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MT '19 > W7: Subversion and the Stage > Flashcards

W7: Subversion and the Stage Flashcards

1
Q

as members of the Protestant-Ascendancy in Ireland

A

Synge and Wilde have a double identity as both coloniser and colonised

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2
Q

they have a taste for paradox, irony, and allegory

A

inversion, paradox and divergence within repetition

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3
Q

pervasiveness of highly structured word-plays and reversals coincides with the…

A

reassembling of the social fabric, as the worlds of the plays turn on their satirical axis

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4
Q

Cecily to Algernon QUOTE

A

‘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’

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5
Q

Ireland seemed

A

‘a puzzle-the-world’ ; uncertain whether Ireland was a sister kingdom or a colony (representation_

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6
Q

1857

A

Indian mutiny predominantly suppressed by Irish troops; victim / agents of Empire

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7
Q

deflation characterises portrayals of Irishness;

A

Lit built up utopian idea of a free Ireland

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8
Q

Synge uses making and unmaking of celebrities to expose flawed logic of the Gaelic mythic identity

A

in opposition to racial narrative of Aubrey de Very and Matthew Arnold who see Ireland as entirely spiritual

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9
Q

de Vere analyses Ireland as though it has its own personality

A

‘to Ireland, a spiritual one’ he writes in Recollections’

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10
Q

Synge explores what is

A

‘superb and wild in reality’

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11
Q

T.R. Henn on Synge’s attitude to Ireland

A

‘Synge’s attitude to Ireland and the Irish peasantry was highly ambivalent: insight combined with toleration, love without passion,’

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12
Q

Double identity, plot level of Earnest

A

Jack and Algy’s invented aliases enable them to lead double lives; such duality dominates Wilde’s life and art

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13
Q

Simultaneously a colonised Irishman and an English socialite, a husband and a covert homosexual…

A

a Protestant and later a Catholic, the double identity pervasive in ‘Earnest’ seems to pertain to Wilde’s own life

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14
Q

Well-matched pair in verbal duelling

A

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

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15
Q

Synge saw Ireland in terms of romance and realism

A

Playboy invokes ideas of a mythic Ireland, while simultaneously exploring the way in which the mythic language is performative

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16
Q

R. Ellman on Wilde’s divided life in later years

A

‘Wilde saw his life divide more emphatically between a clandestine, illegal aspect, and an overt, declarable side’

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17
Q

Synge situates play in physical landscape in NW Mayo - land lying westward of the Shannon proverbial for its ‘wildness’ and poverty; and

A

fantastical realm with connotations of St Brandon; romantic connotations as the Country of the Sunset, the holy Islands and St Brandon’s hermetic ventures.

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18
Q

Christy ‘lies and blather’ offer more entertainment than truth; retelling self-consciously performative quote

A

‘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)’

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19
Q

Christy’s self-aggrandizing ‘poetry talk’ calls attention to Christy as dramatic performer, girls celebrate:

A

‘Well, you’re a marvel! Oh, God bless you! You’re the lad, surely!’

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20
Q

Russian writer Maxim Gorky on Playboy??

A

‘subtle?? irony on the cult of the hero’

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21
Q

‘gallous story’ of his parricide;

A

parricide; tragedy appears in construction of identity out of lies

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22
Q

Romantic Ireland image

A

‘sedulously fostered in the 90’s: the Land of Saints, the country whose Literary Renaissance would save European culture’

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23
Q

‘Christy’

A

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’

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24
Q

Playboy as a comic Oedipus

A

“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”

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25
Q

Play about parricide appears….

A

just after Freud defined the Oedipus complex in his Interpretation of Dreams, 1899

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26
Q

Just as Earnest exposes the fact that society is a tissue of lies and wouldn’t hold together without them…

A

in Playboy “Christy Mahon is made a mighty man by the power of a lie”

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27
Q

Pegeen’s absolute loss

A

‘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.

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28
Q

Comic inversion of gender conventions trope and romantically fostered idea of modest Irish womanhood

A
  1. 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’

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29
Q

Wilde on women concretising imaginary relationships / mythologising

A
  1. 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

30
Q

Algy eating muffins quote

A

‘How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble… You seem to be perfectly heartless

31
Q

Shawn’s religious cowardice

A
  1. leaves Pegeen and pub available to CHristy
  2. pious language loaded w ironies
  3. Roman Catholic speicifically; Synge turns RC into real Pagans
32
Q

Shawn religious cowardice QUOTE

A
  1. calls upon ‘St Joseph and St Patrick and St Brigid and St James’
  2. When he asks ‘Father Reilly, and the saints of god, where will I hide myself today?’
33
Q

Shawn red coat quotes

A

‘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)

34
Q

syntactical conjunctions in Synge’s attacks on religious tradition e.g. description of Kate Cassidy’s wake balanced delicately against Michael’s drunken profanity

A

‘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?

