thady's grey goose quill: historiography and literacy in maria edgeworth's castle rackrent
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University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)
Thady's Grey Goose Quill: Historiography and Literacy in Maria Edgeworth's Castle RackrentAuthor(s): Jean FernandezSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 13, No. 3 (FÓMHAR / AUTUMN2009), pp. 133-146Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25660904 .
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Jean Fernandez
Thady s Grey Goose Quill: Historiography and Literacy
in Maria Edgeworth s Castle Rackrent
Most postcolonial scholarship on Castle Rackrent (1800) has addressed the
question of Thady Quirk as colonial subject and as an unreliable narrator.
However, an intriguing conundrum regarding Thady presents itself to the read er in the opening pages of Edgeworth s novel. The narrator introduced to the
reader is described as an "illiterate old steward"1 of Irish stock, who "tells the
history of the Rackrent family" (CR 4). In the course of his narrative, the "illit erate old steward" will engage in numerous acts of reading and writing, while
offering a history that recounts the overthrow of his Anglo-Irish masters, not
through armed rebellion, but through skills of literacy that his son Jason exer
cised as accountant, being "as good a clerk as any in the county" (CR 22). What imperial prejudice was Edgeworth ironically foregrounding in this
stigmatizing of the native historian and his "history" by insinuating that both were products of an oral culture? And what, as a consequence, are its implica tions for the workings of plot and reader relations in Castle Rackrent7. In her
Preface, Edgeworth assumes the persona of an editor laboring over Thady's manuscript. By configuring her Irish steward narrator as illiterate, while repre
senting his story as "written," she initiates a drama of illegibility in regard to
Irishness. As a result, the text enacts contemporary, vexatious Anglo-Irish read
er relations with Irish history. Castle Rackrent may be read as a narrative that
explores the ironies incumbent upon what, as Joseph Lennon notes in Irish Ori
entalism, was a developing perception that "Irish historiography and pseudo history had been pegged in England as an unreliable quagmire of dubious books."2 What readerly discomposure, then, does Edgeworth "plot" through a
1. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3; hereafter
cited parenthetically, thus: (Ci? 3). 2. See Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History, (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2004), p. 137. See also: Niall 0 Ciosain, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland
1750-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1997); Jacqueline Hill, "Popery and Protestantism, Civil Rights and
Religious Liberty: The Disputed Lessons of Irish History 1690-1812," Past and Present, 118,1 (1988),
NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 13:3 (AUTUMN / F6MHAR, 2009), I33-I46
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria EdgewortWs Castle Rackrent
narrative that proceeds to undermine naive constructions of a colonized peo
ple "written off" by official Imperial history as culturally backward and pre-lit erate?
Azade Seyhan has noted in Representation and Its Discontents (1992) that the
French Revolution, with its dramatic ruptures between past and present, made
questions of "totality," "continuity," and "representation," deeply uncertain for
the historian. In this sense, historiography was already in crisis after 1795.3
Edgeworth, masquerading as Editor, alerts the reader to a similar suspicion of
the historical enterprise, but chooses to situate it in the context of prejudices
incipient to an oral-literate binary that associated orality with the primitive, the
fanciful, and the naive, and simultaneously privileged literacy as aligned with
rationality and scientific objectivity. The "editorial" Preface directly problema tizes this binary:
Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any
advantage from their labours! The heroes of history are so decked out by the
fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose. . . .
Besides there is much uncertainty even in authenticated ancient or modern
histories... (CRi)
By constructing themselves as representatives of a literate culture, colonizers
could author so-called definitive histories in order to discredit extant native his
tories as unreliable narratives of unlettered colonized subjects, devoid of intel
lectual sophistication. However, if the production of history as factual narrative
is contingent upon literacy skills, then such skills, for the Rackrent Editor, are
antithetically associated with artifice and embellishment. Edgeworths editor
offers this caveat: "those who are used to literary manufacture know how much
is often sacrificed to the rounding of a period or the pointing of an antithesis"
(CR 3). This logic leads inevitably to the editorial verdict that the "plain unvar
nished tale" is "preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative" (CR2).
96-129. Patrick Brantlinger, in The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Cen
tury British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), documents the general panic over
working-class literacy. Susan Glover notes the reference to Thady's illiteracy in "Glossing the Unvar
nished Tale: Contradicting Possession in Castle Rackrent" Studies in Philology, 99, 3 (Summer,
2003), 295-311; Rebecca Shapiro notes the marking of Thady's speech as Irish, in "Educating the Eng
lish: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and Essay on Irish Bulls" Women's Writing, 10,1 (2003),
73-91. Neither pursues the issue in regard to larger questions of Irish literacy and historiography.
