Authors: Declan Kiberd
There was ample sanction for such reversals in the Utopian plays of Wilde and Shaw, but Synge added a
Gaelic resonance entirely absent from their writings, and based on his knowledge of poetry in the Irish language from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There, in works like
Cúirt an Mheáin Oíche
(The Midnight Court) by
Brian Merriman, the writers had denounced the new Anglicization
of sexuality in rural Ireland. Merriman was especially scandalized by the high-heeled shoes, the artificial cosmetics (
púdar
) and the clothing (
húdd
) which characterized the new fashions, and his use of the accompanying Anglicized slang-words in the poem indicated his deep contempt. Though revivalist critics preferred to read all this as a nationalist critique of English culture by a defender of Gaelic values, there is much more than that at stake. What is under attack in such texts is the reification of the female body to the point where it becomes a fetish of the puritan male's imagination. Merriman's poem contains many other elements which would have been congenial to Synge: it is based on the idea of a court of love ruled by women; these complain of enforced marriages to spent old dotards, very much as Nora Burke complains in
The Shadow of the Glen,
they are frank rather than genteel in asserting their sexual urges; and the male poet is mocked, as Synge was on Aran, for being over thirty years of age and still unmarried.
An even more explicit critique of the Anglicization of sexuality in eighteenth-century rural Ireland may be found in
"Bodaigh na hEorna" (The Churls of the Barley) by
Art Mac Cumhaigh. Here the poet denounces the vulgar fashions worn by the females of a south Ulster family, which has circumvented the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics by making a small fortune from distilling:
Is tócuil an tseoid níon bhodaigh sa ród
Is cha ghlacann sí cóirú Gaelach,
Mur mbeadh hata uirthi ar dhóigh, is crios air den ór,
Is cleite ag treabhadh na gaoithe.
36
The daughter of a churl is a proud jewel on the road
And she does not wear Gaelic fashions,
But a hat in new style, with a golden braid,
And a feather ploughing the wind.
Prose texts from the same period such as
Parliament na mBan
(The Parliament of Women, 1703) were even more elaborate in their critiques of a male chauvinism which had relegated women from public life to the domestic periphery. One year after
Daniel Defoe's
Good Advice to the Ladies
(1702) the male "author" of the
Parliament,
Dónal Ó Colmáin, complained that the female sex had lost much of its power through lack of education and through the accompanying fetishization of the woman's body. Doubtless, in Gaelic Ireland as elsewhere, there were those for whom imbecility in females represented a great enhancement of their charms, but Ó Colmáin captured the authentic anger of women who would not brook such marginalization:
Do chítear daoibh go léir go mbíd a gcomhairlí agus a gcomhrhionóil ag na fearaibh go laethúil ag déanamh a ngnótha agus ag tabhairt aire do gach ní bhaineas riu féin, i gcás, an uair bhíd siad ag trácht orainne, gurb amhlaidh bhímid mar chaitheamh aimsire, mar chomparáid, nó mar stoc magaidh aca de 1ó agus d'oíche. Agus fós, ní admhaíd siad gur daoine sinn ar aon chor ar bith, ach gur créatúirí sinn do cruthaíodh in aghaidh nádúir, agus nach bhfuil ionainn ach
malum necessarium,
"drochní is riachtanas do bheith ann".
37
It is evident to you all that the menfolk had their meetings and conferences on a daily basis, doing their business and taking care of all that pertained to themselves – so that, whenever they mentioned us, we were simply a pastime, a comparison, or a source of mockery to them by day and night. And even still, they will not admit that we are human at all, save only that we are creatures created against the forces of nature, and that we are nothing but a
malum necessarium,
a bad thing which is necessary.
Of course, as a male writer, Ó Colmáin was speaking on women's behalf, just as a male poet, Merriman, voiced the female protest against false gentility in the
Cúirt:
two facts which, in themselves, indicate just how far Gaelic women had fallen from earlier times. For it was well known that the ancient Irish laws were remarkably liberal in their attitude to women. A woman could divorce a sterile, impotent, or homosexual husband, could marry a priest, and could give honourable
birth to a child outside of wedlock. Merriman's poem was not the foreign-inspired debauch complained of by some puritans of the national revival, but a dynamic plea for a return to more radical traditions: according to one historian, however, "the natural development of these liberal customs was... cut off by the imposition of English law on Ireland in the seventeenth century".
