Do the united discourses of freedom and secularity function in a singular way across the contexts of coercive colonial control in which they are deployed? Can the ideological union between secularity and freedom really be analyzed singularly, or is it more accurately understood as a cluster of related but ultimately discrete phenomena? In this paper, I will use the case study of freedom and secularity in Sydney Owenson’s 1806 novel The Wild Irish Girl as an example of the idiosyncrasy with which these interrelated discourses can function in comparison with frequently circulated theories. Through this analysis, I will come to a methodological suggestion that it may be useful to build on theories of secularization and colonialism with contextually specific analysis, greater descriptive accuracy to general theoretical characterizations. What could we gain from moving from speaking of “secularism” as such to a discussion of related but discrete “secularisms?”
Scholars of secularity and colonialism have produced important insights that “provincialize” (to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term) secularism: although it claims universal neutrality, authors such as Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Tracy Fessenden, Peter Coviello, and An Yountae have done important work in delineating its Christian (or specifically Protestant Christian) and/or Western European provenance.[i] For this reason, secularism is shown in their work to have powerful marginalizing impacts for groups and individuals whose religious practices do not conform to a specific set of liberal behavioral and political norms, which impact has been particularly salient in colonial and neo-colonial contexts.
Owenson’s novel The Wild Irish Girl bears many of the commonly discussed features of the colonial discourse of secularism excavated in various ways by the scholars that I have named. In the novel, assimilation of Irish Catholic characters (especially peasants) to the settler-colonial religious paradigm through conversion to Protestantism is assumed to be a category of liberation. In other words, Protestantism is identified as that which will free the Irish Catholic population from the prison of their intellectually outdated and illiberal religious beliefs. Catholicism’s emotionally charged superstition, in the novel’s characterization, prevents their collective intellectual development and leaves them vulnerable to exploitation from conniving priests. This valorization of one religious formation over another according to the extent to which it conforms to an external standard of respectability is a recognizable instantiation of the general phenomenon that has been called “secularism” in previous scholarly work.
However, The Wild Irish Girl also has several narrative features which, while still recognizably “secularizing,” have an idiosyncratic relationship with commonly circulating overarching theories of secularity. One is the clear civilizational commitment that the novel demonstrates to Christianity as such, in a way that confounds definitions of secularism as equally hostile to all religious lifeways unassimilated to a specific category of Protestant normativity. Although the novel’s assessment of Catholicism is decidedly negative, there are individual Irish Catholic characters who are represented as unusually enlightened or progressive, in proportion to the extent to which they espouse specific Protestant-adjacent modes of worship or belief. These Catholic characters are, in other words, inchoate Protestants. And writing in their voices, the author claims in several instances that it is only a matter of time until their Irish Catholic countrymen follow in their wake under the benign guidance of British and Protestant colonial authority. This insistence on the developmental potential of Irish Catholics reveals a civilizational investment in Christianity as such, even across sectarian lines. This feature of the novel challenges arguments like Peter Coviello’s that secularism is a universally operative “theodicy” that is “a sacralized vindication of the world—colonial, racially stratified…as it is,” regardless of the context in which it appears.[ii] A second idiosyncrasy of the novel’s secularity is its insistence on the separation between feminine domesticity, coded as properly private, and the realm of religious belief and observance, which is coded as properly public and most functional when evacuated of the private affects of feminine domesticity. This representation cuts against a common tendency, pioneered by Joan Wallach Scott, to identify secularism with the privatization of religion, especially through its association with private emotion and feminine domesticity.[iii] Conversely, the separation of domestic affect from the public world of religion allows Owenson to criticize Catholicism for its overinvestment in sensuality and to identify its adherents as unsuitable candidates for public activities of governance.
The idiosyncrasy of secularity in Owenson’s novel, I argue, emerges from the particular colonial circumstance that was the pretext for its writing. Unlike some of Britain’s other colonies, the colonization of Ireland involved two Christian populations, differing only in denomination. And the projected model of the colony’s development, especially for someone like Owenson, would have been informed by comparison with the assimilationist precedent of Scotland and Wales, in which absorption into the United Kingdom resulted in an imposed adaptation of British identity. Such an assimilationist colonial paradigm differs markedly, for example, from the highly segregationist colonial paradigm that Kenneth Ballhatchet has explicated in British governance of India.[iv] By analyzing in this way the idiosyncratic particularity of Sydney Owenson’s secularism in The Wild Irish Girl, I hope to both broaden our general understanding of the relationship between coloniality and secularism and suggest the usefulness of pluralizing our ways of thinking and speaking on the subject. Speaking of “colonial secularisms,” rather than the “colonial secular,” I suggest, may offer texture and specificity to our extant theoretical apparatuses.
[i] Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature, Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, An Yountae, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and the Poetics of World-Making
[ii] Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 44, original emphasis removed.
[iii] Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism
[iv] Kenneth Ballhatchet, quoted in Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (University of California Press, 2010), 17.
Do the united discourses of freedom and secularity function in a singular way across the contexts of coercive colonial control in which they are deployed? Can the ideological union between secularity and freedom really be analyzed singularly, or is it more accurately understood as a cluster of related but ultimately discrete phenomena? In this paper, I will use the case study of freedom and secularity in Sydney Owenson’s 1806 novel The Wild Irish Girl as an example of the idiosyncrasy with which these interrelated discourses can function in comparison with frequently circulated theories. Through this analysis, I will come to a methodological suggestion that it may be useful to build on theories of secularization and colonialism with contextually specific analysis, greater descriptive accuracy to general theoretical characterizations. What could we gain from moving from speaking of “secularism” as such to a discussion of related but discrete “secularisms?”