To Yeats, as Mario Praz remarks in The Romantic Agony, sex was “themainspring of works of imagination”(vx). This paper is an attempt to read Yeats’s“A Woman Young and Old” in terms of poetic representations of femininesexuality and gender. All written in years 1929 through 1931, the sequence ofeleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressivepatriarchal society.
The first and introductory part of the paper briefly surveys the social andcultural background of the poems. The centrality of the subject of femininesexuality and gender in these poems shows that Yeats saw the social and culturalrepression of women and their sexual desire as one of the serious and urgentproblems facing Ireland at that time. In Ireland of the 1920s, where the newnational frame was being created under the hegemony of the Catholic Church andthe middle class, the general attitude toward the women’s position and role andtheir sexual expression was very conservative and repressive.
The main part of the paper closely reads the poems of the sequence, from“Father and Child” in which a daughter boldly asserts sexual freedom in defianceof her father’s opposition and criticism, to “From the ‘Antigone’” which showsanother daughter defying the authority of king for the sake of filial love and thefreedom of conscience. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how Yeats’sawareness and affirmation of the female body and desire is expressed in hiscriticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society,especially the Catholic Church. In opposition to that sexually repressive and asceticculture, he shows women’s body and sexual desire in such a bold and affirmativeway that the poetic expression itself turns out to be an effective critique of thatculture.