Christina Reid

Virginie Privas-Bréauté

Docteur Ès

Etudes Irlandaises Lyon

    How to "Reshape the Contours of Northern Irish Drama"? The Neo-Brechtian Use of Music in The Belle of The Belfast City (1989) by Christina Reid Virginie Privas-Bréauté To cite this version: Virginie Privas-Bréauté. How to "Reshape the Contours of Northern Irish Drama"

delicate and spirited, and her command of an urgent, free-flowing theatrical form. "(2008: 393). The influence of Brechtian theory in Reid's piece is thus here under consideration. The Brechtian use of music becomes a device for the playwright to redefine the contours of Northern Irish drama and provide an aesthetic -as well as a political and social -perspective on the Northern Irish situation of the end of the 20 th century. This is how Reid's play becomes neo-Brechtian as shall be studied. In his introduction to the Methuen Anthology of Irish Theatre, Patrick Lonergan explains that Reid is indeed concerned with the redefinition of national identities for her people but also for theatre: [Reid] challenges and transgresses the boundaries that define national identity. In doing so, [she] push [es] against the conventions of theatrical form: by asking what it means to be Irish, [she] [is] also exploring how identities can be represented theatrically. Along the way, [she] crosses and redraws many other borders. The dramatic merges with different literary forms and other media, from storytelling to music to cinema. (LONERGAN 2008: vii) For Stewart Parker, another Northern Irish playwright contemporary of Reid, Brecht was indeed one of the colossi "of the European theatre in this age […] [to] offer a formidable choice and challenge to those playwrights caught in their historical wake" (DAWE et al. 2008: 23).

Since Brecht asserted that music played an important part in his epic theory, did not merely illustrate events but was rather a dramatic necessity, an anti-illusionist device, the use of music and songs in Reid's play is under scrutiny in this paper. Before tackling the effect of distanciation created by Reid's songs as recommended by Brecht, I will first highlight how they contribute to fragment the play, fragmentation being another element part of the epic.

Fragmentation

The Belle of The Belfast City revolves around Dolly, the matriarch who used to be a singer in a concert hall in Belfast in the 1940s. She is here welcoming, for the first time in Belfast, her 18 year-old granddaughter, born in England from a Black father and named Belle after her grand mother's then scene name. Twenty-two songs of different contents, lengths, rhymes, rhythms and genres are strewn over the play. They are folk songs, ballads, nursery rhymes, Sunday school chants, negro-spirituals. The title, which not only recalls the nickname of the singer Dolly but is also melodious, sets the tone. Through the repetition of the defining article "the", we are invited to understand that Belle is not only the Belle of Belfast. There is specifically only one Belle and only one Belfast. The repetition of "Bel" in Belle and Belfast also creates music from the very beginning. Yet at the same time as it conveys some kind of articulation through the preposition "of" it entails an idea of rupture and heralds the Brechtian resonances of the play. Similarly, through the name "Belle" ambiguously referring either to Dolly when she was young or to her granddaughter, Reid creates a tension between continuity and discontinuity, all the more so as from time to time, depending on the songs she sings, Dolly becomes "Belle" again, visibly rejuvenating on stage.

Fragmentation within the play recalls the then situation of Belfast, one of disharmony and fragmentation. Similarly, the starting point of Brechtian epic realism is a fragmented reality conveyed through several principles including music (VALENTIN 2000: 197). Brecht resorted to songs particularly to give a fragmented aspect to his play 1 . He gave the example of The Three Penny Opera as a real piece of innovation through the strict isolation of musical elements. Even though The Belle's stage directions do not put forward any particular light effects, on-stage orchestra, screen on which the titles of the songs are written as did Brecht 2 , there are changes when the characters sing. The title of Reid's play is extracted from a line found in the chorus of the first song, I'll tell me Ma, a children's song from the 19 th century which can be adapted -and indeed it has been adapted in The Belle -to other cities and situations: Dolly (sings) I'll tell me ma when I go home The boys won't leave the girls alone They pulled my hair they stole my comb Well that's all right till I go home She is a handsome she is pretty She is the Belle of the Belfast City She is courtin' One Two Three Please won't you tell me who is she (TBBC 3 ,179). Dolly, 77, sings the play open as if talking about her own childhood. She is then joined by other members of her family, Vi, Rose and Janet, and she will resume singing it alone, later, to close the selfsame scene of act 1. From the beginning, this song, which she had started singing in the present of the play, marks fragmentation since when it is then taken up by the others, the playwright mentions that the year is 1958. Furthermore, whereas Dolly was sitting as an old woman at the beginning of the song, when it is sung by the members of her family, "[she] joins in and becomes an agile woman of 49" (TBBC, 179). There is a rupture between the present and the past triggered by the singing of this song. Not only does this song frame this very first scene, fragmenting the text visually, cut by the playwright who gives directions in between the first part and the following verses of the song but it also ruptures the chronology of time. The changing of rhymes between song n°1 and the different verses of n° 2 4 and 3 5 also create discontinuity. This first device highlights the notion of fragmentation as stated by Brecht in his definition of epic drama based on montage, variety show, and biography 6 . Besides, Jeske Berg explains in Bertolt Brecht, L'Homme et son oeuvre, that in 1926, Brecht advocated the idea of a dramatic piece as a series of independent elements which interacted, completed or contradicted one another impeding a fluid, homogeneous action (BERG & JESKE 1999: 107). Brecht ultimately sought to make music, scenery, lighting, costume, acting and singing all convey the same impression of anti-illusion.

Along the Brechtian theory then, there should be no linearity, each piece has to be on its own, and there should also be no unique centre of perspective since reality is fragmentary. Songs in The Belle convey this impression of a fragmented play as well as they offer a plurality of voices, of perspectives. For instance, song n°18 is sung by Dolly who takes up the role of another character they knew back in the 1950s, Naomi: We have the double perspective of Dolly and her daughters on Naomi, but also that of Naomi who is remembered as she was perceived by Dolly and her daughters back then. Again, the absence of chronological linearity stands out through this embedding of points of view. There is also a rupture in the fluidity in term of space. All the characters pretend they are at the chapel where Naomi, being the piano player and wife of the reverend of the parish, used to meet them on Sundays for cult.

Another element in the songs hindering fluidity in the play is conveyed through the repetition of lines, such as in song n°9, another children's song:

Our Queen can birl her leg Birl her leg, birl her leg Our Queen can birl her leg Birl her leg leg leg (TBBC,203) This repetition gives the impression that it is difficult to proceed, to move on. Continuity is further hampered by the fact that the songs tackle different themes and are not only sung by Dolly but also by her daughters, her niece, her nephew, and even her grand-daughter.

Lisa Fitzpatrick explains about Tea in a China Cup that Reid "uses music, an episodic structure, and minimal properties, and typically divides the stage into different spaces, depicting different times and spaces simultaneously to create juxtapositions and to allow actions to comment upon each other " (2005: 329). This idea can be taken up for The Belle in so far as juxtaposition, another Brechtian element called montage and conferring a fragmented dimension within a play, is here conveyed through songs. Even if most of the time, several pages, several dialogues or even several decades, separate two songs, there are occasions when two songs, of different themes and contents, of different genres, are juxtaposed. This is the case for songs n° 16 and 17. Dolly first sings a nursery rhyme while the rally is about to reach her street, then she pulls a party popper, Belle hands her a drink (only one line of stage directions to separate the two songs) and she resumes singing a historic and political song this time:

Dolly (sings) Vote vote for Maggie Thatcher

In comes Belle at the door, io For Belle is the one that'll have a bit of fun And we don't want Maggie anymore, io. (TBBC,224).

Like song n°1, this song has been adapted to the situation since the original characters mentioned were Harry Midgley -the sitting labour MP candidate for the 1938 elections in Ireland -instead of Maggie Thatcher on the one hand, and James Collins -the Nationalist candidate opposing Midgley in the constituency of Dock in Belfast -in lieu of Belle 7 on the other hand.

