Reshaping Mirrors: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Irish and Galician Women’s Poetry

RESHAPING MIRRORS: MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH AND GALICIAN WOMEN´S POETRY Mª TERESA PÉREZ TILVE DOCTORAL THESIS/ TESE DE DOUTORAMENTO DIRIXIDA POR: DRA. MANUELA PALACIOS GONZÁLEZ Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá Facultade de Filoloxía Universidade de Santiago de Compostela 2014 RESHAPING MIRRORS: MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH AND GALICIAN WOMEN´S POETRY DOCTORAL THESIS WRITTEN BY: Mª TERESA PÉREZ TILVE DIRECTED BY: DR. MANUELA PALACIOS GONZÁLEZ This is to certify that this dissertation has been carried out under my guidance and supervision. Date Signature Department of English and German Philology Faculty of Philology University of Santiago de Compostela 2014 INFORME A Dra. Manuela Palacios González, Profesora Titular de Filoloxía Inglesa da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela e Directora da tese de doutoramento presentada por Dna. Teresa Pérez Tilve, que leva por título “Reshaping Mirrors: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Irish and Galician Women’s Poetry” INFORMA De que esta tese conta co seu visto e prace por reunir todas as características necesarias para proceder á súa defensa pública. Trátase dun traballo de investigación orixinal de calidade que achega nova información sobre a análise comparada das literaturas contemporáneas galega e irlandesa de autoría feminina. O marco teórico e a bibliografía secundaria empregados son os axeitados para o tema investigado e as fontes de información están debidamente citadas e recoñecidas. Tanto a estrutura da tese como a súa redacción cumpren cos requisitos para proceder á defensa da mesma e as conclusións son novidosas ao se tratar dun tema non analizado anteriormente desde unha perspectiva comparada. Santiago de Compostela, a 7 de abril de 2014 Asdo. Manuela Palacios González ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my tutor, Doctor Manuela Palacios González, for her patience, encouragement and motivation. Her guidance helped me through the stages of research and writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank the professors of the Department of English for their support during the doctorate courses. This dissertation has been written in the frame of the research project FFI2012 – 35872 (Ministerio de Economía e Competitividad, FEDER) on Irish and Galician women writers. To my daughters Clara and Rebeca, who are mothers themselves. Reshaping Mirrors 6 The corpus selected for this dissertation is mainly based on poetry collections that have been published for the last twenty five years —with a few exceptions, such as some poems by Luz Pozo Garza, that were first published monthly in Vida Galega (1956), and by Eithne Strong in Songs of Living (1961), Sarah, In Passing (1974) and Flesh: The Greatest Sin (1980), as well as some poems by Eavan Boland (1982). Fifteen Irish and ten Galician women writers have been chosen with the criterion that they have given voice to mothers and daughters who reflect about their relationship in their creative work. The reason for the lower number of Galician poets is that there are not as many contemporary Galician women writers who have represented personal experiences of the mother-child relationship as there are in Irish literature. This may be due to the fact that, after almost forty years of General Franco’s dictatorship, the priority of Galician women writers focused on the struggle for women’s rights and the need to get their voices heard. They had to demonstrate that they could address the same issues men did. All these Galician and Irish women writers belong to three different generations. Xohana Torres and Luz Pozo Garza were born before the Civil War and started publishing in the 1950s, in a time characterised by a strong censorship which restricted the issues that could be the matter of literary creation. Luz Pichel, Marilar Aleixandre, Marica Campo, Ana Romaní, Marta Dacosta, Xela Arias9 and Luisa Castro belong to a generation who was born after the war and, as Manuela Palacios and Laura Lojo underline, “for the first time in history, had general access to third-level education and […] began to write in an effervescent period of feminist, nationalist and left-wing activism” (2009, 20). This is the time when the long-lasting dictatorship of Franco came to an end in 1975 and the priority in the feminist struggle was focused on the conquest of civil rights in general and women’s rights in particular. In addition to this, most Galician women writers were especially concerned with the use of Galician language as a personal and political commitment with a language that had been banned from the public domain and reduced to the rural areas.10 Finally, Lupe Gómez belongs to the General Introduction 7 generation of women born in the 1970s who grew up in the longest democratic period of Spanish modern history. Three generations of Irish women writers are also represented in this work. Eithne Strong and Mary Beckett are the oldest and they have passed away. However, they can be included with Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Anne Hartigan in the generation of writers who, in the 1980s, “began to record women’s explicit gender-consciousness in their writings” (Palacios and Lojo 2009, 22). Paula Meehan, Mary Dorcey, Mary O’Malley, Mary O’Donnell, Kerry Hardie, Jessie Lendennie, Enda Wyley and Susan Connolly belong to an intermediate generation that followed the path opened by the previous one and asserted their right to put their lives and personal experiences into their art. Finally, Sinéad Morrissey is one of the Northern Ireland younger writers who have already consolidated their careers as poets. Some of these poets write in Irish and English and others do so only in English but they do not seem to see any conflict in their using one language or another and all of them consider themselves as belonging to the same culture. All of these women writers have a strong commitment with Irish and Galician literature respectively, although not all of them were born in Ireland or Galicia. Jessie Lendennie — a well-known editor and publisher of Irish Poetry— is an American with Irish roots and Marilar Aleixandre was born in Madrid but works in Santiago and writes in Galician. Some of these writers have a vast literary production which is not restricted to poetry,11 while Jessie Lendennie has published two poetry books so far. The vast majority of texts analysed here are poems, except for Mary Beckett’s short story “Heaven” (1989), some fragments of Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999), Kerry Hardie’s novel A Winter Marriage (2003) and Lupe Gomez’s Fisteus era un mundo (2001). Although this last one is not actually a poetry book, in most of its pages the boundaries between prose and poetry are blurred, subverting, perhaps deliberately, the traditional division of genres. Reshaping Mirrors 8 These women writers had to break the mirrors that reflected images of women that had been shaped for them by the conjunction of several patriarchal discourses. Their struggle takes place at three levels that are closely interconnected and, at some points, link with the general claims of feminist movements, although there are some others that affect them in a more particular way. Firstly, these women writers shared with most Irish and Spanish women the fight to break the walls of an idealised private sphere built for them by the Irish and Spanish nationalist patriarchal discourses.12 These, together with the Catholic doctrine, which inspired the political ideology in both countries and influenced the legal framework in issues, such as divorce, contraception and abortion, affected women’s lives deeply. Secondly, they had to disrupt and contradict images of women defined by seemingly universal discourses, like that of psychoanalysis, which elaborated a fixed feminine identity that was defined by motherhood. Thirdly, women writers had to struggle to place themselves and their work in the public sphere of literary creation, a world that had been men’s domain, without being relegated to a ghetto inhabited by women who write about women’s issues.13 In the “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Hélène Cixous (1981) [1976] stated the need for woman to break the silence imposed on her and write as an act of liberation: “[Woman] must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing, which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (1981, 250). On a collective level, Cixous affirms that this act of writing will be “marked by woman’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression” (250). Writing will allow woman “to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon” (250) and “[t]o become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process” (250). Cixous asserts that “[i]t is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus” (251) that women will be able to “break out the snare of silence” (250) and get out of the state of dumbness that had been reserved for them in and by the General Introduction 9 symbolic. Cixous believes that women “shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin of the harem” (251). Therefore, although the experiences and the points of view of the women writers object of this dissertation may differ considerably from one another, it can be said that they share the clear intention of holding firmly the tool of language in order to talk, from a different position, about those issues related to women’s lives which have been either ignored or used as aesthetic idealisations in literary texts. Manuela Palacios, following Eavan Boland, points out: “A emerxencia destas novas voces modificou as tradicións literarias respectivas ao pasar a muller de obxecto poético, ou sexa, tema ou imaxe na creación literaria, a suxeito, é dicir a autora” (2006, 4). In this dissertation, women are, most of the times, the speaking voices of these poems, not just the objects of contemplation of male poets, as they had usually been. But even when there is a calculated ambiguity about the sex of the poetic persona, the feminist perspective is clear. So, we can say that this objective of taking hold of the position of speaking subjects of the poems serves as a leitmotiv which links the work of these women writers, in spite of the differences of age, cultural background and point of view. 0.2.Motherhood: A Historical Background I want to show an overview of the socio-political circumstances that conditioned women’s lives along the twentieth century both in Ireland and Spain —Galicia has been largely conditioned by the legal and economic measures taken by the Spanish central government— because I think it is important to underline the contradiction inherent in the patriarchal discourses of Irish Nationalism and Spanish Francoist National Catholicism. On the one hand, they developed an ideology that identified woman with mother and elaborated highly idealised images of motherhood, linking them with the image of Mother Ireland and the Maternal Fatherland in Spain. On the other hand, they deprived women-mothers of Reshaping Mirrors 10 any agency to carry out their function by denying them the civil rights and resources that would allow them to improve their lives and their children’s. Spanish women were not allowed the right to go to university until 1911. Amparo Rubiales observes that even primary and secondary education for women was considered advisable as far as it was useful for the education of children, or “en el caso de que tuvieran la desgracia de no casarse, se pudieran ganar la vida, primero como institutrices y, más tarde, como maestras” (Rubiales 2003, 4). There was no reference to the equality of rights between men and women in the Spanish Constitutions previous to the Second Republic. In the first legislative elections of 1931 women could be candidates but not voters. Only three women were elected: Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent and Margarita Nelken, all of them from leftist parties. The three of them were relevant activists in favour of women’s rights. Clara Campoamor14 and Victoria Kent15 were lawyers and had opened the first female law firm in Madrid, and Margarita Nelken had already published several books about women issues (1919, 1931). Nelken underlined that the existing Civil Code rendered women invisible, as it did not consider her a citizen. She also denounced the exploitation by their employers they suffered at work, as well as the hostility of their own male workmates (1919). The fight of Clara Campoamor16 in favour of women’s votes was decisive and clashed with the opposition of her own party as well as that of her colleagues Victoria Kent and Margarita Nelken. Both Kent and Nelken argued that women’s votes could be a danger for the Republic since the vast majority of women lacked the necessary preparation to decide by themselves and would follow the advice of their husbands and confessors.17 Despite this, the constitution of 1931 acknowledged women’s rights by stating in article 25: “No podrán ser fundamento de privilegio jurídico, el nacimiento, el sexo, la clase social, la riqueza, las ideas políticas y las creencias religiosas”. Consequently, women’s right to vote was declared in article 36: “Los ciudadanos de uno y otro sexo, mayores de veintitrés años, tendrán los mismos derechos electorales conforme determinen las leyes”. A total number of nine women were elected in the three elections (1931, 1933 and General Introduction 11 1936) and all of them played important roles during the Republican period but, after the Civil War, these women —like thousands of people— were condemned to exile and their names were erased from official culture, leaving a political and historical vacuum in the field of women’s rights that lasted until the last decades of the twentieth century. After the Civil War there was a serious backward step in the field of civil rights which affected all the people, although it was especially painful for women, who lost all the rights they had achieved during the short period of the II Republic. Universal democratic suffrage18 and divorce were immediately abolished after Franco’s coup d’état. In 1938, in the middle of the Civil War, one law enacted by Francoist government, El Fuero del Trabajo, established as an important goal of the new regime to free the married woman from the workshop and the factory. Moreover, there was both in Ireland and Spain a strong reaction of the Catholic Church against women’s movements which were claiming for laws in favour of contraception, divorce and abortion all over Western European Countries. This reaction was supported by the doctrine expressed by the papal encyclical Casti Connubii published by Pope Pius XI (1930), in which the nature of marriage was attributed to God and, consequently, inalterable by man.19 The doctrine expressed in this encyclical also stated that sexuality was only allowed as a means of procreating children within the normative family and, outside this, it was forbidden and considered a grave sin. Thus, single mothers were considered public sinners unworthy of any social respect and consideration. In accordance to this doctrine, the Spanish Civil Code of 1945 proclaimed in chapter II, article 22: “El Estado reconoce y ampara a la familia como institución natural y fundamento de la sociedad, con derechos y deberes anteriores y superiores a toda ley humana positiva” (BOE, 199/1945). Within the family, the woman was completely subjected to the authority of man: father, husband or tutor. Some articles of this Code were reformed in 1958 so that it could be in accordance to the agreement signed between the Spanish Government and the Vatican in 1953. The Holy See was especially interested in the total abolition of the remnants of Reshaping Mirrors 12 civil marriage, which had been admitted when either the bride or the bridegroom were non-Catholic. After the modification, civil marriage was only allowed when both of them proved to be-non Catholic (BOE, 25/04/1958, 730). Besides, the authority of the husband was reasserted and justified by nature, religion and history: Se contempla, por tanto, la posición peculiar de la mujer casada en la sociedad conyugal, en la que, por exigencias de la unidad matrimonial, existe una potestad de dirección, que la naturaleza, la Religión y la Historia atribuyen al marido, dentro de un régimen en el que se recoge fielmente el sentido de la tradición católica que ha inspirado siempre y debe inspirar en lo sucesivo las relaciones entre los cónyuges. (BOE, 25/04/1958, 730) Children were classified, according to their origin, into legitimate, legitimised and illegitimate, and the latter could in turn be natural or adulterine. The responsibility of the father was different in accordance to each category but he maintained the priority of the custody. Rubiales underlines that “[e]l tratamiento diferente de los hijos, se justificaba en la protección de la familia, pero, en realidad, a quien se protegía era al varón, en perjuicio de los hijos y de las madres” (2003, 8). She also observes that Article 321 discriminated women in that, although the age of majority was 23 years for both sexes, daughters could not abandon their father’s home until they were 25, unless they got married or became nuns. “Se decía que la finalidad de esta disposición era el decoro público y personal de las hijas” (Rubiales 2003, 8). Behind this statement about the need to protect the morality of daughters, one can detect the interest to control women’s sexuality and the legitimacy of the future offspring. Christine Arkinstall (2002) states about the situation of Spanish women that “for almost forty years the body of the mother becomes the dominant element around which sanctioned concepts of femininity, gender and nationhood are organized” (2002, 48). Arkinstall also observes how the close alliance of Falangist doctrine and Spanish Catholicism produced the powerful ideology of National Catholicism in which both Church and State disguised their patriarchal premises General Introduction 13 “by representing themselves as feminized bodies: the Madre Patria (Maternal Fatherland) and Santa Madre Iglesia (Holy Mother Church) respectively” (48). In “Women, the Vote and Revolution” Margaret Mac Curtain (2008a) [1978], points out how the Intermediate Act in 1878 allowed Irish girls access to higher education and, for the first time, women could take degrees and carry off university honours. Mac Curtain underlines the active role Irish women played throughout the nineteenth century until the years previous to World War One. In the first decades of the twentieth century women participated and contributed to what Mac Curtain calls the Irish renaissance, in the fields of theatre, history and art. Besides, there was “a growing consciousness about women’s rights which found expression in a demand for participation in government by means of the vote and, less noticeably, in organising trade unions for women” (Mac Curtain 2008a, 82).20 The women’s suffragist movements clashed not only with the hostility of conservative parties but also with those politicians who showed sympathy for women’s claim but were afraid of their vote being influenced by the clergy. Mac Curtain records that John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party “told a deputation of women in April, 1911, that he was against votes for women as it would increase the power of clergy” (87). It is curious to notice the coincidence of reasoning, in Ireland and Spain, of those who affirmed that they sympathised with women’s claims, but considered women’s vote dangerous on the ground that women would be easily influenced by the clergy and the most conservative sectors of society. Women played an active part in the Easter Rising in 1916, —one of the most outstanding leaders, Countess Constance Markievicz showed a great courage as a lieutenant of the Citizen Army and she was imposed the death penalty, from which she was freed later under the general amnesty. Mac Curtain observes that, after the Rising, “the national question took precedence” over women’s claims and “nationalism sublimated all lesser concerns for the next few years” (94). During the Anglo-Irish War members of the Cumann na mBan “undertook scouting, Reshaping Mirrors 14 dispatch-carrying, intelligence work and first aid, often in high-risk zones” (95). Some were wounded and some suffered jail sentences. Mac Curtain wonders why, after the Civil War, women were not able to take advantage of the rights they had conquered, despite having proved their capability of creating and managing their own movements, their own trade unions and having participated in the sociopolitical events that led to the creation of the Free State: “In many respects it was a spectacular victory but the paradox remains to be explained: Irish women were free in the areas they had struggled for, why then were they content to remain subordinate in a society they had helped to create?” (2008a, 97). In “The Historical Image” (2008b) [1985], Mac Curtain observes that the active participation of women in the political and social struggle was overtaken by “the forces of counterrevolution” (2008b, 135). After the setting of the Northern State in 1920 and the Free State in 1922 women were forced to go back home: “Around Irish women, as in a cage, were set the structures of family life and women were assigned a homebased, full-time role as housewives, whose talents and energies were devoted to looking after husband and children” (2008, 135). Civil divorce was ruled out in 1925 and legislation on censorship about public morality was passed in 1923 and 1927 (Mac Curtain 2008b, 135-136). The De Valera’s 1937 Constitution, with its emphasis on the importance of the family and the woman as the centre of it, showed how the state was determined to remove women from public life and take them back home, thus reestablishing a division of functions based on traditional gender roles. Patricia Kennedy highlights the fact that there was at the time a “moral crisis" in Ireland, with increasing illegitimacy rates and the Constitution “was seen as a perfect opportunity to promote Catholic social teaching and to control the citizens of Ireland, in particular women and to reverse the 1922-1936 Constitution” (Kennedy 2002, 45). Kennedy also states that the ideology behind the articles 41 and 41.2 echoes the doctrine of the Catholic Church expressed in the papal encyclical Casti Connubii (1930). General Introduction 15 Thus article 41 declares the family an institution whose rights were prior and above all positive laws, cutting short the possibility of laws which might attempt the modification of this quasi divine institution. At the same time it emphasises the moral function of the family within the state and of woman within the family as the guardians of social order: Article 41 1.1The State recognises the Family as the natural primary unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law. 1.2 The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its Constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State. (apud Kennedy, 2002, 45) Article 41.2 does not establish a clear distinction between the terms “woman” and “mother” since, in part 1, it states that woman’s contribution to “common good” should be lived out “within the home”, leaving no other way for woman’s contribution to social welfare and, in part 2, the State guarantees the protection of mothers. It might seem that being a woman is a step previous to being a mother, which is considered as the right female identity Article 41.2 1. In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State support without which the common good cannot be achieved. 2. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. (apud Kennedy 2002, 45) Anne Fogarty observes that this article, which aimed at protecting mothers from engaging in the labour force and empowering their role at home, has in fact, the effect of diminishing their power; so, “well-intentioned paternalism paves the way to social oppression” (2002, 87).21 In Francoist Spain, National Catholicism afforded mothers a great symbolic significance while, in practice, denied them any kind of control over their bodies, children and the economic resources necessary to Reshaping Mirrors 22 Sarah Ruddik (1998). Chodorow did not discard biology completely, but stated that the exclusivity of women’s mothering was due to a gendered division of labour and Sarah Ruddik (1989) split motherhood in two separate functions: birthgiving and mothering. Ruddik considered that, while birthgiving is undeniably linked to female’s biology, the capabilities required to care and nurture children are not innate and do not have to be inexorably associated to hormonal processes. However, other feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva asserted the need to rescue women’s bodies from the censorship imposed on them by patriarchy, so that women can enjoy the richness and complexity of experiences the female body can provide, including those related to motherhood, which is considered as a privilege of female biology. In this context I will draw on some poems by Luz Pozo Garza (2004), Eavan Boland (1982, 1991), Mary O’Donnell (2005) and Enda Wyley (2009) which represent different aspects of the mother-child bond in the first stages of their relationship. We will also find, in the poems of Sinéad Morrissey (2009), Xela Arias (1996) and Luz Pozo Garza (2004), “thinking mothers” who, not only express love for their children but, are also able to reflect about the child’s own independent development. Chapter 3, “Redressing the Balance”, will deal with the consequences of the changes in social and familial structures derived from the increasing incorporation, to the work market, of a new generation of women who have had access to education and have been claiming for a place in the public sphere. Playing an active role in the cultural, economic and social world requires a change in the ideological construction of female identities which has been based on women’s roles as wives and mothers. Christine Arkinstall underlines, that this new scenario has brought about a recurrent theme in women’s writing: “the conflict arising over the possible reconciliation of motherhood and a profession, frequently one involving writing” (2002, 64). Arkinstall points out that in some women’s narratives one can see how this situation “has culturally fragmented women, […] General Introduction 23 making them less of a mother if they work and less of a person in a competitive consumer society if they choose to mother exclusively” (Arkinstall 2002, 64). In this chapter 3 we will see, in the poems of Eavan Boland (1995) and Eithne Strong (1993), the inner conflicts of the poetic personas who do not accept being defined by traditional roles and claim for an individual identity that is not limited to their being mothers. They state their right to a personal development which will not diminish their love and dedication to their children. We will also see in some of Sinéad Morrissey’s poems (1996) how the troubles in Northern Ireland affect families. The socio-political oppression exerted on mothers can trigger maternal anger and violence as seen in Luz Pozo Garza (2002), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (1992), Mary O’Donnell (1999) and Kerry Hardie (2003). In this chapter we will also reflect about the so-called new momism and its implication in the construction of a seemingly new ideology of motherhood which has striking resemblances with the old traditional one. Chapter 4, “Revising Myths and Archetypes”, will deal with the research done in the fields of archaeology and anthropology regarding ancient religions that worshipped a powerful Mother-Goddess and we will see how these discoveries have prompted some feminist theorising to contradict images of women derived from Jewish-Christian religions, whose rules were supposedly dictated by a supreme male God and determined the devaluation and submission of women to male dominion. Through some poems of Kerry Hardie (1996) and Anne Hartigan (1991), we will trace the feelings of disempowered mothers and daughters who must submit to a patriarchal authority which is presented as inscribed in the immutable order established by God. We will also see revisions of the myth of the Fall and the image of Eve done by Mary O’Donnell (1993), Marta Dacosta (1998), Marilar Aleixandre (2003) and Marica Campo (2007), as well as the re-writing of some mythical legends and archetypes related to motherhood which emphasise an adult mother-daughter relationship, and represent a rich gamut of feelings. These feelings range from jealousy and over-protection from the mother in Eithne Strong (1993) and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (2001), to the use of the classical myth of Reshaping Mirrors 24 Demeter and Persephone by Eavan Boland (1995, 1998), Mary O’ Malley (2003) Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (1999) and Luz Pozo Garza (2004). This old myth is appropriated by the mothers’ poetic personas in order to address actual issues, such as sexuality, rape, white slavery, emigration and ageing. In chapter 5, “Inflicting and Healing Wounds”, there is a change of perspective with regard to the previous chapters in which mothers were the speaking voices in most of the texts examined. In this chapter the reflection about the mother-daughter relationship is seen from the point of view of the daughter. I will briefly examine the feminist debate that took place in the 1970s and 1980s between those who blamed the mother as the perpetuator of patriarchal ideology and those who considered that mothers were not the agents of patriarchal oppression but the victims of the social, economic and political system that had restricted their development. We will observe how the mother-daughter relationship is multidimensional and is mediated by changes of age, personal circumstances and social context. We will analyse the daughter’s feelings of loss in Jessie Lendennie’s (2001) and Luz Pichel’s (2006) poems, as well as the state of defencelessness of both mothers and daughters in the face of the violence exerted on them, in Jessie Lendennie (2001), Paula Meehan (2000, 2003) and Eavan Boland (2007). We will also reflect about the ambivalence of domestic spaces, which can be protective female domains but also the sites of violence and oppression where the submissive roles of women were transmitted from mothers to daughters, as is represented in the work of Lupe Gómez (2001), Marta Dacosta (1998), Anne Hartigan (1991, 2008), Jessie Lendennie (2001), Paula Meehan (2000, 2003) and Marilar Aleixandre (1999, 2003). We will find daughters’ voices who demystify the supposedly gratifying domestic tasks and rebel against the mothers as collaborators in the perpetuation of patriarchal roles, particularly in the control of their daughters’ sexuality. However, a completely different perspective of the mother-daughter relationship can be found when the mature woman becomes the carer of her old General Introduction 25 mother. We will see, in Mary Dorcey’s poems (1994, 2001), a reversal of the mother-child roles that awakes contradictory feelings in the daughter. The chapter ends with the tribute paid to their grandmothers by Eithne Strong (1993) Mary O’ Donnell (2005), Sinéad Morrissey (1996), Xohana Torres (2004) [1980], Ana Romaní (1998) and Marta Dacosta (1999). By writing about the unknown lives of their female ancestresses, these writers acknowledge the struggle of these women and place them in history while, at the same time, they situate themselves in a genealogy of strong women. This goal of reinscribing women in history was expressed by the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, who affirmed in her “Inaugural Speech” in 1991: “I want this Presidency to promote the telling of stories —stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and of social justice. As a woman, I want women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history” (“The Inaugural Speech”, apud Donovan et al. 1994, 255). 27 CHAPTER 1 PREGNANT BODIES/EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITIES 1.1. Introduction In “Corporeidad y lenguaje en la poesía irlandesa actual” (2008a), Laura Lojo observes that motherhood as biological and/or spiritual experience has been socially constructed through literary and visual images “filtradas por una conciencia masculina, de manera que la asombrosa capacidad de la mujer para crear vida se ‘domestica’ y transforma para servir a las instituciones” (52). Moreover, metaphors of gestation and birth have been traditionally appropriated and used by male poets to represent artistic creation. In “Suspended between Two Worlds” (2010), Katharina Walter quotes a letter James Joyce wrote to his wife Nora in 1912, in which he equated the book he had conceived in his imagination and written with the child his wife had carried in her womb. Walter points out that this analogising of literary creativity with woman’s procreativity is only an example of “the cultural paradigm […] which was premised upon an inapt dissociation and gendering of male mind versus female body, with the implicit assumption that the corporeal was unworthy of art and literature” (Walter 2010, 103). Thus, women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth were not only reduced to silence but also robbed and transformed into metaphorical idealisations by male artistic creation. In the “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Hélène Cixous (1981) reacted against this appropriation and stated the need for woman to break the silence imposed on her and write as an act of liberation both individual and collective. On an individual level, writing will allow woman to “return to the body which has been more than confiscated to her” (250) and has often been turned into “a nasty Reshaping Mirrors 28 companion, the cause and location of inhibitions” (250). Cixous establishes a close connection between the censorship of the woman’s body —whose sexual and reproductive powers were considered dangerous— and the censorship of woman’s speech: “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time” (250). She is convinced that, by the act of writing, woman will be able to break the censorship imposed on her relation to her sexuality and will recover the strength that was stolen from her. Cixous (1981) also disowns traditional psychoanalytic theorising about woman’s desire for a child as compensation for her sense of castration, 1 as well as widespread conceptualisations about the mother-child bond: “The child is the other, but the other without violence, bypassing loss, struggle. We’re fed up with the reuniting of bonds forever to be severed, with the litany of castration that’s handed down and genealogized” (261). Cixous also states the need for women to liberate their bodies from the taboos and the repression they have suffered and to find strength in the physicality of their bodies as well as in a new way of representing themselves and their relationship with the child. She equates the gestation drive to the desire to write: We won’t advance backward anymore; we’re not going to repress something so simple as the desire for life. Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive—all these drives are our strength, and among them is the gestation drive—just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood. We are not going to refuse, if it should happen to strike our fancy, the unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy which have actually been exaggerated or conjured away—or cursed —in the classic texts. (1981, 261) Cixous also affirms that the “taboo of the pregnant women” is the cause of the repression woman has suffered and it is originated in the fear of the creative power of the female body, “because it has always been suspected, that, when pregnant, the woman not only doubles her market value, but —what’s more important— takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and, undeniably, acquires body and sex” (261-62). Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 29 Drawing on Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Heather Ingman states that abjection is “in the underside of the symbolic, what society must reject, cover over and contain, usually involving repudiation of our link with animality, sexuality and mortality” (2009, 228). Consequently, patriarchal ideologies have always tried to control and hide physical realities related to female procreative powers and this has resulted in leaving real mothers’ lives out of public concern. Anne Fogarty states that it is no wonder that the last decades have seen in Ireland how “many of the most virulent moral and ethical debates have hinged on issues of women’s rights and female sexuality” (Fogarty 2002, 88). Patricia Kennedy underlines the contradiction inherent in the fact that the physiological dimension of motherhood is an area of a woman’s life that has been considered as private “and as such outside the sphere of social policy, whereas such essentially private areas as contraception and abortion have been commandeered by the media, legislators and the Church as public issues” (2002, 8).2 In Spain, women’s claims of decriminalisation of contraceptive methods and abortion, achieved some success, not without a strong political and social debate, with the Organic Law 9/1985, which decriminalised abortion in certain cases. However, the modifications introduced by the Organic Law 2/2010 raised almost the same political controversy as the one in 1985, with the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy championing against it.3 Little by little, women’s issues like pregnancy, childbirth and childcare were brought into the public debate and women’s voices started challenging widely established patriarchal and religious assumptions. At the same time, some women writers shook off traditional representations of motherhood in literature by challenging the relegation of maternal subjectivity to the abject and translating their experiences —which sometimes include, pain, sweat, blood and amniotic fluids— into their artistic creation. In this chapter we will see how the dualities mind, soul / body, matter, that have informed Western science and philosophy from the Greeks to the first decades of the twentieth century, have defined conceptualisations of female bodies Reshaping Mirrors 30 and procreativity that are still in the background of some debates about pregnancy, mothering and birthgiving. We will journey with Sinéad Morrissey’s poem “Matter” (2009), through the history of science to see the attempts to demonstrate that life could be generated without the female body. I will examine some poems by Eithne Strong (1993) [1980], Marilar Aleixandre (2003), Luz Pichel (2006) and Anne Hartigan (1991) which denounce the dark aspects of the oppressive control that patriarchal ideology has exerted on women’s bodies. By contrast, in a number of poems by Sinéad Morrissey (2009), Luz Pozo Garza (2004), Mary O’Donnell (1993, 2005), Susan Connolly (1993) and Enda Wyley (2009), we will find various representations of pregnancy and childbirth that are the culmination of a longdesired personal project. 1.2. Enduring Dichotomies In Unbearable Weight. Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1995), Susan Bordo, in a general overview through the history of Western philosophy, shows how a hierarchy has often been established in the dichotomy mind/body, which privileged mind, idea, and intellectual creation, over body, matter, and physical reproduction: “The body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects: these are common images within Western philosophy” (1995, 3). To generalise this dichotomy and extend it to all the philosophical thought would be to oversimplify history. Quite the contrary, Bordo acknowledges the historical variations of this “imaginal shape of the body” (3) or even the somewhat contradictory position of philosophers like Plato, whose attitude toward sex and bodily life is not the same in all his texts.4 Christian thought and philosophy not only established the dichotomy soul/ body but also privileged unequivocally the hierarchy of the soul over the body, the latter being considered the soul’s enemy, the animal subjected to gross instincts and appetites that lead to the worst sins and must be controlled and tamed by the rational, spiritual will. This conception of the body as the site of instinct prevailed Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 31 in the mechanistic science and philosophy of the seventeenth century, although it was not necessarily linked to the idea of sin. “Rather, the instinctual nature of the body means that it is a purely mechanical, biological programmed system that can be fully quantified and (in theory) controlled” (Bordo, 4). It was Descartes who settled clearly at the centre of his metaphysics the distinction between mind and body. He considers them two separate substances created by God apart from one another. The mind is a substance whose essence is thought alone, while the body is a substance whose essence is extension alone. In his Meditations II he defines the body as something that has shape, fills a space and can be perceived by the senses.5 Descartes affirms that powers such as self-motion, perceiving and thinking do not pertain to the nature of the body, and they are attributes of the soul; although he acknowledges that walking or perceiving, for instance, would be impossible without the body. He also asserts that our senses are not reliable sources of knowledge because they cannot inform us about the true nature of things, but they are the necessary means of knitting together soul and body; although for some contemporaries it was not clear how this union could be compatible with the previous separation he established. Descartes is much more categorical when assigning the soul the attribute of thinking, which is defined as the true essence of the self: Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am—I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind. (Html edition 2005. John Veitch’s translation 1901) For Descartes, the mind is the site of our personhood and, with the right philosophical method, it can transcend and overcome the limitations and deceptions of the body and be able to acquire true knowledge. Therefore, as Susan Bordo points out, “what remains the constant element throughout historical Reshaping Mirrors 38 In this essay Ruddik concludes that, from the experiences related to her by birthgivers, pregnancy and birth are not mere physical functions but “intellectually transformative” experiences (41) and, borrowing from psychoanalysis and some feminists like Luce Irigaray (1985b, 1991) and Rossi Braidotti (1998), she opts for representing the “knowing self—the ‘ego’—as […]a bodily ego” (41). Consequently, if the ego is rooted in the body, the body is much more than mere matter, it is the pre-condition of knowledge and the site of one’s own subjectivity. 1.3. Matter and Flesh In Milton´s Paradise Lost the poetic persona laments what he considers the only failure of the Creator and asks why, having populated Heaven with masculine angels, he made the mistake of adding a feminine being to the race of men: This novelty on Earth, this fair defect Of Nature, and not fill the World at once With Men as Angels without Feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind? (Milton, apud Bordo 1995, 88) There have been throughout history several attempts to demonstrate the possibility of spontaneous generation of living beings, without any intervention of both sexes, which might have aimed at correcting what the poetic persona in Milton’s poem above considers a “fair defect / of Nature”. It seems feasible now that biotechnology will be able to erase the female role and fulfil male’s ambition of appropriating female procreative power. In this section I will analyse two poems that differ completely in content, but reflect two aspects of male fear of the female body. In Sinéad Morrissey’s poem “Matter” (Through the Square Window 2009, 13-15), the poetic persona of a pregnant woman goes back through history and summarises the main trends in the theory of spontaneous generation, from Aristotle to the 19th century, when Pasteur’s experiments demonstrated its falsity. One may think that, through these experiments, male scientists tried to find an alternative to sexuality and, consequently, to do without woman’s body. In Eithne Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 39 Strong’s long poem Flesh: The Greatest Sin (1993a) [1980], religious fear of female sexuality resulted in a system that tried to control women’s bodies. The title of Morrissey’s poem “Matter”, reminds us of the Aristotelian duality: active principle, form / passive principle, matter. Although Aristotle believed that most animals originated from animals like themselves, he also thought that life had always been able to arise from matter and there were some bloodless animals which generated offspring but not of the same kind; “such are all that come into being not from a union of the sexes, but from decaying earth and excrements” (Aristotle 2007. Book I, 1). The poetic persona in “Matter” describes these attempts in the first lines of the poem, using a matter-of-fact tone that cannot hide touches of irony that underline the contrast between the alleged seriousness of scientific experiments and the undervaluation of women’s knowledge of body matters: Aristotle observed and recorded it all— that out of rainwater, the marrow of the human spine, foam from the sea, or the putrefying carcasses of bulls and horses spring living beings: frogs, serpents, anchovies, bees and scarabs, locusts and weevils, maggots. (Morrissey 2009, 13) The following lines of the poem mention the agreement of Saint Augustine with the theory of spontaneous generation, according to which, a residue of God’s creative power was still left in the earth. The poetic voice echoes Augustine’s theory that there are some animals which are born from inanimate things or from their corruption, without the union of the sexes,7 “and thus their seed is not in them, but in the elements from which they arise by spontaneous generation” (Edmund Hill and John E. Rotelle 2002, 227). This could explain the existence of all kinds of insects and worms, although their names “find no mention in the chronicle of the Ark” (Morrissey 2009, 13), and there was no need for them to have been saved from the Flood. There is strong irony in the analogy established between this effervescence of life that originates from putrefying matter and the Reshaping Mirrors 40 reference to Mary, the immaculate model of purity, who could also generate without any kind of sexual intercourse. So long as alluvial mud remained, or rotted wood, or rinsed white bones of crocodiles after the wash abated and the salvaged couple and their braying entourage were pitched on top of Ararat, wasps and gnats and fleas would manifest once more in clouds and colonies without a union of the sexes (like Mary) and the earth would effortlessly teem. (Morrissey 2009, 13) On the following lines of the poem the poetic persona insists on the theory of spontaneous generation linked to putrefaction, defended this time by Paracelsus, who followed the Aristotelian tradition and took it further to the point that generative power was also attributed to menstrual blood and semen which, “exposed together to putrefaction may give raise to the basilisk, whose poison is similar to that in the eyes or breath of a menstruating woman” (Paracelsus apud Walter Pagel 1982, 116). The image of rottenness and impurity assigned to menstrual blood as well as to women’s birthgiving bodies has been a constant in most philosophical and religious theorising; it is no wonder that Paracelsus could imagine that menstrual blood mixed with semen could generate the basilisk. But the poetic persona mentions other recipes experimented by Paracelsus and his followers: yet Paracelsus, arch-advocate of decay, saw no reason not to apply the laws of spontaneous generation to ourselves: let the semen of a man putrefy by itself for forty days in a sealed cucurbite, it shall begin, at last, to live. Fed on an Arcanum of human blood and kept in darkness, his fleet homunculus had all the features of a human child. (Morrissey 2009, 13-14) Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 41 Leeuwenhoek is the next step in the poetic persona’s review of some turning points in the story of science and philosophy concerning human reproduction His discoveries reinforced the theorising that tried to demonstrate that woman has no active principle essentially necessary for the creation of a child since the spermatozoa already had all the elements of a human being. Leeuwenhoek bore this experiment in mind when, decades later, using his own microscope, he scrutinized his sperm, magnified as much as three hundred times and fashioned like a bell, with the wrought perfection of a tiny man curled inside each globule. (Morrissey 2009, 14) The poetic persona continues her way through history and mentions a different theory sustained by the Ovists, according to which the tiny animalcules reside in woman’s womb where they were placed by God when she was created (Bordo, 315). These Ovists “may have envisaged instead / a sacred cabinet of children, encased / inside each egg, opening in time” (Morrissey, 14). While all this theorising was developed by male philosophers and scientists, women’s real worries and thoughts about their reproductive powers and needs were completely ignored and unwritten. Jane Flax reflects in Thinking Fragments (1990), on the contradictions inherent in some trends of postmodernist thought. On the one hand it asserts the death of all essentialist concepts of human being, nature, reason and history by declaring the three deaths —of Man, of History and of Metaphysics— and replacing the search for truth by a conversation in which “the philosopher’s voice would be no more authoritative than any other” (32). On the other hand, the problem for Flax is that this philosopher’s voice still “retains the privilege of defining what game is to be played and the rules” (32). Flax affirms that many male postmodernists seem unable to recognise the gendered nature of their interpretation of Western philosophy and the absence of women in their “master narratives” (226). She points out that if the history of Western thought had been told from the point of view of women’s experiences, “the dramatic episodes might not be the three deaths, but rather an ongoing series of Reshaping Mirrors 42 struggles: to give birth or to avoid giving birth; to be represented or to avoid being misrepresented” (226). In this respect, the poetic voice in Morrissey’s poem asserts that while reputed scientists seriously tried to demonstrate their theories of spontaneous generation, woman was left without any control of her body, and her uterus remained a place to be colonised at random by male sperm: whether one believed in this, or the evidence of a light-blanched workshop and a knack for polished glass, or whether one went back to what the Greeks expressed as the facts of reproduction, a woman’s quest for contraception, stacked against the odds of dogged visitors finding lodging in the womb at any beckoning, was hopeless. (Morrissey 2009, 14) The poem goes on with a reference to Soranus of Ephesus, the Greek-Roman physician —96-138 AD— whose book, Gynecology, was a landmark in the study of the processes of pregnancy and parturition, as Owsei Temkin remarks (1956). This book reflects his meticulousness in the observation of those processes, and it deals extensively with the care of pregnant women, the qualities required for a good midwife and the care of newborn children, rejecting some practices related to magic and some uses he considered as barbarian. He also studied the effects of some substances that can be used to prevent pregnancy or even to induce abortion: No wonder Soranus suggested water from blacksmiths’. No wonder olive oil, the pulp of a pomegranate, honey, pine resin, mercury, beeswax, pennyroyal, tobacco juice, arrowroot, tansy were burnt, brewed, inhaled, ingested, inserted into the cervix, or buried in the fields left fallow if the coppery stain of menstruation persisted into the seventh day. No wonder witches consulted the sky. (Morrissey 2009, 14) The first lines in this section of the poem start with the words “no wonder”, as well as the last one. This establishes a parallelism and a contrast at the same Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 43 time, since Soranus’experiments were accorded scientific value, despite the somewhat unconventional recipes he tried, while reference to witches, in a line that might seem disconnected from the previous section of the poem, condenses a whole history of wise women whose knowledge about these matters was always despised when not directly outlawed because their practices were never given credit and related only to witchcraft. In the last section of the poem we find a reference to Louis Pasteur, who disproved the theory of the spontaneous generation of microscopic organisms — through a laboratory experiment in 1864.8 The poetic persona admits Pasteur‘s contribution to a better knowledge of microscopic life and then she shifts from the rather impersonal historical description which has pervaded all the poem, to a personal voice which addresses the child inside her womb and reveals the physical and emotional ties between them. The feet of the fetus kicking against the “windowless dark” of her womb produce physical sensations which also affect directly the heart, traditionally considered the site of feeling, and her pelvis is the temporary cradle which provides for warmth and protection to the infant. And, disowning all the theories about the properties of matter to generate life, the poetic persona claims for the reality of sex and, in using the plural “our” and the word “lovemaking”, expresses her conviction that it was the parents’ love and sexual desire that brought the child into being: And though I know, thanks in part to Pasteur— to his gauze impediments and penchant for boiling—how you came to enter, how you came to roll and hiccup and kick against the windowless dark, feet to my heart and skull to the pelvis cradle, I still think of our lovemaking as a kind of door to wherever you were, waiting in matter. (Morrissey 2009, 14) In the long poem Flesh: The Greatest Sin (1993a) [1980], Eithne Strong represents the consequences of the repression of the woman’s body by Catholicism and the obsession about sexuality that pervaded Irish religious education as well as Reshaping Mirrors 44 the devastating effects it had on women’s lives. The emphasis put of the purity and virginity of Mary, as the only suitable model for woman, created an oppressive dark atmosphere around sex that aimed at inspiring on girls an awful feeling of rejection of everything related to the greatest sin. Drawing on Marina Warner (1976), Michaela Schrage-Früh observes that the model of purity and asexual motherhood embodied by the Virgin Mary is unobtainable and that this myth has provoked disturbing effects on the mind of a Catholic girl: “While in childhood it is possible to identify with Mary’s purity, the onset of puberty is bound to cause problems for a Catholic girl, and can have serious effects on the girl’s self-image and attitude towards her own body and sexuality” (Schrage-Früh 2006, 125). In part II of Flesh we can see how the methodology employed to instill fear of their bodies into the girls’ minds is used in an orphanage. We can perceive the complete ignorance of the girls about sex and the insidious insistence of the nuns on the need to mortify the flesh through hard work. They do not find it necessary to answer the girls’ questions because it is assumed that girls —as daughters of Eve— have an innate perverse knowledge about sexuality: Never never offend the Immaculate Conception. What does conceived without sin mean? Isn’t it plain —it means what it says. The Terrible Sins are those against purity; the vilest. Remember the sixth commandment Thou shalt not commit adultery. What is adultery? Hold your tongue and learn obedience. Mortify the flesh, that is the enemy; not to be pampered, scourge it that you may not fall into eternal fire. Remember what it is like to be burned. Imagine your whole body burning and never any ending. (1993a, 15) In order to mortify the flesh and avoid temptation orphans were systematically subjected to hard work, hunger and cold, while the nuns preached them about the virtues of these procedures: “polish harder, go hungrier; / be glad you are cold; cold and purity combine; / welcome the sweat of heavy labour, it Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 45 washes you pure” (16). When Ellen —the orphan protagonist of this section of the poem— left the orphanage, she was prepared to transmit this ideology: “Taught to teach tomorrow / what she learned today / Ellen, orphan, / product of edicts / denials, spartan procedures, / was finally dispatched” (17). In part V of Flesh, an adult Ellen faces the opposition between the extreme purity she has been taught and the reality of sex in marriage. The poem reflects the deep breach this contradiction opens in Ellen’s mind and body. She has internalised the religious hate of the body and has developed strategies against the temptations of flesh, with the self-righteous conviction of being fighting the good battle against evil, with God and the Church on her side. However, once she is married, Ellen has to submit to the assail of this foe because “the Church was on its side / calling it Conjugal Right” (34). Ellen’s confusion is caused not only by her past experiences in the orphanage but also by the continuous public preaching from the pulpits, which obsessively insists on fighting against desire and pleasure while, in the privacy of confession, priests teach women to yield to conjugal rights because, as the Casti Connubii decrees, sex is only justified in marriage when it aims at procreating children: Angrily confused was she before this foe. From the first, Voices of Authority had forbidden: Deny flesh: Mortify. Abnegate. Voices had wrought fear: Remember Hell. Remember Mary, the Immaculate, conceived without sin. Remember. Ellen remembered that flesh was sin, flesh laid on flesh brought stirrings that meant Hell. The old voices sounded always unrelentingly in her life. Do not indulge. Punish. Crucify self. And the new: from the pulpit, now, the priest frenzied out this loathing; vituperation of the flesh convulsed him near seizure. (1993a, 34) Ellen had obediently accepted the Catholic doctrine and had succeeded in annihilating her body’s sexual responses to the point that, for her, sexual intercourse was a hateful activity: “Long since terrorized to non-response, flesh / of Ellen could not accommodate to this unwelcome licence / called Conjugal Reshaping Mirrors 46 Right: it established her bewilderment, / recoil, hate, but never joy” (35). Thus, Ellen conceived her five children “with no rejoicing” and reared the two who lived “with all respect / to received authority” (35). Thus, she becomes the transmitter of this repression and exerts on her children the same educational system that she suffered in the orphanage, in the conviction that “they must be primed / against the coil of flesh, made know the body should / be fed only for work to be done, not for gratification” (35). In part VI of the poem, a pessimistic poetic persona reflects upon the fate of Ellen’s daughter Nance, conceived without desire or love and predestined from the womb to be the object of her mother’s strict adherence to the principles of Catholic education: “The helpless embryo passively received its legacy / of fear, intersticed through the cankered being. (What does / fear do to flesh that should be spirit’s blossoming?)” (41). Nance will be sent to a nun’s boarding school and her life will be a series of battles and rebellions against this oppressive environment until she can integrate flesh and spirit and reconcile herself with this “integral being” (63). 1.4. Female Body / Male Dominion Seeing pregnancy as a common female experience would be to oversimplify the diversity of factors that determine women’s lives. Although undeniably a physical process rooted in female biology, pregnancy is also a subjective experience that is mediated by a wide range of personal and social circumstances. The experience of a well-to-do white, Western, married woman has nothing to do with that of a poor, single, immigrant woman. To cite only a few factors that precondition pregnancy in contemporary European societies, we must consider whether it is wanted or unwanted; if the future mothers will be able to combine full-time work or a professional career with the never-ending demands of mothering, which requires the availability of child-care centres they can afford to pay for; and what kind of support they may find from their partner —when there is Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 47 one—, their family, and the social context which they live in. Each pregnancy is, even for those women who have had several children, a thoroughly unique experience that cannot be labelled as merely physical. Body and mind are so tightly interwoven and affected by social relationships that motherhood cannot be inscribed into a unifying universal experience. In “Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth” (1994), Sara Ruddick asserts: [T]he bodily ego is thoroughly social: from the beginning it is constituted in and constructed by relationships in which “the body” is held, touched, spoken to, heard, frightened, soothed, hurt, and comforted. Accordingly, potentially transformative physical experiences are imbued with meanings of past and future relationships and may therefore be also socially transformative. (1994, 41) Women’s bodies are the sites where patriarchal ideology exerts its power and control. Until recently, pregnancies that happened outside the close boundaries of marriage had to be repressed and punished. In Luz Pichel’s Casa Pechada (2006), and Marilar Aleixandre Desmentindo a primavera (2003) we find some poems which express the powerlessness of women who were considered inadequate for the role of respectable wives and were the object of every kind of sexual abuse. Additionally, their children were frequently the victims of social and religious discrimination and violence. The speaking voices in these poems are narrators of other women’s experiences from a detached point of view. Luz Pichel’s short poem “Letreiro para poñer na entrada da cova do penedo” (2006, 20) summarises the situation of helplessness of poor and mentally handicapped women, who were frequently used as men’s common properties and on whom rape could be exerted without any kind of moral or legal responsibility. When the mad woman in the poem gets pregnant, she tries to disguise her pregnancy and goes away to the mountain, perhaps to protect her unborn child. Since nobody is responsible for her pregnancy, her child will not be under any male’s protection and will be exposed to every kind of danger. Reshaping Mirrors 54 in the fluids of the body which drag him/her out of the secure refuge of the mother’s womb. The fourth decade The river will not stop this frail bark my body, will not answer my calls, it carries a burden and I flow to the unknown sea, I do not wish to drown in this, who is being born you or I? (1991, 49) Every woman who has experienced labour pains can easily recognise in the following lines the desire to stop the “journey” and wait until she feels “more adventurous”. But nature follows its own path and there is time to ask oneself for the meaning of this pain. The poetic persona expresses her doubts about the idea that love could be the origin and the reason which can explain how it all began, and what awaits her at the end of all this “panting and heaving”. She questions the idealised concept of love that was at the basis of a Christian education of women. Love that was disconnected from sexuality and based on a self-denial of women’s desire and a dutiful care for others —husband and children—, which has in the image of Mary the model of a disincarnated motherhood. The poetic voice also questions the wisdom every woman is supposed to acquire through pregnancy and childbirth. All these beliefs are useless to help her to control her body and to face the risks of real birthgiving. […] this journey can wait; I will leave, until I feel more adventurous. Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 55 Was it love that pushed my brown boat out on the waters? Was it love that sent me peering down into nets for the salmon of knowledge? What will I know when panting and heaving limbs lead I climb hair clinging To the shore? And those cries I hear over the water mingling with sea birds, are they yours, or mine? (1991, 49-50) The woman also questions the usefulness of some old Irish myths. The reference to the story of the Salmon of Knowledge,10 which gave wisdom to those who first ate it, is the counterpoint to the myth of Eve, who was castigated with the pains of labour for her attempt to taste the fruit from the tree of the science of good and evil. The difference of meaning is remarkable. While the Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill was rewarded with wisdom, after having tasted the salmon, and became a famous king, the blame was put on Eve for the loss of paradise and, from then onward, all women have to pay for her sin. The poetic voice asks herself what kind of knowledge she will find at the end of her journey. But when it finishes, the cries of the newly born child are mingled with the cries of the mother and, over them, the cries of the sea birds may suggest that both mother and child might not have reached the shore safely and may have drowned in the waters of childbirth. In her introduction to the book, Anne Hartigan explains that among the voices of the poem is her “grandmother’s sister Lily who died along with her infant in childbirth because her husband refused to let her go to Dublin for medical attention” (7). Reshaping Mirrors 56 1.5. Embodied Subjectivities The dark social aspects of gestation and birth reflected in the poems of Pichel, Aleixandre and Hartigan contrast with experiences of pregnancy as a thoughtful project present in Luz Pozo Garza’s poems of “Adviento” (2004) [1959], Sidnéad Morrissey’s “Found Architecture” (Through the Square Window 2009) Mary O’Donnell’s “Daughter” (Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody 1993) and “The Journey” (The Place of Miracles 2006) [1993], Susan Connolly’s “Cycles” (For the Stranger 1993) and Enda Wyley’s “Diary” (to wake to this 2009). The poetic voices in these poems represent motherhood as the culmination of a long cherished desire which responds to a conscious calling for the child. The mothers in these poems assert that it was their wilful determination that brought the children to them. They do not mention any lover or partner whose active principle may have taken the initiative in the fulfillment of their desire, and, in some cases, they even skip the hardness of childbirth to emphasise the longing for the child and the happiness of the mother when her goal is achieved. I will also draw on Anne Enright’s memoir Making Babies. Stumbling into Motherhood (2004) because she dares to dwell on physical as well as psychical aspects of childbirth and motherhood that have been hidden from public representation and, as Heather Ingman points out, she “reintroduces what has traditionally been repressed in the Irish Catholic discourse of maternity, namely, the female body” (2009, 225). I will see how some of these poetic personae’s experiences relate to Kristeva’s theory of semiotics as it is represented in “Stabat Matter” (1986), a text typographically split into two parallel sections: in one of which she analyses the cult of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism, and in the other, she represents her own experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in a text that, in some way follows the patterns of poetry. Luz Pozo Garza has a vast creative production developed through a long span of time. The poems I am going to discuss here do not fit entirely into the period of time I have chosen for this dissertation, since they were written and first published monthly in Vida Galega along the year 1959. Besides, they were written Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 57 in Spanish, not in Galician, as is the case with the rest of my Galician corpus. However, I think that, apart from the fact that she is one of the major Galician poets, the subject matter of these poems is central to the issue of motherhood, as represented from the point of view of personal experience. This collection is a kind of diary in which, as Carmen Blanco has pointed out, the woman poet “constrúe un calendario materno para ir anotando as vivencias da maternidade que se agolpan confusas no corpo e na mente, asombradas ante o empuxe irresistible do xurrar da vida” (Blanco 2004, 23). Moreover, the poetic persona connects her pregnancy and childbirth with the seasonal cycles of nature, establishing a contrast and, sometimes, a parallelism between what happens outside and inside her body. At the same time, we constantly find references to the religious liturgical year from the title of the collection —“Adviento”— as well as to ancient mythologies that relate the creation of life with some of the four elements defined by the philosophers of ancient Miletus: water, fire, earth and air. The first poem of this collection “Enero” (2004, 193), the month that opens a new year is attuned with the new life that is being conceived inside the woman’s womb. The poetic persona states clearly that love is the origin of the conception: “Temblando para el amor, / Enero, creciente ovillo. / Corazón del año nuevo, / dulce pájaro dormido” (193). Christmas time is still present in the allusion to the Epiphany and we also find resonances of the Annunciation in the feeling of expectation that the miracle of a new life may happen: “Gracia de la Epifanía / en un paisaje amarillo. / Como tú mi corazón / está aguardando el prodigio” (193). There is a contrast between the poetic persona’s emphasis on the darkness of the night and the alertness of her heart that is waiting for the miracle: Enero, noche cerrada, puerta de la madrugada. Noche que no se despierta. Alerta, alerta mi corazón al milagro vivo. (2004, 93) Reshaping Mirrors 58 Pozo-Garza uses the rhymes and metrics of traditional Spanish lyric in all her poems of the “Adviento” series. In this poem we can find echoes of a “villancico” collected in the Cancionero de Uppsala11 —“No la devemos dormir, la noche sancta”— which describes the moment of intimate expectation of the Virgin Mary before the birth of Christ. Pozo Garza translates this same feeling to the moment of the conception of a new being who is going to illuminate the darkness: “Hoy no debes, no, dormir / que sucede lo imprevisto: / Una estrella nueva. / Un niño” (Pozo Garza 2004, 193). Here again we find a parallelism with the star that announced the birth of Christ to the Three Wise Men and guided them to Bethlehem. In the next poem, “Febrero” (2004, 194), February is the month when nature sleeps under the coldness of winter, waiting for the warmth of the spring to revive. The poetic persona feels that her heart is “dormido bajo la nieve” (194), but she also feels that warmth is growing underneath. She addresses the month underlining the fact that, while months and seasons go by, she keeps waiting for the light: “Te vas. Yo sigo esperando. / ¡Silencio! No se despierte. / Dime cómo nace el tiempo / mientras aguardo. ¿No sientes / crecer el calor del sueño / delirando bajo el vientre?” (194). The last lines of this poem abound in images of light and fire which are the counterpoint of the coldness outside. According to Erich Neumann (1972), there is a close connection between son and fire in ancient Indian, Greek and Carthaginian mythologies related to the Great Mother Goddess:12 “The fire of the torch, the lower fire-light son of the wood, corresponds to the upper luminous sons —the stars, moon and sun— which are the children of the night” (1972, 311). Escucha toda esa luz que viene lejos. Enciende, calienta, alumbra. La llama milagrosa permanence. Aquí palpita el destello. Todavía no amanece. (2004, 194) Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 59 In the third and fourth poems, “Marzo” (195-96) and “Abril” (197), springtime and the blooming of nature are in accordance with the growing awareness of the poetic persona of the life that is blooming inside her: “Llevo una flor dentro, dentro. / Silencio, / se me ha dormido. / Marzo me la va acunando / con un aleteo perdido” (195). March and April are often rainy months in Mediterranean climates and so are recorded in popular sayings and proverbs. But rainy weather is not only the pre-condition for the blooming of nature outside, but is also the background of a deeper significance of the symbolism of water: “Abril me llueve. / No es mañana. / Hay la esperanza de las noches. / La expectativa de las ramas” (197). Water —the first of the elements, according to the philosophers of Miletus— is a universal symbol of life, as Mircea Eliade points out: “Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality: it is fons and origo, the source of all possible existence” (1958, 188).13 In connection with this, Barbara Walker affirms that “springs, fountains, ponds, wells were always female symbols in archaic religions, often considered water-passages to the underground womb”(1983, 1067). In “March” and “April” we can see how the poetic persona uses these symbols as the leitmotif that can describe the presence of the life that is growing inside her. He descubierto un arroyo tan vivo aquí. Ya lo toco apenas, milagro mío. Agua de mi corazón, prodigio. Te voy soñando despierta en un silencio de río. (195) Although Anne Enright describes her experience of pregnancy and childbirth in a humorous and down to earth style, she has poetic overtones when she explains the moment when body and mind seem to fully accept the reality of pregnancy: “I looked at the world around me and listened to my own blood. There was a deep note humming through me, so low that no one could hear. It was in every part of me, swelling in my face and hands, and it felt like joy” (2004, 18). This account is in accordance to Julia Kristeva’s representation of her own pregnancy, which, in Reshaping Mirrors 60 turn, reflects her theory of the semiotic, a stage of communication between mother and child that is previous to the symbolic and cannot be represented by the logic of language. Paradoxically, Kristeva uses language to transmit her impossibility of describing what is happening inside her body because to write it down “is an ordeal to discourse” (162): FLASH – instant of time or of dream without time; innordinately swollen atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a yet formless, unnameable embryo. Epiphanies. Photos of what is not yet visible and that language necessarily skims over from afar, allusively. (Kristeva 1986, 162) There is a stage in pregnancy when the fetus ceases to be an undefined presence only perceived by changes in the woman’s body and gives unequivocal signals of its existence —by kicking the mother’s belly, for instance. Anne Enright describes this moment: “The first kick is the child talking back to you, a kind of softening up” (22). At this stage it becomes easier to see the child as another person, as Enright observes: “I began to have ideas about this baby, even conversations with it, some of which, to my great embarrassment, took place out loud” (2004, 22). In Pozo Garza’s poems “March” and “April” we can see how the poetic persona represents a growing awareness of the development of the child, who is now more than a dream and has become a reality. She is conscious of the split of her body into two different beings: “No voy sola. Voy llevando / un vaso de dulce sueño”.