Culture and Nature in Riders to the Sea - Critical Essay

Introduction

Riders to the Sea entails poignant tragedies inherent in fishermen's lives on an isolated island in Ireland. Notwithstanding the plot's thinness and one-act structure of Synge's play, the author, in a way, manages to successfully create a tragic atmosphere assimilated in a framework of the rules and elements of drama. The creative and careful design of the setting, dialogue, and characters showcase a developed transformation of ordinary situations into a culturally fulfilling dramatic play. Having drawn the story behind the play from the Islanders' actual life, the author manages to figuratively interplay culture and nature in bringing out the sea as a source of their daily sustenance and symbol of their lives. The representation of the play's Rural Irish Characters revives Irish Folklore asserting the cultural identity of the Islanders. The local color of the 19th and 20th centuries is represented through the cultural activities and social aspects of Ireland such as peasantry. However, the sea rather presented as the sustainer, is also contrastingly depicted as the destroyer where Synge describes the Island's harsh life with an illustration of a young man who was drowned in the sea. The play relates the fisher-folk cultural identity of the islanders to the sea, a natural aesthetic yet an insatiable and perpetual destroyer that merely takes away the lives of males, ultimately devouring their families' lives. Through this paper, a detailed analysis of John Middleton Synge's Riders to the Sea examining the interaction between cultural identity and nature will be presented.

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Synge portrays the simple lives of the Irish rustics in an endless mixed battle of their cultural identity and the elementary agents of the aesthetic nature of the sea. However, their constant connection with repeated deaths of fishermen is presented as a unique occurrence that they consider an identifying factor, as they keep the sea as their solitary background and implication of sustenance and destruction. In so doing, the author demonstrates a contrastingly universal conflict between the riders and their source of cultural identity, the sea, between the agency of death and agents of life, between the transient cultural human actions versus nature's eternal permanence. The characters that represent the cultural identities of the Islanders, Cathleen, and Maurya, Maurya, and Bartley, showcase tensions rooted in the play's symbol of nature, the sea. Having seen the death of her family members, Maurya stops Bartley from venturing out of the home with his horses. In some instances, she openly displays her despair in her battle against the sea which she instinctively views as a rival to her tranquil and peace.

In light of the play's cultural characteristics, rural Irish characters are presented as a seafaring community mirroring the Islanders' folkloric elements of Irish inhabitants, their countryside nature, and cultural country life. The tension between nature and culture provides a critical impulse for the development of impulsive vernacular cultures that link the islanders to their peasantry and the difficult struggle against the legitimate and natural forces of the sea. Through his writings, it is rather indisputable that Synge understood that a definition of the Irish peasant life in light of the unwitting devour of fishermen lives by the sea mirrors a direct description of Ireland cultural identity. In that sense, the accounts of the peasant life of the Islanders is showcased in a manner that is regarded as stereotypical in revealing the different cultural aspects of the rural Irish countryside.

Through the play, it is apparent that agricultural activities dominated the Irish Islanders because Ireland remains an agrarian society. In fact, most rural Irish populations grow their food and are more often than not, self-sufficient in clothing, housing and many other social and cultural aspects of life. It can, therefore, be asserted that the traditional Irish rural society, through the eyes of Synge's play, rooted their agricultural activities in fishing activities, which, according to the author, is the most agricultural activity. Much as the sea has caused several deaths amongst the Irish fishermen, Synge draws a clear emphasis regarding the local's commitment to their cultural practices as they still gain their livelihoods from the sea.

While this may depict the Irish rural society in a corresponding manner of backwardness, destitution, and poverty, it suffices to present the cultural identity of the islanders and their close relationship with nature as well as its aesthetic values. The wind and the sea dominate all the aspects of the Irish Islanders demonstrated in the play through whistling wind and crashing waves, evocatively exhibiting the power of the natural weather and brutal island-life.

Notably, the short play is based in the Aran Islands closely weaving the observations and experiences of the locals with nature. Note particularly the adept description of men staying out late into the night while fishing, notwithstanding the outwitting fierceness of the sea waves, yet they earn so little as the fish is not plentiful enough to meet the needs of their families. Their sons are presented with two unpleasant options-either grow and remaining at home where the looming danger of the death by the sea is almost assured or banish from the island life as soon as they are of are old enough to travel. Of the teenage girls, the author writes that in a given time they are simple peasants yet in other times the girls view the world with prehistoric disillusion, summing up their expressions in nature's (the clouds and sea) external despondency.

