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

10 hardly be accepted by the community anyway

. The world of the Bull is built on such values of a past or passing form of living as community feelings, belonging to one another and helping one another. Obviously these values become strongly devaluated and turn into their opposites when helping one another comes to mean hiding the criminal.

: Another way in which the old and the new are juxtaposed reminds one of Yeats 's ideas of the decay and degeneration of In man beings and of the nation, especially as it is symbolically presented in Purgatory. There ttie three succeeding generations show the growing degree of the distortion and emptying out of human nature. The Bull in I he Field

, in spite of his brutality, carries great potentials in him and is capable of strong feelings. His son seems to have inherited only the brutality without the feelings, and his relation to the land, as well as to his would-be wife, is purely practical. This contrast in the play does not lead to conflict, but makes the image of ttie changing world more comf1 lex. One of the few seriouc discussions of the play» Stadler's book, charges it with didacticism. (1978:74) It is true that the backwardness, violence and cowardice in ttie life of rural communities is severely criticized, and so is also ttie attitude of mistaking brutality and anarchical passions for heroism, the deception of ttie law out of patriotism, and the utilization of the biassed historical understanding of situations. Yet Keane 's treatment of the theme avoids nne-sidedness and didacticism. Instead there is ambivalence in ttie judgment of the character of the Bull himself, and in ttie elevation of him as a late remnant of a different order of existence and of a different valuesystem. The Fie

ld becomes an outstanding achievement due not to its formal innovations - that has rarely been a strong feature of Irish drama but to its vivid imaginative realism, its lively mixture of comedy with tragedy, and its rich language. Keane's best plays are realistic "only in the sense that the imagination and the sensibility give total assent to the validity of the character" (FEEHAN, 1979:97). It is ttie sort of realism that, while showing the particular, readies out towards ttie universal. This is achieved partly by forming the characters so that they are flesh-and-blood, recognizable figures of rural Ireland, while also