Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Bertha, Csilla: Distortions of Character in John B. Keane's Peasant Plays

- 46 around him,' combined with their being nearly hypnotised by hi»«

v allows him to go on from sometimes childish mischieviousness to deadly terror. Robert Hogan suggests that both ilinzie and Neelus are obsessed by sex, but while Dinzie's obsession is diabolic, Neelus's is angelically simple and harmless (1967:214). It is certainly true that there is an almost transcendental nature to the Evil-Good opposition of these characters, but it might be more appropriate to attribute Neelus's desire to something other than sex. He lost interest in earthly women because Sie fell in love with the legendary princess, Sharon, who, due to the jealousy and betrayal of her handmaiden, fell into a bottomless hole and died. Good and Evil, love and hatred, innocence and jealousy appear in the legend in their pire forms, The image of the golden haired princess is the embodiment of the most perfect beauty in Neelus's fantasy, which he choses over reality. Thus his obsession is rather with the ideal, the perfect, the unchanging, the unearthly, the world of pure values. He is similar to some of the heroes in Yeats's plays who also turn away from all the attractions of this world and follow their longing for the otherworldly, which path, nf course, leads to death. The difference between Yeats

's idealism and Keane's more realistic and sober peasant world is that Yeats's characters are mostly fie roes and iiernines, while Keane's poor Neelus is obviously insane, not only in the eyes of the other characters but also to the audience through the author's presentation. Yet the world of fantasy is not only the property of the mad - at least not in Ireland. Kathryn Hume asserts that "western culture has traditionally been hostile end dismissive toward fantasy in most of its manifestation." (1934:118) While this is true of most of the western world, it is certainly not so in Irish culture, where the visible and the invisible, reality and fantasy have always coexisted from the ancient times up to the modern, in hott» life and literature. The Irish way of thinking is besically different from that in other western countries; in Richard Kearney's words? "the Irish mind remained free, in significant measure, of the linear, centralizing logic of Graecn-Roman culture which dominated most of western Europe. .... The mainstream of astern thought rested upon a series of fundamental oppositions - between being and