Tragedy and Ecophobia: A Study of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea

Abstract

Terry Eagleton’s humorous question of “how a tragedy differs from a congress of global warming” echoes the tragic and traumatic life of human beings facing increasing violence of nature. In a tragedy, the protagonist does not have biophilia as conceptualized by Edward O. Wilson to explain the innate tendency of human beings to find connections with nature and other forms of life, rather experience with themselves of an ecophobia, ‘antipathy towards nature’ as defined by Simon C. Estok. In a tragedy, “the unfathomable agencies of Nature”, to Eagleton, create ecophobia among the characters of tragedies written in most of the periods of literature. It is experienced in a Renaissance tragedy Macbeth by the Bard of Avon with the appearance of ‘nature’s mischief’ as well as in a modern tragedy Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge with the destructive sea devouring Maurya’s five sons, husband, and husband’s father creating an antipathy towards nature as shown in Macbeth’s fear of the ‘unruly’ and ‘rough’ night and the ambiguous movement of the Brinamwood, and Maurya’s desperate request to resist Bartley to travel by sea to the Galway fair. Their ecophobia has created an unhinged personality among them. With all these perspectives this paper aims to re-establish a connection between ecophobia and tragedy and examine how ecophobia has been internalized among the characters of the aforementioned play.