Writing Women’s Mythology: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Louise Erdrich

The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 1 | Issue 1 Article 8 December 2013 Writing Women’s Mythology: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Louise Erdrich Colleen Taylor FCRH '12 Fordham University, Follow this and additional works at: http://fordham.bepress.com/furj Part of the Modern Languages Commons, Poetry Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Taylor, Colleen FCRH '12 (2013) "Writing Women’s Mythology: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Louise Erdrich," The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: http://fordham.bepress.com/furj/vol1/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalResearch@Fordham. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal by an authorized editor of DigitalResearch@Fordham. For more information, please contact . Writing Women’s Mythology: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Louise Erdrich Cover Page Footnote Colleen Taylor, FCRH 2012, is from Sherman, Connecticut. She is an English major, Irish studies minor, and American Catholic studies concentrator. She is currently abroad in Galway, Ireland, studying Irish literature, language, and music. Colleen plans to further her studies of Irish writers and the Irish language in graduate school. This article is available in The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal: http://fordham.bepress.com/furj/vol1/iss1/8 FURJ | Volume 1 | Spring 2011 R e v ie w s Taylor: Writing Women’s Mythology www.fordham.edu/fcrh/furj Writing Women’s Mythology: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Louise Erdrich Colleen Taylor, FCRH ’12 ENGLISH Eavan Boland and Louise Erdrich are authors who write from very different cultures. Boland’s poetry explores Irish history while Erdrich’s traverses Native American culture and the Catholic religion. This polarity, however, is not so crucial when compared to the two poets’ striking similarities in voice and in subject. As women writers aligned with feminism, both Boland and Erdrich seek to express the female perspective and reverse centuries of women’s silence, and even more strikingly, they use the same medium to do so. Mythology is their instrument of choice, with Boland exploring Celtic folklore and Erdrich Native American legend. But these poets do more than explore; they reinterpret and rewrite. Challenging androcentric myths, Boland and Erdrich give the legends of their respective cultures a female voice, thereby creating a new, female mythology. Furthermore, the similarities in their mythological poems speak to the idea of a shared female consciousness. Nevertheless, while the themes, tone, and images parallel one another, their mythological poems do not always end similarly. Erdrich seems to accomplish the liberation of women within her final stanzas, but Boland ends her poetry without freeing her woman-speaker from despair. Award winning author Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota to a German-American father and a part-French, part-Chippewa mother.1 Throughout her life, Erdrich has stayed close to her Chippewa roots. At Dartmouth College, she became involved with Native American Studies, as a result virtually all of her writings engage Native American history and culture.2 Erdrich successfully writes in many different genres including novels, children’s literature, short stories, and poetry, and her first novel, Love Medicine, won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction.3 Baptism of Desire, her second book of poetry, published in 1989, traverses Catholic religious themes and ideas, as well as Native American mythology. It is this book of poetry that aligns so well with Eavan Boland’s work. Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 to Irish parents. The author of over fifteen collections of poetry, Boland is a highly respected Irish poet and the winner of several awards, including the Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry (Irish Writers).4 123 Published by DigitalResearch@Fordham, 2011 Like Erdrich, Boland is particularly in touch with her legacy. Her poetry is rooted in Irish history and often invokes an Irish woman’s experience to comment on the country’s tragic past and national identity. Recently (in 2005) she published a complete collection of her poetry, New Collected Poems. In that collection are her more recent sets of poems, including the “In A Time of Violence” (1994) poems and the “Code” (2001) poems, both of which engage Irish mythological stories to discuss women’s issues. These recent collections of Boland’s parallel Erdrich’s Baptism of Desire, and it is my conviction that, together, these two sets of poems send a very powerful message. Native American myth is steeped in the tradition of androcentrism. Although Native American religions and legends often recognize the importance of mother figures, equality for women is virtually absent in the storytelling tradition. Female figures appear in myths, but they are often depicted as “other” and are resigned to the domestic sphere.5 In A Feminist Companion to Mythology, Mart Weigle notes that in Native American traditions, music, religions, and especially myths and legends are “controlled by men.”6 Of course, societal structure and beliefs differ from tribe to tribe, but, for the most part, Native American women are not storytellers.7 In most Native American mythologies, the trickster takes a central role. The trickster exists, as his name suggests, to create confusion and to upset the progression of a story. He is a clever, important character and is almost always male. The trickster can bend his gender but, as Weigle notes, he is “first of all a man . . . because women are simply not accorded [that] variety of expression.”8 In Native American mythology, women rarely “express” themselves, and they hardly ever tell the story. Louise Erdrich challenges the sexist mythological tradition in several of her poems, and this is most clear in “Fooling God.” Erdrich, in the opening poem of her collection, Baptism of Desire, challenges Native American convention by creating a female trickster. The poem is a series of propositions of possible ways the speaker can hide and escape God, such as “I must become small and hide where he cannot reach” or “I must 1 Irish, Celtic mythology, like Native American myth, is androcentric. There are far more heroes and male characters in Celtic mythology than there are heroines. But a select number of stories can boast of characters with feminist potential, such as Deirdre of the Sorrows. In her book, Women, Myth, and the Feminine Principal, Bettina L. Knapp argues that Deirdre is one of Ireland’s national heroes, and that her “inner fortitude and strength” distinguish her from other female characters in Celtic myth.12 Although Deirdre’s determination is associated with being with a man, Knapp maintains that she nonetheless represents “a woman’s will for independence.”13 Knapp also points out that Gráinne of “The Pursuit of Diarmuid an (...truncated)