Irish Music and Iconic Realism in Sydney Owenson's piece, "When Floating O'er"

 

Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Harp

from my book cover, 

a special acknowledgment to the New York Public Library

From my presentation at an annual Conference of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies, Dublin, Ireland: 

The Irish melody, “When Floating O’er: Cathleen Nolan” from Sydney Owenson’s 1803 collection, Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, demonstrates an iconic vision and focuses the audience’s attention on iconic elements associated with late 18th - early 19th century Ireland that deal with transformation. This particular piece demonstrates my semiotic theory of iconic realism in that it complies with the following necessary components of my theory: 

1.    The presence of a realistic icon: a representation of Cathleen ni Houlihan. 

2.   Deliberate placement of the icon within the midst of a unique, realistic setting out of place for this particular icon: lyrical and musical choices. 

3.  A created dissonance between these two entities as the catalyst that generates audience enlightenment of a cultural dilemma in need of transformation: Irish awareness of cultural valor.  

In Owenson’s compilation entitled, Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, published in 1803, one melody, “When Floating Oér,” contains lyrics that relate directly to the Irish iconic figure, Cathleen ni Houlihan. She situates the essence of this character as one who is ubiquitous yet elusive, much like segments of Irish culture at the onset of the nineteenth century.  

Not only did Owenson’s nineteenth century listening audience experience the pleasant melody of this tune, they also were able to interpret the lyrics as an Irish romantic memory or a realization that a change in the historical relevance of Irish history was at hand. Playing this piece and other Irish melodies on her harp, Owenson exhibited iconic realism by bringing attention of Irish history, plucked on soothing strings. Perhaps, her attempt was to lull her audience into a state of acceptance or awaken them gradually by means of intense harmonics. 

Thus, the utility of music as a means of representing the semiotic theory of iconic realism involves a multiple sensory application in connection with sound wave production and its effect on human cognition. Whether the connection originates from a classical music composition, sounds of nature, or a synthesized production, juxtaposition of an iconic sound with an aspect of realism produces an auditory response that ultimately can lead to an audience’s awareness of positive change, be it cultural or individual.

Bostonian, Mercy Otis Warren, "Muse of the American Revolution"

Mercy Otis Warren, photo from cover of book:

Mercy Otis Warren: The Muse of the American Revolution

Mercy Otis Warren was born in 1728 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful businessman and an acquaintance of John Adams and his family and circle of friends. Warren observed the intensity with which her contemporaries had to live in order to receive the dignified respect that any human being would rightly expect to receive. Within her plays and essays, she included the concept of human rights advocacy and relevant themes of independence, juxtaposed with iconic characters and structures to bring awareness to her audience of the need for social and political transformation.

For example, in her 1773 play, The Adulateur, Warren described the issue of individual rights through the speech of her main character, Brutus:

            The change how drear! The sullen ghost of bondage

            Stalks full in view—already with her pinions,

            She shades the affrighted land—the insulting soldiers

            Tread down our choicest rights; while hoodwinked justice

            Drops her scales, and totters from her basis.

            Thus torn with nameless wounds, my bleeding country
            Demands a tear – that tear I’ll freely give her. 


[1] Mercy Otis Warren, The Adulateur, Act I, Scene I, Boston: New Printing Office, 1773.

        

Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" and Iconic Realism

Adler Planetarium Astronomy Museum, Art Institute of Chicago

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,

and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Above is a poem by the American poet, Walt Whitman. Here, the speaker leaves an astronomy lecture to step outside the fixed parameters and subsequently, learns first-hand the beauty in viewing the same firmament of which the lecturer speaks, but viewed simply with the naked eye, in silence. By leaving the lecture, the speaker has knowledge shared by the astronomer inside and now enjoys the silent beauty with appreciated knowledge. More importantly, the speaker has appreciation of the significance of the stars’ natural state. 

This poem illustrates iconic realism in that the subject, constellations in a contrived setting, brings the audience (the speaker in the poem) to a recognition that education of natural phenomena directly connects humanity with nature. 

I warmly thank the Art Institute of Chicago for purchasing a copy of my book, The Theory of Iconic Realism: Understanding the Arts through Cultural Context.

To hear me read this, please click HERE.

Alice McDermott's novel, 'At Weddings and Wakes' and Iconic Realism: Doors

As my #37 bus passed by this section of Dublin, these doors always intrigued me.

