Fiction and Empire: The Irish Novel

‘A Land Poisoned’: Eugene McCabe and Irish Postcolonial Gothic

“…This turn to the Gothic, apparent in the settings of many national tales and subsequent domestic Big House novels, reflects the fears of an increasingly beleaguered Ascendancy society, trapped in overbuilt but decaying homes, surrounded by a newly resurgent Catholic nationalism, and forced to confront its failure to win native Irish allegiance .… The Irish Gothic novel stylistically and thematically encodes the sublimated anxieties of a colonial class preoccupied with the corrupt source of its power. 10 The 'Big House' tradition, in many respects, is an 'end of empire' literary phenomenon; the assertion of colonial seizure and power is transformed into a scar on the landscape, a persistent reminder of the usurpations of the past. The 'big house' is, then, a mouldering embodiment of the unpaid debts of Ireland's colonial history, and the changing political and social temperature of Ireland in the nineteenth century ominously presage the time when these debts will have to be repaid.…”