copying the title of the nineteenth-century nationalist group to which Mitchel belonged. When Macardle and other prisoners were transferred to Kilmainham in the spring of 1923, they sought out the cells of 1916 leaders, with Macardle tracing the lineage of nationalist heroes imprisoned there all the way back to Robert Emmet, executed for a failed rebellion in 1803 (DMJJ3: n.f., 5 February 1923). Macardle even fused these two leaders’ stories onstage in 1925, when her play The Old Man featured a character named Robert Emmet Sheridan leading an attempt to break Mitchel out of jail on the eve of his transportation from Ireland (see Leeney, 2010: 115–116). Unfortunately, this unpublished typescript was destroyed – either in a fire at the Abbey Theatre in 1951 or by Macardle’s brother, who discarded many of her papers when she died in 1958 – so it is not possible to track in detail the full impact of Mitchel on Macardle’s nationalist ideology. Nevertheless, the model he provides is clear. ¹²

Mitchel’s towering legacy in Irish nationalism casts a long shadow over subsequent prison writing. Indeed, his influence has been so great that it is even an unacknowledged influence on our scholarship of Macardle. If Clarke’s influence can be seen in the over-writing of the title of Macardle’s newspaper, Freedom, with that of his, Irish Freedom, in her 1950 witness testimony, Mitchel’s influence lives on in the title scholars use to describe the texts Macardle composed while in jail. The archives which hold these documents, as well as the most widely respected historians writing on Macardle’s work, use the name ‘jail journal’ to refer to these writings (Aiken, 2021: 96; Lane, 2019; UCD Archives, 2005: 544). However, this has been retrospectively imposed on Macardle’s texts – she does not use ‘Jail Journal’ as a title herself. ¹³ This is why I have chosen the terms ‘prison writing(s)’ and ‘jail writings’ when referring to Macardle’s texts rather than echoing the title of Mitchel’s canonical Journal. When recuperating ‘inert’ agents of memory (Stoler, 2009: 19), it is worth carefully considering the terms we use, especially if we want to accurately reflect the place of a female writer in a male-dominated nationalist prison-writing tradition. David Lowenthal (1996) has used the term ‘textual heritage’ to describe the texts we inherit as part of a given nation’s cultural memory (p. 53). While the ‘textual heritage’ of the masculinist nationalist tradition undoubtedly had a formative influence on Macardle’s own work, describing her prison writings as a ‘jail journal’ may too hastily assimilate her into a cultural tradition which for a long time has had no place for these agents of memory.

Seeking platforms: Prison writings vs public history

Reflecting on the prospect of letters being stopped in Mountjoy, Macardle laments the possibility of losing access to her writing materials: ‘Parcels stopped would mean hunger – that could be endured – but no writing paper – no occupation’ (DMJJ2: 66). In his transnational study of prison writing, Padraic Kenney (2017) has emphasized the importance of legibility in prisoners’ experiences of carceral institutions, mainly focussing on how prisons seek to make political prisoners ‘illegible to themselves and to others’ through obscure and opaque carceral regimes (p. 60). Legibility is a particularly important issue for prisoners, such as Macardle, who are involved in writing work while behind bars. Macardle was arrested at a time when she was centrally involved in the creation of anti-State news copy; as Lane (2019) puts it, ‘propaganda rather than direct action was her political service’ (p. 65). She was therefore well aware of prison writing as a public-facing vocation, even, or especially, when she was physically cut off from that public during a period of war.

This awareness is evident in the content and form of Macardle’s jail writings. Throughout the three notebooks, Macardle rewrites, edits, titles and formats pages like the newspaper editor she was, moving text around to make it more readable for her audience. ¹⁴ Admittedly, there are points at which the notebooks act as a private diary, containing intimate reflections that Macardle would not have wanted broadcast publicly. For instance, she states that, with very few exceptions, the minds of her imprisoned republican comrades, ‘are except^{on moral questions} less interesting, less rich than those of my English friends’ (DMJJ2: 104–105), a highly risky comment to make publicly within a movement that was struggling to emerge from a bloody war with Britain. ¹⁵ However, much of the material is carefully crafted and written to be read by the wider public. For instance, Macardle drafts letters for Mary MacSwiney during her hunger strike (DMJJ1: 50; see also Macardle, 1942) and writes newspaper articles on behalf of her fellow inmates. Despite their historically liminal position in Irish memory culture, then, we can say with some confidence that certain of these jail writings were written to be read by a broader readership outside the prison. ¹⁶

