Anglo-Irish Fairies, Pauperised Catholics: Postcolonial Dwellings in J.S. Le Fanu's “The Child that went with the Fairies” (1870)

The appropriation of fairy tales as vindication tools for the cultural recovery of a nation is a well-attested phenomenon in postcolonial literatures (Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Gunning, Postcolonial Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Although mainly observed in twentieth-century literature (Boehmer), these endeavours had already taken place in the previous century, as the Irish case illustrates (Ingman, A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Stemming from postcolonial research, the present study reconsiders J.S. Le Fanu's adaptation of the myth of the changeling in his 1870 short story “The Child that went with the Fairies” as a critical conveyor of British imperial rule over Ireland. Combining a postcolonial approach and the analysis of the structural and narrative devices employed, this article unveils the association between setting and Irish history, the embodiment and subsequent criticism of the Anglo-Irish in the shape of the fairies and the resistance and systemic pauperisation of the Irish Catholics through colonial legacy.