Kim H. Kowalke, in "Brecht and Music: Theory and Practice", for The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, further explains that "even a solo performance is a kind of montage, a combination of mimetic immediacy and diegetic distancing, a composite of dissected realities" (2006: 254). Indeed, many a time does Dolly sing alone as she did when she was on stage 40 years earlier and was renowned for being the Belle of the Belfast city. Her numerous breaks from the present reality lead Jack, her nephew, to call her a crazy senile old person.

An experimental play as were Brecht's, Reid's The Belle of the Belfast City resorts to songs to interrupt dialogues. They are not introduced and do not illustrate an event; they are part of the plot. When he wrote on experimental drama, Brecht advised modern playwrights to continuously propose new effects (VALENTIN 2000: 312). That is why Reid has many of her songs interrupted too. For instance, Dolly's song n°4 is suspended by her daughter Vi's refusal to know the end of the line for decency: Dolly (sings) There was an oul woman down Donegall Street, who went to the doctor' cause she couldn't… Vi: Mother! (TBBC, 183)

We may think that this old woman is Dolly now in the present as if she suddenly realised she has been ageing.

Social Gestus

As songs are devices to interrupt the play and highlight its episodic structure, they belong to what Brechtian theory calls social gestus. For Brecht, Gest is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes. A language is gestic when it is grounded in a gest and conveys particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men. The musician sees this as an artistic principle. From this, we may judge the political value of the musical score" (BRECHT 1964: 104).

On gestic music, Brecht further explains "it is that music which allows the actor to exhibit certain basic gests on the stage. So called 'cheap' music, particularly that of the cabaret and the operetta, has for some time been a sort of gestic music" (BRECHT 1964: 87). Drama like the opera may mirror the contemporary social issues artistically. In The Belle, [Reid's] "Brechtian dramaturgical style reflects upon the shaping of the characters by their environment" (FITZPATRICK 2005: 329) in a musical-like fashion, not only through the leading theme of the cabaret itself, but also, through the songs in the play, such as the role of women in Northern Ireland -all the more so as she tackles social problems. Reid explores the "relationship between women and community, the writing of women into histories from which they have traditionally been excluded, the links between sexual repression and silence, and the mother-daughter relationship" (FITZPATRICK 2005: 332). Carla McDonough, in "I've never been just me: Rethinking Women's Positions in the Plays of Christina Reid", explains that "Reid's plays examine how religious ideology affects a woman's upbringing. In this ideology, woman is the temptress, Eve, the fallen woman" (2000: 184). One of the main examples shedding light on the problematic situation of women is dramatized by the character of Janet. In act 1 scene 3, Janet, psychologically imprisoned by Jack, her brother, and Peter, her husband, stands centre stage in between them. While Jack quotes from St Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 7, "it is good for a man not to touch a woman", Peter sings her a love song (song n° 10): They both end their replies by saying they love her. Janet then realizes that for both these men, women are seen alike: "a devil [-Jack -] and a saint [-Peter -] are the same thing. Afraid of women. Afraid they will tempt you. Afraid we won't" (TBBC, 209). To Liza Fitzpatrick, in this scene both men express their ideal images of femininity: in Peter's case, the woman on the pedestal, the Angel in the house; for Jack, the virgin sister, sexually unattainable. In each symbolic dimension, the woman is denied agency and a voice." (331). Some critics, like Laura Kane, have pointed out the fact that "some women in Belfast still suffer from a lack of material opportunity that prevents them from articulating their own identities and reforming their citizenships" (KANE 2005: 40). Therefore we may see songs in this play as possible weapons for women to reach freedom, reconstruct their identity far from patriarchy, while men remain trapped in the myths they were raised to believe. Furthermore the main character, Dolly, is a former cabaret star leading an unusual life for a woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her songs were both "politically and religiously irreverent" (MCDONOUGH 2000: 187), which was provocative. This first theme, emphasized by the use of music, becomes a social gestus.

Mary Trotter also overtly refers to Brechtian social gestus through another song in the play, the last (song n°22 8 ), sung by Dolly's granddaughter at the end of the play, after Dolly who suffered a heart attack cannot talk and, as a consequence, cannot sing anymore. Trotter gives the following analysis:

This Belle of the Belfast City sings a contemporary political ballad. Since this song, Ballad to a traditional refrain, by Maurice James Craig, is an ironic politicization of a jingoistic song tradition, Reid ends the play with two translations. Craig's song translates the literary/ music genre of the sectarian ballad into a call for the end of sectarian violence. She also semiotically translates Dolly's now silenced voice into the body of her half-Irish, half African American granddaughter. A song protesting Belfast sectarianism sung by a body with both Irish and African American identity markers becomes a Brechtian gestus, a call to the audience to think critically abut the historical conditions which have led to the constructions of identities in Ireland and around the world. (2000: 175).

In playing his role, the Brechtian performer must convey a social message to the audience. This task might be facilitated by songs if we believe Kowalke who explains that "gestic music could articulate that which the text does not make explicit and thereby provide a sub-text ready-made for the performer" (2006: 251).

Distanciation

In Reid's drama, songs do not only interrupt the stories for aesthetic innovation but also, as Brechtian theory points out, to criticize the contemporary world at the light of the past. This is part of what Brecht called "Verfremdungseffekt". This effect translated in English by "distanciation" for lack of better word is much present in The Belle. As Diderik Roll Hansen says of one of Reid's previous plays, "we move swiftly from scene to scene, quite often in defiance of chronological time" (2008: 393). Likewise in The Belle, even if the time of the play is 1986, flashbacks are legion. Dolly seems to regret her past life in cabarets. She lives in the past as the old photos on her wall illustrate and as the children's songs she sings let us know. Through this play, Reid seems to raise our "awareness of how the past can both anchor and restrain us" (LONERGAN 2008: xi). If song n°1 takes the performers back to 1958, there are other numerous songs bridging the gap between the past and the present. Many traditional Irish songs have been adapted to present situations like song n° 11:

Dolly sits cradling Janet's head in her lap. She strokes Janet's hair and sings. Dolly I know where I'm goin' And I know who's goin' with me I know who I love But the dear knows who I'll marry I'll wear gowns of silk And shoes of fine green leather Ribbons for my hair And a ring for every finger. I know who is sick And I know who is sorry I know who I've kissed But God knows who I'll marry. (TBBC,211) The characters are called to take some distance from their present at the light of their past; but it is not Reid's only goal. Still along her decision to create anti-illusionist effects, she has Belle, in the present, become a spectator of the past of her family. This is how Reid writes: Through this anti-illusionist disruptive effect in which Belle -in 1986watches her family sing in 1959, the Brechtian performer is asked to take some distance from her role. She becomes a spectator in turn. This leads the audience to be challenged too in their role as spectators. They are asked to take some distance from what they are watching. Once again, there is an embedding effect: the audience watches a performer who is watching a scene on stage. But on this occasion, reality is challenged as well. In fact, the performer watches the past. In his plays, as Llewellyn-Jones explains in Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity, "Brecht draws upon devices that, from time to time, distance the reader through the exposure of the creative processes thus challenging 'realism' not only through a deliberate lack of closure but through representation of competing and contradictory discourses " (2002: 45). Thanks to music and songs, Reid orchestrates a reconciliation of impossible elements: the past and the present. Moreover music, along Brecht's epic theory, is designed to comment on and explain what is happening on the stage and in reality; it is not particularly meant to arouse emotions; it should lead to a social reaction. Music is thus distanced from its primary aesthetic role too and is endowed with a social mission.

History and the past are privileged places of dramatisation in which historic periods mentioned are linked to the present. The fact Belle watches the past on stage is part of a process of historicisation, which is a fundamental means of distanciation. The play therefore puts to the fore the many alternatives which could have happened. What is historicized in Reid's play here according to Patrick Lonergan is "the resultant sense of anger and anxiety" entailed by "the implementation of the Anglo-Irish agreement, now regarded as an important step in the development of the peace process, then seen as a betrayal by the Unionists by the British government at that time" (2008: xi). For Brecht the effect of distanciation generated by music enabled to link history and politics too; this is how music may be used as a political weapon in his plays. (LECOUVEY 2009: 20).

