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In O? Casey? s Dublin Trilogy, the playwright attacks the weight of dead heroes which manacled contemporary Ireland to a violent past and self-destructive dream. The space between pretension and failing, rhetoric and reality, abstraction and suffering is carefully exposed as O?
Casey departs from the stereotypes of the Irish stage to evolve a fresh realist idiom of tenement drama. His characters indulge in their own detached fantasies? create sanctuaries of inaction around themselves? and O? Casey strips away the fiction to reveal a earthy, vulnerable, often farcical hollowness inside. In doing so, he also strips the dream of Romantic Ireland away from the brutality and oppressed poverty that accompanied the birth of the Irish Free State.
This dialectic is part of a larger critique in which the rhetoric of heroism is shown up to be a fa? ade for an inability to act, a form of impotency. Finally, O? Casey relates this specifically male failing and elevates the female characters to an anti-heroic status embodying an Ireland with many failings, but real courage and an honesty that shames the hypocrisy of the heroic cult. It is a neat irony that Davoren, the writer in The Shadow of a Gunman, ascribes to an imaginative ideal of poetry, embodying all the shallow clich? s of Romanticism (romantic love, nature, beauty as truth, the tragic muse and so forth. ) Yet he ends up (in his courting of the na?
ve and resolutely uncultured Minnie, for example) as a mock-heroic character in the best traditions of Augustan satire, unaware of his overblown foolishness. Both literary and literal senses of? mock-heroic? undercut Davoren? s two images: that of the poet in communion with the muse and as a dangerous revolutionary on the run.
As we find out, he is actually a second-rate pseudo-Shelley and, of course, ? a mere? shadow of a gunman. ? [ 1 ]This pattern, where the heroic pretensions of a character are revealed to have a comic or satirical core is recurrent within O? Casey, and is thoroughly analysed by Krause. [ 2 ]This movement is interlocked with a larger one between image and reality, where pretensions are ridiculed and often levelled by the concrete intrusion of the outer world? s violence and suffering. For example, Capt.
Boyle lives an illusion similar to that of Davoren: he builds around him the myth of a seafaring past which is in fact limited to a single trip on a collier. Boyle is arrogant enough to even place his heroism above that of the gunmen: ? When I was a sailor, I was always resigned to meet with a watery grave; an? if they want to be soldiers, well there?
s no use o? them squealing? when they meet a soldier? s fate. ? [ 3 ] O? Casey cleverly undercuts this by interrupting Boyle? s most expansive panegyric on his ocean-ranging spirit with the insistent call of a coal-merchant.
In a comic vein, the Captain can be played with heavy comedy? for example, when he reverses opinion and defends the Church at the prospect of taking on bourgeois airs. More tragically, in the wake of his son? s shooting, the oblivious Boyle is drunken and incoherent with his roguish mate, Jones. A similar clash between heroic and comic, image and truth, is seen in the other two plays. Davoren?
s fantasies have already been mentioned, and both his literary pretension and Shields? piety can be played comically. There is a mock-heroic tone to the heavy-handed and letter of Gibson? s (to the Irish Republicans) and an exposure of his true cowardice when he ingratiates himself to the raiding auxiliaries. A similar capitulation that underscores hollow rhetorical posturing comes in the following sequence: Seumas? There?
s a great comfort in religion; it makes a man strong in time of trouble an? brave in time of danger. No man need be afraid with a crowd of angels round him; thanks to God for His Holy religion! Davoren You? re welcome to your angels; philosophy is mine; philosophy that makes the coward strong. The volley of shots that follows this exchange, as well as their fear at finding the bombs, vindicate O?
Casey? s critique of their pretensions. The Plough and The Stars sees the characters at least partially live up to their boasting, some of them taking to the streets in the Easter Rising, but they still fall far short. Clitheroe? s vanity is noted when the audience learns he left the revolutionaries because he didn? t get a promotion.
