Hannah Fitzgerald
Joint Winner
The Patricia Coughlan Award
Published during the most intense phase of the Troubles, Seamus Heaney’s collection North (1975) emerges from the poet’s sense of artistic responsibility to “search for images and symbols adequate for our predicament” (Heaney, 1989, 279). Figuring the contemporary violence of Northern Ireland through the refraction of mythological and historical motifs, such as Scandinavian invasions and the bog bodies of Northern Europe, Heaney sifts through the imaginative space of the bog, probing the past for historical analogues to the present-day violence experienced. Seeking to represent a collective identity for the Catholic minority, “to forge the uncreated conscience of the race” (Heaney, 1989, 282), the poet constructs a romantic, archetypal narrative of political violence through recourse to the traditionally conservative credo of Irish pro-patria political ideology. In this replication of the ‘grand narratives’ of classical myth and Nationalist discourses, Heaney regurgitates the reductive sexual politics on which they are formed, constructing the subjectivity of a racialised (Catholic) minority by replicating his dehumanisation on a gendered other, i.e., woman. The consolidation of the Catholic racial identity in North is then founded upon the silenced spectre of the female body which lies passively at its heart. Imagined through Heaney’s patriarchal lens, she is stripped of selfhood and figured only in such diminutive, male-centring roles as in the neo-Oedipal binary of mother/spouse, as well as lying corporeally present in illustrations of colonial rape analogies and traditionalist associations of woman and landscape. The non-agent feminine in this collection thus serves a ‘heroic’ male fantasy of Nationalist liberation, whose actor’s voice is ventriloquised through her mute and puppeted corpse. Consequently, concerned questions arise around the representative scope of Heaney’s ‘our’ in “our predicament” (Heaney, 1989, 279); if this collection is to speak for a Catholic minority, it is only through the objectivised figure of its further marginalised female populace. Through a detailed, revisionist reading of a number of poems in the collection, I will seek to elucidate this complex of gender politics and reveal the ‘suppressed voices’ present within Heaney’s limited postcolonial response. Against the “facile celebration of an insulated voice’s recovery” at the expense of the female subject, (Mardorossian, 88), I will thus endeavour to fill what Alan Sinfield refers to as the “gaps and silences of narrative”, demystifying Heaney’s mystification of the feminine (Sinfield, 299).
Western colonial discourse involves, according to Edward Said, “a practice of the same sort albeit in different territories, as male gendered dominance or patriarchy, in modern society” (Said, 23). Just so, the feminine finds herself oppressed by both sides at the intersection of the colonial struggle in Ireland. Historically, British colonialism was posited as an imperially male conquest of virgin territory, demonising the indigenous Irish male as an illegitimate sexual power (Sharkey, 7). The struggle for territorial entitlement emerged as a masculine competition of gendered domination over the feminine, where the legitimisation of one entailed the emasculated ostracisation of the other. The reality of women’s agency threatened a disruption to this male competition, which historically has been answered by an imaging of woman as “licentious[…] held in common to all men” (Sharkey, 8). Heaney, in his recourse to the icons of Ireland’s patriarchal Nationalist tradition, reinforces this possession narrative throughout North, which, through personalised fantasies of marriage with Ireland-as-territory, male subjectification through imagery of female corpses and the imagined illustration of Ireland as the raped damsel in distress (at the hands of the imperial ‘illegitimate sexual power’, in a reversal of the colonial narrative), infers a call to arms for the liberating Nationalist hero-soldiers to defend her. Ironically, this liberation is exacted only so the male Irish figure may repossess the female landscape themselves, sublimating their own freedom, not hers, despite her propagandist invocation. As Frantz Fanon delineates, “[t]he native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become a persecutor” (Fanon, 41).
North has been received as a representative text of the Troubles and Irish historical struggles for independence (Starr, 635), that which begs scrutiny of its figuration of the Nationalist experience as a singular struggle of a hero against foreign, masculine forces, which positions an essential, male narrative at the heart of the ‘Catholic condition’. The poetry of the collection is “reliant upon old, familiar and familiarly oppressive allocations of gender positions” (Coughlan, 41), the most consistent of these being the association of woman with the land. The male poet, stuck in the self / not-self dualism of the Lacanian ‘mirror phase’, defines his identity as both intrinsic to and formed against the objectivised, othered feminine (Coughlan, 59); he is “cradled in the dark that wombed [him]” (“Antaeus”), and Nationalist political analogies abound within the invoked symbol of Cathleen Ní Houlihan in the lines “[o]ur mother ground / is sour with the blood / of her faithful” (“Kinship”). Furthermore, in the male fantasy narrative of “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces”, where he imagines himself as Hamlet, accompanied by the spirits of “[o]ld fathers”, the Viking-boat which enables the poet’s quest is “mother-wet”. The feminine is thus relegated to the ‘natural sphere’ at the most foundational level, and through constructed metaphors of her passive body, a singularly male-driven narrative emerges through which the operative male speaker actualises his poetic intent. Invoked as a nature Goddess figure, the mystified ‘she’ of the narrative represents a dominant and stereotyped female ideal, obscuring the individual personhood of actual women through an overarching, dehumanising objectification. The specificity of this mystification of the female as the maternal, (“mother-wet”, “mother ground”, “wombed”), emerges as one half of the neo-Oedipal binary within which all figurations of the female fall in Heaney’s collection, defining woman only through her relation to man. Relegated to the natural, domestic sphere, women are not only erased then from the history of the Troubles but robbed of selfhood. As in “Funeral Rites”, the male speaker expresses the experience of grief and loss as purely male, ‘shouldering’ “a kind of manhood”, “the women hovering / behind me”. Ostracised in “emptied kitchens”, the women are conceived as outside of history, unrepresented in the “we” who “pine for each ceremony” nor even in the casualties of political violence. The grave is “his” and it is “[m]en” who speak of the loss, while women, “left behind”, only think of their husbands (“imagining our slow triumph”) around which their identity revolves in Heaney’s poetry. Appealing to a ruralist ideology, the poet naturalises a conservative nostalgia which threatens women’s subjective identity.
