Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy: Feminist Myths of Monstrosity (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature) 1032288876, 9781032288871

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy
The Theatre of Democracy: Greek Tragedy in Context
Greek-Spirited Ireland: Actualising the Theatre of Democracy
Work Cited
1 From “Woman” to Women on Stage
Fear and Control: The Anatomy of Tragic Monsters
(Self-)Sacrifice on the Altar of Patriarchy
Work Cited
2 Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths
Adapting the Greeks: A Feminist Response to the Classical Tragedians
Appropriating the Greeks: A Feminist Contestation of Irish Tradition
Works Cited
3 Writing Like a Woman
She Speaks, Therefore She Is
Bringing Silent Women to Life
Works Cited
4 Feminist Tragedy
Epic Breach into Mimetic Theatre
Epic Tragedy: The Birth of a Feminist Genre
Works Cited
Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy
The Tragedy of Injustice
The Tragedy of Freedom
The Tragedy of Happiness
The End of Tragedy?
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy

Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy: Feminist Myths of Monstrosity examines the feminist transposition of Greek tragedy in the theatre of the contemporary Irish dramatist Marina Carr. Through a comparison of the plays based on classical drama with their ancient models, it investigates Carr’s transformation not only of the narrative but also of the form of Greek tragedy. As a religious and political institution of 5th-century Athenian democracy, tragedy endorsed the sexist oppression of women. Indeed, the construction of female characters in Greek tragedy was entirely disconnected from the experience of womanhood lived by real women in order to embody the patriarchal values of Athenian democracy. Whether praised for their passivity or demonised for showing unnatural agency and subjectivity, women in Greek tragedy were conceived to (re)assert the supremacy of men. Carr’s theatre stands in stark opposition to such a purpose. Focusing on women’s struggle to achieve agency and subjectivity in a male-dominated world, her plays show the diversity of experiencing womanhood and sexist oppression in the Republic of Ireland, and Western societies more generally. Yet, Carr’s enduring conversation with the classics in her theatre demonstrates the feminist willingness to alter the founding myths of Western civilisation to advocate for gender equality. Salomé Paul completed a PhD in Drama Studies from University College Dublin and in Comparative Literature from Sorbonne University in 2020. She was awarded the French Government Medal and the National University of Ireland Prize for Distinction in Collaborative Degrees for her doctoral research in 2021. She was the recipient of the Two-Year Postdoctoral Scheme of the Irish Research Council from 2020 to 2022. During that period of time, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Drama Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on transpositions of Greek tragedy in European modern and contemporary stages.

Routledge Studies in Irish Literature Editor: Eugene O’Brien,

Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland

Irish Theatre Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities Eamonn Jordan Reading Paul Howard The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Eugene O’Brien Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel Order, Form, and Creative Un-Doing Ian Tan The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry Toward Heaven Edward T. Duffy Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature Heroes, Lads, and Fathers Cassandra S. Tully de Lope Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime Maria McGarrity Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy Feminist Myths of Monstrosity Salomé Paul

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Irish-Literature/book-series/RSIL

Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy Feminist Myths of Monstrosity Salomé Paul

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Salomé Paul The right of Salomé Paul to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-28887-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28888-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29899-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003298991 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Alice, Capucine, Loïc, and Sarah

Contents

Acknowledgementsix

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy The Theatre of Democracy: Greek Tragedy in Context  15 Greek-Spirited Ireland: Actualising the Theatre of Democracy  25 Work Cited  38

1

1 From “Woman” to Women on Stage Fear and Control: The Anatomy of Tragic Monsters  45 (Self-)Sacrifice on the Altar of Patriarchy  60 Work Cited  71

43

2 Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Adapting the Greeks: A Feminist Response to the Classical Tragedians  77 Appropriating the Greeks: A Feminist Contestation of Irish Tradition  92 Works Cited  106

75

3 Writing Like a Woman She Speaks, Therefore She Is  113 Bringing Silent Women to Life  126 Works Cited  138

111

4 Feminist Tragedy Epic Breach into Mimetic Theatre  143 Epic Tragedy: The Birth of a Feminist Genre  153 Works Cited  170

141

viii Contents

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy The Tragedy of Injustice  174 The Tragedy of Freedom  179 The Tragedy of Happiness  185 The End of Tragedy?  190 Works Cited  194

174

Index199

Acknowledgements

This project was inspired by the conversations that I had while completing my PhD with my co-supervisor, Eamonn Jordan, about the potentialities of expanding the scope of my doctoral research. I am incredibly appreciative of the support and advice he has always provided me with since 2016. On his suggestion, I drafted a project of a few lines as a draft of a postdoctoral proposal that I presented to Melissa Sihra. Under her kind and very insightful mentorship, this draft was turned into an award-winning project, and then a book. I cannot express often enough how grateful I am for having the opportunity to work with both of them. They made me grow as a researcher, a teacher, and a person. I also want to thank the Irish Research Council which founded my postdoctoral fellowship from which this book stemmed. I am very grateful to Eugene O’Brien, the editor of this series, who guided me through the whole process of publishing this book. I want to thank ­Michelle Salyga and Bryony Reece from the editorial team at Routledge too. I am incredibly thankful to Marina Carr who very kindly shared with me the script of Girl on an Altar before its publication. I have had the opportunity to meet and work with very inspiring scholars at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin: Emily Pine, Cathy Leeney, John Brannigan, Naomi McAreavey, Paul Halferty, Finnola Cronin, Nicholas Johnson, Ashley Taggart, Pedzisai Maedza, and Jeanne Tiehen. I want to give a particular shout-out to Brian Singleton, Miranda Fay Thomas, Cormac O’Brien, and Emma Bennett for their friendly informal mentorship over the last few years. I also want to thank Neil O’Dwyer and George Hooker for their advice on navigating the uncharted territory that was for me the inclusion of technology in theatre. Thanks to the scholars I have discussed my research with over the years, including Pierre Brunel, Carlos Lévy, Fiona Macintosh, Jessica S­ tephens, Rhona Trench, Lisa Fitzpatrick, Barry Houlihan, Miriam Haughton, P ­ atrick Lonergan, and Aileen Ruane. Thanks to my colleagues from the European

x Acknowledgements Society of Comparative Literature, especially to Brigitte Le Juez and my former PhD co-supervisor Bernard Franco. I also want to thank all the students that I have been very lucky to teach. I have learned a lot from them. I am very grateful to the incredible early career scholars and tutors I have had the chance to work with: Helena Young, Fiona Daly, Rachel ­Feehily, Neha Kamrani, Maha Alawi, Samantha Cade, Phoebe O Leary, Céline Thobois-Gupta, and Yingjun Wei. I also want to single out my friends ­Justine Zapin, Clara Mallon, Rosanne Gallenne, Loïc Wright, Teddy Power, and Sarah Dunne for their constant support. Thanks to my friends Alice Benso, Capucine Guillou, Sarah Ghelam, and Marine Marques, who, despite the distance, helped me to walk out from one of the darkest moments in my life while working on that project. To Quentin Docet, André Rebelo Rochina, and Yvon Chagué too. To the friends that have become family, Sylvana, Philippe, Coralie, ­Annaëlle, Pierre-Philippe, Elly, Romina, Jean-Christophe, Gilbert, Ingrid, and Sarah. To my father, François, my brothers, Maximilien, Sébastien, Phanith, and my sister, Boramey. Finally, to my mother, Dominique, I will quote from Pink Floyd, “I wish you were here.”

Introduction The Gender Politics of Tragedy

We make up The stories we Need to Because we Are terrifying We homo sapiens

(Carr 2021, 20)

Assimilated to the “absolute Other” in patriarchal societies and c­ ivilisations, women embody the terrifying nature of humanity in the arts. Following the legacy of Greek tragedy, Marina Carr channels this traditional assimilation of women into terrifying human monsters to mould the characters of her theatre. Yet, while classical drama showed figures barely human whose extraordinary nature of excess inevitably led the world to the breach of extinction, Carr foregrounds the concepts of gender and monstrosity in the social realm. Her characters are not born monsters. But they do become monsters because of the restrictive roles they must play to fit the patriarchal expectations of Western societies. Therefore, there is not one way of turning into a monster but plenty, which echo the multiplicity of identities and experiences lived through by women in contemporary Ireland, and in the Western world more broadly. Through the comparison of Greek tragedies and their contemporary transpositions in Carr’s theatre, this book looks at the shift in representation of women’s identities and experiences on the tragic stage from embodying the terrifying monstrous part of humanity to becoming monsters because of terrifying patriarchal oppressions. The concept of “transposition” comes from the research area of Adaptation Studies, which has been focusing on the identification and theorisation of the variety of adaptation processes and forms that have emerged in the history of culture. It includes a variety of concepts such as “version,” “adaptation,” and “appropriation” alongside a wide number of technical terms coined for the in-depth exploration of very specific dimensions of DOI: 10.4324/9781003298991-1

2  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Adaptation Studies, which I refrain from using in order to make the content of this book more accessible. In Palimpsest: Literature in the Second Degree, Gérard Genette uses the word “transposition” as an umbrella term to refer to any kind of “transtextuality” or “textual transcendence,” which is “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette, 1). In this regard, Carr’s inclusion of Greek tragedy in her theatre, through the use of intertextuality, adaptation, or appropriation, falls into the broad category of “transtextuality,” subsequently turning her plays into transpositions. Yet, Carr’s dramatic construction of female monstrosity is starkly opposed to the one elaborated by the ancient Greeks as it emanates from a feminist approach to transposing classical tragedies on the contemporary stage. From a feminist perspective, transposition entails the rewriting of narrative elements detailed in one or several other texts according to the principles and philosophies developed by the several trends of feminism to challenge, and ultimately end, the sexist oppression of women. As Carr diverts tragedy from its initial purpose of endorsing and supporting patriarchy to expose the alienation of women in patriarchal societies, her body of work stands as a bright example of the feminist transposition of classical drama. Born in Dublin on 17 November 1964, Marina Carr is one of the most prolific Irish dramatists of contemporary theatre. Up to this date, she has authored more than thirty plays.1 Her work has gained the attention and acclaim of spectators, critics, and academics nationally and internationally since the middle of the 1990s. Some of her most successful plays like The Mai (1994) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998) have been translated for non-English-speaking audiences and are regularly revived on stage. A number of her latest works, including Phaedra Backwards (2011), Hecuba (2015), and Girl on an Altar (2022), have premiered outside Ireland, and more specifically in the U.S. and the U.K. Therefore, Carr stands as one of the most prominent and influential contemporary Irish playwrights and is praised worldwide. This situation is quite unique, especially considering the environment in which she started her career. Carr’s first play to be produced was Low in the Dark in 1989 at the Project Art Centre in Dublin. Yet, her breakthrough on the Irish stage occurred five years later with the production of The Mai on the Peacock Stage of the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre in Dublin. The reviewer Fintan O’Toole stated after attending the performance: “[Marina Carr’s voice] will stay in the head long after the carnival has left town … with The Mai at the Peacock, she emerges in full voice at the centre [of Irish theatre]” (O’Toole, 129–130). As the theatre was unapologetically maledominated in Ireland at the time, the emergence of Carr as a central figure on the Irish stage unsettled the traditional conventions embedded in

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  3 patriarchy not only in terms of canonical authorship but also in terms of dramaturgical form and dramatic content. The grip of patriarchy over theatre – and the arts more generally – is not specific to Ireland. The Irish situation is actually an accurate reflection of the broader conception of the artistic canon as an only-men club in the Western world. In her theatre, Carr discusses and challenges the common assumption that the sole works of art worth celebrating have been created by men. Considering “literature as one endless conversation among kinsmen and kinswomen” (Carr 1998, 194), Carr initiates a subversive discussion with the canon about women’s agency and subjectivity in her plays. Although this process of conversation varies in forms and involves a wide range of interlocutors from William Shakespeare to Anton Chekov and Samuel Beckett, Carr’s recurrent use of Greek mythology and tragedy in the construction of the characters and their dramatic arcs in her plays demonstrates a long-running exchange with the classics. By the Bog of Cats… (1998) is Carr’s first play deriving explicitly from a Greek tragedy, namely, Euripides’ Medea. Yet, this connection was not acknowledged at first as the promotional material used by the Abbey Theatre did not advertise By the Bog of Cats… as a transposition of Euripides’ Medea (Sihra 2018, 199). First performed in 1998 on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre under the direction of Patrick Mason with the set and light designed by Monica Frawley and Nick Chelton, respectively, By the Bog of Cats… is a three-act play dramatising the protagonist Hester Swane’s last living day. The first act starts with Hester (Olwen Fouéré) dragging the corpse of a dead black swan by the bog when the Ghost Fancier (Pat Kinevane) makes a mistake and shows up too early to collect her soul. This apparition stresses the protagonist’s tragic fate through comedy. Hester’s tragic predicament is connected to her identity and living conditions as the following scenes gradually expose her situation and position as a single mother from the Traveller community,2 who suffers from systemic sexism and racism embedded in Irish society. Hester’s daughter Josie (Siobhan Cullen and Kerry O’Sullivan) is indeed considered a “bastard” by her paternal grandmother Mrs. Kilbride (Pauline Flanagan) because she has been conceived out-of-wedlock with a “tinker” (Carr 1999, 278–279). This bigot hostility is also displayed by Xavier Cassidy (Tom Hickey) who, alongside his soon-to-be son-in-law Carthage Kilbride (Conor MacDermottroe), attempts to expel Hester from the bog. Considering that the soon-tobe-married couple formed by Carthage and Caroline Cassidy (Fionnala Murphy) is meant to settle in place of Hester on the bog, the action demonstrates the sexist and racist policy implemented to police, marginalise, and invisibilise those who are othered on the basis of their gender and ethnicity because they do not comply with the social expectations set by Irish

4  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy society. The second act focuses on the marriage of Carthage and Caroline, thus pursuing the exploration of these topics in tighter relation to two of the main pillars of the Republic of Ireland: Catholicism and the traditional family cell. Besides Caroline, three other characters show up at the reception wearing wedding-like dresses: Mrs. Kilbride, Hester, and Josie. This mocks the centrality of marriage in the conception of womanhood developed in Ireland as the institution primarily revolves around men conceived as heads of the households. The final act opens with Hester setting her house on fire, which comes to symbolise her rejection of the homemaker’s life expected from a woman in Ireland. As the marriage of Carthage to Caroline manifests his definitive abandonment of Hester, the protagonist comes to the realisation that her mother Big Josie will never return to the Bog of Cats. She thus decides to take her own life as well as her daughter’s. By the Bog of Cats… reproduces numerous elements of the plot of Euripides’ Medea. Xavier and Carthage’s willingness to evict Hester from the Bog of Cats parallels Creon’s decision to exile Medea from Corinth, for instance. Yet, Carr reframes the classical tragedy to focus more extensively on women and their relationships with one another. The inclusion of the character of Caroline brightly exemplifies that specific angle. In Euripides’ Medea, Creon’s daughter has no name and never appears on stage. She is the protagonist’s invisible enemy. This states to the audience that the root of Medea’s malevolence lies in the immateriality of her extreme passions. Contrastingly in By the Bog of Cats…, not only does Carthage’s new partner have a name and appear on stage, but Caroline’s backstory also establishes a connection with Hester’s situation. It is indeed heavily implied that Caroline was sexually abused by her father while she was a child. Caroline thus embodies another form of sexist oppression endured by women because of the patriarchal structure of Irish society. Furthermore, unlike Medea, “Hester’s actions are motivated much less by the desertion of her lover … than by her feelings about … [B]ig Josie” (Foster, 89). Hester commits two murders throughout her life. Before the events of By the Bog of Cats…, she killed her half-brother Joseph (Ronan Leahy), who appears as a ghost during the second and the third act. This plot line alludes to Medea’s involvement in Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. In the myth, Medea indeed murders her own brother to ensure her escape alongside her lover with the mythological object. In By the Bog of Cats…, however, Hester killed her brother out of jealousy because of the close relationship he had with their mother. As for the infanticide, Hester does not kill Josie to get revenge for Carthage’s betrayal – as Medea does in Euripides’ tragedy – but to prevent her daughter from enduring the same suffering she has experienced herself after having been abandoned by Big Josie. Ariel (2002) relies on a similar approach to transposing Greek tragedy as Carr uses plot elements from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  5 Oresteia to create a play dealing with the story of an Irish family, the Fitzgeralds, over a ten-year period during the Celtic Tiger era. First performed in 2002 on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre, this three-act play was directed by Connall Morrison and designed by Frank Conway alongside Joan O’Clery for the costumes and Rupert Murray for the lighting. All the action is set in the Fitzgerald’s house. The first act takes place on the sixteenth birthday of the family’s eldest daughter Ariel (Elske Rahill). Fermoy (Mark Lambert), the patriarch of the family, is running for the election for the Dáil (the Assembly of Ireland). He is, however, likely to lose as his brother Bonniface (Barry McGovern) states that Fermoy does not “stand a chance” (Carr 2009, 71). Nevertheless, Fermoy remains strongly confident in his forthcoming victory as he explains to Bonniface that he needs to perform a sacrifice to God in order to win the election. The act ends with Ariel leaving the house with her father for a drive. The second act takes place ten years later. Ariel has been missing since her sixteenth birthday, and Fermoy has achieved a national political career. While the family has to attend a service at Church commemorating Ariel’s disappearance, Fermoy receives a call from the ghost of his missing daughter revealing that he murdered her ten years ago. The conversation is overheard by his wife Frances (Ingrid Craigie), who stabs him several times in a desperate attempt to discover where Ariel’s body has been concealed. The third act takes place two months later. Frances is on trial for the murder of her husband but she will presumably “geh off on insanity” (Ibid., 132). Ariel’s body has been discovered at the bottom of Cuura Lake and is now lying in a coffin in the living room awaiting to be buried next to Fermoy. This deeply displeases her sister Elaine (Eileen Walsh). The play ends with Elaine killing Frances. The structure of Ariel bears some striking resemblance with the myth of the Atrides as dramatised in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The situation of Fermoy during the first act echoes Agamemnon’s in the Euripidean tragedy as the king of Argos needs to sacrifice his first-born daughter Iphigenia to enable the Greek army to sail to Troy and gain eternal glory. Carr’s decision to start her transposition with Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis before moving on with the events related in Aeschylus’ Oresteia discloses her feminist intention because, as underlined by Edith Hall, such a recomposition of the tragic action “offers reasons why Clytemnestra, an abused wife and bereaved mother, turns into a vitriolic murderer, then it inevitably alters and modifies the impact of her violent characterisation in Agamemnon” (Hall 2005, 18). The ten-year ellipse between the first and the second acts of Ariel coincides with the time lapse between the sacrifice of Iphigenia and Agamemnon’s murder at the hands of Clytemnestra following his return to Argos. Yet, Frances does not plan carefully the killing of her husband during that time period – as

6  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Clytemnestra does in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – but she stabs her husband in the heat of the moment out of grief (Farquharson, 23). The last act of Ariel parallels Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers as it shows the matriarchal figure stepping up as the head of the household, which eventually leads to her murder by one of her remaining children. However, this action is not performed by the Orestes-based character Stephen (Dylan Tighe) – like in Aeschylus’ tragedy – but by Elaine, the Electra-like figure. Finally, the last play of the Aeschylean trilogy, The Eumenides, which celebrates “the triumph of patriarchy” (Hall 2005, 18), is not transposed in Ariel. While she was working on Ariel, Carr declared in an interview: “It is my goodbye to the Midlands, I think” (Marina Carr in conversation with Melissa Sihra, 55). This moment indeed marks a turning point in Carr’s approach to the transposition of classical drama in her theatre since, up to this date, Ariel is the last play transposing a Greek tragedy in a modern Irish set. Yet, Carr described her forthcoming project The Boy as “very, very loosely based on the three Theban plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone” (The Boy. Writer and Director Interview), which strongly resonates with her conception of Ariel as “based loosely on The Oresteia” (Carr in Kilroy). Carr’s use of the same expression to describe these two projects might indicate some similar approach to transposing Greek tragedy, and thus perhaps a return to the Midlands after more than twenty years. Commissioned by the Abbey Theatre, The Boy is projected to be a five-hour-long play. First scheduled to be performed during the 2020 Dublin Festival, the production has since then been postponed on several occasions due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is expected to premiere in 2024. About a decade after the production of Ariel, Carr started to conceive new works based on Greek tragedy. Yet, these plays acknowledge more explicitly their connection to classical drama as they retain at least partly the classical diegesis of the ancient tragedies. The first play of this new cycle transposing Greek tragedy is Phaedra Backwards which premiered in 2011 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton in the U.S. It was directed by Emily Mann with set, costume, sound, lighting, and projection designed by Rachel Hauck, Anita Yavich, Mark Bennett, Jeff Croiter, and Peter Nigrini, respectively. Phaedra Backwards relies roughly on Euripides’ Hippolytus. Carr indeed offers a complete reversal of the structure of the classical myth and tragedy in that play. Phaedra Backwards opens with Theseus (Randal Newsome) informing Phaedra (Stephanie Roth Haberle) of Hippolytus’ (Jake Silberman) death before moving backwards to relate not only the actions leading directly to that tragic event but also the history of Phaedra’s family. Carr includes a variety of scenes from Phaedra’s childhood involving the figures of Phaedra’s parents, Minos (Sean Haberle) and Pasiphae (Angel Desai), as well as siblings, Ariadne (Mariann Mayberry) and the

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  7 Minotaur (Julio Monge), who eventually emerge from the dead to play a role in the current tragic situation. The entanglement of the past and present temporalities enables Carr to question and challenge the reputation traditionally attached to each figure of the myth. The projection of films showing some of Phaedra’s childhood memories with Ariadne and the Minotaur in several instances over the course of the play humanises the latter who is usually perceived as a feral monster in classical literature and drama. Yet, as a corollary of his humanisation, Theseus’ heroic nature is reframed through the lens of the toxicity of hegemonic masculinity as illustrated by his murder of the Minotaur’s murder, his betrayal of Ariadne, his recurrent infidelities, his abuses of Phaedra, and his constant reprobations of Hippolytus. This approach to the myth transforms drastically the significance of Hippolytus’ death as it does not result from some incestuous passion but from Theseus’ behaviour, thus defusing the tradition of associating Phaedra with a monstrous woman. In 2015, Hecuba premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in the U.K. under the direction of Erica Whyman with set, lighting, music, sound, and movement design by Soutra Gilmour, Charles Balfour, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Andrew Franks, and Ayse Tashkiran, respectively. The play is based on Euripides’ Hecuba. Yet, Carr experiments with a new form of dramatic speech mingling not only dialogue and soliloquy (Sihra 2018, 268) but also narration and enactment (Macintosh, 13), which facilitates Carr’s interrogation of the accuracy of the events related in Euripides’ tragedy because, like history, myths have been written by the winners (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU). In this respect, the death of Polyxena (Amy Mcallister) is not the sole one to be attributed to the Greeks, those of Polydorus (Marcus Acquari/Nilay Sah/Luca Saraceni) and Polymestor’s (Edmund Kingsley) sons (Sebastien Luc Gibb/Christopher Kingdom/Daniel Vicente Thomas/Yiannis Vogiaridis) are too since they are ordered by Agamemnon (Ray Fearon) after having listened to Odysseus’ (Chu Omambala) advice, or enabled by his complete disregard for the lives of the Trojans. In doing so, Carr differs from the narrative of Euripides’ tragedy in which these deaths lead to the transformation of Hecuba (Derbhle Crotty) into a monster. The playwright indeed approaches the fall of Troy as a “genocide” (Carr 2015, 212), which entails the complete obliteration of the Trojan memory. The Kiln Theatre in London produced Girl on an Altar in 2022. Directed by Annabelle Comyn with the set and costume, lighting, sound, and projection designed by Tom Piper, Amy Mae, Philip Stewart, and Will Duke, respectively, the play is based on Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon as it starts with the sacrifice of Iphigenia and ends with the murder of Agamemnon. Yet, Carr changes significantly the course of actions occurring between these two major events of the myth of the

8  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Atrides. In Girl on an Altar, Clytemnestra (Eileen Walsh) does not kill Agamemnon (David Walmsley) right after his return from Troy but several months – or perhaps years – later. This new temporality enables Carr to conceive and include a number of new actions underlining Agamemnon’s abusive behaviour towards Clytemnestra. Despite the support of her father Tyndareus (Jim Findley), her lover Aegisthus (Daon Broni), and her servant Cilissa (Aoibhéann McCann), the queen of Argos is gradually estranged from her family and the royal power, losing everything she holds dear, and more specifically her last born daughter Leda, which reframes the murder of Agamemnon as an act of justice instead of revenge. In 2021, iGirl was produced on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre. It was directed by Caitríona McLaughlin and the set, costume, lighting, sound, and video were designed by Joanna Parker, Catherine Fay, Sinéad Wallace, Carl Kennedy, and Daniel Denton. The play is not a transposition of one or even several Greek tragedies per se as iGirl is not structured as a traditional play but rather as a postmodern dramatic epic poem dealing with death, loss, and extinction. iGirl involves a variety of characters from a wide range of sources (ancient mythology, history, and autobiography) and from different historical periods (prehistory, antiquity, medieval and contemporary times). Yet, the recurrent apparition of the characters of Antigone, Oedipus, and Jocasta – all played by Olwen Fouéré – demonstrates the centrality of classical drama in Carr’s theatre. The entanglement of diverse materials is not specific to iGirl. It has been running in Carr’s playwriting for a long time and only comes across more ostensibly in this dramatic epic because of its postmodern dimension. A play like By the Bog of Cats… is primarily a translocation of Euripides’ Medea. Yet, it also encompasses a variety of intertextual elements ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) to Beckett’s En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) (1952). Likewise, Ariel, for instance, includes elements inspired by the Bible, Shakespeare, and Eugene O’Neill. Such a specific feature of Carr’s playwriting indicates that her use of Greek tragedy cannot be restricted to the plays acknowledging explicitly their relation to classical tragic drama. This is all the more essential when considering that a number of dramatic devices and strategies, which have been inspired by Greek tragedy and implemented in By the Bog of Cats… and Ariel, structure the whole Midlands cycle. All these plays indeed rely on a heavy sense of family doom. From generation to generation, the characters keep reproducing the same behavioural patterns that have brought misery to their parents and grandparents in the first place. This aspect directly borrows from the classical conception of the tragic flaw which is carried not only by the guilty hero but also by their entire family. In this respect, the fatal action caused by that flaw does not curse a single

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  9 character but spreads over the generations, thus dooming entire dynasties to extinction. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance, the chorus considers the eponymous character’s tragic fate as the result of her father Oedipus’ crime: “And you are paying for some crime of your fathers” (“πατρῷον δ᾿ ἐκτίνεις τιν᾿ ἆθλον”) (Sophocles, 82–83). A similar sense of tragic doom irradiates Carr’s Midlands cycle, including the three plays that are seemingly not based on Greek tragedy: The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), and On Raftery’s Hill (2000). These similarities are further sustained by classical intertextualities that Carr interweaves in the plays. First produced in 1994 on the Peacock Stage of the Abbey Theatre, The Mai is a two-act play which was directed by Brian Brady at the time with set, lighting, and music design by Kathy Strachan, Aedín Cosgrove, and Mícheál O Súilleabháin. The Mai is a memory play dramatising Millie’s (Derbhle Crotty) remembrance of some events occurring during her childhood and leading to her mother The Mai’s (Olwen Fouéré) death by suicide. The first act focuses on the visit paid by The Mai’s family, including her grandmother, Grandma Fraochlán (Joan O’Hara), her two sisters, Connie (Michele Forbes) and Beck (Bríd Ní Neachtain), as well as her two aunts, Agnes (Máire Hastings) and Julie (Stella McCusker), to the new house built on Owl Lake. It stresses the house as the symbol of the restoration of family bliss after the return of The Mai’s husband Robert (Owen Roe). Yet, the dead body of the protagonist is unexpectedly displayed in a “[g]hostly light” (Carr 1999, 147) at the end of the first act, which conveys a sense of tragic doom. The second act takes place while The Mai is still alive, and shows a new collapse of her marriage with Robert because of the resumption of his unfaithful habits. Although this betrayal appears to motivate The Mai’s decision to take her own life, the “manipulation of chronological time disrupts the relation between cause and effect”3 (Leeney 2004, 160), thus presenting her death as the result of a tragic fate. The similar chronological construction of Portia Coughlan entails the same conclusion. First staged in 1996 on the Peacock Stage of the Abbey Theatre, Portia Coughlan is a three-act play that was first directed by Garry Hynes with set, lighting, and music designed by Kandis Cook, Jim Simmons, and Paddy Cunneen. The first act opens on Portia’s (Derbhle Crotty) birthday and highlights her utter dissatisfaction with her position as a wife to Raphael (Seán Rocks) and a mother of three children. As Portia spends her day drinking in the company of some of her relatives, first her aunt Maggie (Marion O’Dwyer) and her uncle Senchil (Des Keogh), and then her friend Stacia (Bronagh Gallagher), her inability to be happy is gradually connected to the loss of her twin brother, Gabriel (Michael Boylan/ Peter Charlesworth Kelly), who makes a few ghostly appearances over the

10  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy course of the play. The second act deals with Portia’s suicide: While her body is discovered, her relatives, and more specifically her parents, Marianne (Stella McCusker) and Sly (Tom Hickey), as well as her grandmother, Blaize (Pauline Flanagan), evoke Gabriel’s death by suicide and his close relationship with Portia. The final act takes place before the protagonist’s death by suicide. It reveals the incestuous relationship between Portia and Gabriel as well as their incestuous ascendancy, Sly and Marianne being brother and sister, which instils a sense of tragic perpetuation of the fatal action that dooms the family. The intergenerational reproduction of incestuous relationships lies at the core of On Raftery’s Hill too. First performed in 2000 as a Druid Theatre Company and Royal Court Theatre co-production at the Town Hall in Galway, On Raftery’s Hill is a two-act play that was first directed by Garry Hynes with set, lighting, and sound designed by Tony Walton, Richard Pilbrow, and Rich Walsh. On Raftery’s Hill examines the tyrannical rule of Red (Tom Hickey), a farmer and land owner, over his family including his mother Shalome (Valerie Lilley), his son Ded (Michael Tierney), and his two daughters Dinah (Cara Kelly) and Sorrel (Mary Murray). The first act displays the attempts of several characters to escape Red’s cruelty and violence: Shalome lives in a constant state of delusion caused by dementia and tries on numerous occasions to leave to meet with her long-dead father, Ded resides in the cowshed, and Sorrel intends to marry Dara (Keith McErlean), a young local farmer. Yet, the violence, which is epitomised through the rape of Sorrel by Red partly shown on stage at the end of the first act, appears inescapable. The second act sheds light on the characters’ entrapment within the cycle of violence as Dinah is revealed to be Sorrel’s true mother but did nothing to stop Red from raping the young girl. The denouement stands as another manifestation of that dimension as Sorrel breaks her engagement with Dara to remain with her family, thus pushing the ancient tragic concept of family doom to its very limit. To further the connection of The Mai, Portia Coughlan, and On Raftery’s Hill to Greek tragedy, a variety of women characters in these plays manifest distinctive features traditionally associated with some specific classical female figures. As a memory play, The Mai gives a prominent position to Millie, who fills a narrator-like role. This underlines her inability to cope with and overcome the grief caused by her mother’s death, thus echoing the figure of Electra. Her myth has been brought to the stage by the three tragic poets: Aeschylus in The Libation Bearers and Sophocles as well as Euripides in their Electras. These three tragedies frame Electra as constantly grieving over Agamemnon’s death, incessantly talking about it while waiting for Orestes’ return to restore justice and order in the Atrides’ household and in the kingdom of Argos. This latter dimension is, however, re-enacted through the character of The Mai as she hopes and plans on

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  11 Robert’s return to (re)form a family. In Portia Coughlan, the obsession of the titular character with her dead brother presents some striking resemblance to the figure of Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy. Both Antigone and Portia indeed neglect wifehood and motherhood because of siblinghood. Portia also experiences murderous urges towards her children, which echo Medea’s traditional characterisation as the killer of her own offspring. In On Raftery’s Hill finally, the rape of Sorrel by Red bears some similarities with the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon as both acts manifest a violation and termination of female innocence to re-assert male domination. Carr has thus engaged in extensive conversation with the three classical Athenian tragedians throughout her career. Her feminist input into Greek tragedy – and classical culture more generally – has been discussed in research before. The monographs Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr (2010) by Rhona Trench, Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown (2018) by Melissa Sihra, and The Art of Experience: The Theatre of Marina Carr and Contemporary Psychology (2021) by Dagmara Gizło include essential reflections on the matter in relation to their main topics. Yet, the rewriting in terms of content and form that Greek tragedy undergoes in Carr’s theatre is not the main point of focus of these monographs. A similar observation can be stressed about the collection of essays edited by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan in The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made” (2003). In Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre (2019), Shonagh Hill includes a variety of Carr’s plays in her study of women’s (re)writing of mythological stories for the stage in Ireland but this monograph focuses neither on Carr’s playwriting nor on the transposition of the myths from Greek tragedy. A number of chapters and articles, however, offer an in-depth examination of the reception and rewriting of Greek tragedy in some specific plays by Carr like Eamonn Jordan’s “Unmasking the Myths?: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and On Raftery’s Hill” published in the edited collection Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy (2002) by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, as well as Clare Wallace’s “Marina Carr’s Hecuba: Agency, Anger and Correcting Euripides” (2019) and María del Mar González Chacón’s “‘This is not about love, this is about guilt and terror’: Phaedra Backwards (2011) and forwards by Marina Carr” (2020), both released in the Irish Studies Review. The inclusion of several comments on Carr’s Hecuba as an “epicisation of tragedy” in the collection of essays Epic Performances: From the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (2018) edited by Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward as well as in the book Performing Epic or Telling Tales (2020) by Macintosh and McConnell complements the reflections on the use of tragedy in the Midlands cycle elaborated by Clare Wallace in the chapter “Marina Carr: Nostalgia for Destiny” of her monograph

12  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama (2006). However, there has not been any study yet tracing Carr’s journey into transposing Greek tragedy on the contemporary stage and analysing the evolution of the devices and strategies that she has been implementing throughout her career to overturn the patriarchal purpose of classical drama in order to create feminist theatre out of it. This is precisely what I intend to examine in this book, which covers her use of Greek tragedy from the translocations displayed in the Midlands cycle to her most recent transpositions, namely, iGirl and Girl on an Altar, which, besides their mention in Isabelle Torrance’s article “Greek Tragedy and Irish Politics in the Decade of Commemorations” (2022), have not yet been the subjects of an in-depth examination. This book explores Carr’s transposition of Greek tragedy from a variety of interconnected perspectives. Her feminist lens comes across the most ostensibly through the rewriting of the traditional characterisation of the female characters, which are categorised through the binary antagonism of “the good” and the “bad” women in ancient drama. In her choices of plays to transpose, Carr has revealed a particular interest in the monstrous women that are Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba whom the contemporary playwright redeems from their classical monstrosity. Yet, Carr has also subverted the characterisation and the dramatic arcs of the “good” women – Iphigenia, Polyxena, Antigone, and Electra – to underline the grip of patriarchy over their tragic fates. Such contestations of the classical canon demonstrate a critical approach to the source material(s), which Carr has often exposed in interviews and speeches. She has, for instance, acknowledged her “love” for “Euripides,” whom she believes “is a wonderful writer” having created “a wonderful play” with Hecuba (Carr in Leavy). But she has also argued that he produced “stereotypes of females … to be feared,” thus justifying “the societal need to control and marginalise them” which “still persists [in western consciousness]” (Ibid.). Carr’s specific insight into Greek tragedy tackles the issues of reception and interpretation of any work of art, literature, and theatre. The meaning of a play is not transcendental and shared universally. It is grounded in a socio-historical frame subject to change. For that reason, Carr’s feminist transpositions of Greek tragedy have not emerged in a vacuum. They settle in an environment of questioning and challenging the ideological structures of contemporary Western democracies through the re-examination of their founding myths and artistic canon more generally. The second wave of feminism, which started in the 1950s,4 has played an incredibly active role in that matter with the theorisation of concepts like the “revision” by Adrienne Rich and the “écriture féminine” (“women’s writing”) by Hélène Cixous, which both imply a re-conception of storytelling by turning women from objects to subjects. Yet, feminism is not the sole

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  13 field to call for and implement critically engaged rewriting of the canonical stories. This trend has emerged in a wider project of examining the marginalisation and exclusion endured by some categories of the population in modern and contemporary Western societies through the transposition of Greek tragedy, which a number of postcolonial transpositions of Greek tragedy illustrates, like W. B. Yeats’ version Oedipus the King (1926). Indeed, patriarchy does not simply rely on the sexist oppression of women. It also encompasses “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist” ideologies (hooks, xiv). Through the primary grounding in feminism, Carr’s plays bring on stage this wider attempt to decolonise Western cultural history as a number of the characters based on Greek tragedy suffer from “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1243) and classism in her transpositions. For this reason, this book positions Carr and her body of work in this history of contestation and re-creation of classical drama with a particular focus on gender. Yet, the rewriting of the Greek myths dramatised in ancient tragedies means a re-configuration of classical tragedy as a genre too. In The Poetics, Aristotle defines the tragic plot as “the mimesis of the action” (“πράξεως … μίμησις”) (Aristotle 1999, 48–49) and tragedy as “mimesis of an action” (“μίμησις πράξεως”) (Ibid., 46–47), which demonstrates the intrinsic connection between the structure of the dramatic myth and the genre of tragedy. In this regard, Carr’s transpositions of Greek tragedy from a feminist lens are as significant in terms of rewriting the stories they dramatise as they are in terms of recomposing the genre that enables their dramatisation. This latter dimension has been noticed by Eda Dedebas who notes that Carr elaborates “a new type of tragedy, which allows women to be reborn through the violence that deconstructs the social order” in the Midlands cycle through the “deconstruct[ion]” of the “Greek myths” (Dedebas, 248). It has not, however, led to an in-depth examination of this “new type of tragedy,” its evolution, and its most recent manifestations in Carr’s theatre since, besides some comments about the new dramatic speech implemented in Hecuba, her latest transpositions – from Phaedra Backwards to Girl on an Altar and including iGirl – have not been analysed yet from the lens of generic innovations. Once again, Carr’s re-conceptualisation of tragedy has not taken place in a vacuum as the history of the genre has not gone from Greek tragedy to her transpositions in any straightforward way. Carr’s use of tragedy does not simply rely on the practice and theorisation of the genre during the classical period. She draws inspiration from a variety of influences “assembled from various sources” (Wallace 2006, 254). This includes dramatic practices that have perpetuated and yet simultaneously transformed classical tragedy, like Elizabethan and realistic theatre, alongside others that have been conceived in opposition to it, like epic theatre. It also includes the continuation of the philosophical reflections on

14  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy tragedy initiated by Aristotle in The Poetics, which is illustrated through the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich von Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche during the 19th century, the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus during the 20th century, and Judith Butler during the 21st century. Carr “incorporates fragments” of these “different formulations and (mis)understandings of tragedy and the tragic” (Ibid.) that have emerged throughout the history of practice and theorisation of the genre. I uncover these dramatic as well as philosophical influences in this book, which I connect with Carr’s feminist concern and focus on representing women’s subjectivity and agency as she creates a new, and thus non-conventional, form of tragedy in her plays that deconstructs and redesigns the initial purpose of the genre. Greek tragedy, and theatre more generally, was originally conceived as a socio-political institution of the 5th century B.C.E. Athenian democracy. From a contemporary perspective, the political statements encompassed in every tragedy might thus be considered to be a form of propaganda, especially concerning the topic of gender hierarchies. Helene Foley indeed observes that “Greek tragedies are undeniably androcentric and do indeed provide poetic justification for the subordination of women, foreigners, and slaves” (Foley 2001, 12). This political purpose of Greek tragedy stands in stark opposition to the feminist concerns developed by Carr in her drama. Although she did not publicly identify as a feminist before 2014 (Sihra 2016, 554), her playwriting demonstrates the influence of feminism on her conception, and thus her creation, of theatre. Since the very beginning of her career, not only has Carr manifested a strong commitment to the construction of female characters challenging and subverting gender expectations, but she has also demonstrated a constant interest in crafting narratives from women’s perspectives. And since 2014, she has become more and more vocal about the issues of inequality in theatre as she declared, for instance, to the Irish Times in 2019: I have no illusions … about how difficult it is to be considered equal in the canon. It may be reductive to divide it by gender … but it is impossible not to see how underrepresented women are, that there is a whole world of women’s work that isn’t being seen. (Carr in Keating) Yet, Carr’s interest in Greek tragedy is precisely rooted in feminism as she claimed in an interview published in 2019 that “the three Athenian tragedians were actually the first feminists” because “[t]hey were the first ones that gave half the voice to women” as their female characters “are so articulate … so eloquent, they are transgressors, they take power, because

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  15 power is not allowed them, and they will do it, they can argue like men” (Carr in Terrazas Gallego, 193). This statement might appear as a romanticisation of what Athenian tragedy really was during the 5th century B.C.E., but Carr is deeply aware of the discriminations faced by Athenian women at that time as she asserted during an interview on Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) in 2018: “[Greek tragedies] were salutary lessons in how not to be a woman. [The Athenians] believed that if women were not controlled they would destroy everything” (Carr in Sihra 2018, 10). Yet, as Carr considers literature and theatre as a conversation with authors from the past, I intend to demonstrate that she is the one turning Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides into “the first feminists” in this book. Through her transpositions, Carr exposes the mechanisms of oppression that have structured Western civilisation since the classical period while providing women with an operating voice to enable them to tell their stories. And in doing so, she has overturned the political purpose of tragedy to make it a feminist theatre. Such a conclusion, however, can only be reached through an extensive comparison of Carr’s plays with the Greek tragedies that they transpose. In this respect, this book focuses on Carr and her feminist intention, strategies, and purpose in transposing Greek tragedy on the contemporary stage. Yet, it also offers an in-depth exploration of the oppressive ideology embedded in classical drama, especially in relation to gender representation, and it uncovers creative approaches to defuse these ideological stances in order to produce a form of theatre that challenges rather than endorses patriarchy. The Theatre of Democracy: Greek Tragedy in Context Carr understands perfectly that Greek tragedy was originally used “to define men and women and culture, and how to live” in the “new-city state” that was the Athenian democracy during the 5th century B.C.E. (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). The genre did not emerge originally in the region of the Attic but it grew into “a distinctively Athenian cultural product” (Griffith and Carter, 11) from the end of the 6th century B.C.E. until the 4th century B.C.E. Only thirtythree extant tragedies have been preserved, the rest being either lost or fragmentary. These surviving plays have been authored by three tragedians, who were all Athenians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The chronology of their productions matches some key moments in Athenian history. The oldest tragedy preserved is Aeschylus’ The Persians, which was produced in 472, thus coinciding with the rise of the Athenian hegemony over Greece prompted by the victory at the battle of Salamis in 480 that ended the second Graeco-Persian War. The latest remaining tragedy is

16  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, produced in 401 while its author was already dead and three years after the defeat of Athens against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, which initiated the decline of the Athenian hegemonic power over Greece. These various elements have induced an Athenocentric conception of ancient tragedy which has been deemed inaccurate by historians and archaeologists because that dramatic art was also practised outside Athens, and even outside Greece, like in Sicily, during the 5th century B.C.E. (Stewart, 7). The context and convention of productions of classical drama differ substantially from those of modern and contemporary theatre experienced by Carr. The practice of tragedy was formalised in Athens around 500 B.C.E. through the integration of dramatic performances into the politico-­ religious festival of the Great Dionysia (Cartledge, 23). This event took place every spring and hosted two dramatic competitions: One opposing three tragic poets and the other five comic poets. The playwrights able to compete were selected by the archon eponymous, a yearly appointed leader of the Athenian democracy. After the election, each poet was allocated a group of male-only performers and a choregos, that is, a wealthy citizen financing the very expensive cost of the dramatic production in order to gain a good reputation that would benefit his political career. In the earliest years when tragedy had not been integrated yet into the Great Dionysia, the performances used to take place in the agora (Rehm, 31) – the heart of the polis (city) – but the increasing popularity of that dramatic event propelled the construction of the Theatre of Dionysus around 500 B.C.E. (Cartledge, 23) on the south slope of the Acropolis, which is the hill where the main temples of the gods are located. The initial design of the theatre must have been quite different from the archaeological remains that are currently standing on the location as they result from the numerous alterations undertaken by the Romans between the 1st and the 4th century C.E. (Rehm, 31). According to Rush Rehm, the early architecture of the Theatre of Dionysus must have consisted of “a large, but irregular, orchestra area, backed by a wooden façade with a central door” because “[a]ll extant tragedies can be staged with these basic elements” (Ibid., 34). Such a description unsettles the traditional vision of the scenic space during the classical period, which has postulated the existence of two separate performing areas: The orchestra dedicated to the chorus and the proscenium devoted to the professional actors. Standing behind the performing area, the skénè – the stage backdrop – was painted to provide some iconographic setting to the play. This part of the stage was also used to perform the deus ex machina. Nowadays, it is a famous dramaturgical device involving a god miraculously resolving the crisis dramatised in some plays like the apparition of the god Artemis at the end of Euripides’ Hippolytus, which Carr does not include or even mention in her transposition of the

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  17 tragedy. The deus ex machina, however, alluded originally to a machine used to lift an actor above the skénè. Although it must have been mostly used to represent the appearance of divine characters on stage, Euripides conceived Medea’s exit with it according to Aristotle (Aristotle 1999, 81). The ekkuklêma was another machine dependent on the skénè. It was a wheeled platform moving from the inside of the skénè to the performing area in order to reveal the interior of a building and most commonly the death that had occurred in it, such as Jocasta’s in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Finally, the skénè also provided a space for the actors to change costumes during the representation since they often had to embody several characters. The number of actors playing in a tragedy was limited in Athens during the 5th century B.C.E. According to Aristotle, tragedy was initially performed by only one professional actor, then Aeschylus introduced a second one, and finally Sophocles a third one (Ibid., 43). Yet, all the extant tragedies involve more than three characters, which Carr’s transpositions reflect. But while the performance of her plays can include as many actors as characters, it was expected from an actor during the classical period to embody several characters in a tragedy, including the female ones, thus implying some costume change during the performance. The actor’s switch of identity was facilitated by the mask, especially considering the necessity for male actors to embody female characters. This prop traditionally associated with Greek theatre, which modern and contemporary performances do not usually use, was central to the classical conception of the acting activity and to the successful completion of the performance in theatre. Made of “glued rags,” the mask “covered the whole head” of the actor (Wiles, 147), thus enabling him to develop an acute “awareness of his own body” and to “sense the presence of others beside and behind him” in order to make his voice audible to the whole audience (Ibid., 151–152). The mask also conveyed a sense of proximity for all the audience members, especially for those sitting in the further rows, because it “br[ought] the face [of the performers] closer to the spectator[s]” (Ibid., 149). Despite its great practicality, the mask was not a reusable prop: After a single performance, it was offered to the god Dionysus (Ibid., 147). This specificity emphasises the intrinsically religious dimension of the dramatic performance in 5th-century B.C.E. Athens, which highly contrasts with the modern and contemporary conception of theatre. However, not all the characters might have worn a mask on stage. Classical tragedy – and theatre more generally – relies on the presence on stage of two kinds of characters: The individual figures like the heroes in tragic plays enacted by professional actors and the chorus embodied by a group of Athenian citizens, which means by men only. While all the characters speak in verse, the chorus also dances and sings. Such a mode

18  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy of dramatic acting might seem alien to the modern and contemporary conception of playing on stage established by the conventions of realistic theatre and might explain Carr’s refusal to include the collective character in her transpositions. Despite being “fascinat[ed]” by the figure, she believes that “mak[ing] the chorus dramatic, … mak[ing] the chorus sing today … is hugely problematic in the staging of Greek theatre” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). The precise significance of this collective entity of the chorus is indeed still quite mysterious. According to Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the chorus stood unmasked on stage as a symbol of Athenian democracy and its values to contrast with the aristocratic heroes playing out the mythological past of Greece, whose actions are called into question by the collective character (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 24). Yet, the chorus does not speak in Attic dialect, the language commonly spoken in Athens during the 5th century B.C.E., and they usually embody social categories marginalised in Athenian democracy such as women and/or slaves. The sum of these features positions the chorus as an alienating entity for the classical audience in Athens, which motivates their exclusion from the action in John Gould’s mind (Gould, 382). Unlike the heroic characters, the chorus never performs any action,5 yet it does not mean that they are not concerned with the outcome of the tragedy. In some plays, the chorus is actually the character the most concerned with the action, like in Aeschylus’ The Suppliants (Romilly, 28). This particular position mirrors to some extent the spectators’ situation. Both the chorus and the audience have a strong interest in the story played out during the show, but none of them can take any form of action to push the tragic event in one direction or another. Such a connection must have been increased by the possible unmasked appearance of the chorus while the masked characters stood aside as representatives of a distant mythological past populated by great heroes (Vernant and VidalNaquet, 24). Yet, the collective character gradually lost its dramatic importance over the Golden Age of tragedy in Athens. While they were a central character in Aeschylus’ tragedies as four out of his seven remaining plays are entitled after them,6 only four out of the nineteen plays by Euripides are,7 thus manifesting their marginalisation to focus on the hero’s action and its outcome at an individual level. The Persians – which mythologises an episode of Greek history – aside, the classical tragedies rely on the dramatisation of mythological events detailed in epic poetry that the tragedians reshaped in order to echo the citizens’ political concerns. Epic poetry as illustrated in Homer’s Iliad indeed exalts an aristocratic moral code through the exploits undertaken by great heroes like Achilles. Conceived around the 8th century B.C.E., epic poetry used the myth to justify the privileged position of a small number of families ruling over the Greek cities by presenting them as the descendants of the Homeric

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  19 heroes (Vernant, 211). Although Greek tragedy involves figures mentioned or even playing a part in epic poetry who are considered to be “superior … to existing humans” (“βελτίους … τῶν νῦν”) (Aristotle 1999, 34–35), it does not show their achievement but their downfall as recommended by Aristotle in The Poetics: “[t]he well-made plot … ought to [have] … a change [of fortune] … from prosperity to adversity” (“ἀνάγκη … τὸν καλῶς ἔχοντα μῦθον … μεταβάλλειν … ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν”) (Ibid., 70–71). This re-conceptualisation of heroism in tragedy encouraged the audience to question and challenge the aristocratic values that used to structure the whole Greek world, and thus the city of Athens, before the emergence of democracy. Such a political purpose resonates with the modern and contemporary use of Greek tragedy to question the hegemonic ideologies of Western democracies as exposed in Carr’s transpositions. But while Greek tragedies challenged the values from the past, Carr calls into question those from the present. The implementation of a democratic system in Athens was a long process, which ran from the beginning of the 6th throughout the 5th century B.C.E. In The Politics, Aristotle upholds equality as one of the primary principles constituting democracy: Now a fundamental principle of the democratic form of constitution is liberty … But one factor of liberty is to govern and be governed in turn; for the popular principle of justice is to have equality according to number, not worth, and if this is the principle of justice prevailing, the multitude must of necessity be sovereign and the decision of the majority must be final and must constitute justice, for they say that each of the citizens ought to have an equal share. (Ὑπόθεσις μὲν οὖν τῆς δημοκρατικῆς πολιτείας ἐλευθερία· … ἐλευθερίας δὲ ἓν μὲν τὸ ἐν μέρει ἄρχεσθαι καὶ ἄρχειν· καὶ γὰρ τὸ δίκαιον τὸ δημοτικὸν τὸ ἴσον ἔχειν ἐστὶ κατ᾿ ἀριθμὸν ἀλλὰ μὴ κατ᾿ ἀξίαν, τούτου δ᾿ ὄντος τοῦ δικαίου τὸ πλῆθος ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι κύριον καὶ ὅ τι ἂν δόξῃ τοῖς πλείοσι τοῦτ᾿ εἶναι τέλος καὶ τοῦτ᾿ εἶναι τὸ δίκαιον, φασὶ γὰρ δεῖν ἴσον ἔχειν ἕκαστον τῶν πολιτῶν·) (Aristotle 1944, 488–489) Although citizenship in Athens was strictly restricted to Athenian-born men, the establishment of equality between the citizens was a radical transformation of the conception of political activity from the aristocratic and/ or tyrannical regimes.8 And tragedy as practised in Athens during the 5th century B.C.E. addressed that important transformation of the city’s political environment as they “draw on the vocabulary, issues, and power struggles” emerging from “the tensions of a changing society, tensions between public and private life, between the old, traditional ways and the new requirements of the new political order” (Goldhill 1986, 77–78). Some

20  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy specific socio-political events must have stemmed from these tensions dealt with in the tragic plays produced during the Great Dionysia. However, the spatiotemporal framework offered by the myth sets the tragedies in a remote time and, most of the time, in a foreign land.9 The implementation of such a distance established a clear separation between the reality of politics and its dramatic representation, thus precluding tragedies from addressing explicitly any specific situation. Instead, tragic plays offered an allegorical comment on the current state of affairs in Athens at the time of the performances. According to P. E. Easterling, the distancing device provided by the myth fulfilled two main purposes. First, it “help[ed] avoid the danger of immediate political repercussions” (Easterling, 22). Then, it “ma[de] it possible for plays to be understood … as offering something for everyone in the audience” (Ibid., 25). This entanglement of political and dramatic purposes is enabled through the concept of “heroic vagueness” (Ibid.), which Hall avails of to examine the significance of female figures in Greek tragedy. She indeed argues that “[i]f a performance of tragedy is considered as a site where the Athenian democratic subject flexed his intellectual muscles,” then women characters “could be seen as mythical surrogates of the civic agent receiving advice, attempting to deliberate, and coming to a decision” (Hall 2010, 66). Yet, the gender of the performers acting on stage eased undoubtedly the potential reliability of a female character to a male citizen. The female characters from Greek tragedy brought onto the contemporary stage by Carr are played by women, yet they were initially conceived to be embodied by men. The blatant absence of female actors on the classical stage contrasts with the central position of women in ancient tragic texts. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is indeed the only extant tragedy not displaying any woman throughout the course of the action. All the others involve at least one female character who usually plays an essential role in the unravelling of the tragic action. A simple glimpse at the titles of the most famous tragedies demonstrates the centrality of women in ancient tragic drama. Tragedies were indeed often entitled after the main figure’s name, like Sophocles’ Electra or Euripides’ Medea, or central social group, like Aeschylus’ The Suppliants. Tragic poets repeatedly constructed female characters as the driving force of the action. In Antigone, Sophocles built the whole tragedy on the eponymous character’s inception, performance, and defence of the illegal burial of her brother Polynices. Despite her gender identity, Antigone acts on her own initiative and means, thus revealing actual agency and subjectivity on stage. Such a situation, however, stood in stark opposition to the reality experienced by women in the 5th century B.C.E. This fictionality of women’s gender experience dramatised in Greek tragedy was underlined through their embodiment by men, which was

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  21 “a means of maintaining and exhibiting women’s oppression” in Athenian democracy (Bassi, 141). Only a handful of ancient resources deal with the gender expectations shaping women’s lives in the democratic system set in Athens during the classical era. The funeral oration delivered by Pericles and reported by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War encompasses one of the most significant and valuable entries to that matter. Indeed, while addressing the grief endured by the Athenian population caused by the war against Sparta, Pericles addressed precisely the proper behaviour that women should abide by in such a troubled time: If I am to speak also of womanly virtues, referring to those of you who will henceforth be in widowhood, I will sum up all in a brief admonition: Great is your glory if you fall not below the standard which nature has set for your sex, and great also is hers of whom there is least talk among men whether in praise or in blame. (Εἰ δέ με δεῖ καὶ γυναικείας τι ἀρετῆς, ὅσαι νῦν ἐν χηρείᾳ ἔσονται, μνησθῆναι, βραχείᾳ παραινέσει ἅπαν σημανῶ. τῆς τε γὰρ ὑπαρχούσης φύσεως μὴ χείροσι γενέσθαι ὑμῖν μεγάλη ἡ δόξα καὶ ἧς ἂν ἐπ᾿ ἐλάχιστον ἀρετῆς πέρι ἢ ψόγου ἐν τοῖς ἄρσεσι κλέος ᾖ.) (Thucydides, 340–341) Pericles’ statement seems to provide some serious ground for the prohibition of women from dramatic performances. As theatre entailed a public show, it necessarily conflicted with the invisibility required from Athenian women. Yet, Pericles appears to directly address women in that part of the funeral oration, which implies that they must have been in attendance. Women were probably allowed to attend some socio-politico-religious events of importance, which may have included the dramatic performances at the Great Dionysia. The comic poet Aristophanes provides some scarce information about the sociology of the audience attending theatre during the classical period. Indeed, “unlike tragedy, … Old Comedy consistently drew attention to its performance context and often addressed spectators in terms of social and political categories” (Roselli, 1). In Lysistrata, for instance, the chorus calls upon the whole audience explicitly referring to both the male and female members of the spectatorship: “So let every man and woman tell us / if they need to have a little cash” (“ἀλλ᾿ ἐπαγγελλέτω πᾶς ἀνὴρ καὶ γυνή, / εἴ τις ἀργυρίδιον”) (Aristophanes, 410–411). It thus appears that “although the citizen perspective remains dominant, it is in the gaze of the citizens and their wives that the plays are enacted” (Goldhill 1994, 368). The presence of, at least some, women may even have been

22  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy mandatory in order to offer a complete reflection of the city, even if they were only “a silenced presence on the map of the city” (Ibid.). Despite being marginalised and excluded, women were indeed essential to the survival and prosperity of the 5th-century democratic city. Classical democracy as implemented in Athens relied on two main institutional and spatial concepts: The polis and the oikos (the house). The former referred to the political sphere of Athens and was therefore a maledevoted area, while the latter alluded to the private life of the population concealed in the house and was thus conceived as a female-dedicated space. Tragedy mirrored that division. Even though the female characters displayed agency and subjectivity denied to women in democracy, their dramatic arcs always revolved around topics such as marriage and procreation specific to the institution of the oikos (Des Bouvrie, 323), whereas the male ones’ had to do with the administration of the polis. Carr includes that gendered division of spaces, which she translates in spatial terms as a number of her transpositions are set in the domestic home – The Mai, Portia Coughlan, On Raftery’s Hill, and Ariel – or deal with it – By the Bog of Cats…. However, these two spheres were not as opposed as they seemed to be and were actually deeply interconnected. Foley observes that “both men and women share[d] an interest in the oikos … [and] in the polis,” asserting that these two spaces were “organized on a comparable and complementary basis,” which earmarked the male “legal authority over the female” (Foley 1981, 154). The ideological assertion of the supremacy of men over women in the polis as well as in the oikos leaned on a pragmatic division of human activities based on gender, among other social criteria, which sustained the very existence of democracy as well as citizenship in Athens. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt explores the concept of the vita activa, which includes the notions of labour, work, and action, in Western culture. She thus examines the binary system of spaces structuring the classical Athenian democracy. Arendt articulates the relation of the oikos with the polis according to a traditional antagonistic duo of concepts in philosophy: Nature and culture. In her mind, the oikos was the area dedicated to the essential needs of humanity and was thus regarded as enclosing a “[n]atural community … born of necessity” (Arendt, 30), which operated through a “prepolitical” conception of power using “force and violence” (Ibid., 26–27). The relation of its members was then based on “the strictest inequality” since the head of the oikos was the sole to be “considered free only in so far as he had the power to leave the house and enter the political realm, where all were equals” (Ibid., 32). Unlike the oikos, the polis manifested the cultural dimension of Athens because it was built on democratic laws ensuring equality between its members – the citizens – and functioned through the logos, meaning “words and persuasion” (Ibid., 26). Despite the opposite

