| Writing and Culture in the Nineteenth Century |
[Nov. 14th, 2005|09:56 am] |
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895.
• Wilde born in Dublin 1854, won a scholarship to Oxford. There he was strongly influenced by John Ruskin and his preoccupation with the Italian Renaissance and Walter Pater. Pater denied that art should have any concern with morality in his conclusion to ‘Studies in the history of the Renaissance’.
‘Our one chance lies in getting as many pulsations into the given time’
‘Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass’.(Pater)
He had a lasting intellectual and aesthetic influence on Wilde and his contemporaries.
• By 1877 Wilde was experimenting with artificial poses and positions and beginning to gain a reputation for bon mots. He toured America and Paris lecturing on ‘aesthetics’ and simultaneously becoming a figure of fascination subject to extensive journalism and caricature. In London he wrote journalism, for women’s magazines, literary essays, notably duologues, where two languid dandies discussed philosophical positions. His first novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, published 1891, notorious due to a preface of flippant maxims on art and ‘questionable morality’.
• Worked with Aubrey Beardsley in 1893, who inspired by his play Salome had done a drawing of Salome with Saint John’s Head. Beardsley’s illustrations were unsettling concerned the publisher of the play script with their nudity, they had to be edited. Beardsley’s fame established by The Yellow Book, a quartley for art and literature, Wilde was excluded ‘in the interests of propriety’. Following Wilde’s arrest Beardsley was dismissed as art editor merely by association.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Like all works of art [The Importance of Being Earnest] drew its sustenance from life, and, speaking for myself, whenever I see or read the play I always wish I did not know what I do know about Wilde’s life at the time he was writing it – that when, for instance, John Worthing talks of going Bunburying, I did not immediately visualize Alfred Taylor’s establishment. On rereading after his release, Wilde said, ‘It was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that tiger Life’. At its conclusion, I find myself imagining a sort of nightmare Pantomime Transformation Scene in which at the touch of the magician’s wand, instead of the workday world’s turning into fairyland, the country house in a never-never Hertfordshire turns into the Old Bailey, the features of Lady Bracknell into those of Mr. Justice Wills. Still it is a masterpiece, and on account of it Wilde will always enjoy the impersonal fame of an artist as well as the notoriety of his personal legend.
W.H.Auden, ‘An Improbable Life’ in Richard Ellman, ed., Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969).
• Impossible to separate Wilde as notorious personality from Wilde as artist. Importance of Being Earnest opened on St Valentine’s day 1895 at St James’s Theatre in London. Marquis of Queensbury, father of Wilde’s and lover, attempted to enter with a bouquet of carrots and turnips. Three days later he left Wilde as card at his club, The Albermarle, ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite’. (sodomite misspelt) This event would initiate Wilde’s attempt to prosecute for Libel that would eventually lead to Wilde’s imprisonment for ‘Gross Indecency’ for two years.
• Wilde’s trial revealed an upper-class homosexual world of private dining and rented hotel suites, seeking contacts, casual sex, across class boundaries with younger men. Wilde famously defended the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ as ‘that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect’ rather than admitting to any physical sexual activity. Wilde’s work was also put on trial, with extracts from The Picture of Dorian Grey discussed and quoted extensively as well as his ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young’,- ‘Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others’.
Also private letters from Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas.
• Between 1885 and 1967 all male homosexual acts, whether committed in public or private, were illegal. Taboos against sodomy date back at least to 1533 act of Henry VIII; penalty for the ‘Abominable Vice of Buggery’ was death. Robert Peel 1826, consolidated this maintaining death penalty for the ‘crime not to be mentioned among Christians’ although it was tacitly abandoned after 1836. Death penalty abolished in 1861 to be replaced by penal servitude.
• Earnest enshrines at the centre a double life encapsulated in the practice of Bunburying. As a person committed to homosexual practice, he was compelled by law to inhabit oscillating and nonidentical identity structure, homosexual delight and its arrest are produced and reproduced as interlocked versions and inversions of each other. Wilde’s work more generally seen as metaphors for his ambivalent social and sexual position, as an artist mocking bourgeois pieties as well as defying, in encoded ways heterosexual normalization. A pragmatics of gay (mis)representation, a nuanced doublespeak driven by both pleasure and need for self protection.
• Punning and Inversion. Wilde’s trademark linguistic devices are inversion and pun. For Alan Sinfield inversion is particularly suggestive of the definitions of homosexuality in late C19th Britain. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion 1897, identified inverts and perverts in his defence of an ‘innate’ form of homosexuality. He rejected theories of ‘degeneration’ arguing for natural and spontaneous desire, rather than sickness, an inversion-a turning inwards of the sex drive away from the opposite sex. He did not associate homosexuality with effeminacy or transvestism.
• Who or what is Bunburying?...a character ‘always somewhere else at present’, a secret subject of an open secret, ‘not to conceal knowledge so much as to conceal knowledge of the knowledge’(D.A.Miller, The Novel and the Police, 1988). Wilde’s characters must speak without irony or knowingness in order for this open secret to be maintained. Gay specificity of the figure of Bunbury is unspeakable, Wilde ‘inverts’ this limitation producing a punning overdetermined signifier, full of suggestion. ‘A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it’. Wilde succeeds in mimicking the dramatic conventions of heterosexual triumph whilst inserting within them the ‘unspeakable’ traces of homosexual delight.
• Legacies of Wilde in the emergence of Camp as an established aspect of homosexual language and style, a vehicle of communication between peers, a mode of negotiating existence under dominant heterosexual discourses. Deeply ambivalent, celebrating effeminacy while retaining a sharp awareness of conventional values. ‘A form of ‘minstrelization’ an ambiguous playing to the galleries’. (Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present). |
|
|
| Introduction to Drama: Reading the Page, Reading the Stage. |
[Nov. 9th, 2005|10:18 am] |
Introduction to Drama: Reading the Page, Reading the Stage
7. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Dr Aidan Arrowsmith.
Lecture Outline
1. Chekhov’s Russia
• Feudalism
• Decline of the Gentry
• 1861 Emancipation Act
• Tsar Nicholas II
• Objectivity
2. Form
• Open-endedness
• Dialogue: fluidity and naturalism
• Anti-melodrama
o Plot
o Anti-climax
3. Genre: Tragedy/Comedy
• Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts Theatre
• Cherry Orchard a comedy according to Chekhov
• Soviet stagings
4. Play’s Messages
• Symbolism
• Lopakhin – capitalism?
• Trofimov – revolution?
7. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Dr Aidan Arrowsmith.
NB. These are lecture notes, marginally ‘worked up’, which means that they are rough, unfinished, not publishable quality. They are therefore not really for quoting in your essays! (For one thing the lecture is not properly referenced.) Your essays need to have a much higher quality of finish!
1. Chekhov’s Russia
• Feudalism
Turn of the century Russia was a feudal society – that’s to say an agrarian economy based on a social structure that was strictly hierarchical. In simple terms it was a pyramid, with the Tsar at the top, the landed gentry lower down and, right at the bottom of the pyramid, the peasantry or serfs – those who worked the land for the aristocrats.
This is a very static system, based on birthright, and there is little or no possibility for a peasant to rise up the social structure – you’re kept in your place by the absence of birth and breeding.
• Decline of the Gentry
During the 19th Century, though, the landed gentry were in gradual decline (a decline of the power of the aristocracy that we also saw in the background to the Irish plays by Yeats/Lady Gregory and Synge). The wealth and power of the landed gentry is being eroded and by 1859, 30% of estates in Russia were mortgaged, either to the state or to private banks (this being one of the options available to Mrs Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard).
• 1861 Emancipation Act
In 1861, the Emancipation Act freed the serfs – something which Firs mentions in the play. This allowed the peasantry to own the (small strip of) land they had been working. The aim, however, was less to enable the lower orders to attain wealth and a better quality of living, than it was to help the gentry by providing them with a fresh means of income, from the rents and redemption payments paid by the peasantry.
In practice, the Emancipation Act increased the rate of decline of the gentry. It deprived the landowners of their free labour, as well as the tools and animals that the serfs had brought with them. In the 1870s, the landed gentry still owned one-third of all arable land. By the time of The Cherry Orchard 1904/5, this had dwindled to 22%, of which one third was rented out to the peasantry.
Of course very few of the gentry had ever done a day’s work, so had no idea about agriculture or managing an estate and its accounts. So they often went far away – to Paris, for example, leaving the estate in the hands of dodgy managers. (They became absentee landlords, which is something else lurking in the background of the Irish plays, especially Playboy) In Cherry O, the management of the estate is shared between Varya and the clumsy clerk Yepikhodov.
So in this play, Chekhov is sketching a very specific historical, social and economic context.
Nikolai Petrov: Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy, but in essence it is a novel, an engrossing novel that embraces the whole period from 1861 to 1905 and describes the life of people in Russia just before Tsarism begins to collapse.
• Tsar Nicholas II
Tsar Nicholas II had come to the throne in 1894, aged 26, just as the instability of Russian society was REALLY hitting the fan:
Edward Braun: As the vast semi-feudal empire struggled to catch up with Europe through headlong industrialisation, massive foreign investment and a drive for exports, the rural economy was crippled with heavy taxation, crop failures, cholera epidemics, rocketing land prices and a massive increase in population. In 1901 crop failures resulted in the worst outbreaks of violence since the 1860s, and over the next two years thousands of starving peasants invaded the estates of the gentry. (113)
In Cherry O, this is shown by the vagrants who, we are told, are occupying the servants’ quarters, and being fed by Varya (allegedly on dried peas); meanwhile Gayev takes his sister to town for an extravagant lunch.
Chekhov’s interest as a playwright is largely in man’s relation to society. CO has been called a ‘profound drama of social change’. And, as we can see, he is setting this play very clearly in a specific social and economic context – a context of instability and unrest which, as we know, is ultimately headed for Revolution – especially the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in which the social hierarchies we see decaying here are blown away – seemingly for good
Chekhov’s personal perspective on this was as the son of a serf – a peasant - who went on to become a doctor and landowner and, of course, a writer, during these times of instability. So, it would be difficult to identify him with any one social position. In fact, in various ways, his plays try to make a virtue of his ability to see from various points of view.
