Leda and the Swan

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, "Pornography and Canonicity: The Case of Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan,'" in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, ed. Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 165-87 (footnotes are omitted).

The representation (or nonrepresentation) of bodies and sexuality in Irish culture is conditioned by the social power of the Catholic church. St. Paul's antifeminism and valorization of the spiritual over the physical were especially influential in Ireland, because the generally positive role played by the Catholic clergy in the national struggle against England gave them moral authority. . . . Penitential Catholicism intensified by residual Victorian prudery, however, is only part of the story. . . . Economic conditions resulting from [British] colonial exploitation and the Great Famine played a major part in producing late marriages, a high rate of celibacy, and a concomitant need to control the body and its desires in the Irish countryside. Unregulated eroticism was sacrificed to the need to pass on the meager landholding undivided to the chosen male heir: the survival of the family in perilous economic circumstances dictated sexual choice. When small farmers moved to the towns, they brought their ethic with them despite the fact that it was no longer economically relevant, and their sexual conservatism continued to be reinforced by the ideals of a celibate clergy.

In 1922 the establishment of an Irish nation transformed the politically rebellious but virginal Kathleen ni Houlihan, symbol of Ireland, into a homebound pious housewife. The conservative and petty-bourgeois government of the Free State enforced by law and later enshrined in the Constitution its version of Irish identity as Gaelic, Catholic, and sexually pure. The dominance of Catholicism in the South was reinforced by the colonial legacy of Partition, which reified the confessional division between North and South. Because decolonization failed to change the way Southern Ireland was administered, the new government, backed by the clergy, emphasized the Irish language and the Catholic ethical code as the defining marks of independence. Mary Douglas argues that fetishization of purity is characteristic of threatened minorities, whose concern with political boundaries is displaced into an obsession with bodily orifices and secretions. Ireland's boundaries were compromised from without by continued British presence in the Treaty Ports and from within by Partition and the bitter legacy of civil war: the revolution was unfinished. Anxiety about political unity was partially displaced into an obsession with sexuality, defined as "dirt" and identified as "foreign" in origin. In their 1924 Lenten Pastorals, which Yeats condemned as "rancid, course [sic] and vague," the Bishops lambasted "women's immodest fashions in dress, indecent dances, unwholesome theatrical performances and cinema exhibitions, evil literature and drink." Their continual condemnations of licentious behavior suggest that Ireland was experiencing a mild version of the sexual revolution of the Twenties: "The pity of it, that our Catholic girls . . . should follow the mode of pagan England by appearing semi-nude." Was it for this, runs the subtext of many such effusions, that all that blood was shed?

In response to the perceived threat of national demoralization, Catholic morality was enacted into law. Film censorship was instituted in 1923; the censorship of literature and the press, preceded by the establishment of a Committee on Evil Literature in 1926, became law in 1929. The Bishops forced [Irish president] Cosgrave to revoke the legal right to divorce inherited by the Free State from the English parliament. Although the importation and sale of contraceptives was not formally outlawed until 1935, advertisements for birth control devices were banned by the Censors. At the same time, illegitimacy conferred an overwhelming social and legal stigma. Both the main political parties and the majority of the population accepted the sexual purity legislation, since it accorded with their own prejudices, and the only systematic oppression to the policy of giving Catholic moral standards the backing of the State came from Yeats and his allies.

Yeats began by opposing the Censorship of Films bill (1923). He did not take refuge in the Audenesque claim that "poetry makes nothing happen," but argued that the appeal of the arts to "our imitative faculties" was counterbalanced by their statistically incalculable good effects. The Bill, however, passed, and cleanliness was legally established as next to godliness. As Douglas points out, "holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused," so "hybrids and other confusions are abominated." The