A Williamsian Re-Examination of W. B. Yeats' Philosophy of Unity in his Dramatic World

• Main Authors: Billy Bin Feng Huang, 黃斌峰
• Other Authors: Frank W. Stevenson
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2mm7wz

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === This thesis proposes a Williamsian re-examination of Yeats’ philosophy of unity in his dramatic world. Chapter I elucidates my research methodology. I demonstrate how drama, in the Williamsian tradition, may correlate with culture, society, literature, language, and ideology. Then, I look into Yeats’ philosophy of unity in his dramatic world, connecting it with culture, society, literature, language, and ideology. Thus, the compatibility of Williams and Yeats is self-evident. Chapter II deals with culture and literature. For Williams, ties between culture and society should never be severed, and culture is a product of the social machinery. Besides, Williams considers culture to be a bourgeois idea of society, listing three cultural categories: dominant, emergent, and residual. Yeats expects his theater to unify the Irish society, and above all, to create the Unity of Culture, which is in fact a cultural product. On the other hand, Yeats upsets his own Unity of Culture by equating it with the Anglo-Irish culture, a bourgeois/residual culture in tactical opposition to the Gaelic culture. This cultural configuration explains why some Yeatsian plays, like The Countess Cathleen, have been controversially received. Likewise, Williams binds literature with society; for him, the former may change or be subject to the latter. In terms of a national literature, Williams believes there is a process of selection. Yeats intends to create a national dramatic literature of unity in order to unify the Irish people, with Anglo-Irishness as the only selective criterion. So he cripples his own unity again! Chapter III treats the interfaces of drama/structure of feeling and language/ideology. By Williams, drama allows people a glimpse at the social totality. Structure of feeling is a tacit agreement generated by dramatic conventions, and it aims at social consciousness and totality. Depicting s total Irish society has always been the intention of Yeats’ drama, and Yeats relies heavily on his theatrical professionalism for facilitating the unification of the Irish people. However, a further analysis of structure of feeling in Yeats’ drama will reveal that Yeats’ main concern is paradoxically the Anglo-Irish supremacy, which can instantiate Yeats’ compromised unity. As for language, Williams asserts that it is a material product, and that ideology is certainly sheathed within it. Throughout his dramatic career, Yeats is dedicated to producing a dramatic language of unity, or an Irishized English, which causes him to antagonize the Gaelic League. Luckily, this antagonism is toned down by Yeats’ diplomacy. On the other hand, once we have an insight into Yeats’ ideology in language, we will be disillusioned with Yeats’ idea of linguistic unity and see nothing but Anglo-Irishness. Chapter IV targets Yeats’ and Williams’ theorizations of tragedy and revolution. Williams believes tragedy to be a spiritual cause of revolution, for it spiritually encourages people to revolutionize their condition. Yeats dislikes revolution, but he is convinced that tragedy may generate tragic joy, which can be responsible for a spiritual unification of the audience. Here I articulate that both Williams and Yeats make use of the audience’s emotionality for a society-changing purpose. This is also how Yeats implants Anglo-Irishness in his fellow Irish people. Then I attempt to qualify Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan as a tragedy in both a Williamsian and a Yeatsian senses. Here the main problematic is its theme of revolution, which can be rendered explicable if we come to consider Yeats’ chameleon-like identity. Finally, Chapter V sums up my whole research project. I come to the conclusion that in Yeats’ dramatic world, the philosophy of unity comes to reveal and then to shatter itself.