Edgeworth, Owenson, and the Masculine Border

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the writing of Irish national character in terms of various contemporary and contested modes of constructing masculinity in Sydney Owenson’s O’Donnel (1814) and Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond (1817). Antiquarian, chivalric, modern, cosmopolitan, reasoned, sentimental, and romanticist vectors of masculinity are examined as ideological constructions fundamentally related to various generic and formal structures deployed in each novel. The article argues ultimately that the relative invisibility of O’Donnel in the canon of the English-language novel is related to its construction of a particular type of masculinity embedded in a pointed and conscious generic promiscuity. By contrast, Edgeworth’s reception is related from the outset to both her construction of a unified realism and a very particular masculine national type, as Englishness. In conclusion, the article notes an instance of contemporary (1816) concern with working-class feminine readership as evidence of an understanding that the politics of gender and representation in the novel have real-world social effects.