Uncanny Reflections: Older Widowers in John Banville’s The Sea, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture and Anne Griffin’s When All Is Said

The grieving older widower is a character prominent in recent Irish novels including John Banville’s The Sea (2005), Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), and Anne Griffin’s When All Is Said (2019). In this chapter, I argue that in the wake of their spouse’s death the protagonists in all three novels experience an acute awareness of their own ageing as well as a sense of diminished masculinity. My analysis centres on the widowers’ uncanny reflections as manifested in pivotal mirror scenes and the narrative device of life review which allow them to interrogate, reassess, and to some extent redefine their culturally shaped gendered identities in favour of alternative, caring masculinities.