• Objectivity
In fact, Chekhov was adamant that his job as writer was not to identify with any one position – not to argue for a ‘solution’ – but instead to remain dispassionate, objective – simply to be an observer – not to present solutions but simply to set up the questions:
Chekhov, Letters: You confuse two concepts: the solution of a problem and its correct presentation. Only the second is incumbent on the artist … In my view it’s not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism and so on. The writer’s job is only to show who, how, in what context, spoke or thought about God and pessimism. The artist must not be the judge of his character and of what they say: merely a dispassionate observer … (q in Watson, p.133)
But that doesn’t mean, of course, that the play doesn’t contain social commentary and social critique. The play contains a number of speeches highly critical of the existing feudal order – not least Trofimov’s denunciation in Act 2 of a system based on ‘owning living souls’. Lopakhin echoes these sentiments later on, too. And the Russian State censor clearly saw such speeches as sending out a potentially very dangerous message because he ordered Chekhov to rewrite them before the play could be staged.
(We’ll pick up issues around play’s message in a while)
2. FORM
• Open-endedness
Chekhov’s aim of objectivity feeds into his dramatic form. His plays become very ‘open-ended’, often seeming to avoid clear meanings, which can make them very demanding for actors and producers – and students.
By the same token, Chekhov’s emphasis on form means that it’s difficult to separate form from content: ‘how a character says it’ is very much ‘what he says’. Or as Beckett said of Joyce, his writing is not about anything – it is the thing itself.
• Dialogue: fluidity and naturalism
Chekhov’s dialogue aims for a strong naturalism (hesitations, pauses, massive non-sequiturs). And to achieve this naturalism, Chekhov often uses groups of characters onstage together - in natural situations like arrivals, departures, parties. Ensemble acting.
On one hand, this offers a significant contrast with Ibsen, for example, who usually focuses on one or two characters in intense dialogue – which suggests a concern on Ibsen’s part with the fate of individuals. By contrast Chekhov is interested in creating a sense of social representativeness in his plays – so he places characters from a variety of backgrounds, with a variety of views, on stage together.
Group scenes like this also allow Chekhov to present on stage his ‘real life dialogue’. Watson talks about:
Watson (136): Chekhov’s mastery of random, inconsequential dialogue, as the characters speak not so much to each other as past each other, in contexts which permit juxtapositions and non-sequitors which are sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, and where the polyphony of voices does indeed create at times a musical effect.
One example in Ch Orch could be Beginning Act 2 – ensemble scene – but the characters aren’t really speaking to each other at all – they are all in their own little worlds – this in itself can be read as a social comment, of course.
Another example would be Varya’s dialogue with Lopakhin in Act 4 – when they almost but not quite speak about marriage. Their dialogue here both masks and reveals. Like his characters, Chekhov is withholding information for dramatic effect – a huge amount is deliberately NOT communicated. But in doing so, paradoxically, a huge amount is revealed to the audience.
o Go through this interaction between Varya and Lopakhin. What aspects of their characters are revealed in this interaction; and how does Chekhov do this?
• Anti-melodrama
Chekhov’s innovation with dialogue is in part an attempt to get away from the constraints of older dramatic forms – he’s aiming for a kind of ‘non-theatricality’:
Chekhov: The demand is made that the hero and heroine should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, running after women or men, talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage. A play ought to be written in which people should come and go, dine, talk of the weather, or play cards, not because the author wants it, but because this is what happens in real life. Life on the stage should be as it really is, and the people, too, should be as they are, and not on stilts.
o Plot
This aim of non-theatricality comes through in the ‘lack of plot’ we find in Chekhov’s plays – or at least their appearance of lacking plots. The action in his works is not driven by dynamic characters who engineer and manipulate and therefore drive the action and plot – characters like King Lear or Lady Macbeth or Hedda Gabler. In fact, Chekhov’s characters often seem incapable of action (Mrs Ranevsky, for example, Gayev). Even Lopakhin, who is the nearest to active, tries very hard NOT to buy the estate. So the plots don’t seem like plots; action just seems to happen on its own – all of which is in the service of appearing natural.
o Why do you think Mrs Ranevsky doesn’t make more of an effort to save the orchard?
o And why does Lopakhin seem so uncertain or reluctant to buy it?
o How does the play present each of the classes: the gentry, the peasanty and the bourgeoisie? Find specific examples.
o Why, in your view, are so many of the characters so prone to emotion highs and lows? Find examples.
o What function could be served, or what message sent, by Lopakhin’s (subtly declared) love for Mrs Ranevsky?
o Anti-climax
And, as a result, the plays don’t have climaxes so much as anti-climaxes. Again, this is a reaction on Chekhov’s part to the conventions of melodrama and earlier naturalistic modes, which he saw as containing falsely theatrical moments – moments of drama or melodrama that were obvious in their constructedness and not true to real life.
So, he took pride, he said, in the fact that there is not a single pistol shot in Cherry O. You’ll remember that, just as in Hedda Gabler, we do see guns midway through the play – which automatically sets up an audience expectation that they will go off – as of course they do in Hedda Gabler. But C is playing with us. He took great pleasure in subverting theatrical conventions – in setting up, then subverting, audience expectations.
And Cherry Orchard is full of anti-climax. For example, Lopakhin’s announcement about buying orchard has been built up and built up. Along with Mrs Ranevsky, we’re made to wait for him and Gayev to return from the auction (they miss their train, etc.). So tension and expectation is built in the audience in fairly conventional ways. But Lopakhin’s announcement could hardly be less dramatic. At least at first, he’s just embarrassed and tired. (As he gets going, of course, we get a real sense of a turning-point – both in terms of the play’s plot, and a turning point for this family/social network – and even for Russia as a whole.) But the initial announcement is hardly the explosion we’re expecting. And Gayev’s response to the loss of his family’s ancestral lands is even more anti-climactic – he dishes out some anchovies and goes for a game of billiards!
Now, of course, this lack of action or drama could also be an indication of the characters avoidance stragegies – it could be seen as a denial, if you like, of a harsh reality. For example, Varya and Lophakin’s possible marriage is (as we’ve seen) another huge anti-climax. Chekhov knows that the audience will be expecting their union. Dramatically, it would make sense. Marriage would neatly unite two single characters. It could also imply a message for the play: these two are the hardworking characters, and so their union might suggest the virtue of work as an antidote to social disintegration. Marriage between two characters from such different classes might even have implied a vision of a positive future for Russian society. Chekhov sets up all these possibilities, but then pulls the rug from under our feet: anti-climax.
3. Genre: Tragedy/Comedy
So, because of Chekhov’s determination to depict ‘real life’ onstage, and not get trapped by ‘theatricality’, the plays are difficult both to categorise, and to interpret. Productions often emphasise their melancholy or elegiac qualities – gloomy yet poetic Russia on the cusp of change and death.
• Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts Theatre
Chekhov’s plays are particularly associated with Stanislavsky, and the famous Moscow Arts Theatre, of which he was director. (Stanislavsky known as inventor of ‘the method’ or method acting – made famous subsequently by actors like Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro. Chekhov had actually written the character of Lopakhin for Stanislavsky to play, hoping that, on stage, that the vulgarity of Lopakhin’s capitalism would be made more sympathetic by Stanislavsky’s (apparent) poise and stage presence. Stanislavsky preferred to play Gayev, however, which meant that Chekhov rewrote the play substantially in the process of rehearsals, making the character of Lopakhin more sympathetic on paper.)
Stanislavsky’s productions tended to cast Chekhov’s plays, including Cherry Orchard, as tragedies. This is an approach that has been followed in most British productions: the plays become rather sentimental elegies for an aristocratic class depicted as attractively eccentric and lovable, despite their faults. As a tragedy, then, the play becomes one in which the outcome is shown to be tragic – negative rather than positive.
• Cherry Orchard a comedy according to Chekhov
Chekhov was intensely irritated by Stanislavsky’s emphasis on tragedy, however. He insisted on calling the Cherry Orchard a comedy – the play having a positive outcome.
o Would you produce this play as a tragedy or a comedy? Find two or three textual examples to support your positioning of the play as one or the other.
Not all ‘comedies’ are funny, of course, but comic moments are certainly integral to The Cherry Orchard:
o Have a look at the beginning of Act 2: what function might Charlotte’s cucumber serve (apart from simply being a funny shape …)?
o Gayev’s preoccupation with billiards is also comical. But could it also be significant in terms of character and the play’s themes?
And almost everything Yepikhodov says and does has a strong comic, or even farcical, dimension.
Trying to categorise the plays as either tragedy and comedy might be a red herring, though, given Chekhov’s antipathy to the constraints of theatrical convention. Furthermore, Chekhov is known for his ability to hold these different moods – the tragic and the comic – together at the same time – so that to classify the play according to these old conventions becomes very difficult.
We know, of course, that the meanings thrown up by a play cannot ever be reduced to the author’s intentions – its meanings ultimately depend on the reader (of page and stage). But, whether or not we agree with Chekhov that the play is a comedy in the sense that it offers a positive view of Russia’s future, what is clear is that he believed his plays MUST be produced with a lightness of touch and a casualness – something associated far more with comedies like The Tempest rather than tragedies like King Lear. So in this sense he was determined they should be produced LIKE comedies.
• Soviet stagings
In fact, stagings of his plays in the Soviet Union have largely been comedic, because this suited the message favoured by the communist authorities. In this context, the plays become satires on the inadequacies of the class system in general, and of the decadent upper classes in particular. Stagings imply a the plays’ messages to relate to revolution as the means of a bright future for Russia - the brave new world of Soviet Communism, instituted after the Revolution of 1917.
4. Play’s Messages
• Symbolism
We saw a few weeks ago the influence upon Yeats of European symbolism (and mysticism), writers like Maurice Maeterlink, for example. And symbolism is something for which Chekhov is particularly known. In a play like The Seagull, you can be sure that the seagull is more than just a bird; likewise the cherry orchard here is far more than just an orchard.
