Chapter 6 - Neurological and Psychological Constructs in Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly

Abstract

Excepting "Green Tea" and "Carmilla," Sheridan Le Fanu's fiction is generally neglected by modern-day readers, yet his work reveals much information about the conduct of life in nineteenth century Ireland and England. Le Fanu's works should be appreciated for the insights he provides into the psychology of his characters; his fiction was written prior to what historians of psychology date as the formal establishment of the discipline in 1879, which occurred after his death. His fiction also illustrates the emerging medical specialty of neurology, although Le Fanu's later writings are more illustrative of his interest in the mystical works of Emanuel Swedenborg. His characters frequently suffer from "brain fevers" and other maladies that were the subject of intense debate in England, continental Europe, and America. His male characters in particular suffer from guilty consciences, and suicide is a frequent fate. Each of these aspects of Le Fanu's fiction can be found in the 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly, which purports to contain five case histories of the German metaphysical physician Doctor Martin Hesselius. In this chapter, each of the stories in the collection will be described and analyzed for Hesselius' use of psychological, neurological, or mystical explanations for the events occurring within the story. Hesselius' descriptions of psychological constructs are rather advanced for a physician discussing mental disorders in the nineteenth century. His theories within this collection of stories with respect to neurology and neuroscience, on the other hand, are much more representative of the eighteenth century, something that would be natural given that the stories contained in the collection were purported to have occurred in the latter decades of the eighteenth or early decades of the nineteenth century.