In Eavan Boland’s Domestic Violence, it is through the conflation of the secret with the female body that secrets become the way to simultaneously expose, as well as mediate, one of Boland’s most often addressed themes: a split between the public image of Irish woman as mythic symbol and the private realities of the lives of actual women. This paper argues that these are poems that, even as they explore the relationship between the secret and the body, simultaneously begin to embody the secret themselves. In so doing, it is the poems themselves that ultimately become the secret possessors, revealing and concealing in equal measure as they open up a counter-narrative to the public myths of the Irish woman through their repossession of the body and of desire.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MSSTATE/oai:scholarsjunction.msstate.edu:td-1145 |
| Date | 12 May 2012 |
| Creators | McConnell, Jannell Christine |
| Publisher | Scholars Junction |
| Source Sets | Mississippi State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds