Decolonization of the Female Body in Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Eavan Boland’s In Her Own Image decolonizes and demystifies the female body as signified in patriarchal literary texts. Challenging the restrictions imposed upon women’s self-expression, Boland focuses on describing taboo areas of female bodily experience, such as anorexia, menstruation, mastectomy, and masturbation. Boland argues her female identity from the perspectives of the body and sexual pleasure. The poetic language that she envisages in In Her Own Image directly connects female sexuality and writing poetry. Throughout the poems, Boland’s use of concrete bodily imagery does not stop at disclosing camouflaged patriarchal language; she extends this critique to mythology about women. In so doing, Boland subverts traditional poetic standards, for it is women’s real lives, feelings, and sufferings that defy the laws of male-inscribed literary texts. This paper points out that Boland’s In Her Own Image shows a woman who can perceive through her body; it is in the body that the poetic voices find female identity and selfhood. Positing the female body as the origin of female selfhood, Boland emphasizes her poetic vision, which is embodied through expressing the physical jouissance of the female body as a liberating act. In her artistic decolonization of the female body, female subjectivity is fully liberated from its imprisonment in patriarchal literary texts.