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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
Women in the Plays of Synge and O'Casey:
A Study in Strong-Mindedness

presented by

Beatrice O'Donnell

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

 

Ph.D. degree in Theatre

 

/ u .
« g / ‘vo. x
W :4 “R. 33”
/ Major professgr“ \ f

Date Janum 30. 1976

0-7639

ABSTRACT

WOMEN IN THE PLAYS OF JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
AND SEAN O'CASEY: A STUDY IN STRONG-MINDEDNESS

by

Beatrice O'Donnell

When one reflects upon the characters in the plays of Synge
and O'Casey, it is invariably the women who capture the imagination.
What Pegeen Mike, Maurya, and Deirdre, what Juno, Nora, Loreleen and
Mrs. Breydon have in common is a strong-mindedness that frequently
makes the playwrights' male characters look pallid by comparison.

It is the purpose of this study to investigate not only the
extent of this strong-minded behavior in the drama of Synge and O'Casey
but to explore some of the reasons that account for this phenomenon.

Strongemindedness implies all the overt and covert variations
a woman might choose in order to exert her will. In this context the
term is used to describe both the authoritarian impulse to dominate
another and the humanistic attempt to govern oneself, often in the face
of severe opposition. In short, strong-mindedness describes both the
attempt to acquire power over another and the desire to achieve power
over oneself, both the need to impose one's choices on somebody else
and the determination to make one's own choices.

Part One focuses attention on the plays, with Chapter I an
analysis of Synge's six dramas and Chapter II an exploration of O'Caseys

thirteen full-length plays. The women in Synge's plays are frequently

given to trying to impose their wills on the men in their lives. O'Casey
women, though also given to attempts at dominating the opposite sex, are
more commonly characterized by an impulse to assert personal autonomy.

Part Two explores the socio-cultural background of Ireland
for insight into sociological, historical and psychological influences
upon the two playwrights. Chapter III investigates the strong matriarchal
strain in the average Irish home to explain the submissiveness of men and
assertiveness of women found in the family. Chapter IV gathers together
evidence that both dramatists were not only scholars of ancient Gaelic
mythology but also frank admirers of the autocratic and imperious women
in the Heroic Cycle. It seems likely that the writers' mutual admiration
of the female myth figures at least reinforced basic attitudes that women
ought to be strong and assertive. Though these first two chapters suggest
reasons why both artists created an extensive gallery of strong-minded
female characters, they do not satisfactorily explain the differing types
of strong-minded women each dramatist created.

Chapter V attempts to do so by exploring each man's unique
efforts to effect adult separation from his mother. Because Synge was
never able to declare emotional independence from his mother, his female
characters are marked by an impulse to dominate, to manipulate the men
in their lives, as he felt his mother did him. In consequence, his female
characters often stand as larger-than-life dominating figures in relation
to their men -- looking for all the world as awesomely imposing as a
mother does to her small son. Whereas Synge relied emotionally upon his
mother all his life and resented her for it, O'Casey asserted his indepen-
dence of his mother and admired her.ever after for encouraging it. As a
result, his view of women was more balanced than Synge's. Though some of

O'Casey's female characters also exhibit the tendency to manipulate their

men, they are more commonly characterized by a desire to govern them-
selves, a trait which his mother lived and exemplified every day of her
life.

It is not possible to assert with absolute certainty that the
latter three were the only influences on Synge and O'Casey, but they
certainly contributed to the cultural milieu that helped shape the
dramatists' assumptions about what constituted appropriate female

behavior.

SYNGE AND O'CASEY WOMEN:

A STUDY IN STRONG MINDEDNESS

by

Beatrice O'Donnell

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
1976

@ Copyright by
BEATRICE O'DONNELL
1976

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a very real debt of personal gratitude to:

Mr. Frank C. Rutledge, Chairman of the Theatre Department
and Chairman of my Guidance Committee, for his valued advice on Irish
drama and for his unfailing humor toward "getting me through."

Dr. John F.A. Taylor, Philosophy Department, for encourag-
ing my best functioning as a genuinely extraordinary teacher.

Dr. Arthur Athanason, English Department, for his infectious
love of theatre and theatre scholarship; and to Dr. John Baldwin,
Theatre Department, for his thoughtful reading of my dissertation and
useful suggestions about form.

Mrs. Maureen Spisak, my sister, who launched into the typing
of this dissertation with the same generosity, good-nature, and thorough

ness with which she pursues most things she does.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE:

PART TWO:

SUMMARY. . .

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE PLAYS
Chapter I

Chapter II

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Synge Women. . . . . . . . .

O'Casey Women . . . . . . .

SOCIO-CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Chapter III Matriarchy in the Irish Home.

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Dramatists' Knowledge of Female

Myth Figures. . . . . . . . .

Authors' Relationship with Mother

Women in the Heroic Cycle. . . . . . . . .

Pages

ii

iv

45

134

147

156

178
186

203

INTRODUCTION

At times the contradiction apparently operant between the
modern Irish woman's subservient role in society and her dominating
role in the plays of Synge and O'Casey seems downright bizarre. For
the female characters in the majority of the plays of John Millington
Synge and Sean O'Casey are remarkably strong-minded, often either more
assertive or more autonomous than the playwrights' male characters.
The women are, incidentally, not unlike the self-willed and determined
females who appear in ancient Gaelic mythology.

This study investigates the extent of this strong-minded
behavior in the drama of Synge and O'Casey, and then suggests some
reasons to account for the phenomenon in their plays.

Since most social systems in western countries are patri-
archal in their institutions and women treated as inferior beings,
the means which women use to achieve their will is intrinsically

interesting. Strong-mindedness is the not entirely satisfactory word

 

I have chosen to convey all the overt and subtle variations a woman
might choose in order to exert her will, so as to shape her own life
and possibly the lives of others as well. In this context I have
perhaps stretched the term to describe both the authoritarian impulse
to dominate another and the humanistic impulse to achieve personal au-
tonomy, without necessarily infringing on another's choices or rights.
Though both drives imply fascinating variants in power-seeking, I make
no attempt to judge the superiority of either. I content myself with
merely describing the plays in which women are inclined to impose their
wills on others and those in which they are more concerned with self-

governance. In either case, I want to emphasize that strongfmindedness

 

iv

implies vigorous expression of one's felt needs.

Though numerous critical and scholarly works have been pub-
lished on Synge and O'Casey examining their plays within political,
poetic, religious, historical and biographical contexts, no one has yet
endeavored to analyze the relationship of Irish women to their men in
this way. Occasionally, critics have broached the issue of relationship
between the sexes but have never really come to grips with it. Instead
they usually fall back on some standard assessment like the idea that
Irish men are dreamers and Irish women are realists.l

Since this work probes the particular tensions existing
between Irish females and males, it should prove useful to directors
and actors engaged in the production of modern Irish drama by making
palpable and discernible understandings about sexual relationships
which before were either absent or but subliminally glimpsed.

In addition, it adds thrust to the young but exciting body

of "women's studies,"

though the study is intended in no wise to be
either political or polemical. Rather, it is largely descriptive,
pointing out in individual plays the kinds of circumstances under which
women either reverse the normative situation of male dominance or attempt
to maintain their integrity by living autonomously without adherence to
public opinion.

I pursued this investigation because, scholarly considerations
being equal, I wanted to better understand myself, my family and my

Irish heritage. The idea for the study originated when it struck me

while re-reading O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock how easily Juno dominated

 

 

1David Krause, Sean O'Casey: the Man and His Work (N.Y.:
Collier, 1960), p. 109 Also, see John Gassner, Masters of the Drama
(N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954), p. 569.

 

 

V

her husband. I suppose the recognition startled me more than it should
have because I had only recently come to an analagous recognition about

my own parents' relationship. Returning to O'Casey's The Plough and the

 

Stars, I was intrigued to discover in the young Nora<Ifitheroe a parallel
insistence upon determining her husband's actions.

I then whipped through all the published scripts of the other
giant of the Irish Renaissance, John Millington Synge, and found what
looked to be an even more pervasive pattern of assertive behavior among
women characters. Strong-minded women figure tellingly in his "Riders

to the Sea," The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows,

 

 

to mention but the best known.

During this same period I began dipping into the Gaelic myths
for the first time and was fascinated by the often dominating behavior
of the women in the Heroic Cycle. Initially, I was tantalized by the
idea of a possible connection between ancient cultural behavior and
contemporary. But the more I read about the women in the myths and the
women in the plays, the less I understood them -- at least in the
sense of being able to explain their behavior in terms of a neat little
formula. For at first it seemed as though the dynamism of the woman in
the plays was exclusively linked to the issue of domination. Certainly
Synge's women seem characterized by an outright need to manipulate that
makes them more assertive, more insistent than his male characters.
However, O'Casey's women refused to be so neatly pidgeon-holed. Though
a number of his ladies are often notoriously domineering, more frequently
they are memorable because they possess an inner resourcefulness that
makes them seem more centered, more whole than the men. I found that I
needed not only a larger concept than "dominating" to describe the
variety of the two playwrights' females, but a broader purview against

vi

which to examine Irish behavioral modes between the sexes than just the
idea of myths-as-behavior-models. I recognized that to understand strong-
mindedness in the women of Synge and O'Casey, I would have to explore at
least three specific aspects of the dramatists' cultural milieu:

(l) the effects of having been reared in a country where
family life is usually dominated by the mother;

(2) the possible influence of both writers' knowledge of the
Irish myths and their conscious admiration of the female myth figures in
reinforcing their assumptions about typical behavior for women;

(3) the particular results of each author's unique relation-
ship with his mother in shaping his attitudes about women.

The study then is essentially descriptive, focusing on
character, specifically on females in varying degrees of intimate
relationship with the opposite sex. Only women in such relationships
are analyzed. For that reason, otherwise wonderfully-conceived

characters like Mary Byrne in The Tinker's Wedding and Bessie Burgess

 

and Mrs. Gogan in The Plough and the Stars are not considered. I
attempt neither a formalistic analysis of structure nor an evaluative
assessment of the plays except when the playwright's technique presents
problems in character analysis, as O'Casey's technique does in several
of his middle-period plays.

The work is divided into two parts. Part I represents a
straightforward description of the behavior of women characters in the
two playwrights' dramas. Chapter I focuses on the females in all six
of Synge's plays including his one-acts, since his early death makes
the body of his work slight without their inclusion; besides, a signi-
ficant part of his artistic reputation rests on his powerful one-act
tragedy, "Riders to the Sea." Chapter II focuses on the women in

vii

O'Casey's thirteen full-length plays. Because the O'Casey canon is so
extensive and the one-acts represent for the most part insignificant
vaudeville pieces, the short plays have been eliminated from consideration.
In both chapters the plays are considered chronologically.

Part II attempts to set the playwrights in sociological,
historical and psychological contexts to throw light upon the curious
coincidence that both created an inordinate number of strong-minded
females. Chapter III concentrates on the fact that women have tradi-
tionally played the central role in Irish family life. Chapter IV
probes the ramifications of the fact that both authors were aware of
and admired the dominating women in the old myths. Chapter V considers
the poignant influence of each playwright's relationship with his mother
upon his subsequent attitudes toward what were appropriately female roles
and behavior.

The latter biographical data may account for the different ways
in which Synge and O'Casey female characters express their strong-minded-
ness. However, the issue of whether a character wins or loses her battle
to dominate or to achieve autonomy is not addressed. Rather the focus is
kept on the character's impulse toward one mode or toward the other. In
general, Synge women are generally driven by an impulse to dominate their
men and O'Casey women are more commonly concerned with governing them-
selves autonomously. These two aspects of strong-mindedness constitute
the critical key to understanding the distinction between the two
Dublin writers' similar attitudes toward women.

For the reader unfamiliar with Irish mythology, I include an
appendix giving a brief history of the assertive and autocratic women
found in the Heroic Cycle of the ancient Gaelic myths. Also included

in this segment are some provocative, if inconclusive, opinions of

viii

psychiatrists who contend that ancient myths continue to exert an ongoing
influence upon contemporary attitudes, individual characteusfunctioningas
role models for contemporary behavior. It is a theory that I find insis-
tent and appealing. However, because, it is not yet subject to absolute
proof, I've relegated brief discussion of it to a humble appendix. Need-
less to say, I make no attempt to draw one-to-one comparisons between
these mythic women and the modern females created by Synge and O'Casey.
The various ancient queens, witches, and warriors are cited only to

point out the tantalizingly similar attitude toward self-rule existing

between them and the modern characters.

ix

PART ONE: THE PLAYS

GMHERI

SYNGE WOMEN

John Millington Synge (1871-1909) published six plays during
a brief career which ended when he died of Hodgkins Disease at an un-
timely thirty-eight. In all but one of them, women characters exhibit
a marked determination to shape their own lives: their methods of deal-
in with the men in their lives range from the disarmingly manipulative
to the frankly domineering. In these five plays Synge perceives the
Irish battle between the sexes with fine compassion and unfailing good
humor.

In considering Synge's female characters it is interesting
to note that as he grows surer in his craft, the women too seem to
develop in assurance and confidence about expressing their own ideas,

needs and wills. Thereto they become progressively more domineering.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN (1903)1

If one regards his plays in their order of chronological pro-
duction, one sees Nora Burke's peculiar brand of single-mindedness as a
trial run for later women who would become very dominating indeed. The
central character of Synge's first staged play, though hardly aggressive,
is undeniably determined to hold to her own philosophy of life. She is
strong-minded in a way that not only seems to have hypnotized the three
male characters in the play toward her but, surprisingly, that seems to

have eluded the attention of most Synge scholars.

 

1All play dates refer to production year, unless specified
as publication date.

2

"In the Shadow of the Glen" is loosely based on a folk tale
the author first heard in the Aran Islands about an old husband who
feigns death in order to determine whether he has been cuckolded by his
young wife. "Here we have a play about marriage and temptation, about
an old man and a younger rival, with a taste of Deirdre about it."
However, because Synge did not make the ending (the wife going off with
a stranger) clear enough in moral terms, Irish critics have often found
the story unsettling, suspect. They found it "more like Deirdre with
a Shavian twist."2 However, the one-act has most frequently been
criticized on the grounds that Synge failed to maintain a consistently
comic tone in his treatment of the story. Daniel Corkery contends that
often hilariously farcical moments, like old Dan Burke's apopletically
furious rising from the dead and the lusty Michael Data’s proposal of
marriage to the "widow" in the corpse's presence, are diminished by
Synge's insistence on giving Nora persistently poignant dialogue about
her abject loneliness in the isolated glen. Corkery contends, "the
play is too small for such changes in mood as occur in it; and, to use
a musical term, there are no bridges between mood and mood. Nora
Burke's desperate character is the reason for this uncertainty."3
The effect, he maintains, is a teeter-totter quality tipping from the
uproariously comic to the incongruously melodramatic.

However, I maintain it is exactly this propensity in Nora to

see life through a fog of romantic gloominess that accounts for her

 

2Denis Johnston, John Millington Synge (N.Y.:Columbia U.
Press, 1965), po 15

3Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (N.Y.:
Russell a Russell, 1965), p. 126

3

sublimely comic contribution to the play. Corkery misapprehended the
irony implicit in W.B. Yeats' assessment of Nora as a woman, "melancholy
as a curlew, driven to distraction by her own sensitiveness, for her own
fineness."4 In interpreting literally Yeats' description of Nora as
"sensitive," Corkery was forced to regard her as a noble soul suffering-—-
if not in silence, then certainly with poetic lyricism. Such an explana-
tion would force "In the Shadow of the Glen" into the mere mold of a
feminist tract decrying the Irish socio-educational structure which
gives a woman no means for independence or even survival in old age
except marriage to a man of property. Such a misconstruction of the
play's thrust would make Nora a heroine whose spirit has been systematically
crushed by the insensitive and silent old man she is tied to. That
critical perspective lingers still. Alan Price and Ann Saddlemyer both
tend to romanticize Nora, to miss the comic pervasiveness of her
character by focusing on the weather. Price, particularly sees the play
as a rather serious one, citing the paralyzing psychological effects of
the misty glen.5 However such a reading of Synge's intent would indeed
blur the comic intent of the script.

For the point is, Nora is not a heroine. If anything, she is
a victim, but no more so than her husband6 whom she irritates beyond
measure with her everlasting "sensitivity" to life's day-to-day

anguishes. So determinedly melancholy is Nora that she drives her

 

4Ibid., p. 124

5Ann Saddlemyer, J.M. Synge and Modern Comedy (Dublin: Dolmen,
1968), p. 126; and Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (London:
Methuen, 1961), p. 15.

 

 

6Both are victims of being citizens "in a country where late
marriages are part of an economic and traditional necessity." Donna
Gerstenberger, John Millington Synge (N.Y.: TWayne Publishers, Inc. 1964),
p. 38.

 

4

husband into making a great ass of himself (he pretends to be the guest
of honor at his own wake) because her moroseness is so alien to his
understanding.

For Nora Burke is single-mindedly devoted to seeing the worm
inside the rosebud. Nora Burke has the habit of mind which the Welsh
call ha ith, a predilection to focus only on the bleaker aspects of
life, an inclination to anticipate in the beginning of joy, its con-
clusion. That characteristic is also a markedly Irish one, and one which
Synge turns to delightfully funny uses. So enamoured is Nora of her
misery, she is incapable of responding with anything like happiness,
no matter how promising the prospect. And in that inflexibility, she
achieves in Bergson's term, "mechanical inelasticity" which makes her
a genuinely comic figure.

Though other critics, like J.B. Yeatszpraised the play as an
effective attack on "our Irish institution, the loveless marriage,"7
the compliment is a backhanded one since it overemphasizes the social
criticism implied in the May-December marriage situation and again makes
Nora a figure of bravery. Actually she is a humorless woman who
functions brilliantly as the tool of Synge's comic intent. Far from
being the catalyst who drives the play "to the heights of tragic inten-
sity"8 as one critic misguidedly insisted,Nora is a comically obtuse

figure. She is hardly noble; after all, she married an old man for

 

7David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, John Millington Synge,
1871-1909 (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1959), p. 146.

8P.P. Howe, John Millington Synge: a Critical Study (N.Y.:
Mitchell Kennerly, 1911), p. 49.

 

 

his money. She is the perfect butt for comic treaUment. Ironically, it
is her insistence upon seeing her state in the purple hues of tragedy
that makes her character so deliciously funny. She positively savors her
loneliness, hugs her misery.

"In the Shadow of the Glen" then is not propaganda for a
social message. It is a play built primarily on character, one in
which Nora pressures, coaxes and manipulates all three men in the play
into doing things which without her influence they would never dream
of doing.

Ironically, it is Nora's tendency to accentuate the negative
that inexorably attracts the men to her purposes. Like many of Synge's
subsequent male characters, the three are a rather ineffective lot, a
fact which significantly accounts for their allowing themselves to be
manipulated by Nora. But manipulate them Nora does.

Indeed Nora is indirectly responsible for her husband's
foolish plot to catch her in adultery. Dan's evolving the ludicruous
scheme of posing as his own corpse speaks volumes about the nature of
their relationship. In spite of his jealously prohibiting her to talk
with other men after their marriage, Nora pursued her own will. In
spite of Dan's bullying, in spite of local gossip about the many men
she had become friendly with, she continued to alleviate her loneliness
by chatting with any friendly person who happened by the farm. For her
home is isolated she insists with no little self-insight,

you have to be talking with someone,
and looking for someone, in the
evening of the day, and if it's a power

of men I'm after knowing they were fine
men, for I was a hard child to please,

6

and it's a hard woman I am to please this
day. 9

That she has always had a telling influence on her acerbic
husband is loudly attested to by her erstwhile suitor Michael Dara who,
in a panic at finding the old man's "corpse" about to clobber him with
a shillelagh, shrieks to her,

Get me out of it, Nora, for the love of
God. He always did what you bid him, and

I'm thinking he would do it now. (italics
mine.)

 

Furthermore, she apparently has an even stronger influence
on the young shepherd himself. Though Michael half suspects that Nora
is a bit mad with her perennial talk of the "lonesome fog," so 'intriguing
does he find her, he eventually proposes marriage to her -- something
Nora probably long fantasized about, in view of the fact that her old
husband "was always cold, every day I knew him -- and every night."

Finally, the third man, the Tramp, a complete stranger till
that evening, is so taken with Nora's ability to articulate her misery
so poetically, that he impulsively offers to become her protector when
her husband ousts her from their home -— no small thing in Ireland
since the Tramp will thereby incur the blame for Nora's being, as her
husband claims, a "bad wife."

In fact, the Tramp is impressed with her courage from their
first encounter. On a fiercely stormy night, she admits him, a total
stranger, to the house though she is -- she thinks -- completely alone.

He cannot help feeling cowardly by comparison, since he once let a man

 

9All script citations are from J.M. Synge, The Complete Plays
(N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1935).

 

die in a ditch because he feared to investigate his cries for help after
dark.

Nor can the Tramp help but be struck by her refusal to speak
sentimentally of her "late" husband just because he is now dead. Gazing
appraisingly at the corpse, she tells the Tramp detachedly, "he was
always queer, stranger, and I suppose them that's queer and they living
men will be queer bodies after." Nora admits frankly to him that she
married old Dan Burke for security in her old age. But once she so
guaranteed that security, she found she still was not happy. "What

good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, she asks melodramatically,
"when you do be...seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog...
and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees
-were left from the great storm."

In the early months of her marriage, Nora used to ease the
loneliness of the farm by elegiacally speaking of it to kindred souls
who stopped by -- unfortunately, male souls, much to the chagrin of her
husband. After one of those male friends died under mysterious circum-
stances near their farm, she developed a more salutary mode of behavior:
she would take her misery to her bosom and savor it.

It's very lonesome I was after him [her

dead friend] a long while (She looks over
at the bed and lowers her voice, speaking
very clearly), and then I got happy again ~-
if it's ever happy we are, stranger -- for I
got used to being lonesome.

So amenable has she found such a glum attitude toward life,
that even when her husband's supposed death makes possible her freedom
from the loneliness of the farm, she is compelled to find another source

of misery. In his stage directions, Synge describes her absently

stacking the liberating piles of her husband's gold pieces while

8
simultaneously and perversely considering the inevitable effects aging
will have upon her.

Her absolute determination not to be happy, but rather to
regard life with the myopia of a tragic poet, is seen in wonderfully
comic terms when the burly young shepherd offers her a lusty marriage
bed. However, she resolutely looks past his rippling muscles and
hearty sensuality to forty years hence:

Why would I marry you Mike Dara? You'll be
getting old, and in a little while I'm telling
you, you'll be sitting up -- the way himself
was sitting -- with a shake in your face, and
your teeth falling and the white hair sticking
out round you like an old bush where sheep do
be leaping in a gap.

Nora's comic obstreperousness is again underlined after her
husband's roaring rise from the dead when he sputteringly expells her
from the house. (It is difficult to tell how much of his outrage is a
result of a marriage proposal proffered over his bier, or his final
exasperation with Nora's interminable proclivity to blather about the
barrenness of life. There is, however, some evidence for the latter
in that during the final moments of the play, Dan blithely invites the
man who proposed to his wife to join him in a hooker of whiskey.)
Though Nora is thereby released from the shackles of a joyless marriage,
she is consistent to the end. She will not be cheered even when, at
the eleventh hour, the Tramp unexpectedly emerges as her protector and
offers to become her tour guide on the open road, beyond the narrow
pettiness of the glen. He ecstatically tells her,

You'll be hearing the herons crying out over
the black lakes, and you'll be hearing the
grouse and the owls with them, and the larks
and the big thrushes when the days are warm...

And there'll be no old fellow wheezing, the
like of a sick sheep close to your ear.

9

However, Nora has too long cultivated her misery and she is

unable to rise to hope. 80 she insists with hyperbolic despair:

I'm thinking it's myself will be wheezing

that time with lying down under the heavens

when the night is cold,
and exits with self-conscious anguish into the dark and rainy night that
so suits her temperment.

Nora Burke as the earliest of Synge's female characters, though
never consciously domineering, is certainly manipulative. By virtue of
her single-minded adherence to her self-image as a woman of high-minded
sensitivity, she hypnotizes three radically different men into wanting to
attach their destinies to hers. In her obdurate fidelity to that comic
self-image, Nora so captivates them that each man is willing to chance
making a fool of himself for her: her husband pretends to be the main
attraction at his own wake; Michael Dara, though in the inhibiting

presence of a "corpse,"

pants to marry her; and the Tramp willingly
takes up arms to battle provincial minds by offering to become her pro-
tector on the road.

Nora Burke, then, is her own woman. However, in dealing with
her husband's unreasonable demands, she responds subversively rather

than with frank aggression. Synge's next female creation seeks her own

will more openly.

RIDERS TO THE SEA (1904)

 

When Synge turned his efforts to a genuinely tragic theme, he
simultaneously created a woman of striking courage, fearsome will and a
marked determination to dominate. In Maurya, the central figure in
"Riders to the Sea," one senses an indomitable spirit as one watches at

close quarters her canny and manipulative interaction with the last man

10

living in the house. One senses in her a woman who, Lear-like, would
wrestle with Nature, hurl back the lightening, and still the tumultuous
sea in her instincts to protect her son from its tyranny.

In the course of a hard life, she has lost seven men to the
sea. But if, during that time, she has grudgingly recognized that she
can neither defy nor control Nature's terrible forces, she has not
acknowledged defeat in her struggle to guard her young.

Her last surviving son, Bartley, has become the man of the
house. His sense of self, his very identity, rests upon his functioning
in that role by providing for his mother and sisters. His determination
to ferry two horses to the Connemara Fair during an impending storm
represents a practical instance of such functioning..

However, Maurya is determined to subvert his intention in
order to insure his safety. She would urge him to be submissive to her,
protective of himself.

In Maurya's and Bartley's conflict lies the tragic tension:
two goods irreconcilably opposed. She would protect him from death by
dissuading him from a dangerous boat trip; he would affirm his selfhood
by facing possible death -- lest he learn fear of life.

At curtain rise Maurya gives every appearance of being a beaten
old woman. Nine days earlier the Sea took her fifth and favorite son and
malevolently, has not yet yielded up his body. She is exhausted weeping.

Scuffing slowly from one side of the room to the other, touch-
ing occasionally the coffin boards propped against one wall, moaning
softly as she gazes out the window to the strand and the rocks beyond, she
seems a woman utterly broken in spirit.

But Maurya cannot afford to break. She is marshalling her

ll
energies toward keeping Bartley at home. She knows her efforts to prevent
his going have become a monotonous litany not only to him but to her two
daughters as well. The elder, Cathleen, points out pragmatically, "It's
the life of a young man to be going to the sea, and who would listen to
an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?"

Fearing to thus exasperate Bartley and lose the argument by
default, Maurya first attempts to strengthen her case by alliance with
the priest. Unfortunately, the priest regards her request to dissuade
Bartley from the trip as motherly hysteria and merely tells her to trust
in God's benevolence.

Flung thus upon her own resources, she galvanizes her failing
energies in an eleventh hour bid to reverse her son's resolution to take
to the sea -- during the very moments he is making his last-minute
preparations to leave.

Bartley comes hurrying up the stones into the house, and her
eyes rivet him in the doorway. Instinctively, she turns to psychological
warfare. She regards him silently, accusingly. (She has caught him in
a dilemma: he knows how much mourning she has undergone in this sorrow-
futhouse by the sea. He wants only peace for her in her ebbing days.
But on an island, a man must go on the sea to survive. The land on
Aran is not hospitable enough to live by farming alone. To survive, he
must encounter the sea.) He cannot hold her glance; he turns to his
sister and quietly asks for the new rope to make a halter for the horses.

Like one of the furies intent upon paralyzing him with guilt,
Maurya says,

You'd do right to leave that rope, Bartley,
hanging by the boards. It will be wanting in

this place, I'm telling you, if Michael is
washed up tomorrow morning, or the next morning

12

or on any morning in the week, for it's a deep
grave we'll make him by the grace of God.

She won't be sidetracked by his insistence that the boat at th:
pier is the only one leaving for over two weeks. Instead, she prods his
sense of family responsibility. "It's a hard thing they'll be saying
below if the body is washed up and there's no man in it to make the coffin.’

She attempts to lacerate him with guilt for risking the boat
trip during dangerous weather: "What will I live and the girls with me,
and I am an old woman looking for the grave?"

Sensing his implacability, she shifts from emotion to reason:
the sea is dangerous at the best of times but at the moment, "that wind
is rising the sea."

Furthermore, with unnamable terror that can only arise out of
superstition, she reminds him that last night "there was a star up
against the moon."

Desperately she points out, "if it was a hundred horses, or a
thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses
against a son where there is one son only?"

Bartley makes no answer to her question. She is right. But
he is right too: to survive on Aran, a man must encounter the sea,.

Unable to check his determination to go to the mainland with
either guilt or logic, she changes tack. She would immobilize him with
fear. "It's hard set we'll be surely the day you're drownd'd with the
rest."

In silence, he changes to a warmer jacket for the voyage.
Frustrated beyond tears, she grasps for a mother's ultimate weapon:

she will withhold love. As her son stands in the door awaiting her

blessing, Maurya literally turns her face to the wall, her back on her

13

son. In the stillness, the tension is palpable. In the open doorway,
lowering clouds threaten, the turbulent surf pounds. But she will not
bless him, a son who would defy her.

The wordless conflict is broken by the sound of her son's
hasty steps down the cobbled stones that front the cottage.

Though Maurya loves Bartley deeply, she is aggressively
determined to dominate him, to make his choices for him. And when She
fails to do so, she cannot suppress a rising antagonism toward him.
That she resents his recalcitrance is suggested by her description of
their next meeting, and even more clearly in her epitaph over his
corpse at the play's end.

Cathleen, shocked at her mother's bitter refusal to give
Bartley her benediction, talks the old woman into hurrying down the
shortcut with some bread and a soft word for Bartley before he leaves.
However, the depth of Maurya's resentment is again demonstrated when
she returns almost immediately after having encountered her son face
to face, but unaccountably stifled her blessing a second time. "I
tried to say 'God speed you' but something chocked the words in my
throat." Malcolm Pittock suggested there is significant motive behind
her action. He offered ample proof of her superstitious nature
including the fact that she

implicitly believes that by predicting Bartley's
death, and omitting to say "God speed you" which

is here referred to as if it were some superstitious
formula, she has brought her son bad luck. 10

Yet so embittered does she feel because Bartley will hot be ruled by her

wiser judgment, that she refrains from undoing the harm she believes she

 

10Malcolm Pittock, "Riders to the Sea," English Studies 49

(Oct., 1968): 447

 

14
has done him. (She later maintains that what must have prevented her was
a subsequent vision of her drowned son Michael coming behind Bartley, but
that seems a bit pat, especially in light of the later barely-disguised
resentment in her last words over the drowned Bartley's body.)

During his wake, though nominally accepting the will of God,
her words mask a thinly-veiled disaffection for him, especially in her
citing the economic implications of his having insisted on taking to the
sea,

It isn't that I haven't prayed by you, Bartley,
to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't
said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't
know what I'd be saying; but it's a great rest
I'll have now, and it's time surely. It's a
great rest I'll have now, and great sleeping in
the long nights after Samhain, if it's only a
bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a
fish that would be stinking.

Maurya then is a woman of enormous emotional strength, sus-
tained through much of her difficult life by a bracing haggith. Unlike
the foolish Nora Burke, who uses haggith to side-step life, Maurya
adopts it in order to face life. Haggith prompts her to expect the
worst, to aver simply, "Bartley will be lost now" almost immediately
upon his exit from the house. Her haggith is protective reaction.
There is a certain relief in ceasing to worry that the worst will come
to pass.

All her adult life, starting with her husband and down to her
youngest son, Maurya has sought to dominate the men in her house. The
fact that she wanted to do so in order to protect them in no way alters
the truth of that basic situation. The fact that she and the men were
locked into a dilemma which forced the latter into defying her in order

to insure the family's survival in no way diminished her ferocious

determination to keep them safe. Thomas Van Laan believed that Maurya

15
is too passive to be a tragic figure since the sea, the real protagonist,
is from the start mightier than she.11 But even the fact that her struggle,
in a larger sense, has been not with the men so much as the implacable
sea does not change the reality of her absolute determination to save
them. That fact merely contributes to the situation the ingredients of
tragedy: a dynamic in which an individual faces the unbeatable foe ~-
and chooses to fight anyway. The ferocity of Maurya's will to fight
remains absolute until Bartley, the last man in the house, actually
leaves the house and heads toward the swelling sea. Suddenly, her un-
failing will collapses. She intuits his death as a foregone conclusion.
And though she was wrestled with fate, implored God, struggled with her
men; when her last son is dead, she acquiesces stoically. It's as
though the absence of a man to contend with has diminished her somehow:
"it's a great rest I'll have now and it's time surely."

A woman of archetypal proportions, Maurya finally is awesome
in her contradictions. For despite her lifelong ferocity to keep her
men living, once she realizes her struggle has been ultimately futile,
she reacts with a startling fatalism about the ephemeral nature of
life. It is shocking, for once Bartley's corpse is carried in, we wait
expectantly for her great wailing grief to split the ears of the
universe. We wait for her studdering abandonment to the only means
animal enough to suggest her inexpressible grief: the keen. (In
describing the practice of mourners at burials on the Aran Islands,

Synge observed that the keen seemed

 

1Thomas Van Laan,”Form as Agent in Synge's 'Riders to the

Sea,'" Drama Survey 3 (Winter, 1964): p. 353.

 

16

to contain the whole passionate rate that
lurks somewhere in every native of the
island. In this cry of pain the inner con-
sciousness of the people seem to lay itself
bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood
of beings who feel their isolation in the
face of a universe that wars on them with
wind and seas. They are usually silent, but
in the presence of death all outward show of
indifference or patience is forgotten, and
they shriek with pitiable despair before the
horror of the fate to which they are doomed. 12

However, Maurya reverses the expected pattern. Not for her the bowling
and keening of the other women who have come to mourn Bartley's death.

As she approaches the still dripping body of her last drowned son, she
regards him with the stoical detachment of a woman who has no more
battles to engage her will, and observes with an almost shocking quietude,

"No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied."

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD (1907)

 

After creating two women who are marked by growing strength of
will, one within an early comedy and the other within a one-act play that
has been called "the perfect tragedy," Synge next explored the glorious
world of farce, and therein created his most memorable female character.

' Perhaps because she exists within the j0y0us environs of farce,
Pegeen Mike is Synge's most openly domineering woman. Reared in a country
backwater off the roaring Mayo coast, she lacks the sophistication to
disguise her blunt authoritarianism. She is self-assertive, demanding,
and widely reputed as the local shrew.

However, Pegeen's boldness of character reverberates in direct
proportion to the timidity of the men in her life. In fact, it is the

timorousness of these men that encourageSher dominance of them.

 

12Corkery, p. 137.

17

Her fiance is a bit of a simp and her father, a considerable sot.

Her intended, Shawn Keogh, is as hesistant and queasy a soul as
one might expect to find in the length of Ireland. Afraid of the dark,
afraid of gossip, afraid of the priest, he still seems in wistful shock
at having somehow managed to secure Pegeen Mike's agreement to marry
him.

Her father, Michael James, is an affable publican (albeit a
perpetually thirsty one) who wants nothing so much as a quiet daughter
who will leave off nagging him about his responsibilities to her.

The other men she encounters regularly, Philly Cullen and
Jimmy Farrell, are too intimidated by her short temper and biting
tongue to give her any argument when she orders them about the pub.

With such bland, unprepossessing men, it is little wonder
that her natural bend for authority has developed to such a notorious
degree.

However, despite her ability to manipulate, command, or
simply terrorize the men in her life, Pegeen is a romantic. She is
tired of being known as the "girltwhélwould knock the head of any
two men in the place." She hungers for a man she can respect, a man
cast in a heroic mold, a lad with "a mighty spirit and a gamey heart
in him." She longs for a bold man, a man capable of violence if need
be, "the like of Daneen Sullivan[whq]knocked the eye from a peeler,"
an uncommon man, a man with a poetical way with words, like Marcus
Quinn who used "to tell stories of Holy Ireland till he'd have the
old women shedding down tears about their feet."

Unhappily, her fiance is neither bold nor poetic; Shawn is
an avowed coward and determinedly prosaic. And though she has

decided to marry him, she will not turn a blind eye to his limitations:

l8

' she sneers upon learning that he has just left

'you're a daring fellow,’
a man groaning in a ditch out of fear to investigate in the dark. In
their relationship, it is she who calls the turns. She will not even
give him a firm commitment that she will definitely marry him. "You're

' she prevaricates

making mighty certain, Shaneen, that I'll wed you now,'
And she makes short work of him when he dares to object to her hiring
a young man to help her in the pub. She turns on her fiance unceremo-
niously and orders him to be still: "will you whisht? Who's speaking
to you?" Later when Shawn offers to chaperone her and her handsome new
assistant, she is even more peremptory, "you wouldn't stay when there
was need for you, and let you step off nimble this time when there's
none."

Pegeen has obviously had long practice in speaking her mind.
On her father's first entrance, she pounces on him verbally for his
plans to go out that night with the boys. "It's a queer father'd be
leaving me lonesome these twelve hours of dark." And when she fails
thus to engage his sympathy, before all his cronies she loudly
announces she simply will not stay alone in his pub, and he can do what
he likes about it! The efficacy of Pegeen's ability to manipulate her
father is economically pointed by the alacrity with which Michael James
agrees to her demand that he hire a total stranger, a "murderer," to
keep her company in the pub. That she dominates her father is even more
apparent when she browbeats him into approving her overnight intention
to marry that stranger. Even though the old man has moments before
rushed in in jubilant possession of the Church dispensation permitting
her marriage to Shawn Keogh, Pegeen will not be swayed from her intention

to marry someone else and orders her father, "bless us now, for I sweartx>

19

God I'll wed him {Ehristy Mahon] and I'll not renege."

Generally, Pegeen's relationship with men is cynical. She
assumes a man to be a fool, a rogue, or a liar, till he prove other-
wise. When the mysteriously close-mouthed stranger enters her father's
shebeen, laconically dropping veiled references to some great crime he
has committed, Pegeen is the only one in the room who remains dubious,
even sardonic, about his insinuations:

He's done nothing, so. (To Christy) If you

didn't commit murder, or a bad nasty thing,

or even false coining, or robbery, or butchery,

or the like of them, there isn't anything that

would be worth your troubling for to run from

now. You did nothing at all.
Christy's impulsive avowal that he did, that, in fact, he killed his
father brings a thunderous silence on the assemblage. Patricide! Even
in her most romantic fantasies, Pegeen obviously never hoped to encounter
such a man. She quickly recovers and in a state of high hope insures
his staying by arranging a job'for him in the pub.

