SOURCE: "Misalliance and Anglo-Irish Tradition in Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 47, No. 2, September, 1992, pp. 164-86.

[In the essay below, Howes discusses Le Fanu's novel Uncle Silas in the context of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish politics and history.]

Terms like heritage and tradition have often functioned as problems, absences, or crippling legacies in discussions of Anglo-Irish culture.¹ In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1864 Gothic novel, Uncle Silas, our heroine, the beautiful heiress Maud Ruthyn, promises her exacting and aristocratic father, Austin, that she is willing to "make some sacrifice" in order to restore the lost honor of their family name and tradition.² Her father exhorts her to remember that "the character and influence of an ancient family is a peculiar heritage—sacred but destructible; and woe to him who either destroys or suffers it to perish!" (p. 104). Austin Ruthyn's speech points out two important features of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature: its tendency to figure Anglo-Irish tradition—political and cultural—as an aristocratic dynasty, and its ambivalent characterization of that tradition as both sacred and fragile. His daughter Maud, the silent recipient of his injunctions and the willing sacrifice to the family honor, indicates a related characteristic of Anglo-Irish literature: its persistent habit of encoding its discussions of tradition in representations of gender and sexual issues. This essay will map the historical and political peculiarities of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish heritage in Le Fanu's text, arguing that Uncle Silas structures its representations of Anglo-Irish political anxieties as anxieties about the construction of femininity and the regulation of female sexuality.

Anglo-Irish literature, as distinct from Irish literature written in English, can be defined as the literary production of the social and political caste whose domination of Ireland under British rule was known as the Protestant Ascendancy. The Anglo-Irish were a local ruling class whose pretensions to aristocracy belied their profoundly middle-class character, and whose imaginative construction of an authoritative, aristocratic political and cultural tradition belied their dependence on English centers of power for their strength and legitimacy in Ireland. Like all traditions, the Anglo-Irish tradition was an invented tradition³ whose asserted unity and stability over time and across groups of people sought to mask change and fragmentation. What was unusual about the Anglo-Irish was the degree to which change and fragmentation themselves became the consistent, identifiable characteristics of their invented political and cultural tradition. Because of their hybrid cultural status and tenuous political position, the Protestant Ascendancy imagined an Anglo-Irish tradition that was legitimating and empowering, but simultaneously broken, betrayed, and corrupt. Many of the features specific to Anglo-Irish literature and culture (and illustrated in Uncle Silas) are the results of this ambivalent structure.

Le Fanu's life and family background typify, in many ways, the predicament of the Anglo-Irish in the mid nineteenth century. He was born in 1814 into a middle-class professional (rather than landowning) family. Le Fanu's father was a Protestant minister whose fortunes declined with Catholic emancipation and growing resistance to tithes. Eleven years of Le Fanu's childhood were spent living in Phoenix Park, at the military school where his father was chaplain and where Le Fanu observed constant displays of British military and imperial power that were spectacular yet clearly symbolic and ritualized. The parades, ceremonies, and symbols that dominated Dublin's military life were the trappings of military force rather than its instruments; they suggested power, but power centered elsewhere.⁴ In 1826 Le Fanu's father became the rector at Abington, in Limerick, and there the family became the target of popular resentment and hostility during the disturbances over tithes in the early 1830s (see McCormack, pp. 37-71). Le Fanu was trained as a lawyer but became interested in writing, and managed to make a relatively meager but respectable living at it. He bought the Dublin University Magazine in 1861 and acquired a partnership interest in the Dublin Evening Mail. While he could and did serialize his novels in the Dublin University Magazine thereafter, Le Fanu remained financially dependent on selling them to his London publisher (McCormack, p. 200).

These experiences—living close to a military presence that was more show than substance; being not merely isolated from but openly resented, howled at, and even stoned by the native Irish at Abington; and remaining dependent on his London publisher and the English literary marketplace for his living—all gave Le Fanu an acute sense of the tenuous political and cultural position of the Anglo-Irish. Le Fanu's response to this position was a series of political interests and associations, all of them dedicated to preserving the Anglo-Irish as a distinct and superior caste. As W. J. McCormack puts it:

Le Fanu's politics 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. There was a consistent thread running through these widely separated corners of the fabric, which might be described variously as opposition to politicized Catholicism or attempts to redefine grounds for Protestant supremacism.

(p. 209)

By the time he wrote Uncle Silas Le Fanu was a committed conservative with an intense interest in Irish politics, and was the only contemporary Irish writer of note who was actively involved in the Dublin political and intellectual scene (McCormack, p. 196).

Despite the fact that the novel in its final form is set in England, Le Fanu's critics have generally agreed on its underlying "Irishness." McCormack, whose literary biography of Le Fanu is the best and most thorough examination of his work to date, claims that "more than any other of the novels of 'an English setting and of modern times'Uncle Silas indirectly reveals an Anglo-Irish provenance" (p. 204). In her introduction to the novel, Elizabeth Bowen recorded her impression that Uncle Silas is "an Irish story transposed to an English setting,"⁵ and this is quite literally true. Uncle Silas is based on a short story that Le Fanu originally published in 1833 under the title "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess." It was reprinted in 1851, with some minor changes, as "The Murdered Cousin." In the original short stories, which are set in Ireland, Le Fanu was explicit about the Irish referents of his tale about a noble family degenerating into such displays of vice and crime as gambling, attempts to force the narrator into marriage, and murder. The framing narrator of "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess," a Catholic priest named Father Purcell, testifies to the historical accuracy of the narrative: "To those who know anything of the history of Irish families, as they were less than a century ago, the facts which immediately follow will at once suggest the names of the principal actors."⁶ The narrator of "The Murdered Cousin" characterizes the text as a "story of the Irish peerage."⁷

