Dancing At Lughnasa Analysis

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Dancing at Lughnasa is a play created by Brian Friel in 1990. The story takes place in the last days of summer in 1936 in a rural environment of the fictional town of Ballybeg, Donegal, in Ireland. We are in the midst of a traditional Catholic family in a female environment, composed of a brother, Jack, who has been a missionary in Africa and a five unmarried sisters, Kate, Agnes, Rose, Maggie and Chris, who has a son, Michael, the responsible for narrating the story from his point of view. The fact that one of the sisters has a child being a single woman reveals that at the same time, the family is traditional and also modern. This factor is very important; it is very contradictory to the historical context of the time. We face different wars …show more content…

The fact that some women have a job to earn a salary is a dreadful abuse we must put an end to by all possible means.” …show more content…

Where this strict behavior is in contrast with paganism, the dances and songs of the sisters inside the home, where they can feel more freedom, in the domestic life, the place that women of the time occupied. We can see how this in some cases are liked with various events that were taking place in different places of Europe at the same moment, but all have in common repression and discipline, and the secondary role of women in the society but the principal one in the work. How these five women trying to break traditional stereotypes established by dancing and singing songs like pagan symbol of their freedom against the sexual repression of the time, against their margination and oppression in Ireland as well as in the rest of Europe, as well as the reflection of Ireland around 1936, and how with some little facts they are becoming to be more free, as for example the fact that finally Michael knows the name of his father and they use it without any problem. What Brian Friel could have written autobiographical way, about his own family, which had a feminine influence on his childhood, due to the fact that he spend the time with his five aunts, he draw all as a strong women able to make everything on their