Académique Documents
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Yeats &
the Cultural Milieu of the 1890s
Presenter: 李登慧
William Butler Yeats, 1900
Portrait by his father John Butler Yeats
I. Early Yeats (1865-1899)
• “William Butler Yeats ranks among the most
widely admired and intensively studied
writers of the twentieth century. He attracts
such avid interest because, as T. S. Eliot
famously suggested, his history is also the
history of his time. Beginning as a late-
Victorian aesthete and ending as an influential
contemporary of Eliot and other modernists,
Yeats set the pace for two generations of
important writer.”
(David Holdeman ix)
• “Yeats was in a literal sense a Victorian. Born in
1865 in what may be called the high noon of the
Victorian period, he lived 36 of his 74 years ‘in
the great peace of Queen Victoria and amid all the
social and spiritual conditions prevailing through
her realms.’ One would not, however, find too
many critics ready to characterize Yeats as a
Victorian—indeed, that Yeats was irredeemably
hostile to everything Victorian has been an article
of critical faith.”
(George Watson 36)
• The reign of Queen Victoria: 1837-1901
II. Yeats’s Interactions with the 1890s
• Fin de siècle (世紀末現象)
• French: "end of the century"
• Generally refers to the years 1880 to 1914 in
Europe
• Connotations:
(1) Decadence, typical for the last years of a
culturally vibrant period
(2) Anticipation about or despair facing the
impending change, generally expected when a
century or time period draws to a close
Cultural Milieu of the fin de siècle
• 1. Influences of Pre-Raphaelitism
(前拉斐爾主義)
• 2. Aesthetic / Decadent Movement
(唯美/頹廢主義)
• 3. Apocalypse (啟示錄)
• 4. New Woman
II.1. Pre-Raphaelitism
• Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Pre-Raphaelites):
a group of English painters, poets, and critics,
founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt.
• To reform art by rejecting the mechanistic
approach adopted by the artists who succeeded
Raphael and Michelangelo
• To return to the abundant detail, intense colours,
and complex compositions of the late Middle
Ages and the early Renaissance in the 15th-c
Italy
II.1.1. Imaginary Landscape (幻想的地景)
1. Garden-Orchard-Bower // flowing hair
2. Shadowy Land
II.1.2. Ideal Beloved (理想的摯愛)
1. Femme Fatale (the fatal woman):
Lilith, Salome, Helen
2. Dead Beloved: The tradition from Dante to
Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel”
3. Madonna (Virgin Mary)
II.1.3. Mysticism & Occult Tendencies
(神秘主義)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
The Bower Meadow, 1872
Sibylla Palmifera (Soul's Beauty), 1866-70
Lilith, 1868, 1872-73
Astarte Syriaca, 1877
The Blessed Damozel, 1875-78
William Morris (1834-1896)
La belle Iseult (Queen Guenevere), 1858
Snakeshead printed textile, 1876
Illustration from The Wood Beyond the World, 1894
Burne-Jones, Love among the Ruins
Burne-Jones and Morris, David's Charge to Solomon
II.2. Aesthetic / Decadent Movement
• Took place in the late Victorian period from
around 1868 to 1901, and is generally
considered to have ended with the trial of
Oscar Wilde
• Represents the same tendencies that
Symbolism or Decadence stood for in France,
and may be considered the British branch of
the same movement
• It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and
had post-Romantic roots, and as such
anticipates Modernism.
• Aestheticism had its forerunners in Keats and Shelley,
and among the Pre-Raphaelites.
• In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and
Swinburne, both influenced by the French Symbolists
and D.G. Rossetti.
• This movement was deeply influenced by Walter Pater
and his essays published in 1867-68, in which he stated
that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of
beauty.
• Decadent writers used the slogan “Art for Art’s Sake,”
and asserted that there was no connection between art
and morality.
• The main characteristics of the movement: suggestion
rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of
symbols, and synaesthetic effects(統整性美學效果) —
correspondence between words, colors and music.
• Vogue of Salome:
• Among Yeats’s contemporaries, Stephane
Mallarme, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley
helped resuscitate and reshape the biblical
Salome into an in-vogue symbolist-decadent
icon that profoundly influenced Yeats’s Sidhe-
dancer imagery.
• Based on Wilde’s play, Beardsley’s drawing
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (1893)
visually captures the climatic moment of
Salome holding and staring menacingly at
John’s severed head, which Yeats praised for its
“visionary beauty.”
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898)
Title page, Salome, 1894
The Peacock Skirt, Salome
The Stomach Dance, Salome
The Dancer's Reward, Salome
The Climax, Salome
Maud Allan in her famous early role as Salome, 1906 - 1910
• “Yeats was an expert cultural politician, and used
the Aesthetic or Decadent movement to shape his
Irish movement and present it in a flattering yet
not wholly uncritical light before both English and
Irish readers. Thus, he could pick up on that sense
of sophisticated ennui and hyper-refined
artificiality in the ethos of the Decadent movement
and contrast it with the vigor and energy for the
Irish Renaissance.”
(Watson 54)
II.2.1. Rhymers’ Club
• Beginning in 1890 Yeats frequently sought escape
from his private life and from Irish cultural
politics in the company of a group of young
London writers known as the Rhymers’ Club,
which met in an upstairs room of the Cheshire
Cheese inn.
• Regulars included Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons,
Ernest Dowson, and others; Oscar Wilde also
looked in at times.
• These writers are often linked with the
aesthetically refined and morally decadent
atmosphere of the English fin-de-siecle.
II.3. Apocalypse
• Greek: the lifting of the veil
• The disclosure to certain privileged persons of
something hidden from the majority of humankind
• Apocalypse was one aspect of the fin de siecle that
nurtured in Yeats one of the most fruitful strains in his
sensibility.
• For Yeats, the apocalypse is always connected with
genuine spiritual revelation, with vision, and is
independent of a date in the calendar.
• The persistence of his apocalyptic vision beyond 1900 is
proof, and it issues in some of his very greatest poems—
“The Magi,” “The Second Coming,” “Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Two Songs
from a Play” among them.
II.4. New Woman
• “New Woman” entered the vocabulary as a popular
term in 1894.
• This cultural phenomenon was made possible by the
burgeoning women’s movement of the late Victorian
years.
• It was a reaction to the gender role, as characterized by
the so-called cult of domesticity, ascribed to the
Victorian women.
• Yeats moved in circles sympathetic to emancipation.
Through his early involvement with the socialist group
that gathered around William Morris and his friendship
with actresses like Florence Farr, Yeats met and
befriended many New Women.
III. Reading Yeats's Early Works
in Light of the 1890s
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeats
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_morris
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Rossetti
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Beards
ley
• http://beardsley.artpassions.net/