The journalism Macardle was able to write behind bars literally made the stories of her fellow prisoners legible for the wider public, ‘speaking truths which the Provisional Government desires to keep concealed’, as she forcefully put it in a November 1922 edition of the newspaper Freedom (Macardle, 1922a: 2). However, as is evident from its handwritten cover pages (see Irish Newspaper Archives, 2023), the circulation of Freedom was restricted; in the end, it was a short-lived venture. This is in stark contrast to the memory capital of her nationalist heroes Clarke and Mitchel, both of whom had editorial control over popular weeklies, and both of whom used these newspapers as platforms for the serialization of their own prison memoirs. By contrast, Macardle did not have editorial control of the periodicals for which she wrote on emerging from prison, making the dissemination routes for her prison writings much less straightforward than those of her male nationalist forebears’.

Much of Macardle’s subsequent journalism was for Fianna Fáil newspapers: she wrote for The Nation (founded 1927) and its successor, The Irish Press (founded 1931), under the watchful eye of party leader Éamon de Valera. From early on in his career, de Valera ‘took an active role in editing election propaganda’ (Novick, 2002: 35), and one of his first objectives after the end of the Civil War was to establish a daily newspaper to make the anti-Treaty case, stating that there was ‘no hope in the future without a paper’ (de Valera to P. J. Ruttledge, 26 July 1923, qtd in McCullagh, 2017: 323). Almost a decade later, his establishment of The Irish Press as a national daily became a key part of his bid to regain parliamentary power. Alongside these more ephemeral textual agents, he also commissioned Macardle to write her monumental history of Ireland’s revolutionary years, driven by ‘the belief that neither [he] nor the party which he led could secure a fair crack of the whip from established writers on Irish history and politics’ in the 1920s (O’Halpin, 1999: 390). The result, which took Macardle over a decade to produce, was a canonical contribution to the history wars of the newly independent state; The Irish Republic quickly became the official anti-Treaty account of Ireland’s revolutionary years. Both Macardle and de Valera were keen to stress the book’s impartiality, with Macardle even stating for the record that she had repaid the money granted to her as payment for her authorial work once she became financially independent through inheritance (Macardle, 1950: 2; see also Smith, 2007: 58). However, we know that de Valera closely supervised the work’s composition, ¹⁷ and Macardle’s employment by newspapers he controlled while she was working on the book he commissioned indicates the extent to which her lengthiest publication was dependent on his financial support as well as his cultural capital. Indeed, the very fact that de Valera felt compelled to insist on the author’s editorial independence in his preface, just a few dozen pages after his own full-page portrait appears as the book’s only illustration, speaks volumes. ¹⁸ For her part, Macardle would later critique the Fianna Fáil party under de Valera’s leadership, particularly its ‘discrimination against women’ in employment legislation which served to reduce them ‘to a position of dependency’ by allowing for restrictions in employment on the sole grounds of sex (Macardle, 1935: 8). ¹⁹ In spite of this, she maintained a warm personal relationship with the man who enacted such legislation. ²⁰ These interpersonal dynamics demonstrate well the complex nature of gendered cultural memory in post-Civil War Ireland, particularly among those as privileged as the author of The Irish Republic. On the one hand, Macardle did have substantial cultural capital, most notably in the form of her educational qualifications, social networks and the respect she had earned from her time as a republican prisoner, and this fed into the memory capital available to her in shaping public opinion on the revolutionary years. However, as her polemics against de Valera suggest, her cultural capital in post-Civil War Ireland was constrained by her gender. Ironically, given their disagreements on gender politics, it is in the archive of this male revolutionary leader that the three surviving notebooks of Macardle’s jail writings currently reside, alongside the archive related to the much better-known Irish Republic. This contrast between the fate of Macardle’s public and private texts is a stark reminder of how de Valera’s position as Ireland’s most influential twentieth-century politician gave weight to certain frames of memory, while preserving other writings as agents latent in the archive. Especially considering Macardle’s limited range of publication opportunities following the Civil War, it is crucial to recognize de Valera’s role as gatekeeper of the anti-Treaty canon, as well as his key role in the composition and publication of her public-facing opus of national history. ²¹

