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• 1 2016-02-15T13:57:00-08:00 Political Figures in Star of the Sea 35 gallery 236801 2016-04-04T06:30:37-07:00
  

  The Role of Historical Political Figures in Star of the Sea

  
  The historical political figures featured by Joseph O’Connor in Star of the Sea serve several roles in the novel. Functioning as a postmodern questioning of objective reality, an allusion to the continuing Irish struggle long after the events in Star of the Sea conclude, or a reminder that many English and Protestants did, in fact, fight for the rights of deeply oppressed Irish Catholics, the political figures of the novel serve diverse but important roles throughout Star of the Sea.
  
  Although this theme is more prominent among O’Connor’s artistic figures, a postmodernist questioning of objective reality through the use of historical people also exists among the political figures. Naomi Jacobs writes in The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction that “The presence of the historical figure signifies our questioning of the artificial boundaries between truth and lie, history and fiction, reality and imagination” (xxi). Perhaps the best example of this questioning occurs with women’s education reform advocate and suffragist Emily Davies, who in the world of Star of the Sea is good friends with David Merridith’s sister Natasha; Natasha is even said to have edited Davies’s real-life work The Higher Education of Women (O’Connor 103). This mixing of the historical and the fictional aids O’Connor in the questioning of any one objective history, which is a particularly important examination to make in the context of a postcolonial novel, due to the colonizing country’s suppression of the atrocities it has committed against the colonized.
  
  Other political historical figures are used by O’Connor to remind readers that the Irish struggle for independence continued long after the end of the potato famine. John Mitchel and James Connolly are both quoted in epigraphs decrying Irish oppression, Mitchel in 1856 and Connolly in 1916; prefacing the novel with these quotations reminds or informs readers before the novel even begins that the struggle for Irish independence and horrors committed by the English continued long after the potato famine. The third historical figure serving as a reminder of the continuing struggle, Charles Parnell, who advocated for Ireland in Parliament during the 1870s and 80s, is alluded to in the novel’s epilogue as a final reminder of the post-novel fight for independence (O’Connor 366).
  
  Finally, O’Connor works in Star of the Sea to paint a nuanced portrayal of the English by mentioning political figures who supported the Irish cause. Angela Burdett-Coutts, for example, along with Charles Dickens, runs a safehouse for prostitutes, many of whom were poverty-stricken, starving Irish women, as we see in the novel. Additionally, we are reminded that Theobald Wolfe Tone, Irish but not Catholic, nonetheless “fought and died for Ireland as captain of the revolutionaries in ’98” (O’Connor 67).
  
  O’Connor’s use of historical political figures in Star of the Sea clearly serves a diverse set of purposes throughout the course of the novel. However, what these diverse purposes all have in common is that they demonstrate the complexity and deftness with which O’Connor weaves his tale.
  
  Works Cited 
  Jacobs, Naomi. The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Print.
  
  O’Connor, Joseph. Star of the Sea. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2002. Print.

  Researcher/Writer: Audrey Gunn
  Technical Designers: Lindsey Atchison and Sarah Liebig

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• 1 2016-02-15T13:49:23-08:00 John Mitchel 17 Political Figure from Camnish, near Dungiven Ireland plain 2016-04-04T11:46:27-07:00 54.92586, -6.92117

  “England is a truly great public criminal. England! All England!… he must be punished; that punishment will, as I believe, come upon her by and through Ireland; and so Ireland will be avenged… The Atlantic ocean be never so deep as the hell which shall belch down on the oppressors of my race.
              -John Mitchel, Irish nationalist, 1856” (qtd. in O’Connor IX)

  John Mitchel was born near Dungiven, Ireland, in 1815. His father, a Unitarian Minister and member of the United Irishmen, supported Mitchel’s educational pursuits, and Mitchel began practicing as a lawyer in Ireland in 1840. During this time, Mitchel eloped with and married Jane Verner (Wallace 106).
  
  In the mid-1840s, Mitchel began writing for The Nation, a nationalist newspaper, in which he “wrote masterly descriptions of districts devastated by the potato famine” (Wallace 106). Mitchel and other members of the Young Irelanders split from the Repeal Association headed by Daniel O’Connell, instead founding the Irish Confederation in 1846 (Wallace 106).
  
  Two years later, Mitchel left both the newspaper and the Irish Confederation, instead beginning his own nationalist paper, The United Irishman. Because the paper “openly preached sedition to ‘that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property,’” the English government convicted Mitchel on charges of treason and sent him to a penal colony in Tasmania (Wallace 106).
  
  In 1853, Mitchel escaped from Tasmania, moving to the United States, where he was involved in several new political causes; in his position as editor for the Richmond Examiner, he ironically “championed slavery and the Southern cause” while continuing to write in favor of Irish independence (Wallace 107). Mitchel returned to Ireland in 1875, where he was elected a member of Parliament for Tipperary, Ireland, but died before his election could be contested (Wallace 107).
  
  John Mitchel does not occur as a character in Star of the Sea, but a quotation from him is one of four epigraphs in the novel. Mitchel, along with James Connolly, condemns England for not only its lack of aid to Ireland during the famine, but the country’s role in causing the famine in the first place. Mitchel and Connolly’s quotes are contrasted with those from Charles Trevelyan and Punch magazine, which respectively blame the Irish for the famine and describe the Irish as savage beasts. Mitchel’s quote, dated from 1856, nearly a decade after the worst of the famine, demonstrates the Irish loathing for the English that continued long after the famine came to an end, due to continued colonization and contempt on the part of the English.
  
  Works Cited
  O’Connor, Joseph. Star of the Sea. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. Print.
  
  Wallace, Martin. 100 Irish Lives. Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Print.

  Researcher/Writer: Audrey Gunn
  Technical Designers: Lindsey Atchison and Sarah Liebig

  
  Back to Political Figures in Star of the Sea