W oman and the Land in the Irish Peasant Play
Joy Richmond
Using three seminal plays of the early Irish dramatic movement—W. B.
Yeats and August Gregory’s Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902), J. M. Synge’s
In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), and Padraic Colum’s The Land
(1905)—this paper investigates the complications that arise at the
crossroads of woman and land in the Irish peasant drama. It interrogates
the significance of the “woman at the hearth” to the Irish nationalist
vision of Irishness—her centrality to land issues and the disruptiveness
caused when she abandons the hearth.
In many peasant plays of the burgeoning Irish dramatic movement during
the first decade of the twentieth century, the major dramatic conflict centers
on two seemingly disparate elements: woman and land. Yet, investigations
into these plays rarely focus on the relationship between the two, beyond
those instances wherein woman is the physical embodiment of Ireland, such
as in William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Kathleen ni Houlihan
(1902). Woman as Ireland, however, represents only one intersection of
woman and land in these early plays. The largest percentage of these plays
depicts the “woman at the hearth,” and harmony is often disturbed when
this ideal is disrupted, often through a shift in the woman’s relationship to
the land itself. For example, woman leaves the land through emigration
(Padraic Colum’s The Land, 1905), or she returns to the land (to nature) to
wander the roads (John Millington Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen,
1903).
Using these three plays, this paper seeks not only to understand the relationship of woman and land in the Irish peasant play, but also to investigate
Joy Richmond is an independent scholar who received her PhD from the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas in spring 2007. She has a
paper forthcoming in the Texas Theatre Journal. She is also a director, stage
manager, and dramaturg. She was the Managing Editor for the Journal of Dramatic
Theory of Criticism for five years and currently works as a professional managing
editor for a firm that provides editorial services for academic journals.
20
New England Theatre Journal
the complications that arise at the crossroads of woman and land in Irish
nationalist discourse of the early twentieth century—to interrogate the
significance of the “woman at the hearth,” its centrality to land issues (both
of which were central to the re-imagining of Irish nationality), and its disruptiveness when abandoned. In doing so, I will first briefly contextualize
these plays within the dramatic, historical, and political perspectives of the
late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Ireland. Next, I discuss the significance of the Irish peasant play—and the woman’s place within that genre—
as a tool for Irish nationalism. Finally, I examine the relationship between
woman and land in each of the three plays.
“We are out to kill the Stage Irishman”
In April 1902, the fledgling Irish National Theatre Society (INTS;
founders of the Abbey Theatre) produced their first plays under the slogan,
“We are out to kill the Stage Irishman” (Clarke 79). On the surface, this
statement expresses the desire of the INTS to get rid of an unflattering
stock character that had been present on the English stage since Shakespeare’s Captain MacMorris. But I believe that the deeper ideological task
of the statement carried with it an agenda designed to attack well established stereotypes of and racial bias towards the Irish that were created by
the English as early as the 1180s and that, by the end of the Victorian era,
permeated all corners of English culture, including not only the stage, but
also novels, newspapers, cartoons, the writing of history, and politics, to
name only a few.1 This racial stereotype encompassed a variety of characteristics ascribed to Irish nationality that ranged from the blundering,
drunken Irish servant or the braggart warrior type, both with Irish bulls and
blarney dripping from their lips, to the more insidious Irish rebel of the
second half of the nineteenth century. To demonstr1ate the pervasiveness
of Irish stereotypes within English culture and the assertions these
stereotypes made about the Irish people’s (in)ability to participate fully in
civilized society, I now turn briefly to a form of cultural expression other
than the stage: Irish caricatures found in English illustrated magazines.
In his book Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, L.
Perry Curtis, Jr., examines images of the Irish found in English political
cartoons from the 1860s through the early 1900s, which, he convincingly
argues, illustrated a shift in views about the Irish that transformed Irishmen
from drunken, happy-go-lucky peasants to dangerous ape-men (Curtis vii).
In this study, he contextualizes these caricatures within prevailing (and
changing) social and “medical” theories of the time, such as physiognomy,
discourses about civilization, and the Darwinian debate over evolution.