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  23 features constituting the essence of each of these spheres, the oikos and the polis were intrinsically connected to one another at an individual as well as political level. From an individual perspective first, being denied access to any of these two spheres would have prevented a person from fully achieving their humanity. On the one hand, the oikos symbolised privacy, and “to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human” (Ibid., 64). On the other hand, “liv[ing] an entirely private life” and having no access to the polis, as women did, “meant above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life” because a “private man [who] does not appear … it is as though he did not exist” (Ibid., 58). The interconnection of the oikos and the polis underlines the great difference between the ancient Greek and the contemporary Western conceptualisation of humanity. Human nature was perceived as a spectrum during the classical period, instead of an inalienable essence. Yet, this contemporary vision of humanity appears more as an abstract ideal not necessarily translated into pragmatical actions as epitomised by the dehumanising treatment of the refugees in the Western world. In Phaedra Backwards, Carr tackles and challenges this idea that some beings would be more human and thus more deserving of fair treatment than others through the figure of the Minotaur, that mythological creature half-man, half-bull. The conception of humanity as a spectrum during the classical period allowed the design of a “better” human embodied by the citizens since “to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence” (Ibid., 64) that contrasted with a “lower” one represented by women. It also enabled the complete removal of the slaves from humanity. This conception was not merely philosophical but established a system of socio-political privileges among the people living in Athens. As observed by Aristotle in The Athenian Constitution, “[c]itizenship belongs to persons of citizen parentage on both sides” (“μετέχουσιν μὲν τῆς πολιτείας οἱ ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων γεγονότες ἀστῶν”) (Aristotle 1952, 118–119). Although H. Rackham’s translation relies on the gender-neutral word “persons” to evoke the ­Athenian citizens, Aristotle refers to them using the masculine expression “οἱ … γεγονότες,” which implies that only men born from Athenian parents could access citizenship. People living in Athens and falling out of this definition – because of their gender, for instance – were not only excluded from the community of the citizens but they were also not even regarded as Athenians. Nicole Loraux indeed notices that there is no word in the ancient Greek language that means “female Athenians” who are thus always referred to as “women from Athens” (Loraux, 116). This exclusionary vision of Athenian citizenship provided the very system sustaining the democracy as the oikos ensured the citizens’ freedom because “be[ing] free meant … not to be subject to the necessity of life” (Arendt, 32). The private realm thus provided sustainability to the polis by taking charge of

24  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy the essential needs of the citizens, including the necessity of procreating to ensure the survival of the human species. Therefore, the oikos represented “the other, the dark and hidden side of public realm” (Ibid., 64), populated by women and slaves who shared a similar social destiny as stressed by Arendt: Hidden away were the laborers who “with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life,” and the women who with their bodies guaranteed the physical survival of the species. Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else’s property but because their life was “laborious,” devoted to bodily functions. (Ibid., 72) Her observation is confirmed by the explicit parallel drawn by Aristotle in The Politics as he asserts that both women and slaves need to be ruled by a master (Aristotle 1944, 5). But while “a slave is a live article of property” (“ὁ δοῦλος κτῆμά τι ἔμψυχον”) (Ibid., 16–17), women are simply considered unfit to command over the household (Arendt, 59). This conception relying on some women’s deficiency by contrast with men translates in political terms the biological inferiority attributed to the female gender envisioned by Aristotle as “a deformed male” (“ἄρρεν … πεπηρωμένον”) (Aristotle 1942, 174–175). The political structure sustaining democracy in Athens during the classical period seems to greatly differ from the democratic regimes implemented in modern and contemporary Western countries, including the Republic of Ireland where Carr comes from. The modern and contemporary political systems indeed rely on the concept of society, which was unknown in Athenian democracy according to Arendt. The emergence of society has indeed abolished the strict separation of the public and the private as it has been conceived as a nationwide extension of the family because it “always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest” (Arendt, 39). This has led to a substantial transformation of human communities seeing “the decline of the family,” which, because it “coincide[s]” with “the rise of society,” manifests “the absorption of the family unit into corresponding social groups” (Ibid., 40). The 1937 Irish Constitution epitomises such a conception as article 41.1 asserts: “The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law” (1937 Irish Constitution). This entails the politicisation of what used to be regarded as private by the classical Athenians since society earmarks “the admission of household and housekeeping

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  25 activities to the public realm” (Arendt, 45). Arendt hence states that “[s]ociety is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance” (Ibid., 46). The position and situation of women have mutated accordingly since the process of procreation, in which the female body plays a decisive role, appears henceforth as a social contribution to society and not simply as a natural necessity ensuring the survival of the human species. And the Republic of Ireland offers a blatant illustration of that matter. Yet, this is actually achieved through the perpetuation of the classical distinction between the public and private spheres, which lies at the core of the conversation initiated by a number of transpositions of Greek tragedy by Carr. Greek-Spirited Ireland: Actualising the Theatre of Democracy Carr’s transpositions of Greek tragedy settle in a long tradition of use of the classics in Ireland. Contrastingly with the other postcolonial countries, classical culture has not been brought by the imperial power but is indigenous to the island (O’Rourke and Torrance, 1). Ireland was placed under the authority of the English king in 1541. Twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of the island became independent from the British Empire and formed the Irish New State in 1922 while the six others have remained up to this date within the U.K. The colonisation of Ireland was incited during the 16th and 17th centuries by a policy relying on the eviction of Irish Catholics from the lands of the island to settle British Protestants. The British compared the colonisation of Ireland to the Romans’ “civilising” invasion of the Mediterranean area, and, in reaction, the Irish elaborated a counter-narrative by associating themselves with the ancient Greeks (McDonald, 57). From a historical perspective indeed, the annexation of Greece by Rome led to a paradoxical outcome beautifully expressed by the poet Horace: “Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium” (“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis / intulit agresti Latio”) (Horace, 408–409). It thus comes as no surprise that Yeats, one of the founders of the Irish Dramatic Revival,10 considered the ancient Greek culture as a model to imitate and surpass in his essay “Ireland and the Arts”: The Greeks looked within their borders, and we, like them, have a history fuller than any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as in theirs, there is no river no mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend; while political reasons have made love of country, as I think, even greater among us than among them. (Yeats 1961, 205)

26  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Yeats brought this connection between classical Greek and Irish cultures to the national stage of Ireland in Dublin, the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded in 1904, with the versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (1926) and Oedipus at Colonus (1927). Neither of these plays displays significant modifications of the classical materials, unlike Carr’s transpositions of Greek tragedies. Yet, Yeats interwove references to Irish history into the tragic myths. In Oedipus the King, for instance, Creon explains the lack of investigation over Laius’ murder with the expression: “We were amid our troubles” (Yeats 2001, 371), which alludes to the period of political instability in Ireland running from the Easter Rising in 1916 to the end of the Civil War in 1923. Yet, Yeats never finished the transposition of the Theban cycle since he did not offer a version of Antigone as it would have forced him “to consider the claims of republican women against the Treatyite settlement” (Wallace 2015, 43). He, however, included the classical character in his poetry to conclude The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) but undermined immensely her role, turning her into a figure of passivity solely “define[d]” by her “relation to her father” (Ibid.). This gender-based approach to the classics sheds light on Yeats’ hostility towards the agency of women – whether fictional or real – which feeds the dramatic representations he created to support a certain vision of Irishness based on the heroisation of men and the commodification of women. In 2004, however, the Abbey Theatre commissioned a version of Antigone to Seamus Heaney entitled The Burial at Thebes for the centenary celebration of its foundation. This late completion Theban cycle on the national stage is important on a couple of levels. From a gender perspective first, the conflict between Antigone and Creon necessarily brings the issue of women’s oppression on stage. From a postcolonial perspective then, it reminds the audience that imperialism did not cease to exist on the island after the emergence of the Free State in 1922 as Northern Ireland is still a part of the U.K. Indeed, even though the play was connected to the second war in Iraq at the time of its performance, “the primary cargo of inspiration for Heaney came from deep within Irish history and political conflicts” (Torrance 2020b, 331), especially considering that, since the 20th century, the “classical models have been remarkably flexible and inclusive media for the expression of Ireland’s social and political complexities” (O’Rourke and Torrance, 4), most notably on stage. The influence of Greek tragedy on modern Irish theatre can be traced back to the pre-independence period with plays like Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) by J. M. Synge as well as Major Barbara (1905) by Bernard Shaw. Although these plays do not include any diegetic elements from ancient Greek tragic drama, their plots rely on a nexus of intertextualities with Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides’ Bacchae (Arkins, 23),

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  27 respectively. Such a translocating approach to Greek tragedy bears stark resemblances with Carr’s transpositions of classical drama in the ­Midlands cycle, especially regarding the political significance of tragedy. The ­conservative vision of the genre dismisses its existence in modern and contemporary drama. In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner argues that “[t]here is nothing democratic in the vision of tragedy” because “[t]he royal and heroic characters whom the gods honour with their vengeance are set higher than we are in the chain of being” (Steiner, 241). Yet, the translocation of classical drama operated by Synge, Shaw, and later Carr demonstrates a strategy of democratisation of tragedy. Contrary to Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World and Major Barbara are not tragedies per se but rather include tragic elements. Yet, the reliance on classical intertextualities demonstrates a heroisation of the ordinary, which manifests a willingness to conceive tragedy outside the aristocracy to show the sufferings of the classes not in receipt of wealth and/or power, thus advocating for their tragic worth. This input has, however, been vividly criticised, especially as used by Synge because, as observed by Seamus Deane, it “aestheticizes the problem of oppression by converting it into the issue of heroism” (Deane, 60). Carr has also faced criticism regarding her dramatisation of Irish women from the lower classes through the lens of classical intertextualities as Victor Merriman considers that it “ascribe[s] the inevitabilities of Fate as explanatory context for the vicissitudes of poor and vulnerable women” (Merriman, 200). Such an assessment of Carr’s work is, however, quite unfair in my opinion. While Synge uses fate to mask the lack of examination of the structures of oppression in his plays, Carr conceives the tragic destiny of her female characters as stemming directly from the oppressive system institutionalised in the Republic of Ireland. The 1937 Constitution of the Republic of Ireland elaborated by Eamon de Valera offers a very precise definition of the role women are expected to play in Irish society. Article 41.2 indeed states: In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. (1937 Irish Constitution) Although the article justifies women’s seclusion within the home through a socio-political lens by presenting homemaking as the “support” that they are expected to provide to the Irish State, it is reminiscent of the classical division of spaces. This enables a comparison between the two systems because “the cultural and sexual politics of fifth-century Athenian and

28  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy twentieth-century Irish society can be seen to relate closely to one another” (Sihra 2005, 116), which sustains the women’s tragedies dramatised by Carr in the Midlands cycle. Article 41.2 of the 1937 Irish Constitution might appear as a betrayal of the ideal of gender equality in the nationalist movement reflected in the 1922 Irish Constitution, which claimed in article 3: “Every person, without distinction of sex … is a citizen of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) and shall within the limits of the jurisdiction of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) enjoy the privileges and be subject to the obligations of such citizenship” (1922 Irish Constitution). A number of Irish women were indeed engaged in the struggle against the British Empire because the liberation of Ireland was equated with women’s liberation. Constance de Markievicz articulated publicly that convergence of interests as she stated: “A Free Ireland with No Sex Disabilities in her Constitution should be the motto of all Nationalist Women” (Markievicz in Ward, 34) during a lecture delivered to the Students National Literary Society in Dublin and published in 1909. Organisations like Inghinidhe na hEireann (“Daughters of Ireland”) and Cumann na mBan (“The Women’s Council”) – formed in 1900 and 1914, respectively – created a space for women’s practical involvement and support to the nationalist cause. Cumann na mBan indeed provided tactical and logistic support to the Irish Volunteers, while Inghinidhe na hEireann worked at the cultural establishment of nationalism within society. Dramatic performances were central to that cultural project because it was envisioned as “a way of imagining Irishness through the heroic past” (Leeney 2010, 5), which influenced Yeats’ conception of Irish theatre (Ibid., 2). Yet, this feminist vision of Irish nationalism was deemed naive as soon as it had been formulated since it was not part of the project defended by the main organisations composed of men as underlined by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington: “it is primarily in [woman’s] capacity as mother and housekeeper, not as individual citizen, that [the Gaelic League and the Sinn Féin] have of necessity recognised her importance” (SheehySkeffington in Ward, 37). Indeed, the conception of women solely as homemakers discussed in Carr’s plays finds its roots before the promulgation of the 1937 Irish Constitution and was reflected through the gendered division of human activities and supported by cultural representation. The ideological conception of men as the “providers” of the household and women as its “nurturers” endorsed and perpetuated by the three main pillars of Irish society, which are family, education, and religion, can be traced back to the colonial period (Earner-Byrne and Urquhart, 312–313). Such an ideology regarding gender roles has translated into socio-political terms a certain vision of womanhood perceived as passive and vulnerable used in the cultural representations of colonisation by the Irish as well as

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  29 the British. Both indeed personified Ireland as a defenceless maiden in need of protection from either savages (Banerjee, 31) or foreigners (­ Kearney, 77). These representations encompassed the idea that women were unfit to undertake any kind of action on their own, thus motivating their seclusion in the house. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the Irish personification of Ireland changed to meet the expectations of the nationalist struggle against the British colonisers. It grew into the figure of a mother whose liberation depended on the sacrifice of her sons (Ibid., 75). Decades later, article 41.2 of the 1937 Irish Constitution institutionalised that nationalist conflation of womanhood and motherhood because, as noted by Sihra, “since [its] ratification … the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ are, to this day, used interchangeably” (Sihra 2018, 97). The transmission of the nationalist pre-independence vision of women’s role in Irish society into the Free State was enabled through the realm of culture, and especially of theatre. Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) stands as a pivotal moment in the cultural representation on stage, more specifically regarding gender. This play co-authored by Lady Gregory and Yeats does not display the traditional embodiment of idealised womanhood in Ireland as its main figure is “debilitated physical[ly],” “nameless,” and a “homeless wanderer,” turning her into an “exilic figure of abjection,” yet she is “simultaneously revered [as a] symbol of nation” (Sihra 2007, 6). Despite this intrinsic complexity, Cathleen ni Houlihan has laid down the constitutive and distinctive features of representing female characters as passive creatures inhabiting the kitchen and unable to undertake any action on their own in Irish theatre. The republican revolutionary feminist actor Maud Gonne played the main figure and returned to the stage to embody Hecuba in the 1920 production of The Trojan Women produced at the Abbey Theatre by the Dublin Drama League. The stark opposition between these two roles is of great political significance. Indeed, while the main figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan stands “as a symbol requesting blood sacrifice during the 1798 rebellion,” Hecuba is a figure of “suffering at the hand of imperialist forces” (Torrance 2020a, 257–258). Yet, these two parts also convey antithetical representations of gender, especially in relation to nationalism. The denouement of Cathleen ni Houlihan shows the main figure thriving over the sacrifice of men for her as she turns from a disfranchised old woman into “a young girl” who “ha[s] the walk of a queen” (Yeats and Gregory, 167), thus locating the source of women’s bliss and success into passivity. The Trojan Women on the other hand ends with Hecuba walking towards “slavery” (“δούλειον”) (Euripides, 142–143) as the city of Troy is destroyed by the Greek army. The tragedy resonates quite obviously with the suffering endured by the Irish under the imperialist power of the British

30  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy represented through the Trojans and the Greeks, respectively. Yet, the constant identification of Ireland with classical Greece during the colonial period suggests an additional layer of interpretation, especially considering that all the Trojan characters are female, pointing to the alienation of women endorsed by the nationalist movement, which would be completed with the emergence of the Free State. From the founding moment of the Irish State, women were marginalised from the public sphere of society and forced into the roles of wives, mothers, and homemakers. Those deviating from that social pattern, such as unmarried women getting pregnant, were sent to facilities run by Catholic nuns like the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes to hide their pregnancy and “expiate their sins” through unpaid and unsafe labour. Those facilities closed in 1998. During the time these institutions were running about 9.000 children died according to the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation in Mother and Baby Homes published in 2021 (Executive Summary of the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby, 4). The exclusion of women from society was further in 1932 with the promulgation of the Marriage Bar that prohibited them from working as civil servants and national teachers once married. Yet, this law only institutionalised the invisibilisation of women that had already been practised for decades, especially in the realm of culture and theatre. Inghinidhe na hEireann’s contribution to the emergence of a national theatre in Ireland was disregarded through the celebration of Yeats as the founding father of modern Irish theatre. In doing so, the influence of the triple bill composed of Alice Milligan’s The Deliverance of Red Hugh and The Harp That Once and P. T. MacGinley’s Eilis agus an Bhean Deirce (“Ellis and the Beggar Woman”) produced in 1901 by Inghinidhe na hEireann was completely dismissed. Yeats also refused to acknowledge Gregory’s work on Cathleen ni Houlihan, even though they had both cowritten the play. The Abbey Theatre, which Gregory had co-founded, rejected her play Grania (1912) too. Carr alludes to that history of women’s invisibilisation in Ireland, especially through the figure of Big Josie in By the Bog of Cats…, whose absent presence addresses “women’s haunting loss throughout theatre history” (Sihra 2018, 121). Carr’s breakthrough on the Irish stage occurred at the beginning of the growing liberalisation of the Republic of Ireland initiated by the Celtic Tiger era, running from the middle of the 1990s to the economic crash of 2008. In 1993, the ban on contraception implemented in 1935 and partly relaxed with strong restrictions in 1980 was completely removed; and in 1995 divorce was legalised. Yet, some playwrights used Greek tragedy to advocate for social changes, especially regarding gender equality, on stage before that period. Brian Arkins provides a list and an analysis of the

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  31 main Irish transpositions of Greek tragic drama in Irish Appropriations of Greek Tragedy. After the period of the Revival, such a practice faded away with only two transpositions in the 1930s: The Oresteia (1935) by Edward and Christine Longford and Agamemnon (1936) by Louis MacNeice (Arkins, 22). In the 1970s, however, several translocations of Greek tragedies in a modern setting were produced: Tom Murphy’s The Sanctuary Lamp (1975) based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Brien Friel’s Living Quarters (1978) based on Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Sydney B. Smith’s Sherca (1979) based on Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Ibid., 23). Although these plays used Greek tragedy to sustain political points about the current situation in Ireland, it was in the 1980s that gender became a central question in the transposition of classical drama on the Irish stage. Starting with the unpublished version of Antigone by Aidan Mathews (1984), playwrights used the mythological diegesis of Greek tragedy to discuss the position and situation of women in the Republic of Ireland. Despite its focus on criticising the Criminal Justice Bill ratified in 1984, Mathews included in his Antigone a “reflect[ion]” on “the sociological fact that women in the fifth century Athens and in modern Ireland lack the sort of power enjoyed by men” as the eponymous character proclaims that she stands for “tens thousands faceless women. Women who stand in queues and wait. And their waiting is more busy, more concentrated, than all the bustle of men” (Ibid., 43). Derek Mahon went further in his transposition of Euripides’ Bacchae (1991) since he reframed the clash between Dionysus and the king of Thebes, Pentheus, through the lens of the institutionalised gender oppression in the Republic of Ireland as the god states in the opening monologue of the play: “there will be war between the Bacchant wives / and the strict spirit that control their lives” (Mahon, 62). In 1991, Desmond Egan translated Medea re-envisioning the titular character as “the first feminist heroine” and her main antagonist, Jason, as the “prototype of the male chauvinist” (Egan, 122). Yet, such an interpretation of Euripides’ tragedy had already been brought on stage by Brendan Kennelly as Medea exclaims in his transposition (1989): Medea is the real strength of woman, the strength that for centuries has been subdued, submerged and piously enslaved.

(Kennelly, 117)

Kennelly’s Medea is part of a trilogy transposing explicitly Greek tragedies from a feminist lens. In the first play, Antigone (1986), the titular character explains that her death is intrinsically connected to the patriarchal system

32  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy ruling over the city of Thebes and personified through the figure of Creon as she says: Men are leading me to death. Men made the law that said I’m guilty. Men will place me In a black hole among the rocks. Men will deny me light. Yet all I did was for a man Whom other men called evil.

(Ibid., 44)

In The Trojan Women (1993), the last play of the trilogy, the first monologue delivered by Poseidon asserts in a direct address to the audience: Although what you’re about to see might seem to say that women are the rags and tatters of humanity or, at best, the perks of war, women will rule the world.

(Ibid., 141)

The god presents that forthcoming transformation as beneficial as he states: “When that day comes, I won’t be as / old and tired as I am now” (Ibid.). Medea is, however, the play in which Kennelly advocated the most ostensibly for women’s rights as the chorus says explicitly to the eponymous character after she has disclosed her plan to murder her son: “Abortion is a kind of mercy” (Ibid., 118). This line, which is quite disconnected from the plot as Medea is not pregnant, encompasses Kennelly’s reaction to the 1983 referendum introducing the 8th Amendment in the Irish Constitution. It conferred the same rights to the foetus as to the person carrying it, thus reinforcing the prohibition of abortion which was already illegal. The 8th Amendment was repealed by referendum in 2018, thus granting the right to body autonomy to women in the Republic of Ireland. The resurgence of transposing Greek tragedy on the Irish stage did not solely occur in the Republic of Ireland. The same phenomenon happened in Northern Ireland. But while the playwrights from the Republic addressed gender inequalities in their transposition, which Carr pursues in her own plays, those from the North reframed Greek tragedies to allude to the conflict opposing the nationalist Republicans to the Loyalists and Unionists. During that period often referred to as the period of the “Troubles” that ran from the late 1960s to 1998, Friel founded with the director Stephen Rea the company Field Day, which produced two transpositions of Greek

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  33 tragedy: Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1985) based on Sophocles’ Antigone and Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990) based on Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Although gender equality is not the focus of either of these plays, Heaney as well as Paulin show an awareness regarding that question. Heaney indeed included female characters in his version of Philoctetes, which is the only Greek tragedy not having any woman involved, as he changed the gender of the chorus from male to female. As for Paulin, he used the comparisons drawn by Conor Cruise O’Brien between Creon and the Unionist leader Ian Paisley and between Antigone and the Republican figure Bernardette Devlin to construct his own version of the characters.11 In doing so, he approached the sectarian conflict allegorically represented by the clash between Antigone and Creon through the lens of sexism as the latter proclaims that “[he]’ll not be bested by a woman” (Paulin, 30). The transpositions produced in the second part of the 1990s and in the 2000s display similar differences in the approach to classical material by playwrights from the North and those from the Republic. The Northern Irish transpositions offered by Stacey Gregg in Ismene (2006) and Olwen McCafferty in Antigone (2008) are embedded in the post-conflict context as they both cast a character from Sophocles’ tragedy into the role of a survivor: The Old man in McCafferty’s transposition and Ismene’s in Gregg’s (Torrance 2020b, 339). The choice made by Gregg stemmed from her willingness to emphasise the topic of the “gendered suffering of women” (Ibid., 332), which was the main frame of transposition of Greek tragedy used by the playwrights from the Republic as epitomised in Carr’s plays as well as in Edna O’Brien’s Iphigenia (2003). Frank McGuinness stands aside in regard to that matter. Although he was born in the Republic, his plays have often shown a strong connection to Northern Ireland, and so do his transpositions of Greek tragedies such as his version of Hecuba (2004), which was inspired by funerals in Buncrana – McGuinness’ hometown in Donegal – following the bombing of Omagh orchestrated by the IRA in 1998 (Gardner). In addition to Hecuba, McGuinness also transposed Sophocles’ Electra (1997) and Oedipus (2008) as well as Euripides’ Helen (2008), making him the second most prolific Irish playwright in the practice of transposing Greek tragedies after Carr. Unlike her, however, McGuinness has been reluctant to be overly political in his plays as he believes: “If you are too emotionally or politically engaged, it isn’t good for the play. If you let righteousness carry you away, you are not writing theatre, you are writing propaganda” (Ibid.). Carr’s focus on gender in her transpositions of Greek tragedy captures the zeitgeist of the Celtic Tiger era. She is not the only woman playwright emerging and dealing with the issue of gender inequalities on the Irish stage during that period. Christina Reid, Emma O’Donoghue, and Deirdre Kinahan have also centred their plays on the traumas and struggles experienced

34  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy by Irish women because of the patriarchal ideology ruling over Ireland. This somewhat paradoxical situation, which saw the emergence of women playwrights at the forefront of Irish theatre while dramatising issues of sexist oppression, encapsulates the ambiguities of the liberalisation of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era. Some women were indeed able to achieve financial security on their own, but those belonging to marginalised ethnic, racial, and class communities, like women from the Traveller community, remained excluded from the improvement of women’s rights (Sayın, 80). This situation was further convoluted by the lack of body autonomy experienced by all women in Ireland, which has led to the repurposing of the confusion between womanhood and motherhood as a pillar of Irish society. Over the last two decades, this confusion has been weaponised to sustain the debate on Irish identity propelled by the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum introducing the 27th of the Constitution Act. This amendment indeed states: Notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution, a person born in the island of Ireland which includes its islands and seas, who does not have, at the time of birth, of that person, at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or entitled to be an Irish citizen, is not entitled to Irish citizenship or nationality, unless provided for by law. (1937 Irish Constitution) The question of women’s bodies thus grew into a new importance to fuel the xenophobic and racist vision of Irish citizenship encompassed in the amendment as observed by Sikata Banerjee: “Women’s reproductive functions, linked to their role as border guards of the nation was activated in this debate, with the black female body constructed as a threat to Irishness, read as white” (Banerjee, 155). The weaponisation of gender to serve a xenophobic and racist agenda is still a recurring issue in Ireland nowadays. As I am writing this introduction, far-right groups use the question of gender equality to demonise refugees, even though those same groups refuse to acknowledge the fact that gender is a social construction, thus denying the existence of transidentity, and are often associated with “pro-life” ideology, thus rejecting women’s rights to body autonomy. Spaces, however, emerged in Irish theatre for women playwrights to tell the stories and experiences of marginalisation and exclusion during the Celtic Tiger era. And Carr and her body of work have been at the forefront of that transformation of the industry as By the Bog of Cats… produced in 1998 was the first play authored by a woman to be staged on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre in a decade. A moment of history recently reiterated with the production of iGirl in 2021, which was the first play authored, directed, and performed by women only on that

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  35 same stage. Over the years between By the Bog of Cats… and iGirl, Irish theatre has slowly been growing to be more inclusive and more intersectional in terms of representation and authorship with the emergence of women playwrights and theatre-makers from a working-class background like Louise Lowe, Grace Dyas, and Veronica Dyas during the post-Celtic Tiger era. Yet, the gradual transformation of the industry has not occurred without struggle. One of the most recent emblematic episodes of contemporary theatre history typifying the fight that women theatre-makers have to put on to be included in the industry like men are is the emergence of the #WakingTheFeminist movement in 2015. In that year, the Abbey Theatre advertised the 2016 programme for the celebration of the 1916 centenary “Waking the Nation,” which only contained “one out of the ten plays … written by a woman and three out of ten … directed by women” (About the Campaign). The #WakingTheFeminist movement was formed in reaction to that male-centred programme and held Irish theatre accountable for the lack of representation of women’s plays. In 2017, they published a collection of data about 1155 productions entitled Gender Counts: An Analysis of Gender in Irish Theatre 2006–2015. The movement propelled some important changes, leading the most influential venues to be more inclusive of the diversity of Irish voices in their programming. But it is still an ongoing process. The institutions of legitimation and canonisation have reflected the mutations that Irish theatre has undergone over the last three decades. Women’s authorship and representation have gained traction in academia with the development of feminist scholarships in Irish Theatre Studies. Research published by Emilie Pine (The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture, 2010; The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International Theatre, 2020), Lisa Fitzpatrick (Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, 2013; Rape on Contemporary Stage, 2018), Miriam Haughton (Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow, 2018), and Mária Kurdi (Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland, co-edited with Miriam Haughton, 2018) has shed light on the representation of sexist oppression on stage while celebrating women’s theatre-making in Ireland. This trend of scholarship has also impacted the vision of theatre history through the research conducted by Melissa Sihra (Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, 2007), Cathy Leeney (Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939: Gender and Violence on Stage, in 2010), and David Clare alongside Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase (The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716–2016), 2021), which have challenged and reshaped the traditional – patriarchal – conception of the Irish dramatic canon by bringing to the fore women’s contributions to the theatre from both past and present. Their work has altered the canon in

36  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy a more progressive and inclusive way with the addition, for instance, of Gregory and Teresa Deevey’s plays. A similar tendency can be observed in other institutions of legitimation and canonisation, and more specifically in mainstream theatre venues and education curricula. In 2021, Rosaleen McDonagh was the first woman playwright from the Traveller community whose work was produced on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre with Doors and Windows. The poem “For Our Mother” by the non-binary black performer and spoken-word artist FELISPEAKS has been included in the English Ordinary Level Leaving Cert Curriculum for 2023 and 2025, alongside their poem “Rainbow Blood” for 2025. Yet, the concept of the canon itself remains intrinsically exclusionary and problematic because it translates the hegemonic ideology into aesthetic terms through the hierarchisation of artistic creations and productions. Carr’s transpositions underline the politically charged essence of the canon as she reframes Greek tragedies to put women and their stories at the centre of the plays, thus subverting the patriarchal tradition of marginalisation that they have undergone in theatre and society. In doing so, Carr breaks down the essentialisation of womanhood to shed light on the diversity of its embodiment through the variety of female characters populating her plays. As these characters are confronted with a conception of female identity perceived as unified and unique to all women, a new form of tragedy more inclusive of the diversity of women’s identities and experiences arises. To reach that conclusion, this book explores the different strategies used by Carr in her transpositions of Greek tragedies. The first chapter “From ‘Woman’ to Women on Stage” offers a close comparison of the characterisation of the female characters between the classical tragedies and Carr’s transposition. It focuses on the figure of “woman” embedded in Greek tragedy and its deconstruction in a Derridean sense by Carr. “Woman” assumes two main forms through the antagonistic opposition of the “good” women to the “bad” ones, which are to be related to the political significance of the main purpose of tragedy established by Aristotle in The Poetics: Catharsis. Through a discussion with Sara Ahmed’s analysis of the use of fear in politics, it underlines the endorsement of patriarchy conveyed by the characterisation of female characters in Greek tragedy, which is overturned by Carr in her transpositions. The second chapter “Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths” opens with a conversation on the universality usually associated with myths, especially those encompassed in classical culture, and more specifically theatre, to be connected to the question of interpretation, which underlies any work of transposition. It explores Carr’s feminist approach to Greek tragedy by positioning her work in the modern and contemporary history of the transposition of each classical play that she uses. Using the sub-categories of adaptation and appropriation within the wider process and practice of

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  37 transposition, it underlines her intention to counter the metanarratives about gender in Ireland and more broadly in the Western world. The third chapter “Writing like a Woman” analyses Carr’s situation and position as a woman playwriting in a patriarchal society and their implications on her approaches to classical material. Drawing from the feminist concepts of “re-vision” and “écriture féminine” (“women’s writing”), it underlines her strategies to turn women, who have been traditionally reduced to objects in the history of culture and theatre, into subjective agents by conferring them with authorial narrator-like positions. It also explores her endeavour of bringing into light the (hi)stories of oppressed women, who have been silenced and invisibilised by patriarchy, through the idea of shared experiences. The fourth chapter “Feminist Tragedy” questions the patriarchal agenda encompassed in the dramatic concept of mimesis, which structures, even though quite differently, classical tragedy and realistic theatre that Carr uses. It traces the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre on Carr’s disruption of the mimesis to prompt the spectators’ reflection on the perpetuation of the structures of oppression in Western culture and societies. This influence eventually prompts her creation of a new form of tragedy, entrenched in feminism. The conclusive chapter “A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy” positions Carr’s transpositions of classical drama in the discussions initiated by philosophers on tragedy. It shows that she addresses the funding concepts associated with the genre throughout history, which are justice and freedom. Yet, it also highlights that she centres her dramatic strategy on another concept, which has been disregarded by philosophers analysing tragedy despite its importance in Aristotle’s theorisation of the genre: Happiness. Finally, it considers the potentiality of the death of tragedy if a system free of structural oppressions was one day achieved. Notes 1 Seventeen of these plays have been published, including fourteen in three collections edited by Faber and Faber. Twenty-five of these plays have been produced, including the rehearsal readings of Quartet (2010 and 2015). 2 The presence of the Traveller community in Ireland has been traced back up to the 12th century. Since then, they have been subjected to numerous discriminations marginalising their specific culture and social practices, including nomadism. Only recently, the Traveller community has been fully acknowledged as a specific ethnic group living in Ireland by the Irish State. 3 Cathy Leeney makes that comment in relation to the chronological construction of Portia Coughlan. However, considering the use of a similar time construction in The Mai, her assertion accurately describes the sense of doom in that play too. 4 The second wave of feminism is usually traced back to the 1960s. However, its ideological foundations cannot be separated from the publication of the

38  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy groundbreaking essay The Second Sex, which was first published in 1949 in France. Simone de Beauvoir was indeed the first philosopher to conceive womanhood beyond the realm of biology and to consider the sociocultural history which has constructed and perpetuated that identity through the now very famous phrase: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Beauvoir, 273). 5 The chorus in Euripides’ Hecuba is an exception as the group of Trojan women helps the titular character to blind Polymestor and kill his sons. 6 The Persians, The Suppliants, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. 7 The Suppliants, The Trojan Women, The Phoenician Women, and The Bacchae. 8 Tyranny had a very different meaning in ancient Greece. It referred to a temporary administration of a city by a single man. 9 Only a couple of tragedies are set in Athens and its surroundings: Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Both of them focus on the heroes’ redemption, thus assimilating the city with reconciliation rather than tragedy. 10 The Dramatic Revival was the founding period of Modern Irish Drama, which ran from 1899 to 1939. It saw the production of plays by Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey that “would show an image of the nation itself” (Roche, 4). It is intrinsically connected to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre. 11 Large portions of my monograph Avatars contemporains du tragique grec sur les scènes françaises et irlandaises examine that question in-depth.

Work Cited Primary Sources Aristophanes. 2018. Lysistrata. In Birds. Lysistrata. Women at the Thesmophoria, ed. and trans. J. Henderson, 253–441. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press. Carr, M. 1999. Plays One. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2009. Plays Two. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2015. Plays Three. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2021. iGirl. London: Faber. Euripides. 1999. Trojan Woman. In Trojan Women. Iphigenia among the Taurians. Ion, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 1–143. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press. Kennelly, B. 2006. When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies. Tarset: Bloodaxe. Mahon, D. 2013. Theatre. Oldcastle: Gallery Books. Paulin, T. 1985. The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles’s Antigone. London: Faber. Sophocles. 1998. Antigone. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 1–127. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Yeats, W. B. and Lady Gregory. 1908. The Unicorn from the Stars, and Other Plays. New York: Macmillan Company. Yeats, W. B. 2001. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: The Play, ed. D. R. Clare and R. E. Clark. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  39 Secondary Sources 1922 Irish Constitution. Irish Statute Book. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/ eli/1922/act/1/enacted/en/print. 1937 Irish Constitution. Irish Statute Book. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/ cons/en/html. About the Campain. WakingTheFeminist. http://www.wakingthefeminists.org/ about-wtf/how-it-started/. Arendt, H. 2018. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Aristotle. 1942. Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1944. Politics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1952. The Athenian Constitution. In The Athenian Constitution. The Eudemian Ethics. On Virtues and Vices, trans. H. Rackham, 1–181. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1999. Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Arkins, A. 2010. Irish Appropriation of Greek Tragedy. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Banerjee, S. 2012. Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914–2004. New York: New York University Press. Bassi, K. 1998. Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beauvoir (de), S. 1956. The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Carr, M. 1998. Dealing with the Dead. Irish University Review. 28.1: 190–196. Cartledge, P. 1997. “Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life. In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling, 3–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crenshaw, K. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1: 1239–1267. Deane, S. 1985. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980. London: Faber. Dedebas, E. 2013. Rewriting of Tragedy and Women’s Agency in Marina Carr’s By The Bog of Cats…, Ariel, and Woman and Scarecrow. Women Studies. 42.3: 248–270. Des Bouvrie, S. 1990. Women in Greek Tragedy: An Anthropological Approach. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Earner-Byrne, L. and D. Urquhart. 2017. Gender Roles in Ireland since 1740. In The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, ed. E. F. Biagini and M. E. Daly, 312–326. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Easterling, P. E. 1997. Constructing the Heroic. In Greek Tragedy and the Historian, ed. C. Pelling, 21–37. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Egan, D. 1990. The Death of Metaphor. Savage: Barnes and Noble Books. Executive summary of the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. Government of Ireland. https://www.gov.ie/en/

40  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy publication/22c0e-executive-summary-of-the-final-report-of-the-commission-ofinvestigation-into-mother-and-baby-homes/#. Farquharson, D. 2009. Pity vs. Fear: Performing Violence in Aeschlus’ Oresteia and Contemporary Irish Drama. In Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland, ed. L. Fitzpatrick, 9–30. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Foley, H. P. 1981. The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama. In Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. H. P. Foley, 127–168. London: Gordon and Breach. Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foster, V. A. 2021. Mother Medea and Her Children: Maternal Ambivalence in the Medean Plays of Marina Carr, Cherríe Moraga, and Rachel Cusk. Comparative Drama. 55.1: 83–111. Genette, G. 1982. Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Goldhill, S. 1986. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldhill, S. 1994. Representing Democracy: Women at the Great Dionysia. In Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Account Presented to David Lewis, ed. R. Osborne and S. Hornblower, 347–370. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gould, J. 2001. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffith, M. and D. M. Carter. 2011. Introduction. In Why Athens A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics, ed. D. M. Carter, 1–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, E. 2005. Iphigenia and Her Mother at Aulis: A Study in the Revival of a Euripidean Classic. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 3–41. London: Bloomsbury. Hall, E. 2010. Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University Press. hooks, b. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press. Horace. 1929. Epistles. In Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 247–441. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Kearney, R. 1984. Myth and Motherland. In Ireland’s Field Day, ed. Field Day Theatre Company, 61–80. London: Hutchinson. Keating, S. 2019. Marina Carr: “There’s a Whole World of Women’s Work That Isn’t Being Seen”. Irish Times, September 7. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ stage/marina-carr-there-s-a-whole-world-of-women-s-work-that-isn-t-beingseen-1.4007449. Kilroy, I. 2002. Greek Tragedy, Midlands-Style; In Her New Play, Ariel, Marina Carr Returns Again to Drama’s Greek Roots, By Way of the Midlands Dialect and Modern Irish Public Life. Irish Times, September 20. https:// ucd.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 309488671? accountid=14507. Leavy, A. 2016. Marina Carr Interview: “There is an Affinity between the Russian Soul and the Irish Soul”. Irish Times, December 6. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/marina-carr-interview-there-is-an-affinity-between-the-russiansoul-and-the-irish-soul-1.2893945.

Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy  41 Leeney, C. 2004. Ireland’s “Exiled” Women Playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr. In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. S. Richards, 150–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leeney, C. 2010. Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939: Gender and Violence on Stage. New York: Peter Lang. Loraux, N. 1984. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. C. Levine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Macintosh, F. 2018. “Epic” Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back. In Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison, and C. Kenward, 3–15. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marina Carr in Conversation with Melissa Sihra. 2001. In Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practioners, ed. L. Chambers, 55–63. Dublin: Carysfort Press. McDonald, M. 1997. When Despair and History Rhyme: Colonialism and Greek Tragedy. New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua. 1.2: 57–70. Merriman, V. 2011. Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s. Dublin: Carysfort Press. O’Rourke, D. and I. Torrance. 2020. Classics and Irish Politics: Introduction. In Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016, ed. D. O’Rourke and I. Torrance, 1–23. Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Toole, F. 2003. The Mai: Marina Carr. In Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre, ed. J. Furray and R. O’Hanlon, 128–130. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh. 2016. University of Oxford Podcasts. August 9. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/playwrightmarina-carr-conversation-fiona-macintosh. Rehm, R. 1992. Greek Tragic Theatre. New York: Routledge. Roche, A. 2015. The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939. London: Bloomsbury. Romilly (de), J. 2014. La Tragédie grecque. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Roselli, K. 2011. Theatre of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sayın, G. 2008. Quest for the Lost M(Other): Medea Reconstructed in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…. Journal of Arts and Sciences. 1.9: 75–86. Sihra, M. 2005. Greek Myth, Irish Reality: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 115–135. London: Bloomsbury. Sihra, M. 2007. Introduction: Figures at the Window. In Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. M. Sihra, 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sihra, M. 2016. Shadow and Substance: Women, Feminism, and Irish Theatre after 1980. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, ed. N. Grene and C. Morash, 545–558. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sihra, M. 2018. Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International Publishing. Steiner, G. 1980. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press.

42  Introduction: The Gender Politics of Tragedy Stewart, E. 2017. Greek Tragedy on the Move: The Birth of a Panhellenic Art Form c. 500–300 B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terrazas Gallego, M. 2019. “Writing Is Essentially a Very, Very Innocent Thing”: In Conversation with Marina Carr. Estudios Irlandeses. 14.14: 190–197. That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU. 2017. YouTube. January 18. https:// youtu.be/pAKXPoJJHAs?si=NFXFJaXH0dTNDMsq. The Boy. Writer and Director Interview. 2020. YouTube. January 31. https://youtu. be/YOTLCDkE5Jw?si=M71szNfUwZnSRQnF. Thucydides. 1928. History of the Peloponnesian War: Books I and II, trans. C. Foster Smith. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Torrance, I. 2020a. Trojan Women and Irish Sexual Politics, 1920–2015. In Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016, ed. D. O’Rourke and I. Torrance, 254–267. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Torrance, I. 2020b. Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland. In Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016, ed. D. O’Rourke and I. Torrance, 326–346. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vernant, J.-P. 1980. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd. Brighton: Harvester Press. Vernant, J.-P. and P. Vidal Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. P. Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Wallace, C. 2006. Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity & Citation in 1990s New Drama. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Wallace, N. P. 2015. Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day. Cork: Cork University Press. Ward, M. 1995. In Their Own Voice: Women and Irish Nationalism. Dublin: Attic Press. Wiles, D. 2000. Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeats, W. B. 1961. Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan Company.

1 From “Woman” to Women on Stage

[Women like Hecuba or Medea or Phaedra] are really cautionary tales of how not to be a woman. (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh) Marina Carr’s statement at the University of Oxford in 2016 interrogates the essence and experience of womanhood, especially as addressed through the construction of female characters in Greek tragedy. There are, however, no women in classical theatre, only embodiments of “woman.” Contrary to women who are “real historical beings,” “woman” is “a fictional construct” (Lauretis, 5) that has permeated Western culture. The reliance of classical theatre on an only male cast reveals the intention of “suppressing actual women” not only from the stage but also from the dramatised stories to “replac[e] them with the masks of patriarchal production” (Case, 7). “Woman” epitomises the “normative function” of gender representation (Butler 1999, 3) in Greek tragedy as it conveys an ideological discourse informing women on “what to do” and “what not to do” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 22) to comply with the gender expectations of patriarchy. “Woman” is “the other-from-man” (Lauretis, 5). It translates the patriarchal conception of humanity into cultural and artistic terms. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir underlines the necessity of conceiving an “Other” in the ontological process of defining one’s group essence because “no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself” (Beauvoir, 16). During the classical era, the Greeks defined their own Self according to five dichotomies: God and mortal, Greek and barbarian, citizen and alien, free and slave, and man and woman (Cartledge, 12). Tragedy discusses all these dichotomies to some extent but the opposition of man and woman takes precedence. It is a site of particular interest to the three tragedians because “[t]o pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other” (Beauvoir, 253).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298991-2

44  From “Woman” to Women on Stage The myth constitutes the main material of storytelling in Greek tragedy. It initially filed an epistemological function as it was created to enlighten the origin and purpose of human existence in the universe (Eliade, 177). For that reason, the myth stems from the patriarchal ideology according to which “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as a relative to him” (Beauvoir, 15). In the specific context of ancient Greece, women were conceived to be anthropoi, meaning humans, alongside men but to be from a different race (Loraux, 86). Western mythologies reflect the ambiguous nature of womanhood conceived by the patriarchal ideology as “woman is at once Eve and the Virgin Mary” since she simultaneously stands as “the source of life” and the “downfall” of man (Beauvoir, 143). Greek tragedy draws from a comparable binary pattern when it comes to the characterisation of the women characters. In Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz identifies “two models of womanhood” in Euripides’ tragedies: The sacrificial woman and the vindictive one (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 14). These models result from the endeavour of the women characters towards men’s domination, which can be either submissive or rebellious (Ibid., 22). Although Aeschylus and Sophocles construct women characters differently than Euripides, their tragedies still oppose “good” women to “bad” ones. Carr has an acute awareness of the ontological and epistemological dimension of “woman” in Greek tragedy “to define men and women” in the new “city-state” of Athenian democracy (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). Yet, her approach to the construction of women’s characterisation manifests a substantial shift from the classical tragedians. In Carr’s mind, tragic female characters do not dramatise the ambiguous essence of womanhood but rather the gender restrictions inherent to patriarchy as figures like Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba underline “the outward limit of definition of what a woman is, of what a woman can be, or how far a woman can go within a political model that is controlled by men” (Ibid.). This insight informs her transpositions of Greek tragedy, which consequently offer a deconstruction of the classical sources that she uses. Conceptualised by Jacques Derrida, “[d]econstruction does not consist into moving one concept to another, but in reversing and displacing a conceptual order as well as the nonconceptual order with which it is articulated” (Derrida, 21). Regarding the specific topic of that book, deconstruction implies approaching the characteristic features of tragic women from a different angle, bringing their actions into a new light. Unlike the tragedies she transposes, Carr does not take a stand for but against patriarchy. The comparison between the source tragedies and the transpositions elaborated by Carr exposes her re-conception of the categories of the “monstrous” and “sacrificial” women embedded in classical drama, which provides this chapter with its structure.

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  45 Fear and Control: The Anatomy of Tragic Monsters Carr “particularly love[s] the monsters” (Finn, 44). In Greek tragedy, women monsters include Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba. They embody the model of the vindictive woman that is “to be feared” according to Carr (Leavy). Fear stands as one of the founding pillars of Greek tragedy as highlighted by Aristotle’s definition of the genre in The Poetics: Tragedy, then, is mimesis of an action which is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotion. (ἔστιν οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾿ ἀπαγγελίας, δι᾿ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων.) (Aristotle, 46–47) The classical tragedies focusing on women’s monstrosity are constructed so these two emotions are not addressed simultaneously but successively. The situations of the characters stir pity in the spectators (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 125): Clytemnestra1 and Hecuba have lost one and several children, respectively, Medea has been discarded by her husband, and Phaedra has been weaponised by the god Aphrodite to punish Hippolytus’ impiety. Yet, their responses are “inscribed as excessive” (Ibid., 142). This has several implications: First, it alienates the audience’s initial sympathy for the cause of these characters, then, it turns them into monsters, and, finally, it “confirm[s] Greek men’s worst fears about women” (Ibid., 22). Fear is a powerful emotion constantly used in the political realm. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed notes that fear is at the core foundation of exclusionary and discriminatory communities, which the citizen body of the 5th century B.C.E. Athenian democracy illustrates as it was composed of only adult men born in the city from Athenian parents. In the instance of building discriminatory and exclusionary communities, the marginalised groups are not merely conceived as Others to sustain a certain ontological definition, they are “establish[ed] … as fearsome” (Ahmed, 64), which the Greek tragedies involving women monsters precisely achieve. Ahmed refers to such groups’ ontological definitions as “fantasies [that] construct the other as a danger not only to one’s self as self, but to one’s very life, to one’s very existence” (Ibid.). Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba embody a vision of “woman” that represents a threat to the male supremacy structuring Athenian democracy. And these

46  From “Woman” to Women on Stage threats to patriarchy are brought into light through the physical damages caused by their actions: Polymestor is blinded; Creon, Hippolytus, and Agamemnon lose their lives. Furthermore, the actions of these monstrous women prevent the regeneration of patriarchy through the elimination of patrilineality: Orestes is sent into exile; Polymestor, Theseus, and Jason’s sons are killed. These tragedies show that “female self-assertion on her own behalf comes only at the cost of annihilating” men (Zeitlin, 91). According to Ahmed, the “fantasies of the other hence work to justify violence against others” (Ahmed, 64). In Greek tragedy, women in the audience were not the sole ones to be concerned by the “normative function” of gender representation (Butler 1999, 3), especially considering that fear was involved. The transformation of Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba into monsters settles in a broader destabilisation of “[c]onventional gender roles” prompted by men’s failures to perform traditional masculinity (Blondell et alii, 82). Agamemnon, Jason, and Theseus are also to blame for the tragic actions, which have been enabled by their lack of control over women. Through the fear of “woman” as a monster, Greek tragedy spurred men to exert complete dominion over their women relatives and to stand up as a community for the preservation of “life as [they] kn[ew] it” (Ahmed, 64) relying on patriarchy and patrilineality. The characterisation of women as monsters “to be feared” might appear specific to the political purpose of classical tragedy. Yet, the fear of women refusing to comply with gender expectations and norms is intrinsically engrained in the variety of forms and systems that patriarchy has assumed in Western societies throughout history. Beauvoir indeed notes that “[i]n all civilisations and still in our day woman inspires man with horror” (Beauvoir, 148), and Carr echoes that statement as she observes that the “terrible fear of women, the societal need to control and marginalise them,” which is embedded in Greek tragedy, “still persists” (Leavy). Her transpositions of Greek tragedies offer an in-depth examination of the patriarchal use of that emotion through the deconstruction of the classical women characters associated with monstrosity. Among the gallery of women monsters presented in the Greek tragedies that have inspired Carr, Hecuba is the figure about whom the playwright has been the more vocal regarding the unfair treatment and representation that the character has endured in the literary tradition. On several occasions, Carr has indeed stated that she has “never believed that Hecuba would have [killed Polymestor’s sons]” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh) and in this regard that she “feel[s that Euripides] did an injustice to” the character (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU). Hecuba appears as the central figure of two tragedies by Euripides: The Trojan Women and Hecuba. Both of these plays deal with the aftermath

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  47 of the Trojan War. Yet, the tragedian stresses Hecuba’s monstrosity in only one of them. In The Trojan Women, the character fills the typical role of the powerless mater dolor. The sufferings she experiences from losing all relatives to death and slavery epitomise the outrageous war crimes perpetrated by the Greeks after their victory, thus providing a dramatic explanation for the cycle of miserable returns to Hellas, famously illustrated through Odysseus’ journey back to Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey. In Hecuba, although the titular character suffers similar woes, she does not endure these adversities passively: She fights back. In the course of the play, Hecuba loses her two youngest children, Polyxena and Polydorus. Divided into two main parts, the first half of Hecuba focuses on the sacrifice of Polyxena to honour Achilles. The second half of the tragedy shows the discovery of Polydorus’ body on the shore, which leads Hecuba to beg Agamemnon to get justice for the murder of her son committed by the King of Thrace who had promised to keep the child safe. Although Hecuba’s plea seems perfectly reasonable as she intends to “punish” (“τιμωρουμένη”) “the guilty” (“τοὺς κακοὺς”) (Euripides 2005a, 466–467), the enactment of the deed underlines her monstrosity through unfairness and excess. Hecuba wants to seek justice for the death of her two children since she uses the plural form of the word “guilty” in her speech to Agamemnon. If the identity of the person responsible for Polydorus’ murder is clear, the same cannot be said about Polyxena’s death. Is it Achilles since he asked his “tomb” (“τύμβον”) not to be left “without its prize of honor” (“ἀγέραστον”) (Ibid., 408–409)? Or is it the sons of Theseus who argued that “the Greeks should crown Achilles’ tomb with fresh blood” (“τὸν Ἀχίλλειοντύμβον / στεφανοῦν αἵματι χλωρῷ”) (Ibid., 410–411)? Or is it Odysseus who “urged the army not to reject the most valiant of all the Danaans merely to avoid shedding a slave’s blood” (“πείθει στρατιὰν / μὴ τὸν ἄριστον Δαναῶν πάντων / δούλων σφαγίων εἵνεκ’ ἀπωθεῖν”) (Ibid., 410–411)? Or is it Neoptolemus who “[p]resid[ed] over the sacrifice” (“θύματος δ’ ἐπιστάτης”) (Ibid., 418–419)? Moreover, the concept of murder is hardly applicable to the circumstances of Polyxena’s death. Unlike her brother, Polyxena is not murdered but sacrificed. It was uncommon to sacrifice humans in the ancient Greek civilisation as highlighted by Hecuba’s reaction to the forthcoming sacrifice of her daughter: “Was it Fate that induced them to perform human sacrifice at a tomb, a place where the sacrifice of a bull is more fitting?” (“πότερα τὸ χρή σφ᾿ ἐπήγαγ᾿ ἀνθρωποσφαγεῖν / πρὸς τύμβον, ἔνθα βουθυτεῖν μᾶλλον πρέπει”) (Ibid., 422–423). Several Greek tragedies, however, include reference and/or enactment of such an unusual form of sacrifice as a way to emphasise the extraordinary circumstances at play. In Hecuba, Achilles’ claim for honour encompasses a broader issue: The bodies of the “Greeks who ha[ve] died for Greeks” (“Δαναοῖς τοῖς οἰχομένοις / ὑπὲρ Ἑλλήνων”)

48  From “Woman” to Women on Stage (Ibid., 410–411) are to remain in the foreign land of Troy and will thus never be honoured by their relatives. In this regard, the sacrifice of Polyxena underlines the high price paid by the soldiers who fought the war for ten years and will never get back to Hellas. Polymestor is “the only one” against whom Hecuba can exert her revenge (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 121), and the murder of his two sons might appear as an answer for the death of Hecuba’s two children (Zeitlin, 121). Likewise, blinding Polymestor seems a reaction to the psychological and physical degradation endured by Hecuba as she has been enslaved. Yet, Polymestor is not responsible for all her sufferings since the fall of Troy: Although he is to blame for Polydorus’ murder, he is not to blame for Polyxena’s death or for Hecuba’s enslavement (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 121). In this regard, her act of revenge appears unfair and excessive, which lays the ground for Hecuba’s monstrosity. Unlike the other monstrous women displayed in Greek tragedy, Hecuba is not simply a monster in psychological terms. The prophecy forecasted by Polymestor reveals that Hecuba is to turn into “a dog with fiery eyes” (“κύων … πύρσ᾿ ἔχουσα δέργματα”) (Euripides 2005a, 514–515), thus assuming the physical form of a monster. Such a transformation epitomises the “injustice” done by Euripides to the character as it shows “Hecuba becom[ing] the demarcation between human and savage” as underlined by Carr (Theatre of War Symposium Day Three – Concluding Talk: Marina Carr). The action of Carr’s transposition (2015) diverges substantially from Euripides’ tragedy, which she considers as “his version of a myth” conveying “archetypes of females … in western consciousness” (Leavy). In her transposition, neither does Hecuba “kil[l] the boys” of Polymestor nor does she “blin[d]” him (Carr 2015, 259) as the Greeks perform these deeds. The reversal of these tragic actions illustrates a “radical inversion of the moral hierarchy” of the classical dichotomy opposing the barbarians and the Greeks (Hall 1989, 149). During the classical era, the formers were perceived as having “deviant social practices” (Ibid.), which Hecuba typifies through the unfair and excessive act of revenge she performs against Polymestor. Carr, however, argues that as in history, “myths are … written by winners” (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU). In this respect, she envisions the Greeks to be “the original barbarians” (Theatre of War Symposium Day Three – Concluding Talk: Marina Carr), who used myths to “validate their savage conquest” (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU). In Carr’s transposition of Hecuba, Cassandra voices the playwright’s reading of Euripides’ tragedy. As the play reaches its conclusion, the character directly addresses the audience, thus mirroring one of the functions of the classical chorus. Many Greek tragedies end with the collective character delivering the moral lesson of the play to the audience. Such a

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  49 situation does not exactly occur in Hecuba as the chorus describes their immediate predicament: “Go to the harbors and the tents, my friends, to taste the misery of slavery” (“ἴτε πρὸς λιμένας σκηνάς τε, φίλαι, / τῶν δεσποσύνων πειρασόμεναι / μόχθων”), and comments on that situation: “For fate is hard” (“στερρὰ γὰρ ἀνάγκη”) (Euripides 2005a, 518–519). In Carr’s Hecuba, however, the final lines delivered by Cassandra invite the audience to question “the extremely bad press … that Hecuba got” (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU); as the character claims: They said many things about her after, that she killed those boys, blinded Polymestor, went mad, howled like a dog along this shore. The Achaeans wanted to get their stories down, their myths in stone, their version, with them as the heroes always, noble, fair, merciful. No. They were the wild dogs, the barbarians, the savages who came as guests and left an entire civilisation on its knees and in the process defiled its queen and her memory. What she did was, put her last child on the pyre, say her prayers, wait for death quietly by that pyre. And it came, grudgingly, but finally it came. (Carr 2015, 259–260) The pronoun “they” refers explicitly to the Greeks, but it also alludes to later civilisations, including contemporary Western democracies. As they have conceived themselves as descending from classical Greece, and Athens more specifically, their literary traditions have re-enacted the patriarchal trope of the terrifying “woman” displayed in Hecuba’s story. The final action of the character elaborated by Carr emphasises the fictional dimension of that portrayal of womanhood to support patriarchy in Greek tragedy as it shows Hecuba assisting Polymestor “to wash his son’s shattered bodies” and to “dress his ruined eyes” (Ibid., 259–260), thus highlighting her humanity. The very title of the play Phaedra Backwards (2011) provides crucial information regarding Carr’s approach to this other classical figure of a woman monster. In the mythological tradition, Phaedra appears as an embodiment of purity up until her encounter with her husband Theseus’ son, Hippolytus (Poignault, 269). The subsequent monstrous transformation of the character is at the core of Euripides’ work on the myth, which “may be [the] unique … example of a second treatment by the same poet of a myth he had earlier represented on stage” (Zeitlin, 219). The tragedy Hippolytus that we know is indeed the second version that the tragedian wrote of the story. The current understanding of the first version is scarce due to the fragmentary state of the tragedy. However, the play is famous for the “outraged” reaction it stirred from the audience because of its depiction of Phaedra’s “shamelessness” as she “openly declared her guilty

50  From “Woman” to Women on Stage passion” to her stepson (Ibid.). Euripides “corrected [that] indecenc[y] and impropriet[y]” in the second version of the tragedy (Ibid.) since Phaedra confesses her incestuous love for the “son of the Amazon” (“ὁ τῆς Ἀμαζόνος”) (Euripides 2005b, 160–161) to the sole character of the nurse “out of shame” (“ἐκ τῶν … αἰσχρῶν”) (Ibid., 156–157). Yet, this correction does not redeem Phaedra from her monstrosity. Besides the fact that Hippolytus’ tragic death remains prompted by her false rape accusation, the very act of voicing her sexual desire “transgresses the social rules,” which impose women to stay silent and to “repress and deny … the reality of the[ir] sexual” lives (Zeitlin, 240). Men, however, are not subjected to such social rules. In the mythological tradition, Theseus is particularly famous for his sexual promiscuity with numerous women, including Phaedra’s sister Ariadne. Euripides does not mention that feature of Theseus in his second version of the tragedy. The character is away from the palace during a major part of the action because of a “mission to the oracle” (“θεωρὸς”) (Euripides 2005b, 202–203). Yet, the Roman philosopher and tragedian Seneca provides another explanation for Theseus’ absence in his transposition of the myth, which does not only include the adulterous dimension of the character but also resonates with the depiction elaborated by Carr in Phaedra Backwards. In Seneca’s Phaedra, Theseus is indeed looking for “illicit, adulterous sex … in the depths of Acheron” (“stupra et illicitos toros / Acheronte in imo”) (Seneca the Younger, 426–427). Despite this reputation, Theseus is not conceived as a monster, contrary to Phaedra. Phaedra’s monstrosity is intrinsically connected to the issue of the double standard in patriarchal ideology as women and men are not subjected to the same social rules. Carr’s transposition highlights that dimension from the moment the plot starts unravelling. The first scene is based on the classical denouement of the tragedy as Theseus breaks the silence with the line “Went over the cliff” (Carr 2015, 78), thus announcing Hippolytus’ death. Yet, while Phaedra is to blame for that event because of her lie in Greek tragedy, Carr presents that situation more cryptically in Phaedra Backwards. As in Euripides’ tragedy, Hippolytus’ death appears to have been preceded by an argument with his father during which Theseus pretends that he “was standing for” his wife (Ibid., 79). Phaedra, however, offers a different insight into the event. She claims that Theseus was “ranting about [him]self and [his] battered carcass” because “women don’t look” at him anymore, thus making him “loo[k] for any excuse to rip through [his] son” (Ibid., 79-80). Phaedra’s input stresses Hippolytus’ tragic death as a consequence of the toxicity of hegemonic masculinity. As Theseus “thought [Phaedra] loved [Hippolytus] too” (Ibid., 80), his position as the ageing patriarch of the family was threatened by the youth of his son.