Mary Jean Corbett seeks to read the novel as colonial discourse in "Another Tale to Tell: Post-Colo
nial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent," Criticism 36 (1994), 383-400.
3. Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 6.
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria EdgewortWs Castle Rackrent
If the editorial preface, from the outset, places the relationship between lit
erariness and veracity under pressure, it also generates anxiety and disequilib rium for what Wolfgang Iser terms the implied reader.4 Edgeworths implied lit
erate English or Anglo-Irish reader is cheated out of the classic historical text he
believed he was promised. Furthermore, Edgeworth chooses to represent
Thady's text as "untranslatable":
For the information of the ignorant English reader a few notes have been sub
joined by the editor, and he had it once in contemplation to translate the lan
guage of Thady into plain English; but Thady's idiom is incapable of translation, and besides, the authenticity of his story would have been more exposed to
doubt if it were not told in his own characteristic manner. (CR 4)
But this claim carries some notable corollaries. By troping the servant as foreign, and interpellating the colonial master as ignorant, Edgeworth paradoxically renders her English reader "illiterate." Constrained into a position that the very act of reading should have nullified, and constructed as incompetent reader, her
implied reader must struggle for mastery of the unintelligibly alien, subaltern
text. "Subalternity"?a Gramscian term adopted by South-Asian Studies schol ars?was afforded a specific value for postcolonial theory by Gayatri Spivak in
her key essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" which addresses the failure of mem
bers of oppressed groups to engage in the fullest interchange between them
selves and their oppressors, deprived as they are of voice and access to hege monic discourse.5 Similar ideas can be discerned in the editorial voice in the
Preface, which deems Thady's narrative as "scarcely intelligible, or ... perfectly incredible" to "those totally unacquainted with Ireland" (CR 4). Thady's "unin
telligible" text is proof of such subalternity. Already, there is the invoking of Irish
identity as illegible in the formulation of "characters" that are unverifiable,
indecipherable, and overwritten. The unintelligible text insists upon its own
resistance to the colonizing hermeneutics of the English reader intent upon
mastering its meaning.
Texts in a foreign tongue were not unknown to an Anglo-Irish reading pub lic. Gaelic histories of Ireland were available at the time of Edgeworths writing, the most famous being Keating's Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (c. 1634), which synthe sized Gaelic manuscript histories and oral sources. The Editor's announcement
that Thady's untranslatable narrative "tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom," which is "a tale of other times" as "the race of Rackrents
4. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) on the insertion of the reader as rhetorical entity into the text.
5. Gayatri C. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313.
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent
has long since been extinct in Ireland" {CR 4), would have suggested to the
Anglo-Irish reader texts that were part of a corpus long buried or repressed within the consciousness of modern literate ruling elites. Such repression and
forgetting would have been entirely necessary to their fantasy of Ireland and its
culture as prehistoric, and oral.
Certainly, the privileging of literacy in imperial contexts was especially sig nificant for Catholic Ireland. In Literacy and Popular Culture (1989), David Vin
cent notes that literacy was first deemed essential to combat Roman Catholi
cism. Popery was associated with an emphasis on an oral tradition, while
literacy as a Protestant virtue promoted and strengthened the written authori
ty of scripture. Vincent cites the words of the Puritan bishop Joseph Hall to
underscore the point: "As for orall traditions, what certaintie can there be in
them? What foundation can be layed upon the breath of man?"6
A colonial anxiety that reached back many centuries configured the Irish as
"illiterate," yet paradoxically productive of an untranslatable body of literary texts. From Elizabethan times, legislation had struggled to deal with the Irish
language: at times to discourage its use, at other moments to employ it in the
service of imperial interests. By the mid-eighteenth century, English had gained
increasing prevalence, due to the native's need for "commerce" with the ruling masters. Thomas O. McLoughlin has noted Ireland's similarity to India with its
ancient written culture, before going on to observe:
Ireland's was not a purely oral culture about to be subjected to the written word,
with its peculiar claims to authority and knowledge, as was to happen in much
of the British Empire.7
Britain's encounter with the literary heritage of its colonized subjects made
translation a compelling colonial preoccupation throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. In India, William Jones, the eminent Orientalist who went
to Calcutta in 1873, was already translating Persian and Indian texts, with pro found implications for European Romanticism. Tejaswini Niranjana notes that
one of the most significant nodes of Jones's work was "the need for translation
by the European, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws
6. Cited in David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture in England 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1989), p. 6. For Thady's Catholic identity, see Two Irish National Tales, ed.
James Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 51, which restores a footnote deleted after the 1804
edition, explicating Thady's crossing of himself as a Roman Catholic practice.
7. See Thomas O. McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices Against England in the Eighteenth
Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), p. 33. T.C. Barnard notes that in 1697 it was proposed that
Irish be banned and in 1710 that its use be encouraged. "The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish
Protestant Celebrations" English Historical Review 106,421 (1991), 904-06.
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria EdgewortKs Castle Rackrent
and culture."8 Edgeworths reference to Thady's untranslatable idiom resonates
with similar concerns over meaning that flow from the illegible "native" text, as
well as from the anxious need for cultural intervention on the part of the rulers.
Thady's "untranslatable" idiom?while establishing a text that refuses to circu
late within an imperial economy of meaning?would invoke the colonized sub
ject whose native "tongue" colored or shaded his use of the colonizer's language. Unlike the land, the language resists Englishness; the Anglo-Irish reader may never gain total possession or governance over the colonial subject's language.
Instead, the reader must struggle to "interpret" that which destabilizes and
makes strange "the King's English," as in Edgeworth's "editorial" footnote
response to Thady's frequent use of the word "kilt." "This word frequently occurs in the following pages, where it means not killed, but much hurt. In Ire
land, not only cowards, but the brave cdie many times before their death.' There
Killing is no murder' (CR 114). The Irish native's lawlessness is in danger of
going unread, given the English reader's altogether different lexicon.
Thady himself seems to lack signature, given the numerous interpellations of his Anglo-Irish masters:
?My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known
by no other than 'honest Thady'?afterwards in the time of Sir Murtagh,
deceased, I remember to hear them calling me 'old Thady,' and now I'm come to
'poor Thady'?for I wear a long great coat winter and summer, which is very
handy... (CR 8)
Despite his masters' best linguistic efforts to interpellate or label him as colonial
servant, Thady calls attention to his own illegibility. His true name, "Quirk," which suggests his maverick status, is forgotten and therefore goes unread. Its "unwritten" status for the Anglo-Irish ensures their misrecognition of Thady as
"illiterate."
As for literacy's function as a sign of a superior English civilization, Thady's text consistently proceeds to represent literacy as an illogical technology that breeds a mania for an endless rewriting and contesting of history and histori cal ownership. "Illiterate" Thady becomes the recorder of the perversities and absurdities that literate behavior entails. He bemusedly observes the deranging effects of English literacy upon the Irish land, in the litigious activities of Sir
Murtagh, who "used to boast that he had a lawsuit for every letter in the alpha bet" (CR 15). Thady states: "I never saw him so much himself?roads?lanes?
bogs?wells?ponds?eel-wires?orchards?trees?tythes?vagrants?gravel
8. See: Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Con
text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 13; also Douglas Robinson, Translation and
Empire (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1992).
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria EdgewortWs Castle Rackrent
pits?sandpits?dunghills and nuisances?everything upon the face of the
earth furnished him good matter for a suit" (CR 15). Here is a land under threat of disintegration beneath the colonial master s
pen. An obsession with the sign over the referent, which literacy breeds, leads
only to loss and the impoverishment of both the sign and its owner. Sir Murtagh covets and pursues such documents as wills and title deeds. Such mania for the
legal signs of ownership, leads, paradoxically, to the loss of what is signified as
owned?namely, Irish land. There is no small irony in Sir Murtaghs censorious
aphorism to Thady as he proceeds to lose his estates through litigation that
"learning is better than houses or land" (CR 15). Sir Murtaghs legal disputa tiousness results in a proliferation of the written, to the point of the nonsensi
cal. Contemplating him amidst his writing, Thady remarks: "How I used to
wonder to see Sir Murtagh in the midst of the papers in his office?why he
could hardly turn for them" (CR 15). Immobilized by penmanship, Sir Murtagh is a prisoner and victim of his own powers of literacy.