As she readies a make-shift place for Christy to spend the
night, she takes the initiative and begins wooing him. She flatters
him; she subtly questions the extent of his prowess with the girls back
home; she makes it plain she admires his music with words, his decisive-
ness, his very violence. "I've heard all times it's the poets are your
like, fine, fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's roused."
It is she too who initiates the physical level of their relationship.
As she leaves him to go to bed, she touches his shoulder gently and
says meaningfully, "well, you'll have peace in this place, Christy
Mahon, and none to trouble you, and it's near time a fine lad like you

should have your good share of the earth." And from that moment, she

wins him utterly.

20

However, in Act II when she finds Christy at the center of a
gaggle of townsgirls, she demonstrates her heavy artillary in keeping
him tied to her. She hustles the young women out in a jealous fury and
turns coldly on him, ordering him briskly about his duties, "fling out
that rubbish and put them cups away. (He does so.) Shove in that bench
by the wall. (Christy tidies away in great haste.) And hang that glass
on the nail!"

When he innocently tells her he was using the mirror only to
make himself presentable for the girls, she calculatingly suggests that
such frivilous girls regularly talk to the local constables and with one
deft touch she paralyzes any further notions he may have entertained
about romancing other local girls. In anguish, he immediately envisions
himself dangling from a noose and prepares to take to the road again.

However, seeing his genuine sorrow at the prospect of leaving
her, she suddenly re-calls him, and like a mother who has momentarily
withheld her love from a fractious child, she reassures him he's in
no danger: she has checked the last three weeks' newspapers and found
no reference to his crime having been discovered yet. With naive and
grateful joy, he asks, "it's making a game of me you were, and I can
stay so, working at your side, and I not lonesome from this mortal day?"

Plainly, it is she again who charts the course of their
relationship.

However, Pegeen's strong-mindedness has its drawbacks. Her
fiance notes that she is possessed by the "devil's own temper." Widow
Quinn warns that Pegeen is the kind who when angered will "knock the
head off you." Even Pegeen herself acknowledges ruefully that she is
the "fright of seven townlands for my bitting tongue." And as deweyed-

eyed as Christy is about her, he recognizes with chagrin that when

21

Pegeen finds out that he has not really killed his father, she "will be
turning again, and speaking hard words to me, like an old woman with a
spavindy ass she'd have, urging on a hill."

And his intuition is correct. When she learns the truth her
response is immediate and outraged at being made "the fool of men." Her
ego wounded, she orders him out of her sight and her life. Pegeen's
embarrassment and anger at supposing she has somehow been made "the fool
of men" is highly significant. For it points plainly that she infinitely
prefers having her romantic illusions about Christy's heroics dashed, to
the thought that the local men find her somehow silly or pitiable. She
finds absolutely intolerable the idea that in the men's opinion she has
been the moon-eyed victim of a fast-talking interloper. She has made it
abundantly clear throughout that she has little enough respect for the
men of the town; nonetheless she cannot bear the idea that they might
sneer at her for her infatuation with an articulate and glib liar. And
so to prove she is nobody's fool, she headlong leads the local men in
physical assault on Christy. Even though her best instintts prompt her
to restraint, her vanity will not be reined in and she leads "the ter-
rified locals to rope him like a steer, while she burns him on the leg
with a red-hot turf in order to loosen his grip on the hearth."13 That
violent act finally clears Christy's romantic myopia about her and he
picks himself up with no little pride and strides off into the sunset
and out of her life.

Pegeen, watching Christy's renewed vigor and confidence in
himself as he bounds down the path and along the strand about to start

a new life, is suddenly consumed with self-pity. Suddenly, the

 

13Johnston, p. 38.

22
recognition of the fine hearty young man she has just lost through her
rash and overhasty need to defend her ego overwhelms her. However, even
in defeat the dauntless Pegeen's predilection to dominate is in no wit
chastened: she greets her ex-fiance Shawn's grateful sigh of relief that
the interloper is gone with a sound box of the ear, though she adds a
wailing lamentation that by her own headstrong precipitousness, she has

"lost the only playboy of the western world."

THE TINKER'S WEDDING (pub. 1908)

 

Synge's next play was so controversial and offensive to Irish
audiences that it has been refused public staging at the Abbey Theatre
up to this day. Its burly anti-clericalism is certainly at the heart of
Irish resistance to staging it. For the climactic moment of this unruly
and merry farce is a scene in which the local parish priest is rudely
upended and dumped with dispatch into a burlap sack. Given the progres-
sively more assertive women that Synge has been creating with each new
play, it is not surprising that the instigator of this hilarous aggression
against the sputtering prelate is a female, and a gypsy female (probably
the most despised class in the whole Irish social structure) at that!

The Tinker's Wedding focuses on the formidable Sarah Casey's

 

undaunted attempts to marry the tinker Michael Byrne. But the farce is
more properly a paean to the rites of spring than to those of marriage.
For in it, the tempestuous Sarah's sudden resolution to be formally wed
to her man is as much a result of the headiness of warm weather as the
sudden urge for respectability.

Nonetheless, whatever the cause of her unexpected turn of mind
Sarah is determined to have her way. The fact that the two men oppose her

will, only increases her insistence. A strikingly handsome gypsy, she

23

is another in the growing retinue of Synge's self-willed females.

Once she settles on the idea of having a proper ceremony to
legalize her relationship with her long-time travelling companion,
Michael Byrne, she gathers her resources to convince, first, her would-
be groom and, then, the disdainful parish priest who wants nothing to do
with tinkers.

While she stands at the church gate waiting to ask the priest
for a cut-rate wedding, she bullies her hesitant intended to stop his
grumbling and finish soldering her tin wedding band. She ignores his
argument that a ritual is superfluous since she has been living with him
contentedly for some time without benefit of sacrament. She knows his
grousing is merely the dispirited grumbling of a resigned man. When
Michael sarcastically says that he finds the prospect of waiting for

' she aggressively picks

the snobbish priest "a sacred and sainted joy,’
up an edge in her voice and threatens, "it'll be a small joy for your-
self if you aren't ready with my wedding ring." That she intimidates
him is apparent in the alacrity with which he goes back to soldering
the tin wedding band in spite of the numerous burns he has already
received in working on so small a piece.

Since the moon changed (when she first took the notion into
her head to be married), Sarah has firmly brought Michael Byrne around
to grudging agreement to the idea of sanctified cohabitation, via
periodic threats to run off with another tin-smith. Now, sensing his
reluctance about to reassert itself, she prods his jealousy with
reminders of how awestruck a certain Jaunting Jim was with her beauty
at the last fair. She reminds Michael for good measure, that Jim has

a jaunting car so that if she were to take up with him, she would no

longer have to cart the pots and tin-smithing tools on her back, but

24

could ride in style at her trade, like a lady. She adds archly, "Oh, he's
a great lad, I'm telling you and it's proud and happy I'll be to see him,
and he the first one called me the Beauty of Balinacree, a fine name for

a woman." Michael's glum silence assures her she has made her point.

And Sarah aches to be regarded a lady, or at least to achieve
the respectability that a proper wedding bestows. When her prospective
mother-in-law, Mary Byrne, cackles in gleeful bewilderment at the young
woman's insistent plans for marriage, Sarah defiantly cries "I'll be
married now in a short while; and from this day there will be no one
have a right to call me a dirty name and I selling cans of Wicklow or
Wexford or the city of Dublin itself!"

Sarah has a stubborn singleness of vision that makes it dif-
ficult for her to change her course even when logic suggests another
plan of action. There is sense in old Mary Byrne's pointing out the
extraneousness of a ceremony: "What good will it do? Is it putting that
ring on your finger will keep you from getting an aged woman or losing
the fine face you have?" And though for a moment Sarah is struck by
its ring of truth, as soon as Michael adds an impatient and self-rightous
post script to his mother's remark, Sarah bristles defensively again.

MICHAEL
That's the truth she's saying and maybe
if you've sense in you at all, you'd have
a right still to leave your fooling and
not be wasting our gold.
SARAH
If it's wise or fool I am, I've made a
good bargain with the priest and I'll
stand to it now.
But as hungry as she is for respectability on this blithe

spring evening, she is determined to get the best terms she can manipulate

from the arrogant parish priest, a man she aptly sizes up as "a big boas:

25

of a man." Seeing him at last returning toward the rectory, and knowing
the canon has a great, though discreet, eye for a pretty woman, she
whispers urgently to Michael to bellows up the fire. Like a canny stage
director, she places herself in the campfire's most effective lighting
and accosts the local holy man with her request to be married. Sarah
lunsnothingif'not a charming effrontery. At first, she appeals to his
generosity by suggesting not only that he marry them without charge but
that he contribute a little something toward the cost they've incurred
in making the wedding band!

She is alive to his instant exasperation and quickly changes
tack. This time she deals with him quite honestly and offers him all the
money she has saved, which, unfortunately, is only half his usual fee.
In the face of his adamant refusal, she changes to an emotional course
and plays shamelessly upon his sympathy. "It's two years we are getting
that bit, your reverence, with our pence and our half pence and an odd
threepenny bit; and if you don't marry us now, himself [Michael] and
the old woman fiber prospective mother—in-la 1 who has a great drouth,
will be spending it tomorrow." She breaks down, cries, cites the
injustice of a world that makes possible the grace of a sacrament to the
rich but denies it to her sort simply because she is poor. The truth of
her charge, coupled with her calculated tears, have their effect. The
priest grudgingly offers to officiate for the half-price fee, provided
they add to it the large tin can Michael has just finished soldering at
the fire.

Unfortunately, Sarah's moment of triumph is at that moment
turned awry by the untoward return of her future mother-in-law, roaring

drunk and singing bawdy ditties. As the curate becomes progressively more

26

outraged by the raucus old lady's indiscreet familiarity, Sarah's instincts
go to work and she improvises on what threatens to be a loss by default.
She scurries after the indignant canon and desperately pleads her case:
he mggt perform the ceremony, otherwise he will condemn Sarah to "growing
into an old wicked heathen like herself'Eher mother-inelawfl!" Breathless,
she watches his wrath soften, and with unspeakable delight, she hears him
agree to perform the ceremony.

In an Irish village there is no one man who inspires more respect
and kowtowing (however begrudged) so automatically as the parish priest.

The canon in The Tinker's Wedding obviously is used to dealing with his

 

parishioners peremptorily and pretentiously. Yet Sarah manipulates him
with both charm and skill. Nor is she beyond handling him via rougher
means when he becomes recalcitrant.

To wit: the farce's climactic scene earlier alluded to. On
the morning of the scheduled wedding, the priest happens upon the two
women arguing and maliciously recounting the most recent misdemeanours
of the other. He summarily changes his mind about officiating, reasoning
that it would not do for a man of his stature to mix with such an amoral
lot.

Sarah bounds back into resolute action. Shocked that he would
consider breaking his word, she frankly resorts to blackmail: she will
file a complaint against him with the one man of whom he lives in terror --
the bishop. Her moral arm-twisting is instantaneously effective. He
blusters, gasps, but rescinds his decision.

Nor is that the extent of her daring. Later, near the play's
end, when the curate interferes with Sarah's attempt to throttle the old
woman for having finally and irrevocably disrupted the wedding, she

threatens to batter his holy person unless he clears off; she warns him

27

he will not be the first man she has essayed to prove her strength upon.
"I've bet a power of strong lads east and west through the world, and
are you thinking I'd turn back from a priest," she sputters in exasperated
fury. Sarah'd boldness in threatening to physically beat the priest is
the clarion call to the other two to lay hands on the chubby holy man.
After the unholy gypsy trio frenetically tie him up, gag him and uncere-
moniously stuff him into a huge sack, they delightedly run off down the
spring vally while his ineffectual curses echo in their ears. Sarah
thus triggers the scene which culminates in what must be the ultimate
indignity perpetrated against a priest in an Irish play.

The tempestuous Sarah Casey then is another Synge woman
joyously devoted to havingnher own will, whether that implies inveigling
her intended into surly agreement to wed her or readiness to wrestle

with the local priest to convince him not to interfere with her life.

DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS (1910)

 

Five out of Synge's six published plays focus on markedly

strong women. That his last and unfinished play, Deirdre of the

 

Sorrows, centers on the strongest of them is certainly due to the
dramatist's turning back to Gaelic myth and plainly acknowledging
the archetypal roots of his fascination for Irish women.

Dramatist Denis Johnston in discussing the mythical material

which provided Synge with the stuff for his Deirdre of the Sorrows,

 

observed "it displays a peculiarly Irish attitude toward women that
has not been sufficiently remarked upon by scholars....when the great
majority of good Irish dramatists come to depict the ripe young Irish

female, they do not as a rule show her as a Ministering-AngeflrThou,

28

but basically as a killer."14 Though Johnston is on the track of a
significant insight, he falters and generalized with a simplistic
evaluation that does not at all describe "the great majority" of Irish
dramatists. He is absolutely right in sensing the existence of a
peculiarly Irish attitude toward women; but it is the assumption that
women are frequently the strong-minded partner in relationships between
the sexes, not, as he so glibly suggests that "they are killers."
Deirdre is a woman of titanic will. So strong-willed is she

that not only men hold her in awe, but other women as well. In answer
to King Conchobar's criticism that as her governess, Lavarcham ought to
control Deirdre's wanderings in the woods, the old retainer remarks
simply, "who'd check her like was meant to have her own pleasure only."
For Deirdre is a child of nature given to impulse and delight in the
simple life of the primitive wood where the aging King has hidden her
till she ripen to womanhood. So close does she feel to the elemental,
the primal, the natural, that she is seen visibly to draw sustenance
from it. Lavarcham explains why she does not interfere in her charge's
daily excursions:

She does be all times straying around picking

flowers or nuts, or sticks itself; but so long

as she's gathering new life I've a right not to

heed her, I'm thinking, and she taking her
will. (italics mine)

 

Deirdre pulsates with life. It is not difficult to grasp
why the heretofore wise King Conchobar persists in his patently unwise
decision to have her. An aging man ever aware of the imminence of
death, he is captivated by her insistent youth. For Deirdre is too
exuberant and headlong to be cautious, even about the dire prophecy

concerning her that she would be the cause of ”graves everywhere in

 

1['Ibid., p. 40.

29

Emain Macha.15 Her governess has tried to make her tread life more
carefully because of it, but to no avail:
I'm after telling her one time and another,
but I'd do as well speaking to a lamb of ten
weeks and it racing the hills. It's not the
dread of death or troubles that would tame
her like.
Deirdre's first entrance serves to re-enforce for the
audience the hold she has on the great King. She has come bolting
into the rough cabin carrying a bundle of twigs, a bag of nuts, and
ready tales of the day's outing only to find herself unexpectedly
encountering the High King himself. Nonetheless, she is self-possessed.
She brushes aside her momentary astonishment, curtseys, and despite the
unseemliness of her too buoyant behavior and dissheveled array, disposes
of the twigs at the hearth "without any embarrassment."
Earlier, Conchobar has tried to dismiss Lararcham's warning
against the marriage in the belief that Deirdre's willfulness is
merely the fresh flush of youth. He even insists he is pleased that

his prospective bride is "light and airy."

That misapprehension he is
made to see immediately by Deirdre herself. Whatever else she may be,
she is not "light and airy" with him. The moment he tries to pressure
her withinnuendo about the unsuitability of woodland frolicking for a
future Queen of Ulster, she darkens and states peremptorily, "I have
no wish to be a queen."

She is no child playing "light and airy" games with a doting

suitor. She can barely tolerate his labored breathing after his trek

through the woods to visit her. And though he be High King, she knows

 

5Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Tain (London: Oxford U.
Press, 1970), p.11.

30

the strength of her hold over him even to dare indiscreet converation
with him. Audaciously, she goads him with subject he fears most:

A girl born the way I'm born is more likely

to wish for a mate who'd be her likeness. A

man with his hair like a raven maybe, and

his skin like the snow and his lips like blood

spilt on it.
She watches him stiffen with anger, ready a bitter retort, then slowly
opt for another choice. Conchobar instead chooses to flatter rather
than discipline her. She has calculated her power correctly.

But Deirdre will be no more bribed than intimidated. Boldly,
she makes it clear how little she regards the old King's greatness and
gifts, by an ironic use of parallelism:

ODNCHOBAR

I have come up bringing you rings and jewels
from Emain Macha....What have you brought from
the hills?

DEIRDRE

A bag of nut and twigs for our fires at the
dawn of day.

Ignoring her rudeness, the old man thinks to win her with the
promise of a place that is "safe and splendid." Ironically, what she
craves is more of what she has tasted in the woods, the simplicity of
the country not the sumptuousness of the court: "I will not be your
queen in Emain when it's my pleasure to be having my freedom on the
edges of the hills." Unfortunately, her bluntness succeeds only in
firming his decision to make an immediate marriage.

At the great King's silent exit she is momentarily reduced to
distracted whimpering, begging her-governess to save her from an
unthinkable marriage. But then she begins to collect herself. It is as

though for the first time confronted with necessity, she discovers the

roots of her own strength. She straightens. She rifles through her

31
agitated thoughts for the outline of a shaping plan. She grasps it,
and is suddenly kinetic with energy:
She orders her women to take the tapestries from the chests
and hang them, to set the table with wines and silver goblets-- while
she wildly pulls from a trunk, gowns and jewels. Her head is spinning:
reverberations of the prophecy of her deadly alliance with a young man
pit themselves against the threat of a marriage bed shared with a tired
old man. She wrestles with the dilemma and wrings an existential ”a.
decision from its impossible alternatives:
If Conchobar'll make me a queen, I'll have the
right of a queen who is a master, taking her

own choice and making a stir to the edges of
the sea.

F

As she expected they would be, the hunting Naisi and his
brothers are driven by the heavy rains to seek shelter in her compound
in the woods. She frantically throws off her rough country dress, steps
into a brocaded gown, manipulates her hair into a series of elegant
twists and hastens back to the main room where the three men, apprised
of the prophecy concerning her, are about to hurriedly exit. A bit
breathless, framed in the doorway's dark silouette, she calls urgently,
softly, "Naisi, Do not leave me, Naisi. I am Deirdre of the Sorrows."

The moment is electric. She holds him spellbound with the
very information that under other circumstances would turn him to ice,
the fact that it is she whose fate will intertwine with his and bring
destruction.

Authoritatively, she orders his two brothers to be taken into
the next room and dined, for as she tells them simply, "I have many
things for Naisi only."

In a headstrong, headlong declaration, she tells Naisi that

32

since the first time she saw him earlier that day, she has loved him.
She has no patience with coyness and no embarrassment at being his
wooer, "It's a sweet life you and I could have Naisi. (pause) It
should be a sweet thing and have what is best and richest, if it's for
a short space only."

Even though Naisi is one of the High King's knights, she
seduces him into agreement. Indeed, so compelling is her presence that
his two brothers as well agree to put themselves under her sway. Thus
she shapes not only the direction of Naisi's life but that of Ainle and
Ardan, too, who voluntarily become her bodyguards in exile. Hers
indeed is a dominant psyche.

Seven years after the lovers' excape to Scotland, a most
paradoxical element of Deirdre's character asserts itself. Though
she once used every ounce of her wit and beauty to defy fate, she is
possessed by that tempermental attitude which will not permit her to
enjoy the fruits of her defiance. She suffers from a philosophic
myopia which makes her anticipate the conclusion of her joy at its
fullest moment.

The original Deirdre of the myth was politically savvy
enough to distrust Conchobar's apparent pardon for Naisi and his
brothers and therefore argued fiercely with her lover to refuse the
old king's offer of amnesty. It is only when faced with Naisi's
stubbornness that she grudgingly agreed to return with him to
Conchobar's domain.

But Synge chose to modify the myth in this respect by
making it she who actively campaigned to return to Ireland. The
playwright obviously wanted to underline in Deirdre's character a

thorough going strong-mindedness, which made her the one who con-

sistently made the major decisions about her and Naisi's life

33
together.

Synge managed this turn-about by investing Deirdre with that
familiar Irish temperament that expects the worst inevitably to follow
the best of times. That is, be filled her with a sense of haggith.

Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows has spent a gloriously idyllic
seven years with Naisi; yet when the fateful word is brought by
Conchobar's messengers of the King's dubious offer of a peace, instead

of dismissing the malicious old ruler's offer out of hand, Deirdre

“7

unexpectedly begs Naisi to accept it. Deirdre has no illusion about

U—

Conchobar's sudden claim to enlightened generosity during his golden
years; even if she were not aware of the terrible prophecy told at her
birth, she knows the old King's temper well enough to realize he is
incapable of full and munificent pardon, even seven years after the
wound to his masculine vanity.

No, it is something else that impels Deirdre to accept the
King's questionable asylum. After years so full of heightened joy and
contentment in her lover, the prospect of age and waning passion in
the future terrify her. The spectre of their love growing into a
commonplace thing is an unbearably painful idea to her. Deirdre
would prefer to end their affair at its height than wait for what
she senses must be a debilitating denoument. She regards anything less
than their current absolute and passionate commitment to the other as
a low compromise of her romantic ideal. The unlikely effect of her
present loving devotion to Naisi is paradoxically to be "wondering all
times is it'a game worth playing, living on until you're dried and old
and our joy is gone forever."

Naisi is realistic enough to see Conchobar's promise of safe

conduct for what it is, a ploy for revenge. When he attempts to

34

override her compulsion to return with a sturdy, "I said we'd stay in
Alba," she regards him solemnly but replies plausibly, "there's no place
to stay always." And so strong is her insistence on foreseeing the
nadir of their love that she brings Naisi to the same perspective and he
observes, "You're right maybe. It should be a poor thing to see great
lovers and they sleepy and old."

And remarkably, just as seven years earlier she consciously
chose the direction of their life, this time she chooses the circum-
stances of their death: 1

We're seven years without roughness or growing

weary; seven years so sweet and shining, the

gods would be hard set to give us seven days

the like of them. It's for that we're going

to Emain, where there'll be a rest forever.
In this respect Deirdre is highly contemporary. She makes a consciously
existential choice. She chooses the moment to end their idyl so as to
control and shape its significance. They will relinquish their love at
its zenith rather than wait the ignobling effects of age and the decline
of passion.

lbwever, once back in Ulster and faced with the terrifying
reality of three freshly dug graves, Deirdre abandons her philosophical
detachment, and desperately hatches a plan to try to save Naisi's life.
Face to face with the embittered old Conchobar who for seven sour years
has waited for this moment of revenge, Deirdre wildly dredges from
within herself the means of stopping him. Such command has she over
her emotions that she has the coolness to pull the enraged Naisi from
Conchobar's throat; and slowly begins with smooth words to seduce the

old King with an idea, a plan, a new order that would encompass a great

fellowship between himself and the lovers. Against all odds, her

‘1‘...

,i‘
(1"

£4

35

conscious manipulation of the old King works. Against all odds,
Conchobar regards her with doting eyes. He is canny enough to know her
honeyed words cover an urgent expedience, "and yet this night when I
hear you," he murmurs, "I've small blame left for Naisi that he stole yal
off from Ulster."

Incredibly then, she is masterful enough, dominant enough, to
wheedle a vengeful old man out of his avowed retaliation at the eleventh
hour.

Only external circumstances prevent fruition of her effort. As
Conchobar is about to extend the hand of fellowship to Naisi and Deirdre,
the silence is shattered by the death screams of Naisi's two brothers,
irrevocably ending that tenuous moment of peace, and catapulting the'
rest of them to their final destinies.

In the course of the play Deirdre exhibits a rather easy
authority over those around her. So secure has she become in her
ability to manipulate others to her will that she makes a fateful
misstep. So certain has she become of her psychological ascendancy
over her lover, that she indulges in hubris, with the usual tragic
consequences. As Naisi whirls out of her arms toward the cries of
his mortally wounded brothers, so assured is she of her absolute hold
over him that she begs him to ignore them, to spend his last moments
alone with her. So uncompromisingly selfish is she in her need to
dominate him that she refuses to understand that his honor requires him
to go. Instead she deliberately precipitates a scathing argument --
making their last words to one another painfully bitter ones. She
suddenly breaks from him and asks him sarcastically "Have you no shame
loitering and talking, and a cruel death facing Ainle and Ardan in the.

woods." Her unswerving demand for total fealty to her finally drives

ai-

36

Naisi to impotent rage as he cries out against her feminine unreason-
ableness,

They'll not get a death that's cruel, and they

with men alone. It's women that have loved are

cruel only; and if I went on living from this

day, I'd be putting a curse on the lot of them

I'd meet walking in the east or west.

Inexorable, she watches him rush from her, and alone she
listens in horror to Naisi's death cries outside her tent.

Upon Conchobar's gloating return, however, she begins to regain
some stature when she boldly insists upon the significance of her life,
especially that spent with Naisi:

It was not a low thing to be chosen by
Conchobar, who was wise, and Naisi had no
match for bravery. It is not a small thing
to be rid of grey hairs and loosening teeth.
(with a sort of triumph) It was the choice
of lives we had in the clear woods, and in
the grave we're safe surely.

Seconds later she plunges a hunting kiife into her chest"
before Conchobar's horrified eyes. Unlike the Deirdre of the original
myth who lived for a year as the sulking chattel of Naisi's murderer,
Synge's Deirdre makes an immediate conscious choice about the moment she
will rejoin her lover. She is insistently existential. She has altered
not only the arc of her own life from the High KingSS ordained plan, but
she has also determined the course of Naisi's and his brothers' lives,

as well as shaping the last days of the High King Conchobar into those

of loneliness and guilt.

THE WELL OF THE SAINTS (1905)

 

Of Synge's main body of six published plays, fully five of
them contain women whose behavior is strong-willed to flagrantly

domineering. Of his total output, only in his whimsical comedy The

37
Well of the Saints is there no evidence of attempted female domination.
Rather, in this, the third of his published plays (1905), Synge
focuses on a theme that Pirandello and O'Neill were to make much of: the
need for illusion. Rather than struggle for domination, the blind and
foolish couple, Martin and Mary Doul, cooperate famously to bolster each's
belief about the other's handsome features. A miracle which cures their
blindness removes their mutual illusions of beauty in themselves and each
other.
Instead of a struggle between the sexes, the tension in the
W211 exists, as it also does in a number of O'Casey's plays, between
young and old, between the confident, cocky and beautiful young and the
insecure, defensive, and wrinkled old. The comedy which occasionally
takes on a biting edge pits the young, (who are callously truthful
about the senior citizens' repulsive hoariness,) and the old, (who
quickly learn a kindred malice in reminding the former that a parallel
fa te awai ts them:
It's them that's fat and flabby do be wrinkled
young, and that whittish, yellow hair She has
does be turning the like of a handful of this
grass you'd see rotting, where the wet lies,
at the north of a sty.)
As a result of the bitter disillusionment of seeing each other as
decaying and ugly, the Doul's agree to cancel their miracle and go back
to the harmonious cooperation that characterized their relationship when
each idealized the physical beauty of the other.
With this single exception, however, all Synge's remaining plays
center upon women who grow progressively more determined to have their

own will. That fact obviously accounts for P.P. Howe's enthusiastic

surmise that "the women of the plays are a more wide and wonderful

38

gallery than the men."16

SUMMARY

In considering this systematic progression of the women in
his plays from hard-headed resistance to articulate domination of the
male, Synge's first female creation Nora Burke represents a clear
instance of the woman finding her way. If she finds it difficult in
"In the Shadow of the Glen" to express open defiance toward her dour
husband, she has found other ways to express her resistance to his
jealous attempts to curtail her activities. Nor has she been unaware
of the dyspeptic response her opposition effects in him. And if she
does eventually cease talking to men who happen by the house in
deference to his prohibitions, she gets a good bit of her own back
again by venting on him her unrelenting, virtually obsessive, need
to melodramatically lament her isolation on the fog-shrouded farm.
So positively nurtures her "tragic" self-image. So fond has she
become of it that when she is offered release from her sour old
husband, she obdurately refuses to enjoy her freedom. In spite of the
Tramp's lyrical propaganda, in spite of her husband's cheerful malice
in tossing her out of the house thereby making it possible for her to
discover a more satisfying life, she insists upon looking through the
grey spectacles of haggith: she just knows that the life of freedom is
going to be awful! And with the strong-mindedness that can only be
called wrong-headedness, she grudgingly follows the Tramp out in his
callfito the open road. She goes only on her own terms -- determined

to be miserable, melancholy and tragic.

 

16Howe, p. 162.

39

In "Riders to the Sea" Synge not only created what Walter
Kerr called "the perfect tragedy" but also a woman who had no difficulty
whatever articulating her will upon the men in her life. The play
focuses on her last conflict, a primal struggle of will with her son
that has broad reverberations: "The struggle between Maurya and
Bartley is certainly not a static thing, and it becomes a cosmic expres-
sion of the larger struggle -- the contest between the cottage and the
sea."17 Despite the implications of profounder philisophic meaning
that reverberate through their relationship, the struggle between them
is an intensely personal one in which the metal of each is tested in a
crucible of ineluctable circumstance. Maurya means to impose her will
upon her son; he mgst relent, must submit to her urging. Relentlessly,
she seeks a chink in his armour, a weakness, a vulnerability, in order
to break his determination. There is no psychological manipulation to
which she will not resort to stop him from going: she would fill him
with guilt, shame, embarrassment; she would rob him of his sense of
manhood - all to keep him with her. Maurya's will to power over her
son is at the dead center of the play's dramatic tension.

Synge's next female creation was to be one neither mutely
resistant nor given to subtle psychological warfare in trying to
subordinate the man in her life. Pegeen Mike Flaherty is unabashedly
aggressive and domineering with all the men in her life: she browbeats
her bibulous father, bullies her timorous fiance, nags the locals who
frequent the family pub, and subtly manipulates via a variety of wiles

the title figure in the Playboy of the Western World.

 

Though Christy Mahon is of course Synge's focus in the play,

Pegeen plays the pivotal role in transforming him from a shy, fearful

 

17Gerstenberger, pp. 53—54.

40

lonesome young man to one who finally realizes his own joyous capacity
for life.But the price she would demand for that service is high. In
Christy's attempt to heal the loneliness that has marked his life until
the sudden notoriety he is delighted to have achieved since his "murder"
of his father, Christy confronts a dilemma. If he would wed Pegeen, he
would clearly be "exchanging one kind of domination for another." For
Pegeen makes it abundantly clear time and time again that he can have
her only on "her own overbearing terms."18 But so enamoured is he of
her for even noticing him much less for finding him an entrancing man,
that for most of the play he is willing to accept her on those terms.

It is significant that Pegeen is.the first person

to offer him violence when he enters the

Flaherty cabin, and that she behaves with the

most surly possessiveness ("seizing his arm" and

"shaking him") when the Widow Quinn makes a play

for him. 19 ‘

In short, Pegeen is hot-headed and thick-skulled. Nonethe-

less, she harbors within her a deeply-felt passion for poetry and a
romantic hero. So encompassing is her need to find such a hero that
she virtually creates such a figure out of the unlikely materials of
a Christy Mahon. She wants to see Christy in terms of the rough idols
she formed during her girlhood, the disreputable, but thrillingly
violent sort like "Daneen Sullivan" or "Marcus Quinn." And indeed so
insistent is her need to believe Christy like them, that she convinces
Christy he is like them; he begins to see himself through the mirror of
her eyes. 'The sublime irony, however, occurs in the fact that "the

18Augustine Martin, "The Playbgy of the Western World:

Christy Mahon and the Apotheosis of Loneliness," in Centenary Tribute
to John Millington Synge, 1871-1909, ed. S.B. Bushrui (N.Y.: Barnes
and Noble, 1972), p. 64

191bid., p. 65.

41

adventurous life she professes to prefer shocks her when it occurs
before her eyes, and she turns against Christy."20
And so with a brilliant comic twist, Synge withheld the
traditional comic ending. Not only does the couple not couple at the
play's conclusion, but each sees with striking clarity the implication
of their individual choices: Christy looks forward to a "romping life-
time," while Pegeen because of her hard-headed inflexibility realizes
immediately the pearl without price she has just let slip through her
fingers.
A disconsolate Pegeen laments, too late,
the loss of her only playboy. She realizes
that Christy's visitation had presented her
with a vivid possibility of passion and
poetry and that she has failed to grasp it. 21
In constructing The Tinker's Wedding, a play Donna Gersten-
berger would later call an "inferior," lightweight script, "hardly
worth staging,"22 Synge nonetheless produced another vital, stout-hearted
woman determined to have her own way. One of Gerstenberger's reserva-
tions about the play's quality was the playwright's failure to strongly
motivate Sarah Casey's sudden desire to be married (after several years
of living with, and several children by Michael Byrne).
But the delicious point is Sarah Casey's stubborn character;
the notion to marry is just that, nothing more than a whim brought on
by the sudden balmy spring weather. The significant fact is not that

her decision to marry is a whimsical one but that once made, she pursues

it with enormous determination --in spite of her groom's reluctance, in

 

20
Ruby Cohn and Bernard DuKore, TWentieth Century Drama:

Eggland, Ireland and the United States (N.Y.: Random House, 1966),
p. 94

 

ZlMartin, p. 62.

22Gerstenberger, p. 66.

42
spite of her mother-in-law's hooting sarcasm, and most importantly, in
spite of the priest's arrogance.

With both men in the play, her determination to legalize her
relationship with Michael is implacable. It is only when the "old
flagrant heathen," her mother-in-law, intervenes and is caught upsetting
the financial arrangements Sara has made with the priest, that the
young gypsy's focus on her marriage is distracted. Then fully in the
boisterous spirit of this raucous comedy (and perhaps because of the
feistiness that spring air prompts in her) Sarah takes another whim
into her head: to thoroughly trounce the wheedling old woman at the
gate of the church.

The fact that Sarah Casey makes choices on the basis of whim
does nothing to minimize the determination with which she attempts to
realize them. It is her glorious block-headedness that brings about
the play's climax: the trio's hamstringing the pudgy prelate in a
burlap sack. Whatever the limitations of the play, it boasts another
strong-minded and domineering -- if frivolous -— woman.

Synge's last play offers a woman with not the least shred

of the frivolous about her. Deirdre of the Sorrows, he wrote during

 

the last fifteen months of his life while dying of cancer. During that
time he was deeply in love with and engaged to one of the Abbey's most
volatile young actresses, Molly O'Neill. He wrote the role specifi-
cally for her. Not surprisingly, the play is informed by the double
themes of heightened passion and intimations of mortality.

Deirdre is his strongest woman; she is most completely her

own woman. "Although caught in the web of prophecy, she is eminently

 

p’.
s

0.

ll}

('1‘

43

herself."23 From the beginning of the play to its conclusion, we watch
her strength of purpose grow firmer and her clarity about the meaning of
her life grow more lucid. And from the moment she seduced Naisi into an
elopement through seven years of bliss and happiness, she never falters
in her assurance of the rightness of that choice. It is only "the dread
of the natural course of life,"24 the decline of passion, that makes her
consider the mutability of the choice she made that stormy night in
Ireland seven years earlier. She suddenly recognizes that she must take
action to preserve hers and Naisi's love at its height of glory; 143;,
she must end it at its zenith.

"The heroic resolve to settle for all or nothing, for an ideal
love or an absolute death is in the grand tradition of romantic tragedy,"25
remarks John Reeslbore:enthusiastically. However, Moore is confused by
the way the last movement of the tragedy is initiated. He expects and
wants Naisi to be the inciting agent of the concluding action. He

forgets that unlike the Red Branch story, this tale is not called the

"Sons of Usnach" but Deirdre of the Sorrows. Synge quite deliberately

 

changed his focus from the male to the female. Moore seems to resent a
bit of contrast between the decision-making Naisi in the Red Branch saga
and the modified role he plays in this modern version. In Synge's play,

Moore objects "the complexities of Naisi get short shrift because he is

 

3Ann Saddlemyer, "Deirdre of the Sorrows: (Literature First...
Drama Afterwards," in J.M. Synge Centenagerapers 1971, ed. Maurice
Harmon (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972), p. 100.

2"1pm., p. 97.

25John Rees Moore, ”Synge's Deirdre and the Sorrows of Mortality,"
in Centenary Tribute to John Millington Synge 1871-1909, ed. S.B. Bushrui
(N.Y.: Barnes and Noble, 1972), p. 100.

 

 

44

the passive character, the one to whom 'things happen' while Deirdre's
energy continually forces the issue."26
But that is exactly the point. Synge read in the original myth
other clues that pointed to Deirdre's powerful will and dominating hold
over Naisi (not the least being her physically grappling him by his two
ears and taunting him into an elopement), and made a conscious choice to
give shape, scope and focus to this important element of her character.
In doing so, he made apparent what was often only implicit, the fact that
"the full responsibility of action rests finally on Deirdre alone."
And in Synge's play, she accepts that responsibility with full awareness
of its existential reverberations.
Her final act of will she determines to make suicide, quite

simply because after Naisi's murder, suicide represents a clean act, a
positive act, a completion, that will raise hers and Naisi's brief life
together into the domain of legend.

She knows that her seven years with Naisi

are something priceless and rare, something

which Conchobar would give his all to

possess, but which neither he nor any figure

in the play will ever attain. She knows also

their death will forestall decay and prevent

the perfection of the dream becoming marred,

so they will become a wonder to all people. 28
So she joyously grasps the means of securing immortality for herself and
the man she loved. She plunges Naisi's own knife into her heart, aggres-

sively defying for a second time the plans of the great King who split

his country into civil war to possess her.

 

26Ibid., p. 97

27Saddlemyer, p. 100.

28Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (London: Methuen,

1961), p. 102.

CHAPTER II

0 ' CASEY WOMEN

The Early Period: the Dublin Plays
Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) was a man whose writing career spanned

well over forty years, during most of which time he energetically sought
to expand what he regarded as the commercial theatre's narrow fascination
with "realistic" dramatic conventions. He commented acidly,

In the theatre of today, realism is the totem

pole of the dramatic critics. Matter-of-fact

plays, true-to-life arrangement, and real, live

characters are the three gods the critics adore

and saturate with the incense of their common-

place praise once a day and twice on Sundays in

their trimly dressed little articles.
However, O'Casey insisted that "Realism, or what the critics childishly
believe to be Realism, has had its day."1

John Gassner admired O'Casey's theatricality pnodigiously,

finding in it a "baroque" quality not seen in theatre since the days of
the Elizabethans. Gassner recognized that O'Casey wanted a more lavish,
flexible and dynamic drama than "the largely trivial and constricted
theatre" of the 1930's, '40's, and '50's which was given over to
"neat constructions and small beer feelings."2 And indeed O'Casey
throughout most of his career experimented prodigally with new forms
of theatre. He dabbled in Expressionism, Symbolism, and fantasy; he

incorporated outrageous cartoon characters side by side with three-

dimensional ones; and he explored wildly farcical uses of props and

 

1Sean O'Casey, Blasts and Benedictions (N.Y.: St. Martin's
Press, 1967), P. 153.

