Waking (for) the Nation: Immaterial Materialism and the Feminine Body in Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998)

Abstract

The paper examines Tom Murphy’s play The Wake and the significance of its staging as part of the Abbey Theatre’s 1916 centenary “Waking the Nation” programme. The play critiques the process by which various elements of capitalism – in particular materialistic culture, bourgeois morality and hypocrisy – combine to commodify, repress and eliminate the human body. Murphy suggests that the pitfalls of materialism point to the ironic truth that it denies the substantive materiality to our bodily existence. The female body in particular is continually subjected to violence and exploitation. By dramatising the emotional consequences of this immaterial materialism through the lens of a marginalised female emigre and sex worker, the play contests and subverts the woman / nation figurations in the context of Irish literary, theatrical and cultural imagination. The meaning of the wake ritual is revisited and experienced as a temporary celebration of theatre as community.