Mask, Middle Situation And The Map Of World

The Winner of1923Noble Prize in Literature, William Butler Yeats, one of the foremost figures of modern literature, was not only an influential poet but also a fruitful playwright and the driving force behind the Irish drama movement from1890s to1930s.To Yeats’s life and works, the idea of mask is an important principle, especially in the writing of plays. Proceeding from this idea, he puts his plays into the middle situations, which is developed from personal experience to the national identity and the view of the world.The idea of mask is not only the way of constructing self identity, but also the way of imaging Others and the communities. Based on the literature review about the studies on Yeats’s drama.Chapter One of this paper would discuss Yeats’s thoughts of mask and the correlation between these thoughts and the middle situations of his drama.Chapter Two focuses on the mask and the personal anxiety. The Oedipus Complex is a motif which continues in all Yeats’s career of dramatist. In some most important plays, such as On Baile’s Strand, Yeats rewrites or writes back the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex and talks about the topic of patricide. The image of father on the stage is not only a masked John Butler Yeats, but also a representation of the culture which shapes W.B Yeats’s philosophy and arts. Besides, the ideal woman is a significant image in Yeats’s Plays as well. To some extent, the ideal women are the portraits of Maud Gone, but they also reflect Yeats’s anxiety about Gender. Yeats takes an Arnoldian thought of which Ireland is acknowledged as a woman, and resists it at the same time. Therefore, the ideal "Cathleens" in Yeats’s plays become the symbolic of an ideal nation as well.Chapter Three argues Yeats’s consideration of his national theatre and his nation. He assumes his theatre should be both popular and literary. But in fact, he puts the national theatre in between them and in a dilemma. For the communication of the Irish people and his Anglo-Irish literature, the writer makes a lot of experimental efforts in his plays, including rewriting a number of Irish mythologies and folktales into symbolism plays, and making the plays as a ritualized performances. As one of the drama experiments in his later plays, Yeats offers ritual representations of the nation’s development, by the means of Dramatic Juxtaposition.In Yeats’s plays, the construction of a nation’s identity is not only the establishment of the subjectivity or the narration about others, but also the unfolding of a distinctive view of world.Chapter Four is about the multitudinous spatial representations, through which the playwright transcends his middle situation. In his plays, Yeats presents the dualistic structure of space, the construction and deconstruction of the Heterotopias, and the imagination of the Orient, all of which are the good illustrations of the relation between the view of world and the national identity.Chapter Five and Six discuss Yeats’s drama in a macroscopic view. Chapter Five would follow the poetic travel which is a clue in Yeats’s works. Starting from the mask of poet’s self, to the middle situation of nation, Yeats finds a satisfied view of world in the ideal space in his works.Chapter Six lays Yeats’s drama in the context of modern theatrical theories. It leads the spatial turn in modern drama’s developing. The defamiliarization and the manner of anti-language deconstruct the space of traditional drama, and construct the third space, which is an illustration of modernity.The paper reaches the conclusion in Chapter Seven, which would discuss the significance of Yeats’s drama for the present.