Since the major market for Anglo-Irish literary production was England, Anglo-Irish writers like Le Fanu had to accommodate British reading tastes, which preferred romance to politics, especially where the Irish were concerned, and which often preferred not to read about the Irish at all. Indeed, one distinguishing feature of Anglo-Irish literature has always been its economic dependence on an English market whose demands often dictated that Anglo-Irish writers present Irish political concerns and questions in indirect and encoded form. During the 1860s the Fenian threat made Irish settings and themes particularly unpalatable to the English reading public,⁸ and in 1863 Le Fanu's London publisher demanded that future novels deal with English settings and modern times (McCormack, p. 140). Accordingly, when Le Fanu expanded his story into Uncle Silas he abandoned the Irish scene and set the novel in England. He also added the sexual corruption of a cross class marriage to the list of Silas's sins, and, further, made Silas's misalliance with a Welsh barmaid his original sin, the one that initiates his family's decline and functions as a symbol for his corruption in general. The barmaid's lower-class origins and Welsh ancestry maintain the connection, established explicitly in the short stories, between Celtic nature or influence and the family's descent into debauch and decay. "She drank," comments Maud's cousin Monica Knollys, "I am told that Welsh women often do" (p. 147). While he suppressed the overtly "Irish" aspects of the story by changing the setting and dropping references to the lamentable state of the Irish peerage, Le Fanu enlarged upon the text's indirectly or structurally Irish characteristics through its emphasis on sexual corruption and its preoccupation with Maud's femininity. To work out why genealogical decay, the sexual corruption of marital misalliance, and a preoccupation with the nature and construction of femininity indicate the text's specifically Anglo-Irish origins and concerns, we need to examine the relationship between the Protestant Ascendancy and English imperialist culture.

Anglo-Irish discourses about their uncertain political and cultural status were intimately bound up with representations of gender and sexuality as a result of the structure of contemporary British imperialism. During the nineteenth century, British rule of Ireland underwent two related changes that crucially affected Anglo-Irish attitudes and anxieties. First, the number and complexity of agencies, institutions, and laws used to administer Ireland increased steadily over the course of the nineteenth century, and second, during that period British domination shifted from a reliance on military and legal coercion to an increasing reliance on integrating the native Irish into the state apparatus.⁹ Increasing agitation for Catholic emancipation was a major cause of this shift, and the granting of emancipation was an important means of institutionalizing it. Political integration demanded, or was thought to demand, cultural and linguistic assimilation; the establishment of the national schools in Ireland, in which students were forbidden to speak Irish and were taught English history and literature exclusively, followed hard upon the heels of Catholic emancipation. The Irish were to assimilate themselves to the English model of good citizens and responsible economic, political, and sexual actors. Imperial discourses usually characterized such assimilation as a progress from barbarism to civilization. As a result, more and more aspects of Irish life and character were targeted for government observation and regulation, including Irish sexual and reproductive behavior; the year in which Le Fanu's novel was first published in its final form, 1864, was also the first year in which government statutes required that all Irish births be registered (Lyons, p. 68).

While mid-nineteenth-century British imperialist thought was characterized by new practical and ideological emphases on assimilating the native Irish into the cultural and political structures of Britain, it was also characterized by profound anxieties about assimilation in its more threatening guises. The specters that haunted the colonial and especially the Anglo-Irish imagination were racial assimilation that, it was feared, would sap the strength and purity of England, and assimilation as the descent of the British to the political and social level of the barbarous Irish. In Ireland such anxieties did not merely express colonial fears of "going native"; they represented an acute awareness that the shape of the relationship between the Protestant Ascendancy and the Catholic Irish was in fact changing, albeit slowly. The history of the Anglo-Irish in the nineteenth century is one of a gradual diminution of wealth and power. Colonial discourses alternately allegorized Anglo-Irish relations as a family romance and expressed fear of just such a romance between Saxon and Celt on a literal level. Assimilationist thought was both a basis for policy and a response to already existing political and social trends, expressing both the will to power of British imperialism and its fears of impotence and decay as well.

Matthew Arnold's On the Study of Celtic Literature demonstrates the central ambivalences of contemporary assimilationist thought, ambivalences that appear most strikingly in Anglo-Irish literature. It also illustrates that these ambivalences were inseparable from questions of gender and sexuality. Published in 1866, two years after Uncle Silas, Arnold's text would become a founding document of the Celtic movement's cultural nationalism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. At the time, however, Arnold intended the lectures as contributions to constructive unionism.¹⁰ He proposed that the English should strengthen their imperial power by assimilating the Irish more thoroughly into the political and cultural structures of Great Britain. Merely keeping order was not enough; the English needed to integrate the Irish into the state by giving them a fair and rational system of government and by allowing them a certain amount of local control over that system. Arnold constructed a version of Celtic nature that was inferior but complementary to the English character: the Celt was a flawed genius, incapable of self-government, whose brilliant but unstable nature had much to offer the more plodding and rational Saxon. Arnold's version of English imperial hegemony was based on exploiting and cultivating sympathy and natural affinity rather than on force, demanding that Anglo-Saxon and Celt blend their complementary natures into a more perfect whole. This in turn would foster a peaceful political union with "its parts blended together in a common national feeling."'

