Becoming a Scould: The Dysfunctional Mother-Daughter Relationship and Matricide in The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Abstract

In The Beauty Queen of Leenane Martin McDonagh represents a tragedy of the mother-daughter relationship The domestic violence between the mother and daughter exhibits the dysfunctional relationship while matricide committed by Maureen the daughter became the sudden yet expected result of the built-in tragedy in a traditional remote household in Ireland in the middle of the 20th century The study not only aims at analyzing the dysfunctional mother-daughter/caretaking relationship through fear obligation and guilt (FOG) which Susan Forward proposes in Emotional Blackmail (1997) but also investigates Maureen’s inevitable act of murder in terms of psychoanalytic theories on matricide and the inseparable bond between a mother and a daughter In the context of traditional Irish Catholic motherhood and daughterhood the ideal of harmonious mother-daughter relationship becomes a failure in the Folan Unable to meet the ideal of an obedient daughter Maureen was forced to be a sole caregiver and struggled to break through Mag’s manipulation and hoped to escape from the problematic relationship As a dysfunctional mother Mag attempted to control her daughter through FOG and impelled Maureen to commit matricide Maureen took the inevitable trip to kill her mother in order to find her identity and avoid becoming her mother Maureen could not escape the pre-oedipal complex and the mother-daughter bonding and she finally developed into an angry spinster repeated Mag’s manners and never escaped Mag’s control

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Su-lin Yu (Supervisor)