THE GROTESQUE IN THE ART OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (IRELAND)
Abstract
This study examines the grotesque as it existed in the mind of W. B. Yeats. Analysis of his uses of the term shows that he applied it as a general antithesis to an ideal beauty. Within that general usage four distinct modes of the grotesque are discernible: the decorative, the gothic, the farcical, and the absurd. This study demonstrates how Yeats employed these modes in the course of his artistic development. Yeats's growth as an artist can be viewed as a movement away from the pursuit of a Shelleyean ideal beauty toward a Syngean embrace of grotesque reality. Even before he became a devotee of ideal beauty Yeats had pursued another beauty--the elaborate and fanciful beauty of the Renaissance's decorative grotesque. In this mode he created pastorals that allowed him freely to elaborate his fancy in dense visual imagery. But increasingly he found this idyllic mode of creation inadequate for his human purposes. He recognized that the artist must abandon his fancy and live in the phenomenal world. Man's fate in the phenomenal world was inevitably tragic for Yeats. The individual's destiny is determined by forces antithetical to him. Many of Yeats's most powerful works explore the terrifying aspect of destiny by representing the Anti-Self as the dark double of the gothic-grotesque. This vision of life was difficult for a general audience to accept, so during the years Yeats wrote for the popular stage at the Abbey he created a number of grotesque farces whose function was to introduce his tragic conceptions through laughter. Because farce was considered a trivial form, his audiences could entertain his perspective in a non-threatening context. In his later years Yeats became evermore dubious of man's capacity to understand his situation in the world. He shared with Camus a perception of the absurd limitations on human understanding, and in his final plays he expressed this perception in a grotesque dramatic idiom that became the foundation of the contemporary theater of the absurd.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Biographies
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