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

The estimate of the mountainous Ho employ as a Central Motif in The Real CharlotteThe image of the big house has long been a central motif inAnglo-Irish literature. From Maria Edgeworths Castle Rackrent (1800),it has been a source of inspiration to umpteen writers. champion of the reasons for the surge in castle rackrents (a generic destination employed byCharles Maturin) through the 19th and early 20th century, is that manywriters who used the big house as a backdrop to their work wereresidents of much(prenominal) houses themselves - writers such as Sommerville andRoss, George Moore and Elizabeth Bowen, were born into the ascendancyand wrote about an era and society with which they were familiar.yet modern writers, such as Molly Keane and John Banville, have too found the romantic qualities of the big house alluring andtherefore have continued to use the era and setting as a backdrop intheir works.The big house music genre has resulted in such an outpouring of works ofthis typ e of fiction, that one dilettante remarkedseems to have flourished in direct proportion to the pastal death of the last it seeks to display. 1The Real Charlotte is set in a period, which can be depict as theIndian Summer of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. An Indian Summer is aperiod of relative calm before the on set of winter in this case itis a metaphor describing the spirit of leisure the Anglo-IrishAscendancy lived with their grand tea parties, hunting, theatricalperformances etc, pursuits and interests which W.B. Yeats associatedwith big house life in generalLife which overflows without ambitious pains. 2However, this period of calm is followed by the fire of winter,with the Great Famine and the r... ...l Charlotte. Somerville and Ross were daughters ofthe Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and as they wrote their novel based ontheir experiences, maybe it was only natural that some aspects ofThe Real Charlotte depict the decay of Big Houses and the Ascendancyclass. It is through the d evelopment of characterisation and setting,that Somerville and Ross artfully portray the demise of the Big Houseand its inhabitants at the hand of ambitious middle classes, and as aresult of political evolution. For this reason the novel ishistorically ideal in showing the decline of the Big House. Butdespite their historic downfall, the Big Houses of the Anglo-IrishAscendancy have found a new countenance of life in literature as the BigHouse genre, devising reality what W.B Yeats once saidWhatever flourish and decline These stones pillow their monument and mine. 31