Strangers in Her House: Staging a Living Space for Northern Ireland

In 1902, when the title character in W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory's play Cathleen ni Houlihan lamented the loss of her "four beautiful green fields" and the intrusion of the "strangers in [her] house," audiences heard a welcome indictment of British colonialism offered through the metaphor of domesticity. ¹ With its sympathetic depiction of the title character—a mythic personification of Ireland seeking young men willing to sacrifice themselves for her—the play was immensely popular in nationalist circles, so much so that when Yeats referred to his authorship of the piece during the riots over The Playboy of the Western World (1907), the crowd momentarily ceased booing and began to cheer. ² By describing Ireland's situation as she does, Cathleen figures invasion in humiliatingly intimate terms. After all, the home supposedly served as the one "inviolate space where the occupier could not enter," and imagining the colonial authorities as unwanted houseguests encroaching upon the woman-nation's domestic interior could only intensify an audience's outrage at their trespass. ³ Yet Cathleen's attempts to declare the house a site of national oppression and a potential breeding ground for resistance imposes restrictions on the real women—the young volunteer's mother and bride-to-be—who already preside over the home she enters. Accomplishing her own invasion of this family space, this feminized icon of nationality claims the private sphere for public, nationalist affairs, thus subsuming the literal hearth into the figurative domestic boundary of the sovereign nation; in the process, she displaces the actual women who had previously held sway there. This division heightens our awareness of the complexities involved in representing "[n]ations [. . .] through the iconography of household and domestic space." ⁴ The national household becomes, in Benedict Anderson's terms, an "imagined community," a home in which all the members do not know one another but, all the same, feel a loyalty toward others in their "family." ⁵ As a result, the more personal family unit may become a "locus of resistance to the occupier"—a private incubator of public action—or it may disintegrate from the pressures of loyalty to the more metaphoric domestic establishment. ⁶

A number of plays concerning the conflict in Northern Ireland have sought to explore the relationship between public and private loyalties, but the two examined in this essay—Bill Morrison's trilogy A Love Song for Ulster (1993) and Stewart Parker's Pentecost (1987)—also share a concern to construct a distinct identity for the Six Counties by interrogating the relationship between a contemporary Cathleen-figure and her contested house. Although those who brought this woman-nation ideal to life on the stage at the turn of the last century could imagine Ireland as one domestic household, the present territorial division of the island necessarily complicates the metaphor. ⁷ Rather than a single property whose defense can unite the national family, the situation in the North, as John Hume once noted, is akin to Protestants and Catholics being forced to live together in the same house, an arrangement that suggests restriction, imposition, and discomfort rather than unity of purpose. ⁸ Cathleen's encroaching "strangers" reappear, now diversified to include not just British soldiers but Protestants and Catholic militants as well. These intruders all cry for possession in the name of history, of government, of nationality. The women who seek to combat them must ultimately come to represent something very different—the imperative of life seeking to banish death from the hearthstone, as if in the North the ability to conceptualize a Cathleen-figure requires that she fuse the public loyalties espoused by her old self with the personal concerns of the peasant women who would rather keep their sons and husbands alive and at home.

Such a rejection of the armed conflict encouraged by Cathleen ni Houlihan grows out of these works' genesis in the...