Nation-building Uses of Famines in Margaret W. Brew’s Castle Cloyne and Władysław Orkan’s Pomór

Abstract

The article provides a comparative reading of Margaret W. Brew’s Castle Cloyne (1885) and Władysław Orkan’s Pomór [Murrain] (1910) in the light of Brian Porter-Szűcs’s claim that peasant revolts that question social hierarchy are impossible to include in the nation-centered version of history. It discusses nation-building strategies and the politics of using 1840s subsistence crises as a community-founding event in two (Irish and Polish) famine novels. Special attention is paid to Brew’s idea of the Great Irish Famine as a test of nationhood and Orkan’s ironic approach towards interpreting the Great Galician Famine as a divine punishment for the 1846 peasant revolt against the Polish gentry. Brew’s “double narrative” is analyzed to prove the universality of national suffering, aimed at identifying the Catholic landlords as famine victims alongside the tenants. Pomór’s narrative frame is closely examined with reference to Stanisław Pigoń’s nation-centered exegesis of Orkan’s writing and argued to convey disbelief in the possibility for the subservient to be included in the national community designed by and for the ruling classes. Parallel reading of female characters’ famine biographies abridges the deconstruction of the myth of national unity in Pomór and Castle Cloyne.