아일랜드의 민족주의자이자 작가인 윌리엄 버틀러 예이츠(1865-1939)의 문학적 재능에는 여러 측면이 있다. 아일랜드 신화와 민속을 영국 식민지주의에 대한 저항으로 활용하고, 1916년 부활절 봉기와 같은 아일랜드 민족주의 투쟁의 긴 역사에서 일어난 사건을 찬양하고, 철학적 묵상, 선견지명적 순간, 상징주의, 낭만주의 등 그는 다양한 문학 장르에서 이 모든 것을 다루었다. 예이츠의 시가 그의 문학 작품에서 가장 중요한 자리를 차지하고 있다는 것은 부인할 수 없다. 예이츠의 성격의 여러 측면 중에서 아일랜드 혁명가 모드 곤의 연인으로 묘사된 예이츠는 잘 알려져 있다. 그녀와 그의 삶에 들어온 다른 여성들에게 영감을 받아 그는 상당수의 연애시를 썼다. 이 논문의 목적은 예이츠의 선택된 연애시에서 여성에 대한 표현을 분석하여 남성의 여성에 대한 태도와 다양한 사랑의 뉘앙스에 대한 그들의 경험에 빛을 비추는 것이다. 이는 아일랜드와 세계 다른 지역의 여성 운동에서 일어난 사건으로 인해 여성의 지위가 변화했다는 점을 감안할 때 중요하다. 이 논문은 세기의 전환기에 공공 영역에서 활동하는 “새로운 여성”이 등장했음에도 불구하고 예이츠의 연애시를 포함한 연애시는 궁정 연애의 전통을 이어가며 사랑하는 사람의 아름다움과 수동성을 찬양한다고 주장한다. 이 논문은 페미니즘 이론의 통찰력을 이용하여 시를 분석한다.

셰익스피어의 여성 캐릭터에 다양한 성격 유형이 존재하는 것과 대조적으로 예이츠 극에 등장하는 여성 캐릭터는 사악하지는 않으나 주로 수동적이고 상징적이다. 극에 있어서 예이츠는 셰익스피어만큼 여성 캐릭터에 대한 성격의 폭이 넓지 않았다. 셰익스피어의 여성 캐릭터는 좀 더 주체적인 특징과 발전된 양상을 보인다. 그러나 예이츠 극에서의 여성 캐릭터는 일반화된 성격을 가지고 있다. 즉 그들은 예이츠의 민족주의적인 목적에 따라 형성되었기 때문에 사회적, 문화적 고정관념을 극복하지 못하였다.

예이츠에게 여성은 거의 일생동안 시의 촉매이자 모티브 역할을 충실히 했다. 그들 중에서 모드 곤과 레이디 그레고리, 그리고 하이드-리즈는 그의 시와 극에 지대한 영향을 미쳤을 뿐만 아니라 문학과과 철학관의 형성에도 큰 영향을 미쳤다. 이 논문에서는 모드 곤, 레이디 그레고리, 하이드-리즈와 같은 여성들이 그의 시와 극작 품에서 어떠한 이미지로 나타나며 어떠한 의미를 전달하는 지 고찰하고자 한다.

예이츠의 후기시를 이해함에 있어 여성이미지는 매우 중요한 요소이다. 시인은 대표적인 여성이미지로서 모드 곤과 크레이지 제인을 제시하여 아일랜드인의 개인적, 역사적, 민족적 정체성에 대한 상징으로 삼아왔다. 특히 상류계층의 양심적 지 식인의 대표인 초기시의 모드 곤과 달리 후기시에서 큰 비중을 차지한 창녀 크레이지 제인의 상징적 역할은, 궁극적으로 시인이 거칠고 조악하지만 적나라한 삶의 이중성을 가감 없이 수용하는 아일랜드 민중의 지혜에 대한 신뢰를 드러낸다. 그러나 예이츠는 여기에 그치지 않고 모드 곤과 크레이지 제인의 한계를 극복하고 동시에 그들의 상징 성을 통합하는 여성이미지를 꾸준히 제시하고자 노력하는 데 바로 댄서이미지가 그것 이다. 예이츠에게서 댄서란 앞서 두 여인의 이미지가 상징하는 양심적 지성과 민중적 삶의 지혜를 연결하는 동시에 각각이 지니는 한계를 극복하는 이미지로서 예이츠 후 기시의 궁극적인 여성이미지이면서 민족적 구원을 약속하는 상징이다.

