Iolent Mothers in Marina Carr‟s Plays: The Mai, PortiaCoughlanand by the Bog of Cats....

Abstract

From the 1990s onwards, the depiction of motherhood on the Irish stage has become more intensified as the dramatists began to stress the psychology of mother characters overtly. Among the contemporary Irish playwrights, Marina Carr is prominent with her unconventional mother portraits on the stage. In her Midlands trilogy, namely The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats... (1998), she refuses to present the idealised and romanticised notions of maternity in her depictions of mother protagonists. With regard to her opposition to the images of self-sacrificing, self-denying and perfect mothers, Carr puts forwards the individual troubles and desires of her mother characters and embeds violence in their representations showing them as forcefully rejecting their identity as a mother. The present thesis aims to analyse the mother protagonists in Carr’s aforementioned three plays and argues that these mothers challenge the conventional perception of motherhood intensity.