Introduction
Although Edgeworth wrote in a variety of genres, she is primarily associated with the early English novel of manners and the Irish regional novel. She also produced a number of didactic children's tales that were popular in her own time, but are largely forgotten today. Her most highly-regarded works are Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (1800), a novel based on a family memoir written by Edgeworth's grandfather, and Belinda (1801), a three-volume novel of manners.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Born January 1, 1768, at Black Bourton in Oxfordshire, Edgeworth was the eldest daughter of Anna Maria Elers and the educator and inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the most significant figure in her life and in her writing career. In 1773, Edgeworth's mother died and her father remarried almost immediately. He would eventually father a total of twenty-two children by four different wives, and the demands of caring for her many siblings caused Edgeworth to leave school at the age of fifteen. In 1782, her father moved the family to Edgeworthstown, his ancestral estate in Ireland, and became active in Irish politics and economic reform. During this time, in addition to overseeing the education of the younger children, Edgeworth assisted her father as his secretary. She began writing children's stories to amuse her brothers and sisters, and together with her father produced a volume of essays on childrearing, Practical Education (1798). She then turned to novel writing, publishing her first novel in 1800 and her second a year later.
Edgeworth's work was widely read, but she was uncomfortable with public attention, preferring the quiet domestic life she advocated for women. Despite numerous invitations to visit England, she made her first trip—in the company of her father, stepmother, and sister—in 1813. She was introduced to many of the leading intellectuals and literary figures of her time, and while Edgeworth herself was warmly received, her father was not, which disturbed her greatly and contributed to her withdrawal from literary society. She returned to Ireland where she continued writing, administering the education of her younger siblings, the last of whom was born in 1812, and helping to manage the family estate. Her father died in 1817 after a long illness and Edgeworth was charged with completing his autobiography. His Memoirs were finally published in 1820, and again her father's unpopularity led to widespread attacks in the press. Flaws in her writing were invariably attributed to the contaminating influence of her father's social and political ideas. Although she was stung by such criticism of her father, his death enabled her to venture again into the literary societies of both England and Scotland. At the same time, she gained control of the family estate—which had been mismanaged by her brother—and capably handled all facets of its operation until 1839. She continued writing, publishing her last novel, Helen, in 1834, and a children's story, Orlandino, in 1848. She died on May 22, 1849, at the age of eighty-one at the family estate in Edgeworthstown.
MAJOR WORKS
In 1795 Edgeworth published Letters for Literary Ladies, a three-part work consisting of an exchange of correspondence between two men on the education of women, followed by an epistolary novella featuring two young female characters, and "An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification." With this work, Edgeworth joined the contemporary literary debate on women's rights, but unlike such revolutionary feminists as Mary Wollstonecraft, she advocated a more conventional role for women—one that restricted their intellectual activities to the domestic sphere, where they might exercise their influence through mediation rather than direct participation in public discourse. Her next work, The Parent's Assistant (1796), was...
(This entire section contains 1005 words.)
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a collection of didactic short stories intended for children. Edgeworth's most critically acclaimed work was her first novel,Castle Rackrent, an account of four generations of the Rackrent family narrated by Thady Quirk, the family's loyal retainer. The work drew on the family history of the Edgeworths and incorporated social criticism of both the Anglo-Irish gentry and the middle class. It is considered one of the first English novels to represent working-class life, and is also regarded as the first Irish regional novel. Edgeworth's next effort, Belinda, employed the conventions of the novel of manners to attack the excesses and moral bankruptcy of the fashionable elite, while at the same time warning against the vulgarity the author associated with the middle class. The work's eponymous heroine was charged with finding a middle ground between female independence and domesticity.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
By many accounts, Edgeworth was the most commercially successful as well as the most critically acclaimed female writer of her time. Today, however, her novels and essays are not widely read, although her work has attracted considerable attention from feminist theorists and literary historians. While she is considered an early feminist or proto-feminist by some scholars, largely because of her advocacy of education for women, others believe her writings reinforce the power of the patriarchy by encouraging women to confine themselves to domestic life. Marilyn Butler suggests that Castle Rackrent can be read as a progressive, even radical, work that anticipates the nineteenth-century realist novel. She contends that in the novel "old aristocratic stories of male dominance and legitimacy are being challenged by democratized women-centered plots of family life in which servants, including female servants, wield power, and almost anything is negotiable." Similarly, Edgeworth's 1809 story "Ennui," from Tales of Fashionable Life (1809-12), features three main characters who are powerful women and authority figures according to Butler. Nicholas Mason takes issue with those critics who insist that Edgeworth's work exhibits complicity with the patriarchy because of its emphasis on domesticity. Mason maintains that her version of domesticity extends beyond gender issues and encompasses issues of class as well: "more than a system for proper female behavior, the domesticity Edgeworth advocates is a summons for all members of polite society, whether female or male, to live up to their gender- and class-based responsibilities." Gender issues aside, most critics acknowledge Edgeworth's innovations in literary form, including her contribution to the development of the novel of manners and the regional novel, and her innovations in subject matter, particularly her representations of working-class characters.
Castle Rackrent
COLIN GRAHAM (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1996)
SOURCE: Graham, Colin. “History, Gender and the Colonial Moment: Castle Rackrent.” Irish Studies Review, no. 14 (spring 1996): 21-24.
In the following essay, Graham examines Edgeworth’s treatment of the concept of union—between male and female and between England and Ireland—in Castle Rackrent.
For Irish literary and cultural criticism, Castle Rackrent (1800) is placed almost irresistibly at the moment of the Act of Union; it sets a narrative which faces back to a pre-Union ‘chaos’ against an authorising ‘Preface’ which looks with anticipation to the new post-Union century. I want to examine how the squeezed historical moment of Union, balanced precariously on the thinnest definition of fins de siècle and the gender issues inherent in the text, can be made vital to uncovering a critique of the legislative merging of Britain and Ireland. Edgeworth’s text, I will suggest, expresses its scepticism about the phenomenon of Union through an analogous train of thought which uses a gendered notion of union. And Union in Castle Rackrent is a concept pressurised by its existence between male and female, Irish and English, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Union thus becomes both a marital and political act in Castle Rackrent, and each union is viewed as a relationship of power in which dominance and counter-dominance co-exist, so that Castle Rackrent can eventually be read as a text which supports the notion that dominant discursive formations can be undercut without their knowledge.
Using post-colonial criticism may be contentious in a Irish cultural setting (as Gerry Smyth has recently commented, its status is ‘uncertain and its relationship with indigenous initiatives troubled’),1 and certainly it needs to be adapted and exploited in the specific context of Ireland. This, and the theoretical relationship between gender and post-colonialism, constitute an infinitely wider issue than can be dealt with here, and I want to assume a degree of applicability in looking at how the ideas of Homi Bhabha can be used to untangle some of the possibilities inherent in Edgeworth’s text.
In his ‘Introduction’ to The Location of Culture Bhabha says:
Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fins de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.2
Castle Rackrent can be usefully set in the context of these comments on the fins de siècle, not because it can be made a paradigmatic text in Bhabha’s critique but because it reveals a conflict in terms which echo Bhabha’s polarities of beginnings, endings and myths against difference and identity. Castle Rackrent can be read as a text which defines its historical moment in terms of cultural politics and gender through an examination of the competing versions of a time that is both an ending and a beginning.
In order to uncover the complexities of gender and history at play in Castle Rackrent I want to use Bhabha’s essay ‘Sly Civility’ as a means to understanding his notions of the doubleness of colonial/official discourses and how alternative, ironising forms can be inserted into the official;3 my aim is to turn these onto how Castle Rack-rent addresses gender and history at the same moment.
Bhabha’s essay has two functions. First, he attempts to establish what he calls the ‘ambivalence at the very origins of colonial authority’.4 In the broadest terms this could be seen as the gap between dominance and liberality in Western thought; the dichotomies between notions of the civilising mission of empire (and all the ideologies and narratives of domination which this carries) and the trappings of freedom, individuality and humanism which are basic to Western thought and exist in tandem with dominance in an Imperial context. Bhabha explores this ‘space’ in the predominant discourse in many ways, but perhaps his best example comes in his use of that arch utterer of imperial truths, Thomas Babington Macaulay. Bhabha quotes Macaulay’s essay on Warren Hastings in which he says that Hastings’ ‘instructions, being interpreted, mean simply, “Be the father and the oppressor of the people’; be just and unjust, moderate and rapacious”.’5 Of this piece of colonial advice, Bhabha says:
What is articulated in the doubleness of colonial discourse is not simply the violence of one powerful nation writing out the history of another. ‘Be the father and the oppressor … just and unjust’ is a mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently reinscribes, across differential power relations, both coloniser and colonised. For it reveals an agnostic uncertainty contained in the incompatibility of empire and nation; it puts on trial the very discourse of civility within which representative government claims its liberty and empire its ethics.6
The ‘agnostic uncertainty’ Bhabha describes in colonial discourse, where its self-contradictions cannot close on each other, constitutes the space into which a counter-discourse can press its resistance; it is notable how Bhabha’s configuration of this resistant space parallels the terms he uses to describe the fins de siècle; the complex against the simple, the uncertain against the solid. Having established this space, Bhabha moves on to his second major purpose, to identify the means by which ‘interpretation and misappropriation’ can enter the space. He envisages this counter-discourse in the terms described by the title of his essay—‘Sly Civility’; a phrase taken from Archdeacon Potts’s writing in 1818 about Indian natives. Potts says:
If you urge them [Indian natives] with their gross and unworthy misconceptions of the nature and the will of God, or the monstrous follies of their theology, they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb. You may be told that ‘heaven is wide place, and has a thousand gates’; and that their religion is one by which they hope to enter.7
Bhabha suggests that sly civility, a resistance which can never quite be construed entirely as resistance or acquiescence, deepens a crisis of paranoia in colonial discourse and widens the space in its doubleness. The importance of Bhabha’s description of this psycho-political split is that it breaks the configuration of colonial interaction originally set up by Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism in which the dominant West is entirely dominant as a discourse. Textuality in the colonial context changes from the monolithic and complacent to being complex and unsettled (while still reflecting dominance). For my purposes the idea of sly civility can usefully build a notion of textuality in which texts can be inscribed with both dominant and counter-discourses; in which colonial textuality can be self-parodying of its own dominance through the unwitting inclusion of sly civilities. Perhaps the liminal position of Ireland in the colonial encounter (on the threshold of what might be called entire colonisation, but complicated by geography and blurred race issues) is central to producing texts which are not fixed in their cultural and discursive positions. Added to this wider cultural context in the case of Castle Rackrent is the historically liminal position it occupies on the verge of the century and of a newly legislated polity.
Sly civility describes with some degree of accuracy the textual tactics at play in Castle Rack-rent, and these tactics insist in this case on a paralleled linkage between a coloniser-colonised relationship and the gender relationships of marriage. The crucial factor in aligning colonial and gender relations in Edgeworth is the very notion of Union—as political event and as social marriage; as proffered beginnings placed (inappropriately) in a time of disorientation. Marriages are central to the narratives of Castle Rackrent, and they are the points of which Edgeworth most obviously aligns cultural and sexual politics. But for the beginnings of Edgeworth’s contemplation of sly civility in union/Union we can look back to her ‘Essay on Self-Justificiation’ (1785). In this deeply ironic and shifting text she describes the means by which women can subvert, counter, even control dominant male discourses without the man’s knowledge:
Nothing provokes an irascible man, interested in debate, and possessed of an opinion of his own eloquence, so much as to see the attention of his hearers go from him: you will then, when he flatters himself that he has just fixed your eye with his very best argument, suddenly grow absent.8
The tactics described here are those of the provoking frustration which Bhabha sees colonists worrying over in India. The authority of a discourse is undermined by the deliberate exploitation of the apparent incapacities of those subjected to it: the ‘feminine’ inability to concentrate; the native’s inability to discourse ‘rationally’ on religion. Yet these are the very incapacities which justify the initial dominance. On either side of this paradox is the doubleness Bhabha describes. Edgeworth’s ‘Essay’ instils a gendered, subaltern consciousness which exists in the same social context as its dominant, and which may even exist beside but without the knowledge of that which it undermines. It is a textual quality derived from this sly civility of self-justification which is embedded in Castle Rackrent, and which makes it such a complex text in historical, cultural and gender terms.
The possibilities of this type of reading of Castle Rackrent are immense, but I want to suggest two examples of how the text can benefit from a Bhabha-derived critique of its particular positioning of history and gender at the moment of Union. Both examples illustrate the possibilities for reading which Bhabha’s ideas offer, yet neither allows his theory to fit exactly or complacently as an epistemological framework for the text. This, in turn, reiterates the notion implicit in Bhabha’s essays that colonial discourse and its countering discourses co-exist in unpredictable and continually ironic ways; a cultural condition he sees replicated to some degree by the historical moment of the fins de siècle.
Figuring the Act of Union as a marriage aligns gender questionably but temptingly alongside politico-cultural relations and allows the component discourses of the text to clash in variant ways. The two examples I am going to use suggest that gender can exist on either the ‘official’ or ‘unofficial’ side of colonial discourse; taken together they constitute a sceptical and radical examination of the potential of the political and gender Unions which circulate in Castle Rack-rent. Marilyn Butler reminds us that the ‘Preface’ to Castle Rackrent is, most likely, a work of collaboration between Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth.9 Given this knowledge, it might be tempting to view the work as the kind of dialogue of gendered sly civility which Bhabha transcribes in colonial terms. This need not necessarily involve dissecting the language or authorship of the text in gender terms. As the ‘Preface’ says, ‘there is much uncertainty even in the best authenticated ancient and modern histories’ (p. 61), and the ‘Preface’ itself replicates this textual ambiguity about authenticity, authority and written history. It ends with the hope and projected potential of the Act of Union: ‘When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence’ (p. 63). The teleology of assimilation and loss of identity here are already undermined by the ‘Essay on Self-Justification’ , which has contorted the notion of the possibility of a post-union ‘good-humoured smile’. At the very least the ‘Essay’ implies that the husband can never be certain of the intention of what appears as complacency and compliance. The loss of identity is thus, according the Essay, available only to the most superficial understandings of union/ Union; and against the certainty of beginnings are set the complex figures of misunderstood interactions.
From here we can see how the Preface configures any manner of unofficial discourse it might include—and this leads us inevitably to its discussion of Thady’s voice. In a text which assumes an ‘ignorant English reader’ (p. 63) it seems vital to know if the ‘Irishness’ of the text is understood as a counterpart or a counter to ‘Englishness’. The ‘editor’ of the Preface says that she/he:
had it once in contemplation to translate the language of Thady into plain English; but Thady’s idiom is incapable of translation, and besides, the authenticity of his story would have been more exposed to doubt if it were not told in his own characteristic manner.
(p. 63)
The grammatical construction suggests an elision of the knowledge of sly civility: by not translating Thady’s idiom its existence as something which may cast doubt on the ‘complacent’ loss of ‘Irish’ identity after Union is never, as the Preface says, ‘exposed to doubt’. Indeed, it may be this which makes Thady untranslatable; not because he is insurgent (as an ideological or representative character he is certainly not), but because his otherness to ‘plain English’ is a reminder of the difficulty of union, and because this notion of misunderstood idiom in Union is tied, in gender and political terms, to the polite insurgency described by Edgeworth’s ‘Essay on Self-Justification’ .
The Preface, at least partly as a double-authored text, may then already signal the role of gender in simultaneously covering and exploiting the spaces opened by sly civility. The Union is understood in its ideal terms, but this is undercut by the notion of Thady’s language as untranslatable. How the process of loss of identity is constituted (and it is significantly ‘her identity’ that needs to be lost) is unexplained.
Given these enclosing presumptions about the text, through Bhabha’s writings, Edgeworth’s ‘Essay’ and the Edgeworths’ ‘Preface’, the text can effectively be opened and examined in many ways. One of the most obvious is through the metaphor and narrative device of marriage which closes the Preface as a projected mode of hope. Yet the text itself delineates a succession of failing marriages and unions. This is not to insist on a continual parallel between Ireland and femininity in Union; rather, the work uses a gender perspective on the difficulties, perhaps impossibilities of union. Sir Condy and Mrs Jane, for example, come to represent a marriage which the woman would never have entered into with a fuller knowledge:
my lady couldn’t abide the smell of the whiskey punch. ‘My dear’, says [Condy], ‘you liked it well enough before we were married, and why not now?’ ‘My dear’, said she, ‘I never smelt it, or I assure you I should never have prevailed upon myself to marry you.’ ‘My dear, I am sorry you did not smell it, but we can’t help that now’, returned my master, without putting himself in a passion, or going out of his way, but just fair and easy helped himself to another glass, and drank it off to her health.
(pp. 91-2)
If it can be argued that this is merely narrativity, a ‘novelistic’ marriage without resonances through gender into politics, the footnote which accompanies the incarceration of Sir Kit’s Jewish wife goes further in pushing the political into gender spheres. The ‘editor’ tells the story of a Colonel McGuire’s wife who was imprisoned by her husband for over twenty years. The footnote ends:
These circumstances may appear strange to the English reader; but there is no danger in the present times, that any individual should exercise such tyranny as Colonel McGuire’s with impunity, the power now being all in the hands of government, and there being no possibility of obtaining from parliament an act of indemnity for any cruelties.
