In Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth uses the Gothic convention of imprisonment to emphasize women's marginalized place in the patriarchal society of the end of the eighteenth century. Both Sir Kit Rackrent's wife (significantly, the reader never learns her first name) and Miss Isabella Moneygawl are locked in their rooms against their will because each refuses to accept a specific command from her husband or father, respectively. Although not physically imprisoned in a room, Sir Murtagh Rackrent's wife (another woman without a first name) is nonetheless imprisoned in her marriage because she cannot regain control of the assets she owned prior to her marriage to Sir Murtagh unless she outlives him. Her tyranny over the servants and tenants of Castle Rackrent reproduces the power relationship between husband and wife. Mary Wollstonecraft describes marriage as "slavery" for girls in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (155). The title character of Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, literally imprisoned by her husband, wonders, "Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?" (11). Kari J. Winter, in Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865, asserts that "female Gothic novelists in Britain . . . represented imprisonment and slavery as the central paradigms of woman's condition in patriarchal society" (2). Without names of their own and described through another character's framing narrative, the literally and metaphorically imprisoned Ladies Rackrent reveal the true nature of women's social positions behind this common convention of Gothic fiction.

Published in 1800, Castle Rackrent falls in the middle of the Gothic tradition, lasting roughly from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In his bicentennial study of Edgeworth, James Newcomer asserts, "What is memorable about Castle Rackrent is an atmosphere" which consists of "whiskey, decay, rot, guttering candles, tobacco, damp, horse dung, and dust. . . . [I]t is an amalgam of improvidence, stupidity, cupidity, pride, subservience, animosity, sentimentality, brutality, and perversity" (154-55). Newcomer's list of the elements comprising Castle Rackrent's atmosphere is an example of what Eugenia C. DeLamotte calls "descriptions by inventory," (4) and a "shopping-list approach to a definition to Gothic romance" (5). Newcomer continues:

In the heyday of the Gothic novel, Maria Edgeworth might very well have taken all these Gothic elements and marshalled them in the ingenious order of romance. Marshall them of course she did . . . but it was realism that she was after and not romance, and what in it we accept as truth is more perverse, more outlandish, and morally more revolting than the balderdash of Gothic romance (155).

Newcomer's opinion about Gothic romance notwithstanding, the extent to which Castle Rackrent depicts women's reality directly depends on its Gothic qualities. According to Winter, "both [female Gothic novels and slave narratives] represent the terrifying aspects of life for women in a patriarchal culture" (13). Since the patriarchal society of the eighteenth century treated women as second-class citizens, a "realistic" novel narrated by a male character, as Castle Rackrent is, is likely to ignore completely the conditions of women. Placing her female characters in a Gothic subtext allows Edgeworth to express women's powerless situation through the veneer of Gothic fiction's widely acknowledged conventions.

Castle Rackrent's suggestive atmosphere is the proper background for Edgeworth's primary Gothic convention~the imprisonment of women. Winter notes that "Kate Ferguson Ellis has argued that Gothic novels "can be distinguished by the presence of houses in which people are locked in and locked out. They are concerned with violence done to familial bonds that is frequently directed against women' " (qtd. in Winter 18). There are two such houses in Castle Rackrent: Castle Rackrent itself, where Sir Kit locks his wife, and the Moneygawl estate in Mount Juliet's town, where Miss Isabella is locked in her room by her father. The fact that the only two estates described in the novel are both houses in which men imprison women indicates men's ubiquitous control of women.

Feminist theorists have frequently commented on women's restricted place in a patriarchal society; "feminists have shown repeatedly that in patriarchal cultures women are perpetually and violently dominated by men" (original italics, Winter 10). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar believe that "[d]ramatizations of imprisonment and escape are so all-pervasive in nineteenth century literature that . . . they represent a uniquely female tradition in this period" (85). The acceptability of female imprisonment as a necessary plot device of Gothic fiction underscores Thady's narration of these two imprisonments as unremarkable, even ordinary, events. Claudia Johnson's description of this interdependent relationship states that "the gothic is in fact the inside out of the ordinary" (34).

