신화를 넘어 역사 속으로

Out of Myth into History

This article examines how Eavan Boland subverts idealized images of women in male dominant tradition and voices women’s histories through her poems. Poetic tradition in Ireland has confined women in virtual images of myth, which means male violence over female autonomy. Women remain lodged within the national psyche which privileges myth over history and symbolized images over realized citizens. Boland disrupts the deep-rooted symbolic injustice against women and undermines the limited and glorified existence in myth. Then her poems reveals women’s lived traces in women’s own voices. In this way, Boland constructs women’s identity and recovers the vocation of the poet-as-spokesman.Within the continuum of Irish literary history, women were represented as the enigmatic image of irresistibility and powerlessness. Women were disposed from socio-political histories and constructed into ephemeral images. Boland criticizes contorted figuring of women under male cast of myth. And she breathes her human heat into the mythic and disembodied image of women. By animating the symbolic stone statuary of the conventional female, her poems call for dynamic and realized life of women. Engaging with myth and subverting it, Boland ultimately reworks history. She seeks to restore women into historical vision and to reintroduce the previously silenced voices of women. Women are refigured not as ornaments but as particularized individuals experiencing realized desires and struggles. Furthermore, she focuses on the relations of women from past to present. She is absorbed into re-creation of history upon the flux of women’s experiences. In this manner, Boland inserts women into the predominantly male cast of recorded history and myth. She is a female poet for women who struggles with the preexisting literary tradition.