Heat and Hysterical Daughters: The Link Between Female Sexuality and Temperature on Stage

“No tiny spoons for liars in this house”, Maureen is angry (McDonagh 1996). Directed toward her aging mother, staged as a prop rocking back and forth in her wooden chair, Maureen refuses to give Mag the tool to stir her pot of steaming tea. She faces the lit, crackling hearth of their shared home. Thirty years Maureen’s senior, Mag, is desperate for hot and well-stirred porridge paired with her daily dose of strengthening Complan. Martin McDonagh’s 1996 play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane takes place in Galway, Ireland. The play follows two women, mother and daughter, as they reach a delayed coming of age conflict. Finally, at forty, after facing years of negativity and abusive language from her mother Maureen decides to seek outer identity. As an adult she makes the typical adolescent discoveries of personal agency, drive for exploration, and most central, being introduced to boys as if she were in her late adolescence. Meanwhile, Mag is desperate to keep her middle-aged daughter in the house, pushing her sexual repression further through language, action, and cold emotional response. Mag keeps Maureen miserable, stuck in the comfort of their patterned, abusive cycles. Similarly, Maureen’s prompted behaviors keep Mag malnourished, maimed, and shut in. Both are paralleled by items only useful when merged with high temperatures. Through implicit themes of discrimination against hysteria and mental illness, socially learned repression of female sexuality is defined by McDonagh’s orgiastic-like placement of temperature, affliction and injury within the world of The Beauty Queen of Leenane. 

Developed within his case study of “Dora” Freud’s theory on the causes of developed hysteria concludes that women showcase physical ailment when experiencing affliction. Often observed as an imitation of other women’s ill inspired weakness, Freud's written descriptions in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, explain that desire to adhere to standards of weakness are addictive to unstable women. He states, “The current flows along these paths from the new source of excitation to the old point of discharge--pouring into the symptom, in the words of the Gospel, like new wine into an old bottle” (Freud, 70-71). Once a pattern is developed, in this case a patterned behavior of physical sickness in response to emotional stress, it is willed so strongly one must fully rewire their brain processes before finding relief. In a modern society, the idea of hysteria is accepted as the manifestation of emotional distress and physical ailment in response to the overwhelming world around the objectified. This leads to perceivable instability. McDonagh’s play grants Maureen large amounts of over stimulation causing another part of her psyche to take over, fueled by Mag’s entrapping disordered cycle. Keeping her disadvantage of innocence in mind, she revisits her reactive patterns of anger, insecurity, and fear.

Unfortunately, history has observed women outcast because of their womanhood. Historically, medical professionals do not believe women’s symptomatic descriptions and often misdiagnose (Dusenbery, 2018).Furthermore, women who are elderly or perceivably disturbed are silenced, discredited by their gender and/or afflictions. Thus, a reader and audience can assume Mag and Maureen have not been believed by medical professionals, regardless of their clear need for not only physical help, but also psychiatric support. Their anger, fueled by each other, is only heightened by their shared removal from society. This anger is manifested in different stage images for the two. Maureen’s is made concrete through recurrence of the boiling kettle and licking flames in the hearth. Mag’s is represented by the fire poker, the tool that ultimately ends her life. This rejection of truth offers an outlet for undiscovered emotion, pushing toward sadism and fantasy, perceived as lunacy. McDonagh capitalizes off this aspect of the marginalized female psyche. He grants release through warm, sadistic acts as well as cold, masochistic self-sabotage and delusions.

