Negotiating Femininity and Nation in Three Plays of the Irish National Theatre Movement

Abstract

One common locus for the Irish dramatic tradition has proved to be the almost obsessive
preoccupation of finding the proper formulae and images through which national identity can be projected. Due
to Ireland ’s vexed colonial past, and the ensuing nationalist decolonization politics, the Irish theatrical scene
has often been marred by the interplay of diverse ideologies aimed at defining an authentic Irish identity, which
have also subsumed representations of femininity, symbolically merging womanhood and nation within the
collective mentality. Through the broad lens of cultural studies, but focusing the angle in keeping with feminist
and reception theories, the paper aims to investigated the dramatic productions of the Irish theatrical movement prior to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre, in order to highlight the close interconnection between cultural image and its scenic projection. The chosen corpus of plays includes three key texts in this tradition (W. B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, and J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen), which
allows us to underscore the dynamics of the relationship between the three participants in the theatrical act –
subject matter, author and audience –, and demonstrate how the representations of femininity and nation are
negotiated by the latter on the pre-Abbey Irish stage.