(p. 79)
Such a reassurance (which, like much of the text, is addressed with some irony to the English reader) rests, of course, on the authority of an Act of Parliament. Apart from a potentially deliberate and joking ambiguity about which Parliament is referred to, the authority which the editorial voice invests in this legislation echoes that hopeful note in the Preface about the effects of the Act of Union. The same undermining process, an ironic interjection into the discourse of safety in legislation, begs the obvious question of whether Sir Kit’s behaviour would have been different after political Union and parliamentary legislation. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that Sir Kit’s treatment of his wife is not a pre-Union but a post-union/Union phenomenon, which comes about as much through the frictions of cultural as through gender fusions. Kit’s wife’s Jewishness is continually emphasised by Thady’s account, functioning mainly as a definition of her non-Irishness. When she calls a turf stack ‘a pile of black bricks’, describes a bog as ‘a very ugly prospect’, and laughs ‘like one out of their right mind’, and hears the place name Allyballycarricko’shaughlin, Sir Kit ‘[stands] by whistling all the while’. As Thady says: ‘I verily believe she laid the corner stone of all her future misfortunes at that very instant; but I said no more, only looked at Sir Kit’ (pp. 77-8).
Gender, cultural nationality and the doubly squeezed history represented by the Act meet at this moment in the text, pressuring the notion of Union as benign change, implying dissent beyond the beginning of assimilation, allowing a space for the insertion of what remains outside the teleology and remit of the dominant. In Castle Rack-rent the cultural politics of metaphoric marriages becomes laden with this possibility of sly civility. The text pushes towards the notion of marriage as the appropriate construction for understanding the union/Union, yet ironises its own expressed belief in the ability of union to facilitate a loss of identity tantamount to a discursive monologism. Its notion of the untranslatable idiom (necessary for the treasured notion of ‘authenticity’) can be used to place its delineation of the cracks in colonial, dominant discourses in the context of Bhabha’s idea of the double articulation of colonialism and sly civility. And Edgeworth’s text expresses something implied but unexplored in Bhabha’s essay—that the double-facedness of the coloniser may be seen from outside the coloniser’s discourse, but, if seen, it cannot be articulated; it can only be mimicked, parodied in sly civility. A knowledge of the space between the double-face of colonialism can only be voiced where the coloniser is deaf to it. However small this space may be, any insertion into it begins the process of undermining and exploding the authority of colonialism. To borrow the metaphor Edgeworth uses in advising a woman on how to gain the sympathy of bystanders when confronted by her irascible husband, ‘the simple scratching of a pickaxe, properly applied to certain veins in a mine, will cause the most dreadful explosions’.10 Both the Act of Union, and its place at the turn of the century, restate the need for this space to be understood and utilised. The available interpretative terrain may be under pressure when caught between genders, centuries and cultures, but through its fins de siècle positioning it becomes all the more capable of rendering the complexities of cultural interaction. Castle Rackrent pressures the notion and the moment of Union through a gendered understanding of cultural interaction; against the colonial discourse which implies a loss of identity it pits an awareness of dissent which is dangerous for its untranslatable, slyly civil qualities. Castle Rackrent mobilises ‘a disturbance of direction’11 against sustaining myths, making the most of the spaces in the fusions of history undertaken by the Act of Union and the very notion of the fins de siècle.
Notes
1. G. Smith, ‘The Past, the Post and the Utterly changed: Intellectual Responsibility and Irish Cultural Criticism’, Irish Studies Review no. 10 (1995), p. 27.
2. H. K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: The Location of Culture’, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), p. 1.
3. H. K. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, The Location of Culture, pp. 93-101.
4. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, p. 95.
5. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, p. 95.
6. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, pp. 95-6.
7. Quoted in Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, p. 99.
8. M. Edgeworth, ‘An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification’, Letters for Literary Ladies, ed. Claire Connolly (Everyman, 1994), p. 70.
9. M Edgeworth, ‘Castle Rackrent’ and ‘Ennui’ (Penguin, 1992), p. 347. All further references to this text are cited in parentheses.
10. Edgeworth, ‘Essay on Self-Justification’, p. 70.
11. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: The Location of Culture’, p. 1.
Principal Works
Letters for Literary Ladies (essays) 1795
The Parent's Assistant (short stories) 1796-1800
Practical Education [with Richard Lovell Edgeworth] (essays) 1798; also published as Essays on Practical Education 1815
Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (novel) 1800
Belinda (novel) 1801
Moral Tales for Young People (short stories) 1801
Essay on Irish Bulls [with Richard Lovell Edgeworth] (essay) 1802
Popular Tales (short stories) 1804
Leonora (novel) 1806
Tales of Fashionable Life (short stories) 1809-12
Patronage (novel) 1814
Comic Dramas (plays) 1817
Harrington, a Tale, and Ormand, a Tale (novels) 1817
* Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq.; Begun by Himself and Concluded by His Daughter, Maria Edgeworth. 2 vols. [with Richard Lovell Edgeworth] (biography) 1820
Helen (novel) 1834
Orlandino (juvenilia) 1848
* Edgeworth completed her father's autobiography after his death in 1817.
Belinda
NICHOLAS MASON (ESSAY DATE 2001)
SOURCE: Mason, Nicholas. "Class, Gender, and Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. "In The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Vol. 1, edited by Susan Spencer, pp. 271-85. New York: AMS Press, 2001.
In the following excerpt, Mason examines Edgeworth's second novel as a work that encourages both males and females of the aristocracy and the middle class to accept the responsibilities associated with their social standing.
In 1847 the publishers Simpkin and Marshall contacted Maria Edgeworth, requesting that she prepare an autobiographical preface for a new edition they were planning of her novels. At the time, Edgeworth was seventy-nine years old and still widely considered one of England's greatest novelists. Comfortable in her status among readers, Edgeworth saw no need for further self-promotion through such a preface and decided to decline the publishers' request. In her Memoirs, she explained, "As a woman, my life, wholly domestic, cannot afford anything interesting to the public.…I have no story to tell."1
For those familiar with Edgeworth's fiction, this equation of domesticity with dullness should be somewhat surprising, since on several occasions her form of choice was the domestic novel. In fact, one of the most commonly discussed aspects of Edgeworth's work in recent criticism has been its domestic focus. This is particularly true of her second novel, Belinda (1801), a text which, after well over a century of neglect, has once again begun to attract the attention of readers and critics. Much of the commentary on Belinda from the past two decades has focused on the novel's advocacy of a domestic lifestyle for women. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, for instance, has claimed that this novel is complicit in a "new-style patriarchy" that attempts to make domestic life seem the natural choice for women. Anne Mellor has called Belinda a "textbook case of the new feminine Romantic ideology" insofar as it suggests that the ideal domestic woman combines the positive traits of both genders. And Colin B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson have discussed how the character Harriet Freke exemplifies Edgeworth's beliefs that women should worry more about properly fulfilling their duties at home and less about gaining new rights.2
As I hope to make clear in the pages to follow, I appreciate much of what these scholars have done to illuminate the central role domesticity plays in Belinda. Nevertheless, my goal in this essay is to move beyond the somewhat narrow definition of domesticity brought to Belinda in previous essays and to examine the domestic issues in the novel in terms of a broader definition that includes not only gender, but social class as well. In essence, my argument holds that more than a system for proper female behavior, the domesticity Edgeworth advocates is a summons for all members of polite society, whether female or male, to live up to their gender- and class-based responsibilities.
I
It is only fitting that in the midst of Edgeworth's collaborations with her father to reform educational practices in Britain she should write a novel setting out to reform the domestic conduct of her readers. That Edgeworth has didactic aims in Belinda is made clear in the novel's prefatory pages, where she casts what is to follow as a "Moral Tale" rather than a novel, with all of that genre's lurid connotations. This "moral tale" is the story of Belinda Portman and the various characters she encounters upon going up to London to be the protégée of the famed wit Lady Delacour. At the outset of the novel, Belinda supposes that having Lady Delacour as a guide to polite culture will help her acquire the manners and connections needed to make a desirable match. Soon into the story, however, Belinda becomes disillusioned after discovering the profligacy and social irresponsibility that characterize the lives of Lady Delacour and her circle. Belinda's dissatisfaction with high society only deepens when Lady Delacour recounts to her the life of sin and degradation she has led, a lifestyle that is now taking its toll through a serious wound to her breast she received during her escapades. While Belinda laments the Lady's past behavior, she takes hope that Lady Delacour has reached such depths that she may be ripe for a reformation. After a long struggle to help restore Lady Delacour's physical and moral well-being, Belinda at last leads her guardian to accept her responsibilities as a wife, a mother, and an aristocrat. In the end, Lady Delacour demonstrates her new selflessness by orchestrating Belinda's union with Clarence Hervey, another aristocratic character who has come to understand his social obligations during the course of the novel.
From this brief synopsis, readers familiar with Nancy Armstrong's landmark study of the novel, Desire and Domestic Fiction, might recognize how Edgeworth's plot in many ways conforms to the norms for domestic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Armstrong, the form of fiction which "rose" in the mid-eighteenth century traces its roots to the popular conduct book tradition. So effective was the novel at assimilating the social function of the conduct book, in fact, that from Pamela forward the novel became firmly established as the genre with the greatest power to influence society's perceptions of how women should act. In Armstrong's estimation, "The rise of the novel hinged upon a struggle to say what made a woman desirable."3 Rather than inscribing different codes of behavior for different ranks, as had been done in conduct books of previous centuries, the eighteenth-century novel set out to win all levels of society over to middle-class ideals of domesticity. One of the chief ways this was carried out was through a direct attack on aristocratic manners. The nobleman came to be seen as a spendthrift who, like Richardson's Mr. B, considered women, particularly those of the lower classes, to be his sexual chattel. Even worse in the eyes of writers of conduct books and novels, however, was the aristocratic woman, who had abandoned her motherly duties for a life of self-display at card tables and dancing halls. So powerful was this novelistic juxtaposition of the corrupt aristocratic woman and the loving middle-class mother that by the early nineteenth century the domestic woman had become the prototype for women of all classes. Armstrong concludes that, in very real ways, eighteenth-century novelists paved the way for the cult of domesticity, which, in turn, paved the way for the ascendancy of the middle class.
Although much of what Armstrong states concerning the domestic novel proves useful in studying Belinda, it is her notion of the novel both enacting and facilitating domesticity's conquest over aristocratic corruption that I would like to take up here. As might be expected in an early nineteenth-century novel of manners, most of the characters in Belinda belong to the privileged orders of society. Lady Delacour, for instance, has both wealth and station, having inherited over 100,000 pounds from her father and acquired the rank of viscountess through marriage. Her friend and confidante, Clarence Hervey, comes from a very affluent and highly respected family that has provided him with an Oxford education, a large fortune, a seat in Parliament, and connections in the governments of both the church and the state. Other characters coming from the privileged ranks include the estate-holding Percival family, the baronet Sir Philip Baddely, and the libertine Harriet Freke. Of the novel's major characters, in fact, only Belinda and Dr. X lack rank and wealth, although both come from respectable enough backgrounds to grant them admission to polite society.
One need not read far to see how poorly these upper-class characters are doing in living up to their pedigrees. Most of the minor aristocratic characters are fairly harsh caricatures of England's decadent elite. Sir Philip Baddely, for instance, goes through life depending wholly upon his rank and fortune to gain him access to any polite society, as he otherwise lacks every grace and talent of the proper English gentleman. He drinks heavily, peppers his sentences with "damme's," and, when pressed, can contribute nothing more to polite conversation than questions such as "Don't you think the candles want snuffing famously?" (139).4 Among the female characters of the privileged classes, Harriet Freke is set up to be the most contemptible, as with her zeal for hunting, cross-dressing, and Wollstonecraftian feminism, she violates all guidelines for proper feminine behavior.5 Several other minor characters, ranging from the swindling Mrs. Luttridge to the rakish Colonel Lawless to the gambling Mr. Vincent, further extend Edgeworth's catalog of upper-class vices.
While the novel's two major aristocratic characters, Lady Delacour and Clarence Hervey, eventually come around to a sense of their domestic responsibilities, in the early stages of the narrative they, too, represent all that is wrong with England's nobility. Of the pair, Lady Delacour is cast as the more degenerate, as her longer life has provided her greater exposure to the corrupting influences of high society. In relating her history to Belinda, she discloses such misdeeds as squandering her entire fortune, bringing about the death of an admirer in a duel, using her wealth to sway an election, and ruining an innocent gardener in an attempt to show up her rival, Mrs. Luttridge.6 Even more damning than these public sins of commission, however, are her domestic sins of omission. As a wife, she has alienated her in-laws and driven her husband to gaming and drink; as a mother, her neglect has led to her first child being stillborn, her second child dying as an infant from inadequate nursing, and her third child being sent away to be raised by a wet-nurse and the staff of a boarding school. So overwhelming is the cumulative effect of Lady Delacour's offenses that when she has finished confessing her sordid history, Belinda cannot help but "tremble at the idea of being under the guidance of one, who was so little able to conduct herself" (61).
Lady Delacour, in essence, is the type of decadent aristocratic woman so regularly warned against in the conduct books and domestic fiction of this era. If, as Armstrong suggests, one of the primary social functions of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel was to clear the way for middle-class domesticity by undermining the prestige of the aristocracy, the character of Lady Delacour would seem to be functioning very much as a weapon in this campaign. Several critics, most notably Kowaleski-Wallace, Mellor, and Greenfield, have written insightfully about the ideological function of the Lady Delacour character, with the critical consensus being that, in Kowaleski-Wallace's words, "Lady Delacour's narrative records the process of internalizing a specific image of womanhood."7 While I certainly agree that Lady Delacour's story is grounded in gendered discourse, I believe we need to be careful to read this character's narrative in terms of her position not only as a woman, but as an aristocratic woman. In other words, the tale of Lady Delacour's fall and redemption serves as an excellent example of the extent to which class and gender expectations were linked together in the domestic ideal of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
That Lady Delacour's depravity in the first half of the novel is marked by a simultaneous transgression of gender- and class-based expectations is best evidenced in one of the novel's more intriguing episodes, the "dueling-and-ducking" scene of chapter IV. After years of heated competition for supremacy in the cut-throat circles of London's high society, Lady Delacour and Mrs. Luttridge are provoked by a fashionable pamphlet "upon the Propriety and Necessity of Female Duelling" to clothe themselves in men's attire and engage in the traditionally masculine act of dueling. When all the necessary preparations have been made, however, both ladies lose their nerve and agree to fire their pistols into the air and depart in peace. According to Lady Delacour's account,
I had scarcely discharged my pistol, when we heard a loud shout on the other side of the barn, and a crowd of town's people, country people, and hay makers, came pouring down the lane towards us with rakes and pitch forks in their hands. [T]he untutored sense of propriety amongst these rusticks was so shocked at the idea of a duel fought by women in men's clothes, that I verily believed they would have thrown us into the river with all their hearts. Stupid blockheads! I am convinced that they would not have been half so much scandalised if we had boxed in petticoats.
(51-52)
That the mob would react in this way to women dressing in men's clothing and engaging in a duel would certainly have been satisfying to many of Edgeworth's original readers, since a concerted effort was being made in the conduct literature of this period to warn against masculinity in working-class women and effeminacy in working-class men.8 At least from Lady Delacour's perspective, the riot was wholly in response to the violation of gender codes that had taken place.
In reexamining the story, however, one has to believe that more than gender violations were involved in this mob action. Simply put, this group of laborers most likely would not have reacted in the same way had these been working-class women, as inherent in almost any form of mob action is an element of class conflict. This was particularly true during the age in which Belinda is set, when mobs increasingly functioned as a medium by which workers could forcefully communicate their grievances to the privileged classes. In the case of Lady Delacour's duel, the protest appears to have been the laborers' way of reminding the indecorous noblewomen of what was socially acceptable, both in terms of gender and class. In this respect, this scene serves as the most fitting image of the degenerate condition Lady Delacour—and, by extension, her entire class—is in at the beginning of the novel. The traditional office of the privileged classes to dictate propriety to their social inferiors has been completely forfeited and assumed by, of all groups, the working poor.
Although the novel's other major upper-class character, Clarence Hervey, certainly has less to repent of than Lady Delacour, he too shows a proclivity toward the aristocratic degeneracy so clearly warned against in conduct literature. Chronologically speaking, Hervey first enters the narrative in the afore-mentioned dueling-and-ducking scene, where his involvement comes by virtue of the fact that it is he who has written the pamphlet on the necessity of female dueling which incites the ladies to take up their pistols. From the two brief discussions of this pamphlet in the novel, it is difficult to tell whether Hervey intends the treatise to be ironic or not. But, even if he does have satiric intentions, he leaves enough room for misinterpretation to convince several educated women, including the quick-witted Lady Delacour, that there is no shame in putting one's life on the line in the defense of honor.
To his credit, after the ladies have actually taken up arms, Hervey tries to make amends for his pamphlet by rescuing the duelists from the ignominy of being "ducked," or dunked, by the mob of laborers. His choice of methods for distracting the crowd, however, only raises further questions about his readiness to uphold his lofty station in society. Just as the mob is about to plunge the ladies into the water, Hervey appears, dressed in formal regimental attire, driving a herd of pigs, and declaring that he has entered into a hundred-guinea wager that his pigs can outrun a Frenchman's turkeys. Lady Delacour reports that "at the news of this wager, and at the sight of the gentleman turned pig-driver, the mob were in raptures" (52). Although Hervey eventually loses the wager, he saves the ladies from further disgrace. The lingering question, however, is whether Hervey might not have chosen a more genteel manner of diverting the mob's attention.
