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In Inishmaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature . . . (The Aran Islands, I, p. 75) In 1899 John Millington Synge was nearly thrown from a small boat into raging swells off the island of Inis Meáin. ‘[T]he green waves curled and arched themselves above me; then in an instant I was flung up into the air and could look down on the heads of the rowers, as if we were sitting on a ladder, or out across a forest of white crests to the black cliff of Inishmaan.’1 The danger of the Aran Islands’ rough seas would later become a haunting motif in Synge’s 1904 Riders to the Sea, a tragedy of an Irish mother who loses her last son to the waves. There is a striking duality of landscape in this work; the sea functions as both the provider for the family and as its potential destroyer. This duality is mirrored in Maurya, for she is both the nurturer of her children and the inadvertent destroyer of one. By examining Synge’s use of nature with an ecocritical approach, one can see that it does not conform to many of the traditions of British writers. It is not purely pastoral, Romantic or sublime but is a blend of uniquely Irish ambiguities towards place. Famines, forced removes, and struggles against the rocky turf for farming have created, historically, an often uneasy sense of place for Irish writers. In Riders to the Sea the dualities of land as both provider and killer are evident as well as the personal, spiritual struggles of Synge himself. If the sea is viewed as representative of a harsh, Darwinian landscape, the final resolution becomes even more tragic. ‘Sympathy between man and nature’ becomes the encompassing motif of Riders to the Sea, and this interconnectedness between nature and people supports the full spectrum of structural balance in the work. ‘Sympathy between man and nature’: Landscape and loss in Synge’s Riders to the Sea Joy Kennedy-O’Neill 36 The haunting resolution of the play is the ocean’s (or fate’s) total indifference to a mother’s worry and despair. Maurya’s last son is killed after all, despite her having been reassured earlier by a young priest that God would not leave her ‘destitute [. . .] with no son living’.2 The play has been hailed as one of the greatest one-act tragedies but when it was first performed on 25 February 1904 the reviews were mixed. It was ‘too dreadfully doleful’ for one critic and too obvious (by resorting to the ‘cheap trick’ of bringing in the son Bartley’s body on stage) for another.3 Others felt that the play lacked progression or was fragmented. James Joyce’s criticism resulted from his view that the play didn’t conform to the traditional Aristotelian principles of tragedy: ‘ever since I read it, I have been riddling it mentally till it has [not] a sound spot.’4 But the play’s production was generally well received by audiences. After his second viewing of the play, avid theatre attendee Joseph Holloway wrote in his diary: I have come to the conclusion that a more gruesome and harrowing play than Riders to the Sea has seldom, if ever, been staged before. The thoroughly in-earnest playing of the company made the terribly depressing wake episode so realistic and weirdly doleful that some of the audience could not stand the painful horror of the scene, and had to leave the hall during its progress [. . .] The audience was so deeply moved by the tragic gloom of the terrible scene on which the curtains close in, that it could not applaud.5 26 February 19046 The key powers of the play are Maurya’s grief and the unsettling ambiguities about ‘man and nature’. It is little wonder that the audience initially could not applaud. Is God indifferent? Does the ocean represent God’s, or fate’s, hand? Or is Maurya’s world a Darwinian world of chance and survival ? The debate still continues over whether the play is tipped more towards a Christian or a pagan resolution. Maurya’s grief over Bartley’s body has been interpreted just as dualistically as King Lear’s over Cordelia’s. Are her final words a resolution to Christ or a surrender to superstition? Before any examinations of such dualities and the role of nature in them, it would be helpful to see how Synge...

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