[…] “Ya no voy sola. Me vienen / primaveras por el cielo” (196). The poetic voice of the mother expresses the wonder at this new presence and addresses the child expressing her need to know more about it. Te conocí en un murmullo como de río en calma. Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 61 ¿Me escuchas, dí? ¿Ya tienes alma? […] Te adiviné como un latido de hierba acuática. ¿De dónde llegas? ¿Oyes las voces de la nada? (2004, 197) Pregnancy as an emotionally complex waiting time is reflected in Sidnéad Morrissey’s poem “Found Architecture” (2009, 18-19). On the first line, the poetic persona relates everything she does with her experience of waiting and, on the next lines, she addresses somebody14 to explain how she looks for the hidden architecture in everything that surrounds her. Architecture —the art of building— is an image of what is being built inside her: These days are all about waiting. What would you say if I tried to explain how my single true activity this wet and shivery May is ‘found architecture’? (2009, 18) This “found architecture” in Morrisseys’s poem has multifaceted aspects like those of an “Italian kaleidoscope” (18) whose continuously changing images have an inner symmetry that suggests the changes that are happening inside the body, with the symmetrical divisions of the cells. However, this kaleidoscope is not made of mirrors that contain coloured objects, but one “that makes its heel-toes shapes, not from beads or seeds / or painted meticulous details, but from the room, / from whatever room I happen to be in” (18). So, the kaleidoscope is a metaphor of the poetic persona’s changing body that accompanies her wherever she goes, and is, at the same time, her “waiting-house” in which she started to change colours from the beginning of her pregnancy. This use of metaphors to represent the changes she is undergoing is in line with Kristeva’s expression of the difficulty to represent these sensations: “Words that are always too / distant, too abstract for this / underground swarming of / seconds, folding in / unimaginable spaces” (Kristeva 1986, 162). The poetic persona in Morrissey’s poem uses colourful images to overcome this difficulty: Reshaping Mirrors 62 […] The day it arrived I mangled the blue of the bathroom with the pistachio green of my bedroom ceiling and sat entranced: such symmetrical splicing of everything, anything, to make of my waiting-house a star-pointed frame that entered and left itself behind as the cylinder turned. (2009, 18) The poetic persona finds also architecture in nature in her walk by the sea because she declares that “found architecture” is “the very business of beaches” (19). In spite of the reference to May, the month which is the climax of spring, we cannot find in this poem the usual association pregnant woman / blooming Mother Earth. Just the opposite, the images chosen here suggest destruction and decay after a storm or a shipwreck, and may hint at the creative power of nature in which life and death are two sides of the same cycle: rotted glands of a pond between knee-high grasses and a white tree undoing itself in its ink-stained surfaces. The tree looked like a crocodile’s ribcage. (2009, 18) To the things mentioned above the poetic persona adds “all the usual”, “skeletons of geranium, leaves on windowsills”, “snakeskins” (19), but the most important found architecture has recently happened when she can finally see the ultrasound scan of the small being inside her womb, more like a creature of the sea, and she claims that he comes from the deepest desire of her whole body: […] Most recently (and most disarmingly) this: handed to me in a roll of four like mug-shot photographs from a machine— his seahorse spine, his open-shut anemone of a heart, and the row of unbelievable teeth shining high in the crook of his skull as if backstitched into place. From blood and the body’s inconsolable hunger I have been my own kaleidoscope—. (2009, 19) Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 63 In Mary O’Donnell’s poems that are being commented next, the writer represents her own experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. In “Daughter” (1993, 85), the poetic persona expresses her long-standing yearning for the child that has accompanied her wherever she went: For years I have called across great distances, feeling her hover beyond demotic streets, the summer dust, the slanting rains. (1993, 85) This longing establishes an emotional relationship between mother and daughter which is previous to the child’s coming into being. The poem reverses traditional images of the woman’s body as fertile land where the male seed is sown. Instead, the poetic persona has imagined her daughter as hidden somewhere among the crops of a fertile earth, waiting for her calling: I have called to her across miles of fields, thinking I glimpsed her in drenched grasses, or near a poppy in shimmering oats. (1993, 85) In the final section of the poem, the mother expresses the sense of miracle a lot of mothers feel when a long-desired child finally comes, no matter the times this moment has been imagined. If, as astronomers have proved, the same processes that created billions of unimaginably distant galaxies also created us, the mother feels how the little being has answered her calling and has approached her from the outer space “testing glints of starlight”(85). This is a moment of recognition and of pride for having been able to bring her to life: Now she sets out from some wild galaxy: as I sleep, she nears, testing glints of starlight, nights of hollow soul. I have called her to be human. Reshaping Mirrors 70 old or useless “like the cracked terracotta pot, / a dusty old glasses case, one container / of printer ink, the wobbly wooden chair” (44). The description suggests familiar images of parents tidying up a room and preparing it to be the nest for the new born; but, at the same time, it reminds us of ancient rites of renewal in which old things had to be thrown away or burnt to allow the rebirth of nature. I look and look, get used to these things we should tidy away, to clear our life up, as though you are a visitor we must prepare for. (2009, 44) In the following lines the pregnant woman addresses the being inside her and describes how she is perceiving it. Alongside physical sensations like “a force that aches in my lower back, / a twitch below my appendix mark” (44), we find again the metaphor that links procreation and creation, in this case, body, “blood” with culture, “music”: You —a floating fish, a blip-blipping in my fluid, a force that aches in my lower back, a twitch below my appendix mark, the plucking of fingers inside of me. You will make music in my blood, burst into our life that is already yours. (2009, 44) She is aware that this new life is going to change their lives and the remnants of their old life do not need be changed since the child is going to occupy the core of her body: So lie back with me, little one, in the pale sheets of our waiting. Maybe, just for now, I’ll leave things as they are— those dusty cracked scattered pieces of what we have become— and let your new life nestle between us, beneath my skin. (2009, 44) Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 71 1.6. “Self versus self, / versus death, / versus love and fear” (Mary O’ Donnell 2006, 55) In “Stabat Mater” (1986), Julia Kristeva affirms that pain is inherent in motherhood: “One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain: the child represents it and henceforth it settles in, it is continuous” (167). She describes childbirth as the “undecidable” (168) battle between life and death, between “calm” and “terror” as well as the paradox of “deprivation and / benefit” (168). However, when the battle ends, she feels that calm and life have won: “The life of that / other who wends his way while / I remain henceforth like a / framework. Still life. There is / him, however, his own flesh, / which was mine yesterday. / Death, then, how could I / yield to it?” (169). In this section we will see how some personal accounts of childbirth are represented in the following poems: Sinéad Morrissey’s “Love, the nightwatch…” (Through the Square Windows, 2009), Mary O’Donnell’s “Pre-Birth Flirtation with Self and Others” and “Shipwrecks and Stories” (The Place of Miracles, 2006) —which is dedicated to Mary O’Donnell’s daughter Anna— as well as Susan Connolly’s “Breifne” and “Liadain” (For the Stranger, 1993). In these poems, the women writers transform into poetry their own experiences of birthgiving. The hardest physical aspects of parturition are not avoided and images of blood, storm, thunder and floods are used to describe the feelings of women in labour. The poetic personae in some of these poems describe the scenario in which the birth took place, with plenty of details that help define space and time. In Morrissey’s poem, the poetic persona addresses her child telling him how it was when he was born. Flashes of visual images, intertwined with sounds are successful in depicting, like in an impressionist painting, the atmosphere around them. Thus, the anonymity of the “nightwatch, gloved and gowned” of the aseptic hospital staff, contrasts with traces left in the father’s hands, which are signs of the violence of the moment, but at the same time, are proofs of the support he gave to the mother and his active presence in the room. Radio sounds from “taxicabs” and Reshaping Mirrors 72 “police reports” are “intertwined” with the “distant hoof beats of a heart” (28). The image of the storm outside, with the weather “blowing showery” is attuned with the “thunder of blood” and the “flood-plain of intimate stains” (28). Images of stormy waters are recurrent in most of these poems as well as representations of the body as a “frail bark” as we have already seen in Hartigan’s “Growth”. Water is a universal symbol of life, and waves on a beach are the most evident example of the cyclical repetition of the attraction of the moon, whose cycles have been, in turn, associated to women’s menstrual periods. The rhythm of the waves can also represent the rhythmical sequence of the body’s contractions in labour. But uncontrolled waters can be extremely dangerous and threatening and, in this way they represent the risks a woman is facing during parturition, when there is the possibility of real showers of blood that can endanger both her life and the child’s. Love, the nightwatch, gloved and gowned, attended. Your father held my hand. His hands grew bruised and for days afterwards wore a green and purple coverlet when he held you to the light, held your delicate, dented head, thumbed-in like a water font. They used stopwatches, clip charts, the distant hoof beats of a heart (divined, it seemed, by radio, so your call fell intertwined with taxicabs, police reports, the weather blowing showery from the north) and a beautiful fine white cane, carved into a fish hook. I was a haystack the children climbed and ruined, collapsing almost imperceptibly at first, then caving in spectacularly as you stuttered and came —crook-shouldered, blue, believable, beyond me— in a thunder of blood, in a flood-plain of intimate stains. (2009, 28) In the last stanza, images of a storm are used to describe the decisive moment of childbirth, and the metaphor of the woman’s body as a haystack “collapsing almost imperceptibly / at first, then caving in spectacularly” is an image of how the woman feels that every ligament and muscle that have knotted the structure of her body is being torn apart to allow the new being make his way Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 73 beyond the mother’s body. But, despite the blood and pain, the child has become finally “believable” (28). In Mary O’ Donnell’s “Pre-Birth Flirtation with Self and Others” (2006, 5556) the poetic persona describes how she prepared herself carefully for labour. The first stanza relates how, the night before, she performed the beauty rituals of working her hair, making her up and preparing beautiful clothes for her “final sleep” (55). These rituals are the armours that can help her face the hardness of the moment she is going through, without losing her own identity, whose boundaries may be dissolved into the strain of the body’s biologically programmed control of the process. The threatening resonances of the adjective “final” remind us that death can also be present in the labour room. The second stanza shows how the poetic persona tries to shake off her fear: “Perched on the hospital bed, / I waited in a turquoise robe / with red and golden birds of paradise; / wafting perfume,” (55) and, although she jokes “with the chap who emptied the bins”, there is nothing frivolous about the moment because she is well aware of the crucial importance of the coming struggle and the subsequent changes which will modify her life. Parturition is the moment of splitting of the mother-child shared abode into two separate bodies and subjectivities; a division that is, at the same time, wanted and feared. And the poetic persona represents this struggle with images of war: “armour”, “battle” and “good blood”. The battle has to be fought on two fronts: The mother self accepting the pain to favour the separation of the other self, and the struggle against death. […] ‘Gorgeous’ he called me, which is how I felt. I knew I’d need every armour, for the coming day, mostly to remember who I was, what I could be, in the time of good blood. Flailed into battle, self versus self, versus death, Reshaping Mirrors 74 versus love and fear, the complacent deceit (or was it kindness?) of woman after birth flared up. (2006, 55) The poetic persona affirms that this is “the time of good blood”. Images of blood are not unusual in poetry, but in these poems, in addition to the widespread meaning that links blood with battle and death, we find a positive meaning because blood will be the vehicle that will bring the child into these women’s arms. Women are used to menstrual blood and are not afraid of it. Love for the child can give them the capability of enduring pain and, when the moment comes, they will use all their strength to push the child out of them. In O’Donnell’s poem the poetic persona, states clearly that it is only for the child that this violence is going through: In those moments when I thought I would burst, hands and nails ridged blood-sweet, I pushed to the edge of oblivion, pushed to the edge of my life, pushed for her, only for her. (2006, 56) In “Shipwrecks and Stories” (2006, 59-60), a poem Mary O’Donnell dedicated to her daughter Anna —born 20 January 1993— the birth of the child is set in a specific temporality in which the coming of a new life contrasts with the destruction of nature caused by the oil from the Braer tanker that ran aground in the Shetland Isles on 5th of January 1993. In the first stanza, nature and life are opposed to death caused as a collateral effect of industrial capitalism. The image of the full moon, that governs the cycle of tides and was also traditionally associated with the completeness of women’s gestational period and the time for childbirth, is counterpointed to TV pictures “of slack-feathered / oil-furred creatures” (59) that have been sentenced to death. Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 75 In the second stanza the poetic voice addresses her child telling her how on the day of her birth “a new president was sworn in”,17 creating a social atmosphere of hopes and expectations of peace and “the rights of living and dying” (59). These expectations about the future, contrast with the fear of the poetic persona of dying during childbirth, connecting once more life and death in that process: On the day of your coming, a president was sworn in, messages unfurled, hopes of freedom, tolerance, the rights of living and dying. I thought I would die that day. (2006, 59) Time seemed to have stopped and even “[t]he minute hand on the labour ward clock / seized up with [her] pain” (59). The woman used all the resources culture had given her to counteract the growing labour pains: She “tried to sing, / told stories to the midwives” (59), although she knew that they were already used to hear “the lives of women in birth / never before so compressed / as in that moment” (59). But she did so because she needed to get hold of her identity so as not to be overcome and dissolved into the waves of pain. By repeating like a mantra her wilful determination of steering the process, she asserts the power of will over the uncontrolled forces of nature. I told stories, spoke slowly between the pains, spinning fables to save me, remind me of who I was. And they did. At the close of every story, I repeated one saving phrase, was delivered from battle: ‘I can and I will, I can and I will!’ Believing that, you were born. (2006, 59-60) In the last stanza, the images of animals whose fur and feathers are covered by a slippery layer of oil that is going to lead them to death, contrast with the smooth glossy skin that had helped the child through the path towards life. Reshaping Mirrors 76 In the Shetlands, a tanker had split into two, birds and otters slipped into death as darkness fell. In Dublin the wet dark threw up our child, sleek with life. (2006, 60) In Susan Connolly’s “Breifne” (1993, 23), we find again images of seas, waves and ships to describe childbirth. The female poetic persona tells the child the story of labour as if it were a dangerous adventure in which they both were active protagonists. Thus, the woman’s body is a ship “steered” by the child, shaken by dangerous seas; people in the labour ward are described as “strange voices in command”, and the rhythmical contractions of the uterine muscles are the waves that alternately “washed” the child “overboard” or “back again”, until “[a]t last a hot wave engulfed [them] / and swept [them] ashore” (23). When the adventure finishes with a happy end, each character can recover their true identity and the mother affirms that this adventure they have gone through together has established between them ties that are tighter than those which linked them into the womb. […] So we survived. I became myself again and held you; others looked after me On that warm September evening I stood up after your birth, my body light — my spirit lighter. I looked over at you, closer to me now than you had been within. (1993, 23 In “Liadain” (28), images of a personification of blood as a vehicle of communication between the mother and the daughter in her womb appear on the first lines of the poem: “Blood-whisper and bone-shell / began together; / then her Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 77 blood whispered in me”(28). We find also, as in O’Donnell’s “Daughter”, images that propose an alternative secular representation of the origins of life that challenges the religious teaching. Life becomes the product of the interactions of elements coming from different places of the universe and a sense of magic is introduced through the use of numbers —seven and three— as well as through the protective spaces of circles, which have had a powerful significance in all IndoEuropean cultures. Thus, the poetic persona posits the possibility that “seven stars / gave her light as a gift / to create her spirit-world” and “earth bloomed at her birth” (28). The next stanza comes down to earth with the fear of being “drowned in pain” (28), which we have already seen in poems analysed above, but magic is present again with the three circles made of people who are going to welcome and protect the child.18 I dreamed I drowned in pain till I saw her plunge into life’s waters. Three circles rippled outwards, three nurses laughed with me — at my pleasure, my relief. In the first circle — those who welcomed her; in the second — those who would share her life. (1993, 28) In the last stanzas, we find again the image of the body as a beach bathed by waves, but this time, the waves are calmed after the storm and they bathe the poetic persona’s body with a feeling of plenitude and happiness. The “two-faced god” of the “Boa Island” is an image of the two-sided reality of childbirth, from which pain and joy are inseparable. Quiet as a shore I lay there, and waves of contentment swept over me. I needed nothing more. But remembering Boa Island where the two-faced god Reshaping Mirrors 78 stares east and west — I thought of my split-second change from pain to joy; felt his ancient glare embrace the night. (1993, 28) 1.7. Conclusion In “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother” (1989), Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto acknowledge that, without denying the fact that mothering can be “conflictual and oppressive”, it can also be “emotionally central and gratifying in some women’s lives” (79). Through the poems that have been examined in this chapter, we have seen how motherhood can be oppressive under the constraints of patriarchal ideologies, which have considered women’s bodies as properties that had to be controlled. However, we have also seen that pregnancy and childbirth can be complex and fulfilling experiences when motherhood is freely chosen. The women poets studied in this chapter, have unearthed the physical realities of motherhood, making them the raw material for creative work that challenges philosophical dichotomies that have conditioned traditional images of motherhood, as they integrate mind and body in the representation of an enriching personal experience. There cannot be a unifying theory about these experiences since they are determined by personal and social circumstances that condition women’s lives. Hence, pregnancy and childbirth are lived in radically different ways, depending on the situation of the woman who is the poetic persona in the poems analysed here. In some of the poems, we find a denunciation of the obsessive repression of women’s sexuality by Catholicism but, in some others, religious symbols, associated to the birth of Christ, are appropriated to represent the intimate feelings of pregnant women. Some poems represent motherhood as something imposed without taking into account woman’s will but, some others express woman’s agency and determination to become a mother. The diversity of points of view and perspectives that these poems reflect, proves that motherhood cannot be simplified Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 79 and reduced to theoretical discourses that do not consider the specific location in which this experience takes place. Reshaping Mirrors 86 Chodorow also observes that Winnicott “warns against thinking of a ‘maternal instinct’ and stresses that the changes brought about by pregnancy must be thought of in psychological terms, because they vary so much with the state of the mother” (Chodorow, 23). From a radical anti-essentialist feminist standpoint Mª Xosé Queizán affirms in Anti Natura (2008) that it is anachronistic to speak of such a thing as maternal instinct, “aquel amor de nai baseado no imperio da natureza, na forza do sangue” (2008, 118). She asserts that there is no difference in the way mothers care and nurture their children whether biological or adopted and adds that maternal love is not rooted in animal instincts but in individual consciousness. Queizán observes that at present, in Spain, women can be not only biological, but social and legal mothers; she welcomes the fact that there has been an increasing participation of fathers in child caring for the last thirty years and affirms that they feel happy and gratified in doing this task. Moreover, maternal love can be exerted by homosexual parents: Parellas masculinas homosexuais adoptan criaturas que son atendidas con <<amor de nai>>. Sen dúbida, no relativo a compartir tarefas coa parella, o coidado da infancia é o que os homes fan con máis gusto. Daquela, nas mentalidades actuais, lonxe quedan os instinctos biolóxicos, sanguíneos, uterinos. Rexen outros valores que nos achegan a maternidades e paternidades intelixentes. (Queizán 2008, 118) This theorising welcomed the social and legal changes which allowed homosexual and lesbian marriage,1 as well as the advances in reproductive technologies, which have helped to break the boundaries of the nuclear heterosexual family as the only suitable setting to bring children up. Moreover, in her theorising of mothering as a thoughtful complex project which she separates from the biological fact of birthgiving, Sara Ruddik subscribes an anti-essentialist position. Without completely rejecting the influence of biology, Ruddik does not think that sexual difference is more relevant in the attitudes required to child caring than other social or individual differences: Tying and Untying Bonds 87 Although biological differences between female and male styles of mothering might survive in an egalitarian society, I see no reason to believe—and good reason to doubt— that these differences would make women (or men) more “naturally” suited to protect, nurture and train children. (Ruddik 1994, 35) In “Taken the Nature Out of Mother” (1993), Adria Schwartz asserts that the advance in reproductive technology “has shaken the very foundation of our notions of motherhood and seems to have taken the nature out of Mother Nature” (240-241). To the already varied categories of mothers, new types must be added within the category of surrogacy. A great ethical debate about surrogacy arose when the first cases came out in the news and biotechnology opened new possibilities. A distinction was established between a genetic surrogate, who provides her own ovum and is inseminated with the sperm of a male donor, and the gestational surrogate, who becomes pregnant through in vitro fertilization but is not genetically related to the offspring. At first, these advances were greeted by many feminists because they seemed to break the constraints placed on women by biology, as Schwartz points out: “The associative link between women, fertility and motherhood is being eroded, if not broken, in the laboratory” (242). At the same time, a new range of possibilities were open for single women, lesbian and homosexual couples who can have children genetically related to them. However, both Sarah Ruddik and Adria Schwartz agree in that the famous Baby M trial case raised “fundamental questions about motherhood” in the United States (Schwartz, 242) and was further evidence of the need to revise some feminist theorising about this issue. Marybeth Whitehead, who had already had two children, signed a contract of surrogacy and agreed to be artificially inseminated by William Stern to conceive a child for him and his wife in exchange of ten thousand dollars. Before the pregnancy came to the end, Marybeth recognised that “she had made a grave mistake” (Schwartz, 243) and, after the child was born, she felt that she would not be able to give her baby to the Sterns and intended to keep it. She decided to give back the money she had already been given as well as forfeit that which had been promised. Indignation and anger were the public reactions toward the behaviour of Reshaping Mirrors 88 a mother who had tried first to sell her child and then to break a legal contract, attitudes that automatically defined her as a morally unsuitable mother. Schwartz observes that “[t]he fact that is elementary in contract law that performance may not be enforced, but merely affects to the damages collected, made no difference” (243).2 At the initial trial, an expert witness, psychologist Lee Salk stated that “Mr. and Mrs. Stern’s role as parents was achieved by a surrogate uterus and not a surrogate mother” (Phyllis Chessler, 1989, 231, apud Schwartz, 243). It is clear in this case that the genetic material provided by Mr. Stern —the Aristotelian male effective and active principle— prevailed over that of Marybeth’s. Moreover, Mrs. Stern was liberated from the natural limitations of her body —multiple sclerosis— and her rights as moral mother were achieved through her legal connection with Baby M’s genetic father, establishing once more the prevalence of the male line, while Marybeth was reduced to an uterus as Schwartz points out: Far from being liberated from her body, in the state’s eyes, Marybeth Whitehead became her body or rather a disembodied part-object, an instrumental construct to fulfil the needs of a man who wishes a genetic offspring. If she was only her body, or rather, a body part, then she could not be a mother. (1993, 243) Baby M’s trial raised a strong feminist debate between “essentialists championing women’s biological rights to motherhood, and social constructionists rejoicing at their liberation from the primitive bond of women’s reproductive capacity” (Schwartz, 244). All the technological advances in in-vitro fertilization which allow men to have children with their genes conceived in a hired womb as well as the ascendancy of movements of father-rights reinforce the old Aristotelian conception of man as the true parent and woman as a temporary fetal incubator, with no subjectivity of her own. In The Sacred Bond: Legacy of Baby M. (1989), Phyllis Chessler takes sides with the biological mother affirming that only in a patriarchal society a woman’s labour and attachment to her offspring would be regarded less valuable than the sperm of the father and a contract.3 She underlines the fact that in Tying and Untying Bonds 89 the preliminary surrogacy agreement M. Stern was referred to as the “natural father or “natural and biological father” while Marybeth Whitehead is referred to exclusively as “surrogate” (Chessler, 1989, 167-173).4 It is clear that, in this contract, two different categories of nature are established: the primacy of the true nature of the father’s sperm in contrast with the non-essential quality of the mother’s ova, and the nullification of her womb, which is considered only “a temporary shelter that may even soon be replicated or subsumed by reproductive technological advance” (Schwartz, 244). Moreover, we can see in the news how pregnancy as an exclusive female function is in some cases omitted from the seemingly innocent fashionable language used for famous people, saying that they —both members of the couple— are pregnant, as well as the erasure of the word woman or mother which is substituted by hired womb. As an example of this I will cite three pieces of news: In the first one Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban present their biological daughter Faith Margareth “concebida mediante un vientre de alquiler” (http://mujer.es.msn.com/celebrities/ 26/01/2010, 4). The second is an interview (El País Semanal 14/01/2011), in which Ricky Martin talks about his twin sons who were born from “un vientre de alquiler”, and in the third one a well-to-do homosexual couple —legally married in Spain— speak about their experiences as parents of their children (El País Semanal 29/05/2011, 36-46). In this case the surrogate mothers are mentioned by their names and there are two photographs in the article in which each surrogate mother appears with the children object of surrogacy together with her own family, which suggests that the ties with the biological mother have not been cut completely. However, when