The idea of looking at the relationships in Mojo Mickybo as a bad marriage was really interesting and captivated me this week. What makes a bad marriage? What are the turning points that convert troubling times into a bad marriage? As I was thinking about the relationships in the play both as literal marriages but also as various other unions, I kept thinking about being stuck in a pattern with no way out. It could almost be described as a sense of complacency mixed with no way out. A larger understanding that because of the larger problems in Ireland and their community, there was no way to escape the conflict and so it was better to just accept the conflict than to seek a way out. To me, that is why there is still conflict in Ireland today. Conflicts have become an expected part of everyday life. Resolution isn’t sought because the conflict is so tied into everyday life that without it, life wouldn’t be the same/would be so different that people wouldn’t know what to do.
I wanted to use this idea of a bad marriage to look at the other writings we have read in class. Whether it be MLK writing speeches about race relations in the 1960’s United States or Eamonn McCann writing about his experiences between Protestant and Catholic relations growing up in Ireland, I think that when analyzed as bad marriages, this can help one understand what was going on at the time and how it is represented in literature. How the conflict was so ingrained in all relationships that it felt permanent. It felt like one could not escape it, thus leading to years and years of continuing worsening relationships and not being able to understand one another. I’m intrigued to keep using the lens of a bad marriage to analyze the rest of the literature we read and to see how this can help explain and make sense of what was going on at the time and how that impacts life today.