Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights 3031420683, 9783031420689

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio Modernist Playwrights Zsuzsanna Balázs

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature Series Editor

Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness. The series aims to analyze literary works and investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture have inspired and impacted recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature, which contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.

Zsuzsanna Balázs

Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio Modernist Playwrights

Zsuzsanna Balázs Óbuda University Budapest, Hungary

ISSN 2731-3182     ISSN 2731-3190 (electronic) New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-031-42067-2    ISBN 978-3-031-42068-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

This book is dedicated to my amazing mother Zsuzsanna Nagy and to the memory of my father János Balázs whose absence has been felt every day since he passed away in 1993.

Acknowledgements

This book has evolved from my PhD research which I began in October 2017 with the immense support offered by the Irish Research Council’s Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (2017–2021) and the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Galway (formerly National University of Ireland, Galway). Although my PhD has been significantly rewritten, this book has been shaped by the invaluable advice of all the wonderful scholars that I had the honour to work with between 2017 and 2021, including Ian R. Walsh, Paolo Bartoloni, Patrick Lonergan, Charlotte McIvor, Adrian Paterson, Miriam Haughton, Barry Houlihan, and Catherine Morris from the University of Galway and Susan Cannon Harris from the University of Notre Dame. The feedback I received at Irish and Italian studies conferences over the last six years has also significantly inspired this project, including stimulating conversations with Ben Levitas, Maria Rita Drumond Viana, Margaret Mills Harper, Charles Ivan Armstrong, John Kavanagh, Aileen Ruane, Anna Charczun, Ashim Dutta, Hugh Haughton, Antonio Bibbò, Ursula Fanning, Enza De Francisci, Séan Golden, Niall Mann, Rebecca Anne Barr, Matthew Campbell, and Lauren Arrington. I would also like to thank Eileen Srebernik, Kishor Kannan Ramesh, and Lara Glueck from Palgrave Macmillan for their kind assistance and support throughout the book writing process. Modernist Playwrights has been written under unusual circumstances. I started to turn my PhD into a book in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; hence, I suddenly found myself isolated from the stimulating research community that had helped me so much during my PhD in vii

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Galway. Despite the physical barriers and emotional difficulties during this period, my colleagues and friends have not ceased to support and inspire me. I owe special thanks to Graham Price and Jack Quinn for offering their detailed and insightful thoughts on my book chapters. I also thank my friends who have supported me emotionally, mostly Michael Geaney, Enea Bianchi, Noémi Farkas-Hussey, Gary Hussey, Henriett Túrós, Veronika Németh, Andrea Balázs, Nóra Lengyel, Pawan Kumar, and Komal Agarwal. You have taught me how to be more patient with myself and how to draw boundaries, which has helped me navigate both my personal and academic life. The life-changing 56th and 57th Yeats International Summer Schools in Sligo provided the primary inspiration for this book. Alexandra Poulain’s and Ben Levitas’s thought-provoking drama seminars made me realise that I wished to conduct a PhD on Yeats’s drama in Ireland: their kind words, insightful ideas, and encouragement helped me outline the basis for this research, reassess my relationship with Yeats’s drama, and venture into the area of queer studies. I must give special mention to Alexandra Poulain from whom I discovered the thrill of Yeats’s drama and who encouraged me to shift away from a theoretical approach in the direction of more practical dramaturgical analyses. Please know that your support at the very beginning of my academic career meant everything to me and I am deeply indebted to your inspiration which echoes through this book, too. These summer schools have also enriched my life with precious friendships and life-changing encounters for which I cannot be grateful enough. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all those wonderful scholars who raised and deepened my interest in Irish studies during my BA and MA studies, especially Ildikó Limpár, Kinga Földváry, Gabriella Reuss, Zsolt Almási, and Tamás Karáth. Finally, I would be remiss in not thanking my brothers Viktor Balázs and Péter Balázs who have supported me wherever they could over the last few years. In fact, I should have started this acknowledgement section with my dear mother who has never ceased to believe in me and who, I know, was fully with me more than anyone else through the ups and downs of this journey, supporting every decision I made and providing emotional support both for the difficulties of my academic path and my coming-out journey. Köszönöm, Anya, hogy mindig támogatsz, meghallgatsz, gondolsz rám, szurkolsz nekem és biztató szavaiddal segítesz újra és újra felállni egy-egy nehéz időszak során, életem bármely területén.

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In Chap. 2, my analysis of Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire and Calvary are updated and extended versions of two essays originally published as “Yeats’s Queer Dramaturgies: Oscar Wilde, Narcissus, and Melancholy Masculinities in Calvary.” International Yeats Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2020: 15–44. Published by Clemson University Press; and “‘What secret torture?’: Normativity, Homoeros and the Will to Escape in Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire and Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field.” Studi Irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 10, no. 10, 2020: 23–41. Published by Firenze University Press. In Chap. 3, my reading of D’Annunzio’s The Dead City is a revised version of a book chapter originally appeared as “And this is how ‘the feminists’ are made: Ethical Collaboration between Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D’Annunzio.” In Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism, edited by Katherine Ebury, Matthew Fogarty, and Bridget English, 217–234. Clemson University Press, 2023, ISBN: 978-1638040750. A minor section of my analysis of Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones first appeared as “‘Precarious Bodies and Physical Theater: A Review of DancePlayers’ The Dreaming of the Bones by W.  B. Yeats.” International Yeats Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2021: 89–99. Published by Clemson University Press. Finally, revised versions of my analysis of The Cat and the Moon and A Full Moon in March appeared in a book chapter titled “Reading the Late Plays: Sexual Unorthodoxies.” In The Oxford Handbook of W.  B. Yeats, edited by Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell, 539–554. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023, ISBN: 9780198834670. All articles have been reprinted with permission.

Praise for Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio “Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights offers a fresh, creative, and highly illuminating approach to the work of two essential yet perplexing modern European playwrights. Reading Yeats through the lens of queer theory unlocks some of the contradictions of his treatment of gender and sexuality, demonstrating that they remain profoundly anti-normative and anti-­ authoritarian even when citing heteronormative or misogynistic tropes. In addition to provocative and generative readings of some of Yeats and D’Annunzio’s most difficult plays, Balázs’s book offers a treasure trove of information about modernist theatrical production and the performers who brought these dramas to life. The questions raised in this book about the arts and authority could not possibly be more timely. This book will be essential reading for anyone drawn to the fascinating world of modern European drama.” —Susan Cannon Harris, University of Notre Dame “Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio is an important new study that is revelatory not only for what it reveals about these two important playwrights, but also for its innovative approach to methodology. As modernist playwrights, Yeats and D’Annunzio adopted a variety of approaches – both overlapping and contrasting  – to their dramaturgy and stagecraft, and this book sheds new light on the political and aesthetic consequences of their work. Of even greater value, however, is Zsuzsanna Balázs’s extraordinarily deft and original application of queer theory to these writers’ dramas and legacies. The overall impact is to open up new approaches to research in modernism, theatre studies, queer theory – and beyond.” —Patrick Lonergan, University of Galway

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Family, Normativity, and the Will to Escape 45 3 Moral Prudery, Respectability, and Broken Intimacies101 4 Sadomasochistic  Attachments: Reverse Power and Erotic Stimulations145 5 Defiant Dykes: New Women against Patriarchy191 6 Conclusions233 Index247

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Introduction

Insult is more than a word that describes. It is not satisfied with simply telling me what I am. […] The person is letting me know that he has something on me, has power over me. First and foremost the power to hurt me, to mark my consciousness with that hurt, inscribing shame in the deepest levels of my mind. This wounded, shamed consciousness becomes a formative part of my personality. —Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Countervisuality proper is the claim for the right to look […]. The performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a countervisuality into play. —Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look

Although this book centres on modern Irish and Italian drama and theatre from the 1890s until the 1930s, I have chosen as our points of departure the above passages from French philosopher Didier Eribon’s monograph Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (2004) and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011). Both the performative power of insult coming from normative authorities who dictate what can be seen and the performance of countervisuality by oppressed individuals who claim the right for visibility are central to my critical reading of play texts, some of their performance materials, and to the cultural, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9_1

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historical contexts that informed Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts. Eribon sees insult as “a social structure of inferiorization” (2004, xviii) aimed to consolidate asymmetrical power relations. Building on Michel Foucault’s works, he elaborates, however, that insult can work both as discourse and counterdiscourse: the insulted often reverse the strategies of insult to transform its meaning and create a counterdiscourse for themselves, which is one of the main themes that connects Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama, too. Mirzoeff’s idea of countervisuality resonates closely with Eribon’s discussion in that the authority of visuality dictates and controls what can be seen and acknowledged in society and history. Countervisuality thus becomes a synonym for normativity which equally defines who and what is worthy of recognition. The authority of visuality works like insult: it classifies people and segregates whom it visualises. Countervisuality, however, claims autonomy from this authority, resists segregation, and evades categorisation. The stigmatised characters in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays all perform countervisuality to claim their right to existence as a reaction to the insults they receive from society, their family, and patriarchal authorities. Strikingly, this claim was embodied in performance by queer and/or feminist actors some of whom were fighting for their rights and visibility at the time, mostly Florence Farr, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eleonora Duse, Ida Rubinstein, Irma Gramatica, and Emma Gramatica. In the respective chapters of this book, I briefly introduce these artists and their influence on the playwrights’ ideas about gender and sexuality. Crucially, queer, feminist, and anti-colonial undertones are closely intertwined in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts. Croft has explained that queer performance is always in dialogue with feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial art-making— in fact, queerness is deeply tied to feminism, and it is key to address sexism and homophobia together, since the latter one often arises from misogyny (2017, 15). By portraying stigmatised characters as protagonists embodied by these historically marginalised women, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama allowed the presence of the other on the stage and made “a claim for a different form of visualizing by those who would oppose autocratic authority” (Mirzoeff 2011, 29). Exploring the queer dramaturgical aesthetics of two male heterosexual and canonical playwrights challenges the heteronormative bias of Italian and Irish criticism and demonstrates that straight playwrights can also think queer provided they are embedded in progressive feminist and queer circles that make a life-long influence on their dramatic imagination. Gay Gibson Cima has stressed that even though academic theatre discourse has long assumed that it is only the playwright who can generate changes in

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style and content, it is in fact often done by the actors (1993, 14). Acting requires personal courage and it activates subjectivities that are repressed in society. Therefore, when these influential New Women embodied marginalised characters on the stage, it was a way of creating a discourse of legitimation and sympathy for stigmatised lives and helped deflect the validity of repressive social and political institutions.1 These New Women were embodiments of those subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who, as Jack Halberstam has phrased, “fell outside of [scientific] classification and remained in the wild, so to speak beyond the human zoo, inexplicable, discomforting, shocking, exploitable, and displayable” (2020, 24–25), just like the characters they embodied on the stage. Even though there is no evidence to suggest that either the playwrights or any of their characters were attracted to their own sex, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s networks and theatrical collaborations included women and men who were openly homosexual or were perceived by the playwrights as queer due to their androgynous stage presence or the sexual tension they exhibited. Within Yeats’s networks, we can mention among others Florence Farr, Eva Gore-Booth,2 Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Oscar

1  The “New Woman” was a feminist ideal which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century across Europe. New Women threatened conventional notions about the ideal Victorian womanhood by being free-spirited, independent, highly educated, and uninterested in the institution of marriage, motherhood, and domestic duties traditionally assigned to women. Through these New Women, the end of the nineteenth century brought a radical change in European theatre too whereby the “actress” became much more important than the “actor,” as it was the great actress that could attract masses to the theatre (Re 2002, 115). This phenomenon was parallel to the women’s emancipation movement in other parts of Europe. New Women had a seminal role in these movements, as they embodied the potential of women to be independent, suggesting that women can have multiple roles besides and beyond the domestic one. 2  Ireland’s militant suffrage activity began in Sligo where Yeats spent most of his time in the company of the lesbian poet and playwright Eva Gore-Booth and her sister Constance Markievicz. Eva Gore-Booth’s group of radical suffragists also founded their own periodical Urania in 1916, which focused on gender equality and radical sexual theory. The issues published by Urania criticised the institution of marriage, encouraged women to choose their careers over married life, reported stories about boys who changed into girls and women who cross-dressed, and critiqued the anti-spinster sentiment of the time. They claimed that “[a]mong the women who have not married will be found some of the most charming, the most attractive, and the best-looking of their sex” (quoted in Tiernan 2010, 84). The editors’ wish was, therefore, to challenge the prevailing negative notion that women who did not marry were necessarily undesirable.

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Wilde, Edward Martyn,3 William Sharp/Fiona Macleod,4 while within D’Annunzio’s networks Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt,5 Wilde, Sibilla Aleramo,6 Lina/Cordula Poletti,7 Irma and Emma Gramatica, Luisa 3  Martyn was known as a celibate, who opposed physical comforts, criticised the institution of marriage, and felt ill at ease in the company of women. His contemporaries, including Yeats and George Moore in particular, noticed that “he was afflicted lifelong with some unexplained psychological anguish” (Lapointe 2009, 76). Crucially, in “Dramatis Personae,” Yeats suggests that what hurt Martyn was his repressed desire for his own sex, and wondered “[w]hat drove him to those long prayers, those long meditations, that stern Church music? What secret torture?” (1972, 253). 4  Vern L. Bullogh and Bonnie Bullogh have descried the Scottish writer William Sharp as “one of the more interesting cases of cross-dresser behaviour” (1993, 195) in the nineteenth century. Sharp also admitted to a close friend, John Elder, in 1880: “Don’t despise me when I say that in some things I am more a woman than a man” (quoted in Bullogh 1993, 51). Sharp’s gender-fluid decision to create Fiona Macleod as an authorial persona was probably a manifestation of his own sexual predicament, as he “struggled with Victorian constructs of gender and sexuality, chafing under their constraints, and undergoing in the 1890’s a particularly acute crisis of sexual identity” (Meyers 1996, 4). Yeats was alert to the identity crisis Sharp was going through, and in his Memoirs, he avidly described a dream Sharp had recounted about his gender-bending, sexual union with the invented female figure of Fiona Macleod (1972, 129). 5  Bernhardt had a long-lasting influence on both Duse and D’Annunzio. Even though she was French, she influenced an entire generation of Italian artists and she was D’Annunzio’s earliest theatrical collaborator besides Duse. From June 1896 until February 1915, there was an intense correspondence between them in which D’Annunzio often asked her advice and opinion about the plays he was working on. Famously, Bernhardt’s motto was quand même: despite everything, at all costs. This was her favourite phrase which represented the force, determination, provocation, defiance, and transgression that characterised her personal life and artistic career that lasted for almost sixty years. Bernhardt was particularly famous for playing lead male characters, as at the time, complex roles were written almost exclusively for men—Bernhardt, however, was not interested in uncomplicated, submissive female characters that inhabited the European stage. 6  Sibilla Aleramo was the first feminist novelist of Italian literature. Her novel Una donna (A Woman, 1906) is often referred to as “the Feminist Bible” (Cenni 2018, 46) and is compared to the plays of Henrik Ibsen for its criticism of normative society and its propagation of women’s emancipation. 7  Lina Poletti was a lesbian, feminist playwright who dedicated her anti-conformist life to literature and pressing social issues. She raised unease in her contemporaries, as she often dressed up in male clothes and preferred activities that society did not see appropriate for women, such as writing, travelling, studying, and enjoying total autonomy. Poletti did not belong to D’Annunzio’s close networks, but they knew each other through Aleramo, and Poletti’s poems were directly influenced by D’Annunzio’s decadent art. After her relationship with Sibilla Aleramo, Poletti became involved with Duse in 1910. Similar to D’Annunzio, Poletti began writing for the theatre thanks to Duse’s influence, dedicating two of her plays Arianna and Incesto (Incest) to her.

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Casati,8 Marguerite Radclyffe Hall,9 and Ida Rubinstein played the most important roles. For the purposes of this book, however, I will only discuss Farr, Mrs. Campbell, Duse, the Gramatica sisters, Rubinstein, and Oscar Wilde. These artists made Yeats and D’Annunzio more alert to the vicissitudes of marginalised subjectivities in society and created a dramaturgical tension between the queer and the normative in the plays. I argue that it is exactly the ambiguous tension between the contradictory dramaturgical impulses of normativity/authoritarianism and anti-normative dissidence that creates spaces for queer readings today. The ambiguity of meaning that characterises their drama bears dramaturgical as well as political significance, given that authoritarian normativity demonises ambiguity in every field of life. As Patrick Lonergan has pointed out, prioritising ambiguity over precise meaning in drama can indeed offer new ways of talking about gender, sexuality, and difference (2019, 147). It is also the ambiguity and contradiction that lie in the texts (the tension between the queer and the normative) that eventually make the scripts great performance materials. What is more, as Clare Croft has discerned, it is this contradiction, the friction between various elements in the scripts that produces the queer possibility which eventually resists totalising narratives (2017, 10). I further contend that thanks to the influence of feminist and queer artists, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts had formulated ideas in the early twentieth century that queer theory articulated decades later about the happy family, affect aliens, reverse discourse, sadomasochism, melancholia, 8  Casati was a well-known Italian patroness of the arts in the first half of the twentieth century. She was involved with D’Annunzio, hence scholarship tends to mention her only as D’Annunzio Muse’s, while in fact, she was bisexual (she had a relationship with Romaine Brooks as well), and she financially supported artists as well as fashion designers, such as Mariano Fortuny (whose robes were worn by Elenora Duse too on the stage). Most importantly, her palace in Venice (today’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection), she offered safe space and home to a wide range of gay and lesbian artists who were living in exile in Italy. 9  Radlyffe-Hall became D’Annunzio’s close friend in the last years of his life when he was going through a long period of depression. D’Annunzio’s unexplained melancholia was pointed out by Radclyffe Hall whose melancholy invert protagonist Stephen in The Well of Loneliness impressed D’Annunzio. As Richard Ormrod has noted: “Perhaps something of the ‘outsider’ in Stephen Gordon, the central protagonist, accorded with his own sense of isolation, of being divided from others by an exceptional nature and situation” (1989, 843). What is more, D’Annunzio’s last days and death were recounted by Radclyffe Hall’s partner Una Troubridge in a series of unpublished essays which demonstrate that they spent more time with D’Annunzio in his last months and “Radclyffe Hall wept bitterly on hearing his death and sent, significantly, a large laurel wreath to his funeral” (Ormrod 1989, 845).

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discomfort, dykes, wildness, and the will to escape. Jack Halberstam has referred to Yeats in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020) as one of “the weird white male loners” (23) of modernism who should be queered. Halberstam’s book selected modernist texts by “weird white male loners” such as Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Vaslav Nijinsky, Roger Casement, and T. S. Eliot, not merely because modernism offers us a vast group of wild and revolutionary thinkers, but “because the very classification that seemed established and right in the nineteenth century began to wobble and topple over in the modernist period” (23–24) and because these male loners appear as “the sites of struggle that the canon has retained” (23). Hence Halberstam suggests that we need to rethink the modernist archive and find “new ways of reading canonical authors against the great traditions into which they have been placed” (11). Modernist Playwrights undertakes this challenge and thus intervenes critically in Yeats, D’Annunzio, modernist and queer studies, highlighting the multiple ways in which their texts can be queered. What Halberstam called an “archive of wildness” in their book resonates closely with what my selection of texts has to offer to readers: it is “neither a new canon nor an alternative canon; it is the canon read against the canon” (2020, 24). The aim of Modernist Playwrights is to make Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts more accessible and relatable to students as well as to queer and feminist readers with the help of gender and queer theory. This book thus contributes to revisionist historiographies which approach modernist texts through feminist and queer critical perspectives. The new dramaturgical readings that constitute the vast bulk of this book also serve to encourage theatre makers to readapt Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts for contemporary audiences and to situate them in more global contexts. I am convinced that queer theory can help underline the global and topical nature of the scripts as well as the immense potential of literature, the arts, and thus theatre in challenging deeply entrenched regressive political ideologies.

What Is Queer About Yeats and D’Annunzio? Modernist Playwrights draws on the slipperiness and fluidity of the meaning of queer. In fact, what connects queerness and modernism is their shared indeterminacy. As Heather K. Love articulates it, “the indeterminacy of queer seems to match the indeterminacy, expansiveness, and drift of the literary—particularly the experimental, oblique version most closely associated with modernist textual production” (2009, 745). My analyses

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have equally been inspired by Patrick R.  Mullen’s definition who sees queerness as “a capacious index for a series of non-normative desires, people, politics, and cultural expressions and as a term that maintains specific relations, at times contradictory, with the homosexual and the homoerotic” (2012, 6). Even the meaning of homoeros is fluid: it can imply an emotional or spiritual yearning for another member of the same sex, alternative notions of love and male friendship, and plurality of sexual categories, instead of simply meaning explicit same-sex desire. While same-sex object choice might seem to be the main definition of queerness, what makes a text queer is often the ambiguity of meaning it offers: “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to is the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick 1993, 8). Modernist Playwrights thus also challenges the conflation between queerness and homosexuality: “queer” implies a taste for salaciousness and provocation; sexual behaviours that deviate from the heterosexual paradigm; boundaries of femininity and masculinity as porous; and the shaking of narrative logic and the linearity of dramaturgical structures. Moreover, what the non-normative characters in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama experience can accurately be described by what Sara Ahmed has called queer feelings: “a sense of discomfort, a lack of ease with the available scripts for living and loving, along with an excitement in the face of the uncertainty of where the discomfort may take us” (2004, 155). Hence representations of existential malaise and unease with traditional family and social roles are queer too, as queerness implies all kinds of unorthodox behaviours which go against the norms dictated by (hetero)normativity. In the modernist period, queer primarily meant strange, odd, and eccentric. However, as Anne Herrmann has pointed out, “[t]he multiple ways in which one [could] be odd or at odds [could] […] serve as a cover for those who [were] sexually queer” (2000, 6). This means that there was an ambiguity around the meaning of queer in the modernist period, too: it could refer to both strangeness and sexual queerness. It was in fact John Douglas the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde’s lover), who first used it as a slur in 1894 in a threatening letter to Alfred Montgomery after his eldest son Francis had presumably committed suicide fearing the consequences of his relations with Lord Rosebery: “Now the first flush of this catastrophe and grief is passed, I write to tell you that this is a judgement on the whole lot of you. Montgomerys, The Snob Queers like Rosebery […] I smell a tragedy

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behind all this and have already got Wind of a more startling one.” (Ellmann 1988, 402, his emphasis). In either sense of the word, “queer” has a political significance, especially today when queer is employed as an umbrella term for various non-normative identities and for the process of unsettling established cultural forms and norms. As Judith Butler has explained in “Critically Queer”: “‘Queer’ derives its force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has become linked to accusation, pathologization, insult. […] The interpellation echoes past interpellations, and binds the speakers, as if they spoke in unison across time. In this sense, it is always an imaginary chorus that taunts ‘queer’” (1993, 169). As we shall see, the word queer often appears in Yeats’s scripts, but strikingly, it mostly assumes a positive connotation as opposed to the negative meanings of queer used in Yeats’s time. This book has been inspired by a long tradition of work on queer negativity by Halberstam, Ahmed, Love, Elizabeth Freeman, Leo Bersani, and José Esteban Muñoz. Their works help better understand the significance of dramaturgical representations of “backward feelings” or “bad feelings,” such as failure, loss, broken intimacies, discomfort, the will to escape, anxiety, impossible love, refusal, and melancholia, and the ways in which these can express anxieties about repressive constructions of gender and sexuality. Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays have indeed a lot to tell us about “what it is like to bear a ‘disqualified’ identity, which at times can simply mean living with injury—not fixing it” (Love 2007, 4). These so-called backward feelings can “serve as an index to the ruined state of the social world” (Love 2007, 27) and draw attention to the damage homogenising political narratives inflict on subjectivities who do not wish to be assimilated into those narratives. This book discovers what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s play texts by bringing queerness and queer theory into varied engagement with their scripts and some of their production histories. Queer theory thus helps unveil a queer alterity in Irish and Italian canonical texts in the context of nationalism and it helps reveal that the boundary between the homosocial and the homoerotic in Irish and Italian nationalisms was in fact highly porous. Approaching D’Annunzio and especially Yeats from a queer and feminist perspective is not entirely new. However, considering the enormous amount of scholarship on their works, such readings still constitute a minority and a comprehensive discussion of the queer potentialities of their drama is still missing. Although Sandra Ponzanesi, Charlotte Ross, John Champagne, Gary P. Cestaro, Derek Duncan, Chiara Beccalossi, and

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Gaia Giuliani have written extensively on the theme of homoeroticism in Italian literature, D’Annunzio has never been the focus of attention in this regard. D’Annunzio’s drama has only been analysed from various feminist perspectives mostly by Luisetta Elia Chomel (1997), Lidia HwaSoon Anchisi (2001), Jessica Otey (2010), Andrea Mirabile (2014), Michela Barisonzi (2017), and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (2018). In my dramaturgical readings, I rely mostly on Chomel’s book, as she provided detailed feminist interpretations of all of D’Annunzio’s plays in her monograph. Although Chomel points out anti-authoritarian temperaments and even sadomasochistic power games in D’Annunzio’s scripts, she does not discuss other forms of queerness, therefore my readings aim to complement her analyses in this regard. So far, only Jason James Hartford’s monograph (2018) has highlighted the queer potential of D’Annunzio’s drama through the analysis of D’Annunzio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. I believe what is missing from studies on D’Annunzio is an approach which considers historical and biographical contexts as an important background but allows the text to speak for itself. It is striking that D’Annunzio’s scripts have never been interpreted outside of their historical contexts and production histories, even though plays are not mere historical objects tied to a certain time. His texts can convey messages about difference and non-normative sexuality, which D’Annunzio might not have even intended to reflect on, yet the scripts contain those potentials regardless of authorial intentions. Most of D’Annunzio’s plays portray the institution of marriage, normative society, and the conventional family as constructs that threaten the liberty of the individual. Hence his dissident protagonists always fight against the representatives of such oppressive institutions. Gabrielle Brandstetter highlights that D’Annunzio’s interest in expressing the freedom of the body and free movement on stage came from the performances he had seen in Rome, Milan, and in Paris after 1910s, including dances by Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis (2015, 101–109).10 D’Annunzio was undoubtedly an unconventional thinker whose unorthodox approach to sexuality, the body, and society went 10  To express women’s emancipation and the freedom of the body on stage, D’Annunzio used shawls designed by Mariano Fortuny whose aim was to permit “the greatest possible freedom of movement” (Brandstetter 2015, 101), suggest in-betweenness, allow “an individualized assertion of female identity” (109), and guarantee “singularity and individuality” (105) through the fabric itself. Duse, Duncan, St. Denis, and the famous Ballets Russes dancers were all Fortuny shawl owners.

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against the norms of his time and displayed sexual exorbitance. The types of eros that appear in his plays are almost exclusively desires that were considered outside of the law in his time: adultery, spiritual and carnal incest, homoerotic desires, and sadomasochistic attachments. Foucault has observed that such desires “were infringements of decrees which were just as sacred as those of marriage, and which had been established for governing the order of things and the plan of beings” (1978, 38). In Fascist Italy, for instance, there were numerous factors that could make a literary work subject to state censorship. Ross highlights that representations of failure, breakdown of social relations, emotional yearning for same-sex characters, immoral heterosexual liaisons, effeminacy, excessive female desire for men and any kind of non-reproductive or amoral desires were deemed as obscenity by fascist censors, as such topics offended the national sentiment according to Article 339 of the 1889 Zanardelli Code and Article 112 of the 1926 laws of Public Security (Ross 2016, 404–407). Yet Ross further explains that “the boundaries between acceptable representation of sexuality and ‘obscenity’ were porous and shifting in this period” (2016, 405). This is part of the reasons why ambiguous representations of sexual behaviour and gender roles in D’Annunzio’s drama could eventually evade censorship, as the ambivalence that pervades his plays allowed for both fascist and anti-fascist interpretations. Regrettably, D’Annunzio scholarship still tends to discuss D’Annunzio’s female characters with a focus on their immorality and perversion, avoiding in-depth analyses of the plays’ interrogation of patriarchy and normative as well as non-normative femininities and masculinities. Unlike most of the roles written for women around the turn of the century, D’Annunzio created extremely complex characters for them to fit the expectations of the queer icons of the time (Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Emma and Irma Gramatica, and Ida Rubinstein) who were only interested in difficult roles. The presence of these (in)famous New Women in the first productions of his plays inevitably entailed an engagement in contemporary debates about the sexually ambiguous New Women who always posed a threat to heterosexuality and the institution of marriage. The reviews cited in the respective chapters demonstrate that critics’ reactions to D’Annunzio’s provocative female characters reflected society’s reaction to the emergence of New Women whom they condemned as bestial, wild, immoral, perverse, loud, indecent, and unrespectable—in short, enemies of the nation’s stability, morality, bourgeois respectability, and threats to heterosexuality. Besides D’Annunzio’s strong-willed women, his unorthodox male characters deserve more attention, too. His male protagonists often assume a

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submissive role; feel the pressure to act up; suffer from unexplained anxiety; and feel confused as to how to act out their masculinity or how to perform patriarchal authority. George L. Mosse has explained that at the turn of the century the homosexual man emerged as the antithesis to the masculine Christian gentleman. The widely accepted symptomatic signs of the homosexual included fatigue, a nervous disposition, feminine appearance, sensuality, physical weakness, and compulsive onanism (1985, 28–31). Through these nervous and confused male characters, the plays illustrate the ways in which societal pressure pushes individuals towards violence, self-harm, and denial. Moreover, as Margaret Günsberg has explained: “Masculinity in D’Annunzio’s plays is very much tied in with femininity” (1997, 141). D’Annunzio’s strong, revengeful women and hesitant, anxious men help reveal the systemic failures of historical distributions of power, gender, and sexual roles. The plays abound in authoritative characters who try to contain the unruly behaviour of individuals they label as immoral or sexually deviant, thus power clashes with desire/seduction in D’Annunzio with desire always succeeding in undermining power in some way. Interestingly, these authoritative characters are not always men, as another important clash in D’Annunzio’s drama is between dissident, independent women and women who act as gatekeepers of patriarchy and the family. Hierarchy is central to these normative relationships, yet the intimate and confidential same-sex relationships of the scripts are marked by a sense of equality, tenderness, and tolerance, including both sisterhood and brotherhood bonds. Furthermore, D’Annunzio resembled Oscar Wilde in terms of his self-­ fashioning as a dandy and as a decadent aesthete. Crucially, he wanted to resemble Duse and Bernhardt, and like Wilde, he wished to realise himself aesthetically through Bernhardt. Re explains that he “literally abused the system of the diva” (2002, 125) in his attempts to create a myth of himself and his work for the audience, and in this regard, D’Annunzio was very much like Oscar Wilde. More pressingly, contemporary caricatures portrayed D’Annunzio as an effeminate “uomo-donna” (a man-woman), and audiences associated D’Annunzio “divo” with Wilde and the great actresses of the time (Re 2002, 125). This highlights the gender nonconformist aspects of D’Annunzio’s public persona which, regrettably, has largely remained ignored by scholarship. D’Annunzio’s drama equally features an intersection between sexual desire and violence/death. Love has explained that “[t]he history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants. Those who are directly identified with same-sex desire most often end up dead; if they manage to survive, it is on such compromised

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terms that it makes death seem attractive” (2007, 1). D’Annunzio’s plays are indeed “littered” with the corpses of sexual deviants, yet what makes these negative representations affirmative is the way these characters take their body and death in their own hands, choosing death as a means of resisting the oppressive social environment that makes their life and desires impossible. It is not by accident that Love has warned against the dismissal of such dark representations of queer experiences and stressed the importance of countering stigma by incorporating it. Mentioning Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as an example, Love explains that “[d]espite complaints about their toxicity, such tragic, tear-soaked accounts of same-­ sex desire compel readers in a way that brighter stories of liberation do not” (2007, 3). Love observes that these feelings can register the authors’ painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality regardless of their sexual orientation or intention. This observation can be applied to D’Annunzio’s drama as well, even if love in D’Annunzio’s plays is often framed as a stigmatised adulterous heterosexual romance saturated with homoerotic innuendos. Yeats scholarship has been for years flirting with queer readings of Yeats’s works. Inspired by Elizabeth Cullingford’s ground-breaking books Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1981) and Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (1993), Yeats scholarship over the last more than twenty years has demonstrated a significant move towards comparative, transnational, feminist, queer, and postcolonial readings, and this study benefits from much of this recent work. These new approaches do not aim to pin down Yeats to any political ideology anymore. More importantly, over the last few years, the focus has begun to shift from postcolonial criticism to identity politics, biopolitical criticism, and critical examinations of gender and sexuality not just in Yeats studies but in Irish scholarship in general (O’Brien 2021, 5). Yeats scholarship has begun to highlight the inherent ambiguity of Yeats’s works and their resistance to notions of unity and authority. Some scholars have even acknowledged Yeats’s role in facilitating the appearance of homoerotic content in Irish literature. Yeats’s name is mentioned multiple times in the Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland essay volume by David Norris, Eibhear Walshe, and Emma Donoghue. Norris referred to Yeats as an artist critical of heteronormativity in his 1993 speech in Seanad Éireann to mark the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland. Norris quotes from Yeats’s poem “Crazy Jane and the Bishop” and draws attention to the fact that when Yeats wrote “love has pitched his tent in the house of excrement,” “he was speaking of heterosexual and not

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homosexual love” (1995, 22). In the same volume, Walshe points out that “the period before Yeats and his cultural revolution is barren place for the Irish lesbian or gay reader” (1995, 148). He draws a parallel between gays and lesbians and artists like Yeats who also sought freedom from colonial power in search of a renewed and independent self-image. It was therefore Yeats’s cultural nationalism and the emergence of the emblematic figure of Oscar Wilde that created possibilities for the homoerotic to emerge in Irish literature but, as Walshe remarks, also made it “more threatening in the formulation of an indigenous Irish literary identity” (1995, 147–148). The dramaturgy of some of Yeats’s plays can also be regarded as queer in that they challenged the theatrical conventions of the time. Yeats’s turn to drama was initially a search for what he called “more of manful energy” (VP 849).11 The stereotype of Irish men as effeminate was widespread in British colonial discourses to justify Ireland’s inferior status, hence Irish nationalists and Revivalist writers were expected to create hyper-masculine heroes to defy the colonial imagery. However, a closer examination of Yeats’s play texts demonstrates that Yeats’s representations and ideas about gender and sexuality were, in fact, highly fluid and unstable. In the early twentieth century, Yeats’s scripts were clearly becoming more and more critical of repressive nationalist biopolitics through his representations of manliness and femininity. What is more, his plays do not present the vulnerability of the body as a weakness (as perceived by Irish nationalists), but as something that is continuously abused by political interests and patriarchy. Yeats’s experimentation with dramatic form, multiple identities and non-linear, anti-mimetic dramaturgical structures also created spaces for alternative visions of gender and sexuality. As Cormac O’Brien explains, the fragmented dramaturgical strategies which characterise anti-realism “disavow realist narrative drama in favor of free-flowing theatrical form” (2014, 76). This kind of dramaturgy can challenge “the very concept of norms, and systems of theatrical and social normalizing” (2014, 81) and “the queerer the form, the queerer the possibilities for masculine identities” (2014, 83). Yeats gradually moved towards dance-based plays and physical theatre techniques, focusing on the power and the vulnerabilities of the body, strangers and strangeness, fluid boundaries between various layers of reality, and spectrality. Moreover, there is a lot of nonverbal 11  I use VP as an abbreviation for The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1957), while later I employ the abbreviation VPl to refer to The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats (1966).

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discursive hiatus in the texts, especially in the dance scenes, which can disturb the patriarchal authority of language, and represent the threat of the feminine and the erotic for patriarchy which fears the power of eros.12 What is queer in Yeats is often not immediately visible: “The thing, the ‘queer’ is what emerges among, across, and between,” and “it is how the elements rub, collide, and comingle” (Croft 2017, 3 and 7). Director James Flannery has stated that Yeats was in many ways a twenty-first-­ century writer whose plays try to convey vital messages through text and dramaturgy, yet most of them remain hidden in the dramatic text and subtexts, which the audience cannot see and often cannot understand (1967, 80). Yeats’s plays include several moments when the audience can be queerly moved, as the spectacle, dance, or image transgresses traditional borders of authority, language, and representation, which feel like “a queerly transitory suspension of the regular rules of society” (Campbell and Farrier 2016, 3). His drama features the tension between authoritarian normativity and individuals whom it wants to contain and oppress due to their difference or excessive temperament. This facet of Yeats’s drama demonstrates that theatre can help raise awareness to the manipulative strategies of power and normativity, which want to contain bodies by forcing them into transparent roles such as wife and husband, mother and father, daughter and son, man and woman, normal and abnormal, able-­ bodied and disabled-bodied. In terms of queer dramaturgy, my analyses have been informed by Cormac O’Brien’s recent monograph Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man (2021) and two essay collections: Queer Dramaturgies (2016) edited by Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier and Queer Dance (2017) edited by Clare Croft. Even though these volumes focus on contemporary performance, they can help us understand where the queer moments of modernist plays lie. It would be too far-fetched to claim that Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts reverberate with queer dramaturgical potentials, yet the texts do display some queer dramaturgical strategies, such as the increasing presence of anti-realist total theatre elements (dance, singing, visual effects, music, masks); fragmented and often non-linear storytelling; the attempts by the playwrights to stage their plays outside of conventional theatre auditoria; and the scripts’ 12  Audre Lorde has explained that patriarchal societies fear the erotic and relegate it to the bedroom alone, as the erotic helps recognise the power of one’s own body and a joy which is not achieved with marriage or belief in God (2018, 13).

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potential to raise the spectators’ political consciousness. Their plays’ dance scenes also have a lot in common with Croft’s description of queer dance which implies the pleasure and the difficulty of moving between multiple identities, a sense of frustration, diminishment reframed as strength, images that do not immediately make sense, and an unsettled relationship between centre and margin (2017, 1). Moreover, Campbell and Farrier have underscored that a dramaturgy can be called queer not simply because of their authors or what is included in the text or the production, but also because of the venue and the performers. This idea resonates with the role queer women played in shaping Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama: “What makes a dramaturgy queer is complex and contingent, reliant on the interrelationship between makers, venues, processes and audiences” (2016, 2). Queer dramaturgies abound in moments when the normative rules of society are suspended. These moments in performance can perturb and provoke audiences, since they are confronted with a spectacle of strangeness, while these moments can also allow us to play out other, non-normative ways of being in the world. Despite these thematic overlaps between D’Annunzio’s and Yeats’s drama and their shared interest in anti-realist, physical theatre techniques, the form and style of D’Annunzio’s plays are very different from what Yeats created. Unlike Yeats’s short one-act plays, D’Annunzio wrote long three- and five-act plays in archaic French and Italian which generally took four to six hours to perform on stage including several long solo dance scenes. Besides, while Yeats preferred smaller, intimate spaces for the production of his plays to create the effect of ritual, D’Annunzio aimed to achieve this ritualistic experience by presenting his plays on huge stages or open-air ones where thousands of people could watch the show.13 Yet 13  Richard Schechner has explained that due to its liminality and ambiguity, ritual signals a transformation from one phase to another, when people can linger between more social categories and identities (2013, 66). Ritualistic experience could, therefore, help direct the attention towards the physicality of the body and raise more sympathy in audiences towards the protagonists, thus towards vulnerable social outcasts and their bodily experiences. Ritual can also ridicule theatrical norms and conventions. For instance, Terence Brown has described Yeats’s entire dramatic practice as a “ritualistic eschewal of the conventions of theatrical realism” (2016, 72), which means that ritual helped Yeats challenge and interrogate the theatrical norms of his time. However, in his later plays, ritual bears a dangerous, uncanny nature, and serves to highlight the violence imposed upon marginalised, oppressed individuals. D’Annunzio’s obsession with ritual derived mostly from his admiration of ancient Greek drama—like Yeats, he regarded theatre as a ritualistic experience through which he wished to create a new kind of Italian theatre.

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despite these differences, both playwrights were deeply disappointed with the naturalistic bourgeois theatre of their time, hence their aim was to renew theatrical conventions through total theatre elements and through a focus on the physicality of the body. Strikingly, these total theatre elements are always assigned to dissident characters who use them as a weapon against power.

The Challenges of Queering Straight Canonical Modernists Despite the increasing number of feminist and queer readings in Irish and Italian scholarship, whenever I have queered these playwrights in conference papers and journal articles, I have found myself using an armature of apology because I am always aware that their canonicity also entails that there are limits to what can be said about them. Indeed, I have often encountered reactions which questioned the validity of queering these playwrights or objected to “pulling the rainbow flag on them” or thought that “it was a shame to queer them.” These reactions evoke José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of the tendency in scholarship to demand evidence of queerness to validate queer readings: “When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present, who will labor to invalidate the historical fact of queer lives present, past, and future” (2009, 65). This idea bears resemblance to what Derek Jarman experienced when he addressed the theme of queerness in Shakespeare at a conference, which made him realise that “messing with Will Shakespeare [was] not allowed” (quoted in Menon 2011, 2). Madhavi Menon has further observed that it is usually much more accepted to queer post-nineteenth-century writers, as queer theory regards as its proper domain the historical period in which queerness comes to be understood as homosexuality, namely the period after 1800. Even though Yeats and D’Annunzio composed their plays in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, queering their works still appears to be challenging. There is always the fear of receiving accusations of playing fast and loose with academic credibility if we queer straight canonical writers circumscribed as untouchable by conservative impulses who look at them as heterosexual poets representing a unified Irish and Italian national identity.

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In addition, there seems to be a recurring resistance in scholarship and queer theory to read Yeats and D’Annunzio through a queer lens. This might have to do with the ways in which these canonical figures have been taught and perceived in Italian and Irish education and national imagination. One of the main issues, I believe, is that both Yeats and D’Annunzio have been perceived first and foremost as national poets, hence most of their plays are still unknown to the wider public, especially to students. In D’Annunzio’s case, for instance, he is either referred to as il Poeta (the Poet) or il Vate (the Bard), which stresses his position as Italy’s national poet. A short article by Marilena Cavallo lists the main reasons why D’Annunzio should still be studied today, and strikingly, it mentions exclusively his novels and poems—there is no reference to his plays or the fact that he was also a prominent playwright at all (2018, n.p.). Furthermore, a school competition launched by La Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani (where the D’Annunzio Library and Archives are also located) for the academic year 2022/2023 lists several topics that students can choose from, including “D’Annunzio the Poet” and “D’Annunzio the Hero,” but the list does not even allude to his plays, theatre, or him as an outstanding modernist playwright (“Progetto didattico su Gabriele D’Annunzio 2022/2023,” n.p.). Of course, this does not imply that no one within secondary level education in Italy teaches some of D’Annunzio’s plays or presents his life and works in a more nuanced way, but unfortunately, such approaches still constitute a minority. The situation is getting much better with Yeats, as thanks to the increasing number of gender and queer studies approaches to Yeats’s works, his drama and theatre have received more scholarly attention over the last few years, although these publications are still limited in number compared to the publications on his poetry and prose works. What is more, even when some of their most well-known plays are discussed in class, students are rarely encouraged to interpret the texts in more global and contemporary contexts, hence their drama’s topical potential remains largely unexplored. What makes Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama and theatre different from their poetry and prose works is that the former ones were created and shaped under the influence of various collaborations mostly with feminist and queer women, hence they are full of exciting experimentations with gender and sexuality through form, style, and content. Nonetheless, D’Annunzio is often dismissed as a “notorious hyper-­ masculine womanizer” (Bizzotto 2010, 135) who wrote proto-fascist plays, promoted a virile form of masculinity (Ross 2016, 393), and a

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normative approach to women. Bizzotto has pointed out, for instance, that D’Annunzio was insistent on binary oppositions and shared a machista form of virility in line with fascist visions of masculinity, while Barbara Spackman has argued that D’Annunzio was preoccupied with maternity and women’s procreative duties like fascists (2010, 135; 1996, 17). Even Elizabeth Cullingford—who has argued for Yeats’s anti-fascism, queerness, and feminism—sees D’Annunzio as a poet who invented a “colourful fascist choreography” (1981, 146) during his conquest of Fiume in 1919.14 Yet Cullingford notes that while Yeats saw D’Annunzio as an epitome of stability and discipline in the 1920s, he was in fact a reckless and unpredictable individualist (1981, 146), thus, I would add, also a threat to the order, transparency, and predictability fascists expected to see from influential artists like D’Annunzio. However, it is crucial to note that it is not my aim to whitewash the problematic aspects of D’Annunzio’s life and political engagements, nor is this book an attempt to pull a positive spin on him or to analyse his biography and politics—rather, Modernist Playwrights wishes to shed new light on his drama and theatre histories to 14  D’Annunzio’s occupation of the city of Fiume (today Rijeka) was a carefully calibrated artistic performance which, despite the undeniable fact that it was a military operation, created safe queer spaces for its members and offered them sexual freedom. On 12 September 1919, D’Annunzio leading two thousand rebel soldiers conquered the city of Fiume. He managed to keep the city for sixteen months opposing both conservative and liberal political powers. D’Annunzio’s legionaries included not only soldiers, but writers, aristocrats, industrial workers, and feminists—one of the most prominent supporters of the Fiume project was, for instance, Sarah Bernhardt. Giordano Bruno Guerri observes that “[f]or some women, going to Fiume constituted as an act of feminism” (2019, 177). It is crucial to note, however, that the libertarian, anti-fascist, and even feminist aspects of the Fiume project do not exclude or excuse its authoritarian and fascist elements. In fact, it was a highly authoritarian act that D’Annunzio invaded a city whose inhabitants probably did not want any foreign intervention after the chaos caused by WWI. In addition, when D’Annunzio was forced out of Fiume by the Italian Government, there were violent clashes between his legionaries and the Italian army, resulting in casualties in the civilian population as well at the end of December 1920, which came to be known as Bloody Christmas. Despite Mussolini’s disapproval of the Fiume project and his fear of D’Annunzio’s influence, he later wanted people to think of Fiume as the precursor of his regime, which, as Guerri demonstrates, was not the case at all (2019, 329). The constitution proposed by D’Annunzio for Fiume, the Carta del Carnaro, is an astonishingly progressive document, even though D’Annunzio could never actually realise his plans. Crucially, the constitution’s main principle was equality. It promised to recognise everyone regardless of sex, lineage, language, class, or religion. It also guaranteed freedom of thought, freedom of press, cult, reunion, and association. But its most progressive aspect concerned women, as it would have granted women the right to vote and the right to be elected.

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nuance D’Annunzio’s relationship with gender and sexuality through his life-changing collaborations with Duse, Rubinstein, and the Gramatica sisters.15 Similar to D’Annunzio, Yeats has often been dismissed as an elitist playwright who flirted with fascist ideas.16 Most notably, Conor Cruise O’Brien read Yeats as an admirer of Mussolini and the Irish authoritarian politician Kevin O’Higgins who executed seventy-seven men (1996, 30–31). O’Brien recollected that his own father had mocked Yeats’s fascism by calling him Missolonghi and emphasised that Yeats had written songs for the Irish fascist Blueshirts movement (1996, 35). Cullingford, on the other hand, has pointed out that O’Brien distorted and exaggerated most of Yeats’s remarks about fascism. She finds O’Brien’s portrayal of Yeats as a self-interested, intermittent Irish nationalist and ardent early fascist highly reductive, given that Yeats’s political experience was much more complex and contradictory (1981, viii). It is also sometimes argued that Yeats endorsed a eugenic approach to women’s procreative duties.17 Representations of women in Yeats’s works tend to be dismissed as patriarchal in that women are objectified, dispersed, or occluded (Spivak 1980, 77). Even though Marjorie Howes acknowledges the feminist aspects of Yeats’s life and works, she highlights that Yeats’s representations of women can be highly contradictory: “[w]hile he approved of cultured women, he worried that they would undo the horn of plenty through poor marriage choices” (1996, 172). In her keynote address titled “Yeats and Me Too” delivered at the “Yeats and Eros/Yeats and Paris” conference (2019), Cullingford pointed out that despite frequent associations of Yeats’s writings being patriarchal or misogynistic, feminists can still read Yeats’s works with pleasure, and I will further elaborate this idea in Chap. 5 through the analysis of Yeats’s defiant “dyke” characters. As to the male protagonists of Yeats’s plays, while they appear to conform to conventional notions of masculinity, Joseph Valente and Declan Kiberd have demonstrated that 15  For a detailed discussion of D’Annunzio’s life and politics see Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of D’Annunzio titled The Pike. Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War (2013) and John Woodhouse’s monograph Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (1998). 16  In “Ageing Yeats: From Fascism to Disability,” Joseph Valente offers an insightful account of the arguments of Yeats’s accusers and defenders regarding fascism, elitism, and authoritarianism (2020, 176–178). 17  For a summary of the normative approaches to Yeats, see Jonathan Allison’s essay “The Attack on Yeats” (1990).

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there is an inherent androgyny and sexual ambiguity in Yeats’s hyper-­ masculine heroes, such as Cuchulain (2011, 175; 2001, 414). My analyses will further reveal that Yeats’s male characters do not only display sexual ambiguity, but they are also characterised by an unexplained anxiety and an unease with conventional notions of manliness. It is also interesting that Yeats’s works are often discussed in terms of the search for the Unity of Being—a combination of national unity and the unity of the self—while in fact what he created was rather a disunity of being and the idea of multiple, fluid identity. Margaret Mills Harper in her guest lecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (2019) also explained that Yeats rarely talked about the Unity of Being as something desirable or possible—on the contrary, he found much more attraction in the idea of a disunity of being. Yeats’s interest in discipline, authoritarianism, and fascism in a chaotic post-war world and post-partition Ireland tends to be mistaken for a support for violence and force. Cullingford, however, has offered convincing arguments proving that Yeats’s admiration for order and unity excluded any attempt to create unity by force as he knew it would only result in tyranny (1981, 150). In the draft of Yeats’s Tribute to Thomas Davis, he claimed that “[n]ationality was not to be a thing of race or creed, every man born here belonged to the nation” (quoted in Cullingford 1981, 8). Thus, Yeats’s nationalism—thanks to John O’Leary’s influence—emphasised political liberty, the freedom of the individual without racial or cultural cohesiveness. Besides Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s affiliations with fascism and nationalism, their complex symbols and subtextual references tend to create obscurity and thus function as alienating factors for contemporary audiences, especially for students. Cullingford has called this aspect of Yeats’s works “elitist obscurantism” (1981, 46), while Matthew Campbell in a conference paper referred to it as an “impenetrable nonsense” in his works which even Yeats did not fully understand (2019). Fintan O’Toole has drawn attention to further alienating factors that create a distance between Yeats’s plays and audiences, such as his initial high ambitions for the theatre to reinvent Irish national culture, his refuge in elitist and aristocratic Japanese Noh theatre,18 his overwhelming symbolism, his focus on the heroic world of Irish mythology, and a sense of grandiosity in his drama (2015). What is more, the irony and self-mockery inherent to his drama are often ignored or remain unnoticed. Even his theatrical innovations—  A medieval, aristocratic theatre for samurais originating in the fourteenth century.

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moving between anti-naturalism and naturalism, masks and faces, ancient myths, and modern moments—and his introduction of total theatre elements in Irish drama often “work against his reputations” (O’Toole 2015), as readers might get the impression that Yeats’s plays have nothing to do with real life, socio-political issues, and people’s lived experiences. Chris Moran’s review entitled “Why Yeats was a great poet but an awful playwright” published in The Guardian in 2009—when all twenty-six of Yeats’s plays were performed in New York—can attest to this hostile reception of Yeats’s drama. The adjectives Moran uses for Yeats’s plays include “awful,” “indigestible,” “opaque,” “heavy-handed,” “inert,” and “slavishly aping the ritual of Noh theatre.” Yeats’s obscure symbols acted as barriers between the plays and their audiences at the time of their first productions, too. For instance, an Irish Times review of Deirdre lamented that Yeats wrote heavy and serious plays: “The serious element is a rather too striking a feature of the work of our young dramatists. Why not a little more attention to the humorous side of Irish life? Plays like ‘Deirdre’ appeal to the artistic judgement, but the Abbey Theatre make the mistake of giving us too many ‘heavy’ plays of the ‘Deirdre’ type” (1 June 1912, 4). In addition, On Baile’s Strand was critiqued by Holloway, as a friend of his was unable to follow it (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 71). Yeats’s later plays created even more confusion in contemporary audiences. The King of the Great Clock Tower received a lot of praise, but it was critiqued for its “vague symbolism” in The Irish Times (3 October 1934, 5), while The Resurrection was deemed as unsuccessful because “Mr. Yeats was engaged in making some obscure philosophical point which never emerged, and the central moment of the play (the entrance of the masked figure of Christ) was disturbing and even grotesque” (3 October 1934, 5). D’Annunzio’s drama has often been described with similar dismissive adjectives. For instance, in 1911, M. F. Nion described The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in the following way: “I haven’t seen anything so lamentably and pretentiously boring as these five acts which are dragging themselves through the incomprehensible in the midst of howling chanting” (Une Grande Premiere Au Theatre Du Chatelet [sic] 1911, my translation from French). The average four-to-five-hour length and wordiness of his scrips also raised discomfort in audiences, which is part of the reasons why his plays are rarely produced today. In addition, at the time of his plays’ first productions, the shows were often interrupted by whistles and shouting from the audience (such as in the case of The Dead City and The Glory

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later analysed in this book). Moreover, critics often disparaged his plays simply because of the assertiveness of his female characters or the women who embodied them, especially in the case of Phaedra played by Irma Gramatica and Ida Rubinstein. Obscurity, excessive length, and pretentiousness therefore appear as the alienating factors between D’Annunzio’s plays and his audiences, not to mention that, like Yeats, he also had high ambitions for theatre to renew an entire nation. But once we realise that the meaning lies exactly in the impossibility of giving only one interpretation to their symbols and plays, their works become more accessible, less abstract, and more topical. Their abstract symbols and references can, in fact, be seen as embodiments of all that is marginal in human life. Focusing on queer representations of gender, power, and desire in the scripts further helps crack open these seemingly impenetrable play texts and might encourage theatre-makers to readapt their plays for contemporary audiences. More pressingly, there is deeply rooted tradition in scholarship to rely on the intention of the author and provide evidence from the authors’ biography or their historical contexts to corroborate the interpretation of literary and dramatic texts. Regarding Yeats and Irish theatre studies, I believe that this tendency is decreasing, as scholars such as Patrick Lonergan, Ian R.  Walsh, Alexandra Poulain, Susan Cannon Harris, Charlotte McIvor, Cormac O’Brien, Fintan Walsh, among many others, have shifted the attention from intentionalist approaches to dramaturgical readings regarding both modernist and contemporary Irish drama. A paradigm shift can be observed in Italian scholarship too, but mostly regarding contemporary theatre and drama. When it comes to canonical figures such as D’Annunzio, the predominant approach still seems to be intentionalist. For instance, most monographs that focus entirely on D’Annunzio and offer critical analyses of his works are advertised as biographies in the first place. Such books include John Woodhouse’s brilliantly nuanced biography Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (1998), Lucy Hughes-­ Hallett’s ground-breaking book The Pike. Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (2013), and Giordano Bruno Guerri’s 2014 book La mia vita carnale and his 2019 monograph Disobbedisco: Cinquecento giorni di rivoluzione. Fiume 1919–1920, both of which, however, apply a very unconventional and meticulous approach to his life and works. Even Luisetta Elia Chomel’s monograph (1997) dedicated to analysing D’Annunzio’s scripts builds predominantly on biography and authorial intention. These biographical approaches are immensely useful for dramaturgical readings as well, and there must be an awareness of

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biography while conducting critical readings, however, the text must also be allowed to speak for itself, which is the main purpose of this book. The intention of the author is a significant point of contention between modernist, queer, and theatre studies. While the area of modernist studies tends to prefer the intentionalist approach based on detailed biographical evidence to support the textual analyses, recent queer and theatre studies choose to focus predominantly on the scripts or performance materials, stressing the relevant cultural and historical contexts but without relying on the intention of the author. In this book, I aspire to find a balance between the two approaches, but I lean towards the scripts rather than the authors’ lives or intentions, as I believe it is primarily the scripts that have to offer spaces for queer readings. This predominantly non-intentionalist approach facilitates dramaturgical and queer readings, as it lets the scripts speak for themselves. As Ian R. Walsh has explained, [t]o over-emphasise the cultural and historical conditions of a play runs the risk of reducing it to a single codified meaning, turning it into knowable object that functions as a museum piece, valuable only as a cultural document. A dramaturgical analysis of plays can counter such a reductive move, by examining the performance effects and potentialities of the play texts. (2012, 21)

Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts have too long been observed and analysed as if they were merely such knowable objects and historical documents, while the most fascinating aspect of their plays is that they offer a plethora of different but equally valid political and literary meanings—and the queer is one of them. It is also frequently assumed that queering play texts equals to the implication that some of the characters are gay or lesbian and, by extension, that the authors are homosexual. Joseph O. Aimone has claimed that scholars rarely queer a text without queering the author or making them a homophobe. Yet, in his essay about Yeats’s poetic character Crazy Jane, he queers Yeats’s texts without queering Yeats as a person (2000, 233). In a similar vein, the aim of Modernist Playwrights is primarily to queer Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts, demonstrating that straight playwrights can also write queer texts—however, some aspects of their personal lives will be queered too through their queer and feminist networks and collaborations which created queer spaces in the texts and some productions. The authors’ sexuality plays no part in my analyses, although I acknowledge

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the risk that queering straight male writers’ works might centralise heterosexuality and even fascist politics at the heart of queer modernism. My aim here, however, is to bring to critical attention the texts’ queer potential which, I contend, can and should be separated from the authors’ sexual orientation. In Foundlings, Christopher Nealon maintains that there are certain “foundling texts” that abound in inarticulate hopes and desires gesturing towards a queer community across time, and these texts take on their full meaning with the emergence of a particular kind of reader (2001, 23). Through their main characters, such texts express a desire for an impossible or inaccessible future, for forms of life deemed impossible in their own historical moment, and thus they exhibit a time of expectation “as they wait for the friends who will know how to read them” (Love 2007, 89). In this book, I regard the selected play texts as such foundling texts waiting for queer and feminist readers to find new layers of meaning in them. Modernist Playwrights offers fresh dramaturgical readings of eight plays by Yeats and eight plays by D’Annunzio through the lens of queer theory. The main chapters of this book are organised around specific themes instead of following a strictly chronological order. Each chapter is introduced by a brief analysis of the relevant historical contexts that the scripts seem to revolt against as well as the queer influences that created spaces for contemporary queer readings. Chapter 2: Family, Normativity, and the Will to Escape explores the tension between the normative family and its non-normative subjects through detailed queer dramaturgical readings of Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and Calvary (1920) and D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1901) and The Daughter of Iorio (La figlia di Iorio 1904). I contend that the motifs of unexplained melancholia and the impulse to escape work in these play texts as codes for queer desire framed through the safe frameworks of friendship, brotherhood, and sisterhood. What connects the four plays discussed in this chapter is that their melancholy main characters choose to leave the oppressive world represented by their family or community for a chosen, non-biological family, which resonates very closely with the experience of queer historical subjects. Chapter 3: Moral Prudery, Respectability, and Broken Intimacies offers detailed critical readings of Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones (1919) and The Cat and the Moon (1926) and D’Annunzio’s The Dead City (La città morta 1896) and Phaedra (Fedra 1909). This chapter focuses on the oppressive impact of moral prudery and the cult of respectability on

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subjectivities who are excluded from the frameworks of recognition. Moral prudery and respectability constituted the main pillars of middle-class bourgeois societies as well as nationalist politics: these concepts relied on the heterosexual family model, obedience, demonisation of desire, and clear separation between gender roles. This cult of respectability made certain forms of love impossible and doomed to failure, hence this chapter examines the connection between impossible love, broken intimacies, and queerness. In the selected four plays, shame and the fear of societal judgement either paralyse or distort the main characters, prohibiting certain relationships deemed as unworthy of recognition. At the same time, through various dramaturgical techniques and coded messages the plays eventually assert the power of the non-normative and raise sympathy for those loves and desires which normativity labels as impossible. Chapter 4: Sadomasochistic Attachments: Reverse Power and Erotic Stimulations discerns theatrical representations of sadomasochism (S/M) as a strategy to challenge normative distributions of power in Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand (1904) and A Full Moon in March (1935) and D’Annunzio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien/Il martirio di San Sebastiano 1911) and Pisanella or the Perfumed Death (La Pisanelle, ou la Mort Parfumée 1913). Through theatrical representations of sadomasochistic attachments based on reversible power, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama reveals the systemic failures of normative distributions of power, gender as well as sexual roles. In all four plays, an authority figure attempts to contain an unruly yet potent character, forcing them to obey the norms and rules set up by normative power. Yet these authority figures encounter resistance from the characters they wish to control, thus positions of power and powerlessness alternate in the plays. Chapter 5: Defiant Dykes: New Women against Patriarchy rereads Yeats’s Deirdre (1907) and The Player Queen (1922) and D’Annunzio’s The Glory (La gloria, 1899) and The Ship (La nave, 1908) to illustrate the ways in which the plays’ wilful female characters take advantage of the strategies of patriarchy and eventually turn those strategies against the men who want to contain them. The experience of the female protagonists of the selected plays resonates with Halberstam’s discussion of the relationship between wildness, queerness, and the figure of the dyke. These dyke characters cannot shrug off the insult for which they are the primary symbols, thus they become “a wild card, a slice of disorder, a source of bewilderment” (2020, 22) for the other characters representing the normative order and patriarchy. However, by assuming the strategies of

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normative power to reject centuries of victimhood, the women in the plays run the risk of becoming the oppressors they once opposed, which is a very complex and controversial theme in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays. Regarding D’Annunzio’s drama, one of the main challenges of writing this book has been the lack of English translations of his scripts. Of the eight plays analysed in this book, only three have been translated into English: The Dead City and Francesca da Rimini were translated by Yeats’s friend Arthur Symons, while The Daughter of Iorio was translated by Charlotte Porter, Pietro Isola, and Alice Henry. For the sake of consistency and because even the existing English translations are difficult to get hold of, I have decided to provide my own translations of the original Italian texts for all eight plays. Since I am not a translator, my English translations should not be treated as official translations of D’Annunzio’s plays. Thanks to my knowledge of Italian and my experience in reading and analysing archaic Italian texts, I was able to provide accurate translations of the relevant passages, but I am aware that they do not do justice to the extremely complex art of translation. The Italian secondary sources are also quoted in my own translations unless otherwise stated. As to the names of D’Annunzio’s characters, I have kept their original Italian names. Since scholarship refers to The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and Pisanella with their original French titles, I will call them Le Martyre and La Pisanelle in what follows. Although the focus of this book is strictly on the close examination and rereading of some of D’Annunzio’s plays, it must be acknowledged that the controversial themes and characters that pervade his drama are also portrayed in some of his novels. This might be a useful piece of information for scholars who wish to conduct further research on D’Annunzio’s works, as an in-depth examination of the links between D’Annunzio’s novels and plays in light of representations of sexuality, homoeroticism, and queerness is currently missing from scholarship. For instance, the protagonists’ will to escape from normative ideals of family, sexuality, and gender—which I analyse in D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1901) and The Daughter of Iorio (1904) in Chap. 2—reappeared in D’Annunzio’s 1910 novel Forse che sì, Forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No; D’Annunzio 1959) in the behaviour and fate of the main character Isabella Inghirami. Besides the theme of the will to escape, this novel equally features homoerotic innuendos beneath the surface of highly complex and even incestuous heterosexual affairs, all of which resonates with the plot of The Dead City (1896) and Phaedra (1909), too. As regards the topic of

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sadomasochism—which is the focus of Chap. 4 through the analyses of D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre (1911) and La Pisanelle (1913)—this theme already appeared in D’Annunzio’s 1894 novel Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death; D’Annunzio 1933) in the troublesome, decadent, and oft-morbid relationship between the character of Giorgio Aurispa (who is increasingly obsessed with death and pain) and his lover Ippolita Sanzio. In terms of representations of male characters who are uninterested in marriage, fatherhood, or intimate bonds with women, D’Annunzio’s early novel L’Innocente (The Innocent, 1892, also translated as The Intruder or The Victim; D’Annunzio 1995) is worthy of attention, as the main character Tullio Hermil is not merely a dandy with an androgynous appearance and defiant behaviour, but he shows absolutely no interest in his marriage and in having children with his wife Giuliana. Another interesting novel by D’Annunzio is titled Le Vergini delle Rocce (The Virgins of the Rocks, 1895; D’Annunzio 1896) which is often referred to as D’Annunzio’s first portrayal of the Nietzschean Superman which, as I shall demonstrate in the subsequent chapters of this book, is a much more nuanced and complex theme in D’Annunzio’s works than it first appears. The reason for this is that the ideal Superman figure is always challenged, ridiculed, parodied, dominated by others, or rejected in D’Annunzio’s works. In Le Vergini delle Rocce, for instance, the “Superman” Claudio Cantelmo is rejected by the woman (Anatolia) he wishes to take as his wife to be able to reproduce the best possible characteristics in his future offspring. However, Anatolia does not contemplate becoming a mother or a wife—instead, she chooses to care for her mother and two brothers, all of whom suffer from mental health issues. The main chapters of this book will briefly identify connections between some of D’Annunzio’s plays and the above-mentioned novels to inspire future avenues of research on the links between D’Annunzio’s novels and plays. It is important to note that the selected plays have important implications not only for the timeframe of European Fascism and the first decades of the authoritarian Irish Free State, but also for the period before European Fascism as well as for our time which yet again witnesses the rise and popularity of authoritarian regimes that control women’s bodies, demonise same-sex relationships, idealise the normative family model, and build their power on identifying enemies of the nation. The rigid separation between gender roles, the scorn of ambiguity, moral prudery, the expectation to sacrifice oneself for the nation, obsession with family and reproduction, cult of respectability, disgust for effeminate men and strong women defined Irish and Italian society through most of the nineteenth

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and twentieth centuries and some of these discourses still circulate today. Fascism is not restricted to Italian Fascism—it can refer to all kinds of power demonstrations coming from the state, the Church or other institutions that are ill at ease with spectacles of personal and sexual freedom. I do not wish to join the discussion as to whether the authors were fascist or anti-fascist, or whether their public expressions of interest in fascism, nationalism, and authoritarianism were heartfelt or just opportunistic. Joining this debate would run the risk of over-emphasising the historical and biographical contexts, which would eventually work against the main methodological objective of this book, that is to discover the rich queer potentialities of the scripts through dramaturgical readings with limited focus on contexts in the analyses.

