In some of the Celtic writings examined in chapter i, Yeats's representations of the Irish peasantry used class – the peasant's poverty – to refigure the necessarily subordinate political status that imperial Celticists like Matthew Arnold had most commonly figured through gender. Yeats's Anglo-Irish Celticism was, in part, the cultural nationalism of a native elite who advocated national independence but did not wish to alter the existing social order and distribution of wealth significantly. Celticism's claims to being a “national” movement required that it forge an harmonious nationalist alliance between aristocrat and peasant that would maintain the social and economic divide between them rather than erasing it. In addition, it had to compete with other versions of Irish nationality, struggling to appropriate desirable tropes and signs and structure them according to its needs. Yeats's early play, The Countess Cathleen, first written while he was still deeply but ambivalently engaged with the discourse of Celticism, arranges another configuration of class, gender and nationality towards these ends. This configuration appropriates the widespread tradition of representing Ireland as a woman.