The Human Snout: Pigs,Priests, and Peasants in the Parlor

ABSTRACT

Ireland reeked throughout the nineteenth century from the pages of English representation. The reputed stench of its cabins, cesspools, and dungheaps became a shameful index of national backwardness and the essential mark of Irish olfactory identity. In response to the odor of primitiveness that clung to them also, Ireland's rising middle classes set about a program of national decontamination. Led by the emblematic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this modernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the countryside and the rural home, imposing upon a recalcitrant peasantry a new, “enlightened,” olfactory register predicated on an intolerance of traditional odors. The groundwork for this transformation was the castigation of Ireland's domestic cottage by English observers and, in particular, the metonymic substitution of the peasantry's pigs for Irish national character—a discursive reordering that, though it encountered resistance from a peasantry devoted to an old Gaelic order of sensory values, was completed and even sanctified by a Catholic Church bent on producing modern, disciplined subjects. The smells of everyday life, as a result, took on new meanings. This paper examines Irish and British literary and historical texts around the turn of the twentieth century to uncover that meaning and expose the role of olfaction in the production of the peculiar Gaelo-Catholic ideology of domesticity that until recent decades governed rural Ireland.