Two Stories: Chiaroscuro and the Politics of Superstition

Abstract

Le Fanu’s first rhetorical opportunity comes in the context of a political pressure: that of Protestant cultural nationalism in the Dublin of the late 1830s. That pressure is ‘reconciliatory’: it is the idea that the interests of a ruling class can be best served by the creation of a single national tradition, which can include Protestant and Catholic sides of the Irish sectarian divide. Here is Samuel Ferguson, writing in 1834, in Le Fanu’s own magazine, the Dublin University Magazine (DUM): The Protestants of Ireland are wealthy and intelligent beyond most classes of their numbers in the world; but their wealth has been hitherto insecure, because their intelligence has not embraced a thorough knowledge of the genius and disposition of their catholic fellow citizens. The genius of the past is not to be learned by the notes of Sunday tourists. The history of centuries must be gathered, published, studied, and digested, before the Irish people can be known to the world.’ Le Fanu’s extraordinary first sequence of stories, written between 1838 and 1840 and published in the DUM, was nested perfectly within Ferguson’s political brief.