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

- 45bring good luck to the Good and frighten away the Evil, Or at least that should happen. Out with their very beings they step out of the past or a passing world, and turn out to be powerless to fight against the dark forces of misery and greed in tins changing reality, and the most they can do is lament the death of Sive at the end and turn it into legend. If some figures in Siv

e were distorted by misery and greed, they remained well within the confines of realistic probability. Distortions i

f

l Sharon's Grav

e (1960) are closer to fantasy and sometimes verge on the supernatural. Here, behind the greed for property an even more powerful force works: the repressed sexual drive. In Irish literature this is a fairly rare subject, and Keane treats it with unusual intensity. The peasant milieu is given through realistic detail in this play, too, like in the others, but the extraordinary soon intrudes into the ordinary in two ways. One is the presence of the legend as part of reality, introduced by Neelus, the young man whose admiration for and attraction to the legendary princess, Sharon, drove him into a harmless yet disturbing insanity. The other is the increasingly menacing appearences of the devilish hunchback, Dinzie. The two young men embody two excesses of love and/or sex. The hunchback, being distorted inside as much as outside, is ready to bully, beat or kill in order to achieve his purpose. He wishes to possess his cousin's house and land by driving hier out of it, so that it could attract some woman - any woman - to marry him. Hie situation, together with Dinzie's fanatic insistence on his plan, suggests that the poverty of these families would not make it possible for him to obtain a I louse of his own in any other way. Without a house and land he can never liope that any woman would marry him, so his wickedness is also rooted in a necessity for survival, just like that of Mena in the previous play. But he is different in that his cruelty combines with madness, thus making it hard sometimes to judge how far lie is mad and IKIW far merely evil. His soul certainly lias become warped due to his physical disfiguration, which makes the misery much graver, and the fight for survival more savage. Ordinary human will is not enough, so tie developed - or originaly possessed - a demonic power which seems irresistabie; although everybody hates and dispises him, they also dread him. The fear of the people