Through subtle orgiastic techniques, the stage of this show embodies even more sensory experiences for the characters and audience alike. Coined by Hermann Nitsch’s controversial life work, coincidentally started in Freud’s same place of work; Vienna, orgiastic theatrical art pushes the boundaries of ethics through sadomasochistic nakedness, staged orgies, blood-letting, and animal maiming/death. This approach inspired Nitsch to further explore his OM Theatre (orgies and Mysteries). His work was made in direct opposition to ideals rooted in Irish Catholicism, a motif frequently observed in McDonagh’s theatrical art. The intentions of this movement, though unclear to many, lie in positivity relative to his experience. His SAST report states, “He believes that human instincts have been repressed by social norms and conventions. His ritualized acts of killing animals and physical contact with blood we supposed to release that repressed energy as well as purify.” McDonagh’s maiming of Mag’s arm and his ultimate depiction of Mag’s murder is framed by temperature, imagery, and sound. This mirrors the Nitsch’s sensory work on a smaller, more palatable scale. An example of McDonagh’s implicit sensory work in The Beauty Queen of Leenane is observed in a moment of Maureen’s complete loss of control. Built throughout the preceding scenes of perceivable self-control written into Maureen’s character, a penultimate outburst creates a violent act of literal maiming. Mag reveals she knows a secret about Maureen’s sexuality, though she presented a loss of innocence she is still in fact a virgin. She is enraged that Mag uses this embarrassment to feed off her insecurity and is unable to hold herself back. McDonagh writes, “Maureen stares at her in dumb shock and hate, then walks to the kitchen, dazed.” Her anger has consumed all other aspects of her sense of self. She heats a pan of oil and amidst little dialogue, waits for a pan of oil to parallel her own steaming anger by reaching a boil, beats her mother, questions her, and ultimately takes her mother’s already maimed hand. She douses it in scathing, crackling oil. This graphic and bloody shift in power capitalizes off Maureen’s agility advantage over Mag. Maureen owns her agency for the first time staged. This recognition of power quickly turns to rage. Maureen’s pain has been boiling for so long and mixed with hot oil splatters through the screen of the female, angry vessel. Mag is silent.

Heat is personified throughout The Beauty Queen of Leenane, first observed through Mag’s exhibition of self-control around the boiling teapot. She doesn’t direct heat literally or emotionally toward her mother, boiling internally in the same way the whistling kettle steams. This act is followed by mention of a murdered “oul woman”, strangled to death. Lighthearted conversation revolving around this dark topic provides Maureen’s character with perceivable cool, darkness juxtaposed against the heat of her mother’s tea, a hot pan used for porridge, and the mentioned kettle. His dissonance informs the quickness in dynamic shift between mother and daughter, abled and less abled, capable and less capable. Their roles switch, often.

Personified again in the second scene of McDonagh’s world, temperature is not surrounded by the same level of self-control or good behavior, foreshadowing a slow, lumpy build. Shortly before denying her mother of the utensil to stir her Complan, a strengthening powdered supplement mixed with warm water, Maureen enters the kitchen and turns on the stove to again heat her kettle. As the water boils, Maureen confronts her mother caught in a blatant lie: rejecting the idea that Ray Dooley, a young man from the neighborhood, has visited the home. Maureen pours the drink, without mixing the powder and Mag is quick to admit her lie, through the guise of faulty memory. The admission prompts Maureen to fill the rest of the cup with tap water, cooling the beverage before handing it to Mag; an act of compromise. Themes of repressed sexuality and repulsion at arousal are experienced not only by Maureen, but also exhibited within Mag’s disgust of overt sexuality. She further instills Maureen’s own self shame and pushes her to this point of disgust. This pent-up desire fuels parts of Maureen’s afflictions and mood shifts. Maureen imitates Mag’s refusal of Maureen’s sense of self by refusing to give her food. This opposition reveals a cycle of learned abusive behavior. The heat within their anger and repressed desire are undeniable, they boil over onto the stage. McDonagh writes in a hearth as a third central character, another sister; this one present onstage unlike Maureen’s unseen older siblings, Annette and Margo. They’ve escaped the addictive, hysterical cycle. The characters of fire, heat, and tools offer physical depiction of the dark presence of Maureen and Mag’s inner battle with delusion, craving for power, and comfort sought in control. Freud’s, Dora: An Analysis of a case of Hysteria, speaks on Dora’s unprecedented anger toward her formerly beloved governess. He states, “She did not become angry until she observed that she herself was a subject of complete indifference to the governess, whose pretended affection for her was really meant for her father” (Freud 53). This process indicates an extreme conditional love rooted in fixation proximity mirrored in Mag’s behavior toward Maureen. This is the first evidence of Mag’s own affliction influencing a pattern of disorder and anger within Maureen. The theme is made even more explicit through Maureen and Mag’s discussion of Maureen’s sexual history. In Beauty Queen Mag states, “Young girls should not be out gallivanting with fellas… !” Mag is later mocked by Maureen who reveals that her sole sexual experience to be kisses with two men. It can be assumed that Mag has simultaneously shamed Maureen for living in sin by succumbing to dirty, sexual desires and shamed her for remaining single, compared to her two sisters; both married. This duality further implies Maureen’s hysterical state has been cause by her mother’s inability to let go of her child.

