Session 12(a): Evil, Despair and the Search for Meaning

Session 12a: Evil, Despair and the Search for Meaning
Chair: Amy Hilden
Evil Characters and Evil Playwrights ( … or not )in the History of the Early Abbey Theatre
Encarnacion Hildago-Tenorio
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Campus de Cartuja, Universidad de Granada, Spain

The Abbey Theatre and many of its founding members have often been claimed to depict one stage Ireland (invented and recreated by the colonial mind) that clearly undermined the real one. The anti-heroic fakes, hypocrites, greedy peasants, unscrupulous figures, weak husbands, or anti-romantic Ireland mothers these playwrights put on the stage were openly displeasing to most spectators. In the eyes of Irish society, many of these fictitious creatures misrepresented Ireland and Irishness in a time when the attempt to build up the Irish nation looked more tangible than ever. From their perspective, they symbolised excess, marginality, sinfulness, immodesty, viciousness; that is, the subversion or destruction of most nationalist myths. As a consequence, various Irish audiences regarded both characters and writers as merely evil, which in the end implied the partial failure of this cultural movement. In this paper, then, I will mainly try to explain this type of response. To this end, I will take into consideration some contextual factors that were very influential in this respect. Moreover, I will analyse the three polemical plays which were almost universally criticised (i.e. Countess Cathleen, The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars ). Subsequently, I will raise questions about the very bases upon which that type of unfavourable opinions were founded, and will show why neither the characters nor the playwrights were so wicked in the end.

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To Survive as a Slave
Nina Bosnicova
Department of English and American Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Slave narratives constitute one of the most valuable sources for the study of the institution of slavery and the acts of wickedness perpetrated within it. This paper will discuss the representations of human evil and human suffering in four of the most famous works in the given literary genre. These are as follows: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s (or Linda Brent’s) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861). We will first look at the narratives’ illustrations of numerous evils committed on those in bondage, such as ruthless separation of slave families, sexual harassment and abuse of slave women, cruel physical punishment of slaves, etc. The analysis will try to explain why the narratives choose to depict evil and suffering in a particular way (to raise the reading public’s consciousness of what is going on in slavery, to create pity, to provoke action?), thus pointing to their political dimension. The paper will also devote considerable attention to the presentation of the “survival tools” that an enslaved person discovered and made use of in his/her attempt to fight the oppressive system and prove his/her humanity. Among these the support from family members, the belief in God, the economics of earning money and the acquisition of literacy will be dealt with.

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The Search for Meaning and Sense in Evil and Human Wickedness of Self-Harm
Kathryn Kinmond
Department of Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire, Hassall Road, Alsager, Cheshire, United Kingdom

Self-harm (SH) is beyond the rational existence or experience of most people. As Walsh and Rosen (1987:5) argued, it is an example of “…human beings gone wrong, as wrong as is conceivable.” It speaks of abhorrent acts, of extreme fear, of destruction and annihilation, of unutterable evil and it evokes threat and intra-psychic anxiety to those who encounter it. Perhaps the threat is linked to historical fears of ‘freakery’ (Fiedler, 1978), that individuals who engage in SH may embody pure evil. As France , (1967:24) noted “The ancient myths seem to have a curious hold on the human imagination.” The idea that people who engage in SH must be ‘different’ and ‘evil’, may thus provide some sort of explanation for an otherwise inexplicable form of behaviour. Further, the notion that they began life as ‘one of us’, may make them even more threatening than a mythical evil because of our common roots. Certainly, SH speaks to us of “…something unbearable, unutterable” (Babiker and Arnold, 1997:1). Yet, health and social workers are charged with the care of people who self-harm. They must manage the threat which may arise from the fear that if given voice, the “unutterable” (Babiker and Arnold, 1997:1) would be so terrible that as observers, they might not be able to bear it.
This paper reports a qualitative investigation into health-care workers’ experiences of the threat evoked as workers attempt to manage their fear of the ‘unutterable’ evil of self-harm.