Jung’s Shadow Archetype and Its Traces in Marina Carr’s Play Woman And Scarecrow

Abstract

Being a country that constantly provides well-established writers to the world literature and draws attention as a kind of education country in the eyes of great writers, Ireland embodies a magnificent literary tradition and accumulation from the past to the present. Marina Carr, one of the female playwrights of the contemporary Irish theater of the twentieth century and a contrbuiton of which Ireland to the world literature, stands out among the most important female writers. The main action of Carr's plays is to reflect the psychological dilemmas of individuals who live within the borders of the country and are shaped with Irish culture. In this psychological framework, Carr, who aims to show the introversion of people with depression, often appears as an important playwright, both by rewriting myths and addressing issues that are not familiar to Irish society in her plays. Although, unlike her other plays, she did not use the strategy of rewriting myths in Woman and Scarecrow, she succeeds in giving the play a gothic atmosphere with the Scarecrow character and creates new characters suitable for her own writing style. The play Woman and Scarecrow focuses on Carr's theme of death and makes the audience feel that moment of death and the fear of death that the individual will experience upon realization that life has no meaning when faced with the reality of death. Carr aims to reflect the reality of death to the audience through a shadow character. The moment of death of an old woman who tries to come to terms with her past on her deathbed and takes her pain out of herself is an attempt by Carr to symbolize the reality of death with the characters of Woman and Scarecrow in the play. This study deals with the shadow archetype that Carl Gustav Jung handles in the context of personality theory, forming the dark side of the personality produced by the images in our subconscious, with Scarecrow character created by Carr.