‘Purity, Piety, and Simplicity’: Heretical Images of the Female, Catholic Reader in Irish Modernism

This chapter investigates the Irish response to modern mass media, in which Catholic and cultural nationalists converged in their efforts to de-anglicise the fledgling nation. For different reasons, both factions noisily condemned such modern vulgarities as tabloid journalism, Hollywood movies, music halls, bodice-rippers, and penny dreadfuls. The iconic figure of the young, female, Catholic reader loomed large in these invectives, with Catholic nationalists campaigning to preserve her purity while cultural nationalists bemoaned her seduction by the international culture industry. Boynton explores the relationship between these religious and gender pieties of the nationalist movement on the one hand and the emergence of Irish modernism on the other, tracing through the works of early, high, and late modernists – from W.B. Yeats to Samuel Beckett – a set of heretical strategies that challenge the representation of this consumer demographic as “pure, pious, and simple.”