Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent,
George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin, and
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September
For Mr. Derek Hand
Big House Seminar
Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama MA Program
University College Dublin
Fall 1998
The Anglo-Irish Big House is a historical structure that has been employed for various purposes in the literature of a variety of Irish authors. In reality, an Anglo-Irish Big House was big only in comparison to the peasant cottages and hovels dotting the Irish countryside; a Big House was a far cry from a castle or a palace, for example. And yet the Big House represented in a very concrete way the comparative wealth and power of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as a class as they spraddled the chasm between the colonized, impoverished, predominantly Catholic, Gaelic Irish and their colonizers, the imperialistic English. Due, no doubt, to the fascinating identity conflicts and unique social predicaments of the figurative space the Anglo-Irish occupied in Ireland, Irish authors have long been interested in depicting the literal space, the Big House, within which the Anglo-Irish lived. Perhaps the most intriguing conflicts and predicaments in both the historical and the literary Big Houses involve the uncertain opportunities for females dwelling within Anglo-Irish Ascendancy homes. Three novels dealing with the relative advantages and disadvantages of the women living within Anglo-Irish Big Houses at pivotal points in Irish history are Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, A Drama in Muslin by George Moore, and The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen.
Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth was first published in 1800 at the time of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. This book is generally acknowledged to be the first Anglo-Irish novel and is thus the logical starting point for a brief, chronological look at female characters in the Big House. The Big House in Castle Rackrent is not really a castle, but more of a once-grand country manor house which has degenerated a bit further under the ‘management’ of each successive heir of the Rackrent family. In the novel, the men of the family occupy center stage while the females are marginalized, which is revealing in and of itself, especially as the author is a female! What mention the narrator, Thady Quirk, longtime family Rackrent servant, makes of the females is sketchy and often descends into stereotypes. The first Rackrent female Thady mentions is the wife of Sir Murtagh Rackrent. This Rackrent wife was from the Skinflint family, and, according to how Thady describes her, she lived up to the family nomen! Thady makes it clear he did not care for this mean, stingy, tightfisted woman and that Sir Murtagh only married her for her money. In doing so, Thady says Sir Murtagh made a bad bargain for she outlived him. Thady rather racistly comments of his lady Rackrent that "...I always suspected she had Scotch blood in her veins; anything else I could have looked over in her from a regard to the family" (Edgeworth 68). She is unpopular with Thady and others for such actions as stopping the tradition of providing whiskey to the tenants on rent day. Lady Murtagh Rackrent, it would seem, made the most of her residency in Castle Rackrent; she had poor children spinning for her for free, she collected duty yarn and household linen from the tenants, and she extorted "presents" of food (fowl, eggs, honey, butter, meal, fish, game, bacon, and ham) from the tenants. In addition, she "had her privy purse - and she had her weed ashes, and her sealing money upon the signing of all the leases, with something to buy gloves besides; and besides again often took in money from the tenants, if offered properly, to speak for them to Sir Murtagh about abatements and renewals" (Edgeworth 71). After Murtagh Rackrent dies as a result of an argument with Lady Rackrent over which of the two of them had the right to the abatement money, a generous jointure is settled upon her, and she departs Castle Rackrent a much wealthier woman than when she arrived. Indeed, she made sure to take all her acquired possessions with her: "...for my late lady Rackrent had sent all the featherbeds off before her, and blankets and household linen, down to the very knife cloths" (Edgeworth 72). Clearly, Big House living agreed with her! She, as a materialistic and motivated person, found great opportunities as a woman to acquire greater wealth while dwelling in Castle Rackrent.
