7 Woman and Nation: Readings of Authenticity
There was no corner so quiet that the problem of authenticity would not arise in
it [Ö]^1As Colin Graham notices in ëIreland and the Persistence of
Authenticityí (1999), Revivalist constructions of the nation, typified
by W.B. Yeatsís representation of Cathleen NÌ Houlihan, rely upon a
notion of cultural purity whereby claims to access an authentic notion
of ëIrishnessí underlie cultural nationalism: ëThe nationís very reason
for being, its logic of existence, is its claim to an undeniable
authenticity as a pure expression of the ìrealî, the obvious, the
natural.í^2 The contemporary Irish poets under discussion have in
different ways moved away from the project of inventing an authentic
sense of Irishness as they problematize traditional concepts of
gendered and national identity that rely on mythological and essen-
tialist versions of identity.
The methodology of this debate has drawn on feminist and post-
colonial theorization of identity to call into question the homogeneity
upon which assertions of gendered and national identity rely. At a
basic level, this has led to the conclusion that there is an excess of the
people over the nation, and that identities cannot be fixed or
monumentalized since identification is a ëperformativeí process. This
is played out at a critical level within the poetry as, in their individual
ways, the writers present readers with ëdeterritorializingí, ëanti-
foundationalí, ëhybridí, ëfluidí, ësecretiveí and ënomadicí poetic
voices. The effect of this is that, in differing ways, the poets call into
1 Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970),
p.198.
2 Cf. Colin Graham’s criticism of advertisements representing Ireland which
engages with Luke Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork:
University Press, 1996) in ‘Ireland and the Persistence of Authenticity’, Ireland
and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, eds., Colin Graham &
Richard Kirkland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp.7–28, p.8.