Queer Modernism In Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama, decadent aestheticism mingles with modernist and avant-garde elements. The relationship between decadence and modernism has been an uneasy and complicated one. While both decadence and literary modernism challenged traditional values and employed a predominantly critical attitude to norms, decadence also foregrounded sensuality, promoted sexual and artistic experimentation, a cult of beauty, and a fascination with the bizarre and the exotic. Although modernist innovation is undeniably fuelled by engagement with decadent writing, Vincent Sherry has explicated that there has been an “occlusion of decadence from the critical understanding of modernism” (2015, 21). There were two main reasons for this erasure of decadence by critical narratives of early twentieth-century literature: the fact that decadence appeared as a problematic concept that troubled the exclusivity of modernism’s claim “to make it new” and the association of decadent aestheticism with homosexuality and effeminacy. However, in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, Kate Hext and Alex Murray reveal the subversive potential of decadence and the affinities between decadent and modernist writing: “the main thread that draws together […] twentieth-century innovators in the decadent tradition is their defiant place outside the dominant culture and their use of decadence to critique prevailing ideologies of politics, gender, and sexuality” (2019, 12). Even though it could be argued that modernist discourse was often homophobic and misogynistic, one of the main features of literary modernism and modernist drama was that they began dealing with topical

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issues of their times, such as women’s rights, politics, familial relationships, mental health issues, social problems, and the effects of war among other things. As to modernist drama, the aim was no longer to provide mere entertainment or morality tales, but to offer audiences a critical look at the state of the world and show how the injustices of traditional society affect ordinary people. Avant-garde is an essential component of modernism. Although modernist drama focuses primarily on ideas rather than action, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts render special importance to both ideas and avant-­ garde experimentation through new ways of performing. Dialogues are just as relevant to the storytelling as the nonverbal discursive gaps in the plays, mostly the dance scenes where action (the physicality of the performer’s body, their gestures, and movements) becomes more important than words. I contend that the co-existence of these two ways of storytelling in the scripts demonstrates the tension between realist and anti-realist, anti-mimetic performance styles that characterised the playwrights’ dramatic career, too. A crucial element of this non-traditional storytelling that connects modernist and avant-garde drama was the lack of clear resolution and linear structure in several modernist plays. The temporal distortion and the ambiguous resolution that we often encounter in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts constitute the main characteristics of not only anti-­ realist, anti-mimetic drama but also queer modernist theatre. For the purposes of the dramaturgical readings that this book offers, it is crucial to address the complex relationship between modernism and queer modernism. First, we could argue that in many ways modernism itself was queer—what is more, as Penny Farfan points out, “queerness created modernism,” (2017, 3) given that some modernist texts came to be called modernist exactly because of their sexual dissidence. What makes a modernist drama queer modernist is primarily the coded traces of emergent homosexual identities and the ambiguity around the meaning of queer in modernist scripts. Farfan’s monograph Performing Queer Modernism (2017) is a seminal study for this book, as it also approaches early twentieth-century modernist drama and performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives, looking at performances by Loïe Fuller, Vaslav Nijinsky, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and modernist texts by Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, and Noël Coward. Farfan’s analyses equally demonstrate that modernist performance could queer sex without representing same-sex relationships in explicit ways. Farfan argues that “queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism; that queer modernist

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performance played a key role in the emergence of modern sexual identities; and that it anticipated […] the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies” (1). Modernist Playwrights regards Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s feminist and queer theatrical collaborators active agents in shaping the content and interpretation of the scripts in terms of their representations of gender and sexuality. What is more, due to the presence of New Women in the first performances of their plays we can refer to those productions as queer performances. As Farfan explicates, “performing bodies and performers’ personas were crucial sites around which intersecting ideologies of gender and sexuality converged and from which they emanated” (2). The presence of queer and feminist performers was crucial, as they embodied everything that could not be explicitly represented in the texts due to the threat of censorship. While early theatrical representations of same-sex bonds were either coded, camouflaged, or unstaged (subtextual), New Women helped convey important yet elusive and ambiguous messages about gender and sexuality by their mere presence on the stage. Another area that connects modernism and queerness is their interest in excess and extremity as well as their focus on marginalised, dominated subjects. I consider Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts queer modernist texts because they give heroic importance to marginalised and stigmatised characters and because through various dramaturgical techniques, the texts help assert the power of the non-normative, the strange, the excessive. Modernism is often discussed as an art of excess and extremity and which “was also an era of new social possibilities for a range of marginal or dominated subjects” (Love 2007, 54). This extremist impulse in modernism is “a desire to cross boundaries, to set off from the center of culture toward its ‘freakish circumference’” (Love 2007, 53). More importantly, in modernist art, it seems impossible to decide “where the domestic, the civilized, and the orderly end and where the foreign, the barbaric, and the wild begin” (Halberstam 2020, 34). It is similarly difficult, I argue, to discern the boundary between the queer and the normative in the scripts, but it is this tension and blurred boundaries that create spaces for queer readings and offer a plethora of different, equally valid, dramaturgical interpretations. Halberstam’s discussions of the relationship between wildness and queerness are central to Chap. 5, as wildness operates as a symbol of difference, resistance, and anti-authoritarianism in the texts. As Halberstam explicates, “modernist texts, often canonical works, […] show the fault lines that had begun to appear in such binary constructions as domesticity and wildness” (2020, 9). The language of wildness and

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difference that pervades the selected texts is, therefore, able to create alternative formulations and notions of authority, order, loving, and living. Moreover, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s texts abound in energies which work towards thwarting normative aesthetics, power positions, and temporalities. Finally, it is important to note that while Yeats and D’Annunzio were regarded as prominent modernist poets and thinkers, as playwrights, they did not belong to dominant modernism—due to the oft-problematic perception and even fiascos of the performances of their plays, as playwrights they rather belonged to “the freakish circumference of culture” (Love 2007, 53), hence their drama was written out of the modernist canon. Modernist Playwrights thus wishes to contribute to the ongoing transformation of modernist studies in which drama and performance are still largely underrepresented just as Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama is underdiscussed in Irish and Italian studies. It is crucial to acknowledge that the queerness that runs through Irish and Italian modernist drama is, in fact, part of a long history of queer literature reflecting the tension between anti-normative forces and the scientific/political discourse that labels difference as abnormal. It is by no accident that Italian scholar John Champagne has described Italy as “a particularly queer state” (2015, 7), while Patrick R. Mullen and Seamus Deane have similarly underscored that Ireland is, in many ways, a “queer country” (2012, 16; 1997, 197). Italy has a peculiarly rich queer literary and cultural tradition which is rarely acknowledged, as the queerness of the texts has often been coded. Gary P. Cestaro explains that Italian literature through the centuries has reflected “the difficult positioning of Italian culture and literature between the classical and the Catholic, between ancient organisations of human sexual activity that left some space for same-sex desire and Christian efforts to redefine and delimit it” (2004, 1). Yet Italian and Anglo-American criticism have thus far tended to overlook the queerness of Italian texts at the centre of the canon and have ignored the complex workings of desire in Italian literary works which, in fact, speak both to the past and to our present. Cestaro outlines the queer history of Italy beginning from its Roman past, medieval monastic communities, and the queer literary production of the Renaissance when, while Dante and his Tuscan cohort contributed to “the heterosexual business of dolce stil nuovo” (Cestaro 2004, 5), a smaller group of men expressed their desire for other men in love lyrics. The same-sex activities that Cestaro highlights regarding ancient Rome are even more relevant to the analyses of this book. Italian Fascism was famously obsessed with the highly

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masculinist and normative idea of Romanità, even though “[h]omosexual love [was] there in every foundation of the empire” (2004, 3). As a result, there were significant contradictions within fascists’ obsession with brotherhood and the male body, which I explain at the beginning of the following chapter. The queerness of Irish literature and culture can be traced back to the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries when bardic poets produced intensely homosocial and homoerotic poems in service of their chiefs with whom they had a marriage-like relationship (McKibben 2013, 172; Kiberd 1989, 236). Sarah McKibben notes that same-sex desire was mentioned in early medieval Irish law tracts “when a husband’s preference for sleeping with horse-boys constitut[ed] grounds for divorce” (2013, 182). Moreover, when the Tudor state wanted to destroy Irish culture and lordship, bardic poets’ response was an anti-colonial rhetoric infused with homoerotic content (McKibben 2013, 176). Valente has  equally highlighted that there was a considerable degree of gender equality and lack of sexual orthodoxy in early Irish law, custom, and society before Anglo-Norman contact (Valente 1994, 195). Valente mentions the Gaelic myth of sovereignty as an example whereby a candidate for kingship acceded to power through a mating ritual with a Poor Old Woman who became a young woman afterwards (1994, 195). According to Valente, the myth suggests a phallodecentric patriarchal rule “that is, without an originary division into positive and negative or dominant and recessive gender polarities” (1994, 195). However, this phallodecentric patriarchal rule ended when the Irish Brehon law was replaced with British common law which entailed gender oppression. This queer past of Irish literature and culture often became reflected in Irish Gothic fiction, the works of Irish Revivalist writers as well as in Irish literary modernism.19 The queerness of Irish modernism has started to receive more critical attention over the last few years. Mullen’s monograph The Poor Bugger’s Tool (2012), for instance, looks at Wilde, J. M. Synge, Roger Casement, and James Joyce to demonstrate the queerness of Irish modernism. Mullen contends that both the vicissitudes of Wilde’s life and the British government’s cruelty towards Roger Casement began to echo through mainstream Irish literature. As a result, male Irish modernists “deployed queer 19  For a rich variety of articles on representations of marginalised subjectivities in Irish literature see Minorities in/and Ireland, special issue of Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies (McDonagh 2020).

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aesthetic sensibilities to organise anticolonial discourses that read against the grain of British imperial hegemony” (Mullen 2012, 4). Yet the primacy of this masculinist nationalism led to the repression of various counter discourses in early twentieth-century Ireland, such as feminism, lesbianism, radical socialism, and the homoerotic. But as Mullen explains, Irish modernist writers, including Yeats, “embraced the inclusive potentials of queer aesthetics in order to articulate open and fluid models of Irish national belonging” (2012, 4). Another area that connects Irish and Italian queer modernist texts is the intersection between the national, the colonial and the sexual, which put significant pressure on both male and female bodies and controlled social and sexual behaviours. While Irish nationalists insisted on repressive notions of gender and sexuality to detach themselves from the British colonial imaginary which saw Irish people as childish and effeminate, Italian nationalists insisted on normative ideals and virility to establish their colonial power, secure colonial expansion, and challenge the deeply entrenched notion of Italian men as histrionic and effeminate. The colonial context further complicated the presence of the homoerotic in these countries “because colonialism itself has a gendered power relation and, inevitably, casts the colonizing power as masculine and dominant and the colonized as feminine and passive” (Walshe 1997, 149). As a result, “[t]he emergent post-colonial nation perceives the sexually different as destabilizing and enfeebling, and thus the lesbian and gay sensibility is edited out, silenced” (Walshe 1997, 149). The effeminacy of Italian men, for instance, became such a widespread trope that Giosuè Carducci called Italians people of cicisbei, as cicisbeo refers to an effeminate, indolent nobleman. Italian Fascism tried to defy this stereotype, but eventually ended up confirming it. As John Champagne explains, “[a]s the product of a complex series of contradictory historical circumstances, representations of the Italian male deconstruct binaries of masculine and feminine, active and passive, and, most recently, homosexual and heterosexual” (Champagne 2015, 4). The anxiety-ridden male characters of D’Annunzio’s drama will serve as perfect examples of such contradictory representations of manhood, manliness, heroism, and sexuality. The vicissitudes of Oscar Wilde’s life should also be mentioned as significant factors in increasing the queerness of Irish and Italian modernist literary and theatrical production. After Wilde had been convicted of sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, his “name quickly became the symbol both of gay culture and of the repression it inevitably calls down on itself

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whenever it goes too far in the direction of making itself public” (Eribon 2004, 145). As a result, references to Wilde in Italian literature always appeared in code, using euphemism or periphrasis. Bizzotto claims that in the progressive and anglophile journal Il Marzocco, “Wilde’s influence is unmistakable though it remained undeclared, possibly as a result of the trials” (2010, 126). D’Annunzio’s statement in the Preface of Il Marzocco makes it clear that the aim of the journals’ contributors was to avoid judging, censoring, or stigmatising artists, and looked at the work of art itself: “We believe that every single manifestation of individual genius has in itself, an only by virtue of its being an artwork, a precise sociological and moral value” (quoted in Bizzotto 2010, 126, her translation). Bizzotto further explains that even though Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray did not enjoy much success in D’Annunzio’s circles, D’Annunzio owned and annotated the first French edition, and its influence is visible in D’Annunzio’s preface to his 1894 novel Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death) (2010, 129). D’Annunzio also owned copies of De Profundis in French, English, and German, and he copiously annotated all of them. In early twentieth-century Italy, aestheticism and the so-called Oscarwaldismo were looked at with suspicion.20 The term “Oscarwaldismo” was coined by Paolo Valera in 1909, who thought aestheticism should be a vice just like homosexuality: “Oscarwildeism is the religion of inverts. It is not the illness of certain men or certain degenerates, like many people assume. It is the aestheticism of certain classes” (quoted in Ross 2016, 393). Leo Longanesi, whose satirical magazine L’Italiano took homophobic attacks on Wilde and his effeminacy, claimed that Wilde’s self-­fashioning proclaimed that “homosexuality [was] an aesthetics” (quoted in Ross 2016, 394). These theories were also reinforced by Cesare Lombroso who “linked sexual ‘deviance’ to criminality, effeminacy, illness, and degeneration” (Ross 2016, 397). Ross explains that Italian scientists, sociologists, and critics of the time “often used the term ‘aestheticism’ as a euphemism for the ‘unspeakable’ vice of homosexuality” (2016, 393). It is thus striking that D’Annunzio, the most prominent aesthete and dandy of the time, 20  Paradoxically, Italy was seen by British homosexuals as “an Arcadia untainted by the restrictive sexual mores of their own countries” (Beccalossi 2015, 186). Queer men who felt like social outcasts in their home country, most notably Oscar Wilde, chose to visit Southern Italy regularly, as the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome were widely understood as a code for same-sex love and, as Beccalossi notes, in the South, male same-sex acts were not legally punished in post-Unification Italy (2015, 186).

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evaded fascist censorship and clashes with authorities, even though his work was influenced by Wilde, and for years he had been working with a lesbian dancer Ida Rubinstein who dedicated her entire life to Wilde’s Salomé.21 D’Annunzio, in fact, nurtured a strong sympathy and intellectual kinship for Wilde despite all the insults Wilde received in Italy and Europe. D’Annunzio’s French translator André Doderet in his memoirs about D’Annunzio relates D’Annunzio’s account of an accidental meeting with Wilde in Rome after Wilde had been released from Reading Gaol. This passage is also an account of male bonding and hints at the homoerotic nature of the encounter: D’Annunzio enters a Neapolitan restaurant in Rome … and, as a timid young man, advances towards [Wilde] and greets him saying, – Sir, would you allow me to shake your hand? Without answering, Wilde put his hand in the hand that was offered to him and D’Annunzio went to his usual table to have lunch. When Wilde had finished his meal, before leaving, he stopped in front of the unknown young man. –Excuse me, there’s no doubt that you are a man of letters, sir. –Yes, I am, sir. –What’s your name? –Gabriele D’Annunzio. –Goodbye, sir. –Goodbye, sir. … I asked D’Annunzio: have you seen Oscar Wilde again? He answered: “Never.” (Doderet quoted in Bizzotto 2010, 124)

Interestingly, this motif of two men reaching for one another’s hand comes back in D’Annunzio’s novel Pleasure (Il Piacere, 1889, also translated as The Child of Pleasure) when the protagonist Andrea displays homosexual panic thinking of the gay character Lord Heathfield’s hands by which he is both enchanted and disgusted (Brinkley 1998, 78). Even though this scene echoes Doderet’s account of the meeting between Wilde and D’Annunzio in Rome, it is important to stress that the 21  For more information about Rubinstein’s obsession with Wilde’s Salomé see Vicki Woolf’s monograph Dancing in the Vortex: The Story of Ida Rubinstein (2000) and Silvana Sinisi’s book L’interprete totale. Ida Rubinštejn tra teatro e danza (2011).

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homosexual panic that is clearly represented here is that of the protagonist and not of D’Annunzio. Andrea is in many ways an antagonist with whom the reader cannot identify. What he represents is rather the ways in which normative bourgeois society reacts to people who display any sign of difference, demonstrating a mixture of obsessive interest in the “other” and repulsion. Wilde’s life had a lasting impact on the queer undertones of Yeats’s modernist theatrical production, too. For instance, Jason Edwards holds that “Wilde’s death in 1900 made Yeats more determined to use his work as a vehicle to increase public sympathy for homosexual men,” (2000, 45) mostly for Wilde and Roger Casement. A specific theme that stands out in Yeats’s writings about Wilde is the creation of counter-heroes through a performance of effeminacy as authority, which is most visible in Yeats’s Calvary analysed in the following chapter. Thomas Carlyle’s book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) is relevant to this context. As Mirzoeff has noted, Carlyle’s book asserted that authority was strictly masculine and history was about great men, hence it became the major point of reference for fascist and nationalist visualities (2011, 17). Wilde built on Carlyle’s ideas on the hero but only to challenge them by posing as an effeminate hero, which “created a clear sense of gender and sexual difference” (Mirzoeff 2011, 151) and served as a form of countervisual claim to autonomy staged against Carlyle’s reality. In A Vision “B,” Yeats mentions Wilde in Phase 19 along with the equally transgressive figures of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Lord Byron, and a certain actress, possibly referring to the great New Women of his time. This is the phase of the disunity of being, where “the being is compelled to live in a fragment of itself and to dramatise the fragment” (2015, 110). Yeats claims that these people’s thoughts express an exciting personality which is “always an open attack; or a sudden emphasis, an extravagance, or an impassioned declamation of some general idea, which is a more veiled attack” (2015, 111). Yeats’s notes about Wilde that he finds “in Wilde, too, something pretty, feminine, and insincere, derived from his admiration for writers of the 17th and earlier phases, and much that is violent, arbitrary and insolent, derived from his desire to escape” (2015, 112). Here the disunity of being and the extravagant personality are not necessarily negative. The people belonging to this phase seem to signify the performative turn which can attack the discourse through a counter-­ performance of excess and difference.

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Strikingly, in “At Stratford-on-Avon,” (1901) Yeats expresses his sympathy for young effeminate boys, who prefer contemplation instead of physical activities, and he condemns hyper-masculinity. When Yeats compares Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry V, he takes sides with Richard II, who had always been looked at as a sentimental, melancholy, and weak king. Yeats equally warns against the idealisation of the hyper-masculine Henry V, who was so good at performing power and had “a resounding rhetoric that move[d] men” (1961, 108). People expected from Richard II a “rough energy,” (1961, 106) but he had “nothing to give but some contemplative virtue” (1961, 106). Yeats continues that Shakespeare scholars “took the same delight in abasing Richard II that school-boys do in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and a distaste for school game. And they had the admiration for Henry that school-boys have for the sailor or soldier hero of a romance in some boys’ papers” (1961, 104). Yeats concludes that Shakespeare did not celebrate such hyper-masculine heroes but presented them with tragic irony.22 According to Edwards, Yeats in his defence of Richard II “eulogised Wilde,” (2000, 46) as Richard II “shared Wilde’s tragic destiny in being born in a masculine age antithetical to his own tender personality” (2000, 40). The melancholia and anxiety that mark most of Yeats’s male characters can also be traced back to how Yeats perceived Wilde. In his essays about Wilde, Yeats associates Wilde’s life experience with insult and melancholia. He connects Wilde to Christ as well as to a Lazarus-like figure who cries because Christ has healed him—a motif which appears in Yeats’s Calvary, too. When everyone urged Wilde to run away from the insults, Yeats praised Wilde’s strength in not running away: “he has resolved to stay to face it, to stand the music like Christ” (1972, 288). After detailing how Wilde was humiliated in various towns and scorned by newspapers, Yeats highlights Wilde’s obsession with a tale about Christ, which made a lasting impact on his imagination: One day he began, “I have been inventing a Christian heresy”, and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early Father, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of Christianity. (1972, 136) 22  Interestingly, Garry Hynes’ Druid Shakespeare in 2015 cast actor Aisling O’Sullivan as Henry V.

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In “The Catastrophe,” Yeats yet again mentions Wilde’s tale about Christ, which seemed to reflect Wilde’s difficulties as a gay man, and which Wilde repeated to himself when he was in deep melancholia. In this story, Christ meets three people who are unhappy because he has healed them. Christ’s meeting with an old man grasped Yeats’s attention the most: “At last in the middle of the city He saw an old man crouching, weeping upon the ground, and when He asked why he wept, the old man answered, ‘Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life, what else can I do but weep?’” (1972, 286). Furthermore, in his introduction to Wilde’s The Happy Prince, Yeats more explicitly connects Wilde’s life experience and melancholia with the one of the old man who weeps and tells Christ, “Lord, I was dead and you raised me into life, what else can I do but weep?” (1988, 150). This line can refer to the experiences of people who face social precarity and stigma, and whom the heteronormative world either wants to exclude completely or “heal” to include them in its repressive homogenising narrative. It implies that melancholia is part of this stigmatised life, which can cast a dark shadow even on the moments of greatest triumph. Didier Eribon has made a connection between the historic experiences of gay people and melancholia: “This ‘melancholy’ arises from the unending, unfinishable mourning of the loss homosexuality causes to homosexuals, that is to say, the loss of heterosexual ways of life, ways that are refused and rejected (or that you are obliged to reject because they reject you)” (2004, 37). This complex relationship between queerness, melancholia, and anxiety is central to the critical readings that follow in Chap. 2. Although the vast bulk of this study deals with the past, the patterns that it identifies have significant implications for understanding the contemporary moment which yet again witnesses the rise of authoritarian regimes which deprive women and sexual minorities of their rights, mock effeminacy, trivialise mental health issues, and idealise the normative family as well as a cult of virile masculinity. Each play discussed in this book features authoritarian characters who want to oppress, control, and contain individuals who differ from them, who kill the joy of the family, or who pose a threat to the nation, society, and the normative family with their dissent. Looking at texts from the past helps us recognise structures of domination and manipulation and might help evade power’s traps in the present. Yeats and D’Annunzio wrote plays that reveal the traps and oppressive mechanisms of patriarchy, normativity, nationalism, and various political manifestations of fascism, and thus drew attention to those

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subjectivities who could not identify with such totalising and homogenising narratives. The chapters that follow will help rhyme Yeats and D’Annunzio out of the sublime by letting them chime with various dramaturgical manifestations of the queer. The Yeats and D’Annunzio conjured by queer theory in what follows will be very different from the canonical figures we inherited and got used to.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New  York and London: Routledge. Aimone, Joseph O. 2000. Undressing Crazy Jane: Queer Acts from Yeats to Hollywood and Mine. In Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, ed. Calvin Thomas, 232–252. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Allison, Jonathan. 1990. The Attack on Yeats. South Atlantic Review 55 (4): 61–73. Anchisi, Lidia HwaSoon. 2001. Bodies in Bits and Pieces: Towards a Feminist Re-Reading of D’Annunzio. PhD Dissertation. New York University. Barisonzi, Michela. 2017. Motherhood, Sexuality and Beauty in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Trilogy I romanzi della Rosa. Forum Italicum 51 (2): 505–524. Beccalossi, Chiara. 2015. The ‘Italian Vice’: Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy. In Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914, ed. Valeria Babini, Chiara Beccalossi, and Lucy Riall, 185–206. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bizzotto, Elisa. 2010. ‘Children of Pleasure’: Oscar Wilde and Italian Decadence. In The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista, 124–141. New York: Continuum. Brandstetter, Gabriele. 2015. Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in Historical Avant-gardes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brinkley, Edward S. 1998. Homosexuality as (Anti)Illness: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere. Studies in 20th Century Literature 22 (1): 61–82. Brown, Terence. 2016. W.  B. Yeats and Rituals of Performance. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, ed. Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, 72–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bullogh, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullogh. 1993. Cross-Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Critically Queer. GLQ 1 (1): 17–32. Campbell, Matthew. 2019. “The Yeats family comedy.” ‘Yeats and Eros/Yeats and Paris’ Annual Conference of the International Yeats Society, University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France. Conference presentation.

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Campbell, Alyson, and Stephen Farrier. 2016. Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies. In Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, ed. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, 1–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Carlyle, Thomas. 1840. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. London: Chapman and Hall. Cavallo, Marilena. 2018. Perché studiare ancora oggi Gabriele D’Annunzio nell’Ottantesimo della morte? Orizzontescuola, March 27. https://www.orizzontescuola.it/per che-­s tudiar e-­a ncora-­o ggi-­g abriele-­d annunzio-­ nellottantesimo-­della-­morte/. Accessed 14 May 2023. Cenni, Alessandra. 2018. Ritratto di un’Amazzone italiana: Cordula Poletti. In Fuori della norma, Storie lesbiche nell’Italia della prima metà del Novecento, ed. Nerina Milletti and Luisa Passerini, 43–71. Rosenberg & Sellier. Cestaro, Gary P. 2004. Introduction: Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film. In Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, ed. Gary P.  Cestaro, 1–18. New  York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Champagne, John. 2015. Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chomel, Luisetta Elia. 1997. D’Annunzio: Un teatro al femminile. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Cima, Gay Gibson. 1993. Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Croft, Clare. 2017. Introduction. In Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, ed. Clare Croft, 1–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. 1981. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1993. Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. “Yeats and Me Too.” ‘Yeats and Eros/Yeats and Paris’ Annual Conference of the International Yeats Society, University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France. Keynote lecture. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1896 [2012]. Le vergini delle rocce. Milan: Fratelli Treves. First Electronic Edition (Liberliber.it). ———. 1933 [2010]. I romanzi della rosa: Trionfo della morte. Roma: Per l’Oleandro. First Electronic Edition (Liberliber.it). ———. 1959 [2010]. Forse che sì forse che no. Milan: Mondadori. Second Electronic Edition (Liberliber.it). ———. 1995 [2010]. In L’innocente, ed. Gianni Oliva. Roma: Biblioteca Economica Newton. Second Electronic Edition (Liberliber.it). Deane, Seamus. 1997. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Dublin Topics. By the Clubman. The Irish Times (1 June 1912): 4. Edwards, Jason. 2000. ‘The Generation of the Green Carnation’: sexual degeneration, the representation of male homosexuality, and the limits of Yeats’s sympathy. In Modernist Sexualities, ed. Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett, 41–56. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Ellmann, Richard. 1988. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage Books. Eribon, Didier. 2004. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farfan, Penny. 2017. Performing Queer Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flannery, James W. 1967. Action and Reaction at the Dublin Theatre Festival. Educational Theatre Journal 19 (1): 72–80. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Guerri, Giordano Bruno. 2019. Disobbedisco: Cinquecento giorni di rivoluzione. Fiume 1919–1920. Milan: Mondadori. Günsberg, Margaret. 1997. Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harper, Margaret Mills. 2019. Yeats’s Modernist Dancers. New Delhi. Guest Lecture: Jawaharlal Nehru University. Hartford, Jason James. 2018. Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French: Queering the Martyr. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Herrmann, Anne. 2000. Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances. New York: Palgrave. Hext, Kate, and Alex Murray. 2019. Introduction. In Decadence in the Age of Modernism, 1–26. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hogan, Robert, and Michael J.  O’Neill, eds. 2009. [1967]. Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre. A Selection from his Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Howes, Marjorie. 1996. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. 2013. The Pike. Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kiberd, Declan. 1989. Irish Literature and Irish History. In The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R.F. Foster, 230–281. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Irish Classics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lapointe, Michael Patrick. 2009. Edward Martyn’s Theatrical Hieratic Homoeroticism. In Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, ed. David Cregan, 73–97. Dublin: Carysfort Press.

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Lonergan, Patrick. 2019. Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950. London: Methuen Drama. Lorde, Audre. 2018. The Power of the Erotic. In The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, 6–16. London: Penguin Books. Love, Heather K. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. Introduction: Modernism at night. PMLA 124 (3): 744–748. McDonagh, Patrick, ed. 2020. Minorities in/and Ireland, special issue of Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish studies 10 (10). Firenze: Firenze University Press. McKibben, Sarah. 2013. Queering Early Modern Ireland. Irish University Review 43 (1): 169–183. Menon, Madhavi. 2011. Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Durham: Duke University Press. Meyers, Terry L. 1996. The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona Macleod, Incorporating Two Lost Works, ‘Ariadne in Naxos and ‘Beatrice.’. New York: Peter Lang. Mirabile, Andrea. 2014. Multimedia Archaeologies: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Belle Époque Paris, and the Total Artwork. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moran, Chris. 2009. Why Yeats was a great poet but an awful playwright. The Guardian. 24 April. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/ 2009/apr/24/wb-­yeats-­poet-­playwright. Accessed 10 September 2022. Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig. Mullen, Patrick R. 2012. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Utopia. New York: New York University Press. Nealon, Christopher. 2001. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Norris, David. 1995. Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 1993. Second Stage Speech, Tuesday 29 June 1993. In Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, ed. Íde O’Carroll and Eoin Collins, 13–25. London: Cassell. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. 1996. Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.  B. Yeats. In Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison, 29–56. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. O’Brien, Cormac. 2014. Gay Masculinities in Performance: Towards a Queer Dramaturgy. Irish Theatre International 3 (1): 75–94. ———. 2021. Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

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O’Toole, Fintan. 2015. No WB Yeats, no Samuel Beckett? Fintan O’Toole on why we mustn’t forget the poet’s plays. The Irish Times. 15 June. https://www. irishtimes.com/culture/books/no-­w b-­y eats-­n o-­s amuel-­b eckett-­f intan-­ o-­toole-­on-­why-­we-­mustn-­t-­forget-­the-­poet-­s-­plays-­1.2241559. Ormrod, Richard. 1989. D’Annunzio and Radclyffe Hall. The Modern Language Review 84 (4): 842–845. Otey, Jessica. 2010. D’Annunzio, Eros, and the Modern Artist: Tragedy and Tragic Criticism Reconsidered. MLN 125 (1): 169–194. Ramsey-Portolano, Catherine. 2018. Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860–1920). Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Re, Lucia. 2002. D’Annunzio, Duse, Wilde, Bernhardt: il rapporto autore/attrice fra decadentismo e modernità. MLN 117 (1): 115–152. Ross, Charlotte. 2016. ‘La carezza incompiuta’: Queer Aesthetics, Desire, and Censorship in Ticchioni’s Il suicidio di un esteta. The Modern Language Review 111 (2): 390–412. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Queer and Now. In Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. Sherry, Vincent. 2015. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinisi, Silvana. 2011. L’interprete totale. Ida Rubinštejn tra teatro e danza. Novara: UTET. Spackman, Barbara. 1996. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1980. Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats. Social Text 3: 73–87. The Dublin Theatres. Abbey Players Again on Tour. The Irish Times (3 October 1934): 5. Tiernan, Sonja. 2010. Tabloid Sensationalism or Revolutionary Feminism? The First-Wave Feminist Movement in an Irish Women’s Periodical. Irish Communications Review 12: 74–87. Une Grande Premiere Au Theatre Du Chatelet. 1911. The New  York Herald [European Edition], 23 May, International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887-2013. Accessed 2 June 2018. Valente, Joseph. 1994. The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish Nationalism. ELH 61 (1): 189–210. ———. 2011. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture: 1880–1922. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2020. Ageing Yeats: From Fascism to Disability. In Irish Literature in Transition: 1880–1940, ed. Marjorie Howes, 457–474. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Walsh, Ian R. 2012. Experimental Irish Theatre: After W.  B. Yeats. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Walshe, Eibhear. 1995. Oscar’s Mirror. In Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, ed. Íde O’Carroll and Eoin Collins, 149–157. London: Cassell. ———. 1997. Introduction: Sex, Nation, and Dissent. In Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing, ed. Eibhear Walshe, 1–15. Cork: Cork University Press. Woodhouse, John. 1998. Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Vicki. 2000. Dancing in the Vortex: The Story of Ida Rubinstein. New York: Routledge. Yeats, W.B. 1957. In The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1961. Essays and Introductions. London and New York: Macmillan. ———. 1972. In W. B. Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography - First Draft Journal, ed. Denis Donoghue. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1988. Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies edited by Yeats, ed. William H. O’Donnell. London: Macmillan. ———. 2015. A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. In The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats 14, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine Paul. New York: Scribner.

CHAPTER 2

Family, Normativity, and the Will to Escape

Queer failure [.…] is more nearly about escape and a certain virtuosity. —Muñoz, Cruising Utopia Family love cannot absorb us if we wish to survive. We are complicated, and our possibilities of social and political intercourse are a subject of endless interest and inquiry. Let us then start again on our voyages of discovery, this time with a little more purpose in our method and delight in our hearts. —Florence Farr, Modern Woman: Her Intentions

The family occupied a seminal role in maintaining the normative order and controlling sexual behaviours in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century Ireland and Italy. While in Italy the idealisation of the family and the nation along with a strict control of sexuality and gender roles served to establish the country as a colonial power and secure colonial expansion, Irish nationalists insisted on normative ideals of gender and sexuality to detach themselves from the British colonial imaginary which saw Irish people as childish and effeminate. In both countries, the needs of the body had to be fully repressed in the interest of the family which, by extension, protected the stability of the nation. It was also through the family that the regulation of sexuality and an unquestioned patriarchal authority could be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9_2

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maintained in a society which expected so much of individuals. Marriage inevitably became a crucial institution in this process; hence, people choosing not to marry were associated with homosexuality, were treated as social outcasts, or were deemed as fallen men and women. It is important to note that the Italian state had controlled sexuality decades before Italian Fascism began to do so, expecting people to set aside the needs of the body for the sake of national unity. As Gaia Giuliani explains, “the state would bring ‘rebels’ under the rule of law and make ‘deviants’ conform to the norm and the image of the normative Italian citizen, either forcing them to accept their own inclusion in the Italian political arena or declaring them ontologically and hopelessly incompatible” (2019, 32). Therefore, the period referred to as Liberal Italy (from Italy’s unification in 1861 until the rise of Italian Fascism) already heavily built on ideals of virility and family, and on the exclusion of sexual deviants in order to create a strong national identity. As a result, numerous legal measures were introduced to contain all phenomena regarded as socially deviant, including brigandage, homosexuality, and prostitution. During Italian Fascism, the strict control of sexual behaviours and normative gender roles became even more crucial for the maintenance of racial purity and national identity. However, fascist sexual politics abounded in contradictions. The normative family became one of the main pillars of the regime, as the family was equated with the nation and the regime itself: there was a “unifying notion of virile and patriarchal masculinity that combined obedience and loyalty to the nation and family with obedience and loyalty to the fascist regime” (Giuliani 2019, 65). Interestingly, fascists initially posed as anti-marriage and anti-tradition futurists and anarchists, which changed radically in the late 1920s when their politics began to display an obsession with tradition, marriage, and reproduction, as urbanisation and industrial progress were associated with homosexuality. Inevitably, this obsession with the virile male body entailed homoeroticism, and Derek Duncan has rightly remarked that “[t]he public celebration and display of the male body raises questions of how men looked at each other. Sexual potency was lauded, yet contact with women was shunned” (2004, 189). Nonetheless, men who lived as bachelors and did not reproduce were targets of shaming, as Carlo Scorza’s lines illustrate, “We must despise them. We must make the bachelors and those who desert the nuptial bed ashamed of their potential power to have children” (quoted in Duncan 2004, 191). Bearing this context in mind, it is striking that none of D’Annunzio’s male protagonists in his drama is married or

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has children—although some of them are clearly attracted to women, most characters suffer from anxiety and seek consolation in the company of other men. This is, of course, not true for his novels which feature some married main characters, but the refusal of marriage and motherhood appears, for instance, in The Virgins of the Rocks (Le Vergini delle Rocce 1895; D’Annunzio 1896) in which the character of Anatolia rejects the protagonist Claudio Cantelmo’s marriage proposal, because she wants to escape from the huge burden Cantelmo intends to impose on her, namely to give birth to a boy who would eventually revive the whole Italian nation (Hughes-Hallett 2013, 215). The other reason why she rejects prioritising the “national cause” is because she wishes to take care of her mother who suffers from mental health issues, and of her brothers who experience dementia and melancholia. This motif of rejecting an abstract national cause for the sake of the needs of the body is less prominent in D’Annunzio’s novels, but it certainly pervades his dramatic works. While in Italy the control of bodies, the demonisation of homosexuality and excessive sexual and social behaviours served to ensure the country’s colonial expansion, in Ireland it was part of the process of decolonisation from British rule. In early twentieth-century Ireland, romantic and revolutionary nationalisms became the foremost cultural and political frameworks. Three main strands shaped the country’s attitude to gender and sexuality: conservative constitutional nationalism, militant revolutionary nationalism, and romantic cultural nationalism. Nationalism in Ireland had the power to define who was included in and who was excluded from the definition of Irishness. As Cullingford notes, Irish nationalism created internal borders between the Irish and the Other, excluding women, Travellers, Jews, the working class, abused children, gays and lesbians (Cullingford 2001, 7). Like in Italy, the aim was to secure an uncontaminated Irishness or Ulsterness, but in Ireland, it served as a liberation from colonial oppression. As a result, Irish nationalisms put an enormous pressure on Irish men but mostly on women and their sexual behaviours, since the male body stood for the nation while the female body embodied the symbol of the nation. Harris highlights that Irish nationalism aimed to suppress the needs of the body and deny its power, because they saw the body as a site of possible contamination: the body is what “renders the ‘Irish national character’ vulnerable to imperial coercion, what makes imperial intervention inescapable and cultural pollution unavoidable” (2002, 39). Enforcing normative and oppressive constructions of Irish masculinity and femininity was therefore central not only to the

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maintenance of imperial rule in Ireland but also to the cause of Irish nationalism and anti-imperialism. A crucial component of Ireland’s history of sexuality was the practice of familism; hence, marriage became the most significant institution. Cairns and Richards explain that [f]or familism to operate it was essential that the codes of belief and behaviour upon which it depended, particularly the regulation of sexuality, and unquestioned patriarchal authority guaranteed by the Church’s sanctions and underpinning stem inheritance, should be accepted by the family and the whole community. Only widespread acceptance could make it possible to perpetuate a system which demanded so much of individuals. (1998, 59–60)

Moreover, sexual needs and desires were not recognised either, as “all eros was harnessed to serve economic imperatives” (Lapointe 2006, 36). All forms of sexuality were equated with sin, and bodily pleasure was marginalised and condemned in the name of gaining autonomy from colonial oppression. As Margot Gayle Backus has phrased it, “[t]he Irish in effect mortgaged bodily pleasure (the repression of which was one salient mark of Catholic difference), to retain cultural autonomy” (2001, 114). Therefore, unregulated desire was a threat not only to the nation and the social order but to livelihoods in general. Another way of controlling and punishing women was the establishment of the so-called Mother and Baby Homes from the 1920s onwards for women who became stigmatised by their family, society, the state, and the Church because they fell pregnant unmarried. Historians such as Jennifer Redmond, Maria Luddy, Diarmaid Ferriter, Sonja Tiernan, Lorraine Grimes, and Mary McAuliffe have demonstrated that there was a moral panic in post-independence Ireland whose primary mission was to regulate sexual behaviours through the notions of respectability and decency to prove Ireland could function as an independent nation. Ireland is still struggling to face this trauma of Irish history. An investigation in 2021 revealed that these homes—which were supposed to protect women and their babies—caused the death of nine thousand children just because they were born to unmarried women. Since these institutions existed until the late 1990s, survivors are still part of Irish society.1 The Magdalene 1  Lorraine Grimes has done extensive research on the trauma of women who entered these institutions. See for instance “‘They go to England to preserve their Secret’: The emigration and assistance of the Irish unmarried mother in Britain 1926–1952” (2016).

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Laundries were similar repressive institutions run by the Catholic Church from the eighteenth until the late twentieth century, where women who transgressed or were simply unmarried were punished and confined. These laundries equally caused the death of hundreds of women who were labelled as “fallen women” by the state and the Catholic Church. The report on the Mother and Baby Homes published in 2021 makes it clear that throughout the twentieth century, Ireland was an immensely misogynistic country which rid unmarried women of their basic rights and pushed them in an absurd situation whereby young women were not allowed to know anything about sexuality, and contraception was prohibited as well as abortion (2021, 14–15). The report equally clarifies that women were not forced to enter these institutions, but they had no alternative due to the pressure of the family, society and its cult of respectability. Against the backdrop of this idealisation of the family and marriage in Italian and Irish society, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts make visible the harm such normative constructs and institutions can inflict on individuals who inhabit norms differently and thus seek escape from the traditional family. This chapter explores the tension between the normative family and its unhappy subjects through queer dramaturgical readings of Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and Calvary (1920) and D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1901) and The Daughter of Iorio (1904). The motifs of unexplained melancholia and the impulse to escape work in these play texts as codes for queer desire framed through the safe frameworks of friendship, brotherhood, and sisterhood. In each play, the unease with traditional family roles and community values involves intimate, comforting relationships with members of the same sex. As Sara Ahmed explains, the “[q]ueer subject, when faced by the ‘comforts’ of heterosexuality may feel uncomfortable (the body does not ‘sink into’ a space that has already taken its shape). Discomfort is a feeling of disorientation: one’s body feels out of place, awkward, unsettled” (2004, 148). The selected plays’ main characters (Mary; Christ, Lazarus and Judas; Francesca; Aligi) display an existential anguish which signals their discomfort with the normative family that wants to see them happy in their roles as wives, husbands, daughters, and sons. Yet all of them choose to fail in their domestic duties even if it means becoming failure and source of unhappiness for the family and, by extension, the nation. The actions and experiences of these characters recall Ahmed’s description of affect aliens in The Promise of Happiness (2010). Ahmed maintains that the family sustains its societal position as a ‘happy object’ by labelling those who do not reproduce its line as the causes of unhappiness. She calls

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these othered subjects affect aliens, including mostly feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, and melancholic migrants (2010a, b, 49). Fintan Walsh has pointed out that the phobias of dissolution or non-identity in normative society lead to the production of such affect aliens “whose daily lives are policed by hatred, fear, shame, rather than just legislation” (2009, 64). In the scripts, the family operates as a pressure point demanding its members to reproduce its form, which, however, generates discomfort in those characters who cannot identify with the homogenising narrative of the family and who cannot reproduce the patterns and the life they inherited. This is a legacy from which they seek to escape, thus killing the joy of the traditional family, converting good feelings into bad ones, and eventually becoming affect aliens. As a result, the plays’ melancholy protagonists choose to leave the oppressive world represented by their family or community for a chosen, non-biological family, which resonates very closely with the experience of queer historical subjects. Eribon has observed that those people who suffer “the traumatizing brutality of insults and attacks” (2004, 25) tend to build a circle of chosen relationships mostly through friendships as a means of creating a non-biological family and finding self-­ affirmation in them, which has been characteristic of gay lives in particular. The connection between failure, the traditional family, and queer subjectivities has been explored in depth most notably by Jack Halberstam and Heather K. Love, who have underscored that capitalism and normative society make everyone who differs from them believe they are failures. Love emphasises that “same-sex desire is marked by a long history of association with failure, impossibility and loss. […] Homosexuality and homosexuals serve as scapegoats for the failures and impossibilities of desire itself” (2007, 21). Halberstam contends that in fact “all desire is impossible, impossible because unsustainable, then the queer body and queer social worlds become the evidence of that failure, while heterosexuality is rooted in a logic of achievement, fulfilment, and success(ion)” (2011, 94). Halberstam looks at the family as an obstacle which prevents and denies the authenticity of other forms of alliance, especially for queer people: As a kind of false narrative of continuity, as a construction that makes connection and succession seem organic and natural, family also gets in the way of all sorts of other alliances and coalitions. An ideology of family pushes gays and lesbians toward marriage politics and erases other modes of kinship in the process. (2011, 71)

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The selected plays all dramatize the tension between the discourse that defines what counts as happiness and individuals whom it labels as embodiments of social failure and the cause of unhappiness for others. Their protagonists are either banished from the history of happiness as defined by the normative family or “enter this history only as troublemakers, dissenters, killers of joy” (2010a, b, 17). Their plays offer a glimpse into other worlds beyond the family, which can provide happiness for people who feel uncomfortable with normative family roles. As Harris has discerned, “[i]t is in this realm of failed re/production that Irishness and queerness meet” (2017, 7), which, as we shall see, is an idea that applies to the Italian context and D’Annunzio’s plays, too. The cruel mistreatment of women in Irish society and within the frameworks of the normative family appears as a main theme in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama thanks mostly to their earliest theatrical collaborators: Florence Farr and Eleonora Duse. Both women became very influential in theatre life—they were obsessed with Ibsen’s female characters, had an androgynous stage presence, and shaped male playwrights’ works and ideas about gender and sexuality, embodying sexual liberation and women’s emancipation through their acting and activism. Like the D’Annunzio-­ Duse collaboration, the Yeats-Farr cooperation lasted from the end of the 1890s until the early years of the 1900s, exerting a lifelong influence on the authors’ dramatic imagination and marking their apprenticeship in drama. Farr was “an English feminist turned actress” (Harris 2017, 16), who mostly criticised English society, but she was actively involved in Irish feminist circles, too. In Modern Woman: Her Intentions, Farr undermines the myth of the happy family by observing that most women have unhappy domestic lives: “Among the grownup population about half the number are married, and the other half unmarried. Many of these marriages are unhappy, and it is to be that at least six million of each sex do not wish to marry enough to overcome the terrors of saying that they want for ever, and getting it” (1910). This feminist essay starts with a quotation from the second version of Yeats’s play The Shadowy Waters: “Another fire has come into the harp, /Fire from beyond the world, and wakens it: /It has begun to cry out to the eagles!” (1910). This quotation resonates with the beginning of the essay which predicts that in the twentieth century women are to wake up from their long sleep and come into their kingdom: There is a great difficulty in writing of the women of the first ten years of the twentieth century. This is to be the Woman’s Century. In it she is to awake

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from her long sleep and come into her kingdom; but when I look about me I find myself surrounded by the most terribly contradictory facts. We know there is to be a revaluation of all values—we know that old rubbish is to be burnt up, that the social world is to be melted down and remolded “nearer to the heart’s desire.” (1910)

This essay celebrates free love, encourages women to flirt freely, criticises marriage, attempts to normalise the idea that a man and a woman can be in each other’s company only to exchange ideas, and demands to remove shame from people who do not wish to become parents: “We want married women to recognize the various proportions of sexuality in each sex, to make allowance for the passionate, and to admit that we are greatly indebted for our culture to individuals who do not desire to be parents” (Farr 1910). She explains the origins of women’s oppression in society and outlines the prospect of change which must be initiated by women to achieve freedom. She demands equal wages and work opportunities for women, including wages for women who raise children. She writes honestly about how she is often criticised because of her profession which is associated with prostitution: “I think I had better own up at once that as an artist I am prejudiced against the exhibition of the necessities of nature” (1910). However, she owns her story and refuses to feel ashamed because of society’s opinion, as the body and sexuality are a necessity of nature and there is nothing unrespectable or unnatural about it. Florence Farr’s political and social importance is still largely underrepresented in scholarship as well as her queer stage presence and her contribution to avant-garde drama. Farr had convinced the magnate and fellow occultist Annie Horniman to fund a season of avant-garde drama in the Avenue Theatre, which was the first occasion Yeats saw a play of his produced (The Land of Heart’s Desire). As Harris explicates, Farr “was an outspoken feminist, an occult adept, a vocal critic of the institution of marriage, and a woman already identified—at least by Yeats, Todhunter and Shaw— as queer” (2017, 18–9). Harris asserts that Todhunter’s play A Sicilian Idyll (1890) in which Farr appeared as a Hellenistic New Woman, strongly suggested, “that Yeats, Todhunter and Shaw fell for Farr partly because they identified her as queer. They did not, of course, see her as exclusively lesbian—she had one failed marriage behind her, and for years she was romantically involved with Shaw—but A Sicilian Idyll suggests that Farr’s bisexuality was, for them, one of her charms” (2017, 36). In Todhunter’s play, Farr played Amaryllis who is shown “as a man-hating virgin who is

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grieving the end of a passionate attachment to a younger woman who is just beginning to take an interest in men” (Harris 2017, 36), and this “is enough to establish her as Sapphic” (2017, 36). Farr’s Sapphic presence in Irish plays is still an underrepresented area within scholarship, as so much of Irish criticism has examined her role in Irish theatre merely as a passive Muse figure instead of seeing her as an active agent in it. Farr’s active role in shaping the productions of Yeats’s plays is acknowledged by Yeats too in his letter to John O’Leary before the fiasco of the 1894 London production of The Land of Heart’s Desire: Should we have success, and I am not very hopeful, I shall put on another and larger play—also Irish—I mean if Miss Farr finds she can keep the theatre open. She is desirous of doing my next play as it is a wild mystical thing carefully arranged to be an insult to the regular theatre-goer who is hated by both of us. All the plays she is arranging for are studied insults. (Quoted in Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 106)

Yeats’s reference to the average theatre-goer might seem to be an arrogant and elitist remark, but it is better interpreted as an objection to the naturalist bourgeois theatre convention that dominated Irish theatre at the turn of the century and the conservative nationalist audiences whose judgement depended on the bourgeois cult of respectability and principles of public morality. Also, the play Yeats is referring to in this passage is The Countess Cathleen (1892) which he wrote and staged in Dublin despite the failure of The Land of Heart’s Desire in London. What is more, in its first production, Florence Farr played the male bard Aleel who is in love with Cathleen. The play was presented before Edward Martyn’s equally homoerotic play The Heather Field in 1899 as an inauguration of the Irish Literary Theatre.2 Similarly, in Italy Eleonora Duse spoke up for women whom society stigmatised because they did not want to or could not marry. In Michele De Benedetti’s 1913 interview with her entitled “La Duse parla del femminismo” (Duse speaks about feminism)3 she called for a new type of 2  I have offered a queer reading of Martyn’s The Heather Field in my article “‘What secret torture?’”: Normativity, Homoeros, and the Will to Escape in W.  B. Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire and Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field” (2020). 3  The interview was reproduced by Anna Laura Mariani in her article “Sibilla Aleramo. Significato di tre incontri col teatro: il presonaggio di Nora, Giacinta Pezzana, Eleonora Duse” (1987).

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education for all women to help their emancipation. Moreover, she criticised Italian society for seeing women suitable only for love, motherhood, marriage, housework, and reproduction, while in other areas woman is kept in moral, sexual, and intellectual subjection. As Duse explains: [society] then considers the woman who does not have family as a fallen woman, a woman whom even if due to simple vicissitude of fate, no one wanted. Because men […] cannot admit that a woman can freely and happily live without a man, that she can refuse to choose a husband, and that between the prospect of an unhappy, dubious marriage and that of remaining a “spinster,” she prefers the latter one. (Quoted in Mariani 1987, 132)

Duse’s conclusion is that women’s anger is entirely justified, as “[t]he laws do not make her equal to men” (quoted in Mariani 1987, 131). Duse lamented that women had been diminished in men’s eyes, deemed and treated as inferior even when in terms of productivity, energy, intelligence, and will-power they proved to be equal or superior to them. D’Annunzio’s decision to write for the stage was informed by his collaboration with Duse from the 1890s, when he wrote his first plays The Dead City (1896), Francesca da Rimini (1901) and The Daughter of Iorio (1904), which were all performed in the 1920s as well in front of fascist audiences. Crucially, Duse was not merely a passive inspirational muse figure for D’Annunzio, but an active force and equal partner in his work, which is rarely acknowledged in scholarship. As Re points out, she often dismissed authorial intentions and reshaped characters, acting as an independent actress-author-director: she “was a uniquely powerful, original, and defiant interpreter of texts” (2015, 348). Given Duse’s highly active role in shaping D’Annunzio’s characters, it raises significant ethical concerns when scholarship written mostly by men focuses on the muse status of such exceptional women artists in male playwrights’ lives. Moreover, Lucy Hughes-Hallett has discerned that “feminism and its obverse, misogyny, were dominant themes of public discourse, and d’Annunzio [sic] had to have his say on the subject” (2013, 316). Therefore, as in the case of Yeats too, D’Annunzio’s works inevitably display and reflect on contemporary public discourses, including feminism, misogyny, homosexuality, and the influence of New Women. Regarding D’Annunzio, however, Hughes-Hallett only refers to D’Annunzio’s own intentions, while I firmly believe that when it comes to his plays, the formative role of feminist and queer artists must be taken into consideration,

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too. What is more, since D’Annunzio’s plays were often staged by the women who featured in the plays (Duse and Rubinstein in particular), the ideas these women represented might be more informative than authorial intentions for the interpretation of the scripts. Thanks mostly to Duse’s influence, D’Annunzio’s scripts feature the contradictory dramaturgical impulses of the queer and the normative, which also includes the tension between misogyny and feminism. It is largely underemphasised that Duse was a prominent feminist voice in Italy, who sympathised with the most vulnerable. In 1884, Duse explained in a letter to Francesco d’Arcais that she identified with the hurts and stories of the characters she embodied on the stage who were theatrical representations of historically marginalised subjectivities: How and why and when this tender and affectionate interchange, inexplicable and undeniable, started happening between these women and me, would be too long and also too difficult to explain exactly. I don’t care if they lied, betrayed, sinned, or if they were born perverse, provided I feel that they have wept, suffered for lying, betraying or for loving. I stand on their side with them and for them, and I dig and scavenge, not because I crave suffering but because feminine compassion is greater, more concrete, and sweeter and more complete than the grief that men are used to allowing us. (BBC Podcast 2022)

The above passage was cited in the BBC Podcast series Great Lives in the episode titled Fiona Shaw nominates actress Eleonora Duse. The passage was read out by Fiona Shaw who also discussed Duse’s idiosyncratic acting style with interviewer Matthew Parris. Even though the episode urged scholarship to focus more on forgotten women such as Duse, there is no mention of Duse’s queerness and her life-changing relationships with women. Yet again, Duse remained within a heterosexual framework as a mere muse figure for male creativity. Scholarship should equally emphasise that Duse’s stage presence was outstandingly queer. Her acting style was a spectacle of strangeness and disruption, which reminded audiences of the neurosis afflicting the modern woman, yet for women in the audience she represented the possibility of freedom from patriarchy. Also, Duse was a queer woman who had intense love affairs with the Irish-American dancer Isadora Duncan, Lina Poletti, Laura Orvieto, Maria Osti, and even with her rival Sarah Bernhardt. Re has pointed out that she was able to raise desire in both men and women:

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The strength and charisma that emanated from her persona, and some of her powerful roles and performances made her appear subtly virile—at once masculine and feminine. Duse’s eroticism on the stage, like her acting in general, was always very subtle, made of small, intimate, and often surprising gestures that “seduced” both men and women. (2015, 350)

The protagonists of the four plays analysed in this chapter all choose to leave the domestic world behind for the excitement, uncertainty, and wildness of a new world or a new way of loving and living. However, in the scripts, the wild, unknown worlds beyond the family are not associated with danger—instead, they offer “a way of being in the world differently” (Halberstam 2020, 11) and demonstrate “the potential of certain forms of desire to stray beyond the boundaries of family and home” (Halberstam 2020, 132). Wildness helps flag the faults with the normative family, as “with wildness we leave the strictures, indeed the internal confines, of the home and enter a larger world of vegetation and animals, rocks and landscapes, water, and creatures seen and unseen” (11). The plays chosen for this chapter can also teach us about the unhappiness that lies behind the surface of constructed histories of happiness associated with the home, family, and marriage.

The Happy Family and Affect Aliens in The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) Since Yeats witnessed the sexual tension of some of his close friends (mostly Edward Martyn, William Sharp and Florence Farr) and he also felt ill-at-­ ease with normative masculinity, he understood that some people might not feel comfortable in certain social roles created by what we today call (hetero)normativity. In his Memoirs, Yeats explains that he put his own unfulfilled desire for Maud Gonne in The Land of Heart’s Desire. However, he imagined that Gonne was taken from him by a girl, not a man, thus envisioning the seduction of Gonne as a woman and queering his desire for her: I began to write The Land of Heart’s Desire to supply the niece of a new friend, Miss Florence Farr, with a part, and put in it my own despair. I could not tell why Maud Gonne had turned from me unless she had done so from some vague desire for some impossible life, for some unvarying excitement like that of the heroine of my play. (1972, 72–3)

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Yeats employs the ambiguous phrase “vague desire for some impossible life” which can refer to a spiritual experience but also to a forbidden form of desire. The longing for this impossible life and the unvarying excitement for the unknown recall the relationship between impossible love, failure, and queer lives, especially the link between love’s impossibilities and the “wild hopes for its futures” (Love 2007, 23). An interesting aspect of the play’s production history goes back to its first performance arranged by Farr in London’s Avenue Theatre in 1894 alongside John Todhunter’s A Comedy of Sighs and G.  B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Even though critics and audiences in London were already accustomed to the presence of strong, independent New Women, Yeats’s and Todhunter’s plays failed due to their portrayal of transgressive women. Farr in Todhunter’s play, for instance, “provoked first-night audience to mutiny” (Harris 2017, 45) as a result of her queer stage presence and the lesbian undertones she brought to the production. This failure made Shaw realise that he might lose audiences by collaborating with Farr, which he explained in a letter to Elizabeth Robins: “Oh my Saint Elizabeth, holy and consoling, have you ever seen so horrible a portent on the stage as this transformation of an amiable, clever sort of woman into a nightmare, a Medusa, a cold, loathly, terrifying, grey, callous, sexless devil?” (quoted in Harris 2017, 45). As Harris discerns, the reason for the unrest was that “[l]ike [Yeats’s] Land of Heart’s Desire, Comedy of Sighs fuse[d] two fundamental anxieties evoked by the New Woman: the fear that she would reject motherhood, and the fear that she would reject heterosexuality” (2017, 46). The rejection of these two pillars of (hetero)normativity by women was enough to get labelled as wild, untameable Medusas who threatened patriarchal society. In The Land of Heart’s Desire, the setting immediately indicates the newly wed bride Mary Bruin’s unease with the roles assigned to her by society and her family: she is standing by the door, reading a book, signalling her liminal position and her desire to escape. Mary’s mother-in-law Bridget complains to Father Hart that Mary is not following the example she represents of womanhood and motherhood: “She would not mind the kettle, milk the cow, or even lay the knives and spread the cloth” (VPl 182) and “[s]he is not a fitting wife for any man” (VPl 191). These speech acts are performative and work to let Mary know that she is the cause of the unhappiness of the entire family due to her failure to reproduce its traditions. Mary is thus labelled as a failure by her family, hence she is

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looking for ways to escape this oppressive environment, which resonates closely with the way Farr described her own life: I was brought up in a large family until I was twenty-three, and I lived the orthodox married life for four years, so that I have given home and the family as much trial as seemed necessary. […] I have no regrets, because my failures have been some of my most valuable experiences, and my moments of bitterness have been the cause of my greatest contentment. […] Those who are suffering from the home want to do away with it. With philosophic calm I can suggest improvements and ways of escape that would make it bearable, but would not destroy it. (1910)

The act of reading also appears in this play as a disturbing, suspicious activity for normative characters, as it indicates a lack of interest in domestic activities traditionally assigned to women. Bridget, Maurteen, and Father Hart all highlight the book as a disturbing object. Father Hart warns Mary: “You should not fill your head with foolish dreams. What are you reading?” (VPl 184). Mary is reading about a woman who was lured into “the Land of Faery” (VPl 184): a kinder and more tolerant world “[w]here nobody gets old and godly and grave/Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise/Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue” (VPl 184). These lines can refer to the authoritative, know-it-all, manipulative and insulting environment Mary is forced to endure within the family. Maurteen commands her to put down the book, as it seems to bring her to a different world where she feels better than in her own family. Through Mary’s refusal of conventional notions of femininity and duties assigned to women, she becomes a stranger to her own family: “To become wilfully estranged from femininity is to become a stranger to the family,” (2014, 90) as Ahmed has phrased it in Willful Subjects. Mary thus denies the basic principles of the normative family according to which “[t]he child must not only become part of the family, a willing member, seated at the family table, but as part must become a point, willing to extend the family line, to assemble a new body” (Ahmed 2014, 113). This serves as a technique for straightening out the wilfulness into a willingness to reproduce the family. Yet Mary wants to escape from what she calls a dull house and achieve the freedom she has been denied: “What do I care if I have given this house, /Where I must hear all day a bitter tongue, /Into the power of fairies?” (VPl 191). She begs: “Come, fairies, take me out of this dull

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house!/Let me have all the freedom I have lost; /Work when I will and idle when I will!” (VPl 192). The fairy child—who is in fact older than anyone else—promises Mary a kiss and through that kiss freedom and escape from her captivity: “You shall go with me, newly-married bride, / And gaze upon a merrier multitude. /[…] Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, /But joy is wisdom, time an endless song. I kiss you and the world begins to fade” (VPl 205). In “Happy Objects,” Ahmed mentions this desire “to leave a certain world behind” (2010, 47) as one of the reasons why the happy family associates everyone who is different from them with a life doomed to be necessarily unhappy. For instance, when the Fairy child appears at the door, Maurteen and the others immediately assume that she is unhappy, as she seems to have no family, hence Maurteen lets her in out of pity. Maurteen stresses that he (the family) is happy, therefore everyone around him should also be happy. This implies an intolerance for unhappiness disguised as benevolence and care: “Being happy, I would have all others happy, /So I will bring her in out of the cold” (VPl 195). This is the same reason why Maurteen also commands Mary to put away her discontent, but without any interest in the causes of her melancholia. There is an important connection between fairies and marginalised subjectivities within Irish culture and literature. What is more, by the 1920s, fairies had an established association with both Irish queerness and rural Irish heteronormativity. Charlotte McIvor discusses this connection with regard to George Moore’s novella “Albert Nobbs” in which Alec, the narrator’s fictional interlocutor claims: “A woman that marries another woman, and lives happily with her isn’t a natural woman; there must be something of the fairy in her” (quoted in McIvor 2013, 98). Fairies carry an ambiguous double-meaning, which could help to obscure the homoerotic content of the play: “The ‘fairy’ […] represents both an alibi that allows resumption of heteronormativity and the zone of an alternative queer reality” (McIvor 2013, 98, her emphasis). In addition, according to the Irish Aisling Vision tradition, fairies appear to declare something about Ireland’s future, and while these fairies are dancing merrily, people witnessing it are fearful as they do not know what they are exactly, which “mirrors the reaction of many individuals who witness lesbian and gay lives from afar, who dismiss it as high jinks, or flee with fear, refusing to engage with a different way of being” (O’Carroll and Collins 1995, 1). In The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999), Angela Bourke has similarly stressed that fairies belong to the margins and “their constant eavesdropping

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explains the need sometimes to speak in riddles, or to avoid discussion of certain topics” (28). Fairies can, therefore, serve as metaphors for marginalised individuals and the unspeakable in society: “it is in this very realm of the fairy that queer Irish female histories reside” (McIvor 2013, 98). Yeats’s drama abounds in such metaphors of marginality, which seem impenetrable, obscure, ambiguous, visible, and invisible at the same time, but always strongly associated with forms of desire that normativity labels as dangerous and deviant. Just like the fairy, other seemingly obscure symbols in Yeats’s works could be regarded as what McIvor called “quare signifiers” (2013, 99) and “metaphorical erotohistoriographical archives” (2013, 99), such as the white unicorn of The Player Queen, the wind-like women of the Sidhe in the Cuchulain plays or the white herons of Calvary and The Herne’s Egg. In The Land of Heart’s Desire, Mary desires the unknown, invisible realm of the fairies, while she is getting weary of her husband’s “drowsy love” (VPl 192). Yet unlike anyone else, Shawn seems to take her anxiety seriously: “Do not blame me; I often lie awake/Thinking that all things trouble your bright head” (VPl 192). This is a beautiful moment of understanding between them, and Mary calls him the great door-post of the house and herself the branch of quicken wood. However, she tells him that she cannot hang upon the post this branch, meaning she cannot make him happy: “O, you are the great door-post of this house, /And I the branch of blessed quicken wood, /And if I could I’d hang upon the post/ Till I had brought good luck into the house” (VPl 192–193). Strikingly, Mary does not explain why exactly she cannot make Shawn happy: her failure to conform to conventional social norms remains unexplained; it is marked by silence, which increases the sense of closetedness in the play. Once Shawn mentions that no power can break their marriage, the fairy child interrupts him and sings about “[t]he lonely of heart” (VPl 195) and of a happier land, implying that there are other forms of happiness beyond marriage between a man and a woman. She identifies Mary as her kind whose place is elsewhere: “There is one here that must away, away” (VPl 196). Mary transfers some objects through the door to this supernatural realm, which, as Harris has observed, never return (2017, 40). Similar to the world of queer people and other socially marginalised subcultures, it is a space that is real yet invisible, or as Leo Bersani has put it, it is “[i]nvisibly visible, unlocatably everywhere” (1996, 32). What the fairy child offers is another world which promises happiness beyond the family. This evokes Halberstam’s discussion of animated films which “are able to

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address the disorderly child, the child who sees his or her family and parents as the problem, the child who knows there is a bigger world out there beyond the family, if only he or she could reach it” (2011, 27). The fairy child’s role in this play is to convince Mary that it is worth reaching out to this bigger world that lies beyond the traditional family. Father Hart provides a reductive explanation to Mary’s melancholia, hoping that Mary will one day merge into the normative family and society, and will become like the rest: “My colleen, I have seen some other girls, /Restless and ill at ease, but years went by/And they grew like their neighbours and were glad/And gossiping of weddings and of wakes” (VPl 185). What equally vexes characters representing normativity is pensive and melancholy women and men, hence Bridget’s remark that Mary is “old enough to know that it is wrong/To mope and idle” (VPl 185). Maurteen suspects that Mary is repressing something: she is hiding among her dreams like children from the dark under the bedclothes, hence he implores her to put away her “dreams of discontent” (VPl 189). In “Happy Objects,” Ahmed mentions this kind of demand as characteristic of the normative family which defines what happiness should be: the demand that people should let go of certain histories which cause melancholia (2010a, b, 50). Melancholia can provide a powerful framework to examine the losses and hurts associated with marginalised and stigmatised subjectivities. To mention a recent example from queer cinema, Francis Lee’s film Ammonite (2020) starring Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan and Fiona Shaw has associated the unexplained melancholia of Charlotte’s character (played by Ronan) and the sadness of Mary’s character (played by Winslet) with repressed desire for their own sex. Even though queer critics often argue against treating the link between homosexuality and melancholia as an essential one, Eribon, Ahmed, Love, David L.  Eng and Butler have all discussed the validity of this connection.4 As Eribon has observed, “there exists a specifically homosexual ‘melancholy’” (2009, 36) which is part of the process of ego-formation caused by the loss of heterosexual ways of life. Or, in Ahmed’s words, “the unhappy queer is made unhappy by the 4  For more information on melancholia and gender see Judith Butler’s monograph The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), while for racial melancholia see David L. Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010). Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims (2009) also explores the connection between melancholia, queerness, and change of class.