In Northern Ireland, the political issue at that time was also triggered off by segregation from the Protestants towards the Catholics to cut a long story short. But Reid seems to have chosen not to talk about religious segregation as bluntly as that. On the contrary, she displaces the subject by having her marginal characters being either Black (Belle) or deaf and mute (Davy). Effectively, Reid seems to be interested in neither class nor religious conflicts as Brecht was, but rather in male-female oppositions. Her characters are alienated, estranged; alienation -or rather defamiliarisation 9 , as should rather been said, being another possible translation for the "V-effekt". This alienation is also connected with music as Davy, mute, exemplifies: he cannot sing, yet he can tap out rhythms (act 1). Another example is brought about by the song opening the second act. This song is turned into a poem since Dolly "recites" it:

Dolly (recites)

In a mean abode on the Shankill road Lived a man called William bloat He had a wife, the curse of his life, Who continually got his goat. So one day at dawn, with her nightdress on, He cut her bloody throat. With a razor gash he settled her hash, Oh never was crime so quick, But the steady drip on the pillow slip Of her lifeblood made him sick, And the pool of gore on the bedroom floor Grew clotted cold and thick. And yet he was glad that he'd done what he had, And she lay there stiff and still. But a sudden awe on the angry law Struck his soul with an icy chill. So to finish the fun so well begun, He resolved himself to kill. Then he took the sheet off his wife's cold feet, And twisted it into a rope. And he hanged himself from the pantry shelf. 'Twas an easy end, let's hope. In the face of death with his latest breath, He solemnly cursed the Pope. But the strangest turn to the whole concern Is only just beginnin'. He went to hell but his wife got well, And she's still alive and sinnin', For the razor blade was German-made, But the sheet was Irish linen. (TBBC,21) This engenders a rupture in the pattern of the play: it is the only time a poem is recited. Reid is here close to songs as Brecht wanted to have them: "poems sung" (DORT 1960: 57). The ironic contents of this poem also points to racism in a way -another theme that permeates Reid's playsince it draws a parallel between the poor quality of a German razor and that of hard-wearing Irish linen.

When he elaborated his theory, Brecht had in mind that each element had to comment in a different way. By contradicting expectations and by juxtaposing two contrary moods it could create conflict in the mind of the spectators and entice them to reconcile the two elements to find coherence. Henceforth the term "dialectical" emerged. Brecht viewed theatre as part of an enlightenment project in which discordant jarring elements (music v. text or commentary by actors, for example) would explore ideas and man's contradictory nature. If we go further, in The Belle Reid's goal is to go beyond the mere divide between Protestants and Catholics. The songs she has chosen shed light to other opposing notions which come against the characters' dialogues. For instance, songs n°2, 7 and 16 oppose the outside and the inside worlds, song n°14 frailty against solidity, songs n°3 and 6 nature and culture and song n°5 magic against reality. All these themes punctuate the play so as to show that the world can eventually be transformed. Likewise, while Dolly sings song n°1 Davy taps out its rhythm as if to echo her voice or reply to her. This is a conversation between two people talking different languages but understanding one another; this illustrates what Brecht meant when he suggested that each element had to be on its own but constituted a total coherent objective. The contrast between the gentle content of a song sung with a harsh voice is further relevant in an analysis of a Brechtian play. This is taken up by Reid when she has Jack sing a love song (song n°15) reluctantly only to please her aunt and cousins -and at the risk of being ridiculed since the girls dress him up with unfitting clothes, a situation he profoundly dislikes. Reid writes: "Jack becomes increasingly angry and humiliated as the song progresses" (TBBC, 217). He finally "runs out" (TBBC, 219). The way the actor playing Jack must sing this song is not overtly mentioned in the stage directions but the stage director will undoubtedly play on this.

Through the character of Davy who cannot speak Reid abides by the idea that "music has more impact than words" (KOWALKE 2006: 248), a sentence coined by Kurt Weil, one of the German musicians who collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on many pieces. This issue of impact is really interesting in the context of a Brechtian play, all the more so as the spectator is asked to be involved in the play. Indeed, Bernard Banoun in an article on Brecht and music explains that in Brechtian theory, the poietic function (that of the creator and the processes of creation) is not much present as far as music is concerned, the immanent function (the musical analysis, the technique and the piece itself), secondary; what prevails in fact is the esthesic function, that which links the piece of art with the addressee (BANOUN 2008: 336). So the didactic dimension of The Belle needs to be tackled. After rupturing the naturalist expectations of the audience, Reid breaks down the fourth wall when her characters directly address the audience through their songs in the manner of a cabaret (DOUBLE 1996: 47). Therefore the imperative mode used in song n°16 is unequivocal: Yet, and this is crucial for Brecht, epic plays are not designed to stimulate or arouse emotions, they must examine them. The audience has to think about the music and the songs they listen to. Art had to entail criticism and reflexion for Brecht (LECOUVEY 2009: 19). Art had to teach something to the audience; it had to be didactic and entertain the public. For Francine Maier-Schaeffer, in her book Bertolt Brecht, didactic plays "must abolish the separation between the stage and the audience, between the actors and the spectators, between professionals and amateurs. […] Didactic plays have become to be considered as musical genres nowadays. " (2003: 81). That is why The Belle becomes a didactic Brechtian play with all this music and its songs against religion, against politics, enabling to understand the present, provoking the spectators and asking them to participate in the play. The most didactic song in The Belle, that which stirs the mind of the audience the most effectively, might be the song which sets a jarring parallel between joy and war (song n°13). It is triggered by the word "party" in Belle's preceding line "She votes for the Unionist Party to keep the Republican Party out." (TBBC, 214) but is sung by Dolly: Dolly (sings) Will you come to our wee party will you come? Bring your own bread and butter and a bun You can bring a cup of tea You can come along with me Will you come to our wee party will you come? Will you come to Abyssinia will you come? Bring your own ammunition and a gun Mussolini will be there firing bullets in the air Will you come to Abyssinia will you come? (TBBC, 214) For Bernard Banoun, Brecht was so worried about being clear and unequivocal that music for him was tightly linked to meaning. He did not want music to be played on its own, for its own sake. Therefore he conjugated it with external elements such as drama and words. He had a heteronomous conception of music whose final goal was persuasion (BANOUN 2008: 336).

Dolly (sings)
If songs fragment Reid's play, like Brecht, the message she conveys is not fragmented. She aims at teaching her audiences and inspiring them on the social issues of the 1980s. Yet, her goal is not only social and political; it is first and foremost aesthetic. Reid is not interested in class-conflicts and she addresses Catholics and Protestants alike, she is more concerned with conflicts of sexual genres and racism; that is why The Belle of the Belfast City is neo-Brechtian rather than Brechtian. This play started with a song by Dolly about Belle, as we may understand in the enfolding of the play, and finishes with a song by Belle about segregation in Belfast. This echoes the cycle of violence, the idea that there might be no way out, a repetitive pattern that the structure of Reid's play aims to deconstruct. Giving voice to women in such a male-dominated context, and involving an Irish African English character, she paves the way for a post-colonial interpretation of The Belle along the definition that Julia Kristeva gave of post-colonialism awareness:

A paradoxical community is emerging, made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent that they recognize themselves as foreigners. The multinational society would thus be the consequence of an extreme individualism, but conscious of its discontents and limits, knowing only indomitable people ready-to-help themselves in their weakness, a weakness whose other name is our radical strangeness. (1991: 195).

Indeed, Reid has stated many a time that she resists labels, and that she writes plays open to interpretation (MAGUIRE 2006: 163). If we think, with Brecht that music made possible the poetic theatre (VALENTIN 2000: 702), then Reid is not only a playwright, she is also a poetess.

Bibliography

Primary play REID Christina, (1997)

  Sound of a train. A British customs officer walks on. Belle watches as Dolly, Vi, Rose and Janet dress up from the box. They assume position as if on a train. They eat the dulse and yellowman. The year is 1959. (Dolly is 50; Vi 30; Rose 9; Janet 9.) Dolly (sings) At the oul Lammas Fair Boys Were you ever there Were you ever at the fair at Ballycastleo Did you treat your MaryAnn To some dulse and yellowman At the oul Lammas fair at Ballycastleo (TBBC, 201).

