History, Slavery, and The Phantom in Alice Thompson's Pharos

In Alice Thompson's Pharos (2002), the narrative of an amnesiac woman's desperate attempt to remember her past highlights the contentious participation of a lighthouse keeper's involvement with the Scottish slave trade. Using Nicolas Abraham's psychoanalytic concept of the transgenerational phantom, this article investigates the novel's depiction of unsettled and problematic history and examines the socio-political significance of the slave trade in Scotland. This article argues that the transferral of memory across generations enables unacknowledged aspects of familial and national pasts to be readdressed.