Instances of ineffectual literacy and its attendant corruptions proliferate within Thady s text. Thady ponders over letters by bankrupt Rackrents to agents
seeking money for profligate purposes; scans newspaper reports of Sir Kits
marriage to an heiress for dubious reasons; temporarily preempts arrest war
rants for Sir Condy on the day of his election as member of parliament by
drinking the officer silly; and witnesses to a fraudulent deed that purports to
bestow money upon Sir Condys wife, the financially aggrieved Isabella. Such
writing activity is focalized through the "illiterate" gaze of Thady, so that the
English reader must read literacy through his eyes, shorn and demystified of its
significance for a "literary" ruling class. Edgeworth represents the Anglo-Irish as
inept literates, an emasculated ruling class, incapable of wielding the phallic
power of the pen, and who, significantly, die issueless.
By contrast, the novels crucial moment where the Anglo-Irish colonial
desires Irishness, is one that valorizes illiteracy. Sir Condy, while making his
choice between the Irish Judy and the allegorically named Isabella Moneygawl, swears that he will make his choice between the two women upon a prayer
book, which in fact turns out to be a book of ballads:
?and by this book, (said he, snatching up my ballad book, mistaking it for my
prayer book, which lay in the window) and by all the books (said he) that ever
were shut and opened?its come to a toss up with me, and I'll stand or fall by the
toss, and so, Thady, hand me over that pin out of the inkhorn, and he makes a
cross on the smooth side of the halfpenny?'Judy M 'Quirk, (said he) by her
mark'... (CR 45)
Not only does Sir Condy fail to distinguish between a sacred and profane text,
his oath?which ostensibly reverences Holy Writ?is actually and ironically
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria EdgewortKs Castle Rackrent
taken upon an oral vernacular Irish heritage, which his Gaelic ancestor, Sir
Patrick O'Shaughlin, had renounced on converting to the established Anglican Church and assuming the name of Rackrent, in order to circumvent disinheri
tance under the Penal Laws.
In Sir Condy's spontaneous gesture lurks the hint of cultural hybridity that was inevitable to the hyphenated existence of the Anglo-Irish. Deciding on the
toss of a coin, Sir Condy chooses the sign of illiteracy as a marker of his desire
for the Irish servant, for, as Thady's keen eye observes, "his hand was a little
unsteadied by all the whiskey punch he had taken, but it was plain to see his
heart was for Judy" (CR 45). Explicating the hieroglyphics of desire, the edito
rial footnote collapses distinctions between Anglo-Irish literate masters and
their subjects by remarking that "It was the custom of Ireland for those who
could not write, to make a cross to stand for their signature, as was formerly the
practice of our English monarchs"(CR 45). In a mocking gesture, the footnote
introduces the "salvaged" sign of illiteracy, perversely misrepresented as Irish, by both Sir Condy and Imperial scholarship.
The Editor inserts the facsimile of an Irish mark, which may hereafter be valu
able to a judicious antiquary?
Her
Judy x M'Quirk Mark.
In bonds or notes, signed in this manner, a witness is requisite, as the name is fre
quently written by him or her. (CR 45)
The mark here "signifies" the unwritten in history, especially imperial histories that will not tolerate the inscription of desire for the colonized subject. Literate Sir Condy chooses to designate the object of his desire as nameless. He also uses
the pen in order to produce nonwriting. In doing so, he embraces illiteracy him
self, in order to acknowledge, for a moment, illiteracy's operation as a sign of
repression, not just of forbidden desire, but also as a signifier of the silence and
anonymity of the oppressed subaltern, deprived of both voice and signature. At this moment of crisis, the sign of illiteracy is perversely privileged as enabling the articulation of truth. Unhappily, it is Sir Condy's mistaken?and very
Protestant?regard for "the book" that must result in the final downfall of the clan with his marriage to Isabella, and the loss of both the fertile Judy and his estates. It is not the toss of a coin, but the authority of the book that compels him to forsake Judy and Irishness.
The illiterate steward, by contrast, will insert himself into a culture of liter
acy by dramatizing a crucial act of reading that marks the turning point in the affairs of the Rackrents and the Quirks. Reading a legal document, toward the latter half of the text, Thady notes, "I could scarcely believe my own old eyes, or
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria EdgewortWs Castle Rackrent
the spectacles with which I read it, when I was shewn my son Jason's name
joined in the custodiam . . ." (CR 62). The name of Quirk, once cancelled by other acts of renaming, is now inscribed into legal existence. Thady's spectacles
suggest that the recovery of Irish identity resides in its legibility. The moment
of revolution that actually effects the transfer of power from Sir Condy to Jason
Quirk, as narrated by Thady, is essentially a writing-and-reading revolution.