Sir Murtagh’s heir is his younger brother, Sir Kit Rackrent. Sir Kit wastes what money he has available to him, and decides to marry an heiress to replenish his cash flow. He writes home that "he was going to be married in a fortnight to the grandest heiress in England" (Edgeworth 75). The new Lady Rackrent arrives at Castle Rackrent "a stranger in a foreign country" (Edgeworth 76) only to be greeted with xenophobia and bigotry. Thady refers to his new mistress as a "heretic blackamoor" and mocks her ignorance of such commonplace (in Ireland) Irish things as turf and bogs. Sir Kit does not mind her ignorance of Irish ways nor her Jewish heritage, but he is livid when she refuses to turn over to him her diamonds as she evidently had promised to do before their marriage. In retaliation, Sir Kit requires the cook to have "always sausages, or bacon, or pig meat in some shape or other" (Edgeworth 79) upon the table, blatantly disrespecting kosher prohibitions against pork. As a result, "my lady shut herself up in her own room, and my master said she might stay there, with an oath: and to make sure of her, he turned the key in the door, and kept it ever after in his pocket. We none of us ever saw or heard her speak for seven years after that" (Edgeworth 79). Sir Kit confines his wife to her chambers and then conducts himself as if he were a bachelor again, having frequent parties and dances at Castle Rackrent. The people of the countryside knew of her incarceration but did not speak up for her for fear of having to duel with the notoriously hot-blooded Sir Kit. "Jew Lady Rackrent", as Thady calls this mistress, took ill whilst under lock and key, and Sir Kit, anxious to marry more money, spread the word around that his present wife was near death. Amazingly, he had three heiresses vying for the honor of being the next Lady Rackrent, notwithstanding their knowledge of his vile treatment of the present Lady Rackrent! As a result of the rivalry amongst the three prospective next Lady Rackrents, Sir Kit was mortally wounded in a duel with one of their male relatives. Thus was this Lady Rackrent freed from the - for her - extremely oppressive life she led in Castle Rackrent.
Sir Kit’s heir was Sir Condy Rackrent. Sir Condy has strong feelings for Thady’s grandniece, Judy McQuirk, but marries an heiress, Isabella Moneygawls, primarily because her father’s refusal to consent to the match piques Sir Condy’s familial pride. Her father is so opposed to the match that he locks Isabella up in her room, which has the effect of convincing her to elope with Sir Condy. Isabella Rackrent is the first of the Rackrent wives to be given a proper name. She is an amateur actress and, after quoting Shakespeare, is taken by Thady to be quite mad! She lavishes her limited personal fortune on Castle Rackrent, and she and Sir Condy lead a very fancy existence at first. Once they have wasted all her money on extravagant living and also gone through everything that Sir Condy can borrow, Lady Isabella is no longer happy being mistress of Castle Rackrent. For her, the Big House and the aristocratic name mean nothing without the high style of living to which she is accustomed. In the end, she resolves to return to her father’s house; fate, however, does not allow this, as she is gruesomely dragged to death in a freak roadside accident on her way home. For her, Castle Rackrent was a hollow opportunity that became trap-like once she discovered things were not what they originally appeared. She accuses Sir Condy of obtaining her hand in matrimony under false pretenses when she says, "And did not you use me basely...not to tell me you were ruined before I married you?" (Edgeworth 102). Evidently the illusion of wealth is a less forgivable fraud than the illusion of love he perpetrated to win her!
The three Rackrent wives presented in this novel and discussed here have radically different experiences presiding as mistress of Castle Rackrent, yet all three Lady Rackrents have one main thing in common: their happiness at Castle Rackrent depended upon wealth - the making of it, the relinquishing of it, the evaporation of it. As Judy McQuirk states dismissively when she has the opportunity to become the next Lady Rackrent after Sir Condy has lost everything: "Why, what signifies it to be my Lady Rackrent, and no castle? sure what good is the car, and no horse to draw it?" (Edgeworth 118). It seems that both the Rackrent wives and the Rackrent estate exist merely to provide expendable income for the Rackrent heirs, much as Ireland seemed to exist in British Imperial minds merely to provide exports for British consumption, regardless of the exploitation and unhappiness of the colonized Irish. Thus does financially motivated marital union mirror the Act of Union in this novel. The ability or inability of any individual Lady Rackrent to establish financial independence within the confines of this Big House would seem to determine her happiness or unhappiness as a mistress of Castle Rackrent.
