There was ample sanction for such reversals in the Utopian plays of Wilde and Shaw, but Synge added a Gaelic resonance entirely absent from their writings, and based on his knowledge of poetry in the Irish language from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There, in works like Cúirt an Mheáin Oíche (The Midnight Court) by Brian Merriman, the writers had denounced the new Anglicization of sexuality in rural Ireland. Merriman was especially scandalized by the high-heeled shoes, the artificial cosmetics (púdar) and the clothing (húdd) which characterized the new fashions, and his use of the accompanying Anglicized slang-words in the poem indicated his deep contempt. Though revivalist critics preferred to read all this as a nationalist critique of English culture by a defender of Gaelic values, there is much more than that at stake. What is under attack in such texts is the reification of the female body to the point where it becomes a fetish of the puritan male's imagination. Merriman's poem contains many other elements which would have been congenial to Synge: it is based on the idea of a court of love ruled by women; these complain of enforced marriages to spent old dotards, very much as Nora Burke complains in The Shadow of the Glen, they are frank rather than genteel in asserting their sexual urges; and the male poet is mocked, as Synge was on Aran, for being over thirty years of age and still unmarried.
An even more explicit critique of the Anglicization of sexuality in eighteenth-century rural Ireland may be found in "Bodaigh na hEorna" (The Churls of the Barley) by Art Mac Cumhaigh. Here the poet denounces the vulgar fashions worn by the females of a south Ulster family, which has circumvented the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics by making a small fortune from distilling:
Is tócuil an tseoid níon bhodaigh sa ród
Is cha ghlacann sí cóirú Gaelach,
Mur mbeadh hata uirthi ar dhóigh, is crios air den ór,
Is cleite ag treabhadh na gaoithe.36
The daughter of a churl is a proud jewel on the road
And she does not wear Gaelic fashions,
But a hat in new style, with a golden braid,
And a feather ploughing the wind.
Prose texts from the same period such as Parliament na mBan (The Parliament of Women, 1703) were even more elaborate in their critiques of a male chauvinism which had relegated women from public life to the domestic periphery. One year after Daniel Defoe's Good Advice to the Ladies (1702) the male "author" of the Parliament, Dónal Ó Colmáin, complained that the female sex had lost much of its power through lack of education and through the accompanying fetishization of the woman's body. Doubtless, in Gaelic Ireland as elsewhere, there were those for whom imbecility in females represented a great enhancement of their charms, but Ó Colmáin captured the authentic anger of women who would not brook such marginalization:
Do chítear daoibh go léir go mbíd a gcomhairlí agus a gcomhrhionóil ag na fearaibh go laethúil ag déanamh a ngnótha agus ag tabhairt aire do gach ní bhaineas riu féin, i gcás, an uair bhíd siad ag trácht orainne, gurb amhlaidh bhímid mar chaitheamh aimsire, mar chomparáid, nó mar stoc magaidh aca de 1ó agus d'oíche. Agus fós, ní admhaíd siad gur daoine sinn ar aon chor ar bith, ach gur créatúirí sinn do cruthaíodh in aghaidh nádúir, agus nach bhfuil ionainn ach malum necessarium, "drochní is riachtanas do bheith ann".37
It is evident to you all that the menfolk had their meetings and conferences on a daily basis, doing their business and taking care of all that pertained to themselves – so that, whenever they mentioned us, we were simply a pastime, a comparison, or a source of mockery to them by day and night. And even still, they will not admit that we are human at all, save only that we are creatures created against the forces of nature, and that we are nothing but a malum necessarium, a bad thing which is necessary.
