Three Impostors and Homosociality

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, 

this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of 

unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using 

and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – 

the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the 

feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, 

and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome


Molly McConnell, VIctoriographies