Page 151 - Gullivers

Edgeworth’s decision to fictionalise Ireland’s plight is due to her recognition of Swist’s literary strategy of the maxim taken to breaking point as a means of exposing the corruption at the heart of the matter. In Castle Rackrent we find the maxim of ‘the noble family’ and their ‘time-honoured roles’ as central to her indictment. The assumption that the former will honour the latter in the just management of their estates and tenants is exposed as absent, no longer the case in Ireland. These are the assumptions underpinning the feudal system of colonial rule, their absence in reality now responsible for the alarming decline in Ireland’s situation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. While in the novel it is the native Thady who assumes these to apply, it is very soon clear that no notion of a feudal relationship of reciprocal responsibilities ever enters the heads of the wastrel lords.
Edgeworth chronicles the demise of this clan through five generations
of libertine, feckless, alcoholic and addictive fools and in fact gives us a conte,
or short philosophical disputation designed to be instructive, on the failure
of the idea of the moral family and its honourable role. Edgworth embraces
the Swistian doubleness in the addition to her main narrative of an extensive series of allegedly scholarly footnotes. These too have their Swistian edge insofar as they are parodic and, in bold satire heighten the cultural, social and moral differences between the races. While the main narrative illustrates the customs and habits of Anglo-Irish lords, these footnotes ostensibly aim for a parity of values between the races (enshrined in the new Act of Union) by explaining native Irish traditions to the English.
The Swistian reverse anthropology practised by Edgeworth can be found later in the writing of George Bernard Shaw. Born in 1856 he was educated in Dublin but moved to London in the 1870s to pursue a career as a dramatist. Like Swist, Shaw experienced a sense of apartness, an awareness of his own cultural hybridity and, like Swist, he developed a reputation as an outspoken, eccentric outsider in both countries. As a dramatist and as a writer Shaw was concerned to educate
VII. The Influence of Jonathan Swist on Anglo-Irish Writing 145