“Irish Gothic: How the Canon Intersects History”

This essay first gives a survey of the recent widening of Anglo-Irish Gothic to include works written in the second half of the eighteenth century. It then analyses its development as a response to the political and social conditions in Ireland in the late eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It examines how the Anglo-Irish Gothic writing of the period negotiated and managed to govern the most topical coeval issues: the Union, terror and violence, as well as an increasingly felt decay of the Anglo-Irish class. The fear of subversion and terror aroused by the French Revolution were amplified by the 1798 Irish rebellion, which inexorably led to the Union. A response to political turmoil and modernisation, the Gothic expresses anxieties and fears related to the political, religious and sexual sphere. As a genre which disclosed the violence and corruption inextricably connected to authority, the Gothic was potentially subversive in these years after the French Revolution and the Irish rebellion. In the political and literary imagination, after the Union Ireland was represented both as the feminine sister kingdom and as the wife of Britain, in a marriage that increasingly came to be perceived as a Gothic marriage. The impending fate of the Ascendancy, whose members were more and more unable to efficiently run their affairs, and what was perceived as the inevitability of their fall, increased after the Union. 1800 also saw the publication of Castle Rackrent, astutely set in the years before 1782. Not a Gothic novel, it nevertheless explores issues that have been identified as archetypal of the Anglo-Irish Gothic, such as its obsession with class decay and unease about the legitimacy of their position, the accompanying sense of guilt, (fear of) dispossession, claustrophobic confinement.