Quest for the lost M / Other : Medea Re - Constructed in Marina Carr ’ s By The Bog Of Cats . . . ( 1998 )

Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998), an appropriation of the myth of Medea, re-presents the predicament of Hester Swane, who like Medea, is an outsider, a dispossessed woman living on the margins of society, who, at the age of seven, was abandoned by her mother, and now is struggling to establish her identity by looking for connection with the lost m/other. Carr shifts the focus from stereotypical female wickedness dealt with by the “malestream” playwrights to representation of mothers and maternal relations. This essay, therefore, in alignment with French feminist theory, dismantles the negative image of Medea by representing the wicked woman/monster/witch image on the stage as a psychological and social construct, as well as a masculine one. This re-reading will situate the play as one of the representatives of a new phase of contemporary Irish drama that is, content-wise, free from the nationalist discourse of the masculine Irish dramatic tradition, and is more universal, more humane, and more appealing to a non-Irish audience.