Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker: Strange Surroundings (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature) 3031403908, 9783031403903

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker Strange Surroundings Richard Jorge

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature Series Editor

Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness. The series aims to analyze literary works and investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture have inspired and impacted recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature, which contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.

Richard Jorge

Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker Strange Surroundings

Richard Jorge Department of English, German, Translation and Interpretation Studies University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) Bilbao, Spain

ISSN 2731-3182     ISSN 2731-3190 (electronic) New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-031-40390-3    ISBN 978-3-031-40391-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: De Luan / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

I would like to dedicate this book to my family and friends. Without your unfaltering support, this—like many other projects—would have never been accomplished. Go raibh maith agat, Eskerrik asko, Beizóns.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The  Spaces in Which I/Eye Gaze: J.C. Mangan’s Satirical Appropriation of Colonial Views 41 3 J.S. Le Fanu’s Rhetoric of Nostalgia and the No-Home 63 4 The  Anticolonial Heart of Rural Ireland: Possession and Dispossession in Bram Stoker’s Short Fiction 89 5 Roaming  the World Around: Exile in J.C. Mangan’s Narratives115 6 Haunted  Manor Houses and Bumping Monsters: The Paradigm of the No-Home in J.S. Le Fanu’s Narratives141 7 Adverse  Landscapes, Unwelcoming Homes: (Un)Heroic Colonial Journeys in Bram Stoker’s Short Fictions163 8 Conclusions187 Index195

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About the Author

Richard Jorge  did his BA in English Studies (Language and Literature) from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Driven by his interest in literature, he complemented his degree with an MA in AngloIrish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin, where his minor thesis on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Gothic tradition was supervised by Prof. Declan Kiberd. In 2016 he completed his PhD on the relationship between the short story and the Irish Gothic tradition in the writings of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker at the University of Santiago de Compostela. His research interests include Irish Gothic literature, nineteenth-century Irish literature, postcolonialism and gender theories, among others. He is teaching at the Department of English, German, Translation and Interpretation in the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Space has played a key role in postcolonial literature and theory from the beginning. Given the long-standing physical occupation most postcolonial nations had to endure, this is hardly surprising, as land is strongly linked to a sense of identity, which “is based on a distinction of the self from what it is believed to be not self” (Boehmer 2005, 76). When a land is physically occupied by an alien, colonising force, this identification between self and land is compromised and a process of dislocation, of displacement takes place, “the dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societies whether these have been created by a process of settlement, intervention, or a mixture of the two” (Ashcroft et  al. 2001, 9). It is thus that the self becomes the colonised other, or subaltern, which is then defined by the colonial self in a process that Boehmer (2005) has termed “othering,” in which “the colonized made up the subordinate term in relation to which European individuality was defined” (75–6). Such a perception and conceptualisation of colonised peoples has, in fact, been used to justify the colonial enterprise in what has come to be known as the “civilising mission” or the idea that colonisers would be “bringing civilisation to the ‘dark places of the Earth’” (Gunning 2013, 133). In fact, the so-called civilising mission only depicted colonised

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_1

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subjects as inferior beings, without a proper culture nor civilisation (Boehmer 2005, 77; Gibbons 2004, 38). Ireland has not been alien to this process of redefinition in which colonised subjects become the negative opposite of the colonial self (Wisker 2007, 205). Indeed, despite displaying its ambiguities and complexities, or precisely because of them, Ireland holds a unique status among postcolonial nations (Scanlon and Satish Kumar 2019). Postcolonial writers have sought to repossess the physical and mental spaces which colonisation had occupied. In such endeavours, various strategies have been employed to resolve their identity crises by performing a “recovery of an effective identifying relationship between the self and place” (Ashcroft et al. 1989, 9). One such strategy has been and still is the deployment of setting as an anticolonial and decolonising tool. In the end, there is an intrinsic connection between the land and the self which fosters the belief, the hope that despite all “the redrawing of boundaries for imperial convenience, something rocklike remains, something has survived all the violence and exploitation and thereby demonstrates the salving possibility that all can be made whole again” (Punter 2000, 34). This reconsideration of the role of settings as decolonising tools has served as a scaffolding upon which this work has been framed. The present book reconsiders how James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker constructed and deployed setting conventions in Irish Gothic fiction to resist colonialism, to give voice to the subaltern and redress past misdeeds.

Postcolonialism, Ireland and the Nineteenth Century Despite current trends advocating for a broadening of the discussion on postcolonialism (Kim 2021), literary research and analyses have tended to focus on the end of colonisation and the colonial period. Dealing with its aftermath and the subsequent literary productions of the newly established independent countries has proven a fruitful field of literary and cultural (re)examinations. Research has also focused on the period immediately preceding the end of colonial rule, with a fertile academic outcome as a result. The scholarly production regarding W.B.  Yeats’ exploration and appropriation of Celtic-sounding names or Joyce’s literary reminiscences of the military occupation of Ireland in Dubliners (1914) or Ulysses (1920)

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bear witness to it (Innes 2007, 73). Such analyses have resulted in great contributions to academia and have shaped the understanding of postcolonial writing and the effects of colonialism on postcolonial nations in general and in Ireland in particular; there still is, however, further unchartered territory to explore. Such research tends to highlight the importance of the result of the colonial encounter, to the detriment of the process which led to it. Julia M.  Wright (2007), in Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-­ Century Literature, argued that although postcolonial studies have dealt extensively with colonial and imperial literatures, little attention has been yet paid to the ways in which nineteenth-century writers from colonized nations wrote about colonization beyond their own borders. Ireland […] offers us a unique opportunity to open up such an investigation. (1)

In recent years, new scholarship has redressed this situation by broadening the timeframe of postcolonial analysis. Considering the processes which led to independence, which may sometimes span well over a century, has helped in contextualising later works. Both Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats use pre-colonial themes and tropes in their works, “revisiting the natural world and the consciousness of it” (Innes 2007, 77). Such historical revisions find their precedent in the sometimes-neglected nineteenth-­century writings of authors such as James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu or Bram Stoker. A deeper consideration and assessment of the narratives produced in the period leading to Irish independence seems necessary if a more detailed picture is to be drawn. In this sense, several works have attempted to palliate this gap in scholarship. Sara L.  Maurer’s (2012) The Dispossessed State Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Amy E. Martin’s (2012) Alter-­ Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland or Matthew Campbell’s (2020) Irish Literature in Transition, 1830–1880 are all examples of such efforts. The present work aims to contribute to filling this gap in scholarly research. By considering the Gothic short fictions of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, this book intends to redress a void, to offer an overarching consideration of how Gothic settings can be understood as an anticolonial tool, a form of resistance to British imperial dominance in Ireland.

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In this sense, it is interesting to recall that the postcolonial movement in Ireland, epitomised by the 1916 Easter Rising, cannot be fully understood without looking back to its historical roots. The decolonising movement in Ireland is based on a conception of a primitive Irish identity, which would have been spoilt by the interference and domination of the British Empire. In this conceptualisation of the native Irish, their “wildness” was placed on a par with the romantic primitivism of the noble savage (Canny 2008; Griffin 2008). Rather paradoxically, in its decolonising attempt, Irish nationalism had trouble fully identifying with indigenous peoples elsewhere. Movements like the United Irishmen or the Young Irelanders felt more at ease with a conceptualisation closer to a settler community than a nativist one, “even when Irish nationalists identify with Indigenous peoples or their experience, they reinforce and reproduce the structures of settler colonialism” (Mullen 2016, 84). This experience was mirrored in Ireland’s participation in the imperial quest, “far from empathizing with indigenous peoples overseas […], the Irish, whatever their experience at home, were as brutal as any other white colonisers” (Morgan 1994, 619). This paradox of being simultaneously coloniser and colonised can be partly explained by Ireland’s special status as a colony, being “simultaneously a bulwark of the Empire, and a mine within its walls” (Jackson 2004, 123). In a paradoxical hall of mirrors, this was further replicated back home, where “native Irish identity included Catholics and Protestants, tenants and landed gentry, including Anglo-Irish and Irish” (Scanlon and Satish Kumar 2019, 204). While these differences have been attenuated in time, they were heavily felt prior to Independence and the birth of the Irish Free State. Especially in the nineteenth century, land and its ownership defined individual and collective (very often diverging) concepts of Irishness. Nineteenth-century Ireland was divided not only by different denominations but also by different languages, with Irish being the mode of expression of the poor. This created interesting paradoxes, like the more overt defence of the Irish language by the more pro-Union sectors of Irish intelligentsia. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that there were two million Irish speakers, 1.5 million Irish–English bilinguals and 1.5 million English speakers, with a progressive increase of Irish speakers until 1845. Despite this, English was “the dominant language of all Irish nationalist popular political movements from the United Irishmen of the late eighteenth century through to the nineteenth century” (Ó Tuathaigh 2005, 44). For many Protestant (and pro-Union) intellectuals,

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Irish remained an artefact, a cultural link to the island’s Celtic past, “only passing from the pro-union into the Irish nationalist camp as a programme for a distinctively Irish way of living” (Murphy 2003, 41) towards the end of the nineteenth century. As Doyle (2018) has phrased it, “the Gaelic written tradition was elitist and exclusive. Literacy in English was a major democratising influence in the nineteenth century, which contributed to social, cultural and economic change” (586–7). Such paradoxes do, of course, show a certain, if vague, feeling of shared national consciousness, a common idea of Irishness, which would give rise to the different movements (both nationalist and pro-Union) which appeared during the nineteenth century. It is true that under the 1800 Act of Union, Ireland was de facto part of the British Empire, a fact which has given rise to some scholars’ questioning Ireland’s postcolonial status. Basing his argument on economic and demographic figures, Liam Kennedy (1993) contends that Ireland does not ally with the postcolonial paradigm set by other postcolonial countries (119), an opinion shared by other critics like Michael Gallagher (1985), Edna Longley (2000) and Stephen Howe (2000). However, the 1800 Act of Union only benefitted part of the isle, mostly the Protestant élite. Minorities, like Presbyterian Dissenters, were at a disadvantage during the early part of the century, “to the point of seeking a better and freer life in America” (Vance 2014, 61). Meanwhile, the Catholic majority suffered the consequences of a direct void of power whose effects Westminster failed to palliate. The 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act—intended to redress some of the injustices imposed on Irish Catholics—effectively “nullified suffrage for most of the Irish Catholic population in the United Kingdom” (Martin 2012, 4). As a further example of Ireland’s colonial situation under the Union, Flannery (2009) asserts that as contrary to other European countries, “modernisation in Ireland was not occasioned by native industrial success, but is synonymous with the traumas of colonial occupation” (22). The debate as to Ireland’s rightful claim to a postcolonial status has been somehow attenuated, however. This notwithstanding, it still permeates current and ongoing academic discussions. The vast array of research produced in postcolonial Irish studies has given rise to accusations of Irish studies having become synonymous with postcolonial studies, with “a widespread and energetic institutional and professional drive to frame […] ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irishness’ and to market this as a category of […] postcolonial studies” (Wilson 2005, 536). Despite such academic postulates, many scholars still contend that there is a need for postcolonial Irish studies to

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continue furthering their area of research. Far from being an exhausted discipline, “Irish postcolonial studies continually poses radical questions of established forms of knowledge” (Flannery 2009, 27). Indeed, nineteenth-century Ireland is still rife ground for literary observations. Far from the easy dichotomy of Catholic versus Protestant, the socio-political map was much more complex than it could, at first, be intimated. Although Irish Protestantism experienced a unifying and revitalising process at the beginning of the century, it was still prone to internal and factional divisions, “Evangelicalism had both its limits and its opponents within the churches, especially the High Church party within the Church of Ireland and a handful of theologically liberal Presbyterians” (Holmes 2018, 554). By the end of the first third of the century, Ascendancy power on the isle had all but faded, creating some nostalgia in the Protestant élite for the direct exercise of power. Simultaneously, the figure of Daniel O’Connell, with his pragmatic views and his ability to draw Catholic masses, managed to create a cohesive Repeal Movement whose “core activists were drawn overwhelmingly from the still slender ranks of the Catholic professional classes” (Murphy 2003, 28). By the second third of the nineteenth century, Catholic Irish nationalism was well established. The response to this and to the now defunct Ascendancy control over the island was to be Tory cultural nationalism. Based around the figure of Edmund Burke and using the Dublin University Magazine as their main printing outlet, Tory cultural nationalism was “wedded to Ireland’s union with Britain and place in the empire” (Murphy 2003, 78). Tory nationalism was to be confronted by the Romantic political nationalism represented by the Young Ireland movement and its print outlet, The Nation. Indeed, both are representative of the complex political panorama in nineteenth-century Ireland. The Young Ireland movement had been born as a channel for Protestant Irishmen with a more Romantic view of Irish nationalism. By mid-century, “it had been established in twenty-six of the thirty-two counties with approximately 45,000 members” (Murphy 2003, 87) with a diversified background. Similarly, The Nation had been founded by two middle-class Catholics, journalist Charles Gavan Duffy and shopkeeper John Blake Dillon, but also by Thomas Osborn Davis, coming from an English and Anglo-Irish Ascendancy background. The fact that the paper had been born with O’Connell’s blessings to attract “younger, Protestant and more liberal elements to support Repeal” (Murphy 2003, 88) attests to the complexity of the national sentiment in Ireland during the century. As this progressed, nationalist

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political ideas became more entrenched and radicalised, as attested by the appearance of such organisations as The Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858, of a marked revolutionary and often violent character. The socio-political complexity expressed above helps in understanding that, during the nineteenth century, there is no clear divide between the Protestant and Catholic communities in Ireland in terms of national identity. Rather, there is a continuum, with various degrees of political independence sought for that depended on the complex social structures then operating. The Society United Irishmen, the organisation which had marked the end of the previous century by a frustrated revolution, was originally a Protestant body which sought parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation (Murphy 2003, 15). Such complexity was also felt in literature, with writers of both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds attracted by the varying degrees of cultural and political independence from (or attachment to) the British Empire. For instance, J.S. Le Fanu’s political views “had swung remarkably during his early years, from violent denunciations of the Liberator to a covert and short-lived endorsement of Repeal, from practical cooperation with Young Irelanders to unsuccessful canvassing for a Tory nomination” (McCormack 1980, 209). Irish nationalism, in its varying degrees of adscription, was, for the greatest part of the century, not ethnic based, with “other vehicles for the articulation and solution of Irish grievances which had Irish, British and European contexts” (Murphy 2003, 50). These political and social movements transpired into the literary scene, with the production of works of a decolonising nature. Protestant writers like Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Mariah Edgeworth or Thomas Moore attest to the varying degrees of political emancipation reflected by their literature, with the latter drifting from Whiggism into ethnic nationalism as the century progressed (Murphy 2003, 51). In this scenario, Irish Gothic became one of the literary vehicles through which the complexity of the Irish political scene, with a varying decolonising agenda, came to be embodied.

Irish Gothic in the Nineteenth Century Postcolonial interpretations of Irish Gothic fiction have suffered from similar contentions, precedents of which can be found as far back as the Irish Literary Revival period, when “concerted efforts by the members of Ireland’s emergent literary establishment in the 1890s and 1900s”

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(Murphy 2011, 13) marginalised the works of Victorian writers such as J.S. Le Fanu or Robert Maturin, excluding them from the incipient Irish canon. Fortunately, recent scholarship has dedicated serious and thorough research to such authors and their longer work. The Gothic genre being especially suited to postcolonial readings (Wisker 2006), their inclusion in the canon of Irish authors should come as no surprise. Works such as Robert Maturin’s (1820) Melmoth the Wanderer, J.S.  Le Fanu’s (1864) Uncle Silas or Bram Stoker’s (1897) Dracula are major accomplishments which, analysed through a postcolonial lens, have provided an enlightening insight into the period. Scholarly works such as Margot Gayle Backus’ (1999) The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order, Luke Gibbons’ (2004) Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture, Jarlath Killeen’s (2005) Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century, and The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Texts, Theories (2013), Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie’s (2014a) Irish Gothics Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890 or Christina Morin’s (2018) more recent work The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829, have all proven invaluable to unveil the potential for interpretation Irish Gothic works pose and have served as inspiration for the present study. In his work, Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins and Theories, Jarlath Killeen (2014) acknowledges the difficulty in classifying Irish Gothic as a “tradition,” a “canon” or a “genre,” a fact which he explains by arguing that “Gothic tropes, motifs and themes appear everywhere and anywhere in modern Irish literature” (12). This opinion is shared by Flannery (2013), who attests to the difficulty in defining the genre and the need “to complicate our definitions of the term and of the genre” (93). Despite this, Ireland has long been associated with the Gothic genre, its representation as a place of mystery and the sublime well established in the English literary tradition. Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5) shows Ireland as a wild and dangerous space, levelling it to “Jamaica as exotic and perilous spaces” (Killeen 20014, 4). Similar portrayals of the Irish can be found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which Ireland is identified—in Victor’s mind—with “murder, madness, imprisonment and loss” (Killeen 2014, 5). This should come as no surprise, since Catholicism and Jacobitism were perceived as a threat to the formation of “Britishness,” and thus “both colonization and the animus against Catholicism were inherently bound up with the subjugation of the Celtic periphery – Gaelic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands” (Gibbons 2004, 11). Gothic was the

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perfect genre to portray this since it “manipulates the notion of terror at the precise moment in history when this concept discovers a political avatar in the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution” (Hansen 2009, 5). Not surprisingly, many Irish novelists set out to deconstruct this impression by creating their own Gothic depictions. In both Elizabeth Griffin’s The History of Lady Barton (1771) and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), the first impression of Ireland as an unwelcoming place, as a journey into the heart of darkness, is misleading since in both the country is shown as an attractive place, one worth living in, “such Irish writers realize the expectations of alienation their English readers anticipate and set up Irish exoticism only to undermine it and suggest the two nations have more in common than might be expected” (Killeen 2014, 7). Flannery (2013) also reinforces the uniqueness of Irish Gothic to expurgate the nation’s long-standing political and social problems, “the protracted and traumatic nature of Ireland’s colonial history furnished Gothic authors with a steady diet of atavistic antagonisms and malevolent mythologies” (91–2). This notwithstanding, the most powerful discourse which undermines the tenets of English Gothic conventions regarding the portrayal of the Irish is, without a doubt, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In this work, Burke identifies Ireland with the Sublime and, thus, with “obscurity, darkness, danger and the primitive past” (Killeen 2014, 7); this primitive past, however, is a reference to the druids and the old Celtic traditions, thus portraying primitive Ireland in a positive light, providing “a powerful language with which the Irish landscape could be identified” (Killeen 2014, 7). In a later work—Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—, Burke completes this idea by shifting “the locus of terror from the ancient to the modern, from Jacobite to Jacobine” (Gibbons 2004, 14), so that—unlike in conventional English Gothic—the Catholic Church, along with other remnants of the old order, become the victims of terror, not the terrorisers. Burke reverses the running metaphor of English Gothic—that the past is a threat to modernity, by suggesting that, in fact, it is the modern—the French revolutionaries—that threatens to destroy “the English notion of patrilineal inheritance, which […] establishes a tradition of liberty wherein any truly benevolent citizen looks backwards to ancestry in order to look forward to posterity” (Hansen 2009, 12).

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Whether or not one agrees with Burke’s ideas, what is clear is that his work paves the way for incipient writers of Irish Gothic (Power 2013, 25–6). The sublimity and beauty of Irish landscape features strongly in such works as Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796) or Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), where Horatio Mortimer— the main character—is “so astonished at the wilds of the west of Ireland that he lapses into Burkean reverie” (Killeen 2014, 8). This first encounter with the sublimity of the Irish landscape striking the foreign visitor became such touchstone of Irish Gothic that it is repeated in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1890). This change of scenery is one of the first and paramount characteristics of Irish Gothic—via Catholic intervention, Burke had managed to change the location from a foreign setting to home. Landscape also becomes the device through which much of the British colonial heritage is contested, “the contested nature of the Irish geographical and cultural landscape meant that these topographies were haunted by the disinherited revenants of colonial misappropriation” (Flannery 2013, 92). If traditional English Gothic novels like Radcliffe’s The Monk (1797) were set on the continental mainland, Irish Gothic is going to have as its main location Ireland, so that the past that is revisited in these novels is on home ground; this way, “Gaelic Gothic rattled the skeletons in its own vaults, thus going some way towards exposing the calcified cultural deposits that underlie the ideology of race itself” (Gibbons 2004, 16). Although Ireland is the paradigmatic setting in Irish Gothic, foreign locations have also been deployed to explore the social and political situation back home from a fresher perspective. Morin (2018) notices how these distant geographies “help highlight the terrible disruption, violence, and distress to be discovered at the long-desired home” (117). The present book further explores Morin’s (2018) contention by considering how J.C. Mangan, J.S.  Le Fanu and Bram Stoker employed foreign locations as refracting mirrors on which to portray the socio-political conditions back home. Race is, of course, a key component in Irish Gothic. The Celtic periphery is very often depicted as the garrisons of savagery and superstition, the “repositories of all that which England wished to deny and banish (the irrational, the superstitious, the perverse, the Catholic, the cannibalistic) […] a collective zone of atemporality, a place of the primitive, the out-of-­ touch” (Killeen 2014, 10). In short, in English Gothic Ireland was a shorthand of the primitive, “an amalgam of tenderness and terror, sentiment and savagery – human society, in fact, reduced to its most elemental, primitive condition” (Gibbons 2004, 21). Surprising as it may at first be, Irish Gothic

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writers seem to have embraced this condition. Both Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and J.S. Le Fanu’s Purcell Papers (1880) utilise depictions of illiterate, regressive characters, as does Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800). Jarlath Killeen (2014) attributes it to an failure of Irish writers to generate more “realist” material, “when Irish writers tried to produce purely realist novels, they generally failed, as the Gothic interrupts, intrudes and disrupts any supposedly stable realist mood” (10). Killeen’s (2014) argument moves along the lines that the language of fragmentation, paranoia and the unreal is a more adequate—not to say the only—means of expression for Irish writers, given their colonial situation. This assertion is further supported by Flannery (2013), who remarks upon “the extent to which Irish Gothic was, and remained into the late twentieth century, fixated with the political, economic, and cultural exertions of Ireland’s colonial relationship with England” (93). Although this argument rings true, it does need some clarification as most Irish Gothic writers set out to produce Gothic novels purposefully. As Sage (2000) notes, Maturin “was a conscious inheritor of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel of ‘Monk’ Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, seeking to outdo them in dark extravagance” (vii). As explored in subsequent parts of this book, the reasons behind the adoption of one of the conventions of English Gothic seems to be that of mimicry and subversion, two of the techniques deployed by postcolonial writers when addressing imperial powers. By copying one of the tenets of English Gothic, Irish Gothic writers were able to show its inadequacy for the Irish case, “like a misted-mirror impression of the concurrently-developing genre in England” (Power 2013, 5). Despite ongoing debates as to its most accurate denomination (Haslam 2007, 83–94), Irish Gothic can be considered a tradition within a genre, “and more often than not a very self-conscious one, given that later texts constantly revisit earlier ones” (Killeen 2014, 19). Early Irish Gothic works inspire later works in an almost self-referential manner, a “literary tradition, passed from generation to generation of Anglo-Irish writers” (Morin and Gillespie 2014b, 1). Thus, J.C. Mangan’s “The Man in the Cloak” owes its genesis to Robert Maturin’s Melmoth (1820), while the parallelisms between J.S.  Le Fanu’s “Mr Justice Harbottle” (1872) and Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House” (1891) are undeniable. Killeen (2014) criticises McCormack’s (1993) assertion that the Irish Gothic tradition “posed a chronological problem: there is a large gap of twenty-five years between the publication of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Le Fanu’s first novel, The Cock and the Anchor (1845) […] and a further gap of nineteen years before Uncle Silas (1864) arrived” (20).

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Killeen’s (2014) criticism is based on the very same concept of “tradition,” with which McCormack (1993) seems to have problems. For Killeen (2014), “the Irish Gothic mode subsists in the Irish Gothic tradition, and that this tradition includes all articulations of the Gothic mode […] that have any relationship to the subject matter of ‘Ireland’, as broadly conceived as that can be” (26). However, both Killeen (2014) and McCormack (1993) appear to be focusing exclusively on the Gothic novel, perhaps oblivious to the fact that Gothic short stories continued to be written during that period. Indeed, J.S.  Le Fanu’s Purcell Papers appeared—although in serialised form—between 1838 and 1840, thus predating The Cock and the Anchor (1845) by around five years. Similarly, J.C. Mangan’s earlier stories, “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale,” date back to 1833, while his mock-Gothic story “Love, Mystery, and Murder. A Tale” was published one year later, in 1834. Although not of an entirely Gothic nature, some of the stories contained in William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830) do have an identifiable Gothic turn. As can be seen, McCormack’s (1993) gap is thus greatly reduced if the Irish short story is taken into consideration. However, McCormack (1993) does have a point in arguing that “Irish writers of Gothic literature did not produce a definitive ‘tradition’ but merely mobilised the conventions found in English Gothic” (Killeen 2014, 19). A similar stance is sustained by Richard Haslam (2007), who sees Irish Gothic “more conceptually plausible when envisioned as mode rather than tradition” (89). Hansen (2009) acknowledges Irish Gothic’s indebtedness to “female Gothic,” which shows a young and virtuous woman, removed from the care and protection of her loved ones, and who finds herself entrapped in a castle, monastery or abbey (18). Such novels reproduce and explore the dialectical logic underscored by the terroriser/ terrorised binomial present in postcolonial and Gothic works. Transplanted to the Irish case—Hansen (2009) argues—, this dialectic, as represented in the portrayal of the failed marriage, showcases the idea of the failure of the 1800 Act of Union between England and Ireland. Irish Gothic, then, “becomes a space in which the Irish cultural imagery pits the dichotomous logic of terror against the troubles provoked by the unhappy Union” (Hansen 2009, 23). For Gibbons (2004), Irish Gothic challenges the whole idea of the colonial enterprise as a civilising tool, as this genre

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sees barbarism as intrinsic to the maintenance of colonial rule, not simply as a transient phase in the initial phase of conquest or “primitive accumulation”. In this version of the Gothic, the sins of the past become part of the underside of modernity itself as it weighs upon the minds of the living. (24)

Irish Gothic, be it mode or tradition, is a reaction to the political and social situation in Ireland, a mode of expression that acts as both a reaction to and a catalyst of the dominant Anglo-Irish caste, “the fictional representation of the repressed fears and anxieties of the minority Anglo-Irish population” (Morin and Gillespie 2014a, 1). Irish Gothic portrays the Anglo-Irish in their evolution form invaders to creoles/settlers, exposing their hidden deeds and their guilty consciences, despite the effects of historical process and “external” interventions, a list of writers which includes figures as substantial as Maturin, Le Fanu, Wilde, Stoker, Yeats, Synge, and Bowen, all of whom have a connection to the same political and geographical space, all of whom have recourse to the same broadly defined conventions of Gothic, all of whom have some thematic associations, may still amount to a (much complicated) version of a tradition, indeed, a Gothic tradition in the full sense of the word. The Irish Gothic is a canon, a tradition and a mode all at once. (Killeen 2014, 27)

It is true that Irish Gothic had traditionally been considered a Protestant product; however, Seamus Dean (1997) challenged this consensus by including J.C. Mangan’s Autobiography and suggesting “what we may call Catholic or Catholic-nationalist Gothic” (126). Recent scholarship has enlarged the tradition of Irish Gothic to include more Catholic Irish Gothic writers. Sturgeons’ (2012) consideration of the works of Gerald Griffin has proven the extent to which the works of Catholic Irish Gothic writers can be an “opportunity for readers to reappraise the parameters of Irish Gothic writing” (19). As Richard Haslam (2007) notes, the inclusion of Catholic Irish Gothic writers “provides us with new ways to recognise and contextualise the arch tone in Gerald Griffin’s ‘The Brown Man’ (1827), the polemical tone in Carleton’s ‘Lianhan Shee’, the jocular tone in Le Fanu’s ‘The Ghost and the Bone-Setter’ (1838)” (89). Research conducted by Claire Connolly, Niall Gillespie, Emer Nolan and Christina Morin has shown that “the Irish literary gothic in this period proves a dynamic, cross-sectarian, and cross-cultural enterprise” (Morin 2018, 4). This book works along the parameters thus established as it considers the works of Catholic James Clarence Mangan in relation to those of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker.

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The Irish Gothic Short Story and the Nineteenth Century Despite the long tradition of short story writing in Ireland, whose modern version can track “its roots in the short narratives of the nineteenth century” (Ingman 2009, 13), there seems to be a lack in research considering the Irish Gothic short story as a whole. This assertion needs to be qualified, however. There is a vast array of scholarly work considering the Irish Gothic short story in its individual manifestations, with outstanding studies which analyse different writers and their work in context: Sharon Murphy’s (2004) Maria Edgeworth and Romance, Heidi Hansson’s (2007) Emily Lawless 1845–1913: Writing the Interspace, Gifford Lewis’ (1987) Sommerville and Ross: The World of the Irish R.M., Barbara Hayley’s (1983) Carleton’s “Traits and Stories” and the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-­ Irish Tradition, W.J.  McCormack’s (1980) Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, Paul Murray’s (2004) From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker, Ellen Shannon-Mangan’s (1996) James Clarence Mangan: A Biography, James Walton’s (2007) Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J.S. Le Fanu or Matthew Gibson and Sabine Lenore Müller’s (2020) Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World. This is, by no means, an exhaustive list; however, this very same list attests to a certain lack of overall perspective in coming to terms with the genre. It could be argued that while individual writers and their work have been analysed, an overall approach is still lacking. The present work contributes to filling this void in scholarship by establishing a connection both in time and in genre. Thus, this book considers three authors whose short fiction put together encompasses the greater part of the nineteenth century: J.C. Mangan, J.S.  Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. Both J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were prolific authors, in their longer as well as in their shorter fictions. The unquestionable popularity of Dracula (1897) or the well-deserved reputation still enjoyed by J.S. Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864) or The House in the Churchyard (1863) among lovers of the Gothic genre testify to this. On the other hand, the name of J.C. Mangan is indissolubly associated to the birth of Irish nationalism, his productions well known to scholars and students alike. However, not so many people know that J.C. Mangan was also a short story writer. Like his successors, J.C. Mangan also wrote prolifically and touched almost all possible genres but the novel—pamphlets, journalistic pieces, comedy sketches, literary reviews, political pieces and, above all, poetry. And it is

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this latter genre for which he is renowned. However, J.C. Mangan also produced some excellent short stories which feature in the Gothic genre, or—to be more precise—in the mock Gothic. Nineteenth-century short narratives are defined by the different social and political events which marked Ireland’s historical evolution during the century. Events such as the failure of Grattan’s Parliament, the 1800 Act of Union and the subsequent loss of Anglo-Irish power, the Tithe Wars, the Great Famine and the different violent uprisings all had an impact on the Irish literary scene. I have already mentioned the paradoxical situation the language question underwent in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Murphy 2003, 41). This was produced by a change from the oral to the written tradition, which translated into a change from Irish to English as a medium of communication. Especially among the Irish intelligentsia, there was a widespread consciousness regarding the loss of Gaelic heritage, the very reason which identified them as Irish. This prompted scholars, intellectuals and writers to try and salvage their tradition, “for the impetus behind the retrieval of Ireland’s past was not simply historical but part of a political and cultural engagement in shaping Ireland’s future identity” (Ingman 2009, 15). Nineteenth-century periodicals played a key role in shaping and disseminating the Irish short story. The post-1800 years saw the appearance of dozens of publications, with “a thirst for all types of printed material— broadsides and pamphlets as well as newspapers, which were read by a newly literate population of artisans and shopkeepers, and closely monitored by government” (Tilley 2020, 12). Doyle (2018) estimates that prior to the Famine, around 47 per cent of the population older than five could read in English (605). Publications focused on general affairs, political instigations or land issues such as United Irishman Watty Cox’s The Irish Magazine or the conservative The Irish Farmers’ Journal cohabited with the more high-brow and culture-focused Transactions (1787–1907) or Proceedings (1836–present). Other smaller publications, such as the Dublin Penny Journal (1832–6), the Irish Penny Magazine (1833–4) or the Irish Penny Journal (1840–1) coexisted with longer-running monthly titles like the Dublin University Magazine (1833–77). Many of these journals published short narratives, in answer to the demand of the Irish public for fiction material as journals focused solely on cultural issues were a rare occurrence in the nineteenth century (Tilley 2020, 5). Mode of publication was one of the factors which defined the birth of the short story, with many first published in journals and later collected in

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volumes. However, the nineteenth-century short story was also influenced by the origin of its material, inspired by all types of rather short (mostly oral) narratives, the early nineteenth century is not the starting point for a history of short fiction. The lifespan of the tale is as long as that of humanity […] and critical attempts to pinpoint the “first” short story inevitably invite the challenge of unearthing an even earlier point of origin. (Killick 2008, 11)

Killick’s (2008) contention ushers in nineteenth-century diversity in the short narrative. Terminology is especially contentious, “involving adjacent terms like ‘sketch’, ‘tale’, and ‘novella’” (Shaw 1983, 20), a fact also remarked upon by Marler (1994, 168). Precisely because of the diversity in its form and due to its connection with orality, the short story was the perfect literary vehicle to channel anxieties over a disappearing Irish peasant way of life, to defend Irishness as opposed to Englishness, “the nineteenth-­century Irish short narrative […] was involved as much in intervention in Irish life as in representation” (Ingman 2009, 16). Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales (1804), Ana Hall’s Sketches of Irish Character (1829) or Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Tales and Legends of the South of Ireland (1825) constitute Protestant attempts to explain the Irish to the English. Similarly, John and Michael Banim’s The Tales of the O’Hara Family (1825) or Gerald Griffin’s Holland-Tide; or, Munster Popular Tales (1827) signify Catholic endeavours to “map out and explain Irish customs and life for English readers” (Ingman 2009, 21). Irish Gothic short fiction became a particularly rife field to explore political and personal anxieties. If Gothic fiction was the perfect mode for nineteenth-century Protestant Ireland, with their guilt-ridden, politically waning élite and decaying manor houses (Eagleton 1995, 187-99), the Irish Gothic short story was well furnished to capture the evolution of their fears, paranoia and growing anxieties in the face of changing historical factors. The Gothic short narrative is adept in exploring “issues around the disintegration of identity” (Cox 2016, 51), which in J.S. Le Fanu’s writings manifest in a “world of gliding bodies, monstrous grotesques, and phantom-like protagonists” (Milbank 2010, 362). For Milbank (2010), J.S.  Le Fanu’s writing is characterised by his usage of the grotesque, a figure “that disgusts or amazes the viewer because of its admixture of forms and because it crosses our classifications of knowledge” (363). Milbank (2010) highlights how J.S. Le Fanu’s deployment of the

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grotesque and his exploration of a guilty past stem from both his particular theological doctrine and “the hyphenated nature of this inheritance” (363). J.S.  Le Fanu’s theological doctrine refers to his adherence to Swedenborgian philosophy, where “the sufferer is often guilty of a past crime, and the supernatural acts as a gigantic machinery of judgment, whereby effect follows cause” (Milbank 2010, 367). On the other hand, his “hyphenated inheritance” connects J.S.  Le Fanu to his Anglo-Irish Ascendancy past. J.S. Le Fanu’s Huguenot ascent manifested itself in his emphasis on guilt, which was strengthened by his ancestor’s Charles de Cresseron’s collaboration with the Williamite settlement in Ireland. The Huguenot Calvinist tradition underscored the double predestination of the soul, “whereby one was bound from the beginning to either salvation or damnation. Anxiety and self-division therefore were problematic: the just had a sense of assurance, a confidence in their own election” (Milbank 2010, 367). Bram Stoker’s fiction is similarly imbibed in a literary exploration of identity to the point that “representations of ethnic identities [are] often fed by the phrenological and physiognomic prejudices of the time, but sometimes they are animated by a less judgemental and more simply ethnographic impulse” (Hopkins 2007, 12). Nineteenth-century scientific developments such as phrenology aided Bram Stoker in developing his characters in relation to identity. Indeed, it is through criminal anthropology that “a reassuring means of seemingly fixing identity and firmly establishing lines of difference” is found (Byron 2007, 50–1). Byron (2007) suggests this issue is visible in Bram Stoker’s character development of Edgar Caswall and his African servant Oolanga in The Lair of the White Worm (1911). Also contending racial issues, David Glover (1996) points out that “Stoker often gives his heroes some kind of Viking genealogy” (74), thus subscribing “to the racial ideas dominant in his period, in particular the superiority of the Nordic races to all others” (Richards 1995, 167). Hopkins (2007) suggests that Bram Stoker’s interest in Nordic mythology could have a decolonising reading, as the Norway–Sweden political relationship paralleled that of Ireland and England (Hopkins 2007, 12–3). This interpretation seems plausible in view of Bram Stoker’s self-declared political positioning in favour of Home Rule for Ireland (Murray 2004, 51). It also opens an interesting path in the treatment of Bram Stoker’s locations, which this book intends to further explore: the idea that “ultimately, everywhere of which he writes both is, and is not, Ireland” (Hopkins 2010, 390).

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The short stories of J.C. Mangan can certainly be classified under the above-mentioned area of research initiated by Claire Connolly, Niall Gillespie, Richard Haslam and others. This book’s consideration of J.C. Mangan’s short narratives adds to their efforts to widen the scope of Irish Gothic by including Catholic writers, delineating “an Irish-Catholic-­ nationalist Gothic mode” (Haslam 2006, 240–1). Well known for his verses, “less attention, however, has been paid to Mangan’s […] prose fiction, and the broader historical context of spiritualist writing, activity, and nineteenth-century magical thinking, in which many of Mangan’s most explicit writings on the uncanny were composed” (Jamison 2014, 163). J.C. Mangan’s writings are full of references to hauntings, ghosts and possessions, as made most explicit in his essay “Chapters on Ghostcraft” (1842), and which permeates all his work, “itself the scene of hauntings, and by no means unaware of itself as such” (Lloyd 2014, 14). In a similar vein to the writings of J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, J.C. Mangan’s writings question identity, as epitomised in his 1833 story “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (Lennon 2014, 70–1). However, one of the most remarkable features of his Gothic short fiction is J.C. Mangan’s deployment of settings, which “anticipates the migration of the Irish gothic genre to Eastern Europe, as exemplified in the seminal gothic texts of Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker” (Sturgeon 2020, 12). The present book further explores such movements and changes of location, contextualising them in the greater picture of the Irish Gothic tradition. This usage of place, a binary deployment of Irish and foreign settings, responds to a decolonising logic which transcends the individual, connecting these writers to an Irish narrative tradition.

Setting the Scene—Postcolonialism, Nineteenth-­Century Irish Gothic Short Fiction and the Writings of J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker One of the tenets of postcolonial theory and practice is how writers address the issue of setting at large, with writing being “a means of revisiting the interrelationship between place and history” (Innes 2007, 74). Setting is related to the physical spaces which colonisers occupied and which postcolonial writings attempt to recover for the native population and imaginary, to recuperate their own literary voice. How writers deal with such

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occupation and how they attempt to recover and repossess the land is, nonetheless, a feature which varies from postcolonial nation to postcolonial nation and from writer to writer. The Irish case poses a difficult scenario, with a seemingly endless debate as to “the legitimacy of Irish claims to postcolonial status” (Flannery 2009, 16). The Irish postcolonial conundrum stems from Ireland’s particular postcolonial case, “as well as belonging to a colony at the heart of the British Empire, Irish people helped conquer, populate, and govern the colonies overseas” (Kenny 2007, 92). As already mentioned, this was further complicated at home, with a clearly otherised sector of society (Irish Catholics), an in-between class reminiscent of settler discourses (the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy) and other sectors of society whose situation in Irish history has been largely ignored, perhaps to the detriment of postcolonial interpretation. Postcolonial scholarly practices have marked upon the importance of setting, and the concepts of place and displacement, as a recursive tool in literary practices (Ashcroft et al. 1989, 8). Issues such as land control or land possession have been present from the earliest colonial encounters, as land is a defining concept for both individual and collective identities. Settlers and colonialists changed place names to make them more suitable for their vision of the world, thus implicitly recognising their alien status but also dissociating land from its original inhabitants (Innes 2007, 72). Place is overall a concept—not only physical but also spiritual, as the relationship between place and the self is expressive of the much-discussed construct of belonging. Much postcolonial (and colonial) literature has been written as a reaction to the idea of home, manifested in “efforts to write of the land, or to come to terms with it imaginatively” (Boehmer 2005, 204). In this sense, Postcolonial short fiction appears “as a privileged site for questioning the erasure of toponyms, nomadic routes, sacred grounds and the sense of place that pre-colonial forms of spatiality sustained” (Omhovère and Tollance 2020, 1). This resonates in Irish Gothic fiction, where the concept of home is a convoluted one. Setting plays a key role in Irish Gothic fiction as “the setting of a given piece of fiction can represent a very particular choice, one with both narratological and ideological import. To ignore the significance of this preference, […] is fundamentally to misconstrue the literary gothic” (Morin 2018, 116). The concept of home is, however, a diffuse construct, with the difference between property and home becoming “one of the major preoccupations of the Irish Gothic” (Shanahan 2014, 81). Christina Morin (2011) argues that much Irish Gothic fiction

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manifests an “ongoing uncertainty about the safety and security of their characters’ Irish homes” (83). This insecurity is translated into the spatial design of the home, “with its architectural outer form and inner structure, the Anglo-Irish manor houses indicate a class separation and incompatibility between the two communities” (Wang 2018, 1030). Thus, Irish Gothic fiction taps on one of the omnipresent issues in Irish fiction—the right to land, and land possession as a justification for Irishness and belonging. Both place and its opposite, the idea of displacement, “demonstrate the very complex interaction of language, history and environment in the experience of colonised peoples and the importance of space and location in the process of identity formation” (Ashcroft et al. 2001, 161). Careful consideration needs to be given to both how colonisers experienced the lands they occupied and how colonised peoples reacted to issues of dispossession, exile and forced wandering—concepts all which found their way into literary practices, both colonial and postcolonial. However, the Irish case poses a slight deviation from this binary division often employed in postcolonial readings. Until recent times, postcolonial readings of Ireland have tended to view in the division Anglo-Irish vs. Catholic a mimesis of the established postcolonial division of coloniser vs. colonised. The very existence of the term “Anglo-Irish literature” bears witness to this. However, scholars have, for some time now, been questioning the reductionist approximation this constitutes. McCormack (1994) had already manifested that “the notion of Anglo-Irish literature is given an excessive stability by the acceptance of tradition as accumulated and accumulative succession” (12). Arguing along the same lines, Killeen (2014) has pointed out that “I, too, argued that the Gothic is best seen as an expression of what I called the ‘Irish Anglican Imagination’” to later assert that “this apparently obvious relationship between Irish Anglicans and Irish Gothic has been challenged in recent years” (34). Killeen’s (2014) assertion does, indeed, reveal the complexity of postcolonial interpretations in Ireland, which— perhaps for practical purposes—have been presented as an antagonism between Catholic and Anglo-Irish Ireland. The picture is definitely more complex than it would at first seem, with many in-between figures. The present work engages in this discussion. By considering the works of a Catholic writer, a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and a member of the Protestant middle classes, the approximation to the complex status of Ireland as a colony becomes more composite, nuanced and varied; it thus offers a better

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insight into and understanding of the different social, political, and religious concerns which have moulded the Irish nation, in general, and Irish Gothic, in particular. In this sense, this book follows on the footsteps of the work initiated by such scholars as Claire Connolly, Niall Gillespie, Richard Haslam, Emer Nolan, Christina Morin or Sinéad Sturgeon. Their ongoing research has proven an invaluable tool to substantiate the leading argument of the present work. Despite its reductive nature, I would argue that the term Anglo-Irish has seemingly come to embody a shorthand for Protestant for many scholars. Members of the Protestant denomination, whether Presbyterians or belonging to the Church of Ireland, enjoyed greater privileges than the Catholic majority, with Irish Catholics suffering from a “cultural disability based on their religion and Gaelic background” (Murphy 2003, 106). While that condition did not entail direct access to riches or political positions, it did present a vantage point from which to consider life at large. Murphy (2003) points out how there was a greater number of Protestant scientists as “the pursuit of science generally required a social and economic position beyond the reach of most Catholics” (139). Ireland became the setting in which different cultures—diverging ways to perceive and live space and time—converged, creating a setting where “seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, [were] caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history” (Lyons 1979, 117). Proof of these different perceptions of the world is the diverging literary manifestations that these writers have left us. This book engages with such perceptions adding complexity to oversimplified dichotomous oppositions. The analysis, comparison and contrast of the writings of J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker provide an innovative addition to scholarly work, enlarging the understanding of Irish Gothic short fiction. The perception of space, while subjective, is also class related. It is then logical that these different cultures, with their diverse backgrounds, showed distinct perceptions of space. The concept of the gazing eye, of “bird’s-eye description […] embodied in the high vantage point or knowledgeable position taken up by a writer or traveller as he re-creates a scene” (Boehmer 2005, 68), is of paramount importance in postcolonial interpretations. First, it reveals how colonisers envisioned the lands they occupied. Perhaps more significantly, it is also a good starting point for resistance literature in the process of abrogation and appropriation to recover the colonised subjects’ relationship between the self and the land. Postcolonial literature not only questions the colonial gaze. It mimics it,

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reproducing it in a subverted manner to decolonise the land. This process implies dismantling “the master’s house with the master’s tools” (Ashcroft et al. 2001, 4). Traditional readings, which have classified Irish Gothic as mainly an Anglo-Irish product (Killeen 2014, 35), have been read as replicating “settler colonialist symbolic relations by continually reinforcing Anglo-Irish settler colonialism’s dominant obsession with the veneration and maintenance of a national Other” (Backus 1999, 19). Backus’ assertion is relevant as not only does it reveal a preconception of Irish Gothic as mainly a Protestant (and I would add mainly Ascendancy) product, but it also labels the Anglo-Irish as a settler community. Joseph Cleary (2007) works along the same lines, arguing that Irish Gothic fiction was produced “primarily by intellectuals descended from what was historically a creole colonial settler community” (58-9), thus displaying prototypical settlers’ mixed feelings towards their land, whose strangeness “reinforced the view […] that it was a place of exile” (Innes 2007, 79). This settler status quo also explains their mixed, at times contradictory, reactions towards their Catholic compatriots, “the Anglo-Irish class, [argued] with considerable force that their way of life is Irish” (Wilson 2011, 99) despite Catholic-nationalist attempts to assert the opposite. In this sense, Protestant Irish Gothic can be read as a decolonising vehicle which voiced Protestant anxieties over the relationships with their Catholic counterparts and the metropolis. This book works along those lines, contending that Irish Gothic fiction was written as a mimicking response to the complex Irish colonial situation. As such, it broadens the spectrum of binary interpretations as a way either to denunciate colonial impositions on the Catholic population or to expurgate guilt-ridden consciences on the Protestant side. In this sense, the inclusion of a Catholic writer and a Protestant (but not Ascendancy) author broadens the scope of Backus’ assertion, therefore, including newer perceptions of setting as both a colonised space and a resistance tool. Postcolonial discourses are also concerned with the idea of dispossession, of forced clearances and migrations. The colonial quest implied a forced displacement of the subaltern other insofar as they could not fit in the colonial picture. The empire “involved the editing out or occlusion of extreme otherness: what could not be translated was simply not a part of the represented scene” (Boehmer 2005, 90). Thus, the other is cast into the margins of mainstream colonial discourse, losing their voice. Postcolonial literary productions attest to “the continuing difficulty of finding a literary voice that is able to speak outside of the imposition of

