as a national monument. Smyth criticizes this static representation of
the Irish womanís body as limiting, de-eroticized and impenetrable,
and she draws on Marina Warnerís Monuments and Maidens (1985):
Meanings of all kinds flow
through the figures of women
and they often do not
include who she herself
is^3In Finneganís Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle can be understood as
representing fluidity of meaning, plurality and sexual transgression.
However, her statue in Dublin has become in Yeatsís words from
ëEaster 1916í: ëEnchanted to a stoneí. Anna Liffey the river woman
has been monumentalized: she is stylized as a conventional,
allegorical figure functioning to erase the untidy realities of fleshy
women. In this way, the female water nymph and spirit of place, ëAn
Lifeí, is grounded: ëMinute by minuteí may ëchangeí but she lives as a
timeless female figure, a ëstoneí ëin the midst of allí.^4
In her essay ëOutside Historyí (1990), Boland writes of the
position of the woman poet in an Irish literary tradition: ëwomen have
moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being the
authors of them. It is a momentous transit. It is also a disruptive one. It
raises the question of identity, issues of poetic and ethical direction.í^5
Bolandís comment is interesting in that she imagines women authors
providing ëmomentous transití, ëdisruptioní and ëdirectioní. Her
diction draws on a vocabulary of movement rather than stasis. The
ërealí woman is associated with the living stream rather than with the
monumental. In her poem ëUnheroicí from The Lost Land Boland
presents us with ëgranite patriotsí or the monoliths of Irish nationalism
as it thrives on the past as an unchanging museum culture that draws
upon a national History with which to counteract the claims of
3 Smyth, ëThe Floozie in the Jacuzzií, The Irish Review, Vol.6 (1989), p.9. From
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens, reference uncited by Smyth.
4 William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan,
1933, repr.1963), ëEaster 1916í, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921),
pp.202ñ5.
5 Boland, ëOutside Historyí, Poetry Nation Review, September/October (1990),
pp.21ñ8.