"Well, I've been drinking, but what I saw was real"unreliability of sight in two Victorian short stories

Resumen

Ghost stories became very popular in England during the Victorian period. The rise of rationalism in the new era strongly clashed with the irrational and supernatural content of these phantasmagorical narratives. These stories were intended for people to assimilate to the many societal changes that they were forced to endure. Feelings of uncertainty of their present, as well as the fading past and its traditions, became main reasons for countless social fears. Victorian ghost stories represent individual, as well as collective, anxieties of a society which feels unprotected and defenseless. The genre sets itself as a fundamental opposition to the explicatory development of science and empirical logic. According to Michel Cox and R. A. Gilbert, “ghosts were obvious, though still potent, images of the lost past – past sins, past promises, past attachments, past regrets – and could be used to confront, and exorcize, the demons of guilt and fear” (2003: ix). The frequent presence of alcohol in the stories points not only to a social problem of excessive drinking in the period but also represents a means to overcome people’s experiences with the uncanny and, as a narrative strategy, to blur boundaries between reality and fiction through the introduction of an unreliable narrator and characters. In the selected stories, inebriation plays a fundamental role in the encounter with the Afterlife. This chapter aims to analyze the presence of alcohol at the intersection of the living and the dead, the rational and the irrational.