A note on Juno and the Paycock

Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock tells the story of the downfall of the Boyle family (Jack the father, Juno the mother, Mary the Daughter, and Johnny the son) from relative poverty into destitute conditions. They live in a tenement in Dublin and are working class through and through. Near the beginning of the play, it seems as if good fortune will finally smile upon the Boyle family, as they receive news that a rich uncle has passed away and intends to leave them a sizable sum.

It turns out bad for the family as they are swindled by Bentham, a young lawyer from London, who has, in the words of Captain Jack Boyle done to us the same as he's done to Mary. He had "screwed" the family financially and Mary literally, as he has absconded leaving Mary pregnant and unmarried.

Some interesting parallels to a Doll's House, which Mary is reading at one point in the play: a woman leaving her husband is the finale of both dramas, and the idea that this is pretty radical given the time and the social conditions is evident. Perhaps, as Juno claims "two mothers'll be better than one"... tough from very different social classes, both stories present powerful argument for suffrage.

Mary's character is interested in improving herself, but she has been born into unfortunate circumstances. Page 5 stage direction states that there are "two forces working in her... one, through circumstances of her life... the other, through books..."

Captain Boyle is antagonistic toward her reading and sees it as putting on airs. At one point he even indirectly blames Mary's reading and new ideas as leading to her pregnancy. "What did the likes of her born in a tenement house, want with readin?"

There is an interesting attitude toward religion in the play, as the clergy certainly has power, but religion and god seems to be rendered impotent "agen the stupidity of men". Bentham presents himself as a theosophist and then proceeds to swindle the family. It could be a symbolic indictment of the church in Ireland. Another interesting line comes from the mother of Tancred during her son's funeral procession: "O blessed Virgin where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets?"

The lines spoken by Joxer near the end of the play seem so important thematically: "The whole worlds in a terrible state of chaos." This seems a very modern idea, reminiscent of Eliot's "unreal city" and Yeats' widening gyre of history coming apart. This modern idea of history coming apart, is not a totally hopeless state in the hands of a writer with a truly modernist bent. That, I think, explains the feeling of hopefulness one may feel at the end of Juno or a Doll's house. The modernists see the end as the beginning. Things have to be wiped out before they can begin again, anew. Similar to Giambista Vico's theory of history, which Joyce drew on to write Fennigan's Wake, Juno constructs a world that needs to be torn down-- a world that by being torn down opens the door for new possibilities.