Riders To The Sea A New View

"Riders to the Sea": A New View
Author(s): Bert Cardullo

Source: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies , Jun., 1984, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jun., 1984),
pp. 95-112
Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25512591
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Riders to the Sea: A New View 95
Riders to the Sea: A New View
by
Bert Cardullo
Maurya has willed Bartley's death, but she has also throughout the play desired the retrieval of
her favorite son Michael's body for a proper Christian burial. What she gets for her "tragic error"
is the return of Bartley's body and the loss of Michael's for burial at home. Maurya realizes her
error and paradoxically suffers more than she ever has before over the drowning of one of her
men.
Riders to the Sea was meant by Synge, consciously or unconsciously, to be exper

Aran Islanders. It was they, in their very difficult lives, who would be comforted
that nothing could happen to them that would be as bad as what happened to Ma
would be comforted by the thought that, if the sea did take one of their family, the
they could do about it.
Until Riders is read first as a tragedy of the Aran Islanders, it will co
misunderstood. Suffused at once with a language of inevitability and of distancin
Oedipus Rex, is less a tragedy of character than a tragedy of a people, of a comm
Maurya a voulu la mort de Bartley, mais pendant toute la piece elle a egalement v
le corps de Michael, son fils prefere, pour lui donner une sepulture decente. La c
son erreur tragique est qu'elle recupere le corps de Bartley, mais pas celui de
pourra done pas etre enterre dans son pays. Maurya se rend compte de son err
meme plus de la disparition d'un de ses hommes qu'auparavant.
Synge a voulu, consciemment ou inconsciemment, que l'impact de Riders t
ressenti par les habitants de 1'ile d'Aran. lis devaient se sentir reconfortes par la
ne pouvait pas leur arriver d'aussi penible qu'a Maurya au cours de leur diffici
devaient se sentir reconfortes par la pensee que si la mer emportait l'un des leurs,
qui'ils puissent y faire.
Ce n'est que lorsque Riders to the Sea sera considere comme la tragedie des hab
d'Aran que la piece pourra recevoir une lecture adequate. Ecrite dans un langag
fois l'inevitabilite et le recul, Riders to the Sea, comme Oedipe Roi, est moins
personnage que celle d'un peuple, d'une communaute.
Critics for years have been testifying to the substance of J.

Riders to the Sea (1904) while at the same time denying the one
status. Ronald Peacock finds that the play "is without doubt re
the way it presents unpretentious heroism opposing Sea and Te
hang like Fate over men's lives. But it has nothing whatever of the
of the tragic processes in human life that we find handled and mas
greatest writers."1 Robert Heilman says that "the dominant effect
is one of pathos, and its import is limited"; he calls the play an
special type of melodrama, the "drama of disaster," in which th
are victims either of nature (Riders), society, the self, political for
men.2 Denis Donoghue, applying to Riders Francis Fergusson's c
tragic rhythm (itself borrowed from Kenneth Burke) as moving fr
The Canadian Journal Of Irish Studies, 10, 1 (June, 1984) 95-112

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96 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
through passion to perception, finds that the play comes up short: "At any
stage, the taking by Maurya of a positive course of action is impossible
because the scales are too heavily weighed against her (a human conflict is one
thing, but conflict between an old woman and the Sea is another). For this
reason, action is frustrated, purpose cannot even be formulated. The play
ends in Maurya's Acceptance, rather than in any positive perception."3
What all of these critics have in common is the belief that, since Maurya
cannot possibly win or even "break even" against such an adversary as the
sea, there can be no tragedy. But they are mistaken. Maurya of course cannot
possibly win in any contest with the sea, even as Oedipus cannot win in his
contest with Fate. The point, however, is not whether Maurya can win, but
how she loses, how she tries to beat the sea at its own game, so to speak, and
loses even at that. Any satisfactory interpretation of Riders must, then, take
into serious account what happens at the spring well, when Bartley is riding
down to the sea, and significantly, no critic I am aware of has ever done this.
Once I have described the action at the spring well and considered its
implications for the rest of the play, I shall be in a better position to fathom
Synge's intentions in writing Riders.
Maurya tries to stop Bartley from sailing to Connemara to sell the two
horses at the Galway fair, but he is deaf to her pleas: the family needs money
desperately to live, and the sale of horses is one of the few ways for them to get
it. Because Bartley goes against her will, Maurya refuses to give him her
blessing. As her sole-surviving son leaves, she says, "He's gone now, God
spare us, and we'll not see him again. He's gone now, and when the black night
is falling I'll have no son left me in the world."4 She seems to know he is going
to be drowned here, even as she does when she says, pleading with Bartley not
to go to sea this day, "It's hard set we'll be surely the day you're drownd'd with
the rest" (p. 11). I would go so far as to say that not only does Maurya "seem to
know" Bartley is going to be drowned, but she also wants him to be drowned,
and therein lies her tragedy. She knows the sea to be an implacable enemy;
her problem or dilemma is not that the sea will take Bartley, but when it will
take him. She has to decide whether she, at her age, can "wait out" the death
by drowning of her last and youngest son - after all, her own husband and
father-in-law were hardly young men when the sea took them - or whether she
would like the sea to take Bartley this time out and to be done once and for all
with worrying about what the sea can next do to her life and her loved men. It
is a tragic dilemma Maurya finds herself in, and she does take action (this
corresponds to "purpose" in the purpose-passion-perception scheme).
Maurya wants and doesn't want Bartley to be drowned, then, and nowhere
is this more clear than in her report of her response, or rather lack of response,
to Bartley at the spring well. She goes there to meet Bartley on his way down
to the sea to catch the boat to Connemara; she wants to give him the blessing
she neglected to give him at the house, and she wants to give him some bread

