ABSTRACT
Although Yeats has been considered, as Edward Said asserts, ‘the indisputably great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the domination of an offshore power’ (220), he is seldom portrayed or referenced in contemporary fiction, let alone detective fiction, as a major influence on narratives. Despite the publication in 2002 of the provocatively titled collective work Yeats Is Dead, in which 15 Irish novelists – including Roddy Doyle and Gene Kerrigan – contributed a chapter to a mystery novel about a missing Joyce manuscript, it is really with Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s overlooked novel The Habit of Fear (1987) that Yeats is used most potently as a political as well as literary figure in keeping with Said’s notion of him as a writer immersed in Irish ‘literary nationalism’ (236).
As Davis’s title suggests, The Habit of Fear is steeped in direct references to Yeats. The plot centres around the quest in Ireland of a New York reporter – who had just been brutally raped by two Irishmen in New York – for her father, a nationalist poet who abandoned her at birth. Yet, as soon as she is on Irish soil, Hayes becomes embroiled in the conflicts of a series of nationalist Irish organisations including the Sin Fein, the ‘Provos’, and the ONI (One Nation Indivisible). Through the numerous intertexts between Davis’s The Habit of Fear and Yeats’s more political poems throughout the novel, we can understand how Davis uses Yeats not only as a figurehead for the confused nationalist agendas of the political groups she encounters in Ireland but as the key to her protagonist Julie Hayes’s quest for her own sense of identity as well.
