Rosie Redmond

Rosie Redmond is a Dublin prostitute who appears almost exclusively in Act II of The Plough and the Stars, set in a pub on the night of a nationalist rally during the lead-up to the 1916 Easter Rising. She is loud, streetwise, and entirely unsentimentalised; O'Casey refuses to make her pitiable or redemptive in any conventional sense. Instead, she is presented as a pragmatist operating at the economic margins of a city intoxicated by revolutionary rhetoric. Her occupation places her outside the bounds of respectable Catholic nationalism, yet she occupies the same cramped tenement world as the play's other characters, subject to the same poverty and the same brutal indifference of history. Rosie's brazen self-presentation — her bright clothes, her frank pursuit of customers, her unashamed mercantile attitude toward men — functions as an implicit rebuke to the elevated language drifting in from the street meeting outside.

Rosie enters Act II with a clearly defined and entirely practical goal: to conduct business. The nationalist meeting has, as she repeatedly makes plain, devastated her trade by filling the pub with men whose minds are on Ireland rather than on her. Her arc across the act consists of a series of failed attempts at earning money, punctuated by contempt and harassment from the men around her. Her motivation is survival, pure and simple. She does not pretend otherwise. While the play's male characters cloak self-interest in grand ideological language — republican sacrifice, workers' solidarity — Rosie states her self-interest baldly, which in O'Casey’s ironic scheme makes her arguably the most honest figure in the room. Her small triumph — successfully flattering Fluther Good into buying her drinks and leaving with her — lacks glorious resolution, but it is the only kind of victory available to her, and she seizes it with characteristic practicality.

The central sequence of Act II belongs to Rosie in significant measure. Her running complaint that the political meetings have ruined her livelihood establishes immediately that the Rising's grand nationalism has a cost measured in the humblest economic terms. Her verbal clash with the Covey is particularly sharp: he dismisses her on ideological and moral grounds, invoking the language of socialist doctrine to justify his contempt, and she refuses to be silenced, matching him insult for insult. This exchange is crucial because O'Casey frames the Covey's self-righteousness as no more dignified than his target — the revolutionary rhetoric that should theoretically champion the dispossessed is wielded here to demean one of its most dispossessed members. Her manipulation of Fluther — systematic flattery applied to his vanity about his skills and his youth — is the act's dark comic set piece, and it is entirely controlled by Rosie. She reads him accurately, works him methodically, and exits on her own terms. After Act II she disappears from the play entirely, which is itself a structural statement: the Rising swallows her world without recording her name.

With Fluther Good, Rosie demonstrates her sharpest skill — reading male ego and exploiting it. Fluther's susceptibility to flattery about his vigour and experience makes him an easy mark, and their departure together is her only professional success of the evening, rendered comic precisely because Fluther believes he is the one doing the choosing.

With the Covey, the dynamic is openly adversarial. His ideological contempt for her — dismissing her using the language of socialist theory — reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of male radicalism in the play: a politics claiming to speak for the oppressed that cannot extend basic dignity to a woman like Rosie. She refuses to absorb his contempt quietly, and their sparring is the act's most charged ideological confrontation.

Compared with Nora Clitheroe, Rosie forms one half of O'Casey’s implicit argument about women and the Rising. Nora is respectable, married, and still destroyed by the nationalist politics she cannot control. Rosie is marginalised from the outset. That the Rising renders both equally powerless is O'Casey’s pointed comment on the rhetoric of liberation.

With Peter Flynn and the other pub habitués, Rosie is simply an inconvenience to be ignored or rebuffed, which sharpens her economic grievance: these men's idealism costs her income they cannot even be bothered to notice they are taking.