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Waking the Dead: Funerary Performance, Classical Adaptation, and Gendered Embodiment on the Early Abbey Stage

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Waking the Dead: Funerary Performance, Classical Adaptation, and Gendered Embodiment on the Early Abbey Stage WAKING THE DEAD: FUNERARY PERFORMANCE, CLASSICAL ADAPTATION, AND GENDERED EMBODIMENT ON THE EARLY ABBEY STAGE BY RACHEL PRICE COOPER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Theatre in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Valleri Robinson, Chair Senior Lecturer Eamonn Jordan Kirkpatrick Professor Vicki Mahaffey Associate Professor Andrea Stevens ii Abstract Funerary performances loom large in the earliest accounts of Ireland and Irishness that come down to us. In colonial Ireland, unregulated wakes and funerary traditions endured in spite of legal and ecclesiastical attempts to police death’s meaning according to the interests of the dominant power structure. By the time Anglo-Irish playwrights re-discovered the mourning practices of the Irish people at the end of the nineteenth century, they had largely been forced into obscurity. William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory’s plays frequently and selectively refer to two such vernacular traditions: the caoineadh and the Irish wake. This study analyzes plays produced by the Abbey theatre during its formative years that intermingle observations of vernacular funerary performances in rural Ireland with ancient Greek precedents. I argue that this intertextual brand of theatrical lamentation frequently constructed gender according to certain bodies’ imagined proximity to corporeality. Analyzing the onstage presence, or lack thereof, of the predominantly male “dead” body alongside animate, female characters’ performance of mourning makes visible the ways in which these performance texts place women in a bind between asserting themselves as particularized, intending subjects in their own right and characters’ whose actions are circumscribed by a predetermined social role that is bound up in the flesh. The Gregory, Synge, and Yeats plays addressed in the following chapters each stage a funerary scenario where women actors are evaluated as appropriate producers and caretakers of human bodies, both living and dead, in relation to classically endorsed, gendered divisions of labor and embodiment. In contrast, idealized masculinity is achieved through the loss of corporeality. This configuration reiterates a platonic vision of mind-body dualism, which defines iii human interiority as superior and distinct from human biology. When humans are signified dualistically and the concept of the eternal soul is understood through its binary opposition to the finite body, an asymmetrical relationship emerges that can result in the devaluing of characters aligned with corporeality and physical longevity in comparison to the tragic figure who achieves apotheosis and spiritual survival through premature death. The funerary mode remains a prominent of feature in representations of Irishness today. The Irish obsession with commemorating dead men is perhaps symptomatic of a pervasive cultural tendency to disassociate from human embodiment. This study engages with the status of the flesh when the theatrical trope of masculine death is so frequently reiterated alongside feminine performances of bereavement. iv Acknowledgments This dissertation was a labor of love that could not have come into being without a substantial amount of people. I would like to give special thanks to my Irish grandparents, Patrick Price, Lavinia Mullany Price, and Anne Judge MaGlaughlin Price, whose stories and wit first drew me towards the land of their birth. I was honored to have several brilliant minds serve on this dissertation's committee. To Dr. Eamonn Jordan, whose courses on contemporary Irish theatre had me hooked as an undergraduate and who supervised my master's thesis prior to serving on this committee, you have been a constant source of knowledge and support for many years now. I would have never come this far without your mentorship. To Dr. Vicki Mahaffey, thank you for first enchanting me with Yeats and for continuing to challenge me in my ongoing relationship with his corpus of work. To Dr. Andrea Stevens, your utterly genuine and insightful feedback was invaluable, as was your enthusiasm for interrogating how these plays manifest as embodied entities in a particular place and time. Special thanks goes to my committee chair, Dr. Valleri Robinson, who remained a constant source of positivity throughout this long and sometimes winding process. Thank you for giving me the space to follow my intuition and thank you for reeling me back in when the project became so big that it lost focus. To my fantastic cohort, especially Yu-yun Hsieh, Youngji Jeon, Mina Sohaj, Michelle