Subversion of Heroic Myth: The parricide in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of The Western World

This study aims to investigate the subversion of the heroic myth in John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World by applying the ‘heroic scheme’ of Lord Raglan, who identified a set of common characteristics that appear in the lives of mythological heroes across various cultures, and the model of the ‘monomyth’ by Joseph Campbell, who traced the universal stages of the hero’s journey across diverse myths and folklore. Synge, the Irish playwright, poet, and writer best known for his contribution to the Irish Literary Revival, wrote the play in 1907, which was premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in the same year. Playboy precipitated controversy and riots due to its perceived mockery of Irish rural society; however, it later came to be recognized as a masterpiece of modern drama. Christy, the parricide protagonist, lacks conventional heroic attributes, and Synge’s portrayal demonstrates that Christy does not belong within the traditional heroic framework. This subversion is evident from the play’s outset until its conclusion, through factors such as the protagonist’s social class, the divergence between the divine and the worldly, and deviations in mythotypical skills and qualifications. Methodologically, the analysis first applies Lord Raglan’s heroic scheme to assess Christy’s alignment with traditional heroic traits, followed by an examination through Campbell’s model to evaluate Christy’s non-heroic position. The goal of this complementary approach is to offer an exploration of structural, thematic, and contextual elements revealing layers of heroic subversion that a single-method approach might overlook.