Reductively, if the Irish occupied a rung on the ladder of the races of man
a mere step up from the apes, which, in their view, could be proved through
Joy Richmond
21
the application of physiognomy to the physical attributes of the Irish, then
they were certainly ill-equipped to build civilization, much less govern
themselves. These caricatures, therefore, demonstrated “that cluster of attitudes and assumptions which made up the image of the Irish Celt . . . as a
creature not fully civilized and not quite human” (Curtis, Apes and Angels
vii).
John Tenniel, “Two Forces.” Punch 29 Oct 1881: 199.
22
New England Theatre Journal
Figure 1, entitled “Two Forces,” which appeared in Punch on 29 Oct.
1881, is a representative example of caricatures of the Irish from the latter
decades of the nineteenth century (Tenniel). In this drawing, the female
figure of Hibernia is protected and comforted under the arm of Britannia,
who fearlessly confronts the wild, apish, brute figure of an Irishman. Note
that Britannia (personified England) is masculinized, is squashing the Land
League under her foot, and is buttressed by a sword representing the law,
while the ape-man, in disheveled Irish costume, is labeled an anarchist who
can only lead his assault with such primitive (or, one might say, uncivilized) weaponry as throwing rocks. Personified Ireland (Hibernia) is
illustrated as a fair maiden. Her costume is similar to that of Britannia, but
without shoes, helmet, and neatly coifed hair, and she is not yet the fullyformed woman found in the figure of Britannia. These characteristics mark
her as the child/sister of Britannia. The implications of the drawing are
several: (1) Ireland is a young civilization, not yet fully formed; (2) Fair
Erin is in need of protection from the brutish Irishman who is out to destroy
the still virginal civilization that the English have sought to build in Ireland;
(3) It is only the civilizing influence of English rule—the law guarded by
the disciplined and stern, but caring, mother figure who will use physical
force, if necessary—that can save Hibernia from the “wild,” primitive Irishman; (4) Irishmen, especially those who defy the English government, fall
below humans (even human women) in the hierarchy; (5) These ape-men
are undisciplined, uncivilized, and ill-equipped to govern or protect themselves, much less their country, particularly in a modernizing world. Thus,
the cartoon is not merely a cartoon; it is a complex cultural statement about
the civilized and uncivilized, about who can and cannot, should and should
not, rule in Ireland. This notion can be extrapolated to any number of
cultural products, not the least of which was the Stage Irishman, who was
frequently depicted as an illiterate, drunken, uncivilized buffoon, and occasionally as a violent rebel bent on destroying what civilization the English
had been able to put in place in Ireland. The fact that the Stage Irishman
was an embodied representation added an extra “oompf” to the contentions
that the racial stereotype made.
Irish Nationalism, Culture, and Nationality
The Irish nationalist trend towards a highly-politicized, cultural nationalism from the 1890s forward created the conditions necessary for the
formation of the Irish national theatre and, subsequently, the Irish peasant
play. The main thrust of the cultural nationalist movement was to
(re)discover (or, as we now understand it, to “invent”2 ) a cultural identity
that was peculiar to Ireland. In this regard, the 1890s witnessed the establishment of several cultural organizations, including the Irish Agricultural
Joy Richmond
23
Organisation Society, which supported an Irish civilization centered on the
rural home; the Irish Literary Society, which sought to create literature by
and about the Irish; and the Gaelic League, which pushed for a revival of
the Irish language. In 1899, Irish theatre made its first appearance with the
founding of the Irish Literary Theatre, whose stated goal was to “show that
Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment” for the “Irish
people, who are weary of misrepresentation” (Gregory 9) and was followed
by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902.
The project of rediscovering an Irish cultural identity was grounded in
rural Western Ireland—the area most associated with the land—which
constituted the grounding for the Irish nationalist alternative to the vision
of the Irish that the English had produced and proliferated for almost three
hundred years. The concept of “home” was key to this substitute construction: it provided not only the foundation upon which Irish nationality was
built, but also served as the link between the land and the people. The Irish
had toiled on the land, making it fit for crops and cattle; in some cases, they
had gone through the back-breaking work of reclaiming hostile and infertile
soil; and they had built the houses and other structural improvements on the
land.
