THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN THE PLAYS

OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

.CATHERINE COWEN WEDWICK

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December, 1975

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY • *

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine the diversified ways in which William Butler Yeats characterized the women in his plays, with particular emphasis on his concepts of the various roles inherent in womanhood.

The critical method used employed detailed analysis and close textual study of Yeats’s plays. Specific plays and characters were singled out because they represented an apparent pattern in Yeats's work, and because they tended to represent the fullest development of a type of play or character, or a particular view of womanhood.

Yeats’s vision of the concept of love as a conflict with self revealed a bleakly ironic philosophy that saw life as a pattern of defeat. Study of the characters indicated an intricate variety of temperaments, values and motives. Yeats's woman as child is stripped of her right to a sense of self, and viewed as an appendage of her mate. Using the idea of sex and birth as a violation of woman as mother, Yeats manipulated her self-sacrificing love into a punitive emotion capable of stifling mature action by the hero. Yeats allowed his woman as queen the right to pursue personal freedom and self- interest, making clear that freedom is something one grants to one’s self.

The study concluded that Yeats exhibited an unique willingness and ability to express an ever-changing, multi-faceted view of womanhood; and that the presence of the Yeatsian heroine and her moral choices are mandatory factors in the development of the Yeatsian hero. Ilî

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to Dr. Charles R. Boughton, advisor and friend,

for extending to me the benefits of his scholarship; and for the encourage­ ment and guidance necessary to the completion of this dissertation.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance and valuable insight af­ forded by the members of my doctoral committee: Dr. Lois Cheney,

Dr. Agnes Hooley, Dr. Briant Hamor Lee, and Dr. Allen Kepke.

Lastly, I wish to thank my parents, James and Frances Cowen, for the many sacrifices made in my behalf; and my husband, Dr. Daryl M.

Wedwick, for his help, understanding and confidence. I'/

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I Introduction ...... 1

Background...... 7

II Woman As Child...... 29

III Woman As Mother...... 67

IV Woman As Queen...... 100

V Conclusions...... 138

Bibliography ...... 145 V

IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER,

MARY ANN O'TOOLE NAUGHTON,

WHO TAUGHT ME WHAT IT MEANS TO BE IRISH CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In an era when an ugly spirit of class-conscious intolerance and

closed-shop bigotry yawns over the chasm between the native Irish popu­

lace and the Anglo-Irish minority, it may seem strange that William

Butler Yeats is elevated to the top echelon of Irish immortals. It

would indeed be difficult to overstate the importance of the master

founder and architect of what came to be known as the Irish Literary

Renaissance, a re-birth which indeed without him would have been doomed

to non-existence.

A singularly special man, by all rights Yeats should have followed his Anglo-Irish Protestant heritage and proceeded down the literary path forged by Goldsmith, Congreve, Sheridan, and, in his own time, by Oscar

Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. It would have been the natural thing in those late years of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth for the father-to-be of the Irish theater to have followed his cultural bent and to have ended up in Edwardian London.

John Philip Cohane characterizes Yeats as the immortal who above anyone else "brought back into the sunlight Ireland’s dimly remembered past,"l and even more,

Ijohn Philip Cohane, The Indestructible Irish, Meredith Press, New York, 1969, p. 27. 2

. . . because when the moment of supreme truth arrived he, an Anglo-Irish Protestant, saw for the first time that the common Irish around him in the flesh were the equals in every way of those whose epic spirits had long enthralled and inspired him. 2

Instead of giving In to the tyranny of his cultural background,

Charles Lucey contends that

Yeats thought --- and said no. He turned instead to Cuchullain and Maeve and Deirdre in Irish saga and to the impoverished but unconquerable Irish peasant in field and bog.3

That William Butler Yeats loved Ireland is abundantly apparent

in his desire to raise the level of the literature written in and for

Ireland, and in his determination to link the Ireland of his times to

the Celtic traditions of her past; thereby giving her an artistic

legacy. What may not be apparent, and cannot be neglected, is that,

given the choices foisted upon him by his Anglo-Irish Protestant

ancestors, Yeats decided to deny the English traditions, the Edwardian

London that he hated, and formalized religion. In short, Yeats chose

simply to be Irish.

Ireland herself Is symbolized by a woman, Cathleen Ni Houlihan

or Dark Rosaleen or the Shan Van Voght --- The Poor Old Woman. The

feminine motif is strong in Ireland; her history is laced with earthy,

passionate, dominant females like the ancient queens Deirdre and Maeve

of Connaught, and the Galway pirate queen Grace O’Malley, along with the

numerous heroines of the Irish Revolution.

^Cohane, p. 28.

^Charles Lucey, Ireland and The Irish: Cathleen Ni Houlihan Is Alive and Well, Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1970, p. 128. 3

Richard O’Connor, in discussion of the women represented in Celtic

mythology has pointed out that

. . . their vibrant passions might be compared with the curious conduct of the ancient hero Cuchullain, whose wild fury in combat could be stilled immediately if the enemy sent forward a naked woman, upon which Cuchullain would cover his stricken eyes. As one com­ mentator on the ancient legends has remarked, ’The male is a characterless, wailing and complaining figure, acting not from the heat of the blood but in conformity with a destiny laid upon him by spells and oraclesThe women, however, were figures of splendid wrath and active dispositions.

Even the most cursory study of Yeats’s plays and poetry will re­

veal his strong attraction for these legendary heroines. A brief

glance at a Yeats biography will show that from the beginning of his

adult life to its end, women were always important to him. He rarely

undertook an activity in which women were not involved, and he chose

women as his confidantes throughout his life. Joseph M. Hone states

in the definitive biography of Yeats that he was usually more at ease

in the company of women than of men.5 in her biography of Lady Gregory,

Yeats’s co-founder at the Abbey Theatre, Elizabeth Coxhead comments:

What is plain from his correspondence is that Yeats was one of those rare men who have a gift for intel­ lectual friendship with women, and with several of them simultaneously . . . The friendships survived his correspondents marriages, and eventually his own, surely another pointer to their nature.6

^Richard O’Connor, The Irish: Portrait of a People, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1971, p. 163.

5Joseph M. Hone, W. B. Yeats: 1865-1939, 2nd ed., St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1962, p. 55.

^Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait, 2nd ed., Seeker & Warburg Limited, London, 1961, p. 50. The specific object of this study Is to examine Yeats's treatment of

women as they are characterized in his plays. It is these women who em­

body his ideals: perfect beauty, heroic nobility, aristocratic excellence

and wisdom. Such exploration will necessarily involve a delving into

the cultural background in which Yeats chose to set down his roots, and

subsequently find his subject matter. An exploration of the fiber of his women characters will hopefully divulge the attitudes toward love, hate, sexual expression, violence and isolation that shaped his imagery and his drama.

The duality of the sexes was for Yeatsfe symbolic of the duality of human life; in their union (body and/or spirit) he saw the symbol of the transcendant unity for which human life reaches. It is also possible to arrive at a somewhat clearer insight into the men in Yeats plays, for any character is best seen in relationship to the other characters in a play and in their interaction. * The relationship of William Butler Yeats with the women in his life as reflected in his poetry has been exhaustively chronicled by Margaret

Mary Vanderhaar in her unpublished dissertation Yeats's Relationships With

Women and Their Influence On His Poetry. Brenda S. Webster, in her book,

Yeats --- A Psychoanalytic Study, has tracked the creative process in

Yeats's work by analyzing the fantasies and dreams embedded in his life and work, to show the relationship of his view of his body with the sug­ gestive facts of his life.

This present study will seek to establish Yeats’s view of womanhood as it derives from the very nature of Yeats as an Irish man, steeped in the time honored traditions and attitudes of his native country, and his 5

native mythology. In a broader sense, the study will attempt to show

that Yeats’s Irishness is at the core of the attitudes that took ex­

pression in his drama.

The method In the following study is basically critical, and em­

ploys close textual study. Specifically, an attempt will be made to

paraphrase the content of each play studied, and to relate it to its

folk sources. Because William Butler Yeats was a lyric poet writing

for the theater, biographical information will begin (and may, for the

sake of clarity, be interspersed throughout) each chapter, in an en­

deavor to relate the work of art to the writer as a man; however, the

ultimate thrust of the study will involve Yeats’s work rather than his

life. The commentary of the major Yeatsian critics will be discussed

and related to each other in an effort to explore Yeats’s many uses of

theme, imagery, and symbolic action.

There are literally hundreds of women characters in the thirty-odd plays of this playwright, and it would be preposterous to presume that

there is a possibility or even a necessity for each of them to undergo analysis. The characters and plays that will be selected for close study will be singled out either because they are representative of an apparent pattern in Yeats’s work, or because they tend to be representative of the most fully developed of a particular type of character or play.

Likewise, it would be difficult to impose any strict chronological order, primarily because nearly all of the plays underwent numerous re­ visions throughout the artist’s life. It could literally become impos­ sible, and probably become misleading, to correlate Yeats’s concept of woman with a given year in his life. In cases where the text of a play 6

is quoted, the source used is The Variorum Edition of the Plays of William

Butler Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach, which includes Yeats's explana­

tion of the legendary and mythological foundation of the plays.

In undertaking an extensive study, there is an ever-present danger

that the subject of the elaboration will be distorted through over­

emphasis. Yeats loved Ireland and Yeats loved women; but there is no

substitute for objective analysis and careful consideration of a work of

art as a total and separate entity that stands apart from the artist,

whose work is shaped in a kaleidoscopic manner. Yeats drew upon many

influences, both interior and exterior, in the creation of the women

in his drama, and perhaps no one is more aware of the dangers of sub­

jectivity in criticism, and the necessity for a sense of proportion,

than the writer who is both a woman and Irish.

As for the specific organization of this study, the remainder of

Chapter I will draw on a variety of references regarding the historical,

social and economic backgrounds of the Irish as a people, with particular

emphasis on the role women have played in the Irish society. The next

three chapters will delineate what appear to emerge as three major pat­

terns in Yeats’s treatment of the women characters. Chapter II will

detail William Butler Yeats's concept of Woman as Child, passive, pliable

and in need of protection. Chapter III will explore Woman as Mother,

self-sacrificing but punitive Earth Mother. Chapter IV is devoted to

Woman as Queen, the demon and the devourer. The last chapter is reserved

/ for what conclusions may be drawn relative to Yeats’s heroines and their effect on the Yeatsian hero. 7

Background

John Bull’s Other Island is a lesser known play by George Bernard

Shaw, which was written at the request of William Butler Yeats for the

Irish Literary Theatre. It is a play about Ireland, and although Yeats

appreciated it very much, at the same time he realized that Shaw was very much out of tune with the Celtic Movement. In essence, what Shaw sought to accomplish in the writing of the play was to destroy for pos­ terity the negative concept of the character of the stage Irishman.

Shaw’s graphic depiction of the stage Irishman took shape in the person of Tim Haffigan. When the gullible Englishman Tom Broadbent, admonishes his Irish partner, Larry Doyle, that Tim behaved "just like an Irishman,” Doyle explodes:

Like an Irishman! Is it possible that you don’t know that all this top-o*-the morning and broth-of-a-boy and more-power-to-your-elbow business is as peculiar to England as the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music are? No Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland, or ever did, or ever will. But when a thoroughly worth­ less Irishman comes to England, and finds the whole place full of romantic duffers like you, who will let him loaf and drink and sponge and brag as long as he flatters your sense of moral superiority by playing the fool and degrading himself and his country, he soon learns the antics that take you in. He picks them up at the theatre or the music hall.

Shaw was an ex-patriot set upon conquering England. His play,

John Bull’s Other Island, was a success at Court largely because in it the typical Englishman was sentimental and successful, which was how he liked to see himself represented. The typical Irishman in the play was clever and was assumed to be relatively unsuccessful on no evidence whatsoever, save that he was Irish. 8

George Bernard Shaw was successful in summing up his position with

this comment:

If I had gone to the hills nearby to look back upon Dublin and to ponder upon myself, I too might well have become a poet like Yeats, Synge and the rest of them. But I prided myself on thinking clearly, and therefore could not stay. Whenever I took a problem or a state of life of which my Irish contemporaries sang sad songs, I always pursued it to its logical conclusion, and then inevitably it resolved itself into comedy. That is why I did not become an Irish poet ... I could not stay there dreaming my life away on the Irish hills.7

In the words of his character, Doyle, Shaw expressed his feelings more

poetically, as the embittered Irishman exclaims:

Oh, the dreaming! The dreaming! The torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and use­ fulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman’s imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can’t face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be ’agreeable to strangers’, like a good-for- nothing woman on the streets.

The Irish people are extremely sensitive about the stage Irishman and always have been. Just how sensitive is revealed in the text of a speech by then Prime Minister Sean Lemass several years ago when he attacked

. . . those Irish journalists, playwrights and novelists who seem to think that the surest way to extract any royalties from British publishers is to depict the Irish not as they really are but as the British public have been led to imagine them. These people do not seem to

^Hesketh Pearson, G. B_. S^.: A Full Length Portrait, Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1942, p. 208, 9

understand that they are helping to sustain an Anti- Irish propaganda which was originally devised during periods of cold war against Irish independence and to justify measures which were taken to prevent its attainment. 8

It is certainly not difficult to concede that it is just possible

that Ireland and the Irish have usually been depicted and therefore viewed throughout the sentimental mist of stereotypes —- the thick

stage brogue (which nearly all modern historians and social critics de­ nounce as a product of New York), the flood of words, the jokes, the

songs, the devil-may-care'jauntiness coupled with the down-in-his-cups

sadness, and of course, the great fondness for alcohol. According to

these stereotypes, the picture of typical Paddy is that of a man

”flush-faced, round-bellied, dressed like a walking slum . . . and full of that ’crazy loveableness’.His mind is a bottomless pit of amusing stories; his repartee interrupted only to make comment on the sad state of Irish affairs. He is always seated in an old pub imbibing a jar or two in the "sight of carousing market women, a dancing midget, a muscular man in a pin-stripe suit singing ’Danny Boy,' and a skinny man with a bowler cocked on his head pounding on an ancient piano.

Paddy’s fair Kathleen, meanwhile, is to be found sardonic and silent sitting in a thatched-roof cottage, and occasionally pitching turf upon the dying fire. She wears a Kinsdale cloak or a plain and ancient black shawl, and her face is etched with nobility, strength, wisdom and compassion as she says her beads and broods upon her "riders to the sea."

^Donald S. Connery, The Irish, rev. ed., Simon and Schuster, New York, 1970, pp. 114-115.

^Connery, p. 115.

^Connery, p. 116. 10

One very perceptive observer of the Irish character, the Anglo-Irish

writer Robert Lynd, warned in 1910:

Almost all generalizations, I suppose, were in the be­ ginning born of one seed of truth. Nearly all general­ izations about Ireland, however, have grown up into perverted and lying shapes, like the monstrous light­ hiding trees, and in their branches the parrots of the nations chatter innumerable foolish things.H

The problem then is to look past the stereotypes in trying to char­

acterize the Irish people. A brief look at the history of the nation

from its recorded beginnings is therefore necessary in the attempt to

delineate the quality of Irishness, and the place of women in the Irish

society. This, in fact, is just what Yeats and Lady Gregory set out to

accomplish with the Irish Literary Renaissance, using the legends and myths, in the Celtic tradition, to "bring the imagination and the speech

of the country, all that poetical tradition descended from the Middle

Ages, to the people of the town."12

It has been said that the Irish are the most unmixed race in

Europe and can trace their ancestry for several thousand years better «1 O than any other people in Europe. J The history of prehistoric Ireland as told in the ancient chronicles easily reveals that the Irish are the oldest nation in Europe.

At a very early period Ireland was known to the Greeks as Ierne, and later to the Romans as Hibernia. At a very remote time it appears

Ho’Connor, p. 5.

l^William Butler Yeats, The Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1965, p. 386.

13james J. Walsh, The World's Debt to the Irish, The Stratford Company, Boston, 1926, p. 10. 11

to have been colonized by Greek and other Eastern peoples, who left deep

impressions on the minds of the Celtic race already inhabiting the island.

Robert Graves, in his historical grammar of poetic myth, includes a pas­

sage from C. S. Boswell's edition of the tenth-century Irish Fis Adamnain,

"The Vision of St. Adamnain," which indicates that the early Irish pos­

sessed Sample means of acquaintance with the oral and written traditions

of Greece; and that these traditions were no less important to Ireland

than to Greece. Graves feels that Cuchulain’s Greek counterpart was Euphe- mus, son of the Moon-Goddess Europe."^

Ireland's parentage is indicated by its primitive social organiza­

tion and legal system. The family was the basic social unit, and the

clan was the larger family. Pre-Christian Ireland was divided into five septs: Munster, Connaught, Ulster, Leinster, and Meath; and each of the clans was governed by a chief or a king. Fighting among the clans, marauding and plundering were the chief businesses of everyday life.

The most admired was the one who could accomplish his business with the most daring.

All septs lived under a simple code of laws, which were administered by the hereditary class of jurists known as the Brehons. Any offense was punishable by a system of fines. The land was jointly owned by the clan, and succession to the office of the chief was determined by vote of the clan. It is interesting to note that the most exalted class was not that of kinds or the Brehons, but that of the inspired singers, the Bards. This

Brehon Law was to be closely interwoven with the later history of Ireland.

^Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Vintage'Books, New York, 1959, pp. 148-150 and p. 408. 12

It is precisely from this strongly ambivalent Pre-Christian period that the Irish mythology and legend with which William Butler Yeats was to deal was born.

Irish mythology tends to support a dual, totally dis­ similar ancestry. The first cycle contains the great seafaring tales, epic in spirit, over-flowing with the same release from bondage of earth found in The Odyssey.

Cohane insists that the split racial personality of the Irish mythology is further displayed in the second cycle, the Heroic cycle, which aban­ dons the peaceful and prosperous seafaring people, the men of intelligence, and the tradesmen and craftsmen that dominate the first cycle. This second cycle deals instead with the Celtic warriors --- Fergus, Conchobar, and Cuchullain ---who became major characters in some of Yeats’s plays.

The third cycle, the Fenian cycle of the mythology, concerns itself with the descendants of the people in the first cycle.

All the elements found in the age of chivalry, in the ballads of the troubadours, in the best of medieval literature --- romantic love, the joys of hunting and of fairs, the passion for nature and the Irish country­ side --- unfold in the Fenian Cycle ... It is the same rich source which played a key role in sparking off the great Celtic revival of the late nineteenth century . . .

The Fenian tales reveal remarkable characteristics of the Pre-Christian

Ireland. Dr. Whitley Stokes in his treatise on the Fenian legends wrote:

The tales are generally told with sobriety and direct­ ness .... they evince genuine feeling for natural beauty, a passion for music, a moral purity, a noble love for manliness and honor.

Cohane, p. 163.

IfiCohane, p. 171.

17Quoted in Cohane, p. 173. 13

The tales'date to at least the third century A. D. The earliest re­

liable date for the entrance of the Christian tradition is 432 A. D. with

the admission of St. Patrick. Lest the wrong concept of the early Irish

people be given --- that all were romantic, peace-loving individuals ---

it is necessary to touch upon the contradictory evidence.

Judged by modern standards, their morals were nothing less than

atrocious. Not only did this moral climate exist in pagan times, it was the rule of the land in the fifth century when Patrick arrived, and

continued to flourish without any noticeable improvement during the next

seven hundred years of Christianity. Divorce was common, as were pros­ titution, and the selling of slave girls in the market. Elopement of married women, and the keeping of concubines was prevalent in the upper classes, and apparently not disfavorable with the general public. The great mass of surviving written law indicates that the open living together by lovers and frequent swapping of partners, along with an astonishing rate of illegitimate births were commonplace.

In order to deal with the women in the plays of Yeats, especially those plays based on the legends and myths, it is necessary to have a clear insight into the status of the earliest Irish women. Indeed, wo­ men's rights were expansive under old Celtic laws. In contrast with lower class women, women from the upper and middle classes were afforded what may best be described as at least equal rights, and according to custom, women were in many ways superior to men.

With the introduction of St. Patrick's protogee, St. Bridget, in the fifth century came the development of education for women in Ireland.

James J. Walsh notes that before the coming of Christianity to Ireland, 14

the ancient Irish were devoted to the goddess Bridget, the patron pagan

deity of poetry and wisdom; and that at about the time of Christ there

was a famous lawgiver, also named Bridget, many of whose sayings are

preserved among the Irish traditions. Walsh suggests that some of the

traditions associated with the later St. Bridget have been transferred

from the goddess and/or the lawgiver.!®

It is extremely interesting to note that the rights for which women

in our age agitate were assured by law to the Irish women fifteen cen­

turies ago. Nor does the development of advanced education for women seem strange, but rather it was the natural outcome of the condition of womanhood in Ireland. James J. Walsh points out that women were not simply "sold" into marriage:

First and most unusual in the world of that time, the Irish woman was wooed for herself; she had the right to make up her own mind as to whom she should marry. This right was very preciously conserved and faith­ fully exercised.19-

The Irish woman did not become simply the property of her husband, but an equal partner in a joint venture. Most certainly,, this repre­ sents a definite distinction from nearly all other peoples of the time.

The Irish expression with regard to marriage was "it was contracted be­ tween them." While Irish law made the husband perhaps the more Important of the partners, Irish law "did not abrogate his wife’s rights."20

l^alsh, p. 251.

19walsh, p. 274.

20walsh, p. 274. 15

Once a woman entered a marriage contract, she retained sole posses­

sion of any property that was hers prior to the marriage; she also was given the choice of assigning any property of her choice to her husband.

Such property as was jointly owned by them could not be sold or assigned away by the husband without her consent. Their rights in the joint property of house or family were equal and free and voluntary consent of both was necessary for disposal.21

John Philip Cohane points out that Irish wives fared considerably better than their European counterparts.

Separate accounts were kept, and when and if the marriage was dissolved, she took with her what was rightfully hers. This was subject to court pro­ cedure in which the wife’s testimony was held to be on a par with her husband’s. In matters of property it was an extremely meticulous society. z

While an Irish woman, and especially a married Irish woman, had the right to pursue her own case at law, it is even more astonishing to note that she could also take action to recover a debt.

It was a peculiarity of the old Gaelic law that if a woman levied upon the belongings of a debtor she was supposed to distrain such things as were appro­ priate for women; such animals for instance as lap dogs or sheep; such articles as spindles, mirrors or comb bags. If these had belonged to the man’s wife before she was married, or if she had brought them with her into the marriage contract as was usually the case, then these could only be dis­ trained for the personal debt of the wife. Indeed, such articles of industry as her'distaff, her loom, spinning wheel and spindles were considered somewhat in the light of a working man's tools in the modern time and could not be distrained.23

2^Walsh-, p. 275.

22cohane, pp. 177-178.

23walsh, p. 275. 16

A woman's right to dispose of property held by her in her own name,

which had been appropriated to her by her father, was guaranteed under

Irish law, also. It was a law which made possible the transmission of

her heritage to her children. It is said to have been the celebrated woman Brehon, or female judge, Brigh, who made the decision fixing the

law with regard to succession of lands. Apparently, under tribal law

the ownership of property was a good deal more complex than the owner­

ship laws under a commonwealth system with individual rights to owner­ ship without any obligations necessarily,accompanying them.

* Under the Brehon laws of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Irish female possessed the right of legal separation, even under the Christian dispensation in Ireland. Richard O’Connor, in his discussion of these laws points out that:

The Brehon laws provided that a woman could get a di­ vorce if she considered her husband sexually unsatis­ factory, if he did not promptly make her pregnant, if he embarrassed her in front of visitors, if he struck or abused her physically or verbally, or if he was unfaithful.24

Cohane notes that there were seven valid grounds for the granting of a divorce to a wife:

Aside from the usual reasons of abandonment and infi­ delity she could win her freedom if she could prove that ’the husband had inflicted upon her through beating a visible bruise or blemish ... if he had made her the subject of ridicule in public . . . and if he had denied her full rights in domestic and social matters.' Amplifying the last point, the law decreed, ’Every noble woman is entitled to the exercise of her own free will.*25

24o’Connor, p. 167.

25cohane, p. 178. 17

Nor did the law stop with these offenses. A wife was likewise able to

obtain divorce if her husband did not provide sufficient food and drink,

"especially when her relatives came calling."26 Further, she was able

to divorce under the following conditions:

... if he got too fat or contracted some disfiguring disease, if he went away to war and came back with dis­ abling wounds . . . or if he became ill and took too long to recover.27

Incredible as it may seem* an Irish woman under the Brehon laws

also had the opportunity to opt for a kind of conditional divorce, which allowed her the privilege of changing her mind.