That revolution commences, ironically, with efforts by Sir Condy to appro
priate Thady's literacy, as he has the steward sign "blindly" as witness to a docu
ment that is meant to circumvent debtors: "come into the parlour with the pen and ink yourself Thady, for I must have you to witness my signing a paper I have
to execute in a hurry" (CR 69). Such an act, however, triggers a crisis of events
that follow, with encounters between Thady, Sir Condy, and Sir Condy's wife
first, and Jason, Thady and Sir Condy, a short while later. In describing these
exchanges, Thady's narrative focuses almost fetishistically upon the pen. In con
tradiction to the representation of himself as obedient literate, he describes him
self just after having witnessed the deed, as "shaking the ink from the pen out
upon the carpet" (CR 69). In the ensuing interrogation between husband and
wife on the contents of the document, Thady, ordered to exit by the mistress, mentions that he does so after "I just picked my pen and ink that had tumbled
on the floor"(CR 70). Jason hands Sir Condy "pen and ink to sign this man's bill
and that man's bill and t'other man's bill" (CR 73), even as Sir Condy wishes that
"we could settle it all with a stroke of my grey goose quill" (CR 73). As Jason con
tinues to hand Sir Condy the pen demanding, ultimately, that he sign not just bills, but the very estate away, he also begins to write out the sale deed mention
ing as if he were "just reading to himself" "the lands of O'Shaughlin town, and
the lands of Gruneaghoolaghan, and the lands of Crookaghnawaturgh"(CJR 73). In narrating the struggle for control over the pen?especially given its power
to escape the grasp, or to deface the Rackrent domicile?the servant narrator wit
nesses to the transformation of the innocuous, almost effete goose quill into a
revolutionary weapon. Hence, Thady's double-valenced responses: "Oh, murder!
(says I clapping my hands) this is too bad, Jason" (CR76). Thady's naming of the
writing act as murder implies that Jason is surely as much of a sans cullotte as
were the French-inspired Irish rebels of the United Irishmen's rising of 1798.9 Placed in parentheses, Thady's admission of glee seems almost to be spoken sotto voce, and the sly use of punctuation suggests the servant narrator to be a
sophisticate who can manipulate a sentence's meaning through "literary manu
9. For the Edgeworth reaction to the uprising, see Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth Esq.
Begun by Himself and Concluded by his Daughter, Maria Edgeworth, (London: Richard Bentiey, 1844),
p. 336.
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facture" without confessing directly to revolutionary intent. The Irish character
thereby continues to flaunt its illegibility. Not surprisingly, then, the competent "illiterate" continually embarrasses the
designs of history. By the late eighteenth century, historiography was the sub
ject of considerable debate. Ann Rigney has noted that until Madame de Stael's
De la Literateur (1800), history was viewed as a serious genre and was expected "like tragedy to deal with appropriately dignified topics?matters of state and
the lives of political leaders. In contrast, the novel emerged as the locus par excellence for treating the lives of private persons against the background of
contemporary mores... ."10 Edgeworth's plea for Thady's unorthodox history
synchronizes with this changing trend: "After we have beheld splendid charac ters playing their parts on the great theatre of the world, with all the advantages and disadvantages of stage effect and decoration, we anxiously beg to be admit
ted behind the scenes, that we may take a nearer view of the actors and actress
es" (CR 2). A little earlier, the "editor" has declared: "We are surely justified in
this eager desire to collect the most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and the good, but even of the worthless and insignificant" (CR 2). But to read Thady's narrative as history is to encounter more than a
mere chronicle of a family's rise and fall. His "illiterate" postures proffer moments that undermine the prestige of history as written text, by perversely representing historical recitatives as aligned with the private, the domestic, and the oral.
In "Immemorial Routines: The Celts and Their Resistance to History," Rigney specifically discusses why the Celts and an Irish past were associated with the realm of the legendary, rather than with historical time.11 It is precisely such tensions between historical and legendary narration that Thady manipulates. His most self-conscious construction of himself as historian is as an oral nar rator engaged in a recitative to the young Sir Condy. The latter learns of his "inheritance" through Thady's "tales," while still a barefoot village lad. Thady reminisces how "often's the time when I would call in at his fathers ... where he
would love to sit on my knee whilst I told him stories of the family and blood from which he was sprung"(CR 39). He then muses upon his suggestion that "if the present man should die without childer" the child, Sir Condy, might become "head of the Rackrent estate" (CR 39). Thady's pose of being innocent of all
powers of narratival foresight leads to the apologia that all this "was then spoke quite clear at random to please the child, but it pleased Heaven to accomplish
10. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Itha ca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 68.