The Young Covey? s Socialist ideals, whilst sometimes providing an accurate attack on the shortcomings of the Rising, are pared down to a comic motif as he quotes from his single Socialist textbook. The general myth surrounding 1916 is deflated by O? Casey as he contrasts the supposed solidarity of Dublin with the squabbling and petty rivalries of the tenement block. The tenement dwellers, despite their superficial adherence to the image of revolutionary Ireland, actually take to looting: something that can be read as grotesquely comic in itself?
the two women fighting over the wheelbarrow, for example. This reading has been advanced been Krause. Thus, in O? Casey?
s drama, the tragic cult of heroism is often comically inverted into a fantastical and daydreaming mock-heroism, where pretensions give way to fear, reputations gives way to idle boasts, and the image of glorious Irish solidarity gives way to the chaotic and abrasive existence of the slums. The examples are only a small selection. O? Casey also shows that rhetoric not only disguises cowardice or frailties or delusions of grandeur, but often represents an impotence. There is an element whereby O? Casey is pointing out the Irish working-classes were largely swept up in a tide of nationalist fervour, without really being in control of their own destinies.
Without realising the paradox, the sheen of nationalistic feeling was actually layered over more mundane levels of attainment: a folk-song and a drink are more likely to be the concerns of an O? Casey character than national emancipation. Neither are the tenement-dwellers immune to the lure of bourgeois respectability, as seen in Mary? s attempts to escape the slums through marriage, Boyle? s sudden airs and graces, and perhaps the aloofness of Nora Clitheroe too. The petty social ladder is particularly well-evoked in the jealousies of The Plough And The Stars.
Yet this narrow world and its impotence also represents a wider set of concerns closely allied to anti-heroism. O? Casey is asserting the value of pragmatism over idealism, and also the tragic consequences of the largely comic fronts of the idealists themselves. The idea of impotence is most clearly deliberated in The Shadow of a Gunman, where Seumas? non-response to the question? I mean what action shall we take? ? [ 4 ] foreshadows their response to Act II?
s crisis. It is left to Minnie to snatch Maguire? s bag of explosives and save them from arrest. Mitchell[ 5 ] follows a similar reading in analysing Juno and the Paycock, where the expectation of a legacy leads the family to a more socialist and expansive existence. Yet, the character? s internal fantasies belie a complete impotence which disintegrates the family: ?
their hopes of? break-outs are based on rescue through outside agencies rather than through their own efforts. ? [ 6 ] One might cite Fluther? s drunkenness (when he is needed to fetch a doctor) or Clitheroe? s paralysis in the arms of his wife as further examples of impotence in The Plough and the Stars.
What is apparent, then, is that the tenement-dwellers, locked in by their own pretensions and illusions, can do nothing to stop the chaos around them. Characters like Johnny, awaiting the inevitable assassination, and the slowly-fading consumptive Mollser, represent the irreversible entropy of their situation; the futility of rhetoric in dealing with the suffering and violence of the Irish troubles. Boyle ends up drunk, the male characters in The Plough and the Stars end up gambling in a barricaded house (a useful motif for the chances of fate, perhaps a harbinger for the stray bullet that catches Bessie at the window. ) Only Davoren really realises his own predicament, although Shrank has argued his poetic finale is a rhetorical internalization and denial of the tragedy, where his own egoism eclipses the death of Minnie: ? Donal Davoren, poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet. ? [ 7 ]The only real modes of existence is such a situation are escape or acceptance. O? Casey?
s treatment of the former, which we have seen embodies both mocking comedy and accusing tragedy, is damning. Instead, pragmatism is seen as a possible line of least resistance. We see the ascendance of pragmatism in Juno? s matter-of-fact comment: ? Yi's, ? an when I go into?
of Murphy? s tomorrow, an? he gets to know that, instead of? pain? all, I? m goin?
to board more, what? ll he say when I tell him a principle? s a principle? ? [ 8 ] This mirrors very much the attitude of Nora towards Clitheroe: ? you? ll make a glorious cause of what you? re doin? , while your little red-lipp?
d Nora can go on sittin? here, makin? a companion of th? loneliness of th? night! ? [ 9 ] Although Minnie does not offer the audience such a vocal affirmation, it is clear that she is practically-minded, unswayed by the seductions of rhetoric. Her only question at Davoren?
s poetry is who the sweetheart is in reality: it is merely a lovely little poem, just as she sees the supposed wildflowers for the weeds they are. It is these pragmatic characters that get everything done in O? Casey? s drama.
The only triumph in the tragic finale of Juno and the Paycock is Juno abandoning her husband and setting out on her own. Minnie? s sacrifice, based around the simple principle that the soldiers will respect a woman? s property, is in sharp contrast to the fearful inaction of Davoren and Shields.
