Get Hold Of Castle Rackrent Composed By Maria Edgeworth Released As Readable Copy

inat a time when a novels characters and places were given names which, whilst being silly, were memorable and a helpful prompt to dozing readers like me.
You know exactly who and what they are about, Thus: Rackrent, Stopgap, Skinflint, Moneygawl, Here Maria Edgeworth portrays the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, of which she herself was a part, I read that she wrote as its/their Apologist, Really! To read this is to become further aware of the inevitability of the “Irish Troubles”,

Loyal Catholic subservience to these awful creatures, human in their failings like all of us, could only last so long, Some of this reads like very early Tom Sharpe, The Emerald Isle surely deserved better,

I now need a blast of Stiff Little Fingers, starting with “Alternative Ulster”, I think! There's a curious reference to Castle Rackrent in The Great Gatsby.
Nick invites his cousin Daisy over for tea, instructing her not to bring her husband, The plan is to privately reintroduce her to Gatsby, When Daisy greets Nick, she says "'Are you in love with me, . . or why did I have to come alone'" to which Nick responds, "'That's the secret of Castle Rackrent, '"

It seems Fitzgerald assumed hiss audience would be familiar with Maria Edgeworth's novel, originally published over a century earlier in, Daisy, at least, doesn't ask what the heck Nick is talking about, Then again, perhaps the allusion was meant to be unusual, inspiring readers to pick up the old classic to find out for themselves, Thats what happened to me,

Despite its Gothicsounding title, Castle Rackrent is a rather ordinary novel, Traces of melodrama are subdued and largely rooted in realism, The characters are flawed but not cartoonish, And that seems to be why it was so wildly popular, It is an Irish family saga, featuring wealthy characters, poor characters, poor characters who become wealthy and wealthy characters who become poor, I could go on, but in, notable author J, Fitzgerald Molloy described it best, Here's what he wrote when he reviewed the novel for a "Women Writers of the Victorian Era" segment in the Hartford Courant:

Castle Rackrent dealt with Irish life, and pictured it with relentless faithfulness.
. . In these pages the Irishman was shown to be neither the clown nor the buffoon he was represented in fiction and on the stage.
Maria Edgeworth depicted him as she saw him, not concealing his faults nor exaggerating his virtues, but setting both down, The knowledge of the scenes described, the human nature her characters displayed, were striking, They who read laughed and cried almost in the same breath, as indeed may those who read today, for her stories have that touch of genius which makes their interest evergreen.


Indeed, the novel's "evergreen" charm continues to be its dayinthelife education of what it was like to be Irish at the turn of the nineteenth century.
I was surprised to see how many everyday phrases rooted in Irish life continue to thrive, Many stereotypes are reaffirmed and debunked through the course of the novel, Yes, there's even several mentions of the allimportant potato,

As for why it shows up in Gatsby, I'm still mystified, As is the literary community it seems, There are some arguing that Castle Rackrent's ending is a mystery, so Nick is just saying their meeting is as unexplainable as that, But I didn't find the ending strange at all, It lacks a final "point" perhaps, but it is not unsatisfactory or particularly elusive,

Others have suggested the reference is meant to draw structural comparisons, since Nick and Thady the narrator of Castle Rackrent are both less socially significant than the characters they write about.


Then there are even theories that the reference is meant to be a nod to feminism, since Maria Edgeworth was a rare example of a successful female author at this point in history.


None of these explanations are particularly satisfying to me, Not that I have anything better to offer, The only alternative theory crossing my mind is that both Castle Rackrent and The Great Gatsby show characters who are frivolous with their money and quickly gain and lose wealth.
Perhaps Fitzgerald found some crossinspiration in that

In any case, though the Gatsby allusion remains a mystery to me, I'm glad Fitzgerald included it because otherwise I doubt I would have stumbled across this obscure classic.
In the end, I don't think it holds up as an enthralling read, butat only a hundred pagesit's an easily digestible way to gain Irish history in entertainment form.
Having finished my previous book at the beginning of a long train journey, and being mindful of not spending any more money and thanking the inventor of the Kindle for letting me carry a virtual library with me everywhere I go, I went for the free and fairly short Castle Rackrent thinking that a quick classic might help the journey to speed by.
But, while short, this bored the ass off me, helping make the journey feel like it was three times longer than it was and driving me to play on my phone as often as possible instead.


Told by Honest Thady, the house servant, Castle Rackrent tells the story of four generations of its owners, charting the rise and fall of their fortunes as the house falls into the hands of the family before passing back out and into those of Thadys son.
Fawning over each of its lords in the telling of their tales while making clear the various character defects that have caused their downfall pennypinching, litigious, degenerate, cruel, or just plain dense, each of the lords are utter knobs Thadys tale is apparently a satire that shouldnt be missed, according to those lists of books you should apparently read before you die.
I beg to differ.

