Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The Lie of the Land
- 2 Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)
- 3 John Montague: Global Regionalist?
- 4 Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora
- 5 Padraic Fiacc and James Simmons
- 6 Michael Longley's Ecopoetics
- 7 Derek Mahon: ‘An Exile and a Stranger’
- 8 Tom Paulin: Dwelling without Roots
- 9 Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics
- 10 Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
- 11 New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
- Select Bibliography
- Index
10 - Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The Lie of the Land
- 2 Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)
- 3 John Montague: Global Regionalist?
- 4 Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora
- 5 Padraic Fiacc and James Simmons
- 6 Michael Longley's Ecopoetics
- 7 Derek Mahon: ‘An Exile and a Stranger’
- 8 Tom Paulin: Dwelling without Roots
- 9 Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics
- 10 Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
- 11 New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Postmodern
Medbh McGuckian has devoted her entire career not only to re-imagining women's relation to the female body, to the domestic environment, and to the wider world of society, politics, religion and culture, but to re-constituting the very basis of female subjectivity and self-expression. She explains the demoralising state of affairs that prompts such a revolutionary enterprise:
I know being a woman for me for a long time was being less, being excluded, being somehow cheap, being inferior, being sub. I associated being a woman with being a Catholic and being Irish with being from the North, and all of these things being not what you wanted to be. If you were a woman, it would have been better to be a man; if you were Catholic, it would have been a lot easier to be Protestant; if you were from the North, it was much easier to be from the South; if you were Irish, it was much easier to be English. So it was like everything that I was was wrong; everything that I was was hard, difficult, and a punishment.
McGuckian's confession of feelings of comprehensive lack – an ironic revision of the ‘hierarchy of values’ that Hewitt delineated in his attempt at an assertion of confident (male) Protestant identity – may be understood in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms. According to Lacan, and also to psychoanalytic French feminist thought, personal, social and cultural identity is acquired within a network of social and symbolic discourses organised in and through language.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Writing HomePoetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008, pp. 225 - 248Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008