The Haunting Past in J

THE HAUNTING PAST IN J. S. LE FANU'S SHORT STORIES

By Sally Harris

University of Tennessee

(ISSN 1932-9598)

Despite his association with the Anglo-Irish Tories, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu recognized the suffering of the Irish-Catholics. Le Fanu was aware that the political past was a powerful force in the lives of the Irish. Also, Le Fanu felt the pressures of his own family history: his father’s position as an Anglican clergyman, his mother’s sympathy with Irish rebels, and the political violence he witnessed during his childhood. Recognizing that national and ancestral past is a powerful force, he made use of it in his short stories. The force of history is present but cannot be explained by material science. It has a supernatural presence, directing and informing events in the present without a scientific explanation for its effects. In his works, Le Fanu uses preternatural and supernatural events to emphasize the immediate presence of history and the effects it has in the present physical world. In his earlier stories, Le Fanu often incorporates Irish history. By doing this, he is able to show the power the past has over the present not only through the effects of history as described in his stories, but also through the recurring historical presence in his stories; the past cannot be forgotten. For the same reason, he creates fictional families to show how the actions of one’s ancestors in the past can affect one’s life in the present. For the most part, Le Fanu wrote these stories in which these fictional families are affected supernaturally by their past after the earlier, primarily historical, stories.

As with politics and religion, there is no clear separation between national history and family history in many of Le Fanu’s stories such as “Ultor De Lacy.” However, for purposes of clarity, I separate them when discussing them in his stories. Thus, it makes sense to begin with a background of Le Fanu’s national and familial histories. “Le Fanu’s Ghosts” serves to give insight into the political and familial influences on Le Fanu and the reasons he felt their presence so strongly. From there, in the section entitled “Irish Ghosts,” I move into a discussion of the way in which Le Fanu incorporates Irish history into his stories in order to emphasize the importance of acknowledging the non-material force of history. In the following section, “Family Ghosts,” I focus on the way in which Le Fanu uses the history of fictional families to show that the past continues to affect people in the present and that actions in the present will remain to affect people in the future. The past, like a ghost, is a haunting force which works supernaturally in this world; it cannot be explained by science or materialism. Although it has no physical properties, the presence of the past is keenly felt in the events of the present.

Le Fanu’s Ghosts

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was Irish, and he was Protestant. The Le Fanus were descended from Charles de Cresserons, who had fought for William of Orange, and because of their Huguenot ancestors, when they settled in Ireland, the Le Fanus found their place among the Anglicans who inhabited “England’s colony,” as T. A. Jackson calls it (75). However, the Irish-Catholics did not adapt quite as well. As the Anglican upper and middle-classes grew, the Irish-Catholic aristocracy diminished, and the economic gap between the Catholic peasants and the Anglican bourgeois widened. English laws and taxes harmed the Irish-Catholic upper and lower classes, challenging their previous way of life and making it more difficult for them to survive in their changing world without converting to Protestantism. As Maureen Wall comments in “The Age of Penal Laws,” the Irish-Catholics were at first permitted to own land and participate in trade, but in the early eighteenth century, laws were created to keep Catholics from purchasing land and developing their trade (219-220). In the prologue to Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture, Julian Moynahan comments that, during the seventeenth century, many Irish-Catholic aristocratic families renounced their faith and intermarried with English and Protestant families in attempts to “gain access to the privileged class” (4). After the 1798 uprising in which the United Irish rebelled but were defeated, Protestants in Ireland were threatened, and although they sustained a tentative power by supporting the British government, fear lingered just over their shoulders. Dublin provided a relatively safe place for the new family of Thomas Philip Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan’s father, a Protestant clergyman. However, when Joseph was twelve, the family moved to the country, and they were no longer protected by the civilities of city life. Thus, during his teenage years, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was surrounded by the violence brought about by British rule in Ireland. Because his family was Protestant, he was a target, and this fear of violence was a powerful influence. Later in his life, Le Fanu “found in sensational fiction the means to describe the extraordinary quality of his life, its urbanity and its closeness to violence” (McCormack 8). In fact, Sage argues that it is the fear of Irish-Catholic uprisings that lies at the heart of Protestant horror fiction (44-45). In his stories, Le Fanu does more than simply describe or represent the violence and his fear; he portrays the historical causes for this violence as supernatural forces in the present.

Another political influence in Le Fanu’s life was his mother. In her youth, Emma Lucretia Dobbin formed a sympathy for Lord Edward Fitzgerald, an Irish rebel, and Emma is said to have acquired the dagger with which he killed a captain as he was arrested in Dublin (Ellis 147). Emma Dobbin’s Catholic sympathies can be traced to her father, William Dobbin. Although he was a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, William Dobbin was acquainted with John and Henry Sheares, well-known Irish rebels, and rumors existed about a relationship between Sophia Dobbin, Emma’s sister, and one of the Sheares brothers. Thus, despite their Protestant heritage, the Dobbins seemed to be intimately concerned with the progress of the Irish cause. Although he, too, felt some sympathy with the Irish cause, Joseph Sheridan stayed true to his Protestant-Huguenot Le Fanu heritage and remained a member of the Tory party throughout his life. Thus, the young Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was reared with strong Anglican beliefs but with conflicting sympathies for Irish-Catholics.