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  51 Carr’s introduction of conflicting reasons leading to Hippolytus’ death sheds light on Theseus’ responsibility in that event, which has been disregarded so Phaedra could stand as a monstrous woman. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, although Phaedra’s lie propels Hippolytus’ tragic end, his death sentence is uttered by Theseus who calls upon the god Poseidon to “kill [his] son” (“κατέργασαι … παῖδ”) so he “may … not live out this day” (“ἡμέραν δὲ μὴ φύγοι τήνδ᾿”) (Euripides 2005b, 210–211). This decision stems not only from his desire to get justice for Phaedra but also from his willingness to assert dominance over his son since Theseus does not intend to “be bested by” (“ἡσσηθήσομαι”) his son (Ibid., 218–219). In Phaedra Backwards, as the action goes back in time, the play examines the responsibility of each character in the tragedy at stake because, as noted by Phaedra in the first scene, “Last night was the cause of tonight” (Carr 2015, 79). The unravelling of the action underlines the polysemy of the word “backwards” used in the title: It alludes to the construction of the dramatic temporality on the one hand and of the story on the other. In Carr’s transposition, Phaedra does not love Hippolytus but Theseus. This transformation is brought to light as Phaedra tries to provoke her husband with the assertion that she “want[s] to sleep with [his] son” (Ibid., 94). Yet, Theseus sees clearly through that “ruse” as he replies: “It’s me you want and what is he but a carbon copy of my younger self?” (Ibid., 94). The father and son’s physical resemblance has been stressed in several tragic transpositions of the myth. In the 17th-century French neoclassical tragedy Phèdre by Jean Racine (1677), for instance, Phaedra proclaims: “Mes yeux le retrouvaient dans les traits de son père” (Racine, 848), which Frank McGuinness translates: “I see his face on the face of his father” in his version (2006) (McGuinness, 15). Carr, however, reverses this canonical construction of the father and son’s physical resemblance as she overturns Racine and McGuinness’ lines: It is not Theseus who looks like Hippolytus in Phaedra Backwards, but the other way around, thus revealing that her true love lies with her husband and not her stepson. As Phaedra’s passion for Hippolytus is a game she plays to get her husband’s attention, Carr stresses the fictionality of the adulterous reputation associated with her while simultaneously emphasising that feature of Theseus. He indeed “keep[s] a record” of the women he has had sexual intercourse with and “To date [he has] slept with three thousand and eleven” of them (Carr 2015, 103). This number contrasts with Phaedra’s. She accounts for “[thirteen]” sexual partners “[n]ot counting” Theseus (Ibid., 87). The distinction she draws between her past lovers and her husband ­underlines the special position he holds in her life, which is not mutual as Theseus draws parallels between his wife and other sexual partners:

52  From “Woman” to Women on Stage “Women find me enchanting. … Even my wife. I only have to look at her in a certain way and she dissolves” (Ibid., 103). Furthermore, Phaedra’s non-inclusion of Theseus in the number of her lovers suggests that she has not been intimate with someone else since she got married. Theseus’ “obsession” (Ibid., 103) with women, however, does not point to a similar faithfulness on his part. Despite these elements, Phaedra is “put … to shame” for her sexual life by Theseus and Hippolytus (Ibid., 87), which is a metatextual comment from Carr on the patriarchal embedment of the construction of that figure as a monstrous woman. Carr’s approach to Medea is quite similar as she sheds light on a variety of elements to show the grip of patriarchy on the conception of that figure as a monster. Yet, the deconstruction of Medea’s monstrosity is less explicitly disclosed. Carr indeed uses the myth as intertextuality for two of her Midlands plays: Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998). In this regard, neither of them involves that specific figure but rather new characters inspired by her. Medea’s monstrosity emerges from the dramatisation of the character as a child murderer in Euripides’ tragedy. While earlier versions of the myth present the death of her sons as accidental (Rey, 1281), Euripides weaponises that event through the infanticide to underline Medea’s “unwomanly” nature, which sustains her monstrosity. The character does not indeed behave “like a classical woman but like an archaic … hero when he feels he has been wronged” (Foley, 260). The course of action she undertakes bears some striking similarities with the Homeric hero Achilles: Both of them regard oath with the highest importance and experience extreme wrath when it has been broken (Bacalexi, 277). Medea thus embodies the archaic heroic moral code associated with men. This drives her to kill her children because “[a]s a hero, she wants to do … bad to her enemies” (Foley, 26) and the infanticide’s purpose is “to cause [Jason] grief” (“πημαίνουσ᾿”) (Euripides 2001, 410–411). In Portia Coughlan, Carr plays on the canonical reputation of Medea as a part of “the plot … is derived from” Euripides’ tragedy (Murphy, 390). Portia “embodies the epitome of the unwomanly woman” (Leeney, 95) like Medea does in Greek tragedy. This similarity is further sustained by Portia’s urge to harm her children as she confesses to her husband that “when [she] looks at [her] sons … [she] sees knives and accidents and terrible mutilations. Their toys is weapons for [her] to hurt them with, givin ’them a bath is a place where [she] could drown them” (Carr 1999, 233). These lines echo Medea’s canonical reputation as a child murderer. But Carr actually reverses the characterisation of the classical figure through Portia. Unlike the protagonist of the Midlands play, Medea “love[s] the children” (“τέκνων … φίλταθ᾿”) (Euripides 2001, 394–395). She is thus quite reluctant to perform the infanticide as underlined by

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  53 the speech she addresses to her heart and hand in order to convince herself to commit the deed: Come, put on your armor, my heart! Why do I put off doing the terrible deed that must be done? Come, luckless hand, take the sword, take it and go to your life’s miserable goal! (ἀλλ᾿ εἷα ὁπλίζου, καρδία· τί μέλλομεν τὰ δεινὰ κἀναγκαῖα μὴ πράσσειν κακά; ἄγ᾿, ὦ τάλαινα χεὶρ ἐμή, λαβὲ ξίφος, λάβ᾿, ἕρπε πρὸς βαλβῖδα λυπηρὰν βίου.)

(Ibid., 394–395)

Despite her hatred for her children, Portia, however, never acts on her murderous urges. This reversal of Medea’s features and actions alludes to the process of turning a woman into a monster in the context of modern Ireland. Portia does not grow monstrous because she steps out of the realm of womanhood but because she has been forced into that realm in the first place. She expresses that she “never wanted sons nor daughters and [she] never pretended otherwise,” yet her husband Raphael “thought [he] could woo [her] into motherhood” (Carr 1999, 221). Carr’s examination and deconstruction of Medea are more considerable in By the Bog of Cats…. The plot of the play is indeed more extensively based on Euripides’ tragedy as illustrated through the transposition of the infanticide in the last scene. Yet, Carr deeply changes the circumstances leading the Medea-like figure to perform that murderous act. In By the Bog of Cats…, Hester does not murder her child to retaliate for Carthage’s decision to leave her and to marry Caroline, which thus differs substantially from Medea’s motive. In Euripides’ tragedy, the infanticide is mainly framed as an act of retaliation against Jason’s betrayal, as Medea exclaims: “Children, how you have perished by your father’s fault!” (“ὦ παῖδες, ὡς ὤλεσθε πατρῴᾳ νόσῳ”) (Euripides 2001, 406-407). This does not mean, however, that Medea has ceased to love her children as she proclaims that she “shall never leave [her] children for [her] enemies to outrage” (“οὔτοι ποτ᾿ ἔσται τοῦθ᾿ ὅπως ἐχθροῖς … / παῖδας παρήσω τοὺς … καθυβρίσαι”) (Ibid., 380–381). This shows Medea’s consideration for her children’s future and her sense of responsibility towards them because “the one who gave them birth shall kill them” (“ἡμεῖς κτενοῦμεν οἵπερ ἐξεφύσαμεν”) (Ibid.), which has influenced Carr’s transposition of the myth. Carr’s re-conception of that tragic action has recently stirred some debate among scholars. Initially interpreted as an act of love (Kurdi 2010, 169; Sihra 2018, 120), Mária Kurdi has revisited her position on the matter,

54  From “Woman” to Women on Stage now arguing that “[t]he terrible filicide is not so much an act of love as an irrational deed on the impulse of the moment” (Kurdi 2022, 197). This interpretation is connected to the study of Carr’s drama from the lens of psychology offered by Dagmara Gizło in The Art of Experience: The Theatre of Marina Carr and Contemporary Psychology. According to Gizło, Josie “resembles the child Hester once was,” and so the murder she experiences at her mother’s hands “is a demonstration of harm following the path of the Angry or Enraged Child schema mode,” thus “expressing rage over unmet needs,” which “only brings pain to oneself and others” (Gizło, 164). The gender swap of Medea’s sons into Hester’s daughter shown in Carr’s transposition increases the connection, and thus the identification, between the murderer and the victim(s). On several occasions, Josie indeed appears as Hester’s double: Both of them were/are seven and “wearin’ … Communion dress[es]” (Carr 1999, 297) on the last day with their mothers, for instance. Yet, Gizło’s interpretation does not draw attention to the social relevance of the mother-daughter connection which underlies the tragic action in the play. As noted by Kurdi, there is a “complexity of issues pertaining to the social background of Hester’s reactions to her own plight” (Kurdi 2022, 188). The diverging interpretations of the infanticide in By the Bog of Cats… are highly dependent on the lens adopted by each scholar. It can either be psychological, as illustrated in Kurdi’s recent input, or mythological, as demonstrated in Melissa Sihra’s numerous and extensive studies of Carr’s theatre and more specifically of By the Bog of Cats…. However, Eamonn Jordan argues that “[i]n Carr’s works, myth … take[s] precedence over … the psychological” (Jordan, 245), which is all the more accurate in By the Bog of Cats… since the plot derives from the tragic myth dramatised in Euripides’ Medea. In this regard, the connection between Hester and Josie emerging from the gender switch of Medea’s sons implies that the child is to be subjected to the same marginalisation and discrimination as her mother. Carr does not foreshadow that dimension of Josie’s future but addresses it very explicitly. In the first act of the play, Mrs. Kilbride refuses to consider her granddaughter “a Kilbride” because, in her mind, Josie is “Hester Swane’s little bastard” (Carr 1999, 279). The child is born out of wedlock and thus embodies Hester’s non-compliance with the gender expectation of patriarchy in Ireland. This lays the ground for the subjection of Josie to the same mechanisms of social exclusion as Hester since Mrs. Kilbride rhetorically asks the child: “Why don’t yees head off in that auld caravan, back to wherever yees came from” (Ibid.). This issue is intrinsically connected to the question of the child’s abandonment by the mother in the play. Mrs. Kilbride voices the position of the community living by the bog, at least towards the protagonist. They intend to “run” Hester “out of here”

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  55 through Xavier’s action as they did with her “mother” (Ibid., 328). Although Big Josie was forced to go away, she left her child behind, which stands as a primal form of exclusion experienced by Hester. The significance of names emphasises the protagonist’s marginalisation from the family because, unlike her brother Joseph, Big Josie did not call Hester “after her” but “after no wan” (Ibid., 319–320). This initial exclusion anticipates the protagonist’s social marginalisation from the community, which eventually leads her to consider dying by suicide. Yet, while Hester contemplates taking only her own life at first, the dialogue with her daughter makes her experience an epiphany. As noticed by Kurdi, Josie’s words “Mam, I’d be watchin’ for ya all the time ’long the Bog of Cats. I’d be hopin ’and waitin’ and prayin ’for ya return” (Ibid., 338) resonate with the ones used by Hester to describe herself since her own mother’s departure: “I watched her walk away from me across the Bog of Cats. And across the Bog of Cats I’ll watch her return” (Ibid., 297). Although this parallel “evokes the primal loss of her own mother in Hester” (Kurdi 2022, 197), it also alludes to the founding moment that propelled her exclusion and marginalisation, which she “won’t have” Josie experience (Carr 1999, 339). Instead of leaving her daughter behind, Hester decides that “[she]’ll take [Josie] with [her]” (Ibid.). The infanticide might thus be “an impulse of the moment” (Kurdi 2022, 197), but it is nevertheless an “act of love” (Sihra 2018, 120) sustained by the mythological layer of the play. Besides Medea, Carr has used another classical figure of woman monstrosity twice in her theatre: Clytemnestra. The character indeed appears in Girl on an Altar, which is based on Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first play of The Oresteia trilogy. The figure of Clytemnestra also inspires the course of action undertaken by Frances in Ariel, which transposes the same classical tragedies as Girl on an Altar with the addition of Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, the second play of The Oresteia, in a modern Irish setting. Unlike the other monstrous women, Clytemnestra does not appear in the list of monsters established by Sorkin Rabinowitz as her book focuses on Euripides’ tragedies. Clytemnestra’s monstrosity is indeed characteristic of the depiction offered in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. More surprisingly yet, she is not enlisted either in the gallery of women monsters set by Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar (Žižek and Dolar, 184). As Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the oldest tragedy that we have that deals with a woman breaking the patriarchal gender conventions, Clytemnestra stands as the primary embodiment of woman monstrosity in Greek tragedy. Like Medea, Clytemnestra is an “unwomanly” woman as she is “[p]ortrayed as a monstrous androgyne” (Zeitlin, 89), which her tragic crime underlines. It is not her children she murders but her husband

56  From “Woman” to Women on Stage Agamemnon to “usur[p] male power and prerogatives” (Zeitlin, 89). However, this action is intrinsically connected to her situation as a mother who has lost a daughter at the hands of her husband, a specific feature that Carr uses in both of her transpositions to redeem the character from her classical monstrosity. Clytemnestra indeed frames the murder of Agamemnon as a retaliation for the sacrifice of Iphigenia: “by the fulfilled Justice that was due for my child, by Ruin and by the Fury, through whose aid I slew this man” (“μὰ τὴν τέλειον τῆς ἐμῆς παιδὸς Δίκην / Ἄτην Ἐρινύν θ᾿, αἷσι τόνδ᾿ ἔσφαξ᾿ ἐγώ”) (Aeschylus 2008a, 174–175). This epitomises Clytemnestra’s overvaluation of “the mother-child bond” at the expense of “the marriage bond” (Zeitlin, 95). This stands at the root of her dismissal of patriarchy and transformation into a monster, which Aeschylus explores thoroughly since it “lead[s] to … [the character’s] assertion of sexual independence” (Ibid.). Indeed, following the sacrifice of Iphigenia and while Agamemnon is fighting the war at Troy, Clytemnestra picks a new partner, Aegisthus, thus showing a form of agency reserved for men, which is then “manifested politically by a desire to rule” (Ibid.) leading to the murder of her husband, who is also king of Argos. Carr’s decision to start both of her transpositions with Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis reveals her project to redeem Clytemnestra as it “offers reasons why Clytemnestra, an abused wife and bereaved mother, turns into a vitriolic murderer, then it inevitably alters and modifies the impact of her violent characterisation in Agamemnon” (Hall 2005, 18). Euripides’ tragedy indeed dramatises the references to the sacrifice of Iphigenia used in Aeschylus’ Oresteia to motivate the murder of Agamemnon (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 39). More significantly, Iphigenia at Aulis presents Clytemnestra in a very different light than the Aeschylean trilogy as the character appears as a powerless victim submitted to male domination in several instances. Euripides includes the tale of her marriage with Agamemnon (Pomeroy, 110) who “married [her] against [her] will” (“ἔγημας ἄκουσάν”) after “killing [her] former husband Tantalus” (“τὸν πρόσθεν ἄνδρα Τάνταλον κατακτανών”) and their “baby” (“βρέφος”) (Euripides 2002, 290–293). Carr draws inspiration from that story to devise Frances’ personal background in Ariel. She “wanted to brin [James, the son from her first marriage] on the honeymoon” but “Fermoy sa[id] no” (Carr 2009, 84), and the child died while they were away. The use of reported speech in Frances’ lines highlights that Fermoy is the one deciding and Frances submits to his decisions, thus reproducing the couple dynamics of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. The second instance underlining Clytemnestra’s powerlessness in Iphigenia at Aulis lies in her incapacity to stop the sacrifice of her daughter. This dimension does not come across in Ariel since Frances is unaware that Fermoy killed their daughter. She believes that Ariel has disappeared,

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  57 which echoes Agamemnon’s action of lying to attract Clytemnestra and Iphigenia to the isle of Aulis. In Girl on an Altar, however, Carr heightens Clytemnestra’s endeavours to save her daughter as the character “wrestles the child from Agamemnon with such force he falls backwards” and she “tr[ies] to shake the life back into [Iphigenia]” (Carr 2022, 18), but her efforts are pointless. The inclusion of Iphigenia at Aulis in Carr’s plays provides a commentary on the topic of women in power too. Although Agamemnon is supposed to be king in The Oresteia, he is never shown in that position. His absence has led his wife Clytemnestra to act as the ruler of Argos, and she is the only one to be seen acting as such in the first instalment of the trilogy. In doing so, Aeschylus plays on the primordial myth of a chaotic matriarchy (Zeitlin, 90), contrasting with the order that ensued from the implementation of patriarchy. Carr exposes the pretence of that patriarchal tale as the first acts of both Ariel and Girl on an Altar are based on Euripides’ tragedy, which shows the submission of women to patriarchy. In doing so, the episode of women holding power does not stand anymore as an ahistorical episode before the emergence of patriarchy, which starts history through the implementation of the “natural” order. It rather appears as an ephemeral moment. In Ariel, Frances acts as the head of the household for a short period of time between the death of Fermoy in Act Two and her own in Act Three. In Girl on an Altar, Clytemnestra’s time in power is longer as it lasts for the ten years of the Trojan War but it is not dramatised in the play, thus undermining its importance. Indeed, as soon as Agamemnon is back to Argos, Clytemnestra loses her ruling authority over the men whose “loyalty” she used to “ha[ve]” one “hour … before he stood in front of them” (Carr 2022, 25). Carr’s use of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis overturns the depiction of matriarchy’s destructiveness in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The tragedy sustaining the whole trilogy is indeed triggered by a woman killing a man. This shows “[t]he polarizing imagination of Greek mythic thought,” which “not only establishes a strong dichotomy between male and female” but “also posits predictable behavior responses at either end of the spectrum where female self-assertion on her own behalf comes only at the cost of annihilating the Other” (Zeitlin, 91). In Ariel and Girl on an Altar, however, the trigger of tragedy lies in the murderous sacrifice of a young and innocent girl by her father, thus shedding light on the destructiveness of patriarchy instead of matriarchy. In Ariel, the character of Elaine is based on another classical figure that can be associated with the model of vindictive womanhood: Electra. The story of the Atrides is the sole example we have of the tragic treatment of a myth by the three tragedians: Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers,

58  From “Woman” to Women on Stage Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electras. In all these tragedies, Electra expresses her contempt for the political power in Argos. This feature comes across the most ostensibly in Sophocles’ tragedy as the chorus advises the eponymous character to “not be angry in excess against [her] enemies” (“οἷς ἐχθαίρεις ὑπεράχθεο”) (Sophocles 1997a, 182–183). Sophocles’ conception of Electra turns her into a substitute for the Furies (Foley, 169). The Furies are primordial goddesses of retaliation who haunt murderers of their relative(s), driving them into madness so they would take their own life. As mentioned by the Olympian god Apollo in The Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’ trilogy, they are “detestable to the gods” (“ἐστ᾿ ἀποπτύστου θεοῖς”) and their “appearance indicates” (“ὑφηγεῖται … μορφῆς”) their monstrosity (Aeschylus 2008b, 378–379). In Greek mythology, the Furies do not exhibit a traditional anthropomorphic look like most of the gods do: They are women but their eyes tear blood and they have snakes in their hair. Although Carr transposes Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Ariel, the characterisation of Elaine is inspired by Sophocles’ Electra (Hill, 152). In the first act of the play, the character declares to her Frances: “I’m stayin here, to haunt ya” (Carr 2009, 134). Elaine elaborates on that function in the final act, saying to her mother: “I’m James returned. And I’m me father that ya butchered to hees eyeballs” (Ibid., 145). She thus fills the role of the Furies as Electra does in Sophocles’ tragedy. Despite Electra’s assimilation with monstrous female gods, she is not considered to be a monstrous woman. Unlike Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba, Electra does not stand against but rather for patriarchy. The power she opposes is indeed not held by a man but by a woman as Clytemnestra has been ruling over Argos since Agamemnon’s murder. Such a disruption of the patriarchal order, perceived as unnatural, undermines the moral failure of Electra’s excessive anger, especially since her behaviour is connected to the lack of patriarchal control (Des Bouvrie, 318). Electra also stands aside Clytemnestra, Medea, Hecuba, and Phaedra as she does not undertake any action during the course of the tragedy, thus complying with the patriarchal expectations. Regardless of her hatred for Clytemnestra and her willingness to avenge Agamemnon, she waits for Orestes to handle the situation and restore order as it would be unsuitable for a woman to exert revenge (Foley, 162). This assimilates Electra with another figure of Greek mythology, who is very positively regarded in the tradition: Penelope (Ibid., 148). Penelope has waited twenty years for her husband Odysseus to return and re-establish order in her home by getting rid of the suitors. Carr, however, does not transpose that feature of Electra through the character of Elaine in Ariel. Contrarily to the classical figure, Elaine undertakes action since she is the one avenging the death of her

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  59 father by killing her mother. Yet, this display of agency against another woman does not mean that Carr constructs Elaine as a monster. Elaine includes herself in the enumeration of the haunting presences she embodies as the whole line reads: “I’m James. I’m James returned. I’m me father … And I’m Ariel. And I’m Elaine” (Carr 2009, 145). This echoes the position she has in Frances’ life as metaphorically described by Stephen: There was ony ever two chambers in your heart, Ma, two dusty chambers, me and Elaine tryin to force our way in. Our playground was a graveyard, Ma, we ran among your tombstones like they were swings, we played hop, skip and jump on the bones a your children, your real children, while we whined for ya like ghosts. (Ibid., 138) The comparison with “ghosts” underlines the lack of attention, interest, and care that Frances has had for her living children. It provides an origin story of neglect to Elaine’s embodiment of the Furies. Although this metaphorical description stresses Frances’ responsibility for Elaine’s suffering, it also points out the wider issue of patriarchal oppression. Frances’ obsession with her dead children leading to the dismissal of the living ones results from Fermoy’s abuse. His tyrannical rule over the family caused Ariel’s death and is not disconnected from James’. The Mai offers a different insight into the figure of Electra through two of the characters: The Mai and Millie. The Mai is a memory play narrated by the latter. It revisits events from her childhood, which she believes eventually led to her mother’s tragic death by suicide. In this respect, the play elaborates on the concrete origins of the “dream[s] of water” haunting Millie “all the time” as an adult (Carr 1999, 184). This offers a dramatic illustration of Electra’s situation in classical tragedy, which is that she “is trapped in [an] unending lamentation” (Foley, 156). However, Carr reverses the pattern structuring the daughter-parents relationship: While Electra mourns her father and loathes her mother for his death, Millie grieves her mother and despises her father. As Robert reminds her of “the Fourth Commandment” during their regular spats, Millie always replies that “a father has to be honourable before he can be honoured” (Carr 1999, 128), which hints at the responsibility she believes he has in the death of The Mai. Contrary to the tragic myth of the Atrides, the lost parent is not a man whose death symbolises an attack against the patriarchal system but a woman whose death is entrenched in the patriarchal oppression of women. Carr emphasises that dimension through the transposition of the Penelope-like situation of Electra in the character of The Mai.

60  From “Woman” to Women on Stage Like Penelope and Electra, The Mai has substantial expectations regarding the return of a man in her life. She believes that she “ha[s] the chance of being happy again” with Robert being back home (Ibid., 116). Yet, Carr’s character bears more resemblance to Penelope than Electra: First, The Mai waited for her husband’s return, not her brother’s, and then, she did not wait inactively. While Robert was away, The Mai started and completed the enterprise of building a house on Owl Lake. This parallels the situation of Penelope, who weaved a shroud while her husband was away as related in Homer’s Odysseus. The metaphor of sewing used by Millie to talk about her mother’s project strengthens that parallel. The house is indeed described as the “magic thread that would stitch” the family “together again” (Ibid., 111). But, unlike Penelope who willingly unravels the shroud every night, The Mai watches her creation being torn down against her will. As Robert resumes his unfaithful demeanour, The Mai’s dream house gets damaged as “the fences” are “moved in on either side,” meaning that “half [of] the garden [is] gone” (Ibid., 157). The house stands as a metaphor for the domestic bliss falsely promised to women by the Irish State from which derives The Mai’s belief in her inability to be happy without Robert. In the last scene, she “can’t think of one reason for going without him,” and while she hopes that “in a few years he’ll come back to [her]” (Ibid., 185), his new departure demonstrates her failure to achieve the life that is expected from her in Ireland. This leads her to die by suicide, Carr thus turning her into a victim of patriarchy. (Self-)Sacrifice on the Altar of Patriarchy The tragic endings met by Carr’s female characters, especially in the plays based on Greek tragedies, turn them into sacrificial victims of patriarchy. Yet, this dimension comes across even more ostensibly through the transposition of the classical model of sacrificial womanhood. In Greek tragedy, the sacrificial woman is the polar opposite of the vindictive woman: While the latter is terrifying, the former is a “glorified object which … reassure[s] men” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 37). This model of womanhood relies on a female character’s complete acceptance of the destiny crafted by and for men, even at the cost of her life (Ibid., 22). Two characters embody that specific type of “woman” in Greek tragedy: Polyxena and Iphigenia. They are central to the action dramatised in Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis, which Carr transposes in her Hecuba and Girl on an Altar. The figure of Iphigenia also provides the model for the characterisation of Ariel in Ariel and a subtext for the construction of Sorrel’s dramatic arc in On Raftery’s Hill (2000).

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  61 Carr does not alter that model of womanhood as significantly as she does with the vindictive women. The transformations she includes in some of her transpositions appear as details but actually bear great significance. In Carr’s Hecuba, for instance, Polyxena is “no innocent” (Carr 2015, 216), meaning that she is not a virgin, a feature characteristic of the sacrificial woman in Greek tragedy. The character had a secret love affair with Achilles. This demonstrates the agency she used to have before the fall of Troy and thus increases her alienation at the time of the play, which her sacrifice epitomises. In this regard, Carr does not change the characterisation of sacrificial womanhood as it still leans on the lack of women’s agency, but she overturns its reception. In Euripides’ Hecuba, Polyxena shows “supreme bravery and surpassing nobility” (“τῇ περίσσ᾿ εὐκαρδίῳ ψυχήν τ᾿ ἀρίστῃ”) during the sacrifice (Euripides 2005a, 450–451). These qualities manifest a form of glorification usually associated with men (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 37). Yet, as it emerges from “the representation of” a woman’s “willing subordination” to men, “it allay[s] masculine anxieties about female strength” (Ibid., 35). Indeed, Polyxena agrees to die “both because [she] must do so and because [she] want[s] to die” (“γε τοῦ τ’ ἀναγκαίου χάριν / θανεῖν τε χρῄζουσ’”) (Euripides 2005a, 428–429). These lines display a paradoxical conception of agency because of the lack of choices offered to the character. Yet, they perfectly illustrate the patriarchal vision of womanhood during the classical period, which is that a woman is free as long as she submits to the destiny that has been decided for her by men. Carr erases that dimension from her transposition of Hecuba as Polyxena does not understand “[w]hat … [the Greeks are] going to do to [her]” (Carr 2015, 240), thus focusing on the utter obliteration of her agency. Yet, the most substantial transformation comes from the depiction of the sacrifice itself. The willing submission of a woman to men is a pleasurable spectacle in Euripides’ Hecuba. This dimension is brought to light through the “quasipornographic” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 54) description of Polexena’s sacrifice as she has to “sho[w] her breasts,” which the messenger relating the event deems to be “lovely as a goddess’ statue” (Euripides 2005a, 448–449). The sexualisation associated with the murder of a young woman is also conveyed through the action of stabbing her body as it “work[s] out the dynamic of active/passive, dominant/submissive, male/female by rendering [her] objec[t] … of the knife (which also stands for the phallus and the law)” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 54). In her transposition, Carr retains the requirement of half-nudity as Hecuba “must bare Polyxena to the waist” (Carr 2015, 243). Yet, the emphasis on this unnecessary requirement of revealing the young woman’s body – since Agamemnon only “ha[s] to be able to get at her neck” (Ibid., 243) – prevents the eroticisation and sheds light on the

62  From “Woman” to Women on Stage voyeuristic sadism of the sacrifice. The physicality of the action is central to the re-conception of that action addressed as a slaughter rather than a ritual. Polyxena’s death is gory and graphic. Agamemnon and ­Hecuba describe the young woman “rasping … choking” with “blood whistling in her throat” while “[h]er belly darken[s] with blood” (Ibid., 245). This is an excruciating and seemingly endless death that her body goes through: First, “[t]he knife slides her throat” but “[does]n’t cut deep enough,” then forcing Agamemnon to “plung[e] a knife under her ribs” (Ibid., 244). Unlike the character in Euripides’ tragedy, Hecuba attends the action. This heightens the emotional implication of the scene as the distress experienced by the mother echoes the helplessness endured by the daughter. There is nothing beautiful to admire. It is a literal bloody horror that Hecuba must bear witness to for the audience as Polyxena “keeps looking at” her during the whole course of the murderous sacrifice (Ibid., 245). Carr shows the extreme implication of women’s reification entailed by patriarchy through the deadly ritual that Polyxena suffers. The scene is all the more impactful in that it stands at the climax of the play and has been carefully prepared through Scamandrius and Polydorus’ deaths. The former’s beheaded body is carried by Andromache at the opening of the play, but none of them appears on stage. They are only mentioned by Hecuba who sees “Andromache … screaming, holding th[e] bloody bundle” that is Scamandrius who is “intact except for his head, smashed off a wall” (Ibid., 211). This death is “shameful” as assessed by Polydorus, whose comment appears to allude to his own murder too. Polydorus is the first on-stage character to be killed. Yet, his death occurs off-stage. Carr gradually builds the display of violence in the play to peak with Polyxena’s death, which breaks the classical conventions. While Greek tragedy exposes dead bodies on stage, it does not show murder. Carr abides by this rule with Scamandrius and Polydorus’ deaths only to stir more shocking horror from the show of Polyxena’s sacrifice, a young girl slaughtered by men trying to impose their domination. Carr goes further in the dramatisation of women’s reification in Girl on an Altar. Iphigenia indeed does not even appear on stage; she stands as a mere prop to the story. Carr, however, plays on the “symmetry” (Ibid., 231) of these two sacrifices in classical tragedy mentioned in her transposition of Hecuba as a justification for Polyxena’s death. Like the Trojan young woman, Iphigenia has been “stripped to the waist” and her “throat” has been “slit” with an “obsidian knife” by Agamemnon who has been wearing a “mask” (Carr 2015, 242–245; 2022, 18–20). Yet, the sacrifice is not fully dramatised but only its outcome as Clytemnestra, who like Hecuba is one of the agents relating the event to the audience, arrives after her daughter has been killed. It is through her reaction that Carr underlines

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  63 the “[s]hame[fulness]” of that action consisting of “butcher[ing] [a child] like a beast of the field” (Carr 2022, 18). This comments on the position of women in patriarchal societies. They are not considered to be humans equal to men. They are disposable cattle available to be slaughtered in order to strengthen male domination and patriarchy as Agamemnon intends to “show … what the king of Kings is made of” through the sacrifice of his daughter (Ibid., 16). The image of the “beast” associated with Iphigenia is all the more relevant as Girl on an Altar completes the horrific depiction of women’s sacrifice started in Hecuba by shedding light on the inhumane treatment of the young woman’s body. After the murderous sacrifice, Agamemnon is “offer[ed] … [a] cup of sacrificial blood to drink, [his] daughter’s blood” (Carr 2022, 14), thus enacting the accusation laid in Hecuba that the Greeks are “cannibals” (Carr 2015, 231). Anthropophagy, or more exactly gynephagy,2 exposes women’s commodification by men in a patriarchal system. Blood indeed symbolises the principle of life. In Girl on an Altar, the consumption of Iphigenia’s blood by Agamemnon manifests the obliteration of women’s existence that sustains male domination. A similar line of interpretation underlies Carr’s previous approach to Iphigenia’s sacrifice in Ariel. In this Midlands play, the playwright offers a precise counterpoint to the glorification of the model of sacrificial womanhood elaborated in Iphigenia at Aulis. In this classical tragedy, Euripides frames the sacrifice as Iphigenia’s metamorphosis to serve the true purpose of her life. The character indeed says to her father: “you raised me as a light of salvation to Greece. I do not regret my death” (“ἐθρέψαθ’ Ἑλλάδι με φάος· θανοῦσα δ’ οὐκ ἀναίνομαι”) (Euripides 2002, 330–331). From a feminist perspective, such an uprising is deeply problematic. It dehumanises Iphigenia as it implies that her life has no importance since she will overcome death by becoming a patriotic symbol. Light is a polysemic trope in Western culture, which Euripides uses in relation to the Greek military campaign to Troy to symbolise civilisation and hope as underlined through Iphigenia’s motive to willingly die: Hellas in all its might now looks to me, and upon me depends the power to take their ships over and destroy the Phrygians, so that the barbarians will not do anything to women in the future [and not allow them to abduct women from rich Hellas, since they have paid for the loss of Helen, whom Paris abducted]. All this rescuing is accomplished by my death, and the fame I win for freeing Hellas will make me blessed. (εἰς ἔμ᾿ Ἑλλὰς ἡ μεγίστη πᾶσα νῦν ἀποβλέπει, κἀν ἐμοὶ πορθμός τε ναῶν καὶ Φρυγῶν κατασκαφαί,

64  From “Woman” to Women on Stage τάς γε μελλούσας γυναῖκας μή τι δρῶσι βάρβαροι [μηκέθ᾿ ἁρπάζειν ἐᾶν †τὰς† ὀλβίας ἐξ Ἑλλάδος, τὸν Ἑλένης τείσαντας ὄλεθρον, ἣν ἀνήρπασεν Πάρις].)

(Ibid., 316–317)

Iphigenia’s glorification stems directly from the conception of the sacrificial woman as a means for men to access their own eternal glory. The tragedy offers a dramatic prelude not only to Aeschylus’ Oresteia but also to Homer’s Iliad.3 In this epic, getting Helen back to Greece is a subsidiary topic, even though it is supposed to be at the root of the Trojan War. The Iliad rather focuses on the great exploits performed by male heroes to gain immortal fame. Yet, while those men are still highly regarded as epitomised through the vision of Achilles, who is still considered the greatest Greek hero, Iphigenia is a figure of minor importance in classical mythology. She is barely mentioned in the literature dealing with the Trojan War and its outcome,4 even though Euripides conceived her character as the one enabling the Greek expedition to Troy. In Ariel, Carr comments on the unfair treatment of Iphigenia. Contrary to the representation of the sacrifice depicted in Euripides’ tragedy, Carr approaches that event through the lens of darkness. The last line delivered by the eponymous character and addressed to her father “I’ll puh ouh the ligh so” (Carr 2009, 100) forecasts Ariel’s forthcoming death as the image of switching off the light is a metaphor alluding to the act of dying. The bleak circumstances surrounding Ariel’s sudden disappearance contribute to the dark atmosphere associated with the sacrifice. None of the characters knows or acknowledges her fate for the most part of the second act, thus manifesting a form of ignorance antithetic to the light as a symbol of cognition and recognition. The place where Ariel’s body has been concealed encompasses that dimension since Carr constructs Cuura Lake as a place where women are condemned to darkness and oblivion. Fermoy’s father left his wife’s body there, and “nowan ever found her” (Ibid., 83). Cuura Lake translates the removal of women from the patriarchal narratives in topographical terms, which is then evidenced through Fermoy’s erasure of Ariel’s role in his success story. In the interview he gives at the beginning of act two, Fermoy considers his victory over Hannafin as a result of “divine grace” (Ibid., 102). This attitude underlines the paradoxical relation of patriarchy to sacrificial womanhood as dramatised in Ariel, which draws inspiration from the treatment of Iphigenia in Greek mythology. The grim ending conceived by Fermoy for Ariel radically differs from the tale he has elaborated to evoke the murder: Before I ever laid eyes on you [Frances], long before thah, I had a drame, a drame so beauhiful I wanted to stay in ud till the end a time. I’m in

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  65 a yella cuurtyard wud God and we’re chewin the fah and then this girl wud wings appears by hees side. And I say, who owns her? And God says she’s his. And I say, give us the loan of her, will ya? No, he says, she’s noh earth flavour, like he’s talkin abouh ice-crame. And stupidly I say, I’ll take her anyway. Alrigh, he says, smilin ah me rale sly, alrigh, buh remember this is a loan. I know, I know, I says, knowin natin. And the time’ll come when I’ll want her returned, he says. Yeah, yeah, I say, fleein the cuurtyard wud her before he changes hees mind. Ariel. Thah was Ariel. (Ibid., 124–125) The assimilation of Ariel with an angel echoes Iphigenia’s metamorphosis into light and thus displays similar problematic issues. As Fermoy perceives his daughter as a greater form of being, he precludes Ariel from living as a human. Carr, however, exposes the pretence of that patriarchal glorification of the sacrificial woman through the discrepancy opposing Fermoy’s tale to reality. Although he might consider his daughter to be an angel, her body is left to rot without a proper grave at the bottom of Cuura Lake. Carr offers the most violent and horrific embodiment of sacrificial womanhood in a play that is seemingly disconnected from Greek tragedy: On Raftery’s Hill. Yet, the incestuous rape of Sorrel by Red bears some striking resemblances with Iphigenia’s sacrifice at the hands of Agamemnon. Although Red does not rule over an army or a city, his words edict the law by which the rest of the family abides. Some of Red’s lines addressed to Sorrel reveal his role as the director of her life: “Ya’ll stay where ya are, young wan, till I give ya lave to go” (Ibid., 34). This transposes the power dynamic between the sacrificer and sacrificed in Iphigenia at Aulis in which the sacrificial woman’s life seems to have been “scripted”5 by her father. The incestuous rape furthers that parallel as it enacts explicitly the sexual subtext underlying the sacrifice of young women by men, which assimilates stabbing to penetration (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 54). Like the classical character, Sorrel is dehumanised by her father. She is indeed assimilated to “a hare,” which Red “gut[s]” through the action of “cutting the clothes off her” (Carr 2009, 34). In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood observes that “sexism ha[s] drawn [its] conceptual strength from casting sexual … difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity” (Plumwood, 4). Like Iphigenia, Sorrel takes the place of the sacrificial animal, thus epitomising her lack of agency. This enables Red to re-assert his authority over his family in a comparable way to Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter to secure his position as the leader of the Greek army in Iphigenia at Aulis. Carr, however, introduces substantial transformations in the transposition of the model of sacrificial womanhood through Sorrel’s dramatic arc.

66  From “Woman” to Women on Stage Contrary to Iphigenia as dramatised in Euripides’ tragedy, Sorrel has never consented to endure patriarchal violence, which sheds light on the complete annihilation of women’s agency by patriarchy once again. The outcome of the “sacrifice” is the other considerable change because, unlike Iphigenia, Sorrel does not die. This questions the apprehension of the incestuous rape through the lens of sacrificial womanhood. After that action, however, Sorrel abandons the life she had initially planned: To marry Dara and escape Raftery’s Hill. Instead, she decides to remain with her family. This change of heart typifies the psychological destruction of the character and her absorption in the patriarchal household. Although Iphigenia and Polyxena are perfect embodiments of sacrificial womanhood in Greek tragedy, they do not stand as the sole instances. Another woman figure, more famous and canonical, displays some of the distinctive features of that model, even though with more complexity: Antigone, as dramatised in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, which Carr uses in her transpositions. Antigone appears as one of the several voices intervening in iGirl (2021). Carr has also relied on the myth of that figure before as it constitutes one of the intertextualities of Portia Coughlan. Antigone’s construction as a sacrificial woman is less straightforward than Iphigenia and Polyxena. Contrary to them, she is not passive but takes a large part in the tragic action. In Sophocles’ Antigone, the tragedy is indeed prompted by two elements: Creon’s edict forbidding the burial of Polynices and Antigone’s breach of that law. Sorkin Rabinowitz thus does not consider the character to fit the model of sacrificial womanhood because her “death … is actually a punishment” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 31). The situation is, however, more convoluted than it might seem. From the beginning of the tragedy, Antigone is aware that her action will lead to her death as she declares to her sister Ismene: “It is honourable for me to do this [to bury Polynices] and die” (“καλόν μοι τοῦτο ποιούσῃ θανεῖν”) (Sophocles 1998a, 10–11). Although this has been read as a feminist action because Antigone stands against Creon’s law, the root of her endeavour lies in patriarchy too. Sophocles’ tragedy dramatises the tension between the “family religion” of the oikos and the “public religion” of the polis (Vernant and VidalNaquet, 41), and both of these spheres are structured by and submitted to the patriarchal ideology. Antigone’s willingness to sacrifice herself for her dead brother bears some similarities with the protagonist’s dramatic arc in Carr’s Portia Coughlan. The eponymous character is indeed haunted by her dead brother Gabriel, whose ghost appears on several occasions on stage. In doing so, he reminds Portia of the promise he made before dying, that “[he]’ll keep comin back until [he] ha[s] [her]” (Carr 1999, 250). This call

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  67 for death echoes the situation of Antigone, who claims that Creon “has no right to keep [her] from [her] own (“οὐδὲν αὐτῷ τῶν ἐμῶν εἴργειν μέτα”) (Sophocles 1998a, 8–9). This line is delivered in the prologue of the Greek tragedy and foreshadows the character’s death since the only way for her to join her “own” is to die, which she is willing to do. Carr reveals the suicidal tendencies underlying the action of Antigone through Portia’s characterisation. The protagonist of Portia Coughlan is unable to live without her brother. As Portia asserts that “God … gave [them] just … one [soul] … and it went into the Belmont River with [Gabriel]” (Carr 1999, 211), her self appears deadly mutilated. This sustains the trope of the star-crossed lovers running throughout the play, which Carr subverts through the explicitation of the incestuous subtext of Sophocles’ Antigone. In Antigone’s Claims: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler positions incest at the centre of the discussion about the Sophoclean tragedy. According to them, Antigone’s action demonstrates the “impossible and death-bent incestuous love” (Butler 2000, 6). The philosopher’s well-aware anachronistic interpretation reveals the potentiality to read the classical model of sacrificial womanhood as a challenge to heteronormativity, and thus patriarchy. In Butler’s view, Antigone “does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and a wife, by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, by embracing death as her bridal chamber” (Ibid., 76). In Portia Coughlan, the eponymous character does not challenge heteronormativity as frontally as Antigone does since Portia is a wife and a mother, even though she utterly despises that situation. Yet, Carr uses the topic of incest to question heteronormativity and patriarchy. But while Antigone offers an alternative form of kinship through incest because the “symbolic positions [in traditional kinship] have become incoherent” (Butler 2000, 22), Portia’s incestuous relationship with Gabriel brings the unnaturality of heteronormativity into the light. In doing so, Carr reframes the prohibition of incest to make it relevant to the patriarchal context of Ireland. According to Butler, the traditional – and thus heteronormative and patriarchal – form of kinship has emerged from the prohibition of incest. This theory has been coined by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work is discussed at length in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone by Butler. The prohibition of incest requires “the exchange of women,” who are subsequently reduced to a “linguistic currency that facilitates [the] symbolic and communicative bond among men” (Butler 2000, 41). This enables the transformation of the social system from the family cell to the constitution of society through the alienation of

68  From “Woman” to Women on Stage women. Yet, this pre-culture6 distinction between the family cell and society ceased to make sense as soon as the latter emerged. Hannah Arendt indeed argues that “society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family,” which signals “the absorption of the family unit into corresponding social groups” (Arendt, 39–40). In this respect, the establishment of a patriarchal system to structure society through the prohibition of incest spreads to the family cell. This intrinsic connection appears very ostensibly in Irish theatre. As noted by Melissa Sihra, “[t]he recurring interior of the home on the Irish stage has come to signify an enduring association and conflation of family and nation” (Sihra 2007,  2). Carr uses the “association and conflation” of the family cell and society to undermine patriarchal heteronormativity through incest. The conception of the siblings as forming a single self plays on the trope of the supposed “complementary of the sexes.” Carr undermines the allegedly natural dimension of that trope as the incestuous relationship between Portia and Gabriel started in “the womb,” from which they “[c]ame out … holdin’ hand” (Carr 1999, 211). The single self that Portia believes she shares with her brother leads her to state: “you’re aither two people or you’re no one” (Ibid., 241). Besides commenting on her identity as a twin, this line also reflects on the heteronormative system that fuels and sustains patriarchy. After Gabriel’s death, Portia tried to fill the vacant position of her brother with Raphael, thus showing the compulsion of having a man in her life induced by social expectations. She indeed “married Raphael … because of his name, a angel’s name, same as Gabriel’s” (Ibid., 210). This entails a confusion of the identities of Portia’s brother and husband: On the one hand, Raphael replaces Gabriel, and, on the other, Gabriel assumes the role of the lover that should be played by Raphael. Such an “unnatural” and “monstrous” depiction of heteronormativity sheds light on the constant and unavoidable alienation of women’s subjectivity by patriarchy, which Portia’s inability to define herself on her own term epitomises. Heteronormativity leads the protagonist on a twofold path detrimental to her agency. Portia is indeed confined to the role of the homemaker because of her marriage with Raphael, which she escapes through suicide. Yet, in doing so, she lets Gabriel script her fate. In Portia Coughlan, Carr approaches the model of sacrificial womanhood as embodied by Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy through the lens of monstrosity because of the emphasis on the incestuous subtext. This does not mean that Portia is to blame for being a “monster.” Unlike Greek tragedy, Carr does not locate the origin of female monstrosity in a flaw of a woman left uncontrolled, but rather in the over-controlling heteronormative ideology sustaining patriarchy which prevents women from gaining subjectivity and agency of their own. Carr reiterates the conflation of the

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  69 monstrous and the sacrificial woman in the other transposition of the myth of Antigone, who speaks in several sections of iGirl. The confusion of the traditional kinship positions caused by incest is addressed more explicitly and more repeatedly in iGirl than in Portia Coughlan. Each character from the Labdacides intervening in the play states their convoluted position within the family: Oedipus is the “Son of [his] wife / [the] Brother of [his] / Daughter / [the] Brother of [his] sons,” Antigone is “the sister / Of [her] father,” and Jocasta is the “Mother of [her] / Husband / [the] Wife of [her] / Son / [the] Grandmother to / [her] daughters / And sons” (Carr 2021, 10, 22, 28). In this respect, “what [they] represen[t] is far from clear” (Butler 2000, 22), which positions the family in the realm of monstrosity. In iGirl, Carr turns Thebes into a land of monsters: Not only is it home to the Sphinx, like in the myth mentioned in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus,7 but it is also home to the Minotaur, who inhabits a labyrinth of the palace in the Knossos on the isle of Crete in Greek mythology. The former is associated with “riddling songs” (“ποικιλῳδὸς”) (Sophocles 1997b, 338–339), which mirrors the intriguing nature of the latter. The Minotaur is indeed “Half man / Half bull” (Carr 2021, 11). He embodies an extraordinary “[s]pecies,” which is “Not homini / Not bovini / Not anything / Really” (Ibid.). As the “last of [his] species” (Ibid.), the Minotaur belongs to the “preculture” period of human history. Commenting on the inclusion of that “monster” in Carr’s Phaedra Backwards, Sihra exposes that the “[c]onventional (patriarchal) interpretations of the … legend have identified Theseus’s slaying of the Minotaur as the birth of Western civilisation with the annihilation of barbarism” (Sihra 2018, 263). This bears some significant echoes with the question of incest and its prohibition, which is considered to be the founding moment of humanity moving from nature to culture (Butler 2000, 16). The Minotaur is thus intrinsically connected to the Labdacides in that they are all representatives of a pre-patriarchal world. The impossibility of defining the Minotaur’s species alludes to a world in which ontological categories do not seem to exist yet. This has substantial consequences on the conception of gender roles because it entails their non-existence, which the depiction of Antigone epitomises as she is a woman who “argued like a man” (Carr 2021, 12). This confusion about gender roles is to be connected to her incestuous ascendency. Butler shows that the “incoheren[ce]” of the “symbolic positions” in kinship caused by incest also affects gender. In their analysis of Sophocles’ Theban cycle, they notice that Oedipus considers that his daughters-sisters “are men, not women” (“αἵδ᾿ ἄνδρες, οὐ γυναῖκες”) (Sophocles, 1998b,  556–557). This initiates Antigone’s journey into “kinship trouble” – which is a reference to Butler’s most famous essay, Gender Trouble – since by the end of the

70  From “Woman” to Women on Stage cycle, the character will “ha[ve] taken the place of every man in her family” (Butler 2000, 62). Yet, like the Minotaur’s species, Antigone’s gender fluidity appears as an identity from the past, which has been obliterated by the emergence of patriarchy. The exact line indeed reads: “Creon said / I argued like a man” (Carr 2021, 12), thus alluding to the tragic conflict leading to her death as Carr only shows fragmented glimpses of the whole myth in iGirl. Besides the assumption that the tragedy is famous enough to be known by the contemporary audience, such a transposition drastically reframes the course of action of Sophocles’ Antigone. It indeed implies that Antigone did not die for burying Polynices but for not complying with the gender role of a woman expected by Creon. She thus stands as a “monster” from the prepatriarchal past who was sacrificed so patriarchy could emerge. Antigone’s story parallels the tale about the extinction of the Neanderthals crafted by Carr in iGirl. In the first section of the play, the character on stage asserts that “We destroyed the Neanderthals” (Ibid., 50). Carr elaborates on that episode of the Homo sapiens’ (hi)story in the thirteenth section of the play, which tells the story of “A lone / Neanderthal / Last of its / Kind” who “invited” some Homo sapiens to “S[i]t by / Her fire” (Ibid., 47–48). The story goes on: She served up The dinner Like a good host They served her Up for Breakfast

(Ibid., 48)

The repetition of the same action sets the antagonistic moral compasses of the two species mentioned in the first section of iGirl: While the Neanderthals are “gentle” (Ibid., 5), the Homo sapiens long for the commodification and annihilation of the others because “Nothing exists / Except us” (Ibid., 7), thus sustaining the idea that “The wrong species / Survived” (Ibid., 4). In the thirteenth section of iGirl, the last Neanderthal is a woman, while the Homo sapiens are men as exposed through their essentialisation through a single figure after their cannibalistic feast: “Transhumant / Licked / His lips” (Ibid., 48). Through the consumption of a Neanderthal woman, Carr makes the emergence of humanity coincide with the rise of patriarchy, which also underlies her retelling of the myth of Antigone in the play. In iGirl, those instances of oppression of women stand as the “string theory” (Ibid., 3) that propels human tragedy as the “Homo sapiens” is cursed to become a “vanished tribe / Stuff of the myth” (Ibid., 83).

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  71 Notes 1 Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz does not include Clytemnestra in her study. As I will explore later in this chapter, Clytemnestra stands as the first and most complete embodiment of vindictive monstrous womanhood. 2 The prefix “gyne” is based on the ancient Greek word “γυνή,” which specifically alludes to a woman, while the prefix “anthropo” is based on “ἄνθρωπος,” which alludes to a human seemingly genderless but actually conceived as a man. 3 This myth was perhaps not created yet at the time of Homer. From a contemporary perspective, however, it is an essential episode of the narrative as it enables the Greeks to go to Troy. 4 The modern and contemporary theatre has had a greater interest in the character than the ancient Greeks. Some of the most canonical artists of Western culture, namely, Jean Racine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Christoph Willibald Gluck, have produced drama and opera focusing on Iphigenia and her myth. However, she has never achieved the reputation of the male heroes of the Trojan War. 5 This expression is used by Isabelle Torrance to describe Fermoy and Ariel’s relationship. See Torrance (2018, 77). 6 Lévi-Strauss considers the prohibition of incest as the threshold which enables humanity to move from nature to culture. See Butler (2000, 16). 7 Creon indeed mentions the Sphinx as the main reason for the Thebans not looking into Laius’ murder at the time: “The Sphinx with her riddling song forced us to let go what was obscure and attend to what lay before our feet” (“ἡ ποικιλῳδὸς Σφὶγξ τὸ πρὸς ποσὶ σκοπεῖν / μεθέντας ἡμᾶς τἀφανῆ προσήγετο”). See Sophocles, 1997b, 338–339.

Works Cited Primary Sources Aeschylus. 2008a. Agamemnon. In Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 1–205. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Aeschylus. 2008b. Eumenides. In Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 353–485. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Carr, M. 1999. Plays One. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2009. Plays Two. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2015. Plays Three. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2021. iGirl. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2022. Girl on an Altar. London: Faber. Euripides. 2001. Medea. In Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 275–413. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2002. Iphigenia at Aulis. In Baccae. Iphigenia at Aulis. Rhesus, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 155–341. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2005a. Hecuba. In Children of Heracles. Hippolytus. Andromache. Hecuba, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 391–519. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press.

72  From “Woman” to Women on Stage Euripides. 2005b. Hippolytus. In Children of Heracles. Hippolytus. Andromache. Hecuba, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 115–263. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. McGuinness, F. 2006. Phaedra after Racine. London: Faber. Racine, J. 2013. Théâtre Complet, ed. A. Viala and S. Guyot. Paris: Garnier. Seneca the Younger. 2018. Phaedra. In Hercules. Trojan Women. Phoenician Women. Medea. Phaedra, ed. and trans. J. G. Fitch, 405–523. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1997a. Electra. In Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 165–321. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1997b. Oedipus Tyrannus. In Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 323–483. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1998a. Antigone. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 1–127. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1998b. Oedipus at Colonus. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 409–599. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Secondary Sources Ahmed, S. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arendt, H. 2018. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Aristotle. 1999. Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Bacalexi, D. 1999. Médée héroïque: persistance ou perversion du code ?. Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé. 3: 274–299. Beauvoir (de), S. 1956. The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Blondell, R., M.-K. Gamel, N. Sorkin Rabinowitz, and B. Vivante. 2002. Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. 2000. Antigone’s Claims: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Cartledge, P. 2002. The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Case, S.-E. 1988. Feminism and Theatre. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Derrida, J. 1988. Signature Event Context. In Limited Inc, trans. S. Webber and J. Mehlman, 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Des Bouvrie, S. 1990. Women in Greek Tragedy: An Anthropological Approach. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Eliade, M. 1963. Les Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard.

From “Woman” to Women on Stage  73 Finn, N. and M. Carr. 2012. Theatre in Eleven Dimensions: A Conversation with Marina Carr. World Literature Today. 86.4: 42–46. Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, IL: Princeton University Press. Gizło, D. 2021. The Art of Experience: The Theatre of Marina Carr and Contemporary Psychology. Abingdon: Routledge/Taylor and Francis. Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hall, E. 2005. Iphigenia and Her Mother at Aulis: A Study in the Revival of a Euripidean Classic. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 3–41. London: Bloomsbury. Hill, S. 2019. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, E. 2002. Unmasking the Myths? Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and On Raftery’s Hill. In Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. J. M. Walton and M. McDonald, 243–262. London: Methuen. Kurdi, M. 2010. Representations of Gender and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Drama by Women. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. Kurdi, M. 2022. An Act of Love? Filicide and Child-Killing in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats and Deirdre Kinahan’s Spinning. In “I Love Craft. I Love the Word.”: The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan, ed. L. Fitzpatrick and M. Kurdi, ­183–204. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Lauretis (de), T. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. London: Macmillan. Leavy, A. 2016. Marina Carr Interview: “There is an Affinity between the Russian Soul and the Irish Soul”. Irish Times, December 6. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/marina-carr-interview-there-is-an-affinity-between-the-russian-souland-the-irish-soul-1.2893945. Leeney, C. 2007. Feminist Meanings of Presence and Performance in Theatre: Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan. In Opening the Field, Irish Women: Texts and Contexts, ed. P. Boyle Haberstroh and C. St Peter, 92–101. Cork: Cork University Press. Loraux, N. 1984. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. C. Levine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Murphy, P. 2006. Staging Histories in Marina Carr’s Midlands Plays. Irish University Review. 36.2: 389–402. Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh. 2016. University of Oxford Podcasts. August 9. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/playwright-marinacarr-conversation-fiona-macintosh. Plumwood, V. 2003. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge. Poignault, R. 1995. L’Antiquité dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar: littérature, mythe et histoire, 2. Bruxelles: Latomus. Pomeroy, S. B. 1995. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books.

74  From “Woman” to Women on Stage Rey, B. 2002. Médée. In Dictionnaire des mythes féminins, ed. P. Brunel, ­1280–1295. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. Sihra, M. 2007. Introduction: Figures at the Window. In Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. M. Sihra, 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sihra, M. 2018. Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International Publishing. Sorkin Rabinowitz, N. 1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU. 2017. YouTube. January 18. https:// youtu.be/pAKXPoJJHAs?si=NFXFJaXH0dTNDMsq. Theatre of War Symposium Day Three – Concluding Talk: Marina Carr. YouTube. https://youtu.be/720KzIKEpq8?si=lUxfNaBCyggx2haR. Torrance, I. 2018. Greek Tragedy and the Tiger: The Politics of Literary Allusion in Marina Carr’s Ariel. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. 25.3: 69–99. Vernant, J.-P. and P. Vidal Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. P. Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Zeitlin, F. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Žižek, S. and M. Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge.

2 Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths

Human nature changes very little. That’s one of the reasons I love all the myths. We have not changed that much. The passions are still raging in us all. The idea of family, love, right, wrong, all these questions that they try to tackle, they are still with us and we are still as far from the answers as we were then. (Carr in Terrazas Gallego, 195) Marina Carr’s reflection grounds her fascination with myths in their universality. This intrinsic characteristic of mythological stories, which has ensured their transmission throughout the centuries and cultures, is however more convoluted than it seems. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the specificity of the myth lies in the recognisability of its essence as a myth by “any reader anywhere in the world” no matter their “ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated” (Lévi-Strauss, 210). Meaning is thus not fixated but rather fluid in the myth, while its story and structure remain partly stable. Despite the multiple versions of a single myth, the story remains identifiable through its “mythemes,” which are “gross constituent units” (Ibid., 211) specific to the mythological material and appearing in all the various variations of the same myth. The disjunction of the story and the meaning enables “the alleged universality” (Laera, 1) of the classical myth, especially as dramatised in Greek tragedy. The myth stands as the perfect material encompassing the questions and issues of interpretation, especially through its dramatisation in the history of theatre. Susan Bassnett argues that “[t]he reader … translates or decodes [a] text according to a different set of systems and the idea of the one ‘correct’ reading is dissolved” (Bassnett, 91). In this regard, transpositions of Greek tragedies appear to dramatise the reading of the source text specific to a certain playwright. Yet, the processes of decoding and translating sets of systems are not individually but rather socially grounded. As pointed out by

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298991-3

76  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Roland Barthes, “the work has several meanings” and “[e]ach age can … believe that it holds the canonical meaning of the work” (Barthes, 25). Yet, considering that “[t]he very definition of the work is changing: it is no longer a historical fact, it is becoming an anthropological fact, since no history can exhaust its meaning” (Ibid.), the production of Greek tragedy on the modern and contemporary stages is to be conceived as an anthropological fact. Margherita Laera notes that “since the second half of the twentieth century, ‘classical’ Greece has provided a myth of ‘origin’ in relation to which European ‘democracies’ define themselves” (Laera, 7). Theatre is central to that project because “[t]hrough the mythologies associated with Greek tragedy, it is ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘participation’ that are constructed as timeless” and “underpin narratives of cultural superiority” (Ibid., 10). Yet, the transpositions produced by Carr do not seem to fit such a pattern. Indeed, while the phenomenon described by Laera relies on “the de-ideologization and de-historicization of Greek tragedy” (Ibid.), Carr’s transpositions draw a connection between “the cultural and sexual politics of fifth-century Athenian and twentieth-century Irish society” (Sihra 2005, 116), and the Western world more broadly.1 Carr’s transpositions rely on the feminist concept of the “resisting reader,” which draws attention to the “ancient male authors’ patriarchal control of the characters’ voices” (Hall 2004,  56). It is connected to the theory of “performance reception” elaborated by Edith Hall to “study the ways … ancient Greece … ha[s] been ‘received’ in performed media” (Ibid., 51). Performance reception operates “at the precise intersection of the diachronic history of a particular text … and the synchronic reconstruction of what such a text” means “at the time of the production” (Ibid., 56). This dual temporality stands as the backbone of Carr’s dramatic project of transposing Greek tragedies. But depending on the mode of transposition, one temporality comes across more clearly than the other. Up to this date, two phases articulate Carr’s approach and use of Greek tragedy in her theatre. In the Midlands plays, classical tragedies appear as intertextualities translocated in the cultural context of modern Ireland. The Greek myths thus sustain the questioning of the Irish patriarchal metanarrative2 that defines women’s role as homemakers confined within the home. In the plays created since the 2010s, however, Carr has retained, at least partly, the classical diegesis3 of the tragedies that she has been transposing, thus challenging more generally and explicitly the Western patriarchal metanarratives inherited from the Greeks. These two phases match the distinction established by Julie Sanders between “adaptation” and “appropriation” in the wide field of transposition, which provides the structure and lens of analysis of Carr’s feminist transpositions of Greek tragedies in this chapter.

