From Ritual to Romance in Within the Gates and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy

From Ritual to Romance in Within the Gates and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy RONALD G. ROLLINS • The writer can u'se traditional myths with varying degrees of consciousness (with Joyce and Mann perhaps most fully conscious in our time), and he often does so with no premeditated intention, working from symbolic equivalents in his own unconscious.... Just as there are varying degrees of consciousness, so there are varying degrees of fruitfulness in these uses. of traditional patterns, ranging from dishonest fakery at one extreme to some of the subtlest ironic and imaginative organizations in our poetry at the other. Stanley Edgar Hyman "The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic" SEAN Q'CASEY SIMULTANEOUSLY MIMICS and modifies some distinguishing dimensions of myth, both Christian and pre-Christian, in his Within the Gates (1934), a modern morality set amidst the vanishing greenness of a crowded London park, and in his Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), an Aristophanic allegory situated' in a drought-seared, fence-enclosed Irish garden. Indeed, O'Casey's mythopoeic imagination achieves a marriage of myths in these two dramas as Christian clerics collide with fertility figures, maypole dancing challenges formal Christian worship, and ancient fertility symbols like the silver shaft and the cock's crimson crest contrast with the pious parishioners' cross and rosary beads. O'Casey's basic intent, however, seems to be a desire to use myth both structurally and satirically: (1) to employ myth as a means of organizing his dramas into ritual sequences, and (2) to employ myth as a satiric stratagem which accentuates the difference between the function of mythico-ritualistic elements in the lives of ancient and modern man. Emphasizing the degenerative adaptation of antique mythical patterns patterns designed to restore potency to people and provinces - O'Casey apparently laments modern man's reluctance to enter joyously into the rites 11 12 RONALD G. ROLLINS of revivification which could redeem and revitalize both self and society the sick soul and the modern wasteland. The sequence of events in both plays is similar. Within the Gates records the progressive disintegration of a young London prostitute named Jannice who has been abandoned by her father, the Bishop; terrified by nuns, with their obsessive concern with sin and the landscape of hell; reviled and shoved about by her drunken mother, the Old Woman; and exploited and then discarded by a motley of scheming males concerned primarily with sexual gratification and social security. Unsuccessful in her attempts to fmd enduring love and laughter, Jannice finally dies dancing and the Dreamer, her friend and wandering minstrel, laments her passing from the park which is congested with cynics, religious extremists, and the shuffling Down-and-Outs. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy likewise chronicles the career of a vital, young woman named Loreleen who also wants a courageous, compassionate companion in love with life. Instead, Loreleen is exploited and manhandled by Sailor Mahan and other lusty males, denigrated and stoned by the Irish villagers, and then reviled and sent into exile by Father Domineer, a one-dimensional clerical villain who influences virtually all aspects of life in Nyadnanave, Irish nest of knaves. The other attractive and vital village women and Robin Adair, another wandering minstrel,l follow Loreleen into exile, leaving the cowardly and disconsolate villagers to fondle their rosary beads - their clerical chains. It is in the constantly evolving natural settings in both plays that we first discover the birth-growth-decay pattern so prominent in various vegetation and fertility rituals designed to mirror the fundamental rhythm of nature.2 Cyclical in design, O'Casey's dramas are clearly arranged in a ritualistic fashion so as to serve as symbolic representations of the birth and death of·one year and one day.3 The four scenes in Within the Gates, for example, move us from the splendor of spring to the starkness of winter. Scene I unfolds in the park on a clear spring morning as birds search for food and build nests, fowl swim in the water or preen themselves on the banks, and yellow daffodils search for the sun. A chorus of young boys and girls, representing trees and flowers, enters to sing "Our Mother the Earth...