Abstract
The Gothic tradition underwent a revival toward the turn of the twentieth
century after a decline in popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. The new
Gothic focused more intensely on the inner mind than the classical Gothic, as
we see in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891) and Dracula (1897). This inward turn led to the eventual
transformation of the Gothic into what I would call a “narrative of haunting”
in the twentieth century—two of the best examples being the works of
Virginia Woolf and Henry James. But the Gothic also appeals to collective
anxieties caused by urbanization and industrialization. In this paper I want to
look into the uniquely nationalist dimensions of the Gothic with special
reference to the return of the ancient father/mother in Anglo-Irish Gothic
literature. The idea of ancestral return, after all, need not only be read in
supernatural terms; it can also be read in (post)colonial ones, in the context of
expatriation and repatriation. With the awakening of nationalist sentiments, as
in late 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland, expatriates may find themselves
increasingly alienated in their own "homeland," uncanny strangers in their
own “house.” Looking at the works of two Anglo-Irish writers, Sheridan Le
Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), I suggest that the
expatriated or estranged Anglo-Irishman fantasizes the “return” of his native
(Irish) ancestor as representing the native homeland. Such a “ghostly”
fantasizing can be seen as both symptom and cure, and above all as an
expression of the ambivalence of Anglo-Irish attitudes toward the return of
their ancient, ancestral land.