Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Were it indeed an accident of birth

That she looks on the gentle earth

And the seemingly gentle sky

Through one brown, and one blue eye.^42

Castor and Pollux reappear in ëArmageddon, Armageddoní (1977)
and Clair Wills notices how they are not only the sign of the zodiac
but

also the twins who in Irish legend were born to Queen Macha after her husband

forced her to race against horses. As Macha died in childbirth she called down a

curse on Ulster, so that the twins now augur the evil which is now visited on

Northern Ireland.^43

This dual vision can once more be understood in terms of the Partition
of the North of Ireland; a territory torn in two and occupied by several
different races, cultures, religions or identities.
The representation of identity in the poetry is not simply clear cut
or dichotomous since the child, ëflittingí between the parents, also
provides a bridge between them. It seems that the child is the only
evidence of mixture in the marriage. As the poem is narrated from the
position of the hybrid, ëThe Mixed Marriageí demonstrates that a
middle ground between identities need not be thought in terms of a
dehumanized, inarticulable and mute space. The child speaks of their
separate lives yet also of their togetherness within this condition of
difference. The hybrid is therefore conceived in terms of a human
voice rather than thought of in terms of a mute theoretical space of the
non-sentence, as is outlined by Homi Bhabha in his discussion of the
inbetween.^44

42 Muldoon, ëBlemishí, Mules, p.37.
43 Wills, Reading Muldoon, p.51.
44 Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p.183. Bhabha understands
Rodolphe Gasché’s theorization of the ‘non-dialectical middle’ in terms of
Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘supplementary’, as a psychoanalytic aporia that
cannot be uttered or as a ‘non-sentence’. He asks: ‘Can there be a social subject
of the “ non-sentence” ?’ Muldoon’s speaker in ‘The Mixed Marriage’ provides
a reply to this question with the hybrid voice of the child who speaks from the
middle or the inbetween as a person rather than an aporia. Cf. Gasché, The Tain
of the Mirror (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.210;
Derrida, Writing and Difference; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans., Martin