W. B. Yeats insisted that “the mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write” (CL1303). This essay will explore what that mystical life entails, in terms of Yeats's beliefs, values, and attitudes, as they pertain to issues of gender, and more specifically, Yeats's valorization of the feminine. I have argued elsewhere that A Vision(1937) diminishes the importance of gender compared to its antecedents: the automatic script and A Vision(1925), a position also argued by Margaret Mills Harper and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford. With that diminution in mind, we can ask the following questions: given that Yeats's perception of “a universal masculine & feminine in soul” (YVP1109) shaped the core of his theosophy, what did his occlusion of gender accomplish (or attempt to accomplish) in the second edition of A Vision? Are his more strategic representations and uses of gender true to his vision of the feminine, and more fundamentally, how is gender infused into his symbolic system?

Yeats's View of the Feminine

In the years before his marriage, Yeats associated the female with magic and mystery, since he believed that women were naturally in harmony with nature and her secrets—closer to the body, a privileged position indeed since Yeats believed that “all power is from the body,” at least in Western culture, and that “religion and magic insist on power and therefore on body” (CW3356; Au481). Moreover, the body of a woman is like the words of a poet: “subtle… complex…full of mysterious life” (“The Symbolism of Poetry,” CW4120; E&I164).

Yeats claimed women are also sensitive to the bond between natural and supernatural, which “are knit together” (CW5210; E&I518). In fact, Yeats envies the way women are in tune with the presence of spirits. When it comes to embracing and understanding ancient lore, “women come more easily than men to that wisdom,” Yeats laments (“The Queen and the Fool,” Myth115; M200577). There is a kind of madness to such wisdom, he goes on to acknowledge.