Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image

In 1980 the Irish poet Eavan Boland published In Her Own Image a volume of poetry which stands as a landmark in her career as a writer for its subversive potential to revise creational myths that have contributed to the traditional construction of female subjectivity. The aim of this paper is to discuss Boland’s textual strategies in In Her Own Image and see how she subverts the traditional female iconography that constrains the female psyche and disempowers women. Rather than a set of ornamental female figures, Boland’s volume produces more authentic representations of women that move away from man’s own image and from his icons, which have often been taken as “natural” within the construction of female subjectivity. Resistance to such genderings provides, as the volume illustrates, emancipatory possibilities for the woman writer who regains control over her own body image within the very terms of a culture and of a particular poetic tradition.The present paper appears inscribed within the framework of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education, entitled “Poesía y género: Poetas irlandesas y gallegas contemporáneas (1980-2004)” (HUM2005-04897/FILO)S