The emphasis on the land asserted a continuity with the past, whereby
generations of physical labor and hardship had gone into acquiring, working, and developing the land, and served as the basis for Irish claims to
sovereignty, because the peasant farmer was positioned as settler rather
than mere tenant or squatter. He had struggled and won a kind of permanence against the hostilities of both nature and history. This permanence
posited a proven record of the Irish people’s ability to create a stable
community that, because of that record, had a reasonable expectation of
continued success as they marched into the future. The peasant was, therefore, asserted as the maker of Irish civilization, literally from the ground up,
which was an enormously important proposition in the assault against the
Stage Irishman and his counterparts: The peasant who created Irish civilization with his own hands could not possibly be the wild, transient fellow
embodied on the English stage (or in the weekly edition of Punch, Fun, or
Judy).
In another sense, “home”—as domestic space—was the place of family.
It was also the place where the community gathered. The emphasis on
home, therefore, also served to locate the family and local community at the
center of Irish civilization. It also defined the role of the peasant farmer’s
wife: her place was within the home as wife and mother, as domestic
support for her husband and rearer of Ireland’s future—the children who
would continue Irish civilization. The Irish Homestead, the publishing
organ of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, waged a full-blown
24
New England Theatre Journal
campaign about the role of women in Irish civilization—a campaign that
can best be described as a program of indoctrination that iterated time and
time again that women’s “domestic role in the home” was her contribution
to shaping the “character of an Irish national identity.”3
At the same time, another important aspect of Irish nationalist rhetoric
conflated woman and land into one of the most enduring symbols in Irish
cultural history—that of the woman as nation. In this construction, Ireland
was seen, by turns, as the Poor Old Woman of Irish folklore and song or as
a chaste maiden, both of whom were in need of rescue and protection by
the chivalrous male hero who was ready to give his life for her. In some
depictions of this symbol, the woman begins her story as the old woman
who is transformed into the chaste maiden through the blood sacrifice of
the male hero.
Through these two constructions of Irish womanhood, cultural nationalists were able to confront a number of the assumptions offered in such
English cultural texts as the caricature “Two Forces.” For example, they
symbolically wrested Hibernia from under the arm of Britannia and placed
her under the protection of the (rebellious) peasant male. Moreover, Hibernia is not as young as she looks. Quite the contrary, she is an old civilization who has been almost destroyed by Britannia and will only be rejuvenated once Britannia lets her go. The peasant male has civilized the country
as evidenced by the stability of the Irish rural home and the domesticated
wife, and, therefore, he is neither brutish and ape-like nor wild and primitive. He is indeed capable of governing his own affairs. This alternative
version of Irishness serves as the foundation of the Irish National Theatre
Society’s invention of the Irish peasant play, which, in its capacity as performed text, was a three-dimensional, embodied manifestation of the Irish
nationalist construction of the Irish; in a sense, the peasant play can even
be viewed as a rehearsal of it.
The Irish Peasant Play at the Abbey Theatre
Most of the plays in the company’s repertoire are peasant plays, that
is plays dealing with peasant life.
— Frank Fay, 1908 lecture 4
This definition offers a broad description of the genre of the peasant
play that suggests a focus on character, that of the peasant. The setting for
these plays is particularly significant: the interior of the Irish peasant home.
Through this choice of setting, Irish peasant plays, in a very concrete way,
were able to reify many of the values of the Irish nationalist construction—
most notably, home as the material connection between land and characters,
and home as the woman’s place. Though the audience never actually saw
Joy Richmond
25
the land onstage, a phenomenological sense that the land was just outside
the door haunted the stage, which was highlighted through the plays’
exposition or dialogue, character actions, and indexical properties, such as
farming implements. In the same way, other conclusions could be drawn
about what was outside the door: small barns or other structures, such as
pigsties, subsistence gardens, fields with sheep, cows, or crops, etc. Indeed,
the plays often reference these things. In this manner, the land was an everpresent, underlying force.
The choice of the feminine domain as the setting in these plays also
served as the background for enacting notions of Irish femininity. In fact,
the home setting and the position of female characters within the plays
frequently resonate with the ideological principles towards women found
in the pages of The Irish Homestead. However, as the following discussion
of Kathleen ni Houlihan, The Land, and In the Shadow of the Glen demonstrates, while many (if not most) of these plays reinforced the woman’s
place in the home, they also often revealed an irreconcilability between the
ideal expressed in the nationalist construction and the reality of peasant
life, most notably for women.