Though woman as symbol and image is omnipresent throughout the mythic narratives of the collection, the female subject is completely absent. The almost complete void of feminine presence in Part II of the collection (excepting few peripheral images) underscores this; woman is absent from any realistic portrayal of Northern Ireland, invoked only as a symbolic muse in the first, mythopoeic section. As Edna Longley argues, the feminine mystique of Irish nationalism, evoked by Heaney, has long “masked [its] aggressive patriarchal intent” (Longley, 187), conflating woman with the land while simultaneously excluding her and denying her rights (Starr, 630). Just as he mines her body to inscribe his poetry with metaphor through her dismembered form, the male poet constructs woman’s sexualised form through a “scopic gaze, her imputed mental inaction and blankness being required to foreground the speaker” (Coughlan, 43). The neo-Oedipal binary is specified as dual-passive; the mourning Mother Ireland whose slaughtered sons must be avenged, as in “Kinship”, and the desirable lover-figure who herself is a twin personification of the chaste Aisling and the “symbolic, licentious slut” figures (Sharkey 11), which necessitate Nationalist male interference through their need for protection or (re-)possession. Heaney, as dominant actor over these passive figures, actualises this possession narrative violently throughout North. The earth, figured both as the feminine, and the site of male/female unification (which is intrinsic to the function of the feminine in his narrative), is repeatedly referred to as the “love nest” (“Bone Dreams”) and here the poet himself repossesses the land, after the symbolic ‘pitching’ “of chalk […] at England”. Ownership over the female is made explicit with the possessive pronoun in “my lady’s head” in the same poem, which foregrounds the sexual possession to come, when the speaker ‘ossifies himself’ before demarcating his territory through an illustrated handling of his lover/landscape, from “the sunken fosse of her spine […] towards […] the lips […] the knuckles […] the elbows […] her brow […] the […] collarbone, […] her shoulder”. This sensual unification occurs again in the succeeding poem, “Come to the Bower”, where female agency is again nullified and feminine submission naturalised when “the dark-bowered queen” is imagined through Heaney’s fantasy lens as in need of him as her saviour. In his narration, the queen “[w]hom I unpin / Is waiting” and in his subsequent undressing of her, the poet focuses only on her physical beauty, “each curl / Reddish as a fox’s brush”. The poem ends with a sexualisation of the body, bringing our focus to the “flesh / Of her throat” as, erotically, “spring water / Starts to rise around her”, before introducing the final romantic image, where the speaker reaches out yearningly to “her Venus bone”, relegating woman once again to the dehumanised mystic ideal and allegorising Nationalist repossession of Ireland through a male conquest narrative. The ventriloquism of masculine imperatives through the female body is most overt however in the third poem of the sequence, “Bog Queen”. Here, Heaney imagines himself as the female corpse, projecting a distorting male voice from the necessarily silenced feminine body. Heaney’s fetishising male gaze takes on a particularly uneasy role as his sexualising imperative now is voiced through the body of a woman, potentially obscuring the subjectivity of the male perspective and legitimising its regressive misogynistic politics as objective, further even than the usual supposed ‘universalism’ of the male poetic voice. Though embodying the female, Heaney maintains a perspective wrought with fetishism, imagining ‘herself’ through the male gaze. The elements possess her sexually, “dawn suns groped over my head”, “I knew […] the nuzzle of fjords / at my thighs”. She draws particular attention to her reproductive organs, “the vital hoard reducing / in the crock of the pelvis”, “stitchwork / retted on my breasts”, and the disrobement narrative of “Come to the Bower” continues, “I was […] stripped”. Through a repossession of the symbolic female then, “the feminine body is exalted and becomes a vehicle for resistance, while at the same time it is never [beyond] the control of men”, with the poet capitalising on feminine abjection while maintaining control over the female body (Alexander, 226), (Walsh, 319).
