In Carthaginians, Hark is the only character whose straight masculinity cannot tolerate any feminization. The two feminized men in the women’s camp, Seph and Paul, are a stark contrast to Hark, who is consciously uncompromising with feminization. Working as a gravedigger in the graveyard, Hark does not camp out.
Instead, Hark lives “in a single room,” where he “keeps [him]self clean” and “wants no brother” (Carthaginians 312). Hark’s independent lifestyle is very different from
the collective actions in the women’s camp, sarcastically termed as “a cell” by Paul (312). Besides, instead of identifying with the miracle of resurrection, Hark
recognizes the cruel reality, suggesting the women’s camp to “let them [the dead] rest and go home” (320). When Sarah checkmates Hark’s king in a chess game, Hark also recognizes the death of his piece immediately by saying “the king is dead” while Sarah reveals a hope for afterlife by saying “long live the king” (321). Hark, we recall, looks down on and criticizes those who believe in the miracle of resurrection as
“lunatics.” The disbelief in resurrection and the independent lifestyle disengage Hark from the women’s camp.
Hark’s mentality is typically heterosexual and masculine. The construction of heterosexual masculinity, as Jeffrey Weeks indicates, is often based on “the rejection of femininity and of homosexuality” (190). For one thing, to reject femininity or to avoid every possibility of feminization is necessary for the construction of Hark’s heterosexual masculinity. Hark’s belittlement of the women’s camp as “lunatics” is one of the examples of his “rejection of femininity.” The women’s dependence on a community and their sentiments about afterlife are antithesis to Hark’s independent lifestyle and his sense of reality. When Hark insists on his independent manliness and describes all the members in the women’s camp as “lunatics,” he reveals his
masculine sense of gender superiority. For another, Hark also rejects homosexuality so as to construct his heterosexual masculinity. When Hark enters the graveyard, for example, Dido wants to offer Hark some food for free, but Hark turns down Dido’s offer, saying:
I’d be very glad if I didn’t see you. I am sick of seeing you. Why are you following me? I walk home at night and you are behind me. […] You are known as a queer in this town. I do not like being seen with queers. I do not like queers. I do not like you. Fuck off (Carthaginians 305).
Dido’s queerness is something that Hark wants to be away from. Hark’s abhorrence of Dido’s homosexuality, or the “rejection of homosexuality” in Weeks’s words, is a
necessary process in the construction of his heterosexual masculinity.
Hark is troubled by Dido’s homosexual affections toward him, and such a trouble is then compared to the relationship between Ireland and Britain. When Hark
describes his experiences of being detained by British soldiers, he performs a sexual analogy by sarcastic homosexual advances on Dido:
Have you ever been picked up, Dido? Picked up, by the army or the police?
Will I pick you up? Will I show you how to pick someone up? (Hark
touches Dido on the face.) This is how, Dido. And after that, Dido, do you
know what they do? (Hark kisses Dido.) Does it not turn you on? Answer to your wildest dreams? Me, Dido (Hark caresses Dido’s face again.)(Carthaginians 314).
Firstly, as far as Hark is concerned, Britain fancies Ireland in the way Dido fancies him, and since Hark does not want to have any relationship with Dido, Britain’s fancy of Ireland is as abhorrent as Dido’s fancy of him. In other words, Hark thinks that Ireland should reject Britain just as he rejects Dido, and thus Hark’s rejection of Dido is analogously Ireland’s rejection of Britain. Secondly, British soldiers feminize Hark by “picking up” him, but Hark does not accept the feminization and interprets the
“picking-up” actions as homoeroticism, in which Ireland and Britain are both imagined as masculine entities. Hark further resists the intercourse between two masculine entities by condemning it as a disaster. Hark asks Dido:
Is the United Ireland between your legs? What happens when cocks unite?
Disease, boy, disease. The United Ireland is your disease. Does your cock want a United Ireland? Will it tell me? Would you like it to tell me? Tell me your disease. Tell me (Carthaginians 314).
In Hark’s sexual analogy, the union of Ireland and England is the union of two masculine bodies, or the homosexual union of two “cocks” in Hark’s words. The danger lurking behind the marriage of Ireland and Britain is venereal “disease” after homosexual intercourse. The consequence of the union of two masculine bodies, in
Hark’s sexual analogy, is deterioration to the two bodies/nations.
Hark’s identity, as his independent lifestyle shows, initially seems autonomous and secured, but with the play going on, Hark’s fragility is gradually exposed.
Although Hark assumes that Ireland and Britain are two masculine nations, yet in reality, Irish men are “picked up” and even “strip-searched” by British soldiers like a woman (Carthaginians 323). Hark cannot put up with the insulting feeling of being treated like a woman, feeling humiliated about the “picking-up” actions of British soldiers because his masculinity is forcibly transformed into femininity, to which he feels superior. It is because of the gap between Hark’s assumption and the reality that Hark’s identity shatters whenever he talks about Britain. One example of Hark’s fragile identity is his loss of confidence in Irish football. Alan Bairner surveys the
“his/tory” of Irish sports as “a story of accommodation and resistance” where “women have a relatively low profile” and “men run the game” (190). That is, Irish people, particularly Irish men, used to view sports as a cultural resistance to Britain. Michael Cusack, an Irish nationalist, established the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884, aiming to revive Irishness through sports, particularly hurling and Gaelic football.