Edward Braun (115): As a signifier, it is polysemic yet quite specific. For Lopakhin, the orchard represents both an “economic dinosaur” abd an unmissable business opportunity, as well as embodying the oppression suffered by his father and earlier generations before the emancipation. Paradoxically, it is also for him “the most beautiful place in the world” – a beauty that (like Ranevskaya’s) he can only ever dream of possessing, and which through possessing he is bound to destroy. For Ranevskaya and Gaev, it has always served as the provider of their idly squandered wealth, yet they are oblivious to it economic significance and it evokes only fond memories of their mother, their youth and their happiness. For Firs, it recalls a lucrative rural economy based on skills long forgotten through careless neglect. For Trofimov, it is the embodiment of a corrupt social order in which Anya’s forebears “owned living souls”, whose eyes can be seen staring in baleful accusation “from every cherry in the orchard, from every leaf, from the trunk of every tree”.
o Look at the opening couple of pages of Act 2. What kind of symbolism does Chekhov use in this section, including the stage directions?
o How do you read the sound of the ‘breaking string’ in Act 2, repeated at the end of the play? Do we know what it actually is? Does it have symbolic meaning?
Braun’s analysis of the symbolism of the orchard doesn’t seem to help much in our desire to clarify the play’s overall social message! Does the play approve of the fall of the gentry, we want to know? What kind of future does it advocate? We’re not sure…
As we’ve seen, though, play contains number of speeches apparently highly critical of the existing Russian social order – from Lopakhin and Trofimov in particular.
• Lopakhin – capitalism?
Lopakhin we can see as representing one of Russia’s possible futures – As in the Yeats and Synge plays, what we have here is a former peasant made good after Emancipation – a member of the rising bourgeoisie or middle class – a capitalist interested in ‘getting on’. He is a hard worker in his bid to earn money, with which he will buy property which will in turn earn him more money, and so on. So in this way Lopakhin can be seen to represent a Russian future of capitalism and every wo/man for themselves. In this free market future, the aristocracy will just have to face that reality and work for their bread like everyone else!
And yet Lopakhin is rather an confused character. Not least, this may be a symptom of the radical social change experienced by serf families like his after emancipation. Chekhov’s presentation makes him highly ambiguous, too: how do we read him and his actions? Is he (and, therefore, the future he represents) a positive character? His destruction of the Cherry Orchard, for example, is not necessarily presented as something to admire. You might, in fact, read it as a warning against the triumph of commercial power over the way of life symbolised by the beautiful but unproductive orchard.
Lopakhin’s ambiguity is matched by that of Mrs Ranevsky (with whom Lopakhin is actually in love…). She’s not simply an evil aristocrat. We might even sympathise with her elegiac memories of childhood happiness – unless, that is, you see it as the sickening sentimentality of a bunch of aristocratic freeloaders…
• Trofimov – revolution?
Trofimov is an equally ambiguous character. By contrast with Lopakhin, he represents a more idealistic, and possibly revolutionary, future for Russia:
Orlando Figes: ‘The universities had been the organizational centre of opposition to the tsarist regime since the 1860s. In the Russian language the words “student” and “revolutionary” were almost synonymous.’
Trofimov’s talk about the iniquity of a system based on ‘owning living souls’ is part of his highly intellectualised take on Russia’s social problems. His theory is that Russians have spent too much time talking and theorising while the problems have got worse. So, the bright future – the ‘freedom’ – Trofimov tries to sell to Anya (and possibly to the audience) is one that, post-1917, we read as foreshadowing a socialist Russia – a Russia with no classes anymore, no feudal hierarchies and no capitalist exploitation.
And yet, while Trofimov hates the Russian tendency to over-theorise at the expense of action – that’s exactly what he himself does! So we might well experience as irony Chekhov’s depiction of Trofimov, the eternal student, theorising his days away and never DOING anything! And so the future advocated by Trofimov might well be viewed by the audience less than favourably – as a fantasy, theoretical rather than practical. And, by comparison, Lopakhin’s dynamism might even be preferred …
Think about what message this play is sending about Russia and its future through the characters of Trofimov and Lopakhin. For each character:
o Find some key moments which reveal each character: how do they compare?
o Does Chekhov suggest anything in his descriptions of their appearance?
o What qualities do they each have?
o And what weaknesses or ‘bad’ points do they display?
o what are their motivations and priorities?
So what kind of analysis of Russia’s society and future does Chekhov offer us? Does the play seem to prefer one future over the other? What kinds of readings will it best support? Chekhov would probably deny that it favours anything. He might maintain that it is objective. But even if we take him at his word, we can still ask whether there is a message in a refusal to take a social view…
o Look closely at the play’s ending. Can you read a social message from it?
o If the play really is socially ‘objective’, what other kinds of message might it be sending to the audience?
Introduction to Drama: Reading the Page, Reading the Stage
7. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Dr Aidan Arrowsmith.
Some Useful Quotations
Nikolai Petrov: Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy, but in essence it is a novel, an engrossing novel that embraces the whole period from 1861 to 1905 and describes the life of people in Russia just before Tsarism begins to collapse.
Edward Braun: As the vast semi-feudal empire struggled to catch up with Europe through headlong industrialisation, massive foreign investment and a drive for exports, the rural economy was crippled with heavy taxation, crop failures, cholera epidemics, rocketing land prices and a massive increase in population. In 1901 crop failures resulted in the worst outbreaks of violence since the 1860s, and over the next two years thousands of starving peasants invaded the estates of the gentry. (in Gottlieb & Allain)
Chekhov, Letters: You confuse two concepts: the solution of a problem and its correct presentation. Only the second is incumbent on the artist … In my view it’s not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism and so on. The writer’s job is only to show who, how, in what context, spoke or thought about God and pessimism. The artist must not be the judge of his character and of what they say: merely a dispassionate observer … (q in Watson, p.133)
G.J. Watson: Chekhov’s mastery of random, inconsequential dialogue, as the characters speak not so much to each other as past each other, in contexts which permit juxtapositions and non-sequitors which are sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, and where the polyphony of voices does indeed create at times a musical effect.
Chekhov: The demand is made that the hero and heroine should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, running after women or men, talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage. A play ought to be written in which people should come and go, dine, talk of the weather, or play cards, not because the author wants it, but because this is what happens in real life. Life on the stage should be as it really is, and the people, too, should be as they are, and not on stilts.
Donald Rayfield: [The cherry orchard] represents an economic and social dinosaur approaching extinction. A cherry orchard that could glut the world with cherries and yet cannot earn its owners a living symbolizes a decrepit world, a decrepit Russia for which ordered destruction is the only alternative to disordered ruination.
Edward Braun: As a signifier, it is polysemic yet quite specific. For Lopakhin, the orchard represents both an “economic dinosaur” abd an unmissable business opportunity, as well as embodying the oppression suffered by his father and earlier generations before the emancipation. Paradoxically, it is also for him “the most beautiful place in the world” – a beauty that (like Ranevskaya’s) he can only ever dream of possessing, and which through possessing he is bound to destroy. For Ranevskaya and Gaev, it has always served as the provider of their idly squandered wealth, yet they are oblivious to it economic significance and it evokes only fond memories of their mother, their youth and their happiness. For Firs, it recalls a lucrative rural economy based on skills long forgotten through careless neglect. For Trofimov, it is the embodiment of a corrupt social order in which Anya’s forebears “owned living souls”, whose eyes can be seen staring in baleful accusation “from every cherry in the orchard, from every leaf, from the trunk of every tree”.
Orlando Figes: ‘The universities had been the organizational centre of opposition to the tsarist regime since the 1860s. In the Russian language the words “student” and “revolutionary” were almost synonymous.’
Trevor Griffiths: The Cherry Orchard has always seemed to me to be dealing not only with the subjective pain of property-loss but also and more importantly with its objective necessity. To present it as the first is to celebrate a pessimism; as to see it as both is to redress an important political balance potent in the text Chekhov wrote but in practice almost wholly ignored.
References
Edward Braun, ‘The Cherry Orchard’ in Gottlieb & Allain.
_______, The Director and the Stage (London: 1982)
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (London, 1996)
Donald Rayfield, The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy (NY, 1994)
Vera Gottlieb & Paul Allain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov (Cambridge, 2000)
Trevor Griffiths, a new English version of The Cherry Orchard , (London, 1978).
G.J. Watson, Drama: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1983)
Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London 1987) |
|
|
| British Writing and the Enlightenment |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:31 am] |
Set Texts:
Robert DeMaria Jr (ed) British Literature 1640-1789, Second edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. [D]
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Penguin Classics.
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, Penguin Classics.
A small amount of material will also be distributed separately in time for seminar discussion.
The unit is organised around four major topics:
Introduction: Reason and the Classical Inspiration: Ancient Greece & Rome, and modern France.
Politics: ‘The Universal Rights of Man’ (and women).
Sexuality: ‘The Man (and woman) of Feeling’.
4. Religion and Philosophy: ‘the best of all possible worlds’.
The lectures will introduce the historical and philosophical context of these topics and offer detailed readings of certain important texts.
The main textual discussion however will take place in the seminars. Reading for these is closely specified in the weekly programme (overleaf). You must do the set reading thoroughly and carefully each week and come prepared with your own notes.
Programme of Lectures and Seminars
D = DeMaria
Introduction: Reason and the Classical Inspiration: Ancient Greece & Rome, and modern France.
1. Sept 30 Learning and Ignorance
Dryden, ‘To My Honoured Friend …’ D 174-5; ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’, D 211-3.
Rochester, ‘A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind’, D 281-5.
2. Oct 7 The Tree of Knowledge
Milton, Paradise Lost Bk IX D 105-29.
[also see Addison on PL D 506; Johnson on Milton D 716]
Swift, A Modest Proposal… D 425-9.
Politics: ‘The Universal Rights of Man’ (and women).
3. Oct 14 Who rules?
Filmer, from Patriarcha, D 9-10.
Hobbes, from Leviathan, D 6-8.
Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode…’ D 146-8.
4. Oct 21 Master and Slave
Locke, from An Essay … Civil Government, D 214-9
More, ‘The Slave Trade’ D 882-6.
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of…the African D 871-80
Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France …’ D 803-13.
Mary Woolstonecroft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, D 923-
Sexuality: ‘The Man (and woman) of Feeling’.
5. Oct 28 ‘All that love could say’
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, D 245-78.
31October - 4 November Progression & Assessment Week
7.Nov 11 Barons and Belles
Pope, The Rape of the Lock D 531-49.
Jones, ‘After the Small Pox’, D 637.
Swift, ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’; ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph…’ D 430-5.
Montagu, ‘The Reasons that Induced Dr Swift to Write …The Lady’s Dressing-Room’, D 596-8.
8.Nov 18 Companionate Marriage?
Fielding, The Female Husband (NB to be distributed).
