Gothic Language (Feminine) and Framed Narratives in The Weir, by Conor McPherson
Abstract
In 1997, The Weir would become the first major success of young Irish dramatist Conor McPherson. Using the model of embedded narrations, McPherson adds a new dimension to the scene. As it happened in gothic novels, women will become the nexus between the supernatural and the quotidian. A fairy, an old lady with alcoholic tendencies, a molested girl, and a rural schoolmistress will mark the milestones of this path. Through the character of Valerie, it will also be appreciated how women will leave their traditional role as victims, which will be substituted for a new role as narrators. This article has a double purpose. On one hand, I am to analyze how the female characters articulate the play; on the other hand, I also aim to discern the mixture of drama and narration offered by the author.
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AA. VV. Five Romantic Plays. 1768-1821. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Baines, Paul y Edward Burns. «Introduction». En AA. VV. Five Romantic Plays. 1768-1821. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. vii-xxix.
Bobes Naves, María del Carmen. «El teatro». En Villanueva, Darío (coord.). Curso de teoría de la literatura. Madrid: Taurus, 1994, pp. 241-268.
Briggs, Katharine. The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. Londres: Routledge, 1967.
Buchanan, Jason. «Ruined Futures: Gentrification as Famine in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Literature». Mfs Modern Fiction Studies, 2017, 63.1, pp. 50-72.
Correoso Rodenas, José Manuel. «Juan Pérez de Montalbán y Horace Walpole: dos receptores de la misma tradición». En Martínez Pereira, Ana, Esther Borrego Gutiérrez, María Dolores Martos Pérez e Inmaculada Osuna Rodríguez (eds.). En la Villa y Corte. Trigesima Aurea. Actas del XI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 10-14 de julio de 2017). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2020a, pp. 313-323.
Correoso-Rodenas, José Manuel. «William Dunlap’s Leicester; or, the Migration of Gothic Drama». International Journal of Language and Literature, 2020b, 8.2, pp. 21-30.
Cronin, Michael y Barbara O’Connor (eds.). Irish Tourism. Image, Culture and Identity. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2003.
Davison, Carol Margaret. «The Gothic and Addiction». Gothic Studies, 2009, 11,2, pp. 1-8.
Douglas, Aileen. «“Whom gentler stars unite”: Fiction and Union in the Irish Novel». Irish University Review, 2011, 41.1, pp. 183-195.
Earnshaw, Steven. The Pub in Literature. England’s Altered State. Mánchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Eliade, Mircea. Das Heilige und das Profane Vom Wesen des Religiösen. Berlín: Insel Verlag, 2020.
Frank, Frederick S. «Gothic Drama (1768-1830)». En Thompson, Douglass H., Jack G. Voller y Frederick S. Franck (eds.). Gothic Writers. A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 147-164.
Gillespie, Niall. «Irish Jacobin Gothic, c. 1796-1825». En Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 58-73.
Gladwin, Derek. Contentious Terrains. Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic. Cork: Cork University Press, 2016.
Grantham, Bill. «Craic in a box: Commodifying and exporting the Irish pub». Continuum. Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2009, 23.2, pp. 257-267.
Grene, Nicholas. «Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson». The Yearbook of English Studies, 2005, 35, pp. 298-311.
Grobe, Christopher A. «Love and Loneliness: Secular Morality in the Plays of Conor McPherson». The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 2007, 68.1-2, pp. 684-704.
Hart, Carina. «Gothic Folklore and Fairy Tale: Negative Nostalgia». Gothic Studies, 2020, 22.1, pp. 1-13.
Harte, Liam (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Irish Modern Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Haslam, Richard. «“Broad Farce and Thrilling Tragedy”: Mangan’s Fiction and Irish Gothic». Éire-Ireland, 2006, 4.3-4, pp. 215-244.
Hill, Christopher Austin. «But It Was Changing,» «And Now I Can’t Go Back»: Reflections of a Changing Ireland In the Work of Conor McPherson [MA Thesis presentada en Ohio State University, 2010].
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers. Londres: Penguin, 1986.
