Elaborate the Role of the Sea, or, Portray the Sea as a character in Riders to the Sea

Q. Elaborate the Role of the Sea in J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea.
or, Portray the Sea as a character in Synge’s play Riders to the Sea.

According to Francis Bickley, Synge sees art as a form of expression “not of life keyed down to the low pitch convenient for those who live in the narrow streets of civilization”, but of life “superb and wild in reality”. Riders to the Sea details the struggles of the dwellers of the island against the forces of nature, which are beyond their control. The people cannot do without the sea, even though the sea holds disaster for them. The paradox is that the sea is their major means of survival and at the same time, their death trap.

    The sea is indeed the most impressive character in the play, it is so intimately associated with human characters that it may be called, Fate personified. The peasant family, as of course all other people of the island, live all their lives in open view of the sea. Even little Nora is familiar with its ways, its ebb and flow, its behaviour in storm and calm and all that. They are familiar not only with its physical features and its various moods, but also with the image of the sea as a mighty demon which looms large and dark and mysterious before their minds.

    The sea is a force of Nature over which nobody has any control. Opposing the sea, and opposed by the sea, are the members of the community living on the island which serves as the setting for this play. The human opponents of the sea in this play are Bartley, his sisters Cathleen and Nora, and his mother Maurya. These human opponents operate on three levels. Bartley must sell his horses at the Galway fair. His sisters seem to have a sacrificial prophetic function. Maurya speaks two great elegies for the dead, and the dead are not only members of her own family, not only members of the island community of Aran, but the whole world.

    At the very opening of the play, the sea enters as a terrorizing living personality. The sea as a ‘character’ is never off the stage, nor is it for a moment off the mind of inmates of the cottages. Maurya, an old woman, loses her father-in-law, husband, and sons to the sea, and the wind and the dark night. Maurya recounts the memory of pains that conditions her realities in a surrealistic tone: “I’ve had a husband, and a husband’s father and six sons in this house – six fine men, though it was a hard birth I had with everyone of them and they coming into the world – and some of them were found and some of them were not found, but they’re gone now the lot of them…” The struggle of the family against the sea signifies the struggle of the peasants in their harsh environment. When Nora queries that “Didn’t the young priest say the Almighty God won’t leave her (Maurya) destitute with no son living?” Maurya responds that “It’s little the like of him knows of the sea…” This shows that the peasants are the only ones vulnerable to disaster. The play ends with total submission to fate. The characters could not achieve happy and fulfilled life. Maurya painfully comments when the corpse of the last of her sons is brought on a plank: “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me… They are all together this and the end is come”.

    Man’s conflict with the sea, and woman’s loss is archetypal: it is everywhere in myth, legend, history, from the Greek Anthology to Lycidas. The people living on the Aran Islands must remain constantly aware of the sea, its menace, its moods, and also its help because it is both the giver and the taker of life. It is the giver of life because the people of the island earn their livelihood partly by catching fish from the sea and collecting seaweed from the sea-shore; and it is the taker of life because people perish in it.

    The conflict between the sea and the human characters is indicated at the very outset when we are told about the drowning of a man in the far north and about the shirt and the stocking which were got off that man’s body. If these items of clothing belong to Michael Maurya is to be told that he had got a clean burial. Thus when the play opens, the sea has already robbed Maurya of one of her sons. The next step is Bartley’s decision to cross over to the main land in order to sell a couple of horses. Cathleen feels concerned about the weather on the sea, especially when Nora informs her that there is a great roaring in the west, and that it will get worse when the tide had turned to the wind. Maurya feels even more concerned about the weather, and she wants that Bartley should not go this day when the wind is raising the sea and there was a star up against the moon during the night. As Bartley is firmed about going, Maurya makes the gloomy forecast that he would be drowned like the rest. When he is actually gone, she wails: “He’s gone now, and when the black night is falling I’ll have no son left me in the world.”

    The sea impresses us as a character, just as Egdon Heath in Hardy‘s The Return of the Native or Wuthering in Emily Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights is a character which towers in our imagination when all the rest of the story is forgotten.