Carthaginians is set in a Derry graveyard, where three “Graveyard Girls” – Maela, Sarah and Greta – camp out and “wait for the dead to rise” (306). The women believe “in the same thing [resurrection],” but they are afraid that if they “talk about it, it won’t happen (298). Bloody Sunday, in which twenty-six Irish Catholic protesters in Derry were shot by British soldiers in 1972 and thirteen died on the spot, becomes something that cannot be talked about, but many images of death and indirect
associations keep telling the presence of Bloody Sunday in the three women’s memory. Greta attends to a wounded bird, which dies later. Maela “spreads clothes upon a grave” as if “dressing a young girl” (297). The grave which Maela “spreads clothes upon” may belong to Maela’s daughter, who died of cancer on Bloody Sunday, or to the victims killed in the Bloody-Sunday conflict. A Derry newspaper describes the three women as people who “solve their holiday blues by turning into
ghostbusters” (306). The word “holiday” here is also suggestive of Bloody ‘Sunday,’
with the “blues” referring to the women’s sad and traumatic memory about the deaths on that day.
Gathering in a graveyard based on their belief of resurrection, the three women constitute a camp to express their communal opinions about Bloody Sunday and Irish politics. The word “camp” is adopted here for double meanings. The first meaning of
camp, of course, is the way of living in tents or temporary shelters when people are away from their houses. The second meaning refers to a group of people united by shared values in unsettled or controversial issues, and a camp united in this way is often politically opinionated and ambitious. In Carthaginians, the three women camp out in the graveyard from Wednesday to Sunday morning (when Maela camps out, Dido even moves into Maela’s house), and this is the first meaning of camp. Secondly, and more importantly, since the three women believe in the miracle of resurrection, they are a group of people who have communal beliefs about Irish politics in
post-Bloody-Sunday Derry.3 Suffering from the pains sustained from Bloody Sunday, the women are more than pathetic sufferers mourning for the dead; to certain degrees, they are also politically opinionated and ambitious, thus capable of being potential activists.
Two male characters – Seph and Paul – also join the women’s camp and identify with the women’s expectation of resurrection. Seph always entrenches himself in awkward silence. He suffers from a sense of guilty and feels like a “traitor” because he survives from Bloody Sunday (369). In Dido’s words, Seph is a “rare boy” (303).
In addition to the meaning of being slow and infrequent in speech, “rare” could also be an antonym to ‘common’ and ‘ordinary,’ meaning that Seph appears peculiar, queer, short of something common or ordinary as a “boy,” and thus quite different from most men who have typical masculine mentality.4 Seph is not so typically masculine a man in the first place, and Seph’s identification with the women’s belief of resurrection
3 The stage direction in McGuinness’s 1988 version of Carthaginians contains the reference to women’s peace camp in Greenham Common, Britain, a campaign in 1981 organized exclusively by women to protest against the increasing number of missiles and atomic weapons (Cullingford, Ireland’s Others 123). The reference to women’s peace camp in Greenham Common directly associates women with pacifists, but this stage direction is removed in the 1996 version. The women’s political ambition is apparent in the 1988 version, and by still treating the women as a camp in my discussion of the 1996 version I aim to emphasize the political intentions of this group of people.
4 In McGuinness’s plays, the word “rare” may imply homosexuality as well. For example, in his Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, McGuinness plays with the word “rare”
and supplies the connotation of homosexuality to the character Craig, who gradually develops close affections with the homosexual character Pyper (Observe the Sons 106). The void of Seph’s dramatization in Carthaginians constricts further reference to Seph’s sexual orientation, but McGuinness’s choice of words leaves room for speculation.
further allies him with feminine sentiments. When waiting in the graveyard, Paul fills a position in the women’s camp by playing the role of quiz-master. Like the other members in the camp, Paul also believes in the miracle of resurrection. Paul is paranoid in building a pyramid through which after resurrection he and the dead can
“walk away from this town [Derry] and the state it’s in” (308). Egypt, the place where pyramids are known, is also believed to be the place where Phoenicians sojourned and established the city of Carthage in the 2nd B.C. According to Elizabeth B. Cullingford, eighteenth-century philologists believe that the Irish language comes from Scythia and traveled to Ireland through Phoenicia, Carthage and Spain. Because of this origin myth, the Irish often “align themselves with the Phoenicians,” who “belonged to the category of feminine Orientals or effeminate Semites” because Phoenicians were defeated and then feminized by Romans (“British Romans” 226). Paul’s strong attachment to pyramids, therefore, borrows from the Ireland/Phoenicia analogy a feminine image. Seph and Paul, though they are biologically male, are femininized to certain extent. Maela, Sarah, Greta, Seph and Paul are united by the belief of
resurrection into a camp, and they make the graveyard a very feminine space.
