Theorizing ‘Gothic’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

Irish gothic literature has inspired widespread interest and heated debate in recent years. Much of the scholarly work devoted to the subject has focused primarily on two questions: is there such a thing as an Irish gothic ‘tradition’, and, if so, what are its fundamental characteristics? The conventional answer has been that, if a unique Irish gothic liter- ary tradition does, in fact, exist, it was produced by Anglo-Irish writers concerned with confronting the anxieties induced by their minority position in Ireland. What ties such disparate authors as Regina Maria Roche (c. 1764–1845), Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), Charles Maturin (1780–1824), Sydney Owenson (c. 1783–1859), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) together, it is argued, is their shared Protestant confessionalism and an attendant interest in ‘the burden of colonial history’, which expresses itself in their works via gothic themes, settings, and motifs.² As Roy Fos- ter has influentially argued, Irish gothic writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were motivated by fears surrounding their privi- leged position as members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency. Their ‘occult preoccupations’, Foster contends, ‘mirror a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes’.³

I perceive you have no idea what Gothic is.¹