one of the fathers —a gynaecologist— describes his feelings about the pregnancy and birth of his third son, we can observe how the feelings, the pain and the whole personhood of the mother disappear in favour of the parents as the only protagonists of the event (italics mine): Yo soy ginecólogo, y he estado muchos años ocupándome de partos y embarazos de alto riesgo. Veía a diario complicaciones. Quizá por eso viví Reshaping Mirrors 90 nuestro embarazo con cierta ansiedad. Se me hizo eterno. En el parto, cuando nació Alonso y vi que rompía a llorar con un llanto muy enérgico —pesó más de cuatro kilos—, sentí muchísima paz, me tranquilicé, vi que había llegado bien. En cuanto le cortaron el cordón umbilical nos hicimos cargo y tratamos de separarnos lo menos posible de él. (EPS 29/05/2011, 38) This erasure of the mother as lifegiver has been stated by Patricia Kennedy (2002). Kennedy develops what she calls “A Three Dimensional Model of Motherhood — Mother as Carer, Earner and Lifegiver” (8). She observes that, while the function of carers and earners can be passed onto other people or even the State, “[i]t is only woman who can conceive, lactate and give birth. It is only the birth mother who is caught in the grips of labour pain. It is she who lies under the abortionist, suffers the pain of a miscarriage or the ecstasy or trauma of birth” (7-8). Furthermore, it is not clear that biology can be dismissed so easily. Some research done with rodents in the last decades has shown that some hormones and peptides such as estrogen, progesterone, oxitocyn, cortisol and vasopressin determine how well mothers care for their pups. Beth Azar acknowledges in “The Postpartum Cuddles: Inspired by Hormones?” (2002, 54-56), the difficulty of translating the conclusions of these experiments to human behaviour, as well as the ethical restrictions that do not allow researchers to manipulate human brains; but Azar mentions some experiments carried out at the University of Toronto by the psychologist Alison Fleming and other colleagues about the influence of cortisol on lactating mothers.5 The level of cortisol greatly increases in the last phase of pregnancy and drops abruptly after delivery. According to Azar, this research showed that “women with higher levels of cortisol postpartum are more attracted to their babies’ scent and more attentive to them” (Azar 2002, 54). The results of this research might explain “the excitement, bonding and utter contentment of new motherhood, bolstered by a flood of cuddle hormones that are particularly potent in nursing mothers” (Azar, 2002, 54). This is an assumption that most popular magazines about mothering take for granted. These cuddle hormones could be somehow a safeguard against postpartum depression. But Azar is very cautious Tying and Untying Bonds 91 about putting all the weight on biology and points out that “Fleming emphasizes that her research finds that correlations between hormones and mothers' behavior are usually mediated by environment or the parents’ experience with babies and caregiving” (Azar 2002, 54).6 Moreover, research done about the function of the placenta and the nature of the interchanges that take place between the bodies of the mother and the fetus during pregnancy puts into question some widespread assumptions about the nature of mother-infant relationship. In an interview with Luce Irigaray (1993), the biologist Hélène Rouch explains the complexity of the function of the placenta as a “mediating space, which means that there’s never a fusion of maternal and embryonic tissues” (39). Although this organ is a formation of the embryo, it acts in an almost independent way, playing its “mediating role” in different ways, because it not only regulates the interchange of nutritious substances and waste matter between mother and fetus, it also modifies the metabolism of the mother: “transforming, storing, and redistributing maternal substances for both her own and the fetus’ benefit” (39), creating an environment that provides for a “peaceful coexistence” (39) between mother and child: This relative autonomy of the placenta, its regulatory functions ensuring the growth of the one in the body of the other, cannot be reduced, either to a mechanism of fusion (an ineffable mixture of the bodies or blood of mother and fetus), or, conversely, to one of aggression (the fetus as foreign body devouring from the inside, a vampire in the maternal body). These descriptions are of imaginary reality and appear quite poor indeed—and obviously extremely culturally determined—in comparison to the complexity of biological reality. (Irigaray 1993, 39) Consequently, Rouch does not agree with psychoanalytic theorisations about the fusion between a child and his mother during pregnancy and the first months after childbirth. Such a fusion would have to be broken by a third term in order for the child to be constituted as a subject. Rouch affirms that “the differentiation between the mother’s self and the other of the child, and vice versa, is in place well before it’s given meaning in and by language” (42) and the reality of this Reshaping Mirrors 92 differentiation is not necessarily in accordance to that of our cultural imaginary, which has described it as a “loss of paradise, traumatizing expulsion or exclusion, etc” (42). She does not accuse these forms of the imaginary of being wrong, but “of being the only ways of theorizing what exists before language” (42). Therefore, research done in the field of biology affects theorisations about the nature of the mother-infant bond during pregnancy and puts into question psychoanalytic explanations about the process of subject formation of the individual’s identity. In both Freudian and Lacanian theorisations the mother is a fixed passive object, without any previous or further identity apart from that of a mother, unable to undergo any kind of personal development in accordance or in contrast to her child’s growing. Moreover, as we have seen above, the mother has been often reduced to a maternal body and, more recently, to a womb liable for hiring. Sara Ruddick has noticed not only the absence of the voice of the mother in psychoanalytic theorisations, but also the conceptualisation of the child as somebody who has to fight against the absorbing love of the mother to achieve a real subjectivity. Not only is a mother’s voice virtually absent in psychoanalytic tales; worse, the child that psychoanalysts reveal is often a stranger to her mother. In one dominant psychoanalytic story, an infant is at first part of a mutually desiring mother-child couple. Then, still primarily attached to “the mother,” “the child” moves through a stage of development that sounds like a prelude to the “real” thing—preoedipal, presymbolic. (Ruddick 1994, 32) Ruddick also suggests that the obsessions of the “child hero of the psychoanalytic stories” (32) about gender difference, sex, mother and father may be a reflection of the preoccupations of psychoanalysts themselves, and she underlines the strong contrast between what she calls “psychoanalytic tales” and the stories some mothers tell about their own experiences: When mothers talk about themselves, when they appear as characters in their own maternal stories, they often depict themselves as grappling with problems their children present or that the world presents to their children. But this thinking mother is not reflected in psychoanalytic tales any more Tying and Untying Bonds 93 than she is in philosophy or more ordinary varieties of feminism. (Ruddick 1994, 33) From the field of philosophy Jane Flax also accuses object relations theorists7 of having told the story of human development from the point of view of the child. She laments that “the separate aspects of the developmental processes of a mother qua mother and the child are not adequately considered”. Each member of the dyad has different internal processes which are not fully investigated. Mother and child have been considered as “misleadingly isomorphic” when, in fact, they go through “developmental processes specific to each partner in the dyad as well as fusion, mutuality, and interaction between them” (Flax 1990, 123). Although both mother and child can share situations of unity, separation and reciprocity, the mother’s experience of this development and the meanings it has for her “cannot be identical to or confounded with an account of the child’s process” (Flax 1990, 124). More recently, Celia Shiffer (2009) has pointed out that dominant narratives have “sublimated or even erased the subject who is called, and who calls herself, a “mother”’ (213), without leaving her “room to speak” (213). 2.3. Moments of Enchantment In this section I will explore how the mother-child bond is expressed by the poetic personae of these mothers who address their children and tell them their feelings about the first stages of their relationship. I will show how this first stage of the mother-child bond has been represented in very different ways in some poems of Luz Pozo Garza (2004), Eavan Boland (1982), Mary O’Donnell (2006) and Enda Wyley (2009). I will underline in these poems the voice of the mother as an active subject who, not only enjoys her connectedness to the child, but is also able to reflect about her feelings and about the changes that becoming a mother has brought about. Such a mother’s voice contradicts the image of the silent passive object of the child’s desire or hate so often described in Freud’s and Lacan’s theories. Besides, these mothers’ voices also contradict the assumed Reshaping Mirrors 94 undifferentiating unity of the mother-child dyad and they recognise that the child, using Kristeva’s words, “once the / umbilical cord has been / severed” (1986, 178), is the other. No connection. Nothing to do with it. And this, as early as the first gestures, cries, steps, long before its personality has become my opponent. The child, whether he or she is irremediably an other. (Kristeva 1986, 179) In this line, Anne Enright describes this moment of intimate recognition of the child as an independent being and the feeling of wonder she experiences at this discovery, which happened on the third night of her child’s life: I looked into her eyes and realized that nothing I believed could explain this. It was an embarrassing moment. I think I saw her soul. I suffered from the conviction that a part of her was ancient; and that part chose to be there with me at the beginning of something new. I had a wise child. (2004, 111) If I had to look for a common thread in the diversity of voices we find here, I would say that, in these poems, women writers have translated their own experiences of motherhood and it is the poetic persona of the mother the one who addresses the child and tells him/her what she feels, breaking the silence she was assigned by patriarchal symbolic discourse. In Luz Pozo Garza’s “Nana de Octubre” (2004, 207-208) [1959] we find again —as in the poems commented in chapter 1— the rhymes and metrics of traditional Spanish lyrics in a lullaby written at the time when her first daughter Mónica was born. The poem is the tenth of the series of twelve belonging to the “Adviento” collection we have already seen in chapter 1. In this calendar, October is the month in which the child has already arrived and the poetic voice of the mother sings a sweet lullaby to get her asleep. Under the symbols and images frequently used in Spanish traditional and religious lyrics we find the warm atmosphere of mother-child intense communion. Tying and Untying Bonds 95 The first line of the poem, “[d]uérmete, mi niña”, is recurrent in many popular Spanish lullabies transmitted orally and is repeated in lines twenty five, twenty nine and thirty three. The mother urges the child to sleep and gives her the reasons why she should get asleep. In popular lullabies there are frequent references to the moon in the sky, or to the absence of the sun, as well as some warnings of what might happen if the child refuses to sleep. In this poem, the mother refers to the arrival of the month of October accompanied by the clouds and the rain of autumn. The mother transfers the singing to nature, personified in the character of October, while the only rays of sunlight left are kept in her heart. Duérmete, mi niña, que ha venido Octubre y quiere cantarte su canción de nube. No quedan naranjas en el naranjal. No quedan limones en el limonar. Quedan muy poquitos rayitos de sol. Están bien guardados en mi corazón. (2004, 207) The references to oranges and lemons remind us of some popular romances such as the “Romance de la Virgen y el ciego” also known as “El naranjel”, of which many different versions have lasted to our days. Moreover, oranges and lemons have been widely used in Spanish popular lyrics as symbols associated with love, as Stephen Reckert has observed in Lyra Minima: Structure and Symbol in Iberian Traditional Verse (1970): There is a consistent association of oranges and lemons respectively with gold and silver, (or the white of purity) sun and moon, ripeness and unripeness, fruitfulness and sterility, the acceptance and rejection of love, and ultimately even life and death. (1970, 27) The use of diminutives, so common in children’s songs, has an affective quality and, at the same time it has an evocative power which gives us the image of a world of toys inhabited by the characters of the fairy tales: little horses and Reshaping Mirrors 102 attend the child’s need and both mother and child’s bodies get in touch in a way that has been considered the highest peak of the mother-child bond. On the other hand, breastfeeding is a hard task that takes a long time, it is not always as serene as it should be expected and it implies most of the times lack of rest for the mother and the impossibility of being replaced by other members of the family in the task of nurturing the child. This ambivalence is reflected in Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”: Nights of wakefulness, scattered sleep, sweetness of the child, warm mercury in my arms, cajolery, affection, defenceless body, his or mine, sheltered, protected. (1986, 171-172) In her memoir Anne Enright has tried to demystify breastfeeding affirming that she had never liked being around nursing women because “there was always too much love, too much need in the room” (2004, 40) and asserts that breastfeeding “may be an iconised activity made sacred by some and disgusting by others, but it is first and foremost a meal” (41). She admits that she breastfed her child because she thought she should, and although she smiled and cooed her a bit while doing this activity, she tried to do other things simultaneously, like reading or writing. Enright also observes that, despite the Catholic emphasis in the cult of the Virgin mother and the nationalist idealisation of the nurturing mother, breastfeeding was hidden and completely absent of public representation. In contrast with the scarcity of representations of the Virgin breastfeeding the child, she humorously notices the abundance of another religious image: “The closest the culture came to an image of actual nursing was in the icon of the Sacred Heart, endlessly offering his male breast, open and glowing and crowned with thorns” (43). The task of breastfeeding is not romanticised in Enda Wyley’s poem. The poetic persona describes the tiredness of “late-night and early-morning feeds” (47); tasks that can be exhausting since they mean repeated interruptions of sleep that Tying and Untying Bonds 103 have drawn “black circles below [her] eyes" (47). She explains the state of alertness so familiar to most mothers, who react immediately to the child slightest movement. There is a contrast between the lightness of the movement of the child’s eyes and the numbness of the mother caused by the lack of rest. The image of the mother, who sees herself as a “waking dead” coming out from her “tombstone” (47) might suggest that of a mother-vampire awakening at night to look for nurturance. We find the counterpoint of this image in that of a child-vampire in Anne Enright’s description of her first experience of breastfeeding: “So there we were in the hospital dark; me and my white Dracula, her chin running with milk and her eyes black” (2004, 44). But in Wyley’s poem it represents just the opposite of a vampire. She is able to overcome her tiredness so that she can answer to the need of the child: […] and my sleep shortens with your shuffling, your opening eyes. Now I must stumble to attention. I am the waking dead, pushing a tomb-stone aside, pulling you out and up from your basket warmth. (2009, 47) The next lines reflect the biological response of the mother to the child’s need, because as soon as she starts undressing her breast she can feel them filling with milk. In the last line of this section, the mother expresses the feeling that through her breast she is feeding the child with her whole self. We find a similar image in Xela Arias Darío a diario (1996) when she tells the baby that she is “a gran teta ofrecida” (45). I fumble with buttons, and milk speeds like lightening through my breasts. I fill your mouth with me. (Wyley 2009, 47) Reshaping Mirrors 104 In part 5 of Enda Wyley’s “Diary” the mother contradicts the widespread assertion that babies are most beautiful when they are asleep, perhaps because it is then when the mother is allowed a bit of rest. But the poetic persona tells her child that she/he is most beautiful when she/he is awake and admires the vitality of child, and above all “The deep-cut mark / above your nose / where thinking has begun” (48). The last lines of the poem reassert the mother’s conviction that it was her longing that brought the child home: 5. Most beautiful when you wake, you come to me resisting food as you did sleep hours before, your fingers a web of energy, your face a thousand knots, your skin blotched with the stains of just being alive— the deep-cut mark above your nose where thinking has begun. Oh, so much longing brought you here. (2009, 48) In Enda Wyley’s poem “Little Heart” (2009, 13), which is dedicated to her daughter Freya, the scene depicted suggests a state of mother-child connectedness that may well be inscribed into what Kristeva defines the semiotic stage. The mother explores the body of the child and finds traces of food hidden in the folds of the baby’ skin. The poem plays with the visual image of the infant’s body covered with pieces of strawberries and tuna that does not awake any sense of disgust on the mother. Just the contrary, she sees the corn beads as a necklace that makes the baby more lovable and can awake the sense of taste, as if she were a delicious meal ready to be eaten. In your folds tonight are strawberries to wash away, some knots of tuna netted there, and up along Tying and Untying Bonds 105 your neckline sweet corn beads that make a precious chain. (2009, 13) In the second stanza the sensorial images are the sounds the mother cannot really hear, but she thinks they resonate into the baby’s head as memories of the factual sounds, and she encourages the little heart to go on beating. In your head the dog is barking and the small wall clock is gently ticking, your tongue clicking to its time. Little heart not yet hurt, bear on. (2009, 13) No matter how much the advantages of breastfeeding may be praised, the fact is that there is no definite evidence that the moments of close intimacy and mother-child enchantment cannot be achieved when the mother uses the bottle to feed the baby. We can see how these moments are reflected in Mary O’Donnell’s poem “Survival Tactics” (2006) [1993], and in Eavan Boland’s three sections of “Domestic Interior”, titled “1. Night Feed”, “2. Monotony” and “3. Hymn” (1995, 88-91) [1982]. In O’Donnell’s “Survival Tactics” (2006, 58) we find the poetic voice of the mother describing the moment of feeding the child. The fact that this time the mother is using a bottle does not alter the feeling of intimate connection between mother and child. And the poetic persona shows the surprise she feels before the wisdom the child has acquired during the short span of her life. Wisdom that goes beyond the instinctual need of nourishment, and includes the skills necessary to attract the mother’s attention. The mother feels that, for the baby, sucking is not a trivial task and that she tries to fix her mother’s attention by staring at her with the power of her gaze. In this respect, we find a similar feeling of surprise in Anne Reshaping Mirrors 106 Enright’s first experience of breastfeeding her daughter: “What I remember is how fully human her gaze was, even though it was so new. She seemed to say that this was a serious business, that we were in it together” (44). The poetic persona in O’Donnell’s poem implicitly admits that the instinctual knowledge of the child seems to exceed the experience she has achieved along “half [her] life”: Sucking furiously, her eyes bore through me, unwavering. The kid’s been here before, more experience in her eight weeks than I’ve managed in half a life, knows how to look you straight in the eye without smiling, hedging her bets until hunger pains retreat, the bottle half-empty. (O’Donnell 2006, 58) The importance of the eyes has been stressed among others by Maxson J. McDowell, who draws on the work of Daniel Stern (1985) to affirm that although infant and mother engage each other through all their senses, the eyes play a crucial role in their mutual recognition: “Stern’s model of development suggests why the eyes are important. The mother senses the infant’s inner life in part through the infant’s eyes. Likewise, the infant senses the mother’s inner life in part through the mother’s eyes” (McDowell 2004, 498). Thus, mother and child are not presented as an undifferentiated unity, but as two independent individuals who are learning to know each other. And in this relationship it is not only the mother the one who does the cooing, the baby seems to have an innate knowledge and ability to win the love and attention of adults. Once the feeding has finished, the baby displays “the smile that melts icebergs / raises sea-levels, could / sink the Netherlands /or drown half London / cooing kindness”. The mother makes a humorous use of the overspread fashion of selfhelp books and affirms that the baby has written a treatise about how to win mothers in a previous existence: she ghost-wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People, Tying and Untying Bonds 107 learnt in a previous existence that bees are caught with honey, not vinegar. and so are mothers. (O’Donnell 2006, 58) Anne Enright notes the fact that Eavan Boland’s choice of the bottle instead of the breast in “Night Feed”, “places the poem in the bland modernity of the suburbs” (43) in which Enright grew up, and she writes that she knows what middle-class women were running away from. Enright states that “[a]fter the arrival of infant formula 8 in the fifties, breast-feeding became more of a chosen middle-class activity, but it was still common in the countryside” (43). With bottlefeeding also came the possibility of getting rid of a task that was linked with the animality and sexuality of the mother’s body and had to be hidden, despite the fact that Ireland had, in Enright’s words, “the closest thing to a cow cult outside India” (43). The bottle was a small symbol of the modernity and cleanliness of the suburban women’s lives and with it the disappearance of the disturbing image of the mother’s body. It cannot be denied that it was also a tool that allowed women more freedom. But bottle-feeding is only one aspect of the changes that were taking place in Ireland. More relevant for artistic creation was Boland’s claim for the right to translate women’s experiences —including motherhood— into poetry, as Niamh Nehir, has underlined: “What is significant in this collection is Boland’s repeated association between maternity and poetry and her quiet insistence that the home, the nursery, and even the kitchen, are places where poetry can happen” (2011, 64). Boland’s poem “Night Feed” reflects the moments of closest intimacy we have already found in Wyley and O’Donnell’s poems. The first and second stanzas set the time of the scene that takes place at dawn, when nature is awakening, flowers and birds are preparing themselves to greet the sun and the mother “tiptoe[s]” into the baby’s room to fulfill the daily routine of feeding her. According to Hehir, “[t]his suggests that, for Boland, this is a time of transitions, a place of beginnings, where we are privy to minute transformations, where we savour the interlude before action, the brief reflective meditation before flight” Reshaping Mirrors 108 (Hehir 2011, 64). It is also a time to forget the worries and enjoy the moment that belongs to mother and child. The last verse of the second stanza, the moment when ‘finder is keeper’ (Boland, 88) represents, in Hehir´s words, “a moment when needs are met and desires are satisfied, when something lost is momentarily found” (Hehir 2011, 65). I tiptoe in. I lift you up Wriggling In your rosy, zipped sleeper. Yes, this is the hour For the early bird and me When finder is keeper. (Boland 1995, 88) The third and fourth stanzas describe the surprise of the mother at the intensity of the baby’s sucking and expresses the rotundity of her feeling of fulfillment with the statement: “This is the best I can be / Housewife / To this nursery / Where you hold on, / Dear life” (88). These are the moments when there is nothing that can interfere in her relationship with the child and the mother fully accepts her role as a kind of privilege that allows her to share the beating of life. In the fourth stanza we find again the importance of the child’s eyes in the communication between mother and child, the latter seeming upset once feeding has finished. As the earth is awakening, the moment of enchantment fades away in the same way as the face of the moon fades, stars disappear and mother and child begin their “long fall from grace” (88), when this state of blissful connection will be substituted by a process of separation. The fall from grace suggests the progressive loss of this feeling of communion associated with this paradise-like space of the baby’s bedroom. According to Hehir, “[t]his poem claims a new territory of transcendence with the suggestion that the simple landscape of the nursery, the setting for this night feed, becomes a site of inspiration that nourishes both the needs of the new baby and the poet mother” (Hehir 2011, 65). A silt of milk. The last suck. Tying and Untying Bonds 109 And now your eyes are open, Birth-coloured and offended. Earth wakes. You go back to sleep. The feed is ended. (1995, 88) The atmosphere of intimate closeness between mother and child that pervades “Night Feed” changes in “Monotony” (1995, 89-90). The feeling of intense joy and peacefulness contrasts with the weariness and the doubts about the mother’s role. In “Monotony”, the poetic voice of the mother does not address her daughter but herself in a reflection about the meaning of what being a mother represents for her. The scene takes place again in a time of transition between the busy activities of the day and the restful break the night brings about and it describes a moment when the household chores have almost finished and “[t]he stilled hub / and polar draw / of the suburb / closes in” (89). The mother has not finished her tasks yet and is placed in a transitional space, neither up nor down, but “in the round / of the staircase / [her] arms sheafing nappies”, while in her mind there is a turmoil of doubts and “a well of questions” that perhaps “an oracle” would be able to answer: […] am I at these altars, warm shrines, washing machines, driers with their incense of men and infants priestess or sacrifice? (1995, 89) In contrast to the confident statement expressed in “Night Feed”: “I am the best I can be”, the poetic persona in “Monotony” feels the contradiction between the idealised image of the mother constructed by Catholic and Nationalist ideologies, which placed the mother at the heart of home and at the core of the nation, while the reality was marked by the monotony and tiredness of the Reshaping Mirrors 110 household chores and the undervaluation of women’s traditional functions. The poetic persona asks herself whether she is “the priestess” in this almost sacred realm of the home, or the victim offered in sacrifice to men and children in the “altars” of an ideology for which mothers’ sacrifices, made at “these altars”, were taken for granted. She lets “[her] late tasks / wait like children: / milk bottles, / the milkman’s note” (89), while she looks at the stars for an answer to her questions. One can perceive in the poetic persona a shade of despair at the difficulty of liberating herself from the prosaic household chores so as she can look at the skies in search of the immense possibilities that both nature and old myths can provide her with for her poetic creation: […] will I find my answer where Virgo reaps? Her arms sheafing the hemisphere, hour after frigid hour, her virgin stars, her maidenhead married to force, harry us to wed our gleams to brute routines: solstices, small families. (1995, 89-90) Being the priestess of the home has nothing to do with the epic grandiosity of the myths. In this sense, the mention of Virgo9—the Virgin— not only carries with it the name of the largest constellation in the sky but it also embraces a number of symbolic meanings associated to the ancient Goddess in her twofold aspects of Virgin and mother and their power over nature, as Neumann points out: Tying and Untying Bonds 111 The childbearing virgin, the Great Mother as a unity of mother and virgin, appears in a very early period as the virgin with the ear of grain, the heavenly gold of the stars, which corresponds to the earthly gold of the wheat. This golden ear is a symbol of the luminous son who on the lower plane is borne as grain in the earth and in the crib, and on the higher plane appears in the heavens as the immortal luminous son of night. (Neumann 1972, 317) However, the contrast between Boland’s poetic persona, who is “sheafing nappies” (89) and Virgo, who is “sheafing the hemisphere” (90), represents the distance between myth and reality The last lines of this poem states the difficulty of wedding “gleams” to “brute routines” (90). In “Hymn” (1995, 90-91), the poetic voice of the mother recovers the feeling of intimacy and peaceful acceptance of the sacrifices motherhood entails. Like in “Night Feed” the first stanza sets the scene after dawn, at “[f]our a.m. / December. /A lamb / would perish out there” (90). The image of the lamb recalls the image of Christ who, according to Christian tradition was born in December and was to be the victim offered in sacrifice to redeem humankind, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophesy that said: “he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth” (Isaiah 53, 7). But in the next stanza the mother distances herself from this image of sacrifice because it “has nothing in it / [she] want[s] to follow” (90). She accepts her function of carer and nurturer and admits the importance of the child, as the star around whom her life revolves, but she sets this situation in the everyday life of a suburban landscape: Here is the star of my nativity: a nursery lamp in a suburb window behind which is boiled glass, a bottle and a baby all hisses like a kettle. (1995, 90) Reshaping Mirrors 118 vacilas e recólle-las certezas” (33). She rejects the idea of an undifferentiated mother-child unity. The image of herself she projects is that of a great mother who provides for nurturance and protection for the child and, at the same time, she will be the guide who will prevent him from taking dangerous ways which she does not know exactly where they lead, but she will try to show him “o mais exacto carreiro das estrelas”. This path to the stars is perhaps a symbol of the way she wants her son to follow, the way to a world where everything —creativity, personal autonomy and even utopia— could be made possible. The mother would like to open the mind of her child to the exploration of the whole universe. Non sangue do meu sangue. Non carne da miña carne. Son a gran teta ofrecida, a gran boca que te agarima, a man enorme en recollerte. Hei ser quen che mostre e reña por te dirixir quen sabe a onde, anque coide procurar para ti o máis exacto carreiro das estrelas. (1996, 35) The mother has already assumed that the day will come when her son will say her goodbye, and she hopes that all she will have taught him will enable him to share the world with other people since he will be carrying with him all the love and care and even some of the mother’s sins. The emphasis put in the last word of this section, written in capital letters, plays with different meanings of the word grande in Galician language and underlines the main hope of the mother that her son will be not only big in size, grown up in age but, above all, great: E cando te despidas sabe comparti-lo mundo cos demais. Contigo vai un cacho do meu traballo, tal vez algún pecado, o meu amor todo e por riba ti, sexas cando sexas, GRANDE. (1996, 35) In the next lines the mother summarises the received knowledge she already has about what is good for the baby. She expresses her concern for a healthy physical development of her child as well as for setting the best environmental Tying and Untying Bonds 119 conditions that will facilitate the infant’s acquisition of language but, above all, she asserts her conviction that she will not impose on the child her own vision of the world; her task will be to provide the child with all the stimuli necessary to spur his creativity, so that he will be able to create his own conception of the world: Se andas a gatiñas fórma-la columna e a planta dos pés; Se te alimentas ó meu peito medras san, rexo e forte. Se che falamos con tino, a modo recompós termos e frases. Se a luz non é moi forte descansan os teus ímpetos de neno. Se te-lo ritmo da música has rima-lo aceno dos días. Se estimulado, creara-lo mundo sen que cho impoñan…(1996, 45) The mother makes fun of herself about all the knowledge about education she has shown in the previous lines, but she states that all of that is nothing compared to the new things the baby surprises her with continually: “¡Canto sei! E, sen embargo, / que ananez perante tanta novidade / que ti agasallas a cada instante” (45). And she aknowledges that “hai posible en ser muller un privilexio imposible de transferir” (47). Once again the mother asserts her main aim in the education of her son, contradicting once more the feeling of strong possessiveness all mothers are supposed to have: she wishes him to be the active agent of his development: “Que con cabeza e corazón limpo dirixas, / meu ben, / a orquestra da túa vida” (49). She is perfectly aware that there will be a lot of people who will try to impose on the child’s mind a lot of different sets of “moldes perfectos” (51). Even she, who wants her son to be free, recognises that she will try to model him after or against herself, contradicting her own principles, but she hopes that the son will be able to find his own way, even if it would be difficult for her to accept that the boy did not choose the path she shows him. Reshaping Mirrors 120 Eu mesma que libre te deseño, canto de min por min, de min contra min non tentarei introducir. Que saibas derruí-las marcas e apropiarte, facer teu o aceno, e só aquel que elixas. (1996, 51) The mother’s love for the child will enable her to accept his freedom of choice because she knows that “así se fan / as persoas humanas” (53) and she will be most happy if her son fully achieves the category of a human being. In Luz Pozo Garza’s poem “A meniña Mónica identifica o Rei” (2004, 508509) there is a reference in the first