The Woman Image in Yeats’s Later Poetry: Why the Dancer, Not Maud Gonne or Crazy Jane?

Abstract

Maud Gonne and Crazy Jane have long been critical focuses in discussing the imagery of Yeats’s women, which symbolizes the Irish identity. Yeats, however, sticks to the dancer imagery throughout his writings, while being fascinated with Maud Gonne and even after he had finished with the Crazy Jane poems. It may be that the dancer transcends both Maud Gonne and Crazy Jane, both of whom being not confined to the dominant ideology of their society. They are complimentary, on the levels not only individual but also symbolic, social, cultural and national, each representative of the upper minority and the lower majority—with the poet’s growing confidence in the wisdom of the Irish people, who are crude but penetrate the duality of life. The dancer imagery is Yeats’s ultimate Image of the Woman who extends to all the levels of identities—personal, social, and national—toward redemption, merging the two opposite yet complementary images of women, Maud Gonne and Crazy Jane.