Mantles, quirks, and Irish bulls: Ironic guise and colonial subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth's 'Castle Rackrent'

Criticism of Edgeworth's first novel has been divided over the crucial ques tion of the reliability of its narrator, Thady Quirk. Until recently the do minant tendency has been to identify him as an essentially transparent char acter, a loyal retainer and naive admirer of the family whose 'honour' he e ndlessly professes to guard, and whose 'friendship' he so pathetically trea sures. In such readings the novel's irony derives purely from the perceived gap between Thady's simplicity and the urbane sophistication of the implie d author. More sceptical approaches, however, have seen Thady as a more or less conscious hypocrite, whose servile attitudinizing barely conceals his underlying scorn for the landlord class - let alone his ruthlessly self-int erested behaviour. By decoding a number of Edgeworth's carefully laid hints - developed in part from her familiarity with early modern treatises on th e native Irish - this article offers conclusive evidence that Thady's appar ent naivety was contrived as a satiric trap for unwary readers, and one tha t, once sprung, has much to reveal about the novelist's understanding of co lonized subjectivity.