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(freshly baked by her daughters) for his trip. But she doesn't give him her
blessing, and she doesn't give him the bread. She says, "I tried to say 'God
speed you,' but something choked the words in my throat" (p. 19; emphasis
mine). She wants to give her blessing, but cannot. She wants Bartley to live,
and she does not. By her action, or inaction, finally, she does not want him to
live. Through her vision of Michael sitting upon the gray pony (this vision a
form of action itself) - Bartley rides down to the sea on a red mare, with the
gray pony trailing behind him - Maurya wills Bartley's death. The already
drowned Michael becomes the symbol of death atop the gray pony, and it is
the gray pony that bolts and knocks Bartley off his horse and into the sea
where he drowns. (Bartley must ride the horses down into the sea to meet the
Galway boat; because of the tides and shallows off the island, boats must
anchor far offshore.)
While Maurya wills Bartley's death in not giving him her blessing and in
seeing Michael atop the gray pony, she does not expect Bartley's body to be
found. She makes this clear when she says, as he leaves the cottage for the
boat to Connemara, "He's gone now, God spare us, and we'll not see him
again" (p. 11; emphasis mine), and also when she says, upon returning from
the spring well and her vision, "Bartley will be lost now, and let you call in
Eamon and make me a good coffin out of the white boards, for I won't live
after them [her sons, husband, and father-in-law]" (p. 21; emphasis mine).
Yet, strangely, she holds out hope that Michael's body will wash up on their
island, even though he's been lost at sea for nine days. She buys the new white
boards for his coffin, so certain, or at least hopeful, is she that his body will be
found. Before men bring in the drowned Bartley's body toward the end of the
play, she asks "half in a dream" (p. 21), after stretching out her hand toward
the door in anticipation of the men, if it's Patch or Michael they're bringing in.
Patch was one of her sons whose body was found, and she has just finished
telling of the return of Patch's body home "in the half of a red sail, and water
dripping out of it. .. and leaving a track to the door" (p. 21). Again here, it is
Michael's body Maurya still expects to be found, despite her earlier request,
made under the influence of her vision of Bartley's death, that the white
boards be used to make her coffin; she thinks Bartley's body will be lost for
good (she may will Bartley's death, but she has no idea it will occur the way it
does, thus making Bartley's body comparatively easy to retrieve). Her
daughter Cathleen finally tells her at this point that Michael's body has been
found "in the far north" (p. 23; Cathleen has already told her this once, upon
Maurya's return from the spring well with her vision), but Maurya still doesn't
believe it's not Michael's body that will be brought in directly - that's how
badly she wants to see even the dead Michael. She argues, "There does be a
power of young men floating round in the sea, and what way would they know
if it was Michael they had [in the far north], or another man like him, for when a
man is nine days in the sea, and the wind blowing, it's hard set his own mother

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would be to say what man was in it" (p. 23). Then Cathleen produces
Michael's clothes as evidence that he has indeed been found in the far north,
and Maurya's "passion" or "pain arising from action" begins.
She has willed Bartley's death, wanting to be through worrying about
when the sea will take her last man, wanting her "great rest" from the anguish
of life. But she has also throughout the play desired the retrieval of Michael's
body for a proper Christian burial. Her youngest daughter, Nora, tells us
Maurya was fonder of Michael than of Bartley, and perhaps of her other four
sons (p. 25). Maurya has wanted to be done with fathers and sons once and for
all in her life, and she has wanted simultaneously to finalize her "rest" or
peace with the burial of her favorite, Michael. What she gets for her "tragic
error," for wanting Bartley's drowning and disappearance at sea and
Michael's body, is Bartley's body and Michael's drowning and loss for burial
at home (he is buried, presumably in an unmarked grave, in the far north
where he was found). Maurya realizes her error and paradoxically suffers
more than she ever has before over the drowning of one of her men, when
Cathleen hands her what's left of Michael's clothes. Synge has Maurya stands
up slowly and take the shirt and sock in her hands at this point (p. 23), to
symbolize the dawning of the truth on her, the receiving of knowledge by her.
Unlike Nora and Cathleen, she need not ask now if it's Bartley's body that's
being brought in; she knows it is. She says nothing from the moment she gets
Michael's clothes until she kneels down by the table that holds Bartley's
body; she does not acknowledge the statement by one of the old women that
"the grey pony knocked [Bartley] over into the sea, and he was washed out
where there is a great surf on the white rocks" (p. 23). Maurya does not cry
here because her suffering is too great for tears.
Riders to the Sea has been called "the tragedy of a community," in which
the characters "are not so much individuals as typical representatives of that
community,"5 and nowhere is that more apparent, I believe, than in the
spreading throughout this community of five, including the priest, of a
responsibility for Bartley1 s drowning clearly centered in Maurya. In the play's
rising action, Cathleen keeps the knowledge of the retrieval of Michael's body
in the far north from Maurya by not producing the shirt and sock brought by
the priest for identification before Bartley leaves for Connemara. Cathleen
may do this out of compassion for Maurya - she doesn't want to rekindle
Maurya's grief, and her hope, if the clothes are not Michael's - but the
eventual result is tragic. Without the knowledge that Michael's body has been
found, Maurya continues to hope the body of her favorite son will wash up on
the shore, and both refuses to give her blessing to Bartley and envisions his
death at the spring well so as to be done once and for all with waiting for the
sea to take her men.
The priest himself advises Nora to examine Michael's clothes apart from
Maurya, and "if it's Michael's they are you can tell herself he's got a clean

