Of Penelopes, Mermaids and Flying Women: Celia de Fréine’s Tropes of Mobility

In 2010, Celia de Fréine published the Gaelic translation of “Penelope”, a poem by the Galician poet Xohana Torres which challenges the passive role ascribed to women by Western literary tradition and claims for the unknown seas as the space into which women must venture. In 2011, De Fréine published a revised version of her previous Gaelic rendering and added an English translation, a signal of her attraction towards the symbolic figuration of this alternative Penelope the navigator. Along a similar line, De Fréine’s 2010 poetry collection imram: odyssey, framed by the Gaelic genre of the imram about the voyage and its challenges, sheds light on women’s long-repressed wanderlust and yearning for adventure. This article enquires into the intersection of gender and mobility through the analysis of a number of De Fréine’s symbolic figurations of women’s mobility: navigators, mermaids, and flying women. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s trope of the “nomadic subject” and her thesis regarding the transformative capacity of metaphorical language (1994: 4), I will pay special attention to those empowering tropes which engender alternative forms of agency. Nonetheless, utopian discourses on women’s mobility also need to be scrutinised in light of Judith Butler’s warning about the death of the sovereign subject, her vulnerability and her dependence on the Other (2005)