30 pages • 1 hour read
John Millington SyngeRiders to the Sea
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1904A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Maurya
Maurya is the mother of Nora, Cathleen, and Bartley, among other children who have died at sea. Maurya is the tragic hero of the play. Her journey is emotional instead of physical, and the play reveals the final day of her emotional journey toward a sense of peace despite her grief and loss. Like the tragic heroes of Aristotle’s time, Maurya instills feelings of pity and fear in the hearts of audiences (and readers) through the tragedy of her many losses and the final blow of Bartley’s death at the hands of an apathetic natural world. She has endured numerous misfortunes, and the audience must look on as she faces her powerlessness in the face of that misfortune. Maurya moves through stages of anxious fear, dread, anguished certainty, and passive acceptance of her fate and the fate of her family, embodying and exploring the theme The Relationship Between Tragedy and Catharsis. Ultimately, she is emptied of feeling and any drive to action by the death of her final son.
Maurya, like the rest of the characters, speaks the Hiberno-English dialect, but she and the others resist the stereotyping so common among the Irish characters of 19th-century theater. Her language is not exaggerated; instead, it is carefully crafted to match the dialect of the Aran Islands people with whom John Millington Synge spent time.
Cathleen and Nora
Cathleen and Nora are Maurya’s daughters and the sisters of Bartley. As the play opens, they seem to conduct most of the household business and care, rather than their mother, taking over her responsibilities as she worries over her missing son, Michael, and her remaining son, Bartley. They are the caretakers of the household, and they attempt to care for their mother’s well-being, although the sea thwarts their efforts by taking Maurya’s sons from her.
Cathleen and Nora are secondary to Maurya, but they play important roles in providing information for the audience, supplementing the sense of family grief and loss, and foreshadowing the family’s fate. The play opens on Cathleen bustling about the cottage alone and industriously completing the tasks necessary for family survival on the island; she “finishes kneading cake, and puts it down in the pot-oven by the fire; then wipes her hands, and begins to spin at the wheel” (72). This image of her recalls ancient and medieval associations with the goddess of fortune, who used her spinning wheel to weave the fates of humans. Nora carries a similar connection to fate—although she does not use the spinning wheel, the stocking they examine to determine if it belonged to Michael is one she stitched for him by hand. The sisters foreshadow the tight hold fate has on the family.
Cathleen’s attempt to quiet her mother before Bartley’s departure reveals her acceptance of the reality of island life and The Role of Place and Nature in Irish Culture: “It’s the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?” (75). Although she has lost several brothers to the sea, Cathleen tries to both listen to the priest’s Christian belief that their God would not deprive Maurya of her last son and simultaneously lean on pagan superstitions. Knowing that they need the money Bartley hopes to get from their pony, Cathleen optimistically clings to faith even as her own actions and the events around her foreshadow tragedy.
Bartley and the Other Aran Island Occupants
Bartley is the son of Maurya and brother of Cathleen and Nora. Bartley is a secondary, flat character who appears onstage to drive forward the plot and increase tension during the rising action portion of the play. The tension is heightened through his and his mother’s “conversation,” where neither truly listens to the other and both simply reiterate their own position. Bartley experiences no growth as a character; he exists primarily in the play to provide a face for the fears of Maurya and her daughters. He steps into his brother Michael’s shoes in a foreshadowing of his own doom: Cathleen notes that Bartley put on Michael’s shirt before leaving, “for his own shirt was heavy with the salt in it” (78). By wearing Michael’s shirt, Bartley takes on the shadow of Michael’s death, and his own shirt, “heavy with salt,” foreshadows the seawater-heavy sails Bartley’s body is carried in as the townspeople return his body.
The other occupants of the island, who appear in the form of the female mourners and the men carrying Bartley’s body at the end of the play, function as a representation of the community that has developed on the Aran Islands despite the isolation and danger of their home. They provide support through both the female practice of keening, or wailing in grief over a death, and the support the men provide by agreeing to build a coffin and to bury Bartley for the women who are now without the support of male relatives. Maurya has given into the futility of life and death on the island, but the community survives and mourns with her family.
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By John Millington Synge