Religion and Philosophy:
9. Nov 25 Travelling Hopefully
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
10. Dec 2 Faith and Reason
Finch, ‘The Atheist and the Acorn’ D 343.
Smart, from Jubilate Agno’ D 785-9.
Gibbon, from Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, D 834-44.
11. Dec 9 ‘the best of all possible worlds’.
Voltaire, Candide (Penguin)
12. Dec 16 Revision and Essay Tutorials |
|
|
| British Writing and the Enlightenment |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:29 am] |
Texts for Essay 1 (close analysis)
Read all of these texts thoroughly and then choose one. This is a close textual exercise in which you give a highly detailed account of the work’s subject and style. Avoid generalisation about the period, or ‘the enlightenment’ – it’s too early for this. No additional reading is required.
Begin with a brief summary of the argument or narrative. Then consider qualities such as ‘tone of voice’, genre, vocabulary, syntax, poetic form (where relevant), and the audience to whom you think the text is addressed.
Texts (all are to be found in DeMaria):
Katharine Philips‘To Mrs Wogan…’ D 170-1.
2. Milton: Sonnet 18: ‘On the Late Massacre in Piemont’, D 40.
Pepys: Diary entry from July 1665, paras 1-5 D 220-1.
Ramsay, ‘Give me a lass with a lump of land’, D 529.
Reynolds, from ‘The Discourse’, first 3 paras, D 794-5
Questions for Essay 2 (thematic). Be sure to include discussion of at least TWO different authors)
1. ‘In that its thinkers sought a uniform pattern of explanation for everything, the Enlightenment was no different from earlier traditions of thought. The difference lay in where they sought that pattern.’
Consider how far you think this is true with respect to either political thought or religious thought in this period.
2. ‘Man is born to think for himself.’ (Diderot) How well do you think this might serve as a motto for ‘the Enlightenment’?
3. ‘The problem with the Enlightenment is that it proved a totalising system: it demonised difference and privileged the so-called normal.’
How far do you agree with this critique?
4. ‘Though few can reason all mankind can feel.’ Explore the attention given to non-European people in this period. How ‘enlightened’ was it?
5. Identify and discuss the contribution of one literary form in this period which you consider to have been significantly innovative.
6. Where and how do ‘Reason’ and ‘the fond links of feeling nature’ compete in the writing of this period?
7. ‘One ‘Enlightenment’ writer after another, sadly or gleefully, shows sexuality to be the frustration or Reason.’
How far do you recognise the truth of this observation in writings of the period?
8. Write an essay illustrating and discussing how ONE of the following terms was used in this period: Reason, Nature, Sensibility. |
|
|
| Bristish Writing and the Enlightenment |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:28 am] |
BRITISH WRITING AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Select Bibliography
NB This bibliography aims to point out important general texts. Works on specific authors are too numerous to include here and can be readily found in literature searches.
History and Ideas
Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment, eds. John Yolton et al., 1992.
Eighteenth-Century Sources on the Web: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/index.html
Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1964.
Michel Foucault The Foucault Reader, ed. P Rabinow, 1984. See: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’; ‘The Means of Correct Training’.
Peter Gay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. 1966-9.
Norman Hampson The Enlightenment, 1968.
Paul Hazard European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1946, tr 1954.
Jonathan I Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001.
Oxford Classical Dictionary, eds. N G L Hammond & H H Scullard, 1970
Roy Porter Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, 2000.
The Enlightenment, 1990.
English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1991.
Flesh in the Age of Reason, 2003.
Keith Thomas Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England
1500 1800
see Ch 1: 'Human Ascendancy', 1983
Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular belief in Sixteenth & Seventeenth century England, 1971.
see Ch 22 'The Decline of Magic'.
Literature - general
John Barrell English Literature in History, 1730-80, and Equal, Wide Survey, 1983.
Walter Jackson Bate From Classic to Romantic, 1946.
The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, 1970.
Stephen Copley (ed) Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth Century England, 1984.
Robert DeMaria Jr (ed)British Literature 1640-1789, A Critical Reader, 1999.
John Mullan Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, 1988.
Pat Rogers The Augustan Vision, 1974.
Basil Willey The Seventeenth Century Background, 1934.
The Eighteenth Century Background, 1940.
Raymond Williams The Country and the City, 1975 see Chs. 6-14.
Keywords, 1976 see entries under ‘Democracy’, ‘Empirical’, ‘Improve ’, `Nature' ‘Rational’, ‘Science’, ‘Taste’, ‘Wealth’.
Poetry
eds Alex Preminger
& T V F Brogan The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics , 1993 All you ever wanted to know ... The ultimate reference book, not by authors, but every technical term, form, history & critical viewpoint explained, plus further reading. Completely up to date.
Donald Davie Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry, 1955.
Howard Erskine-Hill Poetry of Opposition and Revolution, Dryden to Wordsworth, 1996.
Germaine Greer Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, 1995.
ed Roger Lonsdale Eighteenth Century Women Poets, 1989.
John Sitter Arguments of Augustan Wit, 1991.
Jeffrey Wainwright Poetry: the Basics, 2004.
Fiction and Non-Fiction
Nancy Armstrong Desire and Domestic Fiction; A political History of the Novel, 1987.
M. McKeon The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, 1987.
Isabel Rivers (ed) Books and their readers in Eighteenth Century England, 1982.
Jane Spencer The Rise of the Woman Novelist, from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, 1986.
Dale Spender 100 Good Women Novelists Before Jane Austen, 1986.
Ian Watt The Rise of the Novel, 1957.
************************************************************ |
|
|
| Drama: Readin the Page, Reading the Stage |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:27 am] |
Texts to buy (in order):
Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (Faber)
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (Dover)
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Methuen)
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children (Methuen)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis |
|
|
| Writing and Culture in the Nineteenth Century |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:26 am] |
Primary Texts
Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White
James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw
Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of being Earnest
Rossetti, Christina, ‘Goblin Market’
Schreiner, Olive, The Story of an African Farm
Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands
Excerpts from: The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick : Victorian maidservant (copies provided)
Course Outline
Week 1 (26.Sept) Introduction: Writing the Nineteenth century AM
I. The Dark Nineteenth Century
Week 2 (3. Oct) James Hogg , The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner AM
Week 3 (10.Oct) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White EL
Week 4 (17.Oct) Henry James, The Turn of the Screw EL
II. Sexualities and Gender in the Nineteenth century
Week 5 (24. Oct) Introduction: Sexualities and Gender in the Nineteenth century
AM
Week 6 (31. Oct) Progression Week
Week 7 (7. Nov) Christina Rossetti , ‘Goblin Market’ AM
Week 8 (14. Nov) Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest EB
Week 9 (21. Nov) Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm EB
III. Class, race and writing in the Nineteenth century
Week 10 (28. Nov) The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant
and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands AM
Week 11 (5. Dec) Assessed Presentation
Week 12 (12. Dec) Review
Assessment
The unit will be assessed through a presentation, essay and exam.
Presentation 25%; Essay 25% 2 hour exam 50%
Due dates for assessed work
500 word critique of presentation: 9. December 2005
1500 words essay: 23. January 2006 (submit 2 copies)
The due date for the essay is Monday 23 January 2006, with an absolute deadline of Monday6 February 2006. ** NB: The Faculty now operates a system of an absolute deadline two weeks after the original due date. Up until the due date, the full range of marks are available; within the subsequent two-week period, essays can be awarded a maximum mark of 40%; after the deadline, no work will be accepted, and a mark of zero will be recorded. **
Essay Questions
As always, essays must be word-processed, documented in correct MHRA style with footnotes or endnotes, and have a full bibliography. You must submit two copies. If you’re in any doubt about the MHRA style guidelines, get some advice from your tutor, and / or refer to the published version: MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2002), also available online at: www.mhra.org.uk
Students must not use substantially the same material in more than one piece of assessed work: this includes both assessed coursework and examinations. If a piece of work is found to repeat material from an earlier assessment, the mark will be reduced, and may even be reduced to zero.
1. ‘That which we cannot conceive is always frightening because it makes us doubt how much we know about ourselves.’ Discuss how nineteenth century gothic narratives can be linked to questions of identity by referring to EITHER James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner OR Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw
2. ‘The emphasis upon the childlike qualities of supposedly lower races parallels the frequent references one comes across of the immature working classes. Discuss the representation of class and race in the nineteenth century by referring to The Diary of Hannah Cullwick
3. How ‘black’ is Mrs Seacole? Discuss the representation of race in relation to gender and national identity in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands
4. The villain is always the most complex and interesting character in Sensation fiction. Do you agree? Discuss in relation to The Woman in White
5. How useful is Lyn Pykett's discussion of the 'improper feminine' to a reading of gender and transgression in The Woman in White?
6. In Goblin Market ‘bodies and language are unstable and provocative’. Discuss by providing a formal analysis of Rossetti’s poem.
7. The end of the Nineteenth century saw traditional masculinity in crisis. Do you agree? Discuss the representation of gender and sexualities in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in relation to cultural anxieties of the fin de siècle.
8. In Story of an African Farm imperialist and colonialist discourse is parodied and undermined. Do you agree? Discuss by paying particular attention to the representation of Africa in the novel. |
|
|
| Drama: Reading the Page Reading the Stage |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:25 am] |
CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN by W.B Yeats & Lady Gregory (1902)
Characters
Peter Gillane Bridget Gillane, Peter’s wife
Michael Gillane, his son, going Delia Cahel, engaged to Michael
to be married The Poor Old Woman
Patrick Gillane, a lad of twelve, Neighbours
Michael's brother
Interior of a cottage close to Killala, in 1798. Bridget is standing at a table undoing a parcel. Peter is sitting at one side of the fire, Patrick at the other.
Peter. What is that sound I hear?
Patrick. I don't hear anything. [He listens.] I hear it now. It's like cheering. [He goes to the window and looks out.] I wonder what they are cheering about. I don't see anybody.
Peter. It might be a hurling.
Patrick. There's no hurling to-day. It must be down in the town the cheering is.
Bridget. I suppose the boys must be having some sport of their own. Come over here, Peter, and look at Michael's wedding clothes.
Peter [shifts his chair to table]. Those are grand clothes, indeed.
Bridget. You hadn't clothes like that when you married me, and no coat to put on of a Sunday more than any other day.
Peter. That is true, indeed. We never thought a son of our own would be wearing a suit of that sort for his wedding, or have so good a place to bring a wife to.
