Sydney Owenson's 'The Wild Irish Girl' and Revolutionary Thought

Sydney Owenson’s national tales and narrative poetry echo those of the American colonists in regard to humanity’s birth right of freedom, particularly in the way her British characters interact with Irish characters. Owenson sees the Irish used as scapegoats for England’s perceived imperial failure and, through her writing, takes a stand against the British. While she leads her fellow country men and women to awareness of individual and national pride, she also sheds light upon the conditions of the nineteenth century female, that of subjugation to male dominance. 

Particularly in The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson reveals eighteenth century societal dictates present within the Irish culture. Her inclusion of Irish speech involves the ‘wild’ Irish instructing the British aristocracy on truths evident to the Irish but virtually unknown by the intruding British. For example, the main female character’s name is Glorvina, the word glor in Irish, meaning voice. In one of her initial conversations with the character, Horatio, she explains the significance of Irish music: 

This susceptibility to the influence of my country’s music, discovered itself in a period of existence, when no associating sentiment of the heart could have called it into being; for I have often wept in convulsive emotion at an air before the sad story it accompanied was understood: but now- now- that feeling is matured, and understanding awakened. Oh! You cannot judge-cannot feel- for you have no national music; and your country is the happiest under heaven! [1]

Audaciously, Owenson configures historical and linguistic elements of Ireland within this foundational national tale and juxtaposes these elements with those of Great Britain through her two main characters, illustrating a cultural fantasy of an Anglo-Irish coalition. 

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[1] Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, Boston: Joseph Greenleaf, 1808, p. 92.