  In and out the windows In and out the windows In and out the windows As you have done before. Stand and face your partner Stand and face your partner Stand and face your partner As you have done before.(TBBC, 223)

Dolly (sings badly) and mimes Naomi Standaloft playing the piano with exaggerated gestures. Sound of a piano. As Dolly sings, she becomes Naomi. Janet and Rose join in as ten year olds. They are torn between giggling and fascination at Naomi's elaborate playing.

	Dolly/Naomi (sings)
	Climb climb up Sunshine Mountain
	Singing as we go.
	Climb climb up Sunshine Mountain
	Faces all aglow.
	Turn turn your back on Satan
	Look up to the sky
	Climb climb up sunshine Mountain
	You and I.
	She shouts "All together now!' and Rose and Janet sing the song and
	march around the room. As they finish the preacher Isaac Standaloft
	walks on. […] Naomi heralds his arrival with a fanfare on the piano…
	(TBBC, 232).

  Janet is situated centre stage between them. She looks from one to the other. Peter I love you. Come back to me. Jack I love you. Come back to me. (TBBC, 209).

	Peter (sings)
	Green gravel, green gravel
	Your grass is so green you're the fairest young damsel
	That ever I've seen
	Green gravel, green gravel
	Your true lover's dead.
	So I've sent you a letter
	To turn round your head
	I washed her and I dressed her
	And I robed her in silk
	And I wrote down her name
	With a glass pen and ink.
	Green gravel green gravel
	Your grass is so green
	You're the fairest young damsel
	That ever I've seen.
	Jack (quoting from Saint Paul)
	[…]

  , Plays 1: Tea in a China Cup, Did you hear the one about the Irish Man?, Joyriders, The Belle of the Belfast City, My Name, Shall I tell you my Name?, Clowns, London, Methuen Drama.

	Referential books
	BERG Gunter & Wolfgang JESKE, (1999), Bertolt Brecht, L'Homme et
	son oeuvre, Paris, Éditions L'Arche.

BRECHT Bertolt, (1964)

, On Theatre, edited and translated by John

Belle

Red brick in the suburbs, white horse on the wall Italian marble in the city hall; O stranger from England, why stand so aghast? May the Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast. This jewel that houses our hopes and our fears Was knocked up from the swamp in the last hundred years; But the last shall be first and the first shall be last; May the Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast. We swore by King William, there'd never be seen An all Ireland parliament at College Green So to Stormont we're nailing the flag to the mast. May the Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast. O the bricks they will bleed and the rain it will weep And the damp Lagan fog lulls the city to sleep. It's to Hell with the future, and live on the past May the Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast (TBBC,250) 9 This is all the more telling as Jack does not want to recognize Belle as part of his family because, she is different physically.


The Trinity of a New Age: Three struggling Women in Anne Devlin's Ourselves Alone (1986) and After Easter (1994) Virginie Privas-Bréauté Lyon 3 Anne Devlin, the daughter of late Paddy Devlin, a democrat in favour of social justice between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ulster, is a Northern Irish Catholic playwright born in 1951. A member of the Labour party in Northern Ireland like her father, she took part in the peaceful marches organized at the end of the 1960s to obtain equal civil rights for Protestants and Catholics. In 1986, she wrote Ourselves Alone, a play in which she gave voice to three Belfast Catholic women, Frieda, Josie and Donna. It presents women's physical involvement in a conflict between the two religious communities. Ten years later, Devlin had her next play, After Easter, performed at the Lyric Players Theatre, Belfast. This play also stages the story of three Catholic women from Belfast (Greta, Helen and Aoife) who are involved in the conflict on a more psychological level. In her plays, Anne Devlin gives us an insight into the forgotten world of women in Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, asked to give a feminist viewpoint on the conflict, she asserted that when she writes "more is called up", suggesting that the problem is more complex than the gender issues involved (Foley 74). Indeed, Anne Devlin points out how little freedom women are offered in her male-dominated Province and how little power they have. She also rages against it. She devotes more energy to showing that the Troubles are about women fighting against men rather than to showing the Catholics fight against Protestants, Republicans against Loyalists, Nationalists struggling against Unionists and, above all, the IRA against the British army. Her conflict becomes primarily the fight about genders; it is not the conflict about either ideologies or territory. Strategically reversing the roles of men and women, she intends to give her own version of the history of Northern Ireland, including the impact of religion in the Troubles. Very often, she refers to the Bible, which she knows perfectly well.

For her the Sacred Book has been misinterpreted and Catholicism misused, notably by Northern Irish men when it comes to justifying the conflict. It is up to women to deconstruct these historical misinterpretations and to present them in a new way. Consequently, Devlin does not hide the fact that both sets of three women might become the Holy Trinity for the new era.

Ultimately, Ourselves Alone and After Easter can lead us to wonder whether God is female. In Devlin's plays, the audience is presented with Catholic women who have been raised to become faithful wives and careful mothers along the lines of a Catholic education. This is particularly highlighted in Ourselves Alone in which Frieda and Josie, two sisters, and their friend Donna, live in Andersonstown. This western area of Belfast has been renowned for being the Catholic "ghetto" of a working-class community in which many men were members of the IRA during the Troubles. Indeed, the Catholic patriarchal system and the Republican movement have been inextricably linked in this part of the world. That is why, Josie and Frieda's father (Malachy), their brother Liam, as well as Donna's ex-husband, naturally belong to the provisional branch of this paramilitary organisation. Although men play only secondary roles in Ourselves Alone and After Easter, Anne Devlin shows that Northern Ireland is a maledominated province in which women are apparently left with two choices: either submit to man's will or be part of the political conflict. Imelda Foley wrote that: "Devlin contextualises political conflict as a male construct in which women's lives are governed by orthodoxies that [are] conservative and authoritarian" (Foley 74). Ourselves Alone provides a particularly adequate illustration of Foley's words. As the play starts, Devlin warns her audience that the play will take place in a club she qualifies to be "the centre of Republican activity, political and social" (OA 9). She adds details concerning the setting and writes, "the period of Republicanism in the post-hunger-strike days is set by the wall hangings; the traditional prominence of Pearse and Connolly has given way to the faces in black and white of ten men: Sands, Hughes, McCreesh,O'Hara,McDonnell,Hurson,Lynch,Doherty,McElwee,Devine" (OA 9). Through this description, the light is shed on the 1981 hunger strike led by the Republican convict Bobby Sands held at Long Kesh, also known as HM Prison Maze. The strikers were demanding the special category status for paramilitary prisoners. It is significant to note that the hunger strike conducted by Republican women in the Armagh prison, who protested at about the same time for the same reasons, is not even alluded to 1 in this club.

The audience will then realize that the club is a male public space in which very few women, mainly waitresses and singers, are allowed. In fact, the major part of the play takes place at Donna's house where women can meet. Thus, females are still confined to domestic roles and private spheres where they, as Donna suggests, "are all waiting on men" (OA 12) 2 . Anne Devlin depicts Donna as someone who has never been able to live her own life. Reared in a Catholic family, she was married to a man she did not love only because she was expecting his child , and as the play begins, she is confined to her house because she has just had another baby. The point that Devlin is making in her play is that Donna has never had any decision-power, having always been manipulated by a patriarchal society like most females born in Republican families in Northern Ireland. Ann Rea believes that "constraining women to domestic spheres facilitates control of men over them" (Rea 220).

At the end of the twentieth century in a western society which tends to be global the control that the Republican men have over the Catholic women seems to alienate the latter.

Imelda Foley observes that:

Devlin's truth lies in the voice of Frieda, whose life and identity have been forged by her family and particularly by her brother Liam. As she says, she has never had the opportunity to be herself. Identity is preordained by male misdemeanour. (Foley 92) Indeed, Frieda asserts in the play:

When did I ever have a chance to be myself? My father was interned before I was born. My brother's in the Kesh for bank robbery. You mention the name McCoy in this neighbourhood, people start walking away from you backwards. (OA 17) Frieda's opinion seems to sum up the situation of Catholic women in Ulster: their fate is deeply subsumed by men's. In Devlin's play, many a time domestic space, or rather female space, is invaded by men in the name of Republicanism and its ideology. For instance, Frieda, who is a singer, is allowed to enter the Republican club. In act one scene one, she is rehearsing a song there, but is interrupted by men, who are piling up boxes containing bandages for the victims of the conflict. They progressively reduce her life's space. Then, when she is at Donna's, she, Donna and Josie, are disturbed by Malachy who has come to introduce Joe, a man trying to get involved in the Irish Republican Army (OA 20). Moreover, men do not content themselves with controlling their daughters, sisters, wives or mistresses; they have also enticed them into embracing their cause.

