Psychological Mirroring in Tana French's In the Woods and The Likeness

Abstract

Tana French’s work has been the subject of a number of recent scholars. Scholarship on French ranges from theories of liminality, to meditations on how French’s work explores the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon in Ireland, to looking at her stories as new takes on old fairy tales. French’s work straddles the line between popular detective fiction and literary fiction, upending popular tropes and creating something wholly new. One issue that has not been explored is how French’s work fits into a Lacanian framework. The six novels in her Dublin Murder Squad detective stories are rife with issues of psychological mirroring, or doubling. As such, they take the typical mystery trope of pairing a detective with a case that alters and reflects back their own psychological traumas, and takes them to a new level. This work will address issues of French’s characters and how they fit into the theories of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, as well as the “Real,” “Symbolic,” and “Imaginary” realms that we human beings unconsciously construct for ourselves. This writing examines the first two novels of the series, In the Woods, and The Likeness, and analyzes them in light of these theories, showing how mirroring exists in nearly every aspect of each text.