Public Affections and Familial Politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the "Common Naturalization" of Great Britain

Abstract

Recent critics of novel generally accept that marriage plot of nineteenth-century fiction, in Tony Tanner's words, represents means by which society attempts to bring into patterns of passion and patterns of property, as in, say, conclusion of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre.' Viewed in such terms, imperial use that Maria Edgeworth makes of marriage as an instrument of narrative closure in The Absentee (1812) figures yet another socially desirable pattern: reconciliation of England and Ireland is troped . .. as marriage of Anglo-Irish [hero] with Irish [heroine], and the happy bourgeois family thus becomes model for colonizer-colonized relationships.2 But no less ideologically, in this novel as in many others, closure enforced by marriage plot glosses over contradictions, inequities, concealed in institution of marriage itself, occluding fundamental disparity of power between partners to union and [disguising] asymmetries encompassed within trope of 'balanced' order.3 The marriage plot in The Absentee thus functions as an imperial plot as well, constructing Ireland as a complementary but ever unequal partner in family of Great Britain. And this imperial marriage works hegemonically to produce domestic stability considered so crucial to national and colonial stability. My focus here, however, will be less marriage plot, which The Absentee undeniably employs, than what we might call familial plot, because it is there that specifically anomalous elements of Irish experience are centered.4 For in order to achieve narratively and ideologically harmonious alignment between unequal partners with which novel concludes, Edgeworth must also reform families from which these would-be rulers of Ireland spring: she must establish modes of legitimate and normative behavior for women and men. The construction of proper familial relations on which she draws is provided by Edmund Burke. His Reflections