Gender And Politics In Seamus Heaneys North English Literature Essay

It should be borne in mind when discussing North and the responses it has evoked that the period in which it was produced was the bloodiest in Northern Ireland’s recent history. Between the beginning of 1972 and the end of 1975 1,180 people were killed; of these, 448 were victims of sectarian killings. Not surprisingly given the extent and intensity of violence during this phase, Northern Irish writers found it impossible to remain at `Pain’s edge’, [2] to ignore the `things that happen in the kitchen houses/ and echoing back steeets’, [3] and `the latest whitewash’.

beyond the nationalist community at this period was Bloody Sunday, yet such was the swell and scale of feeling in that day’s wake that predictably any attempts to contain it in texts failed or were significantly flawed. Even before that tragedy, Heaney’s work was becoming increasingly politicised, as, along with other artists, he felt compelled to seek out narratives and forms, images and symbols which might adequately meet the violence and hurt. The political situation had a huge influence on Heaney’s poetry.

Much of the hostile criticism of North arises directly from the poet’s espousal of myth, a narrative form which may have attracted Heaney for a number of reasons. As Clair Wills has pointed out, myth seemingly offered a ‘means of access to the primitive and “atavistic” part of Irish psyche’ [4] , 63 myth could function as a source for ‘contemplation’, encapsulating tensions and contradictions within and between the ‘inner and outer world’, ” and as a cultural weapon against hegemonic forces, as a counter-narrative, a way of ‘writing back’. A sense of verification, they believed, might be achieved through the invocation of mythic archetypes which paradoxically and simultaneously seemed able both to ‘comprehend’ and transcend the historical moment. As a cultural narrative myth seemed to contain the potential both to de- and re-familiarise. For others, however, myth was ‘false memory’, a tainted, discredited form, and its use constituted ‘a corruption of pure poetic imaginative discourse’ [5] . The first to voice his opposition to Heaney’s deployment of this strategy was Ciaran Carson in his review of North for The Honest Ulsterman. For Carson, the poet’s decision to impose ‘a superstructure of myth and symbol, [6] on his material mars much of the collection, ruins several potentially effective poems, [7] and results in repeated falsifications. By conflating contemporary acts of barbarity with ancient ritual killings, Heaney confers an aura of normality’ upon them; by representing them as if they belonged to some timeless, archetypal pattern of human behaviour, he was endowing these vile deeds – unconsciously perhaps – with a spurious ‘respectability’, and denying their political origins and consequences. [8] Revealingly – in terms of the critic and his subject – Carson characterises Heaney’s procedures as essentially those of the Catholic Church, whose mysteries and rituals are intended, we are informed, to induce ‘a willing ignorance’. [9] 

Repeatedly in her critique of North, which first appeared in the year following the Hunger Strikes, Edna Longley also lays stress on the ‘Catholic’ features of the volume and what she views as its strongly nationalist perspectives, which have caused a sharp contraction in imaginative focus. North, we are told, ‘is a book of martyrs rather than of tragic protagonists’, and throughout her essay one finds a litany of references to the poet’s ‘ritualising habit, his use of ‘rites’, ‘ritual’ and ‘ritual observance’, and allusions to the rosary, pilgrims and pilgrimage, icons pieties and ‘doctrine’. Given that Heaney’s poetry indeed in part ‘itself derives from his religious sensibility’, “it is entirely appropriate that such a vocabulary should be applied to describe his work. Yet, these iterations – her own ‘stacking up’ of ‘parallels’? could equally be read as part of her attempt to position Heaney politically, to present his relationships with Nationalism, and with Catholicism, as unproblematical ones. Where Edna Longley makes a stronger case is when she draws attention to the structuring of the volume and the prominence afforded to myths and analogies. To a large extent the ‘success’ of Heaney’s ‘design’ and ‘architectonic methods’ in North depends upon the reader’s willingness to accept its sustained focus on the bog victims and Viking Ireland. Another important aspect of Longley’s critique of North is where she identifies what she sees as Heaney’s recurring tendency to aestheticise the violence set before us. [10] “She illustrates the way victims of tribal ‘justice’ are transmuted, ‘perfected’ by means of a rhetoric which comes down too definitely on the side of ‘beauty’ and against ‘atrocity’ [11] . It would be not be far-fetched to credit Longley’s essay with some part in the development of a feminist critique of Heaney’s poetry in recent years; certainly both of its principal exponents, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford and Patricia Coughlan,’ [12] acknowledge her contribution in exposing gendered positioning in his work. ‘ Initially Cullingford’s focus lies with the poet’s redeployment of traditional nationalist iconography, what Longley refers to as the ‘aisling element’ in North. [13] In her 1990 essay, ‘Thinking of Her As Ireland’, Cullingford attacks the use of allegorised female figures within such poems as ‘Act of Union’ and ‘Bog Queen’, which she sees as naturalising the reification of women in Irish society:

