colonialism.^6 However, in her essay ëOutside Historyí, Boland
imagines female subjects in terms of ëethical directioní or passages
into the future. Boland suggests that the power of a traditional version
of nationalism is to stop these passages into the future, to turn women
into a trope as Smyth argues is the case with the statue of Anna Liffey:
ëThe nation as woman; the woman as national muse.í In this way,
Irish women are presented in poetry and art as ëpassive, decorative,
raised to emblematic statusí.^7
Gerardine Meaney comments that Boland deals with images of
the nation rather than the legislation of the nation-state. In her essay
entitled ëMyth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity: Eavan Boland
and Irish Womenís Writingí (1993), Meaney contends that in
Bolandís poetry: ëThe poets who silence and reduce Irish women to
ìstatic, passive, ornamental figuresî are not accused of reproducing or
re-enforcing the ideology of the state.í^8 Meaney argues that making
connections between patriarchy, nationalism and state power, whereby
the nation seeks to assimilate citizens into its own idea of itself, risks
undermining difference. She suggests Bolandís poetry has been
assimilated into the patriarchal and the national: ëBolandís difficulty
in simply walking away from the ìthe idea of the nationî [Ö]
confirms Julia Kristevaís view that the first phase of feminism, while
immediately universalist, is also deeply rooted in the socio-political
life of nationsí.^9 Meaney accuses Bolandís poetry of making ëa series
of assumptions about the relationship between gender and national
6 Boland, ëUnheroicí, The Lost Land (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), p.23.
7 Boland, ëOutside Historyí, p.23.
8 Gerardine Meaney, ëMyth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity: Eavan
Boland and Irish Womenís Writingí, Women: A Cultural Review, Vol.4, No.2,
Autumn 1993, pp.138. Meaney refers to Bolandís A Kind of Scar: The Woman
Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic, 1989), p.23. Also published in
Studies, 76 (Summer, 1987).
9 Ibid., p.137. Meaney refers here to Bolandís ëA Kind of Scarí, p.19 and Julia
Kristeva, ëWomenís Timeí, The Kristeva Reader, ed., Toril Moi (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986), p.93. Kristevaís concept of womenís time as moving beyond
the historicist continuum is evocative of Benjaminís notion of a ëjetzt-Zeití that
will blast through History, replacing it with a historical materialism or a time
that is more ërealí. Cf. Benjamin, Part Seven of ëTheses on the Philosophy of
Historyí, Illuminations, ed., Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London:
Jonathon Cape, 1970).