Jane considers a woman to fully know herself to be a woman only once she loses her virginity (is “rent” in order to be “whole”), and only knows herself as an individual (“sole”) in the context of her (disconnected) relationships with men, she laconically reminds the (celibate) bishop. We do the poem a great disservice if we don’t get Jane’s slightly mocking allusion to the fact that we urinate and defecate and bleed every day from the same set of genitalia that we romanticise (“proud and stiff when on Love intent”) as the source of sexual pleasure. Still, in the last stanza of the poem, he catches Jane’s (and other Irish women’s) connection with the practical, the earthy, even the animal. One of my favourites, though, bless him, he wouldn’t have had time for the wife of a working-class man like me :) I’ve lived in Sligo for years and passed by Yeats’s grave and famous statue countless times. By her logic, she stands a better chance of achieving spiritual ‘wholeness’, because she’s been in the gutter or ‘the place of excrement’. Crazy Jane, a downtrodden and ‘lowly’ prostitute, has certainly been ‘rent’ or broken. Nothing can be ‘whole’ or complete that has not been broken first.
In the final stanza of ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, Crazy Jane continues this line of argument, with two kinds of love being compared: there is the woman who is ‘proud and stiff’ when intent on love, but there is also another kind of love, that is found in ‘the place of excrement’: we’re back in Crazy Jane’s ‘sty’ of sin and prostitution. This is a truth that Crazy Jane has learned through her lowly social position, but it would be as true for someone whose heart was filled with ‘pride’ (such as the Bishop and his ilk). But given what follows in the rest of this middle stanza, and in the poem’s final stanza, perhaps a more likely reading of Crazy Jane’s words is this: that people die, whether you belong to Crazy Jane’s world of premature death (the ‘grave’, to which her friends have gone because of their lowly status) or to the Bishop’s world of comfort and security (the ‘bed’). Whatever your beliefs, whether you think that death is the end and you just lie in the grave and rot, or whether you believe in something beyond this life, there’s no denying that her friends are ‘gone’ from this world.Īt least, that’s one interpretation. What she means here is less clear, but we might see the ‘grave’ as representing death of Thanatos, the death-force, and the ‘bed’ as representing the life-force of Eros and sex however, there may also be a suggestion in ‘bed’ of death as just a sleep, as a nod to religious belief that incorporates a belief in the afterlife. Yet she meets this ‘truth’ head-on, saying it’s a truth that neither ‘grave nor bed denied’. The act of getting married and having children may be actively encouraged by the Church (of which the Bishop is a representative), but in order to reproduce, married couples have to have sex, which Crazy Jane (it’s implied by Yeats’s word ‘sty’ that she is a prostitute) has made a career out of.Ĭrazy Jane continues, telling the Bishop that her friends have died: she is growing old, but worse than that, she is growing old and lonely. But Crazy Jane seems to be striking at a deeper philosophical and religious truth: that what we consider to be ‘fair’ is not that far removed from foulness.
0 kommentar(er)
