New Essays on Maria Edgeworth 9780815390664, 9781351152600, 9781351126786

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Story to Tell
1 West Indian Obeah and English 'Obee': Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
2 Maria and Rachel: Transatlantic Identities and the Epistolary Assimilation of Difference
3 Not the Angel in the House: Intersections of the Public and Private in Maria Edgeworth's Moral Tales and Practical Education
4 Maria Edgeworth and the 'True Use of Books' for Eighteenth-Century Girls
5 Finding Her Own Voice or 'Being on Her Own Bottom': A Community of Women in Maria Edgeworth's Helen
6 'I thought I never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man': Maria Edgeworth Scrutinizes Masculinity in Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee
7 Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda
8 'Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy': Servants in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
9 Justice, Citizenship, and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading The Absentee as a Historical Novel
10 Maria Edgeworth and the Irish 'Thin Places'
Index

Citation preview

NEW ESSAYS ON MARIA EDGEWORTH    Edited by Julie Nash

New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

Edited by Julie Nash

ISBN 978-0-8153-9066-4

www.routledge.com  an informa business

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11/1/2017 7:02:09 PM

NEW ESSAYS ON MARIA EDGEWORTH

New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

Edited by JULIE NASH

First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing Reissued 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © The contributors, 2006 Julie Nash has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2005021050 Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. ISBN 13: 978-0-815-39066-4 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-351-12678-6 (ebk)

Contents Notes on Contributors

vii

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: A Story to Tell Julie Nash

xiii

1

West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda Alison Harvey

1

2

Maria and Rachel: Transatlantic Identities and the Epistolary Assimilation of Difference Eve Tavor Bannet

31

3

Not the Angel in the House: Intersections of the Public and Private in Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales and Practical Education Mona Narain

57

4

Maria Edgeworth and the ‘True Use of Books’ for EighteenthCentury Girls Kathleen B. Grathwol

73

5

Finding Her Own Voice or ‘Being on Her Own Bottom’: A Community of Women in Maria Edgeworth’s Helen Frances R. Botkin

93

6

‘I thought I never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man’: Maria Edgeworth Scrutinizes Masculinity in Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee Irene Basey Beesemyer

109

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

7

Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda Joanne Cordon

131

8

‘Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy’: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda Julie Nash

161

9

Justice, Citizenship, and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading The Absentee as a Historical Novel Kara M. Ryan

175

10

Maria Edgeworth and the Irish ‘Thin Places’ Laura Dabundo

193

Index

199

Notes on Contributors Eve Tavor Bannet is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore, 2000) and of Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondences, 1688-1820 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Her current project involves transatlantic women writers and the letter form. Irene Basey Beesemyer holds a Ph. D. from the University of California Los Angeles. Her work focuses on English masculinity, including English male libertinism found in the literature of the long eighteenth century. Her current project is an edition of the 1660 novel/romance Aretina by Sir George Mackenzie for the Scottish Text Society. Frances R. Botkin is an Assistant Professor at Towson University. She has published and presented on Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Jane Austen and William Wordsworth. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Obi: Caribbean Literature and the British Imagination. Joanne Cordon received her Ph. D. from the University of Connecticut in 2004, and has taught at the University of Connecticut and at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her current project is tentatively titled Twin Strangleholds of Style: The Blathering Irishman, the Simpering Miss, and the Invisible Irish Woman, which argues that Irish men and English women are rhetorically stereotyped in the same way in the long eighteenth century. Laura Dabundo is the director of Kennesaw State University Press. She is also a professor in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University where she teaches courses in English Romanticism, the Gothic, and the Bible as Literature. Her publications include The Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain from the 1780s to the 1830s (Garland, 1992) and Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters (University Press of America, 2000), as well as a number of articles on related subjects.

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Kathleen B. Grathwol has a Ph. D. from Brandeis University. She was the recipient of a Mellon Fellowship, as well as an NEH Dissertation Fellowship. She has published on feminist studies in the eighteenth century, and on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Madame de Sevigne. She is currently working as an independent scholar in the Washington, DC metro area and is revising a manuscript on scandal in eighteenth-century women’s writing. Alison Harvey is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Realizing Ireland in an Age of Nationalism: Women, Nation, and the Place of the Irish Novel 18701922, posits the emergence in late-nineteenth-century Ireland of a new kind of national novel that developed alongside but apart from the more well-known writings of cultural nationalists in the period. Mona Narain teaches in the English department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published on eighteenth-century women’s writing and configurations of sexuality and subjectivity. Currently, she is working on the intersections between the concepts of Space and the Public Sphere. She has an article forthcoming in English Literary History on the interconnections between geography and sexuality in the poetry of Rochester and Edward Ward. Another essay is forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism on Elizabeth Hamilton, which is part of a longer project on Colonialism and a comparative analysis of English, and Indian women’s writing on India in the eighteenth century. Julie Nash is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she teaches British literature and writing. Her published works include articles on Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Fay Weldon, and she is coeditor of New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Bronte (Ashgate Publishing, 2001). She was a recent guest editor for a special issue on servants and literature of the journal Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. She is currently writing a book about servants in novels by Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell, to be published by Ashgate Publishing. Kara M. Ryan is currently finishing her dissertation on historical novels by nineteenth-century British and Irish women writers. An essay from her dissertation appears in the collection Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by James H. Murphy (Four Courts Press, 2005). She has also written reviews for Irish Studies Review, New Hibernia Review, and Eire-Ireland. As a graduate student, she was an editorial intern for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and book review editor for The James Joyce Quarterly.

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, noncanonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

University of Leicester

Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the Edgeworth fans who were enthusiastic about this book from its earliest stages, especially George Bouloukos, Anne K. Mellor, Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, Jean Marsden, Kate Capshaw Smith, and Gina Barreca, each of whom offered support, suggested contributors, or just cheered me on. My students at the University of Massachusetts Lowell offered fresh readings of Edgeworth’s novels, and I am grateful for their insight into her writings. I am also indebted to University of Massachusetts Lowell student Nathan Lamar, former student Jonathan Martin, and colleague Paula Haines for their help preparing this manuscript. The editorial and production staff at Ashgate Publishing is a pleasure to work with. I am grateful to series editors Joanne Shattock and Vincent Newey for backing another one of my projects, to Melissa Riley-Jones and Liz Pearce for production advice, and especially to Ann Donahue, a true professional if ever there was one. I would also like to thank my husband Quentin Miller of Suffolk University who continues to inspire and encourage me with each new challenge. Finally, this book is dedicated to the nine other terrific contributors who brought so much more than just their scholarship to this project: encouragement, advice, good humor, and energy. It has been a privilege to work with each one of them.

Introduction: A Story to Tell Julie Nash

Two years before her death in 1849, Maria Edgeworth wrote to her publishers, praising Sir Walter Scott as a ‘national’ writer, and downplaying her own writings as having no national or political significance. Her books, she wrote, ‘require no national explanations, and I have nothing personal to add. As a woman, my life, wholly domestic, cannot afford anything interesting to the public. . . . I have no story to tell’ (Chosen Letters 449). As with nearly everything Edgeworth wrote, we have to read between the lines a bit. In addition to being an internationally known novelist, Edgeworth shaped public policy through her treatises on education and tenant reform. During the Irish famine, she labored with and lobbied for her tenants to ameliorate their sufferings and improve their economic prospects. She did, in fact, have a fascinating story to tell, and the essays in this new collection offer a fresh perspective both on her personal story and on those she spent her lifetime telling. Though she is best known today for her depiction of Ireland’s peasants and landlords, Edgeworth was born in Oxfordshire, England in 1768. She was the eldest daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an Anglo-Irish landowner and quintessential Enlightenment man: inventor, writer, educator, social theorist. She moved to County Longford, Ireland at the age of fourteen. In 1795, Maria Edgeworth published Letters for Literary Ladies criticizing the common practice of educating woman for the sole purpose of pleasing men. Education in general, and the education of women in particular, was a passion of hers. From Practical Education (1798), co-written with her father, to her tales and novels, Maria Edgeworth’s works consistently emphasize the importance of education in shaping one’s moral development and in making rational choices. The publication of Castle Rackrent (1800) established Edgeworth as an important Irish voice, exposing the abuses of the Irish peasantry through vivid satirical portraits of drunken landlords and scheming agents. She continued her exploration of life in Ireland in Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812) and Ormond (1817). Throughout her life, as a writer and an estate manager, Maria Edgeworth worked to reform the exploitative landlord/tenant relationship that structured life in the Irish ‘Big House.’ The Edgeworths provided educational opportunities for their tenants; they developed a system that would enable workers to profit from improvements they made to the estate; and they took a personal interest in their

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tenants’ lives, helping their children find jobs and staying in touch with them after they left the family estate at Edgeworthstown. This system became a model of progressive paternalism in Ireland. In return for their reforms and support, the Edgeworths expected and received their tenants’ loyalty and gratitude. The author did not limit herself to writing about Ireland and the Irish people. Like those of her contemporaries Fanny Burney and Elizabeth Inchbald, Edgeworth’s novels of British society—such as Belinda (1801), Patronage (1814), Harrington (1817), and Helen (1834)—depict the many snares awaiting young women embarking on the marriage market. Her heroines, virtuous and sensible, are rewarded with ‘good’ marriages, but not before they are nearly ruined by the jealous, selfish, or merely thoughtless friends and enemies thrown in their path. These novels of manners treat domestic matters seriously, and, as several of the essays in this collection demonstrate, Edgeworth was well aware of the connections between the personal and the political. Critic Anne K. Mellor classifies Edgeworth as a ‘feminine Romantic,’ opposing the radical social views of her masculine counterparts such as William Blake, William Godwin, and the young William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Instead, she writes, many of ‘the women writers of the Romantic era offered an alternative program grounded on the trope of the family-politic, the idea of a nation-state that evolves gradually and rationally under the mutual care and guidance of both mother and father’ (65). For Edgeworth, then, criticism of the family involved an implicit critique of society in general. Criticism on Maria Edgeworth has traditionally focused on her personal and professional relationship with her father, which was unarguably the most significant involvement in her life. After her mother’s death, Edgeworth lived with her father and a succession of stepmothers on their Irish estate, helping to educate her numerous half-siblings and serving as a companion to R. L. Edgeworth. She credits him as an active influence on all of her novels (except Castle Rackrent and Helen), on several theoretical works on education, and on her numerous stories written for children and young adults. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace describes Edgeworth as ‘a particularly strong example’ of a ‘daddy’s girl,’ for whom ‘identification with patriarchal politics provided an opportunity for self-definition . . . [a] chance for authority and for limited empowerment’ (96). Gary Kelly writes that Edgeworth’s novels ‘followed plans and themes suggested by her father, corrected according to his criticisms, and published under cover of prefaces by him’ (91). Yet if Edgeworth’s had merely reiterated her father’s ideas, her work would not present the critical puzzle that it does. Maria Edgeworth’s writings embody a curious tension between Edgeworth the dutiful daughter of patriarchy and Edgeworth the surprisingly progressive iconoclast. Mark Hawthorne writes that her novels should be read on two levels: the first, ‘didactic, purely and simply. It is this level which repels many 20th century scholars, for she could be . . . crudely dogmatic. . . . On the second [level] she advanced her own doubts . . . [creating] a form of fiction that is at once outspoken and subdued’ (3). Similarly, KowaleskiWallace, who closely associates Edgeworth with patriarchal values, nevertheless

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comments upon ‘the persistent shadows of an irrational force, one that never quite disappears from her work’ (104). Marjorie Lightfoot describes Edgeworth’s outlook as ‘that of a radical and conservative Anglo-Irish woman, as she questions colonialism, traditional male/female relationships, and styles of art and life while trying to preserve moral boundaries’ (119). Each of these critics advances different theses about Edgeworth and each approaches her writings from a different perspective, yet they share the common perspective that Edgeworth’s life and work —at once moralistic and doubting, conservative and radical—resist easy categorization Her copious works move uneasily between an enthusiastic espousal of a progressive paternalist social model and a more radical ideology that embraced change. She referred to herself as ‘little i’ in letters to her father and aunt, but was described by Sir Walter Scott as ‘the Great Maria.’ She was the most highly acclaimed author of her day and an established member of the international literati, but until recent years her place in the British canon—or even the canons of Irish or women writers—has been as a precursor to Jane Austen or Sir Walter Scott. The essays in this collection move beyond the binary categorizations of ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ to situate her writing in the context of her life and times. The story that Edgeworth tells through her educational works, her novels, her letters, and her tales, is the story of a world grounded in tradition, supported by slavery and colonial domination, whose values are being challenged and ultimately changed. Readings of Maria Edgeworth’s works are also being challenged and changed, both by established literary critics, and by newer scholars who are reading the author through the lens of different critical approaches. Recent articles and books on Edgeworth move beyond the traditional focus on her Irish writing or her moral didacticism and examine Edgeworth as a humorist, an educator, and a social critic. Yet few projects examine the range of Edgeworth’s writing from her moral tales, to her letters, to her novels. In fact, prior to 2004, only one collection of essays has ever been published on this prolific and influential author, and that book, Family Chronicles: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, is devoted to a single novel, and it was published in 1987. An internet search of course syllabi reveals that Edgeworth is being taught in courses on Romanticism, the British Novel, Women’s Studies, Children’s Literature, the Regional Novel, and the Political Novel, as well as traditional British Literature surveys. The essays in this collection reflect the diversity of approaches to the author, though they are united in taking Edgeworth seriously as a leading thinker of her day. Far from pigeon-holing the author as a mere ‘domestic’ writer or a regionalist, the first two essays in the collection view Edgeworth in light of international issues. Alison Harvey reads Belinda as a colonial novel, one that examines the West Indian Obeah woman and the British upper-class radical feminist as threats to English colonial and social order. Eve Tavor Bannet also looks at the figure of the outsider in her essay about Edgeworth’s correspondence with the Jewish-American woman Rachel Mordecai Lazarus. Both of these articles

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posit Edgeworth as a thinker who challenges the categories of insider and outsider, and explores the consequences of pushing those boundaries. Mona Narain’s essay on Edgeworth’s Moral Tales and Practical Education also reveals Edgeworth as a writer who resists binary classifications. In these early educational writings, Edgeworth explores the intersections of the private and the public, and presents an integrated discussion about the construction of private subjectivity and its public performance, ultimately rejecting the limitation of women to the domestic sphere. Kathleen B. Grathwol takes up the topic of education in her essay, placing Edgeworth’s educational writings in the context of international eighteenth-century texts, specifically French and English novels about scandalous women who serve as cautionary tales for young girls. Frances R. Botkin and Irene Basey Beesemyer also explore Edgeworth’s interest in gender roles. Botkin notes that Edgeworth’s last novel, Helen, is her most woman-centered text, underscoring the importance of a strong community of women and challenging the notion of Edgeworth as a mouthpiece for patriarchy. As Botkin notes, Helen, Edgeworth’s only novel written after Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s death, interrogates and subverts assumptions about women’s reliance upon and suppression by men. In her essay, Irene Basey Beesemyer takes a close look at Edgeworth’s men, a subject that has received surprisingly little critical attention. Beesemyer points out that Edgeworth is not content to scrutinize and dismiss successful prototypical male figures from the past, but that her works fashion a male hero who does not define his manhood through either the ownership or the subjugation of the female sex. Edgeworth actively resisted stereotypes while using them frequently. Joanne Cordon’s essay examines the ways in which Edgeworth subverts the rhetorical stereotyping of the blathering Stage Irishman and the Simpering Miss in Castle Rackrent and Belinda, pointing out the cultural power of these stereotypes and Edgeworth’s difficulties in challenging them. In deconstructing these stock images, Edgeworth also deconstructs the intellectual, social, and political underpinnings of the cultural ideology. In my essay on Edgeworth’s servant characters, I make a similar point, noting how Edgeworth exploits common stereotypes of servants in her domestic novels, only to reveal these stereotypes as hollow. In doing so, she ultimately challenges the ideology of Burkean paternalism that she often appears to be advocating. Kara M. Ryan also examines the tension in Edgeworth’s response to Burke in her historical novel The Absentee, noting the way in which Edgeworth embraces Burke’s overtly anti-bourgeois stance while revealing his notions of justice and virtue to be inherently gendered and constructed. Ryan places The Absentee in the context of other historical novels, but specifically reads it as a progressive historiography about Ireland. Much has been written about Edgeworth’s relationship to Ireland, a country that both charmed and exasperated her. Toward the end of her life, she wrote a poem about her adopted country that began, ‘Ireland, with all thy faults, thy follies too,/I love thee still.’ Laura Dabundo

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takes a new look at Edgeworth’s relationship to Ireland, and finds some rich Celtic insights that have been previously overlooked or dismissed. Maria Edgeworth is difficult to label: a feminist who parodied Wollstonecraftian radicalism, an abolitionist who idealized the loyal slave, a paternalist who undermined patriarchal power, a realist who never lost sight of the ideal. This collection examines her ideological contradictions as well as her consistent advocacy of education and reason, not as means of finally pinning the author down, but of opening up avenues of further discussion and study. Works Cited Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. 1809. Ed. Brander Matthews. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1909. —. Belinda. 1801. Intro. Eva Figes. London: Pandora Press, 1986. —. Castle Rackrent. 1800. Ed. Marilyn Butler. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. —. Chosen Letters. Ed. F.V. Barry. London: Jonathan Cape, 1931. —. Ennui. 1804. Ed. Marilyn Butler. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. —. Harrington. 1817. London: William Glaisher Ltd., 1924. —. Helen. 1834. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Hawthorne, Mark. Doubt and Dogma in Maria Edgeworth. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1967. Kelly, Gary. ‘Class, Gender, Nation, and Empire: Money and Merit in the Writing of the Edgeworths.’ The Wordsworth Circle 25:2 (1994): 89-93. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. New York/Oxford, 1991. Lightfoot, Marjorie. ‘Morals for Those that Like Them: The Satire of Edgeworth’s Belinda, 1801.’ Eire-Ireland:A Journal of Irish Studies 29:4 (1994): 117-131. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Owens, Coilin, ed. Family Chronicles: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1987.

Chapter 1

West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda1 Alison Harvey

I In her novel of English manners, Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth stages the story of Belinda’s quest for a suitable husband as a morality tale in which deviant and exemplary women serve as models of behavior among which Belinda must choose rightly if she is to marry successfully. Edgeworth presents the shortcomings of the dissipated aristocrat Lady Delacour, the too-radical antics of the mannish Harriet Freke, and the successes of the exemplary wife and mother, Lady Percival, as lessons on Belinda’s road to marital happiness. In order to clear the way for Belinda’s progress, the novel requires that the ‘failed’ women be integrated into or excised from the narrative; thus Lady Delacour is reformed into a good wife and mother, while Harriet Freke is removed from the novel, last seen with her leg caught in a ‘man-trap’ (Belinda 309). Edgeworth’s technique of portraying clearly good and bad characters as moral models for her protagonist—and for the reader as well—is characteristic of her work and can be seen in her Moral Tales (1801) as well as in her novels and plays.2 But in Belinda, as in several of her other works, Edgeworth also interrupts those binaries, in the form of characters that cannot be contained within the simply moralistic binary schema. Thus even as the narrative of Belinda’s development into a sensible and properly married woman requires the excision of the mannish Harriet Freke from the narrative, the novel first maps Harriet’s distance from English domestic society by aligning her with the obeah woman, a figure in African-Caribbean culture who was feared by white West Indian plantocrats for her notorious involvements in Maroon and slave rebellions. In making this link, Edgeworth implies that the threat that Harriet’s gender-bending antics pose to the social order represented by the English family is in some sense parallel to the threat

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posed by the black obeah woman to white English colonial order in the West Indies. Critics have for the most part interpreted Edgeworth’s portrayal of Harriet Freke as an obeah woman as an expression of Edgeworth’s anxious and conservative views regarding Harriet’s radical feminism and the institution of slavery.3 But none has noted the multiple relationships that Edgeworth establishes in this novel between English women and both slaves and West Indian Creoles, relationships through which Edgeworth draws implicit parallels between the sexual subordination of Englishwomen and the ethnic and racial inferiority attributed by English society to slaves and West Indian Creoles. A close examination of these relationships suggests that Edgeworth is not simply enacting what Andrew McCann identifies as a dual containment of difference and insurgency (McCann 56-58). On the contrary, by aligning English women with Creole and African-Caribbean figures whose marginalizations she views with some ambivalence throughout her work, Edgeworth constructs a more complex view of women’s positions in what McCann calls ‘Enlightenment conjugality’ than critics have hitherto considered.4 Noting Edgeworth’s tendency to undermine binary structures of thought, Esther Wohlgemut has argued that, in her Irish novels such as Castle Rackrent (1800) and Ennui (1809), Edgeworth offers a redefinition of nationalism that is neither English nor Irish but rather blurs the boundary between such national identities.5 In her treatment of English colonialist structures of thought in Belinda, Edgeworth blurs conventional views of two other categories as well—gender and race. Such blurrings, which also appear in Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1804), and The Two Guardians (1817), suggest that, while Edgeworth neither endorses the radical feminism of her contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, nor holds a radical view of slaves’ emancipation efforts, she nonetheless offers a critique of the hegemonic power assumed by white English patriarchal society. In Belinda, Edgeworth exposes how a society based on white male privilege views both women and non-whites as ‘others’ whose potential to disrupt social, economic, and domestic English structures must be contained. The irruptions into Belinda’s English world of West Indian Creoles and AfricanCaribbean slaves, and the structural parallels Edgeworth draws between English women and these ‘other’ characters, derail any understanding of her novel as a straightforward narrative of Belinda’s progress toward a seamless integration into rational English domesticity. Rather than read Edgeworth as aligned with the white colonial power she explores in Belinda and other works, my analysis will show that she is—in surprising ways—its critic. II In regard to Edgeworth’s complicated stance toward race, sexual difference, and questions of colonial power, the revisions Edgeworth made to Belinda for its publication in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s 1809 British Novelists Series are

West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’

3

particularly revealing. These revisions concentrated on rewriting those parts of the plot dealing with the relationship between Belinda and the West Indian Creole planter, Mr. Vincent, and the marriage between Vincent’s black servant, Juba, and Lady Delacour’s white servant, Lucy.6 Kathryn Kirkpatrick reads both revisions as Edgeworth’s removal of the threat of inter-racial alliances from her novel of English manners. As Edgeworth explains in a letter to Barbauld, her decision to rewrite the inter-racial marriage of Juba and Lucy as an inter-class one between ‘Jackson’ and Lucy came as a result of ‘gentlemen’s’ reactions to her novel: ‘My father says that gentlemen have horrors upon this subject, and would draw conclusions very unfavorable to a female writer who appeared to recommend such unions; as I do not understand the subject, I trust to his better judgment’ (quoted in Kirkpatrick 342). As Kirkpatrick points out, however, ‘this kind of mixed-race marriage [as that between Juba and Lucy] was far from unheard-of in late-eighteenth-century English society’ as slaves had been brought back to England as servants ‘since the beginning of the slave trade’ and ‘did sometimes marry lower-class English servants’ (342). In her novel, Edgeworth presents informed portrayals of West Indian Creoles and slaves and their ambivalent status in England, through her portrayals of Vincent’s colonial inheritance and his position as ward to the benevolent English gentleman, Percival; Juba’s position as a freed slave in England; and Harriet Freke’s ‘obeah’ tricks and Juba’s responses to them. Edgeworth certainly seems to ‘understand’ a substantial amount about colonial and race matters in England at the time, and thus her disavowal—‘I do not understand the subject’—seems disingenuous at the very least, and is difficult to read without hearing in it a level of irony. Kirkpatrick suggests that what shocked readers of Edgeworth’s novel was not that Edgeworth had imagined an inter-racial marriage but that she had given ‘social sanction to such a marriage’ (342) in Belinda. I would further argue that if there is anything that Edgeworth ‘do[es] not understand [about] the subject,’ it is not the subject itself but rather the fact that ‘gentlemen’ would find such a portrayal by a ‘female writer’ so particularly unsettling. In the idea that an inter-racial marriage portrayed by a woman writer is particularly offensive to ‘gentlemen’ readers, questions of gender, race, and power intersect. There seems something almost equally threatening in a woman’s having portrayed an inter-racial relationship as there is in the inter-racial relationship itself. Edgeworth’s revisions, and her comments to her father, suggest that Edgeworth was not unaware of such intersections. To return to her portrayal of Harriet Freke as an obeah woman, one could argue that in this portrayal of Freke, whose frightening of Juba must be explained and soothed by Belinda’s scientific explanation of an apparently supernatural phenomenon, Edgeworth in some sense defines white English womanhood against racial others in Belinda. But, even as she at times defines Englishness against otherness, she also portrays in this novel a discomfort with how the two distinct categories of gender and race are in fact conflated in a white English male perspective, one that views both women and blacks as others to

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

mainstream English society and as threats to English domestic and colonial stability. This reading runs against the grain of the marriage plot that appears to structure Edgeworth’s novel, but that plot resists straightforward readings, not least because of the way Edgeworth literally stages her novel’s closing scene as a highly artificial tableau of domestic bliss. Edgeworth’s narration of this final scene acknowledges the artificiality and illusory quality of narrative representation as Lady Delacour offers to ‘finish the novel for [Belinda],’ and proceeds to arrange the characters ‘in proper attitudes for stage-effects’ (478). Lady Delacour places Captain Sunderland and Virginia kneeling at Virginia’s father’s feet, and to Clarence she gives ‘the right to Belinda’s hand’ despite Belinda’s implicit resistance (‘Nay, miss Portman,’ says Lady Delacour, ‘it is the rule of the stage’ [478]). Finally, Lady Delacour places herself in a posture of being embraced by her husband, who holds their daughter Helena’s hand: ‘There!’ Lady Delacour exclaims; ‘Quite pretty and natural!’ (478). The fact that Lady Delacour has to arrange all the now-presumably-happy couples in positions which even they do not seem to find entirely comfortable reveals the uncertainties within the narrative that leads to this scene. The kneeling position of Virginia (the daughter of the West Indian planter Hartley) and her affianced, the English captain who saved her father from a West Indian slave rebellion, finds an echo in Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), where the kneeling of an Irish peasant before his Anglo-Irish landlord and ‘master’ is seen as an inappropriate deference to paternal and colonial authority: ‘And my father was dropping down on his knees, but the master would not let him; and obsarved, that posture should only be for his God’ (The Absentee 277). Lady Delacour’s direction to Belinda to give her hand to Clarence contains the hint of Belinda’s reluctance to do so, and Lady Delacour’s own assertion that ‘what signifies being happy, unless we appear so?’ undermines the putative moral of the novel: that appearances are not what are most important to happiness. In fact, although the novel purports to narrate a liberation of its characters from the baneful effects of false appearances, it belies its own appearances, not just in the final scene but at several other points as well. One such slippage occurs in the portrayal of the Creole heir, Vincent. Critics have asserted that, in preventing Belinda from marrying Vincent, Edgeworth enacts a rejection of his racial ambiguities as a Creole.7 Vincent, though loosely positioned as white in the novel, is, as a Creole, identified by the English in the novel with the ‘negroes’ among whom he was raised and from whom he learned his inveterate gambling habits.8 In suggesting that Vincent’s penchant for gambling is due to the corrupting influence of his plantation slaves, Edgeworth alludes to turn-of-the-century discourses that viewed slaves’ practices of obeah and their habits of gambling as dual proofs of their uncivilized and irreligious natures.9 In the context of those discourses, Belinda’s rejection of Vincent for his seemingly fatal flaw of gambling could be read as her seeing that habit as a racial taint that Vincent has picked up in the West Indies and, further, as her cloaking her

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resistance to his otherness. Rather than endorsing Belinda’s rejection of Vincent, however, Edgeworth complicates it, for while it is true that Vincent is ruined at Mrs. Luttridge’s table, he is ruined only because she is cheating. The novel emphasizes the way in which Vincent is the ‘victim’ of the calculating Mrs. Luttridge, who ‘hesitated only whether it would be more her interest to marry him to her niece, or to content herself with his fortune . . . [T]he aunt, careless of her niece’s disappointment, determined that Mr. Vincent should be her victim; and sensible that she must not give him time for reflection, she hurried him on’ (Belinda 427). While Edgeworth has Belinda reject Vincent because of his gambling tendencies, she also makes it clear that an English woman’s manipulation of him is the true source of his downfall. Belinda’s rejection of Vincent solely for his gambling tendencies thus emerges in the novel as a moment in need of further explanation. While Vincent is not, ultimately, ‘redeemed’ in the novel by being allowed the ‘right to Belinda’s hand,’ his being positioned by Edgeworth as the victim of a scheming and morally-bereft society woman—with whom Lady Delacour has fought a duel and whose character resembles that of Lady Delacour before her ‘reformation’—conveys the idea that Vincent’s ‘one fatal propensity’ (444) is at least in part exacerbated by English societal pressures, even as it is not totally disavowed in the novel as connected to his West Indian character. The slippage between Belinda’s responses to Vincent and Edgeworth’s own characterization of him as Mrs. Luttridge’s victim suggests that, whatever association Belinda’s rejection may imply between Vincent’s gambling habits and his racially ambiguous status as a Creole, Edgeworth questions the idea of his being tainted by West Indian culture and also questions the rightness of Belinda’s rejection of him. In tandem with Edgeworth’s characterization of Harriet Freke’s threat to English culture as that of the socially threatening obeah woman, her portrayal of Vincent’s gambling as the flaw Belinda cannot forgive aligns Freke and Vincent with colonial outsiders denied legitimacy in English culture. A contemporary of Edgeworth’s, Benjamin Mosely, in A Treatise on Sugar (second ed. 1800), emphasizes the imagination needed for gambling, and links it with the imagination involved in the practice of obeah, remarking that ‘obi [obeah], and gambling are the only instances . . . among the natives of the negro land in Africa, in which any effort of combining ideas has ever been demonstrated’ (quoted in Richardson 18). Although Mosely’s remarks on obeah and gambling are meant to denigrate both of these activities (as well as the African-West Indians who practice them), they also reveal how both of these instances of colonial imagination were seen as threats to the stability of the colonial and English economic order. Edgeworth distances herself from Belinda’s rejection of Vincent by stating that Mrs. Luttridge’s scheming avarice is at least as much to blame for Vincent’s failures as his own ‘native’ gambling habits. The narrative thus begins to articulate the idea that, rather than there being a parallel between Belinda’s attitude and Edgeworth’s, a more compelling series of parallels can be drawn between Mrs. Luttridge’s exploitation of Vincent, Belinda’s rejection of him, and the colonial fear of the gambling native as threat to colonial stability.

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

As Kirkpatrick argues, although Vincent is set up in the novel in the terms of a stereotypically intemperate West Indian whose actions and property are in need of control by his English guardian (Mr. Percival), Vincent’s property is ultimately ‘withheld from the novel’s ideal patriarch. Rather than depicting the reintegration of colonial wealth into the English social system, Edgeworth sunders the connection between Mr. Percival and his Creole ward’ (Kirkpatrick 347). In her thoughtful reading, Kirkpatrick argues that in severing Percival from his ward (and his ward’s money), Edgeworth evinces an undercurrent of resistance to English absorption of colonial fortunes and thus grants some independence to Vincent as a colonial figure whose property is not successfully absorbed into white mainstream English society. Susan Greenfield, however, reads that development as the refusal of white society—and of Edgeworth herself—to accommodate the ‘other’ into its midst. Greenfield’s reading could be supported by the mere fact that Belinda, whom Clarence Hervey observes has the ‘whitest hands’ and ‘finest hair’ he has ever seen (Belinda 71, 76), chooses the English Clarence Hervey, not the Creole Vincent, as her husband-to-be. In her analysis, however, Greenfield emphasizes the role of Lady Delacour as an agent of the consolidation of colonial power, noting that Lady Delacour plays an active role in this marriage by prompting Belinda to choose Hervey. In Greenfield’s argument, Lady Delacour acts to preserve colonial stability not just in her role in Belinda’s marriage to Hervey but also in her role in Virginia’s marriage to Sunderland, the captain who had rescued Virginia’s father from a slave rebellion: For after ascertaining that Juba’s savior [Sunderland had helped Juba when Juba was injured] is also Virginia’s hero, she [Lady Delacour] guarantees that Sunderland will inherit some of the Negroes he suppressed on behalf of Virginia’s father. The marriage affirms that the English male rights to own a virgin body and to possess a colonized land worked by slaves are part of the same privilege. (Greenfield 224)

Although I agree with Greenfield that the novel raises these joint ideologies of possession, I do not believe the novel ultimately endorses them. Edgeworth complicates any reading of Lady Delacour as a consolidator of white colonial identity in the novel by associating Lady Delacour herself with West Indians in several ways in Belinda. First, her name echoes that of a West Indian character, Belacour, in Richard Cumberland’s play, The West Indian, staged in London in 1771.10 Belacour is a character much like Vincent: a West Indian Creole heir to a plantation fortune whose intemperate nature, ‘repeatedly attributed to the ‘hot clime’ in which he was born’ (Kirkpatrick 226), demands that he bow to the superior management of his English merchant father. Belacour is portrayed as ‘clearly in need of rational English government’ (226), and, unlike Vincent in parallel circumstances, is successfully managed by his English betters and neatly incorporated into the English society from which Vincent is excluded by his ‘fatal propensity.’ The echoing of ‘Belacour’ in ‘Delacour’ suggests that Lady Delacour’s

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reformation from dissipated aristocrat to good wife and mother is based, like Belacour’s, on her successful incorporation into ‘rational English government’—in this case, its social rules and conventions governing sexual behavior. Edgeworth also associates Lady Delacour with the West Indies through the thematic echoes in Lady Delacour’s life of obeah and its effects. Through her diseased breast, Lady Delacour is linked to the effects of obeah not only because Harriet Freke is ‘haunting’ her sick-chamber much as she earlier frightened Juba, but also in the way that Lady Delacour thinks that she is dying of a mysterious disease which is, in fact, not there. Obeah famously operated upon such psychological delusions. While obeah at times used poison to bring about the demise of those against whom it was aimed, it also functioned as a powerful psychological force that could itself lead to lethargy or even death,11 as we see when Juba seems on the verge of death due to his fear of the obeah that we find out is merely a prank of Harriet Freke’s (Belinda 220). Juba is sure that an obeah woman has ‘fixed’ him as revenge for his having, as a child, stepped on an obeah woman’s eggshell fetish (221). Similarly, Lady Delacour, who injured her breast in a duel while wearing men’s clothes, is convinced that her diseased breast is a moral punishment for her having strayed from the proper bounds of female behavior, as well as a punishment for her actions having led to the death of an admirer, Colonel Lawless, in a duel with Lord Delacour. In both Juba’s and Lady Delacour’s cases, the culprit is revealed to be Harriet Freke. She paints a phosphorus figure by Juba’s bed to frighten him, and it is she who goaded Lady Delacour to the duel with Lady Luttridge in which she injured her breast as well as to the subsequent indiscretion that led ultimately to Lawless’s death. But, despite Harriet Freke’s being in some sense responsible for the events that cause Juba and Lady Delacour distress, the fears that both Juba and Lady Delacour have are, at base, brought on by self-inflicted guilt and their fears of the judgments of their respective societies.12 As Hedrick and Stephens point out, obeah was often used in West African societies precisely as a kind of social control; the fear of its power prevented Africans from breaking social boundaries.13 In this regard, Edgeworth, in her portrayals of Lady Delacour’s self-damaging thralldom to social mores, sets her on a par with those slaves who were held in thrall to obeah to the point that they were unable to function. Edgeworth raises a further link in the novel between Lady Delacour and West Indian slave culture when, as Lady Delacour awaits surgery, her maid, Marriott, notes that Lady Delacour has taken to ‘reading those methodistical books that she keeps to herself,’ books of which Marriott seems (in Belinda’s view) to have an irrational fear. In his history of obeah in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaican culture, Joseph Williams states that, although obeah was thought to be declining in Jamaican slave culture with the Christianization of slaves undertaken by Baptist and Methodist missionaries in Jamaica in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in actuality, many slaves were forming a kind of hybrid belief system of obeah and Methodism, which was gradually perceived to be as dangerous to the social order of the plantations as obeah had been before it.14 That Lady

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

Delacour is herself engaged in reading such material seems within the novel to indicate the gravity of her dementia. At the same time, however, it also posits her as exceeding the rational bounds of—and thus remaining a potential threat to—the order into which she is trying so hard to insert herself: that of the domestic sphere characterized by a proper wife and a good mother, and exemplified by the Percivals’ happy home. Several structural parallels emerge in the connections Edgeworth’s narrative invokes between Lady Delacour and West Indian characters and beliefs. On the one hand, Lady Delacour is linked with the West Indian Creole Belacour who, in Cumberland’s play, is successfully integrated into English culture only by granting paternalistic authority to his English guardian. On the other hand, she is linked with Jamaican slaves whose beliefs in obeah were strengthened by the suppression of their traditions under English ‘Acts for the better order and government of slaves’ (Williams 162). Paralleling the position of Lady Delacour in English society and the positions of slaves and Creoles under English authority in the West Indies, Edgeworth shows that neither Lady Delacour nor the slaves and Creoles can be contained within the domestic ideology that underlies Belinda’s development. The parallels Edgeworth draws between women and slaves in her novel, however, are not the same as those that the more radical Mary Wollstonecraft draws in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) as part of her argument against men’s oppression of women.15 While Lady Delacour is characterized several times as a ‘slave’ in Belinda, Edgeworth’s deployment of the woman-slave metaphor emphasizes not women’s slavery to men but rather their slavery to larger social systems. Lady Delacour is called ‘the worst of slaves—a slave to the world’ (41) and a ‘slave of false shame’ (48), and is characterized as ‘enslaved to dissipation’ and (again) to ‘the world’ (209). And when Lady Delacour exerts her own will to free herself from ‘slavery,’ she does so not in relation to male-female roles but against the power her female servant, Marriott, has over her: ‘She thinks that she has me in her power. No, I can die without her, I have but a short time to live, I will not live a slave—let the woman betray me if she will . . . !’ (159). What Marriott will betray is Lady Delacour’s secret: her diseased breast. Thus Lady Delacour is enslaved both to her own judgment of her having acted morally wrongly in the duel as well as to her unwillingness to expose her injury to anyone else (of her own class) and thus risk their judgment of her. Lady Delacour’s slavery to the world and her perceived slavery to her servant are in a sense the same slavery; her devotion to social conventions and appearances prevents her from being able to confide in anyone but Marriott while also causing her to resent the power she believes Marriott to have over her as a consequence of this confidence. Significantly, Marriott emerges in the novel as a true friend to Lady Delacour. Lady Delacour’s horror at being Marriott’s slave seems ill-founded, as Marriott is, next to Belinda, the character who is most ‘alarmed for my lady’ (302) when Lady Delacour is preparing to face the surgeon. Here Edgeworth suggests that, much as the racial and gendered orders have corrupted English views of slaves and of

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women, the ‘world’ and its class divisions have corrupted Lady Delacour’s relationship with Marriott as well. Although Kirkpatrick does not propose any of the links I am positing between Lady Delacour and the marginalized groups of West Indians, slaves, and the lower-class Marriott, she does point out that Belinda Portman is aligned in the novel with West Indians whom English society would not accept into their midst. Kirkpatrick states that although West Indian planters who returned to England formed a strong business lobby in London, their money could not always buy them social acceptance, and many West Indian heirs, such as William Beckford, existed as eccentrics on the margins of English society . . . form[ing] their own social groups and resettl[ing] in England in their own communities. One of these was London’s Portman Square, inherited by Henry William Portman in 1761 and developed into lavish homes. (Kirkpatrick 347-8)

Kirkpatrick asserts that ‘it is appropriate that Edgeworth’s heroine, Belinda Portman, bears the name of this most famous West Indian community [as] [i]t suggests the marginalized status that she shares with her West Indian suitor’ (348). While names in Edgeworth’s fictions always need close attention, Kirkpatrick’s reading of Portman as a name that aligns Belinda with Vincent in a shared marginalization overlooks Belinda’s actual status in the novel. Belinda distinctly does not share Vincent’s marginalized status in the novel, and her rejection of Vincent precludes any possibility of their ever marrying and settling into a ‘lavish home’ in Portman Square or anywhere else. While Vincent gambles away his estate and loses his chance to marry Belinda, thus remaining ‘marginalized’ from English society, Belinda is less willing to make any gambles regarding her future position. Her abhorrence of Vincent’s bad habit, combined with her (somewhat repressed) preference for Clarence Hervey, result in Belinda’s extricating herself from the marginalization Vincent faces from English society. Indeed, by the novel’s end, Belinda’s engagement to Hervey places her on the road to a domestic English household that will exclude all such colonial contacts. The only contacts with the colonial world that might remain after Belinda’s marriage to Hervey are, as Greenfield suggests, more racially clearcut ones, since Hervey at the end of the novel joins forces with Captain Sunderland, formerly an imperial agent in the West Indies, and is about to ‘accompany Captain Sunderland on another ‘cruise’ [Belinda 477], most likely to Jamaica’ (Greenfield 224). Through the questions she raises about Belinda’s own roles within colonial structures in the novel, Edgeworth further undermines a reading of Lady Delacour as agent of colonial consolidation. While Edgeworth associates Lady Delacour’s position in the novel with the marginalization of slaves and West Indian Creoles from the white English domestic economy, it is Belinda who serves as an agent of Lady Delacour’s re-integration into that economy. Earlier in the novel, Belinda exposes Harriet Freke’s phosphorus figure and brings enlightenment to the frightened Juba by bringing Western science to bear on what he believes is obeah.

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

Similarly, she dissipates the irrational obeah-like fears that oppress Lady Delacour and at last convinces Lady Delacour to consult some other doctor than her ‘quack’ in order to discover that her breast is not really diseased. Thus Belinda acts as the rational English corrective to the irrational forces of obeah associated with slave culture in the novel, much as she serves as a contrasting example to the failings of other women by exhibiting a rationality and resistance to otherness that leads her to choose Hervey over Vincent as a husband. Such agency as Belinda exhibits in drawing Lady Delacour back into rational English social convention calls into question Belinda’s status as heroine, and, more particularly, as the heroine Edgeworth endorses as the example of the properly educated Englishwoman. Further, in her acceptance of Hervey as a husband, Belinda endorses a man whose educational experiments with the adopted Virginia emerge in the novel as somewhat less admirable even than the machinations of Lady Luttridge at the gambling table. As with Lady Delacour, the ambivalence that Edgeworth charts around the characters of Hervey and Virginia rests on complex intersections between gender and race, white Englishness and colonial otherness. Influenced by Rousseau’s and Thomas Day’s ideas on education, Hervey has taken over the guardianship of a beautiful girl, Rachel, whose parents are believed dead (though her father will turn up later in the novel as the wealthy West Indian planter, Hartley) and whom Hervey plans to educate in isolation from society and thus raise into the perfect wife for himself. Hervey renames Rachel ‘Virginia St. Pierre,’ after the eponymous heroine of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788). In Saint-Pierre’s Rousseau-informed tale, two French children, Paul and Virginie, are raised by their mothers (one a widow, the other an unmarried mother abandoned by her seducer) on the then-British colonial possession in the Indian Ocean, the Ile de France (now Mauritius). Saint-Pierre portrays the island as an idyllic paradise of simple love and harmony in which the children do not learn to read or write but rather learn from nature how to love each other and their fellow men; the community of mothers and children is further idealized by the equal presence in this extended family of the two women’s former slaves. Hervey’s scheme to create his own ‘Virginie’ apart from society fails as he realizes he does not love Virginia; this realization clears the way for him to recognize his love for Belinda. While Hervey acknowledges the failure of his education scheme for Virginia, his acknowledgment takes the form of his realization that, as Anne Mellor states, ‘he finds her increasingly boring’ (Mellor 44). What he does not acknowledge, however, but what the novel portrays, is that he sees Virginia within the conceptual frameworks of, on the one hand, stereotypes of Creole women, and, on the other, master-slave relationships. When Mrs. Ormond, Virginia’s companion and quasi-governess, expresses her dismay that Virginia (at age seventeen) does not know how to write, Hervey blushes with the realization that his ‘education’ of Virginia has had so little to do with her mind and so much to do with her ‘absolute ignorance of the world, [which] . . . gave an air of originality to her most trivial observations’ (373). Hervey places the blame for Virginia’s not knowing how to write on Mrs. Ormond

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for not teaching her and on Virginia herself for being ‘indolent’: ‘I am grown very fond of Virginia; she is a charming, open hearted, simple, affectionate creature. I rather think it is from indolence that she does not learn, and not from want of abilities’ (374). Virginia’s ‘indolence’ aligns her with the Creole women whom Vincent and Percival discuss earlier in the novel. Vincent explains that he could not imagine Harriet Freke as a ‘mistress or wife’ by comparing her with ‘our creole ladies,’ who are ‘all softness, and grace, and delicacy—’ ‘And indolence,’ ‘Percival breaks in. Vincent rises to the Creole women’s defense in a way that circumscribes the Creole women firmly within a domestic sphere even as it bespeaks a version of domestic responsibility that Edgeworth seems to endorse in the novel: ‘Their indolence [Vincent says] is but a slight, and in my judgment, an amiable defect; it keeps them out of mischief, and it attaches them to domestic life’ (233). Percival then raises a point that Mrs. Ormond later echoes implicitly in her comments on Virginia’s inability to read: ‘Do you think ignorance, as well as indolence, an amiable defect essential to the female character?’ (233). As Mellor points out, Edgeworth’s novel implies that Hervey’s marriage to Virginia would have been ‘a life-long error, marriage with an incompatible woman’ (44), and Edgeworth does seem to use this potential marriage as a counterexample to that between Hervey and Belinda. But when Hervey enumerates Virginia’s faults in comparison with Belinda’s virtues, he seems not to recall that the condition he links with Virginia’s many faults, that of her being ‘entirely unacquainted with the world,’ is the result of his express directions that she not be acquainted with the world: Virginia [Hervey remarks] was ignorant and indolent, she had few ideas, and no wish to extend her knowledge; she was so entirely unacquainted with the world, that it was absolutely impossible that she should conduct herself with that discretion, which must be the combined result of reasoning and experience. . . the virtues of Virginia sprang from sentiment; those of Belinda, from reason. (379)

Edgeworth’s portrayal of Hervey’s fostering of and subsequent disillusionment with Virginia’s ‘indolence’ and ‘ignorance,’ characteristics Virginia shares with the dominant Creole stereotype of the time, underlines how such stereotypes have social causes rather than being the result of inherent tendencies. Edgeworth’s portrayal of Virginia critiques both the stereotypical definitions of Creole women’s ‘indolence’ and ‘ignorance’ that Percival voices earlier as well as Hervey’s misguided experiment to mold himself a perfect wife. Edgeworth suggests that Hervey’s experiment is misguided not just because Virginia is an incompatible wife to him, but because he has cut off her ability to develop into a person at all. Virginia’s position as partially illiterate seventeen-year-old virtually imprisoned in Mrs. Ormond’s house places her precariously close to the position of a ‘favorite slave’ to Hervey. Hervey’s changing of Rachel’s name to Virginia as soon as he acquires her from her

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

guardian places him in a position much like that of the slave masters who often changed their slaves’ names to suit their own fancies: [T]he name of Rachel he could not endure, and he thought it so unsuited to her, that he could scarcely believe it belonged to her. He consequently resolved to change it as soon as possible. The first time that he beheld her, he was struck with the idea that she resembled the description of Virginia in M. de St. Pierre’s celebrated Romance; and by this name he always called her, from the hour that she quitted her cottage. (370)16

Hervey’s view of Virginia after he comes to appreciate Belinda’s virtues places Virginia in the childlike position that non-whites often occupied in the minds of whites: ‘Virginia appeared to him but an insipid, though innocent child; the one [Belinda] he found was his equal, the other his inferiour; the one he saw could be a companion, a friend to him for life; the other would merely be his pupil, or his plaything’ (379). Further, when Hervey realizes that ‘nothing could be more absurd than my scheme of educating a woman in solitude, to make her fit for society’ (472), he does so not because he sees such an experiment as itself an ‘absurd’ imposition of his will and power over another’s, but rather because he sees that such a course of life cannot lead to the love between equals that he so desires: ‘I might have foreseen what must happen, that Virginia would consider me as her tutor, her father, not as her lover, or her husband; that, with the most affectionate of hearts, she could for me feel nothing but gratitude’ (473, emphasis in original). Indeed, Virginia’s fear that she will be perceived as ‘ungrateful’ for not loving Hervey drives her to the brink of insanity: ‘I knew you would think me ungrateful,’ she cries, and as she says this, ‘Clarence marked the wild animation of her eyes, the sudden changes in her countenance; he recollected her father’s insanity; every feeling of his mind gave way to terror and pity’ (469). The insanity of Virginia’s father cannot but be associated with his West Indian experiences, since he is so clearly defined as a man who has made his fortune there and whom Captain Sunderland (Virginia’s soon-to-be-fiancé) saved from a slave rebellion on his estate. Virginia is thus seen as the stereotypical offspring of the tainted Creole who has some kind of madness running through the blood.17 This vision of inherited insanity, as well as of the grateful Virginia, inspires that odd mix of terror and pity with which Hervey turns to Virginia and assures her that ‘you are not ungrateful. I do not think you so. I am not displeased with you’ (469). In linking Virginia with beliefs about Creole women and placing her in a position that parallels those of Creole women as well as West Indian slaves, Edgeworth’s narrative aligns Hervey with white male colonialist ways of thinking on several levels. Having Belinda choose Hervey over Vincent thus raises questions about the usual reading of Belinda with which I opened this essay: that the novel asks us to endorse the trajectory traced by Belinda through the novel. That Edgeworth was herself ambivalent about Belinda is noted by many critics in quoting her famous line about her inability to revise the character to her

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satisfaction: ‘I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda that I could have torn the pages to pieces—and really have not the heart or patience to correct her—as the hackney coachman said, “Mend you! Better make a new one” (quoted in Kirkpatrick 338). In rare contrast to those critics who agree with Edgeworth’s statement and read it as an index of the failure of her novel, Laurie Fitzgerald suggests that ‘Belinda’s lifeless character is the novel’s greatest flaw and the source of its strength’ (82). She continues: Edgeworth set out to write a novel that would instruct young women to seek happiness within the quiet realm of domestic pursuits . . . Belinda is to learn from the mistakes of others and to be perceived as the moral center of the novel. Despite this overt moral structure, the lingering dissatisfactions that readers [and Edgeworth herself] feel with the character of Belinda bears testimony to the paralysing limitations of female existence in the novelistic world Edgeworth presents. Belinda is upstaged by the secondary characters. The alternative female experiences of Lady Delacour, Harriet Freke, and Virginia are simply too disruptive to be resolved convincingly within the moral framework of the novel. No wonder Belinda, faced with so many examples of potential restrictions and pitfalls for women, seems, in Edgeworth’s words, like a ‘stick or stone.’ (Fitzgerald 82)

Fitzgerald’s characterization draws attention neatly to the ways in which the ‘secondary characters’ present alternative female experiences that exceed the moral framework of the novel. At the same time, however, Harriet Freke’s unladylike caprice, Lady Delacour’s aristocratic dissipation and enslavement to the world, and Virginia’s excessive gratitude to Hervey are all put into the shade by Belinda’s example of, as Mellor puts it, ‘the sensibility and modesty associated with femininity . . . combine[d] . . . with shrewd judgment, and a personal sense of honor, sound moral principles based on careful reasoning and extensive observation, earned self-esteem, and a generous capacity for loyalty and love’ (Mellor 42). Belinda’s example of just the kind of femininity Mellor describes—a mixture of sensibility, modesty, judgment, self-esteem, and loyalty—crowds out these other women characters’ counter-examples (which, as Fitzgerald suggests, are not successfully crowded out from the reader’s view of women’s domestic experience). But even as her example of femininity seems to emerge as dominant within the novel, Belinda also serves to reinforce and thus to highlight the intersecting gender and race hierarchies that define Mrs. Freke, Lady Delacour, and Virginia St. Pierre as ‘other’ to English society. In countering what she sees as others’ irrationality with her own rational behavior and beliefs, Belinda practices what may be termed her own obeah, though hers is, as the slave character Quaco in Edgeworth’s 1817 play The Two Guardians says, ‘English obee’ as opposed to ‘West Indian obee’ (Two Guardians 163).18 Edgeworth’s alignments of English women in this novel with West Indians and slaves contribute to a portrait of patriarchal colonial power that Edgeworth ultimately critiques through the character of Belinda and the plot of her novel.

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

While Belinda is usually characterized as one of Edgeworth’s ‘English’ novels (versus her so-called Irish novels), Edgeworth no less here than in her other works interrogates colonial relationships, though in Belinda she registers their effects on Englishwomen more directly than she does elsewhere. In turning briefly to three of Edgeworth’s other works, The Two Guardians (1817), Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) and ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1803), I will bring their articulations of English-West Indian and English-Irish relations to bear on my argument that Edgeworth’s Belinda critiques colonialism and the race and gender categories it establishes and perpetuates. These three works—which take up West Indian slavery, Irish culture, and Irish and West Indian difference from English colonial models—further elucidate how and why Edgeworth in Belinda articulates such uncertainty about white women’s sexual and racial positions in relation to English colonialism. III In Belinda, Edgeworth interrupts the moralistic structure in which exemplary and deviant women apparently serve as good and bad types of English femininity through aligning these women with figures of the Creole and the slave. In The Two Guardians (1817), set in the West Indies, Edgeworth disrupts moral and racial categories by portraying the black slave, Quaco, as morally superior to the white characters in the play. Unlike the English Lady Courtington and her daughter Juliana, Quaco is capable of feeling compassion for the Widow Beauchamp and her ‘starving’ children (172). Mellor argues that Edgeworth in The Two Guardians ‘assign[s] to her black characters a moral insight and strength of character notably missing from her white characters’ in that ‘it is the black servant boy Quaco who is the voice of innocent virtue in the play: he gives his own wages to the impoverished gentlewoman, Widow Beauchamp, and, unlike his youthful West Indian master, St. Albans, he ‘can’t love’ the spoiled, selfish but beautiful Juliana’ (Mellor 80). But as Mellor notes, even as Edgeworth proffers Quaco as morally superior to the whites in the play, she qualifies her representation of Quaco as the moral exemplar of the play, for ‘even Quaco, granted his ‘freedom’ from slavery when he reaches British soil . . . immediately chooses a position of submission: if he can’t be ‘massa’s slave alway,’ he will be his ‘servant’ ([The Two Guardians]160)’ (Mellor 80). Edgeworth’s portrayal of Quaco as morally superior to whites yet a willing perpetuator of his own servitude at the same time would seem to align with a view of slaves as childlike and unprepared for freedom. But Edgeworth complicates her endorsement of Quaco’s role as ‘slave’ and its English equivalent ‘servant’ to the ‘massa’ St. Albans by naming Quaco for one of the leaders of the Maroon War that unfolded in Jamaica from 1725-174019 and that ended finally in a peace treaty which granted total freedom to the Maroon forces. She also undermines any simple reading of her stance toward Quaco’s status as slave/servant

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through her inclusion in the play of the ‘song of freedom’ which Quaco sings upon being made ‘free’ in England: Freedom! freedom! happy sound, Magic land this British ground; Touch it slave, and slave be free, ’Tis the Land of Liberty. Indian Obee’s wicked art, Sicken slow poor negro’s heart; English Obee makes the slave Twice be young, and twice be brave. Quick the magic, strong the pow’r— See man changing in an hour! For the day that makes him free, Double worth that man shall be. Massa, grateful Quaco do Twice the work of slave for you; Fight for Massa twice as long; Love for Massa twice as strong. (The Two Guardians 162-63)

In this song, Quaco understands English freedom and even British ‘ground’ as ‘magic’ and as manifestations of ‘English obee’ that will counter the negative effects of ‘Indian obee.’20 While the ‘wicked art’ of Indian obee sickens and slows the ‘negro’s heart,’ English obee will make the slave not only twice as young and twice as brave, but also twice as productive and twice as loving to his master. That Quaco’s celebration of the ‘rational’ granting of freedom to blacks on English soil takes the form of a paean to English ‘magic’ rather than an acknowledgment of English benevolence or justice suggests that the main difference between Indian and English ‘obee’ is that the latter makes the slave work harder for his master. The question arises as to whether Edgeworth endorses ‘English obee’ over ‘Indian obee’ in Quaco’s lovesong to Englishness. Quaco’s seeing his freedom as ‘English magic’ could also be read as Edgeworth’s portraying the inability of superstitious slaves to comprehend structures of rational justice as anything but English versions of their own ‘magic’ and ‘obee.’ But Edgeworth’s emphasis on the irony that the greatest change Quaco’s ‘liberty’ will effect in him is the increase of his productivity and love for his ‘massa’ undermines an easy reading of this song as an expression of her own views or even as a condescending endorsement of Quaco’s gratitude. The name of Quaco, linked as it is with the Quaco of Maroon War renown, hints further at irony in this Quaco’s enthusiastic celebration of the ‘freedom’ (and the instantaneous ‘double worth’ to whites) granted him by ‘English magic.’ The Maroon Quaco was well known at the time Edgeworth was writing as

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the Maroon leader who, with his brother chieftain, Cudjoe, signed a treaty that granted not servitude to the Maroons (and the other escaped slaves who were part of their forces) but full freedom and equality in law to whites on the island, including the right to own land, cultivate their own crops, and sell their crops at market. Thus while Quaco’s encounter with ‘English obee’ in The Two Guardians serves to make him twice as productive as a servant than he was as a slave, there is a gap between his modified new form of ‘slavery’-as-willing-servitude and the legal freedom that his namesake won from the English. Moreover, even while ‘English obee’ in Quaco’s song seems to refer to a beneficial English freedom, it also resonates with the sort of English ‘obee’ that Belinda portrays as the ‘magic’ (and not beneficial) force that oppresses and enslaves English women: social conventions and structures of behavioral regulation. Quaco’s superiority to such conventions is evinced in his giving— anonymously—his entire ‘little scarlet purse’ of the back wages that St. Albans has paid him to the widow Beauchamp, out of sympathy for her starving children. His experiences as a slave, it is suggested, give him an insight into the experiences of other socially outcast and suffering human beings, regardless of race and class lines. His moral superiority is so clearly portrayed in contrast to the paucity of human feeling evinced by the dual slaves to society, Lady Courtington and Juliana, that St. Albans’ request that Quaco show him ‘that you are a reasonable being, and fit to be free’ (162), rather than appearing to voice the author’s own views, appears ludicrous in its echoing of the stereotypical view that blacks need to prove their fitness for freedom. Mellor suggests that in the figure of Quaco and his chosen submission to St. Albans, ‘we have circled back . . . to the figure of the grateful Negro’ (80) of Edgeworth’s earlier ‘moral tale,’ ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1803). Mellor aligns this ‘circl[ing] back’ with Michael Hurst’s characterization of Edgeworth as having a ‘Colonial Office mentality’ (Hurst quoted in Mellor 79). Edgeworth’s views on Ireland’s subordination to English rule, however, cannot be dissociated from her critique of a white male privilege that subjects middle-class Englishwomen, Creoles, and slaves to interrelated, though not identical, forms of oppression. Edgeworth’s views on Irish-English relations underline her critique of colonial structures and their race and gender categories in Belinda and elsewhere, rather than support the conception of Edgeworth’s ‘Colonial Office mentality’ that leads Hurst to claim that Edgeworth views with ‘the same scorn’ the ‘mumbo-jumbo of the old Irish language’ and ‘priestly witch-doctors’ (and, as Mellor suggests, such obeah-practitioners as the Obeah woman Esther in ‘The Grateful Negro’) (Hurst quoted in Mellor 79). The analogies Edgeworth draws between the situations of the Irish in Ireland and the slaves in the West Indies suggest a more liberal view of both groups than critics tend to grant her. Edgeworth’s readers often presuppose that her position in Ireland as a member of the Anglo-Irish landowning class fixes her in a colonialist and classist attitude. Kirkpatrick identifies this approach as a ‘tendency in Edgeworth criticism [that] encourages analysis of her work as precisely the product of a colonial

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background, the Big House landed gentry of the Protestant Ascendancy’ (Kirkpatrick 332). Mellor, for example, suggests that Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro’ makes explicit Edgeworth’s ‘conviction that the enlightened members of the ruling class, whether white slaveowners or, by extension to Ireland, the AngloIrish Protestant Ascendancy, have the right as well as the obligation to control the lower classes’ (Mellor 79). Mellor further links Edgeworth’s Anglo-Irishness with her views of the lower classes by suggesting that Edgeworth’s equating of ‘the position of West Indian slaves with those of nineteenth-century Irish tenant-farmers is clarified in her Essay on Irish Bulls, where she quotes with approval Voltaire’s comment . . . that ‘Some nations seem made to be subject to others. The English have always had over the Irish the superiority of genius, wealth, and arms. The superiority which the whites have had over the negroes’ (Mellor 79, emphasis in original). But it is important to note that while Edgeworth does quote the parallel that Voltaire draws between the two groups, Irish and ‘negroes,’ she does so not with approval but rather in order to highlight the arbitrary nature of the superiority which the English—and the whites—have exercised over these groups. Edgeworth’s stance on the arbitrary nature of existent hegemonies emerges most visibly in her Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), in which Edgeworth states that she is setting out to discover the ‘authentic’ Irish bull: [W]e must distinguish the genuine from the spurious, the original from all imitations, the indigenous from the exotic; in short, it must be determined in what an Irish bull essentially differs from a blunder, or in what Irish blunders specifically differ from English blunder, and from those of all other nations. To elucidate these points, or to prove to the satisfaction of all competent judges that they are beyond the reach of the human understanding, is the object of the following Essay. (Essay 97)

What Edgeworth actually proves, however, is that there is no specifically Irish bull.21 Her essay indicates that the search for the essential differences between what is ‘indigenous’ and what is ‘exotic’ is itself a spurious one, for the differences that England attributes to the Irish are differences which England arbitrarily supposes (and imposes). While Edgeworth positions herself in the Essay as an English observer, she uses her position as an ironic one from which to mock the way the English look at the Irish ‘species.’ The irony of Edgeworth’s style in this essay emerges only gradually but is undeniable, as, for example, when she is ‘justifying’ how English law and custom have oppressed and marginalized the Irish: It was formerly, in law, no murder to kill a merus Hibernicus; and it is to this day no offence against good manners to laugh at any of this species.22 It is of a thousand times more consequence to have the laugh than the argument on our side, as all those know full well who have any experience in the management of the great or little vulgar. By the common custom and courtesy of England, we have the laugh on our side: let us keep it, by all means. All means are justifiable to obtain a great end, as all great men maintain in practice, if not in theory. We need

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth not, in imitating them, have any scruples of conscience; we need not apprehend, that to ridicule our Hibernian neighbors unmercifully is unfriendly or ungenerous. Nations, it has been well observed, are never generous in their conduct towards each other. We must follow the common customs of nations when we have no law to guide our proceedings. We must therefore carefully continue the laudable practice of ridiculing the blunders, whether real or imaginary, of Irishmen. (Essay 112)

I include that lengthy quotation from the Essay on Irish Bulls because it illuminates Edgeworth’s highly critical views of English attitudes—in both ‘law’ and ‘customs’—toward the Irish people and by extension other ‘marginalized’ groups that I have discussed in my paper. In her Essay, Edgeworth suggests, through her satirical approach to the question of English laughter at Irish bulls, that the power exerted over the Irish by the English is founded on a stubborn persistence in ungenerous behavior toward the Irish nation and on a sense of superiority to the Irish that is not supported in reality. The parallel to Edgeworth’s views of whites and blacks is, I believe, clear: while the English propose an essentialist distinction between themselves and the Irish on dubious ideological grounds, the same principle is at work when whites base their laws (of slavery) and their attitudes (blacks are savages, or, more benevolently, blacks are like children) on their sense of innate superiority to these inferior beings. Edgeworth’s comments on such essentializing ideology in her Essay on Irish Bulls as well as her portrayals of these views in Belinda and The Two Guardians suggest that, in her view, the races (as the ‘nations’ in her above formulation) themselves have no inherent differences. Rather, structures of society—white authority and colonialism—lead to false assumptions of those differences. Those false assumptions lead in turn to the notion that those who are inferior—whether they be Irish, blacks, or, as I have argued above, women—must be prevented from violent rebellion by a forceful exertion of legal and/or physical violence. That is, these subordinated groups must be contained within the social order by the exertion of some kind of social ‘obeah’ that will keep them in their proper place. In Edgeworth’s works, as we have seen, such obeah takes specific forms—the idea that the Irish tend toward ‘blunders’ as a national trait of stupidity, that blacks must prove themselves ‘fit to be free,’ that Creole women (and men) are naturally ‘indolent,’ or that English women must be as rational as men while remaining as ‘delicate’ as men need them to be in order for them to be comprehensible as women at all. IV My re-readings of Belinda and of Edgeworth’s other works do not refute the notion that Edgeworth parodies the radical feminism of Wollstonecraft in her caricature of Harriet Freke or that her views on slavery in The Two Guardians and ‘The Grateful

