Dine 1 Kelsa Dine Senior Project Allison Campbell 28 November 2011

The Tinker and the Witch: Social, Spatial, and Thematic Similarities Between Marina Carr s By the Bog of Cats and Euripides Medea Marina Carr s adaptation of Medea for the modern stage is, she says, a reminder that there are still people in this day and age who will kill for things and die for things (Gardner 1). Thus it should come as no surprise that By the Bog of Cats , while not an exact retelling of Euripides Medea, remains heavily influenced by the original work. Beyond simply sharing common textual and thematic elements, both By the Bog of Cats and Medea respond to and reflect upon social and cultural upheaval in their respective eras with the intention to assuage or at least acknowledge the pain these changes have inflicted on their countrymen. As one might expect, there of course exist obvious similarities in the texts themselves; Carr is not above including sly references to the original in her piece, and she and Euripides share a common sensibility when it comes to dealing with performance space. Additionally, both Carr and Euripides clearly articulate the difficulty faced by women of power in a male-dominated society, and carefully explore the damaging effects of ostracism as experienced by the Other. In his essay, A Greek Theater of Ideas, William Arrowsmith posits that Euripides wrote his tragedies in response to shifting social mores and a loss of innocence caused by a schism in the culture, especially in the great argument

Dine 2 between physis (nature) and nomos (custom, tradition, and law) in which the citizens of Greece began to doubt not only the laws they upheld but the very sanctity of the state, once thought divinely established (Arrowsmith 34). Euripides reflection of this schism in his writing provided both an emotional outlet and a platform for further discussion for the Athenian people, who regarded the theater, not as entertainment, but as the supreme instrument of cultural instruction, a democratic paideia [education] complete in itself (32-33). Euripides also struggled with the changing times he was tormented by the disappearance of the old

integrated culture and the heroic image of man that had incarnated that culture (34), as well as a collapse of the old world-order, which trapped the heroes of his predecessors theatrical work in new and anti-heroic circumstances which degrade [them] and make [them] ludicrous (33) in a context where human nature now shows itself in a new nakedness that all too often proved itself to be violent or unpleasant. Yet it is this same nakedness that also revealed a startling new range of behavior, chaotic and uncontrollable (34) that a bold enough playwright might mine for material. Euripides dramas are marked by their systematic exposure and deflation of traditional heroism (37) which infuses his work with a new sense of realism. His characters are fractured beings, emblems of a divided culture and the new incompleteness of the human psyche (40-41). A Medea without Jason would not be a drama at all it is the nature of Euripides characters to grind off one another

like two rocks (Carr 269) and thus expose the overwhelming strain of cultural and social change. The old heroic Jason becomes nothing more than a vulgar

Dine 3 adventurer (Arrowsmith 37) in this new context, an alien time which immoralizes or distorts him (41). In fact, The very strain that Euripides succeeds in imposing upon his characters is the mark of their modernity, their involvement in a culture under similar strain. And it is the previously unsuspected range of the human psyche, the discovery of its powers, its vulnerability to circumstance, its incompleteness and its violence, that interest Euripides, not the psychological process itself. The soliloquy in which Medea meditates the murder of her children is much admired; but Euripides dramatic interest is in the collapse or derangement of culture the gap between eros and sophia [wisdom] which makes that murder both possible and necessary. (41) Euripides characters must bear the burden (ibid) of their uneasy transition from old world to new as gracefully as they can, but the widening gulf between reality and tradition; between the operative and the professed values of [their] culture; between fact and myth; between nomos and physis; between life and art (38) makes it terribly difficult for them to survive, let alone function in a contained and logical fashion. Euripides used his work as a way to think critically and constructively about [his] world (32) rather than allowing himself to be overwhelmed by the flux all around him. As a result the moral texture of his work is often difficult for the audience moral satisfaction [does] not come easily or even at all problems may

be left unresolved and the intended overall effect of the piece may very well be discomfort or even pain, and the purpose of this discomfort will be to influence the social rather than the individual behavior of the spectator (32). Medea is perhaps one of his best examples of this so-called difficulty of moral texture; Superficially it is a critique of relations between men and women, Greeks and barbarians, and an ethos of hard, prudential self-interest