After Cusack’s GAA, football, as Bairner argues, “serves as an important vehicle for the transmission of a counter-hegemonic cultural and political ideology” (194) and
“provides Ireland and the Irish with a distinctive sporting identity” (195). Contrary to his male predecessors such as Cusack, Hark loses his faith in sports as feasible resistance. For Hark, football promises defeat rather than victory, which is very different from the beliefs of former Irish male nationalists. When Hark chooses not to join the hunger strike near the end of the play, for another instance, Anne F.
Kelly-O’Reilly refers to such a decision as “Hark’s failed manhood, or at least failed in relation to a particular definition of manhood” (104). Though Hark pursues his identity in a different way from the women’s camp, yet like the futility in women’s collective actions, Hark’s approach to deal with the ethnicity problems in
post-Bloody-Sunday Ulster is also not fruitful.
What Hark has in common with the women’s camp and further results in their being stranded in tensions of ever-lasting identity problems is binary thinking. The opposition between masculinity/femininity and heterosexuality/homosexuality revealed by Hark’s intolerance of feminization and his abhorrence of Dido’s
homoeroticism, as discussed, is one of the results of binary thinking. Another telling instance of Hark’s binary logic lies in his blueprint of ideal Ireland. When talking about his dreams in mimicry of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream, Hark hopes that “Catholics shall stand with Catholics, Protestants with Protestants” and says that hoping “Catholics with Protestants” is not a dream but “insanity” (323). If Catholics stand exclusively with Catholics and Protestants with Protestants as Hark claims, sectarian segregation continues. Hark differs from the women’s camp on the grounds that he rejects collective actions and does not believe in resurrection, but when it comes to the resistance to Protestant society, he has something in common with the women’s camp. Sectarianism based on essentialist notion of religion and nation appeals to both Hark and the women’s camp.
Before the discussion of McGuinness’s challenges of gender stereotypes in
Carthaginians, it is necessary to briefly review how gender stereotypes are
constructed in (post)colonial Ireland. “Nighteenth-century imperialism,” Joseph Valente opens his essay about Irish gender stereotypes under British colonization,“relied on normative tropologies of gender disjunction, exclusion and stratification”
(189). In colonial period, conquerors are “celebrated as masculine” while the
conquered are “discounted as female” (Valente 189). Matthew Arnold’s On the Study
of Celtic Literature, which describes the Celtic as a race with “the spell of the
feminine idiosyncrasy,” is cited by Joseph Valente and C. L. Innes to show that Ireland is linked to the feminine by British colonialism (Valente 190, Innes 9). The feminization of Ireland reappears in Irish anti-colonial nationalism. The recurrence of the Irish’s alignment with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in modern Irish drama, as Cullingford tells us, suggests a feminine image for Ireland (“British Romans” 226).
Besides, many Irish nationalists feminize Ireland by characterizing “males as national subjects” and “women as the site of contestation” in the mythical cult of Cathleen ni Houlihan, notably in works of male Irish writers like Yeats, Joyce and Sean O’Casey (Innes 3). Yeats, in his Cathleen Ni Houlihan, assumes “men act as agents and women as symbols” and offers the “myth of Mother Ireland” (Porter 42-43). Moreover, influenced by Victorian middle-class “family ideology,” the Gaelic League founded in 1893 idealizes Irish women as “gentle, low-voiced” mothers and “reproducers of the future nation” (Quinn 40-41). Eamon de Valera’s 1937 constitution also assigns women the responsibility to serve as a good mother and wife at home (Mahon 187).
Women as the symbol of nation and women’s responsibility as gentle mothers are constructed “through the male psyche” (Steel 97). Some scholars then attribute Irish gender stereotypes to the “dualistic opposites” in traditional Western epistemology, which nurtures the men of both British colonialism and Irish nationalism (Nash 110).
In Carthaginians, McGuinness challenges many of the aforementioned gender stereotypes in Ireland. Firstly, McGuinness does not characterize Catholic men as
“national subjects” or “agents” in post-Bloody-Sunday Derry. Hark, as we know in the football trope, gives up resistance. When Hark decides not to join the hunger strike, the stereotypical agency of male Catholic nationalists is even lost. Secondly, McGuinness subverts the stereotype of Irish women as a passive symbol and tender mothers. Maela, Sarah and Greta are no longer “the site of contestation” but rather people who are against violence by themselves. The three graveyard girls are no longer “tender mothers” confined to domestic sphere but women who camp out of home with some political intentions. Justifying gender stereotypes in Ireland, in short, McGuinness elevates women and deprives men.
McGuinness’s modification of gender stereotypes appears tendentious in the early edition of Carthaginians. The first published version of Carthaginians in 1988, according to Cullingford, carries “a bald claim that women are better than men,” and the modified edition in 1996 has a “stronger omission” of such a claim (Ireland’s
Others 123). McGuinness himself seems to be aware of his gender tendentiousness,
thus modifying his text in the 1996 version. Despite the playwright’s self-awareness, modification is nevertheless unlikely to eradicate all assumptions loaded up in the very beginning of composition. If women’s fantasy is an “expressive mode” that“inverts the real” as Rosemary Jackson gives us the term, then Hark’s giving up of resistance is the “escapist form.” Collective activism in the women’s camp, though paradoxically addicted to fantasy, still suggests more political energy than Hark does.