Irish National Identity In Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy: From A Postcolonial Perspective

Martin McDonagh(1970-) is one of the most celebrated contemporary Irish young playwrights. The Leenane Trilogy, set in Leenane, a small village on the west coast of Ireland, consisting of The Beauty Queen of Leenane(1996), A Skull in Connemara(1997), and The Lonesome West(1997) is his most widespread work. Since the first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane received its world premiere, McDonagh has met with numerous critical acclaim and box-office success. As a writer, McDonagh shows a keen awareness of the fate of those dispossessed people in the west of Ireland, where colonial history and national humiliation still exert strong impact. Several centuries of colonization has marginalized its people and resulted in their identity crisis. However, the extreme exposure of the impact of colonial history is not the initial concern of the playwright. On the contrary, the quest for a way to construct a bright future and reshape a new national identity in the brutal circumstances is the ultimate keynote of McDonagh’s plays.Previous studies mainly focus on the macabre humor, violence, and the characteristics of “in-yer-face” theater in McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy, while the study from postcolonial perspective is relatively less conducted. Therefore, a postcolonial reading of his plays might offer a new perspective to further understand McDonagh and his plays. Thus, this thesis aims to unravel the disintegration and reshaping of Irish national identity in McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy so as to unveil the playwright’s deep concern for Ireland and his efforts to reshape Irish national identity and construct a future of multiculture.This thesis is composed of five parts. The introductory part introduces the writer’s background information, the approaches, the significance of this thesis, as well as the current study on Martin McDonagh both at home and abroad. This part also presents the postcolonial theory and some postcolonial concepts which provide a theoretical support for the further analysis.Chapter One elaborates the marginalized and feminized identity of Irish people. The inferior status is unfolded in three aspects. First, the author presents the background history of Ireland. Several centuries of colonization has turned Ireland into an “Other”. Under this circumstance, many people have to leave for England to make a living. Second, taking Pato, Maureen and Ray in The Beauty Queen of Leenane as examples, the author shows the unrootedless living state of those diasporas so as to uncover their marginalized identities; Third, in face of the dominant English power, Irish national identity has been feminized, which can be seen from those feminized Irish males who endeavor to prove their masculinity, such as Coleman and Valene in The Lonesome West, and Mairtin in A Skull in Connemara.Chapter Two mainly discusses Irish people’s mimicry of their colonizers. With marginalized and feminized identities, Irish people become voiceless subalterns. They make mistakes in remembering other people’s names, and they cannot express their true thoughts. In order to be heard, they have no choice but to imitate the colonizer’s language. Their ardent desire to be heard and understood is transformed into resentment and violence. Thus, they become as violent as their colonizers. The plays teem with physical abuse and mental torture. Matricide, patricide, fratricide and uxoricide are omnipresent in the trilogy. In addition to that, Maureen in The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Mick in A Skull in Connemara are both balckmailed emotionally. Besides, owing to the strike of Protestantism and the decline of Catholicism’s authority, Irish people show their contempt over their traditional Catholicism. However, what McDonagh wants to convey is by no means merely the dystopian images of modern Ireland. Behind the seemingly heartless dark, McDonagh offers a possibility of Ireland’s hybrid future, which also provides possibility for the illustration of Ireland’s multicultural identity in the next chapter.Chapter Three focuses on the hybrid future of Ireland. On the one hand, McDonagh tries to plant Irish language into the colonial English speech. As a spiritual weapon of culture, language plays a vital role in preserving national identity. The hybrid language McDonagh adopts is itself an analogy of Ireland’s hybrid identity. On the other hand, in McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy, globalization has infiltrated Irish culture in that Australian soap operas and British sitcoms predominate Irish television programs. Globalization has offered Ireland the opportunity to blend with different cultures from other countries so as to form a multicultural identity. Moreover, Pato’s marriage in America in The Beauty Queen of Leenane also symbolizes that Ireland has the possibility to construct a hybrid national identity.The last part is Conclusion. Grounded on the postcolonial theory, this thesis analyzes the dynamic collapse and reshaping of Irish national identity in Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy, namely, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. It comes to the conclusion that, due to the colonial history, Ireland has been marginalized and feminized, with its people becoming voiceless subalterns. In order to be heard, consciously or unconsciously, they imitate their colonizers, not only in language but also in violence. Faced with the pervading globalization, in the view of the playwright, the only way out for Ireland is to embrace the opportunity so as to form a hybrid future. These three plays of The Leenane Trilogy unveil McDonagh’s deep nostalgic love and profound concern towards Ireland and his effort to reshape the Irish multicultural identity.