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Many of the best-known texts of the Irish Literary Revival deal with a crisis of masculinity. John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World is filled with men who cannot carry out their roles as protectors or simply agents in their own lives, Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom sees himself as ‘a womanly man’, and Gabriel from The Dead loses his wife to a ghost of heroic manhood. This wavering masculinity is also found in other modernist texts (such as T.S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’) and can be interpreted as a response to social changes in the early twentieth century (Lusty 7): women during World War I had taken jobs traditionally filled by men, many workers were now sitting in offices or in a production line rather than carrying out manual labour (Halberstam 2645), and the women’s rights movement was gaining traction (Lusty 7). In Ireland, this crisis was exacerbated by English colonialism, which traditionally represented the Celts as effeminate and Ireland as a feminised nation, as opposed to the masculine qualities of England (Kiberd 30). It is no wonder then that so many authors of the Irish Revival problematise masculinity. Elizabeth Bowen does so herself in The Last September with a cast of passive Anglo-Irish men, but her approach is unique. Whereas many works of the Revival feature strong women, such as Molly Bloom or Pegeen Mike, who stand in contrast to the male characters, The Last September exposes a hidden crisis of femininity. The women of The Last September might be less lethargic than their male counterparts, but they are just as confused and unsatisfied. In this essay I will explore how, in Bowen’s novel, women are negatively affected by their husbands’ crises yet are unwilling to return to traditional gender roles. This, I will argue, plunges them into a crisis of their own.
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