When Josie reveals to Donna how far she will go for Cathal O'Donnell, the man she loves, Donna cannot but remark: "I'm looking at you but it's him who's talking" (OA 12). This line prompted Ann Rea to comment: "Josie's voice has been invaded by that of O'Donnell: she doesn't find a means of expressing her own agency, but rather becomes co-opted by a masculine cause" (Rea 208). For the Catholics in Northern Ireland the masculine cause is the struggle against the Protestants. Anne Devlin's play reminds us that when the police and the army invaded the Republican areas, women would hammer bin lids on the pavement to warn men that they might be lifted (OA 16). One may say they actively took part in the struggle. So, there is definitely a feminine side to the conflict, which was confirmed by the internment of Republican women in the prison of Armagh. In the play, Josie depends so much on men, first her father, then her brother, finally her lovers, that she is involved in the conflict, either conveying information to the Official IRA or planting bombs (OA 56). Her sister, Frieda, does not want to participate in any such activities; however, she sings Republican classics in which men are heroes (OA 9). As Josie observes, women "are used" by men (OA 56). The attitude towards women resembles reification and at times verges on dehumanisation. It is personified by Aunt Cora, Malachy's sister. Her name means "maiden" in Greek, and she effectively embodies the ultimate silent, compliant, suffering woman. In the play, we know that she was seriously injured during an IRA campaign. Frieda relates her story in the following way:

Cora is blind and deaf and dumb and she has no hands, and she's been like that since she was eighteen. […] She was storing ammunition for her wee brother… He asked her to move it. Unfortunately it was in poor condition, technically what you call weeping.

So when she pulled up the floorboards in her bedroom, whoosh! It took the skin off her face. Her hair's never fully grown properly since." She is carried at the front of all parades in order to display to all Northern Irish Catholic women what Republicans would call Cora's "patriotic duty".

In a pamphlet entitled "From Cathleen to Anorexia, The Breakdowns of Ireland", Edna Longley explains that there has been an evolution of the role of women in the North. At the beginning of the 20 th century they were strong and followed the model of Cathleen Ni'Houlihan, Yeats' personification of a fighting Ireland presented in his play titled after this eponymous heroine. As time went by, women grew weak and progressively lost their identity. That is what Longley understands by "anorexia" . Anne Devlin's point is thus to go back to the Cathleen-like situation since, as the play unfolds, it grows more and more obvious that the struggle Frieda, Josie and Donna have undertaken is about freedom. Their fight shares its objective with the movements active at the beginning of the twentieth century. What is more, Devlin's women secretly intend to transcend the situation they are stuck in.

In Ourselves Alone, Anne Devlin develops a metaphor for Ireland colonised by England through women domesticated by men. In fact, "for the women in Devlin's plays, the history of Ireland is a suffocating dream of violence initiated and carried out by men, unsparingly revealed in the gradual and deliberate processes that weave their way in the dark corners of all our rooms" (Anderson 96).The author presents a conflict which opposes men against women, the latter constituting a whole community in the same manner as Northern Irish Catholics, the natives, are a community facing the Protestants, the settlers. What is more, in Devlin's play, women do not want to remain passive and silent. According to Anthony Roche, "Ourselves Alone does not flinch before the intimidating male-dominated prospect of Irish politics, but rather rises to meet and challenge it" (1994 Roche 236). In this respect, females first use their bodies to try to get recognition in what the playwright could call a fight for love.

Alexis Greene explains that "western myths and literature have continually eroticized war. In western culture, war and sex have entwined at least since the Greeks went to battle over Helen" (Greene 90). This comment applies to Devlin's first play in which love and war are obviously intertwined. As noted earlier, Josie participates in the conflict because of the Republican men she loves: first Cathal, then Joe. However, the word "love" does not have the same meaning for her and her lovers . For the men she loves, it means "to love one's country" and is synonymous with patriotism. Yet, men tend to resist love offered by women. For example, in his first words spoken in the play Joe Conran lets Frieda know that he does not want to fall in love with anyone, since he has come to complete a political mission: "I'm very easily seduced. I'm on a job here -I don't want to get involved" (OA 28). For the patriotic men who live like martyrs because they fight and sacrifice themselves for their country emotions are a domain reserved for women. Men do not love women, they make love to them, primarily to soothe their male instinct. Therefore, if women want to be considered by them, they have to become their "warrior lovers" as Josie says. Indeed, she explains to Donna that when she is in bed with Cathal, [her] "body's like armour" (OA 13). However, in adopting a warlike quality, she loses part of her femininity.

If it is true that "feminist analysis commonly places representations of women between polarised images: Virginal Madonna and sexualised Magdalen" (Lojek 67).If so, in Ourselves Alone, Josie would stand for Magdalen, whereas Donna would personify the Virgin. Indeed, the latter character is so much controlled by Liam that she never leaves her house, she does not even dare dye her hair and look pretty for fear he might feel jealous. Therefore, she also loses her femininity to prove how loyal she is to him. Liam, however, cheats on her. Apparently, the word "loyalty" does not mean the same for both sexes. For the men in Devlin's play, loyalty is shaped by ideologies, for women, it depends on a romanticized perception of love.

While Ann Rea asserts that "nationalism depends for its representational efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful, daughterly or maternal" (Rea,210), Devlin once explained that in Ourselves Alone she "set out to test republicanism against feminism and feminism won" (Foley 73). Yet, Devlin's first play shows that in aiming at behaving like men so as to be recognised by them, in unconsciously rejecting their femininity, the women -even Donna who has been married twice and cannot be totally compared to a virginal Madonnafail to represent the ideal of purity (Rea 221).

Ourselves Alone's title is a translation of the Gaelic name of the nationalist political party in Ireland, Sinn Fein. The party "has inspired generations of Catholic Republicans eager for independence from England" (Lojek 60). But the main characters, the heroes, are women.

Like the Republicans who want freedom from the British, women want freedom from men.

However, in an analysis of Devlin's plays, Helen Lojek remarks that "Ourselves Alone disappoints because women are vulnerable and helpless" (Lojek 67). Indeed, in conferring too much emotion on women and in forgetting that they are part of a bigger community and cannot constitute a community on their own, Devlin makes women look weak and dependent.

It is with After Easter, her second play, that the author manages to empower women more effectively. The conflict between men and women occurs on a psychological level. Lives are no longer led through relationships with men, and the women are no longer dominated by men. Men are marginal, textually and subtextually. As Imelda Foley says, "the three women break with the traditional values espoused by the male hierarchy of Ourselves Alone and the culture of auxiliary support within which women in Northern Ireland have had to exist" (Foley 98). Women behave like men. For example, Helen is the one who personally decides of her love affairs and Greta believes that she has been given the mission to free Ireland from the British colonisers. In fact, the enemy in this play is not man but yet another cultural concept: Catholicism. As Chris Wood writes, "the most pervasive form of patriarchal control in After Easter is the Church" (Wood 306). Thus, it is not against men that women must fight, it is against male denomination in the religious dimension. After Easter, whose title refers to the Christian context in characters' lives, calls to question the place of women in a religious society.

If men fight for political reasons and women for social and even economic reasons, Catholicism is another patriarchal system against which women must struggle in Northern Ireland. In fact, in Ulster religion and politics have intertwined for such a long time that it is barely possible to disentangle them. As Stewart Parker, another playwright from Belfast, once commented, "In Northern Ireland we have neither religion nor politics, but only a kind of fog of religi-otics [sic!] which seeps in everywhere. To be a writer is to be a public figure, up there in the trenches with the captains and the clergymen" (Harris 287). Naturally, Devlin's plays must always to some extent allude to Christianity as well.