When Hervey next appears in the novel, he once again raises doubts about his sense of propriety. In a scene that contains the novel's second occurrence of cross-dressing and Hervey's second wager, he bets Lady Delacour fifty guineas that he can dress in a hoop and, his beard aside, conduct himself in so feminine a manner that he might deceive the purblind Lady Boucher into taking him for a woman. Hervey is about to complete a successfully feminine performance when he stumbles in an "unladylike" manner while picking up a comb Lady Delacour has purposely dropped. That he could come so close to pulling the caper off would most likely have not endeared Hervey to the majority of Edgeworth's readers, since, as noted above, much of the domestic literature of the age was devoted to training women and men to act in a manner befitting their gender.
If the cross-dressing is not worrisome enough, the haste with which Hervey enters into his second sizable wager of the novel suggests that he lacks the self-control and maturity to manage his wealth. This suspicion is confirmed in the following chapters, where Hervey wagers with Sir Philip Baddely "for ten guineas—for any money you please" that he can beat him in a walking race. When he loses this bet after being forced to dodge an approaching child, he accepts a double-or-nothing challenge to out-swim Baddely in the Serpentine River, even though he has never learned how to swim. As we discover later in the novel when Belinda lists Mr. Vincent's gambling addiction as one of her primary reasons for rejecting him, excessive wagering—with its implications of financial irresponsibility, fast company, and long nights spent outside the home—was for the aristocratic man as much a sign of a lack of domesticity as sending off children to boarding schools and being a regular on the social circuit was for the aristocratic woman. Despite his occasional displays of impressive talents and good manners, then, the Hervey of the first third of the novel appears to be on a course toward full-fledged rakishness.
II
Although the first half of Belinda may suggest otherwise, the novel is ultimately not so much a coronach on the demise of the English aristocracy as a prospectus for its reformation and revival. Admittedly, at the story's end, many of the minor characters, including Sir Phillip Baddely, Harriet Freke, and Mrs. Luttridge, continue to function as reminders of the hollowness of a privileged life misspent. Nevertheless, the characters we are led to care about—Lady Delacour and Clarence Hervey—have had their eyes opened to the gratification to be found in a distinctively aristocratic form of domesticity that includes not only attention to one's spousal and filial obligations within the home, but, on an extended level, one's paternal (or maternal) duties to the community over which one presides. In order for Lady Delacour and Hervey to appreciate their responsibilities both "Abroad and at Home,"9 however, they need the guidance of characters who already have an understanding of the joy that can be found in basing one's life on correct principles.
The most central of these exemplary characters is Belinda, who must herself undergo a conversion of sorts before she can begin to bring about the betterment of others. Preconditioned by her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope, to believe that fortune and rank are the only paths to happiness, Belinda learns through observing Lady Delacour how miserable someone in so seemingly comfortable an existence can be. Belinda muses, "If Lady Delacour, with all the advantages of wealth, rank, wit and beauty, has not been able to make herself happy in this life of fashionable dissipation, why should I follow the same course, and expect to be more fortunate?" (62). After rejecting Lady Delacour's example, Belinda turns to the Percival family as her model. Patterned after Edgeworth's own family, the Percivals represent all that the privileged classes should be. The parents enjoy a relationship based on love and mutual respect, the children are eagerly immersed in learning, and the family opens its doors to all who wish to share in their happiness. In his relations with others, Mr. Percival acts with dignity and fairness, treating even his tenants respectfully. In one scene that reveals Mr. Percival's understanding of the expanded requirements of domesticity for aristocrats, he visits a couple who for years labored industriously on his estate before being reduced to poverty when old age restricted their ability to work. Rather than turning this couple over to the mercy of the parish, Mr. Percival adheres to the codes of paternalism and provides them with a new home and all the necessities for a comfortable retirement. Mr. Percival's wife, Lady Anne, is even more impressive to Belinda, as she possesses such a degree of inward and outward beauty that others are instantly drawn to her. Belinda observes how Lady Anne combines natural feminine sensibility with a large supply of reason and knowledge, and, as a result, she is "the chosen companion of her husband's understanding" (204).10 After spending a season with the Percivals, Belinda is converted. She resolves that from here on she will use this family's example to "establish in her own understanding, the exact boundaries between right and wrong" (219).
With the zeal of a convert, Belinda sets out to win Lady Delacour over to the Percivals' mode of living and to induce her to use her rank and wealth to benefit those around her. Key to Belinda's success as a reformer is her loyal friendship and her example as one who refuses to live life according to the dictates of fashionable society. These qualities make Lady Delacour so trusting of her that the viscountess is willing to use her protégée as a confessor of sorts. Being able to share the great secret of her breast "cancer" with Belinda has an immediate, liberating effect on Lady Delacour, as it allows her to once again regain her authority as the lady of the house from Marriott, the servant who has hitherto used her knowledge of the secret to maintain power over her employer. One of the first signs that Belinda's project with Lady Delacour is taking effect comes in the Lady's spirited proclamation, "I will not live a slave" (146). The real epiphany in Lady Delacour's life, however, takes place several months later, when Belinda goes to live with the Percivals to quell suspicions that she seeks to be the next Lady Delacour. In a moment of jealousy mixed with fear of losing her only real friend, Lady Delacour renounces all she has built her former life upon, symbolically smashing her coronet upon a marble hearth and exclaiming, "Vile bauble! Must I lose my only friend for such a thing as you? Oh, Belinda! do not you see that a coronet cannot confer happiness?" (195). Soon after this, Lady Delacour's physical and mental ailments take her to the brink of death, and only when Belinda charitably returns and forgives her does her recovery begin.
In their analyses of the domestic ideology in Belinda, several critics have discussed in detail the changes Lady Delacour undergoes from this point forward. What is missing in most readings of this transformation, however, is an acknowledgment of the social dimension of Lady Delacour's domestic reformation. In addition to accepting her obligations as a wife and a mother, she must also learn to fulfill her duties as an aristocratic woman, which in Edgeworth's system entails not only a return from the whist table to the home, but proper religion, charitable treatment of the worthy poor, and a genuine desire to improve the lives of those with whom one comes in contact. Therefore, equally significant in her reformation as her revitalized relationships with Lord Delacour and her daughter, Helena, is her return from Methodism to orthodox religion, her reparations to the gardener whom she has previously cheated, and her diligent efforts to unite Belinda and Hervey. Only when she has completed all of these tasks can she claim to have fulfilled her commission as an aristocratic woman. That she has accomplished this by the novel's end is made manifest in the closing pages, where she once again has assumed her rightful position as the director of the narrative, pointing the other characters in the paths their lives will take when the novel concludes.
The other major reformation project in the second half of Belinda is that which the sage-like Dr. X undertakes with Hervey. These two characters first meet at the low point of Hervey's immature early years, when Dr. X saves the young man from drowning during his swimming contest with Baddely. Being a man of great accomplishments himself, Dr. X can better appreciate Hervey's prodigious talents than anyone else, which makes him all the more cognizant of the way his friend is wasting his life going from lark to lark. Several weeks after he saved Hervey from drowning, Dr. X feels familiar enough with his young friend to confront him about the way he is using his gifts. Dr. X's rebuke on this occasion serves as the novel's most direct edict on the social dimension of domesticity for the aristocratic male:
What a pity, Mr. Hervey, that a young man of your talents and acquirements, a man who might be any thing, should—pardon the expression—choose to be—nothing—should waste upon petty objects powers suited to the greatest—should lend his soul to every contest for frivolous superiority, when the same energy concentrated might ensure honourable preeminence among the first men in his country.—Shall he, who might not only distinguish himself in any science or situation, who might not only acquire personal fame, but, O, far more noble motive!—who might be permanently useful to his fellow creatures, content himself with being the evanescent amusement of a drawing-room?
(105-06)
Dr. X's blunt reproach produces almost instantaneous effects in Hervey. From this point forward, he forsakes the follies of his youth and begins to assume the until-then vacant role of the hero of the tale. As his first noble act, he decides to assist Belinda in "wean[ing] Lady Delacour, by degrees, from dissipation, by attaching her to her daughter, and to Lady Anne Percival" (113). Beyond this, he proceeds to rescue Mrs. Ormond from penury, to tutor and support the orphaned Virginia St. Pierre, and, in his most selfless act, to prevent his rival, Mr. Vincent, from squandering a fortune and committing suicide. Although in the latter half of the novel Hervey is still far from perfect—as is evidenced in the blunders he commits while attempting to cultivate a Rousseauvian relationship with Virginia—he has taken Dr. X's counsel to heart and devoted his talents to the service of others. In this respect, he has become worthy of both his station in life and the love of Belinda.
III
It should be noted that, as was the case earlier in the novel when the mob acted as enforcers of virtue, once again here the reformation of aristocratic characters has been overseen by individuals of lower social standing. Although her connection to Lady Delacour suggests that Belinda comes from a somewhat respectable family, it is evident at several points in the text that she possesses neither the status nor the fortune to be ranked among the aristocracy. One of the most revealing glimpses into her social position comes when Baddely, who, as a baronet, is himself near the bottom of the upper-class pecking order,11 assumes that "a niece of Mrs. Stanhope's [is his] lawful prize" (132). Consequently, when Belinda eventually rejects his marriage proposal, he is mortified, having never expected to be turned down by one so far below him in rank and fortune. Even further down the social ladder than Belinda is Dr. X, a member of the professional class who lacks the fortune to retire from his practice. Other than the servants, Dr. X is the only significant character who is actually seen at work during the novel. However wise and well-educated the doctor may be, he can never transcend his middle-class roots in the eyes of many aristocrats, including Baddely, who expresses absolute disbelief that Belinda and Hervey would prefer the doctor's company to his own. At one point, Baddely taunts Hervey that he is bound to become a "doctor of physic, or a methodist parson" if he continues to associate with such a decidedly middle-class individual (108).
At first glimpse, then, by positioning the two great reformers of the novel somewhere between the nobility and the working class, Edgeworth might be said to be reflecting—and encouraging—a society much like the one Armstrong describes, in which the middle-class domestic ideals of conduct literature were gaining ascendancy over decaying aristocratic traditions. This is certainly the pattern with Belinda's regeneration of Lady Delacour and Dr. X's tutelage of Hervey. But upon further reflection, it should be sufficiently clear that the middle class does not monopolize the role of exemplar within the narrative. As I noted earlier, the novel's original enforcer of domestic ideals is not a member of the middle ranks, but a "crowd of town's people, country people, and hay makers … with rakes and pitch forks in their hands." Beyond this, the prototype of domesticity within the novel is not the family of a merchant or a banker, but the Percivals, an aristocratic family, complete with their titles, their leisure, and their tenantry. Only after living with the Percivals does Belinda come to a lasting appreciation of domestic roles and the happiness that comes when the mother stays at home with her husband and children. In a reversal of what early nineteenth-century readers would have come to expect, it is the aristocratic Lady Anne who serves as the ultimate model for the middle-class Belinda, not vice versa.
Why Edgeworth should complicate the traditional pattern by refusing to allow domesticity to be solely the domain of the middle or any other class warrants examination. From a biographical angle, unlike many women novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edgeworth did not come from the middle ranks of society. In fact, her family was very much in the tradition of the old British aristocracy, tracing their position as wealthy landowners to the reign of James I, when Frances Edgeworth was awarded six hundred acres in the Irish midlands as part of a movement to establish a Protestant gentry in Ireland.12 While their Edgeworthstown estate was by no means among the largest in Ireland, it provided the Edgeworths with a sizable enough income from rents that the extremely large family could live comfortably without working—the true litmus test of aristocracy—and could afford such luxuries as regular trips to England and boarding school expenses.13 From this position near the top of the social hierarchy, Edgeworth tended to see nothing remiss in society's being divided into classes. On one occasion she remarked that she would leave debates over the class system to the politician and the legislator and go forward with her designs for separate educational curricula for the different classes.14
Edgeworth was not devoid of opinion, however, on such issues as the distribution of wealth—she did, in fact, write "An enquiry into the causes of poverty in Ireland" while still in her teens—and the ascendancy of the middle class. In fact, if anything, Edgeworth's corpus shows her to be extremely concerned with issues of class. While at various points in her writing Edgeworth levies sharp criticisms at the behavior of every rank of society, including her own, she reserves much of her harshest censure for the middle class, particularly those among it who aspire to possess more power than they are entitled to by birth. During the Defender uprisings of 1798, Edgeworth's father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had objected to attempts by middle-class tradesmen to lead the community's defense efforts, stating that the people would be foolish to follow leaders who lacked "fortune, knowledge, birth, or education."15 That the daughter shared many similar beliefs is evident in her writing. In her first and most famous novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), the villain is Old Thady's son, Jason, who quickly, shrewdly, and ruthlessly climbs the social ladder, rising from his original position as the Rackrent family's domestic servant, to a position as their agent, before at last being their dispossessor when he accumulates the means to force the ancient family from their estate. In a scene from this novel that anticipates the riotous ducking-and-dueling episode in Belinda, the tenants on the Rackrent estate, upon learning that a member of the aspiring middle class has taken over the castle, "one and all gathered in great anger against … Jason, and terror at the notion of his coming to be landlord over them, and they cried, No Jason! No Jason!—Sir Condy! Sir Condy! Sir Condy Rackrent for ever!" (79).16
In a later novel, The Absentee (1812), Edgeworth suggests that the entire social order comes under threat when the middle class rises to power. Not only does the tenantry suffer under the hands of a middle-class agent lacking the education or paternalistic instincts needed to preside over society, but the treasured traditions of polite culture become bastardized when the middle class takes on aristocratic airs. One of the more ridiculous scenes in a novel filled with caricatures of social pretentiousness is of a middle-class woman—in this case, the sister of a corrupt Irish agent—attempting to host an aristocratic-style dinner party. Upon first observing the spectacle created by the woman's efforts, one of the visiting lords "was much amused by the mixture, which was now exhibited to him, of taste and incongruity, ingenuity and absurdity, genius and blunder; by the contrast between the finery and vulgarity, the affectation and ignorance of the lady of the villa" (87).17
Although no scenes such as these, in which the middle class is skewered for their pretensions, are to be found in Belinda, these episodes from other novels suggest that Edgeworth's biases against the middle class might very well have led to her refusal to position domesticity as an exclusively middle-class virtue. Any suggestion that Edgeworth refused to ascribe domesticity to the middle class because of her prejudices against this group, however, raises another, more vexing question: why would a writer so wary of middle-class ascendancy write a novel championing the central virtue of the middle class's emergent ideology? It would seem that Edgeworth would want to do anything but advocate an ideology that threatened to transfer power from her own class to one made up of merchants and tradesmen. If, however, by the end of the eighteenth century domesticity had been so naturalized that it could no longer be identified as a distinctively middle-class ideal, Edgeworth's advocacy of it would not have seemed a conflict of interest. Instead, domesticity might have appeared to her as a universal truth which transcended class and national boundaries.
The idea that domesticity had achieved such prominence by the early nineteenth century is born out in Armstrong's study. Of the progression of this domestic revolution she writes, "Richardson successfully introduced into fiction the highly fictional proposition that a prosperous man desired nothing so much as the woman who embodied domestic virtue. By Austen's time, this proposition had acquired the status of truth."18 Further evidence for the naturalization of domesticity occurring during this period comes in the now-common recognition among social historians that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a tremendous growth in the social and political influence of the middle class. If one accepts the notion that middle-class culture became dominant in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is not difficult to see how the originally middle-class virtue of domesticity could have been well on its way to being naturalized by the time Edgeworth began writing her novel in 1800.
Viewed as a historical document, Belinda supports the argument that domesticity was beginning to be taken as a universal, timeless truth during this era. While it is true that at the end of the novel segments of the aristocracy remain caught up in the dissolute life of fashion, the examples of the Percivals, Lady Delacour, and Hervey suggest that domesticity was just as expedient for those possessing rank and fortune as it was for those lacking such advantages. In fact, for the aristocracy of Edgeworth's era, domesticity was all the more requisite, since in addition to implying steward-ship over the home, it also carried with it an obligation to fulfill centuries-old paternalistic duties towards one's tenants or subjects. That Lady Delacour and Hervey came to understand this is evidenced in the increased attention they paid to the needs of their families and those of lesser rank following their respective reformations. In the end, the prevailing virtue in the world of Edgeworth's novel is a domesticity that requires behavior befitting both one's gender and one's social class.
Notes
- This excerpt from Edgeworth's privately printed Memoirs is quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Life, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 9.
- Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, "Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda," The Eighteenth Century 29 (1988), 242-62; Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 42-45; Colin B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson, "Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women's Rights," Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 19 (1984): 94-118. See also Susan Greenfield, "'Abroad and at Home': Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth's Belinda," PMLA 112 (1997): 214-28.
- Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987),4-5.
- Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Eiléan Ni Chuilleanain, (Rutland, VT: Everyman, 1993). All page references are to this edition.
- Freke's transgressive masculinity and corrupting influence upon her companions make her a favorite subject of much of the recent criticism on Belinda. See particularly Atkinson and Atkinson, Mellor, and Greenfield.
- During this period, moralists in Britain became increasingly outraged over the excessive lifestyles of aristocrats like Lady Delacour. Apropos to Belinda, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall recount how "Aristocratic claims for leadership had long been based on lavish display and consumption while the middle class stressed domestic moderation. In particular, aristocratic disdain for sordid money matters, their casual attitude to debt and addiction to gambling which had amounted to a mania in some late eighteenth-century circles, were anathema to the middling ranks whose very existence depended on the establishment of creditworthiness and avoidance of financial embarrassment" (Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987], 21).