line to Alvaro Cunqueiro’s novel Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes (1969), in which the old myth, rooted in the Trojan wars and developed in Aeschylus’s Orestiada, is reshaped in a way that allows the atemporality of the plot.11 In Cunqueiro’s novel, Egisto and Clitemnestra are waiting for the vengeful Orestes, who wants to take revenge for the murderous death of his father Agamenon. But, despite the deployment of spies, they mistake some foreigners for Orestes while the real one wastes his time delaying his revenge. In this poem, the poetic persona of Luz Pozo Garza addresses her little daughter Mónica asking her to look through the window and see if the King is coming. When the girl tells her that she does not know the King, the answer of the mother creates an atmosphere that echoes that of legends and fairy tales to tell the little girl the signs that will allow her to recognize the king: “Coñeceralo polo arco da neve / pola rola de lume / por canción manifesta…” (508). The girl imagines him like a fairy-tale king on horseback and wearing a crown of diamonds, and asks the mother if he is coming through the portico of dreams. With this question, the girl adopts the world of magic and fantasy her mother is creating for her, a world in which dreams can be fulfilled. The mother reinforces this feeling giving the girl more magical elements that will announce the coming of the King. She will recognise him “polas aves secretas / pola liña do vento / polos ollos fluviais” (508). But in the twelfth line a man appears against the Tying and Untying Bonds 121 light, who does not fit the image of the wonderful King since he is coming “transido de noite / transido de mágoa / transido de amor…” (508) and he is carrying in his hand a book and a blooming piece e of broom. The mother observes that he takes after the girl’s father and claims for him the honours due to his rank because he is their King: Que lle boten axiña unha alfombra de lilas unha ponla de pombas unha palma de luz ¡Ese é o noso Rei! (2004, 509) The broom and the book the father is carrying have a special significance: the broom plant—also known as Scotch broom and Irish broom— is linked in Celtic tradition with the sacred and magic, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it contains a toxic alkaloid called cytisine.12 The brooms made with them were tools commonly used to sweep the house and the ashes of the hearth. But they also had a higher function when used to clean and purify ritual spaces. Besides, brooms have been traditionally associated with witchcraft due to their magical power to fly. Thus, the blooming broom has a powerful evocative sense of connection with old conceptualisations of the sacred and magic which links Galicia with the other Celtic peoples and, at the same time, with the warmth of home. On the other hand, books are tools of culture. They allow us to go beyond the bounds of space and time and nurture our imagination so that we can live in a dimension where everything, magic included, is possible. In this poem it is the mother who nurtures the imagination of the girl and opens her mind so that that she will be able to acknowledge the father and the tools of culture he brings with him. In Sinéad Morrissey’s poem “Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk” (2009, 31), there is a significant difference with the poems we have analysed so far: the poetic persona of the mother does not addresses her child, but adopts the position of a detached observer of the development of her son, trying to guess how he may record and organise his experiences while he is sleeping, and construing her own theory of how the baby is acquiring knowledge through sensory Reshaping Mirrors 122 experiences. In the first line she asserts that “[t]he only places he can dive to are the senses” and, in the next lines, there is not only a description of the images the child has perceived, but she also places herself in a position from which she can experience the world from the child’s perspective and put forward an interpretation of the child’s reactions to these stimuli. Thus, “[t]he Christmas lights his father dangled from the corners / of his ceiling in July are his palimpsest for the world— / a winking on and off of ebullient colour, unnamed and so untamed, / to be committed to memory and then written over” (31). There is also a reflection about language as the element that will introduce order and meaning into the happy chaos of the child’s life for whom the world is still a place to be enjoyed without fear, before the rules and constraints of society, the Lacanian symbolic order, may fall upon him and determine how he will be modelled and fitted into written theories “with the mean-spirited vanishing act of an ink-black horizon” (31): For now the world is simply to be crawled into, like the sea, of which he has no fear, a bubbling, transmogrifying, allattracting mechanism that has not yet disappointed with the mean-spirited vanishing act of an ink-black horizon. (2009, 31) Meanwhile, the child has already explored the potentiality of his senses. He has already discovered the mystery of the tongue as a site to experience pleasant sensations and as a tool to produce sounds, and “that when he opens / his mouth to admit the spoon, anything can happen, / from passion fruit to parmesan,” the sounds of his name, “and the purring / of cats and cars and the howling of dogs and fireworks. / His fingers adjust the tufts of the sheepswool coat / he lies on in his sleep” (31). And the mother concludes that these are the only things the child can dive into, because it would be thrilling to accept that it could be possible to trace back the child’s memories beyond the mother’s womb to “the undiscovered bourne poor Hamlet dreamed / of entering” (31). The reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet [1605] reinforces the fear of the blurring of boundaries between this world and other unknown worlds that may happen in our dreams: “But that the dread of Tying and Untying Bonds 123 something after death / That undiscover’d country from whose bourne / No traveller returns, puzzles the will” (Hamlet act 3, scene 1). All this can only be where he goes—there can be no other possibility— unless we accept that memory begins in the womb or back, still further, in the undiscovered bourne poor Hamlet dreamed of entering without map or compass as a deliverance from the sight of our back garden in September, the apple tree keeled over and cankered and the fuchsia disrobed. (2009, 31) The mother is afraid of what could happen in those places where the child may be drawn by his dreams. She asks herself what will happen “[i]f he ever bombs inside a swimming pool, or deep-sea dives / or moon walks” (31). These are the things on which she has no control and her only hope is that perhaps “he may remember / what it felt like to wake when he was one, and that it was / a slow, alert surfacing towards the morning” (31). The issue of how language develops and knowledge is acquired appears again in Sinéad Morrissey’s “Cathedral” (2009, 53). In this poem, the poetic persona of the mother addresses her son and tells him the preconceived ideas she previously had about how he was going to acquire language, a process in which she was going to have an active role in marking the steps “[a]s though the world were a spiral staircase, / and the order in which you ascend it / already set, I wanted the words / you attempted first to be solid and obvious: / apple, finger, spoon” (53). The mention of the “spiral staircase” reminds us of Alice falling down into the rabbit’s hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). But the mother thinks that her child is not going to descend the staircase but to ascend through it. She will censor the images she does not consider adequate, even some animals in the “baby book”, and will choose those she thinks more appropriate to be introduced to the child: […] The bat hanging like a blister in your drool-proof baby book or the lovesick cricket with its gossamer instrument Reshaping Mirrors 124 we were surely to be held back: until I could explain, until I could build you a zoo of improbable candidates and properly introduce you. (2009, 53) However, the child does not follow the ordered stages the mother expects to and she has to admit that the baby is “too quick” and the process uncontainable, “like panic, there was no stopping it” (53). Language seems to be created by the child at random, out of his own inner and outer experiences and, “in whatever ramshackle order / it made its presence felt” it is as if it “rained down and into” the child like “Catherine Linton’s wine-through-water / dream of the heath and expulsion / from heaven” (53). The mention of Catherine Linton introduces the unconscious, the uncontrollable world of dreams and refers to Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights [1847], in which the character of this name tells Nelly Dean that she had had dreams that changed her ideas: “they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind” (Brönte 1963, 72) [1847]. The mother in “Cathedral” acknowledges that it is impossible for her to control the power of experiences that have the capability of soaking the child like rain: […] I cannot hang a curtain to keep it off. I cannot section it. It is entering via the ear’s aqueduct, every listening second, trickling in to its base equilibrium and carrying with it an image in negative to be absorbed by the brain and stored. (2009, 53) Knowledge and language prove to be able to burst through the narrow limits of the home and of the family and the child surprises his parents when he is able to repeat what he heard from an unknown man and, more shockingly, when he can construct and give utterance to something that expands the boundaries of his seemingly knowable world, opening it to the uncontrollable power of dreams and Tying and Untying Bonds 125 to an imaginative world of his own, as if he had fallen into the rabbit’s hole after all. It is the verification of this that leaves his parents “speechless”: Bah! Humbug! You say, aged two, like the terrible man in the cape with the walking stick you glimpsed in the afternoon, and what we assumed you knew is jolted on its axis; then this: at six o’clock the ghost of a child might come and eat porridge. We are speechless. (2009, 53) The threatening power of dreams to represent our most intimate and unconscious desires and fears appears again in Sinéad Morrissey’s “Through the Square Window” (2009, 32). The poetic persona of the mother describes a nightmare in which the dead are haunting the house and she is terrified of them being after her son. The scene is set in the beautiful landscape of Strangford Lough.13 In the sky above the Lough the clouds “are stacked” like those in Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft, but the stillness of the landscape in Vermeer’s painting does not conceal the threat of rain, which in some of Morrisseys’s poems is a threatening symbol of unknown danger. Thus, the dead, like rain had arrived “to wash the windows of [her] house” (32). The peacefulness of the landscape of the Lough contrasts with the anguish of the mother who feels defenseless to protect both herself and her son against the uncontrollable fears that haunt her dreams and “[t]here are no blinds” (32) to shut out the windows of her house nor those of her mind, so that she can prevent the huge heads of the dead to peer through them: “The heads of the dead are huge. I wonder / if it’s my son they’re after, his / effortless breath, his ribbon of years” (32). However, the daunting appearance of the dead has not affected the child, who “sleeps on unregarded in his cot, / inured, it would seem, quite naturally /to the sluicing and battering and paring back of glass / that delivers this shining exterior…”(32). The sense of mystery is reinforced by another disturbing image: “One blue boy holds a rag in his teeth / between panes like a conjuror” (32). The Reshaping Mirrors 126 image of the blue boy might refer to one of the most popular representations of hand painted traditional pottery of Delft, but it may also refer to Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Jonathan Buttal The Blue Boy (1770), called so because the boy is dressed in blue silk.14 Whatever possibility we consider, it is undeniable that the poem subverts a representation of beauty and innocence transforming it into a menacing image of a boy with a “rag in his teeth”, although he can act as a conjuror and make possible the departure of the dead. Once the dead are gone, the landscape recovers its familiar appearance, although for the poetic persona, waking up from the nightmare does not mean getting rid of her fears. She feels all the anguish accumulated in her body as if she was suffering from “dropsy”,15 but she feels also like the bottle that contains the “herbalist’s cure” for this illness, and her mouth is closed with a cork, in an image that reflects her impotence to cure her anguish and the impossibility of talking about and/or representing these irrational fears. And then, as suddenly as they came, they go. And there is a horizon from which only the clouds stare in, the massed canopies of Hazelbank, the severed tip of the Strangford Peninsula, and the density of the room I find it difficult to breathe in until I wake, flat on my back with a cork in my mouth, bottle-stoppered, in fact, like a herbalist’s cure for dropsy. (2009, 32) 2.5. Conclusion Through the poems analysed in this chapter we have seen mothers’ voices that break the narrow limits of traditional discourses about the mother-child bond, which have represented silent, passive images of a mother embedded in absorbing love with her child. It is true that the mothers in these poems are engaged in a close relationship with their children and that they enjoy this connectedness. However, it is also evident that they see their child as a subject with an identity of his/her own, Tying and Untying Bonds 127 contradicting the widespread theorising of traditional psychoanalysis about the undifferentiated unity of the mother-child dyad that needs to be severed so that the child can achieve his/her own personhood. In this chapter, we have found “thinking mothers” who, not only express love for their children but are also able to reflect about their relationship and want to facilitate their children’s developmental process. In doing so, these poetic personae show an agency that disowns representations of the mother as a passive object of their children’s love and/or hate. Moreover, some of these poems depict maternal functions, like feeding the child, that had been idealised or sublimated, giving representation to ambivalent feelings that reflect the moments of intimacy but also the tiredness of sleepless nights. Reshaping Mirrors 134 took away with her the clearly established assumptions about the kind of issues that could be suitable or acceptable to inscribe into the Irish poem: The national ethos, as it had been allowed into Irish writing, continued to issue certain permissions as to what the poem could be about. You could have a political murder in it, but not a baby. You could have the Dublin hills, but not the suburbs under them. This is a vital point in considering the poem written by the Irish woman poet. The life of the Irish woman —the ordinary, lived life— was invisible and, when it became visible, was considered inappropriate as a theme for Irish poetry. (Boland 2001b, 104) In an interview with Jody Allen Randolph (2007) [1993] Boland observes that “[t]he ordinary lived life of the woman was something which might come into the object-matter of the poem, but couldn’t be imagined as the subjective stance of it” (103). The poem a woman writer was offered had to be “genderless” (103) and the best thing that could be said of a poet’s work was that “you never know it was by a woman” (103). Against this, Eavan Boland reacted claiming her right to put in her poetry her life as a writer, wife and mother of young children living in the suburbia of Dublin. In the poem “It’s a Woman’s World” (1995, 79-80) the female poetic persona explains how women’s lives have hardly changed since prehistoric times; “since a wheel first / whetted a knife” (79), and how women have been relegated to the enclosed domestic space and excluded from history. The speaking voice admits that there have been changes that may have improved people’s lives, but which have not greatly affected those of women: Maybe flame burns more greedily, and wheels are steadier but we’re the same. (1995, 79) With a slight touch of irony, the poetic persona emphasises the fact that the only “milestones” that might have highlighted the lives of women are their “oversights”. Women’s history has been defined by everyday tasks that have maintained them outside historical and cultural development: “living by the lights / Redressing the Balance 135 of the loaf left / by the cash register, / the washing powder / paid for and wrapped” (79). Women’s lives are defined “like most historic peoples” by what-they-are-not, by their absence from the domain of history and culture, by the lack of possibilities of flying high, “by what we never will be” (79): star-gazers, fire eaters. It’s our alibi for all time: as far as history goes we were never on the scene of the crime. (1995, 79) The poetic persona puts at least part of the blame on women themselves who, in the face of some dramatic historical events, “when the king’s head / gored its basket”, they carried on with her domestic tasks and adopted a passive position of spectators: “We were gristing bread / or getting the recipe / for a good soup / to appetize / our gossip” (80). In the next stanzas she laments that the situation has not changed yet. Mothers’ role continues to be a decisive factor in the socialisation of children into traditional values, attracting them like moths to the flame of home, instead of pushing them into the stream of historical changes. Although the poem refers to children, without distinction of gender, it is undeniable that this socialisation has been more decisive for daughters than for sons in the perpetuation of the roles that tied women to the home. The poetic persona laments the absence of written records that can unearth the unwritten women’s lives —something that Virginia Woolf had already underlined in A Room of One’s Own— and laments the lack of reactions to this injustice: It’s still the same. By night our windows Moth our children To the flame Of hearth not history. And still no page Reshaping Mirrors 136 Scores the low music Of our outrage. (1995, 80) And using again irony, which is the pervading tone of the poem, she compares herself —“her mouth / a burning plume”— with another woman she is watching who, although she seems to be absorbed in the contemplation of “the starry mystery”, is “no fire-eater”, but only a neighbour who “is merely getting a breath / of evening air” (80). Eavan Boland has declared that among the many challenges women poets had, and still have, to face, one of the most important is to “disrupt the permissions issued by the tradition of Irish poetry and put their lives—their gardens, their friendships, their washing machines, their vision of the connection between their life and its expression into the Irish poem” (2001, 105). She has done it and there are other women poets who have done it and who are still doing this. She cites Paula Meehan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Medbh McGuckian among the poets whose work she admires. Boland claims that their poems cannot be considered poems written by women about women’s issues and aimed at women readers. On the contrary, she affirms that these poems are primarily “good poems” which “will be read and valued in places where there is no knowledge of the disruption they caused, the balances they upset, the traditional silences they broke” (2001, 105). And she dares to assure that all this will bring a “generous restructuring of context” in Irish Poetry (2001, 105). Eavan Boland has also written extensively on the difficulty of integrating her private self with a personal poetic voice, but she decided to do it and she explained the reason why she did it: “I wanted to prove my life in poetry. And that in turn had to do with the fact that, until then, I couldn’t find my life in poetry. The tradition I knew and the poem I had learned to write didn’t name it” (2007, 107). In “The Women” (1995, 114), the poetic voice describes the happiness of the moment when she can concentrate on her creative powers. The speaking voice of the woman places herself in a kind of liminal time and space which can be seen as a transition between her two identities: The housewife and the woman writer: Redressing the Balance 137 This is the hour I love: the in-between, neither here-nor there hour of evening. The air is tea-coloured in the garden. The briar rose is spilled crepe-the-Chine. (1995, 114) The image of the woman “going up the stairs in two minds” suggests a shifting from the role of a housewife, worried by household duties, to that of the writer who is seeking for time to develop her creativity. As she goes up she is “leaving something behind”. The space downstairs is the place where most of her duties as mother and wife are performed. It could also represent a lower space where undervalued tasks take place, in contrast to the space upstairs, where highly valued creative task are developed. But, significantly, while going upstairs the poetic persona is still carrying things, “cloth or glass”, which belong to her identity as housewife and she has doubts about bringing with her something she “should have left behind”. This line could be understood as the need for the woman poet to leave behind the patterns and issues dictated by male poets and to find her own voice. However, she takes these objects upstairs with her. The poetic voice expresses the instability of identities and the difficulty of separating the two worlds. Moreover, in bringing with her “cloth or glass”, her aim is to integrate her two selves translating into her writing her life as a suburban woman. The poetic persona enjoys the transformation she experiments when she can test her creative powers and a world of infinite possibilities of representation opens up. Therefore, “in the words [she] choose[s]” and “the lines [she] write[s]”, she can weave a tapestry full of images of women that “rise like visions” before her: The hour of change, of metamorphosis, of shape-shifting instabilities. My time of sixth sense and second sight when in the words I choose, the lines I write, they rise like visions and appear to me. (1995, 114) In the following stanzas, the poetic persona describes herself at her desk engaged in an exciting creative task, “testing the water with a sweet quartet, / the Reshaping Mirrors 138 physical force of a dissonance— / the fission of music into syllabic heat”, through which she can render the wide range of women’s images that can be the subject matter of her creation, from ordinary to mythical women: women of work, of leisure, of the night, in stove-coloured silks, in lace, in nothing with crewel needles, with books, with wide-open legs who fled the hot legs of the god pursuing, who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips and fell and grieved and healed into myth. (1995, 114) But creative work is not an easy task and, in the last stanzas, the poetic persona gets “sick” of her struggles with verses and goes downstairs “into a landscape without emphasis, / light, linear, precisely planned, / a hemisphere of tiered, aired cotton,” (114). This going downstairs can be read from two levels of representation: the first one could be the danger for women of a retreat from the strain that creative work demands by seeking refuge in the established domestic roles; the second one would be the difficulty for a woman writer to create new literary imagery and the temptation to go downstairs to the male writers’ traditional female images, where everything “is precisely planned” (114). In “Limits 2” (2001a, 43), Boland represents her own experience as a suburban woman engaged in a routine that, in accordance to the title, sets the limits that encage her in the role of housewife and mother of little children, whose life seems to be determined by the cycles of nature and the domestic tasks associated to them: If there was a narrative to my life in those years, then let this be the sound of it — the season, in, season out sound of the grind of my neighbour’s shears. (2001a, 43) Redressing the Balance 139 Describing her life in the suburbs Boland explains that, in her lexicon, there were “the kettle and the steam, and the machine in the corner and the kitchen, and the baby’s bottle” and that “not to write about them would have been artificial” (2007, 108) since they were inserted in her life. However, in the last lines of “Limits 2”, the beauty of August has for her the “music of limitation” (43) while her landscape seems also reduced to the Dublin hills that delimit the horizon which encases her in a narrative determined by traditional images of homeliness: Of my children sleeping in A simpler world: An iron edge The origin of order. (2001a, 43) The poetic persona in Boland’s poem “Is It Still the Same” (2001a, 47), adopts a detached perspective of an observer of another “young woman who climbs the stairs, / who closes a child’s door, / who goes to her table / in a room at the back of the house?” (47). This scene may refer to any woman’s life but the next lines show the young woman “her head / bent over the page, her hand moving, / moving again, and the hair” (47). The last lines of the poem reveal that the poetic persona is seeing a reflection of herself when she was younger and was trying to find a voice in Irish poetry: I wrote like that once. But this is different: This time, when she looks up, I will be there. (2001a, 47) These last lines condensate Eavan Boland’s evolution as a woman writer. They can summarise her personal development from a position of the young writer who tried to make her way into Irish verse, to the perspective of a mature writer that knows that she has helped to place the Irish woman’s life into the Irish poem. Boland’s poem “Suburban Woman: Another Detail” (2001a, 48) can be read as the feeling of nostalgia tinged with guilt that a woman writer expresses because, while she is writing at her desk, another woman is caring for her little daughter. This is a situation that working mothers can easily understand, as well as the Reshaping Mirrors 140 sensation that your work is depriving you of living in depth some special moments of connection with your child: Here at my desk I imagine wintry air and the smart of peat. And an uncurtained front room where another woman is living my life. Another woman is lifting my child. Is setting her down. Is cutting oily rind from a lemon. Is crushing that smell against the skin of her fingers. (2001a, 48) However, the poem can also be understood as the metaphor of the difficulty of melting the identities of mother and woman writer, as if these identities belonged to different people who are living different lives. The poetic persona emphasises the ownership of the spaces and the child, as if she were trying to reassure and hold tight her identity: “The kitchen, / the child she lifts again and holds / are all mine: / and all the time / the bitter, citric fragrance stays against her skin” (48). The poem is open-ended because the woman-mother puts herself and the child out of reach of the woman-writer: “She stares at the road / in the featureless November twilight. / Stares for a moment at / the moon which has drained it. / Then pulls the curtains tightly shut. / And puts herself and my child beyond it” (48). 3.3. “Let me be. / There is much / I am starving for” (Eithne Strong 1993, 22) In the front cover illustration of Representations of Motherhood (Bassin et al. 1994), taken from an advertising campaign in the 1940s, it can be seen how the characters of mother and child are reversed. A huge toddler looks at his tiny infantilised mother sitting in a swing with an attitude that looks more like that of Redressing the Balance 141 an authoritative father controlling his daughter. Commenting this picture in their “Introduction” to the book, Bassin, Honey and Kaplan observe how this image can be representative of the feelings “that mothers, especially mothers in isolated nuclear families, often have: the baby is in charge, controlling time and space”. “It is as if he belonged there, as if making demands, dominating, keeping her in her place, doing what pleases him were his right” (1994, 1). Basin Honey and Kaplan affirm that this image subverts the idealised vision of the all-powerful, all-giving mother who provides all the care her defenceless child needs. Instead of this, the picture shows the reaction of the mother as “a mixture of apprehension, intimidation, curiosity and helplessness”, which “suggests the horror of the mother dominated by her child” (1994, 1). Drawing on the sociological analysis of Jessie Bernard (1974), Bassin, Honey and Kaplan underline the fact that Bernard was one of the first feminist critics that explored “the tension between the image of the all-giving mother and the actual lives of women” (1994, 3). Bernard denounced that the Victorian invention of the nurturing, self-sacrificing, ever-patient mother is an image that has not been suitable for women for decades: Bernard, pointing to women’s entry into the workplace, called for a balance between work and family within women’s lives and for shared parenting as ways of moving beyond stereotypical views of motherhood. She celebrated rebellion against maternal myths and found that women of all classes had dared to say that “although they love their children, they hate motherhood”. (Bassin et al.1994, 3) The division of experience between women’s professional career and her motherhood had already been expressed by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born. When asked why she did not write poems about her children as many male poets did, she answered that for her, “poetry was where [she] lived as no-one’s mother, where [she] existed as [herself]” (1986, 31). Eithne Strong is an Irish woman poet who has integrated her life and her art into most of her poems. In “O Magnificent Why”, her introduction to Eithne Strong’s Spatial Nosing. New and Selected Poems (1993b), Mary O’Donnell Reshaping Mirrors 142 writes: “A poet’s relationship with words and her relationship with life are inseparable. The technique reflects the vision, the vision reflects the technique, and as we live, we write” (O’Donnell 1993b, unpaginated). Strong, who bred nine children and developed a career as a writer, has reflected on the difficulty of trying to find time to write while attending the unending tasks of mothering.10 In her autobiographical account, “Married to the Enemy” (My Self, My Muse, 2001), she narrates the family break she had to endure because of her marriage to the nonCatholic Englishman Rupert Strong and the subsequent decision of not having their children baptised in the Catholic faith. With her behaviour she rebelled against the imposed image of the faithful Catholic mother who humbly accepts to breed children to achieve eternal glory. On the contrary, she challenges the traditional Irish morality, which ignores or denies women’s sexual needs, and asserts openly her sexual desire, admitting that both she and her husband were neither good “in restraining delights of fleshly rioting” (2001, 88) nor were they very enthusiastic about artificial birth control. Consequently, she recognises that their children are the result of what she calls the “tyranny of the orgasm” (88). She accepts with responsibility the consequences of both her husband and her bodily pleasures. “Everything carries its price. The little babies, poor little scraps, did not ask to be born—one with brain damage. Clearly my first responsibility was to them” (88). However, she was deeply convinced that she had been born to write and she affirms that she never renounced her project of becoming a poet. Strong describes her difficulties and the lack of continuity in her writing. In “Married to the Enemy” (2001, 88), she admits that she knew “times of discouragement at the paucity of opportunity” as well as “frustration in this regard, impotence, fierce resentment” (88). On little slips of paper were often jotted ideas as they sprang in the midst of imperative tasks. The slips got thrust into a drawer, to be worked on, I hoped, at a future point. That point frequently had to wait a long period, years sometimes. I was quite certain the children—in all there would be nine— were my priority. (88) Redressing the Balance 143 In a time and a society in which the ideological constructed image of the perfect, nurturing and self-sacrificing mother was still deeply rooted, it must have been shocking that a nine children’s mother tried to fight her corner in the male dominated Irish literary tradition. It is easy to imagine the difficulties she had to face. Moreover, she translated some of her experiences into her poems, and this was something rather unusual, since real women’s experiences with their children were considered matters which belonged to the private sphere of the home and not suitable issues that could be inserted into Irish verse. However, Strong’s poems delve deep into a wide range of women’s experiences, highlighting the injustices of a man-made culture, as Mary O’Donnell has noticed: Diversity of thought and impulse makes these poems radiate humanity, belief and a revelatory sense of justice. The inequities of human relationships is something this poet is particularly adept at exploring, and none too gently either, with flesh locked between the teeth as she tears back to the bone. (O’Donnell 1993b, unpaginated) The struggle between Strong’s role as a mother of nine children and her need of fulfillment as an individual is reflected in “Statement to Offspring” (1993b, 22) [1974]. The poetic voice of the mother reassures the children that they are her priority and she could never leave them because they are part of her flesh. The first line tries to state this clearly and she leaves no space for doubt: Look, I’ll never leave you, issue of my bone: inside the marrow’s marrow tissue I am true no matter what. (1993b, 22) But she needs room to breathe and to build her own identity as a separate individual. She assumes the implications of being her children’s birthgiver and remembers that she has given them “sweat and pain” and “breaking labour”. But, at the same time, she claims her right to seek her own personal fulfillment and she firmly asserts that she is not going to be their slave and allow them to suck her later life. As Haberstroh points out: “Motherhood can sometimes seem like slavery […] and mothers are entitled to the same space and nourishment they give to their Reshaping Mirrors 246 Pichel’s “Letreiro para labrar na pedra do lavadoiro” (29) is a poem that condenses in the Haiku structure a whole story of desolation. A little girl is crying while she is washing clothes and the coldness of the place emphasises the sorrow and loneliness of the girl, who cannot find a loving face that can comfort her. The only face she can see is her own, reflected at the bottom of the washing place. Frio na fonte. A nena lava e chora. Vese no fondo. (2006, 29) In “letreiro para colgar no cobertizo cando non quede nada alí” (31) the repetition, with slight variations, of the line “durmirei ao quente” expresses the longing for the warmth of the maternal body, which can provide for shelter and refuge against the hardness of life. The non-presence of a maternal figure is stressed when the poetic voice states the possibility of sleeping in the dog pound or in the henhouse because all of them are warm places and she envies calves, because they can come near their mothers and sleep in the warmth. She considers that even those colts which die are luckier than she is because they can sleep in the warm belly of the earth. Se me deito no cocho do can durmirei quente. Se coubese no niño das pitas durmiría ao quente. Os becerros achéganse á nai e dormen ao quente. Os poldros que morren dormen ao quente. (2006, 31) As I have said above, the absent maternal figure can be replaced by a motherly father. Thus, in most poems of Luz Pichel’s Casa pechada, the image of the father is endowed with the tenderness and homeliness traditionally assigned to the mother. In “Dóeme esta man” (38), the daughter shows her father the wounds Inflicting and Healing Wounds 247 in her hand and complains to him about the physical pain she feels, which is the consequence of hard toil in the fields, as well as about the more undefined pain caused by unfulfilled hope and desire, symbolised by the moon in the brook whose reflection, very much like the memory of the absence-presence of the mother, she is not able to wash away: Dóeme esta man, papá, a de apretar os caldeiros e o sacho, a de arrancar as millás que afogan o millo e secan sen dar nada, […] Dóeme a man de fregar a lúa no regueiro, papá, mira as feridas. (2006, 38) In “O museo dos cestos que fixo o papá” (17), the poetic persona of the daughter is lovingly gathering the tools her father used and the baskets he made in order to make a museum with them. She wants to preserve the memory of the father as well as the traces of the life that was lived there and she is reluctant to discard the baskets his father did not sell as if, by throwing them away, she would be betraying his memory. Vou facer no sitio do curro o museo do cesto, papá, para que veña a xente e diga ata cestos sabía facer o rei do pan de trigo. Como levar ao colector do Concello os cestos que ti nunca tiraches nin vendiches na feira? (2006, 17) In the fact that it is the father the one who weaves baskets and sells them at the local fair, we can find not only a change of roles for an activity usually performed by women, but also a link with the prehistoric Great Mother or Great Goddess and the sacred character of pottery-making and vessel-making, as Erich Neumann (1972) [1963] and Robert Briffault (1969), observed. Neumann affirmed that the function of shelter and preservation “was incumbent on woman” and was ascribed to the “elementary Feminine character” (1972, 284). He stresses the Reshaping Mirrors 248 crucial importance of activities like weaving, binding and knotting in the creation of a shelter, as well as those closely related to the clothing of the body, such as preparation of animal skins to obtain leather and all the processes necessary to obtain thread from bast or leaves. Not less important were those activities such as weaving baskets and making pots of clay, since these containers were necessary for gathering food and transporting water. Moreover, they were essential for the storing of food and played a decisive role in the development of agriculture and culture: These instruments of preservation are important for another aspect of feminine domination that is of critical importance for the development of culture, namely, the storing of food. This first measure to stave off hunger from the group when the hunt failed proved to be the foundation of property. The “stores” belonged beyond any question to the women, whose domination was thus enhanced. (Neumann 1972, 284) Adrienne Rich admits that she is prejudiced against the symbolic connection of women with containers, developed among others by Erik Erikson (1968), since it entails a lot of old associations that have shaped a constructed female identity as passive, “receptive” (97) and as a “receptacle” (97). Rich adds that, the fact that many little girls like playing with dollhouses and some boys do not, would justify for patriarchy the allocation of woman’s place and role. She rejects the widespread ideology that affirms that “[w]oman’s place is the ‘inner space’ of the home; woman’s anatomy lays on her an ethical imperative to be maternal in the sense of masochistic, patient, pacific: women without children are ‘unfulfilled’ ‘barren’ and ‘empty’ women” (Rich, 1986, 97). However, Rich agrees with Neumann and Briffault on the importance of the transformative character of the feminine: “The potential improvement and stabilization of life inherent in the development and elaboration of pottery-making could be likened to the most complex innovations of a technological age” (Rich, 97). Inflicting and Healing Wounds 249 In this way, the image of the father who appears in most poems of Luz Pichel’s Casa Pechada, is a maternal figure that can be endowed with some characteristics that have been traditionally assigned to female identity. 