Visions of the Sightless in Friel's Molly Sweeney and Synge's The Well of the Saints

Visions of the Sightless in Friel's Molly Sweeney and Synge's The Well o/the Saints CAROLE-ANNE UPTON There are poisons which blind and poisons which open the eyes. ] must have been born with the second kind in my veins because I can't see beauty in ugliness or call evil good - I can't!I Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel and The Well of the Saints by John Millington Synge, though separated by almost ninety years in their composition.' bear a number of remarkable similarities. Not surprisingly, both plays are set in rural Ireland - Synge's in "(sJome lonely mountainous district in the east oflreland,"3 a harsh yet mystical place, and Friel's in the now familiar "remote Ballybeg" of Donegal,' a symbolic borderland of north and south. The action of the plot in both cases consists of the central figure(s) being "miraculously" cured of physical blindness, and subsequently rejecting this socalled gift of sight to finish up in a kind of exile. In The Well ofthe Saints, the wretched husband and wife, Martin and Mary Doul are relieved of their blindness at the behest of the villagers by a wandering friar-saint. When their sight begins to fail again, there is a grotesque struggle to avoid a second "cure," with the two finally being driven away southwards under a threat of curses, to face the hostile terrain blind and alone. In Friel's play, the eponymous hero - for Molly surely emerges with that status - has her sight restored to her by a miracle of medicine, but the cure, like her husband Frank's zeal for it, is short-lived, and the play ends with her institutionalised and in grave physical decline. Both of Strindberg's poisons, that of blindness and that of brutal vision, are embodied in the two plays through the perspectives of the healed and the healers respectively. Neither gives credence in its ultimate discourse to casual assimilations between seeing and understanding; indeed, an unsentimental refutation of long-established metaphors of light and darkness, ignorance and knowledge, lies at the heart of both works. In a programme note to the British premiere of Molly Sweeney, Friel, who Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 347 CAROLE-ANNE UPTON also directed the production, acknowledges a debt "to Oliver Sacks's case history 'To see and not see' and the long, strange tradition of such case histories."5 We may recognise literary precedents in both Friel's and Synge's plays - occasional echoes of Yeats's long poem ''The Wanderings ofOisin," in the characters ' yearning for the vitality of the sensual, or of the myth of Orpheus in that curious (semi-)voluntary return to the original state of privation. Maeterlinck's Les aveugles and Pirandello's Henry IV invite further comparisons - and yet, significantly, Friel himselfrefers us not to literature or to myth but to the scientific evidence of clinical psychology. The borderland of an alternative perception inhabited by the blind Molly is not simply a metaphor, but a viable possibility for a new way of seeing. It is not Molly who stands to gain by learning "to create a whole'new world" when her blindness is removed (MS, 22) but the rest of us. In entering Molly's non-visual realm of sensuality and joy, we are offered a new insight into the harmonious world she has already created, if not acknowledged. The first act of the play, which charts the period leading up to Molly's eye operation, is punctuated by Frank's, the self-taught husband's in~ sistent "what has she to lose?" (17, 28). Ironically, it is the surgeon himself, the man of science, who finally expresses the doubt at the end of the act: I was fearful, I suddenly knew that that courageous woman had everything, everything to lose. (39) Instead of Synge's generic saint, the "wandering friar" (57) indiscriminately doling out miracles through the quasi black magic of Catholicism, the miracle worker in Friel's play is Mr. Rice, a consultant ophthalmologist in personal and professional decline in the backwaters of Ballybeg. Blind faith, whether in religion or medical science, is abnegated by the surgeon himself, who thus represents...