The sympathy Le Fanu had for the Catholics was tried when, in 1831, the Tithe Wars began. In Seventy Years of Irish Life, Joseph’s brother, William, writes about some of their experiences during this time. One time, William recalls, he and Joseph were attacked by groups of Catholics who, angry at the rector as a representative of the Protestant government, threw rocks at the two boys. Had the brothers not been on horses, enabling them to get home and into the house quickly, they may have been killed (65). All members of the Le Fanu family were affected by the uprisings: Catherine, Le Fanu’s sister, was pelted by rocks and mud, and friends who visited were subject to taunts from the mobs as they drove into town. Indeed, the whole of Ireland in the nineteenth century was suffering from the repercussions of British rule, and, as McCormack notes, the phrase “Victorian Ireland . . . is itself mildly surprising” (5) because of its conflicting implications. Despite all of this strife, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu seems to have retained some compassion for the Irish-Catholics. In an 1868 letter cited in McCormack’s Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, Le Fanu claimed that although he did not think that England and Ireland were ready for a Catholic Lord Chancellor, he would not have been opposed to the idea (39). McCormack also notes that Le Fanu supported taxing absentee landlords (51). It seems he was pulled in two directions: one by his ancestral, Protestant history and one by his national, Irish history. In 1840, though, Le Fanu’s sympathy with the revolutionaries faltered. He finally decried Daniel O’Connell, an Irish-Catholic revolutionary, in the Dublin Evening Mail, calling him a “sworn exterminator of Protestantism” (qtd. in McCormack 84), and as McCormack notes, it is at this time the last of the stories in The Purcell Papers, narrated by a Catholic Priest, is written. In fact, McCormack considers Le Fanu’s stories collected in The Purcell Papers “a farewell to Abingdon” in which he mourns the decline of the Irish county (63). Sadly, he had turned from what he admired about the Irish because of his political fears, and “behind the fears of O’Connell . . . lay fears about the spiritual quality of his [Le Fanu’s] inheritance, fears ultimately involving larger issues of identity which merged with religious unease” (McCormack 86).

In The Victorian Short Story, Harold Orel remarks that it is these fears about the political and religious strife in Ireland, particularly the unrest between 1842 and 1848, which were reflected in Le Fanu’s works during that period as “psychic decomposition” (37). Similarly, Jean Lozes sees psychological unease in Le Fanu because of his life-long divided political support for the two countries. On the one hand, he had a business sense of loyalty to England, and on the other, he had a literary sense of loyalty to Ireland, which, as Lozes notes in “The Prince of the Invisible,” “suggests a troubled, complicated case of divided loyalties, and the possibility of guilt, for it was impossible for Le Fanu to be true to all his sympathies at once” (93). Le Fanu was deeply affected by the political and religious history of Ireland, and it emerges in his stories. In Specter or Delusions?, Margaret Carter notes that just as the supernatural invades faith and sanity in horror stories such as Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and Stoker’s Dracula, the past intrudes on a “tidy conventional world” like the Anglo-Irish regime (99). Because of this, Le Fanu had the “conviction that the nineteenth century had inherited, and must pay for, the sins of the eighteenth” (Orel 38). This retribution for historical events is one of the driving forces behind the supernatural.

Additionally, Le Fanu felt that he inherited his family’s history with Ireland’s national history. His Huguenot heritage immediately associates him with the Protestant ruling class, as does his ancestor, Charles de Cresserons, who fought with William of Orange and the Orangemen. As James Swafford notes in “Tradition and Guilt,” because of the religious station of Le Fanu’s father, “situation, history and personal finance had become intertwined for the Le Fanus, who were literally having to pay for injustices–or so their Catholic neighbors would style them–committed by generations past” (50). The tithes that had been extorted from Catholics to pay Protestant clergy were being challenged, and Le Fanu’s family stopped receiving much of the income to which it was accustomed. Le Fanu himself never completely recovered from the pressing financial situations his father faced. In college, he felt the strain of not being wealthy, struggling to find money to pay dues to the Historical Society (McCormack 50-51). Still struggling financially when his father-in-law died in 1856, he, Susanna, and their children moved into the house they inherited at eighteen Merion square, Dublin (Crawford 6). Although never poor, Le Fanu continued to struggle financially, and as Orel notes, Le Fanu included much of his own financial troubles in his novel The Tenants of Malory (37). However, there are aspects of Le Fanu’s family life other than politics and money that affected him deeply.

One was the seemingly “inescapable heredity” of intermarriage. As McCormack remarks in Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, “the Le Fanus were related to the Sheridans by three alliances, to the Knowles by two, to the Dobbins by two, and to the Bennetts by two” (1). It must have seemed that wherever he turned, Le Fanu was confronted by relatives. Although these familial relations are not specifically historical, they are another example of the difficulty of escaping one’s family, and the theme of intermarriages emerges often in Le Fanu’s works such as Wylder’s Hand (1863-64) and Uncle Silas (1864). Both novels reject the idea that intermarriage is beneficial to the family. In Wylder’s Hand, two cousins, Mark Wylder and Stanley Lake, are killed in their efforts to marry their other cousin, Dorcas Brandon. Similarly, in Uncle Silas, Silas attempts to force Maud Ruthyn into a marriage with her cousin so that he may have control over her money. When she refuses to marry Dudley, Silas and Dudley plot her death. At the end of both novels, the women are free from their cousins; however, they are irremediably affected by the events. They may be in more control of their lives now, but their suffering remains with them as a memory, coloring their future. That Le Fanu incorporates many of his own familial anxieties and troubles into his works indicates that just as he felt the seemingly supernatural presence of Ireland’s national history, he felt the presence of his family and its history as a powerful force, affecting his present life and his future.

