Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Lisa Weihman

Committee Co-Chair

Adam Komisaruk

Committee Member

Adam Komisaruk

Committee Member

Michael Germana

Committee Member

Bridget English

Abstract

This dissertation explores how three Irish modernist writers, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Macardle, and James Joyce, incorporate and reimagine tropes from the Victorian Gothic Revival to address Ireland’s uneven modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that the Irish Gothic tradition is essential for these writers to express their reflection and reaction to ongoing cultural and social turmoil in Ireland’s process of modernization during the foundation of the postcolonial Irish state. Extending Sheridan Le Fanu’s Big House Gothic legacy, Elizabeth Bowen creates haunted spaces in The Last September (1929) to describe Anglo-Ireland’s precarious situation during the War of Independence. Danielstown becomes a liminal place where the past and present converge, and the tenants become ghostly characters who are paralyzed and suffocated by their inherited traditions. Through the vampiric figure Marda Norton, Bowen hints at a possible future temporality outside of the Ascendancy colonial order. Drawing upon a tradition of Irish Gothic ghost stories and Celtic Twilight folktales, Dorothy Macardle’s Earth-Bound (1924) and The Uninvited (1942) explore the intersection between sacrificial nationalism and feminism during the Irish War of Independence and the post-revolutionary era. In her short story collection Earth-Bound, Macardle acknowledges the healing power of the dead in stories such as “Samhain” and expresses an ambiguous attitude toward sacrificial nationalism in “The Prisoner” and “The Portrait of Róisín Dhu.” In response to the limitations imposed on women by the 1937 Constitution, Macardle’s The Uninvited uses Gothic tropes to warn of the dangers of a nation that fails to grant women autonomy. James Joyce also wrestles with an Ireland haunted by vampires and ghosts. Through the vampiric ghost of Stephen Dedalus’s mother, May Dedalus, Joyce expresses his ambiguous attitude toward family, nation, and religious practices in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses (1922). Stephen’s rebellion against May suggests the formation of the young man’s artistic agency, which implies a possible Ireland created through Stephen’s art. Simultaneously, in “Circe,” Leopold Bloom’s encounter with his dead son, Rudy, mixes a father’s sorrow for his lost child with a vision of a future multicultural Ireland. My study argues that these modern Irish authors are haunted by the Gothic because of its protean potential to mourn outmoded ideologies of the self and the state while imagining emancipatory futures for the postcolonial nation.

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