11.+Carr

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 3 discussions ONLY.//
Karen O'Brien (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

=Marina Carr's //Woman and Scarecrow// = = =

In //Woman and Scarecrow// (2006), Marina Carr employs a dark Gothic aesthetic, artistic allusion, and the theme of death to magnify women's experience of suppression. The play stretches the moment of a woman's impending death to explore the gravity of life. The main character, generically named Woman, is presented as a self-determining agent who has brought on her own "encroaching annihilation"1 but is now unable to prevent the imminence of death.

//Woman and Scarecrow// makes brief allusions to various artists and artistic works, including authors of canonical Western literature and as classic paintings and music. Of particular note is the presentation of the woman figure in the allusion to two paintings: Caravaggio's //The Death of the Virgin// (ca. 1601-1606) and Henri Fuseli's //The Nightmare// (1781). First, however, is a very brief look at how two classic literary works— L. Frank Baum's //The Wizard of Oz// (1939) and C. S. Lewis's T//he Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe// (1950)—operate subtly to heighten the play's Gothic sensibility and poetic treatment of death.

In a nightmarish, feminist version of //The Wizard of Oz//, Woman finds herself on her deathbed at the beginning of the play watched over by Scarecrow and comforted by Auntie Ah (instead of Auntie Em). She faces the ominous threat of The Thing in the Wardrobe, a large, oily black vulture that functions as the Grim Reaper. Borrowing from T//he Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe//, Woman's wardrobe, like the door to the magical alternative world of Lewis's invention, is a liminal, supernatural realm occupied by the Gothic-esque The Thing in the Wardrobe. The space of the wardrobe heightens affective response as it manifests sinister sensations of death.

Fended off by Scarecrow, The Thing in the Wardrobe impatiently anticipates the moment of Woman's death. The frightening creature and ominous threat arrives as a nemesis to accompany Woman from her earthly life. However, Scarecrow, her soul in the existential sense, is eager to be free after experiencing a life of suffocation and oppression by Woman, a mother of eight children who left her home in the West of Ireland and sacrificed her life for a philandering man. Scarecrow attempts to reveal to Woman how she has exhausted both of their lives. Scarecrow tells Woman:

The first law which should be nailed on every cot. The first law. This world's job is to take everything from you. Yours is not to let it. [....] You used everything you had giving everyone what they wanted. [....] You're going into your grave out of bitterness, out of a sense of ruthless meanness. You who were given so much. You who I had such hopes for.2

Scarecrow's protection from The Thing gives Woman a little more time to live and to conclude, however, that "the whole point of living is preparing to die."3 Scarecrow coaxes Woman's contemplations of a life not fully lived and records them on a rolled parchment scroll using her blood as ink for the quill. When the blood in Woman's wrist runs dry, Scarecrow pierces Woman's neck causing a fountain of blood. Scarecrow is in need of documentation in order to free herself as the soul. The tension between suppression and liberation escalate during Woman's process of dying.

//Woman and Scarecrow// alludes to Caravaggio's //The Death of the Virgin// (see fig. 1) and Henri Fuseli's //The Nightmare// (see fig. 2), expressing women's suffocation and exhaustion. //The Death of the Virgin// 4 depicts the subdued, silent mourning of Mary's death. Woman recalls the naturalistic appearance of Mary, specifically her blue feet, which signal her death and typify her as an average mortal:

WOMAN: Many lifetimes ago [...] I went every day across the Seine to see the Caravaggio. //The Death of the Virgin//. Her feet were blue. Her dress was red. Everyone has their head bowed. Oh the grief. . . terrible to look at. . . frightening. . . and do you know why, Auntie Ah? AUNTIE AH: Why what? WOMAN: Because the miracle is over. Yes it is. She's going down into the clay. Not up to the blue beyond. The apostles know it. Caravaggio knows it and we know it. [...] She looks about fifty. . . and still there is something sacred going on. Not with her. She's just another invisible women past their prime. But the mourners are appalling. . . put the heart crossways in you, Auntie Ah. AUNTIE AH: Would it, girl? WOMAN: She was the last mortal loved by a god. And with her end came the end of God's desire for any truck with us. The funeral bier of the last mortal some god briefly and casually loved. . . .5

Even though Woman senses "something sacred," she expresses the fright of the image and recognizes that death is not sacred. She realizes that she, too, will soon be a dead without a god for salvation. With the recollection of the painting came the realization that her belief has been in vain. The painting expresses not only the grim realities of the death and oppression of the body but also the threat of belief systems that terrorize with notions of the destruction of the soul.

The cover of //Woman and Scarecrow// displays //The Nightmare// by Henri Fuseli. The extra-textual painting shows an imp sitting upon the chest of an unconscious woman and gazing on the viewer. A horse's head pokes out of flesh-like curtains with mouth slightly ajar and eyes seemingly fixed on the woman. Tableside containers may serve as evidence of the woman's unconscious state. The painting recalls the irrational and ambiguous structure of the Gothic novel of the late eighteen century and draws on the mythology of vampirism and ancient folklore, such as legends about incestuous incubi who either oppress the mind or reflect nightmarish oppression through suggested acts of sex. There is an easy relationship between Woman in //Woman and Scarecrow// and the image of Mary in //The Death of the Virgin//. Both further extend and connect to the figure of the woman in //The Nightmare//, expressing suffocation and exhaustion and underscoring the condition of death or near death as a significant experience of womanhood.

//Woman and Scarecrow// makes dying a theatrical and intelligible process from which to interrogate oppressive ideological structures that confine the life of women in particular. Although the play ends darkly, the poetic treatment of death and infusions of the Gothic serve to heighten a sense of feeling that may also affect the enlivening of space for transformative possibility. The social impact of emotions is a concern of Jill Dolan, who argues that "utopian performatives" in theatre direct our feelings in a way that can influence the social world, particularly by stirring us "toward the possibility of reanimating humanism as a desirable goal that can be productively modeled at the theater."6 There is an interesting intersection to explore between Carr's dark play (as literature or performance) and Dolan's idea of the reanimation of humanism in order to create "a public space for renewing our critical attention to the machinations of dominant ideology."7 The end-focused, poetic force of //Woman and Scarecrow// enlivens and enlarges the mysteries of death to radically rethink human potentiality and the promise of a more sustainable balance of power.

Figure 1: Caravaggio, //The Death of the Virgin//. Figure 2: Fuseli, T//he Nightmare//.

1 Marina Carr, //Woman and Scarecrow// (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2006), 18. 2 Ibid., 16. 3 Ibid., 47. 4 Ibid., 46. 5 Ibid. 6 Jill Dolan, //Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre// (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 141. 7 Ibid.