Irish Ghosts

Throughout his writing career, Le Fanu drew upon Irish history and the demise of the landed Irish to show the effects that the past had on his own generation. Because of this, there are similarities between Le Fanu’s experience of Ireland and the events in the lives of his characters. Characters such as O’Connor in “The Last Heir of Castle Connor” (1838), O’Mara and Heathcote in “The Bridal of Carrigvarah” (1839), and the Glenfallens in “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) reflect some of the same conflicts and struggles Le Fanu saw and experienced while growing up in rural Ireland. Collected in The Purcell Papers, these stories are connected through Father Purcell, the fictional Catholic Priest among whose papers they were found. In his later works, Le Fanu turned from nostalgically mourning the loss of the noble Irish families to reflecting the way in which a nation is haunted by its past crimes, and he uses supernatural elements to emphasize the effects a nation’s past has on the present. Thus, although his modes of representation changed slightly as he matured, Le Fanu continued to develop the theme that the past is a force which works supernaturally in the present. It makes itself felt in the material world through loss and destruction. Often, the consequences of past actions cannot be avoided, but Le Fanu suggests it is important to recognize the power of the past in order to understand that actions in the present will affect the future.

Through the character of Father Purcell, Le Fanu projects his own anxieties onto Irish history. Because Father Purcell is dead and the fictional editor has sifted through Purcell’s papers to decide which are interesting enough to collect and publish, the stories already have a sense of history. However, they also are primarily stories of people’s lives and histories from further back. In order to distance the stories even more, Le Fanu includes notes from the fictional editor which remark on the deaths of those involved. In reference to the Countess in “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,” the editor states,

She is no more–she long since died, a childless and a widowed wife, and as her letter sadly predicts, none survive to whom the publication of this narrative can prove “injurious, or even painful.” Strange! two [sic] powerful and wealthy families, that into which she was born, and that into which she had married, have ceased to be–they are utterly extinct. (2)

The history that this and other stories in The Purcell Papers recount is distanced by the deaths of the people involved, and the noble characters in these stories, like the Ireland of old, “is no more.” In “The Prince of the Invisible,” Lozes argues that Father Purcell’s preoccupation “with the ancient glory of Ireland . . . strikingly contrasts its present dismal condition” (94). By distancing these stories and creating noble characters with which the reader can sympathize, Le Fanu develops a sense of nostalgia for Ireland before the nineteenth century.

In the prologue to Le Fanu’s early story “The Last Heir of Castle Connor,” the narrator, Father Purcell, establishes a sense of nostalgia by reminding the reader of Ireland’s past grandeur:

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, proving, in mournful contrast with present desolation and decay, what was in other days, appeal, with a resistless power, to the sympathies of our nature. (98)

While the reader is pondering this “evidence of greatness,” Purcell refers to ruined families whose “self-devotion and sacrifices in the cause of a lost country and of a despised religion” (99) instill a passionate interest in the person who gazes on the ruins of these families. In fact, the story of the demise of the young O’Connor, as Lozes also notes, can be read as “an allegory of the fate of . . . his own country . . .” (95). Although Lozes sees this story as an allegory of “the blind savagery [that] directs the theater of its [Ireland’s] history” (95), it seems to be more of an allegory suggesting that something has infiltrated Ireland and is turning the people of its country against one another. Fitzgerald has a preternaturally evil quality about him, and his desire to kill O’Connor after they have developed a friendship almost parallels the way in which the Irish people were divided. Some Irish-Catholics, recognizing the inevitability of British rule, acceded, and others, with a sentimental and noble belief in nationalism and their religious freedom, would not give in. Like young O’Connor, they sacrificed themselves and their family lines by remaining true to their faith during a period when being a Catholic meant being denied education and land. Thus, “The Last Heir” can be seen as a farewell to a noble class of Irish who sacrificed itself on principle in the same way that O’Connor deliberately aims away from Fitzgerald in order to keep his soul free from blood guilt. Because Fitzgerald is a mysterious character who seems to have other-worldly qualities, Le Fanu indicates that the effects of the past on the present appear supernatural in some instances, at the least they have an eerie preternatural quality. By drawing a picture of the glory of the old and noble families of Ireland, Le Fanu develops a sense of nostalgia for a country that has decayed because of the internal divisions.