Kathleen ni Houlihan5
Yeats and Gregory’s play holds a notable position in the development
of the Irish peasant play in that it precisely articulates the nationalist ideal
of the Western peasant farming family described above: the peasant cottage
setting, a rural family from the peasant farming class, a capable, stable male
head of the household, a rebel son ready to fight for the cause of Ireland,
etc. It is not surprising, therefore, that audiences applauded the play as a
piece of “red-hot patriotic sentiment” (Holloway 17). Just as significant, the
play clearly depicts both constructions of Irish woman—woman as Ireland
and the peasant farmer’s wife—a situation not found in most other plays of
the genre. It, therefore, offers a unique glimpse of the two representations
structurally juxtaposed within the same play. This juxtaposition exposes the
symbolic and material relationships of women to the land within the nationalist ideal, both as individual constructions and as two representations that
are inherently irreconcilable.
On the one hand, Kathleen appears as the symbolic, embodiment of
Ireland, who tells the story of Ireland in metaphoric terms in this exchange
between Bridget and Kathleen:
O LD W OM AN . [I]t is long I am on the road since I first went wandering. It is seldom I have any rest.
B RID GET . It is a wonder you are not worn out with so much wandering.
26
New England Theatre Journal
O LD W OM AN . Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet,
but there is no quiet in my heart. W hen the people see me quiet
they think old age has come on me, and that all the stir has gone
out of me.
B RID GET . W hat was it put you astray?
O LD W OM AN . Too many strangers in the house. . . . My land was
taken from me. . . . My four beautiful green fields. (Yeats and
Gregory 225–26) 6
Ireland is old, yes, but is not in a state of old age. Beaten down under the
yoke of oppression, sometimes tired and quiet, yes, but the fire is still there
waiting to be rekindled.
Later in the play, as Kathleen sings about a man who was hanged in
Galway, Michael asks her how he died. She replies, “He died for love of
me” (Yeats and Gregory 227). She later refuses offers of food and money
and declares what she wants from Michael, “If anyone would give me help
he must give me himself, he must give me all” (Yeats and Gregory 228). In
other words, Ireland cannot be bribed or bought; she can only be rejuvenated through the blood sacrifice of the Irish male. Kathleen, then, is the
ethereal guardian of the land’s memory and history, as well as the siren call
for the land’s redemption.
On the other hand, Bridget and Delia represent literal women who have
earthly and practical—material—connections to the land. In the following
dialogue between Peter and Bridget Gillane about the dowry their son’s
bride Delia is bringing with her, Bridget states these material conditions
clearly (and testily):
P ETER . I wish I had had the luck to get a hundred pounds, or twenty
pounds itself, with the wife I married?
B RID GET . W ell, if I didn’t bring much I didn’t get much. W hat had
you the day I married you but a flock of hens . . . , and a few
lambs . . . ? (She is vexed and bangs a jug on the dresser.) If I
brought no fortune I worked it out in my bones, laying down the
baby, Michael . . . , on a stook of straw, while I dug the potatoes,
and never asking big dresses or anything but to be working.
(Yeats and Gregory 223)
Shortly thereafter, Peter reinforces the peasant woman’s material connection to the land when he talks about what Delia’s dowry will enable him to
do with the farm: “We can take the ten acres of land we have a chance of
. . . and stock it” (Yeats and Gregory 223). The peasant woman’s contributions to the homestead, either through work or money, provide the measure
of her value.
Joy Richmond
27
Additionally, the peasant woman’s function as child-bearer and wife
provides a different measure of her worth, in terms that crossover into both
manifestations of Irish woman: materially, her children and her children’s
children will continue to work the land, to maintain the integrity of Irish
civilization, in the future; symbolically, she bears children who will be
sacrificed to the greater cause of Ireland, which is, in the play and in the
rhetoric of Irish nationalism, also for the sake of Irish civilization. Moreover, as the play demonstrates, the nationalist construction demands that
the literal woman subsumes her interests to the symbolic. This tension
between the symbolic and literal representations of Irish womanhood marks
the central conflict of Kathleen ni Houlihan. For example, Bridget implores
Michael and, then, Kathleen:
B RID GET . It is not her friends you have to go and welcome, Michael;
it is the girl coming into the house you have to welcome . . . ; you
would not have an empty house before her. (To the old woman.)