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[colonial] values” (Gunning 2013, 28). Killeen (2014) argues that “[Irish] Gothic, in truth, may not belong to the dispossessed but to the paranoid possessors, the out-of-control controllers, the descending Ascendancy” (48). While Killeen’s (2014) contentious argument is addressed to those who have seen in Irish Gothic a purposeful reflection of the waning power of the Ascendancy, it does reveal a question of perception. Many critics have seen in Irish Gothic a manifestation of the Ascendancy class’s fears of a Catholic return (Gibbons 2004, 80), or a “vision of colonial history wherein the ghosts of a suppressed and repressed Irish Catholic past haunt the present day” (Hansen 2009, 8). Protestant Irish Gothic could be said to be based on the fear of dispossession. Paradoxically, the dispossessors could perceive themselves as the dispossessed. This filtered into Edgeworth’s fiction, where “an initial act of dispossession lies at the root of many characters’ convictions that they are proprietarily connected with a piece of property” (Maurer 2012, 20). This book argues that while Irish Gothic does reflect the unquestionable power of the Ascendancy class as manifested in their legal ownership of land, the genre also reveals the dispossession of the Catholic Irish, and the consequences of illegitimate possession of a land that does not rightfully belong to the Protestant Anglo-Irish community. It, therefore, argues—along the same lines as Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (2014)—that Irish Gothic fiction could be understood as “a displaced form of societal interrogation, the only true way of explaining and attempting to address Ireland’s colonial condition” (10) In their attempt to find this authentic voice, and to garner it as representative of their lost collective identity, nationalist writers tried “to retrieve or invent edenic homelands, lost spiritual traditions set in an unspoilt pastoral past” (Boehmer 2005, 112). Such Edenic, bucolic representations of a homeland lost through colonial agency is also questioned in postcolonial discourse. In recent years, postcolonial ecocriticism has contested the pastoral in its original form. Instead of presenting an elegy of human interaction with nature in a harmonious way, the pastoral genre has been appropriated to be expressive of “the legitimation of highly codified relations between socially differentiated people – relations mediated, but also mystified, by supposedly universal cultural attitudes to land” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 20). The pastoral (or post-pastoral) would, therefore, embody the interconnectedness of human beings and the natural habitat they occupy. It is expressive of the need to nurture this relationship or of the consequences of not doing so. In this regard, nature can also

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be depicted as a vindictive force. Indeed, the pastoral finds its precedent in Ireland in the writings of Irish Jacobins, who had used it to address “the more elite end of the spectrum” (Gillespie 2014, 60) of Irish society before turning to Gothic. Susan V.  Donaldson (2007), in “Faulkner’s Versions of Pastoral, Gothic, and the Sublime,” had already demonstrated the link between the pastoral genre and the Gothic. This relationship had already been noticed as far back as 1986, when Alok Bhalla (1986) asserted that Gothic fiction “rejects pastoral nostalgia as a demonic illusion, and concerns itself with those specific conditions of inequality, power, work and ownership of land which determine the material lives of human beings” (5). There should be little wonder in this as the pastoral is deeply rooted in “a double longing after innocence and happiness, to be recovered not through conversion or regeneration, but merely through a retreat” (Poggioli 1975, 147). This nostalgia for a gone past permeates Irish Gothic as seen in the works of J.S. Le Fanu, whose romantic landscapes are depicted “between the indignation of the journalist and the nostalgia of the autobiographer” (McCormack 1980, 22). Nostalgia as a literary construct can be traced back to the seventeenth century, peaking during the Romantic Era as a response to the industrialisation processes then widespread in Europe (Walder 2011, 1). As a literary mode, nostalgia allows the past “by way of memory and longing, to filter into the present [bridging] the two effectively” (Frawley 1998, 270). Usually thought of “in terms of longing and desire—for a lost home, place, and/or time” (Walder 2011, 4), nostalgia acquires a special relevance in postcolonial literature. Through the deployment of partial, fragmented memories from the past, postcolonial writing “invokes nostalgia as a means of resuscitating the forgotten or obscured histories of both colonised and coloniser” (Walder 2011, 16). As Victorian uses of nostalgia show, it can be employed not only to reclaim a gone past but also to create anxiety over the future, “nostalgia and apocalyptic fears mark the writer’s perception of the destiny of the no-longer-livable [sic.] provincial towns” (Isomaa et al. 2013, 157). Nostalgia filters down into Romantic Irish literature through the Irish language and its loss, which fact “seems to have significantly contributed to the nostalgia that arose around nature and landscape, at least on part because of the loss of words to describe that world” (Frawley 2005, 53). However, these nostalgic landscapes are deceitful, combating “the idea of a Romantic Ireland aligned with the British version in both its sentiments and its language” (Wenzell 2009, 51). The pleasures of the pictorial and

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poetic Romantic English tradition are not reciprocated in Irish portrayals of ruins and rural houses. Kreilkamp’s (2007) assertion that “as the anxious site of political negotiation and loss, the decaying house only rarely serves as a locus for nostalgia” (176) needs some qualifying, however. I contend that while the big house is not itself often a site for nostalgia, its surroundings do tend to portray a deceitful feeling of longing for the past, as will be explored in the fictions of J.C. Mangan, J.S.  Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. In its depiction of Irish landscape, the mock-pastoral acts as a decolonising, de-anglicising tool, “place, or the attachment to a particular locale, can act as a counter to the devastations of time” (Garavel 2008, 99). On discussing the bog as an intrinsically representative feature of Irish landscape, Marine Galiné (2018) argues that [the bog’s] organic properties allows [sic] writers of the Irish Gothic to manifest their anxieties about burying and/or excavating their past – as a protean space, it conjures up the contradicting motifs of stasis, collapse, decomposition and preservation of the dying body. (76)

Galiné (2018) draws on Gladwin’s (2016) similar contention that the bog acts as a liminal third space. I contend, however, that this affirmation is extensible to Irish landscape in general and not just bogland; that, in fact, imperialism had its brunt on the Irish landscape as much as it did on its people (Garrard 2012, 133). Irish landscape, therefore, acts as a decolonising tool, reflecting and reacting to the colonial process. This conceptualisation of landscape is embedded in recent trends in Irish studies, which have sought to prove “direct relationship with the land [as] the true intersection between the Irish psyche and the surrounding natural world, investing them with an esoteric quality” (FitzGerald 2020, 62). This book also delves in such vindications of landscape as the settings crafted by J.C. Mangan, J.S.  Le Fanu and Bram Stoker purposefully defy colonial occupation, questioning determining factors such as legitimacy, ownership or the idea of the belonging. The home is intimately linked to the idea of belonging expressed in relation to nature and natural landscapes. Embodied in all the man-made structures, the home is erected as a witness to both the self and the other’s presence in the land. Building houses can be read an act of reclamation, a “fight to have their understandings of the world granted legal status and their rights honoured on their own terms” (Gunning 2013, 54). It is far

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from surprising, then, that “thematically, the loss of home is, not surprisingly, a recurring concern in narratives of displacement” (McCullough 2011, 807). The importance of the home and the concept of homelessness is also a central issue in Irish Gothic fiction. In Irish Gothic, such issues can and often do translate in one of “Gothic’s primal scene: a confined and feminized character frets over the loss of inheritance and of autonomy” (Hansen 2009, 88). Shanahan (2014) remarks how the concept of home and its absence, the “themes of dislocation and the fear of dispossession, [are] concerns shared by Irish Protestants and Catholics alike” (82). Physical construction, houses, cottages and manor houses convey a sense of the Gothic (Punter 2012, 14), but also a sense of postcolonial resistance to British colonisation or of allegiance to colonial principles, “old houses signal internal division and point to connections across the waters. The eastern house links Ireland to England. The autochthonous western house went with the Irish in ancient times to Scotland and Wales” (Glassie 2014, 42). But it is not only the colonised other that suffers the idea of dispossession and estrangement. Settlers, émigrés and explorers are another kind of exile. Being away from their homelands, they are forced to come to terms with alien landscapes, flora and fauna. It is logical that these exiles voice their “concern to make the land familiar and to mark its ownership” (Innes 2007, 72). In the end, any type of exile is expressive of the concept of not-­ belonging, which “can function in various ways to disrupt or challenge the national narrative, calling into question the presumption of a natural tie between a sovereign state and its subjects” (McCullough 2011, 805). The exile’s perspective is, then, defined by “exclusionism either of the homeland or of the host country, or of both, which often breeds a melancholic nostalgia towards the abandoned home that emerges from the exile’s troubled relationship with a sense of rootedness” (Zamorano Llena 2016, 361). The exilic nature of Irish writers has been explored before. Pine (2014) argues that “certainly Irish writers […] display the same kind of exilic imagination that we also find in migrant minds such as Nabokov, Kundera and of course Rushdie” (248). Although traditional views on exile have affirmed “that dislocations such as that of diasporas, exiles and migrations necessarily disconnect people from a location” (Canelo 2013, 41), Saleh Rofail (2013) emphasises its positive reading, as a writer “rather casts a brave critical lens […] from a comfortable distance” (179). Such postulates find their replication in Irish Gothic fiction, with the “Anglo-Irish hav[ing] an invidious choice to

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make: they can choose separation, exile, and ultimate damnation” (Shanahan 2014, 83). Irish Gothic also abrogates the figure of “the visiting Englishman, always invoking Ireland’s historical ties to continental Europe” (Kreilkamp 2007, 163), for whom the Irish colonial subject embodies the bewildering complexity of the colonised other. Christina Morin (2018) also asserts the importance of location in relation to the figure of the exile, affirming that in Irish Gothic, foreign locations are frequently “framed as the place from which characters continuously strive to return home. As such, they are sites of exile, hardship, enslavement, and imprisonment” (117). Morin’s (2018) assertion is significant, and it has served as inspiration for the design of this book insofar as it delineates a differentiating and defining principle in Irish Gothic short fiction: the alienated (and I would add alienating) usage of settings. It is significant that the three writers considered for this book chose to deploy both Irish and foreign settings, almost establishing a progression, with a tendency towards alienated locations. Such a change of location responded to several conditioning factors; however, I contend that Irish Gothic writers continued to be enmeshed in the political and social scenarios back home, that while using foreign landscapes, J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were, in fact, portraying their home country and its contemporary socio-political turmoil. This change of scenario, I suggest, responds to economic and personal reasons as much as to the creation of a tradition, as nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writing “often explicitly draws on larger geographical networks that establish wide-­ranging international comparisons” (Wright 2014, xiii). We have already seen how J.C. Mangan displaced his narratives as early as 1838 in his story “The Man in the Cloak.” The suggestion that he may have been using these European enclaves as “a heterotopic space […], mirroring the Irish nationalist struggle” (Sturgeon 2020, 23) is one of the sustaining pillars of the present book. Similarly, J.S. Le Fanu’s extended usage of English settings coincides with a tendency in Irish Gothic to use said settings “to critique English structures on broader terms” (Wright 2014, 132), in what can be interpreted as a decolonising tool. In fact, J.S. Le Fanu had used landscape “as the extension of figures emblematic of Irish historical realities” (McCormack 1980, 251) and had only later deployed English settings forced by market requisites. After analysing Bram Stoker’s usage of Iceland as a setting, Hopkins (2010) similarly asserts that in Stoker, location “can ultimately stand for somewhere other than itself, as its cultural and ethnic contours prove to map so conveniently onto those of Ireland” (390).

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These deployments of foreign settings by authors who, one way or another and with differing degrees of national consciousness, sought to contribute to the creation of a national literature is telling. As I have just intimated, these locations are impinged with an aura of Irishness, a feeling “both familiar and alienating at once and, more importantly, [they unveil] how navigating the spatial terrain requires the sharing and the giving up of knowledge” (Spencer and Valassopoulos 2021, 16). By displacing their locations to an alien but at the same time familiar space (as would be the case with Continental Europe), Irish Gothic forces readers to see familiar issues with new eyes, simultaneously perceiving “what is familiar while viewing what is ‘exotic’ in relation to those familiar frames” (Isomaa et al. 2013, xv). This acquires greater significance when considering that a great part of their readership was based in England (Killeen 2014, 6). Such enforced reconsideration of location is especially significant with the usage of English settings. Not only does this deployment compel readers to confront the colonial situation from a new perspective, void of prejudices, but it also questions the English (and by extension British) imperial superiority based on “English political and cultural progress” (Morin 2018, 129). Contentions like these have been similarly intimated before. In Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood, Joseph Valente (2002) already considers Dracula (1897) as displaced fiction discussing Irish issues. Similarly, after analysing the relation between land ownership and national identity in the works of George Moore and George Meredith, Sarah L.  Maurer (2012) affirms that “making a property in England the source […] of Irishness becomes a perverse way […] to ensure both the external, material source of […] Irishness and its inalienability” (205). Grubgeld (1989) has similarly contended that physical displacement can align characters “with a heritage of dispossession” (27). Indeed, dislocating settings to tackle Irish problems, using other locations to represent Irish scenarios, seems to be intimately embedded in Irish writing. In his discussion about Beckett’s dislocated settings, Cóilín Parsons (2013) argues that “even if they are sometimes recognisable to us as specific places, or evoke landscapes that we can connect to […]—the Dublin mountains, Wicklow, Connemara, London—they are also often alien and unrecognisable” (85). Such estrangement works to express not only the Catholic experience of felt dispossession, but also the Protestant one of perceived dispossession and alienation in what is, in the end, their home country.

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By alienating landscapes, Irish Gothic allows for “spatial dislocation and the alienation or estrangement of a formerly secure sense of place” (Alexander 2010, 122), better conveying the idea of loss and ushering in a feeling of nostalgia. Such a reading of geographical dislocations provides a new avenue for interpretation, moving away from familiar spaces to “create their own avenues for transgressive political thinking and expression” (Mechri and Hichri 2017, 12). This understanding of dislocated geographies follows a reconceptualisation of the notion of place, “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan 1977, 6). The more abstract concept of space becomes place when imbued with our sensory perceptions of the familiar, the known, the everyday. This book understands the imagined, dislocated geographies of J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker as extensions of their known spaces, transforming their imagined, displaced locations into alternative visions of their homeland. These imagined geographical dislocations “are mindscapes imagining places and spaces from the perspective of a viewer, inscribing meanings and perhaps whole ideologies to places” (Isomaa et al. 2013, xv). As a result, these geographical displacements can be interpreted in terms of resistance against the established authority, “spatial dis-placement as a form of dis-location can also lead to the dislocation of personality or to cultural dislocation” (Labaune-­ Demeule 2015, 3).

Survey of Chapters Although usually understood in spatial terms, setting is not only the physical and temporal frame which envelops a given story but also how the narrator, the characters and even the reader perceive and explore it. In this sense, the works of these three writers provide with a vantage point of view, given the fact that—put together—they encompass not only the greater part of the nineteenth century but also the two main religious and cultural divisions then existing on the island—Catholics and Protestants. The perceptions transmitted via narratorial intervention or character construction are, therefore, of great relevance in postcolonial terms insofar as they convey the different viewpoints expressed by the authors. Such parsing of space constitutes a fundamental decolonising tool, helping writers to abrogate and appropriate formerly colonised spaces and to denounce colonial agency in Ireland.

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While setting and space can be accounted for and measured in many different (and complementary) ways, there is an evident divide common to all three writers: the usage of home and foreign locations to which Morin (2018) has already alluded. Although deploying foreign locations is not an uncommon feature in postcolonial and Gothic fictions, and it has been well accounted for as a decolonising tool, it is attention-grabbing that these three writers opted for home and foreign settings to locate their stories. Commercial issues considered, the implications of this choice of locations are multifarious and yield themselves even more logically to postcolonial interpretations of their texts. With this in mind, the book is divided into two naturally logical parts. Thus, Part I of this book considers those stories set in Ireland. The authors and their fictions are analysed in chronological order, with a first chapter dedicated to James Clarence Mangan, the second chapter to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the third chapter to Bram Stoker. Conversely, Part II considers those fictions set elsewhere and does so following the same ordering principle as Part I. It thus first addresses James Clarence Mangan’s dislocated fictions, it subsequently moves on to explore the narratives written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the part is finally closed by a consideration of Bram Stoker’s displaced geographies. A chronological approach to analysing the works of these writers yields itself as the natural methodology given that the intention of the present work is to gain an understanding of a genre and a period. Although a theme-based approach would, perhaps, have proven more entertaining, adhering to a chronological approach helps in sustaining a perception of time progression. I hope that this approach proves fruitful in observing how the Irish Gothic short story evolved through the nineteenth century, with its nuances, its influences and literary reflections. Chapter 2 considers J.C. Mangan’s approach to setting deployment and his appropriation of the concept of the colonial gaze. Based on postcolonial approximations which question the concept of the civilising mission (Boehmer 2005) and the usage of settings as a tool to counter colonial misrepresentations (Banerjee 2019), the chapter analyses two of his stories set in Ireland, “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (1833) and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833). In both stories, J.C. Mangan appropriates the colonial gaze to unveil the misperceptions of the colonial enterprise. Resorting to the conventions of Irish Gothic, J.C. Mangan’s literary creations question the validity of the colonial gaze. The chapter further explores J.C. Mangan’s uncovering of the limitations

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and contradictions of the colonial gaze, which places his stories as precursors of the Irish Gothic tradition of reversing the misconception of the Irish Catholic as savage (Gibbons 2004; Khair 2009). Chapter 3 centres on J.S. Le Fanu’s conveyance of nostalgia through landscape and the portrayal of a no home in the Anglo-Irish manor house. To implement this analysis, the chapter examines two stories from J.S. Le Fanu’s early Purcell Papers (1838–40) collection, “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) and “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839). While both stories have been taken from the Purcell Papers, they present very different scenarios. “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) is focused on the Catholic nobility and their fate, using a setting-imbued nostalgia to vindicate the figure of the Catholic. Conversely, “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) centres on J.S. Le Fanu’s own class and on the deployment of their most intimate spaces to unveil their hidden guilt over their colonial past. It further analyses J.S.  Le Fanu’s usage of the locked-room motif in contrast to landscape depiction as an allegorical device to convey criticism of his own class. Closing Part I, Chap. 4 reflects upon Bram Stoker’s usage of rural depictions. Based on Gunning’s (2013) contentions on the importance of rural spaces as decolonising tools, the chapter considers Bram Stoker’s two Irish stories, “The Gombeen Man” (1889) and “The Man from Shorrox” (1894). The first of these deals with one of the issues which greatly concerned author of Dracula (1897): land and its fair distribution, and how the British colonial system in Ireland operates to the detriment of the lower Catholic classes. An analysis of setting deployment in “The Gombeen Man” (1889) reveals Stoker’s anticolonial usage of landscapes and nature. On the other hand, “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) depicts efforts to resist the implementation of the empire under a new disguise, that of the travelling Englishman. Set in the communal space of the public house, the story works as a defence of the rural community against new forms of imperialism. Opening Part II, Chap. 5 looks back at J.C. Mangan and his depictions of foreign settings as decolonising elements which render literary spaces both familiar and alienating at the same time (Spencer and Valassopoulos 2021, 16). This chapter considers two of his stories, “The Thirty Flasks” (1838) and “The Man in the Cloak” (1838), and their portrayal of alienated locations as heterotopic spaces (Sturgeon 2020). Anticipating Bram Stoker’s later stories, J.C. Mangan’s fictions utilise the figure of the exile or émigré, both in its exotic form (as a colonised intellectual émigré in

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European soil) and as the embodiment of the colonial adventurer. The humorous tone and depiction of the colonised émigré and his surroundings in “The Thirty Flasks” (1838) works as an allegory of colonial depletion of colonised lands. Conversely, the analysis of “The Man in the Cloak” (1838) considers the convoluted relationship between the colonial self and the colonised other, and how they reciprocate each other in an endless repetition. This convoluted relationship is manifested in their perception and occupation of physical spaces and in the impossibility of performing a return home. Chapter 6 centres on J.S. Le Fanu’s move from rural to urban settings and from Irish to English locations. Following the trend of other nineteenth-­century Irish writers (Sturgeon 2020; Hopkins 2010), J.S. Le Fanu’s displaced geographies aid in transmitting the experience of loss and displacement of his class (Tuan 1977, 6), convey the Irish colonial situation. To examine this literary change, the chapter first considers J.S. Le Fanu’s “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853), which sets the pattern of urban deployment. It then moves on to analyse “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870) and “Green Tea” (1872) as depictions of enclosed spaces where the Anglo-Irish guilty past is constantly re-enacted as a result of their stasis. The concluding chapter in Part II, Chap. 7 returns to the figure of the exile or émigré introduced by J.C. Mangan. In Bram Stoker’s narratives, however, this is depicted as the colonial adventurer, a figure which was pivotal in the development of colonialist literature. Depicted as the epitome of manliness, the colonial adventurer plays a key role in justifying the colonial enterprise by portraying colonised lands as blank spaces in the map (Boehmer 2005). Bram Stoker appropriates and abrogates this figure to debase its mythical aura. The chapter considers two of Bram Stoker’s dislocated geographies, “The Coming Home of Abel Behenna” (1893) and the posthumously published “Dracula’s Guest” (1914). As a veiled reference to the Irish participation in the British empire, the first story reveals the pernicious consequences back home of complicity in the colonial quest. “Dracula’s Guest” (1914) opposes two different conceptualisations of landscape, the colonial gaze and the subaltern’s nativist perception. The story appropriates the colonialist’s views, embodied in the narrative voice, and sets them in direct opposition to the Gothic setting. This, however, overpowers the narrative voice, ultimately proving the validity of nativist perceptions of the land.

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The final chapter offers an overarching perspective, a collective understanding of the different findings which, chapter after chapter, have been put forward to the reader. While the intention of this book is to contribute to clarifying genre through a particular perspective, in a rigorous and scholarly manner, no research is ever complete and definitive. Thus, the closing chapter also offers some insights as to future research this scholarly work could lead to, signalling different directions to be undertaken.

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Parsons, Cóilín. 2013. The Turd in the Rath: Antiquarians, the Ordnance Survey, and Beckett’s Irish Landscapes. Journal of Beckett Studies 22 (1): 83–107. Pine, R. 2014. The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and The Post-Colonial World. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Poggioli, Renato. 1975. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. MA diss.: Harvard University. Power, Albert. 2013. Towards an Irish Gothic. The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature 1: 3–32. Punter, David. 2000. Postcolonial Imaginings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2012. A New Companion to the Gothic. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Richards, Jeffrey. 1995. Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels. In Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker, 143–171. Aldershot: Scholar Press. Rofail, Lydia Saleh. 2013. The Indian Gothic: Diaspora, Domesticity and Maternal Absence in Deepa Mehta’s Fire. In Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes, ed. A. Nicéphore, 177–198. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction. In Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Robert Maturin, i–xxxi. London: Penguin. Scanlon, Lauren A., and M.  Satish Kumar. 2019. Ireland and Irishness: The Contextuality of Postcolonial Identity. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109 (1): 202–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018. 1507812. Shanahan, Jim. 2014. Suffering Rebellion: Irish Gothic Fiction, 1799–1830. In Irish Gothic Genres, ed. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, 74–93. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Shannon-Mangan, Ellen. 1996. James Clarence Mangan: A Biography. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Shaw, Valerie. 1983. The Short Story, A Critical Introduction. Essex: Longman. Spencer, Robert, and Anastasia Valassopoulos. 2021. Postcolonial Locations: New Issues and Directions in Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge. Stoker, Bram. (1914) 1993. Dracula. London: Penguin Classics. Sturgeon, Sinéad. 2012. ‘Seven Devils’: Gerald Griffin’s ‘The Brown Man’ and the Making of Irish Gothic. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 11: 18–31. ———. 2020. East-Central Europe in the Writing of James Clarence Mangan. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 12 (1): 10–26. Tilley, Elizabeth. 2020. The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Valente, Joseph. 2002. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vance, N. 2014. Irish Literature Since 1800. New York: Routledge. Walder, D. 2011. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory. London: Routledge. Walton, James. 2007. Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J.S.  Le Fanu. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Wang, Yena. 2018. The Landscape Representation of the Anglo-Irish Cultural Estrangements in Bowen’s The Last September. Theory and Practice in Language Studies 8 (8): 1029–1034. https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0808.16. Wenzell, T. 2009. Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature, 2009. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Wilson, Mick. 2005. Terms of Art and Tricks of Trade: A Critical Look at the Irish Art Scene Now. Third Text 190 (5): 535–543. Wilson, Steve. 2011. Journeys Westward: The Complicated Irish West in Somerville & Ross’ ‘Matchbox’ and ‘An Irish Problem’. CEA Critic 73: 89–103. Wisker, Gina. 2006. Postcolonial Gothic. In Teaching the Gothic. Teaching the New English, ed. A. Powell and A. Smith, 168–181. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625358_12. ———. 2007. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, Julia M. 2007. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Zamorano Llena, Carmen. 2016. From Exilic to Mobile Identities: Colum McCann’s ‘Let the Great World Spin’ and the Cosmopolitanization of Contemporary Ireland. Irish University Review 46 (2): 359–376.

CHAPTER 2

The Spaces in Which I/Eye Gaze: J.C. Mangan’s Satirical Appropriation of Colonial Views

The colonial quest, or the imperial mission, was primarily an occupation of space, mainly in physical terms but also as a space upon which colonisers gazed, a space which was thought, analysed and understood in colonial terms. Colonial perceptions of the other shaped how these were subsequently conveyed back home. Produced in the form or journals, letters, diaries and fictional narratives, these perceptions come to embody the experiences of the colonised other (Boehmer 2005, 14). Settler communities would reproduce such colonial readings, as they “tended to conceive of themselves as conferring (or imposing) the gifts of civilization upon the benighted heathen” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 7), with an intentional difference, as they aimed to make a colonised space a new home, trying to “reconcile how to live in the present while also negotiating these [new] wide- ranging social realities” (Spencer and Valassopoulos 2021, 120). Divided between a Protestant settler élite and a largely disposed Catholic majority, Ireland poses an interesting scenario for postcolonial discussions. Especially during the first part of the nineteenth century, such parsing of space was mainly carried out and codified in written narratives by the educated Anglo-Irish, who would then reflect their anxieties, ambitions and fears through the written word (Murphy 2003, 160). Given that J.C. Mangan was of Catholic origin, his writings offer a contrast with

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_2

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those of the Anglo-Irish, allowing for a scrutiny of their gaze. Such a consideration builds on the research conducted by Sturgeon (2012), Morin (2018) and others, who contend that the inclusion of Catholic Irish Gothic writers broadens the understanding of Irish Gothic. Seamus Dean (1997) had already intimated the existence of what he termed “Catholicnationalist Gothic” (126) and went on to include J.C. Mangan’s Autobiography in his canon of Irish Gothic writers. Haslam (2007) has similarly argued that the inclusion of Catholic Irish Gothic writers “provides us with new ways to recognise and contextualise” (19) Irish Gothic. J.C. Mangan’s nationalistic inclinations led him to author several poems which clearly epitomise the nationalist cause in their defence of an Irish nation independent of British rule. Joseph Lennon (2014) argues that his writings “helped fire Irish cultural nationalism with a deeply resonant form of Irish antiquity that carried connotations of deep time, loss, and yet resurgence and immanent power” (79–80), a stance which had already been maintained by Lloyd (1987). However, his short fiction also reveals an abrogation and subversion of imperial tropes and colonial concepts, which he produced through a carefully chosen diction, a particular deployment of the narrative voice and his own depiction of settings. Postcolonial theory has long countered colonial readings of space (Walder 2010), which tended to create a simplified, distorted image of both landscape and colonised subjects, presenting them as a menacing other (Boehmer 2005). Instead, postcolonial writings appropriate landscapes, using a counter-colonial register to produce new, invigorating spatial conceptions (Banerjee 2021, 1), thus establishing a new relationship with the landscape (Gunning 2013). Similarly, Irish Gothic reverses the portrayals of the Irish as steeped into superstition and atavisms (Gibbons 2004; Kahir 2009). By offering a different perception of the source of such depictions (Galiné 2018, 76), postcolonial readings of Irish Gothic question the idea of the empire as a civilising mission (Boehmer 2005). Following these paradigms, an analysis of settings in the short fictions of J.C. Mangan offers a counterargument to colonial theories, which deployed settings as further justifications for colonial aspirations (Namberger et al. 2021). This chapter considers J.C. Mangan’s only stories to be set in Ireland, “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833) and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833). It subsequently analyses how J.C. Mangan’s narrative techniques constitute an act of abrogation by unveiling the misperceptions of the colonial gaze. Such misperceptions are the result of colonial

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paranoia and of a biased interpretation of the discourse of improvement, to which colonisers and settlers alike had resorted to justify colonial interventions (Innes 2007, 9). In this sense, J.C. Mangan’s appropriation of the colonial gaze unveils the stasis to which colonisers and settlers are subjected, ultimately causing a truncated relationship with the land, which is manifest in setting representations.

Parsing Space, Appropriating the Gazing Eye On examining his stories, the first noticeable characteristic—in terms of settings—about J.C. Mangan’s writings is that Ireland is sparingly employed. In fact, of his seven supernatural stories, just two have Ireland as a setting— “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale,” both published in 1833, on 20th and 27th January, and on 19th October, respectively. They were the first stories to be if not written at least published by the Dublin poet. Ireland is then vaguely hinted at in “The Man in the Cloak” (1838) as a necessity stemming from the narrative but not as an actual location. In fact, the story is set mainly in Vienna with some scenes in the French capital. J.C. Mangan abandoned the deployment of Irish settings very early, indeed. The subjacent reasons for this, however, are examined in Part II of this book. For the time being, let us focus on the Irish stories, “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (1833) and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833). One of the most noticeable qualities of J.C. Mangan’s Irish stories is their lack of profundity when it comes to spatial descriptions. Although this is more generous in the second story here concerned, “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833), the truth is that, apparently, the Dublin writer did not spend much ink on descriptions. This is especially obvious if one compares his writings to those of J.S.  Le Fanu or Bram Stoker, who dedicated more lines and paragraphs to describing settings. In this respect, as in many others, J.C. Mangan’s style differs. J.C. Mangan was more concerned with narrative voices, tone and mood, and stylistic elements and less occupied in describing his characters’ surroundings. This, however, could be misleading as J.C. Mangan used space dexterously and certainly to the benefit of postcolonial and decolonising readings. His usage of space constitutes primarily a parsing, an analysis of the characters populating his stories. These are defined in relation to how they

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perceive the world around them. J.C. Mangan, therefore, introduces an innovative vision of space, as this is perceived not solely in the descriptions the narrative voice, or the protagonists, may make manifest but mainly in a way of seeing, perceiving and analysing the world around them. Pivotal in this analysis is the concept of “gazing.” This, however, should come as no surprise. Several critics have stressed the importance of gazing as “self-­ identity is constituted within the gaze of another” (Boehmer 2005, 21), a concept which acquires special relevance in postcolonial studies. Writing about what she terms colonial gaze, Boehmer (2005) asserts that this “depended on the colonizer’s position in charge of a total system, it was also a potent expression of that position. To govern was to know; to see in the round, panoptically” (68). Andrew Teverson and Upstone (2011) have already focused on how travel and movement shape the colonial gaze (3), as have David Spurr’s (2004) The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration, Tim Youngs’ (1994) Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 and Syed Manzurul Islam’s (1996) The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka. Maurice Amutabe (2012) also remarks how “the colonial project is present in emergent structures and institutions and perceptions of” (235) colonised nations and how this gaze should be questioned and interrogated, a remark which especially resonates in the Irish case, where “political stability required an outward gaze to a male authority outside the bounds of the Irish nation” (Killeen 2014, 101).

A Hyperbolic Style—Satire as a Decolonising Tool “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (1833) yields to many an interpretation from the very beginning for, as the narrator makes clear, the story takes place “in College-green, at the Shades Tavern” (Mangan 2002, 14). The “Shades” is, of course, a proper name, but it also alludes to the shades in which the character/narrator will find himself enveloped. The plot is, indeed, straightforward. The narrator has an appointment at the Shades Tavern but, being early, decides to indulge in alcohol. While he is enjoying himself and his mind is wondering, his attention is arrested by a person nearby, “a gentleman of tall stature and commanding aspect, striking, indeed, to a degree, in his physiognomy” (Mangan 2002, 14–5). As the narrator continues to indulge in alcohol severely, he also begins to speculate, concluding the stranger is Dr Bowring. After a close examination, however, the narrator arrives at the conclusion that this unknown

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person can be no other than Maugraby, “the celebrated oriental necromancer, whose dreaded name the romances of my childhood had rendered familiar to me, and who had lately arrived in Dublin” (Mangan 2002, 20). To defeat the necromancer, the narrator tries to face him, “Nature was for once victor over Necromancy. I started up, I shrieked, I shouted, I rushed forward headlong. I remember tumbling down in a state of frenzy, but nothing beyond” (Mangan 2002, 24). In an intended comic turn, the story ends with the narrator awaking the following day, “I was in bed, and my temples throbbed violently” (Mangan 2002, 24). “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (1833) constitutes a good example of J.C. Mangan’s ability to appropriate a genre and its tropes, as the story is but a mockery of the Gothic. Both the character’s throbbing headache and his delusions are caused by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Just before his suspicions confirm that the person before his eyes is Maugraby, he asserts “as, however, I languidly sipped my ninth glass, a heart-chilling and soul-sinking reminiscence came over me” (Mangan 2002, 19). Simultaneously mocking and anticipating J.S. Le Fanu’s loophole effect, the narrator and main character is unwilling—or perhaps unable—to acknowledge the nature of his fantasy, as he exclaims “tout est mystère dans ce monde-ci, thought I; je ne sais trop qu’en croire” (Mangan 2002, 24). A closer look at the narrative techniques employed in the story sheds further light in the interpretation of the text, which is an amalgam of the anecdotal, the journalistic and the narrative. As such, the writer’s decision to employ the first-person narrator is logical, as a first-person account is always more relatable, especially bearing in mind the medium in which the story was published: the Irish satirical periodical Comet. This choice of narrative technique, however, has further implications. First, it limits the point of view of the narration, an implication which the author himself acknowledges, “the foregoing paragraph is exclusively ‘personal to myself’” (Mangan 2002, 14). Most significantly, it is diametrically opposed to the diasporic sense of subjectivity which J.C. Mangan was to deploy in his later stories; a subjectivity which is “decentred, uprooted, dispersed, mobile” (Procter 2003, 13–14). Such use of the first-person narrative is coupled with J.C. Mangan’s word choice and diction in what constitutes a satirical description of a character’s parsing of a place; in fact, one of the outstanding characteristics of the hero—if not the only one—in “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (1833) is stasis, his sense of immobility and lack of action.

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This is, nevertheless, very telling. While the main character does not actually move, the reader is offered an elaborate description of his perspective. The main character commences a minute examination of his surroundings, “I was, however, determined to institute an examination into it stückweise, as they say in Vienna, and I reviewed every feature distinctively and apart” (Mangan 2002, 15). In fact, this examination of the place is expressed via synonymity: “peruse” (Mangan 2002, 15), “gaze” (Mangan 2002, 17), “intimate perception” (Mangan 2002, 20), “that he whom I surveyed” (Mangan 2002, 21), “I witnessed” (Mangan 2002, 21), “he on whom I gaze” (Mangan 2002, 22) are all but instances of synonymity which the narrator/character uses to deliver his examination of both the place and an individual. Most importantly, the main character’s examination of the Shades Tavern, and of the individual he is fixated on, also constitutes an opinionated vision of the place as explicitly admitted by his own assertion, “I examined the stranger opposite me minutely. I criticised him […] from hat-crown […] to shoe-tie […] all underwent a rigid analysis of my searching eye” (Mangan 2002, 15). There can be little doubt that the “searching eye” is also a “searching I.” This way, both place and people become one, providing a channel to understand the narrative voice as colonialist impersonations “refuse colonial spatial conceptions and re-imagine them in a counter-colonial register” (Banerjee 2021, 1). By appropriating the coloniser’s gaze, J.C. Mangan consciously highlights the subjectivity of the colonising enterprise. Colonial appropriations of landscapes, both physical and metaphorical, were always a subjective experience, both at a personal and at a collective level, ironically “subjective in the first place, and yet, far from limited to the individual” (Walder 2010, 4). As C.L.  Innes’ (2007) writings on Australian literature prove (79–96), such perceptions were prone to misjudgements. They often mingled both the colonised land and its inhabitants into an indiscernible and blurred concept of the other, far from the objective reality of colonised peoples and closer to the coloniser’s paranoid conceptions of the other, as can be appreciated in “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833). Thus, insignificant events, unremarkable actions and places can be taken for momentous situations due to cultural misinterpretation, “the stranger, as I continued to gaze, elevated his hand to his head, and slightly varied the position of his hat. Here was a remarkable event, affording scope for unbounded conjecture” (Mangan 2002, 17). J.C. Mangan’s humorous remarks cannot go unnoticed. The opening sentence is remarkably simple and yet it contains all the elements for postcolonial

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interpretation. Here again we encounter the dual “gazing I/eye” alongside the concept of “stranger.” A remarkable feature is the attention the “gazing eye” pays to a rather mundane and insignificant action—changing the position of a hat. J.C. Mangan’s phrasing, “slightly changing the position of his hat,” works as a trigger for the hyperbolic statement that follows it. That such an event should be considered “remarkable” or that it yields to “unbounded conjecture” is expressive of the oddness of paying such great attention to what would be otherwise considered an insignificant detail. Colonial readings of the other tended to picture deformed images in which both landscape and colonised subjects appeared as menacing, distorted figures, as a “historical palimpsest—or layering of interpretations— which combined different and changing ways of characterizing the alien condition” (Boehmer 2005, 79). J.C. Mangan’s writings appropriate this idea and present it as the result of paranoia. This reverses colonial concepts of the inferiority of the colonised other, but also mimics “Gothic’s extensive machinery of paranoia for the purpose of demonizing the Irish followers of the Church of Rome” (Schmitt 1997, 147). In “An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades” (1833), this is explained via overindulgence in alcohol: a humorous but equally effective attack on colonialist perceptions of the other, insofar as excessive indulgence in alcohol was one of the maladies attributed to colonial subjects in general, and the Catholic Irish in particular, even if scholars have contested such image (Murphy 2003, 37). As such, physical features become part of the landscape, or rather, one should say they become the landscape, acting as a liminal third space (Gladwin 2016) through which to question colonial interventions. It is thus that the subject of the colonial gaze identifies the colonised with the menacing via synecdoche—the character’s nose becomes not only the landscape but the ultimate threat itself, It was apparent that in MAUGRABY’S case dismal damage would accrue to the proprietor of the Shades. His [Maugraby’s] nose would soon constitute a barricade; it would thus be impracticable; business would come a dead stand-still; and an evil whose ramifications no penetrations could reach would thus be generated. (Mangan 2002, 22)

J.C. Mangan’s hyperbolic narration is still a parsing element. It is the narrative voice, the dual “scrutinising I/eye,” which assures that

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Maugraby—or rather, his nose—will mean the destruction of Dublin. Presented here as the alter ego of the narrator/protagonist, the figure of Maugraby, the Easter sorcerer, helps in further classifying the protagonist’s voice as that of the colonial self. Maugraby features extensively in many of J.C. Mangan’s prose narrations, representing the ambivalent figure of the colonised other appearing in many anticolonial and postcolonial works, where authors “drew upon the dualisms that defined the colonial other, but at the same time contested the stereotypes of barbarian and savage” (Boehmer 2005, 114). Such discourse is reminiscent of Robert Maturin’s in Women; or, Pour et Contre (1818), [Dublin’s] beauty continues [...] but it’s the frightful lifeless beauty of a corpse; and the magnificent architecture of its buildings seems like the skeleton of some gigantic frame, which the inhabiting spirit has deserted; like the vast structure of the bones of the Behemoth, which has ceased to live for ages, and around whose remains modern gazers creep and stare. We can bear the ruins of a city long deserted by human inhabitants, but it is awful to observe the inhabitants stealing from a city whose grandeur they can no longer support. [...] I walk through the streets of this fine city – I pause at the gate of its superb university [...] I ask where are the “illustrious men and ingenuous youths”, whom the eloquent patriot greeted in other times – its ingenuous youths are all gone to Oxford, or Cambridge and the day might be marked with a cretic note, when a gown with a gold, or even a silver tassel, is seen, a purpureus pannus amid the beggary of its deserted walls. (Maturin 1818, 295)

Maturin’s discourse was published just eighteen years after the 1800 Act of Union had taken place, a treaty which had deprived Ireland—or at least the Anglo-Irish élite—of a free hand to govern itself. J.C. Mangan’s premonition is, in fact, a description, a re-examination some thirty years after the Act of Union was brought about. Curtis (1965) describes the change thus, With the Union the Kingdom of Ireland as vested in the Monarchy and Parliament since 1540 came to an end, the separate government by the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland ceased, and the political connexion with England was expressed legally as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. With the separate Crown passed away the nobility and ­aristocratic

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rule, for there was no reason for noblemen’s seats in the capital once legislature had departed. Only the office and name of Viceroy, a Privy Council, a number of necessary officials, the Established Church, and a judiciary left complete and imposing, remained to tell of the former Kingdom of Ireland. For Dublin the change meant one from a prosperous and stately capital to that of a dull provincial city with a stagnant trade. Parliament House became the new Bank of Ireland and the splendid insignia and trappings of the two Houses the perquisites of former peers and officials. (353)

Descriptions in “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833) abrogate the colonial discourse of improvement based on colonisation, according to which “‘civilization’ is merely the replication of imperial culture across the globe” (Boehmer 2005, 155). While the narrator is trying to depict a futuristic Dublin in which all commerce is gone and terror dominates due to the influence of the malignant, colonised other, the discourse itself refers to the actual consequences of colonisation exerted by the British Empire through the 1800 Act of Union. It, thus, reverses the idea of miscegenation, or of “depictions of Irish life seeped in blood-drinking, cannibalism, or incest, or of Irish people at the mercy of unbridled lust, superstition, and endemic violence” (Gibbons 2004, 34), so widespread among British Victorians. It, therefore, unveils the British Empire as the originator of Ireland’s ruin. J.C. Mangan’s futuristic Dublin thus underscores the failures of the colonial system, which—like medical “progress”—is “introduced to colonized peoples to combat diseases the imperialist themselves have brought” (Boehmer 2005, 155). J.C. Mangan’s parody of the destruction of Dublin due to the unstoppable growth of a nose and its resemblance to the more serious—albeit equally concerning—description by Robert Maturin (1818) is not coincidental. It renders a different reading of place, a different perception of the origins of stagnation and involution, as “it conjures up the contradicting motifs of stasis, collapse, decomposition and preservation” (Galiné 2018, 76) associated with Irish Gothic. And while the setting is not described in profusion, there is an element that stands out—the understanding of space. Indeed, it is the perception of space carried out by the narrator, and how he accounts for it, which constitutes a decolonising tool, as the narrative exposes how “the fictive written self comes to mirror the limitations of [Protestant] bourgeois subjectivity” (Hansen 2009, 163).