Arnold's positive and sympathetic (but ultimately damning) characterization of the Celt, and his claim that the Saxon would benefit from embracing, within limits, the Celtic spirit, were among the most radical aspects of Arnold's argument. They also revealed the central contradictions and ambivalences of assimilationist thought with striking clarity. Two points are of particular interest here. First, much of Arnold's essay was concerned with outlining the Celtic element in English literature and with revealing the deep affinities and hidden kinships between Irish and English. Arnold advocated assimilation by claiming that it was already at least partially achieved. The assertion that the English had already assimilated some of the Celtic spirit led him to the fear that they might be debilitated by their Celticism. "Perhaps, if we are doomed to perish . . . ," Arnold wrote, "we shall perish by our Celtism . . . and yet those very Celts, by our affinity with whom we are perishing, will be hating and upbraiding us all the time."¹² The same affinities that Arnold hoped would strengthen British imperial power could also prove its undoing; the British effort to civilize the Celt could instigate or hasten the Saxon's descent into barbarism.

Second, Arnold explicitly connected the Celt's disabilities and "habitual want of success" (Celtic Literature, p. 344) to femininity, a femininity marked by nervousness, inconsistency, and lack of balance:

no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.

(Celtic Literature, p. 347)

Arnold was by no means alone in equating femininity and Celtic nature in terms that related both to nervous disorders. Ernest Renan's La Poesie des Races Celtiques, upon which Arnold drew heavily in On the Study of Celtic Literature, had made the same connections in 1854. "If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to individuals," wrote Renan,

we should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race .. . is an essentially feminine race. No human family, I believe, has carried so much mystery into love. No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo.¹³

What Julian Moynahan has called the "confusion in the mid-Victorian mind . . . between ideas of Celtic nature and of woman's nature"¹⁴ attributed a debilitating mental or nervous instability to both,¹⁵ and this structure of thought persisted beyond the turn of the century. The Celt's femininity marked both his inferiority and his naturally complementary relationship to the masculine Saxon.

Arnold's insistence on the existence of (potentially threatening) natural affinities between Irish and English and his attribution of a near-hysterical femininity to the Celt appear in Anglo-Irish literature with striking regularity. Since assimilation was often figured as a reconciliation through marriage, and since contemporary theories of the racial difference between Saxon and Celt represented it as, in part, a gender difference, it is not surprising that Anglo-Irish texts interrogated the prevailing political structures and issues through representations of romance, sexuality, and gender. Indeed, for many, as for Le Fanu, the economic constraints under which they wrote made it imperative. Sympathetic unionists had long advocated assimilation as the route to a harmonious empire, and had found marriage between the feminine Celt and masculine Saxon the most inviting and profitable figure for such assimilation. Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) is perhaps the best known of these imperial romances.

But Lady Morgan's book was written before Catholic emancipation and the rise of a Catholic middle class made integration inevitable on a less romantic and more threatening level. As the nineteenth century progressed, and governmental policy and rhetoric increasingly emphasized integration in a number of concrete ways, Anglo-Irish anxieties about their own weakness and tenuous hold on power focused more and more on the dangers of assimilation. For the Anglo-Irish imagination, assimilation did not usually signal a harmonious reconciliation with the native Irish; more often it meant their extinction through the absorptive powers of the Gael. The terms in which the prevailing discourses on assimilation cast the possibilities for maintaining British imperial power in Ireland spelled the demise of the Anglo-Irish as a distinct group. For the Anglo-Irish, to stay in power was also to become extinct. Because of this contradiction, Anglo-Irish writers produced a different version of the imperial romance of reconciliation, a Gothic version expressing Arnold's fears of the English perishing through their affinities with Celts and his ascription of a nervous and unbalanced femininity to the Irish. Such texts represented sexuality as the agent of corruption and immolation rather than healthy assimilation, and revealed apparent political and dynastic strength as emptiness and weakness.

While financial necessity demanded that, in expanding and revising, Le Fanu shape the novel to accommodate the British reading public's taste for romantic and sensational thrillers, Uncle Silas also belongs properly to an Anglo-Irish tradition of "Big House Gothics." From Maria Edgeworth to Yeats to J. G. Farrell, writers in this tradition have lamented or chastised the internal corruption of the Anglo-Irish and have figured the political and cultural decline of the Ascendancy as the genealogical decay of a family dynasty in a Gothic setting. Such texts represent the Anglo-Irish less as victims of British indifference or Irish resentment than as victims of their own vices and debilities. Throughout the nineteenth century the Anglo-Irish were criticized for absenteeism, provincialism, greed, profligacy, and a host of other irresponsible behaviors. In 1849 Thomas Carlyle saw Ireland as symptomatic of a general aristocratic decline, exclaiming, "Alas, when will there any real aristocracy arise (here or elsewhere) to need a Capitol for residing in!"¹⁶ Standish O'Grady's famous description of the Anglo-Irish "rotting from the land in the most dismal farce-tragedy of all time, without one brave deed, without one brave word,"¹⁷ was nothing new; it formed part of a tradition, well-established by the 1860s, of characterizing the Anglo-Irish as an aristocracy in decline due to their own internal weaknesses.

