Lady Gregory's Self-Fashioning In Seventy Years

In modern Irish history, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were a privileged minority of English origin who ruled Ireland on behalf of its colonizer Britain from the 18th century till the early 20th century. When Ireland's de-Anglicization movement gathered momentum in the late 19th century, Lady Gregory (1852-1932) as a member of this ruling class devoted herself to the Irish Literary Revival (1890s-1920s), and became one of its pioneers alongside W.B.Yeats, Douglas Hyde, J.M. Synge, etc. for her prominent managerial, writing as well as translation abilities. However, during her participation in this cultural nationalist movement of Ireland, Lady Gregory was exposed to multiple pressures and trapped in multiple identity crises due to her hybrid Anglo-Irish nationality, Ascendancy status and her gender. Lady Gregory's identity during the Revival period thus has become a hot topic in the discussion of her. Traditionally, critics often use "self-contradictory" or "a woman of contradictions" to describe her complex identities.Seventy Years is written in the 1910s in Lady Gregory's late 60s and is her only full-length autobiography. Through a close textual reading, the present study contends that in this retrospective book, Lady Gregory directly dealt with her multiple identity crises during her participation in Ireland's cultural nationalist movement and crafted a multifaceted public persona for herself. This thesis examines the triple pressures Lady Gregory faced as a result of her nationality, class and gender from the perspective of intersectionality, and further analyzes the fashioning strategies she utilized in dealing with these pressures in Seventy Years. The aim is to interpret Lady Gregory's effort of self-fashioning through self-writing in order to get recognized in Ireland as a woman simultaneously influenced by her nationality, class and gender.This thesis is developed from two perspectives. First, as a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Lady Gregory enjoyed the privileged status of this dominant power in Irish society while at the same time actively participated in the cultural nationalist movement of Ireland. The tension between Englishness and Irishness formed her primary identity crisis. While at the same time, with Irish tenants'land reform gathering momentum, the Gregorys were on their way to become dispossessed landlords, which threw Lady Gregory into another identity crisis. Second, as a great female figure among all the male pioneers in the Irish Literary Revival, though she actively participated in the Revival and achieved a lot for her managerial and writing skills, her talent had never been recognized by Yeats, Hyde, Shaw etc. and she could never enjoy the status as the males did. The discrimination towards her gender led to her third identity crisis. The first two chapters examine how Lady Gregory fashioned her family's Irishness and landlordship as well as her managerial status and authorship. The third one further analyzes the images after her fashioning.