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영어

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between memory, storytelling and women’s life in Marina Carr’s The Mai (1994). Carr, an inheritor of traditional Irish storytelling, always depicts characters who tell the stories from the past. Seven women of four generations in this play are haunted by the absence of men whom they love. They try to fill in the gaps the men have left by stories which they make up with their memories. Millie remains on stage throughout the play, and she is the only narrator to directly deliver the stories to the audience. Her stories are in order of her own perceptive importance, not of chronology. She tries to escape from the curse of Owl Lake only to find it impossible, realizing ultimately the Greek idea of “destiny and fate and little escape.”Grandma Fraochlán transmits to her daughters and granddaughters the local folklores and stories from her past, especially the memories of her beloved husband and her dead daughter Ellen. Grandma Fraochlán’s stories provide the play with the mystery and depth that it might otherwise lack. Memory and storytelling in this play becomes a psychological remedy for women characters as well as a way to search for her own identity. Carr succeeds in strengthening the liminal space where past and present coexist, and so do life and death.