A strangely useless thing: Iseult Gonne and Yeats

Unlike her more famous mother, Iseult Gonne seems actively to have sought the supporting role of muse, which is of course one reason why she has never had a biography of her own.Even with that willingness, she never gained the kind of immortality Maud Gonne did through Yeats's poetry--yet the history of Iseult's relationship with the poet is interesting.Yeats had a front-row seat for Iseult's maturation, and evidently perceived her in several ways over the course of her life: as an archetype of the compromised innocence of childhood, as a mirror image of Maud, and as the quintessence of wasted potential.Almost all published descriptions of Iseult Gonne portray her less as a personality than as an embodiment of some abstraction, some constant companion to other, more vivid human lives.This quality of her character--or perhaps of her fate--is somehow emblematized in the story of her conception.In 1890, Maud Gonne had a son with the French journalist and agitator Lucien Millevoye.The child died a year later. 1 Yeats wrote in his autobiography that "The idea came to her that the lost child might be reborn, and she had gone back to Millevoye, in the vault under the memorial chapel.A girl child was born, now two years old" (Memoirs 133).Yeats both doubted and disapproved, but to Maud Iseult at first represented the child she had lost.Although her date of birth is misreported as 1895 in Nancy Cardozo's biography of Maud Gonne, and in the index to Yeats's Memoirs, Iseult was actually born on August 6, 1894 (Balliett 29).She was educated at a Carmelite convent in France, in Laval, but was probably never as innocent as that fact might sentimentally imply.For one thing, she was almost certainly aware from the beginning of her illegitimacy.Although Maud passed her off to the respectable world at large as her niece--or, as in her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, as "a charming child I French 2 had adopted" (Servant 296)--Iseult was known to be Maud Gonne's natural daughter by a great many people.Many Dubliners suspected that Yeats was the father, but Iseult herself was acquainted with Lucien Millevoye and knew that he was her father. 2Discussing Maud Gonne's life circa 1900, Nancy Cardozo writes that "Iseult was aware that Millevoye, who came for a visit now and then with gifts and a kiss, was her father.Later she considered him licentious, vaguely threatening" (197).When and why Iseult vouchsafed this opinion of her father Cardozo does not say, but it is interesting to note that there were at least two intimidating father figures in Iseult's childhood--another factor mitigating against innocence.John MacBride, too, was a disturbingly unstable father figure.Shortly after severing her connection with Lucien Millevoye, Maud met and then toured the United States with Major John MacBride, veteran of the war in South Africa and exile from Ireland.Maud married him on February 21, 1903 (Cardozo 229).Maud later asserted that Iseult, eight years old at the time, had immediately disliked MacBride: "She was such a beautiful and such a strangely wise child.She had cried when I told her I was getting married to MacBride and said she hated MacBride.I had felt like crying, too.I told her I would send her lovely things from Spain, where we were going for our honeymoon, but she was not consoled" (Servant 348).This story, from Maud's 1938 autobiography, is very probably inflected with all the retrospective prophecy of hindsight, for Maud's marriage to MacBride had ended in a nasty and very public separation in 1905.In her petition for divorce, Maud had charged MacBride with intemperance and cruelty, and worse.

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