Prisoners Of Patriarchy: Images Of Women In Yeats' Poetry

The thesis is composed of six chapters as follows:The first chapter begins with a brief introduction of Yeats' great literary achievement, the literary review, the assumptions, the methodology and this thesis' contribution.William Butler Yeats, winner of Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, is the leading poet in English poetry of the 20^th century. He accomplished great achievements in the fields like Romanticism, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Realism and Modernism. In our country, Mr. Fu Hao is considered the authority in the studies of Yeats. He makes an important contribution by introducing Yeats to China and focusing on Yeats' Occultism and Symbolism. Moreover, Mr. He Ning focuses on Yeats' modernism. The latest studies of Yeats abroad are also very fruitful. They mainly concentrate on the following aspects: the mask theory, symbolism, political poems, romanticism, Occultism and Yeats' life. However, in the studies of Yeats' poetry at home and abroad, those on images of women in Yeats' poetry have not been really touched sufficiently. So this thesis will study Yeats' poetry from the lens of feminism. Since the 1970s, feminist criticism has been growing rapidly in the West and playing a more and more important role in the literary world. It has provided us with new methods of reading literature, which enable us to gain a different insight into the texts. Therefore it is an undeniable further step in judging and interpreting women in literature.The second chapter focuses on the influence on Yeats' creating of typically archetypal images of women. Generally speaking, one's living experiences, beliefs, historical and cultural environments play an important role in his literary creation, especially when he is living in a historical transition. Yeats' literary career is also heavily influenced by those factors. These factors include the social influence and his personal relation with Maud Gonne.Then comes the third chapter analyzing the goddess in Yeats' poetry of the early period. Goddess myth does not mean woman cult but woman denial. Myths represent goddesses as hostile to women, or show them pursuing many activities foreign to the experience of mortal women. In cult, on the other hand, attention is paid both to the fulfillment of women's needs and to the delineation of their proper roles in society. In Greek myth, there are 5 chief goddesses but 3 of whom are virgins and the other 2 of whom come of no better. So goddess myth is, in fact, a mask of a hatred of the unclean female body and a denial of female desire.In youth, Yeats, being a romanticist, seeks tranquility, comfort and inspiration from idealized world, including in the idealized goddess. But, in his poems, he speaks less of her than the feelings she arouses in him. She exists just as absent woman, a woman who does not directly appear in Yeas' poems in physical form, therefore their existence could be easily ignored. They are denied a voice and a subjectivity of theirs. Furthermore, Yeats sees love poetry as a minor in which women see themselves. So he idealizes women as elevated but silent in his works in order to persuade the aristocratic women it is better to be adored than to be emancipated. In a word, goddess can be understood as Yeats' means of highlighting his patriarchal sense. The image of women as goddess is created by men in their imagination and fashioned to suit their needs.Next is the fourth chapter which enquires into the terrible beauty in Yeats' mid-term poetry.In Yeats' time, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Yeats and other male poets to retain their dominance over women, but due to the deeply-rooted conceptions and conventions that had existed for a long time, they felt reluctant to give up the dominance. Hence, the suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion and resisting.Then Yeats, in "Easter 1916" represents the women participating in the political campaign as terrible beauties and in "A Prayer for my Daughter" chauvinistically envisages his young wife and daughter as angel in the house, reinforcing the patriarchal views that "If you are not an angel, then you are a monster" (Bressler. 2004: 186).The fifth chapter investigates the victim of rape as the image of women in the last period of Yeats' poetry.In Yeats' last period of poetry, there is a typically conventional image of women, victim of rape. Undoubtedly, rape myth reflects a strong system of patriarchal values. It institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, which fuses the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female. In patriarchal society, women are symbolically and literally regarded as the sexual toys. At the same time, men get more pleasure and self-assertion through rape or violence, without thinking of women's throes.Leda is known for her being raped by Zeus in Greek mythology. In the poem "Leda and the Swan", Yeats repeats the story. It goes through several times of revision, each time further emphasizing the disparity between dominance and submission. According to Yeats, it is a great pity that Leda's beauty brings her trouble, danger and shame. The image of women in the context of this poem symbolizes weakness and inability to react against male's oppressions. Ironically enough, the Swan is regarded as a noble beast. It naturally symbolizes the males and their dominating power. In the final chapter, a conclusion is reached as a summary of Yeats' three periods of creating of images of women. These three images of women, whether goddess or terrible beauty or victim of rape are typically archetypal. They are prisoners of patriarchy.Yeats lived in a patriarchal society in which "Woman is a myth, an object of male fantasy created out of the minds of male subjects who represent her as it suits their purposes, as objects within their fantasies" (Beauvoir, 1972: 174). "The image of women as we know is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs" (Millett, 1977:46).This patriarchal ideology was deeply rooted in the minds of most people especially in the minds of men. Meanwhile, Yeats, as a white, male, middle-class, Protestant citizen of British Empire, with an acknowledged debt to canonical English writer, belonged to the dominant literary tradition, so Yeats, inevitably and subconsciously, created images of women according to patriarchal way of characterization.Moreover, this chapter involves the limitations of this thesis. Yeats' identity was always in contradiction. His complex position in history and culture, his long obsession with Mysticism or Symbolism, his indeterminate gender identity, his oblique relationships to the canonical tradition and his remaking of his poetics render simple judgments impossible. My aim is not to set all truth upon one side, but to propose a new map that is as partial as others and to do a little part for the further understanding of Yeats and Yeats' poetry .