SHADES OF A WOMAN’S TIME: THE CHRONOTOPIC REVISION OF HISTORY IN SELECTED POEMS OF EAVAN BOLAND’S OUTSIDE HISTORY

Abstract

Eavan Boland has been acclaimed as the foremost feminist poet of modern Ireland, and, although she has been accused of resorting to a depoliticized escapist poetry, her poetry stands for a convergence of both the political/national and the feminine in her homeland. Defined and credited as a nation with a mythological history, Ireland has always already been represented through a temporally male perspective. Correspondingly, in the established canon of Irish poetry, time, mostly as a retrospective concept, is a masculine appropriation of history coupled with the archetypal male and female roles, whose spatio-temporal import are to accommodate to the authorized reductionist historiography. Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope is not only an attempt toward the mutual realization of the time/space motif in a literary work, but also the means to the embodiment of a consciousness, an identity. This study attempts to demonstrate how Boland, in a selection of poems from her collection Outside History (1990), specifically, The Achill Woman, The Making of an Irish Goddess, Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of God, and the eponymous poem Outside History, introduces a series of chronotopes which assist her in redefining Irish national history with a feminine hue in the guise of herstory. Furthermore, it will be argued that her poetry may well be seen as a venture to replace the authoritative concept of time as mythology and fiction with a real history.