Jordan, Eamonn. «Pastoral Exhibits: Narrating Authenticities in Conor McPherson’s “The Weir”». Irish University Review, 2004, 34.2, pp. 351-368.
Jordan, Eamonn. «Lapsed, Augmented, and Eternal Christmases in the Theatre of Conor McPherson». Hjeas: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2017, 23.1, pp. 51-72.
Kerrane, Kevin. «The Structural Elegance of Conor McPherson’s The Weir». New Hibernia Review, 2006, 10.4, pp. 105-121.
Kiberd, Declan. After Ireland Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present. Cambridge (ma): Harvard University Press, 2017.
Kileen, Jarlath. «Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction». Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 2006, 1, pp. 30-43.
Kileen, Jarlath. «Muscling Up: Bram Stoker and Irish Masculinity in The Snake’s Pass». En Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014a, pp. 168-187.
Kileen, Jarlath. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction. History, Origins, Theory. Edimburgo: Edinburgh University Press, 2014b.
Kileen, Jarlath. «Irish Gothic Fiction». En Harte, Liam (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Irish Modern Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 49-68.
Kilfeather, Siobhán. «Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism». boundary 2, 2004, 31.1, pp. 49-71.
LE Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Best Ghost Stories. Nueva York (NY): Dover Publications, 1964.
Longhorn, David. «Conor McPherson (1971-)». The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, 2018, 11, pp. 85-90.
Losada, José Manuel. mitocrítica cultural. Una definición del mito. Madrid: Akal, 2022.
Maley, Patrick. «“The play is set in the theatre”: Conor McPherson and the late-modern humanism of the theatrical event». Irish Studies Review, 2014, 22.2, pp. 207-223.
Martínez Pereira, Ana, Esther Borrego Gutiérrez, María Dolores Martos Pérez e Inmaculada Osuna Rodríguez (eds.). En la Villa y Corte. Trigesima Aurea. Actas del XI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 10-14 de julio de 2017). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2020.
Mcgovern, Mark. «“The Cracked Pint Glass of the Servant”: The Irish Pub, Irish Identity and the Tourist Eye». En Cronin, Michael y Barbara O’Connor (eds.). Irish Tourism. Image, Culture and Identity. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2003, pp. 83-103.
Mcnamara, Karen Hill. «From Fairies to Famine: How Cultural Identity is Constructed Through Irish and Irish American Children’s Literature». Children’s Folklore Review, 2003-2004, 26, pp. 77-90.
Mcpherson, Conor. The Weir. Nueva York (NY): Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998.
Morin, Christina. «Theorizing “Gothic” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland». En Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 13-33.
Morin, Christina. The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Morin, Emilie. «The Celtic Tiger, its phantoms, and Conor McPherson’s haunted rooms». Textual Practice, 2014, 26.6, pp. 1103-1122.
Naughton, Audrey. The Irish Pub: Past, Present – Whither the Future? [MA Thesis presentada en Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, 2011].
Norman, Mark. «Goldfields and the Gothic: A Hidden Heritage and Folklore». Folklore, 2018, 129.2, pp. 212-214.
O’Conor, Norreys Jephson. «The Early Irish Fairies and Fairyland». The Sewanee Review, 1920, 28.4, pp. 545-557.
Power, Albert. «Regina Maria Roche (1764-1845)». The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, 2018, 11, pp. 35-41.
Robitaillié, Audrey. «Away with the fairies»: the motif of fairy abduction and of the changeling, from Irish mythology to the Irish diaspora [Tesis doctoral presentada en Queen’s University Belfast, 2015].
Ryan, Owen. The Bardic Imperative in the Drama of Marina Carr and Conor McPherson [BA Tesis presentada en Dublin Business School, 2010].
Stoker, Bram. The Snake’s Pass. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press, 2015.
Sugg, Richard. Fairies. A Dangerous History. Londres: Reaktion Books, 2018.
Takaki, Tomoko. «The Habitats of Fairies in Irish Folktales». International Journal of Social and Cultural Studies, 2009, 2, pp. 73-92.
Thompson, Douglass H., Jack G. Voller y Frederick S. Frank (eds.). Gothic Writers. A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2002.
