Dissertation

Yeats, women and Ireland

Howes, Marjorie Elizabeth

1990

Overview

This dissertation argues that representations of gender and representations of nationality are interdependent in Yeats's work, and charts the changing set of formulations through which some of his texts articulate that interdependence. The project also advances the historical claim that Yeats's working life spans a period when mutually constructed discourses about women and Ireland were more closely interconnected than at any other time in the cultural history of Ireland and England. Chapter One examines the confluence of race and gender which characterized turn of the century representations of Ireland and the Irish in the discourse of Celticism. This chapter argues that Yeats's anxieties about the Celtic movement's origins in and structural similarities to British imperialism appear as a set of ambivalent postures towards femininity in his Celtic writings. Chapter Two discusses Yeats's vexed relationship with popular Irish nationalism as it is illustrated in his early plays and their reception. It argues that Yeats's representations of figures like Kathleen ni Houlihan, which Irish nationalism produced in response to specific Irish power struggles, express a combination of attraction and repulsion for the Irish political movement, simultaneously suppressing and reinscribing the class and sectarian divisions between the Irish and Anglo-Irish. Chapter Three traces Yeats's engagement with Anglo-Irish culture as a kindred aristocracy, arguing that his use of the family dynasty as a metaphor for Anglo-Irish tradition expresses the disintegration of that tradition rather than its coherence. Yeats constructed Anglo-Irish dynastic continuity as dependent upon the social construction of femininity and the regulation of female sexuality, and figured Anglo-Irish decline through representations of sexual misalliance and racial degeneration. Chapter Four takes up an alternate mood in the middle and late Yeats that articulates criticisms of the Irish Free State's hegemonic definition of Irish identity, which was founded in large part upon the severe regulation of women and sexuality. Yeats resists this Irish identity through representations of transgressive female desire and rebellious feminine personae which leave the Free State's equation of sex with sin intact and assert an alternative metaphysics which incorporates sexuality and the body.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888) / British & Irish literature / British and Irish literature / Foucault, Michel / Literature / Said, Edward / Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955) / Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
• ISBN: 9781392851852, 1392851858