Scene six’s ending offers the most apparent outlet for this disordered relationship again through heat this time, however, offers not only feeling of heat but also visual representation through the fire in the hearth. A third character, the flames consume a love letter intended for Maureen, removing any chance of escape from the painful cycle. Thrown after immoral content prying by Mag’s own hand, it is made most explicit in this moment that Mag has no respect for Maureen outside of her outgrown role as obligated homemaker. McDonagh’s stage directions oppose the heat on stage through the chilling calmness Mag is granted. “Mag picks up the envelope and opens it, goes back to the range and lifts off the lid so that the flames are visible, and stands there reading the letter. She drops the first short page into the flames as she finishes it, then starts reading the second. Slow fade-out.” (McDonagh, 42.) The image of sheer black smoke, remnants of Maureen’s chance to leave, provide an intended provocative image of hopelessness, maliciousness, and impending dread.

Breaking further into Nitsch’s influence past orgiastic technique and embracing Orgies Mystery Theatre’s influence, McDonagh includes moments of light, sexual comedy. This plays on the typical awkwardness of daughters revealing their sexual ownership to their mothers, and being seen as separate for the first time; a typical theme in coming of age tales. The only catch being the delayed age at which Mag and her child experience this further informing the disorder of their stunted codependency. Before Mag’s near fatal revelation of Maureen related knowledge, the play seeks relief and comedy through a phallic staging of shortbread cookies. After expressing her love for the specific cookie over and over throughout the text, Mag wants one from Maureen who is preoccupied bragging tales of her fictitious sexual experience. “Maureen gives Mag a shortbread finger, after waving it phallically in the air for a moment.” (McDonagh, 45). Not only does this light moment follow Nitsch’s OM theories to add shock value to the following violence, but also informs the aspects of normalcy to be found in intricate observation of this bizarre relationship.

McDonagh’s ability to accurately write female dynamics cannot go unnoticed. His attention to inner psyche in regard to sexual repression and female on female domestic violence is directly expressed through controversial staged violence. Provocative in form, undeniable Freudian and Orgiastic themes have aided in the expression of dysfunctional, cyclical, dynamics developed in hatred and female oppressive institutions. The accuracy of emotion informed by heat, heat tools, burning, and ultimately murder can be supported by the work of Sigmund Freud, offering a truthful outlet for suffering women to be confronted with the nature of the inherited reactivity of disordered behavior, often from mothers struggling with the same institutionalized self-hate. This is the cycle. Manifesting internal turmoil through physical temperature and visible heat The Beauty Queen’s evidential groundwork supports Maureen’s final outburst against her mother, offering metaphor for all objectified women. She then slips into the same institution, ending the play alone, in her mother’s rocking chair, no spoon, craving lumpy porridge; she’s become an exact replica of everything she’s fought against. The Beauty Queen of Leenane can be regarded as one of McDonagh’s most feminist works. The gripping language and detailed stage direction shed light on the hidden lives of ‘hysterical’ women through metaphor, personification, and Austrian influence. His intent introduces compassion through explanation of Maureen’s origins applicable to all afflicted women suffering underneath social scripts so deeply instilled.

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Works Cited

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