A Psychological Autopsy of Hester Swane in Marina Carr’s by the Bog of Cats...

• Main Author: Kübra VURAL ÖZBEY
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Ankara University 2018-10-01
• Series: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi
• Subjects: Marina Carr; “By the Bog of Cats…”; Irish Drama; Psychological Autopsy
• Online Access: http://dtcfdergisi.ankara.edu.tr/index.php/dtcf/article/view/4729

Marina Carr (1964- ), a prominent contemporary Irish playwright, draws attention by pointing out the different experiences of women in her plays. Her Midlands trilogy, namely The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998), is at the heart of her career since her unconventional mother portraits endowed with aggression and violence at different degrees in each play create a tremendous impression on the Irish reader/audience. The last play of Carr’s Midlands trilogy, By the Bog of Cats…, is also of success as it reaches more audience, exceeding the borders of Ireland. While this play denies the myth of perfect motherhood in the portrait of Hester Swane, Carr puts forward the individual troubles and desires of her mother character and confounds her reader/audience with Hester’s different shades of violence. This mother finds herself in trouble after her daughter’s father leaves her and decides to marry another woman. Waiting for her own mother who left her when she was seven and promised her to return to the bog of the Midlands, Hester does not want to depart from her land and separate from her daughter. This leads her to violence in different degrees in that she even murders her daughter and commits suicide. This paper sets out to analyse what lurks behind Hester’s violence and particularly her suicide and highlight the protagonist’s self-destruction in the context of psychological autopsy which refers to the process of examining one’s death in relation to the person’s problems, feelings and thoughts before the death.