Paramount among the perceived internal weaknesses of the Anglo-Irish was their susceptibility to the wrong kinds of assimilation with the Celtic Irish. In the absence of a specifically Irish setting, Le Fanu introduced the sexual corruption of Silas's mismatch with a lower-class Celt to suggest the novel's connections with the threatened Ascendancy. In addition, he emphasized issues of genealogical continuity and dynastic decline to indicate a particularly Anglo-Irish decay. While he was giving Uncle Silas its final form, Le Fanu was engaged in two separate correspondences about his own family genealogy, and the names Austin, Ruthyn, and Silas, none of which appear in the short stories, can be found among Le Fanu's own Anglo-Irish relatives (see McCormack, pp. 205-6, 2).

Silas's son from this marriage, Dudley, a coarse, brutal villain whom Maud finds repulsive, incarnates the family's degradation. Ironically, Silas describes Dudley as the culmination of precisely those hereditary qualities that Silas's marriage has imperiled in the Ruthyn family. He tells Maud that "Dudley is the material of a perfect English gentleman" (pp. 248-49) and "a Ruthyn, the best blood in England—the last man of the race" (p. 325). This parodic combination of asserted cultural and genealogical purity with obvious barbarism and corruption is not merely an ironic comment on the disparity between what Silas imagines Dudley to be and what he is. It points to Anglo-Irish fears that the well-bred English or Anglo-Irish gentleman might, on some level, really be indistinguishable from the debauched barbarian; fears that, as Matthew Arnold argued, deep affinities between Celt and Saxon were already established and partial assimilation was a natural fact. Silas's plan to persuade Maud, who is a wealthy heiress, to marry Dudley is frustrated when Dudley's lower-class wife appears to claim him. Silas comments angrily that Dudley has found "a very suitable and vulgar young woman" (p. 331). Dudley's marriage is both an appropriate index to the family's decay, which renders a Ruthyn a "suitable" match for a "vulgar young woman," and a treacherous repetition of the original misalliance. Such repetition gestures toward the inherent and inevitable nature of the genealogical decline it represents.

Since most nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish Gothics were narratives of internal corruption and decline, they usually revolved around collapsing the distinction between the corrupt house and the apparently pure lineage. Much Gothic fiction of the period begins by positing an external threat, only to reveal the internal origin of the horror.¹⁸ Silas, whose side of the family spirals lower and lower on the social and moral scale through repeated misalliances, and his brother Austin, proud of his pure blood and intent on rehabilitating the dynastic line, are in fact true blood brothers, twin manifestations of the same Anglo-Irish tradition, a tradition whose distinguishing feature was that it was imagined as simultaneously empowering and enfeebling.

Le Fanu charted the collapse of the distinction between the pure and the corrupt via his interest in Swedenborg; W. J. McCormack has argued convincingly that Le Fanu gave Uncle Silas a Swedenborgian structure. In Swedenborg the soul relives its actions after death, and their true moral significance in the world is revealed. Uncle Silas is structured around a series of parallels between Austin and Silas, Knowl and Bartram-Haugh (their respective manor houses), and the events that occur at each location. In effect, everything appears or happens twice, and, McCormack argues (see pp. 148-94), Bartram is the post-mortem re-creation of Knowl in the Swedenborgian sense. While the events of the narrative progress toward a happy ending in which Maud escapes from Silas and Dudley and preserves the purity of her name and lineage, the text renders this progress meaningless by revealing the deep identity between Bartram-Haugh and Knowl. Maud's journey from Knowl to Bartram-Haugh is not a transition from one location to the other or from purity, innocence, and safety to corruption and danger. Rather, it marks a process of revelation. This process has its parallel in Maud's circular journey away from Bartram-Haugh, under her Uncle Silas's assurance that she is on her way to France, only to find herself even more securely imprisoned in Bartram-Haugh. The barbarous crime and decay rampant in Silas's rotting mansion form the inverted mirror image of Austin's cultured preoccupation with family name and lineage.

Austin's role as a local landowner also suggests hidden kinships between his purity and Silas's corruption, which prepare the ground for more explicit and thorough assimilation. Maud extravagantly praises her father's deportment as a responsible member of the gentry:

considering how entirely he secluded himself, my father was, as many people living remember, wonderfully popular in his county. He was neighbourly in everything except in seeing company and mixing in society. He had magnificent shooting, of which he was extremely liberal. He kept a pack of hounds at Dollerton, with which all his side of the county hunted through the season. He never refused any claim upon his purse which had the slightest show of reason. He subscribed to every fund, social, charitable, sporting, agricultural, no matter what, provided the honest people of his county took an interest in it, and always with a princely hand; and although he shut himself up, no one could say that he was inaccessible, for he devoted hours daily to answering letters, and his cheque-book contributed largely in those replies. He had taken his turn long ago as High Sheriff; so there was an end of that claim before his oddity and shyness had quite secluded him. He refused the Lord-Lieutenancy of his county; he declined every post of personal distinction connected with it. He could write an able as well as a genial letter when he pleased; and his appearances at public meetings, dinners, and so forth were made in this epistolary fashion, and when occasion presented, by magnificent contributions from his purse.

