Truth at the Bottom of a Well: Synge's The Well of the Saints

Abstract

SYNGE'S CONSCIOUS STRNING IN The Well of the Saints to accomplish his ideal "to produce a myth more beautiful than nature" stands revealed in such revisions as, first, the change in title from When the Blind See; second, his alteration of Mary Doul's mirror from "a bit of a bowl of tin" and later "a big glass was done in the town" to the final "I seen myself in them pools"; and third, his departure from the original story of new sight which concluded with the child's exclamation, "Oh Mother look at the beautiful flowers.” (The setting is autumn and winter and the golden furze is only expected at the end of Act III; nothing blooms during the play.) These three items alone present the archetypes of water and well and seasons. Further, what Mary saw in her mirror — the long hair that brings her new hope for physical glory —adds a prominent fourth. Also there is the blind couple's spiritual odyssey, complete with departure and return and new knowledge, and the obvious prelapsarian mental and physical state of Martin and Mary Doul; they have escaped the curses of work and childbirth. At the close of the play, when they serenely set forth alone, aware of wet and hazardous footing, along unknown paths with no domicile except the earth itself, they are what Synge said Hie artist should be — "a soul in harmony with some mood of the earth.” That mood for them is the freedom of a wet south wind and a singing bird. For his blind primitives, Synge could make certain that the springtime of the local life is not forgotten, though for contrast there stands Timmy the Smith whose pious goal and doubtful glory is to turn the harvest immediately into bricks.

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