The clash between religious and ethnic identity markers in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa

Abstract

Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa, focusing on the struggle of five unmarried sisters in the fictional town of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland, dramatizes the tension between the ethnic and the religious idendity markers, or the intertwined interaction between tolerance and oppression, amidst poverty. Their ethnic consciousness concentrated on the act of dancing offers a kind of solace to them against the oppression coming from the Church and also against poverty. This is another reason for their liveliness despite the hardships in their life. The characters in the play are scaled down against their tolerance or intolerance towards dance or against their submission effortlessly to the mystery of dance and different modes of thinking outside the mainstream. This paper aims to explore the intertwined encounter between their irrational and rational sites of being, between their ethnic and religious identities with references to dancing, Jack, Gerry and Michael.