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world that reads queer as unhappy” (“Happy Objects” 2010b, 43). Mary’s melancholia in Yeats’s play can also be explained with her liminal position between her feelings of duty towards the family and her wish to find freedom somewhere else: This is a melancholy related to a “split habitus,” to invoke Bourdieu’s wonderful, powerful concept. Strangely enough, it is precisely at the moment in which you try to get past this diffuse and hidden kind of malaise, to get over it, or when you try at least to allay it a bit, that it pushes even more strongly to the fore, and the melancholy associated with it redoubles its force. (Eribon 2009, 12)

Interestingly, this melancholia characterised twentieth-century Irish drama written by women too, including the plays of Lady Augusta Gregory, Teresa Deevy, Christina Reid and more recently, the works of Marina Carr, which respond to and defy discourses of exclusion.5 The family in The Land of Heart’s Desire sees the Fairy child and her kind as the evil Other, yet Mary claims they are also children of God, introducing a voice of tolerance and equality into the narrative of hostility and othering. It is only Mary who describes the people outside the house as “queer”: “A little queer old woman dressed in green” (188) and “[a] little queer old man” (VPl 191). Since Mary is the only character who is truly interested in this world, her use of “queer” gives the word a more positive connotation, seeing difference and strangeness as full of potential and possibility. This positive resignification of “queer” in the play is relevant, as in Yeats’s time the word “queer” was used mostly in a negative sense, meaning “outside the norm” or implying sexual deviance. In the play, the queerness of the Fairy Child is also manifested in her age ambivalence—she can put on womanhood anytime as if putting on a dress. Maurteen notes this ambivalence and observes that it is strange that so young a girl loves old age and wisdom, to which she replies that she is, in fact, “much older than the eagle-cock [which is] the oldest thing under the moon” (VPl 203). The strangeness of this figure and Mary’s interest in her raises panic in the others, and they hope the crucifix and the priest will protect them. Since the Child is terrified of the crucifix, she gets Father Hart to put it away by gently “caressing him” (VPl 66). Once the 5  See Mikyung Park’s PhD thesis The politics of melancholia in twentieth-century Irish drama by women: Augusta Gregory, Teresa Deevy, Christina Reid and Marina Carr (2017).

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crucifix is gone, Mary’s seduction begins through dance. The fairy child asks everyone if they love her, and suddenly turns to Mary: “And do you love me too?” (VPl 202). She promises Mary to give her more than her husband can, implying that she can offer just as much or even more to a woman than a man can. Everyone replies with yes to her question, as they see her as a child, not as a woman. Only Mary understands, as Harris has discerned, “how many different kinds of love might be implied in that question” (2017, 42), hence she answers, “I do not know” (VPl 202). It is crucial that Mary’s reaction is neither fully dismissive nor affirmative, but hesitant. Unlike anyone else, Mary feels embarrassed by the fairy child’s question not just because it is very straightforward, but because in the context of their relationship, it might imply romantic love. Promotion photos for the performance published in The Sketch (see Harris 2017, 43) also reveal more about the ambiguous relationship between the two women, as the fairy child’s hands are resting on Mary’s body, while she is also staring intensely in Mary’s eyes. Mary allows this, but her body and confused facial expression display that she is in a state of transition and hesitation. Mary is, therefore, torn between two worlds: Father Hart warns her to “think of this house and of [her] duties in it” (VPl 205), while the fairy begs her to come away, otherwise she will never escape from domestic duties and will become like the rest. It is notable that the prospect of growing like the rest is used both by Father Hart and the fairy, but with a very different connotation. For Father Hart, becoming like the rest is the ideal future for Mary, while the fairy child depicts this as the worst thing that can happen to Mary. The fairy thus begs her: Stay and come with me, newly-married bride, For if you hear him you grow like the rest; Bear children, cook, and bend above the churn, And wangle over butter, fowl, and eggs, Until at last, grown old and bitter of tongue, You’re crouching there and shivering at the grave. (VPl 205–206, my emphasis).

She promises Mary that unlike her family, she will love her as she is, “I keep you in the name of your own heart” (VPl 206). This part of the play is a dramatic competition for Mary’s love and attention between Shawn,

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Father Hart, and the fairy child, in which Mary rejects marriage, motherhood and the Catholic Church, too. Since Yeats himself admitted that he had put his own despair of desires in this play, Harris stresses that, “the battle for Mary Bruin’s soul is inevitably framed as an erotic competition” (2017, 40–41). This fairy child is a queer presence in that she is “an anti-­ reproductive force” (Harris 2017, 42) which takes women away from their conventional duties as wives and mothers. Ahmed explicates that the happiness of the family depends on following a straight path: on “the comfort of repetition, of following the lines that have already been given in advance” (2010a, b, 48). Father Hart, however, laments that people like the fairy child divert people from this straight path: “And day by day their power is more and more, /And men and women leave old paths for pride/Comes knocking with thin knuckles on the heart” (VPl 210). At the end of the play, the fairy child is standing by the door just like Mary at the beginning: Mary begs her to take her to the people of her kind “who ride the winds, run on the waves, /And dance upon the mountains” (VPl 208) and who are thus “more light/Than dewdrops on the banner of the dawn” (VPl 208). The child calls her “little bird” (VPl 208) and Mary addresses her as “Dear face! Dear voice!” (VPl 208). When the seduction is complete, Mary dies, but it is implied that her soul was taken by the fairy child to a kinder world which does not label her as a failure. From Mary’s point of view, the fairy child serves as a medium through which she can find her own voice and place in the world, which recalls feminist and queer bonds of entrustment between older and younger women. As Re has phrased it with regard to Duse’s bonds with women: “[t]he feminist relationship of entrustment (affidamento) is one in which an older, and usually more powerful and authoritative woman facilitates, through dialogue and friendship, a younger woman’s access to a stronger sense of self” (2015, 354). What is interesting about The Land of Heart’s Desire, however, is that due to the Fairy Child’s age ambiguity, it seems like a younger woman helps an older woman achieve freedom and a more assertive voice in this play, while, in fact, the Fairy is older than Mary. Just like Mary follows the fairy child in the play, Irish scholarship also needs to follow the fairies in order to reveal the oft-hidden queer lives included in the texts.

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The Pressure of the Patria Potestas and Melancholy Masculinities in Calvary (1920) Yeats’s mature drama continued to explore the invisible violence of the normative family. Elizabeth Cullingford explains that in the Free State years, Yeats used eros as a political weapon and the crucifixion often equalled to sexuality: “Yeats constructed the erotic in opposition to the Catholic sexual ethic, and to censorship” (1993, 8). Calvary was written in 1920, it was published in 1921, but it was never performed during Yeats’s lifetime. This play is often interpreted in the context of the Easter Rising, but like most of Yeats’s works, it invites several other layers of meaning. My reading examines the impact of normative masculinity and the patria potestas (the power of the father figure) on the intimate bond between three biblical men—Christ, Lazarus, and Judas—who form a kind of non-biological family in this play. More specifically, I examine the unhappy Lazarus motif and the implicit references to the Greek myth of Narcissus, which work to provide a discourse of legitimation for love between men and for alternative, melancholy masculinities. I also look at Christ’s performance of patriarchal authority which he assumes to appeal to his invisible Father and to hide his dreamy personality for which he is being mocked. As Eribon has observed, any representation of an effeminate or melancholy/contemplative man implies “male homosexuality—all of them—even when one knows this has no basis in reality” (2004, 71). Similar to Eribon, Halberstam has underscored that signs of effeminacy— including contemplative/artistic nature, solitude, or melancholia—have always been condemned by masculine societies as a threat to the politics of virility and as a betrayal of patriarchal fraternity (2011, 160). While male bonding and homoerotic fraternity can be worked into patriarchal social structures, a more direct threat for patriarchy is the refusal of these bonds for the sake of solitude and the rejection of masculine mastery, settling for a “non-suicidal disappearance of the subject,” (Bersani 1996, 99) which is exactly what the unhappy Lazarus is longing for in Calvary. Calvary features an emotionally loaded quarrel and rift between Christ and the disillusioned Lazarus and Judas, who rebel against Christ’s and his invisible Father’s authoritarianism. Yeats’s allusion to the raising of Lazarus

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can serve to legitimise the discourse about love between men. This episode of the Gospel of John (John 11–12) highlights the profound love and friendship between Christ and Lazarus. The crowd tells Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill,” (Coogan 2010, 167) and thus Christ stays with Lazarus to look after him. This episode portrays Christ in great despair, weeping because of the possibility of losing the man he loves so much, and when the crowd sees him weeping, they exclaim, “See how he loved him!” (2010, 168). Moreover, Christ as the central character can serve to draw attention to men who are stigmatised in society for their difference. Wilde recounts in De Profundis that according to the song of Isaiah, Christ was “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him” (2013, 121). Interestingly, for Wilde, Christ was inherently anti-authoritarian, as “He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals” (2013, 127). Calvary features various dramaturgical strategies which could be called queer, such as the questioning of normative ideals of manhood, symbolic scenography, meta-commentary, a sense of “masculinity entrapped in the wrong body” (O’Brien 2014, 85–86), and the presence of self-doubting, unhappy masculinities. In addition, there is a palpable tension between voices of exclusion and inclusion in the script. On the one hand, the play features a vocabulary of exclusion and insult along with a performance of hyper-masculine authority, which work to ban emancipatory efforts. On the other hand, it presents recalcitrant, marginalised characters who demand freedom and visibility for themselves. The play challenges our expectations on several levels: it disrupts, changes, and fragments the linearity and orthodoxy of the biblical narrative to convey important messages about power, masculinity, and difference. Alexandra Poulain in Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (2016) discusses in detail the ways in which Yeats goes against tradition in Calvary. She argues that Yeats distances himself from the traditional ritual of the Passion and neutralises its performative efficiency by forcing the Passion narrative into the alien theatrical form of the Noh which it also challenges (56). Poulain’s analysis outlines the two major interpretations of the characters: one that reads Judas, Lazarus, the Roman soldiers, and the subtextual white heron as the marginalised subjects, who do not wish to ask anything from Christ and who claim freedom from the totalising narrative of the Rising. However, according to another reading, Christ appears as the marginalised subject, who cannot identify with the narrative of the Rising and the physical force it promotes (2016, 54–55).

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I would argue, however, that the play inevitably invites another reading whereby Lazarus, Judas, Christ, and the subtextual white heron are all marginalised by Christ’s Father and the mocking crowd and soldiers, who represent the world which operates with the semblance of inclusion only to exclude those who do not wish to belong to its totalising narrative. Poulain contends that Yeats rewrote the Easter Rising as an ironic Passion play to show that the rebels’ sacrifice “fails to include the whole nation within a single emancipatory narrative” (2016, 61). By stressing this lack of inclusion and the structures of exclusion, Calvary fosters a narrative of recognition for those who feel stigmatised. It thus seems apt that Radio Éireann scriptwriter Warren O’Connell has called Calvary a “hymn of freedom of which Sartre or Beckett would have approved” (quoted in Flannery 1967, 78). Calvary, however, is also a hymn of dissidence and solitude: the refusal of inclusion and assimilation constitutes a seminal part of its queer dramaturgy. Ahmed has explained that, “[h]eteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape” (2004, 148). She calls this heterosexualisation which generates a feeling of discomfort and displacement in queer subjects whose bodies cannot sink into this space. Calvary abounds in male bodies experiencing such discomfort: the resurrected Lazarus who is longing for death and solitude; the vulnerable Christ exposed to the mocking crowd; and the famished heron at the beginning of the play who cannot feed himself. According to Ahmed, the maintenance of this feeling of discomfort is an indispensable part of rejecting the violence and the traps of heteronormativity which either explicitly refuses queer subjects or assimilates them to create homonormativity (2004, 149). Calvary is also about closetedness, and the use of the word “love” to describe the relationship between men has performative power here. I do not suggest that these characters should be read as gay, but the play does attempt to legitimise male tenderness and expressions of affection between men. For Sedgwick, “closetedness itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence […] in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it” (1991, 3). Thus, whenever the word “love” is used to describe the relationship between two men, it becomes a performative act which can function as a claim for the right to look:

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The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. […] The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity. (Mirzoeff 2011, 1)

This subjectivity can arrange the visible and the sayable, and here the expression of love between men becomes visible and sayable through the biblical framework and the implicit reference to Narcissus. The quarrel between Christ, Lazarus and Judas is introduced by the image of a passive, contemplative white heron that should be fishing in the stream, yet he is not able to do anything but stare at his own image, “upon the glittering image of a heron” (VPl 781). He is so dumbfounded by his own image that he forgets to eat and eventually drowns. It is usually the white heron that causes confusion in readers and audiences, as the heron is the key symbol of the play and the play’s meaning depends on how we interpret the heron’s role. This is an image that does not immediately make sense, which is one of the main characteristics of queer performance. If we consider the more hidden same-sex references and moments of the play, this heron could be read as a Narcissus-like figure, which not only implies self-love but love of the same sex, especially because neither the heron nor Narcissus was aware that they were fascinated with their own reflections (see Marcuse 1956, 167). Symbolic creatures like this heron or the fairy child in Yeats’s drama are queer in that they are all anti-­ reproductive forces, while reproduction is the foundational myth of (hetero)normativity. Like most of such symbolic figures in Yeats’s drama, the heron only appears in the subtext, which indicates his marginalised status in society: he is invisibly everywhere just like the supernatural creatures in Yeats’s drama and the people belonging to marginalised subcultures within mainstream society. The link between the white heron and the figure of Narcissus also resonates with Christ’s experiences of loss in the play. According to Ovid, a young boy Ameinias fell in love with Narcissus, who, however, did nothing else but scorn the nymphs and the companies of young people. Hence Ameinias cursed him and said “May he himself fall in love with another, as we have done with him! May he too be unable to gain his loved one!” (1955, 92). In fact, what we call narcissism today characterised Narcissus before falling in love with his own reflection, when he still mocked people for their feelings and desires for him, but once he fell in love with his

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reflection—he did not know it was his own image—the other became more important to him than his own self. The meta-commentary provided by the three Musicians regarding the white heron serves to express a discourse of exclusion, but it also challenges that discourse. One of the key phrases in Calvary is the repetition of “God has not died for the white heron” (VPl 780) three times at the beginning of the play and “God has not appeared to the birds” (VPl 787) at the end of the play after the crucifixion. Both phrases are uttered by the Second Musician, and the birds are constantly associated with the three male characters. Raymond Yeates’s 1986 production of Calvary and The Resurrection stressed this connection as the three Musicians were played by women wearing strange, bird-like costumes evoking the subtextual transvestites of The Resurrection: the production was infused with “insidious choral reminders of the bird world that mysteriously extends the thought of Lazarus and Judas” (Worth 1988, 280). In his notes to Calvary, Yeats connects solitary, contemplative birds to the subjective age which includes the individual as opposed to the objective one which oppresses and excludes them: “such lonely birds as the heron, hawk, eagle, and swan, are the natural symbols of subjectivity, especially when floating upon the wind alone or alighting upon some pool or river” (VPl 789). Interestingly, Halberstam has drawn a connection between such wild birds and queer desires, which might further nuance our understanding of these symbols in Yeats’s drama: “wild animals, specifically wild birds and, more precisely, hawks, represent the bristling potential of a set of desires that have little to do with the homosexual/heterosexual binary that emerged as the twentieth century’s most dominant classificatory axis for sexuality or ecological consciousness that spurs on contemporary forms of knowledge” (2020, 79–80). For Halberstam, the desire for wildness that characterises such birds “hold within them a range of other similarly expunged topographies of sexual longing, bodily practices, and intensified sites of fantasy” (2020, 80). My contention here is that the First and Third Musicians speak for Christ, the heron, Judas, Lazarus, and “the birds,” creating for them a counter-visual claim to autonomy which refuses segregation and categorisation and claims the right to existence. The Second Musician, however, seems to represent the world which defines itself only by excluding others, like heteronormativity and patriarchy. Thus the function of the repetitive phrases “God has not died for the white heron” and “God has not appeared to the birds” is to exclude the solitary white heron, the birds as

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well as Judas and Lazarus from the realm of normalcy, here represented by the invisible Father figure. It operates with the performative power of insult, whose aim is to mark the consciousness of those whom it excludes and represents the visuality of authority which separates, segregates, classifies whom it visualises, counters desire, and refuses all emancipatory efforts. As a result, when Lazarus and Judas appear in the play, both terrify the crowds and represent the appearance of strangeness which has no place in the normative narrative. The song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth at the end of the play continues this solitary bird imagery. The Second Musician insists on excluding them by claiming that, “God has not appeared to the birds” (VPl 787), but the First and Third Musicians celebrate the lonely birds who have chosen their part and who are content with their savage hearts. The First Musician then portrays two swans flying next to each other, which in the context of the play’s theme of strong male friendships, appears like an image of same-sex alliance. Interestingly, Julian Carter in Queer Dance mentions bird-women and swans as symbols of queer resistance and queer becoming, as “feathers do not lend themselves to conventional argumentative trajectories” (Carter 2017, 109). In Calvary, Christ appears as both the violator and the victim due to the pressure imposed on him by the invisible Father figure. This means that what forces Christ to act up is his sense of duty to the family, which, however, chases away his chosen non-biological family constituted by Lazarus and Judas. The tension between father figures and their rebellious, non-hegemonic sons is one of the main tropes of Irish drama. O’Brien explicates that the father-son trope in Irish theatre has usually been understood as a metaphor for Ireland’s struggle against colonial masters or as the everyman’s struggle against the authoritarian Church-State complex (2021, 93). Yet O’Brien reads this trope in the context of the “oft-ignored dynamics of the patrilineal inheritance of patriarchy—that passing down from father to son of masculine power and dominance” (2021, 93). In contemporary Irish drama, patrilineage has three main routes: the father is emulated; that father is ousted; or the father is replaced (2021, 93). In Calvary, we can see how the son emulates his father and the power he represents, but the play demonstrates the psychological impact of the pressure to maintain this patrilineage and the harm it inflicts on the individual. Christ represents patriarchal authority and poses as “all-­ powerful” (VPl 784). But masculinity is entrapped in the wrong body here, as Christ fails to perform the role of conventional patriarchal

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authority. Poulain claims that Christ’s “own power, a mere extension of his autocratic Father’s, is the power of the Word with which he handles his creatures like mere puppets” (2016, 58–59). Christ tries to explain his authoritarianism with statements like “[m]y Father put all men into my hands” (VPl 784) and “I do my Father’s will” (VPl 783). Instead of physical force, he uses emotional arguments to impose his power on Lazarus and Judas and make them feel uncomfortable. He emphasises how generous he has been to them, which operates like the “self-authorizing of authority” (Mirzoeff 2011, 7) which makes certain forms of violence and insult appear legal and benign. Christ, however, is also contemplative, vulnerable, and self-doubting. Before his quarrel with Lazarus, he “dreams His passion through” (VPl 781) and “[h]e stands amid a mocking crowd, / Heavily breathing” (VPl 781). He is the opposite of conventional, hegemonic images of masculinity, as “[h]e climbs up hither but as a dreamer climbs” (VPl 781) and he “wears away His strength” (VPl 781). Poulain contends that Christ’s figure challenges the traditional Noh structure as well, in which Christ should be the shite (the one who acts), while here he is the passive waki, fulfilling the role of spectator: “he is the passive, visionary dreamer who conjures the shadows of the past onto the stage and hears their grievances” (2016, 60). The words “mockery,” “mock” and “mockers” are mentioned only with reference to Christ, who must go through this to obey his Father. In fact, Lazarus points out that Christ is performing a role that was forced on him. When Christ defends himself “I do my Father’s will,” (VPl 783) Lazarus reproaches him: “[a]nd not your own” (VPl 783). The fact that the three main characters can be read as both antagonists and protagonists also contributes to the non-hierarchical and more dialectical dramaturgical structure which is part of the play’s queer dramaturgy. The crowd’s mocking reaction to Lazarus, Judas, and Christ positions all three characters in a lower dramaturgical position as the embodiments of strangeness and disruption. Yeats, however, gives voice to the stories and grievances of all three of them so that we can understand why Lazarus and Judas must turn away from Christ, while at the same time we can sympathise with Christ’s loss and predicament. Christ feels betrayed by the two men with whom he has shared a strong bond and who abandon him here because of his performance of masculine authority. Yet the two men’s refusal to reciprocate his love increases Christ’s longing for their companionship. As Ahmed explains:

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Even though love is a demand for reciprocity, it is also an emotion that lives with the failure of that demand often through an intensification of its affects (so, if you do not love me back, I may love you even more as the pain of that non-loving is a sign of what it means not to have this love). (2004, 130)

Ahmed draws attention to the intimate connection between lives that are “grievable” and lives that are “lovable” or “liveable” (2004, 130). But in Calvary, Christ—who is always represented as the figure most worthy of grievability—is mocked and abandoned by everyone, which indicates his marginalised, “ungrievable” and thus “unlovable” position. Christ’s despair at the loss of his companions yet again evokes the story of Narcissus who experienced a similar loss: “Whoever you are, come out to me! Oh boy beyond compare, why do you elude me? Where do you go, when I try to reach you? […] Where are you fleeing? Cruel creature, stay, do not desert the one who loves you!” (Ovid 1955, 92–93). Lazarus’s grievance is that Christ “dragged [him] to the light” (VPl 782) despite his will to lay dead in “an old mountain cavern” (VPl 782). Lazarus laments that Christ “disturb[ed] that corner/Where [he] had thought [he] might lie safe for ever” (VPl 783): Lazarus. You took my death, give me your death instead. Christ. I gave you life. Lazarus. But death is what I ask. Alive I never could escape your love, And when I sickened towards my death I thought, “I’ll to the desert, or chuckle in a corner, Mere ghost, a solitary thing.” I died And saw no more until I saw you stand In the opening of the tomb; “Come out!” you called; You dragged me to the light as boys drag out A rabbit when they have dug its hole away; And now with all the shouting at your heels You travel towards the death I am denied. (VPl 782–783)

The way Lazarus describes Christ’s “benign” violence here is evocative of the ways discourse forces queer people to escape from the safety of the closet only to categorise them as abnormal and prove the healthiness of normalcy. Dragging Lazarus to the light was an act of visualising him despite his will, and as Mirzoeff explains, this kind of visualisation is “part of the labor of being analyzed” (Mirzoeff 2011, 10). But Lazarus refuses

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this visualisation: he demands freedom, safety, and solitude among wild, solitary birds, and commands Christ to take his controlling eyes off him. Christ’s excessive love is also part of Lazarus’s grievance: he wants to be dead to escape Christ’s love. Heather Love considers such excessive, dissonant expressions of desire part of queer historical structures of feeling: “Queer desire is often figured as loving too much” (2007, 40). The quarrel between Judas and Christ is introduced by the First Musician who sings about the love between the two men: Take but His love away, Their love becomes a feather Of eagle, swan or gull, Or a drowned heron’s feather Tossed hither and thither Upon the bitter spray And the moon at the full. (VPl 784)

Even though this passage can equally refer to the love of God, its dramaturgical position—the fact that it comes right after Lazarus leaves the stage and right before Judas appears—makes it an ambiguous reference that can imply the intimate bond between Christ, Lazarus, and Judas. Judas wants to break away from the patriarchal authority represented by Christ and his Father: “I have betrayed you/Because you seemed all powerful. //And is there not one man/In the wide world that is not in your power?” (VPl 784). Judas continues: “I could not bear to think you had but to whistle/And I must do; but after that I thought, /‘Whatever man betrays Him will be free’; And life grew bearable again” (VPl 785). Christ’s performance of normative patriarchal authority also disturbs Judas. When Christ explains that his father put all men into his hands, Judas replies, “That was the very thought that drove me wild” (VPl 784). Thus, both of his companions leave Christ because he is acting up and poses as an authority figure. Judas kisses Christ after which Christ is crucified, mocked, and danced around by Roman soldiers/gamblers. Yet, as Worth explains in her review of Raymond Yeates’s production, in that performance Judas expressed self-hatred for what he has done to Christ, thus suggesting feelings of love in Judas for the companion he had betrayed to free himself: “A sudden awkward gesture of Judas, poking his head down, as in a spasm of self-hatred” (1988, 280).

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After these heated quarrels, Christ’s reaction is not rage or violence as it would be expected from an oppressive patriarchal authority, but sadness and a painful renunciation of the love of his two companions. Instead of blaming Judas or Lazarus, Christ’s perception of his Father changes: he realises that it was his Father who betrayed him by forcing on him this performance of masculine authority, thus Christ becomes “wild” too, like his former companions. While lying on the cross surrounded by dancing men, he cries out, “My Father, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (VPl 787). In the meantime, the Roman soldiers are talking about quarrels and friendships between men while dancing and holding hands, which is a spectacle of male same-sex alliance. At the same time, it is also an ironic commentary on the main action, which mocks and insults Christ because he was unable to settle the quarrels and keep the love of the two men: In the dance We quarrel for a while, but settle it By throwing dice, and after that, being friends, Join hand to hand and wheel about the cross. (VPl 787)

The stage direction makes it clear that unlike Lazarus, Judas stays there and helps placing Christ’s body on the cross. Even though there are no details regarding the movements of the characters here, this scene must include some sort of physical contact between Christ’s body and Judas followed by the dancing gamblers holding hands. Calvary also presents the contradictory dramaturgical impulses of the Promethean and the Orphic-Narcissistic worlds. Marcuse asserts that [t]he classical tradition associates Orpheus with the introduction of homosexuality. Like Narcissus, he rejects the normal Eros, not for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros. Like Narcissus, he protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros is to the end the negation of this order—the Great Refusal. (1956, 171)

Marcuse explains that both Orpheus and Narcissus are akin to Dionysus—who, in the Orphic mythology is also often identified with Narcissus—and represent aestheticism and contemplation. Narcissus and

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Orpheus thus become the exact antithesis of Prometheus: the voice which commands and represents patriarchal authority like the invisible Father/ God figure in Calvary. In fact, Love has called attention to the importance of reading “the Orphic lament as an effect of the particular losses suffered by queer historical subjects” (2007, 50). This Orphic lament or refusal is what characterises Lazarus’s and Judas’s behaviour towards Christ, as they refuse the Promethean totalising power performed by Christ upon his father’s will. Raymond Yeates’s double bill of Calvary and The Resurrection in September 1986 in the Peacock Theatre in Dublin also offered an androgynous portrayal of Christ. He wore a wreath made of flowers, which stood in stark contrast with the muscular Roman soldiers who surrounded him, thus the production underscored Christ’s difference from conventional images of masculinity. As Worth explains in her review of the production, the Musicians were played by three women who were “strange, half-­ Japanese, half-Beckettian figures in long, rope-like wigs, wearing bleached layers of grey-white cloth with voluminous sleeves” (1988, 279). Worth alludes to the gender ambiguity of these strange figures and how they mirrored other characters of the two plays: “Their not-quite human appearance in their stylised make-up and streaming, coarse-haired wigs, related them equally to the bird images of Calvary and the equivocal transvestites performing their Dionysiac rites in The Resurrection” (1988, 279). Worth thus discerns the affinity between Yeats’s bird symbolism and gender ambiguity, which is most palpable in Calvary. The production also emphasised the bond between the three biblical characters: Christ in blank white mask and blue robe faced Lazarus in skull mask and ragged pink, across the full distance of the stage, while Judas, in darker bronze colours, fell into the position of Christ’s shadow as he reluctantly followed the direction written into the script: “He has been chosen to hold up the cross”. (1988, 280)

Worth notes that in this production Lazarus and Judas “acquired real physical force […] each seeking its own way of life” (1988, 280), which resonates with a recurring theme in queer literature: the impulse to escape from social structures and institutions that oppress them.

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Violent Families, Comforting Sisterhood Bonds, and Death as Escape in Francesca da Rimini (1901) Thanks to Duse’s lifelong impact on D’Annunzio’s thinking and dramatic imagination, his drama interrogates the values of normative society, family, and the institution of marriage. In Michele de Benedetti’s interview with her in 1913, Duse brought up the story of Paolo and Francesca to critique over-idealised heterosexual relationships: [T]here is no one who does not see how paralysed and fake the social life between the two sexes is even when there are favourable, or even accessible conditions for love and even when there are none. In the latter case, it cannot be replaced with anything; in the former, the possible relationships are made difficult, impossible, at times, immediately exposed to malicious gossip and slander; they are reverberated then due to common judgements and prejudices into a sinful colour which, in fact, almost always arises in the same dramatis personae, the primary ‘suspect’, as Lancelot’s book in Paolo and Francesca. (Quoted in Mariani 1987, 129)

Twelve years before this interview, D’Annunzio revisited Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca in a five-act verse play written specifically for Duse. D’Annunzio’s version highlights the violence of male characters and shifts the focus from the famous love affair to Francesca’s discomfort and anxiety, introducing two new characters: Malatestino (the brother of Francesca’s husband Gianciotto) and Francesca’s servant and closest friend Smaragdi. The character of Malatestino was first played by a woman, Emilia Varini who introduced a palpable element of same-sex desire in the play’s first production on 9 December 1901 in Rome’s Teatro Costanzi. Most reviews applied a policy of silence regarding this cross-dressing element, while Il Giornale d’Italia found it apt that such an evil character was embodied by a woman, reflecting the time’s deeply entrenched misogyny: Malatestino, Gianciotto’s other brother, singular figure of a fierce and malicious adolescent, who cannot be embodied but by a woman: and forgive me, madam Varini, for this public accusation of ferocity and perfidy that I must anticipate today, since it is her to whom the arduous role will be entrusted. (Quoted in Granatella 1993, 296)

The performance took six hours, and the reception was controversial including both applause and whistles from the audience. According to

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Woodhouse, the play’s favourable reception was only due to the sumptuousness of the staging, as they used genuine mediaeval antiques for props and furnishing (2006, 330). Later in 1927, in Giovacchino Forzano’s direction as part of a fascist project to promote Italian tragedy, Malatestino was played by a male actor Filippo Scelzo. This production was a much bigger success, which shows that violence was more acceptable when it was performed by a man. However, the play was not produced again until 1944. Francesca da Rimini is set against the backdrop of the battle between the ghibellini of Rimini (Francesca’s family, supporters of the Emperor) and the guelfi of Ravenna (Paolo’s family, supporters of the Pope). Yet this battle is also a family conflict within the Malatesta family whose male members (Gianciotto, Malatestino, and Paolo) all fight for Francesca’s attention. The play underlines Francesca’s anxiety and melancholia which can be consoled only in the company of women. But the possessive male character of her own family (her brother Ostasio) and the three men of the Malatesta family tear her out from this consoling atmosphere and push her life towards tragedy. Her character’s melancholia was lamented by theatre critics, calling her “a somewhat pale and faded heroine” (quoted in Chomel 1997, 95). Like so many of D’Annunzio’s melancholy protagonists whose desires are non-normative, Francesca finds escape from judgement only in death, thus this play reads as “a negative judgement on the normative values of a crystallised society” (Chomel 1997, 106) that raises such anxieties in its subjects. Despite the presence of anxiety and melancholia in the play, it begins with a group of confident, cheerful, and assertive women in the house of the Polenta family (Francesca’s home) who are teasing a jester: “Wretched me, I thought I was entering/the house of the gentlemen of the Polenta family/yet I find myself among chattering women” (1995: 1, 237). The women do not let themselves be mocked by the jester and they continue their playful teasing: “Are you being perky?” (237), “Would you like to restart the fight?” (237). This playful atmosphere ends, however, when Francesca’s brother Ostasio arrives, as the women seem to be afraid of him. Ostasio acts as a normative authority here: he attacks his own brother, deceives his sister to “defend” the family, threatens the jester, and wants to censor what can be said and by whom. In Scenes II and III of Act I, Ostasio decides over the fate of Francesca: even though he is aware of Francesca’s feelings for Paolo, he deliberately arranges her marriage with Gianciotto, expressing his despise for effeminate men like Paolo to the

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jester whom he is interrogating: “So you do not know Messer Paolo, the Beautiful, /who loves jesters so much and if he sees them around/plays music and sings…” (242). Yet the jester provokes him and exclaims, “Long live Messer Paolo Malatesta!” (242), which is followed by threats from Ostasio. Ostasio despises singing men like Paolo as well as jesters: “These jesters and courtiers/are the plague of Romagna, worse/than the imperial rascals. Tongues of girls, /they know everything, /they say everything […]” (243). Moreover, Ostasio is disturbed by Francesca’s melancholia and is suspicious of her bond with the women around her: And that Cyprian slave, who is so dear to my sister, now makes me suspicious, given that she is a bit of a fortune-teller; because I know she tells fortune from dreams…And, for days, I see my sister full of thoughts and almost in pain as if she had some deadly dream; and also, just yesterday, I heard her uttering an enormous sigh as if something was ailing her heart and heard Samaritana tell her: ‘What ails you, sister? Why are you crying? (243–244)

This scene demonstrates that in patriarchal systems men feel entitled to possess women and make decisions about their lives without involving them, as Ostasio chooses Francesca’s future husband—he even recalls Francesca’s desperate question to him: “Who will you give me to?” (248). When his brother Bannino arrives in Scene IV, he confronts Ostasio and reproaches him for what he is doing to Francesca’s life: “But you shut up, who, while I am in battle, are conspiring with the notary” (250). Ostasio despises him because he is only a stepbrother, therefore he is not part of the family: “He is from another nest” (250). Bannino reminds Ostasio how tender he used to be and implies that he had an incestuous relationship with his father: “How you were caressing him, oh tender boy! Do you understand me now? I know that thing and you know it too. May God wither your right hand!” (251). This triggers a violent attack from Ostasio, and he is ready to kill him: “Ah, female lie! Bastard, today is your day” (251). What enrages Ostasio here is that Bannino wants to unveil a story

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which would desecrate the family, yet eventually the threat of physical violence silences Bannino: “I won’t tell it…Forgive me! Ah!” (251), but Ostasio stabs him in the stomach anyway and exclaims, “Christ, save my father and my house from the traitors!” (252). These scenes of male violence are followed by a scene of equality and tenderness between women. It creates a visible contrast to the violence of the patriarchal family, as Francesca chooses the women around her as her own non-biological family where she feels fully accepted and loved. Ahmed has pointed out that, “[o]ne of the primary happiness indicators is marriage” (2010a, b, 6), and marriage is regarded as an event that maximises happiness. Francesca’s preparation for his married life, however, is saturated with sorrow and discomfort, because marriage means leaving the women of her life behind. These scenes convey a strong sense of sisterhood and spiritual as well as physical intimacy, especially the scene with her sister Samaritana. The dialogue between the two women conveys an ambiguous diction. Samaritana tells Francesca while the other women are singing around them: “Wish I could still make/my small bed next to yours!/Wish I could feel you at night!” (253). Samaritana is clearly afraid of losing Francesca because of her marriage to Gianciotto: “I have never been separated from you, from your breath. My life had nothing but your eyes” (254). Moreover, based on Francesca’s response, it seems she must force happiness on herself: “O sister, sister, /don’t cry anymore. I’m not crying anymore. Don’t you see/I’m laughing? Ah I’m crying and laughing, /and it doesn’t want to stop” (261). Francesca makes similarly ambiguous statements to her dearest servant Smaragdi and treats her as her equal: “And tell me: what will you do, Smaragdi, without me?” (256). These women do not want Francesca to leave them and marry, and Francesca does not want to live without them, hence she plans to bring Smaragdi with her: I will not leave you; come with me, Smaragdi, to the city of Rimini, and you will be with me, and there we will have a window looking at the see: and I will tell you all my dreams so that you discover the traces of joy and pain; ………………………………………………… Would you like me to take you with me, Smaragdi? (256)

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This passage conveys tenderness and even though Smaragdi is her servant, Francesca never gives her orders: instead, she lets her decide for herself. In fact, this passage reads like a proposal for companionship and mimes the diction of wedding wows, especially because Smaragdi’s answer is that she would walk through flames just to be with her. It is equally striking that Francesca will be longing for an effeminate man, Gianciotto’s brother Paolo, whose beauty is mocked by men representing normative masculinity like Ostasio and Malatestino. The women surrounding Francesca admire Paolo, too: “He is the most beautiful knight of the world, really./Look how he is wearing the long hair/which falls back on/his shoulders, in an Anjou fashion…” (258). Chomel, however, seems to critique Paolo’s character because of his “inherent lack of moral force” (1997, 100) and because Paolo lives only for pleasure without thinking about the consequences. Yet Paolo’s character proposes a different kind of masculinity which is tender, non-competitive, puts pleasure before violence, and treats women as his equals. His lack of physical strength and his beauty should not be mentioned as negative traits of his character. His function in this play is to offer an alternative for conventional manliness and normative masculinity. Instead of idealising violence the way the other male characters do, Paolo feels ashamed of it, which attests to his non-normativity. At the beginning of Act II, Francesca is in Rimini at the Malatesta’s and she meets Paolo who confesses to her that he committed violence: “Making violence/was medicine for my illness, /that night: making violence. /And I killed Tindaro Omodei/and burnt down his houses” (274). He looks for consolation in Francesca’s arms and does not hide his vulnerable side from her, thus their bond resembles the one between the women and Francesca. Moreover, in this scene, Francesca appears much more confident than Paolo, and they participate in a battle together like comrades. Before Paolo arrives, Francesca is in the company of two men who are supposed to supervise the fire on the top of the tower, and they are patronising Francesca, worrying about her anxiety: “She rarely smiles/She is always clouded/with thoughts and angry. She doesn’t have peace” (265). They do not want to light the fire, fearing Francesca will hurt herself, yet she refuses this condescending approach: “Light it! I want it” (269). Since they refuse to obey, she takes action and lights it herself, thus refusing the passive and vulnerable role traditionally assigned to women. When the battle begins, she admits to Paolo:

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I won’t breathe enclosed in my rooms among my trembling women, when people fight in the city … Give me a nice helmet, my brother-in-law. (272)

This subtextual battle scene is yet another addition by D’Annunzio and proposes an acknowledgement of women’s power and gender equality. Francesca becomes her lover’s equal companion here, which is what Duse noted as missing from Italian families where married women could not even become equal companions to their husbands: Because the oriental prejudice of the woman as slave, not materially slave but morally, is still entrenched in our country; the prejudice of the woman who, if a girl, she must not know, if a bride, she must not want, if a spinster, if she is disgraceful enough to remain a spinster, must not live, does not have the right to live. (Quoted in Mariani 1987, 130)

Crucially, Paolo confesses to Francesca that he is paralysed by fear, thus she takes him in her arms to protect him, which subverts conventional representations of gender roles—for Yeats scholars, this scene can also evoke the famous scene from Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain (1939) in which Cuchulain admits to her lover Eithne Inguba that he is afraid, hence she takes him in her arms. When Francesca’s husband Gianciotto arrives, Paolo’s non-hegemonic masculinity becomes even more visible. Gianciotto embraces violence, unlike Paolo who is ashamed and afraid of it. Gianciotto is proud that he is covered in blood and dust, which stands in stark contrast with Paolo’s neat, fashionable appearance. When Paolo starts recounting how Francesca was fighting alongside him, Gianciotto immediately connects this quality of Francesca to her father and suggests that her role is to reproduce to which Francesca’s reaction is frowning her eyebrows (as indicated in the stage directions): “Guido’s daughter, your father imprinted you nicely. /And may God make you fertile, /so that you give me more/ than one lion cubs!” (284). Then Gianciotto begins to criticise Paolo for looking pale and not drinking, which further deepens the contrast between Gianciotto’s hyper-masculine behaviour and Paolo’s tenderness: “Paolo, you haven’t drunk yet. /Drink, because you are pale” (284). His treatment of Paolo is condescending: he keeps comparing his strength to

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Paolo’s and highlights his mistakes, touching his shoulder as if patronising him. Another victim of this compulsory virility is Malatestino who is brought back from the battle bleeding in Scene V, Act II. His wounds are taken care of by Francesca: amazed by her tenderness, he falls in love with her, as he has never experienced validation from anyone else. Since Emilia Varini played Malatestino, this scene must have conveyed strong homoerotic undertones. Malatestino is labelled as strange and perverse by everyone, and he does not feel validated by his family. Gianciotto does not consider him manly enough, therefore he does not let him kill their major enemy Ugolino. As a result, his behaviour shows a constant effort to act up, to look strong, masculine, and violent; hence, even when he is heavily bleeding, he wants to go back to the battle to prove to his brother that he is a valuable member of the family. Francesca senses Malatestino’s violent frustration and confesses to Smaragdi that she is afraid of him, asks for her protection and highlights that all women are destined to the same fate. Moreover, Francesca tells Smaragdi her recurring dream about male violence towards women which resembles Nastagio degli Onesti’s story which she heard from Bannino. In Francesca’s dream, a naked, dishevelled, lacerated woman is fleeing from a man and two mastiffs, crying and asking for mercy, as the mastiffs are biting her. Right behind the mastiffs, a black knight is chasing her too, threatening her with frightening words. This scene highlights how oppressed, exposed, and intimidated women are in a violent patriarchal society, as this scene features two strong women’s concerns about male violence. Significantly, this scene is situated before Malatestino’s harassment of Francesca and Gianciotto’s violence. In fact, the famous kiss scene that happens in Scene V, Act III between Paolo and Francesca is completely marginalised in this play. The focus has been shifted to the strength and vulnerability of Francesca’s body which is exposed to male violence. Malatestino’s complex character is longing for acceptance and tenderness, yet when the only person who seems to love him rejects him, he opts for violence and decides to take revenge on his own family, telling Gianciotto about the affair between Francesca and their brother. At the beginning of Act V, Malatestino is kneeling before Francesca showing her a dead hawk, expecting kind words from her, yet she reproaches him instead: “You are a cruel boy/to take revenge on a hawk!/Why did you kill it if you/loved it?” (318) and she wonders, “Why are you so strange?/ Greedy for blood/you are, always vigilant, /enemy to all. In every word

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of yours/there is an obscure threat” (319). Francesca assumes that this behaviour is the result of being neglected by his family: “Didn’t your mother give you milk?” (319). Since Malatestino continues with his possessive and violent confessions of desire for Francesca, she warns him “Don’t you feel ashamed?” (319) and exclaims, “You are a perverse boy” (320). This scene is about harassment, as Francesca feels entrapped by this violent boy who wants to force his desire on her even though his brother is about to appear. In the meantime, sounds of violence can be heard, as the prisoner Ugolino is being tortured, thus Francesca’s body position begins to show vulnerability: she goes near the window, far from Malatestino, sits down and puts her head in her hands, as the stage directions make it clear. Malatestino disappears but only to return soon with the severed head of Ugolino which he proudly presents to Gianciotto and Francesca to demonstrate his virility. Instead of acknowledgement, Gianciotto reproaches him: “Weren’t you afraid of disobeying your father?” (326). When Paolo returns, he is disgusted with this evidence of violence (the severed head), and now Malatestino can mock him for his lack of manliness since he knows Gianciotto is on his side: “I didn’t know/I had two sisters/so delicate!” (332). To make himself useful to Gianciotto and to take revenge on everyone who has doubted his strength, he reveals the affair between Francesca and Paolo, which is the first time he is taken seriously by Gianciotto. Gianciotto lets him make a plan and is willing to follow him whereby they pretend to leave the house to create a trap for the lovers only to suddenly return and ambush them. Besides critiquing patriarchal violence and the suffocating atmosphere of the normative family, the play replaces the traditional male martyr with a woman. When Gianciotto is about to stab Paolo, Francesca jumps between the two men, thus sacrificing herself to protect Paolo. However, seeing Francesca’s dead body makes Gianciotto even more furious, as his plan was to kill Paolo and keep Francesca for himself, hence he immediately stabs Paolo, too. This pattern of a woman choosing death instead of remaining with an autocratic man who kills her true love will appear in Yeats’s Deirdre, too. Once it became obvious for Francesca that Gianciotto was going to kill Paolo, she decided that even death was preferable to a kind of un-life with a possessive, violent man. Both in the middle ages and in D’Annunzio’s time, such acts of violence were justified in the eyes of normative society, since the love which Gianciotto punished contaminated both family and marriage, two of the main pillars of bourgeois society: “Because the ultimate morale of the tale, from the medieval scenario to

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that of the bourgeois society of the beginning of the century, is always the same: Gianciotto’s revenge is an honorable crime and as such is justified in the eyes of society” (Chomel 1997, 106). Since D’Annunzio rewrote the story of Paolo and Francesca to highlight women’s oppressed status in a violent patriarchal society, stressing the ways in which such acts of violence affect women and force men to act up, the play invites a scrutinising approach to such oppressive institutions.

Leaving the Clan: The Will of the Individual in The Daughter of Iorio (1904) The Daughter of Iorio is a three-act pastoral tragedy considered as D’Annunzio’s masterpiece. The plot bears resemblance to Yeats’s Land of Heart’s Desire, as the happiness of the normative family is threatened by a stranger. A woman called Mila disturbs the family’s peace and makes the young Aligi realise that he cannot be happy among his family members who are constantly exhibiting expectations towards him: instead, he chooses the stranger Mila as his non-biological family, since Mila represents freedom for him. In the words of Emilio Mariano: “The first unusual event, without archetypal model, is the intrusion of Mila who is refused by all components of the patriarchal society, except Aligi” (quoted in Antonucci 1995: 1, 411). Chomel has equally observed that, “the meaning that emerges from it is that of a potent tragedy in which the traditions of the clan clash with the aspirations of the individual, the implacable law of the family and the yearning for free choice” (1997, 109). As I mentioned in Chap. 1, for D’Annunzio, the freedom of the individual and, by extension, the freedom of the body and one’s own will were of utmost importance, hence his plays interrogate every institution that pose a threat to this freedom. The first production of the play on 2 March 1904  in Milan’s Teatro Lirico saw Irma Gramatica as Mila and Ruggero Ruggeri as Aligi. The performance was a huge triumph due to the extraordinary staging unprecedented in Italian theatre. Moreover, the death of Mila at the end of the play could be interpreted as a punishment of such dissident, disruptive women. Yet the play invites another interpretation as well which exalts and creates sympathy for Mila through her sacrifice. The critics were disappointed with Irma Gramatica’s performance, but D’Annunzio chose her for the role in 1915 as well, even though she did not have as much

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“commercial value” as Eleonora Duse or Sarah Bernhardt whom people wanted to see on the stage regardless of the characters they embodied. The Daughter of Iorio was produced in 1922 and 1927 too with Vera Vergani and Maria Melato in the role of Mila, while in 1934 Luigi Pirandello directed another performance of the play, choosing New Woman Marta Abba for the role. As Antonucci has emphasised, the play’s characters are eternal: they speak to the present and to the past as well (1995: 1, 411). This ever-topical message is related to the patriarchal family and the individuals’ wish for freedom and alternative forms of family. Despite the play’s subversive message, it became D’Annunzio’s most successful tragedy, which is due to the ambiguous interpretations it invites. The play opens in the family house where the three sisters (Splendore, Favetta, and Ornella) are preparing for their sister-in-law Vienda’s marriage, who, however, does not speak at all in the play—instead, Aligi’s mother Candia speaks for her. When Aligi appears, he conveys anxiety, hence his mother starts worrying about him and stresses the importance of the family and religion. Judging by his mother’s surprise, it seems that Aligi’s anxiety became visible only when his marriage was imminent. Aligi’s unease, sorrow and frustration can be explained with the disappointment and anxious narrative of self-doubt that often fill the gap between the promise of a feeling (the happiness he should feel at the prospect of marrying Vienda) and the feeling of feeling (Ahmed 2010a, b, 42). According to Ahmed, it is in this moment that we become strangers or affect aliens (2010a, b, 42). Since Aligi cannot find this feeling of happiness, he panics, and his anxiety escalates. Similar to Ahmed’s discussion of the happy family’s reaction to the queer child, here Candia initially expresses being unhappy about Aligi’s unhappiness which is then turned into an unhappiness about his refusal to marry, as for normativity, a childless and family-less future implies an inevitable unhappiness. Aligi talks about his visions of Christ who consoled him and reassured him not to be afraid, indicating that Aligi feels ill-at-ease with the idea of his approaching marriage. He seems to perceive the presence of someone at the door and keeps repeating that he must return to the mountains, signalling his wish to escape from the family house: “And to the mountain I have to return, / even if you cry, even if I cry, mother” (417). As indicated in the Introduction, I believe that scholarship needs to pay more attention to the theme of melancholia and anxiety regarding D’Annunzio’s male characters. Although this theme is most prevalent in his drama, some of D’Annunzio’s novels equally feature men going

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through serious existential crises. The character of Giorgio Aurispa from The Triumph of Death (1894) is one of the main examples of masculinity in crisis. As Marja Härmänmaa has explicated, this novel provides a psychological examination of Giorgio’s existential malaise, as he feels that life has no real meaning and that he is already dead inside, all of which leads him to an obsession with death and painful memories (2014, 278). Moreover, D’Annunzio’s 1895 novel The Virgins of the Rocks (Le Vergini delle Rocce) includes two melancholy young male characters, one of whom is suffering from dementia, while the other one is experiencing depression caused by the fear of getting dementia just like his brother. As Härmänmaa has noted regarding the character of Aurispa, this pessimism and sense of crisis in male characters were, in fact, symptomatic of fin-de-siècle culture (2014, 278). In The Daughter of Iorio, the above-described scene between Candia and Aligi recalls one of the main arguments of the psychology of happiness according to which people have a responsibility to be happy to increase or maintain other people’s happiness (Ahmed 2010a, b, 9). Aligi knows that with his melancholia, he becomes the reason for the family’s unhappiness; yet, he prioritises his own will and feelings over his duties towards the family. His mother panics and urges him to get over this sadness: “Stand up, son. How strangely you talk!” (416) and reminds him that he is making her unhappy: “Aligi, Aligi, why do you want me to cry?” (417). She also claims that the family must be happy, there is no place for melancholia: “Sadness will not enter here” (418). Aligi describes the new life that awaits him at the end of a long dream. This reference to a long dream recalls Love’s queer reading of Walter Pater’s works who, as Love explicates, wrote about a form of social rebellion that is summoning the revolutionism of someone who has slept a hundred years (2007, 25). In D’Annunzio’s play, what Aligi does is a form of social rebellion that rejects the main pillars of normative society. He claims he has been sleeping for seven hundred years and comes from far away, thus signalling his difference and his realisation that thus far he has been living a life which he does not feel comfortable with. In fact, what makes Aligi’s unhappy is his environment which does not let him fulfil his desires. Only Aligi’s sister Ornella sympathises with Aligi’s pain. She is also the one accepting the stranger Mila and letting her in the house despite her mother’s prohibitions. Mila appears in Scene V, Act I persecuted by a group of violent men (the harvesters led by the husband Lazaro) who want to get hold of her body, beat her, and rape her. Mila assumes that the

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values of Christianity will help her and that this religious family will eventually save her from the violent men: They want to take me, creature of Christ, me the unfortunate who did not do any wrong. I was passing by. Alone on the road. Then the shouts and the insults. (423)

Candia, however, contradicts the Christian values she keeps referring to “in order to defend the atavistic laws of the community” (Chomel 1997, 117). The stage direction stresses both Mila’s precarity and Aligi’s difference from the rest of his family. Mila is standing alone at the heath and later she is kneeling with her head on her knees in a crouched position (like Francesca in front of Malatestino in Francesca da Rimini), while all the other women are on the other side of the room, and Aligi is standing aside from the group of women, as if paralysed. Only Ornella helps the stranger, closes the door to protect her, and takes a step towards her—gestures which create an immediate bond between the two women. Ornella feels sympathy for this woman whose body is exposed to such violence and persecution: Breathless you are, creature. You are covered with dust, and trembling. Don’t cry anymore, you are saved. You are thirsty and drinking your tears. Would you like a sip of water or wine? Would you like to refresh your face? (424)

While Ornella prioritises the needs of the body and stands close to Mila, the others are only interested in pinning her down and interrogating her about her origins. Sounds of violence make Mila tremble again, as a group of men is trying to intrude into the house to get hold of her. Aligi seems to be in a trance and is about to open the door, but Ornella prevents him and tries to send them away, while Mila is crouching in the corner. The men shout insults at Mila, comparing her to a contagious disease which brings shame on the family. Associating Mila with illness further deepens her proximity to queer historical experiences, as in twentieth-century medical discourses homosexuality was referred to, among many other

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terms, as a contagious or mental illness strongly linked to shame (Eribon 2004, 80). Despite these accusations coming from the members of their community, Ornella and Aligi move closer to the trembling Mila and they believe her rather than trusting the men of the community. Candia thus accuses Mila of bringing unhappiness to the family and wants to get rid of her: “You have ruined the parental visit / and you have put a sad omen in everyone’s heart” (430). More importantly, this scene portrays Aligi’s hesitation between two worlds, which creates yet another striking affinity between D’Annunzio’s play and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire. Aligi’s mother orders him to open the door and give her to the men, but Aligi does not want to obey and keeps staring at Mila. Because of his refusal to act, one of the women in his family questions his manliness: “What kind of man are you? Has strength escaped your bones …?” (432). Since Aligi disobeys, Candia is ready to open the door herself: “Aligi, I’m talking to you, do you hear me?/Ah, you really have slept/seven hundred years, seven hundred years; /and you don’t recognise us!” (432). Aligi finally raises his voice which shows his annoyance with the entire family: What do you want from me, mother? ………………………………………… Women, what do you want from me? That I grab her by the hair? That I drag her on the floor? That I throw her to the hungry dogs? Alright, yes, I will do so. I will do this. (432–433)

When Aligi approaches Mila, she warns him that he is committing a crime against the people of his kind, indicating that Mila and Aligi belong to the same people, both being oppressed. When he is about to hit her, he suddenly stops and asks for her forgiveness, as he sees a mute crying Angel behind Mila’s back: “Mila di Codra, my sister in Christ, /forgive me for the insult” (435), and he promises to burn the hand that wanted to hurt her. This approach to violence is non-normative and shows similarities with Paolo’s character who also confesses to Francesca that he is ashamed of the violence he committed. Chomel has noted that this vision of the mute crying Angel is what turned Aligi against his family again (1997, 112). This vision acts as a symbol of vulnerable, oppressed people who are denied voice in the family and in society, hence Aligi realises he must help

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these people since he is also one of them. As Chomel has phrased it: “Aligi becomes the representative of a law of charity and mercy in open opposition to the ancestral laws based on the solidarity of the clan, on distrust and on the rejection of the stranger” (1997, 112). Aligi thus invents new laws to offer an alternative to the laws of the family which poses as Christian and benevolent, but only as long as its members obey the rules. Complex father-son relationships constitute a significant trope of D’Annunzio’s drama. In this play, Aligi does not even attempt to maintain the patrilineage by emulating his father—on the contrary, he acts as a shield between violent men and vulnerable women. Aligi speaks up for Mila using religious terminology, with which he calms down the harvesters and places the cross on the threshold forbidding them to enter. When his father Lazaro appears bleeding, Aligi is ready to disobey him: “Father, wait. The cross is on the threshold. /You cannot enter without kneeling. /If the blood is wrongful, you cannot enter” (437). Since it turns out he wounded himself while chasing Mila to rape her, Aligi refuses to let him in, and leaves the family behind with Mila. Chomel reduces Aligi’s feeling of difference and resistance to a lack of responsibility and to a romantic protest: “Defending Mila, Aligi affirms the sacredness of the individual against the collectivism of the clan, but his rebellion is rather a romantic protest which ignores the real duties and responsibilities which the free choice entails” (1997, 118). Nonetheless, marginalising conventional, normative duties and responsibilities for the excitement of the unknown is not simply an irresponsible, romantic protest. Through Aligi’s attempt to free himself from the traditional family, the play at least portrays strategies to deal with the invisible violence of normalcy, even if the play’s protagonist does not manage to achieve full freedom. More importantly, Aligi’s behaviour is marked by refusal, which recalls Marcuse’s idea of the Great Refusal which “has been linked to the queer tradition of the refusal of reproduction and of the future-oriented temporality of the family” (Love 2007, 67). What is more, although Aligi does not achieve permanent freedom in this play, he ousts his violent father and thus shakes the stability of the family which harmed him and Mila. Escaping to the mountains with Mila changes Aligi who becomes more communicative and less anxious in his new world. This pattern yet again recalls Halberstam’s discussion of the queerness of animated films in The Queer Art of Failure. In animated films, the characters often become powerful by abandoning the family: “This notion of the assembled self and its relation to an ever-shifting and improvised multitude ultimately rests upon

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and recirculates an antihumanist understanding of sociality” (2020, 46). The escape attempted by Mila and Aligi also reads as an escape to the “wild world of lost and lonely creatures” (Halberstam 2020, 3). The play presents this wild world as something positive for the freedom of the individual and evokes Halberstam’s definition of wildness as a concept that “can escape its function as a negative condition and can name a form of being that flees from possessive strictures of governance and remains opposed to so-called normal humanity” (2020, 8). Even though the relationship between Mila and Aligi is framed as romantic, Mila’s role reaches beyond prohibited love: it symbolises freedom and a new kind of family which does not want to oppress and control him. Mila notes that he will not be the reason of unhappiness for his family anymore: “and you won’t be reason for anger/and you won’t be reason for crying/to the mother, the bride and the sisters” (441). Aligi talks about his past and how he felt he had to obey his mother, which reads like the story of a trauma. Aligi is ready to go to Rome to beg the Pope to give consent to this prohibited bond, yet Mila warns him that those people who choose their own path will be treated as outcasts: Before you take the new road, consider the law. The one who perverts the way, will be exhausted. Watch the commandment of your father. Follow the teaching of your mother. (447)

The reference to the perils of following a path which diverts from the traditional one is significant and echoes Father Hart’s words from The Land of Heart’s Desire, too. Crucially, Ahmed has noted that, “[h]appiness is often described as a path, as being what you get if you follow the right path” (2010a, b, 9). While holding each other’s hands, Mila notes that they are alone, implying their exclusion from society: “we are alone, brother, we are alone” (448). The escape undertaken by Aligi and Mila is very much a queer project in that just like so many queer lives, they “seek to uncouple change from the supposedly organic and immutable forms of family and inheritance” (Halberstam 2011, 70) and they attempt to forget lineage and traditions in the hope that they could start a new life “unfettered by family, traditions, and usable pasts” (Halberstam 2011, 70). Aligi’s decision to choose his own path is an attempt to create his alternative form of happiness which reaches beyond the normative family, and as

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Ahmed has underscored, “[p]erhaps the experiences of not following, of being stressed, of not being extended by the spaces in which we reside, can teach us more about happiness” (2010a, b, 12). Mila’s love for Aligi is not possessive, as she is ready to let him go if it seems better for Aligi. When Ornella visits her in disguise and tells her about the family’s unhappiness since Aligi left, Mila is willing to give him back not only because of Aligi, but because of her love for Ornella, as Ornella was the one who let Mila in the house. Even in Act III, when all the family is collectively against Mila and Aligi, “Ornella does not participate in the collective excitement” (Chomel 1997, 119). Instead, she exhibits a silent solidarity and kisses Mila’s feet before she dies, thus the play both begins and ends with intimacy and solidarity between Mila and Ornella. Their bond is just as relevant as the Mila-Aligi relationship, and it echoes feminist and lesbian bonds of solidarity and entrustment, which stand in stark contrast with the violent patriarchal world. Scene VI, Act II further elaborates how patriarchal violence works and encourages resistance against it. Lazaro reappears and intrudes into Mila’s home feeling “empowered by the patria potestas” (Chomel 1997, 109). He is not interested in taking back his son, he comes to take Mila with force to rape her. He shows a sadistic enjoyment of the fear he induces in her, as he describes what he is going to do to her before doing it and he keeps laughing. When Aligi comes back to stop his father, Lazaro claims the son is not even entitled to ask anything from the father and threatens him: “For the sake of your life, obey” (460). Aligi denies obedience and prohibits him to touch Mila’s body, standing between them, yet Lazaro’s companions defeat them. Lazaro evokes the law to justify his violence: “Woman, now you have seen that I am the master. /I’m making the law” (463). When he is about to rape her, Ornella and Aligi reappear and Aligi beats his father to death, which seems to him the only way to end patriarchal violence. The trope of ousting the father has not been explored in depth by Italian scholarship, even though it is such a prevalent theme in modern Italian drama, including the plays of Luigi Pirandello. Despite Aligi’s patricide, his character is critiqued by Chomel due to his behaviour in Act III, when the family laments the death of the patriarch and shames Aligi for the consequences of his disobedience, ready to kill him for killing his father. Aligi is criticised because he eventually returns to the family and turns his back on Mila, thus, “Aligi represents only an aspiration towards freedom which remains unrealised” (Chomel 1997, 119). Aligi’s failed attempt to find happiness in a new world recalls Halberstam’s

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analysis of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) in which the protagonist Max feels oppressed by his family, hence he wishes to leave it behind for a new, unknown, wild world. Like Aligi, Max finds himself suspended between the freedom offered by the new world and the family home. Even though he momentarily achieves happiness and spends time with wild creatures in an imaginary, chaotic world where words are not even necessary, when the words return, Max becomes an authority figure and mirrors the oppressive environment he originally wanted to escape, wielding the authority he once rejected (Halberstam 2020, 32), just like Aligi in D’Annunzio’s play. However, even though Aligi is re-assimilated into traditional family and silently witnesses Mila’s sacrifice, he still breaks the family line by killing his father and ruining his marriage. What pulls Aligi back to the family is that he cannot live with the consequences of making his entire family unhappy with his parting. As Ahmed observes, “[a]lthough we can live without the promise of happiness, and can do so ‘happily,’ we live with the consequences of being an unhappiness-cause for others” (2010a, b, 119). In this sense, Aligi’s behaviour—his constant will to escape, his melancholia and his hesitation between protesting against the family and trying to live up to their expectations—makes him a particularly queer character. It is nonetheless problematic that D’Annunzio grants so much visibility to the grief of the family and Lazaro in Act III, which must have contributed to the positive reception of the play at the time. Mila blames herself for everything to save Aligi from the punishment of society and the family: “[…] Power was great in me. /What made him parricide/was my cry in his soul” (481). Mila’s decision to sacrifice herself challenges the male-­ centred sacrificial paradigm, as a woman saves a man here. Mila’s sacrifice also suggests that she, just like Francesca, finds death preferable to the unbearably judgmental and oppressive world of the patriarchal family. Moreover, Ornella’s affectionate and intimate kiss on her feet before Mila’s death gives her the final triumph: “Mila, Mila, Christ’s sister, I kiss your parting feet! The Paradise is yours!” (484) Even though Aligi is taken back by the traditional family and Mila dies, the play undoubtedly reveals that there are certain individuals who do not feel comfortable in normative institutions and draws attention to the violence and hypocrisy of the patriarchal family and society. The order is re-established, but the only one who is not happy about it is Ornella:

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Ornella’s voice refuses this order and confronts it; the thus recoded myth proposes another scale of values which transcends the traditional message. […] The irrefutable message of the tragedy is the denunciation of the blind brutality of the patriarchal system and the exaltation of woman as a site of liberty, diversity, choice, as a subject capable of spiritual ascent. (Chomel 1997, 120–121)

Ornella is therefore the only character who seemingly remains part of the family, but betrays it in the most crucial moments, undermining it from inside. Ornella’s gesture of exalting Mila contrasted with the family’s treatment of her as an abject other is the kind of combination that makes Mila a queer character according to Love’s definition: “Queerness is structured by this central turn; it is both abject and exalted, a ‘mixture of delicious and freak’” (2007, 2–3).

Conclusion The family cell, the maintenance of the family line and patriarchal lineage were central to the stability of the nation as conceived by Irish and Italian nationalists. Crucially, in The Land of Heart’s Desire and in The Daughter of Iorio the gatekeeper of the family and, by extension, the nation, is an authoritative mother figure who, without respect for personal boundaries, forces her own will on family members who are expected to secure the family line. Even though these plays have a patriarch figure too, it is striking that Yeats and D’Annunzio highlighted the mothers’ oppressive power over their family members. The so-called Phallic Mother is an important trope that connects Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama and the way their scripts critique the deeply entrenched patriarchal institutions of their time. O’Brien has emphasised that every epoch in Irish drama and every major playwright has presented a version of Mother Ireland in the figure of a dominant mother (2021, 195). O’Brien discerns that in performance “the Phallic Mother is invested with the patriarchal power of the Law of the Father” (2021, 195). It is important to note, however, that such power could be granted only to mother figures. We can see in the selected plays as well that wilful mother figures are respected, while wilfulness and independent thinking is condemned in every other type of woman. O’Brien explicates that the Phallic Mother “both symbolizes and embodies not only the patriarchal nature of Irish life, but […] also, paradoxically, personifies one of the few ways in which many Irish women can gain some

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modicum of power both onstage and in the broader culture” (2021, 196). The presence of such matriarchs in Italian drama has been largely ignored, but Chomel has flagged the importance of this character in D’Annunzio’s drama and the antagonism between the Mother and the Other as a recurring trope in D’Annunzio’s plays. Matriarchs who “act in the name of the father” (Chomel 1997, 117) appear in Phaedra, The Ship, and La Pisanelle too, which I analyse later in this book through other prisms. In contrast, Calvary and Francesca da Rimini focus on the harm patriarchs inflict on their family members. In Yeats’s play, the patriarch figure is invisible yet omnipresent, as his power is transferred to his effeminate son, who, however, loses the men he loves because of his performance of authoritarian masculinity. In D’Annunzio’s play, there are two patriarchs, as it features two families. Ostasio, the patriarch of Francesca’s family destroys his sister’s life and his decision ruins her bond with the women she loves, while Gianciotto’s actions determine the fate of his effeminate brother Paolo and force the young Malatestino to push the lovers to their death, because he feels this is the only way he could act the man and prove himself valuable for Gianciotto. What these plays demonstrate is how a socially sanctioned form of masculinity crushes not only women but also men who cannot identify with what Martin Kessler has called “hegemonic masculinity.” As O’Brien phrases it, hegemonic masculinity is “an overarching paradigm of manhood that rises to social prominence and thus dominates configurations of gender practice within any given society” (2021, 10). It inevitably becomes as exalted, idealised model of masculinity to which men aspire, yet just like today’s media-driven idealised images of manhood, the socially exalted model of masculinity as conceived by Irish and Italian nationalists was unavailable for most men. Hence O’Brien calls this term normative instead of normal—it is performative, aspirational, and competitive, and since it is a reified ideal, it often pushes men to self-doubt (2021, 11). This self-doubt and performative hegemonic masculinity are exactly what guide the life of Christ in Calvary and Malatestino in Francesca da Rimini. Paolo’s character is striking in this regard, as he does not exhibit any urge to act the man or become like his brother Gianciotto. All four plays analysed in this chapter interrogate the oppressive patriarchal societies of their time, but they also bear implications for the contemporary moment which is still dominated by images of hegemonic masculinity that put an immense pressure on men and control women. It is striking that two male playwrights who undeniably benefited from

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patriarchal structures and often even reiterated them, could represent in such nuanced ways the influence of patriarchy on people who feel suffocated by it. Florence Farr and Eleonora Duse played a crucial role in making these playwrights realise what it meant to be different and oppressed in a world dominated by men. Despite the conspicuous affinities between Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama in terms of representations of gender and sexuality, Yeats had difficulty following D’Annunzio’s plays. In 1902, for instance, he wanted James Joyce to review Arthur Symons’s translation of D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini, and he revealed to the San Francisco Examiner: His ‘Francesca da Rimini’ I can follow easily enough, for that is a flight of fancy. But as drama—Well, in the first act there is an admirable scene with the jester—which has nothing to do with the play. And later there are an astrologer and a peddler—and, as I remember, nothing to do with the play. But at present [...] I do not like to say that I do not like D’Annunzio’s plays. [...] I do see most lovely passages in his work, but it will take me perhaps a long time to understand him as an artist that has influenced the whole of Europe. (Yeats 2002;  CL InteLex, footnote 3 to Yeats’s letter to James Joyce, 9 December 1902)

Even though Yeats did not notice it, the jester scene had a lot to do with the main theme of the play, as a group of confident women spoke up for themselves and refused misogynistic remarks. It equally introduced the oppressive character of Ostasio who acts as a gatekeeper of the traditional family in the play. Yeats’s remark demonstrates that sometimes authors themselves fail to notice the affinities between their works, hence I have chosen to focus on the scripts in this book rather than authorial intentions and remarks. Similar to Yeats’s Land of Heart’s Desire and Calvary, D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini and The Daughter of Iorio highlight that the same formula (marriage, conventional family life, and duties) cannot make everyone happy. There are some individuals who experience an existential malaise as a result of normative societal expectations and thus seek escape from them. The characters in these plays might not have been able to achieve the freedom they had been longing for, but the scripts portray strategies of resisting and critiquing the normative structures the main characters—and so many queer historical subjects—find themselves entrapped in. The scripts display unhappy, anxious, melancholy characters

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who are made to feel ashamed of their difference. Situating unconventional characters who feel ill-at-ease with traditional family roles and social norms in a context of suffering and violence—thus in backward feelings— can “serve as an index to the ruined state of the social world” (Love 2007, 27) and draw more attention to the injustices of historical power distributions. Yeats and D’Annunzio gave voice to the sorrow of the stranger and the outcast, and as Ahmed notes, “[t]he sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar” (2010a, b, 17). Even though the plays’ normative characters who represent the family and the community explain the unhappy characters’ crisis of happiness with their failure to follow social ideals, the scripts reveal that the reason for such crises lies in the failure of those very ideals. In the next chapter, I look at the cult of respectability intertwined with nationalist ideology and the ways in which these concepts doomed certain forms of love to failure.