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  77 Adapting the Greeks: A Feminist Response to the Classical Tragedians Carr’s Phaedra Backwards (2011), Hecuba (2015), iGirl (2021), and Girl on an Altar (2022) display several features mentioned in Sanders’ conception of adaptation. The definition she elaborates on the concept is broad and subsequently tackles most of its manifestations. It includes “amplificatory procedure[s] engaged in addition, expansion, accretion, and interpolation” of the source text (Sanders, 18), which are at play in Carr’s work. In Phaedra Backwards, the screen on stage extends the diegesis of the myth dramatised in Euripides’ Hippolytus. In the prologue, for instance, the screen displays a film showing an episode from Phaedra’s childhood while the adult character embodied by an actor stands on stage. In Hecuba and Girl on an Altar, the dramatic speech, which blends “soliloquy and dialogue” (Sihra 2018, 268), manifests the characters’ inner thoughts as they experience the events dramatised in the source texts. In iGirl, the tragic myth of Antigone as conceived in Sophocles’ tragedy is accreted to a wider narrative about death and extinction. Carr’s use of these amplificatory procedures enables her adaptations to offer “commentar[ies] on the sourcetext[s],” which is another manifestation of the concept (Sanders, 18). The dramatic devices that she sets support the transformative process and result that the classical tragic myths undergo in her plays as they imply that the source tragedies dramatised a single perspective on the stories: Men’s. It thus demonstrates an additional expression of adaptation: The “attempt to make texts ‘relevant’ … to new audiences … via the processes of approximation and updating” (Sanders, 19), which Carr approaches through the lens of feminism. As her adaptations of Greek tragedies intend to defuse the patriarchal metanarratives that have endorsed the sexist oppression of women in Western civilisations throughout history, her work illustrates the tendency of “every generation” to “retranslat[e] the classics, out of a vital compulsion for immediacy and precise echo … [in order] to build its own resonant past” (Steiner, 29–30). In Hecuba, Carr approaches the events of the fall of Troy not as a war but as a genocide. The eponymous character indeed asserts during the first speech of the play that “this is not a war. In war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide” (Carr 2015, 212). This introduces the backbone of Carr’s dramatic strategy: As the Greeks “wip[ed] [the Trojans] out” (Ibid.), the Trojans’ history has been obliterated and substituted by the Greeks’ “version” of the (hi)story. The question of the name of Andromache and Hector’s son is particularly interesting in that instance. While Euripides refers to the child using the name Astyanax in The Trojan

78  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Women, Carr establishes that it is not his true name in the first scene of Hecuba: Agamemnon: Hecuba:

I thought his name was Astyanax. No. Scamandrius.

(Ibid., 214)

The two names are mentioned in Homer’s Iliad: “Him Hector was used to call Scamandrius, but other men Astyanax; for only Hector guarded Ilios” (“τόν ῥ᾿ Ἕκτωρ καλέεσκε Σκαμάνδριον, αὐτὰρ οἱ ἄλλοι / Ἀστυάνακτ᾿· οἶος γὰρ ἐρύετο Ἴλιον Ἕκτωρ”) (Homer, Iliad, 304–305). This implies that Scamandrius was the birth name of the child and Astyanax his nickname. In her adaptation, Carr plays on the two names given to the child to suggest that the Greeks do not have an accurate knowledge of the Trojan civilisation, hence foreshadowing her “correction” of the classical course of action. Yet, while the confusion of names regarding Andromache and Hector’s son is accidental, the genesis of the war is an intentional distortion of (hi)story. The first scene also addresses, and thus corrects, the question of the cause of the war. The Trojan War is traditionally conceived as resulting from the rapt of Helen – Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus’ wife – by Hecuba’s son Paris. Yet, The Iliad, which is the most ancient remaining source relating a part of that mythological story, is more cryptic on the question. In the second book of the epic, a debate about the possibility of ending the war emerges among the human as well as the divine characters. The god Hera, who supports the Greeks and hates the Trojans vividly, polemically asks the question: “would they [the Greeks] leave a boast to Priam and the Trojans, Argive Helen, for whose sake many Achaeans have perished in Troy, far from their dear native land?” (“δέ κεν εὐχωλὴν Πριάμῳ καὶ Τρωσὶ λίποιεν / Ἀργείην Ἑλένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ Ἀχαιῶν / ἐν Τροίῃ ἀπόλοντο, φίλης ἀπὸ πατρίδος αἴης”) (Homer, Iliad, 72–73) to rally Athena to her cause. Yet, the following book offers a different input into that matter as Priam – the king of Troy – declares to Helen: “you are in no way to blame in my eyes; it is the gods, surely, who are to blame, who roused against me the tearful war of the Achaeans” (“οὔ / τί μοι αἰτίη ἐσσί, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν, / οἵ μοι ἐφώρμησαν πόλεμον πολύδακρυν Ἀχαιῶν”) (Ibid., 140–141). Euripides does not offer such a complex insight into the cause of the war in his Trojan tragedies as the chorus of Hecuba “cursed Helen” (“Ἑλέναν … κατάρᾳ”) (Euripides 2005a, 282–484) for the destruction of Troy. In Carr’s adaptation, however, “Helen was never” in Troy (Carr 2015, 216). In doing so, Carr plays on another tradition first mentioned by the ancient historian Herodotus and then dramatised by Euripides. His tragedy Helen indeed relies on the premise that it is not Helen who was kidnapped by Paris but “a breathing image” (“εἴδωλον ἔμπνουν”) looking like her

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  79 (Euripides 2002, 14–15) while she was sent to Egypt by the gods where she remained for the whole time of the war. Carr partly uses that lesserknown version of the myth, which breaks subsequently with “the patriarchal violation of property” associated with the abduction of a woman as the starter of the war (Meyer, 21). Yet, she goes further than Herodotus and Euripides as she implies through the lines of Hecuba that “Helen does not exist,” and that the Greeks “made her up” because they “needed a reason to take” Troy (Carr 2015, 216). Girl on an Altar provides some complementary information on the topic. Although Helen appears to exist as Clytemnestra meets her at the house of their father Tyndareus, the play dismisses the affair with and the rapt by Paris as causes for the war since “[t]here was no need to go to Troy” (Carr 2022, 40). Carr does so to focus on the conflict of civilisations that underlies the Trojan War, especially as addressed in Greek tragedy. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, for instance, Helen attempts to redeem herself in the eyes of her husband Menelaus by reminding the “beauty contest” (“κάλλει”) that opposed ­ Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena and its consequences not only for herself but for all the Greek world: Cypris defeated the other goddesses, and my relations with Paris benefitted Greece to this extent: you are not ruled by barbarians, either because of a battle or by usurpation. But Hellas’ good fortune was my ruin: I was sold because of my beauty, and I am reproached for something for which I should have received a garland on my head. (Κύπρις δὲ τοὐμὸν εἶδος ἐκπαγλουμένη δώσειν ὑπέσχετ᾿, εἰ θεὰς ὑπερδράμοι κάλλει. τὸν ἔνθεν δ᾿ ὡς ἔχει σκέψαι λόγον· νικᾷ Κύπρις θεάς, καὶ τοσόνδ᾿ οὑμοὶ γάμοι ὤνησαν Ἑλλάδ᾿· οὐ κρατεῖσθ᾿ ἐκ βαρβάρων, οὔτ᾿ ἐς δόρυ σταθέντες, οὐ τυραννίδι. ἃ δ᾿ ηὐτύχησεν Ἑλλάς, ὠλόμην ἐγὼ εὐμορφίᾳ πραθεῖσα, κὠνειδίζομαι ἐξ ὧν ἐχρῆν με στέφανον ἐπὶ κάρᾳ λαβεῖν.)

(Euripides 1999, 104–105)

That civilisational conflict stands at the root of Carr’s Hecuba and the redemption that the titular character undergoes in the adaptation because, as argued by Carr, “it was easy to trash Hecuba” since “she was a Trojan, she was the enemy, and most of all she was a woman” (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU). In this respect, the monstrosity associated with the classical figure does not stem only from the sexist conception of women but also from the racist vision of non-Greek peoples.

80  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths In Euripides’ Hecuba, the eponymous character manifests a dramatic representation of “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1243) specific to the classical period. In addition to being a woman, Hecuba is a barbarian. The word is used at the beginning of the tragedy and frames the identity of the Trojans as Odysseus states: Continue, barbarian peoples, not regarding your friends as friends and not honoring those who have died noble deaths, so that Greece may prosper while you enjoy the fate your principles deserve! (οἱ βάρβαροι δὲ μήτε τοὺς φίλους φίλουςἡγεῖσθε μήτε τοὺς καλῶς τεθνηκότας αυμάζεθ᾿, ὡς ἂν ἡ μὲν Ἑλλὰς εὐτυχῇ, ὑμεῖς δ᾿ ἔχηθ᾿ ὅμοια τοῖς βουλεύμασιν.)

(Euripides 2005a, 426–427)

While the first “barbarian” flaw alludes to Polymestor’s breach of the hospitality rule, the second one foreshadows Hecuba’s act of retaliation. Polyxena died with “nobility” (“ἀρίστῃ”) (Ibid., 450–451) but the glory of her death is then undermined by her mother’s excessive revenge. This dimension is not only characteristic of women left uncontrolled by men. It is also a founding pillar of the barbarian identity in the Greeks’ minds since the non-Greek civilisations were conceived to be “[socially] deviant” during the 5th century B.C.E. (Hall 1989, 149). Carr unifies the classical dichotomy opposing the Greeks to the barbarians in her adaptation, creating a single identity of barbarian Greeks as Cassandra discloses that the Greeks “were the wild dogs, the barbarians, the savages” (Carr 2015, 259). This specific input draws inspiration from the tradition of interpretation of Euripides’ Trojan tragedies initiated with Gilbert Murray’s translation of The Trojan Women in 1905, which drew a parallel between the Greeks’ actions in the play and British imperialism over the world (Lauriola 2015b, 65). Yet, this dimension was first brought on stage by Jean-Paul Sartre (Ibid., 66). In his version of The Trojan Women (1962–1965),4 Sartre actualises the Euripidean line showing the “radical inversion of the moral hierarchy” between Greeks and the barbarians (Hall 1989, 149) on which the tragic action is built. In Euripides’ tragedy, Andromache states while her young son is taken away from her to be killed by the Greeks: “Greeks, devisers of barbaric cruelty, why do you kill this innocent boy?” (“ὦ βάρβαρ᾿ ἐξευρόντες Ἕλληνες κακά, / τί τόνδε παῖδα κτείνετ᾿ οὐδὲν αἴτιον”) (Euripides 1999, 90–91) In Sartre’s version, this line is extended to include clear references to the colonial ideology: Men from Europe, You despise Asia and Africa,

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  81 and I believe you call us barbarians, but vanity and greed have led you to our lands, you have been stealing, torturing, and slaughtering. Who are the barbarians then? And you, Greeks, so proud of your humanely virtues, Where are you? Let me tell you this: none of us would have dared to do to a mother, what you are doing to me with a calm and clear conscience. Barbarians! Barbarians!5

(Sartre 1965, 81)

Andromache’s lines dramatise Sartre’s blatant denunciation of the hypocrisy sustaining colonialism. In his political writings,6 he specifically exposes the pretence of the “civilising” enterprise of the colonial system since colonised peoples are reduced to “subhumans” so human rights would not apply to them (Sartre 1973, 26). Such a modern interpretation of the tragic myth of Troy has influenced Carr’s adaptation, even though she does not transpose the same tragedy as Sartre. Hecuba has been disregarded in the history of the reception of Euripides’ tragedies, especially when compared with The Trojan Women. This dismissal stems from the violent action performed by the character and fuelling her misogynistic and racist characterisation, the adapters preferring to frame Hecuba’s reaction to her misery through grief rather than revenge (Dugdale, 100). Carr blends the two Euripidean tragedies in her adaptation: Although the action is based on Hecuba, the eponymous character appears as a grieving figure like in The Trojan Women. In doing so, Carr’s Hecuba settles into a new trend regarding the reception of Euripides’ Trojan tragedies. Over the last twenty years, playwrights have shown a greater interest in transposing Hecuba than The Trojan Women (Ibid., 101). In 2004 and 2005, two versions of Hecuba were produced in London: One composed by Frank McGuinness and the other by Tony Harrison. Both of them apply “the radical inversion of the moral hierarchy” between the Greeks and the barbarians structuring The Trojan Women to Hecuba. In McGuinness’ version, the Greek institution of slavery appears barbaric as Euripides’ line “τὸ δοῦλον ὡς κακὸν” (Euripides 2005a, 428), which means literally “slavery is a bad thing,” is translated into “Slavery is a savage thing” (McGuinness 2004, 18). The word “savage” has been consistently used to designate colonised peoples by colonial rulers to justify colonisation. Yet, McGuinness refers to the Greeks, who have been constructed as the ancestors of Western democracies. Unlike McGuinness, who is reluctant to be

82  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths “too emotionally or politically engaged” in his plays (Garner), Harrison explicitly draws a parallel between his version of Hecuba and the context of its production. He indeed stated in an essay: “We may still be weeping for Hecuba, but we allow our politicians to flood the streets of Iraq with more and more Hecubas in the name of freedom and democracy” (Harrison, 121). The performance of his version fully embraced that interpretation of the classical tragedy as a “pencil amendment in the prompt book” shows the addition of the line “Democracy demands a human sacrifice”7 delivered by Hecuba to refer to Polyxena’s sacrifice (Brodie, 56). Carr approaches the adaptation of Hecuba quite similarly. As the final lines of the play challenge the course of action of Euripides’ ­Hecuba, Carr questions the founding pillars of the Western identity. Since the Greeks were “the wild dogs, the barbarians, the savages” (Carr 2015, 259), their victory enabled the emergence of “a harsher world that would become Greece, that has become us” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). At the time of the performance in 2015, the exactions perpetrated by the Greek army on the Trojan civilians echoed the slaughters conducted by the dictator Bashar al-Assad and the terrorist organisation ISIS in the Middle East. As noted by Carr, “[t]hese wars are completely wiping out some countries and no one in the West bats an eyelid” (Sihra 2018, 267) because Western democracies were seemingly not involved in these conflicts. Yet, the multiple colonial and imperialist interventions of the West in the Middle East have “left … entire civilisation[s] on [their] knees” (Carr 2015, 259–260) and led to the rise of tyrannical power, like al-Assad’s, and terrorist groups, like ISIS. These crises have forced thousands of people to leave their countries, some of them trying to seek refuge in Europe, which has undoubtedly failed to welcome and protect them. Through the West’s inability to prevent these slaughters and accommodate the asylum seekers, “we are playing out the legacy of Troy” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). Like our Greek “ancestors,” we are the true “barbarians” as implied by Carr in her adaptation of Hecuba. Contrastingly, Carr seems to only slightly change the denouement of Euripides’ Hippolytus in Phaedra Backwards. The adaptation’s first scene shows one of the implications of the title. Phaedra Backwards indeed opens on the final action of the source tragedy as it shows Theseus lamenting over his son’s death. This early revelation echoes the non-chronological construction of The Mai (1994) and Portia Coughlan (1996) as both of them show the protagonists’ dead bodies in the middle of the plays. In doing so, Carr plays on a distinctive feature of Greek tragedy: There is no surprise regarding the fate of the characters.

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  83 Some tragedies go so far as to unravel the course of the action in the prologue. Euripides’ Hippolytus is among them. The tragedy starts with a monologue from the god Aphrodite who states that “[she] shall this day punish Hippolytus” (“τιμωρήσομαι / Ἱππόλυτον ἐν τῇδ᾿ ἡμέρᾳ”) (Euripides 2005b, 126–127). She then mentions that since “Phaedra saw [Hippolytus] … her heart was seized with a dreadful longing” (“ἰδοῦσα Φαίδρα καρδίαν κατέσχετο / ἔρωτι δεινῷ”) (Ibid.). While Phaedra “means to die in silence, … that is not the way this passion of hers is fated to end” (“ἀπόλλυται / σιγῇ … οὔτι ταύτῃ τόνδ᾿ ἔρωτα χρὴ πεσεῖν”) (Ibid.), as Aphrodite “shall reveal the matter to Theseus” (“δείξω … Θησεῖ πρᾶγμα”) (Ibid.), which is going to prompt Hippolytus to “be killed by his father with curses the sea lord Poseidon granted him” (“κτενεῖ πατὴρ ἀραῖσιν ἃς ὁ πόντιος / ἄναξ Ποσειδῶν ὤπασεν Θησεῖ”) (Ibid., 128–129). Such an opening is not characteristic of Greek tragedy though since Euripides appears to be the only classical tragedian to proceed in that way (Kitto, 278). Furthermore, the use of prologues has been deemed unnecessary as the classical audience already knew the stories dramatised (Ibid., 279). Tragedies are indeed based on archaic myths, which were used as pedagogical tools in children’s education during the 5th century B.C.E. as mentioned by Plato in The Republic. The classical audiences thus had a good knowledge of the fate of the characters. Euripides’ inclusion of prologues echoes the narrative structure of the sources that he adapts in his tragedies. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre VidalNaquet observe that Greek tragedy “borrow[s] from the legends about the heroes … appear[ing] in the epic cycles” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 213). Yet, these narratives rely on “anticipation,” also known as “temporal prolepsis,” to set “a plot of predestination,” especially as illustrated in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as in Virgil’s Aeneid (Genette 1972, 105). In Carr’s drama, the early revelation of the characters’ death fulfils the same purpose. As in Greek tragedy, her plays do not focus on the characters’ destinations but rather on their journeys. However, unlike the plots of The Mai and Portia Coughlan, the story dramatised in Phaedra Backwards is familiar to the audience because of the canonicity of the myth. Carr’s decision to start her adaptation with the final action of the source plays on the audience’s expectation that she unsettles from the beginning. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra commits suicide and leaves a note wrongfully accusing the eponymous character of rape, which is the cause of his death. In Phaedra Backwards, however, Phaedra stands alive on stage and argues with Theseus about who is to blame for Hippolytus’ tragic ending. Since “[l]ast night was the cause of tonight” (Carr 2015, 79), the audience expects the story to move back in time to grasp how fate is played out. Yet, the second scene takes them further into the past than

84  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths the night before Hippolytus’ death as it shows Phaedra’s mother Pasiphae elaborating a strategy “to woo the white bull” (Ibid., 81), hence locating the origin of the tragedy in the human rather than the divine realm, which seems a substantial departure from the source. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, however, Aphrodite’s involvement does not absolve Phaedra’s guilt for her incestuous passion since “divine interventions … express and define” human character, thus “[i]f a god fills [someone] with … lust, this is a manifestation of [their] … desire” (Blondell et alii, 17). Tragedy is indeed defined as the dramatisation of “a change … from prosperity to adversity, caused … by a great error of a character” (“μεταβάλλειν … ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν … δι᾿ ἁμαρτίαν μεγάλην”) (Aristotle, 70–71). In Hippolytus, Euripides stresses Phaedra’s hamartia as a re-enactment of Pasiphae’s: “Unhappy mother, what a love was yours! … From far back came my woe, not from recent times!” (“ὦ τλῆμον, οἷον, μῆτερ, ἠράσθης ἔρον. … ἐκεῖθεν ἡμεῖς, οὐ νεωστί, δυστυχεῖς”) (Euripides 2005b, 156–159). This conception of hamartia works not only at an individual but also at an intergenerational level, which Carr’s adaptation highlights. In Phaedra Backwards, the divine intervention of the source tragedy is mocked as the eponymous character states: “A few thousand years ago we could blame Aphrodite” (Carr 2015, 88). This line actually comments on the history of Euripides’ dramatisation of the myth. The tragedy Hippolytus that has become canonical is not the first version produced by the tragedian. Unfortunately, very little is known about the first Hippolytus due to its fragmentary state. Yet, it has been evidenced “that the play outraged its audience by the shamelessness of its Phaedra, who openly declared her guilty passion to Hippolytus and when rebuffed, just as brazenly confronted her husband face to face and herself accused Hippolytos of sexual assault” (Zeitlin, 219). This course of action from a lost tragedy seems, however, to have influenced the reception of the tragic myth. One of the most ancient adaptations, the Roman tragedy Phaedra produced by Seneca during the 1st century, relies on a course of action very similar to the first Hippolytus. The absence of Aphrodite connects Phaedra’s hamartia more ostensibly to her mother’s as Hippolytus claims: “you have dared a mightier evil than your monster-bearing mother” (“o maius ausa matre monstrifera malum / genetrice peior”) (Seneca the Younger, 474–475). Jean Racine’s adaptation appears at the crossroads of the two traditions. In Phèdre (1677), the eponymous character blames Venus for the miserable passions experienced by the women in her family, which Frank McGuinness translates in his version (2006): Venus hates me … She perverted my poor mother … Ariadne – my sister –

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  85 She died from love … I am the last of my breed to die. The last and the most lost. Venus wants that – she gets that.

(McGuinness 2006, 13)

In Phaedra Backwards, the juxtaposition of the news of Hippolytus’ death in the first scene with the dramatisation of Pasiphae’s passion for the white bull in the second one appears to play out the intergenerational dimension of Phaedra’s hamartia. This dimension seems all the more important since Carr brings on stage the character’s unfortunate family history while the previous playwrights only mentioned it. In doing so, Carr offers a new perspective on the seemingly monstrous passion of Pasiphae for the white bull. The character indeed claims that she is “only doing what women imagine” (Carr 2015, 82). Carr thus turns Pasiphae’s love affair into a metaphor manifesting women’s sexual agency, which reminds the audience that the significance of a myth does not lie in its literality but in its symbolism. The necessity of using a device to mate with the white bull demonstrates the restrictions imposed on women by patriarchy and encompassed in Pasiphae’s body, which determines her position and situation as a woman. Kate Millet argues in Sexual Politics that sexuality “can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum” because “it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes” (Millet, 23). In patriarchal societies, women are considered “sexual object[s]” (Ibid., 54), thus implying a complete lack of agency that Pasiphae overcomes in Phaedra Backwards. Such an attitude is deemed “obscene” by the inventor (Carr 2015, 82). Not only does this translate the patriarchal reaction to women’s sexual agency, but it also indicates the frame through which the myth has been conceived and received. Pasiphae is not the sole character to be infatuated with the white bull as she underlines that her husband Minos has also been “seduced” too (Ibid., 100). Yet, she is the only one who has been blamed for being a “bull-fancier, a monster-maker” (Ibid.). The re-examination of Pasiphae’s desire has consequences on the conception of Phaedra’s passion because of the intergenerational dimension of the hamartia. Pasiphae’s story has been framed through the patriarchal ideology, and so has Phaedra’s. Yet, this dimension comes across more obviously as Carr reverses the relationship dynamics between the two characters involved in the incestuous “affair.” In Phaedra Backwards, Phaedra is not in love with Hippolytus, but Hippolytus loves Phaedra, thus revealing another implication of the play’s title. In this regard, Carr’s adaptation does not show the re-enactment of a woman’s tragic flaw through Phaedra’s action, but the perpetuation of the demonisation of women as sexual

86  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths beings implemented through patriarchal culture. Such an adaptation of the classical myth resonates with the current issue of victim blaming as women are still too often constructed as the primary instigators of the sexual and domestic violence they experience, and Phaedra is one of them. Theseus indeed reveals that he used to do “all sorts of unspeakable things” while Phaedra was “unconscious,” but “[w]hen [he] hurt[s] [her] now [he] want[s] [her] to know” (Ibid., 90). The play does not show Theseus being physically violent towards Phaedra. Yet, his lines imply that he raped his wife in the past and currently subjects her to psychological and emotional abuse. Like most victims and survivors, Phaedra is not flawless: She pretends that she loves Hippolytus out of “bored[om]” (Ibid., 80). Her lying “whim” (Ibid.) appears as a reaction to years of abuse at the hands of Theseus and does not intend to cause harm as Phaedra is unaware that it would eventually lead to Hippolytus’ death. Contrastingly with the tradition of the myth, Carr’s Phaedra is “no debaucher of the young” and longs for “no one’s destruction but [her] own” (Ibid., 104–105). This particular input makes Phaedra Backwards stand aside from the other adaptations of the myth produced by women playwrights during the 20th century. From a contemporary perspective, the absence of Aphrodite means that Phaedra “[n]ow … ha[s] to take the blame for everything on [her]self” (Ibid., 89) as accurately observed by the character in Carr’s adaptation. This dimension is at the core of the characterisation of the classical figure elaborated in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Qui n’a pas son Minotaure? (To Each His Minotaur) (1963). This French writer was the first woman elected to the influent and prestigious institution of the Académie Française (French Academy) in 1980 and a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir, whose feminist essay The Second Sex was groundbreaking at the time for claiming that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Beauvoir, 273). Yet, Yourcenar was hostile to feminism, considering that it was “dangerous” to “make the woman the equivalent, the parallel of the modern man” (Marguerite Yourcenar et le féminisme), which her adaptation of the myth of Phaedra illustrates. Qui n’a pas son Minotaure? (To Each His Minotaur) is “an analeptic continuation”8 of Euripides’, Seneca’s, and Racine’s plays as it dramatises Theseus’ expedition to Crete to kill the Minotaur and ends with his return to Athens with Phaedra, whose final line reads: “Theseus, I hope I will make myself loved by Hippolytus” (Yourcenar, 231). As the denouement forecasts the tragedy leading to the collapse of Theseus’ household, Yourcenar establishes Phaedra as the sole one responsible for this downfall. In this regard, the classical figure’s characterisation is arguably more sexist than the ones produced by Euripides, Seneca, and Racine, especially because Yourcenar’s Phaedra weaponises sexuality on purpose to take advantage of Theseus. Such demonisation

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  87 of the character contrasts with the portrayal of her sister, Ariadne, who is an embodiment of purity, thus revealing Yourcenar’s endorsement of the patriarchal conception of women. Carr is, however, not the first woman playwright to present Phaedra as a victim of abuse as this perspective was first explored in Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996). Unlike the other adaptations of the myth, Phaedra and Hippolytus do have sexual contact as oral sex is performed on stage. Despite being seemingly a consensual act, Phaedra claims that Hippolytus raped her. In Kane’s mind, this accusation reveals “the inadequacy of language to express emotion” as “‘[r]ape’ is the best word Phaedra can find … to describe the emotional decimation [Hippolytus] inflicts” on her (Kane in Saunders, 77). In spite of Kane’s intentions, the play still re-enacts the classical and patriarchal idea that “women’s discourse is false and allows the ‘weaker’ parties to take advantage of their presumed … feebleness” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 122) structuring the ancient myth. This re-enactment needs to be connected to Kane’s refusal to support feminism as a political theory as she believed that “[a]n over-emphasis on sexual politics (or racial or class politics) is a diversion from [the] main problem” of society, that is, “violence or the threat of violence” of which “[c]lass, race and gender divisions are symptomatic,” but “not the cause” (Kane in Stephenson and Langridge, 134). Phaedra Backwards is not the sole instance that shows Carr pushing for feminist reinterpretations of classical myths in comparison to previous playwrights as illustrated in Girl on an Altar, for instance. Like Phaedra Backwards, the topic of men’s violence towards women is at the heart of this adaptation, even though addressed differently. Girl on an Altar starts with the adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and ends with the adaptation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The juxtaposition of these two classical tragedies redeems Clytemnestra as it provides her with a legitimate reason for killing Agamemnon (Hall 2005, 18), and was first experimented on stage by the French director Ariane Mnouchkine (Ibid., 12). Her production of Les Atrides (1990) is a tetralogy showing Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis before the trilogy of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In this regard, the trigger of the tragic, yet temporary, collapse of the dynasty is blamed on Agamemnon rather than Clytemnestra, even though the course of action of the source tragedies is left unchanged. Such an approach to the classical myth has influenced contemporary directors and playwrights. In 1995, Katie Mitchell directed a production of The Oresteia, in which the ghost of Iphigenia is present on stage during the events of Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers (Ibid., 11). This “Iphigenia-focused production of the Oresteia” (Ibid.) reminds constantly to the audience that the tragedy at play was caused by a crime committed by Agamemnon in the past, thus

88  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths undermining the demonisation of Clytemnestra. Similarly, the adaptations of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis created by Colin Teevan in Iph… (1999) and Edna O’Brien in Iphigenia (2003) include scenes forecasting the action of Agamemnon. In the latter, the final scene shows a group of young girls reminiscent of the classical chorus describing prophetically the murder of Agamemnon while “[b]loodied rain starts to fall” on stage (O’Brien, 109). The former goes further as Teevan opens and ends his adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis with a scene from Agamemnon. Iph… starts with a monologue of an old man like Agamemnon does. The old man says, “You Gods, / You cut me loose from this life of tears!” (Teevan, 3), which draws inspiration from the first lines of Agamemnon: “I beg the gods to give me release from this misery” (“Θεοὺς μὲν αἰτῶ τῶνδ᾿ ἀπαλλαγὴν πόνων”) (Aeschylus 2008a, 4–5). Finally, the last moment of Iph… “[r]eturn[s] to the opening scene” (Teevan, 64). Carr displays a comparable strategy in Girl on an Altar considering the sources of this adaptation. Yet, Carr extends the time period of the tragic action dramatised in Aeschylus’ play. In the classical tragedy, Agamemnon is killed on the very day of his return from Troy, but several months – perhaps years – pass between these two events in Girl on an Altar. The adaptation thus interweaves a course of action of Carr’s own creation in the tragic myth of the Atrides. This frames Iphigenia’s sacrifice as the first of a long series of abuses suffered by women at the hands of Agamemnon as he attempts to ensure his domination as head of the household and king of Argos. Iphigenia is not the only child that Clytemnestra loses in Girl on an Altar. While Agamemnon was away, Clytemnestra begat a daughter with Aegisthus: Leda. As he returns to Argos, Agamemnon considers the girl as a “swap” for the “one” that he “took … from” Clytemnestra (Carr 2022, 25). This reveals the girls’ dehumanisation in Agamemnon’s mind. As noted by Clytemnestra, “[he]’d have never agreed to put Orestes on th[e] altar. … But a girl. You can do anything to a girl” (Ibid., 27), thus highlighting that contrary to boys, girls are expendable. The assimilation of Leda to Iphigenia also foreshadows the former’s death in the harem. Although this tragic event is not intended by Agamemnon, it remains part of the punishment faced by Clytemnestra for challenging his power. According to him, Clytemnestra “mov[es] somewhere beyond men and women” (Ibid., 27) as she shows “concern” for “[w]hat happened in Aulis,” which Agamemnon considers to be “[t]he affairs of men” and have “no place for [her] in them” (Ibid.). Consequently, he removes Clytemnestra from the household and sends her with Iphigenia’s substitute, Leda, to the harem. Yet, the home of the Atrides is a place not only for the family but also for power; Clytemnestra is thus stripped from her position as a queen. Agamemnon goes so far as to write Clytemnestra and her daughter off the royal

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  89 narrative as both of their “name[s]” are “forbidden” (Ibid., 32), thus forcing them into a symbolic death, which eventually becomes literal for Leda. Agamemnon’s re-assertion of power through the death of young girls goes beyond the palace and informs his politics over Argos. Carr subverts a traditional characteristic of tragedy to make that point. Commenting on the centrality of aristocratic and royal families in the genre, Raymond Williams observes that a subsidiary implication of the importance of “[r]ank in tragedy” is that “the fate of the ruling family [is] the fate of the city” (Williams, 25). In Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, which is the second play of The Oresteia, Clytemnestra’s illegitimate and unnatural accession to power has placed Electra “in the position of a slave” (“ἀντίδουλος”) (Aeschylus 2008b, 228–229). Through the princess’ fate, Aeschylus alludes to the enslavement of “the entire city of Argos” (“πᾶσαν Ἀργείων πόλιν”), which Orestes eventually “liberate[s]” (“ἠλευθέρωσας”) by killing Clytemnestra (Ibid., 346–347). In Girl on an Altar, Carr gives even more precedence to the connection between the royal and city fate. The sacrifice of Iphigenia started a new ruling policy. While Polyxena’s sacrificial death on the Trojan shore is mentioned, Clytemnestra notes that “[i]t’s becoming a habit” to spill “[t]he blood of spotless girls” for “these new Gods” (Carr 2022, 35). These lines allude to the establishment not of a new religion but rather of patriarchy as Agamemnon gains the title of “Zeus Agamemnon” for killing Iphigenia and keeps on that title after his return from Troy where he killed Polyxena. After hearing about that second sacrifice, Clytemnestra predicts that “[s]oon it’ll be normal … it’ll be a law” (Ibid.). This instils fear regarding the fate of another of her children: Electra. While Clytemnestra is jailed in the harem, thus unable to look after the safety of her daughter, Cilissa fills that position keeping “Electra … around with her” and “sleeping beside her” (Ibid., 47). Although Electra is not offered as a sacrifice, Clytemnestra’s intuition is proven true as “[a]n orphan girl [is] sacrificed in the mountain” (Ibid., 48) by Agamemnon later in the play. The inclusion of this cycle of young girls’ deaths propelled by the sacrifice of Iphigenia repurposes the murder of Agamemnon, which ends Carr’s adaptation. Even though embedded in personal motives for revenge, Clytemnestra’s action exceeds the private sphere and grows into the political realm. Agamemnon’s murder is indeed salutary for all the women living in Argos because it implies that no young girl is to going be sacrificed again. Behind the fall of a powerful man orchestrated by a woman who has been traditionally deemed monstrous, Carr focuses the audience’s attention on the system that has enabled that man to gain and remain in power: The exploitation, oppression, and alienation of women. Like Agamemnon, Oedipus intends to “become / A god” and “That’s all he wanted” Antigone notes in iGirl as she “Lead[s] [him] on / To the grove /

90  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Of the red-clawed / Furies,” where he will eventually die (Carr 2021, 11). Oedipus’ divine longing seems to re-enact the hubris displayed by the character in Sophocles’ tragedy. In Oedipus Tyrannus, he disregards the foreseer Tiresias, who stands as a messenger of the gods. As early as the first episode, Tiresias reveals that Oedipus is “the unholy polluter” (“ἀνοσίῳ μιάστορι”) of Thebes (Sophocles 1997, 358–359). Yet, this revelation is met with utter distrust, which implies that Oedipus believes he knows better than the messenger from the gods, and thus the gods themselves. Carr includes a comparable situation in Girl on an Altar, which seems to sustain the parallel between Oedipus and Agamemnon in her adaptations. In Girl on an Altar, Agamemnon kills “[a]n orphan girl … to win fair words from Delphi,” but the Oracle “says that Agamemnon is not the rightful king,” Aegisthus is (Carr 2022, 34). Yet, Agamemnon regards her as an “old whore” and does not abide by her divine word since he goes eventually to war against Clytemnestra, Tyndareus, and Aegisthus to secure his position as king of Argos. However, unlike Agamemnon, Oedipus’ desire to overgrow his human condition in iGirl does not equate with power but with atonement, since he has “defiled / Everyone / [he] could defile” (Carr 2021, 26). At the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, the eponymous character asks Creon to “[c]ast [him] out … to a place where [he] cannot be addressed by any mortal being” (“ῥῖψόν … ὅπου θνητῶν φανοῦμαι μηδενὸς προσήγορος”) (Sophocles 1997, 472–472). This exile drives Oedipus to Colonus, where he dies “by a miracle” (“θαυμαστός”) as exposed by the messenger in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles 1998b, 584–585). In iGirl, Oedipus does not go there but to the Cythareon. This transformation plays on the Freudian conception of psychoanalysis as it has greatly participated in making the myth’s canonicity through the conceptualisation of the Oedipus complex. According to Sigmund Freud, every man longs to return to his mother’s womb. Yet, Oedipus goes back to the “Haunted place / Th[e] no man’s land” where he was “left” as a baby to die (Carr 2021, 22). In doing so, he grieves over the life he has had since his survival has “wr[ought] / Such havoc” (Ibid., 24) and hopes that “Next time” he will “Get it right” (Ibid., 26). This highlights the new frame that Carr provides to the myth of the Labdacides to fit the main themes of iGirl, which are death and fall. Yet, she adapts the whole Theban cycle by Sophocles, which includes not only Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus, but also Antigone. Antigone is actually the first character from the Labdacides family to speak in iGirl. Her introduction as a “Stubborn girl” defying her “uncle” who plans to “Teach [her] manners” (Ibid., 10) alludes to the meaning constructed throughout the 20th century of Sophocles’ Antigone. This classical tragedy focuses on the topic of religion, with Antigone standing

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  91 for “family religion” and Creon for “public religion” (Vernant and VidalNaquet, 41). Neither of the main characters is right or wrong since they are both guilty of hubris (Eissen, 64). Creon should not have prevented Polynices from being buried because, in doing so, “[he] ha[s] kept here something belonging to the gods below” (“ἔχεις δὲ τῶν κάτωθεν ἐνθάδ᾿ αὖ θεῶν”) (Sophocles 1998a, 102–103) as underlined by the foreseer Tiresias. As for Antigone, she should not have breached the law because, then, “[she] stumbled against the lofty altar of Justice” (“ὑψηλὸν ἐς Δίκας βάθρον / προσέπεσες”) (Ibid., 82–83) as mentioned by the chorus. The events of the 20th century have substantially changed the interpretation of Sophocles’ tragedy. The prohibition of funerals echoes the mass graves in which the bodies of the victims of genocides were left unattended and unidentifiable. It is now considered a crime against human rights that is tried by the International Criminal Court (Duroux and Urdican, 16). In this regard, the conception of Antigone has grown from a pious woman into a figure of resistance against tyrannical ideologies (Ibid.). This new grasp of the classical character coupled with the gender dynamic fuelling the tragic conflict in Antigone and opposing a woman to a man has enabled a feminist reading of Sophocles’ tragedy. In Ireland, this perspective has been brought on stage by the poet Brendan Kennelly. In his version of Antigone (1986), the eponymous character dies because of the patriarchal oppression of women personified through Creon as she proclaims: Men are leading me to death. Men made the law that said I’m guilty. Men will place me In a black hole among rocks. Men will deny me the light.

(Kennelly 2006, 44)

In iGirl, Carr alludes to the feminist reading of Sophocles’ Antigone as Creon wants to “knock the stuffing / Out of [her]” (Carr 2021, 10). Yet, the adaptation does not offer an in-depth exploration of that dimension as their agon is not shown on stage. The patriarchal oppression of women is indeed not the main topic of the dramatised story, even though it is a part of it. As exposed in the first section of the play, iGirl “is not a song about breasts / Or misogyny / Not that they are not worthy themes” but rather “A little ode to men / That fabulous vanished creature” (Ibid., 3). As Carr asserts that “The wrong species / Survived” because “We destroyed the Neanderthals / The gentle mute Neanderthals” (Ibid., 4–5), iGirl is framed as an exploration of the destruction of an idealised primary state of humanity, which the adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone illustrates. Indeed,

92  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths the classical figure “only want[s] to bury … / The brother … who / fought on the wrong side,” even “If it’s the last thing [she] do[es]” (Ibid., 10). This display of kindness contrasts with Creon’s violence. Although the denouement of Sophocles’ Antigone is not included in iGirl, the tragic death of the eponymous character and the survival of her opponent re-enact the destruction of the Neanderthals. The parallel is all the more ostensible as her father Oedipus describes himself “As the last Neanderthal” (Ibid., 24). Yet, Antigone’s death marks the actual extinction of the species because the dynasty of the Labdacides dies with her, which leads to the emergence of a world ruled by violence. Appropriating the Greeks: A Feminist Contestation of Irish Tradition Carr transposes Sophocles’ Antigone in Portia Coughlan (1996) too. In this play, however, the playwright changes the diegesis of the Greek tragedy as the action is set in the context of the Irish Midlands. The translocation of some of the defining and characteristic features of the myth, or “mythemes,” turns “the informing source into a wholly new cultural product” (Sanders, 26) distinctively Irish, which is a mark of appropriation rather than adaptation (Ibid.). The inclusion of the tale of the god Bel and the witch epitomises this dimension. Although it is briefly mentioned in the version of Portia Coughlan published in the collection of plays by Faber, the version included in the anthology of contemporary Irish plays Dazzling in the Dark edited by McGuinness is more detailed. The tale narrates the story of “a ghirl” who “war tha stranges’ loochin’ creature” and “had tha power a’ tellin’ tha future” (Carr 1996, 267). She was thus accused of “causin’ … all a’ [the] things to chome abouh” by “tha people ‘roun’” (Ibid.). In the version published by Faber, the character is simply referred to as “a witch,” a depiction that Portia vehemently disagrees with because the legendary girl “wasn’t evil” but “different” (Carr 1999, 219). The figure of the witch is traditionally used in Western culture to allude to women not complying with the institutionalised patriarchal order. This echoes Portia’s characterisation as her vocal disliking of wifehood and motherhood makes her appear as a “monster” and “the epitome of the unwomanly woman” challenging the gender expectation of the time (Leeney, 94–95). In this regard, the tale re-enacts one of the main functions of classical myths in Greek tragedy. Besides the myth dramatised in the plot, classical tragic plays refer to other mythological stories “to enlarge … our vision of human experience” (Gould, 411). In Sophocles’ Antigone, as the eponymous character is about to meet her tragic sentence, she mentions the figure of Niobe,9

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  93 who “died the saddest death” (“λυγροτάταν ὀλέσθαι”), and to whom she compares herself: “very like her am I, as the god sends me to sleep” (“ᾇ με δαίμων / ὁμοιοτάταν κατευνάζει”) (Sophocles 1998a, 80–81). Through the reference to the myth of Niobe, Antigone sets “a heroic precedent” for her fate (Gould, 410). In Portia Coughlan, the mention of the tale highlights the identification of the eponymous character to the legendary girl, thus informing her tragic fate. The legendary girl was indeed “impaled … on a stake and left … to die” (Carr 1999, 219). Such a “slow death” (Carr 1996, 267) parallels Portia’s situation. As she compares her house to “a coffin” (Carr 1999, 207), her life is a long dying process, which eventually comes to an end with her death by suicide. The connection of Carr’s Portia Coughlan to Sophocles’ Antigone has only been noticed and discussed by a couple of scholars: Paula Murphy (Murphy, 390) and María del Mar González Chacón (del Mar González Chacón, 482). Indeed, while “[a]n adaptation signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext,” the appropriation does not indicate “the appropriated text or texts … as clearly … as in the adaptive process” (Sanders, 26). This stems from the “more decisive journey away from the informing source” displayed in appropriation in comparison to adaptation, which Carr’s transpositions of Greek tragedy perfectly exemplify. In her adaptations, Carr reframes the sources to answer the patriarchal narratives created by the Athenian tragedians. In the Midlands cycle, however, Carr appropriates the classical tragic myths as a reply to the metanarrative about gender fostered in Ireland and according to which a woman’s “life” is “within the home” (1937 Irish Constitution). Marriage is central to both the Irish metanarrative and Carr’s response as illustrated through the appropriation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Portia Coughlan. The Midlands play shows a subversion of the classical tragedy: While Antigone does not marry because she dies for her brother, Portia dies for her brother because she is married. Unlike Portia, Antigone displays some agency regarding her fate. The opening scene of the tragedy brings on stage that dimension through the opposition of Antigone to her sister Ismene. As the latter decides not “to act against the will of the people of the city” (“τὸ δὲ / βίᾳ πολιτῶν δρᾶν … ἀμήχανος”) (Sophocles 1998a, 10–11), the tragedy implies that Antigone faces a choice, and thus her decision to breach Creon’s law forbidding Polynices’ burial results from her free will. She re-asserts that decision in her final monologue as she claims: “If my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and my father in Hades below, I could never have another brother” (“πόσις μὲν ἄν μοι κατθανόντος ἄλλος ἦν, / καὶ παῖς ἀπ᾿ ἄλλου φωτός, εἰ τοῦδ᾿ ἤμπλακον, / μητρὸς δ᾿ ἐν Ἅιδου καὶ πατρὸς κεκευθότοιν / οὐκ ἔστ᾿ ἀδελφὸς ὅστις ἂν βλάστοι ποτέ”) (Ibid., 86–87).

94  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths In Portia Coughlan, however, the eponymous character does not have any agency over her destiny. Portia wanted to go “to college, had [her] place and all, but” her father Sly “sa[id] no” and forced her to “marry Raphael” (Carr 1999, 199). The patriarchal control over the protagonist’s life continues after the marriage, thus illustrating the extensive range of the implications of ­article 41.2 of the 1937 Irish Constitution over women’s agency. Besides implying that a woman should be a wife, it also implements confusion between womanhood and motherhood, which is still perpetuated since, as noted by Melissa Sihra, “the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ are, to this day, used interchangeably” (Sihra 2018, 97). Portia is forced “into motherhood” by her husband (Carr 1999, 221). This foregrounds the appropriation of Euripides’ Medea in Portia Coughlan as the protagonist feels urges to murder her offspring. Although the classical figure loves her sons, the reception of the myth has turned her into a hateful mother. Kennelly brought on the Irish stage that traditional trend of interpretation in his version of Euripides’ Medea (1991). After learning about Medea’s plan to kill the children, the chorus warns her: Think, Medea, think. You will be, forever, Medea the murderess of her own children. It would have been more merciful to kill them in the womb. Abortion is a kind of mercy.

(Kennelly 2006, 118)

Kennelly connects Medea’s crime and subsequent heinous reputation to the lack of body autonomy experienced by women in Ireland because of the prohibition of abortion right up until 2018. In Portia Coughlan, Carr shows the extent of women’s lack of autonomy, which is not restricted to their bodies only but rules over every aspect of their whole lives. As the scene offering the appropriation of the myth of Medea occurs right after the second act, which reveals that the protagonist killed herself, it implies that violence is the only way out of her situation. Portia chooses suicide over infanticide. Contrary to Antigone whose death is assimilated to going to “the bridal chamber” (“νυμφεῖον”) (Sophocles 1998a, 86–87), Portia dies to escape from the bridal chamber. Portia Coughlan displays a variety of similarities with the first play of the Midlands cycle, The Mai (1994). Among them is the inclusion of a legend, which anticipates the protagonist’s deadly fate. Millie tells the tale of Coillte, who “fell in love with Bláth.” As “autumn” was “approaching,” Bláth left Coillte to “go and live with the dark witch of the bog … Coillte followed him and found him ensconced in the dark witch’s lair.”

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  95 Coillte “cried a lake of tears,” in which she was “pushed” by “the dark witch” and “dissolved” (Carr 1999, 147). The legend alludes to Robert’s extramarital affair, which leads The Mai to die by suicide by throwing herself into Owl Lake. Her last exchange with Millie discloses that “Robert [has] not [come] home yet” at the end of Act Two (Ibid., 185). The soundscape following that dialogue and described in the stage directions includes “Sounds of geese and swans taking flight, sounds of water” (Ibid. 186). This re-enacts the legend since “Sam Brady told [Millie] that when the geese are restless or the swans suddenly take flight, it’s because they hear Bláth’s pipes among the reeds, still playing for Coillte” (Ibid. 147). Furthermore, the position of the legend in the play consolidates the “heroic precedent” as Millie narrates it right before the revelation of The Mai’s dead body on stage at the end of Act One. In Greek tragedy, dreams convey information on the heroes’ futures too. In Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, Orestes’ return is welcomed only by Electra. The other woman character, Clytemnestra, dreads to see her son coming back to Argos. She indeed had a dream in which “she gave birth to a snake … and nestled it in swaddling-clothes, like a baby. … she herself offered her breast to it. … So that in her milk it drew off a clot of blood” (“τεκεῖν δράκοντ᾿ ἔδοξεν … ἐν σπαργάνοις τε παιδὸς ὁρμίσαι δίκην. … αὐτὴ προσέσχε μαστὸν … ὥστ᾿ ἐν γάλακτι θρόμβον αἵματος σπάσαι”) (Aeschylus 2008b, 280–281). This foreshadows her death at the hands of her own son. In The Mai, dreams also inform the threat posed by men on women’s lives. Robert has returned to The Mai because he “dreamt that [she] w[as] dead and [his] cello case was [her] coffin” (Carr 1999, 125). The characters appear to read that dream very differently, yet their interpretations point to the death, either literal or symbolic, of The Mai. She notes right after Robert disclosed his dream: “So you’ve come back to bury me” (Ibid.), which eventually happens. However, Robert’s interpretation manifests another form of death. He explains that he has “finished nothing this past five years” because he “need[s]” her “around” him (Ibid., 127). Robert envisions The Mai as a muse, thus demonstrating the death of her subjectivity and agency. A muse personifies an inspiring creative force but is unable to create anything by herself; she needs a (male) creator to give form to her artistic vision. Robert commodifies The Mai. She is an object helping him to create. Carr brings on stage that dimension from the beginning of the play as Robert “plays the cello bow across [The Mai’s] breasts” in the first scene. Yet, The Mai’s position as his muse stems from a sacrifice on her part. She “was good on the cello” (Ibid., 163), and probably a better artist than Robert since she “was a cellist in the college orchestra” and he “lower[ed]” her (Ibid., 155). The Mai’s loss of agency and subjectivity is intrinsically connected to her marriage. The night before her wedding, she had a dream forecasting her bleak destiny: She is “a child walking up a golden river and everything

96  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths is bright and startling” and she “see[s] [Robert] coming”; he is “a child too.” After he “pass[ed]” her, she “turns to look after” him, but he is “gone and the river is gone and away in the distance [she] see[s] a black cavern,” which “leads nowhere.” Yet, The Mai “start[s] walking that way because … [she]’ll find [Robert] there” (Ibid., 126). The young age of the characters imparts a sense of fate to their marriage and its outcome. In doing so, Carr approaches marriage as the social destiny conceived for women in patriarchal Ireland. As The Mai leaves her path to follow Robert, marriage leads to the death of her agency and subjectivity. Although the play appropriates the figure of Electra through the characterisation of Millie and The Mai, the latter’s tragic fate is moulded on Antigone’s dramatic arc. These two figures from Greek tragedy have been conflated in Eugene O’Neill’s appropriation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). The Haunted, which is the last instalment of the modern trilogy, shows the Electra-like character Lavinia sequestering herself in the family house where she intends “to live alone with the dead” (O’Neill, 178). This echoes Antigone’s destiny as she is “enclosed … in the encompassing tomb” (“κατηρεφεῖ τύμβῳ περιπτύξαντες”) (Sophocles 1998a, 84–85) and left “alone” (“μόνην”) (Ibid., 86–87). In The Mai, the “black cavern” draws an even more explicit parallel to Antigone’s “bridal chamber.” Yet, Carr reverses the classical metaphor: While Antigone’s tomb symbolises her “bridal chamber,” The Mai’s “bridal chamber” will eventually be her tomb. On Raftery’s Hill stands aside the other plays of the Midlands cycle as “it lacks any mythic framework” (Trench, 161). Yet, the play includes a specific mention of a story from Greek mythology. Red’s friend Isaac tells the myth of “Zeus and Hera,” who “were brother and sister and … goh married and had chaps and young wans and the chaps and young wans done the job wud the mother and father and one another” (Carr 2009, 43). Although it echoes the most characteristic feature of the Raftery family, which is their incestuous relationships, it does not structure the tragic course of action of the play. The myth of Hera and Zeus does not indeed set a “heroic precedent” for Sorrel’s fate since the incestuous rape she suffers from her father occurs at the end of Act One, thus before Isaac’s mention of the mythological story in Act Two. Yet, another story seems to forecast her destiny: The tragedy of Sarah Brophy. Sarah Brophy is a girl from the community living in the Valley. Carr heavily implies that Sarah has been raped and impregnated by her father as he confessed to Dara “thah he only went for her the wance” (Ibid., 19). This “precedent” moves within the mundane rather than the legendary realm to enhance the horror of the main topic of the play: Incest. Red, however, does not experience that feeling after hearing the story.

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  97 His reaction is entrenched in the patriarchal narrative of victim blaming as he comments on that tragedy claiming that “Sarah Brophy goh whah was comin to her” and “blamin” her father is “all wrong” (Ibid.). This misogynistic view frames his behaviour as he rapes Sorrel. While committing that criminal violence, Red states that Sorrel is “all the time prancin round like the Virgin Mary” (Ibid., 35). He conceives the defilement of his daughter as an “educational method” to teach her submissive respect and punish her supposedly “schemin … to stale [the] farm” (Ibid., 34). The “educational” dimension of the incestuous rape is emphasised by the dialogue that initiates the crime: Did you gut them hares, did ya? Red: Sorrel: I don’t know how to gut a hare. Red: Donten ya? Alrigh, I’ll show ya how to gut a hare.

(Ibid.)

The scene relies on an appropriation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon. Among the many transformations that the myth undergoes, Carr changes the setting of the “sacrifice”: While Iphigenia dies during a religious, and thus public, ceremony, Sorrel is raped within the privacy of the home, and more specifically in the kitchen. As observed by Rhona Trench, this “demonstrat[es] the collapse of the traditional metanarrative” encompassed in the Irish Constitution, which “presents ‘home’ as … a safe place” for women (Trench, 179). Yet, this collapse stems from patriarchy itself as the traditional family cell reproduces at a microscopic level the dynamics of power and relations of domination of society. The rape of Sorrel epitomises “Red[’s] exploit[ation of] his patriarchal authority,” (Ibid., 180) thus implying that there is no safe place for women in Ireland because the nation is overruled by patriarchy. Unlike The Mai, Portia Coughlan, and On Raftery’s Hill, Carr has “signal[led]” the “relationship” of By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Ariel (2002) with the “informing sourcetext[s]” that are respectively Euripides’ Medea and Aeschylus’ Oresteia as well as Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Yet, the connection of Carr’s plays to these classical tragedies was not recognised, at least entirely, from their releases. When By the Bog of Cats… premiered in 1998, the Abbey Theatre did not advertise the play as an appropriation of Euripides’ Medea. According to Sihra, it took some time for the critics and the audiences to grasp that By the Bog of Cats… was an appropriation of the classical tragedy into Carr’s “familiar idiom,” which “points to the strength of [the] relocalisation” (Sihra 2018, 119). The most distinctive mark of the appropriative process lies in the reconceptualisation of Medea’s identity through the character of Hester.