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Negro’ are arguably ameliorist rather than abolitionist. But Edgeworth’s portrayals of Harriet Freke in Belinda and of the slave Caesar’s foiling of his fellow-slave Hector’s rebellion in ‘The Grateful Negro’ have more in common than just her apparent rejection of the two offending characters. In ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1804), as in Belinda, The Absentee, and The Two Guardians, Edgeworth creates another ambiguous case of gratitude in which gratitude itself serves as an opportunity for Edgeworth to question inequitable power relations. The eponymous slave Caesar, out of gratitude to his good master, Edwards, betrays the trust of his tribal brother and fellow slave, Hector, thus foiling a rebellion planned by Hector and other slaves against their bad master, Jefferies. Caesar’s gratitude to his master, which echoes Virginia’s gratitude to Hervey and presages that of Quaco to St Albans, is troubling in that it leads him to betray his fellow slaves in order to save the life of his white master. At the same time, however, Edgeworth suggests that Caesar’s actions, unlike those of his more radical friend, Hector, are morally commendable, even as his gratitude remains problematic. Much as Edgeworth excises Harriet Freke from Belinda and thus contains the threat posed by Harriet’s radical violations of codes of sexual conduct, she suggests that Hector’s violation of moral conduct in condemning the good master along with the bad must also be contained, even if that containment necessitates Caesar’s avowing greater loyalty to his white master than to his fellow slave. But in neither case does Edgeworth assert that the causes that Freke and Hector espouse are unjust; rather, she implies that the characters’ means of enacting them are misguided under the circumstances of the time. Harriet’s exclamations of ‘I hate slavery! Vive la liberté! I’m a champion for the Rights of Women!’ (Belinda 229) appear naively enthusiastic and almost ridiculous in contrast to the rational Mr. Percival’s calm and measured view that ‘women’s delicacy’ (against which Harriet Freke is railing for its enslavement of women) ‘conduces to their happiness’ (229). At the same time, however, as I suggested earlier, Mr. Percival’s opinions on the indolence and ignorance of Creole women are not entirely enlightened. While his rationality serves as a foil to Harriet’s impetuosity, Edgeworth contrasts their modes of behavior more than (or at least as much as) the substance of their arguments. Harriet’s mode of ‘feminism’ is portrayed as self-destructive for women in the novel, and ultimately it is her love of ‘frolic’ that is seen as dangerous, not necessarily her feminist views themselves. Such capricious behavior as Harriet Freke’s (in a society that is unprepared to accept women in men’s clothing, for example) leads to social suicide for women, as we see in her protegée, Miss Moreton, about whom the novel tells us little except that she is Harriet’s latest friend and that, in befriending Harriet Freke, Miss Moreton is straying into dangerous territory. In the final appearance of this minor character, she has gone hiking with Harriet, and, as Atkinson and Atkinson point out, is last seen ‘teetering on a rocky precipice, a clear foreshadowing of her fate’ (Atkinson and Atkinson 107). There is also a pragmatic sense in which, like the ‘social’ suicide of Harriet’s mannish antics, slave rebellions could themselves be understood as acts

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of suicide rather than self-emancipation, and, considering the history of violent rebellions and reprisals in Jamaica throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Edgeworth may be drawing on that sense in ‘The Grateful Negro.’ In his analysis of the greater occurrence of slave rebellions in the West Indies than among U.S. slave populations, Eugene Genovese argues that the conditions of life in the Old South made revolt appear a form of suicide rather than potential liberation for the slaves: [T]he development of paternalism in the Old South—that is, the development of a sense of reciprocal rights and duties between masters and slaves—implied considerable living space within which the slaves could create stable families, develop a rich spiritual community, and attain a measure of physical comfort. As they came to view revolt, under the specific conditions of life in the Old South, as suicidal, they centered their efforts on forms of resistance appropriate to their survival as people even as slaves. (Genovese 6)23

Genovese points out that slave revolts ‘often generated short-term reaction, with fearful short-term consequences for the slaves and additional difficulties for the abolitionists’ and that ‘most Caribbean slave revolts stimulated British fears of social disorder and colonial race war and thereby inhibited the parliamentary maneuverings of those in England who were seeking to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade and ultimately to emancipate the slaves’ (112). At times, too, slave revolts ended up benefiting abolitionist causes, as Genovese points out in stating that ‘in the specific political climate of 1831, the massive slave revolt in Jamaica—or the ghastly reprisals it provoked—played into abolitionist hands and contributed toward their triumph in 1833’ (112). This more positive consequence of a slave revolt occurred almost thirty years after Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro,’ and I believe it is the former concern that Edgeworth is voicing in her tale. Much as Edgeworth critiques Harriet’s methods more pointedly than Harriet’s message itself, she portrays the slave rebellion planned by Hector, which is enflamed by the obeah woman Esther and foiled by Caesar, as an ill-advised way to carry out a just cause. Instead of countering the brutality of ‘bad’ masters like Jefferies, the bloody revolt planned by the slaves would mirror their masters’ arbitrary violence in its plan to kill all the whites even though, as Caesar serves to point out to Hector, ‘there is one that must be spared’ (‘The Grateful Negro’ 550). The gratitude of Caesar remains questionable, in that it overtakes his loyalty to his tribal brother Hector and leads to the downfall of the slaves who do attempt to rebel (though Caesar does save Hector’s life).24 But gratitude is not viewed without suspicion by Edgeworth, as I argued above regarding the kneeling ‘grateful’ Irishman in the Absentee and Virginia’s somewhat warped gratitude to Hervey in Belinda. As a structure of human relationship, gratitude implies a power imbalance and is, as Mellor points out, ‘an emotion most often felt by people who are, at least momentarily, in a humbled or subordinate position’ (Mellor 54). In the case of

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Caesar, his gratitude is more clearly ‘the condition of being grateful or thankful, of having a warm sense of appreciation for a kindness received’ (OED quoted in Mellor 54), that is, an emotion felt not necessarily in subordination but one which implies equality between the participants. That Caesar is grateful to Mr. Edwards for his kind treatment of him is thus problematic in terms of the power differential it implies but also reconcilable with abolitionist sentiment. Ultimately, the tale does not suggest that slaves should not obtain their freedom, but rather that they will not obtain it by turning the brutality of their masters back on them with the same disregard for individual merit as the brutal masters show toward their slaves. In acknowledging the respect Edwards shows to him, Caesar proves himself morally superior both to brutal planters like Jefferies, who cannot see the difference between any of the ‘negroes,’ and also to Hector, to whom all whites are the same. Edgeworth’s own encounters with Irish Catholic and Protestant zeal may well have had some influence on her representations of the ethical and rational lines between blacks and whites as more blurred than many of her time believed. When Edgeworth and her father fled Edgeworthstown during the 1798 United Irish uprising in Ireland, they did so out of fear of the Irish Catholic mobs who, under the leadership of Wolfe Tone and aided by the French (who had landed on the island to aid Tone’s rebellion), were threatening the lives and estates of Anglo-Irish (Protestant) landlords. Greenfield reports that upon fleeing to another part of County Longford to escape the rebel threat to his life and property, Richard Edgeworth, who had been an active supporter in Parliament of Catholic Emancipation for Ireland, was ‘nearly lynched by a Protestant mob’ (Greenfield 215). In this experience, the Edgeworths themselves felt the effects of a binary structure of allegiances that resembles the one Edgeworth portrays in ‘The Grateful Negro’: to the ‘bad’ masters in ‘The Grateful Negro,’ all blacks are the same and thus enemies of whites. To the too-vengeful blacks such as Hector, all whites are the same and thus enemies of slaves. To the predominantly Catholic Irish rebels, all Protestant landlords are enemies, and to the anti-Catholic Protestants, anyone who fights for Catholic Emancipation is an enemy. The Edgeworths’ own position as pro-Catholic-Emancipation Protestants during the 1798 rising bespeaks an instance in which Maria Edgeworth and her father were themselves caught in the violence that stark binary oppositions can inflict. The irony that Richard Edgeworth was almost beaten by a Protestant mob as he fled Irish Catholic violence provides a useful context for considering Maria Edgeworth’s own ambivalence about the Irish people and, by extension, other oppressed colonial groups. While the Irish rebels of 1798 (and of other Irish rebellions throughout the nineteenth century) were trying to effect a violent upheaval of the social system, it was eventually the efforts of parliamentarians that would change the laws in Ireland. Of course, the roles of failed rebellions in Ireland have been as significant as those Genovese describes regarding slave rebellions: violence met with violence led to public outcry that contributed to legislative changes. But Edgeworth’s own experience of being caught in the middle of irreconcilable opposing violences perhaps played a role in her re-writing the ethical

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divide between Caesar and Hector as greater than the racial divide between Caesar and Edwards. In ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Edgeworth implies, ethnic and racial (and ‘tribal’ and even ‘national’) bonds should not and, in her story, do not override human ones. Edgeworth’s challenge to essentialist racial categories in ‘The Grateful Negro’ and in The Two Guardians elucidates her rethinking of essentialist categories of race and gender (and, though I have focused on it only briefly here, class) in Belinda. While Wollstonecraft draws powerful parallels between the kind of absolute power exerted over slaves and that exerted by men over women, Edgeworth links race and gender in a way that calls attention not only to the ways men oppress women but also to the ways in which colonizing nations apply racial categories to both non-whites and women as a means of securing their power over both groups. Thus even as Edgeworth defines Belinda’s Englishness in the novel against racial and cultural categories invoked by Harriet Freke’s conflation with an obeah woman, she also calls into question Belinda’s superiority to such categories. The ‘English obeah’ of domestic ideology that Belinda dictates to Lady Delacour confirms the Percivals as the model family, but this model is undermined by Mr. Percival’s deployment of Creole stereotypes in order to define proper English female delicacy. And while Belinda’s road to her marriage with Hervey seems to define a kind of femininity that must displace deviant femininities in order to emerge in one piece at the end of the novel, Edgeworth does not unambiguously stage the containment of these deviant women or of their potential for insurgency. Rather, the lengths to which the novel has to go to reform Lady Delacour and rid itself of Harriet Freke foreground the novel’s struggle to accommodate these women to its domestic plot. The novel’s conclusion exposes the signs of this struggle. In light of the novel’s parallels between the structures of subordination experienced by English women, Creole women, Creole men, and African-Caribbean slaves, Edgeworth’s narrative of Belinda’s marriage to the properly English Hervey, rather than cementing racial otherings, deconstructs them. Edgeworth’s final tableau emphasizes the whiteness of all the couples at the novel’s close, and the fact that Juba’s marriage to Lucy occurs earlier and is kept separate from this final scene conveys the extent to which Edgeworth knew, before her father’s telling her, that ‘gentlemen [would] have horrors upon this subject.’ The connections Edgeworth invokes between English women and colonial subjects in Belinda suggest that Edgeworth also knew that ‘gentlemen [would] have horrors’ upon being asked to question their own otherings of both women and racial others. Ultimately, Edgeworth’s novel makes apparent that the gentlemen’s greatest ‘horrors’ would come from their being forced to acknowledge that the lines between themselves and those they exclude from society in order to consolidate its power are not at all so solid as they might like to think. The critiques of colonial and gendered power that Edgeworth voices in Belinda come into sharp focus only when one positions the novel within the broader contexts both of contemporary discourses on race and gender and

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of Edgeworth’s own oeuvre. Reading Belinda within these contexts reveals Edgeworth’s narrative strategy of establishing binary categories only to deconstruct them within individual works as well as through and across different works as she takes up interconnected questions in different registers. Only in attending to the geographical and cultural breadth of the worlds Edgeworth brings into contact with one another in Belinda and elsewhere, as well as to her generically diverse oeuvre, can we begin to perceive and give a full hearing to Edgeworth’s own politics on questions of colonialism, gender, and race. Notes 1

My thanks to Anne Mellor and Joseph Bristow for their valuable comments and suggestions regarding various drafts of this essay. 2 Several of the titles of Edgeworth’s works signal this structure; e.g., her 1791 stories for children, ‘The Little Dog, and the Broken Bowl, or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth’ and ‘The Orangeman, or, The Honest Boy and the Thief,’ and her 1815 play The Two Guardians. Her dualistic approach also emerges within the plots of several of her other works, including Belinda, with its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of women; ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1803) with its just and unjust plantation overseers; and The Absentee (1812) with its moral and immoral landlords and agents. 3 See McCann and Perera for discussions of Edgeworth’s portrayal of Harriet Freke as an obeah woman. Richardson does not explore the Freke/obeah link itself, but reads Edgeworth’s use of obeah as evincing her ‘condescending and quasi-feudalistic attitude toward West Indian slaves’ (Richardson 20). Other critics writing about Harriet Freke focus in the main on her disruptions of gender norms but do not read those as connected to colonial instabilities in the novel (e.g., Atkinson and Atkinson, Kowaleski-Wallace, and Smith). 4 Marilyn Butler has argued for Edgeworth’s ‘radicalism’ regarding questions of women, though her argument springs from her reading of Edgeworth’s Irish novel, Castle Rackrent (1800) rather than from Edgeworth’s ‘English’ novels. Butler does not in her essay consider the continuities between Edgeworth’s ‘Irish’ and other works; thus she does not analyze what I believe is the larger critique Edgeworth makes of social and colonial structures that similarly marginalize women, Creoles, and slaves, a larger critique which cannot be fully perceived through a reading of Edgeworth’s ‘Irish’ works alone. 5 See Esther Wohlgemut, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Questions of National Identity,’ Studies in British Literature 39:4 (1999): 645-658. Wohlgemut examines some of Edgeworth’s ‘Irish’ novels (Castle Rackrent [1800], Ennui [1809], The Absentee [1812]) in relation to Edmund Burke’s formulation of national identity in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to argue that Edgeworth ‘rethinks Burke’s nation and its familial trope’ in her Irish novels and emphasizes a ‘cosmopolitan’ versus ‘local’ or ‘national’ identity. 6 In the original Belinda of 1801, Belinda virtually agrees to marry Vincent, but is deterred by her discovery of his fatal flaw, an addiction to gambling. The revisions do not alter this plot line but do, as Kirkpatrick suggests, ‘reduce the importance of Belinda’s relationship with Mr. Vincent by censoring the portrayal of its interior life’ (Kirkpatrick 340) and recast Belinda’s agreement to marry Vincent as a somewhat distant consideration of his attentions. More notably, the inter-racial marriage between Juba and Lucy is excised completely by the somewhat awkward artifice of replacing ‘Juba’ with ‘Jackson’ wherever the name appears in

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth

relation to this marriage or discussion of it. The infamous direction of Edgeworth’s, ‘for Juba read Jackson,’ guarantees that this substitution will not read well or even make much sense, as Juba inexplicably disappears from the narrative and Jackson appears just as mysteriously. That Edgeworth did not integrate this change more smoothly suggests her reluctance to make this censored episode disappear seamlessly from her novel. 7 See Greenfield for a reading of Vincent’s racial ambiguities as the threat to the novel that in the last half of the novel takes the place of the threatening sexual ambiguities of Harriet Freke. 8 For discussions of Vincent’s alignments with ‘negroes,’ see Kirkpatrick and Greenfield. Greenfield explains that ‘Mr. Vincent’s arriving for an English education guarantees nothing about his racial purity, for, as [Edward] Long [author of History of Jamaica (1774)] complains, ‘many Mulatto, Quateroon, and other illegitimate children [are] sent over to England for education’ (Greenfield 220, interior quotations Long). 9 See Richardson for a discussion of Europeans’ attempts to discredit the religious practices of Africans by renaming these practices as ‘superstitions and sensual delights’ (18) and for Mosely’s linking of obeah and gambling as dual evidences of African backwardness and irreligiosity. 10 Kirkpatrick discusses Cumberland’s play in her essay, where she is primarily concerned with noting the way the play establishes parallels between its West Indian and Irish characters in a colonial context. But Kirkpatrick does not note the similarity between ‘Belacour’ and ‘Delacour.’ 11 Hedrick and Stephens point out that ‘the effectiveness of Obeah is dependent upon the belief in the validity and power of the practice’ and that in the West Indies, obeah was often ‘a very effective force for bringing about both negative and positive results, as its validity is trusted as a ‘natural fact’ of daily life’ (7). 12 Lady Delacour’s diseased breast also invokes what Jean Coates Cleary traces as a narrative connection ‘between what the conduct tracts promote as ‘woman’s sphere’ with what Melanie Klein calls ‘the good breast’ and with what Mary Poovey has defined as an ideology that demands ‘self-control, self-effacement and self- denial’ (Cleary 819). Cleary reads Frances Burney’s 1811 account of her own mastectomy as playing out the metaphorical relations between the ‘bad breast’ and the ‘bad woman,’ as Burney envisioned her own ‘bad’ breast (which, apparently, may not even have been cancerous after all [818]) as ‘a ‘necessary’ but ‘terrible judgement’ on a ‘deep,’ inner ‘evil’ (Cleary, quoting Burney 818). That Edgeworth portrays this narrative in uncannily similar ways ten years before Burney’s mastectomy account indicates the extent to which women’s ‘diseased’ breasts were seen as moral judgments on women for being in some way themselves ‘diseased.’ In Burney’s account and Edgeworth’s novel, the alliance of physically diseased breast with morally diseased woman acts as a kind of societal obeah working to keep women alienated from their own bodies as well as in thrall to social constructions that determine what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ woman and dictate how a woman with a ‘bad’ breast might be able to recover—by amputation, or, in Lady Delacour’s case, by enlightenment and reformation. 13 As Hedrick and Stephens explain, ‘obeah is derived from West African practices of witchcraft which were transported to the Caribbean by African slaves . . . In many West African societies witchcraft was a pervasive institution for maintaining social controls . . . The threat of their [that is, the practitioners of witchcraft or, later, obeah) power being unleashed against individuals who violated established rules served to control the social actions of the group’ (9). 14 Williams suggests that this cloaking of obeah under ‘a veneer of Christianity . . . disguised as a Methodist Revival’ was a gradual process that was not perceived by planters

West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’

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as ‘dangerous’ until the 1820s, when ‘to the planters in Jamaica it [became] clear that there was growing up among slaves a religious fanaticism and unrest that could augur nothing but another upheaval of the social order with attempted massacre and destruction of property’ (171). Thus my argument may be a bit anachronistic. But the way in which Marriott links Methodism with the superstitious habits of Lady Delacour suggests that, even if Edgeworth is not drawing on the exact history Williams raises, she is linking Lady Delacour’s ‘methodistical readings’ with her ‘obeah’-like belief that her diseased breast is a moral punishment. Thus women, like slaves, can fall prey to what mainstream society might deem superstitious beliefs when they turn from established authority to try to find an explanation for what appears a punishment for transgressing the social order. Slaves ‘cloaked’ their own religious beliefs in Methodism because it allowed them an ‘accepted’ outlet for their own beliefs, the practice of which was punishable by death in Jamaica following the 1760 Acts outlawing obeah. Taking ‘superstition’ as the name given to beliefs outside the mainstream authoritative beliefs, I am suggesting that even though Lady Delacour has been ‘enlightened’ and is going to allow the surgeon to amputate what she still believes is her cancerous breast, the novel suggests that her fears of this (unnecessary) operation are justified by portraying her resistance to the ‘enlightened science’ of the English surgeon as a turning to ‘superstition.’ Below, I will link this containment of Lady Delacour’s alternative beliefs to the ‘English obee’ that Edgeworth refers to in The Two Guardians. 15 Wollstonecraft makes many references to women as ‘slaves’ in Vindication. She objects to the ways in which women are educated to become ‘in the same proportion the slaves of pleasure as they are the slaves of men’ (174), and posits that women are ‘taught slavishly to submit to their parents [and thus are] prepared for the slavery of marriage’ (155). While much of her argument depends upon the way in which women are treated by men just as slaves are, Wollstonecraft is not concerned with questioning slavery itself as a system of oppression (though she does at one point refer to ‘the abominable traffick’ [144]). Rather, she suggests that women should be treated better than slaves and should also be educated out of the slavish state which their upbringings have gotten them into. Wollstonecraft is also concerned with the political and civil rights of women, stating that ‘when. . . I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense’(167); here she literalizes her metaphor to suggest that the legal deprivations that face slaves are also faced by women. Edgeworth’s construction of the woman-slave link does not serve, like Wollstonecraft’s, to portray women’s positions in the novel as the result of a slavish dependence on men nor of men’s treating them like slaves. Rather, Edgeworth’s use of slavery as a metaphor emphasizes that Lady Delacour is a slave to damaging social conventions, an emphasis which, as I argue in my paper, points to women’s confinement in larger social structures (including colonial and class structures) than Wollstonecraft is getting at in her use of the metaphor of slavery for English women’s thralldom to English men. 16 As Anne Mellor has pointed out, the fact that Hervey associates ‘Rachel’ with the Virginia of Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie does not bode well for anyone, as Virginie dies at the end of St. Pierre’s novel (private conversation, May 2000). It is also significant that when Virginie dies, it is in a shipwreck from which she might have saved herself but for her excessive modesty: she stands on the prow of the ship as the ship sinks and refuses to remove her clothes so that they will not drag her down, despite the chivalrous captain’s entreaties that she save her own life (Saint-Pierre 224-25). Whether Saint-Pierre’s novel endorses or critiques this ‘modest’ death is not fully answered in his text, but the resonances are relevant here. Virginie is celebrated as a great martyr by the islanders who witnessed her noble death (228-29), but Saint-Pierre’s novel suggests that perhaps Virginie’s modesty, which she apparently picked up in Paris, might have served her better if she had not allowed

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it to overtake her instinct for self-preservation. This notion is echoed in Lady Delacour’s excessive modesty regarding her diseased breast. While Hervey’s education scheme dramatizes the failed experiment undertaken by Edgeworth’s father’s friend Thomas Day to ‘raise’ his own wife, as well as her father’s own failed scheme to educate his son according to Rousseau’s ideas, the complex links between Saint-Pierre’s Virginie, Rachel/Virginia, and Lady Delacour suggest that Edgeworth is critiquing the dangers which both excessive removal from and excessive internalization of social norms pose for women’s development. Hervey’s experiment emerges from his view that society corrupts women, a view which Edgeworth seems to share; his solution is isolation, but Edgeworth portrays this as another level of societal oppression rather than a deliverance from that. 17 That Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre draws on so many of the portrayals of Creoles found in Edgeworth and other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts indicates the pervasiveness of these stereotypes throughout English-West Indian colonial history and their appeal for writers of fictions dealing with these colonies. 18 Here it is a passage worth quoting from Bryan Edwards’ History. . . of the West Indies: ‘Upon other obeah-men, who were apprehended at that time, various experiments were made with electric machines and magic lanterns, but with very little effect, except on one, who, after receiving some very severe shocks, acknowledged that ‘his master’s Obi exceeded his own’ ‘ (quoted in McCann 66). Belinda’s ‘obi’ is not, as McCann notes about the ‘master’s obi’ in Edwards’ anecdote, an enactment of physical violence against Juba. But Edgeworth’s portrayals of Belinda’s deflation of the ‘irrationality’ of Freke, Lady Delacour, Vincent, and Juba do not necessarily extol Belinda’s rationality as superior to their various ‘obeahs’ but rather can be seen as presenting another version of ‘obeah,’ which is linked through Belinda to the questionable view of rational and delicate but not ‘indolent’ femininity endorsed by the patriarch Percival in the novel. 19 Orlando Patterson argues that the ‘First Maroon War,’ usually assigned to the period 1715-1740, should be extended to cover the first eighty-five years of the English occupation of Jamaica (1655-1740), since these years ‘were marked by one long series of revolts, which reached a dramatic climax during the last fifteen years of this period, at the close of which the whites, after coming close to disaster on several occasions, were forced to sue for peace and grant the rebels their freedom’ (Patterson 246). Edgeworth would have known of these Maroon and slave revolts and of the peace treaty signed in 1739 with Cudjoe and his brother Quaco from Bryan Edwards’ History of the West Indies (1796), which Edgeworth states in notes to ‘The Grateful Negro’ that she has read. The name ‘Edwards,’ which Edgeworth gives her ‘good’ master in ‘The Grateful Negro,’ while clearly echoing that of Bryan Edwards, was also the name of Captain Edwards, a prominent English commander involved in pursuing Maroon forces in the Maroon Wars in 1736 (see Bryan Edwards 232). 20 Just to clear up any ambiguity, ‘obee’ is another word for ‘obeah,’ which was spelled in a variety of ways by the English, including ‘obee,’ ‘obeah’ and ‘obi’; as Hedrick and Stephens explain, the word may come ‘from the Ashanti word obayifo, which signifies a wizard, or more generally a witch’ or perhaps from a related African word, ‘obeye, which refers to the spiritual beings that inhabit witches’ (Hedrick and Stephens 8-9). Whatever the etymology, ‘obeah,’ ‘obi,’ or ‘obee’ in the West Indies came to signify a kind of ‘witchcraft or sorcery’ used primarily in ‘preventing, detecting and punishing crimes among the slaves, as well as . . . to seek revenge against someone . . . Obeah was most often practiced on fellow slaves . . . however it was also employed by slaves to inflict harm, through poisoning, on slave masters’ (Hedrick and Stephens 10-11). For more on the history of West Indian obeah’s role in slave resistance, see Hedrick and Stephens and Patterson; for particular readings of the role of women in slave resistance, and especially the obeah woman ‘Nanny’

West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’

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(upon whom I believe Esther in ‘The Grateful Negro’ is at least in part based), see Tuelon and Mathurin; and for a discussion of the interest taken by Romantics in voodoo and obeah, see Richardson. 21 She does so by a lengthy (and amusing) tracing of European analogues to putatively specifically Irish bulls, ultimately suggesting that what the English attribute to a particularly Irish—and somewhat ‘blundering’—way of perceiving and communicating the world is, in fact, one shared by all ethnicities and nations, and extending back to ancient times; as she puts it in the Essay, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (Essay 128). Thus Edgeworth’s Essay seems to prove what she held up as one possible result of her quest to distinguish ‘the genuine from the spurious, the original from all imitations, the indigenous from the exotic’ and to find exactly ‘in what an Irish bull essentially differs from a blunder, or in what Irish blunders specifically differ from English blunder, and from those of all other nations’: namely, that such a quest proves ‘to the satisfaction of all competent judges that [such points] are beyond the reach of the human understanding’ (Essay 97). 22 This talk of the ‘species’ of merus Hibernicus is very Swiftian, and as Butler points out, the Essay was inspired by a ‘joke Jonathan Swift sent to a friend in London, Lord Bathurst, in 1730’ (Butler 276), in which Swift proposed to write a book proving that ‘the English had themselves invented the bull’ (276). Throughout her Essay, Edgeworth uses the same kind of deadpan satire that led some readers to take seriously (that is, literally) Swift’s A Modest Proposal. 23 Genovese’s sentiments are debatable, of course. But the pragmatism of his analysis calls to mind Edgeworth’s pragmatism regarding the potentially self-defeating effects of women’s actions, as seen in her portrayals of Harriet Freke’s self-defeating antics and Lady Delacour’s self-abnegation in the face of societal judgments. 24 Interestingly, the obeah woman Esther’s fate is left unstated at the end of Edgeworth’s story. While Hector is ‘pardoned’ and the ‘chief conspirators are taken prisoner,’ Esther is last seen in the story ‘stretching her shrivelled hands’ over the cauldron into whose poison the rebels are poised to dip their knives at the moment when the English set the hut on fire. That Edgeworth does not graphically kill off the obeah woman, perhaps by dramatizing one of the historical killings of obeah-men that Edwards reports, suggests her reluctance to ‘other’ the West Indian slaves any more than she has to in this tale. The obeah woman’s role in insurrection, her administering of the ‘fetish oath,’ and the dipping of knives in poison were all documented legends surrounding slave culture (see Williams for his reports of several accounts of such practices). While Edgeworth does not portray Esther with a significant amount of sympathy, she leaves her with some dignity by not executing her in the end or even pronouncing a moral message about her evil. In regard to Caesar’s wife, Clara, who is intentionally kept in the dark about the coming insurrection, it is interesting to note that, as Lucille Mathurin explains, it was often women slaves who betrayed planned rebellions, at times because they feared that the infants they nursed would be among those murdered in the rising (see Mathurin). This tendency became so prevalent that often women slaves were not informed of rebellions (Mathurin 21). Thus the obeah woman Esther, as one of the two slave women to appear in the story, is, perhaps between the lines of this ‘moral tale,’ granted more independence and gumption than Clara, even as Esther is also portrayed as more materialistic and morally lacking than either Clara or Caesar. In Edgeworth’s portrayal, Clara can also be seen as not necessarily more materialistic than the other slaves but more clever: she tries to incite Caesar to violence by tempting him with the ‘Victory! Wealth! Freedom! And Revenge!’ that will be his [‘Grateful’ 554], suggesting that she understands the mixed emotions of the rebel slaves—desire for freedom, but also ambition, and hatred—at a pretty complex level.

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth Works Cited

Atkinson, Colin, and Jo Atkinson. ‘Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women’s Rights.’ EireIreland 19:4 (1984): 94-118. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. 3rd edn. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001. Butler, Marilyn. ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes.’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34:2 (Spring 2001): 267-292. Cleary, Beverly Coates. ‘Myth, Misogyny, and the Mastectomy: the Bad Breast in Women’s Fiction and Culture, 1761-814.’ Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment; Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 304 (July 1991): 818-821. Corbett, Mary Jean. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London and New York: Verso, 1995. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. 1812. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, Limited, 1994. —. Belinda. 1801. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. —. Castle Rackrent. 1800. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, Limited, 1994. —. Ennui. 1817. Tales and Novels, Volume VI. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1855-58. —. Essay on Irish Bulls. 1802. Tales and Novels, Volume I. New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1857: 95-203. —. ‘The Grateful Negro.’ 1804. British Literature 1780-1830. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak, eds. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996: 546-555. —. ‘The Little Dog, and the Broken Bowl, or, the Liar and the Boy of Truth.’ ca. 1791. ms. Maria Edgeworth papers, collection 100, box 82. Sadleir Collection, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. First published as ‘The Little Dog Trusty; Or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth,’ in The Parent’s Assistant Part I. 2nd edn. 1796. —. Moral Tales For Young People. 1801. New York, Garland Pub., 1974. —. ‘The Orangeman, or, the Honest Boy and the Thief.’ ca. 1791. ms. Maria Edgeworth papers, collection 100, box 82. Sadleir Collection, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. First published as ‘The Orange Man; Or, The Honest Boy and the Thief,’ in The Parent’s Assistant Part I. 2nd edn. 1796. —. The Two Guardians. 1817. In Comic Dramas. London: 1817. Edwards, Bryan. ‘Observations on the Disposition, Character, Manners, and Habits of Life of the Maroon Negroes of the Island of Jamaica; and a Detail of the late War Between those People and the White Inhabitants.’ 1807. In Price, ed.: 230-245. Fitzgerald, Laurie. ‘Multiple Genres and Questions of Gender in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment; Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 304 (July 1991): 821-823. Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

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Greenfield, Susan. ‘‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda.’ PMLA 112:2 (March 1997): 214-228. Hedrick, Basil, and Jeanette Stephens. ‘It’s a Natural Fact: Obeah in the Bahamas.’ University of Northern Colorado Museum of Anthropology Miscellaneous Series 39 (1977): 1-38. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. ‘ ‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon the Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5:4 (July 1993): 331348. Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth. ‘Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29:3 (Fall 1988): 242-262. Leerson, Joep. ‘Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes Toward a Reassessment.’ Eighteenth-Century Ireland III (1988): 7-24. Mathurin, Lucille. The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies During Slavery. AfricanCaribbean Publications, 1975. McCann, Andrew. ‘Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.’ Novel 30.1 (Fall 1996): 56-77. Mellor, Anne. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Patterson, Orlando. ‘Slavery and the Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665-1740.’ In Price, ed., 246-292. Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. 2nd edn. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1979. Richardson, Alan. ‘Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797-1807.’ Studies in Romanticism 32:1 (Spring 1993): 3-28. Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de. Paul et Virginie. 1788. Gallimard, 1984. Smith, Patrica. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Tuelon, Alan. ‘Nanny: Maroon Chieftainess.’ Caribbean Quarterly 19:4 (December 1973): 20-25. Wohlgemut, Esther. ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity.’ Studies in English Literature 39:4 (1999): 645-658. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. 2nd edn. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1988.

Chapter 2

Maria and Rachel: Transatlantic Identities and the Epistolary Assimilation of Difference Eve Tavor Bannet

Harrington was occasioned by an extremely well written letter, which Miss Edgeworth received from America, from a Jewess, complaining of the illiberality with which the Jewish nation had been treated in some of Miss Edgeworth’s works. Richard Lovell Edgeworth1

On August 7, 1815, an unknown young woman called Rachel Mordecai sat down in Warrenton, North Carolina, to write her first letter to the celebrated Maria Edgeworth, to protest the latter’s negative and stereotyped representations of Jews. Maria and her father both answered her letter. Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s response raised a key question for accomplished eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury readers and writers of letters, and the issue for us in this essay: ‘Whether I am addressing a real or an assumed character is more than I am able to determine . . . If these letters reach you, pray make us better acquainted with your real self.’2 There appeared to be nothing markedly ‘Jewish’ about the letter. But then, the conventional codes of epistolography, drilled in schools and modeled in epistolary manuals for over a century, and the norms of politeness and good breeding which, once mastered, permitted even parvenus to ‘pass,’ made the letter a genre that concealed even more than it revealed of the writer’s ‘real self.’ The commonplace perception that letters represented ‘the voice of the absent’ and made communication possible at a distance by using written characters to supply the place of the living person and the living voice also made the corollary self-evident to everyone: that it was relatively easy for correspondents, journalists, and epistolary novelists to write convincing letters in ‘assumed characters’ with assumed names.3 Rachel’s brother had erased her signature before forwarding her letter because precisely he feared that the ‘coincidence’ between their family name and the name of a Jewish character in Maria’s novel The Absentee, would lead the Edgeworths to conclude that the name ‘Rachel Mordecai’ must be that of an assumed character—as, in the event, Richard Lovell suspected despite his efforts.

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How then was Richard Lovell Edgeworth to determine whether the letter from North Carolina presented the writer’s ‘real self’ or a self-fashioned, merely performative or entirely assumed persona? This conundrum has also plagued modern readers of Maria Edgeworth’s letters who, by contrast, expect private letters to be personal, expressive, revealing and true to the writer’s inner being. Marilyn Butler, still Edgeworth’s most accomplished and suggestive biographer, repeatedly voiced her frustration about the difficulty of getting at Maria’s ‘real self’ through her letters: ‘the self-portrait she gives in her letters appears less complete than her biographers, or indeed the friends of her later life, ever realized;’ ‘she worked for and took some time achieving . . . the persona she wanted to present [even] within the family, to her father, and to the Ruxtons;’ ‘letters cannot be taken at face value, as undesigned revelations of character.’4 What Butler learned from Maria’s letters, therefore, she learned largely by noticing that Maria drew much of the material for her fictions from the lives, characters, conversation and letters of her family, acquaintance and friends. Though Butler made no mention of Rachel Mordecai’s letters, here too Maria ran true to form. Rachel’s first letter prompted Maria to make what Richard Lovell called ‘amende honorable’ for misrepresenting the Jews (8), by writing her novella, Harrington. Maria also re-marked that fact by transcribing within Harrington, almost verbatim, the relevant paragraph from Rachel’s first letter. As Butler found, however, such confluences between letters and tales only compound and displace the problem of reading for the real by turning Maria’s portrayals of characters and societies into ‘factual fictions’ which are suspended intertextually between facts and artefact.5 Rachel too redirected Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s question to Maria: ‘Will you not let me know you better?’ (12) And despite the limitations of what Rachel described as ‘all the intercourse which a separation of three thousand miles will permit with such a family as the Edgeworths,’ Maria came to feel, increasingly as their correspondence progressed, that few outside her family had come to know her better than Rachel. But Maria and Rachel neither offered nor expected naked revelations, even though they corresponded for almost 25 years. For them, the rules of politeness proscribed what could be said, done, repeated and displayed before others—as one Complete Letter Writer put it in 1813: ‘Secrecy is a characteristic of Good-Breeding.’6 For them, the rules of politeness also prescribed what constituted proper epistolary conduct in terms which understood ‘correspondence’ to mean a relation in which identities were shaped by relative roles, relative places in the hierarchy, and different degrees of familiarity. Epistolary codes of style, content and address were finely tuned to express every nuance of such relations. The codes required writers to contain their spontaneity and particularity within the bounds permitted by particular ‘correspondences;’ yet it was also by deploying and exploiting these codes that characters and selves were shown. We therefore need to look in Maria and Rachel’s letters for how each positioned herself in relation to the other and seek to understand how they used the conventional norms of epistolography and concealing codes of politeness to

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negotiate their difference and bridge the social, ethnic, religious, geographical, national, intellectual and emotional distance between them. For these elements of ‘correspondence’ profile the real and assumed character of each with greater clarity than what each relays about herself, and allow us to identify the shifting dialogical limits they established for the revelation that each could or would permit of her ‘real self.’ These dialogical limits, together with their epistolary management of difference and the style of Rachel’s letters, form a significant part of what Maria Edgeworth transposed and imaginatively elaborated in now her largely neglected novella, Harrington. Harrington is, as we will see, a brilliant expose of English anti-Semitic ‘prejudice,’ a prophetic guide to the conditions of possibility for assimilating Jews like Rachel into English society, and a damning reexamination of the role played by the imagination in understanding and representing the other. It is also, read from one point of view, a brutally candid answer to the questions raised by Rachel’s first letter. Negotiating Difference In all but its excessive length, Rachel’s first letter was an exemplary display of her modesty, education and politeness. Rachel signaled her recognition of the great social distance separating her from Miss Edgeworth, and of the even greater distance created by her ‘respect and admiration’ for Maria’s superior achievements as authoress and teacher, not only by her deferential language and style, but also by addressing Miss Edgeworth throughout in the third person, while generally speaking of herself as ‘I:’ With all my confidence in the benignant goodness of Miss Edgeworth I tremble at having said so much, and trespassed so very greatly on her patience and indulgence; still I must entreat that they must be extended to me a little longer. (5-6)

This sentence, which occurs more than two thirds of the way through the letter, just before she embarks on her brief but cogent critique of Maria’s representations of Jews, also indicates Rachel’s rhetorical strategy. Rachel devoted the bulk of her letter to her appreciation of Practical Education, Moral Tales, The Parent’s Assistant, and Early Lessons, and to the uses to which she had been able to put them as ‘the eldest female of a numerous family’ who shared responsibility for her siblings’ early education (4). Rachel turned to the Jewish question and confessed to Miss Edgeworth that ‘it is a Jewess who addresses her’ only once she had ‘said so much,’ not merely to convince Maria of her unwavering ‘esteem and gratitude,’ but also to intimate that there was common ground between them as eldest daughters and teachers of their siblings (6). Contrasting liberality with prejudice, nature with culture, and the old world with the new, Rachel presented the ‘stigma’ attached to

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the character and name of Jew in Maria’s opus and in the old world as doubly anomalous: Relying on the good sense and candour of Miss Edgeworth I would ask how it can be that she, who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice into the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is to the species of character which wherever a Jew is introduced is invariably attached to him. Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious and unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy. Yet this is more than insinuated by the stigma usually affixed to the name. In those parts of the world where these people are oppressed and made continually the subject of scorn and derision, they may in many circumstances deserve censure; but in this happy country, where religious distinctions are hardly known, where character and talents are all sufficient to gain advancement, we find the Jews to form a respectable part of the community. They are in most circumstances liberally educated, many following the honorable professions of the Law, and Physick, with credit and ability, and associating with the best society our country affords. (6)

Rachel used her contrasting descriptions of the character of Jews in the old world and in the new not only to explain Maria’s uncharacteristic lapse into illiberality, but also to invoke a fundamental principle about nature and culture that Maria and her father had expounded in Practical Education: ‘By opposite tendencies of education, opposite characters from the same original disposition are produced.’7 Convinced of the decisive role of education in forming character, how could Miss Edgeworth believe that Jews were ‘by nature’ Shylocks? How could she fail to believe that in America, where they were liberated from oppression and religious discrimination, and given both a ‘liberal education’ and opportunities to use it, Jews acquired the ‘character’ to become ‘respectable’ parts of pluralistic communities? Rachel offered her own experience in Warrenton, NC, as model and example:8 Living in a small village, her father’s the only family of Israelites who reside in or near it, all her juvenile friendships and attachments have been formed with those of persuasions different from her own; yet each has looked upon the variations of the other as things of course–differences which take place in every society. (6)

Rachel affirmed her difference as a Jew while offering Maria an image of social integration predicated on the recognition that all societies were—as Maria surely knew from Ireland—composed of people of different religious persuasions and ranks. She asked, in effect, for an assimilation of her difference within the range of accepted ‘variations.’ She also offered what was for Maria an enticing ideal, to which Maria returned approvingly when writing to her of Ireland’s ProtestantCatholic troubles: the ideal of ‘friendships and attachments’ formed across lines of difference, as the basis for peace, prosperity and union.

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The Edgeworths, father and daughter, appear to have agreed that the anonymous stranger had written what he called ‘an extremely well-written’ letter and what she described as an extremely ‘polite, benevolent and touching’ one. The difference between them lay in how they interpreted this phenomenon. Richard Lovell initially doubted that a Jewess writing from a village in North Carolina would be capable of writing such a letter, and feared to appear a credulous dupe.9 But Maria was immediately ‘persuaded’ that Rachel was a ‘real living person’ writing what she truly thought and felt, just because she was capable of writing this letter: Your own letter is the very best evidence that could be offered of the truth of all you urge in favour of those of your own religious persuasion. And the candour and spirit of tolerance and benevolence you show, you have a right to expect from others. (8)

Rachel’s letter was all the evidence Maria needed that a gentile education and gentile values changed the character of Jews. A Jewess who wrote a letter demonstrating Enlightenment values, and skills learned in the course of a liberal education, had the right to be tolerated and treated with benevolence. Maria’s more generous response displayed the candor and liberality of her own character. But implicit in it was the idea that one who was different had a right to be assimilated once her education, conduct, values and codes of epistolary communication were recognizable, because they were the same as her own. Extending a hand within those codes, Maria slightly narrowed the distance between them: though keeping her letter short, and concluding with the heightened formal subscription ‘I am, Dear Madam, Your obliged and grateful Maria Edgeworth,’ she addressed Rachel as ‘you.’ Rachel took the hint. In her subsequent letters, she supplied the place of the ‘coincidence’ that had so troubled her brother between their family name and the evil Jew Mordecai in The Absentee, with a series of gradual revelations of the many ‘coincidences’ between her own situation and Maria’s. After a single explanatory letter to address Richard Lovell’s doubts about her identity, Rachel respected the codes that made it ill bred to speak at any length about oneself. Nor did she ever explicitly draw any parallels between them, but left Maria to recognize all they had in common bit by bit as she let particulars drop. Yet she managed to indicate over time that they shared a great deal. Like Maria, Rachel had lost her mother at an early age, and had then been ‘encouraged. [by] the best of fathers’ to become his assistant. Jacob Mordecai opened an academy for young ladies when he failed as a merchant, and as governess in the school as well as teacher of her own siblings, Rachel had been ‘engaged in the all important business of education’ with her father since 1808. This explained her ‘extremely well-written letter.’10 Like Maria too, Rachel had her own ‘particular charge’ among her siblings; and in 1821, when she reluctantly married Aaron Lazarus, a widower with seven children, she became—like Maria mothering the offspring of her father’s successive marriages—

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the mother of another woman’s children. Also like Maria, who was isolated at Edgeworthston in rural Ireland and largely confined within her family circle, Rachel ‘lived in small village[s]’ all her life, for the most part as a domestic woman amongst a growing family, and she knew as well as Maria how much that required ‘a mind fertile in its own resources, and gathering from each apparently trivial incident some valuable addition to its stores’ (29). Maria indicated that she had heard and understood with similar indirection. For instance, in response to Rachel’s mention of her father’s academy for young ladies, Maria wrote of the village school her brother had established for children ‘of all religious persuasions.’ Polite epistolary convention taught that a letter should mirror the letter it was answering by addressing every point that a correspondent raised, by answering every question, and above all by reacting agreeably (i.e. with agreement and agreements) to one’s correspondent’s sentiments. Because they are now thought to make dull reading, mirroring letters are too frequently omitted from collections of printed letters; but they served a variety of important phatic purposes in correspondence. At the beginning of their acquaintance, for instance, Rachel used this convention to establish a ‘mental connection’ (21) with Maria, and to show her that she had ‘a heart . . . capable of entering into the sentiments of yours’ (24). Reflecting Maria’s sentiments about her father and her family circle back to her enabled Rachel to show Maria that she understood, as few did at the time, how central the relationship with her father had been to Maria’s personal and professional existence, and how important ‘domestic unity’ remained for Maria’s emotional well-being after his death. Mirroring allowed Rachel to say to Maria what Maria would never directly say about her own feelings or ideas. Mirroring responses to Maria’s own books, for instance, enabled Rachel to articulate what Maria was about while showing herself to be an insightful and judicious reader. As Maria observed more than once: ‘You seize completely the object I had in writing . . . , and give back to my mind in your praises the very ideas I had in view’ (116). Mirroring responses also enabled Rachel to share Maria’s avid interest in books, in the education of children, and in botany, zoology and gardening. Thus in many ways, Rachel’s mirroring letters tell us more about Maria than about herself. How successfully Rachel wrote such letters is evident not only from Maria’s increasingly eager responses to Rachel’s letters, but also from what she wrote to others. In a letter to Mrs Ruxton, Maria described a letter of condolence upon her father’s death from ‘our friend the American Jewess,’ in which Rachel had mirrored what she understood of their relationship from Maria’s Memoir of her father, as a letter ‘written in a spirit of Christian charity and kindness which it were to be wished that all Christians possessed.’11 Maria described her reaction to ‘a little box of curiosity from my most amiable American Jewess’ containing plants and a birds’ nest, in another letter to Mrs Ruxton thus: ‘I was in ecstasy.’12 Strong language for her. Rachel had learned early on, the hard way, how poorly Maria dealt with unmitigated difference. It would have been difficult to miss: Maria had responded with four years of silence to a letter from Rachel in 1817 praising Harrington profusely, but indicating that both she and her father were disturbed by the fact that

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Maria had made Harrington’s Jewish wife turn out to be Christian, and her Jewish father appear indifferent to conversion. ‘The opinion in which all my father’s children have been educated,’ Rachel informed her, was to ‘regard our own faith as sacred’ (16). When their correspondence resumed in 1821, and they tried again to address the issue of difference, they did so with greater caution, via discussions of American Indians (whom Maria believed to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel). Maria remarked with pleasure on how much more rapidly ‘a real savage’ was capable of ‘tak[ing] the polish of what we call gentlemanlike manners’ and becoming a ‘civilized individual’ than the vulgar lower classes, and attributed this superiority to the fact that ‘the savage’s powers of imitation’ were ‘more undisturbed and quicker than ours’ (38). Rachel was careful not to disagree outright this time, but she did mention quite pointedly in one letter that ‘several Indians educated at the US Academy’ who had remained there some years, had ‘returned to live and die among their own people’ (43), and in another letter, she quoted an Indian’s reaction to Missionary schools: ‘we are not prepared to live among you’ and prefer to be ‘left to ourselves’ (62). Rachel decided it was time to shift the basis of their correspondence when Maria wrote—in terms reminiscent of the late eighteenth-century debate about whether blacks could be proved to have human intelligence and abilities—that she had received a book written by a Jew which was ‘peculiarly valuable to me as . . . proof of Jewish ability’ and that ‘she would like to possess any book of merit written by any female of your persuasion, or any mark of their ingenuity, even in needlework . . . which would be prized by me on the same principle’ (34). Rachel changed the basis of their correspondence by overlaying the distance between Christians and Jews with three thousand miles of ocean, tucking her difference as a Jewess into her difference as a foreigner, and taking on the conventional role of transatlantic correspondent. This had always involved writing ‘letters of news’ to satisfy one’s British addressee’s ‘taste for new and curious information’ (36) about distant places, and sending exemplars of exotic flora, fauna and artifacts; and it constituted an epistolary form and function in which difference was already familiar and acceptable to Maria. How completely this made Rachel and her letters assimilable into Maria’s customary domestic, social and intellectual life was immediately apparent. When (with conscious or unconscious irony) Rachel sent Maria an Indian Peace Treaty as her first gift, Maria invited her to ‘write freely’ for the first time. When Rachel sent Maria American plants and specimens of American insects with scientific explanations, Maria wrote Rachel her first excessively long letter, discussing botany, describing ‘how many people you have put it in my power to oblige’ (49), and beginning their correspondence on ‘literary subjects.’ It is to this shift in the basis of their correspondence, that we owe much that is of interest to literary historians. Maria sent Rachel a rare surviving sketch of Edgeworthston House, drawn for the purpose by her sister Honora. She shared with Rachel anecdotes about the Edgeworths and about literary friends and correspondents, such as Sir Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, and Mrs Inchbald, and

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sent her extracts from their letters. Maria’s letters to Rachel also show how unexpectedly widely and persistently she read American literature and American writers on diverse subjects, how many American correspondents sent her American books and journals, and what she thought of what she read.13 Rachel, in turn, introduced Maria to the works of Catherine Sedgwick, sending her copies of Redwood, The New England Tale, and Hope Leslie, and ultimately putting the two writers in touch with each other. Rachel kept Maria informed about her own reactions and the reactions of others in America to Maria’s novels and tales for children, explained the meanings of American words, and acted as a touchstone on American and political subjects. In addition to exchanging mini-reviews of whatever books had caught Maria’s interest, Maria and Rachel developed their ‘regulars’—authors whom they read and discussed repeatedly over the years. These included Sir Walter Scott, Sedgwick, Fenimore Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton, Washington Irving, Harriet Martineau, Mrs Trollope and a certain, problematical Captain Hall. By 1825, Maria had begun to subscribe herself: ‘I am with sincere affection for your character and gratitude for your kindness, your friend, Maria Edgeworth’ (77). By ‘kindness,’ Maria meant that Rachel was ‘always thinking of what would gratify my tastes and give my feelings and heart pleasure’ (315). ‘Kindness’ in this sense was inseparable from the material and epistolary expressions of politeness, the goals of which were to please and to avoid giving offence, that politeness which Maria saw from the first as a key part of Rachel’s ‘character.’ ‘Amende Honorable ’ Questions of ‘authenticity,’ ‘genuineness’ and ‘truth’ recurred again and again in Maria and Rachel’s correspondence about ‘literary subjects.’ Maria read everything—novels, travel accounts, science—for new and true information, presented vividly and candidly, as far as possible without ‘prejudice’ or ‘party spirit.’14 She also generally looked in novels for representations of real people and for a true underlying historical core. This made sense as a method of reading when so many novelists on both sides of the Atlantic based their fictions upon people they knew or upon events that had occurred, more after the manner of Greek dramatists and epic writers dramatizing and imaginatively developing what had once happened to great heroes and prominent families, than after the manner of documentary realism. Defoe novels, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, Charlotte Lennox’s Harriot Stuart and Euphemia,15 Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,16 Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, were all built on a historical character or event. Maria wrote this way herself, and liked to keep track of such things. She wrote Mrs Ruxton, for instance, that she had discovered that ‘the gentleman after whom [Hannah More] drew Coelebs’ was a Mr Harford of Blaize Castle, and (because she did not much care

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for Hannah More) that he was ‘a much more agreeable man than Coelebs.’17 But as Rachel agreed after reading Harrington, this method of writing fictions raised the question of what had been added from ‘the mind’s own resources,’ and whether Jews represented by an imagination which ‘gathered from each apparently trivial incident some valuable addition to its stores,’ were represented in a true or assumed character. Set in the late 1770s, Harrington is centered on an Englishman’s relationship with Mr Montenero and Berenice, a Jewish father and daughter who are visiting England from America where they ‘had enjoyed perfect toleration and freedom of religious opinion’ (H 42). By using her father’s position on ‘keeping our faith sacred’ to correct what Mr Montenero said on the matter in Harrington, Rachel showed that she understood that Mr Montenero was supposed to represent her father, and that Berenice was based on herself. Indeed it is to Berenice that the novel attributes almost verbatim the relevant paragraph in Rachel’s first letter to Maria (H 79)—but with the comment this time that Berenice was ‘not practically aware of the strong prepossessions which still prevail against us Jews’ in England because she had ‘conceived the highest ideas of the English’ from her reading of English history and literature (H 80). From this point of view, Harrington can be read as an answer to Rachel (and through her to other Jews, since Maria complained when Jews did not write to her in response to the novel) that corrects her misapprehensions by demonstrating just how strong and protean prejudice against Jews remained at all ranks of English society. Harrington also contradicts Rachel’s portrait of assimilation as acceptance of Jewishness as one difference parmi les autres, by offering what was to prove a prophetic guide to the conditions of possibility for the assimilation of Jews into Anglophone societies during the next two centuries. The Monteneros enter Harrington’s life in medias res, the res being Harrington’s autobiographical, first-person narration of how his prejudices and antipathy to Jews had originated and been fostered in English society, and of the struggles by which his ‘mature reason and humanity have been able to control and master [his] imagination and [his] antipathies’ towards Jews (H 231). In their correspondence, Rachel attached this ‘greatness of mind which can relinquish opinions long indulged and avowed and which has the courage to recant when convinced that justice calls for recantation’ to ‘the candour, the superiority of Miss Edgeworth’s mind and heart’ (C 16). She understood Harrington’s ‘humanity’ and struggles against his own prejudice to be based on Maria’s own. Displacing ‘the history of [Maria’s] mind’ to the perspective of a male character-narrator, who courts and marries Berenice, raises some interesting gender issues; but it also had several practical advantages. An obvious one is that, as a male, Harrington could describe the anti-Semitic prejudice he saw and heard around him in a wider variety of social circles; he was free to go away to school and university, to move outside his own familial and social circle to meet Jews, to marry against parental opposition, to discuss issues of intermarriage with Berenice’s father without intermediaries, and to try bring Mr Montenero and Berenice into his own domestic

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and social circle. In the process Harrington’s first person perspective as a character-narrator enabled him to make amende honorable not only by describing the ‘history of his mind’ as it imbibed and overcame its antipathy to Jews, and by showing up the prejudice he suddenly recognized all around him, but also by reexamining the role of the creative imagination in perpetuating prejudice and knowing the other (H 13). In her first letter, Rachel had raised the issue of how ideas and images derived from reading or hearing other peoples’ stories bore on a person’s perception of the world, and she held writers responsible for the didactic effects of their stereotypes. Maria tackled this head on by making Harrington’s ‘history of his mind’ a history of the ‘power and influence of the imagination. ‘In Harrington’s narrative, overcoming prejudice and antipathy to Jews involves wrestling with the power over the imagination of what Roland Barthes called the ‘already seen, already heard, and already known.’ Harrington shows how his negative construction of Jews has been formed not only by the antipathies and prejudices of his nurse, parents, school-fellows and companions in the fashionable world, but also by stereotypes imbibed from old nursery tales, from friends false representations of their interactions with Jews, from plays like The Merchant of Venice, and from paintings like Sir Josseline’s flaying of a Jew in Brantefield Priory. Like Mr Montenero who buys an anti-Semitic painting at an auction in order to destroy it, as he says he would like to destroy ‘every record of cruelty and intolerance and everything that can keep hatred and vengeance between Jews and Christians alive,’ Harrington recognizes that the effect of these stories, plays and paintings has to be undone. As the author of his own story, Harrington therefore borrows a device attributed in the novel to Shakespeare, who is said to have altered the story on which he based The Merchant of Venice by giving Shylock Anthony’s evil character, and Anthony, Shylock’s virtuous one. In scene after scene, Harrington shows Jews acting like Christians and Christians showing the avarice, vengefulness, and cruelty stereotypically attributed to Jews. In demonstrating how false conventional views of Jews are to the Jewish characters in the novel, Harrington both re-presents and critiques the intertextual rebottling of stories and types as a dangerous means of perpetuating constructions of reality and of the other which are, though compelling, imaginary. This recognition of the need to subvert stereotypes and to question intertextually repeated constructions also reflects back on the novel’s Christian characters that are not different from the Jews in terms of their intertextual provenance or in terms of their typing. Harrington must also root out from his mind the romantic (Shelleyesque and Keatesian) imagination, construed as a source of sympathetic understanding of others. As author as well as character of this story, Harrington describes imagining as his greatest possible source of pleasure; indeed he dislikes fashionable life precisely because it gives him ‘never one happy moment in solitude to indulge my imagination’ (67). He also uses this faculty as his primary instrument for knowing the world and understanding others. Observing Berenice’s countenance the first time he sees her, at a performance of The Merchant of Venice, Harrington writes:

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‘my imagination formed such a strong conception of the pain the Jewess was feeling . . . that I shrank as if I had myself been a Jew’ (71). Imagination permits him to ‘fancy’ he can go behind the face she presents to the world to feel what she must be feeling at the portrayal of Jews as Shylocks; it enables him to fancy that he ‘feels with her soul’ (112), and that sharing the same thoughts or feelings makes them ‘both feel immediately better acquainted’ (98). Significantly, this sympathetic, creative, romantic imagination is most pleasurable to him when stimulated by new persons and new information; indeed, it almost depends on novelty. Harrington refuses to court Lady Anne because her ‘fashionable forwardness’ and ‘airs of fashionable affectation’ gave ‘his imagination nothing to work on;’ they merely ‘allowed his imagination to be brought down to the realities of fashionable life’ (66). The denizens of fashionable English life are already far too well known to fascinate or stimulate his ‘lively imagination’ (66). Contrary to his parents who ‘have lived with only one set of people’ and want him to do the same, Harrington is drawn to Berenice precisely because her ‘timid sensibility,’ the ‘feminine reserve in her whole manner’ and the ‘propriety and elegance in everything she said’ were able to ‘touch my heart and my imagination’ (98). This is the Lawrence of Arabia syndrome, the fascination for the other who not only appeals to the imagination as something new and mysterious, but who also stimulates curiosity by a reserve or withholding that provokes ever renewed pursuit and penetration. Harrington describes his courtship of Berenice in precisely these terms. Harrington’s practice of viewing the world, the Tower of London, and Berenice through his ‘romantic imagination’ is another form of the ‘power and influence of the imagination’ that Mr Montenero insists that Harrington overcome: ‘We can have the pleasures of the imagination another time. Here are some realities worth our present attention’ (109). The romantic imagination is a form of madness, and Mr Montenero refuses to permit Harrington to marry his daughter until he is convinced that rumors charging Harrington with having once shown traces of madness, are false.18 In bringing the Monteneros into his social circle in medias res, Harrington was not only bringing them into English society, but also into a society populated by types who haunted Maria’s other novels, and who were originally based intertextually on Maria’s grandfather’s narrative of Edgeworth family history in The Black Book. Lady de Brantefield, her son Lord Mowbray and her coquettish daughter Lady Anne are English versions of reckless Anglo-Protestant Black Book Edgeworths—an ancient, native aristocratic family whose fashionable vices, social pleasures, and pecuniary irresponsibility, finally destroyed them. Borrowed from Patronage and possibly based on her acquaintance, Dr Lushington, there is Harrington senior, a self-interested Member of Parliament who is anxious to remain in Lady de Brantefield’s social circle; and Alderman Coates and his family who are his vulgar, cit., social climbing counterparts. Harrington’s nursemaid, Fowler, is another of Maria’s servile yet subversive family servants, anxious to enable her offspring to rise; and the loyal ‘papist servant’ from The Black Book who saves the family by arguing with an attacking mob to prevent the house from being burned

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down, recurs in the form of an Orangewoman who saves Montenero and his house from being burned during a London riot just after the American War.19 Following eighteenth-century practice, these characters are also arranged according to a ‘plan’ of contrasting virtues and vices, and put in scenes where they can demonstrate their prejudices.20 One key scene will introduce some principal themes and methods. Following Berenice’s supposition that ‘prejudices are dying away fast,’ Harrington tries to engineer a meeting between the Monteneros and his mother. His friend Lord Mowbray is delegated to persuade Lady de Brantefield to bring Mrs Harrington with her to an auction of pictures. On auction is a picture called Dentition of the Jew, companion to an equally anti-Semitic picture of Lady de Branteville’s ancestor, Sir Josseline, which hangs in the gallery of Branteville Priory. Before the auction begins, Mrs Coates, the Alderman’s wife, who has met Harrington briefly once, ‘elbows her difficult way’ towards where Harrington and his party are seated, and joins them. Not wishing to ‘come into contact with her’, the snobbish Lady de Brantefield ‘draws back as far as space will permit’ and then moves her companions away to a seat with more ‘air.’ Nothing daunted, and using her elbows again, Mrs Coates follows. In the ensuing conversation, Mrs Coates criticizes Berenice for being ‘a little touchy on the Jewish chapter’: ‘Oh how? why, my lord, a hundred times I’ve hurt her to the quick. One can’t always be thinking of people’s different persuasions, you know–and if one asked a question, just for information sake, or made a natural remark, as I did t’other day, Qeeney, you know, just about Jew butchers and pigeons. ‘It’s a pity, said I, that Jews must always have Jew butchers, Miss Berry, and that there is so many things they can’t touch. One can’t have pigeons, nor hares at one’s table,’ said I, thinking only of my second course . . . But Miss Montenero took it all the wrong way, quite to heart, so, you’ve no idea! After all, she may say what she pleases, but it’s my notion the Jews is both a very unsocial, and a very revengeful people; for, do you know my lord, they wouldn’t dine with us next day, though the alderman called himself. (115-16)

Anti-Semitic prejudice is portrayed as a form of bad manners. Mrs Coates falls back into prejudicial stereotypes not only because she is ill informed about Jewish practices, but because she is ill-bred. As her conversation with Lord Mowbray and Lady de Brantefield confirm, her ‘natural remarks’ invariably show a ‘want of delicacy of sentiment and manner’ that offends. She is always too familiar and too pushy. And failing to understand the code, she is as oblivious to Lady de Brantefield’s efforts to avoid her and to her own impropriety in forcing herself upon the lady, as she is to the delicacy which keeps Berenice from attending the auction as she had planned to do, once obliged to decline Mrs Coates’ invitation to accompany her. The implied double standard is clear, for Mrs Coates accuses Berenice of giving herself ‘airs,’ and thinks nothing of Lady de Brantefield’s rudeness. Mrs Coates’s uses the word ‘vengeful’ to characterize not only Mr Montenero’s refusal to dine with the Coates, but what is behind it: his refusal to

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continue to ‘come up to the Alderman’s expectations’ in ‘money matters,’ despite the Alderman’s repeated importunities. Refusing to ‘act a very generous part by way of being the benevolent Jew’ and declining to come to a dinner where the Alderman’s badgering must force him to act dis-agreeably, makes Mrs Coates charge Mr Montenero with being ‘very ungentlemanlike to the alderman, after all the civilities we had shown the Monteneros on their coming to London’ (117). Mr Montenero is expected to pay handsomely for any ‘civilities’ shown to him or to his daughter, and unwillingness to accept ‘civilities’ of this sort makes him ‘ungentlemanlike.’ Mrs Coates’ derogation of the Monteneros behind their backs is her revenge on them for thwarting her, and easily slides into a derogation of all Jews as ‘an unsocial, and very vengeful people.’ Mowbray later resorts to the same forms of revenge in his club, when his offer to marry Berenice (a wealthy heiress) to save himself from ruin has been politely refused. Both use anti-Semitic stereotypes to vent their anger or hatred when their wishes are thwarted and they are in the wrong. The issue of Mr Montenero’s politeness is raised again in the context of the contrast between Lady de Brantefield’s desire to buy The Dentition of the Jew to add it to her equally anti-Semitic painting of her ancestor, Sir Josseline, and Mr Montenero’s desire to buy it to destroy it and with it the anti-Semitic prejudice it perpetuates. When Lady de Brantefield is told that ‘a Jewish gentleman’ has outbid her for the picture, she exclaims: A Jew perhaps—gentleman I deny: no Jew ever was, or ever will be, a gentleman. I am sure our family, since the time of Sir Josseline, have had reason enough to know that. (119)

In contrast to the way Mrs Coates has used her distant acquaintance with Harrington to ‘elbow’ her way into her presence and embarrass Harrington by her speech about Berenice, Mr Montenero, who is very friendly with Harrington and Lord Mowbray, senses the ladies’ reluctance to have any contact with Jews and the embarrassment his presence would cause Harrington, and does not intrude; he merely bows and passes on. But his good manners do not make any difference. Harrington’s ‘persuasion’ that Mr Montero’s ‘politeness of manner, and his style of conversation, would counteract any presentiment or prejudice . . . conceived against him and his race’ (81) is proved to be wrong. The kind of Jew whose entre into English society Maria was addressing here was based on a Life of Moses Mendelssohn that she had read.21 Mendelssohn is almost directly transmuted into the character of Israel Lyons, a rabbi at Cambridge who is a Hebrew scholar (the author of a Hebrew Grammar) as well as a master of secular learning (he has written a work on botany and one on fluxions), who introduces Harrington to his cultivated circle of ‘literary friends.’ Lyons represents what one might call ‘the assimilated Jew:’ hybrid in culture, ‘he had little of the Jew in his appearance, and nothing of the rabbi in his manner...[he was] altogether a person of modern appearance, both in dress and in address’ (40). He was most

