37 pages • 1 hour read
Maria EdgeworthCastle Rackrent
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1800A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Pragmatism Versus Sentiment
Throughout the novel, Edgeworth reveals the tension between rationality and feeling. On the one hand, there is the editor’s effort to document the doings of an Anglo-Irish family with as much authenticity as possible and tell a “plain unvarnished tale”; however, in order to this, they must invoke the mouthpiece of Thady, who is characterized by his “partiality” to the Rackrent family (2, 3).
The fact that Thady is so emotional and commits such non-masculine acts such as falling into moods and crying makes him more authentic a narrator to the Enlightenment-period English reader, who maintains the stereotype that Englishmen are rational, whereas Celts are sentimental and erratic. Thady’s narration is full of affection for the Rackrent—and formerly O’Shaughlin—institution, which he is “proud to say” is one of “the most ancient in the kingdom” and extends to a strong favor of the family, even when their ineffective leadership is causing him and those like him to suffer (8). He clings to the idea that Sir Condy is ever the promising “white-headed boy” who sat on his knee as a child, even when his passivity, reliance on drink, and profligacy in spending are a liability (39). As a narrator, Thady is somewhat objective: he observes the Rackrents’ misdeeds and mismanagement, so that the reader can see them, but does not pass judgment. For example, he witnesses Sir Condy make the decision to toss a coin, to determine whether he should marry Isabella or Judy, and rather than judging him as foolish and irresponsible, he chooses to view him with tenderness, and as “an easy-hearted man that could not disoblige nobody” (44). It is therefore the reader’s responsibility to judge Sir Condy’s action and pass judgment on him.
Jason—and eventually Judy—are more rational in their judgments. Jason, for example, observes that Sir Condy will “never gainsay” or contradict his wife when she insists on more extravagant expenditure, “though he does not care the rind of a lemon for her all the while” (62). Unlike Thady, Jason can be explicit about Sir Condy’s weaknesses and uses the bold image of a discarded lemon rind to illustrate his awareness of Sir Condy’s indifference to his wife. Jason’s pragmatism, contradicts the English stereotype of Irish sentimentality and shows that Irishmen like him had the capacity to work against the inefficient, feudal-imposed system to their personal advantage.
Decadence
Decadence—defined as moral and cultural decline and characterized by immoderate luxury—is a crucial theme in Edgeworth’s novel. Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who changes his name to Rackrent in order to be able to retain his aristocratic privileges under the penal law, gets divorced from his Irish royal ancestry. Although Thady does not elaborate on this beyond saying that Sir Patrick took the enforced change “sadly to heart,” the reader can infer that Sir Patrick’s disassociation from his Irish identity and the assumption of an Anglo-Irish one is a foreign imposition, one which divorces him from his roots and somehow makes him less authentic (9).
This lack of authenticity means that Sir Patrick and his descendants are prone to a state of decadence: they superficially enjoy the privileges of aristocrats, while disowning their responsibilities to the land and their tenants. Though Sir Patrick is popular with both the rich and the poor, his acclaim stems from being a lavish entertainer and the biggest drinker in “the three kingdoms” (9). In successive generations, the decadence and divorce from the land increases; Kit, Irish only in his O’Shaughlin ancestry, is the typical absentee landlord, who conducts business through middlemen, while he imitates the English aristocracy and amuses himself in Bath. Even Thady can admit that Sir Kit “was a little too fond of play, and Bath, they say, was no place for a young man of his fortune, where there were so many of his countrymen too haunting him up and down, day and night, who had nothing to lose” (23). Losing touch with his land and tenants, Kit is distanced from their plight and has no qualms about exhorting higher rents from them.
Decadence culminates in the rule of Sir Condy, who drinks and denies the extent of his debts while others make decisions for him. It is symbolic that on several occasions, Sir Condy takes to his bed, when faced with troublesome decisions; his supine state is a physical manifestation of his passive character. For example, on moving to the hunter’s lodge, Thady finds Sir Condy “very low and in his bed” and he soon moves to console himself with the fantasy of his funeral (80). Decadence reaches its apotheosis when a ruler prefers to be celebrated in death, rather than in life.
The Wives Who Got Away: Feminine Suppression and Resilience
The women who marry into the Rackrent family are chosen for their dowries and the hope that they will contribute and overturn the family’s misfortune. However, in all three cases, Murtagh, Kit, and Condy’s respective brides outlive their husbands and not only do not provide heirs, and thereby continue the dynasty, but leave the estate, taking their fortunes with them. Sir Murtagh’s wife, the widow Skinflint, is “a great economist” and an austere, moralistic figure when it comes to maintaining control over her tenants (17). Nevertheless, she retains her “privy purse” for her own usage, makes money from the “weed ashes” (alkaline salts that act as fertilizer), and even takes money from the tenants for the office of speaking “to Sir Murtagh about abatements and renewals,” and thereby soften his litigating tendencies (17). She therefore operates as her own agent; when Sir Murtagh dies, she does not hesitate to take herself off with the “fine jointure settled upon her” (18). The final insult to Castle Rackrent is that she does not tip Thady for his service.
Sir Kit’s Jewish bride similarly escapes fully possessed of her riches after her husband’s death. However, her experience at Castle Rackrent is different, primarily on account of Anti-Semitism and her refusal to hand over her diamonds to Sir Kit. While Thady initially sees the bride, who is never named, as a token, rich, heretic Jew, he cannot help but notice that she entertained the notion that Sir Kit truly loved her, calling her “‘my pretty Jessica”’ after the character in The Merchant of Venice (31). While this panders to entrenched Anti-Semitic stereotypes, it is more affectionate than the term he subsequently calls her, “his stiff-necked Israelite,” and his treatment of her when she refuses to hand over her money (31). While Thady and the gentlemen who free her sympathize with her plight, she remains more than ever a curiosity and an outsider to them. “I considered her quite a foreigner, and not at all any longer part of the family,” Thady says, when, like her predecessor, she leaves without tipping the servants and prefers to spend the “rest of her days upon her own income and jewels in England” (36).
The final wife, Isabella Moneygawl, who marries Sir Condy, does not only leave the estate with her fortune intact and rejoin her own family after her separation from her husband, but greatly depletes the estate as well. “Well, thought I, to be sure if she’s no Jewish like the last, she is a mad woman for certain, which is as bad,” Thady surmises, following his first encounter with Isabella’s hysterics (47). Isabella is entirely self-serving in her dealings with the Rackrents; she marries Sir Condy because she enjoys rebelling against her family and basking in the aura of having made a “love match” (52). She proceeds to persuade her weak husband to spend money on a theatre and expensive livery, no matter the consequence to the estate. However, she leaves the situation for her old life and family of origin, when life at Castle Rackrent does not live up to her expectations. To audiences at the time, a separation or annulment between husband and wife would have been scandalous, and a further symbol of Castle Rackrent’s decadence. It is appropriate that she is carried off in a festive jaunt car and “disfigured” following her accident because she is disgraced by her own penchant for drama (96). Nevertheless, like the other brides, Isabella goes after her jointure and enters into a lawsuit with Jason over it.
Overall, the wives, who were temporarily a part of the Rackrent family fare better than the heirs themselves, whose fates are directly aligned to their mismanagement of their position and the estate.
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By Maria Edgeworth
