Abstract
Notwithstanding the fact that the Anglo-Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one of the most popular writers of the British Victorian era, his name and most of his works are not well-known to a common reader. The present research investigates how the author inventively modifies traditional Gothic elements and penetrates them into human’s consciousness. Such Le Fanu’s metamorphoses and innovations make the artistic world of his prose more realistic and psychological. As a result, the article presents a comparative literary study of Le Fanu’s text manipulations which seem to lead to the creation of Le Fanu’s own kind of “psychological” Gothic.
Highlights
When exploring the Gothic it is difficult to isolate psychological factors from social issues
One of the forms of Gothic fiction which distinctively developed in the Victorian period was a ghost story
As Nalecz-Wojtczak (1987) writes, “it is this independent existence of a supernatural reality which seems to be the most essential feature which the Victorian ghost story contributed to the heritage of the literature of the supernatural” (p.99)
Summary
When exploring the Gothic it is difficult to isolate psychological factors from social issues. As eNotes.com (2010) point out: “The five longer stories in the later collection “In a Glass Darkly” (1872) are widely acknowledged as their best work in the genre In these stories Le Fanu combined many of the themes and techniques of traditional Gothic literature with those of modern psychological fiction.”. In stories from his collection “In a Glass Darkly”, “Green Tea”, “The Familiar”, “Mr Justice Harbottle”, “The Room in the Dragon Volant” and “Carmilla” the supernatural appears as the unconscious element of mind that is capable to enter the real world if the barriers between consciousness and sub-consciousness are temporarily opened either under the influence of some chemical substances In these stories (eNotes, 2010) „Le Fanu used the recurring character of Dr Martin Hesselius, a German physician specializing in mental disorders, to introduce each narrative as a patient’s history burden both with supernatural and psychological phenomena. The scholar suggests, “the horror Le Fanu’s protagonist encounters is enough to destroy him, yet the finality of his destruction only heightens the uncertainty of the supernatural” (p. 452)
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