“Ya beautiful, beautiful child, I could ate ya”: The Brutality of Matriarchal Revolution in Juno and the Paycock, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and By the Bog of Cats

Abstract

If Hibernia is often reflected in the major female characters of Irish drama, the mother-daughter relationship would be a particular site of anxiety around the future of the nation. How are the patriarchally essentialized notions of Irishness being preserved or challenged in each generation, and how willing or able is the older woman to transmit and nurture them in the younger? How do the sexual anxieties surrounding these women affect that ideological torch-passing, and in what ways do these escalating pressures manifest in increasingly violent confrontations between the women? In tracing the mother-daughter bond from the supportive and hopeful pair in Juno and the Paycock to the savagery of The Beauty Queen of Leenane and finally the gruesome, fatalistic bond at the heart of By the Bog of Cats, an increasing ambivalence surrounding the state of the nation and the worth of its firmly held identity politics emerges. This paper seeks to address these questions through Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject and the critical work of Brian Singleton, Melissa Sihra, and Victor Merriman.