Apart from being a feminine space, the graveyard in Carthaginians is also a self-isolated space. Self-isolation, in fact, is a common practice of Northern Irish sectarianism. In Northern Ireland, Catholics as an ethnic minority usually hold a negative self-mage, feeling insecure, deprived and powerless (Douglas 156). In practice, their pursuit of ethnic identity is usually based on social division and collective self-isolation. Since 1921, Northern Catholics have turned to political non-recognition of Protestant authorities and separated themselves from the dominant society (Douglas 159-160). The economy of the women’s camp in Carthaginians is an example of such deliberate segregation. Troubled by the memory of Bloody Sunday, members in the camp respond to the Protestant society by self-assertive sectarian isolation. They are haunted by the memory about the militancy on Bloody Sunday and find it hard to live in post-Bloody-Sunday Derry. They resist the Protestant society
and deny assimilation, and thus Derry becomes the city that they isolate themselves from.
The strategy of self-isolation adopted by the women’s camp is soon associated with images of insanity. In Carthaginians, the “visions” of the women’s camp are considered to be lunatic by those who position themselves outside the camp (306). For instance, Dido reports the opinions from the Press to the graveyard, saying that
“Nobody believes you in Derry, they think you are lunatics. The Catholics think you’re mad, and the Prods think you’re Martians” (306-307). Hark, a Catholic man who does not believe in the resurrection of the dead, has similar comments, once saying that “Well, here they all are. The lunatics. They believe in miracles” (313). The women’s camp is despised as “lunatics” by both Derry Protestants and Catholic men who do not believe in miracles. In this self-isolated camp, therefore, a two-fold
“lunatic” minority is united: Catholics as a political minority to Protestants in
Northern Ireland, and Catholic women along with feminized Catholic men as a gender minority to Catholic men.
Sectarian self-isolation refuses assimilation on the basis of essentialist understanding of religion, a concept that is usually connected with nationality in Ireland. The women’s camp is an “imagined community” in which identity is
constructed by essentialist understanding of nation and nationality. Many quizzes that Paul proposes concern nationality, and the other characters have to give answers about the nationality of writers and sports teams or to name the capitals of some nation states. For instance, the author of Aeneid, Virgil, is not an Irish man, but the author of
Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Stern, is an Irish-born novelist:
PAUL: […] Who wrote the Aeneid? (Hark enters) An Irishman wrote it, that’s your only clue. Do you give up?
HARK: Virgil, And he wasn’t an Irish man, he was a Roman. […]
PAUL: […] Who wrote Tristram Shandy?
HARK: Lawrence Stern. He was an Irishman.
PAUL: That’s your only clue. I never read it (Carthaginians 311-312).
In this quiz, nation is “imagined” and constructed through such “cultural artifacts” as Lawrence Stern’s novels, if we use Benedict Anderson’s terms (4). In order to imagine a nation, it is necessary for the women’s “imagined community” to distinguish Irish writers from non-Irish ones. That is to say, for the women’s camp, nationality matters, and it matters essentially.
The British, as a result of the camp’s essentialist understanding of nation and nationality, are non-Irish and thus not members in their Irish community. The antagonism to Britain is expressed by a football trope first mentioned by Dido and re-appearing in Paul’s quizzes. In the graveyard, Dido suggests to the members in the women’s camp that “we need to build up a good team, local and loyal,” encouraging them to seek victory for Derry City in the competition of the European Cup, despite the fact that Hark does not believe that Derry will win in the game (Carthaginians 326). Although it may be difficult for a football team from Derry to win in the
European Cup, Ireland should still keep fighting for miraculous victory in a “local and loyal” manner. Irish Catholics imagine a moment of resistance instead of simply surrendering to other nations, and unyielding fights will prove their being “local, loyal” to Ireland, which, in the football trope, is under the attack of teams, possibly from Britain, or from some other countries. In the women’s camp, Ireland’s
relationship with Britain is imagined as unyielding combats and lasting antagonism.
