The Spatial Politics of Home: Gender, Nation-Building and Female Diaspora in Irish Playwright Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa and The Loves of Cass McGuire
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Han, Chen-Wei
Abstract
This thesis seeks to explore the spatial politics of home in Irish playwright Brian Friel’s plays: Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966). I would like to draw upon the theory of social construction of scale, feminist geography on home and other relevant theorizations on home, such as the unhomely, or uncanny, in order to explore the contested relationships between home and Irish women after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Set in Ballybeg, Friel’s favorite but fictitious setting in County Donegal of the north-western Ireland, Dancing at Lughnasa portrays the political, economic and socio-cultural predicaments of five sisters, further uncovering and destabilizing the normative imaginary of Irish women, home and nation-building in the 1930s. The Loves of Cass McGuire delineates the return of an Irish diasporic woman, Cass, from New York, and her incompatibility with the Irish middle-class home, represented by her brother Harry and his household in the 1960s.
Many of Friel’s plays are primarily set within the domestic places of home, including kitchen, living room, breakfast room, study, garden, and so forth in plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Living Quarters (1977), Aristocrats (1979), Translations (1980), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) and The Home Place (2005). However, the home delineated by Friel is far from a private, intimate place for rest and recuperation; rather, it is always a problematic and contested place for the characters, who, either live in it or only come to visit, have to struggle with the normative social roles and ideologies embodied in the home of the past or the present. In other words, home depicted by Friel in his plays is never merely a setting or background in which the actions of the plays take place; instead, Friel’s plays implicitly reveal that home is not only a material house but also a social sphere constituted by multifarious, and even contradictory, social processes and relations within specifically historical and geographical contexts. More often than not, the homes in Friel’s plays are either broken or on the verge of breakdown, for they are always already permeated by the political, economic, and socio-cultural transformations beyond the scale of home, despite the desperate endeavors by some characters to create or maintain a bounded, stable home.
In this thesis I will argue that The Loves of Cass McGuire and Dancing at Lughnasa represent the gendered politics of home in the newly established Ireland after political de-colonization. Moreover, they both stage the contested struggles with the normative gendered mechanism imposed on Irish women’s mobility, identity, gender and sexuality within the scale of home. The social imaginary of an Irish homely home, with its material embodiments respectively in the 1930s and 1960s, is mutually constituted with the gendered identities and relations of the household. Home in both plays means differently for different characters either within the scale of home or in the process of diaspora. Home is a site of feminized domesticity, national order, Catholic virtue and Gaelic traditions, but it is also a conflicting site of power struggles and identity contestation, especially for certain defiant women characters. On the other hand, for those eagerly to sustain a homely home in the normative vision, they also suffer the unhomely, or uncanny, sentiment, as they are compelled to recognize the recurrence of the once familiar but concealed existences and facts, embodied by certain household members, in their daily life. Furthermore, they are also pressed to confront the reality that their supposedly private home is always an open, public place perpetually reconfigured by myriad social processes and relations beyond the scale of home. In the process of representing the domestic sphere of home in both plays, Friel not only delineates the various aspects of home constituted by diverse structural forces in different contexts, but also addresses to the conflictory and fluid meanings and feelings of home for varied subjects in their individual struggles to create a place that can be called home for themselves; namely, a sense of belongingness to a certain place. Accordingly, the home depicted in Friel’s plays is always an open, intersecting sphere constituted by perpetual processes of flux of socio-spatial dynamics at multiple scales.
Subjects
Brian Friel
home
gender
nation-building
female diaspora
scale
place
unhomely/uncanny
Type
thesis
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