98  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Medea is one of the brightest epitomes of the embodiment of otherness in Greek tragedy because, like Hecuba, she is not only a woman but also a barbarian. Carr appropriates that intersectional dimension of the classical figure as she “cho[o]se[s] to make [Herster] a traveller because travellers are our national outsiders” (Carr in Battersby). Despite being an indigenous group of people living in Ireland since the 12th century, the Travellers have suffered relentless marginalisation and discrimination over centuries. Their peripatetic way of life stands in contrast with the sedentarism of the Settlers and has been criminalised throughout history. During the British colonisation of the island, the Travellers suffered from the laws punishing vagrancy. The establishment of the Free State increased the oppression faced by the community with the implementation of laws specifically sanctioning their lifestyle, such as the criminalisation of nomadism issued in 1963. Although these laws have been disregarded since then, Travellers still endure racism, which has deadly effects as the suicide rate within the community is six times higher than in the rest of the Irish population. In this respect, the characterisation of Hester covers the intersectional dimension of Medea’s identity to locate it in the specific context of Ireland, especially considering that “the female Traveller is a potent personification of the double outsider in Irish society” (Sihra 2018, 120). In By the Bog of Cats…, Carr reverses the dramatic significance of the intersectional identity. In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymous character’s demonisation presents the same “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1243) which structure the Athenian vision of the world and humanity as Hecuba’s. Her revenge is as excessive as the Trojan queen’s, and excess is associated with both women left uncontrolled as well as barbarians. Medea has indeed been betrayed by one person, and yet she kills four people (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 142). This highly distorted sense of justice underlines the social deviance characteristic of the barbarian identity in the Greeks’ minds (Hall 1989, 149). In Euripides’ tragedy, Jason alludes to that dimension as he claims to Medea: “you now live among Greeks and not barbarians, and you understand justice and the rule of law, with no concession to force” (“Ἑλλάδ᾿ ἀντὶ βαρβάρου χθονὸς / γαῖαν κατοικεῖς καὶ δίκην ἐπίστασαι / νόμοις τε χρῆσθαι μὴ πρὸς ἰσχύος χάριν”) (Euripides 2001, 330–331). Yet, Medea does not seem to be characterised as a barbarian in the archaic myth elaborated in epic poetry. Hall thus reaches the conclusion that “her conversion into a barbarian was almost certainly an invention of tragedy, probably of Euripides himself” (Hall 1989, 35). In doing so, the tragedian adapted the archaic myth to the political purpose of Greek tragedy, which was to “provide poetic justification for the subordination of women [and] foreigners” (Foley, 4), and offered support to “the belief in Hellenic superiority” (Hall 1989, 101). Carr, however, uses

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  99 Hester’s identity to convey criticism towards the racism and sexism engrained in Ireland. Carr’s appropriation of Euripides’ Medea settles in the interpretative frame conceived by modern and contemporary playwrights, who have turned the classical figure into an epitome of “the exploited barbarian” ­(McDonald, 301). This trend of interpretation was initiated in 1820 by Franz Grillparzer with the trilogy Das Goldene Vließ (“The Golden Fleece”) as he approached Medea’s “otherness-feature in a way that resonat[ed] with contemporary racial stereotypes of the Jews” (Lauriola 2015a, 392). Since then, European playwrights have used the classical figure’s barbarian identity to question and challenge the systemic oppression of people othered on the basis of their race and ethnicity. For instance, the adaptation of Hans Henny Jahnn (1926) centres on the question of skin colour as Medea is a black woman and her children are mixed-race. This stands as the main reason for their rejection from the city (Ibid., 393–394). Another example is the appropriation Asie (“Asia”) by Henri-René Lenormand (1931), which is “foreground[ed in] colonial and racial concerns” as the myth is translocated into an Asian-Indochinese state ruled by the French colonial power (Ibid., 394–395). Modern and contemporary playwrights have also transposed Euripides’ Medea from the lens of feminism, thus reframing the action so it would be “the result of abuse and domination by men” (Van Zyl Smit, 157). Kennelly’s version illustrates that specific trend of interpretation as it shows Medea “countering the negative effects of patriarchal culture” (Arkins, 79). However, Stephen Wilmer notes that “Medea might seem a surprising choice for women to adapt or direct” because the eponymous character’s “actions … might prove an uncomfortable precedent for women seeking to strengthen their position in society” (Wilmer, 138). According to him, the solution to that issue “lies in Medea’s oppressed status as an outsider and a victim” (Ibid.), which By the Bog of Cats… perfectly epitomises as Carr unifies the two main trends of modern and contemporary interpretations of the classical tragedy. Hester’s home is central to her characterisation as an intersectional outcast. Despite having “a house,” Hester has “never felt at home in it” (Carr 1999, 266) and thus lives in a caravan. Not only does this manifest her identity as a Traveller woman, but it also demonstrates her non-­ compliance with the gender expectations in Ireland. Carr indeed equates the exclusion of the Traveller community to the marginalisation of women who do not embody the identity of “woman” encompassed in the 1937 Irish Constitution. Situated outside the town where the rest of the community lives, the bog translates into spatial terms Hester’s status as an outcast. Carr sheds light on that feature of the character from the very beginning of the play. Unlike The Mai and Portia, Hester is not introduced to the

100  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths audience through the confining frame of home: She first appears on stage walking by the bog. The opening action of By the Bog of Cats…, which is set outside the domestic space of the home, foreshadows Hester’s subversion of the vision of the “ideal” woman in Ireland. While The Mai and Portia became mothers after their marriages with Robert and Raphael, Hester and Carthage were never married and thus conceived Josie out of wedlock. Such a relationship also seems to be a substantial alteration of the source tragedy as Medea and Jason are married. Yet, Hester’s “def[iance of] the core concepts of essential motherhood that have defined motherhood in Ireland for so long … openly” displays her “sexual rather than chaste” lifestyle (Maresh, 179), which bears some significant parallel with the characterisation of Medea. The traditional custom in ancient Greece required a woman’s kurios (guardian) to pick a suitable husband, but Medea chose to marry Jason on her own decision, thus “show[ing] … and … act[ing] on [her sexual desire]” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 138). The sexual freedom of the classical figure and her contemporary Irish counterpart participates in their exclusion through their categorisation as witches. Contrastingly with Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, the word “witch” is not explicitly used to refer to and describe the eponymous character in Euripides’ Medea. The witch is indeed a topical character of Western culture embedded in Christianity. Yet, it “build[s] on Greek and Roman traditions” (Chollet, 15), which is exposed in the Euripidean tragedy through Creon’s depiction of Medea as “a clever woman and skilled in many evil arts” (“σοφὴ πέφυκας καὶ κακῶν πολλῶν ἴδρις”) (Euripides 2001, 308–309). As noted by Aristotle in The Poetics, “it is inappropriate for a woman to be courageous or clever” (“οὐχ ἁρμόττον γυναικὶ οὕτως ἀνδρείαν ἢ δεινὴν εἶναι”) (Aristotle, 78–79). Although his statement is deeply inaccurate regarding the characterisation of women in Greek tragedy (Foley, 109), it reveals the misogynistic definition of what “a woman should be” during the classical period. Medea’s nonconformity with that conception coupled with her supernatural abilities lays the ground for the construction of the figure of the witch during the Christian era, especially considering her identity as a barbarian. In her analysis of the witch hunt, the French feminist author Mona Chollet observes that “[t]he demonization of women as witches had much in common with anti-Semitism” because “like the Jews, witches were suspected of conspiring against Christianity” (Chollet, 7). Yet, while the marginalisation experienced by the Jews stems from antisemitic considerations, the discrimination faced by women is entrenched in patriarchy. There is indeed an “over-representation of single women and widows” accused of sorcery during the witch hunt because they were “women not formally bound and subordinate to a man” (Ibid., 30). The history of that

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  101 figure not only informs but also underlines the relevance of Carr’s appropriation of Medea in the context of modern Ireland. As a single mother living outside the home, Hester embodies insubordination to the religiously informed patriarchy ruling over Irish society. As exposed by Kennelly, “[i]n Ireland, the most powerful single institution is the Roman Catholic Church” and “[i]t is a predominantly male institution,” which entails “[n]o divorce … [n]o contraception”10 and the vision of “[s]exual pleasure … outside marriage” as “a sin” (Kennelly 1992, 36). Carr captures that hegemonic stance to construct the oppression suffered by Hester from the Settled community. Besides calling her “a tinker” on numerous occasions, Mrs. Kilbride describes the protagonist as “a Jezebel witch” (Carr 1999, 280). Opposed to the socially disobedient figure that is Hester, the Settled community conceives themselves to be the guardian of Catholic morality as displayed through the action of its patriarchal representative, Xavier. While evoking Hester’s childhood, he contrasts his behaviour supposedly embedded in “Christian compassion” (Ibid., 294) with Big Josie’s negligent parenting. This opposition frames his relation to Hester too. Unlike The Mai and Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats… does not include explicit reference to any legend forecasting the protagonist’s destiny. Yet, the bog stands as a liminal space, which blurs the line between naturality and supernaturality as epitomised through the apparition of the Ghost Fancier in the first scene. Such a mythological dimension has an influence on the perception of the characters living by the Bog of Cats, including Big Josie. Despite being at the centre of the story, the character never appears on stage. This dramatic invisibility not only “reflects the marginalisation of … Traveller women” (Sihra 2018, 122) that Hester’s dramatic arc enacts but it also “confers [Big Josie] with mythic status” (Ibid.). In this respect, she is the “heroic precedent” informing the protagonist’s fate, especially since Xavier intends to “run [Hester] out” of the Bog of Cats like he “ran [her] mother out of [t]here” (Carr 1999, 328). Like By the Bog of Cats…, Ariel is an appropriation of Greek tragedies, which “signals” and “acknowledges” its “relationship with” several sources. Carr indeed declared about the play as it was produced at the Abbey Theatre: “Ariel is based loosely based on The Oresteia … The plot is pretty faithful to Iphigenia, Agamemnon and Electra” (Kilroy). Despite this clear identification of an “informing sourcetext” from the playwright, the advertisement and the critics have focused more on the influence of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis than of Aeschylus’ Oresteia on Carr’s appropriation (Torrance 2018, 71). This trend manifests the renewed interest in that tragedy by Euripides at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s (Hall 2005, 3), especially in Ireland. Over a time lapse of five

102  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths years, three Irish playwrights offered transpositions of Iphigenia at Aulis: Carr, Teevan, and O’Brien. Although no feminist interpretation seems to have reframed the classical play during the 20th century, Iphigenia at Aulis tackles topics of sociocultural importance in Irish society like women’s body autonomy (Ibid., 14) since abortion rights had not been legalised yet. As noted by Hall, “Agamemnon can make arbitrary choices about when and whom his daughter is to marry; he can also take arbitrary decisions over when and why she is to die,” concluding that Iphigenia’s “body is not her own, whether in sex or in death” (Ibid.). Carr appropriates that latter dimension of women’s submission to men addressed through the relationship between Iphigenia and Agamemnon. Ariel’s life is “scripted” by Fermoy (Torrance 2018, 77) as epitomised through the religiously based story he makes up to justify his crime to Frances since he pretends that Ariel was a “loan” from God, “the price demanded” so he would “flouris[h]” on the political scene (Carr 2009, 125–126). Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis also alludes to the issue of domestic violence that a wife can suffer from her husband since it “offer[s] a crucial aetiology for the vengeful Clytemnestra of the Oresteia” (Hall 2005, 16). This provides the main frame for Carr’s appropriation. Yet, the importance of the topic of marital abuse in Ariel shows the marks of the influence of another appropriation of the myth of the Atrides: Mourning Becomes Electra by O’Neill. Unlike Carr’s Ariel, Mourning Becomes Electra reproduces exactly the structure of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which O’Neill translocates in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. Each play of the trilogy is based on the action of one of the three classical tragedies of The Oresteia: Like Agamemnon, Homecoming shows the return from war and assassination of the father figure Ezra Mannon by his wife Christine; like The Libation Bearers, The Hunted focuses on the retaliation by the children Lavinia and Orin of that crime through the murders of their mother and her lover Adam Brant; like The Eumenides, The Haunted dramatises the son’s struggle with guilt. Feminism is not O’Neill’s main concern, but the topic of men’s violence against women underlies the structure of his appropriation. O’Neill repurposes the source tragedy through the lens of psychoanalysis, which has relied on classical myths to coin the Oedipus complex and its female counterpart the Electra complex.11 The application of Freud and Carl Jung’s theories to Aeschylus’ Oresteia comes across very clearly through the transformation of the parents-children relationships in Mourning Becomes Electra. The Orestes-like character Orin kills his mother’s lover and attempts to fill his role as he intends to “make [Christine] forget” Adam and

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  103 “make [her] happy” (O’Neill, 121) while the Electra-like figure Lavinia wants “to become the wife of [her] father” and thus “scheme[s] to steal [her mother’s] place” (Ibid., 33). A comparable set of relationship patterns appears in Ariel. In Act One, Frances breastfeeds Stephen, even though he is ten years old. This confers that act with an inappropriate, sexual, and incestuous connotation, which a comment from her husband emphasises. He indeed notes that Frances “won’t wean” Stephen “[b]ecause then she’d have to dale wud” Fermoy (Carr 2009, 89), thus implying that their son is partly a marital substitute. Likewise, Elaine seems to fill the role of Fermoy’s wife as highlighted by Frances’ remark to her daughter: “You and your father, swear ya were married to him” (Ibid., 119). Carr draws inspiration from Mourning Becomes Electra because the psychoanalytical lens entails the centrality of the father and so patriarchal figure in the play. In Totem and Taboo, Freud develops a vision of Greek tragedy marked by psychoanalytical martyrdom since “the Hero … had to suffer because he was the primal father” (Freud, 181), which O’Neill uses. The figure of “God the Father” drives the tragedy of Mourning Becomes Electra (Engel, 241). Each generation of Mannon is cursed to commit or suffer the same crime as the previous ones out of their Oedipal or Electral compulsion to either kill or marry the patriarchal or the matriarchal figure of the family (Ibid., 249). This family doom starts before the event dramatised in Mourning Becomes Electra with Ezra’s father Abe’s abuse of his brother’s wife Marie, who is revealed to be Adam’s mother. Like his father, Ezra abuses his wife, thus leading Christine to murder him in Homecoming. In Ariel, a similar pattern is at play since the eponymous character’s “sacrifice” reproduces the murder of Fermoy’s mother by his father. This original crime is only mentioned in the play as it occurred while Fermoy was a child. Yet, Carr strips the cycle of murders of psychoanalytical consideration to focus on the patriarchal violence suffered by women at the hands of men. Fermoy indeed does not kill his wife but his daughter. The connections between the two crimes come from the gender of the victims and the place where the bodies have been concealed: Cuura Lake, which symbolises the obliteration of women’s existence that sustains patriarchy. This dimension appears ostensibly as Fermoy, who kills his daughter to have a political career, looks up to autocratic figures like “Alexander the Greah” and “Caesar” (Carr 2009, 71) and wishes he could be “compare[d] wud Napoleon” (Ibid., 106). Ariel bears some similarities with the vision of tragedy developed in Mourning Becomes Electra. O’Neill’s appropriation leans on Arthur Schopenhauer’s conception of the genre (Engel, 256). In The World as Will and Representation, the philosopher claims that “the hero does not atone for his particular sins, but for original sin instead, i.e. the guilt of existence

104  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths of existence itself” (Schopenhauer, 281). In this regard, Schopenhauer’s definition of tragedy gives an existential turn to the classical vision of family doom. In The Poetics, Aristotle notes “the finest tragedies are composed about only a few families … [who] have suffered or perpetrated terrible things” (“περὶ ὀλίγας οἰκίας αἱ κάλλισται τραγῳδίαι συντίθενται οἷον … συμβέβηκεν ἢ παθεῖν δεινὰ ἢ ποιῆσαι”) (Aristotle, 70–73), which Aeschylus’ Oresteia illustrates. The cycle of murders sustaining the trilogy demonstrates the association of justice with revenge in order to underline the chaotic unfairness of the archaic and aristocratic values ruling over Athens before the emergence of democracy. In Morning Becomes Electra and Ariel, however, the inclusion of that criminal dimension recentres the tragedy on the characters’ existential conditions, thus highlighting the specific lenses of appropriation: The inescapability of psychoanalytical compulsions in the former and of patriarchy in the latter. Like Orin ending up in his “[f]ather’s place” in The Haunted (O’Neill, 155), Frances fills the role of the patriarch after Fermoy’s death in Act Three, and, while in that position, she reproduces the alienation of the other family members. Act Three in Ariel shows Frances’ attempt to limit her children’s agency. She “scripts” Stephen’s life as she dismisses his ambition to work in “films” and presses him to “start turnin [his] mind to cement” (Carr 2009, 136). Since it is a family company, she intends to benefit from the exploitation of Stephen. Frances thus subjects Stephen to the same process of reification and commodification as men do with women in patriarchal societies. In doing so, Frances illustrates a characteristic feature of Carr’s theatre, which is that “victims constantly identify with their persecutors” (Jordan, 245). This translates into dramatic terms the true nature of patriarchy. As demonstrated by bell hooks, the sexist oppression … is perpetuated by institutional and social structures; by the individuals who dominate, exploit, or oppress; and by the victims themselves who are socialized to behave in ways that make them act in complicity with the status quo. (hooks, 43) The final murder of the play further illustrates the participation and perpetuation of patriarchal oppression, even by the victims. Elaine’s murder of her mother bears some comparable aspects to Frances’ murder of her husband. As she does with her son, Frances goes against her daughter’s will and moves Fermoy’s grave. This prompts Elaine’s decision to kill Frances. The action is initiated by an argument between the mother and the daughter, which starts with Elaine’s statement: “I tould ya not to touch me father’s grave” (Carr 2009, 144). Through the action of killing her mother, Elaine recovers a part of the agency that she has been

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  105 denied. Like her mother, however, Elaine is limited in the recovery of her agency due to her gender. While the murders committed by men take place outside, those perpetrated by women occur within the home. Drawing inspiration from Lavinia’s situation who decides to “[l]iv[e] alone [in the family house] with the dead” at the end of Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill, 178), the final action of Ariel shows Elaine entrapped into a vault for the women members of the family. Unlike Fermoy who has been buried in a proper cemetery, Ariel’s coffin stands in the living room to which is added Frances’ body after her murder. Carr thus uses the house as a symbol of the death of women’s subjectivity and agency in Irish patriarchal society. As her appropriation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Oresteia shows more murders performed by women than men, Carr sheds light on the self-destruction women go through because of patriarchy. Notes 1 At the time of the publication of Sihra’s essay, Phaedra Backwards, Hecuba, Girl on an Altar had not been produced yet. This explains the Irish specificity of her comment as only the Midlands plays were transpositions of Greek tragedies at the time. 2 Jean-François Lyotard has coined the concept of “metanarrative.” It is defined as “implying a philosophy of history [which] is used to legitimate knowledge” and “concern[s] the validity of the institutions governing the social bond” (Lyotard, xxiv). 3 This literary concept is polysemic. In this context, I use “diegesis” to mean “the spatiotemporal world” of a story (Genette 1972, 48). 4 The play was written in 1962 but was first produced in 1965. 5 This part of the play was never translated into English. This translation is my own. 6 It must be noted that Sartre worked on several occasions with anti-colonial writers, including Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. 7 The line does not appear in the published version of Harrison’s Hecuba. 8 This concept used by Gérard Genette to address the connection of Jean Giraudoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (1935) to Homer’s Iliad refers to the creation of a narrative preceding and anticipating a story that exists (Genette 1982, 430). 9 In Greek mythology, Niobe claimed to be superior to the Titaness Leto. As retaliation, Leto asked her children, the gods Artemis and Apollo, to kill Niobe’s sons and daughters. Niobe turned into a rock out of grief, thus becoming the epitome of grief. 10 Kennelly published this essay in 1992. At the time, divorce was illegal in Ireland; it was legalised in 1995, and access to contraception, which had been outlawed from 1935 to 1980, was still under restrictions, which were lifted in 1993. 11 O’Neill denied using these theories in his appropriation (Nethercot, 358), but many critics have demonstrated their application to the tragic construction of Mourning Becomes Electra; see the work Doris Alexander, Leonard Charbrowe, Doris Falk, and Georgia Nungent on the topic.

106  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Works Cited Primary Sources Aeschylus. 2008a. Agamemnon. In Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 1–205. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Aeschylus. 2008b. Libations-Bearers. In Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 207–351. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Carr, M. 1996. Portia Coughlan. In The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays, ed. F. McGuinness, 235–311. London: Faber. Carr, M. 1999. Plays One. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2009. Plays Two. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2015. Plays Three. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2021. iGirl. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2022. Girl on an Altar. London: Faber. Euripides. 1999. Trojan Woman. In Trojan Women. Iphigenia among the Taurians. Ion, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 1–143. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2001. Medea. In Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 275–413. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2002. Helen. In Helen. Phoenician Women. Orestes, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 1–199. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2005a. Hecuba. In Children of Heracles. Hippolytus. Andromache. Hecuba, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 391–519. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2005b. Hippolytus. In Children of Heracles. Hippolytus. Andromache. Hecuba, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 115–263. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Homer. 2003. Iliad Books 1–12, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray and W. F. Wyatt. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Kennelly, B. 2006. When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies. Tarset: Bloodaxe. McGuinness, F. 2004. Hecuba. London: Faber. McGuinness, F. 2006. Phaedra after Racine. London: Faber. O’Brien, E. 2005. Triptych and Iphigenia. New York: Grove Press. O’Neill, Eugene. 1948. Plays, 2. New York: Random House. Sartre, J.-P. 1965. Les Troyennes. Paris: Gallimard. Seneca the Younger. 2018. Phaedra. In Hercules. Trojan Women. Phoenician Women. Medea. Phaedra, ed. and trans. J. G. Fitch, 405–523. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1997. Oedipus Tyrannus. In Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 323–483. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1998a. Antigone. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 1–127. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press.

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  107 Sophocles. 1998b. Oedipus at Colonus. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 409–599. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Teevan, C. 1999. Iph…: After Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. London: Nick Hern Books. Yourcenar, M. 1971. Théâtre, 2. Paris: Gallimard. Secondary Sources 1937 Irish Constitution. Irish Statute Book. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/ cons/en/html. Aristotle. 1999. Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Arkins, A. 2010. Irish Appropriation of Greek Tragedy. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Barthes, R. 2007. Criticism and Truth, ed. and trans. K. Pilcher Keuneman. London: Continuum. Bassnett, S. 2002. Translation Studies. New York: Routledge. Battersby, E. 2000. Marina of the Midlands. Irish Times. May 4. https://www. proquest.com/docview/310543496?accountid=14507&parentSessionId=xj2F06 ZaGQzCo6diFiovWYxwhXm%2BncdeZ0%2FMZAFcAJE%3D&pq-origsite= summon. Beauvoir (de), S. 1956. The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Blondell, R., M.-K. Gamel, N. Sorkin Rabinowitz, and B. Vivante. 2002. Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides. New York: Routledge. Brodie, G. 2014. Translation in Performance: Theatrical Shift and the Transmission of Meaning in Tony Harrison’s Translation of Euripides ’Hecuba. Contemporary Theatre Review. 24.1: 53–65. Chollet, M. 2022. In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial, trans. S. R. Lewis. London: Picador. Crenshaw, K. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1: 1239–1267. del Mar González Chacón, M. 2020. “This is not about love, this is about guilt and terror”: Phaedra Backwards (2011) and Forwards by Marina Carr. Irish Studies Review. 28.4: 481–497. Dugdale, E. 2015. Hecuba. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Euripides, ed. R. Lauriola and K. N. Demetriou, 100–142. Leiden: Brill. Duroux, R. and S. Urdican. 2010. Antigone: Retour sur une fascination. In Les Antigones contemporaines (de 1945 à nos jours), ed. R. Duroux et S. Urdican, 13–32. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Eissen, A. 2010. Antigone sur la scène contemporaine : Analyse d’un changement de paradigme. In Les Antigones contemporaines (de 1945 à nos jours), ed. R. Duroux et S. Urdican, 63–73. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Engel, Edwin. 1953. The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

108  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. 2001. Totem and Taboo, trans. J. Strachey. New York: Routledge. Gardner, L. 2004. “I Am Certainly Not a Pacifist”. The Guardian, September 14. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/sep/14/theatre3. Genette, G. 1972. Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Genette, G. 1982. Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Gould, J. 2001. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hall, E. 2004. Towards a Theory of Performance Reception. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. 12.1: 51–89. Hall, E. 2005. Iphigenia and Her Mother at Aulis: A Study in the Revival of a Euripidean Classic. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 3–41. London: Bloomsbury. Harrison, T. 2009. Weeping for Hecuba. In Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, ed. S. J. Harrison, 117–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press. hooks, b. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press. Jordan, E. 2002. Unmasking the Myths? Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and On Raftery’s Hill. In Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. J. M. Walton and M. McDonald, 243–262. London: Methuen. Kennelly, B. 1992. Journey into Joy: Selected Prose. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Kilroy, I. 2002. Greek Tragedy, Midlands-Style; In Her New Play, Ariel, Marina Carr Returns Again to Drama’s Greek Roots, By Way of the Midlands Dialect and Modern Irish Public Life. Irish Times, September 20. https://ucd.idm.oclc.org/ login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 309488671?accountid=14507. Kitto, H. D. F. 2003. Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study. New York: Routledge. Laera, M. 2013. Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. London: Peter Lang. Lauriola, R. 2015a. Medea. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Euripides, ed. R. Lauriola and K. N. Demetriou, 377–442. Leiden: Brill. Lauriola, R. 2015b. Trojan Women. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Euripides, ed. R. Lauriola and K. N. Demetriou, 44–99. Leiden: Brill. Leeney, C. 2007. Feminist Meanings of Presence and Performance in Theatre: Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan. In Opening the Field, Irish Women: Texts and Contexts, ed. P. Boyle Haberstroh and C. St Peter, 92–101. Cork: Cork University Press. Marguerite Yourcenar et le féminisme. 1978. INA: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, January 9. https://sites.ina.fr/archives-departementales-le-nord/ focus/media/I00005178. Meyer, S. R. 2015. Animal Husbandry, Tragedy, and The Patriarchal Psychosis. New Theatre Quarterly. 31.1: 17–27.

Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths  109 Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maresh, K. 2016. Un/Natural Motherhood in Marina Carr’s The Mai, Portia Coughlan, and By the Bog of Cats…. Theatre History Studies. 35: 179–186. McDonald, M. 1997. Medea as Politician and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the Future. In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, ed. J. J. Clauss and S. I. Johnston, 297–323. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Millet, K. 2000. Sexual Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Murphy, P. 2006. Staging Histories in Marina Carr’s Midlands Plays. Irish University Review. 36.2: 389–402. Nethercot, A. 1960. The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O’Neill. Modern Drama. 3.3: 357–373. Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh. 2016. University of Oxford Podcasts. August 9. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/playwrightmarina-carr-conversation-fiona-macintosh. Sanders, J. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Sartre, J.-P. 1973. Préface. In Portrait du colonisé. Portrait du colonisateur, A. Memmi and J.-P. Sartre, 23–30. Paris: Payot. Saunders, G. 2002. “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schopenhauer, A. 2010. The World as Will and Representation, 1, ed. and trans. J. Norman, A. Welchman, and C. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sihra, M. 2005. Greek Myth, Irish Reality: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 115–135. London: Bloomsbury. Sihra, M. 2018. Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International Publishing. Sorkin Rabinowitz, N. 1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Steiner, G. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press. Stephenson, H. and N. Langridge. 1997. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. London: Bloomsbury. Terrazas Gallego, M. 2019. “Writing Is Essentially a Very, Very Innocent Thing”: In Conversation with Marina Carr. Estudios Irlandeses. 14.14: 190–197. That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU. 2017. YouTube. January 18. https:// youtu.be/pAKXPoJJHAs?si=NFXFJaXH0dTNDMsq. Torrance, I. 2018. Greek Tragedy and the Tiger: The Politics of Literary Allusion in Marina Carr’s Ariel. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. 25.3: 69–99. Trench, R. 2010. Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr. Oxford: Peter Lang.

110  Feminist Resistance to Patriarchal Myths Van Zyl Smit, B. 2014. Black Medeas. In Looking at Medea: Essays and a Translation of Euripides’s Tragedy, ed. D. Stuttard. London: Bloomsbury. Vernant, J.-P. and P. Vidal Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. P. Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Williams, R. 1966. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus. Wilmer, S. E. 2005. Irish Medeas: Revenge or Redemption (an Irish Solution to an International Problem). In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 136–148. London: Bloomsbury. Zeitlin, F. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

3 Writing Like a Woman

I just wanted to look through my own lens. (Marina Carr in Sihra 2018, 259) Marina Carr adapts and appropriates Greek tragedy from the ­perspective of an Irish woman who has been brought up and lives in a society ruled by patriarchy. Her theatre translates this gendered experience that she shares with other women. In 1998, the production of By the Bog of Cats… was a historical moment because it showed “women’s rituals and psychological dynamics … for the first time on the national stage,” “which had no place for” them until then (White). In that play, Carr brings to the fore women’s invisibility through the character of Big Josie, whose absent presence manifests “women’s haunting loss throughout theatre history” (Sihra 2018, 121). Cathy Leeney indeed observes regarding the refusal of the Abbey Theatre to stage the play Grania (1910) by its sole woman founder Lady Gregory that “the rejection of a play by producers cannot be explained simply in terms of lack of quality. New subjects and/or styles of work may threaten the ideological and aesthetic terms by which success in performance is defined” (Leeney, 8). The eponymous character of Grania subverts the traditional and patriarchal vision of womanhood, which ironically Gregory participated in to elaborate in theatre with W. B. Yeats in Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902). While Cathleen is a “nameless, homeless wanderer” (Sihra 2007, 6) who needs the assistance of men to escape a distressing situation, Grania is a figure of “power and will … who t[akes] the shaping of her life into her own hands” (Gregory, 362). Like Gregory’s Grania, Carr’s plays “brin[g] women’s art and selfexpression to a forum … dominated by male perspectives almost since its inception” (Donohue, 40), thus subverting “the horizon of expectations” set by the canon, especially in her adaptations and appropriation of Greek tragedy. According to Hans Robert Jauss, the reception of a work by a reader or spectator occurs through a “horizon of expectation,” which is “formed by a convention of genre, style, or form” (Jauss, 24). Although DOI: 10.4324/9781003298991-4

112  Writing Like a Woman he does not mention gender, this dimension is central to the constitution of the conventional rules of theatre and literature. The canon is indeed used to establish “a necessary standard with which to compare any succeeding drama or literature” (Dolan, 20). Yet, the formation of the canon does not merely rely on aesthetic considerations but more importantly on a sociopolitical vision of culture since it is embedded into “a project of a class of privileged, powerful, mostly white male whose ideology it represents” (Ibid.). Greek tragedy epitomises that patriarchal dimension since it stands as the earliest form of canonical drama in Western culture. Despite the very high number of women characters dramatised in classical theatre, “the self that is at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other” (Zeitlin, 68). Written by men, about men, and for men, Greek tragedy is an “undeniable androcentric” form of theatre (Foley, 4). However, Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of classical tragic drama demonstrate that the androcentrism of Greek tragedy, and of the canon more generally, is not inevitable as she shifts the focus of the tragic myths from men to women. In doing so, Carr appears to illustrate Hélène Cixous’ statement that “woman must write woman … [a]nd man, man” developed in the essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Cixous, 877). As a feminist from the second wave, a number of Cixous’ ideas come across as essentialist now: She talks about sex and not gender, and she always uses the singular “woman” rather than the plural “women.” Yet, it is possible to consider her ideas from a more contemporary, inclusive, and intersectional vision of feminism. Indeed, although her statement that “woman must write woman … [a]nd man, man” might appear prescriptive, it actually stems from her experience: As a woman, she “write[s] woman” and considers that “it is up to [man] to say where his masculinity and femininity are at” (Ibid.). Cixous notes, however, that the over-representation of male authorship in the works canonised throughout the history of literature and theatre has unbalanced the representation of gender, which has entailed that “there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity” (Ibid., 878). To counter the “unrepresentab[ility]” of “the feminine sex” (Ibid., 885), Cixous coins the conceptual practice of “écriture feminine” (“women’s writing”). Such a practice must focus on “subjects who are breakers of automatisms” (Ibid., 884), which can occur through the reconceptualisation of female figures from classical mythology, for instance. In the essay, Cixous offers an example of “écriture féminine” through the retelling of the myth of Medusa. Contrastingly with the characterisation of that figure offered in the canon by men authors, Medusa is not “deadly” but “beautiful and … laughing” (Ibid.) in Cixous’ version. This approach to classical myth settled in a wider feminist conception of writing and rewriting initiated in the 1970s, which invited women to take over the

Writing Like a Woman  113 authorship of the traditional founding stories of Western identity embedded in patriarchal ideology to offer feminist retellings. This specific approach to adaptation and appropriation from the lens of feminism has been conceptualised as a “re-vision” by Adrienne Rich. It relies on the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction … to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (Rich, 35) Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy manifest a “process of reassessing dominant narratives of history and cultural memory” to (re)inscribe “unrepresented female experiences” (Hill, 173). In this regard, they offer a contemporary feminist “re-vision” of the classical myths embedded in patriarchy while providing dramatic examples of “écriture féminine.” Yet, Carr pushes Cixous’ concept further since women are not simply the subjects but also “authorial narrator[s]”1 (Wallace, 522) of the stories dramatised in several transpositions of Greek tragedies, which is to be discussed in the first part of this chapter. Even in the plays not involving a narrator-like character, Carr brings the hidden (hi)stories of women on stage through the dramatisation of shared experiences of patriarchal oppression manifested by the female characters, which provides the second part of this chapter with its main point of study. She Speaks, Therefore She Is Storytelling is central to Carr’s dramatic world. It “alters the everyday world” (Sihra 2018, 8) and the way it is perceived by the audience. Storytelling positions women, who have been traditionally the objects of the stories, as subjects and authors. This specific feature of Carr’s playwriting appears in her early work. In the absurd play Low in the Dark (1989), the character of Curtains appears as a “storyteller or ‘playwright’” (Ibid., 49) whose attempts to tell a story are consistently interrupted by the other characters. This speaks to the difficulty faced by women to get their stories inscribed into the greater narrative of the history of literature and theatre. “[C]overed from head to toe in heavy, brocaded curtains and rail” (Carr 1999, 5), the identity of Curtains is concealed from the audience, which is a “metaphor” not only “of Lady Gregory’s lack of acknowledgement as co-author with Yeats of Kathleen Ni Houlihan” (Sihra 2018, 49) but also of the dismissal of women authorship in Western culture. In her adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy, Carr gives voices to the women characters who have been silenced and submitted to the men’s words and actions by the classical tragedians.

114  Writing Like a Woman Starting with The Mai (1994), Carr focuses on the traumatic event of losing a parent as a child experienced by Electra through the character of ­Millie. The three classical tragedies including the figure of Electra – ­Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, Sophocles and Euripides’ Electras – make her instrumental to her brother Orestes’ destiny. Although the Sophoclean and Euripidean plays give precedence to Electra over Orestes, hence their title, their main concern lies with men. The violent passion Electra is subjected to in both plays underlines the dysregulation of the “natural” – ­patriarchal – order (Des Bouvrie, 318) prompted by Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon and her taking over the head of the household and the city. Electra is thus a detail in the greater narrative at stake played by Orestes: The restoration of patriarchy. In The Mai, Carr turns the Electra-like character into the central figure and architect of the story. The appropriation is structured in the form of a memory play narrated by Millie. Such a form is moulded in reference to Electra’s inability to cope with the grief caused by the loss of her father. Her contemporary Irish counterpart stands at the fore of the play as epitomised through her constant physical presence on stage. Millie is indeed the only character in The Mai who “remains onstage throughout the play” (Carr 1999, 107). In doing so, not only does Carr reframe the classical myth to focus on one of its women characters, but the playwright also subverts the conception of memory play as practised until then. This form emerged in modern drama history with Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie (1944) and has influenced one of the most prominent Irish playwrights: Brian Friel, whose memory play Dancing at Lughnasa was produced in 1990, that is, only four years before The Mai. Although both The Glass Menagerie and Dancing at Lughnasa provide the women characters with dramatic importance, none of them fills the role of the narrator. In his comparative analysis of Friel and Carr’s memory plays, Anthony Roche notes that despite the “emphasis on women” of Dancing at Lughnasa, “it is being authored by a man,” which the gender of the male narrator brings to light, whereas “the presence of a young woman narrator in The Mai is an acknowledgement that the play is being authored by a woman” (Roche, 40). Besides inscribing her role as a playwright, Carr places Millie in the position of the narrator to confer her with an authorial function. The Mai does not show Millie’s whole childhood as it would entail the unsuitability of the story for the genre of drama. Only a few moments of dramatic importance are shown on stage. Yet, they result from authorial choices made by the narrator Millie to establish a causal link between Robert’s return and The Mai’s death by suicide. This reverses completely the dynamic of the classical myth: While Orestes carries the legacy of his father through the restoration of patriarchal rule, Millie bears witness to

Writing Like a Woman  115 her mother’s victimisation by patriarchy. As she does so, she constructs her story as the great narrative at stake in the play since the “[m]eaning resides not only in what actually happens in stories, but also in who narrates” (Trench, 99). Millie’s exploration of the past stands as a psychological journey to solve the puzzle of her own current identity. Like her mother The Mai, her grandmother Ellen, and her great-grandmother Grandma Fraochlán, Millie is raising a child on her own. Besides re-enacting a pattern, Millie reproduces the type of parenting of the women in her family. While talking about her relationship with her son, she observes that “Already he is watchful and expects far too little of [her], something [she] must have taught him unknown to [her]self” (Carr 1999, 164). In The Mai, as in all the plays of the Midlands cycle, children are sidelined since the women primarily focus on their “sexual and personal needs” (Donohue, 50). One of The Mai’s aunts, Julie, asserts in that regard that Grandma Fraochlán “didn’t bring [her] at all” because she was “pinin’ for the nine-fingered fisherman” (Carr 1999, 141). Yet, Millie’s memories of her childhood offer a dramatic illustration of that dimension. Despite being a mother living with her children, The Mai seems childless. Her children never appear on stage except for Millie who is embodied by an adult as the narrator plays her own role in the scene from her memories. Yet, Millie’s re-enactment of her childhood manifests her “wrestling” with the past, from which she “ha[s] not yet emerged triumphant” (Ibid., 84). It demonstrates her willingness to break free from the family pattern, which she partly achieves. Unlike The Mai who dreamt of “leav[ing] [her] mark on [the world]” (Ibid., 163) but eventually lost her identity in her marriage, Millie as an “authorial narrator” impresses hers as well as her women relatives’ through the act of telling her (hi)story. In this respect, she appears as a dramatic representation of Carr. The Mai possesses an autobiographical dimension. Like the character she created, Carr lost her mother at a young age in 1981. Through Millie and her narration, Carr writes a fictional version of herself and of her own experience of losing her mother. This dimension draws a strong connection to one of Carr’s latest adaptations of Greek tragedy: iGirl (2021), which alludes to the death of her father in 2019. Despite the divergences of the two plays in terms of forms – The Mai stands as an instance of heightened realism while iGirl is a postmodern tragic epic – both plays deal with the grief caused by the death of a parent – the mother in The Mai and the father in iGirl – through the integration of classical references. The autobiographical dimension comes across more ostensibly in iGirl than in The Mai as Carr appears as one of the speaking subjects in several sections of the play. The first clear integration of the playwright in the play occurs in the tenth section. Starting with the expression “I Girl” (Carr 2021, 33),

116  Writing Like a Woman the woman subject imagines her posterity and how her “Descendants” (Ibid.) will describe her, which includes that “She wrote plays” (Ibid.). Yet, the previous song is already entrenched in Carr’s life. The identity of the speaking subject is not disclosed but it opens with “When my mother / Died / I thought I would / Die too” (Ibid., 31). The description of the members’ positions and relationships within the family, “Your husband / My father” (Ibid., 32), echoes the ones provided by the characters from the Labdacides family in the play. Besides Antigone and Oedipus, Jocasta is among the subjects from the classical culture to speak in iGirl. In doing so, Carr brings to the fore a figure that is traditionally disregarded in favour of her son-husband and daughter-granddaughter. In this respect, Jocasta is primarily framed through her positions as a mother and wife. Yet, this classical figure is actually more complex than it appears, even though that complexity is scarcely mentioned. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, the role played by Jocasta in the eponymous character’s abandonment as a child is very unclear as two versions of that event are offered (Voussaris, 1063). On the one hand, the shepherd claims that Jocasta was the one who gave the baby to him so he would get rid of it (Sophocles 1997, 448–451). On the other hand, Jocasta alleges that it was Laius: “the child’s birth was not three days past when Laius fastened his ankles and had him cast out by the hands of others upon the trackless mountain” (“παιδὸς δὲ βλάστας οὐ διέσχον ἡμέραι / τρεῖς, καί νιν ἄρθρα κεῖνος ἐνζεύξας ποδοῖν / ἔρριψεν ἄλλων χερσὶν εἰς ἄβατον ὄρος”) (Ibid., 398–399). Unlike Sophocles, Carr settles that debate and sides with Jocasta. In iGirl, Jocasta’s version of Oedipus’ abandonment is not challenged by another character. Such an inscription of her recount of the event is sustained by the feminist stance that women’s voices and testimonies should be heard and believed, especially in relation to the abuses they have suffered. Carr’s inclusion of Jocasta as a speaking subject not only offers a settlement to a dramatic debate that has been going on since the 5th century B.C.E., but it also provides the classical figure with a more elaborate background. As she is able to speak her story, Jocasta depicts her husband in a way that highly contrasts with the description of Laius as “a great man” (“ἀνδρός … ἀρίστου”) (Ibid., 348–349) established by Sophocles in Oedipus Tyrannus. Oedipus’ abandonment is indeed repurposed as a rapt perpetrated without Jocasta’s knowledge and consent – “He / Stole / My infant / Son / From the cradle” – and immediately follows the disclosure that Laius is a paederast: “His thing / Children / Boy Children” (Carr 2021, 29). This adds layers to the traumatic experience that Oedipus went through as it implies that Laius may have abused the baby in addition to putting his life in deadly danger. Carr leaves that question open as her use of the traditional elements from the myth “He / … / Hammered

Writing Like a Woman  117 [the infant’s] / Heels / Together” (Ibid.) can be interpreted within this new frame as an act of restricting the baby’s movements so Laius could rape him. This also heightens Jocasta’s fear for the life of her child, but her concern is met with violence from her husband as she recalls: And when I Protested [he] Flung me Against the wall Cracked My head My cheeks My nose Till I Was a mess Of pulp And blood Nearly took Out one of My eyes In his rage.

(Ibid., 30)

The graphic description of the abuses that Jocasta suffered expresses in physical terms the destruction of her self at the hands of her husband that happened after the disappearance of her son. Yet, this insight into Laius’ character does not necessarily contradict the depiction established in Sophocles’ tragedy but rather complements it. It builds on the duplicitous facade displayed by some abusers, who appear like “great m[e]n” in public but are sexually, physically, and psychologically abusive in private. In comparison with Laius, Oedipus is the “Best [Jocasta] ever had” (Ibid., 29). This leads Jocasta to purposefully disregard the true identity of her new husband as implied through the lines: How can I say This plain Did I know it was him I did And then I didn’t And then I did Again

(Ibid., 28)

118  Writing Like a Woman The marriage of Jocasta with Laius first and Oedipus then does not bear any autobiographical echo to Carr’s family life per se. Yet, it speaks symbolically to the concealed dimension of a married relationship, underlining that what it seems might not be what it actually is. Although the marriage of Jocasta and Laius might appear more “natural” than the one with Oedipus, it was actually more destructive physically, psychologically, and emotionally for her than her relationship with her son. On the map of grief provided in iGirl, Jocasta symbolises the part of Carr’s mother’s inner and intimate life that the playwright could not have known. This bears some echoes with the choice of having Millie fill the position of the narrator in The Mai rather than the eponymous character. iGirl stands as a unique piece in Carr’s body of work to date. For the first time, she addresses the topics of women’s agency and subjectivity through the form of a solo performance. Yet, the polyphony of the play, which emerges from the several characters embodied by the solo performer, resonates with the experiments on dramatic speech that she conducted in her adaptations Hecuba (2015) and Girl on an Altar (2022). In these two plays, the characters’ lines reveal their “internal and external thoughts” (Sihra 2018, 268) in alternation with the depiction of the action. The opening scene of Hecuba displays the multiple functionalities of the dramatic speech. It starts with a description of the scene’s location and setting by the eponymous character: “So I’m in the throne room. Surrounded by the limbs, torsos, heads, corpses of my sons. My women trying to dress me” (Carr 2015, 211). This description is essential to the audience’s understanding as Hecuba, like Girl on an Altar, does not bring any of these elements on stage to the spectators’ sights. As explained by Carr, the implementation of this experimental form of dramatic speech means that “you cannot have any illustration in this play, it has to be completely on the line” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona ­Macintosh). Hecuba’s description is interweaved with her personal thought: “I don’t know where Priam is. He went out a while ago, when was it? Last night? Yesterday?” (Carr 2015, 211) In proceeding in such a way, Carr offers “a complex shift … between perspectives (between subjectivity and objectivity)” (Macintosh, 13), which shows Hecuba writing herself into the story of the fall of Troy. Carr places the characters in an “authorial narrator” position, which comes across very ostensibly in the final lines delivered by Cassandra since it offers “an open refutation of the other versions of the story and assert[s] … a more truthful one” (Wallace, 522). Carr’s decision to confer this specific character with that role speaks to the history of dismissing women’s work and silencing their voices in Western culture. Cassandra is indeed a prophetess able to see the future. She, for instance, foresaw the fall of Troy but was not believed and trusted. The god Apollo, who gave her the gift of

Writing Like a Woman  119 prophecy, cursed Cassandra so none of her predictions would be believed because she refused to have sexual intercourse with him. In The Trojan Women, Euripides mentions that characteristic feature of Cassandra. As she predicts the miserable future of the last members of her family and the terrible return to Hellas of the Greek army, the chorus calls her “delirious” (“λήψῃ”) (Euripides 1999, 50–51) and considers that her “prophecies are unreliable” (“οὐ σαφῆ δείξεις ἴσως”) (Ibid., 54–55). Yet, the following events dramatised in the play as well as in other tragedies, like Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and narrated epic poems, like Homer’s Odyssey, all of which the audiences knew about during the 5th century B.C.E., prove Cassandra’s prophecies to be true. Cassandra’s revealing conclusion voices Carr’s opinion about Euripides’ Hecuba, thus turning the character into a dramatic double of the playwright on stage. This draws a parallel with the character of Millie in The Mai. Although Carr’s Hecuba is not a memory play, it opens a space for the characters, and more specifically for the Trojan women, to tell their stories. In doing so, Carr reverses the authorship tradition of the mythological narratives associated with Troy. The Roman use of the Trojan myth in Virgil’s Aeneid aside, classical literature and drama have always framed the stories about Troy from the perspective of the Greeks. Even when these representations do not entail a process of racist othering of the Trojans, they remain instrumental to the more substantial narratives of the Greeks. Homer’s Iliad perfectly illustrates that point: Hector is arguably the most heroic character of the epic, yet the main focus of the story lies in “[t]he wrath … of Peleus’ son Achilles, the accursed wrath which brought countless sorrows upon the Achaeans” (“Μῆνιν … Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος / οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾿ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾿ ἔθηκε”) (Homer, 12–13). Similarly, Euripides instrumentalises the sufferings endured by the Trojans after the fall of Troy to show the Greeks’ hubris and explain the cycle of miserable returns to Hellas in The Trojan Women. In Carr’s Hecuba, however, the importance given to the Trojan women’s perspectives does not annihilate the Greeks’ points of view on the events. Odysseus and Agamemnon are able to narrate themselves in the story too. Carr refuses to silence the authorial voice of one of the two sides at war. She does so in order to not reproduce the process of narrating the events used by the Greeks, which her adaptation criticises since it has entailed the demonisation of the Trojan queen in the tradition. There is indeed no monster in her adaptation of Hecuba. The redemption of the eponymous character has been analysed as a loss of agency because she does not perform any act of revenge (Torrance, 265; Wallace, 523). Yet, as the dramatic speech enables the character to have a voice in the story, Carr confers Hecuba with the subjectivity of an agent unparalleled in the source tragedy. A similar process applies to the figure of Agamemnon. Although

120  Writing Like a Woman he is not a monster like Hecuba is in the classical tradition, he appears as “malignant” in the work of Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides, which Carr intends to prevent by “giving him a fair hearing” in Hecuba (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). Despite the Trojan War being framed as a “genocide” (Carr 2015, 212), Agamemnon does not stand as the “bad guy” of the story. The “unif[ifaction] … of soliloquy and dialogue,” which brings on stage the “characters’ internal and external thoughts” (Sihra 2018, 268), opens a widow for the audience to see Agamemnon’s feelings on his actions. The character takes a substantial part in the narration of Polyxena’s sacrifice, revealing the theatric pretence of “this shit” (Carr 2015, 241). As the wind does not start blowing right after the ritual, the army feels “angry,” and Agamemnon acts like “the voice of Achilles” is “speak[ing] through him” to keep those “fuckers …quiet” (Ibid., 246). The slurs he uses demonstrate the absolute contempt he feels for the Greeks and the utter disgust he has for the task he is forced to do to prove that he is “the rightful king” (Ibid., 232). In this respect, the force he is submitted to does not stem from the gods like in Greek tragedy but from his socio-political position at the head of the Greek army. This entails that Agamemnon ultimately makes the choice to perform these actions. Such a dimension is brought into light as he remembers the sacrifice of his own daughter at Aulis. Although his last words to Iphigenia were apologetic pointing out his lack of “choice” in the matter, Agamemnon recognises that “of course” he “had” some, that he “could’ve fled with her,” that he could have “kept her alive[,] [b]ut he chose” to do otherwise (Ibid.). The dramatisation of that event in Girl on an Altar offers a different perspective not only into that action but also into the character of Agamemnon. The opening of the play, which takes place in Aulis, shows the character in a difficult position within the army as he has faced “a coup” (Carr 2022, 13) and has been physically attacked, which the “wound snacking down his back” and the “cut under [his] eye” reveal (Ibid., 14). Yet, when Clytemnestra and Iphigenia arrive at the camp, “[t]he war council have agreed a treaty,” restoring “peace” within the army, on the promise that a “sacrifice” will occur on the next day (Ibid., 14–15), Iphigenia’s sacrifice. The apology for performing that action mentioned in Hecuba is never uttered in Girl on an Altar as Agamemnon’s focus on his daughter is quickly diverted. While he watches her thinking that he “can’t do” the sacrifice, his eyes lock on Achilles who seems to believe that “[Agamemnon]’ll never go through with” the ritual (Ibid., 16). This fills the king with anger as he exclaims in his thoughts to respond to the silent provocation: “Won’t I, you mortal upstart? Won’t I indeed?” (Ibid.). The action is framed through Agamemnon’s sole perspective with little acknowledgement of the deadly

Writing Like a Woman  121 suffering he is about to submit his daughter to. His main focus lies in the establishment of his narrative as “the king of kings” (Ibid.) with complete disregard for his family, which he subdues to his political ambition. Although Agamemnon claims later in the play that his “hands were tied” because the army “would have taken” the whole family “out” (Ibid., 28), Clytemnestra observes that he “could’ve gone to Troy without leading all the tribes … as just another marauding savage” (Ibid., 40), thus epitomising the alienation of women to serve men’s ambitions. Unlike Polyxena in Hecuba, Iphigenia does not appear on stage in Girl on an Altar. Her existence and story are entangled in the description of the events provided by three of her relatives: The serving woman of the family Cilissa, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra. In doing so, Carr diverges from the feminist trend of adapting the myth implemented by the tetralogy The Atrides directed by Ariane Mnouchkine (1990), which has influenced not only contemporary adaptations of Clytemnestra’s myth but also some productions of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Katie Mitchell offered an “Iphigenia-focused production of the Oresteia” in 1995 (Hall, 11). Even though silent, the ghost of Iphigenia is on stage, thus reminding the audience of Clytemnestra’s true motive for killing Agamemnon, which is undermined in the classical text as Aeschylus provides several different reasons for the murder. In Girl on an Altar, Iphigenia’s absence speaks to the invisibilisation of women’s stories and voices in Western cultural tradition and canon by patriarchy. As her existence is mainly framed through her mother’s dramatic arc, Carr reverses the dynamic sustaining By the Bog of Cats…. In the Midland play, the daughter Hester enacts on stage the story of marginalisation and discrimination endured by the mother Big Josie, which has been erased from the narrative of the community because of her exclusion. In Girl on an Altar, Clytemnestra’s punishment to be sent to the harem is a symbolic death. In this respect, it draws inspiration from the story of Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, who is sentenced to be buried alive for defying the patriarchal law issued by Creon. In Girl on an Altar, Clytemnestra is stripped of her title as a queen and subsequently loses her existence, identity, and individuality as she joins a group of unnamed, “neglected women” (Carr 2022, 42), hidden away from the rest of society to be exploited for men’s “pleasure,” doomed to become “forgotten souls” (Ibid., 43), which resonates with the destiny of Iphigenia and women artists in the Western cultural tradition. While Clytemnestra is locked away in the harem, all sorts of “[r]umours” circulate about her fate: “[Agamemnon]’s hung her” (Ibid., 45), “he’s slayed her in her bath” (Ibid., 44), and Leda’s: “he’s strung the child up over the bed chamber door” (Ibid.). Yet, unlike the characters, the spectators know what has happened to Clytemnestra because of her

122  Writing Like a Woman ability to tell her story on stage, which sheds light on the distortion of “reality” emerging from the objectification of women in men’s narratives. This reification of womanhood by patriarchy also appears through Carr’s reconfiguration of the relation between Clytemnestra and Cassandra. Like Hester and Caroline in By the Bog of Cats…, the two women are not truly antagonists. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the opposition of Clytemnestra and Cassandra stems from their social position rather than the rivalry of marital and extramarital relationships they have with the eponymous character. Clytemnestra indeed does not kill Cassandra out of jealousy but to assert her status as a free woman over a slave (McHardy, 26). In Girl on an Altar, Carr adapts that social dichotomy but intersects it with gender through an exploration of the couple formed by Cassandra and Agamemnon. Cassandra’s arrival in Argos entails a substantial transformation of her identity and social status. While she used to be “the little prophetess” among “the Trojan princesses” in Hecuba (Carr 2015, 232–233), she is a slave in Argos. She is first placed in the harem, but as she looks at the other women there, she grows aware that “[t]hey’re not [her] destiny” (Carr 2022, 26). She is quickly moved to the palace and then settled in the queen’s chamber. This seemingly “social promotion” within the intimate circle of Agamemnon demonstrates the dehumanisation of Cassandra. She remains a “slave girl who goes in fear of her life, in fear of everything” (Ibid., 35) since she is moved around like an object to please Agamemnon as he looks for someone to fill the position left vacant by Clytemnestra. Agamemnon conceives women as interchangeable. Cassandra is first moved to the palace because Clytemnestra has not forgiven him and he cannot “make it right between” them (Ibid., 30). Although the topic of the royal couple’s sexual life is addressed later in the play, the audience is to assume that Clytemnestra refuses to share her bed with Agamemnon as she perceives him to be “a tainted cut throat, a daughter slayer” (Ibid., 29). Agamemnon thus spends his nights with Cassandra, but “it is [Clytemnestra] he craves” (Ibid., 32). The assimilation of the two women grows stronger after Cassandra is promoted to the rank of queen, albeit she is not married to Agamemnon. She gives birth to her children “in Clytemnestra’s bed” surrounded by Clytemnestra’s “tapestries … rugs … enamelled cups … jewels, robes, footstools” (Ibid., 46). This chapter of Cassandra’s life coincides with the loss of her ability to foresee the future as she notices after being moved to the palace that “visions are gone” (Ibid., 32). They only “return” after she has given birth while Agamemnon “says” to her: “You are my Queen” (Ibid., 46). This juxtaposition of events interweaves some social considerations regarding the ability of a character to be an “authorial narrator.”

Writing Like a Woman  123 Carr creates and includes a new character in the classical myth to further the reflection on the social conditions necessary for an individual to have their story told and acknowledged. Cilissa, Clytemnestra’s serving woman, is based on the stock character of the nurse in Greek tragedy. The nurse is nameless, has no background story, and her sole purpose is to support the actions of one of her masters and/or mistresses. Carr fleshes up that figure of classical tragedy, giving her a name, Cilissa, and providing her with a role of dramatic importance. As the temporality of the myth is extended by several months, perhaps years, Cilissa stands as the narrator keeping the audience informed of the events that happen behind the closed doors of the palace. She bears witness for the spectators to the deterioration of Clytemnestra’s mental health after Agamemnon’s return as the queen “won’t eat, won’t wash, can’t sleep … frightening the children” (Ibid., 33) and to the royal decisions such as the prohibition of mentioning Clytemnestra’s and Leda’s names. Yet, she is utterly unable to change the course of events. She advises Agamemnon that “[i]t’s unwise to put [Clytemnestra] away,” alluding to the potential war that such a decision might – will – prompt since “half the kingdom [is] on [the queen’s] side” (Ibid., 41), but her sensible words are of no consequence since, as she says herself to Cassandra later in the play, she does not “wear the crown” (Ibid., 56). Cilissa stands as an ally to Clytemnestra and her claim. Yet, Cilissa is also critical of the queen’s action. As Clytemnestra lets her grief for Iphigenia’s death consume and dictate her life, thus endangering her position in Argos, Cilissa states: “let the dead child go, we’ve all buried children. What’s so different about your grief? So elevated? So proud?” (Ibid., 34) These lines stand as a metatextual comment on the story dramatised not only in Girl on an Altar but also in Greek tragedy more generally. The actions of classical tragedies appear unique because of the form of extreme horror they assume such as human sacrifice. Yet, they rely on common and ordinary tragedies suffered by everyone, kings and queens as well as slaves, like the death of a child. Greek tragedy, however, focuses on “superior” people (“βελτίους”) (Aristotle, 34–35), thus implying that only the stories of the powerful, wealthy, and mighty are worse being told and acknowledged. Carr subverts that tradition by providing a backstory to Cilissa. While she visits Clytemnestra at the harem, Cilissa remembers her “mother” who “died in a place like this when she was sold to Thebes after the house of Tyndareus had no more use for her” (Carr 2022, 48). This creates a connection between women through a shared experience of abuse, which Cilissa emphasises as she notes that Cassandra and she are “just … playthings” (Ibid., 56). Indeed, although Cassandra begat two royal children, she remains a slave. Yet, Cilissa’s line can be applied to Clytemnestra too.

124  Writing Like a Woman The dramatic arcs of Clytemnestra and Cassandra mirror one another. The social climb and fall of the former, who acts temporarily as the ruler of Argos before being evicted from power by Agamemnon, foreshadow the social climb and fall of the latter. Soon after giving birth, Cassandra is indeed “moved from the Queen’s apartments” and the infants are taken away from her (Ibid., 52), thus paralleling Clytemnestra’s exclusion and alienation from her children. Regardless of the recovery of Cassandra’s abilities, the character does not fill the exact same role she has in Hecuba as her role is more cryptic in Girl on an Altar. In contrast with this first instalment of the diptych, there is no “authorial narrator” to “correct” the story in Girl on an Altar. Yet, Cassandra delivers once again the concluding lines of the play, but, this time, the action occurs “as foretold” (Ibid., 61). The verb is polysemic on several levels. From the perspective of the adaptation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon offered in Girl on an Altar first, it alludes to the course of the action of the source tragedy that Carr seemingly leaves unchanged. From the perspective of the character then, it refers to the prophetic power of Cassandra who has foreseen Clytemnestra’s “axe descending” on Agamemnon (Ibid., 32), which enables another level of interpretation. The construction of the play’s denouement is indeed quite atypic as Cassandra describes the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra before the action occurs as underlined by the lines he delivers in response to the depiction of the forthcoming action: “Is she whispering? What’s she whispering?” (Ibid., 61). Agamemnon pursues his speech exclaiming: “So this is what it comes down to. An axe, a raging wife, a bath” (Ibid.), which suggests that Clytemnestra acts in accordance with the prophecy delivered by Cassandra.2 This places the two female characters in the position of actor and director, respectively, thus showing women taking over the action in the play after having been objectified to serve the narrative of ambition of the representative of patriarchy on stage: Agamemnon. In Phaedra Backwards, the dramatic language does not signal Phaedra’s position as the narrative subject of the dramatised story, a screen does. The prologue is a silent scene. The actor who embodies Phaedra “[e]nter[s]” on stage with “[a] glass of champagne in her hand” and “lies on chaise longue” while images are shown behind her (Carr 2015, 77). The film shows images of what seems to be a moment from the eponymous character’s childhood as it pictures Phaedra, Ariadne, and the Minotaur as children. The double presence of Phaedra who appears both on stage and on the screen echoes the purpose of the dramatic speech implemented in Hecuba and Girl on an Altar. Like the “unfi[cation] … of soliloquy and dialogue” which enables the audience to hear the “characters’ internal and external thoughts” (Sihra 2018, 268) in these two plays, the screen

Writing Like a Woman  125 in Phaedra Backwards opens a window for the audience to glimpse at the eponymous character’s interiority. Yet, the use of images rather than words suggests a slightly different purpose in Carr’s strategy to bring on stage the character’s inner life. While the dramatic speech challenges the construction and the reception of the action of the myth through the perspectives of several characters in Hecuba and Girl on an Altar, Phaedra’s “material body and its subjectivity is extended … and reconfigured through [the screen]” (Causey, 384), which redirects Phaedra Backwards’ main focus on the construction and reception of her character as a subject. The screen is not used throughout the whole course of the play but punctually during the action. In the prologue, besides setting the maze of temporalities3 on which the play relies, the juxtaposition of the stage and the screen questions the frame used to construct the perception of Phaedra in the tradition. The character is enlisted among the several embodiments of female monstrosity in classical theatre (Žižek and Dolar, 184). Yet, Phaedra was not born a monster, and she used to display the qualities of a “proper” woman – as conceived during the classical period – up until her meeting with Hippolytus (Poignault, 247). The canonicity of Euripides’ Hippolytus has framed Phaedra in the sole perception of her as a monstrous woman, thus disregarding her more nuanced representation in the whole body of the myth. In this regard, the dramatic frame used by Euripides to dramatise the story of Phaedra echoes Peggy Phelan’s reflections. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, she states that “the ‘I’ cannot be witnessed by the ‘eye’” (Phelan, 5), and this “(faulty) sight of the eye” is “reproduce[d]” through the “camera,” which is “modeled on the human eye” (Phelan, 14). Like a camera, the classical tragic stage fails to seize the subjectivity of a number of characters – especially when they are not Greek men – because they are framed through the tragedians’ biased intentions to fit the ideology and agenda of the 5th century B.C.E. Athenian democratic patriarchy. In Phaedra Backwards, Carr uses the “faulty sight” of the camera to highlight the blind spots of Greek tragedy, and Euripides’ Hippolytus more particularly, as she brings women’s subjectivity on stage through the screen. The images of Phaedra’s childhood in the prologue weave the character’s initial state of innocence into the story adapted from Euripides’ Hippolytus since it is a quality traditionally associated with children in Western culture. This captures Phaedra through a broader lens than the source tragedy while expanding the audience’s knowledge and comprehension of the character as the screen “materialize[s]” her inner life “as pictures to map visions of” (Causey, 388) her subjectivity, thus making the invisible visible. Not only does this include her memories as shown in the prologue, but it also includes her dreams as displayed at the end of the fourth scene. In that specific scene, Carr subverts the traditional

126  Writing Like a Woman scenic conclusion. The exit of Aricia prompted by the end of the dialogue with Phaedra should indeed conclude the scene, but images are suddenly displayed for the first time since the prologue. They show “The Child Phaedra, the Child Ariadne, the Child Minotaur in a graveyard on a cliff. The little girls hold the Child Minotaur by the hand” (Carr 2015, 96). The images introduce and illustrate Phaedra’s next line: “Dreamt we were on the moon when I lay down earlier this evening. Ariadne and I holding you [the Minotaur] by the hand” (Ibid., 97). While the scene dramatises the tensions between the family members, the images displayed on the screen followed by the lines of monologue realign the audience’s attention to the actual focus of the play – Phaedra – thus relegating the family drama to the background of the story played on stage. One of the two alternative endings of Phaedra Backwards reveals the perspective through which the story has been repurposed since it shows an “[i]mage of Phaedra on screen, staring out, huge, all face. Looking” (Ibid., 125). As Phaedra stands alone in the frame of the screen, her account of the story defines the scope of the tragic myth. In this respect, the images of her childhood work as proof of good character in the prologue, especially considering that the story about to be played intends to clear her name from the canonical accusation of causing the destruction of Theseus’ family through the inversion of the incestuous love dynamic and the reversal of responsibility in the death sentence. However, since Carr leaves the other characters outside the frame of the screen, their accounts of the story are left outside the scope of the play, thus exposing Phaedra Backwards to be questioned on the reliability of the action dramatised. Yet, the main point of this adaptation does not lie in correcting the tragic myth as displayed in the source but in opening a space for the woman character of that tragedy to tell her side of the story because, as noticed by Carr, “[Euripides] was writing his version of a myth, but what do you do with just one version?”4 (Carr in Leavy) Yet, unlike Euripides, Carr acknowledges and informs the audience on the subjective perspective framing her adaptation of the story through the images displayed by the screen on stage. Bringing Silent Women to Life In several adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy by Carr, the women storytellers do not use their narrator and narrator-like position to tell only their own stories but also the stories of their female relatives who have been silenced by the patriarchal tradition. Phaedra Backwards illustrates that dimension as scenes from the marital life of Phaedra’s parents are interwoven to the tragic myth dramatised in Euripides’ Hippolytus, thus showing and inscribing Pasiphae’s side of the story regarding the birth of the Minotaur. This process is at work even more extensively in The Mai.