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burial by the grace of God, and if they're not his, let no one say a word about
them, for she'll be getting her death with crying and lamenting" (p. 5). Nora
and Cathleen do examine Michael's clothes apart from Maurya, but too late,
as I have explained, after Bartley has left for the Galway fair. Then they
decide, ironically, not to reveal the existence of these clothes to Maurya when
she returns from the spring well, because "maybe it's easier she'll be after
giving her blessing to Bartley" (p. 17), and it's "easy" they'll want her to
remain during the time Bartley is on the sea. Bartley in part brings on his own
doom because he insists on going to Connemara despite the rough seas. He
feels he must go, because "this is the one boat going for two weeks or beyond
it, and the fair will be a good fair for horses . .." (p. 9); he is the family's sole
support, and support the family he will. Maurya feels Bartley should stay
behind precisely because he is the family's sole support, and if he drowns on
the rough seas, the family will be destitute. Maurya refuses to give Bartley her
blessing when he leaves the house and then is unable to give him her blessing
at the spring well, thus precipitating his death, not only because she wants to
be through finally waiting for a man of hers to be claimed by the sea, but also
because she wants to punish Bartley for going against her will.
Amidst the keening of the old women and the ministrations of the old men
at the end, which underscore the play as the tragedy of a community, Maurya
comes to some awareness or perception about her wronging of Bartley. She
reveals this not through words, but through gesture. She "drops Michael's
clothes across Bartley's feet" (p. 25), and I take this gesture to mean that she
is placing Michael symbolically at Bartley's feet, to atone for her past placing
of the retrieval of Michael's body ahead of Bartley's survival at sea. Bartley
will now have a coffin out of the white boards that were originally intended for
Michael. After sprinkling Bartley's body with Holy Water, Maurya kneels
down and prays for a while and then "stands up again very slowly and spreads
out the pieces of Michael's clothes beside [Bartley's] body, sprinkling them
with the last of the Holy Water" (p. 25). Her standing up slowly here repeats
her standing up slowly when she received Michael's clothes from Cathleen,
and suggests, again, her gradual realization of the truth, her slow climbing to a
vantage point from which to view her situation clearly and fully. She knows
better now than to favor one son over the other, so she doesn't leave
"Michael" at Bartley's feet, but rather places his clothes alongside his
brother's body, as if they contained a body themselves. She makes Michael
equal to Bartley, going so far as to sprinkle his clothes with Holy Water, even
as she did the body of Bartley.
Paradoxically in this tragedy of a community, Maurya's willing of or
wishing for Bartley's death has been an interior, a private willing or wishing,
largely uncommunicated to or undebated by those around her, so extreme an
act is it, equal in extremity or outrageousness to her loss of all her other sons,
her husband, and her father-in-law to the sea. Accordingly, even as she is

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surrounded by her "community" - her two daughters and the old men and
women - she does her suffering, perceiving, explaining, and accepting alone,
inside.
The plot of Riders to the Sea clearly hinges on Maurya's vision at the spring
well, and the "supernatural" quality of this vision in what is often otherwise
seen as a realistic play has caused some commentators to demur. I have
purposely neglected to bring this up until now, because discussion of the
vision takes us into a larger discussion of what tragedy is and what audience
this particular tragedy was intended for. I have made my case for Maurya as a
tragic figure, and I wish now to place her in the larger context of the tragic
experience: what effect she and the play have on an audience.
Whether we believe Maurya could have the vision she has at the spring
well and then in addition have that vision fulfilled, seems to me to be beside
the point. We don't question the improbabilities of plot of a play like Oedipus
Rex, or the outrageousness of Lear's proposing at the start of King Lear to
divide up his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much each
loves him. And I don't think we should question Maurya's vision and its
fulfillment here: this is simply Synge's way of externalizing, of making visual,
Maurya's fears and desires, for his own artistic purposes. Maurya imagines
Bartley drowned, and he drowns; it would be possible for this to occur in real
life, but improbable. We see the dramatic ordering of this experience so as to
reveal strikingly, even exaggeratedly, Maurya's judgment on her last son's
taking to the sea. Exaggeratedly is the key word here, for however realistic
Riders may appear on the surface - in its setting and its suggestion of the
struggle of the Aran Islanders to eke out a living - it is not a realistic play. And I
don't mean it could not possibly be realistic because its language is so
different from that spoken by, say, Ibsen's characters: the language spoken by
Synge's characters is the intensified language spoken by the Aran Islanders,
selected, ordered, intensified and for dramatic effect, as all stage language is.
Happily for Synge, the language of the islanders was particularly suited to the
tragic idiom; I shall have more to say about this later. For now I want to apply
to Riders Charles R. Beye's statement that "it is not clear . . . Greek tragic
drama was ever intended to conjure up reality, to mirror nature, to be true...
the real effort of ancient tragic drama was to make over events in such a
fashion as to render them safe, distant, no longer palpable and menacing - in
sum, to shatter or to shroud any mirror in sight."6 This statement fits Riders if
only because of the extremity or outrageousness, the unreality, of its plot:
Maurya has lost five sons, her husband, and her father-in-law to the sea; she
then has her vision of Michael atop the gray pony and loses her last son,
Bartley, to the sea.
But Professor Beye's statement fits Riders in another way that might not

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be immediately apparent, because the play has never had any stagings on the
Aran Islands themselves. Beye writes further, "The Greeks looked to their
tragic performances to be reminded and reassured .... Alvin Gouldner has
shown how profoundly insecure the life of the ancient Greek was, living in a
society based on a win or lose contest system, seeing around him constantly
the slaves whose fate could any day become his own" (p. 35). In other words,
the Greeks looked to Oedipus Rex to be reassured in two ways: 1.) since what
happens to Oedipus - he kills his father and has children by his mother - is
surely one of the worst things that could happen to anyone, a spectator might
feel comforted by the thought that, chances are, nothing that bad could
happen to him; 2.) since there was no way for Oedipus to avoid what happened
to him, nothing he could possibly do to change things, a spectator might feel
comforted by the thought that, if something horrible happened to him, it was
because there was no way for him to avoid it, nothing he could possibly have
done to change things. What happens to Maurya - she loses seven men to the
sea and then wills the death of her last son - is surely one of the worst things
that could happen to anyone, in particular an Aran Islander. And there was no
way Maurya could have prevented the deaths of her five sons, husband, and
father-in-law, and little she could have done to avoid her vision of Michael
atop the gray pony; like Oedipus' arrogance or rashness, her vision only
hastens or aids in the fulfillment of the inevitable: Bartley's drowning at sea.
So what I am saying is that, ultimately, Riders is to the Aran Islanders as
Oedipus Rex was to the ancient Greeks; that Riders grew out of Synge's
experience on the islands and was meant by Synge, consciously or uncons
ciously, to be experienced by the islanders. It was their play. It was they,
in their very difficult lives, who would be comforted by the thought that
nothing could happen to them that would be as bad as what happened to
Maurya; they who would be comforted by the thought that, if the sea did take
one of their loved ones, there was nothing they could do about it.
Professor Beye writes that the
special need for which the Greeks created and sustained tragic
drama was one which in other cultures religion often satisfies.
We may note that in the fourth century when Isocrates,
Epicurus and Zeno created philosophical systems which
provided ethical modes and quasi-theological notions, tragedy
died, as though it were no longer needed when set side by side
with these emergent species of religion_A body of theology
we do not find [in ancient Greece] .... there was no priestly
caste, no dogma [;] the poets were free to contrive the Godhead
as they chose. Greek religious practice seems to have evolved
principally to help achieve an empathetic response to nature,
but not to try to make meaning of nature. It fell to the poets ...