(pp. 130-31)

Maud's exaggerated language describes her father as everything that most Irish landlords were not. Austin's "wonderfully popular" status and "neighbourly" behavior indicate a close and benevolent relationship with the community, contrasting sharply with the usual descriptions of the Anglo-Irish as isolated and scornful of their local communities. His hyperbolic willingness to subscribe to "every fund, social, charitable, sporting, agricultural, no matter what" contrasts with the often criticized landlords who refused to spend money locally and drained Irish capital into English banks and estates. It also contrasts with Silas, who has been cutting down trees and using them for coal or selling the bark, wasting the resources of his estate because he is strapped for cash (p. 263).

While Austin is the embodiment of the ideal landlord, what is missing is, literally, his body. Maud's description figures him as a kind of resident absentee in his own neighborhood. He is both neighborly and isolated, a voluntary recluse. He makes repeated contact with the local community, but this contact is always mediated, never direct; his physical presence, even at public meetings and dinners, is supplanted by letters and monetary contributions. The complete absence of his physical presence suggests his connections with the irresponsible absentees so often represented in nineteeth-century Anglo-Irish literature, with the kind of destructive proprietorship Silas represents, and with the experience of Le Fanu's family, who left Abington in 1832, at a financial loss, to move to Dublin temporarily while the tithe war and local hostility to the Le Fanus were at their height (they returned to Abington in 1835) (McCormack, p. 40). Austin's political and economic clout are present only in their effects; like Anglo-Irish hegemony in Ireland, they lack a local center of power. The very terms in which Maud represents Austin's power also reveal the chimerical nature of that power.

A number of critics have argued that the political unconscious of Anglo-Irish literature has a particularly Gothic structure." Uncle Silas's preoccupation with dynastic families, its description of the power of such families as present more in its effects than in its physical manifestations, and the novel's dismantling of the boundaries between the pure and the corrupt are all characteristics that inform critical evaluations of the text as an Anglo-Irish Gothic. In her introduction, Elizabeth Bowen invoked the isolation of the Ascendancy and an obsession with bloodlines as evidence of the text's Irishness, citing the "hermetic solitude" of the Ascendancy country house and the "demonic power of the family myth" as evidence (p. 8). In his biography of Le Fanu, McCormack lists an atmosphere of "a sinister vacancy from which authority has withdrawn" (p. 207), and Le Fanu's interest in dynasties as markers of his Anglo-Irish origins and concerns.

Such assessments have become part of a standard formulation of Anglo-Irish Gothic.²⁰ The symbolic geography of the contrast between the solitary Big House and the surrounding villages has offered an exemplary image of an Ascendancy culture whose distinctive characteristics derive from its dependence on an absent center of power and its alienation from those it rules close at hand. So the disintegration, through its own internal weaknesses, of the territorial dominance and dynastic continuity symbolized by the Big House has proved a resonant and recurring figure through which Anglo-Irish texts could articulate their sense of tradition as fractured and corrupt, something that was betrayed in the precise moment and act of its handing down.

The role of gender and sexuality in this Gothic sense of tradition has been much less extensively discussed. While an approach to the Gothic that is material and political rather than psychological is at least as old as the Marquis de Sade,²¹ such criticism has usually paid insufficient attention to the specifically sexual nature of many of the Gothic's most characteristic obsessions;²² critics who discuss the distinctive sexual aspects of the Gothic tend to adopt a psychoanalytic approach. My purpose here is to reveal the political referents and structures of the Anglo-Irish Gothic by attending to rather than evading the central role that sexuality, especially female sexuality, plays in Gothic fiction. Given the prevailing emphasis on assimilation in imperial discourses on Ireland, the widespread tendency of writers and politicians to figure assimilation (whether beneficial or threatening) as a sexual romance, and the period's association of Celtic and feminine nature, it seems inevitable that representations of gender and sexuality would play a crucial role in Anglo-Irish writing about the problematic political and cultural status of the Ascendancy. In Uncle Silas, as in On the Study of Celtic Literature, femininity, nervous disorders, and a debilitating Celticism are equivalent.

Maud's relation to the Ascendancy tradition represented by her father is fractured, obscured, and alienated to such an extent that, in a sense, her true heritage is to be denied a heritage. Her Uncle Silas's plot to kill her and inherit her money is merely the most melodramatic element in the text suggesting the tenuous and threatened nature of Maud's inheritance. There are other indications that Maud is estranged from her family tradition as well. The dominant emotions Austin Ruthyn evokes in his daughter are awe, fear, and anxious curiosity, and while her father is preoccupied with the reputation and purity of his ancient lineage, Maud confesses her ignorance of their "family lore" on the novel's first page. Throughout the first half of the text, Maud remains ignorant of the nature of the sacrifice that she has pledged to make. And of course much of the plot revolves around Maud's gradual discovery of her uncle's true nature. Maud's peculiar heritage places her in relation to a stern and threatening dynastic tradition, all the more threatening because the palpable oppressiveness of its presence is matched by the impalpable mysteries surrounding its precise nature and content.

