Through a Glass Darkly: Uncle Silas

Abstract

Le Fanu’s most celebrated novel, Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, which appeared after Wylder’s Hand in 1864, makes a fitting subject for the last chapter, for it demonstrates the full potential of a reworking of Radcliffean Gothic, both in terms of freedom for the female protagonist and for the regeneration of society. It offers the whole range of Gothic motifs: two houses, both in ‘hermetic solitude’, of which one is the secluded pastoral retreat of Knowl, the other a decaying stone mansion with its full complement of secret passages and locked rooms; an irresponsible though loving father who dies, juxtaposed with an ambiguous male guardian who later shows himself to be malevolent; attempted murder; nature sensibility, which is linked directly to the providential order; and figures and events which might, or might not, be supernatural. Moreover, the heroine, Maud Ruthyn, reads events from a self-consciously Gothic perspective, although with a leaven of irony, which sets her apart from Austen’s Catherine Morland: ‘I feel so like Adelaide, in The Romance of the Forest, the book I was reading to you last night, when she commenced her delightful rambles through the interminable ruined abbey in the forest’ (Ch. 54, p. 350).