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the task of making meaning . . . For the Greeks art is man's

protest against the meaninglessness of events ... Greek tragic
drama seems to mute the fundamental horror and despair of
human existence, and to do this by its very form .... Ancient
Greek tragedy protects us from looking into the deep, dark,
frightening well of the historical alternative, by constantly
insisting that whatever is, is, and it must be so.
(pp. 14-15, 17, 24)

Now the Aran Islanders certainly have a religion, and it is Catholicism. God
is referred to often in Riders ("God help her," "Lord knows," "The blessing of
God on you," "God forgive us"), but God is curiously powerless in this play,
and his powerlessness is called attention to all the more by the frequency with
which His name appears in the dialogue. Nora reports early in the play that
the priest refused to stop Bartley from going to the Galway fair on this
particular day with the words, "Let you not be afraid. Herself does be saying
prayers half through the night, and the Almighty God won't leave her
destitute with no son living" (p. 5). When Nora tells her mother what the
priest said after her mother's return from the spring well and her vision,
Maurya retorts, "It's little the like of him knows of the sea" (p. 21). Editor
William E. Hart glosses this line of Maurya's as follows: "Men who live by the
sea and not by the Chapel alone know it's little the sea cares for God or man."7
My point here is that, although the Aran Islanders have religion and pray
often, they recognize a force over which God has no control. And as a result,
Synge has created a tragic drama for them that satisfies a special need not
satisfied by their religion. Paradoxically, Riders makes meaning of nature for
the Aran Islanders, makes nature accessible or tolerable to them, in its protest
against the meaninglessness of nature's ways, its going the ever-present
potential of the sea for destruction one better by going it one worse and having
all Maurya's men destroyed by the sea.
"Two attitudes ... go to make ancient tragedy [a] comfortable art form,"
says Charles R. Beye. "One has to do with distancing and the other with the
dramatization of inevitability" (p. 19). Both attitudes can be found in Riders.
Let us begin with the play's "dramatization of inevitability." Riders has been
attacked precisely for its dramatization of inevitability. I quoted Denis
Donoghue earlier to the effect that "the taking by Maurya of a positive course
of action is impossible because the scales are too heavily weighted against
her." I am arguing, of course, that Synge intentionally weights the scales too
heavily against her and that the positive course of action she does take - her
vision at the spring well - backfires on her, even as Oedipus' determination to
find the murderer of Laius and rid Thebes of the plague backfires on him. The
mistake Donoghue and other critics make - certainly an understandable one
given the renown of this play outside the Aran Islands - is to read the play in a

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vacuum, to view it as something other than a product of the culture of the Aran
Islands. Professor Beye on the difference between modern Western culture
and ancient Greek culture is instructive here:
Coming from a culture which values surprise - stemming from

life viewed as an act of free will - we have trouble accommodating
our criticism to a dramatic form which is the constant reiteration
of the commonplace and already known. . . . The use of well
known stories with established endings [in Greek tragedy] sets
the tone for viewing subsequent events .... The implicit sense
of the deja vu or entendu which the spectator brings with him
allays all fears, dulls suspicion, palliates horror and fear by
taking the tension from the drama, the turn of events, no matter
how horrible, will be satisfying because it is the fulfillment of
what is known. This is a stylistic ingredient of the religious
solution for which tragedy was created.
(p. 22)
There is no evidence that the plot of Riders was a "well-known story with an
established ending" among the Aran Islanders, but it seems clear to me that
Synge chose the one story from the simple yet harsh lives of these islanders
the ending of which would be known to them, if not to us, immediately.8 Critics
like Donoghue may not get any satisfaction from knowing from the start what
is going to happen by the end of the play, but I believe the Aran Islanders
would have got such satisfaction. The sea is no great threat to Mr. Donoghue;
it is to the islanders, it is the single dominant force in their lives, and to know
from their own experience combined with the evidence of the play what would
happen to Bartley on his journey would have given them a feeling, however
illusory, of control over, or at least equality with, the sea. It is the kind of
feeling a boxer might get watching a fight between a champion who has
already defeated him and a challenger, knowing right away that the
champion is going to win again.
Riders has, I think, been widely misunderstood, and until it is read first as a
tragedy of the Aran Islanders and only then as, say, an ode to the resiliency
and dignity of the human spirit, it will continue to be misunderstood. "We are
not dealing with a literary clique or a socially elite class when we talk about the
production of ancient drama, but instead an art form which was popularly
satisfying," maintains Professor Beye (p. 17). This is something critics of
Greek tragedy often forget, and something critics of Riders should keep in
mind when writing about the play. We are dealing with a literary clique or a
socially elite class when we talk about Riders because the play was never
popularly satisfying to the Aran Islanders, although I believe it could have
been (in the same way that Waiting for Godotwas "popularly satisfying" to the

