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Is There a Bull in This Nation? On Maria Edgeworth’s Nationalism

2010; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/srm.2010.0037

2330-118X

Amit Yahav,

Philippine History and Culture

Is There a Bull in This Nation? On Maria Edgeworth’s Nationalism Amit Yahav (bio) Amit Yahav University of Haifa, Israel Amit Yahav Amit Yahav teaches at the University of Haifa and has published articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, ELH, MLN, and Partial Answers. Footnotes 1. Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary: Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverly Novels (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 66–67. 2. Also see Gary Kelly’s English Fiction of the Romantic Period (London: Longman, 1989), which provides an overview of romantic fiction, focusing on four main issues: romantic fiction’s relation to Enlightenment notions and to the eighteenth-century novel; the various different romantic genres of fiction; the minor genres’ relation to the canonized novelistic modes of Austen and Scott; and, finally, the relation of this cultural production to social and economic history. He discusses the national tale and Edgeworth in chapter three. 3. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: the Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 58. 4. In her more recent The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), Ferris revises her account of the national tale to bring it more in line with notions of cultural nationalism such as Trumpener’s. She argues that it was Owenson who inaugurated the genre with her The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), rather than Edgeworth with her Castle Rackrent. By this genealogy, Ferris explains, the genre is defined through three criteria that Owenson herself specifies: “foundation in ‘national grievances,’ the reference to ‘historical fact,’ and the appeal to ‘the sympathies of the general reader’” (50). Also see Miranda Burgess’ “Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Materialism in Ireland, 1796–1806,” (MLQ 59 [1998]: 33–70), which argues that the Insh national tale participates in a project that supplants political agency with cultural ideology. On this account, the genre does not offer effective political opposition, but it still functions as an important counter-Enlightenment and counter-imperialist discourse. And for a more recent development of Burgess’ argument, see Kathleen Costello-Sullivan’s “National Character and Foreclosed Irishness: A Reconsideration of Ennui” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004) 146–61. 5. Marilyn Butler has also argued that the culturalist format of the national tale—arising from Owenson’s novels—is too narrow a prism through which to view the genre and Edgeworth’s contribution, which—as she puts it—“exhibit an element of virtually postmodern skepticism about the possibility of a stable individual identity” (“Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes,” Novel 34.2 [Spring 2001]: 284). And more recently in her contribution to An Uncomfortable Authority, “Edgeworth, the United Irishmen, and ‘More Intelligent Treason,’ ” Butler has explained that Edgeworth’s work draws from a wide array of heterogeneous Irish cultural forms to produce a “portrait of a hybrid but coherent Ireland” (34) and that the plots of her national tales bring their heroes to Ireland urging them to use the full heterogeneous array in “the task of building a community” (48). My discus sion here joins Butler’s aims, though attempts to do so not through the perspective of postmodern conceptions (of skepticism or of hybridity), but rather through a theoretical perspective contemporaneous with Edgeworth’s views. My discussion also agrees with Clìona Ó Gallchoir’s contention that Edgeworth makes the case for a public sphere of conversation as an ideal of citizenship; but I draw attention to a civic (Enlightenment) variant of nationalism, rather than to the tensions between Enlightenment ideals and Romantic nationalism, and exemplify my claims through considering a different set of examples than the ones Ó Gallchoir explores. See Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin P, 2005). 6. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992). Though at the outset Colley positions herself against those who think of nationality in terms of homogenous culture, homogenation occasionally creeps into her discussion—if not as an essential predisposition for nationalism, then as a necessary outcome of nationalization. (See...