The Fetch and Anglo-Irish Anxiety in John and Michael Banim’s The Fetches (1825)

Doppelgängers provoke the unsettling question of who—or what—constitutes the self and reality (Botting 1996, 6). This inquiry resonates within the Gothic tradition of the double and its Irish folkloric counterpart, the fetch, long understood as a harbinger of death (Morin 2018, 60). The figure of the fetch encapsulates a tension between identity and mortality, destabilizing boundaries between the self and the other across both historical and contemporary contexts. Written in the aftermath of the Irish Act of Union (1800), amid political turmoil and the approach of Catholic Emancipation, John and Michael Banim’s The Fetches (1825) presents the doppelgänger as an omen of destruction haunting two lovers in Kilkenny. This paper argues that the Banim brothers’ depiction of the fetch functions as an allegory for the erosion of social cohesion in post-Union Ireland, reflecting Anglo-Irish anxieties over declining political and cultural dominance. Through supernatural intrusion, the Banim brothers’ novel reflects fears of replacement, moral decay and existential instability—concerns that continue to resonate in contemporary Ireland.