The Mild Irish Girl: domesticating the national tale.(Book Review)

INTRODUCTION

[Sydney Owenson's sentiments are] mischievous in tendency, and profligate in principle; licentious and irreverent in the highest degree ... If ... she could be persuaded to exchange her idle raptures for common sense, practice a little self-denial, and gather a few precepts of humility, from an old-fashioned book, which, although it does not seem to have lately fallen in her way, may yet, we think, be found in some corner of her study; she might then hope to prove, not indeed a good writer of novels, but a useful friend, a faithful wife, a tender 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 some central terms of the debate in Britain over 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 frequent comments on Morgan's books over the next twenty years retain a primary focus, also noticeable here, on the themes of sexual anarchy and gender. In later reviews he increases his causticity and drops his ironic suggestions that she might become an acceptably domestic wife and mother (though not indeed a good writer!), asserting that her social ideals and class pretensions are the ravings of an "audacious worm." In all of his commentary on Morgan and her work, including Ida of Athens, her travel books France and Italy, and her national tales, Croker equates the political and social vision she expresses with socio-sexual impropriety, and attributes her egalitarian "promiscuity" to a root cause: Gaelic Irish antidomesticity.

The reason Croker troubled himself to respond so vehemently and over such a long period of time to an "audacious worm" was, however, only 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 expressed in Morgan's first novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806). (2) In it, Morgan created a powerful heroine who embodied Irish nationhood and who, through her union with the English hero, represented 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 respond, each in his or her own way opposing a reworked union based upon new types of partnerships.

It is clear that The Wild Irish Girl had a tremendous, if unintentionally negative, impact on 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 over 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 term in the elaboration of an idealized British national culture. Croker's reviews of works by Lady Morgan, and her responses to them, were contributions to a dialogue on union engaged by many of Britain's most influential commentators throughout much of the nineteenth century, 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 by closely investigating the crucially different representations of Irish womanhood in two 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 offers 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 both 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 elegy for the Protestant nation, (3) pessimistically encodes the disintegration of Anglo-Irish society as an effect of union. The family's extortionary style of landlordism, known as rack-renting, brings ruin to the tenants, while the family's wastefulness brings ruin upon themselves; both groups are then exploited by a rapacious (and Catholic) middle class. Submerged within the text, moreover, is a thoroughgoing antidomesticity. The only marriages represented in the text are failures--and childless at that. The wives are greedy and the men, in the absence of any well-regulated women, are recklessly improvident. The gentry's disorderliness engenders a similar disorder in the lower classes. Edgeworth will revisit these Burkean themes in more refined detail in later novels, and in so doing will engage Morgan's novels and their depictions of powerful women who exert a positive influence on society through their actions in the public sphere.

Morgan (at this time still known as Sydney Owenson) adopts many of the devices used in Rackrent in elaborating her progressive social vision in The Wild Irish Girl, and in the process transforms the national tale both generically and ideologically. She reimagines union as the comic resolution to her narrative, encoded in the egalitarian marriage of the English hero and the Gaelic Irish heroine. She also argues for a reappraisal of the colonial past, and a transformation of the political dispensation in the future. The hitherto subjected Gaelic Irish are given a "beautiful voice" in her inclusive social vision, newly empowered politically, and embodied in her heroine, Glorvina. The partners in the reimagined union share power and responsibility equally. The social implications of these representations have been largely ignored or in some cases misinterpreted by modern feminist literary historians. Julie Anne Miller, for example, argues that both Edgeworth and Morgan offer "an inadvertent critique" of union by expressing "anxiety about the repressive power dynamics within the institution of marriage," and that "Edgeworth's and Owenson's novels of union expose the way colonial control is secured and obscured through the privatization of power relations in marriage." (4) Such an appraisal ignores fundamental differences in the social and political visions they express, differences of which critics such as Croker were acutely aware. While Morgan does indeed expose the ways in which power relations are secured in marriage, it is anything but inadvertent: she consciously seeks to transform them. In one of the many innovations for which she was one of the most influential (and in some cases reviled) authors of her time, Morgan invokes Shakespeare's second history tetralogy, a group of works that Scott later celebrates as the model of national historical fiction. Her purpose is to expose the overturning and subsequent reinscription of normative gender roles, which the Henriad utilizes as a means of reinforcing the hierarchical social, political, and colonial order. Against this ideological model, Morgan juxtaposes the radically altered relationship of Horatio and Glorvina. (The Henriad is invoked in the dialogue surrounding the "Irish question" throughout the century, not only in Edgeworth's Ormond in 1816 but as late as 1870 in Trollope's An Eye for an Eye.)