O espírito de nación: Visións arquetípicas, nacionalidade e feminidade na poesía irlandesa actual

Abstract

This paper explores the necessity of showing the knotty relationshipbetween gender and nation in Irish poetry by women. The femalebody is metaphorically used to allude to the abstraction of the conceptof nation as related to the reproductive capacity of women bymeans of an iconography firmly rooted in the Irish literary tradition.The paradoxical fact lies on the systematic exclusion of women fromcultural and political processes which intervene in the construction ofa nation which the female body ironically epitomises, due to theassociation of women with natural and biological processes, alien tothe concepts of culture or civilisation. Patriarchal discourse alsoconstitutes a colonising discourse wherein the female body becomesa colonised territory: hence, it is needed, for a great amount ofwomen poets in Ireland, a systematic revision of this female iconographyin order to elaborate a new emancipatory discourse wherewomen may abandon the position of objects within the text to turninto agents of the literary fact.