Nordic Irish Studies Published by Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies (DUCIS) Nordic Irish Studies Network (NISN) General Editors: Literature: Carmen Zamorano Llena ([email protected]) Politics, History, Sociology, Cultural Studies: Billy Gray ([email protected]) Assistant Editors: Literature: Åke Persson Politics, History, Sociology, Cultural Studies: John Braidwood Book Reviews: Heidi Hansson International Advisory Board: Charles Armstrong, Michael Böss, David Clark, Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Derek Hand, Meg Harper, Werner Hüber, Anthony Johnson, Catherine Maignant, Gerard McCann, Hedwig Schwall Copyright © DUCIS, NISN, and the authors. Printed by Strålins ISBN 978-87-91259-17-3 ISSN 1602-124X The aim of Nordic Irish Studies is to publish quality research done by scholars from all disciplines included in the field of Irish Studies. Nordic Irish Studies supports both the publication of inter-disciplinary work, and studies rooted in the methodologies and theories of the individual scholars’ disciplines. We wish to acknowledge kind support from the Irish Embassy, Stockholm COVER DESIGN: Simon Ågren The image on the back cover is a wood-carved head of a dragon in the Hiberno- Scandinavian Ringerike style, excavated at Dublin’s Wood Quay site This journal is listed in JSTOR and EBSCO Host databases and classified as category INT-1 in the European Research Index for the Humanities, ERIH Subscriptions, Sales and Advertisements Carmen Zamorano Llena Department of English School of Humanities and Media Studies Dalarna University SE-791 88 Falun Sweden 3-year subscription rate: 40 EUR, delivery incl. Price per single volume: 14 EUR, delivery incl.; for overseas delivery, add 2 EUR per volume. Free to paid-up members of NISN, Nordic Irish Studies Network (membership fee 2014: 50 EUR). Membership of NISN includes membership of the European Federation of Associations and Centres for Irish Studies (EFACIS). Editors Carmen Zamorano Llena and Billy Gray Volume 13 Number 2 2014 Contents Literature Chu He Nationalism and the West in Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane 1 Laura Lojo Rodríguez Unveiling the Past: Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s ‘Sex in the Context of Ireland’ 19 Marie Mianowski The Choreography of Exile in Colum McCann’s Fiction 31 Wit Pietrzak Yeats’s Hauntings: Exorcising the Demon of Fanaticism in Michael Robartes and the Dancer 43 Barry Sheils ‘Mr Yeats’s treacherous instinct of adaptability’: Subjectivity, Culture, and Theatrical Space 59 Politics, History, Sociology, Cultural Studies Anne Goarzin Seeing Seeing in Steve McQueen’s Hunger 79 Richard S. Grayson From Genealogy to Reconciliation: Public Engagement with Remembrance of the First World War in Ireland 99 Anthony Keating ‘Muscovite Days-and Nights’: A Small Town Irish Newspaperman’s Soviet Travelogue of 1934 115 Richard Kirkland Creating Irish London: Modes of Performative Irishness in London, 1870-1890 137 Alexandra Slaby Understanding the Recent Renamings of the Irish Department of Arts 155 Reviews 171 Contributors 183 Nationalism and the West in Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane Chu He Given their drastically different backgrounds – one is a Tyron native, writing primarily in Ireland from the 1960s to the 1990s while the other is a London-based playwright of Irish immigrant parents whose dramatic debut was published in the 1990s – Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh are seldom considered together. Although they can be said to be writers of different cultures and generations, their portrayals of the west of Ireland are surprisingly similar: both demythologise this nationalist construct and uncover its morbid, violent interior. This article will compare Friel’s The Gentle Island with McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Written twenty years apart, both plays react to de Valera’s national myth of a Catholic, Gaelic Ireland, in which not only the idyllic, self-sufficient country life and noble peasant are exposed as false pretensions but the Catholic morality is also shown to be so dangerously oppressive that it promotes violence. More importantly, this article will argue that through the brutal confrontation between the characters’ backwater world and an intrusive outside world, both plays depict the inevitable bankruptcy of a parochial, xenophobic nationalism in a modern, globalising time. Although no ready remedy is offered directly, the malicious, suicidal cycle presented in the plays clearly rings the death toll for the old myth and calls for a new definition of Irishness. The myth of the west started not only as a reaction to colonial stereotypes but more importantly, as an answer to the Irish people’s need for a national identity. If the English colonisers denigrated the Irish people and country as barbarous and backward, the Irish nationalists go to the other extreme: they sanctified the Irish people as