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A Depressing Landscape It is, however, in “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) where setting acquires a greater relevance. In this story, the figure of the other is introduced not through a specific character but through the landscape that surrounds the narrative voice and main character. Briefly speaking, “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) commences as the narration of a failed love affair. The protagonist confesses his love for Eleanor Campion, a love which was, at first, reciprocated, for he “avowed my passion, and was not rejected” (Mangan 2002, 39). However, sometime later, the main character and narrator introduces his lover to Lionel Delamaine, with whom “a bond of friendship, apparently stronger than death, had subsisted from childhood” (Mangan 2002, 39). Only two weeks after their introduction, Lionel and Eleanor become lovers, leaving the protagonist “sustaining the tremendous shock thus inflicted” (Mangan 2002, 30). As the narration progresses, the protagonist’s physical condition, far from recovering, only worsens, for both his physical and mental health keep deteriorating, “I was a rueful spectacle. No man […] could have looked at me many moments without bursting into a flood of tears” (Mangan 2002, 41). It is thus that he shies away from society altogether and takes refuge in rural Ireland, “breathing out my soul on the rack of despairing poetry” (Mangan 2002, 41). He finally returns to Dublin, where—after a fortuitous encounter with an acquaintance—he discovers the remedy for his malady in humour, “I am now the victim of one ever-lasting, never-ending fit of laughter” (Mangan 2002, 44). Thus, the story ends with the protagonist restored to the Dublin society he had originally left. Despite its ornate use of language—or, perhaps, because of it— “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) is not devoid of J.C. Mangan’s ironic and comic style. In fact, much the opposite can be asserted. The comedic piece which saves the protagonist is, indeed, a copy of The Satirist, a reference to the Dublin Satirist, a journal where J.C. Mangan published frequently (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 138) and where the story was first published in 1833. As a dénouement, J.C. Mangan’s resorting to an explicit reference to this journal somehow detracts from the overall effect of the story. The poet’s need to praise his audience—and his employers—does, however, explain his overt mention of the journal. This does not imply that the story’s merit is in question. Further form that, and once analysed

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carefully, “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1838) reveals a questioning of the colonial self and of its relationship with the colonised other. As in many of J.C. Mangan’s stories, the underlying leitmotif is social destitution, which, in this case, causes both an inner and an outer displacement, for the character finds himself transformed into a different being and isolated from society while simultaneously craving physical isolation, “the house I dwelt in was in a remote and isolated quarter of the city. Solitary, silent, and prison-like, it was nevertheless a dwelling I would not have forsaken for the most brilliant pleasure dome under the Italian heaven” (Mangan 2002, 42). As happened in “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833), there is an association protagonist-setting by which one becomes dependent on the other, creating a synergy and mutually reinforcing the various transformations which subsequently take place, somehow “enact[ing] a process of claiming belonging on its own terms” (Gunning 2013, 68–9). As the narration progresses, the protagonist’s appearance becomes increasingly more degraded. Similarly, his surroundings become more sullen, desolate and barren, as if “the colonised culture is given Gothic treatment as being itself the source of barbarism, temptation and horror” (Procter and Smith 2007, 96). This cycle is recurrent in the story to the point that it is difficult to tell which is the consequence of the other. A deeper reading, however, unveils that the story is, in fact, a subtle criticism of Anglo-Irish perceptions of the other, which are expressed via setting and its influence on characterisation. Being rejected by his betrothed, the narrator decides to shy away from society, “the combination of love with despair probably constitutes the perfect measure of human wretchedness” (Mangan 2002, 40). It is in this isolated, displaced state that the supernatural encounter takes place, and his physical form begins to metamorphose. Such metamorphosis, caused by an encounter with the other, is paralleled in the transformation of the settings which surround him. As he sinks lower in his social degradation and his physical transformation becomes more noticeable, the descriptions of place become increasingly decadent, reinforcing both the atmosphere in the story and the mood of the character, “I dragged myself drearily from room to room in the voiceless cheerlessness of my own house” (Mangan 2002, 41). After some months have elapsed in this condition, he pronounces the earth to be “properly no more than a sepulchral dell, whose very freshest flowers were the rank though flaunting offspring of rottenness and corruption” (Mangan 2002, 41). His inner turmoil, a mixture of frustration and rage, “I wrapped up my heart in the folds of

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bitterest scorn” (Mangan 2002, 41), finds itself replicated in the other, embodied in his surroundings, as a reminder that physical descriptions, delineation of place “provided a frame of justification, both visual and spatial, for colonial aspirations of expansion” (Namberger et al. 2021, 6). And thus, “to feed my fancy,” he takes to the habit “when the whirlwind and the tempest awoke” of standing “out under the starless firmamental cope and longed personally to track the career of the lightning, or envelope myself darkly in the curtains of the thunder cloud” (Mangan 2002, 41). Physical descriptions of settings such as this are uncommon in J.C. Mangan’s prose, especially those dealing with nature and natural manifestations. He rarely used nature, not even in his poems, “the paraphernalia of Dublin would become the psychic furniture of his poetry as well as of his waking of life” (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 20). When he did use natural descriptions, it was to represent some sort of malady or inner disgrace, “when he employed images of trees, which was infrequently, their trunks and branches were afflicted by blight, or they were distorted or monstrous” (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 20). Setting, then, conveys colonial ideas of the menacing other which in Gothic fiction turns out “to be part of characterization and methods of narration to be principles of structure” (MacAndrew 1979, 109). Thus, when the protagonist’s transformation is almost complete and, “darkness would swathe my memory for ever” (Mangan 2002, 41), the physical description of the setting he is inhabiting is similarly expressive of decadence, almost “relishing in what was considered ‘evil’ and ‘sinful’” (Soar 2021, 576). The displacement of the character is almost complete. It is this displacement, this state of being and not being at the same time, of being located within a given society without really partaking in it, which “disrupts a people’s sense of place” (Ashcroft 2001, 125) and parallels that of both Catholics and Anglo-Irish communities in Ireland, raising “questions of citizenship and national belonging so central to” (Morin 2018, 180) Irish Gothic fiction. The core of this struggle between the self and the other is prompted, in the first place, by the truncated relationship of the self and the land. This is, ultimately, the source of all conflict and what causes “the alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image” (Ashcroft 1989, 9). This truncated relationship is, in turn, product of the colonial situation to which Ireland was subject, for—after all— “place, and the experience of displacement, emerge out of the interaction of language,

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history, visual perception, spatial and environment in the experience of colonized peoples” (Ashcroft 2001, 125). Definitely, the relationship of the Irish in general—and of J.C. Mangan in particular—with their motherland was not an easy one. To begin with, the Catholic majority to which J.C. Mangan belonged did not have an easy access to the owning of land, or to the owning of anything for that matter; cottiers, for instance, had to give over two-thirds of their produce as rent, a government tax of 2–3s a year and pay the tithe for the Protestant clergy (Somerset Fry 1991, 169). At first, the terms of the union granted Ireland a not altogether unbeneficial position, with the Catholic situation improved due to the Catholic Relief Act of 1793. However, Irish laws and judiciary remained unchanged, with only a privileged Protestant minority sharing the privileges of England in trade with the Empire (Curtis 1965, 353). The truth, however, is that by 1817—when J.C. Mangan was fourteen years old—trade had declined, taxes had increased by 52 per cent, and the Irish national debt had gone up by 250 per cent. The situation profited both Protestants and Presbyterians, who found the market of linen improved; for the Catholic majority it had worsened, however, “Catholics still maintained their priests themselves, as well as paying the hated tithes to the Protestant clergy. The government and the law remained alien to them, and Protestant members of parliament sitting over the water at Westminster were totally remote” (Somerset Fry 1991, 216). Indeed, and given the context of composition, “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) works as a denunciatory tool of Anglo-Irish (mis) perceptions of Gaelic/Catholic Ireland. And J.C. Mangan combines characterisation and setting to perform his criticism of the Anglo-Irish élite. The poet was renowned for his labelling ability, which he used to craft his nomes de plume, but also to translate placenames and to create the names of his characters. In fact, naming and renaming feature strongly in J.C. Mangan’s life experiences. An example of this was his participation in the Ordnance Survey (the body responsible for the substitution of Irish placenames by their Anglicised versions), to which he contributed with his translations (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 181). He was, therefore, conscious of the symbolic importance attached to using one name or another. This is a fact that is manifest in the core of his fiction as well. As Part II elicits, when J.C. Mangan bases his stories elsewhere, characters’ names are employed in a metonymic referential manner, implying their (not) belonging to the setting the story is based on. Then, when the opposite is the case, it is due to a subtler scheme in the narrative frame.

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Names in “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) are, indeed, revealing. While the name of the protagonist/narrator remains unknown, his association with the rest of the characters in the narration leads us to believe that he cannot have been much different in terms of social standing and background. The fact that J.C. Mangan chose “Eleanor Campion” and “Lionel Delamaine” as the names for the protagonist’s former sweetheart and childhood companion, respectively, should not go unnoticed. Although neither “Campion” nor “Delamaine” is—sensu stricto—Anglo-­ Saxon names, there is little doubt that they are not Irish. Indeed, both surnames are reminiscent of the French influence on the English language, as both surnames are of a clear French origin. A similar concept applies to their first names, which show no Irish origin whatsoever, thus highlighting their foreign origin. These characters can, however, be associated to the Anglo-Irish élite, an assumption that is further reinforced by setting. “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) is unequivocally set in Ireland, with part of the narrative developing in Dublin and the remaining, in the Gaelic hinterland. Such a division is significant, both in interpretative and in structural terms; it frames the narrative and the events which this relates while establishing social distinctions at the same time. In this sense, the social background of the protagonist permeates through the narrative in crescendo, at first with slight hints to his social position, which then increase in presence in the narrative. Thus, when the first effects of the broken affair manifest, we find him “dragging [himself] from room to room in the voiceless cheerlessness of my own house” (Mangan 2002, 41) and coming across the couple “arm in arm, crossing Carlisle Bridge” (Mangan 2002, 42). Such subtle references place the main character in the heart of the city and in the upper social class, as Irish Catholics rarely had access to houses with several rooms to roam while broken-hearted. Many such references through the text make it clear that the protagonist belongs to an affluent class, one which does not and should not worry about monetary issues. The most telling of these is the fact that the protagonist manages to “hire a cottage in the vicinity of Monkstown” (Mangan 2002, 41) to try to appease his longing. This is coupled with the fact that he does not return to Dublin “until the spring of 1832” (Mangan 2002, 41), while the narration establishes that he had met Eleanor “in the autumn of 1828” (Mangan 2002, 39). Although it is true that after the love affair is ended, “weeks and months wheeled onward” (Mangan 2002, 41), there being no

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exact time frame, it is safe to assume that his stay in Monkstown was a prolonged one. The protagonist is, then, characterised as belonging to an economic élite; he possesses sufficient economic means to cater for his basic needs without having to work or perform any physically nor intellectually demanding activity. This is further established when the story comes full circle, and the protagonist returns to Dublin. It is then that The Satirist comes into action, almost as a deux ex machina, and resolves the conundrum. Despite the comic effect, the scene is revealing and worth quoting, “on Thursday evening […] as I was seated in my back parlour […], I was startled by the sudden entry of an old acquaintance who […] hastily apologised for his refusal to take a denial from my servant” (Mangan 2002, 43). Word choice unequivocally identifies him with the well-to-do classes, as “parlour” connotes an idea of grandiosity and affluence rarely associated with lower classes. The same effect is achieved by the subtle yet deft introduction of the word “servant,” leaving no doubt as to the character’s social status. J.C. Mangan’s deliberate usage of setting, however, leaves no crevice for misinterpretation. The dénouement clarifies how the protagonist spends his days “grinning night and day like a mountebank […] I now begin […] to understand that the grand business of my existence is grinning” (Mangan 2002, 44). But it is again setting which elicits the protagonist’s social standing, “he will find me any evening in the six, at Cohen’s cloud-compelling Divan in Dame-street” (Mangan 2002, 45). The two spatial references which close the narrative, Cohen’s Divan and Dame Street, are a direct mark of the economic status of the hero in the narrative. Dame Street was—and still is—the centre of commercial activity in Dublin, while Cohen’s Divan refers to the “proprietor of a cigar divan at 70 Dame Street” (Mangan 2002, 330). It can be safely asserted, then, that the protagonist embodies the figure of the Anglo-Irish élite. Most interestingly, however, the narrative also portrays colonial ideas of Gaelic Ireland as the narrative works under the dichotomous pair coloniser/civilised vs colonised/uncivilised as represented by the two spaces depicted in the fiction: Dublin and the Gaelic hinterland, respectively. We have already seen how Dublin stands for civilisation and economic status, but the narrative voice itself clarifies it further: “I had voluntarily broken the magnetic bonds which unite man with man in socialised being” (Mangan 2002, 42-3), asserts the protagonist when thinking back to his stay in the Gaelic hinterland. It is thus that rural Ireland, representative of Gaelic (and mostly Catholic) Ireland, is set in

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direct opposition to the ruling class embodied by Dublin, epicentre of the Anglo-Irish power. Postcolonial theory has attested how the other is “that which is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined” (Boehmer 2005, 21). This antagonism elicits that for the colonial self, the Catholic other as represented in the story by the Gaelic (and Catholic by association) hinterland is uncivilised, antisocial, wild and sinister, almost reproducing the Wiggish Gothic aesthetic of anti-Catholicism (Long 2013, 85). Drawing on ideas of the colonised other as sickness, as a malady which corrupts the colonial self “on the basis of nineteenth-century discourses such as degeneration theory and criminal anthropology” (Keogh 2014, 194), the hero in the story looks for the Gaelic hinterland as the desperate consequence of an irresistible sickening force, “long I battled against my doom, and sullenly I yielded only when an access of temporary delirium ushered in a fever which placed me on the threshold of the grave” (Mangan 2002, 42). Indeed, this is the first time in which a series of references to death and the otherworldly are made in connection with the Gaelic hinterland, not only paralleling it with the uncanny but, more precisely, with doom, death and sickness. In this vein, the protagonist’s transformation mirrors his degradation, “my dry bones perpetually emitted a creaking and rattling sound […]. My aspect was whitewashy and charnellike” (Mangan 2002, 41). It is in this state that the protagonist seeks rural Ireland; this, however, is not due to any curative or bucolic properties which may be associated with the Irish pastoral world. Much the opposite, indeed as every single description given by the hero connotes decay, gloom and death. Those are, precisely, the attributes he craves, “on the other hand I cherished a morbid sympathy with whatever was terrific or funeral in the operations of nature” (Mangan 2002, 41). J.C. Mangan reverses the essence of the English pastoral by showing a natural space which does not align with the beneficial expectations this genre associated with the rural world. His natural depictions of the Irish wilderness impair any visions of “a Romantic Ireland aligned with the British version in both its sentiments and its language” (Wenzell 2009, 51). On looking to foster these feelings, the protagonist searches for a setting which will reciprocate them. It is then that he decides to hire a cottage “to gratify my predilection in this respect” and thus be able to “wander from crag to crag, hearkening at whiles to the shriek of the sea fowl or the toiling of the billows” (Mangan 2002, 41). Deployment of diction here is noteworthy. On the one hand, the writer emphasises the

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association of rural and Gaelic worlds by choosing “crag,” a word of Celtic origin and very present in Hiberno-English, with all its connotation of a wild, rugged, unwelcoming place. On the other hand, the personification of nature in this extract is also remarkable. The natural images presented to the reader (sea fowl that shriek, billows toiling) are reminiscent of an unwelcoming nature, of life on the brink of disappearance, where death is present to the extent that the protagonist finds himself “breathing out my soul” (Mangan 2002, 41). These images, thus, function as a reminder that “for subjects living in postcolonial environments, environmental instability and catastrophe are woven into the fabric of daily life” (Poray-­ Wybranowska 2021, 158). The colonial perception of the colonised Other as a draining force which “appropriates the vitality, the life-blood, of his victim” (Kahir 2009, 55) is further sustained in the narrative, its effects long-lasting. Having returned to Dublin, the established centre of civilisation in the narrative, the protagonist finds his condition worsens despite having left the Gaelic hinterland. Performing an abrogation of Gothic tropes, J.C. Mangan uses dreams to channel the continually degrading state of the main character. Setting is, thus, displaced from the physical to the oneiric, “my dreams were peopled with the most horrible, and hideous, and misbegotten spectra that ever rioted in the desolated chambers of a madman’s brain” (Mangan 2002, 42). This narrative, then, reproduces nineteenth-century fears of the enemy within: having encountered the subaltern other, the colonial self cannot get rid of its influence. Worse still, the uncivilised, the colonial other is no longer at a safe distance, where it can be controlled, but at the very heart of civilisation, within the precincts of urban life, embodying a different other whose “race is buried beneath their visual whiteness” (Boltwood 2001, 390). Such a reading taps on Anglo-Irish fears of a Catholic return which haunted the Anglo-Irish well into the nineteenth century, prompting “much dispute and agitation […] over the conditions on which emancipation might be granted by the United Parliament” (Machin 1999, 12). It is precisely such fears that J.C. Mangan dexterously—if humorously—manages to portray in “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833). And it is through humour that the Dublin poet introduces a warning. Although the story resorts to the colonial Gothic trope of finishing the story with an apparent return to normality, in which “domestic procreative normality has been restored” (Kavka 2002, 221), he does so with a silver lining, thus abrogating the trope. It is true that the main character is

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restored to his former status and recovers both physically and mentally. He does so at a price, however, the only disastrous effect […] is that it has partially damaged my beauty, for my teeth […] have shifted form a pearl white to an ebony tint; and a brace of wrinkles […] have unfortunately established a permanent residence at the sides of my mouth. (Mangan 2002, 45)

The story’s dénouement is, therefore, a reminder that there is no going back to normality, reproducing colonial-colonised relationships, in an “unending pursuit during which the hero and heroine, though they may move from one exotic location to another, can never escape their destiny” (Hale 2002, 65). In the Irish case, “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) dismantles Anglo-Irish perceptions of the Catholic Other, and the idea that Dublin could be a beacon of “civilisation,” unaffected by the Gaelic hinterland, proving that “it was the landlord class in Ireland that was responsible for the coffin ships, and offloading the remnants of the pauperized Irish peasantry onto the advanced working class of the metropolitan centre” (Gibbons 2004, 79). As with “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833), it is crucial to understand J.C. Mangan offers is a parsing of space based on Anglo-Irish (mis) perceptions. In both stories, the narrative is controlled (and limited) by the first-person point of view, attributable to the colonial self/Anglo-Irish. Often threatening in nature, these spaces are far from the bucolic or pastoral, offering no comfort to the viewer, reinforcing the idea that space in Irish Gothic “only rarely serves as a locus for nostalgia” (Kreilkamp 2007, 176).

Conclusion Mainly satirical in form, J.C. Mangan’s Irish stories manage to abrogate the colonial voice to criticise the imperial quest. While it is true that his stories lack the length and narrative development of later practitioners, like J.S.  Le Fanu or Bram Stoker’s, their condensed essence works to their advantage. Setting imposes itself over the remaining narrative elements, dominating the overall effect of the stories and unveiling the dependence of characters on their surroundings. J.C. Mangan’s settings in “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833) and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833) reveal colonial fears and anxieties over the other taking

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control, or the social degeneration implicit in contact with said other, a figure which is identified with that of the dispossessed Catholic majority. Brimming with humour and satire, J.C. Mangan’s technique portrays the truncated relationship of the dominant Anglo-Irish élite with their native land, and their contradictory perceptions of the Catholic other as a source of evil. Such misperceptions are, indeed, the result of paranoia, of a biased, self-interested understanding of the discourse of improvement which justified the colonial mission and Anglo-Irish presence in Ireland. By first appropriating and then mocking the colonial voice and vision—the gazing eye/I—dominant in colonial discourses, J.C. Mangan broadens the scope of Irish Gothic. J.C. Mangan’s Gothic fiction vindicates the necessity of a plurality of voices, of different visions and perceptions of Ireland, to create a different nation, to prevent Maturin’s (1818) predictions in Women; or, Pour et Contre from becoming the day-to-day reality of the Irish nation.

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Gunning, Dave. 2013. Postcolonial Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hale, Terry. 2002. French and German Gothic: The Beginnings. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle, 63–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, Jim. 2009. Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett. Albany: State University of New York Press. Haslam, Richard. 2007. Irish Gothic. In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 83–94. London: Routledge. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Innes, C.L. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Islam, Syed Manzurul. 1996. The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kahir, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Kavka, Misha. 2002. The Gothic on the Screen. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E.  Hogle, 209–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keogh, Calvin W. 2014. The Critics’ Count: Revisions of Dracula and the Postcolonial Irish Gothic. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1: 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2014.8. Killeen, Jarlath. 2014. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction History, Origins, Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kreilkamp, Vera. 2007. Fiction and Empire: The Irish Novel. In Ireland and the British Empire, ed. K. Kenny, 154–181. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lennon, Joseph. 2014. ‘Antiquity and Futurity’ in the Writings of James Clarence Mangan. In Essays on James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak, ed. Sinéad Sturgeon, 53–83. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Lloyd, David. 1987. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Long, Hoeveler Diane. 2013. Demonizing the Catholic Other: Religion and the Secularization Process in Gothic Literature. In Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Monika Ebert and Bridget Marshall, 83–96. Aldershot: Ashgate. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. 1979. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New  York: Columbia University Press. Machin, Ian. 1999. British Catholics. In The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Protestants Minorities and the Nation State in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Rainer Liedtke, 11–33. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Mangan, James Clarence. 2002. The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1832–1839. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Maturin, Robert. 1818. Women; or, Pour et Contre. Philadelphia: Moses Thomas. Morin, Christina. 2018. The Gothic Novel in Ireland c. 1760–1829. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murphy, James H. 2003. Ireland: A Social, Cultural and Literary History, 1791–1891. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Namberger, Fabian, Gerdis Wischnath, and Sven Chojnacki. 2021. Geo-Graphing Violence: Postcolonial Perspectives, Space and the Cartographic Imaginaries of Peace and Conflict Studies. Geopolitics 26 (4): 1196–1223. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14650045.2019.1676237. Poray-Wybranowska, Justyna. 2021. Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel. London: Routledge. Procter, J. 2003. Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Procter, James, and Angela Smith. 2007. Gothic and Empire. In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 95–105. London: Routledge. Schmitt, Canon. 1997. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shannon-Mangan, Ellen. 1996. James Clarence Mangan: A Biography. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Soar, Katy. 2021. The Cult of Pan in Nineteenth-Century Literature. In The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom, 573–594. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Somerset Fry, Peter, and Fiona. 1991. A History of Ireland. London: Routledge. Spencer, Robert, and Anastasia Valassopoulos. 2021. Postcolonial Locations: New Issues and Directions in Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge. Spurr, David. 2004. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press. Sturgeon, Sinéad. 2012. ‘Seven Devils’: Gerald Griffin’s ‘The Brown Man’ and the Making of Irish Gothic. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 11: 18–31. Teverson, Andrew, and Sara Upstone, eds. 2011. Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Tim Youngs. 1994. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walder, Dennis. 2010. Postcolonial Nostalgias Writing, Representation, and Memory. London: Routledge. Wenzell, T. 2009. Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

CHAPTER 3

J.S. Le Fanu’s Rhetoric of Nostalgia and the No-Home

So far, we have seen how physical descriptions, spatial location and setting in general construe J.C. Mangan’s prose writing. His determination to use the narrative voice to convey setting—especially, using a first-person narrator—constitutes J.C. Mangan’s hallmark approach to deliver his decolonising experience, his alienation and the effects of British colonial interventions in Ireland. As the century progressed, however, different approaches to setting, its uses and implications appeared, adding new meanings and visions of Ireland to that of J.C. Mangan. The writings of J.S. Le Fanu constitute an innovation in this sense. J.S. Le Fanu was a prolific short story writer, novelist and even poet. Although he is best remembered by his 1872 novella Carmilla, it is in his shorter prose where his craft can be better appreciated. J.S. Le Fanu wrote innumerable Gothic short stories, many of which he codified in the format of volumes. Two collections of his short stories are relevant for this study: The Purcell Papers (1838/40) and the posthumous In a Glass Darkly (1872). These two works are remarkable in many senses, not the least important of which is that—put together—they allow us to see a life-long perspective of J.S. Le Fanu’s writing career. There are two other reasons why these two collections are of great interest for the present book. For reasons which will be considered later, J.S.  Le Fanu decided to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_3

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conveniently base his Purcell stories in Ireland; however, his later In a Glass Darkly stories are primarily based elsewhere. The second reason is linked to this latter assertion. Both collections share a similar narrative approach: both use embedded narrations and both share a (vague) thematic unity; more importantly from a setting perspective, both collections share the same exception to the rule J.S.  Le Fanu seems to have established; that is, that all the stories are based either in Ireland (Purcell Papers) or abroad (In a Glass Darkly), except for one story per collection. In this sense, all the stories in The Purcell Papers but “Schalken the Painter” (1839) are based in Ireland; conversely, all the stories in In a Glass Darkly but “The Familiar” (1872) are set elsewhere. As opposed to J.C. Mangan, however, J.S. Le Fanu did make extensive use of setting as a characterising tool to form and shape his diverse narratives. Settings in his oeuvre are both prolific and telling. Spaces, both temporal and physical, bespeak of bygone eras, leaving an overall sense of nostalgia for a gone past blended with “desire for the Catholic Other, and sublime respect for history” (Killeen 2014, 71). The usage of nostalgia as a literary device is widespread in Western literature, traceable back to, at least, the Romantic Era (Walder 2010, 1). As such, nostalgia has proven effective in linking past and present, by combining longing and memory (Frawley 1998, 270). Usually expressed in terms of yearning and desire “for a lost home, place, and/or time” (Walder 2010, 4), nostalgia acquired a special significance during Victorian times. During this period, it became the means to express not only longing for the past but also anxiety over the upcoming future (Isomaa et al. 2013, 157). Walder (2010) argues that nostalgia as a literary device acquires greater importance in postcolonial literatures as it is capable of “resuscitating the forgotten or obscured histories of both colonised and coloniser” (16). Such conceptualisation of nostalgia resonates with J.S. Le Fanu’s writings. McCormack (1991) notes how J.S. Le Fanu’s wife’s Susana suffered from outbursts of irrational anxiety, which the critic acknowledges may have inspired the writer’s “The Mysterious Lodger” (129). Similarly, J.S.  Le Fanu’s daily existence was marked by his Calvinist faith, which translated into “an anxiety about the efficacy of faith, about the nature of passion, and the influence of a determinist fate” (McCormack 1991, 70). J.S.  Le Fanu’s landscape depictions are, at times, reminiscent of the pastoral genre, with a seemingly “yearning for bygone days as well as for a rustic life” (Garavel 2008, 93). However, J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative abrogate these bucolic depictions of natural life to unveil the hidden effects of

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colonialism, to reverse what Renato Rosaldo (1989) has termed Imperial Nostalgia, a cleansing view of imperial domination (107–122). His usage of space can be better understood in terms of Gladwin (2016) and Galiné’s (2018) contention of landscape as a liminal space which “allows writers of the Irish Gothic to manifest their anxieties about burying and/or excavating their past” (Galiné 2018, 76). The consideration of J.S.  Le Fanu’s landscape portrayals as a decolonising tool enhances FitzGerald’s (2020) consideration of Irish landscape as “the true intersection between the Irish psyche and the surrounding natural world, investing them with an esoteric quality” (FitzGerald 2020, 62). S.J. Le Fanu’s Irish landscapes becomes the liminal space which propels an examination of the Anglo-Irish subconscious. J.S. Le Fanu appropriates and abrogates Romantic and Victorian concepts of nostalgia to unveil the misdeeds of Ireland’s colonial élite class. In his stories, nostalgia works as a dual literary device: it vindicates a Catholic past and, simultaneously, views Anglo-Irish history through a critical lens. J.S. Le Fanu’s nostalgia hides secret guilty consciences stemming from his class’s colonial past. To better appreciate this and bearing in mind J.S. Le Fanu’s own distribution of setting in his work, this chapter considers two stories, “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) and “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839). Through a consideration of J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative style, this chapter analyses how the Dublin-born writer deployed settings to convey this sense of nostalgia, with all its implications, while pondering on the narrative representations of the hidden guilt of his own class and the consequences of enforcing the colonial enterprise in Ireland.

Noble Castle, Static Visions Although not the first story in the collection, “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) contains most of the features which J.S. Le Fanu was to deploy in this first part of his short story writing career—an ancient castle, the Gaelic hinterland, a portrayal of Irish peasantry and a family of the old Irish Catholic nobility. The story narrates the last days of young O’Connor (whose first name remains unknown throughout the story), last male heir of the O’Connors of Castle Connor. Having spent the last years on the Continent “for the finishing of his education” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 35), young O’Connor returns to take his rightful place as heir in the ancient castle, where he is met by the peasantry “amid the thundering

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shouts of thousands” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 35). It is here that the reader is first introduced to the ambiguous figure of Fitzgerald, “a tall, squareshouldered man, who stood in a careless attitude […] secluded […] from the busy multitudes which moved noisily and gaily around him” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 37). As the reader will soon discover, O’Connor made Fitzgerald’s acquaintance while on the Continent. Fitzgerald is a key figure in unravelling the plot, for it is when O’Connor decides to pay him a visit that a disagreement between the two takes place. J.S. Le Fanu’s technique in sustaining suspense is critical here, for the reasons of their disagreement are never revealed despite its crucial importance for the story’s development. A series of note exchanges take place, subsequently followed by a duel as the verbal afront caused seems irredeemable, “[O’Connor] said again and again that nothing but [Fitzgerald’s] DEATH could remove the stain which his indecision had cast upon the name of his family” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 48). The duel takes place, ending with the long-foreshadowed death of O’Connor and, thus, with his ancient linage. It is, however, a circular story, for the narrative finishes almost as it commenced, by having Purcell—the narrator—visit the ancient abode and describing the feelings such a vision conveys, Everything looked the same as when I had left it; the old trees stood as graceful and as grand as ever; no plough had violated the green sward; no utilitarian hand had constrained the wanderings of the clear and sportive stream. (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 65)

Even such a brief description serves to give an idea of the central motifs J.S. Le Fanu was dealing with—an admiration for ancient Irish Catholic families, a certain melancholy for a gone past and a subtle criticism of the peasant classes. And while it is indubitable that such ideas are mainly conveyed through dialogue and characterisation at large, setting plays no minor role in developing the plot and the subthemes J.S.  Le Fanu touched upon. J.S. Le Fanu crafted “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) imbued with a sense of melancholy, a longing for a gone past, that permeates all the narrative, and which actually opens and closes the story per se, “there is something in the decay of ancient grandeur to interest even the most unconcerned spectator—the evidences of greatness, of power, and of pride that survive the wreck of time” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 33). Thus runs the opening paragraph in the story, which has already set the mood for the

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remainder of the text. In only one sentence, J.S. Le Fanu has linked “grandeur” to “current decay,” an idea that is reinforced by his usage of a tricolon. This association makes it clear for the reader that the generic term “grandeur” refers to the more precise “greatness,” “power” and “pride.” Added to this is the fact that those possessing these qualities “survive the wreck of time.” As the story clarifies, J.S. Le Fanu is explicitly dealing with the Catholic nobility, but he does so through a physical association. Both “decay” and “wreck” are words used to describe physical spaces whose connotation tends to be negative. However, by aligning it with the aforementioned nouns, J.S.  Le Fanu gives these words a sense of nostalgia which is maintained all through the text, “entail[ing] a backward-looking form of temporality” (Lydon 2019, 28). On examining the closing scene, when Purcell returns to the castle after many years, the technique and the effect are, indeed, much the same, the old trees stood as graceful and as grand as ever; no plough had constrained the wanderings of the clear and sportive stream, or disturbed the lichen-covered rocks through which it gushed, or the wild coppice that over-shadowed its sequestered nooks. (Le Fanu 65)

J.S.  Le Fanu uses a similar formula to the one opening the story to bring it full circle. In this case, however, the tricolon is expressed in the negative (no … or … or), which—paradoxically—works as an affirmation of the previously mentioned qualities. There is a sense of nostalgia which is achieved via stasis, partaking in what Renato Rosaldo (1989) has termed Imperial Nostalgia or “mood of nostalgia [which] makes racial domination appear innocent and pure” (107–22). Imperial Nostalgia is based on the paradox that colonisers lament what they themselves have annulled, or as Killeen (2014) would phrase it, the Anglo-Irish feel nostalgia “for a past of which they were never a part” (71). The reader is aware that time has passed by—the narrative leaves no space for misinterpretation—but the place seems to be frozen in time. Its positive perception is made manifest by the connotation of the words used to create the description. Thus, “old trees” are both “graceful” and “grand,” simultaneously connecting nature and the past while presenting it as, somehow, something better than the present. This is reinforced by the fact that man-made elements (the plough) have not “constrained” nor “disturbed” the natural elements described with such profusion. The castle, and the nature that surrounds it, becomes a metaphor for the ancient Catholics. Via extended metaphor,

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the story demarcates two clearly opposed situations: on the one hand, a utilitarian present embodied in man-made elements (the plough), and, on the other, an idealised past, almost untouched by civilisation. This way J.S. Le Fanu’s settings “concentrate on the political and moral virtue of an idealised past” (Morin 2018, 41). J.S. Le Fanu’s nature metaphor is, indeed, applicable to the O’Connors, who become metonymic for the Irish Catholics. “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) constitutes a vindication of the Gaelic past. However, this assertion needs to be qualified. While it seems rather tempting to assume that J.S. Le Fanu implied a reinstatement of the Catholic Irish, his views on the extent of such a reparation were partial (McCormack 1991, 217–8). As the story itself makes clear, it is only the Catholic nobility which is presented in a positive light. This vindication is mainly conducted via characterisation—despite O’Connor’s flawed leadership, he is still depicted as an admirable character—and supported by setting. In this sense, O’Connor, the castle and its surroundings are presented as almost a single entity, already highlighting that “dispossession is simultaneously acknowledged with the act of reclamation” (Innes 2007, 73). In fact, the narration first introduces the setting in the terms already expressed, and which are summarised in a telling simile, “There do, indeed, still exist some fragments of the ancient Catholic families of Ireland […]. They linger like the remnants of her aboriginal forest, reft indeed of their strength and greatness, but proud even in decay” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 34). Such an analogy not only serves to connect both setting and the idea of Catholic families; indeed, it introduces the postcolonial subtext. The aboriginal forests of Ireland were felled down to fight the native population in a colonial “negative attitude towards wilderness and the association of the inhabitants with the wild landscape of their surroundings justified a reform policy to tame the landscape” (Shokouhi 2019, 24). J.S. Le Fanu must have been conscious of this historical fact. After this metaphoric connection has been established, the narrative voice proceeds to introduce the family, “the O’Connors, of Castle Connor, were an ancient Irish family” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 34). Thus, from the very beginning there is an indissoluble association between the castle—portrayed in nostalgic terms—and the O’Connors. J.S. Le Fanu’s diction again contributes to that nostalgic association, as the family—like the castle—are presented as “ancient.” This link is further reinforced in the following line, “the name recurs frequently in our history, and is generally to be found in a prominent place whenever periods

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of tumult or peril called forth the courage and enterprise of this country” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 34). And, thus, place and family contribute to predispose the reader to perceive the protagonist of the story—young O’Connor—as a dramatic hero. The place is “prominent” while the attributes “courage” and “enterprise” have already been linked to the family prior to O’Connor’s appearance in the narrative. The narrator’s mention of “tumult” and “peril” anticipate the ending of the story, but perhaps the most remarkable narrative deployment is the implication of the past tense employed by Purcell, “called.” In narrative terms, Purcell has a vantage point of view—he already knows how the story finishes. J.S.  Le Fanu’s usage of the past tense here is deliberate, as if for Purcell history, or at least history worth telling, had ended with the race of the O’Connors. It is only when this association between place and history, between the Gaelic past and nostalgia, has been created that O’Connor is introduced to the reader. Like the stories written by J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu’s “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) constitutes a parsing of space. This time, however, the gazing eye is not that of the coloniser, but that of the colonised. Purcell, the character/narrator whose voice gives an overall coherence to the different narratives, is, indeed, a Catholic priest, as he himself acknowledges in the story, “about the year 17—, my uncle, a Catholic priest, became acquainted with the inmates of Castle Connor, and after a time introduced me, […] and little dreaming that a profession so grave as his should ever become mine” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 34). Using Purcell as a narrative voice allowed J.S. Le Fanu to reclaim another tenet of Catholic Irish society—priesthood. By creating a knowledgeable and educated Catholic priest, whose diction leaves nothing to be desired but a certain pedantic undertone, J.S. Le Fanu debased one of the essential principles of Victorian imperialism—that of the Irish as less (Gibbons 2004, 33–42). Most importantly, however, the figure of Purcell allowed the writer to, subtly but firmly, voice his concerns regarding his class and their role in his contemporary Irish society, and the marginalisation the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy had imposed on the other half of the country. Regardless of J.S. Le Fanu’s concerns regarding class and denomination, Purcell’s voice constitutes a vindication of the supressed voice of the subaltern. On making him the main narrator in the collection, J.S.  Le Fanu gave voice to suppressed discourses. Given the context in which “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) was published, J.S. Le Fanu is providing an alternative vision to the colonial gaze—Purcell’s parsing of space constitutes a debasing of the colonial enterprise and its vision of

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colonial subjects. Precisely because his voice is different, Purcell’s appraisal of narrated spaces is of foremost importance, as it questions “the singlevoiced authority of colonial writing” (Boehmer 2005, 4). We have already noted how physical descriptions are imbued in nostalgia, a mood that permeates the whole story. This feeling of nostalgia is taken one step further, however. At its core lies a central vision of the Gaelic past and the ancient Catholic nobility. In the end, the vision Purcell offers is one of stasis, representing “the social stasis of the eversame” (Hansen 2009, 163). Thus, as the narrative opens and Purcell recounts his late encounter with young O’Connor after three years have elapsed, he remarks that “time had wrought no small change in me, alike in mind and spirits; but in the case of O’Connor, it seemed to have lost its power to alter” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 36). Not surprisingly, the narrative is ended in almost identical terms. And, thus, Purcell pays a visit to O’Connor’s mother “some ten years after the occurrence of the events above narrated” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 65), despite which “everything looked the same as when I had left it” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 65). Indeed, the narrative underscores this feeling of stasis by contrasting the immobility of space, its unaltered qualities, with the changes wrought in Purcell. As the narrator/character approaches Castle Connor, J.S. Le Fanu strikes a comparison between the unaltered beauty of the surroundings, with its “sequestered nooks,” and that of the narrative voice, “but they eye that looked upon these things was altered, and the memory was busy with other days, shrouding in sadness every beauty that met my sight” (Le Fanu 1993, 65). As if the comparison with the unaltered setting did not suffice, the narrative displaces the perception of Purcell from the narrator’s inner monologue to an external agent, “I recognised the old servant who opened the door, but he did not know me. I was completely changed” (Le Fanu 1993 [1872], 65). Purcell’s change, perceived both internally and externally, offers a striking contrast to the inalterability of space. This remains much the same despite all previous occurrences which have so altered his physical and intellectual qualities. As a whole, the narrative seems to be putting forward a contradictory discourse as, while there is a vindication of a heroic Catholic past, there is no final reinstatement. “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) places historical past in a confined bubble, safe but remote; relevant but ineffectual. Read in terms of anticolonial discourses, the story is, indeed, very telling of J.S. Le Fanu’s vision of politics. While the writer had wished for a restoration of power to College Green, he did not look forward to a vanquishing of his own class from their hegemonic

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station (McCormack 1991, 209). His narratives, as “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) proves, tend to the promotion of a reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants. It is thus that setting is confined and presented as an unaltered motif, “a usable past, a quest for a historiography to disprove […] supremacist notions” (West 2005, 90) but ineffectual in drastically altering the status quo. Far from being anecdotal, the influence of the past on the present is a constant in J.S.  Le Fanu’s Irish stories. As “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) shows, his stories constitute a vindication of a Catholic past, reinstating their previous glory to the Catholic nobility. They further expose Anglo-Irish misconceptions of the Catholic other as a reflection of the former’s fears and a consequence of colonial intervention, thus dismantling colonial arguments that portray “the disappearance of Indigenous peoples as supposedly an inevitable consequence of contact” (Lydon 2019, 48) and cancelling Wiggish Gothic aesthetic of anti-Catholicism (Long 2013, 85). However, J.S. Le Fanu’s stories also deal with his caste at large. Not only did he vindicate the figure of the Catholic other, but he also criticised and exposed Anglo-Irish fears and hidden guilt. In so doing, his narratives show that Anglo-Irish attempts at hiding the past only resulted in the return of the suppressed other “coming back to haunt the modernising Protestant mentality” (Gibbons 2004, 80) that suppressed it in the first place.

The Anglo-Irish Manor as a No-Home J.S. Le Fanu’s 1839 story “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” is illustrative of the writer’s craft at exposing his own caste’s failings and fears. First published anonymously in the Dublin University Magazine, the story narrates the unfortunate events following the marriage of a girl of an Anglo-Irish family to Lord Glenfallen, “young and wealthy […] and of a family whose influence is not exceeded by that of any in Ireland” (Le Fanu 2007, 201). Upon their marriage, the newly wedded couple travel to the domain of Cahergillagh, “of the Glenfallen estates, lying, however, in a southern county” (Le Fanu 2007, 204). It is there that strange and enigmatic events take place, all of them shrouded in an aura of mystery, further enhanced by Lord Glenfallen’s request that Lady Glenfallen “will visit ONLY that part of the castle which can be reached from the front entrance” (Le Fanu 2007, 10), leaving the rest to the service. Some days after having granted this request, Lady Glenfallen happens to find in her

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chamber a blind woman who claims to be Lady Glenfallen herself. Lord Glenfallen, however, assures his newly wedded wife that this old woman is mentally deranged, but gives no further information as to her origins or why she is there. One night, Lady Glenfallen awakens to discover that the blind woman is threatening to kill her. After a scuffle, she is, however, reduced and brought to justice, where she claims to be the first Lady Glenfallen. In her defence, she accuses Lord Glenfallen of having committed adultery and of convincing her to assassinate the current Lady Glenfallen. She, nevertheless, refuses to produce any evidence of either fact, being, consequently, sentenced to death. It is upon her death that Lord Glenfallen’s mental health deteriorates, ultimately bringing him to believe that the blind woman is hidden in the closet of his study. The story finishes with a servant forcing the door open and finding Lord Glenfallen dead, “the head hung back, as it seemed, almost severed from the body” (Le Fanu 2007, 232). When he wrote “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839), J.S. Le Fanu had still not perfected his logical loop style, a method which implied building “the story on both doubt and fear, leaving the supernatural presence unexplained” (Tracy 1993, ix) and which he would bring to perfection in his later In a Glass Darkly stories (Roop 1985, 360). However, one can still appreciate his early attempts at creating that ambiguity for which he would become renowned. Although the logical explanation seems to prevail and, most likely, Lord Glenfallen took his life due to his mental failure, the possibility of his death having been caused by supernatural agency is still present. From a narrative perspective, however, what poses greater interest is J.S.  Le Fanu’s shift in narrative construction. As opposed to “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838), “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) deals primarily with the Anglo-­ Irish. Although the Catholic other is still very much felt, it occupies secondary spaces, lurking in the narrative, always felt but never fully stated, leaving the Protestant readership “constantly seeing Catholic ghosts and monsters lurking in the outer darkness” (Killeen 2014, 49). As a matter of fact, one of the most remarkable features of J.S.  Le Fanu’s story is his handing down of the narrative to a female voice. “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) is ascribed to the supra structure of embedded narrations typical of The Purcell Papers. A composite of two layers of

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narrative voices—that of Purcell and that of his literary inheritor—this supra structure is first established in the opening story in the collection, “The Ghost and the Bone Setter” (1838), “in looking over the papers of my late valued and respected friend, Francis Purcell […], I met with the following document” (Le Fanu 2007, 1). And, in fact, in most of the Purcell stories, it is Father Purcell himself who narrates—and, therefore, controls—the events which take place. However, in “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839), J.S. Le Fanu tried a different approach. After a brief introduction, in which Purcell claims to “have endeavoured to give as nearly as possible the ipsissima verba of the valued friend” (Le Fanu 2007, 193), the narrative is taken over by the female protagonist, or rather, Purcell yields the narrative to her, “I find that I have taken the story down as she told it, in the first person, and perhaps this is as it should be. She began as follows” (Le Fanu 2007, 193). This usage of the narrative voice is revealing, indeed. Although it could be argued that the narrative has a female voice, being expressive of female concerns, the reality is otherwise; true, it is Lady Glenfallen’s voice the reader is exposed to. However, this is handed down to the reader via a double editorial (and masculine) intervention. Thus, we are not reading the original document but a product of Purcell’s penmanship, which— in turn—has been transmitted via his literary inheritor. The female, although given a voice, remains constrained, encapsulated in Purcell’s male narrative, emphasising “the continuing difficulty of finding a literary voice that is able to speak outside of the imposition of [colonial] values” (Gunning 2013, 28). Purcell’s consciousness of this encapsulation becomes obvious in the efforts he makes in the opening paragraphs to justify himself by a double rhetorical device. Thus, Purcell assures the reader he is a mere, faithful observer, “any aberration from HER mode of telling the tale of her own life would at once impair its accuracy and its effect” (Le Fanu 2007, 193). At the same time, Purcell insists, vehemently, that it is her story and no one else’s, as can be seen in the previous example in the capitalised “HER,” but also in the alliteration “telling the tale” and the repeated use of the possessive adjective “her.” This technique is repeated, almost to excess, in the subsequent paragraph, making it clear that what follows is her story, Would that, with her words, I could also bring before you her animated gesture, her expressive countenance, the solemn and thrilling air and accent with which she related the dark passages in her strange story; and, above all,

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that I could communicate the impressive consciousness that the narrator had seen with her own eyes, and personally acted in the scenes which she described. (Le Fanu 193)

The excessive emphasis laid on the usage of “her” is of a conspicuous overt nature. There are, however, two other issues at play here. Firstly, and most perceptibly, J.S. Le Fanu builds up suspense via characterisation and setting. The narrative opposes the positive connotation of “animated gesture” and “solemn and thrilling air and accent” attributed to the main character to the purposefully ambiguous, and clearly negative, expression “dark passages,” which can be interpreted in both literal and metaphoric terms. The reader is thus sided with the main character and set against the “dark” setting. Second to this comes a more subtle, nuanced interpretation stemming from Purcell’s overt insistence. Purcell’s efforts to remark that the narrative belongs to the female voice only result in the opposite— a disbelief not in the authenticity of the story, but in the lack of male intervention, thus reinforcing the idea of “the ubiquity of male-­dominance at many levels of colonial activity” (Boehmer 2005, 9). As if Purcell’s extreme insistence on this should not suffice, the male editorial intrusion is made patent at the commencement of the story. Right after Purcell has handed over the narrative voice to the female via his “she began as follows” (Le Fanu 2007, 193), the protagonist begins to narrate her story, “my maiden name is Richardson, [1] the designation of a family of some distinction in the county Tyrone” (Le Fanu 2007, 193). This [1] takes the reader to a footnote which leaves no doubt as to the alteration of the original writing, “I have carefully altered the names as they appear in the original MSS., for the reader will see that some of the circumstances recorded are not of a kind to reflect honour upon those involved in them” (Le Fanu 2007, 194). The voice which we read is that of Purcell’s literary inheritor, who acknowledges he has altered the manuscript. This is not the protagonist’s own, but Purcell’s, perhaps acting as a reminder of “the way in which women placed themselves aslant male traditions of representation while yet endorsing the dominant cultural values of the colonial regime” (Boehmer 2005, 71). While this does not imply that the reader should discard the veracity of the narrative, it does cast a shadow of doubt over it. Essentially, it unveils the fact that the female voice remains encapsulated, perhaps remarking and denunciating that—as in much Gothic fiction—hers “is a position of passivity, entrapment and isolation” (Miller 2009, 143). This

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encapsulation is constructed via setting, for as “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) unveils, one of J.S. Le Fanu’s main literary obsessions was the encapsulation of Irish society. In this sense, McCormack (2014) remarks upon the fact that his characters, both Catholic and Anglo-Irish, often display traits of “sternness, introspection, a preference for seclusion” (170). The protagonist of the story can be read as an embodiment of the Anglo-Irish caste. Even if her name has been modified to Richardson, it is a safe assumption to think that the modification still retains the essence of the original, that is, that the protagonist’s family name is one of a distinct Anglo-Irish nature. Further to this is the fact that the Richardson family inhabit Ashtown House. Place names are reminiscent of denomination in Ireland as “the past was evoked in a particularly powerful way through oft-told tales, musical airs, even place names” (Cronin 2018, 244); there can be little doubt, then, that the Richardson family embodies J.S.  Le Fanu’s caste. And it is precisely this institution that is questioned from the very beginning of the story, for Ashtown House is far from a home. Interestingly, “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) opens the narrative with a subplot apparently little related to the main story. The protagonist narrates how “when I was a child, my sister was married” (Le Fanu 2007, 194); a fact that should have made her happy, instead produces the opposite effect on her, such sights were then new to me, and harmonised ill with the sorrowful feelings with which I regarded the event which was to separate me […] form a sister whose tenderness alone had hitherto more than supplied all that I wanted in my mother’s affection” (Le Fanu 194). Such feelings are further reinforced when her sister finally marries, and as “the carriage drove away […] I wept more bitterly […] then ever I had done before. (Le Fanu 194)

As it turns out, the protagonist’s sister’s story embodies and precludes that of the protagonist herself and, metaphorically, that of the Anglo-Irish. Her sister is to be married to “a Mr. Carew, a gentleman of property and consideration in the north of England” (Le Fanu 2007, 194). As the marriage is consummated, the young couple move to his estates in the English countryside; however, not long after their departure, the protagonist’s sister falls ill, showing “loss of appetite and cough” (Le Fanu 2007, 195), for which “the physician who had been consulted […] had strongly advised a removal to her native air” (Le Fanu 2007, 195).

