Where Is My Country?: From Everyday Life to the Emigration Complex in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2024-46.2.07Abstract
Arguably, Brian Friel’s 1964 work Philadelphia, Here I Come! is one of the most influential plays in 20th-century Irish literature, as it focuses on emigration, a pivotal political and cultural phenomenon that recurs in both modern and contemporary Irish history. Crucially, Friel invents a protagonist with split personalities, Public Gar and Private Gar, representing the conflicted mentality of a migrant who finds it necessary to leave their motherland. By reading Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! from the perspective of migration, this paper examines the necessity of departure for Gar and the difficulty of his arrival. I argue that Gar’s conflicts are not accidental but are consistent with a typical Irish mentality. However, the play suggests that the Irish protagonist’s endeavor to shun troubles via voluntary emigration can hardly promise a better tomorrow.
Downloads
References
Beckett, Samuel. 1965. All That Fall. London: Faber and Faber.
Bell, Sam Hanna. 1972. The Theatre in Ulster. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Boltwood, Scott. 2018. Brian Friel. London: Palgrave.
Bradford, Richard, Madelena Gonzalez, Stephen Butler, James Ward, and Kevin De Ornellas, eds. 2020. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Literature, Volume II. Newark: Wiley-Blackwell.
Brown, Terence. 2004. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History: 1922-2002. London: Harper Perennial.
Campbell, Joseph. 1973. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Cave, Richard Allen. 2006. “Friel’s Dramaturgy: The Visual Dimension.” In Roche 2006, 129-41.
Cocoran, Neil. 1993. “The Penalties of Retrospect: Continuities in Brian Friel.” In Peacock 1993, 14-28.
Collins, Mary Elizabeth. 1976. Ireland 1800-1970. London: Longman.
Cunliffe, Barry. 2003. The Celts: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP.
D’arcy, Frank. 1999. The Story of Irish Emigration. Dublin: Mercier Press.
Deane, Seamus. 1985. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980. London: Faber and Faber.
—. 1996. “Introduction.” In Friel 1996, 11-22.
Duffy, Patrick J. 2004. To and From Ireland: Planned Migration schemes c. 1600-2000. Dublin: Geography Press.
Etherton, Michael. 1989. Contemporary Irish Dramatists. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Fitzgerald, Patrick and Brain Lambkin. 2007. Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
Fitzpatrick, David. 1989. “Ireland since 1870.” In Foster, 1989, 213-74.
Foster, Robert F. 1989. “Ascendancy and Union.” In Foster, 1989, 161-212.
—, ed. 1989. The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Franz, Marie Louise von. 1968. “The Process of Individuation.” In Jung 1968, 157-254.
Friel, Brian. 1965. Philadelphia, Here I Come. London: Faber and Faber.
—. 1996. Brian Friel: Plays 1. London: Faber and Faber.
Genet, Jacqueline and Elizabeth Hellegouarc’H, eds. 2012. Studies on the Contemporary Irish Theatre: Truth and Indeterminacy in Brian Friel. Caeo: Presses universitaires de Caen.
Greenwood, Joseph. 2013. “‘Gar O’Donnell and the Philadelphia’: Traditional Song and ‘The Irish Showband’ in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964).” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1.2: 204-31.
Gregory, Lady. 2006. Gods and Fighting Men. Dublin: Nonsuch Press.
Grene, Nicholas. 2012. “Truth and Indeterminacy in Brian Friel.” In Genet and Hellegouarc’H, 2012, 9-20.
Hayes, Maurice. 1990. “Migratory Birds and Roundy Heads.” In Kearney 1990, 11-20.
Heaney, Seamus. 1990. “Correspondences: Emigrants & Inner Exiles.” In Kearney 1990, 21-31.
Henderson, Joseph L. 1968. “Ancient Myths and Modern Man.” In Jung 1968, 95-156.
Higgins, Geraldine. 2010. Brian Friel. Tavistock: Northcote House Press.
Irish Examiner. 2010. “The flight of the Irish—curse we must bring to an end.” 22 September 2010. https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-20131416.html
Jenkins, William. 2013. Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867-1916. McGill: Queen’s UP.
Joyce, James. 1995. Dubliners. New York: Cambridge UP.
Jung, Carl G. 1958. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton UP.
—. 1968. “Approaching the Unconscious.” In Jung 1968, 1-94.
—, ed. 1968. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell.
Kearney, Richard. 1985. “Introduction.” In Kearney 1985, 7-14.
—, ed. 1985. The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions. Dublin: Wolfhound.
—, ed. 1990. Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Kenny, Kevin. 2003. “Writing the History of the Irish Diaspora.” In Savage 2003, 206-26.
—. 2013. Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP.
—. 2019. “Two Diasporic Movement in Irish Emigration History: The Famine Generation and the Contemporary Era.” Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 9: 43-65.
Kiberd, Declan. 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Vintage.
Kilroy, Thomas. 2006. “The Early Plays.” In Roche 2006, 6-17.
Mac Éinri, Piaras and Tina O’Toole. 2012. “Editor’s Introduction: New Approaches to Irish Migration.” Éire-Ireland 47.1-2: 5-18.
MacLaughin, Jim. 1993. “Ireland: An ‘Emigrant Nursery’ in the World Economy.” International Migration 31.1: 149-70.
Matthews, Kelly. 2019. “The Production History of Philadelphia, Here I Come!”, American Journal of Irish Studies 15: 71-87.
McCormack, W. J., ed. 1999. The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Malden: Blackwell.
Meyer, Kuno. 1913. Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry. Translated by Kuno Meyer. London: Constable.
Miller, Kerby 1985. A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Murray, Christopher, ed. 1999. Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews 1964-1999. London: Faber and Faber.
Murray, Henry A., ed. 1968. Myth and Mythmaking. Boston: Beacon.
O’Brien, George. 1989. Brian Friel. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
O’Connor, Joseph. 1994. The Secret World of the Irish Male. Dublin: New Ireland.
O’Toole, Fintan. 1997. The Exile of Erin: Images of a Global Island. Dublin: New Island Books.
—. 2015. “The truth according to Brian Friel.” The Irish Times, 2 October.
Peacock, Allan J., ed. 1993. The Achievement of Brian Friel. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe.
Pine, Richard. 1999. The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel. Dublin: U College Dublin P.
Pratt, William. 1999. “Brian Friel’s Imaginary Journeys to Nowhere.” World Literature Today 37.3: 445-50.
Price, Graham. 2020. “Brian Friel.” In Bradford 2020, 39-48.
Richards, Shaun. 2000. “Brian Friel: Seizing the Moment of Flux.” Irish University Review 30.2: 254-71.
Roche, Anthony. 1994. Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
—, ed. 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Russell, Richard Rankin. 2013. Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama. Syracuse: Syracuse UP.
Savage, Robert J. Savage Jr, ed. 2003. Ireland in the New Century: Politics, Culture, and Identity. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Shorer, Marc. 1968. “The Necessity of Myth.” Myth and Mythmaking. In Murray 1968, 354-57.
Squire, Charles. 2003. Celtic Myth and Legend. Mineola: Dover Press.
Townshend, Charles. 1999. Ireland: The 20th Century. London: Arnold.
Trotter, Mary. 2008. Modern Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ward, Patrick. 2002. Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
