The protagonist in J. M. Synge’s one-act tragic play Riders to the Sea, Maurya, is a peasant woman belonging to the Irish fishing community of the Aran Islands. Maurya appears to be a passive and helpless victim; yet the intensity of her suffering in the hands of the cruel and unpredictable sea is no less than that of the classical tragic protagonists who are victimized by the malice and caprice of the fate.
Maurya’s desperate attempt to prevent Bartley from sailing comprises of one of the most dramatic moments in the play. While Maurya insistently cites several reasons to dissuade her son, he offers a passive resistance by refusing to address her queries with definite answers. While Maurya had previously refused to admit the possibility of Michael’s death, she readily acknowledges it only to hinder Bartley. She argues that if Michael’s body is recovered, a man would be required to arrange for the funeral rites that would be impossible without Bartley’s presence. When no excuses suffice, she candidly exposes the raw core of her suffering heart, pleading Bartley not to devastate her by adamantly sailing to his death. Though she is a Christian, she cannot rely on the superficial consolation offered by the young priest. Like all other Aran mothers, she is a pagan at her heart, believing more in dark and destructive supernatural forces governing human destiny.
Through Maurya, Synge depicts the tragic foreknowledge of most aged Aran mothers. Being accustomed to repeated bereavement, Maurya possesses the intuitive knowledge that Bartley’s decision to sail to Galway to sell the two horses is a fateful one. It is this tragic wisdom that makes her cry out over her son’s inevitable destiny during his departure – “He is gone now and when the black night is falling, I’ll have no son left me in the world.” Traumatized by fear and anxiety, she is unable to bless her son or handing him his piece of bread – all these being symbolically interpreted by Maurya’s daughters as an ill omen or a curse. Maurya’s culminating tragic experience of losing her last son is therefore a predictable one.
The dramatist reveals to us the uncorrupted and untamed folk-imagination of Maurya through the supernatural vision that she witnesses at the spring-well. The strength of her intuition makes her envision the spectre of Michael adorned in new clothes and shoes on the gray pony, following Bartley, riding the red mare. This supernatural vision of Maurya universalizes the intricate relationship between life and death.
Maurya’s suffering reaches its climactic moment towards the end of the play. Her initial response to Bartley’s death is one of stoic defiance when she declares with a challenge, “There’s no harm the sea can do to me”. In the perpetual battle between the life-giver and the destroyer, between the mother and the destructive sea, Maurya, at last, ironically, is triumphant. Having lost all her six sons and her husband, she has been emancipated from the everlasting cycle of suffering and bereavement. At this point, she seems to withdraw her sympathy from the community of mankind when her disillusionment compels her to state – “I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.”
The final phase of Maurya’s suffering reveals a transition from misery to a profound tragic transcendence. Like the Sophoclean protagonists, she achieves knowledge and enlightenment out of misery and heroically accepts her tragic predicament. Tragic wisdom illuminates her mind into the understanding that death is an essential episode in the universal cycle of life. Instead of accusing God, she reconciles to her fate bravely and gracefully and accepts her destitution as the sublime will of God. It is this spiritual sublimation of misery that gives Maurya the status of a great tragic protagonist/heroine.
