Synge's Riders to the Sea: Island as Cultural Battleground

Abstract

John Millington Synge had a tendency to romanticize Irish peasant life: in The Aran Islands, for example, Synge presented the islanders as naive and charming primitives whose lives, while not Edenic, were largely and happily unspoiled by contact with the modern world. Most critical opinion of the last eighty-five years has at least tacitly accepted this image of Synge's peasants.' A criticism informed by contemporary anthropological insights suggests, however, that Rousseauan assessments sell short the plays of Synge and miss much of their richness. If we read the plays admitting the possibility that Synge's characters are neither naive nor uncomplicated, we see that his dramatic presentation of the peasants differs remarkably from his primitivist notions about them. Synge never allowed his theories to dominate his creative vision. As a result, he gave us not romanticized peasants untouched by modernity, but rather individuals fractured by modernity, peasants caught up in the major cultural transition of the modern age: the transition from a folk to an urban consciousness.