She could leave her husband, for instance, during lean times when there weren't enough ox joints and mead to keep his in-laws well stuffed and then return to his bed and board when times were better. Alimony, too, was provided the disaffected wife under Brehon laws. When she was divorced, she was entitled not only to repayment of her dowry but to compensation for her services and punitory damages as well.28

Such legal separation did not permit remarriage while the other partner was still alive, and even under the present laws of the Irish

Free State there is still no legal recognition of divorce. This owes partly to the old Gaelic tradition and law, which saw divorce as working a particular injustice upon the wife.

The place of women in the life of the Irish at the beginning of the golden age of Irish achievement can probably be best appreciated by viewing their position in the great sagas which were later to inspire

26q*Connor, p. 167.

27q*Connor, p. 167.

28q*Connor, p. 167. 18

Yeats and Lady Gregory. An article entitled "The Ancient Irish Sagas," which was published in Century Magazine in 1907, and which Walsh quotes in his elaborations on the ancient sagas, emphasized the contrast between the portrayal of women in the Irish sagas and that of the Norse poets:

Still more striking is the difference between the wo­ men in the Irish sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of the middle ages. In the 'Song of Roland' --- rather curiously, considering that it is the first great piece of French literature --- woman plays ab­ solutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is more than a name, or which can be placed be­ side Roland and Oliver, Archbishop Turpin and the trait---or Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty em­ peror of the 'barbe Fleurie.' The heroines of the early Norse and German stories are splendid and ter­ rible, fit to be the mothers of a mighty race, as stern and terrible as their lovers and husbands. But it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal to our modern ideas as does Emer, the be­ loved of Cuchulain, or Deirdre, the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdre have the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table, though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic tastes and attributes. y

It is possible that it was exactly this combination of high spirit and the "power of inspiring and returning romantic love," and the para­ doxical meshing of the archaic and the modern tastes, which attracted

Yeats to the women in the sagas, to such an extent that he interpolated the legendary characters into his own work. Most certainly, a look at the women in Yeats's own personal life —- the beautiful freedom-fighter,

Maud Gonne, for example --- would bear evidence to his preference for ambivalence and duality in woman's nature. This is not to say that Yeats

29Walsh, pp. 280-281. 19

had an easy time dealing with it, as later discussion of the plays will

indicate.

There is much evidence to support the idea that the early Irish wo­

men were, to say the least, robust and vigorous. It was not until 697 A. D

at a meeting of clergy and laymen at Tara that women were officially

exempted from military service. In addition to accompanying their men

into battle, Irish women were included in the encounters on the hunting

field, which reportedly "sparked off a number of assignations and elope­

ments . "3®

Irish women were also regularly invited along on the cattle raids,

which apparently were something akin to the bloody fox-hunting of the

present day. As late as the sixteenth century, according to accounts

of the escapades of Grace O’Malley, the "Queen of Galway," women rode

bareback and astride, as was the approved Irish riding fashion. Ac­

cording to some of the old Irish medical traditions, it was the Irish

custom that the women be encouraged to give birth in the kneeling posi­

tion, "so as to help themselves"; the period of confinement was from

three to five days, and the birth process, instead of being considered

"a pathological event requiring the attendance of a physician, was looked upon as a physiological incident of life."51

At the numerous Irish fairs, which constituted the important com­ munity aspect in an otherwise dispersed populace, women had a full schedule of conferences and sporting games. At the banquet halls the men and women

30cohane, p. 178.

S^Walsh, p. 413. 20

feasted and drank together. Cohane comments that

When St. Patrick made his way for the first time up the hill to Tara, which happened to be on Easter Sunday morning, it is said he found, a riotous, all- night party still in full swing.32

Richard O’Connor suggests that women’s rights under the old Celtic

laws are ”an indication that intrinsic sexual equality is deeply embedded

in the Irish ethos."33 Unfortunately, the equality, such as it was, came

to an abrupt halt with the succession of invaders who slaughtered the men

and placed their survivors in captivity. Needless to say, the English

legal system was responsible for the drastic reduction in.the status of

the Irish women, after the British occupation during the time of Henry II.

The English, of course, fully expected the Irish to become English; the accounts of the bloody battles between them from the twelfth century to the present prove that the English were sadly mistaken.

The rights and status of women in Ireland, although they suffered further damage at the hands of the British, were slowly but surely under­ mined from the moment that St. Patrick began to preach Christianity, more specifically, Catholicism. The doctrine he preached was based on the concept of a fiercely patriarchal system of values, and was inspired by the early Christian writers, who took a dim view of feminism, which they equated with pagan ideals.

Katharine M. Rogers, in her book on the history of misogyny in liter­ ature points out that:

Woman's relative independence under the Roman Empire also contributed to the antifeminism of St. Paul and

32Cohane, p. 179.

33q'Connor, p. 166. 21

other early Christian writers, who found it alarming because of their inheritance of Jewish patriarchy and their ascetic conviction that woman must be kept un­ der control because of her sexuality.

Most interesting is the fact that such a rigorously matriarchal society

as the Irish was converted to such a rigorously patriarchal society as

the Church.

Under medieval theory the Church’s official attitudes toward woman

changed only for the worse, at least from the viewpoint of women. This z is perhaps most colorfully illustrated by the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas,

in the writing of his Summa Theologica felt compelled to begin his discus­

sion of the creation of woman by justifying her existence, as a "helper

in the work of generation . . . naturally subject to man, because In man

the discernment of reason predominates." Further, Thomas noted that, al­

though she is an occasion of sin, without "these things which proved an occasion of sin, the universe would have been imperfect."®^

Katharine Rogers further notes:

The belief that woman is morally weaker than man and was created only to fulfill her sexual function, to­ gether with sexual guilt resulting from the asceticism of the Church, naturally led to a strong emphasis in medieval religious manuals and sermons on woman’s dan­ gerous seductive propensities. Medieval clerics, like the patristic writers, often supplemented their warnings by inconsistently declaring that the female body is not really attractive at all.3°

^Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1966, pp. 41-42.

35st. Thomas Aquinas, The Basic Writings, ed. by Anton C. Pegis, Random House, New York, 1945, Part I, pp. 879-881.

36Rogers, p. 67. 22

It is necessary to assert that pagan beliefs in Ireland endured long

after the Church tried to stamp them out as heretical and un-Christian;

in fact, centuries after St. Patrick, the Celtic gods, their demons and

superstitions were in co-existence with Christianity. Yeats himself, in

A General Introduction for My Work, tried to reconcile this co-existence:

Behind all Irish history hangs a great tapestry, even Christianity had to accept it and be itself pictured there. Nobody looking at its dim folds can say where Christianity begins and Druidism ends ... I can only explain by that suggestion of recent scholars . . . that St. Patrick came to Ireland not in the fifth cen­ tury but towards the end of the second. The great controversies had not begun; Easter was still the first full moon after the Equinox. Upon that day the world had been created, the Ark rested on Ararat, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt; the umbilical cord which united Christianity to the ancient world had not yet been cut, Christ was still the half-brother of Dionysus. A man just tonsured by the Druids could learn from his Christian neighbor to sign himself with the Cross with­ out sense of incongruity, nor would his children acquire that sense. The organised clans weakened Church organ­ isation, they could accept the monk but not the bishop. '

Indeed the Irish monks who carried the torch for St. Patrick seemed to know better than to dismiss lightly the Irish pre-disposi­ tion for the pagan beliefs, especially those relating to the super­ natural. Historian Owen Dudley Edwards comments that in Ireland

We find ourselves perpetually surrounded by imponder­ ables which mock our investigation, from the early monks who knew too much to reject coexistence with pagan survivals, to Yeats, who in poetry strove with success to catch a glimpse of these intangibles . . .3“

Religion became for the Irish the most pervasive element in their daily lives, perhaps because of this unique blending of the pagan,

37william Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions, Collier Books, New York, 1968, pp. 513-514.

^Quoted in O’Connor, p. 264. 23

the Christian, and the Roman Catholic traditions. Indeed, modern Ireland

has become known as the country more Catholic than the Pope. Donald S.

Connery in his discourse on the Church and the State in Ireland has

stated:

Religion matters in Ireland more than in any other country in the English-speaking world. It is even said that an Irish atheist is one who wishes to God he could believe in God.39

Perhaps the Catholic dogma offered just the right mixture of absolutism and magic to the Irish people who had been cowed by the authority of foreign invaders.

Under English rule for centuries, and operating under a political and economic system that showed the ugliest facets of colonialism, the

Irish were'inundated with a variety of influences which formed the Irish ideas of morality. And, for the Irish, morality was apparently synony­ mous with sexuality. O’Connor comments that history, tradition, and economies operated in a negative manner on romantic love:

History made marriage a practical matter, tradition ordained that the male's whims are more Important than the female's deepest urges, and economic neces­ sity, at least until the last decade, has made it a step to be considered with a long searching intensity.40

Arland Ussher believes that a "sort of polarization" between the sexes occurred which made Ireland a country of Junos, but not Jupitersj^^ a nation in which the fabric is held together by the women, and by sheer * 41

Connery, p. 157.

^O'Connor, p. 143.

41Arland Ussher, The Face and Mind of Ireland, The Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1950, p. 138. 24

force of their character. O’Connor believes the matriarchy developed as

the "psychological consequence of having been conquered so many times;

conquest breaks men but only strengthens women.

Connery characterizes modern Ireland as a man's country where men

rule, but their mothers enjoy the power behind the scenes; curiously,

he equates the matriarchal position with loss of power:

Well known for its late marriages and numerous bachelors and spinsters, it is perhaps the one place in the world where men most effectively manage to continue their bachelor pursuits (which have little to do with sex) after marriage. It has the greatest percentage of virgins . . . and the least-emancipated women in the English- speaking world.*3

Charles Lucey explains that this long existence of a stern matri­

archy is responsible for the prevalence of the bachelor boy, and the

subsequent lateness of the Irish marriage.44 The matriarchal system

seems to leave no question that mother love is good and noble, that

carnal love is unclean, and this idea extends into marriage. Indeed

Ireland is a country where marriage has been defined by the natives as "permission to sin." This would seem to suggest a concept of sex as a function, rather than as a passion. The credit for placing the chastity belt on Ireland has been assigned to the heresy of Jansenism, which found a home with the clerical hierarchy in Ireland. Bruce

Marshall, a Scottish novelist, defines the Jansenist heresy as "the impression that God made an artistic mistake when he planned the

4^0’Connor, p. 163.

43connery, p. 192.

44Lucey, p. 109. 25

mechanics of procreation.

For women in Ireland marriage came to signify an empty triumph;

religion was supposed to have sublimated their sexual desire. The con­

cept of sex as sin was only slightly mitigated by the production of

children; the production of a child, however, insured the Irish woman

the highest place in her society,, motherhood. The concept that Irish­

women are the real rulers has circulated for at least three hundred

years; and this is by virtue of their motherhood.

The Celtic woman was acknowledged to have been willful, but ap­

parently the Celtic man was self-confident enough to have allowed her

the position she held. By the nineteenth century, however, her rights

had been diminished to such an extent that she was characterized as a

spiritless, downtrodden creature. In actuality, this description could

easily fit any woman who had the dubious honor of living during the

Victorian age.

It seems clear that, while the historic heydey of feminism had

long since passed, the Irish woman fared considerably better tkan her

sisters in other countries for the simple reason that she was part of

a matriarchal society. While it is true that the nineteenth century

Irishwoman had been gentled by the patriarchal influences of Christianity and English occupation, it is also true that history shows her strength of purpose to be the underpinning of Irish society. Summoning up visions of Queen Maeve and Grace O’Malley, and all the heroines of the female-laden

Celtic sagas, Mother Machree shed her artificially imposed role and appeared

^Quoted in O’Connor, p. 157. 26

at the forefront of the Irish Revolution in the persons of Maud Gönne and

the Countess Markievicz.

During the fight against the British for home rule, this demure and

supposedly subservient creature made history repeat itself, and went to

war along side her mate. She formed the underground forces, and in addi­

tion to participating in the protest marches,

. . . tended the wounded, sheltered the fugitives, distributed literature from underground presses, and made life hell in the way women know best for the British forces.46

Perhaps the most impressive picture of the typical Irish woman is contained in a speech made by Michael Collins, the imposing Irish poli­

tical leader (who was assassinated during the Civil War of 1921-22), shortly before his death:

No one knows better than I what the women have done during the past two or three years, and it was not only the Cumann na mBan but the ordinary unorganized women of Ireland. Everywhere we went throughout Irelandwe were treated by the women. The women en­ dured more during those years than some people who talk big words today. I know old women who lay awake at night in houses where I and others slept during the conflict . . . The women who sheltered the real fighting men know what the fighting men think of them. I don’t go in for display­ ing my feelings in a cheap way, but any one of us who went through the conflict knows that the women had to face things which we had not to face. We were armed and had that advantage when the enemy came. But the women were subjected to all sorts of indignities, and they had not the protection we had. Few appreciate what Ireland owes to the women who stood their ground during the past few years, and no thanks that anyone can bestow upon them will be too great.

46o’Connor, pp. 168-169

47o’Connor, p. 169. 27

In Collins’ speech there is an echo of the idea that "conquest breaks

men, but only strengthens women." Yeats was a product of the same cul­

tural and social heritage that shaped the woman of his legends as well

as the woman of his times. The picture of womanhood available to him

was indeed a strange composite of independence and frailty, passion and

repression, dominance and subservience. Neither Yeats nor the woman of

his times seemed to be bothered by the apparent incongruities of the com­

posite’.

Sentimentality is a luxury to the Irish, and it was with this hard,

cold fact that Yeats was forced to deal in the creation of the women in

his drama. It is precisely what has come to be called "the Celtic dif­

ference" that allows illusion to be severed so distinctly from reality.

Perhaps no example is quite as successful as that afforded in the verses

of the Irish street ballad, "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye," which, it has

been suggested, should become the national anthem. Sung by a woman whose

husband had deserted her, run off to war, and returned maimed, it pro­ vides a graphic picture of the Irish spirit of jeering at fate, while at

the same time offering a vital clue to the fiber of Irish womanhood, most vividly in the following verses:

You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg, Hurroo! hurroo! You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg; You’ll have to be put in a bowl to beg: Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye! With the drums and the guns, and the guns and drums The enemy nearly slew ye; My darling dear, you look so queer, Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!

But sad as it is to see you so, Hurroo! hurroo! 28

And to think of you now as an object of woe, Your Peggy’ll still keep ye on as her beau; Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!48

Charles Lucey sees fit to describe the Irish in distinctively mas­

culine terms:

I know the Irish as poets, song-makers and word- spinners, as romantics and hard realists, as holy men and unholy men, as beguilers and brigands, as blustering chauvinists and men of vision, as peo­ ple close to the sea and soil and holding to an an­ cient faith in a world where all faith is hard- tested. 49

There is no apparent reason why the same things can not be said of the

Irish women. At any rate, if a fair assessment of the quality of

Irishness, and Irish womanhood is to be settled upon without aid of

the sentimental mist of the stereotype, then, in fact, it is necessary

to see past the Mother Machree that was created in Tin Pan Alley.

48Devin A. Garrity, ed., The Mentor Book of Irish Poetry, Mentor Books, New York, 1965, p. 421. 49 Lucey, p. 21 29

CHAPTER II

WOMAN AS CHILD

Born in Sandymount, Dublin on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats

was to experience the most complicated life. The eldest son of upper

middle-class parents, he spent the greatest part of his early life in

the company of his mother, Susan Pollexfen Yeats, at her ancestral home

In Sligo in the west of Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats, spent

the greatest portion of his son’s childhood in-London, where he was to

move the family in 1874.

In 1876, William was entered into the Godolphin School in Hammer­

smith, England for his first attempt at formal education. Richard

Ellmann reports that he was a daydreamer and Yeats himself admitted

that he was little more than indifferent as a student: ’’Because I

found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my own thoughts, I was difficult to teach.’’3O

For the first time he was with boys of his own age, and they laughed at his awkwardness and bullied him because he was weak, because he was a poor student, and because he was not English. In defiance he be­ came more Irish and more unhappy, and sought for out- of-the-way knowledge beyond the reach of the class­ room. 51

Yeats’s Autobiographies reveal his sense of dependence upon his

^Autobiographies, p. 14.

SlRichard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, p. 26. 30

father, and his continuing attempts to escape from that dependence. The

tension between father and son permeated the Yeats household, and the con­

trast and conflict between Yeats’s mother and father set the stage for the

boy’s early notion of how men and women operate in society. John Butler

Yeats was the talker, an intellectually dominating male and a sceptic, who felt little sense of familial or financial responsibility.

Susan Pollexfen Yeats was a sensitive woman of deep feeling, who had "vew opinions about anything, but liked best of all to exchange ghost and fairy stories with some, fisherman’s wife in the kitchen.”52 she was ill at ease with her husband’s artistic and literary friends, thinking an illiterate peasant better company. Brenda Webster comments that Yeats felt his mother to be "emotionally unavailable"^ to him, and cites the fact that she became easily depressed by and hostile toward her husband’s career. According to John Butler Yeats, Susan was incompetent, and "not at all good at housekeeping or child-minding,"54 a charge which is sup­ ported by Yeats’s sister Lily.

William Butler Yeats was to rely all his life on the fairy and folk tales learned at his mother’s knee, and out of these ethereal materials he was to fashion his earliest imaginary heroes. In reaction to his feelings of loneliness and weakness which were reinforced by his peers, he constructed a proud and solitary hero who was a magician, capable of

S^Ellman, p. 23.

^Brenda S. Webster, Yeats: ,A Psychoanalytic Study, Stanford Univer­ sity Press, Stanford, California, 1973, p. 7.

54william M. Murphy, The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens of Sligo, Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1971, pp. 34-35. 31

mastering the world with his mind. By the time he was eighteen, Yeats

had made several attempts at playwriting. His characters were knights,

shepherds and sheperdesses, enchanters and enchantresses; his settings

were gardens and islands. He had determined to earn his was as an artist

It was at about this time that Yeats became aware of himself in a

sexual sense:

It all came upon me when I was close upon seventeen like the bursting of a shell ... As I look back­ ward, I seem to discover that my passions, my loves and my despairs, instead of being my enemies, a dis­ turbance and an attack, became so beautiful that I had to be constantly alone to give them my whole at­ tention. 35

Yeats took to sleeping in a cave or among the rhododendrons and rocks of

Howth Castle., and began to see that the dreams, which he had previously regarded as distasteful and annoying, were in some way connected with the poet’s words. For Yeats dreams began to have as much significance as language in the construction of his poetry and plays. He began to play at being the sage, to dramatize his position as poet.

Yeats’s view of women at this time was as romantic as his view of himself; his heroes were Hamlet and Shelley's Alastor, isolated and melancholy. Yeats says:

When I thought of women they were modeled on those in my favourite poets and loved in brief tragedy, or like the girl in The Revolt of Islam, accompanied their lovers through all manner of wild places, law­ less women without homes and without chlldren.56

Yeats noted that his father’s influence over him was at its height during

55Autobiographies, pp. 40-41.

^Autobiographies, p. 42. 32

this period. Brenda Webster points out that many of the works he enjoyed

evidence hostility toward a father figure; and, the fact that the women

are childless means that "they can devote their love completely to the

young heroes,"37 and a sense become pseudo-mothers.

In any case, it is obvious that William Butler Yeats sought isola­

tion. Perhaps this was out of a sense of guilt about his sexual feelings

possibly it was guilt combined with an innate fear that he was still the

weak, awkward boy made fun of by his schoolmates. He seems to have re­

jected the idea that physical desire was good for him, and, adopting a

kind of asceticism, set out to conquer the world with his mind. He wanted to live on a little island called Innisfree; the island as a sym­

bol of isolation became most important in his early dramatic work.

I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoreau had lived, seeking wisdom. There was a story in the county history of a tree that had once grown upon that island guarded by some terrible monster and borne the food of the gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away. He did as he had been told, but tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland where she had waited for him, he was dying of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it and died. I do not remember whether I chose the island because of its beauty or for the story’s sake, but I was twenty-two or three before I gave up the dream.38

This island first took shape in his dramatic literature in the form of a verse play written In 1884. Described by Yeats as an "Arcadian

^Webster, p. 11.

^Autobiographies, p. 47. 33

Faery Tale,” The Island of Statues is really little more than a dramatic

poem in comparison with his later plays; its tone is romantic and lonely.

The island Is a place of escape, hence Yeats’s concoction of a place of

beauty fraught with danger. The shepherdless Naschina is pursued by Colin

and Thermot, the shepherds, but the object of her affection is the useless

hunter, Almintor, whom she sends in search of a forbidden flower. The

flower grows on an island isolated by the sea and guarded by the Enchan­

tress.

Naschina is bored with Almintor's innocent and pure love, and in sending him to the island she goads him into action. When he accepts the challenge by going to the island in search of the goblin flower, Al­ mintor is enticed by a maiden's voice, whose meaning smacks of the Eden scene of the forbidden fruit. The voice cries:

When the tree was o ’er appled For mother Eve's winning I was at her sinning.

Lines 80 through 83 end with "Arise, worm, and follow!"

The implication here is that Almintor as "worm" is less than the man that Naschina longs for; in fact, Almintor was less than the hero

Yeats longed for. The female in this play is stronger than the male; indeed, the play is almost a contest between two females. Naschina is basically good, and relatively uninteresting in comparison with the evil

Enchantress. Webster comments that Yeats was more interested in the

Enchantress because she was the "female embodiment of the magician, the role Yeats was most interested in at the time."59 There is also a hint

59webster, p. 11. 34

of the later queen characters present in the Enchantress.

The Enchantress desires power, and her punishment is death; she

scares a starkness with Yeats later heroines. She is not, however, as

the later heroines are, united with the hero; Almintor returns to

Naschina, the ordinary woman, after having had no real contact with the

Enchantress. In the later plays a distinct difference is notable in

that it is generally the hero who must die because he desires too much.

It is Naschina who is left to comment on the death of the Enchantress;

good left to comment on the conquering of evil. The hero remains pas­

sive, having to be prompted by a woman to show any agressiveness.

In a letter to a friend dated 1884 Yeats says that the part of the

Enchantress was written for his cousin Laura Armstrong. The -Island of

Statues, then, becomes the first of many plays written;for a specific > woman.30

During the years 1884 through 1888, Yeats changed from boy to man.

It was during this period that Yeats became acquainted with the Irish nationalist John O’Leary, who, after his return from imprisonment in

England and exile to France, made it his chief business to build up the

Irish morale. Yeats felt that nationalism was to be left to the poli­ ticians, and O’Leary's approach appealed to him, in such speeches as

"What Irishmen Should Know" and "How Irishmen Should Feel." O’Leary gave Yeats a book of Thomas Davis’s poetry,31 and Yeats began to see the literary possibilities in his mother’s fairy and folk tales.

3°W. B. Yeats, The Letters of William Butler Yeats, ed. by Alan Wade, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1855, p. 118.

3-^-Ellmann, p. 46. 35

Encouraged by his friend and confidante, Katharine Tynan, who urged

him to use purely Irish subject matter, Yeats wrote the Wanderings of

Oisin which was to set the trend for the Irish Literary Revival. By

1888, Yeats came to see his previous work as shallow and passionless.

Richard Ellmann feels that the period between 1889 and 1903 is the most

difficult to follow in Yeats’s life. He notes that Yeats’s inclination

"to pose before the world as something different from what he was, to hide his secret self”62 had come to the point where Yeats actually saw himself as two separate parts.

Not unlike the heroes of his contemporaries, Yeats's heroes began to reflect the "subtle change in mental climate" during the nineteenth century, the nature of which suggests the "different conceptions of per­ sonality which prevailed from the time of Byron at the beginning of the century to that of Wilde’s at the century’s end."63

The Byronic hero’s personality was dictated by the overwhelming secret passions and secret sins that destroyed his outward calm with uncontrollable force. By the end of the nineteenth century, the hero was controlled and in control of his base passions. The ideal became the man whose passions had been refined, posed in another self. Char­ acter and personality were no longer one and the same.

For Yeats the theory of the divided consciousness was deeply rooted; he wanted to dream his days away, but felt the need to succeed at being an artist. Yeats saw himself as two men, the secret self for the sake of

62Ellmann, p. 70.

63Ellmann, p. 70. 36

self, and the posed self for the sake of the world. Nor was he alone in

his feelings, for in 1887 Yeats went to London and found himself in the

company of the most extravagant poseurs. Along with Lionel Johnson, * Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde, Yeats became pre-occupied

with elaborate verse and the philosophy of Walter Pater.

