Black Pastoral In Western Ireland

Martin Mc Donagh is deemed as one of the famous playwrights of contemporary Anglo-Irish drama.In 1996,one of his representatives The Beauty Queen of Leenane has garnered six awards after its debut,making it a hit among the audience and critics.Then a series of plays have been created,featuring the setting of Irish West and a combination of Irish literary tradition with a bold postmodern writing.The mixture of eccentric characters,elements of violence and darkness tinged with humour has made it stand out against the background of Irish traditional idyllic culture.When his plays about the West has made a great wealth of honor and success,suspicions and rejections also exist.Critiques like “inauthentic Irishness”,“another kind of Irish stereotype”,“commercial stunt” and so on are not in minority.The paper chooses Mc Donagh's masterpiece The Leenane Trilogy that includes The Beauty Queen of Leenane,A Skull in Connemara,and The Lonesome West to analyze the violent elements in the traditional West and to prove its values and potential humanistic cares.The paper makes a close reading of The Leenane Trilogy through the microscopic and macroscopic perspectives of sociological violence theory,to analyze the collapse of western mythology and tradition in Irish agricultural civilization during the Celtic Tiger,along with the black pastoral which is embodied in the demonized mother,the ineffectual Catholicism and the dysfunctional family.From theperspective of microscopic to macroscopic,the paper attempts to excavate and explain the historical and social roots of violence by focusing on the destructive force that brings by the violence of the capitalist system in the process of industrialization and modernization which attributes to the dysfunction of family,motherhood and religious belief in traditional agricultural myths.This paper first illustrates the dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship with the theory of situational violence from the microscopic perspective.By analyzing the mother's morbid control over her daughter and the fatal counterattack from the daughter,it reveals the demythologized image of motherhood.Then with Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat,this paper proceeds with an analysis of deconstruction of the objects that symbolize Catholicism and Father Welsh's suicide,demonstrating the invalid religious belief in the West.Finally,by analyzing pervading violence over family objects and members,the paper discusses dysfunctional families in the trilogy with ?i?ek's systematic violence theory,through which helps to make clear the hidden violence in modernization.The use of numerous exaggerated elements of violence in The Leenane Trilogy contributes to the deconstruction of the Irish tradition and reflects a tragic picture of the marginalized people,families and the whole social faith in a magnified way during the era of Celtic Tiger,which also reflects the development and change of diversified Irish literature under the background of globalization.