The Queen’s Ecstatic Moment: Eugenic Concerns in William Butler Yeats’s A Full Moon in March

This article examines William Butler Yeats’s eugenicist concerns in his play A Full Moon in March (1935) alongside his essays, primarily “If I were Four-and-Twenty” (1919) and “To-morrow’s Revolution” (1938). This comparative study reveals how Yeats uses the interaction between the Queen and the Swineherd to warn against what he perceived as the reasons for the degeneration of Irish culture and society. The play’s climactic dance, or the Queen’s “ecstatic moment,” serves as a dramatic embodiment of Yeats’s growing belief in the crucial role of elite women’s sexual choice in determining the future of Irish society. Drawing on Yeats’s concept of “mother-wit” as well as his concerns about the population decrease of the “better stocks,” the study demonstrates how A Full Moon in March reflects Yeats’s preoccupation with eugenics and the continuity of upper-class family lineage in relation to societal progress and Irish cultural regeneration. This analysis offers a new interpretation of A Full Moon in March, highlighting the intricate connections between Yeats’s aesthetic, political, and eugenicist concerns in his later career, complementing existing studies which highlight the Japanese Noh-inspired aesthetics of the play.