Liminality in Marina Carr's Woman and Scarecrow and Emma Dante's Vita mia more

This article examines the work of an Irish playwright, Marina Carr and an Italian playwright, Emma Dante. Both female playwrights show a recurring preoccupation with death, dying and living in their work. Contrasting the modern taste for signalling a clear divide between life and death, in Carr and Dante’s work the lines and divisions between this world and the next are not clearly drawn. A number of characters across the writers’ oeuvre occupy liminal spaces within the spectrum of life and death. Neither alive nor dead, these characters blur the edges of our modern understanding of death. Using Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, this paper seeks to investigate the position of two of these ‘betwixt and between’ characters, focussing on Woman in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow and Chicco in Dante’s Vita mia.