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emphatically not the expected bearded old man in a long shabby coat. Although a merchant rather than a scholar, Mr Montenero is hybrid too, not only because he is the product of two cultures, but as an American who is distinctly ‘Spanish’ in appearance. Edgeworth uses scenes like the auction scene to undercut the premises on which this kind of assimilation was based. With manners and education, as well as wealth, the Coates or their children can be as thoroughly assimilated into the society of Lady de Brantefield or Lord Mowbray as the Harringtons have been. Not so Mr Montenero, or Berenice. In this novel, the only society to which Jews are assimilable is that of distinguished foreigners in literary or musical clubs on the margins of society, and that of people like Alderman Coates and Lord Mowbray, who are overtly civil when it suits them, but whose covert prejudice and hatred for the Jews repeatedly breaks through. In the Irish novels, critics have noted that using education to ‘civilize’ and ‘anglicize’ the natives is often presented as the means of integrating the Irish and the English. But in Harrington, no matter how civilized, how polite, how charming, how cultivated, how charitable, how anglicized or how wealthy Mr Montenero is, he and his daughter remain unassimilable by English society as long as they are Jews This point is central both to Maria’s rewrite of the conventional courtship plot in the second half of the novel, and to her inversion of the characters of Christians and Jews. In the conventional courtship plot, the heroine is given the task of proving her own character by distinguishing which of her suitors is the man of sense and virtue who genuinely loves her. Berenice’s ‘trial’ involves distinguishing, in addition, which of her two polite and well-bred suitors, Harrington and Lord Mowbray, has genuinely overcome his anti-Semitic prejudice by noticing where Lord Mowbray’s covert ‘want of toleration broke out’ (149). But even after Harrington is satisfied as to her moral character, and after all other obstacles to their marriage have been overcome (including his father’s threat of disinheritance), the issue of being a Jewess remains. This point is made all the more blatant by the Jewish characters’ demonstration of what Maria called in her letter to Mrs Ruxton ‘a spirit of Christian charity and kindness which it were to be wished that all Christians possessed.’ When ‘persecuted and tortured’ by Lord Mowbray and his school friends, a Christlike Jacob (then provisioning the schoolboys) ‘bears Mowbray’s persecution for [Harrington’s] sake,’ turns the other cheek, acts as a peacemaker, forgives trespasses against him, and disappears. The Monteneros too are overtly compared to Christians at least six times in the novel. For instance, when saved from ruin by Mr Montenero’s charity, Harrington’s father ‘condescends to say repeatedly, and with many oaths, that they both deserved to be Christian;’ (198) and a grateful Catholic Orange woman tells Mr Montenero: ‘Jew as you have this day the misfortune to be, y’re the very best Christian any way I ever happened upon.’ In confronting Christ-like Jews with prejudiced Christians who demonstrate all forms of cruelty, fashionable vices and deadly sins, Maria deployed a literary device for creating tear-jerking sympathy with victims, underdogs and the oppressed while

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didactically reinforcing hegemonic values, that would be used consistently throughout the Victorian era. Christ-like, the Jews in the novel may be; but the fact that they are not Christians remains an insuperable problem for the Harringtons, father and son. Even after he has come to appreciate the Montenero’s Christian and secular virtues, Mr Harrington Senior insists: ‘my prejudices against the Jews I give up–you have conquered them–all, all. But a difference in religion–between man and wife...’ (226). Harrington is his father’s son in this respect: ‘A Jewess–her religion–her principles–my principles. And can a Jewess marry a Christian? And should a Christian marry a Jewess? The horrors of family quarrels, of religious dissensions and disputes between father and child–husband and wife.’ (129)

The best that Harrington Senior can manage is to reluctantly put up with a generous Jewish father, as long as the daughter converts. The Harringtons’ attitude on this matter is contrasted with Mr Montenero’s apparent willingness to countenance his daughter’s conversion for the purpose of intermarriage, and with Jacob’s assurance that on the continent, Jews and Christians who intermarry frequently each keep their own religion. In the event, the matter is resolved by Mr Montenero’s revelation that he has conveniently been married not merely to a Christian, but to an English Protestant, and that Berenice was brought up in her mother’s faith. Rachel criticized the novel ending this way, as well as Mr Montenero’s apparent indifference to conversion. Jacob Mordecai generously offered a literary justification for his character’s abdication: ‘this circumstance was intended as an additional proof of the united liberality and firmness of Mr Montenero’s principles’ (C 16)—and indeed, ‘consistency of character,’ always important to Maria,22 is also emphasized in Harrington’s refusal to ‘sacrifice religion’ to ‘interest or passion’ (228). Esther Wohlgamut also offers a context for Berenice not being the Jewess she seems by drawing our attention to the frequency with which Edgeworth uses fostering and other devices in other novels to create in her characters ‘a disjunction between national identity and national origin.’ She makes the interesting argument that Edgeworth uses these devices to create an ‘ongoing mediation between borders’ which ‘facilitates an international crossover of customs.’23 But there is no international crossover of customs in Harrington. There is only the outline of a step-by-step, generation-by-generation, abandonment of national origin for the purposes of assimilation to another national identity. Like Israel Lyons, Mr Montenero take the first step by living simultaneously in two cultures, and showing only as much of his Jewish culture as Christian society permits. But as the novel shows, this does not make Mr Montenero assimilable to English society. Mr Montenero has also, it appears, taken a second step by marrying an English Protestant. This too does not make him acceptable to English society, for all his excellent manners, Christian morals, financial generosity and education. Indeed, having a Jewish father remains a major obstacle for Berenice to

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overcome, both because of what Rachel called ‘the stigma attached to the name of Jew,’ and because Berenice has inherited her father’s ‘Spanish’ looks. Lady Anne, who ‘took a horrible dislike to Jacob’s face the moment she saw him’ because ‘she thought he had a shocking Jewish sort of countenance’ (206) takes a similar ‘dislike’ to Berenice’s ‘Spanish’ looks. Berenice has to learn to disguise them to make herself more acceptable in Lady Anne’s world, and has to be stripped of her faith before she can be joined to Harrington. What is left of her character as a Jewess is only a virtuous ‘determination never to marry any man whose want of the spirit of toleration, whose prejudices against the Jews, might interfere with the filial affection she feels for her father–though he be a Jew’ (228). Her own daughter will need no such virtue. Harrington’s first person perspective implies and permits limits to his selfunderstanding and to his insight into the lives of ‘others.’ Two of these are pointedly indicated in the novel. First, despite Mr Montenero’s warning of the danger of falling back into his old prejudices and antipathies, Harrington does so twice at the end of the novel, once when he sees a Jew in a Synagogue who puts him in mind of the stereotyped Jewish bogeyman of his nursery days, and once when he sees such a Jew in imagination. The struggle to achieve a ‘spirit of toleration’ has to be renewed again and again. Secondly, when Mr Montenero casually uses the phrase ‘considering all the circumstances’ when speaking of Jewish experience, Harrington recognizes that: ‘considering all the circumstances I did not properly understand.’ But he does not ask or apparently want to know. The novella is not about multi-culturalism; it is a liberal early-nineteenth-century English Christian’s assessment of his own, and of his own society’s, willingness to overcome prejudices and assimilate difference. Maria considered that books had the ‘stamp of truth’ when, in addition to being based on a core of historical truth and to exemplifying ideas or values that she held to be true, they seemed to her to have been written with ‘candor.’ This novella is nothing if not frank and outspoken. But perhaps Maria too did not come off entirely unscathed. Harrington’s lack of popularity among Britons and Americans in its time is underlined by the immense popularity of Ormond, with which it was published. And Maria subsequently wrote no more stories for adults for seventeen years, until her last novel, Helen, in 1734. After Harrington’s critique of character ‘types’ and of intertextual rebottling, after its representation of English society as too well known to stimulate the imagination and its assessment of the failures of imagination in representing those who most intrigued it, perhaps we should not be surprised. ‘Write Freely’ Trusting a correspondent not to betray her confidences by publishing her letters was an important issue for Maria in 1827 when she tried to move her correspondence with Rachel onto a more ‘familiar’ basis, by redefining it as a

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correspondence between friends who could ‘write freely’ to one another.24 To elicit Rachel’s assurance that she would not publish her letters, without offending her by appearing to suspect that she might, Maria sent her Mrs Aiken’s Memoirs of Mrs Barbauld and an edition of Barbauld’s works, with a commentary. Barbauld’s ‘Letter to a Friend Written in her 80th year was written to me,’ Maria explained, but she had not wanted this published in the book because she did ‘not approve of the practice now so common of publishing private letters’25 (118). What made ‘private’ letters so ‘delightful,’ she insisted, was that they allowed readers to ‘flatter themselves’ that they were ‘get[ting] behind the scenes into the private life and character and inmost souls of the writers’ (118). If there were no differences between letters written to friends with ‘truth and freedom’ and ‘letters written for the public’ by people ‘trying to appear well to the world,’ there would be ‘nothing reserved for friends and private confidence.’ With ‘nothing reserved for friends,’ and no getting behind the scenes, there would be no way of representing friendship in letters (118). If she wished to please Maria, therefore, Rachel would write with ‘truth and freedom,’ share private confidences, and take her ‘behind the scenes’ into her private life, character and soul; for these were the proper epistolographical signifiers of the familiarity that friendship entailed. Besides warning Rachel not to publish her letters if she wished them to be friends, this was Maria’s way of conveying to Rachel that she was now as anxious to ‘know you’ as Rachel had been before. Confidences would supply the place of imagination. ‘Private confidences’ did not mean to Maria and Rachel what it would mean for us today—confining private letters to a single addressee who can be trusted not to show them to anyone. Maria and Rachel expected their letters to be shared within the family circle as a matter of course. Letters were read aloud and discussed in both families of an evening, just as novels were; and within Maria’s family in particular, the contents of letters she received were themselves normal subjects for letters to absent family or friends. When Maria began to ‘let my pen run free with you,’ she therefore underlined their new intimacy by telling Rachel: ‘You see I consider you as a family friend and am not afraid to trust our little family vanities to you’ (83). She also wrote to her about her family’s reactions to her letters: ‘All my family agree in wishing they could become personally acquainted with you as they think they should like you above any of my American correspondents’ (154). Once the terms of their ‘private confidences’ were settled to Maria’s satisfaction, Maria also began to confide things to Rachel about her ‘inmost soul’ that she did not want shared with her family, by writing in such a way as to evade all ears but Rachel’s own. For instance, to comfort Rachel on the death of her eldest brother, Maria wrote: I know what it is to lose friends dearly loved and valued. For this there is no remedy upon this earth. Friends can do no more than forbear to torture by obtruding common-place consolations. All must be left to the lenient operations of Time [and] the efforts of our own minds . . . I have found even in the fresh air

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New Essays on Maria Edgeworth and the flowers and shrubs in my garden and in the mere sight of green fields a sense of bodily relief for my mind, if I may say so, in sorrow. The stillness and permanence of the objects of nature have a sort of composing, sublime effect, acting upon the whole creature, we know not how or why, but we feel with submission and gratitude to Providence that this is so, that there is provision in our nature, physical or metaphysical, whichever it may be, both perhaps, against the deadening lethargy, the despair of grief. You see I have felt it. (72)

Without the last sentence, which could easily be skipped when Rachel read the letter out loud to her family (or overlooked when Aaron Lazarus read Maria’s letters to his wife), this can be read as a fairly conventional letter of condolence recommending the comforts offered by nature and time. With that last emphatic statement, however, this paragraph shows why Maria always retreated into herself when she was suffering, what lay behind her almost proverbial ‘reserve,’ the almost frightening depths of emotion of which she was capable, why it sometimes made her physically ill, and what she did to cope with ‘the despair of grief.’26 Maria often revealed to Rachel how emotionally needy she was, and always in sentences that could be skipped or overlooked when her letters were read aloud. When her sister Fanny married in 1828, for instance, Maria wrote Rachel a perfectly cheerful, descriptive letter about the character of the groom, her confidence that it would be a happy marriage, the wedding and the whole family event—stuff that would give Rachel’s family plenty to talk about. But her short opening paragraph was an anguished cri de coeur: ‘I write now to claim from you, my dear kind lady, sympathy—which I am sure you have to give, and which I am equally sure you will give me, as I would give you where your feelings were as intimately concerned’ (181). Rachel came through for Maria both with firm common sense and with understanding for what Maria must be feeling upon losing a constant and favorite companion whom she regarded more as a daughter than a sister: ‘I know full well the struggle it costs to banish self, and to relinquish without repining some sweet solace which has long been identified with all our enjoyments’ (182), but it was time, Rachel gently insisted, for Maria to demonstrate that ‘generous disinterestedness’ which takes pleasure in the happiness of others. The way Maria wrote about Fanny’s marriage to Sophie Ruxton, one of her oldest neighbors and friends in Ireland, was quite different: ‘Fanny Edgeworth is now Fanny Wilson; I can hardly believe it! She is gone! I feel it, and long must feel it with anguish, selfish anguish. But she is happy–of that I have the most firm and delightful conviction; and therefore all that I cannot help now feeling is, I know, only surface feeling and will soon pass away.’27 Maria would be fine, thank you, Sophie; her pain was transient and did not run deep; and the sentence lengths and structures she chose made her sound fairly chirpy. Maria expressed her growing friendship for Rachel, as well as her dependence on Rachel’s understanding and ‘kindness’ not only by feeling free to make repeated demands on her ‘sympathy,’ but also other ways: in urgent and imperious little phrases as ‘Answer this . . . answer this too’ or ‘Send me . . . Send

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me also’ (94); by writing pages and pages of directions about how Rachel should send letters to ensure that they reached her; by writing to her candidly opinions of her friends’ writings that she would not wish to get back to them; by including extracts from the letters of her friends, and by scribbling uncorrected letters that were comparatively carelessly structured, untidy, and hard to read—as if to signify that she was writing freely and en deshabille. Not for Rachel, the sometimes forced, lively, gossipy and entertaining tone of her letters to the Ruxtons or to Miss Carr. She remained cool, serious and informative in the text of her letters, and reserved her warmth and reminders of her new relationship with Rachel almost exclusively for superscriptions and subscriptions: In lieu of the earlier ‘Dear Madam,’ she began to write: ‘My dear friend’ or ‘My dear kind Mrs Lazarus;’ in lieu of the earlier ‘I am, dear Madam, sincerely yours,’ she began to subscribe herself ‘Ever affectionately yours, Maria Edgeworth,’ ‘Believe me to be ever affectionately your friend, Maria Edgeworth,’ or ‘Love me and Farewell.’ While expanding Rachel’s horizons, Maria unobtrusively demonstrated her tact by strictly limiting the range of people she wrote about to those of whom Rachel was likely to have heard, and the range of books and topics she wrote about to Rachel, to those about which she thought Rachel was likely to have something to say. A passing confession that she was beginning to read about India because her brother was going out there, suggests that Maria both read and invited Rachel’s comments on so many ‘accounts America’ and so many American novels, for the same reason that she sent Rachel British books to read: to give Rachel the opportunity to contribute more extensively to their correspondence about ‘literary subjects’ than she would otherwise have been able to do. By contrast, having read Harrington with close attention, Rachel was not entirely willing to be guided by Maria into ‘private confidences’ of her own. She reacted warily to Maria’s invitation to ‘write freely:’ ‘I comply with your invitation to ‘write freely’ and yet I own that in addressing you, I always practice a degree of restraint because I fear to displease’ (46). This did not prevent Rachel from writing with what Maria called her ‘usual frankness’ (74)—indeed stating that she practiced restraint when she wrote to Maria is being perfectly frank. For Rachel, practicing restraint meant reluctance to share all her thoughts and all she was, and unwillingness to allow Maria behind the scenes. Rachel dismissed Maria’s repeated assurance that Rachel could ‘trust me that I would not betray you’ and ‘write quite free from all fear of hurting my feelings’ (74) because she knew Maria’s feelings, and because trusting her correspondent not to betray confidences was not her issue. What mattered to Rachel was that Maria had come to value her through her letters. As Maria said in one letter: Your letters have given me an increasing opinion the more I have seen them of your understanding, plain uprightness of character and real tenderness of heart which attach me as much to you as can possibly be to one whom I have not seen and actually known. (72)

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Rachel did not want to lose Maria’s good opinion. Much as she might wish to enjoy a ‘personal intercourse,’ Rachel wrote, she feared it would be ‘unwise:’ for whatever the standard at which your impressions have rated me I might justly fear to fall below it and to lose a portion of that esteem which your goodness has bestowed upon me. (113)

Rachel did not want to be ‘seen and actually known.’ She reacted with positive panic in 1827 when Maria asked her to receive an acquaintance, Captain Hall, who was going to America for two years to write a ‘true’ account of America designed to dismiss English ‘prejudices’ about it. Rachel feared to appear ‘insipid’ to him, and argued that: You too will know me better, through the medium of a mutual acquaintance, and tho’ your indulgence bears with me on paper, how can I sure that it could be equally extended to my real self?

As she immediately made clear, the ‘real self’ Rachel meant here was her day to day self in an environment far less polite and cultivated than she imagined Maria’s to be: In truth, we labour under many disadvantages; our society is composed of kind, amiable, benevolent people, but with very rare exceptions, few read with any view to mental cultivation; the turn of conversation is consequently frivolous, and tho’ we associate with and cordially esteem many, yet ‘the feast of reason’ is denied us. (132)

Even after learning that Captain Hall was unwilling to ride a half hour out of his way merely to overcome his ‘prejudices’ by meeting Maria’s American Jewess, it took some time for Rachel to overcome the panic that had gripped her at the prospect of his visit. As Rachel tried to explain, what she sought from Maria in desiring to ‘know you’ was the opportunity for ‘an imagined participation in [the] sentiments and opinions’ of a woman she had clearly come to regard as an admirable, superior, and Christian, alter ego (111). Rachel was convinced that she could inhabit that no-woman’s land where ‘friendship and attachment’ became possible between women across social, religious and ethnic backgrounds, only within the disembodied codes and shared normative frameworks of epistolography. Rachel’s reluctance to let Maria get ‘behind the scenes’ and her conviction that only properly coded letters could bridge their cultural and ethnic differences cannot have been separate from her reading of Harrington. Whenever Maria’s questions began to show that she was trying to penetrate Rachel’s ‘restraint,’ therefore, Rachel used ‘mirroring’ letters to draw Maria out further about herself instead, stubbornly exchanging only one guarded piece of information about herself or her family for every revelation that Maria sent. She would also block Maria’s efforts to get behind the scenes by answering

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her questions frankly but obscurely. Like Harrington, Maria consistently failed to ask questions about these frank answers that told her so little. ‘The Stamp of Truth’ By way of conclusion, I will take examples of this frank obscurity which did and did not permit ‘truth’ to show, from fairly early on in the correspondence, because these turn out, unbeknownst to Maria, to open onto the world largely excluded from their correspondence. In a context in which she was discussing whether Waverley could be authenticated as the work of Sir Walter Scott, who initially published it anonymously, Maria asked Rachel to tell her what she thought of Rebecca, ‘the charming Jewess’ in Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe (52). In her answer, Rachel expressed her admiration of Rebecca’s character at length, but she also observed: ‘it appears to me that the mind of Rebecca is not one of romance, and that there are women, who, tho’ not taught by the highly gifted Scott to discourse eloquence like Rebecca, would, under similar trials have acted with similar firmness and rectitude’ (65). Rachel was indicating that Rebecca did not sound right to her, and also that she knew that the character of Rebecca was in other regards based on a real person. Rachel did not tell Maria who that person was or how she knew; and Maria did not follow up. Maria raised the issue of authenticity again in relation to Catherine Sedgwick’s work. She thought that Sedgwick’s characters were ‘to America what Scott’s characters are to Scotland, valuable as original pictures with enough of individual peculiarity to be interesting and to give the feeling of reality and life as portraits, sufficient also of general characteristics to give them the philosophical merit of portraying a class’ (73), but she judged that Sedgwick would be well advised to avoid portraying European characters since their lack of authenticity showed. Maria asked Rachel to pass her advice on to Sedgwick ‘if you have any means of communication with this author.’28 Rachel did not; but two years later, she wrote back to Maria with Sedgwick’s reply, and a copy Sedgwick had sent her of her latest publication, ‘The Deformed Boy.’ Rachel did not tell Maria how she had managed this, and Maria did not ask. As we now know, Scott’s ‘charming Jewess,’ Rebecca, was based on the character of Rachel Gratz, a Jewish woman from a prominent family who lived in Philadelphia. Washington Irving had described her to Maria’s Edgeworth’s friend and correspondent, Sir Walter Scott, when Irving was on a visit to Europe.29 But Rachel knew that Rebecca was ‘not a romance character’ because Rachel Gratz was no stranger to her family. Rachel had known Rachel Gratz ‘through the medium of mutual friends’ (28) at least since 1821. Her brother, Major Alfred Mordecai, subsequently married Rachel Gratz’s niece, Sara Ann Hays; and Rachel’s father, Jacob Mordecai, was also known to and admired by Rachel Gratz. When Jacob Mordecai followed up on one visit to Philadelphia by sending her ‘letters and valuable papers of his own writing’ about ‘David King of Israel’ and ‘The man

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after God’s own heart,’ Rachel Gratz described him to her sister in terms that might well have astonished Maria Edgeworth: He has the advantage of understanding the language in which the scriptures were written–and has a large learned library, a liberal spirit–and leisure to devote to his favorite study–he has never printed a book–but desires to make his own children and grandchildren well acquainted with the religion they profess and there are so few Jews in this country that he has frequent applications from Christian divines on scriptural texts which lead him into extensive examinations and they are conducted with good feeling and good taste.30

As well as being the successful master of a secular school which attracted students from all the Southern states, Jacob Mordecai was a learned, traditional Jew, who was widely consulted on religious matters and who was determined that his children would remain Jewish. What Rachel told Maria about her father teaching his children ‘to regard our own faith as sacred’ was true; but it gave Maria little or no idea of what was involved.31 Rachel Mordecai knew Rachel Gratz’s reaction to Harrington in 1821, and may well have been aware of her reaction to the character based on her in Ivanhoe too. In her letters, Rachel Gratz described Rebecca ‘a representation of as good a girl as I think human nature can reach’ and read her story as ‘the triumph of faith over human affection.’ But she also observed that Ivanhoe ‘fought for Rebecca though he despised her race’ and that he shared the ‘prejudice . . . characteristic of the age he lived in.’32 Rachel Gratz did not have to add to anyone who knew her that, unlike Scott’s ‘charming Jewess,’ she was a determined spinster, a cultured socialite, and an energetic philanthropist, or that her philanthropies included establishing a Hebrew Sunday School Society. If she admired Jacob Mordecai, it was because they were on the same page. Rachel Mordecai’s connections to Rachel Gratz ‘through mutual friends’ may well have been brought into play again when Maria asked Rachel to communicate with Catherine Sedgwick. As well as knowing Washington Irving, who was engaged to her best friend’s daughter, Rachel Gratz was friendly with Catherine Sedgwick and her brother, Robert. And in describing Sedgwick to Maria, Rachel used terms very similar to those that Rachel Gratz had used. Though she lived all her life in the small villages of Warrington and Wilmington, NC, where hers was in both cases the only Jewish family, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was connected through her family to a network of Jews in other places who, like her, lived both in a Jewish and in a Christian world. Like most of Rachel’s Jewish side, this wider Jewish world in America remains concealed from Maria in her letters’ true and frank, but brief, partial, vague and abstract sentences. After Rachel Mordecai’s death in 1737, the wheel came full circle. Maria Edgeworth wrote two letters to Rachel Gratz, in one of which she enclosed a copy of a book written by her father. Perhaps she was hoping to find in Rachel Gratz another kind Rachel with a heart capable of entering into her sentiments. However,

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Rachel Gratz’s response, preserved in a letter to her sister, shows that she no more understood how to read Maria’s letters than Richard Lovell Edgeworth had known how to read Rachel Mordecai’s letters all those years before: I have received another letter from Miss Edgeworth, with the present of a book written by her Father ‘An essay on professional education’—she expresses herself well on the character of Washington which she says is the purest recorded in history. Miss E is the last of those illustrious women who were so conspicuous for their genius, and its useful employment during the last half century—Hannah More—and so many others—and it is her highest praise that she has done so much to raise the character of her poor countrymen—I have an intelligent such woman living with me, who lived in the neighbourhood of Edgeworth Town—and she says Miss E lives on the easiest terms of hospitality and good will with her neighbours and amidst the blessings of the poor—pray My dear Sister let me hear from you soon—it is almost a month since the date of your last letter—Miriam continues her weekly accounts, she is better situated in Savannah than in her former residence—she has more society and a larger field of usefulness.33

The Edgeworth and Mordecai families continued to correspond until the early twentieth century. But that is another story, as they say. Notes 1

Richard Lowell Edgeworth’s Preface to Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, A Tale and Ormond, A Tale, Three Volumes in Two (New York, 1817): i. 2 Edgar E. MacDonald (ed.), The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977): 7. Future page references to this edition will appear in brackets in the text. 3 Familiar examples of journalists are Steele in the Spectator letters and Benjamin Franklin in the Silence Dogood letters or in his letters to the British press. Familiar epistolary novels are Richardson’s Clarissa and Fanny Burney’s Evelina. Eliza Fenwick wrote an epistolary novel significantly called Secrecy. 4 Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972): 3, 155, 127. Butler comments on Maria’s reserve throughout. ‘Real life material’ a little further down is from p. 239. 5 Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 6 [Anon], The New Letter-Writer or The Art of Correspondence (London, 1813): 213. Needless to say, there was nothing new about this recommendation; it had been repeated since 17th century courtesy books. 7 Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (1798; rpt New York: Garland, 1974): 305-306. 8 Ellen Mordecai’s History of Hasting, which is a partly fictionalized description of the customs and personalities of Warrenton when she and her sister Rachel lived there, appears to confirm Rachel’s characterization of social integration there. See Lizzie Wilson Montgomery, Sketches of Old Warrenton, North Carolina (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton,

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1924), where Ellen’s manuscript is used as one of the primary sources for information about Warrenton at the time. 9 He said so quite ponderously when, speaking for his daughter as well as himself, he stressed that: ‘we have learned how to distinguish the value of the coin by which we are repaid for our endeavour to be useful’ (7). 10 For the Warrenton Academy for Girls, and Rachel’s role there, see Stanley L. Falk, ‘The Warrenton Female Academy of Jacob Mordecai, 1809-1818,’ North Carolina Historical Review, 35: 3 (July 1958): 281-298. The school taught grammar, spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, composition, history, geography, the use of globes, the plain and ornamental branches of needlework, and dancing. 1808 is Rachel’s date; Falk places the opening of the academy in 1809, but Rachel may have been dating the school from when they began to set it up. 11 Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Ruxton, April 21, 1821; in Augustus J. C. Hare, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols (Boston, 1895): II, 369. 12 Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Ruxton, March 4, 1827; in Hare, II, 495. 13 Mitzi Myers raises the issue of Maria’s transatlantic influence and connections in ‘Daddy’s Girl as Motherless Child,’ in Living by the Pen, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992). 14 For instance, she enjoyed Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Pioneers, more than The Spy ‘because it described more what was new to us in American manners, customs, habits of living and scenes of the country,’ (C. 56), and was enthusiastic about Sedgwick for the same reasons. She recommended ‘A year in Europe’ which had been sent to her by its American author as ‘a faithful but not lively picture . . . by a hand whose truth and accuracy may be depended on’ (56); and General Segur’s book on Bonaparte for being an ‘eyewitness account recording more of the real history and developing more of the character of Bonaparte at this period of his life . . . than ever before was given to the public’ (C 96). 15 See Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Theater of Politeness: Charlotte Lennox’s British-American Novels,’ Novel (Fall 1999): 73-92. 16 Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Abyss of the Present and Women’s Time in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,’ Eighteenth-Century Novel, vol. 2 (2002): 353-381. 17 To Mrs Ruxton, January 1810; in Hare, I, 179. 18 The fact that Harrington overcomes all obstacles to marrying her only when Berenice turns out not to be a Jewess can be said to reinforce this point, by removing a principal source of her imaginary attraction. 19 See Tom Dunne, Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind (University College, Cork, 1984) for recurrence of types. 20 For the eighteenth-century plan of contrasting characters, see Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2000): chapter II. 21 Maria Edgeworth footnotes her reading in the text. Jacob gives Harrington a copy of The Life of Moses Mendelssohn, just before he goes University Press to Cambridge to meet Israel Lyons. Other books about Jews which are footnoted by being introduced into the text are: Priestley’s Letters to the Jews, Cumberland’s ‘Benevolent Jew’, Voltaire’s Letters of certain Jews, and Lessing’s Nathan der Weise. 22 On this, see Teresa Michels, ‘Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth,’ NineteenthCentury Literature 49, no. 1 (June 1994): 1-20. 23 Esther Wholgamut, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity,’ SEL 39, no. 4 (1999): 645, 647. 24 ‘Familiar intercourse’ [C 184] was Rachel’s description of what Maria was proposing.

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25 She had already, much earlier in their correspondence, told Rachel how annoyed she had been to find a letter she had written to the American woman writer, Mary Griffith, published in the American press. 26 The style of Maria’s condolence to Rachel can be compared to her letter of condolence to a long standing friend, Mrs Lushington, on February 24, 1836: ‘My dear Mrs Lushington, All at Edgeworth Town feel for you–and with you–and only regret that we can only send you this cold unavailing assurance. But cold indeed must be our hearts if we did not feel the loss even to ourselves of such an excellent dear kind friend, so warmhearted herself. The recollection of the happy days when you were with her here, and of all her kindness, presses on my heart at this moment. What must be the mixed feelings you all have? Still, the pleasures of affection for those we have lost have a charm in them which those who have never had such friends, such parents, can never know and those who have never so tended their parents as you and your sisters have, can never in long after years, have such consolation as you must and will feel. I hope your health and your sisters’ will be refreshed. Do not answer this–only believe me most truly and affectionately yours, Maria Edgeworth.’ In Letters of Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. Walter Sidney Scott (GB: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1953): 61-62. 27 Maria Edgeworth to Miss Ruxton, January 1, 1829; in Hare, II, 510. 28 The first was to ‘sketch and record such characters in America’ before they disappeared in a land which was ‘not like Scotland a land of traditions’ and where ‘the present not the past must be the American writer’s domain’; the second piece of advice was ‘to attempt European character only sparingly’ because Sedgwick would be skewered by English critics for the ‘slightest deviation from truth’ in ‘shades of fashion in minute particulars which it is almost impossible for a transatlantic writer to catch, evanescent as they are’ (73). 29 See Edgar E. MacDonald’s introduction to The Education of the Heart, op. cit. 30 Rachel Gratz to Maria Gist Gratz, February 16, 1832, in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, ed. Rabbi David Philipson (Philadelphia: the Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929): 142. 31 For the secular side of Jacob Mordecai, there are letters from Jacob Mordecai to Rachel when she was away at school during the mid 1790s giving her the following instructions about pursuing her secular education: ‘Let politeness distinguish your conduct to every one. Nothing excuses rudeness, even to a domestic’ and ‘Inattention to the counsel of our friends who are zealous to promote our welfare is at all times and in every situation inexcusable. It is a species of ingratitude.’ He also trained Rachel for a literary correspondence: ‘I send you a book; it is well spoken of. Peruse it with attention; give me your opinion’ and ‘mind your reading and writing, that you may be able to send me letters often, for I love you so dearly that I shall always be pleased when you can write to me.’ In American Jewry: Documents. Eighteenth Century, ed. Jacob Rader Marcus (Cincinnati: The Hebrew Union College Press, 1959): 76-79. 32 Rachel Gratz to Benjamin Gratz (her brother), [May 10, 1820] in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, 32. 33 Letter to Maria Gist Gratz, [April 1840] in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, 279-280.

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[Anon]. The New Letter Writer; or The Art of Correspondence. London, 1813. Bannet, Eve Tavor. ‘The Theater of Politeness: Charlotte Lennox’s British-American Novels,’ Novel (Fall 1999): 73-92. —. The Abyss of the Present: Women’s Time in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,’ EighteenthCentury Novel, Vol. 2 (2002): 353-381. —. The Domestic Revolution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Dunne, Tom. Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind. University College, Cork, 1984. Edgeworth, Maria. Harrington, a Tale and Ormond, a Tale. 3 vols. New York, 1817. — and Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. Practical Education. New York: Garland, 1974. Falk, Stanley L. ‘The Warrington Female Academy of Jacob Mordecai, 1809-1818,’ North Carolina Historical Review 35:3 (July 1958): 281-298. Hare, Augustus J.C. The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth. Boston, 1895. Macdonald, Edgar E. (ed.). The Education of the Heart: the Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai, Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Marcus, Jacob Rader (ed). American Jewry: Documents. The Eighteenth Century. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1959. Michel, Teresa. ‘Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 49:1 (June 1994): 1-20. Montgomery, Lizzie Wilson. Sketches of Old Warrington, North Carolina. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1924. Myers, Mitzi. ‘Daddy’s Girl as Motherless Child,’ in Living by the Pen, ed. Dale Spender. New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1992. Philipson, Rabbi David. Letters of Rebecca Gratz. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929. Scott, Walter Sidney (ed.). Letters of Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld. London: The Golden Cockerel Press. 1953. Wholegamut, Esther. ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity,’ Studies in English Literature 39:4 (1999).

Chapter 3

Not the Angel in the House: Intersections of the Public and Private in Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales and Practical Education Mona Narain

In the first paragraph of the preface to Practical Education, published in 1798 and co-authored by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria Edgeworth, the authors assert that, ‘[W]e have no peculiar system to support, and, consequently, we have no temptation to attack the theories of others; and we have chosen the title of Practical Education, to point out that we rely entirely upon practice and experience’ (v). This passage is indicative of the Edgeworths’ pedagogical convictions of empirical observation, experimental process and methods derived from experience and praxis. It also signals Maria Edgeworth’s lifelong conviction that social, political, moral or aesthetic theories are not a priori, indeed they are and should be the product of lived reality. Nor are these theories divorced from each other for her, rather, they all combine to form a complex pattern that emanates from and guides lived reality. This conviction colored both her prose and fictional works. Yet the initial humble disclaimer of having no large-scale political or social agenda is also very familiar to readers of Edgeworth. It is such disclaimers, as well as favorable, conservative eighteenth and nineteenth-century critical comparisons with contemporaries such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, which have been partially responsible for the last two hundred years of scholarly assessments of Maria Edgeworth as a writer of the domestic world and largely interested in private issues.1 In this article I analyze the short stories of Edgeworth’s Moral Tales and the essays of Practical Education as early companion pieces where fiction, instruction, and the didactic intermingle in Maria Edgeworth’s writing to construct and prescribe complex identities. Through her examination of public and private roles in these texts, I suggest that Edgeworth acknowledges distinct ‘contact zones’ between these spaces. By making this contention, this essay questions the commonplace of the ‘separate spheres theory’ in contemporary scholarship, which asserts that late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century women writers, particularly Edgeworth, accepted the limitation of women to the domestic sphere

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and were largely concerned with private conduct in their writing.2 Moral Tales and Practical Education are evidence not only of Maria Edgeworth’s interest in intersections of the private and public, but also her early effort to present an integrated discussion about the construction of private subjectivity and its public performance. Indeed the actual physical space of the Edgeworth’s home was long the center of her father, Richard Edgeworth’s experiments, his large family’s education and the main location of Maria’s prolific literary output. It was also the family’s seat of power, the comforting space the family always returned to and the scene of many family gatherings. The house itself is the perfect example of the muddied and interactive nature of the Edgeworths’ domestic and public activities as well as their material and symbolic spatial integration. Yet Maria Edgeworth’s literary reputation, much more than other writers of her time, remains fragmented by generic and disciplinary divisions and often passed over by feminist scholarship.3 Ironically, even relatively new Edgeworth scholarship, by focusing either on Edgeworth’s deliberations on education and nationality, or her prescription of domesticity and motherhood, is unwittingly, culpable in reinforcing the fiction of the ‘separate spheres theory,’ for less careful readers. Close examination of British literary and historical texts shows that women never were simply excluded from public spheres or public life even if their access was definitely conditional and limited.4 Recently, other feminist and postcolonial reassessments have found Edgeworth to be a cultural theorist of juvenile and adult subjectivities, a creator of a new cosmopolitan national identity and a progressive educator. Yet both the traditional and recent assessments of Maria Edgeworth’s work and her place in literary history often do not consider her prose and fiction together. Moreover, in arguing for her place as a writer of influence on the private development of postEnlightenment subjectivity or an Irish theorist of nationalism, they remain indebted to the familiar divisions of the private and public spheres espoused by Edgeworth’s contemporaries within both liberal and republican political traditions, an inheritance recent scholarship continues to use as a submerged blueprint for analysis. In keeping with the new spirit of reconsideration and recontextualization of Maria Edgeworth’s work that this whole anthology represents, first, I argue against the literary practice of dividing and analyzing the corpus of Edgeworth’s work by genre. Indeed, we must do the opposite and follow her example; Edgeworth did not see her fiction as separate from her prose works, in fact, she often wrote fictional pieces as illustrations of her theories and her theories were based on real life stories. This is probably despite or perhaps because of her early suspicion of the sentimental impact of fiction on its readers. Maria Edgeworth is straightforward about her beliefs in her prose works. I suggest this clarity can prove helpful in preventing misreadings of the more ambiguous portions of her novels and juvenile fiction when her prose and fiction are read together. Second, I argue for a more nuanced analysis of her work within the context of feminist scholarship and suggest that discarding the ‘separate spheres theory’ helps us see Maria Edgeworth as a powerful supporter of female agency even if she does not fit the strict mold of contemporary feminist theory’s requirements for emancipative

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writing. If we do so, we see a different Maria Edgeworth emerge; an astute commentator on her world but also a writer who has a rightful and important place in reconsidered literary histories of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, Children and Women’s Literature.5 I Collaboratively written with her father but really a family project, Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education consists of essays based on eighteenth-century educational philosophy but actively worked out to be useful or practical in life, as the title to the book suggests. The project had started several years before publication when Richard Edgeworth and his second wife, Honora Sneyd Edgeworth, began formulating a plan of education for their family. They first researched current educational theories, then proceeded with their own real life observations of children’s behavior and finally, modified and experimented with ideas already in circulation. According to Grace Oliver, it was Dr. Erasmus Darwin who first suggested Practical Education to Richard Edgeworth; suggesting he read the work of Dugald Stewart, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University and write about education (99). The family letters tell us that Honora kept extensive notes on the conversation and behavior of the Edgeworth youngsters recording the subject, words and often the time and place faithfully. These records contributed greatly to the plan of the book and the dialogues of fictitious children in the texts are usually transcriptions of actual conversations with an Edgeworth child. After Honora’s death, her sister Elizabeth, Richard Edgeworth’s third wife, continued to contribute her ideas, especially on obedience and household management until the very end of her own life. Richard Edgeworth wrote the chapters on Tasks, Grammar and Classical Literature, Geography, Chronology, Arithmetic, Geometry and Mechanics and his son-in-law Thomas Beddoes wrote the chapter on Toys. But Maria Edgeworth wrote all the remaining essays and she very likely revised the ones she did not write.6 Practical Education was very well received for its timely and practical intervention in the intense and fractious philosophical debate in the late eighteenth century on education. The book brought justifiable fame and attention to the Edgeworths and more confidence in her own writing for Maria Edgeworth. The preface to the book is brief, but sought to locate the texts and the writers very specifically, indicating a desire to erase the taxonomical boundaries of late-eighteenth-century knowledge production. The Edgeworths carved out their authorial positions and intended audience very carefully in this first address to their readers. They make it clear that they are not professional educators addressing only a professional audience of tutors, governesses or learned scholars; rather, they also address the people who should be most concerned with children—their parents. At the same time, they are very emphatic that theirs is not a trifling experiment in small teaching lessons, nor is the book mere entertainment meant only for an occasional cursory perusal. They assure their readers that they have spent several

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years creating regularized methods of teaching based on extensive research, scientific experimentation and painstaking observation of the effects of these methods. The Edgeworths tell their readers they particularly believe that children should be introduced early on to the first principles of science through the medium of domestic conversation. Such principles can be readily accessible and acquired through the daily incidents of life. They see this process of domestic experimentation and observation continuing on to through adulthood. Certainly the authors themselves remained famous examples of their own recommendations. Marilyn Butler has discussed the various philosophers and educationists who influenced the Edgeworths’ pedagogical beliefs. Primary among them was Francis Bacon who early in the seventeenth century proposed a child-centered, experimental approach to education. Honora and Richard Edgeworth also read texts by Locke, Hartley, Priestley and Rousseau that helped shape their theories of education (xii-xiii). There is disagreement between Julia Douthwaite and Mitzi Myers, the two scholars who have written extensively about Practical Education, about the degree of Rousseau’s influence on the Edgeworths and Practical Education. Julia Douthwaite finds that Rousseau’s codes of gendered conduct are perpetuated in the book (37). Mitzi Myers believes it erroneous to assert ‘that Practical Education is anglicized Rousseau, it is in fact a reaction against Rousseau’s pedagogy,’ (10) and thinks John Locke to be a more prominent influence. It is true that in the early part of his life Richard Edgeworth was influenced by Rousseau’s theories and brought up his eldest son according to the theories outlined in Emile. However, after observing his son’s conduct he soon realized that he had made a mistake. I find persuasive Myers’ argument that it is Locke’s ‘foundational principle in recognizing the heuristic value of childhood dialogue’ in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) that impacted the Edgeworths more than Rousseau. The Edgeworths use children’s dialogue in the text as embodied examples of the experimental method. Despite basing their methods on extensive research, in Practical Education the Edgeworths offered a distinctively different view of the methods of learning science, away from the laboratories of the Royal Academy and the abstract theories of Hartley and Priestley, even though these thinkers were highly influential on the Edgeworths’ own beliefs.7 Instead they argued for a much more utilitarian view of science, made interesting by its everyday applications and the mysterious process of discovery both for children and adults. Making the home the laboratory, the site of knowledge production and advocating the teaching of science through domestic conversation, the Edgeworths, and particularly Maria, as is evident in the essays of the book, sought to erase the traditional spatial and disciplinary boundaries of public knowledge and private conversation. Different from the Renaissance ideal of the acquisition of holistic knowledge, the Edgeworths’ concept of education was an acknowledgement of the importance of textuality and especially praxis. Indeed, it was the Edgeworths’ redefinition of what constitutes as worthy knowledge, the inclusion of the mundane and the everyday lived reality as essential to knowledge production, which elicits new and broader insights in this book. They valued knowledge acquired through the process

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of action and self-learning more than the acquisition of knowledge simply through books, usually the end product of someone else’s work. Moreover, they included both children and adults in this interactive mode of learning rather than consigning the children to the schoolrooms of rote education. Ultimately, Practical Education offered a new way of instruction and education to their readers. The authors write, ‘to the most enlightened minds new combinations may be suggested by a new arrangement of materials, and the curiosity and enthusiasm of the inexperienced may be awakened, and excited to accurate and laborious researches’ (vii). Immediately after the publication of Practical Education, Maria Edgeworth turned her attention to revising some short stories and writing additional tales as illustrative segues to the Practical Education. A number of these short stories, especially addressing a young adult audience, were published as Moral Tales in 1801. Writing the preface to Moral Tales a few years later, Richard Lovell Edgeworth noted, ‘These Tales have been written to illustrate the opinions delivered in ‘Practical Education,’ and paraphrases Dr. Johnson that merely to ‘invent a story is no small effort of the human understanding.’ It is precisely this interconnection between what has been characterized as a text intervening in public debates about education, Practical Education, and Moral Tales, a text typically read as didactic fiction for moral improvement of private selfhood, which is further evidence that the Edgeworths, particularly Maria, did not consider the private and public two separate but instead interactive categories. As we shall see in the ensuing discussion of the two texts, her tales and essays depict a complex interaction between public and private categories as a moral subjectivity evolves for each of her protagonists. The interactive nature of learning that Maria Edgeworth espoused derived from the Edgeworths’ belief in the importance of the individual but only within the context of a moral community in many ways distinctly different from the transcendental individual of her Romantic contemporaries.8 For Edgeworth early subjectivity could not be appropriately constructed without the mirroring of familial and communal approval. In the chapter on ‘On Vanity, Pride, and Ambition,’she argues that self-approbation is necessary for the formation of a healthy identity, yet this cannot be achieved through flattery or a steady diet of praise gained through exhibitionism. Rather, self-confidence is the result of appropriate appreciation from those people who are worthy of esteem in the individual’s life. She writes, ‘We must observe, that, however independent the proud man imagines himself to be of the opinions of all round him, he must form his judgment of his own merits from standard of comparison, by some laws drawn from observation of what mankind in general, or those whom he particularly esteems, think wise or amiable’ (300). Parents must train children to have the strength of mind to abide by the principles they have formed. The praise and flattery of many strangers seldom bestows any good sense. Edgeworth emphasizes the ‘contact zones’ between what are thought of as traditionally distinct public and private arenas in the formation of a healthy identity. In fact in this text, interiority of self cannot be constructed without exterior modulation. Individuality is the product of collective influences, and the inward space of home is the place where

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persona is forged, a persona that must meet the standard of public etiquette and morality. From the Edgeworths’ perspective this ultimate collective judgment of individuality beyond the immediate family is absolutely essential for the individual’s successful passage to viable adulthood. Towards the conclusion of the essay she tells the readers very specifically why this is so, ‘[T]he self-command which the fear of disgrace insures [sic] can produce either great virtues, or great vices. Revenge and generosity are, it is said, to be found in their highest state amongst nations and individuals characterized by pride’ (309). It is a simple idea really, but powerful in its implications and resonant of the late eighteenth-century’s movement towards the formation of a collective national identity—individuals, particularly children, are ultimately the building blocks of a larger culture and nation. So despite the fact that this text concentrates on individual development, Edgeworth exhibits a larger public concern about the impact of education on society as a whole. To illustrate this point Edgeworth discusses the national characters of the Spaniards and the Turks pointing out the difference between true pride and false vanity. Thus, in the education of the individual child and young adult, parents, teachers and guardians must not forget that they foster a smaller section of a larger cultural milieu and that much more is at stake than just an individual child’s education. The first story ‘Forester’ in Moral Tales is an apt illustration of precisely all of these maxims. In the beginning of the tale, Forester, a newly orphaned young man seeks the society of his guardian and father’s friend, Dr. Campbell and his family. Sadly, though Forester has a good heart and morals, he has been taught to shun society and civil behavior by his father. Indeed this young man is so private, independent and inwardly turned, an eccentricity heavily influenced by several readings of Robinson Crusoe, that he despises the polite but useful conversations of the family and refuses to engage activities such as dancing. In direct contrast to Forester is Archibald Mackenzie, the spoiled aristocrat who has been taught to relentlessly curry favor with the rich and seek public approbation by his mother. His is an identity largely reliant on how he is publicly perceived by others. In private, he is insolent, rude and lazy, especially with those inferior to him in class and position. It is significant that both these young men are misguided due to their incorrect upbringing and the mislead values of their parents. The contrast between these two extreme characters serves to point the reader toward admiring the balanced Dr. Campbell and his well-educated son Henry. Heather MacFadyen has accurately argued that, ‘Dr. Campbell and his son Henry, [who] articulate a model of masculine sociability that Edgeworth believes enables both the domestic and the public realm to function properly’ (399). I think it is important to take this point further. A crucial reason for the success of Henry Campbell both socially as well as an effective reformer is that he understands the intermingling of the private and the public and denies their clear cut distinctions. For instance, Forester fails miserably in effecting change at a nearby school when he discovers a young student being harassed by the schoolmistress. His method of approaching this problem is to lecture the schoolmistress who in return, expels both the student and Forester from the school. Henry on the other hand tries a different route. His social connection

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with a society hostess whom Forester had previously shunned and who also happens to be one of the benefactresses of this charity school allows Henry to successfully urge the lady to inquire more closely into the problems at the school and rectify them. It is Henry’s affable behavior as well as his diagnosis of the cause of death of the lady’s pet canaries, based upon an understanding of poisons learnt from his father in conversations and further pursued by reading at his father’s behest, that give him currency to effect larger public and social change. This is something Forester does not comprehend. Henry’s private standing makes him publicly effective and it is knowledge learnt in household conversations that makes Henry a practical and useful individual. The story follows Forester’s subsequent social education, one that can better facilitate his movement between coterminous spheres of life than his book learning. Forester also learns that what he had previously thought as appropriate self-confidence was in fact vanity in his own ideals untempered by the fire of practical application. He gains success as a printer and writer, successful in the broader public arena of the world, but he must gain the esteem of those who are wise and dear to him. He understands through the course of the story that an individual in society who has friends and an established character is in a better position than someone who lives an isolated life, who has no one to answer for his conduct, none to rejoice in his success, or to sympathize with him. In the last test, the readers see Forester return to the scene of his previous mistakes, a dance ball being held at the Campbell house. This time Forester is much more social. He dances with Flora Campbell and begs Dr. Campbell’s pardon for his past mistakes seeking his foster family’s approval. Dr. Campbell accepts him and prophecies jovially that if Forester continues on his path of change, he will be a great man. These actions and the Campbells’ acceptance and approbation complete Forester’s transition into adulthood and a proper membership of civil society. While the story does not directly address national character, politeness and civility form the bedrock of the bonds that hold people together in the text. Furthermore masculinity is redefined as inclusive of domestic concerns; men who shun female company are chastised and taught to understand that a measure of domesticity is good not just for women but for men too.9 Public charity and private virtue are intimately linked; in fact public charity and private virtue are essential characteristics of the same moral personality. The vision of the concluding ball welcomes the solitary individual back to family and community. In the closing pages of ‘Forester,’ Edgeworth boldly redraws appropriate masculine behavior and in doing so, clearly shows that men do, and should, be part of the domestic sphere, an arena often exclusively seen as a female space by many of her contemporaries, just as they must inhabit the in between spaces of civil society that lie between domesticity and larger public life. What is remarkable about this redrawing is that Edgeworth actively decenters her contemporaries’ Romantic masculinist idealization of exclusive, autonomous male subjectivity, which comes to full sentience in solitude, as well as challenging the traditional view that the only arena important to and worthy of men’s attention is the public arena; a highly exclusive and appropriative cultural norm.

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II The Edgeworths are always very aware of the gender distinctions, particularly Maria, even to the fault of being accused of being patriarchal in her sensibilities. However, this is too broad an accusation. Nuanced analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s texts shows that she is very subtle in her interruption of conventional gender boundaries and behavior. This is clearly evident in the chapter ‘On Female Accomplishments, &’ in Practical Education, addressed specifically to mothers about the education of female children and young adults and subsequently in her Moral Tales as well. As we have previously seen, Forester must learn that too much privacy is harmful for personality and that the appropriate development of individuality is critically based on communal approbation as laid out in the essay on vanity and pride. In the chapter on female accomplishments, Edgeworth roundly criticizes the convention of assessing the worth of female identity solely based on public valuation and success in the marriage market. Too many families, Edgeworth thinks, gear their daughters’ education toward the acquisition of superficial accomplishments such as dancing, drawing and musical recital. These accomplishments are chosen largely because they lend themselves to public performance in an effort to draw the attention of eligible bachelors and their families. For example, the conventional wisdom of aged matrons is that the young ladies who dance the best attract the most notice in public of the other sex, and ‘in short, not only have their choice of the best partner in a ball room, but sometimes of the best partner in life’ (533). First, Edgeworth argues young men who frequent ballrooms or card parties for the lack of anything better to do hardly make good husbands; such persons are usually fortune hunters on the make. Second, she suggests that the ‘fashionable apathy,’ whether real or affected, displayed by such young men is inappropriate and marks the gradual, general loss of respect and esteem for women in society. The system of female education should not be geared toward overcoming a degrading anxiety about this contempt and to attract what Edgeworth considers worthless attention. Edgeworth concludes her argument by remarking on the number of ‘accomplished’ young women who once having fulfilled their mothers’ ambitions and netted a wealthy, titled and eligible husband, spend their lives doomed to misery. Unequal marriages never result in happiness and without happiness there is little left to life other than material possessions and ceaseless ennui. How can such a state of affairs be remedied? Practical Education suggests that parents, particularly mothers, must pay close attention to the education of daughters. When tutors or governesses are employed, the choice must be made carefully; it is important not to choose a governess merely on the basis of her superficial accomplishments. Rather, this person should be someone who has the wisdom to guide the young girl holistically in her development, not just in teaching her the correct dancing posture or a Parisian French accent, but in teaching her to become a moral and well-educated individual, independent, yet mindful of propriety. The pitfalls of poor education, poor parental choice in a governess, too much emphasis on superficial female accomplishments leading to bad life choices

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that the chapter ‘On Female Accomplishments, &’ elaborates, are well illustrated in the story of the misguided Lady Amanda of ‘Mademoiselle Panache,’ included in the Moral Tales. Lady Amanda, daughter of Lady S— has been under the tutelage of a French governess, Mademoiselle Panache, from the age of twelve to eighteen. Lady S— is the precisely the kind of parent that Maria Edgeworth criticizes in Practical Education; fond of public admiration, sentimentally desirous of being thought of a good mother, fond of cards and indolent enough to leave the upbringing of her daughter in the hands of a governess whose character she never actually investigates. Lady S— spares no expense in educating her daughter but as we see the story unfold, we find that education is not about expense but about values and quality. Lady S— is proud of her daughter’s accomplishments of dancing, archery and music but takes little care to cultivate her understanding, sympathy and thoughtfulness. No wonder Lady Amanda is proud, competitive, foolish and overly concerned with appearances, habits cultivated by her ingratiating governess who possesses many of the same qualities. In contrast are the Temple family daughters, particularly Helen Temple, who under the guidance of their mother present calm, sensible and well-educated alternative profiles. Matters come to a head when both Helen Temple and Lady Amanda become the objects of attention of Mr Montague, newly heir to a large fortune and in search of a wife. Initially, Mr Montague and Miss Helen Temple are progressing toward an understanding of attachment but this happy progress is interrupted by the vision of a beautiful Lady Amanda who wins an archery competition. She is able to catch the public eye by this accomplished feat, particularly Mr Montague’s—he is entranced. Edgeworth uses Mr Montague’s character to juxtapose and examine the positive and negative aspects of these two young women’s personalities and her readers learn and make judgments with him. Crucial to the contrast is the issue of inner versus outer appearances. For example, while Helen Temple could play the piano-forte agreeably enough to please her friends, she is not very good and nor is she was anxious to exhibit her prowess. Instead of spending several hours practicing on the piano-forte, Helen and her family spend their time visiting the poor and elderly to help them out in times of sickness, a fact Mr Montague finds out only by accident. On the other hand, all Lady Amanda is concerned about is attracting admiration through her musical recitals. The first time Mr Montague perceives a dichotomy between Lady Amanda’s public persona and her private character is when she exhibits a foolish fear of harmless insects, a fear learnt from Mme Panache, and mercilessly kills a harmless caterpillar. The gesture itself is small but has a significant impact in revealing her true personality, ‘[I]n the same moment Lady Amanda’s whole person seemed metamorphosed to the eyes of her lover. She ceased to be beautiful: he seemed to see her countenance distorted by malevolence; he saw in her gestures disgusting cruelty; and all the graces vanished’ (150). Maria Edgeworth leads Mr Montague and her readers to explore this dichotomy to illustrate the ambiguity of prescribed feminine roles in society. On the one hand, women are expected to be models of private virtue, but if they remain so they rarely catch the eye of a suitable future husband and end up being

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spinsters in a society that does not value single women. Thus, the economics of the marriage market forces young women to develop public personas whose success is dependent on cultivating exhibitionism, selfishness and thoughtless competition. Contrary to current social fashion, Mr Montague comes to realize that women should be judged within the context of their families and homes and not just within the public arena of balls and parties where the marriage market is held: What advantage has a man, in judging of female character, who can see a woman in the midst of her own family, ‘who can read her history’ in the eyes of those who know her most intimately, who can see her conduct as a daughter and a sister, and in the most important relations of life can form certain judgment from what she has been, of what she is likely to be? But how can a man judge what sort of wife he may probably expect in a lady, whom he meets only at public places, or whom he never sees even at her own house, without all the advantages or disadvantages of stage decoration? (155)

Mr Montague goes on to make the right choice to marry Helen Temple and Lady Amanda foolishly elopes with Mr Dashwood, a tutor and fortune hunter, whom Mme. Panache had marked out as a possible husband for herself. So the story ends with both the governess and Lady S— exchanging dismayed accusations. The lack of Lady S—’s motherly supervision of her daughter’s education, the foolishness of the daughter’s personality and the superficial qualifications of the governess contribute greatly to the prophesied ruin of Lady Amanda’s life. Helen Temple on the other hand, benefits greatly from her mother’s tutelage and makes a fine marriage with an enlightened Mr Montague. From the passage above and the conclusion of the tale, it is accurate to conclude that Maria Edgeworth does not really question the cultural consignment of women to the domestic sphere with the same radical rigor of Mary Wollstonecraft or even Catharine Macaulay. Edgeworth accepts, more readily perhaps, the current realities of the position of women in her society as highly circumscribed. What she does do is pose serious challenges to this circumscription without ostensibly querying the basic normative premises of patriarchal binaries. Maria Edgeworth shifts the scene of evaluation of feminine identity from the public arena to the domestic arena and argues that the dichotomy between the public and private in this case is absurd. In fact, the private persona should be the public one too. By doing so, I propose, she troubles the sharp distinction between the public and private showing instead the permeability of these spheres of life and granting women greater agency than tradition allows. Clearly for Edgeworth the maternal role is a powerful one both in the formation of the individual personality of children and the family, but also by extension, of culture as well. She argues for a coherent program of education for girls in Practical Education, shifting a great deal the traditional premises of female education and the kind of knowledge to which women should have access. In doing so, Edgeworth significantly rewrites prescriptions of feminine roles and female subjectivity. Here as well as in Moral Tales, tales which are fictive illustrations drawn from real life, Edgeworth continues and extends her arguments made in her prior publication Letters for Literary Ladies for educating women in

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subjects such as classical literature, mathematics, logic and the sciences such as physics and chemistry, if in a more limited way than men. 10 In the chapter on female accomplishment in Practical Education, Maria Edgeworth also devotes some time to argue that bourgeois women should be well educated. This would allow them more freedom to earn a living as governesses in a world where women are allowed very few opportunities for financial independence. Edgeworth also argues that the job of a governess is indeed and should be recognized as a profession. She writes: A profession we call it, for it should be considered as such, as an honorable profession, which a gentlewoman might follow without losing any degree of the estimation in which she is held by what is called the world. There is no employment, at present, by which a gentlewoman can maintain herself without losing something of that respect, something of the rank in society, which neither female fortitude nor male philosophy willingly foregoes. The liberal professions are open to men of small fortunes; by presenting one similar resource to women, we should give a strong motive for their moral and intellectual development. (548)

In addition to asking that women be provided additional opportunities to make a respectable living, Edgeworth connects again individual development to national character—she asserts that the education of the nobility, the rich and powerful is of national importance. She gives the example of how male tutors and masters of the sons of the upper classes are often given lucrative positions in the church in recognition of their national service. In the same way she argues, and here she is indeed making a radically new argument, that the education of the daughters of the upper classes is as important because they are a part of and make important contributions to the basic fabric of a national identity and culture. As such then, the women who educate these daughters should be given equal respect and recognition for the important task that they do. Thus, Maria Edgeworth not only makes a strong case for the importance of additional professional opportunities for women and public recognition for their work, she makes an even more basic assertion—that women are as important to the political and cultural health of a society as men are and as such should be given equal opportunity and oversight in education. What women read, what women do and what women comprehend is important. Good teachers, careful parents and a viable system of female education can best regulate these things.