In mentioning the Troubles, in using a particular vocabulary and in choosing such a title for her first play, Devlin aimed at conveying the impression that the Northern Irish conflict was mainly political. However, more than once she also alluded to and questioned the role of Christianity in Irish society. Yet, Catholicism is never compared to Protestantism. In Ourselves Alone, Josie explains that she once wanted to be a "nun" (OA 12), then identifies Cathal O'Donnell as "a spoiled priest" (OA 12) and claims that "it is easy to be born into the Catholic Church but it is difficult to convert" (OA 42). She thinks that the conflict has nothing to do with dogma and concludes: "there are no personal differences between one person and another that are not political" (OA 19). This last idea is not shared by Frieda who says that religion is part and parcel of the Troubles but does not give any explanation what she means. The religious dimension is further explained when Greta makes it clear that Irishness is made up of three interdependent concepts: Nationalism, Republicanism and Catholicism. According to her, the intertwinement of these three notions directly leads to the conflict in Ulster. To find peace in the province, she suggests, it is necessary to first dissociate them all, then deconstruct the concepts and finally re-construct them.

Devlin admits that Donna, Josie and Frieda were conceived as a "trinity of women": the mother (Donna), the mistress (Josie) and the career-woman (Frieda). The phrase "trinity of women" echoes the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity, and we cannot but consider Greta, Helen and Aoife as another example of such a trinity, this time of more mature women. On the religious level like on the political one, women have thus substituted men. Effectively, the mission which Greta feels has been assigned to her by God obviously resembles that of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost (precisely after Easter): she must give holy wafers to people in the bus queues in Belfast. Her aim is to reconcile humanity with God through communion. Imelda Foley rightly remarks that "[this] secularisation of religion (taking wafers to bus queues) as symbolised through reversal is repeated by the imagery of the trinity" (Foley 96). In other words, after associating Greta with the Holy Ghost, Helen, the most active and dominant figure, playing the role of a surrogate male (responsible for organizing their lives), would be seen as God the father, and Aoife as Son (Foley 96).

In The Great Code, Northrop Frye, explains that "God is a male because he rationalises the ethos of a patriarchal society dominated by men" (translated from Frye 163). Yet, in Devlin's play, Greta has to bury her beloved father who has just died of a heart attack. The death of the father/Father is highly symbolical both generally on a religious level and specifically in a Northern Irish context which is predominantly defined by patriarchy. Killing one's own father boils down to killing the Father as well. In her dramatic presentation of the killing of the father/Father, Devlin invites the three female characters to take up his role. Deborah Cottreau, who put the play on stage in Canada, remarks that Devlin overtly hopes for a matriarchal system in the province:

After Easter is a critique of patriarchy … [the playwright] undermines the predominance of patriarchy throughout the play. … [It] is a play that replaces patriarchy with matriarchy in a way that not only restores and heals the protagonists but also projects the restoration and healing of the land (Cottreau 199).

It could be suggested that in Devlin's dramatic world God might be figured as female. It would be a logical and rational figuration of the society and its ethos dominated by women. With Greta as a new embodiment of the God figure, one could also speak of the birth of a new, secular convent comprising all the women united against the patriarchal system in Northern Ireland.

Greta's mission is not so much an attempt to secularise religion as to return to the very words of the Bible. In terms of liturgical chronology Pentecost comes after Easter. This episode is related in the New Testament and explains how all the apostles were given utterance.

However, in the collective memory of most Northern Irish Republicans and Nationalists Easter also refers to the Insurrection led by Collins, Pearse and Connolly at Easter 1916. Their aim was to free Ireland from British occupation. The message Devlin wants to deliver is one of reconciliation, since it would be better if this historical event were transcended ( "after" in the title of this play may refer to the transitional passage), and if the original Christian myth were founded again.

Greta, who left Ireland in 1979 for England, lives in two worlds with the sense of split personality, experiencing hallucinations and visions which she has had since her departure. This fragmentation of the self, which mirrors the difficulty in defining Irishness, can also be considered to be the first step towards a possible recreation of her identity. The climax of the development of this dual personality is reached when she experiences symbolic death, during which she loses her voice. Coming back to Ireland, she regains her ability to speak, and declares "everything I will say from now on is true" (AE 17). She thus experiences a psychological resurrection and confesses that she must "stay alive and tell the truth" (AE 53). That is how she starts criticising the Catholic Church for preventing women from being ordained and overtly disagrees with Catholic dogma on that. She is convinced that God has abandoned women in Northern Ireland. Therefore, according to her, if "a woman can be a priest, God can be female" (AE 57); that means that "women might be loved" (AE 57).

It seems that Devlin's aim is to rewrite the history of Ireland and to redefine the contribution of the Catholic Church to the creation of Ulster; it is an objective in which women should endorse a prevailing role. Anne Devlin once explained:

Women are still expected to carry out the domestic story, and men are expected to carry out the epic story, and I do not believe in that. There is a way of rewriting the epic, which in my view belongs more to women [than to men]. They are the creators of life and I think that is very significant (Chambers 120).

The women in Devlin's plays have a role to play in both politics and religion since religion and politics are intertwined in Northern Ireland. Their voices need to be heard, their stories need to be listened to. Therefore, at the end of the play Greta peacefully narrates an invented story about the origins to her newborn: And he took me to the place where the rivers come from, where you come from… […] and this is my own story. (AE 75) For Elizabeth Doyle, the "woman becomes the mythmaker at the end of After Easter. It is not the soldier or the revolutionary that can change society but the storyteller" (Doyle 39). Precisely through the narration of a fictional myth Greta places herself at the beginning of the History of Ireland. For Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, "a key feature in Irish contemporary drama is both disruption of realist form and the reworking of mythic and folk elements as a means of deconstructing ideologies of language, history and gender through performance" ( Llewellyn-Jones 8). More than their bodies, women's voices are a key factor to reach freedom. Anne Devlin's two plays revolve around the theme of the liberation of women, their recognition and emancipation from the three patriarchal systems: Nationalism, Republicanism and Catholicism. According to Foley, Ourselves Alone and After Easter present "an integrity of imagination and cultural honesty that prefigure later political development" (Foley 103). In a way, Devlin's drama, which has a significant political agenda, participates in the evolution of the mentalities in the province. Chris Wood notes that Devlin's plays portray "a world full of divided loyalties, patriarchal power structures and violence towards women who don't accept their role in society, but there is one thing that cannot be taken away from them: their voices.

Telling their stories" (Wood 307). He adds that "perhaps one day, their story will gain a male audience and the struggles will cease. Until then, the story continues" (Wood 307). In Devlin's plays, women are the voices of Ireland, or rather Northern Ireland. Language, be it oral or written, is therefore the key for the liberation of these females. It is up to men, but also to the Catholic Church now, to hear, and above all, to listen to them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Lisa M., "Anne Devlin." Irish playwrights: 1880[START_REF] Longley | The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland[END_REF]: a Research and Production Sourcebook. Eds. Bernice Schrank and William W. Demastes. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997, 93-96. Chambers, Lilian, Fitzgibbon, Ger, and Jordan, Eamonn (eds.). Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001.

After

  Easter we came to the place. It was snowing in the forest and very cold in the fifth month. My mother and I were hunting. […] I looked up and saw it suddenly, a stag, antlered and black, profiled against the sky. […] It leapt through hundreds of years to reach us. […] And then the thaw set in -I could hear the stream running, and the snow began to melt. […] So I got on the stag's back and flew with it to the top of the world.


Fermi Observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud J. Knödlseder for the Fermi LAT collaboration

We report on observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. The LMC is clearly detected with the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and for the first time the emission is spatially well resolved in gamma-rays. Our observations reveal that the bulk of the gamma-ray emission arises from the 30 Doradus region. We discuss this result in light of the massive star populations that are hosted in this area and address implications for cosmic-ray physics. We conclude by exploring the scientific potential of the ongoing Fermi observations on the study of high-energy phenomena in massive stars.