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Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Härmänmaa, Marja. 2014. The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death. In Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen, 225–243. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harris, Susan Cannon. 2002. Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics, and the International Left, 1892–1964. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hogan, Robert, and Michael J. O’Neill, editors. 2009 [1967]. Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre. A Selection from his Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. 2013. The Pike. Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lapointe, Michael Patrick. 2006. Between Irishmen: Queering Irish Literary and Cultural Nationalisms. PhD dissertation. The University of British Columbia. Love, Heather K. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1956. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge. Mariani, Anna Laura. 1987. Sibilla Aleramo. Significato di tre incontri col teatro: il presonaggio di Nora, Giacinta Pezzana, Eleonora Duse. Teatro e Storia: orientamenti per una rifondazione degli studi teatrali 2 (1): 67–133. McIvor, Charlotte. 2013. ‘Albert Nobbs’, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Quare Irish Female Erotohistories. Irish University Review 43 (1): 86–101. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Utopia. New York: New York University Press. O’Brien, Cormac. 2014. Gay Masculinities in Performance: Towards a Queer Dramaturgy. Irish Theatre International 3 (1): 75–94. ———. 2021. Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Carroll, Íde, and Eoin Collins, eds. 1995. Introduction. In Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, 1–13. London: Cassell. Ovid. 1955. In The Metamorphoses of Ovid, ed. Mary M.  Innes. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

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Park, Mikyung. 2017. The politics of melancholia in twentieth-century Irish drama by women: Augusta Gregory, Teresa Deevy, Christina Reid and Marina Carr. PhD dissertation. National University of Ireland Galway. Poulain, Alexandra. 2016. Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Re, Lucia. 2015. Eleonora Duse and Women: Performing Desire, Power and Knowledge. Italian Studies 70 (3): 347–363. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1991. Epistemology of the Closet. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Shaw, Fiona. 2022. “Fiona Shaw nominates actress Eleonora Duse.” Great Lives, BBC Radio 4 Podcast, interviewed by Matthew Parris. https://podcasts.apple. com/ca/podcast/fiona-­shaw-­nominates-­actress-­eleonora-­duse/id2617797 65?i=1000449541014. Accessed 25 Nov 2022. Walsh, Fintan. 2009. Touching, Feeling, Cross-dressing: On the Affectivity of Queer Performance. Or, What Makes Panti Fabulous. In Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, ed. David Cregan, 55–73. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Wilde, Oscar. 2013. De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, edited by Colm Tóibín. London: Penguin Books. Woodhouse, John. 2006. D’Annunzio’s Theatre. In A History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, 323–338. Cambridge (NY): Cambridge University Press. Worth, Katherine. 1988. Calvary and The Resurrection at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, September 1986. Yeats Annual 6: 278–282. Yeats, William Butler. 1966. In The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach. London: Macmillan. Abbreviated in the text as VPl. ———. 1972. In W. B. Yeats, memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft Journal, ed. Denis Donoghue. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2002. In The Collected Letters of W.  B. Yeats, ed. John Kelly, InteLex Electronic ed. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Moral Prudery, Respectability, and Broken Intimacies

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. —Salman Rushdie, “Public Event, Private Lives: Literature and Politics in the Modern World”

The family cell discussed in the previous chapter constituted one of the main pillars of the cult of respectability in early twentieth-century Europe. The concept of respectability and nationalism became closely intertwined in Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, and it became entrenched during the first decades of the twentieth century: first, the combination of respectability and nationalism became dominant in Protestant powers such as England and Germany, but it soon spread to other parts of Europe, including Italy and Ireland. As Mosse explains, respectability as a term indicated decent manners and morals as well as a proper attitude towards sexuality; thus, the flow of passion in English novels of the nineteenth century was seen as a threat to the existing order and Oscar Wilde was considered as one of the first victims of the cult of respectability in Europe (1985, 8). Nationalism played a crucial role in the formation of respectabilities that we now take for granted in normative society. These concepts relied on the heterosexual family model, obedience, demonisation of desire, and clear separation between gender roles. It © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9_3

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defined ideals of manliness, explained the place of women in society, and created a clear divide between insiders regarded as normal and outsiders considered as abnormal. As Mosse further explicates, “[n]ationalism and respectability assigned everyone his place in life, man and woman, normal and abnormal, native and foreigner; and any confusion between these categories threatened chaos and loss of control” (1985, 16). Respectability was equally characterised by a devotion to duty; respect for authority; idealisation of restraint, moderation, manliness, and the nuclear family model; and despise for passion, pleasure, ambiguity, excess of any kind, confusion of gender roles, and homoeroticism. As a result, the body as such and its needs including pleasure became not only marginalised but condemned within the frameworks of respectable societies. Nationalism as “the most powerful and effective ideology of modern times” (Mosse 1985, 9) and its alliance with bourgeois morality “forged an engine difficult to stop” (1985, 9), as it helped control bodies and sexuality, and redirected men’s passions from sexuality to a higher purpose. From the turn of the century, however, a more intense scientific discourse emerged on homosexuality and especially on lesbianism in Italy through the works of sexologists, which had a significant influence on literary representations too. Medical discourses circulated in Italy already in the 1880s: Arrigo Tamassia wrote an influential article “On Sexual Inversion” in 1878 and Guglielmo Cantarano discussed sexual inversion specifically in women in 1883. Even though these works elevated homosexuality in the mainstream discourse, they pathologised it and compared inversion to anomaly and insanity. The following excerpt from Cantarano’s article bears resemblance to the ways in which D’Annunzio’s female protagonists were described by critics and to the perception of independent New Women at the time: She shows no sign of attachment to her daughter, no interest in domestic life, no joy in wearing women’s clothes or performing the tasks of her sex, no desire to be admired or pursued by young men, much less know the torturous delights of marriage, no sign of the reserve and modesty that becomes a young woman. Instead, she prefers a disordered life, virile labors, repugnance towards men and feelings for her own sex. (Quoted in Danna 2004, 119)

Cantarano also condemned men who differed from the norm: “The man who never feels drawn to the enchanting beauty of women is not a

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man; the woman who feels no desire to be wrapped in two strong, manly arms in not a woman” (quoted in Danna 2004, 119). It was Cesare Lombroso who, in the 1880s, criminalised homosexual activity, defined lesbianism as a degeneration, and condemned all types of excessive sexual behaviour, the so-called excess libido. All the selected plays by D’Annunzio either exhibit this excessive sexual behaviour, display men who show no real interest in women, or feature strong women who shun the institution of marriage and societal expectations. The regressive context of the nineteenth century, however, did not prevent Italian artists from writing novels about lesbian relationships. Interestingly, the first ones were produced by male artists under the influence of decadence—which was the case with Irish representations of lesbianism too in the years of the Irish Revival. In 1889, Alfredo Oriani wrote his novel Beyond followed by Enrico Butti’s The Robot (1892). Similar to D’Annunzio’s plays, these novels critiqued the traditional family, patriarchy, and marriage for condemning passion to life in prison, and they mingled heterosexual romances with lesbian undertones, exalting female sensuality. The year 1908 saw the publication of the first lesbian pornography novel Sappho’s Legacy by a woman who published books under the pseudonym Fede. Following Fede’s novel, Sibilla Aleramo—D’Annunzio’s admirer, lover, and friend who was often referred to as “D’Annunzio in drag” (Bassanese 1995, 149)—published Il passaggio (The Passage) in 1919, which was the first novel featuring a sensual description of lesbian love by an author who had intense relationships with both men and a woman Lina/Cordula Poletti. Aleramo also published a feminist novel Una donna (A Woman) in 1906: an influential novel which denounces the condition of women in early twentieth-century Italy and which initiated the Italian feminist movement. Moreover, 1919 saw the publication of Mura’s (Maria Volpi Nannipieri’s) novel Perfide which portrays the love between two women. As Danna explains, Mura enjoyed significant popularity among women after WWI (2004, 125). Thus, same-sex relationships between women became a very popular and accepted theme in artistic and literary subcultures in Italy and had the potential to reach and inspire other women. Even though Italian Fascism condemned homosexuality, the colonies created contradiction in this area, too. Since the main purpose of the regime was to maintain racial purity, “same-sex sexual relations had the advantage of not furthering ‘miscegenation’ as long as they remained conveniently invisible, covert, and unmarked, as the Catholic Church wanted

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them to be” (Ponzanesi 2014, 85). At the same time, homosexual practice was seen as the exact product of miscegenation—the result of an uncontrolled sexuality which threatened to weaken the nation and its racial purity. As Duncan observes, “[t]heir crime was nonreproductive sex that contradicted the regime’s express wish to increase Italy’s population” (2004, 191). Italian Race Laws thus harboured ambivalence around homosexuality, instead of following Nazi Germany’s strict discriminatory legislation. Rather than addressing homosexuality as deviancy in the national discourse, Italian fascists opted for a policy of silence. Even though reproductive fantasy was the regime’s sustaining myth, the purity of the race was more important, and fears of racial amalgamation “even led to the promotion of homosexuality in ‘the imperial game’” (Duncan 2004, 192). Since fascists denied the existence of homosexuality in Italy, they could not publicly shame and persecute gay people, and could not begin a national discriminatory campaign against them. This, however, does not follow that anti-gay violence and homophobia were absent. In fact, as Ponzanesi observes, social repression was so implicit and subterraneous during Italian Fascism that legal eradication became completely superfluous (2014, 89). As a result, same-sex desires in society and in literature were expressed through masking, coding, and strategic silences. It was only in 1938 that the Race Laws labelled homosexuality as enemy of the race, and it was recategorised as a political crime. As Duncan has accurately discerned, “paradoxically it [Italian Fascism] would first of all have had to make visible what had been hidden by political choice for centuries, and then repress it in order to hide it again” (2004, 190). Still, homosexuality in Italy remained in the realm of the unsaid: “of whispers and euphemisms, of circumlocution and hidden faces: a world that is there but which doesn’t exist because it isn’t allowed to emerge into the light of day” (Duncan 2004, 190). In my critical readings of D’Annunzio’s plays, we shall see how this worked in his scripts which all include hints at same-sex desires, yet there is always a sense of closetedness, unexplained anguish, and unsaid words pervading the texts. The homoeroticism and queerness of the Irish Revival and the Irish Literary Theatre have received significant critical attention. Harris has demonstrated that Irish theatre had a remarkable gay subculture and queer aesthetic already at the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to the influence of London’s queer socialism, the fight for sexual liberation in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde’s legacy (2017, 1–15). Even the Abbey Theatre

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founded in 1904 was not as conventionally nationalist as it is often assumed. Lionel Pilkington has pointed out that even though some nationalist intellectuals such as Thomas Kettle and Arthur Griffith thought that a national theatre should reflect the views of the majority, Yeats and Lady Gregory did not share this opinion: “For them, a national theatre was not a forum for the expression of majority orthodoxies, but rather a means to critique dominant, widely held opinions from a critically sceptical perspective” (Pilkington 2001, 3). The homosocial bonds between Yeats, Martyn, and Moore have been widely discussed in Irish scholarship. Adrian Frazier has discerned that “those males most identified with the deliberate creation of an ‘Irish Renaissance’ were well schooled in the creation of alternative male identities” (1997, 9). More importantly, their works conveyed ambiguity, as their representations of male sexual identity could be put into a nationalist master-narrative, yet they also challenged those narratives. Because of this ambiguity, they were soon accused of effeminacy by the veterans of the Irish movement: “in the current code of deprecation, these poets ‘crooned’ or ‘lisped’; real men, the implication was, shouted and argufied” (Frazier 1997, 9). What we can often see in Revivalist plays, especially those of Yeats and Martyn, include coded subtexts, private conversations underneath the dialogue between men, the supernatural as framework to express homoerotic desires, remote overpowering landscapes, ghosts, obsessions, sexually ambiguous diction, melancholy masculinities, men revealing their vulnerability, and inverted love triangles. The crucial importance of respectability and public morality in early twentieth-century Italy and Ireland can be exemplified by audiences’ and critics’ reactions to J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and its Italian rendition by D’Annunzio’s theatrical collaborators Emma and Irma Gramatica. Synge’s Playboy led to riots in Dublin because it associated Irishness with a more open and fluid model of sexuality regarding both men and women. The play’s erotic energy offended those “who did not like what was being implied about Irish character in its representations of Irishness” (Cregan 2009, 1). As Nicholas Grene has observed: “As the repressed physicality of the sexual was allowed to appear from under the normal decencies of its covering, so sex was proximate to violence […]. Such contamination of confused categories was a deeply disturbing affront to the middle-class nationalist community whose self-image depended on just such moral classification” (2004, 86). But Synge’s Playboy did not only upset Irish audiences: in 1912, the players of the Abbey Company

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were arrested in Philadelphia on the grounds that the play was an immoral production (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 152). As Synge’s play caused public outrage in Dublin and Philadelphia because of its explicit portrayal of sexuality, failed men, and assertive women, the Gramatica sisters’ travesti adaptation of Synge’s play generated outrage in Fascist Italy, too.1 Emma Gramatica played Christy Mahon in the 1919 production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (Il furfantello dell’Ovest) in Carlo Linati’s translation, who acquainted Italian artists with Irish drama through his translations from the 1910s onwards. Another rarely emphasised aspect of Emma Gramatica’s life is that she actively worked towards promoting and disseminating Irish drama in Italy (see Bibbò 2022, 112–116). She had a long and complex involvement with Irish theatre and her promotion of Irish drama was not part of Linati’s systematic dissemination strategy. Instead, it arose from her own genuine interest in the works of Shaw and mostly in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World which she produced first in 1919 in Florence and later in the early 1920s as well in Fascist Italy. For theatre critics such as Silvio D’Amico and Marco Praga, Emma Gramatica-as-Christy Mahon disturbed the perception of Christy’s masculinity. Both D’Amico and Praga were horrified by “her constant monotonous whining” and the ways in which she eventually emasculated the male protagonist. D’Amico’s reaction to Emma-as-Christy in 1920 reflects the transgressive potential of her performance. For D’Amico, Emma Gramatica appeared “a naughty boy of uncertain sex, a horrible, awkward goof, whose looks made both the starting premise of the play, and its development, impossible; and those fresh and colorful words of love were inadmissible in her mouth” (1963, 20, Bibbò’s translation). Marco Praga shared D’Amico’s opinion after the 1923 production, harshly criticising the way Emma emasculated Christy through her irritating monotonous whining. For Praga, Christy should be [h]umble and fearful when he introduces himself, cowardly when he is afraid  of the guards, to be sure; but after then, when he feels safe, 1  When Emma Gramatica was about to stage a play by the anti-fascist playwright Roberto Bracco in the 1920s, fascist militants prepared to organise riots; hence, Emma Gramatica wrote directly to Mussolini to ask him to stop the violence, which he surprisingly did, ordering militants and the press to refrain from any criticism (Bonsaver 2007, 61 and 286). However, despite the ban, some fascist militants still protested against the performance.

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­ rotected, admired and courted, he should be a boaster, arrogant and cheerp ful; he  should never lack a certain rough cunning, and in the end he should be furious. (1979, 137, Bibbò’s translation)

Despite the hostile reactions and lack of appreciation for her acting, Emma Gramatica played Christy Mahon again in 1923. She featured in D’Annunzio’s plays as well on several occasions. In 1914, she embodied an iconic Dannunzian dissident woman, Fedra, who is revengeful towards the normative forces that condemn her and her desire. In 1924, Emma Gramatica also played Francesca da Rimini, while in 1928, she was cast as Bianca Maria in D’Annunzio’s The Dead City and played Shaw’s Saint Joan several times. Her sister Irma Gramatica embodied the outcast yet strong and independent Mila di Codra in D’Annunzio’s The Daughter of Iorio in 1904, where her role was to make the melancholy male protagonist Aligi realise that he could not find his place in the traditional family. Even though critics did not like Irma Gramatica’s rendition of Mila, D’Annunzio offered her the role in 1915 as well. As Laura Mariani has explained in a Rai Radio 3 podcast about the Gramatica sisters, Irma was much more masculine-looking than Emma, but Emma was the one who played male characters, too. Both of them were eager to work with D’Annunzio as well as with non-canonical writers, and they continued their work in the theatre despite the constant criticism they received and the failures they experienced (2018, 00:00:00-00:29:20). In this chapter, I discuss the oppressive impact of moral prudery and respectability on subjectivities who are excluded from the frameworks of recognition through dramaturgical readings of Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones (1919) and The Cat and the Moon (1926), and D’Annunzio’s The Dead City (1896) and Phaedra (1909). Respectability allied with nationalist ideology made certain forms of love impossible and doomed to failure; hence, this chapter examines the connection between impossible love, broken intimacies, and queerness. In the selected four plays, shame and the fear of societal judgement either paralyse or distort the main characters, prohibiting certain relationships which are deemed as unworthy of recognition. At the same time, through various dramaturgical techniques and coded messages, the plays eventually assert the power of the non-­ normative and raise sympathy for those loves and desires which normativity labels as impossible.

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Choosing Desire over the Nation: Shame and Impossible Love in The Dreaming of the Bones (1919) The Dreaming of the Bones centres on the story of Diarmuid/Dermot and Dervorgilla and features precarious, liminal bodies whose visibility depends on the decisions and choices of another character—bodies that try to, but cannot, act as agents of their own fate.2 In Irish theatre and society, the body has frequently been a political arena where questions of the nation and sexuality have been contested and interrogated. As Claudia Kinahan notes, the Irish body has often occupied a liminal and vulnerable position, and it has always been a site of conflict in the national imagination, which became more visible at events such as the recent fight for abortion rights or the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 (Kinahan 2017). Yeats’s plays frequently deal with the complex relationship between the nationalist master-narrative and sexual desire, even though for the bourgeois nationalist audiences of Yeats’s time, this was an insulting and dangerous combination. Yeats was aware that The Dreaming of the Bones might cause some turmoil; hence, its premiere was delayed until December 1931. On 6 June 1918, he wrote to Ezra Pound that he saw it as a “doubtful” (Yeats 2002, CL InteLex 3447) play. He continued that “recent events in Ireland have made it actual & I could say in a note that but for these events I should not have published it until after the war. I think it is the best play I have written for some years” (Yeats 2002, CL InteLex 3447). It is also underemphasised in scholarship that Yeats engaged critically with contemporary debates about both normative and non-normative forms of eros. He often expressed his sympathy for men who were attracted to their own sex; who exhibited sexual tension or identity crisis; and who could not fulfil their desires because of some absurd obstacle created by normative society, the Church, or the state. These men included Edward Martyn, Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, Lawrence of Arabia, and Roger Casement, among many others. In a letter to Lady Dorothy Wellesley on 2 December 1936, Yeats 2  Yeats’s character Diarmuid (also spelt Dermot or Diarmaid) is based on the figure of Dermot Macmurrough, the Irish King of Leinster, who was deposed by the High King of Ireland for abducting Derbforgaill/Dervorgilla, the wife of the King of Breifne. In order to recover his kingdom, Dermot asked helped from King Henry II of England, which led to the Anglo-Norman invasion and conquest of Ireland by England.

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criticises those political and social institutions which shame people because of their difference. Here Yeats clearly states that saving a nation cannot serve as an excuse for such public shaming: But suppose the evidence had been true, suppose Casement had been a homo-sexual & left a diary recording it all, what would you think of a Government who used that diary to prevent a movement for the reprieve of a prisoner condemned to death? Charles Ricketts & Lawrence of Arabia were reputed homo-sexual suppose they had been condemned on a capital charge some where [sic], what would you think of a proffession [sic] who insured their execution by telling the middle classes that they were homosexual. […] I can only repeat words spoken to me by the old head of the Fenians [John O’Leary] years ago. “There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.” (Yeats 2002, CL InteLex 6737)

The Dreaming of the Bones displays the clash between the nationalist master-narrative and sexual desire in the context of Ireland’s colonial past. In the play, the ghosts of Diarmuid/the Stranger and Dervorgilla/the Young Girl ask forgiveness for the sin they committed against the Irish nation when they fell in love with each other and as a result, “brought the Norman in” (VPl 773) and “sold their country into slavery” (VPl 773). But more broadly speaking, the play revolves around the precariousness and liminality of two Irish people who cannot fulfil their love for one another and who ask for visibility, recognition and forgiveness from another Irishman, the Young Man: “If some one [sic] of their race forgave at last / Lip would be pressed on lip” (VPl 773). The Young Man is fleeing from the police after the Easter Rising, and here he seems to represent the nationalist master-narrative, duty, and sacrificial politics. He acts as a gatekeeper embodying a conservative code of value both in terms of theatre and politics; thus, he wants to exclude sexual desire from issues related to the national cause. The Young Man’s character also demonstrates how nationalism aimed to redirect men’s passions from sexuality to a higher purpose—in this case, the Irish nationalist cause. Therefore, the play interrogates whether the Young Man is justified to shame and exclude two Irish people from the frameworks of recognition as a way of taking revenge for the country’s colonial past. Although the audience members at the play’s premiere in December 1931 included the Governor General and members of the Free State Executive Council, the show was received with enthusiasm. An interesting

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aspect of the play’s production history is evidenced by a review published in The Irish Times, which critiqued the Young Man’s dismissive behaviour towards the ghosts as un-Christian. However, it notes that the character’s un-Christian conduct “did not seem to worry an audience which received the little play enthusiastically, and acclaimed the author at its end” (7 December 1931, 5). The review further acknowledges the ways in which Diarmuid pleads the cause of the unforgiven lovers, as they can be happy if only one person in Ireland utters a forgiving word: “‘Never shall Dermot [sic] and Dervorgilla be forgiven’ is the un-Christian decision of the Young Man, who may be in need of forgiveness himself” (1931). Although the review expresses sympathy with the ghosts, it attributes the act of pleading only to Diarmuid/Dermot, while, as we shall see, the character who almost convinced the Young Man was in fact the ghost of Dervorgilla. Although the ghost couple is not a same-sex one in this play, the contrast between the Young Man and the ghosts resonates with Halberstam’s discussion of queer bodies and capitalist logic. The characters of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla can be considered as “queer bodies,” as their past and present are rooted in a logic of failure, loss, and lack of fulfilment, which Halberstam sees as directly opposed to the capitalist, (hetero)normative logic of achievement, fulfilment, and reproduction (2011, 94). It is capitalism and capitalist nationalism that label the queer world and anyone who is different from normalcy as somehow failed: “as a subject who fails to embody the connection between production and reproduction” (Halberstam 2011, 95). Just as capitalism casts homosexuals as “inauthentic,” “unreal,” “incapable of proper love,” and “unable to make the appropriate connections between sociality, relationality, family, sex, desire, and consumption” (Halberstam 2011, 95), the Young Man sees this couple as strange and suspicious, whose love is not worthy of recognition, whose story merely demonstrates how they failed and betrayed their nation. Even the space indicates the outcast status of the couple, as the play is set in a desolate place haunted by cries of birds who “cry their loneliness” (VPl 763) in a valley surrounded by mountains near the Abbey of Corcomroe overlooking Galway Bay, the hills of Connemara, and the Aran Islands. This short play also outlines the ghosts’ changing demeanour from demonstrating pride and control to a gradual loss of hope, increase of shame, and fall into despair. When the dialogue between the ghosts and the Young Man begins, the latter one is visibly disturbed, as he does not feel safe and confident in this desolate place, and he cannot see the Stranger who is speaking to him: “Who is there? I cannot see what you are like.

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Come to the light” (VPl 764). In this part of the play, the Stranger is in command and offers the Young Man protection from the police, willing to show him the best hiding places of the hills. This gesture can be seen as an attempt by the doomed couple to try to make up for the sin they feel they had committed against Ireland. Whenever the Young Man begins to criticise those who were born in Ireland and of Irish stock, yet harmed Ireland, the Stranger does not let him finish the sentence as he identifies with those people. Instead, he reassures the Young Man: “I will put you safe, / No living man shall set his eyes upon you; / I will not speak for the dead” (VPl 765). Later, when the Young Man curses the English for the harm they have done to Ireland and condemns everyone who has made Ireland weak, the Stranger diverts the subject once again and mentions examples from the past that he can identify with to elicit some response from the Young Man and anonymously explain their situation. Yet the Young Man’s unceasing bitterness gradually destroys the couple’s hopes as they are approaching the summit of the mountain. As a strategy to make the Young Man more sympathetic towards the dead who perform constant penance for some past wrongdoing, the Stranger emphasises the suffering they have gone through to indicate their constant state of shame: And some for an old scruple must hang spitted Upon the swaying tops of lofty trees; Some are consumed in fire, some withered up By hail and sleet out of the wintry North, And some but live through their old lives again. (VPl 766)

After the Stranger describes their predicament, the First Musician starts singing and his words describe the bodily effects of shame: Why should the heart take fright? What sets it beating so? The bitter sweetness of the night. Has made it but a lonely thing. (VPl 767)

It is the Young Girl (the ghost of Dervorgilla) who manages to raise the Young Man’s attention and almost succeeds in raising sympathy in him. She directs the conversation to their own story without revealing themselves:

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Until this hour no ghost or living man Has spoken, though seven centuries have run. Since they, weary of life and of men’s eyes, Flung down their bones in some forgotten place, Being accursed. (VPl 770)

This passage highlights that because of their forbidden desire, society judged them; hence, they decided to evanesce to some forgotten place. She continues by emphasising that these souls have no joy at all. The couple thus flags the lack of pleasure and joy in their relationship and penance as a focal point of their argument, as if they knew that the society and nation they wish to get reinstated into condemn pleasure, which we shall see in the Young Man’s behaviour later in the play. The couple must perform a “strange penance” (VPl 771), as “[t]hough eyes can meet, their lips can never meet” (VPl 771), and as the Young Girl laments “nor any pang /That is so bitter as that double glance, /Being accursed” (VPl 771). The reason why this double glance is so bitter is that any time their eyes meet, it reminds them of the impossibility of their love, and the moment they establish intimacy through their glance, it is immediately broken by the very knowledge of its impossibility. Whenever they are about to touch, their shame prevents them from re-establishing intimacy: “The memory of this crime flows up between / And drives them apart” (VPl 772). The Young Man also denies the authenticity of their desire by claiming that “when lips meet /And have not living nerves, it is no meeting” (VPl 771). With this claim he also tries to justify why his forgiveness would be unnecessary and wrong; hence, he refuses to recognise their desires and feelings as valid and worthy of inclusion in the master-narrative. Yet the Young Girl’s storytelling seems successful for a while, as the Young Man becomes more interested and instead of cursing the English and the traitors of Ireland, he asks questions about the accursed couple: “What crime can stay so in the memory?/What crime can keep apart the lips of lovers/Wandering alone?” (VPl 772). However, when the Young Girl reveals that she has been talking about Diarmuid and Dervorgilla “who sold their country into slavery” and claims that they were not accursed “if somebody of their race at last would say, / ‘I have forgiven them’” (VPl 773), the power of storytelling fails. The Young Man realises that he has been manipulated by these stories: “You have told your story well, so well indeed / I could not help but fall into the mood” (VPl 773), but in the end he exclaims, “O, never, never / Shall Diarmuid and

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Dervorgilla be forgiven” (VPl 773). The Young Man looks at the Connemara Hills and Galway and claims that but for that pair, this land would be most beautiful. His cursing is once again interrupted, but from this moment on, the couple hardly speaks a word: they change strategy and replace storytelling with dance. It is important that Yeats wrote a play which offers this anti-mimetic possibility only to the Stranger and the Young Girl through a combination of dance, movement, gesture, and masks—all of which contribute to the act of storytelling and make their story more powerful and convincing. In contrast, the Young Man does not wear a mask, does not move around much in the space, does not dance, and stands almost motionless throughout the entire play, employing only words to justify his story. The only time he moves around more is when Diarmuid and Dervorgilla offer to help him and guide him—a gesture which, however, remains unrequited, as he is not willing to perform a similar act of inclusion for the ghosts. This dissonance between the Young Man’s and the ghosts’ stage presence helps to visualise the contrast between two playing styles: the naturalistic theatre tradition represented by the Young Man and the new, more powerful anti-naturalistic way of theatre-making embodied by the two ghosts. In this way, the play interrogates the naturalistic style of drama which relies on the text and facial expressions, and which works with fixed notions of identity and classifications. In contrast, anti-naturalistic theatre tells the story through a combination of dance, singing, music, gesture, and movement; focuses on the body; and operates with more fluid notions of identity. The Young Man gets anxious when he loses control again and cannot understand why the lovers dance, as he finds such explicit, corporeal expressions of desire unnatural: […] Why do you dance? Why do you gaze, and with so passionate eyes, One on the other; and then turn away, Covering your eyes, and weave it in a dance? Who are you? what are you? you are not natural. (VPl 774)

The Young Man describes this dance scene as strange and sweet, but he decides to refuse both strangeness (the other) and sweetness (desire). For him, these ghosts’ precarious bodies are sinful and shameful, hence not worthy of either sympathy or grief. Yet in the final monologue, the Young Man’s language becomes more poetic and moves closer to the ghosts’

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playing style, as if the script was making up for what had been denied from the Young Man’s character before. The last thing the Young Girl says in the play is a revelation of their identity, which, however, makes the Young Man exclaim for the third and final time that this couple shall never be forgiven. This final refusal elicits a visible bodily effect in the couple who, after hiding then gradually revealing themselves, return to hiding: The dance is changing now. They have dropped their eyes, They have covered up their eyes as though their hearts Had suddenly been broken—never, never Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven. (VPl 775)

When the dance ends, the couple is “swept away” (VPl 775), as if they had never existed. The play thus highlights how Diarmuid and Dervorgilla tried to create visibility for themselves, and thanks to the power of dance, gestures, and storytelling, they almost succeeded in convincing the Stranger, who, however, refused to be influenced emotionally. This scene resonates with Ahmed’s discussion of shame before the other. Ahmed explains that shame is an intense and painful sensation that is felt by and on the body, and it is both an exposure and an act of hiding experienced before another: “The subject may seek to hide from that other; she or he may turn away from the other’s gaze, or drop the head in a sensation more acute than embarrassment” (2004, 103). Ahmed also contends that in shame, one feels the need to expel the intense feeling of badness, “expelling ourselves from ourselves” (2004, 104), which I believe the dance can be seen as an attempt to achieve by the spectral couple. The connection between shame and love is crucial to this play, especially in terms of love of the nation. As Ahmed phrases it, “I may be shamed by somebody I am interested in, somebody whose view ‘matters’ to me. As a result, shame is not a purely negative relation to the other: shame is ambivalent” (2004, 105). In this play, the Young Man as a representative of the Irish nation and the Irish nationalist cause matters to the ghosts who are seeking the forgiveness of their country. Although the Young Man and by extension their country made it clear that by prioritising desire over the nation, they brought shame on Ireland as illegitimate others, they still wish to belong to that nation. They thus display a love of their nation through their exposure before the other (the Young Man). The couple feels that their love for their nation failed when they chose

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each other, yet this shame confirms their love for their country: “What is exposed in shame is the failure of love, as a failure that in turn exposes or shows our love” (2004, 106). This play is also very much about nationalist shaming performed by the Young Man and directed at the ghosts, the enemies of the nation. As O’Brien has argued, for nationalist shaming to be effective, it must be witnessed: the act of rendering invisible and the expulsion of the stigmatised enemy situates such characters “as witness to and thus coerced into their own shaming” (2021, 221). Since for the vast bulk of the play, the Young Man is not aware that the objects of his hatred are standing in front of him, this act of making the ghosts witness their own shaming becomes a prolonged and much more painful process. The choreography of the 2019 production of The Dreaming of the Bones in Galway by DancePlayers Theatre Company deserves special attention in terms of representations of the couple’s shame.3 Jérémie Cyr-­ Cooke applied physical theatre elements in his choreography, which helped highlight the spectral couple’s precarious predicament. The choreography was visceral and fluctuating throughout the show: it included a mixture of confident, erotic, and fragile movements and at times outbursts of ecstasy, hinting at the lovers’ wish to become liberated from their punishment and from societal constraints and judgements. The movements of the performers conveyed the strenuousness of their predicament and the strange penance they had to perform in front of the Young Man in hope for liberation. The two performers playing the ghosts moved mostly on the ground and even when they were standing, they seemed bent and broken, except for their first appearance at the beginning of the show. The Young Man never crouched, never crawled during the production, and his body language did not convey as much physical discomfort as the ghosts’ apart from his fear of being lost and his confusion regarding the identity of the ghosts. In other words, he never let himself be fully blown away by the power of desire and refused the needs of the body to stay true to his nationalist ideals. The Young Man’s expressions of refusal also put the ghosts in a psychologically vulnerable position right before the decisive dance scene which determined their fate: they had to dance knowing that they danced only to receive the final and most powerful refusal.

3  I have written a detailed review of this production for International Yeats Studies (5.1, 2021) titled “‘Precarious Bodies and Physical Theater: A Review of DancePlayers’ The Dreaming of the Bones by W. B. Yeats.”

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The second half of the play is marked by the Young Man’s exclamations “O, never, never / Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven” (VPl 773) three times: two times before they reach the summit and once again at the very end during the dance when he already knows he is talking to Diarmuid and Dervorgilla. Three is a magic number in Yeats’s works and The Dreaming of the Bones illustrates this beautifully: there are three singers, three main characters, three circles around the stage in DancePlayers’ production, and Dervorgilla says “being accursed” three times (VPl 770). The Young Man’s three exclamations of “O, never, never/Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven” (VPl 773) seem to work as answers to and verbal reinforcements of Dervorgilla’s three exclamations of “being accursed” (VPl 770) which come right before the Young Man’s rejections. In all three cases, the power and invisible violence of his words visibly crushed the lovers and their bodies collapsed during the show—their movements became fragmented and they groaned as if they had just been murdered. The lovers’ body language illustrated that they perceived the Young Man’s words as an oppressive performative speech act directed at them, which affected the way they behaved, identifying more and more with the subjugated, inferior position that the Young Man’s words assigned to people like them. The Young Man’s response to the ghosts’ request thus mirrors the regressive sexual politics of the time, its moral prudery, and bourgeois respectability, which operated with a clear separation between the national and the sexual, thus policing bodies and sexual behaviours. Yet the fact that the Young Man is also visibly touched by the story of the two lovers and almost yields to the temptation to forgive them might suggest that, as Harris articulates it, nationalism could only work if it gave up the rigid boundaries it created to separate the national from the sexual, the political from the domestic (2002, 25). By allowing both the Young Man and the lovers to tell their stories, The Dreaming of the Bones offers interweaving narratives, poses difficult questions about what and who can be included in the concept of Irishness, and most importantly, refuses to impose a single, totalising narrative on the audience. Crucially, the show visualised the ghosts’ despair through their body position and after all the rejection and insult they had received, they left the stage almost unnoticed. This is similar to Love’s description of Walter Pater’s “disappearing subjects”: “so complete the world’s refusal of [them] that [their] only response is to evanesce, to become transparent” (2007, 60). Love also calls such disappearing subjects “crystal characters” or “diaphanous types,” as Pater in his

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lecture to the Old Morality Society at Oxford titled “Diaphaneité” (1864) describes a particular type of character who “crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life. The world has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between contrasted types of character” (1998, 154). Such disappearing subjects are characterised by their imperceptibility and permanent exile, as they are sent to the grave by all of humanity. Love highlights that through these characters Pater draws attention to the value and heroic importance of the victimised and registers a particular experience of exclusion (2007, 61), which resonates very closely with the ways in which Yeats portrays his own disappearing subjects, Diarmuid and Dervorgilla. Building on the physical theatre elements of Yeats’s plays can indeed highlight how much his drama is able to speak to the present by addressing the still very complex relationship between nationalism, sexual desire, alterity, and the body.

Non-normative Temporality and Broken Intimacies in The Cat and the Moon (1926) Like The Dreaming of the Bones, The Cat and the Moon (published seven years later in 1926 and first staged in 1931) features a broken relationship of intimacy. However, this time the relationship of a disabled same-sex couple (the Lame Beggar and the Blind Beggar) who have been together for forty years is disrupted by a lonely, invisible spectral character—the so-­ called Holy Man or Saint. This spectral character does not even appear in the Dramatis Personae, yet he functions as a disruptive normative force central to the plot. The play does not specify the nature of the beggars’ relationship, but the subtextual references to the romance between a Holy Man and an old lecher as well as to the intimate bond between Edward Martyn and George Moore position their bond towards a same-sex relationship. Adrian Frazier has explored the complexities of male-male desire and literary emulation between Yeats, Moore, and Martyn. Frazier contends that “[t]here [was] a strong current of male-male desire in these relationships, expressing itself in praise not only for the beauty of the boon companion, but for his sense of the beautiful in art and in life. Desire expresses itself through emulation of the style of maleness of the male beloved” (1997, 21). Even if we understand the beggars’ relationship as close friendship based on mutual bickering and teasing, the bond is of interest to queer historiography. As Love has discerned, “impossible or

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interrupted intimacy may offer a model for queer history both before and after the invention of modern homosexuality” (2007, 75). Through this strange friendship, the play can gesture towards “an alternative trajectory of queer friendship marked by impossibility, disconnection, and loss” (Love 2007, 75). Although the characters of the Lame Beggar and the Blind Beggar cannot strictly be labelled as a same-sex couple in a romantic sense, friendship has always offered a safe and utopian space that transcends the limitations of the normative family, respectability, and marriage, hence queer studies’ interest in the history of friendship. It is important to note, however, that while up until the end of the nineteenth century, friendship was a safe site to explore same-sex relationships without being stigmatised and labelled as abnormal, in the twentieth century, same-sex bonds became subject of scrutiny, and they were quickly associated with homosexuality and thus abnormality by normative society. As Mosse explains, after the Great War, homosexuality was regarded by some as the logical culmination of friendship, especially after Oscar Wilde’s trial and the relationship between Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1985, 87). It could also be argued that intimate same-sex friendships in literary works often functioned as a euphemism for homosexuality in early twentieth-­century Europe. Love explicates that queer thought has displayed a tendency to present friendship as trouble-free, since friendship has historically been a salve for queer forms of intimacy trouble (2007, 81). However, both Foucault in “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1997) and Love emphasise that in fact trouble is central to queer friendship and queer forms of intimacy. For Foucault, for instance, the image of an intimate friendship can generate more unease than a neat and explicit image of homosexuality. Love employs this argument to demonstrate that in Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House and its short story version “Tom Outland’s Story,” the story does not really begin until the ideal male-male intimacy has been shattered (2007, 85). Although it would not be accurate to claim the same about the plot of The Cat and the Moon, it is true that the Saint’s disruption of the harmonious, mutually dependent relationship of the two beggars acts a catalyst in the play, which brings to the surface a series of surprising revelations and plot twists in this short play. In terms of temporality, the beggar couple in this play represents a non-­ normative time zone which stands in stark contrast with the fast-paced action required by the authority figure who wishes to dominate the bodies of characters representing a slower, unruly, queer temporality. As Elizabeth

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Freeman has observed, sexual deviants are often “seen as creatures whose very minds had gone temporally awry” (2012, 238) and who become “analogies for temporal catastrophe” (2012, 236, her emphasis). In The Cat and the Moon, the two beggars, especially the Lame Beggar, embody this non-normative time zone. The Blind Beggar is teasing the Lame Beggar because he is flighty and forgets things: “Nothing stays in my head, Blind Man” (VPl 797). Crucially, Halberstam has stressed that forgetting advocates for “certain forms of erasure over memory precisely because memorialization has a tendency to tidy up disorderly histories (of slavery, the Holocaust, wars, etc.)” (2011, 15). Halberstam also highlights that memory itself is a ritual of power, as it selects what is important, so forgetting becomes “a way of resisting the heroic and grand logics of recall and unleashes new forms of memory” (2011, 15). What further situates the couple in a slower, disorderly time zone is the Lame Beggar’s talkativeness. Since he talks too much, it delays the two men reaching the Well of Saint Colman; hence, the Blind Beggar urges him: “Get up. It’s too much talk you have” (VPl 794). The two men move together on the stage: their bodies are constantly touching, as the Blind Beggar is carrying the Lame Beggar on his back. The Lame Beggar’s forgetfulness and tardiness slow down the Blind Beggar and puts him in a fragmented slow time, as they have been together for forty years. This seemingly asymmetrical attachment, however, appears symmetrical within its very asymmetry, as the characters always tease each other mutually, and this reciprocity of insult and manipulation is a sign of mutual attraction towards the other’s body. Their shared temporal dissonance is interrupted by the Saint who speaks through the body of the First Musician and who stays invisible for most of the play. The Saint disrupts their slow and playful pace with his pressing question: “Will you be cured or will you be blessed?” (VPl 798). The Blind Man chooses to be cured, thus accepting the homogenising attempt of the Saint which wants to cure disabled bodies to merge them into the realm of the able-bodied, as Poulain has insightfully explored: Yeats’s drama “posits that normality is always desirable and yearns to cure disabled bodies rather than accommodate them, physically and symbolically, within the space of social exchanges” (2018, 236). When the Lame Beggar chooses to become blessed and as a reward gets cured as well, the Saint enjoins him with more questions, forcing him to express happiness with his new companion: “Are you happy?” (VPl 803), “Haven’t you got me for a friend?” (VPl 803), “Aren’t you blessed?” (VPl 804), “Aren’t you a miracle?” (VPl 804). These questions urge the Lame Beggar to make up

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his mind and begin dancing quickly; thus the flighty, slow, and disabled Lame Beggar is not only cured, but he is also manipulated into the fast-­ paced temporarily of the modern capitalist agenda which tolerates only production-oriented able bodies. The play equally features unexpected yet delectable changes of agency. In the Blind Beggar-Lame Beggar relationship, the Blind Beggar appears as the domineering party even though he occupies an inferior position carrying his partner on his back. Yet the Lame Beggar talks back and steals from his companion, thus refusing submission. When the Blind Beggar accuses him of leading him into the wrong direction, the Lame Beggar retorts: “I have brought you the right way, but you are a lazy man, Blind Man, and you make very short strides” (VPl 793). The Blind Beggar’s resistance to his partner’s mastery is also what revivifies their playful dialogue: “It’s great daring you have, and how could I make a long stride and you on my back from the peep o’ day?” (VPl 793). When the Lame Beggar starts talking back, their body position changes as the two men stand next to each other suggesting a more even distribution of mastery. When he gets up his companion’s back again, he continues teasing the Blind Beggar who punishes him by pinching his leg: “But as I was saying, he being a lazy man—O, O, O, stop pinching the calf of my leg” (VPl 794). The possibility of physical violence that can strike the Lame Beggar anytime appears, paradoxically, an exciting possibility: “If I speak out all that’s in my mind you won’t take a blow at me at all?” (VPl 795). Anytime the Lame Beggar contradicts him, he threatens him with his stick: “Is it contradicting me you are? Are you in reach of my arm? [swinging stick]” (VPl 98). The Lame Beggar’s answers suggest an enjoyment of the anger raised in his partner, which he pushes further: “I’m not, Blind Man, you couldn’t touch me at all; but as I was saying—” (VPl 798). Thus, the two beggars play with the possibility of violence here as a source of excitement, which, paradoxically, made their relationship stable for forty years. The Saint’s abrupt interruption, however, ends their relationship, as he longs for a companion to experience the pleasure of domination. His voice makes both beggars kneel, as they feel they need to show submission to this disembodied voice of power. He offers a partnership proposal first to the Blind Beggar whereby he reveals his vulnerable side, pretending powerlessness: “I am saint and lonely. Will you become blessed and stay blind and we will be together always?” (VPl 798). When the Blind Beggar refuses him, the Saint turns directly to the Lame Beggar who accepts the companionship. The Lame Beggar aspires to become blessed so that his

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name would feature in a book, which is also a wish for authority. As Poulain has discerned, this proposal “mimes the diction of wedding vows” (2018, 237) which is later consummated by the symbolic physical union of the Lame Beggar and the Saint. In order to gain full mastery over the Lame Beggar, the Saint pushes the beggars’ relationship towards physical violence, which he enjoys as he starts laughing: “there he is in front of you and he laughing [sic] out of his wrinkled face” (VPl 800). When he is cured, the Blind Beggar catches sight of the skin of his black sheep on the Lame Beggar’s back, which proves that while he thought he had mastery over him, the Lame Beggar was deceiving him. The Lame Beggar’s attitude also changes towards his former companion, as being blessed gives him a sense of power. Therefore, when the Blind Beggar accuses him of being flighty, he proudly replies: “I am that flighty. [Cheering up.] But am I not blessed and it’s a sin to speak against the blessed?” (VPl 801). When the Blind Beggar threatens him “I shall know where to hit,” (VPl 801), the Lame Beggar becomes more authoritarian and at the same time protective: “Don’t lay a hand on me. Forty years we’ve been knocking about the roads together, and I wouldn’t have you bring your soul to mortal peril” (VPl 802). But the Blind Beggar starts beating him, which turns into a fragmented, clumsy dance which will be countered by the fast-paced dance of the Lame Beggar-Saint formation at the end of the play. While the two beggars accepted each other’s respective bodily marginality for forty years, this normative force only tolerates the Lame Beggar as submissive and able-bodied. The Saint soon becomes domineering: he enjoins the Lame Beggar to bend down his back so that he could get up, then to bless the road they follow and to dance, thus obtaining full mastery. This relationship is no more about playful teasing, but the Saint’s pleasure of domination over the Lame Beggar’s body. The two beggars’ homoerotic bond is mirrored in the subtextual Holy Man-old lecher relationship which refers to Edward Martyn’s and George Moore’s homosocial friendship, as Yeats explains in his notes to the play, too (VPl 808). Also, the way the Blind Beggar describes the sinful relationship between the Holy Man and the old lecher, and by extension that of Martyn and Moore,  reflects the growing suspicions about same-sex friendships in the early twentieth century: “What does he do but go knocking about the roads with an old lecher from the County of Mayo, and he a woman-hater from the day of his birth! And what do they talk about by candle-light and by daylight?” (VPl 797). The Bling Beggar

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continues that the old lecher is “telling over all the sins he committed, or maybe never committed at all, and the man of Laban does be trying to head him off and quiet him down that he may quit telling them” (VPl 797). Yet the Holy Man derives a secret excitement from the old lecher’s stories of sexual exploits: “He wouldn’t have him different, no, not if he was to get all Ireland” (VPl 797) and exclaims that “the bigger the sinner the better pleased is the saint” (VPl 798). In the earlier 1924 version, Yeats included an explicit reference to the romantic nature of this relationship: “Did you ever know a holy man but had a wicked man for his comrade and his heart’s darling?” (VPl 797). The equally subtextual relationship between the cat Minnaloushe and the moon—which opens and closes the play as a song—also implies an intimate bond, as the cat is “the nearest kin of the moon” (VPl 793) and thus they are “two close kindred” (VPl 794). The Cat and the Moon demonstrates the ways in which a normative force disrupts a seemingly dysfunctional, yet quite egalitarian same-sex relationship. Over the forty years of their relationship, the two beggars mutually depended on each other and despite their constant bickering, they accepted their respective disability. But once the invisible Saint interrupts their bond, they become much more aware and critical of their own bodies. This disruptive force creates an urge in the two beggar characters to assimilate into the world of normalcy either by gaining some power (becoming blessed) or getting cured of their disability.

Incestuous Desire, Lesbian Intimacies, and Friendship in The Dead City (1896) The Dead City is D’Annunzio’s first play which can be regarded as an attempt to create a new kind of Italian theatre. He tried to distance himself from the realist bourgeois drama of his time by introducing total theatre elements into the storytelling and by recreating a classical theatre set in modern times. The Dead City does not yet include dance, music, and singing but mingles the classical with the modern and centres on the needs and physical experiences of its characters. What is more, the play’s lead female role (Anna) was shaped and embodied by Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, two of the most charismatic queer New Women of the time. Anna was first played by Bernhardt in Paris on 21 January 1898 in Théâtre de la Renaissance. She was then replaced by Eleonora Duse on 20 March 1901 in the Teatro Lirico di Milano, and the same role was later

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played by Emma Gramatica, too. As Antonucci noted, The Dead City’s success was thanks mostly to Bernhardt and Duse, even though Duse’s performance was interrupted by the audience for a moment, as the audience was perturbed by the lead male character’s (Leonardo’s) murder of his own sister and shouted “Murderer” (1995a:1: 51) at the actor during the performance. The Dead City centres on three types of relationship: female same-sex bonds, male intimate friendship, and the highly controversial topic of incestuous desire. While in France, Napoleon decriminalised incest in 1810 (Benvenuto 2016, xvi), in Italy it was considered a crime and thus a much more problematic thematic choice for the plays. Benvenuto points out that today incest is often portrayed in cinema in a positive light suggesting that “[y]ou can’t rule others’ hearts” (2016, xvii), which is what the play seems to convey too. However, as I shall demonstrate, heterosexual incestuous desires serve only as a distraction from same-sex desires in the script. In fact, as Benvenuto explains, classic psychoanalysis at the time saw a direct connection between incest and homosexuality, regarding the latter one as the result “of the mother’s missed incestuous desire” (2016, 23): Many homosexual men experienced an overly strong attachment to the mother during the early oedipal relationship. Remaining “faithful” to her, they were unable to transfer sexual feelings to other women without experiencing incest fantasies and accompanying prohibitions—thus they changed their orientation from women to men. (Moore and Fine quoted in Benvenuto 2016, 24)

We need to bear in mind that until the 1980s, the association between incest and homosexuality was the dominant trend in psychoanalysis. Foucault has also observed that since the eighteenth century, in Western society incest had occupied a central place exactly because it posited the family as the obligatory focus of affects and love (1978:1: 108). For Foucault, this makes sexuality “‘incestuous’ from the start” (1978:1, 108–9), a phenomenon that “is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot” (1978:1, 109). Incest, therefore, can serve to complicate the relationship between morality, respectability, and the sacred institution of the normative family. Both The Dead City and Phaedra analysed later in this chapter portray this controversial dichotomy of incestuous desire and

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thus engaged in early twentieth-century debates about sexuality and the family. While the prohibition of incest became a universal principle for all societies, Foucault notes that only psychoanalysis “allowed people to express their incestuous desire in discourse” (1978:1, 1: 129): “At a time when incest was being hunted out as a conduct, psychoanalysis was busy revealing it as a desire and alleviating—for those who suffered from the desire—the severity which repressed it” (1978:1, 130). D’Annunzio’s plays, however, made masses of people engage in a debate about such controversial desires simply by confronting them with their existence. What further connects the two plays is that their characters suffer from anxiety and melancholia because they love and desire outside of social norms, yet their anxiety remains unexplained for most of the plot, creating a sense of repressed feelings. Incest as a theme does not only appear in D’Annunzio’s plays, although The Dead City can be regarded as his earliest work in which incest is central to the plot. In terms of provocative, unconventional, and taboo-­ breaking themes, there are several affinities between D’Annunzio’s plays and his novels, but as I have stressed before, women receive centre stage only in D’Annunzio’s dramatic works; hence, they deserve special attention. Although Modernist Playwrights centres on D’Annunzio’s drama and theatre, I wish to mention one of his novels before beginning my dramaturgical reading of The Dead City, as it might enrich our understanding of the play. Incest features in D’Annunzio’s 1910 novel Maybe Yes, Maybe No (Forse che sì, Forse che no) which, as Hughes-Hallett points out, was published in two volumes in the hope that the first half of the book would get a great reception before the controversial themes of the second half of the novel become explicit in the second volume, including brother-sister incest, sadism, and prostitution (2013, 313–314). Although Hughes-Hallett claims that the main female character of the novel Isabella Inghirami was inspired by D’Annunzio’s lover Amaranta (Countess Giuseppina Mancini), she also stresses the resemblances with Eleonora Duse and Luisa Casati in Isabella’s gift for performance, her Fortuny robes, independence, and physical daring (2013, 314). The novel’s plot recalls that of The Dead City in many ways, as it follows the fate of five characters whose desires inevitably lead them to pain and death. The main romance seems to be a heterosexual love affair between Paolo Tarsis and Isabella Inghirami, but Isabella’s sister Vanina is secretly in love with Paolo, while at the same time Isabella’s brother Aldo is conducting a sexual relationship with Isabella.

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These desires generate anxiety in the characters, which eventually lead them to suicide in the case of Vanina and Aldo, who commit suicide together. As we shall see in The Dead City too, behind the heterosexual romances of the novel, there is a crucial and very profound homoerotic relationship between two male characters within the safe, socially approved frameworks of brotherhood, friendship, and comradeship. Tarsis and his close friend Cambiaso served on battleships and submarines together, but they decided to leave the navy, as both despised discipline and order— instead, they travelled the world together. As Hughes-Hallett observes, “[t]heir feeling for each other is a ‘great and virile sentiment,’ which, as d’Annunzio makes explicit, greatly surpasses the love of women” (2013, 315–316). There are several moments in the novel when Isabella tries to arouse Tarsis sexually, but he remains indifferent. What is more, Tarsis does everything to prevent Isabella from meeting Cambiaso, but not because he is afraid that Cambiaso might steal Isabella from her—it is the other way round, which is striking, as the same motif appears in The Dead City as well between Alessandro and Leonardo. As Hughes-Hallett interprets Tarsis’s motivation, he wishes “to protect his friend from the debilitating effects of sexual love” (2013, 316). Hughes-Hallett supports this statement with a quotation from D’Annunzio in which he expressed his views of the modern hero and the modern heroine: “Contempt for women is the vital condition of the modern man: just as … disdain for men is the distinguishing quality of the modern heroines” (quoted in 2013, 316). It is true that rejecting sexual relationship with women and refusing the material aspects of life for an abstract ideal (the national cause) was a central part of nationalist and ultranationalist ideologies. Yet it also inevitably entailed homoerotic and homosocial bonds between men. Hughes-Hallett equally stresses that D’Annunzio probably never had any sexual relationships with men, as he would have written about it somewhere, since he noted even the most intimate aspects of his romances. Hence, she concludes that the intimate bond between Tarsis and Cambiaso in the novel must also be a “clean” friendship, devoid of sexual tension (2013, 159). Yet, regardless of D’Annunzio’s original intentions, what the text of the novel and the script of The Dead City conveys to the reader is that male and female characters display some extent of disdain for the opposite sex, while at the same time they nurture idealised, intimate bonds with members of the same-sex, even if those bonds remain purely spiritual. For queer readers or scholars of queer studies, such themes inevitably recall some of the main topos of queer modernist texts,

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especially that of intimate same-sex friendships. What is more, as explained in the introduction to this chapter, in the first half of the twentieth century, such friendships were under increasing scrutiny and raised suspicions of homosexuality. Besides incest, The Dead City features lesbian intimacies as well, which, however, have remained fully unnoticed in scholarship. Even though Chomel stresses the importance of closeted desires in the play and the characters’ wish for liberation, she does not allude to the unmissable homoerotic desires that equally contribute to the plot. Both female and male homoeroticism plays an important part here, even though the play’s conflict arises from non-normative heterosexual desires, as the blind Anna’s husband Alessandro desires Anna’s friend Bianca Maria, while Bianca Maria desires her brother Leonardo and vice versa. However, desire is equally palpable between Anna and Bianca Maria and between Alessandro and Leonardo. It is also important to note that this play was composed and performed at a time which saw a gradual transition from lesbianism being seen as love that did not even have a name to an explicit hatred for lesbianism, which became even deeper than the hatred directed towards male homosexuals (Mosse 1985, 91). Mosse further explicates that lesbians of the time played on the bourgeois horror of sexual excess and their despise of pleasure by claiming that same-sex relationships between women exemplified pure and noble friendship devoid of sexual passion (1985, 107). This claim proved to be effective, as even Wilhelm Hammer, who despised lesbians, admitted that love between partners of the same-sex was more stable than love between men and women (Mosse 1985, 107). Strikingly, a closer look at The Dead City seems to reveal that the play employs both the argument that bonds between women and bonds between men exemplify pure friendship devoid of sexual passion and that these same-sex relationships appear to be more stable and authentic than the incestuous heterosexual relationships that constitute the play’s main framework. Similar to Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, The Dead City begins by showing the lead female characters in the act of reading. The blind Anna is listening to her close friend Bianca Maria reading an excerpt from Antigone about eros which no one can avoid, portraying the two women in a relationship of intimacy and mutual dependency. Bianca Maria needs the emotional support of Anna, while Anna needs someone to read for her. As Anna phrases it, “You see what I cannot. And I see what you cannot” (1995a:1, 64). The quotation from Antigone is also a description of

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Bianca Maria’s character and foreshadows her prohibited desire for her own brother Leonardo: “And I myself am already outside the laws” (56). Bianca Maria’s anxiety becomes corporeal here, as she begins gasping and her hands are shaking. Even though the play’s main conflict arises from Bianca Maria’s and Leonardo’s incestuous desire for each other, this scene is undeniably homoerotic. Bianca Maria keeps admiring Anna’s beauty which is accompanied by touching each other’s hair and hand, kissing each other on the mouth, and placing their head in one another’s lap: “Your eyes are always beautiful and pure, Anna” (56) and “How beautiful you are, Anna!” (57), which Bianca Maria repeats several times, holding Anna’s hands and speaking tenderly. Since this is embedded in an atmosphere of unexplained anxiety and sadness, initially it feels like as if the closeted desire was a lesbian one: “I understand, Anna. The hour that passes, in the light, gives sometimes an unbearable anxiety. It seems we are awaiting something that never happens. Nothing happens for a long time” (57). Crucially, Anna’s anxiety remains unexplained and ambiguous, which recalls Mary Bruin’s character from The Land of Heart’s Desire, who was similarly unable to name the reason for her existential angst. The posture of these women displays an almost constant physical intimacy in Act I, which I believe requires more scholarly attention, given the length and intensity of these scenes. Heather Love’s observation about the importance of friendship between women to queer historiography resonates closely with these scenes between Anna and Bianca Maria: such bonds “de-emphasized the erotic aspect of relations between women and privileged instead affective intensity, mutual support, and the freedom of self-definition” (2007, 75), which helps make sense of women’s relationship both in the past and the present. In D’Annunzio’s play, it is not only Bianca Maria who initiates physical intimacy: Anna also gently reaches out to touch Bianca Maria’s face and weaves her fingers in her hair, which has been identified as a frequent motif in lesbian representations. Some performance photos from the 1901 production of the play (featuring Duse as Anna and Ines Cristina Zacconi as Bianca Maria) display the erotic nature of these scenes, as Anna’s face conveys pleasure and joy while she is grasping Bianca Maria’s hair whose head is in Anna’s lap.4 Contemporary queer cinema, for instance, abounds in moments of so-called hairplay between women, most famously Reaching for the Moon (2013), Carol (2015) and 4  These performance photos are available in the archives of Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Instituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma (Duse Archive). The images can be viewed online.

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the series Orange is the New Black (2013–2019). Croft has explained the importance of small caresses and gestures between people of the same-sex that might be nonverbal expressions of desire: “The slide of a hand across a hipbone might be just as much an act of coming out as an announcement offered in words” (2017, 14). The question Croft poses is relevant in relation to the bond between Bianca Maria and Anna and the subtle same-sex intimacies in D’Annunzio’s drama in general: “How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we find out about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?” (2017, 14). I do not believe there exists a simple answer to this complex question, as such subtly corporeal scenes between women might offer different layers of meaning and might evoke different memories in each reader or spectator. The above-mentioned “hairplay” inevitably involves hands, which is yet another exciting motif in D’Annunzio’s works. Strikingly, hands are deeply tied in with sexual tension and pleasure in D’Annunzio’s works. Hughes-­ Hallett has drawn attention to this motif with regard to D’Annunzio’s novels The Virgins of the Rocks (1895) and Pleasure (1889). She claims that “[h]ands excited D’Annunzio” and were necessarily “erogenous” in his works (2013, 227). She highlights a virtuoso passage in The Virgins of the Rocks, which centres specifically on the graceful and gentle hands of the three female characters (the three sisters of the novel) and another passage in Pleasure where the main female character Elena Muti lets men lap champagne from her hands as an indication of her availability and allure (2013, 227). Hughes-Hallett further elaborates that hands were even more exciting for D’Annunzio when they were mutilated, hurt, or imposed pain on somebody, which recurs as a theme mostly in his plays featuring revengeful and wilful women, such as The Glory (1899) and The Ship (1908), but it also features in Le Martyre (1911) and La Pisanelle (1913) in the sadomasochistic power games of the plot. Regarding The Dead City, the erogenous nature of hands in D’Annunzio’s works further corroborates the erotic undertone of the scenes between Bianca Maria and Anna. Similar to the way queer studies and queer culture idealise same-sex friendships, The Dead City elevates friendship to the status of an ideal yet highly ambiguous form of intimacy. When Bianca Maria takes Anna’s hands and kisses them, she asks: “Don’t you feel my lips on your soul?” (63). Anna’s response reads like a confession of love and the stage direction states that she exclaims this “with a secret despair” (63): “They are burning, Bianca Maria. And they weigh, as if all the richness of life were

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gathered in them. Ah, how tempting your lips must be! All the promises and all the persuasions must be in them” (63). Strikingly, such physical intimacy appears only between women and between the two male characters Leonardo (Bianca Maria’s brother) and Alessandro (Anna’s husband), never between members of the opposite sex. When Anna praises Bianca Maria to Alessandro, “Bianca Maria’s hair is soft! Have you felt it, Alessandro? I would love to have them always among my fingers, like a spinner” (66), Alessandro replies: “Oh, I have never dared to touch them” (66). Bianca Maria thus clearly acts like the centre of all forms of sexual desire in this play, which Anna articulates too: “All of us are attracted to her as if to a well of life. […] Only she can extinguish our thirst” (91). The constant reference to thirst equally implies the sexual desire between Anna and Bianca Maria, which must be satisfied or extinguished. Thirst reads like a longing for the fulfilment of these repressed desires, as the same motif appears between Alessandro and Leonardo, too. As Rockney Jacobsen has stated, “[h]unger, thirst, and sexual arousal are the three paradigmatic appetites” (1993, 624), and in the arts, the former two are often used as a symbol of sexual desire. Bianca Maria always mitigates the thirst that the other characters complain about, which thus becomes a symbolic gesture of partly fulfilling their sexual desires for her. John Newman, for instance, has demonstrated the parallel between the eating/ drinking domain and the emotional domain, interpreting hunger/thirst as a symbolic expression of desire for emotional stimulation (1997, 218–219). For Bianca Maria, however, Anna represents this force of life and instead of longing for Leonardo, she keeps returning to Anna: “Anna, Anna, I don’t want to leave you anymore, I don’t want to part from you ever again! I would like to escape with you, go far away with you, remaining always at your side” (97). Moreover, in Act IV, Anna tells Alessandro that she thought she was the source of Leonardo’s anxiety, which implies the assumption that Leonardo was sad because of the intimate relationship between the two women which distracted Bianca Maria’s attention from him. The intimacy between Alessandro and Leonardo is framed as a relationship of brotherhood. Crucially, only these same-sex relationships read as honest in the play, while all the other ones are exaggerated through grandiose expressions of idealised love. The reason for Leonardo’s growing anxiety is ambiguous: it can be due to the prohibited desire for his sister or because of the possibility of losing Alessandro if Alessandro loves Bianca Maria. When Anna exclaims that Leonardo is very ill, Alessandro talks

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about him tenderly and expresses his worry about his health, recalling their past intimacy: “How many nights he stayed awake with me, reading aloud those great verses which exhausted him like shouts, too disproportionate for our human breath” (67). When Leonardo enters, he is trembling. His anxiety prevents him from speaking and his first gesture is to touch Alessandro’s shoulder and he speaks only to Alessandro even though Bianca Maria is also present in this scene. Leonardo then takes Alessandro’s hand, and they are about to leave together, both men ignoring Bianca Maria’s affection. Even in Act II, when Alessandro is alone with Bianca Maria, he is looking for Leonardo: I am not less sad than you, Bianca Maria, for him. I was looking for him, hoping … For some days, when he is with me, he seems to be chased by the anxiety of revealing a secret to me. I then let silence fall on us; and wait, not less anxious than him. […] And I don’t dare to interrogate him, fearing that I will tear with force a word from him which his soul cannot yet tell me. And we suffer together, obscurely. (74)

This secret refers to Leonardo’s love for Bianca Maria and this scene includes Alessandro’s expression of love for her. However, Alessandro’s concern for Leonardo reads as if they were in a romantic relationship and it is much more honest than the expressions that follow. Alessandro invades Bianca Maria with his love despite Bianca Maria’s lack of consent. She exclaims several times “Hush! Hush! You speak like a drunk …” (77) and “Hush! Hush! I’m suffocating …” (78). Yet Alessandro is not willing to stop: he continues to bombard her with exaggerated expressions of love, praising her beauty and claiming that they cannot live without each other. This not only reads as dishonest and out of the blue but as a forced performance of heteronormative notions of love. Bianca Maria, in fact, notices this performative element and exclaims: “No, no … You are drunk with yourself. What you see in me is in your pupils. Your word creates from nothing the image that you want to love” (79). Scene IV, Act II reinforces the dishonesty of this previous scene of love, as Leonardo and Alessandro are alone, and their diction and physical posture are highly ambiguous. They are looking at the mountains from the balcony and Leonardo touches his arms and a confidential dialogue follows in which Leonardo comes out to Alessandro about his prohibited desire. Initially, he is afraid of this confession, which hurts Alessandro: So I am not your soul’s brother anymore? For how many days I have been waiting for you to speak, for you to confess your pain to me … Don’t you

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trust me anymore? Am I not that one for you who understands everything, to whom you can tell anything? (85)

Leonardo’s answer resembles a confession of love: “Yes, yes, Alessandro, you are always that person … What do I not owe you? What had I been, before I got to know you, before communicating with your soul? Who was I? I owe you everything: the revelation of life … You made me live from your flame” (85) Alessandro wants him to confess his secret so much that he is standing close to him holding his hands firmly, which perturbs Leonardo as if the secret was related to his feelings for Alessandro: “Yes, I will speak, I will tell you … But do not look at me from so closely, don’t hold my hands … Sit down there … Wait … wait until there is more shade … I will tell you … I need to tell you … to you … to you only … Horrible thing” (86). Here Leonardo already judges himself for his incestuous desire and his anxiety derives from his assumption that everyone around him would judge him as immoral. This fear of societal judgement eventually pushes him to commit violence against his own sister, which can be interpreted as a symbolic gesture of killing desire itself, given that Bianca Maria seems to be desire embodied in this play. When Leonardo confesses the truth, Alessandro’s sudden melancholia can be directed both at his feelings for Bianca Maria and for Leonardo. What is more, the fact that Leonardo feels ashamed in front of Alessandro assumes a relationship of love and desire between the two men. This scene bears resemblance to the ghosts’ relationship with the Young Man in Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones, and it evokes Ahmed’s concept of shame according to which shame “is only felt given that the subject is interested in the other; that is, that a prior love or desire for the other exists” (2004, 105). In this case, Alessandro acts as the ideal other for Leonardo, whose opinion matters and whom Leonardo fears losing by revealing his secret: “In shame, I expose myself that I am a failure through the gaze of an ideal other” (Ahmed 2004, 106) and “my shame confirms my love” (2004, 106). The same ambiguity marks Leonardo’s realisation that Alessandro loves his sister. The way he phrases his anger suggests that the main source of pain lies in Alessandro’s feelings for Bianca Maria: “He loves her, he loves her. Since when? How? What happened between them? … Ah, God, God, everything in me is infected; everything gets contaminated … And this thirst that consumes me!” (103). Even when he confronts Bianca Maria, he wants to know whether Alessandro loves her and not vice versa: “And he … he told you that he loves you? When? When did he tell you? Answer!” (104–105). It is also striking that the two men never show anger towards

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one another, and even when they are standing above Bianca Maria’s corpse in Act V, the two men continue their physical intimacy with Alessandro consoling the trembling Leonardo. Moreover, when Alessandro wants to leave him, he exclaims “taken by an invincible terror” (114): “No, no, don’t go, don’t leave me … Let’s stay here, let’s stay here for a while!” (114). Chomel has noticed this surprising intimacy that remains between the two men even after both lose their love because of the other: “the presumed superman is only a man in pain, trembling, terrified, and Alessandro’s fraternal compassion confirms this interpretation” (1997, 64). The two men’s failure to meet this hegemonic idea of masculinity (the virile heroic superman) draws attention to the pressure such notions put on men, forcing them to deny their feelings and perform a role. What is deeply problematic in this play and thus should receive more critical attention in scholarship is the way these male characters abuse Anna’s and Bianca Maria’s feelings and bodies, maintaining a patriarchal society (even if deeply homoerotic) which blames women even for their own repressed desires. The two men never touch Bianca Maria’s body in the final act, but when Anna arrives, she rushes to her corpse in despair, lies down beside her, gently caressing her body, face, and hair as if protecting her from male abuse, and cries out “Ah! … I can see! I can see!” (114). This moment of miracle signals the importance of Bianca Maria for Anna who, even in her death, heals her soul and body. It is remarkable that Bianca Maria’s body is only touched by Anna in the play not by the male characters whose approach she refuses. This final scene reveals that the most sincere and profound relationships of the play are, in fact, same-sex ones, whose repression and the forced heteronormative ideals of romance push the plot towards physical violence.

