Never Getting Home: The Unfulfilled Promise of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee

SPENCER JACKSON Never Getting Home: The Unfulfilled Promise ofMaria Edgeworth’s The Absentee I N HER FOUR EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRISH TALES, MARIA EDGEWORTH appears to show the rational and ethical necessity of England and Ireland forming a cosmopolitan union in accordance with the Enlightenment val­ ues of tolerance and rational self-interest.1 Published eleven years after the Union of 1801, The Absentee seems to envision the redemption of the Irish peasantry and the English colonial project through the restoration of the Clonbrony family to their proper home or place among their Irish tenants. Yet the culmination of The Absentee, like Edgeworth’s other Irish tales, ul­ timately exemplifies the logic of the uncanny, which Freud articulates in his seminal essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” in that the final, seemingly most reas­ suring moment of the novel, harbors a dangerous secret behind its homely or heimlich appearance.2 Through the failed culmination of The Absentee’s redemptive promise, Edgeworth not only demonstrates the impossibility of the cosmopolitan ideal, but also the hidden nationalism that grounds Im­ manuel Kant’s original vision ofthe cosmopolitan end of history. By locat­ ing the fulfillment of Ireland’s tumultuous past within a final cosmopolitan union, Edgeworth seeks to exorcise the ghostly presence of rebellion within early nineteenth-century Irish society. To conduct this exorcism, Edgeworth employs the strategy of conjuration that, as Derrida has noted 1. These include Castle Rackrent in 1800, Ennui in 1809, The Absentee in 1812, and Ormond in 1817. Although not a tale, Irish Bulls, the essay that she composed with her father in 1805, could be added to this list since it too seeks to promote the capacity ofsympathy as the foun­ dation of any real union. 2. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in Writings on Art and Literature, trans, under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) 505 506 SPENCER JACKSON in Specters of Marx, always fails since it invokes or conjures up the very specter that it seeks to conjure away.3 The subtle references to rebellion and cultural difference that fracture the culminating moment of The Absentee mark the impossibility ofthe West’s secular crusade to reach the end ofhis­ tory by transforming the global multitude into obedient citizens of a single, permanent state. This vision ofa perpetual present safe from the conflicts of the past as well as the future is at the heart of Edgeworth’s national tale; it is, however, a heart that is haunted by everything it claims to have over­ come. Despite her more explicit engagement with intellectual figures closer to home, such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, Edgeworth’s vision of a mutually beneficial union of Ireland and England reflects the political and moral tenets of Kant, with whose work she was at least familiar.4 As Mari­ lyn Butler emphasizes in her literary biography, Edgeworth bears the “in­ tellectual stamp ofa generation, or halfa generation, earlier than that ofher own early adulthood” and “belongs, intellectually as well as aesthetically, with the generation which matured before the French Revolution.”5 Since there is evidence that Edgeworth’s younger step-brother Francis Beaufort knew Kant’s work well, it is probable that the Edgeworth family library in­ cluded some of his major works, beginning with A Critique of Pure Reason (1781).6 While Edgeworth’s relationship to the work of Kant may still ap­ pear distant, her more overt engagement with the work of Adam Smith points to the correspondence between his concepts of sympathy and the free market and Kant’s ideas of the moral imperative and the cosmopolitan end of history. The protagonists in both of Edgeworth’s Irish tales Ennui and Ormond must learn to sympathize not upon the basis of “good feeling,” but rather upon “principle,” since it only can guarantee any “security for the future.”7 Edgeworth’s lesson in rational sympathy draws upon both Smith’s reformulation of sympathy as an intellectual exercise in which the 3. Jacques Derrida, Specters ofMarx, trans, Peggy Kamut (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006). See pages 50—58 for a discussion...