The representation (or nonrepresentation) of bodies and sexuality in Irish culture is conditioned by the social power of the Catholic church. St. Paul's antifeminism and valorization of the spiritual over the physical were especially influential in Ireland, because the generally positive role played by the Catholic clergy in the national struggle against England gave them moral authority. . . . Penitential Catholicism intensified by residual Victorian prudery, however, is only part of the story. . . . Economic conditions resulting from [British] colonial exploitation and the Great Famine played a major part in producing late marriages, a high rate of celibacy, and a concomitant need to control the body and its desires in the Irish countryside. Unregulated eroticism was sacrificed to the need to pass on the meager landholding undivided to the chosen male heir: the survival of the family in perilous economic circumstances dictated sexual choice. When small farmers moved to the towns, they brought their ethic with them despite the fact that it was no longer economically relevant, and their sexual conservatism continued to be reinforced by the ideals of a celibate clergy.

In 1922 the establishment of an Irish nation transformed the politically rebellious but virginal Kathleen ni Houlihan, symbol of Ireland, into a homebound pious housewife. The conservative and petty-bourgeois government of the Free State enforced by law and later enshrined in the Constitution its version of Irish identity as Gaelic, Catholic, and sexually pure. The dominance of Catholicism in the South was reinforced by the colonial legacy of Partition, which reified the confessional division between North and South. Because decolonization failed to change the way Southern Ireland was administered, the new government, backed by the clergy, emphasized the Irish language and the Catholic ethical code as the defining marks of independence. Mary Douglas argues that fetishization of purity is characteristic of threatened minorities, whose concern with political boundaries is displaced into an obsession with bodily orifices and secretions. Ireland's boundaries were compromised from without by continued British presence in the Treaty Ports and from within by Partition and the bitter legacy of civil war: the revolution was unfinished. Anxiety about political unity was partially displaced into an obsession with sexuality, defined as "dirt" and identified as "foreign" in origin. In their 1924 Lenten Pastorals, which Yeats condemned as "rancid, course [sic] and vague," the Bishops lambasted "women's immodest fashions in dress, indecent dances, unwholesome theatrical performances and cinema exhibitions, evil literature and drink." Their continual condemnations of licentious behavior suggest that Ireland was experiencing a mild version of the sexual revolution of the Twenties: "The pity of it, that our Catholic girls . . . should follow the mode of pagan England by appearing semi-nude." Was it for this, runs the subtext of many such effusions, that all that blood was shed?

In response to the perceived threat of national demoralization, Catholic morality was enacted into law. Film censorship was instituted in 1923; the censorship of literature and the press, preceded by the establishment of a Committee on Evil Literature in 1926, became law in 1929. The Bishops forced [Irish president] Cosgrave to revoke the legal right to divorce inherited by the Free State from the English parliament. Although the importation and sale of contraceptives was not formally outlawed until 1935, advertisements for birth control devices were banned by the Censors. At the same time, illegitimacy conferred an overwhelming social and legal stigma. Both the main political parties and the majority of the population accepted the sexual purity legislation, since it accorded with their own prejudices, and the only systematic oppression to the policy of giving Catholic moral standards the backing of the State came from Yeats and his allies.

Yeats began by opposing the Censorship of Films bill (1923). He did not take refuge in the Audenesque claim that "poetry makes nothing happen," but argued that the appeal of the arts to "our imitative faculties" was counterbalanced by their statistically incalculable good effects. The Bill, however, passed, and cleanliness was legally established as next to godliness. As Douglas points out, "holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused," so "hybrids and other confusions are abominated." The horror inspired by the hybrid/bird underlies the Catholic reaction to Yeats' "Leda and the Swan," a poem representing the violent rape of a woman by a god disguised as a member of the lower species. Yeats deliberately chose to site the poem in the public arena in order to arouse controversy and flout censorship. Restored to the context of its publication in the monthly paper To-morrow, its transgressive intent is readily apparent.

According to Yeats, the poem was inspired by a meditation on the Irish situation in relation to world politics. The first version was finished at Coole in September 1923, in the atmosphere of political instability resulting from the Irish Civil War. Yeats told Lady Gregory of "his long belief that the reign of democracy is over for the present, and in reaction there will be violent government from above, as no in Russia, and is beginning here. It is the thought of this force coming into the world that he is expressing in his Leda poem" The swan-god, it seems, originated as a "rough beast," an unlikely amalgam of Lenin and President Cosgrave, subduing the anarchic masses personified by Leda; but Yeats insisted that, "as I wrote, a bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it, and my friend tells me that his `conservative readers would misunderstand the poem.'" All politics did not evaporate in the alchemy of the creative process, however: class politics were overshadowed though not entirely effaced by the politics of sexuality.

