Unmotherly Nations, Unpatriotic Mothers: Other Irelands in Contemporary Women's Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which contemporary Irish women’s poetry revises conventional representations of female allegories of the nation. The analysis will show that traditionally female tropes of Irish nationalism inhabit the same cultural location that characterizes the societal position of motherhood according to Julia Kristeva, who argues that mothers assume an important function in regulating the drives and preparing children for entrance into the symbolic order of society, in relation to which they themselves remain structurally liminal. This paper will show that contemporary Irish women poets use these female tropes as a potent site for revising the discourses of femininity and Irish nationalism, either through aligning these abstract, stereotyped female figures with women’s lived experience, or by reevaluating them from within their liminal positions.