Essay on "Riders to the Sea John"

Essay 3 pages (1093 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

26). By the end of the play, her fears are confirmed, but her response is not what one might expect. After she thinks she has seen Michael's ghost, but before she finds out about Bartley's death, Maurya seems resentful of the sea, as she recalls all of the people she has lost to it and falls into a kind of reverie. From this the audience is led to believe that Bartley's end will be her own, because she seems so frail and powerless in the face of the sea's power.

However, once the truth is confirmed, Maurya (and thus Synge) subverts the audience's expectations, because Maurya's mourning gives way to a kind of peace. Immediately after learning of Bartley's death, Maurya realizes her newfound freedom, saying "they're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me" (Synge, 1911, p. 42). She repeats the language of the sea and weather that has permeated the play, but this time, instead of speaking of the wind and surf in awed, frightful tones, she remarks that she will no longer have to care about any of it; the sea's terrible power of her life ends with Bartley's death, and so although she has lost so many people, she is granted a kind of peace and freedom in her old age (Synge, 1911, p. 42). Her final lines echo this contentment, because after she comments upon Michael's "clean burial" in the sea and Bartley's "fine coffin," she asks "what more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied" (Synge, 1911, p. 45). Thus, over the course of the play, Maurya transforms from the standard trope of the widow to the sea to a kind of liberated woman, come to terms with life and death.

John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea transforms a familiar trope through the clever use of dramatic irony, foreshadowing, and particular language choices, because it takes the usual image of a woman mourning for her dead loved ones and transforms it into a story about the freedom and peace that the same woman is able to find in her loss. The audience is well aware of Michael and Bartley's deaths before the rest of the characters, and it has the effect of centralizing the sea's control over their lives. This is compounded both by the characters' own omens about the future and the frequent discussions of the wind and surf. Up until the very end of the play, the audience expects this to be a tale of unmitigated loss, but in the final moments Synge subverts the audience's expectations by having Maurya frame all of the previous ill omens, mourning, and linguistic representations of the sea's power in light of her newfound freedom. Through the loss of her loved ones, Maurya is able to free herself from the sea's control and come to terms with the inevitability of death, such that the play actually manages to end on a hopeful, if melancholy, note.

References

Synge, J.… READ MORE

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