Patrick [who is still at the window]. There's an old woman coming down the road. I don't know is it here she is coming.
Bridget. It will be a neighbour coming to hear about Michael's wedding. Can you see who it is?
Patrick. I think it is a stranger, but she's not coming to the house. She's turned into the gap that goes down where Maurteen and his sons are shearing sheep. [He turns towards Bridget.] Do you remember what Winny of the Cross-Roads was saying the other night about the strange woman that goes through the country whatever time there s war or trouble coming?
Bridget. Don't be bothering us about Winny's talk, but go and open the door for your brother. I hear him coming up the path.
Peter. I hope he has brought Delia's fortune with him safe, for fear the people might go back on the bargain and I after making it. Trouble enough I had making it.
[Patrick opens the door and Michael comes in.]
Bridget. What kept you, Michael? We were looking out for you this long time.
Michael. I went round by the priest's house to bid him be ready to marry us to-morrow.
Bridget. Did he say anything?
Michael. He said it was a very nice match, and that he was never better pleased to marry any two in his parish than myself and Delia Cahel.
Peter. Have you got the fortune, Michael?
Michael. Here it is.
[Michael puts bag on table and goes over and leans against chimney jamb. Bridget, who has been all this time examining the clothes, pulling the seams and trying the lining of the pockets, etc., puts the clothes on the dresser.
Peter [getting up and taking the bag in his hand and turning out the money]. Yes, I made the bargain well for you, Michael. Old John Cahel would sooner have kept a share of this a while longer. 'Let me keep the half of it until the first boy is born,' says he. 'You will not,' says I. 'Whether there is or is not a boy, the whole hundred pounds must be in Michael's hands before he brings your daughter to the house.' The wife spoke to him then, and he gave in at the end.
Bridget. You seem well pleased to be handling the money, Peter.
Peter. Indeed, I wish I had had the luck to get a hundred pounds, or twenty pounds itself, with the wife I married.
Bridget. Well, if I didn't bring much I didn't get much. What had you the day I married you but a flock of hens and you feeding them, and a few lambs and you driving them to the market at Ballina? [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 that is standing there now, on a stook of straw, while I dug the potatoes, and never asking big dresses or anything but to be working.
Peter. That is true, indeed.[He pats her arm.]
Bridget. Leave me alone now till I ready the house for the woman that is to come into it.
Peter. You are the best woman in Ireland, but money is good, too. [He begins handling the money again and sits down.] I never thought to see so much money within my four walls. We can do great things now we have it. We can take the ten acres of land we have the chance of since Jamsie Dempsey died, and stock it. We will go to the fair at Ballina to buy the stock. Did Delia ask any of the money for her own use, Michael?
Michael. She did not, indeed. She did not seem to take much notice of it, or to look at it at all.
Bridget. That's no wonder. Why would she look at it when she had yourself to look at, a fine, strong young man? It is proud she must be to get you, a good steady boy that will make use of the money, and not be running through it or spending it on drink like another.
Peter. It's likely Michael himself was not thinking much of the fortune either, but of what sort the girl was to look at.
Michael [coming over towards the table]. Well, you would like a nice comely girl to be beside you, and to go walking with you. The fortune only lasts for a while, but the woman will be there always.
Patrick [turning round from the window]. They are cheering again down in the town. Maybe they are landing horses from Enniscrone. They do be cheering when the horses take the water well.
Michael. There are no horses in it. Where would they be going and no fair at hand? Go down to the town, Patrick, and see what is going on.
Patrick [opens the door to go out, but stops for a moment on the threshold]. will Delia remember, do you think, to bring the greyhound pup she promised me when she would be coming to the house?
Michael. She will surely.
[Patrick goes out, leaving the door open.
Peter. It will be Patrick's turn next to be looking for a fortune, but he won't find it so easy to get it and he with no place of his own.
Bridget. I do be thinking sometimes, now things are going so well with us, and the Cahels such a good back to us in the district, and Delia's own uncle a priest, we might be put in the way of making Patrick a priest some day, and he so good at his books.
Peter. Time enough, time enough. You have always your head full of plans, Bridget.
Bridget. We will be well able to give him learning, and not to send him tramping the country like a poor scholar that lives on charity.
Michael. They're not done cheering yet.
[He goes over to the door and stands there for a moment putting up his hand to shade his eyes.
Bridget. Do you see anything?
Michael. I see an old woman coming up the path.
Bridget. Who is it, I wonder? It must be the strange woman Patrick saw a while ago.
Michael. I don't think it's one of the neighbours anyway, but she has her cloak over her face.
Bridget. It might be some poor woman heard we were making ready for the wedding and came to look for her share.
Peter. I may as well put the money out of sight. There is no use leaving it out for every stranger to look at.
[He goes over to a large box in the corner, opens it and puts the bag in and fumbles at the lock.
Michael. There she is, father! [An Old Woman passes the window slowly. She looks at Michael as she passes.] I'd sooner a stranger not to come to the house the night before my wedding.
Bridget. Open the door, Michael; don't keep the poor woman waiting.
[The Old Woman comes in. Michael stands aside to make way for her.]
Old Woman. God save all here!
Peter. God save you kindly!
Old Woman. You have good shelter here.
Peter. You are welcome to whatever shelter we have.
Bridget. Sit down there by the fire and welcome.
Old Woman [warming her hands]. There is a hard wind outside.
[Michael watches her curiously from the door. Peter comes over to the table.
Peter. Have you travelled far to-day?
Old Woman. I have travelled far, very far; there are few have travelled so far as myself, and there's many a one that doesn't make me welcome. There was one that had strong sons I thought were friends of mine, but they were shearing their sheep, and they wouldn't listen to me.
Peter. It's a pity indeed for any person to have no place of their own.
Old Woman. That's true for you indeed, and it's long I'm on the roads since I first went wandering.
Bridget. It is a wonder you are not worn out with so much wandering.
Old Woman. Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart. When the people see me quiet, they think old age has come on me and that all the stir has gone out of me. But when the trouble is on me I must be talking to my friends.
Bridget. What was it put you wandering?
Old Woman. Too many strangers in the house.
Bridget. Indeed you look as if you'd had your share of trouble.
Old Woman. I have had trouble indeed.
Bridget. What was it put the trouble on you?
Old Woman. My land that was taken from me.
Peter. Was it much land they took from you?
Old Woman. My four beautiful green fields.
Peter [aside to Bridget]. Do you think could she be the widow Casey that was put out of her holding at Kilglass a while ago?
Bridget. She is not. I saw the widow Casey one time at the market in Ballina, a stout fresh woman.
Peter [to Old Woman]. Did you hear a noise of cheering, and you coming up the hill?
Old Woman. I thought I heard the noise I used to hear when my friends came to visit me.[She begins singing half to herself. I will go cry with the woman, For yellow-haired Donough is dead, With a hempen rope for a neckcloth, And a white cloth on his head,—
Michael [coming from the door]. What is it that you are singing, ma'am?
Old Woman. Singing I am about a man I knew one time, yellow-haired Donough that was hanged in Galway. [She goes on singing, much louder.] I am come to cry with you, woman, My hair is unwound and unbound; I remember him ploughing his field, Turning up the red side of the ground, And building his barn on the hill. With the good mortared stone; O! we'd have pulled down the gallows Had it happened in Enniscrone!
Michael. What was it brought him to his death?
Old Woman. He died for love of me: many a man has died for love of me.
Peter [aside to Bridget]. Her trouble has put her wits astray.
Michael. Is it long since that song was made? Is it long since he got his death?
Old Woman. Not long, not long. But there were others that died for love of me a long time ago.
Michael. Were they neighbours of your own, ma'am?
Old Woman. Come here beside me and I'll tell you about them. [Michael sits down beside her on the hearth.] There was a red man of the O'Donnells from the north, and a man of the O'Sullivans from the south, and there was one Brian that lost his life at Clontatf by the sea, and there were a great many in the west, some that died hundreds of years ago, and there are some that will die to-morrow.
Michael. Is it in the west that men will die to-morrow?
Old Woman. Come nearer, nearer to me.
Bridget. Is she right, do you think? Or is she a woman from beyond the world?
Peter. She doesn't know well what she's talking about, with the want and the trouble she has gone through.
Bridget. The poor thing, we should treat her well.
Peter. Give her a drink of milk and a bit of the oaten cake.
Bridget. Maybe we should give her something along with that, to bring her on her way. A few pence or a shilling itself, and we with so much money in the house.
Peter. Indeed I'd not begrudge it to her if we had it to spare, but if we go running through what we have, we'll soon have to break the hundred pounds, and that would be a pity.
Bridget. Shame on you, Peter. Give her the shilling and your blessing with it, or our own luck will go from us. [Peter goes to the box and takes out a shilling.
Bridget [to the Old Woman]. Will you have a drink of milk, ma am?
Old Woman. It is not food or drink that I want.
Peter [offering the shilling]. Here is something for you.
Old Woman. This is not what I want. It is not silver I want.
Peter. What is it you would be asking for?
Old Woman. If any one would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all.
[Peter goes over to the table staring at the shilling in his hand in a bewildered way, and stands whispering to Bridget.
Michael. Have you no one to care you in your age, ma'am?
Old Woman. I have not. With all the lovers that brought me their love I never set out the bed for any.
Michael. Are you lonely going the roads, ma'am?
Old Woman. I have my thoughts and I have my hopes.
Michael. What hopes have you to hold to?
Old Woman. The hope of getting my beautiful fields back again; the hope of putting the strangers out of my house.
Michael. What way will you do that, ma'am?
Old Woman. I have good friends that will help me. They are gathering to help me now. I am not afraid. If they are put down to-day they will get the upper hand to-morrow. [She gets up.] I must be going to meet my friends. They are coming to help me and I must be there to welcome them. I must call the neighbours together to welcome them.
Michael. I will go with you.
Bridget. 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 have plenty to do; it is food and drink you have to bring to the house. The woman that is coming home is not coming with empty hands; 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 to-morrow.
Old Woman. It is not a man going to his marriage that
I look to for help.
Peter [to Bridget]. Who is she, do you think, at all?
Bridget. You did not tell us your name yet, ma'am.
Old Woman. Some call me the Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call me Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.
Peter. I think I knew some one of that name, once. Who was it, I wonder? It must have been some one I knew when I was a boy. No, no; I remember, I heard it in a song.