예이츠의 초기 서정시는 문명과 이상화된 이미지들의 결합일 뿐만 아니 라 예이츠가 평생 동안 관심을 가졌던 아니마 문디 상징의 단초를 보여주고 있다. 특히 이 초기 시들에는 예이츠의 난해한 신비주의에 대한 관심과 함께 개인적인 관계를 가진 여성과 신화적인 여신을 상징하는 장미의 상징이 자주 등장하며, 이 장미는 시인으로서 의 개인적인 정서와 통합된 범인류적 기억인 세계령의 강력한 연결고리로 나타난다. 초 기 시에서부터 세계령은 예이츠의 작품에 창조적 구조이며 시적 영감인 뮤즈이다.

본 논문은 예이츠 시 속의 모드 곤, 마키에비치 백작 같은 여성민족주의자들의 모습을 다룬다. 영국의 지배에서 독립하기 위해 저항하는 민족주의자 모드곤은 예이츠가 사랑했고 수차 청혼하여 뜻을 이루지 못한 여인이다. 그녀는 예이츠의 시에서 중요한 인물이며, 본 논문은 아일랜드의 정치를 다른 시를 논한다. 또 한 명의 민족주의자 마키에비치 백작은 아일랜드 국회에 최초 여성 국회의원이 되었고, 그녀도 아일랜드 독립을 위해 투쟁했다. 예이츠는 그녀의 적극적인 정치 참여가 나타나는 시를 썼다.

This article explores Yeats's “A Woman Young and Old.” All the poems in the series “A Woman Young and Old" were written between 1926 and 1929. During this time Yeats was lamenting the vulgarity of hegemonic Irish culture. This series poems described feminine sexuality in the social and cultural repression of women. The sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressive society. In these poems Yeats insisted on the beauty or importance of feminine sexuality and sexual desire. “A Woman Young and Old” takes up Yeats's metaphysical questions - eternal beauty, the relationship between body and soul, the interdependence of sexual love and spiritual hate. Feminine sexuality is the mark of the rebellion against conventional social and cultural frame. Yeats's female personae embody a sacred sexuality and Yeats's sexual frankness close to a sexual mysticism. Feminine sexuality and desiring female bodies are defiantly asserted, and asserted specifically as transgressions, because they are precisely what is forbidden. In this series poems the female body and desire is expressed in Yeats's criticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. Linking of feminine sexuality and the sacred indicates Yeats's critique of Catholic Irishness. The speakers of the female sequence are embattled with a social and symbolic order that seeks to confine them. Yeats described sexual freedom and defiance against the authority and opposition in patriarchal society. Yeats's increasingly explicit emphasis on feminine sexuality and sexual desire at that time. Whereas Irish Catholicism viewed the desires of the body as threats to the soul, for Yeats the two were interdependent. Yeats insisted that “the love of man and woman, and inseparable physical desire, are sacred”(UPII, 451). This article tries to show how Yeats's of awareness of feminine sexuality is linked with a sexual mysticism and the sacred. Yeats connected women's body and desire with a sexual mysticism and the sacred in such a bold and defiant way.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

Yeats suffered greatly from the love affair with Maud Gonne but particularly from the contradiction that she manifested. The poet devoted his love and poems to her in vain. But the contradiction is not peculiar or unique problems to Yeats but all men in Western patriarchal tradition. Indeed women for men are figuring simultaneously as madonna and whore, angel and beast. Because the woman has the power to provoke the tumult of desire in man and to gain over him through the desire, the men is afraid of being weaken by her, infected with her feminity and of then showing himself incapable or castrated. The fact that woman from a phallocentric viewpoint appears to be castrated is as reassuring for men as it is alarming. On the one hand, he projects her as lack and sees himself completed in her, thus confirming male hegemony. On the other hand, the so-called castrated woman can reflect back to man a dangerous paradox: if she had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger by her. In order not to be a paralyzing threat, a woman must have phallic attributes and must become the phallic woman idealized beyond sexuality. The phallic woman is thus fantasized by the man as a defense against castration anxiety. Representation of the phallic woman, he believes, protects him against doubts about his masculinity. Making her like a man conserves the man’s narcissism. The ambiguous nature of the woman is well presented in Yeats’s “Presences.” Here Yeats categorizes the woman as archetypes “harlot,” “child,” and “queen.” And their seductive “rustle of lace or silken stuff” evokes a contradictory femaleness over which he has no rights and which can move rapidly from vulnerable to ruthless, even turning that very vulnerability into a disturbing power over him. In “A Bronze Head,” the woman representative of Maud Gonne remains mysterious and inaccessible, overflowing the ‘images’ and ‘forms’ in which he tries to capture her. In “No Second Troy,” Yeats blames Maud Gonne for her violent political action, perhaps because she cannot be desexualized, idealized, or fetishized fully as he wishes. One of the reasons that Yeats is desperate to prevent the woman from being involved in the politics is that for Yeats the ideal form of a woman would not allow for difference to infiltrate the idealized autonomy. In this sense Yeats prays for his daughter to be the woman with nature of mindless organic spontaneity and for her bridegroom to bring her to a house of custom and ceremony. The idealization of the woman as nature into civilization, however, will not entirely do because it inescapably exposed to the fearful power of death. As Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents, Eros’s sublimation of the nature into civilization inevitably exhausts its power, which leaves it vulnerable to Thanatos that then threatens to destroy the social order one has so laboriously constructed. The dilemma of sublimation is well explicated in Yeats’s “Mediations in Time of Civil War“ where he perceives the conflict between insistent demands of death drive and the inhibitory requirements of civilization. “Leda and the Swan” shows that the phallic civilization is born together with the brute power of violence and destruction that is to threaten all the social orders. By desexualizing, idealizing, or sublimating the woman, the man may reduce the horror of castration. But his attempt is radically self-defeating and self-undoing, for the more he sublimates her, the more likely she becomes the destroyer of ideal orders. Because of this paradox, the woman remains ontological aphoria to Yeats.

