Subworlds, Props, and Settings in Joyce's "Exiles"

Abstract

In 1880, the Irish melodramatist and actor Hubert O'Grady began producing his play Emigration, which, as part of a cycle of historical dramas including The Famine and The Eviction, became one of the most popular plays performed both at the famous Queen's Theatre in Dublin and throughout the Irish countryside. During the late nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, O'Grady's works found their way into the mass consciousness of Ireland; like other Irish historical plays, they brought uneasily into alignment the brutal historical facts of Hibernian life under English rule and the conventions, especially the love conventions, derived from English and continental melodrama. Together with the plays of P. J. Bourke, J. W. Whitbread, and the like, O'Grady's offerings helped to shape Irish resistance at the working-class level to the colonial situation. They also formed the dramatic norm against which the Abbey Theatre defined itself not melodrama but folk drama. And they propagated an awareness of intimate human relationships as scenes performed against a setting of longed-for revolution and dismaying political paralysis. We might take O'Grady's now largely unknown Emigration 1 as a reference point with which Joyce's only extant play calls for comparison. By pairing these thematically related Irish plays, we broach questions about the class-specific critique that occurs in Exiles, about the relationship between an English and an Irish audience (a topic that was much on the minds of the serious Irish playwrights of Joyce's day), and about the resistance to sociopolitical manipulation that Joyce's play seems designed, like much Irish theatre, to stimulate.