Moving Beyond Shame: The Power of the Non-­normative in Phaedra (1909) Incest and lesbian undertones permeate D’Annunzio Phaedra, too, which was his final Italian verse tragedy written in 1909. Fedra’s character was played by Emma Gramatica’s sister Irma Gramatica in 1909 in Milan without any success. Emma replaced Irma in 1914 in Milan’s Teatro Lirico, and the character was played by Ida Rubinstein in 1923 in the Paris Opera and in 1926 in Rome’s Teatro Costanzi under Rubinstein’s own artistic

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direction. This means that the play’s lead role was embodied by the most influential feminist actor-activists of the time, many of whom were queer. Emma Gramatica and Rubinstein turned Phaedra into a success despite the audience’s general hatred for the main character because of her excessive and seemingly incestuous desire and because of her proud, domineering personality. In spite of the play’s relative success, after the 1926 Italian production it was not staged again until 1988 when Massimo Castri’s direction portrayed an autoerotic Fedra and male characters “of dubious virility” (Antonucci 1995b: 2, 272). Paradoxically, collaboration with these independent New Women helped D’Annunzio get away with the socially perturbing themes and characters of his plays in a bourgeois society for whom morality and decency were the main points of reference. This does not mean, however, that D’Annunzio was not criticised for such transgressive portrayals. After the first production, for instance, a critic pointed out that “Fedra’s moral insensibility is maybe the greatest defect of this play” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 699). In 1926, Silvio D’Amico claimed that it was because of Fedra’s character that D’Annunzio’s play could not be regarded as a tragedy: “because we don’t see spiritual conflict: she doesn’t know any moral law; she shouts her fury without restraint, and the play’s contrast is reduced to the clash between her bestial carnality and the chastity of the horse tamer Ippolito” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 756). What we can see here is attempts by reviewers to criminalise the powerful, assertive woman, deny her any heroic function, and exalt the male character despite his moral faults, such as his violence against women, which the text clearly refers to with regard to Ippolito’s and his father’s past. What saved the play in the 1920s, however, was Rubinstein’s incomparable presence: “she appeared, in compensation, miraculously plastic and statuary” (Corriere d’Italia quoted in Granatella 1993, 740). Il Corriere della Sera highlighted that “in her thin and supple body she seems to catch the thrill of the gloomiest desires” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 744). Critics were always in awe of the fluidity of Rubinstein’s body which contributed to the storytelling and helped reinforce the presence of unorthodox desires in the performances, appearing both as a source of fascination and disruption. In 1926, Il Tevere also noted with regard to Phaedra that “her [Rubinstein’s] silent elasticity, and those long thin hands, that Greek but bent nose, make her an accomplished player. […] [T]he pain, the desire, the hatred of which she is capable reside in her mortal body” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 753). When D’Annunzio described Phaedra,

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he claimed that “in the end there [was] always an ethical conflict that [was] not related to social taboos or laws but to transpersonal and divine ones” (quoted in Antonucci 1995b:2, 273). In my critical reading, however, I go against this claim to demonstrate that Phaedra is very much about disrupting social taboos and that the clash between stigmatised sexual desires (incest and lesbianism) and moral prudery serves to reveal the violence of patriarchal society towards women. Phaedra is often read as a drama about Fedra’s conflict with her own self. However, this approach risks assuming that the fault is only with Fedra and ends up pathologising and criminalising her, while at the same time ignoring the violence of the play’s male characters and the repressive environment that determines her desperate actions. As Mosse explicates, since nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed the example of the chaste and modest woman to demonstrate its own virtuous aims, there was a deep hatred for women as revolutionary figures and for rebellious women in general (1985, 90). More importantly, for nationalism, the pure feminine ideal was strictly anti-heroic (1985, 101), while the character of Fedra here is not just rebellious but claims herself the hero of the play. The play is set in Trezene and builds on Hellenistic mythology inspired by Euripides’s and Seneca’s Fedra, Racine’s Phèdre, and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads. D’Annunzio’s version, however, recreates the story and puts an end to the victimisation of Fedra. She claims her own death for the sake of her own liberation from society which condemns her and treats her as a deviant outsider. Her death, however, appears ambiguous: it can be seen both as self-sacrifice and as murder, since Ippolito’s (her stepson’s) guardian goddess Artemis’s arrow injures Fedra’s body as a way of punishing her. Yet Chomel has stressed that this is “a sacrifice which is not committed for a man or in the name of a man, the founding hero of society, religion and tradition. […] Fedra consciously sacrifices herself in the name of herself and only for herself, to create her own poetic myth” (1997, 181–182). Moreover, Fedra’s sacrifice points out the systemic failures of a society which treats stigmatised individuals in a way that they feel the only possible escape from judgement is death, hence the play’s motto “Oh, liberating death” (275). In D’Annunzio’s play, Fedra is in love with her stepson Ippolito, but when a Theban slave is sent as a gift for him, Fedra decides to kill her out of jealousy, then incites her husband Tèseo to kill Ippolito, accusing the stepson of harassing her. This version, however, stresses the violence of

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Tèseo and Ippolito towards women and introduces hints of lesbian sadomasochism into the relationship of Fedra and the Theban slave. Woodhouse has also noted that “[o]n the surface the plot conforms to tradition, but D’Annunzio introduces a new sensuality and new sadomasochistic elements” (2006, 335). Even though everyone treats her as an immoral outsider, D’Annunzio’s Fedra claims her own story and does not let herself be humiliated by society; hence, she takes her own life and claims herself a winner before dying, thus defying the moral prudery which drives society. D’Annunzio also described his drama as a play which “excludes victimisation, moralism, and remorse” (quoted in Chomel 1997, 166). More importantly, Fedra’s character illustrates how the oppressed begin acting like their oppressors to evade victimhood. Fedra’s behaviour is a mixture of feelings of shame and inferiority because of her foreign (Cretan) background and because of her desire for her stepson. Her behaviour displays a will to power as a revenge on a society that has tried to erase her. The play begins with eight women on the stage: seven mothers are mourning their sons who died in battle and are waiting for a ship to bring their sons’ unburied corpses back home, and their lamentation suggests the uselessness of such sacrifice. The nurse Gorgo calls for Fedra several times, yet she arrives with delay and upon her arrival she fails to console the mothers and calls them mad instead. This rigidity and anger towards the mothers indicate Fedra’s unease with motherhood and disguises her shame for her incestuous feelings for her stepson. When a man Eurito brings news of her husband’s victory, Fedra interrupts his narrative and begins controlling it: “Man, do not tremble! Don’t lose breath!” (285). She is ruthless and commanding, which functions as a shield to protect herself from people who judge her and see her intensity as delirium. Her presence is highly corporeal: the state direction indicates that she makes abrupt often dance-like movements and talks loudly, yet this is sometimes replaced with a “melodious sadness” (287), often changing temperament from one extreme to the other. When she learns that a Theban woman will arrive as a gift for Ippolito, she makes a sudden jump in frenzy and wants to see her immediately: “I want to see her! I want to see her! Where do you hide her? / Down there in the black ship?” (294). In her frenzy, Fedra has a vision of Aphrodite and her imaginary dialogue with her reflects her sense of discomfort in society: she feels mocked by the goddess but then submits to her and kneels, feeling persecuted by her: “Goddess, I beg you. Why are you persecuting me?” (296). Her discomfort becomes corporeal,

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as she begins shivering and wincing, as indicated clearly by the stage directions. This visionary meeting is followed by Fedra’s confrontation with the Theban slave Ipponòme, which introduces a sinister intimacy between the two women. Fedra applies the weapon of seduction here to kill her. Fedra leans above the prisoner and scrutinises her, promising that she will be kind to her. The seduction begins here, as Fedra claims: “You are beautiful!” (299), as a result of which the thus far suspicious and terrified woman starts trusting her: “How beautiful, how great you are, Queen of the islands!” (299), replies Ipponòme in awe. Ipponòme does not want to be the mistress of Ippolito and asks Fedra how strong his yoke will be. Fedra calls her fragile and doubts if her bones could resist the first grasp of the hunter, yet Ipponòme claims she is strong enough. Fedra seems to be increasingly interested in her, asks her questions, and seems to admire her self-description as a strong, fast, and warrior-like woman with which she tries to impress Fedra. The stage direction indicates that Ipponòme is deluded by the ambiguous approach of Fedra. Fedra promises her to take her to an island before her marriage to Ippolito, and Ipponòme begs for her protection. Even though Fedra promises to crown her, her behaviour starts changing and Fedra eventually stabs her. After the cruelty of Act I, Act II focuses on the vulnerability of Fedra and the violence of Ippolito and Tèseo, as if providing the psychological background for Fedra’s cruelty. Fedra remains alone with Ippolito who confesses to her that something ails him, but he does not know what it is exactly. In this moment of intimacy, Fedra takes his head in her hands and kisses him on the mouth. Even though he is only her stepson, his reaction to this scene is physical violence and verbal humiliation: “He opens his eyes, shakes his head; grabs the wrists of the woman and pushes her away” (332). He also stigmatises her: Leave me alone. Let me leave so that I don’t hear your insane cry anymore, so that you don’t contaminate me with your breath, oh you infirm. (334)

This is followed by Fedra’s beautiful lines about her love for him, yet Ippolito’s reaction is violence and a threat that he will humiliate her in

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front of his father: “he grabs the woman by the hair, who falls; he is about to hit her, but he refrains” (338). Fedra’s physical expression of her desire acts as a catalyst to bring patriarchal violence and misogyny to the surface. Chomel has emphasised Ippolito’s sudden aggression towards Fedra: Ippolito rejects her, insults her, shouts his despise on her and Fedra retorts accusing him of being like his father, the man who seduced and abandoned her sister Arianna, who had raped her when she was a child, put her on his ship as a loot, the violent predator lacking morality who pushed to death Antelope, Ippolito’s mother. (1997, 174)

This scene thus unveils patriarchal abuse of women’s bodies and criticises Ippolito’s imitation of his father, which Fedra clearly sees as a forced performance. She continuously refers to Ippolito as a little, shy, and tender boy, which disturbs him: “You talk to me as if I were a timid little boy” (316), although later he cannot even free himself from Fedra’s embrace, he needs another woman to help him. Ippolito’s violent reaction appears even more exaggerated given that Fedra is not his real mother. Seeing his cruel rejection, Fedra begs him to kill her, as she fears the reaction of her husband and of society that awaits her once Ippolito tells his father about the kiss. When Tèseo arrives, Fedra’s body position suggests vulnerability, hiding her face and repeating that she wants to die: “Shame keeps me from speaking” (345). This is the same precarious body pose that we could see in Francesca da Rimini and The Daughter of Iorio when the female characters felt threatened by men. Fedra cannot overcome shame for a long time: it inhabits her body as she is crouching before her husband. As Ahmed has argued, “[t]he difficulty of moving beyond shame is a sign of the power of the normative” (2004, 107). Yet eventually Fedra manages to move beyond shame and accuses Ippolito of harassing her, which is true, as Ippolito was indeed dragging her by the hair and almost killed her just because she dared to confess her desire for him. In Act III, Ippolito is already dead, as Tèseo cursed his son and called upon Poseidon to avenge him, so Poseidon caused Ippolito’s horse to rear, drop, and attack his master, tearing out his innards. In the last act, everyone judges Fedra who, however, refuses to feel ashamed of her love, and stays next to Ippolito’s corpse, describing herself as someone who has subverted the ancient laws:

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“My name is ineffable like the name which subverts ancient laws to impose her arcane law” (360). This moment could be an example of Mirzoeff’s notion of countervisuality which is “the assertion of the right to look, challenging the law that sustains visuality’s authority in order to justify its own sense of ‘right’” (2011, 25). Fedra was stigmatised because of her perceived embodied difference—very much like Wilde who is Mirzoeff’s primary example for the countervisual claim—hence, she repositioned her stigma as a heroic resistance to patriarchy and Ippolito’s normative family. Even though according to Carlylian/fascist/nationalist heroism, a woman could never become a hero; here, Fedra becomes what Mirzoeff would call “countervisual hero” (2011, 154) or “counter-hero” (2011, 146), challenging “the gendering of heroism as inevitably masculine” (2011, 147). Fedra thus achieves the impossible here: despite the pressure and the power of the normative world around her, which makes her the source of shame, she manages to detach herself from it, confirming the power of the non-normative. Importantly, Fedra does not refuse shame here—instead, she embraces shame which “means embracing the ‘non’ rather than assimilating to the norm” (Ahmed 2004, 121). Ahmed, however, warns against reducing shame or pride to queer feelings: “rather, the question is how to be affected by one’s relation to, and departures from, the normative in a way that opens up different possibilities for living” (2004, 121). Before Fedra sacrifices herself, she claims that Ippolito can be hers in the realm where society does not reign and exclaims that she has won. She thus proclaims “superiority to the forces which have destroyed her” (Woodhouse 2006, 335). Chomel rightly argues that “Fedra appears in this tragedy as the champion of women, not in the name of Aphrodite, according to the traditional role, but in the name of the woman against the abuse and violence of the masculine world” (1997, 174). Although it is highly problematic that Fedra kills an innocent young woman in the play, it can be argued that it saves Ipponòme from becoming Ippolito’s slave for a lifetime—death liberates her from patriarchal abuse just as in Fedra’s case. Even though Act I presents Fedra as a ruthless, jealous femme fatale, Act II generates sympathy for her and gives her the opportunity to raise her voice against patriarchal abuse of women’s bodies. As a result, by Act III, the reader can understand her reason for turning the two patriarchs against one another and choosing death as an escape. Most readings of this play focus on Fedra’s cruelty and immorality, but why does her behaviour

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raise more outrage than the immorality of the male characters? The play clearly invites a criticism of patriarchy’s hypocritical moral prudery which applies a double standard to women’s sexual behaviour, judging them as immoral, while allowing men to commit any kind of violence against women.

Conclusion Although the four plays analysed in this chapter do not seem to have much in common at first glance, what connects them is that all of them display the power of eros and its frightening potential for those who represent the normative, patriarchal world upheld by the cult of respectability and moral prudery. To contain the power of the erotic, the plays’ normative characters and patriarchs declare certain forms of love impossible and repulsive, and eventually break up intimate bonds of connection. In The Dreaming of the Bones, the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla are shamed and rejected by the representative of the Irish nationalist cause because centuries ago they had prioritised the needs of their body and desire over the nation. Even the dance scene which would serve to convince the Young Man to forgive them affirms the power of the erotic and the repulsion it generates in the character who wants to protect Ireland from further weakening and ruin. His refusal is not simply a refusal of forgiveness but a refusal of the needs of the body. In her essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde explains that for every kind of oppression to assert itself, it must repress the power of the erotic which it associates with the Other, especially with women (2017, 41). While the joy and the desire craved by the two ghosts is visibly crushed by the Young Man in Yeats’s play, D’Annunzio’s take on the erotic in Phaedra offers a different outcome. The play seems to be about incest, but it turns out that the character of Fedra is in love with his stepson, so they are in fact not related. Fedra almost lets the patriarchs of the play crush her erotic power and she is overcome by shame, but eventually she moves beyond shame and affirms both the power of desire and the power of the non-normative, laughing at the pettiness and small-mindedness of those who see her and her desire as abnormal. As Lorde phrased it, “[i]n touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial” (2017, 43). Fedra clearly denies all these supplied states of being and D’Annunzio’s version of the story of Fedra provides a psychological background to her initially

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cruel behaviour, highlighting the immorality and cruelty of the male characters of her past and present. The Dead City offers an outstanding case within D’Annunzio’s dramatic works, as each character of this play suffers from anxiety resulting from a fear of judgement and shame in case their forbidden desire comes to light. Although incest and adultery seem to be the central non-­ normative desires of this play, I have argued that these desires function only as a sort of distraction or disguise, as the real attraction in this play is between same-sex characters. The power of the erotic is manifested in the character of Bianca Maria, and crucially, she is the one whom her brother kills. Even though I have demonstrated that the two male characters in fact desire one another, they are still men who enjoy the privileges of patriarchy, and since they refuse to come to terms with their own desires, they turn their confusion and repressed anger against women. Interestingly, the bond between Anna and Bianca Maria in The Dead City resembles the relationship between the Blind Beggar and the Lame Beggar of The Cat and the Moon, as the two women mutually depend on each other with the blind Anna needing Bianca Maria to read for her, while the latter one needing Anna for emotional support. But unlike all the other plays analysed in this chapter, The Cat and the Moon is a farce, even though its farcical nature is only manifested in the cheeky dialogues between the two beggars—once the invisible Saint’s threatening voice abruptly interrupts their bickering, the innocent jouissance of the couple turns into bitterness and suspicion, which leads to their separation. Unlike in the other plays, the invisible patriarch figure who promotes an able-­ bodied discourse does not wish to suppress the erotic—instead, he wants to experience it; hence, he tears apart the couple. However, the joy and the playfulness of the Lame Beggar-Blind Beggar relationship completely disappears from the Saint-Lame Beggar pair, as the Saint uses his companion to experience the erotic stimulation that arises from dominating the other. The following chapter offers a detailed examination of this relationship between desire and domination by focusing on sadomasochistic attachments.

References Abbey Theatre Ballet. ‘The Dreaming of the Bones.’ The Irish Times (7 December 1931): 5. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New  York and London: Routledge.

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Balázs, Zsuzsanna. 2021. Precarious Bodies and Physical Theater: A Review of DancePlayers’ The Dreaming of the Bones by W. B. Yeats. International Yeats Studies 5 (1): 89–99. Bassanese, Fiora A. 1995. Sibilla Aleramo: Writing A Personal Myth. In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-lazzi, 137–165. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Benvenuto, Sergio. 2016. What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Bibbò, Antonio. 2022. Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Bonsaver, Guido. 2007. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chomel, Luisetta Elia. 1997. D’Annunzio: Un Teatro Al Femminile. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Cregan, David. 2009. Introduction. In Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, ed. David Cregan, 1–6. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Croft, Clare. 2017. Introduction. In Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, 1–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Amico, Silvio. 1963. In Cronache del teatro, ed. Eugenio Ferdinando Palmieri and Sandro d’Amico, 1. Rome/Bari: Laterza. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1995a. In Tutto Il Teatro 1, ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Rome: Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton. ———. 1995b. In Tutto Il Teatro 2, ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Rome: Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton. Danna, Daniela. 2004. Beauty and the Beast: Lesbians in Literature and Sexual Science from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. In Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, ed. Gary P. Cestaro, 117–132. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Duncan, Derek. 2004. Secret Wounds: The Bodies of Fascism in Giorgio Bassani’s Dietro La Porta. In Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, ed. Gary P.  Cestaro, 187–206. New  York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1997. Friendship as A Way of Life. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 135–140. New York: The New Press. Frazier, Adrian. 1997. Queering the Irish Renaissance: The Masculinities of Moore, Martyn, and Yeats. In Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, ed. Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, 8–38. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2012. Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History. In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, Ed. Donal E.  Hall and

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Annamarie Jagose with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter, 236–262. London and New York: Routledge. Granatella, Laura. 1993. Arrestate L’autore! D’Annunzio in Scena: Cronache, Testimonianze, Illustrazioni, Documenti Inediti E Rari Del Primo Grande Spettacolo Del ‘900. Rome: Bulzoni. Grene, Nicholas. 2004. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harris, Susan Cannon. 2002. Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics, and the International Left, 1892–1964. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hogan, Robert, and Michael J.  O’Neill, eds. 2009. [1967]. Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre. A Selection from his Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. 2013. The Pike. Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Jacobsen, Rockney. 1993. Arousal and the Ends of Desire. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3): 617–632. Kinahan, Claudia. 2017. Irish Bodies: The Rise of Dance Theatre. TN2 Magazine, April 6. https://www.tn2magazine.ie/irish-­bodies-­the-­rise-­of-­dance-­theatre/. Accessed 17 August 2022. Lorde, Audre. 2017 [1984]. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 41–44. New York: Ten Speed Press. Love, Heather K. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Mariani, Laura. 2018. Emma Gramatica. Rai Radio 3. Podcast, November 8. https://www.raiplaysound.it/audio/2018/10/WIKIRADIO%2D%2D-­ Emma-­Gramatica-­20bb5a51-­c571-­4677-­9b13-­7a3ca8354ff3.html. Accessed 15 September 2022. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig. Newman, John. 1997. Eating and Drinking as Sources of Metaphor in English. Cuadernos de Filología Inglesa 6 (2): 213–231. O’Brien, Cormac. 2021. Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Pater, Walter. 1998. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Pilkington, Lionel. 2001. Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. New York: Routledge. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2014. Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities. In What’s Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms, ed. M. Rosello and S. Dasgupta, 81–90. New York: Fordham. Poulain, Alexandra. 2018. Failed Collaboration and Queer Love in Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon and Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I. Ilha do Desterro 71 (2): 233–244. Praga, Marco. 1979. In Cronache Teatrali Del Primo Novecento, ed. Ruggero Rimini. Florence: Vallecchi. Rushdie, Salman. 2013, April 17. Public Event, Private Lives: Literature and Politics in the Modern World. Public Lecture, University of Colorado-Boulder. Woodhouse, John. 2006. D’Annunzio’s Theatre. In A History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, 323–338. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Yeats, William Butler. 1966. In The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach. London: Macmillan. Abbreviated as VPl in the text. ———. 2002. The Collected Letters of W.  B. Yeats. InteLex Electronic Edition. Edited by John Kelly. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Sadomasochistic Attachments: Reverse Power and Erotic Stimulations

The most radical function of S/M is not primarily in its exposing the hypocritically denied centrality of erotically stimulating power plays in “normal” society; it lies rather in the shocking revelation that, for the sake of that stimulation, human beings may be willing to give up control over their environment. —Bersani, Homos

This chapter examines theatrical representations of sadomasochism (S/M) as a strategy to challenge normative distributions of power in Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand (1904) and A Full Moon in March (1935) and in D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911) and La Pisanelle, ou la Mort Parfumée (1913). I contend here that the reversibility of power inherent to S/M can help raise awareness to the manipulative strategies of totalising political ideologies and institutions as well as to the elements of dominance and submission in all relationships. Through theatrical representations of sadomasochistic attachments based on reversible power, Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama reveals the systemic failures of normative distributions of power and gender roles. The plays chosen for discussion dramatise the clash between power and seduction in strikingly homoerotic contexts. In all four plays, an authority figure attempts to contain an unruly yet potent character, forcing them to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9_4

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obey the norms and rules set up by normative power. Yet these authority figures encounter resistance from the characters they wish to control, thus positions of power and powerlessness alternate in the plays. Thanks to the element of playful reversibility, the plays portray power as fragile, constructed, performable, and thus destroyable. Besides revealing the queer potential of theatrical representations of S/M, this chapter flags the striking production history of D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre, too. Crucially, this play created theatre history’s first genderqueer Sebastian embodied by the lesbian icon Ida Rubinstein in Paris, causing both awe and outrage in audiences. The topic of sadomasochism is still sexually marginalised and under-­ theorised. The reason for this under-theorisation and absence from the corpus of queer theory is that most lesbian and queer critics have condemned S/M as a perpetuation of genocidal culture (Freeman 2012, 239). It is also often argued that S/M reinforces and acts out the categorisation of sex and sexual roles (Bersani 1996, 84). Similar to melancholia, discomfort, and anxiety, S/M is regarded as a backward element both within and outside queer studies. Yet, in fact, it is a useful tool to understand historical traumas of oppression by acting them out, which helps understand the mechanisms of power and manipulation. Hence Ian Young has claimed that people who practise S/M “have an opportunity to be more aware of the elements of dominance and submission in all relationships” (quoted in Mains 1984, 73). In addition, both Freeman and Bersani have pointed out the inherent subversive nature of S/M in that it is able to disrupt conventional power relations, allows the alternation and exchange of power and powerlessness and thus creates more awareness about the inequalities of power relations within society at large. Pat Califia has also stressed that “[i]n an S/M context, the uniforms and roles and dialogue become a parody of authority, a challenge to it, a recognition of its secret sexual nature” (2000, 135). Therefore, what S/M achieves is the merging of the erotic and the political, which has been a taboo topic for most nationalist discourses that wish to separate the two areas completely. In the selected plays, S/M dynamics are mostly maintained by various moments of surprise; the possibility of the oppressed to turn against the oppressors: “the unexpected element, the switching […] which takes the participants by surprise” (Hart 1998, 141, her emphasis). Bersani has also stressed that the most radical trait of S/M is the prioritisation of pleasure over power: “the shocking revelation that, for the sake of that stimulation, human beings may be willing to give up control over their environment”

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(1996, 95). This idea will be most pertinent to Yeats’s A Full Moon in March and D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre in which authority figures seem willing to renounce power for the sake of pleasure. Within Italian scholarship, John Woodhouse (2006) has discerned the sadomasochistic elements of D’Annunzio’s plays, focusing on Phaedra, but he applies this term to every scene which includes a sudden and cruel change of agency between slave and master positions. In my analysis, however, I call sadomasochistic those scenes which mingle love and cruelty in ambiguous ways and include a constant reversibility of power roles and prioritisation of erotic stimulation over domination. Margaret Günsberg has equally identified sadomasochistic elements in D’Annunzio’s drama, investigating the alternation of submissive and dominant roles that D’Annunzio’s male and female characters often assume (1997, 140). Significantly, Günsberg highlights reversibility, ritual, switching, and the element of play as central to sadomasochistic relations. She stresses that some of D’Annunzio’s female characters only pretend to assume the submissive position only to reject it afterwards: both “the feminine pretense of taking up these positions and the switching of positions that these female characters also undertake [can] signal the ritualistic dynamic at work in sadomasochism itself as performance” (1997, 140). What differentiates sadomasochism from a simple master-slave relationship is the playfulness and reversibility of power distributions that maintain an element of excitement and erotic longing. However, this does not imply that sadomasochistic relations are exempt from fascistic master-slave dynamics: they build on those historical and gendered power distributions but constantly challenge them by presenting those historically irreversible and desexualised relations as reversible and erotic. As Bersani has argued, sadomasochism “removes masters and slaves from economic and racial superstructures, thus confirming the eroticism of the master-slave configuration” (1996, 89). These erotic portrayals of master-slave relations draw attention to the fact that such asymmetrical power distributions still exist: such representations thus gesture “toward the possibility of encountering specific historical moments viscerally, thereby refusing these moments the closure of pastness” (Freeman 2012, 243). For D’Annunzio, it was the charismatic stage presence of the openly lesbian Jewish dancer Ida Rubinstein that increased his interest in theatrical representations of sadomasochism and the relationship between desire, death, and violence. When D’Annunzio first saw Rubinstein in Cléopâtre in 1909 in Paris, she was working with the Ballets Russes company which,

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unlike classical ballet companies, hired tall and boyish women such as Rubinstein and highly effeminate male dancers like Vaslav Nijinsky. Rubinstein encountered difficulties within the ballet circles because of her position as a foreigner (Russian), her religion (Jewish), her sexuality (openly lesbian), her stature (tall, angular, manly), and her lack of ballet education (she received private lessons from Mikhail Fokine, but critics thought she had no talent). As composer Ferruccio Busoni commented, “I shall see Mlle Rubinstein, of whom it is said by one that she cannot speak but can dance; by another that she has a beautiful body, but cannot dance; by a third, that her body is not womanly, therefore not beautiful. She is just like St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows by all” (quoted in Fleischer 2007, 30). In fact, the reviews Rubinstein received could be divided into two categories: ruthless insults and obsessive admirations and sexualisations of her body. Rubinstein’s unconventional movements, body, and voice all contributed to creating a performative queerness on the stage. The queer aspects of Le Martyre were thus accentuated by Rubinstein’s performance, who highlighted the function of Sebastian’s figure as a “queer threat” (Hartford 2018, 51) in the play and its productions. Nicole Haitzinger and Julia Ostwald have contextualised Rubinstein’s performative queerness through the notion of eccentricity which, as a label, was first used deliberately by Bernhardt “to legitimise herself as an artistic female living outside the gendered social norms” (2018). Eccentricity means being outside the centre, but not entirely separated from it, thus it “points to a position that always maintains a flexible and critical relationship with the centre and its norms” (Haitzinger and Ostwald 2018). Eccentricity can thus be understood as a strategy that both reaffirms and subverts the norms, dissolving the order between the centre and the periphery. Interestingly, Rubinstein’s otherness on the stage was enhanced by the discrepancy between the effect created by her voice and body: the latter was usually a source of amazement as she had an almost incorporeal presence, while her voice (Russian accent and hoarse, low-pitched voice) disturbed them. Marcel Proust’s remark makes it clear that Rubinstein, in fact, made a significant contribution to the queerness of D’Annunzio’s drama: “Everything that is strange about D’Annunzio takes refuge in the accent of Mme Rubinstein” (quoted in Haitzinger and Ostwald 2018). She was mocked as representing Saint Barbara not Sebastian, which is a reference to barbarians and foreigners who cannot speak the language properly. Even though she was often accused of destroying D’Annunzio’s words with her accent, D’Annunzio

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insisted on working with her, as he saw a significant potential in her queer stage presence. More importantly, Rubinstein represented the freedom of the body and sexual freedom for D’Annunzio, which constituted the most crucial principles of his life and works.1 D’Annunzio prioritised the needs of the body and considered it impossible to renounce sensuality which for him was the major source of inspiration (Guerri 2014, 81). He thus put pleasure before anything else and he was interested in sadomasochistic sexual experiences, too: “Sap the body, exhaust it with orgy, with lack of sleep, then on this horrible exhaustion pour the mighty wine. Marvelous effects” (quoted in Guerri 2014, 76). In fact, D’Annunzio’s interest in a wide range of sexual experiences helped him escape tradition and norms, as he admitted: “Orgy liberates me from civilisation, tradition, customs, from everything that over the centuries have diminished mankind” (quoted in Guerri 2014, 81). For D’Annunzio, therefore, the freedom of the individual and sexual freedom were indispensable, which is manifested most visibly in the extraordinary, complex, and powerful female characters of his drama. Yeats’s works are marked by unorthodox forms of sexual desire which derive largely from his life-long interest in the occult and his close friendship with sexual and social radicals. As Cullingford has pointed out, occult séances were always highly sexual events and deconstructed fixed notions of gender, often involving sadomasochistic elements (1993, 51–52). Harris has also stressed that “[t]he most significant romantic relationships in Yeats’s life were mediated by the occult, and he could never entirely separate magic from the erotic” (2002, 400). Episodes of heightened sexual energy and magical experimentations were thus closely linked in Yeats’s life. In fact, Yeats attended various séances and rituals, because his search for his Daimon (Second-self) through ritual performance was a search for the feminine in himself (Haswell 2012, 291). Yet this obsession with the occult inevitably made Yeats an unorthodox figure in Ireland: “To most Irishmen at this time, the preoccupation with the occult of Yeats and his wife must have seemed uncanny, obscure, cranky and heretical” (MacLiammoir 1972, 97). After the first occult séances in Bedford Park in the 1880s and 1890s in the company of Florence Farr, Yeats joined the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885, which was renamed as Dublin 1  For a detailed analysis of D’Annunzio’s progressive views of women’s rights and sexuality associated with his Fiume project see Guerri’s recent book Disobbedisco: Cinquecento giorni di rivoluzione. Fiume 1919–1920. Milan: Mondadori, 2019.

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Theosophical Society in 1886. Farr, therefore, played a crucial role in shaping Yeats’s ideas about the relationship between the occult, sexuality, and theatre—she was not only a short story writer, essayist, and playwright, but also scholar of occult studies writing books and articles about alchemists, Kabbalah, and Egyptian magic. Crucially, Yeats experienced sadomasochistic practices through his involvement in the Golden Dawn in the 1890s: “[t]he Golden Dawn, like other occult societies, used its religious rites as displaced vehicles for the frustrated eroticism of its members: at his initiation into the 6/5 grade Yeats’s hands were tied behind his back, a chain was hung round his neck, he was bound to a cross, and he received the symbolic stigmata” (Cullingford 1993, 51–52). Yeats’s early relationship with sexuality and gender was marked by frustration as well as feelings of shame and difference: he experienced anxiety, as he “lacked confidence in his masculinity, and being repeatedly refused [especially by Maud Gonne and later her daughter Iseult Gonne] weakened his self-esteem” (Cullingford 1993, 53). As Cullingford further reveals, Yeats “had considerable trouble becoming a man” (1993, 5), his sexual identity was indefinite, and “[w]omen who loved women also loved Yeats” (1993, 269), most notably Lady Dorothy Wellesley, her partner Hilda Matheson, and Vita Sackville-West.2 Yeats’s anxiety with sexual desire was transformed into an obsession and experimentation with sexuality by the 1920s and 1930s. The King of the Great Clock Tower and its revised version A Full Moon in March analysed in this chapter were composed shortly after Yeats’s Steinach-operation in April 1934 which was “actually a simple vasectomy, intended to increase and contain the production of male hormone, thus arresting the aging process and restoring sexual vitality” (Foster 2005, 496). As Foster further explicates, in Yeats’s later works and life, “[s]ex is an urgent, imperious presence, ultimately unsatisfying unless linked to some kind of revelation” (2005, 503). Furthermore, in 1936, Yeats and Lady Dorothy Wellesley engaged in a game of joint ballad composition: the topics involved sex and sadomasochism too, and their “collaboration on mildly salacious ballads acted as a kind of sexual displacement-activity” (Foster 2005, 546). What is more, “[a]s their friendship deepened, this shared currency became more explicit: 2  Lady Dorothy Wellesley and Hilda Matheson were with Yeats beside his deathbed in Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Cap Martin on the French Riviera. The news of Yeats’s death was telephoned through to Yeats’s family by Vita Sackville-West as instructed by Wellesley (Foster 1997, 650–652).

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he wrote for her a bawdy lyric about flagellation, never published” (Foster 2005, 546). Desire, however, remained marked by restraint and absence for Yeats, who even reckoned that “the desire that is satisfied is not a great desire” (quoted in Cullingford 1993, 43). Inevitably, the longing for annihilation became intertwined with sexual passion in Yeats’s late drama. The sadomasochistic aspects of Yeats’s works have been discussed mostly by Cullingford and Alexandra Poulain. In “Failed Collaboration,” Poulain explored the mutual dependence, violence, and the asymmetrical power distributions between the two beggars in The Cat and the Moon. She has emphasised the presence of a resistance in Yeats’s plays related to queer versions of love and relationships, which “resists the play’s drive towards unity” (2018, 234). Moreover, Poulain has argued that the spectacle of the body in pain can help make visible the otherwise invisible violence imposed on marginalised individuals by various power structures (2016, 11). It can be argued, therefore, that literary and theatrical representations of unruly relationships, disturbing attachments, and bodies in pain can help reveal the often silenced and strictly gendered histories of sexuality, nationalism, and imperialism. In addition, such representations confront audiences with images that most disturb them and compel them to readdress complex issues of morality.

Parodying Power Roles: S/M Dynamics in On Baile’s Strand (1904) The queer aspects of On Baile’s Strand have been addressed by Joseph Valente in The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture (2011). Valente acknowledges that this play is undoubtedly a masculine tragedy, yet not in the sense of asserting conventional masculinity but interrogating it, since Cuchulain3 represents a more fluid, tender, androgynous masculinity while Conchubar/Conchobar, the King of Ulster in the Ulster cycle of Irish mythology, enforces toxic masculine behaviour, a bourgeois code of value, and paterfamilias (2011, 172). What connects Cuchulain to the queer couple of The Cat and the Moon, for instance, is that he also refuses procreative love and his martial as well as marital duties: he is both “boy and man, male and female, hetero- and homosexual” (Valente 2011, 172), hence Conchubar wants to contain Cuchulain’s gender exorbitancy by his 3  Cuchulain or Cú Chulainn is a warrior hero and demigod in the Ulster cycle of Irish mythology.

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standards of manliness. In addition, Susan Harris has drawn attention to Yeats’s proposal for a more progressive, tolerant approach to gender and sexuality within Irish nationalism through this play: “Yeats suggests in On Baile’s Strand that nationalism can only become effective by giving up that masculine/feminine, public/private, political/domestic structure and accepting the more fluid model of gender represented by Cuchulain, Aoife, and the Young Man” (2002, 25). Since the focus of these studies is not explicitly sadomasochism, I explore this theme in more detail here to demonstrate the political importance of unorthodox representations of the body and power in Yeats’s drama. I focus on sadomasochism in Yeats’s drama as a parody of authority, as a fragmented non-normative “slow time,” and as an erotic “ritualised exchange of power” (Freeman 2012, 238) between two or more characters in which the pleasure is derived from the possibility of alternating power positions. In On Baile’s Strand, the playfulness and the element of surprise contribute to the S/M dynamics of the play. These are included in the Blind Man-Fool relationship and in that of Cuchulain and Conchubar, and Cuchulain and his son. The dynamics of the bond between the Blind Man and the Fool mirror the relationship between Cuchulain and Conchubar who, in the Ulster cycle of Irish mythology, is also Cuchulain’s uncle. The relationship between the Fool and the Blind Man is initially built on praise, as the Fool tells his companion: “What a clever man you are though you are blind! There’s nobody with two eyes in his head that is as clever as you are. […] I would never be able to steal anything if you didn’t tell me where to look for it. And what a good cook you are!” (VPl 459) This opening speech posits the Fool in a powerless, submissive position compared to the Blind Man who dominates their relationship. The Fool puts his hand around the Blind Man’s neck establishing visible physical intimacy which is soon accompanied by spiritual intimacy: “I’ll be praising you, I’ll be praising you while we’re eating it, for your good plans and for your good cooking. There’s nobody in the world like you, Blind Man” (VPl 461). The Blind Man’s mastery is also indicated by the fact that he is the one doing the cooking, while cooking together with their bodies constantly touching establishes a homoerotic or at least homosocial context. Strikingly, this couple enacts the scene of submission between Conchubar and Cuchulain with the Blind Man embodying Conchubar and the Fool enacting Cuchulain. This scene is also a parody of the power distribution between Conchubar and Cuchulain and thus parodies the Blind Man’s authority over the Fool, too. Yet, as Poulain has discerned, parody is both

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“an act of love and violence” (2018, 243). The identification between the Fool and Cuchulain introduces the disobedient, self-­willed side of the Fool, who crumples himself up, whines and declares: “I will not. I’ll take no oath. I want my dinner” (VPl 465). This scene works as a playful game between the two characters which allows them to shift positions of power and foreshadows the much more serious exchange between the unruly Cuchulain and Conchubar. Similar to the Lame Beggar of The Cat and the Moon, the Fool also annoys the Blind Man with his flightiness, forgetfulness, and abundance of talk, so the Blind Man repeatedly tries to silence him: “Hush, I say!” (VPl 469). The Fool admits that he cannot remember anything the Blind Man tells him: “How can I remember so many things at once? Who is going to take the oath?” (VPl 471). What is more, the Fool continuously refuses to pay attention to the story of Cuchulain’s affair with Aoife and Conchubar’s resulting anger, which the Blind Man considers much more important than dinner. The Fool’s resistance to accept the importance of this story over dinner might seem merely a comic, farcical element, but bearing in mind Halberstam’s idea that the absence of memory can point towards new ways of knowing (2011, 15), the Fool’s focus on survival might point towards those people who are on the margins of society. Poulain has emphasised this connection between farce and survival regarding The Cat and the Moon in which the beggars join forces against the normative world “to remedy their respective physical weaknesses and survive in a world where the disabled are not catered for by the community of normals” (2018, 235). But while in The Cat and the Moon the normative force of the Saint succeeds in disrupting the two beggars’ relationship, in On Baile’s Strand the Fool and the Blind Man eventually join forces after they see Cuchulain fighting the waves, as the play ends with the Blind Man offering a kind of truce to the Fool, inviting him to steal together from the ovens in Conchubar’s house. But before this happens, to shift the Fool’s attention from dinner back to his story, the Blind Man promises to tell him a secret: that Cuchulain has a son from the warrior queen Aoife. The Fool starts to become cheekier and less submissive towards his companion and talks back: “What a mix-up you make of everything, Blind Man! You were telling me one story, and now you are telling me another story […] How can I get the hang of it at the end if you mix everything at the beginning?” (VPl 473). The Fool also doubts the validity of the Blind Man’s story, brings up past grievances, and orders him to stop telling stories and focus

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on dinner instead, which is an attempt to take over control: “Maybe it was your own making up. It’s many a time you cheated me before with your lies. Come to the cooking-pot, my stomach is pinched and rusty. Would you have it to be creaking like a gate?” (VPl 473). What this play also demonstrates is the ways in which S/M dynamics can bring to surface past traumas and grievances. While Cuchulain is fighting his own son unaware of his identity, the Blind Man-Fool relationship turns violent—and surprisingly, it is the Fool who initiates physical violence: “You have eaten it, you have eaten it! You have left me nothing but the bones. [He throws Blind Man down by big chair.]” (VPl 515). They continue teasing each other which is both a source of pain and pleasure here. The Blind Man highlights the benevolence behind his act of deceit and criticises his companion for being unable to take care of himself because he lives in a different type of temporality: “O, good Fool! listen to me. Think of the care I have taken of you. I have brought you to many a warm hearth, where there was a good welcome for you, but you would not stay there; you were always wandering about” (VPl 517). But this time the Lame Beggar does not let himself be humiliated and brings about his past grievances about their relationship: “You take care of me? You stay safe, and send me into every kind of danger. You sent me down the cliff for gulls’ eggs while you warmed your blind eyes in the sun” (VPl 516). This evokes Freeman’s idea that S/M physicalises the encounter with past traumas and histories of oppression in which the parties move “back and forth between some kind of horrific then in the past and some kind of redemptive now in the present, allegedly in the service of pleasure and a freer future” (2012, 241). Similarly, Mark Thompson has called attention to the element of trauma in S/M relationships: “long-held feelings of inferiority or low self-esteem, grief and loss, familial rejection and abandonment, come to surface during S/M ritual” (Thompson 1991, xvii). When both of them start complaining to Cuchulain, the Fool is singing carelessly, having obtained more confidence and mastery, while the Blind Man is complaining to Cuchulain: “Listen to him, now. That’s the sort of talk I have to put up with day out, day in” (VPl 519). The Fool’s disobedience culminates in letting down his companion by telling Cuchulain that he heard the Blind Man reveal that Aoife only had one lover, which makes Cuchulain realise he killed his own son. But by the end of the play, Cuchulain’s fight with the sea changes the dynamics of their relationship again, and the Blind Man assumes mastery once more: “Come here, Fool!” (VPl 525), he commands three times, and the Fool eventually

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obeys—they go stealing food from Conchubar, thus joining forces to survive together. The relationship between Conchubar and Cuchulain is driven by the same shifting of agency and power. Cuchulain first appears as an authority figure equal to Conchubar, who is well aware that what troubles Conchubar is that he is not willing to be submissive: “Because I have killed men without your bidding / And have rewarded others at my own pleasure, / Because of half score of trifling things, / You’d lay this oath upon me, and now—and now /You add another pebble to the heap, / And I must be your man, well-nigh your bondsman” (VPl 477). Cuchulain’s words make it clear that Conchubar’s demand that he must take an oath of obedience is also a proposal for close companionship between the two men and a wish to integrate Cuchulain, to contain his unruly queer temperament and to make him respectable. Since Cuchulain has his own authoritative voice here, their quarrel sounds like a conflict in a romantic relationship in which one party insists on settling down and focusing on reproduction, while the other wants to maintain an uncommitted free life. Conchubar’s main concern is with respectability, family, safety, and children, as he wants “[a] strong and settled country to [his] children” (VPl 479). The sadomasochistic nature of their relationship is equally reinforced by Cuchulain’s reference to whipping: “Am I / So slack and idle that I need a whip / Before I serve you?” (VPl 479). Yet it is this resistance in Cuchulain towards Conchubar’s authority that revivifies the play and by extension their relationship, too. Cuchulain refers to the bond he shares with Conchubar despite their differences: “I do not like your children—they have no pith, / No marrow in their bones, and will lie soft / Where you and I lie hard” (VPl 481). Shortly after this, Conchubar reinforces this connection and tries to obtain control over Cuchulain by invoking their past intimacy: “I know your thoughts, / For we have slept under the one cloak and drunk / From the one wine-cup. I know you to the bone, / I have heard you cry, aye, in your very sleep, / ‘I have no son’, and with such bitterness / That I have gone upon my knees and prayed / That it might be amended” (VPl 483). This passage is about brotherhood and comradeship, but it also reveals Cuchulain’s secret anxiety over reproduction and the homosocial nature of the two men’s early relationship. In the past, they mutually revealed to each other their vulnerable sides, they prayed and cried in each other’s company and slept together. Hence Conchubar’s command that Cuchulain must take an oath of obedience almost reads as a marriage proposal here, similar to the

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Saint’s proposal to the Lame and the Blind Beggar in The Cat and the Moon. Conchubar turns once again to Cuchulain, urging him to decide: “You are but half a king and I but half; / I need your might of hand and burning heart, / And you my wisdom” (VPl 491). This reveals that even though Conchubar’s main source of annoyance is Cuchulain’s passionate nature, it is also what attracts and excites him, as he needs Cuchulain’s burning heart to complement his wisdom. When Cuchulain decides to obey, having been pressurised by the other kings, the oath ceremony appears like a marriage between the two men with older men acting as witnesses for Conchubar and younger men as witnesses for Cuchulain. The ceremony ends with Conchubar sealing their comradeship: “We are one being, as these flames are one: I give my wisdom, and I take your strength” (VPl 499), which is yet another proof that Conchubar is, in fact, excited by Cuchulain’s fierceness. Since Conchubar’s conservative code of value associates Cuchulain with physical strength, he seems to be taken aback by Cuchulain’s preference for masculine women like Aoife: “although you had loved other women, / You’d sooner that fierce woman of the camp / Bore you a son than any queen among them” (VPl 487). Cuchulain’s response is striking, as he not only criticises Conchubar’s treatment of women but through that criticism he equates himself with women, as Conchubar treats women the same way he treats Cuchulain: You call her a ‘fierce woman of the camp’, For, having lived among the spinning-wheels, You’d have no woman near and would not say, ‘Ah! how wise’ ‘What will you have for supper?’ ‘What shall I wear that I may please you, sir?’ And keep that humming through the day and night For ever. A fierce woman of the camp! But I am getting angry about nothing. (VPl 487)

This affinity between women like Aoife and Cuchulain is corroborated by Cuchulain’s use of the words “wild body” and “turbulent head” (VPl 487) referring to Aoife, which is followed by Conchubar’s lines using the same adjectives to describe Cuchulain. The association is further strengthened by the oath ceremony scene, when Cuchulain speaks his oath while the women of the Sidhe are singing. This effeminate aura around Cuchulain together with his excessive temperament and mad fight with the waves

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went against Irish nationalist expectations of manliness. The British imagined Irish men as effeminate, hysterical, and melancholy, hence Irish nationalists wanted to see virile, mentally and physically strong, hyper-­ masculine heroes without any sign of excessive behaviour. This nationalist ideal of manliness is embodied by Conchubar, whose views of women and whose tyrannical, manipulative behaviour is interrogated in On Baile’s Strand. Interestingly, Yeats modified the first part of the play for its London production in 1907—crucially, he mostly rewrote the parts concerning Cuchulain’s description of his preference for fierce, unruly women like Aoife, which can be explained with Yeats’s negative experience with London audiences in 1894, when both The Land of Heart’s Desire and John Todhunter’s A Comedy of Sighs failed due to their depiction of uncompromising, transgressive women. In the 1904 version, the Fist Young King and Cuchulain talk about the “preferable” types of women. The young king criticises womanhood embodied by Aoife, as “she was never married” (VPl 476), she was “[a] fighting woman” (VPl 476) who “mocked at love till she grew sandy dry” (VPl 476). Hence Cuchulain asks him: “What manner of woman do you like the best? A gentle or a fierce?” (VPl 476). This question establishes the tension between bourgeois society’s expectations of women as gentle, modest, respectable and women who choose another path outside of the regressive realm of social and domestic expectations. The young king replies “[a] gentle, surely” (VPl 478), but Cuchulain represents a different, non-normative attitude and proudly claims “I think that a fierce woman’s better, a woman / That breaks away when you have thought her won, / For I’d be fed and hungry at one time” (VPl 478). This dialogue was cut from the final version of the play, and Cuchulain’s praise of Aoife’s fierceness was considerably tamed down. Cuchulain’s support and preference for dissident, unconventional women can be interpreted as a kind of self-description, as Cuchulain is also criticised by the characters representing a normative bourgeois code of value because of his fierceness, excessive behaviour, and wildness. The dynamics of the Conchubar-Cuchulain relationship change with the unexpected appearance of the Young Man, whom Cuchulain finds much more interesting and attractive than his comradeship with Conchubar, hence he begins to ignore Conchubar. Even though the boy’s explicit purpose is to fight Cuchulain, this prospect of violence does not exclude intimacy between the two men. Cuchulain is attracted to him, because he recognises Aoife’s androgynous spirit in him: “Come nearer,

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boy, / For I would have another look at you. /There’s more likeness—a pale, a stone-pale cheek. […] Put up your sword; I am not mocking you. / I’d have you for my friend” (VPl 505). Then Cuchulain continues praising the boy to Conchubar in the same way as he praised Aoife earlier in the play and expresses his wish to be with the boy whose appearance will help him recall his lover: “He has got her fierceness, /And nobody is as fierce as those pale women. / But I will keep him with me, Conchubar, /That he may set my memory upon her / When the day’s fading” (VPl 505) and “His head is like a woman’s head / I had a fancy for” (VPl 508). The intimacy between Cuchulain and the Young Man is mutual, as he also claims “[t]here is no man I’d sooner have my friend/Than you, whose name has gone about the world” (VPl 507). Cuchulain is willing to reveal his vulnerable side to him, stressing how afraid he was: “O! tell her / I was afraid, or tell her what you will. / No; tell her that I heard a raven croak / On the north side of the house, and was afraid” (VPl 508). This Young Man serves as an element of surprise in Conchubar’s relationship with Cuchulain whereby Cuchulain regains dominance, which leads to a conflict between the two men, as Conchubar treats Cuchulain as his own possession: Conchubar [in a loud voice]. No more of this. I will not have this friendship. Cuchulain is my man, and I forbid it. He shall not go unfought, for I myself— Cuchulain. I will not have it. Conchubar. You lay commands on me? Cuchulain [seizing Conchubar]. You shall not stir, High King. I’ll hold you there. (VPl 512)

But this brief moment of mastery over Conchubar is followed by immediate submission, as the kings convince Cuchulain that the witches manipulated his mind, hence Cuchulain panics: “And laid my hands on the High King himself?” (VPl 512). Just like the Saint manipulated the beggar couple and pushed them towards physical violence against one another, Conchubar achieves the same rift between Cuchulain and the Young Man to his utmost pleasure: “Out, out! I say, for now sword on sword!” (VPl 513), cries Cuchulain to the Young Man. After this point, Conchubar disappears as if expecting Cuchulain’s revelation of his manipulation. When it happens, Cuchulain strikes out at Conchubar’s throne as if he was sitting there, then he goes outside fighting with the waves, believing they

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are Conchubar, but similar to the High King, “the waves have mastered him” (VPl 524). These changing positions of mastery within the play’s male same-sex relationships are crucial in S/M practices as well, as they allow all parties to experience their moment in the exalted position of masculinity and exercise some form of violence over the other person. Yet a more important question raised by S/M representations is why does anyone need to dominate and oppress others to experience the pleasure of mastery? As Bersani observes: “Everyone gets a chance to put his or her boot in someone else’s face—but why not question the value of putting on boots for that purpose in the first place?” (1996, 86). This reversibility also invokes the idea that in fact a certain exercise of power, “a degree of invasive intent” (Bersani 1996, 99) is required in any environment in order to survive; that “the exercise of power is a prerequisite for life itself” (Bersani 1996, 99). This idea is most visibly represented in the Blind Man-Fool relationship, which revolves around the mutual manipulation of the other for the sake of food, thus survival. In “Lives of Infamous Men,” Foucault mentions this phenomenon related to petitions submitted to the monarch in eighteenth-century France whereby people could avail of power against each other: “every individual could become for the other a terrible and lawless monarch: homo homini rex” (2000, 168). Even though Foucault does not relate this to sadomasochism, what he describes is characteristic of S/M relationships in which anyone can become the oppressor and the oppressed alternatingly.

“I Shall Embrace Body and Cruelty”: Desire and Power in A Full Moon in March (1935) Yeats’s move towards anti-naturalistic, total theatre techniques informed by his interest in Japanese Noh theatre from the early 1910s helped introduce pleasure and corporeality in his plays about power and violence. Eastern total theatre focuses on the body and fosters storytelling with a combination of dance, music, singing, gesture, and movement. Yeats noted how the unusual mingling of singing and violence in The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March outraged certain audience members: “I remember a famous war-correspondent saying in an aggressive voice as he left the hall, ‘singing is a decadent art’” (VPl 1009). As Paul Allain and Jen Harvie have observed regarding the Butoh

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performances of Tatsumi Hijikata, physical theatre allows the “exploration of the more emotionally painful and suppressed aspects of the human psyche, including sadomasochistic sexuality and homoeroticism” (2014, 57). In fact, Yeats’s late drama bears striking similarity to what Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata named as Butoh in 1959: a dark style of performance focusing on corporeality, combining Eastern (mostly Japanese) and Western theatrical conventions, including inspirations from Jean Genet’s and Antonin Artaud’s theatre. As Yeats explained, The King of the Great Clock Tower is the first version of A Full Moon in March with the latter being “a quite different verse play on the same theme, the woman dancing with a severed head” (Yeats 2002, CL InteLex 6143). By giving the Queen a speaking part and authority, Yeats rendered a more sadomasochistic undertone to A Full Moon in March in which a woman and a Swineherd both perform powerful authority figures. What is more, Yeats delays the execution in this version whereby the Queen lets the Swineherd provoke her for a long time as if enjoying it, whereas in The King of the Great Clock Tower the King kills the Stroller after his first acts of defiance. These two plays might also echo the infamously turbulent relationship between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in which “[t]he potential for intricate scenarios of sadomasochism was considerable” (Cave 2006, 213). However, among the two plays, S/M is much more central to A Full Moon in March by making the passive Queen of the first version an authoritative matriarch, while The King of the Great Clock Tower is more about the tension between the authority of the King and two oppressed bodies who join forces against him in dance, hence I focus only on A Full Moon in March in this section.4 The Swineherd in A Full Moon in March comes from the margins of society to challenge the Queen’s authority and seduce power, which he begins by exclaiming: “I shall embrace body and cruelty, / Desiring both as though I had made both” (VPl 983). In the earlier version of the script, the Queen’s reply was an acceptance of this erotic power game: “You cannot help but yield to such desire” (VPl 983). Crucially, the Swineherd’s lines identify the double-desire that marks this play: sexual desire and the desire for power over the other.  For an in-depth analysis of modernist dance in The King of the Great Clock Tower, see Megan Girdwood’s monograph Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome’s Dance after 1890 (2021). 4

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The play’s surprise element lies in the Swineherd’s restraint and defiance: he refuses to praise the Queen’s beauty, to sing when the Queen demands it, and rejects submission towards her authority. According to Dolan, this restraint is part of the symbols of pain in S/M relationships (1993, 182), which can in turn generate excitement. The Queen is visibly bored at the beginning of the play: “Some man has come, some terrifying man, / For I have yawned and stretched myself three times” (VPl 980). What differentiates her authority from The King of the Great Clock Tower’s patriarch is that for her pleasure is more important than truth and production. She merges the realm of power with pleasure: “I and my heart decide. We say that song is best that moves us most. No song has moved us yet” (VPl 981). Even though the Swineherd admits he comes from the margins of society and wonders if disabled people can succeed as well (“But what if some blind aged cripple sing / Better than wholesome men?” (VPl 981)), the Queen allows him to participate regardless of his background or bodily ability. Strikingly, he speaks to the Queen as her equal and expresses his wish to obtain power: “And they say / The kingdom is added to the gift” (VPl 980). He uses imperative mode and enjoins the Queen to observe his body carefully: “Queen, look at me, look long at those foul rags, / At hair more foul and ragged than my rags; / Look on my scratched foul flesh” (VPl 981). This is also an attempt to direct power’s attention to the truth of marginalised bodies manifested through the pain of the flesh, thus claiming visibility. The Swineherd’s attempt to dominate the conversation enrages the Queen, hence she delivers a verbal power demonstration: Remember through what perils you have come; That I am crueller than solitude, Forest or beast. Some I have killed or maimed Because their singing put me in a rage, And some because they came at all. Men hold That woman’s beauty is a kindly thing, But they that call me cruel speak the truth, Cruel as the Winter of Virginity. But for a reason I cannot guess I would not harm you. Go before I change. Why do you stand, your chin upon your breast? (VPl 982)

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While these lines serve as a power demonstration, they also express the Queen’s sympathy for the Swineherd: she is both authoritarian and nurturing. But instead of giving up, the Swineherd depicts their marriage night, positing himself in a position of mastery: “What gives you that strange confidence? What makes / You think that you can move my heart and me?” (VPl 982). The Swineherd’s answer implies that the Queen has no power over him at all: “Because I look upon you without fear” (VPl 982). This confidence is both enraging and attractive for the Queen who, instead of sending him away, demands him to praise her in a song. Yet to her surprise, the man who has come to seduce her, still refuses to do so: “I tended swine, when I first heard your name. / I rolled among the dung of swine and laughed. /What do I know of beauty?” (VPl 983). She demands once again: “Sing the best / And you are not swineherd, but a king” (VPl 983). The Swineherd ignores both the Queen’s body and the prospect of power, even though he claimed to come for both: “[Snapping his fingers] That for kingdoms!” (VPl 983). This is a “show of rejection” (Benvenuto 2016, 61) which is in fact “a mise-en-scène directed by the masochist himself” (2016, 61) aimed at provoking his own humiliation and through that the humiliation of the other. It is, in fact, this shared defeat of the other that causes mutual pleasure as the final erotic dance scene shall demonstrate. The more defiant the Swineherd becomes, the more attraction the Queen expresses towards him, so instead of punishing him, she promises him her own power: “I leave this corridor, this ancient house, / A famous throne, the reverence of servants—/ What do I gain?” (VPl 983). Both characters appear as masochists, longing to experience pain and humiliation. Even though the Queen leaves the throne which seems like an act of submission, she suddenly regains her mastery and threatens to punish him: “he came hither not to sing but to heap/Complexities of insult upon my head” (VPl 984). Even when he offers the expected song, he implies that whatever he sings about her beauty is nonsense: “But first my song—what nonsense shall I sing?” (VPl 984). The Swineherd continues to play with power, goes up stage and asks defiantly: “Why should I ask? / What do those features matter?” (VPl 984). With his confidence, defiance and free movement on stage, the Swineherd makes the Queen’s power and space his own, ridiculing her authority. He laughs at her and brings up an enigmatic, violent story from the past about a woman who bathed in blood, “the blood begat” (VPl 985) and she conceived a child in her sleep. This makes the Queen drop her veil which seems like an act of submission, but

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this is when the Swineherd is beheaded offstage. The Swineherd dares the Queen to hurt him, but with this, he punishes the Queen, which recalls Benvenuto’s idea that “masochism is a form of protest against the other. […] Masochism is actually a ‘do it yourself’ way of punishing the other” (2016, 61). The Swineherd’s mastery over his own passivity—his persistent disobedience—becomes a way of mastering authority: “As in the case of an artist who creates a representation of his own failure, it is in the active representation of the masochist’s abjection that his mastery prevails” (Benvenuto 2016, 64). The surprise element of their relationship continues when the Swineherd’s head begins to sing after the beheading. The Queen symbolically conveys authority to the Head by lifting it above her head while dancing, then laying it upon her throne and expressing regret for her “virgin cruelty” (VPl 987): “I did you wrong” (VPl 987). The sadomasochistic dynamics go on, as the Queen enjoins the Head to sing specifically for her: “She is waiting for his song” (VPl 988), but what she receives is laughter as the Second Attendant laughs as Head. When the Head eventually sings, the song itself suggests a mixture of violence and desire: “Jill murdered Jack. / Jack had a hollow heart, for Jill / Had hung his heart on high” (VPl 988). The Queen starts dancing to the song, moving away from the Head, “alluring and refusing” (VPl 988) as if enacting the S/M dynamics of their relationship. She begins laughing and singing, emulating the Swineherd, but the Second Attendant does not understand how violence and love can coexist like this: “She is laughing. How can she laugh, / Loving the head?” (VPl 988). The final phase of the dance reads as a consummation of this violent relationship marked by restraint and attraction: she presses her lips on the lips of the head, her body shivers to very rapid drum taps, then the drum taps cease, and she sinks slowly down holding the head to her breast. What happens here is an eroticisation of unpleasant experiences—the insults of the Swineherd and the traumatic story he brought up before his death—which Benvenuto has identified as one of the main traits of masochism which “is also a strategy for deriving pleasure from something that was once extremely unpleasant” (2016, 64). This play thus demonstrates that the reversibility of normative distributions of power imbued with pleasure, violence, and playfulness is one of the central tropes of Yeats’s late drama. By staging bodies that access the pleasures and truths of the flesh through pain, “theatre can present the explicit danger of the visual and, in the extreme discomfort prompted by looking, force people to define the morality that keeps them from seeing”

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(Dolan 1993, 186). Yeats’s drama achieves this by representing disturbing, erotic-violent bonds which would otherwise be denied visibility. Crucially, Yeats’s play equally challenges the strictly gendered nature of sadomasochistic relationships in which women are always associated with powerless, passive, and submissive roles. In contrast, this play makes conventional gender roles and power positions fluid and fluctuating, as both a woman and a male character from the margins of society alternatingly assume positions of sadistic agency and seemingly powerless yet immensely potent, manipulative masochism.

