SYNGE’S SEARCH FOR IRISH IDENTITY IN JOSEPH O’CONNOR’S GHOST LIGHT - The Self-Contradictory Search for Acceptance

Abstract

Ireland has a long history of colonisation under England’s rule and when the first invaders came to Ireland the Irish had little or no determined identity of their own. In Ghost Light the playwright John Milton Synge is desperately seeking his identity within the Irish community, feeling alienated due to his Protestant heritage. This essay therefore investigates how a colonial presence can interfere with one’s identity in sense of language, religion and class by applying post-colonial theory and the theory of stereotypes. The result shows that Synge’s search for acceptance is contradictory since he constructs his own idealistic Irish identity using stereotypes which hinders him from feeling accepted in a group that he was, ironically, a part of from the beginning.