Joseph Blanco White’s Spanish and Irish Identities and Love: Rose Cusiack’s Symbolic Significance in Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (1833)

Abstract

Joseph Blanco White in his response to Thomas Moore’s Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (1833) went beyond theology to dissent with him on the topics of women and romance, marriage of convenience and national identity during the Second Reformation in Ireland. In Moore’s work the protagonist remains a Catholic dismissing the tempting offer of a mature missionary woman whom he scorns. In Second Travels (1833) Blanco presents a converted, mirrored image of his own Sevillian Roman Catholic family with a happy ending. The protagonist and Rose Cusiack finally marry after a confessional intrigue and a non-imposed process of conversion to rationalist Protestantism. Two different sensitivities and sets of values, against the backdrop of patriarchal religion, are at issue. Moore defends Catholicism as a mark of true Irishness. Blanco defends liberal Protestantism and free choice to accept Ireland as his fatherland.