It is Bessie who rises to dominate the closure of The Plough and the Stars, selflessly fetching the doctor for Mollser, and nursing Nora, who is declining into madness. Yet Bessie was the Protestant who (partially out of sorrow for her son fighting in the trenches) mocked the revolutionaries and spent the entire play sparring with her neighbours. It must be noted that most of these characters are female: O? Casey attacks mock-heroism as a particularly male vice. Of course, the pattern is not universal: Mary shares the faults of the male dreamers, and Fluther redeems himself by an act of courage. Yet, the female is deeply implicated in two vital polarities that O?
Casey sets about deconstructing. The first revolves around the figure of Kathleen ni Houlihan who represents an alternative love for the men of Ireland: ? Ireland is greater than a mother? Ireland is greater than a wife. ? [ 10 ] Most prominently in The Plough and the Stars, O? Casey dramatists a conflict over the soul of men between Nationalism and their womenfolk. As already mentioned, women represent the dogged, imperfect but pragmatic voice of reasonable action; whereas Nationalism represents the seductive rhetoric of tragic and impotent idealism.
The superb scene in which the true-life words of Pearse are juxtaposed with the earthy prostitute Rosie confirms this polarity. It is also apparent that Johnny forsook his mother for the principles of Nationalism, and pays the price with his death; confronting his own hollowness and hypocrisy in betrayal. The relationship is modified and more subtle in The Shadow of a Gunman (especially as Minnie is partly taken in by images, too) but we see here the female spirit sacrificed to Nationalism by Shields and Davoren. The second polarity is that between dead heroes and living women. It encompasses the polarities of image / reality and impotence / pragmatism already discussed. The female characters become the only ones with a measure of heroism precisely because they are anti-heroic.
The moment when the Boyle family leave the gramophone to watch the cortege is a capitulation motif: the cult of death has overwhelmed the capacity for life, and as Mitchell points out, everything goes downhill from then on in. Heroism in O? Casey is ruthlessly exposed as a tragicomedy, an illusion that is both pathetic and ultimately damaging. On the other hand, the pragmatic females who forsake the heroic illusion of Romantic Ireland for love of their wayward sons and husbands, are presented as alternative ideals. They have the potential to lift the deadweight of dead heroes that condemned Ireland to the ideological bloodshed. Although their anti-heroism depends, to a large extent on their relationship with men, O?
Casey? s position was nevertheless courageous and radical in its own way. He portrayed the slums as symbolic of a malaise that beset all Ireland and set Pearse next to a whore to reveal the brutality of his words. As Krause says of Juno, Minnie and Bessie: ? they are the Ireland of tenacious mothers and wives, the women of the tenements? earthy, shrewd, laughing, suffering, brawling, independent women. ? [ 11 ] Their anti-heroism was O?
Casey? s brave alternative to a hail of gunman? s bullets and a shallow grave. Bibliography Sean O? Casey Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock, The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars (London, 1957) O?
Casey: The Dublin Trilogy, ed. Ronald Ayling (Basingstoke, 1985) David Krause, O? Casey and His World (London, 1976) [ 1 ] The Shadow of a Gunman, collected in Sean O? Casey, Three Plays (London, 1957) p. 104 [ 2 ] David Krause, O? Casey?
s Anti-Heroic Vision (1960) collected in O? Casey: The Dublin Trilogy, ed. Ronald Ayling (Basingstoke, 1985) [ 3 ] Juno and the Paycock, collected in O? Casey, p. 47 [ 4 ] The Shadow of a Gunman, collected in O?
Casey, p. 88 [ 5 ] Jack Mitchell, Inner Structure and Artistic Unity (1980), collected in Ayling [ 6 ] Ibid. p 103 [ 7 ] The Shadow of Gunman, collected in O? Casey, p. 130 [ 8 ] Juno and the Paycock, collected in O? Casey, p. 8 [ 9 ] The Plough and the Stars, collected in O? Casey, p. 158 [ 10 ] Ibid. p. 178 [ 11 ] David Krause, O?
Casey? s Anti-Heroic Vision (1960), collected in Ayling, p. 36
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Research essay sample on Mock Heroic Female Characters
