Uncanny Doubles: The Fiction of Anne Enright

Abstract

From Stoker s Dracula, to the Circe episode from Joyce's Ulysses, to Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman Irish fiction presents a range of doubles. Anne Enright's The Portable Virgin (1991), Wig My Father Wore (1995)? and What Are You Like? (2000) also use grotesque doubles to depict disturbing fears and longings. Doubles dramatize the instability of identity and its consequent unpredictability. As a result, they are particularly apropos to Enright's vision of an Ireland in the throes of cultural change, yet still measuring itself against its former nemesis, Britain. In The Portable which won the Rooney Prize in 1991, a wife's discovery of her husband's affair intensifies her fear of aging. Sharing the name of Mary with the Madonna of the story's title, the other woman is the wife's, also named Mary, double too. Doubling wife and mistress against their Biblical prototype, Enright exposes the ludicrousness of women's attempts to construct an eternally youthful identity that pleases men. Enright's first novel, Wig My Father Wore, moves beyond the critique of femininity seen in The Portable Virgin. Wig is a darkly comical novel about death and eternity. In Wig My Father Wore, one of the heroine's dou bles is a supernatural being. Having an angel for a double highlights the conflict between religious ideals and the technophiliac materialism of the contemporary Ireland. A television producer, Enright's protagonist works within the shifting, shallow milieu of popular culture. Enright's juxtaposition of her protagonist's trivial context with her metaphysical conflicts creates black humor and unre solved questions. Like The Portable Virgin and Wig My Father Wore, Enright's What are You Like? uses uncanny doubles to investigate how identity relates to the uni versal fear of death. What Are You Like? employs doubles who dramatize the impossibility of stabilizing identity or answering ontological questions. In Enright's second novel, the doubles are twins who do not know of each other's existence. A sense of the uncanny arises not through an identification between a supernatural being and a person, as in Wig My Father Wore and Virgin,