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- Title
From the Mexican Borderlands to the Irish Bogland: Atravesando Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats.
- Authors
Torres, Domino
- Abstract
This article presents a reading of Marina Carr's Hester Swane in By the Bog of Cats (1998) that moves away from standard comparisons to the European Medea storyline and situates her more closely in relation to La Llorona (the "Crying Woman"), a ghost figure in Mexican/Mexican-American folk stories who wanders near bodies of waters, wailing as she searches for her missing children. La Llorona, like Hester, is an exile, banished from her local community, and while both narratives have been considered in relation to Medea, reading Hester beyond the Greek story and aligning her with La Llorona offers the possibility of locating her within a different cultural context and expanding conventional interpretations. The article traces a brief history of La Llorona and her role within Mexican and Mexican-American border storytelling, researching Irish and Chicana religious iconography and its relation to cultural identity, and establishes transnational connections between the two characters.
- Subjects
BY the Bog of Cats... (Play); CARR, Marina; LLORONA (Legendary character); MEXICAN folk literature; IRISH drama; IRISH literature; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, 2013, Vol 8, Issue 2, p23
- ISSN
1661-6065
- Publication type
Literary Criticism