‘These devils have made quite a saint of you’: Sheridan Le Fanu

Abstract

The Augustinian orthodoxy of Arthur Machen and M. R. James’ stories shows the demonic experience to be inextricably linked to the human condition as fallen being.¹ Following Augustine in depicting evil as the privation of good, Machen’s characters bring about evil agency from the nihil. MRJ’s characters, meanwhile, are haunted by representations of their fallen selves as demonic beings; confrontations which demand recognition and reconciliation through submission to God. In the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, whom MRJ called ‘one of the best storytellers of the nineteenth century’, and to whom all the other authors in this volume expressed a debt, a theological reading reveals even more fractured depictions of the human condition.² For Le Fanu, the gothic motif of doubling becomes central to describing a mode of being which, in its fallen state, responds both to the call of grace and demonic destruction.By reading Le Fanu’s stories theologically, it is possible to trace a journey of transformation from the fallen state to salvation. Indeed, it is possible to trace several journeys. The first is the journey taken by Le Fanu’s protagonists as they recognise themselves as fallen beings, and accept the conditions necessary for grace and salvation. I will argue that in this journey, Le Fanu depicts a Lutheran ‘justification in faith’ which is fulfilled by an explicitly Augustinian transformation of being. The stories discussed here show the various stages of this journey, and I will use Kierkegaard’s concept of dread as the lens through which to identify a Lutheran/Augustinian Anfechtung.