CHASTITY used to come in many different varieties, the role models we had as adolescents ranging from the absolute, if impractical, example of the Mother of God, through lesser species. My favourite sort of virgin was the sweet one, prevalent among the nuns, the sort of woman too kind somehow to engage in sexual activity. But the most useful to ardent girlish spirits was the fighting virgin, from Artemis and Joan of Arc on revolutionary, slightly ecstatic (as virgins were supposed to be), their sexuality more potent in its denial.
It was not necessary to ask why such power was denied to mothers of five, these were the girls who looked good in a uniform. You could not be the inspiration of armies if you were married to Lance Corporal Jones.
These days chastity is seen as more problematic, so no one is tearing their hair out over the revelations in Roy Foster's book that Maud Gonne was less, or perhaps more, than the icon given to us by Yeats in his early poems. To be fair to Yeats, he didn't know that Gonne had a married lover and a family stashed in France, nor could he guess that after years of pearl pale sighing she would run off and marry the nationalist bit of rough John MacBride.
It is a sign of his talent for poetry rather than for self deception that he could accommodate the sorrows and problems of her personality in his later work, without destroying the ideal. Nevertheless, he handed her down to my school desk, "high and solitary and most stern". A bone to pick.
Not that Yeats made high claims for Gonne's virginity, but her refusal to sleep with him for so many years did confuse things a little in the purity stakes. Unrequited passion suited Yeats, who was too poor to marry (except perhaps someone as rich and independent as Gonne) and t9o idealistic, or shy, for a pragmatic choice of mistress. Gonne was a political activist and his yearning for her helped to maintain the tension between his dreamy nature and the demand for action that made him, eventually, a great poet.
But what did Gonne get out of it? Great poems, of course, but these only belong to the person who has written them. How could this impassioned woman sit still on someone else's page? And did she think that the poems represented her in any true sense?
Gonne was six feet tall and had a chin on her, that could take the eye out of smaller mortals heads. I imagine her as the Jerry Hall of her day, astonishing and very nearly ugly. "A great red haired yahoo of a woman", said one. "The badness of expression was startling," said another. "A huge mop of yellow hair crowned her big fat body. One look at her would be enough to form an opinion.
Both views owe more perhaps to the aggressive nature of her politics than to the loveliness of her eyes. The unresolved hair colour could mean that she was too dazzling to be seen properly, or that she was vulgar enough to use dye, but is more likely a reference to her love of theatrics. After Yeats and she diverged on the role of theatre in the nationalist cause, much of her energy was spent in trying to get her Kathleen Ni Houlihan wig back.
But there is no doubt she was serious about her politics. Her ambition was to be "the soul of the crowd", which led to much speechifying and general banging on - all, of course, in a good cause. Many of her statements were ugly and she was casually virulently anti Semitic, but if this woman's violence was to be bearable, it was necessary for men to make it sublime. Both Yeats and she agreed that she belonged to Ireland, that she should make "all men's hearts burn," rather than just his.
Yeats and she were allies, friends, "spiritual lovers" and actual lovers, all at different times. When her husband turned brutish, it was Yeats who helped pick up the pieces, and yet: "As for Willie Yeats I love him dearly as a friend but I could not for one minute imagine marrying him."
It wasn't just a question of bungled timing. There was something silly about Yeats and he knew it. His claim that Gonne did not like sex must have been somewhat bruised by her marriage to an erotomaniac" like MacBride. Certainly the fact that she had conceived Iseult by (or on, why not?) the grave of her first child suggests that she was either rampantly libidinous, or that sex was, for her, a hidden, dangerous, not to mention morbid business. A poem of Yeats dealing, perhaps, with the final consummation of their love ends with the peculiar line "Strike me if I shriek." (She was six feet tall).
Perhaps Gonne's problem was that she was beautiful, which is to say that she presented herself as beautiful and was perceived to be so, never mind the chin. In The Folly Of Being Comforted, Yeats originally described an older Gonne as having "crowsfeet" around her eyes. She objected to the line on the fragile, bitchy grounds that readers would assume he was writing about Lady, Gregory. "It was the first time, Yeats wrote, "that I realised she was human." He had known her for 14 years.
Mirrors are particularly confusing for beautiful women, and Yeats's love poetry was a spectacular mirror. The fact that he dealt in images of reflections and wraiths makes it less surprising, that in this infinite regression, the real Willie, so to speak, was so rarely asked to stand, up. A comparison with modern rock stars is not so facile these were two intensely self regarding people, who felt their actions and thoughts were of historical significance. When there is so much "image", how can there be sex?
BUT there was also the crowd. Theroigne de Mericourt, who became a symbol of the French revolution, did not fare so well as Gonne. A demi mondaine liberated by the political fervour of the time, she may have managed not to sleep with one of her comrades, but that didn't stop the accusation that she had slept with all of them. When men group together, that is what women are for.
It was said that she was a prostitute because she was clean respectable women did not have, to bother washing. Mericourt, like Gonne, was hard to see, spotted in a white, or red, or green coat, on the women's march to Versailles. She ended up raving, as icons can, crying "up the revolution" in her asylum cell, naked, washing obsessively. Whether it was revolution that drove her mad, the Terror, or the failure of the revolution, is a moot point. When you get involved in incendiary politics - it pays to keep yourself to yourself, not to let the contradictions tear you apart.
It is a testimony to Maud Gonne's hard neck as much as to the power of Yeats's poetry, that she survived, scandal free, as an icon into her old age. She believed in herself as she was seen, and that belief was so contagious it outlasted her looks. "I saw her in Brown Thomas trying on some gloves, and you have never seen anyone so beautiful."
Schoolgirls, take note.