Maybe you don’t know, ma’am, that my son is going to be
married.
O LD W OM AN . It is not a man going to his marriage that I look to for
help. (Yeats and Gregory 228)
Once Kathleen has entranced Michael, Bridget attempts to break him out
of it in a gesture that brings the call of the symbolic woman into the sharpest conflict with the material, literal woman: “Look at him, Peter; he has the
look of a man that has got the touch. (Raising her voice.) Look here,
Michael, at the wedding clothes. . . . You have a right to fit them on now”
(Yeats and Gregory 230). At the end of the play, Delia enters and Bridget
implores her to “coax” Michael away from Kathleen. Delia begs, “Michael,
you won’t leave me! . . . (She puts her arms about him. He turns to her as
if about to yield.)” (Yeats and Gregory 230). But, he hears Kathleen calling
from outside and follows her. Kathleen has her blood sacrifice and becomes
a young girl with “the walk of a queen” (Yeats and Gregory 231). The symbolic woman is transformed. The cost? While the presence of the younger
son affords some hope for the future, in the immediate, the Gillanes lose a
son; they lose the opportunity to buy more land through his marriage to
Delia, who loses a husband. Thus, the future of Irish civilization is, at once,
advanced and retarded.
The Land: An Agrarian Comedy in Three Acts7
Even though Padraic Colum’s The Land does not contain the symbolic
woman as nation character, the land and woman’s relationship to the land
are woven into the play’s emigration theme and act as a catalyst for the
28
New England Theatre Journal
play’s major and minor conflicts. Written for (and produced by) the Abbey
Theatre in 1905, Colum grounded the play’s action in current events: the
passing of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, which made it possible for
tenants to purchase the land they farmed from their landlords. The Land
asserts the necessity of following through on the newly-granted right to
purchase the land already in the possession of peasant farmers and, if
possible, improving upon it. In act 1, for example, Murtagh and Martin
argue about the proposed marriage between their children, Matt and Ellen:
M U RTAGH C O S G AR . And do you think a son of mine would marry
a daughter of yours?
M ARTIN D OU RAS . W hat great difference is between us, after all?
M U RTAGH C OSGAR . (fiercely) The daughter of a man who’d be
sitting over his fire reading his paper, and the clouds above his
potatoes, and the cows trampling his oats. (Colum 99)
It is already clear from earlier in the play that Martin cannot purchase
his land. Moreover, in the above passage, Murtagh implies that Martin is
a bad farmer. Thus, Ellen has two strikes against her: she cannot bring a
dowry or land into the marriage, and she does not have the pedigree of a
good farmer to back her up, which might, as with Bridget in Kathleen,
enable her to compensate for her economic lack through hard work and
good farming skills. For Murtagh, Ellen has nothing to contribute to the
improvement of the rural homestead, and, therefore, he refuses the match.
Martin, however, has a better grasp of the consequences of such a refusal:
“There’s many a young man left house and land for the sake of some
woman” (Colum 98). And, indeed, this is exactly Matt’s reaction to his
father’s bull-headedness: “A little house, a bit of land. Do you think they
could keep me here?” (Colum 102). After Matt exits, Murtagh laments, “He
can’t go. How could he go and he the last of the name” (Colum 103). What
Martin already realizes and Murtagh begins to understand here is that the
future continuity of a patrilineal-based Irish civilization depends on keeping
and procreating male heirs, which, in turn, rests on keeping the female in
the rural home.