Of course, as a male writer, Ó Colmáin was speaking on women's behalf, just as a male poet, Merriman, voiced the female protest against false gentility in the Cúirt: two facts which, in themselves, indicate just how far Gaelic women had fallen from earlier times. For it was well known that the ancient Irish laws were remarkably liberal in their attitude to women. A woman could divorce a sterile, impotent, or homosexual husband, could marry a priest, and could give honourable birth to a child outside of wedlock. Merriman's poem was not the foreign-inspired debauch complained of by some puritans of the national revival, but a dynamic plea for a return to more radical traditions: according to one historian, however, "the natural development of these liberal customs was... cut off by the imposition of English law on Ireland in the seventeenth century".38
Synge was well aware of the loss of these liberal traditions, but he delighted in pointing to those areas, such as the Aran Islands, still largely unaffected by the changes. The women of Inishmaan were, he noted, "before conventionality" in their frank, easy manners, which left them untainted by the false Victorian gentility of the women in Dublin, Cork or Galway. Instead, they "share some of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of Paris and New York". The latter, he added in a notebook, "have freed themselves by a desperate personal effort from the moral bondage of lady-like persons".39 He was doubtless recalling the New Women whom he had known on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1890s, women who earned their own livings as dancers, writers, artists. At a time when the wild, passionate and masterful women of the ancient Celts were being rediscovered by scholars, Synge put the debate about rural womanhood back on the agenda in the persons of Nora Burke and Pegeen Mike. After all, The Playboy starts and ends with Pegeen's plight as a trapped rural woman in a landscape virtually bereft of enterprising men, most of whom have been lost to English jails or to the emigration ship. The girls are all agreed that theirs is a dull life, "going up summer and winter (to the priest) with nothing worthwhile to confess at all".40 Mayo is a community of timid apple-lickers, people who if tempted in the Garden of Eden, would have licked rather than bitten the apple.
Into this mediocre zone comes Christy, to all intents a landless, propertyless Shawn Keogh, but to all purposes a pure invention of Pegeen Mike. He starts out as and strictly is a nonentity, until he discovers in himself an unexpected gift for mimicry. Noticing the propensity of the Mayo villagers to narrate deeds with reference to the points of the compass, he retells his own deed in these derived terms: "he gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a lep to the east. Then I turned around with my back to the north, and I hit a blow on the ridge of his skull, laid him stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet".41 In Act One, it is Pegeen and the villagers who speak poetically, telling Christy who he is: and in Act Two, he is saluted as a poet merely for returning to the community, lovingly distorted, a magnified version of its own language.
It is one thing to parody the speech-patterns of interlocutors: it is quite another to appropriate the images, ideas and intensities of an entire literary tradition, as Christy does in wooing Pegeen. The dozens of borrowed lines deployed from Love Songs of Connacht may testify to Synge's versatility as a new kind of writer,42 but, within the play itself, they also expose Christy's initial hollowness as a person, especially when declaring his love in phrases looted blatantly from the songs of the folk. Most of these borrowings occur in Act Two and the earlier part of Act Three, when Christy's desire has abandoned the language of reality for a factitious and flowery dialect. Not everyone, of course, would find such behaviour contemptible: there is a sense in which Christy becomes a kind of hero in these moments by creating a tradition for himself out of nothing but folk culture, thereby restoring to people an image of themselves. This was, as has been shown, one of Yeats's highest aspirations, never fulfilled in his own person, but envied in the achievement of Hyde.
For Synge's own purposes, Christy has to be an empty man at the outset, so that he will carry no baggage from his degrading past into the future. He rejects a false image of self (in the broken mirror) and chooses instead to be, creating instant, improvised traditions of himself out of the shreds of popular culture. Denied identity and freedom by his father's misrule, he is living evidenc
e of the nullity to which oppression may reduce a person or a community. Yet that very nullity is also the source of his charm, for it offers the Mayo villagers an empty space into which they can read from a safe distance their fondest dreams. In the first two acts, Christy is the locus of village desire, carrying himself like a revivalist leader on a rise to absolute power. That power is, of course, bogus, since it is a function of the community's mediocrity and since it prevents either the leader or the members of that community from constructing themselves from within. But it is the gift of all desperately oppressed peoples: witness the Irish search for a Messianic hero through the nineteenth century, from O'Connell to Parnell, a catalogue of revivalist icons made and then broken. As saviour and scapegoat, as poet and tramp, Christy is their logical embodiment at the level of artistic imagination. For, after the famines and emigrations of the 1840s, "Ireland" had almost ceased to exist in the old Gaelic way: what was left – the remaining voices confirmed this – was a terrifyingly open space, in places and in persons.