 

2John Gassner, "The Prodigality of Sean O'Casey," in Sean
O'Casey: Selections of Critical Essays, ed. R. Ayling (N.Y.: Macmillan,
1969), p. 115.

 

45

46

people.3 Though most critics believe that O'Casey's experimentation

commenced with his expressionistic The Silver Tassie, J.C. Trewin

 

found the seeds for his essentially presentational approach to dramaturgy
even in his early period tenement plays. Trewin believed even in them
O'Casey used an imaginative cross-section of theatrical techniques:
"prose, verse, song, dance, incantation, melodrama, slapstick...to
I O O 4
drive his message across the footlights."
However, the majority of critics find the early-period plays
different from his middle- and late-period plays, generally appraising
them as his best drama primarily because of the objectivity of his
characterization. Critics find the characters in these plays closer
to the "realistic" ideal than those in subsequent O'Casey plays.
Vivien Mercier applauds the fact that
there is hardly a character in the three
early plays for whom O'Casey feels either
unalloyed admiration or simple-minded con-
tempt -- the two commonest attitudes in
Gaelic poetry. Even the admirable Juno
appears ridiculous once or twice because
of her ignorance.
Mercier continues that when the dramatist ceases to have a
divided mind about his characters, his technique suffered.
In other words, critics continued measuring his characters with

a "realistic" rule even after O'Casey began working within a broader,

non-realistic artistic ideal. Because the dramatist was aiming for

 

3Thomas Kilroy, Introduction to Sean O'Casay: A Collection
of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975), p. 12.

4J.C. Trewin, Dramatists of Today (London: Staples Press, Ltd.
1953), p. 62

 

 

 

5Vivien Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Claredon
Press, 1962), p. 240.

 

aPu

ill;

.
op,
war.
II
.
sh.
bli:
”I

47
different artistic effects in characterization during his middle-and
late-period plays than he was during his early period, it is helpful

to group analyses of the characters within these three periods.

THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN (1923)

 

One of O'Casey's earliest biographers observed that "the
heroines are the heroes of his plays."6

And indeed he does seem to perceive in women a greater
resilience to life's pressures than men. Benstock found that O'Casey's
"attitude toward women as stronger individuals remained consistent
throughout his career." And certainly in his first full-length play,
"the pathetic weakness of Seumas and Donal made Minnie Powell look
strong by comparison."7

Nowhere is the phenomenon of O'Casey woman as heroine more
economically, or more obviously, in evidence than in this first-

produced play, The Shadow of a Gunman. In this early experiment with

 

the technique of tragicomedy, O'Casey examines the nature of courage.
The Dublin dramatist sketched the character of Minnie Powell
in simple, clean lines to stand in sharp relief against the affected
bravery and verbose twaddle of Seumas Shields (pedlar) and Donal
Davoran (poet), flat-mates in the same tenement where Minnie livies

Donal and Seumas spend the better part of the play engaged

 

6Saros Cowasjee, The Man Behind the Plays (N.Y.: St.
Martin's Press, 1964), p. 36.

 

7Bernard Benstock, Sean O'Casey (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated
University Presses, 1970), p. 74.

 

48

in literary name-dropping and intellectual one-upmanship. Much of
the play's comic mileage derives out of their earnest consideration
of the roots of their present stoic heroism in the face of Ireland's
explosive martial law. To wit.

SEUMAS

Thanks be to God I'm a daily Communicant.

There's a great comfort in religion; it

makes a man strong in time of trouble an'

brave in time of danger. No man need be

afraid with a crowd of angels around him;

thanks to God for His Holy religion!

DAVOREN

You're welcome to your angels; philosophy

is mine; philosophy that makes the coward

brave; the sufferer defiant; the weak

strong; the...
Unhappily, their conversation is rudely interrupted at that point by
a burst of gunshots in the alley below, and both stoics are brought
promptly, and literally, prostrate with terror.

Compared with the honesty and directness of Minnie, both
men are blatherers and irresponsible frauds. They talk continuously,
improvidently. Seumas is a dime-store sociologist who berates the
"Irish race" for the very faults that are most obviously his own.
Donal is almost as enamoured of being mistaken for an I.R.A. gunman
as he is of living up to his self-conscious image of himself as poet.
He is simultaneously naive and arrogant: during another exchange With
Seumas, he swaggers "damn the [common] people! They live in the abyss.
The poet lives on the mountain top."

As the men are the talkers, Minnie is the doer.

Minnie Powell is only on stage for a short
while in the first act and makes only one
brief entrance in the second; yet she still
remains the chief character in the play.

She towers above the others because she at
least lives up to her illusions and gives her

49

life for them. O'Casey does not give her fine

words to speak or great thoughts to voice, but

he endows her with something finer still --

courage. It is the wastrels and good-for-

nothings that are fine phrase-makers; and the

incongruity between their words and deeds is a

source of continual laughter. 8
She is a thoughtlessly romantic straightforward young woman who wants
little more than pretty clothes, an attractive man, and joy in her
life. "There's nothin' I'm more fond of than a Hooley," she bubbles
animatedly to Donal at their first meeting, intimating she would not ,
be averse to his taking her to such a dance.

For all his sophisticated talk about the aesthetic life,
Davoren is quite the innocent about pursuing a sexual relationship; it
is Minnie who initiates it. It is she who finds the excuse for entering
his room via the transparent device of borrowing some milk. In the
face of his initial bashfulness, she asks him "Do you be alone all the
day, Mr. Davoren?" and then quite straightforwardly whether he is
involved romantically at the moment, ”But you have a sweetheart all
the same Mr. Davoren, haven't you?" Informed to the contrary, she
blithely procedes to flirt openly with him: "then if I'm a charmin'
little girl, you ought to write a poem about me."

But for all her lightheartedness, Minnie has iron in her
character, too. Unlike Donal she will not be intimidated by what
others say of her behavior. She has a healthy self-esteem which
enables her to make moral choices and abide by them boldly. When Donal

is frightened by her offer to tidy up his room because of the gossip it

is likely to provoke, she retorts

 

8Cowasjee, p. 37.

50

An' do you think Minnie Powell cares

whether they'll talk or no? She's had to

push her way through life up to this with-

out help from any one, an' she's not goin'

to ask their leave, now, to do what she

wants to do.
Benstock considers this moment quite revealing of each's true mettle
in that "O'Casey often distinguishes the uselessly spineless and the
potentially courageous by having his people commit themselves on their
regard or disdain for what the neighbors will say."9

Perhaps this willingness of Minnie to take responsibility for
her own life without an excessive concern about who is looking over her
shoulder accounts for Donal's withdrawal from her. Or perhaps his
shrinking from her has nothing at all to do with an intimation that her
spirit is finer than his own; maybe his rejection of her is nothing more
than another instance of fear of sex. For "from Gunman on O'Casey
equated the pretty girl in pretty clothes with a vibrant love of life,
. . . . . . "10
in Signiflcant contrast to the mean ex1stences of sex-fearing males.
For whatever the reason, Donal, though a short time before genuinely
charmed by Minnie, eventually justifies demeaning her because of her
ignorance. Whereupon his crony Seumas hurries to agree with perhaps
more pettiness than necessary that indeed she is "an ignorant little
bitch that thinks of nothing but jazz dances, fox trots, picture
theatres, an' dress."
Despite their glib dismissal of her, it is only Minnie who

is capable of decisive, aggressive action.

The theme of the play concerns true and false

bravery. The characters who are truly brave --
bhguire, Minnie, Mrs. Henderson --are not talkers

 

9Benstock, p. 74

lolbid., p. 103.

51

but doers...The characters who are falsely

brave -- Davoren, Shields, Grigson, Tommy --

are all voluble braggarts." 11
When the Black and Tans begin battering down doors in the tenement later
that night, both Davoren and Shields are paralyzed with panic at the
thought of an incriminating bag of mills bombs hidden in their room.
Minnie regards them uncomprehendingly, first at Shields who is breathless
in "agonized prayerfulness" and then at Davoren who is prone, "almost
fainting on the bed." Suddenly fierce with energy, she demands of the
two terror-stricken men "What is it? What have you got; where are
they?" Donal is shaken alert and almost instantly hysterical, "Bombs,
bombs, bombs; my God! in the bag on the table there. We're done,
we're done!"

While the terrifying sound of rifle butts being hammered
against a door down the hall reverberates through the room, Minnie
becomes quiet, calm and decides with authority "I'll take them to my
room; maybe they won't search it; if they do aself, they won't harm
a girl. Good-bye ---Donal. [She glances lovingly at Donal, who is
only semi-conscious, as she rushes out with the baga"

Minnie's fate is concluded off stage. She is caught with the
bag in her possession, arrested, and killed trying to escape.

The play's finale is shot through with a masterful sense of
comic tragedy. O'Casey

imposes a distinctively tragi-satiric/pattern
on these characters and events. Indeed the
play is in some respects an exercise in self-
criticism, showing the superiority of feminine

instinct to masculine rationalization. The
owo principal male characters are blighted

 

llRobert Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O'Casey (N.Y.: St.
Martin's Press, 1960), p. 31.

 

52

by egotism. 12
Neither man can absorb the implication of the young woman's sacrifice.
Donal, after paying lip service to his responsibility for her death,
quickly slips back into a facile iteration of a favorite poet's catch
phrase. A man of shallow emotional and mental responses, he has
inured himself to real pain.

O'Casey deliberately gives his clown the play's last moment,
With it, Seumas would make Minnie's death not only meaningless but
ludicrous, when he complacently attributes its significance to the
fulfillment of his superStition about some unexplained noises he heard
earlier: "[sOlemnlyJ.’ I knew something ud come of the tappin' on the
wall!"

Neither Shields nor Davoren is capable of appreciating Minnie's
action. "These two egotists are judged in terms of their reactions to
Minnie Powell." Neither realizes

that Minnie is an embodiment of Cathleen ni
Hbulihan [the maternal symboLJOf suffering
Ireland in Irish folklore , that this slum
girl treads just as thorny a path as Deirdre
of Irish myth or the legendary Countess
Cathleen of Yeats' first play. The archetypal
quality of O'Casey's central character raises

the play far above the level of topical
realism. l3

JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (1924)

 

More than any other female character, Juno Boyle represents

 

12William Armstrong, Sean O'Casey (London: Longman, Green
and Co., Ltd., 1967) p. 12.

13Ibid., pp. 12-13

 

53

the "typical" O'Casey woman in the popular imagination. She it is whom

critics idolize as "calm, tireless, heroic;"l4 deify as "aptly named:

she does assume universal significance by the end of the play and can

rightly be regarded as the 'goddess' or symbol of womankind and marriage."15
However, to analyze Juno in perspective, one must dig through

the plethora of hyperbolic critical commentary to find the human being

beneath the robes of deity too often heaped upon the harried housewife.
JUno Boyle is easily O'Casey's most dominating woman. With

the possible exception of Reena Kilternan, the leading woman. in his

last published play Behind the Green Curtain, no other woman is less

 

subtle about ordering her man about. However, dominance is not a
behavior she likes in herself. She knows that though her having

taken over the role of head of the”house has given her family the only _
sense of stability it is likely to feel in the teeming Dublin tenement,
her functioning thus has also made her abrasive and petty. Juno knows
that her perpetual harping on her recalcitrant husband has made her
soul shrink somehow. Her purview of life has become as narrow and
demeaning as the view from her tenement window. She sees only too
clearly that her marriage relationship is built on badgering and lies,
nagging and bravado. Jacques Barzun understands her double bind, yet

cannot refrain from attributing part of the blame for the family's

 

£4G...Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British

Drama (London: Phoenix House, Ltd., 1962), p. 374

15Ronald Ayling, "Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy," in Sean
O'Casey: A Collection of Critical Essaya, ed. T. Kilroy (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 83.

 

54

dissolution to her dominance as well as to her husband's irresponsi-

bility: Juno and the Paycock is the story of a family that falls

 

apart because of a shiftless father and a necessarily over-managing
mother."16

Perhaps the fact that she has become so entrapped and
entangled in a debilitating marriage is as much a tragedy as any in
the play. More than any other circumstance, her marriage is responsi-
ble for her losing the animated and capable self she might have become.
O'Casey observes in Act I that under other conditions, Juno would
probably be "a handsome, active, and clever woman." However, living
in poverty and tied to a man She cannot respect, she now wears a "look
of listless monotony and harrassed anxiety, blending with an expression
of mechanical resistance."

During the more than twenty years she and Jack Boyle have
lived together, she has developed a pattern of bitterness and recrimi-
nation that has diminished them both. The fact that her husband is an
alcoholic wastrel does nothing to lessen the vague sense of loss she
experiences each time she falls into the familiar pattern of sarcastic
prodding of the incorrigible "Captain."

When the action opens in a seamy two-room Dublin flat, Juno
is waiting for her husband to come home so she can make him his break-
fast. An ordinary enough domestic situation, except that we learn
almost immediately that Juno is playing not only this wifely role in
preparing breakfast, but is functioning as well in the traditionally

male role of breadwinner.

 

6Jacques Barzun, "O'Casey at Your Bedside," in Sean O'Casey:

Selections of Critical Essays, ed. R. Ayling (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1969),
p. 121.

 

55

The man of the house, Jack Boyle, has been unemployed for some
months and likely to be unemployed for some months to come -- if he has
anything to say about the situation. As even his best friend says of hi1,
Jack Boyle is a man who is constantly "lookin' for work, an' prayin' to
God he won't get it."

The traditional roles of man and woman then are unsettlingly
confused in the Boyle household. Since Juno paired off with a vain
boaster, she has had to head the family herself. Though she has the
moral fibre for the role, she is not at all content playing it.

It is with biting, rueful humor that Juno acknowledges her
spouse's limitations; she has become a tired, anxious woman whose
potential for cleverness has been perverted to a too-frequent resort
to caustic irony. To Boyle's avowal that he has not been near the
local pub that morning, she inquires sardonically, "Oh, is there a mad
dog there?"

There is something especially p0ignant in the demoralizing

effects of her "gnousin" upon both of them. Though she wishes she
did not, Juno knows her husband only too well. She knows he does not
'want to work, but the frustration of having to listen to his latest
lie about his intention of job-hunting that day involuntarily draws
out of her the familiar stinging retort:

If there was e'er a genuine job goin', you'd

be dh'other way about --not able to lift your

arms with the pains in your legs! Your poor

wife slavin' to keep the bit in your mouth,

and you gallivantin' about all the day like a

paycock.

One can very nearly sympathize with the old reprobate Boyle

“who wmnts nothing so desperately as to be able to respect himself when

he replies hopelesSly:

56

It ud be betther for a man to be dead, betther
for a man to be dead.

JUNO
Everybody callin' you "Captain" an' you only

wanst on the wather...

BOYLE‘
Are you never goin' to give us a rest?

JUNO
Oh, you're never tired o' lookin' for a rest.

BOYLE
Do you want to dhrive me out of th' house?

JUNO
It ud be easier to dhrive you out o' the
house than to dhrive you into a job!

Her husband's unwillingness to perform this most basic role
as breadwinner alternately drives Juno either to nagging him like a
fishwife or to ordering him about as though he were an intractable
child, as when she premptorily tells him to "G'win and take off your
moleskin trousers when you're told!" just before company is expected.
He does so.

When the bullied man attempts a quick exit from the flat he
has just returned to after an all-night pub-crawl, Juno impatiently
denies him permission to leave: "You'll sit down an' take your break-
fast, an' let me go to me work, for I'm an hour later already waitin'
for you." Like a chastened schoolboy, Boyle sulkily responds he wants
none of her breakfast. Finally out of patience with his whining
childishness, she whips the frying pan off the stove and into the
press with a tart, "Nobody's goin' to coax you -- don't think that."

Nor is Juno above threats to get her husband to accept
another job. When the local priest sends word there is a job avail-
able: for Boyle if he will but apply for it, Juno responds to her

hustmand's familiar claim to a sudden "terrible twinge in me right

57

leg" with familiar acerbity:

Oh, it won't be long now till it travels into
your left wan. It's miraculous that whenever
he scents a job in front of him, his legs begin
to fail him,

but adds meaningfully, "Then, me bucko, if you lose this chance, you
may go an' furrage for youself!"

Throughout the play, Juno regularly dominates not only her
husband but his crony Joxer Daly as well. When both men return reeling
to Boyle's flat after a carousel and Joxer observes commiseratingly
of the former's marriage that "it's a terrible thing to be tied to a
woman that's always grousin'. I don't know how you stick it, "he
is thunderstruck to realize that Juno has overheard him, and with the
agility of a rabbit his first impulse is to bolt out of her reach
posthaste.

Later when both men are a bit more sober, Boyle recovers
some of his courage and with the encouragement of his "butty," vows
to change his wife's domineering ways,

Let her hop in; we may as well have it out
first as last. I've made up me mind -- I'm
not goin' to do only what she damn well
likes.

JOXER

Them sentiments does you credit, Captain; I
don't like to say anything as between man an'
wife, but I say as butty, as a butty, Captain,
that you've stuck it too long, an' that it's
about time you showed a little spunk. "How
can a man die betther than facin' fearful
odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers an' the
temples of his gods?"

BOYLE

She has her rights -- there's no denyin' it,
but haven't I me rights, too?

JOKER

Of course, you have -- the sacred rights of
man!

58

BOYLE

Today, Joxer, there's goin' to be issued

a proclamation, establishin' an independent

Republic, an' Juno'll have to take the oath

of allegiance.

Unfortunately, into this heady scene of self-emamcipation
comes the sound of Juno approaching on the stairs. All promises of
sturdy independence and mutual support between the two cronies dis-
solve in panic. Joxer literally jumps out the window on to a nearby
roof, and the man who was about to demand an oath of proper submis-
siveness from his wife, races about the room frantically hiding
evidence of Joxer's eating from the family larder.

Not only does Juno browbeat her husband, she sets the
tone for the way everyone else treats him. Virtually everyone who
holds discourse with Boyle either berates or mocks him. His daughter
Mary has so absorbed her mother's assumptions about the old man's
irresponsibility that she often no longer hears him when he addresses
her. His son Johnny openly abuses his father for making too much
noise while dressing. That the Captain feels his whole family has
sided with his wife against him is rather poignantly evident in his
rejoinder to Johnny: "Will you let me alone, will you let me alone?
Am I never goin' to be done thryin' to please th' whole lot of your?"
Even casual acquaintances of the family like Mary's former suitor
Jerry Devine have cued in on Juno's appraisal of Boyle and dismiss
him like a nuisancesome insect: when Boyle with an attempt at
fatherly outrage orders him to leave off what appears to be rough
handling of his daughter, Devine rudely responds "ah, dhry up, for
God's sake," and hurries out after Mary.

Despite the glories of her suggestive name, O'Caseynever

59

intended this sturdy mother-figure to be a apotheosized to superhuman
greatness. As he was careful to clarify his view of women generally:
"women aren't nobler than men, but they are nearer to life, more enduring,
and usually readier to face things and overcome bad times."17 Juno
then, though more pragmatic, realistic, and decisive than her husband in
dealing with necessities, is hardly the paragon of selflessness that
many critics have suggested.

For the daily tedium of contending with a lazy husband and
his carelessly-crafted lies takes its toll on her. Her reactions
become inevitably derisive. When Boyle claims a sudden recurrence of
arthritis in his legs would prevent him from climbing ladders that the
new job would require of him, she sneers that he can "get wan o' the
labourers to carry you down in a hod! You can'tcflimb a laddher, but
you can skip like a goat into a snug!"

Despite her sardonic pettiness, there is in Juno that
strength of character which enables her to meet each new calamity
that circumstance heaps upon her family with unfailing resiliency.
That indomitableness is seen best in Act III when events come
avalanching down upon the Boyles: the unmarried Mary is found to be
pregnant, and the will the family has been relying on for months to
get them out of debt is discovered to have been a dud. Whatever
disappointment Juno may feel in her daughter, it is quickly covered
by a determined solicitousness for Mary's well-being.

In striking contrast, O'Casey shows us Boyle in a state of

helpless, sputtering anger at his daughter's "shame." In righteous

 

17Maureen Malone, The Plays of Sean O'Casey (Carbondale, 111.:
S. Illinois U. Press, 1969), p. 37.

 

60

indignation, he careers wildly between blaming her excessive reading and
raging against Bentham who did "this thing to her." But finally it
becomes apparent that all his blustering amounts to is concern for his
own reputation:

It'll be bellows'd all over the disthrict

before you could say Jack Robinson; an'

whenever I'm seen they'll whisper "that's

the father of Mary Boyle that had the kid

by the swank she used to go with."
Juno's empathy has no hold on her husband's imagination despite her
desperate attempt to make him understand that what they will have

to go through'll be nothin' to what poor

Mary'll go through; for you an' me is

middlin' old, an' most of our years is

spent; but Mary'll have maybe forty years

to face, an' every wan of them'll be

tainted with a bitther memory.
His adamant response is to put his daughter our of the house.

It is perhaps this inability on his part to be tolerant of
another's weakness that finally prompts Juno to cut the cord between
Boyle and herself. Seeing at last that he will be "hopeless to the
end of his days," she determines to leave him and devote herself to
her daughter and her unborn grandchild. Benstock finds her radical
decision to walk out on her marriage a sublimely paradoxical comment
on the basic distinctions between her and her husband's characters:

That Juno's humanity circumvents her con-
centional conformity, while the free-wheeling
Captain proves implacable, is the paramount
triumph of the mother. 18
And as if to reiterate her unconventional stance, Juno soothes Mary's

sudden realization that her child will have no father with the stoutly

insistent, "It'll have what's far betther, it'll have two mothers."

 

18Bernard Benstock, "The Mother, Madonna, Matriarch in
36811 O'Casey," Southern Review 6 (Summer, 1970): 616.

 

61

And that feminist viewpoint is one that O'Casey seems to be
strongly avowing throughout the play. He seems to be saying more than
simply that Juno was a victim of a misalliance with a besotted boaster.
In light of the playwright's treatment of all the men in the play, he
suggests the Irish male is a loser, capable of little more than
fabricating fantasies of self-importance; that he cannot, in short,
deal honestly with reality. For all the men prove unreliable, petty,
and disappointing. In his view of the differences between the sexes
O'Casey may have discovered one of the reasons why the Irish social
system has been so frequently termed a "matriarchal” one.19 Socio-
logists have observed that often a dominant individual has no real
inclination to dominate, but merely fills a vacuum when no one else
is willing or able to control or shape a situation's direction.
Perhaps that perception explains Juno's tendency to dominate, since
some individuals "are gradually pushed up the dominance ladder to
define a social situation with a few positive strokes." Though such a
person may "feel no personal desire to control other people," like
Juno, he may find himself "seduced into assuming a dominant position."20

The unrelieved weakness of all the male characters in Juno and the

 

Paycock does at least suggest the possibility of a power vacuum in
whatever social situations those male operate.

For instance, Joxer Daly, though regularly a benefactor on

 

19Ronald Ayling, Introduction to Sean O'Casey: Selections

 

of Critical Essays, p. 22

 

2
0George MacLay and Humphrey Knipe, The Dominant Man: The
Pecking Order in Human Society (N.Y.: DeLacorte Press, 1972), p. 84.

 

62

Boyle's piddling largesse, demonstrates his pettiness by the delight he
takes when he discovers his friend's expected windfall has fallen
through. Joxer has resented the Captain's playing the Benevolent
Squire these last two months, and gleefully regards the discovery as the
fitwages of Boyle's pride. Joxer savors his crony's comeuppance with
the measured rime of a two-penny poet as he snears, "Jacky Boyle,
Esquire, infernal rogue and damned liar." (Boyle, in a sputtering
fury, answers in kind and demonstrates there is some truth in Joxer's
belief that the Captain is a victim of his own brand of tenement hubris
in his choice of $2.00 words: "I always knew you were a prognosticator
and a procrastinator!")

The other man in the Boyle family, Johnny Boyle, though his
mother's favorite, is pathetically like his father. Indeed like him,
Johnny is desperate for self-respect; yet his actions run perversely
counter to his aspirations. For apparently out of jealousy, he
became an informet and caused the death of a fellow revolutionary
before the play begins. He hides his self-loathing with unrealistic
expectation of perfection from everyone else in his family. His
response to his sister's pregnancy echoes his father's. "She should
be dhriven out 0' the house she's brought disgrace on!" (It is ironic
that that judgment will be his own as moments later he is dragged
from the room to answer charges of betrayal.)

O'Casey makes it a deliberately refreshing experience to
compare this typically hysterical behavior of the males in his play
with the calm, unsentimental reactions of his women. Though Mary at
the beginning of Act III suspects her pregnancy and knows for a fact

that Bentham is irrevocably gone, she will resort neither to blaming

63

her lover nor to futile self-recriminations. With simplicity and
directness, she reflects upon her reasons for her affair with the
Englishman. "The best man for a woman is the one for whom she has
the most love. And Charlie had it all." Unlike any of the men, she
accepts responsibility for her actions.

Bentham is simply another example of the unreliable male in
O'Casey's world. Though both Mary and Juno are initially impressed
with his ambition and promise of success, he too disappoints them. He
lacks the stamina to face the Boyle family and admit the fiasco he has
made of the will. He takes the easy way out and embarks for England
without the kindness of an explanation. The revelation of his cowardice
wrenches from Juno the reverberating question: "Ah, is there not even

a middlin' honest man left in the world?"

In the character of Jerry Devine, O'Casey seems to offer
momentary respite from his all-encompassing picture of the Irish male
as hider-from-reality. Through a masterful use of ironic_reversal,
however, O'Casey uses Devine only to heighten his largely denigrating
view of men.21 When the Boyle family's fortunes have reached their
lowest ebb, Mary's former sweetheart quietly enters, fairly bursting

with the desire to demonstrate his love and humanity. In spite of all,

he wants Mary back; he loves her more than ever. They are both young

 

21Irish literary historian Frank O'Connor observes of the

tenement plays that "what unifies these three great plays and dis-
tinguishes them from all of O'Casey's later work is the bitter recog-
nition that while the men dream, drink, drivel, dress up and go play
acting, some woman with as much brains and far more industry sacrifices
herself to keep the little spark of human life from going out alto-
gether. They are hymns of praise to women, hymns, I should say, above
all to his dead mother." A Short Literary Histogy of Ireland. (N.Y.:
Capricorn Books, 1967), pp. 218-219

 

64

enough, he tells her, to forget the past. For a brief moment it seems
as though she can place hope in this earnest young man -- until she
realizes he does not know the whole truth. As the fact of her pregnancy
dawns on him, all his new-found "Humanity" dissipates in the face of
this evidence of Mary's very real humanity. Shocked, unbelieving, he
whispers to the woman he loves more than ever, "Surely to God, Mary,

you don't mean that...My God, Mary, have your fallen as low as that?"

And Mary, faced with one more instance of the unreliability
of the men in her life, answers ruefully, "Yes, Jerry, as you say, I
have fallen as low as that."

After that encounter, Mary momentarily loses hope and questions
the existence of God, but Juno never falters and sharply brings her
daughter back to reality. "These things have nothin' to do with the
will 0' God. Ah, what can God do agen the stupidity of men!"

Unlike the men in her life then, Juno has the ability to look
at life uncompromisingly. Unlike her husband, she takes responsibility
not only for her own life but for those she loves. Perhaps she goes
too far in trying to manage her irresponsible spouse, but dominating
him must, at times, seem like her only alternative to induce him to
behave maturely. When she realizes she will never be able to convince
Boyle to take responsibility for himself, she leaves him. As painful
as that insight is after twenty years of trying, she faces it nonetheless
and accepts it realistically.

It is in her ability to face a bleak future realistically that
she towers over not only her husband but all the men in the play. In
her realistic outlook, she will transcend the hard facts of slum life
by enduring them.

Indeed, as she leaves the tenement with her daughter for the

65

last time, she might repeat an earlier remark that seems to hold
within it the essence of her character; it's "time we had a little less

respect for the dead, an' had a little more regard for the livin'."

THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS (1926)

Nora Clitheroe is another O'Casey woman who quite persistently
attempts to direct her husband's life, even if she does so with con-
siderably more coyness than Juno.. In addition she is equally determined
to order the lives of the other men in her life, the Covqrand Uncle
Peter who share the tenement flat with her and her husband.

In point of fact, she is the talk of the neighborhood because
she quite high-handedly treats the roomers like schoolboys:

She has th' life frightened out of them,

washin' their face, combin' their hair,

wipin' their feet, brushin' their clothes,

thrimmin' their nails, cleanin' their teeth --

God Almighty, you'd think thi'poor men were

undhergoin' penal servitude.
William Armstrong was greatly amused at the economical way the dramatist
uses this tendency in Nora to take potshots at the "excessive love of
patriots for picturesque regalia and military ranks"; while helping her
self-important Uncle Peter to dress for a parade, "she makes his vanity
seem like that of a small boy when she buckles his sword for him, puts
his hat on his head, and hurries him out of the house.22

Upon her first entrance, the young housewife reinforces this

image of herself as nursemaid to two battling bachelors when she scolds

them for their perennial arguments:

22William Armstrong, "The Sources and Themes of The Plough
and the Stars, Modern Drama 4 (Dec., 1961), p. 237

 

 

66
Are yous always goin' to be tearin' down
th' little bit of respectability that a
body's thryin' to build up? Am I always
goin' to be havin' to nurse yous into th'

hardy habit of thryin' to keep up a little
bit of appearance?

Though younger than the Covey and young enough to be Peter Flynn's
granddaughter, Nora is accepted as mother-mediator by both of them.
She regards the Covey like a little boy who must constantly be reminded
of his responsibilities. "Willie," she asks during his reading of a
philosophical treatise, "is that the place for your dungarees?" Willie
mutters exasperatedly but retrieves them from the floor. And when he
prepares to go out she reminds him,

Willie, brush your clothes before you go.

COVEY
Oh, they'll do well enough.

NORA
Go and brush them. The brush is in the
drawer.

He mutters under his breath but does as he is told.

However, it is in her relationship with her husband Jack that

we see the extent of Nora's functioning in loco matris. The same

 

neighbor who acerbically noted her peremptory manner with her two
lodgers observes how patently relieved Nora was when Jack apparently
lost interest in the dangerous Irish Citizen Army some months earlier
when he was passed over for an officership.

I'm telling you herself’ENOra was

delighted that the cock didn't crow,

for she's like a clockin' hen if he

leaves her sight for a minute.
She is cloyingly protective of Jack's safety. When her husband goes to

fight in spite of her efforts, Nora takes to the street barricades herself

to find out if Jack has been wounded in combat; afterwards she recounts

67

her furious encounter with

one blasted hussy at the barricade who}

told me to go home an' not be thryin' to

dishearten th' men. That I wan't worthy

to bear a son to a man that was out

fightin' for freedom. I clawed at her, an'

smashed her in the face till we were

separated. I was pushed down the street,

an' I cursed the rebel ruffians an'

Volunteers that had dhragged me ravin'

mad into the sthreets to seek my husband.
She is desperate to keep him secure from harm because she earlier
sensed the depths of his fear of fighting, just as she sees it again
in the eyes of his fellow rebels at the barricades:

I tell you they're afraid ... Oh, I saw

it, I saw it Mrs. Cogan ... At the barri-

cades in North King Street, I saw fear glowin'

in all their eyes.

Since well before she married him, Nora has disapproved of
her husband's infatuation with the rhetoric and regalia of rebellion.
Consequently, she has never abated her efforts to manipulate him away
from citizen army activities. Her methods of redirecting his interests
are naively obvious: insistent disapprobation of Irish Volunteer Army
principles and members. For when Clitheroe tries to win her over to
attending a candle-light parade by the Army that evening, she responds
coolly, "I won't go, Jack; you can go if you wish." When he good-
naturedly persists by suggesting the parade will offer her a good
chance to see an old beau "swanking it" since his promotion to Captain,
she handily turns inside out both his attempts to manipulate her and
his envy of the promoted man by remarking of the officer: "He may
have been sweet on mg. I never liked him. I always thought him a
bit of a thick."

Nora discourages not only his enthusiastic talk about the

.Arnw; but even his thinking about it. With bitterness she observes,

68
You were thinkin' of th'meetin}, Jack.
When we were courtin' and I'd want you
to go, you'd say, "Oh, to hell with
meetings" and that you felt lonely in
th' cheerin' crowds when I was absent.
And we weren't a month married when you
couldn't keep away.
In her efforts to turn his patriotic inclinations to domestic
ones, she is not above lacing his swollen ego with some hard home truths
about his inconsistent attitude toward the Army. For instance, when he
exasperatedly reminds her he resigned from the Volunteers at her behest,
Nora implacably points out "ay, you gave it up —- because you got the
sulks when they didn't make a Captain of you. It wasn't for my sake,
Jack."
During the same spat, she also needles him about his expecta-
tions that she do his menial cleaning simply because she is a wife, even
though, like him, she holds a full-time job. When he tries to kiss her
out of her pique, she carefully removes his arm from around her and says
meaningfully,
Oh yes, your little, little, red-lipped
Nora's a sweet little girl when the fit
seizes you, but your little, little red-
lipped Nora has to clean your boots every
morning all the same.

Jack finds himself guiltily in the wrong again.

But Nora's desire to be liberated from demeaning work is not
her primary concern, merely a diversionary tattic to fuel his guilt abou:
wanting to return to Volunteer Army activities. Also, she is quite anxious
to distract him from thoughts of attending tonight's general meeting,
especially since she had the temerity to destroy a letter informing him
of his promotion to the officer's rank he so covets.

Consequently, she deliberately sets about righting their tiff

b)? seducing him out of his irritation. She coaxes him, flirts with him,

69
easily charms him out of his funk, and in a trice has him softly singing
a love song to her before the fire, as he used to do before they were
married. Nora has persistently relied upon her sexuality to manipulate
Jack to her wishes -- a fact which the neighbors have noted with puritani-
cal disapproval. Mrs. Gogan is chagrinned to recall that it was impos-
sible to go to their flat but "you'd feel, instinctive like, that they'd

just been afther kissin' and cuddlin' each other."

And Bessie Burgess
adds sardonically of Jack's sensual dependance on Nora, "General Clitheroe
'd rather be unlacin' his wife's bodice than standin' at the barricade."
(In fact, when Nora herself is most nearly overcome with futility about
finding Jack again amidst the chaos of a beseiged Dublin, she is suddenly
filled with the hope by the memory of her sexual hold over her husband:

Oh, I know that wherever he is, he's thinkin'

of wantin' to be with me. I know he's longin'

to be passin' his hand through me hair, to be

carressin' me heck, to fondle me hand and to

feel me kisses clingin' to his mouth.)

Exactly how determined Nora is to keep her husband out of the
ranks of the Volunteers is seen in the moments following the interruption
of the idyllic love song before the fireplace. An irate messenger from
the I.V.A. pounds on the door wanting to know why "Commandant Clitheroe"
has not yet taken charge of his batallion for the night's parade. She
responds self-righteously to her husband's ire upon learning she was
informed of his promotion over two weeks ago. So resolved was she to
keep him out of the potential danger that surrounds the costumed heroics
of the Volunteers, that she not only withheld the news from him but, she
informs him she "burned the letter" as well.

She refuses to be browbeaten by Jack's wrath. She forth-

rightly counters with a fury of her own and accuses him of frivolous

70

patriotism:
Am I goin' to be only somethin' to
provide merry'makin' at night for you?
Your vanity'll be the ruin of us yet.
That's what's movin' you: because they've
made you an officer of you, you'll make a
glorious case of what you're doin',
while your little red-lipped Nora can go
on sittin' here, makin' a companion of
the loneliness of the night.

But this time her attempts to dominate him come to grief,
because she tactlessly upraids him in the presence of a fellow officer.
Unfortunately for Nora, Jack feels the pressure of his colleague's
unspoken disapproval more than the impassioned words of his wife; and
in an effort to assert his authority as the man of the house, he gives
her a tongue lashing and exits in high dudgeon for the meeting she has
exerted such effort to keep him away from.

Yet even in the fact of this disappointment, Nora maintains
that independence of spirit and mind that distinguishes her from her
vain, romantic husband. Unlike the rather ingenuous Jack who swallows
patriotic cant uncritically, Nora sees through most of the patriotic
assumptions operative since Easter Week fighting broke out between
Acts II and III. Like Minnie Powell, she will not bow to peer-group
pressure. She categorically refuses to accept the popular platitudes
about the nobility of woman's particular contribution to the war
effort:

No woman gives a son or a husband to be
killed -- if they say it, they're lyin'
against God, Nature and against themselves.

When a guerrilla skirmish unexpectedly brings Jack past his
tenement flat, Nora musters all her frantic energy to convince him to

stay with her and their expected child. Deirdre-like, she is fiercely

uncompromising in demanding he turn renegade no matter what the demands

71

of honor.
No, I won't let you go! I want you to be
thrue to me Jack...I am your dearest comrade;
I'm your thruest comrade...They only want the
comfort of havin' you in the same danger as
themselves.

In her overweaning love for him, Nora has the courage to do
the unseemly, to appear shameless in her distracted search for him along
the shelled barricades. By contrast, like Donal Davoren and Seuman
Shields, Jack is terrified of what people will think. Instead of being
touched by her worry, he is shrilly embarrassed at what his mates will
think:

What possessed you to make a show of yourself

like that?... They'll say now I sent you out

th' way I'd have an excuse to bring you home.

Are you goin' to turn all the risks I'm takin' into

a laugh?
So concerned is he of the opinion of his watching comrades that he
violently breaks her grip on him, throws his pregnant wife to the
ground and hurries off with them. Afterwards, she loses their child
and her mind with it.