5.3. Representations of Home as an Ambivalent Space In her essay “Being and Doing” (1971), Nancy Chodorow drew on the work of some anthropologists like Margaret Mead (1949) Herbert Barry, Margaret Bacon and Irving Child (1959), as well as that of Beatrice and John Whiting (1968), and she came to the conclusion that, although the gathering of data and the methodology employed in this cross-cultural research may be subject to criticism it showed that “there are no absolute personal differences between men and women” (260), and that the characteristics assigned to each sex in one culture may be the reverse in another culture. According Barry, Bacon and Child, the expectations about the behaviour of male and female children are closely related to the economic activities that determine the subsistence of the family and the division of work within it. In “Family Structure and Feminine Personality” (1989) [1974], Chodorow reflects on how the structure of the family determines the socialisation of the female child and is at the basis of the construction of a feminine identity. In her essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” (1974) Sherry B. Ortner analyses the historical, economic and social elements that may explain the construction of male and female identities and the reasons that might have led to an identification of woman with nature and man with culture, with the consequent devaluation of woman. Ortner agrees with Chodorow in that the differences between feminine and masculine personality “are not innate or genetically programmed; they arise from nearly universal features of family structures” (Ortner, 81). Among these structures, she underlines women’s responsibility for child rearing and caring, which is reinforced by the differences in male and female role training. It is undeniable that children of both sexes are socialised by the mother in early infancy and that boys and girls develop a personal identification Reshaping Mirrors 250 with their mothers. However, boys “must ultimately shift to a masculine role identity, which involves building identification with the father” (Ortner, 1974, 82). Since the father is not usually the one who stays at home and is not involved in child rearing and family caring, this identification with the father is an “identification with father’s male role as a collection of abstract elements, rather than a personal identification with father as a real individual” (Ortner, 82). The identification with the father also implies the assimilation of certain social rules so that the son can find his place in the world outside home. Ortner also agrees with Chodorow (1974) and Rosaldo (1974) when explaining the different formation of the girl´s identity. For a young girl, the early personal identification with the mother does not require a change and “can persist in the process of learning female role identity” (Ortner, 82). In contrast to a boy, “learning to be a woman involves the continuity and development of a girl´s relationship to her mother, and sustains the identification with her as an individual” (Ortner, 82). She does not need to go out to learn externally defined roles because she finds at home the model of the mother as well as the roletraining activities necessary to shape her personality. Chodorow asserts that: Feminine identification is based not on fantasied or externally defined characteristics and negative identification, but on the gradual learning of a way of being familiar in everyday life, and exemplified by the person (or kind of people — women) with whom she has been most involved. It is continuous with her early childhood and attachments. (1989, 52) [1974] However, Chodorow admits the complexity of sex-role development of girls in modern technological advanced societies. Girls have had access to school and have achieved a preparation that allows them to take active social roles and develop a range of skills that were considered exclusive of men’s realm. However, Chodorow observes that this schooling is often been considered a “pseudotraining” that should not “interfere with the much more important training” (1989, 55) of a feminine identity that will prepare the woman to be a “wife and mother, which is embedded in the girl’s unconscious development and which her mother teaches her in a family context where she is clearly the salient parent” (1989, 55). Inflicting and Healing Wounds 251 Both Chodorow and Ortner agree on the fact that this role training at home will prepare the girl for the caring and nurturing her children as well as the other members of the family, which will perpetuate the persistence of these feminine roles. This personal identification with the mother and the female group in the enclosed domestic space has created abundant images of home as a warm shelter presided by a caring protective mother, though they are sometimes an idealisation of a reality that often disavows this image of blissful happiness. The house has also been the site of oppression for daughters who wanted to rebel against the imposed feminine roles and were, sometimes, the mute witnesses of the violence exerted against women and children. In this section, we will find attractive images of home in Lupe Gomez’s Fisteus era un mundo (2001), as well as in some parts of the long poems of Marta Dacosta (1998), Anne Hartigan (1991) and Jessie Lendennie (2001) that I have analysed in previous chapters and sections. I will also comment some poems of Jessie Lendennie (2001), Paula Meehan (2000), (2003) and Eavan Boland (2007), which are the counterpoint of this idealisation of the home. They show helpless daughters who witness or are victims of domestic violence, as well as powerless mothers who cannot protect their daughters from the violence exerted on them and, sometimes, help to maintain the situation of oppression. I will finally analyse the rebellion of the daughter against the imposed domestic role in some poems of Marilar Aleixandre (1999), (2003). The ambivalence of the domestic space can sometimes be found within the same poem. Thus, in contrast with painful scenes of violence evoked in some sections of Lendennie’s “Daughter” (2001), we also find warm memories of a domestic scene, such as washing the children, which closes the mother’s daily tasks: “Emma’s mother pushed her sleeves up further and rubbed the last child thoroughly. The round tin tub creaked with the struggling, the laughing” (22). In Marta Dacosta’s Setembro (1998), the warm atmosphere of the kitchen is the place where the little girl gets immersed in a female world with the Reshaping Mirrors 252 ambivalence of meaning that this space has: on the one hand, doing the tasks of cooking creates a feeling of solidarity among women and provides for a favourable atmosphere to share intimate feelings and secrets: “Co aceite poñíamos segredos, / palabras, conversas, / e a pota rebentaba fervendo de impaciencia” (47). On the other hand, the kitchen is the heart of a private female world, where daughters have been socialised in order to follow the roles of wives and mothers and perpetuate their confinement at home. The poetic persona explains the monotony of the tasks and routines of the work in the kitchen and the feeling of impotence because long years of toil result in nothing. Women have been fighting a battle against this undervalued domestic work whose importance for the family’s welfare has never been appreciated: “E así un día e outro foron facendo costra, / tixolas, cazos, potas, / non houbo nunca auga que arrastrara eses anos,/ nin xabón que varrera tanto empeño diario (47). In Lupe Gómez Fisteus era un mundo (2001), the happy memories from childhood of the girl protagonist and the more critical point of view of the adult woman are so closely intertwined in the narrative voice that, sometimes, they could be seen as contradictory, though this apparent contradiction derives precisely from the two different perspectives. Thus, the daughter can verify the consequences of patriarchal ideology and speaks with the conviction that “ser muller na aldea era como andar espida pola rúa. Era algo salvaxe. Era algo difícil”, and that, on the whole, “mandaban máis os homes” (Gómez 2001, 100). We can see an example of these seemingly opposing feelings in the attitude that the daughter shows towards her mother’s work. On the one hand, the girl expresses a feeling of exultant identification with her mother presiding the warm atmosphere of the kitchen: “Na paisaxe da lareira estaba miña nai facendo queixos” (20). Making cheese is, according to Neumann, an essential part of the transformative character of the feminine, —the ability to transform raw material into food that could be stored— and was crucial for the survival of the family. The little girl observes with admiration her mother’s work enjoying this instant of close intimacy with her. She sees her as a powerful lady despite her wearing rags: “Aquela dama Inflicting and Healing Wounds 253 vestida con farrapos tiña a arte de facer ben os queixos. Eu non o vía como un traballo, eu víao como unha arte. Eu sentaba no banco. Ela no tallo. E mirabámonos. Nai e filla mirándose. Era o amor” (20). On the other hand, the adult narrator is well aware of the hardness of her mother’s life: “No corpo e na alma da miña nai hai moitos esforzos, moitos traballos, moita alegría, moito cansazo. Traballar era o único que se facía en todo o día. Tanto traballo impedía falar, sentir, pensar. Impedía cousas como dialogar” (105). We can find another example of the warmth of this enclosed female world of the kitchen in “Growth”, (Hartigan 1991, 42). This poem presents the kitchen as the only place where the newly married woman, who has been separated from her own female group, can find refuge from the hardships of an imposed marriage. She feels welcomed in this space where women had worked before her and where she can find a substitute for the loss of her own family: “Memories of women / Cling to this house, / With them I laugh in the kitchen / Where brown crocks gleam / With white milk / Down in the dairy / Gold treasures of butter” (42). In Jessie Lendennie’s “Daughter” we find two scenes that present a powerless mother unable to protect the daughter from the violence of the father. Following the pattern I described in the previous section, in the first lines of each poem the poetic persona describes first, in italics, the scene as it is experienced in Emma’s mind. Thus, in the first poem, the poetic voice says that “she / lay in the dark in images of the dark” (23) and then there is a direct description of the brutality of the corporal punishment the father is inflicting on Emma before her terrified mother. Emma sobbed as the belt cut her, making a sharp noise through the air. She tried to run from her father, to where her mother stood white-faced, hands clasped. (2001, 23) In the second poem, the apparently domestic peaceful atmosphere is disturbed by the threat of a danger that is revealed in the attitude of Emma’s mother. The lines in italics belong to Emma’s inner world where the silence of the Reshaping Mirrors 254 night is disturbed by threatening images of a storm that is premonitory of the danger that haunts her: She thought of the silence, the darkness of the storm; Dark with the edge of winter light. Ice like the hardness At the edge of the winter sky. (2001, 24) The poem follows with the narration of the way Emma is awaken by her presumably drunken father who brings her a parakeet he has won in the fair. Emma feels how “the smell of her father enveloped her” while she takes in her hands the agonising bird, which is “skinny, a faced blue-green, dying”. Despite his insistence on affirming that he has won the parakeet for her, Emma is frightened by her father’s swaying and the presence of the alert mother in the doorway suggests that Emma’s fear of her father is not an irrational one, but the result of the violence she has suffered: “She felt the dead weight of the bird; looked past / her father, saw her mother hesitating in the / doorway” (24). Emma’s fear of her father is so deeply ingrained that every attempt of her father to regain her is destined to die, like the bird. Domestic violence is also present in Paula Meehan’s poems “The View from Under the Table” (2000, 12) and “Thunder in the House” (2000, 20-21). In these poems there is a significant difference with those of Jessie Lendennie commented above. The mothers in Meehan’s poems are not just the passive powerless women who cannot protect their daughters, but the transmitters of patriarchal ideology and active agents in the violence exerted on the daughters, a violence of which they are probably victims as well. In “The View from Under the Table (2000, 12) the little girl takes shelter from a scene of domestic violence under the kitchen table. The enclosed space limited by the table and the tablecloth isolates her in the larger space of the kitchen, creating the illusion of a small home in which she can feel safe. But she cannot avoid watching the scene that takes place outside her refuge and decides to take this place as a privileged position from which she can see the play that is running in the room, in the hope that “the table itself kept the sky from falling” (12). But there is no possibility of detachment for Inflicting and Healing Wounds 255 her: “I was the audience. Listen to me laughing. Listen / to me weeping. I was a child. What did I know?” (12). When the storm ceases only the grandmother sees her and gives her the warmth and love that can transform the kitchen into a home. However, the girl is unable to tell the grandmother what frightens her and this reveals a fact that has helped to perpetuate domestic violence: the silence of the victims, who cannot articulate their suffering, because they feel that it would be like a betrayal of their parents, as well as the incapability of close relatives to see or admit this reality. When her grandmother asks her, the poetic persona in this poem prefers to give an easier explanation for her fear saying that she is afraid of the shadows that chase her all around the house. Telling the grandmother that she was afraid of the different kinds of ghosts that are “waiting to snatch [her]” (12) seems a plausible justification for her fear, because ghosts are, after all, part of popular folklore and children are told that most evils come from otherworldly bad beings. Out, she’d say. Out. And up on her lap the smell of kitchen and Sleep. She’d rock me. She’d lull me. No one was kinder. What ails you child? I never told her. Not one word would cross my lips. Shadows I’d say. I don’t like the shadows. (2000, 12) In this poem there is a change of roles in the Demeter-Persephone plot, since it is the daughter the one who is worried about her mother, lost in the rain. The poetic persona shifts in time and seems to be split into two conflicting feelings: on the one hand, she is the adult woman who reproaches the mother for being the transmitter of patriarchal violence “with her big words” (12), as well as an active agent of repression through “her belt and her beatings” (12). On the other hand, she can recall her mother’s “young face” (12) and can imagine the sadness and loneliness of the mother and revive the longing for the mother she experienced when she was four years old. Somewhere, elsewhere, my mother was sulking in the rain. I call up her young face. Who did she think she was with her big words Reshaping Mirrors 262 house because she does not want to follow the pattern of daughterhood, by which daughters were supposed to substitute their mothers and accept the task of being the carers and nurturers of the family. Closing the house implies that she is looking for fulfillment in the public sphere. In this poem, the daughter asks herself why it has to be she, as one of five offspring, the one who maintains the fire of the hearth alight. In her rebellion, she announces that she will sweep the ashes of the hearth —an action that will frighten away the ancestral spirits of the family and, consequently, will definitely close the history of the house. Paradoxically, it was the father, “reading book after book”, who planted in the children “wind seeds” (18). varrer as cinzas no lar morrerá o lume prendido hai catro séculos e non vou recoller o tizón caído da túa man pai á noite varrerei as cinzas aída que escorrente as ánimas dos antepasados se a cheminea cala as súas palabras de fume gritando en silencio a soidade de casa non me tomes a requesta ¿por que a min de cinco irmáns? (2003, 17) On the one hand, we can identify a feeling of nostalgia for a place and time long gone conveyed in the silent cry of the fireplace, which symbolises the centre of family life. However, the poetic persona in “varrer as cinzas” will not take the burning stick that fell from her father’s hand and will not keep alive the fire of a home that has been lit for four centuries. She does not accept the role of a dutiful daughter who confines herself to the responsibility of sustaining the home while her brothers go away. On the contrary, she remembers how it was the father himself who, with his fondness of books, sowed the seeds of wind that would take Inflicting and Healing Wounds 263 the children away from home: “na cociña que o lume non quece / aínda bate o eco da túa voz / lendo libro tras libro plantando / en nós / semente de vento” (2003, 18). 5.4. Rebellions In the previous section we saw a demystification and rejection of domestic roles by daughters who adopt a critical stance against the position of subordination of their mothers. In this section we are going to analyse some poems from Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya (2000), Luisa Castro’s Baleas e baleas (1988), Anne Hartigan’s To Keep the Light Burning (2008) as well as from Marilar Aleixandre’s Catalogo de velenos (1999) and Desmentido a primavera (2003), in which the poetic voices of daughters go one step further in open rebellion against their mothers’ control over them to prevent them from leaving the trodden path of patriarchal roles. These poems range from the adolescent’s discovery of sex, which must be hidden from her mother, to the position of adult daughters who reject the image of the mother as a mirror of positive identification and claim their right to get rid of the constrictive rules established for women. In most of these poems their rebelliousness is directed against their mothers since they have been important agents in the transmission of patriarchal rules and values. However, there is a significant difference between Meehan’s poem ”On Poetry” (2000, 5558), which represents the rejection of the idealisation of an all-powerful mother and the more personal, intimate rebellion we find in Castro’s, Aleixandre’s and Hartigan’s poems. Paula Meehan’s “On Poetry” engages with the difficulty for a woman writer to find her way into the Irish literary repertoire, which is pervaded by the iconography of Mother Ireland and it reflects the poetic persona’s rebellion against the use of symbols which do not relate to real women’s lives. The poem consists of three sections: “Virgin” “Mother” and “Whore”. Laura Lojo points out that “éstas no son conceptualizaciones disociadas, sino que más bien corresponderían a la Reshaping Mirrors 264 evolución del yo poético como mujer y como escritora” (2008, 51). In the first part, “Virgin” (55), the poetic persona looks back at the young woman she was once and remembers something that happened when “one particular moon snared in the willows” (55). In this memory she links the experience of pleasure of her first love encounter —which had taken place “earlier that day in the abandoned garden” (55)— with the pleasure and the hope of translating all her experiences into her poetic creation: “a notebook beside me with girl poems in it / and many blank pages to fill” (55). These blank pages on which all the memories of her life will be recorded: “and let there be a rose and the memory of its thorn / and a scar on my thigh where the torn had ripped” (55). The last lines of the poem cast a shadow on the fulfillment of this hope: “And let me be peaceful / for I wasn’t. / Not then, not for many moons after” (55). The mention of the moon and its association with the menstrual and reproductive cycles, hints at a non desired pregnancy that may cut short the young woman’s expectations. The uneasiness of the young woman about her biological procreative power also symbolises the doubts about her creative capabilities. In “Mother” (2000, 56-57), we can find several layers of meaning which range from a personal rebellion of a daughter against the mother to a rejection of the nationalist construction of the image of Mother Ireland as a mirror of traditional motherhood. In Meehan’s poem, the poetic persona of an angry Persephone casts a ferocious tirade against an image of Demeter who embodies for her all the bad attributes of a devouring mother: “mother you terrorist / muck mother mud mother / you chewed me up / you spat me out / mother you devourer / plucker of my soul bird / mammal self abuser / nightmatrix huntress” (56). The Goddess mother depicted here has more in common with the powerful mother, who sees herself as a jealous “old witch” and watches the “beautiful gazelle”, in Eithne Strong’s “Mother and Daughter” (1993b, 4-5), a poem that has already been analysed in chapter four. The reference to calendars and the locking of the grain brings the image of an angry Demeter who does not want to allow the earth its fruit unless Persephone returns, and, at the same time, the “ticking off moon days” (56) is a Inflicting and Healing Wounds 265 clear reference to the menstrual cycles that determine the woman’s procreative powers, thus highlighting one of the main issues of mothers’ oppression: the fear of the consequences of their daughter’s sexuality. The diatribe of this rebellious Persephone is aimed at contradicting some of the key elements of the ideology of motherhood and goes against the whole society that tries to perpetuate the identification of woman to nature, while nature is being destroyed and even the maternal milk is contaminated with strontium.10 Thus, the mother is not the tender nurturing being whose realm is the home; she becomes the symbol of the house as a place of imprisonment of her daughter’s desire and freedom. Even her breasts cannot provide healthy milk for her children anymore: “mother house and tomb / your two breasts storing / strontium and lies / when you created time” (56). The poetic persona endows this mother with the attributes of the great ancient Goddesses. She acknowledges her as the supreme creator of universe as well as the origin of all the major achievements of humanity: mother you created plenty you and your serpent consort you and your nests you and your alphabets mother your pictographs your mandalas your runes your inches your seconds your logic your grammar. (2000, 56) The mention of the “serpent consort” (56) makes reference to the snake as a symbol that is, in Neumann’s words, “universal and polyvalent”, with a “hybrid nature” (1972, 144). It allows for a wide range of areas of meaning, but it frequently appears as feminine, connected to the goddesses in Greek, Roman and Egyptian representations as well as in India. The snake is associated with it in a subordinate role. Like the male and phallic element, it appears as a part of the Feminine or as its companion. Thus the snake in Crete and India is an attribute of the female deity, and is at the same time her male-phallic companion. (Neumann, 1972, 144). Reshaping Mirrors 266 The poem goes on describing the mother wearing a “necklace of skulls”, which brings forth the image of the Indian Goddess Kali who represents not only the creative force of nature but also its all-consuming destructive power. A creator “who calls into being / by uttering the name / mater logos metric” (Meehan, 25), but also the Terrible Mother who exacts bloody sacrifices, whose devotional image has been described by Heinrich Zimmer, in “The Indian World Mother”, as “dressed in blood red, standing in a boat floating on a sea of blood” (1968, apud Neumann 1972, 152). Despite the distance in time and place between Indian and Irish traditions, they are closely related according to Barbara Walker (1983), who draws on the work of Merlin Stone (1976), Arthur Avalon (1978) and Austine Wadell (1972) and asserts the similarity between the threefold aspects of the Great Goddess.11 Thus, there is in Meehan’s poem a connection with the mythography of Mother Ireland, which was promoted by nationalism as an element necessary to shape national identity, so that it could be opposed to that of imperial Britannia. This myth still influences, as Anne Fogarty observes, “the ways in which femininity is construed in the country today” (2002, 87). It adopts three different representations: the young maiden, the old crone and, more relevant for this work, the “melancholic mother who demands unceasing sacrifice and devotion from her children and is herself defined by an unswerving propensity to self-immolation” (Fogarty 2002, 87). In this context, the poetic persona in Meehan’s poem rebels against the nationalist construction of a Mother Ireland that has justified the bloodshed and imposed a model of motherhood completely disconnected from the reality of mothers and daughters. In the last stanzas we find the expression of contradictory feelings in the daughter: on the one hand, after venting her rage, she wants the Goddess to recognise her as her breed: “old cow I’m your calf” (56), on the other hand, there is a gradual softening of her anger that gives way to the expression of regret for the loss of the mother. The last lines reflect the death of this powerful mother who is buried under a “granite headstone” (57). Killing the metaphorical mother may be a necessary step for women writers to achieve Inflicting and Healing Wounds 267 independence and maturity, but it is undeniably a loss and so it is expressed with the weeping of the daughter in the last line. mother fetishist heart breaker forsaker and fool in the pouring rain mother I stand over your grave and your granite headstone and I weep. (2000, 56-57) In the third part of the poem, “Whore” (58), the poetic persona tells us that she learnt the value exchange of female sexuality very early and decided to take advantage of it instead of wasting it by accepting the constraints a repressive society puts on women. Thus, she chose to profit from sex and “be cute, be wized / up and sussed, commodify the fun” (58). She adopts a critical stance against marriage as a contract of property on females’ bodies and the tricks women have to use in order to enter into this market. She rejects “the way the goodwives/girlfriends did / pretending to be meek and do as bid / while closemanaging their menfolk” (58) and she affirms that “it wasn’t right” (58). This rebellion against the meekness and submission of wives and girlfriends can be seen as well as a metaphor of the rejection of the images of women that have been traditionally used in poetry. The tone of the poem changes in the last stanzas in which the poetic persona addresses the reader as a witness of her decay: “See me now — / I’m old and blind and past my sexual prime / and it’s been such a long and lonely time / since I felt fire in my belly” (58). However, like the ancient Goddess who married a young husband, the poetic persona still waits for the young boy who will kindle “the spark that wakes the body into dance” (58), and will allow her a new incarnation. Laura Lojo observes that this triad of “Virgin”, “Mother” and “Whore” “expresa la evolución sexual, psicológica y poética de un sujeto femenino hasta alcanzar Reshaping Mirrors 268 conocimiento, experiencia auténtica y poder, que le es conferido a través de la inscripción de lo corpóreo en sus poemas” (2008, 51-52). In some poems from Luisa Castro’s Baleas e baleas (1988), we find the conflicting feelings of an adolescent girl who wants to adjust her behavior to the rules of a nun’s school and be appreciated as a good girl, while her discoveries inside and outside the school contradict the authenticity of the role models she is taught. The poetic persona experiences the split between the idealised normative model of a girl and her authentic self. She addresses her mother and tries to convince her that she does all the things a good girl should do to please the nuns. This description of a good girl’s behavior is interrupted from time to time by the account of the spontaneous manifestations of her personality that contradicts this idyllic image. We can detect that, despite her efforts, she has not succeeded in getting the nuns’ approval and she can feel their contemptuous criticism about her parents. As monxas mándanme ler as escrituras porque son buena e teño cara de buena, loiriña, así, e teño cara de vocación e son a primeira en resolver os problemas de Rubio As veces xuro, pero iso é porque non teño pais, mamá Pero son buena e canto no coro flores a María, vou ás novenas de maio có uniforme cheo de barro de xogar cos pícaros a feitos e verdades pero as monxas pensan que é porque son medio neno e xogo ó fútbol. (1988, 49) In the background of these poems, some issues stand out: corporal punishment, discrimination according to social class and the contradiction between the hypocrisy of religious discourse about sexuality, which was considered the worst of sins,12 and the fact of sexual abuse of children that took place at some nuns’ and priests’ schools. The poems also highlight the need for the girls to Inflicting and Healing Wounds 269 discover the reality of sex and to experience sexual desire, despite the repression they are subjected to. The poetic persona in Castro’s poems tells her mother how some of her school’s friends are punished, “péganlle nas puntas dos dedos coa vara de limitar a peninsula” (51), and how she is spared physical punishment, “a min non me pegan porque pago o trinta. / Eu son pobre mamá / pero pago o colexio e sei demostrar o cociente” (57). However, she cannot avoid another kind of chastisement, despite all her efforts to behave as a good girl: a min non me pegan, mamá, porque son a primeira en aprender onde queda Cataluña chis-pun-fuego, porque son a primeira en demostrar o cociente aínda que xure; a min, mamá, se fago trasnadas métenme man no cuarto do botiquín e non me pegan, métenme man e que non ande en moto cos pícaros que son uns xíbaros e só queren baixarmne as bragas. (1988, 51) The girl tries to minimise the sexual abuse by convincing her mother that the time she is exposed to it is shorter than that of other girls, because she does not do the bad things those other girls do: “Se fago trasnadas / féchanme no cuarto do botiquín por pouquiño tempo / porque son buena e non son coma Ana Franco” (53). Thus, she tries to safeguard her image of a good girl as opposed to some of her school friends that, according to the nuns’ standards, are bad girls, like “Carme”, who shows them her tits in the toilet