The poem, first titled "Annunciation," was too hot for AE's [George William Russell] Irish Statesman to handle. When a group of young intellectuals decided to start a radical monthly paper, Yeats gave them "Leda and the Swan" for the first number. The other contributions included a short story by Lennox Robinson, "The Madonna of Slieve Dun," about a peasant girl who, raped by a tramp while unconscious, believes that she is pregnant with the Messiah, but dies while giving birth to a girl. To-morrow thus offered its readership not one but two rapes. Yeats' "violent annunciation from above" was paired with a parody annunciation from below: both the brutish tramp and the bestial swan-god can be read as blasphemous stand-ins for the Holy Spirit. Like "Leda," Robinson's story had been refused by another periodical "because it was indecent and dealt with rape."

The topic, however, indirectly treated, was taboo. "The Madonna of Slieve Dun" is not explicit: the rape, unlike Leda's, takes place in the white space between paragraphs. In positing a naturalistic explanation for the girl's pregnancy, however, the story suggests that there may also be one for the Virgin Mary's. The Madonna of Slieve Dunne could be read as casting doubt upon the Virgin Birth. So the printers reasoned, for, operating their own extralegal censorship, they refused to produce the paper. . . .

The printers provided Yeats with an opportunity to engage the forces of Catholic public opinion head on. "I am in high spirits this morning, seeing my way to a most admirable row," he wrote. . . . Yeats knew that his name and become a byword for paganism, anti-Catholicism, opposition to Gaelic culture, and snobbery. . . .

"Leda and the Swan" can thus be read as an aristocratic liberal intervention in the cultural debate about post-Treaty Irish identity, an insistence that in bringing to birth a new, independent Ireland, "love is a lustier sire than law." Was Ireland to become, as Yeats wished, "a modern, tolerant, liberal nation," free to deploy the resources of classical mythology and to admire naked Greek statuary; or was it to surrender to the obscurantism of the clergy, soon to be reified in the legislation of the new state? Sexuality, bodies, and their representations occupy center stage in this ideological struggle. The Swan, originating in Yeats'' mind as an image of the violent imposition of the law, ironically comes to symbolize all those desires the censors found threatening: in the context of the poem's reception its brutal energy represents the forces of sexual liberation. . . .

The moral and political debate about "filth" and its exclusion from the national self-image, however, was conducted almost entirely between men. At issue was not the right of women to control and represent their own sexuality, but the male writer's freedom to use rape as a subject in a legitimate journal. Yeats' demand that the body be recognized as "the whole handiwork of God" is admirable, but no one at the time seriously questioned whether this liberalism justified his graphic description of the body of a woman attacked and violently raped by an animal. Yeats himself, however, was aware of the potential female response: when he was asked for a copy of the poem, he replied, "there is no typist here I would ask to copy it--one a few days ago wept because put to type a speech in favour of divorce I was to deliver in the Senate."

Would Yeats' woman reader have objected because of the poem's obscenity, or because of its sexism? Might she have seen in the relation of the famous male poet to a subordinate female stenographer a version of the power relations between the Swan and Leda? Women had had the vote for six years, but political representation did not guarantee access to economic or cultural power. Yeats' putative female reader is still a typist, a copier of other people's texts. The poem she would have read in 1924, however, is different from the poem women readers encounter today: not simply because Yeats revised his words, but because the feminist movement has created radically new conditions of reception for a poem about rape. Contemporary feminists challenge the credentials of a liberalism that privileges male subjectivity and freedom of speech at the price of female objectification. As Catherine MacKinnon argues, "Understanding free speech as an abstract system is a liberal position. Understanding how speech also exists within a substantive system of power relations is a feminist position." The Irish historicist reading therefore needs to be articulated with a radical feminist approach that takes account of other histories: women's history, the history of pornography, the history of the sonnet form, the textual history of the poem.

Contemporary feminist reactions to "Leda" must also negotiate the strategic problem of appearing to echo the original religious outrage. Objections to sexism are not the same as objections to sex, but they may sound alike. . . .