Politically the land is seen as an object to be possessed, or repossessed:

to gender it as female, therefore, is to confirm and reproduce the social

arrangements which construct women as material possessions, not as

speaking subjects”. [14] 

Within Heaney’s re-presentations of earth-goddesses and ordinary mortal female figures, Cullingford detects traces of the misogynistic tendencies inherent within Catholic ideology.

violence inflicted upon his community, by repeatedly deploying ‘gender polarities’ in order to ‘explain’ political and cultural divisions, she argues, Heaney’s poetry itself colludes in violence – against women; instead of challenging ‘the social arrangements which construct women as material possessions’, [15] his poetry confirms them.

According to Patricia Coughlan, Heaney’s texts are ‘dismayingly reliant upon old, familiar and familiarly oppressive allocations of gender positions. Where others have interpreted Heaney’s texts as celebrating feminine creativity and insight, Coughlan claims that in fact they constantly subject actual, individual women into a male ideal. Her critical task is to interrogate the poet’s predilection for archetypes, and challenge the way in which ‘rationality, speech and naming’ appear to be ‘the prerogatives of the autobiographically validated male poet’, while ‘the various female figures dwell in oracular silence, always objects, whether of terror, veneration, desire, admiration or vituperation, never the coherent subjects of their own actions. ” Ironically, though both Heaney and Montague claim to speak for a ‘politically oppressed and therefore hitherto unspoken group, Northern Catholics’, they exclude ‘women as speaking subjects’ in their poems, and, adding insult to injury, exploit gendered images in order to sustain their stereotypical constructions of ‘Irish’ and ‘Englishness’. [16] 

Coughlan’s general critique of patriarchal attitudes within Irish culture and literature is, like Boland’s, Cullingford’s and Meaney’s, convincing, as is her identification of certain recurrent tropes within Heaney’s poetry, such as his deployment of “erotic disrobing narrative(s)”. However, her allegations that Heaney consistently subordinates women in his poetry and aestheticises their “deprivation, suffering and hard work” do not stand up to close scrutiny. When, for example, he locates mother figures in domestic contexts, he is depicting gender relations as they were when he was growing up; to present or represent is not to endorse.

Coughlan appears to have a particular blind spot when it comes to recognising irony when Heaney engages with issues of gender, and fails to register those occasions when Heaney is exposing arrogant and complacent, sadistic and predatory male attitudes. [17] 

Thus in her interpretation of ‘The Wife’s Tale’, the female narrator is merely wearily compliant, and incapable of criticising the smug, self-satisfied manner with which her husband treats her. Her handling of ‘Act of Union’ is similarly reductive. She unites the poet and the poet’s narrator in chauvinist complicity, and, like some other critics, seems unable to grasp that the subject of Heaney’s ironic sonnets might be both gender and politics, sexual imperialism and what she refers to as ‘the tangled intimacy of Anglo-Irish political relations’. [18] Longley, Cullingford and Coughlan have been attentive to the way in which Heaney’s texts can translate women into iconic presences, and on occasion exploit gender in order to deliver political parables.

