Reading the Late Plays

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Abstract This chapter considers the intersections of violence/power and sexual desire in three of Yeats’s late plays—The Cat and the Moon (1926), The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935), and A Full Moon in March (1935)—with a focus on sadomasochism and what has been described as ‘the ritual exchange of power’. It contends that through theatrical representations of sadomasochistic attachments based on reversible power, Yeats’s late drama reveals the systemic failures of normative distributions of power, gender, and sexual roles, and proposes alternatives. It discusses Yeats’s unconventional relationship with sexuality, his increasing interest in corporeality, and the importance of literary representations of sadomasochism. It goes on to evaluate, from a dramaturgical approach, the potentials of the scripts to demonstrate that Yeats’s plays convey crucial messages about power, the body, and difference for contemporary audiences. These plays feature clashes between the unruly forces of seduction and the normative force of power and production. Their protagonists are defiant social outcasts, whose clash with power paradoxically earns them temporary visibility and authority. They fail to meet normative standards of bodily being, which becomes an act of resistance, since the characters representing the power of production (the Saint in The Cat and the Moon, the King in The King of the Great Clock Tower, and the Queen in A Full Moon in March) are obsessed with bodily perfection. These master–slave relationships appear as sadomasochistic mostly due to their reversibility, which also renders them an element of excitement and playfulness.