Ibsen, Yeats, Synge and the Development of Irish Cultural and Political Identity

Abstract

Ireland’s over seven hundred years under British imperialism saw its national identity suffer immeasurably as the Irish themselves did. This is because imperialism was an educational movement where colonizers set out to “consciously modernize, develop, instruct, and civilize the colonized” (Said, 94). As many commentators of Irish history of colonization have reported, Irish native features like the ancient Gaelic culture, Ireland’s mother tongue, Irish traditions, thoughts and ideas, to say nothing of its independent identity were Anglicized. This article focuses on the cultural and political struggle for a reawakening of the Irish consciousness, and defends the view that the adoption of Ibsen’s works in Ireland was largely responsible for future political and literary developments in Ireland. I argue that Ibsen’s writings succeeded in establishing a new type of national identity in Ireland. Ibsen’s early plays like The Pretenders, without doubt, drove the poetic dramatist, W.B. Yeats to focus on dignifying Ireland’s Celtic past and Irish peasant life. By symbolically representing the Gaelic culture with its legends and heroes in Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Yeats intended to make the Irish conscious of their historical and mythological heritage. He used traditional Celtic symbols and shaped them in his own way. With this, he succeeded in transferring them into contemporary Ireland with a slightly different additional meaning. In addition, Ibsen’s master piece, An Enemy of the People, caused Synge to write plays that violated the existing picture of Irish nationality, thus bringing to limelight his personal conception of a new Irish political identity.