Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by traceculture
Grania: An Irish Tragedy by Lady Gregory
4.0
Grania, daughter of the King of Tara is betrothed in a marriage of convenience to the elderly, great warrior-commander Finn MacCumhaill. The night prior to the wedding, her desires change when she meets Finn’s lieutenant and de facto son, Diarmuid, whom she’d seen briefly and maintained feelings for, some years previous. An enraged Finn pursues the couple for seven years until their pas de trois culminates in the death of Diarmuid and a revenge curse that binds them for eternity.
Grania doesn’t observe the archetypal praxis of the heroine who dies with her lover out of honour, she doesn’t hide away and grieve, nor is she reclaimed by Finn, instead, she makes a decision to reunite with her lover’s killer, thereby reinserting herself inside the power structure. That a woman had a choice was an astonishing message at the time and utterly defied gender expectations. The play is about gender justice. Gregory is showing us that women can make choices too, that women have agency. This is something that was unacceptable in Ireland at the time. Women were subservient to men, were devalued to chattel, had to make good marriages to get on in life, there was no equanimity whatsoever so Gregory was adamant in her retelling of the myth that Grania would have ‘power of will’, as distinct from the other tragic heroine, Deirdre, who ‘made no good battle at the end.’ I suppose the fact the play is simply titled Grania is the first demonstration of this. As a storyteller, similar to Peig Sayers, Gregory had the power to shape a narrative about what was being transmitted about the history of Ireland. And she used it to give voice to women.
The original legend itself was very male-centric and the Fenian society was a masculine one, a clan society where women were excluded, fraternal, where courage on the battlefield and fearlessness in the face of death were overarching principles. In Gregory’s version, Grania’s complexity as a character eclipses all of this. Her transformation from naif to experienced woman, her self-awareness and intellectual reasoning on the vicissitudes of human nature determine her decisions, give her agency and diminish these great Fenian warriors of legend who are brought down by their own pride.
And this is a play about pride because pride is what drives men’s passions. At no point in the play do either Finn or Diarmuid fight for Grania’s honour, they fight for their own. At first, Finn is ambivalent about his bride: she’s well-shaped, of good blood but a bit ‘airy’, however, it is only when he learns of Grania’s feelings for Diarmuid that he becomes animated and enraged with jealousy, demanding the wedding take place immediately and threatening Diarmuid that he will find no safety in any Connaught corner, north or south. So nothing has value until it’s been valued by another, for ‘it is by the respect of others, we partly judge even those we know through and through’. Furthermore, when Diarmuid resolves to take Grania away until such time as Finn calms down, he promises an oath of chastity; to return her still Finn’s queen. They live a wandering life, supported only by the wind for seven years. Grania, spending the best years of her life craving intimacy, Diarmuid remaining faithful to Finn. However, when the King of Foreign craves her love, a like love is born in Diarmuid, he’s overcome with passion and accepts the love that has gone unreciprocated for so long when love was all she longed for, it’s what drove her passions. She knew nothing, setting out as an innocent to take her own road, of love and its disappointments, the pain of love unrequited, the loneliness a lack of intimacy can bring because for seven years he kept apart from her as though she were ‘a shadow-shape or a hag of the valley’.
