History, Memory And Traumatic Healing

Brian Friel is widely acknowledged as the most important playwright in contemporary Irish drama domain. As a Catholic born in Northern Ireland, Friel strongly feels the divisions of language, culture, politics and religion ever since his childhood. And this makes him a person fill with profound Irishness. In the tough process of reestablishing national identity, Friel not only takes the responsibility of artistic creation, but uses the most expressive way---drama to record the traumatic social history. In the mean time of envisaging historical trauma, he also explores the possibility of healing trauma. Most of his plays are embedded with incisive cultural and political implications, which have intimate concern for the contemporary Irish society.As we know, another famous Irish playwright Yeats always puts unflaggingly effort into digging the national heroes out of the ancient myths or legends, and attempts to change the traditional barbaric and ignorant Irish images on the British stage, and thereafter reshapes the national images of the Irish. Different from Yeats, the persons or things that Brian Friel likes to characterize are mainly the simple and typical Irish farmers or the rare-known stories of famous leaders. However, he not just describes the daily life of the farmers or politicians, but sets up an interconnected relationship between the most ordinary stories and the Irish native language/traditional culture.Among his brilliant plays, Translations, Making History and Dancing at Lughnasa represent Friel’s highest achievement and also win lots of awards and warm attention from all over the world. Although these three stories happen in different periods, they all witness the traumatic upheavals of Irish society.Besides an elaborate analysis about these three plays, this thesis will review them from the perspective of trauma study. By putting the plays in the historical background of social turbulence, this paper is expected to explore the active power of their shared theme on resolving the existing problems of Northern Ireland. And the referential function over other countries which have similar experience with Ireland will be shown.This dissertation consists of 5 sections. There are introduction and conclusion parts besides the three chapters to form the whole thesis. Introduction part will be specific explanations about the motivation, subject, and literature review on him at home and abroad, the theoretical background and the main layout of the whole paper. Chapter one will be a theoretic foundation through a generalization over the origin and development of the trauma theory. And then, by combining historical materials, the manifestations of historical trauma can be observed.Chapter two will concentrate on reviewing the responses of the main characters towards historical traumas. This purpose will be achieved by exploring their attitudes towards the language trauma, political trauma and religious trauma, etc.Besides a deep discussion over the approaches adopted by the characters to deal with trauma, chapter three will also talk about the contribution of Field Day Theater Company in the aspects of crossing border and traumatic healing under the guidance of multiculturalism theory.The readers can get a clear overview about Brian Friel and the theme of his plays through the conclusion part. Friel doesn’t simply records traumatic history; he also embeds his ideal and ways to solve problems. While he is guiding the reader to review the root causes of traumas, he tries to resolve historical conflicts and cure historical trauma. Reflection on history is for the purpose of looking to the future.