Purgatory includes as its main themes Yeats’s feeling of crisis and anxiety as an Anglo-Irish who was alienated from the Irish society, his skeptical view of the modern Ireland which was seeking after materialism and his predilection for eugenic thought. In Purgatory, Yeats reveals those representative themes of his later writing using the conventions of Gothic: for instance, the supernatural modes such as the transgression of the ancestors, whose tragic result affects the present, the ruined house, wild landscape, and the ghosts, the theme of ‘life in death’ and ‘the death in life’, the opposition of nature and culture and the Freudian psychological characteristics such as ‘the return of the repressed’ and ‘the uncanny.’ This paper aims to analyse how Yeats borrows and modifies those traditional Gothic conventions to convey his themes in a more effective and impressive way and to finally argue that Yeats came to be skeptical about the heroic theme and its representation. Yeats places the old man as a narrator who speaks for his thoughts, but at the same time he puts him as an unreliable narrator and shows us his limitation. Here arises irony, through which Yeats reconsiders his heroic theme that he has insisted throughout his lifetime. Through the old man’s failure to save his mother from her repeated pain of purgatory and his consequent helplessness, Yeats reveals the anti-heroic theme.
예이츠 및 관련 분야에 대한 회원들의 학문 발전을 도모하고 연구 의욕을 고취시키기 위해 다음과 같은 일을 기획하고 수행함을 그 목적으로 한다.
1) 학술 발표회 및 세미나 개최
2) 학술 정보의 수집과 자료 교환
3) 연구논문집 『한국예이츠저널』(The Yeats Journal of Korea) 발간
4) 회원 상호간의 학문적 교류와 친목 도모