An English Cover-Up: Masks, Murders, and English Cruelty in Goncourt, Lorrain, and Schwob

Hannah Scott

doi:10.1080/14787318.2017.1386886

Abstract

ABSTRACTFin-de-siècle writers from diverse disciplines were drawn to the seductive potential of masks and disguise; mask-wearing characters of indefinite identity, indeterminate gender, and insecure psychology proliferate in their texts. However, when characters are designated as English in such stories, they are also, and with remarkable frequency, associated with cruelty or murder: the mask-wielding murderers of Marcel Schwob’s ‘MM. Burke et Hare, Assassins’ carry out their crimes in Britain upon British victims; Edmond de Goncourt weaves his theatrical narrative around the mask-like demeanour of Lord Annandale in La Faustin; and Jean Lorrain’s malicious Lord Ethal exacerbates the Duc de Fréneuse’s perverse obsessions with masks in Monsieur de Phocas. This article explores this unexpected correlation, and examines the ways that English masks are used as narrative devices – at once to mould and play with national distinctions, and to reflect upon the psychological state of the French subject.

Highlights

They may seem emotionally maladroit for the French reader, but they do not typically revel in the suffering of others or deceive the reader with a complex personality or a false mask; they may be taken at face-value, and as such are welcome additions to the catalogue of types on which realism is built – with the added benefit that few French readers would cross the Channel to check their veracity
The present article explores this play of masked Englishmen and Englishmen with masks, examining the ways masks are used as narrative devices in a sample of contemporary texts – Marcel Schwob’s ‘MM. Burke et Hare, assassins’, Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin (1882), and Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901) – in order to mould and play with national distinctions, and to reflect upon the psychological state of the French subject
Mask murder The primary stereotype evoked in Schwob’s ‘MM. Burke et Hare, Assassins’ is the landscape of fog and rain so often associated with the northern climate. This would have been familiar to the French reader from travel writing and cultural studies as well as from translations of British authors such as Dickens and Scott, and as such it brings with it an aura of factual accuracy that places the fantastical mask murders into a convincing framework

Summary

Introduction

Characters who bear masks and are designated as English are associated, and with remarkable frequency, with cruelty or murder – in a correlation unique to this nation. Such a representational choice is notable as English (and occasionally British) characters had long been a stock of trade of French literature without this association having manifested before the fin de siècle.

Results

Conclusion