Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949

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Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949

Paul Murphy


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Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 Paul Murphy

© Paul Murphy 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–53683–8 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–53683–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murphy, Paul, 1971– Hegemony and fantasy in Irish drama, 1899–1949 / Paul Murphy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–53683–8 ISBN-10: 0–230–53683–2 1. English drama – Irish authors – History and criticism. 2. English drama – 20th century – History and criticism. 3. Ideology in literature. 4. Nationalism in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Fantasy in literature. 7. Ireland – In literature. I. Title. PR8789.M85 2009 822⬘.9109—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008021211

For Shaun Richards


Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

Part I Peasant Quality and the National Quintessence 1

Dream of the Noble and the Beggarman

19

2

To Live the Things that I before Imagined

42

3

Whatever Rule We may have, We’ll always have Our Tramps and Paupers

66

That Ireland which We Dreamed Of

91

4

Part II The Woman and its Vicissitudes 5

What Kind of a Living Woman is It that You are at All?

117

6

That a Black Twisty Divil could be Hiding under Such Comeliness

143

Sure if I was a Good Wife to Him – that mightn’t be an Easy Job!

168

Woman Gives to the State

193

7 8

Notes

214

Bibliography

252

Index

261

vii

Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks to the following people who helped me during my research on this book: Scott Brewster; Richard Dormer and Rachel O’Riordan-Dormer; Terry Eagleton; Colin Graham; Azzedine Haddour; Eamonn Jordan; Declan Kiberd; Mairéad Lynch and the staff of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; Bruce McConachie; Anna McMullan; Christopher Morash; Christopher Murray; the staff of the National Library, Ireland; Hugh Odling-Smee and the staff of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast; Laura Peters; Mark Phelan; Anthony Roche; Brian Singleton; the staff of the library of Trinity College, Dublin; Robert and Angela Welch. At Palgrave Macmillan my thanks go to Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife and Steven Hall. I am of course grateful beyond words to my parents Sean and Kathleen Murphy. Special thanks must go to Melissa Sihra, without whose love and constant support this book would not have been completed. Finally, I am indebted to Shaun Richards, my teacher for many years, whose tuition and scholarship formed the inspiration behind this book. The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce extracts from the following copyrighted material: ‘ “that a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness”: Woman vs woman in Early Twentieth Century Irish Theatre’, in Theatre Journal, May 2008 with kind permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. ‘The Myth of Benightedness After the Irish Renaissance: the Drama of George Shiels’ in Moving Worlds, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 2003 with kind permission of Moving Worlds. ‘J.M. Synge and the Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in Theatre Research International, vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2003 with kind permission of Cambridge University Press. ‘Woman as Fantasy Object in Lady Gregory’s Historical Tragedies’ in Melissa Sihra (ed.) Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2007) with kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Yeats, Pearse and the Sublime Subaltern’, in Neil Sammells (ed.) Beyond Borders: IASIL Essays on Modern Irish Writing (Bath: Sulis Press, 2004) with kind permission of Sulis Press.


Introduction

This book is a study of the relationship between ideological hegemony and cultural fantasy in Irish drama produced during the period 1899–1949. In recent years a number of scholars including Cheryl Herr, Stephen Watt, Christopher Murray, Anthony Roche, Nicholas Grene, Robert Welch, Lionel Pilkington, Mary Trotter, Christopher Morash and Ben Levitas have made significant contributions to the study of Irish drama in terms of cultural and historical contextualization.1 Now that Irish drama studies has a sound platform in terms of historicization, particularly regarding the relationship between drama, state formation and national identity, the time is ripe to engage in research which questions that relationship, specifically in terms of the disjunction between nation, class and gender in the Irish cultural context. In this sense Hegemony and Fantasy is a deliberate intervention rather than a general historicization, in terms of an engagement with Irish drama primarily from the perspectives of class and gender, rather than that of nation or national identity, which has formed the superstructure of many debates in Irish drama studies for many years. In parallel with the aim of shifting the methodological paradigm of Irish drama studies, Hegemony and Fantasy attempts to reaccentuate the focus on the Irish dramatic canon by providing a new engagement with canonical drama, as well as engaging with non-canonical drama especially in the under-researched period 1926–1949. Apropos the relationship between hegemony and fantasy, the contention here is informed by Slavoj Žižek’s argument that ‘ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself.’2 Across the period 1899–1949 there is a

1

2


consistent link between political hegemony and its ideological legitimation through the essentialization of subordinate or, to use Antonio Gramsci’s term, ‘subaltern’3 class and gender groups. The hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideologies in this period were frequently structured around the representation of subaltern groups as cultural icons or, to use Jacques Lacan’s phraseology, fantasy objects,4 which paradoxically support and yet also subvert the consistency of those ideologies. The symbolic representation of these subaltern class and gender groups was also the predominant theme of many of the plays written during the period. The classed subaltern was variously represented in the form of figurative tropes such as the Peasant, Proletarian, Wandering Tramp, Landless Labourer and Small Farmer. The gendered subaltern was represented as variations on iconic themes such as Woman, Wife, Mother and Fallen Woman. Seamus Deane states that from the mid-nineteenth century the ‘Irish peasantry, who constituted the mass of the people, were politicized, both by economic pressure and by ideology. At approximately the same time, they were transmogrified both by literary men [sic] of genius and by propagandists.’5 A similar transmogrification occurred to women during the nineteenth century and continued to occur during the twentieth century. Anna McMullan argues that ‘Irish women come under pressure from both Catholic and Protestant ideologies to retain the domestic role as their primary function. Whether Catholic or Loyalist, the role of the woman is to serve and to suffer. While her image is sublimated, her voice is suppressed.’6 Therefore, critical analysis of the dramatic representation of classed and gendered subalterns as fantasy objects will effect a critique of those ideologies which are structured around the essentialization of those same fantasy objects. In order to engage critically with the representation of these subaltern groups, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony7 will be used in conjunction with Jacques Lacan’s notion of fantasy8 to show how the subalterns’ status as being both socially subordinate but symbolically central disrupts the prevailing ideologies in which they are situated. Concerning hegemony and fantasy in Irish cultural politics, those factions competing for political hegemony sought the leadership of the Irish populace by variously appropriating, manufacturing or reinventing iconographic images of classed and gendered subalterns. Such images would function as fantasy objects insofar as they would be used to typify and evoke the ‘essence’ of Irish national character, consequently becoming objects of national desire which could be manipulated to encourage political consent. Hegemony and Fantasy will examine this

Introduction 3

dialectic of desire between social subject and symbolic object in terms of its representation in the iconographic forms of the classed and gendered subalterns as they were manifest in both ideology and drama during 1899–1949. What follows here is a contextualization of the competing ideologies in relation to the historical development of Irish drama, leading into an explication of the methodology to be employed in the analysis of the representation of the classed and gendered subalterns as fantasy objects in Irish drama. The anticolonial struggle with England, which culminated in the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, was predicated on an ideological war of representations over how Ireland was to be imagined as a cultural and political entity, which continued through the period of decolonization leading up to the establishment of the Republic in 1949, and whose reverberations could still be felt in Northern Ireland at the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps more than any other medium in the Irish cultural experience during this period, the theatre was the arena in which this war was fought, to the extent that a venue such as the Abbey Theatre seemed as much a theatre in the militaristic sense as it was in the primarily aesthetic sense. F.S.L. Lyons notes that it was ‘in the theatre that this dilemma was posed most acutely and specifically, partly because nearly all the leading figures of the [Irish] renaissance converged upon it, but still more because it was the most public, and therefore the most publicized, of the arts available to innovators at that time.’9 The ideological conflict was not only between Ireland and England, but also between diverse political factions within Ireland which were engaged in a struggle for hegemony to decide how the nation would be constructed, and whose members would be the architects of that social construction after independence had been achieved. It was in the theatre that the iconographic images or fantasy objects of classed and gendered subalterns were most publicly represented and contested by playwrights and politicians alike in the struggle for national hegemony. As Christopher Murray suggests, ‘in the Irish historical experience drama (the creation of texts for performance) and theatre (the formation of the means of production and conditions of reception of drama) were both instrumental in defining and sustaining national consciousness.’10 While one should take heed of Loren Kruger’s caveat and ‘beware of treating theatre merely as what Althusser calls an “ideological state apparatus” ’,11 nevertheless in a context where the theatre is used as the contested site for nation-building it is important to examine the relationship between dramatic representation and ideological construction.

4


The relevance of dramatic representation to the anticolonial struggle which led to the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 has been frequently interpreted in the transference of energies from purely political nationalism into the more diverse forms and practices of cultural nationalism, after the death of the parliamentary Irish Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell. As W.B. Yeats famously suggested in his acceptance speech on becoming a Nobel Laureate in 1923: ‘The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish war, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived; and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation.’12 The sociocultural unity which Yeats attributes to Ireland during the period after Parnell’s fall, and the teleology which led to the ‘event’ of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, serve to homogenize a variegated context in which several factions with conflicting agendas were competing for hegemony. A view that acknowledged this conflict was offered by D.P. Moran, who argued that Ireland was locked in a ‘battle of two civilizations’13 between two ultimately incompatible visions of how Ireland was to be constituted both culturally and politically. Lyons formalized this conflict as being specifically between the proponents of ‘Irish Ireland versus Anglo-Irish Ireland’,14 in which D.P. Moran was a resolute promoter of the former and Yeats an ebullient defender of the latter. Moran’s ‘two civilizations’ model can be criticized for implying a social polarization that reduces the complexity of a much broader social spectrum. However, the emphasis on the ideological conflict both between Irish Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland, and also within each respective ‘civilization’, is nevertheless crucial in understanding Irish cultural politics during 1899–1949. It was Standish O’Grady’s aristocratic vision with its evocation of a pre-lapsarian heroic past that appealed to the Anglo-Irish dramatists of the Irish Renaissance to the extent that Yeats wrote, ‘I think it was his History of Ireland, Heroic Period, that started us all.’15 Following O’Grady, Yeats and his associates founded the Irish Literary Theatre (ILT) in 1899, and in so doing they sought to fashion a theatre based on heroic legend and folk-tales, which would incorporate the beleaguered Ascendancy into a history that would elide the conflict between Irish Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland. The ILT’s agenda was set forth in a letter signed by Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn, and disseminated in order to publicize the fledgling project and obtain funding. The oft-quoted letter explains the ILT’s core aims and objectives, and this

Introduction 5

extract in particular highlights the cultural politics of representation inherent to the ILT’s raison d’être: We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.16 What is interesting here is that the primary aim is to create ‘Irish plays’ which would represent ‘Ireland’ in contradistinction to the ‘misrepresentation’ of the English commercial theatre, and hopefully gain the support of ‘all Irish people’ (an apparently national and therefore political project). This is contradicted by the secondary aim to carry out ‘a work that is outside all the political questions’, such as colonization, privation, Anglicization and landlordism, that had divided the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy from the native Irish populace for centuries. The ambiguity between representation as both an aesthetic and political process, and the fraught position of intellectuals such as Yeats and Gregory from the formerly hegemonic and increasingly marginalized Ascendancy class, can be analysed in terms of the work of Italian cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s theories emerge from his study of the Italian Risorgimento, and focus on the issue of leadership and the attainment of popular support in the struggle for ideological hegemony. Central to Gramsci’s paradigm is the notion of the ‘subalterns’ as a categorization of diverse social groups which are subordinate to the rule of the dominant class and the State, and his elaboration of the concept of ‘hegemony’ as political dominance predicated on ideological control achieved through the manufacture of popular consent.17 Gramsci suggests that the ‘subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”; their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States.’18 To escape their subordination the subalterns must form their own counter-hegemony in order to displace the hegemony of the dominant class and subsequently form their own State. In this conflict the function of the ‘organic intellectual’ is crucial in forging ‘cultural-social unity’ among the subaltern classes ‘through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world’, with the purpose of ‘attaining a single cultural “climate” ’.

6


The efficacy of the function of the organic intellectual lies in his/her ability to forge a ‘sentimental connection’ with the ‘people-nation’. Gramsci defines cultural-social unity as the formation of a ‘nationalpopular collective will’, commonly experienced as nationalism and its vicissitudes, in which the hegemonic class can ‘nationalise itself’ as the embodiment of the people-nation. Gramsci is keen to emphasize that political dominance does not solely rely on physical coercion but must also achieve popular consent. Insofar as this book is concerned, the leadership function of the organic intellectual in the Irish context was fulfilled by dramatists and politicians alike from the competing factions of Irish Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland. As stated earlier, the classed and gendered subaltern groups were transmogrified by dramatists and politicians into fantasy objects which then formed the ‘essence’ of the various ideologies competing for hegemony. The focus of this book then is on the fundamental disjunction between the subaltern social groups and the fantasy objects used to represent those groups by dramatists and politicians in the leadership struggle. As this book will show, the paradoxical fantasy objects of the classed and gendered subaltern functioned at the heart of the construction of the Irish nation as an ‘imagined community’,19 which was constituted as the Irish Free State in 1922 and ratified as the Republic of Ireland in 1949. Regarding the leadership contest, while Parnell represented the last credible chance for the Protestant Ascendancy to maintain its political leadership of the Irish nation, the efforts of the Anglo-Irish intellectuals such as Yeats to become the nation’s cultural élite, as the necessary step towards becoming the nation’s political élite, offer a valuable insight into the relationship between dramatic and political representation. The evolution of the ILT from 1899 into the Irish National Dramatic Society (INDS) in 1902 and the Irish National Theatre Society (INTS) in 1904, and the opening of its permanent home in the Abbey Theatre in that year, constitute the accomplishment of successive objectives in a strategy which would achieve for Yeats and his class the penultimate achievement of cultural supremacy as precursor to the ultimate goal of political supremacy. Adrian Frazier suggests that in this struggle for hegemony: ‘Yeats acted decisively and successfully to repeat and restore the colonial ascendancy of the Anglo-Irish.’20 The efficacy of this final attempt by the Ascendancy intellectuals to achieve hegemony relied on the ability to forge a sentimental connection with the people-nation, by dramatically representing that people-nation in a manner that would gain popular consent. Hence the recourse by Yeats and his associates to fairy tales and folklore gleaned predominantly

Introduction 7

from the peasantry of the West of Ireland, and the heroic legends retrieved by Ascendancy scholars such as Standish O’Grady from Ireland’s precolonial past.21 The aim was to create an aesthetic space incorporating aristocrat and peasant alike, the primary function of which would render the political implications acceptably ambiguous, but render those implications nevertheless, in an overtly public medium and in a manner which would hopefully forge a sentimental connection with the Catholic populace. The efficacy of this representation would determine the success or failure of constructing an aesthetic sentimental connection that could underpin any putative ideological connection. Ultimately, the strategy of Yeats and his associates to create an aesthetic space as precursor to an ideological space came to grief following a succession of critical contestations with Irish Ireland intellectuals including Frank Hugh O’Donnell, D.P. Moran and Arthur Griffith over certain plays produced by the ILT, INDS, and the INTS. These conflicts began with the dispute over Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1899) and escalated with the controversy over J.M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and the riots and public outcry concomitant to his later work The Playboy of the Western World (1907). In each case the figure of the classed or gendered subaltern was the cause of controversy, insofar as each figure took on the status of a fantasy object which acquired national iconographic status in terms of its manifestation of ‘essential’ Irishness. Both sides in the battle of two civilizations would contend for ownership of the fantasy objects of classed and gendered subalterns, because they functioned as the constitutive principle of national ideology in terms of their manifestation of ‘essential’ national character. In particular the conflict over Synge’s Playboy would effectively signal the end of the Anglo-Irish bid for hegemony against the rise of Irish Ireland counter-hegemony. While the figures of the classed and gendered subalterns respectively manifest in the form of the Peasant and Woman and their vicissitudes took on an increasingly politicized dimension that was contested by both Irish and Anglo-Irish Ireland intellectuals during the period leading up to the foundation of the Free State in 1922, the ironic situation arose whereby the very groups of classed and gendered subalterns seen as aesthetically and politically central by metropolitan intellectuals were becoming increasingly socially marginalized. The mid-nineteenth century saw the gradual decline of the Protestant Ascendancy as the dominant social class in Ireland, due to a combination of increasing agrarian violence by Catholic peasant insurgents,22 and subsequent legislation passed by the British Government culminating

8


in the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 and the Encumbered Estates Act of 1904, which allowed peasant tenants to buy out their Ascendancy landlords with Government-sponsored loans. Consequently, certain elements of the Catholic rural population underwent a slow process of embourgeoisement, to the extent that new socio-economic hierarchies developed, dividing the more prosperous farmers, graziers and shopkeepers23 from less enterprising farmers and landless agricultural labourers. 24 Such internal class hierarchies allowed ‘a new, relatively wealthy, largely Catholic elite to displace the old Protestant ascendancy in land and government.’25 As Phillip Bull suggests, recognition of the ‘legitimacy of this emergent class, linked as it often was socially and politically with the new Catholic middle class elite in the cities, lay at the heart of the convergence of the land reform movement and the nationalist movement.’26 The former ‘peasant’ population of the early nineteenth century had become a much more complex range of communities by the turn of the twentieth century, with disparate economic strata that consigned the small farmers, landless labourers and tramps to the lower echelons of the new economic hierarchy. Yet it was precisely these subordinate groups who achieved centrality in their representation in the literature and ideology of both Irish and Anglo-Irish Ireland, a fundamental contradiction picked up by Alf MacLochlaínn, who contends that such ‘intellectual movements somehow ignore the eight million peasants and their real, vivid, and concrete way of life which owed nothing at all to the chieftains of the Gaelic order who were dead and gone two hundred years and more’. 27 Moreover, the predominantly agrarian nature of Irish social and economic life rendered the situation of the urban proletariat as doubly marginalized in both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland representations of Ireland. The labour problem ‘reflected the nature of Irish urbanization and Irish industry. The latter was largely a question of servicing, processing and transporting agricultural commodities; industrial development as normally conceived remained in an arrested state, as the urban population more or less stabilized in the late Nineteenth Century.’28 R.F. Foster suggests that the ‘non-industrial base of Dublin was one of the main reasons for the precarious and extremely impoverished condition of its proletariat by the late nineteenth century. Their dependence on casual labour was reflected by the very high proportion of so-called general labourers; appalled contemporaries record a bizarre and essentially pre-industrial profile of life in the lower depths.’29 The

Introduction 9

urban proletarian was incompatible with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy vision of an essentially feudal arrangement between aristocrat and peasant. The urban proletarian was equally incommensurable with the Irish Ireland vision of the ostensibly ‘rural’ Gael as the agent of revolutionary Irish history. The plight of the unemployed was largely ignored in the postrevolutionary reality of Catholic bourgeois nationalism, consolidating its hegemony after 1922 through severe economic measures of the kind that did not augur well for the classed subaltern in rural or urban contexts. J.J. Lee notes that Ireland’s first independent government under Cosgrave ‘waged a coherent campaign against the weaker elements in the community. The poor, the aged, and the unemployed must all feel the lash of the liberators.’30 The egalitarian vision of the 1916 insurgent leaders who were signatories to the Proclamation of the Republic, guaranteeing ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’, failed to materialize after independence had been achieved in 1922.31 As Jenny Beale argues: ‘Women won the vote in independent Ireland, but in other ways they paid part of the price of partition. The ideology adopted by the new State as a symbol of national unity was both Catholic and nationalist. It was an ideology that glorified rural Irish life and romanticised the Catholic family.’32 As Beale maintains: It was not women who inherited the land, it was not women who felt the overriding importance of preserving patrilineal descent. There is no doubt that many women who have made the transition from rural to modern life look back on their own or their mother’s lives and see little but grinding poverty, soul-destroying hard work and a total lack of personal choice.33 Yet the continued social subordination of women was belied by their symbolic centrality in dramatic representation and political ideology from 1899, through independence in 1922 and up to the consolidation of the Irish Republic in 1949. The social praxis of familism34 combined with the religious strictures of Catholicism had a powerful influence in shaping and ordering Irish women’s social and sexual lives, to the extent that the crucial role of women in supporting Irish nationalist ideology was enshrined in de Valera’s 1937 constitution. The competing visions in the battle between the ‘two civilizations’ of Irish and Anglo-Irish Ireland were structured around the essentialization of marginalized groups as cultural icons, or to use Lacanian

10 Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949

terminology fantasy objects, which paradoxically subvert the national ideologies they were designed to support through the contradiction between their symbolic utilization and their social subordination. As Ernest Gellner observes: Nationalism usually conquers in the name of a putative folk culture. Its symbolism is drawn from the healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the Volk, the narod. There is a certain element of truth in the nationalist self-presentation when the narod or Volk is ruled by officials or another, an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted first by a cultural revival and reaffirmation, and eventually by a war of national liberation. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high culture, but it does not then replace it by the old local low culture; it revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted) culture of its own, though admittedly one which will have some links with the earlier local folk styles and dialects.35 The hegemony of Irish Ireland and its political supremacy in the form of Catholic bourgeois nationalism after 1922 were structured around the symbolic representation of a rural community designed to repress the continuing existence of class and gender hierarchies, whose traumatic effect on Irish society was mainly alleviated by high levels of emigration beginning well before independence and escalating thereafter. At the heart of this repressive mechanism was the mediation of social trauma experienced by classed and gendered subalterns in the form of fantasy objects represented in both drama and ideology. The debate over the symbolic representation of the subaltern in the Irish cultural context, exemplified by the work of David Lloyd36 and Colin Graham,37 has centred around the application of Gramsci’s theories to the field of postcolonial criticism. Lloyd offers a critique of postcolonial Irish nationalism and state formation by suggesting that, ultimately, ‘both imperialism and nationalism seek to occlude troublesome and inassimilable manifestations of difference by positing a transcendent realm of essential identity.’38 The limitations of an oppositional nationalism ‘become apparent in post-colonial states where political unification around the concept of national identity obscures continuing exploitations of class and cultural difference, and where the aim of a cultural education that retains its hegemonic forms continues to be the production of subjects fitted to the requirements of global economic imperialism.’39 Referring to the Subaltern Studies group of

Introduction 11

historians in India and their seminal application of Gramsci’s formulation of subaltern historiography40 to postcolonial criticism, Lloyd suggests that: in the wake of a still dominant ‘revisionist’ history, Irish historiography has yet to produce anything as self-conscious and theoretically reflective as Subaltern Studies. Nevertheless, it is clear that the last fifteen years or so has seen the emergence of a large corpus of non-elite histories: histories of agrarian movements, local histories, social histories of the complex intersections of class and colonization in rural Ireland, women’s history, in the form both of biographical work and, more recently, of studies of women’s movements and social history.41 Graham has similarly argued that Subaltern Studies have had ‘important effects on thinking concerning the category of the subaltern which need to be understood in order to read the subaltern into an Irish context’.42 The editor of the first six volumes of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, states that the aim of the collection is to ‘promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies, and thus help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work in this particular field’.43 In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Guha explains how the subaltern classes of peasants and small farmers were effectively ‘written out’ as agents of their own history by the historiographers of the British Raj. In many respects there is a similar case to be made in the Irish cultural context insofar as the British administration meticulously recorded acts of ‘insurgency’ by the subalterns which, when read against the grain, can be used to argue for the existence of a ‘rebel consciousness’ inscribed in the midst of the historical discourse which sought to marginalize and efface the subaltern. As Guha states: ‘To acknowledge the peasant as the maker of his own rebellion is to attribute, as we have done in this work, a consciousness to him.’44 The notion of retrieving a ‘subaltern consciousness’ was problematized by the intervention of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who argued that to ‘investigate, discover, and establish a subaltern or peasant consciousness seems at first to be a positivist project – a project which assumes that, if properly prosecuted, it will lead to a firm ground, to some thing that can be disclosed’.45 As the ‘colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous’,46 Spivak recommends an alternative to the quasi-archaeological approach employed by the Subaltern Studies group: ‘what I find useful is the

12


sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; we can use it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the authenticity of the Other’.47 Graham suggests that in the field of Irish postcolonial criticism Spivak’s critique of Subaltern Studies’ methodology and her emphasis on the ‘mechanics of the ordering of subaltern/dominant relations rather than searching for an authentic site of pure insurgency is the starting point of reading the gendered-subaltern.’48 Graham contends that disagreements about the status of gender in the Irish cultural context show that ‘gender in Ireland, because it is figuratively central to nationalist ideologies and yet subversive of them, will enable a critique of subalternity, nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism which will unveil the mechanics of their constitution of the gendered Other’.49 Spivak’s emphasis on the ‘mechanics’ of the ‘constitution’ of the subaltern informs the methodological approach of this book in the sense that, rather than essentializing the subaltern subject as ‘some thing that can be disclosed’, the aim is to show that the subaltern is already essentialized within hegemonic discourse. The primary objective therefore is to explain how the subaltern is essentialized as a fantasy object which is symbolically central to dramatic and ideological representation. Concomitantly it is also crucial to explain how the subaltern maintains a disruptive power through the contradiction of the social subordination of the subject which that fantasy object represents. If we understand fantasy object in the sense offered by the radical psychoanalytic theories of Lacan as the objet petit a,50 then an analysis of the essentialization of the subaltern as the supporting or anaclitic element within ideology can be enhanced. Jacqueline Rose offers a concise definition of the major elements of Lacan’s triadic paradigm: ‘Lacan termed the object of language the symbolic, that of the ego and its identifications the imaginary (the stress, therefore, is quite deliberately on symbol and image, the idea of something which ‘stands in’). The real was then his term for the moment of impossibility onto which both are grafted, the point of that moment’s endless return.’51 One can perhaps begin to understand the objet petit a as the impossible moment of the Real in the oxymoronic sense as a materialized absence or empty signifier, which functions as the receptacle for psychogenic investment in a manner similar to object cathexis in the Freudian sense. Žižek explains that: the Real [is] that which resists symbolization: the traumatic point which is always missed but none the less always returns, although we try – through a set of different strategies – to neutralize it, to integrate

Introduction 13

it into the symbolic order. In the perspective of the last stage of Lacanian teaching, it is precisely the symptom which is conceived as such a real kernel of enjoyment, which persists as a surplus and returns though all attempts to domesticate it, to gentrify it to dissolve it by means of explication, of putting-into-words its meaning.52 It is in these shared senses of objet petit a and symptom that we can understand how the subaltern is essentialized as a fantasy object which is used as the mainstay of the competing ideologies of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland. As Žižek suggests, the function of ideology is not to offer an escape from reality but to offer social reality itself as an escape from some ‘traumatic, real kernel.’53 This traumatic kernel of the Real which the Symbolic order of ideology attempts to incorporate can be understood as the fundamental contradiction between symbolic centrality and social subordination. It is this contradiction which is manifest symptomatically in both drama and ideology in the tropes of the classed subaltern as Peasant, Proletarian, Tramp, Pauper, Landless Labourer and Small Farmer and the gendered subaltern as Woman, Wife, Mother, Fallen Woman. Apropos of the gendered subaltern, the stoical Irish Woman was a kind of metaphorical suture which held the familist structure together in spite of the underlying social injustice which threatened to undermine it. It is at this point that we can begin to appreciate Lacan’s much maligned and misunderstood aphorism: ‘There is no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal.’54 As Rose explains, ‘Lacan’s statement “The woman does not exist” is, therefore, the corollary of his accusation, or charge, against sexual fantasy. It means, not that women do not exist, but that her status as an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy (exactly The woman) is false (The).’55 In a patriarchal social structure such as familism, Irish Woman (with an upper-case ‘W’) represents the essentialist universalization of Irish women functioning as the symbolic centre of patriarchy, while at the same time subverting that patriarchy with the contradiction of their subordinate status. Rose argues that: Within this process, woman is constructed as an absolute category (excluded and elevated at one and the same time), a category which serves to guarantee that unity on the side of the man. The man places the woman at the basis of his fantasy, or constitutes fantasy through the woman. Lacan moved away, therefore, from the idea of a problematic but socially assured process of exchange (women as objects)

14


to the construction of woman as a category within language (woman as the object, the fantasy of her definition).56 It is in this paradoxical sense of being simultaneously ‘excluded and elevated’ that we can appreciate the symptomatic status of both ‘the’ Woman (Wife, Mother, Fallen Woman) and ‘the’ Peasant (Proletarian, Small Farmer, Landless Labourer, Tramp) in the competing ideologies of Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland. The essentialization of both the classed and gendered subalterns occupied a symbolically central role in the competing visions of Irish Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland at the inception of the modern Irish dramatic movement, and would continue to do so up to the establishment of the Free State in 1922 and throughout the period of consolidation following independence. The Anglo-Irish vision of Ireland sought to justify the presence of an increasingly marginalized Ascendancy class as depicted in The Countess Cathleen, set in the fantasyscape of a feudal idyll where a peasant population lived in unity with nature under the benevolent rule of the Ascendancy. Irish Ireland sought the opposite by reminding the population of the colonial nature of the Anglo-Irish presence, which must be nullified if an oppressed rural community were to achieve sovereignty over the land that they had worked for centuries but never owned. These sentiments were typified in agitprop plays such as Padraic Colum’s The Saxon Shillin’ (1902),57 in which a Western peasant renews his faith in Irish nationalism and deserts from the British army to fight ‘For land an’ home’, and Maud Gonne MacBride’s Dawn (1904).58 What is crucial here is precisely the essentialization of both the classed and gendered subalterns in these competing visions, which were themselves largely the creations of a cultural élite of intellectuals engaged on the front line of the ‘battle of two civilizations’. After 1922 the hegemony of Irish Ireland established itself through the social praxis of Catholic bourgeois nationalism, an ideological fantasy space which effectively structured the reality of the Irish people-nation in their practical, quotidian existence. If we interpret Yeats’s romantic notion of Ireland as The Land of Heart’s Desire59 in the Lacanian sense, then we can conceive of an ideological fantasy space constituted around the essentialization of subaltern groups, whose status as symptoms disrupts the structural integrity of the competing ideologies which inhabit that national fantasy space. It is then possible to see what Lloyd describes as the ‘transcendent realm of essential identity’ in the heart of nationalism as being ironically replete with the ‘troublesome and inassimilable manifestations of difference’60 which it

Introduction 15

seeks to occlude, and it is from this perspective that we can begin to analyse the relationship between hegemony and fantasy in Irish drama. Hegemony and Fantasy is structured in two parts, with Part I dedicated to examining the representation of the classed subaltern and Part II dedicated to examining the representation of the gendered subaltern. While the two are evidently related, it is fundamentally important that the palpable differences between class and gender subordination are not conflated in an overarching discourse which sacrifices meticulousness for convenience or expedience. Thus, Part I, ‘Peasant Quality and the National Quintessence’, begins with Chapter 1 ‘Dream of the Noble and the Beggarman’, an analysis of the representation of the Peasant as fantasy object in plays by Yeats, Gregory and Synge. Chapter 2, ‘To Live the Things that I Before Imagined’, examines the representation of the Peasant as fantasy object in the work of playwrights engaging with the ideology of Irish Ireland. Chapter 3, ‘Whatever rule We may have, We’ll always have Our Tramps and Paupers’, scrutinizes plays written during the hegemony of Catholic bourgeois nationalism after the 1922 Treaty. Chapter 4, ‘That Ireland which We Dreamed Of’, engages with the representation of the classed subaltern in Irish drama after the administration of Eamon de Valera came to power in 1932. Part II, ‘The Woman and Its Vicissitudes’, opens with Chapter 5, ‘What Kind of a Living Woman is It that You are at All?’, which interrogates the representation of Woman as fantasy object in certain plays by Lady Gregory and Synge, with special emphasis on the role of Woman in Lady Gregory’s tragedies. Chapter 6, ‘That a Black Twisty Divil could be Hiding under such Comeliness’, considers the representation of Woman as fantasy object in the plays which engage with Irish Ireland’s bid for cultural supremacy. Chapter 7, ‘Sure if I was a Good Wife to Him – that mightn’t be an Easy Job!’ engages with the representation of women after the ratification of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the gradual consolidation of gender roles thereafter. Chapter 8, ‘Woman gives to the State’, examines those plays which engage with the representation of Woman as fantasy object after the enshrining of Catholic gender ideology as social praxis with the ratification of the 1937 Irish Constitution.


Part I Peasant Quality and the National Quintessence


1 Dream of the Noble and the Beggarman

W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ (1938) contains a stanza which offers a retrospective reverie concerning the thematic impetus underlying the work of the ILT’s three major Ascendancy dramatists who formed the Abbey Theatre’s first directorate: John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong. We three alone in modern times had brought Everything down to that sole test again, Dream of the noble and the beggarman.1 The analogy with the legendary giant Antaeus implies that the Ascendancy dramatists gained their inspiration specifically from an intimate ‘contact’ with Irish history and culture, giving the trope a mythic resonance which is clear enough when one considers the ILT’s initial desire to ‘build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’.2 However, these transcendent aspirations are quickly rendered spurious in the following lines, where the atavistic mission to re-energize an ideologically exhausted Ascendancy class, ‘We three alone in modern times’, reveals the parasitic aspect of the trope when it is juxtaposed with the aristocratic dream of the ‘noble and the beggarman’ and the connotations of landlordism and exorbitance which that dream image evokes. The key to the Ascendancy dramatists’ ‘peasant plays’ during the late 1800s and early 1900s is in this relationship between noble and beggarman, or Ascendancy figure and Peasant figure, particularly where the Peasant functions in Lacanian terms as the symptom of Ascendancy 19

20


ideology. The trope of the Peasant is symptomatic insofar as it functions as the anaclitic support of Ascendancy ideology while paradoxically serving as the inherent contradiction of that ideology through its traumatic link to the rural classed subalterns. F.S.L. Lyons notes that ‘when their Irish theatre had become an established fact, Yeats and Lady Gregory would have to withstand the ironic criticism of Dubliners who rated each new play by PQ – peasant quality. But peasant quality, for good or ill, was embedded from the very beginning at the centre of the Anglo-Irish literary movement. The attitude of these early explorers towards the peasant was essentially romantic, for they saw in him [sic] a primal innocence miraculously preserved from the contaminating influences of civilisation.’3 The ILT and INTS’s romantic idealization of past and peasant has been successively criticized by writers including Arthur Griffiths,4 D.P. Moran,5 Daniel Corkery,6 Flann O’Brien,7 Patrick Kavanagh,8 Alf MacLochlaínn,9 Edward Hirsch,10 and more recently Luke Gibbons11 and Joep Leerssen.12 In Edward Hirsch’s synopsis: the recurrent objection to these [Abbey Theatre] plays and to Synge’s work in particular was that, in Daniel Corkery’s summary charge, the ‘plays were not Irish plays inasmuch as they misrepresented the Irish peasant’. The special viciousness and bitter frequency with which this charge was levelled at Synge suggest that to ‘represent’ or ‘misrepresent’ the peasant was to project a ‘representation’ or ‘misrepresentation’ of Ireland itself and consequently to project or call into question one’s own essential Irish identity. But all representations were in some ways misrepresentations. The very idea that some nonindividuated or typical Irish peasant existed was itself a necessary urban fiction.13 The key issue here is the relationship between the (mis)representation of the peasant and ‘essential Irish identity’. Where the link between symbolic centrality and social subordination has previously been acknowledged by critics, the paradoxical status of that link has not been examined with the same degree of meticulousness. The focus in this chapter on canonical plays by Yeats, Gregory and Synge is designed to function as an induction to a new approach to the paradox of the classed subaltern in its manifestation as the peasant figure, as symbolically central yet socially subordinate to the competing national ideologies prevalent in the early years of the ILT and INTS from 1899–1909. The Lacanian concepts of objet petit a and ‘symptom’ are therefore used in

Dream of the Noble and the Beggarman 21

an attempt to describe this paradox, which lies at the heart of Irish cultural and national ideology during the early 1900s. As an examination of the national paradox, then, the aim of this book is not only to explore the repressed issues of class and gender which inhabit the national unconscious, but also to intervene in the essentialism/constructionism debate concerning national identity which has preoccupied Irish Studies academics over the last few decades.14 The objective is not only to trace the Möbius strip of national essence qua cultural construct, but also to analyse the dialectic of desire15 which energizes cultural and political identification. In direct reference to Irish cultural politics the dialectic of desire functions specifically in terms of the disjunction between the class and gender subaltern groups and their transmogrification by dramatists and politicians into fantasy objects. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1899)16 is an early and, considering the outrage it provoked, remarkably naïve manifestation of the Ascendancy dream of the noble and the beggarman, which was first produced in tableau vivant form at the Chief Secretary’s Lodge, and received its first public staging by the Irish Literary Theatre at the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin. If the play was the casus belli of acrimonious debate between Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland intellectuals, it was also in itself a microcosmic arena where the economic and ideological premises of the two competing visions of Ireland were set against each other in a metaphysical conflict from which Anglo-Irish Ireland emerged victorious. The scene is ‘laid in Ireland and in old times’, rendering the temporal frame ambiguous even when the fact that ‘the land is famine-struck’17 would resurrect memories of the catastrophic Famine of the 1840s from which Irish society was still reeling at the turn of the century. The traumatic background creates pervasive tension, which is heightened when it is revealed that the ‘Peasants’ have to sell their souls to two ‘Demons disguised as Merchants’ in order to buy food.18 The geographical specificity of the merchants’ ‘Eastern’ provenance encompasses both materialist England and mercantilist Dublin, which stand in stark contrast to the lofty magnanimity of the Countess (played by the Countess of Fingall) and the occult spirituality of her companion the poet Aleel (Ward Jackson). The scene then is one of physical and moral decline, as the Peasants have succumbed to the seductive forces of bourgeois materialism that have displaced the prelapsarian feudal harmony of noble and beggarman, which is evoked in Mary’s (Madame San Carolo) remark to the Countess: ‘For my old fathers served your fathers, lady, / Longer than books can tell – and it were strange / If you and yours should not be welcome

22


here.’19 The Peasants are for the most part portrayed as gullible simpletons who lack effective leadership and are easily enchanted by the lure of material gain which will ultimately lead them to their doom. When the Countess assumes the burden of leadership and offers to buy back the souls of her Peasantry, ‘Keeping this house alone, sell all I have’,20 she is defied by the merchants, who steal her fortune as she sleeps. The only way for the Countess to save the Peasantry is to sell her own soul in order to cancel the debt, but what this munificent gesture elides is the source of her fortune, namely the exorbitant relationship between aristocrat and peasant, which undermines the moral authority of her gesture and renders the aristocrat as culpable of Peasant misery as the demon merchants. This contradiction is glossed over in the finale when the Countess’s act is rewarded by divine redemption, and the aristocratic vision is vindicated in its triumph over the vanquished forces of bourgeois materialism. The irony here is that the Great Famine of the 1840s had precisely the opposite effect on Irish society, as the peasantry which Yeats mythologizes were the most vulnerable members of rural society, namely the landless labourers and smallholder cottiers who faced the stark choice between emigration and starvation. As Liam Kennedy states: The greatest decline occurred among laborers and cottiers, groups whose interests, when not in direct conflict with those of tenant farmers, were less easily harmonized with the concerns of other agriculturalists. By contrast, the middle peasantry consolidated its position, as indicated by the rise in the number of holdings above 15 acres from 276,600 in 1845 to 303,500 in 1910. The postfamine period also witnessed a strengthening of the class of capitalist farmers, many of whom were graziers. As recent historians have demonstrated, the rise to social and political prominence of this farming elite is crucial to an understanding of agrarian politics in the late nineteenth century.21 In sharp contrast to Yeats’s retroactive (re)vision, the strong farmer/ grazier class grew at the expense of the labourer/cottier class and increasingly challenged Ascendancy authority: ‘The small-scale but solvent farmer of, say, twenty to thirty acres and fifteen-pound valuation would underpin the mass movements that challenged landlordism. They were secure in no longer being outnumbered and threatened by a labourer and cottier class that had entered a precipitate decline – except


in areas of the west, where the economic problems of pre-Famine Ireland continued in concentrated form.’22 Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s blustering response to the play highlights an issue which is worth reconsideration insofar as it offers an insight into the construction of the Peasant as a fantasy object in Yeats’s play. O’Donnell attacks Yeats for misrepresenting the ‘fine old Celtic peasant of Ireland’s Golden Age’ as ‘an agreeable diversification of the Stage Irishman dear to the London caricaturist’.23 Yet O’Donnell’s ‘Celtic Peasant’ is as much a mythological construction as Yeats’s Peasant, and the ‘Golden Age’ to which O’Donnell refers is as vague in temporal specificity as Yeats’s scene ‘laid in Ireland and in old times’. O’Donnell therefore seems to be attacking Yeats for misrepresenting a representation, rather than for misrepresenting any historically specific subject or social group. In each case the Peasant is constructed as the locus, or to put it in Lacanian terms as the objet petit a, of the cultural and political desires of the author. With O’Donnell the Peasant serves as the focal point of a political assault on an old adversary, thinly disguised as a defence of the ‘national cause’ insofar as the ‘spirit of the Celtic past’ was materialized in the trope of the quintessential ‘Celtic Peasant’.24 For Yeats, then, the Peasant becomes the anaclitic complement to the Countess, whose instinctive devotion embodies the political consent necessary to validate the Ascendancy vision. In both cases the Peasant is a metaphysical entity at one remove from the historical peasantry to which it is related. In this instance the Peasant is, in Yeats’s own words, ‘A man who does not exist, / A man who is but a dream’.25 In a 1995 study Deborah Fleming focuses on this key issue: ‘What was important about the peasants to Yeats and Synge was not what would interest an anthropologist, historian, or sociologist; they were interested in whatever gave them images for art: thus, the peasant became a wanderer, a mystic, a man of nature’.26 While Fleming’s analysis offers a thoroughgoing examination of the fabrication of the Peasant as a symbolic entity, the link between dramatic representation and ideological construction is alluded to but not examined with the same degree of critical incisiveness. The trauma of class inequality intrinsic to the aristocrat/peasant dyad which is ignored in Yeats’s representation is again ignored in Fleming’s analysis, where class inequalities are subsumed under the overwhelming importance of national independence and state formation: ‘If they aestheticized the peasants’ experience, they did so in order to revolutionize all of Irish society with timeless traditions and so radically alter that society at a period of momentous change.’27 The ‘national culture’ that Yeats was interested


in forging was Home Rule of the Ascendancy variety, which was very much ‘inside’ both his personal experience and his class provenance. The ‘revolution’ which Yeats envisaged was of the circular kind where history repeated itself and the Ascendancy apotheosis of the eighteenth century could be revived, but this time with Yeats as active protagonist rather than melancholy mythologist.28 In The Countess Cathleen such desires were explicitly manifested, not only incurring the wrath of rancorous enemies like O’Donnell but also engaging the scrutiny of far more sophisticated Irish Ireland polemicists like Arthur Griffith, who ‘came to show himself in favor of what Cardinal Michael Logue had said no Catholic should see: a play that represented the Irish as a people eager to sell their souls for gold, that said souls came at different prices, and that illustrated as features of Irish life some peasants who stole, some who committed sacrilege, and one woman hell-bent on fornication.’29 Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902),30 co-written with Lady Gregory, represents a subtle shift in strategy consequent to the opprobrium that surrounded The Countess Cathleen, as Yeats’s aristocratic vision manifests itself in a motif which is subtextually insinuated under the prevailing leitmotif of anti-colonial propaganda. The aristocrat/peasant dyad returns but is cleverly imbued with the spirit of revolutionary nationalism, as The Poor Old Woman named Cathleen ni Houlihan (played by Maud Gonne), who symbolizes Mother Ireland, calls upon her faithful sons, typified in the young Michael Gillane (J. Dudley Digges), to shed blood in a war of national liberation so that she may be reborn as a ‘young girl’ with the ‘walk of a queen’.31 The setting for the play in the ‘[i]nterior of a cottage close to Killala, in 1798’32 could hardly have been more emotionally charged for a nationalist audience. The 1798 rising ‘was probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history’.33 Kevin Whelan suggests that ‘the [1898] centenary was pivotal in knitting together the strands of nationalist opinion which had unravelled in the acrimonious aftermath of the Parnell split. Indeed, it could be interpreted as a necessary precursor to the nationalist resurgence and the cultural revival of the early 1900s. Yeats collaborated with Maud Gonne in commemorative committees and became fired by her enthusiasms.’34 Indeed Yeats was so ‘fired’ by Maud Gonne’s enthusiasms that he persuaded her to play the title role in the play which validated his ‘nationalist’ credentials to such an extent that, for a short but significant period, zealous Irish Ireland nationalists including Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith gave Yeats and the ILT their complete support. Whelan’s suggestion that the 1898 centenary knitted together the ‘various strands of nationalist opinion’ which had unravelled after


the Parnell split offers an interesting perspective on Yeats’s cunning interweaving of Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland ideologies. If the various strands were at all knit together as Whelan suggests, then it was only for a very short time, as Gonne and Griffith’s political loyalty to Yeats and his ILT associates endured only so long as his drama did not offend their Irish Ireland sensibilities, and this allegiance quickly dissolved in the conflict over Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen in 1903. Cathleen ni Houlihan represents Yeats’s and Gregory’s closest approximation to an ideological suture between the two conflicting visions of Ireland, by playing on the symbolic ambiguity surrounding the relationship between Cathleen and Michael. From an Irish Ireland perspective Cathleen ni Houlihan represents one of many personifications of Ireland as republican matriarch, variously described in nationalist folklore and legend as the Shan Van Vocht or Dark Rosaleen.35 Michael accordingly represents the patriotic Catholic nationalist subject, faithfully performing his duty to retrieve his nation’s sovereignty from foreign domination. The benefits of his blood sacrifice will be reaped by future generations when colonial Ireland as Poor ‘Old’ Woman will be reborn as a ‘young’ Catholic nationalist republic. From an Anglo-Irish Ireland viewpoint Cathleen ni Houlihan represents the personification of the Ascendancy as aristocratic matriarch, who calls upon her peasantry/tenantry to unite with her against a common foreign enemy and consolidate their shared territory à la Samuel Ferguson’s ‘green point of neutral ground, where all parties may meet in kindness and part in peace’36 once political autonomy from England has been achieved. In this perspective the plot echoes the standard scenario in Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland: The Heroic Period,37 where the Celtic Warrior swears allegiance and performs deeds of heroic self-sacrifice to the noble Chieftain. What is crucial in this reading is that the body politic of Old Mother Ireland would be reborn as a ‘young girl’ specifically with the ‘walk of a queen’, implying the renewal of a decidedly aristocratic style of leadership. Victory in this mythopoeic history of the 1798 rising would mean that the 1800 Act of Union never took place and the Ascendancy maintained their governance of a newly independent Ireland. In either reading of the play the central dynamic relies on the compliance of the agent of revolutionary Irish history, personified as the West of Ireland Peasant in the form of Michael Gillane. In the Irish Ireland reading the subordination of the subject’s individual desires and aspirations is the sine qua non of the achievement of the Catholic nation-state. By answering Cathleen’s call Michael is transformed from a ‘classed’ subject with a specific historical location as son of a smallholder/cottier into a


‘national’ fantasy object whose symbolic universality transcends historical particularity in his status as the objet petit a of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland ideology. Michael epitomizes the good citizen whose loyalty to the state is so intrinsic that interpellation within republican nationalist ideology seems a perfectly natural occurrence. In the Anglo-Irish Ireland reading the subordination of the subject’s immediate interests involves a temporary amnesia concerning the class inequality and colonial legacy of the Ascendancy/peasantry relationship, which is the necessary condition for maintaining Ascendancy hegemony. This faith in Ascendancy leadership is the key to achieving an aristocratic Arcadia, where noble and peasant exist in a harmonious society devoid of middle-class interference or aspiration. Michael’s compliance embodies the essential condition of either version of national ideology, insofar as he is constructed as the quintessential Peasant qua national object cause of desire, constituting the fundamental premise of both Catholic bourgeois and Protestant Ascendancy nationalism. In each configuration the smallholder/cottier Michael is transformed into a fantasy object onto which the political desires of each competing faction are transferred. Michael is thus elevated from ‘a’ peasant of historical specificity into ‘the’ Peasant of transcendent universality. The essentialization of the Peasant as fantasy object within national ideology can be further explained through close examination of Yeats’s later play, again co-written with Lady Gregory, The Pot of Broth (1902).38 Alongside Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth proved to be Yeats’s most popular play, approved by Irish and Anglo-Irish Ireland audiences alike. The setting is a quintessential ‘cottage kitchen’, and the plot centres on the narrative of the Tramp (W.G. Fay) who swindles the cottiers Sibby (Máire T. Quinn) and John Coneely (P.J. Kelly) out of a dinner they are preparing for the parish priest, by convincing them that the stone he possesses is magically endowed with cornucopian qualities. Initially the cottiers are cynical about the Tramp’s narrative, but Sibby gradually succumbs to the illusion, much to John’s chagrin: SIBBY [to JOHN]: Do you think is he a man that has friends among the Sidhe? JOHN: Your mind is always running on the Sidhe since the time they made John Molloy find buried gold on the bridge of Limerick. I see nothing in it but a stone.39 Despite his former cynicism John is eventually seduced by the Tramp’s narrative, to the extent that he gives his crafty visitor not only the


entire dinner but the pot it was cooked in as well: ‘JOHN: You deserve it, you deserve it indeed. You are a very gifted man. Don’t forget the kippeen!’40 The play is usually interpreted as a harmless comedy, ‘slight in plot but amusing. It prefigures the comedies of Synge and so many others that the Abbey Theatre later became identified with “kitchen comedy” ’.41 Yet the play offers an insight into the dynamics of ideological interpellation and the constitution of the subaltern as a fantasy object. From the inception of the Tramp’s illusory narrative the farmers are perfectly aware that the stone is intrinsically worthless, but as the fantastic tale takes hold of the couple they begin to act as if the stone were a magical entity. The audience is of course able to see that this magical ‘surplus value’ is nothing other than the couple’s own desire; the stone becomes the materialization of their desire as it is elevated from the inane to the sublime status of fantasy object. In this instance the fantasy which surrounds the stone does not offer an escape from their mundane reality, but rather functions as a support for that reality, allowing them to cope with the trauma of their poverty-stricken lives: ‘SIBBY [looking at the stone in her hand] Broth of the best, stirabout, poteen, wine itself, he said! And the people that will be coming to see the miracle! I’ll be as rich as Biddy Early before I die!’42 The wilful suspension of disbelief is paralleled in the couple’s loyalty to their priest and religion, despite the lack of divine intervention in relieving the hardship of their daily existence: SIBBY: Let me alone. The taste of meat on the knife is all that high-up people like the clergy care for, nice genteel people, no way greedy like potato-diggers or harvest men. JOHN: Well, I never saw the man, gentle or simple, wouldn’t be glad of his fill of bacon and he hungry.43 A potential epilogue to the play where the couple realize they have been hoodwinked would entirely miss the point of the structuring power of the fantasy in supporting their quotidian reality.44 Such an epilogue might as well have the couple realizing à la Nietzsche that God does not actually exist, which would again miss the point that their belief in such a material nonentity, in such a physically absent figure, also maintains the structural integrity of their reality. As Žižek suggests: Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be a ‘formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the

28


subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him – the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.45 The ideological aspect of the play becomes even more compelling when one considers the ‘gaze’46 of the spectator. Any sardonic humour which might arise from the gullibility of the pathetic couple lasts only so long as the spectator also remains unaware of his/her own situatedness within a fantasyscape that structures their reality. The irony becomes especially poignant when one considers that the gaze of the ‘implied’47 spectator is not that of the peasant upon their own lifestyle, but rather the gaze of the Ascendancy upon the peasantry. The Ascendancy landowners can enjoy their symptom of the Peasant as fantasy object around which their desire is structured only so long as they ignore the fact that it does not exist, that the Peasant is nothing more than the form which their desire assumes when it undergoes transference. The Peasant as fantasy object supports the Ascendancy landowner’s ‘reality’ insofar as it is used to elide the trauma of class antagonism which divides noble and beggarman, and to disavow the poverty which the tenantry suffer in the feudal relationship. One can also examine the gaze of the ‘actual’48 spectator to reveal a similar dynamic involving the Peasant as fantasy object. The audience which frequented the Abbey Theatre was predominantly Catholic and middle-class, ‘[b]ut Catholics, especially middle class Catholics, associated the peasant with a strong and debilitating sense of cultural inferiority, and they were at least partially ashamed of their own rural background. The country people never referred to themselves as “peasants” constituting a “peasantry,” terms they found derogatory and condescending.’49 As Hirsch argues: The word peasant was also in disrepute in middle class Catholic Dublin, because for middle class Catholic Dubliners the so-called peasant was almost always a figure out of their own recent family past. Many Catholic Dubliners affected English manners, styles, and habits, stigmatizing the Gaelic language and peasant customs as a badge of social inferiority and backwardness.50 The Peasant thus becomes the paradoxical symptom of the Catholic middle-class Dublin audience; it is simultaneously elevated as the sublime guarantor of national authenticity which the urban shoneen51


inherit from their rural culchie52 progenitors, but also necessarily excluded as an embarrassing reminder of the Catholic middle-class provenance as small farmers who underwent embourgeoisement. The Catholic bourgeois audience can enjoy their symptom of national authenticity only so long as they can repress what that symptom also represents – specifically their small farmer ancestry and insecurity about their nouveau riche status. Apart from the success of Cathleen ni Houlihan (which was largely due to Lady Gregory’s command of vernacular dialogue in contradistinction to the lofty rhetoric which Yeats puts into the Old Woman’s lines), Yeats’s continually frustrated attempt to fabricate an image of the ‘beggarman’ as anaclitic counterpart to the ‘noble’ that could forge a sentimental connection with the people–nation gradually led to a strategic reversal in his later focus on the ‘noble’ as fantasy object that could engage a national–popular collective will, epitomized in his Cuchulain cycle of plays from On Baile’s Strand (1904) to The Death of Cuchulain (1939). With the exception of the unfinished and posthumously published Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910),53 J.M. Synge never had the opportunity to follow his colleague’s example of dramatizing ancient Irish epics, as his premature death in 1909 resulted in a legacy of some of the most controversial and critically contested ‘peasant plays’ in the Anglo-Irish canon. Synge’s aestheticization of the Peasant differs significantly from Yeats’s, particularly with regard to his direct experience of the Peasant lifestyle of the ‘peasant’ community on the Aran Islands,54 his fluency in Irish and hybridization of the language in the Hiberno-English dialect of his plays.55 T.R. Henn argues that ‘[i]n contrast’ to Yeats’s drama, ‘Synge’s work is non-political, detached, ironic; concerned with this excited yet dispassionate exploration of the world of the western peasantry’.56 Henn’s point appears to gain validation from Synge’s explanation of his withdrawal from Maud Gonne’s nationalist L’Association Irlandaise: ‘I wish to work in my own way for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement.’57 However, by definition of the fact that Synge wished to work for the ‘cause of Ireland’, he implicated himself in the cultural nationalism of the Revival movement, and as such his situatedness in the ‘battle of two civilizations’ must be examined in relation to the kind of dramatic work he produced. Synge may not have been quite the Machiavellian strategist that Yeats was, but he still shares with his colleague the Ascendancy trait of constructing the peasantry as fantasy objects, functioning as the key components in


an ideological assault on bourgeois economics and a defence of aristocratic virtues. While Yeats and Synge both emerged from an Ascendancy background there were subtle cultural and economic differences between the two, as Foster states: Both, obviously, were Irish; both middle class Protestants, from clerical families. But Yeats’s background was an important notch or two down that carefully defined ladder. Synge’s ancestors were bishops, while Yeats’s were rectors; Synge’s had established huge estates and mock castles, while Yeats’s drew the rent from small farms and lived in the Dublin suburbs.58 In every aspect, whether cultural or economic, Synge was much more the aristocratic figure that Yeats was definitely not but desperately wanted to be, and so for Yeats ‘Synge became (like Parnell) the figure of a great gentleman. In other ways too his Ascendancy aura was subtly stressed. Thus Synge played a part in Yeats’s evolving theory of aristocracy.’59 If the two were evidently different in that Synge represented the aristocrat in esse to Yeats’s aristocrat in posse, they were markedly similar insofar as their narodnik ‘discovery of the “folk” and explorations of “the people” in their “unspoiled” mode went with a contempt for the new middle classes: expressed early on by Yeats in his antipathy to the plays of Boyle and Cousins, and articulated by Synge in his much quoted letter to Stephen MacKenna after his western tour with Jack Yeats’.60 Synge’s letter to MacKenna, concerning his commission from the Manchester Guardian in 1905 to write a series of articles on the western Congested Districts, must be quoted once more as it goes to the heart of the matter of his representation of the peasantry: Unluckily my commission was to write on the ‘Distress’ so I couldn’t do anything like what I would have wished as an interpretation of the whole life. There are sides of all that western life the groggypatriot-publican-general shop-man who is married to the priest’s half sister and his second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor, that are horrible and awful. I sometimes wish to God I hadn’t a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn’t they hop! In a way it is all heartrending, in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming and in another place where things are going well one has a rampant double-chinned vulgarity I haven’t seen the like of.61


The problem here is that, although Synge registers the pathos of those who cannot or will not achieve prosperity, he berates the hubris of those who actually do manage to achieve relative affluence and becomes their soi-disant nemesis. The peasants are effectively damned by Synge if they prosper and doomed by their environment if they don’t. Such an economic double-bind prompts the question of exactly how Synge would prefer his peasants: ‘starving but wonderfully attractive’ paupers or ‘rampant double-chinned’ vulgarians? The answer, evident in the plays which are about to be examined, is that he celebrates the former and denigrates the latter, thus betraying an archaic Ascendancy desire to restore the feudal landowner/peasant relationship and remove the irksome bourgeoisie. Synge’s first INTS-produced dramatization of peasant life, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903),62 and the vehement response it provoked from Arthur Griffith, have been exhaustively analysed by critics since its first moment of production. The debate over the play has usually centred over Synge’s portrayal of Nora’s infidelity to her aged husband, to which Griffith’s Irish Ireland sensibilities took particular affront. Griffith publicly castigated the play in The United Irishman during a running debate with Synge’s defender John Butler Yeats.63 While the issue of Synge’s representation of women as gendered subalterns is highly significant and is dealt with in Part II of this book, the issue of women as classed subalterns (and indeed men as classed subalterns) in the play deserves critical attention. The cottage kitchen setting of In the Shadow of the Glen is located at the heart of the familist socio-economic system, with the young wife Nora (Máire Níc Shiubhlaigh) locked in a loveless marriage of economic convenience to the much older Dan Burke (George Roberts). The plot is driven by the dialectic between Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy and its discontents, whose heterodox activities are rewarded by continued marginalization. Dan suspects that his wife has taken younger lovers and fakes his own death; while he is laid out during his wake his suspicions are confirmed when he hears Nora planning to spend the proceeds of his will with her sweetheart Michael Dara (P.J. Kelly). When Dan has caught the pair red-handed he reveals his deception and promptly expels Nora from their home, while Michael stands impotently aside and the Tramp (W.G. Fay) offers the only source of comfort to the disenfranchised spouse: TRAMP [going over to NORA]: We’ll be going now, lady of the house; the rain is falling, but the air is kind, and maybe it’ll be a grand morning, by the grace of God.


NORA: What good is a grand morning when I’m destroyed surely, and I going out to get my death walking the roads? TRAMP: You’ll not be getting your death with myself, lady of the house, and I knowing all the ways a man can put food in his mouth … .64 Nora’s subordinate status within and consequent disaffection from the ethics of familism results in her permanent exclusion from that system, as even her fickle paramour will not accept her in her impoverished state. Nora’s economic destitution brands her as much of a social pariah as her sexual digression. Dan’s common-sense nominalism underpinned by inflexible Catholic petit bourgeois ethics situates him as the moral centre in contradistinction to Nora’s deviancy, and the certainty of his decision is confirmed by Michael’s concordance: DAN [throwing away his stick]: I was thinking to strike you, Michael Dara; but you’re a quiet man, God help you, and I don’t mind you at all. [He pours out two glasses of whisky, and gives one to MICHAEL.] Your good health, Michael Dara. MICHAEL: God reward you, Daniel Burke, and may you have a long life and a quiet life, and good health with it.65 In this dialectic between Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy and its discontents, Dan’s grudging materialism is undercut by the Tramp’s courteousness and Nora’s noble acceptance of her fate (reminiscent of the aristocratic Deirdre’s unflinching resolve in Synge’s later play Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910)). The Tramp’s constant reference to Nora as ‘lady of the house’ and his cavalier rescue of the damsel in distress serve to render Dan as the parsimonious ogre. In all of this the Tramp and Nora are imbued with decidedly aristocratic features, in an absurd inversion of the classic fairytale ending where the valiant knight leads the beleaguered princess from the emotional repression of the troglodyte’s lair towards a sunset of sensual bliss: TRAMP [at the door]: Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it’s not my blather you’ll be hearing only, but 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 it’s not from the like of


them you’ll be hearing a tale of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, but it’s fine songs you’ll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.66 Of course the romantic ending remains romantic only so long as the brute facts of looming poverty and desolation are overlooked, as the ‘starving but wonderfully attractive’ couple flee from Dan and Michael’s ‘double-chinned vulgarity’ to enjoy a stimulating if short-lived future in the wilderness. The dialectic between Catholic petit bourgeois normality and its malcontents seems to be the leitmotif in Synge’s peasant plays, where the disaffected heroes qua fantasy objects are invested with aristocratic qualities including a penchant for Byronic fatalism and a strong death drive. The Well of the Saints (1905)67 functions as a kind of thematic sequel to In the Shadow of the Glen, where the ‘weather-beaten blind beggar’ Martin Doul (W.G. Fay) lives in ignorant bliss with his blind, ‘weather-beaten, ugly’ wife Mary (Emma Vernon) in ‘some lonely mountainous district in the east of Ireland one or more centuries ago’.68 Their lives are blissfully ignorant due to the sheer fact that their blindness promotes the illusion that they are a ravishingly beautiful couple. As fate would have it the couple are granted their wish when they are cured of their malady by the Saint (Frank Fay), only to find that their mutual illusion is shattered by the incursion of a shocking awareness that they are not as beautiful as they had previously imagined: ‘MARTIN DOUL: Isn’t it yourself is after playing lies on me, ten years in the day and in the night; but what is that to you now the Lord God has given eyes to me, the way I see you an old, wizendy hag, was never fit to rear a child to me itself.’69 The pain of their disturbing realization is exacerbated by the fact that they are unable to fit into the settled community which has forced the cure upon them in a rude attempt at domestication. Consequently the couple are left with a longing to return to the reality of the previous existence from which they were so abruptly wrenched by the community in its desire to incorporate such ‘abnormal’ figures into their normative framework. Not long after their initial miracle the couple become blind again and rediscover bliss in their mutual fantasyscape. When the community attempts to reincorporate them the couple react violently and are almost drowned for their impudence towards the Saint. In the finale the community eventually banishes the traumatic symptoms that cannot be controlled and which threaten their structural integrity: ‘THE PEOPLE: Go

34


on now, Martin Doul. Go on from this place. Let you not be bringing great storms or droughts on us maybe from the power of the Lord.’70 The threat to domestic safety is consequently banished and Catholic petit bourgeois normality is restored, as the community transfers its collective guilt and insecurity on to the scapegoats whose symbolic sacrifice is sanctioned by the Saint: TIMMY: There’s a power of deep rivers with floods in them where you do have to be lepping the stones and you going to the south, so I’m thinking the two of them will be drowned together in a short while, surely. SAINT: They have chosen their lot, and the Lord have mercy on their souls. [He rings his bell.] And let the two of you come up now into the church, Molly Byrne and Timmy the smith, till I make your marriage and put my blessing on you all.71 The blind beggars Martin and Mary function as the symptom of the settled community, insofar as they constitute the traumatic fragment of the Real which persists in spite of all their attempts to domesticate and integrate it into their Symbolic order. From a historical perspective Martin and Mary represent the trauma of the landless labourers and evicted smallholders who were forced into a desolate reality outside the settled community of peasant proprietorship and embourgeoisement. Such marginalized figures constituted the sine qua non underlying peasant proprietorship and the growth of the middle class, as strong farmers became stronger as they absorbed the land of evicted tenants. While Synge offers a potentially incisive critique of this teleology of embourgeoisement it is undermined by his fetishization of social exclusion, alienation and the implied freedom it holds for those who embrace it: ‘M ARY DOUL [laughing cheerfully]: Well, we’re a great pair, surely, and it’s great times we’ll have yet, maybe, and great talking before we die.’72 The revulsion from Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy, and the putative jouissance available in an alternative reality outside that orthodoxy, is less an experience of life on the peasant periphery and more an experience of the gaze of the Ascendancy figure on that life. The alternative reality which Martin and Mary inhabit is a transcendent fantasyscape on the border of the settled community. The blind couple’s sublime state is a variation on the theme of the Ascendancy desire to construct an aesthetic haven at one remove from the ‘fallen’ world of peasant proprietorship, and this disjuncture between the two worlds is


evident in Synge’s notebooks recording his sojourn in the Aran Islands: I am in the north island again, looking out with a singular sensation to the cliffs across the sound. It is hard to believe that those hovels I can just see in the south are filled with people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest poetry and legend. Compared with them the falling off that has come with the increased prosperity of this island is full of discouragement. The charm which the people over there share with the birds and flowers has been replaced here by the anxiety of men who are eager for gain.73 Here is a clear example of the Ascendancy gaze constructing the peasantry as fantasy objects and their landscape as a fantasyscape that forms the metaphysical superstructure of Anglo-Irish ideology. The key element here is the economic difference enhanced by the geographical distance between the two islands, and the juxtaposition between the rustic purity and sublime poverty of the south island which is at a safe distance from the ‘falling off’ consequent to the ‘increased prosperity’ of the north island. The spatial breach takes on a further ideological dimension when one considers the ‘constitutive gap’74 between spectators and the object cause of their desire. The people of the south island have a ‘strange quality’ elevating them to the level of ‘poetry and legend’, and they are invested with a ‘charm’ which places them on an aesthetic par with the ‘birds and flowers’. In all of this Synge is transferring his own Ascendancy desire for poetry, nobility and prelapsarian purity on to the poverty-stricken lives of the south island peasants. For Synge there is something in the peasants more than the peasants and they function as the materialization of his objet petit a, specifically as the manifestation of his own aesthetic values regardless of the brute facts of their poverty. At this level one can appreciate the perversity of his description of the peasants as ‘starving but wonderfully attractive’ by referring to Lacan’s philosophical fusion of ‘Kant avec Sade’75 to explain the paradoxical pathology of desire: ‘[t]his paradoxical, unique, specified object we call the objet a. I will present it for you in a more syncopated way, stressing that the analysand says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this – I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you.’76 The constitutive gap which separates the Ascendancy spectator from the object cause of his desire also serves to disguise the socio-economic rift between Ascendancy and peasantry, which constantly resurfaces to


disturb Synge’s mythopoeic account of the experience of living amongst the peasants that ‘authenticates’ his work. The gulf of class disparity is particularly evident in one of Synge’s more condescending descriptions: ‘In some ways these men and women seem strangely far away from me. They have the same emotions that I have, and the animals have, yet I cannot talk to them when there is much to say, more than to the dog that whines beside me in a mountain fog.’77 The recognition of class difference is reciprocated (minus the condescension) by Synge’s guide Michael, who shows, much to his own embarrassment, a high degree of class consciousness: ‘I saw you in the street’, he said, ‘but I was ashamed to speak to you in the middle of the people, so I followed you the way I’d see if you’d remember me’.78 This class consciousness is shared by Michael’s fellow islanders in their reference to Synge as a ‘ “duine uasal” (a noble person)’,79 and Synge appears only too happy to play the role of the aristocrat who dismisses his servant after services rendered with a token fee for his trouble: ‘[w]hen we had dug out enough of roots from the deep crannies in the rocks where they are only to be found, I gave my companion a few pence, and sent him back to his cottage.’80 In spite of the obvious class division between the peasant natives and the Ascendancy tourist, Synge persists in his metaphysical essentialization of the peasants with aristocratic qualities: they seem, in a certain sense, to approach more nearly to the finer types of our aristocracies – who are bred artificially to a natural ideal – than to the labourer or citizen, as the wild horse resembles the thoroughbred rather than the hack or cart-horse. Tribes of the same natural development are, perhaps, frequent in half-civilized countries, but here a touch of the refinement of old societies is blended, with singular effect, among the qualities of the wild animal.81 It is almost as if the topology of the text is pushed so far into the realms of aristocratic abstraction that it circumnavigates the social sphere to reappear in the realm of peasant fantasy, while conveniently circumventing the traumatic fault-lines of peasant privation. The peak of Synge’s investment of the peasant figure with aristocratic qualities is reached in his magnum opus, The Playboy of the Western World (1907).82 It was as if Synge’s heretical ‘wish to God’ that he ‘hadn’t a soul’ was granted in his dramatization of the ‘sides of all that western life’ he found so ‘horrible and awful’. Indeed Synge’s prophecy that in ‘putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn’t they hop!’ was fulfilled, as certain members of the audience did indeed go hopping mad in the


protests that ensued on the opening night.83 The Playboy presents a culmination of the thematic development of In the Shadow of the Glen and The Well of the Saints, as the Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy of the settled community is once again challenged by the symptomatic elements which it cannot domesticate and must therefore repress to maintain its structural integrity. The protagonist Christy Mahon (W.G. Fay), the son of a ‘squatter’84 or wandering tramp, comes from the margins of rural life on ‘a windy corner of high, distant hills’85 into the ‘public house’ in the midst of the settled community. Initially he is mistaken by Pegeen (Máire O’Neill) the publican’s daughter for ‘one of the tinkers camped in the glen’ and accused by her father Michael (Arthur Sinclair) of ‘robbing and stealing’, to which he falsely retorts ‘with a flash of family pride: And I the son of a strong farmer (with a sudden qualm), God rest his soul, could have bought up the whole of your old house a while since’.86 Realizing that the villagers are quick to believe his extravagant lies, he builds up a fabulous image of himself as the man who killed his father with the edge of a ‘loy’, and gradually attains heroic status within the community as his Byronic qualities and sporting exploits earn him the title of ‘the champion Playboy of the Western World’87 from the women. In particular Christy earns the affections of Pegeen, much to the chagrin of her feeble fiancé Shawn Keogh (Frank Fay), the actual son of a strong farmer who, in terms of Synge’s typology, represents the ‘cart-horse’ ‘labourer or citizen’ to Christy’s aristocratically endowed ‘wild horse’. In the finale, Christy’s deceitful web comes undone with the appearance of Old Mahon, his father, and the villagers react violently when they realize what Shawn Keogh surmised all along, that Christy was in fact ‘a dirty tramp from the highways of the world’.88 The crowd’s fury at the Mahons stems from the fact that the two tramps dispelled the community’s collective fantasy which they structured around Christy as their object cause of desire. The sensual repression of the rigid familist system creates an emotional void which Christy’s heroic figure seems to fill as he becomes the materialization of the villagers’ desire for a fantastic composite of hero, leader, lover and warrior. The brute facts of Christy’s mundane history shatter the heroic illusion and precipitate the kind of violent response that confirms the Lacanian maxim ‘I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you’: MEN [to PEGEEN]: Bring the sod, will you? PEGEEN [coming over:]: God help him so. [Burns his leg].