Erasing the body: Macardle’s accounts of hunger strikes

While Macardle was in a position to protest against discriminatory aspects of post-Civil War government policy, and while she explored gender boundaries in her fiction, her agency as a prisoner was very different. When arrested, though already a public figure in literary circles through her teaching and theatre work, Macardle was very much an apprentice revolutionary, and her jail writings contain evidence of the author’s recognition that, as a recent convert to the movement, she must earn her place as an Irish nationalist. ‘I had to learn to be an Irish Republican’, she states upon hearing of the destruction of her papers by Free State soldiers; ‘this was my baptism, perhaps’, she says of this immense personal and professional loss (DMJJ2: 63). Macardle’s self-described position as a student of Irish republicanism must be borne in mind when considering the sidelining of the female hunger-striking body in her prison writings of this period.

Macardle’s male superiors in the movement, such as de Valera, were part of a masculinist nationalist tradition that squeezed out other agents from the field of Irish national memory. A prime example of this is Irish nationalism’s co-option of key strategies of female prison activism, such as hunger striking, while erasing its originators from the history of the hunger strike. Despite the pioneering role suffragettes played in devising anti-state tactics for prisoners in Ireland, they were largely written out as an influence on revolutionary-era prisoners. Prison historians have tracked how the hunger strike was dissociated from its place as ‘the women’s weapon’, as Free State minister Kevin O’Higgins derisively called it (Dáil Éireann debate, 1923; see Aiken, 2021). De Valera himself was party to this erasure. When the Irish Volunteers were protesting against conditions in Lewes Prison in 1917 under his leadership, they initially ruled out hunger strike as a protest method because, according to a prison inspector, ‘they did not wish to be considered as copying “Suffragettes”’ (qtd in McConville, 2005: 535). Later that year, the republican movement was re-ignited by the death of hunger striker Thomas Ashe due to force-feeding in Mountjoy. However, Murphy (2007) has noted that not one of the six accounts by Ashe’s co-strikers in Ireland’s Bureau of Military History reference the suffragettes as an influence on their tactics (p. 129). In other words, the framework of Irish nationalist memory was shaped to exclude these key instigators of this important carceral strategy. Following his death in Brixton Prison in 1920, Terence MacSwiney would join Ashe as one through whom ‘masculine self-sacrifice sanctioned by Republicanism’ completely overshadowed the suffrage movement that had introduced hunger striking as a prison tactic (Reynolds, 2010: 116). ²² Having outlined how her male prison predecessors shaped Macardle’s nationalism, and how male nationalist contemporaries such as de Valera had a key influence on how her texts were written and publicly disseminated, this final section analyses how the memory capital of hunger striking was co-opted by Irish nationalists, and explores Macardle’s complicity in this manoeuvre.

Through her analysis of the globally mediated death of Terence MacSwiney, Paige Reynolds (2010) has charted the ways in which the performative nature of the hunger strike has been central to its use in Irish militant politics (pp. 116–155). In a broader-ranging analysis of representations of hunger striking, Maud Ellmann (1993) too has stressed the extent to which hunger striking is a communicative act which requires an audience (pp. 3, 17). In doing so, both scholars draw attention to the centrality of verbal communication in hunger striking – Ellmann (1993) writes of ‘the conversion of the body into words’ (p. 70); Reynolds (2010) of MacSwiney’s ‘script[ed]’ death and his body as a ‘text’ (p. 117). Undoubtedly important as these acts of verbal communication are to the dissemination of the hunger strike as a cultural agent, it is the human body that remains at the heart of this political protest. As Mary Corcoran puts it (drawing on the work of Michel Foucault) regarding a later Irish nationalist hunger strike, ‘the body is a two-way conduit for forces of domination’: having invested significance in the prisoner’s body by confining it, the authorities always leave themselves open to a counter-attack on this same corporeal territory (Corcoran, 2006: 171). Given its key importance, it is even more noteworthy when the human body is elided from later accounts of hunger strikes, thus negating the body’s own agency in the field of cultural memory.

