Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Boland, in effect, is a suffragette. She seeks not to challenge the basis of the

poetís authority, but to widen the political constituency, adding women to the

electoral rolls. But of course poetry cannot simply add the ëprivateí or

ëpersonalí experience of women to its dominant structures, and Boland herself

does not so much represent female experience as trope it.^27

Meaney takes this comment further suggesting that Bolandís poetry is
part of first generation feminism which ëaspired to gain a place in
linear time as the time of project and historyí.^28 In the same essay,
Meaney also argues that

[h]er construction of the category of womanhood, in her critical writing and to

some degree her poetry, owes much to particular ideas elaborated by masculine

logic, most notably that the category of womanhood occupies a space outside

representation and socialization, and a common capacity for biological

motherhood implies a common identity.^29

Yet this is hardly true of either woman in ëThe Achill Womaní.
Reception of Bolandís poetry is caught in a critical impasse: on the
one hand, she is accused of being a ëliterary suffragetteí who attempts
to write women into History; on the other hand, she is accused of
constructing a category of womanhood outside History where,
according to ëmasculine logicí, the feminine has been placed ëoutside
representationí. Here, ëmasculine logicí is essentialized rather than
dismembered. Interestingly, Meaneyís account of Boland drawing on
the ëcommon capacity for biological motherhoodí among women is
precisely what Butler has criticized about Kristevaís work. Should
Bolandís poetry therefore be categorized as exhibiting nasty traces of
ëmasculine logicí, shreds of French feminism or something else
altogether? If Bolandís poetry is to be cleared of these impasses, must
it abandon womanhood, nation and History altogether, and how far is
it possible or desirable to try to attain defeminized and denationalized
spaces?

27 Clair Wills, ëContemporary Irish Women Poetsí, Diverse Voices: Essays on
Twentieth Century Women Writers in English, ed., Harriet Devine Jump
(London: Harvester, 1991), p.258.
28 Meaney, ëMyth, History and the Politics of Subjectivityí, p.137.
29 Ibid., p.147.