The collection’s imperative of forging a ‘racial consciousness’ through the construction of the Nationalist male ego against the abject feminine Other, vehicled by the explanatory context of interpretive myths is most evident in the poem “Punishment”. Here, centring the silent spectre of the ‘frail’, brutalised body of a female victim of retributive Iron Age violence, Heaney foregrounds his voice. Continuing in the same vein, drawing a historic determinism in working from past to present, the poet compares the gender-based violence meted out by a pre-historic people to contemporary ‘tribal’ punishments exacted in response to the perceived sexual transgressions committed by Catholic women with ‘enemy’ British soldiers (Ostalska, 88). As in other poems, the historicisation and mythification Heaney enacts here represents violent local acts as predetermined and atemporal, belonging to an archetypal cycle of human social behaviour, thus naturalising not only violence, but specifically gendered violence against the brutalised women present throughout the collection. As in the case of the other female bog poems, the narrative’s figure is sexualised under Heaney’s gaze; her nipples stand erect “on her naked front”, and in the typical neo-Oedipal binary to which he relegates all women of the text, she finds herself simply as the “adulteress”. Even in death he imagines her as a one-dimensioned muse whose identity must be male-centring, “her noose a ring / to store / the memories of love”, declaring that once “[her] face was beautiful” and, with ironic graciousness, “I almost love [her]”. As in the other bog poems, in “Punishment”, femicide is thus presented as pornographic. The title itself suggests the regressive ideological vein in which the poem situates itself, that spanning from postlapsarian ideas of feminine evil to the modern-day culture of patriarchy which breeds such effects as ‘revenge pornography’; that of female sexual guilt and consequential, justified male retribution in the form of women’s humiliation. The male brutaliser is absent and abstracted, with the focus concentrated on the beautiful, helpless and violated female body, consistently sexualised and imagined as a potential or actual lover. The poem’s references to contemporary violence are overt, describing in passive terms the “shaved head”, “cauled in tar” of the “[l]ittle adulteress”. Found guilty of transgressing what Heaney depicts as an age-old sexual code, “[h]er harlotry is the cause of political disaster, and the ignominy of political impotence is sublimated into a fantasy of redemptive order and restitution - the lady [is] chastened and control of the territory [is] regained with that of the female body” (Sharkey, 11). Such is posited as community property, that which Heaney’s poetry reinforces through its objectification, in the nullification of feminine subjectivity. In the foregrounding of his voice through the spectre of the woman, the poet invokes her brutalised corpse to pose ethical self-queries on the divergent loyalties he is pulled between; a “tribal, intimate revenge” and a humanistic “civilised outrage”. As the “voyeur” to the punishment in question however, Heaney legitimises both stances, confessing that he “would have cast […] / the stones of silence” and describes the “tribal, intimate revenge” as ‘understandable’. Despite the violent image of “her drowned / body […] her blindfold a soiled bandage”, the poet thus purveys the right to an exaction of clannish justice and an abstinence from intervention in this naturalised, ‘age-old’ practice.
In considering the contemporary nature of the events evoked in North, the revisionism of Heaney’s collection which simultaneously rewrites the reality of war as a male preoccupation and historicises violence against women as mythic inevitability takes on particularly uneasy ramifications in “Punishment”, legitimising the actual culture of silence and non-interference in the gendered ‘punishments’ carried out against women during the Troubles. Just as the poem’s speaker “stood dumb”, such an approach was in line with the IRA official policy expressed in the doctrine “whatever you say, say nothing” (Ostalska, 92). Through the violent naming of the victim as “betraying” “adulteress” as well as the justifying euphemism, “they punished you”, the imperative of male sexual ownership over the female is reinforced, along with a disturbing naturalisation of associated right to retributive violence. A gendered origin of violence against women is then portrayed as a community binding force, constructing racial unity through physically and discursively violated female corpses (Ostalska, 88), flattening internal inequities in the presentation of a homogenous, homosocial national culture through her spectre (Starr, 630). Just as in the colonial rape narratives of “Ocean’s Love to Ireland” and “Act of Union”, where the violent domination of the female Ireland by the “imperially / Male” Britain is expressed in disturbing detail, Heaney’s enthusiasm to represent female pain through loaded metaphors of gendered violence is suspect in a collection which purposefully avoids a capitalisation on the dominant (i.e., predominantly male) experiences of violence during the conflict. Figuring violence against women as different, licensable and necessary, Heaney further relegates woman to the Other in a dehumanising act which naturalises female pain.
In conclusion, the representation of women in North symbolises a regressive male sexual politics which hinges on the nullification of female subjectivity to foreground a male speaker in the creation of a singularly masculine war narrative. Just as the inversion or reversal of colonial gender politics represents the failed counter-hegemony of the Irish Nationalist tradition through its ultimate reliance on the same colonial rhetoric it seeks to resist, Heaney’s postcolonial narrative, in recourse to this tradition, is undermined by the same. As Gyatri Spivak elucidates, “[n]o perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self” (Spivak, 252). Thus, not only does Heaney’s reductive representation of women in this collection assure the continual atavistic inscription of female marginalisation in the contemporary Irish canon, but it also ultimately unsteadies his own overarching critique of colonialism.
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