38
Synge was well aware of the loss of these liberal traditions, but he delighted in pointing to those areas, such as the Aran Islands, still largely unaffected by the changes. The women of Inishmaan were, he noted, "before conventionality" in their frank, easy manners, which left them untainted by the false Victorian gentility of the women in Dublin, Cork or Galway. Instead, they "share some of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of Paris and New York". The latter, he added in a notebook, "have freed themselves by a desperate personal effort from the moral bondage of lady-like persons".
39
He was doubtless recalling the New Women whom he had known on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1890s, women who earned their own livings as dancers, writers, artists. At a time when the wild, passionate and masterful women of the ancient Celts were being rediscovered by scholars, Synge put the debate about rural womanhood back on the agenda in the persons of Nora Burke and Pegeen Mike. After all,
The Playboy
starts and ends with Pegeen's plight as a trapped rural woman in a landscape virtually bereft of enterprising men, most of whom have been lost to English jails or to the emigration ship. The girls are all agreed that theirs is a dull life, "going up summer and winter (to the priest) with nothing worthwhile to confess at all".
40
Mayo is a community of timid apple-lickers, people who if tempted in the Garden of Eden, would have licked rather than bitten the apple.
Into this mediocre zone comes Christy, to all intents a landless, propertyless Shawn Keogh, but to all purposes a pure invention of Pegeen Mike. He starts out as and strictly is a nonentity, until he discovers in himself an unexpected gift for mimicry. Noticing the propensity of the Mayo villagers to narrate deeds with reference to the points of the compass, he retells his own deed in these derived terms: "he gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a lep to the east. Then I turned around with my back to the north, and I hit a blow on the ridge of his skull, laid him stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet".
41
In Act One, it is Pegeen and the villagers who speak poetically, telling Christy who he is: and in Act Two, he is saluted as a poet merely for returning to the community, lovingly distorted, a magnified version of its own language.
It is one thing to parody the speech-patterns of interlocutors: it is quite another to appropriate the images, ideas and intensities of an entire literary tradition, as Christy does in wooing Pegeen. The dozens of borrowed lines deployed from
Love Songs of Connacht
may testify to Synge's versatility as a new kind of writer,
42
but, within the play itself, they also expose Christy's initial hollowness as a person, especially when declaring his love in phrases looted blatantly from the songs of the
folk. Most of these borrowings occur in Act Two and the earlier part of Act Three, when Christy's desire has abandoned the language of reality for a factitious and flowery dialect. Not everyone, of course, would find such behaviour contemptible: there is a sense in which Christy becomes a kind of hero in these moments by creating a tradition for himself out of nothing but folk culture, thereby restoring to people an image of themselves. This was, as has been shown, one of Yeats's highest aspirations, never fulfilled in his own person, but envied in the achievement of Hyde.
For Synge's own purposes, Christy
has to
be an empty man at the outset, so that he will carry no baggage from his degrading past into the future. He rejects a false image of self (in the broken mirror) and chooses instead
to be,
creating instant, improvised traditions of himself out of the shreds of popular culture. Denied identity and freedom by his father's misrule, he is living evidence of the nullity to which oppression may reduce a person or a community. Yet that very nullity is also the source of his charm, for it offers the Mayo villagers an empty space into which they can read from a safe distance their fondest dreams. In the first two acts, Christy is the locus of village desire, carrying himself like a revivalist leader on a rise to absolute power. That power is, of course, bogus, since it is a function of the community's mediocrity and since it prevents either the leader or the members of that community from constructing themselves from within. But it is the gift of all desperately oppressed peoples: witness the Irish search for a Messianic hero through the nineteenth century, from O'Connell to Parnell, a catalogue of revivalist icons made and then broken. As saviour and scapegoat, as poet and tramp, Christy is their logical embodiment at the level of artistic imagination. For, after the famines and
emigrations of the 1840s, "Ireland" had almost ceased to exist in the old Gaelic way: what was left – the remaining voices confirmed this – was a terrifyingly open space, in places and in persons.
