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Chapter 3

The Irish National Tale and the Aesthetics of Union

In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet doesn’t get to see the Lake District. “No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth,” Jane Austen writes, and when Mrs. Gardiner initially proposes a trip north, she is ecstatic: “‘My dear, dear aunt,’ she rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.’”¹ The proposal catches Elizabeth at a moment of disillusionment with the marriage market, which has produced only a series of disappointments. “What are men to rocks and mountains?” Elizabeth asks, when the Lakes are offered to her, and in anticipation, she banishes all “disappointment and spleen” (P, 190). When Mrs. Gardiner eventually shortens the trip to the much closer county of Derbyshire, this romanticism has vanished; while “excessively disappointed” at the change, Elizabeth is quickly “satisfied” and “all” is “right again” (P, 264). She later writes to Mrs. Gardiner of her engagement to Darcy and renounces her enthusiasm altogether: “I thank you, again and again, for not going to the Lakes. How could I be so silly as to wish it!” (P, 390). In the novel’s concluding pages Austen thus cures an already quite transformed Elizabeth of a final prejudice as she approaches married life. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice as a whole joins Elizabeth in a renunciation of her initial raptures. But what is objectionable about them? The novel provides two intertwined answers, one internal to the marriage plot and one that gestures far outside it. The cancellation of the trip to the Lakes in favor of Derbyshire paves the way for Elizabeth’s marriage with Darcy, since it makes for a different kind of tourism: of Pemberley itself, which teaches Elizabeth that some men are not worth sacrificing for “rocks and mountains.” The novel’s concluding sentence highlights the importance of the changed travel plans to the novel’s principal action: “Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved [the Gardiners]; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them” (P, 396). Over the course of the novel, Elizabeth’s initial “silly” visions of sublime nature deepen—as they should, Austen suggests—into visions of marriage.

Such contraction reinforces Austen’s status as the novelist of what Franco Moretti has called “a small, homogeneous England.”² Austen’s rejection of Elizabeth’s early desire for travel outside a “small” England epitomizes the narrow geography we find throughout her novels. The correction of Elizabeth’s disposition is accompanied, in this view, by a contraction of space. While Austen marks out courtship as the appropriate subject for the novel as a genre, she simultaneously marks out the “midland counties” as its appropriate setting.³ The linkage of Elizabeth’s reformation to the generic and geographical scope of Austen’s particular brand of realism suggests the predicament of Irish fiction writers, since they hailed from a more distant place than one to which Mrs. Gardiner or anyone else in Austen’s novels would likely propose a tour. Although Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson did not conceive of a homogeneous English space as belonging particularly to Jane Austen, as provincial writers, they felt their distance from it acutely. This chapter focuses on the effects of provinciality for Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s Irish novels, which display an extraordinary self-consciousness about the unfamiliarity of their subject matter to their principal reading public, which, like Austen’s, was gathered around the London book trade.⁴

In Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817) and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the two authors developed literary strategies to mitigate the effects of the distance between their subject and their audience, strategies that Austen, writing of her “small” England and exclusively addressing it, could do without. Such distance was compounded by long-held and virulent anti-Irish prejudice; to compensate for both, Edgeworth and Owenson use self-reflexive formal devises like the marriage plot, travel narrative, and paratexts to project an ideal relationship with English readers that downplays the otherwise vexed political intercourse between Ireland and England. For Edgeworth, this relationship takes shape in the realm of universalized moral codes grounded in the Scottish Enlightenment, while for Owenson, it forms within a more extreme fantasy that casts literary exchange as inhabiting an autonomous sphere of its own. Both of these projections—one harkening back to the eighteenth century, the other looking forward to the nineteenth—are developed through near-constant but inconsistent appeals to national character, which both sustain and trouble the ideal author-reader relationships their novels enact through narrative form. The complicated tensions and idealizations in Edgeworth and Owenson first shaped what this and the subsequent two chapters call the aesthetics of provinciality, a representational mode that ameliorates an author’s subordinate position in the literary field by projecting literary exchange into an exalted realm. The works of Edgeworth and Owenson, like those of Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper after them, do not inhabit this realm in reality—but it is an ideal to which their various literary experiments aspired.