Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry Sarah Fulford Peter Lang Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry This page intentionally left blank Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry Sarah Fulford PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien Die Deutsche Bibliothek – CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Fulford, Sarah: Gendered spaces in contemporary Irish poetry / Sarah Fulford. – Bern ; Berlin ; Bruxelles ; Frankfurt am Main ; New York ; Oxford ; Wien : Lang, 2002 ISBN 3-906766-89-6 British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA Cover Illustration: Anna Livia Millennium Fountain (1988), O’Connell Street, Dublin. Cover design: Thomas Jaberg, Peter Lang AG ISBN 3-906766-89-6 US-ISBN 0-8204-5605-5 © Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2002 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………….… 7 Main Introduction …………………………………………………… 9 Part One: Ireland and the Post-Colonial Introduction to Part One .…………………………………………... 17 1 Seamus Heaney: Between Past and Future ……………………... 29 2 Liminal Spaces: Tom Paulin Walking a Line ……………….…... 71 3 Paul Muldoon, Partition and Hybridity ………………………... 101 Part Two: Ireland, Nationalism and Feminism Introduction to Part Two ……….………..……………………….. 127 4 Eavan Boland, Monuments, Misrepresentation …….…………. 141 5 Medbh McGuckian’s Disidentification …………………….….. 171 Part Three: Ireland, Internationalism and Post-Nationalism Introduction to Part Three …….………………………………….. 201 6 Sara Berkeley’s Nomadic Subjects ……………………………. 215 7 Woman and Nation: Readings of Authenticity ………………... 247 Bibliography ……………………………………………………… 265 Index ……………………………………………………………… 287 5 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements With many thanks to the following: Sara Berkeley, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin, for their readings, interviews and interest. Rod Edmond, Declan Kiberd, Michael O’Neill, Gareth Reeves, Geoff Ward and Pat Waugh, for their encouragement, support and guidance. Kalpana Shenoi for her enthusiasm from the very beginning. The trustees of the University of Kent Alumni Graduate Scholarship for fully funding me for three years and without whom this project would have been impossible. The English Speaking Union for their 1999/2000 Award for Research Abroad. Colleagues from the Department of English at the University of Dundee and my Senior Honours poetry students. The Department of English Studies at the University of Durham for their kind assistance during my first few years of lecturing. The Centre for Post- Colonial Studies at the University of Durham for providing an excellent forum for debate. Peter Brown and Michael Irwin for the ‘Literature and Place Project’ at the University of Kent. The Postgraduate Theory Seminars and the Post-Colonial Research Seminars at the University of Kent, the British Association for Irish Studies, the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, Ailbhe Smyth and WERRC at University College Dublin, and the Women-on-Ireland Network, for providing stimulating discussion. Graham Speake and Joanna Turner for their editorial comments during the final stages of preparing the manuscript for publication. Beth and Geoff Dawes for their help and generosity. Ali Gardner, Katerina Kolyva, Jo Lawrence and Marguerita Prierto-Acosta for their companionship during the writing of this book. Last but first, my parents. 7 This page intentionally left blank Main Introduction Myth and Motherland There has been some discussion of the connection between gender and nation in Irish discourse as in Richard Kearney’s Field Day pamphlet entitled Myth and Motherland (1984) and Gerardine Meaney’s Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics (1991). Kearney explains how, particularly in nationalist myth, the Irish woman is connected with Irish territory as Ireland is traditionally viewed in terms of Mother Ireland or as Cathleen Ní Houlihan. This argument is developed in David Cairns and Toni O’Brien Johnson’s Gender in Irish Writing (1991) which contains essays questioning the position of the feminine subject in relation to Irish nationality. Likewise, the notion of Ireland as the mother country, raped by the imposition of colonial power, is addressed by Lyn Innes in Woman and Nation (1993).1 While making the connection between gender and nation in Irish literature, these studies have paid little attention to the representation of nationality within contemporary Irish poetry. Nor have they considered the ways in which previous conceptions of nationality are being abandoned and critiqued by contemporary poets and critics. Clair Wills’s Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993) begins to approach the transgressive aspects of nationality and femininity in Irish writing while focusing on the poetry of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon.2 In this study, Wills exposes how these poets undermine traditional sexual representation using ‘improper’ narratives with the effect of redefining 1 Richard Kearney, Myth and Motherland (Field Day Pamphlet, No.5, 1984); David Cairns & Toni O’Brien Johnson, Gender in Irish Writing (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991); C. L. Innes, Woman and Nation (London: Harvester, 1993). 2 Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: University Press, 1993). 9 nationality, and she loosely connects this trend with post-colonial and postmodern theories. However, Wills’s discussion is confined to focusing on poetry from the North of Ireland and does not make detailed comparison with Southern Irish poets. Neither does her commentary on the poems engage in any depth with contemporary theorization of identity formation. Therefore, an uncovered area for debate is to explore gender and nation in terms of the relationship between the representation of the national body and national space, in male and female poets from both the North and the South of Ireland. This develops Wills’s argument by addressing poets from the South of Ireland, exploring different ways in which nationality is represented, while investigating the importance of territory and the Partition in contemporary Irish poetry as a whole. Asking how far the connection between the Irish territory and the female body is addressed by contemporary poetry, this will be problematized at a broader level with reference to feminist and post- colonial theorization so as to reassess the configuration of ‘Woman’ and ‘Nation’ in Irish writing. Irish Poetry and the Theorization of Identity Hence, the approach of this book is two fold: first, it explores identity in terms of gender and nationality in contemporary Irish poetry; second, it identifies the points of connection and disconnection between Irish poetry and theorization of identity formation in the fields of feminist and post-colonial theory. Oscillating between poetry and theory each chapter provides a commentary that questions the intellectual and political agenda of contemporary Irish poets, while calling into question the implied divisions between theory, poetry and a practical politics. In view of this, the differing political positions of Irish critics claiming to eschew and pursue the theorization of national identity are explored. Drawing on the work of Carol Coulter, Luke Gibbons, Colin Graham, Declan Kiberd, Richard Kearney, Edna Longley, Gerardine Meaney, Gerry Smyth and Ailbhe Smyth, discussion throughout 10 proves that post-colonial understandings of identity can provide insight into the political and aesthetic concerns of Irish poetry. Asking where do theory and poetry meet, and how far do they challenge one another, the aim is not to privilege poetry and seal it in an artistic vacuum as ‘beyond’ theoretically motivated criticism. Rather, the three parts of this book argue that Irish poetry and criticism can be productively read in terms of the wider contexts of post-colonial, feminist and post-nationalist theorization of identity. The thrust of the argument may therefore be summarized by the following question: How does contemporary Irish poetry relate to and abandon the pathos of authenticity that informs discussion of what constitutes gendered and national identities? The phrase ‘pathos of authenticity’ is understood with reference to the cultural nationalism of the Irish Literary Revival. That is, a nationalism that invented particular versions of Ireland and Irishness by looking back to a mythological past, whereby the nation was gendered as feminine and is typified by William Butler Yeats’s representation of Cathleen Ní Houlihan or Mother Ireland. As Colin Graham notices in his essay ‘Ireland and the Persistence of Authenticity’ (1999), Yeats claimed to ‘know’ an authentic Ireland: Yeats’s collection of Irish ‘peasant’ tales is in one sense part of the continued popularization of the antiquarianism which had begun in Ireland earlier

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