Similarly, this nostalgia is developed in “The Bridal of Carrigvarah” (1839). In this story, Father Purcell introduces the character Martin Heathcote, father to a young girl who marries the young O’Mara, the boy next door, not long before he is killed. Heathcote still lives in the stone house constructed by the Puritan Cromwellite settlers from England in the middle of the seventeenth century. Despite his Protestant ancestry, he has converted to “the true faith” (104) of Catholicism. Although the young O’Mara marries Heathcote’s daughter, Ellen, it is a secret marriage because Colonel O’Mara wants his Irish son to marry Lady Emily, from England. Threatened with disinheritance if he does not marry Lady Emily, the young O’Mara visits her after he is married to Ellen. Prompted by an evil character Dwyer, who has mysterious qualities like Fitzgerald, Heathcote follows O’Mara to the city. Before the young O’Mara can disclose his secret marriage, Heathcote does this for him. Enraged, Lady Emily’s father kills O’Mara in a duel. Because of Ellen’s poor health, Heathcote and Colonel O’Mara never inform her of her husband’s death, and she lives in seclusion believing that O’Mara chose to be with Lady Emily. Eventually, Ellen’s illness leads to her death. Again, two noble family lines collapse because of the machinations of a character with evil motives. Dwyer turns the British against the Irish and divides the Irish against themselves. Despite his Protestant heritage and his family’s immigration to Ireland, Heathcote has become a part of Ireland, as his Catholicism attests, whereas Lady Emily and her family are British. Colonel O’Mara’s desire to marry his son to an English woman can be seen as an attempt to dismiss his Irish heritage in favor of wealth and status. Dwyer’s presence and ability to manipulate others seems almost supernatural, and his machinations indicate an Ireland too willing to serve its own interests by sacrificing its principles. The young O’Mara and Ellen Heathcote are the true, noble, Irish-by-birth characters, whether from Anglican or Catholic heritage, who can no longer exist in an Ireland which has lost its heritage to an assimilation with England.

This nostalgia for what has been lost can be seen in other stories in The Purcell Papers such as “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839) in which another ancient family line is lost. Before his marriage to the current Lady Glenfallen, Lord Glenfallen has previously married a woman who appears to be Dutch and who is blind. Thus, the blind first wife of Glenfallen is associated with Protestant invader, William of Orange, who invaded from Holland and with whom Le Fanu’s ancestors were allied. Despite, or perhaps because of, these associations, Le Fanu never indicates that this first wife is to blame. Rather, Lord Glenfallen appears to be at fault for attempting to be true to two women, one associated with Protestantism and the other with Catholicism. As in the cases of O’Connor and O’Mara, it is the division between loyalty to Irish heritage and loyalty to the new ruling class that causes the destruction of the Glenfallen family line. In this case, however, the past invades upon the present through visions rather than manifestations of evil. Lady Glenfallen sees a black veil dropped before her eyes, and Lord Glenfallen imagines he speaks with angels. Although these are not explicitly supernatural events, their preternatural qualities suggest that something other than an material force is acting. Lord Glenfallen’s division of loyalties between his wives reflects Le Fanu’s own sense of divided loyalties.

By developing nostalgia for the “ancient grandeur” of Ireland, Le Fanu heightens the contrast between Ireland’s past glory and its decay in the nineteenth century. This contrast emphasizes the destructive effects injustices of the past can have on the present and the almost supernatural way they are manifested in the world. Not only do the injustices of the past haunt the present, but like a ghost, nostalgia of the past haunts the present to reinforce the memory of past injustices.

In his stories after those collected in The Purcell Papers, Le Fanu heightens the impact of the past on the present by focusing on elements of the supernatural. He shows that the past not only haunts national memories, but it also haunts a nation in a way that is more inexplicable. In “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853), “Ultor De Lacy” (1861), “The Stories of Lough Guir” (1870), and “Carmilla” (1871-72), supernatural elements from the past invade the present. Differing from those in his earlier works, these elements are not merely preternatural visions or mysterious characters; rather they have a material presence, heightening the supernatural quality and emphasizing the impact the past has on the present.

McCormack argues that suicide is a symbol for Le Fanu’s time in history and the destruction of the Anglo-Irish because the laws they made caused the strife and uprisings that threatened them (80). As he shows through noble Irish characters in “The Last Heir,” and “The Bridal of Carrigvarah,” Le Fanu shows through suicides that the destruction of Ireland comes from within, from the divided Irish and Anglo-Irish. The demise of Ireland returns to haunt the people currently living in Ireland in the same way the ghost of Judge Horrock haunts the two medical students who rent the house in which he hanged himself. In “Strange Disturbances,” the two students are haunted by this ghost over a number of nights. The fact that the students are unaware of the story surrounding the house before they see the ghost suggests history can haunt people even when they have no knowledge of it. If, as McCormack suggests, suicides do represent the demise of the Anglo-Irish, then this story of the fantastic can be understood as Ireland’s history, specifically the cruelty of the Anglo-Irish upon the Irish that brings about the demise of both. Although his heritage is never revealed, Judge Horrock lived in eighteenth-century Ireland and is associated with the ruling class of Anglo-Irish because of his position as barrister. He was a particularly cruel judge, and in the same way his ghost comes back to haunt the present occupants of the house, the crimes of the English return to haunt the lives of those occupying Ireland in the present. Although the students in this story do not suffer except for sleepless and fearful nights, there are other stories in which Le Fanu uses a similar technique to emphasize the often harmful effects past cruelties have on the present.

