Abstract
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.
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Notes
See Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen Ní Houlihan (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991).
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).
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.
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 77.
Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 37.
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).
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).
Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002) p. 45.
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 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.
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.
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.
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, 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).
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).
Lady Gregory, Grania (1912) in Collected Plays, Vol. II: Tragedies & Tragic Comedies (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979), p. 15.
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997) p. 66.
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.
W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge (New York: New York University Press, 2000) p. 170.
W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) p. 124.
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: Svracuse Universitv Press, 1988).
Cited in David H. Grene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge 1871–1909 (New York: Macmillan, 1959) p. 264.
Cited in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 116–117.
See Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1996).
J.M. Synge, When the Moon Has Set in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 219.
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.
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.
J.M. Synge, preface to The Playboy of the Western World in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 174.
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.
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 198.
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writinglreland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 88.
J.M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding in The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1992) p. 112.
For an explication of the Magdalen Asylum system see Maria Luddy, ‘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).
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© 2008 Paul Murphy
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Murphy, P. (2008). What Kind of a Living Woman is It that You are at All?. In: Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583856_6
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