Maud's incomplete relation to and ignorance of her heritage are part of her gendered unfitness for the task entrusted to her. "Pity she's a girl, and so young" laments her father (p. 6), as he decides to perpetuate her ignorance about the sacrifice he demands of her. Austin reasons that as women are easily frightened and unreliable, he must secure Maud's cooperation without telling her what that cooperation involves, musing, "They are easily frightened—ay, they are. .. . I had better do it another way—another way; yes—and she'll not suspect—she'll not suppose" (p. 5). Maud's femininity makes her potentially inadequate as the agent of traditional and genealogical continuity, and she shares her father's view of nervous young women. The attitude of the adult, married Maud who narrates the story toward the seventeen-year-old Maud who experienced it is illustrated by such comments as "I was but a hysterical girl" (p. 107). Maud has what she terms a "peculiar temperament" (p. 298) to match her peculiar heritage, and her narrative comments incessantly on her weaknesses of character and on the state of her nerves: the text applies the adjective "nervous" to Maud with a frequency that borders on the obsessive, she is often on the verge of hysteria, and occasionally is actually hysterical. The self-accusatory narrative of a self-confessed hysteric has precisely the structure of the Anglo-Irish Gothic. The Anglo-Irish Gothic's preoccupation with unrealiable, alienated, and empty centers of political power, and its focus on internal sexual corruption, find their corollary in Maud's emphasis on her helplessness, self-doubt, and emotional instability. Both invoke the contemporary definitions of femininity that allied it to nervous weakness and disease.

Maud's other striking feature as a narrator is her penchant for disparaging her own sex. Never was a heroine so critical of women as a category or so uncomfortable with her own femininity. Maud observes at various moments in the text that "the female heart" is characterized by "an ineradicable jealousy" (p. 61), that women have little capacity for logical argument (p. 167), that women are by nature "factionists" rather than impartial judges (p. 120), that "women [have] preferred hatred to indifference, and the reputation of witchcraft, with all its penalties, to absolute insignificance" (p. 373), and that "man's estimate of woman is higher than woman's own" (p. 25). While Maud works to honor her father's request and rehabilitate the family name and lineage, her femininity and sexuality mark her internal corruption and constantly threaten to betray her.

The most dangerous element in Maud's femininity is her sexual vulnerability; the novel establishes Maud's desires and sexual behavior as particular points of danger requiring vigilant regulation. After failing to discourage an admirer adequately, Maud comments:

Now, it was very odd of me, I must confess, to talk in this way, and to receive all those tender allusions from a gentleman about whom I had spoken and felt so sharply only the evening before. But Bartram was abominably lonely. A civilised person was a valuable waif or stray in that region of the picturesque and the brutal; and to my lady reader especially, because she will probably be hardest upon me, I put it—can you not recollect any such folly in your own past life? Can you not in as many minutes call to mind at least six similar inconsistencies of your own practising? For my part, I really can't see the advantage of being the weaker sex if we are always to be as strong as our masculine neighbours.

(p. 295)

Maud figures her femininity as a potentially dangerous set of sexual weaknesses and instabilities. Trapped in and tainted by "that region of the picturesque and the brutal"—an excellent description of colonial England's characterization of Ireland—Maud succumbs to the temptation of indulging in a slightly uncivilized, if minor, sexual transgression. The exciting cause and potential victim of her transgression is the "civilized" suitor. Her appeal to the lady reader on the basis of a shared corruption suggests that it is simply the nature of feminine desire to resist and elude control, to be inconsistent and corrupt. Her assertion that if one is going to be designated the weaker sex one might as well behave like the weaker sex indicates one of the potentially worrisome aspects of assimilationist ideology; part of the corruption attributed to Celts and women was that they wanted to be corrupt, and might refuse to try to emulate their more masculine and English neighbors. Like her family heritage, Maud's femininity is not only potentially debilitating, it is also mysterious, and its depths of deceit and desire are only partially clear to Maud herself, as when she wonders, "What girl was ever quite frank about her likings? I don't think I was more of a cheat than others; but I never could tell of myself (p. 286). Maud's femininity is an internal corruption, a link with the barbarous of which she has imperfect knowledge and unstable control. It demands a regime of observation and regulation that Maud is only intermittently willing and able to sustain.

In the world of Uncle Silas the unregulated, uneducated female character is an unrealiable, potentially disruptive thing. This is also illustrated by Silas's daughter, Milly, and Milly's education at Maud's hands reinforces the novel's sense of female social and sexual identity as something that must be carefully constructed to avoid chaos. Milly has the natural aptitude to become a lady but has "no more education than a dairymaid," and Maud is eager to restore her to her proper class station (p. 197). Silas calls Milly "a very finished Miss Hoyden" and attributes her wildness of character "to that line of circumvallation which has, ever since [her] birth, intercepted all civilisation on its way to Bartram" (p. 240). Maud resolves to "effect some civilising changes" (p. 197) in Milly's language and demeanor, and regards an instance of temporary intransigence as a "relapse into barbarism" (p. 216). The language of civilization and barbarism here and in Maud's confession about her admirer is the language nineteenth-century imperial discourses used to describe cultural differences between English and Irish and to call for integration of the Irish barbarians into English civilization.²³ Bartram's isolation from "all civilisation," Milly's relapse, and Maud's temporary weakness all inscribe a different and sinister possibility: that the civilized Anglo-Irish will succumb to the barbarous Irish.

