ABSTRACT
Augusta Gregory acutely understood that nationalism and Irish identity were consciously written fi ctions. As a woman, a Protestant, and a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Gregory was thrice excluded from the public sphere created by the mainstream of Irish nationalism. Nonetheless, Gregory not only crafted an identity for herself that allowed her to actively participate in the process of nation-building, but she based this identity on the very characteristics that should have excluded her. The second chapter of Gregory’s autobiography, Seventy Years, contains two short passages which epitomize the author’s public persona. Among a series of fl ashbacks to signifi cant moments in her married life, Gregory fi rst recalls,
It happened one night [. . .] that I was alone in a New York theatre, and my mind, entangled in some business of the day, had strayed between Act and Act. And when the curtain went up again, it seemed to me as if some thirty years had melted away, for I saw before me the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace, as I had fi rst seen it, and the fi ne ladies with trains and veils, wearing plumes of feathers as I had worn them, curtseying or bending to kiss the queen’s hand as I as a bride had kissed it. (30)
Gregory evokes three distinct time periods in this passage: the narrator is the author late in her life; the woman in the New York theatre is the author at the height of her career, and the woman recalled by both of them is a young bride who has been admitted (through her husband’s infl uence) to the inner circle of British aristocracy, long before her literary abilities were realized. Gregory suggests no contrast or discontinuity between these three incarnations of herself; the reader is meant to understand that the mature author contains, without repudiation, the theatre manager who led the Abbey through three major confl icts with the British authorities and the young woman who kissed the queen’s hand. Five paragraphs later, Gregory adds another, equally heterogeneous vision of herself:
On another day to be remembered we went to the Pope’s reception at the Vatican and received his blessing, which he gave very solemnly. To us, indeed, he had given a special word and smile, because of the service
my husband had done in Ceylon to his church there, and because also of the gratitude of the priests and bishops of Ireland. (31)
Here we see that the same marital affi liation that allowed the young Gregory to receive the blessing of the Queen also gained her the blessing of the Catholic Church in Rome, France, and Ireland. Again, the author recalls this moment with no sense of irony, either in itself or in relation to the previous fl ashbacks; deference to the Pope and deference to the Queen are both happily incorporated into the narrator’s identity.
