Castle Rackrent

When I first read Castle Rackrent I was fairly confident that the main villain of the story was Jason M’Quirk, especially after he had practically forced Sir Condy into signing away the whole family estate and cheated him into signing away, for only a few hundred golden guineas, his wife’s jointure. Although that can definitely be seen as villainous, after further reading I found Thady to be the true villain of the story. Thady may have appeared to be the simpleminded, subaltern steward to the Rackrent family, but in reality he was quite dubious and much more disingenuous than anyone would have guessed.

Through Thady’s skewed narrative of the Rackrent history we came to see Jason as the villain of the story based on his coup over the Rackrent family, when in reality Thady had crucially aided his son in the take over of the Rackrent estate from the beginning by assisting Jason in buying up pieces of the estate under market value. Although Thady may not have deliberately helped his son in the takeover of the Rackrent estate, Thady performed a litany of other actions that contributed to the ruin of the Rackrent family.

“While in theory Thady is naïve, what he says and what he doesn’t say may plainly be determined by partisanship or cunning.” (10) Thady stated, “Sir Condy, was ever my great favorite,”(83) and even called him his ‘white-headed boy.’ While this might give the impression that he took great care of Sir Condy, in reality he contributed to his ruin most of all. “It was he who taught his ‘white-headed boy’ to gamble, and to consider the drunkard Sir Patrick Rackrent the model of a popular Irish gentleman.”(11) Though it may seem like these were not such terrible things to do, they were the two contributing factors that causing Sir Condy’s death, and not only that, his death ended up being an imitation of the way in which Sir Patrick died.

Thady’s relationship with his son was a very complicated one. Thady introduced his son by saying, “To look at me, you would hardy think ‘poor Thady’ was the father of attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman, and never minds what poor Thady says, and having better than fifteen hundred a year, landed estate, looks down upon honest Thady; but I wash my hands of his doings, and as I have lived so will I die, true and loyal to the family.”(66) By this introduction it is clear that Thady and Jason had a strained father son relationship. Jason, who had established a fine life for himself, seemed to have no respect for his father or what he did, while Thady will forever be unashamedly devoted to the Rackrent family.

What surprises me the most about Thady is how he so blatantly aided his son by manipulating the bids on the lease of a farm on the Rackrent estate. “I spoke a good word for my son, and gave out in the country that nobody need bid against us.” (74) I found this to be very interesting, for although Thady could not foresee the consequences of his actions, to see him choose anybody, including his son, over the best interest of the Rackrent family and estate went against the actions of the blindly devoted and loyal servant that I understood Thady to be.

In the end of the story when Thady was devastated over his son’s takeover of the Rackrent estate, it seemed that his angst was because Thady was always the subaltern servant to the Rackrent and cannot see himself as anything else. By the Rackrent family ruined and his son taking over the estate, in Thady’s eyes Jason has betrayed him and the subaltern class he had always known.

An event that Thady was an active participant in, which were actions less causative to the ruin of the Rackrent family as they were just plain villainous, included his part in the seven year “incarceration” of Sir Kit’s young Jewish bride. The thing that I found most disturbing about this was that even after Sir Kit’s death Thady had nothing to say about his actions except that “he was never cured of his gaming tricks; but that was the only fault he had, God bless him.” (81) The only fault he had! What part of locking a girl in a room for seven years does not raise a red flag of being wrong? Seeing that Thady did not find anything wrong with what Sir Kit did, and what he did for that matter, just proves how truly evil he was.

When looking back over the novel it is clear that "honest Thady" was an active participant in the downfall of the Rackrent family. The family which he claimed to love so dearly.