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Mental Illness In The Holy City And The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

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Mental illness plays a significant role in both Patrick McCabe’s The Holy City and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Both texts are imbued with a bleak outlook on life, an outlook which is only enhanced by the rural trappings in which the characters find themselves confined; however, in each text, the darkness and austerity is undercut by lashings of black comedy. In this essay, I will discuss the authors’ representations of mental illness in their respective texts and the black comic sensibility of their writing used in tackling the topic of mental illness in their work, and the difficulties that lie in their realisations of such a sensitive subject matter. Mental illness has frequently been used before in both film and literature as a storytelling device; both The Holy City and The Beauty Queen of Leenane utilize this particular storytelling device, and the mental illness depicted in both texts inevitably, it seems, leads …show more content…

Neither Maureen nor Mag get along, and throughout the play each character frequently subjects the other to their own particular brand of abuse. Maureen hopes to leave her stagnant home-life behind by marrying the charming Pato Dooley and moving to Boston, but is thwarted by her manipulative mother, eventually leading to predictably tragic consequences. The Holy City is told through a first-person narrative by the character of Chris J McCool; now in his 67th year and recalling, or perhaps even reimagining, his life growing up in Cullymore - the archetypal backwards Irish town - and quickly revealing himself to be the most unreliable of narrators; even his heritage, his claim, or even his belief, of being the illegitimate son of the aristocratic Protestant Mrs Thornton and her Catholic seducer named Carberry is highly doubtful from the

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