Introduction

Since the early days of high-energy gamma-ray astronomy it has become clear that the gamma-ray flux received at Earth is dominated by emission from the Galactic disk (Clark et al. 1968). This emission can be well understood in terms of cosmic-ray interactions with the interstellar medium (Strong 2007). At energies ∼ > 100 MeV, the generation of diffuse gamma-ray emission is dominated by the decay of π 0 produced in collisions between cosmic-ray nuclei and interstellar medium nuclei. Ultimately, the study of this hadronic gamma-ray emission may provide hints on the still mysterious origin of the galactic cosmic-rays. However, the interpretation of the galactic diffuse gamma-ray emission is complicated by the fact that a large number and variety of individual sources contribute along the line of sight to the observed emission, thus blurring the link between individual cosmic-ray acceleration sites and observed gamma-ray signatures in our Galaxy.

Gamma rays from cosmic-ray interactions are also expected from nearby galaxies, and indeed, the EGRET telescope aboard the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO) has for the first time detected gamma-ray emission from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) (Sreekumar et al. 1992). The LMC is an excellent target for studying the link between cosmic-ray acceleration and gammaray emission since this galaxy is nearby (bringing the sources fluxes in reach of modern gamma-ray telescopes) and since the system is nearly seen face-on (avoiding the superposition of sources along the line of sight that hampers studies in our own Galaxy). In addition, the LMC is rather active, housing many supernova remnants, bubbles and superbubbles and massive star forming regions that are all potential sites of cosmic-ray acceleration (Biermann 2004;Cesarsky & Montmerle 1983;Binns et al. 2007).

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope (FGST) provides now the capabilities to study diffuse gamma-ray emission from nearby galaxies in depth, and of the LMC in particular (Digel et al. 2000;Weidenspointner et al. 2007). We report here on the initial analysis of observations taken in the course of the first year's all-sky survey by the LAT .

Observations

The LAT is the primary instrument on the FGST satellite which has been launched from Cape Canaveral on June 11th, 2008. The LAT is an imaging, wide field-of-view, high-energy gamma-ray telescope, covering the energy range from below 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV. The LAT is a pair-conversion telescope with a precision tracker made of a stack of 18 x,y silicon tracking planes and a calorimeter made of 96 CsI(Tl) crystals. The tracker array is covered by a segmented anticoincidence shield allowing for the rejection of charged particle backgrounds.

The LAT has a large ∼ 2.5 sr field of view, and compared to earlier gammaray missions, has a large effective area (> 7000 cm 2 on axis at ∼ 1 GeV for the event selection used in this paper), improved angular resolution (∼ 0.5 • 68% containment radius at 1 GeV) and low dead time (∼ 25 µs per event). The 1σ energy resolution in the 100 MeV -10 GeV energy range is better than ∼ 10%. A detailed description of the instrument is given by [START_REF] Atwood | [END_REF]. The on-orbit instrument calibration is presented by [START_REF] Abdo | Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics[END_REF].

The data used in this work covers the period August 8th 2008 -April 24th 2009 and amounts to 211.7 days of continuous sky survey observations. During this period a total exposure of ∼ 2.3 × 10 10 cm s 2 (at 1 GeV) has been obtained for the LMC region.

Data preparation

The data analysis presented in this paper has been performed using the ScienceTools version v9r11 and the instrument response functions P6 V3. We collected all data obtained within the period August 8th 2008 -April 24th 2009 and applied the diffuse event class filter that has been designed to minimize contamination by instrumental background while retaining a substantial fraction of the signal. As has been pointed out by [START_REF] Atwood | [END_REF], any harsher event cut would not significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

We further excluded from the data all periods where the spacecraft has entered the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) and for which the spacecraft z-axis points more than 47 • away from the zenith direction (the zenith direction being defined by the vector running from the Earth center through the spacecraft). While the SAA cut excludes periods of particular large instrumental background from the analysis, the latter cut excludes periods where the Earth enters the field of view. Furthermore, to minimize contamination from Earth albedo photons we exclude photons with zenith angles above 105 • from the analysis. We further restricted the analysis to photon energies above 200 MeV where our current knowledge of the instrument response implies systematic uncertainties that are smaller than ∼ 10% and where the redistribution of photons in energy due to incomplete energy measurements becomes negligible. Ten linearly spaced contour levels are plotted. The diamond in the north-east of the image designates the location of the blazar CRATES J060106-703606 (Healey et al. 2007) that contributes at a low level to the gamma-ray emission in this area.

Morphology

To illustrate the distribution of observed gamma-ray photons in the LMC region we show in Fig. 1 a counts-map of the area. The arrival directions of observed photons in the 200 MeV -100 GeV energy range have been binned into 3 ′ × 3 ′ large pixels covering a 10 • × 10 • large area around the position (l, b) = (279.5 • , -33.0 • ). The binned map has then been smoothed using a 2D adaptive Gaussian kernel smoothing technique (Ebeling et al. 2006) to remove Poissonian noise that arises from the relatively small number of counts that have been registered. The signal-to-noise ratio (s.n.r.) has been set to 10 to reduce statistical noise variations to below ∼ < 10% in the image.

We overlay as contours on the Fermi/LAT counts map the extinction map of Schlegel et al. (1998) as tracer of the total gas column density in the LMC. To first order the extinction scales linearly with total gas column density, and we chose 10 linearly spaced contours to allow the reader to visually appreciate the distribution of gas column densities in the LMC. Obviously, a substantial fraction of the gas is found in a small area in the north of the LMC, at roughly (l, b) ∼ (279.5 • , -31.5 • ), which coincides with the 30 Doradus star forming region.

The high-energy gamma-ray photons that are observed from the LMC also peak in this area. The photon intensity in the 30 Dor region exceeds ∼ 300 counts/deg 2 while in most of the remaining regions of the LMC is remains below ∼ 120 counts/deg 2 (the background rate around the LMC is around ∼ 50 -70 counts/deg 2 ). The excess near 30 Dor is also clearly seen in the longitude and latitude profiles of the photon intensity observed by LAT that is shown in Fig. 2.

Within a rectangular box covering galactic longitudes 274 • ≤ l ≤ 284 • and galactic latitudes -36 • ≤ b ≤ -30 • we find a total number of ∼ 1800 counts within the energy range 200 MeV -100 GeV above the expected contributions from galactic diffuse emission, extragalactic diffuse emission, instrumental background, and the blazar CRATES J060106-703606. These background contributions have been estimated by fitting spatial and spectral templates of their emission components together with a spatial template for the LMC emission to the data. Galactic diffuse emission has been modelled spatially and spectroscopically using the GALPROP model (Strong 2007) version 54 59Xvarh7S 1 while for the combination of extragalactic diffuse emission and residual instrumental background we assume an isotropic emission with a power law spectral distribution. CRATES J060106-703606 is modeled as a point source at (l, b) = (281.04 • , -29.63 • ) with a power-law spectral distribution. For the LMC we use the extinction map of Schlegel et al. (1998) as spatial template from which we subtract a pedestal level of 0.07 m from all pixels and for which we set all pixels outside a radius of 4 • around (l, b) = (279.65 • , -33.34 • ) to zero in order to extract the LMC emission. As spectral model we assume a power law for the LMC.

To describe the morphology of the high-energy gamma-ray emission from the LMC we first fit a point source with free position and flux on top of the background model2 to our data. This results in a best-fitting point-source position of (l, b) = (279.58 • , -31.72 • ) with a statistical 95% confidence error radius of 0.09 • (the systematic position uncertainty is estimated to less than 0.02 • ). We note that this position is close to that of R 136, the central star cluster of 30 Dor, which is located at (l, b) = (279.47 • , -31.67 • ), i.e. at an angular distance of 0.11 • from our best-fitted point-source location.

The detection significance of the LMC can be estimated using the so-called Test Statistics (TS) which is defined as twice the difference between the loglikelihood L 1 that is obtained by fitting the LMC model on top of the background model to the data, and the log-likelihood L 0 that is obtained by fitting the background model only, i.e. TS = 2(L 1 -L 0 ). Under the hypothesis that our model satisfactorily explains the Fermi/LAT data, TS follows a χ 2 p distribution with p degrees of freedom, where p is the number of free parameters in the LMC model (Cash 1979). In the particular case of a point source with free position, flux and spectral index we have p = 4 and the measured TS of 869.1 corresponds to a significance of 29.8σ.