“Ultor De Lacy,” subtitled “A Legend of Cappercullen,” is specifically historical in its dealings with the sixteenth- and eighteenth-century wars and their effects on Victorian Ireland. However, Le Fanu locates this history in one family, the De Lacys. Like the divided Ireland, the De Lacys have a divided history. Although the family has English origins, it is now “long naturalized in Ireland” (445). This division is echoed in the current De Lacy, Ultor. Whereas Ultor De Lacy fights against the crown of England and is forced to go into hiding and leave his daughters, his ancestor, Walter De Lacy, a hundred and fifty years earlier, took Irish prisoners on orders from the Queen of England. One of the prisoners taken by Walter De Lacy was a man named O’Donnell, who had asked that his life be spared because of a familial connection to the De Lacys. He was executed, however, and at his death, he vowed to destroy the De Lacy family. One hundred and fifty years after his death, O’Donnell returns to haunt the De Lacys and seduces Una, the youngest and fairest of Ultor’s daughters. After being seduced by O’Donnell, Una disappears from the material world, and Alice, the oldest, is pledged to, and eventually enters, a convent. The family line is ended. The De Lacy’s past comes back to haunt and destroy the family. In “Blue Devils and Green Tea,” Barbara Gates notes that “in the fictional world of Le Fanu, whatever a man’s visage or name, his past cannot be eluded or denied; it is encoded within him” (190). Although she refers to Le Fanu’s novel Checkmate, in which a man attempts to disguise his identity and return from exile by changing the appearance of his face, her statement is certainly true of “Ultor De Lacy” as well. The De Lacys cannot escape the crimes against the Irish committed by their ancestor, Walter, even though they were committed over a century prior to the time of the story. Through the supernatural presence of O’Donnell, Le Fanu shows that the past is a powerful force, physically affecting the present.

Similarly, the past becomes a supernatural force in the “Stories of Lough Guir.” For this collection of anecdotes, Le Fanu returns to his childhood, remembering Irish superstitions and folk tales. These folk tales and superstitions take on a slightly different tone from those in The Purcell Papers, though. Whereas tales of superstition and folklore in The Purcell Papers usually have a natural explanation at the end, the tales in “The Stories of Lough Guir” are clearly supernatural. Two of the stories in this collection refer to instances in which the Magician, Earl of Desmond, attempts to lure someone into speaking with him in order to break the curse which has sent him and his castle to the bottom of the lake from which he emerges every seven years. In one instance, the Earl approaches a blacksmith and motions for him to re-shoe the horse; however, when the blacksmith sees that the horse has on silver shoes, he is aware that this is the Magician Earl, and the smith utters a prayer. Of course, this angers the Magician who cannot harm the smith now that he has prayed, and the Earl disappears. Because the smith did not speak with the Magician Earl, he was safe from harm. The Earl remains under the spell, “but what, in the event of his [the Earl’s] succeeding, would befall the person whom he had thus ensnared, no one knows” (148). This story, like the others in the collection, emphasizes the force of the past within the present. It was centuries ago that the Magician Earl was confined to the lake, yet his presence is felt among the people of the county who still fear him, much as the Irish still suffer under the presence of the English. McCormack also notes that in the “Stories of Lough Guir,” each tale “tells of an unsuccessful attempt by the past to lure a human being into complicity with evil or death” (240). Although the past is unsuccessful in these stories, it still threatens the peace of the present. The threat is physical; like Una in “Ultor De Lacy,” a person who speaks to the Earl may be taken from the physical world. Just as with the history of the Irish nation, the history of an Irish county looms as a powerful force in the present.

“Carmilla,” too, suggests the idea that the past sins of a nation linger, affecting those who inhabit it in the present. Although set in Styria and not explicitly about Ireland, “Carmilla” often is read as political allegory of the Anglo-Irish. Because Laura’s father is English, he and his family are outsiders in Styria, much as the English are outsiders in Ireland. However, like the Anglo-Irish, the narrator, is a hybrid: Laura’s father is British and her mother, who died when Laura was young and is rarely mentioned throughout the story, is Styrian. Like the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, Laura has a position of power in Austria. Her father owns a castle, and even though they are not wealthy by English standards, “a small income, in that part of the world, goes a long way” (244). Thus, when Carmilla, emerging from the ancient folktales of Austria, intrudes on Laura’s life, threatening her existence and luring her toward death, it is as if Laura’s Austrian heritage intrudes on and threatens her complacent, aristocratic, English life. At the same time Laura is repelled by Carmilla, she is drawn to her. Even though she seems to be rescued from Carmilla’s power, Laura cannot fully escape, imagining she hears Carmilla’s step. As Robert Tracy notes in The Unappeasable Host, Laura’s situation in “Carmilla” suggests “the lives of many Anglo-Irish landowners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” in which the old Catholic families threatened the English landowners as Carmilla threatens Laura and her family (71). Tracy also remarks on the Laura’s inability to escape Carmilla: “In Laura’s failure to resist we can perhaps discern Le Fanu’s deepest anxieties about his own class, and his fear that the events of Irish history can never be laid to rest” (72). History is vampiric, drawing those from the present into the same cycle, creating more vampires. The events in the past affect the present, and the events in the present will affect future generations; each generation returning to haunt the next.

