Synge

by Colm Toibin

  It would, on the face of it seem that the comic misconceptions inherent in the relationship of men and women appeal to Irish writers more than to others. Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw, all more or less compatriots of Synge, had after all, been before him with the theme. But their interest had been as much in the societal misconceptions as in the psychological, the one sort admittedly feeding off the other, but the main burden of the comedy, with its societal archetypes, being in the interaction of the two. Synge sought out the primitive so that he could be free from these conventions and bring men and women face to face in a world where five pounds or a tin can were as important as a peerage or a great name. If, in doing so, he overlooked the strength of convention in his apparently primitive social milieux the fact is simply one further proof that he had, as an artist, a purpose other than the anthropological. That purpose was to expose the equivocations, the comic and tragic humiliations, ‘the moods of varying rapture and dismay’, the sheer bewilderment inherent in the relationships of men and women. It is done of course partly through male eyes: there would be no comedy if there were no dismayed or bewildered men. But whatever may be said about Wilde or Shaw, Synge is streets ahead of Congreve or Sheridan when it comes to understanding women and the springs of what the male merely sees as unpredictable and erratic behaviour. It is not, strangely enough, the successful lovers who know what Synge knew about women. And it is part of the triumph of the man as well as the artist that he feels with them, rejoices with them and laughs with them rather than with the almost always simpler, stupider and slower-witted males of his plays. Synge, the man, may have had a hard time of it with Molly; but he achieved as an artist the coolness of vision which is essential to comedy; and beneath all the comedy the underlying emotion is a veneration for the life-enhancing, convention-defying subtleties of feminine psychology which is rare enough in any literature; but which, taking Joyce and Yeats – not to mention Shaw – into account is, surprisingly or not, perhaps less rare in Irish literature than in some others.

  Illustration 9: ‘Selling on the Stones’, St. Patrick’s Street, before the market was closed by the Corporation in 1906. From J.M. Synge, My Wallet of Photographs.

  9 Bad At History ~ Anne Enright

  All of us know that Irishwomen are the most virtuous in the world.

  It is a wonderful sentence. I thought it was said during the Playboy riots, I thought it was something to do with Pegeen in her shift, but in fact it was said in response to The Shadow of the Glen in 1903 and it was said by Arthur Griffith. I finally tracked it down to my school history text by F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine. I have remembered this sentence for twenty-six years.

  I have, in that time, forgotten who Arthur Griffith was, or I have remembered and forgotten again. Maybe I never really knew. When I look him up now I find that he was a member of the committee of the Irish National Theatre Society, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory. When The Shadow of the Glen was read in Lady Gregory’s rooms in the Nassau Hotel, Maud Gonne and Douglas Hyde left the committee in a huff, while Griffith was prompted to set up his own organization, which he called Sinn Fein.

  August 1903: this was the exact place where art and nationalist politics split. I wonder when it happened, and at what line. Perhaps it was when Nora told the tramp that she was not afraid of him, ‘I never knew what way I’d be afeared of beggar or bishop or any man of you at all.’ Maybe it was when she said, ‘If it’s a power of men I’m after knowing they were fine men, for I was a hard child to please, and a hard girl to please, and it’s a hard woman I am to please this day.’ Surely it was long before she gathered her fate about her, and chose the tramp, with, ‘you’ve a fine bit of talk stranger and it’s with yourself I will go.’

  Whichever line it was, Nora Burke has a lot to answer for. She is the opposite of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the eponymous heroine of the play premiered in 1902, when the dramatic nationalists were all singing from the same hymn sheet and Maud Gonne enjoyed playing the role so much that it was with great difficulty she was persuaded to return the wig.

  I am bad at history. Here are some facts: Arthur Griffith was initially in favour of a dual monarchy for Ireland and England. He once wrote an essay called ‘The pirate, the freemason and the Jew.’ No one told him about the Easter Rising, so he sat it out at home in Clontarf. He headed the Irish delegation negotiating the Treaty in London in 1921. In two years time I will have forgotten all these; the only thing I will remember about Arthur Griffith is that he’s the stupid eejit who said, ‘All of us know that Irishwomen are the most virtuous in the world.’

