W7: Subversion and the Stage Flashcards
as members of the Protestant-Ascendancy in Ireland
Synge and Wilde have a double identity as both coloniser and colonised
they have a taste for paradox, irony, and allegory
inversion, paradox and divergence within repetition
pervasiveness of highly structured word-plays and reversals coincides with the…
reassembling of the social fabric, as the worlds of the plays turn on their satirical axis
Cecily to Algernon QUOTE
‘I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy’
Ireland seemed
‘a puzzle-the-world’ ; uncertain whether Ireland was a sister kingdom or a colony (representation_
1857
Indian mutiny predominantly suppressed by Irish troops; victim / agents of Empire
deflation characterises portrayals of Irishness;
Lit built up utopian idea of a free Ireland
Synge uses making and unmaking of celebrities to expose flawed logic of the Gaelic mythic identity
in opposition to racial narrative of Aubrey de Very and Matthew Arnold who see Ireland as entirely spiritual
de Vere analyses Ireland as though it has its own personality
‘to Ireland, a spiritual one’ he writes in Recollections’
Synge explores what is
‘superb and wild in reality’
T.R. Henn on Synge’s attitude to Ireland
‘Synge’s attitude to Ireland and the Irish peasantry was highly ambivalent: insight combined with toleration, love without passion,’
Double identity, plot level of Earnest
Jack and Algy’s invented aliases enable them to lead double lives; such duality dominates Wilde’s life and art
Simultaneously a colonised Irishman and an English socialite, a husband and a covert homosexual…
a Protestant and later a Catholic, the double identity pervasive in ‘Earnest’ seems to pertain to Wilde’s own life
Well-matched pair in verbal duelling
Jack and Algernon
Gwendolyn and Cecily throw each other into comic relief; each rep. a diff view of eligible maidenhood; realism and romance skilfully blended
Synge saw Ireland in terms of romance and realism
Playboy invokes ideas of a mythic Ireland, while simultaneously exploring the way in which the mythic language is performative
R. Ellman on Wilde’s divided life in later years
‘Wilde saw his life divide more emphatically between a clandestine, illegal aspect, and an overt, declarable side’
Synge situates play in physical landscape in NW Mayo - land lying westward of the Shannon proverbial for its ‘wildness’ and poverty; and
fantastical realm with connotations of St Brandon; romantic connotations as the Country of the Sunset, the holy Islands and St Brandon’s hermetic ventures.
Christy ‘lies and blather’ offer more entertainment than truth; retelling self-consciously performative quote
‘CHRISTY flattered and confident, waving bone: He gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a lip 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. (He raised the chicken bone to his Adam’s apple)’
Christy’s self-aggrandizing ‘poetry talk’ calls attention to Christy as dramatic performer, girls celebrate:
‘Well, you’re a marvel! Oh, God bless you! You’re the lad, surely!’
Russian writer Maxim Gorky on Playboy??
‘subtle?? irony on the cult of the hero’
‘gallous story’ of his parricide;
parricide; tragedy appears in construction of identity out of lies
Romantic Ireland image
‘sedulously fostered in the 90’s: the Land of Saints, the country whose Literary Renaissance would save European culture’
‘Christy’
romanticises himself as a Biblical hero: ‘If there’s that terror of them, it’d be best, maybe, I went on wandering like Esau or Cain and Abel on the sides of Neifin or the Erris Plain’
Playboy as a comic Oedipus
“the man who killed his da” ; mock-heroic Oedipus like wanderer ‘cast up and seeking refuge; his triumph in the sports on the sea-shore a parody of the Greek games”
Play about parricide appears….
just after Freud defined the Oedipus complex in his Interpretation of Dreams, 1899
Just as Earnest exposes the fact that society is a tissue of lies and wouldn’t hold together without them…
in Playboy “Christy Mahon is made a mighty man by the power of a lie”
Pegeen’s absolute loss
‘Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World’ ; in losing illusion of greatness, she loses the Playboy whom she has, in part, created.
Comic inversion of gender conventions trope and romantically fostered idea of modest Irish womanhood
- Christ objectified 0 his feet fetishised and feminized
2. Women catch him preening himself in a mirror and giggle, for ‘them that kills their father is a vain lot surely’
Wilde on women concretising imaginary relationships / mythologising
- through diary-writing females
2. when rejected by a girl he professes to adore, he doesn’t weep or beat his breast but Algy eats muffins
Algy eating muffins quote
‘How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble… You seem to be perfectly heartless
Shawn’s religious cowardice
- leaves Pegeen and pub available to CHristy
- pious language loaded w ironies
- Roman Catholic speicifically; Synge turns RC into real Pagans
Shawn religious cowardice QUOTE
- calls upon ‘St Joseph and St Patrick and St Brigid and St James’
- When he asks ‘Father Reilly, and the saints of god, where will I hide myself today?’