Heaney’s two dramatic monologues, ‘Come to the Bower’ and ‘Bog Queen’ embrace traditional representations of ‘Ireland’ as feminine. Coughlan is criticising the way stereotypical gender positions are being replicated in order to gain access to the ‘violated’ territory, though, to present a perspective is not to endorse it. It is possible to read these mythic narratives, however, as intimating that cultural and political, spiritual and sexual renewal can only be effected, not when these ‘female’ dead wake, but when they are wakened. After centuries of waiting, pinned to the bog by ‘sharpened willow” [19] or trapped ‘between turf-face and demesne wall’, [20] these sleeping beauties do seem dependent upon male ‘deliverance’.

Inevitably what undermines this act of self-projection is language itself. Art can only represent suffering by translating it into signs; it can mediate, but cannot contain. The repetition of the third person possessive adjective, ‘her, effects a separation between his imagined and her actual exposure, and from stanza two onwards this ‘divorce’ becomes even more apparent, as touch gives way to sight, and close-ups to long shots. Quickly, tacitly, the narrator admits his inability to sustain his gaze, by swerving away from the fact of the halter and the physical ‘presence’ of the murdered girl’s body. Verses two, three, four and five see her dehumanised and dismembered in a succession of images – her nipples become ‘amber beads’, her ribs ‘frail rigging’, her ‘shaved head/ a stubble of black corn’ – eclipsed by ‘the weighing stone/t he floating rods and boughs’, re-1ocated in the past tense, concealed under the soiled blindfold and the noose.

By broaching again the matter and means of her sadistic punishment in verse five, the narrative voice sets up the ethical dilemma which perplexes him and provides the poem its ambiguous charge. As was apparent from the outset, the girl’s allocated ‘role’ as a transgressor seems to excite sympathy and desire; the focus on her neck and ‘naked. front’ in stanza one may be read as suggesting that the speaker is both moved and aroused by her vulnerability. As the narrative progresses, however, these emotions become checked by feelings of guilt and complicity. Compassion for her suffering vies with his perception of her as ‘an erotic object’ [21] ; she was ‘beautiful’, ‘flaxen haired’, an ‘adulteress’. Having admitted the attraction he feels for her (‘I almost love you’), and equated her status as ritual sacrifice with that of Christ, the narrator aligns himself not with the victim, but with those who passively colluded in murder. He positions himself not with Christ who halted the stoning of the woman taken in adultery, but with the Pharisees:

Its narrator is another solitary, struggling with texts – including the text of himself – and relationships which are resistant to meaning. On returning to his native landscape, he experiences familiar sensations of de-familiarisation. It is simultaneously the land of ‘the strangled victim’ and of ‘the love-nest in the bracken’, a repository of the lyrical (‘a moon-drinker’, a ‘pupil of amber’), and, from the outset of part two, the loathsome. Where once only innocent frogs ‘gathered for vengeance”, there are now the killing fields, ‘domains of the cold-blooded’. The narrator’s attempts to sound out the land as a literal ground for hope and as a possible site for poetic renewal, only lead to the discovery that, like language, it cannot be extricated from history and ambiguity.

As a result within Part Three he resorts again to myth and the marriage trope [23] as means of imaginatively re-possessing the territory he has ‘lost’. In effecting this denouement, this consummation, he deploys an extremely creaky, stagey narrative and over-insistent sexual allusion. The re-erecting of a discarded spade

Before passing judgment on North’s relative successes and relative failures, the circumstances of its production should be kept firmly in mind. Here we have a text which attempts to engage with a devastating sequence of events, a narrative deeply resistant to language, metaphor, the aestheticising impulse. In retrospect, it is easy to be critical about the poet’s dependency on myth, inappropriate historical analogy, or incautious use of gendered or political stereotypes. Like any other writer, Heaney could only deploy the imaginative resources available to him at the time. As the 1970s and 1980s wore on, he would find other exemplars and texts from Rather afield, which would open up different, and sometimes more direct and subtle ways of confronting his responsibilities as an artist in time of war.