To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?
As a woman, I can trace my body through nations since antiquity. It is inescapable in literature, particularly in poetry. We as women have always been there as a figurehead in the literary canon, voiceless figures speaking for a nation. Take the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, for example: also known as ‘The Poor Old Woman’, she is a wandering figure without a home, who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die for Ireland to rejuvenate herself and reverse her ageing to some degree. This figure became most prominent through Yeats’ treatment of her in his play, ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, using her as a representative of the Irish struggles under British colonial rule, her body becoming a site of allegory and metaphor to put across the concept of nationhood. But of course, it is male writers who map this allegory onto us. Throughout history, this portrayal of nationhood as female was our only chance to be included and represented in the male-dominated literary canon, and so made little sense to alienate ourselves from one of the only acceptable feminine representations. But what does this mean now, when the amount of female writers is only expanding? This concept of woman-as-nation, I argue, does more harm than good in the creation of a sense of gendered national identity. As women, we have been placed into the role of representative without understanding the burden this creates.
I feel no connection to England as a motherland, no solidarity between myself as a woman and England as a feminine creation, despite the constant connections made between the two in countless pieces of literature. It is hard to grapple with the concept of a nation which has been forced onto our gendered existence without conforming to the norm, using our bodies and identities as a transactional site in which to gain access into this elusive men’s world of metaphors and similes. To be a female writer, writing about national identity, your role is pre-defined. And to break into this world, this role will be thrust upon you without question, leaving you expected to attempt to evaluate and bring together two separate identities in one.
The imposition of this national narrative onto the feminine, using and appropriating the site of the female body as a non-consensual figurehead for a nation, creates a sense of dissonance between the two identities and can often serve to further isolate female writers grappling with both concepts and their personhood as an intersection of the two. To try and enter this space in an attempt to redefine the sense of gender pre-established by someone outside of this identity is a challenge in itself. This imposition of metaphor, of woman-as-nation, has, instead of bringing the female identity closer to the poetic and literary canon, created a distance between the two, alienating women from the discourse surrounding the concept of national identity and nationhood within their work due to the predefined position they have been given in terms of an expression of national identity. This can only serve to make women and female writers feel as if they have no place beyond the role of figureheads within the sphere of national literature, driving a wedge between the two identities as well as refusing to acknowledge the lived experiences of women within the nation in question.
To become part of this tradition, to enrol yourself within this literary canon, you must re-negotiate the idea of woman-as-nation within a narrative that is overwhelmingly patriarchal. It is a necessary act of re-evaluation, taking the two singular concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘nation’ in conjunction with each other, and what it means to step away from bearing the burden of national identity. The concept of a nation exists as a gendered entity in ways that tend to disempower real women by silencing their actual voices and obscuring their experiences, objectifying women at the expense of their flesh-and-blood subjectivity and negating the importance of their knowledge and understanding of actual experiences, material lives and agency. It is vital that female writers, grappling with the concept of identity, interrogate the disjunctions produced by the nationalisation of the feminine and the feminisation of the national, both within themselves and within the society and literary subculture. Through revising, editing and reconfiguring nationalism rather than repudiating it, there is more opportunity to create space within such narratives for the historical and material experiences of women.
The historical gendering of nations as female within literature has served to create disharmony between the two identities of gender and nationality, with their intersection in modern women’s literature a cause for a re-evaluation of the way the two separate concepts interact. It has now fallen to the female writer to take on the burden of woman-as-nation and examine that to her national identity, reclaiming space within the literary canon and overcoming the divide that the imposition of this metaphor has caused.