- Kowaleski-Wallace, "Home Economics," 243.
- See Armstrong, 20; Atkinson and Atkinson, 104.
- As most analyses of domesticity in Belinda have pointed out, Edgeworth originally gave her novel the title Abroad and at Home to contrast the life spent in high society with the more rewarding life centered around the home.
- In her delineation of masculine and feminine Romantic ideologies, Mellor shows how the Percivals' marriage is the type of union aspired to by many women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Mellor, 43-44.
- The title of baronet, contrived and sold as part of a fund-raising ploy by James I, was not part of the traditional English peerage, which was comprised of dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. Baronets did not hold seats in the House of Lords, were addressed as "Sir" rather than "Lord," and generally enjoyed far less prestige than peers. Part of their relative lack of power, no doubt, was due to the simple fact that in England a baronet was much more common than a peer. In 1800, for example, there were only 267 peers in England as opposed to 699 baronets (see John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England, [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991], 32). Lest we think that Baddely and his fellow baronets were completely devoid of distinction, however, it should be pointed out that in all eras of English history prior to the twentieth century, the aristocracy—including peers, baronets, and knights—accounted for less than one percent of the total population. Cannon, in fact, calculates that in 1801 the aristocracy accounted for a minuscule 0.0000857 percent of the total population (33n.).
- See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity, (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 141.
- For a detailed description of the Edgeworth family's income and lifestyle during their years at Edgeworthstown House, see Butler, 78-145.
- My thanks to George Watson for providing this quote from Edgeworth's The Parent's Assistant (1796) in his introduction to Castle Rackrent, Oxford World's Classics edition, ed. George Watson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), xxii.
- This quotation comes from a letter of 30 April 1795 from Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Lord Charlemont. See Butler, 117.
- Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Oxford World's Classics edition, ed. George Watson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980).
- Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, Oxford World's Classics edition, eds. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988).
- Armstrong, 135.
Primary Sources
SOURCE: Edgeworth, Maria. "Answer to the Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend, Upon the Birth of a Daughter." In Letters for Literary Ladies, Second Edition, Revised, 58-83. London: J. Johnson, 1799.
In the following excerpt, Edgeworth's male letter writer discusses the proper education for women.
No woman can foresee what may be the taste of the man with whom she may be united; much of her happiness, however, will depend upon her being able to conform her taste to his: for this reason I should therefore, in female education, cultivate the general powers of the mind, rather than any particular faculty. I do not desire to make my daughter merely a musician, a painter, or a poet; I do not desire to make her merely a botanist, a mathematician, or a chemist; but I wish to give her early the habit of industry and attention, the love of knowledge, and the power of reasoning: these will enable her to attend to excellence in any pursuit to which she may direct her talents. You will observe, that many things which formerly were thought above the comprehension of women, or unfit for their sex, are now acknowledged to be perfectly within the compass of their abilities, and suited to their situation.—Formerly the fair sex was kept in Turkish ignorance; every means of acquiring knowledge was discountenanced by fashion, and impracticable even to those who despised fashion;—our books of science were full of unintelligible jargon, and mystery veiled pompous ignorance from public contempt: but now writers must offer their discoveries to the public in distinct terms, which every body may understand; technical language no longer supplies the place of knowledge, and the art of teaching has been carried to such perfection, that a degree of knowledge may now with ease be acquired in the course of a few years, which formerly it was the business of a life to attain. All this is much in favour of female literature. Ladies have become ambitious to superintend the education of their children, and hence they have been induced to instruct themselves, that they may be able to direct and inform their pupils. The mother, who now aspires to be the esteemed and beloved instructress of her children, must have a considerable portion of knowledge. Science has of late "been enlisted under the banners of imagination ", by the irresistible charms of genius; by the same power, her votaries will be led "from the looser analogies which dress out the imagery of poetry to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy.—Botany has become fashionable; in time it may become useful, if it be not so already. Chemistry will follow botany. Chemistry is a science well suited to the talents and situation of women; it is not a science of parade; it affords occupation and infinite variety; it demands no bodily strength; it can be pursued in retirement; it applies immediately to useful and domestic purposes: and whilst the ingenuity of the most inventive mind may in this science be exercised, there is no danger of inflaming the imagination, because the mind is intent upon realities, the knowledge that is acquired is exact, and the pleasure of the pursuit is a sufficient reward for the labour.
A clear and ready knowledge of arithmetic is surely no useless acquirement for those who are to regulate the expenses of a family. Economy is not the mean "penny wise and pound foolish" policy which some suppose it to be; it is the art of calculation joined to the habit of order, and the power of proportioning our wishes to the means of gratifying them. The little pilfering temper of a wife is despicable and odious to every man of sense; but there is a judicious, graceful species of economy, which has no connexion with an avaricious temper, and which, as it depends upon the understanding, can be expected only from cultivated minds. Women who have been well educated, far from despising domestic duties, will hold them in high respect; because they will see that the whole happiness of life is made up of the happiness of each particular day and hour, and that much of the enjoyment of these must depend upon the punctual practice of those virtues which are more valuable than splendid.
It is not, I hope, your opinion, that ignorance is the best security for female virtue. If this connexion between virtue and ignorance could once be clearly proved, we ought to drown our books deeper than ever plummet sounded:—I say we—for the danger extends equally to both sexes, unless you assert that the duties of men rest upon a more certain foundation than the duties of the other sex: if our virtues can be demonstrated to be advantageous, why should theirs suffer for being exposed to the light of reason?—All social virtue conduces to our own happiness or that of our fellow-creatures; can it weaken the sense of duty to illustrate this truth?—Having once pointed out to the understanding of a sensible woman the necessary connexion between her virtues and her happiness, must not those virtues, and the means of preserving them, become in her eyes objects of the most interesting importance? But you fear, that even if their conduct continued to be irreproachable, the manners of women might be rendered less delicate by the increase of their knowledge; you dislike in the female sex that daring spirit which despises the common forms of society, and which breaks through the reserve and delicacy of female manners:—so do I:—and the best method to make my pupil respect these things is to show her how they are indispensably connected with the largest interests of society: surely this perception of the utility of forms apparently trifling, must be a strong security to the prudential reserve of the sex, and far superior to the automatic habits of those who submit to the conventions of the world without consideration or conviction. Habit, confirmed by reason, assumes the rank of virtue. The motives that restrain from vice must be increased by the clear conviction, that vice and wretchedness are inseparably united.
Do not, however, imagine, my dear sir, that I shall attempt to lay moral demonstration before a child, who could not possibly comprehend my meaning; do not imagine that because I intend to cultivate my daughter's understanding, I shall neglect to give her those early habits of reserve and modesty which constitute the female character.—Believing, as I do, that woman, as well as man, may be called a bundle of habits, I shall be peculiarly careful, during my child's early education, to give her as many good habits as possible; by degrees as her understanding, that is to say as her knowledge and power of reasoning shall increase, I can explain the advantages of these habits, and confirm their power by the voice of reason. I lose no time, I expose myself to no danger, by this system. On the contrary, those who depend entirely upon the force of custom and prejudice expose them themselves to infinite danger. If once their pupils begin to reflect upon their own hoodwinked education, they will probably suspect that they have been deceived in all that they have been taught, and they will burst their bonds with indignation.—Credulity is always rash in the moment she detects the impositions that have been practised upon her easy temper. In this inquiring age, few have any chance of passing through life without being excited to examine the motives and principles from which they act: is it not therefore prudent to cultivate the reasoning faculty, by which alone this examination can be made with safety? A false argument, a repartee, the charms of wit or eloquence, the voice of fashion, of folly, of numbers, might, if she had no substantial reasons to support her cause, put virtue not only out of countenance, but out of humour.
You speak of moral instinct. As far as I understand the term, it implies certain habits early acquired from education; to these I would add the power of reasoning, and then, and not till then, I should think myself safe:—for I have observed that the pupils of habit are utterly confounded when they are placed in circumstances different from those to which they have been accustomed.—It has been remarked by travellers and naturalists, that animals, notwithstanding their boasted instinctive knowledge, sometimes make strange and fatal mistakes in their conduct, when they are placed in new situations:—destitute of the reasoning faculty, and deceived by resemblances, they mistake poison for food. Thus the bull-frog will swallow burning charcoal, mistaking it for fire-flies; and the European hogs and poultry which travelled to Surinam poisoned themselves by eating plants that were unknown to them.
You seem, my dear sir, to be afraid that truth should not keep so firm a hold upon the mind as prejudice; and you produce an allusion to justify your fears. You tell us that civil society is like a building, and you warn me not to tear down the ivy which clings to the walls, and braces the loose stones together.—I believe that ivy, in some situations, tends to pull down the walls to which it clings.—You think it is not worth while to cultivate the understandings of women, because you say that you have no security that the conviction of their reason will have any permanent good effect upon their conduct; and to persuade me of this, you bid me observe that men who are superior to women in strength of mind and judgment, are frequently misled by their passions. By this mode of argument, you may conclude that reason is totally useless to the whole human race; but you cannot, with any show of justice, infer that it ought to be monopolized by one-half of mankind. But why should you quarrel with reason, because passion sometimes conquers her?—You should endeavour to strengthen the connexion between theory and practice, if it be not sufficiently strong already; but you can gain nothing by destroying theory.—Happiness is your aim; but your unpractised or unsteady hand does not obey your will: you do not at the first trial hit the mark precisely.—Would you, because you are awkward, insist upon being blind?
The strength of mind which enables people to govern themselves by their reason, is not always connected with abilities even in their most cultivated state: I deplore the instances which I have seen of this truth, but I do not despair; on the contrary, I am excited to inquire into the causes of this phenomenon; nor, because I see some evil, would I sacrifice the good upon a bare motive of suspicion. It is a contradiction to say, that giving the power to discern what is good is giving a disposition to prefer what is bad. I acknowledge with regret, that women who have been but half instructed, who have seen only superficially the relations of moral and political ideas, and who have obtained but an imperfect knowledge of the human heart, have conducted themselves so as to disgrace their talents and their sex; these are conspicuous and melancholy examples, which are cited oftener with malice than with pity. But I appeal to examples amongst our contemporaries, to which every man of literature will immediately advert, to prove, that where the female understanding has been properly cultivated, women have not only obtained admiration by their useful abilities, but respect by their exemplary conduct.
I apprehend that many of the errors into which women of literature have fallen, may have arisen from an improper choice of books. Those who read chiefly works of imagination, receive from them false ideas of life and of the human heart. Many of these productions I should keep as I would deadly poison from my child; I should rather endeavour to turn her attention to science than to romance, and to give her early that taste for truth and utility, which, when once implanted, can scarcely be eradicated. There is a wide difference between innocence and ignorance: ignorant women may have minds the most debased and perverted, whilst the most cultivated understanding may be united with the most perfect innocence and simplicity.
Even if literature were of no other use to the fair sex than to supply them with employment, I should think the time dedicated to the cultivation of their minds well bestowed: they are surely better occupied when they are reading or writing than when coqueting or gaming, losing their fortunes or their characters. You despise the writings of women:—you think that they might have made a better use of the pen, than to write plays, and poetry, and romances. Considering that the pen was to women a new instrument, I think they have made at least as good a use of it as learned men did of the needle some centuries ago, when they set themselves to determine how many spirits could stand upon its point, and were ready to tear one another to pieces in the discussion of this sublime question. Let the sexes mutually forgive each other their follies; or, what is much better, let them combine their talents for their general advantage.—You say, that the experiments we have made do not encourage us to proceed—that the increased care and pains which have been of late years bestowed upon female education have produced no adequate returns; but you in the same breath allow that amongst your contemporaries, whom you prudently forbear to mention, there are some instances of great talents applied to useful purposes. Did you expect that the fruits of good cultivation should appear before the seed was sown? You triumphantly enumerate the disadvantages to which women, from the laws and customs of society, are liable:—they cannot converse freely with men of wit, science, and learning, nor even with the artist, or artificers; they are excluded from academies, public libraries, &c. Even our politeness prevents us, you say, from ever speaking plain truth and sense to the fair sex:—every assistance that foreign or domestic ingenuity can invent to encourage literary studies, is, as you boast, almost exclusively ours: and after pointing out all these causes for the inferiority of women in knowledge, you ask for a list of the inventions and discoveries of those who, by your own statement of the question, have not been allowed opportunities for observation. With the insulting injustice of an Egyptian task-master, you demand the work, and deny the necessary materials.
I admit, that with respect to the opportunities of acquiring knowledge, institutions and manners are, as you have stated, much in favour of our sex; but your argument concerning time appears to me to be unfounded.—Women who do not love dissipation must have more time for the cultivation of their understandings than men can have, if you compute the whole of life:—whilst the knowledge of the learned languages continues to form an indispensable part of a gentleman's education, many years of childhood and youth must be devoted to their attainment.—During these studies, the general cultivation of the understanding is in some degree retarded. All the intellectual powers are cramped, except the memory, which is sufficiently exercised, but which is overloaded with words, and with words that are not always understood.—The genius of living and of dead languages differs so much, that the pains which are taken to write elegant Latin frequently spoil the English style.—Girls usually write much better than boys; they think and express their thoughts clearly at an age when young men can scarcely write an easy letter upon any common occasion. Women do not read the good authors of antiquity as school-books, but they can have excellent translations of most of them when they are capable of tasting the beauties of composition.—I know that it is supposed we cannot judge of the classics by translations, and I am sensible that much of the merit of the originals may be lost; but I think the difference in pleasure is more than overbalanced to women by the time that is saved, and by the labour and misapplication of abilities which are spared. If they do not acquire a classical taste, neither do they imbibe classic prejudices; nor are they early disgusted with literature by pedagogues, lexicons, grammars, and all the melancholy apparatus of learning.—Women begin to taste the pleasures of reading, and the best authors in the English language are their amusement, just at the age when young men, disgusted by their studies, begin to be ashamed of alluding to literature amongst their companions. Travelling, lounging, field sports, gaming, and what is called pleasure in various shapes, usually fill the interval between quitting the university and settling for life.—When this period is past, business, the necessity of pursuing a profession, the ambition to shine in parliament, or to rise in public life, occupy a large portion of their lives.—In many professions the understanding is but partially cultivated; and general literature must be neglected by those who are occupied in earning bread or amassing riches for their family:—men of genius are often heard to complain, that in the pursuit of a profession, they are obliged to contract their inquiries and concentrate their powers; statesmen lament that they must often pursue the expedient even when they discern that it is not the right; and men of letters, who earn their bread by their writings, inveigh bitterly against the tyranny of booksellers, who degrade them to the state of "literary artisans".—"Literary artisans," is the comprehensive term under which a celebrated philosopher classes all those who cultivate only particular talents or powers of the mind, and who suffer their other faculties to lose all strength and vigour for want of exercise. The other sex have no such constraint upon their understandings; neither the necessity of earning their bread, nor the ambition to shine in public affairs, hurry or prejudice their minds: in domestic life they have leisure to be wise.
Far from being ashamed that so little has been done by female abilities in science and useful literature, I am surprised that so much has been effected. On natural history, on criticism, on moral philosophy, on education, they have written with elegance, eloquence, precision, and ingenuity. Your complaint that women do not turn their attention to useful literature is surely ill-timed. If they merely increased the number of books in circulation, you might declaim against them with success; but when they add to the general fund of useful and entertaining knowledge, you cannot with any show of justice prohibit their labours: there can be no danger that the market should ever be overstocked with produce of intrinsic worth.
General Commentary
SOURCE: Butler, Marilyn. "Edgeworth's Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes." Novel 34, no. 2 (spring 2001): 267-92.
In the following essay, Butler discusses Edgeworth's Irish fiction and its relationship to historical events.
During the 1990s more critical work has appeared on the Anglo-Irish "national novel" than in any decade since 1800-1810 when, by common consent, the sub-genre first appeared. The new edition of Edgeworth in twelve volumes is a contribution to this collective effort, but the edition is appearing after what is effectively a "school" of Anglo-Irish postcolonial criticism. In the course of the 1990s Tom Dunne, Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, and most recently Kevin Whelan have between them established an essentialist line, not closely concerned with the text, on what they see more broadly as a body of writing initially by Anglicized and Protestant Irish writers that made the "writing of Ireland" a topic dominated by the colonial relationship with England and addressed to the English.1 Some of the postcolonial group argue that the relationship has from the first been hierarchical: they instance the debate Edmund Spenser borrowed from a dialogue by the Greek, Lucian, that of Civility versus Incivility, which survived into the nineteenth century with the Irish permanently cast in the role of barbarians. Critics vary somewhat in the closeness with which they make such general propositions fit individual writers. Whelan is most dogmatic in fitting the colonizer-stereotype to Edgeworth and in the process giving her a specific political role:
By properly playing their civilising leadership role, the [Protestant] Irish gentry could also wean the native Hibernians from clan to state loyalties; their assent thus ensuring the hegemony of that landed class.
(Whelan, Foreword xiii-xiv)
The proposition I shall put in my reexamination of Edgeworth's Irish writing is that when read closely all five of the works concerned indeed exhibit political objectives, but they are not these. Edgeworth has other objectives, including but not limited to nationalism, that prove her much more expressively committed than has hitherto appeared to the history, language, culture, and future of Irish people.