Macardle knew from experience the effects that hunger striking could have on the body: she cared for Mary MacSwiney during her hunger strikes in Mountjoy and Kilmainham; she was present for the hunger strike of MacSwiney’s sister Annie in Kilmainham; and she engaged in a 7-day hunger strike in the same jail herself over conditions of imprisonment, despite her intense concern about doing so (see O’Brennan, 1923: 23–29 March; Redmond, 1923: 23–29 March). Mary’s and Annie’s repeated references to their late brother Terence in their anti-Treaty campaigns against the Free State meant that Macardle was well aware of his legacy, and she would have absorbed this at close quarters during her propaganda work with Mary in prison. ²³ As a journalist scripting firsthand accounts of hunger strikes, Macardle was directly involved in the conversion of the body into readable text. In her prison writing, as in much writing which seeks to persuade its reader of the virtue of the hunger-striking prisoner, the body is edited out, and a noble spirit rises to take its place. So, in her draft ‘With Mary MacSwiney in Prison’, we read of MacSwiney’s ‘vitality’, her ‘spirit’ and her ‘faith’ (Macardle, 1942: 2), but not about her physical distress. ²⁴ Elsewhere, ‘the body of the hunger-striker which feeds on its own substance’ is used as a metaphor for the ‘brooding soul’ of the prisoner (DMJJ3: n.f.; 16 February 1923). Indeed, the suffering of the hunger strike is transposed into metaphors of hunger which Macardle uses to talk about her own writing process, noting that she is ‘starving for [. . .] paper & ink’ (DMJJ2: 65) or that ‘the hunger to be writing is on me’ (DMJJ2: 64). Writing bodily hunger out of the hunger strike thus allows it to be used as metaphor for the creative act of writing, and this is a key part of Macardle’s own apprenticeship in the art of nationalist propaganda-making, one in which the hunger strike is re-narrativized as a noble (male) form of suffering. This much can be seen in the brief, elliptical accounts of hunger striking included in The Irish Republic (1965 [1937]), where Michael Collins’s ‘spirited part’ in a hunger strike at Frongoch Internment Camp in 1916 and an unconscious Terence MacSwiney clenching his teeth to prevent himself being force-fed in Brixton Prison is as detailed as the accounts get (pp. 202, 391). Instead, it is in the ‘mask[ed]’ form of Macardle’s fiction that hunger striking is addressed more fully (Aiken, 2021: 93; see also Palko, 2016: 294). ²⁵

In his analysis of Terence MacSwiney’s hunger strike while it was still ongoing, de Valera defined ‘the only field of battle where we are England’s match. It is the spiritual field, and England’s brute force may manacle MacSwiney’s body, and they may torture it, but MacSwiney’s spirit will triumph in the ultimate victory of the cause for which he is dying’ (qtd in Reynolds, 2010: 147; emphasis added). Indeed, in line with the elision of the human body from Macardle’s firsthand accounts of hunger striking, it is as a spirit that Terence MacSwiney is present in Mountjoy Prison, with Macardle recording that she prays to him instead of God (DMJJ2: 15). She also reports that, while kneeling at a makeshift altar outside Mary MacSwiney’s cell on the twentieth day of her hunger strike in Mountjoy, she and fellow inmate Teresa O’Connell felt ‘a presence advance along the corridor from her cell, pass behind us & disappear down the stairs’ (Macardle, 1942: 4; see DMJJ1: 8). Turning to find no-one there, they speculate that this is the ghost of Terence MacSwiney, come to visit his sister, ‘because it seemed a brotherly presence’ (DMJJ1: 9). Macardle, while still in prison, went on to read and admire MacSwiney’s posthumously published Principles of Freedom (lent to her by his sister, Annie; see DMJJ3: n.f.; 23 February 1923), which includes the standard nationalist argument that suffrage comes second in importance to national independence (see MacSwiney, 1921: 117, 122). Like most nationalist discourse of the time (see Ward, 1995: 84–85), Macardle does not acknowledge the roots of hunger striking in the suffrage movement; indeed, the word ‘suffrage’ does not appear once in her diaries, in spite of Mary MacSwiney’s own roots as a political activist in the suffrage movement – nor is it mentioned in the more-than-1000-page Irish Republic. ²⁶ Instead, with Terence MacSwiney as a key part of her ‘textual heritage’, Macardle continued the elision of the suffering body from republican accounts of hunger striking in prison, and obscured the tactic’s roots in the bodies of female prisoners.

Conclusion: Future agents of memory

As well as its immediate value, Macardle was keenly aware of the power of propaganda in shaping national memory over the longer term, particularly when it came to imprisoned figures of the revolutionary movement, traditionally central to narratives of Irish nationalism. A good example of this awareness can be seen in Macardle’s projections in her jail writings of how two imprisoned comrades will be remembered by the Irish public in years to come.