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inmates at San Quentin when it was performed there9). The audience of

Riders over the years has come from a "socially elite" class - from the
university, for example, in America - and it is to this "socially elite" class that
critics have, again understandably, addressed their comments on the play.
When Synge complained about the "modern intellectual drama" and its
"joyless and pallid words" - the drama of the "socially elite," in other words -
in his famous preface to The Playboy of the Western World,10 he was, I think,
really complaining about the degeneration of language that accompanied the
rise of cities and the development of technology. As life became easier, more
comfortable, more organized, language gradually deteriorated from a power
ful, poetic response or even challenge to nature, to a weak, pedestrian
accommodation of society. Language became just another tool in the
manipulation of the world instead of the primary means for self-expression,
self-assertion. Once this happened, the theatre became a place for the
exchange of ideas, as with Ibsen, Synge argues, but not for the communication
of the joy that is vigorous, beautiful language.
Charles R. Beye writes,"There are no special truths in ancient Greek
tragedy, no topicality_What do we learn from Sophocles [?] Not to kill our
father, nor marry our mother? That excessive hate breeds morbidity?... But.
. . didn't we know all this before? ... Of course we did" (p. 35). There are
special truths in Ibsen's Ghosts, there is topicality. But, to echo Professor
Beye, what do we learn from Riders? Not to wish for the death of our son? That
excessive fear or anxiety breeds superstitiousness? But didn't we know all this
before? Of course we did. Synge, it seems, wished in part in Riders to create
poetry out of the drama inherent in the lives of the Aran Islanders; to
reestablish for the "socially elite," let us say, the existence of words as music,
as the rhythm of living, the simple and defiant celebration of life. What he
succeeded in creating, however, was tragedy of an elemental order that we
have not seen since the Greeks. The Greeks did not go to the theatre to
participate in a lively exchange of ideas. "[They] contemplated a universe of
wilful, uncaring, arbitrary, capricious deities whose interest in mankind was
exploitative, retaliatory or sportive [, and they] went to their theater to
confront this fact. They saw stories which reinforced [these] central truths: life
does not work, death cancels meaning" (Beye, p. 35). Mutatis mutandis, the
ideal spectator of Riders - the native Aran Islander - would go to the theatre for
the same reasons as the ancient Greeks. Riders is anomalous in the history of
drama in that, fundamentally, it was created for an audience it never had. Even
though the Aran Islanders never benefited from its tragic art, it is time that
tragic art was recognized and appreciated. Those who complain of the slight
characterization in Riders (Hart, p. 80) should perhaps try to identify less with
Maurya at a performance of the play than with an imaginary Aran Islander
watching the same performance. Riders is not a tragedy of character, it is the
tragedy of a people.

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The ending of Riders could have been known to an audience of Aran

Islanders immediately, may be known to any audience immediately, but
Synge was taking no chances: he suffused Riders with the language of
inevitability so that there would be no mistake about the direction in which his
play was heading. Death is practically a way of life among the islanders, and
this affects their language. At one point Nora says, "And it's destroyed he'll
[Bartley] be going till dark night, and he after eating nothing since the sun went
up" (p. 11). "Destroyed," according to editor William E. Hart, in this context
means "fatigued, exhausted" (p. 90). But it also carries the meaning of
"killed," so that we getthe ending of the play suggested in Nora's line: Bartley
of course is killed. A little later Cathleen says, "Let you [Maurya] go down now
to the spring well and give him this [give Bartley the bread] and he passing" (p.
13). And we get the same effect. "Passing" means "passing by," but it can also
mean "dying, passing away." Cathleen, trying to open the bundle of clothes
the priest gave to Nora, says to her sister, "Give me a knife . . . the string's
perished with the salt water, and there's a black knot on it you wouldn't loosen
in a week" (p. 15). Editor Hart says that "perished" here means "contracted
and hardened" (p. 91), but again, even though it refers to the string and not to
Bartley himself, "perished" contributes to the death imagery that directs us
forward to the end of the play. It is as if the islanders speak the language of
death in recognition of death's looming and ineradicable presence in their
lives, almost in defiance of such presence.
This recognition carries over into their use of adjectives as well as verbs.
Note in the above examples the phrases "dark night" and "black knot."
"Dark night" is echoed by Maurya's "black night" on the same page (p. 11).
Clearly the word "night" implies darkness or blackness; there is no real need
to preface it with the adjective "dark" or "black." Yet the islanders do, and in
the context of Riders these adjectives forebode something bad or harmful.
The family's pig has "black feet" (p. 9); Michael's body is found in the sea
near "the black cliffs of the north" (p. 15), where "black hags" fly about (p.
17); and there's a "black ["exceedingly hard to undo," glosses Hart, p. 92]
knot" (p. 15) in the string that ties Michael's bundle of clothes. The word
"black" becomes a kind of leitmotif in the dialogue, preparing us subliminally
for the death of Bartley we know must come at the end of the play. We see this
"black" even in the pony Bartley takes down to the sea. Bartley rides a red
mare, with the gray pony trailing behind him. William E. Hart writes that red
and gray are "traditional ballad colors for life and death" (p. 95), so naturally
it is on the gray pony that the dead Michael sits in Maurya's vision, and it is the
gray pony of death that knocks Bartley from the red mare of life into the sea.
William E. Hart also writes that "red and gray are ... the predominant colors
of the island clothing" (p. 95). This incorporating of red and gray into their
clothing could be seen as a tacit recognition or acceptance on the part of the
Aran Islanders of death's existence side by side with life, of death's constant