Though some critics have found this turn of events memodramati:
(Robert Brustein observed that "Nora's insanity has always seemed like
rotogravure to me."23), her madness is a likely enough result of the
anxiety she has endured during several days of shelling on the city and
the miscarriage. Her insanity represents a retreat before her total
failure to understand her husband's need for male approval. She interprets

his returning with his fellow soldiers as a rejection of her and,

possibly, an abandonment of the child. For the first time, she is

 

23Herbert Blau, The Impossible Theatre (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1964),

 

p. 208

72

unable to manipulate Jack:

she is helpless before male fear of dis-
honor, which in effect is at the bottom
of hopeless but stubborn resistance of
Clitheroe and his colleagues against im-
possible odds. 24

For all her love of Jack, however, Nora does not respect him;
at least she does not respect his right to autonomous decision-making.
She would keep him safe at the expense of tearing down his fragile'
sense of self.

On the other hand, Jack does not understand her sense of
vulnerability in being left alone in a chaotic, beseiged city during
her first pregnancy.

Nonetheless David Erause finds Nora "heroic"25 in her own
way. For as short-sighted, selfish, self-righteous as Nora is, she
certainly ranks among those women who possess

the only kind of untainted heroism that O'Casey
recognizes. These women are his Ireland. They
are not the patriotic Ireland that made an
exhilarating epiphany of the ritual of bloodshed.
They are not the romantic Ireland that idealized
Kathleen ni Houlihan of the beautiful green fields
and the harp. They are not the sweet blushing
coleens whose fabled existence is exalted in the
guise of the State Irishwoman. They are the
Ireland of the tenacious mothers and wives, the

women of the tenements -- earthy, shrewd, laugh-
ing, suffering, brawling, independent women. 26

 

24Malone, pp. 13-14

25David Krause, "Sean O'Casey and the Higher Nationalism"
in Theatre and Nationalism in 20th Century Ireland, ed. Robert
O'Driscoll (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1971), p. 130.

26David Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work (N.Y.:
Collier Books, 1962), p. 104

 

73

The Middle Period: Experiments in Symbolism

 

 

The plays of O'Casey's middle period present a problem for the
critic analyzing character and character relationships. For during this
time, the playwright was experimenting with form. Gone was his careful
creation of quirky, contradictory and idiosyncratic individuals that
characterized his gallery of tenement people in the first three Dublin
plays. In their place he introduced two-dimensional figures, symbols
rather than people, who function in the service of thesis. During this
middle period, he was interested in character only as it could serve as

a vehicle for his ideas. From The Silver Tassie, through Oak Leaves and

 

 

Lavendar, The Star Turns Red and Within the Gates, O'Casey was inclined

 

 

to "use" his characters rather than permit them to use the time and space
of the play's action to define themselves as unique individuals. His
characters are primarily symbols, not people. In consequence, though
O'Casey often attributes strong-minded qualities to the woman in these
plays, analyzing these characters is a frustrating endeavor since one
must always bear in mind that the characters are not self-sustaining

creations but most frequently tools of the author's opinions.

THE SILVER TASSIE (1928)

 

O'Casey's pacifist play is one full of paradoxes. Its
expressionistic second act is as powerfully theatrical an indictment
against the dehumanizing effects of war as any written. Its remaining
three "realistic" acts, however, are flawed by his use of characters
who are closer to puppets than people, characters, in short, who
function as propaganda tools. As Yeats tried to make O'Casey under-

stand when he rejected the play for Abbey production, O'Casey had used

74
his characters as coat hangers for his own opinions. "Dramatic action
is a fire that must burn up everything but itself.... Among the things
, H27
that the dramatic action must burn up are the author's opinions.

Despite the working-class playwright's belief that Yeats'
critique was biased by aristocratic snobbery, Yeats' assessment of one
of the play's serious problems has been echoed by critic after critic.
G. Wilson Knight objected to the tentativeness of the characterizations;
with the exception of Harry Heegan, Knight felt "the artistic purpose has
temporarily lost all contact with human individuality."28 Critic
Maureen Malone, focusing on the social and political background of the
plays, mourned the fact that Tassie's characters

have lost much of their individuality in compar-
ison with the working-class people in the early
plays. Simon and Sylvester have nothing of the
idiosyncratic personalities of Boyle and Joxer,
while Mrs. Foran and Mrs. Heegan are vague
sketches compared to Juno and Bessie Burgess. 29

She found that "the detailed lines of individuality in character" pale,

so that the dramatis personae "férm a collective representation of the

 

working class rather than so many highly individualized characters."
This problem in sketchy characterization especially affects
the women. Not only are females rendered by O'Casey as straw women,
more importantly, they are never really "in relationship” with the men
in the play. O'Casey believed that men who had experienced the chilling
horror of war were inevitably alienated from those back home who had

not. As a result,

 

27Ibid., p. 138.

28Knight, p. 375.

29Malone, p. 44.

75

None of the women in the play seem to

understand the "sacredness of life" or

the tragedy of war. O'Casey here departs

from his earlier sympathetic treatment of

women because he is writing about an aspect

of war which is not directly their tragedy,

the holocaust of the battle front. Also,

the insensitivity of the woman increases the

tragic isolation of the soldier, for it is

their tragedy, their play. 30

For significant thematic reasons then, O'Casey made an artisti,

choice which precluded women functioning organically in this play.
Because of that, there is little point in analyzing those two-dimensional

women 0

WITHIN THE GATES (pub. 1933)

The form of Within the Gates, unlike the preceding play,
represents O'Casey's full profession of symbolism. And though none of
the characters is Irish, the often claustrophobic religious atmosphere
is, as well as the rhetorical ambiance. The play "probably owes as
much to public meetings and crowd arguments in Beresford Place and
Stephens' Green, Dublin, as to London's Hyde Park."31

All the characters function as symbols, of "the moral
degredation and decay that characterized the Depression following
World War 1."32 Maureen Malone continues that throughout, ”O'Casey

insists that the virtues of youth, joy and vigor -- both physical and

mental -- must be used to combat the encrouching deadness of modern

 

30Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 150.

3 . . . .
1Ayling, Sean O'Casey: Selections of Critical Essays, p. 27.

32Malone, p. 55.

76
life."33
Jannice, ”the Young Whore" is O'Casey's central focus, and

once again his empathy for women is evident. But unlike the women in
the Dublin trilogy, Jannice is another sort of woman entirely. Whereas
the other three women's characters were informed by a strong sense of
self-esteem, Jannice has been so psychologically wounded by her early
upbringing that her sense of work is badly maimed. She

suffers as the principal victim of the forces

O'Casey is exposing; at the same time she

clearly stands out from the other characters

because of her courage, vitality, and heightened
self-consciousness. 34

She is the "compleat victim,"

opressed by religious propa-
ganda,c social ostracism, and class structure. The remarkable thing

is that she resists. That she fights to assert her value as a human
being might seem to place her in the ranks of strong-minded O'Casey
women. However, Jannice could never be construed as either dominating
or self—directing. So long has she been oppressed that she is incapable
of making independent moral judgments. In fact, O'Casey structures

the play so that she is cleanly centered between the influences of

the conventional Bishop and the unorthodox Artist. Ultimately, she
chooses the Artist's philosophy of life, but certainly not out of
clear-headed preference. The Artist loves her, cares for her more than
the Bishop. Jannice, like an insecure child, runs to the authority
figure who offers her the greater solace. She has been battered for

too long by intolerant narrow-minded Christians; she is no longer capabb

 

33Ibid., p. 61

4Herbert Goldstone, In Search of Community: The Achievement
of Sean O'Casay (Cork: Mercier Press, 1972), p. 97.

 

 

77

of rising to independence.

THE STAR TURNS RED (1940)

 

O'Casey's hymn of hope for Communism's liberation of the op-
pressed worker, The Star Turns Red is often rich with raw theatricality
though its characters, too, are insufficiently fleshed out. They relate
to one another not in human terms but as mouthpieces for the opposing
points of view O'Casey saw vying for political power in Ireland (and
all of Europe as well) in the 1940's -- Fascism and Communism.

Though Herbert Goldstone thinks the play has been tooreadily
dismissed as inferior dramaturgy, to my mind his reasons for pleading
reevaluation serve only to further condemn it as propaganda. For
instance, though. he finds the old parents' arguments reminiscent of
those of Juno and Boyle, however, he notes,

O'Casey is more concerned with alerting
people to a terrible danger, that of
Fascism, and at the same time inspiring
people to believe in the real, dynamic
visions of Marxist laborite James Larkin. 35

None of the women characters really breathes. And though the
Old Woman (the expressionistically nameless mother of Communist Jack
and Fascist Kian) is given to sardonically bickering with her husband,
she "is not really an individuated person but merely a representative of
a complex number of attitudes indicative of the mother prototype."
Bernard Benstock continues that her character seems "to fragment into
unresolved contradictions." Though "she seems as contemptuous of [her
husband:las Juno is of Captain Boyle, ...she lacks Juno's strength of

o . . 3
character and independence and emerges as a travesty of a dut1ful Wife." 6

 

351bid., p. 119.

6Benstock, "Mother, Madonna, Matriarch in Sean O'Casey," pp.
620-21,

78

Julia, too, becomes a victim of the playwright's excessive
concern for his theme. Though she has enough bald courage to slap a
military bully who threatens her man, she is, finally, nothing more
than a puppet O'Casey never quite got around to investing with inde-
pendent life, so enamoured did he become of his Marxist aspirations in
this play.
In his intense feeling for the cause,
O'Casey had lost.much of his sound common
sense, his humor, and his judgment of human
values. Unlike Nora Clitheroe, Julia is
expected to be consoled by the glory of the
cause for which her lover is sacrificed. 37
Unfortunately, not just the women lack flesh-and-blood
dimension. The Fascist men are gratuitously vicious, while the
Communist males too oftem seem ingenuously idealistic, particularly

Red Jim. As even H. Goldstone, who for the most part regards the play

indulgently, must finally summarize it, The Star Turns Red is

 

an expressionistic vision of a violent
conflict between Fascist-clerical forces
and Communist workers, which has a Com-
munist leader who on occasion resembles
Superman, some wildly implausible action,
and some turgid rhetoric. 38

Though several scenes in the play would probably be emotionally
powerful as spectacle at a Moscow May Day theatre festival, to a less
partisan audience, O'Casey's failure to create independent characters

makes the play, finally, naive and unsatisfying.

 

37Malone, p. 68.

38Goldstone, p. 3.

79

OAK LEAVES AND LAVENDAR (1946)

 

Oak Leaves and Lavendar is a muddled play, a potpourri of

 

familiar O'Casey ideas never quite integrated within the minds and
impulses of living characters. Again there are those who espouse a
joyous pleasure in the sensuous moment; again there is the young man
with the instincts of a poet vociferously supporting Communism.as the
hope of the worker; again there is the chaos that befalls the civilian
during war. However, in this play O'Casey abjures the pacifist stance

that informed his play about World War I, The Silver Tassie. Set in

 

west country England during the Second Wold War, Oak Leaves makes it
clear that though still horrible, some wars are necessary.

As in Stag and Tassie, O'Casey stumbles again with character-
ization. Maureen Malone, echoing an earlier Yeats critique of O'Casey,
dismisses this play as a

strange mixture of undigested opinions and
ideas, none of which has been burned up by
dramatic action, and its failure is of the
same kind and attributable to the same
causes as that of The Star Turns Red -- it
is a piece of propaganda masquerading as
drama, and would have been happier in the
form of a political tract. 39

 

Vivien Mercier considers Oak Leaves among O'Casey's "worst
plays." The critic contends that the playwright's "attempt to provide

his drama with an idealogical foundation and an avant-garde manner (one

which was already passg) very nearly ruined O'Casey for good."40

Though the play abounds in active, strong-minded, even

 

39Malone, p. 73.

0Vivien Mercier, "O'Casey Alive," Hudson Review 13 (1960),
p. 632.

80

dOmineering women, none is really human; they are merely tools of the
author's opinion, for as David Krause saw the problem, O'Casey had
"allowed his political 'opinions' to dominate his artistic judgment."41

The most obvious puppet is the abrasive, stridently dogmatic
Deeda Tutting, who engages in a vehement diatribe against the young
Irishman Drishogue O'Morrigun when he will not agree with her that
England and the United States should align themselves with Hitler
against the menace of Stalinist Communism:

Are you listening to this miserable,
besotted, and belated nonsense! Don't

be a fool, man} I've seen them [the

Red ArmyJ and I know -- a deformed,
ill—nourished, tatter-clad crowd! Their
rifles are soft-tube toys; the wings of

war planes fall off in a sturdy wind; their
guns melt away after a few shots; and their
tanks crumple into scrap when they strike a
stone in the roadway.

If the compulsiveness of her argument does not signal us that she is a
symbol rather than a woman, the next phase of the altercation makes it
eminently clear, when O'Casey employs naive, flag-waving rhetoric by
the young Communist to silence her frothing fascism.

DEEDA

I will be glad, delighted, overjoyed at
its [Communism's overthrow! If there is
any honesty or truth left in us, we'll be
at war with them soon to sweep away the
horrid falsity of them and their masters!

DRISHOGUE

[springing to his feet -- fiercely and
loudly] Woe unto any nation making war

on the Soviet Union! She will slash open
the snout and tear out the guts of any
power crossing her borders.

 

"lKrause, Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work, p. 211.

81
The play's main female character, the aging Dame Hatherleigh,
though a bit dotty on the subject of the lost tribe of Israel, demonstnies
considerable courage in the face of crisis. When drink—maddened Abe
Penrhyn brings an unexploded bomb into her house, she is the only one
with presence of mind. While the Home Guard stand paralyzed with fear
or run to take terrified cover, the old lady enters slowly and asks
What is this I hear you have, Abe? You must
carry it to where it can do no harm. The
house must change; but it must not die. [She
lays a hand on Abe's armi] Each of us is very
near the other now. Your home is gone; mine
is going.
ABE
Us's a wicked daughter, ma'am, and she's
brought a double woe on us.
DAME HATHERLEIGH
Your daughter's a fine girl, Abe. She must
look before her; we can only look behind....
Come, my friend -- we shall go together.

She quite deliberately and Slowly takes him outside.

The source of his worry is Monica Penrhyn, his daughter who is
characterized by a certain straight-forward honesty. She it is who
leads her sheepish lover out of a sense of guilt after their first
night together, "Don't look so glum, dear. We haven't done anything so
terrible as you may do before long: isn't it nobler to bring one life
into the world than to hunt a hundred out of it." And when her funda-
mentalist father discovers her in her nightdress with Drishogue and
calls down the wrath of God and her dead mother's shame upon her, she
declares her independence from his cold and strict sway, fiercely
falling back into her native Cornish dialect:

Not since mother left 'ee for ever, when
I was ten, ha' I been near you as daughter

or friend, and am no more; no, never. Dame
Hatherleigh has had to do for me f'r mother

82

an' feyther since. [More fierclyj Get away
from me; get far away from me lover 'n' me.

She subsequently defies Drishogue's father as well, secretly
marrying her lover to have a child conceived by him before he goes to
war. When the elder O'Morrigun mourns after Drishogue's death that "a
cap-badge an' a few buttons are all that's left of my boy!" Monica
insists,

There's more to come; a living spark from

himself that will soon be a buoyant symbol
of our Drishogue who is gone!

O'MORRIGUN ,

[his puritan nature asserting itself]. Oh!
that was wrong of him! I knew something
dangerous would come of the two of you bein'
so often together.

MONICA

[fiercely]. It was right and proper of him,
for I wanted a pledge of all he meant to me;
and I got it; and I'm glad. Besides, we were
married a month ago at a registry office; but
his dad and my dad were so contrairy that we
didn't say anything about it.

O'MORRIGUN

[bhocked]. Woman, woman, that isn't anything

in th' nature of a marriage at all!

MONICA

It satisfyies me. My dad won't, so you must

stand by me now.

Another sturdy-spirited woman in the play is Jennie, a Land

Girl, who exhibits an insistent determination to continue her affair
with the young aristocrat Edgar Hatherleigh despite his mother's
objections. She echoes the unconventional moral philosophy of Jannice
in Within the Gates, everywhere attesting to her belief in and practice
of a joyous sensuousness. When her lover worries about leaving for the

Front, Jennie aggressively sets about turning his thoughts to more

immediate and cheering ideas:

83

My poor boy! Were they trying to measure
your troubled thoughts with sky-blown rules
again? The best prayers for giving courage
and hope are ripe kisses on a young girl's

red mouth! Though life's uncertain, we

ought to edge its darkness with a song!
....[Getting Edgar to his feet, and putting
an arm round him] I'm all cased up in a
costume; but a hand can slip under the jersey,
and the girdle's easy undone.

The broad outline of her character is strong and vivid; she is marked
by a refusal to idealize war or death, and possesses a certain coarse
vitality. However, that vitality has a manufactured quality about it,
for as Malone observes,

Jennie is the mouthpiece of O'Casey's

philosophy, which she underlines with

the occasional bawdy song, and she ends as

a martyr to it by dying in the flames with

Drishogue sic . The other people in

various degrees echo the same theme, some-

times with embarrasingly cheap melodrama,

as when Monica in opposition to her mean

old father, invites Drishogue to "take me

in your arms to my room again, an' show

him I am lost forever." 42

In summary, though Oak Leaves boasts several strong and
courageous women, neither they nor the male characters really convince,
for they function as rather simplistic symbols of O'Casey ideas. In
this play at least, Robert Brustein's charge that O'Casey's vision in
his later plays suffered from a "weakness for adolescent sexuality or
. . . . n 43 .
utopian soc1a1 communities deserves hearing.
In this three-dimensional character that one misses. Walter

Kerr longs for the dramatist's return to his earlier method of character-

ization, in which characters' foibles are rendered side by side with

 

42Malone, p. 88.

3Robert Brustein, Seasons of Discontent (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1966), p. 179

 

84

their virtues:

In Juno, in particular, the texture of the

play is thick and multicolored, patterned

after the coherent contradictions -- the

vices and virtues inseparably bound together --
of mulish mankind. In subsequent plays,
however, O'Casey not only took sides in the
sociological, philosophical and political
arenas, he scrawled giant slogans in bright
colored chalk. 44

Kerr, in short, found plays like Oak Leaves and Lavendar disfigured by

 

an "intensely didactic style." David Krause refers to these middle-
period plays as the dramatist's morality play period. It is an apt
categorization which economically serves to suggest why the characters
in this group of plays fail to satisfy audience members accustomed to
more realistic character conventions.

Purple Dust was also written during this same period when

 

O'Casey was seeking new forms for his political and religious views.
However, possibly because he was investigating farce for the first time,
the women characters are relatively free of the playwright's manipulation

of them. In fact, they do most of the manipulating in this play.

PURPLE DUST (pub. 1940)

 

O'Casey's first farce ribs English notions of bucolic Irish
country living and boasts two women who quite handily manipulate the
men in their lives -- not incidentally, Englishmen..

Avril and Souhaun have quite calculatedly become the bed-mates
of two silly but moneyed English gentlemen. The women are high-spirited,
fetching and quite aware of the fact that they bring considerable sexual

prestige to the otherwise bland and foolish men. Therefore, they are

 

44Walter Kerr, How Not to Write a Play (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster,
1955), p. 66.

 

85
remarkably direct and straightforward with one another in their plans

to coax and beguile as many baubles and furs out of their oul' fools"

as they can during their period of co-habitation.

Ironically, bacause of their rather cold-blooded scheming,
they are at the start of the play almost as fatuous and vapid in their
responses to life as their lovers. In some ways, the Irish women have
forgotten how to respond hOnestly in new relationships. They have
slipped into the trap of role-playing in their inane attempts to live
up to their images as grand ladies of English gentlemen.

However, one of O'Casey's most charming comic devices in this
farce is the release of the women from the meaninglessness of their
play-acting through encounters with "natural" men -- not incidentally,
Irishmen.

Upon their first entrances, both women sweep on full of
imagined elegance of posh ideas about how they are going to refurbish
the interior of the seedy old Tudor manse one of their lovers has just
bought. Both women cavort affectedly, full of inflated ideas about
their stylishness until, of course, they encounter O'Casey"s delight-
fully romantic conception of real men. Avril addresses the local hired
help with all the absurb snobbishness of a new Dame of the Empire
deigning to nod to the peasants. Her cohort Souhan, carrying a huge
vase, comes bustling on immediately after with all the frosty superior-
ity of a head clerk at Harrod's: "Filled with gay flowers, Cyril, this
jug'll be just the thing on your quadrocento desk-bureau."

Fortunately, Avril and Souhan change. They have too much
vibrancy and hunger for life to long endure with their insipid British
stockbrokers. Into their lives, O'Casey introduces the classic comic

conceit that all any misdirected woman needs in order to make her whole

86

again is a real man, a virile man -- in this instance, an Irishman.

In so doing, what might otherwise seem like crassness of
character in the two women, O'Casey refracts through the prism of
farce to look like merely pragmatism. For the men they take advantage
of are clearly fools. Even more than the women, they labor under hope-
lessly puffed up ideas of their own significance. "Foolish, inept and

45 C C U C
pompous," they are natural v1ct1ms. Nouveaux riches bu51ness men,

 

they are pathetically anxious to ape the upper classes.

That neither Avril nor Souhan respects her lover (Basil
Stoke and Cyril Poges, respectively) is evident from the first. Upon
the women's first meeting with O'Killigain, the sexually attractive
foreman overseeing the repairs being made on the crumbling old estate
house, each is so immediately and physically drawn to him that her
fervor amounts to comic compulsion. And neither woman cares a jot for
her wealthy lover enough to discreetly hide the violence of the attrac-
tion she feels toward the Irish workman.

In fact, Avril, as the younger and more impulsive, can so
little tolerate Basil on account of his lack of sexual stamina that at
one point she explodes with delicious hyperbole:

That thing! A toddler thricking with a
woman's legs; a thief without the power
to thieve the thing he covets; a louse

burrowing into a young lioness's belly;
a perjurer in passion; a gutted soldier
bee whose job is done, and still hangs

on to life.

She has been, apparently, a mite frustrated in her relationship with

her English would-be philosopher, so that when a virile man presents

 

45Sean O'Casey, Under a Colored Cap (London: Macmillan and
Co., 1964), p. 264.

87
himself, she takes advantage of him with a winning aggressiveness. As
she leads O'Killigain into the living room supposedly to chastise him
about some work, she suddenly regards him meaningfully and says "You

must sing me a few of your songs sometime."

When the apt foreman offers
"Now, if you'd like to listen," Avril counters evenly but with pointed
significance, "Not now; we might be disturbed; but some evening somewhere
away from here."

Nor is Souhan behindhand at taking an aggressive lead with
him. Though unsure and a bit insecure because she is a few years older
than O'Killigain, she makes the firstjmove toward a physical relation-
ship with him. "I hear terrible things about you, Mr. O'Killigain,"
"that you're a great man for the girls." She continues more boldly,
enquiring about his "familiar name, the name your girl would call you

" So informed, she turns the name over on her tongue like a piece

by.
of candy: "Jack. What a dear name, Jack! What a dear name -- [She
suddenly stands on tiptoe and kisses hima] -- Jack." And for all her
thirty-three years, she runs from the room like an embarassed adolescent.

Both women are characterized by a cavalier defiance not only
of their lovers' opinions of them, but of the world's as well. Like
Minnie Powell and Jannice the Young Whore, they have: small regard for
petty gossip. Both women have dared to return to Ireland to live in
open disregard for conventional morality, no small thing in Ireland

where even the suspicion of sexual indiscretion can have violent con-

sequences as O'Casey's dramatized in his last play, Behind the Green

 

' observes

Curtains. "Irish, too, an' not a bit ashamed o' themselves,’
one amazed local handyman. Neither woman will put on the face of shame,

even when the straight-laced Canon comes to call. In fact, Avril makes

a point of ignoring him, continuing fluzthread of a conversation she was

88

in the midst of before he entered: I'Well, when are we going to have a
decent bathroom, old cock-o'-the-walk?" she blithely asks Cyril before
the nonpulsed pastor.

So independent and self-confident is Avril that she even
challenges the conventional limits of her morally unconventional
relationship with Basil when she dares her milquetoast lover to object
to her going off with O'Killigain for a week. So sure is she of her
hold over Basil that after her week's sojourn with the Irish foreman,
she brazenly returns to the Englishman with neither apology nor
explanation. Even in the last act when Basil finally musters enough
jealous outrage to insist upon accompanying her during another night
walk, she manages him with as little effort as she might to swat a fly.
With an easy contempt she remarks, "Wouldn't you like to, eh? Take my
advice and don't." Flabbergasted by the very casualness of her manner,
Basil's determination withers on the spot and he can do nothing except
stare after her frustratedly and sulk, "She's going to go with
O'Killigain."

Souhan is quite as capable as her friend at manipulating her
"oul' fool." Though most of the time she plays the role of attentive
hausfrau scurring to keep the mayhem of the Irish household from
driving Cyril into another sputtering rage, she has a dangerously low
boiling point when his rage erupts at her personally. For instance,
when he exasperatedly orders her to find someone to fix the telephone,
and then rashly tears some curtain fabric out of her hands she is
measuring so as to hurry her, Souhan turns, regards his petulance,
calmly grabs him by the shoulders and gives him a thorough shaking.
The physicality of the moment is punamusic hall. Thus assured of his

attention, she bellows, "What do you think you are doing, you old

89

dim-eyed, old half-dead old fool! I'll disconnect you as well as the tele-
phone if you don't behave yourself." And as he attempts to justify himsflf,
she concludes the argument, "another snarly sound out of you, and I'm off
to live alone."

And well she might. Both she and Avril earlier joined forces
to make sure they are well pensioned off once their looks fade. Both
women have so cagily maneuvered their "oul' fools" that Cyril and Basil
have settled £500 a year for life on each of them. Nor are the women
content with their comfortable annuities. They are constantly alert
to any opportunity to inveigle further bonuses of jewels and trinkets
out of the doting men. Even the workmen on the premises see how easily
the women manipulate the English businessmen: "Women you're not
married to cost a lot to keep; an' the' two with them'll dip deep into

the old men's revenues, to which a comrade adds sagely, ”Th' two poor

English omadhans [boobies] won't have much when the lassies decide it's

' Though Avril and Souhan often function as referees

time for partin'.'
in the many battles between the two Englishmen, they more frequently

turn those arguments to their own account. After one such spat,

Souhan delightedly urges her confidante to "go on up, and flatter and

 

comfort your old fool by ridiculing my old fool; and when he's half
himself again, wanting still more comfort and flattery, wheedle a
cheque out of the old prattler."

Other times, they will drop subterfuge entirely to manipulate
the old men to their intentions. For instance, when the chaos of
refurbishing threatens to get out of hand, Souhan is as openly domineering
with Cyril as a mother with a testy child. Seeing him about to erupt
again in a screaming temper at the awesome level of Irish inefficiency,

Souhan steps in, catches up a pair of overalls, and orders him

90

[In a bustling and dominant wayi] ...Here,

if we waste any more time talking, the house

will never be ready to live in. Put this on,

and go and bring in the roller from the

front door through here out of the way to the

back. When you've done that, bring the garden

tools to the back too.
When she returns ten minutes later to find that he has gotten side-tracked
into some gossip with a workman, she calls him up sharply, "Oh, look at
you standing here still, and so much to be done --[her voice rises] so
much to be done, and so much to be done! I asked you to get the roller
away from the door an hour ago." She punctuates her expectation by
heaving him physically out the door to tend to the garden roller.

But apparently neither of the women wants men they have to
mother. Both women long for men whom they can respect as peers, as equals.
O'Casey conveniently introduces such men in the persons and the simpler
values of O'Killigain and O'Dempsey. They are admittedly straw men,
idealized men, designed to make the Englishmen look like whey, but no
matter for that in farce. The women listen hypnotized to O'Dempsey's
seductive poetry calling them to make a new life in the spirit of their
Celtic past: "Come then, an' abide with th' men 0' th' wide wathers,
who can go off in a tiny curragh o' thought to the new Island ....With
firm-fed men an' comely, cordial women, they'll be laughter round a red

fire." David Krause compares them to Synge's Nora in "In the Shadow

of the Glen" and Pegeen Mike in Playboy of the Western World who are

 

likewise offered a mystical picture of a life close to nature and an
awareness of their Gaelic roots.46 However, unlike the baleful Nora
who goes grudgingly and Pegeen who fears to go at all, Souhan and Avril

with considerable relish choose the exciting alternative represented by

 

46Krause, Sean O'Casgy: the Man and His Work, p. 239

 

 

91
O'Dempsey and O'Killigain.

They tire of the games they have been playing with their
weak-headed lovers; and in a last gesture of nosethumbing at them,
Souhan and Avril elope with the two Irish workmen in a comic D.H.
Lawrence climax of crackling thunder and surging flood waters. Defiant
to the last, Avril refuses to be made to feel guilty by Basil's sneers

that she is stealing jewels that he gave her. She points out self-

rightously that:

I gave more than I got, you gilded monkey.
It's winnowed of every touch of life I'd be
if I stayed with the waste of your mind much
longer. [She taps the case;] Th' thrinkets
I wormed out of you are all here, an' here

they stay, for th' wages were low for what
was done for you.

B.L. Smith finds the two women representative of more serious
issues than the farce initially suggests. Smith believes that Avril in
particular is typical of O'Casey people who are involved in

struggles against tradition: against forces
which, in their use of human beings, would
lessen or obliterate the joys of life.
O'Casey's healthy rebels declare their
independence with Avril who says, "I'm Bed

up carrying things about to get this foolish
house in order." 47

Along similar lines, Maureen Malone in her sensitive analysis of the
social, economic and political backgrounds of the play, sees in the
climax of Purple Dust a sober vision of Marxian apocalypse:

It is clear that the theme of the play is not
merely a frivolous comparison between Irish and
English national characteristics; rather like
the themes of all his other plays, it springs
from O'Casey's Socialist convictions, and in
the vision he presents in symbolic terms a
picture of what in fact has not yet come to

 

47B.L. Smith, "O'Casey's Satiric Vision," James Joyce

(Marterly 8 (Fall, 1970): 16-17

 

92

pass; the sweeping away of Capitalism and

the past from which it grew and the triumph

of the young workers who carry off the booty

of their enemy as the latter is destroyed. 48

To my mind, however, the play requires no awareness of
portentous dunes for its appreciation. Though O'Casey may have had
such a dialectic image in mind when he wrote the play, fortunately the
script stands on its own without it. The play's vulgar gaity is its own
justification; it stands on its own without reference to the dramatist's
symbolic concern with the Fall of the British Empire. O'Casey created a
robust farce dedicated to youth and joy and sensuality, and he concluded
it just as simply with one of the most cherished traditions of comedy --
a conventional bedding down of the two young women with the appropriatey’
virile males as the 11 o'clock curtain rings down. The women get them-
selves out of the clutches of unworthy men (English) and into the clutches
of worthy ones (Irish). Or as one character from an earlier comedy abou:
a set of misalliances put it:
Jack shall have Jill;

Naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

The Final Period: Synthesis of Form

 

 

After the interim when O'Casey actively sought new artistic
forms for his idea, fortunately he returned to a relatively familiar
treatment of character, integrating some of the symbolist techniques he
had earlier explored in selected sequences of his remaining plays. Even

in his essentially realistic Red Roses for Me, he incorporated a third

 

act in which the city of Dublin is mysteriously transformed by the

 

48Malone, p. 105.

93

visionary powers of a young social activist. For Cock-a-Doodle Dandy

 

O'Casey invented an outlandish six-foot rooster to cavort among a

sexually repressed community. In The Bishop's Bonfire, he not only

 

added a new saint to the Church's calendar, but endowed the saint's
statue with a horn that toots unaccountably whenever nearby Catholics

are tempted to sin. In his Drums of Father Ned, the title figure

 

becomes more of a power than a person, one whom stodgy traditionalist

Christians literally cannot see. Behind the Green Curtains boasts a

 

quite effective piece of theatricality in a doorbell given to ringing

ominously whenever another message from the episcopal palace is brought.
Though his incorporation of fantasy elements add a welcome

dimension to his work, it is O'Casey's return to richer characterization

that one most appreciates in the late plays.

RED ROSES FOR ME (pub. 1942)

 

Although O'Casey deals with the violent Dublin Transport

Workers' Strike of 1913-1914 in both The Star Turns Red and Red Roses

 

for Me, in the latter he deals once again with character rather than
concept, probably because he was integrating familiar friends into the

script.

The play contains more autobiographical matter
than any of the others and is also, perhaps
consequently, among his best. The four main
characters, Mrs. Breydon, the Rev. M. Clinton,
Ayamonn, and Sheila are lifted straight from
O'Casey's account of his own experience in his
autobiography. 49

Harold Clurman praised it because "it contains the earthy

folk realism of his first work and the latter attempt to invest that

 

491616., p. 102.

94
quality with a more conscious, stylized, and exalted lyricism."50
Interestingly, this Dublin play focuses on a male figure.

In the earlier plays, we noticed only heroines,

but here is an intrepid fighter for the cause

he holds dear, ture, selfless, dignified and

generous in his dealings with others. 51
Though Red Roses'spotlight is on a young man's determination to commit
himself to a politically meaningful act, the play's emotional tensions
arise because of a young woman's attempt to dissuade him from that
existential responsibility. In fact, not just one woman but two are
dedicated to that attempt. In Ayamonn Breydon's efforts to lead a strike
that will affirm his most ardent hopes for the worker, not only his
sweetheart Sheila, but his mother as well actively struggle to deflect
him to a safer course of action.

It is paradoxical that at first glance both women appear unas-
suming, reticent, even shy; however, where Ayamonn's safety is concerned,
both Sheila and Mrs. Breydon are iron-willed. Time and again, each woman
works valiantly, if vainly, to mould the worker-poet into her image of
the ideal lover/son. The fact that Ayamonn refuses to permit them to
direct his life in no way alters their determination to keep trying. Both
women persist in advising, cajoling, nagging and begging him to bend his
life to their wiser counsels. Highly protective of him, they urge him
to adopt a less exhausting, more conservative manner of living.

His mother, for instance, worries about his voracious appetite

for life; she frets to see him bolting from a Shakespeare rehearsal to a

 

50Harold Clurman, Lies Like Truth (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1958),

 

p. 122.

51 N. Sahal, Sixty Years of Realistic Irish Drama (Bombay,
India: Macmillan & Co., 1971) p. 109.

95

union meeting, to chasing down a composer for a lyric he has written. She
wants him to modify his prodigality in giving himself so fulsomely to his
wide interests:

I'd thry to rest a little, Ayamonn, before you
go to work. You're overdoing it. Less than
two hours sleep today, an' a long night's work
before you. Sketchin', readin', makin' songs,
an' learnin' Shakespeare; if you had a piano,
you'd be thryin' to learn music. Why don't you

stick at one thing, an' leave the others alone?
She worries not only about his health but his ego as well. As she listens
to his ebullient plans to overcome fellow-workers' intimidation of Shakes-

peare by acting a scene from Richard III for them, she tries to warn him

 

his good intentions may draw only mockery because of the inappropriateness
of Shakespeare at the entertainment: "1 don't think he'll go so well

with a minstrel show,"

she ventures tactfully.

Like so many Irish, she is given to haggith and urges him to
expect the worst from life, hoping thus to protect him from disappoint-
ment. For instance, when Ayamonn tells her of his plans to buy a
Constable print he has wanted for months with his first raise, she under-
cuts his enthusiasm with the warning, "I shouldn't count your chickens
before they're hatched." During another encounter she advises her son
not to be too hopeful about his relationship with Sheila, warning him
that so pretty a young woman is more likely to be attracted by a
military man's glamour than by Ayamonn's romantic talk of their living
together in love and poverty:

Oh, go on with you, Ayamonn, for a kingly fool.
I'm tellin' you th' hearts of all proper girls
glow with th' dhreams of fine thing, an' I'm
tellin' you, too, the sword jinglin' on th'
hip of Inspector Finglas, the red plume hangin'
from his menacin' helmet, an' th' frosty,
silver sparklin' on his uniform are a dazzle 0'

light between her tantalized eyes an' whatever
she may happen to see in you.

96

That her persistent haggith irks him is apparent in his irritated re-
joinder, "tell me somethin' else to add to my hope."

In markedly parallel ways, Sheila is as determined as his mother
to have him bend his life to a more conservative wind. Like the older
woman, "Sheila, too, feels painting, acting, and reading are foolish
because they ignore the realities of everyday life,"52 and counsels him
to husband his resources, to channel his many interests into one that
will guarantee a regular income for them. When Ayamonn tries to distract
her from so pragmatic an expectation with soft, wooing words of their
future life together, she pulls away from him to break the spell of his
hypnotic words. "I won't listen, Ayamonn, I won't listen. You must look
well ahead on the road to the future. You lead your life through too many
paths instead of treading the one way of making it possible for us to
live together."

Both innocent and arrogant, Sheila wants a normal life as the
wife of'a good man with a steady job. Frightened by the implications of
his far-flung interests, she whispers

God knows I don't mean to hurt you, but you

must know we couldn't begin to live on what

you're earning now -- could we? Oh, Ayamonn,

why do you waste your time on doing foolish

things?....trying to paint, going mad about

Shakespeare, and consorting with people who

can only do you harm.
She needs and demands from him a full commitment to a regimented family
life. Of a practical bent, she fears vague poetry about their living
together in barefoot poverty while he revolutionizes the social order.

When made desperate enough, she attempts to manipulate him by

embarrassing him in front of friends. Piqued because her determination

 

52Goldstone, p. 138.

97
to get him to plan realistically for their marriage is thwarted by the

arrival of a friend who has written music to a poem of Ayamonn's, she
erupts hotly, "I've waited too long already. Aren't you more interested
in what I want to say than to be listening to some vain fool singing a
song?" When he makes it clear he will not get rid of his friends, she
makes to go but not without one last attempt to gain psychological
ascendancy. To Ayamonn's anxious inquiry about when he will next see

her, she answers meaningfully, "I can't tell. I'll write. Maybe never.
[Bitterly:} I warned you this night might be the last chance of a talk for
some time and you didn't try to make use of it."

She stays away for some days and when she returns, the contra-
dictory sides of her character are again in evidence. Both courageous
and calculating, she has defied her Catholic parents' prohibition against
seeing the Protestant Ayamonn ever again -- no small thing in Catholic
Dublin. On the other hand, upon her return she immediately sets con-
ditions Ayamonn must fulfill to win her agreement to marriage. She has
thought about him constantly and realizes he must give up his strike
activities if he is to insure a steady future for them. She has heard
via her father's police connections that troops will definitely be used
to quell the strike and urges him to take the expedient course to insure
the promotion that will enable them to marry: "If you divide yourself
from the foolish men and stick to your job, you'll soon be foreman of
some kind or another." She determines to force his hand with the
ultimatum,

Oh, for goodness sake, Ayamonn, be sensible!
I'm getting a little tired of all this. I
can't bear the strain the way we're going on

much longer. [fa short pause] You will either
have to make good, or --

98

AYAMONN
Or what?

