Moreover, the setting is rural rather than urban and there is a sense of
the Achill woman being as ëuncontemporaryí and as mythological as
the poor old woman, Shan Van Vocht. In spite of Bolandís intentions
in her essays where she hopes to explode the stereotypes of women
and nation, ëThe Achill Womaní has the potential to become yet an-
other symbol and trope of gendered nationality or Irish womanhood.
While challenging ëuniversal historyí, Boland risks putting another
delimited construct in its place as more authentic.
In her essay ëFeminism, Nationalism, and the Heritage of the
Enlightenmentí (1995), Carol Coulter notices how ë[p]aradoxically,
the nationalism which accompanied the elevation of the individual in
the Enlightenment also denied the individual.í^19 Coulter could here be
accused of essentializing notions of the Enlightenment yet her
comment can be compared with worries over creating universalizing
frameworks from which to view identity. Connections can be made
between feminism and nationalism as they utilize fixed notions of
identity such as gender and ethnos. Gender and ethnos are markers of
repression by chauvinism and imperialism but also modes of resist-
ance for feminist and nationalist movements. Both first generation
feminism and nationalism tend to rely on consensual frames of
reference for notions of ëWomaní and the ëNation.í In the Irish
context, women and nationality are connected further as in the
iconography of Mother Ireland. As Meaney notes: ë[f]ar from being a
release, this metaphoric construction of the relation between
womanhood and nation tends to keep each in place as a homogenous
and self-contained entity.í^20 In spite of her hopes to move beyond
historicist myth into the herstorical, Boland still writes within the
confines of gendered national identity with its demand for the
authentic. The problem of decolonization remains and this derives
from the need for an authentic sense of identity or ethnicity upon
which the nation-state is founded. The kind of narrative that says ëWe
Irish are thisí or ëWe women are thisí relies on an authenticity that is
as confining, as it is liberating. If Boland wishes to ëchange timeí or
19 Carol Coulter, ëFeminism, Nationalism, and the Heritage of the Enlightenmentí,
Gender and Colonialism, eds., Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sean
Ryder, Elizabeth Tilley (Galway: University Press, 1995), p.198.
20 Meaney, ëMyth, History and the Politics of Subjectivityí, p.148.