"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative

Critics of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements--gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony--or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady's "plain round tale" as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, "What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people." ¹ The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.

Thinking of Castle Rackrent as an Irish slave narrative helps illuminate Edgeworth's motivations as writer and historian: she records Thady's tale as instruction for an English readership just as American editors of slave narratives did for their northern readership, she mediates the narrative with an editorial presence, she establishes complex characterizations of both the peasantry and the Ascendancy class in the figures of Thady and Sir Condy, and she advocates a revised treatment of the English-ruled tenant system in Ireland. In this way, Edgeworth emerges as neither an apologist nor an abolitionist, as various critics have deemed her but, rather, as a reformist of a system that she understands to be profoundly flawed and unfair. Edgeworth pinpoints the fundamental injustice of the Ascendancy through the often comic voice of one of its oppressed, rendering the narrative both more powerfully authentic and less directly confrontational to its English readership than it might be in another form, and therefore ultimately more effective in conveying her reservations about the Ascendancy.

Contemporary critics argue that, without being slaves themselves, authors may create slave narratives in the genre of the "neoslave" narrative. Bernard Bell coined this term in order to classify Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) and Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) within the larger context of African-American Realism. ² In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy defines the genre: "Having fictional slave characters as narrators, subjects, or ancestral presences, the neo-slave narratives' major unifying feature is that they represent slavery as a historical phenomenon that has lasting cultural meaning and enduring social consequences." ³ Rushdy notes that neoslave narratives begin in the 1850s with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) but also include many modern texts, like William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Charles R. Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990). Although Rushdy does not mention whether or not Castle Rackrent's publication influenced any of these subsequent texts, as it did Scott's Waverley (1814) and Turgenev's Russian tales, ⁴ it is important to understand that a narrative written by a nonslave can be classified as a neoslave narrative. This essay, however, will focus on linking Castle Rackrent with traditional slave narratives.

It seems fitting to begin a comparison of Castle Rackrent and slave narratives with an analysis of the narrator, and even more fitting when the narrator has been so often analyzed as Thady Quirk. There are two main critical opinions...