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challenge to life, even as their incorporating of words suggestive of death or

doom into their everyday language could be seen as such a recognition or
acceptance.
Juxtaposed against this language of death and darkness in Riders is a
language of "newness" and "whiteness." It is a curious juxtaposition, because
the "newness" and "whiteness" are themselves part of a language of death.
"New boards" (p. 5) stand up against one of the walls of the cottage
throughout the play: these are "the finest white boards you'd find in
Connemara" (p. 9), and Maurya has bought them to make Michael's coffin.
Maurya has also bought "new rope" (p. 9) for lowering the coffin into the
grave, and it is this rope that Bartley uses to make a halter so he can ride the
horses down into the sea. Bartley, before leaving with the horses, "takes off
his old coat, and puts on a newer one of the same flannel" (p. 11). Maurya
walks down to the spring well with "the [new] stick Michael brought from
Connemara" (p. 13), and she takes "new cake" (p. 25) to give to Bartley for his
trip. She envisions Michael atop the gray pony "with fine clothes on him, and
new shoes on his feet" (p. 19), and three times, once by the young priest, once
by Cathleen, and once by Maurya, Michael's "clean burial" is spoken of (pp.
5,19,27; Hart, p. 86, glosses "clean" and "ritual," but "clean" still carries the
meaning of fresh, new, or fine). Bartley loses his life "where these is a great
surf on the white rocks" (p. 23). Finally, Cathleen spins at her wheel from time
to time in the play, and we can only presume she is making something new.
This language of "newness" and "whiteness" is part of the language of
death in Riders and thus part of the language of inevitability I have spoken of.
But it is Maurya's language of death, it is the making visual of her view of
Bartley's death. I have argued that Maurya wills Bartley's death through her
vision at the spring well and that one of the reasons she does this is to be done
once and for all with worrying about when the sea will take another of her men
from her. "Newness" and "whiteness" are associated with death for Maurya
because the death of her last son, Bartley, has become "new," "white," "fine"
for her: the death of Bartley will renew her, by allowing her to live without the
fear of the death at sea of one of her men hanging over her head. Synge
juxtaposes the language of death and darkness against the language of
newness and whiteness in Riders not only because he is in doing this in fact
juxtaposing life against death, representing through imagery the Aran
Islanders' very struggle to survive, but also because these two languages
symbolize the horns of Maurya's tragic dilemma. Maurya does not want
Bartley to die (death is dark, bad, and defeating) and would rather suffer the
torment of continuing to await his death at sea; and finally she wants Bartley
to die (death is white, good, and renewing) and would rather be at peace, never
having to fear again the loss of one of her men to the sea.
Maurya gets her peace, but not before the terribleness, the "darkness," of
Michael's death is brought home to her. Before Bartley's body is brought into

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the cottage she is handed the bundle of Michael's clothes. The string that tied
this bundle had a "black knot" in it, as I have mentioned, and Michael's one
stocking contained four dropped stitches (only Michael's "shirt and a plain
stocking" [p. 5] were found; the rest of his clothing is itself "dropped,"
or missing). Michael's stocking and shirt were knocked around on the
sea for several days, were given to the priest and then to Cathleen and Nora,
and in the play itself are moved into the loft and out, and then into "a hole in
the chimney corner" (p. 17) before being presented to Maurya near the end.
Maurya had hoped Michael's body would be found; she gets only two articles
of his clothing. The dropped stitches in Michael's stocking, and the very
condition of the stocking and the shirt in addition to their movement from one
place to another before and during the play, represent the difficulty and futility
of life, its "flaw" or cumbersomeness, as well as the "darkness" of death.
Again, Maurya gets her peace, dearly paid for, at the end of Riders, and the
new white boards standing up against the wall, where they have stood as a
reminder throughout the play, are the visual symbol of this peace. Unlike
Michael's stocking and shirt, the boards, symbolizing the stillness, relief, and
purity or perfection of death for Maurya, have remained stationary. Unlike
Michael's stocking and shirt, the boards are unsoiled and unflawed: Maurya
forgot to buy the nails to make the coffin, so it is assured their "sullying" or
"defacement" will be delayed for some time beyond the play.
If Riders is filled with a language of inevitability, a language that suggests
the outcome of the action in advance, it also contains moments in which it
charts the inevitability of its outcome directly. I am thinking specifically of
Maurya's running account, after her return from the spring well, of the
drownings of her husband, father-in-law, and sons Stephen, Shawn, Sheamus,
Patch, and Michael. We already know the outline of Maurya's account -
earlier she had told Bartley, "It's hard set we'll be surely the day you're
drownd'd with the rest" (p. 11); what she does here is fill in the details of the
previous drownings. Maurya fills in the past; we take her lead and fill in the
present: we anticipate or imagine Bartley's drowning. Maurya acts as a kind of
choral figure here, practically separated from her daughters as she speaks and
speaking at length. The stage directions have her continuing "without hearing
anything" (p. 21) at one point and speaking "half in a dream" (p. 21) at
another. Maurya's words find one parallel in the first choral ode of
Agamemnon, where the chorus recounts the events in the past - the rape of
Helen and the sack of Troy - that have led to the situation with which the
audience is confronted at the start of the play. Aeschylus takes the trouble to
remind, to reassure his audience early on that his Agamemnon will end up in
the exact same manner as the Agamemnon of legend, for his Agamemnon is a
product of the same events as his legendary counterpart.
The major difference between the first choral ode of Agamemnon and
Maurya's running account of all the drownings in her family is, of course, that

