engleski

A “Healthy Body” as an Oxymoron in Irish Women's Writing

Contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland once said that she began writing poetry “in a world where a woman’s body was at a safe distance, was a motif and not a menace” (Object Lessons 26). Traditional Irish poetry abounds with images of asexual, voiceless and harmless beauties and the young poet was at a loss to know how to deal with this fact. In the early sixties, the decade Boland addresses, Irish literary scene was, however, also a world where Edna O’Brien, another budding writer, launched her infamous The Country Girls Trilogy (1960, 1962, 1964). By inscribing women’s experience, particularly that pertaining to the body and sexual desire, O’Brien scandalised the conservative Irish readership and managed to offend Irish morality to an unbelievable extent. Some twenty years later, in 1980, Boland published her groundbreaking collection In Her Own Image which tackled the “dark sides” of the female body such as anorexia, menstruation, masturbation, striptease, or domestic violence. In the same year, Eithne Strong published a long narrative poem, Flesh ... The Greatest Sin, sadly termed “the female equivalent of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger” (A.A. Kelly 23). With her redefined image of Irish womanhood, Strong also challenged the unquestioned cultural and social norms of the still rather conservative Irish society. Whereas O’Brien’s “sexually graphic fiction” (St. Peter 73) and Boland’s “body poems” convey the Irish woman heavily burdened by Catholic moral doctrines and parochial concerns of Irish society in which the concepts of the female body / female sexuality and physical health / emotional well being are heavily juxtaposed, Strong’s poem seems to eventually offer hope, thus announcing a new era in the lives of Irish women and Irish women’s writing towards the turn of the century. This paper sets out to discuss some of the fundamental works by Irish female authors that vividly demonstrate how these two notions (the female body and health) represent almost an oxymoron in the context of Irish society and Irish public discourse in the second part of the 20th century.

female body ; sexuality ; health ; women's literature ; Catholic doctrines ; subversion

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