It is with the forming of the Rhymer's Club in 1891, and the ex­

change of ideas that it afforded to-Yeats, that his first direct reference

to what he thought to be the perfect woman was expounded. According to

Yeats, the Rhymers

praised a desired woman and hoped that she would find amid their praise her very self, or at worst, their very passion; and knew that she, ignoramus that she was, would have slept in the middle of Love’s Nocturne, lofty and tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our eyes, for all that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine, our emotions re­ membering the Lilith and the Sybilla Palmifera of Rosetti ... It could not be otherwise for Johnson’s favourite phrase, that life is ritual, expressed some­ thing that was in some degree in all our thoughts, and how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical place

Clearly here, the picture is one of woman depending upon man for her identity, finding in the praise of men her very self.

Yeats noted in "The Tragic Generation" that he had seen the first

Ibsen play to be produced in England, A Doll’s House, and that he "hated the play." Yeats said that his generation could not escape Ibsen, be­ cause "though we and he had not the same friends, we'had the same enemies."65

Perhaps it was more than the dialogue, which Yeats considered lacking in

^Autobiographies, p. 201.

65Autobiographies, p. 185. 37

music and style, that bothered him; perhaps Yeats was not yet able to

reconcile Ibsen's Nora with his own concept of what a woman should be.

At the request of his friend Florence Farr, who had become promi­

nent as an Ibsen actress, Yeats’s took on as his next dramatic project,

the writing of The Land of the Heart's Desire. By this time Yeats had

met and fallen hopelessly in love with Maud Gonne, the woman who held a

central place in his life and work for decades. Ellmann feels that

Yeats's central problem then became that of deciding which of his two

selves to show her.33 In effect, his attempt at resolving this problem

helped him to realize that some change in his basic attitude toward him­

self and woman was necessary. The change was exceedingly slow and not without suffering to the poet.

Maud Gonne and "Willie," as she called him, quarrelled time and again over the role of woman and her place in society. In her chapter on Maud Gonne, Dr. Vanderhaar details their stormy relationship, and

Yeats's poetry of that period is evidence to their struggles. Maud was far too independent to fit into the mold that Yeats, the Romantic poets, and Victorian society in general had assigned to her. She was unwilling to accept the submissive or "symbolic place" that Yeats offered her.

Yeats's views, naturally, were shaped by the century in which he was born, and he came out of the relationship feeling that Maud, because she would not conform, could not understand his work. It is fairly evi­ dent that she understood him on about the same level, for she thought him hopelessly behind the times in his refusal to get involved in the nation­ alistic movement.

33Ellmann, p. 79 38

In a letter to Yeats, which Elizabeth Coxhead feels is from this same

period, Maud remonstrates with Yeats for trying to protect her. Beginning

with her assurance that she would indeed act the title role in Cathleen ni

Houlihan, she continues, "I should not need and could not accept protection

from anyone.’10' In an attempt to puzzle out what had happened between

them, early in 1894 Yeats began the first drafts of The Land of the Heart *s

Desire, "thinking what had caused her quarrel with him must be her longing

’for some impossible life, for some unwearying land like that of the

heroine in my play*."68

Staged in London in 1894, and not produced in Ireland until 1911,

The Land of the Heart’s Desire has been described by A. E. Malone as a

"simple Irish fairy story."69 Shawn Bruin has just brought his bride,

Mary, to his father’s kitchen. Mary, however, is more attracted to folk

lore and fairy tales than to life in the kitchen. Shawn's mother, Brid­

get, calls in a priest to break the spell over Mary that the books of

stories create.

Bridget: Because I bid her clean the pots for supper She took down that old book out of the thatch;

The priest tells Mary that "You should not fill your Head with fool­

ish dreams." Her mother-in-law considers her reading wrong and idle; but,

Mary remains fascinated by the story of the Princess Edain who had followed

a voice "one May Eve" until she came to the land

^Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of Irish Renasence, The Camelot Press Limited, London, 1965, p. 53.

68Ellman, p. 108.

6^a. E. Malone, Irish Drama, Benjamin Blom, New York, 1965, p. 143. 39

Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

Warned of the dangers of such beliefs, Mary ignores her husband, Bridget

and the priest and cries out to the fairies to take her. She places

herself in their powers by her attention to the singing child. The child

enters the kitchen, traps the priest into removing the crucifix, and with

song and dance lures away the soul of the Mary who had complained of her

husband's "drowsy love" and "my captivity."

In an exchange between husband and bride Shawn begs:

Do not blame me; I often lie awake Thinking that all things trouble your bright head. How beautiful it is --- your broad pale forehead Under a cloudy blossoming of hair! Sit down beside me here — these are too old, And have forgotten they were ever young.

Mary replies that Shawn is "the great door-post" of the house, and she but

the "branch of blessed quicken wood." She says if she could she would

"hang upon the post;" this is followed by a stage direction indicating

that Mary wants to put her arms about Shawn, but looks at the priest and

is unable. She tells Shawn, who offers her a "world of fire and dew,"

that "your looks are all the candles that I need."

Mary Bruin is a child, a woman who is a child; she becomes one of

several Child-Women that Yeats created. A number of things are opera­

tive in her character. First, Mary is treated as a child by her mother-in- law; Bridget says in one exchange with her husband "She'd never do a turn

if I were silent." She is patronized by the priest and her father-in-law; it is interesting to note that except for her husband's words of entice­ ment into "drowsy love," he has little to say. 40

Secondly, there is the echo that, to Mary, union with her husband is

somehow wrong; she convinces herself that, under the watchful eye of the

clergy, and the symbol of the church, the crucifix, her husband’s looks

are all the ’’fire" that she needs. Thirdly, it is obvious that the child/

woman has been relegated to life in the kitchen, and has no need of reading,

and perhaps by extension of education.

This last view is certainly borne out in Yeats’s traditional view

that woman’s place is in the home, and not on Maud's lecture platform.

What poor delusiveness is all this ’higher education.* Men have set up a great mill called examination, to destroy the imagination. Why should women go through it, circumstance does not drive them? They come out with no repose, no peacefulness, their minds no longer quiet gardens full of secluded paths and umbrage- circled nooks, but loud as chaffering market places.

Yeats expressed his violent reaction to opinionated women, and at the

same time revealed his Insight into his view of woman's purpose:

Women, because the main event of their lives has been a giving themselves and giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll . . . to women opinions become as their children.or their sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity the more do they forget all other things. They grow cruel, as if in defence of lover or child, and all this is done for ’something other than human life.’ At last the opinion is so much identified with their nature that it seems a part of their flesh becomes stone and passes out of life.

The priest at first dismisses the child that beckons Mary with the line: "That will be the child that you would have." Through the priest

Yeats implies that 1) a child is what would give Mary credibility as a

^Letters, p. 123.

^Autobiographies, p. 341. 41

woman, and 2) the possibility of a child’s coming can make the union of

husband and wife right. From Mary’s viewpoint, life-as-Bridget is un­

bearable; the juxtaposition of the two women is a striking one. Mary

opts for something better than growing "old and bitter of tongue," as

Bridget has and flees to the land of the fairies.

Brenda Webster, in her brief discussion of the play, characterizes

Mary’s actions as those of a woman "who seeks to escape from the demands of mature sexuality, by fleeing to the land of the fairies."22 she likens this need to escape with Yeats’s own need to escape to his island of Innisfree. This may be true, but in view of the Vanderhaar study which chronicles Maud’s consistent refusal, if not inability, to give herself to Yeats in any other than a spiritual union, Yeats's treatment in The

Land of the Heart's Desire may simply be the echo of his own frustrated love for Maud.

Yeats In some ways enjoyed a rather distorted view of Maud, and the view bleeds into the characters that he was to fashion after her.

She was totally feminine to him, even while she was engaged in activi­ ties that he regarded as masculine. In reality she was a spirited individual who sought only freedom and independence; to Yeats, who was afraid of her independence, it seemed more comfortable to see himself as her wise protector: "She is my innocence and I her wisdom . . .

She is my child more than my sweetheart . . . She would be cruel if she were not a child."23 These are the feelings he set down in his diary.

22webster, p. 44

23Ellmann, p. 189. 42

John Rees Moore has commented that even in so slight a play as The

Land of the Heart's Desire, Yeats's characteristic irony is in evidence:

Everyone except Mary is charmed by the faery child; Mary knows all too well that 'unholy powers are dancing in thehouse.' The faery child has come for Mary. No one can save Mary except Mary herself . . . In the debate for Mary's heart, the call of eternal youth is too strong.24

Mary's burled impulses cannot resist the temptation; in her death, she is the victim of her own guilty feelings, as much as she is the victim of the fairy child.

Although the playwright does not give the other characters an oppor­ tunity at the end of the play to express any feeling whatsoever, he some­ how has managed to leave the impression, although not very strong, that he is at once on the side of the fairies, but that there is something vaguely evil about this feeling. As Moore asks: "Are we to regard her passing as a triumph for 'life' or a tragic death?"*2 ^

Just as in The Island of Statues, Yeats has really again not created a hero equal to his heroine. Shawn is little more than an awkward boy, unable to contain or control his woman; the childish Mary is the one, who for good or evil, makes the crucial decision toward action.

Maud Gonne had little patience with Yeats after his writing of The

Land of the Heart's Desire. She claimed it was "insulting to her religion," and resigned from the Abbey Theatre after calling Synge's "The Shadow of the Glen" a "further insult to Irish Womanhood."23 in 1903 Maud Gonne

24John Rees Moore, Masks of Love and Death, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1971, p. 66.

23Mdore, p. 67.

23webster, p. 124. 43

married Major John MacBride; the lady whom Yeats had wished to see as the

unapproachable goddess had married a soldier. Yeats had been unable to

mold her into the kind of woman he wanted her to be; she was to retain her

own strong self-image, an image substantially different from Yeats's image

of her.

Yeats began to realize that he, like his heroes, was quite unequal

to his heroine. Ellmann characterizes Yeats's feelings as a series of

"writhings and twistings,” in seeing her marriage as an ’’indictment," to

be accompanied by guilt.His heroes, then, become, pictures of poets

against the world; the women take on the qualities of being not quite

human, here an echo of Mary Bruin, who is associated somehow with evil

by her embracement of the fairy world.

Two plays completed in 1903 evidence a certain bitterness, and at

the same time a sort of one-sided view of womanhood. Both On Baile’s

Strand and The King's Threshold show a subtle progression of the concept

of Yeats’s woman as child. Where Naschina and Mary Bruin are in the

literal sense children by virtue of their age, they both possess a sense

of independent spirit and a kind of uncontrollable wildness. In a way,

both are passive, but Yeats forces them to be active because the hero is more passive and pliable than they are.

In view of Yeats’s progress On Baile's Strand is especially inter­

esting in two respects: 1) there are no women in the play, except for

the half-human singers (this device is employed later with a shattering

effect, in Purgatory, which will be discussed below; 2) the major action

^^Ellmann, pp. 165-166 44

of the play deals with the need for a woman; the critical point here is

the concept of the function of woman solely as the bearer of children.

In a sense what Yeats was now attempting to do was to reduce character

to pure archetypal Images. His women still have a clearly defined role,

and they are still to be viewed as appendages to his men.

On Baile's Strand was first staged in 1904 as the opening performance

of the Abbey Theatre. It is a dramatic arrangement of the Cuchulain legend

that tells the story of the duel between Finmol and his unrecognized

father, Cuchulain, in which the father unwittingly kills his own son.

Based on Lady Gregory’s paraphrased telling of the legend, “The Only

Son of Aoife" in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Moore points out that the

theme has

... a peculiar ambiguity we have not encountered before. There is no woman in the play to embody the hero’s ideal love, though Aoife’s ghostly pre­ sence may be said to haunt the charged atmosphere . . . by a kind of remote control.2°

Peter Ure observes:

The trappings of Cuchulain in On Baile's Strand, the witches, warriors, hunt, and camp, and the allusions with which the speakers amplify passion and argument, are remotely clear and strange be­ cause they derive from a single vision of a past world.79

The background against which Yeats chooses to show Cuchulain is truly

a natural and pastoral setting. Moore comments that in nature "men are free of woman’s wiles and curses--- and can pit themselves against

28Moore, p. 106.

29peter Ure, Yeats the Playwright, Barnes and Nobel, Inc., New York, 1963, p. 63. 45

adventure in trusting and joyful intimacy."80

In this play Cuchulain is torn between the conservative female of

"threshold and hearthstone: and the wild female whom "none can kiss and

thrive." In the latter is the foreshadowing of the destructive female

that is so prevalent in Yeats’s later Queen plays. In the debate between

the king, Conchubar, and the hero, Cuchulain shows that he could never

accept the family life nor take a mere housewife as a bride. In this

denial he must accept the consequences that his kind of love entails,

as Conchubar so aptly states:

The holder of the fire Shall purify the thresholds of the house With waving fire, and shut the outer door, According to the custom; and sing rhyme. This has come down from the old law-makers To blow the witches out. Considering That the wild will of man could be oath-bound, But that of woman’s could not, they bid us sing Against the will of woman at its wildest In the Shape-Changers that run upon the wind.

The Women singers in reply ask:

Therefore in this ancient cup May the swordblades drink their fill Of the home-brew there, until They will have masters none But the threshold and the hearthstone.

Cuchulain speaks while they are singing that he "will be what you please, my chicks, my nestlings," but that a "free gift" of love is "better than a forced." He chastises Conchubar for his "wives and children," because they keep him from being able to follow one that lives, as a poet, freely,

"like a bird’s flight from tree to tree."

When Conchubar calls Aoife, Cuchulain’s lover of old a "fierce

8°Moore, p. 107. 46 woman of the camp," Cuchulain becomes furious:

You call her a ’fierce woman of the camp,’ For, having lived among the spinning-wheels, You’d have no woman near that would not say, 'Ah! how wise!’ ’What will you have for supper?’ ’What shall I wear that I may please you, sir?' And keep that humming through the day and night For ever.

As John Rees Moore points out:

They will never agree on the definition or func­ tion or limits of love . . . Xt is vividly clear what kind of woman Cuchulain does not like --- one « that would constantly remind him by her flaterry and self-conscious eagerness to please of her utter dependence on him, and therefore his utter obliga­ tion to be faithful, protective, and a good provider.

The striking irony here is that when Cuchulain describes and remembers

Aoife, he does so by means of conjuring up images of her passion as a lover, and her ability to be thoughtful; and his final comment emphasizes her ability to be a mother:

None other had all beauty, queen or lover, Or was so fitted to give birth to kings.

In The King's Threshold, written during the same period as On Bailed

Strand, Yeats again constructed a self-sufficient hero who violently de­ nies his sweetheart. More than one critic has written these two plays off as little more than a way of getting back at Maud for marrying MacBride.

Certainly this must have some bearing on the almost vicious way in which

Seanchan, the hero of The King’s Threshold, comes to treat his wife.

Yeats acknowledged his indebtedness to Edwin Ellis for the basic story.

Peter Ure calls Ellis’s work that "obscure and rubbishy verse-play Sancan

®^Moore, p. 113. 47

the Bard,"82 and notes that it ends with the mysterious love which Sancan

and the Girl discover for each other, each actualizing the other’s ideal.

Brenda Webster says that in Yeats’s version

there is no quest for a perfect woman because Seanchan himself possesses her attributes. This is why Yeats, although adopting other elements of Edwin Ellis’s verse drama Sancan the Bard, re­ jects the ending . . .83

She argues with Ure, who states that Yeats had simply temporarily ex­ hausted this theme by insisting that Yeats was at the critical moment of rejecting it.

Yeats’s Seanchan is a poet who has childishly gone on a hunger strike in protest of the efforts of the king to restrict the rights of poets; the hunger strike "precipitates a conflict dormant before but always ready to burst into flame when the unstable balance between ’rational’ power and

’irrational’ principle is upset."84 The episode between Seanchan and Eedelm, his lover, breaks into the bitterest of quarrels, and the biting Yeatsian view of women as child is once more in evidence.

Although their love scene is short, Fedelm shows an innocent and adoring generosity as she catches him, weakened by hunger, at his lowest point. She offers him the chance to go back to an uncomplicated pastoral world of simple emotions. Fedelm would minister to his needs by having him accept an earthly paradise as a substitute for "Adam's paradise." The fierceness of his earlier speeches to those who beg him to eat is a very real prediction of

82ure, p. 31.

83webster, p. 66.

84Moore, p. 101. 48

her failure to sway him:

Fedelm: Eat this little crust, Seanchan, if you have any love for me.

Seanchan: I must not eat it -- but that’s beyond your wit. Child! child! I must not eat it, though I die.

Fedelm: (passionately) You do not know what love is; for if you loved, You would put every other thought away. But you have never loved me.

In the above passage there is an echo of Cuchulain of On Baile's

Strand, as Seanchan chafes rather cruelly at his "utter obligation" to be faithful, protector and provider. Violently, Seanchan seizes Fedelm by the wrists:

Seanchan: You, a child, Who have but seen a man out of the window, Tell me that I know nothing about love, And that I do not love you? Did I not say There was a frenzy in the light of the stars All through the livelong night, and that the night Was full of marriages? But that fight’s over And all that’s done with, and I have to die.

Fedelm: (throwing her arms about him) I will not be put from you, although I think I had not grudged it you if some great lady, If the King's daughter, had set out your bed, I will not give you up to death; no, no! And are not these white arms and this soft neck Better than the brown earth?

It is at this point that Seanchan turns against Fedelm and the childish, though unconscious, greediness of her love:

Seanchan: Begone from me! There’s treachery in those arms and in that voice. They’re all against me. Why do you linger there? How long must I endure the sight of you?

He deals with her as if she were little more than a spoiled child who has embarrassed him: 49

Go where you will, So it be out of sight and out of mind. I cast you from me like an old torn cap, A broken shoe, a glove without a finger, A crooked penny; whatever is most worthless.

Then realizing what he has done, as Fedelm begs him not to drive her

away from him, he relents --- as one would relent with a child he loved,

and to whom he had just said something that the child was not capable of

understanding because the emotions involved were too difficult for her

to follow:

Seanchan: (takes her in his arms) What did I say, My dove of the woods? I was about to curse you. It was a frenzy. I’ll unsay it all. But you must go away.

Fedelm: ' Let me be near you. I will obey like any married wife. Let me but lie before your feet.

Seanchan: Come nearer, (kisses her) If I had eaten when you bid me, sweetheart, The kiss of multitudes in times to come Had been the poorer.

In The King’s Threshold, just as in The Land of the Heart's Desire,

the young wife is treated as a child; this time, however, she is cruelly

cast off instead of running off, by a hero who is finally becoming capable of action on his own. In the versions of 1904 and 1906, the poet dies, but returns to life and love; Webster contends that "if the play was to negate Maud’s rejection of him, it should be a triumphant play;" and says his enumeration of woman’s deformities "reflects not only devaluation of a longed-for object but also fear of losing his Identity in the beloved woman's."®5 By 1922, the revised version of the play shows Seanchan just

85 Webster, p. 70. 50

dying; this ending is certainly more consistent with what happens in the

play, and improbably made possible because victory over Maud was no longer

the main reason for his play’s resolution. The heroine, if Fedelm may

even be called that, is still the whimpering child willing to but lie

before his feet; a woman who lacks credibility to her mate, and therefore

lacks strength in her own self-image.

In a number of other plays Yeats has assigned women minor roles,

that, in a sense banish them as Fedelm is banished with Seanchan’s com­

ment ’’out of sight and out of mind." Delia in Cathleen ni Houlihan is

the young girl that Michael had planned to marry before the Old Woman

"with the walk of a queen" came calling and stole him away to fight for

her "four green fields," symbolically, Ireland. Yeats gives the impres­

sion that Delia brings little to her marriage but her dowry, and there

is a strong sense of her being practically "sold" into the marriage, as

Peter, Michael’s father, recounts for his wife and his son how he "made the bargain well:"

Old John Cahel would sooner have kept a share of this a while longer. ’Let me keep the half of it till the first boy is born,' says he. ’You.will not,’ says I. ’Whether there is or is not a. boy, the whole hundred pounds must be in Michael's hands before he brings your daughter to the house.’ The wife spoke to him then, and he gave in at the end.

Michael’s father asks him if Delia has asked for any of the money for her own use, and Michael replies:

She did not, indeed. She did not seem to take much notice of it, or to look at it at all.

Bridget answers that Delia must be proud to get a strong young man like

Michael: "Why would she look at it when she had yourself to look at." 51

Michael’s reason for marrying Delia is shortly, but clearly expressed as

he says:

Well, you would like a nice comely girl to be beside you, and to go walking with you. The fortune only lasts for a while, but the woman will always be there.

Nor is his reason enough to hold Michael to Delia when he is faced with a choice. Delia becomes little more than a pathetic, rejected in­ nocent as she cries: ’’Why do you look at me like a stranger?” to Michael.

And then, like Fedelm, who would not release her lover to death, Delia puts her arms around Michael, insisting to the others that he "won’t be going to join the French," and wildly begs him not to leave "and we going to be married tomorrow." Like Seanchan, Michael almost yields, but hears Old Woman Ireland calling him and breaks away from her.

In the discussion of Delia’s dowry, there is the same view of woman’s existence being vindicated by the production of a child (and a boy child, at that) as there is in The Land of the Heart’s Desire; in this play it is coupled with the impression that a "nice comely girl" simply adorns a "fine, strong young man."

The early drafts of The Countess Cathleen show the p(oet Kevin, who in later revisions of the play becomes Aleel, as the protective male poet.

The twist here is that the Countess leaves her dreams for the reality of life and tries to sell her own soul to buy the souls of her starving peas­ ants. Yeats drafted it first in prose in 1889, and finished the first version in verse in 1891. A. Norman Jeffares feels that Yeats’s personal feelings are very strongly contained in the play:

. . . the poet Kevin vainly attempts to sell his own sould to prevent the Countess from selling hers. He believes that she should leave the ultimate salvation 52

of the peasants to the builder of the heavens, that her concern should be with marriage and children.86

The text was revised extensively in 1895, 1901, 1912 and Yeats made nu­

merous minor revisions at other times. Cathleen eventually became equated

with Yeats’s concept of the ideal mother, with little need of a protector.

The Green Helmet, which Yeats wrote in 1910 and subtitled "an heroic

farce," was actually a re-write of The Golden Helmet, and is yet another

part of the Cuchulain legend. In this play, Cuchulain become the champion

as Peter Ure relates, "not as 'the strongest' (the claim that was led to

irresolvable strife amongst the warriors) but as the one who is ’without

fear'."87 He is a gay hero and fits well upon the "gay, animated stage not too far from the mood of the world,"®® which Yeats wanted in this play.

The characters include Laegaire (pronounced Leary) and his wife (who remains nameless), Conall and his wife (who likewise has no name) and

Cuchulain and his wife, Emer. As the play opens, Laegaire and Conall are grumbling about the effect Emer has had since her arrival. Laegaire speaks of Cuchulain:

I would he’d come for all that, and make his young wife know That though she may be his wife, she has no right to go Before your wife and my wife, as she would have done last night Had they not caught at her dress, and pulled her as was right;

8®A. Norman Jeffares, ed., Eleven Plays of William Butler Yeats, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1964, pp. 2-3.

8?Ure, p. 69.

88Letters, p. 674. 53

And makes light of us though our wives do all they can. She spreads her tail like a peacock and praises none but her man.

Cuchulain arrives and an argument of sorts ensues among the three men

after the appearance of the Red Man, a spirit who comes to leave a green

helmet (symbolic of Ireland) for the bravest. As Cuchulain fills the hel­

met with ale and insists that they must drink to sharing the prize, a

terrible uproar begins outside. In a grotesquely comic display, their

wives are arguing over which of the three heroes is the greatest:

Laegaireb Wife: Mine is better to look at. Conail's Wife: But mine is better born. Emer: My man is the pithier man.

In an early, and possibly more dramatically effective version, the

wives get into a knock-down-drag-out over who shall enter the house first:

Laegaire's Wife: My man is the best. I will go in first. I will go in the first. Emer: My man is the best and I will go in first. Conail's Wife: No, for my man is the best, and it is I that should go first.

The stage directions in the prosy The Golden Helmet indicate that Laegaire’s

Wife and Conail’s Wife struggle in the doorway, and that Laegaire's wife

starts to sing:

My man is the best What other has fought The cat-headed men That mew in the sea And carried away Their long-hidden gold? They struck with their claws And bit with their teeth, But Leagerie my husband Put all to the sword.

At this point Yeats’s stage directions indicate that Conall’s wife steps

in front of her and puts her hand over the other’s mouth; singing a song 54

of her own, her action is vaguely reminiscent of the vaudeville stage:

My husband has fought With strong men in armour. Had he a quarrel With cats, it is certain He’d war with none But the stout and the heavy With good claws on them. What glory in warring With hollow shadows That helplessly mew?

