CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE BARDIC PARALLELS IN JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE'S THE TINKER'S WEDDING A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Kathy Keely Blundo August, 1988 The Thesis of Kathy Keely Blundo is approved: Dr. Richard Lid CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE ii DEDICATION To PAUL - the love of my life whose support and encouragement made this thesis possible. and To NINA and MIKEY - two of the most wonderful, loving kittens in the world. They died suddenly of distemper after their love carried me through the final stages of this thesis. There will always be an empty place in my heart for them. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE Page 1. Introduction 1 2. The Goddess Culture 4 3. The Conquest of the Goddess Culture 12 4. The Druid Priests 15 5. From Cultural Blend to Patriarchal Domination 18 6. The Druids in Ireland 29 7. Synge's Bardic Education 45 CHAPTER TWO - THE TINKER'S WEDDING 1. Background Information 52 2. The Author's Preface 54 3. Plot 56 4. Characterization 59 a. Sarah 59 b. Mary 63 c. The Priest 66 d. Michael 68 e. Jaunting Jim 69 5. Act I 70 6. Act II 98 7. Notes 117 8. Bibliography 131 iv Q • ABSTRACT BARDIC PARALLELS IN JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE'S THE TINKER'S WEDDING by Kathy Keely Blundo Master of Arts in English This thesis attempts to prove that Synge's plays contain a rich assortment of prehistoric references. The first chapter provides background information by explain­ ing a variety of ancient cultures; the second chapter focuses on a thorough examination of these references in The Tinker's Wedding. The background information includes a brief synopsis of the goddess culture and its subsequent conquest by patriarchal cultures. Initially, the goddess culture blended peacably with its inferior conquerors, the druidic Aryans, and their unity furthered the progress of humanity. As time passed, however, these patriarchal v p • cultures evolved into the Judaic and Christian cultures we embrace today. They, in turn, obliterated the goddess culture. Synge was one of the most assiduous conservationists of the Irish Renaissance that ushered in the twentieth century. His studies in Celtic history and comparative mythology led him to the realization that the peasants of western Ireland had retained prehistoric archetypes in their culture. The oral tradition inspired by ancient druidic bards had preserved tales with parallels in ancient Indo-European literature. Synge strove to preserve the existence and vitality of these ancient archetypes by incorporating them into his plays. The Tinker's Wedding serves as an excellent example of Synge's preservation of antiquity. It is enacted in a timeless setting of tinkers who have remained the same since the Bronze Age. Through their conflict with a priest, the tinkers re-enact the ancient struggle between a pagan blend of goddess and druidic cu~tures and the patriarchal Christian culture that eventually overcame it. vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction John Millington Synge's love for the Irish peasantry was unparalleled. His great fear was that its culture was fading and all traces of an early oral tradition were dying with it. The vibrant wisdom and beauty he found in peasant literature was sorely lacking in his repressed Victorian environment. He would often escape to rural retreats where he found the peasants' ancient tales as fascinating as the ancient ruins that surrounded them. In 1870, the year before Synge was born, Nietzsche summed up this Victorian malaise that later troubled Synge. He isolated it as a malaise over the death of the mythopoeic imagination in a rational age. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? 1 Placed in a framework of extended metaphors, mythology had explained the foundations of social behavior through an elemental instruction in universal truths. Myths included archetypal symbols that taught social values and insights. When the scientific age began debunking myths and religions, artists such as Synge reached back into the 1 distant past to retrieve that elusive essence found in the ancient archetypes. Synge discovered a treasure trove of the ancient religions and mythologies that became archetypes in the stories recited by local bards. In an effort to preserve them in as natural a form as possible, he chose the literary vehicle of drama -- the perfect blend of oral and literary genres. He knew intuitively that the ancient lore of the bards contained a history of man's cultural evolution from animism, magic and promiscuity to monotheism and monogamy. As a modern day bard and an avid promoter of the Irish Renaissance; he strove to insure that such valuable historical data was