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This introductory story clearly demarcates the lines which the main plot is to follow. First, it embodies the situation of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, who—like the sister—are caught in between England and Ireland, “belonging properly to neither one community nor the other” (Cleary 2004, 125). Secondly, it highlights the differences between English pastoral landscapes and the Irish scenery. Exposed to the “pure and simple existence of long ago” (Frawley 1998, 269) epitomised by English pastoral landscapes, characters are meant to benefit from the positive influences of such natural surroundings. The fact that the protagonist’s sister only finds her health worsens symbolises the impossibility of “a Romantic Ireland aligned with the British version in both its sentiments and its language” (Wenzell 2009, 51). Lastly, it portrays the family—including the idea of marriage—as a place of no-home, displaying a “persistent obsession with the collapse of domesticity, which […] is figuratively represented” (Hansen 2009, 47). Once her sister is dead, she is left, de facto, with no family at all. The father figure “had never seemed to love or to take an interest in me” (Le Fanu 2007, 194) while the mother was “as fond of me as she was of anyone” (Le Fanu 2007, 194). It is, however, the setting that reveals Ashtown House as a well-founded building but far from being a home, acquiring a relevance in the story that embodies the whole Anglo-Irish élite. On returning to Ireland, the wedded couple arrive first in Dublin. Having to cover a stretch of about ninety miles, the journey is divided up, so that “they would leave Dublin on Monday, and, in due course, reach Ashtown upon Tuesday evening” (Le Fanu 2007, 195). Come Tuesday, the protagonist is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her sister, intently listening to any sounds she might grasp, so much so that she describes her situation in the following terms, “for some such sound I was feverishly listening” (Le Fanu 2007, 196). The hyperbaton, along with the connotations of “feverishly,” make her impatience manifest, but they also unveil her inability to effectively act in that respect. In short, she cannot exert her free will as she is constrained by the wishes of her family, thus reproducing the stereotypes of “activity and passivity […] related to gender” (Miller 2009, 146). J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative thus appropriates “the vocabulary of identity first put into play by imperialism, and, thusly, the language of imperial Britain and of the unhappy union” (Hansen 2009, 10) to reveal the failure of the colonial quest. This feeling is only a preclude to the physical description of Ashtown House. As night approaches, the protagonist remarks how “it was,

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however, my father’s rule to close the house at nightfall, and the window-­ shutters being fastened, I was unable to reconnoitre the avenue” (Le Fanu 2007, 196). Instances such as this abound in the story. The home is described as a no-home, a species of fortress whose aim seems to be to contain what is within more than to keep away what is without. These housing structures debase a colonial vision in which “the home and family was the basis for the colonial project of assimilation” (Lydon 2019, 16). The feeling of the parental house not being an actual home is further reinforced by the narrative itself. Once the protagonist becomes Lady Glenfallen, she leaves Ashtown for Lord Glenfallen’s home. At this stage, still unaware of how the narrative will unfold, the protagonist cannot help but feeling if not happiness, relief, “I was not sorry when, after a few days, Lord Glefallen’s carriage appeared at the door to convey us both from Ashtown, for any change would have been a relief” (Le Fanu 2007, 204). The idea of the house as prison, of a no-home, of an “ongoing uncertainty about the safety and security of their characters” (Morin 2011, 83) in their own houses, is further explored in the story as Lady Glenfallen’s new abode does not provide her with the comforts one could expect form a home. Privacy and protection from worldly (and uncanny) dangers are absent from the narrative, thus highlighting one of “the major preoccupations of the Irish Gothic: the distinction between property and home, or inheritance and entitlement” (Shanahan 2014, 81). We have already noted how Lord Glenfallen requires the protagonist to keep out of a certain area of the house. This is, however, no small portion of the state, you will visit ONLY that part of the castle which can be reached from the front entrance, leaving the back entrance and the part of the building commanded immediately by it to the menials, as also the small garden whose high wall you see yonder. (Le Fanu 2007, 210)

Worse than this exclusion from certain parts of what should be her home is the fear of insecurity and that of lack of privacy, of not having a room to herself, that, indeed, her room is not hers at all, giving a new interpretation to McCullough’s (2011) assertion that “the loss of home is, not surprisingly, a recurring concern in narratives of displacement” (807). One day, on returning from a “pleasant sunshine in a ramble through the woods” (Le Fanu 2007, 211), the protagonist goes back to her room, but “upon entering the chamber, I was surprised and somewhat startled to find it occupied” (Le Fanu 2007, 211). The description the protagonist

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provides is, indeed, enlightening, “beside the fireplace, and nearly opposite the door, seated in a large, old-fashioned elbow-chair, was placed the figure of a lady” (Le Fanu 2007, 211). J.S. Le Fanu’s deliberate usage of hyperbaton here to first present the setting and introduce the character of the blind woman last, together with his wording “figure of a lady,” give the impression that this character is intimately associated to the house, and, more specifically, to this chamber. It is as if the blind woman was a further piece of furniture, therefore, having greater claim to the ownership of the room than the protagonist herself. It is also indicative of the inextricability of (a guilty) past from Anglo-Irish history. The blind Dutchwoman is an alien element which, paradoxically, holds a greater claim to ownership than the supposedly lawfully wedded Anglo-Irish protagonist; at least in narrative terms, the blind Dutchwoman is the house, identifying with and partaking in the setting itself. J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative is embedded in the trend started by Edgeworth, where “an initial act of dispossession lies at the root of many characters’ convictions that they are proprietarily connected with a piece of property” (Maurer 2012, 20). Thus, J.S.  Le Fanu’s setting exposes the fact that both Catholics and Anglo-Irish can “invoke land as the grounding of origination in the physical world – the Catholic nationalists working the complaint of confiscated property […], the Protestant Ascendancy exchanging the same property for title to an antecedent cultural eminence” (McCormack 2014, 164–5). The protagonist is left with a feeling of insecurity, of not being safe in her own home, “this occurrence, so startling and unpleasant, so involved in mystery, and giving rise to so many painful surmises, afforded me no very agreeable food for rumination” (Le Fanu 2007, 213). Her fears are justified as, in a further twist of the plot, the protagonist’s chamber becomes a source of threat and horror which, ultimately, she cannot escape. One night, having retired to sleep, the protagonist is awakened by a voice she fancies having heard, and which greatly perplexes her, “there is blood upon your ladyship’s throat” (Le Fanu 2007, 221). Although she examines the room, she cannot see anything amiss; having, thus, being awakened, she finds it impossible to return to sleep, “hour after hour was told by the clock and each succeeding one found me, if possible, less inclined to sleep than its predecessor” (Le Fanu 2007, 222). It is then that she notices a figure trespassing the room, “it stepped cautiously into the chamber, and with so little noise, that had I not actually seen it, I do not think I should have been aware of its presence” (Le Fanu 2007, 222). This figure, this “it,” is no other than the blind Dutchwoman, who having

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grabbed hold of a sharp razor, attacks the protagonist. Despite her horror at seeing this, and of the imminent danger which threatens her, she is “fixed as if in the tremendous spell of a nightmare. I could not stir even a finger” (Le Fanu 2007, 222). But even if she had been able to, escape would have proved impossible for when she does manage to break the spell and attempts to escape by running to the door, she finds that “it was, however, fastened. At all events, I could not open it” (Le Fanu 2007, 223). Although she manages to survive her attacker, what remains clear is that she inhabits a no-home. There is no protection granted—much the opposite, indeed—, there is no love—“I was forced to believe that Lord Glenfallen no longer loved me” (Le Fanu 2007, 213)—, and there certainly is no intimacy. The protagonist’s only resort is to return to her parents’ house, which she ultimately does. However, such a return is, in effect, a return to a no-home, equally unloving if slightly less threatening. The manor houses of the Anglo-Irish are, then, a source of danger, of hidden threats where the past emerges, unexpected, to haunt the present voiding it of any homely intent. One wonders, then, where the source of these threats stems from. And in this, setting can shed a light as well. Although the protagonist’s family home plays no minor role, it is Glenfallen’s estate which holds the greatest importance, both in narrative development—as it is described in greater profusion—and in interpretative terms. We have already noted how the protagonist can be traced back to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy—a clear English name and English manor house act as convincing narrative devices. Glenfallen’s case is different. Although the name Glenfallen does not itself exist, it does present traces of a somewhat Anglicised Irish name, “glen” coming from the Irish word “gleann.” The name of the setting is more remarkable as the couple “proceed to Cahergillagh, one of the Glenfallen estates, lying, however, in a southern county” (Le Fanu 2007, 204). As with the name “Glenfallen,” “Cahergillagh” does not properly exist. However, it seems to be a combination of two Irish words: cathair, meaning stone ringfort, and geal, meaning “bright, white.” Cahergillagh would then come to mean “the white stone ringfort,” which certainly resonates with the description the protagonist provides, “towards the centre a mass of taller and statelier forest trees stood darkly grouped together, and among them stood an ancient square tower” (Le Fanu 2007, 205). Thus, both Glenfallen and, especially, Cahergillagh are connected to the island’s Gaelic past, and more specifically, to its past of military occupation and colonisation, as proven

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by the fact that the house is referred to as “an ancient square tower” and a “time-worn castle” (Le Fanu 2007, 205). However, before dealing in detail with the links between house and owner, it is important to ascertain a central difference in terms of setting. In “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839), J.S. Le Fanu creates an opposition between inner and outer settings, where the former stand for the Anglo-Irish while the latter are symbolic of the Gaelic and Catholic population. However, this portrayal should not be taken as an opposing dichotomy, for the two are intrinsically linked. In fact, when the protagonist first arrives in Cahergillagh, her impression is—overall—a positive one, as she is taken in by the beauty and picturesqueness of the scene, It formed a striking and a beautiful scene. A lake of considerable extent stretching away towards the west, and reflecting from its broad, smooth waters, the rich glow of the setting sun, was overhung by steep hills, covered by a rich mantle of velvet sward, broken here and there by the grey front of some old rock, and exhibiting on their shelving sides, their slopes and hollows, every variety of light and shade; a thick wood of dwarf oak, birch, and hazel skirted these hills, and clothed the shores of the lake, running out in rich luxuriance upon every promontory, and spreading upward considerably upon the side of the hills. (Le Fanu 205)

The long, ornate prose, together with a carefully selected word choice bespeak of an old yet luxuriant life. The connotations of such adjectives as “broad,” “smooth,” “rich,” “velvet”—indubitably positive—coupled with an ascending concatenation of natural elements is evocative of a slightly melancholic, peaceful yet vibrant existence. It is a pastoral scene at its best, with J.S. Le Fanu’s prose taking readers back “across the growing industrialism of the early nineteenth century, into the vanished past, the heart of a ‘dream’ of pastoral solidity” (Sage 2004, 47). The subsequent paragraph seems to proceed along the same lines, This little plain was chiefly occupied by the same low, wild wood which covered the other parts of the domain; but towards the centre a mass of taller and statelier forest trees stood darkly grouped together, and among them stood an ancient square tower. (Le Fanu 2007, 205)

The previous rhythmic cadence is, however, brusquely interrupted by both punctuation—a semi-colon—and the conjunction “but,” which breaks the spell of the rhythm J.S. Le Fanu had created to describe the

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exterior of the manor house. As the description approaches Lord Glenfallen’s abode, the atmosphere changes; here, trees are described in the generic, as “mass,” while the “wild wood” becomes a “forest.” A sombre atmosphere is brought in by the usage of the adjectives “statelier” and “taller” in consonance with the adverb “darkly.” This change in atmosphere reaches its climax in the last sentence by using a hyperbaton— therefore, retaining the feeling conveyed by the description; the verb “stood” is repeated before introducing the manor house, which is presented in its original military function, and intimately associated to Anglo-­ Irish history of land occupation in the mind of J.S. Le Fanu’s contemporary readership. Such a description highlights the differences in terms of outer and inner settings, where the former is understood as life celebrating, as “edenic homelands, lost spiritual traditions set in an unspoilt pastoral past” (Boehmer 2005, 112). The latter, however, is perceived as menacing, hiding secrets from the past. The association between this narrative past and the Anglo-Irish military occupation of Ireland is conveyed by the military references which describe the manor house, current home to the Glenfallens. But there are other instances which clearly signal to this relation between outdoor settings and Gaelic peasantry in a positive light. As the story advances, the protagonist enters the manor—and, therefore, the Gothic world—visually examining the decorations, the furniture and the spatial distribution of what is to be her new home. On parsing the hall, the weight of the Glenfallen family past is heavily felt, “I went with him [Lord Glenfallen] into a spacious sitting-room, wainscoted with finely polished black oak, and hung round with the portraits of various worthies of the Glenfallen family” (Le Fanu 2007, 206). Here again setting provides the atmosphere; although the room is described as “spacious,” the fact that it is wainscoted in “black oak” caters for a feeling of enclosure, a perception of space as a confined area, no matter how “polished” it may be. Such a feeling is heightened by that of being watched and monitored as the room is surrounded by the vigilant observation of the past. Thus, the past encloses and conditions the present, suffocating any attempts at innovation or liberty on behalf of those who enter the manor. As Wang (2018) phrases it, “The Big House, isolated, threatened, estranged, and set in a historical situation of dilemma, together with its masters, stands in Ireland lonely waiting for its execution in the end” (1033).

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This conceptualisation of the past enclosing and conditioning the present is further strengthened by opposition. As the protagonist looks out of the window, she clearly perceives the difference in scenario, This room looked out upon an extensive level covered with the softest green sward, and irregularly bounded by the wild wood I have before mentioned, through the leafy arcade formed by whose boughs and trunks the level beams of the setting sun were pouring. (Le Fanu 2007, 206)

The narration recovers its previous rhythmic cadence, with a long, ornate first sentence to open the paragraph. Again, natural imagery speaks of luxuriance and abundance, and, above all, a pervading sense of tranquillity conveyed through the adjectivisation, “softest green” and “leafy arcade,” coupled with the image of the setting sun. This natural structure is set in direct opposition to the protagonist’s feelings in the inner, artificial and man-made structure of the house. However, the scene this natural structure facilitates is more remarkable, In the distance, a group of dairy-maids were plying their task, which they accompanied throughout with snatches of Irish songs which, mellowed by the distance, floated not unpleasingly to the ear; and beside them sat or lay, with all the grave importance of conscious protection, six or seven large dogs of various kinds. Father in the distance, and through the cloisters of the arching wood, two or three ragged urchins were employed in driving such stray kine as had wandered farther than the rest to join their fellows. (Le Fanu 2007, 206)

There are notable dissimilarities between inner and outer scenes, reinforcing Wang (2018)’s argument that “with its architectural outer form and inner structure, the Anglo-Irish manor houses indicate a class separation and incompatibility between the two communities” (1030). J.S. Le Fanu crafted a pastoral image and made the Catholic, Gaelic Irish its protagonist. The connotations of such a scene are, quite unquestionably, positive in themselves. They associate the previous natural elements to “Irish songs” and depict the people who populate the scene performing daily and meaningful tasks, thus abrogating the “pastoral dream of durability, order and whiteness” (Spencer and Valassopoulos 2021, 39) for the colonised other. This idea is further strengthened by offering something which the protagonist lacks—a sense of home, protection and love. And such feelings are, again, conveyed via natural images which are subsequently

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linked to the Catholic Irish. As the protagonist’s parsing of space moves further away from the manor house, this feeling is enhanced. Thus, from the dairy maids, she perceives the dogs offering protection; and on further examination, urchins look out for their “kine,” expressing their concern for those who have been laid astray. This image is reinforced by a structure which contrast with that of the protagonist, “the cloisters of arching wood.” It is interesting that a natural edifice offers such stark contrast to an artificial, man-made one. But, more significantly yet, what should be considered is that the Catholic Irish, evicted from their property, seem to have been provided the comfort and security of a home by nature. Nature, therefore, asserts their belonging to the land they inhabit, which despite colonial evictions, remains their home; and it is precisely this which the protagonist—in her embodiment of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy—is lacking. As if to further reinforce this sentiment, the protagonist herself declares that “a feeling of tranquillity and happiness came upon me, which I have never experienced in so strong a degree; and so strange to me was the sensation that my eyes filled with tears” (Le Fanu 2007, 206). At the kernel of this pastoral, bucolic description is an opposition inner-vs-outer settings which contrasts the feeling of belonging and that of the no-home. Even though the Anglo-Irish have conquered the land and imposed their rule, they remain an alien élite. For all their castles and manor houses, their structures are but an array of stones and brick, providing no comfort nor security and ultimately debasing the family structure. The Anglo-Irish house is, then, a source of horror, which is attributable to the forced displacement of the Catholic population. Despite having “overlaid military structures onto civilian ones” (Gillespie 2014, 58), the house remains vigilant and weary of outsiders, an alien element in what is perceived, paradoxically, as a threat, as if fearful of Catholic “hopes in the restoration of the old order, the ‘return’ of the Pretender, the revival of a Catholic state” (Killeen 2014, 115). Despite claims to antiquity, to a landed family “and one highly thought of” (Le Fanu 2007, 202), attributes which have gained Lord Glenfallen the right to a more than reasonable match, he is weary of all things old, a feeling he openly manifests when the protagonist first sees the Court of Cahergillagh, [Y]ou must not, my love, […] imagine his place worse than it is. I have no taste for antiquity—at least I should not choose a house to reside in because it is old. Indeed I do not recollect that I was even so romantic as to ­overcome

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my aversion to rats and rheumatism, those faithful attendants upon your noble relics of feudalism; I much prefer a snug, modern, unmysterious bedroom, with well-aired sheets, to the waiving tapestry, mildew cushions, and all the other interesting appliances of romance. (Le Fanu 2007, 205)

Whether intentionally or not, Lord Glenfallen not only associates the Anglo-Irish manor house to the past, but also acts as a reminder of its originally feudal intention. This is inextricably linked to the house and triggers its negative associations “allegoriz[ing] the self-consuming isolation of the ascendancy class” (Hansen 2009, 11). Hidden and not stated— but always present—is the Anglo-Irish history of colonial occupation and of the ensuing Catholic eviction which took place before J.S. Le Fanu’s time but in which his ancestors had taken part (Milbank 2010, 367). In fact, Lord Glenfallen’s description of the Court of Cahergillagh unveils his ambiguous perception of the estate. It is true that he depicts it in negative terms; in fact, not once does he refer to it as a “home,” opting for other semantically related terms void of any positive, homely connotations, such as “castle,” “palace” or the more neutral and barely descriptive “house.” His abhorrence of his old manor house, of Cahergillagh, is so deep, that he even designs an escape plan, I have it—I have it! We must go abroad, and stay there too; and if that does not answer, why—why, we must try some more effectual expedient. Lady Glenfallen, I have become involved in heavy embarrassments. A wife, you know, must share the fortunes of her husband, for better or worse; but I will waiver my right if you prefer remaining here—here at Cahergillagh. (Le Fanu 2007, 213)

The paragraph serves a two-fold purpose: through a consistent repetition (“I have it—I have it,” “why—why,” “here—here”), it depicts Lord Glenfallen’s incipient madness, thus facilitating a two-fold interpretation of the story’s resolution; more tellingly, it signals the source of said malady—Cahergillagh and the mysteries it contains. However, as an embodiment of the Anglo-Irish caste, Lord Glenfallen cannot escape the house any more than he cannot escape his past, showing the genre’s “repetitive recourse to unresolved spiritual issues, the Gothic mediates present and past, living and dead, Protestant and Catholic, modern and antiquated” (Long 2013, 23). Once the blind Dutch woman is tried and sentenced to death, Lord Glenfallen’s mental health suffers— paradoxically—a heavy decline, which stems from his feelings of guilt,

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[F]or some time after this event, Lord Glenfallen appeared, if possible, to suffer more than he had done before, and altogether his language, which often amounted to half confessions of the guilt imputed to him […] formed a mass of evidence. (Le Fanu 2007, 227)

The blind Dutch woman does, nevertheless, return to the house which she—like Lord Glenfallen—can never leave, “‘Whom have you there?’ inquired I […]. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘I see no use in hiding it—the blind Dutchwoman. I have been with her the whole morning. She is very anxious to get out of that closet” (Le Fanu 2007, 229). Whether the final appearance of the blind Dutchwoman is real or a mere fantasy, the fact remains that it is her everlasting influence which prompts Lord Glenfallen’s death. Again, space connotations here are convincingly used; the blind Dutchwoman remains closeted, trapped in the house along with all the mysteries and uncanny connotations the word “closet” can convey, an allegorical expression of “Anglo-Irish writers’ fear of the repressed past and its people (the Catholic majority)” (Morin 2018, 4). However, her entrapment is an appendage to Lord Glenfallen’s daily existence, as the closet is, in fact, part of his private rooms, “he arose and went to the door of a closet which opened from the study” (Le Fanu 2007, 229). Like Lord Glenfallen and the blind Dutchwoman, the Anglo-­ Irish are trapped in an endless repetition, where the past is re-enacted in the present, again and again, until guilt has finally been expurgated.

Conclusion J.S.  Le Fanu’s rhetorical deployment in his Irish stories showcases the writer’s vindication of the Irish Catholic past and his criticism of his own class. His credible creation of a sense of nostalgia, which permeates in “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838), is conveyed through depictions of the old castles and abodes of the vanquished Catholic nobility. This sense of nostalgia is, however, deceitful as it masks the colonial enterprise which caused the demise of the now-admired Catholic upper classes. Although such depictions do vindicate the honour of the Irish Catholics, one should be careful when gauging the extent to which J.S. Le Fanu’s exoneration goes. It is true that the landscapes portrayed, the castles and chambers the characters inhabit all transmit a sense of nobility, honour and respectability. However, the overall aura of nostalgia also hides a persistent sense of stasis, a tendency to immobility. There is vindication, but this is

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only partial, as by the end of the narrative, the status quo of the Anglo-­ Irish remains unchanged and unchallenged. Far from only affecting the Catholic Irish, J.S. Le Fanu’s conveyance of narrative stasis is also applied to his class. As “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) shows, the Protestant landed classes also suffer from their own past, rooted in their colonial history of occupation and usurpation. The main consequence of this is their lack of a sense of belonging, as not being wholly Irish nor English, they cannot feel at home. Their manor houses still retain the essence of their military past, which offers a stark contrast to the nature that surrounds them, as if they, too, were an alien element which had been displaced. Entrenched in their guilty colonial past, the houses of the Anglo-Irish can offer no consolation nor any sense of the home. Thus, the Anglo-Irish manor becomes, de facto, a no-­ home which entraps them, re-enacting their colonial past over and over, as the narrative does not offer any resolution to their inner identity conflict.

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CHAPTER 4

The Anticolonial Heart of Rural Ireland: Possession and Dispossession in Bram Stoker’s Short Fiction

As the nineteenth century came to a close and prompted by the social and political changes which were then taking place (Murray 2004, 137–149), there was a significant shift in writing, not only in terms of topics but also in narrative style. Bram Stoker’s prose shows remarkable differences from both J.C.  Mangan’s and J.S.  Le Fanu’s. Paragraphs tend to be shorter, descriptions more concise and prose—in general—less ornate. Such variations from earlier nineteenth-century prose are only logical, as the creator of Dracula (1897) was an in-between figure. Like his fin-de-siècle contemporaries, his works “engage in narrative experimentation more consistently than their mainstream contemporary counterparts [and] can be seen as on a continuum with such twentieth-century movements as ‘high’ modernism and surrealism” (Hurley 2001, 129–30). Born in 1847, Bram Stoker developed a writing career which spanned until 1912, the year of his death. In fact, Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories appeared posthumously in 1914, while his best-known work of fiction, Dracula, was published in 1897, marginally fitting in the nineteenth century. Despite this, there are, of course, notable similarities. Like J.S. Le Fanu, Bram Stoker was a member of the privileged Protestant classes, and, just like him, he was concerned with the Agrarian Revolts and the Land Question which had troubled Ireland during the century (Murray 2004,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_4

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160), a fact which would explain his obsession with “the issue of proper keeping of records, is the redistribution of land” (Hopkins 2007, 86). Unlike J.S. Le Fanu, however, Bram Stoker did not suffer from class prejudice; in fact, much the opposite can be asserted as he perceived both extremes of the social spectrum as equally dangerous for social development, with the “resulting emphasis on the middle classes” (Hopkins 2007, 109) in his stories. This, of course, can be explained by the fact that— unlike J.S. Le Fanu—Bram Stoker was not part of the Anglo-Irish élite, being better classified as middle class. His father was a low-ranking civil servant although he had acquired the rank of a gentleman. This represented the family’s “precarious respectability and Stoker’s fiction would show an acute awareness of social distinction” (Murray 2004, 19). Bram Stoker’s narratives advocated for hybridity, a union of opposites highlighted by his emphasis on the middle classes (Hopkins 2007, 109), which precludes many of the postcolonial societies to be born from the independence movements taking place in the twentieth century. As Keogh (2014) poses it, many of Bram Stoker’s works tend to “destabilize the essences of class and race upon which imperialism depends and to privilege an ideal of hybridization that receives its apotheosis in the birth of the child to Mina and Jonathan Harker” (200). Although Keogh (2014)’s comment stems from his analysis of Dracula (1894), this contention can also be ascribed to Bram Stoker’s shorter narratives. Like J.C. Mangan, Bram Stoker was also a prolific writer who covered many genres—short stories, novels, non-fiction or articles in periodicals, not to mention his involvement in the theatrical world (Murray 2004, 87-107). And like the Dublin poet, Bram Stoker’s narratives remain conspicuously alienated; in fact, of all his extensive short-story repertoire, only two stories are set in his native land: “The Gombeen Man” (1889) and “The Man from Shorrox” (1894). The reasons for such alienation are multifarious, among them his involvement in Henry Irving’s London’s Lyceum Theatre, but also a certain belief shared with Bernard Shaw that to publish in English, one must publish in London (Murray 2004, 75). Despite this alienation from his native country—both in writing and in his personal life, as he had settled in London—, Bram Stoker remained concerned with problems back in Ireland. Catholic rights, education or the agrarian question were all known to him (Murray 2004, 12), and they, consequently, feature in his stories, bent in “transcending the politicised divide between Protestantism and Catholicism which was proving so destructive to Ireland” (Hopkins 2007, 150). As with J.C. Mangan and

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J.S. Le Fanu, setting acts as the catalyst for many of the themes and subthemes which the author of Dracula (1897) deals with. His short narratives appropriate the concept of pastoral landscapes, depicting a rural Ireland as a pseudo-bucolic space in need of preservation and reactive to colonial occupation, much in line with postcolonial interpretations of setting deployment (Innes 2007, 79; Boehmer 2005, 112). In his attempt to implement setting as a decolonising tool, the writer uses location as a liminal space, where both past and present coalesce (Galiné 2018), and which is deployed to dismantle what Festa and Carey (2009) have defined as the “imperial conquest under the guise of the civilizing mission” (8). Morin (2018)’s definition of Irish Gothic spaces as evocative of the uncanny, therefore, acquires greater significance in view of these narratives. As the chapter unveils, Bram Stoker’s settings evoke past histories of colonial occupation still present in the imbalance between colonised subjects and colonisers’ relationship with land (Gunning 2013, 79). This utilisation of setting actualises Cleary (2004)’s consideration of Irish Gothic as a reaction to the spread of Anglophone industrial ambitions. Cleary (2004)’s contention is enhanced by the consideration of Kreilkamp (2007)’s figure of the visiting English as a travelling salesman and his imprint on the local community. In view of this, the present chapter considers how Bram Stoker construes his settings in his two Irish stories, “The Gombeen Man” (1889) and “The Man from Shorrox” (1894), to abrogate and appropriate colonial concepts and use them as decolonising tools. A careful examination of his narrative style and technique unveils how his portrayals of both nature and the home debase and examine the colonial quest in Ireland, manifested in the civilising mission which enveloped it. This chapter also considers how the imposed colonial system in Ireland derives into conflict, debasing the community and creating further inequalities among the different peoples who populate it. At the same time, Bram Stoker’s narratives vindicate the concept of the Irish rural community as the heart of resistance to colonial interventions.

A Colonial System in Warped Replica An issue which had greatly disturbed J.S. Le Fanu’s contemporaries and class, the Land Question, “perhaps the most pressing problem besetting post-Union Ireland” (Crossman 2018, 888), and indubitably an inheritance of British colonial rule in Ireland, was also to feature strongly in

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“The Gombeen Man” (1889). The story is originally part of the longer fiction The Snake’s Pass (1890), which had been published serially in 1890 by People (Murray 2004, 157). After its appearance and publication as part of the book, however, it was further published in 1904 on its own as a short story by John D.  Morris & Company (Philadelphia) in Irish Literature, Vol. 8. Further reprints of the story in Charles Osborne’s The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion (1973) and Peter Haining’s Midnight Tales (1990) further attest to its consideration as a short story on its own (Dalby and Hughes 2004, 87). The larger background of the Snake’s Pass is, of course, influential in determining that of “The Gombeen Man” (1889). This larger work of fiction, Bram Stoker’s first successful attempt at authoring a novel (Murray 2004, 155), is also where Irish landscape features most prominently and where Bram Stoker deals with “the social conditions of nineteenth-century Ireland” (Murray 2004, 158) most overtly. The landlord-tenant relationships, the big house and the waning influence of the Anglo-Irish, the permanence of oral traditions or the truncated social mobility of the Catholic population are all issues which conform the background of the narrative. Due to its fragmentary inception as a short narrative, these social conditions are not explicitly mentioned in “The Gombeen Man” (1889), however. Nonetheless, they conform the ultimate backdrop against which the story is delineated. Told from a deceptive third point of view, “The Gombeen Man” (1889) narrates an encounter and disagreement which takes place somewhere near Curragh, in County Galway. During a stormy night, Phelim Joyce, the protagonist of the story, arrives in the pub, after his “mare slipped coming down the Curragh Hill and threw me over the bank of the lake” (Stoker 2012, 1635). Such an accident implies two consequences, the first of which is that—to save his life—he “had to hold on wid me one arm for I fear the other is broke” (Stoker 2012, 1635). Most importantly, his falling into the lake means a great loss of time, hindering him from repaying his debt to Murtagh Murdock; consequently, the sheriff “sould the lease iv the farrum known as the Shleenanaher in open sale, in accordance wid the terrums of his notice, duly posted, and wid warnin’ given to the houlder iv the lease” (Stoker 2012, 1636). Having lost almost all his property, Phelim is enraged and “clutching the ash sapling which he had used as a riding whip […], he struck the evil face [Murdock’s] before him” (Stoker 2012, 1636). A short scuffle ensues, which is stopped by the men present and the intervention of the priest, who remonstrates both men: Phelim for “your angry passion” (Stoker

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2012, 1636), and Murdock for his greediness, “you are worse than the land-grabber – worse than the man who only covets” (Stoker 2012, 1637). After the scuffle is over and Murdock has abandoned the scene, the narrator offers to accompany the protagonist home. Thus, the whole company “ventured into the inky darkness of the night” (Stoker 2012, 1639). After a short detour at the doctor’s house to get Phelim’s arm fixed, they proceed to drive him home, where the narrator meets the protagonist’s daughter, Norah, who in “a sweet voice said, shyly: ‘Good night, sir, and thank you for your kindness to father’” (Stoker 2012, 1640). After this short exchange of words, the story finishes with the narrator and his driver setting off again, with the former musing about his last unexpected encounter. This brief summary suffices to show that there is something amiss in the story. If one applies Ó’Faoláin (1951) theory on the structure of short narratives that “a story follows step by step the main idea” (194), one quickly realises that there seems to be no apparent connection between the issues narrated, as the stories do not seem to foreshadow a final story. The scuffle is not taken any further and Murdock’s threat that “there’s thim here what’ll rue this day yit” (Stoker 2012, 1637) is not fulfilled. Nor is there a resolution to Phelim’s land problems. Not to mention that the narrator’s brief encounter with Norah, despite his asserting that it “seemed to have become part of my life” (Stoker 2012, 1640), is left unfinished as it brings the story to an end and seems not to relate to the rest of the narrative. There is one key element, however, which connects and explains all these different narrative aspects—setting. Somehow paralleling both J.C. Mangan’s and J.S.  Le Fanu’s style in “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833) and “A Chapter in the History of a Tyron Family” (1839), respectively, “The Gombeen Man” (1889) levels the importance of setting depiction to that of characterisation. At the heart of Bram Stoker’s narrative lies a portrayal of rural Ireland. The story opens with Phelim arriving in the pub, “room was made for him at the fire. He no sooner came near it and tasted the heat than a cloud of steam arose from him” (Stoker 2012, 1635). Although the hyperbolic “steam arouse form him” is intended to reinforce the fact that he had nearly drowned, the cosiness of the scene created by word choice should also be noted. “Room,” “fire” and “heat” are evocative of comfort, while using the verb “taste” to refer to the perception of the heat coming from the fire, gives it a more visceral meaning, emphasising the comforting sensation.

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Similar scenes are recurrent in the story, all reinforcing this idea of the comforting, peasant home, constituting a retrieval of pseudo-edenic homes, of an “unspoilt pastoral past” (Boehmer 2005, 112). Thus, once the scuffle between Phelim and Murdock is over, and the latter has left the place, they sat around the fire again, whilst, without, the storm howled and the fierce gusts which swept the valley seemed at time as if they would break in the door, lift off the roof, or in some way annihilate the time-worn cabin which gave us shelter. (Stoker 2012, 1637)

In this scene, Bram Stoker manages to emphasise the idea of the comforting home by opposing it to the fierceness and ferocity of nature. Thus, nature is personified; it “howled” and is characterised as “fierce,” while simultaneously being capable of exerting such animate (albeit brutal) actions as breaking doors or lifting roofs. Such ferocity is set in direct opposition to the house, which is described as a “time-worn cabin.” Bram Stoker’s diction is not random here. Despite nature’s fierceness, the house can withstand the storm, as it has done many times before, hence the usage of the adjective “time-worn.” Most remarkably, the house affords “shelter” with all the positive connotations that the concept can conjure up in the reader’s mind. The house the author is depicting gathers all the essential characteristics of a home: it offers comfort—represented in the fire—while simultaneously protecting individuals from extraneous elements, moving beyond the idealistic simplification of “a pastoral retreat, a natural world to be conserved” (Innes 2007, 79) often portrayed by colonial literature. All these associations are linked to the concept of a “cabin,” a typical peasant home in Ireland, and intimately associated to the lower-class Catholics. While the treatment of this dwelling is certainly positive, it also acts as a reminder of social division, with the big house strongly associated to England while the rural, peasant house is reminiscent of Irish ancient times (Glassie 2014, 42). Further, it offers a stark contrast with the idea of a no-home expressed in J.S. Le Fanu’s writings, thus broadening Morin (2018) and Shanahan (2014)’s conceptualisation of Irish Gothic as entrenched in notions of the home. While differently expressed and caused by diverging agents, Bram Stoker’s portrayals of Catholic characters also expose the characters’ “ongoing uncertainty about the safety and security of their […] Irish homes” (Morin 2018, 83).

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The personification of setting acquires greater relevance as the story progresses, however. Once Murdock has left and being trapped in the cabin waiting for the storm to abate, Phelim narrates “how it was that Murdock got me into her power” (Stoker 2012, 1637). It is thus that the protagonist explains how he borrowed money from Murdock on the lease of the house so that he could get his son educated. However, having missed the appointment to pay Murdock back, gives the latter legal possession of his land. It is then that one of the men assembled asks Phelim if “ye signed away all the land, or only the lower farm” (Stoker 2012, 1638). To this Phelim replies that “only the lower farm […]. Indeed, I couldn’t part wid the Cliff Fields, for they don’t belong to me – they are Norah’s” (Stoker 2012, 1638). This conversation leads to a comparison of Phelim and Murdock’s lands, which “is poor soil, with only a few good patches here and there. Moreover, […] there is a bog which is high up the hill, mostly on his houldin’” (Stoker 2012, 1639). Although there is nothing exceptional about a bog in Ireland, what is remarkable is Old Dan’s comment to Phelim’s narration: “True enough! That bog of the Gombeen’s isn’t much use anyhow. It’s rank and rotten wid water. Whin it made up its mind to shtay, it might have done better!” “The bog? Made up its mind to stay! What on earth do you mean?” I asked. I was fairly puzzled. “Didn’t ye hear talk already,” said Dan, “of the shifting bog on the mountain?” (Stoker 2012, 1639)

This scene is a key element in the story, as it brings the many different elements in it together. The shifting bog—that is, a bog that of its own volition decides to change places—is nature embodied and personified; most importantly, however, the bog is depicted as a superior element capable of deciding who belongs and who does not, and of redressing man’s misdoings if appropriate. The bog, therefore, becomes “a protean place of ambivalence where borders are blurred” (Galiné 2018, 79) and past anxieties derived from colonisation are explored. This undoes colonial perceptions that the colonies were places of “banishment, unlawful practice, oppression, and social disgrace, dark lands where worthy citizens might not wish to stray” (Boehmer 2005, 26). The bog embodies an element prior to human agency, but intrinsically linked to the community,

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it moved an’ moved longer than anywan can remember. Me grandfather wanst tould me that whin he was a gossoon it wasn’t nigh so big as it was when he tould me […] I make bould to say that it has made up its mind to sthay. (Stoker 2012, 1639)

The community perceives the bog as having punished Murdock by watering his land, while it can help Phelim out, “ye only have to make the best of it, Phelim. I daresay ye will turn it to some account” (Stoker 2012, 1639), assures Old Dan. In fact, Phelim’s not suffering a total dispossession is not attributed to inheritance nor even to destiny, but to the interference of nature in his favour, “the words of the story-teller came back to me again and again: ‘the Hill can hould tight enough! A man has raysons – sometimes wan thing and sometimes another – but the Hill houlds him all the same!” (Stoker 2012, 1640). In resemblance of J.S.  Le Fanu’s narrative technique, Bram Stoker introduces here a loophole, the possibility—encouraged by the narration—of the existence of an animated bog, which he based on well-­ documented real occurrences. Murray (2004) mentions how these rare happenings were “mysterious and terrifying to the local people” (157). Such supernatural agency would be responsible for Phelim’s salvation. In an analogous way to J.S.  Le Fanu’s embedded narrations, Bram Stoker achieves this by presenting old lore in the words of the storyteller, who is validated by the impartial narrator. A mere observer—and a voice alien to the community—the narrator, nonetheless, acknowledges his belief in the story and in the agency of the bog, “and a vague wonder grew upon me as to whether it could ever hold me, and how!” (Stoker 2012, 1640). This credence dismantles the concept of progress used to legitimise the “imperial conquest under the guise of the civilizing mission, while the celebration of reason disqualifies other belief systems as irrational or superstitious” (Festa and Carey 2009, 8). The narrator’s acceptance of the storyteller’s words implies a tacit belief in and acceptance of what he is saying, thus disqualifying a supposed narrative of progression which “authorized the destruction of primitive cultures in favour of assimilation to a European standard of civility” (Carey and Trakulhun 2009, 278). The bog is Bram Stoker’s ultimate decolonising element in the story, becoming an element of “resistance to, and transformation of, colonial societies” (Boehmer 2005, 176). As mentioned before, it saves Phelim from destitution while punishing Murdock for his greed, evocative of “the uncanny, haunting nature of the past and its ability to turn the familiar

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suddenly strange” (Morin 2018, 37). Such a portrayal could suffice as a not so veiled reference to the almost daily evictions which had plagued Irish Catholics for centuries and which had left a post-Famine social structure heavily dependent on inherited land “with one child, typically the eldest son, inheriting the land and delaying marrying until he received his inheritance, [making] prospects for non-inheriting siblings […] bleak” (Kenny 2018, 1070). The story is, however, more explicit in its denunciation of the landlord-­ tenant relationship and the injustices created and fostered by the British colonial system in Ireland, with local magistrates and the police “seen as a partisan force loyal to the Protestant Ascendancy and hostile to the Catholic tenantry” (Crossman 2018, 894). Murdock’s getting hold of Phelim’s land, although performed by the latter’s “free will,” is assisted by the British colonial justice system grounded in Ireland. Phelim’s main reason to liaise his land is to give his son “the right start in life” (Stoker 2012, 1637) and become an engineer. With an educational system which had been biased against Catholics and in favour of the Protestant classes for centuries (Crossman 2018, 880-882), this basically meant that he had to resort to private funding or the generosity of the well-to-do, as Phelim himself explains, “I went to see [Sir George Henshaw], and he said he would take the boy. He tould me that there was a big fee to be paid, but I was not to throuble about that” (Stoker 2012, 1637). Although Sir George does grant Phelim’s son’s education, he does so only partially for Sir George’s partner “said he couldn’t give up all fee, but that he would take half the fee, provided it was paid down in dhry money” (Stoker 2012, 1637). Such “generosity” only highlights the differences between the accommodated Protestant and the lower Catholic classes, a division Phelim makes even more explicit, The regular fee to the firm was five hundhred pounds […]. I hadn’t got more’n a few pounds by me – for what wid drhainin’ and pantin’ and fencin’ and the payin’ the boy’s schoolin’ and the girl’s at the Nuns’ in Galway, it had to put me to the pin iv me collar to find the money up to now. (Stoker 2012, 1637)

The massive imbalance between the fee paid for such studies (five hundred pounds) and Phelim’s usage of the vague expression “a few pounds,” further highlights the class distance between lower-class Catholic peasants and the educated Protestant élite. Such distance is underscored not only

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by the hyperbolic asymmetry in social class Bram Stoker confronts his readership with (a Sir with a clearly English name versus a peasant of Irish origin), but also by the source of income. While Sir George Henshaw deals with more intellectual matters, holding what can be termed as a white-collar profession and owning shares in a company, Phelim is near destitute, getting his sustenance from toiling hard in the soil, as made explicit by the polysyndeton concatenating farm activities. It is also noticeable that, in this context, paying for education is the last element to be mentioned. The hypothesis that this could be due to his not attaching sufficient importance to education is ruled out by the fact that he is ready to “put me pride in me pocket an’ kem an’ asked Murdock for the money” (Stoker 2012, 1637). It is his need to cater for sustenance first which relegates education to the last element on his mind despite his knowing that this is the only factor which might finalise his family’s rootedness in poverty. This way, Bram Stoker’s narrative offers a very different vision from the pastoral images which had been used to depict the Irish landscape as “lush vegetation and pastoral plenitude, filled with birds and beasts” (Banerjee 2019, 35). This last fact is further strengthened by Sir George’s capacity not to charge Phelim, for “he himself didn’t want any fee” (Stoker 2012, 1637). As this scene makes clear, social mobility is hindered by a well-rooted colonial system which prevents lower Irish Catholics from climbing up the social ladder. Paradoxically, those further from the land are the ones to profit from it, while those closest to it, daily working in close contact with nature, are forced to live in cabins barely resisting the passage of time and cut off from any possibilities of social and economic improvement. The story marks the divide between dispossessed colonial subjects, who are shown “closer to a state of nature and thus an authentic sense of essential humanity” (Gunning 2013, 79), and colonisers who “collaborated in dispossessing local communities [whose] lands […] were appropriated by the administration for individual and corporate gain” thus unveiling the “extreme, disruptive natures of colonial restructuring and extraction of land-based resources” (Shanguhyia 2018, 56). The contrast between Phelim and Sir George, then, dispels one of the myths of colonialism, the idea that “the perfectibility of man […] was to take place in this world as well as the next through the forced march of reason and Western civilization” (Gibbons 2014, 189). Bram Stoker’s colonial criticism is taken one step further, however, as not only does the story highlight the differences and imbalances between

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the Anglo-Irish landed class and the Catholic peasant community, but it also unveils the corrupting consequences of the British colonial enterprise within the community itself. The narrative, thus, opposes the Irish Catholic tradition of proximity to nature and to the local community to “the corrupting tides of Anglophone urban industrial modernity” (Cleary 2004, 67). In the story, land becomes a source of conflict between Murdock and Phelim, but while Murdock has a fame for his greediness, it is also clear that he is part of the community, however shunned he may be by it, “an’ is [Phelim] too in the clutches iv that wolf? Him that we all thought was so warrum” (Stoker 2012, 1635). Bram Stoker’s story delves into one of the direst consequences of the British imperial system in Ireland—setting neighbour against neighbour, implicitly destroying “sense of community and mutual belonging” (Innes 2007, 67). Murdock is so imbibed in the British colonial system, that he becomes its embodiment, being willing to see Phelim destitute if that means obtaining his land, Phelim Joyce, I’ve waited years for this moment – don’t ye know me betther nor to think I would go back on meself whin I have shtarted on a road? I wouldn’t take yer money […] I want yer land – I have waited for it, an’ I mane to have it! (Stoker 2012, 1636)

However, Murdock is only a warped, twisted image of the colonial system, a reflection of the British system of indirect rule over its colonies, which sought “to ‘remake’ the colonized in the image of the colonizer and which allowed the indigenous population to retain certain administrative, legal, and other powers” (Chafer 2018, 801). While he manages to use it to his advantage, profiting from “a power of attorney to enther Judgment for the amount if the money wasn’t paid at the right time” (Stoker 2012, 1638), he remains as entrapped in the colonial system as the rest of the community, if slightly better off. Indeed, he unveils the intricacies of the colonial system in Ireland himself when he explains how he obtained Phelim’s land, “[the sheriff] sould the lease iv the farrum known as the Shleenanaher in open sale, in accordance wid the terrums of his notice, duly posted, and wid warnin’ given to the houldher iv the lease” (Stoker 2012, 1636). His vengeful and vicious attack on Phelim is only partially successful for, in fact, he does not gain ownership of the land, but only access to its lease. Murdock reproduces the colonial system in all its viciousness, replicating its methods and cruelty and reflecting “back to colonizer a

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distorted image of his world” (Boehmer 2005, 164); he is, however, entrapped in this system as he is still dependant on the wishes and whims of an élite he cannot access, replicating “settler colonialist symbolic relations by continually reinforcing Anglo-Irish settler colonialism’s dominant obsession” (Backus 1999, 19) with the land. Colonial interferences, then, produce twisted mirror images which far from accomplishing the supposedly civilising enterprise, distort and corrupt the local, native culture and community system. “The Gombeen Man” (1889) thus unveils how colonialist justice “is a grim farce of irrelevance and misunderstanding which leads eventually to the extinction of the community” (Boehmer 2005, 135). It is only the pseudo-magical interference of the bog which, ultimately, corrects the imperial system by punishing Murdock and saving Phelim. Far from being the idealised colonial image of “potentially fruitful lands as pastoral Edens” (Boehmer 2005, 51), setting, then, is imbibed with a sense of the community, of belonging and not belonging. In a mockery of the imperial mission, this imbibition marginalises those who attempt to reproduce the colonial system under the “the assumption of human domination over nature as making possible hierarchies within humanity” (Gunning 2013, 89). At the heart of Murdock’s rejection and Phelim’s rescue in “The Gombeen Man” (1889) lies a rejection of the imperial system imposed on Irish soil, a system which debases and corrupts the local community only to profit an alien élite.

Communal Spaces and Shared Revolts—“The Man from Shorrox” Bram Stoker’s preoccupation with the Land Question was not a temporary fixation, however. Five years after the publication of “The Gombeen Man” (1889), the London-based writer would issue another story set in Ireland, “The Man from Shorrox” (1894). Set in Kilkenny, right before a market day, the story narrates how an Englishman arrives in town with the intention to open a line for Shorrox, “the greatest long-cotton firm in the whole world” (Stoker 2012, 1651). There being a market on the following day, the hotel is fully booked; however, the Englishman insists on having the best room for himself. Widow Byrne, the hotel’s owner and manager, explains to him that there is no room. However, the Englishman insists on being given the best room. It is then that the widow decides to play a practical joke on the Englishman.

