hood.í^12 Boland sets out in her essays to question a culture of male
oriented nationalism which tended to position the feminine ëOutside
Historyí in either a public symbolic role as Mother Ireland or in a
more private realm of motherhood. Challenging the ërhetoric of
imagery which alienated me, Boland underlines a fusion of the
national and the feminine which seemed to simplify bothí.^13 In Myth
and Motherland (1984), Kearney argues that ëif we need to
demythologize, we need to remythologizeí.^14 In view of this it is
necessary to ask how the female poets revise the representation of
woman and nation, and the body and space in their poetry, and to
consider how far is the old story of Mother Ireland being
reconstructed.
In Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry
(1993) Clair Wills has asked: ëWhere femininity stands as symbol of
the nation, how can woman ìconsumeî the symbol without ìerasingî
herself?í^15 Smythís ëFloozie in the Jacuzzií also problematizes this
erasure of the female in terms of the definitions of gender and nation.
Smyth compares the definitions of ëIrishismí, ëWomaní and ëIdentityí
to argue that at a conceptual level, Irish and female identities have
been presented in terms of lapses, the inbetween or undefined:
Irishism (Roget) paradox sophism equivocation nonsense untruth error lapsus
linguae
Woman (Aristotle/Aquinas/Freud/Lacan) defect lack absence lapsus linguae
Identity tautology, id-entity non-entity in-sense non-sense ab-sense sense
absconded.^16The definitions of ëWomaní and nationality drawn on by Smyth come
from Aristotle, Aquinas, Freud and Lacan, who are male theorists or
philosophers from different places outside Ireland. Smythís use of
12 Eavan Boland, ëA Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Traditioní,
Studies, 76 (Summer, 1987), p.152.
13 Boland, ëOutside Historyí, PN Review, Vol.17, No.1, September/October, 1990,
p.22.
14 Richard Kearney, Myth and Motherland, A Field Day Pamphlet, No.5 (Derry:
Field Day, 1984), p.22.
15 Clair Wills, ëWomen Poetsí, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern
Irish Poetry (Oxford: University Press, 1993), p.52.
16 Smyth, ëThe Floozie in the Jacuzzií, pp.14ñ15