Voice Of Double Other

Eavan Boland is a prominent poet of contemporary Ireland. Her poetry is focused on lives and experiences of ordinary Irish women. In the past four decades, over 10 books of poetry and several volumes of prose, translations and her other literary works have been published. She has systematically presented a female community which is quite different from what is constructed in Irish traditional literature. With her increasing literary status, the studies about Boland and her works are varied, among which feminism and post-colonialism are two key theoretical approaches, together with her employment of myths and legends and great attention to ordinariness. The present thesis endeavors to analyze Boland's works from the combined perspective of post-colonial feminism, and, based on the key concept"Other", dwells on how the poetess gives voice to Irish women, who are marginalized by both Irish patriarchy and British colonization to be double Other, losing their true voice in literature.This thesis is developed from five aspects. Chapter one gives a brief literature review, introduces the theoretical foundation and explains the research value and research approaches. Chapter two mainly discusses the double Otherness embodied in Irish women and the poetess herself. In Chapter three, the major part of this thesis, the strategies employed by Boland to give voice to Irish women are analyzed in detail from the following five aspects: revealing the passivity and silence of Irish women, retelling myths and legends, subverting traditional female images, highlighting Irish women's ordinary but real life, and relocating them in history. Chapter four then deals with the characteristics of the authentic voice uttered by Irish women, namely, femininity, ordinariness and independence. Chapter five, the concluding part, sums up the main arguments, and further points out that with giving voice to the once mute, passive and distorted Irish women, Boland corrects the false image of a double marginalized community and gives readers a window to an ignored or distorted real world.Through the post-colonial feminist studies of Boland's poetics of vocalizing Irish women, it can be concluded that such a double Other as Irish women can still recover voice through what once suppressed them. This understanding will, of course, exert great influences on the literary creation of those with similar experiences.