Dine 4 as against passionate love; at a profounder level it is a comprehensive critique of the quality and state of contemporary culture. (47) The pain Medea causes the audience allows them to acknowledge the deeper, unacknowledgeable pain they feel in response to the unstoppable changes taking place in their own world. For Athenian citizens, the theater was more than pure entertainment it was a form of cultural instruction that provided both an

emotional outlet and a platform for further discussion. Euripides wrote Medea in reaction to the social changes taking place in Athens and Greece in general at the time. The old belief in the sanctity of the state was faltering, faith in old theatrical heroes was waning, and the human psyche was revealing itself to be frighteningly raw, fractured, and incomplete. Similarly, Marina Carr s adaptation reflects a rapidly changing and increasingly unfamiliar Ireland. The years leading up to the publication of By the Bog of Cats were rife with politically and religiously motivated paramilitary violence and rioting (guardian.co.uk). The 1998 establishment of the Belfast Agreement, commonly known as the Good Friday Agreement, served to alleviate most but not all tensions by providing a more integrated and balanced

political forum (niassembly.gov.uk). The Omagh bombing, which took place only four months after the Good Friday Agreement and killed 28 people, devastated the small Northern Ireland town; it was also the first real post-Agreement test of the people s determination to have peace (Freedland). With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Carr turned to Medea for her inspiration the structure of Greek

tragedy permits a political response to irresolvable, extreme situations without being crudely topical (Foley 3).

Dine 5 Born of a long period of explicit violence, By the Bog of Cats remains a timely piece, enriched by Carr s inclusion of her own experience and knowledge of the Midlands (McDonald 129). Although Hester is denied Medea s triumphant escape in a chariot drawn by dragons (Euripides 43), her death is a grimly truthful reflection of quieter turbulence rising in Ireland 1(McDonald 129). By the Bog of Cats opened in San Jos, California on September tenth, 2001, just hours before the attack on the Twin Towers (Gardner 2). Carr, present for the opening, expressed her surprise at the size of the audience, describing it as a trail of pilgrimage. Forty thousand people coming up from Silicon Valley to see this dark, dark play in a dark time (ibid). The cathartic nature of By the Bog of Cats is not accidental like its parent, Medea, it captures

The blinding force of life itself, stripped of any mediating morality or humanizing screen; naked, unimpeded, elemental eros; intense, chaotic, and cruel; the primitive, pre-moral, pre-cultural condition of man and the world. (Arrowsmith 50) In this way, By the Bog of Cats allows its audiences to confront the nature of the

world they are living in and come to terms with the pain it causes them to feel. While productions of Greek theater were certainly emotionally and linguistically rich, there were of course limitations namely in technology, budget,

and physical performance space As a result productions were commonly set in front of, and not in, character s houses (Oedipus Rex and Medea are prime examples of this). Therefore, it makes sense that, in her adaptation of Medea, Carr should use conventions of traditional Greek theater to deal with her treatment of performance

In Ireland in the year 2000 six children died at the hands of a suicidal parent. John McDonagh, Amid Our Troubles, p. 218.

Dine 6 space. For two of its three acts, By the Bog of Cats... takes place out-of-doors the Bog of Cats itself, and outside Hester s house and Big Josie s caravan. Characters in By the Bog of Cats... wander across the empty expanse of the bog and take entrances from and exits into Hester s house and the caravan. Similarly, Medea s stage directions clearly denote entrances coming from and exits going into Medea s house. All other exits and entrances in both pieces are taken in the spaces around the houses. Although Carr does break from Greek theatrical conventions for her second act it is by far the shortest section of the play, representing only eighteen of the her use of the interior space of Xavier Cassidy s house is highly on

play s 76 pages

reminiscent of her handling of the exteriors. Rather than divide up the interior space and have the action take place in a series of disparate rooms, Carr has chosen to set the act in a single large room, one big enough to accommodate a long table covered in a white tablecloth, laid for the wedding feast, and perhaps even a band (298). The actors have enough space to cross one another s paths in passing, and also to cluster and talk in separate groups reminiscent of the near-concurrent actions that occur between Josie and Mrs. Kilbride and their counterparts Hester and Catwoman in the first act. Marina Carr s choice to open By the Bog of Cats with the image of a female figure trailing the corpse of a black swan across a bleak white landscape of ice and snow immediately sets a compelling and mysterious tone for the women of the play, one that is further emphasized by Hester s interaction with the Ghost Fancier (265). Not everyone who lives on the bog can see the Ghost Fancier, however

