Repetitions of the Past: J. S. Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand

This chapter considers modernity’s dream of a ‘radical rupture’ between past and present through Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Wylder’s Hand (1864). It uses the polysemy of ‘inheritance’, describing the transmission of property and biology between the generations, to trace how the proximity of the past was understood distinctly in England and Ireland—contexts with which the Protestant, Anglo-Irish Le Fanu was familiar. In the novel, both senses of inheritance are conjoined within the violent history of the central families, and avoiding the endless repetition of this dreadful past is the incitement to its action. But this prospect is deferred by uncanny repetitions, the disquieting relevance of supposedly anachronistic practices, and the ongoing lure of inheritance. The last part of the chapter explores how the past eventually becomes the agent of its own exhumation in lieu of human intervention, culminating in a resolution that is markedly different from the ‘happy end’ of English fiction.