Mrs. Barton is the mistress of Brookfield, the Anglo-Irish Big House central to the novel A Drama in Muslin, first published in 1886, by George Moore. This novel is set amidst the turmoil of the land agitation, which threatened to eliminate the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and their Big Houses at any moment in an outbreak of chaotic agrarian violence. Brookfield, originally a farm building, has been restyled by Mr. Barton with the addition of a verandah into a would-be Italian villa set in the countryside of Galway! Mrs. Barton has carved a life for herself at Brookfield that she finds quite satisfying. She lives in mutually amicable disinterest with her malleable and non-interfering husband, has the neighboring Lord Dungory paying court to her daily, and enjoys the ego-flattering attentions of droves of men attracted to her coquettish wiles at social functions. She is perfectly happy and content in her Big House, except for one pressing problem: she must get her two daughters married off and settled into Big Houses of their own! Mrs. Barton anticipates no problems marrying off the younger, Olive, who, though vapid, is superficially attractive enough to be the belle of the season; looks are of great importance in the marriage market. Alice, the older daughter, is very intelligent but plain, and Mrs. Barton despairs of ever "unloading" her. In fact, Mrs. Barton is very disparaging towards Alice, "in whom she saw nothing but failure, and in the end certain spinsterhood" (Moore 120). Mrs. Barton values her daughters according to their potential to bring off a "successful" (i.e. moneyed and/or titled) match in the marriage "game". The only opportunity for women, according to Mrs. Barton, is marriage. Mrs. Barton asserts
A woman is absolutely nothing without a husband: if she does not wish to pass for a failure she must get a husband: and upon this all her ideas should be set...Keep on trying, that is my advice to all young ladies: try to make yourselves agreeable, try to learn how to amuse men. Flatter them...Don’t waste your time thinking of your books, your painting, your accomplishments...A husband is better than talent, better even than fortune...with a husband a woman she can rise to any height. Marriage gives a girl liberty, gives her admiration, gives her success; a woman’s whole position depends upon it (Moore 137).
Alice is well aware that her plain looks do not offer her much of a chance at marriage and therefore considers her options as a single woman and despairs that she will lead "an uneventful life dribbled away in maiden idleness" (Moore 58). She longs for some sort of purpose, some calling, some career outside of marriage to give her life value and meaning: "Give me a duty, give me a mission to perform, and I will live! ...but, oh, save me from this gray dream of idleness!" (Moore 98). It is not until Alice learns she can make a useful living and support herself by writing that she finds any consolation for her single status: "Joy bubbled in her brain. To know that she could do something, that she would not prove a drag, a hindrance upon the wheel of life, was an effervescent delight" (Moore 233). In the end, Alice’s sterling qualities are more important than her plain appearance, for she earns the respect and love of a Dr. Reed whose marriage proposal she gladly accepts. Against all odds, she is rescued from spinsterhood, and she is "conscious of many sensations of triumph; sensations of which she was ashamed, but which she could not entirely repress" and exults "Yes, I shall be married, and those girls will envy me; they who always sneered at me, who said I was a plain girl who would never be able to do anything for herself. Well, I shall be married before them after all" (Moore 312). Alice does not allow her overbearing snob of a mother to squelch Dr. Reed’s honorable intentions towards her as Mrs. Barton squelched Captain Hibbert’s honorable intentions towards Olive. And Alice takes pride in the fact that she will be earning almost as much for their household as her husband with her writing career - a very modern woman! Alice deliberately chooses to leave the Big House of her youth and move to England where she will live in much more modest yet much more satisfying, for her, conditions. A girl like her has no future in a Big House, so she very pragmatically leaves that life behind her.
Olive, on the other hand, is convinced by her mother to sacrifice her love for untitled, unlanded, unmoneyed, and therefore inconsequential Captain Hibbert to the goal of "catching" a marquis. Mrs. Barton, for all practical purposes, attempts to prostitute her younger daughter’s looks in return for a title; when that does not seem to be working, she panders for Olive by attempting to buy the impoverished marquis with money. She most unsubtlely informs him that: "Olive will have twenty thousand pounds paid down on her wedding day" (Moore 211). But Mrs. Barton and Olive both have their hopes of a coronet for Olive humiliatingly dashed when the marquis chooses a less attractive and penniless girl to marry instead. Olive is then paraded by her mother before an increasingly less prestigious array of potential husbands, much to the girl’s misery and sense of failure for not "hooking" a husband, any husband, let alone a prize husband worthy of "the belle not of one but of two seasons" (Moore 271). In the end, Olive flees Brookfield, the Big House marriage market, and Ireland to seek sanctuary with Alice and her husband in London, confessing to her sister, "I am so miserable at home; I can’t tell you how unhappy I am. I know I shall never be married, and the perpetual trying to make up matches is sickening. Mamma will insist on riches, position and all that sort of thing - those kind of men don’t want to get married - I am sick of going out; I won’t go out any more" (Moore 328). Beauty was not enough to get Olive a husband, and being an old maid in a Big House makes a woman desperately useless, financially draining on her relations, and marginalized in a highly unfulfilling space. Olive’s opportunities as an unskilled, unintelligent, basically useless spinster are not much greater in England than in Ireland, but at least she will be spared the degradation of all her neighbors and acquaintances in Ireland sneering at her for the rest of her life, although that would be poetic justice, after all, as even at the end of the book all the other unmarried girls are being "jeeringly alluded to by Olive" (Moore 329).
