Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats . . .: An Ecofeminist Reimagining of Euripides' Medea

초록

This paper examines Marina Carr's stage play, By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998), from an ecofeminist perspective, arguing that Carr's denunciation of androcentric, capitalistic abuse of women and nature presents a contemporary re-visioning of female identity. Carr's play relocates Euripides' tragedy Medea and its iconic female protagonist to the present-day wetlands of Midlands Ireland, adding folkloric and Celtic elements. Her palimpsestic transposition resonates with multilayered contemporaneity, verifying her contribution to the raising of social consciousness on the urgent issues of misogyny, domestic abuse, poverty, and the manipulation of women/nonhuman nature, symbolized by the eponymous peatland. Carr is not alone in staging archetypal progenitors as a literature of protest. However, her reimagining of Medea's sacrifices and destructive actions, including fratricide and filicide, is significant for its positing of a causal relationship between patriarchal culture and environmental degradation. The study discusses how this ecofeminist orientation is articulated through a subversion of institutional authority, reversal of normality in the characters, rejection of the constitutionally sanctioned stereotype of motherhood, and a questioning of the utilitarian 'wasteland' perception of peat bogs. Hester Swane, Carr's ill-fated outcast, identifies with the agriculturally ineffectual Bog of Cats and its nonhuman diversity. In doing so, unlike Euripides' Medea, who departs for a new life, Carr's heroine chooses the fate of Black Wing (her animal alter-ego) over eviction from her birthplace and escape from the Ghost Fancier (the messenger of death), in a dark drama of power, morality, and social and environmental injustice. © 2024 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

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