Eavan Boland’ın Şiirlerinde Toplumsal Cinsiyet ile Kesişen Şiddet Temsilleri

Eavan Boland (1944-2020) paved the way for a new era for the next generations of poets through her treatment of the concept of violence as an Irish poet. While looking retrospectively at the turning points in Irish history and making her own private space visible to her readers, Boland also addresses the concept of violence on a gendered basis. Boland’s intellectual radar captures the period of Irish nation-building and the political and ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998. Boland juxtaposes the socially experienced violence in these periods with everyday life experiences. Thus, the boundary between public and private spheres disappears in her poetry. According to Boland, from a gender perspective, the heroic ideal created in the face of violence excludes “the heroine” in Irish history. Accordingly, this paper problematizes how Boland handles violence on grounds of gender. To address this question, the following four poems are explored respectively in this paper: The War Horse, Suburban Woman, In Her Own Image, and Domestic Violence. In these poems, Boland identifies violence as a social experience which cannot be excluded from the private sphere and portrays it as an intertwined material with everyday experiences of the feminine subject.