SHEILA
[with a little catch in her voice e-or lose
me; and you wouldn't like that, would you?

Unfortunately, Sheila has miscalculated how far she can push
him; Ayamonn will not be pressured into such a choice. He tells her
simply but pointedly, "I shouldn't like that to happen; but I could bear
the sthrain." Nonetheless, even in the face of such plain speaking,
Sheila's need to dominate him remains intact. Moments later, they learn
that bullies have attacked Ayamonn's free-thinker friend Mulcanny in the
street below. She watches momentarily dumbfounded as Ayamonn picks up a
stick with which to revenge his friend's assault. Then outraged at his
impulsiveness, she orders "Stop where you are, you fool!" But again her
effort to manage him is in vain, and he rushes out.

Sheila's frustration turns to anger with the unfortunate
Mulcanny. Long shocked by his habit of poking fun at institutionalized
religion, she orders him to leave Ayamonn's flat. Trembling with mis-
directed feeling, she insists his blasphemy is "the kind that shouldn't
find a smile or an unclenched hand in a decent man's house." To her
chagrin, however, Ayamonn contravenes her order and quietly tells the
radical, "you can stay, if you wish, for whatever surity of shelther's
here, it's open to th' spirit seeking to add another colour to whatever
thruth we already know."

She hears her fiance's offer of sanctuary to Mulcanny with
stunned disbelief. Breathless with hurt pride, she bites back tears
and angrily retorts,

Well, shelter him then, that by right should
be lost in the night, a black night, and

bitterly lonely, without a dim ray from a
half-hidden star to give him a far-away

99

companionship; ay, an' a desolate rest under a
thorny and dripping thicket of lean and twisted
whins, too tired to thry to live longer against
the hate of the black wind and the grey rain.
Let him lie there, forsaken, forgotten by all
who live under a kindly roof and close to a
kindly fire.

Though Sheila's outbursts seem unduly vindictive, it needs to
be understoon in light of Ayamonn's, at times, priggish idealism. Gold-
stone notes that ”the truth is much of the time, Ayamonn does sound like

3
a soft-headed idealist,"5 and this particular evening he has been cool
and remote, exhibiting a rather Olympian disappointment in her failure to
appreciate his ambitions as worker-rebel. Following her embarrassing
display of misplaced emotion, he responds with the disdain of the sainted.
"There's nothing more to be said," he tells her as he stares desolately,
if a shade melodramatically, into the fire.

However, there is a boundless resiliance in Sheila. Even after
she has been so roundly rejected, she cannot give up trying to shape
Ayamonn's life. When two strikers hurry into the Breydon flat to offer
Ayamonn his fellow workers' mandate to address the strike meeting that
evening, she indignantly steps between the awed workers and boldly answers
for him:

He'll do nothing of the kind. Cinder-tongued
moaners, who's to make any bones about what
you suffer, or how you die? Ayamonn's his
reading and his painting to do, and his mother
to mind, more than lipping your complaints in
front of gun muzzles ready to sing a short and
sudden death song!

In short, both Sheila and Mrs. Breydon treat Ayamonn in a

motherly, over-protective fashion. Neither accepts the idea that

 

53Ibid.

100

Ayamonn is responsible for his own life choices. They seem compulsively
driven to meddling in his affairs.

Even after her estrangement with him over Mulcanny and his
refusal to stay away from the strike meeting, Sheila has the temerity
to go behind his back to his best friend, the Rev. Mr. Clinton, to urge
him to prevent Ayamonn from the dangerous business of leading the
strikers. "Warning's no good; that's not enough -- forbid him to go.

Show him God's against it, she demands a bit wildly. When the Rector's
ethics hamper him from interfering, she employs a heavy irony to embarrass
him into it: "I'll get his mother to bar his way. She'll do more than
mirror good excuses."

Mrs. Breydon, too, calls on the minister and pleads with him
to make a tool of his friendship with her son: "speak the word that
will keep my boy safe at home."

In fact, so alike are the two women that they eventually join
forces. Just as the strike parade is to start, Mrs. Breydon begs her
son not to lead the strikers, "Stay here my son, where safety is a

green tree with a kindly growth, to which Sheila adds in soft, Circe-
1ike echo, "stay here where time goes by in sandles soft, where days
fall gently as petals from a flower, where dark hair growing grey is
never noticed."

However, as similar as the two women are in their proclivity
to shape the direction of the young social activist's life, they differ
significantly on one point -- flexibility. Ironically, it is the
younger woman who lacks it. Sheila is finally rigid in IN”? hostility
to Ayamon's intention to lead the strike. And even though she reconsiders

her point of view after Ayamonn is killed in the cavalry charge against

the militant strikers, she is nonetheless narrowly limited by her

101

middle-class materialistic values.

She looks small when placed side by side with

Ayamonn. Even her refusal to go away with

Inspector Finglas (who was responsible for

Ayamonn's death) does not impress us, for it

is merely a short-lived emotion. Sheila, it

is clear, is no sister to Minnie or Nora, not

to speak of Juno. 54

In a richly theatricalized climax, it is the old woman, sur-

prisingly, who backs down from her implacable opposition. When she hears
the arrogant Inspector Finglas threatening the strikers with the indomi-
tability of the army's drawn swords and cavalry, she summons up a
magnificient outrage, and pointing to Finglas' betasseled and shinily
accoutred figure, she sneers, "Look at the round world, man, an' all
its wondhers, God made, flaming in it, an' what are you among them,
standing here, or on a charging horse, but just a braided an' a
tasselled dot!" after which she exultantly gives her son her blessing,

Go on your way, my son, an' win. We'll

welcome another inch of the world's
welfare.

COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY (pub. 1949)
Sean O'Casey was 69 years old when he launched into still

another experimental form to create his exuberant fantasy Cock-a-Doodle

 

Dandy. The playwright himself was highly pleased with the results of
his using a huge rooster to symbolize the repressed sexuality of a
large proportion of the Irish population. And critics like John Gassner

judged it "the outstanding poetic extravaganza of the decade and one of

 

54Schal, p. 109.

102
the few masterpieces of Irish drama written since Playboy of the

55

 

Western World."

 

B.L. Smith noted that while O'Casey's effectiveness as a
satirist earned him the suspicion and enmity of the major power sources

in Ireland -- "Church, Business and Politics, unlike many satirists
before him, O'Casey's satiric vision includes ample room for joy and

laughter, for having a good time and loving life in the process."56

For beneath the frolicsomeness of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, O'Casey takes

 

serious aim at the theocratic establishment with its attendant puritani-
cal and misognyistic influences. The play is O'Casey's metaphor of
modern Ireland,
the land where freedom is restricted by clerical
vigilance, the young people thwarted, crushed
into submission or banished, the arts suspected
and severely censored, and the whole outlook one
of bourgeois philistinism motivated by the desire
to make money. 57
Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has a very contemporary tone. Though
written in 1949, an advocate of the women's movement might be surprised
by the playwright's sympathetic charting of the rocky course three women
in a provincial Irish town traverse before cutting themselves loose from
the demeaning self-images imposed upon them by the men of the community.
The rural society of Nyadnave ("Nest of Saints") is sharply

polarized. In no other O'Casey play is the atmosphere so virulently

anti-feminine. The men are puritanical bigots whose joyless view of

 

55John Gassner, Masters of the Drama (N.Y.: Dover Pub.,

1954), p. 729.

 

56Smith, p. 15.

'57Malone, p. 121.

103

life is reinforced institutionally by the local parish priest. The priest
holds the most significant power, that of moral sanction. The town's men
hold the remaining economic and political power. The women, because they
are regarded as ”the devil's handiwork,"58 are psychologically oppressed
from all quarters. However, two of those women learn to resist that
oppression once a catalyst from outside the hermetically sealed moral
atmosphere of Nyadnanave enters the scene.

Loreleen Marthraun, the vivacious young daughter of one of the
town's most narrow-minded men, returns home from London where she has hal
a taste of a broader humanity and a more liberal life style than is pos-
sible in Nyadnanave. Loreleen serves several functions: she incites
rebellion in her father's new young wife Lorna as well as in his maid;
she nettles the town's men because her joyous vitality and sensuousness
is a stinging reminder of their own denied sexuality; and most signifi-
cantly, she is allied with the rambunctious Cock as a symbol of the life
force that will not be denied.

In this suffocating Nest of Saints where love and happiness
are continuously subverted by an unending series of "thou-shalt-nots,"59
it is "the women who yearn to live creatively and exuberantly and the men
who fear to do so."60 The women are "saucy, vital wenches;"61 the men

are "dogma-dulled," "pusillanimous and unimaginative."62 The women are

 

8Maura Laverty, ”Women-Shy Irishmen,‘ in The Vanishing Irish,
ed. John O'Brien (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 54.

 

59Krause, Sean O'Casey: the Man 8 His Work, p. 241.

60Goldstone, p. 167.

 

618mith, p. 26.

62Sahal, p. 112.

104
are marked by "dancing, laughing, and loving,"63 the men by "timidity,
hypocrisy and selfishness.”64

Into this priest-ridden village, Loreleen brings vitality and
independence, in contrast to the apathy and fear that anaFather Domineer's
contribution. (David Krause objects that Father Domineer is "too much
of a straight 'villain' to be an entirely satisfactory symbol,"65 but to
my mind, Domineer is an apt enough symbol for the spiritual paralysis
brought about by his type of clerical zealot who substitutes chastity in
place of love as the first commandment of the Church in Ireland.)

Loreleen is dynamically theatrical, "a character who embodies
passionate sexuality so strongly that she dazzles all the men who meet
her. At the same time she also has a more independent and original mind
than the others, not to mention a sharp wit and a wild gay spirit."66
Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe her as a consciousness-raiser
of her father's young wife and of his maid since, as one critic notes,
she "exerts herself to liberate the women from conditions of domestic
slavery, and bring them forth into the land of the living."67 In

addition, she roundly criticizes the most authoritarian man in town

when she "defiantly lectures Father Domineer on his myopic, Jansenistic

. 68
View of women."

 

3Ronald Rollins, "Clerical Blackness in a Green Garden:

Heroine as Scapegoat in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy," James Joyce Quarterly 8
(Fall, 1970): 69.

6"William Armstrong, "Sean O'Casey, W.B. Yeats and the Dance

of Life," in Sean O'Casey: Selections of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald
Ayling (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1969), p. 141.

 

5
6 Krause, Sean O'Casey: The Man 6 His Work, p. 257.

66Goldstone, p. 167.

67Rollins, p. 69.

68Ibid.

105

In this comic allegory, Loreleen is allied with the six-foot
cock who struts mischievously among the sexually repressed citzenry, a
roguishly-outsized sex symbol that functions as an impish wink at the
sanctimonious vanities of the villagers who regard themselves as exempt
from the thrall of sexual impulse.

The outlandish cock who wreaks such chaos among the puritanical
males of the village serves as a reminder that their insistence upon

seeing women as second Eves, as 'vile" and as "temptresses" is an evasion
of their own sexuality. So long have the men in this community repressed
sexual feelings, that when a sex thought fights its way to consciousness
the typical response is to deny responsibility and blame it on the nearest
woman. The delightful thing O'Casey does in 9235 is to employ this male
tendency toward projection in a literal way. That is, "whenever the men
glare at the women as though they were evil temptresses with horns on
their heads, the mischievous cock obligingly sees to it that a pair of
real horns appear on their pretty heads."69
Vague dissatisfaction drove Loreleen from her home to find

work in London. Her return visit with her father clarifies for her
what initially made Nyadnanave so stiffling. The place is gripped by a
combination of puritanism and misogynism which crimps the very edges of
her soul. During her first days back, she hears with new awareness the
import of her father's casually destructive assumptions about her and

women generally. His epithets ("you jade, you bitch," "you painted
slug") are still painful despite their familiarity.

In Marthraun's distrust and fear of women, he seems repre-

sentative of most of the village's men. Unable to account for the air

 

69Krause, Sean O'Casey: the Man and His Work, p. 248

106
of emotional confusion of late in Nyadnanave, he fixes the responsibility
on the high-spirited daughter he can no longer intimidate: "I'm talking
about whispers ebbin' and flowin' about the house with an edge of evil on
them since that painted, that godless an' laughin' bitch left London for
a long an' leering holiday."

Loreleen, however, has learned to cover her pain at her father's
loathing by adopting a wry, teasing manner with him. Ironically, her
very vivaciousness and determination to find joy even in the gloomy con-
fines of Nyadnanave are characteristics that make raprochement between
them impossible. His philosophy (he's always "thinkin' of th' four
last things -- hell, heaven, death, an' the judgment") and hers (she
is "seeking happiness") are implacably opposed; his vision is other-
wordly, hers is focused on this world.

So unfamiliar is old Marthraun with the simplest joy that he
can explain his daughter's liveliness in no other way than that she is
in league with the devil. At one point he insists rather hysterically
to Sailor Mahon, "she isn't me daughter; she is't even a woman: she's
either under a spell or she's a possessed person."

Loreleen's failure to kowtow to Father Domineer makes the
priest, too, antagonistic to her. For the part he assumes she must
have had in encouraging the men to dance, he demands that she kneel to
him and beg forgiveness; he finds her a ”proud and darting cheat,"
like most of the town's women "shameless" and ”dhressed to stun the
virtue out of all beholders."

Marthraun's and Domineer's fanaticism are not merely isolated
instances of hostility toward one who has become a stranger among them.
Antagonism toward women is rife among the town's men. Old Shanaar, a

religious quack given to mouthing latinate mumbo-jumbo in order to keep

107

evil at bay, intones knowingly, "women is more flexible towards the ungodly
than us men, an' well the old saints knew it." He disapproves of women
wearing brightly-colored dresses or ornaments since they give a "gaudy
outside to the ugliness of Hell." Pronouncements like "women's always

a menace to a man's soul. Woman is the passionate path to hell" echo

not only Shanaar's but the sentiments of most of the community as well.

As official moral voice of the village, it is Father Domineer
who reminds women of their proper place. After a raucously farcical
"exorcism" of the Demon Cock from Marthraun's house, the priest urges
the women thereafter to submission and contentment in the kitchen:

Off you go into the house, good women. Th'
place, the proper place, th' only place for
th' women. Straighten it out and take pride
in doing it. [:He shoves Marion toward the
porch.) Go, on woman, when you're told.

However, the cock's mischievous presence in the village and
Loreleen's casual insubordination make the other women less content
with their usual habits. Both the maid and Lorna have systematically
begun to abandon their wonted sobriety and obedience. Marion, the
young maid, is the first to catch the contagion of Loreleen's impish
humor. After witnessing the terrified behavior of Marthraun, Mahon
and Shanaar when the cock accidentally got into the house, she cannot
resist boldly teasing the old men,

MARION
What a clatther ittthe cock:]all made! And
yous quakin', and even Sailor Mahon there, shakin'

in his shoes, sure it was somethin' sinisther!

MAHON
[angri1y:1 You go into your mistress, girl!

MARION

[giggling] Th' bould sailor lad! An' he
gettin' rocked in the cradle of th' deep.

Me faltherin' tongue can't import th' fun I
felt at seeing yous all thinkin' th' anchor was
bein' weighed for the next world.

108

Even the essentially timid Lorna is stirred out of her accustomed
passivity because of Loreleen's courage and joyous appetite for life. As
Marthraun's young wife witnesses the frenetic preparations to exorcise her
house of evil spirits, she flares up excitedly to Marion "It's all damn
nonsense, though Michael has me nervous in such a way I'm damn near ready
to believe in anything." Her growing resistence to her husband becomes
apparent in her daring to ask him in the mayhem following the attempt to
shoot the cock, "Where were you hit? D'ye think there's any chance of
you dying?" Her behavior becomes positively bold when she tells him he
ought to give the strikers the shilling raise they ask, "be reasonable,
Michael. You're making enough now to be well able to give him all he
asks." This untoward plain-speaking from his wife, Marthraun answers by
[savagely seizing her arm:] Listen, you: even though you keep th' accounts
for me, it's a law of nature an' a law of God that a wife must be silent
about her husband's secrets! D'ye hear me, you costumed slut?" But
Lorna will be intimidated no more and responds, "Don't tear th' arm
out of me! If you want to embalm yourself in money, you won't get me to
do it!"

So strong-minded does she become that at last she even stands
up for her cause before Father Domineer. Though the priest himself
sanctioned the rough pinioning of Loreleen by two local roughnecks,

Lorna steps forward and protests vehemently to one of the men.
Let the poor lass go, you cowardly lout! I know
you: your whole nature's a tuft of villainies.
Lust inflames your flimsy eyes whenever a skirt
passes you by. If God had given you a tusk,
you'd rend asundher every woman of th' disthrict.
What apparently opens her eyes to the misogynism in Nyadnanave is her

recognition of the paranoic malevolence that drives the priest. She

watches hypnotized as he responds to Loreleen's request for shoes so she

109
can leave the village; there is something fearful in the way he hisses
Thrudge it; thrudge it on your own two feet; an'
when these burn an' are broken an' bruised, go
on your belly; crawl in th' dust, as did th'
snake in th' garden of Eden, for dust is the
right cushion for the like of you.
After that Lorna decides to leave Nyadnanave with Loreleen; she will
stay no longer in a place so corrosive to her spirit:
loreleen, I go with you. [Lorna shoves Father
Domineer aside at the gate, nearly knocks
Shanaar over, and hurries to LoreleenP] I go
with you, love. I've got a sthrong pair of
shoes in the sack you can put on when we're
free of the priest and his rabble. Lift up
your heart, lass: we go not towards an evil,
but leave an evil behind us.
The maid Marion also chooses exile. To her delight the town's
Messenger wants to go with her for he loves her. She wants to be with
him, too, "but not here, Robin Adair, 0 not here; for a whisper of love
in this place bites away some of th' soul."
The three women then oppose oppression in the only way they
can: like O'Casey himself twenty years before writing the play, they
choose exile. By leaving the village, they exhibit more moral courage
and independence of mind against the priest's puritanical authoritarianism
than any of the old men. In effect, the three women "leave singing."70
The comedy is, finally, a sad one. As the women go off to a
presumably less restrictive life abroad, the old men are left with a

sense of emptiness. The closing image of a confused Marthraun sitting,

head in hands, seems an apt one for the idea that

O'Casey sees little hope for those who live
like sheep, constantly bowed down under the
unenlightened yoke of the clergy.... O'Casey's

 

7OSmith, p. 24.

110
sanguine hope is that the Irish, who fought so

ferociously for Home Rule, will have some day
power enough to fight the clergy, too. 71

THE BISHOP'S BONFIRE (1955)

 

In his next play O'Casey played upon a similar theme, though

perhaps in a more bitter key. The Bishop's Bonfire is a cynical

 

appraisal of the Irish temperament, particularly the fear of making in-
dependent judgments because of a fear of authority. In addition, O'Casey
uses a small village's preparations for the return visit of a native son
made-good in the episcopal hierarchy to make some devastatingly accurate
criticisms about the uneasy alliance of the Church with Capitalism,72
again about misogynism, and fear of sexuality.

Of all his full-length plays, The Bishopjs Bonfire is the only

 

one in which O'Casey's women are totally beaten by the "mental rigidity,
moral apathy, and automaton living"73 that characterize so much pro-
vincial Irish life.

The two sisters Foorawn and Keelin Reiligan have lived so long
in a moral environment presided over by those "who consider mortification
of the flesh as a prerequisite to joy"74 that they are no longer able to
fight for their emotional needs. Foorawn has almost succeeded in sup-
pressing even her awareness of them. By taking a vow of chastity she

has managed to secure some grudging approval from her otherwise overbearing

 

71Sahan, p. 111.
72Malone, p. 126.
73Smith, p. 16.

74Ibid.

111

father. However, her complacent virginity is jolted when Manus Moanroe
tells her he loves her and gently upbraids her for wearing a large red

cross "lying where my hand ought to be."

She turns on him with icy fear:
"Your words are like the words in the books that will burn in the Bishop's
bonfire. Menus, you are a bad man." Though she loves him, she lacks the
courage to withstand public disapproval were she to request release from
her vow. In consequence, she clings to it with desperate pride; as the
young liberal Father Boheroe recognizes, ”she is too deep in the vainglory
of her chastity" to hear the entreaties of a lover.

Foorawn has taken the Church's line and swallowed it whole. Of
her self-conscious and joyless religiosity, the porter Hughie Higgins
tells her with a frankness born of a bit too much whiskey,

I don't want to listen to you; don't want to go

En>near you, for you're one of the higher ones

ones hearin' woe in the first cry comin' from

a cradle. They're queer these holy men an'

holy women. Never have a minute's piece you

let them get you thinkin'. Give one of them

a chance to get a grip on you, and he'll have

you worryin' God for help to do what you should

be damn well able to do yourself without

botherin' God at all.
And indeed Foorawn has given up trying to do for herself; she fears
taking responsibility for her own life; half child-half woman, she
is trying to please God as she managed to please her father by holding
tightly to her vow of"ferocious chastity."

Not just the women, but virtually all the characters in
Bonfire are heavily dependent upon authority figures to tell them how
to live their lives. Out of their failure to take responsibility for
their continued moral and intellectual growth, a sense of utter sterility
imbues their collective outlook. Ronald Ayling comments that

When the Codger speaks of the dusty aridity of

Reiligan's fields, his observations extend
beyond physical reality to apprehend the spiritual

112
condition of the country. The theme of sterility
pervades the play: Foorawn and Canon Burren bear
symbolic names, for example, the former being a
transcription of the Gaelic for 'cold one'
(frigid one), and the latter derived from that
bare and desolate part of Clare-Galway called the
Burren. 75

Though the younger sister Keelin attempts to rebel against
her father's expections of domestic servility and to defy his strictures
against marrying a man out of her "class," her resistance is desultory
and erratic. When her father and Canon Burren arrange a marriage
between her and a farmer of nearly sixty, Keelin is outraged, "though
the best she can do is organize a kitchen rebellion against preparing
the feast for the Bishop."76 She is chagrinned to watch the Canon
wheedling the kitchen help back to their posts. Though she adamantly

. . n . g . . . "77
refuses to jOin them, Keelin 5 Victory [IS] only a pyrrhlc one.

The Bishop's Bonfire is O'Casey's most pessimistic assess-
ment of Irish timidity before authority. So cynical had the dramatist
become about contemporary Irish life during the writing of Bonfire,
that even his women are broken-spirited. Foorawn is so afraid of
trusting her own feelings about Manus, that she blindly makes him her
murderer. Though Keelin has some spunk, she cannot really muster
sufficient courage to do more than shout rebelliously at her domineering
father and the fawning Canon Burren. One suspects that once her loss
of her young man becomes clear to her, her small resistance will dry up,

and like the dust that covers her father's fallow fields, she will

eventually dwindle into a dusty wife to the tired old farmer on the

 

5Ayling, Sean O'Casey: Selections of Critical Essays, p. 29.

76Benstock, Sean O'Casey, p. 78.

77Ibid.

 

113

land adjacent to her father's.

THE DRUMS OF FATHER NED (pub. 1960)

 

The mood of O'Casey's next play was by contrast sharply opti-

mistic. The Drums of Father Ned is a rosy picture of the blithe effects

 

"7
revolution might have against what Shaw called the "sacerdotal tyranny 8
of the priest class in Ireland. Unlike the heavy symbolism and didac-

ticism of his propaganda piece applauding Communism in The Star Turns

 

Red, The Drums of Father Ned is frothy and charming -- if just as uncon-

 

 

vincing. However, if O'Casey succumbs to the preachy occasionally in the
play, he is nonetheless, in Robert Hogan's estimation,

an artist like Shaw was. He writes plays packed
with opinion, plays that exist to teach and per-
suade as much as to amuse, to move, and to grip.
His plays preach the full and free human life
that his early struggles taught him to value.
The lyricism of his plays extolls that life; the
comedy of his plays laughs at the follies that
would hinder it from coming into being. 79

Vivien Mercier compares The Drums of Father Ned to a latter-

 

day Aristophanic comedy, "a victory of youth and fertility over age and
sterility."80 For here the conflict is clearly between the stodgy
middle-aged, who suspect and fear the effects of Doonavale's cultural
festival, the Tosthal; and the optimistic, hyperenergized young, who
welcome it as some barely sensed signal for a new joy in life. The

conflict is heightened by O'Casey's pitting the old traditionalist

 

78Krause, Sean O'Casey: the Man & His Work, p. 352.

9
Sean O'Casey, Feathers from the Green Crow (Columbia,
Missouri: U. of Missouri Press, 1962), p. XIII

80Mercier, "O'Casey Alive," p. 635.

114
Father Fillifogue, who marks Ireland's moral decline from the day women
were permitted the wearing of "jeans," against the never'seen but
ubiquitously felt young liberal, Father Ned, who urges his young parish-
ioners to begin thinking, saying, and doing for themselves.

Again, there are young women who function independently and
with considerable verve against the joyless middle-aged: "Nora McGilligan
and the servant girl Bernadette Shillayley...succeed from the very begin-
nig in dancing rings around the fossilized symbols of local authority."81
But one never quite believes the struggle, so stacked are the odds in the
young woman's favor. The pert Bernadette, for instance, is forever
deflating the self-important posturings of her two sets of employers,
the Binningtons and the McGilligans. She has a fine sense of proportion
and will be neither intimidated nor impressed by their affectations.
After showing her two female employers the correct way to curtaarat the
upcoming Tosthal Ball, she comments significantly to a friend, "the
night is whispering that their day is ending." Unfortunately, the
battle is not even ritualized; it is a foregone conclusion. The result:
though we are delighted by her saucy independence, we are not quite con-
vinced. The play has a glossy M.G.M. brand of realism, in which an
ersatz Judy Garland will get the Tosthal show on the road despite over-
whelming odds.

Bernadette is particularly strong-minded in her personal
relationship with Tom Killsalligham. Though Tom is inclined fatalistic-
ally to believe "things here have been aged too long for us to try to
make them young again," Bernadette will not resign herself to the idea

that life must be sober and somber. She insists with heady optimism,

 

1Benstock, Sean O'Casey, p. 78.

115

Old fields can still bring forth new corn,

says Father Ned, my Tom, an' wintry minds

give place to thinking born of spring.

Doonavale'll know, says be, something about

the liveliness of color; and Doonavale'll

hear music.

With a great burst of courage -- then suddenly shy -- she

shares with Tom something else the revolutionary priest said: "He
said within the timid stir of this dim town would come laughter and a
song or two; that girls who hurried away from boys, an' boys from girls,

would linger closer together now."

Bernadette is exhilarated by Father
Ned's disapproval of priests who preach damnation as the wages of
sexual attraction and his censuring of the same clerics for Ireland's
notorious pattern of late marriages and disproportionate numbers of
bachelors and spinsters. Tom, however, is frightened by Father Ned's
unorthodox views: he removes his hand from her shoulder and says
"that's a dangerous thing to say.” Bernadette retorts fervently, "Oh
here, in Doonavale, near everything said or done is dangerous. We're
tired out at feeling afraid of a word or a look bringin' courage or
affection into our lonely souls." Apparently, the intensity of her
feelings on the subject quiets his fears and he resumes his embrace
of her.

There is something winningly contradictory in Bernadette's
character. From this scene in which she is much the young innocent
awkardly trying to tell her young man she cares for him, she becomes
with Skerighan who corners her for a kiss, a cunning wench who mani-
pulates his fear of exposure as a "dirty old man" into an hilarious
blackmail scheme. Nobody's pawn, Bernadette maneuvers the Ulsterman
into parting with several pound notes as the price of her silence.

The other young woman in the play, Nora McGilligan, is like-

wise equipped with a quick tongue to overcome both the skepticism of

116

her young man and the obscurantism of the establishment elders. Though
O'Casey clearly would have us admire her high-minded courage, it is hard
not to be put off by her occasional preachiness. For instance, when
Michael Binnington becomes squeamish about their taking on the Old Order,
Nora's response sounds more like a homily than encouragement to a lover:
MICHAEL
An odd fight: I against your father and you

against mine.

NORA

Oh, not against our fathers! We're fighting

what is old and stale and vicious: the hate

the meanness of their policies preach; and to
make way for the young and thrusting.

MICHAEL
Easier said than done, Nora.

NORA
Everything said, Michael, is easier than any—
thing done. It is a fine fancy to say brave
things; better to do them.
Nora is an active agent who learns to believe in her own
judgment because of her tutoring with Father Ned. She becomes, in
I O I 2
David Krause's terms, one of O'Casey's instruments of 'comic apocalypse'.8
when in the last act she lets loose on Doonavale an avalanche of new
ideas and plans. First, she forms a library committee to defy Father
Fillifogue's arbitrary decree to burn "objectionable" books found on
the library's shelves. With a rhetoric that combines the excitement
of the best melodrama and the never—neverland of musical comedy, she
makes a declaration of independence to the non-plussed prelate:
You see, Father, we're fed up bein' afraid
our shaddas'll tell us what we're thinkin'.
One fool, or a few, rules the family life,

rules the school, rules the dance hall,
rules the library, rules the way of a man

 

David Krause, "The Principle of Comic Disintegration,"
James Joyce Quarterly 8 (Fall, 1970), p. 10

117

with a maid, rules the mode of a girl's dhress,
rules the worker in field or factory, rules the
choices of our politician, rules the very words
we thry to speak, so that everything said cheats
the thruth; an' Doonavale becomes th' town of th'
shut mouth.

She next declares her independence from her parents, openly
asserting that she, not they, will decide what is morally correct
behavior for her; that she will not stop seeing Michael Binnington,
that at college, furthermore, she has "slept in the same bed 0' Sundays"
with him.

And finally she reveals hereafter she intends not only to take
responsibility for her own life but to extend it to the polls as well:
she and Michael are running for election to the Dail seats currently
occupied by his father and her father! After which flabbergasting piece
of news, she runs off with Michael to address their enthusiastic young
followers with a campaign slogan winsome enough for musical comedy:
"It's time to go, for more life, more laughter; a sturdier spirit and a
stronger heart. Father Ned is on the March!"

Despite the buoyant hopefulness of Nora and Michael about
bringing a new political and social life to Doonavale, apparently the
last word should have gone to the thick-brogued Ulsterman Skerighan
who warned the young people that they would never achieve independence
or simple delight in life "so lang as ye suffer th' inseedious dumina-
tion of your Church, on' th' waeful inthurference of your clergy in
what ye thry to do." For the difficulties O'Casey encountered in
mounting The Drums of Father Ned made Skerighan's words eerily
prescient.

As it turned out, O'Casey's'harmless comedy," as he called

it, was to occasion a great tempest at, ironically, the Dublin Tosthal

118

Festival which the play was to open. Irony piled upon irony as the imbroglio
erupted exactly along the lines the dramatist was satirizing. The Arch-
bishop of Dublin, hearing that a play by Sean O'Casey was to highlight the
Tosthal's drama events -- without reading the script -- quietly let it be
known he disapproved. David Krause gives a meticulously detailed account
of the fiasco which demonstrated how efficiently "unofficial" censorship
by the Church operated in Ireland wherein even an artist of international
repute can be effectively silenced.83 After the episcopal nod of dis-
pleasure, militant lay groups in Dublin threatened to boycott the pro-
duction, then labor unions protested its mounting; finally, even national
government buckled when the Government Tourist Board, which subsidized

the Tosthal festival, stepped in and requested The Drums of Father Ned

 

to be dropped. It was.

Though Samuel Beckett and the adaptor of James Joyce's Ulysses
withdrew their scripts from the Festival in sympathy for their colleague's
victimization by censorship, O'Casey was bitterly disappointed. The
untoward optimism that characterized the mood of 232mg from beginning to
end, the hope that vital Irish youth might overthrow conservative pietias
and stop the steadily outward flow of young emigrants from Ireland was
apparently once and for all dashed for the aging playwright.

His next, and final, long play was a scathing denunciation of

Irish timidity and cowardice in the face of episcopal pressures.

BEHIND THE GREEN CURTAINS (pub. 1961)

 

O'Casey's concluding play presented corruscating criticism

 

83 0
John Jordan, 'Illusion and Actuality in the Later O'Casey,

in Sean O'Casey: Selections of Critical Essays, ed. R. Ayling (N.Y.:
Macmillan, 1969), p. 160.

119
of Catholic emotional dependence upon the clergy. An often heavy-handed

4
caricature of "Irish fear of Episcopal condemnation,a Behind the Green

 

Curtains ends with the bald suggestion that to live with integrity, one
must emigrate from Ireland -- as have most of her great artists during
the past three hundred years.85

For satiric purposes however, O'Casey focuses on a group of
very minor artists, impressionable pawns in behind-the-scenes power
plays conducted by local churchmen. The dramatist seems more incensed
by Irish failure to make adult choices than by clerical arbitrariness --
though obviously childlike acquiescence by church members and high-
handed demands by "Mother Church" are obverse sides of the same problem.

The script's slight plot centers on attempts by Ballybedhust's
resident "intellectuals" to assert independence of clerical pressure.
Interestingly, the only Catholic whose attemptsmcceeds is a woman. "As
elsewhere it is the young women who play the role of saviors and

"86
redeemers.

Like the woman in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, Reena Kilternan pays

 

for her independence with exile. However, in many ways she is more
interesting than Loreleen Marthraun, for Reena changes markedly in the
course of the play's action. Reena develops from a docile, dependent
individual anxious to please Mother Church to an enlightened, committed
woman determined to expose moral blackmail employed by the church

community to encourage conformity to clerical dicta. It is through

 

84Their ranks are impresSive by one standard, including

Congreve, Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett,
Behan.
85Sahal, p. 112.

86Jordan, pp. 159-60.

120

her eyes that we learn to see the complex interrelationship of the country's
religious, social and political forces, a phenomenon O'Casey finds clearly
infuriating. For the play is clearly a disillusioned

attack on everything in Ireland: the Church,

the State, the intelligentsia, poets, play-

wrights and novelists, and organizations as

dissimilar as the Legion of Mary ...and the

Irish Academy of Letters. The Legion of Mary

is a highly influential society of the lay

apostolate which ... has a reputation, deserved

or not, for busy-bodying and pressurizing....

[The play] represents the 80-year old drama-

tist's accumulated spleen against an Ireland

become for him utterly unredeemable. 87

Even before Reena's awakening to the ubiquitousness of Church

influence on every aspect of life in Ballybedhust, she is marked by an
impulsive courage possessed by none of her Catholic colleagues. When a
Church proscription against attending non-Catholic services stops the
town's intellectuals from going to the funeral of a late playwright-
friend, it is she alone who defies the ban and attends the Protestant
service. For emotionally, these so-called intellectuals are children
fearful of disobeying Mother Church. They are a fatuous group of
self-seekers, with the exception of Senator Chatastray who is genuinely
concerned with the moral dilemma in which he finds himself. He argues
passionately for ignoring the prohibition: "dammit, we must do it, if
we aren't to feel ashamed for the rest of our lives!" Though Chatastray
with much eloquence, he fears to disobey without the unanimous support

of his peers. Reena, on the other hand, sees the issue not as a

dilemma at all but in clear, unequivocal terms: the late playwright

 

87As had been the actual case for Catholic friends of

Protestant playwright Lennox Robinson who died three years before
O'Casey wrote Behind the Green Curtains.

121

was a man she admired and as such deserves her last respects. Therefore,
she urges the stalemated intellectuals, "we can't live our lives disputin'
whether what we think 0' doin' is right or wrong; we have to risk at times.

Come on,"

she calls enthusiastically as she leads the way up the chapel
stairs. But the men hang back, shamefaced and afraid.

In the days following, Reena's act of clerical defiance is
efficiently punished by the lay network in Ballybedhust. Local news-
papers refuse her articles and Legion of Mary friends ostracize her.

She feels her isolation painfully and when offered pardon, responds as
cheerily as a forgiven child only too happy to do her father confessor's
bidding. At the latter's suggestion, she goes to the intellectuals and
encourages them to show solidarity with the Church by attending the anti-
Communist demonstration being planned by local clergy. There is at this
point something naive and still unformed in her character. Given the
hot-house moral environment of Ireland, her thinking could become as
dogmatic as most of the town's citizenry. However, she witnesses the
vigilante kidnapping of the Senator's young maid, and that experience
changes Reena utterly.

Outraged that masked Sodality men should abduct the girl for
"giving scandal" by working as a live-in maid in the home of a single
man, Reena attempts to convice the intellectuals to pursue the bullies.
However, only the "atheist" Martin Beoman has enough Christian charity
to attempt to help the kidnapped girl. (Ironically, Senator Chatastray's
fear to even report the incident to the Police is punished moments later
in a touch of poetic justice when another masked intruder forces him
as well from the house for his part in contributing to the public

scandal.)

As melodramatic as the incident sounds, O'Casey based it upon

122
fact. He abhored such examples of a brother's keeper morality which
results from the Church's failure to encourage moral, intellectual or
emotional autonomy in its members.

Ballybedhust is full of "prying and probing. Ireland's full
of squinting probers!" The leader of the local Sodality, Christy
Kornavaun, is endemic of the type. Robert Hogan observed correctly
that while in other of his plays, O'Casey "had treated his villains

88
with a relatively light hand," in Behind the Greet Curtains, "his con-

 

demnation is almost Swiftean. Christy Kornavaun, the spokesman for

organized religion, is totally loathesome. He heads a sort of religious

Storm Troop that pries into everyone's personal and public life."89
For instance, since open expression of sexuality is discouraged

by the clergy, anyone who appears to be enjoying some sexual activity is

resented belligerently. Kornavaun apparently projects his own lusts on

the pert Noneen and her employer, Sen. Chatastray. While awaiting the

Senator's arrival in an early scene, he mutters a jealous appraisal

of the politician's accomodations: "snug as abug in a rug here, with

a saucy girl to keep him company, an' no one to watch him." When

Noneen brings word that Chatastray is engaged with another visitor and

cannot see him, Kornavaun's neurotic repression becomes apparent by the

very luridness of his language:

KORNAVAUN
Maybe now, you yourself is the private visitor.

 

88 .
Robert Hogan, 'In Sean O'Casey's Golden Days," in Sean

O'Casey: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Kilroy (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 173

89Malone, p. 153.

