A Myth of Own’s Own: Women in Marina Carr’s Plays

In Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture Richard Kearney, drawing on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, suggests that the nationalist movements are almost invariably motivated, at some deep and preconceptual level, by a “mythical-nucleus”. To analyse this ideological deep structure, one has therefore to cut through “the layers of images and symbols which make up the basic ideals of a nation or a national group”. The myth of motherland, which Yeats and Lady Gregory brought so convincingly to the Irish stage in their play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, is certainly among these ‘images and symbols’. Cathleen Ni Houlihan not only embodies the Celtic ur-myth of puella senilis – the old woman transformed into the young girl - but also subsumes the idealisation of woman as an otherworldly creature of sublime innocence. Such an idealisation of womanhood was destined to remain almost unchanged until the twentieth century. However, in the post-colonial and post-national Ireland of the 1990s, parameters defining womanhood have started to be questioned, and Irish dramatic authorship renegotiated. Anna McMullan makes clear that “the absence of women playwrights from the national pantheon of playwrights does not necessarily means that Irish women do not write plays, but that… Irish women playwrights in the past have had no place in the selection of playwrights and texts”. Therefore, contemporary Irish women playwright are challenging the ‘canon’ and, according to Anna McMullan, “they are reclaiming the theatre as a space where they can explore the relationship between the public and the private, the political and the personal, sexuality and gender on their own terms”. Marina Carr is one of the most prominent of the younger generation of Irish playwrights at national and international level. Her dramatic production certainly shows an unprecedented treatment of female characters for the density of issues which are brought on stage. In three of her most successful plays, The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1995) and By the Bog of Cats (1998), she combines elements of realism with mythical references, otherworldly visitations and black humour. Discharged the old myths of nationalist Ireland, Marina Carr deliberately frames her plots in the ‘foundational myths’ of Western civilisation as they are presented in classical Greek drama. Marina Carr exploits old paradigms to give new interpretations of womanhood, which are strikingly in line with issues that feminism has been concerned with. She in fact seems to dismantle what Hélène Cixous calls the ‘patriarchal binary thought’ and her characters seem to embody Cixous’s distinction between the Realm of the Proper and the Realm of the Gift, a ‘masculine’ and a ‘feminine’ libidinal economy. Finally, Marina Carr’s protagonists show what Julia Kristeva calls chora (1984), that rhythmic pulsion which constitutes the heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language.