Not only can “Carmilla” be read as political history, but also as sexual and economic history. In fact, in Politics of Atrocity and Lust, Alok Bhalla argues that Laura is the sexual and economic victim of her father’s patriarchal culture. Bhalla claims that Carmilla is “the monster men always succeed in creating when they refuse to meet other men in a free and equal democratic space” (30). Thus, Laura is threatened because of her dependence on her father. She depends on him both economically and sexually. Although Laura’s economic dependence is easily understood–Laura must rely on her father for income until she is married at which time she will rely on her husband–her sexual dependence should be explained briefly. Because Laura and her father live in a castle in Austria, they are isolated; the nearest residence which houses a family of their social class is over three miles away, and the only person of Laura’s age who resides there is a young woman. However, as the reader soon discovers, the young woman was killed by Carmilla. Laura has no contact with anyone but her father and the household servants, and she has no means by which to discover her own sexuality or develop it in relation to men. It is likely that her father would have chosen her husband for her; he controls her sexuality. When Carmilla enters and begins to awaken Laura’s sexuality, interfering with the relationship between her and her father, the lesbianism and loss of vitality, Bhalla argues, is a natural extension of the power which her father holds over Laura. Carmilla takes Laura’s life and strength, slowly killing her in the same way that oppressive rulers slowly drain the economic life from those over whom they rule, and “Laura’s agony is a particular instance of the pattern of social cruelty and human grief which has persisted over centuries and has, therefore, begun to be seen as if it is preternatural” (Bhalla 26). This social cruelty is historical; just as England invaded and oppressed Ireland, making it economically dependant, the power-hungry patriarchal system of Laura’s father oppresses Laura and threatens to make her another Carmilla. Thus, Laura, “believing she has no choice, . . . surrenders herself without protest and . . . becomes another victim in the long and repeated histories of sexual and economic coercion . . .” (Bhalla 30). Because the English, patriarchal system has created Carmilla and threatens to make Laura vampiric like Carmilla, it is as if Laura’s father has threatened his own family’s existence because of his oppression of Laura and isolation from the Austrian culture of Laura’s mother. Although Bhalla’s reading might seem a bit forced, the idea of division is important. Carmilla awakens Laura sexually, and her recognition of her own sexuality is contrary to her image of herself as a young Victorian lady. With the help of her father and English Victorian culture, Laura tries to ignore both her sexuality and her Styrian heritage, but they emerge in the supernatural form of Carmilla. This is similar to Le Fanu’s perception that a divided Ireland was destroying itself by ignoring its heritage. The past pattern of oppression and rebellion affects the present, and those who live in the present are at risk of becoming like vampires themselves, repeating the sins of their nations at the same time during which they suffer for them.

Le Fanu was well aware of this inevitable intrusion of the history of a nation on its present inhabitants; nineteenth-century Ireland was suffering from the political events of the seventeenth century and, it can be argued, suffering for events as far back as the twelfth. By ignoring history, people are unlikely to recognize the threat it poses to their present stability. In Victorian Ireland, the Anglo-Irish were in danger of losing not only their position in society, but also their land if the Irish uprisings were successful. The aristocracy needed to understand the past injustices in order to recognize the present threat. Another danger in ignoring a nation’s past is that the crimes it has already committed may be repeated only to affect future generations. Certainly, England and Ireland are still experiencing the consequences for the social injustices committed by England centuries ago.

Family Ghosts

Similar to Le Fanu’s interest in national history, which is evident throughout his writing career, his interest in the history of families appears in his stories from the early ones collected in The Purcell Papers to the later ones from In a Glass Darkly. Stories such as “The Last Heir,” “A Tyrone Family,” and “Ultor De Lacy” indicate his interest in both the familial and the political, and they also show that the familial and political are intimately intertwined. As I remarked earlier, though, I have separated the two for clarity. The threat of ancestral history is apparent in his stories, however, and because these themes are most obviously evident in those stories which are supernatural, I refer primarily to Le Fanu’s later stories in which the supernatural is more prevalent. Also, because of the way in which Le Fanu intertwines family histories with political histories, I refer to some of the stories mentioned earlier, primarily “Carmilla.” Whether through the use of specters, vampires, or men returned from the dead, Le Fanu uses these supernatural occurrences in his stories to demonstrate the powerful force of ancestral history.

In many of Le Fanu’s stories such as “Ultor De Lacy” and “The Mysterious Lodger” (1850), the consequences of one character’s actions are suffered by others of a later generation. Just as Una, Alice, and Ultor suffer for the sins of their ancestor, Walter De Lacy, the children in “The Mysterious Lodger” “will have to pay for the sins of the father, because of some ruthless determinism” (Zeender 83). In this story, the narrator’s children die under suspicious and horrible circumstances that are connected to his atheism. Some force, which science is unable to explain, works within this world to serve retribution for crimes committed, in this case spiritual crimes, but it is indifferent to the innocence or culpability of the person on whom it exacts revenge. For example, unlike Walter De Lacy, Ultor De Lacy is innocent of crimes against the Irish because Ultor rebels against England, the country for whom his ancestor fought. Unfortunately, Ultor cannot escape the consequences for his ancestor’s actions; they are “encoded within him” (Gates 190). As Joseph Browne recognizes, “the most horrible fears and the greatest terrors for Le Fanu were generated not only by man’s capacity for self-destruction . . . but also by the prolonged suffering and wretched misery that such destruction could effect in succeeding generations among the guilty and innocent alike” (9). Although neither Gates nor Browne connects an individual character with a nation, it is apparent that in the same way a nation must suffer the consequences of its past actions, so must the descendants of a family line suffer the consequences of their ancestors’ actions. It is this force of family history that Le Fanu emphasizes by combining a strong sense of family heritage with the supernatural.

