‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall’: Female Subjective Dialectics in the Work of Paul Howard, Louise O’Neill and Naoise Dolan

Abstract

This essay will examine how the three authors Paul Howard, Louise O’Neill and Naoise Dolan see the gaze, and the male gaze, as constitutive of subjectivity and identity in a twenty-first-century Irish context. It uses a theoretical matrix that combines the work of Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey and a range of contemporary feminist perspectives to critique the hermeneutics of identity and the concept of the image. In Howard’s work, Ross, the central character, reifies and commodifies women according to how they look, as being with a woman who is beautiful is how he validates his own quite insecure masculinity; his is the gaze of commodification and power. In Asking for It, Louise O’Neill offers a binary image of the power and the allure of visual beauty as her central character looks for the gaze of the other and manipulates it, but is then subject to the rape and the aftermath wherein she has no control over her images on social media and the subjective dehiscence that ensues. In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan’s central character is the object of a male and female gaze, as a bisexual character who oscillates between two lovers; Ava, therefore, problematizes and complicates the theory of reflection and the gaze.