The Big House: Space, Place, and Identity in Irish Fiction

How does Irish fiction stand out as being "Irish"? Irish novels are markedly Irish—from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), the "first truly Irish novel,"¹ to the recent fiction of Maeve Binchy and Niall Williams. On many occasions Ireland itself is presented as a character in the text, as in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), where Dublin and its people stand for the whole of Ireland, enhanced by the detail and exactness of the Dublin sites, streets, and characters. In his 1988 critical history of the Irish novel, James M. Cahalan points out that "the Big House novel was the most popular and enduring subgenre within the Irish novel, except for the Irish historical novel."² What is clear is that these fictions could not be set anywhere else; the action must take place in Ireland. With both these genres the emphasis falls upon the Irish element—either from the historical point of view or with a strong image (the Big House), which evokes the Protestant Ascendancy. The spatial frames of Irish fiction are set and determined, despite their occasional "disturbance" by visitors. Space and place in Irish fiction play an integral role in both the creation and rediscovery of identity, on both a personal and a national level.

Published in 1800, Castle Rackrent may be seen as a novella or tale, owing to its brevity. Its full and weighty title—Castle Rackrent, An Hibernian Tale: Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires, before the Year 1782—ironically backs up the case for the text as tale over novel. Regardless, Edgeworth's title draws attention to the book's "Irishness."³ You know it is set in Ireland and is about Irish people. Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) does this too, but in a more subtle and discreet way. Indeed, later Irish fiction—from Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte (1894) through James Joyce's fiction and on to William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983)—does not seem to feel the need to declare itself as Irish so early on. This change of tactic suggests that Irish fiction had finally found a secure footing in world literature, so it no longer needed to highlight itself as something different.

Despite this, Irish fiction is still "different" because of place and space. In Writing Women and Space (1994), Catherine Nash argues that in Irish fiction, place operates on three levels: "The abstract level of the nation . . . the visual relationship to place associated with the concept of 'landscape' [and] . . . the sensual lived experience of the local environment."⁴ Reinforcing this is Edmund Burke's argument that "National identity begins with local attachment and extends outward, encompassing neighborhood, province, and ultimately nation."⁵ Place is integral to the formation of national identity in any literature, but in Irish fiction place and space combine to create both a national and a personal identity.

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Following Nash's sense of moving inward from nation, it seems only appropriate to begin with language as a social constituent of national identity. Much Irish fiction is written in English, and most of the early texts were published in England first. The intended audience was English, yet the focus was heavily Irish. This is reflected in Edgeworth and Owenson in particular, with their awareness of writing for the Other. The preface to Castle Rackrent explains that Thady "tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom."⁶ Some concessions will be made to the English audience: the footnotes and editorial comments aid "the ignorant English reader" (CR 4) in his understanding. Edgeworth's wandering explanatory footnotes are taken up in The Wild Irish Girl, where they create a whole subplot, Owenson's, which threatens at times to take over from the main narrative. Owenson's reader is forced to choose between following the romantic narrative or indulging in...