Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by W.J. McCormack Valerie Wallace

Author:W.J. McCormack, Valerie Wallace [W.J. Mc Cormack]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843513773
Publisher: Lilliput Press
Published: 2012-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

We see here the establishment of a particular relationship, hitherto inarticulate, between Austin Ruthyn and his daughter. In the words of the American critic Richard Chase (discussing the varieties of fiction generally), Austin and Maud come to share idealized emotion: their relationship is formalized into a Trust, after which obligations are accepted by Maud and confidences spoken by Austin.15 The Trust is abstract in that it refers to obligations overriding personal priorities, and is exclusive in that the influence of others is antagonistic to the understanding which the trustees articulate. The heart of the matter is the acceptance of a risk of sacrifice in order to clear the family name; such emotion is symbolic, its feeling directed away from personalities and towards an abstract objective. Significantly this consolidation of the emotionally symbolic relationship is the longest speech which Maud recalls ever hearing from her father. It is only with this development that we see Maud moving into a central area of the narrative, but there is no corresponding development of parental or filial emotion, but simply a recurring allegiance to the Trust. In Austin’s will it is given explicit terms which carry Maud from Knowl to Bartram-Haugh.

The concentration of Austin’s character in this symbolic emotion focused on Maud seems to extend to his dealings with minor figures also. His treatment of Mme de la Rougierre, when she is accused of rifling his desk, is stiff and resolute, lacking indignation or passion. He so thoroughly embodies certain atttitudes that he is, for the reader, drained of all other emotions. We meet him stepping from a hidden corner of a room; his smile is compared to a Rembrandt expression. Yet when he emerges from these frames, he is free only to adopt equally rigid attitudes. The result, however, is far from being a paradigmatic personality; there are inconsistencies and self-allusions. He is religious, but his daughter seems uneducated in his beliefs. Having castigated his brother’s conduct and referred to his own sense of a duty to others, Austin admits a curious comparison which unconsciously hints at possible culpability: ‘He cares less about his children than I about you, Maud.’

When she takes up residence at Bartram, in accordance with her father’s will Maud moves through two adjustments in her attitude to her uncle. First, she unstitches the elaborate fantasy she had created as a child standing before Silas’s portrait in Knowl, long before she had ever thought of living as his ward. This fantasy is itself an abstract relationship based on the creation of a heroic, martyred figure appropriate to her admiration. The picture, and her fantasy, had been crucial in acting as visible evidence of the substance behind her father’s Trust. Gradually, at Bartram, Maud replaces this view of Silas with a rigid embodiment of herself as the endangered heiress, which inevitably casts Silas as the wicked uncle. Maud’s reaction to him is not merely one of curiosity rewarded by fear; she constructs a victim in her imagination with whom she identifies herself.

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