The threatening figure of Madame de Rougierre, Maud's evil governess, who is in league with Silas and whose French origins signify a corrupting Continental influence, also emphasizes the importance of a girl's education, further dramatizing the danger that assimilation can work in reverse, from Saxon to Celt. At one point she threatens Maud mockingly, "Do you not perceive, dearest cheaile, how much education you still need?" (p. 355). While Maud works to civilize her barbaric cousin and to complete her own assimilation into her father's tradition, her nervous weaknesses and sexual lapses indicate her vulnerability to the assimilation-as-regression that her governess represents. Maud's femininity, which encompasses her nervous instability and her alienated relation to her family heritage as well as the specifically feminine weaknesses she attributes to her sex, emerges as a major threat to the character and influence of the ancient family whose rehabilitation her father urges her to undertake.

Much current feminist criticism of the Gothic as a genre stresses its engagement with what Claire Kahane calls "the problematics of femininity."²⁴ The typical Gothic novel narrates the education of the heroine's desires; the dangers she confronts are in some respect sexual ones, and the text concludes with her marriage and reintegration into society. In Uncle Silas Maud's apparent escape from the decay represented by Bartram to the health represented by Knowl assumes the shape of her confrontation with the problematics of femininity. She wrestles with and conquers her hysterical tendencies, negotiates the sexual dangers represented by Captain Oakley and Dudley Ruthyn, makes an appropriate match with Lord Ilbury (one of the trustees of her estate), and bears him a son. She achieves a socially acceptable femininity and is reintegrated into civilized society. She rejects forbidden sexualities and alliances, and chooses a permissible one that will ensure proper genealogical continuity. As Maud remarks in the novel's conclusion, "the shy, useless girl you have known is now a mother" (p. 424).

I say apparent escape because while Maud's escape from her Uncle Silas (who wanted to defraud her of her heritage) and her marriage to Ilbury (whose position as a trustee signifies his guardianship of her rightful heritage) seem to suggest that she accomplishes her father's will, I have also argued that the novel's Swedenborgian structure links these two alternatives as the two conflicting and inseparable faces of Anglo-Irish tradition. The novel's Swedenborgian linking of Knowl and Bartram suggests the internal corruption of Anglo-Irish tradition, and Maud's journey from the former to the latter and back again casts her as the physical embodiment of that link. Maud's successful negotiation of sexual threats, her role in civilizing Milly, and her advantageous marriage all suggest her affiliations with the version of Anglo-Irish tradition embodied by her father and Knowl. But her dangerous and unstable femininity also connects her with Celts, corruption, and misalliance—Silas's Welsh barmaid, Dudley's lower-class wife—and marks her internal, already established vulnerability to the degradation Dudley represents. Maud's femininity is structured as an inherently treacherous relation to her dynastic tradition; it provides a framework for the novel's depiction of Anglo-Irish tradition as fallen, broken, and betrayed from within through their alienated separation from English traditions and/or their intimate proximity to Irish ones. While on one level Maud successfully assimilates herself to the proper English civilization represented by Ilbury, on another level the text suggests the inevitability of her surrender to the kind of Celtic assimilation that Anglo-Irish writers found so threatening.

Fears about the fate of the Ascendancy haunted Le Fanu's imagination, and the original short story took these fears to their logical conclusion. "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" does not have the happy ending of Uncle Silas: although she escapes from her uncle, the heroine does not preserve her sacred but destructible heritage, and her life following the events she narrates is "long and sorrowful" ("Secret History," p. 102). Father Purcell's narrative emphasizes her role in the destruction of not one but two Irish dynasties. "Strange!" he muses, "two powerful and wealthy families, that in which she was born, and that into which she had married, have ceased to be—they are utterly extinct" (p. 2). But the British readers who preferred English settings also preferred happy endings, so once again Le Fanu suppressed an aspect of the original story that gave it a specifically Anglo—Irish provenance.

The necessity for negotiating between the Irish origins of Uncle Silas and the demands of the English literary market encouraged Le Fanu to encode the text's political concerns in the languages of sexuality, femininity, barbarism, and civilization, which characterized colonial discourses on the benefits and/or dangers of assimilating the Irish more thoroughly into England. The novel's preoccupation with Maud's femininity, its covert association of dangerous femininity with a specifically Irish corruption, its emphasis on the process of constructing a more stable female character through education or civilization, and its representation of sexual misalliance as the exemplary betrayal of tradition, all constitute its distinct Anglo-Irishness and subtly distinguish it from the English sensational thrillers of the period with which it competed. Uncle Silas is a text about the unique uncertainties of Anglo-Irish culture insofar as it both claims and refuses to resolve the problematics of femininity that constitute Maud's peculiar heritage.

Notes

¹ For example, Robert Welch begins his essay "Constitution, Language and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Irish Poetry" by remarking that "to speak of tradition in nineteenth-century Irish literature is to be conscious of an absence" (in Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry, ed. Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene [London: Macmillan, 1989], p. 7). G. J. Watson claims that in Irish literature "always lurking somewhere near the surface is a painful sense of a lost identity, a broken tradition, and the knowledge that an alien identity has been, however reluctantly, more than half embraced" (Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce, and O'Casey [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979], p. 20).

² Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, ed. W. J. McCormack with Andrew Swarbrick (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 102. Subsequent references cited in the text are to this edition.

³ The phrase "the invention of tradition" is associated with Eric Hobsbawm's work, especially The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) is also relevant here.

⁴ See chapter 1 of W. J. McCormack's Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), esp. pp. 15-16.

⁵ "Introduction" to Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, ed. Elizabeth Bowen (London: The Cresset Press, 1947), p. 8.

⁶ Le Fanu, "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess," in The Purcell Papers, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1880), II, 2.

