The Aran Islands Essay Research Paper Synges

?The Aran Islands? Essay, Research Paper

Synge?s Romantic Vision of the Aran Islands

When John Millington Synge made his way to the western most islands of Ireland he was in search of inspiration for his writing. The fruit of his journey was the fame-winning book entitled ?The Aran Islands?. Synge had many purposes for this book, but one of the most compelling was his desire to write an anthropologically geared account of the people and lifestyle of what many believed to be the last bastion of true Irishness. However, Synge?s anthropological work could not avoid the strong Romantic tendencies that influenced his writing. In my opinion it is Synge?s Romanticism that makes his account more believable. The tenants of Romanticism call for the writer to be at once awed with nature and somewhat set apart from the ?noble savages? that he is writing about. Synge?s awe of nature is necessary for the anthropological nature of the book because the environment of the Aran Islands is instrumental in the understanding the psyches of the people, and his Romanticism produces the vivid imagery needed for the reader to understand the landscape. The fact that Synge sees the people of the Aran Islands as a different race from himself, in my opinion, provides him with more perspective and thus allows him to relate the events and personalities of the people with a more accurate and essentially unbiased voice.

One of the most important aspects of anthropology is the understanding of how a culture relates to their environment. Thus, Synge?s imagery of the islands is instrumental in the reader?s grasp of the people and the culture which Synge is trying to describe. Synge develops the landscape in two different ways. He reproduces the landscape alone and also the people?s connection with their environment.

When Synge discusses the landscape of the Aran Islands he paints the picture of a wild and hard environment. In Part One of the book he begins by relating the image of the Aranmor countryside as he walks through it for the first time. He states:

I was wandering out along the one good roadway

of the island, looking over low walls on either

side into small flat fields of naked rock. I

have seen nothing so desolate. Grey floods of

water were sweeping everywhere upon the

limestone, making at times a wild torrent of

the road? Whenever the cloud lifted I could see

the edge of the sea below me on the right, and

the naked ridge of the island above me on the

other side? (Synge 2)

The most vivid aspect of this passage is the diction, which Synge uses to describe the island?s environment. More than once Synge uses the word ?naked? to refer to the rock. He also builds further that image by calling the land ?desolate? and ?wild?. Synge also makes an important play of the colors of the Aran Islands. He uses the images of grey and black quite often throughout the book. At one point he states that everywhere he turns he finds, ??the same grey obsession twining and wreathing itself among the narrow fields?? (Synge 46). By describing the island thus he helps the reader build the image of the Aran Islands as something quite distinct from the lushness of the Irish mainland. The contrast between the environment of the islands and the mainland is important for Synge to establish, as the reader?s understanding of the landscape is essential in any type of anthropological study.

Synge explores at length the incredibly intertwined relationship between the people of the Aran Islands and their surrounding environment. When Synge views the relationship between the inhabitants and nature as both primitive and knowledgeable. Synge comes to understand the primitive nature of the Aran Islanders when he comes to realize that time on the island is determined by the wind and not clocks, as they do not exist in the Aran Islands.

Synge goes on in a different passage to bring to light one of the differences between the unadulterated habits of the islanders and those of the people on the mainland who have been influenced by the other cultures of Europe. He writes:

The absence of the heavy boot of Europe

has preserved to these people the agile

walk of the wild animal, while the general

simplicity of their lives has given them

many other points of physical perfection.

Their way of life has never been acted

on by anything much more artificial than

the nests and burrows of the creatures

that live around them. (Synge 33)

Synge?s Romantic tendencies influence him to see the primitive aspects of the islanders as noble. Even though he refers to them in the above passage as having qualities of ?wild animals?, he does so with respect for the way that they have adapted to their environment. Also in that passage, Synge touches on the innocence of the people because of their close connection to the land. Like many other Romantic writers, Synge believed that modern society corrupted man from nature and thus connected knowledge of the land with innocence of culture. That the people live always in conjunction with the island?s natural world fascinated Synge. At one point in the text Synge even comments that the mood of the people seems to echo the mood of the landscape. It is Synge?s Romantic ideals that mak

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