Text and Textile in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl

Over the last decade and a half, Sydney Owenson’s 1806 novel The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale has attracted a substantial body of criticism—more than any other item in Owenson’s oeuvre.¹ While acknowledging this work and the possible peril of wild Irish girl fatigue, this essay intervenes in the current array of readings by demonstrating how Owenson’s text reflects her materialist thinking. Though she often presented herself and was viewed as the epitome of a hopelessly frothy Romantic nationalism communing with the spirit of the Celts, Sydney Owenson was a serious materialist.² She traced this philosophical bias to the precocity of her younger years: “before I was fourteen,” she wrote in her autobiographical memoir, The Book of the Boudoir (1829), “I had read Locke (which chance threw my way in a parlour window).” Maintaining that “No sophism, however difficult of detection, can supersede the sensible conviction of external reality,” Owenson, with cheerful derision, challenged the validity of Idealism over matter expounded by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley: “Berkeley himself did not run his head against a post” (1.47; 1.III).³

This preoccupation with materialism manifests itself in The Wild Irish Girl as Owenson’s narrative interweaves Irish history with the physical world of material objects—primarily textiles and clothing. Sustained tropes around such items in Owenson’s third work of fiction become instrumental in reupholstering Ireland’s degraded national image, providing the means for a sophisticated re-appropriation of Britain’s image of its own imperial might and Ireland’s backwardness. Clothing and textiles provide a kind of master trope for such a re-appropriation and transformation, not only because Owenson interpreted them as intrinsic to conceptions of Irish corporeality and subjecthood, but also because of their very material nature—their ability to be circulated and exchanged, re-stitched and refashioned. What enthralls Owenson about those material items is not so much their physicality, but their workability—the ways in which they are malleable, portable, and transformable—workable as much by maverick Irish writers as by British imperialists.

In exploring materiality in The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson ranges widely, but she begins from two starting points. She uses her country’s historical prowess in textile manufacture to demonstrate how Ireland could take its place as part of Europe and the world rather than linger as a lesser dominion of Britain. Additionally, she takes as a context resistance against inequitable restraints on Ireland’s textile industry. As voiced by Jonathan Swift through to the Earl of Charlemont, leader of the Irish Volunteers in 1782, such resistance commandeered campaigns to buy Irish textiles and to wear domestically produced clothes. Always cognizant of the evolving historical struggles of Ireland’s textile trade, Owenson reflects on colonial proscriptions against “native” attire, romantically reinvents ideas of ancient dress associated with rebellion, and interprets antiquarian lore through clothing. As a post–1800 Act of Union novel inhabiting a world in which strictures on free trade have been lifted, The Wild Irish Girl focuses attention more on cultural than economic concerns. Owenson, however, perceived points of contiguity between the two, a perception exemplified most dramatically by her deployment of clothing and textiles to purvey the Celtic chic of The Wild Irish Girl’s heroine, Glorvina. In adopting that character’s Celtic dress as part of a self dramatization after writing the national tale, Owenson fused her public self-fashioning with her encouragement of the Irish textile industry.

The Wild Irish Girl not only thematizes the task of re-working materials, it concretely performs that task, weaving the old—voluminous footnotes and intertexts—with a new story line. These Owenson incorporates into her narrative not to channel British cultural authority, but rather to critique and transform it, as she interlaces historical and social context for tropes around textiles and clothing with character development in her narrative—notably the re-education of the novel’s protagonist, Horatio Mortimer—whom, unlike Berkeley, she forces to “run his head against a post” of tangible Irish life. Refuting accusations that Owenson’s copious...