‘Curiosity with corpses’: Poetry, nationalism and gender in Seamus Heaney’s North (1975) and Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower Master (1982)

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• Northern Ireland
• feminism
• nationalism
• conflict

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to The Gallery Press and Faber for their guidance on using the excerpts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ‘Disappeared’ refers to a group of people who were abducted, murdered, and secretly buried mainly by the nationalist paramilitary group, the I.R.A. Although the unionist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force also ‘disappeared’ people too. More information can be found on this in Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, an award-winning non-fiction account of the disappearance of mother of ten children, Jean McConville. Also see: ‘Violence – Details of “the Disappeared”’, CAIN, https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/violence/disappeared.htm

2. The ‘Green Book’ is the term for the illegal document written by the Provisional I.R.A. which outlined guidance to their members on a variety of topics, including: secrecy in public spaces and guerrilla strategy. A reproduction of the ‘Green Book’ can be found at University of Ulster’s online archive Conflict on the Internet (CAIN). More information can be found at: Text of Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) ‘Green Book’ (Book I and II). CAIN. Retrieved from URL: https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/othelem/organ/I.R.A./I.R.A._green_book.htm

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Liverpool John Moores University.

Notes on contributors

Aimée Walsh

Dr. Aimée Walsh has recently completed a PhD in Irish Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and holds a Master’s degree from Queen’s University Belfast. Her project Republican Feminism(s): Literature and Women’s History of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ Conflict won a full Vice-Chancellor’s Award PhD Scholarship (2016 –2019) and a British Association for Irish Studies Postgraduate Bursary Award (2019).