Sports are one of the best places where nationalisms can be exercised, and this football trope is implicitly suggestive of the keen competition between Catholic nationalism and Protestant unionism. European Cup reminds the Irish characters of Ireland’s experience of being defeated by other countries, which reinforces in return the belief of unbending resistance to foreign offenses such as British colonization.
Though revisionists may be skeptical about contemporary Ireland as a post-colonial nation,5 members in the women’s camp seem to locate themselves in a very
5 Most critics, such as Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, as well as Elizabeth Butler
postcolonial context.
The football trope epitomizes the conflict of nationalisms in Ireland and makes two overtones. One is that the eagerness to reconstruct Catholic identity through unyielding resistance refers to at least a deformity of Catholic ethnicity in Northern Ireland. The other overtone, more importantly, is that Catholic ethnicity can/should be reinforced through collective actions just as comradeship can be enhanced through sports competition in teams. For the women’s camp, collective actions are pivotal in unyielding resistance – to stand up against offensive forces and to defend Catholics not by individuals but in a team, or, in Des O’Rawe’s words, with “female bonding”
(161).6 In practice, members in the women’s camp “team up” in the graveyard and resist the Protestant society under British sovereignty by collective isolation
(Carthaginians 304). In this regard, the camp tells a strategy that Irish women usually resort to during the Troubles. In the 1970s, when constant raids occurred in West Belfast, Irish women had to undertake the task of protecting their hometown, especially when men, as soldiers or as prisoners, were absent from home. Northern Irish women at that time turned to collective actions and “organized to provide support structures within their communities” (Hackett 149). During the Troubles, women in Northern Ireland guarded their homes in local groups known as the “hen patrols.” With the conflicts going on, local groups organized by women gradually showed “the emergence of activism” (Hackett 149). During the Troubles, female groups organized to protect their communities are the inception of female
consciousness in the ongoing turbulence in Northern Ireland. The “female bonding” in
Carthaginians is thus a phenomenon able to be found in women’s collective activism
during the Troubles. If activism, according to The New Oxford Dictionary of English,Cullingford, tend to see Ireland as a postcolonial nation. However, revisionists hold a different perspective about Ireland’s role in British colonialism. Kevin Kenny, for example, indicates that Ireland’s participation in British colonialism in Asia and Africa renders Ireland a dual status of both being the “agent” and the “victim” of British colonization (93). In general, revisionists do not view Ireland after 1921 as a post-colonial nation but as an independent entity in modern Europe.
6 The term “female bonding” is used by O’Rawe to contrast with the “male bonding” in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, a play that is often seen as a companion piece to Carthaginians.
is “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change” (Pearsall 18), members in the women’s camp become activists in the sense that they want the Protestant society, where Catholics live under the threat of militancy, to change.
In the history of Irish drama, the tradition to characterize female figures with activism can be traced back to the late 19th century. In a nationalistic atmosphere influenced by Douglas Hyde and the Celtic Renaissance, Henrik Ibsen’s realism masterpiece, A Doll’s House, in which the female protagonist Nora Helmer conveys a consciousness of liberation, enjoys plentiful homage and popularity as “the
intellectual consensus” in Ireland (Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama 11).7 Many Irish playwrights then try to promote the concept of freedom and liberation by female characters, such as Vivie in Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Lady Chiltern in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, and Nora in J. M. Synge’s Shadow of the Glen, to list a few of the so-called New Women plays. The “new women” feel discontented with the society, and they stand against or try to escape from the oppressions imposed on them. The consciousness of freedom and liberation renders the “new women” the potentials of activism, even though they are more feminists than nationalists.8 This Irish drama legacy compounds activism with gender, with Ibsen’s Nora playing an influential role. The three “Graveyard Girls” in Carthaginians are also people who feel discontented with and fight against the society they are in like Nora or the Irish
“new women.” McGuinness’s characterization of females in Carthaginians with activism is perhaps influenced by this Ibsenian drama legacy.9
7 According to Maxwell, Yeats is one of the exceptions (11-12).
8 Feminism and the struggle for freedom in anti-colonialism, according to Robert Young, are compatible when gender liberation and political emancipation work well in a complementary way, though after national independence, political emancipation does not necessarily guarantee females’
liberation (370-382). The appearance of “new women” in Irish drama can be seen as the production of an epoch when feminism and anti-colonialism both find the value of freedom inspiring.