Although including primates as a part of family heritage may not be usual, in the nineteenth century there was much discussion about the relationship between humans and apes; Darwinism threatened the religious beliefs of many. When Darwin’s work appeared, it challenged the traditional understanding of ancestry or, at the very least, added a new dimension to it. Given Darwin’s claims about evolution, discussions about the evolution of humans certainly could not be avoided during the Victorian period. As Lenora Ledwon points out in “Darwin’s Ghosts,” it is important to remember Darwin never claimed that humans descended from apes, but rather that they had a common ancestor. Although Darwin did not discuss the implications of natural selection for humans in Origin of the Species (1859), Ledwon notes that “the public immediately drew the obvious conclusion that man was kin to the ape” (10). After presenting this background, she continues to argue that, published in 1869, two years before The Descent of Man, Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” can be read as a story responding to the frightening implications of Darwinism for clergy. She asks, “why not assume the apparition of the monkey [in “Green Tea”] represents a monkey . . . ? A monkey has terrible implications for a clergy-man in the post-Darwinian world” (12). Ledwon is not alone in noticing the Darwinian implications of “Green Tea.” Helen Stoddart in “The Precautions of Nervous People are Infectious,” also recognizes the similarities between the monkey in the story and the primates of Darwinism. When the spectral monkey first appears, Jennings is studying Pagan and ancient religions. Although he is a clergy-man and apparently a strong Christian believer, he is haunted even during his prayers. Eventually, the monkey urges him to slit his throat, and despite his attempts to ignore the monkey, he cannot fight it and kills himself. If this deadly ghost is a Darwinian monkey, Jennings is haunted by the ghosts of his ancestors; no matter how much scripture he reads, he cannot escape his heritage, his animalistic nature. In fact, it is possible that Jennings’s research may have contributed to his hallucinations. Because his research is about Pagan religions, there is also a connection to the Druids of ancient England and Ireland, another type of ancestral heritage. Thus, Jennings can escape neither his Pagan religious past nor can he escape his Darwinian biological past. His animalistic and primitive heritage haunts him. The Darwinian rumors during the Victorian period offered Le Fanu another method for emphasizing human inability to escape the powerful force of history and the past.

In two of his later works, “The Haunted Baronet” (1870) and “Carmilla” (1871-72), Le Fanu returns to more traditional family ancestry to emphasize the force of the past. Although “Carmilla” involves a slightly older family line, the hauntings in both stories emerge from maternal ancestry. In “The Haunted Baronet,” it is the wrong committed by Sir Jasper Mardykes upon Mary Feltram that must be avenged by Philip and William three generations later. Sir Bale Mardykes, Sir Jasper’s descendant, is not innocent: he drinks, gambles, wastes his money, and treats Philip cruelly. Thus, when vengeance is attained, “the personal and the ancestral past are made to coincide . . .” (Coughlan 37). When Philip is dragged from the lake and pronounced dead, the doctor, a representative of physical science, cannot explain how Philip regains his life. Whether he has been raised from the dead or this is a spirit manifested through Philip’s body is unclear. Either way, a force more powerful than the physical world has brought him back. Because of his personality change after his apparent death, he appears to be a supernatural presence. There are other supernatural presences, too. Sir Bale discovers that one of the men to whom Philip introduces him is identical to the man in a picture his servant finds stored away. Apparently, the picture is of Mary Feltram’s father, who is now supernaturally manifested in the physical world to exact revenge on Mardykes’ descendants. After Sir Bale dies, Philip mysteriously disappears, and the Mardykes’ land passes to Sir Bale’s wife, who, in her will, bequeaths the land to her cousin, William Feltram, younger brother to Philip. The wrongs of history have been corrected, and the Feltrams now own the property that should have been theirs.

Through supernatural means, the force of the past has intruded into the present; its power to resurrect the dead Philip cannot be explained by the doctor of physical science, yet it affects the physical world. Just as Philip inherits the crimes committed against his great-grandmother and must avenge them, Sir Bale inherits his ancestor’s crime as well as the punishment for that crime. In an attempt to explain this connection, Patricia Coughlan comments that “Sir Bale seems to carry in the people’s mind the guilt associated with his ancestor’s evil deed. It seems that he is not quite fully an individual, but as well as being himself, in some sense is also his ancestor” (32). The supernatural presence of Philip as well as Mary’s father seems to suggest that Bale is being punished for his own crime as well as his ancestor’s crime. There are two wrongs being avenged: Sir Jasper’s treatment of Mary and Sir Bale’s treatment of Philip. Bale must suffer for both. Just as Jennings cannot escape his Darwinian ancestry, Bale cannot escape his familial ancestry.

Similarly, Laura, the narrator and victim in “Carmilla,” cannot escape her family’s past. While Laura and her father are looking at some restored paintings, they find a portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, dated 1698, and Laura comments, “I am descended from the Karnsteins; that is, mama was” (273). This picture contains the history of Laura’s own family line at the same time it intermingles with the present, for Carmilla is the Countess Mircalla from the picture. As Carol Senf states in “Women and Power in ‘Carmilla,’” “that Carmilla is a distant ancestor of Laura’s mother, another woman who may have succumbed to a vampire attack, leads the reader to infer that Laura is simply the last in a long line of victims” (28). Laura cannot escape her family’s history and is intimately connected to her maternal ancestor. Carmilla’s “presence once again suggests that the new times have not found their way out of anguish; the future has already been prefigured in the despairs of the past and has been foredoomed” (Bhalla 31). Although Bhalla argues this in reference to the political revolutions of the countryside, the same is true of Laura’s familial history. She is related to Carmilla through her mother, and the family connection haunts and nearly kills her. It is possible that what has happened to Carmilla in the past might happen to Laura; she may become a vampire herself. Once Carmilla is killed with a wooden stake through the heart and decapitated, it may seem that her threat and the threat of the past is gone. However, as Jack Sullivan remarks, Carmilla’s death scene “fails to contain the larger forces of which she is only a single manifestation” (60), implying that the threat still exists and explaining Laura’s longing for Carmilla as she concludes her narrative. Sullivan never indicates, though, what the “larger forces” are, but William Veeder recognizes that one of these forces is the past. Although Veeder does not focus on Laura’s family heritage, his statement, “the past can never be purged” (219), is applicable to a reading of “Carmilla” that implies a person is haunted continually by his or her family heritage.

