‘Gothic’ and ‘National’? Challenging the Formal Distinctions of Irish Romantic Fiction

Abstract

In 1806, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan published what critics now commonly classify as the first ‘national tale’, an allegedly pioneering form of Irish Romantic fiction motivated by a desire to reconcile Ireland and England to the Act of Union (1800). As Katie Trumpener influentially argues,1 Owenson’s text set the precedent for a body of fiction that now dominates critical understanding of Irish Romantic fiction. Trumpener contends that the ‘national tales’ published after The Wild Irish Girl, including, for example, Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), as well as Charles Robert Maturin’s The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief (1812), generally follow the narrative pattern established by Owenson: an English or Anglo-Irish gentleman, long a hostile stranger to Ireland, journeys there, fully expecting to find it a cultural wasteland. While there, however, he falls in love with a native Irish girl, learns to love and appreciate the land and its people, and eventually decides to renounce his habitual absenteeism. He confirms his new respect and affection for Ireland and the Irish people by marrying his Irish heroine in a union that has come allegorically to represent the peaceful resolution of Anglo-Irish tension and strife.2 Compellingly, if myopically, termed ‘the Glorvina solution’ after the heroine of Owenson’s novel,3 the cross-cultural marriage that supposedly ends Owenson’s novel, but which, in fact, is only ever projected, has come to define a body of literature that many critics now assume to comprise almost single-handedly Irish Romantic fiction as a whole — the national tale.