Not to be outdone in this childish game of one-upmanship, Emer

thrusts herself between them, and forcing both of them back with her

hands proclaims: * * I am Emer, wife of Cuchulain, and no one shall go in front of me, or sing; in front of me, or praise any that I have not a mind to hear praised.

She is the very picture of a willful child, stamping her feet and putting

her fingers in her ears! Trying to keep the peace among these children,

Cuchulain orders that three holes be cut in the walls, so that the three

rival wives may come in simultaneously.

They present a truly comic, if deprecating, view of womanhood, as

Cnrian *g wife pulls Emer around shouting: "My nails in your neck!" and

kneels down in the door to keep the others out. It conjures up the image

of a children’s well-known chant, "My Dad’s bigger than your Dad;" or, perhaps more in keeping with the comic spirit of the play, the child in a recent television commercial who sings, "My dog’s better than your dog!"

The important factor is that the game becomes cruel, as children’s games sometimes do, as Emer demands to know "Who is for Cuchulain?"

Stage directions indicate that she sings the same song as before, flour­

ishing her dagger about.* While she is singing, Conail’s Wife and 55

Laegaire’s Wife draw their daggers and run at her, but Cuchulain forces

them back. Laegaire and Conall draw their swords to strike Cuchulain.

The wives then call for the servants and the stable boys to blow the horns

and drown out Emer’s song. In the midst of the confusion, three black

hands come through the windows and plunge into the room into pitch darkness

by putting out the torches.

It is the Red Man come back to collect his debt:

Let some man kneel down here That I may cut his head off, or all shall go to wrack.

A much-sobered Emer begins to keen, and Cuchulain comforts her,

calling her "little wife, little wife," and telling her that "My fame

shall spring up and laugh, and set you high above all." Here again the

familiar pattern of woman finding her identity in the fame of her man

is seen. This time, however, Emer flatly states that it is "you, not

your fame that I love." When Cuchulain refuses her attempt to embrace

him, he also suggests that because she is young, she can have the at­

tentions of another man. Still Emer clings to him, and finally he "throws

her away from him" with the vital question:

Would you stay the great barnacle-goose When its eyes are turned to the sea and its beak to the salt of the air?

It is then that Emer offers the supreme gesture; she lifts the dag­

ger to stab herself in an attempt both to keep Cuchulain alive, and/or accompany him into death. Yeats however cannot allow her to think of herself in the same class as the male hero, for Cuchulain seizes the dag­ ger, and smites her nervy image of herself with two stark and brutal

lines: 56

Do you dare, do you dare, do you dare? Bear children and sweep the house.

Apparently the Child/Woman Emer is not yet to be allowed the heroic ges­

ture; she is still to be banished where all bickering children must go,

seeking her identity in her protector/husband’s accomplishments.

There is definitely a question of hero’s ability to reconcile his

identity; it is very clearly implied in this rendering of The Green Helmet

As Brenda Webster so aptly points out, "If the woman is seen as weak, he

fears that he will destroy her; If strong, that she will destroy him."89

Yeats’s comic handling of the rather serious problem encountered by

the Green Helmet husbands was notably in keeping with the growing number

of anti-feminist tracts which were beginning to flood the nineteenth

century and turn-of-the-century bookstores.

Yeats’s treatment of Emer in The Green Helmet is in some ways little more than a dramatization of the principles set forth in James McGrigor

Allan’s book, Woman Suffrage Wrong in Principle and Practice, which was published in London in 1890. Allan allows that the woman who tries to imitate a man becomes

a monster more horrible than that created by Franken­ stein. Is it possible to conceive a more contemptible and deplorable spectacle than that of the female (I will not profane the beautiful name of woman [we are still in the nineteenth century!]) who . . . deliber­ ately negleets and abdicates the sacred duties of wife and mother to make herself ridiculous by meddling in and muddling man’s work?90

Allan hauled out the old Biblical arguments for the subjection of women,

89webster, p. 49.

90Quoted in Rogers, p. 220. 57

and added his own "scientific" argument that woman is mentally inferior

because her brain is smaller than man’s and the shape of her head closer

to the shape of an infantfe.

That Yeats chose a comic approach in this play is interesting in

that the comic treatment echoes the devices of a popular turn-of-the-

century humorist, T. W. H. Crosland, who published a number of barbs against the New Woman of the Suffrage Movement. Katharine Rogers notes that nineteenth century propriety generally prevented open expressions of contempt toward women, and is of the opinion that the contempt is really the outward vestige of fear and hostility. The comic device is, of course, a clear but muted means of showing woman's mental limitations and subsequent dependence on man. Rogers states:

I believe that some hostility lay beneath the syrupy patronage the Victorians lavished on women: patronage presupposes belittlement and that implies contempt, which is an expression of hostility. It is mainly a matter of emphasis whether the weaknesses ascribed to woman make her all the more endearing or merely consign her to hopeless inferiority to man, whether she is considered a lovable child who must be kept in the home for her own good or a not-so-lovable child who must be forcibly kept where she will do a minimum of harm. 91

Yeats’s quest for the perfect woman is marked by the changes in his own self-concept. The young Yeats sought life on an island in an attempt to master his desire for woman. With the introduction of the hero,

Cuchulain, after his frustrated encounter with love and Maud Gonne, the hero becomes stronger and has the added import of history. Most critics agree that Yeats used Cuchulain as a mask. In A Vision, Yeats describes

9lRogers, pp. 224-225. 58

the hero primarily in a psychological context, giving Nietzsche as an

example. The hero, Yeats says, is

the man who overcomes himself, and so no longer needs . . . the submission of other . . . The sanity of the being is no longer from its rela­ tion to facts, but from its approximation to its own unity.92

The beloved woman therefore becomes unable to frustrate the poet whose chief object is the creation of his mask, or his personality.

Yeats implies that only men know the phase of self-sufficiency, and that "the climax of woman’s development is not self-sufficiency, but beauty;"93 as Yeats puts it, "her masterpiece shall be at the full moon."94 According to A Vision, personality and the true self can be attained only through mask and image, and woman's chief role is to cultivate herself as a beautiful object for the poet to appropriate as his image. In his earlier book, Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1917),

Yeats had stated:

All happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self.95

Yeats’s concept of the Mask, or the apti-self, was first fully dramatized in The Player Queen, the early drafts of which were begun in 1907. Yeats’s vacillation on the subject of woman’s role Is clearly in evidence in an early unpublished manuscript which Richard Ellmann

92william Butler Yeats, A Vision, Collier Books, New York, 1969, p. 127.

93webster, p. 177.

94yeats, A Vision, p. 132.

95william Butler Yeats, Mythologies, Macmillan, New York, 1959, p. 334. 59

includes in his critical biography, and which is included here. Ellmann

feels that the discussion between Peter and Yellow Martin, is essentially

a dialogue between Yeats’s philosophy of woman in the nineteenth and Yeats

in the twentieth century:

Peter: She cannot be found anywhere. Yellow Martin: Not found! Not found! Oh, my God! What has hap­ pened to her! She has hidden herself, drowned her­ self maybe. Peter: She will come back when she is hungry. Yellow Martin: You don’t know what she is capable of. She is capable of killing herself, that she might look up through the roots of the grass and see my misery. Peter: (sings) ’Woman’s delight is the death of her best-beloved, Who dies in tears and in sighs.' [William Blake] Yellow Martin: Here I am all out of my mind, and you sing your verses at me. Is there nothing in life that you do not take as a game? Peter: Because I.take all things lightly, I am the master of all (stands up, puts arm on poet's shoulder affectionately). If you would only listen to me. Here am I, with all my trifling, with an empty head, and I have won, and tired of, half a dozen women, while you were losing one. Love is an art --- a science, if you will. You treat it as if it were the inspiration of heaven. Why do you not give way to her a little, pretending to think her right when you know she is wrong? Yellow Martin: But she wants to play a part she can't play, and that nobody wants if she could play it. Such a wild part. I must not let her hurt herself. Love is a part of wisdom. I have to bring her mine, my wisdom. How else can we be the two halves to make one perfect whole? Peter: No, no. Love is not a part of wisdom, but of gaiety and folly. My dear Martin, it is we light lovers who under­ stand love. We make of ourselves what a woman wishes. Yellow Martin: But I wish to be all the perfection I can imagine, and would be no less myself. Peter: Seem a little, play a little. If you are jealous try to seem trustful and happy. If you are full of gloom because she was cross with you seem lighter than a swallow. If you think her foolish, pretend that she is wisdom itself. Yellow Martin: But I love, and she would not think me worthy of her love if I did not show myself strong enough to be her master. 60

Peter: But only we who love lightly, keeping always our gaiety, are masters. Love masters you, and so you are despised. Yellow Martin: But I love her, What else can I do?96

The Player Queen was written to give flesh to Yeats’s ideas re­

garding the mask, and his note on the play explains a good deal of its

origin and theme:

I began in, I think, 1907, a verse tragedy, but at that time the thought I have set forth in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae was coming into my head, and I found examples of it everywhere. I wasted the best work­ ing months of several years in an attempt to write a poetical play where every character became an ex­ ample of the finding or not finding of what I have called the Antithetical Self; and because passion and not thought makes tragedy, what I made had neither simplicity nor life. At last it came into my head all of a sudden that I could get rid of the play if I turned it into a farce.97

Peter Ure calls The Player Queen Yeats's "nearest approach to a neo­

classical comedy of sexual intrigue."9®

By altering the temper and tone of his images Yeats wanted to

escape from the allegories of his previous work, by "mocking in a

comedy my own thought."99 Whether or not he was really able to

achieve this has been a matter of constant critical argument. Yeats's

idea that "character is continuously present in comedy alone,and that tragic art is distinguished by the exclusion of character, makes

"Ellmann, p. 168.

92yariorum Plays, p. 761.

98ure, p. 135.

"Mythologies, p. 334.

l°°Essays and Introductions, p. 240. 61

tragi-comedy simply a contradiction in terms for Yeats. Ure insists, however, that :

Character, in the sense of the discrimination and definition of individuality, is no more absent from The Player Queen than it was absent from Deirdre. In this respect, The Player Queen fits Yeats’s de­ finition of farce no better than Deirdre fitted his definition of tragedy.101

John Rees Moore maintains that the fable in this play emerges from mythology, even though the plot does not seem to be based on any well- known legend. He cites Yeats's fondness of

stories where a kingdom is at stake, where love comes into mortal conflict with commitment to a higher conception of the self, where royalty as­ serts its perogatives at the expense of its own greatness, where a king and a poet battle for their rights, where marriage is rejected for something closer to the heart’s desire.102

Certainly these familiar themes are all present in The Player Queen, which was first performed in 1919 after an uncountable number of revisions.

The play is really comprised of two different stories which are carefully interwoven. The first story is centered on the drunken poet, Septimus, and the other is centered on his’ wife, Decima, the Player Queen. They are members of a troupe of players who come to the castle of the Real Queen to perform a play called The Tragical History of Noah’s Deluge. In terms of the concept of Yeats's woman as child, the important relationship here is the contrast he creates between the Real Queen and the Player Queen.

The citizens of the kingdom are rioting against the Real Queen; the crowd insists that since she has not been out of her castle during the

lOlure, p. 136.

l^^Moorè, p. 170. 62

seven years of her reign, she must be an evil witch. Lying in a ditch in

a drunken state, Septimus overhears the mob threaten to kill the Real

Queen, because she supposedly joins herself each night with a Unicorn,

a monstrous beast which to them is the symbol of unholy, pagan power.

His wife Decima has run away in order to avoid playing the degraded part

of Noah’s wife in the play, and has locked Septimus out. The first act

ends as Septimus takes up with a beggar who goes into a trance and brays

like an ass when the crown is about to change hands; Septimus decides that

the beggar is as inspired as he is , and defends the Unicorn to the crowd before going off with the beggar. Thus, the poet has aligned himself with the prophet.

The second act opens with the Prime Minister, who is extremely Ir­ ritated and impatient because the leading lady cannot be found. The reason why she ran away is embodied in his opening remarks:

I will not be trifled with. I chose the play myself; I chose ’The Tragical History of Noah’s Deluge’ be­ cause when Noah beats his wife to make her go into the Ark, everybody understands, everybody is pleased, everybody recognises the mulish obstinacy of their own wives, sweethearts, sisters.

By this 1922 printing of the play, the characters of Peter and Yellow

Martin in the unpublished manuscript have been embodied in the char­ acters of the Stage Manager, Prime Minister and Nona, another actress in the troupe. As the Prime Minister raves on about the "brazen, bragging baggage" who has run away, the Real Queen makes her first appearance.

The telling remark with which the Prime Minister concludes his ranting --- "0, Adam! why did you fall asleep in the garden? You might have known, while you were lying there helpless, the Old Man in the Sky 63

would play some prank upon you." -— is followed by the stage direction:

The Queen, who is young, with an ascetic timid face, enters in a badly

fitting state dress.

The Real Queen says that she will accede to the wishes of the Prime

Minister and show herself to the angry people; "I am almost cettain that

I am ready for martyrdom", she says, because "I have prayed all night."

Brenda Webster notes that in the first drafts:

The Real Queen is simply an austere and repressive Catholic. In succeeding drafts, she becomes fix­ ated on martyrdom, longing to follow the example of her patron saint . . . These traits of the Real Queen would seem to derive from the prudery and asceticism Maud demonstrated in decrying Yeats’s Land of the Heart * s Desire.

The crowd in The Player Queen wants to kill the Real Queen for what

it imagines to be sexual excesses. The irony of this lies in the fact

that she is most afraid of the dark passions attributed to her; so afraid that she agrees to let the Player Queen have the throne, so that she may flee to a convent. The Player Queen thus assumes the mask and triumphs over her birth in a ditch. The Real Queen, on the other hand, flees the mask, and retains little of her self. The outcome is vividly expressed by Vivian Mercier:

One could not miss the dramatic contrast between the ’real queen’, who had nothing queenly about her, not even the courage for martyrdom, and the player queen who, though born in a ditch, was a queen to the tip of her greedy tongue. Art tri­ umphed over nature: the point was not the conflict between appearance and reality but that in order to be a real queen one must also act the part; the mask, worn long enough, becomes the face itself. u

10®Webster, p. 124.

l°4Vivian Mercier, "In Defense of Yeats as a Dramatist," Modern Drama, September, 1965, p. 163. 64

The Real Queen, in her discussion with the Prime Minister will not

give up her shapeless dress, saying "I do not deserve new clothes, I am always committing sin.” She also wants to go barefoot before the crowd, and is not adverse to bruising and bloodying her feet, possibly as a sort of penance. She envies her Patron, the Holy Saint Octema, who was thrown by a Unicorn and trampled by the mob. The symbols of martyrdom are quite clear, but in her fear of sexual expression, the Real Queen cannot bring herself to become a martyr, as the episode between the Real Queen and

Decima demonstrates. As Decima tries to stab herself, she is stopped by the Real Queen, and they decide to exchange roles to their mutual benefit.

During the following speech, the Real Queen disrobes, revealing a nun­ like dress, and helps dress Decima in the robes of state, as the Real

Queen speaks:

Was it love? 0, that is a great sin. I have never known love. Of all things, that is what I have had most to fear of. Saint Octema shut her­ self up in a tower on a mountain because she was loved by a beautiful prince. I was afraid it would come in at the eye and seize upon me in a moment. I am not naturally good, and they say people will do anything for love, there is so much sweetness in It. But you will go up to God as a pure virgin. Good-bye, I know how I can slip away. There is a convent that will take me in. It is not a tower, only a convent, but I have long wanted to go there to lose my name and disappear.

The Real Queen, then, is little more than a child seeking to escape the demands of mature sexuality. In addition, she is also seeking to escape the mask, which would allow her to become the self-reliant and indeed self-actualizing person that Decima is able to become. The dreamy language of the Real Queen stands in stark contrast to the earthy and explicit language of the Player Queen. Decima’s use of her sexuality as 65

a weapon will be more fully discussed in Chapter IV, but it should be

noted that by changing places with the Real Queen, Decima is able to

rid herself of the despised role of Noah’s wife. By doing so she is

able, as the Real Queen is not, to become an archetypal figure engaged

in a ritual action which results in the symbolic death of the poet-hero.

Yeats’s use of the play about Noah’s Ark is especially important to

the discussion of woman as child in its broader concepts. During the

Middle Ages, plays like The Tragical History of Noah's Deluge were the mainstay of an anti-feminist repertoire. In this play the shrewish wife was beaten with a big stick, and the beating took the form of providing

the comic relief from the Flood. Yeats uses it here because the ordinary people want plays about ordinary life; his implication that in ordinary life woman is merely a troublesome helpmate is quite clear. Ordinary life, then, comes to suggest a life in which woman is accorded neither her own purpose, nor her own identity, and in which man is still the protector of a lovable (and sometimes not so lovable) child to be kept under control for her own good.

The Real Queen bears a strong resemblance to Mary Bruin in The Land of the Heart's Desire in her wish to escape, in the constriction of her religious beliefs, and in her ultimate act of fleeing. She is also like

Mary in her representation (at least in the minds of the mob) as a witch who cannot conform to the role she is supposed to play. Yeats has, how­ ever, this time allowed Decima the heroic gesture; as the Player Queen becomes more and more her own person, her own self, the Real Queen slides farther and farther into anonymity, a child dependent on illusion and fantasy

The playwright has at last admitted to the possibility that woman, 66 as well as man, has the capacity to become self-actualized. The Player

Queen’s triumphant acceptance as the new real Queen of the mob is evidence that Yeats’s attitudes regarding the conflict between the conservative female and the wild female of On Baile's Strand are maturing; in The Player

Queen he gives the strong impression that he is repudiating the passive, pliable, woman-as-child. 67

CHAPTER XII

WOMAN AS MOTHER

As a child in Sligo, William Butler Yeats spent a good deal of time

with his stern, but eccentric relatives; he was later to say that he re­

membered "little of childhood but Its pain."^5 in his Autobiographies,

Yeats draws a poignant, but rather said*picture of his parents. Yeats

credits his mother with his eternal love of Ireland --- Sligo in

particular --- and his hatred of London:

I longed for a sod of earth from some field I knew, something of Sligo to hold in my hand. It was some old race instinct, like that of a savage, for we had been brought up to laugh at all display of emotion . . . Yet it was our mother who kept that love alive. She would spend hours listening to stories or telling stories of the pilots and fishing people of Rosses Point, or of her own Sligo girlhood, and it was al­ ways assumed between her and us that Sligo was more beautiful than other places. I can see now that she had great depth of feeling, that she was her father's daughter. My memory of what she was like in those days has grown very dim, but I think her sense of personality, her desire for any life of her own, had disappeared in her care for us ... I always see her sewing or knitting in spectacles and wearing some plain dress. 1"

In contrast, Yeats characterizes his father as the man who "ter­ rified me by descriptions of my moral degradation and . . . humiliated me by my likeness to disagreeable people."107 Yeats's problems with

1°3Autobiographies, p. 5

1°3Autobiographies, p. 19.

107Autobiographies, p. 19. 68

his feelings of over-dependence on his father have already been mentioned

in the preceding chapter. Further, Murphy and Webster both make the point

that Yeats felt abandoned by his own mother because of her ill health,

and the fact that she apparently was afflicted by the "strain of depres­

sive melancholia."^08 It must be noted, however, that he must have felt some sense of his mother as a woman who had sacrificed at least part of her personality for the sake of her children in order for him to have remembered her as he did in later life.

Idealization of woman as mother is particularly strong among the

Irish, as O'Connor, Lucey, Connery and countless others make clear in their discussions of the Irish society as a matriarchy. Katharine

Rogers is quick to point out that excessive idealization of the mother was a hallmark of the Victorian era. ^9

The striking irony that becomes readily apparent in the life of

Yeats is that he was raised in a matriarchal Irish society, in a house­ hold which was unusual in its patriarchal domination. This is coupled with the fact that he longed for a mother figure to the extent that his early female literary models had the possibility of becoming his ideal mother. More than one critic has intimated that in his later encounters with the women in his life, what he was really seeking was not a lover but a mother. The Vanderhaar study shows quite clearly that indeed, Lady Gregory and his wife, Georgia, were able to enjoy long relationships with him precisely because in certain ways they were his

^^Murphy, pp. 34-35

lO^Rogers, p. 263. 69

pseudo-mothers.

In his first important play, The Countess Cathleen, Yeats endowed

his heroine with the same self-sacrificing quality that he attributed

to his own mother, however dim the memory. First published in 1892,

but staged in 1899, The Countess Cathleen, according to Alspach, is

the most difficult of the plays to collate intellibily because of Yeats’s

unceasing revisions which resulted in radically different versions for

the many printings.

Yeats called the play "tapestry-like’'^ and gave the plot quite

simply in "Dramatis Personae":

She sells her soul to certain demons for money that the people may not be compelled by starva­ tion to sell theirs. She dies. The demons had deceived themselves . . .112

The idea that Cathleen is the precursor of Yeats’s later mother figure

is borne out by Yeats’s notes to the play. He says that he found the

. legend, in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, under the belief

that it was indigenous Irish folklore. Later he was to find that Leo

• Lespes had given it as an Irish story, but had translated it from the

French. Yeats was, however, conversant with a similar tale in which a

mother went to hell for seven years to redeem the soul of her son, and

stayed another seven years to redeem other souls. As early as 1892

a note states that the play was founded on the latter Christian Donegal tale.

llQyariorum Plays, p. 1.

lllAutobiographies, p. 293.

ll^Autobiographies, p. 277. V

70

Yeats had definitely read Freud, though at exactly what period in

relation to the writing and revising of The Countess Cathleen is not

altogether clear. In any case, it was Freud who had graphically directed

attention to the importance of the mother figure as the prototype of all

later love relations; according to him, a mother’s unique and unparalleled

importance was in her capacity to serve as the first and strongest love-

object.

This comment is not meant to imply that any of Yeats's characters

were consciously patterned after Freud’s models. Instead, it is simply

meant to illustrate that William Butler Yeats was in touch with the

trend of intellectual thought of his day. And, that this fact, along

with his very personal feelings of rejection by his own mother, and his

pre-disposition (because of his Irish heritage) toward matriarchal rule,

"where mother-right, the ’female principle,* or fertility dominated social

and religious life,may have had some bearing on his theatrical treat­

ment of woman as mother.

Yeats dramatically illustrated that the Irish were selling their

souls to the English in The Countess Cathleen, and set up as an example

a woman who was not tempted by riches or the artist-hero, Aleel. He al­

lowed Cathleen to immortalize her soul by going beyond the duties of her

sovereignty at her own expense, and by demonstrating that "saintliness was a matter of selfless love and active courage more than of humility and asceticism. "H4

l-^Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Avon Books, New York,, 1971, p. 153.

H-Sioore, p. 61. ” 71

In her self-imposed isolation, she foreshadows the aristocratic

ideal which Yeats later treats in Purgatory. She becomes the protector

of a pack of hungry children, and in this way Yeats turns his poet-hero

into a hungry, raging and deprived child who simply focuses attention

on the self-confident mother intent on feeding her children. A curious

thing has happened to the hero, as Webster points out:

When Yeats introduced the character Aleel to repre­ sent himself as Maud’s lover in the revision of 1895, his feelings toward Cathleen as ideal mother undercut the intended dramatic contrast between Aleel's heroic attitude and Cathleen's escapist or self-destructive one . . .3-15

This affords to the reader the facet of Yeats's view of Maud, to whom he dedicated the play, as a kind of mother-figure who nurtures the poet; in this context it is the hero who wants to flee responsibility and seek protection.

The important factor in the view of Cathleen as the prototype of the ideal mother (and therefore, the ideal woman) lies In the fact that in order to be saved, the poet must suffer the death of the Mother

Cathleen as a kind of punishment. This punitive quality of mother-love is a theme that Yeats was to take up many times in the succeeding plays.

In On Baile's Strand, Aoife, unknown to Cuchulain, is left behind to bear him a son whom he later unwittingly kills. In this play the death of a child is used as Aoife’s revenge on Cuchulain; it is his punishment for taking Emer as his wife. This time the fierce mother sacrifices not herself, but her son, echoing something of the punitive, superwoman seen in Cathleen in a very different context, and showing once again Yeats's

115Webster, p. 38 72

concept that love is mixed with hatred.

Yeats’s treatment of woman as mother is seen in a startling ritual

context in his play A Full Moon in March. Dated in 1935, A Full Moon in

March is the revised version of his earlier play of the same year, The

King of the Great Clock Tower. It was for Yeats the most popular of his

ritualistic dance plays modelled after the Japanese Noh form of drama.