A Queer Martyr: Sadomasochistic Power Plays in Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911) “This play puts on stage and distorts, under the most improper conditions, the story of one of our most glorious martyrs. The character of Saint Sebastian is taken in this play by a woman! A dancer!! And a Jewish dancer!!! which does not prevent D’Annunzio from claiming: ‘We confirm on our part that this profoundly religious (!) work is the lyrical glorification of not only Christ’s admirable athlete but of the entire Christian heroism.’” —La Semaine Catholique (quoted in Granatella 1993, 792)

Whereas power always presents itself as immortal, irreversible, and exempt from sexual desire (Baudrillard 2001, 46), in sadomasochistic relations, power appears as fluid, reversible, mortal, and deeply erotic. The power game between characters in Le Martyre is reversible and works as “an erotic dialectic between two or more people that ostensibly focuses on the ritualized exchange of power” (Freeman 2012, 238). Even though sadomasochism is often seen as a formation that places men on the dominant sadistic side, while situates women on the submissive, masochistic side, Le Martyre subverts this tradition by casting a woman as Sebastian whose masochism becomes a form mastery over the emperor Diocletian. Masochism thus becomes a form of sadism in D’Annunzio in which “the roles are ironically inverted” (Benvenuto 2016, 61). The excerpt from La Semaine Catholique that introduces this section illustrates the outraged reaction of French Catholics to the performance of D’Annunzio’s Saint Sebastian by Rubinstein. Hartford has observed that before D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre there was no queer Sebastian in literature, only in the visual arts (2018, 45). D’Annunzio therefore created the first queer Sebastian not only on the stage but in literature too by using

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the biblical framework and references to Greek and Roman gods associated with homosexuality or bisexuality. Hartford is the first scholar who stresses that this play’s queerness works on more than one level: “Its subtlety lies in its weaving of numerous queer signs of different order around Sebastian, associating them with him without actually ascribing them to him” (2018, 45–46). Moreover, Hartford discusses D’Annunzio’s ambiguous motifs in the play which can be read both as signs of homoerotic content and as elements of a deeply religious piece, such as the smell of lilies which is present throughout the play. The lily is mentioned in the Bible and can be seen as a sign of Sebastian’s purity, yet the lily was also the emblem of decadents associated with homosexuality: “Queering uncertainty here is reinforced by the always-existing possibility of viewing the lily simply as a token of Sebastian’s purity, itself bolstered by his devotion to the Light of the World. Symbolically and religiously speaking, the result is deliberately, provocatively confusing and open: queer” (Hartford 2018, 47). Sebastian’s longing for Christ works in similarly ambiguous ways both as a sign of faith and an insatiable sexual desire, as this play turns the Passion of Christ into erotic and homoerotic dance scenes. My analysis moves along the lines of Hartford’s ideas but offers a more detailed dramaturgical reading of the queer potentials of the script and the sadomasochistic erotic power games between Sebastian and Emperor Diocletian. Their relationship is built on a seemingly unchangeable hierarchy, yet seduction and desire eventually make power reversible. The play’s ambiguous mysticism helped D’Annunzio combine eroticism with violence and pain in a context which could be read as both religious and profoundly homoerotic. As in the case of Phaedra, what Le Martyre offended was public morality, hence La Semaine Catholique claimed that “[i]t is impossible not to see in this scandalous representation one of these attempts to corrupt the public spirit and morality which the judeo-masonic sect does not cease to pursue by all means” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 712). Parallel to this contempt for sexual and gender ambiguity, there was an obsession with androgyny in late nineteenth-century French culture, and artists often employed androgyny as a way of “destabilizing normative representations of masculinity” (Eribon 2004, 172). Eribon considers androgyny as one of the attempts “to assert a sexual ‘difference’ that ran against established norms, and there were attempts to claim that homosexuality in fact represented the most perfect realization of masculinity or of moral duty” (2004, 204). In fact, this is exactly what D’Annunzio’s

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play suggests by queering a Christian martyr with the help of Rubinstein and situating the character in an undoubtedly homoerotic relationship with Diocletian. While the nineteenth century looked at the androgyne as a symbol of unity and harmony of the sexes, in the twentieth century, its perception changed significantly. As Mosse explicates, “[t]he androgyne as utopian ideal was replaced by a quite different, frighteningly real image. The new fear of androgyne was projected onto woman” (1985, 103). Although “the androgyne as a biological monster was allowed no happy ending” (Mosse 1985, 104), D’Annunzio’s androgynous Sebastian clearly acts as the hero of this play whose self-sacrifice is presented as a happy ending and as a triumphant moment for this character. The theme of sadomasochism already appeared in D’Annunzio’s works at the end of the nineteenth century. D’Annunzio was obsessed with the fantasy of Liebestod (Love Death) which is manifested in the recurring and complex relationship between love, sex, attraction, pain, illness, and death in his works and his life, too. D’Annunzio had referred to the fantasy of Liebestod in a letter to his lover Giselda Zucconi before he even started writing his first novel featuring sadomasochism The Triumph of Death (Il Trionfo della Morte, 1894): “If you were here now, […] we would kill each other…don’t you feel all the tragic terror of this passion?” (quoted in Hughes-Hallett 2013, 109). The novel’s protagonist is Giorgio Aurispa, an aesthete living in Rome. His unhappily married lover Ippolita Sanzio becomes entangled in Aurispa’s increasingly morbid fantasies and obsessions. The novel starts with a suicide witnessed by the couple at Pincian Hill which is, ironically, one of the most romantic places in Rome, yet a woman jumped to her death there. When they leave the scene, Aurispa comments that the dead are blessed, because they do not doubt anymore, which signals a recurring theme in D’Annunzio: death as liberation and/ or escape from societal constraints. To escape the memory of this traumatic event, Aurispa travels to the countryside, to her mother’s home in a small village, yet he becomes even more haunted by images of death and pain through popular superstitions, the suicide committed by his beloved uncle, and the realisation that his father had spent the entire family fortune, which eventually pushed his family into poverty. These memories force him to escape his family home and run to the sea in Venice, which is where Ippolita joins him. Venice is also where sexual desire becomes entangled with morbid thoughts and pain, as he both feels deeply connected to Ippolita and at the same time he is repelled by her. As Marja Härmänmaa has explained, Aurispa starts

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regarding her as a burden, a mere sexual being, a source of pleasure as well as ruin and death (2014, 280). To escape these mixed feelings of pleasure and pain, he decides to kill both himself and Ippolita. However, Ippolita does not want to die, hence there is “a brutal and savage struggle [between them] that concludes when Giorgio throws the woman, together with himself, over a precipice” (Härmänmaa 2014, 280). This signals yet another recurring theme is D’Annunzio works, including his drama, too: men in existential crisis, who cannot deal with their emotions, desires, and traumas, hence they project their anger and frustration onto women in the form of verbal and physical violence. This is most evident in The Dead City, but in terms of savage and brutal struggle, La Pisanelle will evoke the S/M aspects of The Triumph of Death, while the complex entanglement of desire, pain, and death drive is what dominates the actions in Le Martyre. What further connects The Triumph of Death to Le Martyre is that descriptions of bodies in pain are presented as signs of sexual pleasure and orgasm. As Härmänmaa has discerned, the illness and pale appearance of Elena Muti in Pleasure (Il Piacere, 1889), Giuliana Hermil in The Innocent (L’Innocente, 1892), and that of Ippolita in The Triumph of Death “are described as though they were the signs of sexual rapture” (2014, 164). The exact same motif appears at the end of Le Martyre as well, when the arrows injuring his body put Sebastian in an ecstatic state, conveying sexual pleasure through pain. The production history of Le Martyre also demonstrates the queerness of this piece, as during rehearsals and performances, the boundaries between on- and offstage were blurred for Rubinstein and D’Annunzio. According to Halberstam, the blurring of the realms of on- and offstage is a characteristic of queer performance, and it happened in 1913 as well when Nijinsky performed The Rite of Spring in Paris (2020, 53). These examples illustrate that a performance can be made queer by the contexts in which it is created and by the actors who perform it. The Rite of Spring emerged from the same cultural contexts as Le Martyre, hence Halberstam’s idea that the queerness of The Rite of Spring “should be considered then alongside the emergent ‘gay’ communities out of which both the ballet and the music emerged” (2020, 58) is relevant for Le Martyre, too. While The Rite of Spring was the culmination of the intimate collaboration between three queer men (Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Igor Stravinsky), Le Martyre was the end result of the queer love triangle between Rubinstein, the painter Romaine Brooks and D’Annunzio, along

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with D’Annunzio’s close friendship with composer Claude Debussy, costume designer Léon Bakst, and choreographer Mikhail Fokine. The 1911 production of Le Martyre in Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris was part of D’Annunzio’s attempt to realise his dream theatre: namely a Théâtre de Fête which would have been built in the Esplanade des Invalides in Paris with the help of Mariano Fortuny and Countess Béarn’s private theatre. As Chomel explains, the play was informed by the internationalism of Paris, the avant-garde, and the liberating quality of the French language compared to D’Annunzio’s mother tongue (1997, 183). What is more, Rubinstein did not only become the first female Christian hero on the stage, but she also controlled the production, as she financed every aspect of the performance. The play was written in French between 1910 and 1911 for Rubinstein and was presented to a bourgeois public. The incidental music was written by Claude Debussy for orchestra and chorus with solo vocal parts, and the performance involved 150 musicians, 80 chorus members, and 70 actors. D’Annunzio’s former composer Ildebrando Pizzetti noted that the music written by Debussy for the piece helped stress the sense of anxiety and discomfort of the characters through its mysticism inspired by Maeterlinck: Debussy “intoned softly and exquisitely the hectic, fearful and disconsolate mysticism of Maurice Maeterlinck” (quoted in Antonucci 1995:3, 2–3). Léon Bakst made the set designs and the costumes; Mikhail Fokine created the choreography, and Armand Bour the stage direction. As Chomel has observed, the relative success of the play was thanks to the fact that it was put together by artists whose fame was already established in Paris (1997, 184). Besides the international aspects of the production, the narrative itself combined elements from different periods and cultures: Roman, Greek, Christian, medieval references. Debussy’s music equally made use of global sources from different time periods, while Bakst’s stage designs were highly eclectic and in the midst of all this, Rubinstein was miming, singing, and dancing. Thus, the entire production and the play text itself resisted homogeneity and celebrated the intersection of cultures and various forms of otherness. Since the play was written in a period of creative frenzy thanks to D’Annunzio’s stay in Paris, it was the first in which he managed to realise total theatre. D’Annunzio based the dramatic expression on dance and gesture for the first time: “Liberated from the narrative module, D’Annunzio indulges in the verbal melody which mingles with the musical notes, while the tenuous thread that keeps the action together is entrusted to the visual impact of the scenography and to the dance”

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(Chomel 1997, 185). Despite the excellence of the artists involved, the play’s first production in 1911 brought less success than it had been anticipated, as the play put the audience in huge discomfort, testing their patience with the slowness of the development and the five-hour duration of the performance. Another problem was Rubinstein in the role of a Christian saint presented to a bourgeois public whose standards of morality were offended by the queerness of the main character.5 D’Annunzio used the frameworks of Christianity as well as ancient Greece and Rome to confront the audiences with same-sex and sadomasochistic desires. The persecution of Christians, for instance, works here as a metaphor for the persecution of homosexuals. D’Annunzio portrayed Sebastian as someone who uses his authority to protect people who are different like himself, and the play employs Christians as a synonym for people whose identity is different from the normative one. The play thus also blurs the line between mystical love, heterosexual love, and homosexual desire. As Chomel observes “the saint embodied by a woman represents plastically the union of the two sexes in a spectacle that plays with ambiguity. Ambiguity between eroticism and mysticism, between sacred and profane, between divine love and sensual love, between Adonis and Adonaï” (1997, 193–194). Sebastian is thus both a de-sexualised saint, an emissary of God and at the same time an irresistible seductive force associated with Adonis and Orpheus. The play consists of a prologue and five mansions, and it is set in ancient Rome. The setting bears resemblance to the political atmosphere of D’Annunzio’s life and his own personal situation, namely his defiance of political authorities, his interest in non-normative forms of sexuality and occult practices: “all driven by mystical aspirations, religious desecration, contaminations, perversions, Angelism and Satanism” (Chomel 1997, 192). The action refers to an event that happened at the end of the III. Century D. C. during Diocletian’s and Massimiano’s rules: the martyrdom of a Christian saint, head of the imperial army, who chooses death because of his militant faith. However, my contention here is that Sebastian finds liberation in death as a way of escaping the totalising power and suffocating love of the emperor who wants to contain and possess him both in terms of power and sexual desire. 5  For more information on how this production revealed cultural anxieties see Charles R.  Batson’s monograph Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theatre: Playing Identities (2016).

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The prologue is delivered by a Nuncius (messenger) who addresses the audience in the name of God: he tells them to sit through the play as if they were at mass and promises them that they will witness the sacred suffering of an adolescent martyr who attains eternal youth through his blood sacrifice. But after this, the messenger begins using the words “infinite love,” “desire,” and “body” and compares the story that is coming to the tears that Christ cried over Lazarus. The love between Christ and Lazarus features in the subtext throughout the play like in Yeats’s Calvary, which is relevant because Sebastian’s story here evokes Christ’s Passion both in the sense of crucifixion/death/resurrection and in the sense of sexual desire. Jione Havea in “Lazarus Troubles” offers a queer reading of the relationship between Lazarus and Jesus starting out from an excerpt from the Secret Gospel of Mark whose authenticity is questioned by many scholars, but the queerness of its description of Lazarus and Jesus is nonetheless remarkable: “And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God” (quoted in Havea 2011, 157). Besides the Christ-­ Lazarus relationship in the subtext, there are five same-sex bonds that evolve through the five mansions: that of the two brothers Marco and Marcellino; then Sebastian’s love for Christ contrasted with Diocletian’s desire for Sebastian; the bond between Sebastian and his archers; and there is much intimacy between Ida-as-Sebastian and the character of the Enfevered Woman. The first mansion revolves around the twins Marco and Marcellino who are about to sacrifice their lives for their different beliefs. They are tied to two pillars facing each other and their song about brotherly love begins the play accompanied by Claude Debussy’s music: “Brother, and what will become of the world / relieved from our love?” Crucially, their song was performed by two contralti: contralto is a classical female singing voice, thus this scene associated the brothers with femininity and introduced “homosexual innuendoes” (Hartford 2018, 46) into their lines. Moreover, this mansion draws attention to the strategies of totalising systems which do not tolerate difference and dissidence, as the representative of normative authority (the Prefect) is imposing verbal and physical violence on two marginalised individuals here, whose bodies are in a precarious position. Just like in D’Annunzio’s Phaedra, death appears here as the only way to escape the violence and judgements of a normative, authoritarian society, hence Marco exclaims: “Death is life” (1995: 3, 114).

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The Prefect is forcing the twins to withdraw their belief in God and obey, but even on the edge of death sentence, they persevere and disobey. This refusal of obedience pervading the play makes it a hymn of dissidence which is part of its queer dramaturgy, as in the case of Yeats’s Calvary. Marco tells the Prefect: “No, judge. For the living God, no, I do not want to obey” (110). But the Prefect exclaims he is delirious and should not speak in the name of his brother: “One we are. Look. We are one face, one gaze, one song, one love. We are a heart hardened seven times more” (110). Marco calls himself the athlete of Christ which establishes a connection between his figure and Sebastian’s. The stage direction states that Sebastian is still watching the twins in rapture and melancholy, which brings in a constant queer gaze in the spectacle. Sebastian’s ecstasy at the sight of the two boys is so great that he forgets about his bow, hurts himself, and starts bleeding. This moment expresses Sebastian’s sympathy for the two martyrs and signals that he belongs to them, even though he is in the service of the Roman Empire which imposes violence on them. This moment introduces Sebastian’s close bond with his archers who, seeing him in pain, start admiring him: “Pain makes you stronger. We love you, sir, we love you. Leader with beautiful hair, your archers love you. Your archers love you. You are beautiful. You are beautiful like Adonis” (112). The crowd tells that during this scene, they sense an intense odour of lilies, which invites ambiguous interpretations and can be a sign of Sebastian’s chastity/purity as well as his ardent sexual desires. This scene does not only create a clear bond between the twins and Sebastian, but it also establishes a queer alliance between them and challenges hegemonic ideas of manliness. When the mother of the twins appears, she compares the silent Marcellino to his sisters: “O Marcellino, you are sweet. You have been the sister of your sisters” (114). Marcellino claims he wants to die instead of being forced to renounce his faith, but then he loses sight of his brother’s face and begins weeping. The Prefect is about to use this moment to force them to obey, but all of a sudden Sebastian raises his voice for the first time in the play: “Here, suddenly, Sebastian breaks his vigilant immobility. And the unexpected sound of his voice strikes the people with amazement and fear” (121). But to the crowd’s surprise, he encourages the boys’ resistance and makes them strong in their dissidence again. This establishes a moment of queer alliance to which the crowd responds immediately, as Sebastian should serve the Roman Empire as Head of Archers instead of encouraging disobedience to it: “Sebastian, Sebastian, what lunacy, what kind of rage takes hold

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of you? The head of archers, friend of Augustus, is unfaithful to his lord” (121). There is still a strong smell of lilies, and the stage direction claims how proudly Sebastian stands the insults: “Sebastian remains upright and firm, without responding” (122). It is notable that to express the fact that Sebastian is standing tall and proud even when he is being insulted, the Italian text uses the word “eretto,” that is “erect,” which further intensifies the sexual tension between male characters in the play, as Sebastian is “erect” while looking at Marco and Marcellino. In the meantime, the crowd’s anger increases: “O Leader, o Leader, you have betrayed us, you have betrayed us” (126). Strikingly, Sebastian is referred to as Leader (Duce) by his archers, thus the audience saw a woman dressed up as a man on the stage playing a dissident Christian, signing in a soprano voice, referred to as Duce. The play’s physicality significantly increases after Sebastian’s dissent becomes apparent. When Sebastian takes up his bow and arrow, stretches the bow with all his force shooting the arrow towards the sky, it does not fall back, hence he exclaims: “And now I disarm myself! I am surely the Archer of the Sign!” (131). He orders his archers to undress him and leave his legs and feet completely naked. Half-naked, he begins a rapturous dance, and commands the twins to start singing with him: “Brothers, what would become of the world relieved from our love?” (133). The musical instruments intone the dance with a so-called titanic gasping to which the boys begin singing. His half-naked body was thus moving to the contralto voice of two boys and instruments imitating the sound of gasping bodies, making it a highly sexual as well as homoerotic dance. Sebastian languishes like in an ionic dance, but suddenly he turns his head like a warrior, and the dance is described as a pyrrhic dance. Ionic dance is usually highly voluptuous, sexually loaded, which explains why this dance scene caused the biggest outrage in more conservative and Catholic theatre critics and audiences. Also, as Laura McClure explains, in ancient Greece, “[a]s foreigners and exotics, courtesans performed Ionic dances, ‘notorious for their softness and lasciviousness’” (2003, 121). Pyrrhic dance also originates from ancient Greece, but it was an armed, war dance, and its name comes from “Pyrrhos,” meaning funeral pyre (Goulaki-Voutira 1996, 3). Strikingly, it was Achilles “who first performed this dance next to the funeral pyre of his dead friend [and life-long companion and lover], Patroclus” (Goulaki-Voutira 1996, 3), thus this scene carries an extra layer

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of homoeroticism through its coded reference to the widely acknowledged homoerotic bond between Achilles and Patroclus. The second mansion abounds in female characters and the figure of the Enfevered Woman appears for the first time. Seven female magicians begin this mansion singing and praising Sebastian, therefore in the show women were admiring a female leader. Here Sebastian appears like a Christ-like figure, as he tries to prove that he can heal people and perform miracles, but they do not believe him. In his despair, he depicts the miracle of Christ bringing Lazarus back to life, and the stage direction states that his voice made visible this scene of marvel which terrified the crowd. Moreover, this mansion includes intimacy between Sebastian and the Enfevered Woman who asks him if “[i]t is maybe shameful that [her] life is burning for the love of Love?” (151). Sebastian sees the emissary of Christ in this woman (Chomel 1997, 186), thus his approach to her involves much tenderness. Sebastian slowly approaches her, looks at her and talks to her tenderly, whispering so as not to wake her up. Crucially, she begins to talk about the bond between Christ and Lazarus in her dream, focusing on the way Christ looked at Lazarus, waiting for him to give signs of life. But when Christ said “Lazarus, come out,” he did not answer—instead, he turned towards Christ and both of them began crying while looking at each other. Sebastian does not understand many of her mysterious references, which, he says, are not in the Book, and then he touches her wrists to wake her up. The stage directions make it clear that they are touching for a long time in this scene, then they start singing together about love. The third mansion centres on the sadomasochistic relationship between Diocletian and Sebastian. This mansion exemplifies what Bersani has defined as the most radical trait of S/M: the idea that human beings may be willing to give up control over their environment for the sake of sexual pleasure (1996, 95). Chomel has noted the importance of reversibility in this part of the play: “The situation is reversed almost as evidence that the erotic/mystic relationship between the victim and the executioner is reversible” (1997, 189). Even though it is Diocletian who orders the execution of Sebastian, he is more a victim than Sebastian, since Diocletian loses what he wants, while Sebastian achieves what he has been longing for (death and nearness to Christ), thus desire makes power reversible here. The crowd is praising Diocletian and asks him to liberate them from the Christians, but instead of listening to them, Diocletian begins confessing his love to Sebastian. He does so five times, offering all his love and power to Sebastian if he renounces his faith: “Hail, beautiful youth! … I greet

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you, leader of the cohort of Émesa, whom Apollo loves …. For my glory, Sebastian, I love you too” (162) and “I wish to crown you in front of all the gods” (162). But Sebastian responds, “Caesar, I already have my crown” (162). With this statement, Sebastian sets himself up as a firm counter-power to the emperor’s political authority in the narrative. Sebastian’s authoritative voice and refusal of submission and humbleness in front of power both enrage and excite Diocletian, hence he continues: You are too beautiful. And it is right that you be crowned before all the gods. If you have dreams, I don’t want to know about them. I love you. You are dear to me. Tell me, haven’t I given you honours, benefits, adornments, beautiful weapons and glorious hours? […] And I always turned my sweetest face towards you. (162–163)

The emperor’s lines recall what Newmahr has defined as “benevolent dictatorship” (2011, 110) strategy in sadomasochistic games, when the party performing the role of power presents his/her authoritarianism and cruelty as nurturing. Since Sebastian acknowledges the emperor’s kindness to him (“You were generous to me, my lord” (163)), the emperor feels entitled to touch Sebastian’s shoulder which is both a power demonstration and a physical expression of desire. However, Sebastian insists that he has chosen his god and does not need anything from the emperor, which makes Diocletian furious. He laughs at Sebastian, but then looks at him with awe again: “He is too beautiful! I want you to sing, to sing your last song, like the hyperborean swan …. This is what I want. Obey” (165). Yet Sebastian claims firmly that “I am my own sacrificer. I tell you this” (166). This is a refusal of domination: Sebastian claims control over his body and death, and he is willing to sacrifice himself for himself alone similar to the character of Fedra. Just like the Swineherd refused to sing to the Queen in A Full Moon in March, Sebastian refuses to sing to the emperor because his lips are too heavy with love for Christ, which makes the emperor jealous. Sebastian eventually offers him a dance, and commands him to watch it and listen carefully without trembling. Diocletian perceives this dance as a sign of Sebastian’s submission to him, yet it only serves to mock power by demonstrating how power can be weakened through seduction. As he takes pleasure in Sebastian’s erotic movements, Diocletian is willing to give him all his power just to experience this erotic stimulation. According to the stage direction, the emperor is becoming intoxicated with every

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single gesture of him, and the music begins to possess and bend Sebastian’s body: he remains in a curved and reversed position, motionless, then rises again and transfigures, and his voice is transmuted by the flame of his profound heart. In this moment, Sebastian proudly exclaims: “Have you seen the One I love? Have you seen?” (167), as he has a vision of Christ while dancing, but Diocletian misunderstands him and assumes he is the one Sebastian loves. Diocletian calls him the Prince of Youth and describes his body as ambiguous. This is a dance of dissidence, love, and sorrow, which are all relevant to queer dramaturgies and queer dance: the sorrowful queer body physicalises pain and desire here. As a result of his dance, Sebastian suddenly sees the object of his love: he has a vision of Christ descending from the Golgotha at the end of the dance which appears as an orgasm, especially because the text uses the adjective “erect” several times. In his amorous vision, Sebastian accepts the emperor’s offer, and his hand reaches towards Diocletian. The two men are holding hands on stage, but Sebastian suddenly cries out “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, to me! Help, my Lord! Save me, my force, my flame, my King!” (172). In his frenzy, he throws away and breaks the symbols of power he is holding in his hands and curses the emperor, hence he is immediately sentenced to death. But the emperor forbids everyone to touch his body, considering Sebastian as his possession only. Maurice Galerno from Le Monde Orphéonique highlighted this scene of Sebastian’s refusal of political authority: “The emperor loves Sebastian for his great beauty. And he wants to crown this beauty with jewels and glory. He is ready to forgive him. […] But Sebastian chose the only God. […] The Saint with an enormous cry, as if coming out of a turbid nightmare, throws Victory at the emperor’s feet and curses it” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 797). Yet even this review failed to recognise or at least refer to the sexual nature of Sebastian’s longing for Christ, which is so prevalent in the above-described scene. Sebastian claims that his body is one with Christ just like Marco claimed he was one with his brother: “I and Christ are One. I open my arms. We are One” (173). Diocletian once again leans towards him to tell him that he can still change his mind and can be a god, but Sebastian exclaims that for him only Christ reigns. He is sentenced to death, and the chorus sings: “Oh Eros! Cry!” (173), which indicates that the figure of Sebastian in this play embodies sexual desire itself which power wants to contain and abuse. Yet Sebastian denies Diocletian this pleasure, as death means closeness to his object of desire (Christ), and he seems to enjoy being killed by the men

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he is fond of so much (his archers). This masochistic acceptance of death is also a way of punishing Diocletian: [I]nasmuch as he cannot avoid being the target of violence, the masochist prefers to inflict it upon himself—and in this manner extract a kind of desperate pride. This self-destructive behaviour is enjoyable because, through the act of attacking himself as his own sadistic object, he is able to participate in the sadistic enjoyment of the person abusing him. (Benvenuto 2016, 63)

More interestingly, Diocletian’s willingness to give up everything for Sebastian and Sebastian’s refusal of his totalising love reflect what happened between Rubinstein and Romaine Brooks at the time. As Vicki Woolf explains: “Ida wanted to give her life to Romaine completely. She was willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of Romaine’s love: her career, her fortune, her house, her past, her future” (2000, 89), but “[t]o Romaine this passion was daunting. It was this strength of commitment which Romaine found too overbearing: ‘I can’t be loved like that’” (2000, 90). To complicate things, after refusing Ida’s love, Romaine engaged in her one and only heterosexual relationship with D’Annunzio but with inverted roles, as Romaine was the pursuer in this short-lived and one-­ sided relationship. This might offer an interesting queer biographical background to the plays written for Rubinstein, even though biography is not my focus here. It is nonetheless interesting that a lesbian artist who had only desired women, suddenly desired D’Annunzio and that he became the third party in such a famous queer love triangle. As Hughes-­ Hallett has viewed their complex relationship, “[w]ith D’Annunzio they make up a perverse androgynous trio, three incestuous ‘brothers’” (2013, 330). Within Hughes-Hallett’s brilliant and impressively rich, meticulous biography of D’Annunzio, I find this statement problematic. First, this love triangle was based on mutual consent and desire. Neither their androgynous appearance, nor their polyamorous romance deserve to be labelled as “perverse,” especially because this term has extremely negative connotations even today. Secondly, it is well-known that D’Annunzio and Rubinstein referred to each other as brothers in their correspondence, but Rubinstein, Brooks, and D’Annunzio were not in any way related, therefore the adjective “incestuous” is not appropriate and it risks further insinuating the “perversity” of this love triangle, which it was not. The fourth mansion of Le Martyre equally conveys sadomasochistic undertones, but the emphasis here is on Sebastian’s erotic enjoyment of pain rather than his torturers’ enjoyment of power over him. Hughes-­ Hallett briefly mentions both the homoerotic and the sadomasochistic

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elements regarding Le Martyre. She describes the figure of Sebastian as a “victim-hero of so many gay male fantasies” (2013, 160) and adds that Sebastian was “[p]robably not an active homosexual then, but certainly a sadomasochist” (2013, 160). While I agree with these statements, I wish to add that in D’Annunzio’s play, Sebastian’s character clearly rejects the victim status and achieves mastery over the Emperor. Moreover, Sebastian was not merely part of gay male fantasies: D’Annunzio was obsessed with this figure throughout his life, just like Ida Rubinstein. Finally, although Sebastian appears as a masochist figure, paradoxically, it is the mastery over his masochism that turns him into a sadist, at least from the point of view of Emperor Diocletian. Sebastian is awaiting his death tied to a laurel tree—a scene which, for Yeats scholars, might evoke the figure of Cuchulain from Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain (1939). Sebastian is longing to die, while his archers are confessing their love to him: “We love you, we love you, sir. You could have become a god. But you are the god of our dreams and the dream of our youths” (175). What happens here is that Sebastian insists to be killed by his own archers, and he is trying to convince them to shoot him with their arrows: “he demands his death from them as a supreme sign of love” (Chomel 1997, 188). This mansion is about love and death and recalls Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, since the archers have to kill the one they love: “From the depth of my heart, I summon your love, Archers! I call you from the depth of my heart! […] The one who aims most acutely than others with his arrow […] stabbing me with the rod …. He, for sure, I will know loves me, and loves me for ever” (177). This exchange is followed by a prolonged scene of archers shooting their arrows at Sebastian’s body, while he is crying out “Your love! Your love!” (178). Once the arrows penetrate his body, the archers throw away their arrows: “Their hair is entangled with the feathers of the arrows embedded in his young muscles” (178), and they cry out: “We have killed our love! […] Women, do not cry, he will live again!” (179), and when the women take his corpse off the stage, the chorus is mourning him singing “Oh Eros, cry!” (179). The archers’ ritualistic murder of Sebastian reads as an act of penetration, given Sebastian’s orgasmic enjoyment of the pain caused by the arrows. Hartford has stressed the presence of “a continuum of penetrative acts in association with masculine beauty. Through this system of exchanges one is invited to view the mortal, yet exalted penetrated victim as a portmanteau of both the participants and the acts themselves” (2018, 46–47). Sebastian’s passivity towards the violence inflicted upon him is also part of

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his sadistic masochism, as he clearly achieves mastery over his passivity (his relentless refusal of Diocletian’s offers): “while the masochist needs to ensure mastery over the other, it is even more imperative for him to master his own passivity” (Benvenuto 2016, 64). Thus “it is in the active representation of the masochist’s abjection that his mastery prevails” (Benvenuto 2016, 64), which echoes Yeats’s Swineherd character from A Full Moon in March, who punishes the Queen with his constant refusal to do what is expected from him. Sebastian makes himself unavailable and unfindable for Diocletian and by extension for power itself: to use Bersani’s words, Sebastian makes himself “unfindable as an object of discipline” (1996, 99). Therefore, his masochistic surrender becomes an exercise of counterpower and resistance to power itself: Sebastian is both “an object of the exercise of power and an agent of power” (Bersani 1996, 102). Finally, in the last mansion, we find Sebastian in Paradise. He is the one whom God has chosen and crowned, so the chorus of the Apostles claims: “John has given you his space. /You will drink from his glass, / oh Sebastian!” (182). The script’s reference to John is relevant here, as John is referred to as the beloved disciple of Christ in the Gospel of John, and John is also sometimes identified with Lazarus of Bethany, further accentuating the male homoerotic bonds of the play. In the end, Sebastian exclaims “I come, I rise. I have wings” (182) which, after the various hints at penetrative acts, can read as an erotic culmination/orgasm as well as a sign of religious purification due to the scene’s ambiguity. Le Martyre demonstrates that the queer body is both utterly vulnerable and exposed to insults, yet at the same time powerful and full of potential. Rubinstein’s body and voice helped emphasise all this, thus her Sebastian became “an iridescent figure open to a variety of projections” (Haitzinger and Ostwald 2018). It is by no accident that Hartford defined the text as “a good example of a culturally religious and syncretic queer-martyr text” (2018, 47).

Lesbian Sadomasochism in La Pisanelle, ou la Mort Parfumée (1913) D’Annunzio wrote another play in French La Pisanelle (1913) specifically for Rubinstein. It appears like a revised version of his earlier play The Daughter of Iorio (1904), as it features a conflict between a matriarch (the Queen) and an outcast Stranger (Pisanelle). Even though the violence of

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the traditional family plays a central role here, I decided to focus on sadomasochism rather than the family/community, as the relationship between the Queen and Pisanelle displays sadomasochistic dynamics and erotic dance scenes similar to the ones between Diocletian and Sebastian. If sadomasochism is marginalised by queer scholarship and cultural feminism, representations and practices of lesbian S/M raise even more concerns. As Dolan explicates, “[t]he protection of home, hearth, and above all the family demands that any image that challenges such values be erased from human vision, memory, and history” (1993, 179). Dolan points out cultural feminist censorship of what can be seen by whom and why, especially when it comes to lesbian sadomasochism which, for them, “cannot be imaged or even imagined” (1993, 179). Dolan has written favourably of lesbian S/M representations that image gender and power in potentially disruptive ways, proposing that in fact “we need to look closest at images that most disturb us, to address whose interest morality serves” (1993, 181). In Dolan’s interpretation, what disturbs the cultural feminist scene the most about lesbian S/M is the pleasure which is taken in sexual images of power and pain: “Cultural feminism insists on a kind of gender purity […] that damns any intrusive connotation of maleness” (1993, 181). Since S/M practice is rigidly gendered, cultural feminists tend to interpret S/M as misogynist whether practiced or represented in same-sex or in opposite-sex relationships, as the masochist party “is inevitably associated with powerlessness and victimization that is inevitably associated with women” (1993, 182). Due to this gender binary approach to sadomasochistic relationships, cultural feminists seem to be invested in reading signs of power and pain inflicted on female bodies as manifestations of male oppression (Dolan 1993, 183). Characters such as Fedra and Pisanelle appear, to varying extents, as what Pat Califia has called “macho sluts,” that is women whom men hate because they are potentially beyond their control: “Women are not supposed to have machismo, to be macho, but then, we’re not supposed to be sluts, either, and without machismo, a slut is just a commodity” (1988, 20). In Dolan’s words, “[t]he macho slut foregrounds the unleashed physicality of her body, its pain and pleasure, wrestling it away from domestic property” (1993, 184). This unleashed physicality is most tangible in Fedra’s excessive, unruly behaviour; in Pisanelle’s dances in front of the queen and in the queen’s seduction of Pisanelle; as well as in Ida-as-­ Sebastian’s ecstatic and erotic dances. As Dolan maintains, “[t]he violence of the s/m macho slut is necessary to withstand her reabsorption into a

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commodity culture,” (1993, 184) which, in fact, the characters achieve, although it is self-sacrifice which liberates them from systems of oppression. It is also important that re-gendering sadomasochism as an erotic power game between women can work to interrogate patriarchal systems of domination. As Tania Modleski has explained, the woman in the position of power “serves an almost archetypal function, initiating the woman into symbolic order, but transferring and transforming a patriarchal system of gender inequities into a realm of difference presided over by women” (1991, 156–157). This is the only play by D’Annunzio which is defined as “comedy of love and death” (Antonucci 1995:3, 185) instead of being labelled as a mystery or tragedy, even though there are no comic elements in the play. It was first performed in June 1913  in Théâtre de Châtelet directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, with a choreography by Mikhail Fokine, scenography by Léon Bakst, and music by Ildebrando Pizzetti. Despite the talent of the artists involved in its staging and the director’s novel approach, the production was a failure, and it was never staged again (Antonucci 1995:3, 184). The fiasco might have had to do with Rubinstein’s infamous performance of Saint Sebastian in the same theatre two years before. Despite the play’s failure, it is important that for the first time Meyerhold applied a new approach to D’Annunzio’s drama, distancing himself from the poetic text and building all the dramatic action on pantomime. Similar to Le Martyre, La Pisanelle opens with a Prologue introducing the main characters, which is then followed by three acts. The play is set in Cyprus during the reign of the Lusignan. Besides the sadomasochistic undertones, the play features homoeroticism and a melancholy male authority figure (the Queen’s son Ughetto) who feels out of place in his position and in the family. Ughetto expresses no interest in women, only in the dissident stranger Pisanelle whom the Queen tries to contain and murder by seducing her into a sadomasochistic game. The Prologue portrays a melancholy and anxious Ughetto who is bored in the company of his family and religious authorities who have gathered around the Queen— he is only interested in an unorthodox story of desire between Rinier Lanfranco and a statue recounted by his uncle Tiro: “suffering from melancholia, he seems absorbed in some vague dream and livens only at the tale of a strange love story” (Chomel 1997, 208). Rinier took off his engagement ring to be able to play with his friends and put it on the finger of a statue, but when he tried to take it back, it was not possible anymore and the statue became a real woman replacing his fiancée in the bed every

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night. The story revivifies Ughetto so much that he wants to meet Rinieri immediately instead of trying to find a wife for himself, hence he orders servants to prepare the best room for him in the palace. Seeing Ughetto’s interest in this unusual love story, the archbishops begin to worry, thus they warn him that the Church condemns such things. The Queen is also concerned about this new interest and wants to arrange a marriage for him as soon as possible despite Ughetto’s resistance: “My dear mother, I beg you strongly to wait a little bit so that God would send me some good adventure that tears me out of melancholia” (1995:3, 308). Yet his mother understands his melancholia as madness: “My little son, my little son, that madness is always interwoven with melancholia!” (314). Ughetto is similar to the melancholy Aligi of The Daughter of Iorio in terms of the male character’s “sense of estrangement towards society which includes revolt against the father [and] chaste union with women they love” (Chomel 1997, 218). Ughetto has a very abstract and non-sexual approach to women: whenever someone mentions a beautiful woman who has expressed interest in him, he acts up and claims to be in love with her, then suddenly loses interest. His relationship with his closest friend Éudo appears much more confidential and intimate than his bond later with Pisanelle or anyone else. He confesses to Éudo his wish to serve the most vulnerable and to feed the poor instead of dedicating himself to a life as a husband or a father. Pisanelle appears in Act I as a prisoner scrutinised and sexualised by the male gaze of commandants and sailors, waiting for her to-be-groom Ughetto to arrive. She is referred to with a different name in each act, which signals her character’s refusal to be pinned down and categorised: Pisanelle, the Saint Vagabond, Alétis are all variations of her name. This scene in the port of Famagosta portrays her in a precarious body pose, as she is tied with ropes, and she is half-naked exposed to the male gaze. The stage direction states that old men approach her and observe her with their hands, which stresses how vulnerable and exposed women’s bodies are in a patriarchal society in which men assume they are entitled to do anything with women. The sailors start fighting for the possession of the woman and want to buy her for money, seeing her only as an object and as a prostitute: “Indeed it cannot be said that she does not serve with her body whoever requires it” (341), notes one of the sailors. The first time she dares to unveil her face is when Ughetto arrives and puts an end to this violent and misogynistic scene. Ughetto’s approach to her stands in stark contrast with the other men’s attitude, as he is tender, treats her as his

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equal, calls her “Sister,” and most importantly, asks forgiveness for the violence she had to endure: “Forgive the injustices of these rotten people” (347). Significantly, Ughetto protects her from the male gaze by covering her body, just like Aligi protected Mila with his own body from his abusive father in The Daughter of Iorio. Same-sex bonds play an important role in this play, too. Act II portrays Pisanelle as a Saint in the company of nuns in the monastery of Santa Chiara where Ughetto shelters her. Unlike the violence of Act I, this part is about tenderness and intimacy between women. While Pisanelle is sleeping, the nuns around her are admiring her beauty, whispering to avoid waking her up. The scrutinising and possessive male gaze has been replaced by the much more tender and caring female gaze: “Look at her” (354) exclaims one of the nuns, “[h]ow agile and slender her arms are!” (354). When Pisanelle wakes up, she immediately establishes physical intimacy with the nuns: she kisses them and holds their hands, noting how good they smell of basil, lavender, and fresh leather—this kind of reference to intense odours is always sexual in D’Annunzio, like the smell of lilies in Le Martyre. In a way, the nuns fight for her like the sailors did, as they cannot wait to touch her, but this is not competitive and it is not about possession, but pure admiration. Besides the smells, eating is another reference to sexual desire: she begins eating bread and figs very passionately, then she invites the nuns to join her during which the women bond with each other. The nuns do not want her to leave them for Ughetto: “Stay with us!” (362), they beg her, while praising her beauty. Yet male violence disturbs these scenes of peace and tenderness, as people have discovered she is in fact a royal person from Pisa: “Save yourself, save yourself, sisters! Save yourself! These are men, these are men who have come. They forced the doors. They destroyed everything” (364–365). Once again, the play highlights how vulnerable and exposed women are in a society dominated by men, and one of the nuns claims: “Drunk men, lost women” (365). Ughetto’s uncle Tiro plays the patriarch here who has come to put his hand on Pisanelle, yet just like in The Daughter of Iorio, the son turns against the patriarch to prevent patriarchal violence on women. This scene reads like an erotic competition for Pisanelle between the nuns and the violent men, as the nuns try to take her back from them. What is more, Tiro has brought harlots with him and orders women to impose violence on her and the nuns, which makes the scene even more perturbing and foreshadows the female sadomasochism of Act III: “Women, take these wise nuns, soon! And cast them apart” (368). The

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stage direction states that the harlots are laughing while inflicting violence on the nuns, trying to reach Pisanelle. Yet Ughetto arrives and puts an end to this violence, turning against the patriarch. Tiro looks down on him and refers to his lack of virility: “Go away, little child, go suck” (370). But Ughetto stabs him in the stomach and Tiro curses him for betraying the family for an outsider: “You spilled the blood of your blood, in a sacred place. Lost you are, forever” (371). The final act recalls Act III of Le Martyre: erotic dances are performed by a woman to another woman in which power distributions appear asymmetrical yet reversible. The Queen is conspiring against Pisanelle, who has stolen her son and disrupted the family. She blames Pisanelle for the violence, poverty, and disorder that rules Cyprus, hence she plans to invite her for a friendly visit only to murder her on the first appropriate occasion. She behaves like a violent patriarch and insults her female servants: when Oriur tells her it is not sure Pisanelle will come, she grabs her by the hair and threatens her with death: “Ah, Lady! Ah, don’t hurt me, it is not my fault” (380). She is against desire and reproaches her own people: “Oh, oh, crazy of love; you are crazy of love, all consumed by love, seeing your pallid face, is that right? So was that Greek prince who died […]. Do you want to die too?” (381). When the Queen interrogates her women about Pisanelle, they praise Pisanelle’s eyes and claim that she is “like a little girl who loves everything that is strange, and everything that is far away, and everything that brings her change” (383). The Queen is enraged, seeing her women’s fascination with Pisanelle instead of admiring their Queen: “You are enchanted, all of you. I can see; I can hear” (386). When Pisanelle arrives, the women start crying, as they know about the murderous plan. The Queen employs seduction to manipulate Pisanelle, which makes this scene sadomasochistic. She wants to look beautiful when she meets her and when she sees Pisanelle from the balcony, she starts courting her: “Oh my sweetheart, come up! Come up, oh beautiful!” (395). When they stand face to face, the Queen exclaims: “I love you. And I have nothing, nothing to forgive you, nothing anymore” (396). The Queen also encourages physical intimacy so that Pisanelle believe they are equal: “No, no, don’t kiss my hands. I want to kiss you on the cheeks, like this” (396). As if flirting with her, she wonders: “And would you like to dance for me, rose?” (396) and Pisanelle’s answer suggests that she is already fond of the Queen: “I will dance for you on top of my own heart” (397). Thirst appears here as a sexual reference like in The Dead City, as the Queen offers to ease Pisanelle’s thirst. Even though Pisanelle exclaims that she is

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dying of the desire to drink, she becomes suspicious and refuses the poisoned drink, which teases the Queen: “If you want me to die, Lady, don’t kill me so soon, out of mercy, not today!” (403) It seems that Pisanelle is very much aware of the plan conspired against her, yet she is willing to play this dangerous erotic game with the Queen, trying to prolong the time of her murder. The play ends with three dances: the dance of Poverty, the dance of Perfect Love, and the final Hawk Dance. For Yeats scholars, the hawk dance might be evocative of the dance in Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well (1917) performed by the cross-dressed Michio Itō in the role of the Hawk Woman. Interestingly, Halberstam has conceptualised the motif of the hawk as symbol of “the kind of wildness and freedom that marriage and wealth and social standing oppose and contain” (2020, 95). For Halberstam, both hawks and falcons represent a deep desire for freedom, but “like Yeats’s falcon, [it also] represents a spiraling sense of despair, loss, anxiety, and chaos that […] defines […] a larger realm of disintegration” (2020, 95). Crucially, the stage direction states that Pisanelle’s hawk dance expresses pain, mercy, tenderness, languor, and power accompanied with a strange smile and bird-like movements, speaking in her native language, thus celebrating her difference as power in front of the authority that wants to extinguish it. She is eating fruits and drinking wine, but claims that “love will be better” (407) and the Queen replies ambiguously: “I myself will bring it to you in the room […] after the massage” (407). In this moment she touches Pisanelle, which strikes her: “Why are you touching me like this, Queen?” (407), but the Queen continues her ambiguous diction: “To feel your beauty that you hide from me” (407). Pisanelle is already drunk and she is in the Queen’s arms but she wants to escape so that she could continue the dance: “Your sweet hands have tied me, tied me again. But now let me go, Queen. I drank everything. I am drunk. I want to dance” (408). While she is dancing, the Queen’s slaves (women as well) pretend to join her in the dance, but Pisanelle senses the imminent violence, and the dance begins to imitate escape, resistance, and power: “Pisanelle is still laughing, trying to escape in dance steps” (409). When she catches sight of the Queen’s ruthless gaze, she starts begging her to give her one more day and threatens her torturers that she will bite them, but they manage to strangle her by the time Ughetto arrives. La Pisanelle is a rare exception among D’Annunzio’s plays, as the protagonist is killed and fails to take control over her own death. Here the sadomasochistic game is one-sided, as Pisanelle never really gets to gain

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power over the Queen. Pisanelle’s character resonates with the life of stigmatised, oppressed people, as power managed to eliminate her precarious life. As Chomel sees her, “Pisanelle is not a seducer, she does not attempt to dominate the match using her beauty; she is silent and observes with intent eyes the game that decides her fate. Her past is annulled by her silence and her future is uncertain; only the present is alive and felt in its pain and joy” (1997, 215). Because of her timidity and silent observation of how other decide over her life and death, she appears as a totally new character in D’Annunzio’s drama. She is also the only Dannunzian character whose diction shows non-linearity and a stream of consciousness style in which past, present, and future mingle. Yet she is not entirely passive, as she participates actively in the game but only to observe how authorities abuse her body. This, however, raises even more sympathy for her and sheds a more direct negative light on the society that oppresses and abuses difference. There is no excuse for this murder: she has not done any harm to anyone, she is utterly vulnerable throughout the play exposed to sadistic male and female violence, and she does not have any femme fatale features, nor does she wish for revenge like most Dannunzian characters. What she does as part of the sadomasochistic game she is drawn into is displaying the truth of her body through dance. As Califia has observed with regard to lesbian S/M, “[a]ll knowledge, reason, truth, beauty, it is all reducible to physical sensation and actions performed by the agency of the flesh” (1988, 19). Although Pisanelle cannot achieve real mastery over the Queen, she does win the sympathy of the Queen’s slaves, that of the audience and most importantly, she actives the agency of her body through dance and laughter in the face of her inevitable death.

Conclusion Thanks to Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s interest in occult séances and sexual experimentations, the relationship between pleasure, pain, violence, and death became one of the central tropes of their drama. In Yeats’s plays, violent sadomasochistic attachments often include comic elements, bickering, playfulness, and jouissance, as in the Blind Man-Fool relationship of On Baile’s Strand, but also in The Cat and the Moon and in A Full Moon in March. In D’Annunzio’s scripts, however, sadomasochism appears much more violent, sinister, ruthless, and more explicitly sexual. Crucially, Bersani has stressed that “S/M is a kind of X ray of power’s body, a laboratory testing of the erotic potential in the most oppressive social structures”

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(1996, 89). Building on Bersani’s conceptualisation of S/M, I have argued that through the reversibility of power, the scripts draw attention to the systemic failures of normative distributions of power and raise awareness to the manipulative strategies of totalising political ideologies as well as to the elements of dominance and submission in all relationships. On Baile’s Strand, A Full Moon in March, and Le Martyre all feature changing positions of mastery, constantly shifting agency through which the parties involved can experience both the state of being oppressed and that of being the oppressor. Through the reversibility of power, the scripts shed light on the vulnerable side of power: the fact that those enjoying a position of mastery may be willing to give it up for the sake of erotic stimulation. Even though power has always presented itself as separate from the realm of pleasure, joy, or desire—what is more, authoritarian regimes even condemn eros—the plays reveal that authority figures derive sexual pleasure from domination as well as from the potential of losing power and then regaining it. D’Annunzio’s second play written for Rubinstein, La Pisanelle, seems to be an odd-one-out in this chapter not just because it features a sadomasochistic relationship between two women, but also because the reversibility of power is absent from it. Pisanelle does not try to gain control over the Queen: she is aware that the pleasant evening they spend together eating, drinking, and dancing will end with her death, but she passively accepts it. The only thing she does is dance until she is killed—and it is through the three dances of the play that she enacts both her sorrows and her joy. The Queen, however, clearly derives pleasure from involving Pisanelle in her cruel game, and as I have argued above, Pisanelle’s passivity creates more sympathy for her in the play and allows audiences to see how power abuses vulnerable, precarious bodies and how much pleasure it derives from the experience. It is also crucial that this play breaks the gendered tradition of sadomasochism, which has largely been a male-male or male-female space, but it is rarely represented between women. Dolan has stressed the importance of theatrical portrayals of “the violent lesbian s/m body” (1993, 186) which serves to “explode the old images of gender and sexuality and to test the limits of what can be seen” (1993, 186). It seems apt to conclude this chapter with a play that is imbued with lesbian undertones within a sadomasochistic context, as my following chapter focuses on defiant dykes and the ways in which they abuse the strategies of power to undermine it with its own manipulative tools.

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References Allain, Paul, and Jen Harvie. 2014. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Batson, Charles R. 2016. Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theatre: Playing Identities. New York: Routledge. Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. Montréal: New World Perspectives. Benvenuto, Sergio. 2016. What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Bersani, Leo. 1996. Homos. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press. Califia, Pat. 1988. Macho Sluts. Boston: Alyson Publications. ———. 2000. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Cleis Press. Cave, Richard Allen. 2006. Wilde’s Comedies. In A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880–2005, ed. Mary Luckhurst, 213–224. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Chomel, Luisetta Elia. 1997. D’Annunzio: Un teatro al femminile. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. 1993. Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1995. In Tutto il teatro 3, ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Rome: Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton. Dolan, Jill. 1993. Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Eribon, Didier. 2004. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fleischer, Mary. 2007. Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer Collaborations. Amsterdam-New York, NY: Rodopi. Foster, R.F. 1997. W. B. Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. W. B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2000. Lives of Infamous Men. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion, 157–175. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2012. Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History. In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donal E.  Hall and Annamarie Jagose, 236–262. London and New York: Routledge.with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter

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Girdwood, Megan. 2021. Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome’s Dance after 1890. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goulaki-Voutira, Alexandra. 1996. Pyrrhic Dance and Female Pyrrhic Dancers. RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter 21 (1): 3–12. Granatella, Laura. 1993. Arrestate l’autore! D’Annunzio in scena: cronache, testimonianze, illustrazioni, documenti inediti e rari del primo grande spettacolo del ’900. Rome: Bulzoni. Guerri, Giordano Bruno. 2014. La mia vita carnale: Amori e passioni di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2019. Disobbedisco: Cinquecento giorni di rivoluzione. Fiume 1919–1920. Milan: Mondadori. Günsberg, Margaret. 1997. Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haitzinger, Nicole, and Julia Ostwald. 2018. Ida Rubinstein as Saint Sébastien: Performative Queerness in Modernity. Corpus, 25 November. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Härmänmaa, Marja. 2014. The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death. In Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen, 225–243. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harris, Susan Cannon. 2002. Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hart, Lynda. 1998. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hartford, Jason James. 2018. Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French: Queering the Martyr. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Haswell, Janis. 2012. Yeats’s Vision and the Feminine. In W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: Explanations and Contexts, edited by Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson and Claire Nelly, 291–307. Clemson: Clemson University Press. Havea, Jione. 2011. Lazarus Troubles. In Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, ed. Teresa J.  Hornsby and Ken Stone. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. 2013. The Pike. Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. MacLiammoir, Michael, and Eavan Boland. 1972. W.  B. Yeats and his World. New York: Viking Press. Mains, Geoff. 1984. Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press.

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McClure, Laura. 2003. Courtesans at Table. Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus. London and New York: Routledge. Modleski, Tania. 1991. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age. New York: Routledge. Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig. Newmahr, Staci. 2011. Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Poulain, Alexandra. 2016. Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Failed collaboration and queer love in Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon and Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I. Ilha do Desterro 71 (2): 233–244. Thompson, Mark, ed. 1991. Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice. Boston: Alyson Publications. Valente, Joseph. 2011. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture: 1880–1922. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Woodhouse, John. 2006. D’Annunzio’s Theatre. In A History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, 323–338. Cambridge (NY): Cambridge University Press. Woolf, Vicki. 2000. Dancing in the Vortex: The Story of Ida Rubinstein. New York: Routledge. Yeats, William Butler. 1966. In The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach. London: Macmillan. Abbreviated as VPl in the text. ———. 2002. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. InteLex Electronic Edition, ed. John Kelly. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Defiant Dykes: New Women against Patriarchy

Is it not one of the fundamental traits of our society, after all, that destiny takes the form of a relation with power, of a struggle with or against it? Indeed, the most intense point of a life, the point where its energy is concentrated, is where it comes up against power, struggles with it, attempts to use its forces and to evade its traps. —Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men”

A specific group within D’Annunzio’s and Yeats’s drama includes revengeful, defiant women who turn their diminished position into power to revenge the patriarchal system that harmed them or their family. This chapter rereads Yeats’s Deirdre (1907) and The Player Queen (1922) and D’Annunzio’s The Glory (1899) and The Ship (1908) to demonstrate how the plays’ wilful female characters take advantage of the strategies of patriarchy and eventually turn those strategies against the men who want to contain and oppress them. I call these revengeful women “dykes” not because there is any evidence in the scripts that they are attracted to their own sex, but because they exhibit a gender ambivalence and they shake up the normative order of things around them. The behaviour of the female protagonists of the selected plays resonates with Halberstam’s discussion of the relationship between wildness, queerness, and the figure of the dyke. Halberstam contrasts the dandy and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9_5

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dyke, arguing that the dandy “hates the system that hates him” (2020, 22), yet he is indifferent to provoking passion and disdains to look back. In contrast, the figure of the dyke is deeply insulted “by the order that names her as a problem and wears her sense of injustice like a badge, a scar, an open wound” (2020, 22). For Halberstam, therefore, the dyke is wild, while the dandy is not. The dandy has a meaning in the normative system even if only a negative one, but the dyke or the gender-variant subject appears as “an anachronism even in her own time or, rather, because she has no time that is hers” (2020, 22). Unlike dandies, dykes cannot be pinned down or classified by the system: they represent “an unscripted, declassified relation to being—s/he is wild because untamable, beyond order because unexplained; s/he has no place in creation and as such escapes and defies the regimes of regulation and containment that shape the world for everyone else” (2020, 23). More importantly, dyke characters cannot shrug off the insult for which they are the primary symbols; they keep looking back and have a high sense of justice, thus they become “a wild card, a slice of disorder, a source of bewilderment” (Halberstam 2020, 22) for the other characters representing the normative order and patriarchy. The characters I focus on in this chapter—Deirdre, Decima, Basiliola and Elena—are actively and deliberately dismantling patriarchy as a response to the hurts and wounds imposed on them by the system that labels them as wild, untamable, and unnatural beings. Wildness is a useful framework through which to address the four plays, as it means a retreat from the conventional, an affront to the normal and a will to provoke and disturb (Halberstam 2020, 12). In the previous chapters, I referred to the most important New Women Yeats and D’Annunzio worked with, including Sarah Bernhardt, Florence Farr, Eleonora Duse, Ida Rubinstein, and the Gramatica sisters. These women were not only referred to as “phallic women” (Re 2002, 129), but the language critics used to describe them was a language of wildness—they were compared to fierce monsters, Medusas, beasts, and various wild animals because of the new, independent, and thus threatening female ideal they represented in life and on stage. Yeats’s Deirdre and Decima were, for instance, played by New Woman Mrs. Patrick Campbell, while Eleonora Duse embodied D’Annunzio’s Elena in The Glory and the character of Basiliola was written for Ida Rubinstein. Mrs. Campbell was a famous English New Woman who played significant roles in Irish plays and had an intense collaboration with Yeats, too. Her fame in Europe and Ireland greatly increased after her performance alongside Sarah Bernhardt in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande in London and in Dublin’s Gaiety

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Theatre in July 1905—a performance in which the two women played the lovers of the play. This symbolist play by Maeterlinck bears striking resemblance to the story of Paolo and Francesca and thus to D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini, as it features a love triangle between a wife, a husband, and a lover, ending with the death of the wife and her lover murdered by the husband. However, in the performances of Pelléas et Mélisande in London (1904) and Dublin (1905), the lovers were played by two women, while in D’Annunzio’s version of the story of Paolo and Francesca, the latter one gets herself killed by her husband when jumping between the two men to try to save Paolo’s life. As in the case of Barnhardt, Duse and Rubinstein, Mrs. Campbell’s influential role in European theatre was able to attract masses to the theatre: when she first played Deirdre, for instance, Holloway noted that “[m]ost of the audience had been attracted to the theatre to see Mrs. Campbell fill the role of ‘Deirdre,’ and a hush passed over the house as the play commenced […]. Such a highly-wrought audience is seldom seen inside a theatre” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 120). Since Mrs. Campbell was a decisive, assertive New Woman who played complex roles, she was often referred to with a language of wildness by critics. As Hogan and O’Neill describe, she was rarely tactful; she had an outspoken personality; she always took matters in her own hands; and she even managed to order the restless Yeats around, ushering him off his own stage during the rehearsals of Deirdre at the Abbey (2009, xii). The language of wildness pervades the selected plays as well, and I believe the character of Deirdre deserves special attention in this regard. Compared to the other characters analysed in this chapter, Deirdre’s behaviour is by far the calmest and most submissive, yet because she eventually tricks the patriarch Conchubar into submission, she was described by Holloway as “savage” and “tigerish,” as she annihilates Conchubar’s power in the play (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 120). During Italian Fascism, there was a significant contradiction between the totalitarian model of femininity and imperial imaginary. While the regime promoted the sanctity of the family and condemned every action that violated it, the so-called madamism became a popular and accepted practice in the colonies: it meant “the right to have a local (temporary) ‘wife’ […] to grant Italian soldiers and civilians the needed hearth and home, namely care and sexual satisfaction” (Giuliani 2019, 76). Therefore, one of the main contradictions of fascist sexual politics was that “on the one hand, the display of exotic love affairs was encouraged as a sign of Italian virility, while on the other, inter-racial sexual relations were

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condemned by racial eugenics” (Ponzanesi 2014, 85). Yet heterosexual Italian men were rarely identified as the causes of racial degeneration due to their adultery in the colonies: it was always women and their behaviours that were shamed. Fascism put an immense pressure on women: “the sexual behaviour of women was cast as a biophysical medium of the kind of diseases characteristic of inferior races but also as a means for ensuring psychological, physical, and genetic well-being of the Italian race” (Giuliani 2019, 77). Italian women were thus on the one hand idealised as the guardians of morality and the nation’s regeneration, while on the other hand they and their sexual behaviours were always seen as the cause of immorality and racial degeneration. Women were expected to be uncomplicated, decent, and simple. As Giuliani explains, the image of the motherly woman, Christian, yet sexually active and devoted to the husband served to fully confirm male superiority in Fascist Italy (Giuliani 2019, 79). Hence, Italian Fascism discarded the provocative Risorgimento-era she-patriots and the complex women of the fin de siècle and proposed simple, one-dimensional she-patriots without pro-patria martyrdom and sacrifice, thus women were denied entry to the sacrificial paradigm. Fascism countered the turn-of-the-century complex women with the nationalised wife models who rejected the defeminisation embodied by independent, emancipated women, such as the New Women of the time. There were significant connections between the newly established Irish Free State and Italian Fascism mostly in terms of their treatment of women.1 As Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington claimed, the Catholic Irish Free State was built on “a Fascist Model, in which women would be relegated to permanent inferiority, their avocations and choice of callings limited because of an implied invalidism of the weaker sex” (quoted in Beaumont 1997, 563). Accordingly, one of the major concerns of the Catholic Free State was the emergence of New Women in Ireland and their influence on Irish youth. Therefore, young girls had to be protected from influences such as film, theatre, dance hall, immodest fashion, and certain books through strictly supervised and controlled education. Catholic teachers 1  The link between the Irish Free State and the Italian Fascist regime became more tangible in the early 1930s, when Mussolini “began to envisage a fascistization of Ireland” (Bibbò 2022, 182). The Italian fascist political elite, however, did not consider Eoin O’Duffy (the leader of the Irish Blueshirts) as their potential ally—instead, they focused on Éamon de Valera, the leader of the anti-Treaty side. It is also well-known that Irish writers, including Yeats, were influenced by Fascist Italy. Since biography is not the focus of this book, I do not join this academic discussion here. However, Lauren Arrington has recently published a brilliant monograph on this topic titled The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy Shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers (2021).

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had to teach young Irish women the main moral principles that would guide their lives: obedience, modesty, and chastity. Censors were therefore given the power to ban or cut films, plays, and books deemed as blasphemous, obscene, indecent, or subversive of public morals in any way. In 1925, William Cosgrave banned divorce in Ireland, which Yeats as a senator of the Free State explicitly opposed: “Yeats denied that divorce increases immorality, and set the sacredness of individual love against the sanctity of the family. Characteristically, he invoked the liberty of minorities against the tyranny of the majority” (Cullingford 1981, 183). Since New Women posed a major threat to the institution of marriage and young girls, in 1927, the first issue of The Mary Immaculate College Annual was entitled “Wanted—A New Woman”: “Recognising the important social status of teachers, students at the college agreed to play their part in discouraging ‘mannish and immodest’ dress” (Beaumont 1997, 567). Excessive, assertive behaviour and theatre were also condemned: “Young women were to refrain from smoking and from talking or laughing loudly in public. Immodest dances, cinema shows and plays were to be avoided at all cost” (Beaumont 1997, 567). As Halberstam explicates, in the early twentieth century, the language of wildness was often used by elites as a rhetorical device and it was often the lawless precursor of fascism (2020, 25). In addition, using the language of wildness can serve “to draw attention to the danger of those outside of classification” (2020, 25). However, what I contend in this chapter is that the four strong, independent female characters of the plays do not attempt to deny the wildness they are accused of—instead, they use this quality to turn the patriarchal system upside down as a revenge for the treatment they had received from the same system. They embody what Foucault called “counterdiscourse” or “reverse discourse.” For instance, in the nineteenth century, parallel to the appearance of the first New Women, psychiatry and literature initiated a series of discourses on homosexuality, pederasty, and inversion. Yet, as Foucault maintains, this also created the possibility for the formation of reverse discourses. Although Foucault uses the example of homosexuality, this idea can be applied to other subjectivities within society whom the normative order labels as abnormal in any way. As Foucault explicates in the first volume of The History of Sexuality: “homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” (1978, 101). Foucault further explains in an interview: “taking such responses literally, and thereby turning them around, we see responses

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appearing in the form of defiance: ‘All right, we are what you say we are, whatever by nature or sickness or perversion, as you wish. And so if we are, let it be, and if you want to know what we are, we can tell you better than you can’” (1996, 217–218). As a form of defiance, the female protagonists of the selected plays often employ the same vocabulary to refer to themselves as the one the authority figures use to denigrate them: Decima and Basiliola will achieve this in more explicit ways, while Deidre and Elena do it more implicitly, mostly through their ambiguous actions. In Eribon’s interpretation of Foucault’s concept, counterdiscourse means that resistance may consist in a new meaning to an enunciation or a given discourse. More pressingly, this resistance often gains strength “by strategically turning around what power has done” (Eribon 2004, 313). This also means that reverse discourse is not an another, opposite discourse—it draws on the same strategies that power uses but resignifies them: “It might be the same discourse, relying on the same categories, but turning them around or transforming their meaning” (Eribon 2004, 313). As a result, what we will see in the four plays is the transformation of oppressed, stigmatised subjectivities into oppressors (like Decima or Elena) or manipulators who trick the authority figures to be able to take at least their death into their own hands and escape the system that judges them, such as Deirdre and Basiliola. In Homos, Leo Bersani refers to this phenomenon of the oppressed becoming the oppressor in order to reject submission and centuries of victimisation: “the oppressed, having freed themselves from their oppressors, hasten to imitate their oppressors, as if it were in the position of dominance that the drive towards destruction—and, ultimately, toward self-destruction—could be most effectively pursued” (1996, 97). Such actions can be interpreted as tactical reversals of the mechanisms which control women and sexuality, and they serve “to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance” (Foucault 1978, 157).

Death as Liberation in Yeats’s Deirdre (1907): Deceiving the Oppressor Deirdre was dedicated to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, but she took on the role only in 1908. Before Mrs. Campbell’s interpretation of Deirdre, the character was played first by Letitia Marrion Dallas (also known as Mrs.

