"The Feather Shop" by Medbh McGuckian: The Empathetic Gaze to Women and Nature

Article Sidebar

PDF (Galego)
Published: 09-06-2017

Main Article Content

María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia
Universidade da Coruña
Spain
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3524-9477
Biography
No 50 (2017): 1º semestre, Notes
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15304/bgl.50.3999
Submitted: 20-03-2017 Accepted: 29-05-2017 Published: 09-06-2017
Copyright How to Cite

Abstract

The Irish poet Medbh McGuckian is well known from the beginning of her literary career on account of her subtle images that connect nature with women and their corporeality. Whule this aspect of her poems has been studied by many critics within her cryptic texts, this essay attempts a study of her poetic universe, and especially of her recent poems, from a global perspective that analyses the body of women in relation with nature beyond a literary or aesthetic value by inscribing it within an ethical and bio-political perspective. Following James McElroy (2011: 64-5) who misses an ecocritical approach in the studies of this poet, her poetic praxis will be explored from an ecofeminist perspective, bearing in mind that both human beings and nature should coexist on an equal basis. The article includes an Appendix with an unpublished poem by McGuckian and its translation into Galician by the author of the essay.

Keywords:

Medbh McGuckian, Irish contemporary poetry, ecofeminism, "The Feather Shop"
Cited by

Article Details

References

Albrecht, Glenn. 2005. “Solastalgia, a New Concept in Human Health and Identity”, en Philosophy, Activism, Nature, nº 3, pp. 41-44.

Allen Randolph, Jody. 2009. “New Ireland Poetics: The Ecocritical Turn in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry”, en Journal of Nordic Irish Studies, nº 8, pp. 57-70.

Badinter, Elizabeth. 2011. La mujer y la madre. Un libro polémico sobre la maternidad como nueva forma de esclavitud. Tradución española Montse Roca. Madrid: La esfera de los libros. [Le conflit. La femme et la mère. Paris: Flammarion, 2010].

Batten, Guinn. 2002. “Afterword”, en The Soldiers of Year II. Medbh McGuckian. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, pp. 125-30.

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1972. The Second Sex. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Bohman, Kimberley S. 1996. “Borders or Frontiers? Gender Roles and Gender Politics in McGuckian’s Unconscious Realm”, en Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, nº 1 (1), pp. 119-132.

Brazeau, Robert. 2004. “Troubling Language: Avant-Garde Strategies in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian”, en Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, nº 37 (2), pp. 127-144.

Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell.

Cahill, Eileen. 1994. “Because I Never Garden’: Medbh McGuckian’s Solitary Way”, en Irish University Review, nº 24 (2), pp. 264-271.

Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Tradución Keith e Paula Cohen, en Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, nº 1 (4), pp. 875-893.

Daly, Mary. 1990. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, with a New Intergalactic Introduction by the Author. Boston: Beacon Press.

Doubiago, Sharon. 1989. “Mama Coyote Talks to the Boys”, en Healing the Wounds (ed. Judith Plant). London: Green Print, pp. 41-44.

Eaubonne, Françoise d’. 1974. Le féminisme ou la mort. Paris: P. Horay.

Irigaray, Luce. 1980. “When Our Lips Speak Together”, en Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, nº 6 (1), pp. 69-79.

Faragó, Borbala. 2014. Medbh McGuckian. Lanham, MA, USA: Bucknell University Press/ Rowman & Littlefield.

Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. 2ª ed. London: Routledge.

Gifford, Terry. 1999. Pastoral. Londres: Routledge.

Glotfelty, Cheryl e Harold Fromm. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 1984-1985. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”, en Social Text, nº 11 (Winter), pp. 20-64.

Geffes, Gisela. 2013. Políticas de la destrucción, poéticas de la preservación: apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina. [Buenos Aires]: Beatriz Viterbo Editora.

Hitchcock, Tim. 1997. “Unlawfully begotten on her body’: Illegitimacy and the Parish Poor in St. Kuke Chelsea”, en Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor 1640-1840 (eds. Tim Hitchcock, Pamela Sharpe e Peter King). London Macmillan, pp. 70-86.

Hitchcock, Tim, Robert Shoemaker e Robert Brink Shoemaker. 2015. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huggan, Graham e Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London and New York: Routledge.

Leven, David. 2015. “Tennessee Valley Authority”, en Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World (ed. Jared Green). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 164-66.

Lister, Nina-Marie. 2015. “Many Small-Sacale Projects”, en Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World (ed. Jared Green). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 114-16.

Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús. 2004. “An Interview with Medbh McGuckian”, en The European English Messenger, nº 13 (2), pp. 35-43.

Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús. 2005. “Because God is Forbidden to Perform Miracles in this Place’: Medbh McGuckian’s Sense of History”, en Thistles. A Homage to Brian Hughes, Homenaje a Brian Hughes. Essays in Memoriam. Ensayos in Memoriam. Vol. 2 (ed. Francisco Yus). Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, pp. 175-185.

Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús. 2006. “Angels among Us: Medbh McGuckian’s Recent Poems”, en Ireland in the Coming Time: New Insights on Irish Literature/Nuevas incursiones en Literatura Irlandesa (eds. Susana Domínguez Pena, Margarita Estévez Saá e Anne MacCarthy). Weston, Florida: Netbiblo, pp. 121-130.

Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús. 2010. “Invalids in War: Illness and the Irish Conflict in Medbh McGuckian”, en In the Wake of the Tiger Rocky Road to Ireland (eds. David Clark e Rubén Jarazo). A Coruña: Netbiblo, pp. 17-28.

Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús. 2016. “On Not Leaving Belfast in Trouble: Medbh McGuckian as a Symbol of Irish Resistance”, en Ex-sistere: Women’s Mobility in Contemporary Irish, Welsh and Galician Literatures, (ed. María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 136-153.

Lorenzo-Modia, María Jesús e Cristina Fernández Méndez. 2009. “Longer and longer sentences prove me wholly female: Medbh McGuckian and Feminism(s)”, en Writing Bonds. Irish and Galician Contemporary Women Poets (eds. Manuela Palacios e Laura Lojo). Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, pp. 33-55.

Mill, John Stuart. 1989. On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, and Chapters on Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mill, John Stuart. 2009. “Nature”, en Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, 10 (ed. J. M. Robson). Toronto e Londres: University of Toronto Press/ Routledge, pp. 373-402.

McElroy, James. 2011. “Ecocriticism and Irish Poetry: A Preliminary Outline”, en Estudios Irlandeses, nº 6, pp. 64-65.

McGuckian, Medbh. 1988. On Ballycastle Beach. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 1992. Marconi’s Cottage. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 1993a. The Flower Master and Other Poems. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 1993b. Venus and the Rain. Edición revisada. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 1994. Captain Lavender. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 1998. Shelmalier. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2001. Drawing Ballerinas. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2002. The Face of the Earth. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2003. Had I a Thousand Lives. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2004. The Book of the Angel. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2006. The Curragh Requires no Harbours. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2008. My Love Has Fared Inland. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2012. The High Caul Cap. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

McGuckian, Medbh. 2015. Blaris Moor. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Books.

O’Malley, J. P. 2013. “Bringing a Female Poet’s Touch to the Memories of her Mother”, en The Irish Examiner, 9 (March), http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsfilmtv/books/bringing-a-female-poets-touch-to-the-memories-of-her-mother-224921.html [Consulta: 10/03/2017].

Parham, John. 2007. “What is (ecological) ‘nature’? John Stuart Mill and the Victorian perspective”, en Culture, Creativity and Environment. New Environmentalist Criticism, (ed. Fiona Becket e Terry Gifford). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 37-54.

Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.

Plumwood, Val. 2001. Environmental Culture. Londres: Routledge.

Porée, Marc. 2008. “An Animal Muse of Their Own” en E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone, nº 6 (1), pp. 1-24.

Potts, Donna L. 2011. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Poullain de la Barre, François et al. 2013. The Equality of the sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, (ed. e tradución Desmond Clark). Oxford: Oxford University Press [1673].

Poullain de la Barre, François et al. 1993. De la educación de las damas: para la formación del espíritu en las ciencias y en las costumbres. Madrid: Cátedra [1671].

Price, Janet e Margrit Shildrick (eds). 1999. Feminist Theory and The Body: A Reader. New York: Routledge.

Puleo, Alicia H. 2011. Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible. Madrid/Valencia: Cátedra/Universitat de Valencia, Instituto de la mujer.

Rose, Gillian. 1999. “Women and Everyday Spaces”, en Feminist Theory and The Body: A Reader (eds. Janet Price e Margrit Shildrick). New York: Routledge, pp. 359-370.

Shildrick, Margrit e Janet Price. 1999. “Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction”, en Feminist Theory and The Body: A Reader (eds. Janet Price e Margrit Shildrick). New York: Routledge, pp. 17-20.

Shipers, Carrie. 2008-2009. “[I]n Danger/of becoming a poetess’: Poetry as Trope in the Work of Medbh McGuckian”, en Michigan Feminist Studies, Fall-Spring, vol. 22, nº 1, Politics and Performativity. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0022.103 [Consulta: 01/03/2017].

Spivak, Gayatri. 1998. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, en Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (eds. Cary Nelson e Lawrence Grossberg). London: Macmillan, pp. 24-28.

Spretnak, Charlene. 1989. “Towards an Ecofeminist Spirituality”, en Healing the Wounds, (ed. Judith Plant). London: Green Print, pp. 127-133.

Vakoch, Douglas A. 2012. “Introduction: A Different Story”, en Feminist Ecocriticism. Environment, Women and Literature (ed. Douglas A. Vakoch). New York and Toronto: Lexington, pp. 1-12.

Warren, Karen J. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wills, Clair. 1995. “Voices from the Nursery: Medbh McGuckian’s Plantation”, en Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature 2. Irish Literary Studies 43. Gerrards Cross (ed. Michael Kenneally). England: Colin Smythe, pp. 373-399.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1997. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (eds. D. L. McDonald e Catherine Scherf). Hertfordshire: Broadview Press.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2004. Vindicación dos dereitos da muller (ed. María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia). Santiago de Compostela: Servizo Galego de Igualdade/Sotelo Blanco [1792].