Whereas The King of the Great Clock Tower had been built around three

central characters, the King, the Queen, and Stroller; A Full Moon in March,

has been refined to focus only on two --- the Queen and the Swineherd.

Yeats included in both plays parts of his poem, "Parnell’s Funeral" (1932),

which includes his treatment of the mother-goddess and the slain god, the

well-known ritual of the year. A look at the second stanza of the poem

reveals Yeats’s thinking in his play:

Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through, A frenzied crowd, and where the branches sprang A beautiful seated boy; a sacred bow; A woman, and an arrow on a string; A pierced boy, image of a star laid low. That woman, the Great Mother imaging, Cut out his heart. Some master of design Stamped boy and tree upon Sicilian coin.

Wilson collected a long list of the myths related to the dying of

the year, and argued that Dionysus is central in Yeats's thought in these plays.Moore is of the opinion that "if we must have an archetype 118 . . . perhaps the-’family romance* of Freud will fit as well as any."

H^W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. by M. L. Rosenthal, Collier Books, New York, 1969, p. 152.

H?F. A. C. Wilson, W. B_. Yeats and Tradition, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1958, pp. 63-68.

H8jfoore, p. 276. 73

In speaking of Clock Tower, he says that :

In the timeless realm of fantasy the one true love --- of mother and son--- is consummated without the actual source of the desecration ever being revealed. Cer­ tainly in their stylized way the three characters of the play suggest stock atti­ tudes associated with father, mother, and son in the classic Oedipal situation. 3-19

Bloom comments that what triumphs in A Full Moon in March "is that

sadistic Female Will of Sphinx against which Blake fought all through

his life."I-20 That the Oedipal theme was close on Yeats’s mind is evi­

denced in his two translations of the story of Oedipus --- Oedipus Rex

in 1928 and Oedipus at Colonnus in 1934.

The main action of A Full Moon in March concerns the pursuit of

the Queen by the Swineherd. The Queen, like Cathleen, can be seen in

the context of a mother to her kingdom; but, her real theme is the death- union, particularly the union of mother to child. After a dialogue be­

tween Queen and Swineherd, which is a series of verbal misunderstandings,

she orders that his head be severed:

Queen: Pray, if your savagery has learnt to pray, For in a moment they will lead you out Then bring your severed head Swineherd: My severed head. (Laughs) There is a story in my country of a woman That stood all bathed in blood --- a drop of blood Entered her womb and there begat a child.

The Queen foretells her future in the following final exchange be­ tween them:

^9jdQOre> 276.

l20Harold Bloom, Yeats, Oxford University Press, New York, 1970, p. 341 74

Queen: A severed head! She took it in her hands; She stood all bathed in blood; the blood begat. 0 foul, foul, foul!

Swineherd: She sank in bridal sleep. •

Queen: Her body in that sleep conceived a child. Begone! I shall not see your face again.

The severed head is revealed by the Queen’s attendants and having dropped

her veil, she holds it above her own head and begins to sing:

Child and darling, hear my song, Never cry I did you wrong! Cry that wrong came not from me But my virgin cruelty. Great my love before you came, Greater when I loved in shame, Greatest when there broke from me Storm of virgin cruelty.

She lavishes the love she was unable to give previously on the severed

head, as the Head (by means of an attendant) sings a nursery rhyme. The

stage directions for the dance of the Queen quite clearly indicate that

the dance is to represent intercourse and orgasm:.

She takes the head up and dances with it to drum-taps which grow quicker and quicker.

As the drum-taps approach their climax, . . . her body shivers . . . the drum-taps cease. She sinks slowly down, holding the head to her breast.

The Queen is an aristocrat, like Cathleen, but this time her sacri­ fice of self ends in degradation and, as the Swineherd says, in bringing forth ’’her farrow in the dung." Webster’s comment is that "he makes her dirty" and she "decapitates him in retaliation." If the Swineherd can can be seen as the equivalent of the poet, then the Queen also becomes

IZljfebster, p. 141 75

his mothering Muse, and their issue the work of art. In any case, the

feeling of this play is bound up in the concept of the mother as the

vessel of the male seed; necessary, but in some ways incidental to the

act of creation. This would seem to suggest the view of sex as function,

rather than passion; a view which O’Connor and Connery hold to be typic­

ally, if not strictly, connected to the definition of Irishness. As

Joyce Carol Oates comments in her chapter on the tragic rites in A Full

Moon in March:

The demand for life is so strong that even death cannot destroy it; the ’drop of blood* is power­ ful enough to impregnate a woman. Yeats exaggerates the nightmarish power of sex at the same time that he rids the Swineherd of his body . . . the woman has brought about the man's castration, and it is a castration the man, for some reason, desired.122

Yeats has perpetrated yet another subtle shift in meaning in these

two plays. The idea of mother-love as pure and good and noble has taken

on the taint of something vaguely stifling to poet-son and evil to the

mother. Certainly, the idea of marriage being linked with death was not

a new idea to Yeats by the time this play was written in his later years,

but marriage to the mother figure presents an even more horrifying image,

which compliments the violence of the action.

Like the queen in A Full Moon in March, Attracta, the bride of the

Herne (or heron) in The Herne's Egg displays motherly qualities. This

grotesque farce, begun in 1935, as Bloom states,

carries on from A Full Moon in March, and its pre­ cursor, The King of the Great Clock Tower, but with

122jOyCe Carol Oates, The Edge of Impossibility, Cornell University Press, New York, 1971, pp. 176-177. 76

the violent difference that now Yeats overtly chooses the grotesque as a creative mode.3-23

Inherent in the play is yet another variation on the Oedipal theme; in

this play the hero is his mother's rival for his father’s love.

Yeats himself called it "the strangest and wildest thing I have ever written,"124 anj tjje strangeness sometimes borders on incoherence.

The hero, Congal, denies his father, the Great Heme, and deliberately steals and rapes his father’s bride, Attracts (who is also Congal’s step­ mother) .

The first scene is a ritual battle between two kings, Congal of

Connacht and Aedh of Tara. A truce is called as Corney enters, "leading a donkey on wheels like a child’s toy, but life-size." Congal arranges then with Corney to have the eggs of Heme stolen, as he encounters At­ tracts, who tells him that she is a priestess and the bride of the Herne.

She tells Congal:

Only the women of these rocks, Betrothed or married to the Heme, the god or ancestor of hemes, Can eat, handle, or look upon those eggs.

Congal frankly thinks that Attracts is simply lunatic and hysterical; he thinks that the embrace of seven men would cure her "woman dreams:"

Congal: It may be that life is suffering, But youth that has not yet known pleasure Has not the right to say so; pick Or be picked by seven men, And we shall talk it out again.

Attracts answers that she "burns" to be chosen out of her kind,

^■23g^oom, p. 421.

324ketters p. 845. 77

"that I may lie in a blazing bed/ And a bird may take my maidenhead,/ To

the begotten I return,/ All a womb and a funeral urn." Peter Ure states

that "Attracta’s marriage to the god is a perverted fantasy arising from

frustration,"125 an

idea:

Women thrown into despair By the winter of their virginity Take its abominable snow, As boys take common snow, and make An image of god or bird or beast To feed their senuality.

Corney returns with the stolen eggs and demands that Attracts "Grow

terrible: go into a trance." He insists that she:

Bring the god out of your gut; Stand there asleep until the rascals Wriggle upon his beak like eels.

Attracts treats Corney like the child his toys suggest he is:

Stop! When have I permitted you To say what I may, or may not do? But you and your donkey must obey All big men who can have their say.

By thieving the eggs Congal incurs the Herne's curse: he’ll "be changed into a fool" and "at a fool’s hand meet his death."

To summarize the action, Attracts, while walking In her trance, sub­ stitutes a hen’s egg for the stolen egg of the Herne; Congal kills Aedh, thinking that he made the substitution —- he lives the part of a fool.

When he finds out that the real culprit was Attracta, he and his men rape her. Afterward, she evokes the thunder of the god, Herne, and Congal real­ izes the Herne’s power and goes off to die at the hand of Poor Tom Fool "at the full moon."

As Congal lays dying, Attracta, in a blatantly motherly way, offers

125'Ure, p. 147. 78

him her protection and affection in his reincarnated life; she wants to

give Congal a human form, but he munt be reborn as a donkey.

Most critics are puzzled, if not really disturbed, by the meaning

Yeats intended his play to convey. Wilson sees it as a reaffirmation

by Yeats of the self-sufficient hero who defeats the Herne by "dying with

real, if tragi-comic dignity."3-26 Ho0re thinks the hero only retains his

127 dignity In his own eyes. Several writers simply write The Herne’s Egg

off as the ramblings of a confused and bitter old man.

Regardless of Congal’s status as a hero or fool, several features

of the play push Attracta forward as the real focal point of the play

in the role of woman as mother. First, the male characters are little more than carbon copies of each other, who, as Ure points out, play "the

games of children."128 Webster notes the "nursery atmosphere"129 wrought

through such images as the toy donkey and the mock battles of the child­ like men. In this context, Yeats has really forced the motherhood on

Attracta; and she responds with all the correct stock phrases of a good mother, Congal must mind his "manners" and ask her before he takes the eggs. She reprimands Corney in a previously mentioned passage, telling him that he "must obey/ All big men."

Attracta*s motherly qualities are emphasized in the scene with the three maidens, that serves as a counterpoint to the masculine scene

126wiiSOn, p. 133.

^^Moore, p. 297.

128Ure, p. 146.

129^je|jSter, p. 147, 79

preceding it in which nothing is really accomplished. She tells the girls

that the fierce men have gone never to return. She comforts them with

tales of the men she promises they’ll marry, as soon as she marries.

Most importantly, Attracta is the one who is left at the end of the play; it is Congal who must die in punishment for his aggression to­ ward the mother-figure of Attracta, if the Oedipal principle is to be applied to this play. Congal is forced to deal with Attracta in the role of the child who sees the mother as the source of all power, and realizes his utter dependence upon her. In his death Congal must face the punitive power of a mother’s love. In stealing his father’s eggs, which are in Attracta’s care, he attempts to usurp her position in re­ lationship to the Great Herne; but in this childish game of one-upman­ ship, he looses not only his life, but ironically his stature as a hero.

A look at how Yeats has used some of the symbols in The Heme’s Egg may be of help in trying to decipher his meaning in his strange and wild play. Most assuredly his use of the grotesque as a creative mode reveals his desire to show ambivalence and the close bond between continuity and discontinuity. The symbols are sometimes used ambivalently, and can cer­ tainly leave the impression that the playwright’s main purpose was simply to inflict confusion on his audience. Three images are interrelated in an especially grotesque manner in The Herne * s Egg---the heme (heron) , the egg, and the birth-process as it affects the mother.

The heron is an old symbol, which to the Egyptians was the symbol of the Generation of Life; hence, Yeats’s use of the heme as a god, and

"generator" of the eggs (Life). Yeats gives the Great Herne a very strong sense of masculinity, although the heme is an extremely impersonal figure 80

who never appears. The idea that they are the herne*s eggs is disturbing,

for it is the female of the species who is the egg-layer. In this context

the female becomes incidental to generation, or, as in A Full Moon in March

is seen as a vessel of birth.

Birth, in this play, is seen as an act of degradation, and a viola­

tion of the mother-figure. Attracta, the virgin, gives way to Attracta,

the matron, and the issue is something less than human. Animals lay eggs,

and animals come from eggs; humans beget humans. Forced motherhood im-

lies a view of sex for the sake of procreation as rape; but, Yeats shows

most clearly that the rape is necessary for the woman's task to be com­

pleted.

Through the birth process a little of the woman's self dies for the

sake of the completion of her role as mother. If the mother resents this

sacrificial "death," then it makes sense that she may take revenge by

punishing the child, as Attracta punishes Congal; this is complicated,

of course, by the idea that in the rape of Attracta, Congal also engages

in incest. Bloom's comment that what triumphs in A Full Moon in March

is the "sadistic Female Will of Sphinx," may also apply to this play, if

the idea of the Sphinx symbol is explored; Yeats himself used the symbol

in A Vision.

J. E. Cirlot explains that the "sphinx keeps watch over an ultimate 130 meaning which must remain for ever beyond the understanding of man."

Cirlot explains that

130j. g, Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, Philosophical Library, Inc., New York, 1962, p. 289. 81

Jung sees in it a synthesis of the ’Terrible Mother’, a symbol which has left its mark on mythology as well. The mask of the sphinx pertains to the mother-image and also to nature symbolism.131

He maintains that all mother symbols are characterized by ambivalence,

and that the "Terrible Mother" Is a death figure. In Yeats’s treatment

of woman as mother there is a distinct statement of this same death-union

theme; motherhood implies sacrifice, and therefore, when the mother re­

sents the sacrifice, her love becomes a punitive love.

Since Congal is the son of the Heme, it must be presumed that he

too came from an egg. Certainly, he shows more animal quality than human

in the rape scene, and it cannot be forgotten that he is reborn as the

most abject of animals, the ass. The ass is also an interesting symbol

in that it implies the idea of jester or fool. In his "first life" Congal

tries to go against the god, and his punishment, wrought through the

"Terrible Mother" Attracta, is to live out his life as a fool and die

at the hands of a fool. The punishment is to be lived out in his rebirth,

since he must come back as an ass; once again, Yeats has imposed upon the

hero a peculiarly grotesque and ironic image. Congal’s tragic mistake is

that he failed to realize the difference between the mock battles between

childish men in the opening scene, and waging war against God. Jeffares

comments further that "The Great Heme has an impersonality and mystery 1 Q9 which perhaps reinforce the unimportance of Congal’s heroic activity."

Congal fails to assert the masculine principle as the rule of life, and

is in all essentials dominated by the feminine principle in Attracta’s matriarchy.

131Cirlot, p. 289.

132jeffares, p. 13. 82

In the first edition of A Vision in 1925, Yeats sought to draw together

all he knew of history, psychology, philosophy, astrology and art into a

single system, or what he referred to as ’’stylistic arrangements of exper­

ience," meant to help him "hold in a single thought reality and justice."3-33

By means of the system, Yeats felt he could forecast human behavior and the cycles of history, and A Vision did seem to bring him closer to the per­ ception of unity that he spent his life seeking.

I have now described many symbols which seem mechanical because united in a single structure, and of which the greater number, precisely because they always tell the same story, may seem unnecessary. Yet every symbol ex­ cept where it lies in vast periods of time and so beyond our experience, has evoked for me some form of human destiny, and that form, once evoked, has appeared every­ where, as if there were but one destiny, as my own form i34 might appear in a room full of mirrors.

The "story" the symbols told was the achievement of union through the synthesis of opposites:

All these symbols can be thought of as the symbols of the relations of men and women and of the birth of children. We can think of the antithetical and primary cones, or wheels, as the domination, now by the man, now by. the woman . . . All the symbolism of this book applies to begetting and birth, for all things are a single form which has divided and multiplied in time and space.135

Yeats felt that the union of man and woman in itself was not the reso­ lution of the opposites, one to the other, but that the union was symbolic of that resolution. Sexual union allowed man and woman to

133"introduction." A Vision, p. 25.

134^ Vision, pp. 213-214.

135a Vision, pp. 211-212. 83

catch a glimpse of "the eternal instant,” after which the moment of vision

is lost:

The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved anti­ nomy, and were more than symbol could a man there lose and keep his identity, but he falls asleep. That sleep is the same as the sleep of death.136

As Yeats was to explain in yet another way:

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the souls . . . Sexual intercourse is the attempt to solve the eternal antinomy, doomed to failure because it takes place only on one side of the gulf, which separates the one and the many, or, if you like, God and man. But the antinomy is there and can be represented only by a myth. The whole of life, the world itself, arises out of the opposition of these two. You must have a myth. No one can live without a myth. No myth can be proved, but we test it by our everyday experience. '

Variations on the themes of sexual union and life after death became central motifs in Yeats's later plays. Two of these later plays show clearly Yeats’s concept of the purgatorial view of life; both use a house as a major .image; both treat the theme of woman as mother, but in different contexts and with the result of very different degrees of intensity.

The starting point for The Words Upon the Window-Pane, according to

Allan Wade, was Yeats’s finding in 1910 an inscription cut into a window in Oliver St. John Gogarty’s house in Dublin.I" First published in 1934,

Yeats wrote The Words Upon the Window-Pane In 1930 during a period when he was particularly entranced by the writing of Jonathan Swift. The play was

136a Vision, p. 214.

137Quoted in Margaret Mary Vanderhaar, "Yeats’s Relationships with Wo­ men and Their Influence on His Poetry," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1966, p. 143.

l®®Alan Wade, ed., Letters, p. 891n. 84

performed in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre on November 17, 1930.

In A Vision Yeats had determined that the soul should strive towards

the state of Unity of Being, which was achieved in the past, at thè time

of the Renaissance. Ellmann observes, however, that:

He needed a period in Irish history to serve as his model, and in Ireland during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries the Renaissance had not oc­ curred . . . Yeats began to think of Ireland’s eigh­ teenth century as a Renaissance delayed by special historical conditions and as the answer to his problems. Surely Ireland's closest approach to Unity of Being occurred when it could boast of Swift, Berkeley, Burke, and Goldsmith.139

The Words Upon the Window-Pane is a notable departure from Yeats’s

other plays; he writes for the only time in his life "a play with middle-

class characters set not in a fisherman's hut or a palace, or a primitive

dwelling but in a civilized house."140 He tackles the problem of extra­

human phenomena, and gives various explanations of equal validity. The

dramatic scene here is a seance, and, as Ure points out, Yeats had much

experience with seances:

The period between 1911 and 1916 seems to have been specially active. During those years the unpublished notebooks record details of many sessions and the work of many mediums. In the introduction to The Words Upon the Window-Pane, he declared that all the people in it ’were people I had met or might have met in just such a seance.’141

The seance takes place in a Dublin lodging-house where six people are assembling for a visit with Mrs. Henderson, the medium. The characters

l^Eiimann, pp. 264-265.

140Moore, p. 258.

141ure, p. 97. 85

include the president of the Dublin Spiritualists’ Association, Dr. Trench;

the secretary, Miss Mackehna; a visiting student and sceptic from Cam­

bridge, John Corbet, who is writing his thesis on Swift. The other three

characters are "slyly amusing caricatures of typical addicts"^42 of

seances: Cornelius Patterson, whose main interest is sporting events;

Mrs. Mallet, who has come to seek the advice of the departed Mr. Mallet;

and Reverend Abraham Johnson, a minister of the Gospel.

The house in which they are gathering, as Dr. Trench reports to

Corbet, had once belonged to friends of Jonathan Swift’s Stella, Trench notes that it had been a private house in the possession of the aristo­ cracy, and that "Somebody cut some lines from a poem of hers upon the window-pane." They discuss the tragedy of Swift’s person life, and Corbet reads the inscription: .

’You taught how I might youth prolong By knowing what is right and wrong, How from my heart to bring supplies Of lustre to my fading eyes.’

As Corbet and Trench are talking, the others allude to the way in which previous seances in this particular house had been ruined by the presence of a "hostile influence," and the unwanted presence of two spirits who re-enact "the same drama" as if "they were characters in some kind of horrible play."

In. explaining the spiritual world, Dr. Trench echoes some of Yeats’s own thoughts:

The spirits are people like ourselves, we treat them as our guests and protect them from discourtesy and

^•42Ure, p. 97 86

violence, and every exorcism is a curse or a threatened curse. We do not admit that there are evil spirits. Some spirits are earth-bound —■ they think they are still living and go over and over some action of their past lives, just as we go over and over some painful thought, ex­ cept that where they are thought is reality. For instance, when a spirit which has died a vio­ lent death comes to a medium for the first time, it relives all the pains of death . . . Sometimes a spirit relives not the pain of death but some passionate or tragic moment of life ... If I were a Catholic I would say that such spirits were in Purgatory. In vain do we write requiescat in pace upon the tomb, for they must suffer, and we in our turn must suffer until God gives peace. Such spirits do not often come to seances unless those seances are held in houses where these spirits lived, or where the event took place. This spirit which speaks those incomprehensible words and does not an­ swer when spoken to is of that nature.

In this passage, Yeats neatly shifts the focus of the play from the

caricature characters to the central episode in which the real theme

is exposed. The central figure of this episode is Swift, who must

relive in agony the denial of his body in a love relationship with

two ghosts of the opposite sex, Stella and Vanessa.

Jeffares explains in his notes on the play that Stella was Swift’s

name for Esther Johnson, whom he met while he was a secretary in the

household of Sir William Temple; they remained close friends until her

death, and he was buried by her side. His Journal to Stella was a

series of letters from 1710 to 1713 to Esther and a companion. Vanessa was Swift’s name for Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he met in London; she fell

in love with him, and Swift’s poem "Cadenus and Vanessa” is an account

143 of their unhappy relationship.

143jeffares> p. 243. 87

Through the medium and her "control" Lulu, whose voice is the voice

of a child, Swift is revealed in the midst of his passion against Vanessa

because she has written Stella asking If she and Swift were married:

Swift: How dare you write to her? How dare you ask if we were married? How dare you question her?

Swift tries desperately to convince Vanessa, and himself, that the nobler

love is an intellectual love free from the physical complications. Vanessa

only wants to know "Why have you let me spend hours in your company if you

did not want me to love you?"

Vanessa: Was that all, Jonathan? Was I nothing but a painter’s canvas?

Swift: My God, do you think it was easy? I was a man of strong passions and I had sworn never to marry.

Vanessa: If you and she are not married, why should we not marry like other men and women? I loved you from the first moment when you came to my mother's house and began to teach me. I thought it would be enough to look at you, to speak to you, to hear you speak. I followed you to Ire­ land five years ago and I can bear it no longer. It is not enough to look, to speak, to hear. Jonathan, Jonathan, I am a woman, the women Brutus and Cato loved were not different.

Vanessa wants to protect him from the loneliness of old age, and she generously offers to bear him children. Swift now is compelled to tell her that "I have something in my blood that no child must inherit."

She is not to be put off by his claims of madness; and she pleads with him on the one hand to let her take care of him (as a mother would), and on the other hand, to let her become the mother of his children.

Vanessa: If you had children, Jonathan, my blood would make them healthy. I will take your hand, I will lay it upon my heart --- upon the Vanhomrigh blood that has been healthy for generations. 88

Let It not be forgotten that these two ghosts are manl f est-pd only

through the mediumship of Mrs. Henderson. At this point Mrs. Henderson

"slowly raises her left hand," and Vanessa now tempts Jonathan with the

beauty of her physical presence, but he still resists:

Swift: What do I care if it be healthy? What do I care if it could make mine healthy? Am 1 to add another to the healthy rascaldom and knavery of the world?

Vanessa: Look at me, Jonathan. Your arrogant intellect se­ parates us. Give me both your hands. I will put them upon my breast.

(Stage directions indicate that Mrs. Henderson raises her right hand to the level of her left and then raises them both to her breast.)

Vanessa: 0, it is white --- white as the gambler’s dice --- white ivory dice. Think of the uncertainty. Perhaps a mad child -— perhaps a rascal --- perhaps a knave ---perhaps not, Jonathan. The dice of the intellect are loaded, but I am the common ivory dice. , ,

Yeats has curiously juxtaposed the purity which the color white sug- gests with the darker image of the gambler's dice. The uncertainty she talks of is the same uncertainty of any:prospective parent as to what the child will be. While she uses the excuse of children providing him an escape from loneliness in his old age, Vanessa gives a very strong impres­ sion of being desperate to fulfill her own appointed role in life:

You said that you have strong passions; that is true, Jonathan --- no man in Ireland is so passionate: That is.why you need me, that is why you need children, nobody has greater need. You are growing old. An old man without children is very solitary. Even his friends, men as old as he is, turn away, they turn towards the young, their children or their children’s children. They cannot endure an old man like themselves. You are not too old for the dice, Jonathan, but a few years if you turn away will make you an old miserable childless man.

John Rees Moore comments that Swift is "tortured by the responsi­ bility he has taken for another's happiness, who has loved him all her 89

life, by denying her children, lover, and husband,"144 Torchiana remarks

that this rejection scene is in some ways similar to the scene In Gulli­

ver* s Travels where Gulliver swoons at the embrace of his wife, and that

Swift suffers an ’’impotent rage . . .at human folly and'also re-enacts

his own guilt.”145 Stella, Swift’s Muse, is the spirit who never appears yet her presence is pervasive, partly because of her "words upon the window-pane," partly because of her contrast to Vanessa. Moore believes that Yeats’s typical dramatic irony is present; in this play:

Swift becomes a mythical hero who has a vision of a transcendent order of reality. In the name of that vision he sacrifices his ordinary humanity. One • figure represents the claims of the ideal, another the claims of womanly love. The obsessive problem of generation reappears. How can heroism be passed on from one generation to the next?146

In contrast with Stella, Vanessa becomes the villain in her desire to provide Swift with this opportunity; by denying both his physical need, and her vision of maternity, Swift incurs the punishment of a purgatory in which he is doomed to forever re-enact the moment of the tragic denial:

Swift: ... 0 God, hear the prayer of Jonathan Swift, that afflicted man, and grant that he may leave to posterity nothing but his intellect that came to him from Heaven.

