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The Image of the Big House as a Central Motif in The Real Charlotte

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The Image of the Big House as a Central Motif in The Real Charlotte The image of the 'big house' has long been a central motif in Anglo-Irish literature. From Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), it has been a source of inspiration to many writers. One of the reason s for the surge in "castle rackrents" (a generic term employed by Charles Maturin) through the 19th and early 20th century, is that many writers who used the 'big house' as a backdrop to their work were residents of such houses themselves - writers such as Sommerville and Ross, George Moore and Elizabeth Bowen, were born into the ascendancy and wrote about an era and society with which they were familiar. However modern writers, such as Molly Keane and John …show more content…

Sommerville and Ross have not focused on the physical disintegration of the Big House in The Real Charlotte, but as they based the novel on their experiences as part of the Ascendancy, we can see the corrosion of the upper classes stature and power through characterization and setting. The driving force of all Big House fiction is the isolation of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy both physically and metaphorically. The country homes of the Ascendancy/landlords, were deemed Big Houses because of their grandeur and setting; they were huge in comparison to the cottiers mud cabins and labourers cottages of the Irish natives, thus were unrivalled in the countryside. Elizabeth Bowen accurately described their physical detachment from other social classes: "with its stables and farm and gardens deep in trees at the end of long avenues is an island - and, like an island, a world." [3] Their disconnection was deliberate as they generally only interacted with other gentry in the confines of their estates, and consequently their only contact with the native Irish was in their role as master and servant. Although these houses were built to inspire awe in social equals and deference in the lower classes, as Terence Dooley states, such deference in Ireland was: " tinged with a sense of resentment because they were built on what most tenant farmers would deem to have been confiscated land." [4] Adding to their image as usurpers was the fact that many were

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