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Darragh), followed by Mona Limerick. The first performances by Mrs. Darragh as Deirdre in November 1906 were critiqued by Holloway as “tame,” “lifeless,” and over-sensual (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 77), but its revised version in April 1907 with Mona Limerick in the title role received an even harsher criticism. This time, however, Holloway’s criticism targets Mona Limerick and conveys a significant amount of misogyny. The way Holloway ridicules Limerick bears striking resemblance to the way the male characters in Yeats’s play mock Deirdre. For Holloway, Limerick-as-Deirdre was a “high-strung, hysterical actress, with a monotonous, wail-like voice and restless manner” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 91). Strikingly, he continues by expressing sympathy for the male characters in the play, including the authoritative patriarch Conchubar: “‘Deirdre’ as presented by Mona Limerick (what a name, ye Gods!), was a very uncomfortable personage for Naisi [sic] to have been exiled with for seven long years. ‘Conchobar’ [sic] was lucky to have escaped her” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 91). Even though later Holloway praised Mrs. Campbell’s interpretation of the title role, he could not avoid highlighting Mrs. Campbell’s height, which recalls the trope of the tall unwomanly woman that we could see in the reviews of Ida Rubinstein as well. In 1908, J. M. Kerrigan played Naoise alongside Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre and Sara Allgood as First Musician. Holloway notes that “[s]he [Mrs. Campbell] chaffed Kerrigan for not looking at her at all. ‘You mustn’t like me,’ she said. Kerrigan in cast for ‘Naisi,’ and is much too small in stature for Mrs. Campbell’s build. She has to bend down whenever she comes near him …” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 119). Holloway was mostly disturbed by what he called Mrs. Campbell’s modern acting whereby she often dared to face the audience with her back (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 119); her “strongly marked mannerisms” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 120), her excessive passion on the stage and her “jerk-like wriggles that punctuate her every word” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 121). Hence Holloway’s ideal Deirdre would have been Sara Allgood because of her grace, repose, and grandeur in style, which was also a wish for a modest, calm, respectable woman as Deirdre—a woman as defined by normative society. This section focuses on bonds between female characters and acts of defiance as a means of overturning conventional distributions of power. The character of Deirdre rejects oppression first by defiance and disobedience, then by assuming the manipulative behaviour of the oppressor with the help of other women. Deirdre and Decima from The Player Queen are the two most uncompromising women of Yeats’s drama who defy male

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tyranny and draw attention to the vulnerability and power of the female body. In “At Stratford-on-Avon,” Yeats refers to this motif of a woman defeating a male tyrant when he describes the dangerous, manipulative rhetoric of Henry V, who, in the end, fails, as “his conquests abroad are made nothing by a woman turned warrior” (1961, 108). Crucially, both Deidre and Decima challenge the nationalist sacrificial paradigm which conceives of sacrifice as exclusively male, while these plays feature strong women who sacrifice themselves to evade patriarchal domination. As Harris explains, the mythology of sacrificial paradigm functioned as a normative force within the Irish context, and even though Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan helped establish and reinforce this male-­ centred, misogynistic sacrificial tradition and catered for popular nationalism, Yeats later revolted against this notion of sacrifice (2002, 10). Despite this common theme, the plays’ ending is very different: Deirdre chooses self-destruction to avoid being forced into a marriage she does not want, while Decima ends up controlling both the religious and the political authorities of the play and becomes Queen. Strikingly, a review published in The Irish Times highlighted the motif of death as liberation from patriarchal rule in Deirdre: “She suggests with unmistakable art the wistfulness of a girl overshadowed by the determination of a woman to die rather than live as the wife of a man who has killed her lover, and has made the fatal mistake of trying to coerce her into loving him” (24 June 1909, 7). The tension in Deirdre arises from a heterosexual love conflict, as King Conchubar is jealous of Naoise who has won Deirdre’s heart, yet the play is equally infused with intimate female bonds. Also, Naoise’s character displays a very tender form of masculinity and his relationship with Deirdre seems to be based on equality, unlike the hierarchical relationship Conchubar wants to force on Deirdre. The play begins with three women (the three musicians) telling the story of Deirdre and how she defied the patriarch Conchubar: “I have a story right” (VPl 345). This start establishes the importance of intimacy and understanding between women, which plays a crucial role in the unfolding of the plot. It is also remarkable that all three musicians are women here, while in other plays by Yeats the three musicians are either not gendered or they include men too, but here it is clear from the plot that they are all women. What is more, they are three independent, free women who “have no country but the roads of the world” (VPl 348) and who have seen and experienced many adversities, which helps them see through patriarchal manipulation and by extension allows them to help Deirdre.

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The interaction between the three women and Conchubar’s loyal servant Fergus serves to sharpen the tension between the value system of the patriarch and the world of independent women. First, Fergus reproaches the three women for weighing “a happy music with a sad” (VPl 347), and forbids them to sing about melancholy topics, which evokes the association between melancholia and deviancy in the eyes of normative society and the demand that women should always be happy no matter what they are going through. Fergus claims that Deirdre and Naoise have been forgiven by Conchubar and there is no need for worry or sad music, but the three women have an independent mind and cannot be fooled. They notice “dark men, with murderous and outlandish-looking arms” (VPl 349) outside the house, and they are the ones who draw the audience’s attention to the dangers of tyranny and patriarchy. The First Musician tells Fergus: “Forgive my open-speech, but to those eyes/That have seen many lands they are such men/As kings will gather for a murderous task/That neither bribes, commands, nor promises/Can bring their people to” (VPl 360). Fergus immediately denies this accusation and claims that they are only merchants, but the three women cannot be manipulated: “If those be merchants, I have seen the goods/They have brought to Conchubar, and understood/His murderous purpose” (VPl 350). Fergus’s reaction is to reduce these women’s observations to gossip and artistic fabrication, which is characteristic of how patriarchy dismisses women’s feelings: “Your wild thought fed on extravagant poetry” (VPl 351). He also interrupts the First Musician’s warning about Conchubar and tries to silence her with threats of banishment, prison, and death: “Be silent, or I’ll drive you from the door. /There’s many a one that would do more than that, /And make it prison, or death, or banishment/To slander the High King” (VPl 350–351). The dialogue between the First Musician and Fergus also serves to foreshadow the tension between the strong-willed, independent Deirdre and the furious, revengeful Conchubar. As Deirdre and Naoise approach the house, Fergus commands the three women to sing of something sweet and happy: “a verse of some old time not worth remembering, /And all the lovelier because a bubble” (VPl 351). Yet the women disobey, as their song is infused with sinister undertones and warnings: “Lovers, if they may not laugh, /Have to cry, have to cry” (VPl 352). The original stage direction for Deirdre’s entrance states that the first thing she does is to go towards the three women instead of staying near Naoise or going towards Fergus: “She goes over towards the women” (VPl 353). After this physical approach, she immediately

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starts praising the three women and expresses her wish to become like them. This pattern of emulation and admiration between women is one of the less recognised feminist undertones in Yeats’s plays: “These women have the raddle that they use/To make them brave and confident, although/Dread, toil, or cold may chill the blood o’ their cheeks. /You’ll help me, women. It is my husband’s will/I show my trust in one that may be here/Before the mind can call the colour up” (VPl 354). The three women also step closer to Deirdre and gather around her, occupying her attention, preparing her hair, and putting jewels on her. Hence when Naoise looks at Deirdre, she does not reciprocate the gaze, and Fergus brings him to the chess-table, thus increasing the distance between them. This dramaturgy makes more visible the strength of female bonds, sisterhood, and emulation in the play, which eventually helps Deirdre create a trap for Conchubar. The intimate scene between the First Musician and Deirdre conveys crucial messages about the power of women telling stories to each other— women helping each other escape patriarchal oppression and violence and digest stories of trauma. This pattern appeared in D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini too, in which Francesca found temporary shelter from patriarchal violence in the company of women. Once the men leave the house, the First Musician encourages Deirdre to speak about anything that weighs on her heart: “If anything lies heavy on your heart, /Speak freely of it, knowing it is certain/That you will never see my face again” (VPl 359–360). Deirdre accepts the offer at once and they begin talking about love: “You’ve been in love?” (VPl 360), asks Deirdre, and the First Musician further encourages her “If you would speak of love/Speak freely” (VPl 360). Deirdre thus tells her about her concerns regarding Conchubar’s obsessive love for her: “There was a man that loved me. He was old; /I could not love him. Now I can but fear” (VPl 360). The First Musician’s reply critiques toxic masculine behaviour and patriarchal possession of women’s bodies disguised as love: “I have heard he loved you/ As some old miser loves the dragon-stone/He hides away the cobwebs near the roof” (VPl 360). Even though her message is coded, Deirdre is able to decode the meaning: “You mean that when a man who has loved like that/Is after crossed, love drowns in its own flood/And that love drowned and floating is but hate” (VPl 360). Their dialogue is coded, as they do not name who this old man is, but eventually the conversation makes Deirdre understand her fate: “Ah! Now I catch your meaning, that the king/Will murder Naoise, and keep me alive” (VPl 361). At the end

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of this scene of feminist entrustment, Deirdre praises women who dare to think for themselves and live independently, and who can thus survive as they can see through the traps of patriarchal domination—women “[w]ho have their wit alone to keep their lives” (VPl 361). Initially, we can detect some similarity between Naoise and the three women, as there is a non-hierarchical relationship between him and Deirdre. Also, similar to the three women, Naoise senses something sinister in the absence of the High King, which is later echoed by Deirdre, too: “It is strange that there is none to welcome us” (VPl 353). This absence yet invisible and sinister omnipresence of the patriarch figure appears in other plays as well, such as in Calvary and The Cat and the Moon. Deirdre notes the alarming nature of “[a]n empty house upon the journey’s end” (VPl 357–358) and wonders “Is that the way a king that means no mischief/Honours a guest?” (VPl 357–358). Naoise recalls a story of violence which happened to another couple and involved a chess-board: “They moved the men and waited for the end/As it were bedtime, and had so quiet minds/They hardly winked their eyes when the sword flashed” (VPl 356). This part also draws attention to the importance of knowing the past in order to evade history’s traps in the future. Even though Naoise cannot evade his death in this play, nor can Deirdre, throughout the play they feel alarmed and they notice the menacing signs thanks mostly to the three women’s storytelling. Because they are alert to the sinister signs, Naoise dies fighting with Conchubar’s men, while Deirdre dies by her own hands, denying Conchubar’s touch until the very end. At the beginning, therefore, Naoise has the same instincts and observations as the women of the play, but due to Fergus’s manipulation, his treatment of Deirdre changes in the play. Naoise’s tenderness and understanding towards women gradually turns into misogynistic remarks and demands of respect for Conchubar’s authority. First, Naoise tries to explain Conchubar’s absence with men’s inattentiveness: “We must not speak or think as women do/That when the house is all abed sit up/Making among the ashes with a stick/Till they are terrified” (VPl 358). This is Naoise’s first misogynistic remark in the play in which he accuses women of fabricating stories and feeling afraid without any reason. This remark is uttered before Naoise and Fergus spend time alone together, but still indicates the temporary change in Naoise’s character. When he comes back with Fergus, he becomes almost hostile towards Deirdre and takes over Fergus’s role: “Be silent if it is against the King/Whose guest you are” (VPl 363). It is even more striking that he

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does not even use “we” anymore but “you,” distancing himself from Deirdre’s disobedient and suspicious behaviour, siding with the patriarch and his representative Fergus. Fergus notices that Naoise is now on his side, so he encourages Deirdre to speak her mind, which is part of his manipulation, as he knows that it will make Naoise feel embarrassed for Deirdre’s conduct: “I ask your pardon for her: /She has the heart of the wild birds that fear/The net of the fowler or the wicker cage” (VPl 364). Here Naoise criticises Deirdre for her independent thinking, wildness, and wish for freedom. The reference to wild birds is crucial, as in Yeats’s plays birds appear as metaphors of strong-willed, independent women and men who refuse to be dominated, such as the Women of the Sidhe or Judas and Lazarus in Calvary. However, Deirdre refuses to be silenced and mocks the absurd logic of patriarchy: “Am I to see the fowler and the cage/And speak no word at all?” (VPl 364) and she adds “Were it not most strange/ That woman should put evil in men’s hearts/And lack it in themselves?” (VPl 366). When she is accused of mockery, her answer draws attention to the power of the body and the corporeal effects of tyranny: “And is there mockery in this face and eyes, /Or in this body, in these limbs that brought/So many mischiefs? Look at me and say/If that that shakes my limbs be mockery” (VPl 366). Here Deirdre uses the reaction of her body as a proof of the validity of his concerns about Conchubar: her body is shaking, therefore Naoise should believe that her fears are valid and reasonable. However, Fergus’s reaction to this argument is a mockery of women’s logic and he blames women’s sexuality and beauty for everything: “Men blamed you that you stirred a quarrel up/That has brought death to many” (VPl 367). He continues that “If Conchubar were the treacherous man you think/Would you find safety now that you have come/Into the very middle of his power, /Under his very eyes?” (VPl 367). Deirdre’s answer to this patriarchal accusation of women’s body and beauty as the cause of all evil is a threat that she will get rid of her feminine appearance with the help of the three women. This way, Conchubar would lose interest in her once she destroys female beauty as conceived by patriarchy: “Under his eyes/And in the very middle of his power!/Then there is but one way to make all safe: I’ll spoil this beauty that brought misery/And houseless wondering on the man I loved. /These wanderers will show me how to do it; / To clip this hair to baldness, blacken my skin/With walnut juice, and tear my face with briars” (VPl 367). Fergus mocks this threat as well by exclaiming she is becoming even wilder. When a messenger finally

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arrives, he also mocks Deirdre’s concerns as loud cries of doubt, which is a typical description of self-willed women by patriarchy: “You cried your doubts so loud/That I had almost doubted” (VPl 369). But Deirdre cannot be deceived, and when the messenger announces the invitation to dinner, she is sure the message is not finished: “Deirdre and Fergus, son of Rogh, are summoned; /But not the traitor who bore off the Queen” (VPl 370). This moment also brings about a change in Fergus’s attitude, who claims that he did not know about Conchubar’s evil plan and from this moment on, he tries to help Deirdre and Naoise escape, realising that he has served a tyrant: “I’ll call my friends, and call the reaping-hooks, /And carry you in safety to the ships. /My name still carries some power. I will protect, /Or, if that is impossible, revenge” (VPl 372). When Deirdre and Naoise are certain about their tragic fate, they describe themselves as friendless outcasts who need to justify the validity of their love for each other and who are punished for this love which is deemed illicit by those in power. Deirdre claims that, “Our way of life has brought no friends to us,” (VPl 373) while Naoise describes himself as a man who has “loved truly and betrayed no man” (VPl 373) and who “need[s] no lightning at the end, no beating/In a vain fury at the cage’s door” (VPl 373). Deirdre turns to the three women again and asks them that after their death, they continue telling stories about the power and needs of the body, about friendless outcast lovers like her and Naoise: “O, singing women, set it down in a book, /That love is all we need, even though it is/But the last drops we gather up like this; /And though the drops are all we have known of life, /For we have been most friendless— praise us for it, /And praise the double sunset, for naught’s lacking/But a good end to the long, cloudy day” (VPl 374). She also gives a bracelet to the First Musician to make sure they will remember her and will tell her story. Deirdre once again claims that the physical needs of the body cannot be denied, the “tumult of the limbs” and “mouth on mouth” (VPl 376): “I know nothing but this body, nothing/But that old vehement, bewildering, kiss” (VPl 376). As Deirdre is kneeling in front of Naoise, Conchubar appears for the first time interrupting their intimacy, but then he suddenly disappears, which makes Naoise go after him only to get entangled by Conchubar’s dark-faced net. Naoise being entrapped in a net evokes his mockery of Deirdre as a woman who refuses the cage and fowler’s net. It is now Conchubar who mocks the entangled Naoise whom Deirdre chose because of his beauty, which suggests that Conchubar finds him effeminate.

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Deirdre’s counter-performance begins when she realises that to save Naoise she must remain with Conchubar. Strikingly, at this point Conchubar admits his own manipulation and role-playing: “Do you think that I/Shall let you go again, after seven years of longing and of planning here and there/[…] and watching my own face/That none might read it?” (VPl 380) After her acts of disobedience, Deirdre exclaims “My life is over; it’s better to obey” (VPl 380) and encourages Naoise to get over her and find other women. Yet shortly after this, she claims the opposite: “I would obey, but cannot. Pardon us” (VPl 381). While she is telling Conchubar about her love for Naoise to create sympathy for themselves, Naoise is murdered offstage and the Executioner appears with a sword with blood on it. From this point onwards, Deirdre starts performing a role, too: she performs obedience only to disobey Conchubar at the very end and escape his authority. She sees the sword but does not express any emotions; instead, she pretends not to care and delivers an ironic speech about women who are lost outside of the domestic sphere: “King Conchubar is right. My husband’s dead./A single woman is of no account, /Lacking array of servants, linen cup-boards, /The bacon hanging—and King Conchubar’s house/All ready, too—I’ll to King Conchubar’s house. It is but wisdom to do willingly what has to be” (VPl 383). This reaction makes Conchubar suspicious: “Why are you so calm?/I thought that you would curse me and cry out, /And fall upon the ground and tear your hair?” (VPl 383). This passage makes it clear that the patriarch’s image of woman is equal to hysteria and excess, yet Deirdre behaves as patriarchy expects men to behave confronted with violence. As Holloway described Mrs. Campbell’s interpretation of this scene: “Her cajoling ‘Conchobar’ into allowing her to attend to the dead body of her beloved ‘Naisi’ was a supreme piece of dramatic art, full of subtlety and intense emotionalism” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 120). He continues that Deirdre’s “savage outburst on his refusing her first request was superb in its tigerish savagery: the baffled woman let loose the floodgates of her wrath on the loveless old man who waded through crime to attain her, and annihilated him into submission …” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 120). Although the script makes it clear that Deirdre’s reaction to the news of the death of her lover was so calm that it shocked Conchubar, Mrs. Campbell-as-Deirdre conveyed a different meaning for Holloway who at the same time points out Deirdre’s strategic manipulation of Conchubar in this scene. Interestingly, laughter appears in this part of the play as an indicator of Deirdre’s revenge and mockery of Conchubar—what is more, it

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establishes her own personal triumph over Conchubar, as she already knows how she will escape his grip. Even though she is already aware that Naoise was killed by Conchubar’s men, she laughs at Conchubar and claims “You know too much of woman to think so” (VPl 384), which is a reaction to Conchubar’s misogynistic assumption that Deirdre would become hysterical when Naoise is murdered. Conchubar tries to touch her, but Deirdre refuses his approach, which is a symbolic gesture of refusal, denying patriarchy the right to do whatever they want with the female body. She claims agency over her own body, which she manages to maintain only by taking her own life. Conchubar ignores Deirdre’s wish to see Naoise’s body once more—instead, he moves towards her to touch her, but Deirdre stops him by flattering his vanity: “In good time./You’ll stir me to more passion than he could, /And yet, if you are wise, you’ll grant me this” (VPl 385). She also employs misogynistic speech to earn his trust: “Look at him, women. […]/I will have you tell him/How changeable women are; how soon/Even the best of lover is forgot, /When his day’s finished” (VPl 385). What Deirdre performs here is seducing power to avoid its grips: a combination of desire and power which we will see in Decima’s performance as well. When after all her efforts, Conchubar still denies fulfilling her wish, Deirdre turns to the audience and reveals that she is manipulating him: “He has refused. […] I thought as much./[…] I understand him now; I know the sort of life I’ll have with him; /But he must drag me to his house by force. /If he refuses [she laughs], he shall be mocked of all” (VPl 386). Conchubar’s initial refusal of Deirdre’s wish is the patriarch’s and the oppressor’s revenge on a woman and her lover who defied his power with their disappearance and love for one another. Yet thanks to Deirdre’s emulation of Conchubar’s manipulative strategies, she is eventually allowed to say farewell to Naoise but only to disappear and kill herself. When Conchubar wants to touch her lifeless body, his touch is denied again but this time by Fergus who returns with a crowd shouting “Death to Conchubar” (VPl 388). The play ends with Conchubar’s words who tries to justify his violence: “Howl, if you will; but I, being King, did right/In choosing her most fitting to be Queen, /And letting no boy lover take the sway” (VPl 388). This ending is similar to what we shall see in The Player Queen with the significant difference that in the latter one, no one forces Decima to become Queen—she will take agency over her body and fate, and becomes Queen without hurting anyone, while here the male

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patriarch claims he has right to dominate a woman’s body, to decide what is good for her, and to use physical violence to enforce his ideal.

“The Woman Born to Be Queen”: Performance of Power in The Player Queen (1922) The Player Queen had an exceptionally long composition time lasting from 1907 until 1919, during which Yeats rewrote the text several times, and when it was first performed, he chose Mrs. Patrick Campbell to embody the main character Decima. As Holloway recalled the audience’s sentiment before the first performance in December 1919, “[a]t the Abbey all the highbrows congregated in great force … Yeats’s play was looked forward to with interest and modified excitement owing to rumours of its nature. Its strange story baffles me, while its unfolding is set in so picturesque an environment that it charmed the eye if it didn’t wholly satisfy the mind” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 206). What Holloway also pointed out was the play’s criticism of the institution of marriage, as he claims that in Act II “marriage is made very light of, indeed” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 206). Holloway’s recollection also testifies to one of the main barriers between Yeats’s plays and audiences that I have already mentioned in Chap. 1: the elitist obscurantism and dense symbolism that pervade many of his plays and tend to leave audiences confused. My dramaturgical readings in this book aim to demonstrate that these seemingly obscure symbols are not to be afraid of. They do not have one single interpretation—what is more, their meaning often lies in the inability to decode them. I contend in this section that The Player Queen demonstrates the ways in which totalitarian and patriarchal institutions operate and how women and theatre can counter oppressive power performances. Yeats described this play to his father in 1914: “I shall have almost finished my new play, to be called perhaps The Woman Born to be Queen. It is a wild comedy, almost a farce, with a tragic background—a study of a fantastic woman” (quoted in Brown 2010, 54). Moreover, in his notes to the play, Yeats stressed that this is his only play “which has not its scene laid in Ireland” (VPl 761), which opens up a broader European and global perspective and interpretation for the play and its message on power performance. The play also evidences that power is performative and that some individuals, like the Queen of the play, do not wish to be part of it. What is more, it illustrates how totalising political institutions treat social outcasts,

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artists, and women who refuse to restrict themselves to the domestic sphere. The beginning of the play establishes an atmosphere of fear from the point of view of citizens who do not trust those in power. Two old men talk about their fear of violence represented by marching men: “At least fifty passed by an hour since, a crowd of fifty men walking rapidly” (VPl 716) and they exclaim, “Hush! I hear a step now, and it is coming this way. We had best pull in our heads. The world has grown very wicked and there is no knowing what they might do to us or say to us” (VPl 716). These sinister marching men are similar to the dark-faced men of Deirdre, whom the three women perceived as signs of forthcoming violence. When the drunken Septimus appears complaining about his disobedient wife Decima, he identifies the major point of conflict of the play: the tension between the dissident Decima and the Prime Minister. Later the Third Citizen also alludes to the manipulative nature of the Prime Minister claiming that, “He has spies everywhere spreading stories. He is a crafty man” (VPl 721). What The Player Queen also displays is the ways in which people tend to react to convincing power images, and how theatre is applied to manipulate and attract masses of people. Some countrymen and citizens begin talking about their Queen and the violence they are planning against her. They are disturbed by the fact that they are ruled by someone whom they have never seen or heard and who is also sexually ambiguous. Hence they create theories of her as a whore, a witch, a holy woman, and someone who has a mysterious relation with a unicorn. The Third Citizen claims: “Our Queen is a witch, a bad evil-living witch, and we will have her no longer for Queen,” (VPl 721) while the Third Countryman tries to defend her: “In my district they say that she is a holy woman and prays for us all” (VPl 721). The crowd is suspicious because they cannot pin down and categorise their Queen, therefore they perceive her as inevitably perverse: “Seeing what company she keeps in the small house, what wonder that she never sets foot out of doors” (VPl 722). They also claim that someone saw the Queen coupling with a great White Unicorn and that she keeps a goat in her garden. Since they perceive the Queen as someone outside of the bourgeois cult of respectability who might also pose a threat of miscegenation, they wish to get rid of her: “I will not have the son of the unicorn to reign over us” (VPl 724). Here the crowd misses the performance of power that could convince them of stability and strength, so when at the end of the play the Queen switches place with the actor Decima, they

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will admire the Player Queen, because she knows how to perform power. The crowd associates the unicorn and the Queen with illicit, deviant sexuality which they want to exclude from the realm of politics. Yet Septimus defends the unicorn and tries to desexualise it by turning it into an abstract symbol: “I will have no one speak against it” (VPl 724), “[n]obody shall speak against the Unicorn” (VPl 725). The end of Scene I portrays a bond of brotherhood, dependency, and friendship between Septimus (who is refused and mocked by the crowd) and his fellow outcast the Old Beggar (Strolling Michael), which is also a scene about embracing strangeness. Septimus expresses his need of the beggar’s support and exclaims, “We shall be friends” (VPl 728) and calls the Old Beggar his brother. The Old Beggar is taken aback by this offer of friendship and wonders: “Don’t you know who I am—aren’t you afraid? When something comes inside me, my back itches. Then I must lie down and roll, and then I bray and the crown changes” (VPl 728). However, Septimus does not perceive this as a repulsive strangeness, but as an artistic feature which he also shares: “Ah! You are inspired. Then we are indeed brothers. Come, I will rest upon your shoulder and we will mount the hill side by side” (VPl 729). This gesture evokes the homoerotic bond of dependency between the two beggars of The Cat and the Moon, who also lean on each other, even though their intimacy breaks in the end. What the crowd does not see in The Player Queen is that the authority figure they would need to fear is represented by the male Prime Minister, whose idea creates the basic tension in the play. To perpetuate his authority, spread misogynistic messages, and consolidate gender roles, he orders a group of actors to perform a propaganda play titled The Tragical History of Noah’s Deluge. Yeats describes him as “an elderly man with an impatient manner and voice” (VPl 730). Indeed, Scene II opens with the Prime Minister raging in his throne room, intimidating and threatening a group of players because their performance of the play is obstructed by Decima: “I will not be trifled with. I chose the play myself; I chose ‘The Tragical History of Noah’s Deluge’ because when Noah beats his wife to make her go into the Ark everybody understands, everybody is pleased, everybody recognises the mulish obstinacy of their own wives, sweethearts, sisters” (VPl 730). This statement tries to justify violence against self-willed, disobedient women in the name of the national cause and expresses the patriarch’s despise for independent women. Everyone in the play believes that Decima disappeared because of her vanity. Her fellow actress Nona claims that, “she would drown rather than

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play a woman older than thirty” (VPl 730–731). Yet Decima’s disappearance is not merely a statement that she will not play an older woman— rather, it is a political statement which refuses to serve the patriarchal state. The Prime Minister’s words point this out, too: “And now, when it is of the greatest importance to the State that everybody should be pleased, the play cannot be given. The leading lady is lost, you say, and there is some unintelligible reason why nobody can take her place” (VPl 730). Decima’s disappearance recalls Bersani’s thoughts on defiance according to which maintaining a position of ungraspability is an act of defiance itself: “I can’t be oppressed if I can’t be found. Unidentifiability is an act of defiance” (1996, 32). The PM demands obedience and suppresses any other performance around him that might subvert his power. He threatens the players and their stage manager with banishment and prison and wants to punish innocent people just to demonstrate his power and create fear and respect: “I will clap him into gaol for a year and pitch the rest of you over the border” (VPl 731) and “[t]o gaol he goes—somebody has to go to gaol” (VPl 731), which is similar to the menace with which Fergus threatened Deirdre. Similar to Deirdre, Decima refuses to respect patriarchal authority which operates with force and threats of violence. Decima thus destroys the rules set up by the Prime Minister: “Does whatever she likes—I know her sort; pull the world into pieces to spite her husband or lover” (VPl 404). The PM is so misogynistic that even when he acknowledges the rebellious power of Decima, he reduces her reasons to jealousy and pettiness. It is also important that while the Prime Minister is raging, Decima is hiding underneath the throne, which the audience can see; this makes a mockery of the Prime Minister’s fury, fitting the play’s genre as a farce. In line with the play’s genre and Yeats’s tendency of irony and self-­ mockery in his drama, the Prime Minister’s authoritative behaviour and conflict with Decima and the actors might as well be a description of Yeats’s behaviour during rehearsals. For instance, after observing Yeats during the rehearsal of On Baile’s Strand on 31 October 1904, Holloway concluded: I say without fear of contradiction that a more irritating play producer never directed a rehearsal. He’s ever flitting about and interrupting the players in the middle of their speeches, showing them by illustration how he wishes it done, droning reading the passage and that in monotonous preachy sing-­ song, or climbing up a ladder onto the stage and pacing the boards as he would have the players do. (I thought he would come to grief on the rickety

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ladder several times.) […] Frank Fay [the actor who played Cuchulain in the play], I thought, would explode with suppressed rage at his frequent interruptions during the final speeches he had to utter”. (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 45)

Yeats’s conduct was no different during the rehearsals of Deirdre and The Player Queen, but strikingly, in those instances, Mrs. Campbell took action, laughed at Yeats’s restlessness and forced him to sit down: “Yeats kept busily walking up and down in front of the stage, and his gesticulation occasionally sent Mrs. Campbell off in a laugh until she finally had to tell him to sit down” (Hogan and O’Neill 2009, 119). Crucially, The Player Queen features three very different women. Nona is submissive and accepts domination by the Prime Minister, helping maintain patriarchal structures as “a fair, comely, comfortable-looking young woman” (VPl 730). Decima, however, does not seem comfortable in this system of patriarchal domination: she is dissident and wants to obtain power from the Prime Minister to put an end to her oppressed status. The real Queen is also ill-at-ease with her role, as she does not wish to be in a position of power—she is “[y]oung, with an ascetic timid face, [who] enters in a badly fitting state dress” (VPl 731). While Nona encourages the Prime Minister’s fury against women like Decima and tries to distance herself from her by complaining that “[s]he does whatever she likes” (VPl 731), the Queen and Decima, the two dissident forces of the play, help each other out like the three women helped Deirdre. Decima is willing to sacrifice herself and face the angry mob to liberate the Queen from the social and political role enforced on her, while the Queen is also willing to sacrifice herself and is ready to offer her position to Decima: “I will show myself to the angry people as you have bidden me. I am almost certain I am ready for martyrdom” (VPl 731). Yet patriarchy and nationalism deny women to be part of the sacrificial paradigm, hence the Prime Minister states, “No, you will not be martyred” (VPl 732). The Prime Minster wants to make a public spectacle of the Queen and dominate her body as well as her behaviour—he wants her to look decent and respectable, hence he instructs her on how to perform power to calm or excite audiences. First, he forbids her to look melancholy, as a dumbfounded Queen will upset people: “You will put them in a bad humour if you hang your head in that dumbfounded way” (VPl 732). The Prime Minister’s following instruction in the first version of the play also reveals how politics manipulates people: “Give the people some plain image or

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they will invent one” (VPl 733). He also takes control over her body: “Walk! Permit me to see your Majesty walk. No, no, no. Be more majestic. Ah! If you had known the queens I have known—they had a way with them. Morals of a dragon, but a way, a way! Put on a kind of eagle look, a vulture look!” (VPl 732). Yet the Queen’s only wish is to be invisible and live a quiet life in admiration of her idol Saint Octema, so her wish is to live a celibate life marked by spiritual intimacy with a woman saint. Even though Decima would be able to perform what the Prime Minister demands from the Queen, Decima is despised and feared by the Prime Minister because she does not need instructions: “I could bow with my whole body down to my ankles and could be stern when hard looks were in season. O, I would know how to put all summer in a look and after that all winter in a voice” (VPl 735). When Decima appears again, she sings a song in which she describes herself as a harlot and which is full of explicit sexual references: “‘When she was got’, my mother sang, /‘I heard the seamew cry, /I saw a flake of yellow foam/That dropped upon my thigh” (VPl 734). She represents for the others the opposite of the woman as defined by the cult of respectability, which is pointed out by Nona who in this play helps maintain a patriarchal, bourgeois code of value. Nona thus claims that Decima is only fit for low comedy and that she is a “cruel, bad woman” (VPl 736) and “a woman who has never been sorry for anybody” (VPl 737). This means that Decima is despised only because she follows her own will and lives an independent life not letting anyone dominate her. Nona also despises Decima because she does not behave like a decent married woman: “I have never sworn to a man in church, but if I did swear, I would not treat him like a tinker’s donkey—before God I would not—I was properly brought up” (VPl 737). Moreover, Nona further denigrates Decima by accusing her of prostitution and defining her as a woman who “offered herself to every man in the company” (VPl 752). While Nona supports the oppressive patriarchal institution which condemns both women and artists, Decima explicitly criticises the Prime Minister’s propaganda play and Nona’s hypocritical ideas of respectability. When Nona says she can eat only if she accepts her role in the play, Decima replies with irony, “I am not to eat my breakfast unless I play an old peaky chinned, drop-nosed harridan that a foul husband beats with a stick because she won’t clamber among the other brutes into his cattle-boat” (VPl 735). Even though Decima refuses to play the role of Noah’s wife, she identifies similarities between herself and the wife in that both of them refuse to obey to a male authority figure. Decima mocks Nona’s self-image

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as a respectable woman: “If that Holy Image of the Church where you put all those candles at Easter was pleasant and affable, why did you come home with the skin worn off your two knees?” (VPl 736). While she is formulating her criticism of respectability and patriarchy, she is trying to get hold of the lobster to eat her breakfast, and this farcical element helps point out the absurdity of the value system of patriarchy. When Septimus appears, Nona also mocks the way Septimus is mad only about her beauty, which relates back to Conchubar’s idealisation of Deirdre and Deirdre’s wish to get rid of her beauty just to put an end to her oppression by Conchubar. When Decima learns that Septimus cheated on her with Nona, she continues to obstruct the performance of the play. The Stage Manager’s claim about the role of Noah’s wife is also striking as it reflects the fact that at the time playwrights usually wrote very simple parts for women. This was part of the reasons why great New Woman actors often played male parts or the complex female characters of Greek tragedies and Ibsen’s plays: “Do as you please. Thank God it’s a part that anybody can play. All you have got to do is to copy an old woman’s squeaky voice” (VPl 721). When they try to silence Decima, she resists, “No, I must be heard” (VPl 741). Even though she is furious that Septimus chose a woman like Nona to cheat on her, she sees this as a moment of liberation from her role as a wife: “I was dead sick of him. And, thank God! She has got him and I am free. […] I will have no rehearsal yet. I’m too happy now that I am free. I must find somebody who will dance with me for a while” (VPl 741–742). From this scene onwards, Decima begins to dominate the play, interrupting the rehearsal with her Salome-like dance with a Bullhead and a Turkey-cock: “Dance, all dance, and I will choose the best dancer among you. Quick, quick, begin to dance” (VPl 744). They begin dancing around her while she is singing and calls herself Queen Decima. Decima’s fury is clearly directed at patriarchy and women who let themselves be manipulated by men like Nona: “Betrayed, betrayed, and for a nobody. For a woman that a man can shake and twist like so much tallow. A woman that till now never looked higher than a prompter or a property man” (VPl 753). As she is performing this ritual in which she names herself the Queen, Septimus arrives and announces the coming of a New Adam, the Unicorn. The dramaturgical position of this statement suggests that Decima is the New Adam. Indeed, Septimus compares Decima to the Unicorn: “Beautiful as the Unicorn, but fierce” (VPl 750).

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Decima not only displays the power of her body but also its vulnerability, and when she feels betrayed and refused by everyone because of her independence, she wants to kill herself with a scissor, demonstrating a willingness to become a martyr just like the Queen: “I am going to drive this into my heart” (VPl 754). However, the Queen suddenly appears and stops her. This scene displays a very strong bond of support and sisterhood between the two unhappy women, who eventually help each other achieve what they have been longing for: the throne for Decima and liberation from a passive political role for the Queen. Decima reveals her vulnerability only to the Queen with whom she shares a strong affinity: “I am very unhappy” (VPl 755), she admits, to which the Queen replies “I, too, am very unhappy” (VPl 755). The Queen talks about love to Decima, just as Deirdre talked about love to the First Musician, and the Queen also admits her admiration for Saint Octema: “I have never known love. Of all things, that is what I have had most fear of. […] Even Saint Octema was afraid of it” (VPl 756). After this moment of intimacy between the two women, the Queen offers her role to Decima and Decima accepts to help liberate the Queen, thus when the Bishop and the Prime Minister enter, it is Decima who is seated upon the throne. The Bishop’s first observation reduces women’s leadership abilities to their beauty: “So beautiful a Queen need never fear the disobedience of her people” (VPl 757). When the Prime Minister notices the change, it is now Decima who silences the male authority: “Do not try to speak” (VPl 757). She performs a ritual with the crowd to demonstrate her power and to make the Prime Minister understand what will happen to him if he turns against her: “I am Queen. I know what it is to be Queen. If I were to say to you I had an enemy you would kill him—you would tear him in pieces, would you not? [Shouts: ‘We would kill him’, ‘We would tear him in pieces’, etc.] But I do not bid you kill anyone” (VPl 757). Crucially, in her final speech, Decima deprecates the type of woman she represents and talks about herself the way normative characters talked about her before: “A woman player has left you. Do not mourn her. She was a bad, headstrong, cruel woman, and seeks destruction somewhere and with some man she knows nothing of; such a woman they tell me that this mask would well become, this foolish, smiling face! Come, dance” (VPl 760). This is part of Decima’s strategy to get the support of people who thus far has despised her because of her independent thinking and fluid approach to conservative institutions like marriage. It also relates back to Foucault’s reverse discourse and to the ending of Deirdre when Deirdre uses

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misogynistic speech to manipulate the patriarch. Before their banishment, Decima asks the players to perform a dance instead of a play. She does not give any instructions about the type of dance she expects, thus allowing more freedom for the actors’ self-expression. While they dance, she bids them farewell and throws them money. This scene can also be read as an expression of interest in a new kind of anti-naturalistic theatre which puts dance and corporeality at its centre instead of the limitations of the text. Deirdre and The Player Queen portray the ways in which women oppressed by patriarchy encounter power and struggle with it, using the same strategies and manipulative techniques that power used against them. Paradoxically, however, their contact with power is what helps them create visibility for themselves—only if temporarily. It is because of their independence and disobedience that the other characters talk about them and notice them in the plays, even if in a deprecating manner: but “without that collision, it’s very unlikely that any word would be there to recall their fleeting trajectory” (Foucault 2000, 167). The plays reveal that what power does is not simply “to observe, spy, detect, prohibit and punish: but it incites, provokes, produces” (Foucault 2000, 172), thus it provokes resistance against itself by the very exercise of power. Despite its aim to silence individuals and oppress subversive action, “it makes people act and speak” (Foucault 2000, 72), and leads to a redistribution of power relations. Yet this pattern of the oppressed becoming oppressor poses a more important question related to any power relations in society: “can resistance undo the system it confronts but in which it is also caught up?” (Eribon 2004, 314).

Killing Tyrants: D’Annunzio’s Glory (1899) I did not want to depict ‘a hero’ in the Carlylian sense, but a false hero (as [Elena] Comnena calls him), a man capable of aspirations but not of action … His contact with Comnena, in which the spirit of tyranny and corruption come to the surface, ruins him irremediably. I love that woman. It seems to me I have managed to vividly represent in her the irresistible force, the hurricane, the wind. —D’Annunzio quoted in Antonucci 1995:1, 171–172

Besides the anxious, melancholy women, martyr, and matriarch figures that I have discussed in the previous chapters, D’Annunzio’s drama also includes revengeful women who become oppressors from the oppressed

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to revenge the patriarchal system that has caused harm to them or to their family. Elena from The Glory and Basiliola from The Ship are the two finest examples of the so-called Dannunzian superwomen who take control over the patriarchs around them by employing the same oppressive, violent strategies that patriarchy used against them. These women are not anxious anymore—rather, they are enraged and full of ambitions. They teach the male characters how to perform power properly, yet while doing so, they are undermining patriarchal power itself. To compare them to the characters in Yeats’s drama, they resemble Yeats’s omnipresent women of the Sidhe, the warrior queen Aoife, Decima of The Player Queen or Fand, whose ambition is to challenge male heroes and whose visible or invisible presence tends to be compared to the wind, as D’Annunzio compares Elena’s power to a hurricane. D’Annunzio’s Elena is not simply a seductive femme fatale or a variation on the figure of Salome. She is atemporal and cannot be pinned down—she is force embodied, a symbol of power itself. What clashes in these two plays by D’Annunzio resembles what Mirzoeff has defined as visuality and countervisuality. As Mirzoeff explains in his article “The Right to Look,” visuality was named as such by Thomas Carlyle to refer to the tradition of heroic leadership which visualises history to maintain autocratic authority: “This visualizing was the attribute of the Hero and him alone. Visuality was held to be masculine, in tension with the right to look that has been variously depicted as feminine, lesbian, queer, or trans” (2011, 475). As a result, both British imperialism and the fascist leaders of the twentieth century drew direct inspiration from Carlyle’s idea of mystical leadership (Mirzoeff 2011, 475). It is this male-­ centred heroism that D’Annunzio challenges by replacing male leaders with women who know how power works, who are ready to clash with it, and who thus perform countervisuality, claiming the right to look and, by extension, the right to existence. The quote by D’Annunzio introducing this section explains the unconventional heroism that The Glory depicts, which deliberately went against nationalist and fascist notions of Carlylian heroes, that is, against virile, ambitious, and triumphant men. I believe that this kind of representation of failed male heroes and ambitious revengeful superwomen not only subverts the traditional paradigms of heroism and gender, but it also reveals the systemic failures of historical distributions of power and the manipulative strategies of oppression and domination. Nonetheless it is also true that D’Annunzio’s description implies that it is only Elena who acts like a

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tyrant in the play, which borders on the criminalisation of strong, assertive women, although Elena’s actions are reactions to the violence of men around her who treat her as an object. In fact, as Antonucci observed, “the real conflict is not between Bronte and Flamma [the two male power figures], but between them and Comnena” (1995a:1, 172). The failure of the first performance of this five-act tragedy was inevitable, as a strong, domineering woman deliberately kills two male tyrants in the play. This course of action would have been applauded in the case of a male hero, but once such a role is given to a woman, it is not seen as heroic anymore. D’Annunzio was aware that it would cause turmoil, and he explained his concerns to his translator Treves on 26 March 1899: “I wrote a masterpiece. This national tragedy is entitled The Glory. This manuscript is destined to raise huge clamour. Your old conservative skin will be horrified” (quoted in Chomel 1997, 85). The play premiered on 27 April 1899  in Naples’ Teatro Mercadante and it almost resulted in a violent revolt despite the presence of two charismatic actors: Eleonora Duse as Elena and Ermete Zacconi as Ruggero Flamma. As Granatella recounts, there were “deafening whistles from Act III onwards” (1993, 249) as the audience was gradually losing their patience. Antonucci explains that the audience was calm and patient during the first two acts, “[b]ut from the third act on, the situation changed radically and the disapprovals started to become even more decisive, inducing a growing panic in the actors” (1995a:1, 170). Critics, however, mention only practical reasons that led to this reaction, such as the lack of rehearsals for this long piece, the difficulty to follow the plot, and Duse’s distracted presence. Yet D’Annunzio’s explanation after the first performance quoted at the beginning of this section demonstrates that the failure also had to do with the plot and representations of heroism, which forced D’Annunzio to defend himself and explain his novel approach to portrayals of heroism. Moreover, this play is much easier to follow than, for instance, the more successful Phaedra, as the language is simpler, the acts are much shorter, and the plotline is clearer. Even though D’Annunzio spoke up for this play, he ended up cancelling all the following performances up until 1912, mostly as a result of Duse’s concerns after the brutality of the first performance: “My hands were trembling all day, Gabri” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 280). The 1912 and 1928 performances included Emilia Varini as Elena who also played Malatestino in Francesca da Rimini: these productions became more successful, yet the audience was not enthusiastic about the shows.

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The 1928 performance was directed by Giovacchino Forzano and, interestingly, it was commissioned by Mussolini to promote Italian tragedy (Granatella 1993, 248). Yet as Woodhouse has observed, “[c]ritics were unanimous in judging La gloria the worst of D’Annunzio’s plays” (2006, 329). The play is usually described either as an early representation of fascism or as a “tragedy of love which, through the body of the vampire woman, tends to destroy men” (Bisicchia 1991, 66). While the latter one is a reductive reading criminalising the female character just as society criminalises women’s bodies, the former one is indeed true, as the play portrays how totalising politics works, but the play does not promote it. Instead, by representing this practice as counterproductive and inherently doomed to failure, the play rather interrogates such practices and portrays power as performative and thus destroyable, while power always wants to present itself as immortal. In fact, The Glory invites the reader/audience to get an insight into the backstage of dictatorships, unveiling those strategies and ideologies that autocratic power uses to manipulate people. Nonetheless critics were almost unanimous in criminalising Elena and reducing her character to a woman greedy for power, while exalting the male protagonist for the same greediness: “Elena Comnena incarnated a sinister figure greedy of gold and pride, anxious for vengeance and power” (Gazzetta Letteraria quoted in Granatella 1993, 254). Critics were also outraged because unlike in other plays by D’Annunzio, in The Glory the woman who undermines the conventional male hero stays alive: “unfortunately Elena does not die, but continues her evil spells against Ruggero” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 255). While Italian critics were not impressed by the play, French critic Emico Bérenger applauded it as “an absolutely original experiment to interpret poetically the agitations of contemporary society” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 263) and he compared it to Ibsen’s and Wagner’s works. Elena’s body is sexualised and thus objectified by male characters throughout the play: she is mocked for being sterile and thus unable to fulfil the procreative duties assigned to women. But this mocked, pathologised, and objectified woman responds to this invisible violence of patriarchy by making a power image of herself and mocking the men who want to contain her. The beginning of Act I depicts a scene of male comradeship and brotherhood, as a group of men are waiting for their leader Ruggero Flamma, and they are ready to die for him if necessary. It is worth noting here that these male characters are craving to die for someone else, while the female protagonists I have discussed so far died for themselves to escape

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oppression. This scene also reflects one of the main contradictions of Italian Fascism: the inevitable conflation between the homoerotic and the homosocial. These men almost seem to be in love with Flamma and exclaim many times, “We will all die for him” (1995a:1, 175). Fàuro describes this strong brotherhood: “I and my companion have entered the fight, abandoning the solitude of our studies and work, presenting the apparition of a dominating and creative idea of which we wish to be obedient and lucid instruments to rebuilt the City, the Patria, and the Latin Force” (179). Champagne has explained that this proximity of the homosocial to the homoerotic was a real problem for Fascism in Italy, which it was unable to resolve “given fascism’s dependence on often misogynistic notions of virility to produce the collective sense of national identity that liberal Italy had failed to engender” (2013, 14). Hence “Fascism […] paradoxically kept alive the conditions of possibility of a homosexual identity even as it criminalized homosexuals” (Champagne 2013, 14). In a similar vein, Lorenzo Benadusi has stressed that intimacy between men was an inevitable result of comradeship, as in the trenches “everyone was forced into close physical contact with no privacy” (2017, 238); it was “a space in which the most basic physical needs were shared and men were mutually exposed to one another’s nudity” (2017, 238). In The Glory, brotherhood and comradeship between men are not simply characterised by physical intimacy but a spiritual one as well, which further confirms the homoerotic nature of their bonds. After these men’s exaltation of Flamma as a great leader for whom they would die, the leader who appears conveys self-doubt, feels ill-at-ease with his role, and can hardly believe so many people support him, which is manifested in his appearance and movements: “His voice is short and sour. His face conveys an earthy paleness, his eyes have a febrile splendour. […] He seems to look for space in front of him […], like a prisoner” (182). The stage direction further indicates that he is moving back and forth in the room with his head bowed and he keeps asking his men, “Do you believe in me? In the truth and in the potential of my idea?” (183). His body language and lack of confidence are not in accordance with his speech about violence, thus it seems he is forcing a role on himself which does not fit him at all: “The necessity of violence urges us. No work in life can be finished without blood over a nation” (183). He continues urging violence, yet according to the stage directions his movements remain uncertain: he takes some steps forward but then goes backward. Il Giornale d’Italia noticed the dissonance between Flamma’s words and actions and

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was disturbed by Elena’s character: “Comnena is an enigma, Flamma is a vain character, a shadow who speaks well, but is still a shadow, a rhetorician of politics, love and will” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 269). He was also described as weak and cowardly, unable to face the tumultuous crowd and as someone who created an exterior drama to hide the interior one (Granatella 1993, 269). Interestingly, the qualities critics objected in the character of Comnena were the ones they missed from the character of Ruggero Flamma, which reflects that at D’Annunzio’s time (and in fact today as well), violence and passion tend to be justifiable in men, but once a woman displays too much passion or some form of aggression, she is immediately criminalised as immoral, abnormal, and evil. Crucially, Flamma conveys much tenderness towards his men, especially towards Daniele Steno. When he says goodbye to them, their hands touch his hand and “a virile brotherhood connects them” (185), but when Daniele is about to leave too, Flamma begs him to stay. This scene is striking, as Flamma reveals his vulnerable side only to Daniele, and Daniele criticises him for acting up and not caring about his health. He leans towards Flamma “with an almost compassionate tenderness” (185): “Are you tired?” (185), and in the meantime they are holding hands. Flamma confesses to him: “I am anxious as if I was missing life, as if there was not enough blood in my arteries to fill my heart!” (185). Daniele warns him that he will only have life if he becomes less greedy, hinting at the role Flamma is performing to keep power: “A cup that you put under an all too violent act does not fill up” (185). But Flamma feels he must perform this role, and he is expected to look greedy for power: “O Daniele, I need to exceed the others even in greediness; I have to be the most powerful and the greediest of all so that what I deserve won’t escape me and won’t be stolen from me” (186). Daniele offers spiritual consolation for the anxious Flamma through a constant physical intimacy between them, as Daniele is leaning on him, they are looking into each other’s eyes and holding hands, as indicated by the stage directions. When Daniele leaves, Flamma follows him with sad eyes and “[l]eft alone, goes towards the balcony, with the air of someone who feels suffocating” (186). His men notice that he “has the air of a tortured man” (200) which Fàuro corrects as “[n]ot tortured, but hesitant. He is at the crossroad” (200). Fàuro also notes that violence and war is a necessity for Flamma so that he could feel he exists, not because he wants it. Flamma’s uncertainty is contrasted with the confidence of Elena who arrives right after Daniele leaves. The stage direction immediately

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associates her with the man-destroying Medusa, as the only jewellery she is wearing is a small Medusa head: “Her voice almost seems interrogative; nevertheless an intrepid security, an infallible certainty makes it affirmative, as if she was saying: ‘You belong to me, you are mine’” (187). She also proudly presents herself as a self-willed, independent woman: “I have my own thought,” (189) she exclaims. Flamma is worried about her independent thinking which might put her in danger, but Elena refuses this patronising and condescending approach: “And where is your faith in the forces of man? I do not doubt, I am certain, I feel infallible. Don’t worry about me: I won’t be devoured. I’m familiar with risk: it’s like a mastiff that has been eating from my hands. I will return, I will return. I have my own idea” (190). This idea concerns the murder of the old tyrant Bronte, whose violence becomes evident in Act II when he is alone with Elena. He is dying and he blames Elena for everything that has happened to him: “The fear! The fear! My life has been torn to pieces by fear. […] Fear has found weapon in a woman” (194). While Elena is sitting next to him, Bronte continues to heap insults on her: “You, you have been a horrible misery for my last years, the unmentionable plague, the hidden torment, the disgrace and remorse of my old age, the stain on my powerful life” (195). The insults are accumulating and eventually break her peace, so she exclaims venomously, “Enough! Enough! I don’t want to hear it anymore” (196). Due to her refusal to identify with the insults and take the blame, the dying, blind Bronte suddenly stands up and tries to strangle Elena, but his nurse prevents him, thus once again a woman protects another woman from male violence. Insults and threats of physical violence continue in Act III as well, but Elena is now unshakable and unaffected by the insults. A group of men want to kill her by throwing her into the river: “Empress into the Tiber!” (204), they exclaim. But when she appears, they turn pale and silent: “I heard my name. (A moment of silence and hesitation.) If someone must speak, speak. I permit it” (205). When one of them accuses her of killing Bronte, they all begin shouting insults at her: “May you suffocate in blood!”; “Shame! Shame!”; “Blood falls back on you!” (205). It is Fàuro who puts an end to this avalanche of insults but at the same time reducing Elena’s strength: “Shut up! Shut up! Against a woman!” (205) But the men continue the insult, shaming her in various ways and emphasising her outcast position, seeing her as the evil oriental other from Byzantine: “The group is shouting and moving towards the woman, enraged, like a kennel of dogs” (206). Elena, however, stands the insults proudly: “Comnena

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stays where she was, without even the slightest collapse, silent and rigid, with head raised, with an unchanging expression of despise and defiance in her mouth and eyes” (206). As my previous analyses have illustrated, D’Annunzio’s dissident, non-­ normative protagonists are always forced to stand the insults of the authorities around them. It is the use of insult that makes the insulted characters’ experience resonate with the lives of historical queer subjects. Insult and the resulting feeling of shame in D’Annunzio’s characters work to inscribe, “the social order into the subjectivity of ‘pariahs’” (Eribon 2004, xviii) and insult becomes the sign of such individuals’ social and psychological subjectivity. Eribon further articulates that through such insults, “I ­discover that I am a person about whom something can be said, to whom something can be said, someone who can be looked at or talked about in a certain way and who is stigmatized by that gaze and those words” (2004, 16). Elena—like Sebastian, Mila, Fedra, Pisanelle, and Basiliola—discovers the same thing through insults heaped on her head. It is an invisible violence to which these characters respond in different ways, but it always achieves its main purpose: it lets the insulted know they occupy an inferior position in the social order. This wounded consciousness becomes a formative part of the personality of these characters, inducing them to take revenge for such hurts or to escape from the world that insults them. After this scene of violence and defiance, Elena tries to teach Flamma how to perform power. Even though it is Flamma whose words drive away the crowd insulting Elena, it appears like a teaching lesson from Elena, hence scholarship has described her as a “Machiavellian woman” (Chomel 1997, 90): “Ah, this satisfies me! Finally you show yourself what you are: the master. Have you seen them? Have you seen how they fell silent when you looked at them? […] They were nothing but servants in front of you. They could do nothing but obey. They obeyed” (207). Elena promises him glory, but Flamma is not competitive anymore, hence Elena warns him: “Don’t flinch; you hesitate. The one who halts is lost. […] Is your sight clouded? Doesn’t it look for, doesn’t it find the enemy? You must always look for the enemy” (208). Elena tries to increase his confidence by confronting him with the question: “Are you the master?” (208), but Flamma’s response is “Maybe” (208) which Elena sees as a word that he should forget. This scene unveils the manipulative logic and performative strategies of totalising institutions through Elena Comnena’s instructions. Moreover, this scene yet again highlights that Flamma is not comfortable with this hyper-masculine authoritarian power role. He is completely

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powerless in this scene, controlled by Elena—he is trembling, and claims that he is shaking because of her. Despite Elena’s specific instructions, Flamma remains a non-normative authority figure, as he cannot follow the instructions. In Act IV, the stage direction calls him a “Dictator” (213), yet he does not behave like one. The scene is very homoerotic too, since Flamma is with Daniele when a young boy visits Flamma to tell him a secret: the stage direction emphasises the immediate connection between him and the boy and that Flamma cannot stop smiling at him. When he turns away to ask Daniele to leave him alone with the mysterious boy, the boy attempts to kill him, but is eventually disarmed by Daniele. Yet Flamma remains calm, keeps smiling at him, and lets him go: “Go; I won’t touch you. You are free. No one keeps you. Go wherever you want. Daniele, see him to the exit; please” (213). Flamma explains to his closest friend the inexplicable attraction he felt for the boy and how he reminded him of the fact that he was not living the life he wanted to live: You will understand, Daniele, if I tell you that I sensed in him something fraternal, distantly? I had to smile and almost mock him so as not to yield to the surge of my heart. Ah, he deserved the joy of killing me for having revealed to me in an instant that the most profound root of my life is still intact and that I could still restart to live. (213–214, my emphasis)

Flamma becomes nostalgic and recalls his friendship with Daniele which is almost like a sexual reference: “Do you remember, Daniele? Do you remember? We were running, breathless, panting, as if losing a kingdom, losing that moment of supreme light. I was dragging you. My heart was in my throat…Do you remember? How we loved it! How sweet and terrible the beauty of Rome seemed to us!” (214) Flamma’s real wish is, therefore, not for power and violence but for freedom and Daniele’s company. When Elena reappears, Flamma attempts to escape the role forced on him. Crucially, he questions the point of shedding other people’s blood and the idea that men must sacrifice themselves for their nation: “No slave had ever so much hatred for his jail as much as I have for this blind war, forced as I am to spend my life inflicting violence on men. Why? To what end? I did not promise this to myself; this wasn’t the imprint I wished to make on a ransomed nation” (218). Like many Dannunzian characters suffering from a role forced on them or because of other anxieties, Flamma

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also sees the only escape in death, thus he begs Elena to kill him, while Elena is urging him to get up, confront the people, and take responsibility. Scholarship has referred to Flamma as a “failed superman” (Bárberi quoted in Chomel 1997, 92) and Chomel also calls him weak because he is not able to act like a dictator and he exhibits hesitation. However, the real problem with Flamma’s character is that he blames Elena for every mistake he has made in his life and refuses to acknowledge his own part in it. He could have refused power, but as Daniele also pointed out, he was too greedy. He had wanted to exceed others even before Elena began to force this role on him. Yet he accuses Elena of having “trampled on [his] life with [her] bronze feet” (222) and then mocks her for her sterility: “You are sterile. All the old age of the world is in your womb. You cannot produce anything but death” (222). When the crowd cries “Death to Flamma!” (223) and celebrates the Empress, she stabs him in the heart and the crowd demands Flamma’s severed head. Elena’s actions can be interpreted as the consequences of all the insults, paternalisation, objectification, and threats of violence she had to endure from men. She challenges and revenges patriarchy by manipulating all men around her—her body becomes a political space which warns people against the dangers of autocratic power and reveals its fragility by demonstrating through her own actions and words how a violent dictator thinks and acts to manipulate people. Although it is Flamma whom the play describes as the Dictator, it is clear that he is not comfortable with that role, just as the Queen was ill-at-ease with her political role in Yeats’s The Player Queen. Although D’Annunzio’s play sheds light on the male violence (both verbal and physical) Elena has to endure, it is still problematic that she kills the young Flamma once she realises he cannot perform his role properly. If we think of Phaedra in which the script offered explanation for Fedra’s cruelty towards a young woman and her decision to turn the patriarchs against each other, Elena’s actions can be interpreted from a similar psychological point of view. Because of the play’s ambiguity, however, it could also be argued that Elena kills Flamma because he is not manly and ambitious enough, thus he is not able to lead people. Although it is commendable that D’Annunzio chose a female power figure and hero for his play, what raises concerns and invites further critical investigations is that the play turns such an independent and strong female character into a populist, autocratic dictator figure.

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Seducing Patriarchal Power: Basiliola as Superwoman in The Ship (1908) The Ship is a three-act play which bears striking resemblance to The Glory, as its superwoman Basiliola turns the male protagonist Marco Gratico’s vanity and wish for glory against himself. In this play, however, Basiliola’s reasons for revenge are rendered more visible, as her entire family was mutilated by Gratico’s family and her body was abused. Once again a woman (the priestess Ema) acts as a gatekeeper of tradition and community values, similar to the matriarch figures of The Daughter of Iorio and La Pisanelle. The matriarch Ema is challenged by a new kind of woman who defies the norms and values of the community with her dissident behaviour, hence Antonucci called the play “the story of Basiliola’s vengeance” (1995b:2, 153). Basiliola is familiar with the logic of patriarchy and she takes advantage of this knowledge by means of seduction to evade patriarchy’s traps. This play was yet another attempt by D’Annunzio to create total theatre with emphasis on music, dance, and scenery. The play premiered on 11 January 1908 in Rome’s Teatro Argentina with Evelina Paoli as Basiliola and Ferruccio Garavaglia as Gratico. As Antonucci observes, it became a success in 1908 only because the audience gave it a nationalist interpretation (1995b:2, 151), which implies that the play invites other readings as well, since the 1915 performance was already received by the audience with hostility and rigidity. The performance included 84 actors and 109 chorus members becoming one of the greatest theatre events of the twentieth century: “a spectacle that expressed a new, modernist mode of understanding theatre” (Antonucci 1995b:2, 151). In 1921, D’Annunzio’s son Gabriellino D’Annunzio and Mario Roncoroni also directed a short film The Ship in which Basiliola was played by Ida Rubinstein. The play is set in Venice in 552 against the backdrop of barbaric invasions, Byzantine influence and violent internal conflicts and rivalry between two families: the Faledro (Basiliola’s family) and the Gratico. As a result of the two families’ fight for power, Orso Faledro (Venice’s first Tribune) was deported and blinded along with his four sons, and only Basiliola and Giovanni could escape, even though Basiliola was forced to become a prostitute. Since Giovanni has also survived the violence, he could have been an ideal protagonist of this play, but D’Annunzio yet again replaced the male hero with a superwoman, giving her visibility and voice to take revenge on her and her family’s oppressors. The play’s Prologue features

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the five mutilated men on stage standing in front of the head of the Gratico family, the matriarch Ema who justifies her cruelty and rigidity with religion, as she is leaning on the Cross while insulting the blinded, vulnerable men. When Ema claims that she is in the right and God is with her, Orso points out her hypocrisy: “Is he with you in your violent ways? In your visions of lies is he with you?” (1995b:2, 166) Ema’s reaction is to mock him for posing as the oppressed, while he also committed violence during his time. It slowly turns out that what the Gratico call violence is Faledro’s betrayal of Venice by liaising with the Greeks, which echoes the plot of Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones: “You plotted against the liberty of the Islands,” (167) exclaims Ema. During the verbal clash between Orso and Ema, two ships are approaching the port of Venice: one brings Marco Gratico and the other one brings Basiliola. When everyone believes Giovanni is coming, Orso corrects them saying, “No, it’s not Giovanni. It’s my daughter Basiliola. My daughter Basiliola is coming” (169). But Gratico’s supporters wish for the death of the outcast who betrayed their city: “May the Byzantine be thrown into the sea!” (170). When she arrives, she does not know yet what has happened to her family and her growing panic at the sight of the violence imposed on her family generates sympathy for her and her family: “Men, answer me. I have returned from the profound sea. Men who build the house of God, answer me. Who are those sad ones who cover their faces? Who are those shadows without sight and without voice […]? Answer me. Are they Orso Faledro’s sons? My brothers?” (172). Initially, her body position suggests precarity and vulnerability: “Humiliated, I bend over: Make me your servant” (172). At the same time, she feels objectified by the hostile men around her: “Why are all the men devouring me with their savage eyes?” (172). Her four brothers are holding hands with an air of “painful shame” (173), but the youngest one Marino suddenly collapses and dies in Basiliola’s hands, as his injuries have been fatal. It is in this moment that Basiliola understands she must perform a role to take revenge for her family. The first phase of this performance is marked by a pretended submission to the new authorities and the seduction of Marco Gratico, which then turns into a violent mastery over the entire Gratico family. After Marino’s death, she suddenly exclaims that she bows before the winners and will not bury the dead: “Men, if the winner is coming, if our God crowned him, then let the will of our God prevail” (175). The stage direction indicates that she begins talking to Ema “with an ambiguous submission” (176), which makes her suspicious, thus Ema

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claims that she ignores her compliments. Once again, a matriarch figure fulfils the role of gatekeeper of patriarchal society and tradition, as Chomel has also pointed out: “Ema, priestess of tradition, wants Basiliola blind, disfigured, slave, deprived therefore of that subjective autonomy which is a challenge to the norms of patriarchal society” (1997, 160). Basiliola cannot deceive the matriarch with seduction, hence she uses Marco as a weapon against his own family. When Marco is about to be officially elected Tribune of Venice, Basiliola interrupts the ceremony “with the vehemence of the wind” (184) and delivers an ambiguous speech in front of Gratico, which can be seen both as a sign of submission and as a threat: Hear me, oh Gratico. Elected Tribune. Prince of the Sea. Your triumph would be incomplete for sure if it was not celebrated by me, by my voice. Do you recognise me? […] Of course you know me. Your eyes of prey were staring at me more than once. My father called me Basiliola. For you I will call myself Destruction. And I will dance the dance of victory for you, oh Gratico, for you […]; I will dance the sacred dance for you in front of your horse herders and wolf hunters. (185)

This proposal makes it clear that Basiliola will use seduction and dance as weapons against patriarchal power, as she seems to know well that power can be annulled through seduction, thus she will abuse the male gaze and turn it against itself. The men surrounding Gratico immediately become enthusiastic and urge her to dance. She pretends submission and offers both herself and her family to Gratico. She knows that what Gratico wants is glory and the illusion that he has mastery, so she performs a dance with a double-edged sword in front of Gratico: “Oh Gratico, it will be yours. Can you see how it is shining? It will be yours” (187). While dancing to the men, she has her eyes fixed on Gratico and suddenly “bursts out in a frenetic laughter” (187). Not surprisingly, contemporary critics after the performance of Le Martyre saw a comparison between Sebastian’s dance for Diocletian and Basiliola’s dance for Gratico: “Sebastian’s rhythmic step will evoke Basiliola’s dance” (Il Marzocco quoted in Granatella 1993, 790). What clashes here is seduction and power, and the scene demonstrates that seduction can undermine power with its elusiveness. What conveys so much power to seduction is the element of play/game, namely the appearances: “it is appearance, and the mastery of appearances, that rule” (Baudrillard 2001, 88).