38


CHRISTY [kicking and screaming]: Oh, glory be to God! [He kicks loose from the table, and they all drag him towards the door.]89 Christy performs the symptomatic role that the Tramp and Nora play in In the Shadow of the Glen and Martin and Mary play in The Well of the Saints. As the propertyless wandering tramp he is the necessary outcome of peasant proprietorship where strong farmers and traders became affluent at the expense of smallholders and landless labourers. Christy can only regain access to the system which has disenfranchised him by undergoing a process of social gentrification and symbolic transmogrification which represses the facts of his socio-economic marginalization. When the traumatic facts of his repressed history rupture the social consciousness of the settled community he is promptly expelled, and while the Symbolic order of Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy is restored the emotional void also returns in the shape of Pegeen’s desire: ‘PEGEEN: [Putting her shawl over her head and breaking out into wild lamentations.] Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.’90 Christy’s symptomatic role takes on a further ideological dimension, as the poverty and desolation he and his father must face in their marginalization is elided in their heroic dialogue filled with gleeful anticipation of forthcoming adventures: ‘CHRISTY: Go with you, is it? I will then, like a gallant captain with his heathen slave. Go on now and I’ll see you from this day stewing my oatmeal and washing my spuds, for I’m master of all fights from now.’91 Christy’s delusions of grandeur and self-mastery, and his carefree embrace of a desolate future, are symptomatic of Synge’s fetishization of exclusion and alienation and the alleged freedom to be obtained outside the settled community. True to form, Synge invests Christy with the heroic qualities of a ‘gallant captain’ in spite of his being more akin to the ‘heathen slave’, and his claim to be ‘master of all fights’ makes him sound more like the legendary warrior Cuchulain than the homeless tramp who was beaten in a pub brawl. As Seamus Deane argues, ‘Synge aestheticizes the problem of oppression by converting it into the issue of heroism.’92 Moreover, ‘[t]he poverty and the limited incestuous nature of the society is hinted at on several occasions. Yet famine, eviction, military oppression and landlordism, the characteristic facts of late-nineteenth-century Irish rural existence for the peasantry are almost entirely repressed features of the text.’93 In response Declan Kiberd argues that ‘Deane’s reading of the play is mistaken’,94 and contends that ‘Synge is arguably the most


gifted Irish exponent of the three phases of artistic decolonization later described by Fanon. He effortlessly assimilated the culture of the occupying English and then proceeded to immerse himself in the native culture.’95 What Kiberd omits here is the fact that Synge’s Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy background was inextricably linked to the ‘occupying English’ in terms of their colonial domination and class hierarchy over the native Catholic population. At best Synge conforms to Albert Memmi’s figure of the ‘colonizer who refuses’ his colonial position, which means ‘either withdrawing physically from those conditions or remaining to fight and change them’.96 Kiberd states that ‘Synge was, by his own say-so, a radical, whom he defined as “some one who wanted to change things root and branch”. He was a student of such texts as Marx’s Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto, the works of William Morris, L’Anarchie, Problems of Poverty, Principes du Socialisme and Basic Socialism.’97 The problem here is that Synge’s dramatization of peasant life simply does not reflect the socialism he had evidently read about. Synge’s critique of the Catholic petit bourgeoisie does not come from the proletarian perspective of James Connolly but from the perspective of an Ascendancy figure who can fetishize the miserable lifestyle of wandering tramps and indulge in their social exclusion, safe in the knowledge that his ‘small private income’ will put food in his mouth and a roof over his head. Kiberd states that the finale where Christy is discredited and banished is a ‘liberationist third act’,98 and that ‘by the end, indeed, he can proclaim himself master of those forces which have been mastering him’.99 When Kiberd suggests that Christy has moved from being a ‘mirror-self’ that reflects the desire of others to a state of ‘active self-reflection’100 which confirms a more positive sense of self, he omits the fact that Christy has been expelled from the settled community and must face the desolate existence of a wandering tramp. The socioeconomic forces which mastered his life before he came to the village still master him when he leaves. In this regard Kiberd replicates Synge’s elision of the trauma of class disparity by constructing the analogy between Christy’s achievement of a sense of self in the ‘liberationist third act’ and the third phase of ‘Frantz Fanon’s dialectic of decolonization, from occupation, though [sic] nationalism, to liberation’.101 Christy’s sense of self is a delusion, and he is not even master of his own fate let alone ‘all fights’. As far as the analogy with Fanon’s dialectic is concerned, Christy seems to be stuck in the second stage of decolonization, rendering him a victim of the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’102 which sanction economic disparity in the name of national unity.


Synge’s fetishization of the social exclusion of wandering tramps concludes in The Tinker’s Wedding (1908).103 The plot is driven by the desire of the ‘young tinker woman’ Sarah Casey (Mona Limerick) to achieve social acceptance within Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy by marrying her sweetheart Michael Byrne (Jules Shaw), a fellow ‘tinker’, in spite of the remonstrations of her putative mother-in-law Mary Byrne (Clare Geet), who wishes them all to remain outside the settled community: MARY [coming down to them, speaking with amazement and consternation, but without anger]: Going to the chapel! It’s at marriage you’re fooling again, maybe? SARAH [triumphantly]: It is, Mary Byrne. I’ll be married now in a short while; and from this day there will no one have a right to call me a dirty name, and I selling cans in Wicklow or Wexford or the city of Dublin itself.104 Sarah’s mission is hampered not only by Mary but also by the Priest (Edmund Gurney), who acts as the moral sentinel of Catholic petit bourgeois respectability through his reluctance to admit the traumatic figures into the Symbolic order of the settled community: ‘PRIEST [loudly]: Let you hold your tongue; let you be quiet, Sarah Casey. I’ve no silver at all for the like of you; and if you want to be married, let you pay your pound. I’d do it for a pound only, and that’s making it a sight cheaper than I’d make it for one of my own pairs is living here in the place.’105 After some deliberation the Priest finally decides that the couple are unworthy of social redemption, and he consigns them to the oblivion of continued marginalization, much to their vexation. When the tinkers beat him and force a promise not to inform the authorities of their violation, the Priest invokes the wrath of Catholic dogma in order to expel the untameable creatures from his Symbolic order once and for all. The tinkers represent the traumatic elements which the community must repress to maintain the structural integrity of familism and Catholic petit bourgeois orthodoxy. The tinkers are unacceptable because they are intemperate, ungodly, violent, flirtatious and rebellious – all of which are exaggerated to mythic proportions, rendering them the antithesis of the stable community of peasant proprietorship and upward mobility. Before they are expelled the tinkers state their independence from the familist structure: ‘M ARY: It’s little need we ever had of the like of you to get us our bit to eat, and our bit to drink.’106 The tinkers also voice their desire to engage in fiscal irresponsibility and


recklessness: ‘MICHAEL: Hurry on now. He’s a great man to have kept us from fooling our gold; and we’ll have a great time drinking that bit with the trampers on the green of Clash.’107 Once again Synge fetishizes the tinkers’ expulsion by celebrating their insolvency and delinquency while disavowing the harsh consequences of that short-lived existence. The Peasant heroes and heroines which Synge constructs are the anachronistic receptacles of an Ascendancy nostalgia for some prelapsarian era before the Land Acts and subsequent peasant proprietorship. By denouncing the embourgeoisement of the future Synge consigns his Peasants to the feudalism of the past, and his condemnation of the emergent rural middle class is no proto-socialist critique of the kind offered in contemporaneous plays such as Fred Ryan’s The Laying of the Foundations (c. 1902)108 or Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1913),109 but the death rattle of a pseudo-aristocracy. Likewise Yeats’s, and as co-author Lady Gregory’s, construction of the Peasant as object cause of Ascendancy desire renders the archaic ‘Dream of the noble and the beggarman’ as a spurious counterblast to the emergent Catholic petit bourgeois dream of the strong farmer and the tradesman. The enigmatic universality of ‘the’ beggarman is undermined by the traumatic historical particularity of the cottiers and landless labourers, whose real heroism lay in their daily struggle to eke out a living from a harsh environment and unforgiving social system.

2 To Live the Things that I before Imagined

In the 1900s, ‘the outcome of the struggle to capture the concept of “the peasant”, in order to mobilize it as a sentimental connection between the various contending groups of intellectuals and the people-nation, gave a particular form of definition and concretization to that people-nation.’1 While Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland polemic ‘frequently overlapped on the matter of materialism versus anti-materialism, albeit for conflicting strategic reasons, the conflicting concepts which both held of the pure peasant as the quintessence of the nation acted to crystallize their differences’.2 The Anglo-Irish attempt to forge a sentimental connection failed for several reasons, the most significant of which was an inability to harness the power of Catholicism and familism, two ideologies which effectively structured the lived reality of the ‘Irish peasantry who constituted the mass’3 of the people-nation. In sharp contrast, the attempt by the various factions involved in the Irish Ireland contingent to forge a sentimental connection prevailed according to the degree to which they successfully embodied these ideologies in their representation of the people-nation. Irish Ireland advocate Arthur Griffith emphasized the highly charged relationship between dramatic and political representation in the cultural nationalism of the time: ‘We look to the Irish National Theatre primarily as a means of regenerating the country. The Theatre is a powerful agent in the building of a nation.’4 Frazier notes that, ‘Irish history during this period provides an instance of a literary movement leading to a social and industrial movement for self-reliance. Its slogan was Today, on the stage; tomorrow, on the streets.’5 If journalists like Arthur Griffith and D.P. Moran were the ideologists who preached this precept of Irish Ireland nationalism, then dramatists like Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Pearse6 were the idealists who practised it during the 1916 Easter Rising, 42

To Live the Things that I before Imagined 43

and their resolve is epitomized in John Fitzmaurice’s declaration in MacDonagh’s Pagans (1915): ‘JOHN: My writings have only been the prelude to my other work … I am going to live the things that I before imagined.’7 John’s words indicate the importance of the phantasmatic element in driving the Easter Rebels toward their patriotic self-sacrifice, particularly what one would describe as the objet petit a in Lacanian parlance, and how it manifested itself in Catholic Nationalist metaphysics variously as Christ, the crucifixion, Ireland and the afterlife, which formed the symbolic premise of the insurgents’ activities. The dramatic evocation of these phantasmatic elements reaches its apogee in Pearse’s The Singer (1917),8 where the protagonist MacDara declares: ‘One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world. I will take no pike, I will go into the battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on the tree!’9 What is striking in this play is that the organic–intellectual figure MacDara is in fact a peasant, specifically a ‘poor man of the mountains pale like a man that lived in cities, but with the dress and the speech of a mountainy man’.10 In The Singer, Pearse’s ‘last and most inflammatory play’,11 we have an instance of the construction of the Peasant precisely as the ‘quintessence of the nation’, in the form of a phenomenon which one could paradoxically but effectively describe as the sublime subaltern. While Yeats and Synge invested their Peasants with aristocratic qualities to support their vision of Protestant Ascendancy Anglo-Irish Ireland, Pearse invested his Peasant with the qualities of a Messianic leader in order to buttress his utopian vision of a sovereign, Catholic, Nationalist Irish Ireland. The Peasant as sublime object of Irish Ireland ideology functioned as the nexus for national desire, and as a vinculum that sutured the Symbolic order of the Catholic Nationalist people-nation while simultaneously disavowing the trauma of class disparity in the cause of national unity. The struggle of a colonized people ‘to live the things that [they] before imagined’ in achieving national sovereignty went hand-in-hand with the struggle for land tenure and peasant proprietorship to the extent ‘that the one issue became effectively a metaphor for the other’.12 The conflation of nationalism and embourgeoisement served to obfuscate the constitutive principle of Irish state formation – namely the subordination of the interests of subaltern groups such as cottiers and landless labourers consequent to the rise of strong farmers, graziers and traders on the tide of Catholic bourgeois nationalism. The paradoxical symptom of the classed subaltern as fantasy object thus emerged within Irish Ireland ideology precisely in order to sublimate the trauma of social

44


subordination intrinsic to nation-state formation, and underwent its most public scrutiny and critical contestation in the drama produced during the 1900s up to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. From the poetic folktales of Douglas Hyde to the prose melodramas of Padraic Colum and William Boyle, through to the early Ibsenite realism of Lennox Robinson and T.C. Murray, on to the incipient Shavianism of St. John Ervine, the symptomatic trope of the classed subaltern as fantasy object was successively reworked and re-examined. Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope) (1901)13 occupies a seminal place in Irish theatre history, not only for being ‘the first play written in Irish [that] had ever been seen in a Dublin theatre’,14 but also for its status as being perhaps the most influential peasant play of its generation, and for establishing the touchstone of peasant quality as a criterion by which Irish plays would be assessed. Of Casadh an tSúgáin’s opening night the Freeman’s Journal remarked that, [t]he success of the performance of the Irish Literary Theatre last night at the Gaiety Theatre argues well for the possibility of the institution becoming a permanent one in Dublin. That this success was owing in a great measure to a new departure – the presentation of a play in Irish by Dr. Douglas Hyde – was obvious. Every Gaelic Leaguer, every student of O’Growney, everyone interested in the old tongue who could elbow his way into the theatre was there last night, and the enthusiasm was tremendous.15 Among the audience was J.M. Synge who wrote a review for the French newspaper L’Européen: ‘The whole auditorium shook. People were crying. For an instant we had glimpsed, hovering in that hall, the soul of a nation.’16 Stephen Gwynn’s report that ‘there was magnetism in the air’17 serves to underline the powerful attraction that the classed subaltern as fantasy object, manifested in this instance as a Wandering Tramp, exerted in its function as object cause of national desire. Casadh an tSúgáin is set in a ‘farmer’s house in Munster a hundred years ago’18 and centres on a farming community’s attempts to protect the young girl Oona (Miss O’Kennedy) from the affections of Tumaus Hanrahan (Douglas Hyde), allegedly ‘the greatest vagabond ever came into Ireland’.19 Hanrahan is a reckless libertine who was routed out of the parish by the priest and strikes fear into the local people through his seemingly magical abilities: ‘He’s a great poet, and maybe he’d make a rann [curse] on you that would stick to you for ever, if you were to anger him.’20 The community succeed in luring Hanrahan out of the


house by persuading him to attempt the impossible task of twisting a súgán, or rope, out of hay. When he is safely outside, the door is bolted and the security of the familist social structure is restored. In spite of his expulsion Hanrahan still holds sway over Oona’s emotions: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! do not put him out; let him back; he is a poet – he is a bard – he is a wonderful man. O, let him back; do not do that to him!’21 Thematically Casadh an tSúgáin anticipates Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and The Tinker’s Wedding, as the vagabond Hanrahan is the symptom of the familist Symbolic order from which he is necessarily excluded. In his licentiousness Hanrahan is the manifestation of the community’s sexual desires, which must be censured and repressed if the familist system is to maintain its structural integrity. In his status as a disenfranchised vagrant he is a scapegoat for the collective guilt consequent to the process of rural embourgeoisement that turned poor or incapable farmers into migrant labourers at best and wandering tramps at worst. Hanrahan’s quasi-magical status further serves to sublimate the social trauma intrinsic to familism, as it creates a reassuring distance between the safe, ordinary world inside the farmer’s house and the dangerous, extraordinary world outside it. The organization of mimetic space in the play’s mise en scène serves as a good illustration of the psychodynamics of Irish Ireland ideology. The settled community’s unconscious is very much ‘outside’22 in the Lacanian sense, and the stability of its consciousness and quotidian reality depends on the maintenance of Hanrahan as a fantasy object that exists on the threshold of their Symbolic order – he is the fraught object that defines yet also threatens to dissolve it. In this sense the door functions as the ‘gap of the unconscious’,23 the constitutive distance between the community and the fantasy object, which supports their quotidian reality. The tension between the community and the vagabond perfectly illustrates the ‘dialectic of desire’24 between the settled community and their phantasmatic support, as Hanrahan is the contradictory manifestation of the lack from which the community’s desire springs. While Hyde’s An Pósadh (The Marriage) (1903)25 is a thematic inversion of Casadh an tSúgáin, the transmogrification of the vagrant figure remains constant. Again the audience response was emphatic, if perhaps predictably so from a partisan crowd at an Oireachtas na Gaelige festival. As Joseph Holloway records: ‘The Ballaghadereen Branch of the Gaelic League enacted Dr. Hyde’s little play An Pósadh. The enthusiasm which followed the fall of the curtain was extreme, and the native speaking actors were twice recalled, and Dr. Hyde appeared and spoke a few words

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in Gaelic ere the applause died away.’26 The action takes place in the cottage kitchen of a poor newlywed couple, who are about to sit down to their meagre ‘wedding dinner’27 when they are interrupted by the arrival of a wandering Blind Man (Douglas Hyde), who proceeds to eat their dinner for them. The couple are rewarded for their hospitality as the Blind Man displays an uncommon ability with the fiddle, enchanting the local villagers into parting with various sundries and sums of money. In the finale the extraordinary old man is revealed to be none other than ‘Raftery the poet’, a legendary wandering bard whose presence in the house is all the more remarkable as a Young Man reveals after Raftery’s departure that he was buried at ‘Killeenan three days’28 beforehand. Raftery’s quasi-magical talent for lyrical poetry puts him on a par with Hanrahan, but he differs in that it is his status as a ghostly, supernatural entity that separates him from the community and provides the necessary constitutive distance, rather than the imperative to physically situate him on the threshold, thus allowing him to be located in the midst of the community as a phantasm. Raftery’s symptomatic function in the play serves as the locus for the community’s collective guilt related to the material success of its more affluent members, revealed in their embarrassment at not assisting the poor couple earlier. The community’s guilt-driven generosity alleviates the couple’s poverty, rescues them from the brink of homelessness and reincorporates them into the familist social structure. Without Raftery’s symptomatic function the trauma of economic disparity would have remained in the community’s social unconscious, as the young couple were destitute and one step away from eviction, a fate which could only be allayed by Martin pursuing the precarious and uncertain career of a ‘spailpín fanac’,29 or migrant labourer. The community’s cathartic gesture serves to reintegrate the traumatic element into their Symbolic order through the symptom of Raftery, as he links them to individuals whose plight contradicts the logic of familist orthodoxy in spite of their decline being a necessary condition of the growth of the rural middle class, typified in the prosperous strong farmers and graziers in the play. Within the cultural politics of the early 1900s Hyde is a somewhat ambivalent figure: a member of the Ascendancy class who was resolutely Irish Ireland in his outlook with the exception of the crucial factor of Catholicism, which was an ideological institution from which he, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, was necessarily excluded. Hyde’s variety of cultural nationalism was based on linguistic essentialism and the primacy of Gaelic culture as an apolitical, nonsectarian basis for national


identification, which he espoused in his seminal text ‘The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland’: ‘we must strive to cultivate everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because in spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic at the core.’30 Hyde’s critical theory, and also his literary work typified in The Love Songs of Connacht,31 had an enormous impact on both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland ideology, but it was precisely the fraught relationship between culture and politics during the period which stifled the realization of Hyde’s transcendent vision. Hyde was disturbed to find that his idealization of the Peasant as ‘pious by nature [who] sees the hand of God in every place, in every time and in everything’, which he regarded as ‘the link between Gaelicism and Christianity’, was regarded by others as ‘a connection between Gaelicism and Catholicism’.32 The difficulties which Hyde faced came to a head in July 1915, when he resigned his presidency of the Gaelic League because of its politicization by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), who had gained executive control of the League and diverted its energies into the anticolonial struggle. As Hyde wrote to a colleague: ‘[m]y work for twenty-two years was to restore to Ireland her intellectual independence and I would have completed it, if I had been let. These people “queered the pitch” on me, mixed the physical and the intellectual together, interpreted my teaching into terms of bullets and swords – before the time, and have reduced me to impotence.’33 Padraic Colum’s The Saxon Shillin’ (1903)34 is characteristic of this mix of ‘the physical and the intellectual’ which increasingly manifested itself in Irish cultural politics in the build-up to the Easter Rising (1916) and the subsequent War of Independence (1919–1921).35 The plot centres on a family of impoverished tenant farmers called the Kearneys who are about to be evicted from ‘Lord Clanwilliam’s Estate’ in the ‘West of Ireland’.36 The eviction is especially poignant as Hugh Kearney (John Connolly) is one of the soldiers ordered to administer the eviction, an act he is ultimately unable to perform and so he subsequently deserts from the British army in order to fight and die for his family and country: ‘I’ll defend the place till the last. For land an’ home, Irishmen, join me.’37 Through his heroic death Hugh, an archetypal West of Ireland Peasant, embodies the quintessence of the national struggle whose spiritual status transcends the brute material facts of defeat. The Saxon Shillin’ is typical of the kind of agitprop melodrama prevalent in the early 1900s, the most prolific exponent of which was P.J. Bourke, whose plays include When Wexford Rose (1913), For Ireland’s Liberty (1914), In Dark ‘98 (1914) and For the Land She Loved (1915).38 J.W. Whitbread, whose fame and

48


wealth had grown from his production of populist melodramas, offered one hundred pounds ‘for the best original Irish drama dealing with ‘98, the period with which he has dealt in so many plays himself. The author or authoress must be Irish, of Irish parentage, and born in the country’; a project which the Freeman’s Journal endorsed in its editorial on the efficacy of the melodramatic form in engaging public interest in the ‘national’ issue: The Irish Literary Theatre appealed to a limited audience, because it was literary. At the other end of the Irish theatrical world we have had for many years an Irish drama that was not literary in either the modern or the Elizabethan acceptation of the term, but which – as we know it in the Queen’s theatre – appealed very powerfully to the mind of the average man in Dublin, and especially the average working-man. Superior people sneer at what they consider the crude and melodramatic pictures of ‘98 and other periods of Irish history which from time to time are presented in the oldest and most historic theatre in Dublin. For the most part they are critics who have never witnessed the wonderful influence which even a very plainly-told story of Irish patriotism has on the minds of the honest working-men and working-women of Dublin.39 The underlying problem with the influence of patriotic melodrama on the minds of the Dublin proletariat in this context is that the very gesture of reminding the working men and women of their oppression as colonized subjects serves to elide the facts of their oppression as classed subjects. The conflation of colonial with class oppression emphasizes the imperative of national liberation as the immediate precursor to economic liberation which must necessarily be postponed until national sovereignty is achieved. The odious fact of postcolonial liberation is that the primacy of national over economic liberation remains long after sovereignty has been accomplished, ostensibly in the interests of national security and social stability, whose real interests are those of the ‘national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime’.40 Where the problems intrinsic to Catholic bourgeois nationalism are overlooked in The Saxon Shillin’ they receive closer scrutiny in Colum’s later play The Land (1905),41 dealing with the impact of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 on rural communities and the new social order of peasant proprietorship and middle class aspiration. As with Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin, the dramatic tension in the play emerges from the dialectic between the settled community and its discontents, as Murtagh


Cosgar’s (W.G. Fay) property and plans for his son Matt (P. Mac Shiubhlaigh) are put in jeopardy by Matt’s love for Ellen Douras (Máire Ní Gharbhaigh), who longs to escape from the mundane reality of the settled community and fulfil her dream of going to America and experiencing ‘the sights of great towns, and the fine manners, and the fine life’.42 Initially Matt is torn between his love for Ellen and his commitment to home and family, but when Ellen finally declares her incompatibility with farming life Matt decides to leave with her in spite of the security which his father’s land and property would provide. Matt’s decision is bolstered by the emotionally sterile relationship with his father, whose subordination of paternal affection to his overwhelming commitment to financial matters has driven all but one of his children from the family homestead. Sally (Sara Allgood), Murtagh’s only remaining dependent at the end of the play, becomes sole heir to his estate subsequent to Matt’s departure, and the play closes with Murtagh’s declaration of her inheritance and her betrothal to Ellen’s brother Cornelius: ‘CORNELIUS: And tell me one thing, Murtagh Cosgar. Is it true that Matt’s going to America, and that Ellen will wait for him for a year at the school? I met them together, and they told me that./ MURTAGH COSGAR: What they say is true, I’m sure. The land is yours and your children’s./ SALLY (wiping her hands in her apron): O Cornelius.’43 While Colum engages with the social trauma inherent to familism, his potentially incisive critique is mediated by the engaging populism of his earlier work, evidenced in the public approval and unprecedented critical acclaim that The Land received from the Freeman’s Journal: No play yet produced in the Abbey Theatre has so gripped and held captive an audience. What we have been waiting for was a play that should be at once good and popular. Mr. Yeats has proved a little too abstruse, and Mr. Synge a little too bizarre to get fully down to the hearts of the people. Mr. Colum has caught up his play out of the mid-current of actual, Irish life. the Abbey Theatre has at last given its audience a sort of play that they want. It is the type of play that will make the theatre popular and powerful.44 Colum’s verisimilitude was cited by the redoubtable critic and staunch Irish Ireland ideologue Daniel Corkery in an attack on Yeats and Synge’s portrayal of peasant life: Mr. Yeats said that the peasants were not typical peasants – that there was no necessity why a dramatist should select typical peasants. We


think this heresy. Mr. Colum gives us the typical peasant. To take it as a guide that is not necessary to do so, what is it but to change Shakespeare’s saying – ‘Hold the mirror up to nature,’ into ‘Hold the mirror, not up to nature, but up to nature’s freaks!’ This, we believe is what Mr. Synge has done.45 In spite of Corkery’s endorsement, however, it is the very typicality and authenticity of Colum’s portrayal of peasant life which must be scrutinized, and the particular kind of reality which he constructs in his plays. Colum’s credentials for portraying the reality of peasant life were impeccable, and were proudly displayed as he apparently ‘liked to tell people that he was Roman Catholic, of peasant stock, and had been born in the workhouse in Longford’.46 It would seem therefore that Colum saw himself as one of the people who wrote of and for the people-nation, and his commitment to Irish Ireland nationalism resulted in his secession from the Abbey in 1906 to join the overtly nationalist Theatre of Ireland. Colum’s nationalist sentiments are epitomized in some words of advice he wrote to W.G. Fay: ‘[a]nother thing, … Be National. Put yourself in the way of that great wave that is certainly breaking across the country.’47 This sentiment is powerfully relayed in the closing lines of The Land: CORNELIUs: Aren’t they foolish to be going away like that, father, and we at the mouth of the good times? The men will be coming in soon, and you might say a few words. (Martin shakes his head. Murtagh and Sally try to restrain him.) ‘Men of Ballykillduff,’ you might say, ‘stay on the land, and you’ll be saved body and soul; you’ll be saved in the man and in the nation. The nation, men of Ballykillduff, do you ever think of the Irish nation that is waiting all this time to be born?’ (He becomes more excited; he is seen to be struggling with words.)48 The particular kind of reality which Colum constructs in this play is itself an Irish Ireland fantasy, where the settled community consolidates its hard-fought economic security in spite of those elements which seek to disrupt it. Sally and Cornelius embody the national ‘consciousness’ of familist stability, in contradistinction to Ellen and Matt, who manifest the national ‘unconscious’ desire for physical and emotional freedom which the familist structure must necessarily repress. While Ellen’s father Martin berates the fact that ‘the young are going fast’, Murtagh’s


cold response that ‘[s]ome of them are no loss’49 epitomizes the social and emotional cost of emigration as the sine qua non of a system of stem inheritance, where family property is left to the eldest or most suitable child and whose siblings are expected and required to move away. In this context Ellen and Matt become symptomatic of the repressed trauma of peasant proprietorship and the drive towards embourgeoisement. The dialectic between the settled community and its symptomatic discontents is more than a device for building dramatic tension; in the context of Ireland in the early 1900s it is the psychodynamic which underlies the ideological formation of the nascent Irish State. Colum’s success as a dramatist can perhaps be attributed to his populist-realism and vernacular dialogue, two elements which underpinned the success of William Boyle, whose plays also focused on the life of rural communities in the Irish midlands. As with Colum, the emphasis in Boyle’s plays is on verisimilitude and the authenticity of representation which Boyle and his more complimentary critics claimed for his plays. One of Boyle’s least complimentary critics was W.B. Yeats, and this extract from a correspondence between Boyle and his friend D.J. O’Donoghue concerning an early draft of his first play The Building Fund (1905),50 indicates the seeds of disaffection between the two dramatists which would grow into a mutual and irreconcilable contempt: Nobody in Ireland (or elsewhere) makes love in the stage fashion, but then do they do anything else in the way even Yeats and Synge represent? Yeats says my present form would be construed into an attack on the priests, but I think it is not a bit presumptuous to claim that I am a better judge of Catholic feeling than he is. I feel certain that I can go much nearer the precipice (from my country rearing) without going over it than he or even a townbred Catholic dare venture.51 The emphasis here is on audience expectation and representational authenticity, with the implication that Yeats and Synge were plying their own differing political perspectives in the name of artistic freedom, and that Boyle’s agrarian provenance authorized him to depict a more genuine and critically engaging portrayal of the life of Catholic rural communities than his Abbey superiors ever could. In spite of Boyle’s certitude, however, the overtly reassuring temperament of his plays serves to neutralize a more incisive critique of the familist system which is offset by the urge to give a predominantly Catholic, middle-class

52


public ‘what it wants’, in a populist-realist, morality tale format which ultimately supports rather than undermines the ideological premises of Irish Ireland. It would seem that Boyle’s capacity in being a ‘better judge of Catholic feeling’ than Yeats allowed him to successfully forge a sentimental connection with a broad audience, evidenced in the widespread popularity of his plays. Boyle’s The Building Fund is a satire on stem inheritance that revolves around the exertions of the miserly farmer Shan Grogan (W.G. Fay) to secure the proceeds of his penurious mother’s will. Grogan faces competition in the form of his charming but penniless niece, Sheila O’Dwyer (Sara Allgood), who ingratiates herself by caring for her ailing grandmother. In spite of their efforts the prospective heir and heiress are ultimately disappointed, as the executor of the will, Mr O’Callaghan (Frank Fay), explains: ‘take a friend’s advice and don’t make an enemy of the priest. The property is left to him, as you see, to use at his discretion, partly for the benefit of poor persons who are not beggars, and partly to the building fund, just as he thinks proper.’52 After his initial remonstrations and threats of legal action Grogan accepts his fate and is reconciled with Sheila. The Building Fund brought Boyle instant success and critical acclaim, recorded succinctly in this extract from Joseph Holloway’s Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer: The splendid popular success of Mr. Boyle’s comedy is a great step in advance for the Society – as it takes it out of its narrow groove of clique-ism and fluttered the dovecote of mutual admiration dramatists. The Abbey Theatre dramatic quartet, Yeats-Synge-Gregory & Colum, sang anything but a glee on Tuesday when Mr. Boyle scored a number-one success with his Building Fund. The struggle it had to pass the committee of literary cranks – because forsoothe, it was nature that was depicted and not artifice – was not without its humours, when one comes to think that they failed to see that it was true to life; they knew so little of the real article.53 Holloway’s commentary cuts to the heart of the disaffection between Boyle and the Ascendancy dramatists, as revealed in this extract from a letter of Yeats to Synge concerning an early draft of Boyle’s second play The Eloquent Dempsy (1911): ‘Both Lady Gregory and myself think that it is impossibly vulgar in its present form, though there is a play somewhere sunk in it … if you agree with us about the vulgarity of the play protest as strongly as possible.’54 It is interesting that Yeats insists on the ‘vulgarity’ of the play, and his term takes on greater significance when


one considers its etymology from vulgaris ‘belonging to the multitude’, from vulgus ‘the common people’. That Yeats and Boyle were diametrically opposed in their aesthetic predilections is evident in their conflicting perspectives. Yeats wished to impose his own experimental ideas of ‘Literary’ quality on the public, while Boyle wished to entertain them in a familiar manner that they could understand and appreciate. It would seem that the conflict between the two dramatists was as much about social class as it was about artistic ‘taste’.55 What is also interesting is the allegation that Boyle’s portrayal is more ‘real’ than Colum’s and that Boyle depicted ‘nature’ and not ‘artifice’. Of course Boyle’s play is by definition artifice and not nature, and if one understands real as the Real in the Lacanian sense, as the tantalizing essence of desire, then one can appreciate Boyle’s popular appeal. The figure of Shan Grogan is, by virtue of its existence as a character in a play, a fantasy object, but in the context of the play’s reception it functions as the illusory vessel which contains an impossible fragment of the Real, where that fragment is the materialization of a predominantly middle-class audience’s desire. Shan’s avarice, his knee-jerk reaction against the Church and swift return to the fold are symptomatic of the insecurities of the Dublin nouveau riche, whose class transition is the result of an acquisitiveness which is repressed under the veneer of respectability that upward mobility affords. The brute facts of material gain sit uncomfortably next to the spiritual tenets of Christian charity, and Shan’s redemption provides the catharsis necessary to reinforce the Catholic bourgeoisie’s Symbolic order and confirm their ‘reality’ in spite of the fundamental contradiction of economic disparity which threatens to undermine it. According to Catholic orthodoxy, cupidity is a venial and pardonable sin involving only a partial loss of grace; adultery, of the variety displayed in Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen, is a mortal and irredeemable sin involving a total loss of grace and eternal damnation. It follows then that, according to the logic of Catholic bourgeois nationalism, fulfilling one’s lust for money is a necessary evil. However, fulfilling one’s lust for a significant but unmarried other is just plain evil, especially when it threatens the structural integrity of familism. Within this frame of reference Boyle’s cathartic morality plays were applauded and Synge’s romantically anarchic tragi-comedies were condemned. The twin motif of corruption and redemption continues in The Eloquent Dempsy.56 The protagonist Jeremiah Dempsy (W.G. Fay), a ‘Publican and Grocer’,57 is a stereotypical member of the rural petit bourgeoisie, whose politicking and double-dealing are summarized by

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his wife Catherine (Sara Allgood): ‘You’ll go anywhere and subscribe to anything if they’ll only let you make a speech about it. And (tenderly) if you weren’t the best husband and the best father that ever broke the bread of life, I’d say you were the biggest rascal in the whole of Ireland.’58 In spite of his faults Dempsy is redeemed by virtue of being a good husband, father and Catholic. These facts ultimately serve to nullify his hypocrisy at the play’s resolution, when his attempts to appease the antithetical sentiments of ‘the gentry’ and ‘the people’ eventually force him to hand his business over to his future stepson, Brian O’Neill (Udolphus Wright), and accept his wife’s plea to ‘come and live for ever in the country’.59 The scandalous furore which provides the comedic element serves to occlude the underlying scandal of economic disparity and exorbitance. While Dempsy is an acknowledged rascal and mercenary businessman his wife initially seems to hold the moral centre: ‘MRS. DEMPSY: Where the law helps business people to collect their debts I never was against it, but where it turns out poor tenants on the road –/ DEMPSY: Oh, the law never does that, Catherine. It’s the people’s own obstinacy, misled by the advice of strangers.’60 However, as Dempsy later reveals, ‘[s]he thinks we ought to trouble about nothing in the whole world but the shop, and money-making’,61 a fact made ruthlessly evident when some women in the crowd attack Dempsy for his dissimulation: ‘MRS. DEMPSY: Let his coat go, Judy Heffernan! – Come in and pay your bill, Mrs. Brady, then you’ll be fit to talk to him.’62 Mrs Dempsy’s callous mercantilism is graphically illustrated in the following exchange: MRS. DEMPSY: Judy didn’t kick you hard? DEMPSY: Only with her bare feet, Catherine. O’NEILL (pointing): That’s what soiled his clothes, Mrs. Dempsy. It’ll brush off. MRS. DEMPSY: Her boots are in the pawn. Glory be to God! DEMPSY: I gave her a shilling to get them out last night. MRS. DEMPSY: She drunk the money in the shop down-stairs this morning. DEMPSY: That’s lucky for me. If she had her brogues, I wouldn’t have a sound bone left in my body. MRS. DEMPSY: Well, I’ll see her tongue a yard out of her mouth before she’ll get another drop from me – the rascal!63 Judy Heffernan is a faceless member of the ‘crowd of people off the stage’ and her predicament is symptomatic of the insolvent members of the


community who are either in debt to or employed by the social class which the Dempsys represent. Judy’s insolvency is summarily dismissed as the effect rather than the cause of an implied dipsomania, and the gory details of the Dempsys’ profiteering are excused as a matter of fact instead of a cause for concern. When the crowd gathers to hold Dempsy to account for his fraudulent activities Mrs Dempsy restrains her husband from speaking to them and describes the crowd as ‘nothing but the rubbish of the town, wanting to get fun out of you’.64 As Judy and her ilk are consigned to the status of ‘rubbish’ the trauma of class disparity can be safely denied as the incompetence or indolence which separates the industrious Dempsys from the hapless Heffernans. Judy’s symptomatic presence serves to stabilize the bourgeois Symbolic order which it simultaneously threatens to dissolve; she is the scapegoat onto which the ‘groggy-patriot-publican-general shop-man’65 can safely transfer the repressed guilt of his prosperity, which is built on double-dealing and ruthless mercantilism. The satirical value of the play resides only in its farcical quality, and as a critique of small town corruption it seems an overblown spoof in comparison with Fred Ryan’s simple but compelling The Laying of the Foundations (c. 1902) of which only Act II is extant. The protagonist Michael O’Loskin rebels against his mercantilist father who is ‘the greatest slum owner in the city’,66 and sets himself in direct opposition to Alderman Farrelly, the corrupt chairman of the New Building Syndicate: ‘MICHAEL: It is so serious, Mr. Farrelly. We are building a new city and we must build square and sure. In the city of the future, there must be none of the rottenness which you and your class made in the city of old; in the new city you will have no place.’67 While Boyle’s play ends with the duplicitous Dempsy retiring to the country after leaving bedlam behind him, Ryan’s act concludes with his hero bracing himself for class conflict: ‘MICHAEL [Slowly]: I do not compromise. I do not sell myself./ FARRELLY [Going out]: Then let it be war!/ MICHAEL [Going to his desk]: The city of the future demands it. It can be nothing else but war.’68 Boyle’s comedy The Mineral Workers (1906)69 was first produced in the same year as The Eloquent Dempsy, and, while at first glance the play appears to offer a satirical look into the class politics of rural communities, it manifests a similar disavowal of the trauma inherent to class disparity and agrarian enfranchisement. The Irish Times succinctly described the plot as dealing with the discouragements and trials of a smart Irish-American engineer, who is trying to smelt ore in a purely pastoral district in Ireland. The


break on the part of the peasantry with settled habits and interests, the change from farming to industrial enterprise, and the reluctance of the people to accept the new order of things are intensified by the mischievous activity of the local agitator, but in the end the young engineer triumphs.70 The play was admired by audience and critic alike, with the Freeman’s Journal being particularly effusive: ‘instinct with mirth-provoking humour, incisive repartee, telling situations, and far and away and above all, lifelike presentations of certain types of Irish character’.71 Even Boyle’s nemesis Yeats was unusually complimentary: ‘[h]is people are individuals, but they are also types, and there is something of the national tragedy in the play. But if you have no mind for meanings, you can take the play, and I hope any play we produce, as a story, and be content.’72 Whether Yeats intended to be subtly incisive or not is irrelevant, as his final sentence strikes at the heart of the matter of Boyle’s populistrealism. The sole protesting voice representing the mineral workers against the contending schemes of the Irish-American entrepreneur Stephen O’Reilly (Frank Fay) and the ‘Contentious’ (read ‘Strong’) Farmer Dan Fogarty (W.G. Fay) is that of the overtly nationalist Casey (Harry Young), the Poor Law Guardian: ‘O’R EILLY: My good man, capital and science own no nationality. Besides its use by us will enrich the country./ CASEY: We don’t know that at all. A private company is not the country, nor the half of it.’73 The play reaches its finale in an unholy alliance between O’Reilly and Fogarty as the capitalists marginalize Casey’s plea for social justice: ‘CASEY (regretfully): But Fogarty’s on your side, now./ O’R EILLY: I guess he is. He’s not a fool. When the meeting’s over everybody will be with us./ CASEY: There’s treachery in this. The country is betrayed. I’ll have no more to do with it.’74 Fogarty’s triumphant speech is oddly prophetic of the future hegemony of the Catholic bourgeoisie: ‘FOGARTY: wait till Sunday comes, and I’ll make a speech will rouse the nation to it’s [sic] duty in regard to native industries. The future is before us, for the country’s sick of Casey’s [sic]. The time is come, and I’m the man to lead you.’75 The play ends with O’Reilly asking Fogarty to be best man at his wedding as he leads the labourers in applauding Fogarty’s popular mandate: ‘O’R EILLY: Three cheers for Mr. Fogarty. He’s saved the mineral workers. [All cheer.]’76 The memory of Casey’s dissent is finally drowned out by the applause, and the ruthless machinations of the venture capitalists are mellowed by the reassuring atmosphere of the engagement celebrations.


Perhaps the greatest irony of The Mineral Workers is that the subjects to whom the title refers are barely present in the play at all, with Dick (J.F. Barlow) the ‘Engine Driver’ having only two lines of minor dialogue, and the other labourers referred to fleetingly in the stage directions. The sheer liminality of the labourers’ presence within the play confers on them an almost metaphysical status through which the brute facts of their exploitation can be safely elided and repressed. A similar sublimation of the trauma of class conflict occurs in Daniel Corkery’s The Labour Leader (1919),77 which received polite but firm critical condemnation typified in this extract from the Irish Times: ‘In the company of coal-porters, quay labourers, quarrymen, and other horny-handed sons of toil struggling to improve their conditions, there is hardly room for him. He struggles manfully in three acts to present a vivid picture of labour at bay, but he fails to give a finished canvas.’78 The play focuses on the labour leadership composed of pompous buffoons who spout platitudes and feign serious political activity, while the plight of the Quay Labourers takes second place to the contest between the putative leaders for overall hegemony, which ends in a farcical bout of fisticuffs. The play concludes with the restoration of the status quo as David ‘Davna’ Lombard (Paul Farrell) survives a leadership bid from his friend Phil Kennedy (F.J. McCormick) and the two are reunited after the dissenting voices of John Dempsey (Peter Nolan), John Clarke (J.G. St John) and James O’Sullivan (Eric Gorman) have been permanently quelled: ‘PHIL: Do you mean that I –/ DAV … you, or some other that I will have raised up, will push me from my chair. It doesn’t matter. It’s all for the best. Come on, Phil; I must carry on. I go to lead my people, while ‘tis given me. As for you (he turns towards DEMPSEY and the others), you are numbered with the dead. Don’t dare to follow me, any of you.’79 Like Corkery, Boyle employs the classic plot trajectory of order, disorder, and order restored, in which the traumatic symptoms of class antagonism which threaten the Symbolic order of the Catholic middle class are reincorporated, through the transmogrification of social trauma, into the fantasy objects of comically pathetic characters. Boyle’s plays combine the cathartic elements of the confessional booth with the comedic elements of the music hall. The brute facts underlying the rural embourgeoisement that produced the urban middle class are safely transformed into the venial sins of strong farmers like Shan Grogan and publican-cum-grocers like Jeremiah Dempsey. The authenticity of Boyle’s representation was evoked in reaction to W.J. Lawrence’s astute commentary on Family Failing (1912): ‘after an opening act of genuine comedy, the action descends to a farcical – almost


ultra-farcical plane, and towards the end one detects a palpable forcing of the note.’80 Boyle’s sarcastic retort was that of the informed countryman’s response to urban naïveté: ‘How little those Abbey people know of country life. But where’s the use of talking? You Dubliners know more of farm life than the farmers. I made a play to amuse an audience legitimately, and they were amused – that’s the main thing.’81 In these closing words Boyle seems to hoist himself by his own petard in contradicting his initial intentions to ‘go much nearer the precipice without going over it than [Yeats] or even a townbred Catholic dare venture’. The general evidence of Boyle’s plays indicates that he hardly went near the ‘precipice’, and by his own admission his plays were designed mainly to amuse rather than abuse the public, particularly when it was composed of the middle-class, townbred Catholics that formed his audience. Colum and Boyle’s emphasis on ‘authentic’ reproduction of the ‘reality’ of peasant life anticipated the direction in which dramatists such as Lennox Robinson, T.C. Murray and St. John Ervine would go in their use of the realist style, and which will be engaged with later in this chapter. Padraic Pearse’s The Singer (1917) goes against the grain of the realist movement in Irish drama by using folk-tale, Catholic metaphysics and heroic legend. As previously indicated, MacDara (Edmond Bulfin) is something of an oxymoronic character, being simultaneously the ‘poor man of the mountains’82 and an intellectual who taught ‘Irish and Latin and Greek in a school’ and ‘wrote a few poems [which] were printed in a paper’.83 There is no evidence in the play to suggest that MacDara underwent class transition or received formal education other than the statement, ‘I went to the school and taught in it for a year’,84 which surely indicates that MacDara’s attendance was in a teaching rather than learning capacity. What is significant then is that MacDara is an intellectual with leadership potential who emerges from and represents the people-nation: I have lived with the homeless and with the breadless. Oh, Maoilsheachlainn, the poor, the poor! In the pleasant country places I have seen them, but oftener in the dark, unquiet streets of the city. The people, Maoilsheachlainn, the dumb, suffering people; reviled and outcast, yet pure and splendid and faithful. In them I saw, or seemed to see again, the Face of God.85 The equivalence of poverty with purity evokes the paradoxical phenomenon of the sublime subaltern whose traumatic qualities are crystallized in the fantasy object of MacDara: ‘CUIMIN: in the Joyce


country they think it is some great hero that has come back again to lead the people against the Gall, or maybe an angel, or the Son of Mary Himself that has come down on the earth.’86 The multiple idiosyncrasies of Western peasant, wandering bard, teacher, leader and Messianic hero are unified in MacDara and it is the sheer concentration of disparate qualities into one figure that makes MacDara such a powerful object cause of national desire within Irish Ireland ideology: ‘MACDARA: The fifteen were too many. Old men, you did not do your work well enough. You should have kept all back but one. One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world.’87 MacDara’s function as fantasy object can be further explained by reference to Gramsci’s study of Machiavelli’s The Prince. According to Gramsci the figure of the Prince ‘represents plastically and “anthropomorphically” the symbol of the “collective will”. In terms of the qualities, characteristics, duties and requirements of a concrete individual. And gives political passions a more concrete form’.88 Gramsci suggests that Machiavelli’s Prince could be studied as a ‘historical exemplification’ of: a political ideology expressed neither in the form of a cold utopia nor as learned theorising, but rather by a creation of concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will. The utopian character of The Prince lies in the fact that the Prince had no real historical existence; he did not present himself immediately and objectively to the Italian people, but was a pure theoretical abstraction – a symbol of the leader and ideal condottiere.89 Gramsci argues that ‘[t]he modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.’90 There is a striking similarity between Gramsci’s formulation of the modern prince as a ‘concrete phantasy’ which has no ‘real historical existence’ yet gives ‘political passions a more concrete form’, and Lacan’s formulation of the objet petit a as an impossible fragment of the Real which has no corporeal existence other than its form as an empty signifier which materializes the void of desire.91 Apropos The Singer, Pearse almost seems to anticipate Gramsci’s theoretical formulation as MacDara is a modern prince before the fact in his materialization of the national-popular collective will. MacDara’s

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function as the classed subaltern qua fantasy object – the ‘poor man of the mountains’ whose purity in poverty elevates him to the status of national object cause of desire – is the ultimate transmogrification of the Peasant within Irish Ireland and as such is ultimately problematical. The Singer’s status as the work of a dramatist and patriot whose heroic death has conferred on him the status of object cause of national desire in Irish culture necessarily demands care and respect in any critical evaluation. Nevertheless, as Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham suggest, ‘[f]ortunately, it is not really necessary to regard the play as a sacred cow. Although it is very like Yeats’ once-revered Cathleen ni Houlihan in its sentiment, it is also like Maud Gonne’s Dawn and even like Constance Markievicz’s The Invincible Mother. The Gonne and Markievicz plays are as impeccably and implacably republican, and yet hardly an Irishman has ever heard of, much less read, either of them.’92 MacDara’s oxymoronic status as the classed subaltern qua fantasy object depends on the contradictory fusion of Western peasant and national leader, where class and colonial subjection are conflated in MacDara’s transcendent, Messianic death. The trauma of class disparity and economic hardship which MacDara registers is neutralized in its sublimation as an expression of divinity and ‘the Face of God’. The equivalence of poverty with purity as ‘reviled and outcast, yet pure and splendid and faithful’ ultimately serves to elide the traumatic facts of poverty through a symbolic transformation that offers cold comfort to ‘the dumb, suffering people’, whose yearning for economic redemption persists long after national emancipation has occurred. A major tactical strength of Pearse’s play was the deployment of Catholic symbolism in forging a sentimental connection with an overwhelmingly Catholic populace. Catholicism and familism constituted the ideological cornerstone of the Irish people-nation and were successfully embraced by Irish Ireland ideologists and the praxis of Catholic bourgeois nationalism in its hegemonic ascension in 1922 and consolidation of the Irish Free State thereafter. One of the most effective critics of this hegemonic ascension and its glorification of the peasant as sublime subaltern was T.C. Murray, who devoted his energies to debunking not only Irish Ireland but also Anglo-Irish representations of the peasantry: ‘I knew the Irish Catholic peasant from my childhood, and while the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory charmed my imagination, I could never recognise the characters that moved on their stage as counterparts of the country-folk of South Munster, to which I belonged. They created, these three, a peasant world of their own, and


one surrendered to it as to the mood of an old folk-tale.’93 Murray contends that: [i]t was left to Lennox Robinson to sound a new note in the Irish theatre. In their way of thought, their speech, their accent, the people that he created were the people I knew. From the field, the farmhouse, the shop, the wayside tavern, they seemed to have wandered on to his stage. Thus began the realistic movement which produced such a long succession of plays and which reached its climax in the drama of Sean O’Casey.94 What Murray neglects to mention here is his own position alongside fellow Cork Realists Lennox Robinson and R.J. Ray, as one of the most significant members of the realist movement in Irish theatre. Unlike Robinson, Murray was not a theatre ‘professional’ in the fullest sense of the word insofar as he spent forty years of his life teaching at various schools in County Cork and from 1915 he was headmaster of Inchicore Model School in Dublin. Murray remained throughout his playwriting career a redoubtable critic of social injustice whose plays were not only enduringly popular but offered subtly incisive criticism of the premises of Catholic bourgeois nationalism. Murray’s first play to be introduced to a Dublin audience was Birthright (1910),95 which gave an uncompromising portrayal of the fierce competition for land ownership, which is played out not between rival neighbours, but between the two brothers Shane (Arthur Sinclair) and Hugh Morrissey (Fred O’Donovan), who are in dispute over their rights in the system of stem inheritance which underpins the familist institution. The conflict comes to a head when the eldest son Hugh is displaced in his father’s will by the more industrious Shane: HUGH (hotly): You’re a liar, and I will say it again, and I’ll say it till I’m hoarse, for there was never a dirtier grabber in all Ireland than yourself – grabbing a brother’s land. SHANE: That’s a life for you! What right had you to this place – you that never did an honest day’s work in your life? HUGH: What right had I? SHANE: Yes, yes, what right? Is it because you were born a year or two before me?, Tis the man’s work an’ not the reckoning of his years that makes the right! So it is!96 The play reaches its tragic conclusion when the two come to blows and Shane accidentally kills Hugh. Birthright’s significance lies in its rigorous


desublimation of the classed subaltern as Small Farmer qua fantasy object, where the internecine strife intrinsic to the familist system actually undermines its structural integrity. The dialectic of the settled community and its discontents is inverted with disastrous consequences. Hugh is the eldest son who should be the candidate to inherit the family property, but whose disaffection with familist orthodoxy causes his father Bat to promote Shane as heir to the estate and demote Hugh as the extraneous sibling who is expected and required to emigrate. While Murray’s play deals with one of the most sensitive issues in rural life in quite a severe manner, it did not provoke anything like the controversy that raged over some of Synge’s plays. As Robert Hogan, Richard Burnham and Daniel P. Poteet suggest: ‘His work did not seem to distort, to exaggerate, or to exploit, but to investigate fairly and humanely; and he was rewarded by twenty-five years of absorbed interest and attention.’97 The critic Jack Point made the pertinent observation that although ‘Mr. T.C. Murray is generally admitted to be in the front rank of our present Irish dramatists … I am inclined to think that the author is more at home in what may for convenience be styled an Irish problem play … than in the domain of comedy.’98 Another dramatist whose best work lay in his interpretation of the ‘Irish problem play’ was St. John Ervine, whose John Ferguson (1915)99 offers a compelling portrayal of the difficulties experienced by Ulster’s rural proletariat. The eponymous protagonist is smallholder John Ferguson (Sydney J. Morgan), a Job-like character whose Christian devotion is tested to the limit by a series of tragic events. The Fergusons are on the verge of bankruptcy and the vicious gombeen man (usurer) Henry Witherow (Arthur Sinclair) is about to foreclose his mortgage on their farm, when John strikes a deal with the cowardly grocer James Caesar (J.M. Kerrigan) to marry his daughter Hannah (Nora Close) and thus save the family from destitution: ‘JAMES CAESAR (eagerly): I wouldn’t make a hard bargain with you, John! Do you hear me, Hannah? Your da and ma could live on in the place where he was born.’100 In spite of her initial commitment Hannah reveals that she cannot abide Caesar and the Fergusons are once again at the mercy of Witherow, who multiplies the family’s torment exponentially when he brutally rapes Hannah. John’s faith prevents him from retaliating but his son Andrew (Fred O’Donovan) is unable to contain his fury and accomplishes what Caesar threatens but is unable to do by killing Witherow: ‘A NDREW FERGUSON: He didn’t kill Witherow, da. He hadn’t the pluck to kill him. It was me that done it!’101 The admission of guilt sends the final shockwave through the Ferguson


homestead to the extent that John momentarily falters in his religious conviction and desperately begs his son to flee justice: ‘JOHN FERGUSON: Come on, son, and get ready! You must quit the place the night … / A NDREW FERGUSON: No, da … /JOHN FERGUSON: Ay, son, you must! You can go up to Belfast by the next train You’d better change your name, son! … (He puts his hands to his head as if he were dazed.)’102 Andrew concludes the discussion by reminding John of his convictions and insists on accepting responsibility for the murder for which the constabulary have blamed Caesar: ‘A NDREW FERGUSON: It’s no good other people doing things for him. He must do them himself./ JOHN FERGUSON: Yes, yes./ A NDREW FERGUSON: And it’s no good any one doing anything for me. I must do it myself, da. Jimmy can’t pay for me. He can only pay for himself.’103 Andrew’s integrity and brave acceptance of a probable death sentence are enhanced in their juxtaposition with Witherow’s brutality and Caesar’s cowardice. What is crucial here is Ervine’s portrayal of the rural petit bourgeoisie in such a derogatory manner, as Witherow’s bestial treatment of Hannah magnifies his exorbitant treatment of the Fergusons, and Caesar’s craven paralysis further serves to render the enfranchised members of the community as despicable entities compared with the Fergusons as the impoverished but dignified smallholder family which the petit bourgeois figures exploit and abuse. The depiction of the exorbitant gombeen man usurping the role of the rackrenting landlord is reminiscent of an observation made by Ervine’s idol Bernard Shaw in his superlative John Bull’s Other Island (1907): ‘AUNT JUDY: Sure never mind him, Mr Broadbent. It doesn’t matter, anyhow, because there’s hardly any landlords left; and therll soon be none at all./ L ARRY: On the contrary, therll soon be nothing else; and the Lord help Ireland then.’104 The significance of Ervine’s play in this regard lies in its fierce denunciation of the new bourgeois ascendancy of the strong farmer and the tradesman, and also in the desublimation of the Small Farmer fantasy object to reveal the traumatic facts of poverty and exorbitation, which are the internal contradictions of the new social order of peasant proprietorship and middle-class ambition. Andrew is not the self-immolatory national hero of The Saxon Shillin’ or The Singer, but is a classed subaltern in Ireland’s rural community whose murder of Witherow constitutes a potent return of the repressed trauma which dissolves the bourgeois Symbolic order and whose structural integrity can only be restored by Andrew’s exclusion. The trauma of class conflict takes a further twist in Ervine’s earlier play Mixed Marriage (1911),105 which deals with the intersection of class

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antagonism and religious sectarianism, and was ironically produced in the year when Ulster unionism and the Protestant minority faced the real possibility of Home Rule: The Parliament Act of 1911 broke the power of the House of Lords to defy the popular will as represented in the House of Commons. By removing the last parliamentary bulwark against home rule legislation for Ireland, this major measure of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom outraged Irish unionists, whose infuriated reaction to the threat of home rule unleashed violence into twentieth-century Irish politics.106 J.J. Lee suggests that ‘ “Home Rule is Rome Rule” was the slogan that touched a really responsive chord in Protestant hearts’,107 a fear which is registered in Ervine’s play by the Protestant proletarian John Rainey (Arthur Sinclair) in a debate (spoken in strong Ulster dialect) with his wife (Máire O’Neill): ‘MRS R AINEY: A can’t help thinkin’ it’s their country we’ve got./ R AINEY: Their country indeed! What d’ye think’ ud become o’ us if this wur their country? There isn’t a Prodesan in Irelan’ wud be left alive.’108 The play is informed by a Shavian dialectical approach to the problem of class unity in the face of religious sectarianism, typified in this exchange between Rainey’s son Hugh (J.M. Kerrigan) and his Catholic friend Michael O’Hara (J.A. O’Rourke): MICHAEL: Here’s a chance t’kill bigotry and make the men o’ Bilfast realise that onderneath the Cathlik an’ the Prodesan there’s the plain workin’ man. HUGH: Ay, that’s it. They’re jus’ the same onderneath. They need the same food an’ shelter an’ clo’es, an’ they suffer the same wrongs. The employers don’t give a man better wages fur bein’ a Prodesan or a Cathlik, do they?109 Hugh appeals to his father to represent the case for class unity at a public meeting and for a while Rainey’s socialist convictions overcome his religious prejudices: ‘HUGH: Man, da, whin A’m out wi’ Mickey, A sometimes think what a fine thing it ‘ud be if the workin’ men o’ Ireland was to join their han’s thegither an’ try an’ make a great country o’ it. There was a time whin Irelan’ su the islan’ o’ saints. By God, da, if we cud bring that time back again./ R AINEY: It’s a gran’ dream.’110 The dream, however, is short-lived as Rainey’s religious intolerance overwhelms


him when he discovers that Michael intends to marry his Catholic girlfriend Nora Murray (Máire Níc Shiubhlaigh), and the socialist speech which Rainey was to present becomes an affirmation of Protestant fears of Home Rule which rends the possibility of class unity asunder. When the crowd discover Michael and Nora’s relationship they gather outside Rainey’s house and a riot subsequently develops. Nora holds herself responsible for all the trouble and rushes out hysterically to try and quell the disturbance but is tragically shot dead in the confusion and the play ends with the family in a state of turmoil: ‘HUGH: Nora, ye’re all right, aren’t ye? Aw, spake t’ me, womman./ NORA (feebly): Don’t be cryin’, Hugh. It wus right t’ shoot me. It wus my fault. A’m quaren glad./ R AINEY (as if dreaming). A wus right. A know A wus right./ MRS R AINEY (weeping a little, and patting him gently) Aw, my poor man, my poor man.’111 As J.J. Lee suggests, ‘Ulster Protestant workers saw little advantage in adopting the class politics becoming gradually more fashionable among British workers. Their reluctance was economically and psychologically rational, at least in the short term. They did better out of race than out of class.’112 Therefore, ‘Protestant workers could see little likelihood that class solidarity with poorer Catholic workers would improve their own economic position. And solidarity with Catholics might imply equality with Catholics, depriving Protestants not only of their relatively privileged economic position, but also of the psychic pleasure of their racial birth right. Class solidarity would threaten status and identity alike.’113 The antagonism between class and race which informs Ervine’s play anticipates the critique manifest in plays by Sean O’Casey and George Shiels of the priority of race/nation over class during the revolutionary period which persisted after the establishment of the Free State in 1922. John Rainey’s prophetic fears for the status of Protestants in Home Rule Ireland were confirmed as the Catholic bourgeois élite114 consolidated its hegemony in the years after independence and introduced severe legislation in which ‘divorce was excluded, birth control outlawed, [and] the Ne Temere decree enforced Catholic conditioning on children of mixed marriages.’115 The radical dream of the Easter Rebels ‘to live the things that [they] before imagined’ was warped into the conservative orthodoxy of the praxis of Catholic bourgeois nationalism, and the protesting voice became increasingly marginalized as the ideological hegemony of Irish Ireland underpinned the new ‘reality’ of the Irish Free State.