Old Woman [who is standing in the doorway]. They are wondering that there were songs made for me; there have been many songs made for me. I heard one on the wind this morning.[Sings]
Do not make a great keening
When the graves have been dug to-morrow.
Do not call the white-scarfed riders
To the burying that shall be to-morrow.
Do not spread food to call strangers
To the wakes that shall be to-morrow;
Do not give money for prayers
For the dead that shall die to-morrow....
They will have no need of prayers, they will have no need of prayers.
Michael. I do not know what that song means, but tell me something I can do for you.
Peter. Come over to me, Michael.
Michael. Hush, father, listen to her.
Old Woman. It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that, they will think they are well paid. [She goes out; her voice is heard outside singing.
They shall be remembered for ever,
They shall be alive for ever,
They shall be speaking for ever,
The people shall hear them for ever.
Bridget [to Peter]. 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. Such grand clothes as these are! You have a right to fit them on now; it would be a pity to-morrow if they did not ht. The boys would be laughing at you. Take them, Michael, and go into the room and fit them on. [She puts them on his arm.
Michael. What wedding are you talking of? What clothes will I be wearing to-morrow?
Bridget. These are the clothes you are going to wear when you marry Delia Cahel to-morrow.
Michael. I had forgotten that.
[He looks at the clothes and turns towards the inner room, but stops at the sound of cheering outside.
Peter. There is the shouting come to our own door. What is it has happened?
[Neighbours come crowding in, Patrick and Delia with them.
Patrick. There are ships in the Bay; the French are landing at Killala!
[Peter takes his pipe from his mouth and his hat off, and stands up. The clothes slip from Michael's arm.
Delia. Michael! [He takes no notice.] Michael! [He turns towards her.] Why do you look at me like a stranger? [She drops his arm. Bridget goes over towards her.
Patrick. The boys are all hurrying down the hillside to join the French.
Delia. Michael won't be going to join the French.
Bridget [to Peter]. Tell him not to go, Peter.
Peter. It's no use. He doesn't hear a word we're saying.
Bridget. Try and coax him over to the fire.
Delia. Michael, Michael! You - won't leave me! You won't join the French, and we going to be married!
[She puts her arms about him, he turns towards her as if about to yield.
Old Woman's voice outside. They shall be speaking for ever, The people shall hear them for ever.
[Michael breaks away from Delia, stands for a second at the door, then rushes out, following the Old Woman's voice. Bridget takes Delia, who is crying silently, into her arms.
Peter [to Patrick, laying a hand on his arm] Did you see an old woman going down the path?
Patrick. I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen. |
|
|
| Drama: Reading the Page and Reading the Stage |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:07 am] |
Introduction to Drama 3
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
Contemporary critical reception of Ibsen and Hedda
From Egan, Michael: Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1972
P219: […] There is to be noted in the Ibsen drama a total lack of wit or humour, or of other amenities of literary style. It has neither tears or laughter in its composition, being in its essentials merely a grim, gloomy exposure of the vanity, the pettiness, and to some extent the fatalism of human life. To conceive of the Ibsen drama gaining an extensive or permanent foothold on the stage is hardly possible. Playgoing would then cease to be an amusement and become a penance.
P220: Critics who felt that it is expected of them may pretend that they were shocked or that they were bored. But they certainly followed the play for three good hours with every outward sign of lively interest.
PP222-3: The production of an Ibsen play impels the inquiry, What is the province of art? If it be to elevate and refine, as we have hitherto humbly supposed, most certainly it cannot be said that the works of Ibsen have the very faintest claim to be artistic. We see no ground on which his method is defensible. […] Things rank and gross in nature alone have place in the mean and sordid philosophy of Ibsen.
P227: [Of Hedda] It is said there are such women in the world. There may be, but thank God they are the rare exception, not the rule! And Miss Elizabeth Robins has done what no doubt she fully intended to do. She has made vice attractive by her art. She has almost ennobled crime. She has stopped the shudder that so repulsive a creature should have inspired. She has glorified an unwomanly woman. She has made a heroine of a sublimated sinner. She has fascinated us with a savage.
P228: The people who have taken him [Ibsen] up have done so devotedly and as with a religion. The play of Hedda Gabler is not only acted well but rehearsed to perfection. But if I were asked if it is a well-made play, a play for the people, a wholesome play, an instructive play, a play that amuses, or elevates, or assists the imagination or fancy, or fairly contrasts the good with the bad, the evil in life with the good, I should answer ‘No’. We take it down with a gulp, and shudder afterwards. And there is no positive proof that such a dose of medicine does anybody any good whatever.
P241: There are many things in the world that are past finding out, and one of them is whether the subject of a work had not better been another subject. We shall always do well to leave that to the author (he may have some secret for solving the riddle); so terrible would his revenge easily become if we were to accept a responsibility for his theme.
Secondary quotes to accompany the lecture
Clurman, Harold: Ibsen. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977
P162: She [Hedda] is a passionate being in a society where marrying a “wild poet” was unthinkable and an affair with a known debauchee scandalous. The General’s daughter, Hedda, fears scandal above all. Now as a married woman she resists the very thought of adultery; she will countenance no “triangle”.
P163: Repressed, Hedda’s passion and power can only manifest themselves destructively. A moral coward under the pressure of social inhibition, she becomes a corrupting and malefic force. She destroys the man she has not dared to love, and destroys herself to avoid the consequences of her cowardice. […] She cannot assert herself in any positive way; she has only the desperate boldness to do away with herself.
P164: A general atmosphere of boredom, of ennui, is often stressed in the depiction of middle-class life in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in countries such as Norway and Russia.
P165: [Of Ibsen’s beliefs] Failure to enact the dictates of one’s innermost nature spells disaster. And a society which represses the innate potentialities of its members and thus the possibility of progress fosters hypocrisy, corruption, disruption and, finally, violence.
McFarlane, J.W. (Ed.): Discussions of Henrik Ibsen. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1962
Chapter: Arthur Miller, The “Real” in Ibsen’s Realism
P104-5: If his [Ibsen’s] plays, and his method, do nothing else they reveal the evolutionary quality of life. One is constantly aware, in watching his plays, of process, change, development. […] I take it as a truth that the end of drama is the creation of a higher consciousness and not merely a subjective attack upon the audience’s nerves and feelings. What is precious in the Ibsen method is its insistence on valid causation, and this cannot be dismissed as a wooden notion.
Beyer, Edward: Ibsen – The Man and His Work. Trans. Marie Wells. London: Souvenir Press (Educational and Academic) Ltd., 1978
P160: Hedda Gabler is paralysed to the very roots of her being by the upper-class, aristocratic-authoritarian male society of which her father, General Gabler, is a typical representative.
P162: Hedda belongs among Ibsen’s tragic heroes, [in] that she is the bearer of a dream of beauty and perfection which is expressed in the symbol ‘vine-leaves in the hair’, and that she seeks death because the dream cannot be realized. Others […] have replied by saying that Hedda does not have the human dimensions necessary for a tragic hero, and that the ‘vine-leaves’ fantasies do not stand for anything important to her, but, like her desire for power, are the expression of a warped longing for life.
Lucas, F.L.: Ibsen and Strindberg. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1962
P221: Hedda Gabler, then, is a daughter of the [18]nineties. But there have been plenty of her kind at other periods also who, having got women’s rights, forgot women’s duties. Dolls emancipated can become vampires; Noras [the Cherry Orchard] can become Heddas.
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (1890)
Seminar
Some questions to discuss in groups (pg refs are to the Dover edn)
Stage directions
Look at Ibsen’s instructions for the stage set.
• How do you read the ‘signs’ provided by the opening stage set (p.1): what do you see as significant about how the Tesman house is shown?
• In each Act, how does the stage setting relate to the action? For example, what might be the significance of the glass door in each act? Find other examples…
Now look at Ibsen’s descriptions of the characters: George (p.3), Hedda (p.5), Thea (p.11) and Lovborg (p.33). What ‘signs’ of their character are provided by their physical appearances?
Hedda.
What do you see as Hedda’s key moments in the play? Find two or three and explain their importance.
Why is Hedda so obsessed with hair, do you think? Find examples and decode, please.
Why is Hedda so scared of ‘scandal’ – how does this square with her other characteristics?
What do you see as the significance of the scene in which Hedda encourages Lovborg and Thea to drink punch? (pp.41-3)
How do you understand the ‘child’ theme running through the play? (the suggestions of Hedda’s pregnancy, Lovborg’s book, etc.) (see pp.57-9, for example).
What do you see as the significance of the vine leaves which Hedda imagines Lovborg wearing?
Is Hedda a good or bad person in your view?
Why do you think Hedda shoots herself? Does Ibsen justify it?
Plot
Find examples of irony in Act 1: moments where characters are saying something other than what they mean. What effects might such irony produce in the mind of the audience?
What do you see as the key dramatic moments or turning points in the play? Make a list. In each case, how is the ‘drama’ produced (what devices does Ibsen use to create the drama)? And what does each moment add to the plot?
What is the message of this play? |
|
|
| Drama: Reading the Page and Reading the Stage |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:05 am] |
Introduction to Drama
W.B. Yeats & Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)
1. ‘That play of mine…’
• Lady Augusta Gregory
2. Historical Background
• 19thC Cultural Nationalism
• Easter Rising 1916
3. Theatre in Ireland
• Theatre and Nation
• English domination of theatre in Ireland
• Yeats, John Eglinton, AE (George Russell): aim for Authentically Irish Theatre
4. Yeats, Lady Gregory and the Irish Literary Theatre
• Representation
• Melodramatic Irishness
• Revolution. Not.
• Aesthetic Innovation: symbolism
• Stage sets: peasant cottage
• Symbolic Irishness
• Yeats the modernist
• Realism / Naturalism and Mysticism
• Folklore and Irish mythology
5. Cathleen ni Houlihan
• Realism/Symbolism; Material/Supernatural
• Mythology
• Inspiration: propaganda or critique?
Some Useful Quotations
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Man and the Echo’: ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’
Paul Muldoon, ‘7, Middagh Street’ (1987): ‘the answer is “Certainly not”. / If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead / would certain men have stayed in bed?’
Arthur Griffith (1902): We look to the Irish National Theatre primarily as a means of regenerating the country. The theatre is a powerful agent in the building up of a nation. When it is in foreign and hostile hands, it is a deadly danger to the country. When it is controlled by native and friendly hands, it is a bulwark and a protection.