Vanessa: Can you face solitude with that in mind, Jonathan?

Swift: Who locked the door, who locked me in with my enemy?

I44^oor6j p. 260.

145])onai¿ Torchiana, W. .B. Yeats and Georgian.Ireland, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1966, pp. 120-121.

146MoOrej p. 266. 90

At this point Lulu, Mrs. Henderson’s control breaks in; she is angry

and disappointed that Swift has taken over the seance:

Bad old man! Do not let him come back Bad old man does not know he is dead. Lulu cannot find fathers, mothers, sons that have passed over. Power almost gone.

As Mrs. Henderson, exhausted, slumps in the chair, the child-like Lulu

calls for another verse of a hymn:

If some poor wandering child of Thine , .Have spurned today the voice divine, Now, Lord, the gracious work begin; Let him no more lie down in sin.

The hymn brings back Stella’s spirit to Swift, and her influence claims his soul.

David R. Clarke has pointed out the importance of the symbolic use of the child: / That the child could be the ’control’ struggling with the spirit of Swift in the after world, is perhaps fitting, since Swift has refused to ’add another to the healthy rascaldom ... of the world* . . . The verse sung just before the in­ fluence of Stella claims the soul of Swift . . . [is] ... almost like a mother soothing a troubled child . . . Finally we remember that except as ye become as a little child ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Without a child-like faith the manifestation would not be possible.

Moreover, Clarke notes that Swift must, according to the Yeatsian theory of the after life, relive his life first in the order of the intensity of the passions experienced, and secondly in reversed chronological order to regain innocence.

l^Davld R. Clarke, "Yeats and the Modern Theatre," Threshold, No. 2, Autumn/Winter, 1960, pp. 50-51. 91

In keeping with Clarke's comments, and with Moore’s description of

Swift’s dilemma, Stella may then be seen as the pure and noble ideal

mother who watches over and works for the child’s (Swift's) purification.

Vanessa represents the unclean carnal love which is necessary for genera­

tion, and at the same time necessary for the fulfillment of a woman, who,

because she must make the sacrifice, demands that a man do the same. The

horrible reality for Swift is expressed in the last line of the play,

when, after the seance has ended and all has supposedly returned to nor­

mal, Mrs. Henderson speaks suddenly and without warning in Swift’s voice,

"using words recorded as having been spoken during his insanity: "3-48

Perish the day on which I was born!

The Words Upon the Window-Pane was dedicated to the memory of Lady

Gregory, "in whose house it was written." Yeats tells us in "Dramatis

Personae, 1896-1902" that Lady Gregory’s "house had become her passion.

That passion grew greater still when the house took its place in the

public life of Ireland."149 Yeats’s concept of an aristocratic society which would nurture art was very much bound up in his idea that houses

like the one at Coole Park would become centers of culture, for he knew

that the woman who lived in the house surpassed the house itself. Per­ haps Lady Gregory’s attachment to her house, is the seed of Yeats's

constant use of the house as a female symbol, more explicitly a mother

symbol.

Purgatory, along with The Words Upon the Window-Pane, may be classified

148ure, p. 101.

149Autobiographies, p. 262. 92

as one of Yeats’s purgatorial plays. Referred to by many critics as

Yeats’s greatest play, it was written in 1938, along with numerous poems,

a great deal of criticism, and his final play, The Death of Cuchulain,

perhaps by a man who sensed that his death was near. Hardly more than a scene, Purgatory was conceived while Yeats was at work on On the Boiler

Curtis Bradford thinks it more than coincidental that these two works were in progress at the same time. The principle subject of On the Boiler was the need for eugenic reform, and as Bradford states:

This accounts for one of the themes of the play, where the Old Man, product of a misalliance, kills his pubescent son before the boy can carry on the degenerating line. Another theme, the destruction of a house which had at one time been the seat of an established way of life, turns up frequently in Yeats’s later poetry.150

Yeats’s statement to the press after the production of the play at the Abbey Theatre in 1938 reveals his purgatorial view and the symbolism of the house:

In my play, a spirit suffers because of its share, when alive, in the destruction of an honored house; that destruction is taking place all over Ireland today. Sometimes it is the result of poverty, but more often because a new individualistic generation has lost interest in the ancient sanctities. I know of old houses, old pictures, old furniture that have been sold without apparent regret. In some few cases a house has been destroyed by a mesalliance. I have founded my play on this exceptional case, party be­ cause of my interest in certain problems of eugenics, partly because it enables me to depict more vividly than would otherwise be possible the tragedy of the house. In Germany there is special legislation to enable old families to go on living where their fathers lived. The problem is not Irish, but European,

150cUrtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1965, p. 294. 93

though it Is perhaps more acute here than else­ where. 151

Bradford notes that Yeats began writing the play by composing an

eight page scenario, which describes the scene In which the action occurs

in greater detail than the stage directions in the final draft. The fol­ lowing is a paraphrase of the scene as transcribed by Bradford from the scenario. The words in quotation are Yeats’s:

The background is a ruined house, a large window and door of which show. At one side Is a garden wall or hedge. A black tree looks white in the moonlight. The characters are to be well-lighted by a stream of moonlight falling on the front of the stage. The Old Man and the Boy enter, carrying a pack. The Old Man tells the Boy that they are in a terrible place, that it is because of what hap­ pened here that ’he and the Boy must live peddling needles, and pins, and spools of thread.' This has happened to a man who had read books, who learned to read them in the ruined house before them. The Old Man announces the doctrine of purgatory: 'The dead in purgatory return to the place . . .of the transgression --- they return again and again.'15Z

According to Bradford, Yeats had completely projected himself into the character of the Old Man.

David R. Clarke points out that between the years 1934 and 1939

Yeats had set out to apply "structure-baring principles" to his dra­ matic poetry:

He found it necessary to abandon blank verse for an experimental verse, in short lines, with a close approximation to the rhythms of speech. These ex­ periments reached fruition in Purgatory (1938), where speech and poetry, objective reality and sub­ jective reality are fused.153

3-3lQUOted in Torchiana, pp. 357-358.

152sradford, pp. 297-298.

153Clarke, p. 56. 94

Indeed, the play includes a perfect example of Yeats’s dramatic aesthe­

tic: that the single passionate,action must be expressed in language which

is dominated by one or two simple, yet vivid images. The action of the

play is stripped to the most, elemental of conflicts: an encounter with

a pair of ghosts, a betrayal, a murder, and a flashback of an earlier be­

trayal and murder.

The violent Old Man and his bastard son represent age and youth,

and they are caught up in the trap of degenerating humanity. The Old

Man’s father and mother are the souls in purgatory, who have returned to the house of their transgression to mark the anniversary of the Old

Man’s conception, and re-enact their tragic moment.

The opening dialogue centers on the Old Man’s direction to ’’Study that house." He questions, "Where are the jokes and stories of a house,/

Its threshold gone to patch a pig-sty." The use of the word "threshold" is especially interesting in that It is the word Yeats uses in On Baile’s

Strand as he describes the conservative female of "threshold and hearth­ stone." The. word >is also used in the title of The King’s Threshold.

The Old Man says that there is a "shadow of a cloud upon the house,/

And that's symbolical." He commands the Boy to look at the house "Because there is somebody in that house." He explains that the "somebody” is:

The souls in Purgatory that come back To habitations and familiar spots. Re-live Their transgressions, and that not once But many times; they know at last The consequence of those transgressions Whether upon others or upon themselves; Upon others, others may bring help, For when the consequence is at an end The dream must end; if upon themselves, There is no help but in themselves And in the mercy of God. 95

As Peter Ure says, "Yeats --- can it be said? --- has at last found a use

for God."134

Three generations come together in this play, although only two gen­

erations are physically present on stage. The Old Man reminisces to the

Boy about his past; he describes his aristocratic mother who met his father,

a drunken stable groom, and married him against the wishes of her own mother who "never spoke to her again,/ And she did right." He describes the house

in which "Great people lived and died," as being "killed" by his father, who burned it down when he was drunk, and confesses to the Boy that he

(the Old Man) stuck his father with a knife and left him to die in the fire.

As Webster notes, there "Is no ambiguity about the central character or his actions; he is a despairing, dirty old man."135 As the Old Man reflects on his black past, he hears the hoof beats of his father’s horse bringing him home from the tavern; as the Old Man watches, his mother’s ghost appears waiting, framed In the window. Though she is literally the Old Man's mother, she appears to him as a beautiful young girl on the anniversary of her wedding night, and his conception.

Entranced by the vision, the Old Man screams up at the window:

Do not let him touch you! It is not true That drunken men cannot beget, And if he touch he must beget And you must bear his murderer.

The mother's thoughts are not on begetting, however:

154Ure, p. 107.

3-55webster, p. 157. 96

This night she Is no better than her man And does not mind that he is half drunk, She Is mad about him. They mount the stairs.

The problem is that she must re-live the sexual intercourse in "exact detail,/ Driven to it by remorse, and yet/ Can she renew the sexual act/

And find no pleasure in it, and if not,/ If pleasure and remorse must both be there,/ Which is the greater?"

While the Old Man watches, the Boy rummages in search of their bag of money, finds it and turns to run. The Old Man catches him and they struggle, the window now revealing the figure of a man pouring whiskey into a glass; furious at having been caught and convinced that his father is mad, the Boy cries out:

What if I killed you? You killed my grand-dad, Because you were young and he was old. Now I am young and you are old.

At last the Boy, too, sees the vision, "A dead, living, murdered man!"

At this point the Old Man begins to stab his son again and again as the window grows dark; he begins to sing a lullaby:

"Hush-a-bye baby, they father’s a knight, Thy mother a lady, lovely and bright."

The history lesson has ended in death.

Like Swift, the Old Man seeks to prevent the passing on of "pollu­ tion;" he says, "I killed that lad because had he grown up/ He would have struck a woman's fancy,/ Begot, and passed pollution on."

Yeats manipulates a single action with the image of the house,the symbol of the mother, and with the image of the tree, the symbol of "Fat greasy life." John Unterecker comments that the Tree of Life is like the house, in that 97

Like the house, it contains — as Yeats’s treatment of it makes clear --- its own opposite. That is, it contains as a symbol not only that which it is but that which it was. Specifically, it partakes of the symbolism of all Yeats’s trees (and the trees bulk in Yeats’s work almost as large as his obsessive birds), a symbolism associated primarily with life and death.15^

The bird in Purgatory is not the Great Herne, but the predatory jackdaw, who has left only the broken image of birth, "a bit of egg­ shell thrown/ Out of a jackdaw's nest.*’ The Old Man is little more than a fool, but a serious fool; "he is the hero as believer whose beliefs lead only to the most dreadful parody of the heroic action of old.’’*15 7

As in The King of the Great Clock Tower, the house functions as a symbolic representation of mother, but in Purgatory the destruction of the house and the destruction of the mother are wrought through her own degrading act of intercourse. Again the marriage sleep is seen as the sleep of death, here with a double meaning; the mother must die giving birth to the Old Man, and it is her transgression that causes the death of the Boy. The foolish old man hopes to stop his mother’s re-enactment by killing his son, but he is sadly mistaken, for as he gathers up the scattered money, Yeats stabs him with the final and most horrible irony: he hears the hoof-beats, a signal that the scene is to be repeated,

"Twice a murderer and all for nothing."

That the Old Man feels guilty for having cause his mother’s death

Is obvious, but he really rages at the fact that there was a sense of

15®John Unterecker, "The Shaping Force in Yeats’s Plays," Modem Drama, December, 1964, p. 354.

157Mbore, p. 325. 98

pleasure In her act, and a combination of love and hate for the mother

figure Is what spurs him into action. The mother can neither see, nor

hear him, nor speak to him, and, as Moore points out, "is not even cruel * except involuntarily and inadvertently."358 gy ieaving his drunken

father to die in the fire, the Old Man, as a child, thinks he can have

his mother for himself.

There is an echo here of the Queen in A Full Moon in March, who

must "bring forth her farrow in the dung." The Old Man's father is

the source of degradation and violation of a well-born aristocratic

lady, an Anglo-Irish mother who "should have known he was not her kind."

That she should have known better Is graphically illustrated in the fact

that her own mother never spoke to her after her marriage. The Old Man hates the weakness which allowed her to give in to a mere stable groom; but he loves her, for whatever dignity he possesses came down through her. Yeats twists the knife even deeper, though, for whatever dignity the Old Man had he squandered in the begetting and in the murdering of his own bastard son by "a tinker's daughter in a ditch." Because the mother is the only one capable of releasing her own emotions, and because the killing of the Boy does not stop the re-enactment, the Old Man is unable to perform the heroic ritual of exorcism, and ends up the fool.

Hone points out the resemblance between a ghost story Yeats told around 1913 and the action in Purgatory; Webster, in commenting on this recounting, maintains that "the story shows Yeats’s longstanding preoccupation with the murderous Oedipal jealousy and the hereditary

^®Moore, p. 311 99

•I CQ taint of Purgatory." In any case, Yeats’s picture of woman as mother is seldom a pretty one. Moore observes that:

Purgatory goes farther than any other Yeats play in the direction of unredeemed and apparently unredeem­ able blackness. To ’study that tree’ is to recognize that is glistening purity is not of the soul but of life reduced to a sterile stick . . . And however striking and integral its use of the supernatural is, the brutality and terror are specifically modern and Irish in their background and meaning.160

In contrast with the concept of woman as child, when Yeats's woman takes on the role and stature of motherhood the punitive power of her love turns the hero into a foolish child. As Katharine Rogers puts it:

The superhumanly edifying, self-sacrificing, devoted Mother of the Victorians is now seen as a cannibal who lives by castrating and possessing her sons.161

159webster, p. 161.

160noOre, pp, 316-317.

16lRogers, p. 271. 100

CHAPTER IV

WOMAN AS QUEEN

Forsaking the romantic and mournful drama that he had written in his youth, William Butler Yeats labored to write out of his own emotions after

the turn of the century. Mustering up a new courage and an incredible energy, Yeats explored the world of Gaelic literature through new world translations, and became the champion of the Irish dramatic movement. He set out to found societies in which Irishmen could study the Gaelic ma­ terial that had been translated, and the Irish writers who had written in English, the language of modern Ireland.

After meeting with Lady Gregory in 1896, Yeats came even more directly under the influence of the Irish literary revival. Since the Irish people were used to listening to political speeches, and not used to reading, Lady Gregory and Yeats began to see that what the Irish people needed was a theatre of its own; together they estab­ lished the Irish Literary Theatre. The Irish Literary Theatre continued to function until 1902, when it was replaced by the Irish National Thea­ tre Society. Established in its own building by 1904, the Society became the Abbey Theatre Company.

By now Yeats was a public figure, and had encountered the practical problems of play production, political censorship, and the economic pro­ blems of what he called the "management of men." After 1904, Yeats began to concentrate on utilizing the Celtic myths and legends in an attempt to arrive at a suitable expression of reality. 101

Two plays, both begun in this period, deal with the concept of Yeats's woman as queen, though in vastly different ways. Deirdre was to be finished in time for a 1906 production; The Player Queen was to be cast aside un­ finished for six years.

Yeats says in his notes on Deirdre that it is founded upon the most famous of all Irish Legends:

The best version is that in Lady Gregory's 'Cuchulain of Muirthemne,' and is made up out of more than a dozen old texts . . . Deirdre was the Irish Helen, and Naisi her Paris, and Concobar her Menelaus, and the events took place, according to the conventional chronology of the Bards, about the time of the birth of Christ. Concobar was High King of Ulster, and Naisi King of one of the sub-kingdoms, and the scene of the play is laid in a guesthouse among the woods in the neigh­ bourhood of Armagh, where Conconbar had his palace.162

Since the story had been told again and again, the effect of the play, as

Peter Ure perceives, depends upon Deirdre*s "actions . . . as a series of attempts to alter this story, as it were from inside the story itself."163

Deirdre, when printed for the first time in 1907, was accompanied by the following dedication:

To Mrs. Patrick Campbell Who in the Generosity of her Genius has Played my Deirdre in Dublin and London with the Abbey Company, As well as with Her own People . . .

The first records of the staging of the play indicate that there had been a good deal of difficulty in securing the right actress to play the title role. As Ure notes, "the problem was, who was to perform the vast central

162yariorum Plays, p. 389.

163ure, p. 53. 102

role, a virtuoso display-piece for an actress, on a scale that Yeats had

not attempted before."164

Mrs. Campbell had her eye on the role, but Yeats felt that she had

had the wrong training in "plays like Mrs. Tanqueray, where everything

is done by a kind of magnificent hysteria."

This school reduces everything to an emotional least common denominator. It finds the scullion in the queen, because there are scullion in the audience but no queens ... A new school of acting is now growing up under the influence of the various at­ tempts to create an intellectual drama, and of changes deeper than that. The new school seizes upon what is distinguished, solitary, proud even. One always got a little of this in Mrs. Emery when she was good, and one gets a great deal of it in Miss Darragh.^35

Yeats was seeking to show an intense moment in life, and Derldre focuses

on how the individual confronts her destiny. The title role went to Miss

Darragh, but the appointment displeased the Abbey Company, because her

style was too much In contrast with theirs. Willie Fay was to say that

"It was like putting a Rolls-Royce to run a race with a lot of hill

ponies."136 Eventually, the role went to Mrs. Campbell and Yeats began

to compose the play that was later to be called The Player Queen with

Mrs. Campbell in mind for the role of Decima.

Both George Russell (A. E.) and Synge had written plays on the Deirdre legend, but Yeats "confined himself to the last act of the tragedy, and has

134jjre, p. 44,

135ketters, p. 475.

136QUOtej £n Uxe, p. 49. 103

concentrated its essence into a single act of great dramatic intensity.”1®7

The "last act" is an old story, the love triangle Involving the old man

and the young man who both seek the favor of a beautiful woman.

Three women musicians set the scene:

We are come, by chance, Into King Conchubar’s country, and this house Is an old guest-house built for travellers From the seashore to Conchubar’s royal house, And there are certain hills among these woods And there Queen Deirdre grew.

They know the story of Deirdre, who was famous for fleeing with Naoise

"Somewhere beyond the edges of the world." Conchubar had found a house on the hillside, and had encountered the mysteryof the queen’s origin:

And there a child with an old witch to nurse her, And nobody to say if she were human, Or of the gods, or anything at all Or who she was or why she was hidden there, But that she’d too much beauty for good luck.

The musicians know the beginnings of the tale, but not the end.

They are aware that Deirdre had escaped with Naoise on the eve of her wedding to the old king. One musician has more news to tell, but is interrupted by the arrival of Fergus, who bears the news that Deirdre and her lover have arrived and is surprised to find no message from

Conchubar. The musician asks whether Deirdre and her lover are tired of life. The exchange that follows suggests the revenge of the old man:

Fergus: You are not of this country, or you’d know - That they are in my charge and all forgiven.

Musician: We have no country but the roads of the world.

1®7Malone, p. 142. 104

Fergus: Then you should know that all things change in the world, And hatred turns to love and love to hate, And even kings forgive.

Musician: An old man’s love Who casts no second line is hard to cure; His jealousy is like his love.

Fergus is proud of having persuaded the king to forgive the lovers, and refuses to listen to the musician’s cry that ”yet old men are jealous;" he also refuses to be upset by the presence of the treacherous king’s henchmen. He is positive that Conchubar’s oath is to be trusted, and that the musicians' "wild thought" is pure poetic extravagance. As he goes out to get Deirdre and Naolse, the legend-makers sing of Queen Edain, who climbs "to the tower overhead" and look on "the waste places of the sky," and because there is so much to think about she cries.

But her goodman answered her: "Love would be a thing of naught Had not all his limbs a stir Born out of immoderate thought; Were he anything by half, Were his measure running dry. Lovers, if they may not laugh, Have to cry, have to cry."

As the lovers enter, the third stanza is sung, and clearly relates to their plight:

. But is Edain worth a song Now the hunt begins anew? Praise the beautiful and strong; Praise the redness of the yew; Praise the blossoming apple-stem. But our silence had been wise. What is all our praise to them That have another's eyes?

Deirdre, although her "colour has all gone . . . with fear", prepares for her meeting with Conchubar: 105

You’ll help me, women. It is my husband’s will I show my trust in one that may be here Before the mind can call the colour up.

She arrays herself with jewels her husband took from a king "so murderous/

He seemed all glittering dragon." As she dresses the part of a queen, she

realizes that by wearing the jewels:

Myself wars on myself, for I myself --- That do my husband’s will, yet fear to do it --- Grow dragonish to myself.

In accepting the challenge, however, Deirdre begins to grow in stature; in legend she was a romantic heroine, but now Yeats tries to raise her to true tragic action.

As they wait, Fergus brings out the chess board, and Naoise and

Deirdre settle down to play the death game. Yeats's use of the chess game is an especially interesting one. The Queen Edain, of whom the

Musicians sang, was a beautiful woman who had been wooed and taken to the Otherworld ' by King Midir. As Jeffares points out in his historical notes on the play, Edain was changed into a fly by Midir’s wife, who blows her back into this world, where she is reborn three times before

Midir, in a game of chess, wins her back to the Otherworld.^®8

Naoise recalls that it is the same chess table where Lugaidh Red- stripe (a hero of the Red Branch) and his wife played on the night they died; Fergus remembers "a tale of treacherytl A broken promise and a journey’s end," but wants to forget It. As the tale unfolds, the sus­ picion grows and what were Insignificant details take on great importance as the intentions of the King are made.plain.

168'Jeffares, p. 235 106

What Naoise doesn’t know is that the game is between Deirdre and

Conchubar:

Musician: 1 have heard he loved you 0 As some old miser loves the dragon-stone He hides among the cobwebs near the roof.

Deirdre: You mean that when a man who has loved like that Is after crossed, love drowns in its own flood, And that love drowned and floating is but hate; And that a king who hates sleeps ill at night , Till he has killed; and that, though the day laughs, We shall be dead at cock-crow.

Musician: You’ve not my thought. When I lost one I loved distractedly, I blamed my crafty rival and not him, And fancied, till my passion had run out, That could I carry him away with me, And tell him all my love, I’d keep him yet.

Deirdre: Ah! now I catch your meaning, that this king Will murder Naoise, and keep me alive.

Naoise, then, becomes the pawn who is to be sacrificed, for chess Is also a game in which a queen who has been pinned cannot move without putting her own king in check.

Deirdre is trapped, as Naoise says, "She has the heart of the wild birds that fear/ The net of the fowler or the wicker cage.” Her actions now are those of a desparate woman, and she takes on one role after another hoping against hope to change the story, but realizing that she must really find a way to endure it. She is a woman, and she must use the weapons of a woman; if her match is with the King, then she must summon up in her­ self that which is the Queen.

The two young lovers at this point are of divided purpose. Although

Naoise would gladly die for Deirdre, his perception of the situation is that his honor is at stake, and as Moore points out, "the code . . .is 107 bom out of a social convention that strictly subordinates individual feeling to a social good."169 As Deirdre proposes that they fight for their lives, Naolse recalls the .tale of Lugaidh Redstripe and his wife,

"waiting for their end:"

Naolse: They knew that there was nothing that could save them, And so they played chess as they had any night For years, and waited for the stroke of sword. • • • I need no lightning at the end, no beating In a vain fury at the cage’s door.

Then to the musicians he says:

Had you been there when that man and his queen Played at so high a game, could you have found An ancient poem for the praise of it? • • • I have heard the seamew Sat there, with all the colour in her cheeks, As though she’d say: "There’s nothing happening But that a king and queen are playing chess."

Deirdre: He’s in the right, though I have not been bora Of the cold and haughty waves, my veins being hot, And though I have loved better than that queen, I'll have as quiet fingers on the board.

Deirdre knows that love cannot be bound, and as the musicians sing

"Love is an immoderate thing ..." decides that she cannot go on playing the cold-blooded woman. As Moore states:

Deirdre is all woman, and her feminine intuition is at its keenest when she knows that the thing dearest to her --- her love of Naoise --- is beset with dan­ ger on every side. The 'problem' of the play is how, or whether, love can survive in a world of contract, a largely masculine world where the king's word is law because he is the king ... In a special and limited sense, Deirdre and Conchubar are on the same side: both are willing to practice any deception to gain their private ends. ™

l^Mbore, p. 132.

