Abstract
This chapter analyses Joseph O’Connor’s novel Ghost Light about a formerly celebrated Irish actress who lives a life of loneliness and poverty in 1950s London. It reads this fictional biography of Molly Allgood with reference to Freud’s Uncanny. By means of narrative technique, the novel reveals the complexity of the aged protagonist’s inner life as she retells and relives her memories of the younger Molly’s romance with playwright J.M. Synge, while simultaneously struggling to survive in an environment hostile to the old and the poor. The novel thus demonstrates the potential for art to reveal the moral failings of a wider community, eventually seen in Molly’s bleak death.
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Notes
- 1.
I refer to Molly Allgood on first name basis as “Molly” because she is “Molly” in the narrative of Ghost Light.
- 2.
In addition to class, religion and age, Molly’s occupation was likely also a factor in society’s distaste for her and Synge’s relationship. When Synge tells his mother that Molly is an actress, she exclaims that “The worst is true” and continues to describe Molly as a “whore” (55; 58). Historically and into the early twentieth century, the role of an actress had been understood to correspond with that of a prostitute, in part due to the conflation of the willingness to expose oneself on stage with the willingness to perform sexually (Pullen 2006, 9).
- 3.
Woodward draws upon the theories of psychoanalysts Helene Deutsch, Christopher Bollas and J.-B. Pontalis, as they explore emotional memory, the character of feeling, and the secure intersubjective potential of the psychoanalytic space, respectively.
- 4.
Synge died the year after they were engaged, she has since been widowed and divorced, and her son was killed in an air crash (cf. Lunney 2009, n.p.).
- 5.
Segal draws upon psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who uses this expression to describe the multiple ages found in patients’ psychic lives.
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O’Neill, M. (2017). “This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light . In: McGlynn, C., O'Neill, M., Schrage-Früh, M. (eds) Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63609-2_17
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