Reality Deterioration and Academic Precarity through the Lens of J. S. Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand and ‘The Haunted Baronet’

Abstract

The immersive, fictional space that Irish gothicist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu calls his reader to occupy has been underexplored in existing critical literature. This article draws on comments made by China Miéville to demonstrate the power of Le Fanu’s efforts to pull readers into his fictional world in the critically neglected Wylder’s Hand and ‘The Haunted Baronet’. This immersion can allow readers to feel the social critiques embedded in this fiction more powerfully because, while imaginatively occupying this world, they are made to witness – and are implicated in the construction of realities in – Le Fanu’s fictional communities. This reality creation is a process that can be better understood through the lens of social constructionism, allowing insight into how Le Fanu’s fictional communities steadily form often unjust, inadequate visions of reality through interactions in those communities. Further, this article explores one potential application of this visceral experience as social critique. When we close the pages of the text, we can start to explore the mirroring of those fictional experiences with the experience of existing in the neoliberal structures present in academia. Such structures are often constructed, like Le Fanu’s fictional realities, into unjust shapes that both victimize the most vulnerable and steadily reveal their inadequacy. The ways in which Wylder’s Hand and ‘The Haunted Baronet’ prompt readers to recognize and move beyond flawed, constructed, deteriorating frameworks highlight the new critiques we can discover in Le Fanu’s fiction by examining the effects of this radical immersion into which the fiction invites us. It also points to the importance of analyzing Le Fanu’s fiction more broadly, beyond his most critically discussed works, to find more insightful ways of reading and understanding the implications of his fiction.