Disability, Identity, and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Drama

Abstract

This essay assesses the role of physical disability in early twentieth-century Irish dramatic literature. In particular, by focusing on such plays as W.B. Yeats's On Baile's Strand (1903) and the character of Johnny Boyle in Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock (1924), it critiques the tradition of identifying characters with disabilities solely by their physical impairment and exploiting disability as metaphor; physical disability has been historically employed as a synecdoche for a thwarted morality, or blindness as an allegory for prophecy. However, scholarly criticisms of the Social Model of Disability have demonstrated how disability can be reappropriated to reconceptualize notions of bodily normalcy. Furthermore, this essay suggests that the convention of “cripping up”, an industry term describing the practice of an able-bodied actor playing a character with a physical disability, contributes to the marginalization of those with physical disability in Irish culture. The result is the potential degradation of the disabled body, a stylized performance evoking vaudevillian conventions; performance thus engenders belief in stereotype.