It probably didnt help that Ive had a staggeringly good run of books this year, having enjoyed everything Ive read so far, as well as having also only just put down a much more entertaining book, but the only list that Castle Rackrent is gracing in my head is that of the most dull and underwhelming books Ive ever read.


sitelinkAlso posted at Cannonball Read Misogyny, It is unavoidable in literature of the earlyth century, not to mention later entries and even in contemporary efforts, But the degree to which it is presented and the extent to which it contaminates the narrative does vary from book to book, Few reach the amount of hatred for women across generations as does Castle Rackrent and of those that do, even fewer are penned by an actual woman.


In the Introduction, a woman scholar goes to some length to contrast Edgeworth's 'mannish' style to the more flowery and much better known Jane Austen.
And it is quite true that Edgeworth has no patience for incursions into romantic love, dashing beaus who are probably destitute but likely to be plot contrived into wealth by the end of the novel.
Edgeworth's concerns are much more realistic in that they revolve around rents, how these are extorted from the peasantry by increasingly more incompetent aristocrats.


Which is fine and dandy but I wonder if under this terminology of 'mannish' style the scholar was not hinting without, oddly enough, ever admitting to Edgeworth's profound and unrelenting hatred for women.
Much is said about the Rackrent men and how the novel analyses the decay of the family but precious little has been said about the role the women play in this.
This review will, therefore, focus on them,

Every single woman in this novel is portrayed as a shrew, which is already terrible, and culminates in their suffering which is extreme in some cases being dismissed altogether or treated as the stuff of jokes.
In a double whammy, it is a Jewish woman who gets the brunt of this gross prejudice, I do not expect a particularly tactful depiction of Jews in a book published inbut this may very well be one of the absolutely worst cases of criminally racially abusive depictions I have ever countered.
It is worth mentioning that centuries had passed since The Merchant of Venice whose portrayal of Jews is, while deeply problematic, considerably more nuanced than the horror that is Rackrent.



I will spoiler tag details of this abuse but I recommend prospective readers to read them anyway in order to have a clear idea of what they are getting themselves into.


Finding himself penniless, one of the Rackrents, Sir Kit, marries a wealthy Jewish woman.
Right away, our narrator who is supposed to be comedy relief in the way to sings the family's praises, reacts with disgust at having a dark skinned mistress.
An attempt is made at passing her off as Italian or Spanish, something suitably 'exotic' but still white, This fails and Thady finds himself fuming as does Sir Kit when he realizes his wife will not part with her money, What follows is what sets this novel from others in the way it sinks into the morass of Antisemitism and woman hating: Sir Kit shuts her up in her room for seven years.
Seven whole years

of isolation that this woman endures, seven years of the servants turning a blind eye and seven years of Thady approving of this regime because how else will Sir Kit get his money worth This criminal conduct only comes to an end because fortunately Sir Kit meets with an untimely death.
Thady still bad mouths her, though, because of course he does,

All this is already horrible, It does get even worse given that this story has a direct parallel that Edgeworth may or may not have been aware of in real life, in which a woman was kept captive in her own room for twenty whole years.


One can of course question to what extent Thady's views coincide with the author's, After all, he is one of those silly servants who ends up revealing the truth of the affair even as he does his best to counteract it.
The more Thady insists on the dignity of this hopeless family, the more the reader is supposed to see them as precisely that, hopeless.


But the bile against every single woman, even if it is just Thady's, receives no pushback, If this is deliberate and the reader is supposed to see that they are victims in this freak show is not at all clear.
If that was the idea, I will say that it failed grossly,

The last Lady Rackrent finally ups and leaves.
Before she can get very far, she suffers an accident in which she is dragged by an incoming carriage that collides with her own.
It is gruesome, leaving her maimed and in severe agony, No one cares, though. Thady hopes she will die so that his dear Master won't lose money on account of settlement that expires upon her death, Said Dear Master also does not care, at this point he is too enamored with the bottle, So this woman is tottering between life and death, at a time when anesthetics were hardly as effective as they are today, and the attitude is one of sheer indifferent mingled with malice.


Class, and not gender, seems to be lens through which this one is read, It is well worth mentioning that misogyny in this one is not only applicable to the higher classes, Peasant women are almost absent as characters but one does qualify as an actual character with lines, at the very end, only to also be shown to be every bit as worthless as every other female.


This is the sweetheart of the final Rackrent who, after the before mentioned wife is out of the picture, returns after being entirely absent throughout the marriage.
For a moment, this spoiled excuse for a man thinks that she may be coming back to him because she has loved him all these years.
But no. Because now she is old and thus gross and being old and gross she is also greedy and wants nothing to do with a nobleman who has lost his estate.
She has a point but is painted as the ultimate shrew that confirms what had been patently obvious from the start: women are just terrible creatures.


Misogyny is often presented in oblique ways, In Rackrent it is unabashedly endorsed, promoted and offered to the reader as the way of understanding women, .