Writing Like a Woman  127 Defining who the protagonist of The Mai can be a tricky question. On the one hand, the paratextual information contained in the title positions the titular character at the centre of the attention, yet, on the other hand, the action is narrated by her daughter who is the sole character to never leave the stage. One way of solving that issue lies in the intersection of Millie’s identity with The Mai’s story. As a narrator, Millie conceives her mother’s tragic death as the founding moment of her identity. Through the recollection of her memory, Millie attempts to decipher her self, and to do so, she brings her mother back to life. The interconnection between the two characters runs deep and grows into the structure of the story through the inclusion of the classical vision of tragedy: Family doom. In The Poetics, Aristotle indeed states that “the finest tragedies are composed about only a few families” who “have suffered or perpetrated terrible things” (“περὶ ὀλίγας οἰκίας αἱ κάλλισται τραγῳδίαι συντίθενται … συμβέβηκεν ἢ παθεῖν δεινὰ ἢ ποιῆσαι”) (Aristotle, 70–73). Carr uses a similar pattern in The Mai: Not only does Millie’s situation as a single mother who has been discarded by her lover re-enact the misfortune that The Mai experienced with Robert, but The Mai herself replays the woeful relationship of Grandma Fraochlán who has spent her life “at the window pinin’ for the nine-fingered fisherman” (Carr 1999, 141) because “she couldn’t live without” him (Ibid., 145). The tragic pattern experienced by the women in the family stems directly from the socio-legal definition of womanhood in the 1937 Irish Constitution, which prevents the conception of women outside the categories of wifehood and motherhood. In this regard, Millie’s story is the story of her female relatives too as they struggle to define themselves on their own terms without taking their husbands into consideration. The interconnection of these stories is reflected through the setting of Millie’s memories, and so of the play. The Mai is set inside a living room, thus turning a space of privacy into a space to be publicly watched over by the audience, which echoes the tenet of the memory play as Millie reveals the privacy of her inner life through her narration. These intersecting dimensions are emphasised by the “huge bay window” (Ibid., 107) of the set. As Millie “stand[s] at” it (Ibid.) throughout the play and “The Mai is continually seen passing by, or framed with” it (Sihra 2007, 3), this staging prop carries the sense of disclosure on which the action of The Mai relies. Through the narration of her childhood memories, Millie opens a window to the private realm of her family, and more specifically of her mother and female relatives. In doing so, Millie discloses the stories of women who, because they were women, have been concealed and silenced within the home. Indeed, The Mai tells the stories of “four generations of seven characters ranging from 100-year-old Grandma Fraochlán to 16-year-old Millie” (Sihra 2018, 11), thus bearing the testimonies of women throughout a century of the history of modern and contemporary Ireland, especially

128  Writing Like a Woman regarding the impossible task of defining themselves as autonomous subjects in a society which secludes their lives “within the home” (1939 Irish Constitution). Giving a voice and a presence on stage to women is a cornerstone of Carr’s dramatic strategy. Yet, this does not necessarily happen through narration. Unlike her adaptations of Greek tragedies, the Midlands cycle – The Mai aside – does not place any character in a narrator or narrator-like position. Yet, the protagonists still bring on stage the hidden history of women through the embodiment of shared experiences, which is sustained and supported by the intertextualities of the tragic myths, thus writing women’s stories in the history of contemporary Ireland. In By the Bog of Cats…, Carr realigns the focus of Euripides’ Medea on women. Verna A. Foster indeed argues that, unlike Medea, “Hester’s actions are motivated much less by the desertion of her lover, Carthage Kilbride, than by her feelings about … [B]ig Josie” (Foster, 89). This motherand-daughter connection seems, however, to run even deeper. Like the re-enactment of the previous generations’ woeful relationships structuring The Mai, Carr uses family doom to make Hester play on stage the story of Big Josie’s oppression, marginalisation, and exclusion by the community of the Settlers. Xavier Cassidy stresses that intersection between the two women’s stories as he proclaims that since “[he] ran [her] mother out of [the Bog of Cats] … [he]’ll run [Hester] too” (Carr 1999, 328). Big Josie is described by Catwoman as “the greatest song stitcher ever to have passed through” the Bog of Cats in Act One (Ibid., 275). Yet, Big Josie has never told her own story. Her story thus depends on the ­accounts provided by other characters, which are conflicting with one ­another. On the one hand, the characters living in the community of the Bog of Cats portray Big Josie as a neglectful abusive mother who “chained” her daughter “like a rabied pup to th[e] auld caravan” (Ibid., 272) so she could “go off for days with anywan who’d buy her a drink” (Ibid., 294). On the other hand, Hester’s brother Joseph describes her as “gentle” (Ibid., 320). Hester’s reactions to these accounts manifest on stage the unsolvable puzzle that Big Josie is for the audience: While she states that her mother’s portrayal as abusive and neglectful “doesn’t add up” with “what [she] remember[s]” (Ibid., 274), she also claims to her brother that Big Josie “was a rancorous hulk with a vicious whiskey temper” (Ibid., 320). The absence of Big Josie and the utter impossibility of knowing her story emphasises Hester’s position as an outsider (Sihra 2005, 122). Yet, Big Josie’s disappearance carries a socio-political and cultural significance that exceeds the boundaries of the diegetic world dramatised in By the Bog of Cats… as it symbolises “women’s haunting loss throughout theatre history” (Sihra 2018, 121). In this regard, Hester does not only enact on

Writing Like a Woman  129 stage the story of Big Josie but she also enacts the history of oppression, marginalisation, and exclusion suffered by Irish women. Hester’s “quest for identity” (Sihra 2005, 122) thus comes to signify an attempt to uncover and disclose the voices that have been silenced in Ireland. This dimension appears through Hester’s revelations of some of the stories of abuses suffered by the community at the hands of Xavier, and more specifically those endured by his daughter Caroline. The classical character on which Caroline is based never appears on stage in Euripides’ Medea. Furthermore, her name is never mentioned; she is thus only referred to through her relationships with the men in her life: She is Creon’s daughter and Jason’s soon-to-be wife. She embodies the ideal woman as conceived in the 5th century B.C.E. Athenian democracy, which is depicted in Pericles’ funeral oration as reported by Thucydides: If I am to speak also of womanly virtues, referring to those of you who will henceforth be in widowhood, I will sum up all in a brief admonition: Great is your glory if you fall not below the standard which nature has set for your sex, and great also is hers of whom there is least talk among men whether in praise or in blame. (Εἰ δέ με δεῖ καὶ γυναικείας τι ἀρετῆς, ὅσαι νῦν ἐν χηρείᾳ ἔσονται, μνησθῆναι, βραχείᾳ παραινέσει ἅπαν σημανῶ. τῆς τε γὰρ ὑπαρχούσης φύσεως μὴ χείροσι γενέσθαι ὑμῖν μεγάλη ἡ δόξα καὶ ἧς ἂν ἐπ᾿ ἐλάχιστον ἀρετῆς πέρι ἢ ψόγου ἐν τοῖς ἄρσεσι κλέος ᾖ.) (Thucydides, 340–341) In this respect, she stands as an invisible antagonist to Medea because she typifies the “proper” way of being a woman. Carr reproduces that dynamic to some extent in By the Bog of Cats…: While Hester stands as the “improper” woman who has conceived a child out of wedlock, Caroline lives by the patriarchal expectation as she complies with Xavier’s will for her to marry Carthage. Yet, Carr gives more importance to that seemingly antagonistic embodiment of womanhood. Besides the obvious fact that the character has a name, thus anchoring her story into the narrative at play, Carr uses Caroline to explore “the consequences for women of a traditional marriage, as written into the 1937 Irish Constitution” (Trench, 149–150), which Hester has rejected. Like in Euripides’ Medea, this marriage is not prompted by love but by patriarchal necessities. Creon and Xavier both lack a male heir to take over their roles after their death. Carr, however, emphasises the commodification of women necessary to “maintain the male economy” (Ibid., 151) in By the Bog of Cats…. Xavier indeed agrees for his daughter to marry Carthage on the sole basis that his “farm’ll be safe” (Carr 1999, 328),

130  Writing Like a Woman thus assimilating Caroline to land as she becomes a “site of transaction between the Cassidy and the Kilbride households” (Sihra 2018, 127) like the farm is. Yet, the commodification of womanhood is an intrinsic part of the character’s story as disclosed by Hester’s revelations. During the first dialogue opposing Hester to Xavier in Act One, she implies that he is guilty of some crime and that “[i]t’s only [his] land and money and people’s fear of [him] that has [him] walkin’ free” (Carr 1999, 293). Hester refers to the sexual abuse that Caroline suffered as a child from her father. The last exchange between the two women hints at that traumatic event as Hester states that there is “no need to break” Caroline because she “w[as] broke a long while back,” “when [she] w[as] Josie’s age” (Ibid., 337). The inclusion of a background story to the Medea-like’s seemingly rival undermines the antagonistic dynamic of their relationship to stress a similarity between the two women. Indeed, a few moments before their dialogue, Xavier sexually assaulted Hester on stage: Hester: Xavier Hester: Xavier Hester: Xavier:

… ya’ll take nothin’ from me I don’t choose to give ya. (puts gun to her throat): Won’t I now? Think ya’ll outwit me with your tinker ways and – Let go of me! (a tighter grip): Now let’s see the leftovers of Carthage Kilbride. Uses gun to look down her dress. I’m warnin’ ya, let go! A struggle, a few blows, he wins this bout. Now are ya stronger than me? I could do what I wanted with ya right here and now and no wan would believe ya. Now what I’d really like to know is when are ya plannin’ on lavin’? (Ibid., 330)

That scene exposes on stage the sexual violence to which women are subjected but is never talked about. Hester’s ability to break the silence is intrinsically connected to her relation to space. Like Caroline, Hester is assimilated to land, and more particularly to the bog where she “was born” and where “[she]’ll end [her] days” (Ibid., 289). Yet, while the farm is a domesticated land, thus echoing the domesticity associated with the home in which women are secluded, the bog p ­ resents a “topography” of a “naturally rebellious aspect” which echoes “the ungouvernab[ility] … of Hester’s character” (Sihra 2018, 125). It thus enables the expression of the “female energies which exceed the social boundaries” (Ibid., 123) as epitomised through Hester’s embodiment of the shared experience of women’s oppression on stage, which subsequently breaks the silence imposed by patriarchy.

Writing Like a Woman  131 Like Hester, Portia is haunted by the ghost of her brother. Yet, while Joseph plays a role in the depiction of the protagonist’s mother, Gabriel participates in the characterisation of the eponymous character herself. As in By the Bog of Cats…, the action of Portia Coughlan is framed through the loss of a loved relative. Gabriel’s multiple ghostly apparitions on stage during the play show the influence he has over the course of Portia’s life. The opening of the play underlines the determining force that Gabriel is in Portia’s destiny as the first glimpse that the audience has of her shows “Two isolating lights up. One on Portia … The other light comes simultaneously on Gabriel … They mirror one another’s posture and movements … Portia stands there … lost-looking, listening to Gabriel’s voice” (Carr 1999, 193). In contrast with By the Bog of Cats…, the protagonist of Portia Coughlan is the sole one who knows the exact circumstances of his disappearance, a story that she eventually tells and embodies as she takes her own life in the same way as he did years before on the “[e]xact same spot” (Ibid., 224). Gabriel, however, is not a woman but a man, which seems to place Portia in a different position than Hester. Yet, Portia neither tells nor embodies the story of a man but the story of a mutilated woman that resonates with the experiences of women in Ireland at the time. The symbolism associated with incest is polysemic in Portia Coughlan. In addition to subverting the patriarchal myth of the complementary of the sexes, it also refers to the maiming of women’s selves perpetrated by patriarchy. Portia and Gabriel are indeed more than mere siblings; they are twins. In this respect, they “were so alike” that their mother “couldn’t tell [them] apart” (Ibid., 211). This similarity spreads to their psyches as Damus remembers: “You’d ask them a question and they’d both answer the same – at the same time, exact inflexion, exact pause, exact everythin’. … You’d put them in different rooms, still the same answer” (Ibid., 224–225). This confusion of identity is even assumed by the twins themselves as Gabriel “used call [Portia] Gabriel and [Portia] used call [Gabriel] Portia” because they “couldn’t tell who was who” (Ibid., 241), which stresses a single identity shared by the two characters. Therefore, Gabriel’s death comes to symbolise the death of a part of Portia. As a man, Gabriel personifies Portia’s agency. Gabriel’s death and Portia’s marriage to Raphael happen over a two-year time-lapse period. These events occur during the teenagehood of the characters as they are respectively fifteen and seventeen when Gabriel dies and when Portia gets married. These years constitute a transition in the life of an individual from childhood to adulthood. This period thus coincides with Portia’s growth from being a girl to being a woman, which entails her loss of agency. In Ireland, the concept of womanhood is indeed culturally, socially, and legally confused with the one of motherhood (Sihra 2018, 97), which inherently

132  Writing Like a Woman entails wifehood considering the powerful influence of the Church in the country. Such a confusion of concepts underlines the lack of agency of women in Irish society: They do not have any other destiny than being wives and mothers. In this regard, Portia’s longing for her dead twin symbolises a quest for her lost agency. This layer of interpretation of the symbolism of incest in Portia Coughlan reverses the myth of Antigone. In Sophocles’ tragedy, the eponymous character is only able to exert her agency as a subject after the death of her brother because, as noted by Helene Foley, “in classical Attica, … a surviving daughter could be imagined to take appropriate action in the absence of all supporting male relatives” (Foley, 179). In Portia Coughlan, the reversal of the myth of Antigone increases the connection of the eponymous character with Medea. Portia’s situation echoes the first monologue of that classical figure from Euripides’ tragedy, and more particularly Medea’s remark that women have to “take a master for [their] bodies” (“δεσπότην τε σώματος / λαβεῖν”) (Euripides 2001, 304–305). Indeed, the confusion of womanhood and motherhood engrained in the Irish conception of gender forces Portia on the path of having children by her husband, which she has “never wanted” (Carr 1999, 221). Although the incestuous relationship of Portia and Gabriel replays the story of their parents who are half-sister and brother, the main story that Portia’s dramatic arc re-enacts appears to be her brother’s. If Gabriel’s death is approached as a personification of Portia’s loss of agency, then her action of dying by suicide completes the deadly process to which women are submitted by patriarchy. The inclusion of intertextualities from Greek tragedies broadens the seemingly individual and singular experience of Portia in the play, which signals the taboo surrounding women unwilling to be mothers in Ireland. The connections with Antigone and Medea turn Portia into an emblem to open a conversation about the problematic conception of motherhood as a “natural” and “necessary” step in a woman’s life. Through her dramatic arc, Portia inscribes the story of women who do not want to be wives and/or mothers and embodies the tragedy of the dismissal of their wishes in Irish social history. Despite belonging to the Midlands cycle, On Raftery’s Hill (2000) and Ariel (2002) mark a turning point in Carr’s strategy to write Irish women’s (hi)stories on stage sustained by classical intertextualities. The central position of the protagonist(s) is indeed not filled by women but by men. This comes across ostensibly through the figure of Red Raftery in On Raftery’s Hill (Doyle, 503). Act One focuses on the horrific violence he perpetuates as the tyrannical ruler over the family, which includes the torture and slaughter of a cow, the exclusion of his son Ded from the house for being too “girly” (Carr 2009, 23), and the rape of Sorrel. These last two actions

Writing Like a Woman  133 draw a parallel between Red and the character of Xavier Cassidy from By the Bog of Cats…, whom Hester accuses not only of having abused Caroline but also of having caused the death of his son because “he wasn’t tough enough” (Carr 1999, 329). However, while By the Bog of Cats… deals with a female character’s quest for identity, the second act of One Raftery’s Hill unfolds pieces of Red’s past to provide a background to his abusive behaviour. Red Raftery epitomises Eamonn Jordan’s comment regarding the construction of characters in Carr’s Midlands plays: “Victims constantly identify with their prosecutors” (Jordan, 245). Red’s actions re-enact the abuses he suffered. Like Sorrel who is the offspring of the incestuous relationship between him and his daughter Dina, Red is the product of incest as he was conceived by Shalome and her father. The molestation he endured at the hands of his mother during his childhood enhances the parallel between his character and his daughters, especially since these abuses are enabled by the failure of the other parent to protect the child. The cycle of abuse from which stems Red’s characterisation and actions is entrenched in the classical concept of family doom. Although the classical intertextuality is particularly subtle in On Raftery’s Hill in comparison with the other plays from the Midlands cycle, Carr considers this work to be her “most Greek play, with the repetition down the generations and the hidden crime going on, where some things are unfixable” (Sihra 2018, 156). Indeed, while the characters of the other Midlands plays embody some features of their parents and grandparents and subsequently re-enact some dimensions of the actions performed in the family past, the Rafterys reproduce the exact same crimes over and over through the generations. This echoes distinctive mark of Greek tragedy as illustrated through the connection of the two most canonical plays of classical drama: Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone by Sophocles. Although the hamartiai performed by both eponymous characters might seem quite disconnected, they reveal a flaw of character running into the family as underlined by the chorus in Antigone: “Advancing to the extreme of daring, you stumbled against the lofty altar of Justice, my child! And you are paying for some crime of your fathers” (“προβᾶσ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἔσχατον θράσους / ὑψηλὸν ἐς Δίκας βάθρον / προσέπεσες, ὦ τέκνον, ποδί. / πατρῷον δ᾿ ἐκτίνεις τιν᾿ ἆθλον”) (Sophocles 1998, 82–83). Through their actions, both Oedipus and Antigone show defiance and distrust towards the gods and their divine organisation of the universe.5 In On Raftery’s Hill, the fatal actions that structure the family relationships provide Red with a background. Yet, the narrative is enacted through Sorrel’s dramatic arc on stage. It is her story of abuse and molestation at the hands of her father that the audience witnesses. It is her distress and helplessness that the audience watches as she calls for the help of her

134  Writing Like a Woman sister-mother and her brother, who never show up, leaving her unprotected and at the mercy of the patriarchal figure ruling over the house. In doing so, Carr realigns the focus of On Raftery’s Hill to women’s stories, despite the prominent role played by Red. On Raftery’s Hill discloses the most disturbing story of abuses sustained by patriarchy, which primarily affects women, even though it impacts men too. Unlike the other plays of the Midlands cycle, On Raftery’s Hill takes place solely in a “kitchen setting,” which “resonates with plot, structure, symbols and tropes … present in many of the male-authored Irish plays of the twentieth century” (Trench, 25). In Carr’s play, however, this setting challenges the “assumptions” of the home as a “safe space” for women in the 1937 Constitution (Ibid., 26). It is indeed in that seemingly “safe space” that Sorrel is violently raped by her father. In setting On Raftery’s Hill in such an environment, Carr stresses that she is disclosing stories that are never talked about in Ireland. The walls of the house conceal secrets, which Carr exposes purposefully by bringing the inside of the home, and so the intimacy of family, on the public stage. Sorrel’s unanswered calls for help tackle that dimension as underlined by Maria Doyle who comments on that moment from the play: the passivity of the community recasts the audience’s understanding of what they have witnessed: what seemed in its enactment to be the work of a single individual is now seen to be, if not performed, at least condoned by the community. (Doyle, 505) The silence surrounding incest in Ireland, which Carr breaks intentionally in On Raftery’s Hill, enables the perpetuation of these crimes. Building on the traditional use of the family cell as a microscopic field for the exploration of Irish society (Sihra 2018, 164), Red, as the patriarch of the family, embodies Irish patriarchy. Through his figure, Carr offers a terrifying and yet accurate feminist retelling of the Irish “national myth,” which turns “the victimized but bloodthirsty Cathleen ni Houlihan … into a victimizing – and bloodthirsty – father, whose power is enabled by others’ acceptance of it” (Doyle, 512). In doing so, Carr implies that there is nowhere safe, especially for women, as long as patriarchy rules over Ireland, which Ariel illustrates too. Like Red, Fermoy’s crimes are a re-enactment of the past. The mention of his dead mother in several conversations throughout the play, especially in the opening act, suggests that the family is haunted by the past. She died at the hands of her husband, and Fermoy was an accessory to the murder as he “hould [his] Ma down” (Carr 2009, 87), but since he was “seven,”

Writing Like a Woman  135 he was not “criminally responsible” (Ibid., 94). However, as noted by his brother Boniface, “somethin like thah is bound to take uds toll on a person’s view a the world” (Ibid., 87). The motives leading to the murder of Fermoy’s mother by his father are not as clearly stated as the reasons surrounding the “sacrifice” of Ariel. Yet, the scrap of information revealed by the characters shows that both of these killings have been conceived through a similar lens: Men “scripting”6 the destiny of women in the family. Fermoy indeed perceives his mother as a woman who “was never the suurt was goin to die in her bed” (Ibid., 74). Such a characterisation demonstrates his corrupted vision of the world and of the life of h ­ umans – and more specifically women – as Boniface answers: “She’d a died in her bed if she’d been let…” (Ibid.) However, while Fermoy blames God for the decision to kill Ariel, his father decided on his own to murder his wife as “[i]n cuurt he said ud was to save her the trouble a dyin laher on” (Ibid., 87). In doing so, Carr implies that Fermoy behaves in accordance with a system that he has not created but to which he is submitted. As in the case of Red, Fermoy’s re-enactment of the crimes from the past enables patriarchy to persist. The transformation of the “national myth” through the character of Fermoy relies on another subversion of the mythology surrounding Irishness and Ireland. Lisa Fitzpatrick observes that “Irish dramatic (and nationalist) tradition is familiar with the sacrifice of a son … But nowhere is the sacrifice of a daughter mythologized” (Fitzpatrick, 175–176). This line of the plot grows directly from the source material that is Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, which Carr adapts in Ariel but seems to “fai[l] to communicate locally at the level of myth or community” because it “does not fit with th[e] gendered conventions of Irish dramatic and critical practice” (Ibid., 176). Yet, Carr actually coins a feminist mythological narrative through the reversal of the myth of Cathleen ni Houlihan in Ariel, which could also be applied to On Raftery’s Hill. In both plays, the rule of men is ensured by the sacrifice of women, either literal like in Ariel or symbolic like in On Raftery’s Hill, thus offering an exact counter-narrative to the national myth as dramatised in Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which a woman’s freedom is enabled by the sacrificial death of men. Carr’s subversion of the national myth with the use of Greek tragedy speaks to the social reality experienced by women in Ireland as they are secluded in the house. During the classical period, the confinement of women in the oikos was necessary to ensure the access of men to the freedom of the polis (Arendt, 32). This enslaving situation has mutated throughout history but still carries on in contemporary times as underlined by Angela Davis’ reflection on the position of women in postindustrial society who, “as wives, … were destined to become appendages

136  Writing Like a Woman to their men, servants to their husbands” because of their place in the sole locus of the home (Davis, 28). Carr’s decision to dramatise the sacrifice of Fermoy’s daughter rather than wife, as his father did, stresses the social destiny crafted for women by patriarchy in Ireland. This destiny stems from the murder of their agency so they will only be instruments rather than subjects, thus enabling men to thrive. The deadly bleakness associated with Carr’s retelling of myths, either classical or Irish, has led to the questioning of her feminist strategy. Claudia Harris indeed argues that Carr’s female characters are “[n]o[t] feminist in any traditional sense” because they “are not conquering the world, or even surviving for that matter” (Harris, 229). This comment, when applied to the re-conception of the national myth of Cathleen ni Houlihan through the sacrifice of Ariel, questions the possibility of advocating for feminism while crafting a story that relies on the death of a young girl so a man can get into power. Yet, feminist intentions cannot be only restricted to the creation of empowering narratives and plots for women, they also need to reveal the hidden reality of oppression to propel a change in society as advocated by Rich through her definition of the concept of re-vision (Rich, 35). This is precisely what Carr’s dramatic strategy tackles as illustrated in Ariel. In Ariel, the eponymous character is certainly objectified by her father but she is not by the playwright. The ghostly apparition of the young girl in the second act confers the character with the opportunity to tell her post-mortem story. This specific line of the plot draws inspiration from another tragedy by Euripides involving the figure of Iphigenia: Iphigenia among the Taurians. Set a couple of decades after the action of Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia among the Taurians explores the consequences faced by the eponymous character after the divine twist that occurred during the sacrifice. At the end of Iphigenia at Aulis, the god Artemis, moved by Iphigenia’s courage, substitutes the girl with a doe while Agamemnon is about to cut through her neck. Iphigenia is then sent to the island of Tauris. Iphigenia among the Taurians focuses on her life and escape from that place, which is facilitated by Orestes’ arrival on the island as he seeks atonement for the murder of Clytemnestra. Although that tragedy is not enlisted as one of the classical models of Ariel, the eponymous character’s depiction of the world she is stuck in resonates with Iphigenia’s experience on the island of Tauris. Ariel indeed asks Fermoy on the phone to “[c]ome and get [her]” because she is in an “awful” place and tracked down by a monstrous “pike,” which “won’t rest till he has” her (Carr 2009, 123). This echoes the description provided by Euripides of Tauris as a barbaric and horrific place practising human sacrifices in which Iphigenia is forced to partake. However, unlike Iphigenia, Ariel is dead. And so, she does not return home alive but as a decaying corpse in a coffin. Ariel’s testimony defuses the romanticisation traditionally associated with sacrificial death. In the context of the play, she exposes the pretence

Writing Like a Woman  137 of men as “scripters” acting like they know what is best for women’s lives. In this regard, Ariel’s voice carries the horrific experience not only of her grandmother but also of Irish women. Prevented from having a life outside the home, many Irish women went through a social death, unable to tell their stories of oppression and alienation, which have been invisibilised and unacknowledged by the State. This situation is translated through the ghostly nature of Ariel in the second act of the play: A form of being that exists but has no materiality. Carr diverts the trope of the ghost in Irish literature, which she couples with the appropriation of the last instalment of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, to address that matter. None of the acts of Ariel is based on The Eumenides per se. Carr’s decision to not include the last play of the Aeschylean trilogy stems from her feminist approach to the classical source material as The Eumenides consecrates “the triumph of patriarchy” (Hall, 18). Yet, several elements from the plot crafted by Carr draw inspiration from that classical tragedy, including Ariel’s phone call to Fermoy. This moment stresses that Fermoy is haunted by the crime he performed, which is precisely the purpose of the Furies who intend to “pursue [Orestes] to punish him” (“δίκας μέτειμι τόνδε φῶτα”) for the murder of Clytemnestra (Aeschylus, 384–385). Moreover, Ariel’s intervention is reminiscent of Clytemnestra who appears as a ghost to awaken the Furies so they will “save [her] soul” (“ὡς ἔλεξα τῆς … περὶ / ψυχῆς”) by avenging her death in The Eumenides (Ibid., 368–369). In Ariel, the titular character’s phone call to her father prompts a similar course of events as it enables Frances’ discovery of the truth regarding her daughter’s fate leading to the murder of Fermoy as retaliation. Yet, the non-closure dimension embedded in the figure of ghosts has a specific significance in Ireland. These spectral figures grew into a trope after the famine to signify “the victim’s dehumanization,” which “continues to haunt because [Ireland is] not yet free, collectively, of the shadow of processes of dehumanization that have their counterparts all too evidently in [contemporary] time[s]” (Lloyd, 157). In Ariel, Carr inscribes the treatment of women in the history of dehumanisation of Ireland through the apparition of Ariel’s ghost. Yet, in doing so, she subverts the dramaturgical style of realism in which the play is seemingly framed, thus showing that her feminist intentions are not solely reflected by the topics and characterisation but also by the forms of her plays. Notes 1 Clare Wallace uses that expression in relation to Cassandra’s final lines in ­Hecuba, but several characters in Carr’s plays have a similar position. 2 Carr does not provide any stage direction in Girl on an Altar. This leaves the directors free to stage the action as they wish. Anabelle Comyn thus decided to not reproduce the classical murder as described by Cassandra. Instead, Clytemnestra drowns Agamemnon with wine on the bed.

138  Writing Like a Woman 3 According to Melissa Sihra, the play “offers circuitous pathways which … open up a maze of possibilities” (Sihra 2018, 260). 4 Carr made that statement in relation to Hecuba, but it could be applied to Hippolytus too. 5 In Oedipus Tyrannus, the eponymous character refuses to believe Tyresias who, as a foreseer, is a human messenger of the gods. In Antigone, the titular character’s rebellion against Creon’s edict underlines her defiance towards patriarchy, which was conceived as the “natural” order not only of the city but also of the universe during the classical period. 6 This expression is used by Isabelle Torrance to analyse the murder of Ariel by Fermoy (Torrance 2018, 77).

Works Cited Primary Sources Aeschylus. 2008. Eumenides. In Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, 353–485. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Carr, M. 1999. Plays One. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2009. Plays Two. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2015. Plays Three. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2021. iGirl. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2022. Girl on an Altar. London: Faber. Euripides. 1999. Trojan Woman. In Trojan Women. Iphigenia among the Taurians. Ion, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 1–143. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2001. Medea. In Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 275–413. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Homer. 2003. Iliad Books 1–12, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray and W. F. Wyatt. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Lady Gregory. 1983. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, ed. M. Fitzgerald. Gerrards Cross: Smythe. Sophocles. 1997. Oedipus Tyrannus. In Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 323–483. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1998. Antigone. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 1–127. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Secondary Sources 1937 Irish Constitution. Irish Statute Book. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/ cons/en/html. Arendt, H. 2018. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Aristotle. 1999. Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press.

Writing Like a Woman  139 Causey, M. 1999. The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology. Theatre Journal. 51.4: 383–394. Cixous, H. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs. 1.4: 875–893. Davis, A. 2019. Women, Race & Class. London: Penguin Random House. Des Bouvrie, S. 1990. Women in Greek Tragedy: An Anthropological Approach. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Dolan, J. 2012. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Donohue, B. 2013. Marina Carr – Writing as a Feminist Act. In Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, ed. L. Fitzpatrick, 39–57. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Doyle, M. 2010. Slouching Towards Raftery’s Hill: The Devolving Patriarch in Marina Carr’s Midlands Plays. Modern Drama. 53.4: 495–515. Fitzpatrick, L. 2007. Nation and Myth in the Age of the Celtic Tiger: Muide Éire?. In Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present, and Future, ed. P. Lonergan and R. O’Dwyer, 169–179. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foster, V. A. 2021. Mother Medea and Her Children: Maternal Ambivalence in the Medean Plays of Marina Carr, Cherríe Moraga, and Rachel Cusk. Comparative Drama. 55.1: 83–111. Hall, E. 2005. Iphigenia and Her Mother at Aulis: A Study in the Revival of a Euripidean Classic. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 3–41. London: Bloomsbury. Harris, C. 2003. Rising Out of the Miasmal Mists: Marina Carr’s Ireland. In The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”, ed. C. Leeney and A. McMullan, 216–232. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Hill, S. 2019. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jauss, H. R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti. Brighton: Harvester Press. Jordan, E. 2002. Unmasking the Myths? Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and On Raftery’s Hill. In Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. J. M. Walton and M. McDonald, 243–262. London: Methuen. Leavy, A. 2016. Marina Carr Interview: “There is an Affinity Between the Russian Soul and the Irish Soul”. Irish Times, December 6. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/marina-carr-interview-there-is-an-affinity-between-the-russiansoul-and-the-irish-soul-1.2893945. Leeney, C. 2010. Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939: Gender and Violence on Stage. New York: Peter Lang. Lloyd, D. 2005. The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger. Representations. 92: 152–185. Macintosh, F. 2018. “Epic” Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back. In Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison, and C. Kenward, 3–15. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

140  Writing Like a Woman McHardy, F. 2020. Female Violence Towards Women and Girls in Greek Tragedy. In Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy, ed. P. J. Finglass and L. Coo, 19–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phelan, P. 2005. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh. 2016. University of Oxford Podcasts. August 9. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/playwright-marinacarr-conversation-fiona-macintosh. Poignault, R. 1995. L’Antiquité dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar : littérature, mythe et histoire, 2. Bruxelles: Latomus. Rich, A. 1972. When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. College English. 34.1: 18–30. Roche, A. 2003. Women on the Threshold: J. M. Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen, Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche, and Marina Carr’s The Mai. In The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”, ed. C. Leeney and A. McMullan, 17–42. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Sihra, M. 2005. Greek Myth, Irish Reality: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…. In Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. J. Dillon and S. E. Wilmer, 115–135. London: Bloomsbury. Sihra, M. 2007. Introduction: Figures at the Window. In Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. M. Sihra, 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sihra, M. 2018. Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International Publishing. Thucydides. 1928. History of the Peloponnesian War: Books I and II, trans. C. Foster Smith. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Torrance, I. 2020a. Trojan Women and Irish Sexual Politics, 1920–2015. In Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016, ed. D. O’Rourke and I. Torrance, 254–267. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trench, R. 2010. Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr. Oxford: Peter Lang. Voussaris, A. 2002. Jocaste. In Dictionnaire des mythes féminins, ed. P. Brunel, 1059–1070. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. Wallace, C. 2019. Marina Carr’s Hecuba: Agency, Anger and Correcting Euripides. Irish Studies Review. 27.4: 512–527. White, V. 1998. Women writers finally take centre stage. After seeing ‘By the Bog of Cats ’at the Abbey, Victoria White wonders why it has taken so long for women’s psychological dynamics to be sketched in Irish Theatre. Irish Times, October 15. https://www-proquest-com.ucd.idm.oclc.org/docview/310372043?https://www. proquest.com/europeannews?accountid=14507&pq-origsite=summon. Zeitlin, F. 1990. Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama. In Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. J. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, 63–96. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Žižek, S. and M. Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge.

4 Feminist Tragedy

Sometimes you need to go to an older set of ideas and values, and re-examine, and see how they implicate us now. (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh) Marina Carr transforms Greek tragedy through the means of myths in her theatre. In The Poetics, Aristotle stresses a connection between the tragic story and the tragic form. The myth, which is the main material used by the tragedians to frame the plot, “is the mimesis of the action” (“πράξεως … ἡ μίμησις”) (Aristotle, 48–49) and provides the structure of tragedy, which is “mimesis of an action” (“μίμησις πράξεως”) (Ibid., 4 ­ 6–47). The patriarchal agenda of classical theatre is thus engrained not only narratively but also structurally. The hero, who performs the tragic action, is indeed solely conceived as a man in the Aristotelian conceptualisation of tragedy (Wohl, 145). The examples mentioned to provide illustrations of this central character of the genre are confined to men figures only: Oedipus, Orestes, and Thyestes (Aristotle, 70–71). Aristotle’s conception of the tragic hero might be deemed inaccurate since “when [he] in the fourth century set out, in his Poetics, to establish the theory of tragedy, he no longer understood tragic man who had … become a stranger” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 29). A ­ ristotle’s number of women characters in Greek tragedy indeed “violate A assumptions about what they should be like” (Foley, 109), especially considering that he claims that “it is inappropriate for a woman to be courageous or clever” (“οὐχ ἁρμόττον γυναικὶ  … ἀνδρείαν ἢ δεινὴν εἶναι”) (Aristotle, 70–71). Nonetheless, women never stand as the tragic heroes ­ ccupy the in Greek tragedy because, even though “female characters may o center of the stage,” as Antigone, Clytemnestra, Electra, Hecuba, ­Medea, and Phaedra do, “they play the roles of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers, spoilers, destroyers, and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male character,” they “are never an end in themselves” (Zeitlin, 69).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298991-5

142  Feminist Tragedy The gender imbalance in Greek tragedy stems from its founding concept: Mimesis. Feminist scholars have vividly criticised the reliance of some dramatic forms on the mimetic lens, especially in realistic theatre. Mimesis is not strictly the same in classical and realistic theatre: While the former focuses on the imitation of an action, the latter aims at the reproduction of a sociocultural-economic environment. This changes the temporal scope of the story dramatised on stage: While Greek tragedy imitates the past – Aristotle dedicates the ninth chapter of The Poetics to the differences between history and tragedy – realistic theatre appears as a dramatic mirror of current society. Yet, the ambition of offering a reproduction of “reality” on stage entrenched in both classical and realistic theatre makes mimesis the main conveyor of patriarchy in drama. This specific purpose of mimesis does not come across ostensibly as observed by Jill Dolan since it “masks the ideology of the author” through the “reif[ication of] the dominant culture’s inscription of traditional power relations between genders and classes” (Dolan 2012, 84), thus naturalising the systems of oppression. Such a dimension is, however, more blatant in realistic theatre than in classical tragedy as “[r]ealism is more than an interpretation of reality passing as reality; it produces ‘reality’ by positioning its spectator to recognize and verify its truth” (Diamond, 4). Mimesis, as conceived in classical as well as realistic theatre, has been challenged by Bertolt Brecht. His conceptualisation of epic theatre ­revolves around the centrality of the Verfremdungseffect – “the estrangement ­effect,” sometimes also referred to as “the alienation effect” – to prompt the spectator’s “understanding” (Brecht, 71). In “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” Brecht indeed asserts: “What is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect” (Ibid.). As epic theatre aims to uncover the “naturalised” ideology structuring and ruling over society, feminists have used a number of techniques devised by Brecht – including the Verfremdungseffect, the historicisation, and the gestus (Diamond, 43–55) – to analyse and create new representations of gender, which reveal and question the system of oppression and alienation of women by patriarchy. In doing so, they cover a blind spot of Brecht’s theory, which, like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’, does not focus on gender to analyse the structure of oppression and alienation in modern and contemporary societies. The feminist concerns with mimesis are central to Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy, especially considering their dramatic forms. Her appropriations display “heightened realism” but remain “realis[tic] nonetheless” because the “characters inhabit spaces that are neither anachronistic nor atavistic, but which depict a deterioration of certainty in contemporary Irish society” (Sihra 2016, 127). In this regard, the Midlands cycle epitomises the concept of “broken realism,” which

Feminist Tragedy  143 demonstrates the influence of Brecht in the creation of realistic plays, since it “politicizes its spectators through playing by its own mimetic rules: showing the world that is, to the point where it cracks, crashes and is torn apart by the sheer weight of its own violence” (Aston, 85). The Brechtian influence on (re-)creating realism is particularly ostensible in Carr’s transpositions of Greek tragedy. A number of dramatic devices she uses to disrupt traditional realism in her appropriations are further explored in her adaptations to coin a new genre – epic tragedy1 – which she reverses in iGirl (2021) to create a tragic epic. In this regard, this chapter first examines Carr’s subversion of realistic mimesis through the use of Brechtian devices in the Midlands cycle and, then, explores the overlap of epic and tragedy in her adaptations of Greek tragedies. Epic Breach into Mimetic Theatre Carr’s elaboration of new sets of mimetic rules takes several forms in the Midlands cycle. Myths and legends structure the outer and inner worlds of the characters, which is emphasised in By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Ariel (2002) with the irruptions of supernatural creatures – the ghosts of Joseph, Fermoy, and Ariel, the Ghost Fancier, and Catwoman – in the ordinary “natural” space. In The Mai (1994) and Portia Coughlan (1996), time conveys the disruption of realism as traditionally practised: The non-chronological unravelling of the plots on stage does not match the “natural” experience of time felt during human life. These strategies lay the ground for the temporal maze2 structuring Carr’s first epic tragedy, Phaedra Backwards (2011), which provides the mythological monster of the Minotaur with a substantial role. On Raftery’s Hill (2000) seemingly stands aside from the rest of the Midlands plays. The chronologically dramatised action coupled with the complete absence of supernatural elements appears to anchor the play in realism. Yet, the complete disconnection of the characters and their universe from the rest of the world alongside the images supporting the content of the play undermines its realistic dimension, turning On Raftery’s Hill into a tale of horrors, which is paralleled to some extent in iGirl. In The Mai and Portia Coughlan, the temporality of the plots does not match the temporality of the stories. The protagonists’ deaths are indeed revealed in the middle of the plays: “Robert stands [on stage] with The Mai’s body in his arms” in the last minutes of Act One in The Mai (Carr 1999, 147), while Act Two is dedicated to the discovery of Portia’s body in the Belmont River in Portia Coughlan. Such a construction of the plots stresses the tragic fates of The Mai and Portia as it disconnects “the relation between cause and effect”3 (Leeney, 160). After the revelations of their bodies, the protagonists appear doomed on stage. No matter what actions

144  Feminist Tragedy they undertake in the final acts, their fate is already set, the audience knows that they are going to die. This lack of suspense echoes a fundamental ­dimension of Greek tragedy. The classical audience indeed knew the stories dramatised in tragedies since they were adaptations of the archaic myths used in the education of the future citizens in Athens, as mentioned by Plato in The Republic. Furthermore, the prologues of some plays, particularly by Euripides, disclose briefly the tragic course of the action, its outcome, and the characters’ fates. The opening of Hecuba, for instance, shows the apparition of Polydorus’ ghost, which reveals not only his own death but also the destiny of his relatives as he tells the audience: “For fate is leading my sister to her death on this day. My mother shall see two corpses of two children, mine and her luckless daughter’s” (“ἡ πεπρωμένη δ᾿ ἄγει / θανεῖν ἀδελφὴν τῷδ᾿ ἐμὴν ἐν ἤματι. / δυοῖν δὲ παίδοιν δύο νεκρὼ κατόψεται / μήτηρ, ἐμοῦ τε τῆς τε δυστήνου κόρης”) (Euripides, 402–405). However, the construction of The Mai and Portia’s tragic fates relies on the subversion of the Aristotelian conception of temporality in tragedy. The unity of time is not an essential constituent of mimesis either in Greek tragedy or in realistic theatre. Aristotle’s statement on the topic of time in tragedy is indeed not as rigid as it is often conceived since he states in The Poetics: “tragedy tends so far as possible to stay within a single revolution of the sun, or close to it” (“ἡ μὲν ὅτι μάλιστα πειρᾶται ὑπὸ μίαν περίοδον ἡλίου εἶναι ἢ μικρὸν ἐξαλλάττειν”) (Aristotle, 46–47). The course of action of a tragedy like Aechylus’ Eumenides, for instance, can hardly take place within a single day considering the means of transport of the classical period as it starts in Delphi before moving to Athens. Yet, it is quite unusual for a Greek tragedy not to fit the unity of time. This dramatic concept has been, however, disregarded in realistic theatre as illustrated in Henrik Ibsen’s plays, which have established the modern conception of mimesis fuelling realism on stage, since their actions run over the course of several days. The relation of temporality to mimesis lies in the layout of the dramatised action, which must have “a beginning and middle and end” (“ἀρχὴν καὶ μέσον καὶ τελευτήν”), Aristotle defining specifically the latter as “that which itself naturally occurs … after a preceding event, but need not be followed by anything else” (“μετ᾽ ἄλλο πέφυκεν εἶναι … μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο ἄλλο οὐδέν”) (Ibid., 54–55). In The Mai and Portia Coughlan, however, the non-chronological dramatisation of the protagonists’ stories entails that the end manifested through death is followed by other actions. The disruption of the “naturality” of time affects the perception of the protagonists in the last acts of The Mai and Portia Coughlan, which furthers the subversion of traditional realistic mimesis. Christina Wald ­observes about Portia Coughlan that [t]he advancement of Portia’s death … unsettles the categorisation of its characters in terms of real and ghost figures. Whereas Portia initially

Feminist Tragedy  145 appears as a “real” character … [she] in the final act can … be understood as a ghost. (Wald, 196) Such a statement is even truer when applied to The Mai considering its form as a memory play since the narrator Millie conjures the ghosts from her past to replay the events of her childhood leading to the death of her mother. The form of the memory play provides a “natural” frame to the non-chronological dramatisation of the story, and thus the ghostly dimension of The Mai as she reappears on stage in Act Two because all the characters, except for Millie, could be considered ghosts from the beginning of the play. It also questions the nature of the existence of Millie, the only “living character” who is so deeply “haunted by the memories of her mother” that she “becomes ghostly, haunting the past, rather than living in the present” (Pine, 155). In Portia Coughlan, however, the action is set in the living time of the characters. The political significance of the eponymous character’s ghostly appearance, which is also underlaid in The Mai, comes across more clearly. This dramatic strategy appears to bring on stage Hélène Cixous’ criticism of gender representation in theatre. In “Aller à la mer,” the feminist philosopher states that she “stopped going to the theatre” because “it was like going to [her] own funeral” (Cixous, 546). As the dramatic plots mentioned by Cixous are embedded in “male fantasy,” they do “not produce a living woman or … her body or even her unconscious” (Ibid.). Although The Mai and Portia Coughlan might seem to re-enact the flaws of maleauthored plays identified by Cixous in the Midlands cycle as the protagonists are comparable to “phantom[s]” in the final act of the plays, Carr does so to anchor the “repression” that her “doomed” (Ibid.) characters experience into the livingness of their bodies and unconscious. While the productions criticised by Cixous need women “to die … for the play to begin” (Ibid.), Carr refuses on purpose to apply the obvious counter-strategy, which would consist of showing the eponymous characters’ deaths at the end of the plays. According to Carr herself, this linear way of unravelling the action “wouldn’t work”4 because she intended to “shift the focus” by making the audience “watc[h] [them] living, knowing [they are] dead” (Carr in Ní Anluain et alii, 53). Despite death being a central topic in Carr’s drama, it is not the main point of The Mai and Portia Coughlan. The structure of the plays ­starting and ending with the dramatisation of their lives emphasises their living experiences rather than their deaths, even though they do die. Such a structure places the spectators in a situation of inquiry as they try to figure out the reasons leading the eponymous characters to die by suicide. Yet, the final acts of The Mai and Portia Coughlan pursue the dramatisation of ordinary life. Robert might resume his habits of extramarital affairs but

146  Feminist Tragedy this behaviour is not out of character as Act One insists strongly on his unfaithful history. In Portia Coughlan, the eponymous character plans, cooks, and has dinner with her husband, which would have suggested that she has finally come to terms with her situation as a homemaker if the audience had no knowledge of her death. As no out-the-ordinary incident occurs in the final acts of both plays, Carr foregrounds the tragic fate of the characters in the commonality of their lives. This approach heightens the role played by patriarchy as a structuring force that rules over women’s lives in the tragedy displayed in The Mai and Portia Coughlan. Tragedy stems from the characters, and more specifically from their gender, rather than from the action in The Mai and Portia Coughlan, which is a substantial subversion of the Aristotelian conception of the genre. In The Poetics, Aristotle indeed deems that “[t]he most important of these things is the structure of events, because tragedy is mimesis not of persons but of action and life” (“μέγιστον δὲ τούτων ἐστὶν ἡ τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις. ἡ γὰρ τραγῳδία μίμησίς ἐστιν οὐκ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλὰ πράξεως καὶ βίου”) (Aristotle, 50–51). To underline the low value of characters in tragedy, Aristotle goes as far as to claim that “without character there could be [tragedy]” (“ἄνευ δὲ ἠθῶν γένοιτ᾿ ἄν [τραγῳδία]”) (Ibid.). In his mind, however, “without action there could be no tragedy” (“ἄνευ μὲν πράξεως οὐκ ἂν γένοιτο τραγῳδία”) (Ibid.). The Mai and Portia Coughlan are not devoid of action but they do not reflect the Aristotelian conception of that dramatic device. Aristotle conceives “the plot” (“ὁ μῦθος”) as “the mimesis of the action” (“τῆς μὲν πράξεως … ἡ μίμησις”), insisting on the fact that he uses “‘plot’ to denote the construction of events” (“μῦθον τοῦτον τὴν σύνθεσιν τῶν πραγμάτων”) (Ibid., 48–49). Carr’s non-linear dramatisation of the stories of The Mai and Portia, however, deconstructs the events to place the characters’ death in the middle rather than at the end of the plays, thus questioning the nature of the plot in both plays and hinting towards a Brechtian influence. In The Mai and Portia Coughlan, the non-linear structures undermine the centrality of the actions, which lie in the eponymous characters’ suicides in both plays, to give more breadth to their lives. In this regard, they appear to dramatise less an Aristotelian plot and more a Brechtian narrative. In “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre,” Brecht provides a descriptive list of the “shifts of accent” (Brecht, 37) operated in epic theatre in comparison to dramatic theatre. While the latter relies on a “plot” that “implicates the spectator in a stage situation” which they “shar[e]” with the characters, the former dramatises a “narrative” that “turns the spectator into an observer” of the “picture of the world” depicted on stage which they are to “stud[y]” from the “outside” to be “brought to the point of recognition” (Ibid.). The decentralisation of the action in The Mai and Portia Coughlan enables these constitutive elements of epic theatre to

Feminist Tragedy  147 pervade the mimetic space characteristic of classical tragedy and realistic theatre and thus to “poke holes in parts of [their] ideological armor[s]” (Dolan 2008, 455). In contrast with The Mai and Portia Coughlan, Greek tragedies provide more than intertextualities to By the Bog of Cats… and Ariel; they also provide the structure of these appropriations. In this regard, the temporal construction of these two Midlands plays reproduces the temporality of the appropriated classical plays. The opening scene of By the Bog of Cats… epitomises that dimension as the Ghost Fancier shows up earlier than scheduled to collect Hester’s soul because he has confused “sunrise” for “sunset,” “dawn” for “dusk” (Carr 1999, 266), the alliterations in -s and -d enhancing the sense of confusion. This supernatural apparition stresses Hester’s tragic fate as it reveals from the first moment of By the Bog of Cats… that the character is going to die by the end of the day, and so by the end of the play. Such a silly mistake from the Ghost Fancier addresses the tragedy that is about to unravel through a comic tone. Although comedy is a characteristic of Carr’s playwriting as dark humour constantly infuses the tragic content of the Midlands plays, it is quite unusual in classical tragedy. The second book of The Poetics dealing with the genre of comedy has unfortunately been lost. However, Aristotle often brings that genre into the discussion of the first book to underline the stark opposition of tragedy to comedy. Besides the nature of the objects that are mimetically reproduced – comedy “tends to represent people inferior” and tragedy “superior … to existing humans” (“μὲν γὰρ χείρους ἡ δὲ βελτίους μιμεῖσθαι βούλεται τῶν νῦν”) (Aristotle, 35): The purpose of each genre – making people laugh in comedy and accomplishing catharsis in tragedy – has an incidence on the dramatised action since “the laughable comprises any fault or mark of shame which involves no pain or destruction” (“τὸ … γελοῖόν ἐστιν ἁμάρτημά τι καὶ αἶσχος ἀνώδυνον καὶ οὐ φθαρτικόν”) (Ibid., 44–45). The overlap of tragedy with comedy has, however, a long history of practice in theatre. William Shakespeare’s playwriting stands as the epitome of such a practice. Besides the inclusion of comic moments in his tragedies and histories, the structure of Romeo and Juliet (1597) relies on the blending of the two genres. After the prologue, which stresses the tragic destiny of the titular characters, the play assumes a comic tone but turns into a tragedy as the climax is about to be reached. Yet, as early as the classical period, Euripides “experimented” with the inclusion of “comic elements” in one of his latest tragedies: The Bacchae (Seidensticker, 305). This blend of comedy and tragedy was, however, a marginalised practice at the time. Furthermore, the overlap of the two genres takes root in the plot of The Bacchae, which deals with the “ambivalence” of Dionysus and demonstrates his “double nature” through the action of his women followers,

148  Feminist Tragedy the Maenads: “savage cruelty and heavenly bliss, terror and happiness, death and life” (Ibid., 319–320). Jennifer Wallace notices other elements of comedy in Greek tragedy such as the ghost of Clytemnestra awakening the Furies who, because they have fallen asleep, have let Orestes escape, which “is a comic reduction … of the monstrous to the mildly incompetent” (Wallace, 206). These elements, however, are anecdotical inclusions and have no incidence on the tragic structure of the classical plays as they do in Euripides’ Bacchae. Yet, they show “in tragedy … a concern with the comic collusions between low-life and high-life” (Ibid., 207), which Carr reverses completely in By the Bog of Cats…. As a Traveller woman who, thus, does not own land, Hester comes from an underprivileged social background. The topic of class and social hierarchy has long been debated by scholars regarding tragedy. According to a conservative vision of the genre, tragedy is a matter of “royal and heroic characters wh[o] … are set higher than we are in the chain of being” because “the gods honour them with their vengeance”5 (Steiner, 241). This statement by George Steiner seems to bear some striking resemblances with Aristotle’s conception of tragedy as mimesis of people “superior to existing humans.” However, the Aristotelian assertion is more ambiguous than it might appear as the expression “βελτιόνων ἢ ἡμεῖς,” which means literally “better than us,” could refer to a form of superiority in social terms as much as in moral terms (Kelly, 2). The latter has been crucial to the modern definition of the tragic hero, especially as conceived by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel whose work, more generally, had a great influence on Marx and thus on Brecht. In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel establishes morality as the main ground distinguishing the hero from the other characters in tragedy, as he claims that the tragic heroes “are in a special way in subjection to necessity and have a tragic interest attaching to them, who raise themselves above the ordinary moral conditions” (Hegel, 262). The superior position assumed by the hero comes across ostensibly through the tragic conflict because, as underlined by Albert Camus, “[t]ragedy occurs when man … enters into conflict with the divine order,” which can be either “personified” by “a god” or instituted by “society” (Camus, 302). This is on the ground implied by the opposition of the hero to the “divine” order of the contemporary Irish society that Carr constructs the tragedy sustaining By the Bog of Cats…. As a single mother who conceived a child out of wedlock, Hester opposes the “order” imposed on women by patriarchy in Ireland, and as a Traveller woman, her lifestyle “do[es] not coincide with the private property obligations of the capitalist system” (Wilmer, 279). Both of these systems, which structure the social hierarchies of Irish society, are embodied

Feminist Tragedy  149 by Xavier, who stands as Hester’s main antagonist in the play. Carr indeed reverses the antagonistic opposition of Euripides’ Medea to reframe the tragic conflict in her appropriation. In the source tragedy, Creon stands as an ally of the main antagonist of Medea, who is Jason. The death of the king of Corinth is not initially planned in the retaliation scheme elaborated by the titular character, which includes only Jason’s soon-tobe wife and the children. Creon’s death is collateral damage. In By the Bog of Cats…, Hester is opposed to both Xavier and Carthage in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class. Yet, Xavier’s embodiment of that opposition displays more derogatory violence than Carthage’s. Unlike the latter, the former uses racist slurs like “tinker” (Carr 1999, 330 and 332) to speak to and about Hester. Furthermore, he criticises vividly Cartharge’s inability to “control a mere woman,” which makes Xavier question his intention of “signin over [his] farm” to his son-in-law (Ibid., 332). This positions Xavier as Hester’s main antagonist, and Catharge as his ally. Carr repurposes tragedy in By the Bog of Cats…, which comes to illustrate Terry Eagleton’s statement that “[t]here are … reasons why modernity may facilitate tragedy” (Eagleton, 30). One of the reasons he establishes is “the constraints placed on [the human subject’s] agency and autonomy” (Ibid.), which entails any form of social oppression, including gender, class, ethnic, and race inequalities. Carr grounds the tragedy of By the Bog of Cats… in these realms as the tragic conflict stems from the characters’ social identity. Yet, the apparition of the Ghost Fancier stressing Hester’s fate disrupts the realistic embedment of the play. In doing so, Carr interweaves the classical conception of the mimesis, which allows the apparition of non-human characters on stage, to the realistic form and topic of the play, thus subverting the modern and contemporary vision and use of mimesis in drama. Such an approach presents in a “startling” way (Brecht, 71) the issue of social destiny in Ireland, thus echoing the Brechtian intention sustaining the Verfremdungseffect. Unlike Greek tragedy, the tragic outcome is avoidable in By the Bog of Cats…. Carr stresses that dimension in the second dialogue of the play, which occurs right after the Ghost Fancier has left the stage. It shows Hester talking with Monica and discloses that the protagonist could leave her place by the Bog of Cats but decides not to and thus intends to “sourt [Caroline] out” to stay (Carr 1999, 268). This dialogue counterbalances the first one, thus implying that Hester’s fate is going to be tragic only if the characters decide so. In this respect, the tragic fate does not complement “the human action” like it does Greek tragedy as it is “not strong enough to do without the power of the gods” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 44). In By the Bog of Cats…, the tragic fate arises solely from the human characters’ actions, meaning that it can be changed.

