Female Figures and Cultural Anxiety: A Comparative Study of Yeats and Heaney

Abstract

Female figures constitute a recurring poetic medium through which W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney negotiate Ireland and Northern Ireland. However, their representations take different forms under different historical pressures. This study compares the forms, cultural meanings, and historical functions of their female representations. It argues that Yeats primarily employs mythological female figures to evoke an idealized Irish cultural past and articulate anxiety over cultural loss, discontinuity, and the uncertain achievement of genuine political and cultural autonomy. Heaney, by contrast, constructs more corporeal, material, and historically situated female figures to express anxiety over the persistence and reproduction of historical wounds in Northern Ireland. Despite these differences, both poets remain entangled in the patriarchal and imperial structures underlying the feminization of the nation. At the same time, their female representations appropriate and redirect this inherited symbolic framework toward the affirmation of Irish cultural difference, revealing a distinctly de-Anglicizing dimension.