Although Lady Kit Rackrent and Miss Isabella are not locked up arbitrarily, their refusals to accept men's orders provide the thin excuses needed to take away their freedom. According to Winter, "Laws forbidding women to own property, to control money . . . indicate the legal denial of women's independent existence" (10). Lady Kit Rackrent will not surrender her jewels, particularly a diamond cross, to the Rackrent estate after her marriage, which ultimately leads to her imprisonment until she turns them over to her husband. Thady's repetition of the stereotype of the wealthy Jew reminds his audience that there is a specific reason why this woman has any personal wealth at all, since "she was a Jewish by all accounts, who are famous for their great riches" (CR, original italics, 76). After Sir Kit's death, Thady concludes, "Her diamond cross was, they say, at the bottom of it all; and it was a shame for her, being his wife, not to show more duty, and to have given it up when he condescended to ask so often for such a bit of a trifle in his distresses, especially when he all along made it no secret he married for money" (CR 83). Lady Kit's determination to keep her own property ironically leads to the most basic form of denial of her independent existence. She is imprisoned in a room for seven years, and escapes only because Sir Kit dies. Furthermore, Thady's persistent emphasis on Lady Kit Rackrent's Jewishness as her defining characteristic suggests that she is racially different from the Rackrents. Thus, Lady Kit's imprisonment represents colonial as well as gender relationships in eighteenth century society. Although I will not do so here, Castle Rackrent can be read in the political context of the British Empire and Ireland's colonial status.

Mr. Moneygawl also locks Miss Isabella in her room because she disobeys him. Thady reports that Isabella "had disobliged all her relations for [Sir Condy's] sake . . . then she was locked up in her chamber and forbid to think of him anymore" (CR 88). Isabella is freed from her father's house when Sir Condy takes her to Scotland to marry her, only to be trapped at Castle Rackrent by that marriage. This pattern of imprisonment and the rescue which re-imprisons is a variation on Edgeworth's Gothic theme. "Like enslaved protagonists, most Gothic heroines are separated from the men they love by a perverse patriarch . . . In early Gothic texts, heroines struggle bravely to be reunited with their true love, and they usually succeeded ^ only to find that their true love is becoming a patriarch himself" (Winter 66). Isabella's only power in her marriage comes from emotional outbursts, as when she cries and goes "into a fit of hysterics" (CR 92) over Sir Condy's nightly consumption of whiskey punch. Sir Condy agrees to stop drinking the punch, but only in immediate response to her hysterical tears, "this being the first thing of the kind he has seen" (CR 92); later, Thady observes that in time she "[had] grown quite easy about the whiskey punch" (CR 101). Sir Condy gives Isabella relative freedom to spend and do as she pleases (especially in comparison with the previous Lady Rackrent), but still expects her money to be at his disposal. He asks his wife, "why don't [Mr. Moneygawl and others at Mount Juliet's town] show themselves your friends . . . and oblige me with the loan of the money I condescended, by your advice, my dear, to ask?' " (CR 101). Sir Condy and Sir Kit condescend to ask their wives for their assets, knowing that a wife's property automatically becomes her husband's upon marriage anyway. Isabella escapes the confinement of Castle Rackrent by obtaining Sir Condy's permission to return to her family home in Mount Juliet's town; she escapes the marriage by outliving Sir Condy. Significantly, Isabella's "return to live with [her] father and [her] family" (CR 103) is a mirror image of her first escape/re-imprisonment. Leaving one patriarchal home requires that she return to another.

As marriage to Sir Condy traps Isabella, so too is the first Lady Rackrent, Sir Murtagh's wife, metaphorically imprisoned at Castle Rackrent. Like Sir Kit, Sir Murtagh marries for money, "[he] looked to the great Skinflint estate" (CR 68). Although she thwarts Sir Murtagh's plans by outliving him, the law prevents Lady Murtagh from regaining control of her own assets until her husband's death. Lady Murtagh's tyranny over Castle Rackrent's servants and tenants illustrates Wollstonecraft's assertion in Vindication that "[o]bedience, unconditional obedience, is the catch-word of tyrants of every description, and to render assurance doubly sure' one kind of despotism supports another" (150). That Lady Murtagh is allowed to run Castle Rackrent to her own satisfaction reinforces another of Wollstonecraft's points. She writes, "I may be told that a number of women are not slaves in the marriage state. True, but then they become tyrants; for it is not rational freedom, but a lawless kind of power resembling the authority exercised by the favourites of absolute monarchs" (155). Winter also makes this point, noting that "[t]he hierarchy of the family reflects and supports the hierarchies of the state: the male head holds all real power; the wife is both the victim and mediator of his power" (55). Lady Murtagh may not be physically imprisoned, as her two successors will be, yet her limited role as a wife in the patriarchal society of the eighteenth century allows her only one option to exercise whatever power she has~to tyrannize over the group which is even more dependent on Castle Rackrent than she is, the servants and tenants who rely on the estate for their livelihoods.

