Sex in the Civitas: Early Irish Intellectuals and their Vision of Women

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats described various females from Irish saga in the following terms: “After Cuchulainn, we think most of certain great queens—of angry amorous Maeve with her long pale face, of Findabair, her daughter who dies of shame and pity, of Deirdre who might be some mild modern housewife but for her prophetic vision … I think it might be proud Emer … who will linger longest in the memory, whether she is the newly married wife fighting for precedence, fierce as some beautiful bird or the confident housewife who would waken her husband from his magic sleep with mocking words.” A hundred years later, it is the description of early Irish queens as “housewives” that is particularly striking. This perspective is not confined to Yeats’s critical writing but also occurs in his poetry. In the 1893 collection The Rose, the poem Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea refers repetitively to Emer in a domestic setting, working at the arduous task of preparing cloth:

A man came slowly from the setting sun,

To Emer, raddling raiment in her dun,

Then Emer cast the web upon the floor,

And raising arms all raddled with the dye,

Parted her lips with a loud sudden cry.

“You dare me to my face,” and thereupon

She smote with raddled fist.¹