Woman and Territory
The Flower Master (1982) is a collection that contains many poems
about border-crossings and threshold states that are often thought in
terms of a young womenís growth from childhood to the adult, as in
the poem ëEavesdropperí.^11 Docherty notices: ëThese borders,
however, are not the expected geographical border (though that one is
here two) but are more symbolic borders, such as the boundary
between infancy and adulthood.í^12 In her discussion of ëThe Soil-
Mapí and ëThe Heiressí, Clair Wills has also made useful connections
between bodily and territorial borders in McGuckianís poetry.^13 In
view of these critics, the borderline disorders of McGuckianís poetry
can be discussed in relation to the representation of bodily (gendered)
and territorial (national) borders in the poems.
ëThe Heiressí stresses womenís dispossession from the land.^14 In
this poem, as in Irish legal history, the mother inherits through the
son. The Irish nation is feminized but the female character is dis-
connected from the farmland and does not engage in ëdelicate Adam
workí or ëmanís workí of tilling the soil. Yet the manís work is
ëdelicateí which is a word that is more evocative of womenís work or
a ladyís embroidery suggesting that skilled labour need not
necessarily be viewed within traditional conceptions of masculinity.
Even so, the female figure in the poem remains uninvolved with the
manís work since she is told to ëstay out of the low/ Fieldsí and out of
the sun.
In the poem agricultural work on the land is connected with the
temporal: ëWhere the furrow is this year the ridge/ Will be next.í Time
and space are represented as interdependent with one another as the
land reflects the change of seasons and crop rotation. The temporal
and territorial are presented in terms of ëhusbandryí and ëAdam workí.
The reference to Adam connects with a history known since the dawn
11 McGuckian, ëEavesdropperí, The Flower Master, p.15.
12 Thomas Docherty, ëPostmodern McGuckianí, p.193.
13 Clair Wills, ëMedbh McGuckian: The Intimate Sphereí, Improprieties: Politics
and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: University Press, 1993), pp.71ñ
4.
14 McGuckian, The Flower Master, p.57.