  All of us? His Mammy knows it, and he knows it, and his sister knows it, and the boy on the butcher’s bicycle knows it, and the tram conductor and the priest knows it, and the slavey knows it, and the second downstairs maid knows it, and they all go around knowing it all day long: because all of us (yes all of us!) know that the Phoenix Park is the largest enclosed park in Europe and O’Connell Street is the widest street in Europe and Irish women are the most virtuous in the world. More virtuous than Burkina Faso, certainly. Or Haute-Volta as it was then known.

  Of these, the three founding myths of my Irish National School education - the park, the street and the lovely Irish girl, only one really endured. We were never much good, as a nation, at urban planning, but we did a mean job of keeping the lovely Irish girl lovely, for many decades to come.

  Being bad at history, I go online to find out just who knew the thing about Irish women being the most virtuous in the world. A trawl at the more academic end of the internet yields three interesting returns for the phrase ‘Irish prostitutes’ (not that prostitutes are less virtuous than the rest of us – just that they are so clearly not the Rose of Tralee). The earliest, from 1776, comes from Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ where, as an economist, he is writing in praise of the potato as a staple food:

  The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the greater part of them from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root.

  Smith is quite casually of the opinion that prostitution was as Irish an activity as coalheaving. He does not say that these Irish women lack virtue, only that they are ‘unfortunate’. He also thinks that they are beautiful. Smith may not think of the Irish as being separate in a modern sense; in this passage Irish merely seems to be of a piece with ‘London poor’. So although he was not one of Griffith’s ‘all of us’, this may have been before ‘us’ was invented. It is good to see at any rate that the lovely Irish girl, even in this early incarnation, was already considered lovely.

  The second reference is to the nineteenth century scientist, George Cuvier who removed the reputedly super-sized genitals of Saartje Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, and put them in a jar for posterity. Writing about him, Elizabeth Alexander, Associate Professor at Yale, says:

  If you were to understand the essence of African women, he believed you should examine – indeed, dissect – their genitalia. He believed the same for Irish prostitutes.

  It seems that Cuvier, a Frenchman, not only forgot what all of us know - namely, that Irishwomen are the most virtuous in the world – he went so far as to link them, anatomically, with a woman he considered to be halfway between mankind and the beasts.

  The century that separates Smith and Cuvier saw a degradation of attitudes towards female sexuality – still, it is possible that two men will walk through a red light district, even today, and see very different women standing there. Whether Cuvier’s problem was personal or historical, the sad fact of it is that when this man of science thought about Irish women he thought not of their poverty, their beauty, or their sad fate in life, but in a rigorously scientific way, of their nethers. Irish women, in this casual association with Saartje Baartman, were by anatomical imperative sexually depraved.

  Cuvier met Baartman, naked an
d festooned with feathers, at a ball hosted by Madame de Barry: he dissected her body in 1815. The next reference to Irish prostitutes, talks about the years after the famine. It is from an article by William J. Stern, who has written many times about the New York Irish in various respectable, if slightly right wing, publications:

  The Irish immigration of the 1840s was some 60 percent female, most of them single, and many of these newcomers soon found themselves on the street. Ronald H. Baylor and Timothy J. Meagher report in their book, The New York Irish, that the prostitute population jumped from 11,000 in 1839 to 50,000 ten years later, and these ‘nymphs of the pave,’ as people called them, were mostly young Irish girls. But it wasn’t just prostitution: venereal disease, alcoholism, opium addiction, child abandonment, infanticide – the New York Irish suffered crippling levels of social pathology.

  This figure of 50,000 Irish prostitutes on the streets of New York is so alarming that it deserves further investigation. Carol Groneman in the Journal of Urban History, looks at the incidence of prostitution in the immigrant Irish population and her abstract concludes that

  while family ties were strained by immigration, the Irish brought with them and maintained enduring family patterns and ways of life.

