英文摘要 |
Riders to the Sea is one of the less “controversial” plays in John Millington Synge’s dramatic oeuvre. It seems quite moderate in its themes as compared with, say, Playboy of the Western World, which is famous for the riot it aroused. However, Riders does have the potential to be further elaborated in terms of the larger nationalist controversy in which Synge and his other plays found themselves. Situating this study within the debate of Irishness during the Revival period in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, I would like to place Riders to the Sea in the tradition of “Poor Old Woman” in Irish literature, which uses the figure of “Poor Old Woman” as the symbol for Ireland and thereby elevates her story to the level of national allegory. In this light, Maurya the mother can be read as the Poor Old Woman figure, and Riders to the Sea as Synge’s Irish national allegory. This will be done by aligning Riders to the Sea with another Revival play in this tradition, Cathleen Ni Houlihan by William Butler Yeats, Synge’s contemporary and colleague in the Literary Theatre Movement. By comparing and contrasting these two plays, I will examine how Synge adopts and adapts traditional device to present his own version of Irishness, in the hope of uncovering the previously neglected aspect of Riders to the Sea that it offers Synge’s notion of Irishness, albeit in a far less explicit way than what Yeats would have in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Synge not only borrows the trope from the Poor Old Woman tradition represented by Yeats’s Cathleen, but also takes it a step further by rewriting the literary tradition to produce an empowered and empowering vision of Irishness. Therefore, the more “national” aspects of the play would serve as a means to connect Rides to the Sea to Synge’s other plays, as they all set out to explore, if not to define, possibilities of Irishness. |