The best critical writing on Edgeworth in this decade has been more nuanced and more responsive to the texts themselves, as are the articles of Mitzi Myers, W. J. McCormack, Ina Ferris, and Katie Trumpener's excellent overview of the Irish "national novel," Bardic Nationalism (1998). Ferris and Trumpener however have defined this new genre narrowly, by only one of the formats in which it appeared, the fictionalized travelogue as allegorical romance, as used by Sydney Owenson in The Wild Irish Girl, which I regard as too concentrated on antiquarianism and too bluntly propagandist to offer an adequate basis for a discussion of how novelists collectively learned to represent nationhood as a social and cultural concept. Instead, I offer an account of Edgeworth's characteristic themes and methods when representing the Irish and how she developed them as a rich, ambitious blueprint for the national novel.
Edgeworth as a fiction-writer distinguishes her characters, with a new subtlety in relation to their gender, class and nationality, by what they have been reading. In her best, most bookish fiction of upper-class life she introduces a novel kind of sub-text that makes reading and conversations on reading an indicator of rationality and moral worth.2 An indicator of the opposite, as well, as in her satirical treatment of great men in her two most trenchant anti-Whiggish political novels, Vivian (1812) and Patronage (1814).3 In general terms, Edgeworth's characteristic use of allusive conversations conveys a sense of knowledge shared. The name of an author or the title of a book not only opens up other imagined worlds, but also gives us access to the world of books, the reading community, and (by the early 1800s) a specific community, local or national, which may never before have been described as an entity.
In the Irish tales after Castle Rackrent, classic scenes of conversation in high life occur, especially in the opening chapters. These were particularly noticed by reviewers, since the Irish Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812) were each in turn hailed as Edgeworth's best work so far. In the body of the tale, however, where the setting is Ireland, she innovatively alludes to and incorporates popular culture: from recent or current Dublin and Belfast writing in English, satire, lampoon, and United Irish broadsheet propaganda; from the rural Gaelic-Irish tradition, folksong, story, legend, nationalist history, and occasionally magic. Edgeworth's level of encryption in the Irish tales is then a distinctive phenomenon, not recurring elsewhere in her own work or in the work of Irish predecessors or contemporaries. It is an intellectually self-conscious attempt at a group portrait of a hybrid, often disunited people who may have their own languages, some of them secret. It plainly addresses different readerships, either within the one nation or outside it. There is an implicit assumption behind this mode of writing that the English Protestant reader and the Gaelic Catholic reader will have a different reading experience. This is to set down in outline the case for a re-reading of Edgeworth's Irish tales for their intellectuality, their technical virtuosity, their role in literary history, and their move to open up the novel and literature itself to popular language.
A book that uses literary language and other literary devices demands the attention of its readers. A novel stands or falls by its use of language, narration, and plot—not by who the writer is. "Identity," in the simple sense of national or racial or religious identity, cannot itself explain the allegiances and motivations of even a single writer, especially when the writer consciously addressed a diverse public. Edgeworth from the outset wrote fiction for different audiences—between 1792 and 1801, lively short stories for children of various ages and "lessons" cast as dialogues for parents teaching at home; after 1801, novels and novellas set in English high-life; a sub-genre of these introducing French or Frenchified main characters; and her Irish tales, which also have sub-plots or substantial episodes introducing English or French characters.
The language Edgeworth uses in these different genres and sub-genres is tailor-made for its imagined audiences. In the children's tales the main child character, who is either decidedly rich and spoilt or decidedly poor and spunky, may be eight, ten, or twelve to fourteen—in the last case, he or she is struggling with an often dark adult world, and vocabulary and sentence-lengths adjust accordingly. Edgeworth's adaptability fosters her experimental plotting. She uses non-realistic devices from (say) fairy tale and a playful allusiveness to other texts in both dialogue and third-person narration. Her High Society is sometimes scientifically informed or chic and Parisian, that is, well-read in literary classics in English or French, reaching back to 1600 or before. Or, it can be intermittently raffish, as in Belinda (1801), from the introduction of other voices quoting more or less exactly from current newspaper items, fashionable scandals, popular caricature, advertisements, reviews, and the subculture of a big house, the servants' quarters belowstairs.
By characters' easy cross-references to their reading, the Edgeworth text supplies its real-life context. Books by 1800 had a cosmopolitan readership: novels were popular, bookish novels more popular than most. Edgeworth was speedily translated into French from this time, and responded by creating for her readership three socially tiered societies: metropolitan France, metropolitan England, and rural Ireland. Intellectuals of the late Enlightenment were fully aware of the social and political impact of the Europe-wide and Atlantic print network, of belonging to a reading public that knew itself by reading Reviews, memoirs, travels, and novels. Dugald Stewart, philosopher and mentor of the early Edinburgh Review, considered the circulating print network a guarantee of nineteenth-century progress.
Edgeworth, then, is not narrowly concerned with inventing either the national novel or the naturalistic novel, though she contributes to both; she participates in a historical process by developing a more stylized, consciously intellectual cosmopolitan novel, an intrinsically comparative and interactive exercise. Her high-life scenes in London Society portray a wartime English plutocracy driven by greed as illustrated by the London marriage market in Belinda. It is an idle, discontented class, further enfeebled by its own love-affair with French old-régime cynicism and amorality—as Edgeworth shows in her epistolary novel of espionage and adultery, Leonora (1806, pub. 1805), and Patronage (1814). Not exactly satire as Pope's generation understood it (though Pope is a leading presence in these novels), Edgeworth's high-life fiction is critical in a form understood by (for example) Jeffrey, Croker, and Jeremy Bentham.4
Edgeworth's Irish tales and the Essay on Irish Bulls are among her best, most characteristic writings. All five works are consistently and deliberately historical, but in an idiosyncratic mode that relies on quotation, the naming of authors and books, and allusions to familiar thoughts and ideas. These techniques make characters knowable, but in a new way, by having them reveal their own cultural milieu, deepened for the reader by the use of real-life people and the words they used. Radcliffe's gothic Mysteries of Udolpho and Scott's Waverley or Ivanhoe are obviously historical in that the author dates the action in a past age, but their authors' interests cannot be said to be more historical than those of Edgeworth, whose method is theoretically more organic and intrinsic. Her three later Irish tales all seem to situate the action in 1798 or later; yet the flow of names in narrative and dialogue is topographical, historical, literary, and cultural, embedding the characters richly in their own pasts and giving the reader access to the past. Her invented Ireland is fed by a broad stream of references to the history, personalities, and families of the island, its local place names and topography, its extant documents and archives, especially those bearing on the ownership of land.
Edgeworth's first solo book and for some her masterpiece, Castle Rackrent brings together in a narrational tour de force the archive of her own extended family, focusing on (yet also masking) its internal quarrels over money, land, and religion in North Longford between 1688 and 1709. Given that this is what Thady's narration actually is, Edgeworth misleads her readers in providing Castle Rackrent with the subtitle: "An Hibernian Tale/Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires before the year 1782." The subtitle makes a point of being historical; yet, since the book was published in the beginning of the year 1800, only eighteen years on, it hardly reaches back into history. Critics beginning with Thomas Flanagan have unsuspiciously connived with her by interpreting Rackrent as a study of big historical events, such as the loss of the notionally independent Protestant-Ascendancy parliament, and the incorporation in 1800 of the Irish constituencies and some Irish peers into the parliament at Westminster. It is better to assume Edgeworth was out to puzzle her reader, or even play a joke, as she was doing in the contemporaneous Essay on Irish Bulls (1802). This could explain why we have yet to see a satisfactory explanation of how Castle Rackrent is supposed to be rendering such public events; or why the manners of squires a generation earlier might be relevant to such a theme; or whether, indeed, Rackrent qualifies as either a national tale or historical tale at all.
The story, told by the aged steward Thady M'Quirk, serves as the fictionalized memoir of his service of four successive squires on a remote Irish estate over a period of eighty years. The Rackrent family chronicles, it is now generally conceded, really do derive from a similar family memoir not fictional at all. It was written in the late 1760s by Maria Edgeworth's grandfather Richard Edgeworth (1701-70) from family papers; complete with legal documents, it is available in the National Library of Ireland. Richard Edgeworth stops at the point when both his parents died within a few weeks of each other, that is, in the year 1709, when he was only eight. The orphan boy was left alone as the couple's only surviving child. Half a century later he recalls his father, Frank, dying heartbroken after losing the lands and title deeds to the new house he had built at Edgeworthstown. That dark scene closes the memoir, known in the family as the "Black Book of Edgeworthstown," and it also closes Maria Edgeworth's tale of Sir Condy, last of the Rackrents.
The first Edgeworth to settle near Mastrim, afterwards known as Edgeworthstown, was the emigré English lawyer Francis Edgeworth. The Dublin-based husband of Jane Tuite, a firmly Catholic woman from nearby County Westmeath, Francis bought a medium-sized estate at Cranalagh, north of Mastrim, when it came on the market as part of an official reapportionment in 1619. The original owners of the property were O'Farrells, still in 1619 the dominant family in a territory known as Annaly until its modernization in 1570 as County Longford. Francis Edgeworth and others like him benefited from this second wave of anti-baronial modernization: big Old Irish or Old English estates were reduced in size as new gentlemen-farmers from further east or from England were introduced as improvers. Francis Edgeworth was the first of a line of four squires who lived at Cranalagh, two miles north of Mastrim, until Frank, the fourth, built his new house at what became Edgeworthstown.
But Maria Edgeworth changes the real-life story by making the first of the Rackrents an Irishman by descent. This was a purposeful decision: the central family in all four of her Irish tales is of Gaelic origin. Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, a spend-thrift and jolly hospitable host, takes over the house and small estate from a relative on condition he changes to the English name. As a type Sir Patrick strongly resembles Captain John Edgeworth, who inherited the property from his father Francis in 1627, a landlord nicknamed by his tenants "Shaen Mor," Irish for "Big John." The fictional landlords between Sir Patrick and Sir Condy, who are called Sir Murtaugh and Sir Kit, are not specific portraits, but contrasting types pieced together, without regard for chronology, from one striking figure in the real memoirs, and one equally notorious neighbor—of whom more will be said. The original for the mean half-crazy lawyer Murtaugh was not an Edgeworth eldest son, and thus a legitimate heir, but the unfortunate Frank's younger brother Robert, a Catholic; a still younger brother and another Catholic, Ambrose, tricked Frank out of his house with the help of a perjured witness, as one of the glossary notes describes.5
Thady's fictional narrative allegedly covers eighty years, with considerable fidelity to small detail and notable omissions. His life-story matches landlord régimes spanning eighty-two years in the Edgeworth family chronicle. Instead of representing the era immediately prior to 1782, as the subtitle claims, the annals recount the eighty years prior to that, ending in 1709. Consequently, they cover Irish history through two periods of religious and dynastic war, followed in the 1690s by William of Orange's penal legislation against the Catholic gentry—the most determined scheme yet devised to break up big Catholic estates and disrupt a basic precept of English law, the rule of inheritance by the eldest son, and thus of ongoing family wealth and power. It is those two civil wars, of 1641 and 1688, that stand as the largest omission from Thady's narrative.
The Irish local historian Raymond Gillespie, editor of a collection of new essays on County Longford (1991), in his own contribution to the volume narrates the real-life slow decline of the county's leading Catholic family, the O'Farrells. He brings out elements in their story—a major schism between two branches of the family; then, incompetence, bad luck, backwardness, absenteeism, and in the senior branch, sterility—factors that regularly appear in Edgeworth's history of the Rackrents. There was, however, a point of difference: whereas the O'Farrells ran out of male heirs in mid-century, the Edgeworths by the 1690s had all too many quarrelsome siblings. Edgeworth holdings in County Longford had once belonged to the northern branch of the O'Farrells, which farmed the more boggy and mountainous terrain between Granard, near the Westmeath border, westward toward Roscommon and northward toward Leitrim. The Edgeworths were sharply reminded of the old owners by a dramatic incident in the house at Cranalagh during the rebellion of 1641. Big John was away from home, as the "Black Book" tells it. Tenants and local men broke into the house, stripped John's wife Mary, English Protestant daughter of Sir Hugh Cullum of Derbyshire, and drove her out naked into the countryside. A family servant, Brian Farrell, seized the couple's child, the future Sir John, then aged three, and fiercely declared he would kill him. He stoutly prevented the mob from proceeding with their main aim after plundering the house, which was to burn it down: the Farrells, he said, the real owners of the estate, might want to live in it. That done, he left with the child and hid him in the bog until he could be spirited away. Brian Farrell's descendents continued to live on the estate into the next century. He was, in his way, a double agent and prototype of Thady, though in a different political cause.
Since Gillespie, another Irish local historian, W. A. Maguire, in a 1996 article on County Longford, decisively re-sources the best-known episode in Castle Rackrent, indeed the best-known episode in Edgeworth, that of the "Madwoman in the Attic." In the process he uncovers an original for the one Rackrent who was not an Edgeworth. In the novel, the third of the dynasty, Sir Kit, incarcerates his Jewish wife for years because she would not give up her jewels. The real story referred to was public knowledge in the late eighteenth century, thanks to an obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine for Lady Cathcart, once wife of an Irish gentleman, Colonel Hugh Maguire. But the obituary wrongly located their household in County Fermanagh and for two centuries that location, relatively remote from Edgeworthstown, was assumed to be correct.
Maguire shows that the episode occurred in the 1760s in a Catholic household four miles north of Edgeworthstown called Castle Nugent. The owner was indeed Colonel Hugh Maguire, who was the nephew on his mother's side of the celebrated Grace Nugent—the subject of an Irish song by the poet and harpist Carolan and the name of the heroine of The Absentee (1812), after Rackrent the best-known of Edgeworth's Irish tales. The curious intricacy of plotting and the localism uncovered by this discovery has consequences for Edgeworth's readers. She can incorporate the history of neighboring families; in doing so she merges the real-life experience of Catholic and Protestant Longford gentry. A very high proportion of Thady's narration and many of the yarns that flesh out the glossary notes select archival material from the Black Book—not realism, so much as "the real."
Quite separately from these local and family contributions, through the device of allegory the story of Castle Rackrent refers to national history of the same era. Edgeworth left in a family copy of Castle Rackrent a pencilled note of a footnote she intended to add, but never did add, that applies to a line in Thady's narrative, "as I have lived so will I die, true and loyal to the family" (10). Edgeworth's jotting merely says "Loyal High Constable." That ironic allusion to a real title (Lord High Constable) would have brought in James Butler, second Duke of Ormond. By virtue of his office, he carried the crown at the coronation of the Protestant William and Mary, and afterwards at the coronation of Queen Anne. The second Duke inherited the office, though an altered title, from his grandfather, the first Duke, also James Butler (1610-88), who was elevated both to the Dukedom and to the title of Lord High Steward by Charles II at the Restoration—to reward him, gratefully but almost costlessly, for his stalwart support of the Stuart monarchs as their greatest servant in Ireland. As Steward, the first Duke carried the crown at Charles's coronation in 1661 and at the Catholic James II's coronation in 1685, thus beginning the family's tradition of truth and loyalty to four monarchs of the family.
Even before the accession of the Protestant Elector of Hanover as George I, however, the second Duke was no longer in favor and may have been planning a secret coup to bring James Edward, the Old Pretender, back to London before the arrival of the Elector of Hanover. Early in 1715, anticipating his impeachment and the sequestration of his vast Munster estates, he fled to the Continent to join James Edward's court in exile and to lead a Spanish fleet that in 1719 attempted to assist the Jacobite rising of 1715 against George I. It was indeed loyalty from the Jacobite perspective: equivocation, followed by treason, for Hanoverians.
Thady's resonant allusion to the second Duke in the novel's first paragraph need not make Thady a Jacobite; Edgeworth's codes tend to be more equivocal than that. Though it can be characterization, it reads better as allegory: Thady's service of the four Rackrents, who are so close to four Edgeworths, is analogous with the two Dukes' service of the last four Stuarts. Castle Rackrent reads as the requiem for an unlamented century, that of Europe-wide civil wars driven by religion and devious statecraft. A failed line of English-Irish landlords, disinherited by 1709, replicates the feckless, reckless, amorous Stuart dynasty, whose reign over the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland) ended in 1714.
It is sour and failing family history and national history that graphically merges in Castle Rackrent. But even more is perhaps at stake: what the Great House generally signified in feudal times. As it plainly tilts at the irresponsible Stuarts, Castle Rackrent also challenges the system—traditional landownership or the aristocratic system of proprietorship, sustained by male primogeniture on the one hand, profitable marriages and the strategic extension of kinship on the other. Great-House stateliness is debunked when Castle Rackrent's annals are handed over to an illiterate Irish chronicler to relate. The entire social system, based on kinship and alliances, is shown crumbling away as, in each generation, wealth-bearing brides make off with what they can salvage in money and durables. Even Thady's granddaughter Judy manages to rescue something from the wreck of Condy's affairs, and to frustrate the schemes of the men of her family, Thady and Jason. Perhaps the social changes posited here would need a timespan longer than 82 years, which may be why Edgeworth in her subtitle gives herself to 1782. Read this way, the glossary note on "the raking pot of tea," served after midnight in the bedrooms where women rule, is a key to Rackrent's radicalism and a useful signpost to the nineteenth-century realist novel that is on its way (33, 65n). Old aristocratic stories of male dominance and legitimacy are being challenged by democratized women-centered plots of family life in which servants, including female servants, wield power, and almost anything is negotiable.
