Examine the role of destiny in Riders to the Sea.
Ans. The commonly accepted critical dictum “character is destiny” with regard to Shakespearean conception of tragedy, though true in the substance, leaves much of the great master’s tragic conception unexplained. Character, even in the case of Macbeth and Othello, does not fully explain the destiny, i.e. the tragedy that overcomes them. Destiny seems to be a predetermined force kept in store for characters by an inscrutable Fate, the logic of whose action is a mystery. In this matter, the observation of Hamlet “There is a divinity that shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will” is more true of the Shakespearean conception. That is a reversion at least in its qualitative aspect to the old Greek conception of tragedy as essentially an outcome of the will of the gods, who will not tolerate the arrogance or defiance or superhuman efforts of tiny man against the powers that rule heaven and earth and uphold the moral laws.
The conception of human tragedy in Hardy’s novels dealing with the lives of the ordinary lower stratum of society is based on a similar conception of some blind force which he calls ‘immanent will’, which, however, is not bound by moral sense as humanity understands it. Both in Shakespeare and Hardy-and to some extent the same thing may be said of ancient Greek tragedians- characters in their action seem to tempt Fate and it is through character that Fate gets the opportunity to assert its will; yet the mystery of Fate is not wholly explicable in terms of character.
In Synge’s riders to the Sea, the characters who are the victims of Fate do nothing to tempt it, either by their action or by their thought. Physically and morally they are simple people of primeval habits and their only concern is to make a living by hard labor and risky undertakings on or across the sea. They certainly deserve praise by virtue of their patience, courage and even by the grandeur of their character. But they are too weak in the face of the physical power of the sea either to challenge that power or to able to save themselves when it in its insatiable hunger threatens their lives, Impressive as they are by their courage and the grandeur of their character. The tragedy in the play is not due to their character. The philosophy of life that has been forced into them by Fate represented by the sea is the one which the poet Kingsley sums up in the lines: “Men must work and women must weep, And the sooner it’s over the sooner to sleep.” Cathleen’s rebuke to her mother Maurya points to the hard reality of the lives of the Irish peasantry: “It’s the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?” But the aggrieved mother knows better: “…there was a star up against the moon, and it rising in the night.” It is to her a sure indication of the Fate which Bartley must not temp. But her persuasion has little effect on the mind of her dutiful young son-her last surviving one; he says, “I must go now quickly”.
Ason Maurya coming back with the bread in her hand cries, “I seen the fear fullest thing”. She has seen Michael on the gray pony behind Bartley. Both Maurya and Cathleen begin to “keen” : “It’s destroyed we are form this day It’s destroyed surely’. They know well enough the great hunger of the sea and its infinite cruelty. Things turn out as feared by these two women, whom we may call superstitious if we like. But the power of the sea and its character as the main actor on the stage of tragedy are writ large everywhere in the play. The tragedy enacted by the sea is summed up by Maurya: “They’re all gone now and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me…..It isn’t that I haven’t prayed for you, Bartley, to do the Almighty God.
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