The play, therefore, highlights a simple plot concentrating on the emotions that draw the audience strongly to the interaction between nature and cultural identity of the rural Irish Islanders. Conversely, the conflict in the play is not between the sea and humanity but the noble and lasting commitment of the locals to their cultural practices. Although the Islanders are Roman Catholics by religion, their reverence and devotion to the sea transcend their fear of God. Much as they worship God sincerely and committedly, the sea, which is characterized by Synge in the play as a taker of life yet an omnipotent provider through the fish that it throws out in its vicious waves to provide the locals with their staple food, is given an excellent position. The Irish islanders, in the eyes of Synge, revere the sea and fear it far more than they respect any anthropomorphic deity. This is apparent in the acceptance of Maurya's profound loss, having lost her father-in-law, her husband and five sons to the vicious sea. The play's author only demonstrates his concern when Bartleby, Maurya's sixth son dies after which she seemingly achieve some sort of wretched peace. The peace, according to the author, is attributed to the mere fact that she will not lose any more of her family members to the sea as they are all gone. Still referring to the sea as "the Holy Water," she rejoices that she will not have to pray whenever the windbreaks, causing stirs in the East and West. As she kneels down to pray, she demonstrates an immense and eternal commitment to nature as she accepts the profound loss as some form of relief to have lost all her male members of the family to the sea.

The interaction between the cultural identity and nature is prevalent throughout the play considering how all characters refer to the sea continuously. Though Maurya believes that the sea is to be revered, she, however, views it as a rival to peace, openly expressing her despair to the futile battle against the supreme sea. This is affirmed by her continuous assertion that though the sea is to be blamed for the death of her sons, it remains the provider of sustenance. Regarding cultural interaction with nature, the play depicts an internalized conflict between the two in a form that exposes the predetermined fate of the men in the Irish cultural setting and man's universal strife. Ironically, Maurya acknowledges the conflict after her daughter Cathleen blurts out and compels her to consider the fact that she ought not to overlook the sea's sustenance of their lives. The priest, on the other hand, confirms misunderstanding of the appreciable element of the magnitude of the islanders' interaction with nature and reality.in the conflict, the priest assumed that God would never leave Maurya without a single son, but nature, just like she had claimed, took all her sons in a cruel and vindictive manner. Synge, in establishing the atypical association between nature (the sea) and the cultural activities of the Islanders (riding and fishing in the sea), he successively manages to present the sea not only as a geographical entity, but also a source of life and death to which every human being, apparently is riding and will eventually surrender. In so doing, the author manages to universalize the suffering of human beings to a greater magnitude because then, in addition to considering the sea as a force of nature, it's also presented as a symbol of cultural identity that overpowers a human being even when subjecting him to overall dependence. All men, as reiterated by the author, are riders and subjects of the unappeasable sea. Contextually, the author appoints novel, rather versatile roles to the sea, where it presents itself through the eyes of the characters who venture into it, confront and eventually surrender to it.

Synge employed his theories quite well and creatively but did not allow them to dominate the realistic vision that showcases the interaction between the cultural identity of the peasant islanders and the sea. As a result, he delineates a somewhat fractured population of peasants who are somewhat influenced by modernity instead of limiting the cultural definition to simple primitivistic notions. The peasants he writes about are by far fractured by modernity and are caught up in the cultural transitions of contemporary modern age indicative of their shift from the fishing folklore to urban consciousness. In most instances, however, he emphasizes on the cultural identity of rural Irish islanders as charming and naive primitives whose livelihood and aspects of life, while not Edenic, is more or largely unspoiled by unprecedented contact with the modernity of contemporary societies. Take for example Maurya's perspective of her physical and natural world. A world she intimately knows surrounded by natural physics such as portents, graves, the sea, and winds. She plays a crucial role in envisaging the close interaction between cultural identity and nature through her physical orientation and her attitude to the island's customs which is rather traditional. Contrary to some views of younger islanders, she seems acutely conscious of the fact that the island social order of life is facing many and irrevocable alterations. Much of her arguments focus on the apparent erosion of the cultural identity of the Islanders, the tradition, and customs of the island. According to her, a son should never leave the cottage before honoring his brother properly; she is frustrated by the natural circumstances that make women take on roles that are culturally meant for men. In fact, she hints that the Islanders have violated their basic cultural practice and opted to value profit over persons, insinuating the death of Bartleby who risked his life in exchange for a small gain.

The cultural identity of the islanders is evident through the characters of Maurya's children who fear her anger and authority, protect her and worry about her response to the news of Michael's death. In Ireland, it is customary to respect and fear the elderly, where the cultural reverence is owed to rural matri...