The Monstrous Mother and the 'natural man': Mythic Figures and Recurring Metaphors in the Plays of James K. Baxter

Abstract

Previous critical commentary has considered the plays of James K. Baxter to be predominantly a re-working of his social criticism in a different medium. In this study, I argue that a reassessment of Baxter’s plays using a new methodology is long overdue. These plays are significant in and of themselves as a unique body of work written in a distinctive dramatic voice that transcends models of naturalism / realism by returning consistently to iterated characters, images and concerns. Baxter’s plays are remarkable for obsessively repeated symbolic networks—crucifixions, failed Utopias, sexual violence and childhood loss—and for recurring affectively invested mythic figures that appear to project split-off parts-of-self and parts-of-other into the fiction. This study of four of Baxter’s plays, Mrs Aggle’s Id (c.1967), The Spots on the Leopard (1963), The Day That Flanagan Died (1969) and The Band Rotunda (1967) uses a psychoanalytical paradigm to illustrate the formative influence of psychic trauma on the creation of the plays and to suggest how creativity may be used to address intolerable conflicts arising from the clash between inner needs and desires and the external world, encountered during the search for a fulfilling self. Focusing on two mythic figures, the monstrous mother-wife and the “natural man,” my aim in this thesis is to show how conflict, discernible within the poet’s biography and oeuvre, is externalised and projected onto the actions of fictive objects. Unique to Baxter’s drama is the way that these figures—fragmented, doubled, and “split” into opposing pairs—are brought into a form of dialogue with each other, enabling the playing out of long-held inner dramas at a displaced symbolic remove. A consideration of both structural and symbolic elements sheds a specific light upon characterisation and narrative, and demonstrates the capability of psychoanalytical theory to render aspects of the subjective, inscribed both in and below the language surface of the text, accessible from a new angle and amenable to a new working through. By rendering part of the subjective interaction between the poet and the “objects” within his inner world available, some light may also be shed on the paradoxical and difficult figure of the poet himself.