Public affections and familial politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the "common naturalization" of Great Britain.

Recent critics of the novel generally accept that the marriage plot of nineteenth-century fiction, in Tony Tanner's words, represents "a means by which society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property," as in, say, the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre.(1) Viewed in such terms, the imperial use that Maria Edgeworth makes of marriage as an instrument of narrative closure in The Absentee (1812) figures yet another socially desirable pattern: the reconciliation of England and Ireland is "troped . . . as the marriage of the Anglo-Irish [hero] with the Irish [heroine]," and "the happy bourgeois family thus becomes the model for colonizer-colonized relationships."(2) But no less ideologically, in this novel as in many others, the closure enforced by the marriage plot "glosses over the contradictions, the inequities, concealed in the institution of marriage itself," occluding the fundamental disparity of power between partners to the union and "[disguising] the asymmetries encompassed within the 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 the family of Great Britain. And this imperial marriage works hegemonically to produce the domestic stability considered so crucial to national and colonial stability.

My focus here, however, will be less the marriage plot, which The Absentee undeniably employs, than what we might call the familial plot, because it is there that the specifically "anomalous" elements of Irish experience are centered.(4) For in order to achieve narratively and ideologically the "harmonious alignment" between unequal partners with which the novel concludes, Edgeworth must also reform the 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 on the Revolution in France (1790) promotes the gendered ideals underpinning social and imperial order threatened, in his thinking as in Edgeworth's, by feminine sociosexual impropriety: the "consistent policing of female sexuality" that David Lloyd attributes to Irish nationalists in the later nineteenth century may well find an earlier precedent here among thinkers of a different stripe, in the representation of women as always potentially adulterous and thus subversive of the foundations of social, political, and imperial order.(5) In the second half of the essay, I hope to show more specifically how familial reform is for both Burke and Edgeworth, at different moments and with different Irish constituencies in view, contingent on the restoration of masculine authority and privilege; for each, the replotting of Irish and Anglo-Irish families on the model of an English ideal becomes a critical tool in figuring a properly imperial plot.

I

Burke's primary metaphors for political society are heavily dependent on the aristocratic idiom of the landed estate and patrilineal succession, with both terms signifying an ostensibly natural link between property and paternity. Over the course of the Reflections, in James T. Boulton's reading, "the dominant ideas linked with 'nature' and 'order' . . . become involved with the family symbol," so that natural order is represented as familial just as the family comes to appear naturally ordained.(6) In this way, Burke justifies existing arrangements for the transmission of property and for the continuance of the extant form of government by a single principle, through what he calls "an entailed inheritance":

We wished at the period of the [1688] Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant.(7)