living in the North of Ireland is, of course, debatable. Perhaps it is
because she has not left that her poetry tries to take flight from the
ground of the North into less locatable territories while acknow-
ledging difficulties with finding wings for herself and her audience.
Luce Irigaray has accused male centred or phallogocentric
ideologies of enclosing femininity within a space of dispossession that
may be compared with the dispossessed experience of colonial
subjects. She addresses manís delimitation of women as though he is a
cartographer, draftsman or artist:
Everywhere you shut me in. Always you assign a place to me. Even outside the
frame that I form with you [...] You mark out boundaries, draw lines, surround,
enclose. Excising, cutting out. What is your fear? That you might lose your
property. What remains is an empty frame. You cling to it, dead.^43McGuckianís challenge to the God who fashions edges, implicitly
undermines the boundaries set out by sexism and racism, chauvinism
and imperialism, on an island where women and nation, body and
space are entities that have been controlled and policed. Her portraits
of women looking out to sea are evocative of cartoons of Cathleen NÌ
Houlihan looking out to sea for aid from abroad.^44 As the woman turns
her back on the land, this could signify a refusal to attend any longer
to questions of territory. McGuckianís migratory images, evocative of
the unheimlich, of ëmeaninglessí ëwanderingí and the dissolution of
place, can be viewed as a response which abandons territorial issues
altogether. When the Irish territory is mapped onto the female body,
the impulse may well be for the Irish woman writer to abandon
conventional maps altogether and become a disembodied, deterritori-
alized voice whose identity is unclear. This is a move towards a
43 Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans., Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp.24ñ5.
44 Cf. ëExpectancyí, The Leprachaun, September 1911, p.219. The trope of the
woman looking out to see is fairly common in literature as in John Fowlesís
The French Lieutenantís Woman. The deployment of this image within Irish
literature is more loaded with connotations than in English literature; due to a
history of colonial dispossession in Ireland, both invaders and French aid have
come from the sea and in the popular press, Cathleen is often represented
looking out to sea.