It is this very emptiness in his personality and in his contexts which has allowed generations of critics to read so many different meanings into the character of Christy, whether Parnell, Cuchulain, Christ,
Oedipus or artist. In doing this, critics simply repeated the actions of the Mayo villagers, using Christy as a mirror in which to read and explore themselves. Indeed, the recorded responses to the play are, undeniably, extensions and imitations of its innermost theme. The villagers onstage discover that the radically transformed society which they had "read into" Christy is not what they wanted at all: and so they go back to their farce of revivalism, of fireside tales told about past heroes. Similarly, Synge's audience decided that they could not brook such innovation and versatility in a text, so they attacked it on those very points of its strength, Synge's knowledge of Gaelic Ireland. Excessive rhetorical claims had been made for Synge by Yeats and others (he was "the chap who writes like
Sophocles, Shakespeare, etc."), which helps to explain some of the vehemence of the reaction against his work. This recapitulates the progress of Christy who makes no stylized claims for himself – other than the parricide, which he genuinely believed himself to have committed. The case for his own heroism is not made by him, but for him.
Chief among the claimants is Pegeen, whose invention Christy really is, her
animus
returned after centuries of Anglicization to the level of female consciousness. Her lament in the play's final lines is less for the physical man just gone offstage than for lost possibilities of her own womanhood. Christy has
liberated an unsuspected femininity in her ("to think it's me is talking sweetly, and I the fright of seven townlands for
my
biting tongue")
43
mainly because he was
so
at ease with
the
female qualities in himself: and the woman in him took an undisguised pleasure in the man in her. Pegeen, being more of a traditionalist, could not fully reciprocate in this androgynous fashion. Though prizing his femininity, she oppressed her man by compelling him to live up to an extreme of hypermasculinity. He did this to an extent by winning all before him at
the
sports, thereby establishing that men who consciously recognize their
anima
are less effeminate than the Shawn Keoghs who are unconsciously enthralled by the repressed female element: but this was not sufficient for Pegeen. She wanted her partner to exemplify a manliness which she could not fully confront or contain, so much was there of it in herself. Doubtless the woman in him, having established her right to exist, connived in all this by demanding the usual proofs that, despite the contrasexual admission, the partner is still reassuringly male.
Christy, revealed as having
not
killed his father, fails her test. It is a mark of her conventionality that such a test, at this late stage, should still seem necessary. No sooner does he attempt another killing on the
spot than she denies the very violence she had courted. When she drives him out at the end, it is as if her
animus
has been repressed back into the unconscious and demonized accordingly. The revolution occurs, but offstage and in the black-out. She, for her part, surrenders to gentility, kills off her
animus,
and opts to become a "proper" country girl of the kind lampooned by the Gaelic poets. As such, she will be a fitting mate for the "puny weed" Shawn Keogh. He restores the old
patriarchy in the village by
telling
Pegeen to burn Christy's leg; and she submits, doing something which, in all probability, Shawn would be afraid to do himself. This is no contradiction, however, since the weakness of the ineffectual male has traditionally masked itself behind a pose of patriarchy, issuing orders and striking postures but achieving little for itself. Repressing a female dimension which it would require courage to confront, such men are enslaved to the
anima
and enfeebled accordingly. Repressing a male dimension which she briefly flirted with, Pegeen becomes once again enslaved to her animus, which explains her reversion to the harsh, sharp-tongued exterior which she presented in the shebeen before the onset of Christy. Compared with Shawn's dithering, this may give her actions the appearance of decision and despatch, but in any comparison with Christy she emerges as a coward who could not live up to the image of freedom for which they both had reached. She lets Christy go at the end, not really because he is weak, but because he has grown too strong for her. From now on, her
animus
denied, she will continue to obey Shawn Keogh.