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the ode occurs early in Agamemnon, while Maurya's speeches occur late in
Riders. This is important, because Maurya's speeches, coming so late in
Riders, have to be designed to do more than chart the inevitability of the play's
outcome; they are designed, I think, to distance the audience from the shock
of that outcome as well. Our audience of Aran Islanders might know that
Bartley was going to be drowned during his trip to Connemara, but they might
not be prepared for the shock of his drowning before he even embarks on his
trip, or for the shock of his sudden entrance "laid on a plank" (p. 23). Synge
combines Maurya's charting of the inevitability of the play's outcome with the
distancing function of her words brilliantly by having her describe the return
of Patch's body to her covered by a sail. This is exactly the way Bartley's body
is returned to her: it is carried into the cottage "on a plank, with a bit of sail
over it" (p. 23) by some men. We are distanced from the shock of Bartley's
sudden return, covered by a sail, because we have been prepared for it not
only by Maurya's description of Patch's return in the same way, but also by
Nora's description of Bartley's return before he's actually carried through the
cottage door: "They're carrying a thing among them and there's water
dripping out of it and leaving a track by the big stones" (p. 23; compare this
with Maurya's description of the return of Patch's body: "There were men
coming... and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping
out of it . . . and leaving a track to the door" [p. 21]).
Charles R. Beye writes of the significance of distancing for Greek tragedy:
An important feature of ancient tragedy is that the spectator is

kept just that, a spectator, freed from the beguiling seduction
of empathy. It has to do with distancing. How often the chorus
of tragedy takes the spectator away from the play, calms him,
defuses whatever emotion the spectacle might ordinarily
inspire. . . . The choral presence . . . sufficiently defuses the
actual horror one would feel at what might be the real event, so
that the symbolic value of the moment, the over-riding, more
general truth of the event, may dominate. . . . The chorus
functions like a proscenium arch, effectively holding the
spectator back from an embrace with the horrible events he
must discover or witness, (pp. 25-26)
It is important that the spectator be distanced from the horror of what he sees,
even if he has seen it coming, because the point of Greek tragedy according to
Professor Beye is that the spectator not identify with the intensity of the
horror he is witnessing, not to be horrified himself, but that he 1.) resign
himself to the inevitability of horror in general should it befall him in some
portion or in any way in his own life; and 2.) be comforted by the thought that
what horrors are befalling the characters onstage are not befalling him, and
likely never will. In Riders, Synge wants to mute the horror or shock of

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Bartley's drowning for his audience, despite that audience's anticipation of

the drowning throughout the play. For all such anticipation, the sudden entry
of Bartley "laid on a plank" would still shock and discomfort, and Synge knew
this. The playwright did not want his audience to concentrate on the fact of
Bartley's death, its particularity or specialness, but to see it in light of the
drownings which had preceded it, to see it as part of an inevitable chain of
events within the play. He structured Bartley's return to the cottage drowned
then, in Professor Beye's words, "so that the symbolic value of the moment,
the over-riding, more general truth of the event, [would] dominate" (p. 26).
It is not only right before Bartley's return that Maurya acts as a choral
figure; she acts as one after he is carried into the cottage also. Indeed, I would
argue that she acts as a choral figure from the moment he is carried into the
cottage until the end of the play. Maurya is as if the leader of her own chorus,
since "women are keening softly and swaying themselves with a slow
movement" (p. 23) while she speaks. Malcolm Pittock has written that
"keening, the ritual expression of grief, helps to keep grief from overwhelming
the individual by socializing it."11 Charles R. Beye writes, "Prominent in the
definition of the tragic hero is his isolation. The chorus of [ancient Greek]
tragedy is visual reminder that all human experience is social, that private
values and actions are eventually cancelled out by their transformation in
society's assimilation of them" (p. 31). Synge has Maurya serve as her own
choral figure because, paradoxically, in this role she can both isolate herself
from her society for her "crime" of willing Bartley's death- she speaks "as if
she did not see the people around her" (p. 23) - at the same time she remains a
part of that society. She suffers, but she survives, she endures, and this itself
is distancing, comforting. Synge economically makes her actor and chorus
simultaneously. Maurya is not called to account for her "crime" because, first
of all, only her daughters, Nora and Cathleen, know of her vision at the spring
well. But second, and most important, her guilt as a character is not
fundamentally what is at issue here, guilty though she may be. She is only
slightly characterized, anyway (how much do we really know about her?) - this
should be some clue. Like Oedipus, Maurya is primarily exemplum. So, as I
have already remarked, Synge has her internalize her guilt, has no other
character comment on it. So too, again as I have remarked, Synge spreads
throughout the community of five in the play, including the priest, a
responsibility for Bartley's drowning clearly centered in Maurya. What is
important is less her guilt than the inevitability of Bartley's drowning within
the framework of the play; less her guilt than the terrible menace of the sea in
the lives of the Aran Islanders; less her guilt than her lack of control over what
ultimately happens to her (and by extension our same lack of control): she is
driven to hope for Bartley's drowning andthe retrieval of Michael's body for
burial at home, and she gets the opposite.
The same could be said for Oedipus: he is less guilty than victimized. One

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of Synge's achievements in Riders was to see, in line with his internalization of

Maurya's guilt and his parceling out of responsibility for Bartley's drowning to
all the family members and the priest, that Maurya had to act as her own
chorus, for to have expelled her in any way, as Oedipus is expelled would have
been to invite audiences to judge her guilty. Modern audiences often view
Oedipus as guilty, "flawed," however much they might pity him, because they
do not understand the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy; they see the
chorus as superfluous, whereas the chorus is in reality the point; they do not
understand that Oedipus Rex is intended less as a tragedy of character than as
a tragedy of a people, of a way of or attitude toward life, in which man is more
victim than culprit and which the chorus is onstage, if not to deny, then to
make digestible. Again, Oedipus is exemplum, not isolated case. Synge made
Maurya character and chorus, instead of giving her choral role to, say, the
keening women or Cathleen, so that there would be no mistaking that choral
role: to take the focus off the individual and place it on the society, to
assimilate the individual rather than single him out as exceptional. To repeat
what I said earlier about Riders, it, like Oedipus Rex, is less a tragedy of
character than a tragedy of a people, of a community, to use Malcolm Pittock's
term.
In her final speeches Maurya distances us from the horror of her situation,
enables the ideal Aran Islander spectator to feel momentarily safe from or
less troubled by horror himself, precisely because she does not address
herself specifically to her horror: the circumstances of Bartley's drowning.
She repeats things we already know, she reveals nothing new ("They're all
gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me" [p. 23];
"Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God.
Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely"
[p. 27]); and she speaks in platitudes ("No man at all can be livingfor ever, and
we must be satisfied" [p. 27]). Maurya tells herself what she already knows;
she calms herself or distances herself from what has happened through
reassuring, knowing language. Charles R. Beye has said that "the very beauty
of the tragic lyrics [in choral odes], their complexity, their art is an act of
redemption in the face of the tragic dilemma posed by the action" (pp. 30-31).
The same can be said of Maurya's "lyrics": Maurya transforms horrible
reality, renders it harmless and herself strong, by making events over in lyrical
language. Sentences go on and on rhythmically, and words and phrases are
repeated ("It's a great rest I'll have now, and it's time surely. It's a great rest
I'll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain, if it's only a
bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking" [p.
25]): all is smooth, nothing abrupt; one thing follows another: there are no
surprises. Maurya controls her language, and controls our hearing of it, in a
way neither she nor we have been able to control our lives. Surely in our
troubled age there is comfort to be had for the spectator who witnesses her

