Nr. 3 (32) anul IX / iulie-septembrie 2011 - ROMDIDAC

literatura universală
NICOLETA STANCA
Lugh and Marconi against
De Valera's constitution: female challenges in
Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa
The essay aims at discussing Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa as an
illustration of feminine challenges of conservative Irish Catholic values in the
1930s. There is a focus on analyzing dancing, music and storytelling as non-verbal
modes of creating a special female bonding and as a means of social defiance in the
confrontation with the oppressive principles of patriarchal Ireland in the 1930s. Brian’s
play is seen as concerned with a microcosm, represented by the lives of the Mundy
sisters and brother. On the one hand, the family will be seen as dominated by a sense
of some missing or lost dimension; on the other hand, we will draw attention to the
music, dances, laughter, jokes and sense of fun permeating the play. A motif that will
be closely investigated is that of exile or homecoming, depicted through Father Jack’s
story. The essay will also attempt to show the similarity between the rituals associated
in Ireland with the festival of Lughnasa, the Mundy sisters’ dancing on the Irish tune and
the African dances that Father Jack remembers in order to prove the deep humanity
of all these manifestations.
Keywords: Irishness, memory, homecoming, exile, storeytelling, dancing, rituals,
patriarchy, defiance, womanhood
D
Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
172
ancing at Lughnasa, first produced in 1990 at the Abbey Theatre, is a ritual
drama in which the ancient pagan Irish festival of music and dance, the
Lughnasa, is reflected in the lives of the five unmarried sisters and the
unreliable and unstable men in their lives. The focus of the play is on the
difficulties these women have to face to realize themselves in a rigid patriarchal
Catholic society. The primary theme may be considered the relationship
between the sisters, the female bonding that they have built, to which we
may subsume an interest in male-female relationships as well. Basically, “the
Mundy women face Ballybeg’s patriarchal world together” (Lojek 80).
Like many of Friel’s plays, it is set in Baile Beag (Ballybeg, in English) “a
remote part of Donegal” and, as Seamus Deane notes, in “that borderland
of Derry, Donegal and Tyrone in which a largely Catholic community leads a
reduced existence under the pressure of political and economic oppression”
(qtd. in Andrews 2). This imaginary place functions like Faulkner’s created
Yoknapatawpha County, Missisippi, in which he set many of his dark stories.