Castle Rackrent began in 1793-94 as an impromptu act of mimicry, delivered to a family audience that knew the family past, and made vivacious by being retold in the Hibernian vernacular of an ancient steward. The annals of the last landlord were added after a break of two years, and were in place by 1798. At this time, a plan for an Essay on Irish Bulls, to be jointly authored by Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth (hereafter RLE), had been in place since the summer of 1797, but little or no writing on the book-length Essay could have been done.6 In short, there is a clear break between Castle Rackrent and Edgeworth's other Irish writing, beginning with the Essay. True to its title, the latter serves as a trial run for Edgeworth's later fictional constructions of Ireland.
Rackrent is already a carefully considered work, as is apparent from the last-minute framing paratext, consisting of preface, glossary, and probably the first footnote to the text. Despite the spoken idiom in which it is delivered, Thady's narrative has real claims to be taken seriously as history, both for its detail based on fact and for its coolly detached commentary on seventeenth-century Longford and its landlordism. But Castle Rackent avoids contemporary political allusions, except for a sly joke in the closing paragraph at the expense of the Warwickshire Militia, for (presumably) being drunk and disorderly and reported as such in the press. In that respect it differs from the overtly and boldly political Essay on Irish Bulls (May 1802), and from the semi-hidden politics of Edgeworth's elegant later Irish tales.
As a family the Edgeworths lived in Clifton, Bristol, for most of 1792-93, and resumed life in a fast-politicizing Ireland in 1794. By this time the United Irishmen were fully operative in both Belfast and Dublin. Their press had become an excellent tool for disseminating reformist, indeed revolutionary ideas by a combination of satire of the rulers and generalized consensual objectives, attractive to liberals whether Catholic or Protestant. More to the point from the perspective of Edgeworthstown, two of the United Irish leaders, Archibald Hamilton Rowan and William Drennan, were in the dock for their part in these seditious publications. RLE was acquainted with both men since his days as a reformist Volunteer in 1782-83; he had corresponded subsequently with Drennan and took Belfast newspapers at Edgeworthstown. As he followed the trial of Hamilton Rowan, RLE would have noted the line adopted by John Philpot Curran, the impressive counsel for the defense, that freedom of speech was the issue. The Irish people were being denied what the English boasted of having, and by extension the Irish liberal press might also be subjected to official censorship or closed down. As Curran put it when summing up in Rowan's case:
England is marked by a natural avarice of freedom, which she is studious to engross and accumulate, but most unwilling to impart … the policy of England has ever been, to govern her connexions more as colonies than as allies.
(213)
Hamilton Rowan was found guilty but escaped to France; Drennan was acquitted; and so, too, in 1795, was the editor of a United-Irish newspaper, the Northern Star.
Also in 1795, RLE intervened in national affairs by offering the Dublin government a device of obvious strategic importance, a telegraph (which he spelt tellograph) of his own invention. Maria Edgeworth wrote the paper RLE gave to the Royal Irish Academy on 27 June 1795, "A Secret and Swift Messenger."7 It gave advance notice of the feat he achieved on 24 August, a message successfully conveyed by telegraph from Scotland to Ireland. RLE explained to his fellow academicians that he was less concerned with the simple mechanics of his invention than with the utility and symbolic significance of a universal sign-language, a project worked on by seventeenth-century predecessors such as the English mathematician and inventor John Wilkins and, on the Continent, Fontenelle and Leibnitz ("Secret" 122-23). Their aim was to improve worldwide communications by inventing a device for instantaneous translation. Once the codebook was established and disseminated, a telegraph could serve as such a device. But the military interest in a telegraph was likely to be different: to ensure that the transmission of military information was not readable by an enemy. Neither RLE's codebook nor his tello-graph was adopted by Dublin. This may have been because in both County Longford and Dublin RLE himself was considered a security risk.
RLE was aware of the military need for a secure form of coding and decoding. It may already have occurred to him that books and a freely circulating press, such as that achieved by the United Irishmen, provided opportunities for passing secret messages as well as information. In an ambiguous aside to the academicians he hinted at this: "The press is an engine which every person can make use of to convey his ideas to the public" ("Secret" 124). From then on he revived cryptography as a favorite pursuit. And, in the form of riddles, obscure hints, and allusions to underground networking, hidden and double messages became a feature of his daughter's Irish writing.
Security and the removal of an inflammatory circulating press meanwhile continued to preoccupy the most powerful figure in Ireland, the chief law officer John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare. By April 1797 he succeeded in shutting down the last of the United Irish newspapers, The Press. His comment in the previous month on the United Irish movement succinctly identifies its constituent parts: "a deluded peasantry aided by more intelligent treason" (Whelan, Tree of Liberty 73). The Essay on Irish Bulls was adopted as a project that summer. The press, and Fitzgibbon, were salient elements in the eventual work. From the outset, the author's own security (against a minister looking for treason) was a real issue, so that the Essay was probably conceived as a kind of maze, a puzzling family game. It opens by giving readers a variety of clues about where it is coming from. In the first chapter of the 1802 edition we learn that the basic idea was a joke Jonathan Swift sent to a friend in London, Lord Bathurst, in 1730—he proposed to write a book on the so-called "Irish bull," as a verbal blunder, supposedly characteristic of the Irish, that proved their stupidity. Swift's book, he promised, would put this calumny against his nation into reverse: the English had themselves invented the bull; if it conveyed anyone's stupidity, it was theirs.
This theme is indeed faithfully followed, rather too much so, by the Edgeworths. There is, however, another hint on the title page, in a Latin epigraph from Juvenal which refers to Democritus, the ancient Greek scientist, philosopher, and doctor. It is not Democritus himself who becomes a direct source for Irish Bulls, but the seventeenth-century philosopher, doctor, and utopian Robert Burton, who signs himself "Democritus Junior" in the 100-page Introductory Address to his massive medical work The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
With Swift as the work's inspiration, the book's considerable resources open up the books of others, most comprehensively from the ancient world and Ireland's, Britain's, and Europe's seventeenth century. Though the anthology consists of prose rather than poetry, it is eclectic in its forms, for these are often oral and informal: bulls, other jokes, testimony in court, vernacular wit, vernacular oratory, libels, travesty, misinformation, and coded meanings. In a more formal philosophical dialogue, however, the "Bath Coach Conversation" between representatives of the Three Kingdoms, an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman, and in contributions from Scottish-Enlightenment cultural critics, literary critics, linguists, and rhetoricians, discussion ranges across the many genres encompassed by Comedy, the topic of "the low" as a legitimate literary concern, and the status of dialect speech as opposed to written and literary language. In the history of genre-study or formalism, the Essay deserves a mention, particularly for its inclusiveness: prose, dialect, vulgarisms, and the low are all in.
If on the other hand Burton is taken for the presiding genius of Irish Bulls, the Essay reads as an engagingly unorthodox cultural history of early modern Europe, especially the turbulent dystopic history of seventeenth-century religious war, as coolly surveyed by Democritus Junior, or Voltaire, or Charles II's best propagandist, Roger L'Estrange. Burton writes eloquently of a Europe preoccupied with war, want, poverty, and crime, and more compactly of the "dream of a better world," or utopianism, the literary genre that is a blueprint for an ideal commonwealth. The representation of England is conveyed in the Essay disproportionately by figures who could come from Burton's dystopic panorama and by quotations from English lawyers and administrators, newspaper-men and pamphleteers, partisans and libelers of the mid-to-late seventeenth century. Even more bitterly a war of words breaks out in the Essay each time Edgeworth touches on the Anglo-Irish government's part in the 1798 Rebellion and its aftermath. This indeed is a covert strand in the Essay, visible as a strand only by those who experienced the events described or sympathized with its main victims, the ordinary people.8
The Essay provides the first and the most elaborate of Edgeworth's imagined Irelands. Where Castle Rackrent was the chronicle of a family or at most a locality, what she achieves in Irish Bulls is clearly a much richer, more complex national community, by using differentiated voices and accents, groups of people, styles of discourse to evoke the Irish lower orders in their topographical milieus, urban and rural, and their past, as print culture or overheard voices record them. Each of the subsequent Tales picks up the multi-stranded format, each makes use of some aspect of ephemeral popular culture, each contests a metropolitan or Anglicized view by way of an undercover subtext, either invisible or unintelligible to non-Irish eyes. The Tales borrow the technique developed in the Essay for presenting an energized group portrait. Yet even the Essay has limits. It is not quite a cultural portrait of the Irish as a whole, still less of the three Kingdoms. Instead it gives an uncritical and likeable impression of the Catholic masses, offset on one side by a liberal, inclusive anthology of scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment on culture, literature, language, and society, and on another side by a less favorable impression of the English (and Anglo-Irish) as not altogether creditable lawyers, judges, and administrators.
The Essay sees to it that the Irish come off best, the English worst. Hibernian speakers in their workplaces or when appearing before a magistrate are as eloquent, we are being urged, as the great writers and thinkers of the ancient world or of civilized early-modern Britain and Europe, from More's Utopia on. The Essay is politically highly partisan. It is cast as in part an answer to a polemical Protestant Unionist, Richard Musgrave, author of Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, 1641, 1688, 1798 (1801), a work that insists that all three Irish Rebellions were incited and led by Catholic priests, fought by their flocks. Hence Edgeworth's deliberately humorous, diverse, and well-documented portrayal of an apparently peaceable Irish population. And equally, her trail of references throughout the Essay to an unpopular, demonized Unionist politician, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, whose repressive policies had first closed down the liberal press, then unleashed the troops and Yeomanry to bully, torture, and hang suspects in the rebel counties who came their way.
The uneven representation of the people of the Three Kingdoms has the effect of equalizing their status and losing the idea of English hegemony, since the metropolitan center remains an empty space; the State itself in London is notable as an absentee. What is not omitted is the recent debacle of the 1798 Rebellion, and its harsh suppression from Dublin by a powerful cabal of three—an intervention headed by Fitzgibbon in his capacity as chief law officer. Clare offended liberals and constitutionalists as well as radicals and activists by the orders he gave in 1797 and 1798 to arrest men of military age on suspicion and use torture in order to get them to talk. Village blacksmiths were suspect in the eyes of the authorities from the outset, as potential makers of pikes. Catholic priests were seen as the ringleaders once violence broke out: after the defeats inflicted on the rebel forces, the priests were the first to be hanged in Wexford and Wicklow without benefit of trial. At the end of chapter III, Maria Edgeworth quotes accounts in the Dublin press of Clare's provocative demeanor, his boast of carrying a pistol as he walked through the streets of Dublin, along with the cruelty of General Lake, an Englishman, who scoured the Wexford countryside in search of men to hang under Clare's orders. She keeps the scenes in readers' minds and manipulates their responses by contrasting the Lord Chancellor's behavior with the gallant war record overseas since the Rebellion of two Scottish officers, General Abercromby and his next-in-command, Colonel John Moore, in Holland and Egypt. These two soldiers were particular heroes for those opposed to the Irish Government in Ireland because they publicly criticized Lord Clare's orders and the consequent behavior of many military units, as in Sir Ralph Abercromby's remarkable statement recorded in the press on 26 February 1798 that the militia were more dangerous to their friends than their enemies.9
In an entirely different vein, the Edgeworths create an encyclopedic jestbook going back to Greece and Asia Minor, ancient Carthage and Phoenicia—the last two, possible Celtic homelands, though the historically-skeptical Edgeworths do not claim this. Herodotus's history of the ancient Greeks recurs, as an analogue for Irish experience in ancient times rather than as itself Irish. The talented but outnumbered Greeks, fighting their big bully and near neighbor, the Persian Empire, snatched some famous victories by brains and cheek, made the great emperor Xerxes look very silly, and managed to survive, even to flower—as the resilient Irish, confronting the English, generally do. Other Greek writers, Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, and above all the Scythian Greek-speaking Lucian—outsider, fantasist and skeptic—all figure as founding fathers of critical High Comedy, the true intellectual ancestors of the modern Irish. An Irish bibliography on the last page names Swift, Sterne, the Sheridan family, and an impressive proportion of the best eighteenth-century comic dramatists on the London as well as the Dublin stage. Implicitly there is a fusion here, or several fusions, between High Comedy and liberalism, and between Dublin-based intellectuals and writers and the Irish people. But the method Edgeworth has adopted seems more neutral than this: partisan inferences must be made by individual readers.
As a composite picture of the Irish, the Essay anticipates the Tales, making tales in miniature, in the form of three inset stories, succinct epitomes of the strained relations of the Irish with their British neighbors. In "Little Dominick," a school story for children, a pedantic Welsh schoolmaster bullies his small Irish pupil and ridicules the boy's English. "The Hibernian Mendicant," a tragic ballad, has an Irishman and an English soldier quarreling over the Irishman's girl, so that between them they kill her. The longest of the three, "The Irish Incognito," retells Lucian's charming fantasy, "A True Story," ingeniously substituting a boxing match between the English and the Irish champions for Lucian's war in space between the Moonites and the Sunites. But Phelim O'Mooney of Cork, traveling as Sir John Bull, goes from Ireland to England, rather than in the other direction. His quest for a wealthy wife lands him in jail, and then with relief brings him home, in a manner more characteristic of modern stage comedy.
Small touches in each of these short stories illustrate Edgeworth's use of codes and riddling. Dominick in the schoolroom is being mocked for his Hibernian reversal of the normal English usage of "shall" and "will." A bigger Scottish boy in the same class hums a tune to support Dominick—"Will ye no come back again?"—a Jacobite song, as the unpleasant teacher suspiciously observes. Again, "The Hibernian Mendicant" could be an "aisling," a form of Irish ballad, but it is also a story of the type used by Swift in the posthumously published "The Unfortunate Lady" (1748). It is an allegory in which the Lady in question is Ireland, wronged and oppressed by one or both of her big neighbors.10 Phelim's quest-romance consistently interweaves genres in the comic range with popular pursuits (the boxing match) and State politics (the sale by the French revolutionary government of Philippe Egalité's china). Philippe, Duke of Orleans, the French King's cousin but also a supporter of Revolution, is one of Edgeworth's intermittent devices for bringing to mind the United Irishman Lord Edward Fitzgerald, through his wife Pamela, who was rumored to be Philippe Egalité's illegitimate daughter.11 Edgeworth in the Essay on Irish Bulls has taught herself to keep up to a dozen themes or strands separate and in play. Providing glimpses of sympathetic thinkers, writers, even heroes of 1798 by means of a name or association is one method. But the nagging theme of English injustice always somehow seems more visible than the rest, rather as Burke, evoking the crowd-scenes of the French Revolution, saw a gallows at the end of every vista.
Ennui has a prefatory section, understandably close to Robert Burton, since Edgeworth began to plan her next Irish tale late in 1803. The first five chapters explore the fashionable malaise "ennui," alternatively known in the eighteenth century as hypochondria, in the seventeenth century as melancholy, and nowadays idiomatically as depression. The title and theme is the fullest acknowledgment Edgeworth gives of her continuing interest in Burton. She hints at this by providing what looks like a preface—the first five chapters in England, which function as a full-dress historical review of the unhealthy lives of the European upper orders from the late Roman empire on. In the middle of the five chapters Edgeworth introduces the Irish nurse Ellinor O'Donoghoe, a character second only in importance in the novel to the Anglicized peer and "hero," Lord Glenthorn. Ellinor is established in a bravura passage in which Glenthorn, the tale's official narrator, inexactly recollects the tales Ellinor told him of Irish history and myth as he lay concussed on his sickbed. After this, in chapter IV Glenthorn experiences one of the trials of high life, discovery of his neglected young wife's adultery and their subsequent divorce.
For this episode, Edgeworth uses a real-life scandal still identifiable at the time of Ennui's publication (1809). Glenthorn's cuckolding, his offer to forgive his wife, and later the court proceedings, are all based on the actual divorce case (1789-92) of Henry Cecil, briefly Lord Burghley, later Marquess of Exeter, who died in 1804. Edgeworth knew the story well, even very well, since the adulterer in the case was the Reverend Edward Sneyd, her father's brother-in-law, and at the height of the proceedings in 1789 Sneyd took refuge at Edgeworthstown. The aspect of the story Edgeworth used was the aristocratic husband's apathy and enervation: the Judge, Lord Kenyon, the jury, and the press thought Cecil's inertia so odd that they suspected him of colluding with the runaways. The introduction of this recent scandal has a subtle bearing on the standing in the novel of Anglo-Irish ruling families. Henry Cecil was a direct descendant of the English statesman, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. As Elizabeth's chief counsellor, William Cecil was patron to ambitious men who came to Ireland from the 1580s as soldiers, administrators, and planters—and often passed the name of Cecil on to their descendants, some of the leading figures of the Protestant Ascendancy.
It is an important feature of Ennui that it works on two levels, as both a story with strong characters and scenes, and a foray into magic realism and the hidden Ireland. It is in certain ways the most closely observed of Edgeworth's Irish tales: three very different examples of naturalistic episodes on a rising scale are Glenthorn's set-piece comic encounter on the road with an irrepressible coach-driver; his surreal account, echoing real-life press coverage and local Longford stories, of the heroic deeds and horrors of 1798; and his domestic and village encounters with his loving but now alienated mother, Ellinor O'Donoghoe. If Castle Rackrent is a linear masculinist family chronicle, endlessly subverted by the women with whom the Rackrents ally themselves, Ennui virtually reverses this pattern. Its estate and neighborhood are more multi-stranded and complex, the people dangerously divided into hostile camps. Glenthorn feels oppressed by their numbers, as they wait in crowds to speak to him, and is soon further pressured by the hawkish Protestant gentry, who both command the local Yeomanry and engross the magistracy. The people have independent energies, and together they are conspiring. Nevertheless, the estate's affairs and the novel's plot turn out to be in the hands of three powerful women, all authority-figures and, under different rules of legitimacy, together standing for a hybrid Ireland.
