"Stooping to be lorded":
Lockean Influences on the Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth
submitted to Noel O'Hara's Course of Irish Literature, New College of California, May 12, 1999
Molly NíDana
Maria Edgeworth’s life and work occurred during the initial reverberations of the "explosive moment" that created the modern world. Presently iconic figures of what we today term "The Enlightenment" were in her day the political and social innovators, actively creating public discourse. We can best understand the manner in which this occurred by contemplating Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show, Larry King Live, or C-Span’s Booknotes with Brian Lamb, as an expression of the global intelligentsia of our own times. Thus, it might yet be said of myself in the future that I showed influences of, for example, feminists Mary Daly, Sonia Johnson or Suzette Elgin or reacted to the social context of late 20th century environmental decay, or the like. Similarly, it is often said of Maria Edgeworth that she was showing the influences of John Locke, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, in particular, though certainly not exclusively.
This paper will focus on the influence of John Locke, and in particular his concept of the "tabla rasa", as evidenced in the works of Maria Edgeworth. John Locke (1632-1704), was actively involved in English Protestant politics in the latter half of the 17th century, and was actually forced into Dutch exile from 1683-1689, only returning to England after William of Orange took the throne. The following year (1690, more or less simultaneous with the Battle of the Boyne and the startpoint of the Ascendancy in Ireland) he published his Essay concerning Human Understanding, which was to exert a profound influence on R.L. Edgeworth and his daughter as educators. This theme is most strongly expressed in Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), as the central character Lord Glenthorn/Christopher O’Donoghoe/Delamere careens through adolescence and young adulthood seeking stimulation and a reason to go on living, in the absence of proper direction. Locke believed, as did the Edgeworths, that man (sic) is a "white paper" or blank slate at birth, and that all our ideas, the basis of all our knowledge, come from experience. He, and subsequently they, also divided personal identity into man and person, the former essentially genetic heritage, and the latter emerging from "opinions... weighed carefully on their merits by each of us, independently of what others, particularly those in majority or authority, say. ‘Trial and examination must give [truth] price.’
When Lord Glenthorn says, "at this period of my life, ennui was very near turning into misanthropy. I balanced between becoming a misanthrope and a democrat." - I was startled into a rueful laugh of recognition. Here is comic irony of a pure sort - Glenthorn’s wife has left him, his friends have all been revealed as opportunistic free-loaders, his childhood nurse Ellinor O’Donoghoe has come and gone, leaving Glenthorn with a mass of evocative Irish tales, as yet unrealized. We have all stood in this place - about to form a central opinion based on our own interpretation of our experience, yet temporarily frozen by an inchoate sensation of incomplete data. The smallest random event can send the balance one way or another, as indeed occurs further down the page. Glenthorn is tilted towards "democrat" in the 18th century sense of assigning equal value to all men (sic) by 2 temporally associated events. A foreigner of rank and reputation questions the logical justifications for English boxing matches:
"These arguments would have probably made but a feeble impression on an understanding like mine, unaccustomed to general reasoning, and on a temper habituated to pursue, without thought of consequences, my immediate individual gratification; but it happened that my feelings were touched at this time by the dreadful sufferings of one of the pugilistic combatants. He died a few hours after the battle. He was an Irishman; most of the spectators being English, and triumphing in the victory of their countryman, the poor fellow’s fate was scarcely noticed. I spoke to him a little while before he died, and found that he came from my own county..."
In the context of a mental balancing act, the role of experience and chance encounter upon which we base both a subjective sense of irony and an intellectual theory of learning, Edgeworth chooses to apply to Glenthorn’s instability the one-two-punch of pedagogy as I experienced it as a child. To wit, an intellectual challenge of argument, backed up by an emotional appeal or manipulation. This creates, in Lockean terms, certainly, a learning experience, which create in aggregate a person out of the raw stuff of a man, and which can be either accidental, as here, or arranged by a pedagogue for the benefit of their pupils.
So Lord Glenthorn sets out for Ireland, with avowedly mixed motives, yet with the virtue of having been jolted out of his immobilizing apathy. We can say, with the narrator himself in the hindsight of his narrative, that this not only prefigures all that is to come in the rest of the book, but defines the process by which his fall and redemption are accomplished.
We look to a deeper layer for an expression of this Lockean theme in Castle Rackrent, which is a very different sort of narrative indeed. At first reading it might appear that a contrary view is represented. The Rackrent titlebearers seem completely unable to learn from experience and their final ruin with the sale of the Castle to Jason Quirk wafts off the page with the initial odor of a miserable fate justly delivered.