In Practical Education and Moral Tales, the Edgeworths show a keen understanding of how textuality and print, highly public mediums, have immense power to configure interiority of self. If we agree with their argument that the individual is the basic unit that composes society then print and textuality have immense power to recompose the private and public spheres as well. Moreover Maria Edgeworth, from the very beginning of her career, exhibited a sharp recognition of how writing and authorship have the ability to challenge and redraw

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cultural lines. Reading for her was the building block of both writing and comprehension and the Edgeworths heavily emphasized the importance of the right kind of reading at the right age both for girls and boys. This is elaborated in the chapter on ‘Books,’ where in discussing Condillac’s program of education for an eight year-old prince of Parma, they express wonder and sympathy that the prince is made to read texts far beyond his understanding. In the morning the prince read the French poets, Boileau, Moliere, Corneille, and Racine and in the evening, extracts from L’Origine des Loix, by M. Gouget, with explanatory notes about the origins of society. In criticizing such a program, the Edgeworths argue against giving children reading material that they do not have the ability, the background or the context to understand fully. This leads to fallacies as bad as those produced by rote learning. Mitzi Myers has written, ‘Maria always satirized rote learning and formal lessons separated from lived experience. The Edgeworths did not think much of the totally classical education that dominated the major universities at that time’ (Anecdotes 28). Furthermore, too early a reading of texts like Moliere’s or Racine’s work excites the childish imagination in a manner that can prove disastrous. Myers has also written extensively about how such disastrous effects of inappropriate reading material can be seen in ‘Angelina; or, L’Aime Inconnue,’ another short story included in Moral Tales. Excessively sentimental reading that excites the young imagination leads Angelina to misapprehend the world as well as her own sense of self. I want to add a couple more telling examples. Forester is influenced negatively to excessively value a solitary life by reading Robinson Crusoe at a very young age. Part of his reformation comes about through his immersion in Benjamin Franklin’s works at the right moment in life when he has the power to comprehend the author’s message as well as the readiness to apply it to his own life. In ‘Mademoiselle Panache,’ the final blow to Mr Montague’s infatuation for Lady Amanda comes about as he spies a smutty French novel which falls out of her pockets, ‘[H]er lover stood for some minutes in silent amazement, disgust, and we may add, terror’ (157). These examples certainly serve to illustrate the point that reading is powerful in the formation of subjectivity but also to emphasize with some clarity that what one reads, is also the source of how one is judged by others. ‘Formerly it was said, “tell me what company a man keeps, and I will tell you what he is;” but since literature has spread a new influence over the world, we must add, “Tell me what company a man has kept, and what books he has read, and I will tell you what he is” ’ (385), concludes the chapter on books. III I have argued that Maria Edgeworth provides a new and different prescription for both male and female subjectivity through her pedagogical work and that she consciously challenges public and private boundaries, redrawing these boundaries through her texts and fictions. Edgeworths’ protagonists struggle to achieve moral individuation often by interrupting conventional practices of sex and gender. Those who fail are saliently the ones who are unsuccessful in breaking away from

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conventional roles. In Maria Edgeworth’s work, ontology is not protected from politicization; indeed embodied ontology is acknowledged as highly politicized given its power in disrupting the binary dichotomy separating space into public and private zones. While the lines separating these zones still continue to be drawn, even the very act of description involves power. Nancy Fraser has pointed out that different individuals have different relationships to the private and public and some have more power than others to draw and defend the line. Fraser believes that instead of taking the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as self-evident, feminist projects in part must overcome ‘the gender hierarchy that gives men more power than women to draw the line between public and private’ (331). Through the above analysis I suggest that as an educator, Maria Edgeworth was deeply concerned with the moral and ethical implications of the divide between public and private. Pedagogy, literature and reading, she believed, served as powerful tools to disrupt and construct subjectivity, to recreate the lines between public and private and to rewrite the nature of given reality. Moreover, such recreations were of deep import to national and cultural identity and thus of immense public concern. As such then, she understood the powerful and political impact of her own reading and writing on her readers. Carole Pateman has observed that since Mary Wollstonecraft’s day, ‘feminists have been caught on the dilemma over whether to become (like) men, and so full citizens; or to continue at women’s work which is of no value to citizenship’ (9). Earlier women writers like Maria Edgeworth, who have advocated continuing in some measure at women’s work, have often been found wanting by contemporary feminisms. Yet this ‘either’ ‘or’ reading of her work is too replicative of patriarchal binaries. Maria Edgeworth offers instead a subtle escape from this dilemma. She presents a much more integrated vision of masculine and feminine roles in the public and private arenas and imbricates what many of her contemporaries and subsequent scholars have thought of as separate concerns and separate spheres. Thus, if we shift the terms of our scholarly evaluation and read her pedagogical prose and her fiction together, a different and more complex profile of Maria Edgeworth emerges. We see her as a strong advocate of female agency, an educator who sought to create some measure of equality for female education, and a writer who argued for the relevance of the private sphere for men. Importantly, she was also an author who decentered and destabilized many conventional gender practices by showing that women were relevant to and part of public concerns and as such, had a legitimate place in the public sphere. Notes 1

James Newcomer in his article, ‘Maria Edgeworth and her Critics,’ College English 26:3 (1964): 214-218, provides an excellent overview of how twentieth-century literary histories have treated Maria Edgeworth. Caroline Gonda gives a good overview and analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reviews of Edgeworth’s works in her chapter on Edgeworth in Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709-1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Early critics like Elizabeth McWhorter Harden in her Maria Edgeworth’s Art of Prose Fiction (The Hague: Mouton,

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1971), have taken Edgeworth too literally at her occasional word that purports not to espouse any political theory or agenda in her writing. 2 Contemporary scholarship has inherited this view from the Victorians. Victorian literary histories were ideologically predisposed to make such assessments of women writers. Recently, Victorian scholars have challenged such assessments. For a thorough sample of such reassessments see Susan Johnston’s Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001). 3 A recent example is Katharine Binhammer’s essay, ‘Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s’ Feminist Thought,’ Feminist Studies 28:3 (Fall 2002): 667-690. Binhammer does a persuasive reading of what she calls ‘an assortment of texts by women . . . that began to articulate a sustained critique of the political and social deployment of sexual difference,’ (669) by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Catharine Macaulay and Priscilla Wakefield. Maria Edgeworth and her 1798 Letters for Literary Ladies is completely passed over. I believe this is so because Maria Edgeworth is considerably subtler than her contemporaries in her critiques and is ambivalent about a radical proto-feminist agenda. Therefore, she does not easily fit the twenty-first century feminist mold. Nevertheless, she is a prolific women writer of the late 1790s who argues strongly for new rights for women and access to the public arena. Omitting Edgeworth in such accounts is regrettable. Unfortunately Edgeworth’s current literary reputation is largely based on her novels that are highly complex illustrations of her society and therefore are much more open to pro-patriarchal interpretations. 4 Julia Douthwaite in her essay, ‘Experimental Child-Rearing After Rousseau,’ has found Edgeworth to be disparaging of women’s rights in Practical Education. Douthwaite writes, ‘In the name of female happiness, she locates women in a narrow sphere of activity . . . Practical Education raises the ethical question: how can one intervene in the private life of family members without violating the sanctity of the home’ (37). I disagree. I believe Douthwaite comes to this conclusion because her otherwise fine analysis is indebted to the ‘separate spheres theory.’ 5 Mitzi Myers is a critic whose work on Edgeworth cuts across period, genre and disciplinary boundaries. See her essay, ‘Shot from the cannons; or, Maria Edgeworth and the cultural production and consumption of the late eighteenth-century woman writer,’ for an example of cross-disciplinary analysis. In this essay, Myers points out that Maria Edgeworth has traditionally been seen as an unfavorable, though useful didactic foil to Jane Austen. She compares Austen’s canonized status to Maria Edgeworth’s reputation as ‘daddy’s girl,’ and the grudging acknowledgment given to her work by literary history. Myers attributes Edgeworth’s current lack of similar popularity to the fact that she is not ‘Romantic’ enough to suit easy periodization, not ‘feminine and Christian’ enough to suit the nineteenth century, not ‘universal’ enough for the early twentieth and not ‘feminist’ enough to suit the late twentieth century. 6 When referring to her single authored essays, I will use just Maria Edgeworth’s name when I mention the author but will otherwise refer to the authors in plural in my general discussion of Practical Education. 7 Marilyn Butler particularly points to Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, or the Principle of the Association of Ideas, with essays relating to the subject of it, by J. Priestley (1775) as highly influential. Hartley’s book had been published in 1749. 8 In her biography of Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), Butler remarks that her attitudes as a grown woman reflect the decade in which her father grew to intellectual maturity (266). Mitzi Myers agrees that Maria Edgeworth’s beliefs are much more aligned with the philosophies of mid eighteenthcentury thinkers rather than with her Romantic contemporaries. Myers ascribes this to her

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father’s influence on her education and reading materials. Maria read the seminal texts of a generation before her own giving her, what some unsympathetic reviewers called, an antiquated sensibility. See Myers’ article, ‘Shot From the cannons.’ 9 MacFayden discusses the development of the Edgeworths’ vision of idealized bourgeois masculinity in detail in her article For further discussions of the depiction of masculinity and male subjectivity in Edgeworth’s works see Irene Beesmyer’s essay in this volume. 10 Letters for Literary Ladies (1798), Edgeworth’s first publication, is an argument in support of female education and authorship. Maria Edgeworth wrote the book as a response to Thomas Day’s letters sent to her father, which strongly advised against educating daughters in a format reserved for sons or allowing Maria to publish her writing. Day was a very well known philosopher and author of the influential book for juvenile education, Sandford and Merton, in which he laid out a program of education heavily influenced by the work of Rousseau. See Catharine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and my essay, ‘A Prescription of Letters: Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies and the Ideologies of the Public Sphere’ in the Journal of Narrative Technique 28:3 (Fall 1998): 266-286, for further discussions of Maria Edgeworth’s early intervention in the debate on female education and authorship. Works Cited Butler, Marilyn. General Introduction. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. Ed. Jame Desmarais, Tim McLoughlin and Marilyn Butler. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999. VII-LXXX. Douthwaite, Julia. ‘Experimental Child-Rearing after Rousseau: Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education and Belinda.’ Irish Journal of Feminist Studies. 2:2 (Winter 1997): 35-56. Edgeworth, Maria, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Practical Education. Ed. Gina Luria, New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1974. Edgeworth, Maria. Moral Tales. Philadelphia: Ashmead and Evans, 1865. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas.’ Feminism, the Public and the Private. Ed. Joan B. Landes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. MacFayden, Heather. ‘Maria Edgeworth and the construction of Gentlemanly Reading: Forester, Robinson Crusoe, and Benjamin Franklin.’ English Studies in Canada. 20:4 (1994): 395-411. Myers, Mitzi. ‘Shot from the cannons; or, Maria Edgeworth and the cultural production and consumption of the late eighteenth-century woman writer.’ The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, Image, Object, Text. Ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, New York: Routledge, 1995. —. ‘Anecdotes from the Nursery’ in Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798).’Princeton Library Chronicle. LX:2 (Winter 1999): 220-250. Oliver, Grace. A Study of Maria Edgeworth, with notices of Her Father and Friends. Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1882. Pateman, Carole. ‘The Patriarchal Welfare State.’ Feminism, the Public and the Private. Ed. Joan B. Landes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Chapter 4

Maria Edgeworth and the ‘True Use of Books’ for Eighteenth-Century Girls Kathleen B. Grathwol

In the beginning of the eighteenth-century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously summarized Lord Lyttleton’s ‘Advice to a Lady’ in the following aphorism: ‘Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet;/In short, my deary, kiss me and be quiet.’1 Giving advice on the regulation of women’s behavior was a highly popular pastime in the eighteenth century (it remains so today), beginning with careful monitoring of the education of young girls. Frequently, scandalous female characters in novels, memoirs, and periodicals cite improper early education as the source of their downfall. Almost as frequently, unrestricted and/or unsupervised childhood reading is pinpointed as the first step in the long march toward a damaged or lost reputation. Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), both novelist and writer of educational treatises, had much to say about women’s education and appropriate reading matter for young girls. This essay will explore Edgeworth’s sometimes seemingly conflicted ideas concerning this important topic of its time, looking at selections from both her fictional and her non-fictional work, and considering her varying approaches as shifting negotiations between the opposing pursuits of pleasure and of principle in women’s lives. I will argue that, contrary to many critical assessments of Edgeworth’s pedagogical work as a simple regurgitation of her father’s ideas, Edgeworth offers in her views on female education a radical revisioning of women’s place in society. French romances and later English and French novels were widely seen as particularly noxious in their potential effects on women readers, especially young women and girls. The struggle over the aesthetic and/or moral ascendancy of fictional versus non-fictional writing, especially over the increasingly popular new form of the novel, was intensely engaged in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While Boileau’s principal doctrine of L’Art poétique (1674) that the duty of literature was at once to ‘please and instruct’ was embraced in theory by most early writers of fictional prose, fiction itself was frequently seen as morally suspect precisely because it gave so much pleasure. Early defenders of the fictional genre of romance emphasized the limitations of history in its assumed adherence to the factual, arguing that romance ‘affords a larger field for instruction and invention.’2 However, many early eighteenth-century novels began with truth

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claims as their authors tried to assert a moral efficacy and authority that was generally judged lacking in the overtly fictional romances. Lacking the rigorous training of extended formal education, girls and young women were seen as particularly susceptible to the pleasures of the text. Stemming from a general concern over the personal stability of women, the debate over whether the pleasures of literature, and particularly novel-reading, promoted that stability or damaged it was hard-fought. Edgeworth, herself, frequently portrays heroines who sacrifice pleasure to principle in their pursuit of an ethical life. She also, on more than one occasion, denigrates her own fictions. In one case, as Catherine Gallagher has argued, she portrays them as mere ‘illustrative signifiers’ to her father’s ‘originary’ ideas, stating: ‘All the general ideas originated with him, the illustrating and manufacturing them, if I may use the expression, was mine’ (274).3 Despite this seeming depreciation of fiction and of her own writing, Edgeworth was undoubtedly one of the most successful and prestigious writers of her day, competing successfully with both men and other women writers in her prolific production of fictional, as well as non-fictional texts. For Maria Edgeworth, as for her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, higher education for women and the pursuit of literary endeavors by women were both part of a broader Enlightenment belief in the advancement of society through education. Lockean in their approach, the Edgeworths clearly distinguished between female innocence and ignorance, and their educational treatises proselytized on the importance of educating women to be thoughtful, active citizens and, eventually, sensible and effective mothers. Rejecting the Rousseauistic ideal of womanhood as passive and unintellectual, the Edgeworths were outspoken advocates of female education, who nonetheless argued for a system of education tempered by reason and disciplined by self-control. Their co-authored The Parent’s Assistant, or Stories for Children (1796) and Practical Education, or the History of Harry and Lucy (1798) advance a vision of education that is devoted to reason as a guide to conduct and as the surest means to achieving the end of virtue and happiness. Richard Edgeworth approached the subject of education as a domestic science experiment in which he first investigated the needs of the child’s mind and personality and then recorded the conversations and behavior of his own numerous children. Using these family ‘case studies,’ he and Maria, as his amanuensis and collaborator, first theorized on the formation and development of children’s characters, and then argued that if children are clearly shown right from wrong from an early age, they will rationally choose right. The stories that form the backbone of The Parent’s Assistant clearly demonstrate these moral demarcations and thus, in theory, serve to entertain and instruct the children to whom they are read. Richard Edgeworth begins his ‘Preface’ to The Parent’s Assistant with what he admits is an apparently ‘pedantic’ motto from Aristotle: ‘All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth’ (v). The connection that Edgeworth’s father makes here between early childhood education and the realm of politics is a connection that Edgeworth herself explores in her writing.

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For Edgeworth, the engagement in educational theory may be read as a kind of political action open to women and one that she embraced wholeheartedly. In her first published work, Letters to Literary Ladies (1795), Edgeworth executes the first of a series of subtle negotiations of her own precarious position as a highly educated and strongly opinionated female writer of the late eighteenth century. While it has been widely argued that Edgeworth’s political ideology was formed almost exclusively by an adoption of her father’s and her father’s friends’ ideas, more recent readings have focused on Edgeworth’s own subtly transgressive rewritings of femininity within her work.4 On the surface, Letters to Literary Ladies may certainly be read as a transparent reiteration of Richard Edgeworth’s ongoing arguments with his old friend Thomas Day on the subject of female education. In support of this argument is the structure of the initial ‘Answer’ to the ‘Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, Upon the Birth of a Daughter.’ This ‘Answer’ constructs its argument upon the central premise that the ultimate aim of female education is to produce women (both married and unmarried) who will be boons rather than burdens to the men in their lives. Considering first the possibility that his daughter may not find a husband ‘suited to her taste’ (17), the Gentleman argues, ‘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’ (20). He continues and expands the argument, however, emphasizing the importance of her ability to ‘conform’ herself to the dictates of a masculine taste and dominance: 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. (20)

Additionally, the Gentleman briefly restates the argument, advanced just a few years earlier by Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), postulating the importance of female education in creating more effective mothers, as well as better wives. He states: ‘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’ (20). He, in fact, concludes his argument on this central point, musing on the ‘pleasures which men of science and literature enjoy in an union with women who can sympathize in all their thoughts and feelings, who can converse with them as equals, and live with them as friends; who can assist them in the important and delightful duty of educating their children; who can make their family their most agreeable society, and their home the attractive centre of happiness’ (38). Further, the Gentleman denies the commonplace conflation of female ‘virtue’ and ‘ignorance,’ arguing forcefully that while ignorance leads to prejudice and bad habits, good habits such as ‘reserve and modesty which constitute the female

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character’ are formed by a combination of ‘moral instinct,’ ‘knowledge and power of reasoning’ carefully and consistently instilled from a very early age (21-22). Although in many ways progressive, to frame precepts for women’s education based upon what one would wish for in one’s wife is undeniably patronizing. This section of the text advances the forceful, yet in some ways conservative, argument for female education that is reiterated in variant forms in both Practical Education and The Parent’s Assistant. It displays Edgeworth most clearly in the role of femme philosophe, a role to which she claimed she was illsuited: ‘A number of different feelings—many of them most trifling and foolish perhaps— . . . disturb my spirit of observation and unfit me for a philosophical spectatress in the world.’5 We see Edgeworth in this section of the text firmly occupying the role of rational observer, articulating a purely rational system of belief based on unswerving principle, a role that she herself suggests is more ‘masculine’ than ‘feminine’ by her awkward noun of spectatress. Despite her masterful transvestite performance as ‘the Gentlemen,’ the second half of the text exposes her contradictory feelings towards the relative merits of the pleasures of fiction versus the principles of philosophical discourse. The reasonable speech of the latter was culturally privileged throughout the eighteenth century as superior to the excessive and emotional nature of fictional language. Yet in considering how Edgeworth chooses to follow the ‘gentlemen’s’ epistolary statements, we see her attraction to the pleasures of the former. In the ‘Letters of Julia and Caroline’ and the appended ‘Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification,’ Edgeworth indulges the emotions and flirts with the pleasures of fiction, which she so carefully excludes from the first two gentlemen’s letters of the text. Despite the second Gentleman’s expressed ‘dread’ of ‘vulgar novels’ (34) falling into the hands of his daughter, as well as his explicit opinion that women ‘who chiefly read works of the imagination, receive from them false ideas of life and of the human heart’ (25), Edgeworth herself was a writer, a reader, and an, admittedly begrudging, admirer of fiction. In a letter to Fanny Robinson, she writes: ‘Though I am as fond of Novels as you can be I am afraid that they act on the constitution of the mind as Drams do on that of the body—’.6 Her emotional ‘fondness’ is at war in this statement with her attachment to maintaining a clear and unaffected ‘mind.’ It is this struggle between simultaneously tempting and persuasive emotion and the powers of reason that we see enacted in the letters between a rational woman (Caroline) and her sentimental friend (Julia). Edgeworth’s more novelistic discourse here as she ridicules the cult of sensibility, exposing ‘the fashionable and mawkish doctrines thought fit for women’7 clearly charts the defeat of Julia primarily through a strategy of exclusion. Her voice is heard uninterrupted in only one letter followed by a series of letters from Caroline ‘quoting’ earlier letters and responding to them. The essay, oddly enough, is the emotional high point of the text. As Clare Connolly argues, ‘It signifies the return of repressed emotion, passion and pleasure, as it assumes an uncompromisingly “feminine” voice’ (xxv). Despite the obviously satiric nature of the essay, the outpouring of excessive emotion combined with the masterful use

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of rhetoric creates a uniquely ‘feminine’ philosophical voice. Here, what might be imagined as a more able Julia convincingly argues for a female appropriation of power by any means necessary: ‘power is the law of man; make it yours’ (64). Edgeworth here seems to flirt discursively with the pleasures of unadulterated emotion in a deep and mind-altering ‘dram,’ even as she maintains the facade of creating a principled argument. A similar dichotomy may be observed between the abstract theorizing offered in Practical Education and the pleasures of the fictional Moral Tales, which follow. The Edgeworths assert that there is no ‘system’ to their educational treatise, just ‘practice and experience’ (PE, A3). Following the lead of Locke, the differences in their recommendations for the education of the two sexes are remarkably few in number. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke states: I have said He here because the principal Aim of my Discourse is, how a young Gentleman should be brought up from his Infancy, which, in all things will not so perfectly suit the Education of Daughters; though where the Difference of Sex requires different treatment, ‘twill be no hard matter to distinguish. (117)

The references that Locke makes to women in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, are relatively few but, for the most part, appreciative. It may be inferred that Locke would prefer most of his rules for diet, exercise, and exposure to the elements to apply equally to boys and girls, as he makes the now familiar argument in the context of desiring a healthy and hardy wife. When making the case against boarding school and rote, classical education for boys, he also cites the practice of educating girls at home, which, he argues, does not make them ‘less knowing or less able Women’ (166). Further, he repeatedly uses the tactic of showing how women, following a more direct and natural educational approach, can achieve more than boys. For example, he unfavorably compares the rote learning of Latin for boys to girls’ instruction in French: When we so often see a French Woman teach an English Girl to speak and read French perfectly in a Year or Two, without any rule of Grammar, or any thing else but pratling to her, I cannot but wonder, how Gentlemen have overseen [overlooked] this way for their Sons, and thought them more dull or incapable than their Daughters. (269)

While Locke undoubtedly devotes the lion’s share of his text to the education of boys, his repeated tactic of emphasizing both girls’ natural intellectual abilities and, in some cases, the superiority of the educational methods used for them betrays an important shift in early modern writings on education. This growing belief in an equality of both ability and opportunity in education for boys and girls was adopted enthusiastically by the Edgeworths. Following Locke’s lead, Practical Education is even more explicit in conjoining its advice for boys and girls’ education, especially in the area of early childhood education. Edgeworth is notable for her focus on the life of the mind of

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the individual child, as well as pursuing the model of rational inquiry and a social rather than a religious emphasis in educational pursuits. Practical inquiry and manufacture are emphasized as much as, if not more than, traditional scholarship in both the theory of Practical Education and the illustrative tales of The Parent’s Assistant. One notable exception is the chapter on ‘Female Accomplishments, Masters, and Governesses’ in Practical Education (volume II, chapter XX). This chapter devotes much of its discussion to a critical analysis of the current state of female education, particularly the pursuit of ‘accomplishments’ in the fashionable world. The Edgeworths develop an economic model that questions first ‘what price . . . mothers are willing to pay for these advantages’ (3) and second the value of these ‘accomplishments.’ In pursuit of revealing what they see to be the emptiness of traditional female pursuits, the Edgeworths first expose the uncertain fluctuations of the marriage market, for which these skills are honed: Another set of arguments must be used to those, who speculate on their daughters’ accomplishments in this line. They have, perhaps, seen some instances of what they call success; they have seen some young women of their acquaintance, whose accomplishments have attracted men of fortune superior to their own; . . . But they forget that everybody now makes the same reflections, that parents are, and have been for some years, speculating in the same line; consequently the market is likely to be overstocked, and, of course, the value of the commodities must fall. (16)

Part of the effect of the economic emphasis—evident in the terminology of ‘speculate,’ ‘market,’ and ‘commodities’—is to highlight the accepted view of the young women themselves as commodities and the focus of their education on increasing their commodity value rather than cultivating their powers of reasoning. The text further questions the possible negative influences of fashionable masters, the reliability of the instruction, and, ultimately, the end to which all of this effort leads. The question is posed: How many accomplished belles are there, who, having gained the object of their own, or of their mother’s ambition, find themselves doomed to misery for life! Those unequal marriages, which are sometimes called excellent matches, seldom produce much happiness. And where happiness is not, what is all the rest? (26)

In detailing the uncertainties of both the end and the means of female accomplishments, as well as examining the probable effect of ‘purely mechanical’ occupations leading not to an enlarged understanding, but rather to ‘indolence or incapacity of intellect,’ the Edgeworths effectively unmask the emptiness and the inhumanity of contemporary fashionable female education, so-called (34-5). They further lament the disadvantageous effects of fashionable views and publications on women’s intellectual development, more generally:

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Sentiment and ridicule have conspired to represent reason, knowledge, and science, as unsuitable or dangerous to women; yet at the same time wit, and superficial acquirements in literature, have been the object of admiration in society; so that this dangerous inference has been drawn without our perceiving its fallacy, that superficial knowledge is more desirable in women than accurate knowledge. (53)

The chapter’s conclusion clarifies the shift in emphasis that is being proposed for women’s education, explicitly stating that while the ‘masculine pronoun he, has been used for grammatical convenience,’ they do not ‘agree with the prejudiced, and uncourteous [sic] grammarian, who asserts ‘that the masculine is the more worthy gender’’ (55). Once again, we see Edgeworth here (in collaboration with her father) mastering the dryer tone of general principle and abstract theorizing in order to advance an even more progressive argument for female education than that found in Letters to Literary Ladies. This politicized discourse is followed by a more playful, although arguably equally radical, treatment of the same subject in her Moral Tale, ‘Angelina’. A full half century before Edgeworth’s most productive writing decades (1795-1814) and before the publication of Angelina in 1801, the beginnings of the struggle between pleasure and principle in early discussions of girls’ education may be observed. In the preface to Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or, The Little Female Academy (1749), the first known full-length novel written especially for young people and the first school story for girls, Fielding asserts unequivocally to her young readers that the ‘true use of books is to make you wiser and better’ (emphasis mine, xiii). Almost like a conduct book for little girls, Fielding’s tale carries us through the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’t’s’ of behavior for a young lady. Although Fielding’s preface emphasizes the ‘instruct’ of Boileau’s doctrine, her tales also undoubtedly aim to ‘please’ her young, female audience as she intersperses fantastic and romantic tales within the primary didactic narrative, evoking both French romances and children’s fairy tales. While much criticism of children’s literature presupposes a neat divide between those books which teach lessons and thus appeal to the head, and those which engage the imagination and appeal to the heart, Fielding’s text exposes the weakness of this supposition—it is too simplistic. In Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1984), Geoffrey Summerfield writes that: we possess at least two complementary, and potentially conflicting, ways of knowing, one is the poetic, metaphorical, animistic, even magical—the ‘useless’—way. The other is the empirical, scientific—the ‘useful’ way.8

In fact, the ‘poetic’ and the ‘empirical’ are most often combined in children’s literature as the excesses of the imagination are warned against in highly imaginative stories. Fielding’s pioneering text initiates a model of imaginative instruction for young girls that is inextricably linked, like the world of romance and many eighteenth-century novels, to female storytelling. Notable in Fielding’s text is

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the absence of male authority figures or of any male characters, except in the embedded narratives. Like in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), in which the pastoral setting provides a space for the establishment of a utopic female community, Fielding’s schoolgirls draw strength and solidarity from their worldly isolation. Lacking any male presence, the female characters must think for themselves, direct their own activities, and provide their own leadership, all of which they do quite successfully. Of course, much of their thought in relation to proper behavior is a regurgitation of the patriarchal standard for women. Children’s early education is a primary theme of the embedded narratives in Fielding’s text. All of the girls who discover their faults and behavior flaws reveal the source of those flaws in their childhood education when they relate their life stories. The sharing of female life stories establishes a paradigm of women communicating through lived experience and felt emotions rather than through philosophical or abstract thinking. Furthermore, they are encouraged to explore fantasy in their tale-telling, with the sole injunction of their instructor Mrs. Teachum not to lose sight of their allegorical meanings—‘Giants, Magic, Fairies, and all sorts of supernatural Assistances in a Story, are only introduced to amuse and divert’ (16). At the same time, the girls are learning the ‘true use’ of books and stories: to make them ‘wiser and better’, to draw (most frequently) a conservative moral or lesson concerning proper female behavior from them. Like Fielding before her, Edgeworth’s fictions in The Parent’s Assistant are oriented towards self-improvement and purposefully combine pleasure with instruction. Her groundbreaking tales, populated by resourceful and independent child heroes and heroines, serve to popularize the theoretical principles advanced in Practical Education, while offering unsentimental moral sense in a vividly imagined examination of the trials of growing up. The popularity of the tales rests, in large part, on the strength of Edgeworth’s characterizations. As Mitzi Myers writes: The children of The Parent’s Assistant are miniature heroes and heroines domesticated from quest romance. They nurture and counsel inept or ailing parents, they pay the bills, they help out siblings and rescue their pets from slaughter or sale. Brave, ingenious, and strong on character and determination, they are never at a loss for long. These tales of everyday heroism offer the child of the late eighteenth century far more than behavioural rules. They give child readers – boys and girls alike – confidence in themselves and in their abilities to solve problems and to achieve a more satisfying material, intellectual, and emotional life. It is this heroic quality, depicted with dramatic flair and a seemingly transparent vernacular realism, that makes the stories still so appealing, once we cease to expect exercises in Romantic nostalgia and sentimentality. Edgeworth’s tales are also, if one thinks back to Puritan moralizing or forward to Evangelicalism, refreshingly secular. The children depend on themselves, without recourse to God or prayers.9

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One such tale, with its requisite self-reliant heroine, is the tale of Angelina, or L’Amie Inconnue, which was published paired with a tale of a young man, Forester. According to Richard Edgeworth’s preface, Angelina is ‘a female Forester,’ more specifically, an idealistic young adult who ‘react[s] against adult social forms and conventions.’10 Sandwiched between her children’s tales and her fiction for adults, the Moral Tales for Young People, as a final part of The Parent’s Assistant, were explicitly written for young adults and pursue themes which have as much in common with her adult fiction as with her children’s tales. Like the ‘miniature heroes and heroines’ of the children’s stories, Angelina is ‘brave, ingenious, and strong on character and determination,’ as well as ‘never at a loss for long’ (Myers). Her story, however, takes the reader into a world of adults and adult decisions with potentially catastrophic consequences. Angelina, ‘scarcely sixteen,’ is an intelligent young woman whose early education has been badly managed and who has consequently learned to map her world through the lens of sentimental literature. In the first discussion of her in the tale, her aptly named aunt and guardian, the fashionable and utterly solipsistic Lady Diana Chillingworth, describes her as ‘a self-willed, unaccountable, romantic girl,’ while her more sympathetic aunt lady Frances Somerset laments that her ‘great abilities . . . had not been well directed’ (257). When the tale opens, Angelina has eloped, not with a male suitor—her mystified aunt remarks, ‘there is no love at all in the case’ (258)—but to live with a female friend whom she has never met but with whom she has had a long and sentimental correspondence. She has been subject to the unwanted advice, ‘from morning till night’ (258), of her uncaring aunt Lady Diana, as well as to the devious maneuverings of her aunt’s social-climber companion Miss Burrage. That she has been largely neglected is made obvious by Lady Diana’s defense of herself in the matter of Angelina’s elopement: She used, every now and then, to begin and talk to me some nonsense about her hatred of the forms of the world, and her love of liberty, and I know not what; . . . for you know, in London, engaged as I always was, with scarcely a moment to myself, how could I attend to all Angelina’s oddities? (258)

Edgeworth notes, even more explicitly, that Angelina’s deception was facilitated by the fact that Lady Diana ‘was much more observant of the appearance of her protégée in public, than interested about what passed in her mind in private’ (262). Thus, Angelina is left to pursue her fantasy of a life of heroine’s ‘adventures’ and sentimental rural retirement, a fantasy that is bound to be disappointed when her heightened expectations are confronted by reality. Edgeworth’s heroine strongly resembles Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella, and she refers twice to Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752). As Mitzi Myers has noted, she is ‘indebted like so many eighteenth-century and later fictions to a Quixote model—the romantic young person confronting a world which obstinately refuses to tally with the model of what should be generated by the protagonist’s reading.’11 Angelina, like Arabella,

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must learn to recognize and trust her own sincere emotions, rather than those dictated by the exigencies of the cult of sensibility and the ‘folly’ of romance (Ang., 296). She must also find someone willing and able to take the time to ‘direct’ her ‘great abilities’ and supervise her education, a role that it is but too evident neither her parents nor her guardian have taken much time to fill. A central issue in Lennox’s anti-romance is the power of interpretation. The heroine has learned to read the world in a romantic mode. She therefore transforms perfectly normal and harmless situations into romantic adventures centering on herself and her fatal beauty.12 She also, in an interpolated scandal chronicle, fails to recognize truly scandalous behavior in the real ‘adventures’ of Miss Groves, transforming them instead into romance. Lennox’s tone is undoubtedly satiric as Arabella’s foolishness is again and again revealed. However, she is not completely hopeless, and so the reader is drawn into a position similar to that of her lover, Glanville. We admire Arabella’s intelligence, wit, and beauty, but we despair of her ‘Foible’ (21) and struggle to discover a way to teach her how to read the world more accurately, i.e., without the lens of romance. It is Arabella’s hunger for notice, as well as for ‘adventures’ and a history of her own, which marks her as a deviant woman. And it is of that deviance, described throughout the text as her ‘foible,’ that Arabella must ultimately be cured if she is to fulfill her ‘proper’ role as wife and mother. Sadly, the ‘cure’ is, in many ways, worse than the disease as it effectively destroys the heroine’s narrative potential. Arabella’s deviance reflects, in fact, a preference for the pleasures of fictional, romantic discourse, rather than the principles of history, Christianity and philosophy, which are employed in her ‘cure.’ Angelina’s dilemma resembles that of Arabella, but with important differences. We see in both young women examples of scandalous female characters, whose scandal may be traced directly to faulty early education and the influences of novel reading. However, Edgeworth’s treatment of her wayward female character draws our attention again to the radical nature of her vision of women in society. Angelina is undoubtedly a female deviant, whose deviance must be corrected in order to bring her into an acceptable social position. She further resembles Arabella in that her social errors, while sometimes carrying potentially grave personal consequences, are rather innocent and misguided than vicious. However, in one important way, Edgeworth’s quixotic heroine recalls the schoolgirls of Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or, The Little Female Academy more than Lennox’s Female Quixote, because Angelina’s community is almost entirely female; and her savior is also a caring female relative, rather than a male cleric. Cliona OGallchoir has remarked upon the explicitly political nature of Edgeworth’s narrative: Angelina does not look for a lover, but for a female friend and maternal substitute. Angelina’s ‘quixotic’ decision to leave her guardian’s house and seek out her ‘unknown friend’ is, moreover, motivated as much by disgust with her experience of fashionable life as it is by inflammatory reading material. Her ideals are thus to

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be located in the specific and politicized context of post-revolutionary culture: the tale has been described as ‘belonging to contemporary literary warfare.’ (xvii)

OGallchoir cites Angelina’s enthusiastic embrace of Rousseau, as evidenced by her self-dramatizing, ‘Tais-toi, Jean-Jacques, on te comprend pas’ (Be quiet, Jean Jacques, they don’t understand you) in her letter of departure, as the clearest sign of Edgeworth’s locating this tale within the ‘philosophical and political context of the post-revolutionary 1790s, when idealism could be interpreted as dangerous sedition’ (xvii). Despite Angelina’s deviance, however, and her potentially seditious beliefs, Edgeworth does not punish her heroine within her narrative for her rather extraordinary departures from the culturally coded behaviors of a young woman of her time. She is jostled in the street, mistaken for a prostitute and unjustly accused of theft, but ultimately she is redeemed by her enlightened aunt Lady Frances Somerset and we are led to believe that having finally found a protector who is both rational and affectionate, Angelina flourishes. Edgeworth concludes her tale: ‘In short, we have now, in the name of Angelina Warwick, the pleasure to assure all those whom it may concern, that it is possible for a young lady of sixteen, to cure herself of the affectation of sensibility and the folly of romance’ (302). As in the more theoretical discourse of Practical Education, we see Edgeworth once again employing the pleasures of fiction to advance the principles of her strongly held political belief in the importance of female education. Further, we see her advancing a radical revisioning of a world in which young women, perhaps with the aid of sage advice and guidance from older women, ‘cure themselves’ of their follies, rather than relying on an outside male authority to recuperate them into a male-defined cultural standard. Unlike Arabella, our last view of Angelina is not as a properly domesticated wife, but as an autonomous individual of ‘Good sense.’ One who is no longer ‘rambling over the world in search of an unknown friend, [but has] attached herself to those, of whose worth she received proofs more convincing than a letter of three folio sheets stuffed with sentimental nonsense’ (302). Edgeworth demonstrates in this tale that fiction can and most often does convey both pleasure and principle, and that even a truly deviant and initially misguided young heroine may emerge triumphant and independent. At the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft complained that ‘heroines . . . are to be born immaculate, and to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove.’ 13 The role of the heroine had shifted dramatically in the novels of the second half of the eighteenth century. The explicit sexuality that formed the basis of the amatory tales of earlier women writers like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, was increasingly unacceptable. A growing emphasis on sentimentality was accompanied by a gradual shift in the acceptable methods of moral instruction. The majority of writers no longer felt free to ‘teach’ girls and young women readers by the representations of negative examples, i.e., by lengthy and detailed narratives of deviant and oftentimes scandalous women straying from the path of virtue; rather

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many chose to embrace the positive example of the untouched and/or untouchable heroine. Many writers of fiction heeded Samuel Johnson’s warning in The Rambler that: ‘It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation.’14 The ‘true use of books’ for girls in the eighteenth-century, especially the use of widely-read novels and romances, was increasingly defined as a means, if not to being ‘born immaculate,’ at least to learning to lead an immaculate, that is, perfectly virtuous and proper life. The struggle between principle and pleasure, and Edgeworth’s own ambiguous allegiance to the former over the latter is, perhaps, most clearly demonstrated in one of her most popular novels, Belinda (1801), particularly in the uncertain status of the heroine. While Belinda Portman is the nominative heroine of Edgeworth’s eponymous novel and, furthermore, is one who does follow Wollstonecraft’s strictures ‘to be born immaculate, and to act like [a goddess] of wisdom’, modern readers and author have found the story of the secondary character Lady Delacour the much more compelling narrative of the text.15 Interestingly, this novel, which was published in the same year as the Moral Tale of Angelina, shows us a less daring Edgeworth, who refuses to place the deviant female character as the explicit heroine of the novel. At the same time, Edgeworth’s enthusiasm for her heroine was decidedly lacking. According to a biographer, when she was asked to revise Belinda several years after writing it, ‘she confessed that she was so provoked by the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda that she could have torn the pages to pieces, and simply had not the sense or heart to correct her.’ Edgeworth reportedly complained: ‘As the hackney coachman said, “Mend you? Better make a new one.”’16 Despite Belinda’s almost universally acknowledged ‘cold tameness,’ Lady Delacour, as a scandalous woman, seemingly cannot occupy the central position in this domestic novel of 1801. Her narrative must be framed by the story of a ‘good’ woman, whose virtue is so staunch as to provide very little room for narrative development or interest. Lady Delacour’s life and times, in fact, occupy much of the tale-telling of the novel. We are given her complete history and even witness her reformation. But she is not and cannot be the heroine, for her scandal has been great, her lapses frequent and grave, and she provides, through much of her action, a negative example used as a didactic tool in the educating of the true, untouched heroine. Edgeworth’s apparent approach here is decidedly different from that adopted in Angelina, where the deviant female character is the heroine, but her obvious fascination with Lady Delacour throws into question her purpose in telling this tale. In Belinda, Edgeworth explicitly and somewhat misleadingly embraces a didactic approach, stating in her prefatory apologia: The following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale—the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel. Were all novels like those of madame de Crousaz, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Burney, or Dr. Moore, she would adopt the name of

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the novel with delight. But so much folly, errour, and vice, are disseminated in books classed under this denomination, that it is hoped the wish to assume another title will be attributed to feelings that are laudable and not fastidious.17

By situating herself in the company of other didactic women writers and proclaiming her intention to present a ‘Moral Tale’ free of the ‘folly, errour, and vice’ found in too many novels, Edgeworth seemingly distances herself from any representation of scandal in the work to follow. The text itself, however, strays from these stated authorial intentions giving the reader a fairly extensive representation of two decidedly scandalous women—Lady Delacour and Harriot Freke. By the end of the eighteenth century, the marginalization of scandalous women in many novels was so extreme as to lead their creators into a betrayal of their own creations. Edgeworth appears compelled in this preface to deny categorically the scandalous female characters that she so carefully crafts within the body of the text. Their ‘folly, errour, and vice’ inspires her to perhaps the best exposition and characterizations within the novel, but she cannot claim them as her proud offspring in the opening pages, for fear of bringing the weight of a scandalous reputation down upon her own head. In the adult fiction of Belinda, Edgeworth gives the reader a ‘grown-up’ version of the moral tale of Angelina (a fact she explicitly evokes in her Preface), exploring a more complex and sophisticated narrative of female community, deviance and reformation. Yet, in representing these obviously deviant women and recuperating one of them into a life of satisfaction and domestic happiness, Edgeworth is continuing her radical revisioning of women’s position in late eighteenth-century society. Belinda comes under the protection of the first of these scandalous women, Lady Delacour, because her scheming aunt Mrs. Stanhope wishes to place her in a household where she will be initiated into the pleasures of society and meet a man of suitably good fortune to make an advantageous marriage. Having successfully disposed of ‘half a dozen nieces’ on the marriage market, Mrs. Stanhope experiences some anxiety about Belinda who, although ‘handsome, graceful, sprightly, and highly accomplished,’ nevertheless ‘had been educated chiefly in the country; she had been early inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity’ (1). Belinda’s apparent virtues render her unfit for society and, Mrs. Stanhope fears, incapable of accomplishing the ‘one grand object’ (1) of making a ‘good,’ i.e., financially advantageous, match. Mrs. Stanhope clearly recalls the scheming relatives so effectively unmasked in the chapter on ‘Female Accomplishments, Masters, and Governesses’ in Practical Education. Belinda, as an idealized rational and thoughtfully educated young woman, obviously cannot be well-guided by this female protector and so Edgeworth places her with another who, to all outward appearances, would seem to be an even worse guide in the pursuit of a happy, moral and useful life, and yet who finally proves to be the best possible companion.

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Belinda soon discovers that the frolicsome public Lady Delacour hides a ‘different person’ (4), who lives privately in a state of ‘domestic misery’ with a frequently drunken husband for whom she feels a most ‘sovereign contempt’ (4,5). Betrayed by Harriot Freke, the woman whom she considered her one ‘real friend’ (24), the miserable and dying Lady Delacour gives her confidence to the ‘artless’ (25) Belinda, offering to tell her whole history. Beginning with the warning that ‘nothing is more unlike a novel than real life’ (28), Lady Delacour confesses that she married ‘a fool’ (29) both because he was an aristocrat and because she thought he would be easy ‘to govern’ (29), an assumption which quickly proved false. Their early marriage was a ‘long criminating and recriminating chapter’ (31) in which Lord Delacour, who came to the union practically bankrupt, quickly ran through most of her considerable fortune in gambling while she, ‘ambitious of pleasing universally . . . became the worst of slaves—a slave to the world’ (33). At the same time, Lady Delacour gave birth to three children, only one of whom survived—and she was sent away to boarding school, so great was Lord Delacour’s disappointment at her sex. Having ‘nothing at home’ and feeling an ‘aching void’ in her heart, Lady Delacour looked for and found a ‘bosom friend’ in the person of Mrs Harriot Freke (34). It is in Harriot Freke that the truly scandalous woman of the text resides. Possessing ‘dashing audacity’ (35), ‘masculine superiority . . . of understanding,’ and described by Lady Delacour as ‘a philosopher’ (44), Harriot embodies the not infrequently seen character of the freakish feminist or female philosopher.18 Decidedly ‘masculine’ in looks and manner, the cross-dressing Harriot epitomizes female immodesty and, as such, is represented by Edgeworth as hardly a woman at all: Harriot had no conscience, so she was always at ease; and never more so than in male attire, which she had been told became her particularly. She supported the character of a young rake with such spirit and truth, that I am sure no common conjuror could have discovered anything feminine about her. (38)

Harriot ‘delights’ in ‘noise’ (46) and the ‘charming fun’ of ‘frolic’ (283). Not surprisingly, she leads the vulnerable Lady Delacour astray, first placing her in a compromising position with a man she has openly flirted with, inspiring Lord Delacour to challenge the rumored lover to a duel and kill him. Suffering the guilt of having needlessly caused another person’s death, Lady Delacour again allows herself to be misled by Harriot into participating, in male attire, in a duel with another woman. While Harriot escapes unharmed from the ‘female duel,’ Lady Delacour suffers a wound to her breast when her gun backfires and it is this improperly cared-for and carefully-hidden wound from which her health suffers greatly when Belinda meets her and which proves near-fatal. The theme of women’s extreme vulnerability to the loss of reputation—to the imposition of a scandalous persona on a person and actions that may or may not deserve it—appears as a leitmotif in women’s writing of the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries. The oft-proven fact that a reputation for scandal could exist independently from a person’s real actions was particularly an issue for women writers, and it is an issue that Edgeworth addresses in Belinda through the ambiguous figure of Lady Delacour. On one level, Lady Delacour serves Edgeworth as a foil for her heroine, an example of what may happen to any young woman who makes poor choices in the all-important companions of husband and female friends. Her slide down the slippery slope of scandal begins with a marriage based more on interest than inclination and is accelerated by the pressures of society, particularly, the society of one false female friend. On another level, however, Lady Delacour represents a third female character-type in the lexicon of eighteenth-century novelistic discourse. Neither the utterly outcast, unrepentantly scandalous woman that we find in Harriot Freke, nor the modestly virtuous and chaste heroine that Belinda represents, Lady Delacour is that third figure—the ultimately good woman who has become subject to vicious rumors and ruined by the establishment of a public reputation for scandal.19 Without a doubt, Lady Delacour has participated in the making of her public reputation; but within the scope of Edgeworth’s text, her most egregious follies are in the past and she is represented as a truly repentant woman, overwhelmed by the power of a public persona she no longer wishes to act. We see Edgeworth again in her fiction challenging and rewriting overly simplistic formulas for female behavior and offering instead a new vision of the importance of meaningful female education and the possibility of female autonomy. Unlike the irredeemably scandalous and unrepentant Harriot Freke, Lady Delacour’s scandal has been limited in scope (most importantly, she has never actually betrayed her husband) and she wishes for redemption, a redemption that Edgeworth ultimately grants her. In Harriot Freke, however, Edgeworth presents that other character-type not uncommon in late eighteenth-century novels, the ‘freakish feminist.’ In Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (1987), Claudia Johnson argues that to write novels of social criticism, women authors ‘had to develop strategies of subversion and indirection which would enable them to use the polemical tradition without being used completely by it.’20 She posits that the character-type of the ‘freakish feminist’ or ‘female philosopher’ was often used as a sop to gullible readers, a caricature of 1790s feminist principles, mocked and contrasted unfavorably to modest young women. In so doing, according to Johnson, the author freed herself to advance reformist positions about women through the back door. Johnson states that: ‘As a rhetorical device, the freakish female character exemplifies the effort of sceptical novelists to subvert the anti-Jacobin novel from within, as it were, to use its own conventions against itself, to establish an alternative tradition by working within an existing one in a different way and to a different end’ (21). The mere presence, Johnson concludes, ‘of risible women touting female genius and liberty is a symptom of the pressure under which women novelists labored and the political sensitivity of even mildly profeminist platforms’ (21).21

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Cross-dressing, loud, active, and ‘masculine’ in both look and actions, Harriot Freke functions in such a way in Belinda. The extremity of her characterization dictates an unsympathetic reading and sets her up as an easy target for the moral judgments of contemporary readers and critics. Having offered a suitable sacrifice to the public need to condemn deviant women, Edgeworth is able to ‘save’ the less scandalous Lady Delacour whose public reputation far exceeds her private actions, rewarding her at the end of the novel with renewed health, the return of her husband’s love, the homecoming of her daughter, and a new life of domestic bliss, thanks to the interventions of Belinda. While Lady Delacour never speaks truer than when she says to Belinda, ‘It is too late for me to think of being a heroine’ (157), the novel does offer salvation to this formerly scandalous woman and Edgeworth’s treatment of Lady Delacour suggests that not all female folly leads to irrevocable ruin, and that scandalous women, as a class, should not necessarily be driven from society. Furthermore, Edgeworth offers an innovative portrayal of the formerly scandalous older woman and the virtuous young woman, representing the maiden as a means of salvation for the crone. As such, she creates a picture of potential symbiosis, rather than the more frequently seen opposition, between older and younger women. Edgeworth echoes and reverses the structure of Angelina in the narrative of Belinda, refusing once again to cast out her deviant female character and instead demonstrating her ability, with the help of a female friend, to remake herself and reenter the world of reason and usefulness. In continuing to give voice to the scandalous woman even in this domestic novel of 1801, Edgeworth continued to assert an alternate female history, an alternate female character. She insisted again and again in her fictions and in her educational treatises on the possibility, at the very least, of a female voice not modestly silent, but audaciously loud, speaking from without. She insisted, as well, on the importance of female community and the potential of the female intellect, when properly directed, to pursue a life of reason and thoughtful utility. The ‘revolution in female manners’ called for so explicitly by Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) can also be traced in both the fictional and non-fictional work of Maria Edgeworth. Notes 1

This couplet, widely quoted both contemporarily and currently, is from Montagu’s poem, ‘Summary of Lord Lyttelton’s Advice.’ 2 George L. Barnett (ed.), Eighteenth-Century British Novelists on the Novel (New York, 1968), p. 4. Barnett is citing Roger Boyle (1621-79), author of Parthenissa, A Romance (1655). 3 Quoted in Butler, p. 171. 4 See especially Clare Connolly, Catherine Gallagher, Mitzi Myers, Cliona OGallchoir. 5 Letter to Etienne Dumont [1811]; cited by Connolly, p. xxiii. 6 Helen Zimmern, Maria Edgeworth: Eminent Women Series (London, 1883), p. 131. Cited by Connolly, p. xxiii.

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Zimmern, cited by Connolly, p. xxv. Cited in Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children (Georgia, 1993), p. viii. 9 Mitzi Myers, ‘Canonical ‘Orphans’ and Critical Ennui: Rereading Edgeworth’s CrossWriting’, in Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature, vol. 25 (1997), pp. 116-136, p. 126. 10 Cited in ‘Introductory Note,’ p. xiv. 11 Cited in ‘Introduction,’ p. vxii. 12 Arabella, displaying heroic ‘generosity’ (21), often has to ‘command [men] to live’ (16) even though she has denied them the gift of her love and her person. 13 Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman [1798], ed. Moira Ferguson (New York, 1975), p. 21. 14 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler [1750] in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (vol. III), eds. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven and London, 1969): No. 4, Saturday, March 31, 1750: 22. 15 See, for example, Kowaleski-Wallace: 109-111; Elizabeth Harden, Maria Edgeworth (Boston, 1984): 52; Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1972): 308; James Newcomer, Maria Edgeworth the Novelist: 1767-1849, A Bicentennial Study (Fort Worth, 1967): 25-26. Harden comments that Belinda is ‘little more than an abstract embodiment of principles’, while Newcomer describes her as ‘simply too virtuous to be interesting, too virtuous to provide problems of moral depth.’ Kowaleski-Wallace asserts that in the place of moral development on Belinda’s part, Edgeworth and Belinda join to ‘ “shape” a rehabilitated Lady Delacour, who triumphantly assumes her proper role as wife and mother. In short, Belinda is not about Belinda’ (110). 16 Isabel C. Clarke, Maria Edgeworth: Her Family and Friends (London, 1949): 58-59. 17 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda [1801], ed. Eva Figes (London, 1986): viii. All further citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 18 A similarly negative, if more physically repugnant, portrayal of the female wit appears much earlier in the scandal chronicles: ‘a She-Devil incarnate . . . her Face is made in part like a Black-a-moor, flat-nos’d, blubber-lipp’d; there’s no sign of Life in her Complexion, it favours all of Mortality; she looks as if she had been buried a Twelve-month; neither her Cheeks nor Lips can claim any distinction, they are all of an earthy hue; her Teeth rotten, and sweet as the Grave, or Charnel-house, and yet the Devil was in me, I marry’d for Love: Lord bless us! Love of what? not her good Conditions, I’m sure: But I am an old Man, as you see, and she’s a Wit, that took me, tho’ I understood never a word of what she writes or says: Deliver me from a poetical Wife, and all honest Men for my sake!’ (Atalantis, i.159). 19 This character-type is less ambiguously portrayed by Sarah Fielding in the characters of the brother and sister falsely accused of incest in The Adventures of David Simple (1744). 20 Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988): 19. 21 Johnson also discusses the double-edged portrayals of female modesty in Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811) and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), in which the apparently modest heroines adamantly refuse to yield their inner self-control and will to anyone, ultimately refuting the paradigm of repressive female modesty that they seem, at first glance, to epitomize. 8

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George L. Barnett (ed.). Eighteenth-Century British Novelists on the Novel. New York: Ardent Media, 1968. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Clarke, Isabel C. Maria Edgeworth: Her Family and Friends. London: Folcroft Library Editions, 1949. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda [1801]. Ed. Eva Figes. London: Pandora Press, 1986. Edgeworth, Maria. Letters for Literary Ladies, to which is added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification. Ed. Clare Connolly. London: J.M. Dent (Everyman), 1993. Edgeworth, Maria. The Parent’s Assistant. Moral Tales for Young People. Eds. Elizabeth Eger and Cliona OGallchoir. In The Pickering Masters The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. Eds. Marilyn Butler and W.J. McCormack. (Volume 10). London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003. Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Practical Education, or the History of Harry and Lucy. Facsimile edition. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. Poole, England and New York, NY: Woodstock Books, 1996. 3 volumes. Fielding, Sarah. The Governess, or, Little Female Academy. Being the History of Mrs. Teachum and Her Nine Girls. With Their Nine Days Amusement [1749]. Facsimile edition. Ed. Jill E. Grey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820. Berkeley: University California Press, 1994. Harden, Oleta Elizabeth McWhorter. Maria Edgeworth. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler [1750] in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (vol. III). Eds. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969. Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth. Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote or, The Adventures of Arabella [1752]. Ed. Margaret Dalziel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education and of the Conduct of the Understanding. Eds. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton. Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. MacCarthy, B.G. The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists 1621-1818 (1946-47). New York: New York University Press, 1994. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Eds. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Myers, Mitzi. ‘Canonical ‘Orphans’ and Critical Ennui: Rereading Edgeworth’s CrossWriting’, in Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature, vol. 25 (1997), pp. 116-136. Newcomer, James. Maria Edgeworth the Novelist: 1767-1849, A Bicentennial Study. Fort Worth, TX: University of Texas Press, 1967. Pickering, Jr., Samuel F. Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749-1820. Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, ou De l'éducation [1762], in Oeuvres complètes. Eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959-69. Schur, Edwin. Labeling Women Deviant: Gender, Stigma, and Social Control. New York: Random House, 1984. Summerfield, Geoffrey. Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman [1798]. Ed. Moira Ferguson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]. Ed. Miriam Brody. London: Penguin Books, 1982.

Chapter 5

Finding Her Own Voice or ‘Being on Her Own Bottom’: A Community of Women in Maria Edgeworth’s Helen1 Frances R. Botkin

More than fifteen years after her father’s death Maria Edgeworth self-effacingly wrote: ‘Nobody can know what I owe to my father; he advised me and directed me in everything; I never could have done anything without him’ (quoted in Butler 403). Critics, too, have long focused on Edgeworth’s notorious ‘literary partnership’ with her father if only to propose that it detracts from appreciating Edgeworth as an author in her own right. The literary production of Edgeworth’s final novel, Helen (1834), reveals that Edgeworth’s relationships with women significantly contributed to her development as a writer and as a person. Edgeworth engaged her younger sisters and her favorite aunt in writing this notably womencentered novel, the only work she published (for adults) after her father’s death. Helen asserts the importance of bonds among women, a conviction expressed in the novel’s emphasis on the lives of mothers, daughters, sisters, and female friends. Vexed with issues of misrepresentation and forgery, Helen reveals the instability of women’s experience in a patriarchal world that threatens to expose or ‘publish’ them. In its theme and its composition, then, Helen underscores the ways in which a strong community of women interrogates and subverts assumptions about women’s reliance upon and suppression by men. Helen tells the story of the orphaned eponymous character who, upon her guardian’s death, moves in with her childhood friend, Lady Cecilia and Cecilia’s rigid husband. Ostensibly the Bildungsroman of the title character, Helen also tells the story of Cecilia, the lies she must tell to keep her husband, and the ways in which a closer relationship with her mother (Lady Davenant), may have prevented her dilemma. The central crisis of the text revolves around a packet of publicationbound love letters documenting Cecilia’s previous attachment to the wicked Colonel D’Aubigny. Helen claims the letters as her own, sacrificing her own good name to ensure the happiness of Cecilia and Lady Davenant. Even more marked than Helen’s seemingly excessive self-sacrifice, is the extreme anxiety she suffers

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throughout the novel, unlike anything borne by Edgeworth’s previous heroines. Helen’s urgency is due in large part to its preoccupation with issues of identity, questions of authorship, and the inscrutable process of publication. Edgeworth endured a similar experience with the production of Helen. Writing without her father, Edgeworth fretted that she was ‘more anxious far (and for good reason) about this book than any I ever sent into the world’ (Butler 193). Despite her ostensible authorial crisis, Edgeworth’s last work reveals her brilliance and agency as a women and a writer. Since Edgeworth herself privileged her partnership with her father, it is not surprising that even feminist critics do the same. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, for example, argues that Edgeworth presents a ‘particularly strong example of a maleidentified woman’ but that she was empowered by her complicity with patriarchy (96). Gilbert and Gubar similarly suggest that Edgeworth’s authorial voice undermined her father’s patriarchal control, indicating that women can only assert themselves authorially through patriarchy’s back door. Still other critics propose that Edgeworth used her position as her father’s literary partner to disseminate her own ideas; these critics understand the Edgeworth partnership in terms of a gendered and complementary division of labor. Anne Mellor, Mitzi Myers, Julie Shaffer and Mary Poovey view Edgeworth as creating an alternative to patriarchal control, a literary locus of power for women to articulate their own domestic ideologies. Finally, Caroline Gonda argues persuasively that Edgeworth did in fact exercise an authority of her own, sometimes against her father’s wishes; however, she continues, Edgeworth herself perpetuated the myth of unconditional ‘perpetual daughterhood’ (236). Gonda successfully identifies a significant problem in Edgeworth scholarship: the tendency of critics to understand Edgeworth as a writer whose agency is compromised, oppressed or, at least, undervalued by her relationship with her father. Edgeworth herself insisted, ‘Seriously, it was to please my father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued’ (quoted in Butler 289). But, if she wrote to please her father, she also wrote to engage, educate and amuse those around her. Edgeworth’s authorship was not just a partnership; it was a collaborative effort involving the whole family. Edgeworth in fact referred to the older members of her domicile as the ‘Committee of Education and Criticism.’ These ‘committee members’ contributed by listening to or reading Edgeworth’s drafts aloud, editing, consulting and even contributing material. Earlier in her career, Edgeworth had relied heavily upon her Cousin Sophy, her aunt (by marriage) Harriet Beaufort, and especially her Aunt Ruxton, whom Marilyn Butler dubs ‘the presiding genius of the first half of Maria’s career as a writer of fiction’ (300). Later in her career, Edgeworth depended upon her younger sisters, her aunts, her cousins and a few female friends. For Edgeworth, the writing process was a means of getting people involved, or, as Butler puts it, ‘… Maria used her writing to cement her ties with her family’ (292). The writing and editing of Helen bears investigation, because it demonstrates exceptionally well how Edgeworth used her writing to nurture her

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relationships with those close to her. Edgeworth’s particular anxiety about the production of Helen registers in the novel’s theme and tone, but by working with her sisters, Edgeworth found a place for herself and for her novel. Helen was for Edgeworth particularly difficult to write, and it took her almost five years to compose, even though she recycled bits and pieces from earlier sketches. Moreover, Edgeworth did not begin writing this novel in earnest until she had (in her own opinion) paid off her literary debts to her father, most notably finishing his Memoirs.2 Edgeworth’s writing from 1817 until 1830 represents her coming of age authorially, personally and emotionally, and this period functioned as a prelude to writing Helen, her most self-representative work. After the disastrous publication of her father’s Memoirs, Edgeworth fled Ireland (to escape the negative reviews) with her half-sisters, Harriet and Fanny, to tour England, France and Switzerland in early 1820. In the mid 1820s, Edgeworth once again considered writing for adults, primarily for financial reasons. By 1826, Edgeworth found herself in charge of the family and the estate.3 Although typically self-deprecating, Edgeworth nonetheless exercised strength of mind and of habit through these difficult years, and she attributed this strength specifically to her identity as a woman. She wrote to her stepmother in 1833: ‘As a woman I have been better able to bear this situation and these awkward and to a generous mind painful trials that any man of the family could have been … I flatter myself that I am by this means useful to my family …’ (quoted in Butler 428). Edgeworth’s preoccupation with mothering her sisters and managing the estate absolutely took precedence over writing for the public. In the period between her father’s Memoirs and Helen, Edgeworth wrote only stories for children; these stories kept her hidden from the critics’ purview and positioned her where she was most comfortable: When Edgeworth finally finished Helen, she writing for and with her family.4 complained to her friend Mrs Stark, ‘In the sketch of Helen I had not the judgment I formerly had to help me to see if the anatomy was correct’ (quoted in Butler 463).5 Instead, Edgeworth relied upon herself and her half-sisters, creating what came to be her first truly woman-centered project. In 1831, Edgeworth entrusted her half-sister, Fanny, with the first manuscript and urged her to cut as much out as possible; Fanny also worked at incorporating the principal characters more solidly into the plot. In 1832, Edgeworth gave the edited manuscript to her half-sister, Harriet, for still more editing. After Harriet finished, Edgeworth handed the manuscript over to Lucy, who, despite ill health, eagerly offered some material of her own. Edgeworth considered her sister’s contributions to be extremely important, and she urged them to be as bold as they wished. For example, Edgeworth wrote to Lucy: I take all the good thankfully, and assure you that the part you wrote for me would not I think have pleased the family-public so well as it has done if you had not so helped me by your mind still more than by your hand. For your good taste stopped me always when I was going wrong—and encouraged by your approving sympathy when I was going right. (quoted in Butler 461, emphasis mine)

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This description of her familial audience as her ‘family-public,’ indicates how, for Edgeworth, writing occupied the curious space between the comfortable private and intimidating public spheres.6 Edgeworth’s family-public mediated the gap between writing (private) and publication (public) with what she called ‘family councils.’ In early 1833, Edgeworth read her incomplete second version aloud to the whole family in residence. Following this copy a number of letters discussing editorial issues passed between Edgeworth, Honora, Harriet and Mrs Edgeworth. That May, Edgeworth called a family meeting, and this final part of the process, preparation for publication, took four months. Because Edgeworth was touring Connemara in autumn, 1833 (when this version returned from the publishers), she depended upon Honora and Fanny to proofread the manuscript. In 1834, she corrected the novel for a second edition and urged her brother Francis to join in the process. In its blending of voices and ideas, Helen especially reflects the cooperative nature of Edgeworth’s writing. By urging her half-sisters to help her write Helen, Edgeworth turned its composition into a collaborative family project and thus into the kind of private-public act with which she was most comfortable. Like her writing, Edgeworth’s private correspondence provided her with a means of keeping her family together and engaged. Edgeworth had always been an avid letter writer, and through personal correspondence she stayed connected to those who were not in residence at Edgeworthstown, particularly her Aunt Ruxton and Cousin Sophy. These letters constituted a significant part of her writing process, and her correspondence gradually expanded to include a small circle of people outside her family as well.7 In 1815, for example, Edgeworth and an American woman, Rachel Mordecai, commenced an epistolary communication that was to last their entire lives. This correspondence, interestingly, began roughly as Richard Edgeworth’s health declined. Although evidently neither conscious nor calculated, Edgeworth’s woman-centered consciousness emerged when her father’s death was imminent. Rachel Mordecai first wrote to Edgeworth in August 1815.8 In this first letter she expressed admiration for Edgeworth as an author and educator. Mordacai, also a family-oriented teacher with many siblings, depended upon Edgeworth’s works for her own classroom. The real point of this letter, though, was to reprimand Edgeworth delicately for her Anti-Semitic rendering of Jews in The Absentee. Edgeworth responded apologetically, and thus began a long, fruitful relationship; Edgeworth eventually wrote Harrington (1817), a novel about antiSemitism, for Mordecai’s benefit and sent it to her friend to read before sending it to press.9 In addition to learning everything about each other’s family, Edgeworth and Mordecai exchanged literary and even political ideas. Both were passionate and wide-ranging readers. Edgeworth sent manuscripts for Rachel’s perusal and approval, and in turn, Rachel proved a fair, if overly admiring, critic. They also wrote about issues as serious as prison reform and Catholic emancipation, and issues as mundane as botany, sending each other shoots and seeds. Other items that passed through the mail included portraits, scarves, books, bird’s nests, hair

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accessories, and even a pair of love birds (who died en route). Edgeworth’s voluminous correspondence contains insight into her writing process and into her heart. Edgeworth and Mordecai’s friendship represents Edgeworth’s most important non-family relationship.10 From the start, both women acknowledged what Mordecai termed a ‘mental connection’ between them. Edgeworth wrote to Mordecai in June 1821: We are truly grateful for your sympathy, and believe me that your claim of ‘mental connection’ with us is willingly accepted. No earthly thing could dispose this family so kindly towards you as the respect and affection you have shown for my Father’s character. If ever you should come to Europe . . . here is a family who will give a cordial welcome, and where you will find that domestic union which you rightly think the first of human blessings. (MacDonald 22)

Mordecai never came to Ireland, because she married and found herself busy with the upbringing and education of her many daughters; however, their correspondence spanned 120 years, even after both women’s deaths. Rachel Mordecai Lazarus died first, but her sister, Ellen (also a teacher), continued corresponding with Edgeworth, and, after Edgeworth died, with Edgeworth’s third stepmother and with her sisters. After Ellen’s death, her half sister Emma took over, then her niece, Augusta, and finally, Rachel’s great-niece, Rosina. On Edgeworth’s end, her stepmother wrote until 1865, followed by Maria’s sister Harriet, then by her sister Lucy, and Maria’s niece, Harriet Jessie. Thus Maria Edgeworth’s and Rachel Mordecai’s correspondence continued until 1942, a closely connected circle of women who nurtured this relationship through several generations. It is surprising that these letters—like many of Edgeworth’s letters— came to be published at all. In her mind, private letters had no business being published. She wrote to Mordecai in March 1827: But I do not approve of the practice now so common of publishing private letters; among the numerous reasons which I could give that which is least weighty perhaps but which is of itself sufficient weight to decide me against it is that it would necessarily lead people to write private letters for the public, either with the hope of the fear of publication before their eyes. In either case the truth and freedom and peculiar value and charm of private letters would be destroyed. (MacDonald 118)

Yet Edgeworth, who did value the content and spirit of private correspondence, permitted a justification for it under certain circumstances. She continued: But in all virtue or in most virtue there must be some degree of sacrifice required, and in this instance I own it is a sacrifice to give up the chance of reading some admirable private letters. But why is this reading so delightful? Because we flatter

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Edgeworth suggests that one always writes for an audience, intended or not. In other words, letters do not always offer a reliable insight into the characters of their writers. She proposes that older letters might have less potential for inaccuracy or ornamentation because they do not reflect current audience-oriented trends. Moreover, Edgeworth’s anxiety about the publication of private letters reflects her own reluctance to reveal herself to strangers. This anxiety emerges thematically in Helen in which the circulation of Cecilia’s letters, their interception, forgery and near publication dominate the plot and action of the second volume of the novel. These letters hold the supposed authoress up to public scrutiny, calling into question her character and her virtue. Edgeworth, however, suffered not an anxiety of authorship, but an anxiety of publication. She felt, clearly, that in putting forth any writing, letters or otherwise, into the public sphere, one becomes vulnerable to unwelcome examination and misunderstanding. Indeed Edgeworth often took advantage of her ability to make changes to her texts after they had already been published. In addition, her distinction between her ‘authorship self’ from her ‘real’ self suggests that she wished to separate her identity as a writer—her public self—from her private self. Yet, her correspondence with Rachel Mordecai reflects her genuine desire to be known and loved by a chosen few. Like her relationships with her sisters and aunt, Edgeworth’s friendship with Rachel Mordecai demonstrates her need to make connections, perhaps to fill a void within. Despite her success as a writer, Edgeworth never overcame her insecurity as an author or as an individual. She desperately craved approval, but she lacked the self-confidence to believe in the approval she received. Her father recognized this problem, and he viewed Edgeworth’s greatest fault to be her ‘inordinate desire to be loved’ (Butler 477). Edgeworth shared this flaw with her last heroine, Helen. In this novel, Helen’s mother figure, Lady Davenant, warns her: ‘It must not be the mere wish to please this or that friend; the defect of your character, Helen, remember I tell you, is this—inordinate desire to be loved, this impatience of not being loved’ (31). Helen interrogates the social expectations that infuse women with this desire and the social conditions that make it imperative that they succeed, whatever the cost. Helen also suggests the extent to which self-sacrifice—even for other women—might be unhealthy, even life-threatening. When Helen Stanley’s uncle and guardian dies and leaves her in great debt, Helen must find her place in the world. Lady Davenant had long been like a mother to Helen, and she takes great pains to teach her the important lesson that she had failed to impart upon Cecilia: strength of mind. Lady Davenant, possesses her own share of flaws, especially the ‘unnatural’ love of politics that had distanced her from Cecilia and from motherhood years before. Consequently, Cecilia had

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developed into a flighty and deceitful, though generous, woman. Lady Davenant now recognizes a ‘black spot’ in her daughter’s character that she fears is spreading, and she warns Helen to keep an eye upon her. Unfortunately, Lord and Lady Davenant depart for Russia early in the novel, leaving Helen to rely upon her own blossoming judgment. Although Lady Davenant does not know the particulars, she senses that Cecilia hides matters of importance from her, and she had long suspected a problem involving Colonel D’Aubigny. She believes, however, that he was Helens’s rather than Cecilia’s lover, partly because she knows that he had stolen a miniature of Helen that Cecilia had drawn. Cecilia had kept the affair from her mother, because she is frightened of her; however, she is even more frightened of the General, to whom she had initially lied about having no previous affairs of the heart. When the General receives the packet of love letters anonymously in the mail, Cecilia panics, legitimately worried that the truth could destroy her reputation and marriage. Her lie, then, spreads and multiplies, much like the letters themselves. When Helen agrees to claim Cecilia’s letters—temporarily—as her own, she does so because Cecilia appeals to her loyalty to Lady Davenant: ‘Oh for my mother’s sake! Consider how it would be with my mother, so ill as you saw her! I am sure if anything broke out now, in my mother’s state of health, it would be fatal!’ (279). Helen realizes that in accepting the letters against her better judgment and despite her personal regard for truth, she risks the General’s esteem and jeopardizes her engagement with the General’s dashing ward (and Lady Davenant’s close friend), Beauclerc. Helen views her fear and misgivings as selfishness, and thus she counteracts them with ‘all her generous, all her grateful, all her longcherished, romantic love of sacrifice—a belief that she was capable of selfdevotion for the friends she loved, and on the strength of this idea she fixed at last’ (281). Cecilia, however, habitually exacerbates Helen’s disproportionate selfsacrifice, verging even on emotional blackmail. For example, earlier in the novel she convinces Helen to dress exactly like her (buying jewels and gowns she cannot possibly afford), wheedling and pushing: ‘My own dear Helen, if you love me, let it be so.’ This was an appeal which Helen could not resist. She thought she could not refuse without vexing Cecilia; and from a sort of sentimental belief that she was doing Cecilia ‘a real kindness,’— that it what was Cecilia called ‘a sisterly act,’ she yielded to what was unsuited to her circumstances—to what was contrary to her better judgment. (208)

Certainly Helen is aware that she acts unwisely but this same ‘sisterly affection’ or ‘real kindness’ impels her to yield to Cecilia on increasingly serious issues, culminating in the fiasco of the letters. Helen tries to believe in Cecilia, but it becomes painfully apparent to her that Cecilia has, though regretfully, sacrificed her.

