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Eavan Boland's poetry has been widely praised for its revisionist critique of how the Irish literary tradition both emblematizes women and suppresses their actual historical experience.1 Her literary career enacts, as she herself puts it, "the strange scenario of what happens to a tradition when previously mute images within it come to awkward and vivid life: when the icons returns to haunt the icon-makers."2 Yet, according to several prominent critics, Boland's iconoclasm fails to go far enough. Edna Longley, using Boland's "Mise Éire" as her proof text, asserts that Boland "destabilizes Mise but not Éire," and that she "holds to unitary assumptions about 'a society,' 'a nation,' a literary heritage."3 A more sophisticated variant on this critical assessment is provided by Clair Wills, who presents Boland as a poet whose aesthetics and politics are both constrained by a liberal bourgeois ideal of representation. In Wills's formulation, Boland is "a suffragette" of the social imaginary.4 She seeks to make the national consciousness more genuinely representative by expanding the cultural images of women, replacing the mythic icons of the Shan Van Vocht and Cathleen ni Houlihan with more authentic portraits of women in the midst of suburban and domestic life. In Boland's poetry, "a trope of privacy appears in place of the motherland trope, the function of which is to allow women to accede to [End Page 121] the role of poet," but this literary act of privatization leaves unchallenged the underlying construct of a national tradition that is "the basis of the poet's authority."5 In an important but still under-recognized article, Gerardine Meaney augments Wills's critique; Meaney argues that Boland's effort to interrogate the "mythic configurations" of women in the Irish tradition in light of "historical realities" fails because she herself slips from an historical to a mythic conception of female subjectivity.6 Boland's counter-myth, according to Meaney, projects a universal biological essence onto feminine identity; it equates womanhood with maternity and locates it within a cyclical temporality that is rooted in biological processes. The result is a poetry that ultimately replicates the stereotyping of the male-dominated tradition that it purportedly critiques, a poetry in which the "metaphoric construction of the relation between womanhood and nation tends to keep each in place as a homogeneous and self-contained entity."7 The charge of regressive essentialism leveled by these critics against Boland's poetry may find corroborating evidence in individual poems, but not in the overall trajectory of her work. There, one finds an awareness that the underlying strata of the self—gender, nation, history—are neither seamless nor secure, but deeply fissured, a complex interplay of rifts in which "the fracture in one annotates the wound in the other."8 Throughout Boland's poetry, a profoundly lyric sensibility intersects with an exilic sense of displacement, generating verse in which intimacy and estrangement are frequently conjoined. Ironically, this is nowhere more evident than in Boland's poetic reflections on maternity, the supposed locus of her essentialism. In her limning of the mundane moments that define her relationship with her daughters and her own mother, Boland answers Julia Kristeva's call for women to shatter the iconic figures of motherhood by attending carefully to the actual experience of maternity.9 Although Boland's poems occasionally celebrate the blissful communion of mother and child, they more commonly acknowledge the painful necessity of the mother's separation from her progeny. For Boland, as for Kristeva, to be a mother is to be a "split subject," a self that is riven by its intimate encounter with [End Page 122] the other.10 By extending this vision of mother as "split subject" to Mother Ireland, Boland elicits a conception of national identity, that like maternal subjectivity, is open to heterogeneity, dehiscent rather than integral, dispersed rather than consolidated, centrifugal rather than centripetal. * * * To appreciate...
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