In this study, I trace out the influence of woman’s images on Yeats in biographical and feministic point of view. For Yeats, woman was the major poetic motif and source of inspiration; meeting, interacting, and parting with women gave him a motive for poems and deepened philosophy as well as his literary view. As Yeats said in his Essays and Introductions, he "writes of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness,” and "would die of loneliness but for women.” Indeed, woman for Yeats is the focal point of various themes such as praise of heroic and ideal beauty, despair caused by unrequited love, friendship, maternal love etc. Among many women who influenced Yeats, Maud Gonne was the most important figure. It seems that she was a real feminist who tried to seek a dignified life and ideal as a woman, cultivating her identity and soul rather than being a common woman who is financially and physically subject to man and to cultivate outward appearance to draw man's attention. Even though not accepting Yeats's love, she was not an extreme feminist who denied the entire role and realm of man and supported just woman's opinion and benefits. Instead she seemed to be a moderate feminist who tried to find the real freedom and hope for the Irish women and children who suffered from the dignity and violence of a patriarchal husband as well as chronic poverty. Yeats’s painful but productive relationship with Maud Gonne determined his favor for certain type of women with masculinity rather than with a passive, complaisant, and traditional beauty. As in his fascination of Niam suggested, Yeats liked to praise beautiful women who have masculinity, and he took a courtly love attitude to receive their love. Therefore, he tried to write poems which needed great labour like a woman’s childbirth and praise women of a masculine spirit. Yet Maud Gonne’s constant decline of his suit and radical political inclination, and his depressed Libido made him deeply feel the pain caused by such a mannish woman. Especially, the sudden confession of her past love with Millevoye and her marriage with MacBride gave him a great shock and changed his view of woman. Now he instead dreamed of living a comfortable life with a woman who has traditional feminine nature. At last, Yeats got married to Hyde-Lees with such feminine factors, only to find that her charm and sexual satisfaction didn’t last long. After the conflict with Maud Gonne in 1919, Yeats came to emphasize conservative view of woman, insisting that woman should live in a pure blessing and give up her opinionated mind. He asserted that woman with perfect beauty could be happy only when she made herself beautiful and played a faithful role as man’s supporter. In this period, Maud Gonne’s images was painted dark in his poems; ‘intellectual hatred’, ‘opinionated mind’, and ‘a woman who lost the Horn of Plenty’. But such dark images soon disappeared. Yeats again longed for his lost love, Maud Gonne. However he could not escape from the conflicts between body and soul, ideal and reality. Such a dilemma made him pay attention to Unity of Being, the harmonious union of body and soul, and create his persona, Crazy Jane. Yeats's views of woman suffer many changes through his earlier, middle and later poems. It can be said that his views of woman are expressed according to the increase or decrease in femininity or masculinity inherent within Yeats’s self, the influence of his suppressed libido, and his attitude toward Irish politics. However it can’t be denied that woman was the continuous motif and inspiration of his poems.

