Dark Enchantment
by Dorothy Macardle (Tramp Press, Recovered Voices Series, No.6)
Teresa Whitington
Dorothy Macardle has been primarily associated with her 1937 partisan history The Irish Republic, written at Eamon de Valera’s request to give an account of the independence struggle from the anti-treaty side.
In so far as the novelist Dorothy Macardle is known, she is sometimes presumed to be a different writer, of the same name. It’s important to correct this. As Leanne Lane has commented: “Macardle’s literary work was central to her sense of self throughout her life, making it essential to look at her fiction in any attempt to understand the woman in all her complexity.”
Macardle was far from being just a narrow devotee of her political colleague de Valera and the internecine intricacies of Irish politics. Educated at Dublin’s Alexandra College and later a teacher there, she was a deeply cultured internationalist.
Alongside The Irish Republic can be placed her 1949 study Children of Europe (London, Victor Gollancz). This book analysed the impact on children of the bereavement, displacement and trauma occasioned by World War II, with details of their reactions and their special
But she reflected on society through the vehicle of fiction also, and thanks to the inclusion of three of her novels in Tramp Press’s Recovered Voices Series we can now appreciate the ways in which she did this.
Tramp Press has republished The Uninvited (2015), The Unforeseen (2017) and Dark Enchantment (2019). Well-conceived and charmingly written 20th-Century fairytales, Macardle’s novels have also been assessed by critics such as Leanne Lane and Caroline Heavey as vehicles of dissidence: as a means of objecting to the potentially damaging impact of a given society on its individual members (often, for Macardle, its female members).
Let’s look at Dark Enchantment to suggest how this is done.
Macardle had lived between 1952 and 1953 in the Provençal town of Roquebrune (where Yeats had died in 1939), and she sets Dark Enchantment in the imaginary town of St Jacques, in that area of the French Maritime Alps.
Social reflection
The novel’s heroine, Juliet Cunningham, is paired with an anti-heroine, the Romany woman Terka. These two women, as well as the hero Michael Faulkner, each have a dual aspect. They are creatures of fairy tale (princess, sorceress, prince) and real inhabitants of the 1950’s (young woman whose career as a teacher has failed, outlawed gypsy, young botanical researcher) existing on the twinned planes of Macardle’s project: story-telling and social reflection.
Throughout the novel, we can note the co-existence of fantasy and realism at every stage of the narrative. For every fairytale pleasure that Macardle offers her reader, she will offer a corresponding element drawn from the real world of post-war European society.
Romance and realism effectively co-guarantee each other. Hence the fairytale is an authentic one – the social reflection equally compelling.
To take an example from the opening of the novel, Juliet is gazing in wonder at St Jacques as it first appears to her, “hanging there in the golden air”, until her companion interjects with: “They call that a village?”
This companion, her father Frith, is in “good walking form” and looking forward to reorganising his career as an actor “…if he only could think of what the devil to do with the girl” (i.e. Juliet!). The chapter is poised between Juliet’s qualities as romantic heroine – vulnerability combined with strength of character, attractiveness, sensibility – and her father’s rueful worldly self-concern.
Then, before the chapter ends, there emerges the ‘dark woman’ of its title, glimpsed with fascination by Frith and his daughter as they walk through the town’s gilded streets.
A moral and physical victim of the inhabitants’ hostility and rejection, and expelled even by her own Romany family, Terka’s occult strength is central to Macardle’s gothic plot.
The Tarot reading Terka gives to Juliet structures the novel. The subsequent path for Juliet and Michael does not, of course, run smoothly.
The fairytale does (with wit, lightness and humour) reach the destination prescribed by its genre. For Terka, the end is a hospital clinic, where she is protected from her own violence and that of the villagers by the sympathetic care of a psychiatric specialist.
She is rescued, contained, unfree. She has provided Macardle with a means of exploring the mechanisms of social rejection.
Of exploring too the treatment of women who show an ‘occult’ drive towards sexual and economic freedom; freedoms which Macardle had seen undermined in the constitution promulgated by de Valera’s government, two months after the publication of The Irish Republic.
