Hugo Harvey, an Irishman who attended Oxford University, shares his experiences of feeling alienated as a foreigner in a predominantly British environment. He recounts instances of encountering anti-Irish rhetoric in the literature curriculum and the social awkwardness he faced due to his Irish identity.
An Irishman at Oxford: It was an education in being an outsider. I felt alienated from the very start. I tentatively threw out an answer: Moby-Dick. I threw the question back at him as though it was too hot to hold. He replied that every summer break, he would lock himself at home and read 100 books. By his complexion, I knew he was telling the truth. He continued that, this summer, he had, on a whim, decided to read Virginia Woolf’s novels to see what all the hype was about.
Not only did he think her novels were overrated, he told me they should not have been published. One surreal evening in my second year, I was forced by circumstance to attend an event in a dingy, darkened room at the back of a local Conservative club. A crowd of Oxford students in fancy dress took turns getting up on stage and drunkenly shouting out speeches. A unionist took the stage to pontificate on the differences between a papist and a Catholic, and which one deserved to be burned, to raucous applause. I was deeply uncomfortable, scanning the room to see if anyone else felt like me, but everyone simply laughed. It was not only the people I met that left me feeling alienated, but also the rhetoric of the books I read. Since Oxford unsurprisingly taught literature in an extremely traditional way, we almost never read anything written after 1830. By reading so historically, all I had to do was brush off the dust from some of the books, and a load of anti-Irish rhetoric would come flying off with it. We were taught, for instance, about Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), a canonical epic poem that is more than 36,000 lines long and that Spenser described as “cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devices”. I did not know what to make of it, but initially enjoyed how quirky it was. So, I decided to dig further. It did not take long before I realised many of his allegories were distinctively anti-Irish. In fact, I found that Spenser had written an entire tract called A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), dedicated to advocating for the genocide of the Irish. Though English literature once belittled the Irish, Irish writers stood tall within it – and that was a source of connection that other foreigners did not have. For instance, was everywhere – from his poetry to his translation of Beowulf in my Old English studies to his criticism of John Clare in my Romantics module. His presence was all the more comforting since he was a writer my mother, a secondary-school English teacher, had taught me about, even dragging me to one of his last public recitals when I was a child. Wilde, of course, had attended Oxford himself, and lived on in the curriculum, building names and university legend. He was another writer that I had a personal connection to, as my grandmother, who never finished secondary school, had loved quoting Wilde’s witticisms to me growing up. I took great pride in being able to send my grandmother a postcard of him. These were just two of many Irish writers whose contributions to the English-language literary canon could not be denied and with whom I enjoyed a kind of quiet solidarity
Oxford University Ireland Alienation Literature Anti-Irish Sentiment Irish Writers Edmund Spenser Oscar Wilde
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