Castle Rackrent

Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent," published in 1800, the year of Irish union with Great Britain, and just two years after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, is supposedly a comic satire intended to show after years of unrest, that the Irish were civil enough to be assimilated into the British Empire. That is a deceptively simple description of a book in conflict with its author and itself. Told to an "editor" by Thady Quirk, the 80+ year old steward of the Rackrent estate relates (very quickly) the story of the Rackrent family, Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and the absolutely dissolute Sir Condy. The O'Shaughlin family is forced by the Penal Laws to become Protestant and to change their name to Rackrent to regain their estate. The variously weak Rackrent men and their extremely strong and independent wives spend themselves into outrageous debt and tax their tenant farmers to the point of insanity over the course of the novel. Apply Katie Trumpener's argument regarding the importance of the bog to Irish cultural nationalism in her book "Bardic Nationalism," and you begin to see that, all that seems to preserve the legacy of the O'Shaughlin family is their mucky bog, Allyballycarricko'shaughlin, and Thady Quirk, if he is to be trusted, himself seemingly stuck in a feudal past.One of the major questions posed by Edgeworth's novel is "What is it to be Irish?" The Anglo-Irish Rackrent landlords claim an Irish Catholic heritage, but forfeit that personal history for the ephemeral run of the estate. The disenfranchised tenant farmers are forced to yield their produce to support the Rackrents's absurd behaviours. In the middle of this dynamic stand the novel's two most developed and challenging characters, Sir Condy Rackrent and Jason McQuirk, Thady's son. Raised in identical circumstances, these two seem to mark the novel's ultimate judgment on the future of Ireland. Is Condy the last of the feudal Irish aristocracy? Does Jason represent the model for the "British" assimilated Irishman?Can outsiders even fathom Irishness? An almost comically unwieldy editorial apparatus, including a glossary and internal footnotes try to neutralize the foreignness and threat of the Irish for Edgeworth's intended British audience. "Castle Rackrent" is indeed an ambivalent testament to the future of the Irish nation as it is swallowed up into the British Empire at the turn of the 19th century, and an intriguing read.