"In the Gripe of the Ditch": Nationalism, Famine, and The Playboy of the Western World

"In the Gripe of the Ditch": Nationalism, Famine, and The Playboy ofthe Western World GEORGE CUSACK The first description audiences receive of Christy Mahon, the dubious hero of Synge's The Playboy oJthe Western World, is one well suited to, but not often associated with, epic heroism. Entering his fiancee's house from the "great darkness" of an Irish night, the cowardly Shawn Keogh describes a figure he passed on the road, "a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch, groaning wicked like a maddening dog" (115). The image should be a familiar one to modern readers, and would be no less so to Synge's audience; a lone figure lying in a ditch in the Irish countryside, moaning to the point of being subhuman is one of the most commonly used symbols of the Great Famine. The connection between Synge's hero and the Famine, perhaps the most significant and signified period in Irish history, is no accident. Rather, it is the opening move in a carefully wrought satire of Irish nationalism as formulated by the Gaelic Revival. By using Famine imagery in a peasant comedy, Synge brings together two well-worn but mutually exclusive representations of Ireland: the bastion of a vital and heroic culture and the land stricken with eternal suffering. Throughout Playboy, Synge plays these two models of Ireland against each other to demonstrate that the perpetuation of both models in the rhetoric of the Gaelic Revival undermines the very premise of revolutionary nationalism. FAMINE NARRATIVES AND REVIVAL RHETORI C Synge's evocation of the Famine in the opening scene of Playboy locates the play within a cultural discourse which was central to the project of Irish nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Margaret Kelleher has observed that there is a strong rhetorical tradition extending through the Revival that represents the Famine as a fundamental source of Irish identity: "What is clear in the literature of Irish revival, specifically in its attempts to stage the themes of hunger and starvation, is a concern with the symbolic sigModern Drama, 45:4 (Wimer 2002) 567 568 GEORGE CUSACK nificance of famine deaths and the implications, occasionally even more fearful , of survival" (127).' By most turn-of-the-century accounts, the "symbolic significance" of the Famine is palpable and far reaching, extending not just to the people but to the very landscape of contemporary Ireland. For example, Kelleher cites an t892 lecture Maud Gonne delivered at the Catholic University of Cercle du Luxembourg: addressing the subject of Irish history, Gonne insists that "If you come to my country, every stone will repeat to us this tragic history. It was only fifty years ago. It still lives in thousands of memories " (I 12). This infusion of the Famine into the very stones of Ireland served a specific purpose for activists such as Oonne, who was at this time touring France to raise support for Irish independence from England. Gonne saw constant recollection of Irish suffering as crucial to the claim that Ireland had been greatly abused by England's misrule, which was (and generally still is) blamed for the Famine's devastation. By perpetuating the image of Ireland as the "poor old woman" who dwelt perpetually in the shadow of the Great Hunger , Gonne and her colleagues could more effectively raise support at home and abroad for Irish independence. However. Gonne and her contemporaries did not invent this description of the Famine. In fact, English reporters and authorities created this rhetorical tradition during the Famine itself, a fact which imbues the image with an indelible and, for the Revivalists' purposes, rather unfortunate colonial association . Throughout the 1840S, reports emerged from the English press and officials of the British government which tried to make sense of the Famine for English audiences. These accounts create the narrative framework that portrays Ireland in terms of endless, atemporal suffering, a framework which Gonne and the other Revivalists would appropriate in their rhetoric. Several critics, most notably Kelleher and Christopher Morash, have charted the way in which British observers constructed the Famine as an endorsement of British imperialism; in particular, both Kelleher and Morash identify the Malthusian rhetoric of "natural law" that...