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She assures him that the best room is taken by “a man wid less wickedness in him nor you have, an’ less impidince” (Stoker 2012, 1652); however, she agrees to let them share the room, to which the Englishman responds in the affirmative. What the Englishman does not know is that the occupant of the room is, in fact, the corpse of “an ould attorney-man […] a lone man widout friends” (Stoker 2012, 1651). Upon the widow’s request, the county men assembled in the hotel invite the Englishman to “dhrink toasts till he disremmimbers where he is” (Stoker 2012, 1653). It is thus that the Englishman, on entering the room, mistakes the attorney’s corpse for a sleeping man, and to the latter’s “unwillingness” to move over to the other side of the bed, the Englishman answers with serious aggressiveness, “he got more madder shrill […] an’ he kicked an’ shoved an’ grabbed [the corpse] be the leg an’ the arrm to move him” (Stoker 2012, 1653). Being heavily drunk, the Englishman falls asleep only to wake up some hours later, suffering from a terrible hangover, screaming and shouting “me throat is on fire, an’ me face is burnin’! Wather, wather!” (Stoker 2012, 1654). The scandal wakes the whole house up, and it is then that the practical joke is exposed. The Englishman realises, then, that he had been sharing the room with a corpse, which he had profaned. The story ends with the narrator taking a peep at Widow Byrne’s enjoyment of her own trickery, “Oh, but it’s a crool woman I am to have such a thing done in me house” (Stoker 2012, 1655). Unlike his previous story, “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) is devoid of any uncanny or magical interpretations, its gothic elements stemming from its portrayal of the community’s relationship with the magic and otherworldly. While some characters in the story do mistake the drunk Englishman for the resurrected attorney, the reader—via narratorial intervention—knows that it is only a practical joke and a misunderstanding. This does not mean that there are no uncanny elements in the story, however; in fact, much the opposite could be asserted, for the story emphasises the link between the living and the dead all throughout. In essence, “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) can be read as an allegory for resistance against the invader bringing in and imposing new habits, rhythms and systems, with a view to dispossess the native while profiting themselves. Central to an understanding of this story is the hotel/home, which comes to allegorise the Irish nation—a “symbolic national home” (Rees 2013, 132)—in its endurance against English invasion and dominance, and which is the main setting in the story.

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Written to resemble the Irish vernacular, the story opens with the narrator addressing his audience in a tone and style reminiscent of Maria Edgeworth’s infamous narrator in Castle Rackrent (1800), “Throth, yer ‘ann’rs, I’ll tell ye wid pleasure” (Stoker 2012, 1650). From his style and diction, it is easy to perceive that Bram Stoker’s narrator is designed to be a storyteller, “it’s only poor wurrk telling the same shtory over an’ over agin. But I niver object to tell it to rale gintlemin” (Stoker 2012, 1650). As such, the narrator starts by contextualising his narrative, “the place was a market town in Kilkenny […] it was wan of them counties what Cromwell— bad cess to him! —gev his name to” (Stoker 2012, 1650). References to British colonialism in Ireland abound in the story and are overtly mentioned from the start, thus, bringing the “truth of the past into the present, reviving not merely the past moment, but the epiphanic experience of the past in its entirety” (Walder 2011, 9); in this case, the story opens with the explicit mention of one of the issues which most clearly reflect colonial invasion and dispossession—altering toponymy (Innes 2007, 72). This is leads naturally into the Land Wars (1879–83), for in the same paragraph, the narrator provides the background story to the main narrative, that is, how Widow Byrne became to be such. On returning from the Curragh Races, Mickey—Widow Byrne’s late husband—is mistaken for “another gindeman, an unknown man, what had bought a contagious property—mind ye the impidence iv him” (Stoker 2012, 1650). Being drunk, Mickey is unable to “open his eyes to see what was goin’ on, or his mouth to set the bhoys right afther he had got the first tap on the head wid the blackthorns what they done such jobs wid” (Stoker 2012, 1650). Two features are reminiscent of the Land Wars (1879–83). The first, and perhaps most noticeable, one is the fact that “the boys” attack somebody for the sole fact of having acquired property. This attack is prompted by the fact that the land had been bought by “an unknown man,” which bespeaks of resistance to invasion and can only be properly understood in the context of the Agrarian Revolts. Peaking in the years 1879–83, the Agrarian Revolts took place all through the nineteenth century, “with farmers unable to pay their rents and pressure on landlords to reduce them” (Murphy and Hansson 2014, 4) and resulting in over 11,215 evictions only in the first year. References to the Agrarian Revolts are strengthened by the second element, the blackthorn. Blackthorn sticks were, in fact, very popular among the Irish peasantry as a weapon, and they came to be symbolic of armed resistance against the invader, to the benefit of the Land League which saw

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in such resistance “both a mobilizing and a tactical tool, regardless of whether leaders publicly condemned it or covertly condoned it” (Kane 2011, 118). The narrator’s qualifying these weapons as “what they done such jobs wid” (Stoker 2012, 1650) only reinforces this idea of armed resistance against what constitutes an act of “violent appropriation of indigenous land” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 3) by foreign agents. The Land Question and resistance against invasion being the backdrop of story, the narrative centres around the home and its protection. And in “The Man from Shorrox” (1894), the home is presented as a public, communal space dominated, controlled and driven by a feminine presence, thus abrogating “the portrayal of otherness—all that was not white and not male—as feminine” (Boehmer 2005, 74) and using “the rural knowable community […] to contest marginalisation” (Gunning 2013, 104). Despite the hotel being peopled by men, “they was fine min too, some iv thim—and warrm men—big graziers from Kildare, and the like, that counted their cattle be scores” (Stoker 2012, 1650), it is Widow Byrne who commands and controls the establishment, asserting that she “run this house well enough; an’ whin I’m thinkin’ of takun’ help I’ll tell yez, I’ll go on be meself, as I mane to” (Stoker 2012, 1650). It is not difficult to see the hotel and its owner as an allegory of Mother Ireland protecting Irish land, a discourse which had already been adopted by the nationalist cause in their anticolonial fight (Flannery 2009, 146–181), and in which “Ireland is imagined as an archetypal female figure, suffering under the wrongs of history” (Gunning 2013, 31). Widow Byrne’s character follows well-attested nineteenth-century iconic patterns in which “the image of female body as correlate for enveloping land came in handy” (Boehmer 2005, 89), being thus presented as a dual figure. On the one hand, she is seen as a motherly figure, offering homely comfort and protection, “there was niver a man, what was a man at all at all, iver kem in be the door that he didn’t want to put his two arrms round the widdi an’ giv’ her a hug immadiate” (Stoker 2012, 1650), thus evoking “the image of his country as mother” (Innes 2007, 137). On the other hand, she is portrayed as a threatening, blood-thirsty presence “unmanning and polluting for those who fell under her spell” (Boehmer 2005, 73), [S]he always kep by her on the counther iv the bar wan iv thim rattan canes wid the curly ends, what the soldiers carries whin they can’t carry a whip, an’ are goin’ out wid their cap on three hairs, an’ thim new oiled, to scorch the girls. An’ thin whin any iv the shuitors’d get too affectionate she’d lift the

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cane an’ swish them wid it, her laughin’ out iv her like mad all the time. (Stoker 2012, 1650–1)

Two things stand out in this description of Widow Byrne. The first one is the reference to the military, which is constant in the narrative. In this case, the “rattan cane” acts as a dual reminder as it is a weapon used by soldiers, again reminiscent of British imperial domination. Simultaneously, and taken together with the reference to the blackthorn stick, it acts as a reminder of the imbalance in fighting power, as the “rattan cane” can only be considered a lower weapon, intended more to “scorch the girrls” than to cause serious harm. The second remarkable notion is Widow Byrne’s characterisation as a frenzied warrior, an amazon. While such characterisation brings her closer to colonial ideas of the native as “savage bordering on subhuman” (Kissi 2018, 1094), her connotations in the story are overall positive—she is the incarnation of the mother defending her offspring and fighting the aggressive invader. Such a reading is, without a doubt, a subversion, a reversed image, of colonial ideas of the native woman, as “figures such as regents and queen mothers […] not only advised, defended, nurtured, and protected the kings, but also punished and dethroned them” (Chuku 2018, 172), thus presenting a menace to the patriarchal structures of the empire. However, to further strengthen the subversive effect, the narrative deliberately contrasts the character of Widow Byrne to that of the Englishman, who comes to embody the idea of the coloniser. Thus, on making his first appearance in the setting, he is described as a disruptive, threatening and invasive force, “in the middle iv it all, up the street at a hand gallop comes an Athy carriage wid two horses, an’ pulls up at the door wid the horses shmokin’” (Stoker 2012, 1651). Such mise en scène is further supported by the character’s own behaviour, An’ begor’, the man was smokin’ too, a big cygar nigh as long as yer arm. He jumps out and walks as bould as brass to the bar, jist as if there was niver a livin’ soul but himself in the place. (Stoker 2012, 1651)

His attitude perfectly reproduces that of the coloniser, presented this time as “the visiting Englishman” (Kreilkamp 2007, 163), for whom indigenous peoples are inferior, almost non-human, beings, as if they were elements of mere décor, placed there to satisfy his needs. Certainly, his

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bold, aggressive attitude bespeaks of a person who believes himself superior to those who surround him, in this case, Irish Catholics. The narrative seems to be crafted to leave no doubts as to the Englishman’s core embodiment of the imperial quest. His discourse leaves no room for misunderstandings, I want the best room in the house. I travel for Shorrox, the greatest long-­ cotton firm in the whole world, an’ I want to open up a new line here! The best is what I want, an’ that’s not good enough for me! (Stoker 2012, 1651)

There are two issues being dealt with here. On the one hand, the Englishman’s constant requirement of “the best” and his self-assurance that he deserves it are a reminder of the foundations of the imperial quest, justified “because it was self-evidently responsible, above blame, just—and it was just, it could be claimed, because it was British” (Boehmer 2005, 41). On the other hand, and playing along those lines, there is his desire to launch a line of Shorrox in Kilkenny, which would be dedicated to long cotton, that is, the textile industry. The opening up of a long-cotton firm in Kilkenny, at the heart of rural Ireland in the nineteenth century, can be read in positive innovative terms, catering for modernity and progress. It is, however, an actualisation of the civilising mission, a modernised version of “the oft-proclaimed goal of bringing civilisation to the ‘dark places of the Earth’” (Gunning 2013, 133). The negative impact of such advances, the destruction of the rural world and the depletion of its natural resources, along with the disappearance of native cultures in such processes has long been attested as the consequence of the colonialist’s “pattern of invasion, land-clearing and destruction” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 8). Widow Byrne’s resistance to the Englishman’s advances can thus be read as an act of national and cultural resistance, “I’ve run [the hotel] alone since thin, an’ I mane to go on runnin’ it be meself, even if new min from Manchester itself does be bringin’ us new ways” (Stoker 2012, 1652). New ways are not necessarily better; modernity does not necessarily entail real progress. Although not explicitly said, Bram Stoker’s narrative contrasts colonisation and industrialisation—with all their negative connotations—with the Irish rural world, which in the story is epitomised by the many positive references to rural life. Thus, the Irish countryside is presented as thriving and luxuriant, with men who

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used to come ridin’ in to maret on huntin’ horses what they’d refuse hundrileds iv pounds for from officers in the Curragh […]. More nor wance I seen them, forty, maybe half a hundred, strong, clear the market-place at Banagher or Athy. (Stoker 2012, 1650)

Even though they are portrayed as aggressive, such behaviour is almost depicted as playful, almost as a sporting event, or as a necessary act to defend the home from alien agency. It is, indeed, a uniting force, capable of fostering a national spirit and reminiscent of high-rent and eviction resistance, constituting a main strategy and venue of protest as hundreds of tenant farmers, individually and collectively (on estates), refused to pay rents at high rates [becoming] an event for resistance and demonstration by local farmers and clergy, sometimes evolving into a mass demonstration. (Kane 2011, 25)

Thus, when the Englishman tries to take advantage of Widow Byrne by forcing her to kiss him, the narrator describes how “there was more nor wan man there what’d like to have shtud opposite the Manchester man wid a bit iv a blackthorn in his hand” (Stoker 2012, 1651). Irish Catholic violence is, then, presented as a response to and contestation of colonial interventions. Despite this male description, it is Window Byrne who defends the home by caning the Englishman, and, so doing, exposes the unfairness of the British legal system in Ireland, I’m sorry, sur […] that I had to defind meself; but whin a gintleman claims the law to come into a house an’ thin assaults th’ owner iv it, though she has no head, it’s more restrainful he should be intirely! (1653)

In an example of how colonial interventions work, the Englishman had claimed his legal rights—established by the British colonial system—to be admitted in the hotel, “be the law ye can’t refuse to resave me or refuse me lodgmint, especially whin I’m on the primises” (Stoker 2012, 1652). As often happens in colonial contexts, the coloniser had attempted to use self-imbued rights to take over control of the home, “imposing common norms of law and culture over diverse and often resistant populations” (Cooper 2005, 172). Although this behaviour could be interpreted in line with colonial depictions of colonised Irish subjects as “immersed in superstition,

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savagery, and the general credulousness associated with primitive cultures” (Gibbons 2004, 13), Bram Stoker manages to abrogate such depictions. Colonialist representations of the colonised other as childlike, infantile and naïve were dependent on a dichotomy, a reversed image by which the colonised was all the coloniser was not (Boehmer 2005, 78); hence, if the colonised was childlike, aggressive and illiterate, it followed that the coloniser was mature, self-restrained and educated. It was a way to justify the civilising mission: educated peoples cultivating the uneducated and illiterate. However, the Englishman in Bram Stoker’s “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) is proven to be the opposite of the idealised coloniser: he is aggressive, uncouth and just as illiterate as the Catholic Irish in the story. In fact, one of the most remarkable features in Bram Stoker’s narrative is the resemblance in speech between Catholic Irish characters and the Englishman. The subjacent intention in thus enacting the vernacular remains clear. Their speech production is so similar that when the Englishman tries to talk the attorney’s corpse into moving over to the other side of the bed, he uses a clearly Irish expression, “‘Begor!’ he sez, ‘but ye’re the cowldest chap I iver kem anigh iv. Musha! But yer hairs is like icicles’” (Stoker 2012, 1653). The expression “musha,” used to show surprise and/or annoyance, comes from the Irish māiseadh (from mā meaning “if,” plus is meaning “is,” plus eadh meaning “it”).1 Other such instances, although not quite as evident as this, abound in the story. What becomes clear from such linguistic depictions is that the Englishman, the embodiment of the colonial enterprise in Ireland, is far from an educated character. Bram Stoker’s ability—and willingness—to play with register is proven from his other stories, as exemplified by “The Gombeen Man” (1889). His intention, therefore, to level up the Englishman and the Irish characters in “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) becomes an example of a debasement of the supposed civilising imperial mission. In his attempt at exposing the inner contradictions of this mission, Bram Stoker deploys setting to unveil and expose the real objective of the colonial enterprise. We have already seen how the Englishman’s characterisation portrays him as the opposite of this civilising mission. It is, nonetheless, his perception of space, his intended appropriation of the home that reveals the real intent of the coloniser’s gaze. If the Englishman’s arrival and his boisterous behaviour is a representation of colonial obsessions for fame and glory, then, his reaction when informed that “I can’t 1

 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/musha.

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give ye the best room—what we call the best—for it is engaged already” (Stoker 2012, 1651) is most revealing. Instead of showing due respect or inquiring as to whether there is a different type of room available, the Englishman asserts “then turn him out!” (Stoker 2012, 1651). The shortness of the sentence, falling short of an imperative, together with the exclamation, contribute to its perception as a further instance of imposition of his role as a coloniser, indifferent to the needs, customs and habits of the local community. This is further enhanced when Widow Byrne insists on there being no available space, “‘I’ll shleep in that room tonight; the other gintilman can put up wid me iv I can wid him. Unless,’ sez he, oglin’ the widdy, ‘I can have the place iv the masther iv the house’” (Stoker 2012, 1651). Exemplifying the lengths to which the coloniser would go to achieve dominion over the home, the Englishman requests that the rightful lodger of the Queen’s Room be turned out. This requirement is, indeed, further strengthened by his readiness to supplant the husband/ fatherly figure, even before knowing that Mickey Byrne has been long dead. The character of the Englishman, therefore, epitomises the longstanding aspirations of the colonial quest—there is no civilising mission; instead, the colonial quest’s aim is revealed to be solely concerned with the occupation and disruption of the home, by forced imposition or displacement of the head of the family if necessary. The Englishman’s appropriation of space can be read in larger terms, not only as the colonial/British Empire vs. colonised/Catholic Irish. There is a minor character, that of the attorney, who, nonetheless, plays a crucial role, both in narrative terms—as without him, there would be no climactic moment nor resolution—and in interpretative terms. The corpse of the attorney can, indeed, be read as a representation of the Anglo-Irish accommodated classes, which Bram Stoker had already criticised, himself being a “life-long advocate for Irish Home Rule and a firm supporter of the Liberal Party and follower of Gladstone” (Shaw 2018, 178). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Irish control over the island had greatly diminished. This was partly due to the success of the nationalist movement in Ireland, and partly due to the actions in favour of Catholics enforced by the British government at Westminster. In fact, Anglo-Irish power and influence in politics, especially in Ireland, had waned ever since the Anglo-Irish parliament ousted itself (Murphy 2003, 78). The character of the attorney perfectly epitomises that of Bram Stoker’s contemporary Anglo-Irish élite. Like them, the attorney had held a great position in the community, as can be seen in his occupying the best room

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in the hotel, “lyin’ out there in the gran’ room iv the hotel what they call the ‘Queen’s Room’” (Stoker 2012, 1651); and just like them, he was now lifeless. In a further parallelism with the Anglo-Irish, the attorney had also been ostracised by the community, as he is described as “a lone man widout friends” (Stoker 2012, 1651). Indeed, the narrative seemingly leaves no room for possible misinterpretations, as the narrator clarifies that the “attorney him being’ a Protestan’ there was no candles” (Stoker 2012, 1654) at his wake. The character of the attorney, then, can be read as an embodiment of the Anglo-Irish élite, both in profession and in denomination. Most tellingly, the attorney—like the Anglo-Irish—holds an ambiguous position, simultaneously being within and without the community. The colonial quest embodied by the Englishman is then a threat to the whole of the Irish nation—both Protestant and Catholic—, epitomised in the commonly shared public space that is Widow Byrne’s hotel, broadening Morin (2018)’s assertion that Irish Gothic manifests the “ongoing uncertainty about the safety and security of their characters’ Irish homes” (83). The Englishman is equally threatening to the Irish Catholics as he is to the attorney, for in his quest to conquer and dominate—literally possess the Queen’s Room—he does not hesitate to profane the corpse by kicking, pulling his hair and finally taking “him be the head, an’ shuk him an’ brung’ him to the bedside, an’ kicked him clane out on to the flure on the far side iv the bed” (Stoker 2012, 1653). The Englishman’s brutality and then indifference towards the attorney—as after his profanation, the Englishman “fell back in the middle iv the bed, wid his head on the pilla an’ his toes up, an wint aff ashleep, like a cat in the frost” (Stoker 2012, 1654)—parallels that of the British empire towards the Anglo-Irish, who had been promised a place in Westminster only to see their influence diminish both at home and abroad (Murphy 2003, 21–28). It is when the Englishman awakes from his alcoholic imbibition that the true extent of his colonial view is revealed. His (mis)perception of his right to possess the Queen’s Room is such that on waking up and seeing himself surrounded by the hotel’s guests, he exclaims “What does this mane? Why this invasion iv me chamber? Clear out the whole kit, or I’ll let yez know!” (Stoker 2012, 1654). Fulfilling his role of colonial invader, the Englishman has taken full possession of the room even though the corpse of the attorney is still there, and even if the hotel is, in fact, the property of Widow Byrne. Such an interpretation is triggered by his usage of “invasion” and the possessive pronoun “me [my]” together with the implicit threat of violence connoted by the informal expression “I’ll let yez know.” Taken as

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a whole, the Englishman’s reaction is the realisation of the colonial quest, first usurping the land and then keeping it by sheer force. There is little, if any, space left for the civilising mission in such actions.

Conclusion Bram Stoker’s portrayals of rural Ireland are systematically designed to be decolonising tools. Far from presenting the reader with an idealised, bucolic, and pastoral landscape, his narratives offer a stark, aggressive depiction of the strength of natural forces, capable of destruction as much as they are of nurturing the soul. In an updated reflection of J.C. Mangan and J.S.  Le Fanu’s setting deployments, Bram Stoker’s stories embody natural settings with a spirit and willingness of their own, personifying nature and presenting it as the ultimate decolonising tool. It is setting, as represented by the bog, which punishes Murdock and saves Phelim, thus acting as a redresser of colonial interferences. In so depicting setting, Bram Stoker manages to question the driving force of the colonial mission: the idea that the colonial quest brings evolution and progress. In fact, as his stories show, the implementation of the colonial system in Ireland only serves to further enhance social, cultural and economic differences between classes, ultimately altering the very fabrics of the local community. Bram Stoker’s settings also epitomise the idea of the home as a community, showing—and perhaps justifying— (sometimes violent) resistance to invasion, especially when this is camouflaged in the shape of progress and modernity, a new disguise for the civilising quest. His narratives appropriate and abrogate the concept of the Nobel Savage and colonial double visions of the feminine to depict an Ireland which resists invasion to protect the home. Embodied in the female figure which leads the community, this opposition generates a violent reaction in disguised coloniser figures. As “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) exemplifies, the home understood as a communal, public space helps in unmasking the colonial invader. Setting acts as a liminal space where colonial images of the other are reversed, revealing colonisers to be what they had accused the colonised of—a menacing, destroying and corrupting force far from the civilising mission which justified their presence in foreign lands.

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CHAPTER 5

Roaming the World Around: Exile in J.C. Mangan’s Narratives

J.C. Mangan’s physical descriptions of settings, although not widespread, support the idea of isolation, decay and monstrosity (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 20). Often, the notion transmitted by his stories is one of perpetual wandering, a concept which might stem from the poet’s own personal life. In her biography, Ellen Shannon-Mangan (1996) asserts that in his first years of existence, the poet must have known some sort of economic wealth. He had been born into a family of prospering grocers, James and Catherine Mangan, who during those years “can be envisioned as going about the grocery business and raising the children in an ordinary, traditional manner” (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 5). This prosperity the poet knew in the dawn of his life, and which enabled him to attend several schools, was to end around the years 1810–1. In those years, his father, who “loved to entertain his friends, sometimes at home, sometimes in rented rooms in a hotel” (Shannon-Mangan 11), started involving himself into several unsuccessful businesses, among them that of property speculator, “in any event, nothing worked for him. The people he associated with apparently used him mercilessly, and his own weakness contributed to finish him off” (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 18). Some six years later and due to his father’s unsuccessful business ventures and economic ambitions, J.C. Mangan and his family were forced to move

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_5

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to a house in Chancery Lane, which was “rapidly falling into decay” (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 19) even though it was still respectable. Worse than that for the poet was the fact that he was forced to quit school at fifteen and accept a boring, repetitive job even if this offered him acceptable prospects in life. All this—the fact that his father never worked again, of being forced to quit school and work and, especially, the change in residence—proved to be a recurrent trauma in the life of the young writer, “to all intents and purposes, James Mangan’s childhood came to an end with this move” (Shannon-Mangan 1996, 20). Ireland, with its history of perpetual faction fighting, endless taxes, Acts of Union, and worsening conditions for the Catholic majority, did little to contribute to any perception of his homeland as a source of stability. Such perceptions of physical decay, of abandonment, are, no doubt, paralleled in his writings, which are, nonetheless, conspicuously alienated. A purposefully alienated fiction, a constant and thorough usage of foreign settings, are “both familiar and alienating at once” (Spencer and Valassopoulos 2021, 16), does not imply J.C. Mangan was not concerned with issues at home, however. In fact, much the opposite can be asserted. Alien settings offered the Dublin-born poet the possibility of escaping a reality which he personally did not like. At the same time, it afforded him the chance to criticise his contemporary society, dealing with the various social and class problems which he perceived. Such a trend is not uncommon in postcolonial writing. Displacing narratives allows writers to create a more critical work from a safe distance (Rofail 2013, 179), to criticise imperial impositions on broader terms (Wright 2014, 132). In this sense, the figure of the exile or the émigré posits an interesting perspective from which to question the imperial quest. Always paradoxical, this figure parodies the displacement caused by colonial occupations (Walder 2011, 86) while gaining access to metropolitan society, therefore, exposing inner imperial fears of miscegenation (Bacon 2021, 635). The figure of the exile reveals the hypocrisy of the civilising mission, unmasking the myth of progress which justifies it (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 73) and showing the racial discrimination which lies underneath (Gunning 2013; Jewsiewicki 1989). Irish Gothic has also deployed this figure to express the pain produced by dislocation (Punter 2000, 160), challenging the natural ties between states and their subjects (McCullough 2011, 805). Indeed, the deployment of displaced narratives and the figure of the exile allows Irish Gothic to show the paradoxical situation of the Irish in the British Empire, being simultaneously discriminated but necessary for the fulfilment of the imperial quest (Martin 2012; Gibbons 2004).

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J.C. Mangan’s short stories utilise setting as the spearhead which propels such criticism. They unveil his multiple concerns, especially those over Ireland’s colonial situation. Displacing his narratives and using the Oriental other to epitomise the threat within allows J.C. Mangan to criticise British concerns over the Irish as a destabilising force (Martin 2012). These narrative deployments align him with the larger trend of nineteenth-century Irish Gothic writers who dislocated their fictions, establishing international comparisons to question British imperial domination (Wright 2014, xiii). Considering all the above, this chapter reflects on two of J.C. Mangan’s stories, “The Thirty Flasks” and “The Man in the Cloak,” both published in 1838. The chapter analyses his deployment of setting as a decolonising tool, his questioning of the civilising mission and of the ambiguous figure of the exile, both as an exotic colonised émigré and as the consequence of colonial interventions.

Bargaining the Social Ladder—Exoticism and the Figure of the Colonised Exile Set in Germany and based on Balzac’s La Peau de chagrain (1831), “The Thirty Flasks” (1838) narrates the misadventures of Basil Von Rosenwald, an upper-class gentleman, madly in love with Aurelia Elsberg and suffering from a serious gambling addiction. It is this problem which drives him— via his friend Heinrick Flemming—to make the acquaintance of a particular man, the Nabob, who—to Basil’s perplexity—is willing to exchange his riches for Basil’s height, Now mark and ponder: Every time that you drain one of these black flasks you lose an inch of your stature, and I gain it. This is not all: your appearance otherwise becomes altered for the worse; and, in short, by the time you have drained the thirtieth flask you will have sunk down to my height. (Mangan 2002, 191)

Being highly in debt and disbelieving the Nabob’s assurances, Basil agrees to the compact. He starts drinking the flasks and, subsequently, losing his inches, caught in a vicious circle of which he cannot escape. His physical degradation also implies a social deprivation to the point that he realises he needs to get his inches back. J.C. Mangan resolves the conundrum resorting to a Deus ex machina: towards the end of the story, when Basil had lost all hope, Slickwitz, a representative of Basil’s long-lost uncle,

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who had “spent a great part of his life in the east” (Mangan 2002, 236), makes his appearance to restore Basil’s riches and, thus, his inches. Being intimately linked to the concepts of belonging and social standing, setting in “The Thirty Flasks” (1838) is used to convey ideas of isolation and social degradation. Upon further inspection, these can be seen as the consequence of colonial interventions. This section analyses the depiction of the figure of the colonised exile or émigré in the metropolis as both a source of the exotic and a threat within, functioning as a disruptive element “or challenge the national narrative, calling into question the presumption of a natural tie between a sovereign state and its subjects” (McCullough 2011, 805). A careful consideration of setting depictions unveils how this dual, seemingly contradictory portrayal hides the callousness and economic greed of the colonial enterprise. In “The Thirty Flasks” (1838), the Nabob, despite all his powers and wealth, is a wanderer, a “representation of enlightened ‘savages’” (Garraway 2009, 239), who lives in a “forsaken-looking quarter” whose price had gone down because “Ullersbruck, the lawyer, cut his throat here” (Mangan 2002, 183). Despite his fortune, the Nabob remains an outcast, excluded from the privileges of metropolitan society and its pleasures, showing that under colonial rule, even colonised intelligentsia “were undermined, left with little or no power, denied judicial power, and reduced to a low status” (Falola and Agbo 2018, 93). He seems, however, unaffected by that, as he claims no social status, fulfilling colonial ideas of the exotic other “transcending the boundaries between nature and culture [which] are ultimately colonial tropes and racially biased representations” (Teichler 2021, 144). This is symbolically portrayed in the lavishness of his home, whose interior contrasts eloquently with the backstreet alley it is situated in, The door was opened by a servant in fine livery, and the friends were ushered into a parlour, Flemming having desired the man to announce their coming to his master. Basil began to survey some very characteristic paintings by Rubens and his disciple Vandyck, which decorated the walls. (Mangan 2002, 183)

The servant in livery and the drawings by the famous Flemish painters indicate wealth, as does the physical description of the Nabob as a man wearing a “rich dress, a profuse abundance of rings, chains, and jewellery” (Mangan 2002, 183).

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In this description, the narrative plays with the figure of the colonised exile or émigré as a man who has “been granted a ‘special insight’” and is, therefore, allowed to have a say “if granted a voice by permission of their captors/rescuers, about ‘sublime hope’ or the rhetoric of future visions” (Punter 2000, 160). The narrative abrogates the coloniser’s perception of the other, which envision the Nabob as a man of wisdom and above material concerns. This contrast of external poverty vs. internal richness (both inside the domicile and spiritually) has a twofold effect for it manages to deceive Basil while at the same time exposing his material greed and, by extension, that of the colonial enterprise, unveiling “the illusion of a civilizing Mission and the obvious racial factor” (Jewsiewicki 1989, 4). As opposed to the Nabob—apparently freed from such concerns—, Basil is caught in the dynamics of colonial society, in which status is defined by wealth. He is near-destitute because he has gambled away most of his belongings, including “the Koningsmark chateau—and this house, of course, with all its rights, members, and appurtenances” (Mangan 2002, 179). In a stark contrast with the Nabob’s home, Basil’s (its exterior) is located near the central Platz in town (thus connoting power and wealth), but his house (its interior) is now depleted, all its physical comforts “gone” (Mangan 2002, 179). Again, the narrative deploys the same allegory but in reverse. Therefore, colonisers are depicted as externally displaying riches but internally (and spiritually) void, while colonised subjects are shown in a reverse manner. Such a portrayal is, indeed, an abrogation of colonial ideas of the other as the reverse image of the colonial self (Bartels et al. 2019, 189). Setting deployment unveils the emptiness of the colonial figure and, by extension, of the colonial enterprise. This colonial need to possess, to accumulate wealth outweighs even the strongest affections. Aurelia’s father refuses to allow Basil to marry her on the basis that he will not be able to support her lifestyle, despite the couple professing mutual love, Young men and young women never look properly before them. Wealth, rank, title, the consideration of society, the more substantial advantages of life, are with them secondary to the single passion of love, a passion which from its very nature, from its very violence, must be evanescent—and is too often succeeded by mutual disappointment and dislike. On this account I regard it as imperative on me to make every exertion for the advancement of Aurelia’s real welfare. (Mangan 2002, 198)

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This extract plays on the double entendre of “welfare”—happiness and richness—, which are thus levelled off by Aurelia’s father, Elsberg, a prototypical colonialist figure, living in a villa and throwing balls for his daughter’s coming-of-age party. Despite his claims to pure love, Basil is also part of the colonial system which enthrones economic status above all other things. His readiness to take advantage of the exotic other is representative of the colonial quest in its willingness to use up the resources of colonial territories, unveiling it as a profit-driven enterprise, “the prospect of being enabled through the agency of the East-Indian to settle his debts, to regain his accustomed position in society, and above all, to re-establish himself upon his former footing at Elsber Villa, was cheering” (Mangan 2002, 195-6). Basil’s acknowledgement parallels the description of many an adventurous coloniser all through the nineteenth century, The exploits of the adventuring hero took the shape of a quest, campaign, or rite of passage aimed at winning some final prize: victory against the natives, wealth, the achievement of identity, personal or national honour, and withal, status as a Briton and a man. (Boehmer 2005, 73)

In the same way as the imperial notion of the colonial adventurer is flawed, that of the colonised émigré is similarly—and purposefully—distorted. The presentation of this figure as exotic, as a reversed colonial adventurer seeking to explore the metropolis for pleasure and cultural gain, largely ignores the collapse of identity caused by displacement. Such colonial depictions do not bear in mind the true nature of displacement under colonial conditions. This critical insensitivity “not only dismantles the real world of pain and dislocation; it similarly crucially misjudges and misrecognises the fictions produced on the huge terrain encompassed by the refugee, the exile, the diasporic” (Punter 2000, 160). Despite his apparent indifference to material possessions, the Nabob is similarly constrained by a colonial dialectic of power, a dialectic he has not created but must endure all the same; furthermore, colonial interferences have made him partially responsible for its upkeeping as “the status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent” (Sartre 1961, 7). The Nabob’s depiction as an outsider certainly offers points of comparison with the Irish situation in the empire. While Irish immigration to the metropolis differs in nature to that of the Nabob in the story, his depiction

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as an outsider helps in understanding the source of Irish emigration to Great Britain. This had drastically increased during the 1830s and 40s. Such an increase had the effect of altering the ideological paradigm operating at the core of British discrimination of the Irish. While previously state discrimination against the Irish had been religion based, this new, post-Emancipation immigration wave meant that discrimination was now based on “the discourse of Irish racial difference” (Martin 2012, 5). This is highlighted by the presence of the Nabob who, despite being immensely rich, is a castaway in the metropolis. The source of his rejection is, therefore, racial and not economic in nature. The Nabob’s aim is Basil’s in reverse; he is ready to submit his riches to access social prestige, metaphorically seen in the narrative by his gaining Basil’s inches, thus “attaining the social and cultural features that made up the European present [reinforcing the] idea that the non-European world was ‘not yet’ at an equivalent level of development” (Gunning 2013, 158). J.C. Mangan’s Nabob anticipates Bram Stoker’s creation of Dracula as the outsider infiltrating society. In both cases, characters “enter the mainstream of British society […] on anxieties about its relationship to disease, heredity, and cultural intermixing” (Gibbons 2004, 78). Especially in the Nabob’s case, this intermixing is quite literal. If the compact is wholly fulfilled, an exchange of identities would take place, with the Nabob gaining access to metropolitan society, thus fulfilling nineteenth-­ century fears of miscegenation (Bacon 2021, 635), which had been particularly extended to the Irish (Gibbons 2004, 45) The nature of the Nabob’s compact reveals more about the morbid nature of the colonial enterprise than might be, at first, apparent, Every time that you drain one of these black flasks you lose an inch of your stature, and I gain it. This is not all: your appearance otherwise becomes altered for the worse; and, in short, by the time you have drained the thirtieth flask you will have sunk down to my height, and present precisely such a spectacle to the eyes of all who see you as I do now, while I, on the other hand, shall be in possession of all your present advantages of feature and figure. (Mangan 2002, 191)

This exchange implies that Basil gets a massive amount of money at the expense of certain social (and physical) degradation (one inch per flask); simultaneously, the Nabob gives away his richness to acquire social acceptance. Such a compact is, of course, reminiscent of the colonial enterprise,

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and of the exchange of goods from colonial countries back to the metropolis, a fact made possible by the collaboration between colonial “nation’s leaders with […] and foreign governments” (Innes 2007, 163). This association is reminiscent of the Anglo-Irish willing participation in the colonial enterprise. The Anglo-Irish élite’s decision to oust the Irish Parliament in 1800 had been taken in exchange for seats and influence at Westminster, and under the threat of a Catholic return. (Jackson 2010, 7-23). As the nineteenth century progressed and Ireland’s participation in the British imperial mission deepened, Anglo-Irish influence progressively waned, to the point that, by the second third of the century, it had all but vanished (Murphy 2003, 25). Basil’s diminishing stature somehow parallels the waning influence of the Anglo-Irish. These had turned to Westminster for protection, but this came at a price—a diminished influence and presence both at home and in the international sphere. Although Basil’s story could be read as a cautionary tale, a warning on the dangers of allowing the exotic other into the metropolis, the text does much the opposite. It unveils the exploitation of colonised people’s resources in exchange for social betterment based on the “economistic myths of progress: ‘amenity’, ‘benefit’, ‘improvement’” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 73). Such improvement, however, can only be achieved via becoming something similar to the coloniser’s image, an effort itself doomed to fail, since “no matter how hard native nationalist—and settler colonials—struggled, they could never be exactly British. Allegedly civilized through the benefice of colonial rule, they were not deemed civilized at source” (Boehmer 2005, 111). This is, indeed, reminiscent of the Irish situation. Paralleling Basil’s responsibility in his misfortunes and the Nabob’s presence in his life, the 1830s and 40s “immigration of Irish subjects [was] a dislocation produced by colonialism” (Martin 2012, 23). However, one aspect that should not be neglected is the change which the figure of the Nabob experiments during the narrative. As the narrative progresses, Basil keeps losing his inches (and conversely, the Nabob gaining them). While, at first, Basil does not notice the physical change, the narrative does clarify that his economic situation has improved, [I]f the curious in dietetics are agog to know of what his breakfast consisted we will gratify them:—it consisted of one colossal roll and butter, two hen eggs, three slices of Westphalia ham, and four cups of Arabian coffee—a breakfast we undertake to recommend to themselves, the curious aforesaid. After he had finished his last cup, it is a fact that he drew his chair to the fire

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and deposited his toes on the fender; and settled in that position, began to pick his teeth. (Mangan 2002, 200)

Apart from the luscious breakfast Basil indulges in, what is most striking, perhaps, is how he is settled back in his old colonial self as conveyed by the mood established in the narrative. Indeed, the reader is provided with a depiction of a homely atmosphere, Basil’s status (literally) magically restored. Such a perception of space offers a stark contrast to the opening scenes in the narrative, where his house had been depleted of any homely comforts, Look around you—look up at the mantle-piece! You recollect the diamond bracelets, my mother’s miniature set in brilliants, the other trinkets that hung there—each of them once dear to me as life—valuable as a world—all, Heinrick, all […] gone. (Mangan 2002, 179)

Although the narrative opens in media res, the reader soon discovers that such losses are indebted to Basil’s gambling addiction, a fact which ultimately prompts his meeting the Nabob. It is this encounter with the Nabob, with the exotic Oriental other, which allows Basil to recover his wealth, thus paralleling the naïve (and imposed) reading of the colonial enterprise as a mutual and fair exchange, but which inevitably resulted in “colonization and exploitation of indigenous resources” (Sarkar 2021, 117). The agreement with the East Indian does not force Basil to renounce all his inches; in fact, the Nabob reminds him that he is under no obligation to do so, “until you have lost the last, the thirtieth inch, your identity remains in status quo. Retain that inch and you are still you, and I am still I. I do not solicit you to part with it” (Mangan 2002, 234). Basil’s drinking of the Nabob’s flasks, and, indeed, all their agreement, is representative of colonisers’ deals with native intelligentsias, where a quid pro quo is established. Again, the narrative subtly points at a certain connivance, a “collaboration between local elites and the British government in the creation of systemic poverty and human misery” (Kaul 2009, 312) and which parallels “the landlord class in Ireland that was responsible for the coffin ships, and offloading the remnants of the pauperized Irish peasantry onto the advanced working class of the metropolitan centre” (Gibbons 2004, 79). But the compact also implies a warning of the consequences of depleting colonised territories, bespeaking of the danger of miscegenation by which colonisers can, in fact, become the colonial other.

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His reinstatement into society by recovering his material possessions in exchange of some of his inches does not make Basil satisfied. His colonial greed to accumulate more riches, metaphorically conveyed in the narrative via his gambling impulses, gets hold of him and prompts him to start gambling again. Indeed, Heinrick’s encouraging words, “Fortune’s wheel is forever turning. You will have money enough to risk; if you win […], you triumph at once over your fate and your enemies” (Mangan 2002, 220), are reminiscent of colonial discourses of the adventurous hero. It is thus that Basil gives in to his degrading impulses and darts to the Spielhaus, the local casino. The physical description of the setting is, indeed, telling of his degradation, The entrance to the Spielhaus of Trigg […] was by a long and vaulted subterranean approach, terminating in a flagged courtyard. A solitary lamp above a high, narrow door alone indicated by night the site of the building to the stranger. The principal rooms themselves could only be reached after sundry zig-zag passages, well guarded by doors and centinels, had been traversed. (Mangan 2002, 221)

Interestingly, such a description is more reminiscent of the entrance and trespassing of the Gothic world than the Nabob’s abode had been. The tortuous way, the descent and the badly lit rooms all convey a degradation that is soon to embrace the story’s protagonist, for Basil gambles away all his newly acquired riches. The protagonist’s spirits are crushed at finding himself destitute again, a feeling which is conveyed through the physical description surrounding him, “the chill blast blew along the deserted streets, making the melancholy spirit more melancholy still. Its dreary tones and the hollow voice of the night-watch, gloomily proclaiming the hour from his sepulchral turret, alone broke the reigning stillness” (Mangan 2002, 224). Again, the atmosphere delivered by the narrative is one of Gothic undertones, with sepulchral figures, deserted streets and hollow voices all creating a Gothic background. Interestingly, these undertones qualifying setting as Gothic, where “the bleak landscape and uncertain destination of the wandering hero give form to a cultural sense of spiritual desolation and aimlessness” (Botting 1996, 83), are employed during Basil’s gambling sprees. These, however, are not utilised when he visits the Nabob, remarking that the source of degradation stems from Basil himself, that is, the coloniser figure, and not from the Nabob, the colonised other.

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Despite the momentary Gothic emphasis of this depiction, however, this becomes a recurrent pattern in the story. Finding himself in a state of both social and economic destitution and wishing to enrich himself, Basil resorts to the Nabob’s help. Subsequently, the protagonist gambles his newly acquired riches away, and finding himself destitute again, the pattern is recommenced. Such a depletion of resources (for money is, indeed, a resource) is reminiscent of the colonial-colonised pattern of goods exchange, where colonisers would squander goods acquired via colonised subjects only to improve their own situation. The cycle is halted when Basil realises that there is just one inch left, therefore, endangering his status quo, that is, his own existence as an identifiable and unique being. The twist in the narration is, however, remarkable. Predictably enough, Basil turns against the Nabob, and accuses him of not fulfilling his promise, “‘miscreant!” cried Basil, ‘is it thus you keep your promise?” (Mangan 2002, 223). To solve the narrative conundrum, however, J.C. Mangan resorts to a plot twist. The Nabob is transformed into Maugraby, “the magician of the eight and forty-gated Domdaniel” (Mangan 2002, 235), and subsequently dispelled via the figure of Slickwitz. Setting again conveys this transformation, An explosion instantly followed, louder than the roar of ten parks of artillery together, à qui mieux. The whole range of deserted buildings along one side of the Dornensteg […] were for a moment enveloped in one wide sheet of livid flame, and in the next blown into million atoms, —the sorcerer’s own house and all the wealth it contained perishing amid the common ruin. (Mangan 2002, 237)

Despite this last-minute recurrence, this deus ex machina to unravel the story and bring normalcy back, there is one important silver lining: neither Basil’s misfortunes nor his social degrading is caused by contact with the foreign other, but by his own greed. Most importantly, it is when Basil’s, that is, the coloniser’s, identity is finally put serious jeopardy—his status quo terminally challenged—that the literary change from curious, exotic East Indian Nabob to East Indian necromancer is carried out. J.C. Mangan’s decision to finish the story with such a twist is telling. The writer could have had Basil repenting his gambling and putting the remaining of his wealth to good use, or he could simply have resorted to the help of the long-lost uncle all the same, but without transforming the Nabob into Maugraby, the Necromancer. This dénouement bespeaks of

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the self-centredness of the colonial enterprise, which can produce narrative twists at will. Thus, the other is presented as an exotic wanderer, an émigré in search of new experiences, for as long as the agreement is convenient for an exchange of goods in favour of the coloniser. Paralleling the Irish situation in its nineteenth-century racialised depiction, it follows that the Irish “must be institutionalized in a very specific state form in order to fulfil [their] imperial and capitalist destiny” (Martin 2012, 43), performing their duties as “foot-soldier, or as a menial laborer, in strengthening the sinews of empire” (Gibbons 2004, 21). This view is suddenly transformed into the menacing other when the flux of richness ceases to flow, when the colonised other ceases to comply, thus threatening the coloniser’s status quo as a dominant, controlling force. The colonised other then becomes Maugraby, the Necromancer or the wild Fenian which threatens “not only to British rule in Ireland but to security within Britain proper as well” (Martin 2012, 52). Displacement thus allows J.C. Mangan to “casts a brave critical lens […] from a comfortable distance” (Rofail 2013, 179). “The Thirty Flasks” (1838) denounces the arbitrariness of colonial narratives, its need to control not only colonised subjects and their possessions, but also their narrative constructions, their stories and the roles they play in them.