On 24 November 1922, just weeks after Macardle had arrived in Mountjoy Prison, Erskine Childers was executed in Beggar’s Bush Barracks by Free State forces for possession of a pistol (ironically, said to have been given as a gift by Free State military leader Michael Collins). Macardle, who had worked with Childers at the newspaper Poblacht na h-Eireann [sic], was distraught at his death but took solace in the fact that Frank Gallagher – who had worked at the same newspaper, and whose wife, Cecilia, was imprisoned with her in Mountjoy – had vowed to establish his place in the memory of the nation:

Frank Gallagher told Cecilia in a letter that he has^had promised it would be his life-work, if Childers died, to tell the story of his splendid life. I am thankful he is living to do this. I know he will do it well. (DMJJ1: 24–25) ²⁷

It is instructive to compare this with Macardle’s own praise in her draft obituary ‘With Mary MacSwiney in Prison’, which lauds MacSwiney’s conduct during her two prison hunger strikes:

Her greatness will not be forgotten: it forms part of the national history; it is a grief to know that the little things so vivid in the memory of her own generation, must pass without record (Macardle, 1942: 6)

While both Childers and MacSwiney are presented here as national figures worthy of public remembrance, it is notable that the latter account features just as much emphasis on the inevitability of forgetting in the construction of ‘the national history’, particularly regarding the feminine-coded ‘little things’ of daily life. This suggests Macardle’s awareness of gender politics in the ‘legibility’ and ‘agency’ of Irish national memory, especially when it came to its prison narratives, and particularly following her public battles in opposition to the Irish government’s ‘discrimination against women’ (see above). While still in prison, Macardle feared that she and her anti-Treaty comrades would be ‘without power to work for Ireland’ in the Irish Free State, ‘forbidden to write or speak or labour for the Ireland of our love’ (DMJJ2: 30). As we have seen, Macardle was indeed sidelined in the new southern state, though not quite in the manner she predicted. The same year that The Irish Republic was published, Macardle protested against the restrictions on women’s lives imposed by de Valera’s 1937 Constitution, both privately in a letter to him linking these restrictions to the coercive confinement she had suffered during the Civil War and publicly in a letter of protest co-authored with other writers. ²⁸ Though she was instrumental to setting out a rationale for an Irish republic through her history and propaganda writing, the very republic that was being shaped as her book, The Irish Republic, was published in 1937 was hospitable neither to Macardle nor her work.

More broadly, Macardle’s case shows how collective memory can be stymied and blocked without the cultural capital needed to propagate it; the degree to which an author has access to memory capital at any one time also influences the ways in which culturally sensitive topics are framed, as we have seen in Macardle’s representations of hunger striking. Such ‘memory capital’ was severely limited for women in post-Civil War Ireland, as is evident in the fate of their jail writings. Held back by the ‘extreme embarrassment’ that some families felt about a female relative having been imprisoned, which compounded the already taboo nature of the bitter and divisive Civil War as a topic for discussion, revolutionary women’s stories of confinement remained largely untold for much of the twentieth century (McCoole, 2023 [2003]: 13). In recent years, in line with an international shift in state memory practices (see Halama, 2022), there has been a growing wave of interest in these stories, with the publication or re-issuing of memoirs from the period (Buckley, 2022 [1938]; Comerford, 2021), exhibitions on their incarceration in Kilmainham Gaol (see Crowley, 2023) and the digitization of some of their manuscripts (Saunders, 1923; published online 2021). The ‘unforgetting’ of this strand of cultural memory is most evident in the edition of Macardle’s jail writings that is now in process; her notebooks have also itself given rise to a theatre piece and radio documentary (see Dorothy’s Prison Notebooks, 2022; Smock Alley Theatre, 2022).

In one of his later works, Latour (2015) translates the English word ‘agency’ as ‘puissance d’agir’ [‘power to act’ (2017: 4; emphasis in original)]. While, on the one hand, earlier textual agents of Irish nationalism played a key role in shaping Macardle’s prison writings, the twenty-first-century afterlives of her own work demonstrate that her writings still contain political, affective and creative power. Widening Aguilar’s and Budrytė’s range of memory agents beyond the human can help us understand how such power is granted to textual agents of memory as well as how it might be (re-)activated.