So the play explores themes of love, and its shadow, jealousy. Love, so say the old stories, ‘is three sharp blasts of the wind [...] the white blast of delight, a grey blast of discontent and a third blast of jealousy that is red’. Jealousy, the red enemy, kindles love and breaks loyalty. The biggest emotional relationship in the play is between Finn and Diarmuid but their jealousy over Grania divides the soul-brothers. She’s like the original Linda McCartney or Yoko Ono. Or when you consider that historical revisionism proposes that much of our mythological literature rather than being recorded, was created in imitation of the epics of classical literature, Grania is the Irish Helen, whose covetous love triangle with her husband Menelaus and lover, Paris sparked the Trojan war. As with the Irish myth, there are many versions, however, in Homer’s, Paris is killed in action, and Helen is reunited with Menelaus. Here, Finn takes his revenge by sending Diarmuid to his death and Grania reconciles with Finn thereby putting her shadow between his and Diarmuid's forever. Grania may also be Gregory herself. Gregory scholars comment on her inability to write directly of her personal feelings, (she writes of herself always as a collaborator or contributor) and whether due to shyness or a restrictive victorian upbringing that versed women in the art of deception, she seems only able to define herself through the perspective of another. In this case, Grania, whose love tercet parallels the relationship between herself and her elderly husband, William and younger lover, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, for whom she wrote a series of love poems in 1882. But also Grania’s independence, survival instinct, her ability to reinvent herself and take control of her own destiny in an arena populated by men all speak to Gregory’s personal experience
It is on Diarmuid’s deathbed that he delivers the final humiliation to Grania. He ignores her, forgets her completely in fact, remembering only that some resentment had come between himself and Finn that he thinks may have involved a hound. I’m struck by the dishonour, the symbolism and the insinuation, of course, that Irish women and women’s lives more broadly were forgotten to history, relegated to footnotes and marginalised. Women’s deep personal histories weren’t revered or recorded the same way men’s were and if it was the case, they were an aside or an appendage to a greater man. So it’s interesting when we come to understanding women in Irish history that we don’t, as Dr Mary McAuliffe says, just add them in but understand what motivated them. And I suppose what makes Gregory’s play so great is that she gives precedence to Grania’s psychology. Grania, when she says ‘why should I be always a widow that went so long a maid [...] give me the crown [...] I am going out before them now’ understands that there are other paths to heroism. She will go no more ‘wearing out her time in lonely places’. By not choosing death, by refusing to mourn Diarmuid, by facing the ridicule of the awaiting Fenian army, she not only redefines gender roles but inserts herself into history and into a position of leadership within the prevailing power structure and thereby outside of stereotype. By opening the door herself, Grania is having the last word, she’s saying ‘yes’ to the world, she’s opening up in the same way Molly Bloom does at the end of Ulysses ‘yes’ to taking control of her own life, ‘yes’ to taking her place.
They will always be bound in mythic and literary history - Grania, Diarmuid, Finn. They are the Celtic triskele, the triple spiral of life, death and rebirth. Their pasts, presents and futures interlocked for eternity, borne down by the three hard blasts of love.
Lady Gregory's Grania by Joseph Ronsley
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jun., 1977), pp. 41-58 (18 pages)
Lady Gregory's "Grania": A Feminist Voice by Maureen Waters
Irish University Review
Vol. 25, No. 1, Silver Jubilee Issue: Teresa Deevy and Irish Women Playwrights (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 11-24 (14 pages)
Grania doesn’t observe the archetypal praxis of the heroine who dies with her lover out of honour, she doesn’t hide away and grieve, nor is she reclaimed by Finn, instead, she makes a decision to reunite with her lover’s killer, thereby reinserting herself inside the power structure. That a woman had a choice was an astonishing message at the time and utterly defied gender expectations. The play is about gender justice. Gregory is showing us that women can make choices too, that women have agency. This is something that was unacceptable in Ireland at the time. Women were subservient to men, were devalued to chattel, had to make good marriages to get on in life, there was no equanimity whatsoever so Gregory was adamant in her retelling of the myth that Grania would have ‘power of will’, as distinct from the other tragic heroine, Deirdre, who ‘made no good battle at the end.’ I suppose the fact the play is simply titled Grania is the first demonstration of this. As a storyteller, similar to Peig Sayers, Gregory had the power to shape a narrative about what was being transmitted about the history of Ireland. And she used it to give voice to women.
The original legend itself was very male-centric and the Fenian society was a masculine one, a clan society where women were excluded, fraternal, where courage on the battlefield and fearlessness in the face of death were overarching principles. In Gregory’s version, Grania’s complexity as a character eclipses all of this. Her transformation from naif to experienced woman, her self-awareness and intellectual reasoning on the vicissitudes of human nature determine her decisions, give her agency and diminish these great Fenian warriors of legend who are brought down by their own pride.
