Woman as Fantasy Object in Lady Gregory’s Historical Tragedies

Abstract

Barely a year after her death, W. B. Yeats published two poems venerating Lady Augusta Gregory in his collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems, ‘Coole Park, 1929’ and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, both of which commemorate her legacy to Irish theatre and culture. While Yeats’s veneration of Lady Gregory has the effect of canonizing her as a cultural icon, it also has the concomitant effect of ossifying her place in history. Christopher Murray argues that such ‘mummifying tributes’ tend to ‘stiffen her into monumental awesomeness like a building, like Coole House itself or the Abbey Theatre’.¹ What is astounding about Lady Gregory’s career is that in addition to the huge effort involved in organizing and sustaining the fledgling Abbey Theatre, she also managed to produce a canon of some 42 plays.² The achievement is even more impressive when one considers Lady Gregory’s contribution to the writing of plays normally included within the Yeatsian canon, such as The Pot of Broth (1904), Where There is Nothing and its revision as The Unicorn from the Stars (1907), and most notably Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902).³