123

NONEEN

[vehemently,] Saying' that, an' you the Prefect

of Sodality! You have a dirty mind.

KORNAVAUN

What else would you say? All correct an' cau-

tiously coy while the daylight's here to see

things; but when darkness hides things,an' th'

flimsy frills of night are warm, behind the

green curtains th' handlin' sport begins. You'd

be a thrill in anyone's arms. You're damn pretty

before, behind and below as I seen when I folleyed

you up the stairs.
So militant are Kornavaun and his like at seeking out Church-prohibited
behavior that anyone who dares an independent thought contrary to the
Church line does so at his peril. For such ideas are quickly labeled
either anti-clerical or communistic; and the Church's pressure on the
lay sector of society is such that serious consequences can and do ensue,
be they devastating economic sanctions or physical brutality. For
"such is the power of the Church in modern Ireland -- obscurantist,
superstitious, and at times, brutal."90

The sad thing, O'Casey observes of Irish society, is that

even after such oppressive, manipulative events occur, virtually no

one questions the mechanism of the Church-dominated life. As in Cock-

a-Doodle Dandy, the only Catholic in Ballybedhust to object is a

 

woman.

Once Reena sees the bullying techniques of the Sodality men
who subject Noneen and Chatastray to public humiliation and beating for
their purported sexual activities, she is unalterably radicalized.

Once presented with the immediate evidence of how dangerous frightened

provincial minds can become, she turns her former readiness to please

 

OBernard Benstock, "The O'Casey Touch," in Sean O'Casey:
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thom Kilroy (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 142.

 

124
the Bishop to a firm intention to expose the fear that lies at the heart
of Ballybedhust.

She returns to the bruised and cynical Sen. Chatastray deter-
mined to convince, cajole, shame him into at last publishing his doubts
about Church strictures and pressures in their village.

Realizing Chatastray is in the grip of a profound depression
following his assault, Reena becomes extraordinarily tough-minded. She
recognizes that for the masked rough-necks to have dared attack a
national political figure, the Senator himself had to have given them
psychological permission to punish him when he failed to resist them.
However, despite his former passivity, she determines that he can change..
That he must change, if anyone in Ballybedhust is to raise his head again:

REENA

We're all frightened -- those in the North

as well as us in the South; th' men who took

Noneen an' you away with them were as

frightened of faith, an' of anyone setting

himself apart from th' others an' themselves;

an' you an' your friends frightened of fight-

ing for yourselves, or for anything disliked

by th' clergy an' th' foggy explosion of

townsfolk talk.

CHATASTRAY

An' what th' hell does a Legion of Mary lass

know about such things -- tell me that?

REENA

Some of us do a little thinking, sir. I've

thought about it long these many days, an'

frightened under th' hand of fear.
Despite the fact that Reena's dialogue often lapses into stilted
propaganda, just as often she rises to very nearly heroic proportions.
She has a daring that is inflammably theatrical as she learns to put her
need for clerical approval behind her in favor of taking responsibility

for her own thoughts and actions. And as she sees the possibilities of

autonomy for the first time, she becomes quite aggressive in her attempts

125
to encourage Chatastry to make his own leap to intellectual freedom.

When at first he sullenly declines, observing he wants no further
touch of small-minded Ballybedhust, she responds with crushing honesty,
"You deserved all you got." Inexorably, she attacks his self-pity like
another Emer daring to tell her community's great man to rouse himself
from self-absorption:

You got what you got through th' cowardice of
your friends an' your own -- over the years!
I looked back, an' now I remember things done
which shouldn't ha' been done, but you nor
your friends never said a word against them!
No wonder Martin Beoman laughed when I said I
had come to the leaders of Ireland's thought!
Big fellas behind the green curtains, but in
the open, a flock of scurvy sheep! Scant of
wool an' scabby!

Though Chatastray legitimately argues that it was people of her
ilk from the Legion of Mary and the men's Sodality that formed the mob
which intimidated him and his friends, Reena counters implacably that the
latter failed in their primary responsibility as educated men, "You never
tried to tell us how to think, what to do, where to go.... Youse your-
selves helped to form the crowd that cry out against youse." Relentless
in her passion, she points out that the collective silence of him and
his friends gave the mob its sanction.

Unyielding, Reena insists that he must face up to the vacuum
in leadership he helped create in the community because for too long
he solaced himself with feelings of intellectual superiority behind
the security of his green curtains. Stating it is now time to air his
ideas openly, in a richly theatrical moment she sweeps open the heavy
green curtains in his den. For as Benstock observes, "the opening and

closing of the curtains serve to underscore freedom from parochial

restrictions and the petrification of those who lack the courage to let

126
. . "91 . . . .
the out31de world break 1n. Because Reena admires Chatastray s ideallsm
and sympathizes with his terror about changing, she softens and leads him
gently over to the window to watch the marchers readying to parade against

Communism -- the same parade he and his friends have been pressured by the

Bishop to attend: "there they go: an army with banners marching in the
wrong direction." Horrified that she dares voice such deviant ideas, he
responds,

the wrong direction? I thought you believed
you were on the right road?

REENA
I did; I don't know now. Do you?

CHATASTRAY
[hesitant,] I don't really know.

REENA

I'm not asking if you know; I'm just asking
you if you believe one way or th' other.
Will you mingle the patter of your feet
with th' feet of th' marchers; or will you
sit sullen, angry, undecided and afraid?

Ruthlessly realistic, Reena makes him see that neither course
is acceptable if he is to maintain his integrity. She insists he must
at last free himself from the clergy's psychological domination and
declare himself mature enough to think for himself. She appears to be
the only person in Ballybedhust who perceives that the Bishop's anti-
Communist slogan "Free Thought in a Free World" is just as much a
desideratum in Ireland as it is behind the Iron Curtain countries. Her
determination apparently prevails and Chatastray drops his stuffy postur-

ing to admit with a flood of feeling the shame he feels for not springing

to Noneen's defense, a girl he loves like a daughter. Reena's news that

 

91Goldstone, p. 7.

127

that he is to be presented with a sackcloth coat for the Parade sparks his
nearly extinguished pride as he cries out his refusal to march: "the
Brothers Repentant can go to Hell in their own sweet way in their sack-
cloth coats!"

Though Chatastray finds the courage to send the Church delega-
tion away, he finds Reena's fighting spirit somewhat abashing. For
instance, when Kornavaun infers correctly that she has been responsible
for the Senator's new resistance and tries to pull her away from
Chatastray, Reena "[resists fiercely, breaks his hold on her, and hits
him in the face, making him stagger into the grouéI" telling him "you
boarder-line lunatic, you full-feathered hypocrite, you mouldly crumb of
life, lay no further hand on Reena or it will be the worse for you!"

The Senator watches her in silence as she makes it eminently clear she
will not be the passive victim for bigots that Chatastray was. Iron-
ically, though she is generous and supportive with the Senator, she
finds that both her physical and moral courage frighten him. After
Kornavaun and his cohorts leave in defeat, Reena exhilaratedly proposes
to take care of Chatastry. "After hospital duties, I can cook a simple
meal for both of us; and on my free day, we can have a good time
together." To the Senator's shocked refusal lest she incur worse
punishment than Noneen did, Reena replies decisively "It won't happen
to me, an' if they should thry any thuggish thricks, there'll be an
afterglow that'll singe th' whole damned town!"

Her very strength of will apparently breaks his determination.
Or perhaps because the truth game she has played with him resembles
the temporary, feverish atmosphere of an encounter group, the resolve
she provoked in him does not hold. In any event, while her back is

turned, Chatastray slinks off, back to the comfort of old habits, old

128
friends, old rituals -- and belatedly joins the Church sponsored Parade.
Though disheartened, Reena will not be disspirited. And after
a properly brief mourning period appropriate for a comic ending, she finds

(in the spirit of the lovers' pairings in Purple Dust) a more suitable

 

man -- the town's outspoken social critic Martin Beoman. She proceeds
with engaging directness to seduce him out of his sexual timidity. By
virtue of her good humor and compassion, she releases her erstwhile swain
to realize the active sexual role they both want him to play. Beoman
literally sweeps her off her feet and out of Ballybedhust.

Like so many young Irish men and women before them, they choose
exile to the stultifying repressions of Ireland's "theocratic establish-

ments."92

SUMMARY

Before comparing the work of O'Casey with that of Synge, one
must realize that O'Casey wrote three times as many full-length plays
as his predecessor at the Abbey. Yet in most of them, O'Casey, too,
created a gallery of female characters far more strong-minded and auto-
nomous than the males who inhabit their worlds. While they are not as
domineering as Synge's women, O'Casey women are -- with the exception
of those in four of his thirteen plays -- far more active, inner-
directed, and independent than most O'Casey men.

Of the exceptions, the Reiligan sisters of The Bishop's

 

Bonfire are so emotionally immature, so psychologically beaten down,
they have become unable to put up any real or sustained struggle for

what they want in life. Though Keelin briefly objects to her father's

 

129

bullying, her resistance is half-hearted and finally abortive.

In his The Star Turns Red, though Julia has a fine moment in
which she defies the local priest's order to renounce her Communist
philosophy, she is essentially a background figure in the action. O'Casey
was more concerned with focusing attention on the struggles of two brothers:
Communist Jack and Fascist Kian.

Jannice of Within the Gates somewhat resembles the Reiligan

 

sisters in that she has been emotionally oppressed all her life. Though
she has more stamina than they to resist local pietistic pressure about
how she ought to live, she lacks the ability to live creatively according
to her own lights. She chooses to accept the Artist's way of life over
the Bishop's, but her choice is at least as motivated by her desperate
need for his love as by a commitment to his value system.

In his expressionistic The Silver Tassie, O'Casey chose to

 

fashion symbols rather than women, to underline his vast pity for the
front-line soldier of World War I. As a result his female characters
move like insensitive shadows among his anguished and crippled soldier-
heroes. The structure of this play does not permit the women to
function organically, it does not allow them to function in genuine
"relationship" to their men. Rather the women move through the action
in ignorant alienation from the men whose tragedy the play defines.

In his remaining nine plays, O'Casey created a series of
female portraits that cumulatively form an image of Irish womanhood
that is generally far more vital than that of the male half of the
population.

Two things in particular typify the majority of O'Casey

women: (1) their impulses to manage their men and (2) their interior

l3O

autonomy, which enables them to make moral choices without regard for,
often in the teeth of, public opinion. Both these traits are in notor-
iously short supply among his male characters.

Personal autonomy is one of the things O'Casey values most
highly. It is what makes Minnie Powell seem so casually courageous in
his first play and Reena Kilternan so breathtakingly revolutionary in
his last. The O'Casey character who is willing to take responsibility
for her own choices (despite church antagonism, authoritarian bullying,
or neighborhood gossip) is invariably a woman. His male characters are
just as invariably intimidated about acting against public expectation.
Their ranks seem endless:

Donal Davoren is terrified of gossip about Minnie Powell's
visiting his room, while the girl is brashly contemptuous of local
opinion. Capt. Boyle is outraged at his daughter's illegitimate
pregnancy because of what his pub cronies will sneer behind his back,
while his"conventional" wife walks out on her marriage to care for her
daughter and the expected child. Though Jack Cliteroe desperately hides
the least sign of battle fear from his comrades, Nora defies the whole
network of patriotic war idealizers to go scrambling over barricades

in search of the husband who has been seduced to war. The Bishop in

 

Within the Gates is terrified to be seen in the company of a sinner, the
irony of which only the prostitute Jannice sees and as a result rejects
the conventionally-approved Christian prescription for forgiveness.

The list of men living in fear of what people may say of them
is long indeed. It is as if O'Casey measures his characters' worth by a
standard proportionate to their willingness to throw petty public opinial
to the winds and act upon a self-contained value system. In his farce

Purple Dust, the two calculating leading ladies are presented as redeemable

131

in some measure because they do not give a fig for provincial opinion about
their openly living with their paramours. Even in less effectively-crafted

plays like Oak Leaves and Lavendar, the pattern still holds that his women

 

fly in the face of conVention. Monica Penrhyn,after her first night with
her Irish lover, absolves him of the sexual guilt that is such a notorious
part of Irish culture; while her friend Jennie almost makes a reactionary
moral philosophy out of her adamant refusal to be bound by any conventional
expectations about proper sexual conduct.

O'Casey was well aware that flaunting public values is often a
dangerous business in Ireland. Because the majority of the population
is rural, Irish small-town fears and prejudices are always susceptible to

violent explosion. Loreleen Marthraun of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy is beaten

 

and robbed with her priest's approval because she dared to walk with her
head a shade to high for the cleric's taste. The guiltless maid Noneen

in Behind the Green Curtains is kidnapped, beaten, stripped and tied to

 

a telephone pole on a public road all night for "giving scandal" by
keeping house for a single man.

Whether writing "harmless comedy" or serious social criticism,
O'Casey is particularly partial to the woman with a sound enough sense
of her own center that she is able to make her own moral choices no
matter what the public pressure. It was obviously with great delight

that O'Casey created Nora McGilligan of The Drums of Father Ned and

 

structured a musical-comedy climax for her during which she tells off
the community's old fogey priest, happily reveals she has been having
an affair with her young man, and announces that she and that young
man are about to upend middle-class tradition by challenging both their
fathers for their Dail seats in the upcoming election!

In retrospect, O'Casey often seems to have found in womankind

a special grace which enables them, unlike their men, to perceive

132

dilemmas in black or white terms and act decisively upon their percep-
tions. Where his men are often fearful, tentative, pusilanimous, his
women are strong-minded, even headstrong. It seems more than coincidence
that it is usually O'Casey's women who are tough-minded, who see beneath
facile rhetoric and pull their men -- hesitant and dragging their heels--
into the light; as Nora McGilligan does when Michael is suddenly overcome
with qualms about seeking their parents' seats in Parliament; as Jennie
does in Oak Leaves when Edgar buries himself in sober thoughts and somber
demeanor he believes appropriate for a soldier about to depart for the
Front; as Souhan does for Philip O'Dempsey when his shyness will not
permit him to make love to a woman not his wife.

Even with the whole village ranged against her, Loreleen
Marthraun will not relinquish her headstrong new philosophy. She yearns
to take more delight and joy in life than the otherwordly pietism of
Nyadnanave permits; but so afraid are the village's men to even think
about the ramifications of her wider vision, that they believe her the
Devil's handmaiden. Minnie Powell, O'Casey's first heroine, epitomized
the woman with the capacity to clearly see what needs doing, and simply
does it. While Seamas and Donal stand immobilized with terror about
the bombs in their room, Minnie decisively takes the incendiary devices
to her room. Her courage hangs almost palpably in the air after her
exit.

Interestingly, there are, proportionately, significantly
fewer women in O'Casey than in Synge who forthrightly attempt to
either manipulate or dominate their men. Juno is the most unrelentingly
domineering, forced by her husband's irresponsibility to nag him con-

stantly to get a job, to stay sober, to stop lying. Nora Clitheroe of

133

Plough and the Stars is more circuitous than Juno at manipulating her spouse

 

away from his interest in guerilla revolution, using her sexuality, she
manages to divert him only for a time from the dangerous patriot games
that eventually lead to his death. The stereotypical Fascist Deeta Tutting

in Oak Leaves makes a brief and ineffectual attempt to dominate the ideal-

 

istic young Communist Drishogue O'Morrigan by browbeating him rather

hysterically with rabit anti-Communist rhetoric. In Red Roses for Me,

 

both Sheila and Mrs. Breydon interfere shamelessly in Ayamonn's life-
choices. Despite their final failure to swerve him from his intentions,

they make sustained attempts to dominate him. In Behind the Green Curtains,

 

Reena attacks Dennis Chatastray's milquetoast acceptance of Church domin a-
tion with ruthless clarity until she at last pulls from him an admission
of the self-loathing he feels for not having repudiated clerical intol-
erance long ago. Unfortunately, her strong-mindedness is not a transfer-
able commodity and his resolve breaks before he can act upon his insights.
However, Reena embraces her new perspective like a voyager and delighted-
ly emigrates to a country that has room for her expanded horizons.

The pattern in the majority of O'Casey's plays emerges rather
strikingly then: though the women do not dominate as Synge women so
often attempt to do, the O'Casey women possess an autonomy and strong-
mindedness that makes them seem more vital, whole, and self-possessed

than the men.

PART TWO: SOCIO-CULTURAL BACKGROUND

CHAPTER III

MATRIARCHY IN THE IRISH HOME

The female characters, then, in both Synge's and O'Casey's
plays are, generally, emotionally stronger than their male counter-
parts.

To explore this phenomenon, one must reflect upon three
distinct areas of explanation:

I) Sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychiatrists
report that wives dominate in the Irish home -- though not in the
larger social sphere;

2) The Irish mythological system is rife with models for
female behavior which is strong-minded and assertive. Joseph Campbell
stated the case most plainly when he observed, "In Ireland, the woman
has always been the dominant figure in mythology."1 Both playwrights
were deeply interested in Gaelic mythology;

3) Each dramatist's perception of the role and character
of women in general was influenced by his mother, the first woman in his
life. Both men had singularly close relationships with their mothers,
Synge's a suffocating one and O'Casey's apparently a more nurturant one.
The differences in these two relationships offer provocative suggestion
for the differences each dramatist's female characters exhibit in
needing to demonstrate their strength gig a yi§_male characters.

This chapter explores the first consideration.

 

1Personal conversation with Joseph Campbell during Jung
Seminar, The Open Eye Theatre, New York City, N.Y., weekend of May
10"].2, 19740

134

135

Matriarchy in the Irish Home

 

Few would deny the old saw that women are paradoxical creatures.
However, in Ireland that idea seems to have been underlined with a pecul-
iarly dramatic intensity: in the social structure of the community,
women are cavalierly ignored or discriminated against as inconsequential
persons; yet, in the domestic structure of the family, women usually
dominate their children and manipulate their spouses. In consequence,
though in the macrocosm of the larger world they are slaves, in the
microcosm of family life they are rulers.

The pattern of treating women as inferior is as ubiquitous in
Ireland as it is in most western societies. According to Elizabeth
Coxhead, the Irish peasant society has persistently "relegated women to
serfdom."2 Robert E. Kennedy found that the subordinate status of
females in rural Ireland is so onerous that their mortality rates are
significantly higher than those of Irish males: "male dominance
carried to such an extent that it considerably reduced the advantage
in longevity which females normally would have expected for biological
reasons."3 He points out that wives on farms do not sit to dinner
until after all the males have eaten, and that the single girl in a
rural family "is subservient to all other members of the family and

4

shares no confidence with either her parents or her brothers."

 

2Elizabeth Coxhead, J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory (London:
Macmillan & Co., 1961), pp. 145-6.

3Robert E. Kennedy, Jr., The Irish: Emigration, Marriage
and Fertility (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1973), p. 56.

4Ibid., p. 56.

 

136

Sociologist Donald Connery agrees that Ireland is a "man's country
where men are rulers."5 Though aware of the common attitude of male
superiority in western Europe, Connery is nonetheless surprised by
the extent of male assumptions of superiority in Ireland and partic-
ularly by the "unprotesting submission of the female to her inferior
status."6 He points out that, although there are signs of change in
the air, women have been quite fatalistic about their lot as an op-
pressed group and have made no substantial objections to inequities
such as the fact that "twice as many males as females go on to higher

education;"

that it is universally accepted Irish women receive "unequal
pay for equal work;" that in state employment, an Irish woman must sign
a contract agreeing to resign upon marriage; that "there are no women
in the Irish Cabinet and only four females among the 144 members of the
Dail."7
However despite the pervasiveness of female willingness to
accept a submissive role in the larger structure of the community,
when it comes to the intimate structure of the family, the Irish
woman undergoes a dramatic transformation and becomes the dominating
figure in the domestic drama. Psychologists Marvin Opler and Jerome
Singer observe that
the central figure in Irish families is

likely to be a controlling figure on the
distaff side, while fathers, especially

 

5D. S. Connery, The Irish (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1968),

p. 192.

6Ibid.,p. 195.

7Ibid., pp. 192-6.

137
in straitened economic circumstances, are
frequently by contrast shadowy and evanes-
cent. 8
The phenomenon occurs for a complexity of reasons.
One of the most galling circumstances in the life of the young
Irish woman is the tacit social assumption that her husband "has a sepa-
rate social life with his male friends while the wife stays home."9
Male solidarity is a striking aspect of the Irish cultural profile, in
which males derive considerable satisfaction through the pleasure of each
other's company at pubs, dog and horse races, and football matches. Un-
fortunately for the wife, the social gratification which her husband
derives from his male cohorts often functions as a substitute for con-
jugal interaction and pleasure. As one critic of the Irish social scene
observed, flippantly but accurately, the Irish husband seems to regard
his wife as little more than a
king-size hot water bottle who also cooks
his food, pays his bills and produces his
heirs....He takes what should be the happy,
leisurely love-making of marriage like a
silent connubial supper of cold rice pud-
ding. A rapid sex routine is effected, as
if his wife is some stray creature with
whom he is sinning and hopes he may never
see again.
In consequence, the young wife finds herself starved for some
show of love, fondness or even attention -- the need for which becomes a)

strong that it is eventually displaced upon her children, and most

particularly upon her sons. Mary Frances Keating regards the Irish

 

Marvin K. Opler and Jerome L. Singer, "Ethnic Differences in
Behavior and Psychopathology: Italian and Irish." International Journal
of Social Psychiatry 11 (Summer, 1956): 12.

 

9Connery, p. 195.

10Ibid., p. 200.

138

woman's transformation from submissive wife to demanding mother as an
inevitable occurrance. It is simply another instance whereby

the worm turns, and so from being the
slighted and bullied one, she becomes

the bully: often denied the protection,
affection, and tenderness of marital love,
she placates herself with a stranglehold
on her children, refusing to allow them to
grow up and accept their share of respon-
sibilities ll

lest they leave the nest. In her effort to win male love she turns her
attention to her son, lavishing great care and devotion upon him from
his earliest years. So overarching is her love for him that, in effect,
she spoils him for other women. Novelist Maura Laverty bemoans the fact
that the Irish mother contributes heavily toward making the average

young Irishman

the world's prime example of the Oedipus
Complex. He is anchored to his mother
for as long as she lives....In this
matriarchy, the men cannot help but be
mother-bound. Mothers prize their sons
far above their daughters....Sisters are
taught at an early age to dance attendance
upon their brothers. I myself remember
that my nightly duty was to clean my
brother's boots. The inevitable result
is that the Irish boy grows up with an
exageraged affection for and dependence
upon his mother, and with a contempt for
all other females. 12.

Time and again, bitter personal memories like Laverty's are

corroborated by the more objective evaluations of social scientists.

 

11Mary Frances Keating ”Marriage-Shy Irishmen, in The Vanish-
ing Irish, ed. John O'Brien (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 173.

12Maura Laverty, "Women-Shy Irishmen,’ in The Vanishing Irish,

ed. John O'Brien, p. 57.

139

A.J. Humphreys cites the formidable instances of Oedipal fixation found
in the Irish family accounted for, he believes, by a

centripetal mechanism built into the fabric of

rural life. This is the strong-preferential

love of the rural mother for her sons. She is

the magnetic center of the family and her co-

hesive power is affection. This love, which

leads her to "slave" for her sons and to demand

that her daughters do likewise, cushions the

sons' hard lot. It mollifies the constant rub

of his subordination to his father. 13
This same habit of favoritism by the mother is found just as encompas-
singly in Irish urban settings.14 Cultural anthropologist J.C. Messenger
believes that the relationship between mother and son is so close that for
all practical purposes she serves ”in all but the sexual sphere (at least
consciously)" as a "surrogate wife."15

So consuming is her love for her son that she finds it difficult

to loose the silver cord. Should her son show inclination toward mar-
miage, the mother frequently obstructs the blossoming relationship. This
maternal impulse is "also the basis for conflict between mother-in-law
and daughter-in-law that is quite intense in Ireland, the prospect of
which leads so many sons to refuse 'to bring another woman in on my

mother."'16

 

13A.J. Humphreys, "The Family in Ireland," Comparative Family
Systems, ed. M.F. Nimkoff (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1965),
p. 245.

 

1('A.J. Humphreys, The New Dubliners: Urbanization and the

Irish Family (N.Y.: Fordham U. Press, 1966), p. 33
15J.C. Messenger, Inis Beag: Isle of Ireland (N.Y.: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 69.

 

 

 

16Humphreys, "The Family in Ireland," pp. 245-6.

140
The sad irony concludes with the fact that the once-young Irish
mother so thoroughly succeeds in winning from her son.the fondness and
attention that was never forthcoming from her spouse, that she unwittingly
shapes the unsatisfactory conjugal behavior of the next generation of

Irish husbands.

By pampering and then clinging desperately to

her dear boy, she makes him a victim of her
possessiveness and he turns out to be something
less than a full man. While bachelors in

other lands can hardly wait to have a flat of
their own and a life of their own, he finds it
easier just staying home with Mother. If he

does decide to marry he may unconsciously look
for a mother substitute. Even then, he contrives
until his mother's death to turn to her frequently
for advice and comfort. l7

 

Ironically, the very tightness of her son's bond to her becomes a source
of irritation to the Irish mother. Though initially she formed her
attachment to her son as a substitute for her spouse's lack of tender-
ness, ultimately she finds such a compensatory relationship unsatisfactory.
In consequence, her son becomes the target for her subconscious frustra-
tion. In a study involving a group of male Irish psychiatric patients,
it was found their primary problem grew out of "a dominating, rejecting
mother" who alternately resented them as ”forever boys, and burdens" and
lavished upon them indulgent affection. The result, the study concluded,
was that the mother often succeeded in instilling in her sons "primary
anxiety and fear towards female figures." Such ambivalent behavior on
the part of the mother, Opler and Singer suggest, might go a long way
toward explaining in the Irish male

the sexual repressions and socio-religious
definitions of marriage and sexuality for

 

17Connery, p. l99.

141

which his culture, with its high celebacy rates,
protracted engagements and sin-guilt emphases, is
justly famous. In extreme instances, all this
spells a final anxious and fearful lack of posi-
tive sexual identification, varying in a continuum
from repressed and local homosexual balances
through to added displacements and distortions that
are either pallid asexuality or fearful and bizarre
misidentifications. 18

The more commonplace result of maternal ambivalence is male
fear of, if not outright hostility to, otherlfemales. Consequently,
those males who manage to break away from mother long enough to marry
find themselves behaving like the husbands their mothers so bitterly
resented in the early days of their own marriage. These new husbands
bring 'full cycle the behavior pattern of cold,unaffectionate, and
immature spouses.

However, it would be simplistic to suggest that the Irish
female is exclusively responsible for the cyclical continuation of
mutually unsatisfactory relationships between the sexes. The Irish male,
as unwitting as his female counterpart, contributes in equal measure
to spinning the web that keeps them both victims of implicit cultural
expectations. Also, since the pattern of mother favoring sons and
father favoring daughter is one that is relatively common throughout
rural communities of the western world, one must look for another
ingredient to explain the uniquely individual coloration given to Irish
sociological results. The most significant characteristic in relation-
ships between the sexes in Ireland is sexual puritanism. For this phen-
omenon, the Roman Catholic church bears significant responsibility.

Sociologist K.H. Connell believes that the pattern of immature

males in modern times was given considerable impetus by the Famine of

 

18Opler and Singer, p. 15.

142

1845-1848. When it became clear that farms could no longer be subdivided
into progressively smaller holdings, the practice of keeping the land
intact for one favored son came into being.19

Ironically, though the practice started as a means of insuring
survival for the son who stayed on the land (the other sons presumably
emigrating to more promising surroundings), the custom eventually spawned
clearly unhealthy relationships and growth patterns between father and
sons. The tradition called for land to pass through the father, but there
was no settled pattern for deciding which son would be the sole heir to
the farm. As a result, fathers often manipulated their sons quite cal-
culatedly. In an attempt to get maximum free labor on the farm from all
his boys, the father would withhold the name of which son should be the
inheriting one, thereby keeping them all malleable to his will. Messenger
found instances where fathers are so "loathe to surrender their property
and with it control of the family" to a willing son that they "even post-
poned receiving the old age [pension] in order to maintain their status
position past the age of 70 years."20 It is not difficult to see how
such fathers contribute mightily to the cycle of dependent sons who
become dependent husbands. Because they blackmail their sons during
their formative young adult years with the economic club of possible

"extremely subordinate to their father, who

inheritance, the sonsremain
treats them as boys and refers to them as 'boys' even when they are in

O O O 2 0
their thirties." 1 As a result the sons are not only economically, but

 

19K.H. Connell, Irish Peasant Society, (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1968), p. 116.

 

OMessenger, Inis Bea , p. 68.

21Humphreys, "The Family in Ireland," p.245.

143
psychologically, dependent.

The father's tenacious holding on to control of the farm until
their "children" are of a uniquely advanced age constitutes a kind of
gerontocracy which leaves the sons with "a deep sense of inferiority and
submissiveness and other juvenile traits."22

As a result, Irish sons seethe with frustrated rage against
their fathers and resist identifying with them. The result of this fail-
ure to identify with the male role is an anxiety in future relationships
with females, a tendancy which is only heightened by their mother's
ambivalence toward them.

Social scientists have long been fascinated by Irish male
reluctance to marry. In his The Irish, Kennedy attributes such hesitance
to the fear of economic responsibility which marriage implies.23 Most
anthropologists however lay it to the fear of sexual relationships,‘
stemming from a complex interrelationship of the strong Oedipal fixation
in the son's relations with his parents, male solidarity, and the long
range of cultural effects of the Roman Catholic church's promulgation
in Ireland of a Jansenistic attitude toward sex.

Though other male relationships are the only ones the average
Irishman feels comfortable in, when providing heirs makes marriage neces-
sary, the Irish male does marry-- though the nature of his relationship
with his wife necessarily reflects his past psychological relationship

with his mother and father. Because the Irish male is often not

 

22Humphreys, The New Dubliners, p. 23.

 

23Kennedy, pp. 153-4.

4Messenger, Inis Bea , p. 107

144

encouraged in his youth to become autonomous, he is unable to fully
function as an adult within marriage. Sean O'Faolain complains that the
average Irishman envisions the ideal wife not as a passionate lover or an
intelligent companion but a kind of mother-housekeeper to look after him.25
Though the wife resents that expectation, eventually she does
treat her husband as he wishes.26 Eventually she abjures the hope of a
husband whom she can regard as friend, as peer and gives in to his wish
to be treated as a son. Humphreys found one Dublin husband unusual only
in the frankness with which he admitted to a research sociologist, "I
am just the eldest son in the family."27
Needless to say, the price paid for this emotional atrophy is
high for both husband and wife. Keating contends that the Irish wife
takes on the dominant role in the family to fill a vacuum. Like O'Casey's
Juno she often feels the role ill suits her; the role makes her ”fre-
quently dislike herself heartily. It earns for her, too, the dislike
of her man," for he resents the fact that she has become "the driving
force, the seeker out of ways and means."28 Consequently, their dilemma
is mutually dissatisfying: "the wife is the 'strong' person in the
household on whom the husband is emotionally dependent, even when the

. . . . . 29
relatlonshlp IS one of mutual w1thdrawal and uncooperativeness."

 

25Sean O'Faolain, "Love Among the Irish," in The Vanishing
Irish, ed. John A. O'Brien, p. 114.

 

26Humphreys, The New Dubliners, p. 144.

27Ibid.

 

28Keating, The Vanishing_Irish, ed. John O'Brien, p. 173.

 

29Messenger, Inis Beag, p. 78.

145

Finally, one must consider the Church's contribution to the socio-
logical scene.

The fact that Irish men grow up fearful of women is complicated
by the Irish clergy's teachings about sex. A.J. Humphreys suggests that
Irish Catholicism is marked by a notable sexual puritanism not found in
other Catholic countries because the specific doctrinal tradition that
Ireland fell heir to was an Augustinian one. "By comparison with other
orthodox views within the general framework of Catholic doctrine, the
Augustinian tradition lays relatively greater emphasis on the weakness

0 o o o o o ..30
and ev1l to which human nature is prone as a result of original Sln.
Because of this theological purview, the average Irishman

although he is certain that man's bOdily nature
with its emotions is at root good, he is rather
more suspicious of it and deals with it more
severly. As a result he inclines to a jaundiced
view of sex and a generally ascetic outlook
which places a high premium upon continence,
penance, and in most spheres of life, on abstem-
iousness. 31

Some critics frankly blame Ireland's pattern of late mar-
riages, personality disorders, and its high percentage of single men
and women upon the antisexual attitude of priests and nuns. The
latter, sociologists like Paul Blanchard claim,

have exalted virginity to the point of national
catastrophe: they have surrounded the sins of

the flesh with such a poignant sense of guilt
that they have weakened the Irish mating instinct. 32

 

3O
Humphreys, "The Family in Ireland,” p. 249.

3llbid., pp. 249-50.

32Paul Blanchard, The Irish and Catholic Power (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1953), p. 141.

 

146

Another observer of the Irish scene waggishly observed that when a
couple does marry, the Church's attitude toward sex undermines their
pleasure in one another, for in Ireland sex seems ”to be more of a
function than a passion, a case of procreation without recreation."33

The relationship between the Irish woman and her man then is
colored by a complex spectrum of variables. The woman contributes,
the man contributes, the church even contributes. The end result is
the paradox that although the Irish woman is clearly oppressed in the
community, within the home she is clearly the central, indeed the
dominating, influence upon her husband and children. J.M. Synge and
Sean O'Casey merely reflected certain facets of that socio-cultural

pattern in their plays.

 

33Connery, p. 116.

CHAPTER IV

DRAMATISTS' KNOWLEDGE OF FEMALE MYTH FIGURES

James Joyce once observed that "History -- collective and
individual -- is a nightmare from which nobody can awake."l Though
the remark sounds a bit melodramatic, there seems more than a grain
of truth in it when one contemplates Ireland's mythological system.
At times, it seems very likely indeed that Gaelic mythology may con-
tinue to influence and shape behavior in contemporary Irish society.
For instance, the pronounced tendency of women in the Ulster Heroic
Cycle to be dominant or at least markedly assertive with the men in
their lives would appear to be a pattern that has continued in the social
structure of modern Ireland -- if the observations contained in the plays
of John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey constitute reliable indices.
Just as Sigmund Freud found in the Oedipal myth a profoundly
true archetype for early human sexuality, it may be that Synge and
O'Casey were responding in their plays to a particularly Irish attitude
toward woman and her relationship with man which they found implicit in
the early Celtic myths. In fact, ever since Sir James Frazer published

his Golden Bough in 1890, scholars have been growing steadily more

 

attentive to the influence upon a culture of its mythic materials.
Carl Jung postulated the daring thesis that all men possessed in ad-
dition to a personal unconscious, a "collective unconscious," 1:34, a
repository of experiences and memories that occurred to man's most

primitive ancestors. Such a collective unconscious, Jung believed

 

1John Raleigh, "O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and
New England Irish Catholicism, Partisan Review 26 (Fall, 1959): 592.

 

147

148
would explain otherwise unaccountably known patterns of behavior from the
ancient days of the race.2 Unhappily, though tantalizing, the hypothesis
remains just that and unprovable.

The Gaelic myths, nonetheless, seem likely to have had an
effect upon reinforcing Synge's and O'Casey's ideas about women. For,
at a conscious level, both dramatists had a redoubtable knowledge of
Celtic mythology and the power of the women in these stories. During
the end of its 19th Century, Ireland was poised for

a swing away from the civilized and toward the
primal. It was such a surge as that remarked
by Vivien Mercier with regard to the Irish
Revival: in it there was "the mysticism, the
sense of elemental forces... a movement toward
the primitive and archaic." 3

Ireland was hearing the siren tune of the Romantics which had
been playing on the Continent for half a century. With Yeats' supple
mind to articulate the tenor of the times for them, both Synge and O'Ca$y
became firm advocates of Nationalism for Ireland.

One of the drawbacks to the fulfillment of such a dream, how-
ever, was the common people's internationalization of years of British
opinion of them as a backward, lazy, uncivilized race -- not unlike the
plight of Blacks in America today. Before the Irish could be made to

believe they were capable of ruling themselves, they had to be reacquainted

with the facts of their illustrious history before the Diaspora4 in the

 

2Erik Lund, et al., A History of European Ideas (London: C.
Hurst & Co., 1962), p. 300.

3R. H° Currie and M. Bryan, "'Riders to the Sea:' a Reap-

praisal" Texas Quarterly 11 (Winter, 1968): 142.

4Frank O'Connor, A Short of Irish Literature (N.Y.: Capricorn
Books, 1968), p. 154.

149

seventeenth century when Britain deliberately attempted not only to scatter
Ireland's population, but to obliterate her history and her language.

Irish scholars like Standish O'Grady and Douglass Hyde began
to realize that one of Ireland's first psychological lifts had been pro-
vided by an obscure German linguist named Johann Zeuss in 1853 when he

published his monumental Grammatic Celtica, proving Irish was part of the

 

same Indo-European group of languages which spawned Greek and Latin.
Matthew Arnold reinforced this boost to the national ego when he published

his On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1910, a book which "added greatly

 

to the effect of German scholarship in making Ireland and things Irish
dignified."5

However William Butler Yeats had intuitively grasped the
imminent significance of national prestige of primitive Gaelic literature
some years before, when he began a systematic study of Old Irish language
and myth while living in Paris. It was while living in France that he
committed himself to transforming the ancient bardic stories to theatre
fare. Yeats early perceived that making the rich lore of the myths acces-
sible to a wide popular audience could not but help buttress confidence
in weakened Irish pride.

Revisionist histories were already being undertaken restoring
knowledge to the Irish people of the extraordinary "Golden Age" that
had persisted in the country during the period which the rest of Europe
called "the Dark Ages." During this period of chaos following the Roman
Empire's collapse, Ireland's Christian culture grew luxuriantly at
monastic centers like Clonmacnoise. Art flourished in the form of il-

luminated manuscripts, intricate metal- and enamel-work, and elaborately

 

51bid., p. 160.

150

carved high crosses. Scholarship was of such high standards that stu-
dents from the Continent flocked to the Irish monastery schools.6

During the vigorous period of movement toward a national
identity, Synge and O'Casey could not help but be influenced by the
sense of history swirling about them. Rediscovered Irish history as well
as the timeless aura of pre-history represented by the myths seem to have
had a telling effect upon their artistic efforts. Granting that Joyce
is correct in his assessment of the persistent influence of both col-
lective and individual history upon behavior, it seems fruitful at this
point to investigate how aware the two playwrights were of the "collective"
cultural history implicit in Ireland's myths. For the reader unfamiliar
with the women in Gaelic mythology, a reading of the Appendix would be
quite helpful. In the next chapter we will consider the effects of the

dramatists' "individual" histories upon their work.

