W. B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" (1897)

Mir fällt gerade im Zug meiner Yeats-Recherche mal wieder der Unterkiefer Richtung Tischplatte. Ich gehe gerade durch den ersten Teil von R. F. Fosters zweiteiliger Biographie ("I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914", Oxford UP, 1997) und mir sticht im Index ein Name ins Auge. Und ich finde auf S. 485/86 dies:

Zitat
"As Aubrey's sister, Mabel (Beardsley) inherited a certain mystique; WBY remembered a tongue-tied musician, introduced to her at a Woburn Buildings Monday evening, saying it was 'like meeting King Arthur,' Others recalled her as jolly, strapping and unshockable. 'Being Aubrey's sister little that is hidden to most young girls was unknown to Mabel,' wrote Rothenstein rather primly. 'and there was nothing that cd not be discussed.' WBY had more or les lost touch with her, but wrote a sympathetic letter. From January 1913 he began visting her mother's Hampstead house. ... Ricketts, another regular visitor, made her a series of dolls (a fashionable aesthetic preoccupation at the time [n. 133]). fantastically dressed: WBY found her with their faces turned to the wall when she had Mass said on 13 January."

Und in der angegebenen Fußnote:

Zitat
He may have been influenced by Lotte Pritzel's doll-sculptures - figures of wire and wax in decadent dance postures, reminding many of Aubrey Beardsley's work. There was a celebrated exhibition in Munich in 1913, inspiring a famous essay by Rainer Maria Rilke. (S. 618)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabel_Beardsley

Zitat
Yeats' biographer David Pierce notes of Mabel that:

"According to Yeats, in reference to the Rhymers' Club, she was 'practically one of us'; later, she used to attend Yeats's Monday evenings at Woburn Buildings. From 1912, when she was diagnosed as suffering from cancer, until her death in 1916, Yeats was a frequent visitor to her bedside and composed a series of poems on her titled 'Upon a Dying Lady'".[12]

W. B. Yeats' poem "Upon a Dying Lady" is about Mabel.[13]

Bei Ricketts handelt es sich um Charles Ricketts.

Zitat
An older generation still played its part. In 2007, Carl Woodring (1919-2009) published an article in Wordsworth Circle: 'Centaurs Unnaturally Fabulous'. It discussed centaurs as a motif in Rickett's paintings and book illustrations. Woodring was 87 at the time.

The other major concern of Ricketts, the theatre, was not forgotten. Scholars such as Margaret Mitchell, Lindsay Catherine Thomas, and Judith P. Shoaf published essays on the stage designs for performances by and for soldiers in France, Ricketts's Shakespeare productions, and the dolls he made for Mabel Beardsley.

https://charlesricketts.blogspot.com/201...or-charles.html

Zitat
Concerned of course with their own making, and thus showing their working, the Cantos tend to present a male conception of beauty. This same Canto 74 later assures us that (with quotation marks) ‘“beauty is difficult” sd/ Mr Beardsley’, ascribing this crystallization of the toil of modernist difficulty to a male oral tradition.69 As we’ve seen, Yeats’s genealogy for this idea is strikingly different, involving the work and speech of women who ‘must labour to be beautiful’. It is intriguing then that Yeats’s ‘Upon a Dying Lady’ also associates the Beardsleys with silk. Except here Yeats chooses a sharp-tongued female heroine, not one associated with purity. In ‘Certain Artists Bring Her Dolls and Drawings’ Aubrey’s sister Mabel Beardsley is depicted surrounded by figures made in her own likeness where

… a tress
Of dull red hair was flowing
Over some silken dress
Cut in the Turkish fashion,
Or it may be, like a boy’s.70

In real life these dolls dressed in silk were made by the artist Charles Ricketts, one half of a gay partnership with the painter Charles Shannon. Ricketts, a notable practitioner of the ‘lesser arts’ with a considerable influence on Yeats’s aesthetic, had designed costumes for some few of Yeats’s plays. They included, over a simple tunic and trousers, an elaborate grand patterned cloak in green and gold for Cuchulain in the 1915 production of On Baile’s Strand. According to Yeats, Ricketts’ gift to Mabel Beardsley included ‘women with loose trousers and boys that looked like women’.71 That such cross-dressing should suggest not merely nineties’ aestheticism or tacit homosexual signalling but a kind of daring female heroism appeared to herald a new gender-bending world in which women wearing trousers were something to celebrate in poetry. Even decorous silk fashions, through changing gender politics, might conspire to make it new.

"Stitching and Unstitching’: Yeats material and immaterial," Adrian Paterson, Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 2:1 (2018), 166.

II

CERTAIN ARTISTS BRING HER DOLLS AND DRAWINGS

Bring where our Beauty lies
A new modelled doll, or drawing,
With a friend's or an enemy's
Features, or maybe showing
Her features when a tress
Of dull red hair was flowing
Over some silken dress
Cut in the Turkish fashion,
Or it may be like a boy's.
We have given the world our passion,
We have naught for death but toys.

III

SHE TURNS THE DOLLS' FACES TO THE WALL

Because to-day is some religious festival
They had a priest say Mass, and even the Japanese,
Heel up and weight on toe, must face the wall
--Pedant in passion, learned in old courtesies,
Vehement and witty she had seemed--; the Venetian lady
Who had seemed to glide to some intrigue in her red shoes,
Her domino, her panniered skirt copied from Longhi;
The meditative critic; all are on their toes,
Even our Beauty with her Turkish trousers on.
Because the priest must have like every dog his day
Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,
We and our dolls being but the world were best away.