These notes on Marina Carr's 'By the Bog of Cats' include detailed literary analysis with named language and structural devices, direct key quotes from each act, contextual background of Ireland and colonialism, critical viewpoints from well established authors with website links provided that take...
Green: critical viewpoints
Red: context
Blue: quotes from the text
Pink: language devices/methods
Orange: structural devices
Purple: comparison to the Penelopiad
Black: analysis
"Carr’s play is an outrageously gruesome rejection of “tradition,”"
Stagecraft
Colour palette
- "white landscape of ice and snow" reflects a frozen climate (time has stopped/the past
will forever remain/entrapment/preservation of past emotions) conveys purity and
foreshadows death (winter) (pathetic fallacy), "black swan" metaphor for an
unpredictable event (loyalty as they mate for life/seduction/dark feminine
energy/sexuality), "blood" symbol of trauma that "trail[s]" after the swan (Hester),
disrupts the white
- contrast of black and white imitates newspapers (holding stories of the catastrophes
during The Troubles)
- black swan = Morrigan: an Irish war goddess who changes form into a black raven to
perch on those who are soon to die/The Children of Lir: swan as a forewarning of death
and vessel for the soul
The Bog
- represents preservation (natural time capsule), liminality "testify to the complex
interaction of nature and human culture"
(https://breac.nd.edu/articles/dark-and-deepboglands-in-irish-literature/) associated with
reclaiming Ireland's national identity
- Carr's work uses… "the bog to stage a critique of the gender politics of land ownership in
a post-colonial context"
(http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1826/resurrecting-the-bog-queen-exploring-the-
gender-politics-of-irelands-bogs-in-postcolonial-and-nationalist-literature)
- This gendering of Irish land as virgin was used to justify colonial intervention
- Thus, the discourse of colonialism paints colonial land as passive, feminized, and awaiting
masculine, colonial intervention.
- new Irish nationalisms continued to fall into sexist traps that positioned women as idealized
“bearers of the nation” (McClintock, 1993, p. 62) without granting them political agency.
- Carr's critique contradicts the utopian Irish Celtic Tiger years (rapid economic growth
1990s-2000s that encouraged Irish to move past their history and embrace neo colonial
modernity) which resulted in the "forgetting" of the bog much like Big Josie
"forgot"/abandoned her daughter, similarly Carthage tries to forget Hester by taking full
custody of Josie/erase his violent past through his marriage and inheritance
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