heroic and noble with a glorious Gaelic past and propagated the west as intact and authentic because it was distanced from the Anglicised, corrupted east and thus retained its Gaelic-speaking, old-fashioned lifestyle. In this way, an idealised west was created by cultural nationalism: as the preserver of the Gaelic language and culture, the west represents the Irish national identity, characterised by a timelessly noble peasantry and an idyllic countryside. Such romanticising Gaelic traditions gave rise to the Gaelic League and the Nordic Irish Studies Irish Literary Revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which ‘resurrected’ the dying Irish language and the forgotten Irish mythology and folklore. Striving to reclaim ‘a pre-colonial past [. .] free from imperial interference’, Irish nationalists idolised a Gaelic, Catholic, peasant identity’,1 the very opposite to their Protestant, urban, English colonisers, not aware of the falseness of their own fabricated noble Irishmen and their Gaelic west. Yeats and Synge were two important contributors to the myth of the west. According to Declan Kiberd, Yeats has ‘said “Connaught for me is Ireland’. To him, it was the repository of an essential national identity embodied in folklore, poetry, the Irish tongue. It was the landscape of dreams and imagination’.2 In this sense, ‘Yeats actually stood sponsor for [. .] the myth when he celebrated his dream of the noble and the beggar man’.3 Likewise, Synge had his share in the myth of the west and the peasant life. As his travelling account The Aran Islands ‘presents a powerful attraction to the west, to a world that is native’,4 he clearly idealised the islanders’ lives as simple, integrated, and pristine, contrasting sharply with the vulgar life in mainland cities and towns. Living with Gaelic-speaking people also enabled Synge to speak the native language. His ingenious use of Irish vernacular added a strong, rustic flavour to his plays and rendered a true-to-life picture of the peasant life, which, as the manifesto of the new national theatre – the Abbey Theatre – declared, presented a real Ireland for the Irish audience.5 In this way, his reproduction of Hiberno-English and the peasant life contributed as much as his travel journal to the formation of the myth, and his ‘assiduous desire “to restore and preserve the folk-cultural texts of the Gaelic-Irish peasantry” (Castle 265) necessarily locates his work within a nationalist endeavor’.6 As an important source to boost Irish people’s self-esteem and to differentiate themselves from the English, the myth of the west ‘governed cultural productions since the beginning of the cultural revival in the 1880s [. .] guided the political ideology of the 1916 revolutionaries [. .] shaped social and economic policy in the first decades of the Irish Free State after 1922’7 and actually continued to influence the politics of the Irish government from the 1930s to the 1960s. Promoted by conservative politicians such as Michael Collins and de Valera, the ideal of a pastoral, self-reliant Ireland ruled the new Republic: A land whose countryside would be bright with cozy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for 2 Nationalism and the West the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.8 De Valera’s vision of a bucolic, Gaelic utopia, however, ‘never really existed in the first place’, and it was only ‘a picture of what we like to imagine that self to be rather than what that self is’.9 Nostalgia and romanticism prevented the Irish nationalists from seeing that their Gaelic past was not pure or authentic and their country people and life were not noble or idyllic either. Given the persisting fantasy of the west, both Friel and McDonagh choose to revisit this old myth in their plays when Ireland transforms from a Catholic, nationalist, rural country to a modern, international, and increasingly disenfranchised state since the 1970s and thus an overhaul of the old molds is direly needed to make room for the new developments. As Friel says, ‘we are more concerned with defining our Irishness than with pursuing it. We want to know what the word native means, what the word foreign means. We want to know have the words any meaning at all. And persistent considerations like these erode old certainties and help clear the building site’.10 By showing their characters trapped in a desolate island or a suffocating cottage in the west of Ireland and eventually committing homicide, Friel and McDonagh concur in their exposure of the sinister reality behind the romantic myth. While tearing down the enshrined image of the west, they also attack two allegiances that closely knitted with the myth: ‘loyalty to the most authoritarian church in the world and devotion to a romantic ideal we call Kathleen’.11 In the two plays, Catholic morality is shown to be as lethal as nationalist ideology, for they both enthrall the female characters to sterility and drive them to maniac violence.