Inverting the male gaze in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckian

Literature in the socio-political context has been frequently adopted as a weapon against women. It has depicted them as “servants of history,” existing to please men and produce the next generations (Walsh 5). Sometimes, this war inflicted on women was tenacious with colonizers’ attempts to enslave the nations that they conquered. This correlation between sexism and colonialism was present in Ireland, where women were subjugated both to the rules of British colonizers and to Irish men desiring to confine them to their homes. One of the literary traditions contributing to the control of Irish women was the aisling tradition [the word aisling means a vision or a dream; it originated as a Gaelic literary genre connected with love and sovereignty]. The main focus of the aisling is the image of Ireland personified as an ideal woman who comes to Irish men in their dreams, urging them to fight for their country. In modern times, Irish feminists started to point out how the aisling tradition imprisoned women culturally and suppressed their sexuality. Consequentially, Irish women writers have been striving to reverse the profound impact that a variety of literary texts, including this tradition, exerted on the worldview of Irish people. This article will present the ways in which Medbh McGuckian reverses the aisling tradition to give women agency and voice, and juxtapose them with Seamus Heaney’s poetry (especially his two poems: “The Act of Union” and “Ocean’s Love to Ireland”). Furthermore, it will reflect on the transformation from the “male gaze” in Heaney’s poems to “female action” in McGuckian’s poems. The analysis will encompass two of her poems: “The Hollywood Bed” and “The Heiress,” in the framework of literary criticism from acclaimed feminist scholars such as Clair Wills, Alison Garden, and Aimée Walsh. It will also comment on the origins of the term male gaze to contextualize the discussion around it.