9 Frank McGuinness is a devoted reader of Henrik Ibsen. McGuinness has translated two of Ibsen’s plays, Peer Gynt and A Doll’s House, and the translations are published in 1990 and 1996,
respectively. McGuinness’s versions of Ibsen’s plays also include Rosmersholm (performed in Royal National Theatre, 1987) and Hedda Gabler (performed in Roundabout Theatre, Broadway, 1994).
The performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Abbey Theater in May, 2005, is also a version based
However, women’s activism in Carthaginians differs prominently from the activism in Irish New Women plays in their addiction to fantasy. Members in the women’s camp mourn for the dead and imagine a possibility of resistance by sectarian self-isolation, only to be followed by Utopian fantasy without further actions.10 In a chapter entitled “The Fantastic as a Mode” in his book, Rosemary Jackson proposes some characteristics of fantasy. For Jackson, fantasy is not an “escapist form” of social problems but an “expressive mode” of the discontent about the problems (20).
That is, fantasy “inverts the real” in order to expose the problems in a society but
“does not escape it” (20). To invert the real, fantasy builds up “another universe” with both “dystopian fears” and “Utopian desires” (43). And to contrast the real and the unreal, one of the necessary consequences is the “naming of otherness,” which means that the subject of fantasy always locates a Monster to serve as the Other just as the cases of many Gothic novels demonstrate (53). In Carthaginians, isolated space of the graveyard indeed provides “another universe” for Maela, Greta, Sarah, Seph and Paul to camp out and to imagine a sectarian “mode” to express their discontent and
resistance. Death and militancy on Bloody Sunday are their “dystopian fears” and the resurrection of the dead becomes their “Utopian desires.” In the football trope, the imagination of enemies and unyielding fights also testifies to Jackson’s observation about the “naming of otherness” in a fantasy narrative. In Carthaginians, the most apparent sign of activism in the women’s camp is their sectarian isolation, but soon the actions of resistance become something imagined, through some essentialist
“cultural artifacts” or unyielding fights in football games. The women’s camp tries to stand up against the Protestant society, but the members gradually get addicted to fantasy in the self-isolated graveyard.11
on McGuinness’s adaptation.
10 In McGuinness’s own terms, to mourn for the dead with fantastic imagination is like wearing a
“mask.” In the introduction to The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays, McGuinness describes the remembering of the dead by wearing masks in Halloween to be the engagement of “ritual communication between the living and the dead” as if “by remembering them we resurrect them”
(ix).
11 Actually, in addition to Carthaginians, settings confined in a space with overt fantasy are so
The addiction to fantasy marks a salient gap between the activism in
Carthaginians and the activism in Irish New Women plays, and this gap might be a
result of McGuinness’s uneasiness about the binary logic in Irish anti-colonial nationalism. Gerry Smyth borrows the notion of postcolonial “derivativeness” from Frantz Fanon and proposes that early Irish anti-colonial nationalism, which treats Protestants as Other just as Ireland is treated as Other by British colonialism, is articulated with a derivative repetition of the binary oppositions in colonialism.Derivative binarism in Irish anti-colonial nationalism, Smyth worries, will promise more violent conflicts to come (14). Isolated from the Protestant society with
essentialist notion of religion and nation, the women’s camp in Carthaginians invites derivative binarism. Under this circumstance, the binary tensions between Catholics and Protestants cannot be eased. Binary and essentialist thinking is also the major problem in Irish anti-colonial discourse that makes McGuinness uncomfortable. In 1985, McGuinness’s Observe the Sons was rejected by Field Day. Though the reason why Field Day rejects this play is not made known to the public, in an interview in 1986 talking about this rejection, McGuinness frowned upon the “green” position in that company, saying that art should be “more colors than green” and “reflect the rainbow” (Cullingford, Ireland’s Others 111). McGuinness’s love for a “rainbow”
position often results in his suspicion of dualistic or homogeneous ideology. In a 1987 interview, McGuinness further lays it bare: “sectarianism of any kind is stupid” (qtd.
Mikami 3).12 For McGuinness, sectarian isolation, as the women’s camp demonstrates, is never a desirable strategy of identity construction.
Mikami 3).12 For McGuinness, sectarian isolation, as the women’s camp demonstrates, is never a desirable strategy of identity construction.