New Hibernia Review

It is a critical commonplace to read Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809) as national tales that use allegories of marriage to model a successful reconciliation between England and Ireland in the aftermath of the Act of Union. The national tale was a clearly political mode, one with the primary goal of representing Ireland anew to a class of English readers who saw the Irish as hopelessly backward and savage, and thereby articulating a model for the Union on the level of sentiment. This aim was hardly covert: it is openly declared, for example, on the title page of The Wild Irish Girl, which quotes Fazio Delli Uberti’s Travels Though Ireland in the 14th Century: “This race of men, tho’ savage they may seem / The country, too, with many a mountain rough, / Yet are they sweet to him who tries and tastes them.”¹

The link between this project of propaganda and the Act of Union was clearly recognized at the time—perhaps most explicitly by Walter Scott, who wrote that Edgeworth’s depictions of Ireland “have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.”² In both The Wild Irish Girl and Ennui, national reconciliation is symbolized by the marriage between the British narrator and an Irish woman. The narrative preceding the weddings serves to enumerate various lessons about Irish culture and history, and to illustrate how an Englishman can come to love the country and the people. Philosophical theories of “sympathy” and fellow-feeling— particularly those of Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—provide the framework for this process.

The two novels are often read together: their plots are noticeably similar (even within the subgroup of national tales that end in marriage), making the [End Page 127] differences between them appear as explicit markers of divergent approaches to the broader political problems that they address. Indeed, Robert Tracy went so far as to suggest that Ennui was written, or at least revised, in response to the massive success of The Wild Irish Girl.³ Various commentators, including Tracy, Ina Ferris, Seamus Deane, Julia Wright, Katie Trumpener, and Claire Connolly have examined the political implications of both works, particularly as they relate to the colonial context: they consider what the novels suggest about the legitimacy of power, or the intrinsic national character of the Irish, or how they reflect on their historical moment. Despite this sustained critical attention, the ways in which these two novels engage with theoretical frameworks of fellow-feeling have not been fully explored. Rather, the novels are generally seen—and even mocked—as oversimplified allegories, manufacturing easy, sentimentalized solutions to real political problems.⁴ When seen through the lens of theories of sympathy, however, a different view emerges.

Both Edgeworth and Morgan are searching for an intellectual framework upon which to build a politics of fellow-feeling—and failing to find one. Instead, both authors find themselves forced to rely on various novelistic tricks in order to ensure happy endings for their texts. Reading these novels with an eye to their treatment of sympathy as a philosophical problem opens up a way to make sense of the ambivalences and quirks of the texts that bedevil more conventional readings. In The Wild Irish Girl, the power of emotional contagion becomes a threatening, gothic force, suggesting a more sinister view of the supposedly charming Glorvina. Likewise, the bizarre plot twist at the center of Ennui, which serves to confound any allegorical readings of national identity, makes perfect sense [End Page 128] when considered from the perspective of sympathy, as it is a literal example of Smith’s theorization of the process. What is more, the identity swap enacted by the novel can be viewed as a way to bridge the divide within Adam Smith’s own work, the...