3 Whatever Rule We may have, We’ll always have Our Tramps and Paupers

While the ‘rigorous conservatism’ of the Irish Free State has become ‘a cliché’, R.F. Foster suggests that ‘what matters most’ about the social climate of 26-county Ireland in the 1920s ‘is that the dominant pre-occupation of the regime was self-definition against Britain – cultural and political. Other priorities were consciously demoted’.1 On both sides of the Treaty divide, ‘the reaction of conservative rural nationalism was predictably hostile to the Labour renaissance.’2 As the Catholic bourgeois élite consolidated their hegemony, almost inevitably ‘nationalist politics short-circuited class politics. But the unwritten history of the events from 1916 to 1923 must include the post-war challenge of Irish labour – defused not only by the effects of recession and emigration but also by the polarization of nationalist politics.’3 In this arena ‘exalted leaders first fought out a brutal duel over a form of words, and then constructed a new state around preoccupations that resolutely ignored even the vague social and economic desiderata once outlined for Pearse’s visionary republic’.4 J.J. Lee argues that the President of the second Dáil, William T. Cosgrave, institutionalized the neglect of labour, by demoting the Department of Labour, established by the first Dáil, to a mere section of the Department of Industry and Commerce. When Patrick McGilligan, the lawyer son of a comfortable Ulster businessman, succeeded Joe McGrath, the only economics minister who might be suspected of labour sympathies, as minister in 1924, he made no secret of his sentiments. ‘People may have to die in this country and may have to die from starvation’ he told the Dáil.5 66

We’ll always have Our Tramps and Paupers

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At a time when the trauma of class disparity was so blatantly repressed into the social unconscious, it is all the more significant that in the drama produced during the 1920s the classed subaltern occupied a position of symbolic centrality, particularly in Sean O’Casey’s controversial representation of Dublin’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, and George Shiels’s popular representation of rural communities. While the rural subaltern occupied a symbolically central position ever since the inception of the ILT in terms of the dramatic preoccupation with the Peasant, Small Farmer, Landless Labourers, Tramps and other socially subordinate figures, the urban classed subaltern received comparatively scant attention until the advent of O’Casey’s Dublin plays in the early 1920s. St. John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911), A. Patrick Wilson’s Victims (1912)6 and The Slough (1914),7 and Oliver St John Gogarty and Joseph O’Connor’s Blight, The Tragedy of Dublin (1917)8, are among only a handful of plays dealing with the issue of the classed subaltern in an urban context. The dramatic exclusion of the urban classed subaltern is understandable, if not entirely excusable, when one considers the overwhelmingly agrarian nature of Irish society at the time. Hence the importance of O’Casey’s focus on life in the Dublin tenements, which not only constituted a break from the ‘cottage kitchen’ setting of the traditional ‘peasant play’ that had become standard fare at the Abbey, but also constituted one of the first sustained dramatic engagements with the subject of the urban poor. O’Casey’s Dublin plays offer a seminal representation of a subordinate social group, and, while he apparently absorbed Marx’s dictum that because the poor ‘cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’,9 it is the form of that representation which is of concern here. Where the Peasant functioned as a symptomatic trope whose status as ‘quintessence of the nation’ served to mediate the trauma of class disparity intrinsic to the competing ideologies of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland, so the Proletarian in O’Casey’s plays functioned as the symptom of the newly hegemonic Catholic bourgeois nationalism. The impetus behind O’Casey’s representation of the classed subaltern in his Dublin plays lay in his frustration at what he saw as the conflation of class struggle with the national struggle against the British Empire. This came to a head in the resignation of his secretaryship of the socialist Irish Citizen Army (ICA) in protest against both its alliance with the nationalist forces of the Irish Volunteers and its association with Countess Markievicz.10 When national liberation was not followed by economic liberation, an exasperated O’Casey noted in 1925 that after four years of independence, ‘Grenville Street is here to-day, a little older, but as ugly and horrible as ever.’11 Barely a year after these words

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were written, O’Casey gave his most public condemnation of the subordination of socialism by nationalism with the production of his magnum opus, The Plough and the Stars (1926),12 which portrayed the events of the 1916 Easter Rising from the perspective of Dublin’s poor. During the second act of the fourth performance of the play on 11 February 1926, a protest broke out the like of which had not been seen since Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and the controversy raged on in the popular press. On 15 February the Irish Independent printed letters about the play including one from Mrs Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, who had been a leader in the protest and whose husband Francis Sheehy-Skeffington had died trying to prevent looting during the Rising: ‘The demonstration was not directed against the individual actor, nor was it directed to the moral aspect of the play. It was on national grounds solely, voicing a passionate indignation against the outrage of a drama staged in a supposedly national theatre, which held up to derision and obloquy the men and women of Easter Week.’13 O’Casey’s response was as emphatic as it was unrepentant: The heavy-hearted expression by Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington about ‘The Ireland that remembers with tear-dimmed eyes all that Easter Week stands for’ makes me sick. Some of the men can’t even get a job. Mrs. Skeffington is certainly not dumb, but she appears to be both blind and deaf to all the things that are happening around her. Is the Ireland that is pouring to the picture houses, to the dance halls, to the football matches, remembering with tear-dimmed eyes all that Easter Week stands for? Tears may be in the eyes of the navvies working on the Shannon scheme, but they are not for Ireland.14 In spite of O’Casey’s defiance the conservative backlash against his work continued, as did the demise of socialism under a Free State government described by Seán O’Faoláin as ‘an unholy alliance between the church, the new businessmen, and the politicians’.15 O’Casey’s final response was exile and by March 1926 he had left Ireland. Since the production of O’Casey’s Dublin plays, critical debate has revolved around the problematic relationship between class and nation in The Shadow of a Gunman (1923),16 Juno and the Paycock (1924)17 and especially The Plough and the Stars. In Twentieth Century Irish Drama Christopher Murray argues that ‘[f]rom the perspective of the 1990s O’Casey stands out as Ireland’s greatest playwright of the century. He it was who most passionately, most powerfully and most memorably dramatised the traumatic birth of a nation. He was the first English-speaking


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dramatist to make the poor, the undereducated and the dispossessed the subjects of modern tragi-comedy.’18 Murray’s evaluation of O’Casey’s work stands in stark contrast to Seamus Deane’s earlier assessment that O’Casey is ‘a provincial writer whose moment has come again in the present wave of revisionist Irish history, itself a provincial phenomenon’.19 Deane contends that ‘O’Casey does not in any of his plays, and least of all in the three early ones which established his reputation, develop a critique of Irish history or politics, even though he makes gestures in that direction.’20 Following on from Deane’s argument, Declan Kiberd states that ‘O’Casey’s code scarcely moved beyond a sentimentalization of victims, and this in turn led him to a profound distrust of anyone who makes an idea the basis for an action.’21 Kiberd suggests that The Plough and the Stars is indicative of O’Casey’s uneven account of the birth of a nation insofar as ‘the nationalist case is never put, merely mocked. not for even twenty minutes of a two-and-a-half hour play are the rebels allowed to state their case’.22 Sentimentalization of victims is the key issue in O’Casey’s representation of socially subordinate characters, especially in the deployment of comedy as a dramaturgical strategy which mediates class disparity. Comic mediation is indicated in Aristotle’s definition of comedy as ‘an imitation of inferior people – not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction; for example, a comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not involve pain.’23 In this sense one can see how comedy can be used as a way of mediating the trauma of class disparity, to render socially ‘inferior’ people as ridiculous and ‘disgraceful’ in a way that ‘is ugly and distorted, but does not involve [the] pain’ of absorbing the opprobrium intrinsic to that social inferiority. Kiberd notes O’Casey’s ‘delight in the comic male pair’, highlighting the influence upon his dramaturgy of Victorian melodrama, especially the work of Dion Boucicault, which goes some way to explain O’Casey’s popular appeal which ‘saved the Abbey from financial ruin by wooing large numbers of the Queen’s audience to his plays’.24 Where O’Casey inherits the popular appeal of Boucicaultian melodrama he also inherits the problems concerning the representation of socially subordinate characters which are part and parcel of that particular style. With Boucicault there is a valorization of indigence insofar as the wandering tramps Myles-na-Coppaleen in The Colleen Bawn (1861)25 and Conn the eponymous lead in The Shaughraun (1874)26 are the mediators who play crucial roles in resolving disputes emerging


from both class and colonial disparity, while the facts of their own subordinate status as homeless ‘spalpeen’27 are carefully repressed features of the play. Myles is the archetypal stage-Irish rogue with stage-Irish brogue, who saves the ‘Colleen Bawn’ Eily O’Connor from Danny Mann the psychotic ‘hunchback servant’. In the finale Myles provides the denouement resolving the various economic and ethical conflicts surrounding the haute bourgeois Cregan family and the lumpenproletarian O’Connor family. Myles’s final act is to validate the union of ‘poor simple’28 Eily and her dashing paramour Hardress Cregan. Where Myles’s actions result in social stability for the major characters, he ends the play as the Wandering Tramp who will presumably go back to his ‘bed as usual on the mountain above – the bolster is stuffed wid rocks, and I’ll have a cloud round me for a blanket’.29 In Boucicault’s later play, Conn the Shaughraun is the quintessential vagabond, ‘the soul of every fair, the life of every funeral, the first fiddle at all weddings and patterns’.30 He consistently serves the needs of the déclassé haute bourgeois Ffolliot family, from providing sustenance for Claire Ffolliot via his poaching activities to risking his life to save Robert Ffolliot from the schemes of Cory Kinchela, a petit bourgeois ‘Squireen’ hell-bent on achieving social elevation by dispossessing the Ffolliots of their land and property. The play ends with Conn imploring the audience to celebrate his status as the affable rogue, while the rest of the cast cheer Conn as the curtain goes down: ‘You are the only friend I have. Long life t’ye! – Many a time have you looked over my faults – will you be blind to them now, and hould out your hands once more to a poor Shaughraun?’31 The direct address interpellates the audience within a discourse that celebrates Conn’s vagrant status and admires his audacious triumph over the mercantilist forces of Kinchela and his minions. What the celebration elides are the facts of Conn’s status as the propertyless figure within the play, occupying the lowest social rank of vagrant/poacher whose social inferiority is consistently elided by his symbolic elevation as improbable hero and redeemer of the Ffolliot clan. In both plays the stage-Irish brogue, derring-do, buffoonery and roguery all serve to sentimentalize Myles and Conn in a comedic form that mediates the pain of their indigence, precisely by valorizing that indigent lifestyle as something to be admired and celebrated. In his Dublin plays O’Casey employs a similar strategy of comic mediation, particularly where the male characters are concerned, to the extent that Boucicault’s Peasants and Poachers become O’Casey’s


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Proletarians and Lumpenproletarians. Such characters are manifested clearly in the comic male pairing of The Shadow of a Gunman, with Donal Davoren (Arthur Shields) the aspiring poet who ‘bears upon his body the marks of the struggle for existence and the efforts towards self-expression’ and Seamus Shields (F.J. McCormick) the ‘pedlar’ who manifests ‘the superstition, the fear and the malignity of primitive man.’32 The ‘absolute untidiness’ of the room coupled with Shields’s ‘congenital slovenliness’ palpably evokes the squalor of their environment, but the traumatic effect of their squalor on the audience is constantly alleviated by their literary battinage: ‘DAVOREN: Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! /SEUMAS: That’s from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. I could never agree with Shelley, not that there’s anything to be said against him as a poet – as a poet – but …’33 The odd juxtaposition of penurious circumstance with philosophical conversation anticipates Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with the aimless tramps Vladimir and Estragon discussing everything from ‘erections’ to existentialism.34 Beckett would later praise O’Casey as ‘a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres.’35 Where O’Casey uses Shields and Davoren to ruminate poetic possibilities and dissect revolutionary nationalism, and Beckett uses Vladimir and Estragon to examine existential themes, both playwrights tend to valorize indigence while disavowing the social conditions determining that indigence. While this is a problem in Beckett’s play it is doubly so in the work of a self-proclaimed socialist like O’Casey, who is quick to debunk both British colonialism and Irish Republicanism but slow to engage in a serious examination of class politics. The dramatic tension in the play is between the idealization and the reality of republican insurrection, with Davoren romantically misrecognized as the republican gunman by Tommy Owens (Michael J. Dolan), and Shields continually debunking armed revolt: SEUMAS: It’s the civilians that suffer; when there’s an ambush they don’t know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire, an’ shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland. I’m a Nationalist meself, right enough I believe in the freedom of Ireland, an’ that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin’ about dyin’ for the people, when it’s the people that are dyin’ for the gunmen! With all due respect to the gunmen, I don’t want them to die for me.36


The play reaches its climax with Minnie Powell (Gertrude Murphy) shot dead as she dashes out in a pique of revolutionary fervour to face the British Auxiliaries. Yet this is the only traumatic event in a play that devotes its energies to denouncing colonialism and nationalism without denouncing the immiseration of the tenement dwellers. Instead the audience is invited to laugh at Shields’s and Davoren’s pompous pronouncements and cowardly ineffectuality, or amuse themselves with the ignorance and illiteracy of the other residents: MRS. HENDERSON: Them words is true, Mr. Gallicker, and they aren’t. For to be wise is to be a fool, an’ to be a fool is to be wise. MR. GALLOGHER [with deprecating tolerance]: Oh, Mrs. Henderson, that’s a parrotox. MRS. HENDERSON: It may be what a parrot talks, or a blackbird, or, for the matter of that, a lark – but it’s what Julia Henderson thinks, any … whisht, is that a Stop Press?37 Such lines had the desired comic effect on the Abbey audience, as the usually acerbic Frank Hugh O’Donnell records: It was indeed a welcome and wholesome sign to sit last night in the Abbey Theatre and listen to an audience squirming with laughter and revelling boisterously in the satire, which Mr. Sean O’Casey has put into his two-act play. And, too, it came as a revelation, for Mr. O’Casey has in the matter of dramatic construction, broken completely away from the conventional. Of plot he had little, that that little only really interesting towards the play’s end. But his characterisation was excellent and convincing. His characters were as perfect, and his photographs, for one really felt his men and women were but photographs, was nothing less than the work of genius. It is difficult to say anything about work such as this, so original, so brilliant, so true, and so finished in all its details. Out of small materials he pieced together the most genuine comedy that I think I have ever seen.38 What is particularly interesting here is the connection between photographic accuracy and comic genius to the extent that the characterization of the symbolic Proletarians and Lumpenproletarians as comic figures provided accurate representations of the corporeal proletarians and lumpenproletarians living barely a hundred yards away from the Abbey Theatre. O’Donnell’s sentiments were echoed a


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year later by P.S. O’Hegarty in the Irish Statesman calling the play ‘a gramophone record of the Dublin accent and the Dublin tenement and the Dublin poor, all illumined by the Terror and sharpened and defined by it’.39 W.B. Yeats would later defend the authenticity of O’Casey’s representation during the furore over The Plough and the Stars by stating that: ‘It is the life of tenements by a man who has lived in tenements.’40 The prevalent image of O’Casey as the working-class dramatist who emerged from and dramatically represented Dublin tenement life was carefully crafted in his Autobiographies41 and sanctioned by favourable critics of his plays from their first production onwards. Since the 1960s, however, biographical evidence has called this orthodoxy into question, and recently Nicholas Grene has argued that on closer examination ‘it appears that rather than the working-class autodidact from the slums of his self-representations, O’Casey belonged to that commoner type, the writer from a middle-class family gone down in the world.’42 Grene states that ‘[t]he only time O’Casey ever spent in what could credibly be called a tenement was the period of five months in 1921–1922 where he shared a room in 35 Mountjoy Square, on which experience he based The Shadow of a Gunman’.43 Taking into account the autobiographical nature of The Shadow and O’Casey’s own déclassé petit bourgeois provenance, one becomes increasingly aware of his social distance from the subjects he portrays, apparent in the quasi-anthropological style O’Casey uses to evoke the tenements and their residents. The cultural distance between anthropologist and the subjects under observation parallels the cultural and class distance apparent in O’Casey’s depiction of the residents. In the opening lines we are quickly made aware that Shields the pedlar has the ‘fear and the malignity of primitive man,’ while Mrs Grigson (May Craig) is ‘is one of the cave-dwellers of Dublin, living as she does in a tenement kitchen, to which only an occasional sickly beam of sunlight filters through a grating in the yard; the consequent general dimness of her abode has given her a habit of peering through half-closed eyes. She is slovenly dressed in an old skirt and bodice; her face is grimy, not because her habits are dirty – for, although she is untidy, she is a clean woman – but because of the smoky atmosphere of her room.’44 We are told that Minnie ‘is at ease in all places and before all persons, even those of a superior education, so long as she meets them in the atmosphere that surrounds the members of her own class’45 but ‘like all of her class, Minnie is not able to converse very long on the one subject’.46 The simianization of Shields and troglodization of Mrs Grigson renders cultural (if not also evolutionary) distance, while the proletarianization of Minnie as ‘of her class’ renders social distance.


The positioning of the implied reader/spectator here is not an immersion into the quotidian lifestyle of the tenements, but rather an experience of the gaze of the cultivated bourgeois subject upon the socially distant Proletarian object, paralleled in the gaze of the haute bourgeois Ascendancy subject on the socially distant Peasant object prevalent in the work of Yeats, Gregory and Synge. As Grene notes: The inner-ness of the inner-city slums, their proximity to the very theatre itself, were as much distinct features of the O’Casey play as the far-out-ness of the earlier Abbey dramas. In neither case was the life or milieu represented that of the audience. But the Dublin trilogy showed Dubliners the life of their own city, and whereas Synge’s vision of the West was distrusted in part because of his class background, O’Casey’s supposed tenement origin was the guarantee of the authenticity of his drama.47 The constitutive gap of desire between Ascendancy subject and Peasant object is paralleled in O’Casey’s tenement plays in the gap between bourgeois subject and Proletarian object. In a sense then, O’Casey substitutes the ‘peasant quality’ indicative of the earlier rural-based drama for the proletarian quality inherent in his urban-based drama. Where the classed subaltern as Peasant fantasy object and its variations functioned as the symptom of the contending Anglo-Irish and IrishIreland ideologies in a rural setting, the classed subaltern as Proletarian fantasy object became the symptom of the hegemonic bourgeois national ideology in an urban setting. The bourgeois subjects can enjoy their symptom of authentic proletarian Dublin, an imitation of inferior people who are laughably disgraceful, in a way that does not involve the pain of having to venture forth into the northside slums. In Juno and the Paycock Jack Boyle (Barry Fitzgerald) and Joxer Daly’s (F.J. McCormick) antics similarly detract from the poverty of their circumstances, emphatically portrayed as a consequence of their indolence rather than the outcome of social conditions beyond their control. When Mrs Boyle (Sara Allgood) hears about the possibility of a job for her perpetually unemployed husband, her response is one of weary resignation: ‘MRS. BOYLE [piteously]: There now, he’ll miss that job, or I know for what! If he gets win’ o’ the word, he’ll not come back till evenin’, so that it’ll be too late. There’ll never be any good got out o’ him so long as he goes with that shouldher-shruggin’ Joxer. I killin’ meself workin’, an’ he sthruttin’ about from mornin’ till night like a paycock!’48 Boyle frequently contradicts his pronouncements about the


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power of Church and Capital over the working man, and his double-act partnership with Joxer is pure farce. Even when the family is falling apart from the ravages of debt and the moral opprobrium of illegitimate pregnancy, Boyle and Joxer provide the comic relief: BOYLE: I’m able to go no farther … .Two polis, ey … what were they doin’ here, I wondher? … Up to no good, anyhow … an’ Juno an’ that lovely daughter o’ mine with them. [Taking a sixpence from his pocket and looking at it] Wan single, solithary tanner left out of all I borreyed … . [He lets it fall.] The last o’ the Mohicans … .The blinds is down, Joxer, the blinds is down! JOXER: [walking unsteadily across the room, and anchoring at the bed]. Put all … your throubles … in your oul’ kit-bag … an’ smile … smile … smile!49 Where O’Casey renders Boyle and Joxer the authors of their own demise, the former a strutting peacock and the latter a grinning idiot, Boyle’s wife and daughter Mary (Eileen Crowe) are initially rendered victims of social circumstance. Mrs Boyle ‘has now assumed that look which ultimately settles down upon the faces of the women of the working-class; a look of listless monotony and harassed anxiety, blending with an expression of mechanical resistance. Were circumstances favourable, she would probably be a handsome, active and clever woman.’50 Similarly, Mary is pulled by two opposing forces, ‘one, through the circumstances of her life, pulling her back; the other, through the influence of book she has read, pushing her forward. The opposing forces are apparent in her speech and her manners, both of which are degraded by her environment, improved by her acquaintance – slight through it be – with literature.’51 However, Mrs Boyle, the common-sense nominalist who holds the moral centre of the play, is shown to be as gullible and foolhardy as her husband and daughter who are all quick to believe Bentham’s (Gabriel J. Fallon) false prophecy of an inheritance and end the play bankrupting themselves with debt. The forces which seal the Boyles’ fate are shown to be more to do with idiosyncratic weaknesses attributable to individual character traits, rather than the determining effects of social deprivation. In The Plough and the Stars the ageing labourer Peter Flynn (Eric Gorman) and his sparring partner, a fitter referred to as The Young Covey (Michael J. Dolan), are the comic pair providing the slapstick to alleviate the trauma of class disparity: THE COVEY [flinging the white shirt on the floor]: If you’re Nora’s pet, aself, you’re not goin’ to get your way in everything.


PETER [plaintively, with his eyes looking up at the ceiling]: I’ll say nothin’… .I’ll leave you to th’ day when th’ all-pitiful, all-merciful, all-lovin’ God I’ll be handin’ you to th’ angels to be rievin’ an’ roastin’ you, tearin’ an’ tormentin’ you, burnin’ an’ blastin’ you! THE COVEY: Aren’t you th’ little malignant oul’ bastard, you lemon-whiskered oul’ swine! [Peter runs to the sword, draws it, and makes for the Covey, who dodges him around the table; Peter has no intention of striking, but the Covey wants to take no chance.]52 O’Casey’s gift for characterization is more a gift for the exaggeration of stage-Irish types, eejits and omadhauns, whose antics serve as a derogation of Dublin communities ravaged by ‘tuberculosis and related diseases’ with ‘an infant mortality higher than that of Calcutta’.53 His ‘gramophone record’ of the Dublin accent, so admired by O’Hegarty, tends to stick all too frequently to alliterative flourishes like Fluther Good’s (Barry Fitzgerald) ‘It would take something more than a thing like you to flutther a feather o’ Fluther’,54 or fabricated phrases like Clitheroe’s ‘A taste o’ me mind that’ll shock her into the sensibility of behavin’ herself’.55 As Declan Kiberd argues: Fluther’s repeated ‘derogatives’ invite the literate, theatrical audience to patronize rather than understand this half-articulate workman in a manner which is not all that different from the ‘superior’ British indulgence of blarney in the nineteenth century. The lovable peasant has been thereby introjected into the native Irish psyche, to reappear as a twentieth-century slum-dweller. The rolling cadences of Synge and the forms of the traditional Abbey play are ill-suited to the rhythms of urban life: O’Casey repeated but did not remodel them.56 The nearest O’Casey comes to offering a sincere critique of class politics in the play are The Covey’s exclamations such as: ‘What’s th’ use o’ freedom, if it’s not economic freedom?’57 and ‘There’s only one freedom for th’ workin’ man: conthrol o’ th’ means o’ production, rates of exchange, an’ th’ means of disthribution.’58 Yet The Covey’s socialist rhetoric is diminished by constant buffoonery and finally undermined by his collusion with Bessie Burgess and the others in the looting that takes place towards the end of the play. All too often comedy is used to mediate the harrowing existence of the Dublin proletariat, and this is especially problematic when one considers that each play is explicitly


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described as ‘A Tragedy in Three Acts’ (Juno), ‘A Tragedy in Two Acts’ (Shadow) and ‘A Tragedy in Four Acts’ (Plough). The comic elements were amplified in the opening performances of the plays, featuring Barry Fitzgerald and F.J. McCormick, ‘the two finest comic actors in Abbey history’,59 with Fitzgerald playing Captain Boyle in Juno and Fluther Good in Plough, and McCormick playing Seumas Shields in Shadow and Joxer Daly in Juno. F.R. Higgins’s reaction to the first production of The Plough and the Stars constitutes an acerbic analysis of O’Casey’s dramaturgical strategy: One is eager to have the opinions of our dramatic critics on a technique largely based upon the revue structure, in the quintessence of an all-Abbey burlesque, intensified by ‘divarsions’ and Handy Andy incidents, with the more original settings offered by Sean O’Casey. That aspect of comedy so gushly over-portrayed from Dublin artisan life, as seen only by this playwright, merely affords laborious bowing on one-string fiddle – and ‘Fluther’ Good’s is just the successor of Captain Boyle’s more lively ragtime. If, as a sincere artist, Mr. O’Casey interpreted the raw life he is supposed to know, the sure strokes of a great dramatist would have painted such a picture of the Dublin underworld that instead of driving some to demolish the theatre, they would be driven out in horror to abolish the slum.60 O’Casey’s quasi-anthropological rendering of tenement life is not the indictment of urban poverty one finds, for instance, in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times61 or Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. In spite of the socialist ethos inherent in O’Casey’s Autobiographies, letters62 and other writings,63 his dramatic construction of Proletarian otherness ironically functions as the anaclitic support of the middle-class hierarchies consolidating themselves in the post-1922 Free State. The social antagonisms intrinsic to these hierarchies produced a range of social symptoms: ‘Ireland continued to be characterised by a high incidence of mental disease, by hideous family living conditions in its urban slums, and by a demoralised casual working class, urban as well as rural. Few voices were raised in protest.’64 The national struggle for sovereignty of the land soon transformed into the social struggle for acquisition of the land, of capital and of the means of production. Consequent to this was the promulgation of an upwardly mobile bourgeois sensibility in both rural and urban communities, and this sensibility permeates the position of the implied spectator in O’Casey’s plays.

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While O’Casey registers the social symptoms inherent to bourgeois hierarchies, he does so in a way which mediates the antagonistic nature of those hierarchies, turning the Proletarian into a spectacle to be viewed from a safe symbolic distance. O’Casey’s reliance on comedy to dull the edge of his social critique can be explained somewhat in this extract from Joseph Holloway’s journal: I was speaking to Sean O’Casey who doesn’t like [T.C.] Murray’s plays because they take too much out of him. Both Birthright and Maurice Harte distressed him very much in witnessing. He likes his plays with brightness intermingled with sadness. The comedy of life appeals to him most. O’Casey loves Shaw’s work because in the very kernel of tragedy he can introduce something to make one laugh its sting away. Murray never does this his tragedy is ever unrelieved.65 Where T.C. Murray’s uncompromising tragedies drive the sting of his social critique into the minds of the audience, O’Casey’s so-called tragedies are ultimately melodramas built on the comic mediation of pain and destruction. The Dublin proletariat needed a series of tragedies that painted such a picture of the tenements that the audience ‘would be driven out in horror to abolish the slum’; what they got was a series of melodramas that painted a comic mask that was ugly and distorted but did not involve the pain. The first 20 years after O’Casey’s departure ‘are usually considered barren ones for the Abbey; a favourite amusement of the Dublin literati has been to revile the poverty of the company’s repertoire’.66 This derogation of the Abbey repertoire by the critical community, which one might describe as the propagation of the myth of benightedness after the Irish Renaissance, continued up to the end of the twentieth century, manifesting itself somewhat in Christopher Murray’s statement that overall the ‘Irish plays of the 1940s and 1950s are now of interest predominantly as cultural documents’, insofar as they reflect ‘the values, artistic and moral as well as socio-economic and political, of a people struggling to establish firm contours of identity in a post-colonial phase’.67 The apparently negative emphasis implied by Murray’s statement can be inverted, however, so that plays after the Irish Renaissance are examined precisely because they are cultural documents, in the same sense that the canonical plays of Yeats, Gregory, Synge and O’Casey are of interest because they are cultural documents reflecting the struggle to establish firm contours of identity in an anticolonial phase. Moreover, Brian Fallon has shown, in An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture


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1930–1960, that it is simply inaccurate to consider the 1930s and 1940s as a period of benightedness. Aside from the thriving theatre scene, the relative cultural vitality of the period is manifest in terms of the links with the London literati; the appetite for Engish and American cultural products; the enthusiasm for modern art being influenced by artists especially from France and Spain; not to mention the quality of intellectual and scholarly journals. Robert Hogan notes that, more than any other playwright, George Shiels ‘wrote the typical Abbey play of the 1930s and 1940s. Almost totally realistic, his plays ranged from asinine farce to adroit and wryly thoughtful dramas. He rivalled O’Casey in popularity; his The Rugged Path of 1940 was the Abbey’s first long run, packing the theatre for twelve weeks.’68 While Hogan’s description of Shiels’s range is somewhat severe, it nonetheless captures the gist of Shiels’s style in terms of dramatic and thematic development. What is interesting is Shiels’s representation of the classed subaltern during the hegemonic rise of Eamon de Valera, whose ‘vision of Ireland, repeated in numerous formulations, was of small agricultural units, each self-sufficiently supporting a frugal family; industrious, Gaelicist and anti-materialist’.69 De Valera’s ideal, ‘like the popular literary version, was built on the basis of a fundamentally dignified and ancient peasant way of life’.70 Vis-à-vis the popular literary version, Shiels’s dramaturgy undergoes a transition from an earlier valorization of the Peasant and its vicissitudes which functioned as the phantasmatic support of Free State bourgeois nationalism, to a later investigation of the class politics underlying de Valera’s national ideology. Three of Shiels’s early plays, namely Bedmates (1921),71 Paul Twyning (1922)72 and Professor Tim (1925),73 are comedies whose central characters are, or at least appear to be, wandering tramps. Bedmates is an allegorical tale about the partition of the six counties of Northern Ireland consequent to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921/22. The Irish Times approved of the play: Two ragmen engage the one remaining bed in a common lodging house, directed by Molly Swan. Bertie Smith, racecourse tout, thimble-rigger, and self-confessed trickster, a Londoner to boot, would persuade the landlady to turn out the two ragmen, and let the room to him. No Irishman could ‘blarney’ as does this Englishman. However, the ragmen return from a visit to a neighbouring public-house, and then it becomes a duel between the keen wits of an unscrupulous Englishman and the rich sense of humour of a Southern

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Irishman. The former makes a tool of a simple-minded Ulsterman by playing on his fears of ‘Romish plotters.’ the audience was vastly amused and highly delighted. Mr. Barry Fitzgerald was the ideal Irish tramp, and Mr. Tony Quinn acted the simple Ulsterman to the life.74 In terms of the Irish theatre, Shiels is in many respects the great chronicler of the 1922 Partition: a native of Ballymoney, County Antrim, who emigrated to Canada in his youth but returned after sustaining an injury while working for a railway company that left him paraplegic. His plays are variously set in Northern Ireland and the Free State with their characters occasionally traversing the border as the plot demands. Bedmates contains the hallmark valorization of itinerants and vagrants that denotes his early work. Pius Kelly (Barry Fitzgerald), the Catholic ragman from the South and his counterpart Andrew Riddle (Tony Quinn), the Protestant ragman from the North, are figurative tropes representing their respective States in an allegorical farce examining the new phenomenon of Partition. As Pius points out in a moment of self-reflexive recognition: ‘It’s the story av Ireland come to life in a lodging-house; seven hundred years’ history cut down to man’s size.’75 The play is a political satire-cum-morality fable, concluding with the English troublemaker Bertie Smith (Michael J. Dolan) chased out of the dosshouse while the two uneasy bedfellows are left to settle their own differences. While the two tramps Pius and Andrew are effectively used to look awry at the Anglo-Irish conflict, the particularity of their status as classed subalterns is universalized in their transformation into national tropes. Shiels provides an interesting aesthetic engagement with national politics but only at the expense of evacuating the specificities of class disparity, thereby rendering itinerant ragmen in a comic framework that ignores the penury intrinsic to their circumstances. Paul Twyning (Barry Fitzgerald), the eponymous hero of Shiels’s later play, is a meddlesome ‘Tramp Plasterer’ from Dublin, who makes a nuisance of himself in a Northern Irish village by attempting to patch up James Deegan’s (Gabriel J. Fallon) domestic affairs as well as the walls of his domicile: ‘DEEGAN: When I took you in – a tramp off the highway – it was to plaster my house, not to meddle in my family affairs.’76 Deegan is the archetypal strong farmer and magistrate who ‘had to banish four other sons and two daughters for disobedience’,77 when they refused to submit to his bullying, and the same fate awaits his shy and retiring son Dan (Michael J. Dolan) unless he marries Daisy Mullan (Christine Hayden), allegedly ‘home from America with a boat-load of money’.78


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Dan is middle-aged and on the verge of emigrating because his father disapproves of his affections for Rose M’Gothigan (Eileen Crowe), the daughter of a ‘small farmer’ with significantly less resources than Deegan, whom he equates with Twyning as being ‘the same breed of inferiors’.79 Twyning’s matchmaking skills provide the mediating influence which, after several twists and turns, culminates in the resolution between the two families at the end of the play, but only after he has duped several of them into giving him enough money to be able ‘to take a scoot over to Chicago’80 with Daisy, who reveals herself as a fellow fraudster. Writing in the Evening Herald, Frank Hugh O’Donnell found it ‘the most gloriously farcical phantasy that has come our way for some time’, noting that ‘the audience at the play’s finish showed their appreciation in no half-hearted manner.’81 While on one level the play is an amusing bit of froth that aroused no more critical opprobrium than some slight confusion as to whether it was a ‘melodramatic farce’82 or ‘farcical comedy’,83 it does offer some poignant instances of social criticism: DEEGAN: Let the vagrant have his say. PAUL: And the vagrant will have his say. Ireland, north, south, east, and west, is lousy with your kind. There was more happiness on the Irish homestead when you were paying the rack-rent and eating the lumpers. PAT: Smite him, Paul! Smite him! PAUL: The omnipotent God only knows what you’ll be like if you ever get Home Rule. I wouldn’t like to be Dan Deegan and vote for Labour. DEEGAN: Whatever rule we may have, we’ll always have our tramps and paupers. PAUL: And your Dans! who are more destitute than any paupers I’ve met. [Points to DAN] Just look at that product of yourself and ninety-five acres of Irish soil. No more spine than a lizard, and so bulldozed and brow-beaten that he’d swear a lie before he’d own the simplest truth.84 Twyning’s polemic is a direct assault on the rural middle class ‘north, south, east, and west’ that had been consolidating its strength following legislation such as the Ashbourne Land Purchase Act of 1885 and the Wyndham Land Act of 1903. By 1900 ranching was widespread, ‘a style of farming that required large acquisitions of land, working capital and minimal labour, and seemed to negate the opportunities of land


purchase made available to small farmers. The haute bourgeoisie thus created (often townsmen) were much resented, and anti-grazier hostility became endemic over the next decades.’85 Deegan’s declaration that whatever ‘rule we may have, we’ll always have our tramps and paupers’ is an odious forecast of the continuance of economic hierarchies in both Northern Ireland and the Free State. While Shiels offers a withering critique here of the nouveaux riches in both States, it is ultimately neutralized by the reconciliation between the rival farmers Deegan and M’Gothigan through the union of their children, Dan and Rose, organized by Twyning. Deegan ensures the economic stability of the two families by giving the ‘farm’ to Dan and the ‘public house’ to his other son Patrick. The notion of ‘destitute’ paupers is soon forgotten in the finale when Twyning’s itinerant lifestyle is valorized in the final image of himself and Daisy ‘galloping down the road, and laughin’ like mad’.86 The audience is left with an enduring image of Paul Twyning as the wily rogue who lands on his feet and gets the girl, rather than ‘a tramp from God knows where’87 whose next meal depends on his ability to beg, steal and borrow. The matchmaking skills of a meddlesome tramp also facilitate the union in Professor Tim between Peggy (Eileen Crowe), daughter of ‘strong farmer’ John Scally (Eric Gorman), and the déclassé haute bourgeois ‘Sporting Farmer’ Hugh O’Cahan (P.J. Carolan), set near the village of ‘Ballykennedy’,88 County Antrim, in Northern Ireland. Witnessing the first production, Susan L. Mitchell observed that: Laughter could hardly have been out of place anywhere during its three Acts. Professor Tim is the Scally’s distinguished uncle, long expected by them from abroad. Instead, however, of returning in a style to do his family credit, he disguises himself in drink and penury in order to test their quality. after a number of mystifications on the part of Uncle Tim that would not deceive a hen, all ends in general benevolence and a couple of weddings.89 While the popular appeal of Professor Tim made it stock-in-trade for amateur companies throughout Ireland, the critics were quick to condemn it, as Joseph Holloway records: ‘I saw Hayes chatting to John MacDonagh and the former joined me … . He asked me what I thought of Professor Tim, and I said it is a good night’s entertainment! “That is just what it is and nothing more,” he said. “The old-fashioned Irish stage type of play over again. Why did they accept it at the Abbey?”’90 That Shiels harboured no illusions about the nature of the play was


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revealed in a letter to Lady Gregory: ‘The play in itself is not much, but its aim was a modest one – namely, to give a night’s simple entertainment.’91 When taken merely as piece of entertainment the play is ‘simple’ enough, but as a cultural document the play is surprisingly intricate in its portrayal of the business ethics and class politics underpinning rural embourgeoisement. Tim’s (F.J. McCormick) visitation is received as if it were an infection, when his itinerant status disrupts the structural integrity of the respectable bourgeois household: MRS. SCALLY: Oh, you prodigal you! You vagabond! That the very smell of the house is abominable PEGGY: It’s only snuff, mother. If you leave him to me he’ll give no trouble. I’ll get him something to eat and he’ll rest and go away. MRS. SCALLY: He’ll never break bread in my house! He’ll never sleep under my roof! God only knows where he’s coming from or what plague he has with him. PROFESSOR: My only plague is poverty. A chronic attack of penury. It arises from an absence of brass in the vest pocket. And at my age it’s incurable.92 Mrs Scally (Sara Allgood) is obsessed with her family’s embourgeoisement and she frequently scolds her husband for being overly impressed with the equally pretentious Kilroy family: ‘If their grandeur frightens you, it doesn’t frighten me. Go out and meet them and take them up to the hall door. And no scraping or touching your hat to them. Don’t be a serf.’93 The Scallys represent the archetypal graziers who benefited most from the Land Acts of 1885 and 1903 and the redistribution of ‘450,000 acres’ to ‘24,000 families’ by the Land Commission between 1923–1932.94 The Scallys are initially eager to help James Kilroy (Peter Nolan) buy out Rush Hill from the bankrupt Hugh O’Cahan: ‘MRS. SCALLY: Buy it, James. Buy it. You’ll never rue the day you bought Rush Hill. Only that we bought a second farm last year, we’d buy it ourselves.’95 Kilroy uses the leverage of his son Joseph’s legacy of ‘two thousand pounds; his aunt’s money that died ten years ago’,96 to persuade the Scallys to consolidate their interests in a marriage of convenience: ‘K ILROY: Joseph last night told his mother and me, plump and plain, that he means to marry Peggy Scally or die in the attempt./ MRS. SCALLY: Well, buy it, James, and we’ll stock it. I want to see Peggy and Joseph in Rush Hill.’97 Kilroy’s expansionism earns him the label ‘grabber’ from O’Cahan and his employees, one of whom proceeds to foil Kilroy’s plans by


bidding against him in the auction for Rush Hill and forcing the price way above his means. As the play moves towards its conclusion Kilroy is revealed to be insolvent and John Scally is reconciled to the fact that he would rather have his daughter marry O’Cahan ‘with all his faults’ than Kilroy’s son Joseph the ‘prig with all his virtues’: ‘Oh, I’m not as soft as I let on, Peggy. By minding my own business I’m a strong farmer. Kilroy, by minding other people’s business, is a weak one. He’d ruin me now like himself, but I won’t let him.’98 In the final reversal it is revealed that Tim ‘has been play-acting’ and is actually ‘a professor of Geology, and a considerable man in the world’.99 Tim has made an agreement with Mr Allison (John Stephenson), the property agent for the ‘deeds, documents, [and] old mortgages’ to Rush Hill, which he promptly gives to Peggy so she can reinstate Hugh and fulfil her dream of a happy marriage with the reformed wastrel. In the end even the ‘grabber’ Kilroy and his son are forgiven, with Joseph offered the hand of Peggy’s sister, and the play closes with the Professor’s last benevolent gesture: ‘Have a smoke, friends. I bought these cigars in Bombay.’100 While Professor Tim is clearly described as a ‘A Comedy in Three Acts’, it nevertheless broaches the hard facts of rural embourgeoisement and exposes the ruthless business ethics of land acquisition intrinsic to the rise of the grazier class to become the new haute bourgeoisie. The ferocity with which Mrs Scally rejects her brother when she perceives him as a vagrant is a manifestation of the palpable distaste with which the nouveau riche subjects regard their social antecedents in a former colony whose native traditions had been ‘pauperized into virtual illiteracy’101 during the nineteenth century. Mrs Scally’s response is sadistic insofar as it conforms to the truly Sadean impulse whereby she is consumed with destroying Tim’s immutable body (immutable because it is Tim’s vagrant image which is the target) rather than his corporeal body, which simply gets in the way of her wrath: ‘MRS. SCALLY: Whist, now … you tripped over something./ PROFESSOR: I tripped over nothing at all. You gimme a heave that sent me heels over tip. Here, feel this lump. [On his head.]’102 Professor Tim caters for the bourgeois status quo by removing the sting of Tim’s symptomatic vagrancy and reinforcing the structural integrity of the urban and rural haute bourgeoisie with ‘general benevolence and a couple of weddings’. The ideological function of general benevolence in this instance is not to offer the audience a point of escape from their reality, but rather to function as the phantasmatic support for a social reality underpinned by the traumatic Real, which in this instance is the brutal mercantilism of land acquisition inherent to rural and urban embourgeoisement in both Northern Ireland and the Free State.


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The New Gossoon (1930)103 was one of Shiels’s most popular plays and seems, prima facie, to be primarily concerned with the generation gap between the anticolonial generation who forged the socio-economic structure of the Free State, and the postcolonial generation who reaped the benefits of their forebears’ toil and sacrifice. Luke Cary (Denis O’Dea) is the eponymous ‘gossoon’, a young tearaway who is quick to waste his mother Ellen’s (Maureen Delaney) hard-earned resources on gallivanting around on his motorbike and attracting the attention of local girls Sally Hamil (Eileen Crowe) and Biddy Henly (Shelah Richards). Luke’s mind-set is devoid of his mother’s work ethic, favouring leisure over labour, and he resents her prudent financial management to the extent that he steals from her in order to fund his social activities: ‘I’ve stolen sheep myself, and money too. I’d to steal eggs and sell them to get cigarettes and petrol. She only gived me sixpence on Saturday night, and a shilling at Christmas. Isn’t that meaner than stealing?’104 The difference between the generational perspectives is crystallized in the motif of technology and its manifestation in Luke’s motorbike and his Uncle Peter’s (Michael J. Dolan) motorcar: PETER: That old car’s part of my living. I attend five markets every week in it. LUKE: And this old bike’s part of my hobby. When I work all day in the fields I go out for a run at night. Is there any monumental insanity in that? If there is, the whole country must be one big asylum. PETER: If it’s time enough for you to’ve a hobby when you can afford it. You can’t afford it now. Your mother can’t afford it. And the farm can’t afford it. – That’s what I’m trying to get at. LUKE: Any farm that can’t afford a six-pound hobby should be left to the crows. – That’s what I’m trying to get at. PETER: If you’d any pride in the land you’d make your work a hobby.105 The nationalist emotional investment in sovereignty of the land which fuelled Peter’s anticolonial generation is viewed by Luke as a redundant ideology: ‘I take no pride in drudgery. All that poetry about the young Irishman’s passion for the red soil is bunk. If the damned thing can’t afford a decent living without tearing our guts out day and night – then it’s only slavery, and should be worked by Chinamen.’106 Both Ellen and her brother-in-law Peter are baffled by Luke’s behaviour, with Peter arguing that Ned Shay (P.J. Carolan), the Carys’ ‘Servant Man’, should act in loco parentis as disciplinarian in place of Luke’s dead father: ‘You’ve

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helped to spoil the gossoon. You should have taken an ash-plant and whaled the ever lasting divil out of him.’107 Ned, however, understands Luke and is very much the negotiator between the two generations: PETER: This country’s going to hell at a hundred mile an hour! Petrol and pictures and potheen and jazz and doles and buses and bare legs and all sorts of foreign rascalities. You and I were content to toil and moil for a living, but the new breed wants to be well paid, well fed, and idle. NED: I must be short-sighted, Peter, for I see nothing wrong. The changes I see are all for the better. I like to see the big bus stopping at the end of the road to lift the kids for school … .Lord, it must be great to be a kid and go to school on a bus! PETER: It’s a wonder you and Luke couldn’t get on well together – for you’re as big a fool as himself! NED: ‘Twasn’t my fault, Peter. I always tried to see the boy’s point of view. D’ye see that motor-bike? That’s the evolution of the low-backed car. The boy that rides on that isn’t the one that sat beside ‘sweet Peggy’… . He’s a new gossoon altogether, and demands new treatment.108 David Krause states that this ‘quaint notion of toiling and moiling contentedly in an agrarian Ireland of nineteenth-century hardships’ was to be reworked ‘in Eamon de Valera’s dream of “frugal comfort” for his people’, and was to be exposed to ‘savage mockery in all of O’Casey’s later pastoral comedies’.109 Krause argues that ‘the benign comedy of Shiels often gravitates toward sentimental conversions and therefore lacks the integrity and barbarous irony of O’Casey’s dark comedy. O’Casey never cheats by trying to “civilize” or clean up such corrosive clowns as Boyle and Joxer.’110 While Shiels ‘may come close to these profane rogues with his Pius Kelly, Dick Cartney, Rabit Hamil, and Felix Grogan’, Krause insists that ‘he is just as likely to provide his shaughrauns or clever tramps with more bark than bite and disguise their noble hearts with a rough exterior of comic rhetoric’.111 Krause’s argument has some credence, but he tends to overlook the fact that O’Casey is just as guilty as Shiels, if not more so, of the valorization of indigence and the comic mediation of pain and destruction. O’Casey’s clowns serve only to corrode the possibility of effective social critique, whereas Shiels’s representation of ‘shaughrauns’ and ‘clever tramps’, particularly in his later plays, tends to offer an increasingly sophisticated negotiation of the class hierarchies of postcolonial Ireland.


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While the dramatic tension in The New Gossoon stems primarily from the ethical antagonism between anticolonial and postcolonial generations, it also significantly emerges from the parallel social antagonism between the Cary family and their neighbours the Hamils and the Henlys. Ellen Cary is a ‘small farmer’ obsessed with the embourgeoisement and respectability to be gained through good husbandry and callous snobbery, to the extent that she fires her ‘Servant Girl’ Mag Kehoe (Frollie Mulhern) for consorting with Rabit Hamil (F.J. McCormick), a ‘Poacher’ who had been given ‘liberty to trap and snare and shoot the whole mountain’112 by Ellen’s dead husband: ‘ELLEN: I’ve no fault, Mag, to find with you or your work. But you’re making friends of certain people that I object to./ MAG: You mean the Rabit Hamils?/ ELLEN: I mentioned no names./ MAG: But you fired the last girl was here because she made a chum of Sally Hamil.’113 Ellen manifests the aspiring bourgeois subject’s revulsion for the socially subordinate members of her community and reprimands her son Luke for consorting with the objectionable Rabit Hamil’s daughter Sally: ‘ELLEN: Isn’t this a nice mess you’ve got yourself into with them vermin?/ LUKE [putting on gauntlets]: I’m in no mess at all. What do I care about the Hamils! Not a spittle./ ELLEN: You’ll care more before they’ve done with you. You’re in the trap now, and they won’t let you out easy.’114 Ellen’s disdain for the Hamils is also manifest in her son’s paradoxical attitude to Sally insofar as she was ‘the first girl he ever fell for, and ‘twas such a discovery that he went clean crazy’;115 yet Luke is torn between his desire for Sally the woman and Sally the objectionable poacher’s daughter: ‘I disregard Rabit Hamil – and the breed of him!’116 The visceral contempt for the Hamils’ lumpenproletarian status is even more fervently manifest by Luke’s Uncle Peter: ‘Tell me this: is the boy an imbecile? I think we ought to spend a guinea on a good doctor. Sure nobody in his right mind would go near the Rabit Hamils. Didn’t I know the whole breed forty years ago? They’d the mind of a rabbit, and the instincts of a rabbit, and the morals of a rabbit.’117 The usually fair-minded Ned tempers Peter’s ferocity by comparing the Hamils to the even more objectionable Henlys: NED: The Hamils are gentry compared with the other party up at the corn mills. PETER: Isn’t that my argument that he’s a freak/ Don’t I know the corn mills party? Haven’t I a grass farm up beside them? ELLEN: People called Henly. PETER: The Mad Henlys! The father was in the asylum twice. The sons are horse dealers – high-way robbers. And there’s either four


or five wee, crafty, black-eyed baggages of girls – like gypsies – with not as much clothes on them as’d make a pair of leggin’s for a hummin’-bird; and it’s one of them Luke has out with him every night on this ould seaplane of his … .I tell you the end-up there’ll be stark calamity.118 The play reaches its climax when ‘Mad’ John Henly (Arthur Shields) threatens to beat Luke to death over an alleged relationship between Luke and his ‘under age’ daughter Biddy. At the moment of crisis Sally intervenes and coaxes Biddy to ‘split fair’ and ‘tell the truth’ that she had pestered Luke into giving her a ride around the coast on his motorbike, which had kept her out past her curfew when the old scrambler continually broke down on the journey. When Henly is finally reassured that his daughter had not been acting improperly with Luke the situation is resolved, much to the relief of Ellen, who has undergone something of a volte face in her opinion of Sally during her performance as mediator: ‘PETER: And will you let him bring Rabit Hamil’s dandy doll in here … . Will you stay here and wash dishes for them?/ ELLEN: If Sally suits him, she’ll suit me. Luke isn’t such a catch in himself.’119 Ellen’s decision is less a case of romantic magnanimity than one of settling for the lesser of two evils, preferring her feckless son settled with what Rabit calls ‘a good country girl, one with a right smart edge on her’,120 than following Peter’s example and going to work in a ‘Glasgow foundry’ which would ‘more likely make him a corner boy. Then he’d come back to me and bring a dirty wife and child with him.’121 Rabit’s role as the ‘shiftless, scheming, and hypocritical poacher’ has been described by Robert Hogan as one of the ‘best character parts’ in Abbey drama, acted ‘first by F.J. McCormick and later by Harry Brogan, this character is nearly as fine as O’Casey’s Joxer Daly’.122 Yet Rabit’s precarious role as landless poacher is much more poignant than Joxer’s malingering buffoon, as his very livelihood depends on the charity of the landowning Carys who despise him, with Luke threatening to ‘rent the shooting of the mountain to Captain McKane for ten pounds a year, but he doesn’t want a professional poacher thrown in’.123 Rabit is objectionable precisely because of his lumpenproletarian status as impoverished poacher, which is an extrinsic or social position, rather than an intrinsic or instinctual trait of the kind Peter condescendingly refers to. Rabit has to scheme to ensure that his daughter Sally will marry into the upwardly mobile Cary family because he has no property to offer as her dowry. Rabit’s ‘plan’ provides the resolution of the class


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conflict at the end of the play, when he persuades Ellen to purchase ‘Captain McKane’s three farms for sale’124 which Ellen promptly acts upon: ‘ELLEN: Well, I think, in God’s name, we’ll settle it in that way. I’ll buy you the farm with the house on it, and stock it for you. I was going to buy it for myself….I hope I’m doing the right thing./ LUKE: Right or wrong, I’m content./ SALLY: And me too. I’ll have the nicest house in Ireland.’125 As his daughter’s financial future is secured in the embourgeoisement guaranteed by her union with Luke, Sally’s final action is as matchmaker for Ellen and Ned, who has been in love with his employer for ‘twenty years’. When ‘all is settled’ Rabit’s financial future is also secured as Ellen and Ned are consumed with starry-eyed munificence and confirm his right to poach on their land: R ABIT: Ned Shay, what about them placards? I suppose now you own the mountain and all? NED: Tear them down, Rabit. And get the hut on the summit as soon as you like. ELLEN: Long may you enjoy the privilege, Rabit. R ABIT: Thank ya Ellen. And you Ned. And may fortune make you both her favourites … .The mountain is my ould sweetheart. I’ll live and die on it, and be buried on it. And, if it’s possible, I’ll come back and poach on it for all eternity. [He goes.]126 The ending is of course similar to Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and The Colleen Bawn, with the landless poacher returning to his hut on the mountain, but the crucial difference is that Rabit’s indigent lifestyle is not constituted as something to be celebrated in the same way as Conn the shaughraun or Myles-na-Coppaleen. On the contrary, Rabit is a thoroughly unattractive character, not least in terms of his exploitation of Mag Kehoe’s affections in order to marry her and thereby gain a wife to tend to him in his elder years, only to cast her aside at the last minute when she reveals his schemes to Ellen and Ned. As Rabit explains to Sally: ‘Would I wed with a menial, and you going to be a farmer’s wife? D’ye think I’ve no family pride in me at all?’127 In Rabit Hamil Shiels demonstrates a mastery of dialectical characterization by forging a symptomatic trope of the dispossessed members of postcolonial rural communities in the form of one of the ‘best character parts’ in Abbey drama. Rabit manifests the ruthless desperation of those classed subaltern groups who were economically marginalized by the embourgeoisement of their neighbours. As J.J. Lee


observes, the Free State administration under Cosgrave ‘took the view that the poor were responsible for their poverty. They should pay for their lack of moral fibre.’128 Dissenting voices were quickly marginalized by the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929, which ‘served the materialistic values of the propertied classes by fostering the illusion that Ireland was a haven of virtue surrounded by a sea of vice’.129 As Lee argues: The clergy, strong farmers in cassocks, largely voiced the concern of their most influential constituents, whose values they instinctively shared and universalised as ‘Christian’. The sanctity of property, the unflinching materialism of farmer calculations, the defence of professional status, depended on continuing high emigration and high celibacy. The church did not invent these values. But it did baptise them. Rarely has the Catholic church as an institution flourished, by materialistic criteria, as in the Free State. And rarely has it contributed so little, as an institution, to the finer qualities of the Christian spirit. Censorship, Irish style, suitably symbolised the impoverishment of spirit and the barrenness of mind of the risen bourgeoisie, touting for respectability.130 As a metonymic trope of the classed subaltern groups of wandering tramps, itinerant labourers and similar members of the lumpenproletariat, Rabit Hamil offers a perverse enjoyment insofar as one must laugh at him more out of embarrassment than sympathy; the Abbey audience could only enjoy their symptom of the landless poacher as long as it was mediated through the comic acting of an F.J. McCormick or Harry Brogan.

4 That Ireland which We Dreamed Of

Independent Ireland was ‘dominated by a huge, and recently created, farming class’, varying in strength from the ‘obsolescent landless labourer at one end of the scale’ to the ‘great grazier or rancher at the other’.1 There was a new ‘middle class of over 200,000 farmers with between fifteen and 100 acres’, which dominated society and politics due to ‘its massive collective presence in the form of demographic weight, cultural centrality and electoral political clout’.2 Class politics in the Free State were ‘the politics of political competition between different classes of agrarian workers, owners and employers’ in a context of ‘a propertied community only recently legally ratified by the Land Acts of 1870–1903’.3 In essence, ‘small-propertied agrarian’ Ireland was the ‘child of the Famine and of Michael Davitt’s Land League’ in alliance with ‘the Gladstonian Liberals’.4 As late as the mid-1930s, ‘the pressure on the de Valera government to extend land-division programmes from western and poorer counties to the eastern and southern richer counties was considerable.’5 The metonymic representation of the trauma consequent to class disparity in the Free State recurs in George Shiels’s The Rugged Path (1940)6 and its sequel The Summit (1941).7 The sober, thought-provoking tone of these plays mark a significant departure from his earlier comic formula based on the matrimonial farce. Robert Hogan notes that The Rugged Path was ‘a milestone for the Abbey. Considering Dublin’s size, its twelve-week run would be the equivalent of a smash hit in London or New York.’8 While the acting of The Rugged Path ‘grew ever broader during its run’ it was hardly Shiels’s fault, ‘for neither The Rugged Path nor its sequel The Summit was a brainless farce’.9 Hogan contends that both plays are ‘worthily realistic portraits of rural Ireland. They both form one continuous story, on which Shiels never loses his grip. The 91

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story’s significant theme contrasts the older Irish tolerance for lawlessness and contempt for the informer with the new responsibility that must necessarily, if painfully, be accepted by citizens of a free nation.’10 The plays are set against the traumatic background of World War II, and it is precisely the painful, traumatic aspects of Free State rural society which Shiels represents in the class conflict between the bourgeois Tansey family and the lumpenproletarian Dolis family. The spatial dynamics of both plays alternate between the Tansey’s modern farmhouse in the first and third acts, ‘a comfortable room, with decent furniture, a good fire and electric light’11 and the Dolis’s dilapidated cabin in the second act, where the ‘furniture is primitive and scanty. Through the open door at the back can be seen a ridge of mountain half covered with whins and heather.’12 The spatial and thematic construction foregrounds the contradistinction between the respectable Tanseys, who are ‘good citizens’ and ‘quiet people’ that want no ‘trouble’, and the disreputable ‘Dolis tribe on the mountain’ who act like ‘Red Indians’ and are in need of ‘a feed of good citizenship’.13 The thematic leitmotiv spirals around the ethics of informing on a neighbour’s illegal activities, which comes to a head when the Tanseys are asked by the Sergeant to demonstrate their ‘good citizenship’ by testifying that young Peter Dolis (James Dunne) murdered the frail old pensioner John Perrie (Harry Brogan). What Shiels chronicles here is the transition from colonial subject to Free State citizen, linked to the concomitant fracturing of the myth of ‘National unity’ under the weight of class hierarchies which existed before, during and remained after the anti-colonial struggle against the ‘British Lion’. The Sergeant (Austin Meldon) laments the fact that the anti-colonial generation’s ‘national kink’ of ignoring colonial law and despising ‘the very name of an informer’,14 continues in the post-Treaty State to the extent that ‘many a decent Irishman is a damned bad citizen’15 when they close ranks and ignore those who break Free State law. While Michael Tansey (John MacDarby) and Mrs. Tansey (May Craig) initially maintain their national solidarity and conspiracy of silence, their son Sean (Denis O’Dea) is steadfast in his opinion that such solidarity is a product of ‘the slave mind’.16 Sean’s outlook is shared by the other members of his post-colonial generation including his sister Sara (Ria Mooney) and Miss Benny (Bríd Ní Loingsigh) the school teacher, who suggests that ‘the root’ of ‘the subject’ of informing qua good citizenship is less a matter of conscience than a matter of ‘fear’ of reprisal from the accused:


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SERGEANT: Fear? I’d like you to explain that. MISS BEN.: That’s easy. I see it every day in my own school. There’s one boy from the mountain, with the scowling countenance of a Barbary ape. He carries an outsize in jack-knives, and has the school furniture almost whittled away. SEAN: Sounds a bit like Johnny Dolis. MISS BEN.: That’s just who it is – Johnny Dolis. He attacks small children and frightens the wits out of them. But I’m convinced that if he were to cut one of their throats, not a single boy in the school would have the pluck to tell the Master.17 The politics of cultivating good citizens as part of the process of cultivating a new state leads to a focus on the intersection between state apparatuses and domestic structures: SERGEANT: How about the parents of the young citizens? How are you going to teach them the civic virtues? MISS BEN.: Ah, I was afraid you’d say that. You’ve knocked the bottom out of it. SERGEANT: I knew I had you there, Miss Benny. The old ones are the problem. When Johnny Dolis, after a feed of good citizenship goes up to his mountain home, it’s a different lesson he gets from his father.18 The crucial distinction which emerges in both plays is between the Dolis’s violent behaviour as an intrinsic or natural characteristic making them ‘bad citizens’, and the notion that their behaviour is an extrinsic or learned characteristic linked to particular socio-economic circumstances. Where Sean’s solution to the Dolis’s violence is to ‘Smash them. And they’d soon learn to respect me’, the School Master Mr Adare (Michael J. Dolan) explains how Sean is replicating the oppressive discourse of the British colonial administration: ‘Now, you’re talking the same language as Buckshot Foster and old Balfour. They – with the whole British army at their back – stood up to them, and we all know in the end how the Dolises respected them’.19 Shiels crystallizes the issue of the Dolis’s bad citizenship in a debate between the Tanseys and the Dolises with the Master functioning as a quasi-Shavian raisonneur: MICHAEL: I’ve often told Sean about the hard old times … . DOLIS: For us they’re still as hard as ever. The Dolises are as poor today as they were at the dawn of history.


M ASTER [butts in]: Excuse me, that’s what makes me what I am – a rank Socialist! [Even DOLIS looks at him with amazement.] What I keep asking myself, has twenty years of home government given the Dolises that they didn’t enjoy under alien rule? DOLIS: Damn all! that’s the answer. M ASTER: It makes my blood boil. The poor Dolises used to live in hope, fed on rosy promises. But all they ever saw of the promised land was the vision. DOLIS: Reply to that, Sir Sean, if you can. SEAN: I can’t. M ASTER: ‘Twas a lifelong swindle. I remember as a boy hearing an old Irish Party candidate addressing them. ‘Men of the mountain’, says he, ‘your deliverance is at hand. The oldest man in this immense throng will live to see the green flag tossing proudly in the breeze over an Irish Parliament. And you will be the first to enjoy the fruits of victory.’20 The rationale underlying the Dolis’s bad citizenship leading them to defy Free State law with the same vigour as they defied British colonial law, is because their indigent circumstances remain unchanged regardless of the change in administration. Shiels offers a diachronic analysis of this dilemma by showing how the class conflict between the Tanseys and Dolises has a historical dimension stretching back to the early Nineteenth Century, where their grandparents had a ‘quarrel’ over ‘stolen sheep’ which was only resolved by their parents: ‘MICHAEL: At that time our people owned a good lump of the mountain, but my father gave it to the Dolises./ MASTER: Did he sell his interest?/ MICHAEL: Sell his interest? Who d’ye think would buy it? That’s how he made peace with them – he gave it to them. Washed his hands of them and it.’21 The conflict reignites when Michael buys ‘A stock farm at the foot of the mountain’,22 in spite of the fact that Mrs. Tansey points out ‘We’d plenty of land without it.’23 The Master explains that ‘A Government official told Dolis he’d the first right to the land’,24 and offers a compromise to resolve the conflict which reaches its climax when Hugh Dolis (Seumas Healy) threatens to kill Sean in reprisal for informing against his son Peter: M ASTER: A hundred and seventy-five acres, and only one son to leave it to! MICHAEL: I’ve another son at college; if he’s no brains I’ll have to give him land.