Ellen’s dilemma consists of the choice between accepting a teaching job
in a neighboring county, emigrating to America with the other young
people from the area, or marrying Matt and becoming a farmer’s wife. At
the beginning of the play, Ellen says that she wants to marry Matt and stay
on the Cosgar farm. However, events during the play make her finally
admit that she does not want that life at all. First, the boys and girls who are
heading to America come to say goodbye and encourage her to go with
them. Their conversation points to the realities of a peasant wife’s life with
Joy Richmond
29
such comments as, “Houses in bogs and fields. It was a heart-break trying
to keep them as we’d like to keep them,” and “I’ll be thinking on my
brothers and sisters. I nursed and minded all the little ones” (Colum 110–
11). These comments are reinforced through the character of Sally, who
literally enacts the woman’s work on the stage throughout the play—she
prepares slop for the pigs, cleans and sweeps, cooks, etc.—and when she
does take a moment to rest, Murtagh enters and barks orders at her. Sally’s
view of these chores are registered in complaints, such as, “It was all over
that baste of a sow that has kept me slaving all through the spring” (Colum
105).8
The second event that helps Ellen to acknowledge her true desires
comes as a result of her finding out about Matt’s argument with his father.
Sally tells her that Matt and his father have “had an odious falling out” and
that “Matt is going to America, like the others, and he’s taking you with
him” (Colum 112–13). Ellen responds to this news, “And I thought I’d be
content with a new house” (Colum 113). Her hopes are soon dashed,
though, when Matt tells her that he thinks his father will change his mind
about the marriage and that he wants to stay after all. Ellen reacts angrily,
“Do you think I could go into a farmer’s house? . . . It’s a bad hand I’d
make of a farmer’s house. . . . I’m not like Sally” (Colum 118). Finally,
“with great vehemence,” she insists “If you take me, you will have to go
from your father’s house” (Colum 118). Even at the end, when Murtagh
consents to the marriage, offers to separate his holdings, and promises to
build Matt and Ellen their own house, Ellen refuses to marry Matt. She
accepts the teaching position she has been offered, and Matt, heartbroken,
emigrates to America in order to make his fortune hoping that Ellen will
then change her mind.
Murtagh’s response is pointed: “The floor swept, the hearth tidied. It’s
a queer end to it all. Twenty years I bid them offer. Twenty years, twenty
years” (Colum 133). Everything is finally as it should be: the farmer’s will
finally own their land for themselves and their children; the home is neat
and tidy, ready for wife, children, the future . . . but . . . the ones for whom
all the past hardship, work, and sacrifice were intended have abandoned the
cause in its moment of triumph. In the end, Murtagh does the only thing he
can do. He makes a match between his daughter Sally and Martin’s son
Cornelius. Civilization will continue, but not in the Cosgar name.
In the Shadow of the Glen9
Like Kathleen ni Houlihan and The Land, John Millington Synge’s In
the Shadow of the Glen includes an Irish woman whose relationship to the
land shifts during the course of the play. Unlike the other two plays, however, the nationalist audience and press condemned the play, and this
30
New England Theatre Journal
condemnation provides perhaps some of the best subtextual evidence of the
peasant play’s significance as a cultural expression of the rural construction
of Irishness and, especially, the role of women within that construction.
When the play was first produced in 1903, the press issued scathing
reviews of the play, calling it, for example, a “farcical libel on the character
of the average decently reared Irish peasant woman” (Daily Independent
and Nation 9 Oct 1903: 3). Two particularly curious things emerge regarding the responses to the play, which, almost without exception, focused on
the sexual morality of Nora and the character of Irish peasant women. First,
no evidence exists in the play to suggest that the relationship between Nora
and the Tramp was to be sexual: Nora didn’t leave with the Tramp as an
adulterer would leave with a lover; Dan evicted her and the Tramp at the
same time. Second, the emphasis on the one female character in the play
ignored the unfavorable representations of Dan and Michael. Both of these
curiosities, I believe, point to the real reason behind the brouhaha over the
play: Nora’s shifting position from within the home to that of the open road
threatened the nationalist construction of Irish nationality.