Roaming the Earth and Back—Colonial Exiles The pre-eminence of displacement and the narratives of exile in Irish literature is hardly surprising given the devastating effects of colonial rule in Ireland and the several natural disasters which have historically blighted its population. The most recent of these, the Great Irish Famine (1845–50), caused the reduction of its population by almost a half due to emigration or death, and it still features prominently in the Irish subconscious (Gray 2018, 1052). Politically speaking, many dissenting intellectuals, especially of Catholic background, were forced to leave the country due to their opposition to British imperial rule, as exemplified by “émigrés set[ting] sail for America as the United Irish movement was repressed by the state in Ireland” (Griffin 2018, 965). Those who remained had to find subtler channels to express their dissent. The writings of James Clarence Mangan constitute a perfect illustration of exiled narratives, somehow mimicking how “colonial settlement almost always involved the displacement of the original inhabitants” (Walder 2011, 86). While J.C. Mangan never left his native Dublin, his short

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narratives are conspicuously exiled. Set in such faraway places for the Irish nineteenth-century imagination as Germany or France, as exemplified by “The Thirty Flasks” (1838), these narratives still reveal the writer’s concern with problems back home. Postcolonial narratives often resort to displacement as a form of vindication, an indirect way to tackle local problems while seemingly dealing with foreign lands, employing “complex layering of spaces and temporalities, bringing together discourses of the local (ethnic) and the global and disrupting the time/space of the nation” (McCullough 2011, 804). Sturgeon (2020) has already argued that East-­ Central Europe constitutes a “heterotopic space for Mangan, mirroring the Irish nationalist struggle while enabling the poet to articulate a muted wariness of the human costs such political movements entailed” (23). In addition to Sturgeon (2020)’s contention, I would add that J.C. Mangan’s “The Man in the Cloak” (1838) gives the concept of exile a different turn. While the story considers exile and wandering, it also confronts the controversial problem of returning to a colonised home. The story challenges the double narrative of exile and return, questioning ideas of home and returning under colonial rule, presenting “the return to the homeland as an emotional crisis, the end of a nostalgic dream, or a harsh encounter with a reality of continuing social and political hardship” (Boehmer 2005, 192). It has been traditionally believed that the extent of J.C. Mangan’s fictional oeuvre was limited to a reduced number of stories, some of which were actually based on other authors’ works. However, recent scholarship has reconsidered his translations as “pseudotranslation,” with the consequent improvement in understanding of the writer’s work (Sturgeon 2020). This chapter builds on these assumptions, in the belief that the stories themselves are worthy of literary analysis. J.C. Mangan’s stories— even if they be adapted versions of earlier writings—do show a significant deviance from the originals (Chuto 1995, 176) to render them as separate literary compositions. Indeed, these narratives touch upon some key issues which greatly concerned the Irish writer, like nationalism, belonging and exile (Shannon-­ Mangan 1996, 75). A good example of J.C. Mangan’s creative impulses is his 1838 story “The Man in the Cloak.” Based on Balzac’s Melmoth réconcilié (1834), the story is a sequel to Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Perhaps the greatest difference between Balzac and J.C. Mangan’s stories is that of point of view and protagonist. Although the argument is loosely the same in both narratives, J.C. Mangan’s is

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focused on the life and misadventures of Braunbrock more than on following Melmoth’s destiny. Indeed, Melmoth appears more as a secondary character than as the object of exploration in the narrative. I would contend that J.C. Mangan’s story is about the cloak and he who inhabits it more than about any character itself. Indeed, J.C. Mangan’s “the Man in the Cloak” (1838) constitutes an exploration of the importance of setting and of the consequences of colonialism. The eponymous protagonist of Maturin’s narration, Melmoth, is an Irishman who signs a compact with the devil and exchanges his soul for eternal life and superhuman powers. He soon discovers that this compact is far from a bargain and spends his life roaming the earth in search of someone who will accept the same compromise; someone who can rid him of the supernatural burden. In J.C. Mangan’s story, Melmoth does find one such candidate in the person of bank clerk Braunbrock. On the brink of committing fraud, Braunbrock is visited by the Irishman, who shows him what future awaits him should he pursue his plan. Braunbrock agrees to selling his soul in exchange for superhuman agency, thus liberating Melmoth. He soon discovers, however, that extending his life unnaturally and possessing unrestricted powers and unlimited wealth does not bring him any comfort. Rather, the opposite is true, “the enormous nature of his power only made him acquainted with the essential desolation of the heart” (Mangan 2002, 259). From then on, Braunbrock pursues the same path Melmoth had taken and tries to find somebody who will take over from him. He eventually succeeds, for [o]ne evening he happened to be passing the Bourse […] he exclaimed aloud […] can I then find none—none to deliver me? Is there in this world of cupidity not one wretch to be met with, who, at such price, will accept of inexhaustible riches and boundless power? (Mangan 2002, 262)

On hearing thus, “a ruined man” (Mangan 2002, 262) accepts the compact and Braunbrock is then free to die in peace, “his last moments […] characterised by a penitence as sincere as that of Melmoth himself” (Mangan 2002, 263). Despite the generally humorous tone employed by J.C. Mangan, the story touches upon many points worth analysing, not the least important of which are the usage of the female figure, the story’s attack on so-called economic leaders or its take on the importance of the soul versus that of money. And here one could wonder how the story is remotely related to

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Ireland and its history as a colony, given that bar a few scattered references here and there, Ireland does not feature in the story at all. And that is precisely the point. Given that J.C. Mangan was a self-declared nationalist—in fact, he was posthumously labelled “the greatest of our modern Irish poets” (qtd. in Shannon-Mangan 1996, 422), many of his stories, like “The Thirty Flasks” (1838) and “the Man in the Cloak” (1838), seem conspicuously alienated. However, a careful consideration of his narratives unveils the writer’s deliberate usage of settings to counter colonial issues at home. To better understand the role of setting and space in the story, it is first necessary to establish that, in “the Man in the Cloak” (1838), Braunbrock and Melmoth act as the dichotomy self vs. other, where Braunbrock embodies the colonial self while Melmoth represents the colonised other. This association is easily ascertained if we consider that Braunbrock is intimately linked to the sources of colonial power, for not only is he a banker in Willibald and Brothers, but he also “had served in the Imperial Army as a colonel of the Austrian dragoons” (Mangan 2002, 239). Likewise, Melmoth establishes himself as a colonised subject, for—in the words of Elleke Boehmer (2005), he displays that attitude which classifies him as “seductive distraction or baleful presence, unmanning and polluting for those who fell under [his] spell” (73). Thus, Braunbrock is first repulsed by Melmoth, “aiming a furious blow with his clenched fist” (Mangan 2002, 247) only to be subsequently awed by him, “‘strange and mysterious being!’ exclaimed Braunbrock, whose superstition was awakened” (Mangan 2002, 248). Added to this is the fact that Melmoth is, indeed, an Irish subject, and, therefore, at the time the piece was written, a colonial subject per force. This dichotomy allows the narrative to deploy setting to address the consequences of colonial intervention. The other presented in this story in the figure of Melmoth is a simultaneously confining and a confined force, giving new meaning to interpretations of the other as “both a source of strength and a source of anxiety” (Shanahan 2014, 92). It, thus, conveys the dual and ambiguous position of Ireland—and the Anglo-Irish—in the colonial quest, with its “male protagonists, caught between an embattled, isolated femininity and the fearsome masculine anxiety it provokes, come to embody precisely the incapacitating contradictions of modern Irish masculinity” (Hansen 2009, 6). In this sense, Melmoth is shown as capable of conditioning the self by arresting his physical actions. Thus, when Braunbrock tries to confront him, he finds himself paralysed, unable to

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produce actual movement, “‘make way, gentlemen, if you please;’ and seizing the arm of the bewildered cashier, who was now almost passive in his grasp, he dragged rather than led him” (Mangan 2002, 248). In an analogous way, the story also pinpoints the futility of colonial agency in subduing the subaltern. As the story shows, colonised subjects, now reduced to that mixture of child-like beings, both delightful and hideous at the same time (Boehmer 2005, 78), inhabit the border between this world and the uncanny, oscillating between “the dominant colonialist poles of the (European) Self-same, and hence good/ civilised or capable of goodness/civilisation, and the negative-of-the-(European)-self, and hence evil and incapable of being really civilised” (Khair 2009, 12). Colonised others, then, take advantage of these characteristics to perform their return, showing Ireland as “place where the past had never in fact disappeared, a place where the past is in fact the always present” (Killeen 2014, 10). “The Man in the Cloak” (1838) offers various such instances. On their first meeting and after having exchanged some words, Melmoth disappears just as stealthily as he had appeared, permeating setting at will and leaving Braunbrock to wonder “how the deuce can he get out at all? […] Or how did he come in?” (Mangan 2002, 241). But perhaps the best example of this ability of the colonised other to baffle the colonial self, to appear and disappear at will, is performed when Melmoth convinces Braunbrock to agree to the compact, granting him momentary freedom to arrive home and sign it. The police make their appearance to arrest Melmoth, ensuring the impossibility of his escape, “in a minute more, the Man in the Cloak, his hands and feet having been first secured by cords, was thrust into a coach and left to his meditations” (Mangan 2002, 253). To the policemen’s surprise, on arriving at the police station, the Man in the Cloak is nowhere to be seen, “Come, old twaddler, which are your legs?” asked the officer. “What the deuce!” he continued, as he now looked in: “what do I see? Surely this is not our prisoner.” He put his hand into the carriage. “Why, grill me alive,” he exclaimed, at the top of his voice, “if you haven’t made prisoner a bag of feathers!” (Mangan 2002, 253)

The rest of the squad—even the officer—are similarly baffled and they cannot help but attribute it to magic, assuring that “he has changed himself into a bundle of hay. I thought he had a wizard look” (Mangan 2002, 254). The scene’s climax is reached when, despite knowing it to be a

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dummy, the officer still orders the policemen to “take out this moment whatever you have got crammed into the carriage” (Mangan 2002, 254). It is the narrative voice, then, which makes sure the punch line is not lost to the reader, “the prisoner was accordingly released from durance. He proved to be a mere man of straw, with very thick legs of about ten inches in length, and a hollow pumpkin, stuffed with old rags, for a head!” (Mangan 2002, 254). Such a detailed description, accompanied with the qualifying deictic noun “the prisoner” in reference to what the reader already knows to be a man of straw, only strengthens the comedic tone of the scene. Most importantly, and in a reversal of roles, this description portrays the colonial self as a credulous, infantile and inept being, incapable of constraining the colonised other, who can—apparently—leave the stage at will. This depiction results in an undoing of one of the tenets of the imperial system, based on the alleged “English political and cultural progress” (Morin 2018, 129). Despite this seeming freedom to dupe the colonial self, the colonised other is still trapped in a world where freedom is just apparent. Thus, the colonised other is continually constrained by the coloniser-colonised dichotomy, simultaneously having a “double status as insiders and outsiders” (Innes 2007, 200) as represented in the figure of Melmoth. Despite his impressive powers over space, “I am here; and yet I may be elsewhere, for I am independent of time and place and distance” (Mangan 2002, 248), Melmoth is also confined for there is one place he cannot escape: his cloak. In this story, the cloak is a metonym for the colonial subject’s condition. Melmoth inhabits the cloak in the same way as the cloak lives off him, for Melmoth is Melmoth only as far as he wears the cloak. Proof of this is that as soon as Braunbrock’s inheritor “obtained possession of the talisman […], Braunbrock was restored to his ancient identity” (Mangan 2002, 263), thus becoming “a man who need no longer shroud himself in a cloak” (Mangan 2002, 262). But there is an added reading to the cloak as a living space. Melmoth’s cloak is the channel through which Melmoth and Braunbrock, that is, self and other, interact. Much as happened with the colonial enterprise, the cloak acts as a transforming channel. The self, slowly but steadily, ends up becoming a species of other, not exactly the original self, but closely resembling it, “‘his name was Melmoth,’ replied the priest. ‘Unless I am greatly deceived, too, that name should also be yours. There is a marked resemblance in features between you both’” (Mangan 2002, 260). Braunbrock’s process in accepting the cloak also

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parallels that of the colonial period. At first, Braunbrock—now the Man in the Cloak—satisfies all his cravings and thus “purchased a magnificent villa, furnished it in the costliest manner, stocked its cellars with the rarest wines” (Mangan 2002, 259). However, as time passes, Braunbrock realises that his soul is lost, that he is “like to a rocky beach, strewn with wrecks and redolent of barrenness, when the full and gushing spring-tide of the morning has rolled back from it to the ocean” (Mangan 2002, 259). J.C. Mangan’s simile illustrates the consequences and the process of colonial intervention, with a first period in which colonisers can and do take all the riches of colonised people unaware of the consequences of depleting their lands. This is subsequently followed by a second period where the consequences of such actions are manifest in the “wreck” caused by the decolonisation processes which ensued, following a “pattern of invasion, land-clearing and destruction” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 8). The implications of the cloak as a metonym for setting do not end here, however. There is a subplot in the story which involves the romantic—or rather unromantic—relationship between Braunbrock and Livonia— Braunbrock’s supposed lover. When Melmoth starts his acquaintance with Braunbrock and to better convince him, Melmoth shows him what his future will be if he does not accept his proposal; simultaneously, he shows him that Livonia has another lover and one for whom she professes real love. The narrative technique employed is revealing. J.C. Mangan takes advantage of Braunbrock’s theatre night to create a story-within-story frame, explicating it so that the reader is aware of this, “once more the scene was changed to the eye of Braunbrock” (Mangan 2002, 251). As a consequence of this revelation, Braunbrock readily accepts Melmoth’s proposal and agrees to the compact. After the theatre performance has ended, Melmoth, Braunbrock and Livonia return to Livonia’s place, where Braunbrock signs the compact and, therefore, becomes the Man in the Cloak. All this time, Livonia’s other lover—Rudolf—had been hiding in the closet. The new Braunbrock/ Man in the Cloak, in a display of his newly acquired powers, exposes both lovers and expels them from the house, “Livonia!” cried Braunbrock, turning to the girl, who had witnessed this exercise of superhuman power with no less astonishment than her lover, “Livonia, you must leave this house.” He rang the bell and ordered a carriage to be called. “Go where you please.” (Mangan 2002, 258)

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Livonia and her lover readily leave, and they are seen no more in the narrative. It is important to remark that this scene takes place in Livonia’s rightful home, that is, she is the rightful owner of the house. And yet Braunbrock expels her. This ousting closely resembles an act of eviction, in which the rightful tenant of the land is sent off and without proper warning. Most remarkably, this eviction happens immediately after Braunbrock has taken the cloak over from Melmoth. Accepting the previously established hypothesis that Braunbrock stands for the self and Melmoth for the other, then, the act of eviction takes place when the colonial self has already taken control over the colonised other. Therefore, the act of expelling Livonia is only one further instance of the former’s engulfing the wealth of the latter, reproducing the “growing numbers of colonists [who] regarded the lands they occupied as theirs by right” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 9). There are, of course, more sub-readings here; Livonia being a woman, it is tempting to read in her character depictions of nineteenth-century representations of Ireland. Further still, given the fact that the story was written in 1838, when the landlord-tenant system had not yet been revised for the benefit of the Catholic population, the scene is reminiscent of what were then common daily happenings. Kenny (2018) remarks how in the 1840s “eviction accompanied by compulsory assisted emigration was an effective way of clearing the land of destitute tenants” (1075). It is thus that J.C. Mangan uses setting to touch upon the narratives of eviction and exile. The fact that Livonia’s exile is prompted by an agreement with Melmoth recalls Ireland’s history of colonial occupation. Here the context of composition plays a significant role. The 1800 Act of Union had come into effect only thirty-eight years prior to the story’s publication. Even more significantly, the figure of Melmoth had been crafted only twenty years after the Union had taken place. Ireland had become part of the United Kingdom by unilateral decision of part of its population, the Anglo-Irish élite, and given the promise of Catholic Emancipation, even a sector of “Catholic Ireland welcomed the prospect of Union” (Bartlett 2018, 174). Thus, the story’s setting broadens Hansen (2009)’s contention of the unhappy Union. As the story suggests, not only is the Union not a happy one (at least, for one of the parties involved), but it is also a Union in which the owner can and is expelled from their rightful home, ushering in the topic of illegitimate land possession. There are further instances where the story touches upon the narrative of exile. Here again, setting and the cloak play a crucial role. Despite all his

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powers and immortality, and his capacity to alter the movements of the colonial self, Melmoth remains an exile, in search of “Edenic homelands, lost spiritual traditions set in an unspoilt pastoral past” (Boehmer 2005, 112), and condemned to roam the world until he has found a substitute. When the self/Braunbrock takes over, he finds himself similarly constrained; exile, therefore, has become an inherent condition, “he traversed Spain, Italy, Holland, England, and France” (Mangan 2002, 260). Remarkably enough, this had been foreshadowed by the female figure embodied in Livonia, “from Germany to England from England to France, and from France to Italy! Really the Wandering Jew may begin to tremble for his reputation” (Mangan 2002, 246). The reference to the mythological figure of the Wandering Jew, eternally condemned to roam the earth until forgiveness has been granted, should not go unnoticed. Neither should the list of countries which both Livonia and the narrative voice mention as they all share the arguable honour of having been colonial empires, thus drawing “on larger geographical networks that establish wide-ranging international comparisons” (Wright 2014, xiii). In this sense, Morin (2018) remarks how in Irish Gothic “foreign locations are frequently framed as the place from which characters continuously strive to return home” (117). Thus, setting triggers the perception of the binding effects of the colonial enterprise. Colonialism does create exiles and does so not only in occupied lands, as represented by Livonia and her forced exile, but also back home, rendering the “return to an idea of homeland” (Gunning 2013, 97) impossible. Once the colonial self has encountered and usurped the place of the colonised other, a transfer of characteristics takes place which affects the capacity of the colonial self to return home. Braunbrock is then condemned to roam the earth until forgiveness has been granted, as can be seen in his being characterised as a pilgrim, “crossing the Mediterranean he passed as a pilgrim through Asia from east to west” (Mangan 2002, 260). Such wandering reflects the real nature of the exile, based on pain and dislocation, which must always be intertwined with disavowal, with an abiding incredulity about the extent to which the “self” must remain “not known” – not known by the outside world […] but also in the end not known even on the inner screen. (Punter 2000, 162)

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The nature of the exile is one of a forced search, always looking for a place to belong and never finding it, for they no longer belong. Having become “an alien in a new land” (Emmambokus 2011, 91), exiles are doomed to wander the earth, “month after month [Braunbrock] prosecuted his search wherever he thought it likely to be successful. He traversed Spain, Italy, Holland, England and France. Crossing the Mediterranean he passed as a pilgrim through Asia from east to west” (Mangan 2002, 260). One relevant question, then, would be where this condition of the exile begins. For Punter (2000), this condition of exile is “based on the impossibility of return and thus, more importantly, on the impossibility of secure knowledge. It spreads into an absence of grounds for self-definition; and it embraces a wide emptying of the heart” (165). In a similar vein, Morin (2018) argues that “the distant geographies in [Irish Gothic] texts frequently help highlight the terrible disruption, violence, and distress to be discovered at the long-desired home” (117). This “possibility of no return” stems, no doubt, from the colonial condition which originated it, and which has caused the “alienation of vision and the crisis in self-image” (Ashcroft et al. 1989, 9) usually associated with dislocation. This displacement, however, goes further than a mere forced change of scenery. In fact, it has little to do with it, for Braunbrock/Melmoth does return, in the end, home, Borne on the broad waters of the Atlantic he visited America. But the day of his enfranchisement was not yet to be, and he at last returned to his native land. And there he remained, alone among men, groaning under the intolerable burden of his gifted and terrible nature. (Mangan 2002, 260)

However, and despite Braunbrock/the colonial self’s physically returning home, he finds no consolation, as it is rather something metaphysical which Braunbrock craves, “his soul […]. Lost, even while yet he lived and breathed and moved among men” (Mangan 2002, 260). Melmoth and Braunbrock’s return home reinforces the concept of a pilgrimage as a “framework for a reuniting of landscape and tradition in postcolonial literature” (Innes 2007, 77). This effectively acts as a reminder that the condition of the exile is not merely a physical distancing from a place; it is more of a psychological condition which implies a distancing, an annulation of the self through a disconnection with the land, with the very roots which justify a nation,

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The place of a diasporic person’s “belonging” may have little to do with spatial location, but be situated in family, community, in those symbolic features which constitute a shared culture, a shared ethnicity or system of belief, including nostalgia for a distant homeland. It is when a place is least spatial, perhaps, that it becomes most identifying. (Ashcroft 2001, 125)

J.C. Mangan’s narrative makes the condition of exile attributable to Ireland based on a perception of the country’s loss of a sense of community. This loss is traceable back to the disappearance of a shared national identity implied in the ousting of the Anglo-Irish Parliament in College Green. Like Braunbrock, the Irish nation had bargained its “soul” by committing (to) an Act of Union which had, as a matter of fact, annulled its powers of self-government. Such an act irredeemably cancelled her existence as a nation, forcing upon the island the condition of exile. As attested, being an exile implies an alienated existence: a country present in the minds of those who dreamed it but not in the reality of the charts.

Conclusion J.C. Mangan’s narratives take advantage of the concept of alienation to explore the different ways in which the figure and the idea of exile can reflect the pernicious consequences of the colonial enterprise. Paradoxically, alien, foreign and exotic places function as a liberation tool as they allow the writer to freely concern himself with colonial issues also affecting Ireland. His narratives present landscape as a source of instability, not only for the characters who inhabit them but also for the colonial system in Ireland. J.C. Mangan’s abrogation of the exile as a gifted man, a character with a special vision of the world, shows that the colonial enterprise corrupts all levels of society and all those who encounter it. The figure of the Nabob, a supposedly wise man, exchanging his riches for inches parodies the colonial civilising mission, unveiling its commercial intent and its class and racial bias. Even if the subaltern attempts to become the colonial self, it will always remain a parody, an imperfect image. Progress is only understood in colonial terms, that is, as an exchange of riches for social prestige and as such it conditions all human relationships both in the colonial context and back home. The narrative deployment of setting enhances and questions colonial conceptualisations of the exile. The colonial other, forced to roam the world, is presented in a purposefully ambiguous way, both as a

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constricting and as a constricted force, his freedom to upset the coloniser’s world limited by the very same colonial enterprise which created it. J.C. Mangan’s stories also contain a new appraisal of the colonial system— once the coloniser has taken over the land of the subaltern, a transfer of characteristics takes place which renders him an exiled figure, unable to ever fully return home. Overall, these narratives function as an analysis of the Anglo-Irish caste, caught in between a coloniser and a colonised figure. Once they have taken the land of colonial subjects, they become a pseudo-colonising force, as evidenced by their acts of eviction. However, as these narratives show, the trait of exile acquired through contact with colonised subjects is primarily a mental condition which implies a severing of the ties with home. This severing annuls the intrinsic relationship between the self and the land, thus ostracising the Anglo-Irish élite in their own home.

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Garraway, Doris L. 2009. Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism. In The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 207–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibbons, Luke. 2004. Gaelic Gothic. Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture. Galway: Arlen House. Gray, Peter. 2018. The Great Famine, 1845–1850. In The Cambridge History of Ireland Volume III 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly, 1019–1053. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffin, Patrick. 2018. ‘Irish’ Migration to America in the Eighteenth Century? Or the Strange Case for the ‘Scots/Irish.’. In The Cambridge History of Ireland Volume III 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly, 949–985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunning, Dave. 2013. Postcolonial Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hansen, Jim. 2009. Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett. Albany: State University of New York Press. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Innes, C.L. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Alvin. 2010. Ireland 1798–1998: War, Peace and Beyond. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. 1989. African Historical Studies Academic Knowledge as ‘Usable Past’ and Radical Scholarship. African Studies Review 32 (3): 1–76. Kaul, Suvir. 2009. How to Write Postcolonial Histories of Empire? In The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 305–327. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenny, Kevin. 2018. Irish Emigration, c.1845–1900. In The Cambridge History of Ireland Volume III 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly, 1061–1095. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness Ghosts from Elsewhere. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Killeen, Jarlath. 2014. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction History, Origins, Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mangan, James Clarence. 2002. The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1832–1839. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Martin, Amy E. 2012. Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

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CHAPTER 6

Haunted Manor Houses and Bumping Monsters: The Paradigm of the No-Home in J.S. Le Fanu’s Narratives

If there is a substantial change in J.S.  Le Fanu’s writings from 1863 onwards, that is his change of settings. From the publication of Wylder’s Hand (1864) on, virtually all J.S. Le Fanu’s stories share the same characteristics—what McCormack has termed the “Bentley formula,” “the story of an English subject and in modern times” (McCormack 1980, 140). One should not be deceived by this change of scenario, however. J.S. Le Fanu’s agreeing to change the settings for his narrations does not imply that he stopped writing about Ireland. In fact, much the opposite can be asserted. In her introduction to the 1947 edition of Uncle Silas, Elizabeth Bowen noted how the narration was “an Irish story transposed to an English setting” (McCormack 1980, 141). Never truer words were uttered, since Uncle Silas was a re-writing of “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838), one of the latest Purcell instalments, and, therefore, the story was originally an Irish one. What could be seen as anecdotal information is, in fact, a deeper structural change in J.S. Le Fanu’s fiction. Indeed, J.S. Le Fanu was not alone in such geographical dislocations. Irish nineteenth-century nationalist writing shows a tendency to dislocate settings to establish international comparisons (Wright 2014, 132), a trend which can be observed in J.S. Le Fanu’s work (McCormack 1980, 251). This is, actually, a common factor

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_6

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to Irish Gothic, as has been observed in J.C. Mangan’s heterotopic usage of spaces to mirror the Irish nationalist struggle (Sturgeon 2020, 23) or in Bram Stoker’s deployment of displaced locations (Hopkins 2007). Dislocated geographies allow writers to question the colonial quest from spaces which are simultaneously familiar and alien (Isomaa et al. 2013, xv). This statement rings especially true in the case of an English readership suddenly confronted with the colonial situation at home in English soil (Maurer 2012; Parsons 2013). Setting dislocation functions as a decolonising tool, Setting dislocation functions as a decolonising tool (Tuan 1977, 6), as it allows Irish Gothic to estrange formerly safe homes, thus better conveying the colonial experience of dislocation to its readership (Alexander 2010, 122). There is more in this change of scenario than a simple transposition of Irish settings into English ones, however. J.S. Le Fanu’s change from the Limerick of his childhood to the English countryside is, as a matter of fact, a change from an outdoors scenario to an indoors one. That is not to say that inner spaces were not present in the J.S. Le Fanu’s original writings or that there are no outdoor descriptions in his later stories. There is, however, a certain tendency towards isolation, a sense of the claustrophobic, in the stories contained in In a Glass Darkly (1872) which is not present in The Purcell Papers (1838–40). Furthermore, although J.S.  Le Fanu’s Purcell stories feature old castles or isolated mansions, these are placed in the Irish hinterland, nature and natural descriptions always providing a backdrop to the supernatural story. Both “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) and “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838) imply journeys into the Gaelic heartland, where the big house is situated. This is a clear move away from civilisation into the darkest areas of humankind, visiting a colonial hidden past which cannot be escaped, and which must be confronted. A past which reminds readers that complete erasure is impossible for even “acceptance of a self-­constructed reality did not erase from view the tenebrous spaces, impervious blockages, and gaps in knowledge which persisted” (Boehmer 2005, 88). These natural enclaves, at times idyllic and at times threatening, are substituted by urban enclosure in J.S. Le Fanu’s later stories. There is no doubt that this fact parallels his personal life. J.S Le Fanu’s “withdrawal from politics after 1848 seems largely the result of internal, psychological pressures, as an émigré at home” (McCormack 1980, 196). This withdrawal was not only a political one, however; J.S. Le Fanu had also partially isolated himself from Dublin society, earning himself the nickname

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of “the Invisible Prince,” which is, of course, an exaggeration as he still attended soirées and kept a close circle of friends and acquaintances (McCormack 1980, 197). Bearing all the above in mind, this chapter explores how J.S. Le Fanu deploys the house and its surroundings to portray Anglo-Irish entrapment in their own colonial past. To do so, it first considers the writer’s narrative change from rural to urban spaces to analyse his rhetorical and stylistic techniques in these new settings. Having done so, the chapter reflects on two of his later stories, “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870) and “Green Tea” (1872). The analysis unveils how the narratives convey manor houses and urban settings as enclosed spaces where the Anglo-Irish guilty colonial past is re-enacted in an endless repetition which reflects their class stasis.

A Pattern of Urban Encasement A sense of urban encasement is present as far back as his 1853 story “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street,” first published in the Dublin University Magazine and later incorporated to M.R. James’ collection Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories (1923). The story is paradigmatic of the change J.S. Le Fanu’s fiction is to undergo, with the exception that it is set in Dublin, predating the 1863 Le Fanu-Bentley agreement. Nonetheless, all the elements which will conform the Dubliner’s fictional settings are included in this story, for in his fiction, the house—and not just the big house—is a symbol of entrapment, isolation and collapse of identity; “an overall sense of persecution and paranoia” (Killeen 2014a, 121), which will become a hall mark in Irish Gothic, permeates J.S. Le Fanu’s stories, offering a stark contrast with colonial ideas of the house as a symbol of familial protection, stability and safety. J.S. Le Fanu’s house shows how the colonial quest could “threaten the security of society at home” (Boehmer 2005, 27). This transformation of the house into a symbol of decay and isolation again parallels the writer’s personal life. J.S. Le Fanu had been forced to mortgage his share of the family estate in Co Cavan, and now “lived in his father-in-law’s house which was itself mortgaged” (Milbank 1988, 314). In this story, two medicine students—and cousins—decide to “take our abode in the untenanted house” (Le Fanu 1994, 68) to be closer to the university and to the amenities offered by Dublin. The house itself is pronounced to be very old, “how old it was then, I can’t say; but, at all events, it had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all that

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mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most old mansions” (Le Fanu 1994, 69). More ominously perhaps, the house is said to have belonged to Judge Horrocks, who “having earned the reputation of a particularly ‘hanging judge’, ended by hanging himself, as the coroner’s jury found, under an impulse of ‘temporary insanity’” (Le Fanu 1994, 69). As the two students start to spend more time in their new abode, they also commence to see apparitions, which—at first—they try to deny, “What’s the matter, Tom? What’s the matter with you? What the devil’s the matter with you, Tom?” I demanded shaking him with nervous impatience. He took a long breath before he answered me, and then it was not very coherently. “It’s nothing, nothing at all – did I speak? – what did I say? – where’s the candle, Richard? It’s dark; I – I had a candle.” (Le Fanu 1994, 72)

In the end, and thanks to the intervention of the handmaid, they do face their fears and admit that they have been witness to the apparition of Judge Horrocks. She further relates the story of a previous tenant who had died there. This, of course, prompts the two students to look for lodgings elsewhere. The figure of the handmaid is, however, more pertinent in this case as she reveals the source of evil. Judge Horrocks hanged himself using his housekeeper’s daughter’s skipping-rope, after which the daughter “used to be starting up out of her sleep, and screeching in the night time, wid dhrames and frights that cum an her; and they said it was the speerit of the ould Judge that was tormentin’ her” (Le Fanu 1994, 83). The story, however, unveils its true uncanny nature when the handmaid reveals that “the poor little crathure was his own child; for he was by all accounts an ould villain every way” (Le Fanu 1994, 83). Thus, the haunted property acts as a reminder of the denaturalised familial relationship of the judge and his servant. J.S. Le Fanu’s change from rural to urban settings actualises the idea of the no-home expressed in previous chapters. The narrator’s discovery of the past hidden in Judge Horrocks’ house parallels the Anglo-Irish “sudden, sometimes surprising, recognition that the ‘homeland’ is indeed foreign” (Punter 2000, 83). This is further emphasised by the fact that although the property remains in the hands of the Anglo-Irish landed classes, it will never be “home,” as the family institution, “the crucial agent in the perpetuation of both political and verbal representational control in Ireland” (Flannery 2009, 159), has been

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dramatically altered by the Judge’s illicit sexual intercourse. Judge Horrocks’ house belongs to the narrator’s allegedly landed Protestant family, “my Uncle Ludlow […] while we were at lectures, purchased three or four houses in Aungier Street, one of which was unoccupied. He resided in the country” (Le Fanu 1994, 68). Despite this possession of the land, the property is never fully theirs, as it remains haunted by the very same past which the colonisers created, rendering it uninhabitable. But the house is also a metaphor of Anglo-Irish pre-eminence in Ireland, or rather of their downfall; the link of body and house is, in fact, based on one of J.S.  Le Fanu’s recurrent nightmares “in which the house threatened to collapse on top of him” (Milbank 1988, 319). Judge Horrocks’ house does collapse, with all its colonial significance, when a quack doctor […] filled the parlour windows with bottles of indescribable horrors preserved in brandy and […] one night, being overcome with much wine, he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned himself, and totally consumed the house. (Le Fanu 1994, 85)

This pattern, the house as a metaphor of failed familial stability due to colonial interferences, is reproduced to a greater or lesser extent in the remaining stories. The house becomes a no-home area, “the insecure house and the house as tomb” (Milbank 1988, 315), its natural links to property and legitimacy disrupted by colonial transgressions which “mask continuing inequalities, and through which enduring white anxieties over” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 139) land possession is sustained.

The Unredeemed Ghosts of the Anglo-Irish Manor This pattern is similarly explored in “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870), where the legitimate heir is walled alive behind a closet only to be found years later by a character who turns out to be the illegitimate proprietor. In “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870), J.S. Le Fanu used a very interesting narrative technique. The story is deceitfully narrated by a woman who went to “wait on Dame Arabella Crowl, of Applewale House, near by Lexhoe” (Le Fanu 1994, 3). J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative trickery is, however, overt, as the reader is presented with a double narrator, “I’m an old woman now; and I was but thirteen my last birthday, the night I came to Applewale House” (Le Fanu 1994, 3). By so framing the narrative, J.S. Le Fanu casts a doubt over the veracity of the narrative. While the elderly

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voice gives it ethos, its reliance is diminished by the dual fact that when the narrative took place, the narrator was a young girl (and might, therefore, have misinterpreted the facts) and by the time span which has elapsed since. The young girl arrives in Applewale House, where she is introduced to her aunt and Mrs Wyvern, who along with “but three or four servants, and the old lady in the house” (Le Fanu 1994, 4) made up the whole of the house’s boarders. The young narrator’s job is to help her aunt and Mrs Wyvern in whatever chores they may require her to do. One night, her aunt leaves her alone with Madam Crowl under the pretext of getting her supper. Curiosity getting the best of her, the narrator takes a peep at Madam Crowl while she is sleeping and, subsequently, gets the fright of her life as she “opens her eyes, and up she sits, and spins herself round” (Le Fanu 1994, 9). Most interestingly, Madam Crowl talks to the narrator in an accusatory tone, “ye little limb! What for did ye say I killed the little boy? I’ll tickle ye till ye’re stiff” (Le Fanu 1994, 9). It is after this frightful encounter with Madam Crowl that Mrs Wyvern unveils a story which had been the talk of the town at the time. Madam Crowl married Squire Crowl, who was a widower and had a child from his first marriage. She, however, wished to see her own son inherit the estate and so allegedly arranged for the disappearance of the boy, whose body was never found. Some days after the narrator is told this story, Madam Crowl dies and the narrator is moved to a different room, where she sees Madam Crowl’s spirit pointing at a gap in the room. Upon inspection on the following day, a secret room containing “the bayans o’ a child” (Le Fanu 1994, 14) is discovered. Thus, the story comes to an end, and while the truth is revealed, the status quo remains unaltered, there being no closure for the dead child. The central leitmotif of “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870) is the denaturalisation of the family institution, a degradation caused by illegitimate land possession and usurpation, brought in by “the colonial/racial Other back to the (imperial) centre” (Khair 2009, 10) and which—ultimately— affects all strata in a society. And to achieve such leitmotif, setting is used as the primary narrative tool. Although most of the narrative takes place indoors, the outdoor landscape also acts as a mirror reflection of the indoor setting. Thus, the young narrator describes how her “heart sank as I drove into the dark avenue. The trees stands very thick and big, as ald as the ald house almost” (Le Fanu 1994, 4). A similar description is given later in the narrative, “when I had my dinner my aunt sent me out for a walk for an hour. I was glad when I came back, the trees was so big, and the place so dark and lonesome” (Le Fanu 1994, 7).

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Natural elements both foreshadow and reinforce the uncanny atmosphere in the house by an adjectival association of negative connotations in “big,” “old” and “lonesome,” transmitting an overall sense of alienation in the narrator, who “cried a deal, thinkin’ of home” (Le Fanu 1994, 7). Indeed, J.S. Le Fanu uses colour and shape imagery to heighten the uncanny atmosphere, “a great white-and-black house it is, wi’ great black beams across and right up it, and gables lookin’ out, as white as a sheet, to the moon” (Le Fanu 1994, 4). Contrary to what could be expected, the greatness of the house is not perceived as a positive element. It is a massive, thwarting and awning setting. The blackness of the beams conveys the feeling of darkness created by the avenue, while the whiteness of the gables, coupled with references to sheets and the moon, is reminiscent of the uncanny. Outer and inner setting put together, they actualise the past into the present “muddl[ing] the difference between past and present” (Morin 2014, 20), as the heavy weight of the “ald house” conditions all the narrative. In a step which anticipates Madam Crowl’s case, the narrator’s family relations are also portrayed as denaturalised, “perturbed and slighted” (Long 2014, 46). Thus, when the narrator first meets her aunt, she describes her as “tall and thin, wi’ a pale face and black eyes, an’ long thin hands wi’ black mittins on” (Le Fanu 1994, 4). The same colour combination which he had been used to describe the house is employed. The aunt and the house, therefore, convey the same negative effect on the narrator, who finds herself alienated from her relative. To further strengthened this feeling, the narrator comments how the aunt “would hev bin kinder to me if I had bin her sister’s child in place of her brother’s” (Le Fanu 1994, 4). This link between the aunt and the house is reinforced by a double narrative technique. On the one hand, the aunt’s room is not described at all, leaving the reader with the overall description of the house as the sole connection to her chamber. Simultaneously, J.S.  Le Fanu provides the reader with the character of Mrs Wyvern, who acts as a motherly figure for the narrator, strengthening “the sense of alienation felt by […] protagonists in their own” (Gair 1997, 258) family circle. When first introduced, she is described in overall positive tones, as a fat, jolly lass of fifty, a good height and a good breadth, always good-­ humoured […]. She had fine wages […] and wore, mostly, a twilled chocolate cotton, wi’ red, and yellow, and green sprigs and balls on it, and it lasted wonderful. (Le Fanu 1994, 4)

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Everything in Mrs Wyvern bespeaks of exuberance, lush and life, a certain joie de vivre which is coupled by her chamber’s description, [Mrs Wyvern’s] room – very comfortable, yak (oak) all round – there was a fine fire blazin’ away, wi’ coal, and peat, and woud, all in a low together, and tea on the table, and hot cake, and smokin’ meat; and there was Mrs Wyvern, fat, jolly, and talkin’ away. (Le Fanu 1994, 5)

Mrs Wyvern and her chamber offer the narrator a haven in an overall menacing and alienating environment, significantly epitomised by the narrator’s aunt, highlighting the breach in the “rhetoric of the patriarchal family metaphor [used] to accommodate colonial ideology” (Hansen 2009, 171). Such an opposition is maintained all through the narrative, emphasising that the house is, indeed, a no-home in terms of natural relations. J.S. Le Fanu uses the narrator and her aunt’s relationship to subvert nineteenth-­ century ideas of miscegenation. Indeed, the narrative reverses the concept. It is the narrator’s aunt, a lower-class character, who has become contaminated via her associations with upper-class Madam Crowl, rendering her family relations unviable. Thus, when the narrator relates how she was “beginnin’ to feel more comfortable and at home like” (Le Fanu 1994, 6), she found “a queer old leathern jacket, wi’ straps and buckles to it, and sleeves as long as the bed-post” (Le Fanu 1994, 6). Seeing that the narrator had found the straitjacket, the aunt gives her a thrashing, reprimanding her harshly, “while ever you stay here, don’t ye meddle wi’ nout that don’t belong to ye” (Le Fanu 1994, 6). In a depiction which highlights the pauperisation of their family relations, Mrs Wyvern consoles the narrator, “Tut, the child meant no harm  – come here to me, child” (Le Fanu 1994, 6). Setting emphasises the unhomeliness of the house. Prior to the discovery of the straitjacket, the narrator had described the room they are in, “there was pretty old china things on the cupboard, and pictures again the wall; and there was a door open in the wainscot, and I sees a queer old leathern jacket” (Le Fanu 1994, 6). The combination of parallel structures (“there was … there was”) with the extensive deployment of the coordinating conjunction “and” suggest that the straitjacket and the pottery are on a par, sharing in their sense of the familiar and the everyday. The homeliness evoked by the furniture—indeed reminiscent of Victorian times, and evocative of a stable, protective and affective home—is altered by the presence of the straitjacket.

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The house offers no comfort, however. It is, indeed, a locked space, where the colonial past is encapsulated and actualised in the present. Despite its grandiosity, its elaborated décor, the house is, in fact, a trap. When the narrator enters Madam Crowl’s room for the first time, she is impressed, A grand chamber it was, wi’ a great four-poster, wi’ flowered silk curtains as tall as the ceilin’ an’ foldin’ down to the floor, and drawn close all round. There was a lookin’ glass, the biggest I sid before, and the room was a blaze o’ light. (Le Fanu 1994, 6)

Anticipated by the curtains being “drawn close all round” (Le Fanu 1994, 6), when the narrator has trespassed the Gothic world by peeping into the enclosed area of Madam Crowl’s bed—thus awaking her—the room becomes a trap, a living hell, If I’d a thought an instant, I’d a turned about and run. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I backed from her as soon as I could, and she came clatterin’ after […]. I kept backin’ and backin’ as quick as I could […]. I went back this way, right into the corner, and I gev a yellock, ye’d think body and soul was partin’. (Le Fanu 1994, 9).

Such a disruption of the home stems from illegitimate possession and land usurpation. Indeed, the denaturalisation of the relationship with ownership is overtly explored. Madam Crowl had deceived the young child—and rightful heir—so that she could supplant him by her own son, thus epitomising the Anglo-Irish usurpation of Catholic lands. Remorse at having done so transforms her into an “obsessive and self-absorbed individual guilty of grievous crimes against [her] dysfunctional family in the form of […] carefully planned and executed murders” (Davison 2009, 204). Ultimately, she becomes a spirit which will haunt Applewale House until the truth is revealed and past misdeeds are redressed. Such transformation, however, is an ongoing process as well before dying, she has already acquired spirit-like qualities. Thus, when the young narrator takes a peep at Madam Crowl while sleeping, she is described in the following terms, There she was, dressed out. You never sid the like in they days. Satin and silk, scarlet and green, and gold and pint lace […] A big powdered wig, half as high as herself, was a-top o’ her head, and, wow! - was ever such wrin-

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kles? – and her old baggy throat all powdered white, and her cheeks rouged, and mouse-skin eyebrows […] But her nose was crooked and thin, and half the whites o’ her eyes were open […]. Her wrinkled little hands was stretched down by her sides, and such long nails, all cut into points, I never sid in my days. Could it ever a bin the fashion for grit fowk to wear their fingernails so? (Le Fanu 1994, 9)

The narrative itself answers this rhetorical question by having Madam Crowl wake up and frighten the narrator with her “great glassy eyes and a wicked simper wi’ her old wrinkled lips, and long fause teeth” (Le Fanu 1994, 9). Madam Crowl is, then, described as an in-between figure, not wholly dead nor wholly alive, and, therefore, not belonging to either world, as the narrator herself makes clear, “well, a corpse is a natural thing; but this was the dreadfullest sight I ever sid” (Le Fanu 1994,9). She—and the Anglo-Irish with her—is placed in that liminal space between “cultural in-betweenness (the racial Other as cannibal versus the civilised and Christian European) and theological in-betweenness (not the Devil and not human either)” (Khair 2009, 59). Transformed into a spirit, Madam Crowl attempts to finally redeem herself in a “profoundly ambivalent attempt to solve the tensions of the past, break out of the suffocating enclosures of the enclave” (Killeen 2014a, 50) by revealing where the body of the rightful heir is hidden. Madam Crowl having been buried “in the vault under Lexhoe Church” (Le Fanu 1994, 11), the staff have to wait for the return of Squire Chevenix, the inheritor, and they decide to stay “up at the great house till such time as the squire should come to tell his will about us” (Le Fanu 1994, 11). The narrator is, however “put into another room, two doors away from what was Dame Crowl’s chamber” (Le Fanu 1994, 11). This room is very distinct and different from the others in the Applewale House, The room I was in now was a large square chamber, covered wi’ yak panels, but unfurnished except for my bed, which had no curtains to it, and a chair and a table, so, that looked nothing at all in such a big room. (Le Fanu 1994, 11)

The nakedness of the room, the scarce decoration, offers a stark contrast with the rest of the house, especially with that of Madam Crowl’s. The only other distinct object the narrator remarks in the room is “the big looking-glass, that the old lady used to keek into and admire herself from

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head to heel” (Le Fanu 1994, 11). Being a reflecting device, the mirror also helps reflect “a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a takeover” (Foster 1995, 220); taken together with the nakedness of the room, the whole scene connotes the idea that the naked truth is to be revealed. Ironically, the truth—and the heir’s body—is hidden in the nakedness of this room, which Madam Crowl attempts to unveil, And what sud I see […] but the likeness of the beldame […]. I couldn’t stir, but she passed me straight by, wi’ a blast o’ cald air, and I sid her, at the wall, in the alcove as my aunt used to call it, which was a recess where the state bed used to stand in ald times, wi’ a door open wide, and her hands gropin’ in at something’ was there. (Le Fanu 1994, 11–12)

Madam Crowl’s efforts at redeeming the past to find eternal peace, however, prove fruitless as the status quo remains unchanged, epitomising the Anglo-Irish position in Ireland, “becoming instead an endless repetition of familiar crises, with no hope of resolution” (Kiberd 1996, 393). Although setting is displaced to the English countryside, the story is reminiscent of an Irish setting. Ironically, such change of setting constitutes a sort of forced displacement, for J.S. Le Fanu was forced to write “the story of an English subject and in modern times” (qtd. In McCormack 1980, 140). Anticipating a later postcolonial technique, however, J.S. Le Fanu insinuates “into his modern English settings many of the characteristics of the Irish past” (McCormack 1980, 140). Maurer (2012) has expressed it in similar terms, arguing that “making a property in England the source […] of Irishness becomes a perverse way […] to ensure both the external, material source of […] Irishness and its inalienability” (205). The usurpation of land by an alien élite, the conspicuous foreign names of the usurping upper-class characters, the trope of the absentee landlord and the French connection—Squire Chevenix, “Dame Crowl’s grandson – came down there […] about twice or thrice in the year” (Le Fanu 1994, 4), is self-exiled in France—are all topics which sufficiently connect the story to Irish history to render such parallelisms plausible. In fact, this geographical displacement aids in understanding the Irish alignment “with a heritage of dispossession” (Grubgeld 1989, 27). The ghosts that haunt the Anglo-Irish are, like Madam Crowl, the product of a guilty colonial conscience at having usurped and evicted the legitimate owners of the land, showing that “the Irish Protestant

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imaginary was well aware of its own acts of usurpation” (Long 2014, 36). This feeling of guilt is unavailing as the Anglo-Irish descendants, like Irish Gothic itself, keep re-enacting past deeds by doing everything in their power to leave the status quo unchanged, repeating “the tropes and themes of this horrific intolerance” (Killeen 2014a, 49), “Twas the bayans o’ a child; a’ the rest went to dust at a touch. They said nout for a while, but he turns round the skull as it lay on the floor. Young as I was I consayted I knew well enough what they was thinkin’on.” “A dead cat! Says he, pushin’ back and blowin’ out the can’le, and shuttin’ to the door.” (Le Fanu 1994, 14)

By thus shutting the door and blowing out the candle, the past is again concealed, and, thus, Irish Gothic fiction does not resolve the tensions of the past but “instead collapses and dissipates into contradiction and incoherence” (Killeen 2014a, 50) perpetuated in the present. The truth survives in the relation of the narrator, but the illegitimacy remains unchallenged as does “the modernising fantasy that the past could be completely obliterated and a new temporal order inaugurated” (Killeen 2014a, 188). Paradoxically, the story becomes “a ‘paper replica’, an attempt to preserve at the same time as banishing memories of a ‘time apart’, as a haunting and haunted presence/absence inhabiting a dimension which is always provisional” (Punter 2000, 90). This is, however, one of the few instances in which the author allows for such an ending. Especially in his later works, there usually is retribution and if a colonial tool like the judiciary is no source of relief, religion is not going to be better off.