  So Ms. Groneman might know it, but there are certainly many in the history game who are completely ignorant of the fact that Irish women are the most virtuous in the world. It seems that Arthur Griffith may have had very strong reasons for defending Irishwomen’s honour: the poor and the displaced are often driven to prostitution; the ‘racially inferior’ are often considered to be sexually base. I want schoolchildren to be taught this, now, that the lovely Irish girl came from an Irish girl so poor she did not even own her body, and that is why we didn’t allow contraception, abortion or divorce, or at least not on our native soil – because Irish women have always done bad things abroad, but when they are at home all of us know that Irish women are the most virtuous in the world.

  In A Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus loses his virginity to a prostitute in a scene that is set around the turn of the century. When he first wanders into the red light district he wonders, in a disturbing echo of Griffith’s anti-semitism, whether he has strayed into ‘the quarter of the Jews’. It seems that, even for a writer as international and open as Joyce, there was something about all that sexual activity that was not strictly ‘Irish.’

  It is hard to say what Irish women were really like in 1903 – levels of prostitution may not be the best indicator; besides business was concentrated in urban areas (except for the Curragh) and the mythically pure Irishwoman was a country girl. Mind you, that other mythical Irishwoman, Griffith’s fellow committee member on the Irish National Theatre Society, Maud Gonne, was not in the slightest bit virtuous. She conceived her second illegitimate child on the grave of her first, though Griffith was not to know that, or not that precisely, and besides the rules are always different for people like Maud Gonne, who was not, in the first instance, actually Irish.

  It seems true to say that there was an increase in national virtuousness in the last years of the nineteenth century: there was, at any rate, a decline in the numbers of prostitutes. In her essay, ‘Abandoned Women and Bad Characters: prostitution in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Maria Luddy reports that the number of women arrested for offences other than soliciting in 1870 included 11,864 women thought to be prostitutes. That figure had declined to 2,970 by 1900. This she ascribes to the purity movement of the 1880s and also to the rise of a middle class morality among the survivors of the famine.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the women admitted to the Magdalen homes were the ‘seduced’ daughters of the middle classes, rather than working prostitutes. After the withdrawal of British troops in 1922, business got even slower, and by 1925 the main brothels of Monto had been closed down. This was effected, in part, by the reforming zeal of the Legion of Mary, whose founder Frank Duff, estimated that there were 200 girls working there in 1922, and that, by 1925 this was reduced to 40. Underpinning his account of the fall of Monto, Miracles on Tap, is the sense that women themselves knew that they were out of joint with the times.

  In July 1922, Duff took the first group of 23 ‘girls’ off in a charabanc for a weekend retreat in Baldoyle, stopping briefly to pick up a Franciscan at Adam and Eve’s church on the quays. He writes:

  As we go, we are brushing by history ... I bound creditably from my perch and run across the road to the door. If I had thought to look across the Liffey – as all those I left behind me were now doing, I would have witnessed a pitiful sight. Portions of the former proud walls of the Four Courts, the central law courts of Ireland, were being pulled down by great gangs of men with ropes. Civil War had just been raging, and these dangerously tottering walls were part of its grim heritage. And even during the short time I was away, our great adventure was in peril: the result of that striking scene playing upon supercharged nerves and galvanizing into life that old terror to which reference has already been made, that a government plot was in operation against them. What were those soldiers stalking about with rifles for and looking – many of them – in the direction of the vivid-coloured charabanc? Did they not look as if they were going to shoot at it?

