Imagining the Other: The Jew in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington

Abstract

The following argument comes to develop and modify existing interpretations of Maria Edgeworth's 1817 Harrington. The paper begins with the understanding that Edgeworth's revisionist novel, though written as an apology for her previous anti-Semitic portrayals, never fully abandons the shylockian myth employed in her works prior to Harrington. Rather, Shakespeare's Shylock invades the narrative, on more than one occasion, to reaffirm that the image of the money-oriented Jew is socially undesirable. The argument suggests that in her (failed) endeavor to move beyond the figure of Shylock, Edgeworth applies a Christian perception to render a “good” Jew. Thus, the novel's failure to subvert the rhetoric of conversion is due not simply to the revelation that Berenice is not an actual Jewess but rather to Edgeworth's Christianization of the Jewish characters in the novel. But even the figurative conversion and Christianization of the Jew do not allow him an equal standing in Edgeworth's socially constructed narrative. Although the Christianization of the Jew promotes tolerance, it does not encourage the social integration of the Judeo-racial other, whose assimilation into English society is weighted solely according to his economic worth.