"Pornography" may seem an extreme term to apply to `Leda and the Swan, which is protected from such judgments by its canonical status as "high" art. Artistic merit is, of course, one of the grounds on which a work can be defined in law as not pornographic. But as Kappeler argues, "What women find objectionable in pornography, they have learnt to accept in products of `high' art and literature. Stripped of its canonical privilege and examined in terms of its content alone, "Leda and the Swan" certainly qualifies as pornography, which is, according to MacKinnon, "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture."

Subordination, dehumanization, pain, rape, being reduced to body parts and penetrated by an animal: Leda has it all. Yeats' subject, moreover, is one that has been employed for centuries on the pornographic fringe of the fine arts. . . . Bestiality has always been an established subgenre of pornography: offering a visual image of female degradation, it abrogates a woman's claim to be considered human. When we encounter "Leda and the Swan" in its frame as modernist masterpiece, dirty postcards featuring women and donkeys do not suggest themselves as valid analogies, and we are likely to forget its extracanonical pornographic pedigree.

Kappeler, however, claims that what she calls "the pornography of representation: inevitably controls the focus of any poem written by a man depicting the body (let alone the bodily violation) of a woman. The male author/subject invites the male reader to enjoy a visual spectacle in which the woman becomes an object for his scrutiny and pleasure. Although in theory the representer may be female and the represented male, this possibility has not been historically realized: "The history of representation is the history of the male gender representing itself to itself--the power of naming is men's . . . . Culture, as we know it, is patriarchy's self-image." Kappeler . . . goes further than [others] in assuming that the structure of all male representation of women is pornographic: she sees no justification for female pleasure in viewing or reading the works of men . . . . If we agree, it is pointless to approach "Leda and the Swan" or, indeed, most Western art and literature. . . . [John Berger's] less exclusivist theory allows us to read "Leda and the Swan" in search of Leda's almost obliterated subjectivity.

"Leda and the Swan" is a representation of a representation. Lady Gregory notes that "W. B. Y. finished his poem on Leda--showed me the reproduction of the carving on which it is founded, confirming the hypothesis of Charles Madge that the immediate visual source for "Leda" was a Hellenistic bas-relief reproduced in Elie Faure's History of Art (1921), which Yeats owned. The carving corresponds to the configuration of bird and lady in Yeats' sonnet, and Faure's overheated commentary isolates precisely the features of the bas-relief that attracted Yeats' attention:

"look at the `Leda' as she stands to receive the great swan with the beating wings, letting the beak seize her neck, the foot tighten on her thigh--the trembling woman subjected to the fatal force which reveals to her the whole of life, even while penetrating her with voluptuousness and pain."

The . . . collocation of fatal force, voluptuousness, and pain identifies Faure as a Decadent, convinced not only that Leda did `put on his knowledge with his power,' but that she did so willingly: she `receives' the God, `letting' his beak seize her neck. Faure interprets Leda's rape as consensual intercourse.

The sestet [the last six lines of the poem, which is a sonnet] of Yeats' poem remained the same in all printings, but the octave [the first eight lines] as it appeared in To-morrow was closer than later versions to its visual source:

A rush, a sudden wheel, and hovering still

The bird descends, and her frail thighs are pressed

By the webbed toes, and that all-powerful bill

Has laid her helpless face upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs!

All the stretched body's laid on the white rush

And feels the strange heart beating where it lies.

As in the carving, the bird is `hovering' in the air, and Leda's head is pressed against his breast. The image is grotesque. The anatomical improbability of rape by a swan, which has an extremely small penis, is surmounted by transferring phallic prominence to `that all-powerful bill.' This awkward disposition of the swan's `webbed toes' is more apparent in the carving than in the sonnet, but the disparity in height between a standing woman and an attacking bird evokes an absurdly athletic image of an airborne rapist, beating his wings furiously just to stay in place.

Yeats addresses these problems, which are simultaneously problems of poetics and of power, in the final version of his first quatrain. He decreases the clumsiness of the God, increases his violence, and frames that violence as seductive:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

The vagueness of `rush' and `wheel' and the discursiveness of `the bird descends' are condensed into the immediacy of `a sudden blow' that comes from nowhere. The absurdity of the hovering rapist is transformed into the violent image of `great' wings `beating.' The bird no longer hovers and descends at the same time: he is poised in the superior position, `above' his victim. Leda, previously no more than a pair of `frail thighs' and a `helpless face,' is finally characterized as `the staggering girl.' `Staggering' conveys precisely the body's lurch under the weight form above: the violence has a specific target and physical effect. . . . `Girl' has a shockingly intimate effect, its colloquiality eliding the gap between the mythological past and the present. It increases the erotic charge for the male reader, who can transfer the action to `girls' of his own acquaintance. The improvement in poetics intensifies the sexual and kinetic power of the verse. The notion that the `higher' the art the less pornographic it is requires reconsideration.

