Introduction: Cross-Gendered Literary Voices

Abstract

Referring to the crazy voice of the female persona in his later poems in Words for Music Perhaps (1932), W. B. Yeats claimed ‘Crazy Jane poems’ were ‘founded on the sayings of an old woman “Cracked Mary”’ who ‘had an amazing power of audacious speech’ in Galway (Yeats 1996: 604–5). According to the aging poet, Crazy Jane was also the product of his own ‘uncontrollable energy’ (605), suggesting that he melded a need to borrow a female voice he knew and could confidently mobilize with his own exuberant poetic energy. In Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane poems’, we see the licentious old madwoman arguing against the Bishop through her ‘ballad poetics’ and what Elizabeth Cullingford calls the Bakhtian ‘carnivalesque insistence on the grotesque body’ which disputes the ‘monologic identity constructed by [the] celibate clergy’ (1993: 227). For Cullingford, ‘Crazy Jane was both Yeats’s attempt to speak the Other and a strategy for evading his own internal censor’ when resisting ‘patriarchal ecclesiastical authority’ (235). In contrast, Alan Michael Parker and Mark Willhardt claim that Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane ends up reinforcing gender hierarchies’ (1996: 202), and thereby other socio-political patterns of constraint, rather than offering a forcefully subversive sense of female agency.