W.B. Yeats and Florence Farr: The Influence of the "New Woman" Actress on Yeats's Changing Images of Women

W.B. Yeats and Florence Farr: The Influence of the "New Woman" Actress on Yeats's Changing Images of Women CASSANDRA LAITY Studies of the women in Yeats's art have too often been reduced to what Parkinson calls "Maudism.,,1 Yeats himself romanticized his compulsion to locate Maud Gonne behind every legendary or historical female figure he undertook to describe: "0, unquiet heart," he laments in "The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "Why do you praise another, praising her,1As ifthere were no tale but your own talel Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound?,,2 But Yeats's beloved/muse Maud Gonne was, in fact, a fiction which he continually re-created, like his tale of unrequited love, to accommodate the many "masks" or personae he assumed in his career. Yeats's Maud Gonne was consequently more a poetic conception than a real personality in his work, a coalescing ofthe many women in art and life that captured his imagination, and a changing form as new influences entered and he discarded old notions of love, art, beauty, and sexuality. I am concerned here with the impact of another woman on this related network of ideas: Florence Farr, a self-described "New Woman" and "Ibsenite" actress whose intimacy with George Bernard Shaw had indoctrinated her in his revolutionary theories of the actress and the "unwomanly woman. ,,' She would become Yeats's stage manager, actress, and constant companion during the decade (1893-1904) that marked his apprenticeship in the drama. Yeats's own theories of acting and actresses would sound suspiciously Shavian; and it is probable that the other Irish dramatist influenced him indirectly through Farr, who was the original Shavian heroine as she was the prototype for Yeats's later images of women. Her boyish beauty, her emancipated view of women and seXUality, and even her strident manner brought into question Yeats's former ideal of beauty, the chaste sensuous maidens of his early poetry, and the romantic code of platonic love that reinforced his Victorian prudery. The unconventional New Woman provided the model for Yeats's revisionism of his own Celtic mythology as he focused on the strong female figures of the past: Maeve, Emer, and Aiofe. W.B. Yeats and Florence Farr 621 Yeats had begun his apprenticeship in the drama writing plays on the model of his early Romantic/Pre-Raphaelite poetry. The chaste, "pearl-pale" maidens of his early work became the soulful heroines of The COllntess Cathleen and The Land ofHeart's Desire. Yeats soon found that his sorrowful madonnas paled beside the vital, imposing heroines in the lbsenite drama of his contemporaries and provided poor vehicles for the group of actresses, who included Florence Farr, that helped to create the emancipated New Woman heroine. Actress May Whitty had been merely "commonplace" as Yeats's Countess; but she became "acrid, powerful, original" as the pragmatic Grace Tyrell in friend Edward Martyn's Ibsenite The Heather Field.4 Abandoning his early poetics of the deathly femme fatale for the drama, Yeats subsequently created the strong heroines of The Shadowy Waters (1906), Deirdre, and The Player Queen specifically for the "distinguished, solitary, proud" actresses of "the new school" of acting.5 Although Yeats may have perceived Maud Gonne behind his warrior-queen heroines - Dectora, Decima, and Deirdre - just as he had formerly identified her with the victimized Countess Cathleen and the dreamy Mary Bruin (The Land ofHeart's Desire), his sexually emancipated, often glib and irreverent heroines demonstrate a greater affinity with the New Woman Florence Farr. Yeats's early fairy spirits had reflected the influence of the nineteenth-century fairy femme fatale , so prevalent in the art and literature of the nineties. For the early Yeats, the fatal woman symbolically projected the Aesthete's longing to immerse himself obsessively in "beauty" at the expense of "all the general purposes of life" (Autobiography. p. 209). Yeats's first published poem, "The Wanderings of Oisin" (V Poems. p. I), originally entitled "Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him," recounts the poet-seeker's seduction into realms of enchantment by an exotic fairy-temptress, Niamh. Having sacrificed his soul to the "amorous demon," Oisin is doomed to...