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CHAPTER 1 Beginnings I know how things begin to happen But never expect an end ‘Early Recollections’ (SP 24)1 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin once explained: ‘What attracts me is that which I do not know’.2 Sometimes stepping over boundaries into unknown territory brings enlightenment; however, often Ní Chuilleanáin’s subjects and speakers are suspended in liminal states, in what an early poem described as ‘waters between’ (RG 32). Nevertheless, learning the limits of what you can know is valuable knowledge which has its own reward, and the journey is worth the effort. In one of the distinguishing characteristics of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, the re-visioning of the female figure, the impetus comes often from what she does not know, her sense that the lives of women have often been blocked – overlooked or, in history, unrecorded – and that a woman poet is in the unique position of addressing that issue, especially when much about women’s lives has been lost. Moreover, the gap between women’s lives and the representation of those lives in history or literature leads to her imagining many types of figures, a way of getting beyond some images she found limiting. Her imaginative creation of historical or religious females, her deconstruction and reconstruction of women from folklore and myth, her portrayal of female members of her own family, her dramatisation of the ordinary lives of women and of experiences from her own life led to a collection of female figures who live in an imaginative space but clearly challenge some established attitudes towards women in Ireland. In a world of continual change, her imagery illustrates the possibility of renewal and revision. However, Ní Chuilleanáin’s intention is not to write only for and about women, nor to present any unvarying truth about women’s lives. Arguing 1 for ‘the psychological importance of images’, this poet believes that ‘a woman artist may also aspire towards creating an image of herself and her sex from a feminine point of view, and by a logical progression she arrives at an outlook on the whole of human experience which, by that originality of perspective, is able to explore what has been missed by the male vision’.3 A statement like this suggests that Ní Chuilleanáin sees her work as creating images which give a complex view of women’s lives and achievements and, by extension, a more comprehensive view on the ‘whole of human experience’. Her poems are full of speculation and unanswered questions, inviting the reader to continue to explore new angles on human experience; as the speaker in ‘The Flood’ (S 26) proclaims: ‘I’m out again, straying / Earnest as ever I quested / In search of the neutral ground’. Before one can appreciate the significance of such a statement, and of Ní Chuilleanáin’s revising efforts, of her foregrounding women as subjects and speakers in many of her poems, it is important to understand the historical situation that gave rise to it. The lack of recognition of the achievements of Irish women, as well as problems with onedimensional representations of women in many popular Irish historical and cultural narratives, was early on an important factor in this regard. As she says in her introduction to the 1985 collection of essays Irish Women: Image and Achievement, ‘the study of the Irish woman’s image through history is also the study of the gap, most easily appreciated for the last couple of centuries, between that image and what many Irish women have actually experienced.’4 In the introduction to their collection Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy likewise argued that ‘traditional interpretations of historical events are cast in universal terms and would seem to include women’, but in examining many of the events in Irish history with which people are most familiar, they maintained that the significance of these events for women, or women’s part in them, had not been sufficiently investigated. Raising ‘re-vision questions’, according to Luddy and Murphy, ‘questions the whole basis of traditional historical enquiry … [and] requires a radical re-conceptualizing of what is considered historically important’.5 Much has been accomplished since the 1980s both in re-conceptualising women’s roles in Irish culture and in uncovering the achievements of Irish women by scholars like Mary Cullen, Catriona Clear, Margaret 2 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Female Figures [18.191.147.190...

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