英文摘要 |
Situating William Butler Yeats in the milieu of the rising early modern dance, this paper examines the dancing bodies and gender politics in middle Yeats's works, such as in his plays ”On Baile's Strand” (1904) and ”The Only Jealousy of Emer” (1919), and other poems. Whether mythological, legendary, or human, middle Yeats' dancers represent an oppositional force to rigid notions of nationality, gender, and religion, just as early modern dancers combat against the physical constraints of classical ballet and Victorian conceptions of pure womanhood to liberate the female body. This aesthetic and ideological rebellion inevitably provoked antagonistic reactions among various patriarchal institutions that perpetuated the myth of pure domestic womanhood to ensure their operation. For instance, Irish patriarchs in ”On Baile's Strand” view the Sidhe dancers as threatening to their political establishments and laws; to exorcize these marginal forces and ward them securely outside patriarchal society, the forefathers devise an elaborate ritual to ”blow the witches out.” Yeats further dramatizes the power struggle between human women and the Sidhe in his play ”The Only Jealousy of Emer” where Cuchulain's wife Emer and his mistress Eithne band together against the bird-woman-witch dancer, Fand. The power struggle between these three women provides a locale for us to examine Yeats's gender politics in relation to the various women's movements of the early-twentieth century. Yeats, in befriending and writing about the dancers, partook in dialogues that often revealed him as a supporter of women dancers' artistic achievements and of their proto-feminist outlook. |