In A Drama in Muslin, the happiness of the three Barton women depends upon their skill and success in working the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy marriage market. Mrs. Barton did well for herself and is content to live her Big House life of wealth and privilege, lording it over the peasantry and other "lesser" folk. The book suggests that that lifestyle may not be an option for her kind for much longer due to land unrest in Ireland. Her Big House pretensions may soon be as ridiculous and out of place in Ireland as an Italian villa would be in Galway! Moore himself was an Irish landlord and knew what a precarious existence that was getting to be. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy’s position is quite tenuous at this point in history, and "An entire race, a whole caste, saw themselves driven out of their soft, warm couches of idleness, and forced into the struggle for life" (Moore 95). Mrs. Barton has blinders on and refuses to acknowledge that the true threat to her lifestyle requires greater social flexibility. By insisting on maintaining strict Anglo-Irish Ascendancy social hierarchies, she, in effect, ends her Big House’s line - no new generations descended from Bartons will ever live in Brookfield. Her daughters, in contrast, are forced to contend with the non-deniable changes underway in Irish society. Poor Olive, despite her beauty, has little chance of survival on her own. Like the Anglo-Irish in general, she has no skills to survive in a radically changed society: "What could they do with their empty brains? What could they do with their feeble hands?" (Moore 95). Alice is able to achieve a happy and successful life, but she has to leave the Big House and Anglo-Irish society - and, indeed, Ireland itself - behind her to do so. By leaving, both daughters escape what they perceive as the constraints and lack of opportunity for women of the Big House.
Escaping from the Big House is the central preoccupation of Lois Farquar, protagonist of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September, which is set in the middle of the Anglo-Irish War in the early 1920’s. Lois is living at Danielstown, an Anglo-Irish Big House owned by her uncle, Richard Naylor, and his wife Myra. An orphan, Lois has reached young adulthood and is at a loss for what to do in life. Unlike her aunt Myra, who sees no sense of the absurd or the futile in continuing to live "on the hyphen", as is said, of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy tradition in the midst of the Anglo-Irish war, Lois senses her alienation from both sides in the conflict and the impending doom the conflict spells for those not solidly aligned with one side or the other. The Anglo-Irish are neither totally Irish or English, and they are therefore mistrusted and harassed by both the Irish Republican Army and the Black and Tans. As a class, they have more in common with the English officers sent in to subdue Ireland. Yet they identify themselves (and are identified by the English) as being distinctly Irish in stark contrast to what being English is evidently conceived as. Lois is not comfortable, metaphorically or physically, dwelling in a Big House, and yet she does not know where to go instead. With Ireland at war with Great Britain, she - like the rest of the Anglo-Irish - has no real home on either side of the Irish Sea.
Lois feels an emptiness at Danielstown in both herself and the Big House: "She and the home surroundings still further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack" (Bowen 166). After a harrowing confrontation with an IRA gunman, Lois contemplates her position in the Big House: "She felt quite ruled out, there was nothing at all for her here. She had better be going - but where?" (Bowen 125). In explaining to Marda, a visitor to Danielstown whom Lois admires greatly, why she has stayed at Danielstown despite her dissatisfaction with life in a Big House, she says, "I like to be in a pattern...I like to be related, to have to be what I am. Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely" (Bowen 98). Marda responds that Lois can always fall back on the stereotypical female role and be a wife and mother. Lois retorts, "I hate women. But I can’t think how to begin to be anything else...But I would hate to be a man. So much fuss about doing things" (Bowen 99). Lois is having great difficulty defining herself as an individual, as someone outside of her inherited Anglo-Irish position of privilege, which she realizes is under siege. About her situation, she says, "It’s just that I feel so humiliated the whole time" (Bowen 187). Talking about her family, she says, "What they never see...is, that I must do something" (Bowen 186). But what? At various times in the novel, she considers these options: an affair with an older married man visiting Danielstown who had been in love with her mother, art school, acting, a trip to America, language lessons, a trip abroad, and marriage to a young English officer of her acquaintance. She seems committed to that future until her aunt interferes with the engagement and, subsequently, her English beau is shot down by Irish republicans.
