Eavan Boland's Poetry

Paper Summary:

This paper takes an in-depth look at the feminist perspective of poetry which is represented by six different aspects--multiple oppression, multiple subject positions, contradictory subject positions, relational subjectivity, situational subjectivity, and hybridity. It explains how and why Boland has attempted in her poetry to come to terms with each of these forms of identity. It explains how Boland has been described as believing that women poets have been hampered by traditional ideas of femininity and poetry on the one side, and by the demands of separatist feminism on the other. In this paper, her work is examined from the perspective of feminist criticism in general and gynocriticism in particular. Assessments of the degree to which Boland has achieved her objectives are also be presented.

From the Paper:

"The feminist critical perspective has been variously developed to reflect many of the central concerns expressed by women and women writers. Lee (p. 1) comments that feminist criticism moves away from an androgynous appreciation of literature and its products as essentially "senseless" or "genderless." Women's writing, like that of men, is viewed as inherently gendered. In gynocriticism argues that the female experience occurs in the feminine subjectivity of the reading process, with "gynesis" or "gynetic disruptions" paramount as expressions of this orientation. Gynesis is therefore set against - and often in opposition to - the patriarchal system. The patriarchal system in literature has gendered a world of images, symbols, and metaphors in which woman is positioned as "other," as dependent, as object and as essentially silent. It is this silence, imposed from outside, that most troubles many modern women poets, including Evan Boland. One of Boland's first books of poetry was titled Introducing Eavan Boland. A review by Marie Ponsot (p. 665), written in 1984, when the book was first published, commented that Boland's range was broad and canny. Her poems were characterized as clear, coherent, and true to what is known of mental life where there is no categorical hiatus or separation between inner and outer vision. In one poem, "The Mimic Muse," Boland descries a woman who fled housework and battering and left the world she could have sheltered in her skirts. The early female characters or speakers created by Boland were deliberately identified as housewives, small and ordinary women who were an antithesis to the ethic mythological heroines of the Irish male poets whose construction of women as other has become a literary canon."

More papers on Eavan Boland's Poetry:

• Analytical Essay # 27937 : "Eavan Boland"
• Creative Essay # 58512 : "Poetry in the 21st Century"

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