ABSTRACT

Both Heaney and McGuckian employ imagery of the female body in pain as a site of political violence in their works. The violence which led to over 3,600 deaths, haunts both poet’s collections. The female body, in both representational and metaphorical ways, is skewed within Heaney’s collection. While Seamus Heaney’s poetry collection North opened up a space for highlighting the human cost of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the writing of gendered experiences reinforces traditional nationalist stereotypes which leave women silenced. Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen’, for example, depicts the silent disintegration and absorption of a woman’s body into the land, conjuring links between womanhood and nationhood. The development of gendered writing is explored here in relation to Medbh McGuckian’s debut collection The Flower Master, which responds to this literary silencing. This collection introduces an embodied experience of nationalist womanhood, with women’s experiences being written into the literary narrative of the conflict. The women speakers speak of the absorbed traumas of the Troubles; each becoming a kind of ‘living’ corpse. I argue that The Flower Master recalibrates the meaning of ‘Mother Ireland’ and situates the (living) female body as a medium for communicating the lived experiences of political violence.

摘要

希尼（Heaney）和麦古基（McGuckian）都将痛苦中的女性尸体图像用作其作品中政治暴力的地点。暴力导致3600多人死亡，困扰着两位诗人的收藏。无论是代表性的还是隐喻性的，女性身体都在Heaney的收藏中歪斜。西蒙·海尼（Seamus Heaney）的诗歌集《北方》为强调北爱尔兰“麻烦”的人为代价开辟了空间，而性别体验的书写则强化了传统的民族主义陈规定型观念，使妇女保持沉默。例如，希尼（Heaney）的“波格女王（Bog Queen）”描绘了女性身体在土地上的无声瓦解和吸收，从而迷惑了女性与民族之间的联系。此处与Medbh McGuckian的首张收藏有关的性别写作的发展正在探索中花大师，回应这种文学上的沉默。该系列介绍了民族主义女性化的具体经验，并将女性的经验写进了冲突的文学叙事中。女议长们谈到了麻烦所吸收的创伤；每个都变成一种“活着”的尸体。我认为“花艺大师”重新定义了“爱尔兰母亲”的含义，并将（活着的）女性身体定位为交流政治暴力经历的媒介。