Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1996 The Allegorical Ireland Figure in the Irish National Theatre, 1899-1926 Svetlana Novakovic Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Novakovic, Svetlana, "The Allegorical Ireland Figure in the Irish National Theatre, 1899-1926" (1996). Dissertations. 3589. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3589 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1996 Svetlana Novakovic LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE ALLEGORICAL IRELAND FIGURE IN THE IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE, 1899-1926 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY SVETLANA NOVAKOVIC CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JANUARY 1996 Copyright by Svetlana Novakovic, 1995 All rights reserved. ll ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Janet Nolan and Pat Casey for patiently reading through my drafts and offering suggestions. I would like to express special gratitude to Verna Foster not only for her abundant technical assistance but also for her enthusiastic belief in Irish drama as performance. The themes I explore in this dissertation would not have been comprehensible without her perspective nor would the long incessant work have been tolerable without her belief that Nora Burke and Juno Boyle are something more than characters in a text. Also, I wish to acknowledge Sandra Blaje for her support during the length of this project; Justin Schaltz for patiently proofreading my early drafts and, more importantly, for always talking about Hal or Othello as if they were real people whom we could be mad at; and Tim Randell for sharing Yeats with me in so many spoken and unspoken ways, and acting out Deirdre each time I wasn't sure of her intentions. But most of all, this project like so many other things would have remained impossible without the support of my parents. I would like to thank my mother for vigilantly keeping all lll the empty spaces in the yard planted with flowers and for her compassionate intelligence, for understanding small and great sufferings in a simple gesture. Juno Boyle and Mrs. Breydon couldn't have captured my heart so intensely if I didn't already know them in you. And I would like to thank my father for teaching me so early on that everything in the world was a story, and perhaps the world itself, and for filling my childhood with stories of Serbian rebels, Croatian peasants, Muslim hodjas --and a gypsy bandit here and there. My first encounter with Synge's peasants, so many years later in college, felt like the acting out of a memory. I would have never understood the powerful allure of a decrepit old woman named Cathleen Ni Houlihan without the "historical memory" you imparted to me each time you recounted the colonial struggles and displacement that mark Yugoslavia's history in each generation, including the present one. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii Chapter INTRODUCTION . 1 1. THE LITERARY TRADITION OF THE ALLEGORICAL IRELAND FIGURE . 13 2. YEATS'S CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN (1902) .......... 51 3. MAURYA: SYNGE'S REALISTIC PEASANT ALTERNATIVE TO CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN (1904) ....... 96 4. NORA BURKE: A SENSUAL CORRECTIVE TO CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN (1904) .......... 116 5. YEATS'S DEIRDRE (1907) AND THE TRADITION OF THE LEGEND LEADING UP TO IT ... 150 6. SYNGE'S DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS (1909) ........ 184 7. O'CASEY'S JUNO BOYLE: THE TENEMENT MOTHER IRELAND (1924) .......... 204 8. O'CASEY'S SUBVERSION OF THE RESPECTABLE IRELAND FIGURE IN THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS (1926) AND RED ROSES FOR ME (1942) ............. 226 AFTERWORD AND AFTER O'CASEY ............. 268 v Appendix FIGURE 1: THE FENIAN PEST 284 FIGURE 2: HOW HAPPY COULD SHE BE WITH NEITHER . .285 FIGURE 3 : THE MAD DOCTOR 286 FIGURE 4: TWO FORCES 287 FIGURE 5: THE BIRTH OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC, 1916 . .288 WORKS CITED . 289 VITA ......................... 302 Vl INTRODUCTION If you want to interest [an Irishman] in Ireland youve [sic] got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination. G.B. Shaw, John Bull's Other Island (1907) The allegorical representation of Ireland as Woman has a long intricate history traceable to the sovereignty goddess from Pre-Christian Gaelic myth. Medieval heroines like Queen Maeve and Deirdre are humanized versions of this goddess. It was only after Tudor colonization, however, and the subsequent shift to the English language that the figure began to assume the political cast (i.e. an anti-colonial, anti-British stance) that became its defining characteristic in modern nationalist literature.1 Issues of gender, political power, and Ireland's colonial identity intersect in each of the Ireland figures discussed in this dissertation. The long-standing Irish tradition of celebrating the national self in the feminine was complicated by Britain's colonial rhetoric, beginning in the sixteenth century, which engendered Ireland as a woman in order to legitimize lThere is also a rich tradition of the Ireland figure in the visual arts beginning in the nineteenth century: oil paintings romantically depicting Eire with a harp as well as more contemporary recruiting posters for both the Irish nationalists and the British. 2 political dominance. The collision of native tradition and colonial ideology in a shared trope complicated and enriched the Woman as Nation allegory in Ireland, where, George-Denis Zimmerman claims, it was developed to a far greater degree than in any other country (54). The figure's popularity is evident in the various female appellations for Ireland in both Gaelic and English --Hibernia, Eire, Erin, speirbhean, Mother Ireland, the Poor Old Woman, the Shan Van Vocht, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, and Dark Rosaleen, to name a few. As popular as the figure was before the inception of the Irish National Theatre, however, it was only after W.B. Yeats transposed the figure to dramatic form in Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902) that the most popular literary version of the trope was created. The intense enthusiasm aroused by Yeats's play inspired several imitations in the National Theatre and even more counter-responses over the following decades; thus, the tradition of the Ireland figure was effectively transposed by Yeats to drama where, I will argue, the trope reached its most complex forms. In retrospect, it seems only natural that the Ireland figure became a focus of interest in the early dramatic movement --four figures appeared in the first five years-­ whose manifesto professed "to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland" (Lady Gregory, Our 8-9). This statement presumes an authority to define and express the Irish 'soul,' the common core of Irish nationality, and 3 implicitly assumes the right to determine which segment of national society is "the real Ireland," or the "Irish Ireland." The Ireland figure had been utilized for this purpose for centuries, as poets changed her features to promote their changing definitions of "Irishness." Modern Irish playwrights, participating in a theatre movement with explicitly nationalist intentions, followed suit. Yeats found the real Ireland in the poetry of the peasant imagination, so he created a Cathleen Ni Houlihan that embodied Ireland's ballad tradition; Synge found the essence of Irish nationality in the tragedy of a peasant mother; O'Casey saw the same national essence encapsulated in the struggles of a proletarian woman. The Ireland figure's long­ standing tradition provided each of these playwrights rich and various source materials with which to convey the.i,r personal vision of 'Irishness'; each of the chapters in this study will explore the ways these source materials, and the Gaelic traditions they reflect, were molded into new figures, each more relevant than the two-dimensional political symbol that the Ireland figure had become by the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the Ireland figure was traditionally used to project a symbolic sense of cultural unity, a communal concept of Irishness never emerged in the Irish theatre. Instead, as Mary FitzGerald observes, "Subtle notions of nationality --or, more precisely, perceived nationality-- 4 played a somewhat divisive role in the early Irish theatre" (148). The succeeding chapters will show how the clash of national visions expressed itself in the ways each playwright purposely revised previous Ireland figures -- especially the repeated attempts to deconstruct the first and most influential figure in this study, Yeats's overtly political Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The first play considered will be Cathleen Ni Houlihan(l902) rather than the equally allegorical The Countess Cathleen(1899), because of its far more influential status, evident in the numerous imitations it inspired and the standard of expectations it created. (Contemporary critics like Arthur Griffith and Mrs. Sheehy- Skeffington note their disappointment with later Ireland figures in the theatre by using Cathleen Ni Houlihan as a standard of comparison.)