Displaced Geographies and Uncomfortable Truths: Unveiling Anglo-Irish Silenced Past in Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House” (1891)

Abstract

Abstract Irish history and literature are plagued with silenced discourses and untold stories. The discourse of dominance, which maintained the Anglo-Irish élite in their ruling position for centuries, was built on the silencing of the repression exerted on the Catholic population. Fin-de-siècle Irish literature encapsulates, and portrays, such silencing, which the Anglo-Irish exerted through their dominance and abuse of the judiciary, the religious and the political statements. Postcolonial reinterpretations of these writings have helped unveil the perceptions of Irish society at the time, and how different Irish writers attempted to criticise this corruption. Bram Stoker’s Gothic story “The Judge’s House” (1891) explores how the past, albeit silenced, always returns to haunt the present, exposing Anglo-Irish anxieties over the return of the repressed native Catholic population, simultaneously denouncing the one-sided abuse conducted by an élite. This paper explores how narrative technique is used to convey the idea of the perennial return of the unsolved, guilty past. Silence over historical past continuously actualises the unresolved conflicts of the Anglo-Irish, generating the ghosts that haunt them.