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If Helen’s participation in Cecilia’s web of deception seems justified by her desire to love and be loved, Cecilia’s motives might also be warranted. General Clarendon was quite clear about refusing to marry a woman who had been previously attached, and fear of his wrath, indeed fear of his unbending, unforgiving nature, leads Cecilia to desperately take whatever means necessary to avoid the disaster that would undoubtedly ruin her. Much of Cecilia’s earlier (precrisis) behaviors—her habitual white lies and falsehoods told to mollify or mediate—situate her firmly within the parameters of women’s socialized behaviors. Evoking Mary Wollstonecraft’s critique of Dr. Gregory who ‘recommends dissimulation’ and a fondness of dress for women who wish to please men, Cecilia’s actions also support Wollstonecraft’s argument for the necessity of strength of mind and body for women as well as for men (232, emphasis mine). In other words, Helen seems to reinforce Wollstonecraft’s assertion that ‘From tyranny of man . . . the greater number of female follies proceed; and the cunning, which I allow makes at present a part of their character . . . is produced by oppression’ (234). Cecilia’s letters, ‘playfully and delicately expressed,’ doubtless reflect the misuse of sensibility that Wollstonecraft decries, and they function perhaps as a performativity of exaggerated emotion. Yet the letters (like the lie) take on a life of their own after their first exchange. Cecilia’s letters follow an interesting and convoluted trajectory, worth delineating here in full. The letters begin in the hands of Colonel Henry D’Aubigny’s brother, Sir Thomas, who is in the process of writing and publishing his deceased brother’s Memoirs. Sir Thomas’ Portuguese servant, Carlos, had previously worked as Lady Davenant’s page; however, after Helen exposed his part in a forgery scam that had implicated Lady Davenant, Carlos had left in disgrace. While snooping through Sir Thomas’ papers, Carlos finds the letters and recognizes the opportunity for ruining his nemesis. Carlos knows from eavesdropping upon Lady Davenant and Helen that some mystery surrounds the relationship between Col. D’ Aubigny and either Helen or Cecilia. Because of the similarity in Helen and Cecilia’s handwriting, Carlos cannot determine the identity of the authoress, but when he finds the miniature of Helen, he concludes they belonged to her and sends the letters and picture to General Clarendon.11 At the same time, Beauclerc’s ‘friend,’ Lord Beltravers, returns from Europe and, discovering Carlos’ identity, pays him to copy the letters. Lord Beltravers also wishes revenge on Helen, because he had wanted his own sister to marry Beauclerc, and he brings the letters to Sir Thomas’ editor. The editor then consults the pedantic Horace Churchill (who also resents Helen for having refused him), who recommends spicing up the letters for publication. Beltravers interpolates scandalous but false material, implicating the authoress. Once the General learns of the scandal, he procures what he believes to be the only completed copy, and he forces Helen to go through the marked manuscript to underline which passages are hers so that he can compare them to the remaining copies of the originals. Helen, of course, cannot:

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She saw things which she felt certain Cecilia could never have written; yet truth and falsehood were so mixed up in every paragraph, circumstances which she herself had witnessed so misrepresented, that it was all to her inextricable confusion. (358)

Yet it is not only what the General calls ‘miserable intrigue between booksellers and literary manufacturers’ that conspire against Helen: the papers, local vehicles of scandal, and petty social forces also contribute to the circulation of this misinformation. While Helen tries to sort through the letters, Cecilia visits her irritating cousin, Lady Louisa Castlefort, to investigate rumors about Helen that had been circulating in society and in the papers. Louisa shows her an advertisement announcing the upcoming publication of Colonel D’Aubigny’s memoirs, Memoirs of the Late Colonel D-y; or Reminiscences of a Roué, wellknown in the Fashionable World Although Louisa is too dim to understand the situation, she does know that her malevolent sister, Lady Katrine Hawksby, and Horace Churchill have something to do with both the rumors and with the book. Lady Katrine bears Helen particular malice because she had hoped to live with Cecilia in Helen’s place; unmarried and bitter, Katrine has few options, especially since Louisa Castlefort does not want Katrine living with her either. When Cecilia asks about the status of the book, Louisa replies: Absolutely published, I cannot say, but it is all in print, I know. I do not understand about publishing. There’s something about presentation copies: I know Katrine was wild to have one before anybody else, so she is to have the first copy . . . this very morning for the people at breakfast; it is to be the bonne bouche of the business. (351)

Louisa’s response reiterates the blurry line between printing and publication, emphasizing the danger and uncertainty surrounding the production of the written word. The letters now circulate out of Helen’s and Cecilia’s control. Cecilia dupes Louisa into giving her the book; when she opens the sealed packet, her perusal of the letters, of her own words adulterated and embellished, terrify her. Overcome by the gravity of her situation, she steals and burns the volume and departs for the publishing house to bribe the publisher. The General, however, is already there, buying the final copy, yet the nightmare continues on. When Cecilia finally rejoins Helen, she tries to help her sort through the existing manuscript. Though she alone can distinguish truth from falsehood, she will not leave intact any passages that reveal her attachment to the Colonel, in case she were ever to claim the letters as her own. The General subsequently refuses to condone Helen’s marriage to Beauclerc, and she feels compelled to leave Clarendon Park. In the end, Helen’s downfall stems only partially from her wrongly placed loyalty to Cecilia: the printers, the papers and the people surrounding her play a role in her ruin. Helen and Cecilia fall prey to the Colonel’s indiscretion, Sir Thomas’ ignorance, Beltravers’ malice, Churchill’s vanity, Lady Katrine’s malevolence, Carlos’ wickedness and the General’s severity. The letters endure the

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violence primarily of men; the problems with misinformation and forgery bring into sharp relief the primary forces that threaten to wrongly expose or ‘publish’ women. In addition, it suggests how women sometimes turn on one another to ensure their own survival in a limiting, patriarchal social environment. Helen and Cecilia’s situation reflects Edgeworth’s own anxieties about the public circulation of private documents, emphasizing how it may damage the character of the author or subject. As her letter to Rachel Mordecai suggests, publication may destroy the ‘value and charm’ of personal letters. Worse still, truth may be corrupted. Helen also registers Edgeworth’s general anxiety about authorship and literary property. The confusion between Helen and Cecilia’s handwriting parallels the confusion critics faced trying to distinguish Maria’s writing from her father’s interpolations; however, Edgeworth’s writing process clearly indicates that she in fact expected all written texts to be composed by a number of authors or editors. She hesitated only when it came time to publish these documents; her anxieties revolved around the release rather than the writing of the documents. The circulation of Cecilia’s letters and their relevance to Edgeworth’s life has intrigued a number of critics. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, for example, argues that ‘[W]riting to Henry D’Aubigny, Cecilia first ‘authorizes’ the force of her youthful passion. She subsequently discovers that her control over that passion, a force now put into free-play, is challenged to the limit . . .’ (193). She continues, If the letters have the status of the irrepressible, as well as the ability to regenerate themselves in still more sinister form, they suggest the explosive potential of writing itself. As an image of writing, they convey the dangers implicit in the act of putting pen to paper, of committing to words those feelings best left unarticulated. (195)

Kowaleski-Wallace attributes Cecilia’s authorial dilemma specifically to the struggle of the daughter as writer, that ‘writing itself has become the monster that menaces the daughter as author’ (195). Caroline Gonda takes issue with this analysis, noting that Kowaleski-Wallace’s reading ignores the dynamics of the other relationships in the novel and collapses the experiences of all women writers under one limiting rubric (232-234). She writes: ‘Writing is not in and of itself monstrous, even when performed by a woman, although people—mostly men, in this case—may do monstrous things to and with it’ (234). Gonda rightly recognizes Helen as a reflection of Edgeworth’s experience as a published author proposing that ‘marking up copy, the difference between ‘printed’ and ‘published’ which is so important in the plot . . . help to give the crisis its air of reality’ (230). Although Gonda resists reading Helen as a ‘fable about female authorship under patriarchy, ‘I propose that Helen exposes the problems women face living (and writing) in a man’s world, predicaments that may be overcome only by forming bonds with other women. At the same time, Helen intimates that women’s commitment to each other is often complicated by their own oppression by or relationships with men. In

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either case, women’s agency is challenged by the needs, the authority, and even the whims of men. Yet, women’s commitment to one another makes survival possible in Helen. It is ultimately Esther Clarendon, the General’s sister, who saves Helen. Distinguished by her bluntness and honesty, Esther is the polar opposite of Cecilia and perhaps the embodiment of the ‘masculine woman,’ Wollstonecraft dismisses as a bugbear. Described tellingly as ‘handsome and penetrating,’ Esther lives in ‘melancholy isolation’ with her older aunt, financially and emotionally independent of men. Esther takes an immediate liking to Helen, recognizing in her the truthfulness she finds lacking in her sister-in-law. She says to Helen: I am not quite such a bear as I seem, you’ll find; at least I never hug people to death. My growl is infinitely worse than my bite, unless someone should flatter my classical, bearish passion, and offer to feed me with honey, and when I find it all comb and no honey, who would not growl then? (47)

From the start, Esther recognizes Cecilia as ‘all comb and no honey,’ and has discerned that Helen’s disgrace stems from Cecilia’s deception. Therefore, she feels a particular urgency to help Helen who, leaving Clarendon Park and on the brink of a nervous breakdown, intends to live with her Uncle’s housekeeper in a style to which she is unaccustomed. She urges, ‘You must be with me at Llansillen . . . the world can say nothing when you are known to be with Miss Clarendon’ (387). With Esther and her mild-mannered Aunt Pennant, Helen is able to create an alternative—a gynocentric—community: By their perfect good-breeding, as well as good nature, from their making no effort to show her particular attention, she felt received at once into their family as one of themselves. They not only did not expect, but did not wish, that she should make any exertion to appear to be what she could not be . . . They left her, then, quite at liberty to be with them or alone. (390)

Helen slowly recovers from her nervous collapse with Esther’s ‘utmost zeal and activity’ and Miss Pennant’s ‘solicitude and tenderness’ (398). Despite her desperate unhappiness, Helen appreciates their kindness and their inclusion. Although she misses Cecilia’s charm and ‘suavity of manner,’ she nonetheless admires the ‘safe solidity of principle of her present friend [Esther], and admired, esteemed, and loved . . . her unblenching truth’ (412). A bit of a gruff nurse—stubborn and occasionally abrasive—Esther shares her brother’s honesty and uprightness. But if the General represents England and its rigid mores, Esther calls them into question. Living in Wales with her aunt, Esther occupies a foreign space on the literal border of England. Helen at first feels as though she is in a strange land: ‘The rosy Welsh maids looked with pity on the pale stranger. They hurried to and fro, talking Welsh to one another . . . and Helen felt as if she were in a foreign land, and in a dream’ (399). Esther offers Helen refuge,

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literally and figuratively, from the purview of English hegemonic codes. It could be argued that Esther functions as Helen’s other surrogate mother, and like Lady Davenant, she transgresses gender lines, providing another example of a problematic, yet compelling, mother figure. In Helen the mothers are literally identified with the foreign: the French-influenced Lady Davenant spends much of the novel in Russia and Esther lives in the wilds of Wales. In a sense, Helen ‘others the mother.’ Indeed, Helen seems exceptionally preoccupied with both absent and surrogate mothers. Edgeworth identified the moral of the novel as pertaining to Lady Davenant’s early failure at motherhood: But the moral I draw from Helen is from that fine Lady Davenant’s character that talented mothers should take care not to make their children afraid of them so as to prevent them from telling truth & entrusting them with faults & secrets at a time when youth most want another’s council . . . In short the moral of Lady Davenant’s character is that talents should make themselves objects of Love not fear. (quoted in Butler 476)

Lady Davenant, too, blames herself for Cecilia’s mistakes: At the novel’s conclusion, she insists: ‘Her only fault was mine—my early neglect: it is repaired— I die in peace’ (444). Yet, Cecilia’s fear of her mother has more to do with having secrets to hide than with her mother, and she consistently makes unfortunate choices that she well knows her mother would rightly criticize. Helen, for example, is also intimidated by Lady Davenant, but armed with her own clear conscience, with her own truthfulness, she can trust her older friend’s justness in a way that Celica has never been able to do. The problem is less Lady Davenant’s failure as a mother, and more the failure of Cecilia and her mother to successfully bond until it is nearly too late. When Cecilia, worn down and lost in her husband’s esteem anyway, finally does admit to her lies, her relationship with her mother can be repaired. The General unsurprisingly separates from her, but with her mother’s respect and support, Cecilia comes into herself finally: ‘Wretched she was, but still in her wretchedness there was within her a relieved conscience and the sustaining power of truth; and she now had the support of her mother, and the consolation of feeling that she had at last done Helen justice!’ (430). Moreover, Cecilia has at last won Esther’s esteem as well. When she tells Esther her story, Cecilia emphasizes the General’s blamelessness in their separation: ‘That he should have mentioned nothing of her conduct even to his sister was not surprising. “I know his generous nature,” said Cecilia. “But I never knew yours till this moment, Cecilia,” cried Miss Clarendon, embracing her; “my sister now,—separation or not” ’ (436). Despite the apparent failure of Cecilia’s marriage, Lady Davenant, Cecilia, Esther and Helen unite into a woman’s community that liberates and nurtures as it confronts the forces that contain it. Love, conditional but sincere, binds the women together.

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Lady Davenant soothes Helen: ‘we must love one another, perhaps all the better, for not being too perfect’ (429). In a troubling and dramatic deathbed scene, Lady Davenant convinces the General to take back Cecilia in what appears to be a satisfying conclusion: ‘Here I die if I appeal to you in vain—to your justice . . . a mother for her child—a dying mother for your wife . . . If now her husband separate from her, her good name is lost forever! If now her husband protect her not—’ (443). However, the joyful reconciliation of the conjugal family—the General, the contrite Cecilia, and their newborn son—lacks conviction. The clumsily repaired marriage, especially the General’s dubious forgiveness, and Lady Davenant’s death reflect how women survive despite rather than because of the men around them. In fact, in this novel, women’s relationships with other women eclipse women’s relationships with men. Certainly for Helen, women come first. Despite the pain it causes her, she prioritizes Cecilia and Lady Davenant before even Beauclerc. Rife with independent, dominant women, Helen undermines the importance of attachments to men. Helen for example assures Lady Davenant: ‘[M]y uncle always said a woman might be very happy unmarried. I do not think I shall ever be seized with a terror of dying an old maid’ (176). Edgeworth, of course, never married, and Helen’s statement echoes one of her own: I have not doubt that my happiness would be much increased by a union with a man suited to me in character, temper, & understanding, and firmly attached to me—but deduct any one of those circumstances and I think I should lose infinitely more than I should gain . . . Therefore, I may well be content with that large portion of happiness which I actually enjoy—I am not afraid of being an old maid. (187)

This assertion, like many others, supports Marilyn Butler’s claim that ‘when Maria Edgeworth wrote the tale which expressed herself, she wrote Helen’ (457). Edgeworth wrote Helen from within her own community of women, demonstrating how women can and do achieve a ‘large portion of happiness,’ productivity and dignity, with or without men. Carving out a powerful and regenerative space, Edgeworth’s family-public, comprised as it was primarily of women, reconciled her public and private interests, her ‘authorship self’ with her real self. Despite her understandable anxiety about writing without her father, this novel expresses less anxiety about her father’s literary absence than it does about her lack of mother. Mitzi Myers has correctly urged us to consider Edgeworth ‘the motherless child who has triumphantly created in both art and life the nurturance she needed’ (151). She did so, I suggest, by making important, lasting connections with other women. In its theme and composition, Helen identifies woman’s agency and voice as a significant locus of power. By middle age, Maria Edgeworth had started coming into her own, and as Butler writes, ‘as a private woman Maria realized herself more fully after 1817 [the

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year Richard Edgeworth died] than ever before’ (412). In 1822 Isaac D’Israeli wrote to Lord Byron: The literary comet in our conversaziones this season was Maria Edgeworth, who took up an odd whim of introducing and being introduced. It was all Soul’s day with her. She is monstrously ugly, and I saw her in a shepherdesses hat. She says nothing, but a great deal. In her father’s lifetime, when she came up to London, she was like a sealed fountain; but now, being on her own bottom, she pours down like the falls of Niagara. (quoted in Butler 413-414).

These words, I think, sum up Maria Edgeworth: a homely spinster with a sense of humor and a fast moving pen who flourished despite a boorish father and an inordinate desire to be loved. Edgeworth was 63 years old when she started writing Helen. Unlike Edgeworth’s earlier works, Helen left little impression on critics, but it is crucial to understanding her, because it fully represents her as a mature woman writer; its divergence from her previous literary tendencies and influences indicate stylistic and personal growth. More than any previous Edgeworth work, Helen engages the reader with its skill, fluidity and emotional impact. Notes 1

See p. 104 for the context of ‘on her own bottom.’ See Caroline Gonda for an illuminating discussion about the publication of these Memoirs. 3 Edgeworth’s brother Lovell had severely jeopardized financial matters at Edgeworthstown; his expenses, his debt, and his general ignorance of matters financial put the estate into massive debt. In 1833, Lovell confessed to more secret borrowing, so the next brother, Sneyd, bought Lovell’s remaining property from him, including his debts. In turn, Sneyd entrusted Maria as agent, and she kept this task until 1839 (age 71). See Butler (402-457). 4 She feared that in writing she would negatively call attention to her father once again. To Walter Scott she wrote: 2

I have a motive yet untold for wishing to publish anonymously— I have a fear that reviewers or other newspaper writers might follow up a line of criticism which they commenced—the only one which could really hurt my happiness—the setting my father’s fame & name in competition—whether in praise or blame to me this would be odious—I should reproach myself for having brought it on by publishing again—I should say to myself—Why could I not have avoided it by ceasing to write— or by writing only as I have done ever since 1817 children’s books which no reviewer can ever think worth mentioning. (quoted in Butler 413) 5

I am greatly indebted to Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography for the material on Edgeworth’s publication history, especially pertaining to Helen. Butler’s Chapter XI offers a through analysis of Helen, and it provides the bulk of my biographical and literary information on this novel.

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6

Butler points out that Edgeworth’s letters imply that her sisters ‘wrote’ segments of the text but only on a secretarial level. She explains that Edgeworth dictated the passages to them in order to hear their spoken effects; when the young women hesitated, Edgeworth changed the words (461). But Edgeworth, as her letter explicitly states, appreciated their mental help, even more than their transcription. 7 Certainly, she never lost her need for male approval; two of her main correspondents were men: Etienne Dumont and later, Walter Scott. Edgeworth repeatedly attempted to persuade Scott and later his son, Lockhart, to take over her father’s role as supervisor (he did not). Edgeworth, in fact, notoriously influenced Scott in his writing more so than the reverse. 8 Edgar E. MacDonald’s introduction to this collection of letters, The Education of the Heart, provides a fascinating overview of the Edgeworth-Mordecai relationship, from which I borrow extensively here. 9 Edgeworth’s ‘Jewess’ in Harrington turns out to have a Christian mother that, by Jewish law, makes her Christian. This denouement permits the Jewish heroine to marry her Christian lover. Oddly, Rachel Mordecai converted to Christianity on her deathbed. 10 Like Edgeworth, Mordecai lost her mother at a young age. Subsequently, her relationship with her father similarly accrued significance, and she entered with him into the ‘important business of education’ (MacDonald 10). Mordecai’s four younger siblings occupied much of her attention and nurturance, although her father, like Edgeworth’s, remarried. Mordecai’s sincere consolations for the loss of Edgeworth’s father contributed to Edgeworth’s appreciation of her. 11 See Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (192) for a careful analysis of the significance of the similarity in handwriting. Works Cited Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Edgeworth, Maria. Helen. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Gonda, Caroline. Reading Daughters’ Fictions: 1709-1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. MacDonald, Edgar. The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Mellor, Anne. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Myers, Mitzi. ‘The Dilemmas of Gender as Double-Voiced Narrative: or Maria Edgeworth Mothers the Bildungsroman.’ The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth-Century. Ed. Robert Uphaus. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1988. 67-96. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

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Shaffer, Julie. ‘Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage Plot in the Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen.’ Criticism 34 (Winter 1992): 51-73. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Norton Anthology of British Literature, Vol 2. New York: Longman, 1999.

Chapter 6

‘I thought I never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man’: Maria Edgeworth Scrutinizes Masculinity in Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee Irene Basey Beesemyer

Robert told lies . . . because he was afraid of being punished . . . He was a coward, and could not bear the least pain; but Frank was a brave boy, and could bear to be punished for little faults. The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth (4) ‘Thank’e, master, with all my heart; but I can’t take your oranges, only the one I earned . . . as for a black eye, that’s nothing! but I won’t be paid for it; no more than for doing what’s honest.’ The Orange Man; or, The Honest Boy and the Thief (49) Owen, without making any answer, began to kick, and push, and pull, and struggle, with all his might; but in vain . . . he found that ten people are stronger than one.—When he felt that he could not conquer them by force, he began to cry; and he roared as loud as he possibly could. The Cherry Orchard (62)

Maria Edgeworth wrote with a purpose. She wrote for women, for children, for Ireland. And laterally, she wrote for men. While some of her obvious literary strengths lie in a gendered awareness of female power, didactic forays into social correctitude, and the complexities of Irish and Anglo-Irish nationalism, a less transparent agenda lurks deep at the heart of three of her texts, Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee. Like the boy-children behavioral binaries she juxtaposes in her moral tales for young readers, these prose fictions all probe what seems to have been a conscious concern for Edgeworth: how should England/Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth century construct an ideal yet viable masculine posture? In my opening quotes from three of Edgeworth’s popular earlynineteenth-century children’s stories, we see her male-oriented didacticism at work. Operating in the gendered arena of boys-as-future men, the young ‘Robert’ emblematizes weakness and mendacity; conversely, his brother ‘Frank’ personifies

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sturdy and forthright probity. The disgruntled ‘Owen’ nurses petulance and what Mitzi Myers calls ‘androcentric fantasies of individual autonomy’ (viii); ‘Charles,’ on the other hand, exudes an aura of self-worth coupled to a strong work ethic. And these, Maria Edgeworth believed, were vital lessons to engrave on young male minds. These same young minds, after all, would grow into adult minds— minds capable of shaping behavior throughout an upcoming generation of men. But Edgeworth was not content merely to apotheosize virtues like honesty and responsibility along with the other godly attributes extolled in contemporary children’s literature. Nor was she satisfied with the slow processes of inculcation and absorption necessary to raise a new standard of masculinity. Rather, she tackled the problem in its already existent forms, scrutinizing and dismissing dominant male power nodes from both the present and the past. Sweeping away the chivalric, patriarchal, libertine, sentimental, and romantic models of her time, Edgeworth fashions a composite male figure capable of propelling a reconstituted masculinity forward into the nineteenth century. Complimenting Edgeworth’s strong women, this newly minted man of the millennium has adapted to the crosschannel political/social upheavals of 1789. Recognizing that aristocratic heads unwilling to change with a changing world land at the foot of either a real or metaphoric guillotine, he eschews the complacent self-privileging of inherited wealth. He rejects the power, control, and sensuality associated with the libertine male of the Restoration and early-to-mid 1700s. He disdains the self-serving, selfapproving joy of the mid-eighteenth-century’s sensibility-wracked man of feeling. And he repudiates the Romantic celebration of the loner as either artist or vessel of unbridled passion. Edgeworth’s ideal man negates ‘the Romantic will to power and possessive individualism . . . [embodied in] the solitary walker à la Rousseau, the rapist hero of fiction, the traveler-adventurer, the military titanist, and a whole host of . . . masculinist ideologies’ (Myers viii). Women, Edgeworth’s paragon realizes, are no longer to be smothered by the mantle of chivalry, manacled by the fetters of patriarchy, commoditized by the indulgences of libertinism, or engulfed by the demands of male sensibility. Instead, he shoulders his social responsibilities accrued through deserved wealth and inherited position. He prizes the value of work and education. He embraces commonality of endeavor. He acknowledges that personal effort confers dignity as well as revaluation in the eyes of the often influential and much admired women in his life. And he does not define his manhood through either ownership or subjugation of those involved in his sphere of influence. Maria Edgeworth did not stand alone in this pursuit of contemporary gender reconfiguration, however, nor was hers the only voice demanding a retooling of its parameters. Mary Wollstonecraft, for one, lobbied for female emancipation, renovating the conventional duties of wives and mothers to embrace companionate marriage and early childhood education. She also espoused similar virtues for male counterparts, foregrounding the bourgeois roles of husbands and fathers as appropriate for enlightened men of the eighteenth century. Edmund Burke, another gender-focused thinker but with a recidivistic agenda, plunged into this same charged arena by decrying ‘the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the

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vilest of women’ (76). Camouflaged in the language of insurrection vivified by the French Revolution, his thunderous denunciations attacked liberated women in revolt against a tradition of male power. In effect, recognizing the existence of such women only mirrored a widening rift in the solidarity of masculinist selfconstructs, a rift Burke perceived as arising out of weakness and emasculation. Men, according to Burke, were shorn of nobility, degraded, and unprincipled, ‘gross, stupid, ferocious . . . destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride’ (83). Rather than Wollstonecraft’s bourgeois model, Burke opted for a reinstitution of ‘manly sentiment,’ ‘heroic enterprise,’ and a return to codified chivalry where gender roles were clearly defined (by men themselves, of course), with both sexes accepting their time-honored niches in the social stratum (80). Unraveling the complex strains of gendered behavior and reweaving them into new models became an urgent topic for writers and thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century. I When Maria Edgeworth wrote Castle Rackrent in 1800, she took on the formidable task of attempting to reshape masculine politics. It was, as Patrick Murray comments, ‘probably the most influential single piece of narrative prose to appear in England between the death of Smollett in 1771 and the publication of Waverly in 1814’ (38). She also produced what Thomas Flanagan deems ‘as final and as damning a judgment as English fiction has ever passed on the abuse of power and the failure of responsibility’ (68). From a socio-political standpoint, Flanagan’s statement is undisputable; because Edgeworth’s generations of miserable Rackrent wastrels abuse aristocratic privilege by abnegating aristocratic responsibility, they are themselves abnegated, rubbed out by Edgeworth from the pages of the text. ‘The drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtaugh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy,’ she notes with satisfaction, ‘are . . . no more to be met with at present in Ireland’ (Rackrent xix). According to Elizabeth Harden, Rackrent is ‘a revealing understatement of one of the great national grievances—a gentry made irresponsible by the same social conditions which reduced the peasantry to pariahs and outcasts’ (47). But more than a social indictment or commentary on nationalistic stereotypes, Edgeworth’s short Rackrent portrait gallery limns the face of an aberrant masculinity. These men fail at their social duties because they have failed at being men. Edgeworth realized that for her adult male audience, the simple moral stories she fed to youth would have little appeal and less impact. Rather than an overt moralistic approach, then, she couches her message in tales of a degenerate aristocracy, served by an often equally degenerate peasantry. ‘Her characters,’ Harden points out, ‘fulfill their own destinies; [Edgeworth] relinquish[es] the duty of pointing a moral to the story itself’ (69). The flaws in manhood, Edgeworth believes, transcend social classes with similar flaws found in all men regardless of station. ‘Like Jane Austen and almost everyone else in that age who was not subject to some dangerous jacobinical influence such as Godwin

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or Tom Paine,’ George Watson reminds us, Maria Edgeworth ‘believed that distinctions of class are . . . on the whole a neutral fact, about human society’ (Watson, Rackrent xxi). With this social permeability of masculinity’s constructs in mind, Edgeworth styles Castle Rackrent as a sort of vernacular running commentary by ‘Honest’ Thady Quirk, the estate’s elderly retainer. This commentary sets up a hierarchy of conspicuous losers in the masculinity sweepstakes, losers that we are meant to identify as male failures. This format, Edgeworth tells us, is peculiarly appropriate for analysis because the heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness or heroism, to sympathize in their fate . . . We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters . . . We are surely justified in this eager desire to collect the most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and good, but even of the worthless and insignificant, since it is only by a comparison of their actual happiness or misery in the privacy of domestic life, that we can form a just estimate of the real reward of virtue, or the real punishment of vice. (Rackrent 1903, xlviii)

And Castle Rackrent busies itself with both ‘the worthless’ and ‘the insignificant’; for Edgeworth will not craft her ideal male of the nineteenth century until she takes us through a line-up of patently non-ideal men. Through Thady’s reporting of ‘careless conversations’ and ‘half finished sentences’ about the Rackrent failures, we will be able to distill out the ‘real characters’ of the Rackrent men including their problems along with their lackluster masculinist ideologies. Additionally, Edgeworth’s intention to probe both ‘the great’ as well as ‘the insignificant,’ affirms Watson’s statement about class distinctions. In Edgeworth’s assessment of Thady, she demonstrates the social neutrality of her gender appraisals in her unconcern for Thady’s servile status; for when both the lower and upper orders go about ‘their own business . . . as if it was their everyday occupation,’ then all is ‘tight and right’ in the social schema (Absentee 229). Indeed, in his everyday occupation of family retainer, Thady has intimate knowledge of the four Rackrent aristocrats. His self-styled Memoirs of the Rackrent Family supply the linkage that binds these generations of masculine prototypes together as well as entangling his own characteristics among those prototypes. Paradoxically, Thady seems an almost androgynous figure in the text, the once-man who has lost all shreds of manhood in his cloudy, obsequious service to his ‘betters.’ Muffled in his much-touted great coat, Thady is as impervious to social climate as he is to the physical elements that swirl about him. Although he recognizes injustice, he cavalierly dismisses it under his mantle of ‘faithfulness’ to the family, always keeping an eye out for the main chance to aggrandize himself and his son, lawyer Quirk. What problematizes Thady and compromises his

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masculinity is his slipshod ineffectualness, his inability/refusal to undertake his duties efficiently and seriously. In a sense, the great coat becomes a paradigm for Thady’s failed version of masculinity; he uses it cloak-fashion and, ‘as I never put my arms into the sleeves, they are as good as new’ (2). Thady never pushes his hands out of the sleeves—he metaphorically hides beneath his posture of silent but faithful retainer. He never sticks his neck out, nor extends himself in any way. Indeed, he makes his greatest efforts on the side of intimidation when he makes it known that no one need bid against his son for the title to a lucrative land share. Hiding within his great coat, moreover, Thady is impotent in going about his ‘own business.’ During Sir Condy’s tenure at Castle Rackrent, for example, the roof leaks, the windows are broken, and the doors flap in the wind ‘for want of right locks.’ Thady ‘mends’ the broken window ‘to the best of [his] ability,’ but Edgeworth lets us know the shabbiness of this ability; he stops up ‘one of the panes with the old pillow-case, and the other with a piece of the old stage green curtain’ (46). No glazier’s craft, or even honest boards, hammers and nails for Thady. He grabs the first rags to hand which significantly turn out to be domestic detritus, an incursion into the female purlieu; this effectively renders his gesture effeminate as he stuffs the hole in the window. Thady’s version of masculine posture lies somewhere at the bottom of Edgeworth’s scrap heap. Fawning, incompetent, self-serving and lazy, ‘faithful Thady’s’ brand of ‘faithfulness’ can in no way compensate for his shortcomings as a man. And even this faithfulness itself is called into question. Thady’s final assessment of those he serves always predicates itself upon the magnificence of the funeral baked meats; Sir Condy may be Thady’s ‘great favourite . . . the most universally loved man I had ever seen or heard of,’ but in the end, ‘he had but a very poor funeral, after all,’ Thady dismissively observes (24, 72). ‘Far from being simple,’ James Newcomer notes, Thady is ‘relatively complex . . . He is artful rather than artless, unsentimental rather than sentimental, shrewd rather than trusting’ (Newcomer 151). Thady may be craven, but he is no fool. In creating Thady as a cunning, self-serving creature devoid of admirable masculine qualities, Edgeworth constructs a paradigm of failure. And by giving such a flawed vessel the narrative lead in her text, she forces us to question Thady’s assessments and judgment; this undermines the substance of anything Thady might tell us by way of interpretation. We may accept the verifiable facts of Thady’s tale, Edgeworth subtly warns, but not his analyses; thus, Thady’s fulsome praise of all the Rackrent men invites serious deliberation on the part of the reader. In Thady’s verbal portrait of the first Rackrent, Sir Patrick, for example, he proclaims, ‘never did any gentleman live and die more beloved in the country by rich and poor’ (4). Yet we learn that Sir Patrick is a chronic drinker with his universal appeal based solely on the magnificence of his house parties. When Sir Patrick comes into his estate, Thady remarks, Now it was that the world was to see what was in Sir Patrick . . . [H]e gave the finest entertainment ever was heard of in the country; not a man could stand after

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With Thady established as a questionable narrator, Edgeworth’s use of the italicized ‘in’ resonates with double meaning. Thady ostensibly refers to the fine stuff Sir Patrick is made of, the noblesse oblige of the landed aristocracy in hosting jovial social gatherings for the county. The reader, however, can read the phrase in a different way; we too want to see ‘what was in Sir Patrick’—and discover nothing more than a reveler who can drink his guests under the table and the inventor of ‘raspberry whiskey . . . as there still exists a broken punch bowl at Castle Rackrent, in the garret, with an inscription to that effect—a great curiosity’ (3). Sir Patrick’s accomplishments, deconstructed to their essentials, are symbolized by the ‘broken punch bowl,’ useless and forgotten, moldering in the lumber-room under the eaves. And lest we miss the point about this universally ‘beloved’ peer, Edgeworth gives us two more large hints about ‘what was in Sir Patrick’; he had, according to Thady, ‘the largest pimple on his nose’; additionally, creditors impounded his body during his funeral cortege as a hostage for debt (3). The large flaw on the face emblematizes the large flaws in the man, while the theft of his body suggests that Sir Patrick was not so universally beloved, after all. If the first Rackrent aristocrat gets slammed by Edgeworth for abnegating fiscal responsibility and drinking himself to death at the expense of his creditors, his son, Sir Murtaugh, fares little better under Edgeworth’s pen. If his father was a wastrel, Sir Murtaugh is a skinflint; rumor has it that he arranged for the abduction of his father’s corpse in order to lay blame on the lawful creditors, rendering his inherited debts of honor null and void. Of course, Thady assures us, ‘none but the enemies of the family believe it’ which, read with Thady’s negative credibility in mind, suggests that the rumor is widespread and generally countenanced (4). Even so, Sir Murtaugh has a host of other failures to his credit. He marries a pennypinching heiress suggestively named Skinflint who starves her servants during Lent in the name of God and squeezes the tenants dry. Concomitantly, Sir Murtaugh increases his herds of livestock by seizing any animals that trespass on his lands; for this very purpose, he keeps his fences in poor repair. He also invokes every stipulation in the leases, [getting] all the work about his house done for nothing . . . there were strict clauses heavy with penalties, which Sir Murtaugh knew well how to enforce; so many days’ duty-work of man and horse, from every tenant, he was to have, and had, every year . . . so he taught ’em all, as he said to know the law of landlord and tenant. As for law, I believe no man, dead or alive, ever loved it so well as Sir Murtaugh. (6)

Although Thady admits to being ashamed of Sir Murtaugh’s tight-fistedness, his ‘faithfulness’ to the family explains it away by blaming the wife:

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the cellars were never filled . . . and no open house, or anything as it used to be; the tenants even were sent away without their whiskey. I was ashamed myself, and knew not what to say for the honour of the family; but I made the best of a bad case, and laid it all at my lady’s door, for I did not like her anyhow, nor anybody else. (5)

Yet in the next breath, Thady assures us that ‘she made him the best of wives, being a very notable, stirring woman, and looking close to everything’ (4-5). In the above three quotations, we again need to differentiate between what Thady’s words mean in a literal sense, and what impressions Edgeworth wants us to come away with. In the first quotation, Thady assures us of Sir Murtaugh’s love of the law, yet we discover that this ‘love’ does not mean ‘reverence’ or ‘devotion to.’ It is, in fact, exactly opposite. Sir Murtaugh abuses the law. He expends all his energy and the resources of the estate on frivolous suits through which he never gets ahead: ‘He once had sixteen suits pending at a time,’ Thady tells us: Roads, lanes, bogs, wells, ponds, eel-wires, orchards, tithes, vagrants, gravelpits, sandpits, dunghills, and nuisances, everything upon the face of the earth furnished him good matter for a suit. He used to boast that he had a lawsuit for every letter in the alphabet . . . Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen; the rest he gained with costs, double-costs, treble costs sometimes; but even that did not pay. He was a very learned man in the law, and had the character of it; but how it was I can’t tell, these suits that he carried cost him a power of money: in the end he sold some hundreds a year of the family estate . . . and I could not help grieving when he sent me to post up notices of the sale of the fee simple of the lands and appurtenances of Timoleague. ‘I know, honest Thady,’ says he, to comfort me, ‘what I’m about better than you do; I’m only selling to get the ready money wanting to carry on my suit with spirit with the Nugents of Carrickashaughlin.’ (7)

Not only does Sir Murtaugh rob his tenants, he diminishes his patrimony to serve his obsession. In the second quotation, Thady’s attempts to blame ‘my lady’ for Sir Murtaugh’s tight-fistedness in anything other than lawsuits only suggest Thady’s willingness to sacrifice the Rackrent women in favor of the Rackrent men. The women, after all, are not ‘real’ Rackrents. Most do not even have personal names in Thady’s narrative. Later, we will see this same proclivity to crucify the outsider in Thady’s harsh assessment of the Jewish wife of Rackrent heir #3, Sir Kit. Yet Thady’s statement that Sir Murtaugh’s lady is the ‘best of wives’ only bolsters our analysis of Sir Murtaugh himself; her penny-pinching goes hand-in-hand with his established policies of sucking the lands and tenantry dry to fuel his useless suits. In the early nineteenth century, women’s agency was largely undeveloped; blaming Sir Murtaugh’s lady for his failures would suggest that a weak Sir Murtaugh, unable to control his own wife, subsidiarily follows her lead. Thady cannot have it both ways. Sir Murtaugh cannot be both strongly ‘honourable’ and at the same time uxoriously led astray. We come away sharing Edgeworth’s

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opinion of Sir Murtaugh, a man obsessed with seigniorial privilege yet devoid of seigniorial responsibility that would validate the existence of a viable aristocracy. When the childless Sir Murtaugh ‘in his passion broke a blood-vessel,’ Edgeworth extirpates him from the text; the Rackrent estates pass to his younger brother Sir Kit of whom Thady exclaims, ‘I thought I had never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man’ (8, 10). Once again, as Edgeworth’s savvy readers, we are forced to question the basis of Thady’s encomium. It seems Thady grounds this new ideal of masculinity in horsemanship and financial liberality—‘he threw me a guinea out of his waistcoat pocket, as he drew up the reins with the other hand, his horse rearing too’ (10). Unlike his stingy older brother, Sir Kit is open handed, for ‘he valued a guinea as little as any man: money to him was no more than dirt’ (10). But Sir Murtaugh, at the very least, ravaged his estate personally; Sir Kit rapes his inheritance as thoroughly as Sir Murtaugh, but as an absentee landlord through an agent on the premises. With the ‘sporting season’ over, young, spirited Sir Kit gets bored with country living and takes himself off to England; he does not, however, get bored with Rackrent revenues, and constantly sends for large sums to support his lifestyle: Having got down a great architect for the house, and an improver for the grounds, and seen their plans and elevations, he fixed a day for settling with the tenants, but went off in a whirlwind to town, just as some of them came into the yard in the morning. A circular letter came next post from the new agent, with news that the master was sailed for England, and he must remit £500 to Bath for his use before a fortnight was at an end; bad news still for the poor tenants, no change still for the better with them. Sir Kit Rackrent, my young master, left all to the agent; and though he had the spirit of a prince . . . what were we the better for that at home? The agent was one of your middlemen, who grind the face of the poor . . . he ferreted the tenants out of their lives; not a week without a call for money, drafts upon drafts from Sir Kit . . . About this time we learnt from the agent, as a great secret, how the money went so fast, and the reason of the thick coming of the master’s drafts: he was a little too fond of play. (12-13)

Sir Murtaugh stole labor and livestock from his tenants to feed his lust for lawsuits; Sir Kit does much the same, to fuel his passion for gambling. Edgeworth subsequently paints Sir Kit as a libertine of sorts—one with freedom to experience and power to control, all in the service of pleasure. ‘Sir Kit,’ Harden concurs, ‘represents the irresponsible, gay, impecunious swashbuckler and is reminiscent of Miss Austen’s villains . . . find[ing] pleasure in life by discarding scruples and candor’ (Harden, Maria Edgeworth’s Art 50). When his demands become too great and his agent resigns, Sir Kit ‘sent his service, and the compliments of the season, in return to the agent, and he would fight him with pleasure to-morrow, or any day, for sending him such a letter, if he was born a gentleman which he was sorry (for both their sakes) to find (too late) he was not’ (Rackrent 1903, 13). And in the finest libertine tradition, Sir Kit marries solely for money to set his woefully bedraggled affairs in some semblance of solvency: ‘the bride might well be a great fortune—[but] she was a Jewess by all accounts . . . Mercy upon his honour’s poor

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soul, thought I; what will become of him and his, and all of us, with his heretic blackamoor at the head of Castle Rackrent estate?’ (15). Denying Sir Kit’s capacity for negative agency, Thady once more lays blame on the other as a corrupting influence on an ‘honourable’ Rackrent male. Sir Kit has already proved his prowess in libertine self-indulgence; his marriage soon reveals itself as a sham arrangement to part his wife from a considerable fortune in diamonds that she keeps about her person. When she refuses to relinquish them, Sir Kit insists on serving ‘pig-meat’ (21) at every meal possible and locks her in the ‘barrack-room.’ Earlier, Sir Kit has inquired about the condition of this room: ‘Is the large room damp, Thady?’ said his honour. ‘Oh damp, your honour! how should it be but as dry as a bone,’ says I, ‘after all the fires we have kept in it day and night? It’s the barrack-room your honour’s talking on.’ (15)

By deliberately choosing a damp and insalubrious room, Sir Kit makes his intentions towards his wife known; he hopes to drive her into suicide or death from the miasmal conditions, thus obtaining the ‘thousands of English pounds concealed in diamonds about her, which she as good as promised to give to my master before he married’ (Rackrent 1903, 18). This situation continues for seven years; meanwhile, Sir Kit lines up three prospective second wives for himself before ‘the Jewess’ is even dead. And Thady calls him ‘a reformed rake’ (emphasis added; 21). Maria Edgeworth knows he is not reformed. And because Sir Kit has promised marriage—foolishly in writing—to each of these three prospective Lady Rackrents, members of their families challenge Sir Kit to defend his honor. His third duel is fatal. Thady, however, assures us Sir Kit’s demise is widely mourned and, ‘as proof,’ offers that there was a song made upon my master’s untimely death in the newspapers, which was in everybody’s mouth, singing up and down through the country, even down in the mountains, only three days after his unhappy exit. He was also greatly bemoaned at the Curragh, where his cattle were well known; and all those who had taken up his bets were particularly inconsolable for his loss to society. (22-23)

Sir Kit, it seems, was not quite the popular fellow Thady would like to believe; his foolish death becomes fodder for a doggerel ballad in a paean to stupidity and only his creditors feel his loss. Rather than inconsolable, his wife is jubilant at her release and takes herself out of Ireland with all possible dispatch. Libertinism, abuse of power, cruelty to dependents, and cretinously reckless confidence mark a seriously flawed version of masculinity in Maria Edgeworth’s estimation. As a paradigm of opportunistic self-indulgence, Sir Kit goes the way of Sir Patrick and Sir Murtaugh before him, and equally inelegantly. He is unceremoniously hauled away from the duel in a garden wheelbarrow, and dumped off the pages of the text. Sir Condy, the final Rackrent heir from ‘a remote branch of the family,’ has always been Thady’s ‘white-headed boy’ (25); accordingly, Thady allots fifty

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pages, or the bulk of the Memoirs to his favorite. Thady has known him as both boy and man, and regales us with anecdotes of Sir Condy’s sweet disposition; according to Thady, he was ‘well acquainted and popular . . . hand and glove with every one, and as far from high, though not without his own proper share of family pride, as any man ever you could see’ (27). The problem with Sir Condy is not ill temper; rather, it is his willingness to delegate all responsibility for money matters to Jason Quirk, now the established agent, ‘not [being] willing to take his affairs into his own hands, or to look them even in the face’ (28). This indecisiveness extends into his personal life as well, for he cannot make up his mind whether to marry Judy M’Quirk whom he loves (a once removed niece of Thady’s and consequently of the working class), or the moneyed and landed Miss Isabella Moneygawl. Although Sir Condy ‘never was fonder of Judy than at this present speaking,’ he is too vacillant to choose, ignoring his heart and allowing a coin toss to decide his wife. ‘It is important to recognize,’ Elizabeth Harden cautions, ‘that part of Maria Edgeworth’s mind was on the side of benevolence and feeling and that the heart mattered to her as much as the head’ (Harden Maria Edgeworth 43). Despite Sir Condy’s pleasant demeanor, he already has two strikes against him in Edgeworth’s estimation: first, he ‘hated trouble, and could never be brought to hear talk of business, but still put it off and put it off, saying, ‘Settle it anyhow,’ or, ‘Bid ‘em call again tomorrow,’ or ‘Speak to me about it some other time’’; and second, he is too emotionally slothful to listen to his heart. As Lady Isabella’s ‘few thousands’ of pounds dwindle to nothing through careless spending, Sir Condy makes no effort to make the estate profitable: ‘things . . . came to such a pass there was no making a shift to go on any longer, though we were all of us well enough used to live from hand to mouth at Castle Rackrent’ (36). The household runs out of basic necessities; there are no candles for light or turf for the fires. Sir Condy’s solution is to borrow candles and order a tree cut down, ‘any tree at all that’s good to burn’ (37). One tree out of many in the Rackrent park matters little in itself; rather, it is the attitude behind the felling that vexes. Sir Condy is too ‘mellow,’ too apathetic to see to the proper provisioning of his household; stopgap expediency is always his answer, whether it be cutting down a tree or selling off some of the land or leases. The Rackrents, Flanagan observes, become ‘mindless looters of their own possessions’ (Flanagan 78). And down a spiral of lackadaisicalness Sir Condy continues to slide. He manages to get elected to Parliament, but through no effort and little desire of his own: ‘my master did not relish the thoughts of a troublesome canvass . . . but all his friends called upon one another to subscribe, and they formed themselves into a committee . . . and did all the business unknown to him’ (38). The only thing Sir Condy does for himself is stuff the ballot box—and a good thing, too; had he not gained the election, he would have been arrested for debt. As it happens, all of his notes of credit are bought up by Jason Quirk; an execution descends on the estate; Lady Isabella leaves him; as a last resort, he signs all of his property over to Thady’s son, including ‘the castle, stable, and appurtences of Castle Rackrent’ (55). Shortly thereafter he dies from alcohol poisoning and an undoubtedly pickled

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liver: “ ‘I’m in a burning pain all withinside of me, Thady . . . nothing will do me good no more . . . brought to this by drink . . . Where are all the friends?—where’s Judy? Gone, hey? Ay, Sir Condy has been a fool all his days,” said he; and there was the last word he spoke, and died’ (72). Sir Condy—and the Rackrent aristocracy—is finished. Before we close the pages on the Rackrent men and their servitor, two final points need to be made about Maria Edgeworth’s exploration of failed masculine prototypes in this important exploratory text. The first issue is embodied in Thady’s son, lawyer Jason Quirk, while the other lies in the realm of true versus ersatz aristocratic blood. In a real sense, Jason is a failure as a human being as well as a man, for Thady tells us early on: ‘To look at me, you would hardly think ‘poor Thady’ was the father of Attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman, and never minds what poor Thady says, and having better than fifteen hundred a year, landed estate, looks down upon honest Thady’ (2). Thady had helped Jason get his start in obtaining one of Sir Kit’s leases at a low rate; but after gentrifying himself, Jason no longer has any use for his humble origins as he sweeps through Sir Condy’s tenure acquiring lease hold after lease hold until he takes over the title to Castle Rackrent itself. Although Edgeworth does not play social one-upsmanship in Castle Rackrent damning aristocratic masculinity as soundly as its common counterpart, the failure of the Rackrents seems that much more consequential since their role carries that much more responsibility. Somehow we do not completely despise Jason Quirk for attempting to better himself—his methods seem disloyal, crass, grubbing, and drearily industrious in a nose-to-grindstone sort of way—but in their incapacity for sound governance of an estate, the Rackrent men have shown themselves to be undeserving of any subsequent entailment and at the mercy of shrewder—and harder working—individuals. Audrey Bilger contends that novelists like Maria Edgeworth ‘parody the system that grants even foolish males a higher social status . . . and demonstrates that not all men deserve the privileges society bestows on them’ (Bilger 93). Jason represents a new breed of man arising at this time, the bourgeois entrepreneur aspiring to better himself both socially and economically. Jason has little regard for his father, clearly seeing himself as having moved out of his birth radius. ‘Jason’s character,’ Flanagan observes, ‘shows a shrewd understanding on Maria’s part of the new class which was rising to power’ (Flanagan, 78). Titles, after all, were becoming easy to acquire by successful industrialists and mercantilists: ‘there is so little difference made between bought and hereditary rank in these days,’ Lady Catherine comments in The Absentee. But the admirable Miss Broadhurst, speaking for Maria Edgeworth’s position, rejoins, ‘bought rank is but a shabby thing. . . even birth, were it to be bought, I would not buy . . . unless I could be sure to have with it all the politeness, all the noble sentiments, all the magnanimity—in short, all that should grace and dignify high birth’ (124). Jason possesses none of these qualities. He is not the male paradigm Maria Edgeworth seeks to forward; ‘she doubted that “manufacturers” [or other business opportunists] had contributed either to the moral or intellectual improvement of the

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people of England’ (Harden, Maria Edgeworth 103). In an exaggerated parody of this sort of opportunism, Maria Edgeworth limns a new class arising in Ireland, the squireens, persons who, with good long leases, or valuable farms, possess incomes from three to eight hundred a year; who keep a pack of hounds; take out a commission of the peace, sometimes before they can spell . . . and almost always before they know anything of law or justice! Busy and loud about small matters; jobbers at assizes; combining with one another, and trying upon every occasion, public or private, to push themselves forward, to the annoyance of their superiors, and the terror of those below them. (Absentee 204-205)

Ideal masculinity, then does not reside in the Lawyer Quirks or their ilk in Edgeworth’s world. One final warning issues from the pages of Rackrent, a rather surprising one considering that Maria Edgeworth’s writing seems clearly to indicate neutrality towards the facts of social hierarchies. Throughout this discussion, I have been talking about ‘real Rackrents’ and ‘Rackrent men.’ It turns out, however, almost from the opening of Thady’s text, that there are no ‘real Rackrent men.’ Rather than vertically, the line has passed laterally through a ‘cousingerman.’ It seems Sir Patrick, the first of Thady’s studies, was no Rackrent at all, but rather, an O’Shaughlin; when his first cousin, Sir Tallyhoo Rackrent was thrown from a horse and died, the ‘estate came straight into the family’ (2). Upon one condition: Sir Patrick must change his name to ‘Rackrent’ for himself and those of his line. ‘They say,’ Thady muses, that Sir Patrick took that condition ‘sadly to heart . . . but thought better of it afterwards, seeing how large a stake depended upon it: that he should, by Act of Parliament, take and bear the surname and arms of Rackrent’ (2). This genealogical glitch may appear of slender importance at this point in this essay, but Maria Edgeworth thought it important enough to insert in the first few pages of Thady’s narrative. And we should keep this whole notion of ‘real’ versus ‘assumed’ aristocratic titles in mind when the discussion moves into Ennui, another tale that deals with a faux aristocrat, and The Absentee, where the character of Lord Colambre proves that blood matters to Maria Edgeworth. Significantly, with the exception of the protean Sir Patrick himself, none of the pseudo-Rackrents produces an heir, almost as though the true line snapped along with Sir Tallyhoo’s neck (we have, after all, no way of knowing if Sir Murtaugh and Sir Kit were born before or after the name change). All that remains of the Rackrents, as this short novel draws to a close, is the negative impression of failed men that Maria Edgeworth plants in our minds along with a profound sense of emptiness, impotence, waste, and ignorance.

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II In her 1800 Castle Rackrent Maria Edgeworth had devoted a fair number of pages to describing what men should not be; by 1809, she turned her efforts toward constructing a composite figure that could begin to approximate her ideal of masculinity. Ennui tells the story of a young aristocrat beset by clinical boredom, a physically manifested psychological condition that exaggerates the complaisance Edgeworth had already condemned nine years before in the character of Sir Condy Rackrent. In this memoir of the Earl of Glenthorn’s life, he delineates his emotional and social impotency resulting from ennui, the male version of the nineteenth century’s female malady of hysteria. Before she foregrounds any concatenation of positive masculine attributes, Edgeworth wants to show the denigrating effects of an uneducated, aristocratic life of moneyed ease, ‘those errors to which the higher classes of society are disposed’ (R. L. Edgeworth 141). If Romanticism can be considered an epochal lacuna in its yearning for identity or the ideal work, the condition of ennui mimics the Romantic project as the personal male lacuna of the times. And like the period itself, clinical ennui possesses both an immeasurable amount of potential energy as well as a negation of social intercourse. The energy of boredom, however, unlike the eruptions of creative brilliance that characterize the Romantic artist, manifests itself in frantic and masturbatory bursts, only to sink with equal suddenness back into a void of despair. This dark energy ‘can and often does induce efforts to fill the void that it hollows out,’ alternating its occasional destructive thrust with vast periods of flatlining (Kuhn 378). It is no accident that Bunyan’s Christian encounters the slough of despair or that Pope envisions a Cave of the Spleen. Structured in terms of emptiness—hollows, caves, sloughs—boredom is a void, and emptiness, a life on hold, a potentiality waiting to become, with the yawn its emblem issuing from the cavern of the mouth at the moment when the arrest of breathing mimes an arrest of life itself. Maria Edgeworth knew this disease afflicted the rich idle male; it was an exaggerated sensibility, a ‘social overcultivation’ that could degrade into ‘degeneracy and madness’ (Butler 32). Medical science proposed energetic activities as a cure; Glenthorn tries ‘spending, gambling, gourmandizing, prizefighting . . . democratic politics . . . and travel with a purpose,’ all legitimate early nineteenth-century cures for male depression (Butler 32). ‘What sums I did spend in this interval,’ Glenthorn recounts, ‘in expedition-money to Time!’ Yet none of his efforts alleviate his constant ‘fidgeting, yawning, and stretching, with a constant restlessness of mind and body; an aversion to the place I was in, or the thing I was doing, or rather that which was passing before my eyes, for I was never doing anything’ (Ennui 144). By the time he reaches his twenty-first year, he has attained a majority in numbers only; instead of exuding a male potency associated with a coming to manhood, he sinks deeper into indolence, sporadically flagellating himself into meaningless activity: ‘The pleasures of the table were all that seemed left to me in life,’ he remembers, ‘[so] I became a perfect epicure, and gloried in the character, for it could be supported without any intellectual exertion,

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and it was fashionable’ (152). Here Edgeworth mentions a dead civilization of emasculated men to underscore the gravity—and predictable outcome—of Glenthorn’s condition: ‘Epicurism was scarcely more prevalent during the decline of the Roman empire than it is at this day amongst some of the wealthy and noble youths of Britain’ (153). When food understandably fails to provide a raison d’Ítre, Glenthorn turns to gambling as a means of warding off ‘silence and black melancholy’ (154). He has already rejected sex, an obvious outlet for a young man with a healthy male appetite. But Glenthorn’s sexual appetite is not healthy. It is sickly and despondent; his sham marriage-for-money remains unconsummated and he has no interest in traffic with ‘the worst part of the sex’ (150). Gambling, however, provides some frenetic respite. Instead of ‘spending’ in a sexual sense, he substitutes onanistic outpourings of money, energy, and time at play: ‘My days and nights were passed at the gaming table,’ he muses,’ I remember once spending three days and three nights in the hazard-room of a well-known house in St James’s street; the shutters were closed, the curtains down, and we had candles the whole time . . . We scarcely allowed ourselves a moment’s pause to take the sustenance our bodies required’ (148). Gambling transcends eating and by extrapolation, sexual activity. Edgeworth constructs it as perhaps the most masturbatory of Glenthorn’s activities for it takes place in darkness and privacy and provides him with feverish sensations: ‘sensual indulgences are all that exist for those who have not sufficient energy to enjoy intellectual pleasures’ (153). Edgeworth carries the inability of the Rackrent men to produce heirs one step farther in Ennui for Glenthorn does not even make the attempt. Instead, he decides to rub out his line and attempt suicide. But even this agency is denied him; instead, he is passively thrown from his horse and sustains severe head injuries. The vigorous masculinity of a young man has been replaced with abberent substitutes; Edgeworth presents the Earl of Glenthorn as the paradigm of social degeneracy. Because Ennui is a far longer text than Castle Rackrent and deals with only one failed aristocrat, Edgeworth can go into much greater detail about the Earl of Glenthorn’s life than she does with the Rackrents. She takes us through his divorce from the unfaithful Lady Glenthorn, an event that provides him with a sudden but impermanent surge of energy; ‘but no sooner was the affair settled, and a decision made in my favour, than I relapsed into my old nervous complaints’ (165). His cuckolded state reminds us of his emasculation, his inability or lack of interest in satisfying his wife. It highlights his crippling lack of potency. Urged on by his old Irish nurse Ellinor, he decides to visit his Irish estates in a desperate hope of finding something to give his life meaning—any meaning. He not only thinks that a change of venue might stimulate him, but also looks forward to Ellinor’s promises of his ‘feudal power . . . in my vast tenantry over tenants who were almost vassals’ (169). It is significant that Glenthorn takes his ragged hopes for revitalization to an itself devitalized country; at this time in history, Irish rebellion against its more powerful neighbor resulted in the squelching of hopes for autonomy and the subsequent constitutional Union with England in 1800 (Butler 33). Ireland itself had been politically castrated and it is from this emasculated,

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disempowered country that an ennui-riddled Glenthorn hopes to gain empowerment. While in Ireland, however, Glenthorn undergoes numerous and useful rites of passage. He is introduced to the concept of despotic power—and learns to reject it. He meets a woman who fires his imagination, whose very presence suggests that love might exist. He meets a man whose respect he cannot buy and another whose friendship he must earn. He dabbles in democratic politics and staves off an attempt on his life. He learns to interpret sycophantism. All these experiences prove educational for Glenthorn, necessary ingredients in Edgeworth’s slow evolution of a positive masculine figure. They are, however, not enough. Glenthorn remains plagued with enervation until Edgeworth reveals the climax of the tale: Glenthorn is not of the aristocracy at all. Switched with the true but sickly young earl at birth, he is Ellinor’s son, plain Mr. Christy O’Donoghoe without an aristocratic gene to his name. The village blacksmith is the real Earl of Glenthorn. This revelation of Glenthorn’s sham aristocratic status resonates with the social confusion created nine years before by the O’Shaughlins-turned-Rackrents. The Rackrent men along with the Earl of Glenthorn are not the goods; because they are pseudo-aristocrats, usurpers of aristocratic privilege, they are incapable of understanding much less assuming, aristocratic responsibility. In the case of the Rackrents, Maria Edgeworth postulates no cure for their diseased condition—they are terminal; Castle Rackrent does not attempt to go beyond exposure of masculine failure and the grim consequences of such failure. With the Earl of Glenthorn, however, Edgeworth moves beyond diagnosis into prognosis and the process of recuperation. However ennui-riddled Glenthorn-Christy O’Donoghoe has been, part of his problem lies in the false veneer of aristocracy that has plagued him for much of his young life. The subtle implication here, gleaned from both Ennui and Rackrent, is that a true aristocrat (such as Lord Y— in Ennui) would either not suffer from these problems in the first place, or if he did, would be knowledgeable enough to seek a cure. The faux aristocrat is either dismally unaware (the Rackrents) or else incapable of finding a solution (Glenthorn). The glitch here, of course, is exactly how Maria Edgeworth defined ‘true aristocrat.’ At this point in my argument, there is insufficient information for an inclusive delineation; the one necessary ingredient that has emerged so far, however, is indisputable genealogical pedigree. Once the former Earl of Glenthorn achieves his true identity, he suddenly becomes empowered and the healing begins. He throws off the mantle of sham aristocracy that carries the germs of ennui and, as plain Mr. Christy O’Donoghoe, realizes the need for education and a career. He works long and tirelessly to earn a position in law, engendering both self-respect and the respect of the woman he has come to love. The somewhat trite baby-changing plot carries a different twist under Edgeworth’s pen. Rather than the hero turning out to be the rightful heir with his titles and wealth restored, he is demoted to obscurity and hard labor; yet his five years of toil bear fruit in the forms of a barristership and the eventual winning of a major case. Glenthorn-turned-O’Donoghoe accomplishes something and accomplishes it in a new site of male authority, the law court. With The Law gradually replacing

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the power of God or of the king, a new social hierarchy emerges that honors the bureaucratized man who knows how to work within the structure of rules and forms, a master of procedure rather than of land or the sword. Edgeworth’s choice of career for ‘Glenthorn’ places him squarely in this new order of masculinity. By subsequently winning Cecelia Delamere’s love, he reverses the barrenness of his first marriage, suggesting a fully developed male potency that will produce an heir. He achieves complete male stature: he can ‘rise’ to speak ‘with confidence and fluency’; he can ‘exert’ himself; he can entertain a ‘passion’ for the woman he now knows how to love (319-321). Edgeworth couches his success in the positive language of productive masculine power. Eventually, as his reward for undergoing the important process of education and learning to trust his heart, Edgeworth reinvests ‘Glenthorn’ with a new aristocratic name (Delamere) and the money and lands that were once his. As for the other important male figure in the text, Edgeworth shows us that for the blacksmith Christy O’Donoghoe, aristocratic genes alone are not enough without the education that must go along with them. His good heart manifests itself in both his moving farewell to Glenthorn (complete with tears), and accepting the earldom for the sake of his son. Yet sensibility alone cannot suffice. He fails miserably as the new earl, losing control of the money to his shrewish wife and losing control of his son John to indolence. Ignited by John’s careless candle, Glenthorn Castle burns to the ground along with the heir to the earldom; methaphorically castrated by his wife’s power and the death of his heir, the recently instated Earl of Glenthorn abjures his title and returns to the forge once again. Thus Edgeworth fills out the sketch of the ‘true aristocrat’ I mentioned earlier in this essay; pedigree means not only the blood that situates one in a place on the social hierarchy, but also an informed recognition of the responsibilities that blood carries. One might argue that if pedigree is a critical part of Edgeworth’s ideal masculine figure, then the Glenthorn-O’Donoghoe-Glenthorn main character does not fulfill this requirement. He is, after all, the son of an Irish peasant. Yet he scoops up the rewards at the end and emerges as an admirable figure of masculinity, a seeming contradiction to my contentions throughout this essay. Here, I think, we need to go back to Edgeworth’s notion of the ‘neutral fact’ about class distinctions in human society. If everyone is born into an appropriate place— we remember that Jason Quirk is condemned for clawing his way up the financial and social ladder—then this issue of blood becomes less muddled. Everyone is expected to understand their rightful place in the social schema and develop themselves to the best of their abilities within the parameters of that place. Without the proper genealogical positioning, this understanding and development is impossible. Thady, for example, is a servant and he recognizes this as his place. He does not, however, work at being the best servant possible—he is lazy and passive, an altogether bad servant paradigm. The Rackrent men are O’Shaughlins, but have abandoned their O’Shaughlin world, having traded up to occupy Sir Tallyhoo’s sphere. In a sense, they are not much better than Jason Quirk who has compromised his integrity for financial gain. The O’Shaughlin’s have given up