Dine 7 Hester is one of the few who has the gift of seein things as they are, not as they should be, but exactly as they are (274). Hester derives little joy from this so-called gift, though, troubled by the forces she feels running in her blood that she s fought so hard to keep wraps on (325), but her power unseen is undeniable. both over the seen and the

While certain of the townspeople do call Hester a witch, more threatening than her perceived proficiency in any kind of black art thing (324) is her success as a self-made, unmarried woman in a patriarchal society and her audacious claim Carthage Kilbride would be nothin today if it wasn t for me (268). When held at gunpoint by Xavier Cassidy, the town patriarch, Hester refuses to yield, any fear of death negated by her stubbornness and pride. She burns down her own house, refusing to obey or leave quietly. Hester recognizes that she is responsible for her own fate (King 45), and while that is at times for her a terrifying prospect, it is ultimately the source of her strength. The original versions of Greek drama provide an unusual respect for the power of women to rebel and to subvert the power relations to which they are subjected (Wilmer 114); in this fashion Medea too is a force to be reckoned with it is only with her aid that Jason survived his Colcian adventures with the firebreathing bulls and fleece-guarding dragon (Mills 291), although he later denies that she was of any value to him. Medea is also skilled in the making and administration of potions and poisons, offering to cure Aegis of his impotence in return for her safety, and killing the Athenian princess with a poisoned dress and

Dine 8 diadem. Like Hester, Medea laments her power it has only brought her strife. In the course of By the Bog of Cats and Medea, Hester and her predecessor establish themselves as women of power. Both women Express values that oppose the patriarchal order, and their viewpoints resonate in today s more sexually liberated, divorce-prone society where women have gained unprecedented power in government and the workforce but continue to strive for equality, respect, and control over their own bodies. (Wilmer 109) Hester Swane was born on the Bog of Cats and over the past fourteen years has built her life up from a caravan on the side of the bog (Carr 268). Her shared wealth is what allowed Carthage, one of the Kilbrides who never owned anythin (289), to purchase land and improve his social standing with the townspeople, but she is still not considered a full member of her society. Although Hester herself is not one of the Travelling People, her mother was and it is the presumed in this case, her cleverness as

uncleanliness of her tinker blood that unequivocally brands Hester an outsider (ibid). Despite her father s status as a settled man, the shadow of Big Josie s heritage clings to Hester; as a child, she was acutely aware of her mother s non-person status, and as an adult she must face the townspeople s assumptions that she is worthless, dangerous, and destructive. Worse than being accused of having lazy shiftless blood (312), however, she is threatened with actual physical harm. When Hester refuses to leave her home, she is told that the townsfolk will burn [her] out if [they] have to (315) later, Xavier Cassidy threatens to cut that tinker tongue from her

mouth and brand her lips (332).

Dine 9 Despite the threats and violent hostility Hester faces from the townsfolk, she continues to assert her right to belong. Taken away from the bog at a young age after her mother s disappearance, Hester returns with one desire: to be able to live in the only place she calls home. I m goin nowhere, she states in response to the unrelenting pressure to leave, this here is my house and my garden and my stretch of the bog and no wan s runnin me out of here (268). Stubborn as she is, the constant need to prove herself settled as any of yees (295) wears on Hester she is torn between her love of the only home she knows

and her anger at those who ostracize her, inspiring a hard and bitter pride in her own outsider state. She has been used and discarded by the man she taught the ways of love (King 45), and feels as though she is slowly being eradicated or erased. There is very little left for Hester in the world she inhabits can trust. What have I ever done on you that ya feel the need to take everythin from me? Hester asks (Carr 283). There is, of course, no answer just the silent certainly no one she

invisible expanse of her Otherness that leaves her with no one to turn to (Wilmer 122). Even Hester s seven-year-old daughter repudiates her: Josie: Me name is Josie Kilbride. Hester: That s what I said. Josie: Ya didn t, ya said Josie Swane. I m not a Swane. I m a Kilbride. Hester: I suppose you re ashamed of me too. (Carr 292) Although Josie s rejection of her mother springs from a desire to defy her grandmother and therefore lacks the intentional malice of the ostracism Hester faces daily from her neighbors, it is still painful for Hester to be spurned by her only child.

