Defiant Dykes: New Women against Patriarchy

A specific group within D’Annunzio’s and Yeats’s drama includes revengeful, defiant women who turn their diminished position into power to revenge the patriarchal system that harmed them or their family. This chapter rereads Yeats’s Deirdre (1907) and The Player Queen (1922) and D’Annunzio’s The Glory (1899) and The Ship (1908) to demonstrate how the plays’ wilful female characters take advantage of the strategies of patriarchy and eventually turn those strategies against the men who want to contain them. The chapter employs Michel Foucault’s idea of reverse discourse, Leo Bersani’s conceptualisation of the oppressed becoming oppressor, and Jack Halberstam’s ideas of the figure of the dyke and wildness to provide new avenues of understanding Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s plays. The language of wildness not only permeates the selected plays but it was also used by critics to describe the New Women Yeats and D’Annunzio worked with, including Mrs. Patrick Campbell who played both Deirdre and Decima in Yeats’s The Player Queen. Besides offering novel critical readings, the chapter briefly conceptualises the perception of New Women in early-twentieth-century Ireland and the contradictions of the totalitarian model of femininity in Fascist Italy.