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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
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)
Against innovation, revolution, and the hybridity they breed, Burke proposes inheritance, both economic and political, as the only natural and just means of insuring continuity and reproducing it over time, thus projecting the metaphorical family/property/civil society nexus as indissoluble.(8)
Burke's concern here is to furnish "a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement" (R, 29); while he does not rule out political change and economic expansion, Burke yet hopes to control the momentum of both by restraining them within the firmly established bounds of what he calls a "family settlement" (R, 29). He draws explicitly on the affective relations of the familial realm for his model of how to contain the anarchic energies he associates with both the revolutionary French and the rising bourgeois English:
We have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars" (R, 30).
Within this framework, to rise against the polity would be equivalent to parricide; far better, then, to treat both head of family and head of state with a respectful affection that proceeds from one and the same source. The naturalization of ties to patriarch and monarch, invested with the power of "family affections," makes any assault on those ties an unnatural and alien act.
Burke's intertwining of familial with political relations in a patriarchal mode can be read from a feminist perspective as part of a wider cultural shift in relations among men and women. As the work of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall establishes, a characteristically middle-class ethos came to depend on the articulation of a nexus between gender and class that redefined the family as a political, economic, and psychological unit. In their words, "The forms of property organization . . . framed gender relations through marriage, the division of labour and inheritance practices," so that "the structure of property can be regarded as a powerful 'relational idiom' in the creation of both gender and class."(9) Illuminating the interrelation of the affective with the economic and providing a critical tool for reevaluating concepts of property and inheritance, this feminist lens brings into view their gendered elements. For example, in Burke's case, we see that the idea of inheritance entails both economic and political transmission, operations that ostensibly involve and concern only men; Davidoff and Hall's analysis enables us to recognize, however, that the "relational idiom" functions both as a norm for the lived experience of men and women and as a powerful warrant for the gendered character of that experience.
For while women may not be considered political actors, and are thus excluded from Burke's "we," being by no means among "our forefathers," they are profoundly implicated in the familial paradigm he employs, both as the primary creators and maintainers of "family affections" and as the embodied and embodying agents of inheritance. Even so, women's crucial role in the metaphorical and literal reproduction of the family is largely written out of Burke's account of transmission and inheritance. That absence should alert us to the gender politics of Burkean thought and its latent assumptions about the nature and character of women and men, assumptions well documented in the work of Isaac Kramnick and Ronald Paulson; they agree on the centrality of the gender binary to Burke's politics as well as, in psychobiographieal terms, to his own personality.(10) From his earliest work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), Burke associated masculinity with energy and terror, femininity with quiescence and delight.(11) Rhetorically, Burke registered his outrage at the French Revolution in terms drawn from the available vocabulary of gender and class polarity: in the celebrated section of the Reflections concerning the French royal family, as Paulson argues, "we see Burke opposing a vigorous...
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