  Fatefully, by Frank Duff’s account, the charabanc did not contain Honour Bright, who changed her mind at the last minute because she ‘did not want to leave her baby’, and was subsequently killed, while working, in 1926. Testimony at her murder trial shows that although Monto was quiet, business was still brisk outside the Shelbourne, where girls and jarveys provided a ‘once around the Green’ service for gentlemen at the end of their evening. Accounts of the trial, as well as interviews with former residents of Monto, make it clear that the Dublin poor had a great sympathy for the ‘unfortunate girls’ working in their midst, and that many of the better-off were equally slow to judge. When Arthur Griffith talked about ‘all of us’ he was conjuring a middle class that did not yet exist; this was the same ‘nearly’ middle class that Synge abhorred, perhaps because he was looking at it from the other side.

  The groggy-patriot-publican-general-shop-man who is married to the priest’s half-sister and is second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor ... are horrible and awful.

  Synge wishes he could put these people on stage. ‘God, wouldn’t they hop!’ In his letter to a friend about his travels in the West, he is distressed to find,

  in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming, and in another place where things are going well, one has a rampant, double-chinned vulgarity I haven’t seen the like of.

  Arthur Griffith may be a prime example of this ‘rampant double-chinned vulgarity’, but perhaps he had a stronger idea than Synge of what it was to be poor (but wonderfully attractive), and on the boat, and on your back. Besides, how was he to know that polemic always fades, while art survives?

  On the opening night of The Shadow of the Glen, Yeats, in what an onlooker described as ‘his usual thumpty thigh, monotonous, preachy style’, stood up in the Molesworth Hall and ‘defended the artist’s right to show life, instead of the desire which every political party would substitute for life.’ His spat with Griffith rose to a pitch with the Playboy in 1907, which Griffith described as

  a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform ... the production of a moral degenerate, who has dishonoured the women of Ireland before all Europe.

  In the characters of Nora Burke, Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quin, Synge was drawing on a pre-famine tradition of women who are strong, and likeable, and free enough. The lovely Irish girl had too much mischief in her ever to be really good, and all through the twentieth century Synge’s characters gave the lie to the legislative piety of Griffith’s inheritors. You could say that the war goes on, though the most convincing battles were fought in the referendums of the 1980s.

  Now, from a tired distance of twenty years, it seems to me that
this second Irish Civil War, the one we fought about contraception, abortion and divorce, wasn’t actually about virtue – or only incidentally so – it was about breeding. It was about maintaining stock. The country faced a demographic shift towards the young. We could not believe that, for the first time since the famine, the population of Ireland did not have to overproduce just to keep still.

  I grew up during the 1980s. For very good reasons, I am bad at history. Much better, like Synge, to stick to art.

  One last thing: through all the hard years of the twentieth century, Pegeen Mike ran around in her shift on stages all over Ireland, both amateur and professional. She has a lot to answer for. There hasn’t been an Irish production since without a woman in her shift, or ‘slip’, as they are now known. Forget the pan of rashers, it is the woman standing in her slip with a regretful look on her face that marks the Abbey production out for me. ‘Run out there to Guiney’s and get me another twenty mixed slips,’ says the Wardrobe Mistress to the Assistant Wardrobe Mistress, ‘These ones are getting a bit yellow under the arms.’

  A woman in her slip, I think it is fair to say, is someone who has just had sex with the main character. She is not married, because a married woman on an Irish stage would always wear a dressing gown. The woman in the slip reads as ‘naked’, though this is complicated by the fact that the actress wearing the slip also wears various other undergarments, even when sitting up, post-coitally, in bed. This is in case her nipples might show.

  Pegeen, in her Ur-slip, had a better time than any of them, and this I take as a sign that Synge was a better writer of women than those who came after him. The first are often the best. In Riders to the Sea he instituted another great trope of the Irish Theatre – the dead child. This is a child that the audience has never seen, heard, or met, who dies offstage to leave its mother grieving for the duration. Maurya, the mother in the play, has six of them, which makes her a hard act to follow. Synge may have thought he was being Greek about this, but subsequent playwrights just think they are being Irish. They seem to think that if a woman says, ‘I had a child and it died’ we will always believe them, in a way that we do not believe a dead body on stage: in the way, indeed, in which we do not believe a child onstage.