Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

4 Eavan Boland, Monuments, Misrepresentation

A river is not a woman Ö

Any more than

A woman is a river,^1

National Monuments

Homi Bhabhaís essay ëDissemiNationí notices how

The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present

becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. Historians transfixed on the

event and origins of the nation never ask, and political theorists possessed of the

ëmoderní totalities of the nation ñ ëhomogeneity, literacy and anonymity are the

key traitsí ñ never pose, the essential question of the representation of the

nation as a temporal process.^2

What follows poses such a question whilst exploring the intersections
between gender, nation and time within Eavan Bolandís poems.
Ailbhe Smythís essay ëThe Floozie in the Jacuzzií describes how
the figure of Anna Livia Plurabelle from James Joyceís Finnegans
Wake (1939) has been transmuted into a statue in the centre of Dublin
City. In Joyce, she is a water nymph representing a ëliving streamí, the
River Liffey or in Irish, ëAn Lifeí. In Dublin, she is carved in ëstoneí

1 This chapter was first delivered as a paper at the Women-on-Ireland Network
Conference at St. Maryís University College, Strawberry Hill on 27th June

1998. I would like to thank Ailbhe Smyth and the audience for their comments.
      Cf. Eavan Boland, Collected Poems, III Anna Liffey, ëAnna Liffeyí,
      (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), p.201. All subsequent references to the Collected
      Poems are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.
      2 Homi Bhabha, ëDissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern
      Nationí, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.142. With
      reference to E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983),
      p.38.