The womanís ëslashed/ Sleeves of purpleí are evocative of
Elizabethan clothing but also her body after birth. She remembers the
ëmomentí of birth ëexactlyí and the word ëmomentí introduces her
own sense of temporality that is associated with her body. However,
the female is presented as having no real control over time and
territory since ëthe birth/ Of an heiress means the gobbling of land.í
The woman will be married for her land but she is disconnected from
the landscape and its history, which are possessed only by the hus-
bandry of the man who tills the land each year. Like Cathleen NÌ
Houlihan, McGuckianís female figure is the dispossessed woman who
is homeless and wandering along the shore; she is exiled from History
or time, as we know it.
The end of the poem depicts the woman walking along a beach.
It is only here that she is able to fully possess both the land and herself
as ëunrulyí she drops ë[a]mong my shrubbery of seaweed my black
acorn buttonsí. Such a place becomes an outlet for the woman who
moves away from the masterful voice that dominates her in the first
stanza. The woman in ëThe Heiressí is either housed indoors ë[l]ike
Italian rooms no longer hurt by the suní or is outside walking by the
sea. When she is not at home she becomes homeless and ëunrulyí on
the beach like a castaway who makes herself at home among the
seaweed. Paradoxically, it is when the woman is away from the house,
and walking along the periphery of the beach that she is most at home.
In the poem there is a tension between being at home and being
homeless, between being rooted and free. On the beach McGuckianís
heiress creates an ethos unheimlich or something strange and uncanny
that challenges traditional conceptions of femininity and domesticity.
In the poem there is a merging at several points between the
ëdomesticí and ënature.í There are images such as the ëstriped marble
of the glení that links with the ëItalian roomsí which are likely to have
marble floors; a window is imagined in the mountain; and there are
ëacorn buttonsí on the beach. Nature is elided with domesticity with
the effect of dissolving divisions between the unhomely and the
homely.
ëThe Heiressí evokes the uncanny as the typical boundaries
between the natural and the unnatural, and the meaningful and the
meaningless, are crossed by her insubstantial and shadowy figure. She
is a ghostly figure located on the edge of things whose view renders
grace
(Grace)
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