Ideology and dramatic form in the plays of Sean O'Casey, 1922-49

Thesis

Sean O'Casey was a writer much involved in both social and theatrical politics. He was, by turns, a Communist, nationalist, pacifist, feminist and Christian-humanist, and one of the early concerns of the thesis is to clarify his political position vis a vis leading socialists of his time, and to explore the extent to which his politics took overt shape as an ideology within his plays.

A second and central concern is to explore the aesthetics of the less definite 'political' form of carnivalism within O'Casey's work, and to examine in the plays the relations between this form of anti-rationalist and anti-bourgeois comedy and a parallel mood of increasing despair and 'nihilism' which I believe to be related to O'Casey's frustration at finding so few of his political ambitions and values fulfilled in the Ireland of his time.

At its best, his carnivalism expresses a deeply dialogical grasp of metaphysical issues. At its worst, it twists into an entropic nihilism under the pressure of its own anti-idealistic materialism. In the later plays (1927-49), an attempt is made to balance the earlier nihilism with a stress upon carnivalistic elements of dance, song and play, but the later work is flawed at those moments where metaphysical expressions become detached from social and self-consciously discursive processes and become merely an expression of romantic vitalism.

Finally, one can theorise O'Casey's carnivalism as a response to the efforts of some contemporary writers to detach their literary language from ordinary social processes in the at tempt to create a 'mythological' and nationally pure form of drama which had shed signs of its contemporaneity. I have chosen the example of W. B. Yeats to illustrate this point. O'Casey's carnivalism produces a hybrid form of Irish drama which is, by contrast. unashamed of its precipitation from the heteroglossic literary and social discourses of its time. Ultimately, however, O'Casey shares much of Yeats's suspicion of English empiricism and utilitarianism and his work can be seen as complementary to Yeats's own post-colonial development.

Authors: Higginson, P; Peter Higginson

• Publication date: 1994
• Type of award: MLitt
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: Sean O'Casey
• Subjects: English Language and Literature