The Celtic muse: anthropology, modernism, and the Celtic Revival

Decolonisation and mysticism in William Butler Yeats'sThe Celtic TwilightandThe Secret Rose

“…As Castle emphasises, The Celtic Twilight and the folkloric fictions, in large measure because their hybrid forms tended to resist the process by which ethnographic texts acquire social authority over the native subjects they seek to represent, offered a vision of a "unity of being" forged in an intersubjective rapport with a mystical peasantry. 114 His subsequent actions and writings incorporated the three phases that Frantz Fanon avers for all new nations. Although Fanon describes his three phases of decolonisation twentytwo years after Yeats's death and almost seventy years after The Celtic Twilight and The Secret Rose were compiled, Fanon's framework elucidates Yeats's writings.…”

“…15 Castle points out how "quite explicitly, Arnold seeks to encourage the Celtic people to accept the cultural role that he assigns to them, a role designed to further the aims of imperialism at the cost of the Celt's native language and customs". 16 These views explain how the new British education was designed to "help the people to dismantle the myths which still bound them to their own culture". 17 Yeats attempted to converse with Arnold, through his response "The Celtic Element", about his mistaken assumptions, specifically the Irish love of nature, to little avail.…”

“…The initial goals of Ireland's "racial self-improvement" through the Celtic Revival, Castle points out, "underscore the extent to which Irish-Ireland nationalists had internalized anthropological and colonialist assumptions about the Irish 'race'". 24 These internalised assumptions, stemming from Arnold and others like him, are what Yeats first attempted to overcome.…”

“…Castle remarks how "the primitiveness of the Celt, defined by Arnold in terms of racial essence, is redefined as a spiritual trait that links the ancient to the modern in a continuous, timeless unity". 52 According to Lloyd, "the identification of each representative individual with the nation constitutes the people which is to claim legitimate rights to independence as an 'original,' that is, essential, entity". 53 This identification was accomplished as "Irish folk culture is transformed into an ahistorical ground on which the defining difference of 'Irishness' can be established over against the homogenizing/hybridizing influence of 'Anglicization'".…”

“…is one of the most controversial elements of the Celtic Revival, in part because the anthropological authority behind it renders it internally contradictory, at once complicit with and hostile toward a tradition of representation that sought to redeem Irish peasant culture by idealizing or essentializing its "primitive" social conditions. 7 On the other hand, Castle argues that the Celtic Revival was far less bound up in the institutional structures of power . .…”