Richard Allen Cave, W.B. Yeats: Selected Plays : Theatrical culture was as much a vehicle for colonial domination and exhibitionism as were more overtly political and social dimensions of life in Ireland. There was no such thing as an Irish theatre.
Yeats & Lady Gregory: We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. (Our Irish Theatre, 20)
Cave: Increasingly the plays popularised a particular kind of rhetoric apostrophising ‘This land of Emerald Green … beloved country watered by the tears of thy daughters and nurtured by the blood of thy sons!’ The defeatism and self-pity implicit in such rhetoric, far from inspiring active revolutionary ardour in audiences, were likely to to be disabling in their effect, which is presumably why the Queen’s plays were never censored by Dublin Castle or the Lord Chamberlain in London.
Cave: In Cathleen ni Houlihan a peasant comedy about dowries and wedding clothes is invaded by an elderly woman whose strange talk mesmerises the son of the house … In contrast with the realism of the room and the relaxed postures of the Gillane household, she seems an alien presence, tense, rhetorical, insistent, with her tales from legend and history about men who have died for her cause, her songs and her prophetic exhortations about an army that is massing outside. Yet by the end of the play she has transformed Michael’s way of seeing his home: it becomes unreal to him in contrast with the image of a patriotic destiny that Cathleen awakens in his imagination and promises might soon be his.
James Pethica: Early audiences generally regarded the play as a clarion call to nationalist action. Its famous final line, which announces Cathleen’s offstage transformation from an Old Woman into ‘a young girl’ with ‘the walk of a queen’ was seen as symbolically dramatizing the kind of renewal of Ireland that patriotic commitment might yield. Shaw recognized that the play ‘might lead a man to do something foolish … More recent audiences have viewed Michael’s susceptibility to her call less positively, however, as a disturbing loss of agency at best, and at worst as his falling victim to a vampiric shape-shifter who feeds on his blood. Rather than celebrating single-minded patriotism, or validating Michael Gillane as a martyr who earns the status of mythic hero, the play’s action has instead come to be seen as embodying a tautly conflicted critique of the attractions and dangers of idealistic nationalism.
Worksheet
Read through the John Eglinton and W.B. Yeats’s articles on the ‘subject of national drama’:
• Summarise the arguments presented. What are the main similarities and differences in the views expressed by these key figures?
Cathleen ni Houlihan
Cultural Politics of the play: reading the signs
• Can you find any clues in the play as to the Gillane family’s social class?
• What values and priorities do the family hold to? What message do you think Y & LG are sending here?
• What triggers Cathleen’s change and how do you read this? What values does Cathleen represent, and how do we know it?
• Can you see Christian symbolism in this play? What function might this serve?
• Find some juxtapositions of naturalism and mysticism in the play. Why do you think Y & LG juxtapose the concrete with the spiritual in this way?
• Does this play send any messages about what constitutes ‘proper’ Irish masculinity and ‘proper’ Irish femininity?
• How effective / problematic do you see the trope of ‘woman as nation’ being?
Dramaturgy
• In the first production of the play, the audience were encouraged to play the role of the clapping/shouting villagers that can be heard when the French land. What effect might this audience participation be designed to have?
• The original ending of this play had Michael remain standing in the doorway. In performance, however, Maude Gonne (playing Cathleen) insisted he should join her outside. What different meanings are in play here?
• How are we to read Bridget and Delia’s ‘embrace of consolation’ at the end of the play?
Debate
• Prepare an argument either for or against the proposition: ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan is not art but is dangerous nationalist propaganda.’ |
|
|
| Introduction to Drama: Reading the Page and Reading the Stage |
[Oct. 26th, 2005|11:03 am] |
Introduction to Drama 5.
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1907)
Lecture
1. Synge and the Irish Literary Theatre
• Playboy Riots
• Peasant fetish
• Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
• Synge’s dramatic theories
o Rejection of naturalism
o Rejection of bourgeois philistinism
• Playboy and genre
2. Synge and the Catholic Nationalist Audience
• Douglas Hyde, The Twisting of the Rope (1901)
• sacrifice of individual desire for national advancement
• Catholic Nationalism and gender
• Desperate society
• Shawneen
3. Christy and Liberation
• Passion, vitality, savagery
4. Synge’s Nationalism
• Ending: return of repressive status quo?
Some Useful Quotations
Lady Gregory: There was a battle of a week. Every night protestors with their trumpets came and raised a din. Every night the police carried some of them off to the police courts. Every afternoon the paper gave reports of the trial before a magistrate who had not heard or read the play and who insisted on being given details of its incidents by the accused and by the police … There was a very large audience on the first night. … Synge was there, but Mr Yeats was giving a lecture in Scotland. The first act got its applause, and the second, though one felt that the audience were a little puzzled, a little shocked at the wild language. Near the end of the third act there was some hissing. We had sent a telegram to Mr Yeats after the end of the first act “Play great success”; but at the end we sent another – “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift”.
J.M. Synge: In the modern literature of towns … richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid works. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the modern intellectual drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.
Yeats, Essays & Introductions: Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite excellent people who think Rossetti’s women are “guys”, that Rodin’s women are “ugly” and that Ibsen is “immoral”, and who only want to be left in peace to enjoy the works so many young men have made specially to suit them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought.
Synge: The Playboy is not a play with a “purpose” in the modern sense of the word [ie. it is not didactic, as some accused Shaw and Ibsen of being] but, although parts of it are or are meant to be extravagant comedy, still a great deal that is in it and great deal more than it behind it is perfectly serious when looked at in a certain light. This is often the case, I think, with comedy, and no one is quite sure today whether Shylock or Alceste should be played seriously or not. There are, it might be hinted, several sides to The Playboy.
Synge, letter of 1897 to Maud Gonne: Association Irlandaise as "revolutionary and semi-military movement … [T]o work in my own way for the cause of Ireland … my own theory of regeneration for Ireland". Objection to the "unmodern, ideal, breesy [sic], springdayish, Cuchulanoid National Theatre".
Cairns and Richards, Writing Ireland: Synge's plays provide a critique of nationalist ideology while simultaneously advocating a liberation which was absolute to the extent that it was of the woman; idealized into impotence by the nationalists, and taken as the epitome of Celtic ineffectuality by the apologists of imperialism."
Cairns and Richards: "[The Playboy riots were triggered by] the fact that he dramatized the explicit belief that the revolution required, if not desired, by Ireland, was of the sensual -- and frequently female -- individual."
Luke Gibbons, ‘Synge, Country and Western: The Myth of the West in Irish and American Culture’: For Synge, the glorification of violence and lawlessness so evident in The Playboy was animated by Yeats’ ‘dream of the noble and beggar-man’, by a desire to return to the pre-lapsarian world of Ascendancy Ireland, when the rule of law and the centralizing structures of a developing capitalist economy had still not brought about the landed gentry’s fall from grace.
Gibbons: One of the most notable feaures of Synge’s representation of women is the lack of reverence towards the virginal mother figure which dominated Catholic devotional practices, and indeed family life itself in post-Famine Ireland. Synge is not content merely to subject the idyllic mother figure to ridicule as when he depicts the unruly Widow Quin poisoning her husband and burying her children – he also redirects his mockery towards the church itself. In a grotesque perversion of the most intimate bond between mother and child, the Widow Quin, we are told, not only suckled a black ram to her breast, but the ram itself ended up on the Bishop’s dinner table “so that the Bishop of Connaught felt the elements of a Christian, and he after eating it in a kidney stew.”’
Gibbons: The political controversy surrounding The Playboy may be construed as simply an argument about representations, with the conflicting parties held captive by images but oblivious to the reality which lay beyond them. However, it would be wrong to characterize the clash between Anglo-Irish and orthodox nationalist versions of the west in these terms, as if mere representations of Ireland alone were at stake. For these were, in Yeats’ phrase, “masterful images”, and what we find in the confrontation between Synge and his Catholic nationalist opponents is a struggle over access to a dominant ideology, to a controlling vision of Irish life. This is precisely the theme to which The Playboy addresses itself, “the power of the big lie”, of images and representations, in transforming society.
Mary King: Christopher Morash highlights the multiple causes of audience actions and reactions on the initial and subsequent “riotous” occasions. They include the symptomatic antagonism of the lower-middle-class Catholic audience to the perceived slight against morality and nationhood, but also their unfamiliarity with the audience decorum demanded at the Abbey. This required respectful silence as opposed to the freer, more vocal and interactive Queen’s Theatre tradition. In the Irish context these competing understandings reflected and exacerbated class, sectarian and political tensions, making the battle over the play a political struggle about cultural ownership of theatre.
Mary King: The society which Synge anatomised, ironised and castigated through laughter fed on the pathologies of a patriarchal bourgeois society which underwrote imperialism. Nationalist responses were tainted by their related brand of authoritarianism and racial essentialism … Like Christy Mahon’s bit of a looking-glass held to face and rear, Synge’s dramatic mirror may help us realize that all quests for essentialist perfection of identity, race, nation, religion or gender are chimerical and treacherously flawed.
Irish Drama: References and Further Reading
Scott Brewster et al (ed), Ireland in Proximity (Routledge 2001)
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (MUP, 1988)
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996)
Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama (CUP, 1999)
Susan Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (e-resource)
T.R. Henn, ‘Introduction’ to The Playboy of the Western World (London: Methuen, 1961)
Eamon Jordan (ed) Theatre Stuff: Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort, 2000)
Mary King, ‘J.M. Synge, “National Drama” and the post-Protestant Imagination’, in Richards (ed) 2004, pp. 79-92.
P.J. Matthews, Revival (Cork UP, 2003)
Ronan McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature (Palgrave 2002)
Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (MUP, 1997)
Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in 20th Century Ireland (London: Routledge 2001)
Shaun Richards (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (CUP, 2004)
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994)
Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Penguin, 1968)
This is a selected bibliography of the best and most recent general works in the field available in the MMU library. I’ve included no author-specific texts – you can find these yourself quite easily. You can also use the John Rylands library, which is particularly good for journals such as Irish University Review, Irish Studies Review, Modern Drama, NTQ. You’ll find useful articles in back editions.