and smokes, or “Ana Franco”, who laughs at the nuns and frightens them. We can see how the nuns’ obsession about sex, cold showers and Saint Thomas are echoed in the daughter’s questions to her mother: “Mamá, / ¿Qué se sinte debaixo dun home? ¿Qué se sinte lendo a Santo Tomás debaixo da ducha fría?” (51). These questions are repeated intermittently as the girl discovers that sexuality is not only a threatening sin in the nuns’ words, but a reality that is everywhere around her: “Mamá, qué se sinte debaixo de meu pai, os sábados” (57). Reshaping Mirrors 270 The lack of freedom to deal with the issue of sex, as well as the contradiction between the religious discourse of purity and the hidden sexual abuse, created an atmosphere of guilt and blame around sexuality. This brought about the need for girls to discover and experience it in hidden dark places of which mothers were supposed to have no notice. Mamá, ti non sabes o que pasa na última fila do cine coas máis grandes. Rosa ás veces tamén pero fago que non miro. Mamá, ti non sabes o que pasa cando me quedo soa con Carme a varrer a clase. (1988, 53) […] As internas danlle bromuro á cea Pero despois, pola noite, déitanse xuntas de tres. Mamá, ti non sabes o que pasa coas internas cando se quedan soas. (1988, 55) In spite of all the efforts of the young girl to fit into the mould of a good girl, her rebelliousness and spontaneity breaks out the stiffness of the model and, consequently, she is often expelled from the class and has to expend long hours in the corridors: “As veces xuro e bótanme fóra. / En terceiro paséi todo o ano nos corredores / vendo voar a Sampi” (59). Although the girl boasts about her lack of fear of unreal dangers, such as lions in the circus, she acknowledges that she is afraid of the medicine cabinet room and corridors, since these are dangerous places where the girl is unprotected from abuse: “Só lle teño medo ós corredores / e a quedarme soa coa monxa no cuarto do botiquín” (59). Marilar Aleixandre’s Catálogo de velenos (1999) is dedicated to her mother: “á miña nai Marilar Aleixandre, / que escribía poemas para rompelos”. It is important to observe that both the writer and her mother have the same name because in the first poem of this book, “baixo as uñas” (1999, 13-14), the poetic persona acknowledges that she had usurped her mother’s name. This appropriation reveals a feeling of reconciliation with the dead mother and the recognition of her as an agent who propitiated the daughter’s rebellion. In the essay that closes the book, “A mazá envelenada sobe aos labios” (67-71), Pilar Pallarés affirms that Inflicting and Healing Wounds 271 Catálogo de velenos “é un acto de amor e un axuste de contas” (67). The character of the daughter who questions herself about the mother has not been frequent in Galician poetry and to speak of this conflicting relationship was a kind of taboo for certain trends of Feminism. However, the dark aspects of the mother-daughter bond appear in fairy tales and we find the characters of Snow White and the jealous Step Mother in some of Aleixandre’s poems we are going to study next.13 They reflect the complexity of feelings that are intermingled in the motherdaughter relationship, as Pilar Pallarés explains: Dese amor estrefrebado con ódio falaron máis os contos de fadas que a literatura adulta, tan ben comportada. Rencor pola madrasta que nos envelena, que é a nosa rival, a que nos clausura na casa coma Cincentas ou nos abandona nun bosque tenebroso. (Pallarés 1999, 68) In “baixo as uñas” (1999, 13), the poetic persona of the daughter addresses her dead mother and remembers how the night before she died she was removing the pink enamel from her mother’s fingernail so that the doctor could see the blood running underneath. At the same time, she remembers that, the previous year, she was twenty five years old and she was very busy at not being like her mother and erasing the enamel of all her fingernails. With this action she symbolises her rejection of the female role that takes for granted that it is part of the feminine identity to be attractive in order to seduce a a boyfriend that will become a husband: “estaba tan ocupada / en non ser coma ti / non criar sete fillos / borrar os esmaltes / de todas as uñas” (13). She remembers that there is a part of her life, that related to sexuality, which was hidden from her mother, since sex was usually one source of misunderstanding between mothers and daughters. Now that the mother is dead, the poetic persona confesses the existence of a lover that the mother would not have approved. However, despite her efforts to be different from the mother, the daughter acknowledges now that under the surface, once the enamel has been erased, there is the blood she has inherited from her mother. In fact, it was her mother who Reshaping Mirrors 278 Anne Hartigan explains, in the same book, the reason behind the writing of this poem: In ‘Song’ I was telling myself and my long dead mother that I was about to live my life my own way, that the inherited rules I received from her were not going to hold me any longer, that I was going to step out and live by my own rules. (2008, 62) The poetic persona is ready to forget everything she has been taught and to be guided only by “the ring around the moon” that “is playing on the floor” and “is singing in [her] head tonight” (63). The moon rings are optical effects produced by light reflection that, in weather folklore, often predict storms. Besides, the moon has been associated in patriarchal ideology with the dark creative force of female biology. However, in this poem the coming storm is a positive one and is caused by love. The last stanzas are addressed to her lover and are full of hope and determination: I’ve lit a little lamp, my love, It’s burning in my mind, The door is creeping open I’m lifting up the blind. I have undone my apron strings It’s fallen on the floor, The moon has winked her eye at me, My hand is on the door. (2008, 63) 5.5. Reversing Roles The feminist struggle in the seventies claimed for the need of shared parenting and it also helped to increase the creation of public child care centres in order to allow women to combine motherhood with work outside home. Thus, the problem seemed to be, at least partially, solved. However, the present economic crisis together with the increase in life expectancy constitutes a new threat to women’s independence, since they are considered the natural carers of their old parents in the absence of enough public social services. In Spain, the high rate of Inflicting and Healing Wounds 279 unemployment affects specially women and this favours the option of remaining at home caring old and disabled people, at the cost of frustrating their hopes of a personal fulfillment as well as the realisation of being left alone to face a situation that is often difficult and distressing. In the previous chapter, we already analysed the presence of aging mothers through the voice of Ceres in Eavan Boland’s poetry. In this section we are going to see the process of illness and decline through the voice of the daughter, as well as the changes in the relationship when the daughter becomes the one who cares for the mother. I will focus on the work of Mary Dorcey to analyse how she represented this painful experience in some poems published in Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers (1994) and in Like Joy in Season, Like Sorrow (2001) as well. In the poem titled “Grist to the Mill” (2001, 8-9), the poetic persona remembers her mother saying that everything can be “grist to the mill” and she has to remind herself “[t]hat a writer can make / Use of everything” (8). Thus, she has decided to transform into poetry the painful experience of seeing her mother losing the memory of herself and her progressive transformation into a dependent child.14 In her review, written in the back cover of this book, Eavan Boland says that “[t]his poetry is, above all, a celebration of the power of the memory in the face of its destruction”. The poem is set in a hospital room while the daughter is feeding the mother and, at the same time, she is transcribing the dialogue that takes place between them. The image of the daughter feeding the mother with a spoon and wiping her chin suggest that of a mother with her child, but for the dialogue, which has the tone proper to adult people. The daughter repeats her mother’s words: “Nothing is wasted, / you say, / No experience, / However dismal — / Entirely redundant” (2001, 8). She understands these words as both an offer and a permission to make the most of this situation by giving it poetic representation and, on doing so, she will bring to the light this reality that, like many other aspects of women’s lives, has been absent from artistic creation. To take this sorrow — Reshaping Mirrors 280 This irreparable loss; The erasure By stealth, Of culture and past — This commonplace and Unreported suffering, And put them to work. (2001, 8) Moreover, the daughter wants to rescue from erasure the image of the mother she once had. She needs to reconstruct through memories a solid image of the woman who inhabited this body before and recover from oblivion her “laughter”, her “sudden shafts of vision”, her “dark ironies” and even her pride, so that she can give them the shape of “an artefact” (9), of “[s]omething / One can take up / And put down” (9). And with this reconstruction of the woman her mother was once she will be able to face the actual woman, with “[t]his sly dispossession — / This infant dependence” (9). The daughter is determined to be honest and use everything and, despite the pride she has inherited from her mother, she will not mask the hard reality of the present: “Damage and indignities, / Piled day by day, onto / The wreckage of self” (9) and she will do it for her mother’s sake and for her own. The poem which opens the book, “Uncharted Passage” (2001, 3-4), is a reflection on the sense of protection against the storms of life and against death we feel when we still have parents that precede us in this struggle. It seems that, as long as they are alive, they are like a bulwark that protects us against death. In this poem, the poetic voice of a daughter addresses her mother comparing her to the flagship that directs the course of the family: You are the flagship — gladly or not we travel in your wake. So long as the masthead bears your colours we hold course. (2001, 3) Inflicting and Healing Wounds 281 However, the sense of security about the steadiness of the hand that governs the ship has disappeared and both captain and crew have to face this progression through illness and loss across this “uncharted passage” “[w]here the storms and shallows / threaten alike” (3) and they have to stand helpless “[w]hile half a lifetime’s / cargo is jettisoned / and the flotsam / Of memory; the silks / and the bric-a-brac, / float out, / On an ebb tide” (3). Parents have been the repository of the story of the family and the memories of our childhood, which are an important part of our personal story. When the mother loses her memories it seems that an important part of our life is in danger of dissolving into nothingness since the person who gave us life cannot recognise us as her children. The metaphor of wreckage suggests this sense of destruction and irreparable loss. The poetic persona wants to hold tight to this mast to delay the moment of the definite destruction. So long as you hoard a remnant of self above water, A frail bulwark survives. In the late middle-age We remain, all of us — somebody’s children, still. (2001, 3-4) In “Each Day Our First Night” (2001, 5-7), the title of the poem suggests the sense or repetition of routines and dialogues in which time seems to have come to a standstill since the mother cannot remember what has been talked about the previous day. The poetic voice of the daughter looks back forty years to recover the images of the mother she had when she was young and compares these images with those of the old woman who can be “anybody’s mother” (5). This contrast produces in her a feeling of estrangement as if time had not been linear and there had been a gap between past and present that prevents her from recognising the Reshaping Mirrors 282 course of time. The daughter expresses her adoration for a mother who was in her memories “beautiful”, “tall and graceful”, “dark haired” and “laughing” (5). These memories had nothing to do with the worn out old woman she lives with and who answers when she calls out the word mother: Now I climb the steps To a cold house And call out a word That used to summon her. An old woman Comes to the door: Gaunt eyed, grey haired, Feeble. An old woman Who might be Anybody’s mother. She Fumbles with the locks, And smiles a greeting As if the name spoken Belonged to her. (2001, 5) The daughter tries to build bridges between past and present through routines and questions that can bring her back to her previous self and place her in time, but her efforts are useless and have only the effect to reinforce the similarity of this scene with that of a mother trying to teach her little child the basic knowledge about seasons, hours and days. But teaching a child is a gratifying activity, which bring surprises everyday and allow parents to enjoy their children’s progression towards youth and adulthood. On the contrary, there is no hope for this child-mother being able to remember anything that has been taught her and the only result is to make her feel ashamed of her incapability of retaining anything. She cannot remember The day of the week, The hour, nor The time of the year. Look at the grass, Inflicting and Healing Wounds 283 I say, Look at the leaves — You tell me! Autumn, she answers At last. Her hands Wind in her lap, Her eyes like a child’s, Full of shame. (2001, 5-6) However, this kind of stagnation in time is not a safeguard against loss. The daughter knows that all her efforts to anchor her mother in the present and delay the definite annihilation of her identity are doomed to failure: “Each day, / A little more / Is lost of her, / Captured for an instant, / Then gone” (6). Against this, the daughter has to hold on to the memories of a younger mother and she accepts these present routines that the old woman is still able to perform, as the repetition of an “[e]xperimental piece” in which the mother can still follow the “stage directions” she has practised all her life and can lift her hand to wave her daughter off “[w]ith such command — / Watching her / Take a bow / From the curtain — / You could swear she / Was born for it!” (7). In “First Love” (1994, 17-19) the first stanza might seem the voice of a lover describing with adoration the beauty of the loved one, but we soon discover that the poetic persona is a daughter who addresses her mother, going back to a time when she was a beautiful and charming woman and the daughter was a little girl in love with her. The poem represents moments of happiness and perfect connection between mother and child walking together hand in hand. The mother was still young enough and the child was old enough to share secrets of childhood and both of them could look at the future with great expectations because illness, decay and death were not in their emotional landscape. You were tall and beautiful. You wore your long dark hair wound about your head, your neck stood clear and full as the stem of a vase. Reshaping Mirrors 284 You held my hand in yours and we walked slowly talking of small familiar happenings and of the lost secrets of your childhood. (1994, 17) The next stanzas place this shared experience in a time of the year which seemed to have come to a halt since it was “always autumn” and in a beautiful wild landscape that is described as the scenery in which mother and daughter enjoyed the playful experiences that linked each other. They “laughed in a wind” / that cracked the leaves from black boughs /and sent them scuffling about [their] feet” (17). They “would climb” “to the cliff’s edge” and would enjoy “the wind howling” and “the breath from white checked waves” (17), and the girl is not afraid of these impressive natural elements because her mother is there to protect her. You steadied me against the wheeling screech of gulls and I loved to think that but for your strength I would tumble to the rocks below to the fated death your stories made me dream of. (1994, 17-18) The daughter remembers that they had no need of asking questions nor even looking into each other’s eyes to communicate. She says that their blood was the way through which their thoughts passed “and the slightest pressure / of [their] hands / decided all issues wordlessly” (18). The fact that no conversation between them is necessary reinforces the girl’s feeling that the sole presence of the mother and the physical connection established between them are enough to give her the warm security of a protective love. Furthermore, the sense of protection can change even the threatening aspects of nature, of “the water’s fierce, inhuman / company”, which can be transformed into a promise “of some future, timeless / refuge from the fixed / anxieties / of our world” (18). The protection of the mother, who enwraps her in her coat, gives the girl strength to face the “ice teeth” (18) of Inflicting and Healing Wounds 285 the wind. Although this scene may relate to factual memories of the girl, it also has a strong symbolic power with the image of a loving mother who is powerful enough to protect the daughter against the storms of life. And this sense of protection is emphasised by the warm atmosphere of the home when they arrive there. This home means “fire” and “sweet, strong tea” but also the stories that link the characters with tradition and folklore in the songs the mother sings. These are songs that have an evocative power of representation because they speak “of Ireland’s troubles / and of proud women loved / and lost” (19) and the vividness of the images set for the girl “a brilliant stage of characters” that seem more alive than her “own chosen friends” (19). These songs connect her to a romanticised past inhabited probably by brave heroes and beautiful heroines like her mother. The poem starts and finishes with the same description of the mother’s beauty, but in the last four lines the daughter expresses the nostalgia for a past that has forever gone: “I was young – / you were my mother / and it seems / it was always autumn then” (19). The happy memories of a time shared with a beautiful young mother described in the previous poem contrast sharply with the feeling of witnessing our own voyage towards death in the face of our mother’s decline that is represented in Mary Dorcey’s “Repossession” (1994, 56-57). The poetic persona addresses her old mother whose womb has been taken out because she has “no use for it” (56). In previous chapters we have seen how women have often been considered bodies by patriarchal ideologies and, frequently, as wombs to be used. Consequently, losing the creative function of the womb has symbolically been equated to losing feminine identity. The daughter describes her old mother as “stooped and frail / and thin” with “fingers swollen” and knees that “don’t work” (56) and, on seeing the decay of her mother’s body, she finds difficult to imagine that this same body was once so young and strong, that it was her daughter’s “chariot” and “tree house” and, before that, it was the vessel that contained her. Reshaping Mirrors 286 To think that once your flesh was fat and full enough to feed me to think you suckled me – to think I broke from your body wet and dark – sleek as a seal’s head breaking water. (1994, 56) The realisation of the changes in her mother’s body awakens the daughter’s awareness of her own changes since that time when she broke from her mother’s body and obliges her to face her own ageing process. She observes how the decline affects also the old woman’s mind, who “mislays everything / but the past”. She gets lost in the house but her mind goes back to the past, to the memory of her own mother, “who died in a Home” (57) because she had all her children “to think of” (57) and could not take care of her. The poetic persona attends to this imaginary conversation between mother and grandmother that reflects the sense of guilt and the need of justification and recognition that can heal the wounds of the past. For the daughter it seems that as the mother’s mind is gradually failing to grasp the present, the figure of the grandmother is growing more and more important as if she were repossessing that body which was once part of her. Becalmed at your fireside – you talk to her and she talks back – endlessly sifting the argument. Hour by hour she reclaims you She has grown into your lapses – into your hands into your walk. Like mother – like daughter I say: excuses – justification. (1994, 57) Inflicting and Healing Wounds 287 When the daughter gets tired “of all this blather” and stands up “to clear the table” (58), she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror her grandmother gave to her mother and she can see with surprise that the face reflected in “the giltframed glass” (58) is her mother’s face “looking out from / [the daughter’s] eyes” (58). Thus, beyond the fact that, as we grow older, the physical resemblance to our parents gets more and more conspicuous, these last lines stress the feeling of belonging to a chain of women who have preceded us in the path of life and whom we are going to follow towards death. That is the reason behind the uneasiness and anguish we can feel when we witness our mothers’ decline because it forebodes our own. The poems I am going to comment next, “When You’re Asleep” (1994, 7982) and “Going Home Without You” (2001, 10-11), reflect a wide range of feelings the daughter experiences before the not completely assumed fact of her mother’s gradual infantilisation and dependence, as well as her reluctance to accept the reverse of roles that force her to adopt the identity of a mother. In “When You’re Asleep” (1994, 79-82) we find a situation easily identifiable with that of a busy mother doing the domestic routines while attending the unceasing demands of her child. In the opening line, “I’m worn out with you” (79), which is repeated two more times along the poem, the daughter expresses her exasperation toward her child-mother, who follows her restlessly everywhere asking questions that may help her to reconstruct the family’s story and her own past, like a child who wants to hear her mother repeat stories she already knows, but the details of which she has forgotten. So, she wants her mother to go through them over and over so that she can build the whole picture. However, there is a crucial difference between the scene described in the poem and the one that might take place in a real mother-child relationship because, for an actual child, these details are retained in her mind and help her to build her own identity as part of the family, but for this old child-mother all the efforts aimed at the reconstruction of the past are useless since her mind is unable to hold on to these memories and the Reshaping Mirrors 294 The life of this “Materfamilias” is placed in the context of a “tall-storied town house” with “a mysterious attic gloom”, “[b]eds with bolsters” and “a sunny, summer sitting room”, which might give us the image of the scenery where the grandchildren’s happy memories belong. However, the poetic persona transcends the privacy of this individual life by placing it in a historical context in which women had to face the consequences of grave illnesses and wars and she tells us that this house was also the place which witnessed how the grandmother “[b]artered away with diphtheria, TB from her brood / Between two world wars and after” (77). The story of this individual woman brings to the light the silenced stories of women that are not represented in official History, although this is not meant to transform this woman into a victim or into a symbol. The poetic persona gives us details of her grandmother’s personality that make her a flesh and bone woman, who did not renounce some fashionable luxuries, or the control over the education of her children: “A pansy-eyed flapper she tended to herself / Obliquely, in astrakhan, or snug suede shoes; / Ambitious for all, yet slow to praise for fear / Of spoiling with Hollywood notions, child-dreams” (77). A woman who survived the death of two sons and “wore Queen Mother / Hats” (77). When her daughter asked her whether she would do it again, the answer she gives, “no chance” (77), expresses both the fact that she had not had any other possibility of choice and, even in the case that it had been possible for her to go back and start her life anew, she would not feel like going through this experience twice. The poetic persona agrees with her: “Womanhood, the struggle between self and others, / Was costly; to deal once with the rise and fall / Of life, of death, enough” (77). In Sinéad Morrissey’s “My Grandmother through Glass” (There was Fire in Vancouver 1996, 42-45), the characters who appear in this poem are based on former members of Morrissey’s family.15 There is a symbolic chain that connects the women of the family and erases the boundaries between life and death. The stories of the grandmother, the great aunt Sarah, —who secretly loved the grandfather—, the mother and the daughter, who is the poetic voice, are intertwined at crucial points of birth and death, as two sides of the same process. Inflicting and Healing Wounds 295 This process establishes among all the female members of the family a quasireligious relationship that allows them to cross the boundaries of life and death in order to help each other. In the first stanza the poetic voice addresses her dead mother who is going to meet in the afterlife those who loved her and even the spirits of the children she could not have, in a possible reference to abortion or miscarriages. The poem transfers the yearning of the mother for the children she did not have to the other side of life, where she will meet “the spirit-children” [w]hose faces pushed against that line for years” (42 and whose deep desire to be born is expressed with a paradox, since they were “dying to be born” (42), linking death and birth in their yearning. In the next stanzas the poetic persona remembers how these spiritchildren have haunted her mother until it was impossible for her to conceive them: You said you felt the weight of their plea As eyes on your back in an empty room Or a flock of pestering voices beyond your range. Their whispering nagged your mind. Then his pit accident, your hysterectomy Or the usual, age-seep of indifference Stopped intercourse for good After that, those tiny moon-faces were crushed. (1996, 42) In another section of the poem the poetic persona describes her birth as something supernatural due to the mysterious intervention of the great aunt Sarah who, “from the other side” (44), helped the niece in the delivery of the grand niece, because “[s]he’d seen enough of childbirth to know / How the tunnel of pain can terrify” (44). Thus, Sarah sent the niece “sleep in labour” and “when she woke from her dreaming she just wanted to push” (44), while “the nurses wept with laughter”. The poetic persona in this poem substitutes the religious iconography of the Virgin Mary and the saints, who are believed to help humans to overcome difficult situations, by a genealogy of lay women linked by family ties that can help each other to cross the “tunnel of pain” both ways. Thus, as the newborn “entered the world with a shower of blood” (44) “Sarah saw [her] off with a Reshaping Mirrors 296 message of love” (44) for the grandmother in order to repair the misunderstanding they could not solve when both of them were alive. In this story of the women of the poetic persona’s family, as portrayed in “My Grandmother through Glass”, the figure of the great aunt Sarah is representative of thousands of women who did not marry and whose lives were invisible and made irrelevant in a patriarchal society since they did not fulfil the established roles of wives and mothers. However, they frequently acted as mothers, caring and nurturing the whole family while their feelings about love, deception or jealousy were ignored or laughed at. In this poem, the voice of the grand-niece, recognises the importance of this woman: “She laid out the dead, delivered / The furious children, buried / Two sisters who were rotten with anthrax, / And never married” (43). In contrast to the magical help Sarah can exert because she is dead, these lines describe her as a woman who played a decisive role in the history of the family and place her in the real context of a difficult time marked by World War II.16 The character of Aunt Sarah when she was still alive appears again in the poem “Aunt Sarah’s Cupboards and Drawers”, collected in The State of the Prisons (Morrissey 2005, 39). The poetic persona describes the confinement that age and a broken hip have brought to the old lady whose life is still full of little things she can enjoy. She sits now in “her high-backed chair watching television /as dust falls over the soup-tin lids/ in the tin cupboard in the kitchen”. But she is not completely alone because her sitting room is “cheerful with photos of relative’s children” and, the previous year, she had enjoyed following the sun’s eclipse and seeing how “the days collapsing wattage” “shuttered each face in unison / and then released them” (39). But now that Sarah is dead, the poetic persona, gives her the status of a virgin mother, in a domestic scale, because she stresses the fact that she died a virgin but she shared motherhood. The separation between life and death is represented with the image of the glass, through which the characters go and whose transparency shades off the boundaries between the two worlds. This image is opposed to the darkness that Inflicting and Healing Wounds 297 often characterises images of death and expresses the hope of another kind of life after death, which allows a woman, “from the other side” to help those who stay on this side of life as well as the possibility of healing the wounds inflicted or suffered in this world. Thus, the poetic persona describes her mother’s death as the crossing of this glass, with the serene conviction that she is going to meet the people who loved her in another dimension, in which time cannot be measured by human standards: You’ve gone through the glass and into the arms Of the children who cried to break into your body. Your mother will be young again. No negotiation from this side in— The glass descended and shimmered open And then froze hard again beyond all normal view. No doubt your own face changed. No doubt memory followed you. (1996, 44) This blurring of space-time boundaries could be related to a perception of time which is non linear, as Julia Kristeva explains in “Women’s Time”, (1986, 187-211). Kristeva affirms that “female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations” (191). The repetition of cycles determined by the biological rhythms of woman´s body is associated to those of nature and “imposes a temporality” “whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extra-subjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance” (191). In relation to this, Kristeva observes the recurrence of the myth of resurrection: Or one is reminded of the various myths of resurrection which, in all religious beliefs, perpetuate the vestige of an anterior or concomitant maternal cult, right up to its most recent elaboration, Christianity, in which the body of the Virgin Mother does not die but moves from one spatiality to another within the same time via dormition (according to Orthodox faith) or via assumption (the Catholic faith). (Kristeva 1986, 191) Reshaping Mirrors 298 The poems of Galician writers that we are going to comment next reflect the need to recover the story of our female relatives and insert their lives into a history that has undervalued and ignored them. In Ana Romaní’s “Avoa” (Arden, 1998), in one section of Marta Dacosta’s Setembro and in Xohana Torres’ “Elexías a Lola” (2004) [1980], the poetic voices of granddaughters pay homage to the unknown lives of their female ancestresses. In Ana Romaní’s “Avoa” (1998, 29-31), the poetic persona remembers the stories the grandmother told her and the experiences they shared together. In a country like Galicia that has been predominantly rural until the second half of the twentieth century, grandparents have been the repository of a rich oral tradition which covered, not only folk tales, but also deep knowledge about plants, animals, as well as the language and the non-written history of the land, which have been ignored or marginalised by the dominant Spanish culture. To this, it must be added that a close relationship was often established between grandmothers and little children, who stayed at home while adults were outside, working in the fields, with the cattle, or, in fishing villages, at sea. Thus, in the warm atmosphere of the kitchen, grandmothers were the transmitters of a culture that is about to disappear. In Romaní’s poem, the granddaughter asks her grandma to tell her again “os alcumes e as historias /os perfís das xeografías que habitamos e nos posúe / a terra desde Noia nun mar que non existe / que inventamos” (30). Moreover, the young woman wants the older one to acompany her to be witness to the destruction of the marine environment: “Baixemos avoa ó malecón ver morrer os peixes e o mar” (30). In Marta Dacosta’s Setembro (1998, 99), from which we have analysed some fragments in chapter four, there is a photograph of a girl and an old woman with a dedication: “Á memoria de Saladina Ortega. A todas as mulleres da miña familia, fillas, netas e bisnetas”. It is evident the intention of the author to insert her own life as a link between a lineage of women that lived before her and those who may possibly continue the chain, as Teresa Seara points out in “Revelación da muller oculta” (1998): Inflicting and Healing Wounds 299 Na figura fundacional da nai reside porén un dobre vínculo que nos fala ecoicamente das outras, elos dunha cadea materna que se estende ata os principios do mundo e das estirpes, e anticipa a nai que ela mesma será, as futuras fillas e netas. Mergullándose nesa xinea de descoñecidas antecesoras —tantas que son innomeables e van diluíndo o seu rastro acuático nas augas vitais do propio ser— así como nas nais máis próximas —Saladina, Manueliña, Rosa, Pepa ou Teresa—, o eu poético inicia a procura da súa definición xenérica e familiar. (1998, 10) In Chapter four we have already seen the symbolic connection that Dacosta’s poetic persona establishes between her birth and her revision of Eve’s birth, placing herself in a mythological course of history that goes back to the time when the first woman was born, but, in this section, the poetic persona looks back to the story of the real women that belonged to her family and places them in a real past and in a real Galician landscape. Thus, she can see the image of her grandmother “que aínda é tan pequena como eu a recordo / e segue alí no vello paseo Alfonso XII” (99). This urban landscape, “vencido de ruídos” which is separated by one hundred steps from the familiar space of “a praciña de pedra en que aínda hai un pozo / ou a casa pequena da indomable Manuela” (99). This separation/connection between spaces reflects the changes in both urban and rural Galician landscapes, due to the migratory movements from the country to the city that happened in the second half of the twentieth century, which was characterised by the coexistence —not always harmonic— of growing urban spaces surrounded by rural and fishing villages and hamlets where old people remained living in their old houses, keeping the ties