11. Ann Rigney, "Immemorial Routines: The Celts and their Resistance to History," in Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 159-81.
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my prophecy afterwards, which gave him a great opinion of my judgment in
business" (CR 39). Such "magical" powers of narration possess an authority that traditional his
tories do not; written histories record the past, whereas Thady's words proph esy the future. Such histories generate anxiety in the English or Anglo-Irish reader, who is forced to accord more weight to the rambling "illiterate's" words.
As fairy tale, narrated for purposes of fantasy and pleasure, Thady's history recalls?in this case quite ironically?for the Anglo-Irish an ancestry they would much rather deny or forget, a memory of religious and cultural aposta
sy. A race in servitude produces an historical narrative apparently innocuous in
its powers to seduce through praise, but in reality quite fateful in the telling. Their primitive oral histories are heritages thrust upon the conquerors by their
victims. The oral retains a power that the literate culture assumed it had sup
planted. In doing so, Thady dexterously blurs the categories of the public and
the private, a process that has transpired through his narratival impertinence as
historiographer. The bareheaded, barefooted Sir Condy is thus cast as an infantilized Anglo
Irishman, body-snatched by Thady's tale as surely as were his ancestors' corpses at their funerals. If Thady's tale has all the fearful aura of an Irish curse in its
duplicity, then the mere act of reading his narrative replicates for its reader the
doom that such a story held for his surrogate, Sir Condy, who died raving and
delirious, attended by none but his Irish servants, Thady and his "shister." Thady's
"loyal" history is, paradoxically, revolutionary in its potential, since the mere act
of telling must redefine, and ultimately ensure the death of the hapless Anglo Irish master. It is therefore significant that at the deathbed of Sir Condy, Thady revisits this narrating moment:
He was very low and in his bed when I got there,... and knowing the nature of
him from a boy, I took my pipe, and while smoking it by the chimney, began
telling him how he was beloved and regretted in the county, and it did him a deal
of good to hear it. (CR 80)
For the English or Anglo-Irish reader, bewilderment over such unofficial and
alternative histories plays out in the way that historical perspective is dramatized
as vertiginous, in the plethora of disorienting, or contending perceptions that
frustrate or preempt the writing of imperial history. First, Thady chooses to
recirculate fondly other oral, subaltern, Irish histories that have incurred Anglo Irish disfavor. Describing the funeral of Sir Patrick, the first Rackrent, Thady remarks, "my grandfather said, that to see all the women, even in their red
cloaks, you would have taken them for the army drawn out" (CR 11). At other times, Thady chooses to offer a history lesson of his own, as in his
efforts at mediating an exchange of "views" by Anglo-Irish husband and Eng
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lish wife on the Irish country. The foreign wife begins "spying over the country"
through her binoculars, inquiring over "the black swamp" and "the ugly
prospect" (CR 27) before her eyes, only to be told by her husband that what she
views is, in fact, "My bog, my dear" (CR 27). In his diplomatic attempts to res
cue the situation, Thady proceeds to instruct the outsider in imperial history and imperial geography, only to reinforce the absurdity of imperialisms rhetoric
of ownership. He informs her that she will not see the bog once the leaves of
planted "trees" are out, and also that as the same
bit of bog has been in the family, we would not part with the bog of Allybally carricko'shaughlin upon no account at all; it cost the late Sir Murtagh two hun
dred good pounds to defend his title to it, and boundaries, against the O'Leary's, who cut a road through it. (CR 28)
Thady's narration of a local history of ancient disputes ironizes proprieto rial English attitudes toward Ireland. As "black swamp," the bog is an absence, a meaningless name that defies imperial impulses toward mapping. In its
strange anti-geography, it becomes an absurd nonpossession resisting occupa tion, a site and sight that is unwittingly trashed, even as it is fought over. In rep
resenting the bog as property to the outside world, Thady renders it as unreal as imperial pretensions to ownership. Placenames prove resistant to Anglicizing, for the wife asks in vain for its meaning in English. The episode harks back to
legislation in 1655 under Charles II, when "His Majestie taking notice of the bar
barous and uncouth names by which most of the towns and places in this king dom of Ireland are called, decreed that new names be given that were more suit
able to the English tongue."12 Imperial cartography's ambitions are never easily imposed upon a subjugated people; its endeavors are often retold as historical farce.
