Desiring Women

The interrelationship between sexual and social revolutions in London in the 1890s shaped both the Irish dramatic revival and twentieth-century English drama. W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw both embraced a socialism rooted in the radical eros of Percy Bysshe Shelley and developed by William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and Edward Carpenter. This “queer socialism” (the chapter acknowledges but departs from from Patrick Mullen’s earlier use of the phrase) was defined by its insistence on pleasure as the means and as the end of social progress. Yeats, Shaw, and John Todhunter—all Shelley enthusiasts, and all fascinated by Florence Farr’s bisexuality—contributed plays to a season that Farr produced at the Avenue Theatre. The opening night audience violently protested the double bill of Yeats’s Land of Heart’s Desire and Todhunter’s A Comedy of Sighs , in part because both plays mythologized the New Woman’s transgressive sexuality through occult representations of lesbian desire. Shaw moved to protect himself from homophobic condemnation by replacing Farr in the lead role of Arms and the Man with a more gender-conforming actress. After Shaw’s brilliant success, Yeats decided to pursue his dramatic career in Dublin, leaving Shaw to found a straightforwardly socialist dramatic revival in London.

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