Marina Carr: Writing as a Feminist Act
in "Performing Feminisms", Carysfort Press (Forthcoming)
Irish women in 2010 look around at a landscape of changed societal and personal values. Once tied to... more
Irish women in 2010 look around at a landscape of changed societal and personal values. Once tied to domesticity, women have begun to gain admission to professional and artistic areas previously inaccessible to them. The theatre has long been a male dominated industry and no role more so, than that of the nationally revered playwright. This paper investigates the work of Marina Carr, a woman born in 1964 and part of the first generation of Irish women to grow up after the women’s liberation movement, who has claimed the title of playwright and presented her plays on the Irish National Stage. It suggests, through an analysis of her work, that the very act of working as a female playwright in Ireland today can be considered a meaningful feminist act.
The Irish theatrical canon is notoriously male dominated and in 2010, our theatres are still overloaded with male playwrights. Theatre today is still a male preserve, with a growing number of female exceptions. Marina Carr is one of these exceptional women. Of the four new plays presented on the Abbey Stage in 2009, only one – Marina Carr’s Marble – was written by a woman. Carr, through her plays, stakes a place for women playwrights in our National Theatre. Her work brings women’s art and self-expression to a forum that has been saturated in the male perspective almost since its inception. It attracts national and international critical attention. Carr, of all the contemporary female playwrights, seems most likely to achieve canonicity, thus providing future generations of Irish women with a model to work off or, indeed, against.
Marina Carr performs feminism through playwriting. While her presence in the Abbey, and other leading theatres, represents women and provides female models, her feminist act does not end at simply making up the numbers. This paper maintains that Carr’s body of work, in narrating new realities and new possibilities, plays a vital role in enabling Irish women to conceive of themselves and one another differently. Her female characters disrupt tropes previously used in canonical male works, portraying instead complex, profound, thinking women. These are women who resist the demands of the society around them, who are often dissatisfied with their lot and are prepared to take action. They are modern women for whom religion means increasingly little, the family can be a heavy burden and life experiences need to be more meaningful than the just hum of the domestic quotidian. We argue that in bringing new female models to the stage, Carr is allowing Irish women and men to imagine ‘woman’ in new and sometimes difficult ways.
Liminality in Marina Carr's Woman and Scarecrow and Emma Dante's Vita mia
Published in February 2012
Focus: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies VIII. IIssue on Interfaces between Irish and European Theatre. Ed. Mária Kurdi. Pécs: University of Pécs, Institute of English and American Studies, 2012.
This article examines the work of an Irish playwright, Marina Carr and an Italian playwright, Emma Dante. Both female... more This article examines the work of an Irish playwright, Marina Carr and an Italian playwright, Emma Dante. Both female playwrights show a recurring preoccupation with death, dying and living in their work. Contrasting the modern taste for signalling a clear divide between life and death, in Carr and Dante’s work the lines and divisions between this world and the next are not clearly drawn. A number of characters across the writers’ oeuvre occupy liminal spaces within the spectrum of life and death. Neither alive nor dead, these characters blur the edges of our modern understanding of death. Using Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, this paper seeks to investigate the position of two of these ‘betwixt and between’ characters, focussing on Woman in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow and Chicco in Dante’s Vita mia.
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