브라이언 프리엘의 『루나사 축제의 춤』: 아일랜드 여성 서발턴의 젠더/섹슈얼리티와 미완의 혁명

Abstract

Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, set in the Irish Republic of the 1930s, focuses on Mundy sisters’ performativity of gender roles, their subversive resistance, and their tragic failure. In this play, Friel exposes the social, political, religious mechanisms in Ballybeg which have constructed Irish female subalterns’ gender role and constrained their life. In the patriarchal world of Friel’s plays, the most subjected are the Irish female subalterns in terms of gender, sexuality, class, and situation. And, therefore, Irish women in Friel’s plays lack their own voice. This study explores Mundy sisters’ socially constructed gender roles and their sexuality in terms of Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘subaltern,’ Michel Foucault’s theory on the relationship between power and body/ subject-product, and Judith Butler’s theory on gender and ‘performativity.’ In Dancing at Lughnasa, the narrator’s or Michael’s unavoidable male gaze perpetuates the typical male gaze that has oppressed women and engendered their gender roles and space. This paper also examines the subversive resistance of Mundy sisters’ unruly body and the eruption of sexuality against the stifling patriarchal expectations. These Irish subalterns struggle to destabilize the mechanism through which social/state authority is performed on and through their bodies. The sisters, who become full-bodied, explode their suppressed sexuality in their defiant and desperate dance, defying the corporeal codes of respectable female behavior and the narrow confines of their kitchen lives. Mundy sisters’ defiance is, however, at best a momentary rebellion. Their challenge to the constitutional and cultural restrictions cannot get over the mechanisms of their society. The mechanism of power which tames these women is everywhere, in the rigid Irish Catholic notion of moral rectitude, in the economic policies of the new State, in family structures, and in the legislative paternalism. As a result, they live out their lives in wretched circumstances. Their tragic failure gives a punishing message to women about the consequences of deviation. In Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel critiques the postcolonial Ireland as a society stifled by the reified patriarchal authority and the male-centered economic, class, and gender systems. In this sense, Dancing at Lughnasa can echo a meaningful message even to the twenty-first century Irish women exploring the unkept promises of the Irish revolution.