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their identity for land and gold: ‘the denial has been made for the sake of land and the money which land brings, but these despite every frantic measure, run through their fingers’ (Flanagan 78). They are incapable of operating successfully outside of their own sphere and make a miserable mess of being Rackrent aristocrats. Jason Quirk, a lawyer and an agent—both suitable and admirable occupations for one of his birth—inappropriately aspires to the aristocracy and must inappropriately maneuver to achieve his ends. Blue blood or red blood is not really the issue; it is developing the potential of that blood, whatever it might be, that counts in Maria Edgeworth’s estimation of manhood. In contrast to the patent failures characterized in Castle Rackrent and the manic-depressive early Glenthorn in Ennui, Edgeworth approves of an industrious Glenthorn working within his appointed sphere to develop his full potential. He eschews the Romantic vision of the loner, embracing cooperation with other figures in the text. If ‘non-identity [is] a refusal of conjugality,’ Glenthorn’s acceptance of his true identity permits social interaction (McCann 184). He has already learned about land management from Irish agent M’Leod and now allows Lord Y— to guide his maturation. Like the Honest Boy in The Orange Man, Glenthorn now only wants ‘the one I earned’: ‘after a full experience of most of what are called the pleasures of life, I would not accept of all the Glenthorn and Sherwood estate, to pass another year of such misery as I endured whilst I was ‘stretched on the rack of a too easy chair’ (321). Like Frank in Little Dog Trusty he has proved he can ‘bear to be punished.’ And unlike Owen from The Cherry Orchard, he has discovered that ‘ten people are stronger than one.’ Finally, we understand why Edgeworth rewards ‘Glenthorn’; he has not attempted to exceed his position. He has worked to better himself in his capacity as ordinary Christy O’Donoghoe. Because he falls in love with an admirable woman who demands an equally admirable man, he strives to fulfill her—and now his— expectations for manhood. And because she turns out to be the residual heir to the Glenthorn estate, ‘Glenthorn’ has, in effect, earned that estate. His early upbringing combined with his educational experiences in Ireland have rendered him peculiarly capable of shouldering aristocratic responsibility—and, after all, from Maria Edgeworth’s pragmatic standpoint, she has left no one else in her text capable of doing the job, other than this bourgeois aristocrat. In her prototype of the man of the future, Edgeworth concludes, it is possible ‘that a man may at once be rich and noble, and active and happy’ (323). III Three years after the publication of Ennui, Maria Edgeworth produced The Absentee, a novel that refines the Glenthorn male prototype and culminates in a polished—and finished—ideal of masculinity for the new century. In Ennui, Edgeworth probed the rotten core of a faux aristocrat unable to realize his potential because of a false identity. In The Absentee, she gives us an internally sound Irish lord of unimpeachable pedigree faced with seemingly insurmountable external

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problems. In her delineation of this paragon, Edgeworth shows us how an ideal man with intelligence and motivation tackles these problem through experience and education, ‘becoming all that a British nobleman ought to be (Absentee 113). He is, Edgworth notes, one of ‘the few people of his age . . . capable of profiting by the experience of others’ (149). Cambridge educated Lord Colambre, only son of the Earl of Clonbrony has not yet reached his majority; yet Edgeworth bestows on this outstanding scion of a revered but tottering Irish house a degree of maturity and perspicacity belied by his chronological age: Young and careless as he seemed, Lord Colambre was capable of serious reflection. Of naturally quick and strong capacity, ardent affections, impetuous temper . . . he was not spoiled—not rendered selfish . . . .plunged into one of our great public schools [he was] forced to struggle, mind and body, with his equals, his rivals [and] the little lord became a spirited schoolboy, and, in time, a man. (94)

As a man, using skill, intelligence, and honor, he successfully fields difficulties no twenty year old should have to face; he is, Harden notes, ‘an unusual offspring’ (Maria Edgeworth’s Art 167). With his Irish absentee parents emulating Sir Kit Rackrent by draining money from the familial estate, Colambre remains the voice of reason and balance, ‘a perfect embodiment of his creator’s attitudes’ (Murray 43). He becomes concerned about the family’s debt-riddled lifestyle and the impact of this lifestyle’s demands on its Irish tenantry. And he especially distrusts the bottomless pit into which his mother pours their money—lavish but futile ventures to impress the English ‘ton’ and gain acceptance in London society. Like the vain and foolish Mrs Raffarty at Tusculum, Lady Clonbrony attempts to move out of her appropriate sphere; instead of striving to be the best Irish aristocrat she can be, she adopts a false English identity. We have already seen Edgeworth’s portrayal of the ineffectualness of false identity in both the Rackrents and Lord Glenthorn. Colambre, however, astutely recognizes the similarities between his mother and the grocer’s wife: It was the same desire to appear what they were not, the same vain ambition to vie with superior rank and fortune, or fashion, which actuated Lady Clonbrony and Mrs. Raffarty; and whilst this ridiculous grocer’s wife made herself the sport of some of her guests, Lord Colambre sighed, from the reflection that what she was to them, his mother was to persons in a higher rank of fashion.—He sighed still more deeply, when he considered, that, in whatever station or with whatever fortune, extravagance, that is the living beyond our income, must lead to distress and meanness, and end in shame and ruin. (87)

Lord Colambre has learned these unpalatable facts first-hand; he has overheard jibes at his mother, and knows intimately the dangers of living beyond one’s means. Colambre’s college friend, Mr Berryl, has suddenly lost his father, and with Sir John’s death, the family is ruined: ‘His daughters, who had lived in the highest style in London, were left totally unprovided for. His widow had mortgaged her

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jointure. Mr. Berryl had an estate now left to him, but without any income’ (148). In addition to her financial debacles, Lady Clonbrony also makes herself personally pathetic; she speaks with an artificial and exaggerated ‘English’ accent in an attempt to hide her Irishness, becoming a laughingstock in the eyes of her socalled English ‘friends’: ‘Now that is so cruel of your grace,’ said Mrs. Dareville, laughing, ‘when poor Lady Clonbrony works so hard, and pays so high, to get into certain circles.’ ‘If you knew all she endures, to look, speak, move, breathe like an Englishwoman, you would pity her,’ said Lady Langdale. ‘Yes, and you cawnt conceive the peens she teeks to talk of the teebles and cheers, and to thank Q, and, with so much teeste, to speak pure English,’ said Mrs. Dareville. (90)

Lady Clonbrony remains naively unaware of the sport at her expense; Colambre, however, is insightful enough to perceive his mother’s humiliation. He only wishes she had some ‘proper pride . . . and would not then waste her fortune, spirits, health, and life, in courting such people as these’ (132). Lady Clonbrony is not Colambre’s only problem. In attempting to juggle his debts, Lord Clonbrony embroils himself in dubious schemes engineered by that master of ‘jovial profligacy,’ Sir Terence O’Fay (113). When pressed by Colambre for answers, Lord Clonbrony ‘could not bring himself positively to deny that he had debts and difficulties; but he would by no means open the state of his affairs to his son’ (112). All he can do is repeat his mantra, paying mere lip service to the notion of taking his affairs in hand: ‘If people would but, as they ought, stay in their own country, live on their own estates, and kill their own mutton, money would never be wanting’ (112). Once an important man in Ireland, Lord Clonbrony is ‘nothing, nobody’ in London; ‘one never hears of him’ (90). In the dysfunctional Clonbrony family, roles have been reversed. The son becomes the man of the house, while the foolish mother and good-hearted but ineffectual father bumble and stumble their Rackrentish way through mazes of trickery, malice, snide comments, and actions for debt. And it is up to Lord Colambre to set things right. In order to restore family integrity, Colambre realizes he must first restore family identity. His mother must revert to her appropriate sphere; as an Irish aristocrat, she has a strong identity and is beloved by her tenants: ‘Lady Clonbrony was really a good woman, had good principles, moral and religious, and . . . she was good-natured’ (135). It is her obsession with ‘fitting’ into English society and the ‘duties of acquaintanceship’ that have seduced her and created the precarious financial and social position the family finds itself in (135) . Likewise, Lord Clonbrony also needs to reconnect with his proper place in the social hierarchy. He needs ‘to return to Ireland . . . [and] reside on his estate all the rest of his days’ (292). Lord Colambre faces formidable tasks. But with the spirit and confidence of ‘the true thing . . . the rael gentleman’ (277), a man ‘very conscious of being ‘Irish’’ (Flanagan 85), Colambre sets out on a journey of

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exploration and fact-finding to learn about Ireland, the family’s Irish estates, and what exactly it means to be Irish: ‘I wish to go thither—I desire to become acquainted with it—because it is the country in which my father’s property lies, and from which we draw our subsistence’ (169). As ‘the true thing,’ Colambre’s education, disposition, and tastes, fitted him exactly for the station which he was destined to fill in society—that of a country gentleman; not meaning by that expression a mere eating, drinking, hunting, shooting, ignorant country squire of the old race, which is now nearly extinct; but a cultivated, enlightened, independent English country gentleman—the happiest, perhaps, of human beings. (143)

In preparation for rounding out his own identity as well as reestablishing that of his parents, he reads books on Ireland and Irish history. Once in Ireland, he familiarizes himself with both ‘the great and good’ as well as ‘the worthless and insignificant.’ He gets to know the tenants and becomes conversant with their just grievances. He meets a good agent, Mr Burke, and learns how, properly administered, an estate might thrive. More significantly, he meets bad agents, the Garraghty brothers, and observes how greedy absenteeism runs an estate into the ground. His first glimpse of Clonbrony castle reveals ‘broken piers at the great entrance,’ ‘mossy gravel,’ ‘loose steps at the hall-door,’ and ‘an air of desertion and melancholy. Walks overgrown, shrubberies wild, plantations run up into bare poles; fine trees cut down, and lying on the gravel in lots to be sold. A hill that had been covered with an oak wood . . . was gone; nothing to be seen but the white stumps of the trees, for it had been freshly cut down, to make up the last remittances’ (271). ‘At what expense have we done all this?’ he reflects angrily; ‘For a single season . . . at the expense of a great part of [our] timber, the growth of a century—swallowed in the entertainments of one winter in London! Our hills to be bare for another half century to come!’ (308). ‘It is this spectacle of mismanagement and corruption,’ Flanagan explains, ‘which awakens in Colambre a sense of responsibility for the lives of his tenants, and a conviction that he can only fulfill his responsibilities by living on the land’ (Flanagan 87). To plot all of Colambre’s Irish experiences would be tedious; suffice it to say that, ever eager for education, he meets an admirable Irish aristocrat, Count O’Halloran, who mentors his fledgling sense of aristocratic responsibility. He becomes friends with an outstanding Englishman, Sir James Brooke, who teaches him much about the social and political climate of Ireland; Sir James eventually facilitates the reestablishment of the pristine heritage of an important young woman in Colambre’s heart, Grace Nugent, clearing the way for Colambre to follow that heart and marry for love. We confidently assume Colambre, unlike the Rackrents, will continue his family line. Carrying his new-found convictions on Irish identity back to London, Colambre persuades his parents to return to Clonbrony castle. He devises an honorable plan for eliminating debt, and replaces the venal Garraghty brothers with the exemplary Mr Burke. It seems that Clambre has indeed learned more than

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‘Greek and Latin’ at Cambridge; he has learned how to think through problems and find intelligent solutions (290). The book ends with everything set right in the Clonbrony world, single handedly accomplished by a young man who embodies the very best in turn-of-the-century male potency. The educated, socially aware man operating in his correct sphere of influence, one who takes on a working role in administering that sphere—this man Edgeworth sees as the leader of tomorrow. He recognizes and accepts his allotted place in the social hierarchy and with the acceptance of that place, shoulders its responsibilities. He works to make himself the best he can be. He is acknowledged by his peers and universally loved by those who serve him, for he recognizes the dignity of every individual, regardless of station. Through the character of Viscount Colambre, Edgeworth calls upon her readers to acknowledge an ideal masculinity in someone who can validly inspire the sentiment, ‘I thought I never set my eyes upon a finer figure of a man.’ Works Cited Beesemyer, Irene Basey. ‘Romantic Masculinity in Edgeworth’s Ennui and Scott’s Marmion: In Itself a Border Story.’ Papers on Language and Literature. 35 (Winter 1999): 74-96. Bilger, Audrey. ‘Mocking the ‘Lords of Creation’: Comic Male Characters in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.’ Women’s Writing: the Elizabethan to Victorian Period. 1 (1994), 77-98. Burke, Edmund. Reflections of the Revolution in France. New York: Prometheus, 1987. Butler, Marilyn. Introduction. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. By Maria Edgeworth. London: Penguin, 1992. Edgeworth, Maria, The Little Dog Trusty; The Orange Man; and The Cherry Orchard: Being the Tenth Part of Early Lessons. The Augustan Reprint Society #263-64. Ed. Mitzi Myers. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1990. Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent and The Absentee. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1903. Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent. Ed. George Watson. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. London: Penguin, 1992. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. Preface. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. By Maria Edgeworth. London: Penguin, 1992. Flanagan, Thomas. Irish Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Harden, Elizabeth. Maria Edgeworth. Twayne’s English Authors Series. Gen. ed. Herbert Sussman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Harden, Elizabeth. Maria Edgeworth’s Art of Prose Fiction. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Kuhn, Reinhard. The Demon of Noontide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. McCann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790s. London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1999.

Chapter 7

Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda Joanne Cordon

We hear it from very good authority that the king was much pleased with Castle Rackrent—he rubbed his hands and said, ‘What, what— I know something now of my Irish subjects.’1 Richard Lovell Edgeworth Letter to Daniel Beaufort, Maria Edgeworth’s grandfather, April 1800

In the long eighteenth century, Irish men and English women are rhetorically stereotyped in the same way: both the blathering Stage Irishman, with his brogue and his penchant for verbal blunders called Irish bulls, and the Simpering Miss, with her conduct-book-style equivocations and exaggerations, speak the same kind of indirect, imprecise, comic language. These culturally ‘inferior’ groups are confined to funny or flowery scripts, yet the opposite is true of the dominant social group. When the reformers of the Royal Society proposed the proper kind of English style, they argued that the best style was literal, simple, and plain. In the History of the Royal Society (1667), Thomas Sprat explains that good prose style should be as much like a scientific formula as possible. The ideal is ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can’ (113). The preferred style is plain, yet The Royal Society’s directive on style is not merely a longing for a smaller degree of figurative language. As Robert Markley argues in Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve, style and ideology are inextricably linked in the seventeenth-century writers. Markley theorizes that ‘the linguistic commentary of the 1660s and 1670s is not intended primarily . . . to provide a theory of style, but to promote the ideology of privilege’ (Markley 54). If the true English gentleman uses the plain style, society can marginalize those who speak differently; therefore, the political implications of this paradigm are simple: The plain style is affirmed as a way to maintain power. Resisting the narrowness of this ideological straitjacket, a diverse group of Irish and women writers between Sprat’s Restoration text and the Act of Union

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(1801) dismantle the stereotypes of the Stage Irishman and the Simpering Miss as a central part of their work. Both stock images appear occasionally in the same work, for example in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1774), yet no writer in the long eighteenth century attacks both images simultaneously. Genre differences partly explain the segregation of stereotypes. Stage Irishmen appear most frequently in drama, while Simpering Misses congregate in fiction. Writers tend to challenge the stereotype that applies to them, and few writers before Maria Edgeworth are doubly marginalized with national and gender codes. Edgeworth does challenge the negative images of nationality in Castle Rackrent (1801) and gender clichés in Belinda (1800), yet she is careful not to revise the two versions of the rhetorical stereotype in the same work. Simultaneously deconstructing the Stage Irishman and the Simpering Miss would require a writer to reveal the intellectual, political and social constructions of cultural ideology. Since stereotypes are the central form of imperialist discourse, as Homi Bhabha observes in ‘The Other Question,’ stripping away so much of the imperialist fabrication is something that a writer in a culturally inferior position can seldom afford to do. This facet of imperial control suggests why Maria Edgeworth cannot write Castle Belinda. Maria Edgeworth published her two most popular novels, Castle Rackrent (1800) and Belinda (1801), in successive years, during a tumultuous period of Irish history. Immediately before the publication of the two works, Ireland saw the most sustained political uprising in more than a century; like James II’s last attempt to regain his crown from Williamite forces at the disastrous Battle of the Boyne (1690), the rebellion of 1798 triggered a swift English response in the form of the Act of Union. Passed in March 1800 and taking effect on New Year’s Day of 1801, the Act of Union joined Ireland with Wales, Scotland and England as one nation; this reconfiguration stripped the Irish Parliament of its power. Because of her background, Edgeworth was aware of the political and cultural concerns of the day. When she was a teenager, the family moved to Ireland so that her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, could run the family estate at Edgeworthstown; serving as his secretary, accountant and collaborator, she became familiar with his milieu, from the point of view of her own class as well as of her father’s tenancy. Because her father was Member of Parliament for the borough of St. Johnstown’s in 1798, Edgeworth knew about the heated debates on the proposed dissolution of the Irish parliament.2 In addition to being well aware of the political issues of the day, Edgeworth was, as a woman, experienced in the cultural expectations of her sex and also her family’s deviations from such norms. Educated with the Enlightenment principles of rationality and order, she was encouraged to read widely and to develop her intellect. As co-author of the educational treatise Practical Education (1798), Edgeworth centered herself in the culture’s continuing hot topic for women: their education. Though Castle Rackrent and Belinda do not deal with the current events of Ireland in a direct way, Edgeworth systematically challenges the racial and gender scripts of the Blathering Irishman and the Simpering Miss, scripts that do the political work of keeping things the way they

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are for those in power. Edgeworth’s personal experience with both stereotypes uniquely qualifies her for writing against such imprisoning clichés. While she spent most of her long (1768-1849) life in Ireland, Maria Edgeworth’s Irishness is a not a simple issue. What exactly it means to be Irish is a shifting question, and for her class, the gentry, at the end of the eighteenth century, identity and nationality are complicated. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the self-image of the Anglo-Irish changed. In the preface to Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, S. J. Connolly argues that Irish Protestants defined themselves in terms of their English identity and resisted identification with the Irish; however, this situation changes over the course of the century: ‘At the beginning of the eighteenth century Irish Protestants most frequently thought of themselves as Englishmen living in Ireland . . . By the mid-eighteenth century this sense of a separate ethnic identity was in decline’ (16). As Jim Smyth puts it, this class had ‘their Irishness thrust upon them’ (797). The long eighteenth century is also a formative time for conceptions of English nationality. As Linda Colley argues in The Britons: Forging the Nation, the English define themselves by who they are not: ‘The sense of a common identity here did not come into being, then, because of an integration and homogenisation of different cultures. Instead, Britishness was superimposed over an array of internal differences in response to contact with the Other, and above all in response to conflict with the Other’ (6). Colley’s analysis does not consider the place of Ireland in the British nation during the long eighteenth century; however, one can balance her insight against Declan Kiberd’s theory in Inventing Ireland that the English solidify their image by focusing on all the ways in which they differ from the Irish: ‘Ireland was soon patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were, in many important ways, the very antithesis of their new rulers from overseas’ (Inventing Ireland 9).3 In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, Britain tried to lessen the chance of an Irish rebellion by ameliorating the legal restrictions on disenfranchised Irish Catholics. The willingness of the British to loosen the restrictions of the Penal laws—laws which had severely limited non-Anglicans’ ability to worship, work, and own land, and which had been in place since the end of the seventeenth century—suggests the degree of British concern about Ireland as a potential threat. Unfortunately, Britain’s openness to a more conciliatory relationship with the population was neither significant nor soon enough: England strategized ‘the easing of penal restrictions on Catholics in an effort to deflect them from Jacobinism . . . But it acted too slowly and too brutally’ (Deane 33). England’s bid to neutralize the temptation for the marginalized Irish to rebel could not compete against the vision of Irish autonomy presented by the United Irishmen. Founded by Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) and a group of Belfast businessmen in 1791, the United Irishmen offered an inclusive vision of Irish identity. Inspired by the revolutions in France and America, Tone imagined that an alliance between Catholics and Protestants meant they could work together to achieve independence from Britain. In his popular pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791), Tone envisions a future in which ‘the

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odious distinction of Protestant and Presbyterian and Catholic were abolished and the three great sects blended together under the common and sacred title of Irishman’ (Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 124). The ideas of Tone and the United Irishmen found support all over the country. The British government reacted predictably, given the political climate between Ireland and England in the late eighteenth century. The organization was outlawed in 1794. Soon after, the British also crafted their first version of a proposal that ultimately became the Act of Union. Tone fled to France, but his exile from the country did not stop him from getting French help to launch two invasions, one in 17964 and another two years later. At the time that the rebellion broke out across Ireland on 23 May 1798, the government had most of the United Irishmen’s leaders under arrest. Though they were ultimately unsuccessful, the United Irishmen posed a significant threat to the British: ‘small and brief though it was, the Rising of ’98 was the first in Irish history to have a defined national goal’ (Guttman 6). Maria Edgeworth lived in Ireland during the period of the 1798 uprising. Edgeworthtown in County Longford, north and west of Dublin, saw little revolutionary activity. The United Irishmen plotted a multi-pronged attack at major centers around Ireland, hoping that with French assistance and multiple successes, the local risings would eventually march to Dublin and converge. Instead, though fighting broke out in Carlow, Kildare, Meath and Wexford, the rebellion faltered, lasting only a few months and comprising eight significant battles.5 The Wexford group beat the North Cork Militia, but they held out against the much larger British force for just short of a month. 6 When the French troops numbering little more than 1,000 men landed on 22 August in County Mayo at Killala Bay, they and ‘some 1,000 poorly armed Irish peasants . . . routed a British force about three times their number at Castlebar on August 27’ (Guttman 6). Though Edgeworthtown saw relatively little disturbance during the rebellion, the nearby town of Ballinamuck was the site of one major battle. While heading from Killala toward Dublin, the successful French troops led by Jean Joseph Amable Humbert met General Charles Lord Cornwallis and his 30,000 men a few miles from Edgeworthstown. Outnumbered fifteen to one, French and Irish troops battled for less than an hour before Humbert surrendered to Cornwallis. Maria Edgeworth wrote about her experiences of living through the turmoil in her letters as well as in the volume of her father’s Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth that she assembled after his death in 1817. She writes about the mood of the country and of her own part of Ireland, drawing on her father’s connections for much of her information. John Beatty, editor of Protestant Women’s Narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, points out that Edgeworth, like her contemporaries, describes the upheavals in the country as a mixture of chaos and danger.7 Though the scope and ferocity of the armed conflicts turned out to be much less than anticipated, the women who wrote about their experiences of the rebellion of 1798 were often scared witnesses to violence, and most ‘ believed their own deaths to be imminent’ (14-15). Maria Edgeworth was the only writer to publish her reaction to these events during her lifetime: After her father’s death, she included the 1798 rebellion in the material she added to the Memoirs of

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Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Since Edgeworth published her experiences after the Act of Union passed, as Beatty notes, political considerations can affect rhetorical strategies in her writing. Edgeworth describes political unrest calmly and rationally, using a measured and intelligent tone that sounds very much like the unflappable calm of Belinda Portman in Belinda: Toward the autumn of 1798, this country became in such a state, that the necessity for resorting to the sword seemed imminent. Even in the county of Longford, which had so long remained quiet, alarming symptoms appeared, not immediately in our neighbourhood, but within six or seven miles of us, near Granard. The people were leagued in secret rebellion, and waited only for the expected arrival of the French army, to break out. In the adjacent counties military law had been proclaimed, and our village was within the bounds of the disturbed county of Westmeath. Though his own tenantry, and all in whom he put trust, were as quiet, and, as far as he could judge, as well disposed as ever, yet my father was aware, from information too good to be doubted, that there were disaffected persons in the vicinity. (Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth 2: 209)

Edgeworth describes the mood of the country during the time of rebellion in the most general and abstract terms. She does not exercise her formidable imagination in speculating on what the ‘alarming symptoms’ look like or what will result from being ‘leagued in secret rebellion,’ and she does not comment on the reasons for the locals to be ‘disaffected.’ In her personal letters, Edgeworth more vividly describes the political situation in Ireland. In the years when the agrarian violence began to escalate, Edgeworth catalogues her experiences with the Defenders, members of a secret Catholic organization that retaliated against bad landlords.8 On 11 August 1794, Edgeworth describes the rumors of Defender activity in her part of the country for her aunt, Mrs Ruxton: ‘There have been lately several flying reports of Defenders, but we have never thought the danger near till to-day. Last night a party of forty attacked the house of one Hoxey, about half a mile from us, and took, as usual, the arms. They have also been at Ringowny . . . they took the arms and broke all the windows’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 56). The Defenders stockpile weapons and smash glass, but later in the same letter, Edgeworth downplays the threat in comparison to her aunt who had had ‘soldiers sitting up in your kitchen for weeks’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 57). Though Edgeworth glosses over the proximity of her own danger, the local sheriff conferred with Richard Lovell about setting up a defense for Edgeworthstown and Longford. Edgeworth’s interest in monitoring the peace extends from the local neighborhood to the entire country. Writing to her aunt again on 20 June 1798, Edgeworth comments on the difference between the rebellion in other parts of the country and in her own: ‘Hitherto all has been quiet in our county and we know nothing of the dreadful disturbances in other parts of the country but what we see in the newspapers’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 83). Edgeworth is aware of her own relative safety, but she keeps up with the newspaper accounts, which would

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have been one of the only ways of tracking revolutionary activity across Ireland. In June, her letters to Mrs Ruxton still include descriptions of the happiness of her father’s recent (fourth) marriage and her own writing, but by the end of August, the violence is closer. On 29 August 1798, Edgeworth relates the wild variety of rumors of the number of the French force reputedly landed in Ireland: ‘some say 800, some 1,800, some 18,000, some 4,000’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 85). Reports of ‘a large body of rebels, armed with pikes’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 86) on 5 September 1798 send the Edgeworth yeomanry to collect their arms that the government had finally sent to Longford. Though three hundred rebels come within a mile of her home, Edgeworth gives scant details. She acknowledges that the Edgeworths left their homes, and on the road they passed ‘the trunk of the dead man, bloody limbs of horses, and two dead horses’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 86), the sad remains of an ammunition cart with which Maria and her family were supposed to travel. Edgeworth saves her more passionate writing for the biggest threat to the Edgeworth family during the Rising: not the rebels but the loyalists. In fact, one of the rebel leaders came to the Edgeworth house during the peak of the unrest and, citing the generosity of the housekeeper who had loaned his wife money to pay the rent the previous year, ordered his men to leave the place alone once he had determined that the household held no weapons. The loyalists suspected Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s loyalties, reasoning that the rebels left the property alone because of Richard Lovell’s sympathy or even collusion with their cause. Equally suspicious to the Orange loyalists is Richard Lovell’s integrated yeomanry; in allowing Catholics and Protestants to serve in the private force he put together to protect his property, his non-sectarian principle suggested the political ideals of the United Irishmen. When Richard Lovell and his forces guarded the premises of the local jail, loyalists even worried that he was a spy for the French. While there is very little discussion of what happens when the rebels pass over the Edgeworth property, the threat to Richard Lovell’s safety gets much more attention in the narrative because the loyalists presented a bigger threat to the family’s safety than the rebels did. Edgeworth quotes the housekeeper who is ‘so much terrified that she could scarcely speak’ as she reveals that ‘the mob say they will tear him [Richard Lovell] to pieces if they catch hold of him. They say he’s a traitor, that he illuminated the gaol to deliver it up to the French’ (Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth 2: 226). Richard Lovell escapes lynching when the mob sees him in company with an officer, Major Eustace, believing that he is under arrest. When the mob spies Richard Lovell out with the un-uniformed major, they roar in the street for vengeance: At first we thought the shouts were only rejoicings for victory, but as they came nearer, we heard screechings and yellings, indescribably horrible. A mob had gathered at the gates of the barrack yard, and joined by many soldiers of the yeomanry on leaving parade, had followed Major Eustace and my father from the barracks . . . The mob had not contented themselves with the horrid yells we had heard, but had been pelting them with hard turf, stones, and brickbats. From one

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of these my father received a blow on the side of his head, which came with such force as almost to stun him; but he kept himself from falling, knowing that if once he fell he should be trampled under foot. (Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth 2: 230)

The reactionary violence of the mob suggests the atmosphere for those threatened by the events of 1798. While the rebels overlooked Richard Lovell’s being a landlord because of his good management and the kindness of the staff, the loyalists suspected Richard Lovell Edgeworth of being a French agent because he burned two candles in the window while he and his forces guarded the premises of the local jail. The reactions suggest the volatile and shifting mood of the crowd, howling for vengeance even after the hostilities are officially over. Though the rebels were often demonized in loyalist writings about the 1798 rebellion, Edgeworth saves her strongest phrasing for the ‘indescribably horrid’ noisy threats of the loyalist mob. Edgeworth’s experiences during the 1798 rebellion give her a layered perspective on the political considerations of the times. Though her background might suggest that she would look at the political agitation of the 1790s as a threat to her family’s position and security, Edgeworth’s personal experiences greatly complicate this view, not only because her family received better treatment at the hands of the rebels than at the hands of the loyalist mob, but also because she observed her father’s attempts to soften sectarian lines at Edgeworthstown. Similarly, one cannot simply assume her support for the Act of Union. Richard Lovell Edgeworth himself did not vote for the Act, not because he opposed the idea of closer political ties with Britain, but because he was appalled by the political maneuvering and outright bribery practiced by the British government and its supporters in passing the measure. After the Act of Union took effect, public dissent would be ineffective and possibly dangerous. The United Irishmen leadership were either jailed or dead; the Irish Parliament was completely stripped of its political power, and 20,000 combatants were dead, 90% of them rebels (Bartlett 392). Reading from Edgeworth’s personal to her literary ideologies, particularly at this point her career, is neither definite nor simple. The timing of Castle Rackrent is significant, for the novel was published during the period in which English policy vigorously sought to contain the perceived threats from Ireland through the legislative means of the Act of Union. Because of the incendiary elements of current events, the composition of the novel seems important, yet the evidence does not allow critics to determine the exact date of the novel’s composition, thus complicating attempts to gauge Edgeworth’s attitude by the year of composition. Edgeworth biographer Marilyn Butler analyzes the dates of composition as ‘1794-6 for the first section, 1796-8 for the second’ (CR ix), but in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing Brian Hollingworth argues for a later composition (106), so that the second part of the narrative coincides with the immediate aftermath of the 1798 uprising. Noting that the Monthly Review grouped Castle Rackrent not with novels but with books about the Union, Hollingworth argues that ‘[t]o publish an Irish story in January 1800 was a political act’ (73).9 A

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later date of composition argues for a more complicated reading of the novel’s political sympathies. 10 Post-colonial studies of Castle Rackrent have focused on the connection between Edgeworth’s editorial persona and that of her narrator. 11 In these studies, critics often read the relationship between Edgeworth’s editor and the narrator in Castle Rackrent as a metaphor for the relationship between the English and the Irish or between the ‘Anglo-Irish’ and the ‘native Irish.’ For example, in ‘Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent,’ Mary Jean Corbett argues that the relationship between reader and character is a colonial one: ‘For Castle Rackrent’s irony depends on how it establishes our readerly distance from the narrator . . . And this ironic distance is not only a literary device, but also a political one, which works to construct the superiority of the domestic English reader over the Irish subject’ (383). Reading the editorial apparatus in Castle Rackrent as opposed to Thady’s narrative conflates Edgeworth’s sympathies with the domestic English reader’s, and such a reading may oversimplify the political complexities of the situation. By contrast, Brian Caraher reads Edgeworth’s narrative strategy employing an editor and ‘native’ narrator as a way of suggesting the complexity of the Irish situation: However, Edgeworth’s ironic literary regionalism provides a way to render Linguistically and psychologically, idiomatically and somatically, those regional structures of authority and servility that construct a Rackrent and comprise a Quirk. Such structures, rendered affectively through the intensely localized voice and persona of Thady Quirk, deconstruct a Rackrent’s pretense to lordly authority and turn a Quirk’s residual servility towards ironic intent. (135)

In Caraher’s analysis, the editor and Thady are not merely oppositional but almost choral; the editor’s and Thady’s voices collaborate to make the entire novel a representation of the political realities of Ireland. While these considerations of political sympathies are certainly pertinent and can enrich a discussion of Edgeworth’s fiction, the relationship between the editor and the narrator or between tenant and landlord is not the only important relationship to consider in discussing the novel. As Robert Tracy argues in The Unappeasable Host with the same background and the same place in society, the Anglo-Irish were nevertheless ‘at once insiders and outsiders . . . In England they were considered Irish, and in Ireland English’ (Tracy 3). Although Maria Edgeworth would not have looked like the Irish stereotype of the Restoration, her critics certainly considered her as Irish or ‘ultra-Irish,’ as John Gibson Lockhart, son-in-law to Walter Scott, described her: ‘a little, dark, bearded, sharp, withered, active, laughing, talking, impudent, fearless, outspoken, honest, whiggish, unchristian, good-tempered, kindly ultra-Irish body’ (Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography 3). However her Irish readers may have reacted to Edgeworth, her English readers, in some significant ways, cannot distinguish between Maria Edgeworth and Thady Quirk.

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Because her English readers can so easily conflate the author of the story and the narrator of the tale because of their mutual Irishness, the parallels between Thady Quirk and the Stage Irishman are significant. While Thady resembles the Stage Irishman in several striking ways in Castle Rackrent, the differences between the stereotype and Thady are highly suggestive. Teague, the classic Stage Irishman in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1665), is usually a minor character lending comic relief to a play with his Irish bulls,12 but Thady is the narrator of the Rackrents in decline. He is not a minor character used solely for comic relief; he is the filter through which all the events in the narrative pass. Without Quirk, the Rackrent history would evaporate, for none of the Rackrents described in the novel have any capacity for history. The preface of the narrative even calls Thady ‘the author of the following memoirs’ (3). Though Thady does not write the ‘memoirs,’ he is their source. As the narrator of the tale, Thady is not merely the person who brings them to their editor’s attention. His long connection with the Rackrent family gives him a privileged place from which to observe the characters whose history he renders. This choice of biographer matches Samuel Johnson’s advice on biography in Rambler No. 60 almost literally, for Johnson argues that biographers typically ‘so little regard the manners or behaviors of their heroes that more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative’ (206). Precisely because the small domestic moments and ordinary conversations illustrate character, Thady is in the perfect position to observe. The editor underlines the importance of Thady’s contribution to history, contrasting the steward’s idiomatic speech with the bombast of the professional historian: ‘We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters’ (CR Preface 1-2). In the Johnsonian sense, Thady is the true historian. His narrative confirms the editor’s comment about the aptness of the details of ordinary life to illustrate character, and Thady’s account clearly shows that the Rackrents are spendthrifts, drunkards, fighters, and chronic litigators. Though Quirk agrees to work with the editor solely for ‘the honor of the family’ [italics Edgeworth’s] (CR Preface 4), his proclamations of loyalty do not define the limits of his tale. He never criticizes the Rackrent family through its generations and despite its declining fortunes; however, without drawing attention to it, Thady’s tale narrates the rise of his own family as it tells the decline of the Rackrents. Thady’s tales are transformed into text through the mediation of an editor, a personage who hears Thady’s tale and persuades Thady to let him write down the story of the Rackrents.13 His voice renders the events of the past to contemporary readers, and even if he comes with a fictional editor, the apparatus of a glossary as well as the editor’s charge that Quirk had to overcome his ‘habitual laziness’ (CR Preface 4) to complete the narrative, Thady speaks in his own words. While a Stage Irishman speaks only in parts of the narrative, Thady’s voice constructs the text.

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Like other Stage Irishmen, Thady Quirk has a brogue. His accent is inspired by the speech patterns of an actual person, John Langan, one of Richard Lovell’s stewards. The resonance of Maria Edgeworth’s memory of Langan suggests the distinctiveness of his voice, and many years after she had first heard the man, she describes the infectiousness of Langan’s tone: ‘ I heard him when first I came to Ireland, and his dialect struck me, and his character, and I became so acquainted with it, that I could think and speak in it without effort: so that when . . . I began to write a family history as Thady would tell it, he seemed to stand beside me and dictate’ (Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 3 152). In her description of the composing process, Edgeworth not only highlights the importance of the rhythms of the man’s speech patterns, she also declares the power of Langan’s rhetorical gifts. So completely can she adapt her mind to his style, she shapes her story ‘as Thady would tell it.’ By suggesting that Langan seemed to guide her imaginative powers as if he were dictating the narrative, Edgeworth emphasizes Thady’s perspective and not just his voice to contour her ‘family history.’ She does not just do an impression of him and translate the resultant text to the page; she uses his style to guide her to his way of thinking. In this view, style not only contours but also creates content. The emphasis that Edgeworth puts on the intimate relationship between style and content suggests that one could interpret the editor’s contributions of an introduction and the glossary as other than the colonial framework applied to a text. One could look at the additional materials as an acknowledgement of the distance between Castle Rackrent and the political realities in the aftermath of the Act of Union.14 Edgeworth did not originally include the supplementary material when she conceived of the novel. Marilyn Butler observes that Edgeworth and her father decided to draft the preface after a trip to England in 1799 (CR ix). The trip highlighted the degree of idiomatic differences between Quirk’s style and many of her English readers. While Edgeworth wrote the glossary notes, her style suggests that she could adopt more voices than just Langan’s for her novel; the glossary notes are ‘all but one Maria Edgeworth’s, though phrased in the masculine Royal Irish Academy style’ (Butler, CR xlii). Edgeworth did not draft the preface and the notes at the same time that she wrote the text of the narrative; instead, their presence indicates Edgeworth and her father’s fears about how the Irish story might be read by its English audience. Comparing her earliest writing on the subject of Ireland with Castle Rackrent suggests just how original her narrator is. When she first arrived in Edgeworthstown in 1782, her father set her a course of reading on Irish history and politics so that she could write an essay about the causes of poverty in Ireland. Her reading list included Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (1774), and Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland (1780), in addition to newspapers and political pamphlets. Describing her findings to her friend Fanny Robinson, the teenage Maria Edgeworth did little more than recycle clichés in her account of the Irish: ‘The lower class of Irish are extremely eloquent, they have a volubility, a fluency & a facility of delivery which is really

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surprising’ (Letter to Fanny Robinson, n.d. [August 1782], quoted in Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography 91).15 Given the writers her father directs her to read, her picture of her new environment is unsurprising, drawing on the stereotype of the blathering Irishman whose wit is as voluble as his mind is vacant. More than a decade later, her view of Ireland, as demonstrated in the complexity of Castle Rackrent, is markedly more sophisticated. Setting her story in Ireland is a great innovation. Though a few anonymous novels are set in Ireland before the nineteenth century,16 none before Castle Rackrent makes the setting so significant an element in the story. In the preface to Waverley (1814), Sir Walter Scott famously credits Edgeworth with innovating an approach he could use in his own fiction, and critics consider Edgeworth’s Irish story as one of the first regional novels. Setting her novel in Ireland is more than an accident of geography. In addition to setting her story in an environment that is more than nominally Irish, Edgeworth makes Irish characters central to the action. Irish characters appear in novels before Castle Rackrent— Mr Fitzpatrick in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, or Sir Ulic Mackilligut in Tobias Smollet’s Humphry Clinker—but they do not have a central role in the narrative. In Castle Rackrent, every major character in the novel is Irish, and the social panoply includes characters of more than one class. Bringing the Stage Irishman into the world of domestic fiction is in itself a revisionary act. Though not limited to the stage, the stereotype of the Stage Irishmen appears most prominently in the drama. Though the theatre is the usual home for the stereotype, Castle Rackrent is not the only work of Edgeworth’s that considers the Stage Irishman. The hallmark of the Stage Irishman is the Irish bull, and her first publication after the Act of Union takes effect is her Essay on Irish Bulls (1801). Both the timing and the rhetoric of the essay show how aware Edgeworth was of the connection between style and nationality. Thady Quirk does utter some Irish bulls, yet the presence of Irish bulls in the story does not make Thady Quirk a Stage Irishman. Edgeworth argues in her essay that the Irish, like every other nationality, occasionally make verbal blunders; the mistake is in thinking that the Irish are singular in their linguistic slips, for ‘the bulls and blunders of which they are accused are often imputable to their neighbors, or that they are justifiable by ancient precedents, or that they are produced by their habits of using figurative and witty language’ (Essay on Irish Bulls 151). She includes a list of bulls from persons of a number of different backgrounds; more importantly, she includes a list of verbal blunders by famous authors, including the very English writers Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. As Johnson’s work includes the English dictionary itself, filled with quotations from the rich heritage of English literature and its best writers, Edgeworth’s inclusion of Johnson in the list of writers who incorrectly use language makes her argument clear: the verbal blunder is not the automatic sign of inferiority, stupidity, or Irishness. The verbal blunders in Castle Rackrent’s glossary are very different from the usual trajectory of Irish bulls, illustrating a key difference between Thady and the classic Stage Irishman in The Committee. When Howard’s Teague utters an

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Irish bull, he speaks simple English words, but the comic meaning of what he says is clear only to the audience. For example, when Teague mixes up taking an oath (called the Covenant) with taking a pamphlet (titled The Covenant) for his master, he tells Colonel Careless: ‘Well, I did take the covenant, and my master took it from me, and we have taken the covenant then, have we not?’ (V.i. 23-25; 514). The pamphlet called The Covenant outlines the oath that the Puritans required all subjects to swear, proclaiming their fidelity to the true faith. Swearing the oath meant taking the covenant, and Teague imagines that in taking the pamphlet he has acquitted his master of having to take the oath. Teague does not see the double meaning of taking the covenant, and part of the scene’s comedy is the dim-witted loyalty he demonstrates to his master. By contrast, when Thady Quirk utters an Irish bull, both the context and the content demonstrate a more sophisticated humor. The presence of Irish bulls in Castle Rackrent does not make Thady Quirk a Stage Irishman even though Thady Quirk pronounces most of them (Owens 77). As the story’s narrator, Thady naturally dominates the discussion in the book. The kind of bulls he uses, however, suggests that he can use the form as a kind of Trojan horse for criticizing the landlord system in Ireland. The editor of the glossary flags the first bull that Thady makes; commenting on the litigious Sir Murtagh, Thady ‘praises’ his competence: ‘Out of forty-nine suits, he never lost one but seventeen’ (CR 15). The editor’s analysis of the remark pays attention to the style and not the substance of the remark: ‘Thady’s language in this instance is a specimen of a mode of rhetoric common in Ireland. An astonishing assertion is made in the beginning of a sentence, which ceases to be the least surprising when you hear the qualifying explanation that follows’ (CR 105). While the humor of Sir Murtagh’s failure in losing thirty-two of forty-nine lawsuits is amusing, the joke is not on Thady. While using a form that masquerades as a compliment, he makes his criticism of his landlord clear; attending to spurious lawsuits instead of to his tenants, Sir Murtagh has the wrong priorities. The glossary’s further example of the ‘specimen of a mode of rhetoric common in Ireland’ gives the story of a barely vertical drunk who will nevertheless swear upon pain of divine retribution for lying that he has drunk nothing at all ‘since morning at-all-at-all, but a half a pint of whiskey, please your honor’ (CR 105). The glossary presents the drunken man as not so far inebriated that he cannot make a funny reply to his social superior, yet the overall effect of the bull is not to showcase the stereotype of the drunken Irishman. This ‘specimen’ works opposite to the bulls within the narrative, for the bulls that Thady makes have a much more political interpretation. Whether the editor deliberately misreads the tenor of Thady’s remarks or whether he hopes to enable them, his comments camouflage the social criticism of Thady’s bulls. Critics have remarked on the importance of the Irish bull in the strategy of the narrative; Owens, for example, argues that ‘the Irish Bull—a general term for a variety of rhetorical trope in which sense is cunningly encased in apparent nonsense—is a paradigm for the entire novel’ (72). Thady’s cunning can only be properly gauged against the typical path of the stereotype, for Thady takes a form used as a tool of ridicule against the Irish and transforms it into an

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instrument of social commentary. For example, when the narrator discusses the social politics of marriage, Thady notes that Bella ‘was the happiest bride ever they had seen, and that to be sure a love match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it’ (CR 52). The twist at the end of the sentence undercuts everything that went before it, condemning the marriage market economy with its resultant cost in human misery. In another example, Thady’s bull links Sir Condy’s incompetence as an MP with clear evidence of government corruption, for he ‘was very ill used by the government about a place that was promised him and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very honorably, and being greatly abused for it’ (Rackrent 61). Thady’s bull only seems a compliment to the man whom he frequently proclaims to be his favorite, Sir Condy; with one remark the narrator indicts both the political system in Dublin and those who participate in it. Thady’s remark underscores the irony that political corruption in Ireland is so deeply entrenched that even those who abandon their principles go unrewarded. Compared to the simplicity of Howard’s Teague, the framework of Edgeworth’s novel—with its preface, glossary and footnotes necessary to accompany Thady Quirk’s tale—counters the implicit transparency of the Stage Irish stereotype. The text does not present Thady’s stories with words that only his English audience can understand, while he himself is unenlightened. Though the syntax reflects the way the language is spoken in Ireland rather than in England, Thady’s style does not declare him to be a fool. Instead, the editor clarifies the vocabulary for the English reader who would be unacquainted with the large population of Irish tenants. Before the British audience can laugh, they have to understand the things that an Irish person would already know. While Teague’s bull suggests English superiority, in Castle Rackrent the Irish have the advantage of familiarity. Because of the differences in idioms, the editor allows the outsider reader to hear a story he or she would otherwise not have access to. By contrast, when Teague utters something that the audience would not recognize in their own dialect, Howard does not gloss the phrasing. Instead, Teague spins out meaningless interjections. When his soon-to-be-master asks him what kind of skills he has, Teague’s speech links his laziness and his incomprehensibility: ‘Bo bub bub bo, a trade! A trade! An Irishman, a trade!’ (I.i. 243-244; 477). The meaning of ‘Bo bub bub bo’ requires no translation, for it recycles the equation of Irishness with feckless incoherence Teague is not significant enough to have his own dialect; whatever he says that is not simple English is not important enough for the audience to bother with. Most importantly, the need for a gloss would ruin the effect of the ridicule. Though the editor of Castle Rackrent’s glossary occasionally highlights the quaintness of the persons in the story, the overall effect of the language is not to belittle Thady Quirk.17 For example, when Thady begins his story with ‘on a Monday,’ the glossary explains this choice by observing that ‘no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but Monday morning’ (CR 99). The examples accompanying the definition shows that the Irish tenants use the phrase as a procrastination strategy: ‘Oh please God we live till Monday

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morning, we’ll set the slater to mend the roof of the house— On Monday morning we’ll fall to and cut the turf—On Monday morning we’ll see and begin mowing— On Monday morning, please your honor, we’ll begin and dig the potatoes’ (CR 99). While the use of the phrase does not flatter the Irish tenant, the glossary does leave other interpretations open to the reading public. One can read the gloss to reflect what happens as a result of the policies of bad landlords; also, the ability to delay drudgery by using language can suggest the reasonable cunning of an oppressed population. The glossary entry does not end with the fact of procrastination but on the way the landlord reacts to the wielding of the phrase: ‘The Editor knew a Gentleman who, to counteract this prejudice, made his workmen and labourers begin all new pieces of work upon a Saturday’ (CR 99). Since the glossary of the work aims at the class much more likely to be landlords than tenants, one could read the glossary as an ironic handbook for absentee landlords. In some respects, the glossary works against itself. For even though the editor can tell the reader that kilt18 ‘means not killed, but much hurt’ (CR 114) or that fairy mounts are ‘high mounts [that] were of great service to the natives of Ireland, when Ireland was invaded by the Danes’ (CR 105), knowing how to interpret the words does not give the reader sufficient information to interpret the tale or even Thady’s opening remarks about himself. Though he says that he has ‘always been known by no other than ‘honest Thady’ (CR 7), the man’s honesty is highly debatable. Critics interpret Thady’s tone as everything from being ‘too stupid to understand the meaning of the tale he tells’ (Irish Classics 245) to ‘not too far removed from those double-dealing tenants who serve their landlords faithfully by day and plot their overthrow by night’ (Murphy 50). Thady uses the first person as he narrates his tale; though his ‘duty’ moves him to say ‘a few words, in the first place, concerning [him]self’ (CR 7), the only details he initially gives are his name, the fact of his honesty, and his wardrobe, which is a greatcoat. Personal details come through in the narrative eventually. Thady reveals that he has a son, Jason, whose rise in the world accompanies the simultaneous decline of the Rackrents, yet the reader has a hard time determining whether or not Thady approves of his son, is his secret co-conspirator, or merely gives his story with the same simple honesty that he proclaims of himself. When the editor does include a derogatory remark, he undercuts its effect. In the first note, for example, explaining the history of the greatcoat that Thady describes, the editor gives both a classical treatment of the garment and an account from the plantation polemicist Spenser, quoting from his View of the Present State of Ireland, a book that Edgeworth had certainly read. The way the editor phrases Spenser’s remark undercuts the comment. Before including the quotation from Spenser on the greatcoat’s usefulness as ‘a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief’ (9), the editor comments that ‘Spencer knew the convenience of the said mantle, as housing, bedding and clothing’ (CR 8). One could interpret the editor’s comment that Spenser ‘knew the convenience of the said mantle’ to mean that Spenser knew the convenience personally; in which case, the editor slurs him as an outlaw, a rebel and a thief.19 By contrast, when the editor

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discusses the three uses of the great coat, he simply lists them as ‘housing, bedding and clothing’ (CR 8); Spenser and not the editor assigns the costume to the respective crimes. In marking the greatcoat the editor alludes to early English writers about the Irish who often emphasized the differences in costume and custom between the two countries. The contrast between the tone of the editorial remarks and Spenser’s in his work on Ireland suggests the difference between their views of the Irish. Spenser’s slur of the Irish costuming as fit for criminals is mild compared to some of his views, for example, that the Irish were cannibals because they were too lazy to cultivate their land in more conventional ways.20 More importantly, alluding to Spenser in a footnote only to turn his slur back on himself suggests the editor’s familiarity with and suspicion of the typical comments of English readers of Irish customs. The editor’s choice of style for the narrative is also significant. Rather than physically marking the variations from standard British idiom, the editor renders Thady’s narrative by finding a style to accommodate the rhythms of Irish speech. As Marilyn Butler notes in the introduction to her edition of Castle Rackrent, the text does not use phonetic spelling to give the sense of Thady’s brogue: ‘Edgeworth does not convey regional speech through the Victorian convention of misspelling, a device which signals the speaker’s ignorance and linguistic incompetence. Instead she adjusts her rhythm and syntax so that it seems possible for the reader to hear an Irish inflection’ (12). Brian Hollingworth notes that Edgeworth constructs the voice in the text by marking the differences of pronunciation and dialect, both of which she uses ‘very sparingly indeed’ (87). This rendering of Thady’s voice emphasizes the vitality rather than the peculiarity of his language. Edgeworth shapes the narrative to emphasize standard English rather than non-standard or peculiar Irish English. When she is writing to another countrywoman, however, Edgeworth shows that she can write the phonetic peculiarities of the man who inspired the character of Thady. In letters to her aunt spanning decades after her arrival in Ireland, Edgeworth wrote John Langan’s style with phonetic indicators of the accent. Ann Owens Weekes in Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition notes that Edgeworth interjected Langan’s idiom in letters to her aunt, Sophy Ruxton, for more than thirty years: ‘The brevity of the notations suggests a long-standing joke, one so familiar to both writer and reader that a word serves to evoke it. As early as 1792, for example . . . ‘larning’ is used for ‘learning’ in imitation of the Gaelic accent’ (38). The editor’s choice not to resort to phonetic markers suggests the profound difference of private and public genres. Despite these connections to the figure of the Stage Irishman, Thady Quirk is not the same as Teague. His name, however, is a phonetic rendering of Irish name Tadgh. Taking the Irish name Tadgh and Anglicizing it to Thady makes the name less English than it would be than if it were Teague. Since Teague has been a stock character for well over a century, and since the stereotype’s name almost always appears as Teague (or Teg) throughout the plays of disparate writers through the long eighteenth century, Edgeworth can allude to the tradition while deliberately frustrating the rest of the match-up.21 While Thady may have a

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semblance of Teague’s patter, almost all of the significant elements of the character differ from the stereotype. Since many of her English audience would not know that the names Teague, Tadgh and Thady are equivalents, the choice of the character’s name seems particularly resonant for its Irish audience. To get the joke of the non-Teague qualities of Thady, one would need to know more than the reader served by the facts of the glossary would know. Another factor that resonates differently for audiences depending on their knowledge of Ireland is its setting. Thady’s tale is deliberately set before 1782, as the novel’s full title relates, Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale Taken From Facts, and From the Manners of the Irish Squires, Before the Year 1782. This date has a double resonance, evoking both the return of the Edgeworth family to Ireland and return of legislative hope for Ireland. Though the frailties of the Rackrent families often mirror the Edgeworth family flaws of earlier generations, Edgeworth deliberately sets her story in a time before her own extensive residence in Ireland.22 The date is also significant for the establishment of Grattan’s parliament, named for its leader, Henry Grattan, who led the first Irish parliament in many years with the power to legislate for its own country. British policy makers, spurred by the events of the American Revolution and not yet horrified by the events of 1789, loosened restraints on the Dublin’s ability to set policy, and the result was a happy interval in Irish parliamentary politics. Setting the novel before Grattan’s parliament, Edgeworth connects the disastrous management of the Rackrents with the impotence of the Irish parliament, suggesting that political power for the Irish may ameliorate the situation. The political climate in which the Edgeworths drafted the preface perhaps explains much of its tone. Conceived in the gap between the passing of the Act of Union and its taking effect, the rhetorical purpose of the preface has often been seen as evidence of Edgeworth’s support of the Act of Union. When the editor comments upon the idea, his language is conciliatory. When the editor mentions the Union, the style is almost sentimental: ‘When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-natured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence’ (CR 5.). One can interpret this comment on the aftereffects of the Union as reflecting a colonialist certainty that closer ties with England can bring only good to Ireland; however, its meaning may be something more analogous to a concession to power, assuring the English reader of the editor’s endorsement of the Union. As an MP, Richard Lovell cannot have escaped noticing that Great Britain dissolved the Irish parliament, and with a minimum of wrangling, rather than address the serious divisions and inequalities of Irish life. Given the consequences of Irish dissent, the editor must be sensitive to the time-honored way to allay English fears of the Irish political threat. In this case, the editorial persona is rather like the Stage Irishman, whose original purpose was to minimize the fears of the Restoration audience in London that Ireland was a political threat by showing his comic ineptitude. Seeming to recycle the old stereotype, the editor in fact screens Thady’s more revolutionary narrative. Instead of using Irish bulls in the traditional way, however,

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Edgeworth subverts their typical purpose. The vestiges of the stereotype allow her to criticize the problems in end-of-the-century Ireland. Just as Edgeworth refigures the stereotype of the Stage Irishman to combat it, she also reworks the script allowed for the Simpering Miss. In telling the story of a husband-to-be who educates a woman to be his wife in Belinda, Edgeworth analyzes the cultural ideals of femininity in Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762). As Mary Wollstonecraft points out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Rousseau’s ideal woman is the same as the conduct book paragon. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth does not investigate the rhetorical framework that prescribes both a style and a code of conduct for women; instead, her strongest argument against the stereotype is the insipidness of the example that she presents in Belinda, a young woman named Rachel Hartley. With her ‘ideal’ character, Edgeworth emphasizes the role of male labor in creating the perfect woman. Since Rachel is also perfectly dull and perfectly shallow, Edgeworth presents with deliberate irony the fullest illustration of the bad effects stemming from the false cultural principles on education for women. Because Simpering Misses are made and not born, the education of Rachel Hartley is a crucial element in the story. Seeing the importance of education in the ultimate happiness of society, Rousseau sets out the key educational principles for his protagonist, Emile, and in order for Emile to find happiness, he must find a connection with a woman. Just as education is crucial to Emile, the same is true of Rousseau’s ideal woman, Sophie. To match Emile, Sophie should ‘be a woman as Emile is a man— that is to say, she ought to have everything which suits the constitution of her species and her sex in order to fill her place in the physical and moral order’ (357). Rousseau argues that the sexes require educations that address the fundamental nature of each, and because men and women are made by nature for different ends, their educations must differ. Rousseau is not the first writer to set out educational principles for the so-called weaker sex; the topic of female education is a significant issue throughout the period and for a large number of eighteenth-century writers, starting with Mary Astell, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eliza Haywood and on through to Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. The immense popularity of Rousseau’s books makes him a kind of lightning rod for proto-feminist contemporaries.23 In writing a plot in which a husband tries to engineer the perfect wife by educating her, Edgeworth draws upon both real and literary models. Thomas Day, one of Richard Lovell’s close friends, undertook the exact same project that Clarence Hervey did in wife-shaping.24 Day tried to make his own Sophie after his relationship with Richard Lovell’s sister fell apart. Moved by ‘a scheme, which had long occupied his imagination,’ Day picked out two pretty, preteen orphans and ‘resolved to breed up [the] two girls, as equally as possible, under his own eye . . . [hoping] that, before they grew up to be women, he might be able to decide, which of them would be most agreeable to himself for a wife’ (Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth 1: 214). Wealthy enough to indulge his fancies and notoriously unlucky with women (he proposed to and was rejected by Maria Edgeworth’s aunt

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as well as her first two stepmothers), Day went to France to carry out his experiment. Because the young girls spoke no French and got no instruction in the language, they ‘were not exposed to any impertinent interference’ (Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth 1: 216). He came back to England with one of the young women, but never married her. Rousseau’s recipe for growing one’s own wife set out its principles like a conduct book. The correct relationship between Emile and Sophie, in Rousseau’s formulation, is a balance between the power in the active strength of the male and the charming resistance of the passive weakness of the female: If woman is made to please and to be subjugated, she ought to make herself agreeable to man instead of arousing him. Her own violence is in her charms. It is by these that she ought to constrain him to find his strength and make use of it. The surest art for animating that strength is to make it necessary by resistance. Then amour-propre unites with desire, and the one triumphs in the victory that the other has made him win. From this there arises attack and defense, the audacity of one sex and the timidity of the other, and finally the modesty and the shame with which nature armed the weak in order to enslave the strong. (Emile 358)

In order to keep male power in check, women must be coquettish and virtuous, a combination that pleases Rousseau’s ideal man and at the same time keeps him bound to the woman. He is entertained by her dialogue and challenged by her maneuvering, while certain of her absolute fidelity. Since the male has more power, the woman orchestrates the emotional tenor of the relationship, controlling the man through a combination of sweetness and sexual cunning. As Rousseau conceives men and women as formed for different ends, their respective educations must be different as well. Suited as she is to the domestic sphere, a woman should develop the skills like sewing, embroidery, lace making, and a little drawing that will allow her to decorate herself tastefully. Not all of her education is home-centered and decorative; he does recommend that women need moderate exercise and comfortable clothing. More than any particular set of skills, women need to be busy and obedient; moreover, they must understand the social consequences of behavior: ‘They must first be exercised in constraint, so that it never costs them anything to tame all their caprices in order to submit them to the wills of others’ (Emile 369). Women’s educators should equip their charges with gentleness and guile, the two great weapons for women who want to ‘conquer’ their men. Though gentleness and guile are substantial additions to the armory of the woman who would enslave her man, the greatest weapon that she possesses is wit, which Rousseau calls the ‘true resource of the fair sex’ (Emile 371). He argues that conversational elegance requires early and frequent encouragement, and regular exercise of the vocal instrument is crucial to success: ‘These conversations, which should always be marked by gaiety but also artfully arranged and well directed . . . would teach them which qualities men truly esteem and what constitutes the glory and happiness of a decent woman’ (Emile 377). He identifies verbal prowess as the most significant one for females, a kind of proxy for the physical strength they

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lack. Because wit is women’s most significant source of power, style of speech becomes a very important issue for the happiness and security of any woman. Rousseau’s ideas about feminine power and language seem contradictory. When he discusses the language that Sophie will use, he almost seems to advocate a plain style for his ideal woman: She is not acquainted with the trivial compliments, and she invents none that are more studied. She does not say that she is very obliged, that one does her great honor, that one should not take the trouble, etc. Still less does she take it into her head to turn phrases. She responds to an attention or to an act of routine politeness with a curtsey or a simple ‘thank you,’ but from her mouth that expression is well worth any other. In response to a true service, she lets her heart speak, and it is not a compliment that it finds. (Emile 398)

Disdaining the formulaic overstatement of most species of compliment, Sophie’s speech matches exactly the feelings of her heart, and she is not afraid to express her gratitude in simple phrases. Such simple directness, however, contradicts Rousseau’s idea that women need to manage their husbands by the covert manipulation of seeming inferior while all the while maintaining unacknowledged control of the household. In Rousseau’s cosmos, Sophie requires a more sophisticated linguistic program than compliments and gratitude. She requires non-verbal communication skills as well as the diplomatic negotiating style of a Member of Parliament: Women’s empire is an empire of gentleness, skill, and obligingness; her orders are caresses, her threats are tears. She ought to reign in the home as a minister does in a state by getting herself commanded to do what she wants to do. In this sense, the best households are invariably those where the woman has the most authority. But when she fails to recognize the voice of the head of the house, when she wants to usurp his rights and be in command herself, the result of this disorder is never anything but misery, scandal and dishonor. (Emile 408)

Because all the Sophies in their worlds will have to manage to conceal their orders under the guise of caresses, Rousseau’s ideal will need to manipulate her husband to ask her to do the thing she wants to do all along, while never suggesting that his control is anything other than absolute. Women’s language troubles Rousseau. He talks about the threats of witty women in the same way that the members of the Royal Society talk about writers who have recourse to excessively figurative language. For example, in outlining his objections to witty women, he extends his analysis to his own personal preferences, asserting that he would rather have a dumb girl than a literary one: ‘I would still like a simple and coarsely raised girl a hundred times better than a learned and brilliant one who would come to establish in my house a tribunal of literature over which she would preside’ (Emile 408). The ‘tribunal’ of literature suggests that literary power allows women unfairly to extend the dimensions of their empire. Rousseau imagines disaster if the head of the household begins to

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perceive the machinations of his wife. He addresses his male readers directly and asks them if they would choose simple over witty: ‘What gives you a better opinion of a woman on entering her room, what makes you approach her with more respect—to see her occupied with the labors of her sex and the cares of her household, encompassed by her children’s things, or to find her at her dressing table writing verses, surrounded by all sorts of pamphlets and letters written on tinted paper?’ (Emile 409). The answer that Rousseau clearly expects is the former, and he makes the messiness of the second option sound slightly suspicious. Writing verses and reading pamphlets seems too much encroachment on the public empire, and if a woman openly displays her language skills, her husband may guess that she is not the passive doll she pretends to be. Such a woman will lose the only real power she has in her relationship. How language figures into the power dynamic between husband and wife is central to an essay in Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795). In the section called ‘An Essay on the Noble Art of Self-Justification,’ Edgeworth mocks Rousseau’s concerns over the dangers implicit in women’s language by constructing a persona to counsel the inexperienced wife on the best way to use language to control ‘the enemy’: her husband. Language is the key to power for women, and the essayist outlines a list of tactics applicable to an array of domestic circumstances. For example, if a man complains about his wife’s character, she should first allow that she does have a great many faults, an admission that suggests her frankness, and then she should totally disavow that she has the particular fault of which he accuses her. However, a woman with a strong and intelligent husband must not argue with him directly but with trivialities: ‘harass him with perpetual petty skirmishes: in these, though you gain little at a time, you will gradually weary the patience, and break the spirit of your opponent’ (Letters for Literary Ladies 112). Most importantly, a woman should ‘take advantage of the ambiguity which all languages and which most philosophers allow’ and manipulate the discussion to perpetually frustrate even the most minor chance that conversation will ever drift from casuistry to communication. Though Rousseau’s narrator in Emile asks the question of whether a man would prefer a simple woman or a woman of wit, Edgeworth’s essayist illustrates that under Rousseau’s system even the simplest woman can be witty if wit is defined as an ability to spin out words with no regard for the truth or for the feelings of others. In Belinda, Edgeworth makes the same point as the persona of ‘An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification’ but from a different angle. Her refutation of Rousseau uses her imaginative skills to show the results of a woman who conforms to all of Rousseau’s ideals and compares her against the heroine of the novel. In the opening scenes of the novel, when Belinda goes to stay with Lady Delacour, one might expect that the two women will form the major contrast in the novel because they both vie for the attention of Clarence Hervey. Instead, Belinda’s only competition for Hervey is Rachel Hartley, the woman who embodies all of the ideals of the stereotype of the Simpering Miss. She is the personification of innocence: the young woman is gentle, modest, obliging to an