Solerno, and Sara Thiel, thank you for keeping me sane. Thank you also for being brilliant, generous, genuine people. I won the lottery when fate chose to put us together. Mina, thank you for allowing me to essentially live in your house when I was trekking across the state every week. To my amazing family, especially John, Margaret, Sean, and Teddy Price, your love and support has been unwavering even as I had to divert time and focus towards achieving this goal. Finally, to my v partner, Riley Cooper, you have been my rock. We have both made so many sacrifices to get here. I could not have done any of this without you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: IRISH MORBIDITY AND THE ANCIENT GREEKS..................................1 CHAPTER 1: SETTING THE STAGE: THE OLYMPIANS AND DANU'S CHILDREN.................................................................................................................................. 24 CHAPTER 2: CLASSING AND GENDERING THE MIND-BODY SPLIT IN THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN...............................................................................................................53 CHAPTER 3: WOMB, LOOM, TOMB: WOMEN'S WORK IN RIDERS TO THE SEA...........96 CHAPTER 4: ABSENT CORPSES AND DUELING MOURNERS IN THE GAOL GATE....132 CONCLUSION...........................................................................................................................170 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................186 1 Introduction: Irish Morbidity and the Ancient Greeks On June 26, 2015, ABC aired an episode of The Bachelorette in which the contestant and her suitors travelled to Dublin during one leg of their exploitative journey to find true love. The American reality show’s format dictates that, as the harem of eligible men shrinks, its remaining participants are whisked away on a whirlwind trip around the world. The contestants participate in stereotypical activities associated with each region they visit. The Dublin episode featured a “group date” to an Irish wake. The bachelorette, Kaitlyn Birstowe, pretended to be a corpse and each man took his turn in publically eulogizing her. They went around the coffin saying a few parting words about the motionless woman playing dead, sometimes addressing her directly, sometimes addressing their peers. Most took the opportunity to praise and entertain her—they were still attempting to win her affections and, in turn, the competition. A few men aired thinly veiled grievances. For instance, one suitor claimed that Bristowe had tragically died of boredom after having to spend the previous day with a particularly disliked, frontrunner named Nick. Another contestant, who had recently lost his mother, took the scenario quite seriously and expressed grief at having lost a woman he was beginning to imagine a future with. Once everyone had said their piece, the bachelorette sat up in her coffin and two traditional musicians entered the scene. They led the group in singing “There’s Whiskey in the Jar” while everyone had a drink. They continued on on to the Guinness storehouse where one lucky suitor was selected to accompany the resurrected bachelorette to a cathedral. Finally, the two were serenaded by, none other than, the Cranberries. What is interesting about the Dublin episode’s crass sampling of Irish stereotypes is that it actually references a very real cultural gravitation towards wakes, funerals, and performances of bereavement that has received increasing critical attention in recent years. The funerary situation presented on The Bachelorette 2 is a gendered inversion of several dramatic precedents that permeated assertions of cultural identity on Irish stages a little more than a century ago. Not only does it invert the sacred trope of feminine bereavement enacted as a reaction to masculine death, it also refers to the comedic convention of a corpse (again, usually male) waking up to disrupt the obsequies enacted by women on its behalf. This study primarily analyzes plays produced by the Abbey theatre during its formative years that draw upon ancient Greek mythology and drama to emphasize female characters as caretakers of human bodies, both living and dead, in relation to classically endorsed divisions of labor and embodiment. John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) and Lady Augusta Gregory’s The Gaol Gate (1906) emphasize female characters as threshold entities charged with ushering their male counterparts into and out of the physical world. William Butler Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen (1899) is presented as an anomalistic antecedent to the plays that would come after it. Yeats’ play was widely rejected for its insensitive treatment of the famine and its bestial portrayal of the Irish poor. I
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