Glenthorn is, naturally, set up as the regular metropolitan male authority-figure and aristocrat, who could be expected to have significant encounters with wild Irish Womanhood. Neither of the other women is as violent as Ellinor, when she suddenly springs at the head of Glenthorn's horse so that the animal throws him against the stone pillars of his gate. Taken up for dead, he awakes to find her in the room beside him. In a blurred state, he listens to her stories. In retrospect, he pieces together, for himself and the reader, her manipulative campaign to "Irish" him. From his sickbed he first sees her simply, uncritically, even sentimentally as his nurse and even a mother-figure. After this he becomes more exact about the stories she told during his convalescence:
I listened or not, just as I liked; any way she was contint. She was inexhaustible in her anecdotes of my ancestors all tending to the honour and glory of the family; she had also an excellent memory for all the insults, or traditions of insults, which the Glenthorns had received for many ages back, even to the times of the old kings of Ireland; long and long before they stooped to be lorded; when their "names, which it was a pity and a murder, and moreover a burning shame, to change, was O'Shaughnessy."
Her own voice, her attitudes, her favorite hero, have entered their conversations:
She was well stored with histories of Irish and Scottish chiefs. The story of O'Neill, the Irish black-beard, I am sure I ought to remember, for Ellinor told it to me at least six times.
(175)
Despite her care, Ellinor has had only partial success in telling Glenthorn about Shane O'Neill, in English eyes Blackbeard, the fearsome rebel and barbarian of the early years of Elizabeth's reign. Forgetting the first name, Glenthorn's narration would permit a careless reader, that is a Glenthorn, to think instead of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Elizabeth's much more courtly and less barbaric opponent. He makes even less of her still more Gaelic reminiscences:
Then she had a large assortment of fairies and shadowless witches, and banshees; and besides, she had legions of spirits and ghosts, and haunted castles without end, my own castle of Glenthorn not excepted.…Formanya long year, she said, it had been her nightly prayer, that she might live to see me in my own castle; and often and often she was coming over to England to tell me so, only her husband, as long as he lived, would not let her set out on what he called a fool's errand: but it pleased God to take him to himself last fair day, and then she resolved that nothing should hinder her to be with her own child against his birthday: and now, could she see me in my own Castle Glenthorn, she would die contint—and what a pity but I should be in it! I was only a lord, as she said, in England; but I could be all as one as a king in Ireland.
(175)
It is a piece of writing that resists abridgement: the inner free speech of an imperceptive narrator and sick man, a collage that dangerously assumes no harm in Ellinor's ramblings on Irish legend, Shane O'Neill, and sinister apparitions. "We resist efforts by those who … employ artifice to change our determinations," Glenthorn complacently comments in retrospect, still underestimating Ellinor (175). Coming back to the passage on a second reading, one finds that Ellinor's political commitments stand out, as does (perhaps) her knowingness as a secret agent in the cause of Ireland. While the last remains a possibility, in mythological terms Ellinor has an uncanny resemblance to the banshee (in Gaelic, bean si) who foretells and delivers the fall of a great house.
Edgeworth's Irish country-house life is more populated and, within the conventions of satire, more plausible than Owenson's version in The Wild Irish Girl. In a style appropriate to stage comedy, simplified types, rather than characters, indicate that the main occupations of the Irish provincial gentry are husband-hunting and keeping boredom at bay. Young Irish women competing for scarce eligible men direct their jokes at Glenthorn and at an Englishman, Lord Craigle-thorpe, who is collecting materials for a book of travels. This figure was taken by reviewers and probably most readers for the modern traveller, John Carr, whose Stranger in Ireland (1805) became a subject for burlesque in England. Craiglethorpe is represented as supercilious and lazy, and it is plain that the company sees an amusing resemblance between him and Glenthorn. Since Glenthorn already has one discreditable English double in Henry Cecil, matters for our hero, can, it seems, only get worse, as indeed they do. He tries to propose to Lady Geraldine, a sprightly but dowerless Irish noblewoman, and she turns him down, despite title and wealth, for not being good enough.
Craiglethorpe meanwhile is being misled by the mischievous ladies, a confrontation that older Irish readers must have recognized. In 1776 an English traveler, Richard Twiss, toured Ireland notoriously borrowing "facts" and stories from (for example) the discredited and superseded Fynes Morrison and, with the help of Morrison and others, finding Irish ladies ugly, vulgar, and drunken (355).12 Dublin manufacturers retaliated by marketing a chamberpot that bore on the inside a caricature of Twiss's face. Edgeworth had several times reintroduced Twiss and his cleverest tormentor, a Dublin poet and satirist called William Preston, as one of her nice pairings of ill-informed English and ingenious Irish in the Essay on Irish Bulls. Presumably in order to reduce Glenthorn's standing still further, Edgeworth takes him to Killarney and has him do there what the hapless Twiss seems to have done in real life: he quotes his description of the scenery from another author's guidebook (Ennui 250-51, n226).
Ennui's Anglo-Irish world is full of names that are historically suggestive. They provide an impressionistic chart of the layering of the Irish population by successive waves of British immigrants, from the twelfth-century barons on. Geraldine represents those barons as a member of the Norman Fitzgerald family, Earls of Kildare and Dukes of Leinster. Equally, the man she prefers to Glenthorn, Cecil Devereux, represents the next large wave of English immigrants, the Elizabethans. His first name, Cecil, evokes the Elizabethan statesman William Cecil; his surname, that of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's Irish Commander-in-Chief; the heiress-at-law to the Glenthorn estate, Cecilia Delamere, is yet another Elizabethan arriviste. Giving us three more Cecils can be no oversight; though Cecil and Cecilia are presented as virtuous, they are heavily outnumbered in the novel's pack of Englishmen, beginning with the aristocrats Henry Cecil and Glenthorn, if indeed we can think of them as two people rather than one. It looks as if the introduction of the scandalous Henry were designed to discredit the English aristocracy/Anglo-Irish gentry as a caste, in much the same way as digging up the Twiss story throws ridicule on English travelers as arbiters of Ireland. Such a reading of the satirical strand in Ennui conflicts, of course, with recent critical claims that Edgeworth's Irish tales are "Whiggish," or for Whelan "effete Whiggism," and that her underlying goal is to ensure "the hegemony of that landed class" (Whelan, Foreword ix, xiv).
Once the story moves to Ireland, Glenthorn's contact with the people is made more interesting than the upper-class scenes. It turns on his ongoing, flawed relationship with Ellinor, a mother and son irremediably divided by their upbringing and cultural experiences, whose half-understandings and frustrated feelings are depicted in a series of natural domestic meetings. It is also through Ellinor and her sons that Glenthorn builds up without knowing it a bystander's picture of the 1798 Rebellion, the familiar myths and legends of the Rebellion common to Wexford, Wicklow, and Longford, where in September the rising was finally crushed by the defeat of Humbert's French and Irish army at the Battle of Ballinamuck a few miles northwest of Edgeworthstown. The stories included the hiding of arms and use of ancient secret passageways, police and Yeoman brutality, the torturing of blacksmiths to find weapons, summary justice on suspects, and the "cute" servant planning to betray his master to the terrorists outside the walls.
Looking back, we find magic has been implied throughout Ennui. The hero's encounters in Ireland with three powerful women, each representing a different strand of the Irish people in history, capture him and transform him. Three times he changes, and three times he changes his name. The last change of name, part of it imposed by the modern Anglicized wife, Cecilia Delamere, who owns the title-deeds of the estate and now ruined castle, is the most striking because of its ancient suggestiveness. "The O'Donoghoe" is a name from the Gaelic-Irish history of County Kerry in the remote southwest—a folk hero who was an Irish counterpart of Arthur, the "once and future King." In old age, after a happy reign, the O'Donoghoe walked out on the surface of Lake Killarney, then under the water. He had told his people that when they needed him he would return, and legend says he was occasionally seen. It can't be more clumsy plotting, it has to be after authorial deliberation that at the very end of Ennui a man who now thinks of himself as by descent a Gaelic Irishman, named O'Donoghoe De-la-mere, comes back to his own land and people near the southwest coast of Ireland, and takes up the task of bettering their conditions. Cecilia's surname De-la-mere puns ingeniously: over the sea, but also over the mere or lake. For the English reader, her (or her mother's) snobbish requirement that he adopt her name is yet another sign of Glenthorn's enslavement to a female principle. For the Irish reader, the symbolic return of the Gaelic hero is much the stronger reading. The Irish plotlines knot in a finale that prophesizes the future restoration of the land—to an Irish population not solely Gaelic, for it is represented here by Ellinor's hybrid sons.
Is Ennui the most accomplished of the Romantic-era Irish national tales? Reasons for such a view include its weaving together of contested history and story, as well as its energized use of stereotyped figures of the native Irish. The best of these are bred out of colonial paranoia—best of all, as Edgeworth herself thought, Ellinor the nurse, but also Joe Kelly, the treacherous servant and, more topically and popularly, the blacksmith, seen as a figure of folkloric significance and heroism at this time. Myth is used here with special boldness in the finale. All three later Tales however exhibit an element of virtually postmodern skepticism about the possibility of a stable individual identity (a stability denied by the shape-shifting, namechanging characters), and by the democratizing, universalizing recruitment of old story that distinguishes the Edgeworth tale from clumsier rivals.
The plot of The Absentee, non-magical and less historical, has a coded subtext turning on Edgeworth's use of the song "Gracey Nugent," written in Irish by the harper Carolan, who died in 1739. Again, it is a woman, this time the heroine, who represents Ireland, and whose story the sympathetic reader must attend to. The heroine shares her name with an Irish popular song: it is the song-title that is the key, for it brings in many other songs, in fact whole traditions of popular and patriotic Irish song. First it represents, rather loosely, the tradition of the "aisling."13 The historical Grace Nugent must have been considered a lady, for her uncle was the Duke of Tyrconnell, James II's Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, who himself features (as a dog) in the satirical Protestant song, Lilliburlero. Grace's own song is not an interesting example, for it reads like any conventional lyric paying tribute to a beauty. Early in the eighteenth century these poems, routinely featuring a woman, could show her forlorn, perhaps homeless and wandering, perhaps abandoned by her lover. She appears to figure Ireland; her absent husband or lover alludes to the Stuart King or Pretender over the water or perhaps to his sympathizers and followers, the exiled Catholic gentlemen known as the "Wild Geese." Later in the eighteenth century the Jacobite associations of these songs began to fade, and the heroines acquired common village names, such as (in English) Maureen, Sheila, or Eileen (Ellinor). Such women now represented the rural Catholic masses; Grace's village god-daughter and namesake in the novel may be Edgeworth's acknowledgement of the more popular nature of Irish song.
In still earlier songs of the aisling type, the woman's virtue is called in question, much as Catholic and Stuart legitimacy was denied in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland. This story-line also enters the novel, and the virtue of Grace's Catholic mother, a Miss St. Omer, and thereby Grace's own legitimacy, are both suspected. Edgeworth had encountered Carolan's poem to Grace Nugent in Charlotte Brooke's edition, with accompanying English translation, of Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). The real Grace Nugent had been a near neighbor, living at Castle Nugent four miles north of Edgeworthstown, a member of a family less or more friendly with the Edgeworths for generations (Maguire 146-59). Brooke, who became a celebrated author after her book was published, also lived before her death in 1793 near the town of Longford and corresponded with Edgeworth. Edgeworth apparently worked a special, Gaelic set of variations that lightly evokes the changing nature of the ballad heroine over time, and uses the history traced by the genre to tell a story about the trials of Grace's forlorn mother. A group of real-life literary women, and of fictitious village women, this time stand in for an Ireland where the Gaelic strand still seems powerful, even dominant.
The edition of The Absentee (1989) by W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker lays out the political significance of the name Nugent as referring to real-life leading Catholics, Jacobites, and "Wild Geese." Our edition suggests that the text refers to other real-life Nugents who played a political role in Irish and pro-Catholic campaigns. The first of these was an Irish-born MP in the Westminster Parliament, Earl Nugent, who proposed both religious and financial reforms on Ireland's behalf in 1778. The second, still more significant for the novel's denouement, was a minor political song-writer of the 1790s.
Towards the end, Grace does turn out to be legitimate, but, puzzlingly, she also acquires an English-sounding grandfather called Reynolds, so that her name, awkwardly, becomes Grace Nugent Reynolds or just "Miss Reynolds." Her identity has strangely begun to merge, but for three letters, with that of a real-life Irishman, George Nugent Reynolds, author of songs such as "The Catholic's Lamentation," also known as "Green were the fields where my forefathers dwellt-O," and "Kathleen O'More." These songs appeared in Dublin journals regarded as politically suspect by the government because of their links with the United Irishmen. The journals were the Sentimental and Masonic Magazine, Carey's Evening Star, and Watty Cox's Irish Magazine, which typically signed the songs with the poet's initials, "G-e R-s" and "G-e R-n-lds." George Nugent Reynolds, a Protestant gentleman from South Leitrim, was then a well-known contributor to general magazines supportive of the United Irishmen in the very years, 1794 to 1797, when the government was shutting other parts of this press down.
In 1799, during the tense round-up following the Rebellion, George became a notable public figure. His celebrity was enhanced thanks to the severity shown him by the unpopular John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, who deprived him of his office as a Justice of the Peace on the grounds that his loyalty was in doubt. George retaliated by addressing Fitzgibbon with a defiant open letter, immediately published in Watty Cox's suspect magazine. Referring to Fitzgibbon's Catholic antecedents, Nugent Reynolds said he would have behaved more like a gentleman if he had been educated, as his father intended, in the Jesuit college at St. Omer. In times of crisis and press censorship, resistance movements relied on songs or fiction with double meanings or cryptic press items to circulate rebel messages. The use of such songs and such messages by a writer would have constituted an expression of sympathy with the Catholic side. In this particular quarrel, the author's tactic of distancing herself from the harsh policies of the Dublin Government seems unmistakable.
The finale of The Absentee celebrates in the novel's closing rituals the homecoming of Grace as the legitimate heiress of a remote divided Irish estate, in some sense that Lord and Lady Clonbrony and their son Lord Colambre are not. For local Irish readers, the real-life estate referred to would have been identifiable as Colambre, three miles south of Granard near the Westmeath border. But Colambre in real life was not yoked to Clonbrony, as it is in the novel. It is linked to Castle Nugent, the home of a Longford branch of the Catholic Nugent family. The real-life Clonbrony, some two miles west, was close to Kilshruly, at the end of the seventeenth century the family seat of the Catholic younger branch of the Edgeworth family, whose owner, the intriguing Robert Edgeworth, tried and for a while succeeded in unseating the Protestant senior branch of the family at Edgeworthstown.14 In short, the historical placenames have Catholic associations, as does Grace's own name. Where a novel adopts the traditions of stage comedy, it arrives at closure in a marriage, but often at something deeper, a restitution. This is the case in The Absentee as in Ennui. Grace's homecoming has an equivalent or greater historical depth than that of Ellinor O'Donoghoe's son, for it is celebrated in a mighty bonfire that, according to the villager who describes it, could be "seen … from all parts of the three counties" (Absentee 200), a fiery echo of ancient-world sunworship.
In Ormond (1817), Edgeworth returns to the manner of her most theoretical construction of Ireland and most ambitiously composite book, the Essay on Irish Bulls. Ormond's plot is a maze of classic quest-plots ancient and modern: Harry Ormond relives the experiences of Telemachus, wandering son of the wandering Ulysses; Tom Jones, who is also in quest of a father; Shakespeare's Prince Hal; Spenser's Red Cross Knight; and Sidney's prince Musidorus in Arcadia.15 More elaborately than anywhere else, Edgeworth weaves together quests, poetic fantasies, and idealistic projects from the later Elizabethan period of about 1580 to about 1700 and locates them in the southwest and middle of Ireland, in County Long-ford and Munster. The novel is her most sustained and artful literary collage, a composite portrait of Irish (meaning Irish-resident) men and women over the two centuries that began with the arrival of the first Elizabethan planters. One remarkable character, the eccentric self-styled "King" Corny, incorporates the scientific and technological projects, the old and new learning, above all the social idealism, egalitarianism, and republicanism that (in addition to land-hunger and greed) sustained the century's fervor to re-make paradise on either side of the Atlantic. Edgeworth often uses fairy-tale and classical and early-modern fantasy, all long-established literary languages, but in Ormond she comes closer to attempting a utopia, a more philosophical and complex mode. The world the politician Sir Ulick makes for himself in provincial Ireland is a dystopia full of the quarrels and hatreds familiar enough in seventeenth-century religious wars, and revived in the post-Union Irish countryside, Edgeworth suggests, in the sectarian squabbles fought by educationalists setting up an Irish school system. The utopia to be built on the remote Black Islands that Edgeworth comes near to imagining in Ormond is a changing and imperfect one—a mixture of Corny's superseded paternalism with the idealism of a group of friends.