The poetically effective replacement of `her frail thighs are pressed / by the webbed toes' with `her thighs caressed / By the dark webs' also strengthens the connection between male violence and male-eroticism. The action in the first version is a straightforward exercise of force, corroborating those who claim that rape is `about' violence and not `about' sex at all. MacKinnon insists, however, that for men violence and sexuality are often indistinguishable. `Caressed' develops this terrifying ambiguity. The blow followed by the caress becomes a sinister form of seduction, as the swan's poetically ridiculous `webbed toes' are transformed into the metaphorically threatening `dark webs.' Leda is entangled in sexual webs constructed by the deceptive promise of gentleness. Her face is not merely `laid' on the swan's breast, her `nape' (another increase in physical and verbal precision at the expense of Leda's human individuality) is `caught' in his bill. The imbalance of face/breast is replaced by a constrained equivalence: `he holds her hopeless breast upon his breast.' Leda is `held,' but in a position that suggests lovemaking: the bird's expression of desire mimics the gestures of tenderness until physical satiation reveals his utter indifference to his victim. . . . Yeats thought `Leda' was a poem in which `it is not clear whether the speaker is man or woman.' Can we imagine it as voiced from the subject position of the `helpless' victim of male power?

The major obstacle to such a reading occurs in the second quatrain, in which the ambiguous relationship between male force and female consent, the heart of all legal discussion of rape, is linguistically played out. For what Susan Estrich calls `real rape,' sexual intercourse by force, against the will and without the consent of the victim, is required. `Leda and the Swan' begins as real rape, but Yeats' language hints at the possibility of consent in medias res. In many previous version of the myth, Leda is clearly so willing to be hardly a victim at all. [The Renaissance poet Edmund] Spenser represents her as complicit with the Swan:

Whiles the proud Bird ruffing his fethers wyde,

And brushing his faire brest, did her inuade;

She slept, yet twixt her eyelids closely spyde,

How towards her he rusht, and smiled at his pryde.

This is not rape but male pornographic pretense. Leda likes swans: she allows Jove to act out the violation scenario while secretly pursuing her own gratification. The scene embodies a number of classic male assumptions about female sexuality: women love a bit of force; or when a woman says no she means yes; or women like to degrade themselves with animals. In The Player Queen (1916) Yeats had taken a Spenserian view of his inherited material. Decima chooses deliberately between actors dressed as beasts:

Shall I fancy beast or fowl?

Queen Pasophae chose a bull,

While a passion for a swan

Made Queen Leda stretch and yawn.

. . . In comparison with Spenser or with Yeats' other versions of the story, however, `Leda and the Swan' initially presents the rape as rape: the forcible violation of an unsuspecting victim. After the brutal attack Yeats moves into the interrogative mode to test the possibility of female resistance: arguing the case for the prosecution, he suggests that it was no wonder she did not struggle more purposefully, or make her unwillingness more clear:

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

In seeking to adopt the victim's point of view, Yeats takes a tentative step toward granting her a subject position of her own. Although the divine rapist's state of mind is never explored, the narrating voice tries to gain access to Lead's consciousness via two unanswered questions. The epithet `vague' suggests that Leda is too numb with shock to fight back: unlike Spenser's peeping and smiling Leda, she is `terrified.' Fear and disorientation render effective resistance impossible: Yeats' first rhetorical question implies that she could not have prevented the rape, and therefore was not legally responsible for her own predicament.

The questions, however, also contain certain assumptions in which male author and male reader are directly complicit. Those `vague' fingers and `loosening' thighs suggest that, although she is hurt and stunned, Leda's body, if no her will, responds to the rapist as physically erotic. Is it Leda's consciousness or the narrator's that approvingly tropes her aggressor as `the feathered glory'? Kappeler argues that the idea that the woman's body will involuntarily dears the rapist panders to the male view of women as `naturally' lustful creatures: `The unwillingness of the woman-victim is thus the cultural state of woman, coded by the patriarchal economy of the exchange of women, its laws and religions. The willingness of the woman-object is the natural state to which she has been returned through the offices of men' Pursuing Merriman's idea that `love is a lustier sire than law,' Yeats uses his description of rape to flout Irish patriarchal laws against the verbal expression of sexuality. In its repetition of male cultural assumptions, about women's bodies, however, his poem paradoxically contributes to the imprisonment of the female rape victim in a legal trap: if she brings a case against her abuser, the idea that women `naturally' desire their own violation will be used to discredit her testimony. Lead's `loosening thighs' imply a moment of consenting, mutual erotic pleasure, and the omission of the possessive pronoun before `body' suggests that both bodies `feel' the beating of the other's `strange' heart. The `heart' is culturally coded to suggest emotion. . . . This rhetoric of feeling suggests to the male reader that if he behaves like the swan, women will find him emotionally as well as physically irresistible. . . .