Nora’s relationship to the home is the same addressed in the other two
plays: she is a peasant farmer’s wife. But she is a discontented farmer’s
wife. Her husband, Dan, is much older than she is. He is also physically and
mentally abusive and unable (or unwilling) to give her children—all of
which the play makes clear either directly or indirectly. For example, she
tells the Tramp, “Maybe cold would be no sign of death with the like of
him, for he was always cold, every day since I knew him . . . and every
night” (Synge 4). Moreover, Nora bemoans how afraid, lonely, and isolated
she has been since living in the glen. She tells the Tramp, for instance, that
she does not fear strangers; she then looks out the window and lowers her
voice, “It’s other things than the like of you, stranger, would make a person
afeard” (Synge 5). Later, she talks to Michael about how marrying Dan had
been a mistake: “I do be thinking in the long nights it was a big fool I was
that time, . . . ; for what good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, and sheep
on the back hills, when you do be sitting looking out from a door . . ., and
seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, . . . and hearing nothing
but the wind crying out” (Synge 11). Thus, in this play, the depiction of
rural life for the peasant farmer’s wife betrays a reality that is a far cry from
the ideal expressed in the pages of The Irish Homestead. Instead of a happy
home with flowers and shrubs, a decent man, and the patter of little feet
running about, the rural cottage is cold and lonely and peopled with hard,
irrational, greedy men, and the environment outside—the land itself—is a
place to be feared.
To add insult to injury, Synge had Nora leave with the Tramp, but it was
not a sexual relationship, implied or otherwise, between the two that caused
Joy Richmond
31
all the fury. Rather, it was what the Tramp represented (or did not represent) in the context of the nationalist ideal that caused the nationalists to
cry foul. The Tramp was someone who not only rejected the society of his
countrymen, but also the land, in the sense of ownership and settlement.
For him, the true Ireland was the unsettled Ireland. He was someone who
had chosen a freedom much different that the one outlined in the nationalist
paradigm. In one passage, as Dan tries to frighten Nora with “lonesome
roads” and the spiders and dead sheep in the ditches where she will sleep,
the Tramp offers her a different view:
W e’ll be going now, . . . you’ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the
way you’re after sitting in this place, making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by. You’ll be . . . hearing the
herons crying out over the black lakes, and . . . the larks and the big
thrushes when the days are warm; and it’s not from the like of them
[Dan and Michael] you’ll be hearing a tale of getting old . . . and
losing the hair off you, . . . but it’s fine songs you’ll be hearing . . .
and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close
to your ear. (Synge 15).
In this juxtaposition of road and Nora’s home, the road, in spite of all its
wetness and hardship, is certainly more favorable. Through the Tramp,
then, Synge turns the audience towards the idea that the natural world—the
land in its “uncivilized” state—is the better place to be. The Tramp,
because he shuns the rural homestead, is a dangerous construction. The
situation is made even more dangerous when Nora chooses to leave with
him, because she breaks the connection to home, which unravels the ideal
construction of Irishness. Nora and the Tramp opt for the wild, transient
existence found in the English stereotypes. Moreover, Dan and Michael are
left on the stage in all their brutality and ineptitude for the audience to
ponder—they cannot, after all, even govern an Irish woman properly much
less the country.
These three early peasant plays demonstrate that the Irish peasant play,
as a cultural iteration of Irish nationalism’s construction of the rural West
of Ireland as the seat of real Irishness, makes clear that the woman’s place
within that construction was specifically connected to her relationship with
the land. Through the interior peasant cottage setting, these plays located
woman at the fulcrum of land and civilization, and it is through her static
or changing relationship to the land in these plays that the construction is
seen as either stable, problematic, or an utter failure. ’
31a
New England Theatre Journal
Notes
1
For a full investigation of anti-Irish prejudice in England (and among many
members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Ireland itself), see Curtis.
2
See Hobsbawm and Ranger.
3
MacPherson 131. MacPherson’s article explores the Irish Homestead’s
articulations of women’s roles in the nationalist construction of the Irish as based
in the W est of Ireland, providing specific examples of how she was expected to
fulfill those duties. For example, part of the responsibilities placed upon women was
to make village life “brighter and more responsive to the finer influences of
civilised life” (Irish Homestead, qtd. in MacPherson 137). Included in this mission
was the founding of village libraries, the organization of Irish dances, and the
beautification of both the homestead and the village, which was given impetus
through competitions awarding the community that best made “their parish a place
which no Irishman would like to emigrate from.” One of the suggestions of how to
accomplish this goal charged the community with launching a “[c]rusade against
badly kept and dirty homesteads; the beautifying of cottages by cultivation of
flowers, shrubs and vegetables, removal of dung heaps, etc” (Irish Homestead, qtd.
in MacPherson 137).
