Mud

Abstract

Abstract This chapter uses new materialism and posthumanism to challenge the mud cabin stereotype, reviewing what comforts and affordances mud cabin living offered the dispossessed Irish tenant, rather than what it did not. Eighteenth-century English writing, especially Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland (1780), used mud to insinuate a lack of subjectivity and intelligence in the Irish people while vindicating the British mission of civilizing Ireland by literally ‘cleaning up’ private, mud cabin life. However, mud cabins were a space of creative human–nonhuman collaboration. The material fact of mud’s vibrant mutuality and symbiosis with Irish tenant life demands a new reading of native characters in fiction, whose mud cabin living can now be read to hold subversive, anti-imperial narratives. In Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), Ellinor’s mud cabin constructs Ellinor herself as a deep, subversive, and unreadable character, whose true national intentions are hidden from the reader, much like the interior of her cabin is kept out of view.