Destined to be raped or a burden she was willing to take?

For a number of reasons, Yeats's sonnet “Leda and the swan” became a controversial issue since the very moment of its publication. As I'm sure you know, this poem, in very general terms, is about an old Greek myth that tells the story of the way in which Zeus, the great Greek god, transformed himself into a swan, so he would be able to “have” Leda, woman he had seen bathing, naked in the river Furatos.

Even if we put a side the disturbing fact that this is a story about a woman “engaging” in intercourse with a swan, there are many other aspects that we should pay attention to when analyzing it. On the one hand, for instance, there's the way in which the woman is put as an object, violently submitted by a male figure and reduced to body parts by the narrator when he mentions her nape, breasts and thighs. Though the poem itself is not completely violent, because we are able to evidence some kind of sympathy and/or empathy from the narrator, especially when we see him trying to guess and understand what she is feeling and enduring, in the second part of the octave with questions such us-

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”.

In addition to that, we also see the image of the woman helplessly trying to push him away, and at the same time she's put at an inferior level. She has no divine powers to confront him. Personally, after reading it for the first time there was still the doubt on the possibility that she was up to some point accepting her fate, especially if we consider this idea of destiny or fate being decided by the gods. Was she destined to be raped? Was she barely complying with her obligation? And if we compare it to the story and image of Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, and some other cases in which female characters have had to follow a divine order without having a say, is it the role of “the feminine” in history/religion/mythology/literature, to be used as objects of male's desired, or merely vehicles for future events? Furthermore, we could also say that this very same image of a narrator almost in a voyeuristic stand, watches and describes for us a scene as if it were almost a spectacle offered by Zeus himself.

Was Yeats aware of the presence of violence towards the female and feminine images in Western culture? Did he felt as the restless spectator of a disturbing reality? Some people argue that it's really evident that he wanted to flout censorship, because in the 1920s, Ireland was consider an extremely conservative place. This even led to the establishment of an institution the Committee of Evil Literature, which was given the power to ban written material that they considered obscene or that would corrupt the public moral of the time. Elizabeth B. Cullingford, a Yeatsian scholar who is also a known feminist critic, in her work Pornography and Canonicity: The Case of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan, argues that “no one at the time seriously questioned whether this liberalism justified [Yeats’s] graphic description of the body of a woman attacked and violently raped by an animal. (Cullingford 1994)

The same way that some people think that the answer to the last question of the poem (Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?), should be a yes, and she foresaw the future awaiting as consequence of this event, or that at least she felt that it would lead to something greater than herself, I strongly believe that Yeats also anticipated the female discomfort with a male chauvinistic society, and supported it before it even started.