Blow the Witches Out: Gender Construction and the Subversion of Nationalism in Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and On Baile's Strand

Blow the Witches Out: Gender Construction and the Subversion of Nationalism in Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and On Baile's Strand SUSAN C. HARRIS The response to the 1903 production of J.M. Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen and the riots that attended the 1907 Abbey production of The Playboy of the Western World demonstrated to Yeats that Irish national drama, as defined by nationalist journalists and activists such as Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne, was defined not only by its stance on national independence but by its construction of gender. Audiences were unwilling to accept Synge's violation of the nationalist rules of gender decorum, insisting that the play could not be a true representation of Ireland because "Irish women would never sleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer , nor use a word like 'shift."Ii For the "patriotic journalism" against which Yeats fulminated in his defense of Synge, acceptable political content included the reproduction of predetermined gender roles.' Yeats's 1910 essay "J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time" attacks those constructions of "Ireland's womanhood" as the "unreal" fantasies of "minds unsettled by some fixed idea," the products ofa petrified nationalism that, while "great enough to carry [its adherents] to the scaffold," has lost the ability to adapt to new challenges and precludes any innovative approach to the problem of Ireland's political or culturalliberation.3 His apologia for Synge explicitly fonnulates a critique of this fossilized nationalism, and the impoverished conception of Irish identity that sustained it, which had already been developed in his drama. On Baile's Strand, premiered in 1904 and revised significantly in 1906, reflects Yeats's departure from the "school of patriotism that held sway over [his] youth" and his understanding of the connection between nationalist discourse and gender construction.4 By undermining the definitions of "Ireland's womanhood" created in pre-Abbey Irish nationalist drama, Yeats's characterization of Aoife and his use of the female chorus question the value of tum-of-the-century Irish nationalist dogma by dramatizing its dependence on dangerously simplistic conceptions of femininity, masculinity, and identity. Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 475 SUSAN C. HARRIS On Baile's Strand premiered on the opening night of the Irish National Theatre Society's Abbey Theatre. As the first play on the program, On Baile's Strand (1903) represented what patrons of the Abbey could look forward to, while Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), which followed, reminded them of what they had been getting. That juxtaposition invited the audience to contrast what Joseph Holloway called the familiar "red-hot patriotic sentiment"5 of Cathleen with the more complicated treatment of nationalism in On Baile's Strand, and to recognize the formal innovations that marked On Baile's Strand as the first product of Yeats's "search for a new mode of presentation.,,6 It also offered evidence of a more subtle transition that was intimately related to the other two - a change in Yeats's construction and use of female figures in his drama. Between the plays, Yeats moves from an endorsement of self-sacrifice for Ireland to a position that questions the very possibility of dying "for Ireland" in any meaningful way. At the same time, he breaks the formal ties to earlier popular drama that are evident in Cathleen as he searches for a new dramatic idiom that will be more congenial to "the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland.'" Not coincidentally, the rigid distinction established in Cathleen between the mortal women who claim the hero for the family and the supernatural woman to whom he rightfully owes allegiance is also challenged in On Baile's Strand. Using female figures to articulate a strategy of mediation between the supernatural and the mortal worlds rather than to reiterate their disjunction, Yeats questions Cathleen's celebration of sacrifice in the name of Ireland by complicating its double vision of woman as either a supernatural force propelling man toward heroic self-immolation or a wife/mother intent on trapping him in materialism. While Cathleen still evokes, primarily through its presentation of the title character, "the theatrical conventions...