Stoicism, Asceticism, and Ecstacy: Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows

Stoicism, Asceticism, and Ecstacy: Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows BRENDA MURPHY • THE STUDY OF SYNGE'S DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS has 10ng been encumbered by two critical cliches which are responsible for the rather limited viewpoint taken by a good number of critics in writing aboutit. Both of the cliches, that the play is preeminently a "peasant drama," and therefore a strikingly new treatment of the Deirdre legend, and that its theme is chiefly autobiographical, may be traced back to Maurice Bourgeois' early and very influential study of Synge published in 1913. Bourgeois says that Synge "handled the ancient story as a peasant folk tale."t This, he thinks, "was probably untrue to the heroic element in the legend; but what it lost in the heroic sense it gained in the human sense. Synge drew the character of Deirdre not as a queen, but as an untamed, unsophisticated child of Nature, and brought her out of the land of mystical visions where poets like Mr. Yeats and "AE" seemed to confine her, into the world of flesh-and-blood reality.,,2 The essence of this view has continued to be expressed in critical studies of the play with little alteration. Daniel Corkery, for example, says that Synge took the Deirdre legend and "threw it into a peasant mold,,,3 and David Greene asserts that Synge's peasant treatment "turned out to be the severest of limitations when used to exploit the ancient Ireland of the sagas.,,4 Such a view of the play is not only severely limiting, in that it tends to restrict one's consideration of the play to its differences from more "heroic" treatments like Yeats's and AE's, it is simply wrong in regard to the Deirdre legend itself. In an article written in 1904, six years before Synge's Deirdre appeared, and three years before AE's and Yeats's, Eleanor Hull mentioned the version of the Deirdre tale in the Book of Leinster and an eighteenthcentury version which had recently been published by Douglas Hyde, remarking on the difference between the characterization of Deirdre in the 155 156 BRENDA MURPHY earlier legends and that in the later legends: The Deirdre of the ancient tale, forceful of purpose, fiercely determined at all hazards to gain her ends, and, spite of the steadfastness and strength of her devotion, showing in her conduct the savagery of an untamed nature, becomes softened in a later surviving form of the tale preserved in a 17th or 18th century manuscript into the tearful, sentimental maiden of a century ago. It is curious to find the wild woman of the 12th century Book of Leinster version transformed into the Lydia Languish of a later age.5 The Lydia Languish figure is easily seen in AE's Deirdre, who constantly reiterates ineffectual warnings to Naisi, and makes such remarks as "I was no mate for you. I am only a woman, who has given her life into your hands," and gets such answers from Naisi as "poor timid dove, I had forgotten thy weakness.,,6 One can hardly picture an exchange such as this between Synge's Deirdre and Synge's Naisi. In the earliest version of the legend, Deirdre woos Naisi by flinging herself on him, "seizing him by the two ears," and saying, "Behold thy two ears marked with scoffing and disgrace, if you do not take me with yoU.,,7 The earlier version is certainly closer to the personality of Synge's Deirdre than AE's "poor timid dove." Something of the wilfulness and passion of this "wild," primitive Deirdre is conveyed in Deirdre of the Sorrows, but it exists in a much more refined state than that of the folktale. One can as little conceive of Synge's Deirdre grabbing Naisi by the ears to woo him as considering herself "only a woman." Synge has not, in fact, "roughened" the legend, or "thrown it into peasant mold," but rather chosen the more "primitive," the essential legend, and cast it in contemporary, though simple terms. He has retained the passion and directness of the early legend, and the simplicity in diction and in the way of life...