What Kind of a Living Woman is It that You are at All?

Abstract

The representation of women as fantasy objects in Irish culture has a long history stretching back through the ages from Old Irish (written before 950ce), to Middle Irish (950–1200ce) and Early Modern Irish (1200ce to the 1700s).1 The earliest extant literature was written during a period of social transition and, while based on pagan oral tradition, it was transcribed by Christian writers. Consequently it is difficult to determine what the original pagan tradition must have actually been, as it was buried under centuries of interpretive and translational palimpsests. While early Irish literature was constantly re-worked into the new Christian mythopoeic system, it was not interrupted or broken up by that system but merely transformed into the new Christian ethos. Between the early Irish and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish traditions, however, there was definite schism. The new modifications were due to several contingent factors, as Rosalind Clark suggests: ‘the change from an independent to a colonial Ireland, the change from the Irish to the English language, new social mores, and, finally, new standards of literary convention and taste. As the society and its ideals and beliefs altered, the literature and its portrayal of women altered.’2 Clark contends that the Anglo-Irish authors ‘knew little of the dying Irish tradition until they discovered it by means of laborious scholarship.