As next step we replace the point source model by an extended source model which we implement as axisymmetric 2D Gaussian shape with variable angular size σ. In addition to the size we again fitted the position, flux and power law spectral index of the source. This results in a best-fitting source position of (l, b) = (279.5 • , -32.2 • ) (with a 95% confidence radius of 0.1 • ), and source extent of σ = 1.0 ± 0.1 • . The TS amounts to 1088.5 which is larger by 219.4 than the value obtained for the point-source model. Since we added one additional parameter (the source extent σ) with respect to the point-source model we obtain the significance of the source extension from the χ 2 1 distribution to 14.8σ.

Alternatively to the geometrical models we also compare the Fermi/LAT data to various spatial templates that trace the interstellar matter distributions in the LMC. For neutral hydrogen (H I) we use the aperture synthesis and multibeam data that Kim et al. (2005) have combined from ATCA and Parkes observations. For molecular hydrogen we use CO observations of the LMC obtained with the NANTEN telescope (Yamaguchi et al. 2001). We further used the extinction map of Schlegel et al. (1998) (SFD) as tracer of the total gas column density and compare also our data to the 100 µm IRIS map that has been obtained by reprocessing the IRAS survey data (Miville-Deschênes & 1.

The best fits are obtained for the SFD extinction map and the IRAS 100 µm infrared map which give TS values of 1179.6 and 1179.1, respectively. For 2 free parameters (the total flux in the map and the spectral index) this corresponds to a detection significance of 34.5σ. An almost equally good fit is obtained using the neutral hydrogen map. Fitting instead the CO map to the LAT data provides a rather poor fit, suggesting that the gamma-ray morphology differs from that of molecular gas in the LMC. Fitting the H I and CO maps together to the data confirms this result since the fit attributes 97% of the total flux to the H I component. Correspondingly, the TS increase with respect to fitting the H I gas map alone is also negligible.

The H I/SFD/IRIS 100 µm maps fit the data considerably better than a single point source, adding further evidence that the observed high-energy gamma-ray emission is extended in nature. Furthermore, the 2D Gaussian source model cannot reach the fit that is obtained by those tracer maps, suggesting that the emission morphology is more complex than a single Gaussian shape.

Spectrum

Using the extinction map of Schlegel et al. (1998) (i.e. our best fitting spatial template of the high-energy emission) we extract a spectrum of the LMC by fitting the data in 12 logarithmically-spaced energy bins covering the energy range 200 MeV -20 GeV. Above 20 GeV, photons from the LMC become too sparse in our actual data set to allow for meaningful spectral points to be derived.

Figure 3 shows the LMC spectrum that has been obtained by this method. Our analysis indicates a spectral steepening of the emission with increasing energy, suggesting that a simple power law is an inadequate description of the data. We confirm this trend by fitting the data using a broken power law instead of a simple power law. This results in an improvement of the TS by 10.1 corresponding to a significance of 2.7σ (p = 2) of the spectral steepening. Fitting alternatively an exponentially cutoff power law improves the TS by 7.8 with respect to the simple power law, corresponding to a significance of 2.8σ (p = 1) of the spectral cutoff. Integrating the broken power law or the exponentially cutoff power law model over the energy range 100 MeV -500 GeV gives identical photon fluxes of (3.1 ± 0.2) × 10 -7 ph cm -2 s -1 and an energy fluxes of (2.0 ± 0.1) × 10 -10 erg cm -2 s -1 for the LMC. The systematic uncertainty in these flux measurements amounts to ∼ 10%. et al. (1992) reported the first detection of the LMC in > 100 MeV gamma rays based on 4 weeks of data collected with the EGRET telescope aboard CGRO. Due to EGRET's limited angular resolution and the weak emission detected from the LMC, details of the spatial structure of the galaxy could not have been resolved. However, it has been obvious from EGRET data that the LMC was an extended gamma-ray source.

Discussion and conclusions

Sreekumar

Fermi/LAT allows now for the first time to clearly resolve the gamma-ray emission of the LMC and to attribute the emission maximum to the 30 Dor star forming region. While this coincidence could be taken as a hint for an enhanced cosmic-ray density in 30 Dor with respect to the rest of the galaxy, we note that a substantial fraction of the interstellar gas of the LMC is also confined to the 30 Dor area. Consequently, the target density for cosmic-ray interactions is greatly enhanced in this region which implies a corresponding enhancement of the gamma-ray luminosity. Whether the data do also support an enhanced cosmic-ray density in 30 Dor with respect to the rest of the galaxy needs a more detailed analysis of the observations. The rather poor fit of the CO map to the LAT data suggests that the overall distribution of gamma-ray emission differs from that of molecular hydrogen. The distribution of neutral hydrogen fits the data considerably better and the combined fit of H I and CO maps indicates that any contribution to the gammaray emission that is correlated to the molecular gas is at best marginal. This agrees well with expectations since the gas budget of the LMC is largely (90-95%) dominated by neutral hydrogen (Fukui et al. 1999). Consequently we are presently unable to determine the CO-to-H 2 conversion factor, X CO , from our LMC data. Fichtel et al. (1991) performed a detailed modelling of the cosmic-ray distribution in the LMC and predicted an integrated > 100 MeV photon flux of (2.3±0.4)×10 -7 ph cm -2 s -1 for the galaxy. Pavlidou & Fields (2001) predicted an integrated > 100 MeV photon flux of 1.1 × 10 -7 ph cm -2 s -1 based on estimates of the LMC supernova rate and total gas densities. Our observed flux of (3.1 ± 0.2) × 10 -7 ph cm -2 s -1 falls at the hide side of these estimates, yet given the uncertainties in the models the agreement can be judged satisfactorily.

Further studies of the LMC with Fermi/LAT will now concentrate on the spectral analysis of the data, with particular emphasize on variations of the spectral shape throughout the galaxy. Thanks to the excellent sensitivity and angular resolution of the LAT, this is the first time that such studies become possible. And other nearby galaxies await their detection, such as the Small Magellanic Cloud or the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Both should be in reach of Fermi and the comparative study of their diffuse gamma-ray emission should help to understand the impact of the environment and metallicity on the physics of cosmic rays.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Preliminary adaptively smoothed (s.n.r. = 10) Fermi/LAT counts map of a 10 • × 10 • large region centered on the LMC for the energy range 200 MeV -100 GeV (greyscale). The contours show the extinction map of Schlegel et al. (1998) as tracer of the total gas column density in the LMC.Ten linearly spaced contour levels are plotted. The diamond in the north-east of the image designates the location of the blazar CRATES J060106-703606(Healey et al. 2007) that contributes at a low level to the gamma-ray emission in this area.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Preliminary longitude (top) and latitude (bottom) photon intensity profiles of the LMC region for the energy range 200 MeV -100 GeV. The solid line indicates the expected contributions from diffuse galactic emission, diffuse extragalactic emission, instrumental background and the blazar CRATES J060106-703606 at (l, b) = (281.04 • , -29.63 • ) in this area of the sky.

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Preliminary spectrum of the LMC obtained by fitting the extinction map of Schlegel et al. (1998) in 12 logarithmically-spaced energy bins covering the energy range 200 MeV -20 GeV to the Fermi/LAT data. Errors are statistical only.

Table 1 .

 1 Comparison of maximum likelihood model fitting results (see text for a description of the models). Column 1 gives the model used to the fit the LMC data, column 2 gives the TS value of the fit, and column 3 specifies the number of free parameters of the LMC model.Lagache 2005). The results of this comparison are summarized together with that of the geometrical models in Table

	LMC model	TS Parameters
	Point source	869.1	4
	2D Gaussian source	1088.5	5
	H I gas map	1173.4	2
	CO gas map	932.2	2
	H I + CO gas maps	1176.1	4
	SFD extinction map	1179.6	2
	IRIS 100 µm infrared map 1179.1	2

Available from the website: http://galprop.stanford.edu

From now on we call the combination of the GALPROP model, the isotropic model and the CRATES J060106-703606 point source the background model of our analysis. The free parameters of this background model are the normalization of the GALPROP model, the intensity and spectral slope of the isotropic component, and the flux and spectral slope of the CRATES J060106-703606 point source.