Coloniser or Colonised: J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western WorldThis is a featured page

Coloniser or Colonised: J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

Dr. SURESH FREDERICK
Reader in English
Bishop Heber College,
Trichy - 620017
sfheber@gmail.com

John Millington Synge (1871-1909) has a unique place in Irish history. During his
short life, he completed five plays which brought peasant drama to the point of perfection. In the words of C.J.Watson "At the beginning of this century, English drama was revitalised by the use of Irish legend, folk- tale and symbolism and by the use of Irish idioms..." (3). It was the Irish National Movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which made Anglo-Irish writers self-consciously Irish. J.M.Synge and W.B.Yeats established an indigenous Irish theatre in Dublin.

Influenced by Yeats' advice: "Give up Paris... Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you are one of the people, themselves, express a life that has never found expression" (Grene 19), Synge went to Aran Islands. Synge paid several visits to the Aran Islands and stayed there for varying periods. He finally returned to Dublin after these periods of preparation. Then he started his unique contribution to the Irish theatre.

The Playboy of the Western World (1907) centres around the character and personality of Christy. When Christy enters the pub, he is afraid of telling why he is running from the law. But the constant encouragement offered out to him by Michael and others encourages him, to divulge boldly the crime committed by him. When they come to know that the stranger has committed some heinous crime, they did not develop an aversion to him. Instead they casually begin to guess as to what could be the nature of his offence. One suggests that he might be wanted for robbery and stealing, and another suggests that he might have attacked a bailiff, a law officer, and others come up with some wild guesses. Christy rejects them all and comes out with the truth that he has killed his father. They are excited to hear that the stranger has committed the daring crime of parricide. Nicolas Grene calls this the "Crazy upside-down view of parricide" (150).

Over and above, appreciation and esteem for his achievement grows. They attempt to guess how he could have killed his father. He denies using all the conventional weapons including pistol and knife. He also rejects the act of hanging. He announces triumphantly that he just used a 'loy', and killed his father. Loy is a long spade used for digging potatoes. Hence he becomes a clear winner over the rest of the criminals and is given the number one position of a hero.

In reality Christy is not a criminal. He has sympathy for the suffering fellow human beings. That is why he explains that his father dies without much suffering, in the first account. He says, "... he went down at my feet like an empty sack, and never let a grunt or groan from him at all" (106). As Christy is from an alien society, he says like this. His alien attitude further comes out when Pegeen asks him whether he has buried the dead body. He replies, "I buried him then" (106). This answer is a naked lie, because, he never buried his father. In fact he ran away from that place without even looking at his father.

Later Christy adjusts himself to the society. He also becomes more boastful of his deed. His next version: "I did up a Tuesday and halve his skull" (110). In the next version he elaborates and says, "With that the sun came out between the cloud and the hill, and it shinning green in my face. 'God have mercy on upon soul' says he, lifting a scythe; 'or on your own', says I, raising the loy”(118). He also says, “He gave a drive with the scythe, and I gave a lep to the east. Then I turned around with my back to the north, and I hit a blow on the ridge on his skull, laid him stretched out, and split the knob of his gullet" (118-9). Finally he makes the extravagant claim that he "cleft his father with one bow to the breeches belt" (125). What is the reason for this kind of behaviour and how could the society, have contributed towards this? Nicolas Green says, "… from the beginning of the play violence has been accepted not only as normal but admirable" (155). Why do people accept violence as normal as well as admirable?

The society present in The Playboy is not a bad society. The people there are not supporting violence but they oppose the police and the bailiffs, the symbols of oppression. Mary C.King in The Drama of J.M.Synge says, "They treat their character at first as a kind of neutral mirror upon which to project their own fears - fears of ... bailiffs... and police..." (136). The Irish people were suppressed by the British for many centuries. Their lands were taken over by the British landlords. They were treated badly by the landlords. Toni O' Brien Johnson is Synge, The Medieval and the Grotesque says, "In the fact that the people of Aran had hidden a parricide fleeing from the law, Synge saw not only a refusal to allow public justice to discount and individual state of mind but also a striking contrast with honoured law of the heroic world of Early Irish Tale"(56). So, in the beginning these Irish people were law abiding. But after the intervention of Britishers, they started hating the police and all symbols of power.

In The Playboy, the characters do not really support violence. But they oppose the brutality of the police force. The whole story hangs on one term: ‘police’. As Christy says "It's a safe house, so (104), means safe from “polis” (104). If Christy has not mentioned that he is running from the law, no one would have supported Christy and his patricide. Edward Said feels that "nationalistic Ireland" is "typical of writers whose own position is postcolonial” (Barry 194). Because Synge has taken a postcolonial position, he is able to write vividly like this.
Peter Barry in The Beginning Theory says "Yeats, being a member of the protestant ruling class in Ireland, has a double identity as both coloniser and colonised, and the recognition of such double identities is one of the strengths of the post colonialist view" (Barry 195). John Millington Synge is also from the same protestant minority community and shares the idea double identity. With this strength, John Millington Synge clearly supports the colonized with a view to helping them.


Works Cited

Barry, Peter. The Beginning Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004.

Grene, Nicholas. Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays. London: Macmillan, 1979.

Johnson, Toni O’ Brien. Synge: The Medieval and the Grotesque. New
Jersey: Colin Smythe, 1982.

King, Marcy C. The Drama of J.M. Synge. London: Fourth Estate, 1985.
Saddlemyer, Ann. J.M. Synge. Oxford: OUP, 1995.


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