From a paper presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies, Emory Univ., Atlanta, Georgia: 

Alice McDermott incorporates the iconic figure of a door, as a primary trigger of childhood memories in her novel, At Weddings and Wakes. Usually, a door is the iconic representation of a threshold, transporting either the characters or the reading audience to a new episode or revelation. However, McDermott’s doorways represent stability, a way for a child’s mind to capture a moment in time and hold it in place to reminisce or perhaps learn about oneself or the influential people who enter and leave via the strategically placed doors. For example, she begins the book with a vivid description of the narrator’s childhood front door: 

Twice a week in every week of summer except the last in July and the first in August, their mother shut the front door, the white, eight-panel door that served as backdrop for every Easter, First Holy Communion, confirmation, and graduation photo in the family album, and with the flimsy screen leaning against her shoulder turned the key in the black lock, gripped the curve of the elaborate wrought-iron handle that had been sculpted to resemble a black vine curled into a question mark, and in what seemed a brief but accurate imitation of a desperate housebreaker, wrung the door on its hinges until, well satisfied, she turned slipped away from the screen as if she were throwing a cloak from her shoulders, and said, “Let’s go.”   

On their odyssey through the city transportation system, the mother and her children encounter the subway entrance, described to reflect the child’s perspective: “And then bars, prison, bars, a wall of bars, and, even more fantastically, a wall of revolving doors all made of black iron (pp. 6-7).”  As they reach the Brooklyn apartment, another vivid description of doors provides the reader with a sense that this memory is one that the child paints in her mind to recall the important relationships of her mother. They connect the mother’s memory with that of the child’s: 

Key in hand, they climbed the steps again and let themselves in through the double glass door framed in heavy wood, across a tiled vestibule that held the cool stone smell of a church, and then into the dim hallway where the air was brown with the reflection of the dark wooden floor and the staircase, with the odor of stewing beef and boiled onions… 

One flight and across a narrow hallway with silent doors on either end, another flight, their mother’s shoes tapping on each tread and the dull yellow light now passing through an opaque lozenge of white skylight. An identical hallway (voices from behind the far door, again those rushed incomprehensible syllables struck throughout with startling exclamations), another flight, the light growing stronger until it spread itself like a blurred hand over the tops of each of the dulled and hazy light there was only a single door and the hallway on either side of it was filed with a clutch of cardboard boxes and paper bags…. (p. 1)

The single door gave off the purr and rattle that made it seem thick and animate to the children, with an internal life all its own. There was the scratch of the delicate chain, the metallic slither of its bolts, the tumble and click of its lock, and then, slowly, the creak of its hinges…. The face that appeared between the door and its frame was thinner than their mother’s and so, for the children, offered no resemblance – despite the same pale blue eyes and light skin and narrow mouth that was, as was their mother’s, fighting to resist a grin. ( pp. 12-13) 

Toward the end of the memoir, the father’s presence reveals a sense of humor in relation to a door, all the while, creating a puzzle in the children’s minds as he points out: 

She and her brother passed the corner parking lo of the Presbyterian church, crossed another side street, and then the catty-cornered doorway of a small bar (about which their father would say, with the same consistency that he made his cemetery joke but with a far more serious air, “ in all the years that we’ve lived here I’ve never passed through those doors,” filling his children with a vague admiration and a cautious sense of gratitude for what it was he had managed to avoid). (p. 151)

The iconic doors lend a sense of spirituality in McDermott’s novel as each door seems to have a personality of its own, a stability that intrigues and stimulates the childhood imagination that seems absent in the adults’ consciousness. This cognizance carved within the various slabs of wood, configured to keep out and keep in, actually create an experiential plane perceived by the children through their senses of sight, smell and especially sound, albeit occasionally, a dissonant harmony prevails between the squeaking movements of the doors’ hinges. 

Sydney Owenson's Writing and Iconic Realism: Spiritual Connection Between Humanity and Natural Law

An excerpt from my book: 

Owenson acknowledges the spiritual connection between humanity and natural law, a common theme occurring in Goethe’s works. In one of his conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann, he explains:

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for, by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it. [1]

Owenson, then, incorporates the Romantic concept of nature’s influence on humanity’s intellectual actions while she introduces the reality of political and societal constraints through many of her characters’ struggles with self-awareness. Through this conflict, Owenson personifies the dichotomous nature of glory in which her birth nation struggles with true autonomy and its native glór (voice) to be heard. Owenson’s romantic, graceful style of writing demonstrates iconic realism through the interactions of her characters, placed in unique situations, as she awakens her society to effective conflict resolution that begins with the self.

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[1] Johann Goethe, quoted in Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, translated by John Oxennford, edited by J.K. Moorhead (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 157.