170jioOre, p. 132. 108

Naoise would have her accept death, ”1 would have you die as a queen

should/ In a death-chamber.’’ Deirdre, however, cannot deny the warmth

of life, and pleads with Naoise to remember ’’That old vehement, be­

wildering kiss.” Before he can speak, Conchubar breaks in, and his men

take Naoise in a net.

Deirdre begins to bargain for her lover’s life: ’’all the blame

for what he says should fall on me." Conchubar is willing to bargain

thinking that he can get Deirdre to come to ,his house voluntarily:

"You may go free/ If Deirdre will but walk into my house/ Before the

people’s eyes, that they may know . . ./ I have not taken her by force

and guile." Naoise cannot accept the terms of the bargain, "And do you

think/ That, were I given life at such a price,/ I would not cast it

from me?" Unseen by Deirdre, who is praising her lover before the King,

Naoise is taken behind a curtain and killed.

Conchubar is shocked at her calm acceptance of his death, and is

shamed into letting Deirdre make her farewells to Naoise:

Deirdre: I cannot be your queen Till the past's finished, and its debts are paid . . . They’ll say to one another, "look at him That is so jealous that he lured a man For over sea, and murdered him, and yet He trembled at the thought of a dead face!

Conchubar: How do I know that you have not some knife, And go to die upon his body?

Deirdre: Have me searched, If you would make so little of your queen.

Not wanting his queen to be humiliated, and therefore, himself bear humiliation, Conchubar makes, his fatal mistake and lets Deirdre go to

Naoise. Fergus has returned with an angry mob and demands to see

Naoise and Deirdre; the haughty king believes still that he has won 109

the game. He orders the curtain opened, but when it is drawn back he

cannot believe that Deirdre is dead: "She cannot have escaped a second

time!" Fergus warns Conchubar not to touch the queen, for: „

What's this but empty cage and tangled wire, Now the bird’s gone?

The crowd outside shouts "Death to Conchubar!" But, Conchubar most aptly

states:

Howl if you will; but I, being King, did right In choosing her most fitting to be Queen, And letting no boy lover take the sway.

In "Estrangement" Yeats had written after Deirdre that "the masks of tragedy contain neither character nor personal energy."171 Perhaps in this case, he was not his own best critic, for Deirdre is at once full of character and personal energy. She is the personification of the active will; she accepts the mask, if not with pleasure, certainly with courage. She triumphs in the sense that she does finish the story her way, and in so doing becomes "distinguished, solitary, and proud."

Perhaps in the creation of Deirdre, Yeats’ really created a model or pattern for the queens that were to come in the later plays. The likening of the character of the queen to a wild bird in a cage is an important analogy, for the fact that it is a wild bird suggests a Cer­ tain right to freedom. Likewise, it is a freedom that can not be abro­ gated by the cage of a man, even though that man be a king. Ure notes:

The audience, using her breakdowns and failures to measure the effort that this [action] costs her, is brought into the intimate life of the character by observing her struggle to disguise

17lAutobiographies, p. 319. 110

herself or to discover in herself a self that can outface the worst.172

It is by escaping "for the second time'’ that Deirdre proves herself, as

Conchubar says, ’’most fitting to be Queen.”

Deirdre is indeed an equal opponent of the King, "neither ecstatic nor maddened, but a woman who has found a way of fully possessing her own nature."173 The process of Deirdre’s self-actualization is seen in develop­ ment throughout the course of the play; she is different from the start from characters like Cuchulain, who are assumed to have the stuff of heroism.

At the beginning Deirdre assumes the role of Queen by putting on a queen's jewels or mask, and Yeats keeps up the suspense of the outcome until the final moment when her death is revealed; and indeed, as Mercier comments in reference to The Player Queen, art triumphs over nature. Deirdre’s courage in assuming the mask, and in wearing it "until it becomes the face itself,"174 is certainly the equal of Cuchulain's brand of courage as he fights the waves.

Although she accepts the chess game, Deirdre cannot accept the acknow- leged design for dying in the tale of the hero of the Red Branch. As

Rajan puts it:

The difference between Deirdre and Naoise is that Deirdre is able to create her style. Naoise may die with dignity but he dies trapped and silent. Deirdre fights for her death and makes her death reflect her. Her last scene with Conchubar in which she first displays resignation, then pretends

172ure, p. 53.

173Moore, p. 142.

174jjgrc£er> p. 163. Ill

to be attracted to the man of power, demands to pay her last debts to the old lover so that she can make a better start with the new one, beats down Conchubar’s suspicions and, in a final de­ cisive flair of disdain, challenges him to search her for the knife which is concealed on her, not only imposes her personality on the man at the centre of the spider’s web but also obliges the fate she cannot change, to respond to and fulfil her nature.175

It would seem then that a quality of queenliness lies in the woman’s ability to assess her powers and her weaknesses, and to chart her strug­ gle so that the forces that oppose her do not at the same time overwhelm her. Certainly, Deirdre uses every womanly weapon at her disposal to outwit the enemy, which, Moore notes, includes even Naoise and Fergus, as they unwittingly aid the King.17® In the face of Deirdre’s supremely aggressive denial of a future life as the mock queen of Conchubar, the men in this play pale in comparison with the heroine who has her wits about her to the very end. What remains is the essence of the queen, passionate, dominant, solitary, and of her own making. By definition, then, woman as queen is inherently free to become her truest self.

Deirdre is representative of Yeats’s efforts to rise above "the kind of magnificent hysteria . . . which finds the scullion in the queen."

Just as Deirdre attempts to find the queen within the queen, Decima, in

The Player Queen, attempts to find the queen within the scullion. Again,

Yeats was seeking to show an intense moment of life, this time directly dramatizing Decima’s use of the Mask as she confronts her destiny.

17^Balachandra Raj an, W. B_. Yeats: A Critical Introduction, Hilary House, New York, 1965, p. 63.

176MOore> p. 132. 112

Peter Ure comments that:

In Thé Player Queen the finding of a Mask is linked to the miraculous end of an era and the coming of a new dispensation --- all that is symbolized in Where There Is Nothing by the beast with iron claws and in The Unicorn from the Stars by the trampling, milk- white unicorn . . . The setting is removed from Ireland to a nameless country whose only visible political in­ stitutions are a queen, a mob, and a comic prime minister.177

The central action of the play has been detailed in the second chapter, along with a comparison of Decima with the ineffectual Real Queen. There is a marked difference between the first and second acts of this play, and in that difference lie the developmental procedures which Decima adopts in achieving the position of queen.

The second act of The Player Queen concerns the process of Decima’s stripping away of the old life to make way for a new era. Two devices are especially noteworthy: first, Decima’s relationship with Nona, and their struggles over Septimus; secondly, the use of the unicorn as a symbol of destruction.

As Act II opens, the Prime Minister is in a state of despair, he knows that he will never make the Real Queen able to fulfill her ap­ pointed role. He is also furious that the leading actress cannot be found. What he doesn’t know is that while he has been attempting to teach the Real Queen to be queenly, Decima has been hiding underneath the throne, taking in the lesson. As the Prime Minister and the Real

Queen leave, Nona, another leading actress with the company, comes In a bottle of wine and a boiled lobster, which she sets in the middle of

177Ure, p. 135 113

the floor before retreating to the doorway at the back of the stage.

Cautiously, Decima comes out from her hiding place singing:

"He went away," my mother sang, "When I was brought to bed." And all the while her needle pulled The gold and silver thread.

She pulled the thread and bit the thread And made a golden gown, She wept because she had dreamt that I Was born to wear a crown.

Just as Decima reaches for the lobster, Nona steps out and tells her that she can eat only when she's dressed for the rehearsal. Decima tries to distract Nona by asking her if she knows the song; Nona reveals that it is a song Septimus composed.

Decima says that it is a "song of the mad singing daughter of a harlot" whose father was a drunken sailor, and whose mother foretold that she would marry a prince and become a great queen:

How therefore could she help but braid The gold upon my hair, And dream that I should carry The golden top of care.

The importance of the harlot image as it is imposed on Decima herself is pointed out in Dre's lengthy discourse, as well as in the explana­ tions of Wilson and Melchiori, as they relate the significance of the harlot as the virgin of the new era. Yeats also treats the same theme in his story, "The Adoration of the Magi." The theme of the woman mating with beast (in Player Queen with the unicorn) is also taken up in Yeats's poem "Leda and the Swan;" Ure is of the opinion that these 178 works are of primary importance in the understanding of The Player Queen.

3-78{jre, p. 139. 114

Interested primarily in satisfying her appetite, Decima engages Nona

in a conversation in which several important pieces of informst-fnn are

imparted. Decima says that as she lay hidden she thought she could play

the part of the queen, "a great queen’s part; the only part in the world

I can play is a great queen’s part.” Nona reminds her that she was born

in a ditch and wrapped in a stolen sheet, and that the only thing she's

fit for is low comedy. Decima reveals what the role would mean to her:

The Queen cannot play at all, but I could play so well. I could bow with my whole body down to my ankles and could be stem when hard looks were in season. 0, I would know how to put all summer in a look and after that all winter in a voice.

I understood all this in a wink of the eye, and then just when I am saying to myself that I was bom to sit up there with soldiers and courtiers, you come shaking in front of me that mask and that dress. I am not to eat my breakfast unless I play an old peaky-chinned, drop-nosed harridan that a foul hus­ band beats with a stick because she won’t clamber among the other brutes into his cattle boat. (She darts for the lobster.)

Nona begs her to remember that if there is no play Septimus will go to jail; comically, but cruelly, Decima gives the impression that that’s just where she’d like to see him, "saying to the turnkey, ’I am here because of my beautiful cruel wife, my beautiful flighty wife.’"

Decima’s idea is that every time he thought that way she’d become more beautiful in his eyes. Nona thinks it would just make him hate her, and It is obvious that her idea of love Is that it is gentle and pro­ tective. It Is just as obvious that Septimus really thrives on Decima’s cruelty, and that Nona is in love with Septimus. 115

Now Nona boasts that Septimus is her lover, and that she was present

when he wrote the poem which he gave to Decima, after she had cast him

out of her bed. Nona says that she will play the part of Noah’s wife, and

the players arrive for the dress rehearsal.

The Stage Manager is glad that someone will play the part: "Thank God

it’s a part anybody can play. All you have got to do is copy an old woman’s

squeaky voice." He sets the scene, urging the costumed players to their

places: "All you beasts are to Crowd up on the prompt side." Decima, however, will not have the rehearsal begin until she has her say on the /

subject of the Septimus-Nona alliance:

O', I have been a badger and a weasel and a hedgehog and a pole-cat, and all because I was dead sick of him. And, thank God!, she has got him and I am free. I threw away a part and I threw away a man --- she has picked both up.

Decima now begins to dance among the players, now dressed as beasts aboard the ark: "Now that I have thrown Septimus into her lap. I will choose a new man. Shall it be you, Turkey-cock? or you, Bullhead?" In a frenized dance which eventually includes the entire company, Decima, unashamed, flaunts her sexuality as a weapon:

Dance, Bullhead, dance --- no —- no --- stop. I will not have you for my man, slow on the feet and heavy of build, and that means jealousy,*and there’s a sort of \ melancholy in your voice. What folly that I should find love nothing, and yet through sympathy with that voice should stretch and yawn as if I loved! Dance, Turkey-cock, dance --- no, stop. I cannot have you, for my man must be lively on his feet and have a quick eye. I will not have that round eye fixed upon me now that I have sent my mind asleep. Yet what do I care who it is, so that I choose and get done with it? Dance, all dance, and I will choose the best dancer among you.

The dance is accompanied by Decima’s song: 116

Shall I fancy beast or fowl? Queen Pasiphae chose a bull, While a passion for a swan Made Queen Leda stretch and yawn, Wherefore spin ye, whirl ye, dance, ye, Till Queen Decima’s found her fancy.

Spring and straddle, stride and strut, Shall I choose a bird or brute? Name the feather or the fur For my single comforter?

None has found, that found out love, Single bird or brute enough; Any bird or brute may rest An empty head upon my breast.

While Decima dances, Septimus announces the end of the Christian

Era, and "the coming of a New Dispensation, that of the New Adam, that

of the Unicorn; but alas, he is chaste, he hesitates, he hesitates."

Webster points out that

Decima’s mating dance among the beast-men is a grotesque version ... of the exalted union with the Unicorn . . . Septimus prevents this degraded union by announcing the Unicorn’s exalted marriage. The shift from Septimus as passive spectator to Septimus as impresario of the marriage strongly suggests an attempt by Yeats to master an over­ whelming experience by taking an active role.^79

What has happened, as Septimus "rails upon the Unicorn for his chastity," is the marriage of the themes of destruction and the anti-self, for, as

Melchiori explains:

The Unicorn is chastity itself. Copulation and be­ getting are its opposites, its Mask. Now, the con­ summation by the Unicorn of an act of lust would mean reaching its own opposite, its Mask; and this is outside the range of natural possibilities, it is miracle . . . Only miracle can produce the end of an era and the advent of a New Dispensation. ^-80

12%ebster, p. 133.

180giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art, Macmillan, New York, 1960, p. 67. 117

The "miracle" in The Player Queen is, of course, the way in which the

crown is turned over to Decima.

As the end of the play approaches, the mob outside has begun to

storm the castle, and the players make haste to save themselves. Only

Nona, Septimus and Decima remain behind, and Decima has locked the gate

and has the key; she wants yet another chance to bargain with Septimus.

The problem is she wants to be the queen, but she also still wants

Septimus. However, Septimus has kept faith with the Unicorn, and Decima

has allied herself with other forces. Nona eggs him on to take the key

from Decima by force, and at first he Is unwilling: "Beautiful as the

Unicorn, but fierce ... If i were not her husband I would take the

key, but because I am her husband she is terrible. The Unicorn is ter­

rible when it loves."

Decima is plainly jealous and demands that Septimus swear an oath

never to sepak to Nona again. Septimus says he will "die railing upon

the beast. The Christian era has come to an end, but because of the

machinations of Delphi he will not become the new Adam." Nona snatches

the key away from Decima, and Decima vows to have her killed. At this

point Septimus makes his decision; he is the strong "unforsworm man" who is a "violent virginal creature." Septimus and Nona leave her to her own devices; Decima assumes that she, by staying behind, must die:

Betrayed, betrayed, and for nobody* For a woman that a man can shake and twist like so much tal­ low. A woman that till now never looked higher than a prompter or a property man.

Decima, thinking that the mob is coming to kill her, is startled by the appearance of the Old Beggar, who brays like a donkey whenever the crown is about to change. She takes up the scissors and means to 118

drive them into her heart, but is stopped by the words of the beggar,

"You have a look ’of a foretelling sort. Who knows you might be put

to foretell the death of kings."

The Real Queen enters as the Old Beggar leaves, and spots Decima

trying to kill herself again. They strike a bargain, as Decima, now

greedy for power, offers to die in the place of the Queen: "if only

I could wear that gold brocade and those gold slippers for one moment,

it would not be so hard to die." Decima assumes the robes of state

and is seated upon the throne as the crowd gathers and the Prime Minis­

ter enters accompanied by the Bishop.

The Prime Minister has convinced the crowd that the reason the

Real Queen has not shown her face to the kingdom was "that she might

pray for this kingdom undisturbed." He turns and is astonished to

hear Decima speaking to the crowd:

I am Queen. I know what It is to be Queen. If I were to say to you I had an enemy you would kill him --- you would tear him to pieces, would you not? (Crowd shouts agreement.) But I do not bid you kill any one —- I bid you obey my husband when I have raised him to the throne* He is not of royal blood, but I choose to raise him to the throne. That is my will.

Septimus protests that the "Queen" is his flighty wife. The

Prime Minister warns him that the "miracle" has occurred, believing that Decima means to take him (Prime Minister) as her husband, and she requests an audience with the players. Picking up the prop mask / of the sister of Noah, who was drowned because she thought that Noah was telling lies. She hides her face as the Real Queen had instructed her. She banishes the players, but reminds them that they have lost one thing which she will not restore: 119

A woman player has left you. Do not mourn her. She was a bad, headstrong, cruel woman, and seeks destruction somewhere and with some man she knows nothing of; such a woman they tell me that this mask would well become, this foolish, smiling face!

Decima’s transformation is complete; she has at last progressed from ditch to throne.

Ironically, Yeats has allowed Decima to find the queen within the scullion, but he has charged a high price for power. She gets to be queen, but loses the one she loves, only to be coupled with a stupid

Prime Minister who loves the play about Noah’s ark. She gets to be

Queen, but, as Webster notes, ’’the Queen becomes the harlot-Eve."iOX

Moore makes a very valid point when he says:

If the world has reduced Septimus and Decima to actors who can only play at heroism, their vir­ tues rejected by the sceptical and the vices encouraged by the gullible, so much the worse for the world. We may be amused at the spec­ tacle, and Yeats intends us to be, but we should realize the implications of his comedy. In such a world tragedy is no longer possible. ^-82

Seen in this context, Septimus the drunk is as much a player poet, as Decima is a player queen. The important implication here, though, is that he allows himself to be degraded by the woman. The idea that the way to become the queen is by marrying into it is dismissed as the second act commences. Clearly, queenliness is dependent upon the courage, energy, and resourcefulness of the individual. Yeats makes it most ap­ parent that not everybody has the capacity to be queen, but what he also

183-Webster, p. 135.

^2nQOre> pp. 183-184. 120

implies is that not everyone has the capacity to play queen. Yeats’s rendering of Nona as the trusting conformist who is incapable of cruelty, sheds a new light on the idea of woman as queen. Apparently, an innate quality of queenliness is the ability to be cruel, as Decima so graphically points out in one of her early speeches. In addition, however, the child must learn to reject the toys of the past, and accept the responsibility that infliction of cruelty entails.

Moore calls The Player Queen a "negative inversion of the heroic design:"

Decima, for instance, has something of Countess Cathleen's sublime egoism but none of her moral scruples; she has, too, something of the Faery Child’s anti-Christian gaiety in Heart's Desire but completely lacks the Child’s ingenuous ig­ norance of what it is up to; above all she has Deirdre’s sense of rising to a great occasion, but for Decima greatness is not a matter of em­ bracing immortality for love of another but of mastering others here and now for her own sake.

Decima truly knows what she is up to; like Deirdre, she is not shamed by her sexuality. Where the Real Queen flees to escape from sexuality,

Decima and Deirdre both recognize it as a precious possession to be used in whatever way best suits the demands of the occasion.

Ure believes that Decima is the "new Deirdre:"

Like Deirdre she had the courage and ’energy of soul' to assume the role that would alter her story after the bitter experience of playing parts devised for others' stories; and like Deirdre she achieves her imaginative triumph in the face of death. For Deirdre’s stately passions are not merely ’mocked’ and ’got rid of’ by Decima’s wit and sensuality. The resemblance, as well as the difference, between the pair are the index of a vast, potential enlarge­ ment of the woman's place in Yeats's drama. . .183

183Ure, p. 145 121

The Player Queen points forward in design and treatment to the dance

plays in which the queens are frigid queens, whose function is the cas­

tration of the hero who desires castration; and to The Herne’s Egg in

which the use of the grotesque becomes the playwright’s creative mode.

Reg Skene, in his book on the Cuchulain cycle in Yeats * s plays,

has said that the ’’Celtic queens derive their queenliness from their

fierce pride and not from anything that later ages might characterise 184 as decdrum." Certainly, this idea is justified in terms of Yeats’s

treatment of Emer in both The Green Helmet and in The Only Jealousy of

Emer. In•The Green Helmet, Emer is able to overcome the other two

queens by sheer physical force and a stamina based on her pride in

her husband's supremacy over the other kings. As Laegaire and Conall

envy Cuchulain, so their wives envy Emer.

It is Emer’s pride which allows her to try to kill herself, but

it is Cuchulain’s masculine power in The Green Helmet which subjects

the will of his woman to his own will. As the play ends, Cuchulain

reigns supreme in all Ireland, not because he has defeated the other

Warriors, but because he has been "without fear" in his willingness to sacrifice himself. Yeats offers Emer the same test in The Only

Jealousy of Emer.

John Rees Moore points out that it is only in Yeats’s early plays that sacrifice is "romantically" justified:

In these it is a relatively painless act of deliberate choice, no matter how harrowing the dramatic circumstances may be. But as

184Reg Skene, The Cuchulain Plays of W. B. Yeats, Columbia University Press, New York, 1974, p. 150. 122

Yeats himself experienced disillusion, the dis­ illusionment which had always had a literary attraction for him deepened, and sacrifice be­ came more poignant, grimmer, and more shocking • . . The conditions of the world grow more exigent, choice seems more Illusory, pain more inevitable.185

The hero Cuchulain valued only spirited women for whom the concept of love was also a conflict with self. In The Only Jealousy of Emer the queen finds herself torn apart by trying to reconcile love and freedom, the ideal and the actual.

Yeats began The Only Jealousy of Emer, the most intricate of his .4 . “ - "Plays for Dancers," in 1916 and finished it in January of 1918. The J story is derived from the legendary tale, "The Sick-Bed of Cuchulain."

A prose version, written in 1928, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in

1929, but apparently no production of the original verse play was seen in Ireland until 1948.

Yeats says in his notes to the play that he filled it "with those little known convictions about the nature and history of woman’s beauty."186

The idea that human life is sweetened by death is at the very heart of the paradox which is the statement of this play.

Cuchulain, after fighting with the sea, lies in a death-stupor with

Queen Emer at his side. His mistress, Eithne Inguba, approaches but is afraid to come near because she has "too deeply wronged" the queen. Emer tells her that:

^85john Rees Moore, "Cuchulain, Christ and the Queen of Love: Aspects of Yeatsian Drama," Tulane Drama Review, March, 1962, p. 156.

186yariorum Plays, p. 566. 123

Although they have dressed him out in his grave- clothes And stretched out his limbs, Cuchulain is not dead; The very heavens when that day’s at hand, So that his death may not lack ceremony, Will throw out fires, and the earth grow red with blood. There shall not be a scullion but foreknows it Like the world’s end.

The activity suggested by his glorious and is contrasted most directly

in this play with the passivity of the hero seen only as a form and a

ghost.

Emer asks that Eithne Inguba kiss the body that he may awaken to

life at her kiss. Eithne Inguba is aware of her position in his life,

as is Emer:

Eithne Inguba: He loves me best, Being his newest love, but in the end Will love the woman best who loved him first And'loved him through the years when love seemed lost.

Emer: T have that hope, the hope that some day somewhere We’ll sit together at the hearth again.

Eithne Inguba: Women like me, the violent hour passed over, Are flung into some corner like old nut-shells.

Emer covers his face "to hide the seas” and urges the mistress to be unafraid and take action, "We’re but two women struggling with the sea."

When the body awakens to the kiss it is possessed by the god,

Bricriu, the maker of discord. He offers to restore Cuchulain’s life on the condition that Emer will renounce her love of the hero, and all hope that Cuchulain will at his end return to her in love. Emer pro­ tests and hesitates, but Bricriu shows her the Ghost of Cuchulain being tempted by Fand, the Woman of the Sidhe, who would draw him forever into immortal and unnatural love. Cuchulain resists, remembering the love he 124 had for Emer. Emer at last makes the sacrifice, just at the moment when

the Ghost of Cuchulain is at the point of yielding to Fand. Ironically, when Cuchulain awakens his first words are to Eithne Inguba, who thinks it was she who saved him.

In making her sacrifice, Emer has returned perhaps an unwilling hero to the time-bound world of memory, desire and frustration. In

Emer’s renunciation of her love is seen her greatest act of love; she has denied herself only to witness the victory of another. The price for her has been the sacrifice of all that she holds dear, for as she says, ”1 have but two joyous thoughts, two things I prize,/ A hope, a memory, and now you claim that hope."

In The Only Jealousy of Emer, the queen, like Deirdre and Decima, knows exactly what she is doing; as Ure says, "she chooses this destiny . . . chooses to be cursed." T87 Like Deirdre and Decima, she accepts the terms of the bargain, and is willing and able to pay a price for freedom. In this play, however, Emer makes the sacrifice not for herself, but for the freedom of the one she loves. The sacrifice is a solitary deed which stands as the symbol of a love and nobility much greater than Eithne, in her singular equation of love with physical desire, can even comprehend.

As Skene observes:

Emer’s ability to use desire and jealousy as weapons in her fight with the Sidhe is the mark of the extent to which she is no longer dominated by either . . . Emer’s pride and nobility allow her to love Cuchulain with a love which carries her beyond such pettiness as human jealousy.^88

l87|jre, pp. 74-75..