It is this very emptiness in his personality and in his contexts which has allowed generations of critics to read so many different meanings into the character of Christy, whether Parnell, Cuchulain, Christ, Oedipus or artist. In doing this, critics simply repeated the actions of the Mayo villagers, using Christy as a mirror in which to read and explore themselves. Indeed, the recorded responses to the play are, undeniably, extensions and imitations of its innermost theme. The villagers onstage discover that the radically transformed society which they had "read into" Christy is not what they wanted at all: and so they go back to their farce of revivalism, of fireside tales told about past heroes. Similarly, Synge's audience decided that they could not brook such innovation and versatility in a text, so they attacked it on those very points of its strength, Synge's knowledge of Gaelic Ireland. Excessive rhetorical claims had been made for Synge by Yeats and others (he was "the chap who writes like Sophocles, Shakespeare, etc."), which helps to explain some of the vehemence of the reaction against his work. This recapitulates the progress of Christy who makes no stylized claims for himself – other than the parricide, which he genuinely believed himself to have committed. The case for his own heroism is not made by him, but for him.
Chief among the claimants is Pegeen, whose invention Christy really is, her animus returned after centuries of Anglicization to the level of female consciousness. Her lament in the play's final lines is less for the physical man just gone offstage than for lost possibilities of her own womanhood. Christy has liberated an unsuspected femininity in her ("to think it's me is talking sweetly, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue")43 mainly because he was so at ease with the female qualities in himself: and the woman in him took an undisguised pleasure in the man in her. Pegeen, being more of a traditionalist, could not fully reciprocate in this androgynous fashion. Though prizing his femininity, she oppressed her man by compelling him to live up to an extreme of hypermasculinity. He did this to an extent by winning all before him at the sports, thereby establishing that men who consciously recognize their anima are less effeminate than the Shawn Keoghs who are unconsciously enthralled by the repressed female element: but this was not sufficient for Pegeen. She wanted her partner to exemplify a manliness which she could not fully confront or contain, so much was there of it in herself. Doubtless the woman in him, having established her right to exist, connived in all this by demanding the usual proofs that, despite the contrasexual admission, the partner is still reassuringly male.
Christy, revealed as having not killed his father, fails her test. It is a mark of her conventionality that such a test, at this late stage, should still seem necessary. No sooner does he attempt another killing on the spot than she denies the very violence she had courted. When she drives him out at the end, it is as if her animus has been repressed back into the unconscious and demonized accordingly. The revolution occurs, but offstage and in the black-out. She, for her part, surrenders to gentility, kills off her animus, and opts to become a "proper" country girl of the kind lampooned by the Gaelic poets. As such, she will be a fitting mate for the "puny weed" Shawn Keogh. He restores the old patriarchy in the village by telling Pegeen to burn Christy's leg; and she submits, doing something which, in all probability, Shawn would be afraid to do himself. This is no contradiction, however, since the weakness of the ineffectual male has traditionally masked itself behind a pose of patriarchy, issuing orders and striking postures but achieving little for itself. Repressing a female dimension which it would require courage to confront, such men are enslaved to the anima and enfeebled accordingly. Repressing a male dimension which she briefly flirted with, Pegeen becomes once again enslaved to her animus, which explains her reversion to the harsh, sharp-tongued exterior which she presented in the shebeen before the onset of Christy. Compared with Shawn's dithering, this may give her actions the appearance of decision and despatch, but in any comparison with Christy she emerges as a coward who could not live up to the image of freedom for which they both had reached. She lets Christy go at the end, not really because he is weak, but because he has grown too strong for her. From now on, her animus denied, she will continue to obey Shawn Keogh.