Warman, Brittany Browning. The Fae, the Fairy Tale, and the Gothic Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature [Tesis doctoral presentada en Ohio State University, 2018].
Wilde, Lady. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. Londres: Ward and Downey, 1887.
Yeats, W. B. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Londres: Walter Scott, 1888.
Baines, Paul y Edward Burns. «Introduction». En AA. VV. Five Romantic Plays. 1768-1821. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. vii-xxix.
Bobes Naves, María del Carmen. «El teatro». En Villanueva, Darío (coord.). Curso de teoría de la literatura. Madrid: Taurus, 1994, pp. 241-268.
Briggs, Katharine. The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. Londres: Routledge, 1967.
Buchanan, Jason. «Ruined Futures: Gentrification as Famine in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Literature». Mfs Modern Fiction Studies, 2017, 63.1, pp. 50-72.
Correoso Rodenas, José Manuel. «Juan Pérez de Montalbán y Horace Walpole: dos receptores de la misma tradición». En Martínez Pereira, Ana, Esther Borrego Gutiérrez, María Dolores Martos Pérez e Inmaculada Osuna Rodríguez (eds.). En la Villa y Corte. Trigesima Aurea. Actas del XI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 10-14 de julio de 2017). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2020a, pp. 313-323.
Correoso-Rodenas, José Manuel. «William Dunlap’s Leicester; or, the Migration of Gothic Drama». International Journal of Language and Literature, 2020b, 8.2, pp. 21-30.
Cronin, Michael y Barbara O’Connor (eds.). Irish Tourism. Image, Culture and Identity. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2003.
Davison, Carol Margaret. «The Gothic and Addiction». Gothic Studies, 2009, 11,2, pp. 1-8.
Douglas, Aileen. «“Whom gentler stars unite”: Fiction and Union in the Irish Novel». Irish University Review, 2011, 41.1, pp. 183-195.
Earnshaw, Steven. The Pub in Literature. England’s Altered State. Mánchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Eliade, Mircea. Das Heilige und das Profane Vom Wesen des Religiösen. Berlín: Insel Verlag, 2020.
Frank, Frederick S. «Gothic Drama (1768-1830)». En Thompson, Douglass H., Jack G. Voller y Frederick S. Franck (eds.). Gothic Writers. A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 147-164.
Gillespie, Niall. «Irish Jacobin Gothic, c. 1796-1825». En Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 58-73.
Gladwin, Derek. Contentious Terrains. Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic. Cork: Cork University Press, 2016.
Grantham, Bill. «Craic in a box: Commodifying and exporting the Irish pub». Continuum. Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2009, 23.2, pp. 257-267.
Grene, Nicholas. «Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson». The Yearbook of English Studies, 2005, 35, pp. 298-311.
Grobe, Christopher A. «Love and Loneliness: Secular Morality in the Plays of Conor McPherson». The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 2007, 68.1-2, pp. 684-704.
Hart, Carina. «Gothic Folklore and Fairy Tale: Negative Nostalgia». Gothic Studies, 2020, 22.1, pp. 1-13.
Harte, Liam (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Irish Modern Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Haslam, Richard. «“Broad Farce and Thrilling Tragedy”: Mangan’s Fiction and Irish Gothic». Éire-Ireland, 2006, 4.3-4, pp. 215-244.
Hill, Christopher Austin. «But It Was Changing,» «And Now I Can’t Go Back»: Reflections of a Changing Ireland In the Work of Conor McPherson [MA Thesis presentada en Ohio State University, 2010].
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers. Londres: Penguin, 1986.
Jordan, Eamonn. «Pastoral Exhibits: Narrating Authenticities in Conor McPherson’s “The Weir”». Irish University Review, 2004, 34.2, pp. 351-368.
Jordan, Eamonn. «Lapsed, Augmented, and Eternal Christmases in the Theatre of Conor McPherson». Hjeas: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2017, 23.1, pp. 51-72.
Kerrane, Kevin. «The Structural Elegance of Conor McPherson’s The Weir». New Hibernia Review, 2006, 10.4, pp. 105-121.
Kiberd, Declan. After Ireland Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present. Cambridge (ma): Harvard University Press, 2017.