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MASTER: The day of the ten-acre land is at hand. Thank God I’ll live to see it! That’s land enough for any Irish family; then the Dolises won’t be outcasts; they’ll have their little homestead – SEAN: Master, you’re not a whit better than the counsel who defended Peter Dolis. He drew a picture of a poor boy who’d been away at sea – trying to earn an honest penny to help his old father to pay the rent. MICHAEL: As if Dolis ever paid a penny of rent in his life! SEAN: It’s to a bald-headed jury you should tell the land-hunger story; we’re not likely to fall for it. Hugh Dolis and four brothers never did a day’s work in their lives. They’d rather watch us working and then come down at night and steal it. That’s more romantic than sweating for it.25 The crux of the conflict lies in the inter-related questions of sovereignty of the land as a national right and land-tenure as a socio-economic issue: ‘MICHAEL: We were the tillers of the soil./ M ASTER: The Dolises have none to till – that’s the trouble.’26 Philip Bull suggests that it was among ‘the more prosperous farmers that the desire to own their land arose as much from social as economic aspirations, and the desire for Home Rule was an extension of the wider cultural demand by a new, relatively wealthy, largely Catholic elite to displace the old Protestant ascendancy in land and government.’27 Smaller farmers and what remained of the agricultural labourer class ‘were drawn inexorably into this national consensus, in which a continuum of cultural factors and a wider sense of identity served to subordinate the economic issues which had defined the original agitation’.28 The Land League and the United Irish League had been founded ‘initially upon the plight of the poor smallholders in the west of Ireland’ and ‘the status given to land as the symbol of liberation from oppression’ was such that those ‘who had too little or no land were unable to see either their individual identity or their national and social identity in terms other than as landholders and farmers’.29 The ‘disappointment and frustration’ engendered by ‘the failure to achieve significant alleviation in their condition’ even though they played so important a role in ‘mobilising reform’ for those wealthier than themselves, ‘was consolidated into an expectation that something could be done for them’.30 Such expectations formed the motivation underlying the ‘ranch war and a succession of smallholder revolts’, culminating in a political party, ‘Clann na Talmhan’ in 1938, specifically devoted ‘to the pursuit of their interests on the national political stage’.31

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It is against this contemporaneous historical background that the Dolis’s violence towards the bourgeois grazing community and also towards members of their own disenfranchised community on the mountain, can be understood in terms of the disappointment and frustration felt by the small farmers and landless agricultural labourers whose plight formed the ideological justification of the Land League and United Irish League. Hence the paradoxical nature of the impoverished Peasant qua national quintessence which formed the ethical foundation of the Nineteenth Century Land War and the cultural nationalism of the early Twentieth Century, in spite of the fact that those social groups which the Peasant metonymically represents never saw the ‘promised land’ of socio-economic manumission. Shiels foregrounds the bleakness of this situation by showing how the Dolises are finally deprived of ‘their little homestead’, when the Tanseys are rescued from their predicament by the arrival of their neighbour Liam Cassidy (Fred Johnston), a similarly strong farmer. The Tanseys, the Cassidys and other members of the bourgeois grazier-class form an alliance against the lumpenproletarian Dolises: CASSIDY: How much hay have you got over there in the shed? SEAN: About forty tons. CASSIDY: Well, somebody put a match to it, but I got there in time to put it out … . DOLIS [suddenly]: Come on, Peter … . CASSIDY: Don’t go away, Dolis. I’ll attend to you and Peter in a minute. [to SEAN] You needn’t worry about the hay, Sean, or the cattle. They’ll be quite safe. SEAN: I was going to spend the night over there. CASSIDY: Well, just go to your bed. The neighbours have got together and are going to stop this racket … .32 While Michael Tansey and Liam Cassidy fought on opposing sides during the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923, they are quick to unite against the Dolises. Cassidy takes the moral high ground of the respectable bourgeois farmer, who disavows the socio-economic rationale behind the Dolis’s violence in the name of modernity and good citizenship. In his capacity as bourgeois land-owner Cassidy makes a proposal reminiscent of the noblesse oblige associated with more liberal minded Ascendancy landlords, by offering the Dolises employment in a quarry, to which Hugh responds: ‘I’d let no Irish upstart farmer harness me to work, like an ass, or tell me what to do! We’re a free people! And maybe


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you patriots’ll soon be killing one another – as you did before and then the Dolises’ll come into their own again!’33 The Master berates Cassidy’s actions as a manifestation of the hegemony of the Free State bourgeoisie and a replication of the hierarchy of the colonial Ascendancy: ‘You people of property have always been severe on Dolis. He’s the product of what Lord Macaulay – that serene, that sumptuous snob! – called “the civilizing influence in Ireland.” ’34 While Cassidy is at least willing to make Dolis a condescending offer in order to restrain his disruptive influence, no such offer is made to the vagrant Marcy (F.J. McCormick), ‘a typical old roadster of uncertain age’.35 Similar to Rabit Hamil in The New Gossoon, Marcy is a thoroughly detestable character insofar as he plays the Tanseys against the Dolises by lying and scheming in order to acquire John Perrie’s meagre property and marry the small farmer Maggie. In The Rugged Path Marcy relies on the charity of the Tanseys in order to get a few scraps of food and the occasional night’s lodging, by bringing ‘stones’ and other ‘oddments’ from ‘Slemish’ mountain across the border in Antrim, a place with hallowed resonances associated with St. Patrick. Marcy progresses through each play by making unholy alliances and giving information to the Tanseys and the Dolises about each others plans and ambitions. In the finale Marcy is forced into exile by Cassidy and the bourgeois alliance: CASSIDY: And you’re going too. For you’re not far short of being the devil. In our house you talk like a saint, and down at the forge your language frightens the old blacksmith. MARCY: Yae, I was expectin’ this. You were right to send Peter away. CASSIDY: I’m just as right to send you after him. M ARCY: Poor Peter must live all his life with a bad conscience – CASSIDY: You’ve a good conscience. M ARCY: My love, I’ve none at all. Never had. CASSIDY: Well, just stay on the other side of the Border. You don’t need a conscience over there.36 After ‘Five and thirty years on the road’ Marcy has become ruthless and amoral; he is reduced to lying and scheming to put bread in his mouth, and becomes one more of the dispossessed to be ejected in order to preserve the structural integrity of the bourgeois farming community. In The Rugged Path and The Summit there is barely any comic relief, and as Robert Hogan observes, even though the play offers a solution, ‘Shiels avoids a tritely


happy ending by a final wry indictment of the Irish character, in these closing lines about the old man who was murdered’:37 CASSIDY: There’s one thing we must do, Michael; we must put up a bit of a headstone to John Perrie. MICHAEL: It’s a sorry monument! CASSIDY: And we must carve on it this inscription: ‘John Perrie, aged 74, was murdered by a neighbour for two pounds.’ SEAN: And an Irish jury found him Not Guilty.38 If the closing lines are an indictment of bad citizenship and the refusal to an inform on a neighbour in the modern Free State, they are also an indictment of the traumatic consequences emerging from the severe disappointment and frustration experienced by small farmers and landless agricultural labourers, in the failure of the Free State to deliver the social justice which underpinned the both the Nineteenth Century Land War and early Twentieth Century Anglo-Irish War. David Krause suggests that in his latter years Shiels was preoccupied with ‘the vindication and rehabilitation of former prisoners and the triumph of justice’, but ‘for fatalistic Irishmen’ whose country had been exposed to ‘700 years of British injustice’, there were at least ‘700 reasons’ to suspect ‘that right would not be done in Ireland’.39 The situation cried out for ‘political or comical rebellion’, both of which ‘apparently the aging Shiels, perhaps confined too long to chronic illness in a Northern Ireland village, failed to understand’.40 What Krause fails to comprehend here is the conflation of national justice with social justice, intrinsic to the hegemonic ascension of the Catholic bourgeois élite in rural and urban Ireland. The ethical foundation of the Land League and the United Irish League was that right would be done in Ireland, specifically to alleviate the plight of poor smallholders. The myth of benightedness between the end of the Irish Renaissance in 1926 and the emergence of Brendan Behan in the 1950s is tenable only so long as one disavows the critical capacity and sheer drama of Shiels’s later work. A more accurate response to Shiels’s oeuvre is offered by Robert Hogan: ‘The best of his later plays are tightly knit, convincingly realistic diagnoses of his country’s morality. These tart, dour pieces are far from the buffooneries and kitchen comedies usually associated with him. It took Shiels a lifetime of writing, but what a distance he came: he began as a clown and ended as an artist.’41 The social criticism offered in The Rugged Path and The Summit offers a salient contradiction of Eamon de Valera’s oft quoted St. Patrick’s day


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speech of 1943, broadcast barely a year after Shiels’s plays were published: Acutely conscious though we all are of the misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged, let us turn aside for a moment to that ideal Ireland that we would have. That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.42 Later in the speech de Valera seems to give the lie to the cliché that the Fianna Faíl government couldn’t afford social justice, by stating that ‘our material resources are sufficient for a population much larger than we have at present, if we consider their use with a due appreciation of their value in a right philosophy of life.’43 De Valera continues by stating that: ‘For many the pursuit of the material is a necessity. Man, to express himself fully and to make the best use of the talents God has given him, needs a certain minimum of comfort and leisure. A section of our people have not yet this minimum. They rightly strive to secure it, and it must be our aim and the aim of all who are just and wise to assist in the effort. But many have got more than is required.’44 The most striking aspect of a speech which focuses on Irish spirituality and the primacy of the national language is the tacit acceptance and discrete elision of class hierarchies and those who ‘have got more than is required’. The ‘we’ who realized ‘that Ireland which we dreamed of’ were the strong farmer-grazier class who became the rural haute bourgeoisie, and their progeny who became the Catholic bourgeois élite in the cities, who in turn propagated the ideology of the classed subaltern and its vicissitudes as quintessence of the nation. As Luke Gibbons suggests: ‘the longing for community and primitive simplicity, are the product of an urban sensibility, and are cultural fictions imposed on the lives of those they purport to represent. It was urban-based writers, intellectuals and political leaders who created romantic Ireland, and perpetrated the myth that the further west you go, the more you come into contact


with the real Ireland.’45 One can interpret the ‘real Ireland’ that Gibbons refers to in this instance in the Lacanian sense as the Real Ireland of those urban-based writers, intellectuals and politicians, insofar as the classed subaltern functioned as the symptom qua traumatic fragment of the Real which sustained the Symbolic order of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland ideology. In order to negotiate the traumatic facts of social subordination inherent to the classed subaltern groups they were transmogrified into sublime objects through which variegated and often conflicting desires could be mediated by competing factions in the struggle for hegemony In the same year that de Valera broadcast his famous 1943 St Patrick’s Day speech, the Abbey Theatre produced Old Road, the first play by Galway dramatist M.J. Molloy, which contradicted de Valera’s idealisation of rural life by dramatizing the harsh realities of class disparity. Where Shiels was the great chronicler of the border counties of Ireland and Northern Ireland, Molloy was the ‘great chronicler of the West of Ireland, its poverty, depopulation and decline in the 1940s and 1950s’.46 Molloy’s main interest was folklore insofar as ‘he wanted to capture and immortalise the manners, customs, language and people he knew intimately in County Galway.’47 Christopher Murray points out the danger inherent to this antiquarian tendency as ‘too often Molloy simply lapsed into quaintness, the very thing the Abbey adored at this time and termed PQ or “peasant quality” ’.48 Indeed the tension between romanticism and realism defines Molloy’s dramaturgy. Robert O’Driscoll records how Molloy came across an unpublished thesis in the National Library of Ireland which explained how pre-Famine Ireland was ‘characterised by runaway matches and a high marriage rate’.49 Molloy told O’Driscoll that without this discovery he would probably have written ‘bitter, rather cynical, and satirical plays like those of George Sheils [sic]’.50 Aside from the fact that Molloy reduces the range and complexity of Shiels’s dramaturgy, this quote highlights the difference between the two playwrights in terms of the work they produced in the 1940s. Where Shiels’s plays were increasingly severe indictments of the lack of social justice, Molloy chose to mollify the incisiveness of his critique with recourse to romantic plot-lines, typified in Old Road. The setting for Old Road51 is the ‘usual old-fashioned farm-house kitchen’ in rural Galway at the onset of World War II in 1939, ‘and the general impression is one of inefficient housekeeping to an extreme degree’52 insofar as it is inhabited by bachelors more accustomed to outdoor labour than domestic chores. The play is subtitled a ‘A Comedy in Three Acts’ but it is a black comedy if anything insofar as it revolves


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around the plight of landless labourer Myles Cosgrave (Cyril Cusack), ‘a sturdy lad in the early twenties, unsophisticated and pleasant looking’ and Brigid McDonagh (Bríd ní Loingsigh), a domestic servant ‘between eighteen and twenty, of pleasing appearance though shabbily dressed’, who must eventually accept emigration as their route out of penury in Ireland to an economically viable life together in England. Myles earns his living primarily by working for ‘The Lord’ Patrick Walsh (F.J. McCormick), a ‘grizzled choleric looking, loud voiced old farmer of sixty-six or so; his innate wilfulness, developed to the full by a long life-time of wayward bachelorhood’. Brigid has just left the employ of the tyrannical ‘oul’ Miss Darcy’ and is desperate for an opportunity as her family is ‘bitter poor’ since her father died. The tension in the play emerges from the young couple’s struggle to earn a living in a cut-throat environment, in which their economic superiors ‘The Lord’ and his rival ‘Bodagh’ Merrigan (Brian O’Higgins) compete ruthlessly to acquire land and profit often at the expense of the poorer members of the community. Myles’s and Brigid’s indigent circumstances are symptomatic of those classed subaltern groups occupying the lower eschelons of rural society in the 1940s. Diarmaid Ferrtier states that: ‘Studies of agricultural labourers have shown that rises in the standard of living lagged behind aspirations in these decades, and yet Muintir na Tíre berated the “indecency” of agricultural “civil war” waged by striking labourers in Kildare in the 1940s.’53 Myles situation is typical of the post-Famine consolidation of family holdings in which his older brother inherited the land and Myles and his sister were forced to move out and find employment elsewhere. Brigid similarly has to work for others and must endure the opprobrium consequent to any failure to hold a decent ‘position’ as a servant in a middle-class household, and she summarises their current and future plight by asking Myles: ‘D’ye think will you and me be working our way the like of this from wan place to another till the end of our time?’54 The Irish Independent considered Brigid to be one of the best roles of the play, and that Bríd ní Loingsigh acted it ‘in a most convincing way’.55 From the moment that Brigid walks into the batchelor inhabited house Myles consistently helps her to the extent that he is prepared to put his own livelihood on the line to assure her welfare. Myles’s support is reciprocated by Brigid’s affections as the play develops and what is interesting is that the dynamics of class solidarity are mediated through the trope of romantic love. Myles’s support for Brigid emerges in the first instance from a sense of concern and compassion for her penurious circumstances as an unemployed, landless servant, and indeed his own situation as landless servant and rabbit-catcher are

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hardly much better, so the bond of class solidarity actually precedes the romantic bond which develops between them. The solidarity and fondness shared by Myles and Brigid stands in stark contrast to the pitiless opportunism demonstrated by Mrs Callaghan (Maureen Delaney), ‘a woman of forty or over’56 and widow who has her dead husband’s land but cannot work it herself. To consolidate her position as respectable small farmer with strong farmer ambitions, she is desperate to marry Luke Sweeney (Michael J. Dolan) who is similarly ‘middle-aged’ and constantly prevaricates over the matter as he is comfortable enough with Brigid’s housekeeping. Mrs Callaghan responds with ruthless expedience by informing on Myles who, driven in his desperation to provide financial security for himself and Brigid, has been illegally trading his employer’s produce. When Luke challenges her and asks why she informed or ‘split’ on them, she defends herself by saying she did them a ‘good turn’ and that they should ‘go to England where they’ll make a right living’.57 Under the guise of commonsense observation, Mrs Callaghan hides the cold calculation which is to remove Brigid so that she can complete her seduction of Luke and then marry him, thereby consolidating her own status as a respectable married woman with land and a new husband to work it. In this regard Mrs Callaghan’s behaviour typifies the callous pragmatism underlying bourgeois ambition, manifest in her reprimanding Myles for thinking of marrying ‘the like of’ penniless Brigid, and further castigates him for ‘proposing marriage to her when you have no right ways of living for her’.58 An unholy alliance develops between ‘The Lord’, Merrigan and Mrs Callaghan who pompously declare the superiority of their own class of landed bourgeois and petit bourgeois in contradistinction to ‘that class’ of landless and poorly paid servants Myles and Brigid. William Duffy (Eric Gorman) is the flatterer who swindles alcohol out of the ‘The Lord’ on the promise that he can get him a good ‘match’, and William is only too quick to ally himself with ‘The Lord’ and his class: MERRIGAN: Wan minute now and we’ll be with you. (To MRS C) How did you find out they were trading? MRS C: Wouldn’t any wan know they must go trading if she wanted to make up the costs for England, and himself costs for the gun. Sure Lordeen wouldn’t pay a penny if ‘twas to buy a ticket through the gates of Heaven. THE LORD: (Turning) I was paying them more than their worth. They’d be paid enough if I was only feeding them.


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WILLIAM: Sure ‘twas evermore the way with that class. When you’d shorten them in their pay they’d go behind your back for costs whenever they’d need to buy thing. THE LORD: (Leaving bags aside and confronting MRS C furiously) You divil’s rap! For why didn’t you tell me about this work before now? MRS C: Didn’t you know well the like of them won’t do with half pay any more? Them days are gone.59 The hard mercantilism demonstrated by these bourgeois landlowners shows that after two decades of Free State independence, any sense of the national solidarity and cameraderie from the anti-colonial period is shown to be redundant in the post-colonial period, as class strata are consolidated and class disparity confirmed as the status quo. Such disparity had a negative impact on the political effectiveness of Clann na Talmhan insofar as the various factions which formed the political party could not concur on the equilibrium to be achieved between the requirements of western and easterm agribusiness, which was the principal reason that the party could not build on its initial success of ten seats in the 1943 general election. As Ferriter suggests: ‘This highlighted class tension and Fianna Faíl’s ability to place itself above this; the inequities in Irish farming in terms of size, region and specialism were seemingly inimical to sustaining a farmers’ party that could command a wide and permanent appeal.’60 Molloy’s indignance at the demise of village life at the hands of the strong farmer-grazier is given full vent in his portrayal of ‘The Lord’ and ‘Bodagh’ Merrigan. ‘The Lord’ is a selfish brute whose parsimony is only rendered humourous by his absurd quest to marry a local woman, which is constantly thwarted by his intemperance and discourtesy. The Irish Times noted how F.J. McCormick ‘was at the top of his form all through in the comic character’61 and one can well imagine how McCormick’s hilarious rendition of ‘The Lord’ served to mediate the character’s negative qualities. Indeed these flaws are exacerbated by his delusions of grandeur and overweening pretentions to middle class respectability, as Mrs Callaghan notes: ‘But then wan with a fortune wouldn’t do him, but only wan with a salary; an’ ‘tis that craze for a teacher that has left him high and dry in the world’.62 ‘The Lord’ constantly boasts of his wealth, ‘There’s seventy acres here; the finest land in the country’,63 yet when Brigid asks for the loan of ‘ten shillings’ travel money to England he dismisses her out of hand, even though Paak Merrigan (Denis O’Dea) (‘Bodagh’ Merrigan’s errant son), states

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the obvious that ‘The Lord’ is ‘a man with a cartload of money in the Bank. Ten shillings ‘d be no loss to him’.64 ‘The Lord’ treats Myles with similar disdain, which is all the more striking insofar as he suffers from ‘agonising rheumatism’ and depends on Myles to run his business affairs. When Mrs Callaghan reveals that Myles has been illegally trading his employer’s goods to make up the ‘twelve pounds’ back-pay he is owed, ‘The Lord’ wastes no time in reporting him to the police knowing full well that a guilty verdict would ruin Myles, as he has already been ‘bound to the peace’ over a ‘row’ at a ‘Sports’ meeting the previous year. ‘Bodagh’ Merrigan is far more devious than ‘The Lord’ and is rendered as a villain in a style reminiscent of Boucicaultian melodrama: ‘a powerful, burly man in the fifties, blackavised, with a black, savage-looking, meat-chopper moustache’ with ‘the smile of the genial bandit or headsman’ and ‘the voice deceptively mild’.65 True to type, Merrigan is only too happy to exploit Myles’s precarious situation by tantalising him with the offer of a cottage and land as he plead’s Myles’s case to the Sergeant: ‘And the lad there is promised a fine situation; a cottage and land for himself and marrying the young wan. But if you bring him to Court he’ll lose all; he’ll be a tramp on the road. What you’re doing now will tipple the scales against you on the Day of Judgment.’66 Merrigan’s appeal to the pious Sergeant’s religious disposition saves Myles who is quick to follow up on the offer, only to find that Merrigan has no intention of keeping his word and is quick to dispense with Myles when he has no further use for him: ‘MYLES: All we want is to put the war over us./ MERRIGAN (Vigorously): That’s all right; that’s what ye’d say, and that’s what ye’d think; but wance ye’d sink yere teeth into my land ye’d think different. Then ye wouldn’t budge, and the Law wouldn’t give me leave to put you out, unless I’d find ye another house to stop in – and where would I get wan around? The new thing ye’d be off behind my back to the Land Commission ruffians to give ye a stripe of the farm for good.’67 Merrigan’s hard-nosed acquisitiveness is revealed earlier in the play by his son Paak who explains that his father ‘has a notion to be like the graziers of old with grazing farms bought and stocked up and down the five parishes. His mouth is watering for the day when Lordeen ‘ll run his farm ashore with the drink and have to sell.’68 When Paak asks for the cottage and land that his father will later tantalise Myles with, Merrigan’s response typifies the familist logic of stem inheritance and consolidation of property: ‘The cows ‘ll be stabling in Dargan’s house


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next month when the nights turn cold. I’ll divide my farm for no second son.’69 When Paak protests that Merrigan has plenty of land his father’s response typifies the cold business ethics of strong farmer-grazier expansionism: ‘They’re all the one farm now; and I’ll not divide it even if it was to keep you out of the poorhouse.’Twould be a bad day for everyone the day we’d start dividing our farms. Ireland got a burn from that before.’70 Myles’s retort at Merrigan’s casualness crystalizes Molloy’s critique of the economic status quo: ‘Wasn’t the old plan better than what’s going now? Wan village after another dying out and the graziers like yourself buying up the land from the bachelor houses?’71 In terms of the politics of the time, Tom Garvin states that ‘Fianna Fáil in government backed off from the proposal to break up the great “ranches” of Lenister and Munster only after 1935, under pressure of fear of wrecking what was left of a commercial farm economy in anticipation of a great new war which many knew was to come shortly.’72 The large commercial farmers survived because ‘de Valera realised that, despite his own sentimental anit-modernism, he could scarcely forego the productive power of what comercialised agriculture the country had in the parlous circumstances of the time.’73 Merrigan’s overconfidence and unwillingness to engage with alternative economic models typifies the prevailing attitude of the rural bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie in the 1940s: ‘MERRIGAN: (Pleasantly) Sure long ago if a man had a hundred acres he’d divide it amongst his sons, and they’d divide it amongst their sons till they’d be all poverised down to an acre a piece./PAAK: ‘Tis the same story with ye all, from the man with sixty acres to the man with a thousand. Because th’oul people done it too good wan way is no reason why ye should be doing it too good th’ other way.’74 Garvin suggests that ‘it took what was seen as the economic disaster of the mid-1950s and the ageing of the Boys of the Old Brigade to force real change; there was a genuine problem of gerontocracy.’75 In the 1950s, ‘the facts of economic life and electoral pressure began gradually to nullify the special interests of older business, ecclesiastical, cultural and labour elites, the people who had, essentially, carved up the entire country into a set of fiefdoms after 1920 and 1932.’76 The problematic issue of emigration runs through the play as Myles, Brigid and Paak oscillate between staying put and trying to make some kind of living in rural Galway, or taking their chances in England on the brink of war. Ferriter notes that the ‘lack of sympathy for the plight of emigrants was also reflected in the views of

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some rural activists; a contributor to the report of the Vocational Commission suggested that emigrants should have to pay “at least five hundred pounds” before they would be allowed to emigrate.’77 This in spite of the fact that an ‘estimated £21 million was remitted from emigrants in Britain to Ireland during the war’.78 In relation to ‘domestic welfare, it is unsurprising that by the end of the Emergency criticism of social conditions were mounting, despite the genuine attempts by Fianna Fáil during this period to instigate measures conducive to greater social justice’.79 Brigid is told consistently by various characters, particularly Mrs Callaghan and Mary Kennedy (Maureen O’Sullivan), to emigrate because her indigence and lack of a dowry for a potential husband render her position untenable: ‘PAAK: They’ll all do the wan thing – work somewhere where they’ll have a chance to marry before they get middling old. And that’s what you should do, too./M ARY: And you have no business about this country when you have no fortune for them.’80 Eventually Myles and Brigid make the difficult decision to emigrate: ‘MYLES: Squandering our lives away here when we could be beyond going ahead hard and fast at our battle with the world! (Turning away woefully.) My mind is a misery to me here from now on./ BRIGID (Running to him): Myles! I couldn’t live and see you that way suffering. We’ll go. We’ll take our chance. (She clings to him.)’81 The combination of class solidarity with genuine affection renders the romantic fantasy which concludes the play, as the young couple determine to prosper in England rather than languish in Galway. It is this recourse to romantic fantasy which somewhat molifies the indictment throughout the play of both class disparity and the intransigence of the rural bourgeoisie to consider an alternative economic system. The tendency to mollify insightful realism with romantic fantasy is augmented in his later play The Wood of the Whispering (1953), where the impoverished old tramp Sanbatch Daly uses fairytale and folktale alike to construct a romantic fantasyscape, which he hopes will encourage the young men and women not to emigrate but to stay and repopulate the West of Ireland. In terms of the critical reception of Old Road both the Irish Times and the Irish Independent praised Molloy’s dramaturgy, with the Irish Times noting his ‘natural ability for the stage’ and ‘his gift for easy and telling dialogue’.82 The Irish Times review commented on the ‘none too easy charm’ of Old Road, stating that in terms of realising the play ‘occasionally, the production and the players seemed to fail the playwright’.83 In spite


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of the production problems, Old Road was awarded best new play at the Abbey Theatre in 1943, and later awarded best play in the all-Ireland drama festival of 1961. Like Shiels before him, Molloy had that rare ability to produce plays which were not only popular with audiences but also contained incisive criticism of the society they depicted. The inconsistency between the quality of a play and the quality of its theatrical production was endemic at the Abbey during the 1930s and 1940s, resulting in the palimpsest of performance accretions which have over-determined the treatment by historians of plays produced in this period. Robert Hogan notes that the Abbey had produced ‘great players’ such as ‘Sara Allgood, F.J. McCormick, and Barry Fitzgerald’ and that there were ‘fine actors in the company;’ however it was ‘still true that many of the best recent actors’ such as Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, Walter Macken and Ray McAnally left the Abbey.84 The reason for this ‘was not merely monetary, but artistic’ insofar as it was ‘difficult for great acting to flourish in this atmosphere of playing for the easy laugh’.85 The poor production standards were exacerbated by the tendency to write what Denis Donoghue termed ‘Abbey plays’ involving ‘a dishonest stock of Abbey “characters”, Abbey gestures, Abbey idioms, Abbey coat-trailing’.86 Notwithstanding this tendency, Hogan suggests that: If there were no new plays to generate riots in the theatre, there were plenty of good, sound, new plays. These years saw some of the strongest work of [W.B.] Yeats, [Lennox] Robinson, [Brinsley] MacNamara, T.C. Murray, Rutherford Mayne, and St. John Ervine. George Shiels poured forth a steady flow of increasingly wry plays that grew ever farther away from the broad buffooneries that had made his reputation. Some fascinating new talents appeared: Paul Vincent Carroll, Teresa Deevy, Jack B. Yeats, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, and Louis D’Alton, to mention only the best. Among them, these worthy writers gave about seventy-five new plays to the Abbey, which would have made an enviable reputation for a less famous theatre.87 In addition to being a fine actor, Walter Macken was a dramatist and novelist from Galway who at the age of 17 joined the Irish language theatre An Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, where he acted, directed and wrote plays in Irish. In the 1940s and 1950s he acted at the Abbey, and played the lead in the Broadway production of Molloy’s The King


of Friday’s Men (1948). As a consequence of the 1966 actor’s strike against decisions made by aristic director Ernest Blythe, Macken was co-opted to the Abbey board of directors and served briefly as aristic director until succeeded by Tomás Mac Anna. Macken’s plays in English produced at the Abbey in the 1940s and 1950s such as Mungo’s Mansion (1946)88 and Home is the Hero (1952)89 which focus on the urban poor, were compared with with O’Casey’s Dublin plays. As the Irish Times stated: ‘ “Mungo’s Mansion”, which is having its first production at the Abbey Theatre, is a dramatic essay on the comedy and tragedy of slum life in Galway, and it evokes, inevitably, comparisons with Sean O’Casey – not entirely to the advantage of Mr. Macken’90 The review suggests that Macken’s comic characters do not ‘arrest us with the thought, “Here is the body and soul of life” as O’Casey’s characters do’.91 Nevertheless, it can be argued that the problems with the comic mediation of class disparity inherent to the dramaturgy employed in O’Casey’s Dublin plays are manifest to a certain degree in Macken’s dramaturgy. Mungo’s Mansion and the unproduced Vacant Possession (1948)92 both deal primarily with the issue of inadequate housing for the poor of Galway, with the former set in a dilapidated tenement and the latter set in a condemned house. Mungo King (F.J. McCormick) is the eponymous central character – a docker who was disabled by a work-related accident for which he received no compensation. Mungo’s déclassé status as gainfully employed proletarian turned unemployed lumpenproletarian has a negative impact on his family’s quality of life, for which his son Mairteen (Micheál Ó Briain) and daughter Nellie (Siobhán Ní Chionnaith/Siobhán McKenna) constantly harangue him in their demand that he move the family out of the slum tenement in Buttermilk Lane. More disconcertingly, the Doctor informs Mungo that his youngest son Tomeen has diptheria (reminiscent of Mollser in O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars) and recommends that he relocate his family to the ‘nice Corporation houses’ in Shantalla which he would qualify for on account of the sheer size of his family. The representation of such poverty bears upon historical precedent insofar as reports from ‘the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children from the mid-1940s did not point to numerous deliberate instances of cruelty to children, but rather to the generally appalling physical environment in which the vulnerable lived.’93 Ferriter notes that it was ‘ironic that a society which placed such a premium on the family and the home environment was still prepared to incarcerate children in institutions where childhood was all but non-existent,


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while legal adoption continued to be resisted on the grounds that it would threaten the religious welfare of children’.94 In spite of the deprivation which his children have to endure, Mungo is loathe to move as he receives subsistence level financial support from various charities and disregards the severity of Tomeen’s illness: ‘MUNGO: A man has a right to have one sick child out oo eleven, hasn’t he?’95 Indeed Mungo’s carelessness for his family’s welfare echoes that of ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and his friendship with the tinker Mowleog’s Canavan (Harry Brogan) parallels that of ‘Captain’ Boyle and the ne’er-do-well ‘Joxer’ Daly. Whilst ‘Captain’ Boyle is an inveterate loafer, Mungo is slightly different insofar as he has a strong work ethic registered by both the Doctor and Mairteen, when it transpires later in the play that Mungo has won a small fortune through a bet placed on a horse-racing sweepstake. Until that point, and indeed for at least half of the play, the entertainment derives largely from Mungo engaging in tomfoolery with fellow lumpenproletarians Mowleogs (Harry Brogan) and Winnie Gilhealhy (Eileen Crowe) ‘a perpetual and heavy porterdrinker’.96 It is on the level of stage antics that the play most closely replicates O’Casey’s dramaturgy in its reliance on the comic male pairing of Mungo and Mowleogs, and the humour derived from local idiom typified in this exchange between Winnie and her peer Maggie Badgers: ‘WINNIE: (annoyed): Oh, indeed, sez the Queen a Claddy, airin’ herself like the Connemara cow she is, goin’ round with her topin’ dirty black porter, an’ her poor starvin’ children at home pullin’ their rags around thim an’ their mouths ever open like a pack a young skaltauns starvin’ with the hunger, a nice one teh talk indeed!’ 97 As Declan Kiberd notes of O’Casey’s Dublin plays where the ‘lovable peasant’ reappeared as a ‘twentieth-century slum-dweller’, so with Mungo’s Mansion the Dublin slum-dweller reappears in a Galway tenement, similarly repeated but not remodelled, with the ‘literate, theatrical audience’ invited to ‘patronize rather than understand’ the tenement denizens.98 By replicating the comic strategies employed in O’Casey’s Dublin plays, Macken also risks the comic mediation of trauma inherent to social deprivation, yet his polemic against such deprivation in the post-colonial era of Catholic bourgeois nationalism is more clearly defined than O’Casey’s. This is evidenced somewhat in the contrast between the bourgeois landlord’s agent Skerret (Michael J. Dolan) and the socialist Doctor (Fred Johnson). Skerret typifies bourgeois hypocrisy as the false concern for his tenants disguises the real concern for revenue: ‘Now, now,

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Mister King, you mustn’t think for a moment that my periodic visits are motivated purely for the sake of gain. No, no, indeed! I like all my customers very much, and I am interested in their welfare. When misfortune strikes them it also strikes me, in the moral sense of course’.99 Skerret displays the inherent contradiction of the Catholic bourgeoisie whose catechistic obligation to the poor is promptly overridden by the desire for material gain: ‘I trust you, Mrs. Gilhealy, like I’d trust my own mother, but don’t you think a short trip out to the house on this auspicious occasion would merit its own reward? Let us take time by the forelock and advance to the noble work of God’.100 The ‘noble work’ referred to is of course the extraction of rent through the euphemistic agency of ‘so many gentle bailiffs’,101 and Skerret’s callousness is diametrically opposed to the Doctor’s selfless dedication to the underprivileged: ‘DOCTOR: I’m afraid I’ll never be rich, because I’m too fond of you and Mowleogs here and other people like you. I could never give you up, Mungo, for the gilded boudoirs.’102 Where the Doctor’s sincerity is deliberately used to emphasize Skerret’s hypocrisy in Macken’s polemic against the aloofness of the hegemonic bourgeoisie, the role of Mowleogs is less obvious insofar as he constitutes a reincarnation of the trope of the clever tramp deployed successively by Boucicault, Synge and Shiels. Macken makes it clear that one should ‘be disgusted at the sight of him, but somehow he is so honest with his rags, and is the possessor of such a happy, carefree, cheerful countenance that you are rather interested than otherwise’.103 Mowleogs occupies the lowest rank of propertyless lumpenproletarian, with the Doctor pointing out that he once saw him ‘sitting at the side of the road mending a lot of pots’.104 Mowleog’s shares a love-hate relationship with Mungo who frequently makes such denouncements as ‘Mowleogs Canavan is God’s mistake’105 Yet it is Mowleogs who places the winning bet on the sweepstake, gaining his friend Mungo a small fortune enabling him to take his family out of the slum-tenement to a better life in Shantalla. It is Mowleogs who saves Mungo from the psychotic Jack Manders who, after murdering his own wife, tries to kill Mungo ‘but fortunately Mowleogs reaches him, and putting his two hands around the front of him, holds Manders’ arms stiff and powerless’106 After saving the day, Mowleogs refuses to share in the prosperity he has won for his friend, and ends the play with a romantic gesture all too reminiscent of the pronouncements made by the clever tramps in Synge’s and Boucicault’s plays: MOWLEOGS (turning): Look, Mungo, can’t ye see the poor oul’ Mowleogs trottin’ up the Shantalla an’ all thim respectable people


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lookin’ at m’ as if he was somethin’ that came in under the dure? No, I’ll see yeh around, Mungo. Whin yer lig is better agin, mebbe you and the Mowleogs’ll hit the spots together again. The feelin’ is comin’ over the Mowleogs again. The Mowleogs will have te be off agin. The oul’ road is callin’, Mungo, and the sweet bed a hay be the side a the ditch, an’ the sun shinin’ mebbe and the rain lashin’, all the pots that has teh be minded and all the stables that has teh be cleaned, and all the great big pots a flowery spuds waitin’ teh have yer teeth sunk in them. Ah, the call is comin’ to the Mowleogs, the call is comin’.107 Mowleogs provides closure here by conjuring a fantasyscape at one remove from the embourgeoisement of the settled community, which echoes Christy Mahon and his delusion of ‘romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the Judgment Day’,108 and Conn the Shaughraun who will return to his ‘bed as usual on the mountain above – the bolster is stuffed wid rocks, and I’ll have a cloud round me for a blanket’.109 Mowleogs, like Christy and Conn before him, constitutes the classed subaltern as fantasy object which both supports the logic of embourgeoisement whilst simultaneously subverting that logic through his paradoxical status as the impossible fragment of the Real around which the Symbolic order of bourgeois desire is structured. Mowleogs’s fantastic luck and incredible timing are the precise factors which faciliate the embourgoisement of Mungo and his family, and yet he is necessarily excluded from that bourgeois Symbolic order which will regard him as the disgusting residue of the Real, or in his own words ‘as if he was somethin’ that came in under the dure’. The traumatic aspects of Mowleog’s and for that matter Winnie’s subaltern status are mediated by comedy, as the review for the Irish Independent indicates: ‘the author carries his comedy along with the wealth of his dialogue and the picturesqueness of his characters. [...] His two characters, the tinker Mowleogs Canavan, and the loquacious Winnie Gilhealy, are however first class and his best achievement. Harry Brogan and Eileen Crowe play the parts with rare abandon.’110 In terms of plot structure the review notes that Mungo’s Mansion is ‘first and foremost a comedy, and if he plunges into stark tragedy in the third act after two acts of particularly robust fun, the tragedy comes suddenly and violently like a blow on the face – even if there is a faint suggestion of its coming. There is no purposeful build-up to tragedy. It comes like a summer shower; it passes and the fun and games go on

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again, maybe a bit damp and a little more subdued’.111 Vacant Posession develops along a similar trajectory in terms of the shenanigans in the first half of the play, but when the tragic ‘blow’ lands in the second half there is no return to ‘fun and games’ and the tone becomes increasingly sombre as the play moves to its conclusion. Gunner Delaney is the main character who, like Mungo before him, has been relegated from proletarian coal delivery-man to lumpenproletarian rag-and-bone-man by a crippling work-related injury which has left him with a wooden leg. Gunner’s decline has led to depression and chronic dipsomania to the extent that he squanders the rent money on ‘porter’, resulting in his family’s eviction and their current status as squatters in the dilapidated house known as The Gantry. ‘Fixit’ Maloney is Gunner’s comrade, an ageing World War I veteran who, according to Mrs Delaney, ‘was born to be a tinker’,112 in terms of his preference for an itinerant lifestyle and natural ability to repair the seemingly irreparable, from patching up a hole in the roof to mending Gunner’s fragile wooden leg. Fixit exhibits many good qualities, not least in terms of his friendship with Gunner and support for his wife and son ‘Chicken’ Delaney. Fixit stands up to Mister Kilcullen ‘The Dummy’ who is a ‘ganger’ or middle-man representing the Corporation construction department and is a jobsworth bureaucrat who has no sympathies for either Fixit or the Delaney family and is hell-bent on demolishing the house whether they are evicted or not. Fixit demonstrates uncommon sympathy for the local hoodlum Wee-Wee Brady, and agrees to shelter ‘Gabbler’ Blake the aged déclassé businessman turned lumpenproletarian. In an act of real physical bravery Fixit defies the much younger and stronger local thug James ‘Revenge’ Horgan in a confrontation over rent money. Fixit’s bravery is not just the delusional behaviour of an ageing warrior insofar as his experience in World War I had a profound effect on his view of the world: ‘Before I wint in’ the Army I was a real professional Catholic like all the boys. It ruined me, so it did. I’m oney an amature prayrer ever since.’113 Fixit’s wartime experiences have made him a more compassionate rather than more callous individual, particularly in terms of his regard for the disenfranchized and dissafected, as Mrs Delaney observes: ‘I never saw anywan like ye, Fixit, with the soft mouth on yeh for every oul’ tinker that passes the road. Yeh always had a soft spot for Wee-wee.’114 Fixit’s compassion for the underpriviledged parallels Macken’s own concern for the poor which he makes clear in the preface to the play. Whilst Macken notes that at the time of writing Galway Corporation had ‘eradicated slums and have almost abolished tenements’ his


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motivation is clear: ‘But the poor, alas, we have always with us, with the throbbing drama of their lives. Poor they may be in the material things, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in things of the spirit. [...] So, to my friends, the poorer people of Galway, I respectfully dedicate this play.’115 It is this sharper focus on poverty, particularly its traumatic effects on the destitute, which perhaps explains the dramaturgical shift from the comic mediation of trauma and positive conclusion provided by clever tramp Mowleogs in Mungo’s Mansion, to the litany of woes which makes up the second half of Vacant Possession. Fixit is unable to divert Gunner from the downward spiral of alcoholism, with the consequence that Gunner assaults his wife when she resolves finally to stop funding his drinking habit. Out of pity for his friend Mowleogs helps fund a commiseratory drinking session which ends with Gunner’s death after he falls into the canal while hobbling drunkenly home from Minchin’s public house by himself. Fixit’s sympathy for Wee-Wee Brady and ‘Gabbler’ Blake backfires insofar as Brady has robbed Minchin’s pub, and the aged Blake which Fixit cared for is actually a career criminal that Brady used as an alibi. Inspite of Fixit’s defiance of the ‘ganger’ Kilcullen, the demolition of The Gantry proceeds at the end of the play, executed by no less than Fixit’s nemesis ‘Revenge’ Horgan, and so Fixit, Mrs Delaney and ‘Chicken’ Delaney are evicted yet again. The only redeeming aspect in the denouement of the play is that Gunner’s death will result in his more temperate son ‘Chicken’ inheriting the ‘horse and cart’, enabling him to provide at least a basic standard of living for his grief-stricken mother. The deliberate irony of the name ‘Fixit’ Maloney is repeatedly hammered home in the second half of the play in a series of violent ‘blow[s] on the face’ in terms of the catalogue of misfortunes that befall him and his friends, all of which he is ultimately unable to counter with the customary guile demonstrated by his antecedents such as Myles-na-Coppaleen in Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn or the Tramp in Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen. Fixit’s desolation at the end of the play is crystalized in his denunciation of Horgan’s demolition of The Gantry, and constitutes Macken’s denouncement of class disparity and the moral bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism: FIXIT: Don’t lave a stone on a stone oo it, because yeer pullin’ down the freedom a man on top a yeer own dirty heads. Let ye sing at yeer work a pullin’ down the oul’ Ganthry, because the Ganthry is ended and so is the rights a the common people. Let ye wave yeer green flags over its grave and sing a Hallelujah whin yeer blinded in its dust. Let ye give great shouts outa ye because yeer knocking

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the props under democracy, and it’ll fall like a corpse under the foundations a the Galway Ganthry. Democracy? How are yeh!116 As Fixit leaves The Gantry he can be heard joining in with the words of the song on a record playing on the old gramophone, which he has given Horgan as back-pay for the rent: ‘The baritone on the record is singing feelingly, “Sure, a little bit of Heaven fell from out the sky one day,” and the curtain finally descends as he bawls, “They called it Ire-e-e-e-land.”’117 Instead of the comic mediation of class disparity and horrendous living conditions, with a clever tramp who provides closure by saving the day, we witness a succession of events of unalloyed trauma and are left with an indictment of bourgeois nationalism. In Politics and Irish Life, 1913–21, David Fitzpatrick suggests that if ‘revolutions are what happen to wheels, then Ireland underwent a revolution between 1916 and 1922 ... social and political institutions were turned upside down, only to revert to full circle upon the establishment of the Irish Free State’.118 The ratification of the Republic of Ireland Act on 18 April 1949 formally ended 26-county Ireland’s membership of the British Commonwealth, and the dialectic between Irish Ireland and Anglo-Irish Ireland completed another revolution. The Irish Ireland contingent led by the Catholic bourgeois élite consolidated its hegemony and through a process of dialectical mediation had become its own antithesis. As with so many former colonies of the British Empire where the nationalist middle class displaced the colonial class as the ruling élite, the social praxis of Irish Ireland as Catholic bourgeois nationalism replicated the class hierarchies of colonial Ireland under the Ascendancy. Whilst the Free State endured a nationalist civil war subsequent to the partition of Ireland in 1922, the post-Famine legacy of economic emigration was the safety valve which dispersed those energies born of class disparity that could well have produced an Irish version of the October Revolution. As undesirable as this kind of social revolution may seem from the perspective of the post-Soviet era of global capitalist hegemony, the attendant triumphalism of bourgeois nationalism not only disavows class disparity both nationally119 and internationally,120 but also disavows the historical dimension of class disparity. When Hugh Dolis in The Rugged Path refers in disgust to Sean Tansey and what Frantz Fanon would call ‘the national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime’,121 he speaks for a generation of classed subalterns: ‘That Sean fella’s stinking with pride and importance. Riding about on horseback, looking at his sheep and cattle, like a lord of the soil. I wonder why in hell we wiped out the old landlords to make room for a new gentry!’122

Part II The Woman and its Vicissitudes


5 What Kind of a Living Woman is It that You are at All?

The representation of women as fantasy objects in Irish culture has a long history stretching back through the ages from Old Irish (written before 950ce), to Middle Irish (950–1200ce) and Early Modern Irish (1200ce to the 1700s).1 The earliest extant literature was written during a period of social transition and, while based on pagan oral tradition, it was transcribed by Christian writers. Consequently it is difficult to determine what the original pagan tradition must have actually been, as it was buried under centuries of interpretive and translational palimpsests. While early Irish literature was constantly re-worked into the new Christian mythopoeic system, it was not interrupted or broken up by that system but merely transformed into the new Christian ethos. Between the early Irish and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish traditions, however, there was definite schism. The new modifications were due to several contingent factors, as Rosalind Clark suggests: ‘the change from an independent to a colonial Ireland, the change from the Irish to the English language, new social mores, and, finally, new standards of literary convention and taste. As the society and its ideals and beliefs altered, the literature and its portrayal of women altered.’2 Clark contends that the Anglo-Irish authors ‘knew little of the dying Irish tradition until they discovered it by means of laborious scholarship. They then adapted it for their own purposes’.3 A consistent feature of the portrayal of women in the Anglo-Irish tradition is the construction of Woman as a fantasy object which is symbolically central in terms of aesthetic and political investment. What is striking in the representation of women in the Anglo-Irish tradition, and particularly in AngloIrish drama, is the contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as a fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects. While there are crucial differences between the 117

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Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland representations of women as fantasy objects, they nonetheless share the fundamental contradiction between symbolic centrality and social subordination. Just as the figure of the classed subaltern as fantasy object was appropriated and adapted to serve the different purposes of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland factions in an ideological struggle for hegemony so, it will be argued, the figure of the gendered subaltern as fantasy object in its various manifestations as Woman, Wife, Mother and Fallen Woman was similarly appropriated and adapted for the same purpose. Vis-à-vis the figure of the Woman as the contested site of national identification, the notion of Irish sovereignty in the pre-Christian era was symbolized as the land goddess who engaged in sexual union with the king in order to ensure victory in battle against his enemies and good harvests for his subjects. During the Christian era ‘the Sovereignty could no longer be worshipped as a goddess, although her symbolic role in inauguration rites remained the same. Her portrayal in literature had to be altered. In pseudo-historical tales, the Sovereignty gradually becomes an allegorical figure, a very conventional medieval way of dealing with the problem of pagan goddesses.’4 The next phase in the evolution of the sovereignty theme emerged in response to Ireland’s colonization by England in the 1600s. Aisling or ‘vision’ poetry became a major genre in the late 1600s and grew in significance during the 1700s, and the rise of aisling poetry is intimately linked to the impact of colonialism, as Melissa Sihra argues: ‘Since the anti-Catholic Penal Codes of the seventeenth century, it had been forbidden to directly refer to, or name, Ireland in ballads, poems and so on. Hence the female personification of the nation began, and flourished as an iconographic trope of cultural and political resistance.’5 In an aisling poem, the poet has a vision of a beautiful young woman who personifies Ireland. The woman laments her country’s woes and reassures the poet that after the colonial English have been eventually driven out she will be joined in matrimony to an Irish king. In this mythos, the goddess’s power is considerably reduced as she must wait for the king’s assistance rather than bring assistance to him. In this incarnation of the Woman as Sovereignty figure the emphasis is increasingly focussed on the construction of the woman as symbolic object of national desire, a process which necessarily occludes the complex issues of gender hierarchies in favour of an overdetermination of the Woman as national icon. The Sovereignty figure emerged in the Anglo-Irish literary tradition in the translations of aisling poems and love songs by authors such as

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James Clarence Mangan6 and Aubrey de Vere.7 The Irish love songs of the 1800s and early 1900s were constructed around the notion of the poet’s mistress as the personification of Ireland. In the love songs the Sovereignty figure acquired a more tangible, human character, and she is referred to in more credible terms as the author’s lover rather than a deity or fairy from another realm. A remarkable feature of the AngloIrish tradition is that the Sovereignty figure is transmogrified as a peasant woman, a trope which achieved its apotheosis in dramatic form in Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Sovereignty as an Old Irish goddess had three aspects: that of the young beautiful maiden, the powerful sexual woman, and the hag or death goddess. In the later sovereignty tradition she becomes a dual, not a triple goddess. It is her middle aspect, the most powerful and positive one, which is missing. She cannot dispense riches, for she has none; or fertility, since that is morally unacceptable; or victory, for that is politically unlikely. She can be seen as young, beautiful but inaccessible, or as a hag, the dispenser of death.8 The Woman as Sovereignty undergoes a transmogrification through successive reconfigurations by Anglo-Irish writers, specifically in terms of the transformation from a focus on the physical aspects of mortal women to a focus on the Woman as a supernatural and immortal entity whose power lies in her status as object cause of both national and sexual desire. The tactical strength of Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan in forging a sentimental connection with a predominantly Catholic people-nation lay in the ambivalent representation of Cathleen as the trope which functioned as the object cause for both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland forms of national desire. As the analysis in Chapter 1 of this book indicates, the Cathleen who transforms from an old hag to a young girl ‘with the walk of a queen’ can serve as the object cause of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland versions of nationalism, insofar as the specificity of ‘a’ woman is nationalized as ‘the’ Woman qua fantasy object. This split between the physical woman and the fantasy Woman inherent to competing ideologies of Irish womanhood was maintained across the twentieth century. As Anna McMullan notes: ‘The Reverend Ian Paisley has insisted that the divinely ordained role of a Protestant woman is to provide service and succour to her husband, while in Catholic iconography, women are offered as role models both the Virgin


Mary, infinitely forgiving and supportive, and Mother Ireland, a grieving mother whose land has been plundered and her sons taken.’9 The personification of Ireland as Woman therefore ‘necessitated that the purity of that image was maintained on all levels for, in order to maintain its mobilizing force, “Woman” could only ever be an eternal essence beyond the physicality which suggested other, darker, demands and desires’.10 The paradoxical dynamic between symbolic sublimation and social suppression is intrinsic to the gender ideologies and the dramatic texts of both Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland. The fantasy object of Woman was used by both factions (and indeed factions within those factions) as a mobilizing force in the struggle for national hegemony, in spite of the fact that the social and political advancement of women was disavowed by Anglo-Irish and Irish Ireland intellectuals and politicians alike. The Woman as fantasy object is also a consistent feature in three of Lady Gregory major plays, namely Kincora, Dervorgilla and Grania. Each of these plays involves a variation on the theme of Woman as sublime object who undergoes a sharp desublimation, which renders her a Fallen Woman and betrayer of Ireland’s sovereignty to foreign invaders. Barely a year after her death in 1933, Yeats published two poems commemorating Lady Gregory in his collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems, ‘Coole Park, 1929’ and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, both of which commemorate her legacy to Irish theatre and culture. While Yeats’s appreciation of Lady Gregory manifested in both his poetry and prose have the effect of eulogizing her, they also have the concomitant effect of mummifying both her plays and her place in history. Christopher Murray argues that such ‘mummifying tributes’ tend to ‘stiffen her into monumental awesomeness like a building, like Coole House itself or the Abbey Theatre’.11 What is astounding about Lady Gregory’s career is that, in addition to the huge effort involved in organizing and sustaining the Abbey Theatre project, she also managed to produce a canon of some 42 plays.12 The achievement is even more impressive when one considers Lady Gregory’s contribution to the writing of plays normally included within the Yeatsian canon, such as The Pot of Broth (1904), Where There is Nothing and its revision as The Unicorn from the Stars (1907), and most notably Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902).13 Colm Tóibín states that: It is now absolutely clear that Cathleen ni Houlihan, though credited to Yeats, was written largely by Lady Gregory. The idea belonged to Yeats and Yeats wrote the chant of the old woman at the end. But he


could not write peasant dialogue, and the play depends on the naturalistic setting, the talk of money and marriage, the sense of ease in family life in a smallholding. In the manuscript held in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, Lady Gregory has written in pencil on the first section of ten pages ‘All this mine’, and ‘This with WBY’ at the beginning of the second section.14 In spite of the evidence of her skill as a dramatist, Lady Gregory’s plays are hardly ever performed at the Abbey or any other theatre in Dublin or the rest of Ireland. While a great deal of scholarship has been produced about the plays of Yeats and Synge, only a fraction of that amount has been produced about Lady Gregory’s plays. As Christopher Murray suggests, ‘A pat on the laurelled head from Yeats does not do Gregory justice.’15 Scholarship produced on Lady Gregory since the 1960s has generally taken the form of biographical and commemorative work, stressing her significance to the Irish Renaissance in terms of her political and intellectual development, her management skills and her support of other dramatists, particularly Yeats.16 The scholarship which focusses primarily on Lady Gregory’s dramatic work tends to be similarly biographical and commemorative, and avoids rigorous examination of the cultural politics of the plays and their relationship to the social context in which they were written.17 The commemorative approach conforms to what Nietzsche describes as ‘antiquarian’18 history, specifically the work of one ‘who preserves and reveres’ that which has gone before them.19 In certain ways this approach replicates Yeats’s eulogization of Lady Gregory insofar as the antiquarian mode can sometimes ‘grow too mighty and overpower the other modes of regarding the past. For it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it.’20 While Lady Gregory’s oeuvre has been (so to speak) well-preserved, it has not been engendered or revitalized in the same manner as the plays of Yeats or Synge. A major reason for the constant revivification of Yeats and Synge’s work is the application of what Nietzsche calls ‘critical’21 history, which involves ‘bringing it before the tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it’.22 The irony here of course is that the more the plays of Yeats and Synge have been scrupulously examined and ‘condemned’ by scholars and audiences, the more their plays have been written about and revived on the stage. The dialectics of critical debate over the years has involved constant reinterpretation and reassessment of their work. In this sense then, Lady Gregory’s plays must also be subjected to a ‘critical’ historicization in order for her plays


to be saved from the kind of eulogization which has led to her mummification as a dramatist. Like Synge, Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory was born of a landed family from the Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. Her family, the Persses, were staunch Unionists who owned Roxborough, an estate of significant proportions in southern Galway. The Persses were ‘not regarded by the people, the tenantry, as beneficent’,23 acting towards them as colonial expropriators, gaining from the Great Famine of 1845–1849 when other members of their class were almost bankrupted by the catastrophe. As a retaliatory gesture to the Persses’ expropriation the IRA burned down Roxborough House in 1922. In 1880 Augusta Persse married Sir William Gregory, a widower 35 years her senior, who owned Coole Park and had been an MP for Dublin and Galway, and Governor of Ceylon 1871–1877. Sir William was responsible for the infamous ‘Gregory Clause’ of 1847, an amendment to the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act of 1838, ‘which denied relief to anyone possessing more than a quarter-acre of land; this boosted the landlord desiderata of land clearance and emigration, and has been credited with “disintegrating the fabric of rural society” ’.24 By birth and marriage, then, Lady Gregory was intimately involved with the colonial Ascendancy class and her political evolution from ardent unionist to strident nationalist was a slow and difficult one.25 Sean O’Casey, an unlikely ally considering his political beliefs, crystallized Lady Gregory’s predicament in a letter to her in 1928: ‘you had to fight against your birth into position and comfort as others had to fight against their birth into hardship and poverty, and it is as difficult to come out of one as it is to come out of the other’.26 A pivotal event in Lady Gregory’s political development occurred during her travels in 1881 with Sir William to Egypt, where she met the poet William Scawen Blunt, who was visiting Egypt with his wife. Both Lady Gregory and Blunt developed an interest in the activities of Arabi Bey, an Egyptian revolutionary who was contesting the colonial domination of North Africa by Britain and France, and Lady Gregory’s first published work was an account of her meeting with Arabi and his family.27 From their keen interest in the activities of the anticolonial Arabi, Lady Gregory and Blunt developed a keen interest in each other and had a passionate love affair which lasted 18 months, starting when Lady Gregory had been married to Sir William for less than two years in total. Lady Gregory and Blunt’s affections were covertly manifested in ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’, comprising 12 sonnets written by Lady Gregory and remodelled by Blunt, which he published near the end of January 1892,


barely six weeks before Sir William died.28 While Lady Gregory’s public persona after Sir William’s death was an Anglo-Irish version of Queen Victoria after Prince Albert’s death, wearing black and maintaining a cool detachment from the world around her, the sonnets reveal the burning desire beneath the cold exterior. A sense of guilt and betrayal pervades Lady Gregory’s biography and aesthetics in terms of both sexual and national politics: her love for Sir William and her love for Blunt constituted a deep emotional conflict which troubled her for many years; her loyalty to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class and her commitment to Irish anticolonial nationalism constituted a similarly difficult impasse. When one factors in the sublimation/subordination double-bind which Irish women of all classes and creeds faced on a quotidian basis then one can appreciate the issues with which Lady Gregory was faced. Indeed these issues manifested themselves in her plays, especially in her rendering of the female protagonist as Woman qua fantasy object of masculinist and national desire. Three of Lady Gregory’s tragedies, namely Kincora, Dervorgilla and Grania, conform in many ways to the Classical Greek model, which Aristotle describes as the imitation of ‘agents’ who are ‘admirable’ or who are ‘better people than we are’.29 The tragic element lies in an ‘error of some kind’ which causes a reversal of fortune from an admirable to deplorable state, typified in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Euripides’ Medea. The admirable agents who undergo such a reversal are invariably members of the aristocracy: Oedipus as the King of Thebes; Medea as the princess of Colchis and wife of Jason, son of Aeson the King of Iolcus. Lady Gregory’s tragedies follow very much in the vein of Classical Greek tragedy insofar as they involve the same reversal of fortune where the respective protagonists Gormleith, Dervorgilla and Grania are aristocratic women who are driven by choice and circumstance from an admirable to a deplorable state. All three tragedies are effectively history plays dealing with specific junctures in Ireland’s long history of conflict with incursionary forces bent on conquering the Island. Kincora (1905)30 charts the relationship between Gormleith and Brian Boru in the events which lead up to Brian’s legendary victory over the Viking and Danish forces at Clontarf in 1014. The play opens with a prologue where Brian encounters Aoibhell the ‘Spirit’ who tempts him to join her in her supernatural realm. Brian has the opportunity to achieve the jouissance available in a relationship with the aged Aoibhell, but he rejects her in favour of the possible jouissance to be gained in the realization of a united Ireland, which is


achievable only after the ordeal of constant war and sacrifice. Brian has the opportunity to short-circuit the constitutive gap of desire and immediately experience this jouissance, but in choosing ‘that hard sweetheart Ireland’ he accepts the pain of successive ordeals. Brian’s choice parallels the masochistic etiquette followed by the knight in the classic courtly love scenario where he pretends that his ‘sweetheart’ is the cruel, inaccessible Lady: ‘The knight’s relationship to the Lady is thus the relationship of the subject-bondsman, vassal, to his feudal Master-Sovereign who subjects him to senseless, outrageous, impossible, arbitrary, capricious ordeals.’31 The inaccessible ‘hard sweetheart Ireland’ takes on material form for Brian in the shape of Queen Gormleith: wife to Malachi, the High King of Ireland; sister of Maelmora, King of Leinster; and mother to Sitric, Leader of the Danes, through a previous marriage. Gormleith’s nationality is central to the play insofar as she was born in Ireland but also has loyalty to the incursionary Danish forces. The combination of Gormleith’s potential for ‘great trouble’ and her ‘high beauty’ constitutes her as the object cause of desire for both the Irish and the Danish forces who are contesting the ownership of Ireland.32 In many aspects Gormleith is an incarnation of the Morrígan insofar as she is driven towards (and drives others towards) war and conflict. Gormleith’s lust for battle leads her to betray Brian and Malachi’s forces and side with the Danes and her brother Maelmora in the battle of Glenmama. Malachi is hell-bent on retribution against Gormleith and her coconspirators, stating that ‘Ireland can have no worse enemies than these’, but he leaves their fate to Brian’s decision. However, Brian’s desire to bring peace through superior firepower and unify Ireland’s disparate factions results in an unexpectedly magnanimous gesture. At the very moment when Brian can finally ‘force a peace’ he frees Gormleith and her co-conspirators, an act which will ironically lead to further war and ultimately to his death. Just as at the start of the play when Brian can actually achieve jouissance he undermines the realization of that possibility by this time releasing Gormleith, whom Malachi prophetically describes as ‘the very seed and root of war’, before relinquishing both Gormleith and his High Kingship to Brian. In the peaceful lull before the final war at Clontarf, Ireland achieves a measure of unity under High King Brian’s peace, revealed to him by Maire, who ‘came safely through all’ as she travelled from Ulster to Munster, to provinces that had warred for aeons. Gormleith, however, cannot tolerate Brian’s peace and shatters it by betraying him again: ‘GORMLEITH: I am going to Clontarf, to give my help to the armies of the


Gall that are on the sea now, coming to Ireland!’33 Once more Brian has a chance to stop the battle before it begins by killing Gormleith. Yet in this moment of clarity Brian can finally look awry at Gormleith and realizes that she is a mortal woman rather than the sublime Woman of his fantasy. As a consequence he is shattered: ‘BRIAN: It is I myself have betrayed my people. The blame is on me. (He half kneels at table, covering his face with his hands.) War, war, keening and treachery. Ireland red again!’34 On the day of his death Brian accepts Gormleith’s flaw as a treacherous, mortal woman, and finally identifying with his symptom as he stops misrecognizing Gormleith as his object of his desire: ‘BRIAN (standing very strong and straight.): Clontarf! Now I know what Aoibhell meant! She said it was at Clontarf I should find peace. That is well. Give me my sword. (MALACHI takes it down and gives it to him.) It has another battle to win.’35 Like the protagonist of Yeats’s Cuchulain cycle of plays, Brian can only achieve the jouissance which has tantalized him all his life when he moves from the Symbolic order into the Real in the moment of his death at the end of the battle. Gormleith becomes the object cause of his desire insofar as her status as his objet petit a, the traumatic fragment of the Real, is doubly significant in terms of her status as the locus of both national and sexual desire. Brian risks his life and the security of his kingdom for her, just as Brodar of Manannan’s Island, Sigurd of Orkney and the Danes risk their lives and fiefdoms for the possibility of union with her. At each juncture Gormleith functions as the fantasy object of masculinist desire which is intimately related to the issue of national sovereignty. Lady Gregory wrote a revision of Kincora which was produced in 1909.36 The revision is broadly similar to the original but the prologue where Brian encounters Aoibhell the Spirit and refers to ‘that hard sweetheart’ Ireland is noticeably absent. Brennain’s daughter Maire is replaced by the Beggar Girl, and Aoibhell is only referred to a handful of times in the play, once when Brian is talking to the Beggar Girl about the peace he has temporarily brought by uniting Ireland. Gormleith’s role remains constant however, and while Gormleith is certainly an active subject rather than a passive object, her activities oscillate between fealty and treachery to both Ireland and its invaders, so that her only discernable objective seems to be war and bloodshed. Gormleith’s raison d’être and primary dramatic function therefore is to serve as both goad and goal of the male protagonists, particularly Brian whom she marries and ‘in an ambivalent way both betrays him and creates his finest hour at Clontarf’.37 Gormleith then is typical if not indeed archetypal of the Woman qua fantasy object, who is sublimated

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insofar as she enables/supports masculinist–nationalist ontology, and yet is simultaneously subordinated as the scapegoat who must accept responsibility for the war and bloodshed concomitant to preserving the structural integrity of both national and masculinist identity. Ultimately Gormleith serves to re-create if not also advocate gender stereotypes of Irish womanhood rather than challenging those stereotypes in any progressive manner. Dervorgilla (1907)38 is set outside the Abbey of Mellifont near Drogheda in 1193, during the period of the first wave of Anglo-Norman invasions which involved the ‘piecemeal displacement of the native rulers by Anglo-Norman noble families, a process loosely supervised by the English monarchy’.39 The play deals with the consequences of Queen Dervorgilla’s betrayal of O’Rourke, King of Breffny, in her affair with Diarmuid, King of Leinster, which allegedly had a causal relation to the Anglo-Norman invasion. Dervorgilla is living anonymously at Mellifont, her identity protected by her servants Flann and Mona from exposure to the native, colonized Irish who hold her accountable for their predicament. Dervorgilla has devoted her time to charitable exploits in order to ease her guilt-wracked conscience, and has accordingly earned the love of her community: ‘MONA: No wonder the people to be saying she will surely get the name of a saint; the darling queen-woman of the Abbey of Mellifont.’40 Dervorgilla’s status as ‘saint’ and ‘darling queen-woman’ is doubly significant when interpreted in Lacanian terms as le sinthome, a neologism designed to describe a symptom which endures beyond the fantasy framework which gives it meaning in the first place. In ‘Joyce le symptôme’ Lacan develops sinthome as a synthesis of the traumatic quality of the symptom with the sublime quality of the saint.41 Žižek suggests that ‘[w]hat we must bear in mind here is the radical ontological status of symptom: symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject.’42 In other words, ‘symptom is the way we – the subjects – “avoid madness”, the way we “choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)” through the binding of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation which assures a minimum of consistency to our being-in-the-world’.43 Dervorgilla functions as the sinthome in the play in the double sense as the saint/ queen-woman whom her servants and the community at Mellifont revere, but also as the traumatic symptom of the recently colonized population who hold her responsible for their plight. Dervorgilla is well


aware of her status as saint/symptom within the community, as this incident confirms when, in a moment of bonhomie shared with her servants and neighbours, she is abruptly reminded of her traumatic legacy when Mamie runs in with a dead crane shot by English archers: ‘DERVORGILLA: Was it not I brought the curse upon O’Rourke, King of Breffny, the husband I left and betrayed? What I have done can never be undone. How can I be certain of the forgiveness of God?’44 Dervorgilla’s self-reflection reveals the symbolic nature of her guilt insofar as her sexual betrayal is intimately linked to her national betrayal of her country’s sovereignty. Flann explains that it was internecine war and internal division among the factions within Ireland which led to English occupation, but Dervorgilla’s guilt at her marital infidelity drives her to internalize the opprobrium of a recently colonized people who are desperate to rationalize the trauma of their oppression. In this sense, then, Dervorgilla functions as the symbolic materialization of her people’s immiseration, with her peccadillo with Diarmuid taking on national proportions in the colonized people’s need to create a single scapegoat rather than engage with the political complexities of their situation. Dervorgilla’s traumatic quality comes to the fore as the play reaches its climax when a Songmaker comes to the village and recites the tale of Dervorgilla’s transgression to the local English garrison. Dervorgilla asks Flann to send the Songmaker away before he can arouse any further suspicion but Flann is killed by the English archers for interrupting the Songmaker’s performance. When Flann’s husband Mona hears of his demise she breaks into grief-stricken lamentations and unintentionally reveals Dervorgilla’s true identity to the local villagers. The play ends with the villagers returning all the gifts that Dervorgilla has given them as she resigns herself to her fate as the fallen woman responsible for the nation’s woes: ‘There is kindness in your unkindness, not leaving me to go and face Michael and the Scales of Judgement wrapped in comfortable words, and the praises of the poor, and the lulling of psalms, but from the swift, unflinching, terrible judgement of the young!’45 Dervorgilla, like Gormleith, is a manifestation of the Woman as object cause of masculinist desire from the ancient Irish sages and evokes the chauvinistic portrayal of women intrinsic to that period and its literature. The rendering of Dervorgilla and Gormleith as scapegoats for bloodshed and national immiseration are the products of masculinist inadequacy in the face of superior colonialist force. The problematic quality of the women characters in these ancient sagas is that they are made to pay for either the sexual or military impotence of the males,


and that quality is part and parcel of Lady Gregory’s dramatization of the sagas insofar as she replicates but does not contest the injustice of their gender typology. It is hard to imagine that Lady Gregory was unaware of this injustice, and her status as a female dramatist would not necessarily require her to overtly engage with gender issues. Indeed, the majority of her dramatic canon does not explicitly engage with the role of women in Irish society. Perhaps one reason for Lady Gregory’s replication of stereotypical gender ideology may be from an overwhelming sense of guilt over her infidelity to her husband with Blunt. Dervorgilla’s paradoxical status as sublime queen-woman and traumatic symptom of her country’s woes is markedly similar to the eponymous protagonist of Lady Gregory’s later play Grania (1912).46 Grania is one of the great femmes fatales in Irish mythology and Lady Gregory had engaged with Grania’s story long before she wrote the play, when she recorded her tale in Gods and Fighting Men (1904).47 In the play Grania, the King of Ireland’s daughter, is initially betrothed to the much older Finn, the leader of the Fianna. In their opening dialogue Finn asks if Grania ever gave ‘a thought to any man in the way of love?’ to which Grania replies that she was attracted to a man she met briefly ‘a long time ago’ but ‘he was but as if a shadow, that came for a moment and was gone’.48 When Grania explains that the ‘shadow’ saved her pet dog from being killed, Finn considers her to be naïve, stating that as far as love is concerned ‘I think it is little at all you know of it’; they then engage in a discussion of the politics of desire. The discussion elaborates upon what Lacan refers to as ‘the impossibility of the sexual relationship’, where the sexual relationship between the two lovers is impossible insofar as they desire what each other represents in the field of desire – namely each other’s jouissance – rather than what they actually are in the material sense. Love is precisely ‘tearing and vexing’49 because it is unobtainable in the material realm and can only ever be sought after in the fantasy realm as the impossible objet petit a. The ironic nature of romantic love is that it depends on misrecognizing the objet petit a as the actual person who temporarily materializes or stands in for the fantasy object: ‘GRANIA: I think it might be a pleasing thing to have a lover that would go through fire for your sake.’50 The impossibility of being ‘done with’ love and being ‘safe from its torments’ is confirmed in the following lines when Grania is introduced to Diarmuid, Finn’s ‘kinsman’ and allegedly ‘the best lover of women in the whole world, and the most daring in the war’.51 It transpires that Diarmuid is the ‘shadow’ which Grania fleetingly encountered long ago, but the desire she had for him


quickly returns to divert her affections from Finn to Diarmuid. Within a short space of time Grania goes through a rapid desublimation in Finn’s eyes, as he accuses her mother of being a prostitute (‘some woman of the camp’), calling Grania’s explanation a ‘false woman’s flattering words’ and finally castigating her as a ‘pitiful hag with the hair matted wild to her knees’.52 When Diarmuid gallantly defends Grania’s honour by threatening to draw his sword, Finn responds: ‘My life is a little thing beside what you have taken!’53 What Finn accuses Diarmuid of stealing is not Grania the physical woman, but more what she represents as the object cause of Finn’s desire. Finn is so consumed with frustration that he faints and collapses, and Diarmuid takes the opportunity to flee with Grania. It takes Finn seven years to catch up with Diarmuid and Grania, who have, as he predicted, fallen in love with one another, but their relationship was not as easy or as mutual as Finn had envisaged. Grania explains to Diarmuid that he only fell in love with her out of ‘jealousy’ when he saw another man, the King of Foreign, desiring her: ‘GRANIA: And it was not till you saw another man craving my love, that the like love was born in yourself.’54 What is striking is not only the transformation of Grania from desexualized ‘shadow-shape’ or ‘hag’ to sublime object of Diarmuid’s desire, but equally the successive desublimation when he realizes that she desired, albeit fleetingly, the King of Foreign. With that Diarmuid goes off to kill the King of Foreign, and in the afternoon of the same day Finn encounters Grania and explains at length the desire he still has for her: ‘But the light in your grey eyes is my desire for ever, and I am pulled here and there over hills and through hollows.’55 In spite of the intensity of Finn’s affection for her, Grania is implacable and is devoted to Diarmuid, ‘that gave all up for love is the best lover of the whole world’.56 Diarmuid returns after killing the King of Foreign but is himself mortally wounded in the battle. Diarmuid’s final words are directed solely to Finn as Diarmuid reiterates his loyalty and devotion to his leader: ‘That would be a very foolish man would give up his dear master and his friend for any woman at all.’57 When Grania realizes that Diarmuid has not forgiven her flirtation with the King of Foreign and died professing his devotion to Finn, she performs a volte face as striking as her turn of affections earlier in the play as she expresses her desire to return with Finn as his wife. When Finn also refutes his earlier declarations of love for her in favour of loyalty to his dead friend, Grania is laughed at by the soldiers but she ends the play nonetheless defiant: ‘GRANIA: How well he kept his own promise to you!