Synge's Awareness of Female Myth Figures
John Synge's interest in the subject began as a boy.

Restricted from games because of his sickliness, his exercise became
walking. One of his favorite haunts was Glenasmole, at the time

as wild as the glens of Wicklow. Irish had been

spoken in the vale of Glenasmole only forty years

before, and stories were still told of ancient

Gaelic heroes by the people of the valley, and

the place names were redolent of Irish folk lore. 7

He began serious study during his first semester at Trinity College,

Dublin, when he delved into Irish antiquaries and the language. 80

 

6Alice Curtayne, The Irish Story (N.Y.: P.J. Kennedy & Sons,
1960), p. 59.

7D.H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge, 1871-1909

(N.Y.: Macmillan, 1959), p. 7.

 

151
rich was his delight with the latter that after only a year's study, he

took the College's first prize in Irish. Undoubtedly caught up in the
spirit of the Irish Renaissance and the dedication of scholars like
Douglas Hyde who founded the Gaelic League in 1897, Synge continued to
deepen his pursuit of Celtic studies. As a graduate student he attended
lectures on Old Irish language and civilization at the Sorbonne by one
of Europe's foremost scholars on the subject, Prof. H. d'Arbois Jubainville,
during "which the ancient Irish civilization was compared with that of
Homer's Greece, a comparison he never forgot."8

It was during this French sojourn that he also had the oppor-
tunity to spend enthusiastic hours discussing the myths with W.B. Yeats
and Maud Gonne. During this same period he contributed some half dozen
reviews to French periodicals of new translations and adaptations of
the myths, critiquing them rigorously for their fidelity, or absence
thereof, to the barbaric spirit as well as the letter of the originals.

He was intrigued by Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne for having

 

caught something of the essence of the women in the Heroic Cycle.

Most of the moods and actions that are met
with are more archaic than anything in the
Homeric poems, yet a few features, such as
the imperiousness and freedom of the women,
seem to imply an intellectual advance beyond
the period of Ulysses. The chief women of
the cycle, Maeve, Queen of Connaught, and
Emer, wife of Cuchulain, and Etain, the
daughter of Etar, King of the riders of the
Sidhe, are described in many passages of
great clarity and beauty. 9

 

 

8Robin Skelton, J.M. Synge and His World (N.Y.: Viking Press,
1971), p. 46.

9J.M. Synge, Collected Prose, ed. Alan Price, vol. 2: Prose

(London: Oxford U. Press, 1966), p.

 

152
At Yeats' suggestion he left the bohemian life of Paris and
returned to Ireland in an effort to rediscover his creative roots among
simpler people. He continued his avid interest in folk history, filling
notebooks "with scores of anecdotes, local history, and folk tales
which he carefully recorded as they were told him."10
Critic Una Ellis-Fermor wrote a brilliant assessment of Synge as

a mystic and nature writer.11 It is not unlikely that his mystical sens:
of continuity between earlier generations and contemporary ones coalesced
during his stays on the Aran Islands, off Galway. For there,

he found a belief in the miraculous and

supernatural which invigorated his

imagination. He found himself believing

that he could understand the cries of the

gulls, and one night, after a dream of

ecstasy and frenzy in which he was "swept

away in a whirlwind" of music, he found

himself convinced that "there is a psychic

memory attached to certain neighborhoods. 12
During this same period, he also tried to articulate his sense of the
mystic power of women. One Aran Islands woman he perceived as possessed
by a dual persona, at one time "a simple peasant" and yet at another as
"looking out at the world with a sense of prehistoric disillusion." So
struck was he by the formidable simplicity and directness of the woman
that he was moved to wonder if perhaps there was not a relationship
"between the wild mythology that is accepted on the islands and the

strange beauty of the woman."13

 

10Greene and Stephens, p. 138

llUna Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement (London:

Methuen, 1939), p. 166.

lekelton, p. 57.

13Ibid.

 

153
I am inclined to believe that he answered that question in the
affirmative when he created characters like Sarah Casey, Pegeen Mike,

Deirdre of the Sorrows, women of startling beauty and domineering will.

O'Casey's Awareness of Female Myth Figures

Though robbed of a formal education by poor eyesight and extreme
poverty, Sean O'Casey, by a determined program of self-education, pro-
vided himself with a "rich and wide-based culture." At the turn of the
century, spurred by the hopeful zeitgeist of his country's Nationalistic
and Labor Movements, he taught himself the Irish language proficiently
enough to become a teacher himself at the Gaelic League. The same spirit
led him to become "widely read in English and Gaelic literature;"14 in
fact, so enamoured did he become of the latter that most of his middle

and late period plays are full of rich allusion to the myths.

In volumes III and IV of his autobiography (Drums Under the

 

Window and Innishfallen, Fare Thee Well) he recreates the spirit of the

 

time when nationalistic hopes for an Irish Republic free of British
interference sparked fervent interest in recovering the ancient heroes
and history of the country. O'Casey made himself a scholar of the

Gaelic myths, and in plays like Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me he

 

 

incorporated figures from them, along with contemporary heroes like
Parnell, to sound a call to Irishmen to pride and self-respect. Red

Roses for Me is rife with references to "Celtic heroes -- Finn Mac Cool,

 

Goll Mac Morna, Caoilte, Milesius, Emer, Oscar, and Osheen."15 Even an

 

1['Ronald Ayling, ed., Introduction to Sean O'Casey: Selections
of Critical Essays (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1969), p. 26.

15David Krause, Sean O'Casey: the Man & His Work (N.Y.:
Collier Books, 1962), p. 221.

 

 

 

154

early play, The Silver Tassie, carries evidence of O'Casey's profound

 

interest in Ireland's mythic past. Playwright John Arden notes that in
the expressionistic second act, two front-line soldiers are sent parcels
from home, one a prayerbook in a green plush cover with a gold cross, the
other a red and yellow colored ball. Arden points out that "these are
not just any old props, introduced so the dialog can make a verbal point,
but carefully selected emblematic objects like articles of equipment
carried by heroes of the Iaig,"lé the main story in the Heroic Cycle.
Some critics even maintain that one of O'Casey's major
artistic purposes in his plays was to ”unite what is best in Irish myth
l7

and history with what is best in Christianity." William Armstrong

believes in plays starting with Red Roses through Cock-a-Doodle Dandy and

 

The Drums of Father Ned, O'Casey intended to satirize certain flaws in

 

Irish civilization by affirming "a highly personal creed which blends a
pagan delight in the free expression of the senses and the imagination
with intuitions and ideas drawn from Irish mythology, Christianity and
Marx."18 One of O'Casey's most intensely felt criticisms of contemporary
Ireland was her uncritical acceptance of Christian joylessness in the

world and mortification of the flesh. In Within the Gates and The

 

Bishop's Bonfire, he makes explicit his disapproval of the "repressive

 

pietism" that had taken hold in Ireland, in sharp contrast to the wildly

joyous philosophy of Osheen from the Fenian cycle.19 But perhaps nowhere

 

16John Arden, ”Ecce Hobo Sapiens: O'Casey's Theatre," in Sean
O'gzsey, ed. Thomas Kilroy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975),
p.

7
William Armstrong, Sean O'Casey. (London: Longmans, Green
and Co., Ltd., 1967), p. 29.

18 Ibid., 26.

 

9David Krause, "The Rageous Ossean: Patron Hero of Synge and
O'Casey," Modern Drama 4 (Dec., 1961), pp. 287-90.

 

155

does he more brilliantly capture the distinction between the life-affirm-
ing Ossianic philosophy of the myths and the joyless other-worldly stance
of Christianity than in his hilarious five-page monologue of St. Patrick

haranguing his Irish flock in Pictures in the Hallway.

 

As for the women in the myths, he suggests something of the
hold they had upon his imagination in a letter to his great friend Lady
Gregory. For a time it would appear such strong-willed women constituted
his ideal conception of woman.

Shaw once wrote that you were the most
distinguished of living Irishwomen. And now
I have thought of our present country women,
seeking some, seeking even one, that had in
her something of Grania, or Emer, or of
Maeve, but God, perhaps, has hidden them from
my eyes. 21
So O'Casey,too, it would seem likely had at least part of his con-

ception of woman shaped by the imposing gallery of self-possessed and

imposing females in the Gaelic myths.

 

20Sean O'Casey, Autobiography: Pictures in the Hallway
(London: Pan Books, 1971), pp. 13-17.

21David Krause, Sean O'Casey: Self-Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968), p. 25.

CHAPTER V

AUTHORS' RELATIONSHIP WITH MOTHER

While it is undoubtedly significant to point out that the
Irish home is powered by a matriarchal impulse, and that mythic role
models for strong female behavior existed in the consciousnesses of
both Synge and O'Casey, it is just as true that their personal exper-
iences with women, and particularly with their mothers, could have
negated these powerful cultural and intellectual influences on the

dramatists. However, they did not. If anything, their maternal relation-

7:.- 4 ...-.... '
'Iuifi» . ‘Tflflfl'

ships reinforced their inclination to see women as emotionally stronger
than men. Naturally, the particular nature of each man's relationship
with his mother had particular modifying influences on his vision of

the degree of power possessed by women: Synge's female characters being
usually dominating and O'Casey's more commonly being less threatening
to, but more autonomous than, his male characters.

Approaching the interpretation of biographical data is of its
nature an iffy endeavor. Psychographs seem particularly dangerous
because they rely so strongly upon inference and are not subject to
verification with the authors in question. Add to this the paucity of
raw autobiographical material kept by the Synge family after the play-
wright's death and the disregard of O'Casey for things like dates and
chronological sequence in his huge six-volume autobiography, and the
task seems frightening indeed. Nonetheless, such data as are available
tantalizes and cries out for explication. The caveat stated, the
argument proceeds.

Synge's Relationship with His Mother and Other Women

156

157
John Millington Synge was one year old when his father died,

too young to have retained any memories of him. Therefore, his mother and
his maternal grandmother became the central influences in his life.
Because of a sickly constitution, the boy's early education was irregular;
however,

there was nothing irregular about his religious

training: for his mother and grandmother ruled

a household where discipline was almost as strict

as that of a religious order. Mrs. Synge and

her mother had gone to school themselves to a

harsh master. Their authority was the Bible and

they cited it constantly to their children. 1

Though in adolescence he came to bitterly resent his mother as

wrw"1_

"a woman of narrow Protestant piety, to whom he was closely bound by an
exasperated and rebellious piety,"2 his boyhood relationship with her was
apparently quite fond. Early on he learned to rely upon her for emotional
support. When at six years of age he woke one night from a dream in which
the theological concept of Hell became terrifyingly real for him, he
permitted himself to be soothed, even flattered, by her explanation that
the dream meant he was now of an age that the Holy Ghost was convicting
him of sin and therefore preparing him for salvation.

Kathleen Trail Synge, ("rigorously religious, thoroughly well-
meaning, energetic in her triviality, possessive in her sense of family,

0 C O 4
didactic, and utterly uncomprehen31ve of her son's nature" ), of

 

lD.H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge, 1871-1909
(N.Y.: Macmillan, 1959), p. 7.

 

2 .
Elizabeth Coxhead, J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory (London:
Longmans, 1962), p. 9.

3
J.M. Synge, Collected Works, ed. Alan Price, vol. 2 Prose
(London: Oxford U. Press, 1966), p. 4.

4S.B. Bushrui, ed., A Centenary Tribute to John Millington

Synge, 1871-1909 (N.Y.: Barnes & Noble, 1972), p. 9.

 

158
necessity had to be with five children to rear. She drew considerable
sustenance and psychological comfort from her religion and her member-
ship in Dublin's Protestant Ascendancy, the city's elite landowning
class. Eminently pragmatic, she had little patience with what she
regarded as John's maudlin guilt about evicting a tenant farmer from
family land and burning his house to prevent surreptitious return. She
argued implacably that not to evict him for non-payment of rent would
be to weaken the strength of landowners, and 1887 "was no time for the
landlords to relax their already precarious hold on the rights and
privileges that gave them their power."5

Though Synge absorbed his mother's bourgeois horror of reveal-
ing personal aspects of his life in his writings, one can detect between
the lines of his sketchy autobiographical notes an early tendency to
idealize the female sex. During these same boyish years, Synge also
developed the passion for Nature that would so strikingly identify his
art. In the course of long therapeutic walks through woods outside his
mother's country home, he grew exquisitely susceptible to the changing
moods and beauty of Nature. In fact, all his work is alive with a
palpable sense of beauty of the outdoors.

Interestingly, he seems to have identified, equated, women
with the rapturous beauty and power of nature. In his autobiographical
manuscript, he remembers

about puberty when the boy begins to look
with uneasy awakened gaze that lingers
because it is not satisfied, I saw in one

hour that both nature and women were alive
with indescribable radiance -- with beauty.

 

5Greene and Stephens, p. 12.

 

159

Even when the animal feelings were at their

height, a beautiful woman seemed an intangible

glory. 6
Of the thin amount of material he left about his early family years, his
memories of his first attachment to a member of the opposite sex at ten
years of age seems to have struck him as important since the relationship
apparently taught him to distrust the sex it was his tendency to idolize.
He recalls in uncommonly luxuriant detail the delight and agony of his

friendship with Florence Ross. He recalls avidly sharing tennis, bird-

watching, and drawing with her. He developed an intense affection for

Twe-r"-nnnw'
,- _

her and told her "with more virile authority" than he felt he ever pos- i
sessed again "that she was to be my wife. She was not displeased."
Nonetheless, upon the arrival of a male cousin upon the scene, she
rather blithely transferred her affections. Synge "was stunned with
horror" and moped about the house for days. Though his mother, recog-
nizing the source of his malaise, attempted to get him to walk again
with the girl, his faith was broken: "thus I learned very young the
weakness of the false gods we are obliged to worship."7

A year later, however, he was sufficiently over his wound to
adore her again. When the male cousin moved to another part of the
country, he resumed his relationship with her and contrived to believe
he was in love with her. As though he needed to believe the female
sex were constituted of some sort of extraordinary beings rather than
merely the other half of humanity, he took to kissing "the chair she
had sat on and [h'ewould] kiss the little notes she sometimes sent to

me till I blotted the ink."8

 

\

6Synge, Collected Works: Prose, p. 13.

7Ibid., p. 8.

81bid., p. 0.

 

160

During these early years ”he was inevitably very much depend-
. . 9
ent upon his mother and grandmother for his understandlng of the world;"
during his adult years it is perhaps not so surprising he was more com-
fortable with women friends than men. John Mansfield recalled that

when I turn over my memories of him it seems

that his grave courtesy was only gay when he

was talking to women. His talk to women had

a lightness and charm. It was sympathetic;

never self-assertive, as the hard brilliant

Irish intellect often is. 10
However, the ease of these relationships apparently did not carry over
into the sexual sphere. He seems to have chosen for his friendships

. . . . 11

women cut in his mother's mold, educated and strong-minded persua51ons.
Despite the strength of his attraction toward them, these women apparently
never returned his affections. His pliant charm was not enough for them.

In an autobiographical segment of his first play, the unpublished The

Moon Is Set, Synge apparently gave vent to the frustration he had felt

 

in being rejected by several self-possessed young women with whom he had

fallen in love during several years living on the Continent:

 

9Robin Skelton, J.M. Synge and His World (N.Y.: Viking Press,
1971), p. 10.

10John Mansfield, J.M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections
(Philadelphia: Richard West, 1973), p. 9.

11He counted upon the friendships of women like Valeska Von
Eiken, a German girl with whom he confided his hopeless love for Cherry
Matheson. She apparently reined in his growing attraction toward her
by upbraiding him for addressing her as "Valeska" unpreceded by "Miss."
While studying at the Sorbonne, he met Therese Breydon who was a French
art teacher interested in politics and the Feminist Movement, and a
defender of Dreyfus. He loved arguing religion with an American woman,
Miss Capps, who he met while studying Italian in Italy. Likewise, he
was attracted by another strong-minded woman, Hope Rea, an Englishwoman
studying art and doing research on Donatello and Rubens; he was fasci-
nated by her rationalist and later theosophical philosophies.

 

 

V-umm*rrrv‘r1mmur

161

my life has gone to ruin because I mis-

understood love and because I was scrupu-

lous when I should have been strong. I

treated women as though they were gods and

they treated me as if I might be damned for

their amusement. 12

His relationship with his mother looms tantalizingly in the

background during these courtship years. Synge began his many attempts
to break his dependence upon her during his adolesence. At 15 or 16,
after reading Darwin, he began doubting her religion. At 18 he announced
he would no longer attend church. Mrs. Synge was shocked by his apostasy
and with Samuel, another son, she

carried on a constant campaign of prayer and

propaganda directed at John. She reported to

Robert [her eldest son]: "Sam has lent him a

book to read, written by a clergyman, to those

who have doubts and unbelief, and we are asking

the Lord to speak through the book. We take

ahold afresh of His promises." 13
His next attempt to assert his independence of her expressed itself in
his determination to study the violin for performance. Bound by a
formidable sense of class obligation, she was rocked to the soles of
her shoes and implacably opposed to his serious preparation as a perform-
ing artist. Only the intercession of a female cousin convinced Mrs. Synge
to relent. Though his study of the violin and music theory in Germany
occasioned his leaving home for the first time, it did not mark his
psychological independence of his mother.

While he was on holiday in Dublin, he fell in love with and

proposed to an attractive young woman named Cherry Matheson. However,

because of his lack of religious orthodoxy, she rejected his suit. So

 

12Skelton, p. 34.

13Greene and Stephens, p. 26.

162

undimmed was Synge's reliance upon his mother that he begged her to
convince Cherry to relent in her determination not to marry him. Since
his mother probably hoped such a match would bring him back to the
church, she did intercede but without avail. Upon his return to the
Continent, he made friends with and confided the painful details of his
frustrated love affair to a number of educated and sympathetic young
women, who invariably side—stepped the relationship when Synge attempted
to turn the friendship to romance. He may have been unconsciously
expecting them to function as mother—substitutes. Such a possibility is

not unlikely since he maintained a bond of dependency upon his mother

 

until her death when he was in his mid-thirties.

At 35, he apparently grew tired of being treated by women as
little more than an affable conversationalist. He entered into a
relationship with Maire (Molly) O'Neill apparently determined to change
his pattern of relating to women as he did to his mother. Ironically,
he chose to function more like Molly's father than lover. For she was
young enough to be his daughter and in many respects he treated her as
such. He may have believed her youth and inexperience would make her
more malleable than the previous women in his life; however, Molly
O'Neill demonstrated a strong inclination to dominate the by-then
famous playwright. "When walking together in the glens of Wicklow, they
were often ecstatically happy, but quarrelled as often, for Molly had a
quick temper and seems, at least on occasion, to have enjoyed making
her lover buckle under."14 Something in her conformed to the "wildness,"

the primitiveness," he had learned to love in the Celtic myths while

 

1['Skelton, p. 102.

 

163

a bookish boy.

In addition, as an actress she was exactly the choice of fiandée

guaranteed to chagrin his mother. It is not unlikely that he chose her
at least partly as another rebellious attempt to assert his independence
of his mother. Molly was Roman Catholic, uneducated, and a former shop-
girl. Her "unsuitability" was sure to nettle Mrs. Synge. Robin Skelton
commented of the young actress's tempestuous personality that

while Pegeen Mike's language owes a great

deal to [Synge's] Kerry friends, her

temperament is not unlike that of his

beloved. The waywardness, the wildness,

the warmth, the independence, the sudden

burst of temper and the restless yet ill-

formed ambition were all characteristics

of Molly. 15

A psychiatrist might well suspect Synge's choice, wondering if

the fifteen year disparity in their ages, their different class back-
grounds, did not constitute an unconscious way of assuring the match
would never be concluded. Certainly, the course of their relationship
never ran smoothly. Synge apparently decided that this time it would be
he who would steer the direction of their romance. He liked to think of
Molly as an impressionable student and himself as her wiser teacher: "I
hope you'll read steadily while I'm away," he wrote.

I hate to preach at you or schoolmaster you

-- I like you so perfectly as you are -- but

you must know that it will make life richer

for both of us if you know literature and

the arts, and the things that are of most

interest to me and my friends, that you'll
know one of these days. 16

 

lsIbid., p. 102

16Greene and Stephens, p. 207.

were

..J

164

His love letters are more often than not imbued with a stuffy, paternal-
istic tone. For instance, when she moved out of her parent's house into
that of a married sister, where there would be presumably less supervision,
he wrote high-handedly,

you agreed not to stay there as I did not

like it for you. Now at the last moment

you tell me you are going back on your

definite word, and going to do what I ask

you not.... You seem determined that I am

never to trust you. 17
Or else his letters alternate with querulous requests for greater sympathy
on Molly's part for his periodic bouts of illness. Ann Saddlemyer observed
that since Synge had become used to ”the close attentions of a devoted
mother," he came to expect a corresponding sympathy from his fiancee.1

His difficulty in relating to her like a lover instead of a
father must have been compounded by his shyness about being demonstra-
tive with her. He tried to explain his reticence about displays of af-
fection in a letter: "You must not mind if I seem a little distant at
the theatre; everyone is watching us, and even when we are publically
engaged I do not care to let outsiders see anything."19
That he had not yet broken his mother's hold upon him seems

evident from the fact that during his wooing of Molly, he spent
anguished months trying to write a letter to Mrs. Synge informing her
of his plans to marry. He attempted to justify the delay to Molly by
explaining it was better to give his mother time to adjust to the idea.

When he finally did summon up the courage to tell her, she accepted the

idea without fuss conceding it could be a good thing for a man of his

 

17Ibid., 210.

18Ann Saddlemyer, Letters to Molly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
U. Press, 1971), p. XVLL.

 

19Greene and Stephens, p. 263.

165
lonely bent. Apparently, however, Synge was afraid not only of his mother
but of marriage as well, for even after acquiring his mother's acceptance
of the engagement, he hedged about setting a wedding date, explaining to
Molly: "my mother enquired quite pleasantly about our walk and where we
had been. She is coming around to the idea very quickly, I think, but
still it is better not to hurry things."20
Before Synge could marry, however, he became ill requiring abdom-

inal surgery. Soon after, his mother became ill. He attempted to nurse
her himself, but as the period of her illness lengthened and he suspected
she was dying, "he felt a sudden need to return to Germany once more."
For

just as in the past he had avoided confron-

tations by telling both Samuel and his mother

of his marriage plans by letter rather than

face to face, so now he could not help evading

the issue. 21
His feelings toward her were at best ambivalent; the unresolved emotions
that continued to dog him because he was still strongly bound to her,
were once again expressed in rebellion against his sense of duty. Whenae
letter from Dublin informed him that her condition was grave, he decided
to do nothing unless she got even worse. However, when he received word
that she had died, he decided he was not strong enough to rush back to
the funeral. In consequence, the mother who during her life could never
bring herself to attend one of her playwright-son's I'theatricals" at the
Abbey, was buried without her much-loved son, Johnny, in attendance.

It seems an ironic conclusion that only five months afterwards,

Synge followed his mother's lead and succumbed to Hodgkins Disease.

 

201bid., 2. 226.

21Skelton, p. 123.

166

His unresolved relationship with his mother seems everywhere
apparent in both his personal life and in his plays. A father figure
being unavailable to him, he seems to have identified himself almost
exclusively with Mrs. Synge, and ”except for two brief periods during
his last years, Synge made his home with his mother."22 Further,
because he both idolized and feared her, he was never able to conclude
a successful sexual relationship with a woman, equal to equal. The only

way he could sustain an intimate relationship was in choosing a female

 

who resembled a daughter more than a fiancee. His failure to sever his g
psychological dependence23 upon his mother may explain the disproportion- 'h
ate number of female characters he created who stand as larger-than-life

dominating figures in relationship to their men -- looking for all the

world as awesomely imposing as a mother does to her small son.

O'Casey's Relationship with Mother and Other Women

 

Sean O'Casey, on the other hand, appears to have successfully
negotiated release from emotional dependence upon his mother in a
relative natural, if lengthy, maturing process.

Like Synge, O'Casey was born in Dublin, of Protestant stock,
the last of five surviving children. Like him, he was sickly as a boy
and educated erratically (Synge by a series of tutors, O'Casey by him—
self). Like Mrs. Synge, Mrs. O'Casey was widowed, snobbish about Roman
Catholics, and disapproving of theatre. Unlike her, however, O'Casey's

mother seems to have provided her son with greater freedom to make, and

 

2Saddlemyer, p. xvii
23Robin Skelton observed that Synge's "intellectual rejection
of her beliefs had been complete, but he had never lost his emotional
dependence upon her presence." J.M. Synge and His World, p. 123.

 

167

respect, his own choices.
Whereas the Synge's were well-off financially and socially, the

O'Casey's lived in abominable and debasing poverty until Sean's success
at the Abbey Theatre in middle age. What Susan O'Casey ("O'Casside" in
the Autobiography) was unable to give her children in material comfort,
she attempted to make up for in selfless generosity of spirit. O'Casey
immortalized this singular quality of his mother not only in his six-
volume autobiography and in the character of Mrs. Breydon in Red Roses
for Me, but in conversation and correspondence for the rest of his life.

Though she died when he was thirty-eight?4 Susan O'Casey

“if"! ‘ _ ‘ ’ I‘m“ V a

remained the most important woman in his life till he married, nearly

ten years later. In I Knock at the Door, he remembers her with a boy's

 

eyes as a woman of heroic proportions, who contended with Poverty at
every turning. Thomas Kilroy regards I Knock as primarily "an account

of a fierce maternal act of defiance against death, or rather Death in

a Morality Play, with his own mother cast as Everywoman."25 The ferocity
of her struggle may be surmised from the fact that death had already
claimed two sons before Sean who had been given his name. The entire
autobiography is packed with recollections of the woman who struggled

so assiduously to compensate in warmth and affection for the demoral-

izing effects of the tenement slums in which she was forced to rear him.

 

24In Innishfallen, Fare Thee Well, O'Casey claims to have

been 35 years when his mother died, but in 1964 his friend and scholar
David Krause showed him O'Casey's birth certificate which he had finally
located in Dublin's Hall of Records. Its date was 1880, leaving the
dramatist three years older than he had supposed himself to be.

 

5Thomas Kilroy, ed., Introduction to Sean O'Casey: A Collection
of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 3.

 

168

Susan O'Casey was a loving, nurturant mother whose persistence alone was
responsible for preventing her son's total blindness as a boy, and whose
strong-mindedness protected him from the bullying of ignorant school-
masters. Though she might have suffocated him with overprotection because
of his sickliness, she did not. She recognized the importance of her
son's growing at his own pace, in his own independent style; consequently,
she turned down a welfare scholarship to a Protestant military school for
him:

they'd hammer religion] into him.... Every

turn he'd take would be chronicled; and if

one wasn't done as they had planned, the

boy'd be broken into their way of doin' it;

an' Johnny's my boy an' not theirs.... I'm

not goin' to have the life in him cowed out

of him so long as I can prevent it. There's

no use harpin' on the Blue Coat School, for

me mind's made up -- the boy won't go into

it. 26

She was a woman who did not permit her own prejudices to

straitjacket her children. Though she suspected the theatre as the
breeding place of sin, when she saw that teenaged Sean meant to act in
an amateur production of a Boucicault play despite her misgivings, she
had the grace to add to his departing figure, "well, since you've com-
mitted yourself, do your best and don't, for goodness' sake, make a
show of the Cassides by giving a bad performance." She had the knack
of bestowing on her son the gift of his own joy in doing the thing he
wanted to do.

But most important, she taught him to trust and value his own

judgment. When he refused to remove his cap while collecting his pay

 

26O'Casey, Autobiography: I Knock on the Door (London: Pan
Books, 1971), p. 186.

 

27O'Casey, Autobiography: Pictures in the Hallway, p. 137.

 

169

at the end of a fifteen-hour day and lost his job in consequence, his

first thought -- in spite of the knowledge of how much his family counted

on his salary -- was, "well, my mother will be glad I left it."28 He

instinctively knew she would support his decisions. (Near the end of his
life, he reflected in an interview his philosophy of raising his own
children was very much like his own mother's:

Children must feel free to follow their

interest, and not feel under any obligation

to the parents. I've always treated my

children as equals, and not expected anything
back from them. I don't meddle. I'm of a

different generation -- what right should I
have to meddle? Fledglings flee the nest in
their own good time -- the debt contracted

to one's parents in one's youth is paid to
one's offspring. That is the natural order
of things. 29

Like Synge, O'Casey, too, early lost his father. However,
O'Casey had the advantage of his father's presence during the critically
formative first six years of his life. During that period, his most
significant memory was his father's fear that the boy was doomed to
ignorance on account of the eye disease that made reading excruciatingly
painful to him.30 That recollection, coupled with the fact that Susan
O'Casey kept the memory of her husband as scholar a live and loved image
before her family, was responsible for one of the playwright's major
life choices. Though he could not read until he was 14 because of the

ulcerating eyes, he determined

 

28Ibid., p. 183.

29Sean O'Casey, The Sting and the Twinkle, ed. E.H. Mikhail

and John O'Riordan (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 78.

OO'Casey, Autobiography: I Knock on the Door, p. 36.

170

he would learn, he would learn. He wouldn't
keep on being the ignoramus [his brother]
Archie had called him when he ventured to say
a word in an argument.... If his father had
made himself into a scholar by boring into
books, his son could do the same. He was
studying all words he didn't really know the
meaning of in an old dictionary his father had
left behind him. More than that, he was busy
learning something about physical, political,
and commercial geography out of his father's
old book, Sullivan's Geography Generalized.
More than that, he was learning grammar, too;
and history from his father's Merle d'Aubigne's
History of the Reformation. 31

O'Casey senses that the abasement, the soul-pinching despair that were

the accoutrements of poverty could be eased only by enlarging his mind.

uuunresfi'amfiflmflflfl'

So with his father's image before him, he spent his free time -- often
fifteen hours at a go on his day off -- peering down at jumping words
lit by the sputtering flicker of a paraffin lamp.32 He pored over the
most exciting and demanding books he could find in second-hand book
stalls, till he could at last wrest for himself a tenuous sense of
self-respect.

The ideal of intellectual integrity which his father repre-
sented to him stayed with him throughout his life. For instance, at 46
in the course of an interview with W.B. Yeats about his new play, [ha
Plough and the Stars, the older man complimented O'Casey for it calling
him "the Irish Dostoyevsky." O'Casey felt he ought to have laughed and
informed Ireland's most famous poet that he was indulging in a bit of
literary pompousness inasmuch as the dramatist knew Yeats had been

introduced to his first Dostoyevsky novel only the night before. O'Casey

 

1O'Casey, Autobiography: Pictures in the Hallway, p. 87

321bid., p. 184.

171

refrained, though he was afterwards ashamed: "Sean's father would
have said how he felt and what he thought without a hesitation. He had
let his father's memory down. He'd try to be braver next time."33
O'Casey was further aided in formulating a positive identifi-
cation with a male role by three older brothers. Whereas Synge's older
brothers were sent away to various boarding schools and colleges, the
tenement playwright had his brothers readily accessible as role models.
From the eldest Archie, he learned that once he started working, he
would automatically be accorded the right to pursue his inclinations
independently; for fourteen-year old Sean observed that though his
mother often objected to Archie's plans, she held her tongue since
her oldest son was

the only one bringing in the wherewithall to
keep the little home together. Johnny, too,

had to be kind to Archie, and careful not to

say anything that would offend, for, as well

as keeping him, he gave Johnny tuppence a

week, a treasure that gave him the power to

buy The Boys of London and New York, a further
volume of Deadwood Dick or Franke Reade, Jr. and
His Electric Airship. So Johnny cleaned Archie's
boots with a cake of Cooney's Paste Blacking
taken out of its oiled green paper, and pressed
into an old tin to keep it soft; ran errands for
him; and generally laboured to please and serve
his brother in every way. All the same, Johnny
didn't like him, and did these things because
there was no way out of it. 34

 

 

 

 

However, Johnny/Sean got "out of it" as early as he could by enthusias-
tically getting his first job that same year.

From his favorite brother, Tom, a handsome and well-turned out
Dublin Fusilier, he acquired a sense of ease in masculine, and an antici-

pation for feminine, company. For Tom gave the teenaged Sean his

 

33O'Casey, Autobiography: Innishfallennyare Thee Well, p. 191.

 

34O'Casey, Autobiography: Pictures in the Hallway, p. 20.

 

172

introduction to pub-life. Soon he knew all of Tom's favorite pubs by
heart,

had drunk ginger beer or claret in each of

them; had listened to the rare manly talk

beatin' round the house like the stirring

wind or bustling sea. And now he was at the

Cat 'n Cage. He was getting on and filling

his young life with wondhers. Here he was

in a pub miles from home between two oul'

swaddies havin' his share of dhrink with the

best of them. Few more years an' he'd be

workin', able to go on his own way, swagger

about the streets, an' show Jennie Clitheroe

the sort he was. 35

These twin influences of his father's idealized image and his

brothers' roisterous company helped the young O'Casey toward a natural,
if occasionally painful, separation from his mother. During one pub
adventure with his brothers that erupted in a melee among them, a hurl-
ing team, and two constables, Sean suggested they "borrow" a coach and
horse to engineer their escape from the law. With Sean driving, the
exhilaration was high indeed as they dashed through Dublin streets in
a stolen cab while police whistles grew steadily more dim behind them.
Afterwards as his brothers and the hurlers complimented him lavishly,
he was full of satisfaction and a sense of growing up. But growing up
encompasses ambivalent feelings; for "then he remembered he had left
behind on the counter the lovely branch of crimson and golden berries,
plucked for his mother; and his heart got a little sad again."36
Despite his mixed emotions, however, he made the inevitable break from

his mother's authority.

Perhaps Susan O'Casey's greatest heritage to her son was the

 

351bid., p. 55.

36Ibid., p. 64.

173
seedbed of self-confidence she implanted in him, enabling him through
seven years of rejections to continue believing in his talent as a write;
He had made up his mind years ago that the
Abbey Theatre curtain would go up on a play
of his; an' up it would go, sooner or later.
First decide slowly and deeply whether it is
in you to do a thing; if you decide that you
can, then do it, even though it kept you
busy till the very last hour of your life. 37
Whereas Synge depended emotionally upon his mother all his life
and resented her for it, O'Casey asserted his independence of Susan and
admired her ever after for encouraging it. As a middle—aged man O'Casey
quite unself—consciously recalled his abiding respect and affection for
her. His contemporary Gabriel Fallon remembers how often O'Casey
would talk of his mother, her care of him,
her unfailing kindness, her "gay laugh at
the gate of the grave." "Though she is
dead now for many years, she is still a
living presence with me. 38
As a result of his releasing himself from his childhood bond
with his mother, his relationshfixswith women seem to have been more
relaxed than Synge's. Neither do his female characters loom so large
and domineering as Synge's women do; they are scaled closer to life size,
they are less inclined to manipulate than Synge's women.
Given the sexually puritanical milieu of Ireland, O'Casey's
relationships with women were remarkably natural. He tells of stealing
his first kiss at twelve from a slum neighbor named Jennie Clitheroe.

At about fifteen or sixteen, he carried on an intense flirtation with

a co-worker named Alice Norris in a secluded company stock-room. In

 

37O'Casey, Autobiography: Innishfallen, Fare Thee Well, p. 117.

8Gabriel Fallon, "The House on the North Circulor Road:
Fragments from 3 Biography," Modern Drama 4 (Dec., 1961), p. 229.

 

 

174

Pictures in the Hallway he recalls his sexual initiation with a Daisy

 

Battles whom he met at an anti-British demonstration that turned violent.
Initially, he was shy, kissing her rather tentatively. Good humoredly,
she commented on the kiss, "well, you take care not to hurt yourself

when you're kind to a girl,"

whereupon she proceeded to relieve him of
his trousers on the pretext of sewing them. O'Casey recalled with
delight that several hours later she observed correctly, "you've
learned a lot here today, haven't you? You'll be a knowing fellow from
this out."39
He was middle-aged before he fully recognized intellectually

the misogynism that clerics implanted in Irish minds40 but his instincts
early revolted against such attitudes as he found himself drawn to women's
bodies just as often as he was to their spirits or minds. At a political
meeting in Dublin's Liberty Hall, O'Casey found himself staring at a
20-year old woman who wept as she denounced Michael Collins' 1916 Treaty
partitioning Ulster. Regarding her with unabashed desire, he

thought how good she would be to have beside

him under a hiding hedge away in the country

where no one thought of trespassing. She had

a great mass of dark-brown hair rippling over

her neck, big grey eyes, a tempting mouth,

ripe and red as a finely-born cherry; her coat
was open, and underneath the blouse Sean saw

39O'Casey, Autobiography: Pictures in the Hallway, p. 208.
40

 

O'Casey regularly took aim against misogynistic clerics,
Iflfixlting up anti-feminine attitudes dating back to medieval times. He
Cited.one Benedictine of luny who warned that woman's beauty was merely
skin deep; that if a man were to look within her, he would find there
merely "phlegm and blood and humours and gall," adding logically "if

we cannot bring ourselves even with the tips of our fingers, to touch
dung, wherefore do we desire to embrace this bag of filth?" O'Casey

was c>ften incensed to find that "this outlook on woman is) as strong
among timeclerics of today as it was in the middle ages." Autobiography:
I!£fi;_and Crown, p. 192.

 

 

1“,.

mm

“22”"...

175

that her breasts were lovely enough to make
a nest for a hero's head. 41

Unlike Donal Davoren in The Shadow of a Gunman, O'Casey was

 

able to get past his initial fear of gossip when a forward young
tenement wife named Bessie Ballynoy offered herself to him with hilarious
assertiveness after a Black and Tan Raid.42 He courted a beautiful young

Catholic girl named Nora Creena (the prototype for Sheila in Red Roses for

 

In

Ma) for several seasons until he realized that she lacked the courage to

.d.‘-'w

‘In...

defy her parents or her priest in his behalf, that she was too mindlessly

tied to her Faith. "Free thought to her would be blasphemy and ruin

eternal," he saw, while to him it was as necessary as breath. Yet he

“_u.

felt no bitterness for her inability to follow his lead: "let her
gentle, quiet nature lead a quiet, gentle life; let his doubting, stren-
uous one live out its activity, struggle however bitter and painful, any,
or all of it, might be."43 However, the brief, if unsatisfying, hap-
piness he had felt during his courtship of Nora did serve to clarify

that he must have a woman to share his life.

