thady's grey goose quill: historiography and literacy in maria edgeworth's castle rackrent

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



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.

134




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.

135



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.

136



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).

137




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

138




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

139




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.

140




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.

141




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

142




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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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

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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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thady's grey goose quill: historiography and literacy in maria edgeworth's castle rackrent

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