I will go to Almhuin in spite of you; you will be ashamed to turn me back in the sight of the people, and they having seen your feet grown hard in following and chasing me through the years.’58 Grania’s oscillating status in the play as sublime object cause of desire who goes through a rapid desublimation constitutes a fascinating engagement with the complexities of Woman as fantasy object. Each of Lady Gregory’s tragic heroines shares this commonality of desublimation with the die Frau-Welt in courtly love poetry. Žižek argues that the ‘same experience of desublimation was already well known in the tradition of courtly love, in the guise of the figure of die Frau-Welt (the woman who stands for the world, terrestrial life): she looks beautiful from the proper distance, but the moment the poet or the knight serving her approaches her too closely she turns her other, reverse side towards him, and what was previously the semblance of fascinating beauty is suddenly revealed as putrefied flesh, crawling with snakes and worms, the disgusting substance of life.’59 Žižek suggests that the ‘gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of the Real’.60 In the case of Lady Gregory’s heroines, the moment of desublimation occurs when the heroine exercises agency in terms of desiring another lover or choosing a different political allegiance. The heroine’s status as sublime or desublimated object is linked to the performance of her sexual and political desire. Thus, Grania incurs the scorn and hatred of Diarmuid’s comrades in the Fianna when they hear that he has died, and when she hears about their mocking laughter waiting for her outside she is determined to have the last laugh: ‘Give me now the crown, till I go out before them, as you offered it often enough. (She puts it on her head.) I am going, I am going out now, to show myself before them all, and my hand linked in your own. It is well I brought my golden dress.’61 When Grania goes outside the expected laughing from the warriors in the Fianna stops abruptly; her status as object cause of desire is immediately reinstated when she performs the role of Queen and wife to Finn, the leader of the Fianna. She thus reinstates the constitutive gap of desire between herself and the Fianna, turning herself from object of derision to sublime object. Where Gormleith and Dervorgilla’s sexual and political choice ends in a deplorable state, Grania is able to negotiate both her internal conflicts and the external opprobrium from her community and ends the play in a comparatively admirable state. Grania’s gesture involves a high degree of self-reflexivity insofar as she


self-consciously utilizes her status as fantasy object to save herself from the deplorable state which befell her antecedents Gormleith and Dervorgilla. The parallels between the differing trajectories of these heroines and Lady Gregory’s own teleology are quite striking in terms of her negotiation of politics in the shift from unionism to nationalism, and negotiation of sexuality in the shift from betrayal-born guilt to acceptance and self-reconciliation. The fates of Gormleith and Dervorgilla manifest Lady Gregory’s own situation in terms of the difficulty of reconciling her former unionist politics with her growing nationalist sympathies, and her infidelity towards her husband Sir William. Grania’s torturous development constitutes a negotiation of the irreconcilable double-bind in which Lady Gregory found herself as the Ascendancy aristocrat turned home-rule nationalist. The closing image of Grania embracing the fidelity/infidelity dialectic at the heart of her ontology is indicative of the tenuous position Lady Gregory came to occupy as the colonizer who refused her colonial position, while at the same time desiring to maintain a leading role in the shifting sands of Irish cultural politics. Where Lady Gregory’s representation of Woman as fantasy object constitutes an attempt to negotiate conflicting forms of nationalism and sexuality, the use of Woman qua object in J.M. Synge’s plays comprises what can only be described as a frontal assault on Catholic bourgeois economics and concomitant gender ideology. While much has been written about the representation of women in In the Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World, and the audience responses these plays provoked, comparatively little has been written about Synge’s first play When the Moon Has Set (1900–1903),62 a piece which specifically engages with the gendered subaltern as fantasy object and its vicissitudes and clearly indicates the way in which Synge would render female protagonists in his later plays. Moon was neither published nor produced during Synge’s lifetime, principally because of its rejection by Yeats and Lady Gregory. Yeats defended the decision by stating: I wish to be emphatic about this play. It is just the kind of work which some theatrical experimenter with no literary judgment or indifferent to literature would be glad to get. It is quite complete. It might have a slight stage success with a certain kind of very modern audience. It was Synge’s first play, he read it to Lady Gregory and myself in either two or three acts. He has since then, at what date I cannot now remember, though certainly not very recently, reduced it to one act. It is morbid and conventional though with an air of originality. The


only thing interesting about it is that it shows his preoccupation with the thought of death. He knew my opinion about it at the time. It was after its rejection by us he took to peasant work.63 Yeats’s suggestion that the play might have success with a ‘certain kind of very modern audience’ refers perhaps to the moral heterodoxy of the piece, which graphically portrays the systematic defrocking of a young Irish nun and her concurrent sexual awakening. Where the perceived slights to Irish womanhood respectively provoked rant and riot over Shadow and Playboy, it does not stretch the bounds of credulity too far to consider that the onstage unnunning of a young Irish woman in Moon could have earned Synge a public lynching. There are two basic versions of Moon: the two-act text rejected by Yeats and Gregory in 1901, and the one-act text written in Synge’s late hand ‘tentatively’ dated after 1902.64 The plot structures of the two versions of the play are broadly similar. In the two-act text, Sister Eileen, a nun in a Catholic nursing order, has cared for her uncle the landlord Columb Sweeny during his final days, and remains to tend the gunshot wound the deluded peasant-servant Stephen Costello inflicts on her uncle’s nephew, heir and namesake Columb. In a letter Columb the elder posthumously urges his nephew to marry for love rather than money; following his uncle’s advice in the most literal sense, Columb seduces Sister Eileen in direct defiance of her religious beliefs regarding chastity and conformity to Catholic dogma. Eileen plays the harp and dons a green wedding dress (both deeply imbued with nationalist siginification) originally made for Columb the elder’s one-time sweetheart Mary Costello, whose psychological decline grew out of the frustration of their relationship by their diametrically opposite views on religion. Columb the younger eventually persuades Eileen that they should avoid repeating the actions which led to the demise of the older couple’s relationship, and the play ends in a paganistic betrothal which deliberately defies Catholic matrimonial orthodoxy. The main difference with the one-act text is that, while Stephen Costello is present but not technically seen on stage in the two-act version, in the one-act text Stephen’s sister Mary takes his place as the catalyst whose story ultimately serves to bring the two young lovers into closer proximity with each other resulting in the final denouement. The controversial nature of the potential relationship between the younger Columb and Sister Eileen is further compounded by the fact that she is his distant cousin. The two-act text is set in an ‘[o]ld family library. Many books are in shelves around the walls, and in the corner, a gun, dog-whips etc. are


lying as if thrown carelessly together.’65 The setting immediately raises what W.J. McCormack has described as ‘a complicated problem of orientation’,66 because it is unclear whether the house belongs to an Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy family or to a Catholic bourgeois nationalist family. The distinction is crucial as the former grouping comprised the hegemonic ‘social elite predominant in Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne (1690)’,67 whilst the latter represented the counterhegemonic class which would eventually displace the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy to become the new ruling élite after the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty. McCormack notes the ‘general silence which surrounds the background of the Sweenys’68 in the play, specifically Columb Sweeny, who has inherited his namesake and dead uncle’s estate in which the play is situated. McCormack focuses on the hermeneutic negotiability of Moon, arguing that because the play ‘acknowledges autobiographical, dramatic and historical registers of signification, meaning can be found in any one of these, only to be challenged by the claims of some other one of these registers’.69 The autobiographical aspect of the play is evident enough, not least in terms of Synge’s affection for his cousin and childhood sweetheart Florence Ross, as well as his obsession with the religiously inclined Cherrie Matheson.70 But the relationship between Columb and Eileen takes on a deeper resonance when one situates the play in the broader cultural and historical context in which it was written, specifically in terms of the displacement of Synge’s own AngloIrish Protestant Ascendancy class by the forces of Catholic bourgeois nationalism.71 Synge’s distaste for Catholic bourgeois nationalism is typified in this oft-quoted polemic against those who ranted at Playboy: ‘the scurrility and ignorance and treachery of some of the attacks upon me have rather disgusted me with the middle class Irish Catholic. As you know I have the wildest admiration for the Irish Peasants and for Irishmen of unknown genius but between the two there’s an ungodly ruck of fat-faced, sweaty-headed swine.’72 When one combines Synge’s well documented antipathy towards the ‘middle class Irish Catholic’ with Columb’s relentless critique of Sister Eileen’s religion one can perhaps begin to situate Columb’s ideology in the cultural politics of the period. Columb cites a letter sent to him from Paris from his nationalist acquaintance O’Neill: ‘My compliments to the little Irish pigs that eat filth all their lives that you may prosper.’73 This could well indicate that Columb was of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy stock; however, this becomes ambiguous when one considers that the upwardly mobile Catholic strong farmer-grazier, satirized by Synge as


the ‘groggy-patriot-publican-general shop-man’74 was increasingly occupying the landlord role that the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy had once taken for granted.75 More evidence of Columb’s ideology is indicated in his uncompromising judgement of Sister Eileen’s religion: ‘It is the glory of your religion that its scope is so wide, yet in its attempt to resolve all the discords of life in one wave of beautiful pity the genuine passions are destroyed. Any system that does not give full play to the humour and passion of the [ ... text illegible] is the system that imposes death [strikethrough in original Ms.].’76 The fact that Columb refers to ‘your religion’ situates him as separate and distinct in his own ideology, be that a variety of Protestantism or, as we shall see, a form of Protestant-inspired anarcho-romanticism coloured by quasi-pagan nature worship. The critique of Catholicism forms the bulwark of Columb’s strategy in his seduction of Sister Eileen. Columb’s argument works through a dialectic between a putative secular spirituality to be found in nature and the work of great artists, and the stultifying effects of Catholic dogma, whose ‘[p]arasitic ideas are holding you back from the ecstacy of freedom.’77 Columb profers the ‘the triumphant wail that breaks out from the poised ecstacy of Beethoven, or the muscles of Micheal Angello’,78 artists who have a ‘cosmic faith’ in contradistinction to the Catholic faith which Eileen insists is inherent to the artists and their work. Each time Eileen offers this defence Columb relentlessly counters it with more artists like Rabelais and Reubens, arguing that: ‘All the solemnity of art is begotten by the obcession [sic] of death [strikethrough in original Ms.]. All power and mirth are associated with the thought or the unconscious will of reproduction. That is symphony. The utterance of passion is the only sincere utterance of LIFE.’79 By focusing on sexual intercourse and death, the ‘two poles of existence from which all our emotions are derived’,80 Columb constructs a discursive platform based on the classic existentialist universals which slowly but inexorably seduces Eileen away from Catholic dogma. A key element in the play which adds momentum to Columb’s seduction of Eileen is the advice contained in a letter to him from his dead uncle urging him to marry for love: ‘ “If you love a woman subdue her. You will not love a woman it is not lawful to love. No man of our blood has ever been unlawful.” ’81 The predatorial force implied by the word ‘subdue’ is given extra weight by the uncle’s paganistic philosophy which reinforces Columb’s own beliefs: ‘ “God is in the earth and not above it. In the wet elm leaves trailing in the lanes in autumn, in the deserted currents of the streams, and in the breaking out of the sap, there are joys that collect all the joy that is in religion and art.” ’82 The


letter ends with a reference to a former lover of Columb’s uncle: ‘ “The dress and the rings were made for a woman I once hoped to marry. She was poor. She died afterwards, and her brother became crazy. He would have shot me but some vow restrained him. He thought I had wronged her.” ’83 The woman in question is the ‘insane’ servant Mary Costello and her brother Stephen is the ‘avenging lunatic’ who shoots Columb because he is gripped by the delusional misapprehension referred to in the letter. While Mary is indeed referred to in the two-act text she does not make an appearance until the one-act version of the play. Mary’s intervention in the couple’s relationship serves to re-buttress Colm’s (as spelled in the one-act text) seduction and Eileen’s conversion insofar as her thwarted relationship with Colm’s uncle functions as a warning to the younger potential couple. The elder couple’s story, and its consequences for Mary’s mental health, is relayed to Colm by servant Bride, and he discusses it with Sister Eileen: COLM: Bride has been telling me that she was a long time in the Asylum, and that she was connected in some way with my uncle. SISTER EILEEN: He wanted to marry her although she was beneath him, but when it was all arranged she broke it off because he did not believe in God.84 Colm responds with a conclusion born of romantic libertarianism: ‘It is far from enough if it has not made you realize that in evading her impulses this woman did what was wrong and brought this misery on my uncle and herself.’85 To the hegemonic rise of Catholic gender ideology in shaping the sexual practices of the Irish people-nation, Synge responds by advocating a form of anarchic-romanticism, in which the individual rails against Catholic sexual mores in the pursuit of a putative jouissance to be discovered outside those ethical boundaries. The figure of Mary Costello is used to bolster Colm’s plea to Sister Eileen, as the denial of romantic love by religious conviction led Mary into the abyss of madness. Mary Costello’s relevance to the plot also has a much deeper social resonance insofar as she is symptomatic of generations of Irish women whose sexuality resulted in their incarceration in various asylums and medical institutions. Áine McCarthy argues that, under new ideas of ‘moral management’ implemented throughout the British Isles in the nineteenth century, the mad came to be regarded as sick human beings, objects of pity not fear, and capable


of defeating their madness if subjected to kindly surveillance and care in comforting surroundings. Reformers posited ‘asylums’ as a suitable environment for this care, not the jails, workhouses or private madhouses in which the mad had previously been housed.86 McCarthy states that alongside the ‘ideological changes of moral management’ came a ‘fundamental shift’ in the ‘symbolic gendering of insanity, from male to female’.87 The ‘repulsive madman’ who had been ‘the prototype and cultural representation of the lunatic’ was replaced by ‘the youthful, victimised and sexualized madwoman’.88 In particular, the ‘focus on female biology’ placed the ‘problem of madness’ within the ‘woman’s person’, rather than the ‘social reality’ of her life.89 Mary Costello’s madness emerges from her fraught situation in the paradoxical double role of Woman in Catholic gender ideology, in which the biological woman was expected and required to meet the impossible demands of the fantasy Woman qua Virgin Mother of Christ. Colm’s, and by implication Synge’s, solution to this impasse is for Sister Eileen not to repeat Mary Costello’s history and to embrace the physicality of her status as a biological woman. The anarchicromanticism of this gesture is highlighted by the lived experience of women who pursued a similar choice in that some of the women committed to the Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum ‘with religious symptoms had rejected religion outright and it seems that this alone could be reason enough for their committal, especially if it was a deviation from previous behaviour’.90 The ‘prevailing gender ideology’ was given ‘religious endorsement by the Roman Catholic Church’, which emphasised ‘the “natural” female virtues of obedience, servility and self-sacrifice’ for women and repressed the ‘reality of sexuality’.91 While Synge could be credited for criticizing Catholic dogma for its sexual repressiveness he does so at the expense of fetishizing Sister Eileen as a fantasy object. Sister Eileen thus functions as the trope with which he can assault the bedrock of Catholic gender ideology, rather than advocating a progressive or proto-feminist platform in and of itself. This is most evident in the elaborate transformation which Sister Eileen undergoes as she renounces her role as a bride of Christ to become Colm’s bride to be. The conversion begins during an exchange between Sister Eileen and Mary Costello, where Sister Eileen hands over various items of religious signification in order to placate Mary’s sorrow, notably her crucifix and rings of betrothal to Christ. As the play moves towards its conclusion Sister Eileen eventually removes her habit and


adopts a green dress, the significance of which is resonant in mythic constructions of Irish Woman insofar as it evokes elements of Cathleen ni Houlihan and the ancient Goddesses and heroines of Irish legend: ‘SISTER EILEEN takes the green dress and goes out without looking at him. He looks out for an instant, then packs the rest of the papers into the bureau drawer. He goes back to the window. In a moment SISTER EILEEN comes in behind him in a green silk dress which is cut low at the neck. She reaches the window just as the red morning light sweeps into the room.]/ SISTER EILEEN [in a low voice]: Colm, I have come back to you.’92 The parallels between Synge’s and Ibsen’s dramaturgy are well documented, and the rendition of the sexual awakening of a young Irish woman is contentious and progressive in terms of positing a protofeminist platform in the Irish context.93 Yet the driving force of the play is concerned with the systematic critique of Catholic gender ideology rather than the more general critique of Victorian gender ideology which Ibsen offers in plays such as A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler. The final scene is specific in terms of a nun physically defrocking herself on stage; renouncing her role as a paragon of Catholic Womanhood; and joining in matrimony with Colm in what amounts to a quasi-pagan ritual in which the ‘Summer’, the ‘Sun’ and ‘Whole World’ displace God as arbiters of divine recognition. It is this specificity which amounts to what is, in effect, a blatant assault on the heart of the gender ideology that formed a major bulwark of Catholic Nationalist counter-hegemony. When one takes into account the likely ostracism, and possible incarceration, awaiting Eileen in terms of the social praxis of the prevalent gender ideology of the day, then one is drawn to the conclusion that Synge fetishizes Woman as a figure through which he can not only aestheticize revolt, but also mediate an attack on Catholic gender ideology. In this regard Moon is prototypical of Synge’s fetishization of Woman as a fantasy object manifesting heterodox qualities to those inherent in Catholic gender orthodoxy in his later plays, notably Nora Burke in Shadow and Pegeen Mike in Playboy. While Synge changed the setting from bourgeois living room to peasant cottage, the assault on Catholic gender ideology continued unabashed in his subsequent ‘peasant’ plays. In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) contains the hallmark criticism of Catholic womanhood in the familist domestic space, with the infamous ending of the play where Nora is forced to accept a life on the roads with the Tramp rather than remain in a loveless marriage with her husband Dan Burke. As such, the gesture was almost custom-built to offend the sensibilities of Irish


Ireland critics like Arthur Griffith, who published a vehement response in The United Irishman: The Irish National Theatre Society was ill-advised when it decided to give its imprimatur to such a play as In a Wicklow Glen [sic] ... .It is a staging of a corrupt version of the old-world libel on womankind – the ‘Widow of Ephesus’, which was made current in Ireland by the hedge-schoolmaster ... .Yet although Mr. Synge speaks Irish and resides for a period each year in Aran, this play of his shows him to be as utterly a stranger to the Irish character as any Englishman who has yet dissected us for the enlightenment of his countrymen. His Wicklow tramp who addresses an Irish peasant woman as ‘lady of the house’, and his Wicklow farmer’s wife who addresses the man who has craved her hospitality as ‘stranger’, never existed in the flesh in Wicklow nor in any other of the thirty-two counties.94 Griffith’s argument is interesting insofar as he insists that the ‘Irish peasant woman’ and ‘farmer’s wife’ had ‘never existed in the flesh’ in Wicklow or any other county. The key point here is precisely that Nora never existed ‘in the flesh’ because she is an aesthetic construct or a ‘type’ as Griffith insists: ‘The outcry against the Countess Cathleen – where it was not dishonest – was ignorant. Mr. Synge – or else his play has no meaning – places Norah Burke before us as a type – “a personification of an average” – and Norah Burke is a lie. It is not by staging a lie that we can serve Ireland or exalt Art. Art is Truth.’ 95 In response to Synge’s ‘staging a lie’ Griffith went so far as to practice his slogan that ‘Art is Truth’ by publishing in The United Irishman the short play In a Real Wicklow Glen (1903),96 in which Norah resists the advances of her suitor John Kavanagh who ‘hadn’t a penny to bless hiself with’ and remains faithful to her much older but financially solvent husband: NORAH: Oh! John, I couldn’t help it. I did fight not to marry; but you know me father, and he made me. John, for my sake, will you give up the drink? JOHN K AVANAGH (Turning away): No, what would I be doin’ that for, it’s me only comfort. (Turning back, quickly with both arms out.) Give me a kiss an’ I will. NORAH: How dare you insult me, John Kavanagh. Ye coward. Ye know I am a married woman. You will never see my face again with my will.


JOHN K AVANAGH: Oh! Norah, me jewel, I was mad – forgive – Norah, come back – me love – I wish I was dead. (Bursts into tears.)97 The action here is in complete concordance with the tenets of Catholic gender ideology which ‘held almost universal sway across different social classes and groupings’.98 Failure to perform the circumscribed role of Irish Woman typified in this play could have severe consequences, as ‘many causalities of the strict gender ideology ended up in the asylum; both those who rejected and those who too wholeheartedly embraced their gendered role within society were vulnerable to committal’.99 The title of the play as a ‘Real’ Wicklow Glen, which implies a more truthful portrayal of Irish Womanhood, offers an understanding of the truth value of the play as an instance of Woman as the Real of patriarchal gender ideology. Griffith’s Norah ‘never existed in the flesh’ any more than Synge’s Nora because she represents the sublime object at the heart of Catholic gender ideology, always at one remove from the biological woman socially subordinated by that very ideology. Whether the play is truthful or not in terms of the society it represents is less important than the insistence that Norah typifies the authentic Irish Woman, all of which is constructed from an Irish Ireland perspective on womanhood. In this regard both Synge’s and Griffith’s Nora/Norah are a ‘type’ of Irish Woman whose authenticity depends on the ideological perspective of who is producing the play and who is witnessing that play’s reception. Where Synge uses Nora Burke as an aesthetic construct to mediate his critique of Catholic gender ideology, Griffith uses Norah to defend and promote the selfsame ideology. Where Synge fetishizes a heterodox anarchic-romanticism on the margins of rural society, Griffith fetishizes an orthodox conservatism in the domestic space at the centre of that society. In both plays the outcome for the woman is odious: Nora is condemned to a life of penury on the roads with the Tramp, while Norah is condemned to a life of servitude on a ‘well-stocked farm’. In either case Woman is used as a trope to propound competing notions of womanhood as tactical elements within the battle of two civilizations for national hegemony. The preface to The Playboy of the Western World (1907) contains an interesting comment about Synge’s inspiration for the female characters in In the Shadow of the Glen: ‘When I was writing “The Shadow of the Glen”, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.’100 This vision of Synge fetishizing the chatter of servant

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girls is useful in understanding his construction of Woman as fantasy object in which the voice itself, the very dialogue of the female speaker, functions in the same manner as the gaze in terms of manifesting the dialectic of desire between Synge’s subject position and the Woman qua object he conjures in his plays. Mladen Dolar explains that in Lacan’s later philosophy the gaze and voice were isolated as the ‘two paramount embodiments of the object a, but his early theory has given an unquestionable privilege to the gaze as the paradigmatic instance of the Imaginary, elevating it into a model’.101 Dolar argues that the voice ‘can be seen as in some sense even more striking and more elementary – for isn’t the voice the first manifestation of life and, thus, isn’t hearing oneself, and recognizing one’s voice, an experience that precedes the recognition in the mirror?’102 Indeed Synge used the voice, specifically in terms of what he heard the ‘country people’ say, to defend the authenticity of his work and forestall criticism of The Playboy after the critical response to In the Shadow of the Glen: ‘In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used very few words that I have not heard among the country people, or spoken in my own childhood before I could read the newspapers.’103 In all of Synge’s apologia for his work one can see the voice of both the Peasant and the Woman functioning as the objet petit a. In particular the female voice functions as the objet petit a insofar as it manifests the traumatic fragment of the Real within a patriarchal discourse. This is specifically true of an element from Pegeen’s dialogue with the Widow Quin, which sparked the controversy over Synge’s play: ‘PEGEEN: Then you’d best be getting it and not be fooling us here. (To the Widow Quin, with more elaborate scorn.) And what is it you’re wanting, Widow Quin?/ WIDOW QUIN (insolently): A penn’orth of starch./ PEGEEN (breaking out): And you without a white shift or a shirt in your whole family since the drying of the flood. I’ve no starch for the like of you, and let you walk on now to Killamuck.’104 The traumatic nature of the female voice, specifically as it refers to female underwear and its proximity to the female body, in this instance is marked by the vehement response it evoked. As Robert Hogan notes: A letter to The Freeman’s Journal signed ‘A Western Girl’ objected in particular to Pegeen’s mention of the word ‘shifts’ in the second act – ‘a word indicating an essential item of female attire, which the lady would probably never utter in ordinary circumstances, even to herself.’ That phrase as well as Christy’s reference to ‘drifts of chosen females standing in their shifts’ provoked hissing from the first night audience,


and caused Synge and Lady Gregory to send a telegram to Yeats, who was then in Scotland: ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.’105 That Synge chose to have Pegeen utter the word ‘shift’ and for Christy to later evoke the image of ‘a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself’ is symptomatic of his disregard of the sensibilities of his Irish Ireland audience and especially his most vehement critics amongst them. The word ‘shift’ and its evocation of the female body, functioned as a palpable desublimation of the status of Woman as sublime object of Catholic gender ideology. It is hard to believe that Synge would have been ignorant of the significance of this term and its impact on an interpretive community whose understanding of womanhood was bifurcated between the symbolic Woman of Catholic ideology and the biological woman who endured the emotional and frequently physical scarification concomitant to that belief system. In this regard the Woman functions in Synge’s play as the medium through which the ideological bedrock of Catholic bourgeois nationalism could be assailed. Padraic Pearse retaliated in An Claidheamnh Soluis, arguing that ‘deliberately or undeliberately’ Synge was ‘using the stage for the propagation of a monstrous gospel of animalism, of revolt against sane and sweet ideals, of bitter contempt for all that is fine and worthy, not merely in Christian morality, but in human nature itself’.106 Pearse concluded, prophetically enough, that ‘for Anglo-Irish drama – it is the beginning of the end’.107 In spite of Lady Gregory’s best efforts at damage limitation, the Irish Ireland audience and critics who supported the theatre which produced Cathleen ni Houlihan would not be cajoled, and William Boyle went so far as to withdraw his plays from the Abbey repertoire. As David Cairns and Shaun Richards argue: ‘In the decade that followed The Playboy the reality of [D.P.] Moran’s assertion that “The Gael must be the element that absorbs” unfolded. With Joyce selfexiled, Synge terminally ill, and Yeats ever more explicit in his advocacy of “aristocratic” values, the voices of creative criticism were silenced. The move to 1916 was to be fuelled by fundamentalist principles.’108 The Tinker’s Wedding (1908) constitutes Synge’s final critique of such fundamentalist principles and is crystallized in this exchange between Sarah Casey and the Priest: ‘P RIEST: The Lord have mercy on us! What kind of a living woman is it that you are at all?/ SARAH: It’s Sarah Casey I am, your reverence, the Beauty of Ballinacree, and it’s Michael Byrne is below in the ditch.’109 The fact of the matter is that as a character in

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the play Sarah is no ‘living’ woman at all, but rather a figurative Woman as fantasy object used to fetishize the alleged freedom to be obtained outside the Catholic Symbolic order. While there was undoubtedly a need for emancipation from Catholic gender ideology, in which the elevation of Woman to the status of sublime object would ironically result in the increased subordination of women in Irish society, the emancipation that Synge offers in his plays is available only in exile or on the periphery of society. In terms of the social praxis of Catholic gender ideology at the time, Nora in Shadow faces the prospect of destitution, while Eileen in Moon faces the possibility of institutionalization in a Magdalen Asylum110 for her heterodoxy, and Sarah in Wedding faces continued ostracization. The form of liberation which Synge advances here is ultimately little more than a fetishization of those elements antithetical to Catholic gender ideology, rendered as they are in such a hyperbolic and deliberately provocative manner.

6 That a Black Twisty Divil could be Hiding under Such Comeliness

In a lecture delivered to the Students National Literary Society, Dublin in 1909, Constance Markievicz exhorted her listeners to: ‘Fix your mind on the ideal of Ireland free, with her women enjoying the full rights of citizenship in their own nation, and no one will be able to side-track you, and so make use of you to use up the energies of the nation in obtaining all sorts of concessions – concessions too, that for the most part were coming in the natural course of evolution, and were perhaps just hastened a few years by the fierce agitations to obtain them.’1 Markievicz intimates here that full citizenship for women would be a fait accompli of Irish statehood, with the attendant implication that one should not be sidetracked by gaining ‘concessions’ from the British government such as the vote, through ‘fierce agitation’ like feminist activism, because such concessions were inevitable in the ‘natural course of evolution’ rather than the outcome of social struggle. What we witness in these lines, therefore, is an advocacy of the subsumption of feminism into nationalism – a central component of the Irish nationalist strategy in the ideological conflict culminating in the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921. This subsumption of feminism into nationalism would then be consolidated as the status quo in the Irish Free State after 1922, as Jenny Beale argues: ‘Women won the vote in independent Ireland, but in other ways they paid part of the price of partition. The ideology adopted by the new State as a symbol of national unity was both Catholic and nationalist. It was an ideology that glorified rural Irish life and romanticised the Catholic family.’2 The problem for women was ‘that this family was rigidly defined and patriarchal. The only roles for women were as wives and mothers; 143

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women were denied economic independence, were discouraged from taking employment and had very limited rights.’3 Maryann Valiulis describes the ‘ideal Irish woman’ inherent in this ideology as ‘the self-sacrificing mother whose world was bound by the confines of her home’, a woman who ‘was pure, modest, who valued traditional culture, especially that of dress and dance’, a woman who ‘inculcated these virtues in her daughters and nationalist ideology in her sons’, a woman who ‘knew and accepted her place in society’ and who ‘served the purposes of the ruling Irish male elite’.4 The irony in all this of course is that the ideal Irish woman did not exist in the material sense but was constructed by both male and female Irish nationalist intellectuals, in order to forge an ideological connection with the predominantly Catholic Irish population as part of the process of fulfilling the teleology of Irish nationalist counter-hegemony to British colonial rule. At this juncture Lacanian theory is particularly useful in terms of negotiating the profound disjunction between the physical, social woman and the ideal, symbolic Woman: ‘There’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal. There’s no such thing as Woman because, in her essence – I’ve already risked using the term, so why should I think twice about using it again? – she is not-whole.’5 The ‘essence’ of the ‘Woman’ in a patriarchal system is of course male desire or in Lacanian terms the objet petit a of male fantasy. In relation to the Irish context then, the ideal Irish Woman is the fantasy object of patriarchal nationalist desire, which is necessarily at one remove from the physical Irish woman who was faced with the impossible task of fulfilling the variously idealized roles of Woman, Wife and Mother. The protagonist, Bride, in Maud Gonne [MacBride’s] Dawn (1904)6 constitutes an archetypal manifestation of the ideal Irish Woman insofar as the play is a piece of nationalist agitprop similar to Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and Padraic Colum’s The Saxon Shillin’ (1903). Gonne occupied a central role in Irish cultural nationalism at the time; born in Aldershot, England, the daughter of an army officer of Irish descent, she founded the nationalist journal L’Irlande Libre in 1897 and nationalist women’s organization Inghinidhe na hÉireann in 1900, which sponsored the first production of Cathleen ni Houlihan in which she played the title role. When the Irish National Theatre Society (INTS) declined to stage Colum’s The Saxon Shillin’ after W.G. ‘Willie’ Fay ‘found that the ending, though it read well, did not act at all so strong’,7 Gonne, Arthur Griffith and Mary Quinn argued that the propaganda value outweighed the aesthetic limitations of the play.8 When it became clear that the INTS would not yield, the ‘consequence was that Arthur Griffith and

That a Black Twisty Divil could be Hiding

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Maud Gonne withdrew from the Society. And so the link between the theatre and Cumann na nGaedeal [sic] was broken.’9 After Gonne refused a marriage proposal from Yeats on two separate occasions she married Major John MacBride10 in Paris in 1903 only to separate from him in 1905. An ardent republican, Gonne sided with the widows of the Easter Rebels in the debate over O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926, and in her autobiography A Servant of the Queen (serialized in The Irish Press during 1938–1939) she extolled the virtues of sacrificial nationalism as ‘life out of death, life out of death eternally.’11 Gonne’s ideal of sacrificial nationalism in the service of Woman qua Ireland is dramatically represented in Dawn, which was first published in 1904 but remains unproduced. A one-act famine play in three tableaux settings of ‘Sunset’, ‘Night’ and ‘Dawn’, the piece deals with the stoic resistance of a rural community led by Bride, which was dispossessed of its land and livelihood by the Stranger, who unequivocally represents the English colonial presence in Ireland. The parallels with Cathleen ni Houlihan are evident from the outset as Mike O’Hara, one of the men employed on the famine relief works, comments that Bride ‘never goes far from her land; each day she wanders around the fields that was hers – it’s that which angers the Stranger against her’.12 The similarities with the Old Woman in Yeats and Gregory’s play could not be more explicit: ‘MICHAEL: What hopes have you to hold to?/ OLD WOMAN: The hope of getting my beautiful fields back again; the hope of putting the strangers out of my house.’13 The theme of blood sacrifice runs strongly through Dawn with the ailing rebel ‘Old Michael’ lamenting his perceived inadequacy to the anticolonial struggle: ‘Bride, Bride of the Sorrows, it is your service I took, I have been faithful. I thought one time I might have been one of the stones your foot would rest on when you walked to Freedom – when you will drive the Stranger out – but I am too little a stone.’14 The mobilizing force of Woman as Ireland reaches its peak as the play moves to its conclusion when Bride’s daughter Brideen’s death through starvation incites her son Seamus and the relief workers to revolutionary fervour: ‘MIKE O’HARA: The dead are speaking to us. They are telling us we have endured too long; that the day of waiting is over, and the day for deeds has come. By dead Brideen, we swear we will make Bride of the Sorrows Bride of the Victories./ CURTAIN/ [As curtain goes down, BRIDE sings]: They have bright swords with them that class the battle welcome, A welcome to the red sun, that rises with our luck.’15 By her death Brideen becomes the sublime object of national desire whose status is shared with Bride as Mother Ireland who will be transformed, like the Old Woman in Cathleen ni Houlihan, from Bride of the

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Sorrows into Bride of the Victories. Thus we see the construction of Woman as the fantasy object of Irish nationalist ideology, but this sublimation involves the necessary disavowal of the contradictory socio-economic status of women as second-class citizens within the remit of the same ideological configuration. Woman is used in the play specifically as the object cause of national, masculinist desire, and the immiseration of Bride and death of Brideen are the responsibility of the Stranger, who is clearly analogous with British colonialism. What is subtly occluded in the highly charged emotional content of the play is the injustice intrinsic to the status of women in Irish nationalist philosophy and its social praxis in Catholic gender ideology. At a time when political life in Ireland ‘was concerned with one issue only: Ireland’s domination by Britain and whether or not to fight for independence’,16 it is perhaps unsurprising that feminism17 was subsumed and at times positively disavowed by nationalism. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists in the House of Commons from 1891 until the 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath effectively ended his political career, ‘was, in any case, utterly opposed to women’s enfranchisement. As the likelihood of home rule increased, so too did Redmond’s antipathy towards the feminists, whose agitation threatened to divide the nationalist ranks.’18 Inspired by the establishment of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) in England by the leading suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in 1903, a number of Irish feminists including Hanna and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington founded the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL) in 1908. From the beginning, ‘the IWFL was absolutely clear on what their strategy would be: they were going to ensure that votes for women were incorporated within the proposed Home Rule Bill. With their defiant slogan of “Suffrage First – Before All Else!” they made it clear that all other issues would be subordinated to this one end.’19 The revised Conciliation Bill of 1912 would have given women with property the right to vote and thus establish a platform to eventually achieve universal suffrage, but was defeated by 14 votes. Sylvia Pankhurst blamed the defeat on the sharp reversal of Irish voting tendencies, but Margaret Ward argues that there was another reason: Redmond’s realisation of the repercussions involved in franchise reform. If the franchise was extended, this would have to occur along with general electoral reform, including redistribution of seats. Giving the vote to the working class and women would assist the rise of Sinn Féin, while a redistribution of seats would strengthen the


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Unionists in Ulster. Redmond was painfully aware that any measure of female suffrage was an opening of the floodgates.20 The Liberal Government and the Irish Party had effectively ‘decided the terms of Irish independence; they were terms that completely excluded women, denying them citizenship. They would neither voice their opinion, nor participate in the new legislature.’21 The exclusion from legitimate parliamentary channels, combined with the increasing national tensions which led to the Anglo-Irish conflict of 1916–1921, would culminate in the gradual splintering of the feminist movement into various factions and its eventual subsumption into nationalism. Where nationalist rhetoric frequently conflated, under the aegis of anticolonial unity, national ‘sovereignty’ of the land with economic ‘ownership’ of the land, the social and economic differences between the two issues were at the heart of not only class hierarchies but also gender hierarchies both before and after independence had been achieved. As Beale notes: ‘It was not women who inherited the land, it was not women who felt the overriding importance of preserving patrilineal descent. There is no doubt that many women who have made the transition from rural to modern life look back on their own or their mother’s lives and see little but grinding poverty, souldestroying hard work and a total lack of personal choice.’22 Rarely is this situation more movingly depicted than in Padraic Colum’s The Land (1905),23 in which the interrelated issues of land sovereignty, land ownership and the role of women in rural communities are interrogated. Matt Cosgar is ‘a young peasant of about twenty-eight’ who is set to inherit his father’s property and expresses the desire of generations of small farmers in a comment to his neighbour Martin Douras: ‘M ATT: Ah, it’s a great thing to feel the ownership of the land, Martin.’24 Matt’s father Murtagh (W.G. Fay), is positively obsessed with the notion of land ownership as a right of any putative national sovereignty and as an expression of masculinity: ‘MURTAGH COSGAR: Them that come after us. Ay, and their manhood spared the shame that our manhood knew. Standing in the rain with our hats off to let a landlord – ay, or a landlord’s dog-boy – pass the way!’25 Murtagh’s dream of land ownership and embourgeoisement is justified by the belief in private property as the right of a colonized subject for economic manumission, which is mediated through the tacit acceptance of stem inheritance and patrilineal descent: ‘MURTAGH COSGAR: A son in Aughnalee, a son in Ballybrian, a son in Dunmore, a son of mine with

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a shop, a son of mine saying Mass in Killnalee. And I have a living name – a name in flesh and blood.’26 Matt’s sweetheart Ellen Douras, played by Máire Ní Gharbhaigh (Máire Garvey), is very much aware of the status of women in the patriarchal socio-economic structure which Murtagh espouses and prefers to emigrate to America rather than resign herself to the life of drudgery which Matt’s sister Sally (Sara Allgood), has accepted. Ellen is a qualified schoolteacher with a dream that is diametrically opposed to that of Murtagh as she longs for the social and economic freedom she imagines possible in America: ‘SALLY: Matt is going to America, like the others, and he’s talking you with him./ ELLEN: And I thought I’d be content with a new house. Now we can go away together. I can see what I longed to see. I have a chance of knowing what is in me.’27 Ellen’s desire for self-fulfilment is metonymic of a generation of women frustrated with the only legitimate roles assigned to them within the patriarchal system being Wife and Mother in line with Catholic doctrine. Beale argues that the ‘system of land inheritance and marriage forced the majority of young people off the land. It was perhaps also inevitable that the commitment of both women and men to the land should decline rapidly once they started to compare their lot with outside standards.’28 As this happened, ‘women became less willing to participate in a way of life which offered them a clearly subordinate role. They knew that jobs, albeit low-paid ones, awaited them abroad, and as a result of campaigns for the emancipation of women in the USA and in Britain, the “woman question” was a live issue in both countries and the status of women had begun to change.’29 While Matt is aware and indeed proud of the fact of his role within patrilineal descent and stem inheritance, he is nonetheless prepared to forsake all for his love for Ellen. However on sober reflection Matt baulks at the idea of losing land and having his name lost to future generations consequent to the emigration to America: ‘M ATT: His name is something to a man. Could you hear of your own name melting away without unease? And you are a woman. A man feels it more.’30 The invocation of patrilineal descent and fear of the patriarchal name ‘melting away’, combined with the implied reference to the necessary subordination of women within that system, incites Ellen to a vehement defence of her autonomy. When Matt insists that ‘A farmer’s roof will be high enough for you some day’, Ellen retorts: ‘As if I’d go into Murtagh Cosgar’s house. As if I’d go into any farmer’s house. As if I’d get married at all, and the world before me.’31 Ellen’s steadfast refusal to conform to the ideal Irish


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Woman forces Matt to decide between his love for her or his land and name. Matt’s father is equally steadfast in his belief in the patriarchal system as Ellen notes, ‘he’ll never let a son of his marry a girl without land or fortune’.32 Ellen remains implacable about her decision stating that ‘I’ve stayed here long enough. I want my own way; I want to know the world.’33 When Matt makes a final impassioned attempt to reconcile his love for Ellen and love for the land, Ellen brings the matter to a head with some of the most poignant lines uttered by a female character in Irish theatre during the early twentieth century: MURTAGH COSGAR: It’s hard for a man to part with his land before the hour of his death; and it’s hard for a man to break his lands; but I’ll break them, and give a share of land to you. ELLEN: You were never friendly to me; but you have the high spirit, and you deserve a better daughter than I would make. The land and house you offer would be a drag on me. (She goes to the door.) MATT: Ellen, what he offers is nothing, after all; but I care for you. Sure you won’t go from me like that? ELLEN: Oh, can’t you let me go? I care for you as much as I can care for anyone. But it’s my freedom I want. MATT: Then you’re going surely? ELLEN: I am. Good-bye. (She goes out, M ARTIN follows her. M ATT stands dazed. MURTAGH closes the door, then goes and takes M ATT’S arm, and brings him down.)34 Ellen’s defiant insistence on her own identity and agency over her own destiny stands in stark contrast to Sally, who is a stereotypical manifestation of the ideal Irish Woman, seemingly bred for her future duties as the good Wife and Mother: ‘She is a girl of twenty-five, dark, heavilybuilt, with the expression of a half-awakened creature. She is coarsely dressed and has a sacking apron. She is quick at work, and rapid and impetuous in speech.’35 The critic for the Freeman’s Journal considered the part to be ‘a very exacting role’ which ‘on the whole’ Ní Gharbhaigh filled ‘adequately’ but ‘she was hardly as exuberant or abrupt as one would imagine the part’, and at times ‘she was on the borderline of melodrama.’36 L.J. M’Quilland, writing for Ireland’s Saturday Night, was more enthusiastic, finding it ‘astonishing that a girl so young should have achieved so thorough an artistic triumph in a far from sympathetic part. The intensity and force of her acting is extraordinary.’37 In comparison he found Allgood’s Sally ‘too vehemently voluble for even the comic relief of stage flirtation’.38 The Freeman’s Journal found both Allgood’s and


Arthur Sinclair’s (who played Cornelius Douras, Ellen’s brother) performance ‘delightful’, noting that while both parts are ‘broadly humorous’ when one considered the ‘the relative social “fitness” of the two who go from the land, and of the two who stay, and remembered certain lunacy statistics, one began to see grave things behind the laughter’.39 The link between relative social fitness and lunacy statistics was examined by Áine McCarthy in her study of female insanity and institutionalization in early twentieth century Ireland, particularly regarding the Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum.40 McCarthy found that analysis of the records ‘makes it clear that many casualties of the strict gender ideology ended up in the asylum;’ both those ‘who rejected and those who too wholeheartedly embraced’ their gendered role within society ‘were vulnerable to committal’.41 McCarthy highlights the complexity which the Freeman’s Journal review picks up on, insofar as Ellen and Sally respectively represent women in Irish society who either rejected or accepted the role of ideal Irish Woman. Each choice carried the risk of institutionalization in terms of how far a woman’s performance in everyday life materialized that impossible ideal of Womanhood. What we witness here, in Lacanian terms, is the necessary distance between the social subject and symbolic objet petit a which constitutes the phantasmatic framework of patriarchal, Catholic, nationalist gender ideology. As Slavoj Žižek suggests, ‘in order to be operative, fantasy has to remain “implicit”, it has to maintain a distance towards the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it, and to function as its inherent transgression. This constitutive gap between the explicit symbolic texture and its phantasmic background is obvious in any work of art.’42 Where the ebullient Ellen defends her autonomy at every turn, Sally rarely speaks at all and is quick to play the role of domestic servant to her father. Like many women of her generation Sally functions as a commodifiable object when Murtagh proposes a ‘match’ with Martin Douras’s son Cornelius, in order to consolidate his property in concordance with the patriarchal system of marriage as a form of economic exchange. While Sally gains social and economic security from the ‘match’ which the two men have decreed, it comes at a high price, namely her continuing obeisance and domestic service to the male, shifting from her father to her husband, with her social position requiring her to perform the strictly defined roles of Wife and Mother. Sally’s fate is not decided ‘by’ her but crucially ‘for’ her by two men, and the overbearing patriarchal tone pervades Cornelius’s closing lines with the invocation to the ‘men’ of the locality to stay on the land so that they will be ‘saved’ in the ‘man’ and the ‘nation’. Indeed the


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‘nation’ waiting to be ‘born’ in 1922 would continue unabridged the patriarchal order inherent in this scene, as the predominantly male Catholic bourgeois élite would rule from the city, while their rural counterparts would dominate the patriarchal socio-economic system in the country. Sally’s paradoxical status as both commodified object of material economic exchange and as symbolic object qua ideal Irish Woman is significant in terms of the key distinction between the material woman whose social subordination contradicts the sublimity of the symbolic Woman. Lacan’s early theories of woman and sexual difference emerged from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of kinship in prefeudal societies, in which women were defined as objects of economic exchange.43 The problem with this conceptualization is that it automatically assumes the subordinate role of women within that patriarchal system, rather than providing a critical analysis of that subordination. In his later philosophy Lacan shifted his paradigmatic focus from the notion of women as material objects of exchange to the notion of woman as a linguistic category and thus Woman as the objet petit a, the sublime object cause of desire within patriarchal discourse.44 The contradictory status of woman as material object and Woman as fantasy object is a predominant theme in William Boyle’s The Mineral Workers (1906). Where Sally’s paradoxical commodification/sublimation occurs at the end of Colum’s The Land, the figure of Kitty Mulroy in Boyle’s play undergoes the same transformation through the duration of The Mineral Workers. Kitty’s exchange value is discussed early in Act I by her parents Ned and Mary, particularly in reference to whether she should marry the much older Dan Fogarty: ‘MARY: I wish that he was younger. But his land is good and handy./ NED: Sorrow wife the man is wanting, Kitty! – she can wait till some other boy comes round for her./ M ARY: Dan has the best breed of cows in the country – and if the Lord spares Kitty –.’45 The situation is archetypal insofar as the young girl is matched up with the much older but financially stable man in the economic interests of both parties regardless of the girl’s opinion or volition. In many ways this situation is the legacy of the Great Famine of the 1840s in terms of the change in the socio-economic structure of rural communities. The famine ‘weakened women’s economic position’ particularly on farms where ‘women’s work became less important with the shift from tillage to livestock in the countryside. Both these changes decreased women’s economic contribution to the household and emphasized the importance of the dowry in marriage.’46 Rural Ireland subsequently became characterized by ‘its low marriage rate, late age of


marriage, large numbers of single people and a high emigration rate. Each of these characteristics shaped and defined women’s lives in particular ways.’47 In this context one can understand how ‘marriage increasingly became an economic transaction as the family’s standard of living could only be maintained if the wife brought a dowry with her. Arranged marriages, which occurred among farmers before the famine, became more common in post-famine times.’48 As represented in the play this archetypal situation is made more complex by the arrival of Stephen J. O’Reilly, a ‘returned American engineer’ and Mary’s cousin, who has a venture capitalist scheme to extract iron from the local vicinity. The tension emerges from the fact that O’Reilly needs water which runs through Dan Fogarty’s property in order for the mining operation to function. In his role as ‘contentious farmer’ Fogarty is strongly opposed to the scheme, and the conceit of the play is how Kitty is used as a commodified object to lure Fogarty into a marriage of economic convenience, which will help O’Reilly and his investors, including Ned and Mrs Walton, who is a general busybody and sister to fellow investor the ‘resident landlord’ Sir Thomas Musgrove: NED: In Ireland a man’s land is as sacred as his wife. I wonder if I offered to him now! Kitty and two hundred of a fortune – ? MRS. WALTON: The very thing. A suitable match for both of them. (Pulls Ned aside.) MRS. WALTON (aside to NED): You and I, Mulroy, will see about this. You think your daughter is willing? NED: She’ll do it to save her family.49 What is striking here is the expectation that Kitty will ‘do’ what is required of her, regardless of her own desires which are automatically subordinated in the interests of economic necessity. To all intents and purposes then, Kitty is expected and required to conform to the tenets of the ideal Irish Woman: self-sacrificing, bound by the confines of her home and one who accepts her place in society in the service of the male élite. Already we see the contradiction between the woman as commodified object of exchange and as the noble creature who is expected to conform to the ideal Irish Woman; the material woman’s agency is subordinated in the same instance as her symbolic status is valorized . In Act II Mrs Walton ruthlessly pursues the ‘match’ by negotiating terms with Fogarty, and the brutal mercantilism of the match is


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registered by O’Reilly, whose long sojourn in America has resulted in his defamiliarization with the process: MRS. WALTON: As you seem to have forgotten half our ancient customs, I’ll explain. Fogarty has just gone into the old folk to make up his match with Kitty. He didn’t say exactly but I fancy that he’ll have her if he gets seven hundred pounds, and we shall have the water. O’R EILLY: Hell! MRS. WALTON: No! Cupid’s bow – and water. O’R EILLY: I call this simply damnable. MRS. WALTON: Stephen J., don’t talk such nonsense. These marriages are excellent. I’ve seen lots of them and know that they turn out the happiest. O’R EILLY: A barbarous old custom! MRS. WALTON: You are here to dig up iron – not to re-mould our customs. Kitty’s a good girl. She’ll do her parents’ bidding and be very happy doing it.50 Nonetheless O’Reilly’s own mercantilism gets the better of him as he agrees to ‘stand half the money’ of Kitty’s dowry so that the match can be finalized along with the surety for the mining scheme. When O’Reilly discusses the ethics of economic marriages with Kitty, the issue is thrown into relief as Kitty enunciates a proto-feminist critique of the commodification of women in the matchmaking process: ‘BARTLE: You don’t blame Stephen for the new ideas./ K ITTY: I blame him for having the new ideas and acting on the old ones. I blame him for coming here and planting the new ideas round him, and, the moment that it suits his pocket, throwing up the new ideas.’51 The ‘new ideas’ which O’Reilly ‘has’ are the contentious issues of female suffrage and enfranchisement which were being campaigned for in America and Britain at the time by feminist activists. When Kitty shows the hypocrisy of his behaviour set against the conviction of his disavowal of economic marriages the play reaches its climax as O’Reilly makes a stand on principle: ‘BARTLE: You don’t know Irish girls. She’ll make a good wife to him and be happy doing her duty./ O’R EILLY: Duty to hell! I say I shan’t allow it. He’s not going to have my money – not one blasted nickel! (Goes to door.) Come out here, Ned Mulroy and Mr. Cadger Fogarty. Come out here, you two ladies. I’ve changed about this business. Changed, changed. I’m not going to stand a dollar. (Enter hastily NED, MRS. MULROY, FOGARTY and K ITTY.) The bargain’s off, my friends. I’ll have nothing to say to it.’52

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The final act deals with the consequences of O’Reilly’s stand insofar as he and Mrs Walton use subterfuge to trick Fogarty into selling the property through a third party called ‘Miss Stubbs’. As the play ends O’Reilly and Kitty acknowledge their love for each other and Fogarty is asked to be the best man at their wedding. This aspect of the play as a romantic comedy serves to assuage the brutal mercantilism and social injustice inherent to the economic marriage from which Kitty is saved by O’Reilly and Mrs Walton’s double-dealing. To say that such a situation (or indeed any broadly similar situation) would never have happened in Ireland is to miss the point; what is crucial is that such an alleviation of the fate awaiting Kitty in the ‘match’ would be a very rare exception to an almost inflexible rule. The only other escape routes would be emigration or religious orders, but that also was concomitant on the class of the woman involved, as Beale notes: ‘Emigration was closely related to social class. Few people from large farms or professional backgrounds emigrated as they were more financially secure, and religious life was an option for the single.’53 While The Mineral Workers offers an interrogation of the injustice inherent in the familist economic marriage, the analysis is tempered by the resolution, and the trauma which women experienced under the familist system is hinted at but ultimately assuaged by the happy ending where young girl is betrothed to rich and comparatively young entrepreneur. The brutal economics underlying the matchmaking process is also interrogated in The Country Dressmaker (1907)54 by the Kerry dramatist George Fitzmaurice, who had worked as a civil servant in Dublin and wrote short stories for various newspapers. When the play was performed in October 1907 it was so well received ‘that another weekend’s performances were added’.55 The tone of the play is much more sober and serious than Boyle’s play, dealing as it does with such issues as betrayal, ruthless mercantilism and disillusioned love. The plot revolves around Julia Shea (Sara Allgood), the impoverished ‘country dressmaker’ of the title, who dreams of being reunited with her childhood sweetheart Pats Connor (J.M. Kerrigan), who has emigrated to America. Julia is constantly harried away from this allegedly quixotic dream by the efforts of well-meaning neighbour Matt Dillane (Frank Fay) and soidisant matchmaker Luke Quilter (W.G. Fay) to pair her off with local lad Edmund Normyle (J.A. O’Rourke). From the start, though, Julia states her desire to have agency over her own affairs regardless of Dillane’s positive intent which is restated by his daughter Min (Máire O’Neill): ‘MIN: He’ll be coming in, Julia. I’m thinking he’ll be wanting you to make up your mind over Edmund Normyle this evening./ JULIA: Min Dillane, it’s distracted I am; it’s distracted I am entirely. Why can’t


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they leave me go my own way? Wherefore should Matt Dillane be so hard upon me at all?’56 When the rough ‘man from the mountains’ Luke Quilter arrives on the scene to press the matter, the conversation takes a impolite turn concerning Julia’s eligibility in the matchmaking process. In particular Julia’s age at some thirty years becomes problematic when juxtaposed with a younger and seemingly more eligible partner for Edmund in the form of local girl Bridget Gildea: ‘LUKE: It’s a young woman you are by yourself, but in the comparison with Bridget Gildea you wouldn’t be such a young woman at all./ JULIA (tosses head): Females must be animals according to mountainy people, I am thinking, and the way you reflect on them.’57 Julia’s proud retort is ironic insofar as it was not only ‘mountainy people’ who accorded relative animal or cattle status to women, but rather the postfamine system of economic marriage which dictated the exchange value of the woman by the assumed level of her fertility and the calculated amount of her dowry: ‘LUKE (speaking solemnly): Julia Shea, at twenty-five the spring of life is gone for evermore. Now, look here to me. At thirty a single woman is an old withered hag, and there’s no more about her in this world.’58 In spite of Quilter’s unchivalrous denouncement of both her economic viability and her ontological consistency as a female subject, Julia rallies by maintaining her composure and defending her autonomy: ‘JULIA (angrily): I won’t listen to you, Mr. Quilter; it’s too presumptuous you are entirely for a strange man, I’m thinking.’59 Eventually Julia is mollified into accepting the match with Edmund if she has not had contact from Pats Connor within three months and so accepts the judgement of the matchmaker with resignation: ‘JULIA: I can’t be going against the whole world, and its conquered I am.’60 The derogation with which Quilter treats Julia is paralleled in the following act by the ruthless ‘strong farmer’ Michael Clohesy’s (Arthur Sinclair) Draconian treatment of his daughters Babe (Eileen O’Doherty) and Ellie (Kathleen Mullamphy). When Clohesy’s wife Maryanne (Máire O’Neill) tells him that their daughters ‘are as bitter as ever with the jealousy of one another as to which is to have Pats Connor’, Clohesy responds with unbridled fury: ‘Is this the way my commands are being respected by a pair of hussies? I’ll warrant ‘tis one or either of them will have a mark if it’s much more of this cat-fighting I hear going on between them. Let them take good heed of the arrangement to behave like a pair of sweet, smiling dolls for themselves, and let the Yank have whichever matches his fancy.’61 Clohesy’s ferocious treatment of his daughters emerges from his own brutal mercantilism to the extent that he has been hoisted by his own petard of corrupt business practices. As

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such Clohesy is counting on the imminent arrival of Pats Connor as part of a grand scheme to become financially solvent once more: ‘MARYANNE: It’s a wonderful chance that has come to us entirely, Michael, and here they are ready to be scrooging the eyes out of one another if you weren’t coming all day and parsing between them./ MICHAEL: It’s settled we’d be if Pats Connor has the money we think, and we succeed between us all – and he having no knowledge of land – by getting the big money from him with the mountainy farm and one of the girls. And whatever would remain over after stocking the farm would likely pay off the debt.’62 The overriding concern with the finances to be gained from economic marriages expands Julia’s observation that ‘Females must be animals’ according to both ‘mountainy people’ and strong farmers of the ilk represented by Clohesy. In this instance we see the unashamed commodification of woman as mere object of exchange and what is interesting is that this commodification is enacted under the symbolic aegis of the ideal Irish Woman, insofar as the woman in question will comply with her commodification in her willingness to subscribe to the axiomatic truth of the ideal Irish Woman. This is borne out by Babe and Ellie’s overwhelming desire to marry Pats Connor, ‘scrooging’ or gouging ‘the eyes out of one another’ as they go, and thus conform to the future roles of Wife and Mother. In order to ensure the success of his machinations Clohesy and his family have been manipulating both Julia Shea and Pats Connor by keeping them unaware of their mutual affections. In spite of their skulduggery Pats Connor manages to wring the truth out of Babe on his arrival in the locality and swiftly proceeds to reunite himself with Julia and propose their imminent marriage, much to Clohesy’s evident chagrin. The final reversal occurs in Act III on the eve of Julia and Pats’s wedding, as rumours which Julia has heard about her fiancé’s exploits in America start to play on her mind with increasing frequency: ‘NORRY: It’s distracted she is by them story-tellers. It’s the like of her that has the greatest love that do be the easiest upset in themselves./ PATS: I reckon she has cancelled her love and prefers Edmund Normyle./ JULIA (rising): It is you that have blasted it with what you have done. You have deceived me since you came home itself. It’s no hint you ever gave me that you were married to a German woman, Pats Connor!’63 Julia’s conviction brings with it the real possibility of destitution for both herself and her mother Norry (Brigid O’Dempsey) as without Pats’s economic support they face insolvency and ultimately the ‘workhouse.’ Julia’s ethical position stands in stark contrast to that of the duplicitous


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and virtually amoral Clohesys, who are quick to capitalize on her decision by literally dragging Pats out of her house and towards a putative wedding with whichever daughter he chooses. The farcical antics of the final scene counterbalance the real pathos, as Julia stands diametrically opposed to the principle of the economic marriage, choosing to marry only the man she loves. The final irony of the play is that Pats’s former marriage to the ‘German woman’ was less of a problem than the fact that when he returned from America he was no longer the man that Julia had fallen in love with: ‘PATS: I guess these are my last words. I am willing to forgive and be forgiven. I am willing to make the best of it./ MIN: (aside). Julia, do be spunky and make the best of it./ JULIA (aside to MIN). I suppose I can’t be going against them all.’64 Unlike the denouement of Boyle’s The Mineral Workers, the resolution of The Country Dressmaker is no happy ending but rather a bitter-sweet conclusion, with Julia’s recurring motif of resignation, ‘I suppose I can’t be going against them all’, serving as a compromise between her own struggle for autonomy balanced against the pressing need for economic security for herself and her mother. Julia is significant in terms of her resolute noncompliance with the role of ideal Irish Woman which Babe and Ellie crave for, and as such her progression in the play allows the reader/spectator to look awry at the dark side of the postfamine custom of marriage as an economic transaction. While the audience enjoyed Fitzmaurice’s play enough for the performance to be extended, the critics were less impressed and queried the play in a manner reminiscent of the criticism of Synge in terms of the verisimilitude of the piece: The author has most unquestionably, in his dramatis personae, given us some remarkably true types of Irish character, and has drawn an accurate, though incomplete, picture of Irish country life. Much though Irishmen, filled with a genuine patriotic spirit, would wish to see their countrymen and countrywomen without serious blemish, it cannot be denied that such a type as ‘Michael Clohesy,’ crafty, and treacherous and lying, finds his prototype in the flesh. It must be admitted that his scheming wife and quarrelsome daughters are not pure creations of the imagination. But there is the consoling reflection that they are the almost inevitable products of the twin degrading influences of Irish landlordism and centuries of foreign rule. ... The whole picture which the author presents is incomplete. He might, without straining beyond the borders of accuracy, have introduced a few more lofty and more Irish types than appear in his


conception. The scene is laid in North Kerry. But it is to a very much Anglicised community that the author introduces us. It even appears that it is from a cheap English periodical, and a sensational English weekly paper that the locality receives its literary sustenance. ... There is no breath of the Gaelic League in the whole play, and no suggestion of the new National spirit which is sweeping over the country.65 The most politically insincere aspect of this critique is the hackneyed cliché of blaming English colonization for all of Ireland’s problems. While gross injustices were exacted on Irish people on a great many levels during the colonial period, it cannot justly be used as an excuse for all injustices during that period, especially those inflicted by Irish people on other Irish people. Moreover, in the years subsequent to the ratification of the Irish Free State in 1922 social injustices not only continued on apace but actually intensified, especially in terms of the establishment of the ideal Irish Woman as social praxis through the mechanisms of a state-enshrined Catholicism. The basic premise of the Evening Telegraph review of Fitzmaurice’s play constitutes the cultural logic of the hegemony of the Catholic bourgeois male élite, who disingenuously excused their economic brutality and sexual repression under the aegis of anticolonial nationalism. The closing statement arguing that the play has no suggestion of the new ‘National spirit’ sweeping over the country is particularly ironic, insofar as the people who constitute the nation, especially women, would have been better served had the same ‘National spirit’ incorporated the critical discourse of gender hierarchies with which the play engages. Lennox Robinson’s Harvest,66 first produced at the Abbey in 1910, offers an incisive analysis of the ideal Irish Woman in the deployment of a high degree of self-reflexivity, copious quantities of irony and a strong degree of metatheatricality. The penetrating and often irreverent demystification of city-based intellectuals’ construction of country life is evident in the opening scene where newlywed Jack Hurley (Fred O’Donovan) returns from Dublin with his wife Mildred, (Sara Allgood) to his family home in the country village of Knockmalgloss. Jack has undergone a process of embourgeoisement from his farming background through his education as a chemist in Dublin and his naïve bourgeois wife is keen to see his ‘peasant’ roots: MILDRED: You’re quite right, it’s perfectly lovely. There’s an open fire and a big pot hanging over it ... and there’s turf! ... It’s just like a scene in the Abbey Theatre. I mean this house is really a peasant


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house, and your father and Maurice are real, genuine peasants, aren’t they? JACK: Certainly. Knockmalgloss is real peasant through and through. MILDRED (with a sigh of ineffable content): That’s what I love! I’ve always longed to know their lives, to get close to the soil, to get to know the great, eternal mother of us all. You used to smile at me, Jack, for reading nothing but books about Ireland and going to Irish plays. You said I was too West Briton to understand the peasant, but now ... here ... I feel at home in a way I never did before (solemnly).67 The scene is of course dripping with irony in its parodic rendering of urbane bourgeois conceptions of country life, with the deliberate metatheatrical reference to the Abbey Theatre designed to amuse any Irish theatregoer. The debunking strategy continues throughout the play and culminates in the final Act with an acute desublimation of the ideal Irish Woman by revealing that Jack’s sister, Mary (Máire O’Neill), had been working as a prostitute in London. Jack discerns Mary’s secret profession when she provides him with bogus addresses for her domicile in London, and when he presses Mary on the subject she cracks under the strain: JACK (sternly): No, I must have your explanation now. (Silence.) Well, I’m waiting for it. Why don’t you want me to know where you live? MARY: I ... I ... (Dead silence.) JACK: Mary, what are you doing in London? MARY (after a moment): I think you know, Jack? JACK: Mary! This ... this ... isn’t true, is it, Mary? I mean ... . MARY (quietly): It is quite true. ... Typing didn’t pay, so I ... I found a more paying profession. JACK: Mary!68 Jack is traumatized not merely because of the radical desublimation involved in his shifting perspective from Mary (the fact that she shares the same name as Mary the Virgin Mother of Christ would only redouble the impact in the contemporaneous Irish cultural context) as ideal Irish Woman to Fallen Woman. Perhaps more critically the brute fact of Mary’s status as a physical being, the Real of her sexuality, threatens to dissolve the Symbolic order around which the ideal Irish Woman is paradoxically structured – her sublime status is ultimately inseparable

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from her physicality as a sexual being, which simultaneously supports and subverts that sublime quality. As Lacan suggests, ‘[t]he fact remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely in the following respect: being not-whole, she has a supplementary jouissance compared to what the phallic function designates by way of jouissance’.69 Perhaps if one redesignates the non-material Woman as ‘it’ rather than ‘she’ then one can more quickly appreciate the supplementary aspect of Woman as having a ‘supplementary jouissance.’ This supplement is nothing more than the investment of male desire (in this case Jack’s desire) into the non-material Woman qua fantasy object in contradistinction to the material woman who endures the physical and emotional scarification of that ontological disjunction. The key aspect of this contradiction of the abstract ideal of Irish Woman with the visceral force of Mary’s admission is the focus on her agency over her own affairs and refusal to conform to the standards of femininity expected of her. When Jack implies that she had been somehow forced into the profession by an overbearing male, Mary responds: ‘No, Jack; honestly, I went into it deliberately with my eyes open. You see, a woman I knew chucked typing and went in for this ... and I saw what a splendid time she had, and how happy she was – and I was so miserably unhappy – and how she had everything she wanted and I had nothing.’70 Mary explains that she had eventually become dissatisfied with her life in London and decided to come home, only to find that she has become similarly disenchanted with the demands of country life and longs to return to London. Mary pleads with Jack not to tell her father, whom she adores, about her profession and she undergoes a great deal of soul-searching, thinking that she has disgraced her honest and respectable father. All this changes, however, when Jack reveals that their father is in the process of an insurance fraud to pay off the debts of his son’s education, and Mary decides that none of her family has the right to take the moral high ground in judgement over her: ‘M ARY (pausing for a moment, then breaking into half hysterical laughter). I’m no worse than he ... .I don’t care now, I can enjoy my life thoroughly. Nothing on earth will stop me going. You’ve done me the best turn in your life telling me that. Give me a kiss, old boy, and I’ll be off.’71 In this and similar instances the play serves as an obviously hyperbolic defence of radical female autonomy. While prostitution can be fairly criticized as the wholesale exploitation of women, the point of the play is that Mary ‘went into it deliberately with [her] eyes open’ and was prepared to accept the consequences of working as a prostitute in order to achieve ‘all that dreadful, splendid life’ in London. Mary positively denounces


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the notion of the ideal Irish Woman by choosing a lifestyle which is diametrically opposite to that ideal and the related roles of Wife and Mother. The critical response to the play was predictably hostile and this unsolicited commentary sent to the Evening Telegraph illustrates perhaps the most extreme reaction: ‘Not since the precious Playboy was thrust down the throats of the Dublin public by the D.M.P. and the Divisional Magistrates has anything so objectionable as the evil-smelling Harvest of Mr. Robinson has been presented at the Abbey Theatre. It out-Synges Synge.’72 The reference here is to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, which incited riotous behaviour during its first production in late January 1907 and the furore continued in the popular press for weeks afterwards. The ‘Playboy Riots’ went on to become the subject of much scholarly scrutiny, with opinon generally resting on two probable causes: the reference to ‘shifts’ (female undergarments) and connotations of female sexuality; and Synge’s heterodox representation of the Irish ‘peasant’ which had become almost as sacrosanct for nationalists in early twentieth century Ireland as the ideal Irish Woman.73 In a context where the dramatic representation of female sexuality was such a controversial issue, the critical response to Robinson’s Harvest is perhaps not so surprising, but it is nonetheless informative in terms of the disjunction between the social woman and the symbolic Woman of patriarchal, national desire. The review for the Evening Telegraph goes on to describe Harvest as ‘repellent, repulsive, abhorrent’, and the last act ‘especially is a mere seething pot of vice, filth, meanness, dishonour, dishonesty, depravity and duplicity’.74 Mary is described as ‘a creature of shame, open, brazen, unblushing, flaunting her vice and taunting her old teacher – why or wherefore who can say? – with being responsible for this “harvest” of sin and shame’.75 The review finishes with the crescendo that it is ‘all a horrid miasma, and one leaves the theatre with a feeling of sickly loathing and a bad taste in one’s mouth. The man of decent instincts who brought sister, wife, or sweetheart to the Abbey last night must have felt decidedly uncomfortable.’76 What the reviewer finds so objectionable here is precisely the brute fact of Mary’s sexuality insofar as it manifests the Real of Catholic gender ideology, which is best explained in the paradox of Mary’s namesake and the Virgin Birth, perhaps the most sacrosanct aspect of Catholicism. In order for the Mother of Christ to attain sublime status she must by definition and of necessity conceive, but it is the contradictory, traumatic kernel of the conception itself which is the very anchoring point of Catholic gender ideology. The