150  Feminist Tragedy However, Carr’s decentralisation of fate from the metaphysical to the human realm does not mean that the characters are equal in terms of agency. Since the characters are “the sum of all social circumstances” (Brecht, 46), Hester has little power to change her fate which lies in the hand of Xavier who forces her to leave the bog. But she takes another path through death, thus exerting the small agency that has been left to her in a society ruled by sexism, racism, and classism. As the circumstances leading to the tragic outcome are “alterable” (Ibid., 60), her “sufferings” do not appear “inescapable” but “unnecessary” (Ibid., 71), which is to propel the spectators’ reflection on the system of oppressions enabling the tragedy to happen. A similar conclusion emerges in Ariel, especially regarding the murder of the titular character. Fermoy justifies his crime with his violent religious belief, which entrenches the classical concept of fate structuring tragedy in the realm of Catholicism. Like in By the Bog of Cats…, however, fate does not erase the characters’ agency but stems from it. As highlighted by the character of the journalist Verona at the beginning of Act Two, Fermoy’s election is not the result of “divine grace” bestowed by God after the “sacrifice” of Ariel but of his action “in the breaking of [a] scandal” that led to “Hannafin’s fall” (Carr 2009, 102). The entanglement of politics and religion in the play while the action takes place in the private setting of a family confers Ariel with a special position in the Midlands cycle because in no other piece has Carr addressed so ostensibly the “dysfunction[ality]” of “[t]he three pillars of the traditional Irish society” (Torrance 2018, 92). Although the patriarchal ideology professed by the Church and institutionalised by the State plays a role in the domestic tragedies experienced by women in the rest of the Midlands plays, this influence is alluded to rather than brought on stage. Carr’s strategy in Ariel ties up more closely the action to society as the reviewer Ian Kilroy notes that “she brings [the Irish spectators] into a world that frighteningly mirrors our own. The mirror she holds up may distort and magnify the tragic in life, but it is recognisable nonetheless” (Kilroy). The overlap of life and death epitomises the distortion of the “real” Irish society as it explores on stage the idea of “living death.”6 Although it can be traced in all the Midlands plays – through the non-chronological construction of the action in The Mai and Portia Coughlan, for instance – the “living death” is literally embodied in Ariel. And it is actually the object of several embodiments: On the one hand, the apparitions of the ghosts of Ariel and Fermoy show the dead “living,” but, on the other hand, Frances and Elaine are deadly living. The description provided by Stephen of Frances’ inner life as a “graveyard” filled with the “tombstones” and “bones of [her] dead children” (Carr 2009, 138) demonstrates the paradox of the “living death.” The character is indeed physically alive but

Feminist Tragedy  151 emotionally and psychologically dead. This partial death has been caused by the losses of James and Ariel, which grow to symbolise the abuses that Frances suffered for years. Her inner death manifests the alienation of her agency and subjectivity because of her marriage with Fermoy. Even after his death, Frances cannot come back from that deadly state as she does not assume an identity of her own but fills the tyrannical position of Fermoy. Her situation as a “living dead” has led to the neglect of Elaine and Stephen, which the former underlines through her intention to “sta[y]” in the house “to haunt” Frances (Ibid., 134). Elaine thus assumes a ghostly presence comparable to the apparitions of Ariel and Fermoy after their deaths, especially since Frances considers Elaine to be her “penance for James” (Ibid., 84). Yet, unlike Ariel and Fermoy, Elaine is alive. Melissa Sihra analyses the “living death” as a mark of a “lack of fulfilment,” which she considers to be “the greatest loss” (Sihra 2018, 11). The situation of “living death” echoes the conception of the tragic hero developed by Jacques Lacan through his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. In this specific tragedy, the embodiment of tragic heroism might be difficult to identify because of the similarities between the two main characters: Antigone and Creon. As noted by Lacan, “neither one seems to feel fear or pity” (Lacan, 258). Although this comment seems to refer to the fundamental emotions of catharsis as conceptualised by Aristotle, Lacan uses them to coin his own vision of the tragic hero. Contrary to Creon who “is moved by fear toward the end,” Antigone is not, and “[t]hat is why, among other things, she is the real hero” (Ibid.). The “other things” include “the zone between life and death” (Ibid., 280), which resonates with the embodiment of the “living death” in Ariel. According to Lacan, “the zone between life and death” is where Antigone moves in Sophocles’ tragedy because “[a]lthough she is not dead yet, she is eliminated from the world of the living” (Ibid.). Her punishment to be buried alive might epitomise her “living death” situation but, as noticed by Lacan, “[s]he has been telling us for a long time that she is in the kingdom of the dead” (Ibid.). This questions the character’s agency in the situation, especially since Lacan underlines that Antigone is a “self-willed victim” (Ibid., 247). However, he does not consider that the character is forced to assume that “living death” position because of Creon’s law. The “zone between life and death” extends beyond the dramatic arc of Antigone and comprises the whole area of the city of Thebes. The foreseer Tiresias mentions that Creon’s law forbidding the burial of Polynices keeps “here something belonging to the gods below, a corpse deprived, unburied, unholy” (“τῶν κάτωθεν ἐνθάδ᾿ αὖ θεῶν / ἄμοιρον, ἀκτέριστον, ἀνόσιον νέκυν”) (Sophocles 1998, 102–103), thus blurring the line between the world of the living and the dead in the city. This line is similarly blurred in Ariel as the eponymous

152  Feminist Tragedy character’s “coffin lies at the centre of the stage” (Carr 2009, 129), which is set in the dining room of the family house, all through Act Three. Carr incorporates the liminal space between life and death featured in Greek tragedy into the realistic style assumed in Ariel to draw a “picture of the world” (Brecht, 37) in which the audience lives. Patrick Lonergan argues that the connection drawn between “political corruption” encompassed in Fermoy’s dramatic arc and his “control over the feminized body” of Ariel shows that “if the nation is female, then violence against women and political corruption become entangled” (Lonergan, 172). Yet, Carr’s political stance exceeds the topic of political corruption, which appears as a pretext, the tragic trigger, to explore the system deeply rooted in patriarchy ruling over Irish society. The dramatic world of Ariel enables the death – whether symbolic or literal – of women through the denial of their agency and subjectivity, thus preventing them from “script[ing]”7 their own lives and so condemning them to a “living death,” which the “real” Ireland does too by confining them into “the home” (1937 Irish Constitution). On Raftery’s Hill stands aside the other Midlands plays as the references to ancient tragedy and mythology remain intertextualities that do not disturb the structure of the realistic form of the play. Yet, these intertextualities convey a form of estrangement in the dramatisation of the “real” Irish society. There is only one explicit reference to classical culture in On Raftery’s Hill. While debating on human monstrosity, especially in relation to incest, Isaac mentions the story of Hera and Zeus who “goh married and had chaps and young wans” together because “they had to populahe the world” (Carr 2009, 43). This cosmogonic myth settles in a complex nexus of images and references to the primary state of the world and humanity “before laws was made” (Ibid., 58). The characters identify with that primordiality as they assimilate themselves to “gorillas in clothes pretendin’ to be human” (Ibid., 28). This echoes the Darwinian theory of evolution coined during the 19th century, which has been turned into a tale-like story since its rebuttal, thus making it comparable to the myths of classical culture. In spite of its entrenchment in the dramatic form of realism, On Raftery’s Hill offers a mythological tale about primordial humanity to “br[ing]” the audience “to the point of recognition” (Brecht, 37) regarding “the stahe a the country” (Carr 2009, 43). This mythologisation of realism is particularly ostensible through the dramatisation of the land, which is a characteristic feature of Carr’s playwriting in the Midlands cycle. Unlike The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats…, and Ariel, the only land involved in On Raftery’s Hill is not wild but “tamed” by humanity as it is a farm. Furthermore, the stories haunting the space and forecasting the tragic destiny of the women characters do not stem from the past

Feminist Tragedy  153 but from the present. Red first appears on stage carrying the corpses of two hares that he has “unfairly” killed as “he went into the lair after them” (Ibid., 15). This forecasts the rape of Sorrel taking place in the family “lair,” meaning the house, during which the character is assimilated into a hare being gutted. While Red considers this act of violence necessary as “[the hares]’ve the land ruined” – which can also be applied to Sorrel as she defies his tyrannical rule by giving credit to Dara’s story over her father’s regarding the slaughtering of a cow – Isaac provides another insight on the matter as he accuses Red of “ha[ving] the land ruined” because he “turn[s] [a] beauhiful farm into an abattoir” (Ibid.). Considering the entanglement of the play in cosmogonic mythologies, it turns the farm into an anti-Eden space, a place of desolation, destruction, death, and decay caused by patriarchy. In doing so, Carr reverses the patriarchal intention of cosmogonic mythologies, which traditionally associates the “fall” of humanity with women like Eve in the Bible and Pandora in ancient Greek culture. The realistic setting of the “primordial” myth explored in On Raftery’s Hill aims to underline the currency of the topics tackled in the play for the audience. Yet, as it assimilates patriarchy and its systemic violence to a period “before laws was made,” it also implies that such a situation can be overcome and changed, thus echoing the vision of the “human being” as “alterable and able to alter” the world comprised in epic theatre (Brecht, 37). Yet, despite the “poke holes” produced by Carr in the “ideological armor” of realistic theatre through its epicisation, this dramaturgical style “cannot achieve the cutting critical edge of more Brechtian epic drama” because it remains entrenched into the dimension of “individualism” (Dolan 2008, 405). Such an issue fades away in Carr’s adaptations as the classical myth dramatised in Greek tragedy through “its half-mythical, half-historical status reaches us as an emblem of shared ‘origin’ for European peoples that has no parallels, except for the Bible” (Laera, 10). Epic Tragedy: The Birth of a Feminist Genre Unlike the Midlands cycle, Phaedra Backwards (2011), Hecuba (2015), and Girl on an Altar (2022) are set in the spatiotemporal frame of the myth. The lack of a realistic setting enables Carr to push further her experimentations on the inclusion of epic theatre in dramatic theatre to produce a new genre deemed theoretically impossible by Aristotle in The Poetics: Epic tragedy. Carr’s strategy of “‘epicizing’” (Macintosh and McConnell, 35) tragedy was first noticed with the new form of dramatic speech implemented in Hecuba, which Fiona Macintosh describes as “a kind of an epic tragedy through the use particularly of the third person” (Playwright

154  Feminist Tragedy Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). In Hecuba, the dramatic speech blends “soliloquy and dialogue” (Sihra 2018, 268) as well as narration and enactment,8 which produces “shifts” of “perspectives and temporalities” (Macintosh and McConnell, 35). Yet, Carr has first implemented these “shifts” in Phaedra Backwards, especially through the use of the screen. This technological device is used in epic theatre to “effect temporal disjunctions within the dramatic action, resulting in multilayered/multi-perspectival performances” (Macintosh, 4) and enacts the “literalization of the theatre” called to be developed by Brecht (Brecht, 43). In this regard, Phaedra Backwards stands as the first instance of epic tragedy in Carr’s theatre, which is then pursued in Hecuba and Girl on an Altar, and reversed in iGirl as this play stands as an example of a postmodern tragic epic. Before displaying Phaedra’s childhood memories, Phaedra Backwards opens with the screen projecting “[t]ime-titles”: First, “Now and Then. Then and Now. Always,” and then “Once Upon a Time. The End”9 (Sihra 2018, 262). According to Brecht, the projection of titles is “a means of obtaining access to ‘higher things’” that enables the spectator to “think about a subject” beyond “the confines of the subject” encompassed in “the action” and “the text” (Brecht, 44). Besides foreshadowing the temporal “fluidity” (Shira 2018, 260) of the play, which moves between the present and the past of its main figure, Phaedra, the “time-titles” invite the spectators to reflect on the mythological nature of the dramatised story. The expressions “Now and Then. Then and Now. Always” echo the “timeless[ness]” associated with Greek mythology, and thus tragedy, which sustains the construction of classical Greece as the ancestor of modern and contemporary Western democracies (Laera, 10). This dimension is brought on stage as the partial use of the classical diegesis shows the classical characters of Phaedra, Ariadne, Pasiphae, Theseus, Hippolytus, and Minos in an “anachronistic” context conveyed through the “costumes and props,” which include “champagne” and “mobile phones” (Sihra 2018, 263). As the contemporary world pervades the ancient myth, Carr underlines how Western democracies have been infused with classical ideologies through the conception of Greek tragedy as timeless. This is particularly accurate concerning gender and its representation because, as pointed out by Carr, the classical tragedians created “archetypes of females” that “are still in western consciousness” (Carr in Leavy). Yet, she uses the timelessness associated with Greek tragedy in Phaedra Backwards to demonstrate that such a situation is not “unalterable” but “alterable” (Brecht, 37). The third scene opens with the projection of the sentence “The Beginning of the End” on the screen as the Minotaur makes his first physical appearance on stage.10 In doing so, Carr frames this entrance as the

Feminist Tragedy  155 incident triggering the tragedy, which relegates subsequently the canonical elements of the myth dealt with in the first two scenes – Hippolytus’ death and Phaedra’s monstrosity inherited from her mother – to the background of the story. Although the retelling of the classical myth is central in Phaedra Backwards, the crux of the play relies on a course of action from Carr’s own creation and introduced by the Minotaur “[r]ipping” his way “through a dimension” (Carr 2015, 84) to enter the stage. The defining dimension of this moment in the play is emphasised to the audience through the projection of “The Beginning of the End” because, following Brecht’s thought on the use of screens on stage, it enables spectators “to think above the stream” rather “than to think in the stream” (Brecht, 44) of the action. From the moment of the Minotaur’s physical appearance on stage, the present dramatised on stage mutates into a liminal space where the line separating the world of the living from the world of the dead is blurred. And as the play unravels, this line gets blurrier and blurrier. At first, the Minotaur is invisible to the rest of the characters: Even though he stands on stage with Phaedra, “[s]he doesn’t see him” (Carr 2015, 84). She starts feeling his presence in the fourth scene. The Minotaur “enters” the stage “[a]s she is speaking” about her dream introduced by the projection of a film of “[t]he child Phaedra, the Child Ariadne, [and] the Child Minotaur” (Ibid., 96–97). Although he speaks, she does not completely perceive his presence as she “[l]ooks through him” and asks “Who’s there? … Who is it?” (Ibid., 97). His words, which Phaedra does not hear, simultaneously resonate with the classical concept of the deus ex machina and the Brechtian purpose of the alienated acting style. The Minotaur indeed claims: “The Druids align. Dinosaurs in St Paul’s again. It is time. It is way past time” (Ibid., 97). The references to the past seem to align with the purpose of the deus ex machina as conceived by Aristotle in The Poetics since they allude to “events outside the drama – preceding events beyond human knowledge … for we ascribe to the gods the capacity to see all things” (“τὰ ἔξω τοῦ δράματος, ἢ ὅσα πρὸ τοῦ γέγονεν ἃ οὐχ οἷόν τε ἄνθρωπον εἰδέναι … ἃ δεῖται προαγορεύσεως καὶ ἀγγελίας”) (Aristotle, 80–81). Yet, these references are deliberately obscure and do not provide any enlightenment per se as the Minotaur’s lines actually foreshadow the climax of the play. This confers the character with a similar “standpoint” to the Brechtian description of the actor who, “unlike the spectator, … has read the play right through and is better placed to judge the sentence in accordance with the ending, with its consequences” (Brecht, 138). Indeed, as the Minotaur proclaims: “It is time. It is way past time,” he anticipates the eruption in the present of figures from the past which, besides Pasiphae and Minos, include Ariadne. She has only been seen as a child up until that moment.

156  Feminist Tragedy In this respect, her physical apparition on stage as an adult epitomises the bleeding of the world of the dead into the world of the living, of the past into the present. Carr signals to the audience the climatic importance of the eighth scene in the previous scene. The seventh scene does not show any action on stage but only on the screen, which displays a film of “[t]he Minotaur carr[ying] Phaedra into the sea” (Carr 2015, 106). The same footage is mentioned as one of the two alternative endings created by Carr to the play: “Or reprise of the Minotaur carrying Phaedra into the sea” (Ibid., 125). This ending has been analysed in two different ways. On the one hand, Isabelle Torrance argues that it shows “Phaedra embracing death through suicide and the Minotaur returning to the realm of the dead” (Torrance 2022b, 239); on the other hand, María del Mar González Chacón reads that ending as the Minotaur carrying Phaedra “into another existence … from [which] she will not return” (del Mar González Chacón 2020, 489). As death does not entail the complete annihilation of the self in Phaedra Backwards – and more generally in all of Carr’s plays – but another form of existence separated from the living, these interpretations are complementary rather than contradictory. The proleptic projection of Phaedra’s ending stresses the following scene as the point of no return sealing her fate. For the first time since the beginning of the play, characters from the past and the present are able to interact with one another, and these interactions are not simply verbal but also physical as Pasiphae, Minos, and Ariadne bite and eat some of Phaedra’s flesh while the Minotaur “suspends her … midair” (Carr 2015, 116). This cannibalistic action underlines the consumption of the present by the past. Despite Phaedra’s efforts “to keep” her past personified by her family “at bay” (Ibid.), it still dictates the present. The death of Hippolytus demonstrates that dimension since the character dies because of his father’s behaviour. The toxicity of Theseus’ hegemonic masculinity mentioned in the first scene is further examined through the exploration of the past, and more specifically through the examination of the Minotaur’s death. This event is projected on the screen at the end of the ninth scene to introduce the final scene of the play, thus stressing Hippolytus’ death as “the price” that had to “be paid for the transgressions” committed by Theseus in the past (Ibid., 123). While he attempts to differentiate his crime from the Minotaur’s claiming that “[h]e was an animal, a furious bull who scorched the air,” Phaedra replies “And you’re not an animal? And I’m not? … We’re animals” (Ibid.). Although this answer might sound tautological, Carr centres the construction of the characters on their “humanimal[ity]”11 (Torrance 2022b, 242) to propel the audience’s reflection on the supposed opposition of monstrous animality to civilised humanity. The Minotaur stands as the epitome of the hybridisation of humanity and animality through his physical appearance, which is characteristic of

Feminist Tragedy  157 monsters in classical culture (Lauretis, 110). Yet, Phaedra displays a similar form of hybridity, even though less ostensibly. She mentions the act of “eating daffodils” on several occasions in the play, a habit that she shares with the rest of her family, hence “cast[ing]” them “as hybrid beings” because “if they graze on flowers like animals do, they are somewhere between human and animal” (Torrance 2022b, 239). Theseus seems to stand on the other side of the spectrum, being completely human. However, his murder of the Minotaur is an act of gratuitous violence in Phaedra Backwards as Carr does not include the whole narrative of the classical myth on purpose. There is indeed no mention of Theseus being sent alongside seven women and six other men as sacrifices to the labyrinth built by Minos to imprison the Minotaur. The lack of motive leading to his death “resituat[es] patriarchy as the savage beast” in the play (Sihra 2018, 263). In doing so, Carr redeems the figure of the Minotaur, which mirrors the redemption of Phaedra structuring the play, especially since Phaedra Backwards stems as much from “Phaedra’s score” as from “the Minotaur’s” (Carr 2015, 75). Their hybridity challenges patriarchal hegemony, which stands as the true source of human tragedy. Yet, as Phaedra leaves the stage to “go on [her] own steam” (Ibid., 125), Carr underlines the possibility for humanity to leave this tragic path and create a new hybrid one that would embrace diversity. The epicisation of tragedy reflects the topic of hybridity in terms of dramatic form. Carr indeed offers a hybridisation of classical tragedy through the lens of epic theatre as coined by Brecht to invite the audience to reflect on the weight of the past on the present, on the legacy and perpetuation of structural oppressions. A similar purpose emerges from Hecuba and Girl on an Altar, but the hybridisation stems not only from the blending of dramatic and epic theatre but also from the overlap of tragedy with the classical genre of epic as conceptualised by Aristotle and illustrated in pieces of work like Homer’s Iliad. Carr implements this specific form of epicisation of tragedy in Hecuba for the first time. The opening lines of the play demonstrate a “complex shift … between subjectivity and objectivity” (Macintosh, 13) as Hecuba writes herself into a scene that is not shown to the spectators. In doing so, Carr creates a play that goes against the traditional rules of playwriting. In The Poetics, Aristotle indeed establishes that tragedy, and drama more generally, uses “the mode of enactment, not narrative” (“δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾿ ἀπαγγελίας”) contrary to epic (Aristotle, 46–47). In this regard, a dramatic line traditionally enacts a character’s subjective insight into an event rather than narrating it “objectively” as epic does. Carr subverts that fundamental distinction in Hecuba. Yet, the use of the modes of enactment and narration in tragedy and epic is more blurred than Aristotle seems to establish. As noted by Macintosh and Justine McConnell, “one third of

158  Feminist Tragedy the Homeric epics are in direct speech” (Macintosh and McConnell 4), which means that one-third of these epics rely on the mode of enactment rather than narration. Aristotle acknowledges the blending of these two modes in Homeric works as he asserts that “in the same media one can represent the same objects by combining narrative with direct personation, as Homer does” (“αὐτοῖς καὶ τὰ αὐτὰ μιμεῖσθαι ἔστιν ὁτὲ μὲν ἀπαγγέλλοντα ἢ ἕτερόν τι γιγνόμενον ὥσπερ Ὅμηρος ποιεῖ”) (Aristotle, 34–35). Drama also demonstrates such a combination, but it is not considered by Aristotle in The Poetics. In classical tragedy, the dramatic action is regularly paused by the chorus who often narrates mythological stories outside the scope of the narrative of the dramatised myth.12 Carr has mentioned her “fascinat[ion]” with the classical chorus but also confessed her “determinat[ion]” not to use the collective character whom she considers “hugely problematic in the staging of Greek theatre” on contemporary stages (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). Yet, the implementation of the dramatic speech blending enactment and narration in Hecuba has made her reach the conclusion that “what [she] ha[s] written is everybody is everybody’s else chorus” (Ibid.). In Greek tragedy, the chorus does not partake in the action going on on stage but rather comments upon it to prompt the audience’s reflection on that action so the heroic characters “become the subjects of a debate” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 24). A comparable dimension is at work in Carr’s Hecuba as the dramatic speech reveals the characters’ inner thoughts to the spectators through the “unif[ifaction] … of soliloquy and dialogue” (Sihra 2018, 268), which intensifies the “shift between objectivity and subjectivity” (Macintosh, 13). This offers a variety of perspectives to reflect on the identity and motives of the characters. The figure of Cassandra is particularly interesting in that regard. She is first introduced as a “little trollop” by Hecuba because Agamemnon “smiles at Cassandra” and “Cassandra smiles back” (Carr 2015, 213), thus presenting her as a traitor to the Trojan cause and interest. Yet, these tensions come from a misunderstanding of Cassandra’s intention: When she forecasts the tragic fate of her entire family, she appears to be “happy” while she is actually “right” (Ibid., 224). In this regard, Cassandra’s behaviour is dictated by the circumstances, thus underlining the influence of epic theatre on her characterisation. In order to provide “a comprehensive picture of the world,” a play has to show “the human being … as ‘the sum of all social circumstances’” according to Brecht (Brecht, 46). The dramatisation of the characters’ inner thoughts in the dramatic speech turns them into subjects of a psycho-social study13 (Torrance 2022a, 201). In addition to her foreknowledge of the future, Cassandra’s behaviour is also motivated by the marginalisation she endures from her family. She is “the mad daughter, the oracle” (Carr 2015, 248) who “do[es]n’t count in

Feminist Tragedy  159 [her mother’s] universe” (Carr, “Hecuba,” Plays Three, 248) because Hecuba “can’t … love” Cassandra (Ibid., 226). And yet, as she wit­ nesses her mother’s “desperat[ion],” Cassandra “wish[es] [she] could” tell ­Hecuba some “good news” because “[s]he’s still [her] mother” (Ibid., 226). This complex background enables the audience to grasp Cassandra’s special position within the category of the Trojan characters, subsequently undermining her first introduction as a traitor-like character, which is completely disregarded in the final moment of the play since she stands as the guardian of the truth redeeming Hecuba from her monstrous reputation. At the end of Carr’s Hecuba, Cassandra fulfils the role of the classical chorus. In Greek tragedy, the collective character is often the last to speak in order to deliver the ethical stance of the play as perfectly epitomised in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Although that tragedy deals primarily with the question of hubris, the chorus invites the audience to reflect on a different, yet connected, topic as they say to the audience: “that one should wait to see the final day and should call none among mortals fortunate, till he has crossed the bourne of life without suffering grief” (“ὥστε θνητὸν ὄντ᾿ ἐκείνην τὴν τελευταίαν ἔδει / ἡμέραν ἐπισκοποῦντα μηδέν᾿ ὀλβίζειν, πρὶν ἂν / τέρμα τοῦ βίου περάσῃ μηδὲν ἀλγεινὸν παθών”) (Sophocles 1997, 482–483). A similar purpose structures Cassandra’s final lines as she offers an interpretation of the classical myth in which the Greeks are “the barbarians … who … defiled” Hecuba (Carr 2015, 259–260). These lines are directly addressed to the audience like the chorus’ stasima are. However, they are a breach of the fourth wall in the context of modern and contemporary drama ruled by the convention of realism, and thus echo the Verfremdungseffect of epic theatre, especially as Cassandra’s lines invite the spectators to assume a critical position towards the classical myth dramatised in Greek tragedy. Of all the plays created by the three classical tragedians, Carr’s decision to adapt a play by Euripides in order to proceed to an “epicisation” of tragedy speaks to the particular position of his dramatic practice within the tradition of ancient drama. The German philosopher Friedrich ­Nietzsche indeed criticises vividly Euripides’ playwriting for its inclusion of “a critical distance,” which would have produced a “dramatised epic,” thus prompting the death of tragedy during the classical period (Macintosh, 13). In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche analyses Greek tragedy as mimesis of the Apollonian “image-world of the dream” and of the Dionysian “intoxicated reality” (Nietzsche, 23–24): While the former dramatises “[t]he higher truth … contrast[ing] with the only partial comprehensibility of everyday reality” (Ibid., 21) through the heroic dramatic arcs, the latter enables the “re-establish[ment]” of “the bond between man and man” (Ibid., 22) through the songs and dances of the chorus. According to Nietzsche, however, Euripides unsettled this balance through his attempt

160  Feminist Tragedy “[t]o excise th[e] … Dionysian element from tragedy and to re-build tragedy purely on the basis of an un-Dionysian art, morality, and world-view” (Ibid., 68). In doing so, Euripides would have brought on stage “highly realistic imitations of thoughts and emotions” and conceived the “unartistic aberration” of “aesthetic Socratism” relying on the idea that “In order to be beautiful, everything must be intelligible” (Ibid., 70). The connection between Carr’s epiciation of tragedy and Euripides’ “dramatised epic” – as perceived by Nietzsche – operates in the realm of the actor enacting the play. According to the philosopher, “the tragic effect is admittedly unattainable” in the Euripidean plays because they are devoid of the Dionysian. In this respect, they are “dramatised epic[s]” in Nietzsche’s mind as “[t]he poet … is as unable to fuse completely with his images as the epic rhapsode: he remains for ever calm and unmoved, a wide-eyed contemplation, which sees images before itself” (Ibid., 69). Translated into Aristotelian terms, Nietzsche reproaches Euripides for creating a narration rather than an enactment of the action in his tragedies, which prevents the actor from being “completely an actor” and assimilates them to “a rhapsode” (Ibid.). This overlap of the actor and the rhapsode enables the inclusion of a critical distance in the play as the actor does not lose themself in the character. It thus bears some similarity to the Verfremdungseffect as Brecht asserts that “the actor will … do all he can to make himself observed standing between the spectator and the event” in epic theatre (Brecht, 58). A similar phenomenon is observable in Carr’s Hecuba as the blend of narration and enactment leads the characters to act “as if [they] were spectator[s] of their”14 own actions (Macintosh, 11). Although the actors do not distinguish themselves from the characters, the characters’ narration of themselves turn them into the rhapsodes of their own actions. In Carr’s Hecuba, not only is “everybody … everybody’s else chorus” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh), but they are also the chorus of themself. The blend of narration and enactment coupled with the “unification of dialogue and soliloquy” enables the characters to comment, and thus self-reflect, on their own deeds. During the “sacrifice” scene, Agamemnon’s description of Polyxena’s “frail, too thin” half-naked body prompts his reflection about the Greek army’s strategies used during the war as he wonders if they “[h]ave … been starving” the Trojans (Carr 2015, 243). As the character stands outside the action to be positioned as an observer, it invites the audience to assume a similar position, thus “preventing the spectator from transferring himself to” the stage (Brecht, 58). Through the characters’ awareness of the emergence of “a harsher world” from the “rubble” of Troy, Carr leads the audience on the path of recognition that this “harsher world … has become us, has

Feminist Tragedy  161 become the future” because “we are playing out the legacy” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh) of that mythological war which has framed contemporary Western democracies. Carr pursues and extends the strategies and purpose of the epicisation of tragedy in Girl on an Altar. This play relies on the same dramatic speech as Hecuba, yet its course of action is much broader. Indeed, while Hecuba adapts a single tragedy, Girl on an Altar adapts two: Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. In this regard, Girl on an Altar subverts two other main characteristics distinguishing tragedy from epic: The unity of time and the unity of action. As “tragedy tends so far as possible to stay within a single revolution of the sun, or close to it” (“ἡ μὲν ὅτι μάλιστα πειρᾶται ὑπὸ μίαν περίοδον ἡλίου εἶναι ἢ μικρὸν ἐξαλλάττειν”) (Aristotle, 46–47), this short temporal length has an influence on the dramatic content of Greek tragedy. Aristotle repeatedly defines tragedy as “mimesis of an action” (“μίμησις πράξεως”), using systematically the singular, which implies the dramatisation of a single action. This single action is indeed the “soul” (“ψυχὴ”), “the first principle” (“ἀρχὴ”) of the tragedy as it provides its “[p]lot” (“μῦθος”) (Ibid., 52–53). Both of these characteristics are observable in the sources of Girl on an Altar: Iphigenia at Aulis focuses on the day of the sacrifice of the eponymous character, and Agamemnon centres on the tragic return of the titular character since he dies on the day when he is back to Argos. The combination of Iphigenia at Aulis and Agamemnon in Girl on an Altar entails a course of action that exceeds the one-day span of classical tragedy. The play starts with the departure of the Greek army to Troy and ends over a decade later with the murder of Agamemnon after his return to Argos. The scope of time and action of Girl on an Altar is thus too broad to fit the genre of classical tragedy, even though the play includes a ten-year time ellipse, which coincides with the Trojan War. Furthermore, the action of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is extended since the titular character does not die on the day of his return from Troy but several months, perhaps years, after as Carr includes a new line of action from her own creation between these two events. In doing so, she brings Girl on an Altar closer to the genre of epic. Unlike tragedy, “epic is unlimited in time span” (“ἐποποιία ἀόριστος τῷ χρόνῳ”) (Ibid., 46–47). This entails that “the mimesis … is less unified” (“ἧττον μία ἡ μίμησις ἡ τῶν ἐποποιῶν”) because it does not rely on a single action but on “multiple actions” (“πλειόνων πράξεων”) (Ibid., 138–139), which resonates with the variety of events included by Carr in Girl on an Altar. The epic dimension of Girl on an Altar demonstrates the influence of Brecht on Carr’s project of epicising tragedy. While “dramatic theatre” relies on a “plot” and presents the characters as “unalterable,” “epic

162  Feminist Tragedy theatre” leans on a “narrative,” which allows the characters to be “alterable and able to alter” the world in which they are living (Brecht, 37). The purpose of epic theatre structures the combination of Iphigenia at Aulis and Agamemnon in Girl on an Altar and is particularly epitomised through Clytemnestra’s dramatic arc. Commenting on the plot line crafted by Carr, Macintosh observes that “Clytemnestra clearly learns things, her own mistakes,” especially “when she is amongst those other repressed, oppressed women” (Marina Carr and Patrick O’Kane in conversation). She refers more specifically to Clytemnestra’s realisation of the enduring persecution of women in Argos while the character is jailed in the harem. Clytemnestra confesses that during “all [her] years at Argos, [she] never deigned to visit th[e] place” and subsequently “[n]ever gave these lonely neglected women a thought,” even “though [she] approved the accounts every quarter” (Carr 2022, 42). As the character grows aware that she “ha[s] allowed this” (Ibid., 43), she grasps the enabling participation she has played in the establishment of the patriarchal oppression of women, which has eventually impacted her and her family. This learning episode in Clytemnestra’s dramatic arc is pivotal in the transformation of the character from a loving wife subdued to patriarchal authority into a husband killer causing the collapse of patriarchy. Clytemnestra’s narrative as handled in Girl on an Altar comes thus to echo “the vitality and complexity of human action, choice, and experienced outcome” of Greek tragedy that the British director Tim Supple considers to be epic (Supple, 51). In “Theatre on an Epic Scale,” Supple develops a conception of epic and its application in theatre, which differs from the Aristotelian as well as Brechtian visions. Besides the length and content of the narrative and plot, which he mentions through the dramatic “words,” “ideas,” and “characters’ actions” (Ibid.), Supple applies the characteristic magnitude of epic to the constitutive elements of theatrical production, considering the spaces (Ibid., 47) and the number of spectators (Ibid., 51) as part of the epic dimension of theatre. As classical performances were produced in an amphitheatre during the religious festival of the Great Dionysia, thus attracting all the Athenian citizens and numerous foreigners, Supple considers Greek theatre to be epic (Ibid.). Yet, he also notes that the theatrical convention of the three actors on stage contravenes his assimilation of Greek tragedy to epic: “the numbers performing, the scale of performance, was not epic” (Ibid.). Yet, this handful of performers speaks to the scope of the classical tragic plays, which, far from being epic, are “claustrophobic” (Gould, 411). However, Greek tragedy is not the only historical form of theatre that Supple associates with epic, he also considers Shakespeare’s drama in a similar way. Carr has drawn inspiration from Shakespearean drama throughout her career: The village of Belmont in the county of Offaly where the action of

Feminist Tragedy  163 Portia Coughlan takes place echoes a fictional place in The Merchant of Venice (1598) (Sihra 2018, 99), the titular character of Ariel is reminiscent of the same-named character in The Tempest (1611) (Torrance 2018, 75–76), and Cordelia’s Dream is a “response to King Lear” (1606) (Carr in Battersby), for instance. In Girl on an Altar, Carr reconfigures Greek tragedy through the epic scale of Shakespearean tragic theatre. According to Supple, Shakespeare is “an elemental, metaphysical, epic social dramatist” whose plays are “concerned with the workings of power, the nature of governance, the ethics of authority, the workings of law, the struggle of humanity to come to terms with fate and to endure life sufferings and disappointments” while embedded simultaneously in “family drama” (Supple, 59). Greek tragedy entangles the realms of power and family too as most of the heroic characters are from a royal family. In this respect, the hero’s “fate [is] the fate of the house or the kingdom which he at once rule[s] and embodie[s]” (Williams, 50). Yet, the “claustrophobic” scope of Greek tragedy means that the implications of the hamartia on the family and the political realms are addressed through a single course of action, which usually focuses on only one of the two realms while alluding to the other. In Iphigenia at Aulis, for instance, the outcome of the titular character’s sacrifice is mainly framed through the political lens of the Greek army’s ability to go to Troy. This minimises the aftermath of the sacrifice for the family of the Atrides as the revenge of Clytemnestra for the murder of her daughter is scarcely mentioned, even though it is explored in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Carr assimilates the limitations of Greek tragedy in terms of narrative scope to “something of the chronicle” which focuses on what “happened” with “a kind of lunar coldness” but lacks “flesh and blood people” (Marina Carr and Patrick O’Kane in conversation). Unlike the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare was not subjected to the classical conventions of the number of actors on stage and of the unities of time and action. He was thus able to provide an in-depth exploration of the consequences of the initial incident in the realms of politics and family in a single play through the inclusion of subplots. Carr draws inspiration from the Shakespearean approach to tragedy to craft Girl on an Altar, especially when considering the extension of the course of action derived from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Carr has “imagine[d] what would happen if [Clytemnestra] didn’t kill [Agamemnon] straight away” to show the “many tragedies and sorrows” that this “very long marriage has withstood,” thus focusing more on “the life in people” rather than what “happened” (Ibid.). To do so, she complicates the causal link between Iphigenia’s sacrifice and Agamemnon’s death. Clytemnestra might hate Agamemnon but, unlike her classical counterpart, she also “love[s] him” (Carr 2022, 34). The family drama of the play explores these conflicting feelings of Clytemnestra between the memories

164  Feminist Tragedy of “the golden prince of [her] girlhood who brought [her] nothing but joy” that used to be her husband and the reality of “th[e] battle-scarred warlord with his daughter’s ghost trailing him” that he has become (Ibid., 36–37). Although the couple attempts to repair their relationship because they are “devastated without” one another, Clytemnestra cannot get over his “stinking, filthy, daughter-murdering hands” (Ibid., 40). As she refuses to share her bed with him, she is gradually substituted by Cassandra who fulfils the “marital duties” claimed by Agamemnon. If “he … sleep[s] alone” at first (Ibid., 27) while Cassandra lives in the harem, this changes as soon as she is “given [her] own chamber in a side wing off his” (Ibid., 31) since she gets “pregnant” (Ibid., 33). This situation coupled with Clytemnestra’s lingering feelings of hatred and disgust prompts Agamemnon’s decision to “send … men in full armour to escort her to the harem” (Ibid., 41). These events occurring in the realm of the family are propelled by the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which underlines the political considerations fuelling the family drama throughout Girl on an Altar. The sacrifice of Iphigenia stands as the funding moment of Agamemnon’s rule. He indeed shows to the rest of the Greeks “what the king of the kings is made of” (Ibid., 16) through that action, which also coincides with the beginning of the tragedy. In this respect, the play’s structure bears some similarities with the dramatic genre of histories that “focuses on the birth and rise of nations and empires” (Hoenselaars 138) and their collapse. Such a dramatisation of history has been analysed as a generic innovation relying on the “fusion of Aristotle’s tragedy with the genre of epic” (Ibid.), which numerous plays by Shakespeare illustrate. Although only his plays dealing with ancient Roman15 and English history16 have been categorised as histories, his tragedies Hamlet (1599–1601), King Lear (1606), and Macbeth (1606) include historical figures and contents too. And some of them demonstrate an epic structure similar to the genre of histories. This is particularly epitomised in Macbeth, which dramatises the rise to and fall from power of the titular character, echoing the dramatic arc of Agamemnon in Girl on an Altar. As in the case of Macbeth, Agamemnon’s ascension to power stems from a murderous action, which grows to define the politics he implements during his rule. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is indeed not an isolated event since he “sacrificed another girl before [the Greek army] left Troy” (Carr 2022, 35). This leads Clytemnestra to comment: “It’s becoming a habit. Soon it’ll be normal and before you can turn round it’ll be a law” (Ibid.), a prognosis which is proven accurate. Several months – maybe years – later, “[a]n orphan girl [is] sacrificed” by Agamemnon “to win fair words from Delphi” as his status as “the rightful king” (Ibid., 48) is questioned. The challenge posed to his governance stems from the marginalisation of women from power. After the seclusion of Clytemnestra to the harem, which demonstrates her physical as well as

Feminist Tragedy  165 symbolical removal from power since “[h]er name is forbidden” (Ibid., 46), Agamemnon might claim that he “ha[s] a new love” (Ibid., 43), but he also proclaims that he has “no Queen,” even though Cassandra has just been “moved into the Queen’s apartments” (Ibid., 41). In accordance with the characteristic irony that sustains tragedy, Agamemnon falls by the very means that have enabled his ascension to power. Indeed, after the sacrifice of the orphan girl, “Delphi says that Agamemnon is not the rightful king” but “Aegisthus” is (Ibid., 49). This situation reiterates at a political level Agamemnon’s loss of legitimacy as a husband after the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Clytemnestra considers that Aegisthus “deserves the title [of husband] more” because he “kept [her] alive” and “put [her] back together after” the death of her daughter (Ibid., 38). This parallel between the status of husband and king positions Clytemnestra as the agent of Agamemnon’s fate, even though or rather because she has been excluded from the family and the political realms. This sense of irony is underlined by the circumstances surrounding Agamemnon’s murder as Clytemnestra stands in front of him as a “common prisone[r]” (Ibid., 59), thus embodying the alienation of women under the rule of Agamemnon. This repurposes the crime which does not stand as a mere act of revenge but as an act of survival and liberation not only for Clytemnestra but for all the women in Argos that she embodies. As Girl on an Altar ends with the murder, and thus the fall, of Agamemnon, Carr writes an epic about patriarchy, highlighting its (self-) destructivity through the genre of tragedy. Aristotle indeed defines tragedy as the dramatisation of “a change … from prosperity to adversity, caused … by a great error of a character” (“μεταβάλλειν … ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν … δι᾿ ἁμαρτίαν μεγάλην”) (Aristotle, 70–71). In Girl on an Altar, Agamemnon personifies patriarchy, and Carr shows the downfall of this system through his dramatic arc because of his own flaw: His disregard for women’s agency. In iGirl, Carr gives a postmodern twist to the Aristotelian definition of epic as mimesis of an action “less unified” than tragedy. The play, which is enacted by a solo performer, shows several characters narrating their individual stories in one or several dedicated sections, labelled as “poems” by Torrance (Torrance 2022a, 197), which seems particularly adequate considering that Carr does not write in prose but in verse. In this regard, the form of iGirl is reminiscent of the genre of classical epic as it is a poetic work of narration. Classical epics are indeed composed of songs – twentyfour in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – which all focus on different actions so they could be understood independently as it was impossible to perform a whole epic at once. The fifth song of Homer’s Iliad, for instance, deals exclusively with the prowess of the Achean hero Diomedes – inspired by the god Athena – on the battlefield against the Trojans and the gods supporting

166  Feminist Tragedy them. Yet, despite the possibility for classical epic songs to stand independently from one another, all of them are connected to a greater narrative, which is explicitly asserted in the first lines of the written versions of the classical epics as The Iliad starts with “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles” (“Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος / οὐλομένην”) (Homer 2003, 12–13), and The Odyssey with “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driven far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy” (“Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν”) (Homer 1998, 12–13). In iGirl, some sections show some clear connections to others: The narrations of Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus are a retelling of the events dramatised in Sophocles’ Theban cycle, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone from their own individual perspectives. Yet, there seem to be no great unifying narratives in iGirl. This lack of unification stems from several factors: First, the characters appearing on stage come from a variety of materials, including history (Neanderthal and Jeanne d’Arc), Greek tragedy (Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus) as well as mythology (Persephone), and autobiography (Carr herself); then, they come from diverse historical eras, namely, prehistory, the antiquity, the medieval times, and the contemporary period. These elements sustain their complete lack of interactions with one another throughout the play. In this regard, the poems appear quite disconnected from one another. Yet, Carr uses tragedy to unify the poems in iGirl. The collection of stories presented in iGirl all deal with the “change from prosperity to adversity” of the characters, which is the backbone of tragedy as defined in Aristotle’s The Poetics: The Neanderthals were “destroyed” by the Homo sapiens (Carr 2021, 5), Antigone died because she “argued like a man” (Ibid., 12), and Jeanne d’Arc was “burned … at the stake” (Ibid., 8). Through this diversity of narratives, Carr traces the history of human violence through their “Shared stories of carnage / And … / Destruction” (Ibid., 11), which started when “The wrong species / Survived” because “We destroyed the Neanderthals / The gentle mute ­Neanderthals” (Ibid., 4–5) as disclosed in the first poem. These violent tendencies constitute the tragic fate of humanity as a species since Carr draws a parallel with the extinction of the ancient gods in the final poem: Human specimen He will record Homo sapiens Question mark Homini Possibly The old gods

Feminist Tragedy  167 That vanished tribe Stuff of myth Barely a trace of them Survives.

(Ibid., 83)

The body of the single performer on stage stands as a means of historical unification too. Elin Diamond indeed argues that “gender … ideology” is “a system of beliefs and behavior mapped across the bodies of women and men,” which can be addressed through “the continued timeliness of Verfremdungseffekt” in order “to [be] denaturalize[d] and defamilarize[d]” (Diamond, 47). But gender is not the main focus of iGirl as expressly stated in the first poem: This is not a song about breasts Or misogyny … Breasts are like string theory Connected to everything So obvious we have to deny them Misogyny too

(Carr 2021, 3)

As with “string theory,” gender underlies the violent urge of humanity, which iGirl alludes to through the figures of Antigone and Jeanne d’Arc, for instance, who both died because they did not comply with gender expectations. This dimension comes across more ostensibly through the body of the performer – Olwen Fouéré in the 2021 production at the Abbey ­Theatre – who stands on stage topless. As she embodies all the characters speaking throughout the play, her body grows into the locus of unification of the variety of materials and historical eras included in iGirl. Fouéré thus comes to embody human history, hence subverting the patriarchal ­assumption that “humanity is male” (Beauvoir, 15). In doing so, Carr traces the history of human violence through the lens of oppression rather than domination, which Fouéré’s body grounds into the contemporary period through the exposure of her breasts. Despite the undeniable move towards gender equality in Irish society over the last decades epitomised by the repeal of the 8th Amendment in 2018 granting body autonomy to women, they remain oppressed. And, this situation of oppression is “mapped” across the repression of their bodies: Unlike men’s, women’s chests are still sexualised, taboo, and must be hidden. This physical “indecency” echoes the social indecencies from the past, which used to concern the mere presence of women in public, thus confining them to the

168  Feminist Tragedy private realm of the oikos in classical Athens and of the home in modern and contemporary Ireland. Fouéré thus embodies our history, our tragic fate. And, in this regard, she plays a dramatic persona reminiscent of the classical rhapsode. iGirl draws inspiration from the postmodern experimental form of “rhapsodic theatre.” Coined by Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, the form of “rhapsodic theatre” is “part dramatic … part epic” as it “s[ews] together … dramatic moments and narrative pieces”17 (Sarrazac, 38). Although most of the poems in iGirl rely on narration, poem eighteen stands aside as it shows a dialogue between two unidentified characters both embodied by the single performer, thus interweaving a more traditional “dramatic moment” into the “narrative pieces” that compose the play. Yet, this specific moment participates in the construction of iGirl as a dramatic epic. Although Aristotle notes the overlap of narration and enactment in epic, it usually manifests through the inclusion of some bits of dialogue within the narration. This phenomenon is also observable in the literary genre of the novel, which can be conceived to be descending from classical epic because of its focus on narration, even though novels are usually written in prose rather than in verse. Yet, modernist novelists have conducted experiments on the overlap of narration and enactment through the integration of scenes written in accordance with the convention of a play script. This is, for instance, illustrated through the episode of Circe – episode fifteen – of James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses (1920). Based on Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses narrates the peregrinations of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, and the fifteenth episode dramatises his visit with the other protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, to the brothel of Bella Cohen while both of them are experiencing hallucinations through the use of stage directions and dramatic dialogues only. Carr revives that modernist input into epic in iGirl but breaks with its narrative-driven foregrounding as the dialogue of poem eighteen does not provide any spatiotemporal indication regarding the context aside from the fact that the gods “are all gone” and only their “names survive” (Carr 2021, 62–63). The absence of a great narrative in iGirl echoes the “fragmented” stories that are “reassembled into new forms, collage-like” through a “combination of forms and genres” from which emerges the “narrative” in rhapsodic theatre (Macintosh and McConnell, 17–18). Through tragedy, Carr indeed unifies myth, history, and autobiography to write the epic of human history, thus showing “the syncretization” of stories “from diverse times and places” characteristic of “rhapsodic theatre … in … recent works” (Ibid., 18). However, unlike the rhapsode, the performer does not stand outside the narratives of the characters since she embodies them as explicitly underlined by the opening line of several poems: “I Jeanne

Feminist Tragedy  169 d’Arc” (Carr 2021, 8), “I Antigone” (Ibid., 10), “I Oedipus” (Ibid., 22), “I Jocasta” (Ibid., 27), “I Neanderthal Prince of the Plains” (Ibid., 51), and “I Girl” (Ibid., 33). This last character alludes to Carr herself as the poem extrapolates on the memory she will leave to her descendants after her death: She wrote plays Now out of print That’s where you get Your creative bent The great-great-granddaughter Will say To her well loved Son or Daughter When they want to be an actor

(Ibid.)

Carr might write herself into iGirl but she does not write herself as a storyteller and is thus not embodied as such by the performer, which epitomises the dramatic form of the tragic epic that is iGirl. Notes 1 Macintosh uses that expression in reference to Carr’s Hecuba only, but, as I am demonstrating in this chapter, it can be applied to all of her adaptations of Greek tragedy. See “Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh”; Macintosh 2018, 11–13; Macintosh and McConnell, 34–35. 2 Sihra describes Phaedra Backwards as “offer[ing] circuitous pathways which, like the legend of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, open up a maze of possibilities” (Sihra 2018, 260). 3 Leeney makes that statement in relation to Portia Coughlan but, considering the similarity in terms of non-chronological construction of the plot, it can also be applied to The Mai. 4 Carr talks about Portia Coughlan but once again her remark can be applied to The Mai. 5 This statement, and Steiner’s conception of tragedy as a whole, might seem outdated but is still discussed by scholars as illustrated by the publication of Eagleton’s Tragedy in 2020. 6 The concept of “living death” is mentioned and explored by Sihra in her monograph: Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. 7 Torrance uses that word to describe Fermoy’s relationship with Ariel. See Torrance 2018, 77. 8 Macintosh speaks of a “blend of diegesis and mimesis” (Macintosh and ­McConnell, 35). Yet, Aristotle argues that “Epic matches tragedy to the extent of being mimesis of elevated matter” (“ἡ μὲν οὖν ἐποποιία τῇ τραγῳδίᾳ μέχρι … μίμησις εἶναι σπουδαίων ἠκολούθησεν”), but tragedy uses “the mode of

170  Feminist Tragedy enactment, not narrative” (“δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾿ ἀπαγγελίας”) contrary to epic (Aristotle, Poetics, 46–47). For that reason, I am using the concepts of narration and enactment. 9 These sentences are mentioned in the description of the setting provided by Carr in the published version of the play (Carr, 2015, 75), but it is Sihra’s account of the performances that indicates that they were used on stage. 10 See note 85 in Sihra 2018, 274. 11 Torrance applies that concept to the sole character of the Minotaur but I am demonstrating it is also relevant to analyse the characterisation of Phaedra and Theseus. 12 My student Mats Van Sluis inspired that idea through a comment he made during a lecture about Aristotle’s The Poetics. 13 Torrance demonstrates that Girl on an Altar “explores the deeper psychologies of the mythological characters and their motivations” but as Carr uses the same dramatic speech in Hecuba, Torrance’s comment is accurate to analyse this play too. 14 This idea comes from Macintosh’s comment on the character of Hecuba in the opening scene of the play, which reads: “Listen to Hecuba’s opening speech in Carr’s play … acting as if she were spectator of her own grief” (Macintosh 2018, 11). 15 Julius Caesar (1599), Coriolanus (1605–1608), Anthony and Cleopatra (1607). 16 King John (circa 1590), the eight plays of The Henriad (1591–1599), Edward III (1596), and Henry VIII (1613). 17 Translated and quoted in note 55 of Macintosh and McConnell, 16.

Works Cited Primary Sources Carr, M. 1999. Plays One. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2009. Plays Two. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2015. Plays Three. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2021. iGirl. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2022. Girl on an Altar. London: Faber. Euripides. 2005. Hecuba. In Children of Heracles. Hippolytus. Andromache. Hecuba, ed. and trans. D. Kovacs, 391–519. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Homer. 1998. Odyssey Books 1–12, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray and G. E. Dimock. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Homer. 2003. Iliad Books 1–12, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray and W. F. Wyatt. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1997. Oedipus Tyrannus. In Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 323–483. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1998. Antigone. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 1–127. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press.

Feminist Tragedy  171 Secondary Sources 1937 Irish Constitution. Irish Statute Book. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/ cons/en/html. Aston, E. 2006. “Bad Girls” and “Sick Boys”: New Women Playwrights and the Future of Feminism. In Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory, ed. E. Aston and G. Harris, 71–87. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aristotle. 1999. Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Battersby, E. 2000. Marina of the Midlands. Irish Times. May 4. https://www. proquest.com/docview/310543496?. Beauvoir (de), S. 1956. The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Brecht, B. 1974. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. J. Willett. London: Eyre Methuen. Camus, A. 1970. On the Future of Tragedy. In Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. and trans. E. Conroy Kennedy, 295–310. New York: Vintage Books. Cixous, H. 1984. Aller à la mer, trans. B. Kerslake. Modern Drama. 27.4: 546–548. del Mar González Chacón, M. 2020. “This is not about love, this is about guilt and terror”: Phaedra Backwards (2011) and Forwards by Marina Carr. Irish Studies Review. 28.4: 481–497. Diamond, E. 1997. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. New York: Routledge. Dolan, J. 2008. Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein. Theatre Journal. 60.3: 433–457. Dolan, J. 2012. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eagleton, T. 2020. Tragedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gould, J. 2001. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1895. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 2, ed. and trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hoenselaars, T. 2010. Shakespeare’s English History Plays. In The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. M. De Grazia and S. Wells, 137–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, H. A. 1993. Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kilroy, I. 2002. Greek Tragedy, Midlands-Style; In Her New Play, Ariel, Marina Carr Returns Again to Drama’s Greek Roots, By Way of the Midlands Dialect and Modern Irish Public Life. Irish Times, September 20. https://ucd.idm.oclc.org/ login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 309488671?accountid=14507. Lacan, J. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller and trans. D. Porter. London: Norton & Company.

172  Feminist Tragedy Laera, M. 2013. Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. London: Peter Lang. Lauretis (de), T. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. London: Macmillan. Leavy, A. 2016. Marina Carr Interview: “There is an Affinity Between the Russian Soul and the Irish Soul”. Irish Times, December 6. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/marina-carr-interview-there-is-an-affinity-between-the-russian-souland-the-irish-soul-1.2893945. Leeney, C. 2004. Ireland’s “Exiled” Women Playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr. In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. S. Richards, 150–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lonergan, P. 2009. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Area. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macintosh, F. 2018. “Epic” Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back. In Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison, and C. Kenward, 3–15. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macintosh, F. and J. McConnell. 2020. Performing Epic or Telling Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marina Carr and Patrick O’Kane in conversation. 2021. YouTube. March 15. https://www.youtube.com/live/J0cXE6HTFBw?si=3tmzczEJYHyoDOAA. Ní Anluain, C., M. Murphy, and T. Kinsella. Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Nietzsche, F. 2000. The Birth of Tragedy, ed. and trans. D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pine, E. 2011. The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh. 2016. University of Oxford Podcasts. August 9. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/playwright-marinacarr-conversation-fiona-macintosh. Sarrazac, J.-P. 1981. L’Avenir du drama. Écritures dramatiques contemporaines. Lausanne: Éditions de l’Aire. Seidensticker, B. 1978. Comic Elements in Euripides’ Bacchae. The American Journal of Philology. 99.3: 303–320. Sihra, M. 2016. Marina Carr in the US: Perception, Conflict and Culture in Irish Theatre Abroad. In Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance Studies Reader, ed. F. Cronin and E. Jordan, 125–134. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Sihra, M. 2018. Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International Publishing. Steiner, G. 1980. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press. Supple, T. 2018. Theatre on an Epic Scale. In Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison, and C. Kenward, 46–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Torrance, I. 2018. Greek Tragedy and the Tiger: The Politics of Literary Allusion in Marina Carr’s Ariel. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. 25.3: 69–99.

Feminist Tragedy  173 Torrance, I. 2022a. Greek Tragedy and Irish Politics in the Decade of Commemorations. Éire-Ireland. 57.1 & 2: 189–213. Torrance, I. 2022b. Rewriting Hippolytus: Hybridity, Posthumanism, and Social Politics in Marina Carr’s Phaedra Backwards. Arethusa. 55.3: 229–244. Vernant, J.-P. and P. Vidal Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. P. Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Wald, C. 2007. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallace, J. 2013. Tragedy and Laughter. Comparative Drama. 47.2: 201–224. Williams, R. 1966. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus. Wilmer, S. 2017. Greek Tragedy as a Window on the Dispossessed. New Theatre Quarterly. 33.3: 277–287. Wohl, V. 2005. Tragedy and Feminism. In A Companion to Tragedy, ed. R. Bushnell, 145–160. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Zeitlin, F. 1990. Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama. In Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. J. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, 63–96. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Conclusion A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy

What is happiness?

(Carr 2021, 3)

Marina Carr opens the epic journey brought on stage in iGirl (2021) with this question, which seems more philosophical than dramatic, and, yet, which underlays all her plays, especially her adaptations and transpositions of classical drama. The emergence of Greek tragedy during the 6th century B.C.E. was a pivotal moment in Western history. Not only did that art arise concomitantly with the establishment of democracy but it also propelled the development of philosophy. The chronology of classical culture laid down by Jean-Pierre Vernant indeed demonstrates that “[t]ragedy succeeded epic and lyric and faded away as philosophy experienced its moment of triumph” (Vernant, 29). Yet, the triumph of philosophy was prepared by tragedy because it “g[a]ve expression to … human experience” (Ibid.). The connection of tragedy with philosophy has been increased throughout the history of Western culture as philosophers have often used classical drama as study cases for their philosophical inquiries. This entanglement has mainly operated in relation to two essential concepts in philosophy, which are central to feminism as a socio-political project and thus resonate in Carr’s drama: Justice and freedom. The Tragedy of Injustice Justice is the cornerstone of tragedy in the conceptualisation of the genre elaborated by the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and developed in several of his philosophical essays. In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, he claims that “in tragedy, … destiny moves within a certain sphere of moral justice. … The destiny of individuals is represented as something incomprehensible, but necessity is not a blind justice; on the contrary, it is recognised as the true justice” (Hegel 1895, 264). As Hegel argues in Natural Law, fate is the necessary component

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  175 to achieve the reconciliation of the conflicting forces sustaining tragedy because it restores the ethical order (Hegel 1975, 105). Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy, however, do not seem to achieve such a purpose because of their bleak endings. In most of her plays, “women are not … even surviving” (Harris, 229). While death has been wrongfully conceived as an essential characteristic of tragedy, it is not a purpose but rather a means to achieve reconciliation. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance, the death of the titular character is instrumental to Creon’s acknowledgement of his own wrongdoing. Yet, nothing comparable seems to emerge from Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy as Clare Wallace wonders “what comes out of the darkness” of these plays (Wallace 2019, 514). The tragedies shown in Carr’s theatre do not propel any change in the dramatic world of the characters. Death is the end. Carr addresses death through a variety of perspectives in her theatre. It is often literal as manifested through the centrality of suicides and murders like in The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), By the Bog of Cats… (1998), Ariel (2002), Phaedra Backwards (2011), and Girl on an Altar (2022). Yet, this literality is layered with symbolism. This dimension comes across more ostensibly in the plays not dramatising the death of the main character(s) during the course of action like in Hecuba (2015) and On Raftery’s Hill (2000). In the former, Cassandra mentions the death of the titular character in the final lines of the play after “correcting” the canonical version of the myth dramatised in Euripides’ tragedy. As the queen of Troy, Hecuba stands as a personification of the Trojan civilisation whose death symbolises its collapse. These correlated events enable the rewriting of the (hi)story by the Greeks, which comes to manifest the death of the truth for political consideration as “[t]he Acheans wanted to get their stories down, their myth in stone, their version, with them as the heroes always, noble, fair, merciful” (Carr 2015, 259). In doing so, Carr assimilates the canonical version of the myth and the victory of the Greeks to the consecration of injustice. Cassandra might have borne witness to what actually happened in Troy but she has no power to change the way the (hi)story is to be told now that she is a slave whose forthcoming death entails the complete loss of the Trojan truth. Yet, the final line of Carr’s Hecuba reads: “we sailed … to a new and harsher world” (Ibid., 260). The personal pronoun “we” is twofold. On the one hand, it alludes to the people who have managed to survive the Trojan War. On the other hand, it refers to the contemporary Western democracies that have conceived themselves as descending from the Greeks, especially as this line is delivered through a direct address to the audience. While Cassandra is unable to change the course of the (hi)story, contemporary Western democracies and their citizens are able to advocate and implement restorative justice for past and present ­oppressions. Carr’s input in Euripides’ Hecuba, and in Greek tragedy more

176  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy broadly, illustrates that stance as she redeems the classical figures from their canonical monstrosity, which has been conceived and perpetuated to support and advocate for a system of inequities in terms of gender, class, and race. The lack of reconciliation is deliberate and has a political significance in Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy. The restoration of the ethical order at the end of classical tragic drama presents the world as “granted” and “unalterable” – to borrow from Bertolt Brecht’s vocabulary (Brecht, 37) – especially since Greek tragedy “provide(s) poetic justification for the subordination of women, foreigners, and slaves” (Foley, 4) that structures democracy in Athens during the 5th century B.C.E. The absence of reconciliation in Carr’s plays, however, aims to depict situations of oppression that are “alterable” (Ibid.) and should be altered. The first phase of her transpositions of Greek tragedy, the Midlands cycle, was first produced during the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland. It was a period of unprecedented economic wealth and relative liberalisation as divorce was, for instance, ­legalised in 1995, both of these factors enabling women to achieve financial security on their own. Yet, Ireland remains deeply structured by inequalities as “women are still underrepresented in the political and political sectors and are still dealing with issues of pay inequalities” (Sihra 2007, 214). Carr shows the perpetuation of these structural issues in the Midlands cycle by “tearing apart the historical fabric of … appearances” (McMullan, 15) in order to “addres[s]” a variety of “painful narratives” so “transformations can occur” (Sihra 2007, 214). This is all the more important as the social changes of the Celtic Tiger era did not improve the ­living conditions of all women in Ireland. Depending on their socioeconomic, ethnic, and family backgrounds, a number of women are still maintained at the margins of Irish society (Sayın, 80) because they do not embody the communal values of the Republic as epitomised through the tragedy of the Travellers and single mothers of the characters of Big Josie and Hester in By the Bog of Cats…. The second phase of Carr’s transpositions broadens her enterprise to the Western culture more generally, which manifests the global dimension of the systems of oppression structuring democracies in the West as illustrated through the crisis of welcoming the refugees as well as the dissemination of the movements Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. The concept of recognition underlays Carr’s strategy to prevent any form of reconciliation, and thus the re-establishment of justice, following the tragedies presented in her plays. First theorised by Aristotle in The Poetics, recognition has been revisited and re-conceptualised by Brecht to fit the critical purpose of epic theatre. In the classical definition, the ­anagnorisis (recognition) is a component of complex tragic plots showing “a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading to friendship or to enmity,

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  177 and involving matters which bear on prosperity or adversity” (“ἐξ ἀγνοίας εἰς γνῶσιν μεταβολή, ἢ εἰς φιλίαν ἢ ἔχθραν, τῶν πρὸς εὐτυχίαν ἢ δυστυχίαν ὡρισμένων”), which works at its “finest” (“καλλίστη”) when it “occurs simultaneously with reversal” (“ὅταν ἅμα περιπετείᾳ γένηται”) (Aristotle, 64–65). The Aristotelian conception of the recognition thus concerns the characters, especially considering that Aristotle relies on the example of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to illustrate his point about the overlap of the anagnorisis and the peripeteia (reversal). In epic theatre, however, recognition is approached primarily from the perspective of the audience as the plays aim at providing a “picture of the world” to be “studie[d]” by the spectators in order to “br[ing them] to the point of recognition” (Brecht, 37). Although Carr adapts and appropriates Greek tragedy, her plays demonstrate an epicisation of dramatic theatre, especially regarding recognition, which she achieves through the subversion of the traditional tragic mechanisms sustaining tragedy. In The Poetics, Aristotle identifies the essential components of tragedy, including the plot, the unities of time and action, the hamatia, the catharsis, the anagnorisis, and the peripeteia. Yet, the structural mechanisms of the genre have been uncovered by Hegel. In The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the German philosopher analyses tragedy through the lens of the philosophical system he elaborates. According to him, tragedy “shows” the “spirit,” which is the ethical essence, “as ripped asunder into … two extreme powers” (Hegel 2018, 422). The “split” of “the ethical essence” fuels the conflict dramatised in tragedy as the hero stands for one of the powers and against the other one, and as they act on that stance, they fall into “guilt” (Ibid., 270), which coincides with the Aristotelian concept of hamartia. The two laws emerging from the division of the ethical essence assume several different yet interconnected oppositions: Human and divine; feminine and masculine; family and state power (Ibid., 423). The interconnections between these oppositions appear in classical tragedies but their conflicts often give precedence to one over the others. Euripides’ Hippolytus, for instance, layers the opposition between the feminine and the masculine but the tragedy is primarily framed through the opposition of Aphrodite and Hippolytus, and thus the human and divine. Similarly, Sophocles’ Antigone demonstrates the opposition of the feminine and the masculine through the conflict between Antigone and Creon but focuses predominantly on the opposition of the family and the state power. The latter opposition in that specific tragedy is of particular interest to Hegel as it encompasses another opposition: The one of the individual and the collective. According to Hegel, Antigone embodies the “spirit of individuality” (Ibid., 276) because she stands for family religion and “family[’s] … ground is singular consciousness” (Ibid., 275) while Creon personifies the collective as the head of the state.

