Enam's Note

Question: How does the playwright portrays the character of Maurya as a Universal mother in his play "Riders to the Sea"? Maurya, a woman of over eighty, is one of the four major characters of the play ‘ Riders to the Sea’ by John Millington Synge. The whole story moves around her, telling the tale of her tragic past. Her great endurance and bravery in the most striking phases of the life reaches her at the level of real heroine of the play. Now we are going to look into Maurya critically.                         At the very beginning of the play we see that, Maurya has already lost her four sons and now she is waiting to recover the dead body of fifth one, Michael, who has been missing for nine days and to receive his dead body. As she says; “…if Michael is washed up to- morrow morning, or the next morning, or any morning in the week, for it's a deep grave we'll make him by the grace of God.” Now, Bartley is only one alive son of her family.