“Why does its lock fit my key?” the spatial representations of home in Brian Friel’s drama

Abstract

This thesis is a geo-critical study that combines spatial and post-colonial approaches to read the concept of home in Brian Friel’s drama. The thesis focuses on how the dramatic treatment of space and place shapes the representations, understandings and experience of home in his drama. The study attempts to resolve the questions of whether Brian Friel partakes in the de-familiarisation of the nationalistic discourse on space through his representation of home and thus creates discourses of resistance that challenge dominant assumptions about home space, or whether he in fact asserts this discourse on space despite his postcolonial position. In light of the complex and contradictory thematic of home in Brian Friel’s dramatic work, the study endeavours to elucidate four main aims. Firstly, it aims to consider how home is produced, negotiated, and represented dramatically in a partitioned state and the ways in which home might be considered a (post) colonial space under these conditions. Secondly, it plans to challenge dominant readings of home in Friel’s drama that have primarily been shaped by the concerns of nationalism and other 'public' discourses, focusing instead on the interplay between home as a space of life’s intimate human spatiality and home as a space of political negotiations. Thirdly, this thesis attempts to elucidate the paradoxical undertones in representing home as a political space, reinforcing colonial powers. Finally, I wish to contribute a productive theorisation of the value of home that synthesises its spatial and postcolonial critiques. Initially, the study is interested in the playwright’s response within his plays to the political, social, religious and cultural milieu in Ireland since the nineteen twenties and how this affects his awareness of the trauma of home. The project demonstrates conclusively how Brian Friel’s tendency to situate his dramatic plays within the domains of home reveals his critical engagement with the concept of home in the (post)colonial Irish context, and how this also is crucial for an understanding of the relationship between drama and political engagement of other texts produced in other postcolonial contexts.

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