Challenges to and Distortions of Parental Love in Contemporary Irish Women’s Theatre
Challenges to and Distortions of Parental Love in Contemporary Irish Women’s Theatre

Summary/Abstract: The point of departure of this essay is Eric Fromm’s theories of love and its different forms. For the exploration of literary representations of parental love contemporary plays by Irish women offer a fruitful terrain as family issues are usually problematized in them. The plays examined in this essay were written between 1994 and 2011, a period which saw the advent and rise of the Celtic Tiger and also its demise, changing relations within many families. In the three texts the theme of parental love, challenged, compromised or even suffering from distortions, is represented as they reflect on certain critical problems of the Irish society which form their context: the heritage of postcolonial deprivation and gender inequity in Marina Carr’s The Mai (1994), post-Troubles alienation in Northern Ireland in Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves (2007), and post-Celtic Tiger social fragmentation in Nancy Harris’s No Romance (1911). What the plays share is a flawed relationship between parents and children, which can be described as the failure to achieve “intersubjectivity” as, among others, Jessica Benjamin’s feminist psychology uses it alongside the key-term “recognition.” Recognizing the other as subject and not object is a pre-condition of mature love, partly or completely missing from the parents in the plays the present essay addresses.

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