WILDGOOSE LODGE
by William Carleton, 1833

Critics of Irish fiction generally agree that William Carleton's "Wildgoose Lodge," with its focus on the horrified emotions of the narrator, its terse style, and its suggestive detail, is typical in technique of the modern short story as developed by Poe and Hawthorne. They also, however, agree that Carleton probably achieved this pre-Poe success by instinct rather than by knowledge of short story models. Indeed, the tight structure, economical detail, and symbolic language of the story are not typical of Carleton's more familiar discursive, detailed, and often polemical style. Because this "tale of terror" is, as Carleton tells the reader in a final note, "unfortunately too true," the question it raises for students of the history of the short story is by what means Carleton, without previous models, is able to transform an event based on fact into a modern symbolic narrative with thematic significance.

The story recounts the revenge murder of an entire family by a group of Ribbonmen, members of a Roman Catholic secret society. Not a story of Irish sectarian conflict, for both the murderers and the murdered family are Catholic, the event is recounted in the horrified accents of a former Ribbonman who witnessed the murders. Originally appearing in 1830 in the Dublin Literary Gazette as "Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman," the story was retitled "Wildgoose Lodge" in the second series of Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1833). Carleton said that he saw the body of Patrick Devann, the captain of the Ribbonmen responsible for the murders, hanging from a gibbet in County Louth, although he himself was not actually present at the atrocity. Thus, his choice of the first-person point of view is a romantic literary device—typical of such writers as Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne—to emphasize the reactions of the teller. Although ostensibly merely an eyewitness report of an event, the account reflects the kind of self-conscious patterning of reality that is characteristic of the modern short story. A completed action, treated as if it were an action in process, "Wildgoose Lodge" is a classic example of how the modern romantic short story writer developed techniques to endow experience with thematic significance without resorting to allegorical methods of symbolic characterization and stylized plot construction.

The story begins with the narrator receiving a summons to a secret meeting of the society to which he belongs. Although there is nothing extraordinary or startling about the summons, he has a premonition of approaching evil. An "undefinable feeling of anxiety pervades [his] whole spirit," very much like the undefined sense of anxiety that pervades the spirit of many of Poe's narrators, for example, the unnamed narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" when he first rides into view of the ominous house. Moreover, like many of Poe narrators, Carleton's narrator says that he cannot define the presentiment or sense of dread he feels, for it seems to be a mysterious faculty, like Poe's "perverse" beyond human analysis.

Another self-conscious literary device Carleton uses is the creation of a thematically appropriate atmosphere surrounding the events. He describes the day as gloomy and tempestuous, almost beyond anything he remember. Moreover, the fact that the meeting at which the murders are planned takes place in a church and involves ceremonies of brotherhood is perceived by the narrator to be bitterly ironic. This ironic contrast between the church and the men is further emphasized when the narrator describes the devilish malignancy of the Ribbonman captain as "demon-like," "Satanic," "supernatural," and "savage." When the captain slams his fist down on the altar Bible as he swears an oath to the horrifying revenge that is planned, a sound of rushing wings fills the church, and a mocking echo of his words seems to resound throughout the building. Although the sound of wings and the echo of the man's oath have natural explanations—doves in the rafters frightened by the leader's striking the Bible and natural echoes reverberating throughout the building—they communicate a sense of mockery of Christian values.

The actual scene of the revenge murders is also described symbolically, for the torrential rains have created a lake in the meadow where the house lies, isolating it on a small island in the middle. The Ribbonmen have to create a human bridge over the water so that they can reach the house. The actual description of the murders is graphic and horrifying. When a woman leans out of the window and cries for mercy, her hair aflame, she is "transfixed with a bayonet and a pike" so that the word "mercy" is divided in her mouth. When another woman tries to put her baby out of the window to safety, the captain uses his bayonet to thrust it into the flames. The story ends with the narrator affirming that, although the language of the story is partly fictitious, the facts are close to those revealed at the trial of the murderers, which resulted in between 25 and 28 men being hanged in different parts of County Louth.

What makes "Wildgoose Lodge" a modern story is the heightened perception of the engaged first-person narrator, who is at once both dramatically involved and ironically aware. Moreover, the story's selection of metaphoric detail with the potential for making an implied ironic moral judgment—the atmospheric weather, the ironic church setting, the physically isolated house, and the imagery of the leader as Satanic and his closest followers as fiendish—shift the emphasis of the story from a mere eyewitness account to a tight thematic structure. It is just this shift that signals the beginning of the modern short story most commonly attributed to Hawthorne and Poe in the following decade.

—Charles E. May