REVIEW OF THE ROSE AND THE KEY
                       
Sheridan Le Fanu

Ed. and Intro. Frances Chiu. Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2007.

                                                                                                    (ISSN 1932-9598)
                                 
    Le Fanu’s The Rose and the Key, serialized in All the Year Round in 1871, features a tangle of narrative, painterly, and armorial metatexts, especially Maud’s grandfather’s will: “such a tesselation of puzzles, so many provisoes, exceptions, conditions, as no layman could disentangle” (204). The same might be said of the heteroglossic text itself, which broadcasts a variety of readerly signals suggesting different generic, thematic, and theoretical approaches.  In fact, as if anticipating critical readings, Maud’s mother, Lady Vernon, emphasizes at one point,  “People see with different eyes” (168). Ivan Melada, for example, sees the tale as “a social-problem novel about abuses in mental institutions” (Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne, 1987. 83), while James Walton focuses, via Pilgrim’s Progress, on the Vanity-Fair implications of the madhouse, which “Le Fanu has stylised into a satiric model of the larger society” (Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J.S. Le Fanu. Dublin: U College Dublin P, 2007. 153). The text under consideration here, Frances Chiu’s recent Valancourt edition of The Rose and the Key however, discovers a significantly new, post-colonial context: “Lady Vernon’s attempted disinheritance of Maud can be understood as an interpretation of British imperial policy,” that is, “of the English disinheritance of Ireland” (xli, xxxviii).

    Chiu’s edition replaces--and is a distinct improvement over--the 1982 Dover and 1994 Pocket Classics paperback editions of The Rose and the Key, neither of which is currently in print. Chiu’s achievement rests on her Notes, Appendix, and, especially, her critical Introduction. Her explanatory Notes are helpful without being overly intrusive, though I have a few quibbles about the selection process and extent of the annotation. Why for example explain Cleopatra and the asp (374) and not Don Quixote’s hostility to the “mean and sober restraints of a well-regulated world” (324)? Or, why provide a note (372) on the “Quest’ è un Nodo” sextet from Rossini’s opera Cenerentola (1817) without translating the Italian and emphasizing Cinderella’s very relevant motif of disguise, which Rossini features? But, again, these are mere quibbles regarding minor editorial choices. Chiu’s appendices include selections from Isaac Butt’s Land Tenure: A Plea for the Celtic Race; excerpts from the Dublin University Magazine on the state Church and sorry “state” of Ireland; a letter from Le Fanu’s editor, Charles Dickens, regarding the possible addition of an Irish character to the novel; the anonymous and uncomfortably cheerful account of asylums, “Happy Idiots,” from All the Year Round (1864); James Clarence Mangan’s poetic lament over a vanishing Ireland, “Dark Rosaleen”; and two cleverly critical, contemporary reviews. Each of these selections is pertinent to Chiu’s Introduction (several are cited), which is the jewel of her edition.

    The Introduction is divided into three sections: “From alienation [sic] to Alien Nation”; “‘The Habitation of Symbols’: Sheridan Le Fanu and Fiction”; and “‘Unnatural Alienation’: The Politics of The Rose and the Key.” The first section details relevant “debates over land proprietorship, religion, and domestic legislation,” which in both England and Ireland “were beginning to coalesce into a full-fledged debate on national independence” (vii). Chiu emphasizes the recurring personification of Ireland as a distressed damsel like Mangan’s “Dark Rosaleen” and the fairly familiar post-colonial point that Irish history itself often reads like a tragically histrionic Gothic romance. Citing a variety of Victorian writers, Chiu is especially perceptive in illustrating the subtle shifts in both England and the conservative Dublin University Magazine from pro-British positions to growing sympathy for Ireland. Her next section focuses on Le Fanu’s equally shifting, or at least increasingly ambivalent, political postures in his fiction, particularly during the last ten years of his life when he served as editor of the DUM. Chiu pays special attention to Uncle Silas and “Carmilla” here, concluding that “literary critics have tended to assume a fairly consistent Tory Anglo-Irish perspective on Le Fanu’s part: an assumption that is far from foolproof” (xxii).

    Chiu’s final section discusses The Rose and the Key in the shadowy light of English-Irish conflicts and Le Fanu’s own shifting national sympathies. Here she does a superb job of integrating details from her prior two sections with a fairly intricate reading of Le Fanu’s text. If she produces a post-colonial allegory, its nuanced reflections further suggest a fascinating and proliferating, dark conceit of Irish troubles. In her words, “Even if Le Fanu did not set out to write an allegorical novel on the relations between England and Ireland, . . . The Rose and the Key can nonetheless be read as a novel deeply inflected by contemporary nationalist ideas on land, religion, and Irish identity” (xxvii). More specifically, Lady Vernon personifies the hypocritical British motherland which not only disinherits its spirited Irish daughter, but then in the name of practical expediency, abjectly imprisons her: “Lady Vernon’s government of Maud replicates at one remove the nationalist belief that the British have governed Ireland out of little more than prejudice and spite while pretending to be impartial and dispassionate” (xlii).

    My only reservations about Chiu’s reading are that I wish she had pushed two points further. One involves metaphors of “home” and “homelessness” which Le Fanu compulsively repeats in the text and which beg for an uncanny reading of Anglo-Irish hybridity, one that would surely strengthen Chiu’s thesis. Her Introduction does imply such a reading, but only cursorily: “Like the ‘unhomed’ colonist, Maud never feels at home at Roydon [her family estate]--and thus continues to long for independence” (xxix). Secondly, the hybrid character of the Reverend Michael Doody, a Protestant-Irish curate with a Catholic background, also deserves more analysis. Doody first appears as a boorish, if not obnoxious, parody of Irish stereotypes.  Later, however, he reappears as “youthful and athletic” (321) and carries Maud’s talismanic rose to her would-be lover Charles Marston, which act ultimately liberates Maud from the Glarewoods asylum. Chiu recognizes that “Le Fanu reverses [Doody’s] negative stereotype into a positive one” (xxxix), but given her thesis, she doesn’t go nearly far enough in pursuing this Irishman’s textual ascendancy. In the final analysis, though, Chiu’s approach is perceptive, persuasive, and au courant. More importantly, her post-colonial reading may well resurrect The Rose and the Key from the graveyard of critical oblivion--a result most Le Fanu scholars can only applaud.

Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.