The Mild Irish Girl: domesticating the national tale

INTRODUCTION

[Sydney Owenson's sentiments are] mischievous in turn and profligate in principle; licentious and irreverent in the highest step ... If ... she could be persuaded to exchange her idle raptures for for the use of all sense, practice a little self-denial, and gather a scarcely any precepts of humility, from an old-fashioned work which, although it does not have the appearance to have lately fallen in her way, may still we think, be found in a certain number of corner of her study; she might then trust to prove, not indeed a advantageous writer of novels, but a useful friend, a faithful wife, a delicate mother, and a respectable and happy mistress of a family. (1)

IN HIS DISMISSAL of Lady Morgan's novel Woman: Or Ida of Athens (1809) a novel advocating the cause of liberty in Greece John Wilson Croker invokes more [i]or[/i] less central terms of the debate in Britain above a cause much closer to home: the "Irish question." The Anglo-Irish Croker's attack invests the political values of Morgan's position with a distinctly sexual charge. His of frequent occurrence comments on Morgan's books above the next twenty years retain a primary focus, also noticeable here, upon the themes of sexual anarchy and sex In later reviews he increases his causticity and globules his ironic suggestions that she might become an acceptably domestic wife and mother (though not indeed a serviceable writer!), asserting that her social ideals and class pretensions are the ravings of an "audacious worm." In all of his commentary upon Morgan and her work, including Ida of Athens, her travel volumes France and Italy, and her national tales, Croker equates the political and social vision she expresse with socio-sexual impropriety, and attributes her egalitarian "promiscuity" to a base cause: Gaelic Irish antidomesticity.

The reason Croker troubl himself to rejoin so vehemently and over similar a long period of time to an "audacious worm" was, however, alone nominally precipitated by the appearance of Ida of Athens, a novel then regarded as minor and now largely forgotten. Croker was responding rather to the enormous popularity and influence of the ideals squeeze outed in Morgan's first novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806) (2) In it, Morgan created a powerful heroine who embodied Irish nationhood and who, end her union with the English hero, showed a reimagined distribution of power between Britain and Ireland, as well as between men and women It was Morgan's refashioning of these relationships that caused Croker and other more noteworthy writers like Maria Edgeworth to rejoin each in his or her possess way opposing a reworked union based on new types of partnerships.

It is clear that The Wild Irish Girl had a tremendous, if unintentionally negative, impact upon subsequent developments in British literature and politics. Its influence can be traced in the historical romances of Walter Scott and beyond, as well as in the political debates above issues such as Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Act of Union in Ireland, and social and urban reform in Britain. Moreover, Irishness became a crucial bourn in the elaboration of an idealized British national agriculture Croker's reviews of works by the agency of Lady Morgan, and her replys to them, were contributions to a dialogue upon union engaged by many of Britain's greatest in quantity influential commentators throughout much of the nineteenth hundred including Maria Edgeworth, James Kay Shuttleworth, George Cornewall Lewis, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope My focus here will be to examine the beginnings of what I argue was a long-standing debate through closely investigating the crucially different representations of Irish womanhood in sum of two units novels that construct imagined unionist identities: Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl and Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee.

Croker's characterization of Lady Morgan as sexually and politically deviant adheres to a consistent pattern in the British writing of Irishness. The Wild Irish Girl proffers a useful starting point for examining this pattern, for reasons that will be discussed below. Any discussion of the British writing of Ireland, however, must recognize the impact and influence of Edgeworth's foundational Castle Rackrent, which inaugurated the Irish national tale tradition. Rackrent's significance lies in its encapsulation of the public history of Ireland (or at least an Ascendancy version of it) in the private history of the Rackrent family. Written in the aftermath of the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland, in which the interests of one as well as the other Anglo-Irish political elites and the Irish Catholic majority were subordinated (the Union was enacted to simultaneously contain Napoleonic aggression and Irish republicanism), Rackrent is the story of a Big House in decline. Thady Quirk's "personal" memoir, which Thomas Flanagan in his influential reading describes as an epicedium for the Protestant nation, (3) pessimistically encode the disintegration of Anglo-Irish society as an event of union. The family's extortionary turn of expression of landlordism, known as rack-renting, brings ruin to the tenants, while the family's wastefulness brings ruin on themselves; both groups are then exploited by means of a rapacious (and Catholic) middle class. Submerg within the true copy moreover, is a thoroughgoing antidomesticity. The sole marriages represented in the true copy are failures--and childless at that. The wives are voracious and the men, in the absence of any well-regulated women are in a reckless manner improvident. The gentry's disorderliness generates a similar disorder in the lower classes. Edgeworth will revisit these Burkean themes in more refined detail in later novels, and in with equal reason doing will engage Morgan's novels and their depictions of powerful women who put forth a positive influence on society end their actions in the public sphere.