And this is a play about pride because pride is what drives men’s passions. At no point in the play do either Finn or Diarmuid fight for Grania’s honour, they fight for their own. At first, Finn is ambivalent about his bride: she’s well-shaped, of good blood but a bit ‘airy’, however, it is only when he learns of Grania’s feelings for Diarmuid that he becomes animated and enraged with jealousy, demanding the wedding take place immediately and threatening Diarmuid that he will find no safety in any Connaught corner, north or south. So nothing has value until it’s been valued by another, for ‘it is by the respect of others, we partly judge even those we know through and through’. Furthermore, when Diarmuid resolves to take Grania away until such time as Finn calms down, he promises an oath of chastity; to return her still Finn’s queen. They live a wandering life, supported only by the wind for seven years. Grania, spending the best years of her life craving intimacy, Diarmuid remaining faithful to Finn. However, when the King of Foreign craves her love, a like love is born in Diarmuid, he’s overcome with passion and accepts the love that has gone unreciprocated for so long when love was all she longed for, it’s what drove her passions. She knew nothing, setting out as an innocent to take her own road, of love and its disappointments, the pain of love unrequited, the loneliness a lack of intimacy can bring because for seven years he kept apart from her as though she were ‘a shadow-shape or a hag of the valley’.
So the play explores themes of love, and its shadow, jealousy. Love, so say the old stories, ‘is three sharp blasts of the wind [...] the white blast of delight, a grey blast of discontent and a third blast of jealousy that is red’. Jealousy, the red enemy, kindles love and breaks loyalty. The biggest emotional relationship in the play is between Finn and Diarmuid but their jealousy over Grania divides the soul-brothers. She’s like the original Linda McCartney or Yoko Ono. Or when you consider that historical revisionism proposes that much of our mythological literature rather than being recorded, was created in imitation of the epics of classical literature, Grania is the Irish Helen, whose covetous love triangle with her husband Menelaus and lover, Paris sparked the Trojan war. As with the Irish myth, there are many versions, however, in Homer’s, Paris is killed in action, and Helen is reunited with Menelaus. Here, Finn takes his revenge by sending Diarmuid to his death and Grania reconciles with Finn thereby putting her shadow between his and Diarmuid's forever. Grania may also be Gregory herself. Gregory scholars comment on her inability to write directly of her personal feelings, (she writes of herself always as a collaborator or contributor) and whether due to shyness or a restrictive victorian upbringing that versed women in the art of deception, she seems only able to define herself through the perspective of another. In this case, Grania, whose love tercet parallels the relationship between herself and her elderly husband, William and younger lover, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, for whom she wrote a series of love poems in 1882. But also Grania’s independence, survival instinct, her ability to reinvent herself and take control of her own destiny in an arena populated by men all speak to Gregory’s personal experience
It is on Diarmuid’s deathbed that he delivers the final humiliation to Grania. He ignores her, forgets her completely in fact, remembering only that some resentment had come between himself and Finn that he thinks may have involved a hound. I’m struck by the dishonour, the symbolism and the insinuation, of course, that Irish women and women’s lives more broadly were forgotten to history, relegated to footnotes and marginalised. Women’s deep personal histories weren’t revered or recorded the same way men’s were and if it was the case, they were an aside or an appendage to a greater man. So it’s interesting when we come to understanding women in Irish history that we don’t, as Dr Mary McAuliffe says, just add them in but understand what motivated them. And I suppose what makes Gregory’s play so great is that she gives precedence to Grania’s psychology. Grania, when she says ‘why should I be always a widow that went so long a maid [...] give me the crown [...] I am going out before them now’ understands that there are other paths to heroism. She will go no more ‘wearing out her time in lonely places’. By not choosing death, by refusing to mourn Diarmuid, by facing the ridicule of the awaiting Fenian army, she not only redefines gender roles but inserts herself into history and into a position of leadership within the prevailing power structure and thereby outside of stereotype. By opening the door herself, Grania is having the last word, she’s saying ‘yes’ to the world, she’s opening up in the same way Molly Bloom does at the end of Ulysses ‘yes’ to taking control of her own life, ‘yes’ to taking her place.
They will always be bound in mythic and literary history - Grania, Diarmuid, Finn. They are the Celtic triskele, the triple spiral of life, death and rebirth. Their pasts, presents and futures interlocked for eternity, borne down by the three hard blasts of love.
Lady Gregory's Grania by Joseph Ronsley
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jun., 1977), pp. 41-58 (18 pages)
Lady Gregory's "Grania": A Feminist Voice by Maureen Waters
Irish University Review
Vol. 25, No. 1, Silver Jubilee Issue: Teresa Deevy and Irish Women Playwrights (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 11-24 (14 pages)