And so at 47, more than halfway through his life, he married.
Interestingly, like Synge he chose an actress, a Roman Catholic, and a
woman considerably his junior. Eileen Carey O'Casey in her Sgap gives
the impression of idolizing her husband virtually from their first

meeting, when he had her salary doubled for playing Nora in Plough and

 

the Stars. He was the lionized dramatist of that 1926 London season

 

41O'Casey, Autobiography: Innishfallen, Fare Thee Well, p. 84

42Ibid., pp. 57-8.

43Ibid., p. 231.

176
and she found both his tenderness and his social gaucheness endearing.
She spent the thirty-four years of their marriage loving him for the
one and protecting him from the results of the other. Fortunately for
them both, she appears not to have had any axes of superiority or
dominance to grind.

O'Casey is quite clear about his reasons for choosing her: she
was pretty of face and figure, as well as charming and soothing company.
Unlike Synge, he felt no need to "educate" her to the ways of the world.
He recognized that at 23 she already possessed considerable sophistication.
Instead he took real delight in watching her natural impulses develop at
their own pace. For in her girlhood, Eileen Carey had been taught by

restrictive Ursuline nuns,

taught primarily to repress natural vivacity
beaming from her nature, an active, imaginative,
and humorous mind hidden in a silly repressive
gentility; till she escaped their consecrated
clutches and found a fuller life in the theatre.
All these precious convents did the same service
to their pupils; you must grow up into a ladylike
person at all costs; refined, reticent, ignorant
of life, its valour and its vehemence; she was
developing the rash and lovely confidence which

the nuns had dulled. 44
Because he absorbed his mother's lesson of trusting each soul to respond,
open and blossom in its own time, his marriage to her was a long, fruit-
ful and contented one.
In summary then, because he was able to separate himself
psychologically from his mother and achieve an ongoing and positive

identification with male role models, O'Casey adopted a more balanced

view of women than did Synge. O'Casey was never overwhelmed by feminine

 

O'Casey, Autobiography; Rose and Crown, p. 140.

V’s-I'm", ..m-mn .17 . ....g ' I

177

sexuality as it seems likely Synge was. In consequence, though O'Caseys
female characters may be strong-minded, they are not outsized and
domineering as Synge's are. However, O'Casey's females singularize
themselves as generally more courageous, autonomous, and realistic than

0 II 0 0 0 0 9'45
his often stupidly idealistic males. In a letter to Maureen Malone,

he stated that though

women aren't nobler than men, they are
nearer to life, more enduring, and usually
readier to face things and overcome bad
times.... They are nearer to the realities
of life than men. 46

In short, he found in women generally the fortitude, strong-mindedness,

‘uln?‘****"

and personal autonomy that had characterized his own mother.

 

45O'Casey, The Sting and the Twinkle, p. 92.

6Maureen Malone, The Plays of Sean O'Caspy (Carbondale, 111.:
S. Illinois U. Press, 1969), p. 37.

SUMMARY

Strong-minded female behavior in the plays of John Millington
Synge and Sean O'Casey, then, is quite extensive. Five out of Synge's
six plays, and nine out of O'Casey's thirteen plays contain women who
function assertively.

Though his early death prevented Synge from producing a large
body of plays, all but one of his dramas, The Well of the Saints, focuses
on strong-minded women. It is interesting to note that Synge's women

grew steadily more aggressive with each play he produced. However, even

in his earliest play "In the Shadow of the Glen," Nora Burke has most of
the earmarks of the women to come. Though not domineering, she is certain-
ly single-minded and so determined to hold to a tragic view of life that
she succeeds in being very funny indeed. In "Riders to the Sea" old

Maurya exhibits a fierce resolution to manipulate her last surviving

son through reason, guilt, or terror from encountering the Sea that

has become her personal enemy. Pegeen Mike of Playboy of the Western

 

World is the gentle playwright's most violent and openly domineering
woman. Though secretly a Romantic, the shrewish Pegeen is as subtle as
a pub brawl in manipulating the timid Christy Mahon into wooing her. In

the dramatist's paean to Ireland's gypsies, The Tinker's Wedding,

 

Synge created in Sarah Casey a tempestuous and hot-headed woman who
brooks no contradiction from her lover. Her sudden whim to be married
is for Sarah a consuming passion which Michael Byrne dares not question.

Synge's final play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, centers on a woman whose

 

will is her only guide. A female of titanic purpose, she imposes her

desire upon the man she chooses to be her lover merely by her insistent

and headlong determination.
.178

179

Women in a remarkable nine out of thirteen of O'Casey's plays
are significantly strong-minded. Though there are also women in the
O'Casey canon who attempt to dominate their men, proportionately, they
are not as clearly represented as the women in Synge's plays. However,
Juno in Juno and the Paycock rather easily, if exasperatedly, dominates

her irresponsible spouse. Nora Clitheroe of Plough and the Stars is

 

just as frequently given to "pesterin'" her uncle and her cousin into
behaving respectably. But more importantly, she attempts to shape her

husband into a conventional domestic animal. More coy than Juno, she

“an. s.m_1\—_T_=‘m’

is just as manipulative in trying to seduce Jack Clitheroe out of his h
interest in dangerous revolutionary activities. In a like vein both i
Mrs. Breydon and Sheila insistently struggle to deflect Ayamonn from

dangerous actions in the Labor Movement. Both women mother him, over-

protect him, wheedle, cajole, and nag him in an effort to convince him

to bend his life to their wiser and more conservative counsels. Reena

Kilternan of O'Casey final play Behind the Green Curtains all but

 

hypnotizes the cautious Senator Chatastray in her unrelenting efforts
to convince him into acknowledging that priests intimidate most Irish
laymen from taking responsibility for their own moral choices. Her
own recent recognition of that fact makes her seem ruthlessly domina-
ting in her badgering him to see the same fact.

However, the qyality that most commonly characterizes O'Casey
women is their impulse to govern their own lives, make their own choices
This ability to function on an internal moral code, to be inner-directed,
was one of the personal qualities O'Casey most admired. Interestingly,
it is usually the women who most dramatically possess interior autonomy.

His first heroine, Minnie Powell in The Shadow of a Gunman, possesses

 

it in unselfconscious innocence when she refuses to be cowed by local

180
gossip into refraining from visiting Davoren in his room. The brash young

gold-diggers in his farce, Purple Dust, get our sympathy in part because

 

they look down their noses at local opinion about the way they live their
lives. Loreleen Marthraun is physically manhandled when she will not
accede to the narrow pietism of her provincial village. Both the young

women in Oak Leaves and Lavendar, Monica Penrhyn and Jennie the Land Girl,

 

make quite theatrically effective soapbox speeches for acting on one's
beliefs rather than other people's expectations. Nora McGilligan is
newly liberated because of the tutoring she received at the hands of

the title figure in The Drums of Father Ned about the primacy of making

 

 

one's own life choices. And of course, the fiery Reena Kilternanan

spends half her time in Behind the Green Curtains urging the town's

 

resident "intellectuals" to take responsibility for their own thoughts

and actions.

This phenomenon of strong-minded women in the plays of Synge
and O'Casey seems to have occurred because of certain socio-cultural

influences upon the authors:

(1) the general domestic pattern in Ireland is strongly

matriarchal;

(2) both playwrights were exposed to specific influences
that served to reinforce the national cultural pattern:

a.) Synge and O'Casey were not only pro-
foundly aware of the strong women in
the literary tradition of the ancient
Gaelic myths but avowed clear admir-
ation for them;

b.) both Synge and O'Casey had extremely
close relationships to their mothers,
women who were strong-willed and
influential forces on their sons.
These primary relationships very
clearly shaped both authors' attitudes

181

toward women as well as their assump-
tions about what were suitable roles
and behavior for the female sex.

In general, the strong matriarchal strain apparent in the
average Irish home makes for a corresponding tendency toward submis-
siveness and immaturity in the Irish male, whether his role be son or
spouse. Consensus is clear that Irish men never quite break the Oedipal

bond with the mother. The Irishman

is anchored to his mother for as long as she
lives. If this should seem an exaggeration,
consider the following facts: an Irishwoman's
life expectation is sixty-eight years. Her
marrying age is thirty. Her son's marrying
age is thirty-five. It follows that an
Irishman does not marry until after his mother
has died or is about ready to die. 1

.. ...-a. -‘.MMW
. . .... ~ .
. P. 4 I

 

Again and again, the striking fact is reiterated that chronologically
mature men permit their mothers to control "their lives well into adult-
hood."2 Irish men seem unaware of any biological or emotional urge to
separate themselves from the maternal bond even after sexual maturity.
They seem unwilling or unable to confront maternal resistence to the
idea of a possible marriage. Male passivity before the power of the
mother seems to explain

the remarkable number of men in the country-

side working the farm for their widowed mothers

through their forties and even into their fifties,

who will not marry until she dies and who, by then
confirmed bachelors, may never marry at all. 3

 

1Maura Laverty, "Women-Shy Irishmen,” in The Vanishing Irish,
ed. John O'Brien (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 57.

 

2D.S. Connery, The Irish (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1968),
p. 194.

A.J. Humphreys, "The Family in Ireland," in Comparative
Family Systems, ed. M.F. Nimkoff (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.,

 

 

1965‘), pp. 245“6o

182

Female power and male subordination within the family has the
expected reverberations in setting up deeply resented polarities. In fact,
"it has been said that Ireland is divided by a boundary even more pernidr>us
than that between the North and South -- the boundary between the sexes."4
Males express their resentment toward the mother by hostility and fear
toward other women.5 They compensate by socializing with their own

rather than the opposite sex, a pattern which is readily apparent today

:1_u”

in the "masculine society of clubs and bars, of wit and talk and stimulus I“

from which a woman...would be forever excluded. Anthropologist J.C.

 

Messenger felt that John Synge captured some of the ramifications of make E I
exclusion of female company in his plays. Synge's heroines, Messenger
contended, "are creatures caged and raging, given no scope for their
powers, condemned to love men who are poor things compared to them."7
The history of dominating and assertive women in Ireland goes
back eons in time to pre-history and mythological times. The race's
ancient myths record the disposition of women to rule not arbithemselves
but their men as well. And if it cannot be conclusively proved, as
psychiatrists like Carl Jung postulated, that a race's myths continue
to exert an ongoing preconscious influence upon contemporary cultural

patterns, it can be demonstrated that both Synge and O'Casey were

conscious of the myths and admired the autocratic and fiery women who

 

4Arland Ussher, "Boundary Between the Sexes," in The Vanishing
Irish, ed. John O'Brien, p. 154-5.

 

5Marvin K. Opler and Jerome L. Singer, "Ethnic Differences
in Behavior and Psychotherapy: Italian and Irish," International
Journal of Social Psychiatry 11 (Summer, 1956), p. 15.

6J.C. Messenger, Inis Beag (N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1969), pp. 145-6.

71bid.

 

 

183

are such notable figures in the Heroic Cycle. Since both men were sensi-
tive in the early twentieth century to Ireland's nativistic aspirations,
her attempts to find pride in her own heritage after seven centuries of
British rule, they both made it their business to garner an uncommonly
broad knowledge of Gaelic mythic traditions. Widespread interest in the
Celtic myths had begun at the turn of the centuries through the work of
scholars like Drs. Doughlas Hyde and Standish O'Grady. Both Synge and
O'Casey sensed that the myth scholars' work would provide Irish

society with psychological compensation

for the frustrations engendered by

cultural subordination; the revived forms

would symbolize the real or imagined

freedom, unity, greatness, or happiness

enjoyed by the people. 8
before British colonization. However, whatever their patriotic reasons
for beginning study of the bardic traditions, both men were soon struck
by the vitality of the myths and particularly the dramatic and dynamic
women in them. Encountering such imperious women in the race's most
primitive literature may have served to reinforce an inclination on their
parts to regard women in varyingly strong-minded terms.

However, the fact that both men were closely bound to their

mothers well into their middle thirties is a consideration that seems
to offer the most pregnant area of speculation about the dramatists'
future atitudes toward women. Given the admitted dangers of attempting
to interpret biographical data to construct psychographs of authors who
are no longer alive either to contradict speculation or fill in gaps in
information, it is nonetheless possible to see at least the outlines of

each man's particular relationship with the first important woman in his

life. Furthermore, while both authors appear to have been influenced

 

8Ibid., p. 3.

 

 

184

by their socio-cultural heritage so that both created strong-minded women
in their plays, the different types of strong-minded women each created
can perhaps best be explained by each man's unique attempt to effect
adult separation from his mother. Because Synge was never able to
declare emotional independence from his mother, his female characters are
more frequently than not marked by an impulse to dominate, to manipulate
the men in their lives as he felt his mother did him. Synge's females
are rather larger-than-life, imposing in scale. Deirdre has the temerity
to scorn a king and the arrogance to challenge the man she has chosen to
become her lover to dare to ignore her. Pegeen Mike has the boldness

and authority that make more men than Christy Mahon quake in her presence.
Old Maurya has the personal animus to struggle against the tyranny of the
Sea itself. Synge's women are idealized. They often feel more like primal
female powers than female humans. In short, they suggest the vision of
women that a young boy might have.

O'Casey's women, too, are manipulative on occasion, but more
often his women characters' particular brand of strong-mindedness is
marked by an impulse to achieve personal autonomy. O'Casey women, unlike
his timid men, refuse to be browbeaten by the gods of public morality.
They often act directly in the teeth of public expectation, as if they
define themselves by the integrity with which they pursue their own
needs and desires, unswerved by external pressure. O'Casey draws sharp
contrast between his women's insistence on governing their own lives
and his male characters' frequent capitulation to the spectre of public
opinion.

It is of marked interest to compare the tenement dramatist's
relationship with his mother to that of Synge to his. Whereas the

middle—class Mrs. Synge appears to have had a rigid series of expectations

 

185
about religion, education, and career for her son John to fulfill
appropriate to his position in Dublin society, Mrs. O'Casey's partic-
ular wisdom seems to have resided in an innate recognition that while
she might have hopes for Sean, "expectations" for him impinged upon his
developing personality. She had the good sense to perceive that he
would mature best when left to grow at his own pace and according to his
own lights. She supported his decisions and approved his growing

assurance in trusting his judgments. O'Casey's six-volume Autobipgraphy

 

as well as his collected letters amply testify to his mother's gift to
him. He appreciated her courage, endurance, and quiet autonomy in sur-
viving the debasing degradation of daily tenement life. His female
characters are in consequence often testimony to her influence on him.
They are most frequently low-key, realistic, and strong-mindedly per—
sistent to their philosophy of life.

In brief, Synge's and O'Casey's inclination to perceive women
as strong-minded was probably influenced by a combination of the general
Irish socio-cultural pattern of matriarchal incidence, the dramatists'
study of the autocratic females in the Gaelic Heroic Cycle and each
playwright's specific attempt to effect emotional separation from his

mother.

 

APPENDIX:

WOMEN IN THE HEROIC CYCLE

APPENDIX

Women in the Heroic Cycle

 

The central cycle in Gaelic myth, the Heroic or Red Branch or
Ulster Cycle, which was extant at least as early as the second century,
abounds in women who were quite determined to shape their own destinies,
with or without the acquiescence of the men who chose to live with them.
However, a tendency toward matriarchy in Ireland goes back even earlier
into the country's pre-history.1 The Gaels trace their beginnings back
to the goddess Danae, (not to her male companion Bile) calling their
predecessors the tuatha d3 Dapaa, children of Danae.2
And even earlier into the darkness of pre-history, there is a
tradition that a queen and her women followers ruled Ireland. She,
Cessair, was a magician and is said to have inhabited the country "after
the great universal flood."3
Thomas Kinsella in his fine translation of the central tale of
the Heroic Cycle, the Iaip_pp Cuailn ne, ”The Cattle Raid of Cooley",
gives testimony to the fact that ancient Irish women had the uncanny
knack of singularizing themselves.
Probably the greatest achievement of the Ialp
and the Ulster Cycle is the series of women, some
in full scale and some in minature, on whose strong
and diverse personalities the action turns: Medb,

Derdriu, Macha, Nes, Aife, It may be as goddess-
figures, ultimately, that these women have their

 

lMarie-Louise Sjoestedt-Jonval, Gods and Heroes of the Celts,
trans. Myles Dillon (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., l949),p. 36.

2
Pierre Grimal, ed. Larousse World Mythology (N.Y.: G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1963), p. 347.

31pm., p. 352.

187

 

188

power; it is certainly they, under all the
violence, who remain most real in the memory. 4

Unquestionably, the most imposing personality among the
women in the Heroic Cycle is that of Queen Maeve of Connacht who
started a war over a domestic spat.

Beautiful, ambitious, and imperious, she is

equally fearless in forming her designs and

unscrupulous in executing them. .She is a

splendid type of the barbarian chieftainess,

ruling her people with the craft of an

Elizabethan and leading them to war with the

courage of a Boadicea. 5
Always competitive, she was chagrined tolearn while in bed with her
husband of an evening that they were equally matched in all things,
except that he possessed a great white bull called Findbennach.6 She
instantly determined to gain possession of the Brown Bull of Cooley,
the only creature in Ireland magnificient enough to even up her relation-
ship with her husband.

When the Brown Bull's owner refused to sell it, Maeve simply
mobilized the army of Connacht and declared war on Ulster -- a war that
was to prove the most devastating in the whole of Gaelic mythology.
Though her motives for such an act of aggression were trivial, her

behavior was not surprising when seen in the light of the great and

unusual care Maeve took in locating an ideal husband for herself

 

4Thomas Kinsella, trans., The TAIN (London: Oxford U. Press,
1970), p. XV

5Eleanor Hull, ed., The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature
(London: David Nutt, 1898) p. LIV

 

6John Arnott Macculloch, Mythology of All Races, vol. 3,
Celtic Myth (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1954), p. 59.

 

 

 

189

originally.

Before marrying Ailill, she determined she would in no way be
submissive to her husband. She interviewed many men so as to find one
who was her equal in generosity, courage and freedom from jealousy.

She refused categorically to even consider a man prone to jealousy inas-
much as she insisted as prelude to any marriage contract that she retain
the same extra-marital rights as her mate. She observed quite pragma-
tically

Should he be jealous, the husband with whom I

should live, that too would not suit me, for

there never was a time I had not one man in

the shadow of another. 7

Her intuition that Ailill of Leinster was such a man was
reinforced emotionally for Maeve by a mystical encounter with a trans-
figured swineherd who advised her to "marry Ailill," pointing out he
"would never get the upper hand" over her.

At the nuptials Maeve further secured her independence by
preventing her husband from ever saying that he had saved her from her
father's domination by reversing the patriarchal ritual existent at the
time.9 First, she paid the "purchase price" to him, which of tradition
was paid to the bride. Second, she turned inside out the usual notion
of the wife's honor being the responsibility of the husband, by
deliberately taking upon herself full burden to right any slurs upon

Ailill's good name. She made her reasons amply clear when she declared

 

7Padraic Colum, ed., A Treasury of Irish Folklore (N.Y.:
Crown Pub., 1954), p. 59.

8

 

Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, p. LXXIII..

9 .
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
(N.Y.: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 36-40

 

 

190

to him, "Whosoever brings shame and sorrow and madness upon thee..., it
is to me the compensation belongs,...for a man dependent upon a woman's
maintenance is what thou art."10
Though after their marriage, they governed Connacht jointly,
Celtic scholar Rolleston observed
Maeve was the ruler in truth, and ordered all
things as she wished, and took what husbands
she wished, and dismissed them at pleasure;
for she was as fierce and strong as a goddess
of war, and knew no law but her own wild way. 11
Other scholars interpret the significance of Maeve's dominance
over her spouse in terms of quite elementary sexual forces. Heinrich
Zimmer believed flatly that the famous Pillow Talk episode between
Maeve and Ailill was an instance of a primal "conflict between Celtic-
Aryan father dominance and the mother dominance of the pre-Celtic
inhabitants of the British Isles."12 Joseph Campbell adds that the
Pillow Talk sequence demonstrates that
the pre-Celtic goddesses, though subjugated in
Ireland, were by no means out of power. The
grotesque epic of the war of the Brown Bull of
Cooley, precipitated by the brazen action of
Maeve, when she sent for the bull and offered
herself in partial payment is filled with a
sense of the force of female powers over the
destinies even of war. 13
An even more dramatic instance suggesting this kind of

elemental animosity between ancient Irish women and men is to be

seen in the encounter between Morrigan, who figured in Celtic myth

 

10Colum, p. 59.

l1T.W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race

(London: George Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1911), p. 202.

12Kinsella, p. XII

13Campbell, p. 303.

 

191

"variously as earth-mother,cudlxnxegiver, muse, and goddess of fate and
war,"14 and Cuchulain, the greatest male hero in the Heroic Cycle. When
the latter foils Morrigan's attempt to steal the famous Brown Bull of
Cooley for Queen Maeve by making a "great leap into [her] chariot and
putting his two feet on her shoulders and his spear on the parting of
her hair,"15 she reacted with breathless rage. After maneuvering herself
out of his clutches, she planted herself on the opposite side of the
river and began to hurl invective at him, promising him dire punishment
for his insult to her ego. Cuchulain took up the gauntlet of verbal
battle and the encounter seemed to hold within it something basic and
elementary indeed, a kind of schema for future Irish generations in the
ongoing battle between the sexes:

MORRIGAN

I will become a gray wolf for you, and take

the flesh from your right hand as far as to

your left arm.

CUCHULAIN

I will encounter you with my spear until your

left or right eye is forced out.

MORRIGAN

I will become a white red-eared cow, and I

will go into the pond beside the ford in

which you are in combat, with a hundred white

red-eared cows behind me. And I and all behind

He will rush into the ford, and the Fair Play

of Men [Ehe ultimate test of courage] that day

shall be brought to a test, and your head shall

be cut off from you. 16

And indeed so fierce was the enmity between them that Morrigan

thereafter became the great hero's nemesis and eventually caused his

 

1411516., p. 307.

151616., p. 305.

16Ibid.

 

192
death.

In the Heroic Cycle there was no short supply of women ready to
right their wronged honor. One redoubtable one was subsequently to found
the seat of Ulster government, Emain Macha. Macha was the daughter of
one of the three kings of Ireland. Upon her father's death, she
naturally sought to ascend to his kingship. However, the three sons of
Dithorba said they would not confer kingship upon a woman.

So she fought against them and routed them,

and they went as exiles to the wild places

of Connacht. And after a while she went in
search of them, and she took them by treachery,

and brought them all in one chain to Ulster.
The men of Ulster wanted to kill them, but she i 4

 

i
I).
a
,fi

" Act-IQ

said, "No, for that would be a disgrace on my

good government. But let them be my servants."

And she said, "and let them dig a EEEP for me

that shall be the chief seat of Ulster forever." 17

Irish mothers have a long tradition of strong-minded political

astuteness. Before contracting to marry King Fergus of Ulster, the
widow Ness stipulated that her son Conachar should rule in Fergus's
place for one year so that "his posterity may be called descendant of
a king.”18 Upon her husband's agreement, Ness began a secret program
of educating her son in how to work toward achieving the support of the
most important men in Ulster. So skillful was she in supplying him with
secret funds and giving him advice on how to distribute that wealth
among the populace that at the end of the bargained-for year, the
Chieftains rose up in Conachar's favor and would not permit him to

return his throne to his stepfather, rationalizing that "having con-

sented to barter the kingdom as a dowry to his wife, [Fergus] had,

 

7
1 Lady Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (N.Y.:

Oxford U. Press, 1970), p. 39

8
1 Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, p. 9 -

 

193

. . n 9
in fact’actually reSigned it. 1

Interestingly, it appears to be the "career" woman more than
the mothers who captured the imagination of the Celtic myth makers.
Women who shaped their fortunes squarely in the center of man's world
as warriers were invariably the focus of both adulation and fear.
Sjoestedt observed that when a female combined the bravery of a warrier
and sensuality of an attractive woman, more frequently than not the
pattern developed that the woman became "dominant” over the male.20

It is fascinating to note that it was a woman warrior,
Scathach, who literally taught Cuchulain everything he knew about battle.
So proud did she become of his aptness as pupil, she presented him with
the ultimate weapon, the ga§_hplga, a mysterious instrument that
apparently worked on the principle of a dum-dum bullet: it entered the
wound of an enemy at one point and made thirty tearing points within.21
Scathach would have thus conferred invincibility upon Ireland's greatest
hero.

Unfortunately, Cuchulain had the misfortune to incur the
wrath of another female warrior, Aife, who perversely constructed a
plot to turn the gaa_pplga against Cuchulain to wound him where he was
most vulnerable -- in his love for his son.

Aife was a woman of utter integrity and independence. An

expert warrior (Scathach gave her a character reference as "the hardest

woman-warrier in the world."22), she lived in a man's world bound by a

 

19161d.

20Sjoestedt-Jonval, p. 29.

21Myles Dillon, Early Irish Literature (Chicago: U. of Chicago
Press, n.d.), p. 10

22Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, p. 78

 

 

 

194

male code of bravery and courage. In battle, she gave no quarter; in
defeat, she surrendered fearlessly. Possibly because Cuchulain was the
only warrior to best her in battle, she took him for her lover and had
the singular distinction of bearing to Ulster's greatest hero his only
child. After he abandoned her, however, she made that distinction more
memorable by setting up the circumstances that would make him the
murderer of that child. Lady Gregory recounts that word of Cuchulain's
faithlessness was brought to Aife shortly after their son was born, and

great jealousy came on her, and great anger, and
her love for Cuchulain was turned to hatred...

 

and she determined in her mind that when her son E u
would come to have the strength of a man, she i4 5
would get her revenge through him. 23 ’9.

One can sense the measure of her fearsome determination to take revenge
by the fact that she never backed down from her decision during all the
years young Conlaoch was growing up. She had him taught all the same
skills his father was taught as a boy. However, since only Cuchulain
had the ultimate weapon at his disposal, she knew she was dooming her
son to death at his father's hand. Temperamentally then, she was iron-
willed and implacable once she set her course of action. One wonders
if she would have melted somewhat had she been able to hear Cuchulain's
lament as the full implications dawned upon him that the stranger he
had just killed was his son: ”Without a son, without a brother, with
none to come after me; without Conlaoch, without a name to keep my
strength."24 It seems more likely though that her pleasure in the

fruition of her revenge would have climaxed were she to hear Cuchulain's

futile rage once he realized it was she who devised the scheme that made

 

23Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, p. 237.

24Ibid., p. 241

 

195
him the killer of his own son. At his son's last breath, Cuchulain's
famous Fury gripped him, and seeing an enormous white rock before him,
he wrenched his sword from his scabbard and roared, "'If I had the head
of the woman that sent her son to his death, I would split it as I split
this stone,' And he made four quarters of the stone."25

Emer, the wife who remained loyal to Cuchulain through his
countless and regular infidelities was the most apparently fragile,
docile and malleable of the women in the Heroic Cycle. Yet she was
never simply a shadow of her famous husband, any more than she was her
father's compliant little girl. Even before she married the Ulster hero,
she demonstrated her stamina in resisting her father's will.

When her father insistently betrothed her to Lugaid of Munster
and invited him to the castle for the nuptials, Emer set about shaping
her own future. Entering the great hall to meet her father's choice, she
moved silently down its great length, stopped in front of Lugaid and
regarded him meaningfully.

She took between both her hands his two cheeks,

and laid it on the truth of his honor and his

life, confessing it was Cuchulain she loved,

that Forgold [her father] was against it, and

that anyone who should take her as his wife

should suffer loss of honor. 26
She calculated well the risk between defying her father and antagonizing
her betrothed, for Lugaid out of fear of Cuchulain refused to take her
as wife and left her father's castle that very night.

And even after Emer had cleared the way for Cuchulain's

wooing of her, she valued herself highly enough not to be won easily.

 

251bid., p. 241

26Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, p. 77.

 

196

She treated the Ulster hero during this Period with a winning capricious-
ness and confident teasing which heeapparently found irrisistible. If
her intelligence in adeptly conversing with him in the poetic language
of the kennings (a skill unheard of in women) had not won him, her
sophisticated bantering certainly would have:

For while they were thus conversing, Cuchulain

saw the breasts of the maiden over the bosom of

her smock: "Fair is this plain, the plain of

the noble yoke."
To which the glib Emer retorted, "No one comes this plain who does not

9

slay three times nine men at one blow.’ thereby both whetting his
sexual appetite and reminding him of the task he must perform before
possessing her.

After her marriage to Cuchulain, Emer continued this same
frankness with him. Though all her girlhood training inclined her
toward feminine submissiveness (indeed Cuchulain was attracted to her
because he believed she encompassed in one person all the traditional
feminine virtues: "the gift of beauty, the gift of voice, the gift
of sweet speech, the gift of needlework, the gifts of wisdom and
chastity."28),Emer regularly confronted and contradicted her spouse,
subtly puncturing the swollen ego that was an occupational hazard of
every professional "hero."

In one such notable instance when Cuchulain, because of a
spell, had been pining, idle and in the grip of a mysterious ”wasting
sickness" for over a year, only Emer approached him. When none of his

fellow champions of the Red Branch had dared to urge him to rouse

 

27Ibid., p. 68.

281bid., p. 61.

 

197

himself from his ennui, Emer it was who stepped forward and cried,
"Shame on you! Arise, Hero of Ulster."29 Seeing the man she loved
regard her so lethargically, she stepped up to him and said quietly
"This stupor is not good wholesome sleep; it is idleness and fear of
battle; long sleep is the same as drunkenness; weakness is only second
to death."30 And hearing this first honest appraisal of his behavior
in over a year, Cuchulain at last shuddered, roused himself, and "put
his stupor and heaviness off him."31

Perhaps the most determined woman in the Cycle was Deirdre,

. . . 32 . . .
"the femme fatale of Irish tradition." whose inSistent seduction of

 

young warrior Naisi provided the original source of the story of Tristan
and Isolde.33 Deirdre was paradigmatic of all that is bitter and sweet
in a romantic triangle. She should have been a young innocent, naive
and timid, reared as she was in seclusion to be a fit wife to the great
though aging King Conchobar. Totally sheltered from the sophistication
of the court, she might have been expected to be shy, timorous, reticent.
Unaccountably, she was not. Deirdre was nothing if not paradoxical.
Despite her careful rearing to be a docile companion to a great ruler,
she grew to be an independent and self-willed woman.

One winter day while her foster-father skinned a calf for her
dinner, she watched a raven swoop down from the sky to drink the blood

staining the whiteness of a fresh fall of snow. With an absoluteness

 

29
Ann Moray, A Fair Stream of Silver (N.Y.: wm. Morrow, 1965),
pp. 19-200

 

3OGregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, p. 214.

31Ibid.

32 o o '
P. Power, A Literary History of Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press,
1969), p. 18

 

 

33 Dillon, Early Irish Literature, p. 43.

 

‘Esa;"

198

of will that was striking even for those mythical times, she declared her
determination to give herself only to that man who could compare to the
aesthetic she saw implicit in that moment of barbaric beauty: "That man
only will I love who hath the three colors I see here, hislfiflr as black
as the raven, his cheeks red as the blood, and his body white as the
snow."34
When a day later fate brought just such a man across her path,_
she permitted nothing to stand in the way of her gratifying her yearning
for him -- neither honor about her betrothal to the King nor terror of
the prophecy forecast about her since birth. When she saw Naisi hunting
near her compound in the woods, she stole out to see him at a nearer
place. And upon clear sight of him, she impulsively thrust aside modesty
to seduce him with her presence by provocatively striding past him.
Unlike the more coy and almost wilting maiden that appeared in the modern
literary adaptations of Yeats, Ferguson and James Stephens, the Deirdre
of the original myth was of a considerably bolder, more passionate and
elemental nature. To Naisi's appreciative "Nice is the heifer which

goes by us,’ Deirdre retorted with engaging straightforwardness, "It
is proper that big heifers would be wherever the bull is."35 Patrick
Power observes that "the blunt style of this passage reflects an
agricultural society where the secluded maiden makes no secret of her
desire. She actually seduces Naisil:sioI."36
When the young warrior attempted to evade her, citing his

fear of the prophecy concerning her, her response was as immediate as

it was aggressive. "She sprang upon him, and she seized him by his

 

3['Power, p. 19.

35Ibid.

36Ibid., p. 20

 

199

two ears. 'Two ears of shame and mockery shalt thou have,' she cried,

'if thou take me not with thee'"37

Not only did she thereby win over
Naisi to her will but also his two brothers Ainle and Arden who swore to
become her acolytes and defenders wherever exile would drive them.

In the name of love then, Deirdre split the country into civil
war since half the country's men swore to revenge Conchobar's wounded
honor and the other half pitted themselves against the old King after he
trapped and slaughtered the three brothers via treachery seven years later.
Significantly, even after being forced to witness her lover's mutilated
body, Deirdre was no whit subdued. Even in that desperate hour, she
remained willful, wild, even barbaric; for when she approached the place
where.Naisi's decapitated body lay, "Deirdre disheveled her hair and
began to drink Naisi's blood,"38 a desperate effort to become one with
him again one last time.

And for a full year later after she had become the old King's
prize, she refused utterly to bend her will to his. For a full year
she refused to speak to Conchobar about anything except her inconsol-
able grief for her dead lover. When at the end of that time, out of
malevolent frustration, Conchobar attempted to break her spirit by
turning her over to the warrior who had actually slain Naisi, Deirdre

exhibited her refusal to be dominated by an ultimate and absolute act.

 

37A.H. Leahy, ed. and trans., Heroic Romances of Ireland, vol.

2, (London: n.p., 1905-6), p. 95

38Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, p. 45.

 

 

 

 

200
As she was being driven away to the warrior's palace, she quite deliber-
ately thrust her head outside the chariot as it took a turn around a great

jagged boulder and spattered her brains out against it.

Possible Relationship between Ancient Myths and Contemporary Behavior:

 

There is a considerable body of scholarship suggesting that
mythology functions as an ongoing preconscious force which shapes a
society's present attitudes. Otto Rank, for instance, believed myths
are expressions of a group's desires, needs, hopes. In short,he regarded

myths as group phantasies, "wish~fulfillments for a society strictly

 

analagous to the dream or daydream of an individual,"39 a position that g
gives some weight to the idea that Irish men may prefer Irish women to
make decisions in matters concerning both of them.
Bronislaw Malinowski insisted myth "in its primitive form, is
not merely a story told but a reality lived....believed to have once

happened in primeval times and continuing ever since £p_influence the

 

world and human destinies." He continued inexorably,

 

These stories live not by idle interest...but are

to the natives a statement of primeval, greater,

and a more relevant reality, by which the present
life, fates, and activities of mankind are

determined, the knowledge of which supplies man-

kind with the motive for ritual and moral actions,

as well as with indications of how to perform them. 40

Adding further support to this idea, Carl C. Jung credited myth
with the most organic sort of functioning within the human animal. The

Swiss phychologist observed that just as a study of comparative anatomy

 

39Clyde Klucklorn, "Myths and Ritual: A General Theory," Myth
and Literature, ed. John B. Vickery (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska, 1966), p. 33.

 

40Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth and Primitive Phychology (N.Y.:
W.W. Norton 8 Co., 1926), p. 39.

 

201

reveal the development of man's body from archaic times, so does a study

of comparative mythology reveal the development of man's mind4 partic—
ularly through "archetypes" exposed therein. These archetypes Jung defined
as unconcious images of the instincts themselves; in other words, they are

. . . 42
patterns of instinctual behaVior."

 

Building upon Freud's definition of dreams as fragments of the

repressed life of the infantile psyche, psychiatrist Karl Abraham went on

_ “a. ’
, cuts-.1123”

to define myths as the collective dreams of a given people, expressing
the same repressed infantile wishes of that race or society as the dream

reveals in the individual. He pointed out, "the myth springs from a

P

 

period, in the life of a people long gone by, which we may designate as pg
the childhood of the race." He continues significantly that the myth

"contains (in disguised form) the wishes of the childhood of the race.

 

Irish myth scholar Jeremiah Curtain embraces this psychoana-
lytical point of view in noting the significance of myth to today's
recurring unconscious patterns of social response. He insists that a
nation's myths are ”tales that embody the philosophy of the races that
44

made them."

As early as 1871, Edward B. Taylor in his Primitive Culture

 

postulated the provocative hypothesis of evolutionary anthropology, that

 

41C.Go Jung, et al., Man 8 His Symbols (N.Y.: Dell Pub., 1968),

 

p. 57.
42 - . .
C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective UnconSCious,
trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton U. Press, 1969), p. 44, italics mine.
43Karl Abraham, Dreams & Mythology: A Study in Race Psychology,
trans. W. White (N.Y.: The Journal of NervoUs and Mental Disease Pub.
Co., 1913), p. 36, italics mine.

 

 

Jeremiah Curtain, Hero Tales of Ireland (Boston: Little,
Brown a Co., 1894), p. XLVII.

 

202

is, ”our culture's institutions and artifacts repeated patterns derived
from earlier societies."45 Though his theory awoke renewed interest
some twenty years later when Sir James Frazer's justly esteemed Golden
Bppgh was published, hard scientific proof that myths exert specific
influence on contemporary behavior through what Jung termed a "collectie
unconscious" is still inconclusive.

However, both Synge and O'Casey had conscious knowledge of ‘
the Heroic Cycle and admired the female figures in them. The influence ' i
of that admiration upon the creation of their female characters seems a

more profitable area of investigation and is discussed in the chapter on

 

the "Authors' Knowledge of the Myths."

‘QQEJ‘

 

45Sheldon Grebstein, ed.,Perspectives in Contemporary Criticism

(N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 313. .

 

B IBLIOGRAPHY

 

i

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham, Karl. Dreams and Myths; a Study in Race Psychology. Translated
by William White. N.Y.: The Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease Publishing Company, 1913

 

Alvarez, A. "The Love, that was born of Juno and the Paycock." Saturday
Review 55 (January 29, 1972): 57-9

Arbois de Jubainville, H. d'. Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic
Mythology. Translated by R. Best. Dublin: n.p., 1903

Arden, John. "Ecce Hobo Sapiens: O'Casey's Theatre." In Sean O'Casey:
A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 61-76. Edited by Thomas
Kilroy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975

 

Arenberg, Conrad. The Irish Countryman: An Anthropoligical Study.
Garden City, N.Y.: American Museum Science Books, n.d.

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