35
Q

approval of Pegeen’s marriage seems….

A

a drunken half parody of the traditional blessing

36
Q

Algernon’s irreverent remark

A

‘Divorces are made in Heaven’

37
Q

Yeats September 1891 on Earnest

A

called it an ‘extravagant crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity’

38
Q

Social reversals:

A
  1. Charity - Chasuble speaks of the ‘Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders’
  2. 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
39
Q

Wilde capitalises on the…

A

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
40
Q

Wilde on the instability of language

A

‘everyone is good until they learn how to talk’

(Synge = to talk is to tell ‘lies and blather)

41
Q

in a colonial setting, language itself appears an area of concern….

A

insofar as words are untrustworthy in a colony where the locals are forced to adopt the language of the oppressor, mirroring the masters.

42
Q

adopting a double language = a mode of self protect…

A

as Declan Kiberd argues in ‘Inventing Ireland’, ‘lying to government officials became a moral action’

43
Q

where the linguistic furniture belongs to somebody else…

A

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’

44
Q

Stephen in Joyce’s Portrait

A

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’

45
Q

‘speak double’

A

employing wit and irony as counter-speech, ‘turn[ing] the double-speak of the Empire back on itself’ (Stephen Raby)

46
Q

pun on Earnest; dualistic theme in identities but also inheres in language itself

A

joke in subtitle about ‘serious people’ in a play where to be ‘earnest’ is to fake

47
Q

Oedipal complex

A

Freudian

Touch of hamlet; ghost of father

48
Q

Freudian

A

Oedipal complex
the woman he was supposed to marry suckled / nursed him
Ireland and womanhood; gender slippage

49
Q

Raymond Williams 1980s

A

talks about modernism as the work of exiles and emigrés

50
Q

example of one of Wilde’s epigrams

A

‘More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read’

51
Q

‘More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read’

A

could mean:

  1. what was important in contemporary literature was censored by society
  2. what society hailed as culture was not worth reading
52
Q

Von Neumann puns

A

we enjoy puns because our neuronal connections are provoked by the dual input that comes with accumulated information from two arbitrarily connected things

53
Q

the dialect in playboy

A

a ‘rich and living language’ with ‘rich and copious words’

54
Q

‘phrases just heard’ through ‘a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house’ which allows

A

‘at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form’

55
Q

Yeats ‘believed that by adopting the pose of an Englishman,

A

Wilde devised a clever strategy for challenging English prejudices about the Irish’

56
Q

Peter Raby in ‘Wilde’s comedies of Society’

A

Wilde imitated Englishness ‘as a subtle form of insult’

57
Q

Ernest Newman on paradox

A

victorian critic, writes ‘a paradox is a truth seen round a corner’

58
Q

Peter Hall on Wilde

A

he ‘criticised his audience while he entertained it’

59
Q

Bernard Shaw on Synge

A

‘The Playboy’s real name was Synge, and the famous libel on Ireland […] was really the truth about the world’

60
Q

Stephen Raby on ‘double-speak’

A

‘turn[ing] the double-speak of the Empire back on itself’ through metaphysical juxtapositions

61
Q

anonymous critic writing in Truth, Feb 1895

A

‘all the dramatic personae, from the heroes down to their butlers, talk pure and undiluted Wildese’

62
Q

Pegeen’s ‘double-speak’

A

‘I’ll maybe tell them, and I’ll maybe not’

63
Q

‘double speak’ appears

A

‘as fully flavoured as a nut or apple’

64
Q

without their backgrounds which are ‘rarely pure and never simple’ their lives,

A

‘would [have been] very tedious… and [their] literature a complete impossibility’

65
Q

Robert Crawford (proto-modernism at work)

A

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)

66
Q

Jack and Algernon contort themselves to fit fantasised images

A

but Christy’s self-perceived identity is moulded to an idealised state from without

67
Q

Richard ellman

A

amusing as the surface is, the comic energy springs from the realities that are mocked’.

68
Q

Mary C. King

A

notes that Pegeen has ‘helped transform’ Christy, but argues that she ‘brutally tortures’ him later in the play

69
Q

Monica Charlot

A

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’

70
Q

Wilde, in The Critic as Artist

A

‘language is the parent and not the child of thought’

71
Q

Cecily ‘engaged’ to Algernon (Earnest) ; ‘diary’ - narrative control

A

‘for the last three months’ despite having never previously met him

MT '19 (19 decks)

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