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immaculate (because impossible) conception which simultaneously confirms and denies Mary’s status a sexual being is the contradictory matrix of Catholic notions of Womanhood. Robinson’s play aroused such ire because of the audacity involved in pointing out the contradiction between the physicial, quotidian woman and the sublime Woman as fantasy object. What is also interesting about a play which allegedly ‘out-Synges Synge’ is that, while the critical response achieved levels of vehemence bordering on rabidity, the audience response was relatively unremarkable and certainly nowhere near the pitch of emotion which greeted the first production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Why would an Abbey Theatre audience that ‘broke up in disorder at the word shift’77 remain comparably placid at the on-stage revelation of an Irish woman being a prostitute? The question will probably never receive a satisfactory answer, but one possible explanation is that the audience’s horizon of expectations had shifted since the production of Synge’s play three years earlier, insofar as the interpretive community had expanded their tolerance threshold to be able to negotiate that which would have been impossible in previous years. In addition it is worth noting the social differences between Synge and Robinson: Synge was of Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy stock, while Robinson, also a Protestant from a unionist family, was the son of a stockbroker turned clergyman and therefore a notch or three down the carefully defined Protestant social ladder. Where Synge wrote about communities in Wicklow or the Aran Islands from which he was at one remove either by class or geographical distance, Robinson, particularly in Harvest, wrote about the Cork society in which he grew up. The conclusion to this observation is simply that an Irish audience would better tolerate challenging representations of their society from Robinson, a Corkman and ardent Nationalist (who later joined the National Volunteers in 1914), whom they would consider as ‘one of our own’, than from an Ascendancy figure such as Synge who emerged out of the landed colonial élite and would therefore be considered as ‘one of them’, particularly in the emotionally and politically charged environment of Irish society at the time. While the audience may have been able to tolerate Mary’s status and frank discussion of her chosen profession, Irish society in a broader sense in the early twentieth century both before and after independence took a very dim view of prostitution. That prostitution was ‘a considerable problem in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland’ can be gauged by the fact that ‘by 1835 there were at least eleven rescue homes, or Magdalen asylums, attempting to reform prostitutes in Dublin’.78 That


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there was ‘some public concern about prostitution’ in the nineteenth century ‘is without doubt. But in many instances the public had an ambivalent attitude to prostitution. That no absolute sexual moral standard was enforced regarding prostitution is evident from the fact that the most common concern about prostitution was its visibility.’79 The most ‘extensive network of Magdalen asylums’, or refuges, ‘was provided by Catholic nuns. After 1930 no lay Catholic asylum was established to look after prostitutes and those begun earlier in the century were all taken over by religious congregations.’80 Maria Luddy argues that it is clear ‘that the Catholic hierarchy, and the Catholic public, felt that the only worthwhile impact to be made on fallen woman could come from nuns’.81 However, the religious-run asylums failed to reform ‘fallen women’ and probably the most effective influence in reducing the amount of prostitution was the ‘new morality that was developing strongly amongst the Catholic population’.82 The purpose of the Magdalen asylums was modified in the twentieth century, where they became ‘increasingly homes for unmarried mothers, rather than for prostitutes’.83 The population viewed these asylums administered by religious orders as ‘institutions of repentance’, of ‘possible “cure” ’, and in the twentieth century as ‘hiding places for “shame filled” daughters.’84 As the nuns had acquired ‘authority over Catholic children through education’, the Catholic community gave them the authority to ‘mould and influence their wayward daughters’ and to keep them, and also their families, ‘in an age which was becoming increasingly concerned with the concept of “respectability”, from public shame.’85 The influence of the Catholic church on attitudes to sexuality, particularly regarding ‘shame filled’ daughters and ‘respectability’, is taken to task in T.C. Murray’s unproduced The Briery Gap, first published in 1917.86 As the editor’s note to the Colin Smythe edition of Murray’s plays states: The Briery Gap was not staged at the Abbey at the time of its completion nor subsequently, presumably because its [sic] treats of sexual relations before marriage and an unwanted pregnancy and concludes with Joan’s desperate suicide in the ‘great flood down there’ in the valley below. The very theme and qualities that make it a powerful and relevant tradegy [sic] to modern specvtators [sic] or readers would have profoundly shocked Catholic sensibilities in 1917, though that clearly was Murray’s intent, given the fervour of his anti- clerical stance in his representation of Father Coyne as blinkered and uncharitable.87

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The Briery Gap is indeed a harrowing play, simple in structure but effective in theme and content, with the young lovers Joan and Morgan living in mortal fear of Catholic dogma embodied by Father Coyne. Morgan is due to inherit his uncle’s land and property on Michaelmas Eve and cannot marry Joan until then, but she presses him to marry her with increasing urgency until, driven ‘mad with fright’ that her pregnancy will bring everlasting shame upon her, she runs to Father Coyne and begs for mercy. However, the priest will not countenance any notion of forgiveness: JOAN (in a shamed voice): I’ve – I’ve disgraced your parish, God help me, the – the same as her. FATHER COYNE: Disgraced? Disgraced? Was that what you said, girl? JOAN: Have pity on me, Father. FATHER COYNE (distressed): Oh,. girl! girl! you’re not telling me the truth. JOAN (brokenly): God help me, I am, Father. FATHER COYNE: You are? JOAN: Yes, Father. FATHER COYNE: My God! And you ask for pity? JOAN: Father? FATHER COYNE (angrily): The like o’ you deserve no pity! None!88 When Morgan tries to convince the priest that it is worth waiting until he inherits the land before he marries Joan, the priest remains implacable and demands that they marry instantly. With that the priest states that he will inform their parents of the matter, leaving Morgan and Joan distraught, with Morgan venting his frustration at Joan: MORGAN: But you’ll live to be sorry for it, maybe. JOAN: Wisha, don’t say that, Morgan. The dread o’ being shamed before the world was on me. It drove me to it in spite o’ myself. MORGAN (derisively): It did! JOAN: God knows it did. I was no more than a straw in the wind. MORGAN: You’ve destroyed us, finely. Destroyed us for ever!89 It is unclear why Morgan holds Joan responsible for their ‘being shamed’, specifically with regard to whether he is ashamed of her being pregnant out of wedlock or more annoyed that she told the priest about her situation. In any event Joan undergoes a rapid desublimation in Morgan’s opinion: ‘Look, Joan, look. All the wild joy that used to rush


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down on me ever and I looking into the dark eyes of you, all the strength an’ the pride, an’ the wonder that came with the thought of you – they’re gone – gone from me for ever.’90 With that Morgan leaves Joan to her fate, which is ultimately short-lived as she decides that she cannot live with the opprobrium which she will have to endure from the Catholic community: JOAN: Different ways? ... .There’s only the one way for the like o’ me. (Looking beyond the Gap.) There’s a great flood down there, but ’twill wash my sin away, maybe. ’Tis the hard penance and I so young ... but what matter now? (She blesses herself very slowly). The Lord – have mercy – on my poor soul. (With sad quiet eyes she passes through the Briery Gap, pausing an instant half expectant, and the[n] [sic] slowly disappearing.)91 What is striking in this play is the speed at which Joan’s status can shift from a potential candidate for the mould of ideal Irish Woman to a ‘fallen woman’ whose candidacy for incarceration in a Magdalen Asylum is assured. A similar process of desublimation occurs in Murray’s later play Autumn Fire,92 first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1924, but with a significantly different scenario insofar as the social problem engaged with in the play is incest rather than pregnancy out of wedlock. With the exception of a few minor quibbles the critical reception was overwhelmingly positive and is typified by this commentary from Susan L. Mitchell: Mr. T.C. Murray’s latest play, Autumn Fire, performed at the Abbey Theatre this week, is a remarkable piece of work, and will, I think, deepen its effect on audiences as time goes on. It is stark, without trimming or extraneous matter of any kind, whether in incident, dialogue or character. The drama moves mainly between four persons. An elderly widower, Owen Keegan (played by Mr. M.J. Dolan), who feels no hint of age in himself, is attracted by and attracts the affection of a girl [Nance] young enough to be his daughter. His son loves the same girl but she is unresponsive to his serious love, something lighthearted in the father appealing to her youth and gaiety, and she marries him.93 Mitchell comments that the ‘dark figure’ in the drama is ‘Keegan’s daughter Ellen’, who ‘hates the marriage, distrusts the girl and believes that her father is making himself ridiculous. Ellen is played as only Sara Allgood can play such a character, with a power elemental,

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ominous.’94 As with The Briery Gap the climax of the play pivots on female agency, in this case Nance’s choice between Owen and his son Michael (Arthur Shields). The tradition of having a young woman marry a much older man was a product of the consolidation of rural socio-economic structures after the Great Famine of 1845–1849, but it is this very structure that Nance rails against insofar as she refuses to play the designated role of Wife in line with the tenets of the ideal Irish Woman: ‘NANCE: I know I’m not much of a wife, God forgive me. But there are things in ourselves that’s hard to fight ... ./OWEN: Aye – the kiss of your stepson in the chimney corner! O, a fine one you are! – a grand one – an honest pair o’ souls the two of you indeed.’95 By refusing to mould herself into the ideal Irish Woman as fantasy object of nationalist, masculinist desire, Nance’s status undergoes an abrupt and violent desublimation from Owen’s perspective: OWEN: Wicked an all, you’ll stay. You’re my wife. Do you hear that? – my wife. I won’t be a mock for the parish and a good honest name put to shame ... .Go to bed. (NANCE obeys. her foot is on the stairs, when he calls.) OWEN: Wait! (She turns.) OWEN (looking at her with intense deliberation). Do you know what I’m thinking? (She answers in a mute negative.) ’Tis how I’m asking myself is there any man at all and he to be looking at yourself this minute would believe that a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness.96 The ‘black twisty divil’ is of course Nance’s desublimated status as material woman which contradicts the ‘comeliness’ of her status as Woman qua object cause of Owen’s desires. When Nance no longer conforms to the fantasy object she rapidly dissolves, at least from Owen’s perspective, into ‘a black twisty divil’ whose ugly, monstrous quality is redoubled by the pseudo-incestuous relationship with her stepson Michael. In a moment of reflection Owen comes to a relative understanding of his own investment in Nance in terms of constructing a ‘comeliness’ which is little more than his own objet petit a, the impossible fragment of the Real of his desire. Autumn Fire constitutes a powerful intervention in the cultural politics of women’s status in Ireland in the first quarter of the twentieth century, showing as it does the disjunction between the material woman and the fantasy Woman of Catholic gender ideology. The sad fact of Irish history during this period, however, is that the agency


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demonstrated by Nance would in social terms lead to disgrace and the real possibility of incarceration in a Magdalen Asylum or similar institution, precisely because of the irreconcilability of the material woman with the fantasy Woman. In this regard Irish women faced an impossible task of reconciling these two entities and more often than not endured the physical and emotional scarification concomitant with this dilemma.

7 Sure if I was a Good Wife to Him – that mightn’t be an Easy Job!

While the 26-county Irish Free State ‘gave women over twenty-one the vote after the Treaty election, in recognition of women’s work during the War of Independence, and in accordance with the provision of the 1916 Proclamation, it was a bitter victory’.1 This gesture was in effect ‘the last piece of progressive legislation concerning women’ that would be passed ‘until a new generation of Irish feminists’ began to raise ‘insistent voices fifty years later’.2 In losing the political cohesion of the suffrage movement, Irish women simultaneously ‘lost their only independent voices as nothing emerged in its place’.3 With no formal organization ‘to give priority to women’s needs’, the Free State Government was able to implement ‘highly reactionary policies’ in relation to women, whose ‘domestic role within the family’ became endowed with ‘almost sacramental qualities’.4 The period between the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty and the ratification of the 1937 Irish Constitution was a difficult time for Irish people, and especially women. In 1926, ‘nearly two-thirds of the population for the twenty-six counties lived outside towns and even villages, and over half the workforce was in agriculture. Farms were generally small, providing little more than a subsistence living for the majority of country people.’5 Two groups of men – ‘the farmers and tradesmen – dominated the political and social thinking of the new State. Both were essentially conservative, and were backed by an equally conservative Catholic Church. At this time 93 per cent of the population was Catholic, and both class and sexual divisions in society were obscured by the dominant ideology.’6 The impact of Partition, the need to restore public order as well as the deleterious effects of economic decline both north and south of the border, all combined to 168

Sure if I was a Good Wife to Him

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relegate the subject of women’s rights to the bottom of the agenda of any major political party. Issues such as divorce, abortion, the right of married women (let alone married or single mothers) to equal citizenship were either politely suppressed or dismissed out of hand. Above all, ‘De Valera’s 1937 Constitution seemed to sum up and enshrine Catholic social teaching on the family, marriage and the place of women. Then as now, feminists attacked its implicit attempt to imprison women within a narrowly circumscribed private and familial role.’7 The sections contained in Article 41 ‘combined with the prohibition on divorce, idealised women as unpaid homemakers and mothers while doing little to improve the day-to-day lives of women within or without the home’.8 A similar valorization of Irish Woman, Wife and Mother occurs in Sean O’Casey’s Dublin plays In the Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Nicholas Grene argues that the ‘cult of the woman’ has become something of a ‘cliché in criticism of his work’, and in this regard these three plays are correspondingly ‘atypical of O’Casey’s drama as a whole’.9 Grene contends that ‘nobody would think of O’Casey as a feminist on the basis of The Harvest Festival or Red Roses For Me with their positively Christ-like heroes, The Silver Tassie with its predatory wives and sex-object girlfriends, or the later plays in which male sexuality (Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy) and male-led activism (The Star Turns Red) are so often associated with liberation’.10 Even with the Dublin plays, ‘the issue of gender is oversimplified in the traditional view of women as heroes, men anti-heroes’.11 Seamus Deane also takes issue with this binary opposition in O’Casey’s dramaturgy, arguing that: ‘Only the women in O’Casey die meaningfully, but they also die in the framework of that familial unit to which they and not politics, belong.’12 Deane contends that there are ‘two standards consistently evoked in all O’Casey’s work. They are a) the dehumanizing effects of visionary dreaming, especially when it takes a political (nationalist) form, and b) the humanizing effects of being involved in people rather than in ideas or ideologies, best expressed in the desire for domestic security and bliss which is such a marked feature of his women-folk.’13 The tension between these two standards is evident in In the Shadow of a Gunman (1923), particularly in the figure of Minnie Powell. From the outset Minnie is obsessed with the ‘male’ world of politics and abstract idealism, particularly as they coalesce in the form of Donal Davoren, whom she mistakes for an IRA gunman: ‘DAVOREN: What am I?/ MINNIE [in a whisper]: A gunman on the run!’14 Minnie’s obsession with the


specific form of visionary dreaming as anticolonial nationalism leads to her ultimate demise as she sacrifices herself to save Davoren from the British Auxiliaries by rushing at them with the bag full of bombs: ‘DAVOREN reclines almost fainting on the bed; SEUMAS sits up in an attitude of agonized prayerfulness; MINNIE alone retains her presence of mind. When she sees their panic she becomes calm, though her words are rapidly spoken, and her actions are performed with decisive celerity.’15 Minnie’s bravery is starkly contrasted with the cowardice of Davoren, who ends the play berating his inaction: ‘Oh, Davoren, Donal Davoren, poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet.’16 As Seamus Deane argues, ‘to make Minnie Powell heroic is a sentimental risk only partially justified by the result, which is to make Davoren criminally ridiculous. It is this role of morality as a form of satiric propaganda which more than anything else makes so much of O’Casey’s work linguistically strident and melodramatic.’17 The implication in the play is that the dehumanizing effects of visionary dreaming led to Minnie’s untimely death, following as she does such abstract ideals which the men in O’Casey’s plays typically fall victim to. Furthermore, Minnie’s pursuit of such ‘male’ idealism stands in contradistinction to the role of Woman and Wife played by Mrs Henderson and Mrs Grigson, who remain firmly within the familial unit and have no intention of engaging in ‘political’ activities: ‘[MRS. GRIGSON enters. She is excited and semi-hysterical, and sincerely affected by the tragic occurrence.]’18 The moral of the story, therefore, is that if women are gulled into abstract ideals such as political activism then they suffer the same fate as the impressionable men. In this instance the ideal is nationalism, but by the same token feminist agitation would qualify as an equally abstract ideal to be avoided at all costs. In this sense O’Casey’s dialectic reveals itself to be politically regressive, insofar as Woman retains the moral centre only to the degree by which she refutes rather than engages with political activism, and thus conforms to the role of Wife or Mother as apolitical, common-sense humanist. That role reaches its apotheosis in O’Casey’s plays in the form of Juno Boyle in Juno and the Paycock (1924), who denounces abstract idealism from the outset of the play. When her daughter Mary raises the issue of class struggle and socialism, Juno is blatantly dismissive: ‘MARY: It doesn’t matther what you say, ma – a principle’s a principles./ MRS. BOYLE: Yis; an’ when I go into oul’ Murphy’s tomorrow, an’ he gets to know that, instead o’ payin’ all, I’m going’ to borry more, what’ll he say when I tell him a principle’s a principle? What’ll we do if he refuses to give us any more on tick?’19 Juno holds nothing but equal contempt for the ideal of


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nationalism, particularly in terms of its effect on her son Johnny who was maimed fighting in the Easter Rising and later for the anti-Treaty faction in the Irish Civil War: ‘MARY: He stuck to his principle’s, an’, no matther how you may argue, ma, a principle’s a principle./MRS. BOYLE: Amn’t I nicely handicapped with the whole o’ yous! I don’t know what any o’ yous ud do without your ma.’20 Juno’s words here serve to crystallize O’Casey’s philosophy, at least in the Dublin plays, as the ‘ma’ holds both the house together and also the moral high ground through an instinctive disavowal of the vagaries of politics and ‘principles’ regardless of their ethical content. Where men such as her idle husband ‘Captain’ Boyle, his gormless pal Joxer and the devious Bentham variously try to bring ‘ruination’ on her household, she alone struggles to maintain the structural integrity of her home against male gallivanting and philosophizing with her common-sense nominalism. Seamus Deane contends that: ‘In Juno we get a “great” speech, morality’s set piece, deploring the state “o’ chassis separating hearts o’ stone” (male) and “hearts o’ flesh” (female). O’Casey, however, is as willing to exploit the comedy of the chaos as he is unwilling to probe the tragedy of the stony-hearted.’21 Where ‘Captain’ Boyle and Joxer are two-dimensional stage-Irish types, Juno and Mary are no less two-dimensional and for that matter no less ‘types’ in terms of their status as beleaguered Wife and ‘fallen woman’ respectively. Juno’s final speech, leading up to the famous ‘hearts o’ stone’ invocation, serves to console her daughter’s trepidation about the future and to castigate male folly: ‘MRS. BOYLE: We’ll go. Come, Mary, an’ we’ll never come back here agen. Let your father furrage for himself now; I’ve done all I could an’ it was all no use – he’ll be hopeless till the end of his days. I’ve got a little room in me sisther’s where we’ll stop till your throuble is over, an’ then we’ll work together for the sake of the baby./ MARY: My poor little child that’ll have no father!/ MRS. BOYLE: It’ll have what’s far betther – it’ll have two mothers.’22 In O’Casey’s Dublin plays the ‘fathers’ are wrong for their folly and idealism, while the ‘mothers’ are right for their humanism and apoliticism. The problem of course is that such a formula does a disservice to both parties, and does nothing to illuminate the fraught relationship between nationalism and feminism either at the time of the Irish Civil War when the play is set, or after the establishment of the Irish Free State when the play was produced. The tendency to use female characters to undermine abstract ideals, particularly nationalism, reaches its peak in The Plough and the Stars (1926). Nora Clitheroe’s opening lines are used to scold Peter Flynn, The Covey and Fluther Good for not only talking too loudly but for having

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a heated debate about socialism, nationalism and religion: ‘NORA: If th’ two o’ yous don’t thry to make a generous altheration in your goin’s on, an’ keep on thryin’ t’ inaugurate th’ customs o’ th’ rest o’ th’ house into this place, yous can flit into other lodgin’s where your bowsey battlin’ ‘ill meet, maybe, with an encore.’23 The spatial dynamics of the play enhance Nora’s disavowal of her husband’s nationalist idealism, especially regarding the dichotomy between the safe, domestic world inside the tenement and the dangerous, public world outside. When the threshold between the two worlds is breached the structural integrity of Nora’s domestic haven is compromised, particularly when Captain Brennan arrives to draft Clitheroe into the Irish Citizen Army: ‘NORA [tremulously]: No, no. Please, Jack; don’t open it. Please, for your own little Nora’s sake!/ CLITHEROE [rising to open the door]: Now don’t be silly, Nora.’24 Nora’s abjuration of nationalism, and concomitant advocacy of the inherent safety of a putatively apolitical domesticity, stand in stark contrast to Clitheroe’s fanatical devotion to the national ideal, which reaches fever pitch when he disowns Nora after he discovers that she burned the initial summons from General Connolly. Clitheroe’s denial of the domestic safety which Nora represents reaches its climax in the ‘commodious public-house’ in Act II, where Langon, Brennan and Clitheroe exalt Ireland as an abstract ideal in direct contradistinction to the equally abstract ideal of ‘mother’ and ‘wife’: LIEUT. L ANGON: Th’ time is rotten ripe for revolution. CLITHEROE: You have a mother, Langon. LIEUT. L ANGON: Ireland is greater than a mother. CAPT. BRENNAN: You have a wife, Clitheroe. CLITHEROE: Ireland is greater than a wife. LIEUT. L ANGON: Th’ time for Ireland’s battle is now – th’ place for Ireland’s battle is here. [The tall, dark figure again is silhouetted against the window. The three men pause and listen.]25 The dialectic between the various roles of Woman and the abstract ideal of ‘Ireland’ is further enhanced by the juxtaposition of the prostitute Rosie Redmond qua Fallen Woman with the flag of the Citizen Army during the speech by the ‘dark figure’ representing Padraic Pearse. The insurgents’ oaths to sacrificial nationalism such as Clitheroe’s ‘Death for th’ Independence or Ireland!’ are undercut by Rosie’s seduction of Fluther Good and the promise of sexual intercourse. The final contrast between female authenticity and male falsity is in Bessie Burgess’s ‘real’


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heroism in Act IV, when she is shot pushing Nora away from the window in contrast to the rendition of male heroism which is portrayed as mere self-delusion. Bessie’s ‘humanity’ is deliberately overstated at the end as she debunks even the humanistic impulse of her own self-sacrifice by railing against Nora with her dying words: ‘BESSIE [with an arrested scream of fear and pain]: Merciful God, I’m shot, I’m shot, I’m shot! ... Th’ life’s pourin’ out o’ me! [to NORA] I’ve got this through ... through you ... through you, you bitch, you!’26 Declan Kiberd states that in ‘O’Casey’s mind all –isms are wasms’27 and this holds true particularly for The Plough and the Stars (1926), where the trope of Woman and its vicissitudes are used to undercut nationalism, which is itself rendered as a form of quixotic, male idealism. In O’Casey’s Dublin plays any ostensibly feminist critique is offset by the prevalent tactic of using the roles of Irish Woman (and even Fallen Woman in the case of Rosie Redmond), Wife and Mother to provide a blunt analysis of abstract idealism, where the broadsword is invariably favoured over the scalpel and ‘principles’ are consequently lacerated regardless of their ethical content. Rather than questioning idealized roles of Woman, O’Casey ultimately endorses these roles and contributes to the reification of the material woman in the form of the phantasmatic Woman, by frequently idealizing his female characters insofar as he invests in their authenticity in direct contradistinction to male falsity. By using this tactic, however, O’Casey is hoist by his own petard insofar as he condemns the male characters for investing in the abstract ideal of nationalism, while at the same time celebrating the relative authenticity of the female characters in their variously idealized roles as Woman, Wife and Mother. O’Casey castigates nationalism, and a narrow-gauge form of nationalism at that, in favour of equally narrow-gauge forms of female ontology which are politically regressive and antithetical to any progressive notion of Irish womanhood. Where O’Casey effectively endorses reified versions of female ontology, Margaret O’Leary engages with the intricacies of Woman and its vicissitudes particularly in terms of the complex matrices of desire. A native of West Cork, O’Leary took an MA at University College Cork and taught at second-level until retiring in 1927, when after a brief sojourn in France she returned to Ireland and wrote short stories, plays and novels, winning the Harmsworth Prize for her first novel, The House I Made (1935). In spite of her success as a novelist O’Leary is best known for her two Abbey-produced plays, specifically The Woman (1929),28 directed by Lennox Robinson, and The Coloured Balloon (1949),29 directed by Frank Dermody. W.B. Yeats was particularly impressed with The Woman

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and wrote to Robinson, stating emphatically that O’Leary was ‘the best realistic peasant dramatist who has yet appeared’.30 Similarly to George Shiels’s The Rugged Path, O’Leary’s The Woman dramatizes the conflict which emerges from class disparity, specifically between the respectable, strong farmer O’Hara family and the disreputable, lumpenproletarian Dunn family. As with Shiels’s play the spatial dynamics emphasize the class disparity, with Acts 1 and 3 set in the O’Hara family’s ‘large comfortable farm kitchen’ in rural Cork and Act 2 set in the Dunn family’s ‘small, drab, poorly-furnished kitchen’. What distinguishes The Woman from The Rugged Path is the focus on Ellen Dunn, not in terms of her status as classed subaltern, but more specifically in terms of how her status as gendered subaltern constitutes the traumatic kernel of the play. In the opening lines of the play it is clear that strong farmer John O’Hara (P.J. Carolan) is furious about the possibility of his son Maurice (Arthur Shields) marrying Ellen Dunn (Eileen Crowe), describing her as a ‘black-eyed slut’ and ‘the seed and breed of tinkers and twisters! Her father born in a ditch the son of a gipsy! And her grandmother, the gipsy woman, drownding [sic] herself in a bog hole!’31 That O’Hara loathes the prospect of his descendants becoming déclassé through his son’s union with an economic inferior is clear enough: ‘Ha, a nice wife she’d make for any man, let alone any of the O’Haras. (With arrogance): a family that always held their heads high – a family with a long line of ancestors – a family that never owed a penny to anyone – and that had respect from everyone high and low, from king to beggar.’32 What is more interesting, however, is the emphasis placed on Ellen’s gender and sexuality, specifically insofar as they are rendered as not only deviant but even fiendish by O’Hara and the rest of Ellen’s detractors. When Ellen is described as physically attractive, O’Hara retorts: ‘Goodlooking indeed. So is the devil, and all his damned spawn.’33 In terms of Maurice’s attraction to her, O’Hara insists that ‘she put her spells on him – the jade. Good looks indeed? Ay, good looks, good looks. It’s her and her likes that do the devil’s work.’34 O’Hara’s brother-in-law James (Michael J. Dolan) states that she is ‘a light woman’35 and Mrs O’Hara (Maureen Delany) remarks that ‘when a woman like that marks a man down, he goes down like a flower before the scythe, God help him.’36 The opprobrium which surrounds Ellen in terms of the equivalence of her sexuality with iniquity stands in stark contrast to the fondness with which Mrs O’Hara regards Kitty Doyle (Mairead Bonass), a neighbour and daughter of small farmer Patsy Doyle. The moment that Kitty enters her home Mrs. O’Hara showers Kitty with compliments: ‘You’re lovely,


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just lovely, child.’37 When Kitty rejoices in the ‘independence’ that she has learned during her recent sojourn in Dublin, Mrs O’Hara retorts: ‘You’re too – independent. You shouldn’t hold off so much. (Briskly): Make up to a man. – make much of him – joke with him – tease him – look him in the eyes – get him to notice you – and – and to run after you.’38 When Kitty recoils in mock horror at Mrs O’Hara’s suggestion that she should ‘flirt’ to get what she wants, it soon becomes apparent quite how eager Mrs O’Hara is for Kitty to marry Maurice: ‘You are young, you are beautiful, you are loving – just the woman to make a man happy. (As Kitty stands up): No, no, my child, don’t go away. (Mrs O’Hara stands up): You can save Maurice – you are the only one.’39 In her desperation Mrs O’Hara graphically describes the phantasmatic differences between the roles of Wife and Mother: ‘But what am I? A poor old grey woman. Is [sic] isn’t the likes of me a ripe young man wants – it’s not a mother he wants at his age – it’s a wife – young and ripe for love like yourself.’40 Kitty’s response unveils the primordial ferocity beneath the idealized role of the caring Mother: ‘A poor old mother indeed. A mother? Why, there’s nothing more terrible on God’s earth than a mother foraging for her child.’41 John O’Hara’s determination to dissuade Maurice from marrying Ellen reaches fever-pitch as he fails to comprehend his son’s devotion to her: ‘MAURICE: I have my woman, the one woman in all the world for me.’42 O’Hara is baffled by his son’s obsession and responds with common-sense nominalism: ‘Aren’t all women the same? Haven’t they all eyes, and ears, and – and tongues.’43 Unable to comprehend his son’s fixation, O’Hara invokes the trope of the land qua Woman to counteract Maurice’s obsession with Ellen qua Woman: ‘The land that is more to you than a mother – that stands by you from cradle to grave – that feeds you – and puts a roof over your head – and a coat at your back. The darling land – always with a welcome for you – and you digging the potatoes our of her! And her fields of ripe yellow corn! And she always so fresh – and clean – and – and – why, man, just like God Almighty Himself!’44 The irony here of course is that both men are obsessed with differing forms of Woman as fantasy object that are in turn merely projections of their own desire; in Maurice’s case a physical woman and in O’Hara’s case his land and property. In both instances the Woman functions as the structuring principle around which their subjectivity is based: for O’Hara his land and wealth are absolutely fundamental to his wellbeing; for Maurice Ellen fulfils the role of his recently deceased wife and provides the anaclitic support which stops him falling into complete despair. Ellen’s role as fantasy object is so crucial to Maurice

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that he is even prepared to renounce his own children if they disrupt his fantasy framework, as Mrs O’Hara remarks: ‘He’s mad, he’s mad. No children? He said he had no children. John – James – did you hear? Gone out of his mind he is.’45 The fate that awaits Maurice should Ellen’s support fail him is materialized in the form of the Stranger, Ellen’s former lover, who wanders the countryside like a lost soul and is bereft because Ellen has abandoned him for Maurice. It is clear that Ellen exerts the same hypnotic attraction on the Stranger as she does on Maurice, and in his despair the Stranger predicts that Maurice’s fate will be the same as his: ‘She will bring a curse on you. She will bring a curse on any man who looks into the black fire of her eyes. Oh, God! Her eyes! You will never have a minute’s peace by her side. She is a woman of flame. She will blight you you [sic]. She will suck the youth out of you. You will be older than your father when she’s finished with you. And she will finish with you soon – and another man will be drinking in her kisses of fire – another man.’46 The Stranger’s prediction is echoed later in the play when Mrs O’Hara confronts Ellen in a doomed attempt to bribe her to emigrate to America: ‘You will bring discord where there’s peace./ ELLEN: I don’t care./ MRS. O’HARA: You will divide father from son./ E LLEN: I don’t care./ MRS. O’HARA: You will bring a mother to the grave before her time./ ELLEN: I don’t care./ MRS. O’HARA: You will rob little helpless orphans of their father./ ELLEN: I don’t care./ MRS. O’HARA: Then you are a ravenous wild beast!/ ELLEN: A wild beast must live.’47 In both scenes where Ellen’s malign power is expressed, the intonation and supernatural imagery echo a scene in W.B. Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well (1917), where the young Cuchulain ventures to Scotland to find a well of immortality that is protected by the Guardian, a supernatural entity also known as the Woman of the Sidhe, that materializes in the form of a hawk. The Old Man warns Cuchulain about: The Woman of the Sidhe herself, The mountain witch, the unappeasable shadow. She is always flitting upon this mountain-side, To allure or to destroy. When she has shown Herself to the fierce women of the hills Under that shape they offer sacrifice And arm for battle. There falls a curse On all who have gazed in her moistened eyes; So get you gone while you have that proud step And confident voice, for not a man alive


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Has so much luck that he can play with it. Those that have long to live should fear her most, The old are cursed already. That curse may be Never to win a woman’s love and keep it; Or always to mix hatred in the love; Or it may be that she will kill your children, That you will find them, their throats torn and bloody, Or you will be so maddened that you kill them With your own hand.48 Whether O’Leary was directly influenced by this section from Yeats’s play is a matter of conjecture, but what is interesting is the power that the Woman of the Sidhe has over men, specifically in terms of her status as a supernatural entity or abstract thing. Žižek describes this phenomenon of the Woman as Thing in terms of the dynamics of courtly love: This coincidence of absolute, inscrutable Otherness and pure machine is what confers on the Lady her uncanny, monstrous character – the Lady is the Other which is not our ‘fellow-creature’; that is to say, she is someone with whom no relationship of empathy is possible. This traumatic Otherness is what Lacan designates by means of the Freudian term das Ding, the Thing – the Real that ‘always returns to its place’, the hard kernel that resists symbolization. The idealization of the Lady, her elevation to a spiritual ethereal Ideal, is therefore to be conceived of as a strictly secondary phenomenon: it is a narcissistic projection whose function is to render her traumatic dimension invisible. In this precise and limited sense, Lacan concedes that the ‘element of idealizing exaltation that is expressly sought out in the ideology of courtly love has certainly been demonstrated’; it is fundamentally narcissistic in character.49 In terms of O’Leary’s play, then, Ellen constitutes the Woman as Thing insofar as she represents the impossible kernel of the Real around which the variegated desires of both her admirers and her detractors are structured. For O’Hara, Mrs O’Hara, Maurice and the Stranger, it is impossible to see Ellen as she really is, insofar as her status within their respective fantasies requires a non-knowledge on their part as to the narcissism inherent in their perspectives of her. Their desires are narcissistic because they see in Ellen only their respective objets petit a,


their own individuated desires, be they manifest in terms of love or hate rather than what she actually is outside of their fantasies. Ellen’s status as Woman qua phantasmatic Thing is reinforced by the stage directions, in that she is described as ‘small and dark’ and ‘under her heavy mass of dark hair, looks almost elk-like [sic, elf-like]’.50 She is ‘very agile’, and moves with ‘quick, rhythmic, feline grace. When at bay, she elongates her neck and throws up her head in a manner which suggests a beautiful untameable bird.’51 Her voice is ‘flexible, vibrating and extremely sensitive to all her varying moods’.52 Ellen’s phantasmatic status is augmented by her quixotic obsessions with either travelling to some far-fetched ‘lovely country where all the sun is’ or immersing herself in ‘the black water of Poulgorm’, a local bog hole where ‘her grandmother drowned herself’.53 That Ellen’s obsessions emerge in part from her status as classed subaltern is clear enough, insofar as she pleads with Maurice to take her ‘away out of this dirty hole of a house, where the floor does be so cold when it is raining outside, and the wind whistling under the door’.54 Yet her obsession also emerges from her status as gendered subaltern insofar as she requires nothing less than selfless devotion from her male counterparts. When Maurice reassures her that ‘I love you more than my father and mother and house and lands and everything. (Smiling): Now are you satisfied?’ Ellen responds equivocally: ‘I don’t know. I wonder do you love me that much? (Confidentially): I want an awful lot of love, Maurice, so much that there’ll never be any end to it. I am always looking for love, and I never get enough of it.’ (Nestling to him): Tell me again that you love me.’55 Ellen’s need to invert her subalternate status within Catholic gender hierarchy by requiring complete submission from her paramours only results in constant dissatisfaction, as each one is unable to completely manifest the impossible Real of her desire: ‘I found them out – one after the other – and they were all ugly and small – and then I couldn’t bear them any more. (Quickly): But I don’t talk of them – they spoil everything. (Harshly): I hate them – they are all liars.’56 Ellen’s ontological stability is based on her capacity to constitute herself as the objet petit a of her male devotees, which in turn constitutes each of them successively as her objet petit a: ‘Let me look into your eyes. (She catches his head and looks steadily): I want to see the love in your eyes. (Kissing each eye slowly): Oh, yes, it is there. (To herself ): While I see that love I am satisfied – at least I think I am.’57 What O’Leary represents here are the complex matrices of interpersonal desire where Ellen, in her role as wild and vivacious temptress, is necessarily marginalized in order to maintain the structural integrity of the Symbolic order of Catholic


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gender ideology, and thereby constitutes the impossible fragment of the Real of desire for Maurice as bourgeois scion. For Ellen, Maurice and her former lover fleetingly manifest the impossible fragment of the Real of her desire, which is itself an amalgam of the need for social acceptability, economic security and sexual fulfilment: ‘I have a terrible thirst for love (Passionately): It’s not fair, it’s not fair. (She swings round, rushes over to Maurice and falls on her on her [sic] knees; then tearfully): ‘Tis killing me. I want love. I want beautiful things. I want to go to America, (dreamily): to be watching the grand ladies dressed in red and purple, and they driving in their beautiful carriages.’58 In the end Maurice is unable to join Ellen on her hopeless quest for fulfilment, not simply because of his responsibility to his children, but primarily because of the lure of Woman qua Land and Legacy. In this respect his mother achieves what his father could not by weaving a gendered narrative about their family’s embourgeoisement from famine victims to strong farmers which ultimately proves more alluring than Ellen: MRS. O’H ARA (pensively): And when the Great Famine was there, and we with nothing to eat but the yellow meal, for the potatoes were all rotted, there would he be telling us – and he warm in the telling, and we forgetting our hunger – telling us of the beautiful women of olden times, and their golden hair sweeping the ground, and the long white arms of them, and they living forever in the Land of the Young, where there is no sorrow or pain. (Her voice trails off almost to a whisper). M AURICE (dreamily): And the white – warm – arms of them! MRS. O’H ARA: And their – golden – hair – sweeping – the ground.59 When Ellen learns of her defeat it seems that she determines to embrace the Real of her desire in all its traumatic plenitude by drowning herself in Poulgorm: ‘But away my own road I must be going now, – (moving to the door) And tis grand and shiny the water in Poulgorm will be now, and so soft – (moving away into the night) – so soft!’60 Yet before she does so she engages in a vigorous denunciation of the role of bourgeois Wife and Mother. When Mrs O’Hara tries to counsel Ellen that ‘love is just feeding your man well, and keeping a warm shirt to his back’, Ellen retorts ‘No, no, no, no! (She moves her hand across her forehead. Then her face brightens. Triumphantly). Your man broke you in. (Proudly). But no man will ever break me in.’61 In terms of the context of the play’s moment of production, Ellen demonstrates radical female agency by

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totally rejecting the orthodox roles of Wife and Mother which women were expected to fulfil. In doing so she also rejects the socio-economic system which was intercalated with such gender roles: ‘Ellen (coming back to reality; rather sadly): What would you be doing with me, Maurice O’Hara, and the biggest half of you yearning for your home and your stock?’62 As Ellen leaves to repeat her grandmother’s fate in Poulgorm, she celebrates her status as object cause of bourgeois masculinist desire: ‘But for all that, Maurice O’Hara, you won’t forget me. And often in the night-time when you’ll wake up out of your sleep, you’ll turn your back to the good wife sleeping beside you, and every drop of your blood will cry out for me. There will be no hunger like that hunger, and no thirst like that thirst.’63 The hypnotic power of her departure affects the other members of the bourgeois household to such an extent that even Mrs O’Hara finally remarks: ‘Tis her and her likes that the grand stories of the world are about, like Helen the Beautiful and Deirdre of the Sorrows.’64 Whilst The Woman offers a powerful critique of bourgeois society and concomitant gender roles, particularly in the advocacy of a radical rejection of prescribed female roles, the audience reception was markedly positive in terms of the performance. The reviewer for the Irish Independent observed that the Abbey audience ‘mustered in force’ for the first production and to ‘judge by the storm of cheers that greeted the author when she made her bow before the curtain, this latest recruit to the ranks of the Abbey dramatists can congratulate herself on having pulled off a popular success’.65 The Irish Times reviewer states that a ‘packed house received the play with enthusiasm’ but suggests that ‘the applause would be more appropriately bestowed upon the actors than upon the author’, particularly in terms of Eileen Crowe’s performance as Ellen Dunn.66 The review notes that ‘for two acts it hung indecisively, but the third act suggests that Miss O’Leary may be a dramatist of great possibilities’, and highlights the applause which ‘greeted her [Ellen’s] outburst in the third act’.67 The Irish Independent review was similarly disparaging about O’Leary’s dramaturgy, arguing that ‘like most novices’ O’Leary makes the mistake of ‘starting too many hares, with the result that her audience get the impression they are being dragged round in circles instead of driving ahead to their goal’.68 Where both reviews reduce the complexity of O’Leary’s dramaturgy in favour of simplistic plot-lines and characterization, they also suggest that O’Leary’s style was variously influenced by the plays of T.C. Murray and J.M. Synge. Indeed the Irish Times reviewer goes so far as to suggest that the ‘influence of Synge’s “In the Shadow of the Glen” pervades the


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play, so that a tramp’s voice re-echoes in the theatre’.69 The comparison with Murray’s work is certainly tenable in terms of the representation of the trauma inherent in social realism, but in terms of ‘reeling off accepted formulas in Syngeian rhythms’70 it is evident that O’Leary is simply not interested in replicating Synge’s valorization of marginalized figures typified in his wandering tramps. As Ellen’s mother says: ‘Tis only people with a warm bed to lie on do be always talking about the joy of going the roads and lying on the hedges.’71 Moreover, the manner of Ellen’s departure goes to the root of O’Leary’s representation of her protagonist as both classed and gendered subaltern. Whilst the hypnotic quality of Ellen’s final words has a palpable effect on the characters in the bourgeois household and therefore exhibits radical autonomy, it is patently clear that unlike Synge’s Christy Mahon she will not go ‘romping and romancing a lifetime’.72 In fact what Ellen does after she leaves the O’Dara house is somewhat ambiguous. In a letter to Lennox Robinson, W.B. Yeats suggested changing the ending of the earlier draft of the play where Ellen wanders the roads alone and states categorically that she should die, so that her death: ‘leaves her dominant overall, all there are answered and confounded. The act becomes strong and passionate instead of being as it is sentimental.Her passion has to die as the sanctity of the saint has to die.’73 O’Leary implies in a letter74 that this change was made, but as Lisa Fitzpatrick argues ‘this is never confirmed either mimetically or in the diegesis, and no body of the dead woman appears on stage. Ellen leaves, and the play ends with Maurice dashing off, having just realized what she intends to do.’75 Margaret O’Leary’s fellow Corkonian Teresa Deevy also engages in an incisive critique of the roles women were expected and required to play in the Free State. Deevy was educated at Ursuline Convent in Waterford and began an Arts degree at University College Dublin, which was cut short when she developed Ménière’s disease. When she transferred to University College Cork to complete the degree she was almost deaf. Deevy returned to Waterford and in 1930 had her first Abbey Theatre success with The Reapers;76 in 1931 she was joint winner (alongside Paul Vincent Carroll for The Bed of Procrustes) of the Abbey playwriting prize for Temporal Powers,77 and throughout the 1930s she had a string of Abbey productions of her plays. Deevy’s relationship with the Abbey ended unhappily in 1942 when the board rejected Wife to James Whelan with the implicit assertion that her future plays would not be produced. After the break with the Abbey some of her plays were produced by experimental companies; her later plays were written for radio and were produced by the BBC and Radio Éireann. Her canon contains two

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of the most compelling dramatizations of the situation of women in Ireland during the 1930s: The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935)78 and Katie Roche (1936).79 These plays offer an astute analysis of the ideal Irish Woman which was effectively nationalized in the 1937 Constitution only a few years after their production, as well as a remarkably complex representation of female ontology. The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) illuminates the dark side of the familist system in rural society by using deliberately hyperbolic characters to emphasize the economic brutality and sexual repression of 1930s Ireland. In the opening lines the threat of patriarchal violence is made clear by Peter Kinsella’s (John Stephenson) annoyance that his daughter Annie (Ria Mooney) hasn’t made his dinner on time: ‘PETER: I’ll make her feel something her father without his dinner.’80 The threat soon materializes into a physical attack which is witnessed by their neighbour Mrs Marks (Ann Clery) and Annie’s suitor Jim Harris (Cyril Cusack): ‘PETER: Hand me that tin./ [A NNIE hands it, keeping as far as possible from him. PETER, hits out at her, A NNIE dodges and escapes, but cries out; JIM springs forward; MRS MARKS catches JIM by the arm.]’81 It is interesting here that Mrs Marks not only restrains Jim for his own protection from Peter’s wrath, but that she positively endorses both Annie’s punishment and her immediate transition from bold girl to the role of dutiful Wife: ‘MRS. M ARKS: Now I’ll tell you this – though I know you won’t listen – if you were a man at all you’d make her marry you./ JIM: An’ how I do that?/ MRS. M ARKS: Ah, you’re too soft-hearted for any woman. ‘Tis the hard man wins, and right he should.’82 Mrs Marks’s complicity with patriarchal chauvinism and the axiomatic truth of the role of dutiful Wife is symptomatic of the general acceptance by most Irish women of Catholic gender ideology and its institutionalization in the Constitution: ‘MRS. M ARKS: She earns what she gets. Why don’t she settle down? She’s a bold wild thing./ JIM: He treats her cruel; it don’t do her any good./ MRS. M ARKS: And what would do her good? That Annie Kinsella will be romancin’ all her life with whoever she can.’83 Liam O’Dowd argues that ‘it seems certain that in the 1930s the Constitution did not offend the self–image of the majority of Irish women. It did however seem to set strict limits on the political aspirations of women which were raised in the course of the long campaign for universal suffrage.’84 Deevy offers an insight into the complexity of ideological hegemony and the relationship of gendered subalterns to the dominant regime, by showing the relative complicity between women and the ideological roles they were required to play. As Gramsci suggests, the history of the subalterns is ‘intertwined with that


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of civil society’ and hence his recommendation that it is necessary to study ‘their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, their attempts to influence the programmes of these formations in order to press claims of their own, and the consequences of these attempts in determining processes of decomposition, renovation or neo–formation’.85 Where Mrs Marks embodies an active affiliation to hegemonic Catholic gender ideology, Annie Kinsella embodies an initially active rejection and an eventual passive affiliation to the dominant political formation. Annie’s reputation for ‘romancin’ is evident early in the play in her passionate embrace with Roddy Mann (J. Winter), a local firebrand: ‘RODDY: And there you have your heart. Now give us a kiss. What did you promise? Leave down the tin. [A NNIE puts the tin on the ground, slips her hands up about his neck and gives him a long kiss].86 Annie much prefers the thrill of casual sexual interaction with Roddy ‘a big lounging figure, cap pulled low over his eyes’, to the promise of a stable but less stimulating life married to Jim: A NNIE: Settle down. (A knell to her.) I dunno could I ever get into service in a place in London? JIM (in fury): If your father heard you were at the crossroad last night – or if the priest heard tell of it – dancin’ on the board, an’ restin’ in the ditch with your cheek agen mine and your body pressed to me. A NNIE: It is only in the dark I could do it – for when I’d see the kind you are – JIM (catches her): What’s wrong with me now? A NNIE (holding back): Is it me to go near you – me?87 Annie rails against the prescribed roles of good Irish Woman and Wife to the extent that she invests in a romantic fantasy: ‘JIM: I’m sick of that thing! Who’s the King of Spain’s daughter?/ A NNIE: Myself./ JIM: Yourself. ... (A laugh.) And the bride beyond!/ A NNIE: It is myself I seen in her – sailin’ out into the sun, and to adventure.’88 The dramaturgical effect of this fantasy is of course deliberately exaggerated and is designed to draw the spectator into Annie’s field of desire, specifically in terms of her longing for independence and a gender role outside those prescribed for her by the community. Through this conversation with Jim on the fraught matter of her destiny as either an independent woman or dutiful Wife and Mother, Annie enunciates the core of her desire. Annie’s ‘unconscious’ is thus ‘outside’ insofar

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as her sexuality and autonomy are crystallized in the fantasy of the King of Spain’s daughter as her objet petit a, the impossible fragment of the Real of her desire.89 Moreover, Annie’s yearning to realize her desire and break out of gender roles rigidly defined by a patriarchal social system situate her as a ‘want-to-be’ in the Lacanian sense as a ‘manque-à-être’.90 Annie wants-to-be precisely what is firmly denied her within the patriarchal discourse – namely a gregarious, sexually active, independent woman. Annie’s desire is by its very nature incompatible with her father’s chauvinist discourse and he forces her to choose between five years indentured labour in a local factory or marriage to Jim: ‘A NNIE (to Jim): I might as well have you. (Low) Who would I ever meet would be fit for me? Where would I ever find a way out of here?’91 The pathos emerges, of course, from the answer to Annie’s question, which is simply that there is no ‘way out’ for her, and so her active rejection of the designated role of Wife is forced into passive affiliation with her situatedness in hegemonic Catholic gender ideology: ‘A NNIE (softly): You have me ruined. It is all over now. You can go settle with the priest./ JIM: You won’t ever regret it. You won’t (But she turns away.)’92 The exchange between Annie and her father is a dramatic hyperbole of what is essentially a historically and culturally specific phenomenon. As Beale contends: ‘The family, as envisaged by both Church and State, was strongly patriarchal. The father was expected to be the head of the household and the breadwinner. His was a strictly disciplinarian, often authoritarian, role.’93 The ‘woman of the family’ was expected to be ‘wife, mother and home-maker. In practice, of course, many women did not accept a secondary position in the family but were strong and assertive individuals who took pride in themselves and their achievements. But the role of woman in the ideal family was defined by both Church and political leaders as a strictly home-based existence – so much so that it too was written into the Constitution.’94 While Annie has no choice other than to engage in passive affiliation with the gender roles enshrined in the Constitution, her gregarious nature is consequently bowed but is nevertheless unbroken, as indicated by her response to Mrs Marks’s patronizing reassurances: ‘MRS. MARKS: A good, sensible boy./ A NNIE: Boy! (she laughs exultantly) I think he is a man might cut your throat!/ MRS. M ARKS: God save us all!/ A NNIE: He put by two shillin’s every week for two hundred weeks. I think he is a man that supposin’ he was jealous – might cut your throat. (Quiet – exultant: she goes.)/ MRS. MARKS: The Lord preserve us! that she’d find joy in such a thought.’95 In these final lines of the play we witness the irrepressibility


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of Annie’s desire and her ‘joy’ or jouissance as the impossible fragment of the Real, that is necessarily external to the Symbolic order of Catholic gender ideology to which she is subjected. The Irish Independent noted that Annie was ‘superbly played by Ria Mooney who captured every subtle nuance in the kaledescopic [sic] emotions of Annie, and got the very last ounce out of the part’.96 The Irish Times observed that it ‘might have been expected that a new play by Miss Teresa Deevy would have drawn a much larger audience’ but that in ‘the event the entertainment was excellent’.97 Ria Mooney and Cyril Cusack ‘both gave excellent interpretations’, noting in particular that ‘rebellious dreaminess of Annie Kinsella gave Miss Ria Mooney very fine material and she made a memorable character of the girl’.98 Katie Roche’s situation in Deevy’s eponymous play of (1936) is slightly different from that of Annie Kinsella, insofar as Katie (Eileen Crowe) vacillates between active rejection of, and active affiliation to, the prescribed role of Wife in concordance with hegemonic gender ideology. Such vacillation is evident early in the play during Katie’s conversation about her future with Stanislaus Gregg (F.J. McCormick), the brother of her employer Amelia (Ria Mooney), in which she describes her conflicting desires: one of which is to go to the ‘regatta at Coolbeg’ and the ‘dance after’, while the other is to ‘enter the convent next month’.99 Katie’s confusion over which desire to pursue is compounded by Stanislaus’s offer to marry her in spite of the fact that at ‘about forty-five’ he is old enough to be her father, and also used to harbour affections for Katie’s dead mother Mary Hanlan. When Stanislaus reveals his intentions to Katie he also sheds some light on her mysterious provenance, as it is known to the community at large that Katie is the offspring of unmarried parentage and is treated with a combination of sympathy and derision. Indeed the ambiguity over Katie’s provenance contributes to her anxiety and concomitant desire for security and a source of emotional sustenance, which is manifested in the variegated channels that she invests in, ranging from the dance hall, to the convent, to a potential marriage to Stanislaus. Katie discusses her perplexity with Reuben (Michael J. Dolan), a ‘very holy man’ who is a composite of oracle, healer and wandering tramp: R EUBEN: Tell me what’s wrong. K ATIE: I will I will. (pause. She stands close to him, hands clasped. R EUBEN bows his head, listening.) Well ... we ... I long ago made up my mind I’d be a saint. I was trying to find one went before me in a

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way I’d like. They most of them entered a convent very young, and I was wondering would I – But now there’s a man came here and asked me to marry him – and I know in my heart I’d like that better. (Silence.) Sure if I was a good wife to him – that mightn’t be an easy job! (Silence. Then, more defensive) St. Margaret of Scotland – she wasn’t a nun, and didn’t hold with them either.100 In this brief exchange we gain an insight into the complexity of Deevy’s rendering of female ontology. Katie’s discourse is deliberately punctuated to show how her desire constantly vacillates between diverse objectives, and how her state of mind subtly shifts with each inflection to reflect her confusion over which object to pursue. Robert Hogan finds the structure of Katie’s fraught discourse somewhat problematic, arguing that the ‘speeches break off halfway through a topic and abruptly switch to a new topic or adopt a new tone. Fiction can more easily handle such quick shifts, for dramatic dialogue must be obvious enough to be caught on the wing. Three or four contradictory tones in the same speech are probably too dazzling.’101 The scene which Hogan finds particularly objectionable involves the exchange where Katie accepts Stanislaus’s marriage proposal: K ATIE (in turmoil): Oh, who knows what they wish! (Clasps her hands; then, seeking strength) ‘One false step and you’re over the precipice, one bad link and the chain goes snap, one wrong act and a life is ruined, one small ... one small ... one ... one ...’ (trying to concentrate). Ach! (turns to run from the room, meets Stanislaus coming in. He opens his arms, takes her.) Oh–h. ... Oh–h ... (in ecstasy). STANISLAUS: I couldn’t wait. (Kisses her.) K ATIE: Oh! (Overcome; then frees herself, stands back from him.) Yes, I’ll give you my hand. STANISLAUS: That’s right. That’s a good girl. Now don’t be nervy. Don’t be upset. It’s only the strain. (Pats her shoulder reassuringly. K ATIE stiffens.) Why – even I felt it. We’ll be sensible. We’ll get married very soon. My sister will live with us – if you don’t mind. She’ll go away sometimes. (K ATIE looks at him now with the anger of a child who sees a clumsy companion ruin a play.)102 Hogan argues that in the short amount of time which this exchange takes, ‘the actress must convey her confusion, her attempt to overcome it, her inability to overcome it, her despair and flight, her shock, her “ecstasy”, her control, nervousness, aversion, and finally her anger – a


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sequence which runs from hysteria to coolness, from love to hate. Each point must be made clearly and instantaneously. Few actresses could do it, and few audiences could take it in. For this reason, the play is not quite a success, but at least it fails by trying to be too good.’103 Hogan’s thesis was to be contradicted when Judy Friel directed Derbhle Crotty in the lead role in at the Peacock Stage of the Abbey Theatre in April 1994. Anthony Roche states that Friel ‘beautifully conveyed Katie Roche’s inward glow of youthful possibility by starting the play with Katie already on, standing at the window in the afternoon sun and basking in its light. As a result of this, Stan’s muted entrance was all of a piece, the first inevitable clouding or, to use Deevy’s term, smothering.’104 Katie’s discourse is not fragmentary in a disconnected, arbitrary sense; rather it is fraught with conflicting desires, where those desires are more than simply a teenage girl’s insipid flights of fancy. Most significantly they are fantasies which can offer support to Katie’s concept of reality and indeed to the very substance of her ontology, or as Heidegger would put it, her Dasein, her ‘being-in-the world’. In the set directions at the start of the play Deevy makes it clear that Katie’s desire and its link to her ontological status are a key element in the play: ‘Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her is a sort of inward glow, which she continually tries to smother and which breaks out either in delight or desperation, according to circumstance.’105 The ‘inward glow’ is of course a deliberate expression of Katie’s desire, which cannot be smothered and consequently ‘breaks out’ in ‘delight’ or ‘desperation’ specifically according to the social circumstances that Katie is subject to. The emphasis on Katie’s desire is redoubled when one takes into account her diverse preoccupations with sainthood, marriage and her strong urge to go down to the dance with the local boys after the regatta: ‘Not that a body’d mind the regatta itself – only skiffin’ up and down the river – but the dance after if they could get the chance.’106 What is fascinating is that even after Katie settles for the realization of one of these fantasies, namely marriage to Stanislaus at the end of Act I, she is nevertheless drawn to local boy Michael Maguire (Arthur Shields) and the lure of the dance in Act II, and her fantasy about attaining sainthood persists into Act III. One can interpret Katie’s various contradictory desires in terms of the Lacanian neologism sinthome, where the symptom persists beyond the fantasy framework designed to contain and maintain such a pathological state.107 Katie is symptomatic, or rather (and to take liberties with Lacan’s term), sinthomatic of the desires of a generation of Irish women who were expected to perform social roles such as Wife and Mother, which

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were as contradictory in terms of social realization as the paradoxical icon of the Virgin Mother of Christ. The dialectical antagonism between social subject and fantasy object takes on a further ideological dimension when one situates Katie Roche in the cultural and historical moment of production in mid-1930s Ireland. If one accepts that fantasy objects like the role of Wife, Mother and Saint attract psychic investment from individuals subjected to those ideological fantasies, then it is no surprise to learn that Katie is attracted to these fantasy roles in spite of the fact that they are not only contradictory but indeed mutually exclusive. For instance, Katie is attracted to the role of dutiful Wife to the extent that she marries Stanislaus. However, when she attempts to consummate their relationship and thus fulfil the role of Mother by approaching Stanislaus in the most basic form of foreplay after they are married early in Act II he pulls away from her, thus demonstrating his lack of interest in her sexually: ‘Stanislaus and Katie sit in front of the fire, side by side. They bend eagerly over some papers which Stanislaus holds. Katie’s arm is thrown across his shoulder. In her eagerness, bending forward, reading, she comes in the way of his view. He moves a little from her: she moves closer to him, drawing him down towards the papers. Stanislaus quietly frees himself, sits back. After a moment Katie sits back too, sighs contentedly.’108 Katie’s contentment with the role of unsatisfied Wife only lasts so long as she becomes increasingly sexually frustrated with Stanislaus’s frigidity and is drawn towards local boys such as Michael, who is much younger and more vigorous than her husband: ‘MICHAEL: I’d better be going./ K ATIE: Yes (slowly – listening) you’d better be going. ... (Before MICHAEL knows what is happening, she is on his knee, her arms about this neck.) But come again – some time he’s out. (Very distinctly – over MICHAEL’S shoulder, towards the door. MICHAEL starts up, tries to push her off: she clings to him.) Come again, Michael.’109 The vitality and enjoyment which are available in a relationship with Michael take on greater resonance in terms of the post-regatta dance which further tests Katie’s commitment to her marriage well into Act III: ‘K ATIE: What possessed him? To–day of all days! ... And the regatta on ... and the boys ... the boys will be coming up for the bench. ... Oh, Amelia – and he might – (Cannot finish – with laughter.)/ A MELIA: My dear! What’s wrong?/K ATIE: Wrong? Is it? (Controlled, defensive. Stands up.) I must have this room ready – like a good wife. (Goes to door – laughs again – this time more happily.) They’ll be coming like ... like they did last year. (Goes.)’110 The palpable threat of the activities manifested in the dance to the structural integrity of Catholic gender ideology resulted in the ratification of the 1935 Dance Halls Act,


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only a year before the production of Katie Roche. Lionel Pilkington notes that this piece of legislation ‘gave sweeping moral vigilante powers to local Catholic clergy as well as to Catholic Action groups, and in which, for example, a jail sentence was imposed on a young woman (but not the man) for kissing and embracing in public’.111 Jenny Beale explains the cultural logic underlying the moral climate in the 1930s: ‘the Irish bishops were concerned about a decline in sexual morality for which they blamed undesirable new influences from abroad: “The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress – all of which tend to destroy the virtues characteristic of our race.” ’112 On the most basic level, for Katie to fulfil the role of Mother she must procreate, and as this is not possible with Stanislaus then she seeks sexual fulfilment with another. Again this situation echoes a cultural phenomenon consequent to the enshrinement of Catholic dogma as social praxis. Beale states that: ‘The Church denounced sex outside marriage, and saw the procreation of children as the only proper function of sex within marriage.’113 Of course this is not the sole reason for Katie’s attraction to Michael, but the bare fact of physical, sexual need is manifest in her attraction to the younger man. The role of dutiful, unsatisfied Wife is performed by Stanislaus’s sister, who is sardonically named Margaret Drybone (May Craig), ‘small and pinched – about forty – with an air of suspicious, brooding intensity’.114 Margaret is a hyperbolic embodiment of the dutiful Wife; her husband Hubert ‘never objects’ to any of her acquaintances because, as she states with more than a modicum of pride, ‘I don’t have people to whom he objects; I don’t think a wife should.’115 Margaret conspicuously dislikes Katie; moreover, she dislikes Katie’s marriage to Stanislaus, which she considers a ‘mistake’, particularly when she discovers that Katie might have had improper interactions with Michael: ‘M ARGARET: Of course, they should never have married. I wasn’t consulted. I didn’t mind. Hubert said to me, “They seem happy. I wonder how long it will last?” I said, “I don’t suppose it will last very long.” How could it, Amelia? ... Now she’s gone out to her Michael Maguire.’116 Margaret is a far from two-dimensional character as she reflects on the cost of playing prescribed roles such as the good Wife: ‘M ARGARET (clears her throat): Of course, I don’t think anyone’s really happy ... . I think everyone has to pretend.’117 The word ‘pretend’ is loaded insofar as Margaret implies that under the hegemony of Catholic gender ideology being ‘happy’ is less of a right than a privilege, but more crucially the notion that ‘everyone has to pretend’ suggests

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that under such hegemony each subject has to play a particular and prescribed gender role. Katie’s dilemma is that she is not comfortable playing any single role, but rather vacillates between the various roles as possible fantasies which offer jouissance in different ways. The desire to become a saint involves a form of social role-play which also turns out to hold a gendered nuance for both Katie and Reuben. Katie’s childhood longing to become a saint emerges from a strong desire for social acceptability and indeed respectability in terms of her perception by the local community, manifest in her desire to emulate Reuben and to reconstitute her status as something more than the ‘bastard’ child of Mary Hanlan, a Fallen Woman who fornicated and conceived out of wedlock. Reuben is quite merciless in his mentorship of Katie in her various roles as putative Wife and want-to-be Saint. When Katie demonstrates an intention to veer from the role of dutiful Wife and flirt with the local boys, Reuben responds with physical violence: ‘K ATIE: Is it snug as the turnips you’d have us live? (Scornful. Laughs, turns from him, takes a few steps. R EUBEN, with surprising vigour, raises his stick, hits her across the shoulder. K ATIE collapses on to a chair. Groans. Silence. Then) Now I’ll say this – ’tis a mistake for a body to be too meddlesome. If you had broken my shoulder you could be put in the court. ... You’ve no more right over me than a man on the road./ R EUBEN: I’ll have your promise now, or I’ll warn your husband.’118 In a discussion about Katie’s vacillation late into Act III Reuben maintains his severe disposition: ‘R EUBEN (turns to STANISLAUS): I’d give her a flogging (harsh)./ K ATIE (amazed): Oh!/ STANISLAUS: Excuse me –/ R EUBEN: She knew you didn’t like them, that she was “too friendly”. But she’ll amuse herself, like that night in the winter. She won’t be punished. She’ll play tit for tat.’119 Reuben’s Torquemada-like fanaticism against Katie’s flirtatiousness and love of the dance hall has disturbing parallels in contemporaneous Irish society, as Liam O’Dowd notes: ‘The clergy, magistrates and newspapers continually blamed dancing and dancehalls for rape, illegitimacy and infanticide and a host of related evils. In deploring the dance-craze in 1924, the bishop of Galway advised fathers: ‘ “If your girls do not obey you, if they are not in at the hours appointed, lay the lash on their backs. That was the good old system, and that should be the system today.” ’120 As far as Katie’s candidacy for sainthood is concerned Reuben is quite convinced of his position and of Katie’s tendencies: ‘She’ll serve God – when she’s ready! She’ll be a saint – in a way she likes! Full of false pride! (Turns to STANISLAUS.) She’s not to be depended on. What she needs is humiliation; if she was thoroughly humbled she might begin to


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learn. (Stops abruptly; STANISLAUS is looking at him in surprise.)’121 In all of this Reuben finds Stanislaus as culpable for Katie’s behaviour as she is: ‘R EUBEN (flashing): You know very well – all about her. She doesn’t know how wild she is. ... A girl with such a parentage. ... /STANISLAUS (dry): I think we’ll leave that alone./ R EUBEN: You can’t leave it alone! You must face it! A man of your age ... to marry that girl ... and leave her here, among young people! (Lowers his voice) And that wild blood in her veins ... .’122 At this juncture Reuben reveals Katie’s full ‘parentage’ by stating that he is ‘Maurice Fitzsimon of Kylebeg’123 and no less than Katie’s father, who had an affair with her mother which resulted in Katie’s conception even though he had ‘wife and children before ever they met’.124 The extreme zealotry, and for that matter rank hypocrisy, of Reuben’s Saulian transformation from the adulterous Maurice Fitzsimon explains his flagellatory treatment of both himself and more importantly his daughter Katie. Reuben’s hyperbolic status within the play is a powerful trope to render the perceived hypocrisy of Catholic gender ideology and the impossibility of reconciling the material subject with fantasy object. In similar but crucially different ways Reuben and Katie function as sinthomes within the play by manifesting contradictory desires and playing variously contradictory roles which are themselves phantasmatic constructs of hegemonic gender ideology. As the play moves to its conclusion Stanislaus decides that Katie’s vacillation between various roles is untenable with the mores and ideological configuration in their contemporaneous context in Ireland, and so decides to ship them both ‘abroad’. While Katie is deeply unhappy that she has to leave behind her community and the joy to be had at the regatta and dancehall afterwards, she remains nonetheless ebullient: ‘A MELIA (stopping her): Katie, you must be brave./ K ATIE: Brave is it? (Bitter) There’s no grandeur in this! To be taken away ... my own fault. (Covers her face with her hands.)/ A MELIA: But ... if you’re brave, that can make it grand./ K ATIE (gazes at her for a moment – then, light dawning): You’re right. ... (Pause.) I’m a beauty ... after all my talk ... crying now ... (Grows exultant.) I will be brave! (They catch hands.)/ A MELIA: We both will!’125 This sense of female solidarity in the final lines serves as a form of reassuring closure, but what is interesting is that right up to the end Deevy maintains the fractured, conflicted tone of Katie’s discourse. It is this dialectical form of discourse which represents the complexity and antagonisms inherent to the notion of desire and female ontology in the cold climate of gender ideology in Free State Ireland. The quality of the play was not lost on the reviewer for the Irish Independent who was quite overwhelmed: ‘My knowledge of Miss Teresa

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Deevy’s previous work had prepared me for a vital and unusual play, but not for a masterpiece. Masterpiece is a word to be used sparingly, but I have no hesitation in applying it to Miss Deevy’s “Katie Roche”. In face of such superb economy I admit frankly that I do not appreciate it fully at the moment. It is a play to be read, to be studied, to be seen again and again.’126 In terms of direction Hugh Hunt ‘produced it splendidly’ and with regard to the acting Eileen Crowe gave a ‘magnificent interpretation’ of Katie and F.J. McCormick ‘expounded’ to the reviewer ‘the mysteries of the finely conceived role of Stanislaus’.127 The ‘glorious Amelia of Ria Mooney’ was the ‘most beautiful creation of the whole play’ with the only ‘black mark’ being for the fact that ‘she looked ten years older than she should have looked’.128 The Irish Times suggested that ‘the great charm about Miss Deevy’s latest play is the faint impression of unreality which it leaves’ and that it ‘is neither a dream story nor a fairy tale, but it has enough of the qualities of both to give it a peculiar fascination’.129 The complexity of Katie’s ontology was noted insofar as the review states that the character ‘is most skilfully drawn – an almost impossibly childlike mind combined with a wild temperament – and is acted faultlessly by Eileen Crowe. Miss Crowe’s Katie was vivid and convincing. It was, undoubtedly, “her play”, and she has seldom acted better.’130 What the reviews for both Deevy’s plays and also for O’Leary’s play demonstrate is perhaps that drama could provide a thoroughgoing critique of the status quo, and yet could still achieve critical acclaim and popular success. The reception of plays such as The Woman and Katie Roche clearly indicate the quality of drama produced after the alleged ‘end’ of the Irish Renaissance with the departure of Sean O’Casey in 1926, and highlight the fairly obvious but frequently ignored fact that a play doesn’t necessarily have to provoke a riot in order to be worthy of canonization alongside the plays of Synge and O’Casey.

