Abstract
Johnsen analyzes the relation of Tana French’s crime novels to earlier constructions of the gothic by Irish writers Sheridan Le Fanu and Elizabeth Bowen. The chapter demonstrates that French’s Dublin Murder Squad series transforms tropes of traditional Irish gothic into contemporary domestic noir. Houses are a typical gothic nexus, and in French’s fictional Dublin real-estate tour, everything flows through the house. Bowen’s notion of hallucination offers a fruitful way to analyze character and identity. French’s two novels with female narrators, The Likeness (2008) and The Trespasser (2016), are the primary focus of analysis, and Johnsen’s conclusion makes connections between French’s fictional exploration of modern Ireland to the Tuam babies scandal.
A game’s a game, but what’s a hallucination? You begin by laughing, then it gets in you and you can’t laugh it off.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The texture of [Uncle Silas] is never entirely distinguishable from its material, the world in which it takes place.
— W. J. McCormack
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Some discussion of this territory is also found in Charles L. Crow’s American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
- 2.
Sansom, Ian, “Only death is consistent: The nuanced world of post-war female suspense fiction”, review of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s, ed. Sarah Weinman, TLS, 11 November 2016 (no. 5928), pp. 14–15. It also worth pointing out that the book under review uses two classifying terms for its contents: “crime” and “suspense”. The domestic noir draws on many different modes and genres.
- 3.
“Scottish and Irish Gothic”, in Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 105–23 (p. 105).
- 4.
For twentieth and twenty-first-century Irish historical context directly pertinent to French’s work, see Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, “Twenty-First-Century Mothers in Tana French’s Crime Fiction”, Clues 32.1 (2014), 61–70 and Maureen T. Reddy, “Authority and Irish Cultural Memory in Faithful Place and Broken Harbor”, Clues 32.1 (2014), 92–102.
- 5.
There is a curious moment in Broken Harbour, however, in which religious practice re-emerges in an upside-down way: after killing her two children and her husband, Jenny Spain finds it is not as easy to kill herself as she had anticipated. On the floor, afraid the police and an ambulance will arrive to save her, in her terror at not dying she turns, unexpectedly, to prayer: “‘I prayed. I knew I didn’t have any right to, but I did anyway. I thought maybe God would strike me dead for it, but that was what I was praying for anyway. I prayed to the Virgin Mary; I thought maybe she might understand. I said the Hail Mary—I couldn’t remember half the words, it was so long since I’d said it, but I said the bits I could remember’” (pp. 495–96). This may not be the traditional gothic approach to Catholicism, but its inversion of doctrine is striking nonetheless: Spain prays for death at her own hand and expects the Virgin Mary to understand her slaughtering her family. This is the kind of “perversity” that old-school gothic writers like Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe would make much of.
- 6.
Tana French, The Likeness (London: Hodder, 2013), p. 251. Subsequent references to this edition will be made in the text.
- 7.
“Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors: On the Penguin Horror Series”, in The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (NY: Penguin, 2013), pp. xi–xxxii (p. xx).
- 8.
“Introduction”, in The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (NY: Penguin, 2013), pp. xxxiii–l. (p. xxxiv).
- 9.
Anna Powell and Andrew Smith, eds., Teaching the Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
- 10.
“Prefaces: Uncle Silas”, in Collected Impressions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), pp. 3–17 (p. 4).
- 11.
Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 209.
- 12.
As Lucie Armitt notes, “the Gothic may take as its focus one family, but its consequences always apply to society at large”. This is true whether or not Daniel March perceives himself as a contemporary updating of a gothic villain and his inherited house as a gothic trope. Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), p. 80.
- 13.
Tana French, Broken Harbour (Dublin: Hachette Books Ireland, 2013), p. 13. Subsequent references to this edition will be made in the text.
- 14.
Tana French, The Trespasser (New York: Viking, 2016), p. 183. Subsequent references to this edition will be made in the text.
- 15.
“Female Gothic”, in Teaching the Gothic, ed. Anna Powell and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 107–20 (p. 114).
- 16.
See Endnote 3 (p. 86).
- 17.
“Vision and Blind Spots: Characterization in Tana French’s Broken Harbour”, Clues 32.1 (2014), 40–50 (pp. 40–41).
- 18.
Dissolute Characters, p. 226.
- 19.
p. 28. This has its counterpart in a natural (if rather creepy) image of regeneration: when she is at the famine cottage, meeting Ned, Cassie observes that “there were things growing beside me out of the earth where she had bled, a pale clump of bluebells, a tiny sapling that looked like a hawthorn: things made of her” (p. 471).
- 20.
“Prefaces: The Demon Lover” [The American Edition], in Collected Impressions (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1950), pp. 47–52 (p. 49).
- 21.
My sources for the citations on the Tuam scandal are “President Pays Tribute to Work of Historian in Tuam Babies Case”, 8 March 2017, www.irishtimes.com; Shane Harrison, “Tuam Mother and Baby Home ‘Chamber of Horrors’—Irish PM”, 7 March 2017, www.bbc.com; Fred Barbash, “The ‘Mother and Baby Home’ at Tuam, Ireland, Where Friends Just ‘Disappeared, One After the Other’”, 13 March 2017, www.washingtonpost.com; “Tuam Babies”, 11 March 2017, www.rte.ie/radio1/marian-finucane/programmes; and “Past and Present: A Dark Pattern We Must Not Repeat”, 11 March 2017, www.irishtimes.com. These sources are listed here in the order in which they are quoted in the conclusion.
Works Cited
Armitt, Lucie, Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011).
Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Prefaces: The Demon Lover and Other Stories’, Collected Impressions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950a), pp. 47–52.
Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Prefaces: Uncle Silas’, Collected Impressions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950b), pp. 3–17.
Crow, Charles L., American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
Del Toro, Guillermo, ‘Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors: On the Penguin Horror Series’, in The Haunting of Hill House, ed. Shirley Jackson (New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. xi–xxii.
French, Tana, Broken Harbour (Dublin: Hachette Books Ireland, 2013a).
French, Tana, The Likeness (London: Hodder, 2013b).
French, Tana, The Trespasser (New York: Viking, 2016).
Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’ in Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 105–23.
Jackson, Christine, ‘Vision and Blind Spots: Characterization in Tana French’s Broken Harbor,’ Clues 32.1 (2014), pp. 40–50.
Jackson, Shirley, ‘Introduction’ in The Haunting of Hill House(New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. xxxiii–l.
Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson, ‘Twenty-First-Century Mothers in Tana French’s Crime Fiction’, Clues 32.1 (2014), pp. 61–70.
McCormack, W. J., Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
Murphy, Bernice M., The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Powell, Anna, and Andrew Smith, eds., Teaching the Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Punter, David, ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’ in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 105–23.
Reddy, Maureen, ‘Authority and Irish Cultural Memory in Faithful Place and Broken Harbor’, Clues 32.1 (2014), pp. 92–102.
Sansom, Ian, ‘Only Death is Consistent: The Nuanced World of Post-War Female Suspense Fiction’ [review of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s, ed. Sarah Weinman], Times Literary Supplement,11 November 2016, pp. 14–15.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Johnsen, R.E. (2018). The House and the Hallucination in Tana French’s New Irish Gothic. In: Joyce, L., Sutton, H. (eds) Domestic Noir. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69337-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69338-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)