-*-88Skene, p. 207. 125

Yeats’s own words in his preface to the prose version, Fighting the

Waves, is reminiscent of Deirdre’s line "Myself wars on myself."

Here in Ireland we have come to think of self- sacrifice, when worthy of public honour, as the act of some man at the moment when he is least himself, most completely the crowd. The heroic act, as it descends through tradition, is an act done because a man is himself, because, being himself, he can ask nothing of the other men but room amid remembered tragedies; a sacrifice of himself to himself, almost, so little may be bar­ gained, of the moment to the moment.189

Indeed, until the last possible minute, Emer wars upon herself to find

that self which is capable of making the needed sacrifice. Yeats writes:

’Everything he loves must fly,* everything he desires; Emer too must renounce desire, but there is another love, that which is like the man-at-arms in the Anglo-Saxon poem, ’doom eager.’ Young, we discover an opposite through our love; old, we discover our love through some opposite neither hate nor despair can des­ troy, because it is another self, a self that we have fled in vain.190

In Emer’s final act of love she finds her true self, her true identity as a woman, as a wife, and as a queen. Emer represents a refinement of love for which Cuchulain is not ready. As Moore puts it:

Emer is the love that persists through time by virtue of memory and hope, Eithne Inguba is the momentarily fortunate shadow of the ideal which lies beyond embodiment, and Fand is the dream of the ultimate aesthetic perfection.191

Cuchulain must settle for Eithne, but her effect will be temporary; his salvation depends on the love of the queen whom he deserted. For­ tunately, the queen possesses the freedom to summon up her best self,

189yarioruro plays, p. 569.

190yariorum Plays, p. 571.

l^lMoore, Masks of Love and Death, p. 212. 126

however bleak the consequences; like Deirdre and Decima, but for different

reasons, Emer is capable of using her womanly weapons with pride and

courage. Emer even tries to instill some of the fierce pride of her rival,

but Eithne cannot conceive of a love that, although not reciprocated,

still endures.

In the character of Emer Yeats has provided the woman as queen re­

duced to an archetype; she is almost so refined that she is hard to get

a hold on. Certainly, she exists not within the realm of the world of

the real people around, but within the realm of her inner self. She

leaves the impression that what she does, she does for the sake of her­

self, for it is a matter of debate whether Cuchulain really wants to be

delivered back to the time-bound world.

The musicians who open the play with their song sing "A woman's

beauty is like a white/ Frail bird, like a white sea-bird alone."

Beauty becomes "a strange, unserviceable thing,/ A fragile, exquisite,

pale shell." Fand describes herself as "not complete," and Emer says

that Fand "Has hid herself in this disguise and made/ Herself into a

lie." Fand, once the "bird of prey" in At The Hawk's Well, knows that

memory is beauty’s "bitterest enemy;" but Emer is willing to settle for memory, being unwilling to become the statue that Fand becomes in the musician's closing song.

Ure notes that Emer is "more the heroine of the moral choice"

than any of her predecessors,^92 an(j this difference is at the heart

of the bleakest of Yeats’s ironies which sees life in terms of a

192ure, p. 75. 127

pattern of defeat. Yeats’s theme of commitment to an ideal involves a

penalty which is inescapable; Emer must act upon her choices because it

is precisely those choices which make her what she is. The problem is

that the more queenly, the more noble, the more loving the act, the more painful the reward. Emer, the child of The Green Helmet, could not yet have accepted the consequences of taking on such awesome responsibility; but Emer, the queen, by welcoming the responsibility, along with the pain and the defeat, creates a style which raises her to the wisdom which allows her to continue to survive as something more than a "shadow" or a "dream." As the survivor, Queen Emer is as detached as the music which opens and closes the play, for she alone has the courage to make the choice.

In On Baile’s Strand Yeats characterizes the relationship between

Cuchulain and Aoife, his fierce warrior queen, as a poisonous relation­ ship. Yeats gives full meaning to his idea that love between heroic man and heroic woman is inextricably mixed with its opposite, hatred.

Cuchulain expresses the sentiment to Conchubar:

I have never known love but as a kiss In the mid-battle, and a difficult truce Of oil and water, candles and dark night, Hillside and hollow, the hot-footed sun And the cold, sliding, slippery-footed moon — A brief forgiveness between opposites That have been hatreds for three times the age Of this long - 'stalished ground.

In Mythologies, Yeats gives further relevance to the idea of sex as a sort of arhetypal division which becomes part of the action in the

Cuchulain plays:

Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweet­ heart, and I divine an analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has 128

bid us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike, among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astro­ logers say; and it may be 'sexual love' which is 'founded upon spiritual hate,* is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark between Daemon and sweet­ heart. 193

In On Baile's Strand, Aoife’s wrath is an inevitability, and Yeats

conveys a meaning of woman as queen in her most destructive form.

Emer, in The Only Jealousy of Emer, says of the woman of the

Sidhe that she knows her sor:

They find our men asleep, weary with war, Lap them in cloudy hair or kiss their lips; Our men awake in ignorance of it all, But when we take them in our arms at night We cannot break their solitude.

Aoife, in On Baile's Strand, shows the same propensity for calamity

and destruction. She is an Indomitable woman, committed to mastery

of her man, upon whom she casts an "evil shadow," as on any man who would love her.194 As the singing women say, she is a woman "none

can kiss and thrive;"

But the man is thrice forlorn, Empty, ruined, wracked, and lost, They that follow, for at most They will give him kiss for kiss While they murmur, ’After this Hatred may be sweet to the taste.'

The cruelty of the Player Queen is seen at full force in Aoife, for she is the "will of woman at Its wildest." The association of

Deirdre with the witches is most certainly repeated in Aoife's

193Mythologies, p. 336.

194Letters, pp. 471-472. 129

association with the supernatural elements. The effect on Cuchulain,

as Skene points out, is that "Cuchulain is bewitched . . . Hatred is

sweet to the taste."195

Bloom remarks that Yeats uses the symbol of The Great Wheel in

A Vision to distinguish between the two main types of women in his

life. The beautiful and gentle women are contrasted with the aggres­

sive and beautiful women.196 in A Vision, Yeats says that the aggres­

sive women "walk like queens, and seem to carry upon their backs a

quiver of arrows, but they are gentle only to those whom they have chosen

or subdued."197 As Bloom would have it, Aoife is of the sort "who do

rather than suffer violence."

In A Full Moon in March, the Swineherd-poet is put to death for

desiring the Queen, And the Queen revels in her cruelty. She takes

the same vengeful pleasure in dancing before the severed head as Aoife

takes in sending Cuchulain’s son to be murdered by his father; the

Queen suffers violence, and therefore must do violence. Oates likens the Queen in A Full Moon in March to a kind of Christ, "a supernatural being whose actual body will be violated, sacrificed so that something may be born out of it." In a sense what both women do is devour the ■ V ■ .. ■ . . man they would love, and then spit his back out to take his consequences.

^95skene, p. 183.

196Bloom, p. 253.

197a Vision, p. 139.

^98jnoom,-'p. 252.

199oates, p. 177. 130

The theme of the mutilation of men at the command of women is scat­

tered throughout Yeats’s writings, and curiously, a form of It appears

in Yeats’s last play The Death of Cuchulain, written in 1938-39. Ap­

proaching his own death which would come on January 28, 1939, Yeats made

the preparations for the death of his favorite hero. Having told his wife that ”it was harder for him to live than to die,"200 he penned the

final end for Cuchulain, the man doomed to die his life and live his death.

Peter Ure describes the last play as the most perfect in terms of design:

This is done by the characteristic Yeatsian method, which has operated in all the plays, of building up episode against episode, and character against char­ acter so that the anti-theses they form permit the ironic inferences to be drawn, or culminate in a moment of revealing double-natured action: the heroic decision that is also the mistaking . . . the love or courage whose expression in action unties the knot one way only to tighten it another.201

Again in The Death of Cuchulain the themes of sex and death are interwoven, as Cuchulain once more becomes the victim of his women.

There is, however, a strange paradox in the character of Cuchulain that Yeats expressed in terms of his own life when he wrote:

I have grown happier with every year of life as though gradually conquering something in myself, for certainly my miseries were not made by others but were a part of my own mind.202

As the play opens an Old Man stands upon a bare stage; the stage

2°°Ellmann, p. 285.

20^Ure, pp. 82-83.

202Autobiographies, p. 5. 131

directions say he looks like something out of mythology. He tells the

audience that it is a select group which "must know the old epics and

Mr. Yeats* plays about them." The Old Man promises musicians, a singer,

a piper, and a drummer, to perform the music of the beggarman, "Homer’s

music." He promises a dance, "because where there are no words there

is less to spoil."

Emer must dance, there must be severed head --- I am old, I belong to mythology —— severed heads for her to dance before . . . But I was at my wit’s end to find a good dancer . . . thé tragic dancer, upon the same neck love and loathing, life and death.

Moore calls the events that follow "a dramatic summary" of Cuchu­

lain’s career, the effect of which is "to remind us how much more impor­

tant women are than men in the hero’s life."203 Cuchulain is encircled

first in one episode and then another, by Eithne Inguba, Aoife, Maeve,

the Morrigu, and Emer. In a way, the women melt one into the other as

the hero’s life is paraded before him.

Eithne is the first to come, bearing a message that she says is

from Emer, who urges him to "out and fight," for his house is on fire

and his death is at hand. She carries a letter in. her hand, however, which Cuchulain discovers to be just the opposite: "It tells a dif­

ferent story. I am not to move/ Until to-morrow morning, for, if now,/

I must face odds no man can face and live." Eithne realizes that Maeve has put her in a trance, and is no longer the pretty creature who slept with the boy Cuchulain, but the monster Morrigu, who has "an eye in the middle of her forehead."

2®3Moore, p. 328. 132

Once again Eithne is used by Emer in an effort to save Cuchulain;

this time she is also used by Maeve who would send him to his death.

Skene sees the figures of Emer and Maeve as ’’twin aspects of the femi- O A / nine deity.” with Emer representing love and Maeve representing hate. Bloom observes that everyone except the hero, who has grown

indifferent, is ’’moved intensely by love or hatred for him."

The Eithne episode really hinges on the question of youth against age. Cuchulain is scornful of Eithne*s explanations concerning the letter; he says he is too old for her, that she needs a "younger man, a friendlier man." Cuchulain rationalizes that she is afraid of his violence and really wishes him dead. Both note the changes in Cuchu­ lain, and Eithne goes so far as to say that he is not the man she loved, "That violent man forgave no treacher."

Essentially, the Eithne of The Death of Cuchulain is still the

Eithne of The Only Jealousy of Emer. She is, like Nona, still but a shadow: not a queen, but the second-best mistress of a king.

Cuchulain reminds her that it was his wife who brought him back

"When I went mad at my son’s death and drew/ My sword against the sea." Cuchulain knows that he must make provisions for her; he asks "How can I save her from her own wild words?" Calling a ser­ vant, they decide to drug Eithne; Cuchulain arranges to have her sent to Conall Caernach, who is a "good lover." Moore likens the child­ like Eithne to a "netted bird, wildly beating its wings to escape when there is no escape."205 jn this context she is the white frail

2°4Skene, p. 227.

205Moore, p. 332. 133

bird, an unserviceable thing. Eithne bears little resemblance to Deirdre

who escapes from her cage; indeed, Eithne operates for and because of

others, but not because she seeks her best self. The Morrigu, the goddess

of war, has come between Cuchulain and Eithne , summoned by Cuchulain’s

wish to fight, and to Eithne "All is Intelligible."

When the blackened stage again lights up it is empty. As the stage

directions indicate, Cuchulain enters wounded. He tries to fasten him­

self to a pillar-stone with his belt. Aoife, an erect white-haired

woman enters. In On Baile’s Strand, it is said she had seduced the

hero with her beauty and then spurned him with her sword; it is the word that Cuchlain remembers, though he still does not recognize her:

Cuchulain: You fought with a sword, It seemed that we should kill each other, then Your body wearied and I took your sword.

Aoife: But look again, Cuchulain! Look again!

Cuchulain: Your hair is white.

Aoife: That time was long ago, And now it is my time. I have come to kill you.

Cuchulain is confused, "Where am I? Why am I here?" In a moving scene, Aoife, still a masterful woman in old age, gently retells their story in words that reveal just the slightest vestige of the love they once shared. In a single line, Yeats allowed Cuchulain the poignant acceptance of what is to come; "Because you have the right." Aoife has approached; because Cuchulain killed their son, she has the right to kill Cuchulain!

In ritual fashion, Aoife helps him fasten his belt to the pillar- stone, as they remember what happened at the hawk’s well and on Baile’s strand. She wraps her veil around him, and asks how her son fought; '134

Cuchulain answers the right answer: "Age makes more skilful but not

better men. " Her eloquent gesture with: the veil speaks of the love

which still binds the, and the hatred. Conquered by Cuchulain, Aoife

had sought out his sleeping-place, "laid my virgin body at your side,/

And yet, because you had left me, hated you." In the face of death,

Cuchulain "cannot understand." Aoife leaves to ask "questions" before

she kills him, intending to complete her mission later.

The Blind Man from On Baile’s Strand appears, he has overheard Queen

Maeve offer pennies for ''Cuchulain’s head in a bag.” Cuchulain under­

stands the irony: "Twelve pennies! What better reason for killing a

man?" Seduced to playing the part of the Fool, Cuchulain dies at the

hands of a Blind Man. Yeats draws a parallel as he shows the need of

the Blind Man for the Fool in On Baile’s Strand:

You are but half a king and I but half; I need your might of hand and burning heart, and you my wisdom. • • •' Life drifts between a fool and a blind man To the end, and nobody can know his end.

Cuchulain speaks at the moment of death:

There floats out there The shape that I shall take when I am dead, My soul's first shape, a soft feathery shape, And is not that a strange shape for the soul Of a great fighting-man? • • • I say it is about to sing.

When the stage is lit again, Morrigu, the woman with crow’s head

addresses the dead. She displays the head of Cuchulain, now a black parallelogram; there are six other parallelograms on the backcloth,

six that "Gave him mortal wounds." She claims to have arranged Cuchu­ lain’s dance of death. Emer enters; the Morrigu places Cuchulain’s 135

head upon the ground and leaves.

Emer dances the promised dance. The directions for the dance

indicate that she moves in a way that seems to rage against the heads

of those that wounded Cuchulain, perhaps makes movements as though to

strike them. She moves toward the head of Cuchulain, as if in adora­

tion or triumph. Her dance of lamentation is reminiscent of the dance

of the severed head in A Full Moon in March. As Oates states, "Emer has not caused Cuchulain to be beheaded, but her presence seems to be necessary, in Yeats’s imagination, in order that he become transformed into his ultimate shape."206 she is about to prostrate herself before his head, and hesitates. There is silence, and out of the silence a few faint bird notes.

In strange juxtaposition, the next music is the loud, raucous, modern music of an Irish Fair, sung by a street singer who sings the song "the harlot sang the beggar-man." In one final irony, Yeats asks the question "Are those things that men adore and loathe/ Their sole reality?"

The Death of Cuchulain reveals the many guises of Yeats’s woman as queen. In the positive sense, the queen as the universal woman is the ideal, marked with sweetness, and dominant by gentle persuasion.

In the negative sense, she is the symbol of vanity, seduction, calamity and destruction.

Aoife*s love in old age is the same as her love in youth. She seeks to possess Cuchulain; she.cornea to kill him out of pride and

206Oates, p. 178. .136

remains the perfect mixture of love and loathing. Emer remains his first,

last and greatest love precisely because she Is able to love without pos­

sessing. Like Cuchulain, Emer passes beyond the need for passion, seeking only "that her love may safeguard and preserve him, not that it bend him to her will."207 The Death of Cuchulain is Yeats’s attempt to weigh the values of love and hate; in the attempt he also offers his most balanced, blended view of woman as queen. 137

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

The driving force behind the central thread which runs through and

connects the plays of William Butler Yeats was the unceasing struggle

on the part of the playwright to remake himself. Because of his con­

tempt for sentimentality and his knowledge that personal utterance alone

could be neither the organizing factor, nor the organic structure of any

body of literature, Yeats was particularly careful with the artistic

handling of personal utterance.

Yeats wrote always for and of what he was not, what he wanted to be,

and what he wished he had come from. His terror and emptiness were the

terror and emptiness he recognized to be the polarity between the ideal

and the actual. Yeats hid behind myths; they became his masks. His

drama is his attempt to explain man to himself.

For Yeats, the proper study of mankind was of ten not man, but woman.

The sheer number of fully developed women characters in his work, when

compared to the number of men, is but one index of the vast importance of women in the overall scheme of Yeats's thinking in the creation of his drama. In an age when the prevailing advice to all womanhood was

"look lovely and keep your mouth shut," William Butler Yeats is set apart by his treatment of women in his dramatic work. By and large, his rever­ ence for womanhood remained unclouded by the Victorian romantic paternalism that characterizes the work of so many of his contemporaries. 138

The fact that the women in the plays became the embodiment of Yeats’s

ideals of perfect beauty, heroic nobility, moral superiority and wisdom,

is testimony to the unique willingness and ability on the part of the playwright to deal not with a prescribed stereotyped idea of Irish woman­ hood, but with the multiple facets of the duality of the sexes that he saw at the core of the human condition. Union of the sexes, then, became for Yeats the symbol of the state of unity for which he strove, and for which he saw all human life searching to achieve.

Just as Yeats’s drama is marked with the unceasing revisions which indicate the maturation of the playwright, the treatment of the women in his plays mirror Yeats’s ever-changing view of womanhood. Yeats’s women characters exhibit an intricate variety of temperaments, values and motives.

Even though the treatment and handling of their characterizations vary in manner, in degree, and in intensity, Yeats’s women all have one significant base of operation in common. They all start from the point of view that they have something to prove; something that by nature Yeats’s men are from their beginnings assumed to possess.

Throughout his dramatic literature, Yeats maps out and then admin­ isters the tests which allow woman to prove herself. The very early plays attribute to woman qualities that more properly might be assigned to a child. This paternalistic view of women as child is at its center a romantic view which strips woman of her right to decide whether or not to take on tasks that might be considered unromantic. Seen primarily as an appendage of her mate, the direction and Intensity of the actions of the child/woman are limited by the direction and Intensity of the actions of her mate. Yeats assigns his woman as child a submissive, ''symbolic" 139

place that is typical of. the place of woman in a male-dominated society whose view is that if the woman seeks more, she simply wants to play a

role that she can’t play, and that nobody wants her to play, even if she

could. Yeats assumes that she has no need of a separate identity, and

allows her little or no sense of self.

Woman as child then become the victim of her own guilty feelings about wanting a sense of personal identity, and the guilt extends into and is often expressed through her need to seek an escape from the de­ mands of her sexuality. Her love is a greedy love, although sometimes unconsciously so. She is possessive of her man precisely because her identity is so closely bound up in him, and not in any independent action of her own. Since the love is a possessive love, it is also for the child/woman a potentially destructive force.

Given the relative weakness of the heroines in the plays which treat woman primarily as a child, it might be expected that the heroes would be inordinately strong and dominant. Study of the plays, however, reveals that this is simply not the case. Reacting to his own feelings of weakness and loneliness, Yeats created heroes that were timid, inde­ cisive, and embarrassingly passive. The result is that even the weak romantin women are stronger than their male counterparts;because the he­ roes are weak, the heroines are forced to show an uncharacteristic ag-' gressiveness.

After his ruinous romance with Maud Gonne, Yeats consciously began a period of self-examination which resulted in the construction of the self-sufficient hero who violently denies his need for woman. The changes in his own self-concept are marked in Yeats’s plays by the introduction 140

of Cuchulain. With the coming of Cuchulain both as character and as

Yeats’s mask, the playwright was able to reject the woman as child as

the ideal woman. Yeats then was able to see that the man who overcomes

himself is not so desperately in need of the submission of others; his

ideal then became the merger of love and wisdom.

Yeats’s pre-occupation with the Oedipal crime found expression in

those plays in which woman is treated primarily in her role as mother.

Implicit in this view of womanhood is a concept of sacrifice which some­

times reaches the limits of martyrdom. For Yeats the sacrifice was

simply a natural condition of the concept of womanhood which embraces

the idea that birth is necessary for the completion of the female life

task.

This view of sex as a function rather than as a passion is funda­

mentally and specifically tied to the Irish pre-disposition to the

assertion of the female principle in which fertility dominates social

and religious life. In Yeats’s concept of the matriarchal rule,

motherhood is connected with the physical act of intercourse only

incidentally; in his nightmarish exaggerations of the power of sex,

little note is made of the possibility of the physical act as an act

of loving communion. Indeed, Yeats takes great pains to show the per­

petual virginity of the maternal soul.

Because no love is involved, woman as mother views sex as a physical and spiritual violation of self. Because she must sacrifice part or all of her self, she retaliates by violation of the male.

Yeats’s heroes become angry, raging deprived children dependent on

the all-powerful maternal figure for protection and fulfilment. Yeats's 141 - woman as mother cannot forgive the violation of her self, and the concept

of motherly love takes on the taint of possessive, and therefore destruc­

tive, love which in Yeats’s plays becomes inextricably mixed with hatred

and death. Using the idea of sex and birth as rape of the woman as mother, Yeats manipulates the image of motherly love into a vengeful, punishing emotion capable of stifling mature action on the part of the hero. By turning woman into mother, the playwright turns the hero into a child whose Actions then become a grotesque parody of heroic action.

Yeats's treatment of woman as mother is a direct and dramatic re­ flection of the problems wrought by age-old Irish adherence to a stern matriarchy which presumes that women are superior to men. His problem was the marriage of the ideal pure and noble love to the actual unclean carnal love; his task was to divorce illusion from reality. For Yeats, reality took expression in the unredeemable blackness of the purgatorial view of life, and as a brutal ritual re-enactment of a very private and individual terror.

Yeats’s frequent use of Celtic legend and mythology is no doubt responsible for the great number of queen characters in his plays. In some cases the playwright chose to see the queen primarily in her roles as child or mother, rather than as an inherently free individual seeking her best self. In any case, this merely points up the fact that in the fully developed women characters elements of all three patterns are pre­ sent, and that the playwright controlled the emphasis by careful selection of dramatic events and details. This study has equated those women char­ acters of personal energy and active will with the concept of woman as queen. 142

Inherent in the Yeatsian view of woman as queen are the ideas that man as patriarch resents woman’s self-assertion; that the patriarchal system provokes woman to resistance; that Yeats’s woman as queen is as­ sumed to have the right to pursue personal freedom and self-interest.

These characters attempt to alter their stories, either by stripping away the role imposed by society, or by finding the way to endure it without being overcome by it.

In those plays in which Yeats treats woman as queen, he offers his characters an opportunity to make a crucial moral choice; the process by which the choice is made provides the action of each play. In this manner, the character is seen in development throughout the play, and the playwright offers a means of escápe from the central problem.

If woman chooses not to use the avenue of escape her sexuality be­ comes a most valuable possession in gaining her sense of self, and ulti­ mately her identity. The sacrifice of self to self implies an inherent knowledge of her responsibility for self-mastery, and its high price.

In those cases where the sacrifice is a willing one, woman passes Yeats’s test. Unashamed acknowledgement and acceptance of her sexuality allows woman as queen the right to make her actions reflect her true self, just as it gives her the courage and the means to create her own style.

One point that Yeats makes very clearly is that personal freedom is something that one grants to one’s self. Once granted, the sense of self becomes indomitably strong and is characterized by a fierce solitary pride and a singularly resourceful personal energy. As queen, woman’s intuition is keenest when whatever she holds dearest is in jeopardy; the process of her self-actualization is strongest when her love is given 143

freely and without the attempt to process its object.

Yeats’s vision of the concept of love as a conflict with self reveals

a bleakly ironic philosophy that sees life as a pattern of defeat and

heroic action as the commitment to an ideal which involves an inescapable

penalty. For Yeats’s woman as queen the heroic decision Is sometimes ex­

pressed in love, and sometimes in hatred; whatever the expression, Yeats makes it clear that her presence and her choice to undertake the challenge

of the decision are mandatory factors in the life and death of the Yeatsian hero.

In 1891 an innocent naive William Butler Yeats, in his quest for the

ideal woman, had posed the question, "how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical place?" In 1939, after enduring nearly fifty years of trying to define the limits, frustrations, relationships and meanings of life and death, love and loathing, illusion and reality, William Butler

Yeats was a gravely ill old man. His concepts of life, ritual and woman had suffered bitterly painful changes over the course of his career as a playwright. His last play offers a brilliant kaleidoscope of the Yeatsian woman in all her roles and a poignant portrait of the mind of Cuchulain and Yeats, now one and the same, as a purgatory full of questions and de­ void of answers. 144

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