"Leave me alone!": Liminal Reverberations of Memory and Trauma in Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan

Abstract

Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan (1996) is one of the elaborative representations of Irish culture and women within the boundaries of memory and trauma. It not only discusses the subject of Irish female identity but also offers an exploration of cultural memory using ghostly agents obscuring the liminal boundaries between the past and the present, culture and individual. Portia is depicted as a rebellious character who needs becoming independent of cultural restrictions and ghostly memories. In this paper, I aim to analyse the liminal reflections of memory and trauma by focusing on Portia’s struggles for reclaiming her identity within the scope of Jacques Derrida's theory of hauntology and Dominick LaCapra's trauma theory. In the light of these theories, I aim to explore how cultural and individual trauma is represented through spectral characters in Portia Coughlan. Derrida concentrates on the boundary between life and death and positions spectres in this purgatory. For him, haunting is intertwined with time and is a part of memory. LaCapra suggests that traumatic memory creates temporality and eliminates the boundaries between the past and the present. Portia is an in-between character trapped by the purgatory between the past and the present. Her rejecting traditional gender roles, such as her reluctance for domestic and familial issues, talking with her dead twin Gabriel, and her inevitable suicide display how she is traumatically dissociated from her cultural boundaries. Therefore, Portia Coughlan has a significant place within the scope of liminal, memory, and border theories in terms of its employment of Irish gender identity and traumatic memories.