preserved. The ancient references in Synge's plays, however, are not limited to bardic literary references, although those abound. There are also references to unrecorded goddess cultures who lived in Ireland in prehistory. The numerous invasions that followed these early settlements usually stopped short of the rocky hills and barren islands of western Ireland. There was little to be gained from conquering them. Untouched by the world, the peasants were able to maintain their primitive beliefs until the twentieth century. The bards had preserved not only vestiges of the earliest forms of worship, social­ ization and communication, but the human intensity that 2 had been lost through excessive cultivation. Chapter One will provide the reader with a frame of reference with which to analyze the archetypes Synge rep- resents in his plays. In order to demonstrate the numerous layers of religion embedded in peasant life and, subsequently, Synge's plays, this chapter will include an explanation of the goddess and druidic cultures that spawned the bards. It will also include highlights of Irish prehistory and a brief insight into Synge's bardic influences that will enrich the reader's appreciation of the play. The second chapter will provide an in-depth analysis of the numerous prehistoric and bardic allusions in The Tinker's Wedding. This play was chosen over Synge's other plays because it is relatively unstudied, and deserves far greater recognition than it has received. This analysis will provide evidence of the cultural layers compacted into this play by a playwright who was an authentic cultural conservationist of the Irish Renaissance. 3 THE GODDESS CULTURE The oldest artifacts of the goddess culture found to date have been traced to the Aurignacian culture. Named after a French cave region, this culture spread from Palestine to France, and entered England around 30,000 B.C. The paleolithic paintings on the cave walls in Altamira, Spain and Arege in the French Pyrenees date from at least 20,000 B.C. The Altamiran paintings are the work of the Aurignacian people who have also left records of their rituals ... in Southern Rhodesia. At Domboshowa a Bushman painting ... shows the death of a king who wears an antelope mask and is tightly corseted; as he dies, with arms outflung and one knee upraised, he ejaculates and his seed seems to form a heap of corn. An old priestess lying naked beside a cauldron is either mimick­ ing his agony, or perhaps inducing it by sympathetic magic. Close by, young priest­ esses dance beside a stream, surrounded by clouds of fruit and heaped baskets ... and a huge bison bull is pacified by a priestess accompanied by an erect python. 2 This is the earliest proof we have of a well-developed fertility cult. It represents an ancient goddess religion in which both stag and bull were sacred to the Great Goddess. By the time the Bronze Age came around, this religion had spread throughout Crete, Greece, and Ireland. There is another Aurignacian cave painting in Cogul, Spa~n that depicts the Dionysian sect of the goddess culture. 4 ' ' A young Dionysus with huge genitals stands unarmed, alone and exhausted in the middle of a crescent of nine dancing women who face him. He is naked, except for ... boots; they are fully clothed and wear small cone­ shaped hats. These wild women ..• grow progressively older as one looks clock-wise around the cres­ cent ... In between are three vigor­ ous golden-haired women ... (who) clearly represent the New Moon, Old Moon and Full Moon triads.... 3 The Triple Goddess represented the underworld, the earth and the sky. These three categories were often expanded into nine to accomodate all the roles assigned to the Goddess. As Goddess of the Underworld she was concerned with Birth, Procre­ ation and Death... As goddess of the Earth, she was concerned with the three seasonsof Spring, Sum­ mer and Winter; she animated trees and plants and ruled all living creatures. As Goddess of the Sky she was the Moon in her three phases of New Moon, Full Moon and Waning Moon. 4 This Triple Goddess was a personification of primitive 5 woman as creatress and destructress. Numerous cave walls and tombs of the Paleolithic period demonstrate that woman's sexuality was a major preoccupation. "We mainly find hunting scenes and female representations, such as the Venus of Lespugue or the Venu~ of Willendorff, statuettes with greatly exaggerated 6 sexual characteristics." Markale notes that "woman was a 5 (~ . a magical creature, in touch with the divinities and uniquely indispensable for the survival of the species ... 7 But fertility was not associated with sexuality." The next group to make themselves known to archae- ologists were the Gravettians, hunters who had populated an area ranging from South Russia to Spain.