Riders to the Sea

Maurya is the mother of Nora, Cathleen, and Bartley, among other children who have died at sea. Maurya is the tragic hero of the play. Her journey is emotional instead of physical, and the play reveals the final day of her emotional journey toward a sense of peace despite her grief and loss. Like the tragic heroes of Aristotle’s time, Maurya instills feelings of pity and fear in the hearts of audiences (and readers) through the tragedy of her many losses and the final blow of Bartley’s death at the hands of an apathetic natural world. She has endured numerous misfortunes, and the audience must look on as she faces her powerlessness in the face of that misfortune. Maurya moves through stages of anxious fear, dread, anguished certainty, and passive acceptance of her fate and the fate of her family, embodying and exploring the theme The Relationship Between Tragedy and Catharsis. Ultimately, she is emptied of feeling and any drive to action by the death of her final son.

Maurya, like the rest of the characters, speaks the Hiberno-English dialect, but she and the others resist the stereotyping so common among the Irish characters of 19th-century theater.