Dis/Continuation of Female Tradition in Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup

This essay investigates how Christina Reid’s 1983 play, Tea in a China Cup, deploys tea to expose the lives of women from the working-class Protestant family in Belfast, who have been marginalised from the public discourses of wars and conflicts in Northern Ireland. Tea in the play functions to provide the family women of three generations with space in which to tell their own stories and to disclose the women’s involvement in and resistance to the coercive demand for sacrifice and silence within Protestant communities. Paying special attention to Beth’s act of getting rid of the Belleek tea set, a symbolic object of the female legacy of the family, except one cup and one saucer, this essay offers a nuanced reading of her complicated struggles with the terms that define her identity. I argue that Beth’s act of both breaking and preserving the legacy is crucial to the understanding of Beth as a negotiating subject. By carefully negotiating between resisting and honoring the legacy of her foremothers, Beth strives to re-invent selfhood, which is neither total abandonment of history nor complete surrender to societal pressure.