8 Woman Gives to the State

Barely a year after Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche was produced, the 1937 Constitution was ratified and represented the culmination of the ‘process of institutionalizing Catholic doctrine. It afforded a special position to the Catholic Church and reflected Catholic teaching in its articles on the family, education and private property.’1 The chief architect of the Constitution was Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, who held staunchly conservative views on religious, social and sexual matters. Yet, as Jenny Beale suggests, his approach was ‘supported by the Catholic majority, and few were prepared to oppose the main thrust of the Constitution. Women’s organizations campaigned for the deletion of the articles on the family, education and social policy, but failed to get any member of the Republic’s legislature, the Dáil, to champion their cause.’2 Beale notes how the ‘terms “woman” and “mother” are used interchangeably’3 in Article 41, and the synonymity with which the terms are used is indeed striking: 41.2.1 In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. 41.2.2 The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.4 The failure to effect social policy was further evidence of the incohesiveness of feminist activism combined with the dearth of women in mainstream politics. Consequently the ‘Catholic family (and the subordinate status of women within it) was laid as a foundation stone of the new State’.5 One of the most comprehensive and unambiguous expositions 193

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of the role of women in the ideal Catholic society was propounded by E.J. Cahill in The Framework of a Christian State.6 Cahill was one of de Valera’s principal lieutenants in the composition of the Constitution and was ‘concerned to apply Continental social teaching to Irish conditions. A secondary, if explicit theme, was his attempt to stress the responsibility of the Reformation and subsequent Protestantism for the degradation of women. Indeed, he sees the rise of feminisms as a response to the latter and to an unholy complex of modern ideologies such as liberalism, individualism, marxism and freemasonry.’7 The fundamental premise of Cahill’s thesis was his version of the doctrine of ‘natural law’ as a form of social order in which ‘the sexes are complementary of each other and form when united an organic whole’.8 This normative basis promoted the institutionalization of class and gendered hierarchies of men over women, to function as a form of unequivocal and unquestioning common-sense nominalism which valorized a wave of legislation restricting the autonomy of generations of Irish women. Marriage bars were introduced into several occupations, including the civil service, which required that married women resign their post in order to look after their family. The State categorized ‘all married women as economically dependent on their husbands’ to the extent that they ‘could not pay tax separately or claim welfare benefits in their own right’ and, as ‘contraception was illegal’, women who might have ‘wanted to stay in employment after marriage had difficulty in limiting their families and ended up as full-time mothers instead’.9 The 1935 Conditions of Employment Act was ‘introduced by Sean Lemass’ and supported by ‘nearly all Dáil Deputies including the Labour Office policy’ in that it sought to ‘improve working conditions and limit female participation in the labour force’.10 Successive acts of legislation from the cities institutionalized female subordination and, combined with the harsh economics and sexual repression of familism in the countryside, served effectively to define and delimit female agency with increasing intensity in Free State Ireland. The same year that the 1937 Constitution was ratified also saw the premiere of Paul Vincent Carroll’s play Shadow and Substance,11 which offers a powerful rebuke of the officious clericalism inherent in Irish Catholicism by the time of its enshrinement in the Constitution. Carroll was born near Dundalk in County Louth, the son of a country schoolmaster who educated him until the age of 14. Shortly afterwards, as he described the matter, ‘I escaped to Dublin in 1914, where I entered training as a teacher, learned to drink a bottle of Guinness without spluttering and haunted the pit of the Abbey Theatre, to which I owe


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everything dramatic that I have.’12 According to Robert Hogan, Carroll was ‘an idealist who had seen in the Abbey “the spiritual rebirth of the Irish race” ’13 that took concrete form for him in the 1916 Easter Rising which he witnessed. The heroic idealism Carroll observed in the Rising was juxtaposed with the mundane reality he found on his return to Dundalk in 1920, as the twin pillars of embourgeoisement and Catholicism underpinned a general sense of conservatism, complacency and philistinism. Following his father’s suggestion Carroll moved to Glasgow and taught in state schools from 1921 to 1937. In 1930 his unpublished play The Watched Pot had an experimental production at the Peacock Theatre. In 1931 he was joint winner (alongside Teresa Deevy for Temporal Powers) of the Abbey playwrighting competition for The Bed of Procrustes, later renamed Things That Are Caesar’s,14 notable for its forceful denunciation of overweening clericalism that forms the hallmark of Carroll’s early plays. Carroll’s fame grew outside of Ireland, with Shadow and Substance and The White Steed (1939)15 successively winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play of the year. Although W.B. Yeats approved of The White Steed it was rejected by the new Abbey board dominated by Frank O’Connor, F.R. Higgins and Ernest Blythe, and this began Carroll’s alienation from the Abbey; as Hogan notes, ‘once again the theatre was driving away its strongest writer’.16 Shadow and Substance evolved from an earlier play, Farewell to Greatness!, based on the Augustan writer Jonathan Swift, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. As Carroll explains: ‘I decided one day to resurrect Dean Swift, make him not only a Catholic, but a learned interpreter of Catholicism, and throw him into the modern mental turmoil in Ireland, which could be complicated by contact. From him came the character of the Canon.’17 Shadow and Substance is set in the living-room of Canon John Skerritt’s parochial house in Ardmahone, a small town at the feet of the Mourne hills in County Louth. In essence the play juxtaposes the degeneration of religion concomitant with its institutionalization with the purity of faith expressed by Brigid, the Canon’s ‘simple’ servant girl. This theme is materialized in the characterization insofar as the Canon (Arthur Shields) is finely built, ‘but a little too full in the stomach His eyes are vividly living always, and at times his whole being concentrates in them. He has a perfect bow, his voice is cultured, he can be very charming and courteous, can quickly adapt himself to suit people, and has a kingly walk and dignity.’18 In contrast, Brigid (Phyllis Ryan) is small, ‘possibly a little stupid-looking, with large eyes; neat, but not to any degree Quakerish. She is obviously not mentally outstanding, but capable of deep affection, and

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pleasing in her person.’19 In terms of the Gramscian notions of ‘active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations’ referred to in Chapter 7, Brigid seems to engage in radical affiliation to Catholic gender ideology insofar as she pays the ultimate price by trying to embody the impossible ideal of Irish Woman. Brigid’s purity of faith is manifested in the visions she has of her patron saint, and the programme note to the play states that the ‘legend connected with St. Brigid relates how in order to escape the attentions of persistant suitors, she disfigured the loveliness of her face at Faughart, her birthplace, near Dundalk’.20 The combination of Brigid’s rustic simplicity and supernatural ability sets her apart from the baroque élitism of the Canon and the liberal humanism of the schoolmaster O’Flingsley (Cyril Cusack). For Carroll, the ‘rebel schoolmaster and the Canon represent the conflicting forces that crush Brigid (the spirit of the nation) between them’.21 Her desire to emulate her patron saint is manifest in her expression of agape, the ideal of self-sacrificing love in the Christian tradition: ‘I won’t be separated from her. I love her. Some day I shall come to her, she said.’22 Regarding its Greek etymology and redefinition in Christian ethics, agape represents an elevation of the concept of brotherly or sisterly love to a devotional, even spiritual ideal of love, which is different from philia as friendship, and different again from eros as explicitly sexual love. In Lacanian terms, the uncommon purity and unearthly quality of Brigid’s agape functions as le sinthome23 within the play, specifically in terms of her embodiment of the sublime quality of the saint with the traumatic quality of the symptom in terms of her status as gendered subaltern. As Žižek suggests, ‘sinthome is thus more radical than symptom or fantasy: sinthome is a psychotic kernel that can neither be interpreted (as symptom) nor “traversed” (as fantasy) – what to do with it, then? Lacan’s answer (and at the same time the last Lacanian definition of the psychoanalytic process) is to identify with the sinthome.’24 The tragedy of Shadow and Substance emerges from the inability of either the Canon or O’Flingsley to identify with Brigid as their respective sinthome, which ultimately results in her death that tragically occurs too late, at the very moment of their identification. Indeed the essential feature of tragic irony is exactly this misrecognition, manifest in the unconscious disavowal by the protagonist of the portents of their fate; for the audience member the enjoyment is derived precisely from their ability to see things ‘as they really are’, which is enjoyable to the degree that it is impossible for them to do so in their own quotidian existence outside of the aesthetic experience of the play. Apropos of Shadow and Substance,


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both the Canon and O’Flingsley variously disavow Brigid’s status as the traumatic fragment of the Real around which their respective desires are structured right up until the moment of her death, which they inadvertently (because unconsciously) bring about by their misrecognition. O’Flinsley’s misrecognition stems from his fervent adherence to humanist rationalism, causing him to dismiss Brigid’s visions as mere ‘nonsense’. When O’Flingsley asks why she has not revealed her ‘secret’ to anyone, Brigid elaborates by explaining the phantasmatic nature of her visions: ‘I don’t know. ... Didn’t you tell me yourself, one time, that there’s no words at all for some of the things we think and feel?’25 What Brigid articulates here is, in terms of late Lacanian theory, the object that is the subject itself or ‘the agalma, secret treasure, which guarantees a minimum of phantasmic consistency to the subject’s being. That is to say: objet petit a, as the object of fantasy, is that “something in me more than myself” on account of which I perceive myself as “worthy of the Other’s desire” ’.26 O’Flingsley reciprocates Brigid’s confidence by sharing his own ‘secret’: that he has pseudonymously published a heretical text condemning institutionalized Catholicism, which has outraged those parishioners with an uncritical view of the Church. The irony is that O’Flingsley is unable to appreciate the significance to Brigid of her visions as her agalma, in spite of the fact that his own vision of how the purity of Catholic faith has been traduced by institutionalization, combined with his passionate dedication to rational humanism, actually constitutes his own agalma. In his confrontation with the Canon later in the play which results in O’Flingsley’s dismissal, his parting shot reveals Brigid as the materialization of his objet petit a: ‘Goodbye, Canon. You will be remembered, if at all, not as a classicist, nor as a priest, but for your love for a poor little miserable child.’27 What O’Flingsley unconsciously betrays here is his own secret ‘love’ for Brigid as ‘the poor little miserable child’ to be saved from her religious delusions by the Enlightenment humanism which O’Flingsley insists upon in his disavowal of Brigid’s agape. The Canon’s misrecognition of Brigid’s agape stems from his seeming obsession with the ‘decline and decay of the great classic ideals and the steady vulgarization of our life’,28 which prompts him to order the removal of the oleograph of the Sacred Heart that Brigid had furtively installed: ‘CANON (tiredly, with veiled contempt): Hang it at the crossroads where a people who at least had a classic past, can see their Nordic God, and forget about the Royal Christ of the Renaissance.’29 The Canon’s baroque élitism and valorization of the ‘Christ of the Renaissance’ is doubly absurd insofar as it was the vice and hauteur intrinsic to

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institutionalized Catholicism during that period which triggered the Protestant Reformation in the pursuit of ‘their Nordic God’. The Canon replicates the arrogance and corruption of the Catholic Church during the Renaissance by replacing the overqualified O’Flingsley with the newly (and spuriously) qualified teacher Francis O’Connor as the new schoolmaster with the sole aim of consolidating a ‘match’ with his niece Thomasina Concannon, also a newly qualified teacher. Aside from his delusions of grandeur buttressed by a third-rate Machiavellianism in manipulating small town politics, the Canon’s enjoyment is bound up in Brigid as his objet petit a: ‘I have borne all day with fools, Brigid, knowing that at the end you would come to me, and ask my wants and find no fault in me. There now. You see how it is with me.’30 For the Canon, Brigid’s rustic simplicity augments her purity, which is at one remove from his own corruption: ‘You are a very understanding child, Brigid. The law of Nature’s compensation is not after all a myth. (He looks up at her as she stands solicitously watching him) Brigid, promise me you’ll never leave me.’31 It steadily becomes apparent that the Canon’s obsession with baroque Catholicism is merely the way in which he avoids short-circuiting the gap of desire and identifying with Brigid as the sinthome embodying the purity of faith on which his religion is based. The Canon’s unconscious misrecognition is evident in the sheer number of occasions when he disavows Brigid’s agape as the inchoate ramblings of an ignorant child. When the Canon insists that Brigid is his ‘friend’ and she falteringly attempts to reveal the nature of her visions, the Canon ruthlessly pursues the matter in a rude attempt to winkle out her agalma in spite of her palpable terror that her secret will be revealed to an unsympathetic observer. Only when he beholds her faith in her tremulous visage does he desist and momentarily glimpse her agalma: ‘(She puts down her hands. Head is held up, but tears in her eyes. She is firmly against the wall like one at bay. An incongruous pride sits upon her. The CANON observes her strangely, as if deeply moved at a discovery.)’32 Yet the Canon’s insight is fleeting, as soon after his brief inquisition he is quick to dismiss Brigid’s wish to become a nun as the manifestation of her being ‘overwrought’, and tries to distract her with mundane trinkets by offering to purchase a ‘new hat’ with a ‘wee white dog at the side and a nose veil’.33 Perhaps the most evident misrecognition occurs when (on St Brigid’s feast day, which also happens to be Brigid’s birthday), she virtually personifies her patron saint: ‘(The CANON stops abruptly to stare at BRIGID who suddenly comes in by the window. She is dressed all in white, is neat and comely, matter-of-fact and practical in manner, and is smiling slightly. She leans against curtains — a white picture


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in a white frame. All turn and stare at her.)’34 The Canon’s response exemplifies his unconscious misrecognition: ‘CANON: Brigid! What does this mean? I am incensed and angry.’35 The Canon’s final act of misrecognition occurs when Brigid reveals that her saint has asked them both to perform a miracle which will inspire the congregation: ‘We are to kneel down on the seventh flag from the door and I am to keep sayin’ the prayer to St. Brigid. And you are to invoke her three times, and then kiss the stone and say, “Mary of the Gael, show us the way through the dark.” And she promises that a stream of water, waitin’ there for years, will gush out over the flagstone, and that the fingers of everyone will dip into it for ever.’36 The Canon’s response is one of fury followed by reproach: ‘CANON (chidingly): Brigid! Brigid! These morbid fancies! How now, can I speak to you if you go on giving rein to them like a wilful child?’37 The play reaches its climax when Brigid runs out to protect O’Flingsley who is beset by a local mob incensed by his newly revealed heresy, and receives a mortal head wound from ‘half a brick’ intended for O’Flingsley. It is clear that the Canon is dismayed at the prospect of losing Brigid: ‘CANON (shakingly): God of mercy, do not take this, my one consolation away from me. ... (His voice breaks) Is — is it serious, O’Flingsley?’38 Brigid’s final moments are concerned with fulfilling the task set by her patron saint. The surety of emulation that her ‘face was like St. Brigid’s then ... torn and hurt’39 is her final consolation as death marks her passage from the Symbolic order to the Real: ‘BRIGID: I want to keep faith with her. I want her to see me face like hers.’40 The moment of identification for O’Flingsley and the Canon occurs at the moment of Brigid’s death when, too late, they finally see her as their sinthome: ‘(Together they draw the coverlet over BRIGID’S face. Their eyes meet fully for the first time, and hold each other over BRIGID’S body. Then each moves slowly back in different directions.)’41 O’Flingsley is distraught and the Canon is shattered: ‘CANON (huskily, as O’Flingsley nears the door). No, no! ... Do not leave me, O’Flingsley. ... I am alone. (For a moment, O’FLINGSLEY regards him from the doorway, his face a study — in mingled hate, pity and respect. He turns slowly and goes out. A moment passes. The CANON sits down heavily. He lifts heavy, weary eyes to the couch and the empty room.) CANON (his head down again, slowly). I am not well.’42 In terms of critical reception a ‘Special Representative’ for the Irish Independent insisted that Shadow and Substance ‘is the most remarkable play produced at the Abbey for many years; it is also one of the best plays in their repertoire’.43 The ‘Special Representative’ stated that ‘Arthur Shields’ study of the Canon is, I think, the best performance I have ever


seen him give – it must be one of the best performances ever given in the Abbey. Next, I rank Phyllis Ryan, this child, a pupil of the Abbey School of Acting, simply astounded last night’s audience by her playing of Bridgit [sic]. It is a magnificant [sic] but testing part, and I know few experienced actresses who could have played it better.’44 The Irish Times noted that an ‘enthusiastic reception was given by a large audience in the Abbey Theatre last night. At the fall of the final curtain on the first presentation of “Shadow and Substance” players and playwright were recalled many times, and it may be inferred that some of the enthusiasm was for the play itself.’45 The reviewer was aware of the contentious nature of the play and possible audience reaction: ‘It seems to have been expected that the play would arouse controversy; but whatever may be its effect in the immediate future controversy was stilled last night.’46 The Irish Times review concluded that Shadow and Substance ‘is a brilliant play, splendidly acted by its three principals: Miss Phyllis Ryan as Brigid, Mr. Arthur Shields as Canon Skerritt, and Mr. Cyril Cusack as the Schoolmaster upon whom fell the main burden. The production by Mr. Hugh Hunt and the settings by Miss Moiseiwitsch brought to the play exactly the qualities it needed.’47 Where the legendary St. Brigid chose self-mutilation in an effort to access her agalma, mortal Brigid achieves self-mutilation by proxy in an effort to emulate her saint and achieve the impossible goal of accessing her agalma, which is achievable only through her death. To refract the classic Lacanian maxim through the lens of his later philosophy: I love me, but, because inexplicably I love in me something more than me – the agalma – I mutilate me. Whilst Carroll provides a thorough denunciation of institutionalized Catholicism in Shadow and Substance, he nonetheless ultimately endorses Catholic gender ideology by rendering Brigid as the sublime object cause of desire. It is after all the scarified body of a woman which functions as the sinthome in the play, and by the end of the play Brigid is elevated to the sublime Woman of Catholic ideology. As Carroll grew older his earlier hostility towards clerical haughtiness mellowed and his plays effectively became endorsements rather than critiques of Catholicism. The Strings, My Lord, Are False (1942)48 is a veritable paean to the clergy and thus diametrically opposed to the critical approach inherent in Things That Are Caesar’s. Set against the bombing of Glasgow in World War II, the protagonist Canon Courteney is the epitome of the self-sacrificing, devoted cleric. Although The Strings, My Lord, Are False is an indictment of human suffering and the horror of war, its eulogistic tone makes it seem twodimensional compared with the more complex characters that inhabit


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his earlier plays. As Hogan suggests, ‘the less critical Carroll grew, the less of an artist he grew’.49 Louis D’Alton was one of the foremost dramatists to take issue with the sexual politics of marriage and the role of women in 1940s Ireland. D’Alton was born in Dublin in 1900, the son of Frank D’Alton, an actor who played alongside Barry Sullivan and toured with Charles Dillon. During his formative years Louis was educated in London, entering the civil service in 1916 only to leave two years later to study art, and eventually left London to work as a cartoonist in Dublin. D’Alton moved into acting and toured around Ireland with Victor O’Donovan’s Irish Players for a season, and he subsequently formed his own touring company while at the Queen’s Theatre. D’Alton wrote a number of plays which were produced at the Abbey Theatre, to which he was connected in one form or another for some 18 years, with his play The Money Doesn’t Matter (1941) achieving one of the longest runs in the Abbey’s history. On a prima facie analysis D’Alton’s Lovers Meeting (1941)50 is simply ‘a domestic tragedy about the perennial theme of Irish drama, the made marriage’.51 The plot follows the lives of three sisters, Frances Linehan (Maureen Delaney), Hannie Martin (Ria Mooney), Jane Sheridan (Eileen Crowe) and her daughter Mary (Phyllis Ryan). Frances Linehan entered into a familist-style arranged marriage for economic convenience with her alcoholic husband Mossy (Michael J. Dolan), and while their relationship is relatively devoid of any real strife it is also devoid of any real love. In contrast, Hannie Martin married because of love but her husband left her and emigrated to America. This estrangement has had a ruinous effect on Hannie’s mental state to the extent that she performs a daily pilgrimage to the post office in search of a letter which will never arrive, and is convinced that the community at large is conspiring against her by hiding the phantom letter. Like Frances, Jane Sheridan similarly entered into an arranged marriage, with the only exception to 20 years of marital fidelity being a fleeting liaison with old flame Mick Hession, of which her daughter Mary is the progeny. Jane’s guilt over her peccadillo drives her to control her daughter’s fate so that she will not repeat her mother’s transgression, to the extent that Jane insists that Mary should marry the much older but financially secure Batt Seery (Seamus Healy), rather than her current lover Joe Hession (Denis O’Dea), a young hothead who only Jane is aware is Mary’s sibling. Joe murders his uncle in order to obtain his inheritance and thereby gain Jane’s acceptance, but when he is apprehended for the crime Mary is forced into marrying Batt and on her wedding night she hangs herself. While the theme of the play may be relatively mundane in terms of the


preoccupations of Irish drama produced in previous decades, the execution of that theme, combined with the critical engagement of politics of the ‘made marriage’, situates the play as a crucial interrogation of the role of women in 1940s Ireland. In particular, the play engages with the complexities of active and passive affiliation to hegemonic Catholic gender ideology, as well as the consequences of active rejection of that ideology. In terms of the opening night production, the press reviews indicate that the tragic quality of the play was hampered by apparently comic aspects of the performance. The Irish Times stated that there was ‘some doubt which was expressed at the time, as to whether Mr. Louis D’Alton’s last play, “The Money Doesn’t Matter”, was a tragedy or a comedy, but there was no such doubt in the mind of the Abbey audience last night. His new play, “Lovers’ Meeting”, which is described quite definitely as a tragedy, seemed to amuse the audience almost all the way through, and to win acceptance mainly as a comic piece.’52 By way of explanation the reviewer suggests that: ‘One wonders what really happened in production to a work where what was apparently intended as a comic relief from the pressure of tragic relationships and the distress of poignant situations becomes almost the whole play. Surely that cannot have been the author’s intention, nor completely the aim of all the players. It may just, then, have been the will of the audience, driving hard towards an evening’s enjoyment.’53 Regarding the roles of Mary Sheridan and Joe Hession the Irish Times suggested that: ‘In the two parts of the tragic lovers neither Phyllis Ryan nor Denis O’Dea had scenes full enough at any point to show us convincingly the pitiful nature of their relationship, and seemed mere sketches of characters that had not been fully written.’54 Regarding the amused reaction from the audience it is worth considering what the Irish Times reviewer remarked about the audience response to Frank Carney’s 1946 play The Righteous Are Bold, stating that ‘last night’s audience made the now accepted moronic premise that every time a character speaks in dialogue it must per se be comedy’.55 The Irish Independent was similarly ambivalent about the production: ‘ “Lovers’ Meeting” is at once Louis D’Alton’s best and worst play; as a story it is magnificent dramatic material and yet it does not quite convince; technically it is the best play he has written, and yet it fails fundamentally because to have great tragedy, the action must be inevitable and the victims must follow a course they choose deliberately.’56 The reviewer continues by suggesting: ‘These are qualities that deprive the play of greatness, and because it comes so near greatness I stress them. The dialogue is by far the best Louis D’Alton has written – natural, vivid,


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alternately humorous and powerful. The construction of the acts is admirable, and the characterisation clear-cut: and we were given some memorable acting by the players and very fine production by Frank Dermody.’57 In terms of the acting ‘Phyllis Ryan and Denis O’Dea were very good as the young lovers’, but ‘the palm for the night’s acting goes to Ria Mooney for her superb performance as the mad sister. It is a fine part, splendidly written, but she gave it an eerie, discomforting quality that well earned the magnificent ovations she received.’58 In terms of the cultural politics of the play, Frances Linehan’s active affiliation with hegemonic gender ideology is a self-conscious activity and as much (if not everything) to do with embourgeoisement. While Frances explains to Jane that she hates ‘the very look of a farmer’s house’ she nonetheless relishes the status her marriage to ‘Mossy Linehan, General Grocer and Licensed Victualler’ gives her.59 This situation is of course the very antithesis of the Ireland which J.M. Synge envisaged, where the ‘groggy-patriot-publican-general shop-man’ that Synge found so ‘horrible and awful’ successfully displaced the Anglo-Irish landlords as the rural élite.60 Indeed the two sisters’ discussion goes to the crux of the matter of familist socio-economics as Frances responds to Jane’s rebuke for derogating the small farmer class which they married out of: ‘JANE: It doesn’t suit you to be makin’ little o’ your own people./ FRANCES (impatiently): Oh, God, Jane sure I’m not doin’ anythin’ o’ the kind. But at the same time I was glad enough to get me heels out o’ the mud an’ on to the flags and rise a step in the world. Isn’t that the whole idea in makin’ a good match./ JANE: Aye, we all did that.’61 When it comes to the issues of married love, both sisters are quite emphatic about the dichotomy between the two: ‘JANE (with sudden uncontrollable bitterness): That same foolery of love is answerable for a lot./ FRANCES: I often thought the half of the people wouldn’t know anythin’ about love if they didn’t read about it in books. That’s what educatin’ them does./ JANE: Lovin’ an’ marryin’ has nothin’ to do with each other./ FRANCES: No. They might have a kind of noddin’ acquaintance for a while but that’s all. What the half o’ the people doesn’t understand is that marriage isn’t a way o’ keeping love goin’ but a sure way o’ puttin’ a stop to it.’62 A key motif in the play is this dichotomy between love and marriage, particularly in terms of the specific social context of 1940s Ireland where marriage as an economic transaction regardless of mutual affection had been the norm for the best part of a century. Desire is of course the key dynamic where both issues are concerned: desire for a marriage of financial security and social respectability; and desire for love which is reciprocated between consenting adults. The tragedy of the situation, and indeed the

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play, is that the two issues are mutually exclusive and for that matter dialectically opposed, within both the confines of the play and also the confines of the social context in which it was produced. Jane and Frances are in concordance on the issue that ‘Hannie made a great mistake’ when she married for love, and that ‘she’d be a happy woman to-day if she done as we did and married the man was picked out for her’.63 However, the matter of whether love is a positive or negative phenomenon receives increasing scrutiny as the play develops, typified in this exchange between Frances and Mary: ‘FRANCES: Aye, Oh! that was what love done for Hannie./ MARY: But it could make you very happy to love someone, Aunt Frances./ FRANCES (promptly): It could make ye very miserable, too, look at Hannie.’64 When Mary posits the notion that love is not something that can so easily be put aside, Frances retorts with evidence of Hannie’s psychotic state: ‘M ARY: When it was her nature to love someone like that how could she help it?/ FRANCES: Oh, love! love! love! Don’t let anyone hear ye talkin’ that kind o’ nonsense. Take pattern be Hannie. There she is astray in the wits, twitterin’ and flutterin’ round an’ Martin Conran flyin’ his kite through the world an’ fallin’ in an’ out of love like a drunk man in a hammock. God such a life.’65 Hannie’s psychosis over her estranged husband is mediated in the symptom of the last letter which he sent her ‘nearly four years since’,66 and the vain prospect of another letter announcing his return to her: ‘H ANNIE: ‘Twas good news I got, very good news – the best./ FRANCIS: Oh I suppose./ H ANNIE (whispering urgently): Oh! yes, the best. ‘Twill be any time now. (apparently much astonished) I must tell ye about it later. (holding up the letter) ‘Tis all in this (going to mantelpiece and putting letter on it in a prominent position).’67 The letter in this instance is of course symptomatic of the love that Hannie yearns for but can never attain; more specifically in the Lacanian sense Hannie’s yearning takes the form of a demand for ‘a presence of an absence’.68 Hannie’s yearning for the presence of her husband’s love is nothing more than her demand for the impossible fragment of the Real of her jouissance, which is of necessity absent in the material sense. As Lacan suggests, demand constitutes ‘the Other as already possessing the “privilege” of satisfying needs’, that is, ‘the power to deprive them of the one thing by which they are satisfied’.69 This ‘privilege of the Other’ renders the ‘radical form of the gift of something’ which it ‘does not have’, specifically, ‘what is called its love’.70 The ‘gift’ for Hannie is the gift of love which her husband as the Other who is always absent in the play is unable to give, so that Hannie is left only with the residue of her jouissance, the letter as crude material fragment of the Real


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of her desire. The significance of Hannie’s obsession is redoubled by her situatedness within the familist community where she decides to engage in active rejection of hegemonic gender ideology by choosing her own lover rather than the lover chosen for her. As Frances remarks: Sure, the pair o’ them were made in love. She refused a made match with a strong farmer, Killbanna side. It was the sorry day for her. Mistress of five hundred acres she’d be to-day and the mother o’ twelve children. But, no, roarin’ an’ cryin’ an’ bawlin’ to marry Martin Conran, an’ leppin’ out through windas in the dead o’ night to meet him. Sure the way she went on was a public scandal. ‘I love him”,’ says she, ‘I’ll tramp the roads with him, an’ I’ll beg in the streets for him.’ Fine talk: ‘indeed, I’ll have Martin Conran,’ says she, ‘or I’ll have no man.’ No man is what she got.71 It is interesting here that D’Alton does not proffer active rejection of hegemonic gender ideology as an escape route to be fetishized in the same manner that Synge does with Nora’s departure at the end of In the Shadow of the Glen. On the contrary, D’Alton emphasizes the consequences of such rejection in the destinies of Hannie and Mary, with the latter woman’s fate prophetically implied in this exchange: ‘HANNIE: “Dear God”, ye must say, “let me die now; now let me die.” That way ye could escape the one sorrow is in the world. There is only one sorrow, ye know!/ MARY: What is it Aunt Hannie?/ HANNIE: It’s the sorrow of knowing such great happiness couldn’t come to ye again, an’ that nothin’ else is worth livin’ for./ MARY: But I’d think it cruel to die then./ HANNIE: ‘To live after is what’s cruel. Dyin’ is a kind thing, a happy thing. It’s what I wish for anyone I was fond of. I went through it an’ I know.’72 For both women in different ways they can only grasp the impossible love qua fragment of the Real of their jouissance in the transition from the Symbolic order to the Real, a transition ultimately possible only in death. It is appropriate then that Hannie is the first to witness Mary’s suicide at the end of the play, as in her psychotic state only Hannie is able to realize the sublime act of Mary’s tragic attempt to grasp the impossible jouissance denied her in her unconscionable love for her brother Joe: H ANNIE: She’s comin’ now (smiling more brightly than usual). But I must tell ye (nodding). ‘Tis kind o’ queer an’ I’ve to laugh when I think of it. The door (nodding rapidly). The door was closed when I went up. I got no answer to the knockin’. She’s at the prayin’ still,


I thought an’ I opened the door. I nearly walked into her. The room was dark but she was shining, dress and all shining. She was lookin’ at me with her head to one side. ‘Save us, child’, I said, ‘Ye look that tall in the dim dark. Ye look bigger than yourself ... bigger than ye were.’ She never answered me. The blinds were drawn. She never answered me. TOM: Tell us ... what it was. H ANNIE: I looked down the whole length of her. I saw that her feet weren’t touching the floor. TOM: Mother of God ... intercede for them.73 In many ways Hannie’s psychotic obsession with the gift of love she will never receive from her husband is a hyperbolic version of the same gift which both Frances and Jane demand through the very act of denial. It is perhaps Jane’s denial of her own desire which blinds her to the significance of her daughter’s impossible love for her brother Joe, and Jane’s denial of her sexual desire is itself a necessary consequence of active (if not fervent) affiliation to the politics of the made marriage. One of the great subtleties of the play is the use of historical repetition to highlight the return of Jane’s repressed desire as her sister Frances consistently reiterates: ‘MOSSY: Aye, but she usually goes the same way as the money is goin’. / FRANCES: I’ll tell ye what it is; it’s a case of history repeatin’ itself. Not to be reapin’ up old straws but there was one time that Joe Hession’s father was mad in love with Jane, an’ wantin’ to marry her./ MOSSY (amazed): Go way to hell!/ FRANCES: Control your language, please. Anyway, Jane was hoverin’ betwixt and between, but me Ma married her to Tim [sic] Sheridan and put a stop to her hoverin.’74 The supreme irony of the play is that the more Jane insists upon Mary not repeating her own ‘mistake’ with Mick Hession, the more Mary is inexorably drawn towards his son: ‘JOE: What is there against me havin’ Mary?/ JANE: There might be a many a thing, but one is enough. She’ll marry into a good home with a man o’ substance. She won’t go meeting’ misfortune with a man o’ straw.’75 On one level Jane is susceptible to the charge of gross hypocrisy in denying her daughter the jouissance which she herself momentarily achieved in her illicit union with Mick Hession. More significantly, however, Jane’s repression of both herself and her daughter only goes to confirm the power of desire and its determining effect within the play. Indeed the destructive force of the Real of desire reaches its peak when Jane is compelled to reveal Mary’s true provenance: ‘JANE: Their faces. The face of Mick Hession./ TOM (Moving to them, then turning back to JANE


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with almost childish appeal.): No. No, Jane ... /JANE: She’s Mick Hession’s child. I didn’t want sayin’ it ... to destroy us all./ JOE (Covering his face): Oh! Mother o’ God ... Mother o’ God./ M ARY (A whisper of horror): Ma ... ’76 The return of the repressed does indeed have a truly destructive impact insofar as the structural integrity of Jane’s home starts to disintegrate from that moment onwards, as the traumatic Real of Jane’s desire starts to disintegrate the Symbolic order of her family. Yet in spite of the inevitable disintegration of her home Jane clings even more resolutely to the notion of the family, and virtually in line with the exact dictates of the Constitution, as she insists that Mary will marry Batt Seery on the same day that Joe is to be hanged for murdering his uncle. Even though her own husband Tom (W. O’Gorman) states in the opening lines of Act III that he is leaving her, Jane is adamant that her daughter conform to the role of dutiful Wife in concordance with hegemonic gender ideology in order to avoid her mother’s fate: JANE: By submittin’ an’ hardenin’ yourself. Be strivin’ day in an’ day out alongside your husband an’ welcomin’ the least unwelcome touch, till you harden yourself against shrinkin’ away. Strivin’ to care up for your family. ‘Tis a short while only till the softness is gone out o’ ye. MARY: I seen it, Ma. The hardness in the faces o’ the women. The hardness lookin’ out o’ their eyes. JANE: Ye must offer up to God the givin’ up of your youth an’ softness for him. ‘Twould help him to be forgiven; ‘twould help me, an’ yourself it will help, too. An’ you’ll have your reward. You’ll have your good home an’ your husband. You’ll have respect and prosperity. Ye’ll have content, as I’d have it now, but for me sin.77 The word ‘sin’ is key here insofar as it goes to the root of the conflict between the Real of desire and the Symbolic order of Catholic gender ideology. Jane argues vehemently in defence of her transgression in a vain attempt to stop Tom leaving her by stating ‘(Stubbornly): Whatever me fault I kep’ the laws o’ me church. In twenty years beside ye I kep’ me bargain. What was the fault o’ one day beside that?’78 The problem here is not simply that Catholic gender ideology will not brook an exception to the law of marital fidelity, but that it does not account for the exception which proves the rule of desire. Hence Mary’s status as Jane’s ‘sin’ insofar as Mary constitutes for Jane her own transgression of the Symbolic order she stubbornly believes in, and yet was


passionately driven to transgress: ‘JANE: If I was hard ‘twas of seein’ ye three, reminded me o’ me fault. Seein’ ye grow up before me like a livin’ sin./ M ARY (With a little cry): Ma.’79 The entire Symbolic order of Catholic gender ideology, particularly in the context represented in the play, was predicated on the Real of sexual desire which must necessarily be excluded in order to maintain the structural integrity of that ideology. The paradox was that the prohibition required to maintain that ideological integrity served to reproduce the desire for that impossible jouissance which was excluded and yet ironically defined and delimited the Symbolic order that was constructed to contain sexual transgression. The axiomatic ‘woman’ who ‘gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’ is in the unenviable position of simultaneously having to fulfil the material duties of physical support to the State, while at the same time having to support the State on an ideological level by conforming to the impossible (because phantasmatic) roles of Woman, Wife and Mother. In sharp contrast to D’Alton’s critique of the status quo, the apotheosis of theatrical endorsement of Catholic gender ideology was realized in Frank Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold (1946), which proved to be the greatest theatrical success of its age with an unprecedented 16-week run.80 As with Shadow and Substance the body of a young woman is the battleground for the ‘spirit of the nation’, but this time the struggle is not between liberalism and conservatism, but ostensibly between the age-old polarities of good and evil. The young woman in question is Nora Geraty (Máire ní Dhomhnaill) who during her time working in England has been possessed by the Devil, and on her return home to her family in Mayo she is eventually exorcized by local priest Father O’Malley (Michael J. Dolan). As with Carroll’s later plays, Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold is a ringing endorsement of the self-sacrificing cleric, whose efforts to save Nora and her family from perdition end in his own death. Not only do the hyperbolic theme of the play and use of the appellation ‘Nora’ for the female protagonist render it as diametrically opposed to Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen, but the stridency of its support for Catholic gender ideology renders the polemical agitprop of Arthur Griffith’s In a Real Wicklow Glen as relatively mild by comparison. The Irish Independent forecasted that: ‘Judging by the rapt interest with which a tense audience followed the second and third acts of “The Righteous Are Bold” at the Abbey Theatre last night, and the prolonged and enthusiastic applause when the curtain fell, Mr. Frank Carney has written a play which will run for many weeks.’81 The reviewer suggests


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that ‘Mr. Carney’s sense of character is poor, and his dialogue is trite and uninspired, but his play is well constructed, and the unusual interest of the theme carries it triumphantly.’82 Regarding the acting Carney ‘was magnificently served by Máire Ní Dhomhnaill as the possessed girl. For an actress of so little experience to play such a role successfully was a splendid feat.’83 The Irish Times review stated that: ‘This is grand material, and, while last night’s first production veered between the wildest melodrama in the second act and a heavy cart-horse slowness in the first act, the play should settle down into a piece of good, meaty, peasant drama, if Abbey audiences learn to take it a little more seriously than last night’s audience – who made the now accepted moronic premise that every time a character speaks in dialogue it must per se be comedy – took it.’84 Regarding Ní Dhomhnaill’s performance the reviewer suggested that: ‘The difficulties attendant on pointing an effective contrast between the destructive hysteria of a possessed creature and the quiet, affectionate peasant girl are great. Her hysteria was not graded, but held the same pitch throughout, so that what should have been a terrifying climax in the exorcism scene was weaker, and therefore, less effective than it might have been.’85 The setting is the quintessential ‘kitchen of a poor farmhouse built into the rocks of Taobh na Cruaiche, the Western ridge of Croagh Patrick, a holy montain in County Mayo’ in 1945.86 To enhance the sacrosanct quality, the ‘house has the appearance of being swept bare and clean by the high winds of Heaven’ and inside a ‘plaster statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception has a lamp in front of it. Also hanging are a holy-water font’ and ‘a picture of the Sacred Heart.’87 On Nora’s return to the family home she is greeted with a barrage of invective from her brother Patrick (Micheál Ó Briain) and father Michael (Fred Johnson): ‘I hope to Almighty God this night you haven’t brought disgrace on the house. For, if you have, out that door you’re going the way you came in. (NORA cries quietly.)’88 The emotional onslaught exacerbates her depression and brings on the first instance of possession, which is manifest in an expression of rationalist atheism: ‘NORA: ‘I’ve discovered that I have a mind of my own. I’ve learned to think for myself. I never believe anything now unless my reason tells me it’s true. What use is reason otherwise?’89 This is followed by a hysterical act of iconoclasm: ‘NORA: (She walks slowly across the stage, turns suddenly opposite the statue, goes quickly to it, takes it in her hands and holds it aloft. Mockingly) Benedicta es tu, Virgo Maria, a Domino deo excelso prae omnibus mulieribus super terram! (She spits on the statue and dashes it to the ground. In a frenzy): There is no God! There is only the devil – his works and his pomps.’90

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Where the first instance of possession is in response to patriarchal chauvinism and involves a forceful denunciation of the paragon of Catholic gender ideology, the subsequent instances of possession occur in response to the priest’s attempts to reinforce that ideology: NORA (with rising agitation): He said in the letter ‘I have had her under observation for the past six months and it is my considered opinion that she is obsessed.’ Ha, ha, ha! (She rises and approaches the priest. She speaks in the shrill voice of La Cardami): I was a Gitana in Spain. La Cardami they called me. I was a Moor before that and before that again I was in Egypt and the tombs. The others will soon be with me. (She wails in eerie, Moorish melody the verse of a Romany song).91 On one level the play is simply a hackneyed tale of good versus evil, but on another level it is about the radical heterogeneity of female ontology versus the redaction of that heterogeneity by Catholic gender ideology. In this sense then it is interesting that the possession is manifest principally in the change of voice, specifically into that of the female avatar La Cardami. The voice in this instance functions as a form of transgression of the Law qua Catholic gender ideology; the paradoxical nature of the voice here is its aspect as objet petit a, the impossible fragment of the Real around which the Law is structured.92 As Mladen Dolar suggests: ‘If the Law, the word, the logos, had to constantly fight the voice as the other, the senseless bearer of jouissance, feminine decadence, it could do so only by implicitly relying on that other voice, the voice of the Father accompanying the Law. Ultimately, we don’t have the battle of “logos” against the voice, but the voice against the voice.’93 We witness this battle of voice against voice in the exorcism scene where Nora’s demonic raving is pitted against the priest’s invocation of the Rite of Exorcism: NORA: Look at him now! What do you think of your holy priest and his prayers and religion? Who is the stronger now? (She runs across and spits twice in the face of the priest. As she spits in his face, FATHER O’M ALLEY, by a tremendous effort of will, brings strength into his weakened frame, rises aloft and, with one hand on high, towers above the girl. As he speaks the final words of exorcism, NORA, unable to fight against his new power, flees crouchingly to the table, the chair, the fireplace and finally throws herself writhing in front of him on the floor. Against a jabbering background of devil voices one voice issues from her more clearly than the other saying: ‘I will not leave, I will not leave.’)94


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The incursion of the Real of feminine jouissance is countered with the Law of the Father, which is predicated on that same jouissance as the paradoxical logic at the heart of the Law. As Dolar suggests, the ‘secret is maybe that they are both the same; that there are not two voices, but only one object voice, which cleaves and bars the Other in an ineradicable “extimacy” ’.95 In the finale the priest completes the exorcism and for a moment the Real of feminine jouissance threatens to dissolve the structural integrity of the Catholic Symbolic order: An evil influence fills the kitchen. There is a loud jabbering. The others shrink away in terror or stand flattened against the walls. The nuns prostrate themselves on the floor. There is another moment of silence. Then a weaker jabbering comes from outside the house. It turns into a wail. As the wail dies away, Anthony moves to the outer door and looks out. Rain falls suddenly. Then the light brightens and the rain stops. All look up and concentrate on the door. There is a little cry from NORA.96 The rendering of feminine jouissance as absolute Other reveals the constitutive principle of the Law qua Catholic Symbolic order; in order to maintain structural integrity it must subordinate that jouissance and simultaneously sublimate it as the object voice of Woman, manifest in the ‘little cry’ from Nora as she is ‘redeemed’ to become good Catholic Woman and future Wife to childhood sweetheart Anthony Costelo (Raghnall Breathnach). Ultimately what endows the Law with authority ‘is also what irretrievably bars it, and the attempts to banish the other voice, the voice beyond logos, are ultimately based in the impossibility of coming to terms with the Law’s inherent alterity, placed at the point of its inherent lack which voice comes to cover’.97 In terms of the reception and popularity of Carney’s play, Christopher Murray argues that during the 1940s and 1950s: A new conformism permeated Irish culture at this time, summed up in Roger McHugh’s amusing review of The Righteous Are Bold (1946) in The Bell. When Nora went into her demonic fit at the end of Act I, spat at and then broke the holy statue, McHugh overheard a young woman in the audienced say, ‘it’s all right, mother, I have my eye’s shut tight; I’m not looking at it at all.’ Audiences were not looking for any real manifestation of evil in the age of de Valera; society had its eyes shut tight. They didn’t open them again until the 1960s.98

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Murray suggests that one must accept ‘that the audiences which flocked to The Righteous Are Bold during its sixteen-week run approved what they saw. It was left to O’Casey to parody the famous exorcism scene in his Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949).’99 O’Casey’s play is an irreverent farce about the overbearing influence of clericalism in Irish society. Whilst Cock-a-Doodle Dandy100 is critical of Catholic gender ideology it nonetheless replicates the polarity inherent to his earlier Dublin plays, insofar as the male characters are shown to be gulled by superstition and religious abstraction whereas the female characters are grounded in common sense and earthy sensualism. The plot centres on the weird and wonderful Cock, who enjoys a brief reign of bedlam in the small town of Nyadnanave (Irish for ‘The Nest of the Saints’), in spite of the best efforts of the local priest, sardonically named Father Domineer, to drive him out. The parody of the exorcism scene in The Righteous Are Bold is pure farce, with the implacable Father Domineer raging against all vestiges of heterodoxy and nonconformism: ‘FATHER DOMINEER (stormily): Stop where yous are! No hidin’ from the enemy! Back to hell with all bad books, bad plays, bad pictures, and bad thoughts! Cock o’ th’ north, or cock o’ th’ south, we’ll down derry doh down him yet. Shoulder to shoulder, an’ step together against th’ onward rush of paganism! Boldly tread, firm each foot, erect each head!’101 The female characters Lorna and particularly Loreleen, who endures the brunt of the pseudo-exorcism, are disparaged insofar as their sexuality is equated with wickedness to the extent that in the finale they leave the village indignantly to follow the Cock: ‘L ORNA: Loreleen, I go with you! (Lorna shoves FATHER DOMINEER aside at the gateway, nearly knocks SHANAAR over, and hurries to LORELEEN. Draping the green cloak over LORELEEN’S shoulders) I go with you, love. I’ve got a sthrong pair of shoes in the sack you can put on when we’re free from th’ Priest an’ his rabble. Lift up your heart, lass: we go not towards an evil, but leave an evil behind us! (They go out slowly together).’102 The play was staged at the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, in north-east England, and the controversy it provoked in the press both in England and from Irish journalists who saw the play ‘show clearly that it was not just Dublin which was getting at O’Casey but any wellinformed bourgeois audience with a dash of Roman Catholics in its membership’.103 Whilst O’Casey intended the play to generate a debate about overweening clericalism in Irish society, when the facts were revealed that he had (albeit inadvertently) offended Catholic audience members, O’Casey let emotion overrule reason and responded with ad hominem attacks and his usual indictment of the hypocrisy of the


213

Catholic Church in Ireland. As Christopher Murray suggests: ‘This was a mistake. It was to concede that in some measure the Cock is a tract. Let stand for what it might be in production, a naughty, somewhat surrealistic satirical farce, the Cock needs neither epilogue nor excuse.’104 Nonetheless, the generally negative response to O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, compared with the overwhelming success of Carney’s The Righteous Are Bold, demonstrated the pervasiveness of Catholic gender ideology as the status quo in Ireland. This was a situation which would remain largely unchallenged until a new generation of women in the 1970s, led by such formidable figures such as the young Mary Robinson (who would later go on to become the first female President of Ireland), raised their voices in protest at the Constitutionally enshrined gender roles of Woman, Wife and Mother which restricted and confined their ontology to a narrow set of precepts.

Notes Introduction 1. Cheryl Herr, For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas 1890–1925 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey and the Irish Popular Theatre (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, from Beckett to McGuinness (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994); Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Robert Welch, The Abbey Theatre, 1899– 1999: Form and Pressure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001); Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1890–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) p. 45. 3. While this term achieved critical currency primarily from Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Notes on Italian History’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), with the advent of the work of the historians of the Indian Subaltern Studies group the term has gained greater valency to include members of minority race and gender groups. 4. The relationship between subject, fantasy and object is prevalent in Lacan’s work – see for instance Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973 (New York: Norton, 1998). 5. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985) p. 12. 6. Anna McMullan, ‘Irish Women playwrights since 1958’ in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds), British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993) p. 111. 7. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 8. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1977) and The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992). For an explication of Lacan’s notion of fantasy see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997). 9. F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1880–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) p. 62. 10. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 3. 214

Notes 215 11. Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992) p. 7. See also Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Ben Brewster (trans.) (London and New York: New Left Books; Monthly Review Press, 1971) pp. 127–186. 12. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 559. 13. D.P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin, 1905), chapter 6. 14. See ‘Irish Ireland versus Anglo-Irish Ireland’, in F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1880–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), chapter 3, pp. 57–83. 15. Samhain: An Occasional Review Edited by W.B. Yeats (Dublin: Sealy Bryers & Walker; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902) p. 12, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 1: The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899–1901 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1975) p. 9. 16. Lady Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972) p. 20. 17. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. For a thoroughgoing application of Gramscian theory to Irish cultural politics see David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 52. 19. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 20. Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990) p. 135. 21. See W.B. Yeats (ed.), Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (New York: Simon & Schuster; Touchstone, 1998), which contains Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892). 22. See Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jnr (eds), Irish Peasants: violence and political unrest 1780–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). 23. See Liam Kennedy, ‘Farmers, Traders and Agricultural Politics in PreIndependence Ireland’ in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jnr,, Irish Peasants (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) pp. 339–373. 24. See John W. Boyle, ‘A Marginal Figure: The Irish Rural Laborer’ in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jnr., Irish Peasants (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) pp. 311–338. 25. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996) p. 140. 26. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, p. 140. For an analysis of the rise of the Catholic bourgeois élite see Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Élite, 1879–1922 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). 27. Alf MacLochlaínn, ‘Gael and Peasant – A Case of Mistaken Identity?’ in Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes, Views of the Irish Peasantry 1800–1916 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977) p. 31. 28. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 436. 29. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 436.

216

Notes

30. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 124. 31. The signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic included Thomas J. Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Padraic Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett. 32. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (London: Macmillan Education, 1986) p. 5. 33. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 36. 34. The American anthropologists C.M. Arensberg and S.T. Kimball used the term ‘familism’ to describe the post-Famine consolidation of family holdings and transmission of family wealth through stem inheritance to the eldest male which became the mainstay of the rural socio-economic system in Ireland. See their Family and Community in Ireland (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1968). 35. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) pp. 57–58. 36. David Lloyd, ‘Discussion Outside History: Irish New Histories and the “Subalternity Effect” ’, in Shahid Amid and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds) Subaltern Studies, Vol. IX (Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 261–280. 37. Colin Graham, ‘Subalternity and Gender: Problems of Post-Colonial Irishness’, Journal of Gender Studies 5, no. 3 (1996) pp. 363–373. 38. David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1987) p. x. 39. David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, p. x. 40. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 52–55. 41. David Lloyd, ‘Discussion Outside History’, p. 266. 42. Colin Graham, ‘Subalternity and Gender’, p. 365. 43. Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies, Vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. vii. 44. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 4. 45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 202. 46. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures (London: Macmillan, 1988) p. 284. 47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, p. 294. 48. Colin Graham, ‘Subalternity and Gender’, p. 370. 49. Colin Graham, ‘Subalternity and Gender’, pp. 372–373. 50. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1995)p. xi, and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1994) p. 282. 51. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, Jacqueline Rose (trans.) (New York: Norton, 1985) p. 31. 52. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 69. 53. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 45.

Notes 217 54. Jacques Lacan, ‘God and the Jouissance of The Woman’ in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds) Feminine Sexuality, p. 144. 55. Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 48. 56. Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 47. 57. Padraic Colum, The Saxon Shillin’, first published in The United Irishman, 15 November 1902, reprinted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance (Dixon, California: Proscenium Press, 1970) pp. 65–72. 58. Maud Gonne MacBride, Dawn, first published in The United Irishman, 29 October 1904, reprinted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, pp. 73–84. 59. W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, first produced 29 March 1894, at the Avenue Theatre, London; first published London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894; Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894. 60. David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, x.

1

Dream of the Noble and the Beggarman

1. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ in Richard Finneran (ed.) Collected Poems (New York: Scribner; Simon and Schuster, 1996) p. 321. 2. Lady Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972) p. 20. 3. F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1971) p. 235. 4. For a comprehensive collection of Griffith’s journalized criticisms of Yeats, Synge and the ILT see Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2: Laying the Foundations 1902–1904 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1976); and Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3: The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge, 1905–1909 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978). 5. See D.P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (c. 1905) (Dublin: J. Duffy, M.H. Gill, The Leader). 6. See Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) (Cork: Cork University Press, 1947, third impression). 7. See Flann O’Brien [Myles na Gopaleen], An Béal Bocht (1941), translated by Patrick Power as The Poor Mouth (New York: Viking Press, 1974). 8. See Patrick Kavanagh, Self Portrait (Dublin: Dolmen, 1964). 9. See Alf MacLochlaínn, ‘Gael and Peasant – A Case of Mistaken Identity?’ in Daniel J Casey and Robert E Rhodes (eds) Views of the Irish Peasantry, 1800–1916 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977) pp. 17–35. 10. See Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, PMLA 106, no. 5 (October 1991) pp. 1116–1133. 11. See Luke Gibbons, Chapter 2 ‘Synge, Country and Western’ and Chapter 6 ‘Coming Out of Hybernation’ in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). 12. See ‘The Presence of the Past: Peasantry, Community and Tradition’ in Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996)

218 Notes

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

pp. 157–223. This excellent book is worth close consideration for its incisive critique of historical and literary representation, and particularly for Leerssen’s intriguing concept of ‘auto-exoticism’. Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, PMLA 106, no. 5 (October 1991) p. 1126. For a succinct account of the essentialism/constructionism debate in Irish Studies see Shaun Richards’ ‘Foreword’ to Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket and David Alderson (eds) Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) pp. xi–xv. See ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1977) pp. 292–325. W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen: Tableaux Version first produced Jan. 1899, at the Chief Secretary’s Lodge, Phoenix Park, Dublin; first stage production 8 May 1899 by the Irish Literary Theatre, Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin; first published in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892; Boston: Roberts Bros., 1892). W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen (1899), in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 3. W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, p. 3. W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, p. 7. W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, p. 27. Liam Kennedy, ‘Farmers, Traders and Agricultural Politics in PreIndependence Ireland’ in Samuel Clark and James S Donnelly, Jnr (eds) Irish Peasants: violence and political unrest 1780–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) p. 341. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 344. F. Hugh O’Donnell, Souls for Gold (London: Nassau Press, 1899), cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 1: The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899–1901 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1975) p. 32. F. Hugh O’Donnell, Souls for Gold, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 1, p. 32. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Fisherman’, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats ( New York: Simon and Schuster; Scribner, 1996) p. 149. Deborah Fleming, ‘A Man Who Does Not Exist’: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1995) p. 183. Deborah Fleming, The Irish Peasant in the Work of W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge, p. 43. See W.J. McCormack, ‘Yeats and the Invention of Tradition’ in From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) pp. 302–340. Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990) p. 2. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan: first produced 2 April 1902 for the Daughters of Erin by W.G. Fay’s National Dramatic Society, at St. Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, Dublin; first published in Samhain (October 1902); first separate publication, London: A.H. Bullen, 1902;

Notes 219

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

reprinted in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach (eds) (London: Macmillan, 1966; New York: Macmillan, 1966). W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 88. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan, p. 75. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 280. Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) p. 172. See Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen Ní Houlihan (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991). Samuel Ferguson, ‘A Dialogue Between the Head and Heart of an Irish Protestant’ in Dublin University Magazine (November 1883) p. 467. Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland Volume 1: Heroic Period (Dublin: E. Ponsonby, 1878; reprinted New York: Lemma Publishing, 1970). W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, The Pot of Broth: first produced 30 October 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company, at the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin; first published in The Gael (September 1903); first book publication, in The Hour-Glass and Other Plays (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1904); reprinted in The Variorum Plays. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, The Pot of Broth (1902) in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 96. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, The Pot of Broth, p. 103. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, p. 37. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, The Pot of Broth, pp. 103–104. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, The Pot of Broth, pp. 94–95. See ‘How the Non-duped Err’ in Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) pp. 67–87. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1989) p. 21. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Of The Gaze as Objet Petit a’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) pp. 67–119. See also Slavoj Žižek, ‘ “I Hear You with My Eyes”; or, The Invisible Master’ in Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl (eds) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) pp. 90–126. cf. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). I am of course substituting ‘spectator’ for ‘reader’ in my use of Iser’s concept, and while Iser’s theory emerges from the study of prose fiction I find that it remains equally valid when applied to the dramatic text and particularly to theatrical production. For a concise definition of Iser’s theory see Raman Selden, Practising Theory and Reading Literature: An Introduction (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) pp. 120–121. Ibid. Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, p. 1123. Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, pp. 1123–1124.

220

Notes

51. ‘Shoneen’ means an Irishman who imitates English ways; from the Irish Seonín, diminutive of Seon ‘John’ taken as a typical Englishman’s name. 52. ‘Culchie’ is an Irish colloquialism meaning a rough labouring countryman; formerly used in a broader sense to describe any Irish person born outside the Pale (an old geographical designation for the English-controlled colonial enclave ranging from Dundalk to Dublin) and in more recent times to describe anyone born outside of Co. Dublin, with the connotations of backwardness and rusticity which distance from the metropolitan centre implies. 53. See J.M. Synge, Deirdre of the Sorrows: first produced 13 January 1910 by the Irish National Theatre Society Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Churchtown: Cuala Press, 1910. 54. See J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands (1907) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). 55. See Declan Kiberd, Synge and The Irish Language (London: Macmillan, 1979). 56. Introduction to J.M. Synge, The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 6. 57. Cited in David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge (New York: Macmillan, 1959) p. 63. 58. R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995) pp. 198–199. 59. R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 207. 60. R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 205. 61. Cited in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 116–117. 62. J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen: first produced 8 October 1903 by the Irish National Theatre Society, Molesworth Hall, Dublin; first published in Samhain (December 1904); first book publication in The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea (London: Elkin Mathews, 1905); reprinted in J.M. Synge, Collected Works, Vol. III, Plays, Book I, Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 63. See Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, pp. 74–83. 64. J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen, p. 93. 65. J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen, p. 94. 66. J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen, p. 94. 67. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints: first produced 4 February 1905 by the Irish National Theatre Society, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published London: A.H. Bullen, 1905. 68. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints (1905) in Synge: The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 131. 69. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, p. 146. 70. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, p. 170. 71. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, p. 171. 72. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, p. 162. 73. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 69.

Notes 221 74. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 18–19: ‘In order to be operative, fantasy has to remain ‘implicit’, it has to maintain a distance towards the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it, and to function as its inherent transgression. This constitutive gap between the explicit symbolic texture and its phantasmic background is obvious in any work of art’. 75. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) p. 276. 76. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 268. 77. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 66. 78. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 74. 79. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 81. 80. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 123. 81. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, pp. 21–22. 82. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World: first produced 26 January 1907 by the National Theatre Society, Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1907. 83. See Robert Kilroy, The Playboy Riots (Dublin: Dolmen, 1971); Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3; and David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘Reading a riot: The “reading formation” of Synge’s Abbey audience’, Literature and History 13 (1987) pp. 219–237. 84. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1907) in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 173. 85. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 184. 86. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, pp. 181–182. 87. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 213. 88. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 221. 89. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 228. 90. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 229. 91. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, pp. 228–229. 92. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985) p. 60. 93. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, pp. 59–60. 94. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996) p. 175. 95. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland , p. 186. 96. Albert Memmi, ‘The Colonizer Who Refuses’ in The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 1990) p. 85. 97. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 175. 98. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 175. 99. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 185. 100. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 184. 101. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 184. 102. See Frantz Fanon, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin) pp. 119–165. 103. J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding: first produced 11 November 1909 by the Afternoon Theatre at His Majesty’s Theatre, London; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1908.

222

Notes

104. J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding (1909) in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 122. 105. J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, p. 112. 106. J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, p. 129. 107. J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding, p. 129. 108. Fred Ryan, The Laying of the Foundations: first produced c.. 29 October 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company, at the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin; only Act II is extant, reprinted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance (Dixon, California: Proscenium Press, 1970). 109. Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island: first produced 1 November 1904 by Vedrenne and Barker, at the Court Theatre, London; first Irish production 6 October 1913 by the Dublin Repertory Theatre, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin; first published London: Constable, 1907.

2

To Live the Things that I before Imagined 1. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 71. 2. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, p. 71. 3. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985) p. 12. 4. [Arthur Griffith], ‘All-Ireland’, The United Irishman (8 November 1902) p. 1, quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2: Laying the Foundations 1902–1904 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1976) p. 38. 5. Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990) p. 52. 6. See Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 5: The Art of the Amateur, 1916–1920 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984) pp. 67–68: ‘These were the Irishmen of the theatre who died as a consequence of the Rising: Padraic Pearse [ ... ] James Connolly [ ... ] Thomas MacDonagh [ ... ] Joseph Mary Plunkett [ ... ] Sean Connolly [ ... ] Francis Sheehy-Skeffington [ ... ] Willie Pearse [ ... ] J. Crawford Neil [ ... ]’. 7. Thomas MacDonagh, Pagans (1915) in William J. Feeney (ed.) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance Volume II: Edward Martyn’s Irish Theatre (New York: Proscenium Press, 1980) p. 53. 8. Padraic Pearse, The Singer: first amateur production c. 13 December 1917 at the Foresters’ Hall, Parnell Square, Dublin; first professional production 25 May 1919, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in The Singer and Other Plays (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1918) reprinted in Plays, Poems, Stories (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1950). 9. Padraic Pearse, The Singer (1917) in Plays, Stories, Poems (Dublin: Helicon, 1980) p. 44. The contradictory specificities of MacDara as ‘poor man of the mountains’ who is also an organic intellectual who can ‘teach Irish and Latin and Greek in a school’ are examined later in this chapter.

Notes 223 10. Padraic Pearse, The Singer, p. 16. 11. Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 5, p. 186. 12. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996) p. 4. 13. Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin: first produced 21 October 1901, by the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League, for the Irish Literary Theatre, at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin; first published in Samhain (October 1901); first book publication, in English, in Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish by Lady Gregory (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Co. Ltd; London: John Murray, 1903). 14. Lady Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972) p. 29. 15. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 1: The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899–1901 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1975) p. 102. 16. J.M. Synge, Collected Works, Vol. 2, Alan Rice (ed.), Robin Skelton (gen. ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) pp. 381–382, quoted and translated from the French by Seamus Deane in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985) pp. 61–62. 17. Stephen Gwynn, ‘The Irish Literary Theatre and its Affinities’, The Fortnightly Review (1901) pp. 1055–1058, quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 1, p. 114. 18. Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin (1901) in Gareth W. Dunleavy and Janet Egleson Dunleavy (eds) Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991) p. 35. 19. Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin, p. 37. 20. Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin, p. 39. 21. Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin, pp. 52–53. 22. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) p. 131. 23. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 29. 24. See ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’ in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1977) pp. 292–325. 25. Douglas Hyde, An Pósadh: first produced August 1902 for the Connaught Feis, Galway; first published in English in Poets and Dreamers by Lady Gregory, 1903. 26. Joseph Holloway, Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, 25 June 1903, quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, p. 64. 27. Douglas Hyde, An Pósadh (1902) in Gareth W. Dunleavy and Janet Egleson Dunleavy (eds) Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991) p. 81. 28. Douglas Hyde, An Pósadh, p. 105. 29. Douglas Hyde, An Pósadh, p. 87. 30. Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’ in Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr George Sigerson, Dr Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature: Addresses by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. George Sigerson, Dr Douglas

224 Notes

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

Hyde (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894; reprinted New York: Lemma Publishing, 1973) p. 159. Douglas Hyde, The Love Songs of Connacht (Dublin: Dún Emer Press edn, 1904). F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1880–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) p. 81. See Leon Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood 1858–1924 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1976) p. 171. Padraic Colum, The Saxon Shillin’: first produced 15 May 1903 by the Daughters of Erin, at the Grocers Assistants’ Hall, sometimes called the Banba Hall, Dublin; first published in The United Irishman (15 November 1902), reprinted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance (Dixon: Proscenium Press, 1970). While one could argue along with R.F. Foster that ‘the separatist struggle that began with the 1916 rising and continued until the Treaty of 1921’ (Modern Ireland (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 461), there is general consensus among historians that the War of Independence or Anglo-Irish War is referred to as occurring between 1919–1921. For further clarification see F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Fontana Press, 1985) pp. 408–428. Padraic Colum, The Saxon Shillin’ (1903) in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, p. 65. Padraic Colum, The Saxon Shillin’, p. 71. See Cheryl Herr, For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890–1925 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), for a timely reassessment of the value of Irish political melodramas, and for the complete text of four of the most significant plays in this genre which were formerly deemed lost or unpublished. Editorial in the Freeman’s Journal (7 April 1902) p. 4, quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, p. 21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) pp. 119–120. Padraic Colum, The Land: first produced 9 June 1905 by the Irish National Theatre Society, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 1905, being Volume III of the Abbey Theatre Series. Padraic Colum, The Land (1905) in Sanford Sternlicht (ed.) Selected Plays (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986) p. 25. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 37. ‘The Irish National Theatre, New Play: The Land’, the Freeman’s Journal (10 June 1905) p. 8; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3: The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge, 1905–1909 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978) p. 31. ‘Lee’ [Daniel Corkery], ‘Mr. Yeats in Cork’, The Leader (30 December 1905) pp. 313–314; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 45. Sanford Sternlicht, ‘Introduction’ to Selected Plays, Sanford Sternlicht (ed.) (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. vii.

