Taking the “Black Stick”

Abstract

The chapter explores representations of ageing fathers and husbands in J. M. Synge’s and Teresa Deevy’s theatre. In Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1903), the old husband threatens his young wife away with a black stick, symbolizing impotence, and the father in Deevy’s Katie Roche (1936), a religious fanatic, wants to punish his daughter by flogging. The Playboy of the Western World (1907) by Synge and The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) by Deevy also use the stick in similar ways. By analysing the ageing male characters in the four plays, the chapter studies how they reflect the destructive nature of patriarchy and its constricting ideologies which determined the fate of many young people, especially women in early twentieth-century colonial Ireland and 1930s post-independence Ireland respectively.