Treatment of Women in W. B. Yeats

It is not an easy task to find out any clear-cut answer regarding Yeats and his feelings towards the woman in his poems. Yeats lived in a sexist and oppressive time when the “woman question” and the “exploration of sexual identity” became “major cultural issues of the time” But unlike many men of the time, Yeats is seen, in his poems, as a progressive male, struggling…. to recognize women question.

         

In fact, “Yeats loved, liked, collaborated with, and respected women- most of the time. His best friends were all women that included Madame Blavatsky and Maude Gonne, a fierce advocate for girls and women. Both of these women greatly influenced Yeats in his life, and later, in his poetry.

Yeats in his poems makes himself ambivalent towards his opinion. As Yeats himself explains:

“A poet writes always of his personal life” observing that “all that is personal soon rots: it must be packed in ice or salt” (Cullingford, 9).

Therefore the reader of Yeats’ must always remain vigilant, understanding that the poem may not reflect the personal opinions of Yeats himself.

          In his poems, No Second Troy, Michael Robartes and the Dancer and Crazy Jane, Yeats tries to resolve the struggle between what society expects of women and what women themselves want. No Second Troy explores transgressing stereotypes, Michael Robartes and the Dancer explores the effect of changing sexual roles and Crazy Janegives voice to female sexuality.

 

In No Second Troy, Yeats asks a rhetorical question about a woman of transgressing stereotype:

“Why should I blame her [?]”

Because, she is simply seeking her own freedom. She

“taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?”

Woman, here, is taking charge of her own destiny, creating a new society with courage, violence and desire. For, she has

“beauty like a tightened bow, a kind/

That is not natural in an age like this/

Being high and solitary and most stern?”

Thus, Yeats creates in the poem a transgressing heroine who creates change, not through the “lure” of feminine wiles, but through the “violent” and “most stern bow.” This new woman creats enormous conflict both in society and within Yeats himself.  However, his application of the words “violent”, “street”, “beauty” and “Troy” in the last line draws our attention. Thus, the poet shows

“a force field of unresolved feelings and of deep ambivalence about woman” (Brown, 183).

         

 

          In Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Yeats attempts to discuss the effects of changing sexual roles on society. There is a quarrel taking place between the “He” and “She” of the poem. “He” tries to convince “She” that

“Opinion is not worth a rush/

…it’s plain/

The half-dead dragon was her thought,/

That every morning rose again/

And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.”

Here, the man tries to convince the woman to kill the “dragon” that is her opinion and thus to free the dancer “from the terrors of abstract opinion” (Kline, 143).

          But, Yeats’ “she” raises her voice answering directly back to the man

She is infringing on “Robartes’s patriarchal attempt to restrict women’s role” (Brown, 279).

          “May I not put myself to college”

But Robartes’s sexism relentlessly argues  that true blessedness comes from perfecting the body and not from developing the mind.

“what mere book can grant a knowledge/

With an impassioned gravity/

…………………

Thus, the argumentation goes on between “he” and “she” in the poem which ends with her underculting all of Robartes’s arguments in the poem

          “They say such different things at school,”

Here it is not easy to guess if Yeats is supporting or silencing her opinion. In fact, this poem is really a

“social quarrel about the effect of changing sexual roles; but it is also that quarrel with himself [Yeats], out of which, he insisted, poetry is made”

 

            

          In the poem, Crazy Jane, Yeats sets Crazy Jane “Against these civilized, decorous and accommodated women [in Yeats’ other poems],” giving voice to female sexuality. (Innes, 96).

 

          An outlaw and never confined, Jane possesses passion and energy:  She discards traditional Christianity. The Bishop relentlessly tries to move her back inside to the traditional realm of womanhood:

“Those breasts are flat and fallen now,”

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.”

But “Jane opposes the sterility of the celibate Bishop” (Cullingford, 241):

“My friends are gone, but that’s a truth/

Nor grave nor bed denied,/

Learned in bodily lowliness/

And in the heart’s pride.”

Here she finds true freedom not in the home, but in freedom from home and in free sexuality. Thus, Yeats’ writes of a gloriously free and openly sexual woman defying the nature of traditional womanhood.

After all of my research, I find that Yeats and the “woman question” have no easy answers. No Second Troy, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, and Crazy Jane all demonstrate Yeats’ own struggle between accepting the traditional role of woman and of helping to usher in a new and progressive vision of womanhood. While it seems obvious that the influence of his feminist friends, Maude Gonne and Madame Blavatsky, and his progressive Occult teachings, dominate the words of his poems, it is also easily recognizable that Yeats continues to struggle with the more traditional sense of male and female roles. These three poems are the articulation of his internal struggles and they make for a murky understanding of just were he lies in the “woman question.”      

Works Cited:

Brown, Terence. The Life of W.B. Yeats. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001.

Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry. New York: Syracuse U. Press, 1996.

Kline, Gloria C. The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman. Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983.