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almost unimaginable degree, habitually passive, grateful, loyal and sincere. Most importantly, she is never witty and always simple. In attacking this stereotype, Edgeworth first uncovers its foundation before demonstrating the dullness of the insipid Miss Hartley. The narrator emphasizes that Rachel Hartley’s character reflects her isolation in the first part of her life and also the conditions that Hervey encourages once he takes over as her guardian. When a reformed Lady Delacour receives a packet of Hervey’s letters containing what she hopes will be a vindication of Hervey from the charge of secretly keeping a mistress, the narrative suddenly shifts. Instead of presenting the text of his letters, the narrator relates ‘the principal circumstances in the third person,’ ironically commenting that keeping Hervey’s own words from the text will ‘save our hero from the charge of egotism’ (Belinda 362; ch. 26). The narrator relates the ‘principal circumstances’ in order to contextualize the foundations of the Simpering Miss stereotype. Just as Rousseau does in Emile, the narrator shows that the wife-growing project begins with the disaffection of its hero. Rather than explicating Hervey’s project by starting with the childhood training of Rachel Hartley, the narrator begins the story with Clarence Hervey’s early adulthood. The narrative eventually does fill in the details of the young woman’s background several chapters later, but the story starts with Hervey’s wild days on the Continent. In traveling to France after the Revolution, he indulged in the fashionable dissipation of Paris. His excesses induce a kind of moral exhaustion at such sybaritic stimuli, and he returns to England with a disgust for the kind of woman that he has met. In his reaction to his ill-spent youth, Hervey resembles Rousseau’s description of himself in Emile just before he conceives his educational project. Such a parallel of situation suggests that the Simpering Miss is not a reflection of a woman’s natural state but a reflection of a man’s choices; exhausted and satiated, Hervey ‘formed the romantic project of educating a wife for himself’ (Belinda 362; ch. 26). The narrative mocks Hervey’s romantic project of custom-educating a woman to be his bride. In Belinda, Hervey does not train a woman literally from infancy to be his wife, nor does he, like Thomas Day, avail himself of a preteen orphan. Hervey’s Sophie almost drops into his lap, and, as if in a fairy tale, he happens upon Rachel Hartley. Riding off the main path through a forest Clarence Hervey sees Rachel standing in something like a pastoral paradise: ‘a beautiful glade, in the midst of which was a neat but very small cottage, with numerous beehives in the garden, surrounded by a profusion of roses, which were in full blow’ (Belinda 363; ch. 26). The surroundings perfectly match the woman herself; she is natural, fresh and beautiful. He responds to her immediately for her loveliness; he finds her even more compelling once he, after the death of Rachel’s only known relative, becomes her guardian. The idea of shaping her into his wife becomes a kind of living science experiment for him: Her simplicity, sensibility, and, perhaps more than he was aware, her beauty, had pleased and touched him extremely. The idea of attaching a perfectly pure,

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Her innocence invites him to imagine himself as her creator, and the first thing he does is name her, like Adam within a mini-Eden. Connecting himself to a young woman named Rachel is not ‘delightful to his imagination,’ so he renames her. Inspired by Virginie in Jacques Henri Bernardin St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1789), he adds the author’s last name to his character’s first name, changing Rachel Hartley into Virginia St Pierre. In giving his ideal a more ‘natural’ name rather than the biblical one of Rachel, he doubly inscribes Rousseau on his ideal, christening his woman with a name that suggests both chastity and the tabula rasa. Hervey finds his ideal easy to manage. Rachel/Virginia has been secluded from the world for so long that she is easily satisfied with her situation: ‘Virginia never expressed the slightest curiosity to see any other persons, or any thing beyond the walls of the garden that belonged to the house in which she lived’ (Belinda 370; ch. 26). In almost perfect fidelity to Rousseau’s ideal, she accepts her restraint unquestioningly. In her willingness to please Hervey, she is equally docile. When he finds out that she had not been taught to write, he teaches her himself and Rachel ‘though she did not by any means equal his hopes, astonished Mrs Ormond by her comparatively rapid progress’ (Belinda 375; ch. 26). As long as she can write letters to Hervey, she has enough incentive to overcome any difficulty and progresses accordingly. Rachel Hartley/Virginia St Pierre turns out to be very much like Rousseau’s ideal. The narrator of Belinda comments that the woman Hervey wants for himself is one who possessed ‘simplicity without vulgarity, ingenuity without cunning, or even ignorance without prejudice . . . with an understanding totally uncultivated, yet likely to reward the labour of late instruction; a heart wholly unpractised, yet full of sensibility, capable of all the enthusiasm of passion, the delicacy of sentiment, and the firmness of rational constancy’ (Belinda 362; ch. 26). In all of the ways that he imagines her, Rachel fits his ideal. Her understanding is totally undeveloped; locked away from the world, she has had little instruction beyond the conversation of her grandmother and the text of the novels she reads. She is closer to ‘ignorance without prejudice’ than ‘ingenuity without cunning’; she has nothing of the guile of calculated cunning. In beauty and docility, Rachel is supreme; her wit, however, has only a partial charm. Partly because she is so isolated and so has no contact with the world and partly because the only thing she has to read is romances, Rachel has a quaint and child-like quality to her speech. In all of her conversations, Rachel speaks most characteristically in exclamations and intensives. For example, choosing between the offer of a moss rose or a pair of diamond earrings, Rachel takes the flower because of ‘how sweet it smells!’ (Belinda 371; ch. 26). She does not use excessively ornate language; in fact, she usually expresses herself through simple syntax, marking the strength of her feelings with exclamation points, repetition, or both. When she thinks about being reunited with her father, the word

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itself sends her into repetitive raptures: ‘My father! How delightful that word father sounds! My father! May I say, my father? . . . O, how I shall love him! I will make it the whole business of my life to please him!’ (Belinda 409; ch. 27). She characterizes her caretaker, Mrs Ormond, as ‘so kind, so very kind to me (Belinda 382; ch. 26), Hervey is ‘very good, too good’ (Belinda 386; ch. 26) and ‘too good, too kind’ (Belinda 400; ch. 27), and her dream figure speaks ‘so kindly, so tenderly’ (Belinda 388; ch. 26). Her language reflects the limitations of the world that she has been allowed to inhabit, and such a narrow range of expression keeps her from ever making anything that remotely resembles a joke. Her charms as a conversationalist are the incidental charms of naïveté: ‘Virginia's absolute ignorance of the world frequently gave an air of originality to her most trivial observations, which made her appear at once interesting and entertaining’ (Belinda 372; ch. 26). This originality, for a short time, draws Hervey’s interest. Even after he renews his acquaintance with Lady Delacour, Hervey can see that her superior charms as a conversationalist require his active and intellectual participation in a way that Rachel/Virginia’s never do, but he still prefers ‘Virginia’ for a wife, though he is in no particular hurry to marry her: ‘Her simplicity and naiveté, however, sometimes relieved him, after he had been fatigued by the extravagant gaiety and glare of her ladyship’s manners; and he reflected that the coquetry which amused him in an acquaintance would be odious in a wife’ (Belinda 378; ch. 26). The limitations of her situation make Rachel/Virginia’s failure as a wifein-training unsurprising. Hervey gives Rachel no society, not even the acquaintance of the near-celestial perfection of the Percivals of Oakly Park, to develop her socially, and he gives her no substantive private education. As a result, the young woman he trains for wifehood talks like a doll. When Mrs Ormond tries to uncover the depth of Rachel/Virginia’s feelings for Hervey by asking whether she prefers her guardian to her favorite bird, the young woman’s reply showcases all the characteristic markers of her style: ‘No, indeed!’ cried she, eagerly: ‘ how can you think me so foolish, so childish so ungrateful, as to prefer a little worthless bird to him—’ (the bullfinch began to sing so loud at this instant, that her enthusiastic speech was stopped). ‘My pretty bird,’ said she, as it perched upon her hand, ‘I love you very much, but if Mr. Hervey were to ask it, to wish it, I would open that window and let you fly; yes, and bid you fly away far from me forever. Perhaps he does wish it? Does he? Did he tell you so?’ cried she, looking earnestly in Mrs. Ormond’s face, as she moved toward the window. (Belinda 376; ch. 26)

The emphatic warmth of her opening interjection shows her passionate loyalty to her guardian, and the abundance of her qualifiers—the repeated so in ‘so foolish, so childish, so ungrateful’; the pretty, little, worthless applied to the bullfinch— and the readiness to declare herself in the exalted drama of releasing the bird immediately, suggests her lack of prudence as well as of a sense of humor. She declares her love for her bullfinch with the same passion with which she pronounces her readiness to send it away forever; that her mind moves so quickly

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from Mrs Ormond’s inane question to imagining a complete renunciation of her favorite pet underscores her warmth and even her sincerity, but shows nothing of wit or reason. Ultimately, each of the would-be lovers rejects the other for his or her inadequacies with language. Rachel/Virginia wants a man who can speak to her the way that heroes in novels do, and after spending a considerable amount of time with Belinda, Hervey sees the cavernous divide between what he imagined— Rachel/Virginia—and what he really desires: Belinda. He does not want a sweet doll but a woman of substance, and Belinda is no Simpering Miss. The entire argument of the novel Belinda is that women who match the stereotype are completely and utterly dull. Sweet, loyal, and beautiful Simpering Misses may be, but as Belinda has those same qualities and a working mind, the choice of whom a man ought to prefer is clear: Belinda. Following Rousseau’s prescriptions will not necessarily result in a happy ending; instead, cultural stereotypes will lead to boredom: ‘Belinda had cultivated taste, an active understanding, a knowledge of literature, the power and the habit of conducting herself; Virginia was ignorant and indolent, she had few ideas, and no wish to extend her knowledge’ (Belinda 379; ch. 26). Realizing that Belinda could be an equal partner while Rachel/Virginia could only be his toy, Hervey sees that the woman he trained is inferior to the woman who ultimately shaped herself. Ironically enough, Rachel also rejects Hervey for his inadequacies in language. Having been given almost nothing to read except romances, Rachel prefers a lover who speaks in the same way that heroes do in romances. Like Hervey, she wants her beloved to employ a certain kind of style, and the man of her dreams is linguistically superior to Hervey. The man of her dreams speaks poetry, gazes upon her with admiration, and falls in submission to her charms. By contrast, Hervey does not address the young woman ‘with the same sort of tenderness, and he does not throw himself at [her] feet’ (Belinda 384; ch. 26). Hervey speaks to Rachel with the simpler style of ordinary conversation, but she craves the more exalted language of romance. Just like Thomas Day (and Rousseau’s Emile, for that matter), Hervey meets with failure when he tries to put his plan into action. As the narrator ironically observes, ‘it was easy to meet with beauty in distress, and ignorance in poverty; but it was difficult to find simplicity without vulgarity, ingenuity without cunning, or even ignorance without prejudice; it was difficult to meet with an understanding totally uncultivated’ (Belinda 362; ch. 26). The narrator’s remarks about female understanding are particularly important. The natural metaphor suggests that minds are as good as they are educated to be; in this instance, the narrator agrees with Rousseau that education for women is important, but denies on principle the ideal that a person’s mind could be totally uncultivated. Very different from Rousseau’s ideal woman, Belinda is the embodiment of ‘an understanding totally cultivated.’ Most importantly, Belinda cultivates her own understanding. The narrative says very little about Belinda’s education except that ‘she had been educated chiefly in the country; she had early been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading’ (Belinda 7; ch. 1). The

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narrator mentions no specific program of study for Belinda, and one can assume that Belinda’s education comprises the interaction between her intellect and the book she chooses. Through her own reading and reflection, she develops from a blindly obedient young girl whom the narrator at the beginning of the novel calls ‘a puppet in the hands of others’ (Belinda 10; ch. 1) to a woman who is able to make her own decisions. Most importantly, she is a woman who can say what she means, blending the qualities of rationality and wit: ‘Reasoning gradually became as agreeable to her as wit; nor was her taste for wit diminished, it was only refined by this process’ (Belinda 232; ch. 17). Hervey educates Rachel and ends up bored by her insipidity, and Belinda shapes herself and enthralls Hervey; this discrepancy argues the importance of education and the superiority of the woman who violates all of Rousseau’s theories. Since Edgeworth worked on Belinda immediately after finishing Castle Rackrent, one might expect that the women in the earlier novel might share in Belinda’s mockery of the Simpering Miss stereotype, but the women in Castle Rackrent do not play a central role in the narrative. The novel does not contain simpering women, though its women have unconventional endings to their marital adventures. Their fate, as Ann Owen Weekes argues in Irish Women Writers, is opposite to what usually happens in a romantic plot: ‘In Rackrent each wife escapes upon her husband’s death, her fortune intact and indeed in two cases increased’ (43). The striking Irish males of Castle Rackrent do not appear in Belinda, either. The only colonial character in the novel is a West Indian called Mr. Vincent, and even if he represents the colonial character, the figure is very different from the Stage Irishman; moreover, he is a minor presence in the novel. The absence of a central Irish character in Belinda, as well as the absence of a central female character in Castle Rackrent, may represent the understanding of the novel’s originator that in a certain significant way, for her English readers, challenging one stereotype at a time is risky enough. Terry Eagleton observes that the positions of writer and narrator in Castle Rackrent have parallels of doubleness and ambiguity: ‘such is the doubleness of one of Irish fiction’s most intriguingly enigmatic characters, Thady Quirk in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), and it is perhaps not surprising that this ambivalent creation should be the work of an upper-class woman, who is like to experience a somewhat parallel conflict between her social power and sexual subordination’ (161). Because Edgeworth lives in Ireland, the English reader can see her as equivalent in inferiority to Thady, not only because her nationality is suspect, but also because her gender marks her as inferior. As doubly marked by both nationality and gender, she sees the limits of the stereotypes that are leveled against the Irish and at women. Writing against Rousseau, Edgeworth can take on gender stereotypes, and speaking in the words of Thady Quirk, Edgeworth can challenge national stereotypes. In attacking the rhetorical straitjacket of each script, she attacks the same imperialism, but attacking both at once would unravel too explicitly the strategies of oppression. Uncovering the methods of imperialist control is always dangerous; in a climate of political turmoil, such a deconstructive enterprise is impossible. As long as she

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writes in the shadow of the Act of Union, Maria Edgeworth will not write Castle Belinda. Notes 1

Butler 353. Hollingworth notes that the text of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s speech to the Parliament and the advertisement for Castle Rackrent appeared together. 3 For a more comprehensive discussion of Colley’s model for nationality in the context of twentieth-century Irish historiography, see Jim Smyth, Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union 2-9. 4 The invasion of 1796 failed because bad weather kept the ships from landing. 5 For a succinct summary of the economic, political and social factors in the failure of the rebellion, see Dickson 215-218. 6 The government ‘portrayed the Rebellion as a Catholic conspiracy to exterminate Protestantism’ (Newsinger 31). Kevin Whelan notes in The Tree of Liberty: ‘In defence of the United Irishmen, it should be stressed that blame for the introduction of sectarianism into the political life of the 1790s should not be laid at their door, but at that of the sectarian state itself’ (129). 7 Beatty also points out that middle- and upper-class Protestant women suffered comparatively little during the Rebellion compared to their Catholic counterparts who were ‘raped and brutalized by invading English and Hessian armies’ (10). 8 ‘It started out as a movement committed to the defence of Catholic tenant farmers and artisans against the Protestant Ascendency and its agents, but increasingly came to adopt a revolutionary posture, looking to the French example and allying itself, indeed eventually merging with, the United Irishmen’ (Newsinger 12). 9 Willa Murphy discusses the importance of secrecy as a strategy for revolutionary activity, noting that though Edgeworth argued for the importance of truth, she crafted fictions in which secrecy and surveillance was central, for ‘as she cast an artist’s eye over Ireland during her lifetime, a lifetime that spanned the rise of countless conspiratorial movements— including the Defenders, the United Irishmen, Whiteboys, Rightboys, Ribbonmen, and Molly Maguires. These revolutionary and agrarian societies relied on a combination of secrecy and terror to effect political rebellion’ (46). 10 In ‘War Correspondents,’ Mitzi Myers theorizes the way women ‘do’ politics: ‘Especially useful in understanding women writers as political practitioners who deploy genderinflected language and forms of representation is the notion of liminal space, the border country between history and literature where public events and multiple private texts come together—what Gérard Genette in his transtextual poetics terms ‘paratexts,’ the thresholds of interpretation’ (75). The narrative strategy of Edgeworth’s novel— allowing it to be read simultaneously with smug confidence by its imperialist audience and also as a handbook for revolutionary tactics by its more rebellious readers— suggests that, while Myers may be right about the way some women do politics, it is not the only way. 11 For example, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace argues that Edgeworth’s use of an editorial persona illustrates her view of Thady’s class: ‘I have been suggesting that Maria’s AngloIrish interests involved her in a series of attitudes toward indigenous Irish culture and that, although much about that culture intrigued her, much also seemed to demand that she distance herself from the ‘otherness’ on display before her. It seems that, at the moment of union with England, Anglo-Irish Protestants such as the Edgeworths defined themselves as a 2

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class not necessarily in terms of ‘superior blood,’ or even in terms of economic privilege (although these continued to be a factor) but, instead, in terms of a particular awareness of how the body was to be lived—a knowledge that was thought to be the product of a superior culture and education’ (159). 12 In Mere Irish and Fior Ghael, Joseph Leerssen defines the Irish bull and its connection to the Irish stereotype: ‘A new comical trait is his propensity to make verbal blunders, that is statements which though their meaning is clear and straightforward, are so infelicitiously expressed as to be self-contradictory. When ascribed to Irishmen, such blunders became known as Irish bulls and came to occupy a place alongside the brogue as standard markers of an Irish character’s nationality’ (101). 13 Daniel Hack reads this strategy as rhetorical self-effacement masking colonial appropriation in ‘Internationalism: Castle Rackrent and the Anglo-Irish Union.’ 14 For example, in ‘ “The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady”: Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative,’ Kate Cochran argues that Edgeworth ‘records Thady’s tale as instruction for an English readership just as American editors of slave narratives did for their northern readership’ (57). 15 Edgeworth merely parrots the opinions of the writers on her reading list. For example, Spenser notes that Irish poets corrupt young minds with their volubility: ‘And as for words to set forth such lewdness, it is not hard for them to give a goodlie gloss and painted show thereunto, borrowed even from the praises which are proper unto vertue itself.’ 16 Marilyn Butler mentions The Reconciliation: or the History of Miss Mortimer and Miss Fitzgerald (1783), Anthony Varnish (1786), and The Minor: or, the History of George O’Nial, Esq. (1787) in Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography 344-345. 17 Even Terry Eagleton, who criticizes the novel’s editorial elements, ‘which supervise and regulate Thady’s disheveled discourse with a very English ironic condescension’ (164), observes that the ‘verve and brio of his discourse partly qualify its cringe: he may be a groveller, but the language which betrays the fact is garrulously self-assertive’ (162). 18 In a letter to her aunt, Edgeworth uses the same word, kilt, when she describes her father’s attendance at a local gathering to discuss the Defenders: ‘he came home yesterday fully persuaded that a poor man in this neighborhood, a Mr. Houlton, had been murdered; but he had only been kilt, and ‘as well as could be expected,’ after being twice robbed and twice cut with a bayonet’ (January 1796; 43-44 Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth). 19 His Irish contemporaries were similarly critical of Spenser. As Declan Kiberd notes, the poet Seathrún Céitinn (Anglicized as Geoffrey Keating) defended the Irish character in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1618-1639); English title often given as A General History of Ireland) against Spenser’s observations and crafted ‘a devastating critique of English narrative methods. At the centre of Céitinn’s complaint is a view of Spenser as a pure textualist rather than as a man responding to felt experience. He further alleges . . . that Spenser relied mainly on English documents rather than taking Gaelic texts into account’ (Irish Classics 618). Céitinn points out that Spenser ‘spent but ten Weeks in compiling his History of Ireland, which is sufficient to convince impartial Judges of the Merits of his Performance’ (A General History of Ireland xvii) and ‘was a Writer that was unable to make himself acquainted with Irish Affairs, as being a Stranger to the Language’ (A General History of Ireland viii). 20 In ‘Swift as Irish Historian,’ Carole Fabricant argues that ‘Of all the means used to vindicate England’s claims to being a civilizer of barbarians, none was so dramatic or emotionally charged as the portrayal of early Irish as cannibals’ (Fox and Tooley 63). 21 As Robert Tracy points out in The Unappeaseable Host: Studies in Irish Identities, ‘Thady is in fact Teague or Teig, in Irish Tadgh, a common name but one with political and

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even literary overtones. Teague becomes Anglo-Ireland’s general name for any Irishman after about 1640 . . . Ireland was called ‘Teagueland’ as early as 1690’ (14). 22 The Rackrents also resemble a contemporary absentee landlord, Viscount Palmerston. See Brian Connell, Portrait of a Golden Age: Intimate Papers of Second Viscount Palmerston, Courtier Under George III, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958. 23 Though Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, found his sexual politics to be vastly inferior to the ideas of the social contract, some contemporary women found liberation in his writing. In ‘When Girls Read Rousseau,’ Lesley H. Walker illustrates that not all contemporary women focused on the contradictions for women in Rousseau’s writings, citing the career of Marie-Jeanne Roland, the French revolutionary who wrote her autobiography while waiting to be executed; she appropriates Rousseau to ‘authorize a radical perspective on femininity’ (25). 24 Like Rachel Hartley/Virginia St Pierre in Belinda, Day’s orphan of choice, Sabina, did not marry her educator. Widowed after a brief marriage to Thomas Day’s friend, she became a housekeeper. Works Cited Bartlett, Thomas, et al. 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Beatty, John, ed. Protestant Women’s Narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. Bhabha, Homi. ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.’ Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36. Burke, Helen. Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theatre,17121784. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. —, ed. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. Maria Edgeworth. New York: Penguin, 1992. Caraher, Brian. ‘Edgeworth, Wilde and Joyce: Reading Irish Regionalism through ‘the cracked lookingglass’ of a Servant’s Art.’ Ireland in the Nineteenth Century:Regional Identity. Eds. Leon Litvack and Glenn Cooper. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. 123-139. Castle, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London: Verso, 1995. Céitinn, Seathrún. A General History of Ireland. 3rd edn. Trans. Dermot O’Connor. London: B. Creake, 1838. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet ECCO. Cochran, Kate. ‘‘The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady’: Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative.’ New Hibernia Review 5.4 (2001): 57-72. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Connolly, S.J., ed. Political Ideas In Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. Corbett, Mary Jean. ‘Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent.’ Criticism 36.3 (Summer 1994): 383-400. Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Dickson, David. New Foundations: Ireland 1660-1800. 2nd rev. edn. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London: Verso, 1995.

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Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. 1801. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. —. Castle Rackrent. 1800. Ed. George Watson. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. —. An Essay on Irish Bulls. 1801. Eds. Jane Desmarais, Tim McLoughlin and Marilyn Butler. Vol. 1 of The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. Marilyn Butler, gen. ed. 12 vols. 1999. —. A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth With a Selection of Her Letters. 1867. Ed. Mrs Edgeworth. Privately printed. London: Joseph Masters, 1867. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth: Begun by Himself and Concluded by His Daughter Maria Edgeworth. 1820. 2 vols. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969. Fabricant, Carole. ‘Swift as Irish Historian.’ Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies on Swift. Ed. Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Guttman, Jon. ‘The Irish Won a Great Victory Four Centuries Ago, But It Was a Failed Rising 200 Years Later That Gave Birth to their Nation.’ Military History. 15.3 (1998): 6. Hack, Daniel. ‘Internationalism: Castle Rackrent and the Anglo-Irish Union.’ Novel 29 (1996): 145-164. Hollingworth, Brian. Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics. New York: St Martin’s, 1997. Howard, Sir Robert. The Committee. 1665 Ed. Cheryl L. Nixon. The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ed. Douglas Canfield. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001. Johnson, Samuel. A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Donald Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. —. Irish Classics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Patriarchal Complicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Leerssen, Joseph. Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986. Markley, Robert. Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Moody, T.W., R. B. McDowell and C.J. Woods. The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763-1798. Vol 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Murphy, Willa. ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Aesthetics of Secrecy.’ Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998. Myers, Mitzi. ‘War Correspondence: Maria Edgeworth and the En-Gendering of Revolution, Rebellion, and Union. Eighteenth-Century Life 22.3 (1998): 74-91. Newcomer, James. Maria Edgeworth the Novelist, 1767-1849: A Bicentennial Study. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1967. Newsinger, John. United Irishman: The Autobiography of James Hope. London: Merlin Press, 2001. Owens, Cóilín. ‘Irish Bulls in Castle Rackrent.’ In Family Chronicles. Ed. Cóilín Owens. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1987: 70-78 Scott, Sir Walter. Waverley. London: Oxford University Press, 1909. Smyth, Jim. ‘ “Like amphibious animals” ’: Irish Protestants, ancient Britons 1691-1707.’ Historical Journal 36 (1993): 785-97. —, ed. Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Tracy, Robert. The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998. Walker, Lesley H. ‘When Girls Read Rousseau.’ The Eighteenth Century 43.2 (2003): 2546. Weekes, Ann Owens. Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Whelan, Kevin. The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press/Field Day, 1996. Wohglemut, Esther. ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity.’ SEL 39.4 (1999): 645-658.

Chapter 8

‘Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy’: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda Julie Nash

‘Those who attempt to level, never equalize . . . The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

In his 1790 piece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke celebrates a rather dubious distinction: the English people’s ‘resistance to innovation,’ and ‘cold sluggishness’ (222). The former reformer and advocate for the emancipation of America and Ireland had been horrified by the violence of the French Revolution, and sought to convince his countrymen of the wisdom of Alexander Pope’s thinking that—at least where God and King are concerned— ‘Whatever is, is right’ (Essay on Man, Book I). Burke goes on to defend the social status quo, including individual prejudices, saying that, ‘Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision—skeptical, puzzled, unresolved’ (223-224). Maria Edgeworth may have had a number of prejudices, but they did not prevent her from feeling skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Nor did she share Burke’s distrust of social change.1 Yet Burke need not have feared that Edgeworth would join the ‘levellers’ who he believed would ‘corrupt our minds, vitiate our primary morals [and] . . . make us fit for, and justly deserving of slavery, through the whole course of our lives’ (233). Edgeworth generally kept quiet about political matters. According to her biographer Marilyn Butler, she once wrote to her aunt that she would be unable to respond to a political question: ‘I am very proud of the honor you have done me in asking me to criticize upon a subject which I feel to be far above my capacity and information; were the subject any other but politics you should find me pert and ready’ (113). Butler highlights Edgeworth’s conservative impulses, calling her ‘[b]y inclination . . . the least controversial of AngloIrishwomen . . . It was only through complex personal circumstances that she

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became the author of three progressive, at times even radical, studies of the AngloIrish in Ireland’ (125). Throughout her life Edgeworth stated her opposition to discussing politics, while frequently engaging in political debates in her letters, her essays, and her fiction. An 1825 letter to her American correspondent Rachel Mordecai Lazarus is a case in point: the letter opens with Edgeworth thanking her friend for sending some representative American plants. It moves on to a discussion of Lord Byron’s posthumous reputation and his engagement in ‘the Greek cause’ (80) for independence. She then launches into a passionate defense of Byron’s sacrifices in Greece and her own fears for the revolution’s failure: The Greeks like the Spaniards have been so long degraded by slavery that they cannot exert themselves sufficiently to regain or deserve liberty. This is the greatest evil and injury done by tyranny. It induces the vices of falsehood and cunning the miserable, the only arms of the weak against the strong . . . But we must not do the cruel injustice of supposing that these faults of character are natural and inherent and incurable, and make this imputation a plea for continuing the wrongs and oppression by which the faults were produced. (80)

Edgeworth then draws an analogy between the Greeks and the Irish Catholics in her own nation, moving from there to an informed discussion of the progress of the industrial revolution in Ireland. She even encloses a prospectus from a new manufacturing firm. Yet she apologizes for this clear engagement with world and local affairs with a breezy, ‘I am sorry I mentioned it, for I generally avoid politics, sure that I can do no good by talking of them. I will now only say that the Irish Catholics . . . have borne their disappointment with great temper’ (80). Many of her letters follow more or less the same pattern: political opinions sandwiched between family and literary gossip. Edgeworth’s comments on the politically weak people of Greece, Spain, and Ireland reflect her views of an oppressed group closer to home—domestic servants. A look at Edgeworth’s servant characters reveals that while the author certainly shared Edmund Burke’s suspicion of revolutionaries, she did not condemn change. On the contrary, in another letter to Lazarus, Edgeworth expressed her hopes that ‘steadiness and reasonable reform will produce and maintain tranquility’ in political matters (202-203), and her writings about domestic life in England and Ireland speak passionately about the need to adapt to changing times. Edgeworth’s domestic novels do not speak directly to matters of state and politics, but through her depictions of patriarchal families interacting with various social classes, Edgeworth actively engages with the same issues that inspired more overtly political writers such as Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Barbara Brothers and Bege K. Bowers make a convincing argument for rescuing the conventional novel of manners from its reputation as frivolous entertainment. Noting that ‘[m]anners reveal not just how a society conducts its business but also

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what its business should be,’ they go on to define the genre as a complex union of private and social concerns: Novels of manners are concerned with selfhood and morality within a cultural context and thus depict the inevitable conflict between the private and public personas and between illusion (imagination and desire) and the actualities of daily existence. In fact, they are so concerned with the details of everyday life that some critics have dismissed them as ‘trivial,’ ‘unimaginative,’ or ‘dull.’ (4)

In her study of Edgeworth’s novels of manners, Janet Egleson Dunleavy asserts that Edgeworth used the ‘familiar forms and themes of the novels of manners in what some critics have called the novel of social purpose’ (56). Dunleavy writes that, ultimately, Edgeworth was most interested in ideas—ideas about gender, about nation, and about class. In novels such as Belinda that expose the corruptions of English society, Edgeworth depicts the English home in the same way that she characterizes the Irish estate: as a site for rebellion and resolution. Anne K. Mellor classifies Edgeworth as a ‘feminine Romantic,’2 opposing the radical social views of her masculine counterparts such as William Blake, William Godwin, and the young William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Instead, Mellor writes, ‘the women writers of the Romantic era offered an alternative program grounded on the trope of the family-politic, the idea of a nation-state that evolves gradually and rationally under the mutual care and guidance of both mother and father’ (65). Writers such as John Locke and Burke had likened the state to a family before, but they tended to concentrate on the patriarchal underpinnings of both institutions.3 Inherent in the female Romantic philosophy is a critique of that patriarchal family structure and the paternalist social model to which it gave rise. As Mellor notes, in feminine Romanticism, ‘The oldest son is no better—or worse—than the youngest daughter; both are to be cherished equally’ (66). Mellor’s study demonstrates that the female Romantics either directly or indirectly sought to ‘radically transform the public sphere . . . and [their family politics] should be recognized as a viable alternative political ideology’ (84). This redefinition of the family politic has implications for class as well as for gender. Edgeworth possessed many of the prejudices of her privileged upbringing, including prejudices against domestic help, but her vision of a more egalitarian society based on an ideal of the middle-class family overshadows her more conservative impulses to keep the servants quiet and in their place. Throughout her writings, Edgeworth demonstrates that while servants have very real (and often negative) power over the families they serve, these undesirable qualities are a result of their education (or lack thereof) and not their nature. By exposing the dissatisfactions of people who work in domestic labor, Edgeworth may not be consciously advocating for the kind of radical levelling decried by Burke, but her ideas amount to levelling nonetheless.

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Apparently, servants had always played a vital role in Edgeworth family lore, both as saviors and potential destroyers of the family. Although these stories may well be apocryphal, they were passed down through the generations, and no doubt informed Edgeworth’s strong views of the serving class. R. L. Edgeworth opened his Memoirs (1820) with a history of the Edgeworth family, a history that acknowledges the importance of servants to its very survival. According to family tradition, a seventeenth-century infant heir to the Edgeworth castle was about to be murdered by Irish rebels: One of the rebels seized the child by the leg, and was in the act of swinging him round to dash his brains out against the corner of the castle wall, when an Irish servant, of the lowest order, stopped his hand, claiming the right of killing the little heretick himself, and swearing that a sudden death would be too good for him; that he would plunge him up to the throat in a boghole, and leave him for the crows to pick his eyes out. Snatching the child from his comrade, he ran off with it to a neighbouring bog, and thrust it into the mud; but, when the rebels had retired, this man, who had only pretended to join them, went back to the bog for the boy, preserved his life, and, contriving to hide him in a pannier under eggs and chickens, carried him actually through the midst of the rebel camp safely back to Dublin. This faithful servant’s name was Bryan Ferral. (8-9)

R. L. Edgeworth not only includes this story in his memoirs, but notes several corroborating sources, and takes care to mention the servant’s name and fate (Mr. Ferral and his descendents served the Edgeworths for generations enjoying the family’s ‘support’ and ‘protection’ (9). As Edgeworth’s 1904 biographer Emily Lawless dryly comments, ‘The expedient of hiding a child in a pannier, which is afterwards filled up with eggs and chickens, and carried through a camp of hungry rebels, does not somehow appeal to the mind as quite the safest that could have been devised’ (22), but the story reinforces a belief that even the ‘lowest order’ of servants can go down in history as heroic. On the other end of the spectrum of potential servant behavior, however, is the dangerous servant. Another family anecdote illustrates the idea that the upper class is never safe in the company of their domestic help, through either the malice or incompetence of servants. The Edgeworths tell this story of a brave ancestor: While she was living at Lissard, she was, on some sudden alarm, obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was followed upstairs by an ignorant servant girl, who carried a bit of candle without a candlestick between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was halfway downstairs again, she observed that the girl had not her candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected and answered that she had left it ‘stuck in the barrel of black salt.’ Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by herself to the room where the gunpowder was; found the candle as the girl had described; put her hand carefully underneath it, carried it safely out; and

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when she got to the bottom of the stairs, dropped on her knees, and thanked God for their deliverance. (13)

This anecdote would seem to support the ideals of social paternalism in which the ruling class deservingly possesses power. Lady Edgeworth is depicted as brave, intelligent, and quick thinking. In addition, she has moral sense enough to thank God for her good fortune. The ‘ignorant servant girl,’ on the other hand, would seem to need constant watching. Not having sense enough to recognize gun powder when she saw it or even to carry a candlestick with her, she is lucky indeed to be protected by the wise and fearless Lady Edgeworth (who, according to R. L. Edgeworth was known to have a violent temper. One shudders to imagine how it may have been turned on the—in this case nameless—servant.) These two family legends reveal the polarities of Maria Edgeworth’s attitude toward the serving class, attitudes that are visible in her fiction as well. Bryan Ferral—or his type—appears regularly in Edgeworth’s works, the blindly loyal near-slave, a remnant of the feudal vassal. This stereotype of the devoted retainer was a comforting one for paternalists who defined the relationship between employees and employers (as well as between poor and wealthy) in moral terms. The social hierarchy was maintained by the belief that those of the lower order owed loyalty and service to their social betters as payment for their moral guidance and protection. It was not enough to perform one’s servile duties, it was equally (or more) important to perform one’s servile role. One servant guide book advises those in service, ‘Whenever you are ordered to do anything, do it without grumbling whether you think it belongs to your place or not, for willingness and good nature are half a servant’ (Brophy 212). Paternalists on both sides of the kitchen table promoted the idea that servitude was a ‘natural’ state for many. A guide book written by Samuel and Sarah Adams, a married couple with a total of fifty years in service between them states that, ‘The supreme Lord of the universe has, in his wisdom, rendered the various conditions of mankind necessary to our individual happiness: some are rich, others poor—some are masters, and others servants. Subordination, indeed, attaches to your rank in life, but not disgrace. All men are servants in different degrees’ (Brophy 105). In Belinda, the relationship between the black servant Juba and his master Mr. Vincent is a textbook example of this dynamic. Mr. Vincent relies on Juba, ‘the best creature in the world,’ less for his service than for his loyalty, which confirms Mr. Vincent’s proper role as master. Juba, in turn, would be lost without his master’s protection. Superstitious and impetuous, he needs constant reassurance that he is safe: [Mr. Vincent] had a black servant of the name of Juba, who was extremely attached to him: he had known Juba from a boy, and had brought him over with him when he first came to England, because the poor fellow begged so earnestly to go with the young massa. Juba had lived with him ever since, and accompanied him wherever he went. (199)

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The character of Juba richly illustrates Edgeworth’s attraction to social paternalism. Essentially a slave,4 with a child-like mind, Juba needs his master’s protection because in his ignorance, he believes he sees ghosts, and believes in the ‘foolish’ Obeah traditions of his native West Indies. He is blindly obedient to his master, and frequently gets into boyish scrapes because of his insistence on the superiority of his master. For his part, Mr. Vincent plays his paternalist role well. He treats Juba kindly and is careful not to laugh at his ignorance. In an astonishing exchange, Mr. Vincent goes so far as to compare Juba to his dog, also named Juba, and brags that Juba is ‘the quietest and best creature in the world’ (315): ‘No doubt,’ said Belinda, smiling, ‘since he belongs to you, for you know, as Mr. Percival tells you, everything animate or inanimate that is under your protection, you think must be the best of its kind in the universe.’ ‘But, really, Juba is the best creature in the world,’ repeated Mr. Vincent, with great eagerness ‘Juba is, without, exception, the best creature in the universe’ ‘Juba, the dog, or Juba, the man?’ said Belinda, ‘you know, they cannot be both the best creatures in the universe.’ ‘Well! Juba, the man, is the best man – and Juba, the dog, is the best dog, in the universe.’ (315)

By confusing Juba the man and Juba the dog in this conversation, Edgeworth highlights the connection between the ideal servant and a household pet, both sentimentally appreciated for their loyalty and goodness, existing solely for their master’s gratification. Juba ‘belongs’ to his master as any other object ‘animate or inanimate’ might. Juba the servant never emerges from the background of the novel as more than a loyal dog.5 His animal-like inability to control his temper when anyone challenges his master’s status is mitigated by his general good nature and constant sense of gratitude. Though Juba is black, enough of Edgeworth’s white servants fall into this dog-like role as well, indicating that the blindly devoted companion like Bryan Ferral figures largely in Edgeworth’s conception of an ideal servant. Yet Edgeworth also distrusted such devotion, and her distrust is a critique of the hierarchical social system that governed English society. Edgeworth did not believe (as much as she might have wished otherwise) that most members of the poor and working class accepted their positions with gratitude. She frequently recognized and wrote about class conflict within the home, and this conflict took the form of power struggles between servants and masters. Because the paternalist system depended not only upon the duties of the servant class but also upon the acceptance and performance of those duties as morally correct, a servant who stepped out of his proper ‘place’ was a danger to the social system as a whole. Although the novel’s characters had nothing to fear from Juba, Susan C. Greenfield points out that even this slavish character is more ambiguous than first appears:

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The reference to the religious practice of obeah, a widely feared source of slave resistance, is a reminder that slaves throughout the West Indies, and especially in Jamaica, are engaging in deadly rebellions . . . Indeed, if Juba’s eagerness to follow Mr. Vincent proves the reciprocal value of the master-slave relationship, the place Juba insists on going to, England, is one where in theory, if not in fact, he can be legally free. (220)

Anthea Trodd writes about the tradition from nineteenth-century detective novels that closely linked servants and crime. She cites a conventional plot used frequently by Arthur Conan Doyle in which ‘we see the main features through which servants and crime are conventionally associated . . . the family secret which has fallen into the hands of the servants’ (175). Though this convention may be more sensationalized in popular crime fiction, the stereotype of the dangerously disloyal servant is as common throughout all of nineteenth-century British fiction as that of the blindly obedient one. While these two images may appear to be contradictory, they are actually complementary: both types of servants, like the two who appear in the Edgeworth family folklore, control the lives of their masters and even the survival of the family line. In Belinda, Edgeworth offsets her portrayal of Juba with that of Champfort, a French page who, out of sheer maliciousness and desire for power, tries to destroy his master’s marriage and Belinda’s impeccable reputation. Champfort is a spy and a gossip, a malignant presence in the Delacour family who delights in seeing his master and mistress at odds with one another so that he can benefit from their divided and thus weakened power. Edgeworth gives this stereotypical character no more depth or moral ambiguity than she gives Juba the man/dog, but his actions have serious implications for Belinda and for the Delacours. Like a true villain, Champfort will stop at nothing to maintain his considerable influence over Lord Delacour. As in all class struggles, what Champfort wants is power, and he fears losing his to Belinda. Champfort disseminates a rumor that Belinda’s kindness to the Delacour family is motivated by a desire to marry Lord Delacour after his wife dies. The danger that Champfort causes is real: not only does he nearly destroy the strong friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour, but he potentially ruins Belinda’s reputation, causing her to leave the home of her protectors under scandalous circumstances. Even after Champfort’s tactics are exposed and he is fired from the Delacour’s household, he continues to cause mischief by seducing a ‘stupid maid’ of the Delacours and learning the family’s secrets. Edgeworth’s narrator comments, ‘On these “coquettes of the second table,” on these underplots of the drama, much of the comedy, and some of the tragedy of life depend. Under the unsuspecting mask of stupidity this worthy mistress of our intriguing valet-de-chambre concealed the quick ears of a listener, and the demure eyes of a spy’ (268). With this moment of narrative intrusion, Edgeworth confirms the fears of every middle- and upper-class Englishman: though often appearing ‘stupid,’ servants are listening and watching

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everything that goes on in the household, and behind their apparently humble situation, they hold all the cards. Conduct books and servant manuals also reflect this terror of servant spies. A 1734 guide states, ‘There cannot be a more famous Breach of the Rules of sound Morality, than for a Person to betray his Master’s Secrets . . . which is so vile a breach of Trust, so high a Degree of Treachery, that it ought to make him odious to all men’ (Folkenflik 259). A 1773 manual raises the stakes, making servant treachery a betrayal of divine rule: ‘[Telling a masters’ secrets] is also a very great sin, and one of the breaches of the fifth commandment; for as we are commended to honour our parents, so it is necessarily implied that we also honour and respect all those who have authority over us’ (Folkenflik 259). By drawing comparisons between masters and parents, these manuals reaffirm the paternalistic social order, but in revealing such deeply held fears about servile treachery, the manuals also reveal an understanding that these social relations are fragile. Edgeworth voices these concerns about the dangers of giving servants too much influence throughout of her writings. In Practical Education (1798), she and her father devote an entire chapter to the subject. They argue that children will be corrupted if they are allowed to spend too much time in the company of family servants. Too much exposure to household servants is likely to teach innocent children ‘the language and manners, the awkward and vulgar tricks’ of the class as well as the more dangerous habits of ‘cunning, falsehood, [and] envy’ (123). The Edgeworths warn parents, ‘If children pass one hour a day with servants, it will be in vain to attempt their education’ (12). Yet even in the seemingly unambiguous anti-servant message embedded in Practical Education, the Edgeworths go out of their way to explain that the flaws in the characters of servants are a result of their circumstances: What has been said of the understanding and dispositions of servants, relates only to servants as they now are educated. Their vices and their ignorance arise from the same causes, the want of education. They are not a separate cast of society doomed to ignorance, or degraded by inherent vice; they are capable, they are desirous of instruction. Let them be well educated and the difference in their conduct and understanding will repay society for the trouble of the undertaking. (124)

Yet the Edgeworths admit that blurring the line between social stations is confusing and disorienting. They argue against allowing young children to play with the children of servants because it will be difficult for everyone involved to assume their prescribed roles as they reach maturity: A boy who has been used to treat a footman as his playfellow, cannot suddenly command from him that species of deference, which is compounded of habitual respect for the person, and conventional submission to his station; the young master must therefore effect a change in the footman’s manner of thinking and speaking by violent means; he must extort that tribute of respect which he has

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neglected so long, and to which, consequently, his right is disputed. He is sensible, that his superiority is merely that of situation, and he therefore exerts his dormant prerogatives with jealous insolence . . . No servant feels the yoke of servitude more galling, than he who has been partially emancipated. (125)

Taken together, these two passages exemplify the problems of social paternalism as Edgeworth presents them in Belinda. On the one hand, she states that servants do not comprise a ‘separate cast of society.’ On the contrary, they seek selfimprovement through education and are fully capable of shedding their vices. On the other hand, the logical extension of that argument is that if servants are not ‘separate’ from their masters, then each class has the same innate capabilities of leadership or servitude. The only thing separating one class from the other is convention, situation, and the willingness and ability of each class to act out their roles. Thus, servants who are emancipated through education and the breaking down of social barriers are likely to resent their station and be abused by their masters. Edgeworth seems to want it both ways here: she argues that the education of servants be improved to make them fit companions for children, but laments the inevitable loss of deference and respect that will follow such leveling measures. This ambivalence contrasts with the thinking of Edmund Burke, whose enthusiasm for class stability is clear: [T]he wealth of the country is as usefully employed as it can be, in fomenting the luxury of individuals. It is the public ornament; it is the public consolation; it nourishes the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it, whilst the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority, and degrades and villifies his condition. (234)

Rather than balk at this reminder of inferiority and degradation, says Burke, the humble classes take comfort in the luxury and privilege enjoyed by their superiors. By equating the wealth of individuals with the power of the state, the poor can believe themselves to be a part of something greater than their own low rank. Furthermore, Burke adds, the wealth of others is put to good use in reminding the poor man of his own unfortunate circumstances so that he may focus on his heavenly rewards ‘when the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature’ (234). Despite some apparent mixed feelings about that fact, Edgeworth clearly believes that members of the servant class do not have to die to achieve the status of ‘equal by nature.’ Even when she is portraying her servants in a stereotypical way, Edgeworth questions the social system that excludes servants from having more freedom and a more open relationship with their masters and mistresses. Edgeworth best demonstrates the complexities of class conflict within the home and her vision for accommodating a gradually changing society through the character of Marriott. Belinda features an important subplot about the relationship between a servant and her mistress. Through this ‘underplot,’ the author suggests

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that the classes have much to gain by interacting honestly and seeing beyond stereotypes and misunderstandings. As the novel opens, Lady Delacour mistakenly believes that she is dying of breast cancer brought on by a injury she once received in a duel, a secret she has kept successfully hidden from everyone but her maid. Only Marriott knows that behind Lady Delacour’s apparent lightheartedness is a fearful and depressed mind and a deteriorating body. At this early point in the novel, Lady Delacour and Belinda share the common belief that servants cannot be trusted. Despite the fact that Marriott has never given her mistress reason to question her loyalty, Lady Delacour fears rather than befriends her waiting-woman. The otherwise haughty mistress submits to her own servant in trivial matters, out of a fear that Marriott will betray the secret of her disease. Belinda, unaware of Lady Delacour’s illness, finds her hostess’s attitude perplexing: Upon many occasions she had observed, that Marriott exercised despotic authority over her mistress; and she had seen, with surprise, that a lady, who would not yield an iota of power to her husband, submitted herself to every caprice of the most insolent of waiting-women. For some time, Belinda had imagined that this submission was merely an air, as she had seen some other fine ladies proud of appearing to be governed by a favorite maid; but she was soon convinced that Marriott was no favorite with Lady Delacour; that her ladyship’s was not proud humility, but fear . . . It seemed as if Marriott was in possession of some secret, which should remain forever unknown. (13)

Because Marriott does not conform to the ideal of the grateful and meek servant, as Juba does, both her mistress and Belinda suspect her of treachery. The rightful roles of servant and master have been reversed. Lady Delacour ‘submits’ to a ‘despot.’ Marriott is opinionated, occasionally rude, and she speaks her mind freely. In other words, she acts like a human being rather than a pet. In consequence, she lives under a cloud of suspicion that is well out of proportion to her actions. For example, when Lady Delacour finally tells Belinda the story of her life and the truth about her failing health, she laments that she has no true friends despite her immense social popularity. Belinda, in a rare moment of passion, declares, ‘Trust to one who will never leave you at the mercy of an insolent waiting-woman – trust to me’ (24). Belinda implies that Marriott is more than insolent, that she is downright sinister. She does not speak of her friend being left to the ‘care’ or ‘responsibility’ of Marriott, but to her ‘mercy.’ Belinda’s and Lady Delacour’s suspicions of Marriott reflect the widespread English fear of social unrest and revolutionary ‘mercilessness’ on the part of the lower classes. Yet Lady Delacour is in absolutely no danger of becoming a victim of her maid, as Edgeworth goes on to reveal. Despite her ‘insolent’ ways, Marriott genuinely loves Lady Delacour, although that love does not take the fawning, dog-like form that Juba’s does. After Lady Delacour is injured in a carriage accident, Marriott begs to care for her lady herself. Edgeworth uses this period of Lady Delacour’s recuperation to develop Marriott’s character more fully.

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While Lady Delacour convalesces, she becomes very irritated by the sound of Marriott’s pet macaw and orders her maid to get rid of the bird. Marriott naturally resists this order and protests vehemently: ‘O dear, my lady! to call my poor macaw odious! – I didn’t expect it would ever come to this – I am sure I don’t deserve it – I’m sure I don’t deserve that my lady should have taken a dislike to me’ (125). Marriott’s affection for the bird is obviously out of proportion to the context; after all, there has been no real disaster, simply a woman’s disturbance by a noisy pet. Yet Marriott takes Lady Delacour’s irritation as a serious personal affront, one that is beyond her comprehension. Yet what at first seems like an overreaction on Marriott’s part—spurious logic that because her lady does not like her bird, she does not like her—turns out to be correct. While we are laughing at Marriott’s foolish sentiment, Edgeworth uses the incident to highlight the maid’s perceptiveness and sensitivity. Marriott correctly understands that this conflict has more to do with her than it does with the macaw. Lady Delacour has made it clear that she resents the power that Marriott holds over her. The issue with the macaw becomes a means by which Lady Delacour can reassert her authority over her maid. After several similar exchanges with her maid, Lady Delacour finally exclaims, ‘Good heavens! am I reduced to this? . . . [S]he thinks that she has me in her power. No; I can die without her: I have but a short time to live – I will not live a slave’ (141). Now it is Lady Delacour who is overreacting. The subtext of this conflict has everything to do with power and very little to do with a pet bird. Lady Delacour’s assertion that she ‘will not live a slave’ reveals her fear that the natural hierarchy of servant and master is threatened by Marriott’s possession of her mistress’s secret. In defending herself, Marriott rightly asserts that she ‘does not deserve’ to be treated like a potentially dangerous criminal. Through this conflict Edgeworth illustrates the tension inherent in the servant/master relationship. The upper-class dependence on servants for their duties as well as for the status they bestowed was in direct conflict with the need for domestic privacy. Lady Delacour believes herself to be ‘reduced’ from her rightful position as ruler to one of ‘slave,’ yet Marriott is hardly elevated as a result of Lady Delacour’s ‘reduction.’ Marriott is torn between her loyalty to her lady and her love for her pet, the one creature in the house who does not suspect her of treachery. Edgeworth uses this example to point out that while Lady Delacour exploits the language of slavery and submission, it is ultimately Marriott who makes the personal sacrifice. Like the caged macaw, Marriott may be able to stir things up by making a lot of noise, but ultimately she too can be disposed of when she becomes inconvenient. Judith Terry points out this paradox of a servant’s position, at once part of the family and outsider: ‘The intimate nature of servants’ duties meant that they witnessed most of what went on: they saw their masters and mistresses dress and undress, in fair and dour temper; they watched, worried, rejoiced, criticized, despised or admired along with them. Yet they never really participated’ (104). These intimate ties between masters and servants strain rather than strengthen relations between the two groups.

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As expected, Lady Delacour wins the power struggle over Marriott’s bird; the maid trades the macaw for a quiet goldfish, and becomes significantly less ‘insolent’ as the novel progresses. But Marriott wins a battle of her own. The incident is a catalyst for a major shift in narrative perspective: we no longer see the character only through upper-class eyes, and Edgeworth provides insight into Marriott’s motives and gives the maid a powerful voice with which to defend herself and her situation. Marriott guesses that Belinda suspects her of plotting to betray her mistress and bristles: ‘[B]etray her!—Oh Miss Portman, I would sooner cut off my hand than do it. And I have been tried more than my lady knows of, or you either’ (142). She goes on to explain that enemies of Lady Delacour had offered her money to reveal her Lady’s secret, ‘and I defy them to get anything out of me. Betray my lady! I’d sooner cut out my tongue this minute! Can she have such a base opinion of me?’ (142). Ironically, Lady Delacour has more to fear from the schemes of her ‘equals’ than from her waiting-woman, who is shocked to hear the accusations against her. Marriott’s vow to dismember herself in defense of Lady Delacour might be a bit overdone, but she backs up these strong words with evidence that she has refused bribes already. She is both personally indignant and surprised to learn that her mistress does not share her affection. This speech and others like it allow Edgeworth to resist traditionally held views of servants and to give voice to the anger and resentment of the ‘humble’ classes. Marriott’s articulate defense moves her from a marginal position in the novel to center stage. Lady Delacour’s, Belinda’s, and even the reader’s opinions about Marriott have been wrong. Edgeworth exposes as a stereotype the prevailing view that servants are untrustworthy by allowing Marriott to reveal for herself her integrity, insight, and strength of character. In addition, Edgeworth indirectly suggests that the strict hierarchy of English society, predicated on birth and rank, should give way to a more caring familial arrangement. Yet while Edgeworth does effectively expose the potential for the abuse of power within the existing system, she hardly shatters the social hierarchy. Marriott remains a loyal subject and Lady Delacour reforms into a more benevolent mistress. (She also becomes a better wife, mother, and friend in the process.) Through Marriott’s character, Edgeworth vocally insists on the humanity and moral equality of servants, but Marriott’s self-defense is more an argument for gradual change than a radical equalizing of social position. Edgeworth endows Marriott with ideas, opinions, and rights, and throughout the remainder of the novel, the maid is treated by her mistress with respect and friendship. Maria Edgeworth’s thinking was strongly influenced by a paternalist worldview, yet contrary social outlooks rivaled this view as she accounts for and depicts inevitable social change in her novels. Servants were a useful way for her to illustrate this tension, as they served practical and ideological purposes in her novels. Although all of her novels (with the exception of Vivian) are ultimately comic, Edgeworth injects them with tragic elements. As Eilean Ni Chuillean writes, ‘[F]or Maria Edgeworth, as an anti-classical writer the tragic and the comic will be frequently confused or disconcertingly alternated. This is certainly true of her

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fiction, especially when it places itself at a distance from the centers of power, dealing with the Irish, or lower-class, or women’s or children’s experience’ (30). Edgeworth clearly saw the gap between the paternalistic ideal and the reality of the British social hierarchy. Throughout these domestic novels, Edgeworth exploits all of the common literary stereotypes of servants only to reject these stereotypes as inadequate and to prescribe a new, more familial and egalitarian relationship between mistress and maid and to advocate for a society that is open to change. In an early chapter of Belinda, Marriott interrupts a conversation between Lady Delacour and Belinda, displaying two costumes for a masquerade ball, one that depicts the comic muse and one that depicts the tragic muse. Lady Delacour comments, ‘Whilst we are making speeches to one another, poor Marriott is standing in distress, like Garrick, between tragedy and comedy’ (12). This anecdote illustrates quite literally the dual role of servants in Belinda, caught between two opposite roles: at times they function as flat comic stereotypes, indicating that these figures are well suited to their inferior station; other times Edgeworth gives their difficult lives and personal relationships a sense of dignity, indicating her belief in their moral and sometimes intellectual equality with their ‘betters.’ Notes 1

As Andrew McGann demonstrates in his study, Cultural Politics in the 1790s, Edgeworth refers directly to Reflections on the Revolution in France in her 1801 novel, Belinda, when the radical feminist and revolutionary Harriet Freke calls Burke’s notion of ‘the decent drapery of life’ (i.e. social conventions) ‘the most confoundedly indecent thing in the world.’ Given Edgeworth’s extremely unflattering portrait of Harriet Freke, the scene implies some sympathy with Burke’s affection for social conventions. 2 Mellor also describes Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and other lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women writers as feminine Romantics. 3 Locke acknowledges that mothers should have ‘an equal title’ with fathers to power over their children, but contends that the foundations of society are built upon paternal power. 4 Edgeworth has been called an abolitionist for her line ‘I wish there was no such thing as slavery in the world’ in her short story, ‘The Grateful Negro,’ but as George E. Boulukos points out, she was more of a ‘moderate’ with regard to slavery in Britain. Although she disliked the institution, she writes in her story that ‘the sudden emancipation of the Negroes would rather increase than diminish their miseries’ and she argues for a reform within slave plantations that would prevent a slave rebellion. 5 In the 1801 edition of Belinda, Juba has a larger role than he does in her 1811 revision. The biggest change in his character is the elimination of his interracial marriage in the later edition. Works Cited Boulukos, George E. ‘Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery’ Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (February 1999): 12-29.

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Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Women’s Lives and the Eighteenth Century. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991. Brothers, Barbara and Bege K. Bowers. Reading and Writing Women’s Lives: A Study of the Novel of Manners. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990. Burke, Edmund. On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, A Letter to a Noble Lord. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, Corporation, 1937. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Dunleavy, Janet Egleson. ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Novel of Manners.’ Reading and Writing Women’s Lives: A Study of the Novels of Manners. Ed. Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P: 49-65. Edgeworth, R. L. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth Begun by Himself and Concluded by his daughter Maria Edgeworth. Vol. I. 1820. Intro. Desmond Clark. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968. Edgeworth, R.L. and Maria. Practical Education. 1798. Intro. Gina Luria. Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. 1801. Intro. Eva Figes. London: Pandora Press, 1986. Folkenflik, Robert. ‘Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the Novel.’ EighteenthCentury Fiction 5:3 (1993): 253-268. Greenfield, Susan C. ‘Abroad and at Home: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda.’ PMLA 112: 2 (March 1997): 214228. Lawless, Emily. English Men of Letters: Maria Edgeworth. London: Macmillan & Co., 1904. MacDonald, Edgard E., ed. The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977. McGann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Trodd, Anthea. ‘Household Spies: The Servant and the Plot in Victorian Fiction.’ Literature and History 13:2 (Autumn 1987): 175-187.