Edgeworth uses two additional techniques to further highlight women's disenfranchisement in the eighteenth century. The first two Ladies Rackrent, Sir Murtagh's and Sir Kit's wives, are not given first names in Thady's narration, making it impossible to refer to them outside of the context of their husbands. Lady Murtagh is represented as the embodiment of her family name, Skinflint. Whether this is her maiden family name or that of her first husband is not specified, apparently because information about her life before marrying Sir Murtagh is irrelevant. Not only does Sir Kit's wife lack individuality within her marriage, but she is also a stereotyped representative of all Jews. As discussed above, Thady frequently explains her wealth in terms of her Jewishness. After Sir Kit dies, she is further marginalized as "the Jew Lady Rackrent" and "the Jewish" (CR 83, 86); she becomes an embodiment of her religion. Lady Murtagh's and Lady Kit's impersonal status makes it easy for Thady to blame them for their husbands' troubles. Regarding Sir Murtagh's refusal to entertain neighbors at Castle Rackrent, Thady says, "I made the best of a bad case, and laid it all at my lady's door, for I did not like her any how" (CR 68). Once "the Jew Lady Rackrent" decides to return to England after Sir Kit's death, Thady confides to his audience, "I considered her quite as a foreigner, and not at all any longer as part of the family . . . But from first to last she brought nothing but misfortunes amongst us; and if it had not been all along with her, his honour, Sir Kit, would have been alive now in all appearance" (CR 83). Miss Isabella Moneygawl has a full name because her family has independent connections to the Rackrent estate. Once married, Sir Condy reduces his wife's name to "Bella," although he is the only Rackrent to call his wife by any form of her first name. While it is customary for a servant to address his master and mistress by an honorific, Thady always refers to his mistresses as "my lady", but often uses his masters' first names, "my lord, Sir ( )." By not individually naming the Ladies Rackrent, Edgeworth stresses their peripheral place in the story of the Rackrent family, and women's parallel position on the margins of patriarchal society.

The framing narrative is Edgeworth's final technique for foregrounding women's status as second-class citizens. The stories of the Ladies Rackrent are told by another person, Thady Quirk, who gives readers almost no information about them. In fact, Thady's narrative of "the MEMOIRS of the RACKRENT FAMILY" (CR 65) is exclusively concerned with the paternal line, commenting on the wives only when they directly interact with the Rackrent men. This technique is Edgeworth's most direct contribution to the late eighteenth century feminist discourse which likens women's position in society, especially in marriage, to that of slaves. Wollstonecraft and Winter make this link explicit in their work cited above. Winter also points out that "[i]n general, the common device of framing in both Gothic novels and slave narratives highlights the fact that we never have direct access to the protagonist's experience" (48). The controlling nature of the framing device is illustrated by The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave Related by Herself. Although Mary Prince's editor, Thomas Pringle, insists that her narrative has been merely "pruned" for grammatical clarity (185), critics disagree about the exact extent of his influence in shaping Prince's text. Such disagreement about the framing of a first-person narrative severely compromises Thady's reliability as a third-person narrator of the Ladies' Rackrent stories. The historical use of framing in slave narratives supports Edgeworth's marginalization of the three fictional Rackrent wives through a framed narrative, which in turn reflects women's real-life disempowerment in society in general, and in marriage in particular.

Imprisonment, namelessness, and framed narration reinforce the "realism" of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent by enabling various men in the novel to control and speak for women simply by virtue of their respective genders. The scene in which Sir Condy chooses between marrying Miss Isabella Moneygawl and Judy M'Quirk by flipping a coin encapsulates this control by depicting women as indistinguishable from one another. Rather than introducing a fantastic element to the text, the Gothic convention of imprisonment makes women's marginalized place in the eighteenth century more concrete by portraying such action as acceptable within patriarchal society. For eighteenth century women, the true horror of the Gothic convention of imprisonment is its basis in reality.

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Works Cited

Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent and Ennui. London: Penguin, 1992.

Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women, Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Newcomer, James. Maria Edgeworth the Novelist: 1767-1849 A Bicentennial Study. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1967.

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. "The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince." African American Review 26.1 (1992): 131-146.

Prince, Mary. "History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave: Related by Herself." The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. London: Penguin, 1987.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865. Athens: UP of Georgia, 1992.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

---. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Carol H. Poston. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.