Reading Journal 6

• Reading Journal
• Let's start with our three act tragedy. As opposed to the melodrama we got with The Irish Heiress, we get a stage realism version of the play. Boyle is Stan, acquiring debts shamelessly. But it doesn't have the part where everything works out in the end, where the evil character is punished. In the end, the character who is punished is Johnny. Johnny is this martyr/hero, but he is the one that ultimately pays the price for the vices of his father. How do we judge the other characters?
• Mrs. Boyle is seemingly just as bad as her husband, enabling him at every step along the way. Mrs. Boyle does not play the role of the wise spouse who sees his spouse's faults, like John to Sibby in Pot of Broth. John sees what's going on, and lets Sibby proceed to her ruin as an observer, but one who understands her faults. But Mrs. Boyle is different. I don't think there is a way to read Mrs. Boyle sympathetically as we read John.
• What to make of the Mary/Jerry/Bentham love triangle? Obviously Jerry is not good. I feel like you would find him in a Cornell group chat. Mary makes a lot of sense. She says that "the best man for a woman is the one for whom she has the most love" (231). But unfortunately, the one she has the most love for is Bentham, who runs away after getting her pregnant. I guess the whole love triangle just reveals an obvious truth: the worst thing for a woman is a man, whether she loves the man or doesn't. I don't know if that's the point O'Casey is trying to make, but if he is making some other point here, I don't think I would buy it anyway.
• All that said, is Joxer our character who we should look to in the play? He knows his friend Boyle's faults, and he plays him for it. He says, "him that goes borrowin' goes a sorrowin'" (233).
• On to our two ponderous Yeats plays. At the Hawk's Well is a very different offering from the Cuchulainoid National Theatre than we got with On Baile's Strand. To me, it felt clear Cuchulain and Concobar were not the point of the play. That the play fully belonged to Barach and Fintain, and so I had no Synge-like complaints about the work. But Hawk's Well feels "purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, [and] spring-dayish" for me. If I am going to take anything out of this play, I guess we might ask what we can say about this play as part of all three plays that we read this week. And if we look for a connecting theme for these plays, the old man has spent, or wasted, his life seeking more than he should, like Boyle.
• And finally, Purgatory. I guess maybe the old man has the same take-away that I shared earlier about Mary/Jerry/Bentham, albeit he takes a more pro-active and violent approach to addressing the concern. His father is a terrible person, so he killed him, and his son is a man, so undeniably, he will be just as bad as his father--also a man. One might ask why the old man does not also perform seppuku, but he provides a preemptive defense: "I am wretched foul old man / And therefore harmless" (34). I guess the argument is defeated with this perfect tautology?