Further, as a self-conscious historian, Thady's fumbling loyalties continue to
expose imperial history's servile, propagandistic mission, in his improvised genealogy of the Jewish mistress in the servants' kitchen. He confides that in
response to below-stairs chatter about the bride, "I took care to put the best foot
foremost, and passed her for a Nabob, in the kitchen, which accounted for her dark complexion, and everything" (CR 26). The complication deepens: "Nabob" was a sobriquet for the wealthy Anglo-Indian colonial, who accumulated dubi ous prestige through the spoils of empire, which is what Sir Kit's wife is, as mis tress of her Irish subjects. But the name "Nabob" derives from "Nawab," a
species of Indian royalty who were being increasingly compelled to own
suzerainity to the British, so that gender relations mime imperial relations, in the Jewish wife as plundered vassal. The mistress therefore enjoys no sovereignty
12. Cited in McCloughlin, p. 33.
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over her assets, but is colonized through marriage into submission to her Anglo Irish husband and overlord. For the English reader, such indeterminacies of sig nification between colonized and colonizer demonstrate the crisis that afflicts
the referential functions of the historians vocabulary. Thady, at this point, also
draws attention to narrative's proliferative character. We see its capacity for
being rewritten, with its character contingent upon the circumstances and audi
ence that provide for its instantiation. The stability of the written word must
therefore contend with the vitality of illiterate, subaltern orality. While Edgeworth in her Preface advocates a behind-the-scenes approach to
history, Thady's narrative parodies naive ideals of veracity in order to serve
Edeworth's irony. Paradigmatic of such a representational crisis is the crucial
scene of a lurking Thady eavesdropping upon the quarrel between Sir Condy and his wife Isabella over money needed for the former's debts, which she
refuses to disburse. His explanation that "I heard all that was saying within" due
to the door being left "a-jar after Mrs. Jane" (CR 65) might suggest omniscience
on the part of the spying servant. However, it is important to note that Thady
only hears all. His vision is hampered by the half-shut door, and as the squalid
wrangling between husband and wife proceeds?with Isabella objecting to her
spouse's unshaven countenance?Thady notes of his master that he had "a
glimpse of him at the cracked glass over the chimney-piece, standing up shav
ing himself to please my lady" (CR 65). With this keyhole perspective, the sweeping overview of the historian is
replaced by the voyeuristic, subaltern gaze. The servant-narrator chooses to rep
resent narcissistically the act of looking performed by the subaltern, rather than
the deeds of his masters, making his own voyeurism the subject of the seen and
scene. Thady carries the new logic of historiography suggested by Edgeworth and
others to its disconcerting limits. By the end of his narration, the very purposes of history, and its need for a behind-the-scenes approach will be nullified by
Thady's rhetorical question, "Where's the use of telling lies about the things which everybody knows as well as I do?" (CR 96). The "revelations" of history are
actually open secrets, proven by the belatedness of all historical writing. Such belatedness marks Thady's text from its beginnings. If the presence of
history tautologically suggests the presence of writing, then Thady's "unhistor
ical" sense of time that leads him to date his text "Monday Morning" is not,
merely, as the footnotes suggest, a stylistic expression of Irish tendencies to
procrastination, such as "On Monday Morning, please your honour, we'll begin and dig the potatoes" (CR 99). Thady's narrative told "several years ago" (CR 4) to the Editor, is written down much later after his overcoming of "habitiual lazi
ness" (CR 4). His act of narrative inscription is a deferred one. The literate,
moral-seeking reader of history, who is either Anglo-Irish or English, is a belat
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Historiography and Literacy in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent
ed reader of a belated narrative, who cannot be rescued from his own already foretold extinction by reading the lessons of history.
Edgeworths text demonstrates that literacy cannot be privileged over oral
ity, as the latter possesses a freshness and timeliness that the belatedness of
inscription foregoes. Thady's undated text, commenced upon a "Monday Morn
ing," also becomes a resolute resistance to any teleological assumptions that lie
behind historical narrative and the written text. This is the semiliterate's resis
tance to clock time and the chronicle that proceeds to undermine imperial his
tory's presumptions of narrating progress. When viewed as written text, Thady's narrative is located amidst the shards
of an Anglo-Irish past, represented as it is within the novel as a manuscript to
be edited and annotated. With its materiality insisted upon, such evidence of
subaltern literacy proves to be the anxious object of the historical imagination.