Throughout his other short stories, Le Fanu continues to emphasize that the past is a force which “can never be purged.” Whether it be the past of a nation, the past of a family, the past of all humanity, or his own past, Le Fanu recognized it as a powerful force affecting the physical world. To heighten the reader’s awareness of this presence, Le Fanu turned to supernatural elements which represented the power of the past. By showing the power of this non-material force, Le Fanu warns his readers that there are elements of which they may not be aware affecting their lives. Similarly, he attempts to explain the plight of Victorian Ireland through stories such as “The Last Heir of Castle Connor,” “The Bridal of Carrigvarah,” and “Ultor De Lacy” by showing how past events emerge in and affect the present state of the nation. In stories such as “The Haunted Baronet” and “Carmilla,” Le Fanu also shows that often people in this world suffer the consequences for actions taken by their ancestors centuries earlier. The non-material force of the past manifests itself in the present, affecting those who are connected with it. As Joseph Browne notes, Le Fanu’s villains “rarely ‘look back’ to realize the suffering they have caused. Needless to say, they never look forward either to the destructive consequences of their acts–consequences which Le Fanu always forces the reader to appreciate” (13). Because Le Fanu highlights the impact the past has on the present, the reader becomes aware that any actions taken in the present may have a profound, often unexpected, and seemingly supernatural effect in the future.

WORKS CITED

Primary Works

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street.” Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1964. 361-79.

—. “The Bridal of Carrigvarah.” The Purcell Papers, vol. 2. New York: AMS, 1975. 103-83.

—. “Carmilla.” In a Glass Darkly. Herfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995. 232-302.

—. “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family.” The Purcell Papers, vol. 3. New York: AMS, 1975. 29-135.

—. “The Last Heir of Castle Connor.” The Purcell Papers, vol. 1. New York: AMS, 1975. 98-200.

—. “The Mysterious Lodger.” J. S. Le Fanu Ghost Stories and Mysteries, ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1975. 332-72.

—. “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess.” The Purcell Papers, vol. 2. New York: AMS, 1975. 1-102.

—. “Stories of Lough Guir.” J. S. Le Fanu Ghost Stories and Mysteries, ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1975. 144-52.

—. “Ultor De Lacy.” Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1964. 444-66.

Le Fanu, William. Seventy Years of Irish Life. New York: AMS, 1976.

Secondary Works

Bhalla, Alok. Politics of Atrocity and Lust: The Vampire Tale as a Nightmare History of England in the Nineteenth Century. New Delhi: Sterling, 1990.

Browne, Joseph. "Ghosts and Gouls and Lefanu." The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 8.1 (1982): 5-15.

Carter, Margaret L. Specter or Delusion? The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction. Studies in Speculative Fiction 15. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1987.

Coughlan, Patricia. "Doubles, Shadows, Sedan-Charis and the Past: The ‘Ghost Stories’ of J. S. Le Fanu." Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature. Eds. Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox. Totowa: Barnes and Nobles, 1989. 17-39.

Crawford, Gary William. J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography. Bio-Bibliographies in World Literature 3. Westport: Greenwood, 1995.

Ellis, S. M. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others. London: Constable, 1951.

Gates, Barbara T. "Blue Devils and Green Tea: Sheridan Le Fanu's Haunted Suicides." Studies in Short Fiction 24 (1987): 15-23.

Jackson, T. A. Ireland Her Own. London: Cobbet P, 1946.

Ledwon, Lenora. "Darwin's Ghosts: The Influence of Darwinism on the Nineteenth-Century Ghost Story." Proteus 6.2 (1989): 10-16.

Lozes, Jean. "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: The Prince of the Invisible." The Irish Short Story. Eds. Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1979. 91-101.

McCormack, W. J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Sage, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Senf, Carol. “Women and Power in ‘Carmilla.’” Gothic ns 2 (1987): 25-33.

Stoddart, Helen. "The Precautions of Nervous People are Infectious: Sheridan Le Fanu's Symptomatic Gothic." The Modern Language Review 86 (1991): 19-34.

Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio UP, 1978.

Swafford, James. "Tradition and Guilt in Le Fanu's ‘Schalken the Painter.’" The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 14.2 (1989): 48-59.

Tracy, Robert. The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities. Dublin: University College Dublin P, 1998.

Veeder, William. "‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 197-223.

Wall, Maureen. “The Age of the Penal Laws.” The Course of Irish History. Eds. T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin.1967. Cork: Mercer P, 1984. 217-231.

Zeender, Marie-Noëlle. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Sweedenborg: An Inquiry into the Origins of ‘The Mysterious Lodger.’” Etudes-Irlandaises 5 (1980): 75-89.