Paul Fussell's analysis of the structure of the sonnet form, one of the constants of Western Civilization since the early Renaissance, reveals how permeated by the male point of view are even the supposedly abstract shapes of canonical genres. "The [octave] builds up the pressure, the [sestet] releases it; and the turn is the dramatic and climactic center of the poem. . . . we may even suggest that one of the emotional archetypes of the Petrarchan sonnet structure is the pattern of sexual pressure and release." Fussell's analogy is based on the mechanics of male sexual responses . . . . "A shudder in the loins" is both linguistically graphic and physically climactic. Yeats' placement of this brutally naturalistic "low" diction at the "turn" between the octave and sestet, the place of maximum formal effect, demonstrates both his fidelity to the male shape of the genre and, paradoxically, the way in which his attitude to the traditionally sublimated sexuality of the Petrarchan sonnet has changed.

Like all modifications of a generic form, the poem depends for its full effect on our knowledge of the convention that is being inverted. Originally the sonnet was the vehicle of idealized woman-worship, in which the Lady disdained her helpless male lover, who was suspended in perennially unfulfilled desire; in Yeats' poem the woman is "helpless" before the "brute blood" of her male ravisher. Having overpaid his courtly dues in his youth, Yeats swung with corresponding intensity toward the opposite extreme: rape can be construed as the dark underside of Romance. . . .

But Yeats finally resists the temptation, implicit in the way he constructs the question, to assume that being raped by a god must be a glamorous experience worth any amount of incidental inconvenience. Despite the ambiguity of the rhetorical question in the penultimate line, the last line, although syntactically interrogative, has the force of a declarative. Yeats places at the conclusion of his poem, and thus formally emphasizes, the fact that Leda has been victimized by an indifferent brute. The god, combining overwhelming force with seductive hints of tenderness, has betrayed Leda into a human response to a creature both less and more than human, who can never engage with her. When his "indifferent beak" lets her drop we understand, as Yeats did, that Leda has been both physically and emotionally used, objectified, and discarded.

When the Virgin Mary said, "Be it done unto me according to Thy Will," she too became a vessel of the Divine (Male) Purpose. As we have seen, the question of Mary's instrumental sexual relation to the Godhead was part of the controversy over the original publication of "Leda and the Swan," . . . In "The Mother of God" the Annunciation is a "terror" borne, like Leda's, by "wings beating about the room"; the co-option of a "common woman" by indifferent forces that care nothing for her individuality. The rhetoric of religious representation deliberately erases Mary's bodily experience. . . .

Yeats' personal empathy with two female rape victims who were closely associated in his mythological imagination does not, however, dispel the doubts and questions of a feminist reader. . . . Does Yeats essentialize the subordination and victimage of women, and therefore perpetuate it even as he sympathizes poetically with Leda and Mary? In bringing their physical reality to the attention of a priesthood and a culture that systematically ignored and denigrated the female body, does he expose and so pornographically abuse them? . . .

"Leda and the Swan" demonstrates what happens when a writer cares more about using sexuality as a strategy for tilting at establishment authority than with the implications of that strategy for women, who are both the subjects of and subject to the power of his imagination. Yet is also exposes vividly the brutality of the male or divine exercise of force. We cannot make a tidy separation between a positive historicist hermeneutic and a negative feminist one. . . . In a Catholic culture the revision of Virgin into rape victim challenges the repressive ideology of female purity but risks reinscribing the woman into the equally repressive category "loose" (as in "loosening thighs"). To challenge the gathering impetus toward censorship Yea's flirts with pornography. [We] might emphasize the negative outcome of Yeats' attempt to stick a needle into the national being through verbal sexual transgression; but a consideration of the effects of censorship in Ireland upon the dissemination of information about contraception suggests that the virtues of resistance should never be underestimated. Liberation in complicity with oppression is surely better than oppression tout court?