Is There a Bull in This Nation? On Maria Edgeworth’s Nationalism

Abstract

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES MARIA EDGEWORTH HAS BEEN RECOVERED for the history of British novels as the inaugurator of the Irish national tale, a sub-genre that facilitated the tradition's transformation in the early nineteenth century. The strand of Edgeworth studies that has affected this shift importantly connects her political and aesthetic interests, making visible her contribution to the literary tradition within which she worked. It also, however, continues to accord Edgeworth a peripheral status--either on account of the marginality of the sub-genre she shaped and that limited her work, or on account of the liminality of her political views: a liberal nationalist, Edgeworth is usually understood to be stranded in limbo between Enlightenment projects and Romantic sentiments. In Ina Ferris' The Achievement of Literary Authority, for example, the national tale enables a move from an ahistorical universalist conception of man and society (that she believes dominates eighteenth-century novels), to a recognition of cultural heterogeneity and of historical process (that she sees as key to Romantic counter-Enlightenment). Edgeworth, she explains, inaugurates the national tale with Castle Rackrent (1800), where she presents the story of three generations of Irish landlords narrated by one of their servants--Thady Quirk--complete with his specific dialect, pronunciations, and idioms, and framed by a preface, explanatory footnotes, and a glossary by an English editor. But Ferris proceeds to focus on the way in which early nineteenth-century reviewers marginalized Edgeworth, and since Ferris' main concern here is to explain Scott's rise to literary authority, she does not question the hierarchy that these reviewers established. Nonetheless, the reasoning for Edgeworth's marginalization chronicled by her is especially revealing, insofar as it sets up the national tale as an imperfect (inferior, marginal) example of a novel. Edgeworth's work, these early nineteenth-century reviewers argued, is too domestic and evinces insufficient knowledge of, and discomfort with, public discourse (by contrast with Scott, who confidently incorporates official trans-national history into his narratives); additionally, Edgeworth's characters lack emotional individuation, a result of what reviewers saw as her eschewal of feeling (again in contrast with Scott, who endows his characters with a more complete subjectivity). (1) Thus, insofar as the national tale focuses on local (national) history and typical (national) character, it fails to measure up to the more global attitudes (towards social relations as well as towards personality) that the British novelistic tradition manifests at its best. (2) If Ferris credits Edgeworth with rejecting Enlightenment universalism, Katie Trumpener suggests that the extent of her rejection is insufficient; this, in Trumpener's account, makes Edgeworth's national tales peripheral to the work of her compatriots. Trumpener argues that Edgeworth's novels successfully criticize early nineteenth-century travel narratives that import an ostensibly universal standard of measurement into a landscape of great historical and cultural complexity. (3) At the same time, however, these novels continue to embrace the progressive and utilitarian concerns of Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland (of the 1770s) and thus fail to offer a full critique of Enlightenment reason. Other early nineteenth-century Irish authors, such as Sydney Owenson and Charles Maturin, tie Enlightenment reason with English imperialism, and criticize this combination with a cultural nationalism founded on the irreconcilability of local specifics and abstract systems. In such novels the territory-topos symbolizes a combination of local material conditions and past intellectual achievements, and is used to differentiate a local heritage, to mobilize sentimental attachments to this heritage, and to interpellate readers for traditionalist values. …