Kileen, Jarlath. «Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction». Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 2006, 1, pp. 30-43.
Kileen, Jarlath. «Muscling Up: Bram Stoker and Irish Masculinity in The Snake’s Pass». En Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014a, pp. 168-187.
Kileen, Jarlath. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction. History, Origins, Theory. Edimburgo: Edinburgh University Press, 2014b.
Kileen, Jarlath. «Irish Gothic Fiction». En Harte, Liam (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Irish Modern Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 49-68.
Kilfeather, Siobhán. «Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism». boundary 2, 2004, 31.1, pp. 49-71.
LE Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Best Ghost Stories. Nueva York (NY): Dover Publications, 1964.
Longhorn, David. «Conor McPherson (1971-)». The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, 2018, 11, pp. 85-90.
Losada, José Manuel. mitocrítica cultural. Una definición del mito. Madrid: Akal, 2022.
Maley, Patrick. «“The play is set in the theatre”: Conor McPherson and the late-modern humanism of the theatrical event». Irish Studies Review, 2014, 22.2, pp. 207-223.
Martínez Pereira, Ana, Esther Borrego Gutiérrez, María Dolores Martos Pérez e Inmaculada Osuna Rodríguez (eds.). En la Villa y Corte. Trigesima Aurea. Actas del XI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 10-14 de julio de 2017). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2020.
Mcgovern, Mark. «“The Cracked Pint Glass of the Servant”: The Irish Pub, Irish Identity and the Tourist Eye». En Cronin, Michael y Barbara O’Connor (eds.). Irish Tourism. Image, Culture and Identity. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2003, pp. 83-103.
Mcnamara, Karen Hill. «From Fairies to Famine: How Cultural Identity is Constructed Through Irish and Irish American Children’s Literature». Children’s Folklore Review, 2003-2004, 26, pp. 77-90.
Mcpherson, Conor. The Weir. Nueva York (NY): Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998.
Morin, Christina. «Theorizing “Gothic” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland». En Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 13-33.
Morin, Christina. The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Morin, Christina y Niall Gillespie (eds.). Irish Gothics. Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890. Nueva York (NY): Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Morin, Emilie. «The Celtic Tiger, its phantoms, and Conor McPherson’s haunted rooms». Textual Practice, 2014, 26.6, pp. 1103-1122.
Naughton, Audrey. The Irish Pub: Past, Present – Whither the Future? [MA Thesis presentada en Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, 2011].
Norman, Mark. «Goldfields and the Gothic: A Hidden Heritage and Folklore». Folklore, 2018, 129.2, pp. 212-214.
O’Conor, Norreys Jephson. «The Early Irish Fairies and Fairyland». The Sewanee Review, 1920, 28.4, pp. 545-557.
Power, Albert. «Regina Maria Roche (1764-1845)». The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, 2018, 11, pp. 35-41.
Robitaillié, Audrey. «Away with the fairies»: the motif of fairy abduction and of the changeling, from Irish mythology to the Irish diaspora [Tesis doctoral presentada en Queen’s University Belfast, 2015].
Ryan, Owen. The Bardic Imperative in the Drama of Marina Carr and Conor McPherson [BA Tesis presentada en Dublin Business School, 2010].
Stoker, Bram. The Snake’s Pass. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press, 2015.
Sugg, Richard. Fairies. A Dangerous History. Londres: Reaktion Books, 2018.
Takaki, Tomoko. «The Habitats of Fairies in Irish Folktales». International Journal of Social and Cultural Studies, 2009, 2, pp. 73-92.
Thompson, Douglass H., Jack G. Voller y Frederick S. Frank (eds.). Gothic Writers. A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2002.
Warman, Brittany Browning. The Fae, the Fairy Tale, and the Gothic Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature [Tesis doctoral presentada en Ohio State University, 2018].
Wilde, Lady. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. Londres: Ward and Downey, 1887.
Yeats, W. B. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Londres: Walter Scott, 1888.
Gothic Language (Feminine) and Framed Narratives in The Weir, by Conor McPherson. (2024). 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada, 14, 241-257. https://doi.org/10.14201/1616202414241257
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