silverí. The poem also introduces the ëbodyí and ëfleshí of a ërealí
mother who is neither a Virgin mother nor a Roman goddess but who
is constantly edited out of History. With ëthe marks of childbirth/ still
on ití, the body in Bolandís poem makes gestures and gains scars,
with the effect that it is ever changing rather than timeless and fixed.
Rather than using the poem as a vehicle for timelessness, Bolandís
writing allows the female body to age and move toward death,
ëremaking the lyric subject into an approximation of a time-bound,
disappearing body and thus revising the idea of art in the processí.
Boland makes ëthe written word a realm not of agelessness and beauty
but of change and decayí.^13
Like Kristeva, Bolandís sense of womenís time is bound up with
notions of the ëcosmosí and the ëeternalí. When Boland attempts to
get out of myth and into History, her project becomes comparable
with modern manís will to get into the historical. In Walter
Benjaminís terms this would be a more ëmaterialistí version of the
historical or ëherstorical.í Boland looks not for a utopian transcend-
ence ëoutside historyí or an ëauthentic, positive eternity, which
extends beyond time.í^14 Rather, Bolandís essays hope to make History
differential and materialist. That is, to take History out of myth into a
herstorical consciousness which takes place, as in Kristeva, via the
female body, yet unlike Kristeva, by critiquing the cosmic, eternal and
sacred.
ëThe Making of an Irish Goddessí implies that historical myth
ignores ërealí bodies such as the corpses of female victims of the
famine in favour of the immortalized Dark Rosaleen and Erin, the
Aisling poems or as Smyth outlines: ëWoman Ireland Banba Foladh
Eiri ̇ Red Rose RÛisÌn Dubh. CaitlÌn NÌ Houlih·n.í^15 The poem
suggests that attention to ëthe way I pin my hairí is a more ëaccurate
inscriptioní of the woman. This is also an inscription of pain or
ëagonyí that is associated not only with childbirth but with memories
of the famine. Writing of the female victims of the Irish famine,
13 Margaret Mills Harper, ëFirst Principles and Last Things: Death and the Poetry
of Eavan Boland and Audre Lordeí, Representing Ireland: Gender, Class,
Nationality, ed., Susan Shaw Sailer (Florida: University Press, 1997), p.182.
14 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History (1949)
trans., Williard R. Trask (Princeton: University Press, 1954, 1974), p.103.
15 Smyth, ëThe Floozie in the Jacuzzií, p.18.