The Other Deleting the Other: Narrative Erasure in Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes

초록

This paper contends that beneath the seemingly empathetic juxtaposition of the writer Mary Talbot and James Joyce’s beloved daughter, Lucia Joyce, in Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes lies a dynamic of “the other deleting the other.” In this dynamic, Mary is the unrecognized other under patriarchal oppression, while Lucia is the marginalized other neglected by history. Mary oversimplifies and uses the tragic parallels in Lucia’s life as a narrative device to amplify and validate her own domestic struggles, treating Lucia not as an independent subject but as a symbolic instrument for her therapeutic resolution. This instrumentalization is evident in the abrupt structural erasure of Lucia’s conclusion. While Mary’s life is documented with reflective detail, Lucia’s fifty years of institutionalization are condensed into a mere two pages. This stark narrative void suggests that once Lucia’s tragedy has served its purpose in highlighting Mary’s narrative arc, her life is deliberately silenced, calling into question the work’s integrity as a memoir. As a result, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes ends up repeating the very censorship it implicitly criticizes. While the Joyce estate erased Lucia from history, Mary resurrects this figure only to delete her once again. To Mary’s eyes, Lucia is nothing but a narrative tool.

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