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John Galsworthy’s “That Old-Time Place”

This essay offers an interpretation of English novelist, John Galsworthy’s sketch, “That Old Time Place,” that examines the symbolic meanings of his descriptions of interstitial spaces in New Orleans’ St. Louis Exchange Hotel. The author demonstrates how a range of the hotel’s in-between spaces—from its stairways, to its high-ceilinged dome, flooded hallways, and vaulted auction block—express and shape a repetitive, unrepentant fantasy of racial mastery underlying the South’s nostalgic version of history—the myth of the Old South. Drawing on the concept of Freudian “uncanny” as the “return of the repressed,” the essay argues that the English narrator’s overwhelming encounter with these in-between spaces of the South reveals his own unconscious attraction/repulsion for a race and class-based British “tradition.”