How green was my valley: the critique of the picturesque by Irish and Galician women poets

Manuela Palacios González

doi:10.14198/fem.2005.5.10

Abstract

The present paper explores how contemporary women poets in Ireland and Galicia have engaged, for the last thirty years, in a critique of the Picturesque representations of landscape. Irish poets like Eavan Boland, Anne Le Marquand Hartigan or Mary Dorcey, and Galician ones like Luz Pichel, Chus Pato and Lupe Gomez draw our attention to the strategies through which power relations, as well as political and economic interests, shape space. These female poets also expose the ways in which gender difference affects our experience of landscape. A materialist approach helps us see the conditions of labour that are inscribed in those landscapes that much of the pastoral canon has represented as idyllic spaces for leisure. Besides, current ecofeminist debates contribute to this critique of the picturesque with their conception of the relative difference of nature.

Highlights

Since the 1970s there has been a growing interpenetration of both ecology and feminism which has been accompanied by a parallel increase in environmental literature written by women.1 In this paper I intend to show how these recent cultural and literary changes and innovations have brought about a critique of the traditional canon of nature writing
Recent developments of ecofeminism have questioned the misleading simplicity of the opposition male/female and have introduced in the debates
In the present analysis of Irish and Galician women poets’ critique of the Picturesque I have found that the notions of class, religion and nation are deeply interconnected with that of gender in the writers’ perceptions of landscapes. Apart from these considerations, ecofeminism has encouraged an important on-going discussion about the alterity of both nature and women that is illuminating for literary criticism

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1970s there has been a growing interpenetration of both ecology and feminism which has been accompanied by a parallel increase in environmental literature written by women.1 In this paper I intend to show how these recent cultural and literary changes and innovations have brought about a critique of the traditional canon of nature writing.

Results

Conclusion