![\"Lady](\"http:\/\/www.belfastpovhist.com\/files\/2014\/12\/lady-gregory.jpg\")
<\/a>Lady Gregory [from http:\/\/www.biography.com\/people\/lady-gregory-9320138]<\/p><\/div>The production (though not the original play) opens with Mrs Donohoe heading off to the Cloone (fictional) workhouse. She means to remove her brother (Mike McInerney) who has been there many years. Mrs Donohoe’s husband has just died and she finds the house lonely. While she knew that it was \u2018no credit to her to have her brother in the workhouse\u2019, she had not gone to visit before. She was now cynically recognising the value of another man about the house to\u00a0help with some of the work of the farm etc. Indeed, removing family from workhouses and asylums often occurred for those very purposes – to help with household chores.[1]<\/a>\u00a0Her husband had died \u2018a fine natural death\u2019 and \u2018he got a lovely funeral; it would delight you to hear the priest reading the Mass\u2019. Dying naturally, at home, and having a priest say the mass, was all emblematic of what has been referred to in the historiography as a \u2018good death\u2019, in contrast with death by violence or very sudden death.[2]<\/a>\u00a0Dying in his own home largely insured against a fate considered very gruesome at this time.<\/p>\n If Donohoe had died in the workhouse then it is possible that the Anatomy Act of 1832 would have come into force; dying in an institution with a family that had no means to bury the body permitted the union authorities to sell the cadaver to medical schools for dissection. \u2018Following the Anatomy Act, anatomists could claim bodies from workhouses and other public institutions, including voluntary hospitals.\u2019[3]<\/a>\u00a0Mr Donohoe’s natural death at home offers a contrast to death in the workhouse, the likely fate for the two main characters in the play.<\/p>\n When we enter the eponymous \u2018workhouse ward\u2019 we hear Mike McInerney and Michael Miskell arguing, competing about who is in more pain, and the spectre of dissection is raised by McInerney. While Miskell shows the visible signs of gnarled hands and rheumatism as evidence of his infirmity and suffering, McInerney declares that his pain is internal; you would have \u2018To open me, and to analyse me, …[to]… know what sort of a pain and a soreness I have in me heart and in me chest.\u2019 Being ‘opened’ and ‘analysed’ was part of the dissection process to which paupers and criminals were subject. But we know that McInerney\u2019s sister, Mrs Donohoe, is coming for him and such a fate is unlikely.<\/p>\n Click on image above to watch the first reel of the play<\/p><\/div>\n Before she arrives however, the competitive arguing continues, and the evidence becomes both somber and uniquely Irish, focusing on funerals past and the presence of the Banshee. Miskell declares that, \u2018But for the wheat that was to be sowed, there would have been more sidecars and common cars at my father\u2019s funeral, God rest his soul, than at any funeral ever left your own door.\u2019 McInerney goes one step further, invoking a traditionally Irish figure; \u2018And what do you say to the banshee? Isn\u2019t she apt to have knowledge of the ancient race? Was ever she heard to screech or to cry for the Miskells? \u2026 She was not, but for the six families, the Hyneses, the Foxes, the Faheys, the Dooleys, the McInerneys. It is of the nature of the McInerneys she is I am thinking, crying for them the same as a king\u2019s children.\u2019\u00a0The Banshee was a mythical female figure believed to attend at the death of certain individuals and families, and as Nina Witoszek suggests was a means by which the dead \u2018could still acquire social prestige\u2019.[4]<\/a>\u00a0Respectability in the context of the Irish death was about the grandness of the funeral, the final fate of the dead body, and, in this \u2018stage-Irish\u2019 play, the relationship between the Banshee and the family. Such a family were akin to royalty!<\/p>\n While the banshee was a mythical creature, there were other very real concerns for the two workhouse paupers. Death in the workhouse even if it did not involve dissection, could involve burial in a pauper graveyard; anonymous and unmarked, the pauper grave was a sign of social failure. Despite his presence in the workhouse McInerney still believed he had some control over where he might be buried, \u2018I \u2026 have one request only to be granted, and I leaving it in my will, it is what I would request, nine furrows of the field, nine ridges of the hills, nine waves of the ocean to be put between your grave and my own grave the time we will be laid in the ground! \u2026 I’d sooner than … know that my shadow and my ghost will not be knocking about with your shadow and your ghost, and the both of us waiting our time. I\u2019d sooner be delayed in Purgatory!\u2019 Miskell agrees, \u2018Amen to that!\u2019<\/p>\n These claims to control of their bodies post-mortem by McInerney and Miskell were not necessarily unfounded. Paupers might leave something to ensure burial in a graveyard, or a family member might come to claim their bodies. The Porter\u2019s Book of the Thurles Poor Law Union reveals coffins going in and out of the workhouse, sometimes heavy with the remains of a pauper who had family with enough means, affection or pride, to ensure burial outside the workhouse grounds and beyond the pauper plot.<\/p>\n Click on the image above ‘The Workhouse Ward’ to watch the first reel. The second and third reels are\u00a0here\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0here<\/a>. I won’t give away the ending!<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> \u00c1ine McCarthy, \u201cHearths, Bodies and Minds: Gender Ideology and Women\u2019s Committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum, 1916 – 1925,\u201d in\u00a0Irish Women\u2019s History<\/i>, ed. Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart, 115 \u2013 136 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [2]<\/a> Clodagh Tait,\u00a0Death, burial and commemoration in early modern Ireland, 1580-1650\u00a0<\/i>(Palgrave, 2002), p. 7<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [3]<\/a> \u2018Medicine and mutilation\u2019,\u00a0http:\/\/wellcomehistory.wordpress.com\/2012\/03\/27\/medicine-and-mutilation-oxford-manchester-and-the-impact-of-the-1832-anatomy-act\/<\/a>\u00a0[accessed 11 December 2014]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [4]<\/a> Nina Witoszek, \u2018Ireland: A Funerary Culture?\u2019,\u00a0Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review<\/i>, Vol. 76, No. 302 (Summer, 1987), p. 208. See also P. Lysaght, (1985)\u00a0The banshee : a study in beliefs and legends about the Irish supernatural death-messenger\u00a0<\/i>(Dun Laoighre: Glendale)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Georgina Laragy Teaching about pauper death and funerals today I went looking for an interesting alternative resource on YouTube for tomorrow\u2019s seminar \u2013 videos of Victorian funerals, etc., but they were hard to find. However, I did come across … Continue reading <\/a>
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