“Delicate Fantasy” and “Vulgar Reality”: Undermining Romance and Complicating Identity in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass

Abstract

In The Snake’s Pass (1890), Bram Stoker drew on two distinct literary aesthetics. One is unique to this novel, which is Stoker’s only work set in Ireland: the Irish narrative genre of stories about placenames, the dinnseanchas tradition. The second is a technique Stoker uses in almost all of his longer fiction, including Dracula (1897): the construction of an unreliable narrator, in this case Arthur Severn, the “I” through which all events are filtered. Previous readings that interrogate the character of this English narrator have assumed that all of Arthur’s perceptions of and commentaries on the environment, the people, and their motivations—indeed, all the “content” of the novel—are unproblematically delivered to us as readers. However, like each of the narrators in Dracula, Stoker gives his readers plenty of cues that Arthur is not an objective observer. Most of these cues occur within the narrative fissures provided by Stoker’s deployment of the dinnseanchas tradition, both within the content of the novel—that is, the narrative as Arthur relates it—and the larger structure of the tale as a whole (that is, as Stoker builds his novel). Though previous critics have simply collapsed the two English characters of Arthur and his friend Dick Sutherland, Stoker carefully distinguishes between the two. He also makes distinctions concerning the formation of a different community of inclusion in which membership is not determined by race or ethnicity, but rather by class and work ethic. These narrative subtleties problematize a general critical assessment that in The Snake’s Pass, “Stoker’s treatment of the Irish national character never strays far from the received categories of his