Mother Maurya: Development and Conversion of Maurya to a Spiritual Status

Among the concourse of tragic character through the eons, the portrayal of Maurya, the protagonist of the play Riders to the Sea is one of the rarest achievement of the dramatist. It is seldom that a woman is projected as a tragic protagonist. If one ransacks the history of world literature, the only identical examples that are found are Sophocles’s Antigone and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Beginning as a miserable peasant woman, Maurya turns to be a visionary; an epitome of serenity; a stoic resigner to the will of Almighty.

However , with Maurya’s character we are confronted to a mother who suffers not because of any Hamartia or error of judgement but because of the buffets of the uncanny destiny. In her life miseries have piled up one over the other- her grief is unfathomable; suffering immeasurable, yet she remains unconquered. As the play opens , we find the bereaved mother, almost undone by a series of tragic mishaps, is in deep mourning for her fifth son Michael who is reported to have been drowned in the sea nine days back. Therefore, her obsessive concern is now for her last surviving son Bartely who has resolved to undertake a voyage to the sea.She initially hoped that  the young priest would certainly deter Bartley from this dangerous sea voyage. But when Bartley pays no heed to her solicitude , she makes a mourning comparison: “If it was a hundred horses , or a thousand horses you had itself , what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?” Here Maurya transcends her poverty , her love for physical comforts and requirement in her love for child.

However , as an illiterate lady she believes in all superstition which are common in Aran Islands hence the distraught mother to whom blessing is almost a ceremonial custom comes to the Spring well with a stick in hand bought once by Michael- the way she bursts into an emotional muttering on the incongruity of the situation moves the audience into tears.

But soon afterwards the wretched mother returns back home and explains that she had seen the ghost of Michael riding on the grey pony following Bartley riding on the red mare. This may have been the figment of her own overwrought nerves. But this vision is good enough to intensify the tragic torn state of the heroine. At last all her fears, anxiety , and prayers end with a bitter conclusion- the fear of Bartley’s death so stirred her that it makes Maurya fall in a reverie and she being absorbed in the thought of dead Patch is suddenly surprised by the body of Bartley, but along with this death , she gains the tragic wisdom.

The death of Bartley leaves her to a contemplation of the predicament of death, the death which tolls her away from her sole self to all humanity.Like Oedipus Maurya surrenders to the will of God. Hers is thus an evolution through successive stages of being a keening woman, a woman selfishly happy and finally a unique woman who can accept all death including her own with certainty.