There were so many common thoughts in Yeats’s poetry and Lao tzu’s philosophy on the Feminine Principl.” Both Yeats and Lao tzu lived in turbulent times. They thought the cause of anarchy in their world resulted from the True God’s absence as the Feminine Principle. Thus they were eager to support it as the Primary principle in the world. Yeats was a gnostic visionary. He believed in God’s androgynous Trinity; Man, woman and child. A Child is a daughter or a son. Yeats refused to accept the masculine Trinity. Yeats searched for the hidden Goddess who is called Sophia or Binah as the dark Mother in the Cabalah. Binah is identified with Saturn(male). So Sophia is androgynous. Yeats called Sophia by many names. Those included Rose, Countess Cathleen, Nimah, Helen and Jane as the symbol of immortal Beauty. All of his poetry owes much to a symbolism derived from the Rosicrucianism, Cabalism, Christian Gnosticism and Orientalism. Orientalism included the Taoism of Lao tzu. I read that Yeats was deeply impressed by the Chinese book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, which is explained Taoism. Because Taoism is s common with Yeats’s main poetic theme, which is the Feminine Principle and the hidden God. Although Lao tzu lived about 2,500 years ago, he had almost the same idea as Yeats. His main theme is Tao, the way which symbolizes the Feminine Principle, like Sophia in Christian Gnosticism and Cabalism. We can say Tao is intangible and permanent, governing the impermanent became it symbolizes the Mother of all beings. Tao especially symbolizes darkness. Thus I can say that “dark Sophia” in Yeats’s poetry is identical to Tao. Lao-tzu described that Tao stands for the feminine archetypal imagery such as water, darkness, valley, cave, abyss. Especially Lao tzu’s heavenly Virtue, Tao is called “Hyeon-bin” which means a black female. Thus Tao is identified with the dark Mother, Sophia in Yeats’s poetry. Also Lao tuz eulogized the virtue of Tao as water. For example, Lao tzu explained that “water’s virtue is the highest goodness.” This symbol of water symbolizes the Feminine Principle like Sophia’s characteristics in Yeats’s poetry. Thus, they all refused to accept the andro-centric society.

In reading Yeats’s works rooted in the ancient Irish tradition it will be helpful to understand celtic myth. Among extraordinary women from the ancient celtic tradition I studied three Irish women in W. B. Yeats's works: Queen Maeve in The Old Age in Queen Maeve, Deirdre in Deirdre, and Emer in The Only Jealousy of Emer. Moyra Caldecott’s Women in Celtic Myth provides much knowledge about Irish women characters. For the Irish stories the writer consulted Jeffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas, Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, and T. W. Roleston’s Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. Maeve is the most written about among the Irish heroines: she is beautiful, forceful, strong, proud, devious, clever, lusty, and bloodthirsty. Daughter of Eochaid, the High King, she married a relatively minor king, Ailell, son of Ross Ruadh, king of Leinster. Their castle was on the plain of Magh Ai in the province of Connacht. Although Ailell was no weakling, he was, without a doubt, secondary to Maeve in many ways. She had property of her own: cattle, treasure and land that couldn’t match what he had. In fact the whole bloodbath of war to steal the Brown Bull of Cuailnge was brought about because there was one possession Ailell had that outshone her own: Ailell had a better bull. Maeve is the Queen most quoted as showing the privileged position of celtic women in the Iron Age. They were equal in every respect to men, and in some cases they were superior. They owned property; they could, as kings did, “divide gifts” and “give counsel”; they could ride chariots, fight battles, and dispose of lives. And with all this power and freedom went the recognition that women’s sexual needs were as legitimate as men’s. In The Old Age of Queen Maeve Yeats rehandling a given myth depends upon a combined knowledge of the myth that he learned and Yeats’s personal vision, sometimes even his personal affairs. Yeats’s love Maud Gonne is compared to Queen Maeve. A god of love, youth and poetry, Aengus who is crossed in love reminds us of the poet himself. In celtic myth there is a story of the love between Deirdre and Naoise: love with a lot of risks and sacrifices. This love is contrasted with the possessive and destructive lust of Conchubar. Then there is a theme of honor and dishonor. And finally there is beauty. Much is made of the extraordinary beauty of Deirdre, and it is a male reaction to her beauty that brings about “the sorrows.” In Deirdre Yeats selected certain elements which seem to be characteristic of the tale and dramatic in themselves, and introduced three wandering musicians, who are not in the myth. Deirdre was the Irish Helen, and Naisi her Paris, and Concobar her Menelaus. Yeats’s thematic structure provides the clearest link between the Irish myth and heroic romance. He wrote it in praise of the heroic woman, of “wild will”, and of passionate love and the powerful and joyous shattering of common codes and lives. Emer is the admirable wife of a great hero Cuchulain. She is beautiful, healthy, strong, intelligent, and vigorous. Her love for Cuchulain is the best of human love. In The Only Jealousy of Emer Yeats elevates Emer to the same tragic stature as Deirdre, the heroine of his Deirdre. Told by Bricriu that she must renounce her love for Cuchulain as the price for his return to life, Emer decides at the last moment to accept this bitter choice and return Cuchulain, ironically, to the arms of his mistress. These celtic women’s beauty may be representative not only of physical beauty but also the high aspirations of the soul. They are not virgins but mothers or wives. The heroic women show us that love makes humans mature. In these Plays Yeats turned to romantic dreaming, the tradition of nobility in the ancient celtic myths.