Anglo-Irish representations and postcolonial discourse in J. S. Le Fanu’s “The familiar”

Abstract

Relations of dominance in postcolonial and Gothic literatures are concomitant to the struggle between self and other, encompassing the different issues hidden behind a seemingly binary and simplistic tug of war. This antagonism is reflected in how the dichotomy self versus other is portrayed in Gothic literature. In such depictions, protagonists usually represent the self, while the other is “everything else in that world” (Day 1985, 19). Seen this way, Gothic literature would constitute an examination of how identities, both individual and shared, are formed. Colonial Gothic deploys this concept of self and other, placing it, however, under the dichotomy colonizer–colonized; this has a twofold effect on characters, who are first perceived as the monstrous other and then linked to the colonized subject. This binary relation just exposed is further complicated in the Irish case, however, which is, perhaps, better realized “as a triangle in which two of its vertices are fixed – Catholics/Irish and English – while the third vertex, that of the Anglo-Irish, gradually shifts positions from the English to the Irish one, following a creolization process in which they are both victims and victimizers” (Jorge 2019, 71). Other critics, among them Flannery (2013), have expressed their views that “the histories of colonialism in Ireland demand combined postcolonial and Gothic readings” (96). Through an examination of the context and by drawing a comparison to his earlier work The Purcell Papers (1850), the present essay demonstrates how J. S. Le Fanu deploys narrative construction and characterization in his In a Glass Darkly (1872) short narratives as represented in “The Familiar.” This analysis will unveil how his short ficitonsrepresent this in-between state of the Anglo-Irish class as colonizers but not quite while simultaneously fostering a cultural blending between the Catholic and the Protestant communities in an attempt to create a shared Irish identity.