The Disruptive Other: Phantom Hauntings in the Ghost Plays of W.B. Yeats

Abstract

In 'A General Introduction for my Work' William Butler Yeats states that a 'poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; [...] there is always a phantasmagoria' (1961: 509). This study will examine Yeats's use of the ghostly figure in the three plays The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), The Words Upon the Window Pane (1934), and Purgatory (1938), in order to examine the internal psychic conflicts that haunt Yeats's political life and consequently the plays themselves. At the centre of a haunting is the incessant presence of an other that shadows the lives of the living. In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's neo-Freudian psychoanalytic theories, it is not simply an other that returns to haunt, but the secrets buried within the other's unconscious which haunt and thereby disrupt both psychic lives of subsequent generations. With reference to Abraham and Torok's theory of the 'transgenerational phantom', this study will examine the fragmented psyches of characters in Yeats's plays, through the form of the ghost, in order to trace the traumatic effects of key politico-historical contexts and events that haunt Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. In the phantasmagoria that is Yeats's theatre, we find the tragic effects of 'remorse', 'lost love' and 'loneliness' that result from the un-liveable realities of Ireland's history that reveal Ireland's otherness within itself.