Chapter 9

Justice, Citizenship, and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading The Absentee as a Historical Novel Kara M. Ryan

In surveying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and Irish historiographies, contemporary historians have argued that the intellectual energy of the Enlightenment, combined with intermittent political unrest, ultimately produced ‘progressive’ and ‘philosophical’ English and Scottish histories, whereas Irish historiography of the same period exhibited no such trend. The reasons for the backwardness of Irish historiography, according to one historian, are diverse and attributable to the particularities of Irish history itself (96-97). This essay seeks to counter the assertion that Ireland was devoid of ‘progressive’ or ‘philosophical’ historiographies by reading Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) as a historical novel in the Lukácsian sense of the term. A reading of The Absentee as a Lukácsian historical novel allows the text to be positioned as both critical historiography and within the Anglo-Irish literary tradition. Moreover, we then see its realism as produced from a tumultuous historical context illustrating the transformation of a myopic, individualized historiographical perspective into a broader, collective historical consciousness. Although ostensibly about absenteeism—that is, the practice whereby Anglo-Irish landlords lived away from their estates, usually in England— Edgeworth’s novel evades a simplistic rendering of this behavior by disclosing it to be a specific historical practice rather than merely an isolated, aberrant behavior. In the process, this textual investigation into absenteeism becomes a segue toward a more nuanced or totalizing comprehension of history by specifically disclosing the concepts of citizentry, virtue, and justice, as inherently gendered and far from resolved. Through its analogy of disempowered woman with disenfranchised Catholic peasantry, Edgeworth’s novel unmasks the narrowness within both eighteenth-century radical and conservative political philosophies. The Absentee, then, is a historical novel in that it seeks to represent the historical condition of absenteeism, but the text is additionally historical (or historically accurate) for what it is unable to resolve. In her novel, Edgeworth addresses the manner of absenteeism by seeking out a contextual causality. At one point in the novel, absenteeism is attributed to

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the 1800 Act of Union and the subsequent power shift from Ascendancy to middle class. In this analysis, absenteeism is presented as necessary lest the Ascendancy fall prey to the burgeoning ranks of the opportunistic middle class (Edgeworth 801). Within this perspective, the mainly Protestant England-bound gentry, colonial profiteers par excellence, is displaced by a class of vulgar upstarts, the religiously diverse middle class, which is unable to finesse its exploitation through noblesse oblige. Written over a decade after legislation failed to secure Ireland as docile and willing, the novel and its allegorical union (to use Mary Jean Corbett’s phrase) is meant to reinforce Ireland’s status as a valued asset to the kingdom. Although she is presented as a ‘partisan’ or ‘friend to Ireland’ (70), rather than a ‘citizen’ (182) (the label that Lady Clonbury attaches to Miss Broadhurst), the Rousseauean union between Lord Colambre and Grace Nugent discloses the Ascendancy’s desire for an Ireland in which Catholicism has quietly vanished. Edgeworth’s symbolic union remains ambivalent, however, due to the narrative’s depiction of what is lost once unity between England and Ireland is achieved. As Lord Colambre’s reign of power increases geographically, his subjectivity becomes entrenched, while those of the others wane. Although Edgeworth’s novel does not overtly address religion in its analysis of absenteeism, in that Lord Colambre’s return to Ireland and moral redemption only occur after Grace Nugent is ascertained to be legitimate both in terms of birth and faith—that is, she is a Protestant born to married parents— connects the quandary of absenteeism to questions concerning religion and gender. Underscoring this relationship is the narrative’s emphasis upon Grace Nugent’s vacuity, a textual dynamic that forces a comparison between her disempowered status as a woman and that of the similarly objectified Catholic populace. Like Ireland’s Catholic majority, so, too, is Grace Nugent regarded with suspicion by the adjudicating Ascendancy (that is, Lord Colambre), but whereas the former’s transgression is its faith, Grace Nugent’s supposed transgression is less decipherable, as rumors of ancestral Catholicism intermingle with whispers of maternal, sexual immorality. In The Absentee, recusancy will come to mean Catholic disloyalty and female sexuality, both of which are equated with irrationality and, therefore, provide justification for civic disempowerment. Ultimately, The Absentee discloses how liberal notions of subjectivity are guaranteed only by way of the designation of citizen—a privilege denied both to Catholics and to women. The theories of Georg Lukács are relevant to Edgeworth’s novel for three primary reasons: first, Lukács singles out Sir Walter Scott, friend and protégée of Maria Edgeworth, for producing the epitome of the historical novel in the form of Waverley in 1817; second and related to this first point, Lukács extols Scott for creating a more totalizing view of history; and, finally, a Lukácian dialectical methodology is helpful for a feminist deconstruction of The Absentee’s recurring conceptual trope of justice. Lukács notes that like their eighteenth-century predecessors, Scott’s novels also have heroes, but within these works, the fates of these heroes are

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dependant upon the historical context. He identifies the realism and ‘totality’ of Scott’s historical novels as evident of an emergent historical consciousness; as such, he values them for their revolutionary potential perceiving that these texts, and other realist works like them, have the ability to illuminate the causality of the subject’s alienation as that of capitalism and thereby engender ‘true consciousness’ (Historical Novel 44). Thus, within a Lukácian critical paradigm, totality can be considered in opposition to, and a remedy for, reification in that what is achieved is a ‘historical critique of economics which resolves the totality of the reified objectivities of social and economic life into relations between men’ (History and Class Consciousness 49). Moreover, the concepts of justice and citizenship, recurring motifs in Edgeworth’s text, Lukács sees as produced out of what he calls the ‘contemplative nature of man,’ a condition which is itself born out of man’s fragmented state under capitalism (History and Class Consciousness 98). ‘Natural law,’ exaltation of ‘the rational,’ and the belief in ‘the content of law as purely factual,’ form what Lukács calls ‘the antinomies of bourgeois thought’—those internal paradoxes that sustain human fragmentation and alienation (History and Class Consciousness 112). And, he looks to aesthetic forms in order to uncover the contradictions that capitalism seeks to contain. Thus, Lukács sees the epic as indicative of a holistic culture not yet suffering from the trauma that comes with mechanization and he values Scott’s historical novels for their nascent historical consciousness—a necessary precursor to proletarian class consciousness (Theory of the Novel 64-66; Historical Novel 24). Aside from feminist standpoint theory, feminism, particularly feminist literary criticism, has not adopted or for that matter challenged, many of Lukács’s concepts. One contemporary scholar who does find Lukács helpful is feminist drama critic Janelle Reinelt. Reinelt is optimistic that Lukács’s insights into the interconnections between aesthetic particulars and the broader political whole can yield a greater truth, particularly as they unravel patriarchal hegemony (123). Following Lukács, Reinelt rejects Bertolt Brecht’s position maintaining that avantgarde movements such as Expressionism breed historical insight; rather, Reinelt reconciles feminism and realism by way of likening components of Lukács’s theories to theoretical strands within feminism: The Brechtian, anti-realist solution insists that knowledge of the construction of subjectivity can only be obtained through a distancing, objective, rational apprehension. The Lukácian defense of realism is based on the notion of knowledge which comes from experiencing the particularity and immediacy of individual subjects and at the same time apprehending the social, economic, historical and political patterns of forces which underlie and shape individual experience. The emphasis in Anglo-U.S. 1970s feminism on giving voice to women’s experiences, providing recognition and even identification for spectators, can be understood not only as a corrective procedure in the light of patriarchal history, but also as providing a viable entry into another mode of knowing reality. (132)

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Reinelt insists that textual moments illustrating the fragmentation and the alienation of the subject, particularly as these instances are presented in the ‘totalizing’ manner of realism, facilitate apprehension of the material context fomenting that very dispersion. The theories of Lukács have found a more willing audience among critics of Anglo-Irish literature. W. J. McCormack reads potential in Lukács’s theories, particularly in terms of comprehending the Ascendancy, a culture that defines itself and is defined by a supposed historical role (Ascendancy and Tradition 1-2). For McCormack, Lukács’s theory of totality allows for a comprehensive cultural reading of Irish history and a comprehensive historical reading of Anglo-Irish culture. In using the term totality and by referencing Lukács in his prefatory remarks, McCormack is essentially saying that if one wishes to understand the current historical tumult of Ireland, one must engage in a reading of a certain literary history that is inseparable from a reading of history. In terms of his seminal study on Anglo-Irish culture, totality is descriptive of McCormack’s critical methodology and of the various texts he analyzes. Thus, for Lukács, as for Reinelt and McCormack, totality, dialectical methodology, and certain strains of literary realism are all interdependent concepts with the potential to yield historical truth. This essay, in its reading of The Absentee, seeks to blend Reinelt’s feminism with McCormack’s historical materialism and his emphasis on totality. The novel’s multifarious, contradictory signifiers, particularly as embodied in the figure of Grace Nugent, result in a depiction of post-Act of Union Ireland that is historically illuminating. The context that is presented in The Absentee was drawn from Edgeworth’s life as witnessed and experienced. Edgeworth’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, ended his own absenteeism in 1782 with his return to Edgeworthstown, the 600-acre Co. Longford property that had been granted to the family in 1585 under the auspices of a Crown policy meant to secure Ireland as a Protestant (Butler 13). Edgeworthstown was just one of many parcels of land confiscated from the Catholic Old English and Gaelic Irish and given to Protestant settlers coming from England and Scotland. The statistics speak to the success of the plantation policies: at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Scottish and English accounted for less than two percent of Ireland’s populace, while by the early 1800s, their numbers had increased to 27 percent of its total population (Foster 13). The demographics of landownership are more startling: prior to the civil war that began in 1641, three-fifths of Ireland was held by Catholics; by the end of the seventeenth-century, Catholic landownership amounted to less than onefifth (Moody 212). Although the settlement policy had ended by the time the Edgeworths arrived in Ireland, from the late seventeenth- through the mid-eighteenth century, the Crown implemented the Penal Laws, the legal restrictions on Catholics meant to establish and maintain Protestant ascendancy. Specifically, the Penal Laws disenfranchised Catholics both politically and materially: Catholics were forbidden to vote and to hold mortgages; they were also disallowed from holding leases on land exceeding thirty years; Catholics were taxed at a higher rate than Protestants;

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Catholics were disarmed, and they were required to take an oath of allegiance if they served in government positions. Essentially, the Penal Laws sought to broaden the Protestant power structure that had been inaugurated with the plantation settlements while these acts also sought to curtail the proportion of Catholics in the middle class (McGrath 25-46; Foster 205-209). Ironically, however, one of the primary effects of the Penal legislation was an increase in the number of Catholics entering the trades. Although the Penal Laws formally articulated the anti-Catholicism that had become prevalent in both England and Ireland during the Jacobite conflicts, historian Kenny Colum notes that prior to their implementation, Catholics in the legal profession had been subjected to restrictions (337-357) In 1537, the Irish parliament deemed that every ‘temporall judge, justicer, mayor . . . every lay officer and minister’ take an oath of allegiance to the Church of England or risk losing his position. Nearly a century later, there were no Catholic judges remaining in office (339). The Act of 1704 required the allegiance oath for Catholic lawyers and also stipulated that they ‘produce an authoritative certificate of his receiving the sacrament according to the usage of the church of Ireland as by law established’ (Black Book quoted in Colum 352). The result of these acts was a rise in conversion among Catholics wanting to serve in the legal profession, a point of frustration for those in authority. The Crown responded by implementing even more stringent measures such as barring Protestant lawyers married to Catholics. In general, recusants were eyed as potential conspirators, while those in the legal profession were particularly scrutinized for their supposed blind loyalty to the faith. Within the reasoning of sectarian prejudice, Catholics, like women, were seen as inherently irrational and, hence, incapable of attaining impartiality or rendering justice. Moreover, the existence of the statute disbarring Protestant lawyers married to Catholics reveals the multifaceted nature of this particular prejudice: Catholicism was perceived as inescapable, inheritable, and contagious. Anti-Catholic sentiment continued throughout the 1700s, although in the latter part of the century, the war with the American colonies and the popularization of democratic sentiment necessitated that the Crown confront its Irish situation pragmatically (Hill, Religious Toleration 98-109). Richard Lovell Edgeworth returned to Ireland concurrent with the implementation of various reformist measures meant to appease the Ascendancy, the remaining Catholic gentry, and those Catholics in the middle ranks. In an effort to maintain the loyalty of the landed Anglo-Irish, Westminster agreed to reconvene the semi-independent Dublin parliament, of which Richard Lovell Edgeworth was a member. And in a two-pronged attempt to placate those Catholics in the middle class while filling the ranks of the English military, various Catholic Relief bills were enacted, including an act in 1792 readmitting Catholics to the bar. The Catholic Relief Act of 1793 voided the majority of what was left of penal legislation (Bartlett 21). In spite of these measures, however, in the 1790s, the Catholic question did not disappear; rather, it became adopted by the religiously-integrated United Irishmen. Founded in 1793 by Theobald Wolfe Tone, in its early incarnation, the

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United Irishmen consisted of approximately 300,000 middle-class Protestant and Catholic Whigs, many of whom had already been active in the Catholic Committee, of which Wolfe Tone was secretary (Curtin, Nation of Abortive Men 33; Foster 260). By 1798, the year of the failed uprising, the United Irishmen had become a full-fledged revolutionary organization, made up of 500,000 with many of its ‘citizen-soldiers’ pulled from the ranks of the Catholic peasantry (Curtin, United Irishmen 8). With its platform calling for universal suffrage and equitable political power regardless of religion or property, the United Irish movement represented a radical rupture in terms of eighteenth-century political ideology. It adopted democratic ideals holding rank to be irrelevant to property holdings, virtue to be determined by behavior, and citizenship to be an inalienable right. In contrast to Edmund Burke’s ideal government formed by way of inherited property, the United Irishmen, congruent to the ideals of the French Revolution, saw the starting point of civic life as inherent within every man. Natural law was redefined as universal equality, in opposition to the Burkean notion perceiving natural law as constitutional monarchy (97). And, perhaps most crucially, the United Irishmen revised the concept of virtue. Whereas Burke and the defenders of the old order equated rank with virtue—thus, they perceived the bourgeoisie-led regime in France as without virtue—the United Irishmen posited virtue within the realm of the autonomous individual. Sacrifice for the democratic state, or what historian Nancy Curtin has deemed ‘patriotic self immolation,’ was considered the ultimate form of civic virtue (Nation of Abortive Men 40). A closer scrutiny of the United Irishmen’s tenets, however, undercuts perceptions of the movement’s radicality. Drawing as it did from the theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, the ideals of the United Irishmen identified the nation as specifically democratic with a citizenry that was decidedly masculine. Nancy Curtin’s work on the gendered ideology of the United Irish movement is helpful on this point: United Irish claims to full civic competence contingent on gender drew on a range of masculine ideals, providing some over-determination of the chivalric manly impulse, as well as appealing to all elements within the cross-class alliance that characterized the movement. Classical republicanism adapted the aristocratic ideal of manhood rooted in military service by identifying citizenship with the bearing of arms . . . Middle-class men asserted patriarchal claims to represent familial and economic dependents in the public sphere . . . Thus militarized and disinterested patriotism, emerging separate spheres of ideology, and the possession of productive skills contributed in part to a redefinition of masculinity undertaken by the politically excluded classes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Add to this the destabilizing context of the era of the French Revolution, the beginning of the Victorian prelude when elite British males cut their hair, donned trousers, found religion, and generally acquired more respectable bourgeois values to reinvent themselves from the polymorphously perverse Gallic court ladies and Parisian viragos. (NA 37)

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In the nationalist mythos of the United Irish movement, Ireland was figured as the imperiled woman (Hibernia, Granu, or Erin) with an honor that could only be restored by its well-armed male citizens. And for Irish women, nationalist service—or, womanly civic virtue—was to be enacted domestically and corporeally: women were citizens by way of being wives and mothers to republican husbands and sons. Thus, in that various eighteenth-century liberalist political theories perceived women as ‘[representing] both order and disorder, both morality and boundless passions,’ women were simultaneously figures to protect and, given their supposed potential to disrupt the civic order, figures to be feared (Pateman 25). Westminster responded to the growing radicalism of the United Irish movement by passing, in 1800, the Act of Union, which dissolved the semiindependent Dublin parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. Prime Minister William Pitt justified the union between Great Britain and Ireland as one that would guarantee the ‘security, wealth, and commerce’ of all countries involved (Pitt quoted in Jenkins 5). In exchange for supporting the Act, enfranchised Irish Catholics from the middle ranks and gentry were promised further relief in the form of full emancipation and economic reform. The Act of Union, however, brought neither: over a decade later, in 1812, the same year that Edgeworth’s novel was published, Westminster was paralyzed over Ireland, despite the well-documented ‘sufferings’ of its peasantry (Jenkins 8). The British parliament ultimately ruled that the Emancipation issue should remain ‘open’—that is, Westminster would take an officially neutral position vis-à-vis Catholic Emancipation—a decision historian Fergus O’Farrell equates with ‘a full admission of [its] inability . . . to resolve the question’ (3). This apparent apathy in the face of overt misery prompted support for Catholic Emancipation among the Catholic peasantry and working class, a populace not unlike the one Friedrich Engels would later described to be ‘[as] poor as church mice, [wearing] the most wretched rags, and [standing] on the lowest plane of intelligence possible in a halfcivilised country’ (40). The political events of revolutionary Ireland and their underpinnings are relevant to The Absentee for two reasons: first, Edgeworth’s turn to realism could be said to have been born out of the historical chaos of the events of 1798 and their proximity to the Edgeworth family; second, and more importantly, in its depiction of the absentee problem and Ireland’s seemingly ceaseless unrest, Edgeworth’s novel confronts the related questions of civic virtue and self-determination, the core issues that the United Irish movement and the Act of Union sought to settle. Her text represents history as that of a struggle between the aristocratic old order versus a bourgeoisie whose interest in democracy is inseparable from its fiscal opportunism. The Ascendancy is revealed as a powerful fraternal social order while the republicanism of the United Irish movement does not fare much better. State sovereignty and male authority, The Absentee tells us, stems from man’s privileged access to the adjudicatory process, while defining what constitutes feminine virtue and ascertaining when female behavior falls within the parameters of that definition establishes and insures male subjectivity at the expense of female

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subjectivity. Ultimately, neither a reformed Ascendancy nor the revolutionary society of United Irishmen offer a vision of the Ireland that is comprehensively liberatory. Near the end of The Absentee, the hero Lord Colambre and the maligned Lady Dashfort meet again and engage in a brief but revelatory repartee. Lord Heathcock, the fiancé of Lady Dashfort’s daughter, Lady Isabel, has just reassured his betrothed that ‘no women’s diamonds married this winter . . . shall eclipse lady Isabel Heathcock’s.’ The once almost ensnared Lord Colambre hears these words ‘with contempt,’ a sentiment that gets checked by Lady Dashfort: ‘My Lord Colambre,’ said she, in a low voice, ‘I know your thoughts, and I could moralize as well as you, if I did not prefer laughing—you are right enough; and so am I, and so is Isabel; we are all right. For look here: women have not always the liberty of choice and therefore they can’t be expected to have always the power of refusal.’ (239)

We might be tempted to overlook these words given they are spoken by a character we are meant to disparage; however, Lady Dashfort’s sentiments are an accurate reading of the erosion of feminine subjectivity once it comes into contact with male authority presented in the guise of impartial justice. In one fell swoop, Lady Dashfort exposes Lord Colambre’s seemingly impartial rulings on female behavior as biased moralizings. She minimizes his authority through her acerbic tone and by relativizing his claim to truth. In the novel, Grace Nugent becomes a composite allegory for those disempowered within the text’s respective historical setting. As critics have noted, her name is meant to conjure up a number of images specifically linking her to Irish history and culture: ‘Gracee Nugent’ is the name of a tune written and performed by the famous eighteenth-century blind harpist Torlough Carolan, an entertainer popular among the Ascendancy, while the surname of her adopted family, ‘Nugent,’ like her mother’s maiden name, St Omar, harkens back to Ireland’s pre-settlement days when the majority of the country was controlled by a Catholic aristocracy, (McCormack, Introduction xxiii; Appendix I 276-81). Grace Nugent’s implied Catholicism is further constructed in that her first name is also the term for the favors that the British parliament doled out to Catholics in exchange for their loyalty during the Jacobite conflicts. Finally, the association of Grace Nugent to a disempowered Catholic Ireland is further reinforced by her doppelganger, the peasant girl, Grace O’Neill, a character whose name alludes to the Gaelic Irish chieftain Hugh O’Neill. In 1607, O’Neill, together with a cadre of Catholic noblemen, fled Ireland in what has become known as the ‘flight of the earls,’ an event which, within Irish historiography, symbolizes the ultimate demise of Gaelic Ireland. Although she bears a name with substantial meaning (The Oxford English Dictionary lists eighteen entrees for the word ‘grace’), Grace Nugent remains undeveloped. This insubstantiality is emphasized from the onset of the narrative when we glimpse her through the appropriating gaze of the hero, Lord Colambre:

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He marked the superior intelligence, the animation, the eloquence of her countenance, its variety, whilst alternately, with arch raillery, or grave humour, she played off Mr Soho, and made him magnify the ridicule, till it was apparent even to Lady Clonbury . . . he was touched by the respectful, earnest kindness— the soft tones of persuasion with which she addressed her—the good sense, the taste, she showed, yet not displaying her superiority—the address, temper and patience, with which she at last accomplished her purpose and prevented Lady Clonbury from doing anything preposterously absurd, or exorbitantly extravagant. (14)

In the first sentence of the above passage, Grace Nugent is grammatically objectified, a semantic arrangement mirroring a passivity that will become magnified as the novel progresses. All of the attributes associated with this character—her ‘superior intelligence,’ her ‘eloquence,’ her ‘patience’-are projected, or ‘marked’ onto her by Lord Colambre. Although she is described as ‘beautiful and graceful,’ she remains ‘unconscious . . . of her charms’ to that extent that she seems to nearly ‘forget herself’ (14). Under the appropriating gaze of Lord Colambre, the subjectivity of the ‘unconscious’ Grace Nugent is further eroded: she is ‘the only object presence [upon] which his eye rested with pleasure’ (my italics). He sees her as ‘[b]eautiful—in elegant and dignified simplicity— thoughtless of herself—yet with an air of melancholy, which accorded exactly with his own feelings, and which he believed to arise from the same reflections that had passed on his mind’ (27). Moreover, Grace Nugent gains initial favor in Lord Colambre’s eyes not because she checks the condescending behavior of the opportunistic interior decorator Mr. Soho but primarily because she manages to curtail his mother’s sophomoric behavior, which has been a continuing source of embarrassment to her son. Lord Colambre thus assesses Grace Nugent based on her ability to maintain his public perception, reading her ‘reflections’ as identical to his own. His dependence upon Grace Nugent becomes a perversion of the Hegelian dialectic that produces self certainty: Grace Nugent is the ‘other’ facilitating the construction of Lord Colambre’s self consciousness, yet she receives nothing in return; theirs is a one-way exchange. In fact, it will be her own reluctant grandfather, Mr. Reynolds, who, in an act of supreme power, symbolically grants her existence once her sexual integrity, or rather, that of her mother’s, is ascertained: ‘If there was a marriage,’ [Mr. Reynolds says], ‘show me the marriage certificate, and I will acknowledge the marriage, and acknowledge the child’ (230). Lord Colambre, with help from Mr. Brooke, produces the marriage certificate of Grace’s parents thereby precipitating Reynolds’s acceptance of her and opening the door of opportunity for himself. The insubstantiality of Grace Nugent is emphasized by the novel’s counter presentation of the commoner-heiress, Miss Broadhurst. Although this character occupies even less textual space than Grace Nugent, Miss Broadhurst will be endowed with a denser presence when she does appear. Unlike the vacuous Grace, Miss Broadhurst is described as a ‘character’ (29) with a ‘too lofty and independent a spirit to stoop to coquetry’ (41); she exhibits strong self awareness,

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being ‘conscious of rectitude’ (42) and ‘perfectly aware of her lack of her want of beauty’ (41). And, in contrast to Grace Nugent’s fragmented form of perception that sees people and herself categorically, Miss Broadhurst’s perception emanates from ‘a strong mind’—not only is she able to ‘[look] steadily at truth’ but she can apprehend ‘the whole truth’ (72). The narrative attributes the differences between Grace Nugent and Miss Broadhurst to their dissimilar educations: Miss Broadhurst is said to be more at home with her books than at social gatherings without them, while Grace Nugent is said to have ‘never [had] the opportunity of acquiring literature herself’ (44). Although not naïve—in fact, Grace is said to have a natural, ‘superior intelligence’—nonetheless, her typically feminine education has rendered her to be governed instinctively by ‘duty, honor, and gratitude’ (14; 44): Miss Nugent had seldom till now had the advantage of hearing much conversation on literary subjects. In the life she had been compelled to lead she had acquired accomplishments, had exercised her understanding upon everything that passed before her, and from circumstances had formed her judgment and her taste by observations on real life; but the ample page of knowledge had never been unrolled to her eyes. She had never had opportunities of acquiring literature herself, but she admired it in others, particularly in her friend Miss Broadhurst. Miss Broadhurst had received all the advantages of education which money could procure, and had profited by them in a manner uncommon among those for whom they are purchased in such abundance; she had not only had many masters, and read many books, but had thought of what she read, and had supplied, by the strength and energy of her own mind, what cannot be acquired by the assistance of masters. Miss Nugent, perhaps overvaluing the information that she did not possess, and free from all idea of envy, looked up to her friend as a superior being. (44; my italics)

Thus, while Grace Nugent’s sense of justice is said to have developed through passive observation, Miss Broadhurst’s proclivity for rendering justice is formed dialectically through the interaction of a formal, masculine-like education with a more typically passive feminine internal nature. Miss Broadhurst’s extraordinary subjectivity is evinced in her ability to formulate ‘judgment[s]’ that are untouched by ‘flattery’ or ‘fashion’ (186) while her talents of adjudication are obvious: suitors vie for her attention (fortune) leading to a courtship that resembles more of a courtroom with her beaux arguing their case as she ‘cross examines’ them (186). Meek, effacing, and ‘thoughtless of herself,’ Grace Nugent embodies Rousseau’s ‘passive and weak’ Sophie, a complement for ‘active and strong’ Emile/Lord Colambre (Edgeworth 44; Rousseau 358). For Edgeworth, Rousseau was an ambivalent influence whose progressive musings on education existed alongside a troubling misogynistic impulse. Despite his various insights, however, Rousseau failed to turn his interrogative impulse back upon himself in order to query how his own assertions obscured their positionality through their continued focus on universal law or Nature; rather, this is a task that Edgeworth’s novel assumes. Ultimately, The Absentee revises and feminizes Rousseau’s views on

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education while the novel simultaneously reveals what happens when sexual and political virtue are conflated. Both Emile and The Absentee expose how justice serves hegemony. In Rousseau’s text, the tutor identifies justice as a sentiment born out of empathy and mercy, and as such, produced in nature. When it does appear in civil society, Jean Jacques explains, justice is a perversion of its pure, natural form and merely serves to justify power for a privileged minority: [J]ustice and goodness are not merely abstract words—pure moral beings formed by understanding—but are true affections of the soul enlightened by reason, are hence only an ordered development of the primitive affections; that by reason alone, independent of conscience, no natural law can be established . . . In the civil state there is a de jure equality that is chimerical and vain, because the means designed to maintain it themselves serve to destroy it, and because the public power, added to that of the stronger to oppress the weak, breaks the sort of equilibrium nature had placed between them. From this first contradiction flow all those that are observed in the civil order between appearance and reality. The multitude will always be sacrificed to the few, and the public interest to particular interest. Those specious names, justice and order, will always serve as instruments and arms of inequity. (235-236)

The troubling aspect of Rousseau’s theories resides in his simultaneous exaltation of the natural sphere and castigation of the social sphere and his perception of woman as the paradoxically powerful figure spanning this chasm. His association of women to national well being, or what we might call his biopolitics, recurs throughout his writings. At the beginning of Emile, Rousseau clarifies that he envisions his primary audience to be mothers, figures whom he credits as the first educators of children (37). A bit later in the first book of Emile, he delineates a mother’s first duty to be that of breastfeeding her child. He famously derides the woman who opts instead for a wetnurse as ‘denatured’ and the epitome of selfcenteredness (44). For Rousseau, the mother who does not nurse commits an act of betrayal that is but the first in a series of traitorous acts that will come to plague man throughout his existence: Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from this first depravity. The whole moral order degenerates; naturalness is extinguished in all hearts; home life takes on a less lively aspect; the touching spectacle of a family aborning no longer attaches husbands, no longer imposes respect on outsiders; the mother whose children one does not see is less respected . . . But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together . . . Thus, from the correction of this single abuse would soon result a general reform; nature would soon have reclaimed all its rights. Let women once again become mothers, men will become fathers and husbands again. (46)

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Thus, for Rousseau, when woman rejects her natural dictum as nourisher to her child, she sets in motion a catastrophic domino effect that culminates in utter and complete social depravity. Very simply, according to Rousseau, the solution to the quandary of man and civilization literally resides within the breast of woman. While this simultaneous ideological exaltation/dread of women receives its full expression in Emile, in his earlier work, the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (the Second Discourse), Rousseau makes several statements that anticipate the tensions of The Absentee. He dedicates this work to ‘that precious half of the Republic which causes the other’s happiness, and whose gentleness and wisdom preserve its peace and good morals.’ He continues: Amiable and virtuous Citizen-women, it will always be the lot of your sex to govern ours. How fortunate when your chaste power, exercised in conjugal union alone, makes itself felt solely for the State’s glory and the public happiness . . . What man would be so barbarous as to resist the voice of honor and reason from the mouth of a tender wife; and who could not despise vain luxury upon seeing your simple and modest attire which, by the radiance it owes to you, seems to complement beauty most? It is up to you, by your amiable and innocent dominion and your ingratiating wit, always to preserve the love of the laws in the State and Concord among the Citizens; by happy marriages to reunite divided families . . . Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of morals and the gentle bonds of peace, and continue at every opportunity to assert the rights of the Heart and of Nature on behalf of duty and of virtue. (122)

The duplicity inherent in Rousseau’s directive is ironic: although women are apparently endowed with free will (‘It’s up to you . . . ’) and a role in the civic order, Rousseau fails to reconcile the concrete realities of women’s lives—namely, their lack of adequate education—with the idealized role he sketches out. In extending the label of ‘citizen’ onto women, Rousseau commits a verbal slight of hand: he conveys the sense that women enjoy the privileges of citizenship without problematizing the way in which historical context serves to actualize oppression. When Sophie is finally brought into Emile, Rousseau presents a onedimensional type necessary not only as companion for Emile but also as societal cornerstone. Sophie, like Grace Nugent, is virtuous and compliant, a complete binary to the ‘unfaithful woman’ whom Rousseau castigates as the ultimate force of destruction: [B]ut the unfaithful woman does more; she dissolves the family and breaks all the bonds of nature. In giving the man children which are not his, she betrays both . . . What does the family become in such a situation if not a society of secret enemies whom a guilty woman arms against one another in forcing them to feign mutual love? It is important, then, not only that a woman be faithful, but that she be judged to be faithful by her husband, by those near her, by everyone. It is important that she be modest, attentive, reserved, and that she give evidence of her virtue to the eyes of others as well as to her own conscience . . . These are the reasons which put even appearances among the duties of women, and make honor and reputation no less indispensable to them than chastity. (361)

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In Rousseau’s line of thinking, actuality and perception become blurred. Essentially, what he is saying that it does not matter if the woman is faithful as long as external perceptions of her read her as such, a conflation that is confirmed by the excerpt’s final sentence in which honor and reputation are indistinguishable from ‘chastity.’ This passage not only seems to describe Grace Nugent but it is also an uncanny close reading of The Absentee’s plot. Captain O’Halloran’s advice to Lord Colambre that men in considering marriage to a specific woman should ‘look sharp at the mother . . . and back to the grandmother too, and along the whole female line of ancestry’ (214) and Lord Colambre’s self-admission of having the ‘greatest dread of marrying any woman whose mother had conducted herself ill’ (107) both subscribe to the Rousseauean notion that for women, sexual virtue is inheritable and even separate from actuality. Lord Colambre’s return to Ireland takes the form of a quest to determine the causality of absenteeism and to decipher the mystery surrounding Grace Nugent. These are interrelated truths in that one is formulated within the patriarchal framework of colonialism while the other is formulated within the colonial framework of patriarchy. Upon hearing that Grace Nugent may, in fact, be born to an unmarried Catholic mother, Lord Colambre denies that she can be his wife: ‘But St Omar!—Why? Why is she a St Omar!—illegitimate!—‘No St Omar sans reproche.’ My wife she cannot be—I will not engage her affections’ (206). In this declaration, Lord Colambre expresses clear repugnance although the source of this is uncertain: is Grace unable to be his wife due to her Catholic ancestry? Is she an unsuitable marriage prospect due to her supposed illegitimate birth? Or, are we to read this ambiguity as implying a common nineteenth-century perception of the Ascendancy, regarding Catholicism itself as illegitimate? For Lord Colambre, these two conundrum conflate: he confesses that there is an ‘invincible obstacle’ preventing their marriage, but it is not clear whether the obstacle is Grace’s presumed illegitimate birth or whether it is the possibility of her Catholicism. Ultimately, Grace Nugent’s crisis of legitimacy symbolizes the broader question concerning what role, if any, Catholicism should play within an Ireland that is part of the British empire. Moreover, if we read Edgeworth’s Grace Nugent to be Rousseau’s Sophie to be colonized Catholic Ireland, we might then read Grace’s inherited sexual indiscretion as symbolic of the insurrections committed by the Irish peasantry in the turbulent 1790s or, for that matter, since 1688. For while the United Irishmen Uprising of 1798 was indeed a concerted effort at insurrection, the fact remains that post-Revolutionary Ireland was continuously awash with societies of ‘secret enemies.’ Thus, Lord Colambre’s quest becomes a general one of ascertaining transgressions of virtue in both the private domestic sphere and the public political arena. When he arrives in Ireland, Lord Colambre views the Irish with the same penetrating and objectifying gaze that he viewed Grace Nugent. He notes that the Dublin middle class has ‘a spirit of improvement, a desire for knowledge, and a taste of science and literature,’ while he also observes, with pleasure, an absence of the ‘vulgarity, of which his mother complained . . . ’ (79). Sir James Brooke, the British soldier who serves as Lord Colambre’s tour guide, reassures him that the

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Act of Union has supplanted the libidinous environment of semi-independent Ireland with a tempered ‘feast of Reason’ (79). Any hint that the Irish might be able to govern themselves becomes overridden by the supposed existence of an inherent Irish nature which, like that of women, is anarchic and, thus, in need of an ordering presence: [The Irishman] will oblige you, but he will not obey you; he will do you a favor, but he will not do justice; he will do any thing to serve you, but the particular thing you order he neglects; he asks you his pardon, for he would not, far all the goods in his warehouse disoblige you; not for the sake of your custom, but he as a particular regard for your family. (82)

These remarks are significant in that they occur within a harangue categorized as a ‘just idea of [the Irish]’ (78). Yet, as Sir James continues his description, any semblance of impartial justice is elided by the spirit of his speech, which is, essentially, an apologia for British occupation. Once on his tour of Ireland, Lord Colambre assumes Sir James’s selfappointed role of ‘impartial’ observer of Ireland. He visits his family’s two properties, Oranmore and Nugent’s town, discovering the former to be a model estate run by the benevolent manager, Mr. Burke, while the latter is representative of the worst that can result from absenteeism. Land agent Burke’s views on land distribution follow the philosophy of his namesake Edmund Burke while Mrs. Burke’s view on education make her a feminist revision of the Rousseauean matriarch. As proprietress of a utopic school in which Protestant and Catholic children are educated together, Mrs. Burke reveals Edgeworth’s liberalist faith in education as the panacea for the wrongs of Ireland and the wrongs of woman (128). These children ensure a peaceful Ireland in a way that mere legislation cannot. Moreover, through their seemingly passing comments on justice, both Burke and his wife promulgate a definition of the term that is trenchantly colonial: land agent Burke is said ‘to show no favour or affection but justice’ (127), while his wife, with in her plea-cum-declaration to Lord Colambre, ‘you can judge—you do him justice . . .’ (132) will offer the final word on his position as ultimate adjudicator. The dehumanization that Lord Colambre witnesses at Nugent’s town mirrors the dehumanization of the estate’s namesake. When Lord Colambre arrives in Nugent’s town, in contrast to the healthy, hearty peasants that he observed at Oranmore, he sees ‘curious figures’ and ‘squalid children’ that resemble ‘bundle[s]’ of rags (140). Their poverty is explained by his Irish Catholic peasant guide, Larry Brady, to be the result of an irresponsible agent who will not give them work. After perceiving how the Irish of Nugent’s town have been victimized by criminal agents, Lord Colambre declares himself their champion and justice his weapon: ‘[I]s this my father’s town of Clonbury?’ thought Lord Colambre, ‘Is this Ireland. Let me not, even to my own mind, commit the injustice of taking the speck for the whole. What I have just seen is the picture only of that to which an Irish estate and

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Irish tenantry may be degraded in the absence of those whose duty and interest is to reside in Ireland, to uphold justice by example and authority; but who, neglecting this duty, commit power to bad hands and bad hearts—abandon their tenantry to oppression, and their property to ruin.’ (156)

From his vantage point as occupier, Lord Colambre defines justice in a way that legitimizes the colonial project. If Mr Burke’s land agency is ruled as just, then the colonial project itself is cast as ‘just’ and ‘natural.’ As implied in this passage, Lord Colambre regards the landlord’s role as one of feudal protector over faithful subjects, while he sees justice as something to be secured by way of ‘example’ and ‘authority.’ In the dichotomous tableaux of Oranmore and Nugent’s town, Edgeworth holds the Irish responsible for their own degradation: culpability rests not with the absentee estate owners—in this case Lord Colambre’s own family—but rather, with those land agents, many of them middle-class Irish Catholics, who are opportunistic rather than benevolent. Absenteeism is occluded by the corrupt Irish themselves, while justice becomes a payout for acquiescent service. Within Lord Colambre’s survey of Ireland and the Irish, colonialism is emptied of dehumanization and degradation and instead becomes justified due to the presumed inherent anarchy of the native populace. Ultimately, by idealizing the Burkes and Oranmore, Edgeworth engages in a historical misreading: the troubles of Ireland are perceived as solely sectarian but curable by way of education. Absent from this view are the concrete material inequities produced from two centuries of anti-Catholic legislation. In his book Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul Gilroy analyzes how diasporic groups suffer a continuous crisis of identity given the spatial absence that has created their displantation. Without the presence of land, these groups must seek out other unifying forces. And although the Ascendancy cannot be described as definitively diasporic—in fact, one might make the case that the Gaelic Irish are the true diasporic group—in that members of the Ascendancy were oftentimes absentee landowners over confiscated territories allows for a consideration of this group as diasporic. According to Gilroy, the paradoxicality of diaspora is that such status engenders an obsession with identity, while cultural and geographic displantation simultaneously prevents a group from engaging in simple self-categorization: [D]iaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness. It destroys the naïve invocation of common memory as the basis of particularity in a similar fashion by drawing attention to the contingent political dynamics of commemoration. (123)

In other words, diaspora means more than just being without land; rather, the term connotes the existence of a complex population whose sense of unity is rooted in its precarious, even non-existent, identity. Moreover, Lord Colambre’s dependence

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upon Grace Nugent as the source of his own identity is illustrative of how gender, or more precisely, women’s bodies, frequently come to serve as focal point for forging a unified, masculine identity: Where separation, time, and distance from the point of origin or the center of sovereignty complicate the symbolism of ethnic and national reproduction, anxieties over the boundaries and limits of sameness may lead people to seek security in the sanctity of embodied difference . . . The unholy forces of nationalist biopolitics intersect on the bodies of women charged with the reproduction of absolute ethnic difference and the continuance of blood lines. The integrity of the nation becomes the integrity of its masculinity. In fact, it can be a nation only if the correct version of gender hierarchy has been established and reproduced. The family is the main device in this operation. It connects men and women, boys and girls to the larger collectivity toward which they must orient themselves if they are to acquire a Fatherland. (Gilroy 126)

Chronologically situated as it is between Wollstonecraft, the United Irishmen, the Act of Union, and the rise of O’Connell, Edgeworth’s novel can thus be read as a sort of historical bildungsroman: the trails and anxieties of the Anglo-Irish landholder are revealed to be historically situated while resolutions to these quandaries are disclosed as residing in the feminine sphere. The climatic and most revelatory moment of Edgeworth’s text occurs not when Lord Colambre pledges to live in Ireland but when he holds his mother culpable for absenteeism and its political and geographical repercussions: ‘Mother, in compliance with your wishes my father left Ireland—left his home, his duties, his friends, his natural connexions, and for many years he has lived in England, and you have spent many seasons in London . . . . . . And at what expence have we done all this? For a single season, the last winter (I will go no farther), at the expense of a great part of your timber, the growth of a century—swallowed in the entertainments of one winter in London! Our hills to be bare for another half century to come! But let the trees go; I think more of your tenants—of those left under the tyranny of a bad agent, at the expence of every comfort, every hope they enjoyed!—tenants, who were thriving and prosperous; who used to smile upon you, and to bless you both . . . ’ (194)

Although it may seem that Lord Colambre’s accusation of deforestation is meant to be mere humorous hyperbole, the desperation of his words emanate from the recognition that as the land becomes obliterated, so does the power and authority of the Ascendancy. Lord Colambre’s final plea ‘O mother . . . Restore my father to himself’ (194) is thus an enactment of the Rousseauean perspective, holding women, specifically mothers, to be the center of societal order. Ultimately, the novel concludes with the return of the absentees (or at least the Clonbury family) and with them, the restoration of domestic security: Grace Nugent is ‘possessed’ by Lord Colambre—he ‘develop[s] . . . [the] fresh charms in his destined bride’ just as he develops the Colambre and Clonbury lands (252). Herein exists the paradox that the totality of Edgeworth’s novel reveals: although women and the

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peasantry are disallowed from partaking in the privilege of citizenship (an exclusion due in part to their corporeal productivity), these figures are revealed to be utterly necessary for fostering the integrity of masculine authority. As Edgeworth’s retelling of absenteeism emerges, so, too, do more subtle elements surface and herein exists the text’s radical feminist potential. Edgeworth exposes the unequal and gendered spheres of virtue, while she also contests idealistic assumptions regarding equitable access to justice. The novel clearly repudiates absenteeism while remaining vague on several fronts: the text does not clarify why absenteeism is wrong nor does it explain its genealogy. The reader is left to wonder if absenteeism is to be considered bad behavior because it represents the aristocracy’s abdication of paternal responsibility or, if absenteeism is to be abhorred for what it signifies—that is, a hegemonic shift from Ascendancy to middle class—the former group by definition, Protestant, whereas the latter group, made up of both Protestants and Catholics. Essentially, Edgeworth’s blurriness on this point mirrors her own contradictory politics born out of an anomalous subjectivity. As a well-educated, neo-Liberal Protestant woman living amidst a poor, politically-disenfranchised Catholic peasantry, Edgeworth was simultaneously akin to the native Irish, yet greatly different from them. Her extraordinary and atypical (at least for an eighteenth-century standpoint) education engendered an intellectual acumen that allowed her both to empathize with the Irish tenantry in their disempowered situation, while this education also provided her with the abilities to represent in a realist manner, their hardships and humanness. Ultimately, The Absentee imbues history with a breadth and complexity incongruent to contemporaneous novels and historiography. Works Cited Bartlett, Thomas. ‘The Catholic Question in the Eighteenth Century.’ History Ireland (Spring 1993): 17-21. Burke, Edmund. Reflections of the Revolution in France. 1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Corbett, Mary Jean. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Colum, Kenny. ‘The Exclusion of Catholics from the Legal Profession in Ireland, 1537-1829.’ Irish Historical Studies 25100 (1987): 337-357. Curtin, Nancy. ‘A Nation of Abortive Men: Gendered Citizenship and Early Irish Republicanism.’ Reclaiming Gender: Trangressive Identities in Modern Ireland. Ed. Marilyn Cohen and Nancy Curtin. New York: St Martin’s, 1999. 33-51. —. The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. 1812. London: Penguin, 1999. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845. London: Penguin, 1987.

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Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland, 1600-1972. New York: Penguin, 1988. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ‘Grace.’ Oxford English Dictionary Online. University of Tulsa, McFarlin Lib. 1 November 2003. http://dictionary.oed.com. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hill, Jacqueline. ‘Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty: The Disputed Lessons of Irish History 1790-1812,’ Past and Present 118 (February 1988): 96129. —. ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763-1780.’ Archivium Hibernicum 44 (1989): 98-109. Jenkins, Brian. Era of Emancipation: British Government of Ireland, 1812-1830. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983. —. History and Class Consciousness in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. —. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Malcomson, A. P. W. ‘Absenteeism in Eighteenth Century Ireland.’ Irish Economic and Social History 1 (1974): 15-35. McCormack, J. M. Introduction and Appendix I, II, III. The Absentee. By Maria Edgeworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 267-284. —. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History From 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. McGrath, Charles Ivar. ‘Securing the Protestant Interest: The Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695,’ Irish Historical Studies 30.117 (May 1996): 25-46. Moody, T. W., and F. X. Martin, eds. The Course of Irish History. Cork: The Mercier Press, 1984. O’Ferrall, Fergus. Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy, 1820-30. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985. Pateman, Carole. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. ‘Recusant.’ Oxford English Dictionary Online. University of Tulsa, McFarlin Lib. 15 October 2003. http://dictionaryoed.com Reinelt, Janelle. ‘A Feminist Reconsideration of the Brecht/Lukacs Debates.’ Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 7.1 (1994): 122-139. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Ed. and Trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. —. Emile, or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Scott, Walter. Waverley. 1817. London: Penguin, 1985.

Chapter 10

Maria Edgeworth and the Irish ‘Thin Places’ Laura Dabundo

In ancient Celtic traditions that precede Maria Edgeworth’s early-nineteenthcentury Ireland, the sacredness of the land, borne of human attachment to it in an agricultural society, dominated and personalized the landscape. And out of that connected holiness came a special sense of ‘boundary points’ where the material, workaday world blended into the spiritual, met it, like Jacob’s ladder or a ‘doorway to heaven’ (Joyce 25). These are ‘thin places’ (Joyce 25). Now Maria Edgeworth is not known for her Gaelic or Celtic insights (Jeffares 28), and critics in general have tied her Irish novels and Irish characters and, indeed, Irish perspective to the socioeconomic politics of her day in post Union, pre-Revolutionary Ireland (Neill 130-131, Ullrich). At best, as one critic notes, ‘Maria loved the native Celts . . .’ (Stevenson 181). However, I would like to propose that that reading misses an aspect of her fiction that acknowledges this other reality of spiritual thin places. It lies imprisoned in the depiction of the Irish Catholic native class, mostly peasant and pre-Famine folk with whom she stocks her narratives, as well as of the Protestant Ascendancy on whom she focuses and who preside. Nonetheless, I am convinced that if we scratch the surface we can release this mystical, mysterious, and powerful Celtic impulse and transform how we have been reading some of her more famous books to release their truths of the ‘real and fabulous history of Ireland’ (The Absentee 116). For instance, early in Ennui, the dissolute raffish narrator lies near death, having been thrown by his horse, startled when Lord Glenthorn’s Irish nurse, just come from the homeland to see her former master, hugs it, supplying Edgeworth a peephole into this other world, this borderland that is this other Ireland. Speaking of the nurse, later denominated as Ellinor O’ Donoghoe, who comes to figure fairly significantly in the Irish portions of his tale, he observes: ‘. . . she had a large assortment of fairies and shadowless witches, and banshees; and besides, she had legions of spirits and ghosts, and haunted castles, my own castle of Glenthorn not excepted . . .’ (160). The nurse, interestingly in this early part unnamed, so that her otherworldly potency is not at all on the same plane evidently as her social, everyday self, stays at Glenthorn’s bedside throughout his convalescence, and he is brought back to life, but not before he has clearly and unexpectedly been exposed

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to the life-in-death potency of this spiritual Ireland. In other words, his near-death experience is both occasioned and treated by the intrusion of a weird sister and her weird magic from mystical Ireland. The nurse is emissary, and she awakens young Lord Glenthorn’s interest in and appetite for his ancestral lands. And with this intrusion, the veil to this other place is torn, and a thin place is revealed. And though he presents her as a member of the Roman Catholic peasantry, the matter which she bears is not Biblical or Christian but from before then, from a preChristian world of fairies, witches, and banshees, as he notes, which is testament to some other reality, accessible mostly in such near-death experiences as she causes Glenthorn to undergo. And I would like to suggest that a similar understanding can be uncovered in other of Edgeworth’s Irish novels, particularly, Ormond and The Absentee and Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth’s most famous Irish novel. Edgeworth herself is not indifferent to these predecessor influences, as can be seen in the Glossary she attaches to Castle Rackrent to explain Irishisms to her English audiences. In just the third note, describing the Irish ‘lamentation over the dead,’ which is certainly germane to my context, she notes, by ‘transcribing,’ she says in her Editorial persona, ‘the fourth volume of the transactions of the Royal Irish Academy,’ the characteristic form this dirge takes ‘seems derived from their Celtic ancestors, the primaeval inhabitants of this isle . . . [ellipsis in original]’ (CR and E 124). Partly then because the narrator is a genius of the place, as it were, and conversant in ways not perhaps readily intelligible to English audiences, the Glossary and footnotes very carefully parse meanings of vocabulary, usage, and custom for readers of this 1800 work. However, for the three subsequent Irish novels (Ennui, 1809; The Absentee, 1812; and Ormond, 1817), she dispenses with such editorial apparatus, to allow the reader to wander untutored through the wilds of Irish custom, unconcerned with whether the reader is informed about the origins of such behavior. Still for my purposes, I think we can without too much difficulty unearth those origins in what Edgeworth delineates. And later scholars certainly affirm these origins, as I hope to show that her novels demonstrate. As one such scholarly exemplar, Michael Staunton observes of the historical Ireland when Edgeworth lived and set her tales, Visitors to Ireland often remarked upon the piety of the people, their chastity, and the low rate of illegitimacy. But behind this apparently healthy picture, the religious lives of the mass of the people was still a matter of concern to the Church authorities. Though people were inclined to attend Mass and receive the sacraments, their approach to such matters appeared lax. Before the time of the Famine [generally dated around 1840, so that this excerpt highlights Edgeworth’s period nicely] . . . worrying for the [clerical] hierarchy was the range of practices and beliefs which betrayed preChristian origins. In many rural areas the preoccupation with natural forces, and the attribution of magical powers to those forces, had not died out with the coming of St Patrick. People would speak of fairy people living in mounds, or of the banshees (a wailing spirit) and the pooka (a hobgoblin). (108)

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And, indeed, both Castle Rackrent’s Glossary and the quote above from Ennui prominently display banshees, and the Glossary devotes a page or more to fairy mounds. One other Irish custom, borne of the pagan past and merged with Christianity in the elixir of the Celtic is the ‘pattern,’ in which a saint’s holy day coincided with a preceding pagan holy place and time in an unruly, exuberant celebration marked by bonfires and much carrying on (Staunton 108-110). Edgeworth includes such a holiday in Ormond, characterizing native custom and culture (60-63). Thus, it is apparent that her novels reflect the Celtic culture underpinning the Ireland with which she is contemporary. Also, like Ellinor O’Donoghoe from Ennui, in Ormond a similar very talented elderly female nurse works her magic. She is introduced in the text as ‘an old woman . . . hovering over the fire, stirring something in a black kettle’ (40), who is obviously a weird sister ala the Celtic Scots Macbeth. She is aptly named Sheelah Dunshauglin for ‘sheelah’ in Celtic tradition attaches to the image of the crone often curiously associated with the power of life and death represented in the strange naked carvings of the ‘sheelah-na- gig’ preserved now over thresholds in scattered ruined churches throughout Western and Northern Ireland and Britain (E. Kelly 5, 43). That location over an entranceway suggests a meaning for the sheelah having to do with translation to another place, another world, most usefully for this human Sheelah Dunshauglin, who also seems at times to hold the translation powers of life and death and who appropriately therefore nurses Moriarty Carroll. He is the poor driver whose collision with Harry Ormond at a crossroads is reminiscent of the results of a similar stubborn refusal to give way at a significant juncture in Oedipus Rex, leading to a murder that remakes the fortune of that hero. Here, Ormond is banished to the remote Black Islands off Western Ireland, but Moriarity’s recovery and subsequent indebtedness to his abject, remorseful attacker are in keeping with the changed and ultimately much improved trajectory of both their fortunes which this event, a forestalled murder, precipitates. In fact, while some critics argue that ‘Edgeworth . . . attacked the popular culture of ‘superstition’, tradition, and custom . . .’ it seems more likely as with these two nurses that popular remedies are shown to be efficacious, which bolsters a claim for the rural practices and culture from which they derive (G. Kelly 15). What is shown, in short, is the power of Ireland itself. And, in truth, Ormond only reluctantly finally leaves Ireland, as irresistibly held it seems as Lords Glenthorn and Colambre (who are drawn back to their ancestral homeland early on in their novels in actions that provide their novels with their plots), for near the end of Ormond he scampers back to Ireland from fashionable, pre-Revolutionary Paris almost as quickly as he can (Ormond 281, Ennui 169, The Absentee 70). This is a large association, transcending the individual Celtic residue that may or may not be manifest in any given novel or two, which I think grows out of Edgeworth’s Gaelic roots. That is, in short, the connection to the land, that is a tie to what becomes sacred and holy and thin. All four Irish novels are concerned with land and the magnetism that it exerts upon its inhabitants. The very titles of Castle

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Rackrent and The Absentee indict those of the Protestant ruling class who have established the, frankly, errant (because detached) relationships with the land and its people, leading to one row of miserable huts, sunk beneath the side of the road, the mud walls crooked in every direction; some of them opening in wide cracks, or zigzag fissures, from top to bottom, as if there had just been an earthquake—all the roofs sunk in various places—thatch off, or overgrown with grass—no chimneys, . . . squalid children . . . pale women, . . . men with countenances and figures bereft of hope and energy. (The Absentee 140)

This is a vision of Ireland the traces of which can still be seen in the Famineravaged west and south, derelict, abandoned, and ruined. However, in The Absentee, Ennui, and Ormond a more desirable association with the landscape is prescribed and described: ‘. . . the neat cottages, and well-attended schools, not only what could be done, but what had been done, by the influence of great proprietors residing on their own estates, and encouraging the people by judicious kindness’ (The Absentee 124) and this, where on display is— Sir Herbert’s principal estates were in another part of Ireland . . . what had been done there to improve the people and to make them happy; of the prosperous state of the peasantry; their industry and their independence; their grateful, not servile, attachment to sir Herbert . . . (Ormond 202)

The key in both ameliorative cases is respectful and caring providence, coupled with shared educational opportunities for Protestant and Roman Catholic children, as shown in Ennui (216) and Ormond (209), and the three later novels all conclude with the hero evidently about to be securely established on an estate in tranquility and prosperity, grounded in ‘judicious kindness’ and enlightened responsibility and proprietorship. But even more profound than this human association is the connection with the land itself, which only honorable residency can fulfill. What is this Ireland? For the English, ‘. . . there being no living in Ireland, and expecting to see no trees or accommodation, nor any thing but bogs all along’ and ‘the Giants’ Causeway, and the Lake of Killarney, were the only things I had ever heard mentioned as worth seeing in Ireland’ (The Absentee 91 and Ennui 250). But the reality is much different, and this forms a significant part of Edgeworth’s message for her English readers. For these novels, the pleasant countryside and wellmanaged estates, maintained as instructed, above, are premised on individual happiness. Consider the peasant farmer Christy in Ennui, ‘. . . for all I’ve wanted in the world, a good mother, and a good wife, and good childer, and a reasonable good little cabin, and my little pratees, and the grazing of the cow, and work enough always, and not called on to slave, and I get my health, thank God for all; and what more should I have if I should be made a lord to-morrow?’ (281). As a matter of fact, of course, Christy is so elevated, to the destruction of his wife, his

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child, and his way of life, to correct his having been switched at birth in his nurse/mother’s misguided attempt to improve the other infant’s chances, indicating how important education is. For, had he been educated as well as to the manor born, he would not have literally have seen his hopes go down in flames, as he does (321-323). And similarly instructive to Christy’s innate wisdom concerning his own situation is what Harry Ormond imagines for his own life’s joy: ‘The only place in the world I should wish for, sir, would be a place in the country . . . A place of my own . . . a comfortable house and estate, on which I could live independently and happily, with some charming amiable woman’ (170). The simple life in harmony with the earth is most to be desired, is the means to bliss and peace. Drawn like magnets to Ireland, all three heroes might end as Edgeworth sends off Lord Colambre, And we leave him with the reasonable expectation that he will support throughout life the promise of his early character; that his patriotic views [meaning his Irish obligations] will extend with his power to carry wishes into action; that his attachment to his warm-hearted countrymen will still increase upon further acquaintance; and that he will long diffuse happiness throughout the wider circle, which is peculiarly subject to the influence and example of a great resident Irish proprietor. (252)

Interestingly and in parallel, Ennui also ends with the final realization of this promised paradise yet to be achieved, and of course Castle Rackrent closes with its landholding family bankrupt and the estate in the hands of the narrator’s upstart and acquisitive lawyer son. So in three of the four Irish novels, paradise is yet to be, and of course we know what actually was to come was the Irish potato blight and the accompanying Irish Famine, ‘which finally caused [Edgeworth] to give up writing of Ireland’ (MacCarthy 453). However, what abides? The compelling nexus is what lives through the land and what is lost in Castle Rackrent. The thin places here are the familial and class connections, spanning generations and binding landowners with the laborers of the Irish soil to the greater enhancement of all concerned. Thus are the Clonbrony family in The Absentee, returned now to Ireland; Harry Ormond bringing to rights the Black Islands inheritance from his guardian the O’Shanes, abetted by his marital connections the Annalys, both presented as longstanding in situ Irish gentry; and Lord Glenthorn, rightly ensconced on an estate restored to him after the decline and abdication of the uneducated heir and also with the benefit of his new wife’s resources. Each man stands with his Protestant ancestors behind or beneath him and his fellow Roman Catholic Irish beside and before him, as an image, perhaps, from St. Patrick’s Breastplate, ‘where the Celtic saint beseeches spiritual support on all sides, beside, before, behind, beneath.’ And these three heroes of Edgeworth’s are shown dedicated to living in Ireland on their properties, not delinquent in London nor even in Dublin, but firmly on the old sod, joining

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together family and tenant, bound constructively and responsibly, through the years and the land, time and space, reminding the reader that Edmund Burke, like Maria Edgeworth also a great and thoughtful Protestant Irishman, writes in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ‘Society is indeed a contract, . . . a partnership not only between those living but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,’ extolled gloriously by their English contemporary William Wordsworth around the same time (1805), ‘One great society alone on earth:/ The noble living and the noble dead’ (The Prelude 11.96768). It may not be realistic, progressive, or ultimately possible or enacted, but it is a vision of a land made sacred by the bonds of those who accept their obligations to it and its inhabitants, acknowledging traditions of inherited responsibilities, a partnership and a contract, as Burke says, a trust, that is holy, consecrated, and firm, even as it glistens and dwindles in the rush of the storms of time. Works Cited Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the French Revolution. The Harvard Classics, 1909-14. http://www.bartleby.com/24/3/7.html. Para 165. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. Heidi Thomson and Kim Walker, editors. New York: Penguin, 2000. —. Castle Rackrent. George Watson, editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. —. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. Marilyn Butler, editor. New York: Penguin, 1992. —. Ormond. Claire Connolly, editor. New York: Penguin, 2000. Jeffares, A. Norman. A Pocket History of Irish Literature. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1997. Joyce, Timothy. Celtic Christianity: A Sacred Tradition, A Vision of Hope. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Kelly, Eamonn P. Sheela-na-Gigs: Origins and Functions. Dublin: Country House, 1996. Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830. New York: Longman, 1989. MacCarthy, B. G. The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists, 1621-1818. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Neill, Diana. A Short History of the English Novel. New, Revised Edition. New York: Collier Books, 1967. Staunton, Michael. The Illustrated Story of Christian Ireland: From St. Patrick to the Peace Process. Dublin: Emerald Press , 2001. Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Ullrich, David. ‘A Reading of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent,’ in Jane Austen and Shelley and Their Sisters, Laura Dabundo, ed. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000: 83-95. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, editors. New York: Norton, 1979. (412).

Index Maria Edgeworth’s writings are listed under ‘works’, under ‘Edgeworth, Maria’. The definite article is ignored, but not inverted in alphabetizing. For example, The Absentee is under ‘A’. Maria Edgeworth is referred to as ‘ME’ elsewhere in the index. absenteeism 175–6, 191 Adams, Samuel & Sarah 165 Aikens, Mrs, Memoirs of Mrs Barbauld 47 Anglo-Irish 16, 17, 21, 109, 133, 138, 179 see also Ascendancy anti-Semitism in The Absentee 35, 96 in Harrington 39, 40–41, 42–3, 96 Ascendancy 17, 176, 178, 179 see also Anglo-Irish Astell, Mary 147 Austen, Jane xv Bacon, Francis 60 Baillie, Joanna 37 Ballinamuck, battle (1798) 134 Bannet, Eve Tavor xv, 31–56 banshees 194–5 Barbauld, Anna L. 2, 3 Barthes, Roland 40 Beatty, John, Protestant Women’s Narratives 134 Beddoes, Thomas 59 Beesemyer, Irene Basey xvi, 109–29 Behn, Aphra 83 Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Jacques Henri, Paul et Virginie 10, 152 Bhabha, Homi 132 Bilger, Audrey 119 Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England 140 Blake, William xiv, 163 Boileau, Nicolas, L’Art poétique 73 boredom, in Ennui 121–2 Botkin, Francis R. xvi, 93–108

Bowers, Bege K. 162 Boyne, battle (1690) 132 Brecht, Bertolt 177 Brothers, Barbara 162 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 38 Burgh, James, Political Disquisitions 140 Burke, Edmund 162, 163, 169 on masculinity 110–11 Reflections on the Revolution in France 161, 198 Burney, Fanny xiv Butler, Marilyn 32, 60, 94, 105, 106, 137, 140, 145, 161 Byron, Lord 106, 162 Caraher, Brian 138 Carolan, Torlough 182 Catholics, discrimination against 178–9 Coleridge, Samuel xiv, 163 Colley, Linda, The Britons: Forging the Nation 133 Colum, Kenny 179 Connolly, Clare 76 Connolly, S.J., Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 133 Cooper, Fenimore 38 Corbett, Mary Jean 138, 176 Cordon, Joanne xvi, 131–60 Cumberland, Richard, The West Indian 6 Curtin, Nancy 180 Dabundo, Laura xvi–xvii, 193–8 Darwin, Erasmus, Dr 59 Day, Thomas 10, 75, 147, 154 Defenders organization 135

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diaspora, paradox of 189 D’Israeli, Isaac, on ME 106 Douthwaite, Julia 60 Doyle, Arthur Conan 167 Dunleavy, Janet E. 163 Edgeworth, Elizabeth 59 Edgeworth, Fanny 95, 96 Edgeworth, Harriet 95, 96 Edgeworth, Honora Sneyd 59, 96 Edgeworth, Lucy 95 Edgeworth, Maria in academic studies xv anti-Semitism, accusation of 34 authorial identity 98 authorial voice 94 criticism on xiv–xv description of 138 as educator 59–69 on English attitudes to the Irish 17–18 father, relationship xiv, 93, 94 on governesses 67 identity issues 95, 98 insecurity as author 98 and Ireland xvi–xvii Irishness 133 letter writing 96 on letters, publication of 97–8, 102 literary circle 37–8 on masculinity 110–29 nationalism, redefinition 2 on novels of manners 163 ontology 69 politics, reluctance to discuss 161–2 private letters, attitude to publishing 97–8, 102 on race 18 Rachel Mordecai, correspondence with 31–8, 46–51, 96–7, 162 reading, personal 38, 140–41 on reading 68 on Sir Walter Scott xiii travel, Europe 95 versatility xv, xvii, 58–9 on women’s education 64–8, 73–88 works, The Absentee xiii, xvi, 4, 119, 125–9 anti-Semitism in 35, 96 as historical novel 175, 178–91

masculinity, ideal of 125–9 realism in 181–2 Angelina 79, 81–3 Belinda xiv, xvi, 1–29, 84–8, 132, 147 character portrayal 1–2 colonial issues 2, 5, 6, 14, 16, 22–3 Creole stereotypes 4–5, 11, 19, 22 didacticism 84–5 education motifs 10 gambling 4–5, 9 gratitude in 20–21 inter-racial marriage 3 obeah woman 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9– 10 power relations 19 principle vs pleasure 84 revisions 2–3 servants in 165–7, 169–73 woman-slave metaphor 8, 11–12 Castle Rackrent xiii, xvi, 2, 111– 22, 132 composition date 137, 137–8 process 140 editorial apparatus 138, 140 as first regional novel 141 glossary 139, 140, 142, 143–4 Irish bulls in 141–3 Irish-English language 139– 40, 143–5 masculinity in 111–14, 116, 117, 119–20 narrative voice 139 postcolonialism 138 social hierarchies 120 ‘thin places’ 194 time setting 146 The Cherry Orchard 109, 125 Ennui xiii, 2, 121–5 boredom in 121–2 masculinity in 123–5 ‘thin places’ 193–4 Essay on Irish Bulls 2, 14, 17–18, 141 ‘The Grateful Negro’ 2, 14, 16, 17, 18–19, 20, 21, 22

Index Harrington xiv, 31–56, 96 anti-Semitism as bad manners 42–3 correction of 39, 40–41, 96 origins 31, 32 plot 39 Helen xiv, xvi, 46, 93–106 composition process 95–6 criticism, feminist 94 family collaboration on 94–6 female loyalty in 103 as ME’s self-expression 105, 106 plot 93–4 reception 106 Letters for Literary Ladies xiii, 66–7, 75, 79, 150 The Little Dog Trusty 109, 125 Memoir of Maria Edgeworth 135–6 Moral Tales xvi, 1, 57, 61 ‘Angelina’ 68 ‘Forester’ 62–3 ‘Mademoiselle Panache’ 65–6, 68 The Orange Man 109, 125 Ormond xiii, 46 ‘pattern’ in 195 ‘sheelah’ in 195 ‘thin places’ 195 The Parent’s Assistant (co-author) 74, 76, 80 Patronage xiv Practical Education (co-author) xiii, xvi, 34, 57, 59–62, 132 influences 60 interactive learning 60–61 ‘On Female Accomplishments’ 64, 65, 67 reception 59 on science teaching 60 servants in 168–9 The Two Guardians 2, 14–16, 18, 22 obee woman 13, 15, 16 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell xiii, xiv, xvi, 21, 31–2, 35, 53, 61, 178, 179 family education plan 59 threats to life 21, 136–7 works Memoirs 95, 134–5, 136, 147, 148, 164

201 The Parent’s Assistant (co-author) 74, 76, 80 Practical Education (co-author) 57, 168 Edgeworthstown xiv, 21, 132, 178 Engels, Friedrich 181 epistolography 32–3, 36 and self-revelation 31, 32, 35, 50 fiction reading, views on 73–4 Fielding, Henry Jonathan Wild 38 Tom Jones 141 Fielding, Sarah, The Governess 79, 82 Fitzgerald, Laurie 13 Flanagan, Thomas 111 Foster, Hannah, The Coquette 38 Franklin, Benjamin 68 Fraser, Nancy 69 French invasion, Ireland (1798) 21, 134 French Revolution (1789) 133, 161 Gallagher, Catherine 74 Genovese, Eugene 20 Gilbert, Sandra 94 Gilroy, Paul, Against Race 189 Godwin, William xiv, 163 Gonda, Caroline 94, 102–3 governesses, ME on 67 grace, definition 181 Grathwol, Kathleen B. xvi, 73–91 gratitude 19, 20 definition 21 Grattan, Henry 146 Gratz, Rachel 51–2 Greenfield, Susan 6, 21, 166–7 Gubar, Susan 94 Hall, Captain 38 Harden, Elizabeth 111, 116, 126 Harvey, Alison xv, 1–29 Hawthorne, Mark xiv Haywood, Eliza 83, 147 Hedrick, Basil 7 Hollingworth, Brian 145 Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing 137 Howard, Robert, Sir, The Committee 139, 141–2 Hurst, Michael 16

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identity British 133 English 133 Irish 133 Inchbald, Elizabeth xiv, 37 inequality, Rousseau on 186 Ireland 1798 rising 21, 132, 134–6, 137, 180, 187 Catholic Emancipation 181 French invasion 134 as imperilled woman 181 Penal Laws 133, 178–9 plantation policies 178 Irish bulls 18, 131, 141 in Castle Rackrent 141–3 see also Stage Irishman Irish-English language, in Castle Rackrent 139–40, 143–5 Irving, Washington 38 Johnson, Claudia, Jane Austen 87 Johnson, Samuel 61 The Rambler 84, 139 justice, Rousseau on 185 Kelly, Gary xiv Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland 133 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn 3, 6, 9, 16 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth xiv–xv, 94, 102 land, in ME’s novels 195–8 Langan, John 140 Lawless, Emily 164 Lazarus, Rachel Mordecai xv Lennox, Charlotte Euphemia 38 Harriot Stuart 38 The Female Quixote 81–2 Lightfoot, Marjorie xv Locke, John 163 influence on Edgeworths 60 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 60, 77 Lockhart, John Gibson 138 Lukács, Georg, literary theories 176–8 Lyttleton, Lord 73

Macaulay, Catharine 57, 66, 147 McCann, Andrew 2 McCormack, W.J. 178 Manley, Delarivier 83 Markley, Robert, Two-Edg’d Weapon 131 Martineau, Harriet 38 masculinity in The Absentee 125–9 Burke on 110–11 in Castle Rackrent 111–14, 116, 117, 119 in Ennui 123–5 ME’s ideal of 110 Mellor, Anne K. xiv, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 94, 163 Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady 73, 147 Mordecai, Jacob 35, 51, 52 Mordecai, Rachel correspondence with ME 31–8, 46–51, 96–7, 162 death 52 Mosely, Benjamin, A Treatise on Sugar 5 Murray, Patrick 111 Myers, Mitzi 60, 68, 80, 81, 94, 105, 110 Narain, Mona xvi, 57–71 Nash, Julie xiii–xvii Ní Chuillean, Eilean 172–3 novel reading, by women 73–4 O’Connell, Daniel 190 O’Farrell, Fergus 181 O’Gallchoir, Cliona 82–3 Oliver, Grace 59 O’Neill, Grace 182 O’Neill, Hugh 182 Paine, Thomas 162 Pateman, Carole 69 ‘pattern’, in Ormond 195 Penal Laws 133, 178–9 Pitt, William 181 Poovey, Mary 94 Pope, Alexander 161 reading ME on 68 ME’s 38, 140–41

Index Reinelt, Janelle 177–8 Romanticism xv, 59, 121, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ideal woman 147, 148–50, 185–7 influence on Edgeworths 60 on justice 185 refutation by ME 150–51 works Discourse on Inequality 186 Emile 10, 60, 147, 185 Rowson, Susannah, Charlotte Temple 38 Ryan, Kara M. xvi, 175–92 Scott, Sarah, Millenium Hall 80 Scott, Walter, Sir 37, 38, 176–7 on ME xv works Ivanhoe 38, 51 Rebecca character 51–2 Waverley 51, 111, 141, 176 Sedgwick, Catherine 38, 52 self-revelation, and epistolography 31, 32, 35, 50 separate spheres, women 57–8, 69 servants in Belinda 165–7, 169–73 in Edgeworth household 163–5 in Practical Education 168–9 Shaffer, Julie 94 Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice 40 ‘sheelah’, in Ormond 195 Shelley, Mary, The Last Man 38 Sheridan, R.B., The Rivals 132 Simpering Miss xvi, 131, 132, 147 slave revolts 20 Smollet, Tobias, Humphry Clinker 141 Smyth, Jim 133 Spenser, Edmund, View of the Present State of Ireland 140, 144–5 Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society 131 Stage Irishman xvi, 131, 132, 139, 141, 145, 146–7 see also Irish bulls

203 Staunton, Michael 194 Stephens, Jeanette 7 Stewart, Dugald 59 style, plain 131 Summerfield, Geoffrey, Fantasy and Reason 79 ‘thin places’ in Castle Rackrent 194 in Ennui 193–4 in ME 193–8 in Ormond 195 Tone, Theobald Wolfe 21, 179, 180 An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland 133–4 Tracy, Robert, The Unappeasable Host 138 Trodd, Anthea 167 Trollope, Mrs 38 Union, Act of (1801) 132, 137, 140, 146, 176, 181, 190 United Irishmen 21, 133–4, 137, 190 ideals 180–81 Watson, George 112 Weekes, Ann Owens, Irish Women Writers 145, 155 Williams, Joseph 7 Wohlgemut, Esther 2, 45 Wollstonecraft, Mary 2, 18, 22, 57, 66, 83, 100, 110, 162, 190 A Vindication of the Rights of Women 8, 75, 88, 147 women behaviour, regulation of 73 education, ME on 64–8, 73–88 novel reading 73–4 separate spheres theory 57–8, 69 Wordsworth, William xiv, 163, 198 Young, Arthur, Tour in Ireland 140