Deirdre des douleurs ou le Romantisme absolu

Although, with Deirdre of the Sorrows, J.M. Synge does not depart from his usual lucidity and realism, he seems to have enriched the mythical character with some of the main feelings and longings set off by Romanticism. In Deirdre, a figure of pride and defiance, a rebellious woman eager to have her own will, passionate and absolute in her refusals and in her desires, the temptation of heroism goes together with the exaltation of the self. Being an image of the "super-ego" of Ireland in quest of her identity as a nation, she is above all an embodiment of love as Romanticism extolled it : an uncontrollable and subversive power imposing its own law, the supreme value which can even stand for a kind of "religion". Deirdre is a "fatal woman" yet she is also romantic because of her faithfulness to an ideal of flawless passion, because of her obsession with the passing of time, because of her introspective trend, her wistfulness and her yearning for an intensity of living. She is also a romantic figure in her nearly mystical union with Nature and because of the way she participates — thanks to her very words and her decisions — in the shaping of her own myth, thus aiming at a kind of personal eternity.