“Leave this place now or ya never will”: the bog as a site of resistance in Marina Carr’s play by The Bog of Cats...

Abstract

This work offers an analysis of the female protagonist in By the Bog of Cats… , by Irish playwright Marina Carr, first premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1998. I propose in this article a fresh ecocritical reading of the play and its female protagonist, Hester Swane, by arguing that the natural force which drives and impulses her throughout the theatrical text is not simply resorted to as a means of conveying or representing the so-called “female nature”, but  that it is first and foremostly used for reinforcing binary positions, mainly related to gender and nature. In these terms, the ecocritical focus is informed by Dereck Gladwin’s and Timothy Clark’s works, whereas I also refer to the concept of female agency in the terms discussed by Judith Butler and Lois McNay, for a thorough analysis of this protagonist’s coping mechanisms in face of a set of constraining elements which might have impaired her of fully achieving her individual capacities.