Introduction to Drama 5: J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
Seminar Worksheet
1. Act 1
Look closely at the opening scene (from beginning, to entry of Christy)
• What impressions do we get of Pegeen and Shawn from their opening exchanges? (What, for example, does Pegeen mean when she says to Shawn, ‘[with scorn] As good is it?…etc.’ (p.43); and why does Shawn feel awkward alone with Pegeen and, later, ‘afeard of Father Reilly’? Do we see Shawn in a positive or negative light?
• What tensions or contrasting values are set up through this opening scene?
The rest of Act 1
• How does Pegeen feel about Christy? How does he compare with Shawn?
• What is at the root of Pegeen’s quarrel with the Widow Quin?
• On the opening night, Lady Gregory reported to Yeats that, by the end of Act 1 the audience seemed ‘confused’. Can you see why they might be?
2. Characters:
Pegeen, Christy, Shawn, Widow Quin.
Taking one character in turn, discuss what motivates them? Might they carry social symbolism? Find some key moments as evidence.
3. Overview
• What is it about Christy that so impresses the girls? What qualities does he seem to have?
• What is Michael’s priority for Pegeen?
• How do you read the play’s ending: does it pass a comment on Irish society?
• Synge once said that before Irish poetry and drama could once again be human, ‘it must learn to be brutal’. Judging from Playboy, what do you think he could mean? What message might Synge be sending in this play?
• Could you call this a nationalist play? |
|
|
| Writing and Culture in the 19th Century |
[Oct. 10th, 2005|01:35 pm] |
SEMINAR
The Woman in White
The Woman in White is told from the viewpoints of many different characters throughout the novel, for many different reason, a few of these could be:
♥ So that you can see the story from many different perspective.
♥ So that it is set out like a collection of legal testimonies. Collins' was very interested in the law.
♥ You can compile more information about the characters.
♥ A large novel is made less monotonous with the change of styles and characters. This could also have been a literary form of 'cliff hanger' as the novel was first publish weekly in a journal.
♥ To provide questionable narrators. This novel was a predecesor of the crime novel, Collins' next work 'The moonstone' was an early example of crime fiction.
Looking at the narrative structure of some of the characters
Marian
Marian's diary is concerned with the emotional side of things. She uses emotive words such as 'deplorable' and 'helpless, useless woman'. Her narrative is cut off with "I can write no more." further evidence of her feminine characterstics of irrationality and inability to control her emotions.
Gilmore -the Solicitor
Detached view. Business-like in what he says. Writes in the way you would expect a man of this time to write with ideals of beng rational and precise.
The Cook
Had to have her statement written for her as she couldn't read or write. She uses very short, simple sentences. She is very mater of fact and uses no flowery language. Throughout her account she makes the reader very aware of her status, saying that she shouldn't be believed because of it, but because of this appearing all the more credible.
Walter
He believes it is his duty to tell the reader the story and to tell it n the 'legal' manner. He frequently talks directly to the reader and is very familiar to us. He wants to be trusted. He has more dominance than the female characters simply because he is a man. He can get emotional, but in a rational, calm manner. His emotions won't affect his logical mind, because he is a man.
Gender
Marian is very aware of her place as a woman, but frustrated about this and talks about the things that she could do if only she were a man, for example she wants to punch Count Fosco in the face. She is thought of as being a physically unattractive person and described as being 'ugly'(she is described as having facial hair resembling a moustache), 'robust' and 'magnificent' by different people throughout the novel, her strength and intelligence are admirable qualities though and it is as though Collins' is making a statement that women cannot have it both way, because she's not beautiful, she can be rational. When she first meets Walter he's amazed that she (a woman) can talk to a stranger, indepth, without having to familiarise herself with him. She is put across as 'spinsterish', with potentially lezbian tendancies.
Marriage
Throughout the novel they talk alot of the marriage market and the idea of females as a commodity. Women can't inherit property and when they are married any property of theirs goes directly to the husband. This novel was written before the passing of the 'Married Womans Property Act' (1870) After this women got some of their property and were able to keep their own earnings. Also at this time womens bodies belonged to their husbands. This is why marital rape wasn't an issue at this point.
Madness
Collins' is making the reader fully aware of the scandals that were going on at the time of his writing of The Woman on White. Many people were beng wrongfully incarcerated in asylums at this time particularly woman and others that might cause troubles for prominant people. People were being taken into asylums for the simplest of reasons and once they were in there it became extremely difficult to prove their sanity and get out, as you would have to go against authority, the people in power, the law and a patriachal society. |
|
|
| Writing and Culture in the 19th Century |
[Oct. 10th, 2005|12:53 pm] |
LECTURE
The Woman n White
♥ The sensation genre in the 1860s
♥ Gender and Transgression
♥ The Victorian Madwoman
♥ Women, illness and male medical authority
The sensation genre in the 1860s
- Developement in the Gothic genre.
- In part response to increased sensationalised crime reporting in press at a time when newspapers featured accounts of executions, rape, murders, and details of court proceedings as entertainment.
Generic Conventions
- PLots of violent crime and buried secrets in a domestic setting.
- Dark side of contemporary life: murder, suicide, bigamy, sexual assault.
- Focus on insanity and disease.
- Also interested in marriage, property, inheritance (all key elements of the Mid-Victorian novel in general).
Gender and Transgression
[The sensation novelists] focused minutely on individual women's lives, demonstrating or exploring the contradictions of the dominant ideology of the feminine, by charting the conflict between 'actual' female experience and the domestic, private, angelic feminine ideal...The constructed plots and characters which registered or interrogated the contradictions of contemporary marriage and the domestic ideal.
"The sensation heroine...cannot be easily accommodated to either the category of normal, proper, feminine, nor to that of deviant, improper feminity."
Lyn Pykett, The 'Improper' Feminine: Women's sensation Fiction and the New Women Writing (Routledge, 1992),pp.6,21.
The Victorian madwoman
Asylums and moral management.
Increase in asylums in the mid-Victorian period: under the lunatics act of 1845 all counties and boroughs required to have one.
Madness to be cured by 'moral management' (a more humanitarian approach than the restraining devices used on the mad in the 18th Century in places such as Bedlam).
Inmates subjected to a culture of control and surveillance.
1858-9 one of the 2 major 'lunacy panics'- cases of wrongful incarceration, definitions of madness shifting-now more closely linked to female deviance or waywardness and the pathologisation of female sexuality.
"By far the most prelevant view...sees an equation between femininity and insanity that goes beyond statistical evidence of the social conditions of women. Contemporary feminist philosophers, literary critics and social theorists have been the first to call attention to the existence of a fundamental alliance between 'women' and 'madness'. They have shown how women within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature and body, while men are situated on the sode of reason, discourse, culture and mind. They have analysed and lluminated a cultural tradition that represents 'woman' as madness. and that uses images of the female body...to stand for irrationality in general."
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and the English Culture, 1830-1980(Virago, 1987), pp. 3-4.
"Some of the strange questions put to me by the woman n white, after my ill considered promise to leave her free to act as she pleased, had suggested the conclusion either that she was naturaly flighty and unsettled, or that some recent shock or terror had disturbed the balance of her faculties. But the idea of absolute insanitywhich we all associate with the very same name of an Asylum, had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me, in connecton with her. I had seen nothing in her language or her actions, to justify it at the time...What had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London and unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?...Was she capable of controlling her own actions?"
Walter's narrative, 1st Epoch, IV
Women, illness and male medical authority
"Seeing the urgent necessity of quieting her at any hazard and by any means, I appealed to the only anxiety that she appeared to feel, in connection with me and with my opinion of her-the anxiety to convince me of her fitness to be mistress of her own actions. 'Try to compose yourself, or you will make me alter my opinion of you. Don't let me think that this person who put you in the asylum might have had some excuse..."
Walter's narrative, 1st Epoch, XII
"For Collins, an awareness of the madwoman's disturbing capacity to absorb the meanings attached to her assists a powerful critique of mid-Victorian psychological medicine and a no less exacting critque of romantic fiction...Collins' characers are involved in doubting resisting or disputing the judgement of qualified medical men."
Helen Small, Love's Madness: Medicine the Novel and Female Insanity. 1800-1865(Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.193,197. |
|
|
| British Writing and the Enlightenment. |
[Oct. 7th, 2005|05:18 pm] |
Learning and Ignorance: The Tree of Knowledge.
Preparatory reading: Milton, Paradise Lost
Swift, A modest proposal for preventing the children of the poor people from being a burden to their parents or the country, and for making them beneficial to the public. (1729)
Lecture
Milton:
A strong supporter of the parlimentary side.
An anti-monarchist who supported the execution of King Charles 2nd.
A radical Protestant.
from Of Education (1644)
"The end then of learning is to repair the ruines of our first parents (meaning Adam and Eve) by regaining to know God aright, and out of knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him..."
In the 17th Century it was widely believed that because of Adam and Eve being led into temptation all decendants of them were therefore conceived in sin and born into corruption. Because of the actions of our first parents we are all predestined to Eternal Damnation. In his most idealistic moments, Milton did not believe that the human race was completely Damned, it was his belief that if each individual could gain enough knowledge, general knowledge and knowledge of God we could improve ourselves morally and save our own souls. However he also believed that if people were virtuous for purely selfish reasons, then their virtue was worth nothing at all.
On poetry in Education:
"[the study of poetry, ie Greek, Roman and Italian classics] would make them [students] percieve what despicable creatures our common Rimers and Playwriters be, and shew them what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry both in divine and human things."
Poetry is more 'simple, sensuous and passionate' than philosophy or rhetoric but is the result of
"...industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs."
-from The Reason of Church Government (1642)
"...when universal learning shall have completed its cycle, the spirit of man, no longer confined by this dark prison house, will reach out far and wide until it fills the whole world and the space beyond."
-from Oratio pro Arte
♥ ♥ ♥
Paradise Lost The re-telling of the book of Genesis from the Bible. It tells the story of Adam and Eve and their seduction by Satan in the guise of a serpant, into eating the 'forbidden fruit' from the tree of knowledge and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, therefore triggering the beginnings of all death and disease in our world.
The book deals with issues of human freedom and 'free will'. Are people free to do whatever they wish and if they do can they deal with the consequences of their actions?
Also why should God allow this to happen in the first place? If he is the omniscient being we are told he is, he would have known what would happen when he banished Satan from Heaven and if he told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit, therefore making it more of a temptation.
Seminar
will update later |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
langlitology's journal