178  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy Like classical tragic drama, Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy show the interconnections of the oppositions emerging from the division of the ethical essence, especially considering the secularisation of the human and divine opposition through the one of the individual and the collective operated during the 20th century as illustrated in ­Albert Camus’ definition of the genre: “[t]ragedy occurs when man … enters into conflict with the divine order, personified by a god or incarnated in ­society” (Camus, 302). However, while the two antagonistic laws emerging from the split of the ethical essence are equally valid, which enables their eventual reconciliation in Hegel’s theorisation of tragedy, they are not in Carr’s drama. This statement might seem startling when considering the demonisation that women undergo through the representation of gender in Greek tragedy. Yet, the transformation of women into monsters is enabled by the failures of men to assume the roles associated with manhood (Blondell et alii, 82). Carr’s disruption of the tragic equilibrium finds its roots in the opposition of the individual and the collective developed by Hegel through his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. In his mind, the collective indeed possesses a “negative aspect” since it “can only sustain itself by suppressing th[e] spirit of individuality” (Hegel 2018, 276). This specific dimension echoes the political purpose of one of the two founding emotions of catharsis, the main purpose of classical tragedy: Fear as it stands at the core of discriminatory and exclusionary communities as observed by Sara Ahmed (Ahmed, 64). Yet, Hegel, unlike Carr, has no interest in the political role played by tragedy in the 5th century B.C.E. Athenian democracy, and he thus focuses exclusively on the dramatisation of the collective in tragic plays. In the context of a tragedy like Sophocles’ Antigone, the collective personified by Creon is as wrong as the spirit of individuality embodied by Antigone since both act on a single law rather than the ethical essence. The tragic conflict presents, nonetheless, an opportunity for growth, which occurs through reconciliation: As Creon acknowledges his mistreatment of Antigone’s claim, he operates a transformation of the collective to accept that its “liveliness” lies in “the singular individual” whose “individuality… collapse[s] into one universal polity” (Hegel 2018, 276–277). Such an outcome might have been deemed the epitome of the re-establishment of justice by Hegel alongside the tragedians who created and dramatised tragedies during the 5th century B.C.E. Yet, this input has to be considered in relation to their social position as men who benefited from the system’s intrinsically sexist, racist, and classist ruling not only over Athenian democracy during the classical period but also over modern (and contemporary) societies in the West. In regard to gender, the conception of universality has been pervaded by patriarchal ideology, which is perfectly demonstrated through the development of a vision of “humanity” as

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  179 primarily “male” (Beauvoir, 15). In this respect, although a new universal form of collective acknowledging the importance of the individual emerges from the tragic conflict, it remains based on an ideology discriminatory and exclusionary at its very root, which the reconciliation of Sophocles’ Antigone actually highlights. As an embodiment of the figure of “woman,” the titular character indeed does not represent the experience of “real women” but wears the mask of patriarchy (Case, 7). Her action is indeed entrenched in the patriarchal values of the oikos that should be honoured by the patriarchal polis. Carr, on the other hand, is a woman who has gone through first-hand experiences of the sexist oppression of patriarchy that fuels the collective in Ireland. Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek drama rely on the Hegelian opposition between the individual and the collective. She creates plays that show the tragedies of being a woman in a patriarchal world, of being disregarded as a subject, and thus as an individual, by the collective, of being dismissed as an agent to be forced into a role by society. Characters like Portia in Portia Coughlan and Hester in By the Bog of Cats… fight back against that state of oppression through their “unwomanly” actions, but they fail “to ensure their rights,” which leads them to die by suicide (Hancock, 21). Far from demonstrating an “abdicat[ion]” ­(Wallace 2001, 435), these deadly deeds participate in the conflict waged by the characters against the collective to assert their individuality since death by suicide manifests a “[r]efus[al] to live a life of submission” (Kurdi, 126). The character of Phaedra in Phaedra Backwards voices that claim as she states that “[she]’ll go on [her] own steam” in her final lines before leaving for the realm of death with the Minotaur. In this regard, their deaths do not “indicate finality but movement” (Sihra 2003, 28). They might not implement a transformation of the collective, but they point to the changes that need to be enforced in order for such tragedies to cease to happen, hence the absence of reconciliation. In doing so, Carr places the spectators in a “confronting” position with the “darkness” of their “world” (Doyle, 57), which The Mai and Ariel epitomise as they show the impossibility for women to escape patriarchy. A character cannot single-handedly transform the collective because the opposing forces are deeply imbalanced as society is actually able to restrict the potentiality of action of an individual. From this observation, another philosophical inquiry emerges from ­tragedy: The question of freedom. The Tragedy of Freedom Freedom has been analysed as the main focus of tragedy by another 19thcentury German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Although his work was conceived prior to Hegel’s, it offers a frame of study more

180  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy adequate to the modern and contemporary approaches to tragedy, especially as illustrated in Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of classical drama. Human freedom is indeed a subsidiary question in Greek tragedy as “the human action is not, of itself, strong enough to do without the power of the gods, not autonomous enough to be fully conceived without them” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 44). Therefore, “the gods often intervene in human lives” as dramatised in tragic plays to “inspire and define” human characters (Blondell et alii, 16–17). Yet, the modern and contemporary practice of tragedy has approached the genre from a more secular lens, which Carr mentions in Phaedra Backwards as the titular character jokes about as she proclaims that “A few thousand years ago we could blame Aphrodite” but “Now [she] ha[s] to take the blame for everything [her]self” (Carr 2015, 88–89). This transformation has entailed a paradigmatic transformation of the genre.1 Greek tragedy centres on the concept of justice as it “depicts … one dikè in conflict with another” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 26), which Hegel captures in his theorisation of the tragic mechanisms. Modern and contemporary tragedies, however, give precedence to the struggle between the tragic hero(es) and their fate. This pattern articulates Carr’s tragedies as they show the woes endured by women, whether they rebel against or comply with gender expectations of patriarchy. Yet, such a pattern needs to be traced back to Schelling’s vision of tragedy according to which a “mortal” is “destined to be a criminal” and “fight[s] against this fate” but nevertheless ends up being “punished for the crime,” even though that crime “was a work of fate” (Schelling, 288). This conceptualisation seems to stem completely from the course of action dramatised in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as the play discusses the multiple deeds performed by the characters, especially the titular hero, to prevent the patricide and the incestuous marriage of the prophecy to occur. Yet, Schelling’s reflection on the imbalance of forces at play in the struggle between the tragic hero and fate enables a broader scope of application. He indeed observes that “in the strife of human freedom with the power of the objective world, … the mortal necessarily succumbs” because “the power” of fate “is superior” (Ibid.). In Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy, the death of the women characters demonstrates precisely that imbalance of power: They are mere humans crushed by the patriarchal system structuring Ireland, and more generally Western societies. Furthermore, the deaths of Carr’s women demonstrate a similar significance that Schelling reads in the action of dying Greek tragedy. According to him, the death of the tragic hero displays a complex and seemingly contradictory meaning since it is simultaneously a “punish[ment]” and an “honour” because it stands as a “recognition of human freedom” (Ibid.). Carr’s women characters are pushed towards death because they do not fit the roles that have been forced upon them but it also reveals the disruptive

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  181 power of their “unwomanly” actions, and thus the threat to patriarchy that they represent if such behaviours were to spread. The term “honour” does not, however, describe accurately the representation of death in Carr’s drama. The tragic story of Oedipus, which Schelling uses as the blueprint for his theorisation of tragedy, dramatises death exactly as a punishment and an honour as the character dies “by a miracle” (“θαυμαστός”) for his wrongdoings (Sophocles 1998, 584–585). Yet, this intricate dimension only emerges because death does not constitute the end but enables reconciliation in Greek tragedy, even though Schelling does not mention that concept, thus contrasting with Carr’s theatre. Yet, death in her adaptations and appropriations of classical drama still encompasses a sense of recognition for the struggle that the women characters have put against patriarchy. This dimension comes across in On Raftery’s Hill, which is the sole transposition of a Greek tragedy not showing or even mentioning the death of any of the main characters. Commenting on that unusual outcome for one of her plays, Carr stated that none of the characters “earned their death in” On Raftery’s Hill because “[i]f they had, [she] would have released them” (Marina Carr in conversation with Melissa Sihra, 60). Her statement needs to be correlated to the centrality of the human struggle against fate in tragedy. Although the first act of On Raftery’s Hill shows Sorrel’s defiance towards fate as she opposes the patriarchal figure of Red, the second one demonstrates her abdication. In addition to her decision to stay with her family instead of marrying Dara, Sorrel embraces the illegal and oppressive mode of living of her family as she proclaims in the final scene of the play: “We’re a band a gorillas swingin from the trees” (Carr 2009, 58). Unlike the women characters of Carr’s other transpositions, Sorrel engages only temporarily in a fight against patriarchy. As she has not “earned” her death, she thus cannot pretend to be “honoured,” or more exactly “released,” through the action of dying. Carr gives release to most of her characters through death, but she does not provide the same releasing opportunity to the audience. Commenting on the non-linear structure of the plot of Portia Coughlan, Maria Doyle observes that the exposure of the eponymous character’s dead body in the middle of the play prevents the accomplishment of the catharsis because it denies the possibility of “explanations and intellectual argument” to understand that death (Doyle, 49). Such a demonstration can easily be applied to The Mai considering the similarities between the two plays regarding the non-chronological unravelling of the story, and it can also be extended to most of Carr’s work. As the dramatic worlds remain unchanged following the women characters’ deaths, they are pointless and senseless for the audience as the spectators “cannot derive any pleasure from the downfall of these women” (Ibid.). This transformation of tragedy is highly political as Carr brings on stage situations of oppression still experienced by women

182  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy in the contemporary period. She does so either quite literally like in her appropriations of Greek tragedies which tackle issues such as divorce and body autonomy in Ireland or more symbolically like in her adaptations in which the subversion of the canonical courses of action underlines the acts of silencing and demonising women throughout Western history. Yet, as Carr removes catharsis from her practice of tragedy, one might wonder if her plays can still be considered to be tragedies. Catharsis is the main purpose of tragedy as epitomised in Aristotle’s definition of the genre: Tragedy … is mimesis of an action which is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotion. (ἔστιν … τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾿ ἀπαγγελίας, δι᾿ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν) (Aristotle, 46–47) Yet, several elements laid out in that definition have been subverted through the history of literature and theatre. In terms of language first, while the Aristotelian conception of tragedy requires the use of verse solely, the Elizabethan practice of the genre interweaves prose as illustrated in William Shakespeare’s plays, and it is currently quite unusual for a contemporary play to include verses. In terms of action then, while the classical vision of tragedy focuses on extraordinary events happening to superior people, 19th-century realistic theatre, which draws inspiration from the structure of Greek tragedy, deals with everyday issues faced by middle-class families as typified in Henrik Ibsen’s plays. These transformations of tragedy demonstrate that the definition of a genre sets a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss, 24), which changes over time as innovative work disrupts the traditional rules to include other ones. As observed by Tzvetan Todorov, “[t]he fact that a work ‘disobeys’ its genre does not mean that the genre does not exist” since “the transgression requires a law – precisely the one that is to be violated,” which “becomes v­ isible – comes into existence – owing only to its transgression” (Todorov, 14). The extensive scholarship focusing on and debating the significance of the bleak endings of Carr’s plays proves him right and reveals the unsettlement of the “horizon of expectation” of the spectators and critics by the absence of reconciliation and catharsis in her theatre. A new form of tragedy arises from Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of classical drama. This tragedy refuses to reassure its audience. The stories

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  183 it dramatises might be fictional, and even mythological, but they show issues that are current, and need to be addressed. While the previous evolutions of tragedy concerned stylistics and storytelling, Carr re-conceives the very purpose of the genre. Unlike her predecessors, who were men, she is a woman and her playwriting bears witness to the past and present oppressions endured by women, which contemporary Western democracies have to face and acknowledge for changes to be implemented, for a better world to emerge, for human tragedy to finally reach reconciliation. In a way, Carr places the audience in a similar position as Clytemnestra in Girl on an Altar. The character is deeply angry at her husband for the murder of their daughter to the point that her “ghost child … comes to torture” her, “howl[ing] out the injustice” (Carr 2022, 31). Yet, Clytemnestra takes action only after having witnessed and suffered a variety of instances of abuse from Agamemnon. Like Clytemnestra, the audience is aware of the tragedies that have risen from the systematic oppression of women in Irish, and more generally Western, societies. In Ireland, for instance, this has been epitomised through the “punitive and carceral … system” of institutions like the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother running from the 1920s to the end of the 1990s (Haughton et alii, 5) and dedicated to concealing unmarried pregnant women and making them “atone” for their “sins” with free labour. These institutions emanated from “ideologies” that were “neither uniquely Irish nor Catholic” as facilities with a similar purpose of “rehabilitating destitute women” were founded during the 18th century in the U.S., and the U.K. and its colonies (Ibid., 2). Although the Irish state launched official investigations over that matter at the turn of the 21st century with the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (2000–2009), the Inquiry into State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries (2011–2013), and the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2015–2021) (Ibid., 3), the topic of pregnancy outside wedlock was brought on stage before that period with plays like An Triail by Máiréad Ní Ghráda (1964). Similarly, the abuses conducted in institutions like the Mother and Baby Homes and the Magdalene Laundries were publicly uncovered by theatremakers before the official publications of the reports through the productions of Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed (1992) and ANU’s Laundry (2011), for instance. As expressed by Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe, and Emilie Pine, “this history” does not stem from “exceptional cases” but translates “expressions of social attitudes that viewed vulnerable members of the population as morally suspect, a ‘problem’ which the state, church, and citizenry responded to through mass institutionalisation” (Ibid., 2). Carr does not include these institutions per se in her plays but the dramatised homes stand as jails restricting women’s agency and subjectivity, thus demonstrating the structural ­ideology of the Irish state regarding gender.

184  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy Unlike the women protagonists from Carr’s other plays, Sorrel aside, Clytemnestra does not die in Girl on an Altar. Carr might pursue this story in the future as she continued the narrative initiated in Hecuba in Girl on an Altar. Currently, however, the denouement of Girl on an Altar puts an end to the diptych which contrasts significantly with the denouements of the adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy conceived by Carr up until then. The play ends abruptly with Clytemnestra’s action of taking down the force of oppression intersecting racism, classism, and sexism personified by Agamemnon in Hecuba and Girl on an Alar. Carr’s decision to not show Clytemnestra getting into power cannot be connected to the audience’s knowledge of the source material which is Aeschylus’ Oresteia. It rather stems from the political meaning of the last two plays of the classical trilogy as The Libation Bearers shows the disaster of a woman exerting political power and The Eumenides celebrates the re-institution of patriarchy. Girl on an Altar ends with a feeling of uncertainty, which is encapsulated in the fate of Cassandra. The final line of the character, which also concludes Girl on an Altar, reads, “And then, as foretold, she [Clytemnestra] comes for me” (Carr 2022, 61), thus implying the death of Cassandra as the play seems to catch up with the trilogy of Aeschylus. Yet, the action does not explicitly confirm that the classical course of events is actually going to occur. Several elements included by Carr in the adaptation suggest that it might not. Clytemnestra indeed “can’t fault” Cassandra for the deterioration of her marital and political life (Ibid., 33). Clytemnestra even “send[s] the midwives to examine” Cassandra (Ibid.), indicating a form of solidarity, which the similarities of their social fates enhance. The uncertainty of Cassandra’s fate as Clytemnestra not only survives but defeats patriarchy marks the opening of a new and blank page in the (hi)story that needs to be written. Girl on an Altar has a special position in Carr’s theatre as the play seems to settle into as well as initiate a new phase of approaching classical materials. While her appropriations of Greek tragedies bring to the forefront the reality of the patriarchal oppression of women concealed in the privacy of the home, the rewriting of the founding myths of Western civilisation in her adaptations suggests that patriarchy can be overcome and undone. In addition, the adaptations, especially if Hecuba is considered part of a diptych with Girl on an Altar, touch on the possibility of reconciliation as the existence of a world accommodating women’s subjectivity and agency is stressed. Yet, while Phaedra needs to die to reach this world, Clytemnestra is placed in a position that enables her to create it while alive. Carr alludes to the potentiality of the emergence of a postpatriarchal world through Clytemnestra’s dramatic arc. When considered as a whole, Carr’s appropriations and adaptations of Greek tragedy produce a narrative that not only exposes the audience to the tragedies of

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  185 patriarchy but manifests the possibility of changing that system to create a post-patriarchal world, which the last transposition demonstrates. Girl on an Altar does not invite the audience to imitate literally the action of Clytemnestra but to draw inspiration from her experience: After having witnessed so many instances of oppression, the time has come to take action against such a system for humanity to reach reconciliation. This socio-political reflection that Carr elaborates on in her theatre is sustained by the philosophical inquiry that structures the genre of tragedy. Justice cannot be achieved unless freedom is guaranteed to all individuals regardless of their gender, class, race, or ethnicity. Yet, the actual purpose of such a transformation of the world leans towards another philosophical purpose: Happiness. The Tragedy of Happiness The bleakness associated with both Carr’s drama and Greek tragedy seems to sidetrack the philosophical inquiry offered about happiness in these plays. Philosophers have indeed disregarded the concept in their analyses of tragedy to focus on the issues of justice and human freedom. Yet, happiness is central to the structure of tragedy since Aristotle describes the tragic plot as dramatising “a change … from prosperity to adversity” (“μεταβάλλειν … ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν”) (Aristotle, 70–71). And such is the moral lesson that the audience is expected to take away from one of the most canonical Greek tragedies, Oedipus Tyrannus, as the chorus concludes the play by claiming in a direct address to the audience: “one should wait to see the final day and should call none among mortals fortunate, till he has crossed the bourne of life without suffering grief” (“θνητὸν ὄντ᾿ ἐκείνην τὴν τελευταίαν ἔδει / ἡμέραν ἐπισκοποῦντα μηδέν᾿ ὀλβίζειν, πρὶν ἂν / τέρμα τοῦ βίου περάσῃ μηδὲν ἀλγεινὸν παθών”) (Sophocles 1997, 482–483). Similarly, happiness stands at the backbone of Carr’s adaptations and ­appropriation of classical drama. The Midlands cycle defuses the myth of the domestic bliss endorsed by the Irish state so women would comply with the gender expectation restricting their role to homemakers confined to the home. Carr exposes the pretence of this “ideal” by showing on stage the “living death” experienced by the women characters because of the “lack of fulfilment” in their lives, “which is the greatest loss” according to Melissa Sihra (Sihra 2018, 11). The idea of “loss” echoes the structural movement of the fall from which tragedy stems. Yet, while Greek tragedy usually dramatises the fall completely, the situation is quite different in Carr’s adaptations and appropriations because of the feminist lens she uses. As patriarchy relies on an intrinsic imbalance of gender which entails the commodification of women to ensure the supremacy of men, the mere fact of being a woman

186  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy encompasses a fall from humanity manifested through an inherent loss of agency and subjectivity. In this regard, the fall of the women protagonists has been initiated before the beginning of the plays as revealed through the unhappiness they feel with their situation and the struggle they undertake in an attempt to change their lives. Carr gives only a glimpse to the audience of that fall because it is inevitable for women living under patriarchy. This sense of inevitability is not a metaphysical demonstration of fate but rather stems from the social destiny designed for women by patriarchal societies like the Republic of Ireland, which has defined in its 1937 Constitution that the “life” of “woman” is “within the home” (1937 Irish Constitution). Although the Midlands plays take place in the present, the past is constantly conjured in an attempt to understand the current situation, which the form of The Mai as a memory play epitomises. Yet, the past is not confined to the individual (hi)stories of the characters. Through the legends mentioned by the characters and the myths underlying the plots, Carr inquires about the origins of the fall and loss of women but the stories whether Irish or Greek remain entrenched in sexist oppression. Patriarchy appears timeless, inherent to the human species, especially as stressed in On Raftery’s Hill since the characters justify the cycle of abuse they endure and submit one another to as a re-enactment of behaviours that existed “before laws was made” (Carr 2009, 58). Such a conclusion is not, however, the one reached by Carr and demonstrates an abdication from the struggle of changing the world, which contributes to the idea that the characters from that specific play did not deserve the release of dying. Carr, then, goes further back in time through her adaptations of classical drama, thus dealing with the very material from which the “archetypes of females … to be feared” first emerged alongside “the societal need to control and marginalise them” which still permeates the “western consciousness” (Carr in Leavy). The myth of the Minotaur and its slaying by Theseus, which is intrinsically connected to the tragedy experienced by Phaedra in Phaedra Backwards, posits a first point of origins to the fall and loss experienced by women. This event indeed marks “the birth of Western civilisation with the annihilation of barbarism” (Sihra 2018, 263) but, as pointed out by Phaedra, the Minotaur, Theseus, and herself, “[they]’re animals” (Carr 2015, 123), all of them, all of us. Yet, Theseus introduced the violence that has sustained patriarchy since then by taking the “life” of “[an]other specimen” of “the human race” (Ibid., 124), which initiated an ideology differentiating the individuals and their rights to exist based on their gender and race addressed through the symbolic spectrum of “humanimal[ity]” (Torrance, 242). But while Phaedra Backwards approaches the origins of patriarchy from the lens of the individual, Hecuba does the same but at the scale of civilisation.

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  187 Carr conceives the contemporary Western democracies in connection to the fall of Troy. According to her, “we are actually playing out the legacy of Troy, we’re what’s left because Troy’s in rubble” (Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh). This moment coincides with the origins of patriarchy as “something beautiful was buried in Troy, something that all of us let go willingly or unwillingly in some way we’re all responsible for that” because “there was something in civilisation that ended there, that we haven’t picked up yet” in her opinion (Ibid.). From the destruction of Troy emerges “a harsher world that will become Greece, that has become us, that has become the future” (Ibid.). As an “authorial narrator” (Wallace 2019, 522), Cassandra voices Carr’s insight as the character proclaims in the final line of Hecuba: “And the wind came too and we sailed with it to a new and harsher world” (Carr 2015, 260). That sentence directly follows the disclosure of Hecuba’s death, which is announced through the same lexical and grammatical structure: “And it [Hecuba’s death] came, grudgingly, but finally it came” (Ibid.). The similarities between the two sentences draw a causal link between the two events: A “harsher world” rises because of the death of the Trojan queen. Little information is disclosed regarding the political system of Troy before its destruction but Hecuba reveals that “it’s permitted … for all Trojan women” to entertain relationships with several men (Ibid., 253). This suggests a level of gender equality unknown in Greece as Agamemnon says that he “ha[s] many wives” but does not consider that his “queen,” who “has powerful allies” (Ibid., 252–253), might have extramarital relationships of her own. This topic is further explored in Girl on an Altar as Agamemnon, who openly cheats on his wife, considers that Clytemnestra’s affair with Aegisthus “was a stupid move … not worthy of” her because a “queen should be untouchable, above reproof” (Carr 2022, 29). Carr dramatises the emergence of patriarchy in human history as an act of utter violence in her adaptations, which Girl on an Altar pursues since Agamemnon confirms his position as the rightful king after having shown “what the king of kings is made of” (Ibid., 16) and killed his daughter. Yet, the “claustrophobic” dimension of tragedy (Gould, 411) – that Carr also translates in her appropriations through the entrapment of women within the home – might appear as an obstacle to the depiction of patriarchy as a systematic structure of oppression because the genre relies on a single action propelling the fall of the tragic hero, which is manifested through the loss of women’s agency and subjectivity in her plays. Tragedy is to be understood as a metaphorical reflection on the “real” world. This purpose, however, might not be grasped by the audience as illustrated through the reception of Carr’s Midlands cycle. Patrick Lonergan indeed notes on that matter that, even though “Carr’s work is political because it has always directly addressed Irish society, highlighting its flaws, demanding that it change”, the “audiences prefer to imagine that the worlds she creates on

188  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy stage are not real, that her concerns are not serious” (Lonergan, 131–132). The postmodern dimension of iGirl enables Carr to get free from the restriction imposed on her political stance by the focus on a single story of traditional tragedy. In iGirl, she writes the tragic (hi)story of humanity through a “collage” (Macintosh and McConnell, 17) of historical, legendary, mythological, and autobiographical events ranging from the prehistorical to the contemporary periods. In doing so, Carr presents a series of instances of violence engrained in the history of humanity. She stresses the systematicity of human violence, which cannot be overlooked by the audience as it stands as the unifying narrative that connects the snippets of the stories permeating “western consciousness” and that grounds the tragedy. iGirl starts with the question “What is happiness?” (Carr 2021, 3) but the topic is never explicitly approached again in the play. Following that opening question, the dramatic person speaking in the first poem continues, saying: They haven’t cut my tongue yet Or beheaded me I won’t be flogged this morning Hopefully

(Ibid.)

These lines foreshadow the tragic fates of Antigone and Jeanne d’Arc who are the narrators of the two following poems. These lines thus equate happiness with mere survival, which subsequently gives a central position to the topic of violence in the play. This violence is gender-based as epitomised by the higher number of women narrators – Antigone, Jeanne d’Arc, Persephone, Carr herself – than men – Oedipus – and by the performer, Olwen Fouéré, embodying them on stage. Yet, iGirl “is not a song about breasts / Or misogyny” (Ibid.). The broader scope of violence addressed in the play alludes to the multiple oppressive ideologies that feed patriarchy in contemporary Western societies. Far from being solely entrenched in sexism, patriarchy also encompasses “imperialis[m], white supremacis[m], [and] capitalis[m],” as observed by bell hooks (hooks, xiv). Plays like By the Bog of Cats…, Hecuba and Girl on an Altar rely on the “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1243) and classism to build the tragedies not only of the protagonists but of all the women characters. iGirl, however, pursues a more philosophical conception of the intersecting forces fuelling patriarchy first introduced in Phaedra Backwards. Through the story of the murder of the Minotaur by Theseus, Carr indeed implies that any individual or group of people manifesting features deemed as a form of otherness by the dominant social body – white cisgender heterosexual men in contemporary Western societies – is to be oppressed and suppressed. The Minotaur might be a

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  189 “specimen” different from T ­ heseus but he still belongs to “the human race” (Carr 2015, 124). Yet, the diversity introduced to the human race by the Minotaur is enough to justify his dehumanisation and his murder in Theseus’ mind. The tragedy of the Neanderthals follows a similar pattern in iGirl. The first poem is delivered by a “Human,” who elaborates on the definition of that species: “It means / Last of the homini tribe,” and its evolutional – “Great fingers” in reference to the opposable thumbs – and technological – “Fond of fire and tools” – achievements before adding: “What we didn’t brag about / We destroyed the Neanderthals / The gentle mute Neanderthals” (Carr 2021, 4–5). The use of the personal pronoun “we” includes the spectators within the story and the reflection narrated by the speaking character, especially as the genre of epic implies that the poems are directly addressed to the audience. Carr presents the annihilation of the Neanderthals as the starting point of the human (hi)story of “carnage” and “destruction” (Ibid., 11). It demonstrates the terrible life philosophy that “Nothing exists / Except us” (Ibid., 7), which Carr uses to ridicule the high conception we have of our species: Sapiens – that means wise Ask the deer The dodo The Neanderthal How wise you are

(Ibid., 5)

Contrary to the Neanderthal and the dodo, the deer does not belong to an extinguished species. Yet, Carr includes it in this short enumeration to allude to the question of hunting, which poses a significant threat to biodiversity. The topic of climate change, which is the most pressing issue currently faced by humanity as it threatens the survival of our species if drastic changes are not implemented in the way we live, thus appears as the result of the human history of violence. Although the final poem forecasts the extinction of the “Human specimen,” “That vanished tribes” of which “Barely a trace … Survives” (Ibid., 83), Carr inserts a glimpse of hope in iGirl through the probability of our species descending not only from the Homo sapiens but also from the Neanderthal: Surely we Must’ve fallen In love With one Of them [the quiet Neanderthals.]

(Ibid., 49)

190  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy This would suggest that humanity is not doomed to reproduce the cycle of violence that has marked our history as exposed throughout the epic journey that is iGirl because “We must / Have / Neanderthal blood” and thus an incline to gentleness that might express itself. “This gives [the narrator] hope” because “In our blood / The Neanderthal / … / Sleep[s] through / Our Carnage” but he might “awake” (Ibid., 50). Yet, for this awakening to occur, we have to become “a race / That / Deserves him / And his / Kind” (Ibid.). Carr thus calls to walk out of the path of tragedy that humanity has set itself on by embracing violence as it will lead to the extinction of our species. Embracing the diversity of humanity and the world is the only way to prevent this tragedy from happening, in order to survive, and to reach happiness. Yet, one might wonder if achieving a world of gentleness and inclusivity would not equate with the end of tragedy. Can the genre survive in a world not ruled by the “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy”? (hooks, xiv). The End of Tragedy? The publication of George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy announced the end of the genre more than half a century ago, in 1961, on the ground that “[t]here is nothing democratic in the vision of tragedy” (Steiner, 241). Although this statement was made to defend a conservative conception of the genre entrenched in classism as only royal and heroic characters were deemed worthy subjects and to exclude modern and contemporary plays dealing with ordinary issues from the tragic realm, it still tackles an essential feature of tragedy, which is its relation to hegemonic powers. Since its inception during the 6th century B.C.E., tragedy has been a highly political genre in theatre. First used in Athens to “provide a poetic justification” to the structures of inequalities “subordinat[ing] … [the] women, foreigners, and slaves” sustaining democracy during the 5th century B.C.E. (Foley, 12), the modern and contemporary practice of the genre shows a shift in its political use by the playwrights to challenge the systems of marginalisation and exclusion ruling over Western societies, which Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy epitomise. The cultural development of the second wave of feminism led to an in-depth examination of gender representation in the founding myths of the Western world by scholars and artists. Greek tragedy has been since then an object of particular attention because it stands “as an emblem of shared ‘origin’ for European peoples” (Laera, 10). Yet, its dramatisation of gender is quite paradoxical: While Athenian democracy professed the invisibility of women as an ideal, Greek tragedy seems to posit them at the centre of attention. Among the corpus of surviving tragic plays that are not fragmentary, only one – Sophocles’ Philoctetes – does not involve any

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  191 female character, and eighteen out of thirty-three are titled after a woman character2 or a group of women.3 Such an important representation is at the root of Carr’s great appeal to classical drama since she conceives “the three Athenian tragedians” to be “the first feminists” because they created women who “can argue like men” (Carr in Terrazas Gallego, 193). Yet, the women in Greek tragedy are not really women: They are all played by male actors as women were prohibited from the stage. These characters thus do not represent women but rather men’s conception of women. They are the product of men’s creation for men’s consumption. They are embodiments of “woman,” “suppressing the experiences, stories, feelings and fantasies of actual women” to dramatise “the patriarchal values attached to the gender” (Case, 7) through a binary representation of womanhood, which opposes the “good” female characters willing to die for the sake of patriarchy to the “bad” ones who rebel against male power (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 14). Carr is acutely aware of the “normative function” of gender representation (Butler, 3) in Greek tragedy as she observes that Greek tragedies “were salutary lessons in how not to be a woman” because they dramatise the “belie[f] that if women were not controlled they would destroy the world” (Carr in Sihra 2018, 10). Her appropriations and adaptations thus offer a deconstruction – in the Derridean sense of the term – of the classical “two models of womanhood” (Sorkin Rabinowitz, 14). Women do not turn into monsters because of a lack of control but because of the controlling oppression over their lives and stories by men enabled by patriarchy. As for the sacrifices of young girls, once celebrated, they become gruesome spectacles of the commodification of women by men sustaining patriarchy. Carr bringing women rather than “woman” on stage in her transpositions of Greek tragedy stems from the feminist concept of the “resisting reader” (Hall, 56), which puts emphasis on patriarchal ideology fuelling gender representation not only in classical but also in Irish theatre. Indeed, while Carr exposes the patriarchal ideology engrained in the founding myth of the Western identity in her adaptations, she uses the classical myth to construct counter-narratives to the metanarratives about gender institutionalised in Ireland in her appropriations. In both cases, however, Carr’s rewriting of the tragic myths settles in trends of interpretation initiated by modern and contemporary playwrights, and more generally artists. In this regard, the concept of “resisting reader” manifests a cultural shift in the approach to myths from justifying to questioning and challenging the hegemonic structures of power. This has enabled the feminist as well as decolonial re-visions of the mythological stories dramatised in Greek tragedy in modern and contemporary theatre. Yet, Carr takes that process a step further because, through her rewriting of the classical myths, she offers a reflection on the ideological conditions that have led to their creations “to ensure that we can’t see [them] as we used to do” (Lonergan, 139).

192  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy This specificity that emerges from Carr’s adaptations and appropriations of Greek tragedy is intrinsically connected to her gender identity and its subsequent social consequences. As a woman, Carr belongs to a social group that has been historically oppressed by society, marginalised in dramatic representation, and suppressed from theatre authorship. Her theatre simultaneously bears witness to and breaks that history of silence imposed on women. Carr places the women characters of her plays in authorial narrator-like positions, enabling them to tell their truth and to carry the voices of women from the past. Such an approach demonstrates her practice of the feminist concepts of “re-vision” and “écriture féminine,” respectively, coined by Adrienne Rich and Hélène Cixous, which also impacts her construction of traditional dramatic forms. Mimesis is at the centre of Greek tragedy and realistic theatre that Carr uses in her transpositions of classical drama. As an imitation of the “real,” mimesis naturalises the structures of oppression ruling over societies, hence preventing the audience from reflecting upon and thus from taking action to change them. Inspired by the political purpose of epic theatre, Carr re-creates realistic theatre and Greek tragedy with the use of Brechtian devices and techniques. It starts with “pok[ing] holes” in the “ideological armour” (Dolan, 455) of dramatic realism before leading to the emergence of the new genre of epic tragedy that she reverses in iGirl to create a postmodern tragic epic. Carr’s “epicisation” of the two most highly regarded, conventional, and traditional dramas in the Western world aims to reveal the state of oppression endured by people because of the “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” in contemporary Western democracies as well as its origins. Although her theatre primarily focuses on gender and women, it also shows a concern with intersectionality, especially in relation to class, race, and ethnicity. In this regard, the strategies that Carr devises and implements to defuse the metanarratives about gender are relevant to the analysis of the deconstruction of the myths justifying and perpetuating any structure of social and cultural oppression, including race, ethnicity, class, sexualities, masculinities, and disabilities not only in her theatre but in every transformative approach to the canon in terms of content, form, and authorship. These transformations in the cultural landscape do not intend the “cancellation” – to borrow from the conservative vocabulary – of works from the past of which certain aspects have been acknowledged to be problematic. When talking about the source material of Hecuba, Carr states that “Euripides was writing his version of a myth” (Carr in Leavy) while hers “is a response to Euripides” (That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU). She does not attempt to substitute the canonical plays she transposes with the feminist-framed versions she offers as revealed by her rhetorical question: “what do you do with just one version?” (Carr in Leavy). Carr’s project is part of the “endless conversation among kinsmen

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  193 and kinswomen” that sustains “literature” (Carr 1998, 194) and which reflects the necessary discussion on the influence of the past on the present, especially regarding the mutation, and yet perpetuation, of the systems of oppression in contemporary Western societies. Democracy might coincide with the death of the tragedy. Yet, as democracies are currently ruled through the system of “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, xiv) in the Western world, they rely intrinsically on an imbalance of power, which prevents an equal and fair repartition of wealth, and thus access to justice, freedom, and happiness. This situation is an environment conducive to the development and flourishment of tragedy. And it will be as long as some groups of people are being othered on the basis of their gender, class, sexualities, race, ethnicity, and disabilities, hence being considered less equal than others, and thus less deserving of justice, freedom, and happiness. The transpositions of the canon transform the founding stories of the Western democracies to include the diversity composing contemporary societies. They create a cultural past inclusive and common to all acknowledging the past and present systems of oppression and pushing forward their dismantlement for an actual democracy to emerge. In the meantime, tragedy remains a potent device for theatre to challenge the still ongoing imbalance of power in contemporary Western societies, which Carr’s future project of transposition illustrates. In the conclusion of Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown, Sihra revealed that the Abbey Theatre had commissioned “a new version of Sophocles’ Oedipus King” to Carr (Sihra 2018, 280). Initially scheduled to be performed at the end of 2020, the production has been postponed on several occasions not only because of the pandemic of COVID-19 but also because of the great scale of the project, which is a trilogy based on Sophocles’ whole Theban cycle, which includes Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone in addition to Oedipus Tyrannus (The Boy. Writer and Director Interview). Little information is currently known about that transposition but Carr’s description of the trilogy as “very, very loosely based on the three Theban plays” is reminiscent of the conception of Ariel as “based loosely on The Oresteia” (Carr in Kilroy), which would suggest an appropriation rather than an adaptation of the source material. Yet, this does not necessarily mean a return to the translocation of classical drama in the contemporary setting of the Midlands because, while she was working on Ariel, Carr declared: “It is my goodbye to the Midlands, I think” (Marina Carr in conversation with Melissa Sihra, 55). If it turns out to be, however, a return to the Midlands, the project will doubtlessly carry the influence of epic tragedy developed through her adaptations, and more specifically in the diptych formed by Hecuba and Girl on an Altar, as the scale of a trilogy manifests the characteristic magnitude of

194  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy epic. The title of the project, The Boy, seems to indicate a new frame of rewriting Greek tragedy as it will be the first transposition entitled after a male character, thus implying a focus on his dramatic arc, which the importance of the figure of Oedipus in iGirl might confirm. The creation of this tragic epic was prompted by the death of Carr’s father at the end of 2019 and thus overlapped for a moment with her work on The Boy. The emphasis put on the myth of the Labdacides in iGirl might provide some clues regarding Carr’s approach to Sophocles’ Theban cycle in The Boy. Despite the importance of Oedipus, his experience is framed through the perspective of women in several poems, thus putting an unprecedented emphasis on Jocasta and giving a greater role to Antigone, which is no more restricted in terms of centrality to the action dramatised in Sophocles’ Antigone. If such a pattern structures The Boy, it could initiate a new phase in Carr’s transposition of classical drama, which could offer an in-depth analysis and deconstruction of the current form of masculinities inherited from the founding myths of Western civilisation through the lens of feminism. Nonetheless, The Boy will probably illustrate once again, and perhaps even extend, the idea that Carr “do[es] not adhere to a single definition … [of] tragic drama” but “incorporates fragments of different formulations and (mis)understandings of tragedy and the tragic, assembled from various sources … simultaneously drawing upon retrospective elements as well as highly contemporary ones” (Wallace 2006, 254) in order to “make up / The stories we / Need to” (Carr 2021, 20) prompt changes. Notes 1 This theory is the backbone of my doctoral thesis which was published in 2022 under the title Avatars Contemporains du tragique grec sur les scènes françaises et irlandaises (“Contemporary Variations upon Greek Tragedy on the French and Irish Stages”). 2 Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra; Euripides’ Alcestis, Medea, Andromache, Hecuba, Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Helen, and Iphigenia at Aulis. 3 Aeschylus’ The Suppliants, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides; Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis; Euripides’ The Suppliants, The Trojan Women, The Phoenician Women, and The Bacchae.

Works Cited Primary Sources Carr, M. 2009. Plays Two. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2015. Plays Three. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2021. iGirl. London: Faber. Carr, M. 2022. Girl on an Altar. London: Faber.

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  195 Sophocles. 1997. Oedipus Tyrannus. In Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 323–483. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press. Sophocles. 1998. Oedipus at Colonus. In Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. H. Lloyd-Jones, 409–599. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Secondary Sources 1937 Irish Constitution. Irish Statute Book. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/ cons/en/html. Ahmed, S. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aristotle. 1999. Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. Beauvoir (de), S. 1956. The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Blondell, R., M.-K. Gamel, N. Sorkin Rabinowitz, and B. Vivante. 2002. Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides. New York: Routledge. Brecht, B. 1974. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. J. Willett. London: Eyre Methuen. Butler, J. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Camus, A. 1970. On the Future of Tragedy. In Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. and trans. E. Conroy Kennedy, 295–310. New York: Vintage Books. Carr, M. 1998. Dealing with the Dead. Irish University Review. 28.1: 190–196. Case, S.-E. 1988. Feminism and Theatre. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Crenshaw, K. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1: 1239–1267. Dolan, J. 2008. Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein. Theatre Journal. 60.3: 433–457. Doyle, M. 2006. Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr’s The Mai and Portia Coughlan. Modern Drama. 49.1: 41–59. Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gould, J. 2001. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, E. 2004. Towards a Theory of Performance Reception. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. 12.1: 51–89. Hancock, B. R. 2005. “That House of Proud Mad Women!”: Diseased Legacy and Mythmaking in Marina Carr’s “The Mai”. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 31.2: 19–26. Harris, C. 2003. Rising out of the Miasmal Mists: Marina Carr’s Ireland. In The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”, ed. C. Leeney and A. McMullan, 216–232. Dublin: Carysfort Press.

196  Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy Haughton, M., M. McAuliffe, and E. Pine. 2021. Introduction: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State. In Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State, ed. M. Haughton, M. McAuliffe, and E. Pine, 1–26. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1895. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 2, ed. and trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. T. M. Knox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2018, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, ed. and trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. hooks, b. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press. Jauss, H. R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti. Brighton: Harvester Press. Kilroy, I. 2002. Greek Tragedy, Midlands-Style; In Her New Play, Ariel, Marina Carr Returns Again to Drama’s Greek Roots, By Way of the Midlands Dialect and Modern Irish Public Life. Irish Times, September 20. https://ucd.idm.oclc.org/ login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 309488671?accountid=14507. Kurdi, M. 2018. “Old Women Interfere with My Sense of Myself”: Attitudes to Female Age and Ageing in the Midlands Trilogy and Marble by Marina Carr. Nordic Irish Studies. 17.1: 113–130. Laera, M. 2013. Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. London: Peter Lang. Leavy, A. 2016. Marina Carr Interview: “There is an Affinity between the Russian Soul and the Irish Soul”. Irish Times, December 6. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/marina-carr-interview-there-is-an-affinity-between-the-russiansoul-and-the-irish-soul-1.2893945. Lonergan, P. 2019. Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950. London: Bloomsbury/ Methuen Drama. Macintosh, F. and J. McConnell. 2020. Performing Epic or Telling Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marina Carr in Conversation with Melissa Sihra. 2001. In Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practioners, ed. L. Chambers, 55–63. Dublin: Carysfort Press. McMullan, A. 1998. Marina Carr’s Unhomely Women. Irish Theatre Magazine. 1.1: 14–16. Playwright Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh. 2016. University of Oxford Podcasts. August 9. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/playwright-marinacarr-conversation-fiona-macintosh. Sayın, G. 2008. Quest for the Lost M(Other): Medea Reconstructed in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…. Journal of Arts and Sciences. 1.9: 75–86. Schelling, F. W. J. 2021. Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, trans. G. Anthony Bruno. In The Schelling Reader, ed. B. Berger and D. Whistler, ­288–291. London: Bloomsbury. Sihra, M. 2003. Renegotiating Landscapes of the Female: Voices, Topographies and Corporealities of Alterity in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan. Australasian Drama Studies. 43: 16–31.

Conclusion: A Threshold towards an Inclusive Tragedy  197 Sihra, M. 2007. The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr. In Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. M. Sihra, 201–218. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sihra, M. 2018. Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International Publishing. Sorkin Rabinowitz, N. 1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Steiner, G. 1980. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press. Terrazas Gallego, M. 2019. “Writing Is Essentially a Very, Very Innocent Thing”: In Conversation with Marina Carr. Estudios Irlandeses. 14.14: 190–197. That Trojan Queen. Marina Carr. TEDxDCU. 2017. YouTube. January 18. https:// youtu.be/pAKXPoJJHAs?si=NFXFJaXH0dTNDMsq. The Boy. Writer and Director Interview. 2020. YouTube. January 31. https://youtu. be/YOTLCDkE5Jw?si=M71szNfUwZnSRQnF. Todorov, T. 1990. Genres in Discourse, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Torrance, I. 2022. Rewriting Hippolytus: Hybridity, Posthumanism, and Social Politics in Marina Carr’s Phaedra Backwards. Arethusa. 55.3: 229–244. Vernant, J.-P. 1980. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd. Brighton: Harvester Press. Vernant, J.-P. and P. Vidal Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. P. Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Wallace, C. 2001. Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s “The Mai”, “Portia Coughlan” and “By the Bog of Cats…”. Irish University Review. 31.2: 431–449. Wallace, C. 2006. Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity & Citation in 1990s New Drama. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Wallace, C. 2019. Marina Carr’s Hecuba: Agency, Anger and Correcting Euripides. Irish Studies Review. 27.4: 512–527.

Index

Acquari, Marcus 7 Aeschylus 4, 6–7, 10, 15, 17, 18, 20, 31, 38, 44, 55–58, 64, 87–89, 95–97, 101–102, 104–105, 114, 119–122, 124, 137, 144, 161, 163, 184, 194; Agamemnon 5–7, 55–56, 87–88, 102, 119, 122, 161–163; The Eumenides 6, 38, 58, 102, 137, 144, 184, 194; The Libation Bearers 6, 10, 38, 55, 57, 87, 89, 95, 102, 114, 184, 194; Oresteia 5–6, 31, 55–58, 64, 87, 89, 96–97, 101–102, 104–105, 120–121, 137, 184, 193; The Persians 15, 18, 38; The Suppliants 18, 20, 38, 194 Ahmed, Sara 36, 45–46, 178 ANU 183 Arendt, Hannah 22, 24–25, 68 Aristophanes 21 Aristotle 13–14, 17, 19, 23–24, 36–37, 45, 100, 104, 127, 141–142, 144, 146–148, 151, 153, 155, 157–158, 161, 164–166, 168–170, 176–177, 182, 185 Arkins, Brian 30 Balfour, Charles 7 Banerjee, Sikata 34 Barthes, Roland 76 Bassnett, Susan 75 Beckett, Samuel 3, 8 Bennett, Mark 6 Boylan, Michael 9 Brady, Brian 9 Brecht, Bertolt 37, 142–143, 146, 148, 154–155, 157–158, 160–161, 176 Broni, Daon 8

Burke Brogan, Patricia 183 Butler, Judith 14, 67, 69 Camus, Albert 14, 148, 178 Carr, Marina (plays): Ariel 4–6, 8, 22, 55–60, 63–64, 97, 101–105, 132, 134–138, 143, 147, 150–152, 163, 175, 179, 193; The Boy 6, 194; By the Bog of Cats… 2–4, 8, 11, 22, 30, 34–35, 52–54, 97–101, 111, 121–122, 128–129, 131, 133, 143, 147–150, 152, 175–176, 179, 188; Girl on an Altar 2, 7–8, 12–13, 55, 57, 60, 62–63, 77, 79, 87–90, 105, 118, 120–125, 137, 153–154, 157, 161–165, 170, 175, 183–185, 187–188, 193; Hecuba 2, 7, 11, 13, 48–49, 60–63, 77, 81–82, 105, 118–122, 124–125, 137–138, 153–154, 157–161, 169–170, 175, 184, 186–188, 192–194; iGirl 8, 12–13, 34–35, 66, 69–70, 77, 89–92, 115–116, 118, 143, 154, 165–169, 174, 188–190, 192, 194; Low in the Dark 2, 113; The Mai 2, 9–10, 22, 37, 59, 82–83, 94–97, 101, 114–115, 118–119, 126–128, 143–147, 150, 152, 169, 175, 179, 181, 186; On Raftery’s Hill 9–11, 22, 60, 65, 96–97, 132–135, 143, 152–153, 175, 181, 186; Phaedra Backwards 2, 6, 11, 13, 23, 49–51, 69, 77, 82–87, 105, 124–126, 143, 153–157, 169, 175, 179–180, 186, 188; Portia Coughlan 9–11, 22, 37, 52, 66–69, 82–83, 92–94, 97, 101, 131–132, 143–147, 150, 152, 163, 169, 175, 179, 181

200 Index Charlesworth Kelly, Peter 9 Chekov, Anton 3 Chelton, Nick 3 Chollet, Mona 100 Cixous, Hélène 12, 112–113, 145, 192 Clare, David 35 Comyn, Annabelle 7, 137 Conway, Frank 5 Cook, Kandis 9 Cosgrove, Aedín 9 Craigie, Ingrid 5 Croiter, Jeff 6 Crotty, Derbhle 7, 9 Cullen, Siobhan 3 Cumann na mBan 28 Cunneen, Paddy 9 Davis, Angela 135 de Beauvoir, Simone 38, 43, 46, 86 de Markievisz, Constance 28 de Valera, Eamonn 27 Deane, Seamus 27 Dedebas, Eda 13 Deevey, Teresa 36 del Mar González Chacón, María 11, 93, 156 Denton, Daniel 8 Derrida, Jacques 44 Desai, Angel 6 Devlin, Bernadette 33 Diamond, Elin 167 Dolan, Jill 142 Dolar, Mladen 55 Doyle, Maria 134, 181 Duke, Will 7 Dyas, Grace 35 Dyas, Veronica 35 Eagleton, Terry 149, 169 Easterling, P. E. 20 Egan, Desmond 31 Engels, Friedrich 142 Euripides 3–8, 10–12, 15–18, 20, 26, 31, 33, 38, 44, 46, 48–58, 60–64, 66, 77–84, 86–88, 94, 97–102, 105, 114, 119–120, 125–126, 128–129, 132, 135–136, 144, 147–149, 159–161, 175, 177, 192, 194; Bacchae 26, 31, 38, 147–148, 194; Electra 10, 58, 114, 194; Hecuba 7, 12, 38, 46–47, 49, 60–61, 78,

80–82, 119, 144, 175; Helen 33, 78, 194; Hippolytus 6, 16, 31, 49, 51, 77, 82–84, 125–126, 138, 177; Iphigenia among the Taurians 136, 194; Iphigenia at Aulis 4–5, 7, 55–58, 60, 63, 65, 87–88, 97, 101–102, 105, 135–136, 161–163, 194; Medea 3–4, 8, 20, 54, 94, 97–100, 128–129, 149, 194; The Trojan Women 26, 29, 38, 46–47, 79–81, 119, 194 Fanon, Frantz 105 Flanagan, Pauline 3, 10 Fay, Catherine 8 Fearon, Ray 7 FELISPEAKS 36 Field Day 32 Findley, Jim 8 Fitzpatrick, Lisa 35, 135 Foley, Helene 14, 22, 132 Forbes, Michele 9 Foster, Verna A. 128 Fouéré, Olwen 3, 8–9, 167–168, 188 Franks, Andrew 7 Frawley, Monica 3 Freud, Sigmund 14, 90, 102–103 Friel, Brian 31–32, 114 Gallagher, Bronagh 9 Genette, Gérard 2, 105 Gibb, Sebastien Luc 7 Gilmour, Soutra 7 Giraudoux, Jean 105 Gizło, Dagmara 11, 54 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 71 Gonne, Maud 29 Gould, John 18 Gregg, Stacey 33 Gregory, Lady Augusta 29–30, 36, 38, 111, 113 Grillparzer, Franz 99 Haberle, Sean 6 Hall, Edith 5, 20, 76, 98, 102 Harris, Claudia 136 Harrison, Stephen 11 Harrison, Tony 81–82 Hastings, Máire 9 Hauck, Rachel 6 Haughton, Miriam 35, 183

Index  201 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 8 Heaney, Seamus 26, 33 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 14, 148, 174, 177–180 Heidegger, Martin 14 Hickey, Tom 3, 10 Hill, Shonagh 11 Homer 18, 47, 60, 64, 71, 78, 83, 105, 119, 157, 165, 168 Horace 25 hooks, bell 104, 188 Hynes, Garry 9–10 Ibsen, Henrik 144, 182 Inghinidhe na hEireann 28, 30 Jahnn, Hans Henny 99 Jauss, Hans Robert 111 Jordan, Eamonn 11, 54, 133 Joyce, James 168 Jung, Carl 14, 102 Kane, Sarah 87 Kelly, Clara 10 Kennedy, Carl 8 Kennelly, Brendan 31–32, 91, 94, 99, 101, 105 Kenward, Claire 11 Keogh, Des 9 Kilroy, Ian 150 Kinahan, Deirdre 33 Kinevane, Pat 3 Kingdom, Christopher 7 Kingsley, Edmund 7 Kurdi, Mária 35, 53–55 Lacan, Jacques 14, 151 Laera, Margherita 76 Lambert, Mark 5 Leahy, Ronan 4 Leeney, Cathy 11, 35, 37, 111, 169 Lenormand, Henri‑René 99 Lévi‑Strauss, Claude 67, 71, 75 Lilley, Valerie 10 Lonergan, Patrick 152, 187 Longford, Christine 31 Longford, Edward 31 Loraux, Nicole 23 Lowe, Louise 35 Lyotard, Jean‑François 105

MacDermottroe, Conor 3 MacGinley, P. T. 30 Macintosh, Fiona 11, 153, 157, 162, 169–170 MacNeice, Louis 31 Mae, Amy 7 Magdalene Laundries 30, 183 Mahon, Derek 31 Mann, Emily 6 Marx, Karl 142, 148 Mason, Patrick 3 Mathews, Aidan 31 Mayberry, Mariann 6 McAuliffe, Mary 183 McCafferty, Olwen 33 Mcallister, Amy 7 McCann, Aoibhéann 8 McConnell, Justine 11, 157, 170 McCusker, Stella 9–10 McDonagh, Fiona 35 McDonagh, Rosaleen 36 McDonald, Marianne 11 McErlean, Keith 10 McGovern, Barry 5 McGuinness, Frank 33, 55, 81, 84, 92 McLaughlin, Caitríona 8 McMullan, Anna 11 Memmi, Albert 105 Merriman, Victor 27 Millet, Kate 85 Milligan, Alice 30 Mitchell, Katie 87, 121 Mnouchkine, Ariane 87, 121 Monge, Julio 7 Morrison, Connall 5 Mother and Baby Homes 30, 183 Murphy, Fionnala 3 Murphy, Paula 93 Murphy, Tom 31 Murray, Gilbert 80 Murray, Mary 10 Murray, Rupert 5 Nakase, Justine 35 Newsome, Randal 6 Ní Neachtain, Bríd 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14, 159–160 Nigrini, Peter 6 O Súilleabháin, Mícheál 9 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 33

202 Index O’Brien, Edna 33, 88, 102 O’Casey, Sean 38 O’Clery, Joan 5 O’Donoghue, Emma 33 O’Dwyer, Marion 9 O’Hara, Joan 9 O’Neill, Eugene 8, 96, 102–103, 105 O’Sullivan, Kerry 3 O’Toole, Fintan 2 Omambala, Chu 7 Paisley, Ian 33 Parker, Joanna 8 Paulin, Tom 33 Pericles 21, 129 Phelan, Peggy 125 Pilbrow, Richard 10 Pine, Emilie 35, 183 Piper, Tom 7 Plato 83, 144 Plumwood, Val 65 Rackham, H. 23 Racine, Jean 51, 71, 84, 86 Rahill, Elske 5 Rea, Stephen 32 Rehm, Rush 16 Reid, Christina 33 Rich, Adrienne 12, 113, 136, 192 Roche, Anthony 114 Rocks, Seán 9 Roe, Owen 9 Roth Haberle, Stephanie 6 Royal Shakespeare Company 7 Sah, Nilay 7 Sanders, Julie 76–77 Saraceni, Luca 7 Sarrazac, Jean‑Pierre 168 Sartre, Jean‑Paul 80–81, 105 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 14, 179–181 Schopenhauer, Arthur 103–104 Seneca 50, 84, 86 Shakespeare, William 3, 8, 147, 162–164, 182 Shaw, Bernard 26–27 Sheehy‑Skeffington, Hanna 28 Sihra, Melissa 11, 29, 35, 68–69, 94, 97, 138, 151, 169, 185, 193

Silberman, Jake 6 Simmons, Jim 9 Smith, B. Sydney 31 Sophocles 9–11, 15–17, 20, 26, 31, 33, 38, 44, 58, 66–70, 77, 90–93, 114, 116–117, 121, 132–133, 151, 159, 166, 175, 177–180, 190, 193–194; Antigone 6, 9, 20, 26, 33, 66–67, 70, 90–93, 133, 138, 151, 166; Electra 10, 20, 33, 58, 114, 194; Oedipus at Colonus 6, 16, 26, 38, 90, 166, 193; Oedipus Tyrannus 6, 17, 26, 69, 90, 116, 133, 138, 159, 166, 177, 180, 185, 193; Philoctetes 20, 31, 33, 190 Sorkin Rabinowitz, Nancy 44, 55, 66, 71 Steiner, George 27, 148, 169, 190 Stewart, Philip 7 Strachan, Kathy 9 Supple, Tim 162–163 Synge, J. M. 26–27, 38 Tashkiran, Ayse 7 Teevan, Colin 88, 102 Thucydides 21, 129 Tierney, Michael 10 Tighe, Dylan 6 Todorov, Tzvetan 182 Torrance, Isabelle 12, 71, 138, 156, 165, 169–170 Trench, Rhona 11, 97 Vernant, Jean‑Pierre 18, 83, 174 Vicente Thomas, Daniel 7 Vidal‑Naquet, Pierre 18, 83 Vogiaridis, Yiannis 7 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 71 von Schiller, Friedrich 14 WakingTheFeminist movement 35 Wallace, Clare 11, 137, 175 Wallace, Jennifer 148 Wallace, Sinéad 8 Waller‑Bridge, Isobel 7 Walmsley, David 8 Walsh, Eileen 5, 8 Walsh, Rich 10

Index  203 Walton, J. Michael 11 Walton, Tony 10 Whyman, Erica 7 Williams, Raymond 89 Williams, Tennessee 114 Wilmer, Stephen 99

Yavich, Anita 6 Yeats, W. B. 13, 25–26, 28–30, 38, 111, 113 Yourcenar, Marguerite 86–87 Žižek, Slavoj 55