Shawn red coat quotes
‘Michael James, leave me go, you old Pagan, leave me go, or I’ll get the curse of the priests on you, and of the scarlet-coated bishops of the Courts of Rome’ (himself pagan)
syntactical conjunctions in Synge’s attacks on religious tradition e.g. description of Kate Cassidy’s wake balanced delicately against Michael’s drunken profanity
‘aren’t you a lousy schemer to go burying your poor father unbenknownst when you’d a right to throw him on the crupper of a Kerry mule and drive him westwards, like holy Joseph in the days gone by, the way we would have given him a decent burial, and not have him rotting beyond, and not a Christian drinking a smart drop of glory to his soul?
approval of Pegeen’s marriage seems….
a drunken half parody of the traditional blessing
Algernon’s irreverent remark
‘Divorces are made in Heaven’
Yeats September 1891 on Earnest
called it an ‘extravagant crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity’
Social reversals:
- Charity - Chasuble speaks of the ‘Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders’
- Algernon’s complaint that the lower-class orders fail to set the aristocratic classes a good example, as he assigns the lower orders the ‘moral responsibility’ of his class
Wilde capitalises on the…
conventional genre of the ‘well-made play’ while simultaneously mocking its convention:
- gives us the ‘woman with a past’ in form of innocent Miss Prism
- keeps Jack’s guilty secret dramatically present through the figure of Algernon
Wilde on the instability of language
‘everyone is good until they learn how to talk’
(Synge = to talk is to tell ‘lies and blather)
in a colonial setting, language itself appears an area of concern….
insofar as words are untrustworthy in a colony where the locals are forced to adopt the language of the oppressor, mirroring the masters.
adopting a double language = a mode of self protect…
as Declan Kiberd argues in ‘Inventing Ireland’, ‘lying to government officials became a moral action’
where the linguistic furniture belongs to somebody else…
as argued by Raja Rao in Kanthapura; ‘one has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’
Stephen in Joyce’s Portrait
patronised by an English dean due to his use of a local dialect word, his soul ‘frets in the shadow of language’ ; ‘the language in which we are pspeaking is his before it is mine’
‘speak double’
employing wit and irony as counter-speech, ‘turn[ing] the double-speak of the Empire back on itself’ (Stephen Raby)
pun on Earnest; dualistic theme in identities but also inheres in language itself
joke in subtitle about ‘serious people’ in a play where to be ‘earnest’ is to fake
Oedipal complex
Freudian
Touch of hamlet; ghost of father
Freudian
Oedipal complex
the woman he was supposed to marry suckled / nursed him
Ireland and womanhood; gender slippage
Raymond Williams 1980s
talks about modernism as the work of exiles and emigrés
example of one of Wilde’s epigrams
‘More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read’
‘More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read’
could mean:
- what was important in contemporary literature was censored by society
- what society hailed as culture was not worth reading
Von Neumann puns
we enjoy puns because our neuronal connections are provoked by the dual input that comes with accumulated information from two arbitrarily connected things
the dialect in playboy
a ‘rich and living language’ with ‘rich and copious words’
‘phrases just heard’ through ‘a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house’ which allows
‘at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form’
Yeats ‘believed that by adopting the pose of an Englishman,
Wilde devised a clever strategy for challenging English prejudices about the Irish’
Peter Raby in ‘Wilde’s comedies of Society’
Wilde imitated Englishness ‘as a subtle form of insult’
Ernest Newman on paradox
victorian critic, writes ‘a paradox is a truth seen round a corner’
Peter Hall on Wilde
he ‘criticised his audience while he entertained it’
Bernard Shaw on Synge
‘The Playboy’s real name was Synge, and the famous libel on Ireland […] was really the truth about the world’
Stephen Raby on ‘double-speak’
‘turn[ing] the double-speak of the Empire back on itself’ through metaphysical juxtapositions
anonymous critic writing in Truth, Feb 1895
‘all the dramatic personae, from the heroes down to their butlers, talk pure and undiluted Wildese’
Pegeen’s ‘double-speak’
‘I’ll maybe tell them, and I’ll maybe not’
‘double speak’ appears
‘as fully flavoured as a nut or apple’
without their backgrounds which are ‘rarely pure and never simple’ their lives,
‘would [have been] very tedious… and [their] literature a complete impossibility’
Robert Crawford (proto-modernism at work)
in Devolving English Literature argued that high modernism in Britain wasn’t created by metropolitan English people but by exiled barbarians from Ireland and America; linguistic estrangement)
Jack and Algernon contort themselves to fit fantasised images
but Christy’s self-perceived identity is moulded to an idealised state from without
Richard ellman
amusing as the surface is, the comic energy springs from the realities that are mocked’.
Mary C. King
notes that Pegeen has ‘helped transform’ Christy, but argues that she ‘brutally tortures’ him later in the play
Monica Charlot
Gwendolyn’s power of linguistic mastery, as her and Cecily ‘rebel against sexual roles by mastering the language and being witty-qualities often ssociated with men’
Wilde, in The Critic as Artist
‘language is the parent and not the child of thought’
Cecily ‘engaged’ to Algernon (Earnest) ; ‘diary’ - narrative control
‘for the last three months’ despite having never previously met him
