Serving the Storyline of the Novel: The Powerful Role of the Feudal Servant-Narrator
This thesis addresses issues of class as represented through the narrative agency exercised by the servant-narrator in Castle Rackrent and Wuthering Heights. Thady Quirk and Ellen Dean are servant-narrators who strategically use feigned allegiance, astute perception, and selective disclosure to wield power over the lives of their masters. These “arts of subordination” allow the servant-narrator to tell his or her own life narrative, while appearing to share the masters’ memoirs. While both servant-narrators are motivated by economic means, Ellen Dean’s involvement throughout Wuthering Heights is further complicated by her desires of emotional connection. However, each servant-narrator achieves his or her goals by manipulating the events and relationships that constitute his or her masters’ lives.
The unappeasable host : studies in Irish identities
The cracked looking-glass of a servant - inventing the colonial novel Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan - legality versus legitimacy fiery shorthand - the Banim brothers at work self-fashioning as pseudo-history - Roger O'Connor's "Chronicles of Eri" Sheridan Le Fanu and the Unmentionable that rooted man - Yeats, "John Sherman" and "Dhoya" long division in the long schoolroom - among school children intelligible on the Blasket Islands - Yeats's "King Oedipus", 1926 merging into art - "The Death of Cuchulain" and the death of Yeats living in the margin - Synge in Aran words of mouth - Joyce and the oral tradition Mr Joker and Dr Hyde - Joyce's politic polyglot polygraphs in the heart of the Theban necropolis - mummyscripts and mummiescrypts in "Finnegan's Wake" the burning roof and tower - identity in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Last September" Elizabeth Bowen - rebuilding the big house a ghost of style exorcising the Anglo-Irish past.
Inter-Nationalism: "Castle Rackrent" and Anglo-Irish Union
By the Act of Union of 1800, Ireland merged with Great Britain to form one United Kingdom. To mark this change, a proclamation issued the day the Union took effect added the Cross of St. Patrick to the British flag, where it appears to this day as a red cross saltire (X-shaped cross) broken up, or "surmounted," by the Cross of St. George (Barraclough 22). This choice of the Cross of St. Patrick to supplement the flag was "curious," as the editor of Flags of the World mildly puts it, since "the Irish have never used this cross as a national emblem," preferring the shamrock or the golden harp. In fact, because St. Patrick was not a martyr, he "was not entitled to a cross as his badge" at all. It is true the Cross of St. Patrick was not concocted on the spot; at the same time, however, it was not exactly the Irish themselves who had invented it, but rather, "the powerful family of the Geraldines, whose presence in Ireland as representatives of Henry II was due to the efforts of the English sovereign to subjugate the country" (Barraclough 22). The ironies accumulate rapidly here. First, in claiming to add something Irish to the ostensibly British flag, the proclamation in fact added something AngloIrish. Second, by giving St. Patrick a cross and thereby making him, as it were, a posthumous martyr, the new flag changed-murdered-something Irish. Third, in the process of symbolizing a larger British national identity, it created a symbol of Irish identity. Fourth, also in the process of symbolizing this larger identity, the changing of a flag that had been the same for almost two hundred years (since 1606) made newly visible the constituent parts of the flag (that is, the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew) and, by reducing the amount of white (which is to say, of the Scottish cross) and breaking up the Cross of St. Patrick, the new flag visually and cognitively foregrounded the English cross. In claiming to make Irishness part of a larger Britishness, then, the modification of the Union Jack simultaneously ignored, killed, and created Irishness; equated Irishness with Anglo-Irishness; and emphasized Englishness. The vehicle and emblem for these seemingly contradictory maneuvers is a cross or X. A similarly curious X-shaped cross appears as the only non-linguistic, graphic mark in Castle Rackrent, a novel by the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth which was published in 1800, on the eve of Union. An Irish landlord, Sir Conolly Rackrent, decides to flip a coin to determine whom he will marry: Isabella Moneygawl, the daughter of a neighboring landlord, or Judy M'Quirk, a local peasant. Taking a halfpenny,' Sir Condy first "makes a cross on the smooth side," saying "Judy M'Quirk, her mark" (45). An "editorial" footnote inserted into the text at this point informs the reader that "It was the custom in Ireland for those who could not write, to make a cross to stand for their signature, as was formerly