Representations of the Child in Modern Irish Drama

Abstract

The present paper surveys representations of the child-subject in modern Irish drama from the 1890s to the 1980s, examining their links with the process of decolonization through revealing some of the social and psychological effects of colonialism and its aftermath. In the early 19th century the newly constructed roles of the child became entrenched in the ideology of colonial imperialism. During the Irish Literary Revival, the drama as a key literary genre provided a decidedly anti-imperial response to and counteracting of the colonial stereotypes which described the Irish as feminine, child-like and uncivilized, by redirecting the force of these categories. In several plays of the period the character still growing tends to be implicated in the project of highlighting the difference between the paralytic world of the moment and the potential for change, and is shown as capable of envisaging and anticipating transformation. After the 1920s, in post-independence and post-colonial times the dramatized child-subject becomes related to the sense of frustration and impasse generated by the persistence of the old narratives, troping the experience of communal and individual crisis, loss, the difficulty or even impossibility to change certain patterns, prejudices and attitudes. It is only in the late 1980s that this trend seems to change, and the child in drama evokes the transcendence of past traumas, looking back to the Irish theatre of the early 1900s. The conclusion of the paper points to the recent emerging of yet another group of contemporary Irish plays with teenagers as protagonists, which junior characters, along with their counterparts in world-drama, perform a new aspect of the cultural and anthropological self-definition of the postmodern individual.