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Basiliola’s anger is not simply directed at the Gratico family, but at patriarchal society in general: at authorities who feel entitled to insult and abuse the vulnerable. In the Second Episode, Basiliola is among the prisoners who curse Marco Gratico. Basiliola arrives with her archers and poses as an authority figure which recalls Rubinstein-as-Sebastian: just as Sebastian asks his archers to kill him, the prisoners beg Basiliola to murder them. Gauro is the leading voice here who takes pleasure in offering his body to Basiliola: “Basiliola, come here! Here’s my naked breast, my throat uncovered. Come, and take the double-edged sword, and strike me” (190). Since Basiliola is not willing to grant him this pleasure, he begins insulting her, telling her that he sees her as a prostitute and that he was among the people throwing insults at her earlier. Basiliola’s restraint perseveres, and it is only when Gauro admits he tortured Marino (Basiliola’s brother) and as a result he died that Basiliola stabs him, while Gauro exclaims “I love you” and “Your hand is sacred” (195). The stage direction refers to the performative element in her actions, as she “renews the game” (196) and begins shooting all the other prisoners who ask for death. As Chomel notes, this hyperbolic scene is the result of “the sadomasochistic impulses of the fin de siècle culture in which sex, blood and mysticism are mingled” (1997, 153) and which portrays the deliberately savage eroticism and refinement of a society which inverts every relationship in search of a new equilibrium. When Gratico’s man Traba arrives and sees the massacre, he calls Basiliola Iézabel. Basiliola proudly confirms that she is indeed Iézabel, which is much better than being a false prophet like him. What Basiliola does here is a reappropriation or resignification of the insult. When Gratico arrives, Traba wants to convince him to kill Basiliola for what she has done, which makes her burst out in laughter again, disturbing Traba: “My God! Her teeth are grinding in her horrible laughs!” (203). The stage direction indicates that she keeps mocking Traba as he is complaining to Marco about the impossibility of controlling Basiliola: “Whatever it is that’s in her is surely eternal and beyond life and death, and cannot be dominated by man” (204). Even though Marco temporarily takes over mastery and disarms her, once Traba is gone, Basiliola seduces him again and regains control: “How you are coming closer and closer! Watch out: you are almost breathing on my lips” (207). Marco is disturbed that he cannot pin her down, so Basiliola promises him to reveal her secret to him soon: “You will know, you will know who I am” (208). Marco insists: “Tell me, ah tell me your secret! Why are your women calling you Diona

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when they sing your grace?” (208). Basiliola’s presence makes Marco feel disempowered: “Lord, Lord, why have you trampled my force? Why have you forsaken me?” (210–211). After she kisses him, the stage direction states that she “smiles and speaks ambiguously” (213) and “she seems to smile in herself at her own victory” (213). Her victory is manifested in Marco’s changed body position as well: “When the humiliated bends over, her face gets illuminated with victorious scorn” (213). Despite Marco’s visible hesitation and disempowerment in this play, contemporary critics tended to project heroism and virility on his character, denying even the possibility of the presence of an anti-Carlylian male hero or a heroine in an Italian tragedy: “The hero of the tragedy is Marco Gràtico, who gathers in his spirit all the energies of those builders of empire who want to dominate at all cost, as at all cost he will want and will know how to rule the new republic” (Corriere della Sera quoted in Granatella 1993, 662). What Italian critics of the time wanted to see was Marco as a virile victorious hero and Basiliola as a perverse woman reduced to the sensuality of her body, which is the exact opposite of what really happens in the play. In fact, after the 1918 production, L’Illustrazione Italiana complained that the music composed for the production failed to represent Basiliola as a “sensual, fascinator and perverse woman” (quoted in Granatella 1993, 679). Basiliola’s final attack on the Gratico family is through Marco’s brother the Archbishop Sergio Gratico. In the Third Episode Basiliola challenges Christianity as well, replacing it with her own pagan faith and posing as a religious authority. Sergio and Basiliola are presiding over an event celebrating Diona, the idol of Basiliola’s esoteric religion, while devout Catholics are shouting insults at them, but she confronts the clamour and mocks them. This scene includes an erotic dance which she performs in front of the altar and Sergio, thus turning the two brothers against each other, as Marco murders his own brother out of jealousy and orders that Basiliola be tied to the altar. While Ema urges violence against her, insisting that she should be blinded and forced into slavery, Basiliola manipulates Marco once again by begging him: “Honour me. Be a prince. Release me from the ropes; and take me on the Ship, and the altar too; and throw me in the sea, so that I sink to the bottom and find my third crown” (263). Marco releases her without hesitation and turns against his mother Ema. Basiliola thus receives the opportunity to take her death into her hands and throws herself on the burning altar to deprive the Gratico of the pleasure of killing her with their hands. Before the sacrifice, she mocks

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Marco’s vanity again, pointing out how easy it was to control him through the forces of seduction: “Brave man, I have seen you once more turn pale at the odour of my hair; and you are still pale” (265). She further warns him: “Remember that I saw a ship of fire above you. […] Despot, despot, can you feel my force? Enormous, enormous prey of lion […]. Are you trembling?” (264). Because of these scenes, The Ship is probably D’Annunzio’s most violent play which deflects the strategies of dictatorships and reveals the dangers of “obsessive loyalty to the family clan” (Chomel 1997, 158). Basiliola’s aim, however, is not to obtain personal power, but to play with it and eventually annul power which ruined her and her family.

Conclusion The defiant dyke characters analysed in this chapter constitute one of the primary reasons for the ambiguous interpretations that Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts invite. Scholarship has largely reduced these characters to mere femme fatale figures who pose a threat to the stability of the patriarchal world and the established order of things. Yet by choosing these defiant and recalcitrant women as the protagonists of the plays and by highlighting the insults they endure from the patriarchs and matriarchs that surround them, the plays generate sympathy for the predicament of strong, independent women and at the same time offer an X ray and parody of manipulative strategies with which patriarchal power operates. Deirdre, Decima, Elena, and Basilola are all strikingly aware of the ways in which men think about women, which helps them deceive and outperform patriarchs, kill tyrants, or seduce them. Of the four female characters examined above, Deirdre and Basiliola deceive power figures in order to evade their grasp and take their death into their own hands as a form of liberation. Decima and Elena, however, choose to replace despotic characters by outperforming them, thus proving that authority is not restricted to the realm of men. Contemporary critics perceived these characters as Machiavellian femme fatale figures, who should be punished and whose presence in the plays demonstrates the threat women pose to the male-­ centred world. However, I have argued that the scripts do not interrogate the female characters, but through them they invite a scathing criticism of the oft-invisible violence of the patriarchal world which lies behind the actions of these women. As John Champagne has observed, “this representation of the sexually tarnished woman is always in tension with an

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acknowledgement that forces beyond her control—forces directly linked to male power and prestige—are equally if not more responsible for her unhappy fate” (Champagne 2015, 88). Moreover, acts of defiance in these four plays consist of showing disrespect for normative authorities, promising to obey the rules set up by the male authorities but in the end doing the exact opposite, which is often combined with dance scenes and frenetic laughter. It is not only excess that can pose danger to organic nation-states and male power but also the refusal of performance: the act of not doing what is demanded of them. Halberstam calls this “refusal of mastery” (2011, 11) one of the many forms of queer “failure” which is “an art of unbecoming” (2011, 88) what society expects people to become. The four defiant dykes of this chapter are dismissive of conventions, often behave like traditional male mythic heroes, refuse respectability, traditional family constructs and motherhood, and they perform power much better than their male counterparts, thus unbecoming “respectable” oppressed women. Their defiance is “a refusal to be or to become woman” (Halberstam 2011, 124) according to the schemas set out for women by patriarchy and its regressive cult of respectability. Through the tropes of power performance or the refusal of it, the plays reveal how the strategies of power work, how fragile and reversible power is, and how crucial the role of performance is in politics and in the manipulation of the people. They also illustrate that theatre, through its form, is always able to provide a powerful counter-performance threatening the establishments and ideas in which authoritarianism and nationalism ground their legitimacy. Fascism had very deep intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic roots which had appeared already in the nineteenth century and it gradually took hold of Europe as a “radical chic” (Kaplan 1986, 170). It was therefore inevitable for artists to think about the fascism of performance, meaning all kinds of political performance including totalising and homogenising efforts and manipulations. Carlston elaborates this topic regarding Virginia Woolf, Natalie Barney and Marguerite Yourcenar, and claims that even though Woolf’s fiction is anti-fascist, Barnes’s is apolitical and Yourcenar’s is conservative, “none of their texts holds a position entirely outside of the terms of fascist discourse” (1998, 6). Similar to the above-mentioned artists, Yeats and D’Annunzio were equally involved in a culture that became increasingly dominated by fascist discourse, hence they began “thinking fascism,” that is, they portrayed how fascist, totalising structures and institutions operated and the harm they inflicted on

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individuals. As I have argued in this book, this is most visibly manifested in clashes between the contradictory dramaturgical impulses of the queer and the normative, which also carry crucial implications for the contemporary moment as I shall briefly demonstrate in my conclusion.

References Arrington, Lauren. 2021. The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy Shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. Montréal: New World Perspectives. Beaumont, Caitriona. 1997. Women, citizenship, and Catholicism in the Irish free state, 1922/1948. Women's History Review 6 (4): 563–585. Benadusi, Lorenzo. 2017. The Disappearance of the ‘Third Sex’? Fear of Effeminacy and the Rediscovery of Virile Homosexuality during the Great War. In Homosexuality in Italian Literature, Society, and Culture, 1789–1919, ed. Lorenzo Benadusi, Paolo L.  Bernardini, Elisa Bianco, and Paola Guazzo. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bersani, Leo. 1996. Homos. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press. Bibbò, Antonio. 2022. Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Bisicchia, Andrea. 1991. D’Annunzio e il teatro. Milano: Mursia. Brown, Terence. 2010. The Literature of Ireland: Criticism and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carlston, Erin G. 1998. Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Champagne, John. 2013. Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chomel, Luisetta Elia. 1997. D’Annunzio: Un teatro al femminile. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. 1981. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1995a. Tutto il teatro, Vol. 1, ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Rome: Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton. ———. 1995b. Tutto il teatro, Vol. 2, ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Rome: Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton. Eribon, Didier. 2004. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Foucault, Michel. 1978. In The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction, ed. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1996. The End of the Monarchy of Sex. In Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 214–225. New York: Semiotext(e). ———. 2000. Lives of Infamous Men. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion, 157–175. New York: The New Press. Giuliani, Gaia. 2019. Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Granatella, Laura. 1993. Arrestate l’autore! D’Annunzio in scena: cronache, testimonianze, illustrazioni, documenti inediti e rari del primo grande spettacolo del ‘900. Rome: Bulzoni. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harris, Susan Cannon. 2002. Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hogan, Robert, and Michael J.  O’Neill, eds. 2009. [1967]. Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre. A Selection from his Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Kaplan, Alice Yaeger. 1986. Reproductions of Banality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look. Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 473–496. Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Deirdre. The Irish Times (24 June 1909): 7. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2014. Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities. In What’s Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms, ed. M. Rosello and S. Dasgupta, 81–90. New York: Fordham. Re, Lucia. 2002. D’Annunzio, Duse, Wilde, Bernhardt: il rapporto autore/attrice fra decadentismo e modernità. MLN 117 (1): 115–152. Woodhouse, John. 2006. D’Annunzio’s Theatre. In A History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, 323–338. Cambridge (NY): Cambridge University Press. Yeats, William Butler. 1961. Essays and Introductions. London and New  York: Macmillan. ———. 1966. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.  B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach. London: Macmillan. Abbreviated as VPl in the text.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions

The aim of this dramaturgical and queer reading of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama and some of their production histories has been threefold. First, my purpose is to foster the relationship between queer theory and the modernist canon, responding to Jack Halberstam’s suggestion for scholars to start queering the works of the “weird white male loners” (2020, 23) of modernism. My dramaturgical readings of eight plays by Yeats and eight plays by D’Annunzio have outlined the thus far underrepresented affinities between their drama in terms of gender and sexuality. The aim of this approach has been to encourage readers, scholars, students, and theatre makers to employ contemporary queer theory to discover topical messages in modernist scripts which at first glance might seem to be unapproachable due to their obscure symbolism or language. This book equally aspires to stimulate readers to employ the non-­ intentionalist approach when it comes to reading dramatic texts. Scripts and literary works can be treated and interpreted separately from their authors’ intentions, sexuality, and original historical contexts, even if such an approach inevitably encounters resistance by conservative gatekeepers who dictate what can be said about these canonical figures. Modernist Playwrights has equally aimed to demonstrate that Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays would deserve more attention today, as they convey unorthodox and ambiguous messages about power, gender, sexuality, and difference, which makes their drama seminal to the queer modernism, too. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9_6

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In line with the book’s purpose to open up Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s scripts to more global and topical political interpretations, this conclusion will be somewhat unusual as academic concluding notes go. Instead of merely recapitulating the main contentions of this book, I wish to highlight the ways in which the authoritarian Hungarian political context this book has been written in has informed my queer, anti-authoritarian understanding of the scripts. It is this increasingly populist, autocratic, xenophobic, and homophobic atmosphere that made me realise how topical Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays are for the contemporary moment—in this case, for the rise of right-wing governments, illiberal democracies, and the strengthening of far-right movements across Central and Eastern Europe. My discussion of the Hungarian political context and its relevance for the scripts and this book will be brief and non-comprehensive: my focus will be on the Hungarian government’s attitude to gender studies, academic freedom, and theatre practice. I have decided to conclude this book in such an unusual manner because the context in which this book has been written bears striking resemblance to the original political contexts in which Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays were composed and produced. The authoritarian and anti-gender Hungarian political atmosphere has not merely informed my critical readings, but it has also often obstructed the book writing process. For instance, the recognition of my PhD—which had served as the basis of this book—was rejected in Hungary by a Catholic university which I had attended for six years before my PhD. As a justification, they offered an unacceptably vague and unspecific three-line review of an in-depth four-year research funded by the Irish Research Council, thus overruling the decision of an Irish and an American university along with the opinion of the internationally acclaimed scholars of Irish, Italian, theatre, and gender studies who had reviewed my PhD. The feeling that my research had no value at all in my home country inevitably influenced the way this book has been written—yet, paradoxically, the resistance I have encountered due to my chosen topic and approach has further encouraged me to finish this project despite everything. I started to work on Modernist Playwrights in the summer of 2020 after being compelled to leave Ireland and move back to Hungary due to the pandemic. After more than three years spent in an accommodating and vibrant research community most of whose members were doing outstanding gender and queer studies research, I suddenly found myself in a country which demonised gender studies as well as the queer community

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and began to dismantle academic freedom, especially in literature and theatre studies. While writing this book, government representatives insulted the LGBTQA+ community, theatre makers, teachers, professors, and scholars working in the field of humanities on a daily basis, letting us know that what we are and what we do has no value in Hungary. Since FIDESZ rose to power in 2010, several constitutional and legislative changes have  paved the way towards repression: staff dismissals, de-funding of anti-government institutions and individual artists began along with the placement of right-wing loyalists in positions of considerable power in cultural and academic areas. Suppression and discrimination have been perpetrated mainly through media control, funding mechanisms, and interference in arts and cultural governance.1 As early as 2012, a new constitution was enacted which defined the institution of marriage strictly as the union of a man and a woman, and it flagged the nuclear family as the basis of the survival of the nation. Another significant change happened in 2018 when gender studies was banned as a discipline in Hungary, forcing the Central European University (CEU) to move to Vienna. The legal prohibition of gender studies as a discipline has probably played a significant role in the Hungarian Catholic university’s decision to reject the recognition of my Irish PhD in my home country and question its academic value. Since 2018, academic curricula have been monitored by government representatives to make sure no sensitisation trainings and gender studies courses are delivered at universities. The first significant attack against the LGBTQA+ community happened at the beginning of COVID-19. The first step the Hungarian government took after receiving unlimited power to tackle the pandemic was changing the constitution so that on official documents people could only indicate their biological gender, thus making trans people’s lives immensely more difficult in this country. Besides idealising the normative family and demonising gender studies and the trans community, the FIDESZ government’s self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” has also been employing children as a propaganda tool to generate the fear of difference in people. In the summer of 2021, the government voted the Child Protection Act, also known as Pedophile Law, which severely limits young people’s rights to access information 1  For a detailed discussion of the state of academic freedom in Hungary during the Orbán regime, see Andrew Ryder’s monograph The Challenge to Academic Freedom in Hungary: A Case Study in Authoritarianism, Culture War and Resistance (2022).

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about minority sexualities and sexuality in general. This law equates queer people’s existence to propaganda and their sexual orientation and gender identity are conflated with paedophilia, thus criminalising the LGBTQA+ community. What made this law even more outrageous is that at the time 19,000 videos including child pornography were found on a senior government member’s laptop. This law, however, does not offer any help to children who are subject to such abuse, sexual harassment, and assault— instead, it puts the blame entirely on the LGBTQA+ community. As Hungarian CEU scholar Rita Béres-Deák has explained, the two main predecessors and possible inspirations for this law were the Russian Gay Propaganda Law (2013), which claimed to protect children from any information that advocates for a denial of traditional family values, and the UK Section 128 of the 1980s, which forbade local authorities to promote teaching about homosexuality as a pretended family relationship (2021, n.p.). This discourse thus argues that children must at all costs be protected from everything that violates normativity and heterosexuality—a rhetoric which has had a psychologically and emotionally devastating impact on the LGBTQA+ community and on many other people working in cultural, academic, and artistic sectors. It is for this reason, for instance, that I had to suspend writing this book several times, as this toxic, hateful propaganda made it seem worthless and at times potentially dangerous to finish the book in this country. It is no surprise that theatre and literature have become suspicious areas for the Hungarian government, which need to be constantly monitored and controlled. The literary and publishing industry has changed considerably since FIDESZ rose to power in 2010. Most significantly, the Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) was transformed into a major cultural centre, and in 2019, FIDESZ appointed Szilárd Demeter as head of PIM. Demeter has made it clear on several occasions that his aim is to promote Christian, nationalist narratives through literature, which, he believes, have been neglected by Hungarian authors. He further demonstrated his anti-liberal sentiments in 2020 when he called billionaire philanthropist George Soros (founder of CEU and one of the main targets of Orbán’s propaganda) as the “liberal Führer”: “He described Soros’ news reporting and benevolent giving as ‘poisoning Europe’ and likened his work to the Nazi gas chambers” (Sethi et  al. 2022, 30). Despite the public outcry following this statement, FIDESZ did not remove him from his position, which shows that the government no longer cares about public opinion, having gained unlimited power and two-thirds majority for the third time in a row in

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April 2022. FIDESZ has also interfered with the funding of cultural and literary magazines most of which have already ceased their operations. Instead, government funding has been reallocated into the creation of government-aligned cultural journals. As a result, private publishers struggle to survive in Hungary: first, their accessibility is strained due to restructured arts and cultural funding bodies; second, they are under pressure also when it comes to decisions with whom they can work; and third, due to the high costs of publication, most authors are unable to publish through private publishers without the support of state grants, which poses as a major challenge for liberal and independent authors who are unlikely to receive these grants. Paving the way for the Child Protection Act, a collection of fairytales titled A Fairytale for Everyone (2020, ed. Boldizsár M.  Nagy) was censored after its publication and was deemed dangerous for children. Similar to the plays discussed in this book, A Fairytale for Everyone retells familiar stories but makes the stigmatised characters protagonists with whom people from minority groups can identify. The collection includes seventeen tales: only five of them feature LGBT heroes, while the rest focuses on other disadvantaged minority groups. The collection’s aim is to offer children minority heroes whom they can identify with and to show children how diverse the world is. After the book’s release, there were two alarming reactions: one from the Prime Minister and the other one from an extreme-­ right politician. When asked about the book, Viktor Orbán claimed that “[r]egarding homosexuality, Hungary is a tolerant, patient country. […] But there is a red line which cannot be crossed, and this is the sum of my opinion: leave our children alone!” (quoted in Rédai 2022). This statement brings to mind the character of Father Hart from Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, who seems to be deeply concerned about the impact of new ways of loving and living on the future generation. What is more, one of the tales features a character very similar to Mary Bruin: her name is Thumbelina—she marries a fairy prince but soon realises that she cannot be happy with him; thus, she begins to learn how to help herself and find other ways of being happy. Of course, this propagandistic attitude to children and the queer community is not only present in Hungary, but here it constitutes the main pillar of the mainstream political and public discourse. In his recent book, Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama, Cormac O’Brien drew attention to a similar phenomenon in Irish right-wing organisations who maintain that “[p]redatory homosexuals […] armed

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with a hidden gay agenda, would turn children into queer and usher in the outlawing of traditional family life—hence, homosexuals should be silenced, and, in some countries, eliminated” (2021, 22). To express her wish that the LGBTQA+ community should be silenced, a representative of the far-right Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom) shredded the above-mentioned fairytale collection during a televised press conference. What is more, extreme-right groups put up posters on bookshops warning people that in those bookshops a homosexual propaganda publication was sold, which was dangerous for children (Sethi et al. 2022, 36). In 2022, there was an opportunity for Hungarian theatres to stage stories from the collection, but none of the theatres in Hungary undertook this project for fear of losing more state funding; hence, A Fairytale for Everyone was eventually staged in Vienna’s Svung Theatre (Svung Bécsi Magyar Színház) in the form of a puppet show directed by Tamás Pille. These actions, however, incited an unprecedented public outrage in a country with a Nazi and communist history of book destruction and resulted in an enormous public interest in the book both in Hungary and abroad. In a very short period of time, the book has been translated into eleven languages and has become a symbol of resistance. The publishers’ mission to create a children’s book featuring heroes with whom minority groups can also identify evokes what we could see in D’Annunzio’s and Yeats’s drama. Their protagonists are often disabled, poor, marginalised because of their desire or oppressed because of their gender, yet they refuse to feel ashamed of their difference and claim visibility for themselves. Another similarity is that the publishers’ clash with power has earned them significant visibility and voice, which is also the way in which the protagonists of the selected plays gain some modicum of power in a world which aims to silence them. Besides the LGBTQA+ community, the Hungarian theatre scene has also been under attack since 2010. The FIDESZ government has been appointing government loyalists into management positions of theatres and has been simultaneously funding performance spaces that comply with the party’s nationalist agenda. The Hungarian Theatrum Society plays a key role in effectuating the government’s cultural policy, as it is “an association of right-wing theatre professionals with the mission of countering liberalism in the performing arts” (Sethi et al. 2022, 27). The government’s interference with Hungary’s theatre scene began in 2012 when the Prime Minister appointed György Dörner as the director of Újszínház (New Theatre) despite Dörner’s history of outspoken anti-Semitism,

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anti-Roma statements and his vehement support for Jobbik (a political party that defined itself as neo-fascist). Dörner claimed that his mission was to eliminate the “degenerate, sick, liberal hegemony” in Hungarian arts scenes (quoted in Sethi et al. 2022, 27). As a result, since Dörner’s appointment, the New Theatre has staged mostly Hungarian plays which highlight Christian narratives. The second victim of Orbán’s attack on the performing arts was the Budapest National Theatre. From 2008 until 2013, the director of the National Theatre was Róbert Alföldi—an accomplished Hungarian actor-­ director and an openly gay and Jewish man, who has been staging provocative productions challenging existing nationalist narratives about Hungarian politics and identity. In 2013, however, he was rejected for renewal of his contract despite his exceptionally successful term as director. Besides being humiliated as a theatre maker, he also had to face slurs in the months preceding his rejection. He became “the subject of ridicule and hate speech from far-right conservatives in the Hungarian parliament who called him ‘a f*g, a pervert, and a Jew;’ they claimed that, as such, he was unfit to lead the theatre” (quoted in Sethi et al. 2022, 27). To make sure the National Theatre’s repertoire aligns with government propaganda, Orbán appointed his loyalist Attila Vidnyánszky as director, who had remained in this position even though in 2018, half of the tickets for performances remained unsold and the theatre lost approximately 500,000 USD (see Sethi et al. 2022, 27). On an optimistic note, in Átrium Theatre, Róbert Alföldi has recently directed an extremely popular production of the musical La Cage aux Folles (The Cage of Mad Women, based on the 1973 play by Jean Poiret) which tells the story of a gay couple in the form of drag entertainment. Strikingly, it is extremely hard to purchase tickets for the show, as every performance has been completely sold out. Alföldi has also directed Csaba Székely’s play Joy and Happiness (Öröm és boldogság) which offers a parody of Hungary’s treatment of the LGBTQA+ community and ridicules their anti-gender propaganda. The fact that both shows have been extremely successful and sold out might suggest that something has begun to change in this country despite the hateful political propaganda. Crucially, the government denied state funding to Alföldi’s Átrium Theatre, but it has been able to survive so far, thanks to the ongoing financial help of the community. It is also interesting that the Theatre’s motto bears resemblance to Sarah Bernhardt’s defiant quand même: “Free Theatre. Free Country. In Spite of Everything.”

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Fortunately, over the last decade or so, theatre companies in Budapest have been producing more and more productions which either implicitly or more explicitly critique the government’s treatment of the most vulnerable members of society, the political elite’s hypocritical reliance on Christian values, and their controversial stance on the war between Russia and Ukraine. Yet it can be concluded that recently theatre makers’ most common focus has been on issues of gender and the LGBTQA+ community. Among many others, theatre directors such as Róbert Alföldi, Kriszta Székely, Béla Pintér, and several contemporary playwrights and actors have been working hard in a collaborative effort to point out the systemic failures, absurdity, and hypocrisy of the current Hungarian political system despite the lack of financial support they receive from the state compared to government-friendly theatres and artists. The constantly sold-out theatre shows demonstrate a growing need in Hungarian theatre-goers to attend productions whose purpose is not merely to entertain but to raise uncomfortable and topical socio-political questions, which is a relatively new phenomenon in Hungary. The question is that in an increasingly autocratic and repressive environment and with constantly decreasing state funding, how long such theatre companies can and are allowed to function. The Hungarian Opera House was also forced to make a leadership change when the Minister for Human Resources (Zoltán Balog) appointed Szilveszter Ókovács as the General Director of the Hungarian State Opera in 2013. Despite Ókovács’s links to the government, he received criticism by the conservative media in 2018 for staging the popular musical Billy Elliot which portrays a young English boy who discovers his love for ballet. Since pro-government media outlets described it as homosexual propaganda simply because the protagonist did not conform to normative notions of masculinity, Ókovács cancelled the rest of the shows to please the government and avoid consequences. However, restructuring and gaining control over theatres was not enough for the FIDESZ government—academics whom they saw as threats to FIDESZ propaganda also had to be chased away. In July 2020, the Hungarian Parliament passed an act establishing a foundation whose role was to oversee academic activity at the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE) based in Budapest. As the report of the Artistic Freedom Monitor outlines, “[t]he foundation operates as a government-appointed board of trustees, with the authority to manage the University’s state funded budget and the appointment of its faculty and president” (Sethi

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et al. 2022, 19). The government immediately positioned one of its loyal supporters, the theatre maker Attila Vidnyánszky, as chairman of the foundation, who founded the above-mentioned Hungarian Theatrum Society and expressed the desire for SZFE to place a greater emphasis on “the nation, the homeland and Christianity” (quoted in Sethi et al. 2022, 20). In April 2021, a much larger bill was passed, transferring administrative oversight of eleven major universities and cultural institutions to private foundations presided over by government appointees. SZFE was the only university that publicly refused this change: notable film directors, theatre makers, actors and playwrights stepped down in solidarity with their students whose protest against the bill lasted for months. As the Artistic Freedom Monitor describes it, “[i]n an iconic show of solidarity, thousands of supporters formed a ‘live chain’ around the university’s building, which was later extended through downtown Budapest until it reached the Parliament building. A document declaring the university’s autonomy was passed along the three-mile-long human chain, and its ultimate arrival on the Parliament steps was met with cheers” (Sethi et  al. 2022, 20). Although FIDESZ ignored the protests and eventually took over SZFE, the students’ protest gained global recognition through the support of artists such as Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, and Salman Rushdie, who shared viral selfies with “Free SZFE” written on their palms. For some time, the Doctoral School of SZFE had remained relatively unchanged, but in September 2022 the president of the Doctoral School György Karsai was dismissed from his position by the new Rector of SZFE without any explanation. Karsai was vehemently criticised by Attila Vidnyánszky who complained that Karsai could never understand what the nation, the homeland, and Christianity meant and thus found him incompetent to understand the views he wanted to promote at the restructured SZFE. Just like in today’s Hungary, the leading mode of theatrical practice in early twentieth-century Ireland and Italy was predominantly naturalist, literary, and obsessed with questions of nationhood and Christianity. Yet Modernist Playwrights has demonstrated that Yeats and D’Annunzio, who were most closely associated with this kind of nation-building theatre, actually wrote and produced plays that gradually moved towards a new kind of anti-naturalistic, physical theatre, ambiguously and subtly questioning the pillars of their time’s mainstream normative political discourses, similar to what some theatre makers and playwrights have been doing in Hungary in recent years. This new type of  theatre questioned fixed ideas of nationhood through non-normative representations of

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gender and sexuality. As I have argued in this book, this more fluid approach to theatre practice, gender and sexuality was significantly informed by Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s queer and feminist collaborators, including mostly Florence Farr, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Ida Rubinstein, and the Gramatica sisters. Modernist Playwrights has been written in the hope that it will stimulate readers to continuously rethink what queerness and anti-authoritarianism mean in terms of content, form, and context. It equally invites readers to consider the potential of the ambiguity of meaning in drama and the ways in which it can offer new ways of addressing difference. From the beginning of this project, I knew that Didier Eribon’s book Insult and the Making of the Gay Self would have a lot in common with my analysis of both Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama in that their plays visualise the physical and psychological effects of insult that the normative world continuously imposes on marginalised subjectivities, including the queer community. All of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s protagonists in the selected plays are non-normative and receive insults from patriarchal and religious authorities for their difference. The plays thus create what Mirzoeff has called “countervisuality” for subjectivities who have been stigmatised and contained by normative power. I have also argued that although Yeats and D’Annunzio are considered canonical modernists, their canonicity only applies to their poetry, while their drama has been largely written out of the canon. In 2015, Fintan O’Toole lamented that Yeats the dramatist still gets overshadowed by Yeats the poet, which obstructs contemporary interest in his drama. O’Toole rightly urges readers to forget about all the alienating factors associated with Yeats’s plays and ask the question: “Can they hold the stage and touch something in an audience that approaches them with an open mind?” (2015). Modernist Playwrights has proposed one possible answer to this question by demonstrating that Yeats’s D’Annunzio’s drama (whose plays are rarely performed because of similar issues) could indeed convey crucial and topical messages about social exclusion, difference, biopolitics, and power distributions, which all have significant implications for contemporary audiences and global political issues. O’Toole continues that “[s]omeone needs to have enough faith in Yeats’s artistry to decide that, in spite of himself, he might have made plays good enough not for aristocrats or pickpockets but for real live audiences” (2015). This book has attempted to prove that Yeats’s drama can, among others, speak to socially marginalised groups, including the queer community.

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Stephanie Burt is yet another scholar who has argued for the relevance of Yeats’s works to our time’s socio-political anxieties, when right-wing governments and extreme-right organisations are strengthening all over the world. The citizens of so many countries today have been experiencing the “fear of a generation-long authoritarian take-over which will hurt immigrants, people of color and the poor” (Burt 2016). Burt wrote the article when Donald Trump came to power and explored how Yeats’s lines might offer hope and consolation for better times ahead. Burt encourages us to reread Yeats in these seemingly hopeless authoritarian times, as Yeats captures the feeling of having lost an unfair fight, the clash between honour-­bred people and truth twisters, and the frustrations of the day. Yeats’s works can in fact teach us the art of introspective dissent, but also the art of anger at the destruction of institutions, the art of a patriot whose country was not what he thought it was or could be, the art of an idealist let down, an art (not least) that speaks to America from outside America [and to other countries where authoritarianism rules or threatens to take over]: the thoughtful, angry, frustrated, and painfully memorable art of W. B. Yeats. (Burt 2016)

Like Yeats, D’Annunzio has been acknowledged first and foremost as a poet, which overshadows the topical messages that his drama can convey. Moreover, D’Annunzio’s drama has often been described with the same dismissive adjectives that tend to be applied to Yeats the dramatist. My hope is that this book will stimulate scholars and theatre makers to reread and restage D’Annunzio’s plays through queer and feminist lens, reassessing the alienating fascist, nationalist, and elitist associations of his drama, and making it more accessible to contemporary audiences. More importantly, both their characters and the artists involved in the productions of D’Annunzio’s plays may give hope and encouragement to our time’s freedom fighters. The historical context of Le Martyre and Phaedra can serve as examples of the power of resistance, since the former one was banned by French Catholics, while the latter one was banned by the Vatican, yet D’Annunzio and Rubinstein went on with the productions despite religious authorities’ attempt to erase the shows. The New York Herald frequently wrote about D’Annunzio’s and Rubinstein’s political defiance. An article from 18 June 1922, for instance, reports that despite the Pope’s ban, Rubinstein performed Le Martyre in aid of the funds of the Inter-Allied memorial for the soldiers fallen at the Somme,

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which cannot but recall Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), the first Irish play which featured a kiss between two men on the stage. An article from 10 April 1926 titled “Ida Rubenstein to Play despite Ban” celebrates Rubinstein for playing Phaedra despite the Vatican’s ban in Rome and her attempts to remove the veto. Moreover, when people heard D’Annunzio would attend the show too, they ignored the ban and began purchasing tickets (1926, 7). The Vatican’s veto of Le Martyre attests to another idea that this book has demonstrated: that even though right-wing and extreme-right governments tend to look down on the artistic and literary world, theatre, literature, and the arts can indeed pose a threat to religious and political authorities with their reversal of gender roles, with their focus on sexuality and the body, and with their subversion of theatrical and social conventions. For instance, in an article titled “Pope Blacklists D’Annunzio for ‘Sebastian’ Play,” The New York Herald recounted the panic reaction of the Catholic Church to D’Annunzio’s genderqueer Sebastian on 7 March 1926: Three churches in Milan last night offered services in reparation for alleged blasphemous performance. Cardinal Archbishop Tosi preached in one church, warning the congregation against the play. Following the service, those who attended walked solemnly through the streets to the entrance of the Scala, where prayers were offered as evidence of protest. (7 March 2026, 1)

It is thus worth rereading Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays and to focus on the past, as their texts dramatise what Foucault called “the most intense point of a life” (2000, 161): when an oppressed, stigmatised individual whose life was made invisible by power and who grew up in a world of insult, comes up against power itself to confront it with power’s own oppressive strategies in order to reject a long history of oppression and victimhood. Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s protagonists display how to evade power’s traps and allow us into the backstage of authoritarianism and patriarchy, unveiling their manipulative strategies. Rereading these plays today is a way of “spring[ing] the traps that have closed on the present” (Harris 2017, 4). Modernist Playwrights has proposed that the queer perspective, the ambiguity of meaning, and the contradictions that permeate the scripts and productions can work to combat fascist and totalitarian ideologies and narratives. Through the clash between the contradictory dramaturgical approaches of the queer and the normative, the texts offer strategies of resistance and encouragement in the face of totalising and oppressive

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political narratives, including the violence of (hetero)normativity and the manipulative strategies of authoritarian regimes. Although the current autocratic, populist Hungarian political contexts have often obstructed the book writing process, it is also true that my analyses have grown out of this oppressive background whose insults had made me experience feelings similar to the ones that I discovered in the plays of Yeats and D’Annunzio. The hope is that the new readings offered by this book might help other people from marginalised communities find something in these plays that speaks more directly to their own experiences: lines or scenes that can offer consolation, encouragement, or any reflection of their sorrow, despair, defiance, joy, and resilient fight for visibility and recognition.

References Béres-Deák, Rita. 2021. “What is the Hungarian ‘Pedophilia Act’ and What is Behind It?” Lefteast. 16 June. https://lefteast.org/what-­is-­the-­hungarian-­ pedophilia-­act/. Accessed 25 Nov 2022. Burt, Stephanie. 2016. “Reading Yeats in the Age of Trump.” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum. 29 November. https://www.bostonreview.net/ articles/stephen-­burt-­reading-­yeats-­age-­trump/. Accessed 15 Oct 2022. Foucault, Michel. 2000. Lives of Infamous Men. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, 157–175. New York: The New Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harris, Susan Cannon. 2017. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics, and the International Left, 1892–1964. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. “Ida Rubenstein to Play despite Ban.” 1926. New York Herald [European Edition]. International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013. 10 April. O’Brien, Cormac. 2021. Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Toole, Fintan. 2015. “No WB Yeats, no Samuel Beckett? Fintan O’Toole on why we mustn’t forget the poet’s plays.” The Irish Times. 15 June. https:// www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/no-­wb-­yeats-­no-­samuel-­beckett-­fintan-­ o-­toole-­on-­why-­we-­mustn-­t-­forget-­the-­poet-­s-­plays-­1.2241559. Accessed 2 August 2022. “Pope Blacklists D’Annunzio for ‘Sebastian’ Play.” 1926. New York Herald [European Edition]. International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013. 7 March.

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Rédai, Dorottya. 2022. “How children became a tool in Orban’s anti-LGBTQ propaganda.” CNN. 31 March. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/31/ opinions/hungary-­orban-­lgbtq-­referendum-­redai/index.html. Accessed 1 June 2022. Ryder, Andrew. 2022. The Challenge to Academic Freedom in Hungary: A Case Study in Authoritarianism, Culture War and Resistance. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Saint Sébastien Played at Opéra. 1922. New York Herald [European Edition]. International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013. 18 June. Sethi, Sanjay, Johanna Bankston, Joscelyn Jurich, Roisin Putti, and Sofía Monterosso. 2022. Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts and Culture in Crisis. Artistic Freedom Monitor. New  York: Artistic Freedom Initiative. https://artisticfreedominitiative.org/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2022/03/ Artistic-­Freedom-­Monitor_Hungary_Systematic-­Suppression.pdf. Accessed 23 November 2022.

Index1

A Abba, Marta, 85 Abbey Theatre, 21, 104 Abortion, 49, 108 Academic freedom, 234, 235, 235n1 Achilles, 172, 173 Adonis, 169, 171 Aestheticism, 28, 34, 74 Affect alien, 5, 49, 50, 56–64, 85 Ahmed, Sara, 7, 8, 49, 58, 59, 61, 64, 67, 71, 72, 79, 85, 86, 90–92, 96, 114, 131, 137, 138 Aisling Visions, 59 Aleramo, Sibilla, 4, 4n6, 4n7, 103 Alföldi, Róbert, 239, 240 Allgood, Sara, 197 Ambiguity, 5, 7, 12, 15n13, 20, 27, 29, 64, 75, 102, 105, 131, 165, 169, 178, 223, 242, 244 Ambivalence, 10, 62, 104, 191 Ameinias, 68

Ammonite (Francis Lee’s film, 2020), 61 Ancient Greece, 34n20, 169, 172 Androgyny, 20, 165 Anti-authoritarianism, 30, 242 Anti-colonial, 2, 32 Anti-fascism, 18 Anti-mimetic theatre, 29 Anti-realist drama, 14, 15, 29 Anti-Semitism, 238 Anxiety, 8, 11, 20, 37, 38, 47, 57, 60, 76, 77, 80, 85, 124, 125, 127, 129–131, 140, 146, 150, 155, 168, 169n5, 184, 222, 243 Arms and the Man (Shaw, 1984), 57 Artaud, Antonin, 160 Artistic Freedom Monitor, 240, 241 At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats, 1917), 184 Authoritarianism, 5, 19n16, 20, 28, 65, 71, 174, 230, 243, 244 Avant-garde, 28, 29, 52, 168

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Z. Balázs, Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42068-9

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INDEX

B Bad/backward feelings, 8, 96 Bakst, Léon, 168, 180 “Ballad of Reading Gaol, The” (Wilde, 1898), 177 Ballets Russes, 9n10, 147 Barnes, Djuna, 29, 230 Barney, Natalie, 230 Baudrillard, Jean, 164, 226 Benign violence, 71, 72 Benvenuto, Sergio, 123, 162–164, 176, 178 Bernhardt, Sarah, 4, 4n5, 10, 11, 18n14, 55, 85, 122, 123, 148, 192, 239, 242 Bersani, Leo, 8, 60, 65, 146, 147, 159, 173, 178, 185, 186, 196, 209 Bickering, 117, 122, 140, 185 Biopolitics, 13, 242 Birds, 64, 69, 70, 73, 75, 110, 202 Body in pain, 151, 167 Bond of entrustment, 64, 91 Book destruction, 238 Bourgeois/conservative code of values, 109, 151, 156, 157, 211 Bourgeois society, 25, 36, 83, 84, 133, 157 Bracco, Roberto, 106n1 Brigandage, 46 Broken intimacy, 8, 24, 25, 101–140 Brooks, Romaine, 5n8, 167, 176 Brotherhood, 11, 24, 32, 49, 125, 129, 155, 208, 217–219 Butler, Judith, 8, 61, 61n4 Butoh (Japanese dance theatre), 159, 160 Butti, Enrico, 103 Byron, Lord, 36

C Cage aux Folles, La (Poiret, 1973), 239 Califia, Pat, 146, 179, 185 Calvary (Yeats, 1920), 24, 36, 37, 49, 60, 65–75, 94, 95, 170, 171, 201, 202 Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 2, 3, 14, 15, 29, 192, 193, 196, 197, 204, 206, 210, 242 Canon, 6, 31, 233, 242 Canonicity, 16, 242 Cantarano, Guglielmo, 102 Capitalism, 50, 110 Capitalist nationalism, 110 Carducci, Giosuè, 33 Carlyle, Thomas, 36, 215 Carr, Marina, 62 Casement, Roger, 6, 32, 36, 108, 109 Cat and the Moon, The (Yeats, 1926), 24, 107, 117–122, 140, 151, 153, 156, 185, 201, 208 Cather, Willa, 118 Cathleen ni Houlihan (Lady Gregory and Yeats, 1902), 198 Catholic Church, 49, 64, 103, 244 Censorship, 10, 30, 35, 65, 179 Central European University (CEU), 235, 236 Christ, 21, 37, 38, 49, 65–75, 79, 85, 87, 88, 92, 94, 164, 165, 170, 171, 173–175, 178 Christian hero, 168 Christianity, 37, 87, 169, 228, 241 Clan, 84–96, 229 Closetedness, 60, 67, 104 Comedy of Sighs, A (Todhunter, 1894), 57, 157 Comradeship, 125, 155–157, 217, 218 Conquest of Fiume (Rijeka), 18

 INDEX 

Conrad, Joseph, 6 Consent, 90, 130, 176 Corporeality, 159, 160, 214 Corriere della Sera, Il, 133, 228 Counterdiscourse, 2, 33, 195, 196 Counter-hero, 36, 138 Counter-power, 174, 178 Countervisual hero, 138 Countervisuality, 1, 2, 138, 215, 242 Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats, 1892), 53 Coward, Noël, 29 Crazy Jane (character in Yeats’s works), 12, 23 Cross-dressing, 76 Crucifixion, 37, 65, 69, 170 Cruelty, 32, 136, 138, 140, 147, 159–164, 174, 223, 225 Cuchulain (character in Yeats’s works), 20, 60, 81, 151–158, 151n3, 177, 210 Cult of respectability, 24, 25, 27, 49, 53, 96, 101, 139, 207, 211, 230 Cultural nationalism, 13, 47 D Dallas, Marion Letitia (aka Mrs. Darragh), 196 D’Amico, Silvio, 106, 133 Dance, 9, 14, 15, 29, 63, 64, 74, 113–116, 121, 122, 139, 148, 159, 160, 160n4, 162, 163, 165, 168, 172, 174, 175, 179, 183–186, 194, 195, 212–214, 224, 226, 228, 230 Dandy, 11, 27, 34, 191, 192 D’Annunzio, Gabriellino, 6, 92, 107 Dante, Alighieri, 31, 76 Daughter of Iorio, The (La figlia di Iorio, D’Annunzio, 1904), 24, 26, 49, 54, 84–96, 107, 137, 178, 181, 182, 224

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De Profundis (Wilde, 1905), 34, 66, 177 de Valera, Éamon, 194n1 Dead City, The (La città morta, D’Annunzio, 1896), 21, 24, 26, 54, 107, 122–132, 140, 167, 183 Death as liberation, 166, 196–206 Death of Cuchulain, The (Yeats, 1939), 81, 177 Debussy, Claude, 168, 170 Decadence, 28, 103 Decolonisation, 47 Deevy, Teresa, 62 Defiance, 4n5, 160–162, 169, 196, 197, 209, 221, 230, 243, 245 Degeneration, 34, 103, 194 Deirdre (Yeats, 1907), 21, 25, 83, 191, 193, 196–207, 210, 213, 214 Dependency, 126, 208 Desire, 4n3, 7, 10–12, 22, 24, 25, 30–32, 36, 48–50, 52, 55–57, 59–61, 64, 68–70, 73, 76, 77, 83, 86, 101–105, 107–117, 122–135, 137, 139, 140, 147, 149–151, 159–167, 169–171, 173–176, 180, 182–184, 186, 205, 238, 241 Deviancy, 104, 199 Diaghilev, Sergei, 167 Difference, 5, 9, 14, 16, 30, 31, 36, 48, 62, 66, 75, 86, 87, 89, 96, 109, 138, 150, 155, 165, 170, 180, 184, 185, 205, 233, 235, 238, 242 Diocletian, 164–166, 169, 170, 173–179, 226 Dionysus, 74 Disability, 122 Discomfort, 6–8, 21, 49, 50, 67, 76, 79, 115, 135, 146, 163, 168, 169

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INDEX

Disobedience, 91, 154, 163, 171, 197, 204, 213, 214 Disorder, 25, 183, 192 Dissidence, 5, 29, 67, 170, 171, 175 Disunity, 20, 36 Doderet, André, 35 Domesticity, 30 Domination, 38, 120, 121, 140, 147, 174, 180, 186, 198, 201, 210, 215 Douglas, John (9th Marquess of Queensberry), 7 Douglas, Lord Alfred (Bosie), 7, 160 Drag, 72, 88, 103, 205, 239 Dramaturgy, 13–15, 67, 71, 171, 175, 200 Dreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats, 1919), 24, 107–117, 131, 139, 225 Dublin Hermetic Society, 149 Duncan, Isadora, 9, 9n10, 55 Duse, Eleonora, 2, 4, 4n5, 4n7, 5, 5n8, 9n10, 10, 11, 19, 51, 53–56, 64, 76, 81, 85, 95, 122–124, 127, 192, 193, 216, 242 Duty, 3n1, 18, 19, 49, 58, 62–64, 70, 86, 89, 95, 102, 109, 151, 165, 217 Dyke, 6, 19, 25, 186, 191–231 E Easter Rising, 65, 67, 109 Eccentricity, 148 Effeminacy, 10, 28, 33, 34, 36, 38, 65, 105 Eliot, T. S., 6 Elitism, 19n16 Elitist obscurantism, 20, 206 Emulation, 117, 200, 205 Eng, David L., 61, 61n4

Eribon, Didier, 1, 2, 34, 38, 50, 61, 61n4, 62, 65, 88, 165, 196, 214, 221, 242 Eros, 10, 14, 48, 65, 74, 108, 126, 139, 186 Escape, 6, 8, 24, 26, 36, 45–96, 129, 134, 138, 149, 166, 167, 170, 184, 192, 196, 200, 203–205, 217, 219, 221–224 Euphemism, 34, 104, 118 Excess, 7, 30, 36, 102, 103, 126, 204, 230 Exclusion, 46, 62, 66, 67, 69, 90, 117, 242 Existential malaise, 7, 86, 95 F Failure, 8, 10, 11, 25, 49–51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 64, 72, 96, 107, 110, 115, 131, 132, 134, 145, 163, 180, 186, 215–217, 230, 240 Fairy/faery, 58–64, 68, 237 Fairytale for Everyone, A (ed. Boldizsár M. Nagy, 2020), 237, 238 Familism, 48 Farr, Florence, 2, 3, 5, 51–53, 56–58, 95, 149, 150, 192, 242 Fascism, 19, 19n16, 20, 28, 38, 194, 195, 217, 218, 230 Fascism of performance, 230 Fascist Italy, 10, 106, 194, 194n1 Femininity, 7, 10, 11, 13, 47, 58, 170, 193 Feminism, 2, 18, 18n14, 33, 53–55, 179 Femme fatale, 138, 185, 215, 229 FIDESZ (Hungarian political party), 235–238, 240, 241 Flannery, James, 14, 67 Fluidity of gender, 164, 242 Fluidity of identity, 20, 113

 INDEX 

Fokine, Mikhail, 148, 168, 180 Fortuny, Mariano, 5n8, 9n10, 124, 168 Forzano, Giovacchino, 77, 217 Foucault, Michel, 2, 10, 118, 123, 124, 159, 195, 196, 213, 214, 244 Francesca da Rimini (D’Annunzio, 1901), 24, 26, 49, 54, 76, 87, 94, 95, 107, 137, 193, 200, 216 Freedom of the body, 9, 9n10, 84, 149 Freedom of the individual, 20, 84, 90, 149 Freeman, Elizabeth, 8, 118–119, 146, 147, 152, 154, 164 Friendship, 7, 24, 49, 50, 64, 66, 68, 70, 74, 117, 118, 121–132, 149, 150, 158, 168, 208, 222 Full Moon in March, A (Yeats, 1935), 25, 145, 147, 150, 159–164, 174, 178, 185, 186 Fuller, Loïe, 9, 29 G Garavaglia, Ferruccio, 224 Gay Propaganda Law (Russia), 236 Gazzetta Letteraria (Italian literary magazine), 217 Genderqueer, 146, 244 Genet, Jean, 160 Ghosts, 72, 105, 109–116, 131, 139 Giornale d’Italia, Il, 218 Glory, The (La gloria, D’Annunzio, 1899), 25, 128, 192, 215–218, 224 Golden Dawn, 150 Gonne, Iseult, 150 Gonne, Maud, 56, 150 Gore-Booth, Eva, 3n2 Gramatica, Emma, 2, 4, 5, 10, 19, 105–107, 106n1, 123, 132, 133, 192, 242

251

Gramatica, Irma, 2, 4, 5, 10, 19, 22, 84, 105–107, 132, 192, 242 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 62, 105, 198 Grievability, 72 Griffith, Arthur, 105 Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 18n14, 22, 149 H Hairplay, 127, 128 Halberstam, Jack, 3, 6, 8, 25, 30, 50, 56, 60, 65, 69, 89–92, 110, 119, 153, 167, 184, 191, 192, 195, 230, 233 Happy family, 5, 51, 56–64, 85 Happy Prince, The (Wilde, 1888), 38 Hawk, 69, 82, 184 Hawk Woman, 184 Heather Field, The (Martyn, 1899), 53 Hegemonic masculinity, 94 Herne’s Egg, The (Yeats, 1938), 60 Heroism, 33, 138, 164, 215, 216, 228 Heron, 60, 66–69, 73 Heteronormativity, 7, 12, 56, 57, 59, 67–69, 245 Heterosexuality, 10, 24, 49, 50, 57, 236 Hierarchy, 11, 165 Holloway, Joseph, 21, 193, 197, 204, 206, 209 Homoeros, 7 Homoeroticism, 9, 26, 46, 102, 104, 126, 160, 173, 180 Homogenisation, 8, 38, 39, 50, 119, 230 Homophobia, 2, 104 Homosexuality, 7, 12, 16, 28, 34, 38, 46, 47, 50, 54, 61, 65, 74, 87, 102–104, 108, 118, 123, 126, 165, 195, 236, 237 Homosexual panic, 35, 36

252 

INDEX

Homosexual propaganda, 238, 240 Homosocial, 8, 32, 105, 121, 125, 152, 155, 218 Horniman, Annie, 52 Humiliation, 136, 162 Hungarian government, 234–236 Hungarian State Opera, 240 Hungarian Theatrum Society, 238, 241 Hymn of dissidence, 67, 171 Hymn of freedom, 67 Hyper-masculinity, 37 I Ibsen, Henrik, 4n6, 51, 212, 217 Idealisation of family, 45, 49 Identity crisis, 4n4, 108 Immorality, 10, 138–140, 194, 195 Impossible love, 8, 25, 57, 107–117 Incest, 4n7, 10, 123, 124, 126, 132, 134, 139, 140 Inclusion, 46, 66, 67, 112, 113 Injustice, 29, 96, 182, 192 Innocent, The (L’Innocente, D’Annunzio, 1892), 27, 167 Insanity, 102 Insult, 1, 2, 8, 25, 35, 37, 50, 53, 66, 70, 71, 74, 87, 88, 116, 119, 137, 148, 162, 163, 172, 178, 183, 192, 220, 221, 223, 227–229, 242, 244, 245 Intention of the author/authorial intention, 9, 22, 23, 54, 55, 95 Interpellation, 8 Intimacy, 8, 25, 79, 91, 101–140, 152, 155, 157, 158, 170, 173, 182, 183, 198, 203, 208, 211, 213, 218, 219 Invisibility, 10, 60, 65, 70, 75, 89, 94, 115–117, 119, 122, 140, 151, 201, 211, 215, 217, 221, 229, 244

Ionic dance, 172 Irish Free State, 27, 194n1 Irish Literary Theatre, 53, 104 Irish Revival, 103, 104 Irish Times, The, 21, 110, 198 Irony, 20, 37, 209, 211 Italian Fascism, 28, 31, 33, 46, 103, 104, 193, 194, 218 Itō, Michio, 184 J Jarman, Derek, 16 Joyce, James, 32, 95 K Kettle, Thomas, 105 Kill-joy, 50 King of the Great Clock Tower, The (Yeats, 1935), 21, 150, 159–161, 160n4 L Land of Heart’s Desire, The (Yeats, 1894), 24, 49, 52, 53, 56–64, 84, 88, 90, 93, 95, 126, 127, 157, 237 Language of wildness, 30, 192, 193, 195 Laughter, 163, 185, 204, 226, 227, 230 Lawrence of Arabia (Thomas Edward Lawrence), 108, 109 Lazarus, 49, 65–75, 170, 173, 178, 202 Lesbianism, 33, 102, 103, 126, 134 LGBTQA+ community, 235, 236, 238–240 Liberal Italy, 46, 218 Liebestod, 166

 INDEX 

L’Illustrazione Italiana, 228 Limerick, Mona, 197 Lineage, 18n14, 90, 93 L’Italiano (satirical magazine), 34 Lombroso, Cesare, 34, 103 Lorde, Audre, 14n12, 139 Loss, 8, 38, 50, 61, 68, 71, 72, 75, 102, 110, 118, 154, 184 Love, Heather K., 6, 8, 12, 24, 30, 31, 50, 57, 61, 73, 75, 86, 89, 93, 96, 116–118, 127 M Machismo, 179 Macho slut, 179 Madamism, 193 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 168, 192, 193 Male gaze, 181, 182, 226 Manhood, 33, 66, 94 Manipulation, 38, 119, 146, 158, 159, 198, 201, 202, 204, 230 Manliness, 13, 20, 33, 80, 83, 88, 102, 152, 157, 171 Marcuse, Herbert, 68, 74, 89 Marriage, 3n1, 3n2, 4n3, 9, 10, 14n12, 19, 27, 46–52, 54, 56, 60, 64, 76, 77, 79, 83, 85, 92, 95, 102, 103, 118, 136, 155, 156, 162, 181, 184, 195, 198, 206, 213, 235 Martyn, Edward, 4, 4n3, 53, 56, 105, 108, 117, 121 Martyrdom, 169, 194, 210 Martyre de Saint Sébastien, Le (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, D’Annunzio, 1911), 25, 145, 164–178 Marzocco, Il (literary magazine), 34, 226 Masculinity, 7, 10, 11, 17–19, 38, 46, 47, 56, 65–75, 80, 81, 86, 94,

253

105, 106, 132, 150, 151, 159, 165, 198, 240 Masochism, 163, 164, 177, 178 Maternity/motherhood, 3n1, 18, 47, 54, 57, 64, 135, 230 Matheson, Hilda, 150, 150n2 Matriarch, 94, 160, 178, 214, 224–226, 229 Maybe Yes, Maybe No (Forse che sì, Forse che no, D’Annunzio, 1910), 26, 124 McGuinness, Frank, 244 Medusa, 57, 192, 220 Melancholia, 5, 5n9, 8, 24, 37, 38, 47, 49, 59, 61, 61n4, 62, 65, 77, 78, 85, 86, 92, 124, 131, 146, 180, 181, 199 Melato, Mila, 85 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 180 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 1, 2, 36, 68, 71, 72, 138, 215, 242 Miscegenation, 103, 104, 207 Misogyny, 2, 54, 55, 76, 137, 197 Modernism, 6, 28–32, 233 Modern Woman: Her Intentions (Farr, 1910), 51 Monde Orphéonique, Le, 175 Moore, George, 4n3, 59, 105, 117, 121, 123 Morality, 10, 29, 53, 102, 105, 123, 137, 151, 163, 165, 169, 179, 194 Moral prudery, 24, 25, 27, 101–140 Mosse, George L., 11, 101, 102, 118, 126, 134, 166 Mother Ireland, 93 Muñoz, José Esteban, 8, 16 Muse, 53–55 Mussolini, Benito, 18n14, 19, 106n1, 194n1, 217 Mysticism, 165, 168, 169, 227

254 

INDEX

N Nannipieri, Maria Volpi, 103 Narcissus, 65, 68, 72, 74 National culture, 20 National identity, 16, 46, 218 National imagination, 17, 108 National poet, 17 National sentiment, 10 National unity, 20, 46 Needs of the body, 45–47, 87, 115, 139, 149, 203 New Women, 3, 3n1, 10, 25, 30, 36, 54, 57, 102, 122, 133, 191–231 New York Herald, The, 243, 244 Noh theatre, 20, 21 Non-biological family, 24, 50, 65, 70, 79, 84 Non-intentionalist approach, 23, 233 Non-normative temporality, 117–122 Non-normativity, 80 Normalcy, 70, 72, 89, 110, 122 Normality, 119 Normative authority, 1, 77, 170, 230 Normative family, 24, 27, 38, 46, 49, 51, 56, 58, 61, 65, 83, 84, 90, 118, 123, 138, 235 Normative society, 4n6, 9, 50, 76, 83, 86, 101, 108, 118, 197, 199 Normativity, 2, 5, 14, 24, 25, 38, 45–96, 107, 236 Norris, David, 12 O Obscenity, 10 Obscurity, 20, 22 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (McGuinness, 1985), 244 Occult, 52, 149, 150, 169, 185 O’Duffy, Eoin, 194n1 O’Higgins, Kevin, 19

O’Leary, John, 20, 53, 109 On Baile’s Strand (Yeats, 1904), 21, 25, 145, 151–159, 185, 186, 209 Oppressed, 1, 15n13, 82, 84, 88, 92, 95, 135, 146, 159, 160, 185, 186, 196, 209, 210, 214, 225, 230, 238, 244 Oppression, 32, 47, 48, 52, 139, 146, 154, 179, 180, 197, 200, 212, 215, 218, 244 Oppressor, 26, 135, 146, 159, 186, 196–206, 214, 224 Orbán, Viktor, 235n1, 236, 237, 239 Oriani, Alfredo, 103 Orpheus, 74, 75, 169 Orvieto, Laura, 55 Oscarwaldismo, 34 Osti, Maria, 55 Otherness, 148, 168 O’Toole, Fintan, 20, 21, 242 Our Homeland Movement, 238 Ovid, 68, 72 P Pain, 27, 72, 78, 86, 124, 128, 130–133, 151, 154, 161–163, 165–167, 171, 175–177, 179, 184, 185 Paoli, Evelina, 224 Parody of authority, 146, 152 Passage, The (Il passaggio, Aleramo, 1919), 103 Passion of Christ, 165 Pater, Walter, 86, 116, 117 Paterfamilias, 151 Patria potestas, 65–75, 91 Patriarch, 91, 93, 94, 138–140, 161, 182, 183, 193, 197–199, 201, 202, 204–206, 208, 214, 215, 223, 229

 INDEX 

Patriarchal authority, 2, 11, 14, 45, 48, 65, 70–71, 73–75, 209 Patriarchal lineage, 93 Patriarchal society, 57, 82, 84, 132, 134, 181, 226, 227 Patriarchy, 10, 11, 13, 14, 25, 38, 55, 65, 69, 70, 95, 103, 138–140, 191–231, 244 Patroclus, 172, 173 Pedophile Law (Hungary), 235 Pelléas et Mélisande (Maeterlinck, 1893), 192, 193 Performance of power/power performance, 206–214, 230 Perversion, 10, 169, 196 Phaedra (Fedra, D’Annunzio, 1909), 22, 24, 26, 94, 107, 123, 132–139, 147, 165, 170, 216, 223, 243, 244 Phallic mother, 93 Phallic woman, 192 Phallodecentrism, 32 Physicality of the body, 15n13, 16 Physical theatre, 13, 15, 115, 117, 160, 241 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde, 1890), 34 Pirandello, Luigi, 85, 91 Pisanelle, La (D’Annunzio, 1913), 25–27, 94, 128, 145, 167, 178–186, 224 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 168, 180 Playboy of the Western World (Synge, 1907), 105, 106 Player Queen, The (Yeats, 1922), 25, 60, 197, 205–215, 223 Playfulness, 140, 147, 152, 163, 185 Pleasure, 15, 19, 48, 80, 102, 112, 120, 121, 126–128, 146, 147, 149, 152, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161–163, 167, 173–175, 179, 185, 186, 196, 227, 228

255

Pleasure (Il Piacere, D’Annunzio, 1889), 35, 128, 167 Poletti, Lina/Cordula, 4, 4n7, 55, 103 Policy of silence, 76, 104 Postcolonial criticism, 12 Pound, Ezra, 108 Powerlessness, 25, 120, 139, 146, 179 Power of the body, 202 Praga, Marco, 106 Productivity, 54 Prostitution, 46, 52, 124, 211 Proust, Marcel, 148 Pyrrhic dance, 172 Q Quand même (Bernhardt’s motto), 4n5, 239 Queer alliance, 171 Queer community, 24, 234, 237, 242 Queer dance, 15, 175 Queer dramaturgy, 14, 15, 67, 71, 171, 175 Queer feelings, 7, 138 Queer gaze, 171 Queer historical subjects, 24, 50, 75, 95 Queer martyr, 164–178 Queer modernism, 24, 28–39, 233 Queerness, 2, 7–9, 16, 18, 25, 26, 29–33, 38, 51, 55, 59, 61n4, 62, 89, 93, 104, 107, 128, 148, 165, 167, 169, 170, 191, 242 Queer performance, 2, 29, 30, 68, 167 Queer socialism, 104 Queer temporality, 118 Queer theory, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 24, 39, 146, 233 R Race, 20, 104, 109, 112, 194 Racial purity, 46, 103, 104

256 

INDEX

Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite, 5, 5n9, 12 Rape, 86, 89, 91 Realist drama, 13, 122 Refusal, 8, 47, 58, 65, 67, 71, 75, 85, 88, 89, 114–116, 139, 174–176, 178, 181, 205, 220, 230 Refusal of obedience, 171 Reid, Christina, 62 Rejection, 57, 65, 89, 116, 137, 154, 162, 239 Reproduction, 27, 46, 54, 68, 89, 110, 155 Resistance, 12, 17, 25, 30, 70, 89, 91, 120, 138, 146, 151, 153, 155, 171, 178, 181, 184, 196, 214, 233, 234, 238, 243, 244 Respectability, 10, 24, 25, 27, 48, 49, 53, 96, 101–140, 155, 207, 211, 212, 230 Restraint, 102, 133, 151, 161, 163, 227 Resurrection, The (Yeats, 1931), 21, 69, 75 Revenge, 82–84, 109, 135, 185, 191, 195, 203–205, 215, 221, 223–225 Reverse power, 25, 145–186 Reversibility of power, 145, 147, 186 Revolutionary nationalism, 47 Ricketts, Charles, 108, 109 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky, 1913), 167 Ritual, 15, 15n13, 21, 32, 66, 119, 147, 149, 212, 213 Romanità, 32 Romantic nationalism, 47 Roncoroni, Mario, 224 Rubinstein, Ida, 2, 5, 10, 19, 22, 35, 35n21, 55, 132, 133, 146–149, 164, 166–169, 176–178, 180, 186, 192, 193, 197, 224, 242–244 Ruggeri, Ruggero, 84

S Sackville-West, Vita, 150, 150n2 Sacrifice, 27, 67, 84, 92, 134, 135, 170, 174, 176, 194, 198, 210, 222, 228 Sadism, 124, 164 Sadomasochism, 5, 25, 26, 135, 145–147, 150, 152, 159, 160, 164, 166, 178–186 Salomé (Wilde, 1891), 35, 35n21 Same-sex desire, 7, 12, 31, 32, 50, 76, 104, 123 Same-sex intimacy, 128 Sapphic presence, 53 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 7, 67 Seduction, 11, 56, 63, 64, 136, 145, 165, 174, 179, 183, 224–226, 229 Semaine Catholique, La, 164, 165 Sexual identity, 4n4, 30, 105, 150 sexuality, embodying sexual, 51 Sexual liberation, 104 Sexual orientation, 12, 24, 236 Shadowy Waters, The (Yeats, 1911), 51 Shakespeare, William, 16, 37, 37n22 Shame, 16, 25, 50, 52, 87, 88, 91, 104, 107–117, 131–140, 150, 221, 225 Sharp, William (aka Fiona Macleod), 4, 4n4, 56 Shaw, Fiona, 55, 61 Shaw, G. B., 52, 57, 106, 107 Sheehy-Skeffington, Hanna, 194 Ship, The (La nave, D’Annunzio, 1908), 25, 94, 128, 191, 215, 224–229 Sicilian Idyll, A (Todhunter, 1890), 52 Silence, 60, 67, 76, 79, 104, 130, 153, 185, 199, 212–214, 220, 238 Sisterhood, 11, 24, 49, 76–84, 200, 213 Sketch, The, 63

 INDEX 

Sodomy, 33 Solitude, 65, 67, 73, 218 Soros, George, 236 Spectrality, 13 St. Denis, Ruth, 9, 9n10 Storytelling, 14, 29, 112–114, 122, 133, 159, 201 Strangeness, 7, 13, 15, 55, 62, 70, 71, 113, 208 Stranger, 13, 58, 84–87, 89, 96, 110, 111, 113, 114, 178, 180 Stravinsky, Igor, 167 Superman, 27, 132, 223 Supernatural, 60, 68, 105 Superwoman, 224–229 Survival, 153, 159, 235 Swans, 69, 70, 174 Switching, 146, 147 Symbolism, 20, 21, 75, 206, 233 Symons, Arthur, 26, 95 Synge, J. M., 32, 105, 106 Székely, Csaba, 239 T Tamassia, Arrigo, 102 Thinking fascism, 230 Thirst, 129, 131, 183 Todhunter, John, 52, 57, 157 Total theatre, 14, 16, 21, 122, 159, 168, 224 Touch, 91, 112, 120, 127–130, 132, 139, 173–175, 182, 184, 201, 205, 219, 222, 242 Transgression, 4n5 Trauma, 48, 48n1, 90, 146, 154, 167, 200 Travesti, 106 Triumph of Death, The (Il Trionfo della Morte, D’Annunzio, 1894), 27, 34, 86, 166, 167 Troubridge, Una, 5n9

257

Trump, Donald, 243 Tyranny, 20, 195, 198, 199, 202, 214 U Unhappiness, 49, 51, 56, 57, 59, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91 Unhappy queer, 50, 61 University of Theatre and Film Arts, 240 Urania (magazine), 3n2 V Varini, Emilia, 76, 82, 216 Vatican, 243, 244 Vergani, Vera, 85 Victimhood, 26, 135, 244 Victimisation, 134, 135, 179, 196 Vidnyánszky, Attila, 239, 241 Virgins of the Rocks, The (Le Vergini delle Rocce, D’Annunzio, 1895), 27, 128 Virile hero, 132 Virility, 18, 33, 46, 65, 82, 83, 133, 183, 193, 218, 228 Vision, A (Yeats, 1937), 36 Visuality, 2, 36, 70, 138, 215 Vulnerability of the body, 13 W Well of Loneliness, The (Radclyffe Hall, 1928), 5n9, 12 Wellesley, Dorothy (Duchess of Wellington), 108, 150, 150n2 Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, 1963), 92 Wild, Oscar, 3–5, 7, 11, 13, 29, 32–38, 34n20, 35n21, 66, 101, 104, 108, 118, 138, 160, 177 Wildness, 6, 25, 30, 56, 69, 90, 157, 184, 191–193, 195, 202

258 

INDEX

Willingness, 58, 176, 213 Will to escape, 6, 8, 24, 26, 45–96 Woman, A (Una donna, Aleramo, 1906), 4n6, 103 Women of the Sidhe, 60, 156, 202, 215 Women’s storytelling, 201 Woolf, Virginia, 230

Y Yeates, Raymond, 69, 73, 75 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 230 Z Zacconi, Ermete, 216 Zacconi, Ines Cristina, 127