Notes 225 47. Letter of Padraic Colum to W.G. Fay, dated 3 August 1907. Copy in W.A. Henderson papers, Ms. 1730, National Library of Ireland; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 186. 48. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 37. 49. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 14. 50. William Boyle, The Building Fund: first produced 25 April 1905 by the Irish National Theatre Society, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 1905, being Volume VII of the Abbey Theatre Series. 51. Letter of William Boyle to D.J. O’Donoghue, dated 29 May 1904. Ms. 1805, National Library of Ireland; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, pp. 118–119. 52. William Boyle, The Building Fund, p. 47. 53. Joseph Holloway, Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, 29 April 1905, Ms. 1803, National Library of Ireland; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 28. 54. Letter of W.B. Yeats to J.M. Synge, dated 15 August 1905. In Synge Microfilm 5380, National Library of Ireland; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 29. 55. For a good examination of this conflict see Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes, pp. 138–141. 56. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy: first produced 20 January 1906 by the National Literary Society Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son (n.d.); second impression Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1911. 57. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy (1906) (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1911, second impression) p. vii. 58. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 14. 59. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 67. 60. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 9. 61. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 17. 62. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 63. 63. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 64. 64. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy, p. 71. 65. J.M. Synge, in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 116–117. 66. Fred Ryan, The Laying of the Foundations (c. 1902) in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds), Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, p. 30. 67. Fred Ryan, The Laying of the Foundations, p. 36. 68. Fred Ryan, The Laying of the Foundations, p. 37. 69. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers: first produced 1906 by the National Theatre Society, Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin and Waterford: M.H. Gill and Son, 1919. 70. ‘The Abbey Theatre’, the Irish Times (22 October 1906) p. 8; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 66. 71. Quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 66. 72. W.B. Yeats, ‘A Note on The Mineral Workers’, The Arrow (20 October 1906), p. 9; quoted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 66.

226

Notes

73. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers (Dublin and Waterford: M.H. Gill and Son, 1919) p. 42. First produced 20 October 1906 by the National Theatre Society, Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 74. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, p. 107. 75. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, p. 108. 76. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, p. 109. 77. Daniel Corkery, The Labour Leader: first produced 30 September 1919 by the Abbey Company, Abbey Theatre, Dublin: first published Dublin: Talbot Press; London: Unwin, 1920. 78. ‘The Abbey Theatre’, the Irish Times (1 October 1919) p. 4; quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 5, p. 207. 79. Daniel Corkery, The Labour Leader (1919) (Dublin: Talbot Press; London: Unwin, 1920) p. 134. 80. [W.J. Lawrence], ‘Irish Productions’, The Stage (11 April 1912) p. 14; quoted in Robert Hogan with Richard Burnham and Daniel P. Poteet, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 4; The Abbey Theatre: The Rise of the Realists, 1910–1915 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979) p. 183. 81. Letter of William Boyle to Joseph Holloway, dated 15 April 1912. Ms. 13,267, National Library of Ireland; quoted in Robert Hogan with Richard Burnham and Daniel P. Poteet, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 4, pp. 183–184. 82. Padraic Pearse, The Singer in Plays, Stories, Poems (Dublin: Helicon, 1980) p. 16; first produced c. 13 December 1917, at the Foresters’ Hall, Parnell Square, Dublin. 83. Padraic Pearse, The Singer, p. 29. 84. Padraic Pearse, The Singer, p. 29. 85. Padraic Pearse, The Singer, p. 35. 86. Padraic Pearse, The Singer, p. 17. 87. Padraic Pearse, The Singer, pp. 43–44. 88. Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Modern Prince’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 125. 89. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 126. 90. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 129. 91. See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989) pp. 50–51: ‘Marxism, then, did not succeed in taking into account, coming to terms with, the surplus-object, the leftover of the Real eluding symbolization – a fact all the more surprising if we recall that Lacan modelled his notion of surplus-enjoyment on the Marxian notion of surplus-value’. 92. Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 5, p. 189. 93. T.C. Murray, ‘Appendix I: George Shiels, Brinsley MacNamara, etc.’ in Richard Allen Cave (ed.) Selected Plays of T.C. Murray (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) p. 205. 94. T.C. Murray, Selected Plays of T.C. Murray, pp. 205–206. 95. T.C. Murray, Birthright: first produced 27 October 1910 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1911.

Notes 227 96. T.C. Murray, Birthright (1910) in Selected Plays of T.C. Murray, p. 53. 97. Robert Hogan with Richard Burnham and Daniel P. Poteet, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 4, p. 46. 98. Jack Point, ‘At the Abbey’, The Evening Herald (12 September 1913) p. 4; quoted in Robert Hogan with Richard Burnham and Daniel P. Poteet, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 4, p. 258. 99. St. John Ervine, John Ferguson: first produced 30 November 1915 by the Abbey Company, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published London and Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1915. 100. St. John Ervine, John Ferguson (1915) in John Cronin (ed.) Selected Plays of St. John Ervine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988) p. 136. 101. St. John Ervine, John Ferguson, p. 187. 102. St. John Ervine, John Ferguson, p. 189. 103. St. John Ervine, John Ferguson, p. 192. 104. Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1907) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) p. 112. 105. St. John Ervine, Mixed Marriage: first produced 30 March 1911 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1911. 106. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 1. 107. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 8. 108. St. John Ervine, Mixed Marriage (1911) in John Cronin (ed.) Selected Plays of St. John Ervine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988) p. 22. 109. St. John Ervine, Mixed Marriage, p. 27. 110. St. John Ervine, Mixed Marriage, p. 28. 111. St. John Ervine, Mixed Marriage, p. 63. 112. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 5. 113. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 5. 114. See Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1922 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). 115. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 534.

3 Whatever Rule We may have, We’ll always have Our Tramps and Paupers 1. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989) p. 516. 2. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 515. 3. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 515. 4. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 515. 5. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 126–127. 6. A. Patrick Wilson, Victims, first produced 26 December 1912 by the Irish Workers Dramatic Club, Liberty Hall, Dublin; first published in Victims and Poached (Dublin: Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, c. 1912).

228 Notes 7. A. Patrick Wilson, The Slough, first produced 3 November 1914 by the Abbey Company, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; unpublished, but manuscripts of individual parts are held in the National Library of Ireland. 8. Oliver St. John Gogarty and Joseph O’Connor, Blight, The Tragedy of Dublin, first produced 11 December 1917 by the Abbey Company, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published as Blight, The Tragedy of Dublin (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1917); reprinted in The Plays of Oliver Gogarty (Newark, Delaware: Proscenium, 1971). 9. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, II (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 239. 10. See David Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1960). 11. David Krause (ed.) The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–1941 (London: Cassell, 1975) p. 131. 12. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, first produced 8 February 1926, by the Abbey Company, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published (London: Macmillan, 1926); acting edition (London and New York: Samuel French, 1932) in Collected Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1949). 13. ‘No Opposition’, Irish Independent (15 February 1926) p. 5, cited in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, The Years of O’Casey, 1921–1926 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992) p. 310. 14. Sean O’Casey, ‘Plough and the Stars’, Irish Independent (20 February 1926) p. 3; reprinted in O’Casey’s Letters, Vol. 1, pp. 168–171; cited in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 312. 15. Cited by Jack Lindsay, ‘Sean O’Casey as a Socialist Artist’ in Ronald Ayling (ed.) Sean O’Casey: Modern Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 194. 16. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, first produced 12 April 1923 by the Abbey Company, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Two Plays (London: Macmillan, 1925); reprinted separately, London and New York: French’s Acting Edition, 1932 in Collected Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1949). 17. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, first produced 3 March 1924 by the Abbey Company, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Two Plays (London: Macmillan, 1925); reprinted in Collected Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1949). 18. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 88. 19. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985) p. 122. 20. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, p. 108. 21. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996) p. 223. 22. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 228. 23. Aristotle, Poetics, Malcolm Heath (trans.) (London: Penguin, 1996) p. 9. 24. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 220. 25. The Colleen Bawn first produced at Laura Keene’s Theatre, New York, 27 March 1860. 26. The Shaughraun first produced at Wallack’s Theatre, New York, on 14 November 1874.

Notes 229 27. In the ‘Glossary of Irish Expressions’ which prefaces the plays the Irish spalpín is transliterated as ‘spalpeen’ and explained fairly accurately as a ‘wandering labourer, hence tramp or vagrant and scoundrel’, in Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn in Andrew Parkin (ed.) Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987) p. 23. Myles-na-Coppaleen is consistently referred to as spalpeen, vagabond, tramp and beggar. While Conn the Shaughraun is similarly described, he even refers to himself as a vagabond stating ‘I’m a vagabone entirely’ in The Shaughraun p. 275 in the same anthology. 28. Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn in Andrew Parkin (ed.) Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987) p. 251. 29. Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn, p. 242. 30. Dion Boucicault, The Shaughraun in Andrew Parkin (ed.) Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987) p. 258. 31. Dion Boucicault, The Shaughraun, p. 326. 32. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1923) (London: Macmillan, 1952) p. 94. 33. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, p. 96. 34. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragi-Comedy in Two Acts, first published in French as En Attendant Godot by Les Editions de Minuit in 1952; first published in English by Faber and Faber in 1956; first performed in Théâtre de Babylone, Montparnasse, Paris, 19 January 1953; first English version performed in London, 3 August 1955. 35. Samuel Beckett, ‘Sean O’Casey’ in Ruby Cohn (ed.) Disjecta (New York: Grove Press, 1984) p. 82. 36. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, p. 132. 37. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, p. 121. 38. Frank J. Hugh O’Donnell, ‘Treat at the Abbey’, Evening Herald (13 April 1923) p. 2, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 145. 39. P.S. O’Hegarty, ‘A Drama of Disillusionment’, Irish Statesman (7 June 1924) p. 399, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, pp. 146–147. 40. ‘These People Will Never Learn Sense’, Evening Mail (12 February 1926) p. 5, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 305. 41. See Sean O’Casey, I Knock at the Door: Swift Glances Back at Things That Made Me (1939); Pictures in the Hallway (1942); Drums Under the Window (1945); Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949); Rose and Crown (1952); Sunset and the Evening Star (1954); Mirror in My House: The Autobiographies of Sean O’Casey, 2 Vols (New York: Macmillan, 1956). 42. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 112. 43. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 112. 44. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, p. 135. 45. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, p. 105. 46. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, p. 107.

230 Notes 47. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 133. 48. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock in Collected Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1949) p. 9. 49. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, pp. 87–88. 50. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, p. 4. 51. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, pp. 3–4. 52. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars: A Tragedy in Four Acts (1926) (London: Macmillan, 1952) p. 174. 53. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 129. 54. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, p. 209. 55. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, p. 179. 56. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 232. 57. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, p. 197. 58. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, p. 197. 59. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy (London: Cornell University Press, 1982) p. 138. 60. F.R. Higgins, ‘The Plough and the Stars’, Irish Statesman (6 March 1926) pp. 797–798, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 325. 61. For a contextualization of Dickens’s influence on O’Casey see Colbert Kearney, The Glamour of Grammar: Orality and Politics and the Emergence of Sean O’Casey (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2000) pp. 18, 22, 119 and 123. 62. See David Krause (ed.) The Letters of Sean O’Casey. Vol.1, 1910–1941 (London: Cassell, 1975); David Krause (ed.) The Letters of Sean O’Casey. Vol.2, 1942–1954 (New York: Macmillan, 1980); David Krause (ed.) The Letters of Sean O’Casey. Vol.3, 1955–1958 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989); David Krause (ed.) The Letters of Sean O’Casey. Vol.4, 1959–1964 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992). 63. See Robert Hogan (ed.) Feathers from the Green Crow: Sean O’Casey 1905–1925 (London: Macmillan, 1963), and The Green Crow: Selected Writings of Sean O’Casey (London: Virgin, 1994). 64. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 159. 65. Robert Hogan and M.J. O’Neil, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre (Carbdondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967) p. 220. 66. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since The Plough and the Stars (London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968) p. 21. 67. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, p. 138. 68. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 33. 69. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 538. 70. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 538. 71. George Shiels, Bedmates, first produced 6 January 1921 by the Abbey Company, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published as Bedmates: A Play in One Act (Dublin: Gael Co-operative Society, 1922).

Notes 231 72. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, first produced 3 October 1922 by the Abbey Company, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Professor Tim and Paul Twyning (London: Macmillan, 1927). 73. George Shiels, Professor Tim, 14 September 1925 by the Abbey Company, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Professor Tim and Paul Twyning (London: Macmillan, 1927). 74. ‘The Abbey Theatre’, Irish Times (7 January 1921) p. 6, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 34. 75. George Shiels, Bedmates: A Play in One Act (Dublin: Gael Co-operative Society, 1922) p. 13. 76. George Shiels, Paul Twyning (1922) in Three Plays (London: Macmillan, 1945) p. 100. 77. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 125. 78. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 109. 79. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 110. 80. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 167. 81. Frank Hugh O’Donnell, ‘Comedy or Farce?’ Evening Herald (4 October 1922) p. 4, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 82. 82. Jacques, ‘Beware of Lozenges’, Irish Independent (4 October 1922) p. 4, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 82. 83. Joseph Holloway, Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, Ms. 1873 (3 October 1922) p. 604, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 83. 84. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 144. 85. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 414. 86. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 173. 87. George Shiels, Paul Twyning, p. 115. 88. George Shiels, Professor Tim (1922) in Three Plays (London: Macmillan, 1925) p. 41. 89. S.L.M. (Susan L. Mitchell), ‘Drama Notes’, Irish Statesman (19 September 1925) p. 50, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 273. 90. Joseph Holloway, Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, Ms. 1896 (16 September 1925) pp. 692–693, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 274. 91. ‘Letter of George Shiels to Lady Gregory, 17 September 1925’, Berg Collection, quoted in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, p. 274. 92. George Shiels, Professor Tim, pp. 32–33. 93. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 13. 94. See R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 522. 95. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 17. 96. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 17 97. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 21. 98. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 70. 99. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 91. 100. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 96.

232 Notes 101. Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) p. 1. 102. George Shiels, Professor Tim, p. 80. 103. George Shiels, The New Gossoon: a Comedy in Three Acts, first produced in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 19 April 1930, first published as The New Gossoon (London: Macmillan, 1936). 104. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 257. 105. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 232. 106. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 232. 107. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 231. 108. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, pp. 259–260. 109. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy (London: Cornell University Press, 1982) p. 147. 110. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, p. 138. 111. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, p. 138. 112. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 183. 113. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 181. 114. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 205. 115. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 201. 116. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 185. 117. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 221. 118. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, pp. 221–222. 119. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 258. 120. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 189. 121. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 259. 122. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 35. 123. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 183. 124. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 262. 125. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 264. 126. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, pp. 267–268. 127. George Shiels, The New Gossoon, p. 261. 128. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 124. 129. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 158. 130. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 159.

4

That Ireland which We Dreamed Of 1. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so Poor for so Long? (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2004) p. 27. 2. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 27. 3. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 27. 4. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 27. 5. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, pp. 27–28. 6. George Shiels, The Rugged Path: A Play in Three Acts, first produced in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 5 August 1940; first published with The Summit (London: Macmillan, 1942).

Notes 233 7. George Shiels, The Summit: A Play in Three Acts, first produced in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 10 February 1941; first published with The Rugged Path (London: Macmillan, 1942). 8. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 36. 9. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 36. 10. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 36. 11. George Shiels, The Rugged Path (1940) in The Rugged Path and The Summit (London: Macmillan and Co., 1942), p. 3. 12. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 46. 13. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 29. 14. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 23. 15. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 22. 16. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 19. 17. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 28. 18. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 29. 19. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 103. ‘Buckshot Foster’, also referred to in Dáil Debates 13 December 1922 and 19 June 1931, and in James Joyce’s Ulysses, chapter 16, ‘Eumaeus’ (London: Penguin 1992) p. 764. The name ‘Foster’ is actually a misspelling of W.E. Forster, Chief Secretary of Ireland 1880, who earned the nickname ‘Buckshot’ because he allegedly ordered the RIC, for humanitarian reasons, to load with buckshot when firing into a crowd. 20. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 110. 21. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, pp. 102–103. 22. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 10. 23. George Shiels, The Summit (1941) in The Rugged Path and The Summit (London: Macmillan and Co., 1942) p. 219. 24. George Shiels, The Summit, pp. 218–219. 25. George Shiels, The Summit, pp. 220–221. 26. George Shiels, The Summit, p. 220. 27. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996) p. 140. 28. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, p. 140. 29. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, p. 178. 30. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, p. 178. 31. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, p. 178. 32. George Shiels, The Summit, pp. 229–230. 33. George Shiels, The Summit, p. 235. 34. George Shiels, The Summit, p. 235. 35. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, p. 7. 36. George Shiels, The Summit, p. 236. 37. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 37. 38. George Shiels, The Summit, p. 238. 39. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, p. 153. 40. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, p. 153. 41. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 39. 42. Maurice Moynhian (ed.) Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917–73 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980) p. 466.

234 Notes 43. Maurice Moynhian (ed.) Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917–73, p. 467. 44. Maurice Moynhian (ed.) Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917–73, p. 467. 45. Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) p. 85. 46. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 146. 47. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 48. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation, p. 147. 49. M.J. Molloy, Selected Plays, Robert O’Driscoll (ed.) (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) p. ix. 50. M.J. Molloy, Selected Plays, p. ix. 51. M.J. Molloy, Old Road: first produced Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 24 April 1943; first published as Old Road: A Comedy in Three Acts (Dublin: Progress House, 1961). 52. M.J. Molloy, Old Road: A Comedy in Three Acts (Dublin: Progress House, 1961) p. 1. 53. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 378. 54. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 24. 55. ‘Good Dialogue in New Abbey Play’, Irish Independent (28 April 1943) p. 2. 56. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 4. 57. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 44. 58. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 50. 59. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, pp. 42–43. 60. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 379. 61. ‘Abbey Theatre, “Old Road” ’, Irish Times (26 April 1943) p. 3. 62. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 5. 63. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 18. 64. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 10. 65. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 28. 66. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 55. 67. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, pp. 56–57. 68. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 28. 69. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 29. 70. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 29. 71. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 29. 72. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 28. 73. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 28. 74. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 29. 75. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 27. 76. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future, p. 27. 77. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 382. 78. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 383. 79. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 391.

Notes 235 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 33. M.J. Molloy, Old Road, p. 63. Irish Times (26 April 1943) p. 3. Irish Times (26 April 1943) p. 3. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 8. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 8. Denis Donoghue, ‘Dublin Letter’, The Hudson Review XIII (Winter, 1960– 1961) p. 538. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, pp. 21–22. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion: first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (11 February 1946); first published as Mungo’s Mansion: A Play of Galway Life in Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1957). Walter Macken, Home is the Hero: first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (28 July 1952); first published as Home is the Hero: A Play in Two Acts (London: Macmillan, 1953). ‘Galway Slum Life as Theme of Abbey Play’, Irish Times (12 February 1946) p. 2. Irish Times (12 February 1946) p. 2 Walter Macken, Vacant Possession: unproduced; first published as Vacant Possession: A Play in Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1948). Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 391. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 392. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion: A Play of Galway Life in Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1957) p. 76. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 21. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 55. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 232. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 19. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 24. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 25. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 100. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 36. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 16. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 20. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 91. Walter Macken, Mungo’s Mansion, p. 101. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 229. Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn, p. 242. Irish Independent (12 February 1946) p. 2. Irish Independent (12 February 1946) p. 2. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession (London: Macmillan, 1948) p. 17. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession, p. 45. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession, p. 45. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession, p. v. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession, p. 106. Walter Macken, Vacant Possession, p. 107. David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life, 1913–21: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977) p. 232.

236

Notes

119. For a critique of class disparity in the Irish context see Fintan O’Toole, After the Ball (Dublin: New Island Books, 2003). 120. For a critique of class disparity in the international context see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002). 121. Frantz Fanon, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968) p. 149. 122. George Shiels, The Rugged Path, pp. 59–60.

5 What Kind of a Living Woman is It that You are at All? 1. See Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen Ní Houlihan (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991). 2. Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens, p. 2. 3. Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens, p. 2. 4. Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens, p. 5. 5. Melissa Sihra, ‘Landscapes, Voices and Corporealities of Excess in the Theatre of Marina Carr’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2002, p. 3. 6. See The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, four volumes, edited by Jacques Chuto, Tadhg Ó Dúshláine and Peter Van de Kamp (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996–1999). 7. See Aubrey de Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve, and Other Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1892), and The Infant Bridal and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1864). 8. Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens, p. 8. 9. Anna McMullan, ‘Irish Women playwrights since 1958’ in Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (eds) British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958: A Critical Handbook (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993) p. 111. 10. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 77. 11. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 37. 12. See Lady Gregory, Collected Plays: Vol. I: Comedies (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1971); Vol. II: Tragedies and Tragic Comedies (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979); Vol. III: Wonder and Supernatural (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1970); Collected Plays, Vol. IV: Collaborations, Adaptations and Translations (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979). 13. See Daniel J. Murphy, ‘Lady Gregory, Co-Author and Sometimes Author of the Plays of W.B. Yeats’ in Raymond J. Porter and James D. Brophy (eds) Modern Irish Literature: Essays in Honour of William York Tindall (New York: Iona College Press, 1972). 14. Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002) p. 45. 15. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, p. 37. 16. See especially: Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982); Mary Lou Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory: The

Notes 237

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance (London: Andre Deutsch, 1985); Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe (eds) Lady Gregory, Fifty Years After, Irish Literary Studies 13 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1987). See Ann Saddlemyer, In Defence of Lady Gregory, Playwright (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966); Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966). Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 67. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 72. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 75. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 75. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 76. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, p. 40. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 328. See Ann Saddlemyer, ‘Augusta Gregory, Irish Nationalist: “After all, What is Wanted but a Hag and a Voice?” ’ in Joseph Ronsley (ed.) Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Waterloo Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977) pp. 29–40. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey, Vol. 1, David Krause (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1975) p. 233. The account was published as ‘Arabi and His Household’, The Times (23 September 1882). William Scawen Blunt, ‘A Woman’s Sonnets’ in Love Lyrics and songs of Proteus with the Love Sonnets of Proteus (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892). Aristotle, Poetics, Malcolm Heath (trans.) (London: Penguin, 1996) p. 5. Lady Gregory, Kincora, first performed 25 March 1905 by the Irish National Theatre Society, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: The Abbey Theatre, 1905, being Volume II of the Abbey Theatre Series. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994) p. 90. Lady Gregory, Kincora (1905) in Collected Plays, Vol. II: Tragedies & Tragic Comedies (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979) p. 325. Lady Gregory, Kincora, p. 345. Lady Gregory, Kincora, p. 348. Lady Gregory, Kincora, p. 349. Lady Gregory, Kincora, revised version, first produced 11 February 1909 by the National Theatre Society Ltd., at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Irish Folk-History Plays, First Series (New York and London: Putnam, 1912). Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, p. 53. Lady Gregory, Dervorgilla, first performed 31 October 1907 by the National Theatre Society, Ltd., at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Samhain (1908); first book publication in Irish Folk History Plays. First Series – The Tragedies (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912). David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, p. 1. Lady Gregory, Dervorgilla (1907) in Collected Plays, Vol. II: Tragedies & Tragic Comedies (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979) p. 95. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Joyce le symptôme’ in Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin; Paris: Diffusion Seuil, 1987). Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 75. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 75.

238 Notes 44. Lady Gregory, Dervorgilla, p. 98. 45. Lady Gregory, Dervorgilla, p. 110. 46. Lady Gregory, Grania, no record of production; first published in Irish Folk History Plays. First Series – The Tragedies (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912). 47. See Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory (London: Albemarle, 1904; Gerrards Cross: Irish University Press in association with Colin Smythe, 1970). 48. Lady Gregory, Grania (1912) in Collected Plays, Vol. II: Tragedies & Tragic Comedies (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979), p. 15. 49. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 15. 50. Lady Gregory, Grania, pp. 15–16. 51. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 14. 52. Lady Gregory, Grania, pp. 20–21. 53. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 20. 54. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 28. 55. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 38. 56. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 39. 57. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 42. 58. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 45. Grania’s agency is the main reason Lady Gregory decided to write a play about Grania rather than Deirdre because so many plays had ‘been written about the sad, lovely Deirdre, who when overtaken by sorrow made no good battle at the last. Grania had more power of will, and for good or evil, twice took the shaping of her life into her own hands.’ [Lady Gregory, Irish Folk-History Plays (New York, London: Putnam, 1912), p. 283] 59. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997) p. 66. 60. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 66. 61. Lady Gregory, Grania, p. 45. 62. J.M. Synge, When the Moon Has Set, first recorded Irish production at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, 5 March 2002, by the final year of the professional acting programme directed by Conall Morrison, dramaturgy by Paul Murphy; one-act text edited by Anne Saddlemyer and first published in her edition of Synge’s Collected Works, Vol. 3: Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); two-act text edited by Mary King and first published in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, general editor Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), Vol. II, pp. 898–951. 63. W.B. Yeats, extract from a memorandum to Synge’s executors, 1909, cited in J.M. Synge, Plays, Anne Saddlemyer (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 213. 64. Synge Ms. 4351, Trinity College, Dublin. 65. Synge Ms. 4351/1. 66. W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge (New York: New York University Press, 2000) p. 170. 67. W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) p. 124. 68. W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family, p. 165. 69. W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family, p. 163.

Notes 239 70. For a thoroughgoing analysis of When the Moon Has Set and its relationship to Synge’s wider theatrical canon see Mary C. King, The Drama of J.M. Synge (London: Fourth Estate; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988). 71. See Paul Murphy, ‘J.M. Synge and the Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, Theatre Research International 28, no. 2, pp. 125–142. 72. Cited in David H. Grene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge 1871–1909 (New York: Macmillan, 1959) p. 264. 73. Synge Ms. 4351/8. 74. Cited in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 116–117. 75. See Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996). 76. Synge Ms. 4351/17. 77. Synge Ms. 4351/18. 78. Synge Ms. 4351/19. 79. Synge Ms. 4351/20. 80. Synge Ms. 4351/20. 81. Synge Ms. 4351/36. 82. Synge Ms. 4351/36. 83. Synge Ms. 4351/36. 84. J.M. Synge, When the Moon Has Set in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 219. 85. J.M. Synge, When the Moon Has Set, p. 219. 86. Áine McCarthy, from ‘Hearth’s Bodies and Minds: Gender Ideology and Women’s Committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum, 1916–25’, in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) Female Experiences: Essays in Irish Women’s History (Dublin, 2000), cited in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) The Irish Women’s History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 102. 87. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, pp. 102–103. 88. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, pp. 102–103. 89. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 103. 90. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 106. 91. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, pp. 105–106. 92. J.M. Synge, When the Moon Has Set, pp. 224–225. 93. See for instance W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family, pp. 163–175. 94. Arthur Griffith, ‘All Ireland’, The United Irishman (17 October 1903) p. 1, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2: Laying the Foundations 1902–1904 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1976) pp. 78–79. 95. Arthur Griffith, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, p. 79. 96. Published under the pseudonym ‘Conn’, The United Irishman (24 October 1903), reprinted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, pp. 148–152. 97. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2, p. 151. 99. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 104. 99. Áine McCarthy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 104. 100. J.M. Synge, preface to The Playboy of the Western World in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 174.

240 Notes 101. Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’, in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) p. 13. 102. Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’, p. 13. 103. J.M. Synge, note to The Playboy of the Western World, printed in Abbey Theatre programme, 26 January 1907, cited in Robert Hogan, James Kilroy and Liam Miller (eds) The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge 1905–1909, p. 124. 104. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 198. 105. Robert Hogan, James Kilroy and Liam Miller (eds) The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, pp. 125–126. 106. An Claidheamh Soluis (9 February 1907) p. 7, cited in Robert Hogan, James Kilroy and Liam Miller (eds) The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 158. 107. Cited in Robert Hogan, James Kilroy and Liam Miller (eds) The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 158. 108. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 88. 109. J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 112. 110. For an explication of the Magdalen Asylum system see Maria Luddy, ‘Abandoned Women and Bad Characters’: Prostitution in NineteenthCentury Ireland’ in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) The Irish Women’s History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

6 That a Black Twisty Divil could be Hiding under Such Comeliness 1. Constance Markievicz, ‘Women, Ideals and the Nation’, cited in Margaret Ward (ed.) In Their Own Voice: Women and Irish Nationalism (Cork: Attic Press, 2001) p. 34; first published as a pamphlet by Inghinidhe na hÉireann in 1909 and reissued by Cumann na mBan in 1918. 2. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (London: Macmillan Education, 1986) p. 5. 3. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 6. 4. Maryann Valiulis, ‘Neither Feminist nor Flapper: The Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman’ in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen. Woman’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1995) p. 178. 5. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore 1972– 1973, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, JacquesAlain Miller (ed.) Bruce Fink (trans.) (New York, London: Norton, 1998) pp. 72–73. 6. Maud Gonne MacBride, Dawn: no record of production; first published in The United Irishman (29 October 1904). 7. Letter of W.G. Fay to W.B. Yeats, in Fay Ms. 13,068, National Library of Ireland, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama,

Notes 241

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

Vol. 2, Laying the Foundations, 1902–1904 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1976) p. 50. In a letter to Yeats, Fay defended his decision of putting art before politics: ‘About offending U.I. [The United Irishman] or people like that I have only one opinion – that a Theatre is no more a Political Party when it’s a Temperance platform or can exist at all as a Preaching shop for one set of opinions. For pity sake, let Art at least be free.’ From a Letter of W.G. Fay to W.B. Yeats, in Fay Ms. 13,068, National Library of Ireland, cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 2: Laying the Foundations, 1902–1904 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1976) p. 51. Padraic Colum, quoted in Lennox Robinson, Ireland’s Abbey Theatre (New York: Kennikat Press, 1951) p. 38. Major John MacBride: born in Mayo, joined an Irish Brigade to fight for the Boers; vice-president of Cumann na nGaedhael; member of the Supreme Council of the IRB; fought under Thomas MacDonagh in the Easter Rising; executed by court martial 5 May 1916. See Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (London: V. Gollancz, 1938; revised edition Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994, edited by A. N. Jeffares and Anna MacBride White). Maud Gonne MacBride, Dawn in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (eds) Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance (New York: Proscenium Press, 1970) p. 74. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 84. Maud Gonne MacBride, Dawn, p. 76. Maud Gonne MacBride, Dawn, p. 84. Margaret Ward, ‘‘Suffrage First – Above All Else!’ An Account of the Irish Suffrage Movement’ in Ailbhe Smyth (ed.) Irish Women’s Studies Reader (Dublin: Attic Press, 1993) p. 20. While the term ‘feminism’ may not have been a term used by either advocates or opponents of female suffrage and related women’s rights issues at the time, and may perhaps be interpreted as a form of revisionism concerning the Irish women’s movement, it is nonetheless a term used by scholars of Irish women’s studies referred to in this article. The term ‘feminism’ is therefore used here and throughout as an economic concept designating the various related issues associated with female suffrage and political activism. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 23. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 25. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 27. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 30. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 36. Padraic Colum, The Land, A Play in Three Acts: first produced 9 June 1905 by the Irish National Theatre Society, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published Dublin: Maunsel & Co. Ltd, 1905. Padraic Colum, The Land in Sanford Sternlicht (ed.) Selected Plays of Padraic Colum (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986) p. 9. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 14. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 15.

242 Notes 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 23. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 38. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 38. Padraic Colum, The Land, pp. 25–26. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 27. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 10. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 34. Padraic Colum, The Land, pp. 34–35. Padraic Colum, The Land, p. 5. ‘The Irish National Theatre, New Play: The Land’, the Freeman’s Journal (10 June 1905) p. 8. Cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3: The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge, 1905–1909 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978) p. 32. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 32. ‘The Irish National Theatre, New Play: The Land’, the Freeman’s Journal (10 June 1905) p. 8. Áine McCarthy, ‘Hearth’s Bodies and Minds: Gender Ideology and Women’s Committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum 1916–25’, cited in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) The Irish Women’s History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 104. Áine McCarthy, ‘Hearth’s Bodies and Minds: Gender Ideology and Women’s Committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum 1916–25’, cited in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) The Irish Women’s History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 104. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997) p. 18. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, James Harle Belle, Rodney Needham (eds) John Richard Von Sturmer (trans.) (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1970). See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers (Dublin and Waterford: M.H. Gill and Son, 1919) p. 6. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 24. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 24. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 23. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, pp. 62–63. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, p. 70. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, pp. 79–80. William Boyle, The Mineral Workers, p. 81. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 33. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker: first produced 3 October 1907, National Theatre Society, Ltd., Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Five Plays (London and Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1914). Robert Hogan, James Kilroy and Liam Miller (eds) The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, p. 177. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker in Five Plays (London and Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1914) p. 5. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, pp. 13–14.

Notes 243 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, p. 14. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, p. 15. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, p. 18. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, p. 22. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, p. 22. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, pp. 45–46. George Fitzmaurice, The Country Dressmaker, p. 56. ‘The Country Dressmaker at the Abbey’, the Evening Telegraph (27 December 1907) p. 2, cited in Robert Hogan, James Kilroy and Liam Miller (eds) The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, pp. 178–179. Lennox Robinson, Harvest: first produced 19 May 1910, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Two Plays: Harvest and the Clancy Name (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1911). Lennox Robinson, Harvest in Two Plays: Harvest and the Clancy Name (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1911) pp. 2–3. Lennox Robinson, Harvest, p. 49. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, p. 73. Lennox Robinson, Harvest, p. 48. Lennox Robinson, Harvest, p. 57. ‘An Outside Criticism’, the Evening Telegraph (20 May 1910) cited in Robert Hogan, Richard Burnham, and Daniel P. Poteet, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 4: The Rise of the Realists, 1910–1915 (Dublin: Dolmen Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979) pp. 33–34. See Robert Kilroy, The Playboy Riots (Dublin: Dolmen, 1971); David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘Reading a riot: The “reading formation” of Synge’s Abbey audience’, Literature and History, 13 (1987) pp. 219–237; Christopher Morash, ‘A Night at the Theatre 4: The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea’ in A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) pp. 130–138; and most recently Bruce McConachie, ‘The Playboy Riots: Nationalism in the Irish Theatre’ in Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 272–278. ‘An Outside Criticism’, the Evening Telegraph (20 May 1910). ‘An Outside Criticism’, the Evening Telegraph (20 May 1910). ‘An Outside Criticism’, the Evening Telegraph (20 May 1910). The quote is taken from a telegram sent by Lady Gregory to W.B. Yeats and is cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 3, pp. 125–126. Maria Luddy, from ‘Abandoned Women and Bad Characters: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’ in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) The Irish Women’s History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 87. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 87. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 91. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 91. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 92. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 93. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 93.

244 Notes 85. Maria Luddy, The Irish Women’s History Reader, p. 93. 86. T.C. Murray, The Briery Gap: no record of production; first published in Spring and Other Plays (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917). 87. Richard Allen Cave (ed.) Selected Plays of T.C. Murray (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) p. 117. 88. T.C. Murray, The Briery Gap in Richard Allen Cave (ed.) Selected Plays of T.C. Murray (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) pp. 111–112. 89. T.C. Murray, The Briery Gap, p. 114. 90. T.C. Murray, The Briery Gap, p. 115. 91. T.C. Murray, The Briery Gap, p. 117. 92. T.C. Murray, Autumn Fire: first produced 8 September 1924 at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925). 93. S.L.M. (Susan L. Mitchell), ‘Drama Notes’, Irish Statesman (13 September 1924) p. 20, cited in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, The Years of O’Casey, 1921–1926 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992) pp. 202–203. 94. S.L.M. (Susan L. Mitchell), ‘Drama Notes’, Irish Statesman (13 September 1924) p. 20, cited in Robert Hogan and Richard Burnham, The Modern Irish Drama, Vol. 6, pp. 202–203. 95. T.C. Murray, Autumn Fire in Richard Allen Cave (ed.) Selected Plays of T.C. Murray (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) p. 174. 96. T.C. Murray, Autumn Fire, p. 176.

7 Sure if I was a Good Wife to Him – that mightn’t be an Easy Job! 1. Margaret Ward, ‘ “Suffrage First – Above All Else!”: An Account of the Irish Suffrage Movement’ in Ailbhe Smyth (ed.) Irish Women’s Studies Reader (Dublin: Attic Press, 1993) p. 42. 2. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 42. 3. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 43. 4. Margaret Ward, Irish Women’s Studies Reader, p. 43. 5. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (London: MacMillan Education, 1986) p. 6. 6. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 6. 7. Liam O’Dowd, ‘Church, State and Women: The Aftermath of Partition’ in Chris Curtin, Pauline Jackson and Barbara O’Connor, Gender in Irish Society (Galway: Galway University Press, 1987) p. 5. 8. Liam O’Dowd, Gender in Irish Society, p. 6. 9. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 125. 10. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 125. 11. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 125.

Notes 245 12. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985) p. 112. 13. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, p. 110. 14. Sean O’Casey, In the Shadow of a Gunman in Collected Plays: Volume One (London: Macmillan, 1952) p. 109. 15. Sean O’Casey, In the Shadow of a Gunman, p. 146. 16. Sean O’Casey, In the Shadow of a Gunman, p. 157. 17. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, pp. 108–109. 18. Sean O’Casey, In the Shadow of a Gunman, p. 156. 19. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock in Collected Plays: Volume One (London: Macmillan, 1952) p. 7. 20. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, pp. 7–8. 21. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, p. 109. 22. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, p. 86. 23. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars in Collected Plays: Volume One (London: Macmillan, 1952) p. 176. 24. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, pp. 187–188. 25. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, p. 213. 26. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, pp. 257–258. 27. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000) p. 486. 28. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman: first produced 10 September 1929, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; unpublished; typescript held in National Library of Ireland, Ms 29446. 29. Margaret O’Leary, The Coloured Balloon; first produced 8 May 1944, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; unpublished. 30. W.B. Yeats to Lennox Robinson, 16 April 1929; reprinted in ‘Publishers Note’ to Margaret O’Leary’s novel Lightning Flash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939) pp. 7–9, which is derived from The Woman. 31. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/2. 32. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/2. 33. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/3. 34. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/3. 35. The term ‘light’ was used from the late medieval period onwards to describe a woman or woman’s behaviour in terms of being unchaste or wanton, typefied in Robert Browning’s poem ‘A Light Woman’ in the anthology Men and Women (1855). 36. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/5. 37. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/8. 38. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/13. 39. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/16. 40. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms. 29446/16. 41. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/17. 42. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/36. 43. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/36. 44. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/37. 45. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/38. 46. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/46. 47. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/73–74.

246

Notes

48. At The Hawk’s Well (1917), in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 215. 49. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994) p. 90. 50. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/50. 51. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/51. 52. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/51. 53. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/57. 54. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/55. 55. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/55. 56. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/57. 57. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/57–58. 58. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/58. 59. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/96. 60. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/116. 61. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/101. 62. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/108. 63. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/116. 64. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/116. 65. Irish Independent (11 September 1929) p. 5. 66. Irish Times (11 September 1929) p. 4. 67. Irish Times (11 September 1929) p. 4. 68. Irish Independent (11 September 1929) p. 5. 69. Irish Times (11 September 1929) p. 4. 70. Irish Independent (11 September 1929) p. 5. 71. Margaret O’Leary, The Woman, Ms.29446/62. 72. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 229. 73. W.B. Yeats to Lennox Robinson, 16 April 1929; reprinted in ‘Publishers Note’ to Margaret O’Leary’s novel Lightning Flash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939) pp. 7–9. 74. O’Leary’s statements are interwoven in the letter from Yeats to Robinson cited above. 75. Lisa Fitzpatrick, ‘Taking their Own Road: The Female Protagonists in Three Irish Plays by Women’ in Melissa Sihra (ed.) Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) p. 75. 76. Teresa Deevy, The Reapers; first produced 18 March 1930, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; unpublished. 77. Teresa Deevy, Temporal Powers: first produced 12 September 1932, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; unpublished. 78. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter: first produced 29 April 1935, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Three Plays: Katie Roche, The King of Spain’s Daughter, The Wild Goose (London: Macmillan, 1939). 79. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche: first produced 16 March 1936, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published in Famous Plays of 1935–6 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). 80. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter in The King of Spain’s Daughter and other one–act plays (London: Macmillan, 1939) p. 25. 81. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 28. 82. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 29.

Notes 247 83. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 27. 84. Liam O’Dowd, Gender in Irish Society, p. 6. 85. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1971) p. 52. 86. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 28. 87. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 33. 88. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, pp. 30–31. 89. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) p. 131: ‘I say somewhere that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. Now, the discourse of the Other that is to be realized, that of the unconscious, is not beyond the closure, it is outside. It is this discourse, which, through the mouth of the analyst, calls for the reopening of the shutter.’ 90. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 29. 91. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 33. 92. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 34. 93. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 7. 94. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 7. 95. Teresa Deevy, The King of Spain’s Daughter, p. 35. 96. New Play at the Abbey ‘King of Spain’s Daughter’, Irish Independent (30 April 1935) p. 10. 97. New Play at the Abbey, ‘The King of Spain’s Daughter’, Irish Times (30 April 1935) p. 5. 98. New Play at the Abbey, ‘The King of Spain’s Daughter’, Irish Times (30 April 1935) p. 5. 99. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche: in Famous Plays of 1935–6 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936) p. 617. 100. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 624. 101. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since ‘The Plough and the Stars’ (London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968) p. 41. 102. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, pp. 642–643. 103. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, pp. 41–42. 104. Anthony Roche, ‘Woman on the Threshold: J.M. Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen, Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche and Marina Carr’s The Mai’ in the Silver Jubilee Issue on Teresa Deevy and Irish Women Playwrights, Irish University Review 25, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1995) p. 151. 105. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 615. 106. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 617. 107. For an elaboration of le sinthome see chapter 5. 108. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 644. 109. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 654. 110. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 675. 111. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 134. 112. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 8. 113. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 8. 114. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 662. 115. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 666.

248

Notes

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 665. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 666. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 656. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 693. Liam O’Dowd, Gender in Irish Society, p. 20. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 694. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 695. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 695. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, p. 626. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, pp. 700–701. ‘A Masterpiece at the Abbey: Miss Deevy’s New Play’, Irish Independent (17 March 1936) p. 10. Irish Independent (17 March 1936) p. 10. Irish Independent (17 March 1936) p. 10. ‘The Abbey Theatre: Miss Deevy’s New Play: “Katie Roche” by Teresa Deevy’, Irish Times (17 March 1936) p. 5. Irish Times (17 March 1936) p. 5.

127. 128. 129. 130.

8


1. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (London: Macmillan Education, 1986) p. 9. 2. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 9. 3. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 7. 4. Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland), Article 41.2.1., 41.2.2., pp. 136–138. 5. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, p. 9. 6. E.J. Cahill, The Framework of a Christian State: An Introduction to Social Science (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1932). 7. Liam O’Dowd, Gender in Irish Society, p. 16. 8. E.J. Cahill, The Framework of a Christian State, p. 45. 9. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland, pp. 7–8. 10. Liam O’Dowd, Gender in Irish Society, pp. 26–27. 11. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance: first produced 6 May 1937, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published as Shadow and Substance (New York: Random House, 1937; London: Macmillan, 1938). 12. ‘The Substance of Paul Vincent Carroll’, New York Times (30 January 1938) Section X, p. 1. 13. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since “The Plough and the Stars” (London: MacMillan, 1968), p. 53. 14. Paul Vincent Carroll, Things That Are Caesar’s: first produced 15 August 1932, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published as Things That Are Caesar’s: A Tragedy in Three Acts (London: Rich & Cowan, [1934]). 15. Paul Vincent Carroll, The White Steed: first produced 10 January 1939, Cort Theatre, New York; first published in The White Steed and Coggerers (New York: Random House, 1939).

Notes 249 16. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since ‘The Plough and the Stars’ (London: MacMillan, 1968) p. 56. 17. ‘The Substance of Paul Vincent Carroll’, New York Times (30 January 1938) Section X, p. 1. 18. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance in Two Plays: The Wise Have Not Spoken; Shadow and Substance (London: Macmillan, 1948) p. 111. 19. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 101. 20. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 100. 21. ‘The Substance of Paul Vincent Carroll’, New York Times (30 January 1938) Section X, p. 1. 22. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 106. 23. For an elaboration on le sinthome see chapter 5. 24. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992) p. 137. 25. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 103. 26. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997) p. 8. 27. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 177. 28. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 126. 29. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 127. 30. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 155. 31. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 138. 32. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 130. 33. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 144. 34. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 181. 35. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 181. 36. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 190. 37. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 190. 38. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 203. 39. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 205. 40. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 206. 41. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 207. 42. Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance, p. 207. 43. ‘Remarkable Play at the Abbey’, Irish Independent (26 January 1937) p. 10. 44. Irish Independent (26 January 1937) p. 10. 45. ‘Shadow and Substance: New Play at the Abbey Theatre’, Irish Times (26 January 1937) p. 8. 46. Irish Times (26 January 1937) p. 8. 47. Irish Times (26 January 1937) p. 8. 48. Paul Vincent Carroll, The Strings, My Lord, Are False: first Irish production 16 March 1942, Olympia Theatre, Dublin; first published in Three Plays: The White Steed, Things That Are Caesar’s and The Strings, My Lord, Are False (London: Macmillan, 1944). 49. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since ‘The Plough and the Stars’ (London: MacMillan, 1968) p. 57. 50. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting: A Tragedy first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 20 October 1941; first published Dublin: P.J. Bourke, 1964. 51. Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, p. 47.

250 Notes 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

‘Abbey Theatre: “Lovers’ Meeting” ’, Irish Times (21 October 1941) p. 5. Irish Times (21 October 1941) p. 5. Irish Times (21 October 1941) p. 5. ‘The Righteous Are Bold’, Irish Times, 30 July 1946, p. 7. ‘New Tragedy at the Abbey’, Irish Independent (21 October 1941) p.3. Irish Independent (21 October 1941) p.3. Irish Independent (21 October 1941) p.3. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting (Dublin: P.J. Bourke, 1964), p. 10. Cited in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 116–117. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 10. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 11. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 11. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 19. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, pp. 19–20. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 18. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 14. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, Jacqueline Rose (trans.) (New York: Norton, 1985) p. 80. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds) Feminine Sexuality, p. 80. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds) Feminine Sexuality, p. 80. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 18. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, pp. 22–23. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, pp. 69–70. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, pp. 15–16. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 34. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 52. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 61. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 53. Louis D’Alton, Lovers Meeting, p. 60. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold: first production 29 July 1946, Abbey Theatre, Dublin; first published as The Righteous Are Bold: A Play in Three Acts (Dublin: James Duffy, 1951). ‘Grim Theme in New Play’, Irish Independent (30 July 1946) p. 6. Irish Independent (30 July 1946) p. 6. Irish Independent (30 July 1946) p. 6. ‘The Righteous Are Bold’, Irish Times (30 July 1946) p. 7. Irish Times (30 July 1946) p. 7. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold (Dublin: James Duffy, 1952) p. 5. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 5. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 25. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 28. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 29. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 47. For an elaboration on voice as objet petit a see Chapter 5. Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’ in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) p. 27.

Notes 251 94. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 70. 95. Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’ in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, p. 27. 96. Frank Carney, The Righteous Are Bold, p. 71. 97. Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’ in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) p. 27. 98. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, p. 10. 99. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama, pp. 144–145. 100. Sean O’Casey, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy: first produced 10 December 1949, People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne; first published as Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London: Macmillan, 1949). 101. Sean O’Casey, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy in Collected Plays: Volume Four (London: Macmillan, 1951) p. 211. 102. Sean O’Casey, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, p. 217. 103. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2004) p. 318. 104. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey, p. 318.

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Index Abbey School, 200 agape, 196, 197, 198 aisling poetry, 118 Allgood, Sara, 49, 52, 54, 74, 83, 107, 148, 154, 158, 165 Althusser, Louis, 3 An Claidheamnh Soluis, 141 An Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, 107 Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, The, 4–9, 14, 19, 20–6, 28–31, 34–6, 39, 41, 43, 46, 52, 74, 96–7, 114, 122–3, 131, 133, 134, 162 Anglo-Irish Ireland, 4, 6–9, 13–14, 21, 25–6, 42–3, 47, 60, 67, 74, 100, 114, 118–20 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 79, 133, 168 Anglo-Irish War (1919–21), 98, 143, 224, see also War of Independence Arabi Bey, 122 Aran Islands, 29, 35, 162 Aristotle, 123 Ashbourne Land Purchase Act (1885), 81 asylum, 85, 87, 135–6, 139, 142, 150, 162–3, 165, 167 Beale, Jenny, 9, 143, 147–8, 154, 184, 189, 193 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, 71 Behan, Brendan, 98 Berg Collection (New York Public Library), 121 Blunt, William Scawen, 122–3, 128 Blythe, Ernest, 108, 195 Boucicault, Dion, 69, 110 The Colleen Bawn, 69–70, 89, 113 The Shaughraun, 69–70, 89, 111 Boyle, William, 30, 44, 51–3, 57–8 The Eloquent Dempsy, 52–5 Family Failing, 58 The Mineral Workers, 55–7, 151–4, 157 Broadway, 107

Brogan, Harry, 88, 90, 92, 109, 111 Bull, Philip, 8, 95, 213, 215, 223, 233, 239 Bunreacht na hÉireann, Constitution of Ireland (1937), 15, 168–9, 182, 184, 193–4, 207 Cahill, E.J., 194 The Framework of a Christian State, 194 Cairns, David, 141 Carney, Frank, 208–9 The Righteous Are Bold, 202, 208–13 Carolan, P.J., 82, 85, 174 Carroll, Paul Vincent, 107, 181 The Bed of Procrustes, 181, 195 Shadow and Substance, 194–200, 208 The Strings, My Lord, Are False, 200 Things That Are Caesar’s, 195, 200 The Watched Pot, 195 The White Steed, 195 Censorship of Publications Act (1929), 90 citizenship, 92–4, 96, 98, 143, 147, 169 Clann na Talmhan, 95, 103 Clark, Rosalind, 117 Clery, Ann, 182 colonialism, 12, 71–2, 118, 146 Colum, Padraic, 44, 49, 50–2, 58 The Land, 48–51, 147–51 The Saxon Shillin’, 14, 47–8, 63, 144 Conditions of Employment Act (1935), 194 Connolly, James, 39 Cork Realists, 61 Corkery, Daniel, 20, 49, 217, 224, 226 The Labour Leader, 57, 226 Cosgrave, W.T., 9, 66, 90 courtly love, 124, 130, 177 Craig, May, 73, 92, 189

261

262

Index

Crowe, Eileen, 75, 81–2, 85, 109, 111, 174, 185, 192, 201 Cusack, Cyril, 101, 107, 182, 185, 196, 200 Dáil, The, 66, 193–4 D’Alton, Louis, 201–2, 205 Lovers Meeting, 201–8 The Money Doesn’t Matter, 201–2 Dance Halls Act (1935), 188 Dark Rosaleen, 25 de Valera, Eamonn, 15, 79, 91, 99, 100, 105, 193, 211 de Vere, Aubrey, 119, 236 Deane, Seamus, 2, 38, 69, 169–71 Deevy, Teresa, 107, 181–2, 185, 187, 191, 195 Katie Roche, 182, 185–92 The King of Spain’s Daughter, 182–5 Reapers, 181 Temporal Powers, 181, 195 Wife to James Whelan, 181 Delaney, Maureen, 85, 102, 201 Dermody, Frank, 173, 203 Dickens, Charles, 77 Digges, J. Dudley, 24 Dolan, Michael J., 71, 75, 80, 85, 93, 102, 109, 174, 185, 201, 208 Dolar, Mladen, 140, 210–11 Donoghue, Denis, 107 dramaturgy, 69, 79, 100, 106, 108–9, 137, 169, 180 Dunne, James, 92 Easter Rising (1916), 4, 9, 42, 47, 68, 146, 168, 171, 195 emigration, 10, 22, 51, 66, 90, 101, 105, 114, 122, 148, 152, 154 Encumbered Estates Act (1904), 8 Engels, Frederick, 77 Ervine, St. John, 44, 58, 62, 107 John Ferguson, 62–3 Mixed Marriage, 63–5, 67 Euripides, Medea, 123 ‘Fallen Woman’, 2, 13–14, 118, 120, 159, 172–3, 190 Fallon, Brian, 78

Fallon, Gabriel J., 75, 80 familism, 9, 13, 32, 40, 42, 45, 49, 53, 60, 194 Famine, The (1845–49), 22–3, 38, 91, 100–1, 114, 122, 145, 151–2, 166, 179 Fanon, Frantz, 39, 114 fantasy, see Lacan, Jacques farce, 75, 79–81, 91, 212–13 Fay, Frank, 33, 37, 52, 56, 154 Fay, W.G., 26, 31, 33, 37, 49–50, 52–3, 56, 147, 154 Ferguson, Samuel, 25 Ferrtier, Diarmaid, 103, 105, 108 Fianna, the, 128, 130 Fianna Faíl, 99, 103, 105, 106 Fingal, Countess (Lady Elizabeth Burke Plunkett), 21 Fitzgerald, Barry, 74, 76–7, 80, 107 Fitzmaurice, George, The Country Dressmaker, 154–8 Fitzpatrick, David, 114 Fitzpatrick, Lisa, 181 Fleming, Deborah, 23 Foster, R.F., 8, 30, 66, 93 Frau-Welt, die, 130 Frazier, Adrian, 6 Freeman’s Journal, 44, 48, 49, 56, 140, 149, 150 Friel, Judy, 187 Gaelic League, 45, 47, 158 Garvin, Tom, 91, 105 Gellner, Ernest, 10 Gibbons, Luke, 20, 99 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 67 Gonne, Maud, see MacBride, Maud Gonne Gorman, Eric, 57, 75, 82, 102 Graham, Colin, 10–12 Gramsci, Antonio, 5–6, 59, 182 counter-hegemony, 5 hegemony, 2, 5 organic intellectual, 5 people-nation, 6 sentimental connection, 6 subaltern classes, 2, 5 grazier, 8, 22, 43, 46, 82–4, 91, 96, 99, 103–5, 133

Index 263 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 4–5, 15, 19, 20, 24, 26, 52, 60, 74, 78, 83, 120–5, 128, 131–2, 141 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 24–6, 29, 60, 119–20, 137, 141, 144–5 Dervorgilla, 120, 123, 126–8, 131 Gods and Fighting Men, 128 Grania, 120, 123, 128–31 Kincora (1905), 120, 123–5 Kincora (1909), 125–6 The Pot of Broth, 26–8, 120 The Unicorn from the Stars, 120 Where There is Nothing, 120 Gregory, Sir William, 122 Gregory Clause (1847), 122 Grene, Nicholas, 1, 73–4, 169 Griffith, Arthur, 7, 24, 31, 42, 138–9, 144 In a Real Wicklow Glen, 138, 208 Guha, Ranajit, 11 Harmsworth Prize, 173 Hayden, Christine, 80 Healy, Seumas, 94 hegemony, see Gramsci, Antonio Heidegger, Martin, 187 Herr, Cheryl, 1 Higgins, F.R., 77, 195 Hirsch, Edward, 20, 28 Hogan, Robert, 60, 62, 79, 88, 91, 97–8, 107, 140, 186, 195, 201 Holloway, Joseph, 45, 82 Hunt, Hugh, 192, 200 Hyde, Douglas, 44–7 An Pósadh (The Marriage), 45–6 Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope), 44–5, 48 The Love Songs of Connacht, 47 Ibsen, Henrik, 44, 137 Inghinidhe na hÉireann (The Daughters of Ireland), 140 Ireland’s Saturday Night, 149 Irish Civil War (1922–23), 96, 114, 171 Irish Free State, 3–4, 6–7, 14–15, 44, 60, 65–6, 68, 77, 79–80, 82, 84–5, 90–2, 94, 97–8, 103, 114, 143, 158, 168, 171, 181, 191, 194

Irish Independent, 68, 101, 106, 111, 180, 185, 191, 199, 202, 208 Irish Ireland, 4, 6–10, 13–15, 21, 24–6, 31, 42–3, 45–7, 49–50, 52, 59–60, 65, 67, 74, 100, 114, 118–20, 139, 141 Irish Literary Theatre (ILT), 4–7, 19–20, 24–5, 67 Irish National Dramatic Society (INDS), 6–7 Irish National Theatre Society (INTS), 6, 138, 144 Irish Rebellion (1798), 24–5 Irish Renaissance, 4, 78, 98, 121, 192 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 122, 169 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 47 Irish Times, 55, 57, 79, 103, 106, 108, 180, 185, 192, 200, 202, 209 Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), 146 Jackson, Ward, 21 Johnson, Fred, 109, 209 Kavanagh, Patrick, 20 Kelly, P.J., 26, 31 Kennedy, Liam, 22 Kerrigan, J.M., 62, 64, 154 Kiberd, Declan, 38–9, 69, 76, 109, 173 Krause, David, 86, 98 Kruger, Loren, 3 labourer, 8, 22, 34, 36–8, 41, 43, 45–6, 56–7, 75, 90–1, 95–6, 98, 101 Lacan, Jacques, 12–13, 126, 128, 151, 160, 177, 204 agalma, 197–8, 200 fantasy, 2, 13–14 manque-à-être, 184 objet petit a, 12 Real, 12–13 sinthome, 126 Symbolic order, 12 symptom, 12–13 Land League, The, 91, 95–6, 98 ‘Landless Labourer’, 2, 13–14, 72 L’Association Irlandaise, 29

264 Index Lee, J.J., 9, 64–6, 89–90 Leerssen, Joep, 12 Lemass, Sean, 194 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 151 Levitas, Ben, 1 L’Irlande Libre, 144 Lloyd, David, 10–11, 14 Logue, Cardinal Michael, 24 Luddy, Maria, 163 ‘Lumpenproletarian’, 71–2 Lyons, F.S.L., 3–4, 20 Mac Shiubhlaigh, P., 49 MacBride, Maud Gonne, 14, 24–5, 29, 60, 144–5 Dawn, 14, 60, 144–5 MacDarby, John, 92 MacDonagh, Thomas, 42–3, 82 Pagans, 43 Macken, Walter, 107–10, 112–13 Mungo’s Mansion, 108–11 Vacant Possession, 108, 112–14 MacLochlaínn, Alf, 8, 20 MacNamara, Brinsley, 107 Magdalen Laundries, see asylum Mangan, James Clarence, 119 Markievicz, Countess Constance, 60, 67, 143 The Invincible Mother, 60 Martyn, Edward, 4 Marx, Karl, 39, 67 Mayne, Rutherford, 107 McAnally, Ray, 107 McCarthy, Áine, 135–6, 150 McCormack, W.J., 133 McCormick, F.J., 57, 71, 74, 77, 83, 87–8, 90, 97, 101, 103, 107–8, 185, 192 McKenna, Siobhán (Siobhán Ní Chionnaith), 107–8 McMullan, Anna, 2, 119 Meldon, Austin, 92 melodrama, 44, 47–8, 69, 78, 81, 104, 149, 170, 209 Memmi, Albert, 39 Mitchell, Susan L., 82, 165 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya, 200 Molloy, M.J., 100, 103, 105–7 Old Road, 100–7

The Wood of the Whispering, 106 Mooney, Ria, 92, 182, 185, 192, 201, 203 Moran, D.P., 4, 7, 20, 42, 141 Morash, Christopher, 1 Morrígan, The, 124 ‘Mother’, 2, 13–14, 24–5, 60, 118, 120, 136, 144–5, 148–50, 156, 159, 161, 169–70, 173, 175, 179–80, 183, 187–9, 206–8, 213 Murray, Christopher, 1, 3, 68–9, 78, 100, 120–1 Murray, T.C., 44, 58, 60–2, 78, 107, 163, 165, 180–1 Autumn Fire, 165–7 Birthright, 161–2, 178 The Briery Gap, 163–5 Ní Dhomhnaill, Máire, 209 Ní Gharbhaigh, Máire (Máire Garvey), 49, 148–9 Ní Loingsigh, Bríd, 92, 101 Níc Shiubhlaigh, Máire, 31, 65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 121 Northern Ireland, 3, 79–80, 82, 84, 98, 100 Ó Briain, Micheál, 108, 209 O’Brien, Flann, 20 O’Casey, Sean, 61, 65, 67–79, 86, 88, 108–9, 122, 145, 169–71, 173, 192, 213 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, 169, 212–13 Juno and the Paycock, 68, 74–5, 77, 109, 169–71 The Plough and the Stars, 68–9, 73, 75, 77, 108, 145, 169, 171–3 In the Shadow of a Gunman, 68, 71–4, 77, 169–70 O’Connor, Frank, 107, 195 O’Connor, Joseph, 67 O’Dea, Denis, 85, 92, 103, 201–3 O’Doherty, Eileen, 155 O’Donnell, Frank Hugh, 7, 23, 72, 81 O’Donoghue, D.J., 51 O’Donovan, Fred, 61–2, 158 O’Dowd, Liam, 182, 190 O’Faoláin, Seán, 68, 107

Index 265 O’Gorman, W., 207 O’Grady, Standish, 4, 7, 25 O’Higgins, Brian, 101 O’Leary, Margaret, 173–4, 177–8, 180–1, 192 The Coloured Balloon, 173 The House I Made, 173 The Woman, 173–81 O’Neill, Máire, 37, 64, 154–5, 159, 208–9 O’Rourke, J.A., 64, 154 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 106 Pankhurst, Christabel, 146 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 146 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 146 Parliament Act (1911), 64 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 4, 6, 24–5, 30 Pearse, Padraic, 42–3, 58–60, 66, 141, 172 The Singer, 43, 58–60 ‘Peasant’, 2, 7, 11, 13–15, 17, 19–20, 22–3, 25–6, 28–9, 41, 43, 47, 60, 67, 74, 79, 96, 140 philia, 196 Pilkington, Lionel, 1, 189 Poblacht na hÉireann (Proclamation of the Republic), 9 Poor Relief (Ireland) Act (1838), 122 ‘Proletarian’, 2, 13–14, 67, 71–2, 74, 77–8 Quinn, Máire T., 26 Quinn, Tony, 80 Ray, R.J., 61 realism, 44, 51, 56, 100, 106, 181 Redmond, John, 146–7 Republic of Ireland, 3, 6, 9, 193 Republic of Ireland Act (1949), 114 Richards, Shaun, 141 Richards, Shelah, 85 Roberts, George, 31 Robinson, Lennox, 44, 58, 61, 107, 158, 161–2, 173–4, 181 Harvest, 158–62 Robinson, Mary, 213 Roche, Anthony, 1, 187

Rose, Jacqueline, 12–13 Ryan, Fred, The Laying of the Foundations, 41, 55 Shan Van Vocht, 25 Shaw, Bernard, John Bull’s Other Island, 41, 63 Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 68, 146 Sheehy-Skeffington, Hanna, 68, 146 Shields, Arthur, 71, 88, 166, 174, 187, 195, 199–200 Shiels, George, 65, 67, 79–80, 82, 85–6, 89, 91–4, 96–100, 107–10, 174 Bedmates, 79–80 The New Gossoon, 85–90 Paul Twyning, 80–2 Professor Tim, 82–4 The Rugged Path, 91–4, 97 The Summit, 94–7 Sihra, Melissa, 118 Sinclair, Arthur, 37, 61–2, 64, 150, 155 Sinn Féin, 146 small farmer, 8, 11, 29, 81–2, 87, 96–8, 102, 147, 174, 203 ‘Small Farmer’, 2, 13–14, 62–3, 67 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 123 Sovereignty, The, 118–19 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 11–12 strong farmer, 22, 37, 41, 63, 80, 82, 84, 96, 99, 102–3, 105, 133, 155, 174, 205 subaltern classed, 2–3, 6–7, 9–10, 13–15, 20, 25, 31, 43–4, 48, 60, 62–3, 67, 79–80, 89–90, 99–101, 111, 114, 118, 174, 178, 181 gendered, 2–3, 6–7, 10, 12–15, 31, 95, 118, 121, 131, 139, 150, 174, 178–9, 181–2, 190, 194, 196 see also Gramsci, Antonio Swift, Jonathan, 195 Synge, J.M., 7, 15, 19–20, 23, 25, 27, 29–41, 43–5, 49–53, 60, 62, 68, 74, 76, 78, 110, 113, 121–2, 131–3, 135–42, 157, 161–2, 180–1, 192, 203, 205, 208

266

Index

Synge – continued Deirdre of the Sorrows, 29, 32, 180 The Playboy of the Western World, 7, 36–8, 45, 68, 131–3, 137, 139–41, 161–2 In the Shadow of the Glen, 7, 25, 31–3, 37–9, 53, 113, 131, 137–8, 139–40, 142, 180, 205 The Tinker’s Wedding, 40–1, 45, 141–2 The Well of the Saints, 33–4, 37–8 When the Moon Has Set, 131–7, 142

‘Wife’, 2, 13–15, 118, 144, 148–50, 156, 161, 166, 169–71, 173, 175, 179–90, 207–8, 211, 213 Wilson, A. Patrick, 67 The Slough, 67 Victims, 67 ‘Woman’, 2, 7, 13–15, 117–20, 123, 125, 127, 130–1, 136–7, 139–42, 144–6, 149–52, 156–62, 165–7, 169–70, 172–3, 175–80, 182–3, 196, 200, 208, 211, 213 Wright, Udolphus, 54 Wyndham Land Act (1903), 8, 48, 81

Theatre of Ireland, 50 ‘Tramp’, 2, 13–15, 26–7, 31–2, 38, 44, 67, 70, 80, 113, 137, 139 Trotter, Mary, 1

Yeats, John Butler, 31 Yeats, W.B., 4–7, 14–15, 19–26, 29–30, 41, 43, 49, 51–3, 56, 58, 60, 73–4, 78, 107, 119–21, 125, 131–2, 141, 144–5, 173, 176–7, 181, 195 On Baile’s Strand, 29 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 24–6, 29, 60, 119–20, 137, 141, 144–5 The Countess Cathleen, 7, 14, 21, 24, 138 The Death of Cuchulain, 29 At the Hawk’s Well, 176 The Land of Heart’s Desire, 14 ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’, 19 The Pot of Broth, 26–8, 120 The Unicorn from the Stars, 120 Where There is Nothing, 120

United Irish League, The, 95–6, 98 United Irishman, The, 31, 138 University College Cork, 173, 181 University College Dublin, 181 Valiulis, Maryann, 144 Vernon, Emma, 33 ‘Wandering Tramp’, see ‘Tramp’ War of Independence (1919–1921), 47, 168, see also Anglo-Irish War Ward, Margaret, 146 Watt, Stephen, 1 Welch, Robert, 1 Whelan, Kevin, 24

Žižek, Slavoj, 1, 12–13, 27, 126, 130, 150, 177, 196

Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949

Gender and Modern Irish Drama:

Hegemony

Hegemony

Contemporary Irish Drama & Cultural Identity

Emerald magic: great tales of Irish fantasy

Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy

Emerald Magic Great Tales of Irish Fantasy

Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy

Irish Television Drama: A Society and Its Stories

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama

Hegemony: Studies in Consensus and Coercion

War in the Heavens: Hegemony

Language And Hegemony In Gramsci (Reading Gramsci)

US Hegemony and International Organizations

Fantasy and Reality in History

Drama in drie bedrijven

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