Author: Margaret Terry

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13:

Ireland's ancient roots in the strong, powerful goddess provide its women with a feminist tradition that predates and supersedes its colonial past. Scholars are now examining the disparity between representations of Irish history as strictly maledominated and those of gynocentric origin. This paper explores the (r)evolutionary relationship of the goddess to the literature of Irish nationalism. From her origin in myth to her representation in song, poem, or story, the goddess has appeared in one avatar or another throughout Irish literature. By revisiting such pagan images as the mythological Sean Bhean Bhocht and utilizing her dual identity, writers contest the dual subjugation of Irish woman by both colonial and patriarchal Christian culture and her constraint to symbolic role as Mother Ireland. As a result, Irish women can challenge restrictive historical and political representations of them as passive and domestic or sacrificial and suffering, contributing to the nation solely through marriage and motherhood. Images require interpretation and this postcolonial, feminist examination re-visions the goddess as a spinster Sean Bhean Bhocht which contradicts the patriarchal version of all women as invisible, voiceless, and virtuous. The works discussed are written by both male and female, native and diasporan, and in genres from the ancient ballad through poetry of the Great Famine to drama of the fin de siècle Irish Literary Revival as well as short fiction from both early and late twentieth century authors. Each of the works is associated with some form of cultural controversy extant at the time of its creation. Although the span of time covered is extensive, the choice of literature is limited to works that respectively reconsider a fundamental aspect of Irish identity--artistic independence, religion, land, and language--as it is conceptualized by a non-traditional representation of woman, the spinster Sean Bhean Bhocht. The results of my examination reveal that the Irish spinster, a woman who loves her country yet chooses to reproduce it with cultural creativity rather than by bearing its children, maintains a unique and invaluable role in Irish nationalism. She has proved herself a significant thread that women have historically sewn towards a unified yet heterogeneous cloak for their country of Ireland.