Unsettling Monsters of the Mind Such is the case with one of J.S.  Le Fanu’s later stories, “Green Tea” (1872). Published as part of the In a Glass Darkly collection, the story narrates the misadventures of the late Reverend Jennings, a clergyman belonging to the Church of England, who has begun to see a monkey. Greatly concerned by this apparition and upon recommendation of his friend Lady Mary Hayduke, Jennings contacts Dr Hesselius in the hope of receiving some treatment for his malady. The latter agrees to see and treat him, and after a first examination, recommends that Jennings should take a break from his religious duties and that he abstain from drinking green

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tea, which he had been consuming in great quantities. Despite following Hesselius’ advice, the monkey reappears in Jennings’ life, ultimately driving him to insanity and causing his death. Although the story encompasses at least three different locations, in “Green Tea” (1872) there are two basic scenarios relevant for Mr Jennings and his monster monkey—his vicarage in Warwickshire, where he goes to “engage in the actual duties of his sacred calling” and London, “where in a dark street off Piccadilly, he inhabits a very narrow house” (Le Fanu 1993, 7). It is remarkable that J.S.  Le Fanu chose to characterise both places in almost opposite—one could say complementary—ways; thus, the church is described as “old and pretty” (Le Fanu 1993, 7), while his house off Piccadilly is “narrow.” This is a purposeful delusion, no doubt. In fact, it is much the reverse. Despite the feeling of physical oppression attached to it, the house off Piccadilly turns out to be a refuge, both an intellectual and a spiritual sanctuary of peace and quiet, and very tellingly situated in Blank Street. The room which particularly captures the narrator’s attention is, not surprisingly, Jennings’ back drawing-room, “this was really a study— almost a library” (Le Fanu 1993, 13). This characterises Jennings as a learned man, a man of intellect, and as such, the room connotes both spiritual and intellectual comfort, “the room was lofty, with two tall slender windows, and rich dark curtains. It was much larger than I had expected, and stored with books on every side, from the floor to the ceiling” (Le Fanu 1993, 13). The room is purposefully described as a spacious area, almost as an open space, via adjectivisation (“lofty”), in contrast with the narrator’s present impression to his previous assumptions about Jennings’ abode. However, this parsing of space, this idea of openness— which suggests Jennings’ liberality of thought—is contrasted with the actual occupation and disposition the clergyman does of it. Indeed, it seems that the luxury of the room, “the upper carpet—for to my tread it felt that there were two or three—was a Turkey carpet” (Le Fanu 1993, 13), is almost neutralised by sound imagery; or rather, by its absence: “my steps fell noiselessly” (Le Fanu 1993, 13), comments Dr Hesselius, the narrator in the story. Likewise, the openness of the place is nullified by the excess of books which occupy the room, “the book-cases standing out, placed the windows, particularly narrow ones, in deep recesses” (Le Fanu 1993, 13). The room is a physical paradox, and it reveals more about Jennings than can be intimated at first: he is a learned man, a man of intellect and thought, who delights in silence perhaps to the

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extreme, as can be gathered from Hesselius’ reference to the carpets and his noiseless step. An association which is at first positive—the Turkey carpet, the books covering the walls, the luxurious elements—turns out to be negative, as can be collected by the emphasis on the negative aspects of silence: “silent room,” “silent house,” “gloomy,” “darkness,” “sombre feeling” are all mentioned in the reduced space of five lines, almost in consecutive order. Not wishing to leave any crevices for misinterpretation, the narrative has Hesselius summarise his impressions, The effect of the room was, although extremely comfortable, and even luxurious, decidedly gloomy, and aided by the silence, almost oppressive […]. I stepped into this perfectly silent room, of a very silent house, with a peculiar foreboding; and its darkness, and solemn clothing of books, for except where two narrow looking-glasses were set in the wall, they were everywhere, helped this sombre feeling. (Le Fanu 1993, 13)

The intention in thus characterising the house is twofold. On the one hand, the narrative anticipates a possible dual explanation—Jennings is an obsessed man, with a tendency to sadness and depression; thus, his death is, in fact, a suicide caused by his reclusive manners. On the other hand, such an obsession with silence, gloom and darkness can also be read as the product of a hidden, suppressed nature, suggesting that the monster monkey is, then, Jennings’ doppelgänger, or his repressed animal nature, embodying the “fictional representation of the repressed fears and anxieties of the minority Anglo-Irish population” (Morin and Gillespie 2014, 1). What is perhaps more interesting is the narrative association of learning with spiritual corruption via the metonym of Jennings’ books. However, such a connection is explained through setting again. Although currently a neighbourhood in London, J.S. Le Fanu’s chosen third scenario for the story—Richmond—was, at the time the story was written, a separate county; in fact, it was more of a rural than an urban enclave. Even though most of the narration takes place in secluded spaces, the narrative deploys Richmond’s outdoors to both emphasise the uncanny atmosphere and reveal the origin of Jennings’ sombre thoughts, the Anglo-Irish “dark, passionate, and murderous struggle between the Self and the monstrous Other” (Sage 2004, 6). When Hesselius is communicated that Jennings is in Richmond, he decides to visit him. The narrator’s thoughts both anticipate and prepare readers for the uncanny atmosphere,

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He would have been much better in a lodging house, or hotel, I thought, as I drove up through a short double row of sombre elms to a very old-­ fashioned brick house, darkened by the foliage of these trees, which over-­ topped, and nearly surrounded it. (Le Fanu 1993, 20)

The effect of the adjectivisation (“sombre,” “old-fashioned,” “darkened”) contributes to the overpowering connotation created by the natural imagery employed. The nature surrounding the house is not reviving nor luxuriant; rather, it oppresses the house much as it oppresses Jennings’ mind. Sage (2004) had already remarked upon J.S.  Le Fanu’s usage of darkness and its association to the past, arguing that “epiphanies of darkness, when the past (several layers of it) usurps the present, and an older universe of 'superstition' and barbarity rushes momentarily into the vacuum left by civilised, 'modern'” (4) spaces, are a characteristic of J.S. Le Fanu’s fiction. This feeling of oppression, of despair, is heightened via visual imagery, “I sat down, looking out upon the richly-wooded landscape that glowed in the grand and melancholy light which was every moment fading” (Le Fanu 1993, 20). Oppressed by the “wooded landscape,” Jennings’ intellect—his “light”—is slowly but steadily fading away, thus allegorising “the struggle between pre-Christian forces of the ancient past and the future-oriented powers of Protestant Christianity” (Killeen 2014b, 174). This parallelism of light and intellect being overpowered by a dark, cumbersome ancient nature is continued indoors, “the faint glow of the west, the pomp of the then lonely woods of Richmond, were before us, behind and about us the darkening room” (Le Fanu 1993, 21). The feeling of oppression, of impending threat, is made manifest, both physically and intellectually. Having entered Jennings’ Richmond’s house, Hesselius remarks upon the physical change Jennings has suffered, “on the stony face of the sufferer […] rested that dim, odd glow which seems to descend and produce, where it touches, lights, sudden though faint, which are lost, almost without degradation, in darkness” (Le Fanu 1993, 21). To further reinforce this feeling, J.S. Le Fanu resorts again to auditory imagery, “the silence, too, was utter; not a distant wheel, or bark, or whistle from without; and within the depressing stillness of an invalid bachelor’s house” (Le Fanu 1993, 21). Jennings’ light/intellect is overpowered by natural symbolism, as if his character were at odds with nature. Somehow, nature rejects Jennings’ presence, and sensing him as an alien colonising element, surrounds, encapsulates and, ultimately, stifles him. His characterisation as

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an “invalid” and the levelling up of sound imagery outdoors and indoors point towards Jennings’ final decline. The Irish setting, displaced and transposed to the woods of Richmond, performs an act of rejection of the colonial Jennings, who intends to apply his Protestant vision of the world to comprehend his surroundings. In his embodiment of the Anglo-Irish, Jennings learns—only too late—that he only seems “to possess all the power of definition within […] national space, [needing] to negotiate an anxiety of non-belonging and to reshape their story of the nation accordingly” (Gunning 2013, 63). The nature of this rejection, of Jennings’ intellectual downfall, is subsequently revealed in the narrative, About four years ago I began a work, which had cost me very much thought and reading. It was upon the religious metaphysics of the ancients […]. A wide and very interesting field […] but not good for the mind—the Christian mind, I mean. (Le Fanu 1993, 21)

Jennings’ mind has become corrupted by his reading the wrong books, which have opened a channel for the disclosure of more primitive, animal instincts, “Paganism is all bound together in essential unity, and, with evil sympathy, their religion involves their art, and both their manners, and the subject is a degrading fascination and the nemesis sure” (Le Fanu 1993, 21). It is not difficult to see in the Reverend Mr Jennings an embodiment of the Anglo-Irish élite. He is described in a rather positive light as “tall and thin […] middle-aged, and dresses with a natty, old-fashioned, high-­ church precision. He is naturally a little stately, but not at all stiff” (Le Fanu 1993, 6). It is precisely the overt reference to “high-church precision” (Le Fanu 1993, 6) which connects Jennings to the Anglo-Irish. Robert Tracy (1993) unveils that this comment refers, indeed, to “a clergyman committed to maintaining the Church of England in all its privileges” (320), thus resembling Anglo-Irish wishes for the Church of Ireland and for themselves. However, it also unveils J.S. Le Fanu’s caste’s fears of miscegenation, the idea that the Irish Catholics were “disease-carriers, the pollutants of the modern city” (Gibbons 2004, 43) as epitomised by Jennings, who seems to have lost his sanity via contagion with “pagan” forces. But, in fact, the story unveils that Anglo-Irish contagion fears— epitomised in the story by Jennings’ malady—are the sole product of their

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hidden guilt over colonial occupation, represented by Jennings’ inner monster. The monkey is an ape-reflection of his animal nature, a reversed-­ mirror image on which Jennings sees himself. The monkey is, therefore, the sole product of his self in his fight against the other in a colonial order in which “identity […] is always already its own dark double” (Hansen 2009, 11). If Jennings is calmed, intellectual and affable, the monkey is aggressive, vindictive, and vicious, “always urging me to crimes, to injure others, or myself” (Le Fanu 1993, 32). It is, however, Kenlis which is more relevant to Jennings’ story and its connection with J.S. Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irish élite. In fact, Kenlis is where he both preaches and has his habitual residence, and—most importantly— it is there where the monkey monster manifests itself. The relevance of the church is paramount for although this is not described in detail, it is where the uncanny interferes with ordinary life most manifestly, When I entered the discharge of my duties, another change took place. The thing exhibited an atrocious determination to thwart me. It was with me in the church—in the reading-desk—in the pulpit—within the communion rails. At last, it reached an extremity that while I was reading to the congregation, it would spring upon the open book and squat there, so that I was unable to see the page. (Le Fanu 1993, 29)

J.S.  Le Fanu introduces his readers to a monstrous other which is incompatible with intellectual agency. It represents and exposes the animal nature hidden in Jennings—and in the Anglo-Irish by extension—unveiling the brutality exerted in the colonial quest. As such, it is a savage being, characterised as “atrocious,” while the verb which describes his actions (“thwart”) connotes irreflexive brutality. Verbs reflecting animal movement are—most tellingly—used when Jennings intends to exert his intellectual abilities, literally and metaphorically impeding him to “see the page” (Le Fanu 1993, 29), that is, to perform any intellectual actions. This is not randomly chosen, for Jennings cannot accomplish his main duty as a clergyman: preaching to his parish. The whole community is thus affected by Jennings’ inability, which stems from the misdeeds of Anglo-­ Irish colonial past. J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative, therefore, criticises one of the tenets of the Anglo-Irish élite—the Church of Ireland—which had profited from the taxation Irish Catholics had been subjected to (Jackson 2010, 40).

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In fact, the monstrous other is dependent on the church and its environment, for when Jennings absents himself from Kenlis, the monkey disappears only to return when Jennings is back. There are three instances of this; the first one takes place when he is residing in London, on Blank Street (his spiritual refuge); the second one, when he unsuccessfully receives treatment by Dr Harley, and the last one, when he goes to spend some time with his family in Richmond. Kenlis is, then, the physical place where the religious fails to usher familial comfort. The choice of such a name as the setting for the monster monkey is, indeed, telling. As Robert Tracy (1993) points out, “there is no English place so named, but Kenlis (Irish Cean-lis, head fort) is an old name for Kells in County Meath” (320). This ties in with the idea of the monkey as Jennings’ doppelgänger, which is only manifest when the reverend returns to the Irish Cean-lis. The monster is a manifestation of Jennings’ colonial nature and, at the same time, proof of the failure of the colonial quest. The Gaelic Cean-lis, now anglicised and—quite literally—displaced, is still a source of discomfort for colonial society as it forces a new appraisal of colonial misdeeds, “even if they are sometimes recognisable to us as specific places, or evoke landscapes that we can connect to […] they are also often alien and unrecognisable” (Parsons 2013, 85). Colonialism has failed not only because it has not managed to dominate the colonised other but because it has been itself corrupted by the colonial enterprise to the extent that a reverend is incapable of bringing religious comfort to his own community, thus destabilising the bases of colonial society. This disruption, however, is deeper than it may at first seem, unveiling “Anglo-Irish Unionist Gothic’s obsessive guilt-ridden ruminations on landlordism, its troubled representations of class, sectarian, and—eventually—racial difference, and its compulsive dread of the claustral” (Hansen 2009, 28). There is an uneasy toing and froing in Jennings’ behaviour, a certain feeling of being eternally looking for home and not finding it so that “we might ask, does a conqueror discover ‘home’? Does he do it, for example, by naming the land he finds?” (Punter 2000, 92). J.S. Le Fanu’s narrative seems to highlight the idea of the Anglo-Irish as a caste for whom Ireland is a “place to feel at home [and] a foreign place” (Punter 2000, 82) for although the monster monkey is at his most atrocious when in the church, it is in Jennings’ home that the reverend finally meets his destiny. Just as in “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853) and “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1870), “”Green Tea” (1872) conveys the idea of the house as unreliable and frail: “its function as a barrier,

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its separation of outside from inside” has failed before “its invasion by alien forces, [revealing] its fragility under attack” (Milbank 1988, 315). It is thus that Jennings accepts his destiny amid the disquieting feeling of being simultaneously home and not home, I opened the door a little. The candles were both out, which was not usual. I had a bedroom candle, and I let the light in, a little bit, looking softly round. I saw him sitting in that chair beside the dressing-table with his clothes on again. He turned round and looked at me. I thought it strange that he should get up and dress, and put out the candles to sit in the dark, that way. (Le Fanu 1993, 36)

Conclusion Although J.S. Le Fanu effected a change of physical settings, from Ireland to a narrative English scenario, a consideration and analysis of his narratives unveils that, in fact, the writer kept dealing with problems back home. In his In a Glass Darkly stories, J.S. Le Fanu focuses on themes and topics which he had already touched upon in earlier narratives, as set in the example of “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853). The profuse usage of indoor settings transmits a sense of enclosure and isolation, of a claustrophobic decay, which debases the house from any family comforts. As happened with the rural manor houses of the Anglo-Irish, the urban house is proven to be a no-home area. Despite their possession of the land, epitomised in the house, ownership is never fully materialised. The Anglo-Irish colonial past haunts these dwellings, rendering them uninhabitable and annulling the effects of illegitimate possession. Used as a decolonising tool, J.S. Le Fanu’s dwellings reverse nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation, as seen in “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1853). Contagion, in the form of denaturalised family relationships or uncanny monsters, stems from the guilty Anglo-Irish past encoded in their residences. As epitomised in “Green Tea” (1872) by Jennings’ descent into madness and ultimate death, the unatoned guilty past ultimately filters into the rest of society. Setting, then, works as a vindictive tool, dismantling the idea of the colonial family and overturning the fears of miscegenation which had troubled J.S. Le Fanu’s caste. It is, indeed, the Anglo-Irish élite and their unredressed colonial complicity which causes degradation and an alteration of the pillars of civilised society.

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A locked, confined space, the house continually re-enacts the past, actualising it into the present. Urban dwellings act as elements that parallel and reproduce Anglo-Irish stasis as their efforts to redeem their guilty past are curtailed by their descendants, condemning them to become spirits and roam their manors in search for a relief that is never to come. As an embodiment of the Anglo-Irish themselves, the house deforms its natural surroundings, which far from offering any luscious and reviving atmosphere, oppress the colonial invader’s mind. In a mockery of the Anglo-­ Irish split identity, urban dwellings—now displaced to English locations—reproduce their internal fight between a colonial, brutal side and their intellectual, educated settler pose. In the end, this internal struggle is unresolved. The secrets of the past are encapsulated in the Anglo-­ Irish dwelling, be it rural or urban, reproducing a pattern of encasement and leaving the ghost of the past to roam at large, their wainscoted walls a permanent rehearsal of their guilty colonial deeds.

References Alexander, Neal. 2010. Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Boehmer, Elleke. 2005. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davison, Carol Margaret. 2009. Monstrous Regiments of Women and Brides of Frankenstein: Gendered Body Politics in Scottish Female Gothic Fiction. In The Female Gothic: New Directions, ed. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith, 196–214. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Flannery, Eóin. 2009. Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, Roy. 1995. Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. London: Penguin. Gair, C. 1997. The Disappearing Other: Exoticism and Destruction in Jack London’s South Sea Writings. In Writing and Race, ed. Tim Young, 244–266. London and New York: Longman. Gibbons, Luke. 2004. Gaelic Gothic. Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture. Galway: Arlen House. Grubgeld, Elizabeth. 1989. Topography, Memory, and John Montague’s ‘The Rough Field.’ The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 14 (2): 25–36. Gunning, Dave. 2013. Postcolonial Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Hansen, Jim. 2009. Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hopkins, Lisa. 2007. Bram Stoker A Literary Life. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Isomaa, S., P. Lyytikäinen, and K. Saarikangas. 2013. Imagining Spaces and Places. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Jackson, Alvin. 2010. Ireland 1798–1998: War, Peace and Beyond. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness Ghosts from Elsewhere. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Kiberd, Declan. 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage. Killeen, Jarlath. 2014a. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2014b. Muscling Up: Bram Stoker and Irish Masculinity in The Snake’s Pass. In Irish Gothics Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, ed. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, 168–187. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. 1993. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1994. Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Long Hoeveler, Diane. 2014. The Irish Protestant Imaginary: The Cultural Contexts for the Gothic Chapbooks Published by Bennett Dugdale, 1800–5. In Irish Gothics Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, ed. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, 34–57. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Maurer, Sara L. 2012. The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain and Ireland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McCormack, W.J. 1980. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Dublin: The Lilliput Press. Milbank, Alison. 1988. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in the Fiction of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sheridan Le Fanu. Lancaster: University of Lancaster. Morin, Christina. 2014. Theorizing ‘Gothic’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. In Irish Gothics Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, ed. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, 13–33. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Morin, Christina, and Niall Gillespie. 2014. Introduction: De-Limiting the Irish Gothic. In Irish Gothics Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, ed. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, 1–12. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Parsons, Cóilín. 2013. The Turd in the Rath: Antiquarians, the Ordnance Survey, and Beckett’s Irish Landscapes. Journal of Beckett Studies 22 (1): 83–107. Punter, David. 2000. Postcolonial Imaginings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Sage, Victor. 2004. Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Sturgeon, Sinéad. 2020. East-Central Europe in the Writing of James Clarence Mangan. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 12 (1): 10–26. Tracy, Robert. 1993. Introduction. In In a Glass Darkly, ed. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, i–xxxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place:The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wright, Julia M. 2014. Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Adverse Landscapes, Unwelcoming Homes: (Un)Heroic Colonial Journeys in Bram Stoker’s Short Fictions

Following J.C. Mangan and J.S. Le Fanu’s fictional patterns, Bram Stoker’s short fiction also displays signs of a conspicuous alienation. Except for “The Gombeen Man” (1889) and “The Man from Shorrox” (1894), all his short narratives take place outside Ireland. Indeed, his fiction can be pronounced not only to be displaced (Hopkins 2010) but in transit. Bram Stoker’s usage of dislocated narratives facilitates the criticism of the colonial enterprise in Ireland by rendering everyday scenarios as alien and unrecognisable (Parsons 2013, 85). This exchange of settings and characters acts as an efficient conveyor of colonial identification (Cleary 2001, 136), which yields a narrative criticism of the colonial enterprise. Many of his stories deal with the concepts of returning home, exile, or the adventurous invader, taking advantage of the British public “voracious appetite for missionary and explorer travelogues and adventure romances” (Boehmer 2005, 30). An example of this fiction in transit would be Snowbound (1908), a collection of short stories whose common link is to be told by the passengers of a train whose progress has been arrested by a massive snowstorm. As the journey has physically come to a halt and with nothing better to pass the time, each passenger is compelled to tell a story to make the waiting more amenable.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_7

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The idea of travelling—or, indeed, of not travelling at all—is the underlying leitmotif in the collection. Paradoxically, while the narrative progresses, the characters are stuck in time, thus paralleling the impossibility of advancement of the colonial enterprise and questioning “Western discourses of rationality and human progress” (Gunning 2013, 177). At the heart of Bram Stoker’s short fiction there is a questioning of colonial progress, displayed in the degrading of home. Natural spaces, once romanticised, lose their idyllic qualities to acquire characteristics representative of suppressed violence, conflict, usurpation and possession (Innes 2007, 9; Flannery 2009, 84; Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 101) reminiscent of colonial occupation. Fractured by colonial ambition and alienated by colonial agency, the home becomes a place to which it is impossible to return, proving that “colonial characters and developments had the power to threaten the security of society at home” (Boehmer 2005, 27). The concept of returning home is present in many of the Bram Stoker’s stories but it is, perhaps, in “The Coming Home of Abel Behenna” (1893) where it acquires all its representative force. Boehmer’s (2005) concept of the travelling metaphor proves an essential tool for interpretation here. Central to the construction of the Empire, the travelling metaphor (or the transferability of empire’s organising metaphors) became a device by which “colonial territories came to be interpreted, as it were, as a series of reflecting mirrors, which repeated, reinforced, and, at times, reversed (though within the same symbolic system) cultural significations emanating from England and Europe” (Boehmer 2005, 49-50). Boehmer (2005)’s travelling metaphor entails the notion of the transfer of richness from the periphery to the metropolis. This exchange of goods implied that a man—or at least a white man—could travel to the colonies, participate in the “transoceanic commercial networks and imperial conquests” (Festa and Carey 2009, 32), and then return home to enjoy his share in the profits of the empire. However, as an analysis of Bram Stoker’s stories shows, under colonial conditions, home is not a source of peace and quiet; rather, the colonial enterprise transforms it into a source of discomfort “with local communities bearing the brunt of these decisions” (Brownell and Falola 2012a, 2012b, 13). Boehmer (2005)’s contention of the travelling metaphor also ushers in a figure which has already been considered in J.C. Mangan’s writings: the exile or émigré, and which emerges as a constant in Irish Gothic short fiction. Building on this, Bram Stoker’s stories further explore this figure, embodied in his narratives by the colonial adventurer. Although exile can

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be read in many terms and can be prompted by various circumstances, the condition always implies displacement, a sense of not belonging, as “to be an exile […] is, by definition, not to belong to the nation” (McCullough 2011, 805). In this sense, many of Bram Stoker’s protagonists are middle or upper-class characters who, for some reason or other, find themselves displaced. Such portrayals may reflect the writer’s own displaced life. As of 1878, Bram Stoker had changed Dublin for London, while he himself estimated that “between 1883 and 1904, he spent more than four years in the USA on eight theatrical tours with the Lyceum” (Murray 2004, 104). This figure, nonetheless, is reminiscent of a crucial event which permeates Irish history. The end of Gaelic order meant by the flight of the earls and the figure of the absentee landlord are just two instances of this imprint which translates into a feeling of void in power, allegorically represented in the transformation of the House of Parliament in College Green into the Bank of Ireland. In fact, Dracula (1897) has been read as a criticism on the Anglo-Irish absentee landlord (Murray 2004, 197). At its best, the exile or émigré can be read as a self-imposed condition. Curiosity to explore foreign lands, to become an adventurer or even to bring civilisation to unchartered lands, prompts a character’s displacement abroad. This character, however, soon finds himself alienated from his own community and in a foreign—often unwelcoming—environment, re-­ enacting the Irish Gothic trope of “topographies […] haunted by the disinherited revenants of colonial misappropriation” (Flannery 2013, 92). The character’s exploration of the Gothic world thus relives “a history of […] colonization which the protagonist seeks to escape” (Innes 2007, 61). At its worst, this émigré is an invader in disguise, a colonialist who wishes to impose his views on foreign lands “by enforcing a Eurocentric view of spatiality, and naming, or renaming, existing places as a demonstration of power” (Ashcroft 2001, 133). Both figures are, however, representations of the colonial quest, of the desire to “see one place in terms of another” (Boehmer 2005, 55). Building on these concepts, the following chapter considers the figure of the colonial adventurer in his quest for adventure and riches, and his subsequent return home in two of Bram Stoker’s short narratives, “The Coming Home of Abel Behenna” (1893) and “Dracula’s Guest” (1914). By analysing how setting is presented through narrative and stylistic techniques, this chapter addresses Bram Stoker’s concerns with the underlying reasons for the colonial quest, economic and otherwise. It also considers the writer’s abrogation of the figure of the colonial explorer and his relationship with landscape. The

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analysis of these narratives unveils the economic reasons behind the colonial enterprise and its destructive effects on the local community. Further, it also reveals how Bram Stoker dismantles colonial perceptions of colonised spaces by undoing the colonial adventurer’s assessment of so-called unchartered territory, thus demystifying the romanticised figure of the British colonial adventurer.

No Return Home: Nature as an Anticolonial Element “The Coming of Abel Behenna” (1893) narrates the story of the eponymous protagonist, his friend, Eric Sanson, and their childhood companion (and pretending lover), Sarah Trefusis. Unable to decide between either as her betrothed and encouraged by her mother, Sarah has them toss a coin, “the man who wins takes all the money that we both have got, brings it to Bristol and ships on a voyage and trades with it. Then he comes back and marries Sarah, and the two keep all” (Stoker 2006, 80). To add more suspense to the narrative, she allows the winner the timespan of a year to accomplish this feat. Fortune has Abel as the winner and so he sets off on his journey. As the due date for Abel to return approaches, and having heard no news of his whereabouts, Eric begins to feel hopeful about marrying Sarah. However, on the appointed day for Abel’s return, a great storm breaks out, leaving “a tale of disaster everywhere” (Stoker 2006, 84). Sailing from Bristol to Penzance, the Lovely Alice is trapped in this storm and soon shipwrecked. In a display of manhood, Eric runs for the cliffs to help those who may have survived the devastation. Having seen a man falling into a recess, Eric risks his life to save him only to discover the man is none other than Abel, On the instant a wave of passion swept through Eric’s heart. All his hopes were shattered, and with the hatred of Cain his eyes looked out. He saw in the instant of recognition the joy in Abel’s face that his was the hand to succour him, and this intensified his hate. Whilst the passion was on him he started back, and the rope ran out between his hands. (Stoker 2006, 87)

Burdened with guilt, Eric becomes a troubled man while simultaneously the townsfolk commence to tell bizarre stories about a monster roaming the very same location where Abel had died. On the day of Eric

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and Sarah’s wedding, however, the corpse of Abel Behenna appears near the coast, and, consequently, both Eric and Sarah go insane, “whenever she tried to recollect there would come a buzzing in her ears and a dimness in her eyes, and all would pass away” (Stoker 2006, 92). This brief recount suffices to show the story’s possible allegorical interpretation as a denunciation of the colonial quest, revealing it to be a question “of ownership, and rights to the resources of the land” (Innes 2007, 123) more than a supposed quest for glory or a civilising mission. There is an added—and equally relevant—reading, however; the underlying idea that the imperial quest, be it for money or glory, disrupts familial contentment or any idea of the home or the community. To portray this shattering of the community, this destruction of friendship and love, Bram Stoker deploys the same setting in two different instances. This parallelism illustrates the alteration the colonial quest can cause back home, expressive of “dehumanisation under colonisation with a corresponding dehumanising of the colonisers, which offers a carte blanche for inflicting excessive violence in return” (Gunning 2013, 132). “The Coming Home of Abel Behenna” (1893) presents a curious displacement scenario. Bram Stoker had chosen “the little Cornish port of Pencastle” (Stoker 2006, 74) as the setting for his fiction while on summer holidays in Cornwall (Murray 2004, 153), becoming fascinated by the small fishing village he had discovered by chance while on a walking excursion. However, Cornwall, being one of the Celtic remnants on British soil, still poses an interesting setting in postcolonial terms. This Cornish location offers a different viewpoint from which to understand displacement, “calling into question the presumption of a natural tie between a sovereign state and its subjects” (McCullough 2011, 805). In a way, it is a more suitable choice than other, perhaps more “English,” locations as it facilitates a ready comparison with Ireland, with which it shares its Celtic heritage. Cornwall can, thus, reproduce Ireland’s status as “a bulwark of the Empire, and a mine within its walls” (Jackson 2004, 123). Similar readings of Bram Stoker’s displaced locations have been performed with settings less conspicuous of comparison (Hopkins 2007) rendering similar interpretations. This has led Hopkins (2010) to suggest a heterotopic reading of space in Bram Stoker’s fiction (390), an argument which is sustained in the present chapter. Familial tranquillity is portrayed via landscape depiction. Indeed, the opening paragraph conveys pastoral ideas of the rural world,

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Pencastle was bright in the early April, when the sun had seemingly come to stay after a long and bitter winter. Boldly and blackly the rock stood out against a background of shaded blue, where the sky fading into mist met far the horizon. (Stoker 2006, 74).

The natural image of the sun coming to stay after a cold winter transmits peace and quiet, especially considering how the narrative emphasises the severity of winter by qualifying it as “long and harsh.” However, this pseudo-pastoral image is deceiving, as the narrative foreshadows the rashness of landscape. In fact, the story is an abrogation of traditional ideas of the pastoral genre, which has been deployed to convey sublimated bourgeois ideologies (Patterson 1987; Williams 1973). Bram Stoker, however, uses these depictions in a reversed form, to unveil how idyllic pastoral depictions, corrupted by the colonial enterprise, reveal “a spectral form, always aware of the suppressed violence that helped make its peaceful visions possible, and always engaged with the very histories from which it appears to want to escape” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 101). Indeed, there are two elements which shatter this sense of tranquillity. The first is the usage of the adverb “seemingly,” implying deception, and dismantling the emphasis of the affirmative sentence. The second is the emphasis laid on the rock, conducted via the hyperbatonic “boldly and blackly” and suggestive of how the narrative will unfold. Nature is, in fact, presented as a defensive structure, welcoming but menacing at the same time, a reminder that “frontiers and borderlands that are coloured by conflict, occupation, usurpation and oppression” (Flannery 2009, 84) and thus “the sea […] of true Cornish hue – sapphire, save where it became deep emerald green in the fathomless depths under the cliffs, where the seal caves opened their grim jaws” (Stoker 2006, 74). The sea, first described in positive terms as “sapphire,” becomes unpredictable; in combination with land elements, it reinforces the idea that nature should not be “romanticized [as it can be] deceptive and hostile” (Innes 2007, 79). Nature is almost zoomorphed, as the land acquires animal qualities via the seals which inhabit its caves, projecting a “grim” end for those too daring. This description, which empowers nature and aligns it with supernatural agency, acts as a foreshadowing element, as the cave will play a vital role in the dénouement of the story. Precisely because of its essential role in the story and due to its uncanny qualities, it acts as a liminal third space (Gladwin 2016), a “protean space, it conjures up the

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contradicting motifs of stasis, collapse, decomposition and preservation of the dying body” (Galiné 2018, 76). However, to better convey nature’s reaction to and rejection of the colonial enterprise, the narrative first portrays the seemingly uncorrupted community. Unspoilt and undegraded by colonial ambitions to possess foreign lands, the community is depicted as an Edenic haven, a homeland representation offering “lost spiritual traditions set in an unspoilt pastoral past” (Boehmer 2005, 112). The narrative, thus, appropriates pastoral concepts which legitimate the “codified relations between socially differentiated people  – relations mediated, but also mystified, by supposedly universal cultural attitudes to land” (Huggan and Tiffins 2015, 20). Landscape is, therefore, portrayed in a positive light, as a welcoming, protective element, giving shelter for those who inhabit it, “higher up, the stream still flowed deeply, for the tide ran fan inland, but always calmly, for all the force of the wildest storm was broken below” (Stoker 2006, 75). Nature is shown as a resilient element, strong and deeply rooted; protective, but not menacing; it is, therefore, part of the social machinery which supports social relations, emulating precolonial communities. In line with this pastoral portrayal of nature, human structures—a metonym for their inhabitants—are depicted as a harmonious element, non-­ invasive and part of the landscape, At either side of the river was a row of cottages, strongly and snugly built, with trim narrow gardens in front, roses, wallflowers, and stonecrop. Over the fronts of many of them climbed clematis and wisteria. The window sides and door posts of all were as white as snow, and the little pathway to each was paved with light coloured stones. At some of the doors were tiny porches, whilst at others were rustic seats cut from tree trunks or from old barrels; in nearly every case the window ledges were filled with boxes or pots of flowers or foliage plants. (Stoker 2006, 75)

In a resemblance to the landscape which surrounds them, or rather, of which they are a part, cottages share in the landscape’s properties. Reminiscent of the Irish cottage, these rural houses “point to connections across the waters. […] The autochthonous western house went with the Irish in ancient times to Scotland and Wales” (Glassie 2014, 42). They are strong but homely, while the multiple references to natural elements used as decoration, along with the adjectival patterns followed to create a sense of endearment (“little pathway,” “light coloured stones,” “tiny porches”)

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transmit the reader an overall bucolic atmosphere, an idea of a simpler but fuller life, almost recreating the Garden of Eden. Bram Stoker’s creation of such bucolic images pre-empts his future deployment of natural images. It caters for the colonial connection with Ireland but it also ushers in the sense of the Gothic attached to physical constructions (Punter 2012, 14) and the fear of the loss of home prototypical of Irish Gothic (Shanahan 2014, 82). The narrative technique is evident—the clearer the initial pastoral picture is, the more impactful the feeling of destruction of the community will be. It is in this context that the love triangle between Abel, Eric and Sarah is introduced. In fact, this relationship is first portrayed in a good light, in line with the bucolic, precolonial scenery. Thus, Abel and Eric are presented almost as brothers, “companions and rivals form their boyhood […]. These two seemed to have singled out each other […] to work and strive together” (Stoker 2006, 75). On the other hand, Sarah is characterised both as the pinnacle of beauty, “certainly the prettiest girl in Pencastle” (Stoker 2006, 75), and as the nexus between the two friends “the coping-­ stone in their Temple of Unity” (Stoker 2006, 75). As an extension of the narrative depiction of landscape, this relationship is conveyed in equivalent bucolic terms, “the two men and the woman found themselves thrown much together. They were all satisfied, so it did not matter” (Stoker 2006, 76). A Paradise regained, this idyllic portrayal of life in pseudo-Edenic terms forms part of Bram Stoker’s decolonising narrative technique and owes much to “episodes in the greater narrative of journeying: the idyllic childhood and the dawn of selfconsciousness” (Boehmer 2005, 191). It conforms the literary antechamber of “the time following, of severance and departure, and the loss of roots, home, or motherland” (Boehmer 2005, 191). This harmonious, precolonial bound is broken by what precisely best characterises colonial ambition, an economic drive which typifies “European practices in pursuing avid colonial expansion” (Carey and Trakulhun 2009, 256). When the time has come for Sarah “to make the choice between the two men” (Stoker 2006, 76), the references the narrative voice gives are economic in nature. Consequently, Sarah’s discourse is almost a faithful resemblance of a mere economic transaction, “her mind was so constituted that she thought more of what she might lose than of what she might gain” (Stoker 2006, 76). The plot is given an extra twist which further debases colonial ideas of the civilising mission. Given Sarah’s inability to choose between her two childhood friends, her mother

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interferes and manages to convince both Abel and Eric to “toss up for her […]. First put your money together – ye’ve each got a bit put by, I know. Let the lucky man take the lot and trade with it a bit, and then come home and marry her” (Stoker 2006, 78). Thus, in an unanticipated plot twist, the narrative reveals the colonial enterprise as economically driven. Further still, the colonial enterprise permeates and corrupts the local community in all its manifestations, from friendship to family relations. Thus, the motherly figure is transformed into a greedy, manipulative character who sends Sarah “up the hill-side, and when ye come back I’ll have it fixed – I see a way quite easy!” (Stoker 2006, 77). In a similar fashion, the narrative unveils that there is no love to be expected as it can be reduced to a mere economic transaction. When Sarah returns from her wandering and finds out the deal her mother has proposed her two childhood friends, she shows “no indignation whatever at the proposition” (Stoker 2006, 79). The tossing up of a coin has Abel as a winner of the bet, and so he is to sail the world for a year with both his and Eric’s money and marry Sarah on his return. Corrupted by the colonial quest and colonial promises of riches in foreign lands, Abel becomes the embodiment of the colonial hero in his quest for fame and glory, and—most importantly—riches. Abel Behenna’s going on a journey to obtain riches to satisfy the “love” of Sarah can be interpreted as a thwarted mirror image of Britain sending her children on the colonial mission. Bram Stoker’s narrative, therefore, emulates how “patriotic citizens and colonial subjects were exhorted to fight for ‘Mother England’” (Innes 2007, 138), under the promise that, on their return to the motherland, they could expect the female faithfully and patiently waiting “as the reward for a job well done, or to cap a triumphant return” (Boehmer 2005, 73). This image is, however, quite reversed in Bram Stoker’s story, as there is no real home to return to, no real love awaiting the hero, and no childhood friend to partake in the merriment of communal society. The price paid for the fulfilment of the imperial dream is the disintegration of the precolonial community, which, in narrative terms, is conveyed via the disappearance of images associated with a bucolic landscape. Imagery and landscape depictions transform accordingly, portraying the effects of the colonial enterprise “with local communities bearing the brunt of these decisions” (Brownell and Falola 2012a, 2012b, 13). Consequently, the narrative portrays landscape as a defensive element against foreign interventions and colonisation. When the due date for Abel’s return approaches, Sarah overhears “an old fisherman say to the

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coastguard, ‘I seen it just like this once before, when the East Indiaman Coromandel went to pieces in Dizzard Bay!’” (Stoker 2006, 85). The reference to the East India Company, a representative of the British empire overseas, both unveils the commercial nature of the imperial quest and links it to the character of Abel. However, having been corrupted by colonial interferences, Abel is transformed into a colonising agent. As a result, his once native land resists his return, rendering his coming home impossible. Parallelisms with Ireland are evident. The deployment of Cornwall, a Celtic place under English control, as the narrative location facilitates the comparison with the Irish colonial situation. Despite his colonial condition, Abel also comes to embody the figure of the colonial invader, and thus his actions become reminiscent of the Irish complicit participation in the British imperial quest. Read this way, the narrative is suggestive of what John Breuilly (1994) has termed “collaborator systems,” or systems involving the co-operation of privileged élites within the colonised community to run its administrative units (183). As these narrative parallelisms attest, Bram Stoker was conscious that in Ireland “imperial rule depended in the nineteenth century on the co-operation of an élite comprised mainly of Anglo-Irish Protestants” (Cleary 2001, 25). Further still, the story dismantles the whole idea of the coloniser’s journey back home, what Boehmer (2005) has termed the “overarching metanarrative of journeying and return” (190). As the narrative analysis underscores, there is no welcoming home awaiting, as—transformed by colonial agency—home has become a no-home. Abel does manage to return just in time to marry Sarah, but his arrival is far from welcoming, as a storm had broken out, and the “sea rose and lashed the western coast from Skye to Scilly and left a tale of disaster everywhere” (Stoker 2006, 85). Having abandoned his motherland to join the colonial quest, Abel has become alienated and is, thus, rejected by the same land he deserted in the first place. The ferocity of the elements against his arrival, which threatens his life and impedes his return, acts as an indication that he is no longer home, but “in a kind of liminal inbetweenness” (Killeen 2014, 181), thus epitomising his being and not being coloniser and colonised at the same time. Fulfilling the old fisherman’s prophecy, the Lovely Alice—on board which Abel is—, rushed to her doom on the great island rock that guarded the mouth of the port. The screams of those on board were fairly borne on the

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tempest as they flung themselves into the sea in a last chance for life. (Stoker 2006, 86)

Far from being a source of comfort and relief, his native land has become a source of destruction, revealing how “the darker side of nature and in its negativity becomes a source of potential terror” (Khair 2009, 46). The rock “guards” home against colonial invasion, now embodied in Abel’s returning character. Abel epitomises the colonial hero on his return home, who having been altered by the colonial enterprise, is not recognised as a member of the local community any longer. Being both colonised and coloniser, and, therefore, neither one nor the other, he is rejected by the motherland. This mistreatment and rejection of the colonial hero exposes the fallacy of “the colonial hero ideal––the assumption that the British hero is great because British, because ‘one of us’” (Boehmer 2005, 62). Contrary to all probability, however, Abel does survive the maelstrom and manages to drift into the seal cave; he is, however, left in desperate need of help. The story is, then, rounded up for Eric succours Abel without really knowing it is him; in fact, it is when his identity is revealed that the final test of friendship is unveiled, “Eric Sanson and Abel Behenna were face to face – and none knew of the meeting save themselves; and God” (Stoker 2006, 87). Based on the idea of camaraderie, colonialist writings were “full of scenes not merely of male bonding but of solidarity between men” (Boehmer 2005, 74). The narrative, however, undermines the concept of colonial camaraderie, rendering it inexistent. Based on economic bounds, colonial interventions condition all human interactions. Abel and Eric’s idyllic childhood friendship is forever lost; it had, in fact, eroded the moment they both agreed to the proposal, consequently, signing themselves up for the colonial quest. The narrative attests to the corrupting nature of the colonial mission. The day Abel set sail, he found Erick’s money at his door and “on a small slip of paper pinned to it was written: ‘Take the money and go. I stay. God for you! The Devil for me! […] – Eric Sanson’” (Stoker 2006, 82). Angered at Abel’s return and, therefore, having lost both his money and Sarah’s hand, Eric, “whilst the passion was on him he started back, and the rope ran out between his hands” (Stoker 1996, 87). The impact of the scene, which clearly portrays the devastating effects colonial agency in social terms, is made more critical for the reader by a narrative interference as the narrator recounts how “Abel Behenna saved [Eric] there on a night

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like this when my boat went on the Gull Rock” (Stoker 2006, 86). This parallelism with a comparable situation prior to colonial interferences strengthens the perception of the colonial quest as a destructive force. At the core of “The Coming Home of Abel Behenna” (1893) there is a demystification and dismantling of the idea of the colonial quest. The story demonstrates that behind ideas of the civilising mission—an “enterprise [which] would secure the happiness, prosperity, and salvation” (Boehmer 2005, 35) for those concerned—lies a purely economic idea, a craving for profit disguised under the appearance of civility. As Boehmer (2005) states, “the Victorians had a genius for fashioning moral ideals which matched their economic needs: they stapled duty on to interest, Christianity on to profit” (35). Complicity in the colonial quest only causes the alienation of those colonised subjects partaking in it. Despite the economic profit which may be derived from this complicity, the destructive implications for the homeland and the local community are unquestionable. Irish participation in the British empire, displaced to Cornwall, is brought under narrative scrutiny to expose the dangers of colonial complicity for the Irish nation, reinforcing Hopkins’ (2010) assessment that “ultimately, everywhere of which [Bram Stoker] writes both is, and is not, Ireland” (390).

Disowning the Colonial Hero “Dracula’s Guest” (1914), the story which introduces the eponymous collection, is a good example of Bram Stoker’s narrative appropriation of the émigré, or the adventurous colonial explorer. Before dealing with the story itself, however, some consideration as to its inception needs to be given. Although the publication date given here is that of 1914, Routledge had actually published the story one year earlier, in December 1913, along with another unpublished Stoker story (Murray 2004, 272). The manuscript, however, dates back to an earlier time, having only been found after Bram Stoker’s death by a former administrative and presented as a deleted introductory chapter to Dracula (1897). Much controversy has been generated by the place this story occupies in relation to the genesis of the novel, which Murray (2004) summarises thus, “none of the competing theories can be definitely proved or disproved” (170). Despite this, it is safe to assume that its composition date must have been prior to Dracula’s publication in 1897, which would classify the story, therefore, as a fin-de-­ siècle conception. It is as such that it is considered in this chapter.

