Bog Queens: The Representation of Women in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney

This essay investigates the construction of feminine figures, and the vocabulary of roles allotted to them by two prominent contemporary Irish poets, John Montague and Seamus Heaney. Feminine figures and more or less abstract ideas of femininity play a major role in the work of both: how should this centrality of the feminine be interpreted? Is it, as it most usually announces itself, to be taken as a celebration? Or does it flatter to deceive, as has been remarked about Matthew Arnold’s perhaps analogous celebration of the alleged Celtic virtues of passion, sensuousness, non-rational insight (see Cairns and Richards, ‘Woman’1)? I have chosen to discuss the work of male poets, believing strongly that both ‘gynocritics’ — the ‘naming’, recovery and revaluing of women’s writing — and the persistent demystifying of representations of women in men’s work must continue in tandem. The social and cultural construction of gender is a continuously occurring process, in which it is certainly not yet time to stop intervening. I shall argue that even able and serious contemporary work is deeply and dismayingly reliant upon old, familiar and familiarly oppressive allocations of gender positions. Our celebration of this work must therefore be inflected by this question as to its effect: can poetry’s implicit claim to universality of utterance and to utopian insight be upheld in the face of a reader’s awareness of its gendered and therefore (perhaps unconsciously) partial perspective?