In A Glass Darkly by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: "Green Tea", "The Familiar", "Mr. Justice Harbottle".

Abstract

This thesis analyses three ghost-stories in the collection In A Glass Darkly (1872) by Anglo-Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873): "Green Tea", "The Familiar" and "Mr. Justice Harbottle". Published the year before his death, In A Glass Darkly is Le Fanu's most mature work, the final product of an eccentric and tormented personality. Following the traumatic death of his wife in 1858 Le Fanu progressively isolated himself from Dublin society, living the last period of his life in a state of reclusion that earned him the appellative of "Invisible Prince". Reflecting deep-rooted religious anxieties as well as a growing interest in the work of Sweden mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the stories in the collection are exceptionally grim tales of haunted individuals, retributive ghosts, mysterious pathologies and suicide. The stories considered in this thesis are tied together by remarkable similarities in point of narrative structure, characters and plots, as well as motifs and thematic threads. Framed as clinical case studies, all three tales challenge the reliability of scientific explanations and posit a world in which the supernatural element easily intrudes into the psyche of the protagonists. The narrative of persecution, which develops through the theme of contagion and infection, functions at the thematic as well as at the structural level: the medical narrative is effectively contaminated by the ghost story and the tale of mystery, in turn, shifts into a psychological case study. Intertwining the neurological with the metaphysical, Le Fanu negotiates between the physical manifestations of a malevolent supernatural and the psychological nuances supplied by paranoiac delusions and persecutory fears. The ambiguous nature of the hauntings to which his protagonists are subjected is Le Fanu’s greatest achievement. “Green Tea” especially reads like an exceptionally modern tale, one which in many respects anticipates the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud. The open-endedness of these stories is here read against the backdrop of nineteenth-century shifting epistemologies triggered by Darwinian debates and anthropological research on one hand, and theological and traditional beliefs on the other. If the medicalization of mental illness, the development of optical research and the emerging field of neurology are undoubtedly the legacy of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, nevertheless the surge of the Spiritualist movement, the popularity of the séance room and the Victorians’ interest in the psychic phenomena and the occult are emblematic of an equally energetic and lively counter-culture. Within this multifarious context the ghost-story genre, caught between the conventions of the realist novel and the thrills of sensation fiction, places itself firmly within the Gothic mode and functions as a particularly surprising and engaging medium to fictionalize the cultural, religious and scientific concerns of the time.