⁷ Le Fanu, "The Murdered Cousin," in Ghost Stories and Mysteries, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover Publications, 1975), p. 216.

⁸ See Maurice Colgan, "Exotics or Provincials? Anglo-Irish Writers and the English Problem," in Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England, and the World, vol. 3, National Images and Stereotypes, ed. Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987), p. 36.

⁹ See F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), esp. Part 1. Lyons documents the increasing volume and complexity of regulatory discourses and institutions in Ireland, arguing that in many respects Ireland functioned as a kind of "social laboratory" (p. 65) for the English, who often tried out new rules and procedures in Ireland before introducing them into England.

¹⁰ On Arnold's construction of the Celtic element in literature, see John V. Kelleher, "Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival," in Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 197-221; Rachel Bromwich, Matthew Arnold and Celtic Literature: A Retrospect, 1865-1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); and Maurice Riordan, "Matthew Arnold and the Irish Revival," in Literary Interrelations, vol. 3, National Images and Stereotypes, pp. 145-52.

¹¹ "The Incompatibles," in English Literature and Irish Politics, vol. 9 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1973), p. 242. David Lloyd's introduction to his Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987) contains an excellent discussion of Arnold's assimilative ideology.

¹² "On the Study of Celtic Literature," in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super and Sister Thomas Marion Hoctor (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 382.

¹³The Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies, trans. William G. Hutchinson (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1896), p. 8.

¹⁴ "Lawrence, Woman, and the Celtic Fringe," in Lawrence and Women, ed. Anne Smith (London: Vision Press, 1978), p. 127.

¹⁵ L. P. Curtis claims that "of the many pejorative adjectives applied by educated Englishmen to the Irish perhaps the most damaging, certainly the most persistent, were those which had to do with their alleged unreliability, emotional instability, mental disequilibrium, or dualistic temperament" (Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England [Bridgeport, Conn.: Univ. of Bridgeport Press, 1968], p. 51). Curtis also comments that "Irish femininity was also a persistent theme," and observes that "the relevance of such attributions to English policy in Ireland lies in the assumed connections between femininity and unfitness for self-government" (p. 61). On the mid nineteenth century's anxieties about women's mental instability and sexual corruption, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

¹⁶Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1882), p. 55.

¹⁷ "The Great Enchantment," in Selected Essays and Passages, ed. Ernest A. Boyd (Dublin: Talbot Press, n.d.), p. 180.

¹⁸ In her Freudian/Lacanian study of fantastic literature, Rosemary Jackson argues that as society became increasingly secularized during the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction came to embody the internal and personal origin of horror, rather than external and supernatural sources (see Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion [London and New York: Methuen, 1981], p. 55).

¹⁹ In "The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic: Maturin, Le Fanu and 'The Return of the Repressed,' " Julian Moynahan argues that in Ireland "Gothic literature often carries a heavily political or meta-political charge" (in Studies in Agnlo-Irish Literature, ed. Heinz Kosok [Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1982], p. 44). Patrick Rafroidi notes that in Ireland the haunted Gothic house had a "resonance . . . that had long ceased to impress in the neighbouring island" (Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period [1789-1850], Volume 1 [Gerrard's Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980], p. 64). Mary E. F. Fitzgerald observes that "the more mythologised the power structures of a society, the more productive gothic seems as a means of exploring them" ("The Unveiling of Power: 19th Century Gothic Fiction in Ireland, England and America," in Literary Interrelations, vol. 2, Comparison and Impact, p. 15), and she argues that Ireland, in which power was both brutally exercised and exercised from a distance, by agents who were visibly absent (like absentee landlords), produced Gothic fiction distinguished by power that is present in its effects but is always located elsewhere.

²⁰ This characterization of the political world of Anglo-Irish Gothic has found its way into several influential surveys of Irish and Anglo-Irish literature. A. Norman Jeffares concludes that Le Fanu's "experience of agrarian and sectarian strife in the Limerick countryside underlay the sensational, the Gothic atmosphere of his major novels" (Anglo-Irish Literature [New York: Macmillan, 1982], p. 132); and Seamus Deane asserts that "Irish Gothic establishes the abiding presence in the latter part of the century of the dilapidated Ascendancy house, in which the former masters are increasingly isolated from the surrounding tenantry and reduced, politically and economically, to a state of psychic exhaustion" (A Short History of Irish Literature [London: Hutchinson, 1986], p. 100).

²¹ See, for example, Kenneth W. Graham, ed., Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression (New York: AMS Press, 1989); and Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1988).

²² One exception is Juliann Fleenor, who draws a parallel between women and minority writers as marginalized from the literary mainstream and argues that the Gothic is a congenial form through which to express a writer's separation from her culture (see her introduction to The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann Fleenor [London: Eden Press, 1983], p. 8). She links Gothic description of architecture and setting with the intersection of public and private, political and sexual, in the heroine's body because the Gothic "uses traditional spatial symbolism of the ruined castle or an enclosed room to symbolize both the culture and the heroine" (p. 15).

²³ On the history of the language of civilization and barbarism in British political discourses on Ireland, see Seamus Deane, "Civilians and Barbarians," in Ireland's Field Day (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1986), pp. 33-42.

²⁴ "The Gothic Mirror," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 336. Kahane suggests that the central mystery of the Gothic revolves around the problems of femininity and maternity: "What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden center of the Gothic which draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront" (p. 336).