Edgeworth’s “Great Coat”: A Material-Semiotic Reading of the Irish Mantle and Novelistic Interiority

Abstract

This article presents a material-semiotic reading of the Irish mantle to develop a new, formal analysis of subjective interiority in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish novels. The mantle’s material functions of concealment and physical defense in medieval Ireland, alongside its imperial and nationalist adaptations in the writings of Edmund Spenser and Joseph Cooper Walker, evince the garment’s complex narrativity. Informed by new materialist theory, this article uses the mantle’s material and semiotic articulations, from its violent history and gendered adaptations in the early nineteenth century, to adapt Deidre Lynch’s model of deep character in the British novel to Irish fiction. Through the allusion to colonial violence, the mantles in Castle Rackrent (1800) and Ennui (1809) structure a deep interiority that is unique to Irish character. The mantle both signals and conceals the depths of Irish subjectivity within the text, confounding reader-character intimacy. Edgeworth’s mantles demand a revised model of deep character for the Irish context.