(Un)Masking Red Hanrahan: Reconsidering Yeats as a Short Story Writer (for the late Professor Daniel Albright)

Abstract

Confronted with the questions of why the study of Stories of Red Hanrahan still remains a relatively uncharted territory in the field and whether this overdue interest in and scholarly inattention to the stories can ever symptomatically point to a direction for a future Yeats studies to take, this article examines Yeats as a short story writer alongside the discussion of the stories. My argument here is that Red Hanrahan stands in for Yeats as a poet who is feeling his way in his own Romantic quest as a “rebel.” Such a poet is deeply rooted in the folkloric tradition but recreates himself to be “modern,” “innovative,” and “shocking” as well. It is the way in which Yeats at once masks and unmasks Red Hanrahan, not completely severed from the Irish communal folkloric tradition but figuring as a Romantic poet who emerges at a moment of national crisis with his passionate intensity and uncompromising self-sacrifice that can redeem the sterility or loss of idealism of his culture — a central theme in the writings of his final years.