4
Fay 76. This lecture was given to a New York audience shortly after Frank
and his brother W illie left the Abbey Theatre for good.
5
Summary: Set in 1798 in a cottage kitchen near historic Killala, a small
village in County Mayo in the W est of Ireland, Peter and Bridget Gillane are
preparing for their son Michael’s marriage to Delia Cahel, who is bringing a
generous one-hundred-pound dowry into the family. Kathleen ni Houlihan, a
withered, old woman, arrives and tells the family that strangers stole her land and
that she needs assistance. Mesmerized by her words, Michael goes with her to fight
in the historic W olfe Tone Rebellion, leaving his pleading mother and bride-to-be
behind. After they leave, Michael’s younger brother enters. Peter asks him if he saw
an old woman on the road, to which Patrick replies, “I did not; but I saw a young
girl, and she had the walk of a queen” (Yeats and Gregory 231).
6
The four fields represent the four provinces of Ireland: Ulster, Connacht,
Munster, and Leinster.
7
Summary: Set in the peasant cottages of Murtagh Cosgar and Martin
Douras, the peasant farmers are about to buy their tenant farms under the provisions
of the 1903 W yndham Land Act, the product of the hard fought Land W ars. At the
same time, many of the county’s boys and girls are preparing to emigrate to the
United States. Staying on the land vs. leaving the land provides the central conflict
of the play. Murtagh has two children left at home, M att and Sally, the youngest two
of twelve (the rest abandoned the farm years before). Martin also has two children
at home, Ellen and Cornelius. M att wants to marry Ellen and take over the Cosgar
farm, but, in the end, she refuses because she does not want to be a farmer’s wife.
31b
New England Theatre Journal
Instead, she accepts a teaching position in another county.
8
Perhaps one of the more interesting effects of the peasant cottage setting
in these plays is that it is the women that audiences actually see working. The men’s
work is entirely indexical, made evident through the use of such props as harnesses
and pitchforks, which they often carry on and off the stage.
9
Summary: Set in a peasant cottage in County W icklow, just south of
Dublin, Nora Burke watches over the “corpse” of her husband Dan. A Tramp
arrives asking for shelter and sustenance. Nora lets him in and then leaves the
Tramp to look over the body while she goes out to find a neighbor who can spread
the news of Dan’s death. After she leaves, Dan sits up and reveals to the Tramp that
he is only pretending to be dead so that he can catch his wife being unfaithful. Nora
returns with a young farmer named Michael Dara, who promptly asks Nora to marry
him while he counts her inheritance. Nora turns him down. Dan jumps out of the
bed and threatens Nora and Michael. He evicts Nora. Michael is no longer
interested in her because she has no money and tells her she can go to the local
workhouse. The play ends after the Tramp tells Nora that she can go with him out
onto the roads. She agrees to do so, leaving Dan and Michael to their whiskey.
Works Cited
Clarke, Brenna Katz. The Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play at the Abbey
Theatre. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1982.
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in
Victorian England. Bridgeport, CT: Conference on British Studies, 1968.
— — — . Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. W ashington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution P, 1971.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1983.
Holloway, Joseph. Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal, Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer. Ed. Robert Hogan and
Michael J. O’Neill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1967.
Fay, Frank. “Some Account of the Early Days of the INTS.” The Abbey Theatre:
Interviews and Recollections. Ed. E. H. Mikhail. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble,
1988.
Gregory, Lady Augusta. Our Irish Theatre. New York: Capricorn Books, 1965.
MacPherson, James. “‘Ireland begins in the home’: W omen, Irish National Identity,
and the Domestic Sphere in the Irish Homestead, 1896–1912.” Eire-Ireland
36.3/4 (2001): 131–52.
31c
New England Theatre Journal
Synge, John Millington. In the Shadow of the Glen. Collected Plays and Poems and
the Aran Islands. London: Everyman, 1996.
Tenniel, John. “Two Forces.” Punch 29 Oct 1881: 199.
Yeats, W illam Butler, and Lady Augusta Gregory. Kathleen ni Houlihan. Eleven
Plays of William Butler Yeats. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. New York: Collier,
1964.