Synge’s Playboy and the Eugenics of Language

Abstract

While much criticism of The Playboy of the Western World has focused on Christy’s self-actualization through language, this essay asserts that Synge’s imaginatively hybrid diction constitutes a critique of the discourses of heritage contemporaneous with the play’s debut – biological and cultural, eugenic and evolutionary, as well as the projects of cultural and literary recuperation so central to the Irish Literary Revival. The drama’s eugenic component reveals itself in the overarching objective of the main character, which is to kill his father and reinvigorate his lineage by marrying the beautiful and vital Pegeen Mike. The drama’s cultural work is embedded in its linguistic negotiation between the colonizers’ English and the land’s native Gaelic. The inexorable force of unwanted heritage (biological, cultural, theatrical, linguistic) is subverted only through an imaginative act that both acknowledges and transforms the authority of the past.