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performance, and the performance of the whole of Riders to the Sea.
NOTES
1 Ronald Peacock, The Poet in the Theatre (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Co., 1946), p. 110.
2 Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experienc
(Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 38-39.
3 Denis Donoghue, "Riders to the Sea: A Study," University Review, I, No.
(Summer 1955), 57.
4 J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea, in Plays: book I, ed. Ann Saddlemeyer, Vol
Ill of J.M. Synge: Collected Works, gen. ed. Robin Skelton (London: Oxfor
Univ. Press, 1968), p. 11. All subsequent references to the play will be to th
edition.
s Malcolm Pittock, "Riders to the Sea,"English Studies, 49 (1968), 446.
6 Charles Rowan Beye, "Nature's Mirror or Nature's Distillery: The Proper
Metaphor for Ancient Greek Tragedy," in To Hold a Mirror to Nature:
Dramatic Images and Reflections, Vol. I of The Univ. of Florida Dept. of
Classics Comparative Drama Conference Papers, ed. Karelisa V. Hartigan,
Proc. of the Univ. of Florida Dept. of Classics Fourth Annual Comparative
Drama Conference, 17-19 April 1980 (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of
America, 1982), p. 13. All subsequent references to Professor Beye's essay
will be included in parentheses in the text of this essay.
7 William E. Hart, Intro. and Ed., Playboy of the Western World and Riders to
the Sea, by John Millington Synge (Arlington Heights, III: AHM Publ. Corp.,
1966), p. 95. All subsequent references to Mr. Hart's introduction and his
editorial comments will be included in parentheses in the text of this essay.
8 When I say that Bartley's drowning is inevitable, I mean within the context
of the play (all of Maurya's other sons, her husband, and her father-in-law
have drowned before him). An Aran Islander audience, if not any audience,
would anticipate the ending of the play right away. It is in this sense that
Synge "dramatizes the inevitable." The Greek tragedians dramatized well
known stories with established endings; thus, they were dramatizing the
inevitable - this is how the idea of fate in ancient tragic drama can be
explained. It has nothing to do really with a belief that everyone's life is fated,
and that one can know one's fate by consulting the proper oracle. The Greeks
may have believed this, but this idea of fate is not relevant to Oedipus Rex. The
play itself does not dramatize the "inevitable," the prophecy of Apollo
concerning the son of Laius and Jocasta. It dramatizes Oedipus' discovery
that he has fulfilled the prophecy of Apollo, and Oedipus' discovery of his
actions is not part of the prophecy. It is inevitable in the play in the sense that

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it is expected to occur by an audience familiar with the Oedipus myth.

Bernard Knox has written that the
Delphic oracle... was, for Sophocles and his audience, a fact of

life, an institution as present and solid, as uncompromising
(and sometimes infuriating) as the Vatican is for us. States and
individuals alike consulted it as a matter of course about
important decisions .... [The oracle's] power was based on a
widespread, indeed in early times universal, belief in the
efficacy of divine prophecy. The gods knew everything, in
cluding what was going to happen, and so their advice was
precious; the most famous dispenser of such advice was Apollo,
son of Zeus. ("The Freedom of Oedipus," The New Republic,
30 August 1982, p. 29)
According to Knox, one reason Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex was to reaffirm
his audience's belief in prophecy ("In the second half of the fifth century B.C.,
particularly in Athens, this belief in prophecy... was under attack," Knox, p.
29) by showing what happened to one man who, along with his parents Laius
and Jocasta, scorned the prophecy of Apollo. But Knox' view fails to take into
account that, no matter what Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus had done, the
prophecy of Apollo would have been fulfilled ultimately anyway. So the fact that
Oedipus, for example, tried to avoid the prophecy by leaving Corinth and the
people he believed to be his parents (Polybos and Merope), becomes almost
beside the point. An ancient Greek audience might have got the "message"
from the play that it was foolish to try to escape a prophecy, but that same
audience was bound to ask the larger questions: What does one do once one
knows a terrible fate is to befall one, and, most important, why is any one
person, in this case Oedipus, singled out for such a terrible fate? There is no
answer to this latter question - this is the true meaning of fate: that * 'whatever
is, is, and it must be so" (Beye, p. 24). And I believe, with Professor Beye, that
this is the meaning an ancient Greek audience would take before any other
from a production of the play. An ancient Greek audience member would
sense from the play less that it was wrong to try to avoid prophecies than that
at any particular time, known or unknown to him, a terrible fate might
inexplicably be afflicting him.
9 See Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, New York:
Anchor, 1969), pp. 1-3, for a description of the reception to the San Francisco
Actors' Workshop production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin penitentiary
in 1957.
io John M. Synge, The Complete Plays (New York: Vintage, 1960), p. 4.
ii Pittock, p. 448.

139.5.242.163 on Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:18:19 UTC

Riders To The Sea A New View

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