Leda And The Swan

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, "Pornography and Canonicity: The Case of Yeats' `Leda and the Swan,'" in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, ed. Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 165-87 (footnotes are omitted).

The representation (or nonrepresentation) of bodies and sexuality in Irish culture is conditioned by the social power of the Catholic church. St. Paul's antifeminism and valorization of the spiritual over the physical were especially influential in Ireland, because the generally positive role played by the Catholic clergy in the national struggle against England gave them moral authority. . . . Penitential Catholicism intensified by residual Victorian prudery, however, is only part of the story. . . . Economic conditions resulting from [British] colonial exploitation and the Great Famine played a major part in producing late marriages, a high rate of celibacy, and a concomitant need to control the body and its desires in the Irish countryside. Unregulated eroticism was sacrificed to the need to pass on the meager landholding undivided to the chosen male heir: the survival of the family in perilous economic circumstances dictated sexual choice. When small farmers moved to the towns, they brought their ethic with them despite the fact that it was no longer economically relevant, and their sexual conservatism continued to be reinforced by the ideals of a celibate clergy.

In 1922 the establishment of an Irish nation transformed the politically rebellious but virginal Kathleen ni Houlihan, symbol of Ireland, into a homebound pious housewife. The conservative and petty-bourgeois government of the Free State enforced by law and later enshrined in the Constitution its version of Irish identity as Gaelic, Catholic, and sexually pure. The dominance of Catholicism in the South was reinforced by the colonial legacy of Partition, which reified the confessional division between North and South. Because decolonization failed to change the way Southern Ireland was administered, the new government, backed by the clergy, emphasized the Irish language and the Catholic ethical code as the defining marks of independence. Mary Douglas argues that fetishization of purity is characteristic of threatened minorities, whose concern with political boundaries is displaced into an obsession with bodily orifices and secretions. Ireland's boundaries were compromised from without by continued British presence in the Treaty Ports and from within by Partition and the bitter legacy of civil war: the revolution was unfinished. Anxiety about political unity was partially displaced into an obsession with sexuality, defined as "dirt" and identified as "foreign" in origin. In their 1924 Lenten Pastorals, which Yeats condemned as "rancid, course [sic] and vague," the Bishops lambasted "women's immodest fashions in dress, indecent dances, unwholesome theatrical performances and cinema exhibitions, evil literature and drink." Their continual condemnations of licentious behavior suggest that Ireland was experiencing a mild version of the sexual revolution of the Twenties: "The pity of it, that our Catholic girls . . . should follow the mode of pagan England by appearing semi-nude." Was it for this, runs the subtext of many such effusions, that all that blood was shed?

In response to the perceived threat of national demoralization, Catholic morality was enacted into law. Film censorship was instituted in 1923; the censorship of literature and the press, preceded by the establishment of a Committee on Evil Literature in 1926, became law in 1929. The Bishops forced [Irish president] Cosgrave to revoke the legal right to divorce inherited by the Free State from the English parliament. Although the importation and sale of contraceptives was not formally outlawed until 1935, advertisements for birth control devices were banned by the Censors. At the same time, illegitimacy conferred an overwhelming social and legal stigma. Both the main political parties and the majority of the population accepted the sexual purity legislation, since it accorded with their own prejudices, and the only systematic oppression to the policy of giving Catholic moral standards the backing of the State came from Yeats and his allies.

Yeats began by opposing the Censorship of Films bill (1923). He did not take refuge in the Audenesque claim that "poetry makes nothing happen," but argued that the appeal of the arts to "our imitative faculties" was counterbalanced by their statistically incalculable good effects. The Bill, however, passed, and cleanliness was legally established as next to godliness. As Douglas points out, "holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused," so "hybrids and other confusions are abominated." The horror inspired by the hybrid/bird underlies the Catholic reaction to Yeats' "Leda and the Swan," a poem representing the violent rape of a woman by a god disguised as a member of the lower species. Yeats deliberately chose to site the poem in the public arena in order to arouse controversy and flout censorship. Restored to the context of its publication in the monthly paper To-morrow, its transgressive intent is readily apparent.

According to Yeats, the poem was inspired by a meditation on the Irish situation in relation to world politics. The first version was finished at Coole in September 1923, in the atmosphere of political instability resulting from the Irish Civil War. Yeats told Lady Gregory of "his long belief that the reign of democracy is over for the present, and in reaction there will be violent government from above, as no in Russia, and is beginning here. It is the thought of this force coming into the world that he is expressing in his Leda poem" The swan-god, it seems, originated as a "rough beast," an unlikely amalgam of Lenin and President Cosgrave, subduing the anarchic masses personified by Leda; but Yeats insisted that, "as I wrote, a bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it, and my friend tells me that his `conservative readers would misunderstand the poem.'" All politics did not evaporate in the alchemy of the creative process, however: class politics were overshadowed though not entirely effaced by the politics of sexuality.

The poem, first titled "Annunciation," was too hot for AE's [George William Russell] Irish Statesman to handle. When a group of young intellectuals decided to start a radical monthly paper, Yeats gave them "Leda and the Swan" for the first number. The other contributions included a short story by Lennox Robinson, "The Madonna of Slieve Dun," about a peasant girl who, raped by a tramp

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