While she recognizes the social status and privilege of being born to money, Lois is completely unhappy about her lack of purpose living in the Big House. She needs a role to play. As the reader learns early on in the novel, "She had never refused a role. She could not forgo that intensifying of her personality..." (Bowen 32). In the end, she leaves to tour France to improve her French. Her actions make no big statement; she slips out of the Big House and the novel never having resolved her lack of identity or purpose. In her absence, Danielstown is burned down by the IRA, which was the inevitable result of the family entertaining officers of the British Empire so blatantly, with Lois even dancing down the avenue leading to the house with them. Lois had stated earlier in the novel that she hoped Danielstown would be torched: "She hoped that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call..." (Bowen 98). This is similar to her desire "to be alone, but to be regretted" (Bowen 32). The house flames; Lois merely fades. Lois escapes the Big House and, in fact, outlives it, but her options outside of the Big House are very uncertain. As someone who grew up in an Anglo-Irish Big House herself during this time period, Elizabeth Bowen was well aware of this. Like the Anglo-Irish as a class, it is highly unclear what role Lois will play in the society of an Irish Republic...and there is no longer any safe Big House to which to return.
In The Last September, Lois Farquar’s happiness depends upon finding a role to play, a position for herself in Irish society. Traditional Big House roles for Anglo-Irish Ascendancy women are not an option for her; the Big House will not survive the birth of the Irish Republic, and Lois perceives this. Lois’s sense of alienation and purposelessness is representative of the Anglo-Irish class as a whole having had their homes burnt down and their privileged position in the Irish social hierarchy demolished. A Big House family background was a definite liability rather than an asset for a woman in Ireland at this time in history; the Countess Markievitz was an anomaly. Lois’s inability to find a satisfactory role for herself outside of the Big House results in her quiet departure from Ireland, much as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy is removed from power in Ireland with barely a whimper. It is her inability to transcend her Anglo-Irish identity which deprives her of a space in the new Ireland to be built.
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September all present Anglo-Irish women living within Big Houses. Whether a woman perceives her position in the Big House as an advantage or a disadvantage seems to be determined by whether her status would be improved or damaged by the fall of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy social hierarchy. Those who profit from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy system, such as Lady Murtagh Rackrent, Mrs. Barton, and Myra Naylor, obviously see life as mistress of a Big House as a position of privilege. Those who suffer due to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy system, such as Lady Kit Rackrent, Olive and Alice Barton, and Lois Farquar, see the Big House as imprisoning them, either literally or figuratively. Interestingly, the Big House tradition in literature emigrated with the Irish to America, where deep South plantation novels resurrect Big House themes. In probably the most famous American Big House novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, set in Georgia in the second half of the 1800’s during the American Civil War, it is not an Anglo-Irishman or any other white Anglo-Saxon Protestant who builds the Big House plantation the novel is centered around, but rather Gerald O’Hara, of Irish Catholic peasant stock. Gerald O’Hara makes his fortune in the New World, marries an aristocratic Southern woman, and builds the ultimate Big House, a fabulous plantation he names Tara, in honor of the seat of the high kings of Ireland. Black slaves, rather than Gaelic peasants, are at the bottom of the Big House/plantation social hierarchy here. It is intriguing that Gerald O’Hara’s eldest daughter, the unforgettable Scarlett O’Hara, will hang on to her family’s Big House by any means necessary. She lies, cheats, steals, and even kills to keep Tara! Like Lady Murtagh Rackrent, Mrs. Barton, and Myra Naylor, she is in a position of extreme privilege as long as her Big House society is intact; but, unlike those women, she is able to adjust to changes in her society in order to hang on to Tara. She is socially flexible and astute, like Alice Barton, and she is able to do what Lois Farquar is not - Scarlett creates a new role for herself and a new context for Tara in the post-war era. In many ways, I find Gone with the Wind and Scarlett O’Hara to be the most memorable novel and heroine of the Big House genre, eclipsing Castle Rackrent, A Drama in Muslin, and The Last September and their female characters in certain aspects.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Last September. London: Random House, 1998.
Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
Moore, George. A Drama in Muslin. London: Colin Smythe Ltd, 1993.