with those who went to live in the city and preserving the memory of a rural world from its total disappearance. Thus, the poetic persona wants to recover the memory of these lives and of the people who lived them: Recupero a memoria de Pepa silenciada pola peste da gripe cando empezaba o século, e o misterio da vida en garrafas de barro e algodón por Gonzalo, que naceu a destempo. Recupero a friaxe e o sal do mar na noite e a chalana afogada na outra beira da ría. (1998, 99) Reshaping Mirrors 300 She remembers especially her mother “tirando carbon desde a bufarda / ou atada a unha silla de falar castellano” (99). Speaking the Galician language identified you as a peasant, poor and uneducated person and, in order to avoid the consequent discrimination and marginalisation, people compelled themselves to speak Spanish, which was the only language allowed at school. The last lines of the poem express the identification of the poetic persona with all the women of her lineage: “E eu sinto que son hoxe tantas que entón me foron, / Saladina, Manueliña, Rosa e tamén Pepa, / e a mesma Teresa que nos fala incansable / mentres o tempo vai rodando pola tarde” (99). Xohana Torres dedicates the seven poems collected under the title “Elexías a Lola” (2004, 189-200) [1980] to her dead grandmother “Dolores, nun cemiterio perto do mar” (2004, 185). These poems are, in fact, parts of a long poem made of an introductory one and six sections. All of them have an elegiac tone in accordance with the title and, through them, the powerful image of the grandmother becomes alive in the remembrance of the poetic persona. In the introductory poem she identifies Lola with the river Avia, which flows through the vineyards she cultivated. The constant flowing of a river has often been used as a metaphor of the continuous changes in the course of life, which draws all human beings toward death.17 The permanence of the river, on whose banks Lola lived and worked, stresses the feeling of an absence that can only be counteracted through the memories that link grandmother and granddaughter to a shared territory and a shared time of childhood: Podo dicir “O Avia” e es ti, calmo xurrar do río anegando as orelas. Tamén podo dicir “Dela non queda nada” senón este rumor que deixa a folla”… O meu corazón coñece territorios que non somete á noite: País onde nacemos libre de toda sombra. Así o declaro todo: Infancia coma as aves e a humidade na arboreda. (2004, 189) Inflicting and Healing Wounds 301 The metaphor of life as a river that runs to the sea of death appears again in a fragment of section “I” (191-192). The poetic persona places herself in the real setting of a house where the sounds of the wind and the sea can be heard and at an specific time of the year, September, that signals the end of summer and the start of autumn. Both place and time acquire explicit symbolic meaning, since the sea symbolises death and September is the time of harvesting the ripe fruit. Also, the falling of leaves has usually been used as metaphors of death. The choice of time and place to say goodbye to her grandmother, represents the acceptance of the inevitable flow of life and death and the solemn invocation “[m]uller da miña casta, Lola das roxas viñas” (192) expresses the pride of belonging to the lineage of this woman, to whom she gives a title of nobility, borrowing the way kings used to recognise the deeds of some outstanding vassals. By calling her “Lola das roxas viñas” the poetic persona wants to underline the nobility of work and stress the character of a hard-working woman as well as the sense of attachment to the land she worked and lived in. Polo silencio desta casa grande consigo o son do mar. Ouh, que vento das illas, Lola de amor, que vento, xa que todos os gozos finan nun mar, ben salado, o da morte! Muller da mina casta, Lola das roxas viñas, este mes e setembro a redimirse maduramente para alguén no froito. Ti, acouga en paz. Sobre a violenta verdura da túa tumba traballan en ringleiras afanosas formigas. (2004, 192) In part “II” (193-194), the poetic persona describes with admiration the strong personality of Lola, and admits that she has not inherited her confidence, although she had always tried to imitate her: “Eras precisa e forte. Non tiñas medo a nada. / Lei extraña do herdo: non obstante eu, / aínda na escuridade, aínda hoxe confusa, / ¡tanto que te imitaba!” (2004, 193). The granddaughter can still feel her powerful influence in the atmosphere of the bedroom where she can enter the magic circle that, as it has been said in previous sections, symbolises the protective Reshaping Mirrors 302 sacred space of the great Goddesses: “Cando entro na alcoba / noto no ambiente o teu círculo máxico / e os anos non o levan” (193). This grandmother, like the one in Marta Dacosta’s poem and the vast majority of Galician women of their age, did not have access to what was officially considered culture, but those who lived in close contact to nature had the ancestral knowledge of its cycles and the agricultural practices that did not destroy the environment. The poetic persona wants to present the authentic character of this woman to counteract the bourgeois image of her, dressed in velvet for the occasion, which has been immortalised in a photograph that hangs in the dining room. The photograph reflects a stereotyped image of a woman and the poetic persona considers this to be the photographer’s failure. Against this artificial static representation, she prefers to symbolise her with the image of a “[s]imple cunca / para un simple xantar / conseguido, se cadra, coa suor cotiá” (193) and gives us a description of the dynamic hard-working woman proud of her vineyards: “Todas as beiras do Avia foron miñas”… Na encosta campesiña, ao reclamo das cepas, ¡entón si que batías, Viñateira, nas tinas, cando toda evidencia era unha luz de outono recubrir de ouros cada acio! (2004, 193) In part “III” (195-196), the poetic persona describes the family house as the place that has witnessed the lives of the members of the family, whose names are remembered to rescue them from oblivion: “Aquí xogaron / Antón, Manuel, Rosiña, Pepe, Basilisa, Marciana, / a Maruxa, os netos. Tamén morreu Rosario.” (193). The house is remembered through memories of sensorial experiences and is itself personified as one living being that is constantly waiting to hear the dogs bark which will announce the presence of visitors. It is also the place that congregated the family around the grandmother, who helped to maintain the family ties and preserve them from breaking up, thanks to her decision to remain there and not to be transplanted to the city. A decision that has the power of compensating even for the disintegrating force of emigration and the will to Inflicting and Healing Wounds 303 maintain the memory of the hard lives of unknown peasants who are part of the unknown history of the land. Casa atenta aos ladridos dos cans, a porta de emparrado que se grava nos ollos cando imos no tren; a cancela sen chave, os figos migueliños, os catro limoeiros que nos convidan dende que nacemos. Ía e viña a familia só por verte a ti, os fillos que corrían as millas dos océanos, os outros, sedentarios, labregos sen historias aferrados ás cepas e ao pan de cada día. (2004, 195) Now that the grandmother is not here, the harmony of nature cannot fill the emptiness of her absence and the poetic persona knows that no matter how hard she would wish to conjure up her presence through the birds, the moon, or the wind, nobody is going to come: “Ninguén virá. Ninguén. / Polo tellado esvara esa tristeza, / oco de ti, e a chuvia, miudiña” (196). Luciano Rodríguez affirms in “As mareas poéticas de Xohana Torres” (Poesía reunida 2004, 9-37), that “Elexías a Lola” is “un homenaxe á muller laboriosa, independente, entregada, feble e forte, dona da casa, vencello social, valente e arriscada, muller que camiña cara ó solpor, consciente de que é ave de paso” (Rodríguez 2004, 31). 5.7. Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to show an overview of the multifaceted and, sometimes conflicting, aspects of the relationship of the daughters with their mothers as they are represented in the poetry of some of the Irish and Galician writers object of this study. The main conclusion is that these relationships are greatly determined by age, as well as by economic, social and personal circumstances. Consequently, the mother-daughter bond cannot be forced to fit into any of the totalising discourses —Psychoanalysis or Radical Feminism, for instance— that tried to find a unifying theory that could explain the diversity of 311 NOTES Introduction 1. Under a law imposed in 1847, called the “Gregory Clause” no tenant holding more than a quarter acre of land was eligible for public assistance. Thus, those who sought entrance into the workhouses in order to avoid death by starvation, had to surrender their holdings to their landlords. It is estimated that over a quarter of a million people suffered the mass evictions or clearances by which they were dispossessed of their land and their homes were levelled or burnt. These evictions worsened the already desperate situation of the peasantry. See Christine Kinealy (1994). 2. Christine Kinealy affirms that “over one million people died and an even greater number emigrated” (2002, 2). 3. ‘Foro’ is a system of tenancy of land that allowed peasants to cultivate the vast amount of land which belonged to the monasteries, the clergy and the nobility. For further information about the system of foros in Galicia, see Ramón Villares (1982a, 1982b). 4. It is estimated that the Irish population was cut by over 25% after the Famine. For further information see Peter Gray (1995), Cathal Poirteir (1995), Christine Kinealy (2002) and James S. Donnelly (2005). In Galicia, seasonal emigration to Castile had taken place along the eighteenth century and continued during the nineteen century but, from 1850 on, massive emigration to Latin-America produced a constant decrease of population. For further information see Ramón Villares (1985) and Pilar Cagiao (1997). 5. “The Galician national anthem, based on a poem by Eduardo Pondal (1835-1917), claims that Galicia is the home of Breogán, Amergin great-grandfather” (Palacios and Lojo 2009, 13). According to the Lebor Gabála Érenn —known in English as the Book of Invasions— Amergin, is a mythological Irish druid and bard among the sons of Mil “who allegedly departed from Galician shores” (Palacios and Lojo, 2009, 13) and invaded Ireland. 6. Research done in the field of Irish Studies is currently held in the three Galician universities. 7. This project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education (2005-04897) and has been continued in two further related projects (2009-08475, 2012-35872). 8. Through this project, Irish and Galician women writers, as well as scholars, literary critics and editors, have collaborated in different ways —conferences, seminars, poetry readings, essays and translations of poems from Irish and English into Galician and vice versa. All these activities have been extremely fruitful and their Reshaping Mirrors 312 results can be found in the books published: Pluriversos: Seis poetas irlandesas de hoxe. (Manuela Palacios ed. 2003) Palabras Extremas: Escritoras gallegas e irlandesas de hoy (Manuela Palacios and Helena González eds. 2008), Writing Bonds. Irish and Galician Contemporary Women Poets (Manuela Palacios and Laura Lojo eds, 2008), To the Wind Our Sails. Irish Writers Translate Galician Poetry (Mary O’Donnell and Manuela Palacios eds. 2010), Creation, Publishing and Criticism: The Advance of Women’s Writing (Mª Xesús Nogueira, Laura Lojo and Manuela Palacios eds. 2010) and Forked Tongues: Galician, Basque and Catalan Women’s Poetry in Translation by Irish Writers (Manuela Palacios ed. 2012). 9. Xela Arias died in 2003, aged 41. 10. All the works by Galician women writers selected for this dissertation are written in Galician, except for some poems by Luz Pozo Garza, —written in Spanish— which were first published in 1956. 11. To cite only a few examples: Eithne Strong also wrote short stories and novels; Eavan Boland, prose essays; Mary O’Donnell and Kerry Hardie, novels, and Anne Hartigan, drama; Marilar Aleixandre, Xohana Torres, and Luisa Castro, fiction. 12. Although radically different in their political aims, Irish Republican nationalism and Protestant nationalisms —Unionist and Loyalist— in Northern Ireland shared with Spanish Francoist nationalism the patriarchal discourse about the place they assigned to women. Regarding Northern Ireland, Monica McWilliams affirms: “the traditional link between nationalism (both orange and green) and their respective churches has ensured that the ultra-conservative view of women as both the property of and the inferior of men remains strongly entrenched in Irish society” (1993, 81). In Spain, Galician, Basque and Catalan nationalisms were banned —as political parties— after the Civil War. 13. In Ireland, the lack of representation of women writers became evident when, in 1991, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing I, II, III was published by Seamus Deane as general editor and it was found that the vast majority of women writers and artists were omitted in the three volumes. Heidi Hansson (2003) observes that “[i]t would have been considered ludicrous” (149) if those first three volumes had been subtitled “Men’s Writing and Traditions” (149), although this was what they were about. Hansson suggests that this was due to the fact that all editors were men but also that “women’s issues did not fit into the agenda” (149). In order to repair this omission, which raised a great controversy at the time, a team of women scholars coedited The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volumes IV and V: Women’s Writing and Traditions (Angela Bourke et al. 2002), which was the result of a ten-years work project in which they compiled a great bulk of women’s writing from different fields. Hansson underlines “the remarkably long time it has taken to challenge the perception that there have been no notable Irish women writers” (2003, 149). The situation in Galicia has some similarities with that in Ireland. In Antologia de poesia galega (ed. Yara Frateschi Vieira, 1996) five women and twenty five men were represented. In A tribo das baleas. Poetas de arestora. (ed. Helena González, 2001) there is a balance between contemporary women and men writers. However, Notes 313 two years later, the Antoloxía consultada da poesía galega 19762000 (ed. Arturo Casas, 2003) is again unbalanced in favour of men; —six women and twenty men. In this case it is interesting to know the methodology employed for the selection of authors and works, which the editor explains in the “Proemio”: He asked two hundred people —authors, editors, teachers, critics and even historians of Literature— to elaborate a list of fifteen authors and ten poetry books. Almost half the people answered and the final selection of poets was the result of the lists of more voted authors and books. Casas underlines the fact that, although the first list of people consulted was gender balanced, among those who answered, only 27% were women. It seems probable that this may have influenced the results, but the fact remains that in 2003 the work of women poets was neither as well known nor valued as men’s. 14. Clara Campoamor, along with some colleagues from other European countries created the International Federation of Women Lawyers in Paris in 1928. 15. Victoria Kent was General Director of Prisons from 1931 to 1934. During this short period she implemented a great number of measures destined to improve the conditions of life in prison. For further information about the life and work of Victoria Kent, see Villena (2007) and Balaguer Castejón (2007). 16. Clara Campoamor reflected her struggle in the book El voto femenino y yo: mi pecado mortal (2006) [1935]. 17. Paradoxically, right-wing parties supported women’s suffrage on the same basis. They thought that women would vote conservative, which in fact happened: in 1933 right-wing parties won and Clara Campoamor was not re-elected. However, in 1936, left-wing parties won, showing a significant shift in women’s vote in the short span of three years. 18. We cannot consider as universal democratic suffrage the right to participate in the elections organised under Franco’s dictatorship, since political parties were forbidden and so was the possibility of campaigning against the proposals of Francoist governenment. Besides, it could be dangerous to abstain from participating in local elections and the two referenda, since this could signal you as a disaffected person by the authorities. 19. This encyclical states: “Let it be repeated as an immutable and inviolable fundamental doctrine that matrimony was not instituted or restored by man but by God; not by man were the laws made to strengthen and confirm and elevate it but by God, the Author of nature, and by Christ Our Lord by Whom nature was redeemed, and hence these laws cannot be subject to any human decrees or to any contrary pact even of the spouses themselves” (Casti Connubii 1930, 5). 20. Among the organisations Mac Curtain mentions I will cite The Irish Women’s Franchise League, founded by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins in 1908, the Irish Sufragge Society, founded by Anna Haslam in 1876 and the Ladies Land League, founded by Fanny and Anna Parnell as an auxiliary branch of the Land League, which had played an important role in rural areas after the Famine. Another important women’s organisation was founded in 1914, the Cumann na mBan —the Irish Women’s Council─, which was conservative in its aims but “in the aftermath of Reshaping Mirrors 314 the Rebellion it proved tireless in organising political prisoners” (Mac Curtain 2008, 95). 21. For further information about women’s poverty see Mary Daly b (1993). 22. Michaela Schrage-Früh observes that the ideal of the Virgin Mary as the model of Catholic Irish mother is unattainable and points out that “[b]esides political and material consequences, the psychological conflict suffered by individual women faced with the ideal of virginal purity can be equally devastating” (2006, 124). 23. The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act became law in July 2013. Abortion is permitted when there is risk of loss of life from physical illness (sections 7 and 8). Among the risks, suicidal ideation is included (section 9). There are no lawful provisions for abortion in case of rape or incest in this act. Abortion is not permitted when there is a serious illness of the fetus, even if there is no possibility of it being viable. 24. For further information about Galician women’s emigration see Cagiao Vila (1997) and Liñares Giraut (2009). Chapter 1. Pregnant Bodies/Embodied Subjectivities 1. According to traditional psychoanalytic theory, the lack of a penis originates in woman a feeling of castration that would only be compensated by having a child. 2. In Ireland, The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act became law in July 2013. Abortion is permitted when there is risk of loss of life from physical illness (sections 7 and 8). Among the risks, suicidal ideation is included (section 9).There are no lawful provisions for abortion in case of rape or incest in this act. Abortion is not permitted when there is a serious illness of the fetus, even if there is no possibility of it being viable. 3. In the Spanish Organic Law 9/1985, induced abortion was legalised in three cases: serious risk to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, rape and malformations or defects, physical or mental, in the fetus. The Organic Law 2/2010 of sexual and reproductive health allowed unrestricted abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. From then on, it was only permitted when the life of either the mother or the fetus was in serious risk. This risk must be established by a committee of specialists. Debate about abortion is a current issue again, in 2014, because the project of a new law has been launched by the Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz Gallardón. This project considerably restricts the possibility for women to decide about their pregnancy. 4. “In the Phaedo passion [the body] distracts the philosopher from the pursuit of knowledge, but in the Symposium it motivates that pursuit: love of the body is the essential first step on the spiritual ladder that culminates in recognition of the eternal form of Beauty” (Bordo 1995, 3-4). 5. Descartes affirms that by body he understands “all that can be terminated by a certain figure; that can be comprised in a certain place, and so fill a certain space as Notes 315 therefrom to exclude every other body; that can be perceived either by touch, sight, hearing, taste, or smell; that can be moved in different ways, not indeed of itself, but by something foreign to it by which it is touched [and from which it receives the impression]” (html edition 2005. John Veitch’s translation 1901). 6. A new law was presented in the Spanish parliament in November 2010. According to this law, an agreement between both parents is required to decide which surname goes first; otherwise, the surnames will be assigned in alphabetical order. 7. Agustine affirms that these animals’ seeds are not in their bodies, “but in the elements from which they arise by spontaneous generation”. See Edmund Hill and John E. Rotelle (2002, 227) 8. This laboratory experiment won Pasteur the prize offered by the Academy of Sciences of Paris in 1864. 9. Anne Hartigan’s poems “In That Garden”, “Eve—New Mouth” and “From Eden” (1993) subvert the myth of the Fall by representing a powerful Eve who disdains Adam’s cowardice and claims her right to eat the apple. See González Arias (1998). 10. Fionn/Finn Mac Cumhaill was a mythical hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, occurring also in the mythologies of Scotland and the Isle of Man. The stories of Fionn and his followers, the Fianna, form the Fenian Cycle (or Fiannaidheacht). James MacKillop affirms that “the Salmon has been especially important in Celtic tradition, both Goidelic and Brithonic as a repository of otherworldly wisdom” (1986, 20) The Salmon of Knowledge episode was the first of a series of magical adventures which prepared Fionn for his career as a great chief. When he was young, Fionn met the druid and poet Finnegas, and studied under him. Finnegas had tried unsuccessfully to catch the Salmon of Knowledge, which lived in a pool on the river Boyne —whoever ate the salmon would gain all the knowledge in the world. Eventually he caught it, and told the boy to cook it for him. While cooking it, Fionn burned his thumb, and instinctively put his thumb in his mouth, swallowing a piece of the salmon's skin. This imbued him with the salmon's wisdom and with the power of divination. He then was able to call on the knowledge of the salmon by sucking his thumb. For further information see MacKillop (1986). 11. The Cancionero de Uppsala —named after the Swedish university in whose library the book was found— also known as Cancionero del Duque de Calabria or Cancionero de Venecia, is a collection of Spanish Renaissance villancicos published in 1556. 12. Demeter, Hecate and many other goddesses bear a torch as their symbol. For further information see Neumann (1972). 13. Mircea Eliade (1958) affirms: “Principle of what is formless and potential, basis of every cosmic manifestation, container of all seeds, water symbolizes the primal substance from which all forms come and to which they will return either by their own regression or by a cataclysm” (1958, 188). In this line, Barbara Walker draws on Campbell (1959) and Neumann (1972) and explains that water is “the Arché, mother of all things. Water gave birth to spirit, supposedly a male principle; hence the idea of Reshaping Mirrors 316 baptismal rebirth that Christians copied from the pagans involved both water (feminine) and spirit (masculine)” (Walker 1983, 1066). 14. The poetic persona in “Found Architecture” may be addressing Kerry Hardie, to whom the poem is dedicated. 15. Theorising in favour of surrogacy contracts takes for granted that there is no affective bond between the pregnant mother and the child she has been carrying inside for nine months and that giving the child away will not affect her physical and mental integrity. 16. The American actor Michael Douglas acknowledged some years ago that he was a sex-addict. 17. This mention of a new president may refer to Bill Clinton whose Swearing-In Ceremony was on 20th January 1993. 18. For further information about the meaning and symbolism of the circle see Mircea Eliade (1957) and Erich Neumann (1963). Chapter 2. Tying and Untying Bonds. 1. In Spain, marriage between same-sex persons was allowed in the Law 13/2005, “por la que se modifica el Código Civil en materia de derecho a contraer matrimonio”. Chapter 44 of the existing Civil Code was modified by adding: “El matrimonio tendrá los mismos requisitos y efectos cuando ambos contrayentes sean del mismo o de diferente sexo” (BOE 157, 2/07/2005). 2. In the USA, it is widely assumed that any party can breach a contract. The major remedy available at common law for breach of contract is an award of damages. This is a monetary sum fixed by the court to compensate the injured party. The amount of damages is to compensate the claimant for his loss, not to punish the defendant. (www.goldsmithibs.com). 3. In Spain, the Law 14/2006 states clearly in article 10: “Será nulo de pleno derecho el contrato por el que la gestación, con o sin precio, a cargo de una mujer que renuncia a la filiación materna a favor del contratante o de un tercero. La filiación de los hijos nacidos por gestación de sustitución será determinada por el parto”. (BOE, 27/5/2006) 4. In 1987 the New Jersey Superior Court validated the surrogacy contract and awarded custody of Baby M to the Sterns. However, in 1988 the New Jersey Supreme Court invalidated surrogacy contracts as against public policy but “in the best interest of the child”, remanded the case to family court which awarded the Sterns custody and Mary Beth was given visitation rights. See Chessler (1989). 5. Although the functions of cortisol are complex, this hormone has been called, together with adrenalin, the stress hormone, because it is secreted in higher levels as a body’s response to stress in fight-or-flight situations. 6. Research lead by Margaret Altemus, with the collaboration of Patricia Deuster, Elise Galliven, Sue Carter and Phillip W. Gold (1996), explored the correlation between Notes 317 lactation and stress responses in humans. Altemus and her colleagues found that lactation seems to reduce the symptoms of anxiety disorders. However, they acknowledged that more work needs to be done to determine exactly which are the elements of lactation physiology that are responsible for producing this anti-stress effect. In another study done by Victoria Hendrick, Lori L. Altshuler and Rita Suri, “Hormonal Changes in the Postpartum and Implications for Postpartum Depression” (1998), they conclude that there seems to be some evidences that the higher or lower level of some hormones like oxytocin —which stimulates uterine muscle contraction at labour and promotes release of breast-milk— “appears to stimulate maternal behaviour” (Hendrick et al 1998, 97). However, it has not been assessed for its relationship to postpartum depression. Among their conclusions, Hendrick and her colleagues emphasised the social aspects that can alter the mother’s mood after childbirth: “Clearly, psychosocial stressors contribute to the syndrome in many women: a lack of support, marital conflict, unemployment, an unplanned pregnancy, single motherhood, and younger age are some factors associated with postpartum depression” (Hendrick et al, 1998, 98). 7. In her critique of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, Jane Flax (1991) disagrees with Lacan and object relations theorists with regard to the relationship between self and other, although she finds relevant differences between them. Flax affirms that Lacan “is so unnerved by his discovery of the desire of the m/other that his discovery results in the (theoretical) annihilation of the self. For Lacan the self cannot really exist precisely because it comes into being in and through the desire of the m/other” (18). Flax observes that object relations theorists differ from Lacan in that they “believe it is possible to be a ‘true’ self, but only in and through a relationship with a ‘good enough’ mother who exists for the child and in the theory as an object” (18). Flax admits that object relations theory is more compatible with feminism because it has emphasised the importance of preoedipal mother-child relation in the formation of a self as well as the role of play “as a source of knowledge” (19). However, she underlines that “despite the centrality of the concept of reciprocity in object relations theory, the mother never appears as a complex person in her own right, with her own processes that are not simply isomorphic to those of the child” (19). 8. An infant’s liquid food preparation based on milk of cows or other animals and/or other ingredients, given as a substitute for breast milk. 9. Virgo is the second largest constellation in the sky. The name means “virgin” or “young maiden” in Latin. Drawing on Jack Lindsay (1971), Barbara Walker affirms: “Virgil said the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin) was Erigone, Goddess of Justice, also known as Atraea or “Starry One”. She identified with Libera, or Libra, the Lady of the Scales, judge of men and and ruler of their fates” (Walker1983, 1051). It has been also associated with Demeter and represented as a virgin holding a sheath of wheat. The brightest star in Virgo is Spica —espiga in Spanish and Galician, ear of grain or wheat— which is also how both Demeter and Persephone are represented. 10. Xela Arias had already developed a career as a writer before she became a mother. Reshaping Mirrors 318 11. In Cunqueiro’s Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes (1969) the characters of Aeschylus’ tragedy fade and dissolve in a world in which unbounded fantasy is mixed with elements of Galician landscape and everyday life. Thus, Egisto and Clitemnestra are getting older and lead an impoverished life while they are waiting for the arrival of the vengeful Orestes who, in turn, delays for years the fulfillment of his aim. Cunqueiro changes the the end of the tragedy. Orestes gives up his revenge, abandons the city and becomes forever “una sombra perdida por los caminos” (1969, 227). Cunqueiro also changes the fate of Iphygenia. The narrator affirms that she did not die and was living in a tower without doors in which Egisto ordered to enclose her so that she could not receive secret messages announcing the arrival of Orestes (1969, 218-221). 12. The Irish called it “the physician’s power” because of its diuretic properties and their flowers, when drunk in tea, have first an exciting and then a sedative effect. 13. Strangford Lough is a large sea lough in Northern Ireland separated from the Irish Sea by the Strangford peninsula. 14. The boy in this painting, which has been endlessly reproduced in Flemish tapestries, is dressed in a Flemish fashion that was 150 years behind the time it was painted. 15. Dropsy is an old term that gives name to an illness characterised by the swelling of soft tissues due to the accumulation of water. Chapter 3. Redressing the Balance 1. Irish Female civil servants and other public servants had to resign from their jobs when they got married, on the grounds that they were occupying a job that should go to a man. Banks operated a similar policy. 2. In Spain, around 1939, women were forbidden to register as workers in the Unemployment Offices with a few exceptions: unmarried women, either without resources or with a degree that would allow them to have a profession, women who were heads of the family and married women who had a handicapped husband. For further information see Ortiz Heras (2006). 3. Around 1961 working regulations in Spain ceased to include clauses of dismissal of women when they got married. However, married women still needed the husband’s permission to work outside home, to sign a contract, to open a bank account or to obtain a passport. For further information see Ortiz Heras (2006) and Ruiz Franco (2007). 4. The Civil Service Act 1973 removed the ban on recruitment or employment of married women in the Civil Service, Local Authorities and Health Boards. 5. The Acts 13/1972 and 14/1975, that reformed the Código Civil y de Comercio, removed the need of the husband’s authorization for activities like signing a contract or asking for a passport. In the Act 11/1981, the husband ceased to be the only administrator of the family finances. Notes 319 6. Ireland became a member of the EU in 1973 and Spain in 1986. 7. A report from the Secretaría de Estado de la Seguridad Social done by Marta Ortega Gaspar (2006) states that in couples with children under six years old, men did between 25% and 30% of the tasks related to child-care. For further information see Marta Ortega Gaspar (2006). For information about the involvement of fathers in child-bearing in Ireland see Patricia Kennedy (2002, 156-160). 8. The first volumes of The Field Day Anthology were not an isolated example of the absence of women in canonical anthologies. Joan McBreen, who recorded samples of one hundred and thirteen women poets only in the last century in The White Page. Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets (1999), laments in “The Editor’s Introduction” that there was “a serious under-representation of poetry written by women” (1999, vii) in some anthologies published in the last decades of the twentieth century. She observes that women poets like Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eithne Strong and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who by 1980 had already published “substantial bodies of work” (vii), did not appear in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (ed. Thomas Kinsella 1986). McBreen also underlines the scant representation of women poets in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (ed. Brendan Kennelly, 1970) —only five women— , in Contemporay Irish Poetry (eds. Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon, 1990), —four women— in Patrick Crotty’s volume, Modern Irish Poetry: an Anthology (1995) — seven women— and in Sebastian Barry’s volume The Inherited Boundaries — Younger Poets of the Republic of Ireland (1986), from which women were excluded. More recently, in chapter VIII of The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (ed. Patrick Crotty, 2010), which covers the period from 1971 to 2009, eleven women and twenty nine men are recorded. 9. The Troubles is the name given to the conflict that, for about thirty years, took place in Northern Ireland between Unionists and Loyalists, who wanted the region to remain within the United Kingdom, and Republican Nationalists, who wanted to join the Irish Republic. 3.500 people are said to have died in this conflict, which ended officially with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 10. Virginia Woolf reflected about the state of mind required for writing poetry and the difficulty for women to achieve this state of mind (2000, 52-53) [1928]. 11. Virginia Woolf points out the hostile circumstances women writers had to face; among them, she mentions the lack of a room of their own (2000, 54). 12. The CRSEV states that the number of children murdered at home have increased between 2000 and 2004 a 77% in Spain, from 9 to 16. (prensa.com 01/10/2007). 13. 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