Parnellites, Playboys, and Pathology: Irish Modernist Drama and the Politics of Sexual Health

AbstractThe personal, political, and aesthetic ideals that Irish modernists found embodied in the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell —independence, self-mastery, and a capacity for radical self-fashioning—have been well attested in Irish literary historiography. What has been less often noted is the centrality of sexual health to the conception, articulation, and emulation of those virtues, particularly when attempting to tra nslate Parnell’s public persona to the stage. This essay addresses this lacuna by tracing how a medicalized and politicized conception of sex informed Irish modernist efforts to dramatize the Parnell myth at the Abbey Theatre. It begins by establishing the hitherto underexamined ways in which the Parnell myth informed the infamously divisive sexual politics of J. M. Synge’sThe Playboy of the Western World (1907), in which the fallen leader and his career provide a template for Christy Mahon and the virile autonomy he is held to embody. Building on this analysis, the essay proceeds to explore the ways in which Synge ’s restaging of the Parnell myth, and the medicalized and politicized model of sex which underpinned it, informed Lady Augusta Gregory’s efforts to resuscitate (and sanitize) Parnell for Abbey audiences in 1911’sThe Deliverer. Finally, through a close reading of Lennox Robinson ’s largely overlooked 1918 play,The Lost Leader, the essay charts how the organicist and hereditarian model of sexual health upon which earlier iteration...
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research