Corny is an important figure in Ormond, and his place in the historical allegory needs consideration. His home is an island in Lough Ree, largest of the Shannon lakes, the natural boundary between Annaly and Connaught in the west; its southern tip, where Munster begins. The Shannon system is the dominant geographical feature of central Ireland, which is Edgeworth's Ireland. The islands that dot its many lakes are often associated with the long history of Ireland as a dark-age "land of saints," and the medieval era of abbeys, churches, hermitages, and defensive towers, buildings in stone that survived only as ruins. Their name, "the Black Islands," comes however from the Arabian Nights: this is also a kind of Arcadia. Traditionally, utopias too are found on islands, sometimes on magical islands that appear and disappear so that they cannot be found again. The key is that Corny's home is an ideal place, where we see many ideas tried out and dreams of the future conceived. Corny, whose closest confidant is the local priest, embodies Catholic Ireland. His lifestyle and attitudes are old-fashioned and seem to belong to the early-to-mid seventeenth century, when Ireland and especially Munster was also the homeland of projectors, inventors, plantationmakers—at their most eminent for the English, Robert Boyle, later of the Royal Society, and Sir William Petty—but also many other scholars, including Ireland's early-modern Gaelic-language historians, such as Geoffrey Keating and the Anglican scholar Archbishop Ussher, who had friendly relations with Celtic scholars.
In Ormond, however, one Elizabethan Munster planter William Herbert (died 1593) stands for the rest; and this real-life story, sketched into the plot, is the Protestant and English modernizing counterpart of Corny's benign traditional patriarchy. William Herbert of Castleisland, near Tralee in west Munster, was in real life a man of literature and learning. He wrote a poem to Sir Philip Sidney, a treatise in Latin on Ireland, and he subscribed to the mystical Platonism of the sixteenth-century Florentine school. On the Welsh borders other gentlemen shared the same enthusiasms: William Herbert married Florence, the daughter of William Morgan of Llantarnan, Monmouthshire, a Neo-Platonist, if his daughter's first name is any indication. William Herbert has given his name to the novel's idealized landlord, Herbert Annaly; his wife Florence Herbert gives her name to Herbert Annaly's sister, whom Ormond eventually marries. In real life William Herbert quarreled with a neighbor, Sir Edward Denny of Tralee, whom Herbert accused of encouraging pirates on the coast. That episode figures in the novel, when Herbert Annaly becomes involved in a fracas with smugglers on the seashore that causes his death. In one respect, however, William Herbert is an insufficient model for Herbert Annaly. It was his son-in-law, Edward Herbert of Cherbury, Lord Castleisland in the Irish peerage, who was the ecumenical thinker, a conscientious objector to England's sectarian Civil War of the 1640s, and a man who wrote his own autobiography as a chivalric, dream-like Arcadian romance: a book that had a cult following among RLE's friends of the Lunar Society of Birmingham after its publication by Horace Walpole in 1764. In style, Herbert's Life is a model for RLE's own first volume of his Memoirs, which in 1817, as Maria wrote Ormond, he made her promise to complete.16
Corny in his youth had been the contemporary of the father of "White" and "Black" Connal; this fact confirms his place among the Gaelic Old Irish landowners of Annaly, or County Longford. It suggests he lived between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the dominant O'Farrells divided themselves into two factions, White and Yellow, one group to lead largely provincial lives, based on farming, in backward, boggy North Longford, before the line of male heirs failed them. Meanwhile the more sophisticated Yellow O'Farrells communicated with the English and French Court at both Westminster and Versailles. After her father has pressed Dora to marry White Connal, he suddenly dies. Dora throws in her lot with the soldier Black Connal, whom she accompanies to Versailles, as a Catholic gentleman's daughter in the late seventeenth century might well have done. Dora's separate adventure, a subtly unhappy story, complements the book's many male quest-romances, while its glamour puts London's attractions in the shade. It stands as a reminder that the Irish Catholic gentry had stood for civility in history in ways beyond the reach of English squires. Because Dora in Sidney's Arcadia was actually Pamela, the tale also offers a wry suggestion of the many historical occasions when Irish and French united against the English.
To return to the question with which I began this investigation of Edgeworth's diverse cultural materials: in what sense does Edgeworth write "national novels"? All Edgeworth's writing on Ireland, even the relatively local Castle Rackrent,is concerned with its nationhood. Work on the densely literary Essay on Irish Bulls sophisticated Edgeworth's approach, by requiring her to reflect on what a nation is when it is less than an autonomous state. To judge from the materials she includes in the Essay as in some way Irish (such as the High Comedy of the ancient Greeks), Edgeworth considers that a nation's group identity rests on its shared experiences, as these have been passed down in history and story over time: in sharing land, particularly a land with well-defined borders such as an island, and in sharing a language, with all that that implies of popular literature in its many genres, written and oral. Language is problematic, however, for the Irish have two languages, one of which, the Gaelic Irish tongue, is used almost entirely by the Old Irish part of the population, while the other, Hibernian English, is treated by the English as an inferior dialect. Religion, for other nations a cohesive factor, has been and is divisive in Ireland's case. Edgeworth restricts her references to religion, before Ormond at least, to what is for her the straight-forward issue of Catholic Emancipation. Together, these Irish elements—historical, topographical, linguistic, and literary—determine the language used in Edgeworth's Irish fiction, both in narration and dialogue, and introduce an unusual variety of alternative plots, often based on fairy and folk tale, myth, and still more informal forms, such as scandal and practical jokes. Finally, the linguistic elements include secret codes and are problematic because they are exclusive and divisive. But since Edgeworth's apprenticeship as an Irish writer took place in the 1790s, swift and secret communication was essential to her inclusive uncensorious non-doctrinaire account of the Irish in time, as a complex, hybrid people.
This self-conscious, intellectual, and very detailed method of indeed constructing a people out of a large body of written materials, past and present, as well as the spoken words of contemporaries, is highly unusual, and to conventional novel-readers often strange, obscure, and politically hard to interpret. With hindsight, Edgeworth emerges as both a theorist of cultural history and natural identity, a true if unsung pioneer of the historical novel and a novelist with a powerful vision of what the nineteenth-century novel is there to do.
Notes
- See Dunne, "A Gentleman's Estate" 96-101 and "Haunted by History" 68-91; Deane 30-40; Eagleton 161-77; and Whelan, Foreword ix-xxiv.
- See Leonora (1806), Edgeworth's epistolary novel of international espionage and seduction, which features the letters of Mme de P—, a former Countess and (in a plot located in Britain and Paris during the Peace of Amiens, 1802-03) an active politician. Most of P—'s literary allusions are to old-régime and seventeenth-century writings, e.g., by Rochefoucault, Voltaire, and Sévigné. Emilie de Coulanges, in Tales of Fashionable Life, is a dialogic novella about a triangle of three French and English upper-class women: the external cultural reference-points include the Renaissance paintings the English hostess Mrs. Somers collects.
- See also the wide intellectual range but imperfect comprehension betrayed by the Whig peer Lord Glistonbury in Vivian (146-47) and the dialogues between Lord Oldborough and Commissioner Falconer in Patronage (VI.21-26, VII.66-67).
- Some of Edgeworth's early reviewers and readers complained that she was a critic of the aristocratic system, e.g., of nepotism and patronage in the professions (Patronage) and bought votes in Parliament (Vivian). But Bentham published a two-part anonymous letter in consecutive issues of Leigh Hunt's Examiner (February 1814) extolling her criticisms. In private he urged her not to retract the least point. The identity of Bentham as the author of the Examiner letter was established by Dinwiddy.
- "We gained the day by this piece of honesty" (Castle Rackrent 34). See glossary note to text (66n).
- Letter from Frances Beaufort [from 1798, the fourth Mrs. RLE] to her brother William Beaufort, 2 July 1797. Her predecessor, Mrs. Elizabeth (Sneyd) Edgeworth was already at work designing the vignettes (of two bulls) which eventually preceded and followed the text.
- The full title used on publication was "An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence."
- See the discussion below of the 1798 Rebellion and, for Maria's use of utopianism from the Essay on Irish Bulls on, much of it via Robert Burton and Sir John Davies, see Butler "Edgeworth, the United Irishmen and 'More Intelligent Treason.'"
- See Butler and Desmarais, ed., Essay on Irish Bulls (85, 99, and notes 53, 54, 108, 210).
- There are suggestive parallels to "The Hibernian Mendicant" in two anonymous stories, "Ierne" [Ireland] and "A True Story," which both appeared in a short-lived Irish satirical newspaper, The Anti-Union (1798-99).
- See Essay on Irish Bulls, "Little Dominick" (The Novels I.89-95); "The Hibernian Mendicant" (The Novels I.112-16); "The Irish Incognito" (The Novels I.134-51).
- See Leerssen 355.
- My discussion of the aisling is indebted to Eoin.
- For the use made of Robert Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent, see The Black Book of Edgeworthstown.
- See also, Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, Télémaque (1699), classic work of a moralist and educator widely admired for his enlightened spiritual Catholicism; Fielding, Tom Jones (1748-49); Henry IV, Pts I and II; The Faerie Queene, Bk I. In Arcadia (1598) prince Musidorus glimpses the king's daughter Pamela, falls in love with her, and dresses as a shepherd, Dorus, in order to woo her—a model for Ormond's private courtship of "King" Corny's daughter Dora, whose name confirms the allusion to Sidney. Pamela was the name of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's wife.
- Edward Herbert's Autobiography (in later editions, Life) was discovered in ms by one of his descendants, and first published by Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill, 1764) with a frontispiece of Isaac Oliver's portrait (1616) of Herbert, dressed in black, covered by a shield, and lying by a woodland stream. The shield bears the inscription "Magia Naturalis"; behind Herbert is a caparisoned knight's horse, evidence of a battle. The scene depicts one of many quarrels or duels (allegorized as knightly encounters) in Herbert's then unpublished Autobiography. Herbert's most contentious works, those relating to religion, were not available in English, though on the Continent the Latin De Veritate (1624) was soon translated into French. Charles Blount's Religione Laici (1683) is substantially taken from Herbert. Herbert's version (1663), The Religion of the Gentiles, was translated into English by W. Lewis (1705). The Lunar Society's interests in alchemy and the scientific thought of the Renaissance are captured by the painter, Joseph Wright of Derby, who uses Oliver's portrait of Herbert, without attribution or explanation, as the model for his painting (1780) of the friend of Darwin and Wedgwood and English admirer and patron of Rousseau, Sir Brooke Boothby.
Works Cited
Beaufort, Frances. Letter to William Beaufort. 2 July 1797. Ms. 13176. Edgeworth Letters, to 1817. National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
Bentham, Jeremy. "A Pupil of Miss Edgeworth's." Examiner 20 February 1814: 124-26; 27 February 1814: 140-41.
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1621.
Butler, Harriet Jessie [Edgeworth] and Harold Edgeworth Butler, ed. The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and other Edgeworth Memories, 1585-1817. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927. 46-52.
Butler, Marilyn. "Edgeworth, the United Irishmen and 'More Intelligent Treason.'" Ed. Chris Fauske and Heidi Kaufman. An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2003.
Carr, John. Stranger in Ireland: or, A tour in the southern and western parts of that country in 1805. Shannon: Irish UP, 1806.
Curran, John Philpot. Collected Speeches, with a new Memoir of his Life. Dublin. 1815.
Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. 30-40.
Dinwiddy, J. R. "Jeremy Bentham as a Pupil of Miss Edgeworth's." Notes and Queries 29 (June 1982): 208-10.
Dunne, Tom. "'A Gentleman's Estate should be a moral school': Edgeworthstown in Fact and Fiction, 1760-1840." Ed. Gillespie and Moran. 95-121.
——. "Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing, 1800-1850." Ed. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich. Romanticism in a National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 68-91.
Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1997. 161-77.
Edgeworth, Maria. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. 12 vols. General Ed. Marilyn Butler, with Mitzi Myers. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999.
——. The Absentee. Vol. V. Ed. Heidi Van de Veire and Kim Walker.
——. Castle Rackrent. Vol. I. Ed. Tim McLoughlin and Marilyn Butler.
——. Emilie de Coulanges. Vol. V. Ed. Heidi Van de Veire and Kim Walker.
——. Ennui. Vol. I. Ed. Tim McLoughlin and Marilyn Butler.
——. Irish Bulls. Vol. I. Ed. Marilyn Butler and Jane Desmarais.
——. Leonora. Vol. III. Ed. Marilyn Butler and Susan Manly.
——. Ormond. Vol. VIII. Ed. Claire Connolly.
——. Patronage. Vols. VI-VII. Ed. Connor Carville.
——. Vivian. Vol. IV. Ed. Claire Connolly.
Edgeworth, Richard. The Black Book of Edgeworthstown. Ms. National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. "An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence." Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy VI (1797): 95-139. Rpt. in Nicholson's Journal II (1798-99).
Eoin, Máirín nic. "Secrets and Disguises? Caitlín Ní Uallachaín and other female personages in eighteenth-century Irish political poetry." Eighteenth-Century Ireland XI (1996): 7-45.
Ferris, Ina. "Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale." Nineteenth-Century Literature 51 (1996): 287-303.
Flanagan, Thomas. The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850. New York: Columbia UP, 1959. 69-79.
Gillespie, Raymond. "A Question of Survival: The O'Farrells and Longford in the Seventeenth Century." Ed. Gillespie and Moran. 13-29.
Gillespie, Raymond and Gerard Moran, ed. Longford: Essays in County History. Dublin: Lilliput, 1991.
"Ierne." The Anti-Union 1 Jan. 1799: 9-12.
Leerssen, Joep. Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development, and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. 2nd ed. Cork: Cork UP, 1996.
Maguire, W. A. "Castle Nugent and Castle Rackrent; fact and fiction in Maria Edgeworth." Eighteenth-Century Ireland XI (1996): 146-59.
McCormack, W. J. "The Tedium of History: an approach to Maria Edgeworth's Patronage (1814)." Ideology and the Historians. Ed. Ciaran Brady. Dublin: Lilliput P, 1991. 77-98.
Musgrave, Robert. Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, From the Arrival of the English: Also, a particular Detail of that Which Broke Out the 23d of May, 1798; with the History of the Conspiracy which Preceded It. 1801.
Myers, Mitzi. "Goring John Bull: Maria Edgeworth's Hibernian High Jinks versus the Imperialist Imaginary." Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire. Ed. James E. Gill. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995. 367-94.
Obituary for Lady Cathcart. Gentleman's Magazine August 1789: 766-67.
Swift, Jonathan. Letter to Lord Bathurst. Oct. 1730. Vol 3. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Harold Williams. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. 409-412.
"A True Story." The Anti-Union 17 Jan. 1799: 37-40.
Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.
Twiss, Richard. A Tour in Ireland in 1775. London: n.p., 1776.
Whelan, Kevin. Foreword. "Writing Ireland, Reading England." The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. Ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000. ix-xxiv.
——. The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760-1830. Cork: Cork UP, 1996.
Further Reading
Biography
Lawless, Emily. Maria Edgeworth, New York: Macmillan. 1904, 220 p.
Offers a biography of Edgeworth from the English Men of Letters series.
Criticism
Gallagher, Catherine. "The Changeling's Debt: Maria Edgeworth's Productive Fictions." In Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820, pp. 257-327. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Discusses Edgeworth's privileged position within the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace.
Gamer, Michael. "Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of Real Life." Novel 34, no. 2 (spring 2001): 232-66.
Analyzes Edgeworth's unique approach to literary realism.
Greenfield, Susan C. "'Abroad and at Home': Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth's Belinda." PMLA 112, no. 2 (March 1997): 214-28.
Examines the oppositions between public and private spheres and between England and the British West Indies in Belinda.
Hoad, Neville. "Maria Edgeworth's Harrington: The Price of Sympathetic Representation." In British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, edited by Sheila A. Spector, pp. 121-37. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Studies Edgeworth's attempt to represent Jews in a sympathetic manner, which is complicated by issues of gender as well as social and economic class.
Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. "The Limits of Liberal Feminism in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. "In Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, edited by Laura Dabundo, pp. 73-82. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000.
Discusses Edgeworth's Lady Anne Percival as a model for female domestic virtue.
Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth. "Reading the Father Metaphorically." In Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, pp. 296-316. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.
Considers Edgeworth's relationship to her father and its influence on her life and writing career.
McCann, Andrew. "Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda." Novel 30, no. 1 (fall 1996): 56-77.
Examines Edgeworth's attempt in Belinda to encourage the abolition of slavery in the colonies and replace it with the culture of wage-labor.
Narain, Mona. "A Prescription of Letters: Maria Edgeworth's Letters for Literary Ladies and the Ideologies of the Public Sphere." The Journal of Narrative Technique 28, no. 3 (fall 1998): 266-86.
Discusses issues of feminine identity and the woman writer through an examination of Edgeworth's Letters for Literary Ladies.
Page, Judith. "Maria Edgeworth's Harrington: From Shylock to Shadowy Peddlers." The Wordsworth Circle 32, no. 1 (winter 2001): 9-13.
Examines Edgeworth's use of Gothic conventions to situate the figure of the Jew as an outcast in Harrington.
Schaffer, Julie. "Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage-Plot—The Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen." Criticism 34, no. 1 (winter 1992): 51-73.
Comparative study of three marriage-plot novels: Burney's Evelina, Edgeworth's Belinda, and Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Edgeworth's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 116, 159, 163; Feminist Writers; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 51; Something about the Author, Vol. 21; Twayne's English Authors; and World Literature and Its Times, Ed. 3.