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“Dracula’s Guest” (1914) narrates the adventure of an English traveller while visiting Munich. While on a drive with his German coachman, he discovers what seem to be the remnants of an abandoned village. His curiosity piqued, the Englishman decides—against the better advice of the coachman—to explore alone the now deserted ruins. The German guide warns him against such an exploration and on such a night, for it turns out, it is Walpurgis Night. Despite this warning, the narrator goes on his exploration only to be caught in the middle of a great snowstorm. To shelter himself from the oncoming storm, he finds refuge in a tomb “where the suicide lay” (Stoker 2006, 12) and thus trespasses on the Gothic world of the uncanny, which leaves him face to face with the undead, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. (Stoker 2006, 12)

Being left out in the storm, he passes out, only to come round to a feeling that “some great animal was lying on me and now licking my throat” (Stoker 2006, 13). Despite the protagonist’s first apprehensions, it is the warmth of the wolf and its yelping which keeps him alive. Thanks to the wolf’s intervention, a search-party of soldiers can locate him and take him back to his hotel. On inquiring how they had discovered his location, the narrator finds out that it was thanks to a letter signed by Dracula, upon reading which, “the room seemed to whirl around me; and, if the attentive maître d’hotel had not caught me, I think I should have fallen” (Stoker 2006, 17). The first thing to notice in Bram Stoker’s story is the transposition of settings; an Englishman acting as a tourist in Germany finds some curious ruins. Attracted as much by the quaint landscape as by the uncanny story told by his German coachman, he decides to explore the area, unaided and solely armed with “my oak walking-stick” (Stoker 2006, 8). This apparently simple statement is, in fact, deceiving. The setting is Germany and the narrator a tourist, but we are still in the presence of the colonial order. Although there is a substitution, a transposition of both settings and characters, these function “as efficient conductors in the transfer of [colonial] identification” (Cleary 2001, 136). The underlying idea remains much the same—the deserted and abandoned village acts as a geographical “blank space or mystery” (Boehmer 2005, 28) prototypical of colonial

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observations while the German coachman performs the role of the colonised other, “less human, less civilized, as child or savage” (Boehmer 2005, 76). The coachman’s colonial status is exemplified in his imperfect usage of the English language. Thus, when they traverse an abandoned village, the Englishman enquires about it, obtaining a slightly broken and ungrammatical answer, “no, no. No one lives there hundreds of years” (Stoker 2006, 7). The German guide’s imperfect utterance exemplifies Bram Stoker’s geographical displacement in the story. Johan’s intelligible but misconstrued English together with his depiction as a colonial subject act as a reminiscence of Victorian portrayals of the Irish, whose “horrified revulsion [stems] from the degenerate Irish accent, [and] their (mis)use of the English language” (Wills 1991, 21). Keeping the story in European soil further facilitates the assimilation of an Irish setting to a displaced (but easily identifiable) location, thus rendering the familiar alien and unrecognisable (Parsons 2013, 85). It creates a sense of estrangement around the familiar, conveying the idea that colonisation can happen in Europe and not only in the far lands of the East. Despite this dislocation, the coloniser–colonised dichotomy is maintained all through the story. As the narrative progresses, the narrator asks the coachman to bring him down the path which leads to the deserted village. Seeing his reluctance, he exclaims, “Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.” For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me, and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something – the very idea of which evidently frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he crossed himself: “Walpurgis-Nacht!” (Stoker 2006, 6)

Johann is characterised as a credulous man whose superstitious beliefs lead him to act “childishly.” As an example of his childlike behaviour, he is afraid to be out in the dark on a night like Walpurgis, a feast of the powers of darkness; this superstitious behaviour triggers a reaction which epitomises colonial beliefs in racial superiority, “all my English blood rose at this, and, standing back, I said: ‘You are afraid, Johann – you are afraid. Go home; I shall return alone; the walk will do me good’” (Stoker 2006,

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8). What can be appreciated in this extract is an actualisation of the correlation coloniser vs. colonised; true—it is presented in a much milder form, but the tropes at work are much the same: the adventurous (British) coloniser opposed to the infantilised, superstitious colonised subject, linked to the sense of adventure in a foreign land. In addition, the narrator’s utterances bear a paternalistic undertone which reinforces the perception of the colonised other “at a less ‘advanced’ state of civilization” (O’Brien 2009, 282). The story highlights the difference in setting appraisal under colonial conditions. Johann finds himself in a familiar setting. This geographical location, alien for the narrator, is, however, imbued with “the interaction of language, history, visual perception, spatiality and environment in the experience of colonized peoples” (Ashcroft 2001, 125) for Johan, who appraises space through the sensorial perceptions of a native. His observation skills have deep roots in the history and traditions of the community because he is part of it, that is, he belongs. When Walpurgis Nacht is nigh, Johann reacts thus, “The storm of snow, he comes before long time.” Then he looked at his watch again, and, straightaway holding his reins firmly – for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads – he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey. (Stoker 2006, 7)

Johann is one with the horses and the natural elements; in his role of colonised subject, he is more sensitive than the narrator, manifesting a “symbiotic connection between human and environment [that] recognises no formal point of beginning” (Read 2000, 180–81) nor end. On the other hand, the English narrator/protagonist displays the prototypical colonial gaze as a “one-sided, objectifying […] scrutiny” (Khair 2009, 68). This implies that when the landscape and the elements are focalised through him, the narration tends to a seemingly neutral, merely descriptive account. In his role of colonising invader, the narrator is insensible and insensitive to the different cues pointing at supernatural agency. Such a divergence in spatial perception epitomises the alienation suffered by the figure of the colonial exile—disguised here as adventure. Defined by its “exclusionism either of the homeland or of the host country” (Zamorano 2016, 361), the colonial adventurer lacks a sense of rootedness. Therefore,

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his alienation from the geographical location drives him to ignore or misinterpret essential cues manifested in the landscape. Thus, when told that the deserted village is, in fact, a burial place for suicides, his reaction is one of analytic scrutiny, “‘ah, I see, a suicide. How interesting!’ But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened” (Stoker 2006, 6). This faithfully reproduces a parsing of space prototypical of colonialist literature, in which “the gaze appears as bird’s-eye description, and is embodied in the high vantage point or knowledgeable position taken up by a writer or traveller as he re-creates a scene” (Boehmer 2005, 68). This scrutinising, analytic perception is, however, proven inappropriate to understand the location he is perusing. This self-imposed misperception of landscape acts as a justification for his mapping of unchartered territory, “in perceiving (or rather, misperceiving) land to be untouched, primordial and unchanged, foreigners justify their interventions on that land” (Brownell and Falola 2012a, 2012b, 2). As soon as Johann leaves for Munich, the narrator proceeds in his solitary journey, With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason, that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a couple of hours without thinking of time or distance, and certainly without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned, it was desolation itself. But I did not notice this particularly till, on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood; then I recognized that I had been impressed unconsciously by the desolation of the region through which I had passed. (Stoker 2006, 8–9)

This is a turning point in the story, for the narrator has, indeed, trespassed the frontier of the uncanny. As he himself acknowledges, even though unconsciously, he is impressed by the desolation of the place. In fact, the deeper he gets into the uncanny, the stronger his feeling of powerlessness becomes. Nature all around him becomes aggressive, almost as if it perceived the presence of an intruder, as if “landscape […] is not only hostile and barren, but alien” (Innes 2007, 124), As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me

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was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and blew with increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icy-cold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. (Stoker 2006, 9–10)

The narrator/coloniser finds himself challenged by elements he cannot comprehend, perceived as an intruder by a setting which thus becomes an active agent in resisting colonisation, re-enacting the Irish Gothic trope of “topographies […] haunted by the disinherited revenants of colonial misappropriation” (Flannery 2013, 92). Therefore, the air is “a cold shiver” and the country is “bleak.” The ensuing description, emphasised by the hyperbaton and the adjectival repetition as well as by the usage of parallel structures, gives the prose a certain feeling of a tale narration. While it most certainly contributes to the uncanny atmosphere, it also portrays the estrangement of the colonial protagonist. The main character finds himself surrounded by a Gothic colonised space that resists invasion, and which had already been depicted as a place immersed in an obscure historical past, somehow drawing attention to the Irish “history of violent invasion and dispossession” (Morin 2018, 118). Hence, the natural world becomes wilder and more aggressive, with the protagonist literally sinking into it. In his colonising impulse and against his better judgement—“for a while I hesitated. I had said I would see the deserted village, so I went on” (Stoker 2006, 9)—, he decides to proceed in his adventure. Thus, he finds himself entrapped in the Gothic world, quite literally, for in his search for shelter against the storm, he breaks into a tomb. All his analytical skills defeated, the colonial protagonist acknowledges the fact that the supernatural has taken hold of him, “there was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice” (Stoker 2006, 11). What is more striking, however, is the narrator’s reaction to the changes which take place around him, Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad – when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of

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centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone – unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all the philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright. (Stoker 2006, 11–2)

The narrator/coloniser acknowledges having trespassed the frontier of the natural world and his presence before the uncanny. The repetition of three parallel structures (This was … This was … This was …) enumerating his previous disbeliefs precedes his confession of his mistake in doing so, thus emphasising the defeat of his analytical powers. He is, in his own words, “unmanned,” in a state of desolation, which is caused—as he himself admits—by the colonial Gothic setting he is in. His implicit acknowledgement that Johann was correct in his interpretation of space is also his acquiescence that the colonial gaze has failed. It constitutes the acceptance that colonial cartographies do not apply when reading the maps of colonised realities. Such a failure originates in a colonial conceptualisation of “Otherness as anything but a lack or a negativity: the Other is seen only in its potential as ‘limit and menace’, and hence a source of terror” (Khair 2009, 169). A mere analytic description does not suffice to understand the alien other, to take in space, As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realize the shock moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash, which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted that tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant-grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of the sheeted-dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail. (Stoker 2006, 12–3)

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Despite the overall analytic and descriptive tone, this extract conveys the narrator’s incredulity and astonishment, a shock “moral as well as physical.” The narrator’s usage of nuanced language signals his attempt to attenuate the effects of the uncanny, to somehow retain control of the world by encouraging of an oneiric reading. Thus, he is grasped “as by the hand of a giant,” the air “seemed reverberant,” and the moving phantoms are remembered as “vague,” “as if all the graves had sent [them] out.” Such language deployment is just a lessened expression of his disbelief, perhaps of his inner desire that it all might be an imaginary construction. His own confession of not feeling alone dispels such an interpretation. Overall, the passage also conveys the idea of the narrator’s estrangement. The colonial protagonist is an alien element whose presence deforms the environment. However, the realisation of colonial fears and presumptions of colonial lands “as mysterious, grotesque, or malign, and in general hostile to European understanding” (Boehmer 2005, 85) is explained via his degrading presence and not as an inherent quality of colonised landscapes. In a symbolic reversal of roles, the narrator/coloniser is physically rejected, pushed back, “grasped,” “hurled” and “dragged” by the same scenario he is attempting to dominate. He is otherised in the same aggressive terms colonial adventurers would use to dominate foreign lands and the peoples who populate them, redressing the imprint of imperialism on Irish landscape (Garrard 2012, 133). Remarkably enough, this rejection of the colonial invader is placed on a morally superior level. Contrary to colonial discourse, and despite Müller (2018)’s claims to the contrary (91), the narrator is not physically harmed nor is there any explicit or implicit intention to do so. In fact, much the opposite could be asserted since it is under the influence of the colonial other that he manages to survive the night. This conveys a positive reading of the other which reverses conceptions of the subaltern as “beasts, demonic, threatening and grotesque” (Gunning 2013, 116). Thus, when the soldiers find him, they exclaim in surprise, “And for him – is he safe? Look at his throat! See, comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm.” The officer looked at my throat and replied: “He is all right; the skin is not pierced. What does it all mean? We should never have found him but for the yelping of the wolf.” (Stoker 2006, 15)

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Milbank (1998) has interpreted Dracula’s control of wolf-hordes in Bram Stoker’s 1897 eponymous novel as a reminder of the “violence produced in Ireland by the ‘roofless villages’ of its devastated countryside” (15). Murray (2004)’s contentions on the origins of “Dracula’s Guest” (1914) enable the application of Milbank (1998)’s interpretation to the story. Certainly, the harshness of the landscape in “Dracula’s Guest” (1914) is evocative of the roofless villages in the post-Famine landscape. Most tellingly, this landscape, along with the uncanny figure of the wolf, allows the narrator to gain a real perspective of the consequences of the colonial enterprise in Ireland, accessing Galiné (2018)’s protean space, where the colonial past is conjured up. Overall, “Dracula’s Guest” (1914) can be read as a colonial adventure tale in reverse, in which the exploits of the adventuring hero took the shape of a quest, campaign, or rite of passage aimed at winning some final prize: victory against the natives, wealth, the achievement of identity, personal or national honour, and withal, status as a Briton and a man. (Boehmer 2005, 73)

Bram Stoker’s story, thus, proves the failure of the colonial quest by demystifying the figure of the colonial adventurer. Far from conveying “British manliness, an ideal of robust character combining Christian honour with patriotism” (Boehmer 2005, 74), the narrator is, in his own words, “unmanned,” his beliefs in the colonial enterprise as a modernising element challenged. Ultimately, “Dracula’s Guest” (1914) proves the impossibility of reading the other in the coloniser’s terms, of “enforcing a Eurocentric view of spatiality, and naming, or renaming, existing places as a demonstration of power” (Ashcroft 2001, 133). Despite having been conquered, colonised settings remain untenable, “representing an unassailable truth about history; they confront us with an extraordinary form of alien intrusion yet at the same time they signify […] a curious reversal of the gaze, a de- and re- provincializing” (Punter 2000, 86–7).

Conclusion Bram Stoker’s narratives depict a reactive nature, with landscapes which offer the comfort and security of the home, but which are then transformed into maelstroms, oppressive elements which literally and metaphorically destroy characters. However, this change is not random. As these stories emphasise, transformation is a reciprocal reaction to the

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invasiveness portrayed by the colonial characters trying to control and take possession of an otherwise welcoming scenery. At the heart of this rejection, there is a response to the colonial enterprise, the supposedly civilising mission, which is unveiled to be a mere economic transaction. These narratives portray how the mainly economic nature of the colonial quest corrupts and destroys local (precolonial) communities. Appraising relationships in relation to their economic value alters family relationships, destroys friendships, and vanquishes love. As a warning to his own Protestant class, Bram Stoker’s fictions reveal how complicity in the colonial quest, even if in faraway lands, alienates those who profit from it, causing destruction back home. Welcoming native lands are, consequently, transformed into a source of pain and destruction while characters become ostracised by their own community, producing a reversal of roles in which the self becomes the other. In these narratives, the transposition of both settings and characters which can still be identified as Irish is facilitated by the deployment of a European setting. Despite the narrative’s much milder form, Bram Stoker still showcases the colonised-coloniser relationship in the figure of the English colonial adventurer and the German coachman, as exemplified in “Dracula’s Guest” (1914). The narrative deploys these characters to construct two very different perceptions of location. Johan’s perception is, at first, depicted as puerile and superstitious while the coloniser’s is portrayed as analytical, based on reason. As the narrative unfolds, however, the former—embedded in the historical interaction of colonised peoples with their surroundings—is proven to be a correct appraisal of landscape. The latter, based on colonial perceptions of colonised lands, is shown as an inadequate form to gauge the territory, which causes him to misread the uncanny signs. Having trespassed the Gothic world, the colonial adventurer is confronted with the uncanny. Nature becomes harsh, desolate, bleak and barren of life, thus reminiscing the effects of the colonial enterprise on Irish soil. Bram Stoker’s setting debases the colonial gaze and, paradoxically, substitutes it for one conveying the destructive effects of colonialism. This uncanny setting overpowers the colonial narrative voice, forcing the coloniser to acknowledge the inadequacy of colonial readings of subaltern lands. The Irish Gothic protean space epitomised by Bram Stoker’s narrative acts as a decolonising tool, dispelling the aura of valour attached to the figure of the colonial adventurer. It exposes the inadequacy of colonial visions of colonised lands, bringing down the curtain of the civilising mission and unveiling the destructive force of the colonial quest.

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References Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-Colonial Transformation. Oxon: Routledge. Boehmer, Elleke. 2005. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breuilly, John. 1994. Nationalism and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brownell, Emily, and Toyin Falola. 2012a. Introduction: Landscapes, Environments and Technology—Looking Out, Looking Back. In Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Emily Brownell and Toyin Falola, 1–18. London: Routledge. ———. 2012b. Landscapes, Environments and Technology—Looking Out, Looking Back. In Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, 1–18. London: Routledge. Carey, Daniel, and Sven Trakulhun. 2009. Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment. In The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-­ Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 240–280. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cleary, Joe. 2001. Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Festa, Lynn, and Daniel Carey. 2009. Some Answers to the Question: ‘What Is Postcolonial Enlightenment?’. In The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-­ Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 1–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flannery, Eóin. 2009. Ireland and Postcolonial Studies Theory, Discourse, Utopia. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. ‘A Land Poisoned’: Eugene McCabe and Irish Postcolonial Gothic. Literature & History 22 (2): 91–112. Galiné, Marine. 2018. ‘[…] the Cry of a Woman Keening. It Came from the Bog’: (Re)Presentations of the Bog in Nineteenth-Century Irish Gothic Fiction. Nordic Irish Studies 17 (2): 75–92. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Gladwin, Derek. 2016. Contentious Terrains: Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic. Cork: Cork University Press. Glassie, Henry. 2014. The Irish Landscape. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 38, No. 1/2 Special Issue: Text and Beyond Text: New Visual, Material, and Spatial Perspectives in Irish Studies /Numéro Spécial: Le Texte et Ses Reflets: Nouvelles Perspectives Visuelles, Matérielles, et Spatiales des Études Irlandaises 39-44: 27–38. Gunning, Dave. 2013. Postcolonial Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Hopkins, Lisa. 2007. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. A Philosophical Home Ruler: The Imaginary Geographies of Bram Stoker. In A Companion to Irish Literature: Volume 1, ed. Julia M.  Wright, 377–392. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Innes, C.L. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Alvin. 2004. Ireland, Union and the Empire, 1800-1960. In Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny, 123–153. Oxford: Oxford University 0Press. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness Ghosts from Elsewhere. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Killeen, Jarlath. 2014. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McCullough, Kate. 2011. Displacement as Narrative Structure: Refugee Time/ Space in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz. American Literature 83 (4): 803–829. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-­1437225. Milbank, Alison. 1998. ‘Powers Old and New’: Stoker’s Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic. In Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith, 12–28. Hampshire: Macmillan Press. Morin, Christina. 2018. The Gothic Novel in Ireland c. 1760–1829. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Müller, Sabine Lenore. 2018. ‘Sure We Are All Friends Here!’: Bram Stoker’s Ideal of Friendship and Community in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Bio-Social Thought. In Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World, ed. Matthew Gibson and Sabine Lenore Müller, 77–100. Clemson: Clemson University Press. Murray, Paul. 2004. From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. London: Random House. O’Brien, Karen. 2009. ‘These Nations Newton Made His Own’ Poetry, Knowledge, and British Imperial Globalization. In The Postcolonial Enlightenment Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 281–303. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Cóilín. 2013. The Turd in the Rath: Antiquarians, the Ordnance Survey, and Beckett’s Irish Landscapes. Journal of Beckett Studies 22 (1): 83–107. Patterson, Annabel. 1987. Pastoral and Ideology: From Virgil to Valéry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Punter, David. 2000. Postcolonial Imaginings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2012. A New Companion to the Gothic. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Read, Peter. 2000. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Shanahan, Jim. 2014. Suffering Rebellion: Irish Gothic Fiction, 1799–1830. In Irish Gothic Genres, ed. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, 74–93. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoker, Bram. 2006. Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories. London: Penguin Classics. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus. Wills, Claire. 1991. Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence. Oxford Literary Review 13 (1/2): 20–60. Zamorano Llena, Carmen. 2016. From Exilic to Mobile Identities: Colum McCann’s ‘Let the Great World Spin’ and the Cosmopolitanization of Contemporary aIreland. Irish University Review 46 (2): 359–376.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusions

This book was conceived with the intent to analyse a common distinctive factor to the nineteenth-century Irish Gothic short story: a tendency to displace narratives, to first write stories about Ireland, with Irish settings and characters, and then progressively dislodge the narrative and place it elsewhere. The overall purpose was to consider whether this change also implied an alteration in motifs, in perceptions of colonial interventions and its manifestations, or whether the change in settings worked as a façade, a literary device to adapt to a changing publishing market and readership while yielding the same anticolonial essence in narrative terms and interpretations. With such an idea in mind, the book was divided into two clearly demarcated parts, one for Irish settings and a subsequent part for non-Irish ones. Each part was consequently divided into three chapters, one for each author, thus maintaining a sequential and chronological approach. This, it was intended, would facilitate the observation and analysis of alterations and deviations in structure, depiction, motifs and other literary elements as the century evolved. It is my belief that this analysis has proven that despite such changes in location, criticism of the colonial quest in Ireland and at large remains, in essence, at the core of these works. What is most remarkable is the overall impression that these three writers deployed analogous techniques for

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0_8

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similar objectives despite their different backgrounds, as part of an ongoing conversation on postcolonial contestations of British imperialism. In essence, all of them perform an appropriation and abrogation of the colonial gazing eye, showing how such perceptions are, indeed, based on misconceptions of the subaltern other. The resulting images tend to be the consequence of paranoia, of a guilty conscience over participation in the Irish history of colonial occupation. Settings embody these concepts, presenting pastoral outdoor scenarios which are welcoming for the Catholic, local community. Conversely, these locations become stifling, oppressive or destructive when set in opposition to the Anglo-Irish, reinforcing their perception of not belonging, of being an alien element despite their longstanding claim to property and ownership. These ideas are subsequently reproduced in indoor settings. Very much in the image of their owners, the manor houses of the Anglo-Irish are presented as stately and majestic buildings which, however, contain lurking secrets and mysteries, hiding their owners’ colonial past. Devoid of any comforting elements, they function as confining forces, entrapping the Anglo-Irish in their walls, altering family relationships while re-enacting past deeds and mischief in a vicious circle. Overall, they convey a sense of paralysis, a stasis which characterises much of Irish Gothic short fiction, including settings and characters. This narrative paralysis debases any idea of progress which can be associated to the colonial enterprise. As opposed to this, the houses of the Catholics, built to withstand the passage of time despite their humble presence, are depicted as elements in harmony with their natural surroundings. These houses replicate and reproduce their environment in a harmonious manner untenable for the Anglo-Irish and their descendants. One of the main contentions which framed this book was the idea that Irish Gothic writers continued to be immersed in the political and social scenarios back home while using foreign landscapes. The running argument was that J.C. Mangan, J.S.  Le Fanu and Bram Stoker employed displaced geographies to portray their contemporary socio-political turmoil at home in Ireland. This contention was, in fact, used to conduct the structuring design of the book and, consequently, the second part was focused on examining the usage of foreign locations. I consider that the book has been successful in proving the authors’ usage of displaced locations to confront issues at home. J.C. Mangan’s appropriation of the émigré finds its continuation in Bram Stoker’s abrogation of the colonial adventurer. Despite their diverging literary approaches, both use this

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figure to question the imperial quest disguised as a civilising mission. By reversing this concept and dislocating both characters and settings, these writers manage to portray Ireland’s colonial situation from a fresher perspective, not only criticising the economic nature of the imperial mission but also exposing the dangers of the Irish complicit participation in it. In the end, these narratives debase the colonial gaze, revealing colonial perceptions of colonised places as inappropriate to gauge the land. Dislocation in J.S.  Le Fanu’s narratives implies a change not only from Ireland to England, but also from rural to urban settings. These changes to inner urban locations also imply a deeper change in his delivery of natural landscapes. There is an abandonment of bucolic nature, associated with the Catholic Irish in his earlier narratives, to portray an oppressive scenery which reinforces indoor scenarios. Despite these changes, his leitmotifs remain unaltered—the endurance of a guilty colonial past haunting over his class and the feeling of encasement, representative of the alienation of the Anglo-Irish in their home country, are much more present than in previous instances. There are, of course, parts missing in this picture. While the book considers three authors and manages to encompass the whole of the nineteenth century, there is an imbalance in representation. Both J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker fit into what could be broadly classified as Protestant Irish Gothic—with the former belonging to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy while the latter was a member of the Protestant middle classes. Despite this difference, both were college-educated and came from an affluent background. J.C. Mangan, however, came from a Catholic backdrop and although widely read, he was, in the main, self-educated. Subsequent research would benefit from the inclusion of other Irish Gothic short-­ story writers of Catholic background, such as Gerald Griffin. In the same line, this research has focused on the Irish Gothic short story. While this is not a drawback for the conclusions which have been reached, widening the scope of research to include the short story as a genre would surely benefit the academic community and scholarly research in this domain. Despite the above-mentioned general conclusions, each author presents particularities which are worth pondering. J.C. Mangan’s Irish stories abrogate the colonial voice to condemn the imperial mission. Geographical locations configure the overarching narrative element which controls their overall effect, revealing the dependence of characters on setting. Setting deployment in “An Adventure in the Shades” (1833) and “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale” (1833)

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unveils colonial fears and anxieties. The disposed Catholic other gaining control and the social degradation inherent to contact with the other are the major leitmotifs implicit in these narratives. J.C. Mangan’s narrative technique, which is characterised by his usage of humour and satire, conveys the convoluted relationship between the dominant Anglo-Irish élite and their native land, and their (mis)perceptions of the Catholic other as a source of evil. These stem from paranoia, from a biased, self-interested conceptualisation of the discourse of improvement used to rationalise the colonial mission and Anglo-Irish presence in Ireland. By appropriating and mocking the gazing eye/I characteristic of colonial discourses, J.C. Mangan broadens the scope of Irish Gothic. In its decolonising intent, his Gothic fiction caters for the need of a multiplicity of different understandings of Ireland to foster a new nation. J.C. Mangan’s displaced narratives employ the concept of alienation to peruse different ways in which the figure of exile can reflect the insidious consequences of the colonial quest. Paradoxically, alien, foreign and exotic places are deployed as decolonising devices as narrative displacement permits him to address colonial issues in Ireland from a new perspective. His narratives depict landscape as a source of instability, both for characters and for the colonial system. J.C. Mangan’s abrogation of the exile as a gifted man, a character with a special vision of the world, unveils the multi-­ layered corruption of the colonial enterprise. The figure of the Nabob exchanging riches for inches satirises colonial endeavours, revealing its commercial nature and its racial bias. Efforts of the subaltern to become the colonial self always remain a mockery, an imperfect image. Understood in colonial terms, progress is equated to an exchange of riches for social prestige, therefore, conditioning all human relationships both in the colonial context and at home. These displaced narratives question colonial conceptualisations of the exile. The colonial other, forced to wander the world, is shown in a purposely equivocal manner. It is both as a constricting and as a constricted force as their capacity to upset the coloniser’s world is hindered by the very same colonial enterprise which created it. J.C. Mangan’s stories also contain new portrayals of the colonial system. These displaced geographies reveal how once the coloniser has possessed the land of the other, a transfer of characteristics is produced. This transforms him into an exiled figure, who is incapable of returning home. In the main, these narratives dissect the Anglo-Irish caste, portraying it as trapped between a coloniser and a colonised figure. Once illegitimate possession has been produced,

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they become a pseudo-colonising force, as manifested in their acts of eviction. Nonetheless, these narratives show how the trait of exile acquired through interaction with the subaltern is primordially a mental state which entails a severing of the ties with home. This severing dissolves the inherent relationship between the self and the land, thus ostracising the Anglo-­ Irish élite in their own home. In his Irish stories, J.S. Le Fanu employs rhetorical elements to reclaim the Irish Catholic past and to criticise his own class. “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838) shows how his utilisation of nostalgia is conveyed through representations of the old castles and dwellings of the vanquished Catholic nobility. J.S. Le Fanu’s nostalgia is, however, deceitful. It blurs the colonial quest which caused the downfall of his revered Catholic nobility. Although these portrayals reclaim the honour of the Irish Catholics, this vindication is only partial. Landscape depictions, castles and chambers convey a sense of nobility, honour and respectability. However, the overall perception of nostalgia also hides a relentless sense of stasis, a tendency to immobility. Thus, vindication is limited, as shown by the unaltered status quo of the Anglo-Irish by the end of the narrative. J.S. Le Fanu’s depiction of narrative stasis is especially relevant for his class. “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) portrays the Protestant landed classes in awe of their own past, trapped in their colonial history of occupation and usurpation. As a result, the Anglo-Irish lack a sense of home as, not being totally Irish nor English, they do not belong in either place. Their manor houses keep the essence of their military past. In bleak contrast to their surrounding nature, this military past qualifies them as an alien, displaced element. Imbibed in their guilty colonial past, the manor houses of the Anglo-Irish provide no consolation nor any sense of the home. De facto a no-home, the Anglo-Irish manor house entraps its dwellers, doomed to re-live their colonial past as the stories do not offer any resolution to their inner identity conflict. Changing Irish geographies for English ones did not imply a change in J.S. Le Fanu’s basic leitmotifs. His In a Glass Darkly stories show how he still focused on the themes and topics dealt with in earlier narratives, such as “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853). Indoor locations convey a sense of enclosure and isolation, a claustrophobia which depletes the house of any family comforts. In these displaced geographies, the urban dwelling is shown as a no-home area. Thus, the house allegorises Anglo-Irish lack of control over the land despite their legal possession. The Anglo-Irish colonial past haunts these uninhabitable

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houses, which unveils their illegitimate possession. In J.S. Le Fanu’s later narratives, the urban house reverses nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation, as exemplified in “Madam Crowl’s Ghost” (1853). As the narrative shows, contagion stems from the guilty Anglo-Irish past emanating from their dwellings. It is this past which denaturalises family relationships and creates uncanny monsters such as Jennings’ monkey in “Green Tea” (1872). Jennings’ malady shows how the unredeemed guilty past ultimately filters into the rest of society, as epitomised by the community. Geographically displaced locations function as a reclaiming tool, undoing the concept of the colonial family and overturning Anglo-Irish anxiety over contagion. It is the Anglo-Irish élite and their unatoned colonial past which causes the degeneration of the pillars of civilised society. The urban house is a confined space where the past is continually re-­ enacted and actualised in the present, behaving as an elements that replicates Anglo-Irish stasis. Despite their descendants’ failed attempts at redemptions, the Anglo-Irish are condemned to become spirits and wander their dwellings in search for atonement. As an allegory of the Anglo-­ Irish, the urban house distorts its surroundings. These enclaves oppress the colonial invader’s mind. J.S.  Le Fanu’s displaced urban dwellings mimic the Anglo-Irish inner struggle between a colonialist and a settler self. In the end, this internal struggle is unresolved. The past is still encapsulated in the Anglo-Irish house. Whether rural or urban, the house re-­ enacts a pattern of entrapment, with the ghost of the past free to roam at will, in a permanent rehearsal of their guilty colonial past. In Bram Stoker’s short fictions, rural Ireland is systematically deployed as a decolonising tool. Contrary to the pastoral ideal of a bucolic landscape, his narratives depict a stark and aggressive nature, which can destruct characters as much as it can nurture them. Building on J.C. Mangan and J.S. Le Fanu’s setting deployments, Bram Stoker’s short fictions employ natural locations with a willingness of their own. Nature is personified and depicted as the ultimate decolonising tool. Settings are embodied as redressers of colonial misdoings, thus questioning the central tenet of the colonial enterprise. These narratives debase colonial conceptualisations of progress and unveil the real consequences of the colonial quest. As the stories reveal, the colonial system in Ireland only enhances social, cultural and economic differences between classes, tensing the very fabrics of the local community. In this sense, the home is portrayed as the epitome of the community. As such, it displays resistance to invasion under the pretext of progress and

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modernity. Bram Stoker’s narratives appropriate the concept of the Nobel Savage and colonial double visions of the feminine to portray an Ireland which resists invasion. Represented in the female figure which guides the community, this opposition engenders violent responses in disguised coloniser figures. Bram Stoker’s “The Man from Shorrox” (1894) exemplifies how the home can be perceived as a communal space to expose the colonial invader. Settings become liminal spaces where colonial images of the other are reversed, unveiling colonisers as a threatening and corrupting force, diametrically opposed to the supposedly civilising mission which justified their presence in foreign lands. In Bram Stoker’s narratives, nature is reactive. Landscapes can provide the comfort and security of the home, or they can become maelstroms, oppressive elements which destroy characters, literally and metaphorically. This change, however, is not unmotivated. These narratives emphasise how transformation is a reciprocal reaction to the invasiveness conveyed by colonial characters attempting to possess the land. Landscape transformations, then, are a response to the colonial mission, unveiling its economic nature. These narratives reveal the corruptive nature of the colonial enterprise as it degrades local (precolonial) communities. Family relationships, friendships and love are, thus, altered and expressed in relation to their economic value. Bram Stoker’s short fictions unveil the alienating nature of the colonial quest and its consequences back home. Idyllic native lands, thus, become a source of destruction while characters become ostracised by their own community, producing a reversal of roles in which the self becomes the other. Bram Stoker’s displaced geographies still represent the colonised-­ coloniser relationship in the figure of the English colonial adventurer. As “Dracula’s Guest” (1914) exemplifies, characters are used to portray two very different conceptions of location. Johan’s parsing of space is portrayed as puerile and superstitious. The coloniser’s, on the other hand, is depicted as analytical. As the narrative moves forward, however, a reversal of roles takes place. Rooted in the historical interaction of colonised peoples with their surroundings, nativist’s perceptions of landscape are proven more accurate appraisals of landscape. The coloniser’s perception, on the contrary, is shown as an inadequate form to gauge the territory. Once in the Gothic world, the colonial adventurer is in the presence of the uncanny, which his colonial identity hinders from interpreting. Nature is transformed into a harsh, desolate space. A liminal area barren of life and

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reminiscent of the effects of the colonial quest in Ireland. Thus, Bram Stoker’s displaced locations debase the colonial gaze. Paradoxically, the colonial gaze is substituted for a new way of parsing the land, one expressive of the destructive effects of colonialism. These uncanny settings overpower the colonial voice and force the coloniser to accept the inadequacy of colonial readings of subaltern lands. The Irish Gothic displays a protean space where narratives act as decolonising tools, thus dissipating the glow attached to the figure of the colonial adventurer. Whether set at home or displaced in faraway lands, Irish Gothic exposes the inadequacy of colonial visions of colonised lands, bringing down the curtain of the civilising mission and unveiling the destructive force of the colonial quest.

Index

A Abrogation, 21, 42, 57, 119, 136, 165, 168, 188, 190 Agrarian Revolts, 89, 102 Alienated, 27, 90, 116, 129, 136, 147, 164, 165, 172 Anglo-Irish, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13–15, 17, 19–23, 26, 31, 41, 48, 51–55, 57–59, 65, 67, 69, 71–86, 90, 92, 99, 100, 108, 109, 122, 129, 133, 136, 137, 143–152, 154, 156–160, 165, 172, 188–192 Anticolonial, 166–174 Ascendancy, 6, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 69, 78, 79, 83, 97, 189

Belonging, 19–21, 25, 26, 51–53, 55, 76, 83, 86, 99, 100, 118, 127, 136, 150, 152, 156, 165, 188, 189 Blackthorn stick, 104 Bog, 25, 95, 96, 100, 110 Bowen, Elizabeth, 141 Bristol, 166 Britain, 3, 6, 76, 126, 171 British Empire, 4, 5, 7, 19, 49, 108, 116 British imperialism, 188 Bucolic, 23, 56, 58, 64, 83, 91, 110, 170, 171, 189, 192 Burke, Edmund, 6, 9

B Balzac, Honoré de, 117, 127 La Peau de chagrain, 117 Melmoth réconcilié, 127

C Cabin, 94, 95 Cahergillagh, 71, 79, 80, 83, 84 Castle Rackrent, 11, 102

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Jorge, Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40391-0

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INDEX

Catholic, 4–7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 18–23, 26, 28, 29, 31, 41, 47, 52–55, 57–59, 64–72, 75, 78, 80, 82–86, 90, 92, 94, 97–99, 105–109, 116, 122, 126, 133, 149, 156, 157, 188–191 nobility, 31, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 85, 191 other, 56, 59, 71, 72, 190 Catholic Emancipation, 5, 7, 133 Catholic Relief Act, 53 Celtic, 2, 5, 8–10, 57, 167, 172 Church of Ireland, 6 Civilising mission, 1, 30, 42, 91, 105, 107, 110, 116, 117, 136, 167, 170, 174, 183, 189, 193, 194 College Green, 70, 136, 165 Colonial, 1–3, 5, 9–13, 19–23, 25–32, 41, 42, 44, 46–49, 51, 52, 55–58, 63, 65, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83–86, 91, 94–100, 102, 104, 106–110, 116–126, 129–131, 133–136, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156–160, 163–165, 167–177, 179–183, 187–193 gaze, 21, 30, 42, 44, 47, 59, 69, 177, 180, 183, 188–190, 194 invader, 109, 110, 160, 172, 181, 192, 193 quest, 22, 41, 76, 91, 108–110, 120, 129, 142, 143, 157, 158, 165, 167, 171–174, 182, 183, 187, 190–194 rule, 2, 13, 91, 118, 122, 126, 127 system, 49, 91, 97–100, 106, 110, 120, 136, 137, 190, 192 Colonialism, 134, 158 Colonised, 1, 4, 20–22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 41, 42, 44, 46–49, 51, 55–58, 64, 69, 82, 91, 106, 108, 110, 117–120, 122–127,

129–134, 137, 158, 166, 172–174, 176, 177, 179–183, 190, 193 Colonised subjects, 1–2, 21, 42, 47, 91, 119, 125, 126, 130, 137, 174 Contagion, 156, 192 Cornish, 167, 168 Cornwall, 167, 172, 174 Cromwell, 102 Curragh Races, 102 D Decolonising, 2, 4, 7, 17, 18, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 43, 49, 63, 65, 91, 96, 110, 117, 142, 159, 170, 183, 190, 192, 194 Degradation, 51, 56, 117, 121, 124, 146, 155, 159, 190 Discourse, 9, 19, 22, 23, 43, 48, 49, 56, 59, 69, 70, 103, 105, 121, 124, 127, 164, 170, 181, 190 Dislocated geographies, 142 Dislocated settings, 28 Dislocation, 1, 26, 29, 116, 120, 122, 134, 135, 142, 176 Displaced geographies, 188, 190, 191, 193 Displaced locations, 29, 142, 167, 188, 192, 194 Displacement, 1, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28, 51, 52, 77, 83, 108, 116, 120, 126, 135, 151, 165, 167, 176 Dispossessed, 23, 59, 98 Dispossession, 20, 22, 26, 28, 68, 78, 96, 102, 151, 179 Dominance, 3, 74, 101 Dublin, 6, 15, 28, 43, 45, 48–50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 65, 71, 76, 90, 116, 126, 142, 143, 165 Dublin University Magazine, 6, 15, 71, 143

 INDEX 

E East-Indian, 120 Edgeworth, Maria, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 23, 78, 102 1800 Act of Union, 5, 12, 15, 48, 49, 133 Élite, 16, 41, 48, 53–55, 59, 76, 83, 90, 100, 108, 122, 133, 137, 151, 156, 157, 159, 172, 190–192 Émigré, 31, 32, 116–120, 126, 142, 164, 165, 174, 188 Empire, 4, 44, 49, 53, 164, 167 Enclosure, 81, 142, 159, 191 England, 10–12, 17, 26, 28, 48, 53, 75, 76, 94, 134, 135, 151, 152, 156, 164, 171, 189 English countryside, 75, 142, 151 language, 54, 176 locations, 160 Estrangement, 26, 28, 29, 176, 179, 181 European, 1, 5, 7, 27, 32, 96, 121, 130, 150, 170, 176, 181, 183 Eviction, 84, 106, 133, 137, 191 Exile, 20, 22, 26, 31, 32, 116–127, 133–136, 163–165, 177, 190 F Family, 65, 68, 71, 74–77, 79, 81, 83, 90, 98, 108, 115, 136, 143, 144, 146–149, 158, 159, 171, 183, 188, 191 Famine, 15, 97, 182 Female figure, 103, 110, 128, 134, 193 Fin de siècle, 89, 174 France, 9, 127, 134, 135, 151

197

G Gaelic, 5, 8, 10, 15, 21, 53–58, 65, 68–70, 79–82, 142, 158, 165 Galway, 92, 97 Gazing, see Colonial, gaze Gladstone, 108 Gothic, 2, 3, 7–30, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 56–59, 63, 65, 71, 74, 77, 81, 84, 91, 94, 109, 116, 117, 124, 125, 134, 135, 142, 143, 152, 158, 164, 165, 170, 175, 179, 180, 183, 187–190, 193 Great Britain, 48, 121 Griffin, Gerald, 13, 16, 189 H Hiberno-English, 57 Holland, 16, 134, 135 Home, 4, 10, 19, 24–28, 30, 31, 41, 64, 75–79, 81–84, 86, 91, 93, 94, 101, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122, 127, 129, 130, 133–137, 142–145, 147–149, 158, 159, 163–165, 167, 170–173, 176, 182, 183, 188, 190–194 Home Rule, 17, 108 Hybridity, 90 I Illegitimacy, 152 Illegitimate possession, 159, 192 Immigration, 120, 122 Imperial mission, 41, 100, 107, 122, 189 Imperial quest, 58, 105, 116, 167, 172, 189 See also Colonial, quest Ireland, 2–17, 19–21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 41–43, 48–50, 52–56, 58,

198 

INDEX

59, 63–65, 68, 71, 75, 76, 81, 89–91, 93–95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105–108, 110, 116, 117, 122, 123, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 141, 144, 151, 156–159, 163, 165, 167, 170, 172, 174, 182, 187, 188, 190, 192–194 rural Ireland, 55, 91, 192 Irish, 2–30, 42–45, 47, 49, 52–54, 56–58, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 75–79, 82, 84–86, 91, 92, 94, 97–103, 105–109, 116, 117, 120–123, 126, 127, 129, 134–137, 141–144, 151, 152, 156–160, 164, 165, 169, 172, 174, 176, 179, 181, 183, 187–189, 191, 192, 194 emigration, 121 Famine, 126 landscape, 10, 25, 65 nationalism, 4, 6, 7, 14 studies, 5, 25 United Irish, 126 Irish Gothic, 7–14, 16, 18–29, 31, 42, 91, 116, 142, 170, 183, 189, 194 fiction, 2, 7, 19, 22, 23, 26, 52, 152 short story, 14, 16, 30, 187, 189 The Irish Republican Brotherhood, 7 Italy, 134, 135 J James, M.R., 143 J.C. Mangan, see Mangan, James Clarence J.S. Le Fanu, see Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan Judiciary, 49, 53, 152

K Kenlis, 157, 158 Kildare, 103 Kilkenny, 100, 102, 105 L Land, 1, 2, 4, 15, 19–26, 28, 31, 32, 43, 46, 52, 53, 59, 78, 81, 83, 90, 91, 93, 95–100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 127, 132–135, 137, 145, 146, 149, 151, 158, 159, 165, 167–169, 171–173, 176–178, 181, 183, 189–191, 193, 194 Land League, 102 Landlord, 58, 92, 97, 123, 133, 151, 165 Land Question, 89, 91, 100, 103 Landscape, 9, 10, 24, 25, 27, 31, 42, 47, 50, 64, 68, 92, 98, 110, 124, 135, 136, 146, 155, 165, 167–171, 175, 177, 178, 181–183, 190, 192, 193 Land Wars, 102 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10–14, 16–31, 43, 45, 58, 63–76, 78, 80–82, 84–86, 89–91, 93, 94, 96, 110, 141–145, 147, 148, 151–159, 163, 188, 189, 191, 192 “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street,” 158, 159, 191 Ashtown House, 75, 76 Carmilla, 63 “A Chapter in the History of a Tyron Family,” 93 “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family,” 31, 65, 71–73, 75, 80, 86, 142, 191 Dr Hesselius, 152, 153

 INDEX 

“The Familiar,” 64 Glenfallen, 71–73, 77, 79, 81, 83–85 “The Ghost and the Bone Setter,” 73 In a Glass Darkly, 63, 64, 72, 142, 152, 159, 191 “Green Tea,” 143, 152, 153, 159, 192 guilt, 13, 16, 17, 22, 31, 65, 71, 78, 84–86, 143, 149, 151, 152, 157–160, 188, 189, 191, 192 Invisible Prince, 143 “The Last Heir of Castle Connor,” 31, 65, 66, 68–72, 85, 191 “Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” 143, 145, 146, 158, 159, 192 Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories, 143 “The Mysterious Lodger,” 64 O’Connor, 65, 66, 68–70 “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,” 141, 142 Purcell (see The Purcell Papers) The Purcell Papers, 63, 64, 72, 142 “Schalken the Painter,” 64 Uncle Silas, 8, 11, 14, 141 Wylder’s Hand, 141 Limerick, 142 M Manchester, 105, 106 Mangan, James Clarence, 2, 3, 10–15, 18–31, 41–59, 63, 64, 69, 90, 93, 110, 115–117, 121, 125–129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 142, 163, 164, 188–190, 192 “An Adventure in the Shades,” 42, 46, 49, 51, 58, 93, 189 Autobiography, 13, 42 Comet, 45

199

“An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades,” 12, 18, 30, 43–45, 47 “The Man in the Cloak,” 11, 27, 31, 32, 43, 117, 127, 130 Maugraby, 45, 47, 48, 125, 126 “My Transformation. A Wonderful Tale,” 30, 42, 43, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 189 The Satirist, 50, 55 “The Thirty Flasks,” 31, 32, 117, 118, 126, 127, 129 Manor house, 16, 20, 26, 31, 71–86, 143, 145–152, 159, 188, 191 Maturin, 8, 11, 48, 49, 127 Melmoth the Wanderer, 8, 11, 127 Melmoth, 8, 11, 127–135 Metropolis, 22, 118, 120, 122, 164 Mirror, 11, 49, 100, 142, 146, 151, 157, 171 Miscegenation, 49, 116, 121, 123, 148, 156, 159, 192 Mockery, 45, 100, 160, 190 Modernity, 9, 13, 99, 105, 110, 193 Moore, Thomas, 7 Morgan, Lady, 7 Motherland, 53, 170–173 N Nabob, 117–125, 136, 190 The Nation, 6 Natural landscapes, 25, 189 Nineteenth century, 4–7, 14–16, 29, 30, 41, 57, 80, 89, 102, 105, 108, 120, 122, 172, 189 Nostalgia, 6, 24, 26, 29, 31, 58, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 85, 136, 191 O O’Connell, Daniel, 6 Oriental other, 117, 123

200 

INDEX

Other, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 14, 17, 19, 22, 25–28, 32, 41, 42, 45–52, 56–58, 63, 68–71, 74, 76, 78, 80–82, 84, 92, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 118–127, 129–134, 136, 150, 154, 157, 158, 165, 167, 170, 173, 176, 177, 180–183, 187–190, 193 Othering, 1, 8, 12, 24 Owenson, Sydney, 7, 10 P Paralysis, 188 Pastoral, 23–25, 56, 58, 64, 76, 80–83, 91, 94, 98, 100, 110, 134, 167–170, 188, 192 Personification, 57, 95 Piccadilly, 153 Possession, 19, 20, 23, 95, 109, 121, 131, 133, 145, 146, 149, 159, 164, 183, 190, 191 Postcolonial, 1–5, 8, 11, 12, 18–21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 41–44, 46, 48, 57, 64, 68, 90, 91, 116, 135, 151, 167, 188 Postcolonialism, 2 Postcolonial studies, 3, 5, 44 Presbyterian, 5, 6, 21, 53 Progress, 28, 49, 96, 105, 110, 116, 122, 131, 163, 164, 188, 190, 192 Protestant, 4–7, 13, 16, 20–23, 26, 28, 29, 41, 49, 53, 71, 72, 78, 84, 86, 89, 97, 109, 145, 151, 155, 156, 172, 183, 189, 191 élite, 5, 6, 97 Purcell, see The Purcell Papers The Purcell Papers, 11, 12, 31, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72–74, 141, 142

R Repeal Movement, 6 Resistance, 3, 21, 22, 26, 29, 91, 96, 101–103, 105, 106, 110, 192 Richmond, 154, 155, 158 Romantic Era, 24, 64 S Scilly, 172 Self, 1, 2, 11, 17, 19, 21, 25, 32, 44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56–59, 84, 105–107, 119, 123, 126, 129–131, 133–137, 142, 149, 151, 157, 165, 178, 183, 189–193 Setting, 18–29, 52, 57, 58, 110, 119, 125, 142, 148, 159, 189 Settler, 41 Shaw, Bernard, 90 Short fiction, 18–29 Skye, 172 Society United Irishmen, 7 Space, 1, 43–44 Spain, 134, 135 Stasis, 25, 43, 45, 49, 67, 70, 85, 86, 143, 160, 169, 188, 191, 192 Status quo, 22, 71, 86, 123, 125, 126, 146, 151, 152, 191 Stoker, Bram, 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17–31, 43, 58, 89–94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 107, 108, 110, 121, 142, 163–165, 167, 168, 170–172, 174, 175, 182, 183, 188, 189, 192, 193 The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion, 92 “The Coming Home of Abel Behenna,” 164, 165 Dracula, 8, 14, 28, 31, 32, 89–91, 121, 165, 174, 175, 182, 183, 193

 INDEX 

201

“Dracula’s Guest,” 32, 165, 174, 175, 182, 183, 193 “The Gombeen Man,” 31, 90–93, 100, 107, 163 Irish Literature, 3, 92 Liberal Party, 108 London, 28, 90, 100, 153, 154, 158, 165 Lyceum Theatre, 90 “The Man from Shorrox,” 31, 90, 91, 100, 101, 103, 107, 110, 163, 193 Midnight Tales, 92 People, 92 The Snake’s Pass, 10, 92 Snowbound, 163 Subaltern, 1, 2, 22, 57, 69, 130, 136, 137, 181, 183, 188, 190, 191, 194

U Uncanny, 18, 56, 77, 85, 91, 96, 101, 130, 144, 147, 154, 157, 159, 168, 175, 178–183, 192, 193 Uncivilised, 55, 57 Urban, 57, 99, 142–144, 154, 159, 160, 189, 191, 192 dwellings, 160, 192 locations, 189

T Tenant, 92, 97, 106, 133, 144 Travelling metaphor, 164

Y Yeats, W.B., 2, 3 Young Ireland, 6

V Victorian, 8, 14, 24, 64, 65, 69, 148, 176 W Wandering Jew, 134 Warwickshire, 153 Westminster, 5, 53, 108, 109, 122