“If a female had once passed the gate it would be practically impossible to watch what buildings or chambers she had entered.” Such were the words of the Board of Trinity College in 1895. Less than a decade later, in 1904, the first women – three in total – entered Trinity as students. 120 years on and a building on campus has, for the first time, been named after a woman. A name might not seem like much, but the homage we pay daily in speaking that name matters. And so, like Boland’s work, this renaming is meaningful without being ostentatious, a respectful acknowledgement that will be repeated daily.
Boland’s “great achievement was to move women from the object (muse, dream, symbol) of poetry to the subject who was writing the poem.”
Boland, through her poetry, moved women from the position of muse to maker. As historian Catriona Crowe notes, Boland’s “great achievement was to move women from the object (muse, dream, symbol) of poetry to the subject who was writing the poem.” There has been a long tradition of the woman’s role in art being that of the artist’s muse. In Greek mythology, the Muses were the nine Goddesses of artistic inspiration. (It is from here that the etymology of the word museum stems, with the museum originally being the place that the muses were worshipped.) Originally, these Goddesses were in control of their own destiny, but somewhere along the way in the annals of history the term got distorted such that the muse became only a source of inspiration for the male creator, with the muse herself being shut out of the act of creation.
The artist-muse relationship is traditionally romanticised and there is, admittedly, a certain allure to this ethereal role. There is a seeming grandiosity granted to the woman from which the artist is said to draw his inspiration, without whom the art would be directionless and lost. In the evocative words of Germaine Greer, “in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind.” And yet the muse is anonymous and underestimated rather than a person in her own right, the object being acted upon rather than the acting subject. As Zadie Smith writes in A Sentimental Education, from the perspective of a young woman speaking of men, “Don’t talk about them like they’re objects, they don’t like it. They want to be the subject in all situations. Don’t you try and be the subject.”
The muse was often an artist and creator herself whose role would be overshadowed by the man whom she served, with her own career becoming progressively sidelined as the male artists’ career grew. There was a time when this position as muse might have been the only avenue through which aspiring female artists could gain access to the male world of art to which they were barred entry, posing as models, for example, in schools in which they were not themselves permitted to enrol. Just as in the wider patriarchy, the woman in the artist-muse relationship plays a quiet but integral supplementary role for which the forward facing man is credited. This is blatant with the amount of women artists who are referred to only in relation to the male artists to which they were muse (just last term, a classmate of mine referred to the work of Yoko Ono as that of “John Lennon’s wife.”)
Moving away from this pattern of creation is not only a feminist endeavour but also one which serves art itself
This is not to say that there is no beauty in a working artistic relationship in which there is interplay and collaboration between the subjects, an exchange of power rather than a hoarding of it. This, however, is not the artist-muse relationship as we know it, in which the female muse is depicted only through the eyes of the male artist, denying the woman self-determining agency. Moving away from this pattern of creation is not only a feminist endeavour but also one which serves art itself, with the best art emerging from neither navel gazing nor detachment but rather a simultaneous examination of both one’s inner and outer world. As Frieda Kahlo, who is most famous for her self-portraits, declared, “I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best.” There is a lot to be said for this drawing of inspiration from the self rather than from the aesthetic beauty of the subject before you.
Through her poetry she honoured with honesty the extraordinary daily life of women
In Boland’s own words, “I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other.” Boland was acutely aware of the marginalised position held by women in Irish society and history, and much of her life’s work was a quietly persistent resistance to this assigned place. Through her poetry she honoured with honesty the extraordinary daily life of women, “I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.”
Boland’s life was, relative to standard conceptions of artistic fame, conspicuously ordinary. The work that she did, however, was not. For in carving out a space for women in Ireland to be both creators in their art and in their life, she moved women from the position of object to subject, muse to maker. It is an act of poetic justice that Trinity’s library, home to writing and learning, quiet study and humble thinking, should be honoured with her name.