Antiquarianism?which was a particularly fashionable historical trend in the
aftermath of the French Revolution?stressed the significance of cultural arti
facts from the past. Thady's text is to be deciphered and labeled as an archival
curiosity, an enigmatic object under scrutiny and invested with an archaeolog ical significance by the scholarly efforts of its editor.
To view the "history" of the Rackrents as a relic of Ireland's primitive past, is to address such positions as Kathryn Kirkpatrick's, which assign the editori
al notes and glosses a disciplinary and constraining function over a rebellious
text.13 Maria Edgeworth was persuaded by her father into tempering her text
with such "editorial readings" as would placate an English readership by its
judicious use of satirical commentary on the Irish, and their servant narrator
representative. Close reading, however, reveals that Edgeworths own double
edged editorial ironies continue to disturb "literate" English reading responses.
Edgeworths glosses are double-valenced, and do not degenerate into conces
sions to an English readership for purposes of mitigating the revolutionary effects of Thady's subaltern narrative. In her quotations from "authorities" on
Irish culture and society, Edgeworth indulges not so much in the act of fram
ing Thady's narrative through ridicule, but rather, offers?through the presence of the heteroglossic?the calcification of official discourse reduced to margin alia, which Thady's vigorous "illiterate" text in turn subverts. Such discourse when actually read in conjunction with Thady's text, may, in fact, generate, rather than contain, reader anxieties.
Consider, for example, the gloss on etymology that observes that conjunc tions in Modern English originated out of imperatives in Old English. Edge
worth's Editor notes that the "celebrated Home Tooke has proved most satis
13. Kathryn Kirkpatrick, "Putting Down the Irish Rebellion: Notes and Glosses on Maria Edge worth's Castle Rackrent" Eire-Ireland, 30,1 (Spring, 1995), 77-90.
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factorily, that the conjunction but comes from the imperative of the Anglo Saxon verb (beonutan) to be out;..." (CR 99). The gloss then suggests a similar
future for Thady's Irish phrase "let alone," explicated in the sagely speculation:
"Page 9. Let alone the three kingdoms itself] Let alone, in this sentence, means
put out of the consideration. This phrase, let alone, which is now used as the
imperative of a verb, may in time become a conjunction, and may exercise the
ingenuity of some future etymologist" (CR 99). In such glosses, Edgeworth plays to anxieties over progenitorship. Anglo
Saxon comes to be constructed as progenitor language by Tooke, himself a
known supporter of revolution in the American colonies, imprisoned for sedi
tion, and therefore a threatening "authority."14 Such etymological "history" func
tions as a paradigm for a history that narrates Irish progenitorship. The dis courses of etymology suggest that the literacy of the servant narrator must result
in an Irish insemination of the language of both the text and its reader, a revo
lutionary act producing strange Irish "corruptions" that will make the writing of
"the King's English" a future impossibility.15 Interpellating the reader elsewhere
in these notes as English, lazy and ignorant, Edgeworth permits textual politics and reader relations to reverse, exchange, or destabilize national identities. The
"English reader" comes to be constructed here as Irish in his preference for an
uncritical, lazy indifference to the official discourse in her marginalia?dis courses resembling those found in authoritative texts like the fourth volume of
the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, which Edgeworth cites as "unread."
As ostensibly "illiterate" and covertly literate, Irish culture sabotages impe rial historiography. Thady is situated at the very point where the oral and the lit
erary intersect. Such indeterminacies of literate status and literary competence in an Irish, subaltern narrator must ultimately function as a defacing, illegible blot upon Anglo-Irish history and its ambitions to be read as official discourse.
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
jfernand@umbc.edu
14- The English politician John Home Tooke (1736-1812) was identified with the revolutionary cause in France and tried for treason. His Diversions ofPurley (London: Routledge, 1993), written in
two parts, and published in 1786 and 1805 deals with etymology and philology, among other topics.
15. For a discussion on how issues of national identity were caught up in the push toward stan
dardization in the late eighteenth century, see Liz Bellamy, "Regionalism and Nationalism: Maria
Edgeworth, Walter Scott and the Definition of Britishness," in The Regional Novel in Britain and Ire
land 1800-1900, ed. K. D. Snel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 54-77. Bellamy cites the Anglo-Irish grammarian Thomas Sheridan's condemnation of "the odious distinction kept
up between the subjects of the same king" and his search for a way by which "the attainment of the
English tongue in all its purity... might be rendered easy to all inhabitants of His Majesty's domin
ions, whether of South or North Britain, of Ireland or the other British dependencies, p. 56.
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