Playboy of the Western World Research Papers (original) (raw)

This thesis addresses the complex relationship between fathers and sons in three highly successful literary texts that grapple with Irish nationalism: Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People. Each text comes from a different historical moment, but each of these moments is distinguished by major change, a change so paradigm-shifting as to be worthy of the adjective millennial. While multiple literary critics have paid huge attention to the figure of Ireland as mother—and, indeed, Ireland in other female roles (Old Woman, beautiful young queen, fabulous Sky Woman)—few have interrogated what dynamic father-son relationships "say" in stories, whether novels or plays, conscious of shifting political, social, and cultural realities in Ireland. It is with in this vacuum that I propose the literary device, the father and son trope, as an effective means for developing a discourse on the power struggle that is colonialism.

- by Marla Bruner
- •
- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Colonialism, Masculinity
- by Mousir Khan
- •
- J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World

The parricide in The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge indicates the demise of protagonist's alienation from his "I" stemming from the father's domination. By this familial conundrum in the image of son/father-contextually of Ireland/England as well-the play gives a portrait about a conflict between two dichotomic "I"s, in which parental "I" annexes the other. So, while annexation of the father elevates his own authentic "I", it perforce rules out the son's "I" by imposing a constructed identity. In other words, liminal receptiveness of ontological "I" is pushed to the periphery by the authority. This leads to son's alienation from his own "authentic self", which, as a personal observation, is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger's Dasein that is lost in the hegemony of "dictatorship" culminating in an alienation of self under the banner of Distantiality (Entfremdung). This essay aims to reach a conclusion about the importance of symbolic parricide in exploring the dualities of the son and the father; relatedly Ireland and England; as well as interchangeable the other and "I" with reference to Dasein and Distantiality.

- by Oguzhan Ayrim
- •
- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Martin Heidegger, Parricide

A comparison of the disturbances that erupted in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin during the opening run of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 with the response to the 1913 premiere in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s avant-garde ballet and orchestral work, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps). There are startling similarities between the audiences’ actions at the Abbey and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and only six years separate the two events. What is even more extraordinary, when one considers that the two disturbances have not been read side by side, is that a list of the factors that contributed to the Paris riot are remarkably similar to the socio-political context often provided by contemporary scholars in relation to the Dublin fracas. The riots that met Playboy of the Western World became one of the landmarks of Irish theatre history, and are usually interpreted in terms of competing definitions of a national theatre. However, by putting the 1907 Playboy riots in the context of the very similar response to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Synge’s work is placed in the context of a modernist understanding of primitivism and aesthetic shock. This prompts a new understanding of what became known as ‘peasant drama’ in the early Abbey theatre, seeing it not as a form of realism, but as a critique of previous dramatic forms.