The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 by Christina Morin

Author:Christina Morin [Morin, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Gothic & Romance, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, History, Europe, Ireland, General, Renaissance, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Social History
ISBN: 9781526122315
Google: W3K5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-05-11T00:39:49+00:00

3

Gothic geographies: the cartographic consciousness of Irish gothic fiction

Theodore Melville's The White Knight, or the monastery of Morne (1802) provides both a useful instance of the convergence of regional, national, and gothic literary forms considered in Chapter 2 and a helpful starting point with which to discuss the geographic settings of Romantic-era Irish gothic literature. Published just two years after Castle Rackrent (1800), The White Knight presents itself as a quasi-historical account of Irish antiquity and is set entirely in Ireland, with the main activity of the tale occurring in fifteenth-century Munster and Ulster. Melville's preface explains that its subject matter – the White Knight himself – was a real person: ‘There were formerly three branches of the family of Fitzgerald, distinguished in Ireland by the titles of the White Knight, the Knight of Kerry, and the Knight of Glynn. The first, which I have chosen as the subject of the following pages, is now extinct’.1 The narrative that follows clearly aligns itself with a Radcliffean tradition of gothic romance in its prominent use of the ‘explained supernatural’ and its tale of abduction, imprisonment, and thwarted love centred in the secret, subterranean passageways of Glanville Castle, the Castle of Dromore, and the nearby Monastery of Morne. At the same time, it bears a significant resemblance to the regional and national fictions of Edgeworth and Owenson. Its conclusion, envisioning the amicable end to the violent clan warfare at the heart of its narrative, maps the political onto the private in the symbolic marriages of once feuding families, thus evoking the nationally significant unions associated with the national tale. Similarly, its attempts to inform its (English) readers about Ireland and its people through lengthy descriptions of Irish landscape as well as explanatory details about Irish language and folklore, recall Castle Rackrent's glossary and foreshadow Owenson's dense use of topographical and antiquarian material to establish Ireland's cultural significance in The wild Irish girl (1806).

As in the cases of Roche's The children of the abbey (1796) and Cullen's The castle of Inchvally (1796), The White Knight has arguably been neglected because of its association with popular gothic romance.2 The novel is therefore seen not to seriously engage in the kind of cultural nationalist work associated with Edgeworth, Owenson, and even Melville's later novel, The Irish chieftain, and his family (1809).3 The flaws in such arguments are discussed in Chapter 2. Melville's Irish setting reinforces the claims made in Chapter 2 about the formal fluidity of national, regional, and gothic forms; the novel's publication so soon after Castle Rackrent's draws attention to contemporary and earlier instances of Irish writing about Ireland – many of them gothic – that situate Edgeworth's text as part of a long-standing tradition of Irish engagement with specifically Irish material.4

If The White Knight's resolute attention to Irish geography encourages us to see a longer, larger trend in Irish literary representations of Ireland, it also highlights some of the problematic issues associated with Romantic-era depictions of the country, especially those composed with an English audience in mind.

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