Dine 10 Abandoned by her mother, replaced by her lover, rejected by her neighbors, and a source of embarrassment for her daughter, Hester is slowly vanishing from the acknowledged world. She has been cut free from the fabric of society by her Other state, and finds herself becoming a ghost while still alive. Similarly, Euripides Medea is a barbarian, an outsider to Athenian society (Raber 307) with no family to turn to. According to Athenian law, Medea cannot become a citizen or enjoy the rights of citizenship, and as a result her marriage to Jason is not considered legally valid (Raber 307). Medea s Otherness is compounded by the fact that she is not only a foreigner, but someone who entered Greece from outside the whole known world (Mills 291) things in her life are Jason and her children. Yet despite the vast differences that exist between Medea and the Athenian women, Euripides takes pains to show that Medea is not all pure barbarian femininity, but rather a barbarian woman who has been partially and imperfectly Hellenized (Arrowsmith 48); a completely barbarian Medea would turn the play into a clumsy, shambling farce, and that is not Euripides intention. Rather, Euripides shows Medea making use of her civilized virtues (49), emphasizing from the beginning how much of her energy is dominated by her attempt to pass for Greek, to say the right thing (48) in order to highlight the totality of her exclusion from society. When Jason abandons Medea for a more politically advantageous marriage with Glauce, Creon s daughter in order to secure a connection to the throne of Corinth (Raber 307), he attempts to placate her by insisting that his only intention the only truly familiar

Dine 11 in marrying Glauce was to breed a royal progeny to be brothers/ To the children I have now (Euripides 19). However, Legal reality in fifth century Greece dictated that the children of outsiders could not claim citizenship any more than could their foreign parents. Jason has in fact fully destroyed any status his sons could hope to hold; the fact that Creon initially decrees their exile shows how marginal they have in fact become. The interests of the state, in short, have for Jason supplanted the interests of blood. (Raber 309) In one selfish move, Jason effectively renders Medea and her children non-persons in the eye of Athenian law. Rapidly slipping into Othered invisibility in a strange and unwelcoming world, Medea is left with few options in murdering her

children, she simply fulfills by action what his [Jason s] ideological stance regarding his first family has already accomplished (ibid): Their total vanishment. William Arrowsmith is absolutely correct when he writes, for Hellas and humanity a new and terrible day dawns at the close of the Medea (Arrowsmith 49); an equally haunting night yawns open at the end of By the Bog of Cats . Both Carr and Euripides have accomplished in their work that sense of purgation or catharsis which all writers of tragedy strive for, but few achieve. Medea is still incredibly relevant today, and it is to Carr s credit that she has crafted an adaptation strong enough to stand on its own.

Dine 12 Works Cited Arrowsmith, William. A Greek Theater of Ideas. Arion 2.3 (1963) 32-56. Carr, Marina. By the Bog of Cats 1999. 256-241. Euripides. Medea. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993. Foley, Helen P. Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy. Transactions of the American Philological Association 129 (1999) 1-12. Freedland, Jonathan. The bomb hit right where it was placed: at Omagh s heart. Guardian News and Media Unlimited. 22 Oct. 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1019591,00.ht ml>. Gardner, Lyn. Death becomes her. Guardian News and Media Unlimited. 17 Oct. 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/nov/29 >. King, Robert L. Life in the Theater. The North American Review 284.2 (1999) 4548. McDonald, Marianne. Rebel Women: Brendan Kennelly s Version s of Irish Tragedy. New Hibernia Review 9.3 (2005) 123-136. Mills, S. P. The Sorrows of Medea. Classical Philology 75.4 (1980) 289-296. Northern Ireland: a brief history of the Troubles. Guardian News and Media Unlimited. 22 Oct. 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/northernireland/page/0,12494,1569841,00.ht ml>. Northern Ireland Assembly. Northern Ireland Assembly. 28 Oct. 2011. Marina Carr: Plays. London: Faber and Faber,

Dine 13 <http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/>. Raber, Karen L. Murderous Mothers and the Family/State Analogy in Classical and Renaissance Drama. Comparative Literature Studies 37.3 (2000) 298-300. Wilmer, Steve. Women in Greek Tragedy Today: A Reappraisal. Theatre Research International 32.2 (2007) 106-107.