"Haunted by Places": Landscape in Three Plays by W. B. Yeats

1 COMPABATIVE ? ama Volume 31Fall 1997Number 3 "Haunted by Places": Landscape in Three Plays B. Yeats by W. Natalie Crohn Schmitt I am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory has no reality, that the natural and supernatural are knit together, that to escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science; at that moment Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism, not shut off in dead history, but flowing, concrete, phenomenal.—W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (1937) Three Yeats plays set out of doors, among his best, are precisely wedded to the landscapes—sacred wells and ruin—that he attributes to them: At the Hawk's Well (1916), The Cat and the Moon (1917),1 and The Dreaming of the Bones (1919). In this essay, I examine the sites and their attendant myths in relation to the plays. Finally, I argue for the importance of landscape in Yeats's plays not merely as source but as substance. I show the relationship between the realistic settings in the plays, the supernatural they also represent, and Yeats's dramatic form. The extent to which Yeats's description of the sites is precisely realistic and, in two cases, the story told inspired by the 337 338Comparative Drama mythology of the sites has been given scant attention in the energetic search for literary sources and in the wealth of symbolic readings the plays have provoked. Consequently, the significance of these sites and myths in Yeats's drama has not been examined. Later critics who have sought to look at the plays as dramas— entailing dramatic actions—have, not surprisingly, overlooked the number of lines in Yeats's plays devoted in whole or in part to establishing the setting—in The Dreaming of the Bones, almost a third of them. The highly abstract staging that Yeats sought for his plays has also led critics to perceive the plays as esoteric and abstract. Katharine Worth, for instance, tells us that the darice plays "take us into a kind of no-place." And Barton Friedman argues that the setting for the At the Hawk's Well is the mind of the playwright gestating the play.2 The plays' realistic descriptions of the landscapes and their attendant myths do not diminish the interest of the variety of related stories that critics have found—whether or not they all were, in fact, sources for the plays. When a variety of stories come together as one, Yeats regarded them as essentially truer. The search for literary sources does, however, reveal a kind of literary Darwinism at work: an assumption that it is literature that begets literature, an assumption fostered in this case by the fact that for most critics the literary sources are more accessible than the landscapes that also inspired them. For each play, I provide the descriptions of sites included in the literary sources which critics have cited—when indeed the literary source describes a site—to demonstrate that the actual site is closer. The realistic description of landscape in the plays does not necessarily invalidate the symbolic readings of the plays which critics have provided for them, although it does tend to make some of them seem far-fetched. The plays are unquestionably symbolic. Yeats sought, he said, a dramatic form "distinguished, indirect, and symbolic,"3 and he himself provided symbolic readings of elements in his plays. But for Yeats the literal and symbolic (or, as he would see it, "natural and supernatural") are knit together; the symbolical is bound to the particular, and, in the plays under consideration here, that particular is primarily landscape . The supernatural in the plays' sites is to be understood to a considerable extent as indwelling. For the Irish, as Yeats observed , the mythology of the landscape is "not symbols but Natalie Crohn Schmitt339 realities."4 In the western countryside dotted with ruins and the remembered sites of ancient rituals, including some that are still celebrated, the distinction between past and present, dream and reality, sacred and profane, is unclear. Symbol and site are joined, as are the abstract...