Chapter 5 - Haunted Bodies and Violent Pasts

Summary

This chapter addresses the ways through which performance can highlight the body as a site of memory, history and forgetting. Mary Devenport O’Neill’s Bluebeard (1933), Eva Gore-Booth’s The Buried Life of Deirdre (published 1930) and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996), all offer ghostly performances which stage the unsettling effects of the past as it resurfaces in the present. The plays address both individual memory and the cultural memory of female experience as defined by limiting myths of an idealized and domesticated passive Irish femininity. The haunted body offers the means for an examination of the processes of memory and history as layers of somatic memories which are exposed and reperformed. The chapter draws on Joseph Roach’s concepts of surrogation and genealogies of performance to explore how the haunted bodies in these plays offer a genealogy of performance that exposes the body as the site which bears the consequences of the disavowal of violent pasts. The performing body engages with the resurfacing of that which has been repressed and forgotten, and this offers the means to address the potentially destabilizing and uncanny effects of performing elided pasts.