When Irishness and Jewishness Meet: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Limerick Gloves’ (1804) and Harrington (1817) as Fictions of Cultural Identity

Abstract

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) has recently attracted the interest of postcolonial studies for her portrayal of cultural stereotypes at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this paper I insist on the close connection between Edgeworth’s “The Limerick Gloves” (Popular Tales 1804) and Harrington (1817). By drawing on a close reading of the stories and previous research on Edgeworth’s oeuvre, I argue that in Harrington Jews share with the Irish a common landless condition and both are seen as a cultural menace. Cultural identity is here taken as the set of values that relate the individual to the world and reflects historical experiences and shared codes while Jewishness and Irishness refer to perceiving people as Jew or Irish with all the connotations that go with them. I maintain that the approach to woman in both narratives has to be associated with Irishness since both women and the Irish are discriminated in terms of prejudice and ethnic othering in relation to what was being presented as normative English society. “The Limerick Gloves” is paramount to understand Edgeworth’s attack against fanaticism in Harrington because the latter involves evolution in technique that makes her narrative so enticing even for readers nowadays.