The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry

CHAPTER 5 - Women and the Sacred

CHAPTER 5 Women and the Sacred She still prayed for them all by name. I remember When she would give me an hour of her visions, When she would levitate – she was always deaf – When thin pipe music resounded beyond the grilles ‘Anchoress’ (SP 93) One of the more intriguing aspects of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work is her interest in the sacred and the spiritual, demonstrated often through traditional religious imagery. The connections with history are highlighted when she says: ‘I am interested in the sacred in history’; she has also defined herself by way of religious heritage as ‘a Gaelic-speaking female papist’.1 However, as in much else, it is difficult to pin Ní Chuilleanáin down in terms of a specific religious vision. Her poetry and critical writing on such topics as Donne’s sermons,2 or in such essays as ‘The Debate Between Thomas More and William Tyndale, 1528–33, Ideas on Religion and Literature’,3 reflect not only her academic work in Medieval and Renaissance literature, but also a continuing exploration of the interconnections between the spiritual and the literary. Using her word ‘sacred’, we can examine her vision and use of Christian imagery, understanding that this is related to her sense of the sacred in the stories and rituals of myth and folklore as well. Given the institutional church’s resistance to both feminist thought and gender equity, and its promulgation of very narrowly defined roles for women, it is interesting to examine Ní Chuilleanáin’s challenges to models that the Christian, and more specifically the Catholic, church has presented as ideal females. Especially important is her response to the negative images of female sexuality the church has helped to promote. As is typical of Ní Chuilleanáin, she often separates sacred imagery from paternalistic contexts to give us new visions of religious rituals and female saints. At the same time she challenges the institutionalised church’s 81 treatment of women. In an interview with Deborah Hunter McWilliams,4 Ní Chuilleanáin describes the sacred as a way to highlight ‘the history of injustice, deprivation, victimisation’, and, in her images of religious figures and issues, the injustice to and victimisation of women are often highlighted. As we shall see, the spiritual for Ní Chuilleanáin has broad and multiple meanings, and reimagining sacred figures is significant in developing these. In examining Ní Chuilleanáin’s later poetry, Catriona Clutterbuck places this work within a Roman Catholic religious context and, invoking Sartre, makes a distinction between bad and good faith, seeing Ní Chuilleanáin as focusing on the ‘liberating potential of religion’ in an age when the Catholic Church is increasingly under criticism. Ní Chuilleanáin, she says, uses religious tradition as ‘a forum that connects aesthetics and politics through its facilitation of communal awareness’.5 Noting that as ‘issues of gender and sexuality have come to the forefront in the disintegration of the traditional authority of the Irish Catholic Church’,6 Clutterbuck believes that some of Ní Chuilleanáin’s wariness about the institutional church comes from its treatment of women. Linking this with issues of political identity, Clutterbuck argues that the ‘impossible language of good faith is one where the divisiveness of gendered and national identity is eradicated in order to restore the possibility of desire and its unconfirmed but real promise of fulfillment’.7 Applying this definition, Clutterbuck reads Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Magdalene Sermon, The Brazen Serpent and The Girl who Married the Reindeer as involving ‘a positive reassessment of religion’.8 Patricia Coughlan argues from a slightly different point of view. Discussing Ní Chuilleanáin’s images of nuns, relics, miracles, saints and devotional practices, Coughlan says that Ní Chuilleanáin employs all of these ‘not in order to propose a re-mystification of the world (in the teeth of postmodern secularism), still less to reinstate Catholic hegemony, but to set up a thematic viewpoint which is both specifically feminist and allows a kind of symbolic intelligence which is alternative to current Anglophone norms to operate’.9 Agreeing with Clutterbuck that gender identity is a problem within the institutionalised church, Coughlan also sees Ní Chuilleanáin as conducting ‘a thematic exploration … of the role and psychological functions of the sacred, including religious manifestations from the subaltern realm of popular devotional practice’.10 82 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Female Figures While mysteries involving the...