“Martyr, angel, demon”: Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Uncle Silas’

This is a strange book – strange, disturbing, violent, and thoroughly Victorian in every way.

With extremely limited rights around ownership of their finances and even more limitations around opportunities to generate income, the burden of monetary concerns was a crippling one for women in Victorian society. In terms of actual law, women were little more than property until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. Before that single women had been able to own their own property, but if they had no inheritance to draw on, marriage was the only way to survive given employment opportunities were so limited, particularly for the middle class, while wages and living conditions among the women of the working class caused similar problems, exacerbated in just about every way conceivable. Upon marriage any property and income owned or earned by the woman passed absolutely into the ownership of the man under the law of coverture, the doctrine that made two people legally one upon marriage. The reality of being shackled to the incomes and estates of their fathers until marriage made the latter appear as a form of freedom and independence, a means with which to leave the family home, an idealised notion generated by the literature of the Romantic and sensationalist ages. But the fact remained that with such repressive laws it was merely a new form of ownership and dependence and if the woman came from a particularly wealthy background an invitation for predatory fortune-hunters.

This was the premise Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu took for Uncle Silas in 1864, drawing inspiration from Ann Radcliffe’s pioneering 1794 Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho as well as more contemporary authors like Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood.

It’s basically Austen’s Emma if Emma’s father had died when she was still a teenager and a creepy uncle had locked her up and conspired to murder her.

Heiress Maud Ruthyn falls foul of the “enigmatical person – martyr – angel – demon” that is her sinister Uncle Silas when he concocts a plot to divulge her of her fortune.

Imprisoned in his nightmarish mansion when her father dies, Maud wonders if Silas is going to carry her away and stick her in a “mad-house”. Suspecting imminent assault, she refrains from drinking the drugged claret brought to her, which is instead consumed by the dodgy Madame de la Rougierre, who is completely unaware of the rest of Silas’s plan. An hour after Madame falls asleep on Maud’s bed, Maud hears motion in the yard and, as she watches a figure in the darkness below, she suddenly realises “like a thunderbolt” that “smote” her brain that “they are making my grave”. Silas’s son, Dudley, then enters the bedroom through the window and brutally murders the governess, thinking she is Maud, in a scene Le Fanu would echo seven years later in his Gothic novella Carmilla when the eponymous vampire assaults Bertha Rheinfeldt in her bed. Madame’s last convulsion sounds like “the shaking of a tree and rustling of leaves” to Maud, who is crouching out of sight, “prepared to struggle like a tigress” for her life.

Published five years after Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and two years after Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Le Fanu’s novel ventures into similar territory with the character of Madame, who rocks the role of the ethereal yet fundamentally terrifying madwoman inclined towards intrigue and volatility. You also can’t help but think of Tennyon’s Maud, which was published nine years before Uncle Silas, a poem again about a young woman whose father dies, leaving her at the mercy of an emotionally unstable predator.

In the end, Maud Ruthyn’s financial predicament is more visceral than it is nuanced, and there is little engagement with the navigation of social strata á la Eliot. The heightened sensational tone is indicative of that old chestnut trope of the male gaze using female trauma as a plot device, also prevalent in Le Fanu’s other writings. Carmilla is full of murdered women, with the vampire herself eventually impaled, beheaded, and burned. It’s cheery stuff.