The Women Incarnate of Words Upon the Window Pane

Abstract

This chapter examines Mary McGuckian’s Words Upon the Window Pane (1994), itself an adaptation of W.B. Yeats’ 1934 play of the same name. Given the play’s focus on Jonathan Swift’s haunting of a 1920s séance, Yeats’ play is most frequently understood as Yeats’ lament for a newly independent Ireland’s abandonment of its rich Anglo-Irish heritage. While McGuckian’s use of mise-en-scène and cinematography to cinematically render the Gothic dimensions of its original literary text maintains this dimension, the film’s numerous transformations of Yeats’ play—particularly its significant expansion of female characters silently relegated to the background in Yeats’ work—provocatively develop a more complex articulation of gender. Consequently, the film Words Upon the Window Pane not only recuperates the importance of historical figures such as Stella and Vanessa to Swift and his work, but also and more tellingly restages Yeats’ play as a filmic drama of women’s agency—a shift that achieves particular resonance when read in conjunction with debates surrounding gender in 1990s Ireland. An analysis of McGuckian’s film further enables us to appreciate its unique intervention into two strands of Irish filmmaking whose considerations of gender have often proved contradictory: the heritage film and its enshrinement of an idealized Irish past embodied in traditional depictions of women’s role in Irish society (specifically within the family); and feminist filmmaking practices with their attempts to challenge the conservative and disempowered representations of Irish women that dominated the corpus of Irish cinema.KeywordsMary McGuckian Words Upon the Window-Pane Irish heritage cinemaW.B. Yeats