The radical implications of the manly woman of Gaelic tradition were deflected by the Mayo villagers, even as the sensuous images drawn from the love-songs of Connacht were denounced as titillating by some puritans of the Gaelic League. It is ironic to recall, in this context, that the League's own president had edited the book from which Synge looted some of the most disturbing lines. Synge shrewdly remarked, however, that a writer could get away with things in Irish which would not be tolerated in English: a point depressingly confirmed in the 1940s when the independent state banned an English-language version of The Midnight Court, though the far more ribald Irish-language version remained available. Revivalism was proving rigidly selective of that which was worthy to be revived and translated into popular versions. Sexuality, it seemed, was not to be deanglicized. The conclusion of Synge's play proved bitterly prophetic of the sexual politics of the new state, which would deny the manly woman epitomized by Constance Markievicz and Maud Gonne, opting instead for de Valera's maidens at the rural crossroads, themselves a pastoral figment of the late-Victorian imagination. And thus a people who, in the nineteenth century, had thought in Irish while speaking English, came in the twentieth to "think English" even while they were speaking Irish.
The spark that lit the Playboy riots is well known, recorded in the famous telegram sent by Lady Gregory summoning Yeats to return at once from Scotland: "Audience broke up in disorder at use of the word 'shift' ".44 The controversial lines represented a modest, if mocking, reworking by Synge of a scene in the national epic. In the play, Christy tells the Widow Quin "it's Pegeen I'm seeking only, and what'd I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself maybe, from this place to the eastern world".45 In Lady Gregorys Cuchulain of Muirthemne the hero regularly returns from combat filled with a battle-rage, which leads the men of Ulster to forbid his entry to the city of Emhain Macha. They fear that his spasms might destroy peace and damage city buildings, and so they conduct earnest discussions of the ways in which his ardour might be cooled. This is finally achieved by sending thirty women, stark naked, across the plain of Macha in serried ranks: and when the hero sees them, he blushes to his roots, casts down his eyes, and with that (say the manuscripts) "the wildness went out of him".46 In his typescript version, Synge had his maidens "stripped itself"47 (rather than in "shifts itself") but was clearly advised by Yeats that the more puritanical members of the Abbey audience could not tolerate such candour. (With commendable innocence, Yeats appears not to have realized that a scantily-clad woman can be even more inflammatory than a naked woman to the puritanical male mind.) The word "shift" had been used without offence in Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht (in Irish, of course, as léine): but when Synge politely pointed this out in a newspaper interview, the point was left unexplored in
the ensuing controversy.48
It is hard, at the same time, not to feel some sympathy for the protesting audiences in the play's first week. Most were nationalist males49 who frequented the theatre for political reasons, since the Abbey was one of the few national institutions in occupied Ireland. Few men anywhere in the Europe of 1907 could have coped with Synge's subversive gender-benders, least of all a group committed to the social construction of precisely the kind of Cuchulanoid heroism which the playwright was so mischievously debunking. Irishmen had been told that when they protested their voices rose to an unflattering female screech: and so they were off loading the vestigial femininity of the Celtic male onto icons like Cathleen ní Houlihan or Mother Ireland. These were the men who accused Synge of "betraying the forces of virile nationalism"50 to a movement of decadence. They were hardening themselves into hypermasculinity, in preparation for an uprising, rather than adopting the more complex strategy of celebrating their own androgyny. That Synge preferred the latter option is clear from the tripartite structure of his play, which corresponds very neatly with Frantz Fanon's dialectic of decolonization, from occupation, though nationalism, to liberation.
In Act One, Christy finds a false image of himself in the cracked mirror of his father's cruel home, the very image of Irish self-disgust under colonial misrule. In Act Two, he then discovers an over-flattering image of himself in the perfect mirror of Pegeen's shebeen, the very acme of Irish pride under the conditions of a self-glorifying revival. But nationalism, as Fanon warned, is not liberation, since it still persists in defining itself in categories imposed by the colonizer. A revolution couched in such terms is taken away from a people even as they perform it: it is only by breaking out of the binaries, through to a third point of transcendence, that freedom can be won.51 Only in Act Three can Christy forget about the good opinion of others, throw that mirror away and construct himself out of his own desire (as opposed to allowing himself to become the locus for the desire of others). Only then does he lose the marks of a provincial who is doomed to define himself through the distorting mirror of a public opinion shaped in some faraway centre of authority.
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