And yet, the initial premise, that man is a blank slate who becomes a person by virtue of their experiences, will serve very well indeed. The Rackrent family history, as narrated by family retainer Thady Quirk, does rest on the same premise. It is merely the results that are so different, as we see in this section from the tale of Sir Kit Rackrent while he was an absentee in Bath.
"About this time we learned from the agent as a great secret, how the money went so fast, and the reason of the thick coming of the master’s drafts: he was a little too fond of play; and Bath, they say, was no place for a young man of his fortune, where there were so many of his own countrymen too hunting him up and down, day and night, who had nothing to lose."
Or this section from the concluding tale of Sir Condy Rackrent:
"By these means he became well acquainted and popular amongst the poor in the neighborhood early; for there was not a cabin at which he had not stopped some morning or other, along with the huntsman, to drink a glass of burnt whiskey out of an eggshell, to do him good and warm his heart, and drive the cold out of his stomach. The old people always told him he was a great likeness of Sir Patrick; which made him first have an ambition to take after him, as far as his fortune should allow. He left us when of an age to enter the college, and there completed his education and nineteenth year; for as he was not born to an estate, his friends thought it incumbent on them to give him the best education which could be had for love or money; and a great deal of money consequently was spent upon him at college and Temple. He was a very little altered for the worse by what he saw there of the great world; for when he came down into the country, to pay us a visit, we thought him just the same man as ever, hand and glove with everyone, and as far from high, though not without his proper share of family pride, as any man ever you see."
In both instances, Thady perceives a connection between the influences brought to bear upon his masters and their subsequent behavior. That their actions end in ruin does not change the structural premise upon which the evaluation is made, though I hesitate to leave it at that - certainly an entire complex of activity surrounds these out-of-context exemplar. Castle Rackrent is a very different sort of tale than either Ennui or The Absentee, a fast-moving race down a very steep hill of degradation, imbued with an air of fatalistic inevitability contrasted with sharp moments of hilarity that serve to emphasize the inevitable end.
It’s no wonder at all that Castle Rackrent looms large in the modern Irish social landscape as a moral fable, while Ennui languished in the obscurity of its 1884 Routledge edition. Edgeworth’s biographer Dr. Marilyn Butler eventually included it in her 1992 edition of Castle Rackrent instead of the more familiar Absentee. The pair of them read together raises important issues of personal and national identity, which seem potentially uncomfortable, even today. Her Rackrents are a Gaelic family, after all, with a senachie (Thady Quirk) who explicitly locates the connection between the two families back to at least the mid 16th century, and potentially further. The shadowy emblem of a tanistic election lurks behind the ascension of Jason Quirk to the Castle - his cousin Judy M’Quirk asks at the end,
"Why, what signifies it to be my lady Rackrent, and no castle?"
implying, to my mind, that this title is only English, but the Castle is built upon enduring Gaelic land, and a challenger may take over the lordship without breaking the succession.
Ennui, on the other hand, essentially raises the possibility that anyone raised in Ireland can become Irish, or lose their Irish identity if raised as English, (or American, or Swedish, etc.). Edgeworth explores this burning issue of her times through the fairytale device of children switched at birth, placed within a dynamic modern setting, rather than the static worlds of Celtic Twilight or the Brothers Grimm. Such explicit result of a Lockean pedagogy have significant consequences in any colonial situation where circumstances of birth, rather than education, were generally seen as justification for one’s position and entitlements in life. Thus, the Lockean influences I hope I have demonstrated place her works in a context within which they were profoundly part of both the political and the intellectual movements of her time.
Thady Quirk tells us that Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin saw "how large a stake depended on" conversion. Lord (O’Shaunessy) Glenthorn recalls his nurse’s tales of past Gaelic glories with coded reference to Hugh O’Neill raised in England, returned to his roots in Ulster and then forced to choose between them.
It may have been wishful thinking on Edgeworth’s part at the time, that those who "stooped to be lorded" in the 17th and 18th centuries would find themselves in the 19th century forced to either die out entirely or remake themselves for the modern world. It might very well from the end of the 20th cent strike us as prescient. Given the immense popularity of both Castle Rackrent and Ennui in intellectual circles of her day, we must ask ourselves: was Maria Edgeworth a cause, or merely a result of her times?