The opposition between architectonic masculinity and female feeling for mystery and divination underlines much of Heaney’s writing and may be seen in the two part divisions of Wintering Out and North

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Sarah Bailiff                Yr 12 Lit

Seamus Heaney Long Essay

Question 4

“The opposition between architectonic masculinity and female feeling for mystery and divination underlines much of Heaney’s writing and may be seen in the two part divisions of Wintering Out and North. In literature, representations of femininity and masculinity may be seen in terms of contests for power and possession. In Heany’s work, the representations of gender can be read as two opposing yet complimentary representations of gender interactions. The first of which, can be seen in ‘Tollund Man’, from Wintering Out, 1972. The poem represents “a woman who dooms, destroys, puzzles and encompasses the man”. In this poem, Heaney conveys the seductive power of the bog  goddess, and the weakness of the unearthed ‘bridegroom’. The poem functions to comment on Heaney’s society, by relating it to the fate of the Tolland man, yet it also represents the power held by women in a gendered hierarchy created by foundations of fear. This was due to the way Irish society related ordinary women to ideas of Mary, the mother of god, and Celtic mythological heroines. In the poem, the bog is represented as a place of sex and marriage, but also as a place of execution and necrophilia. This idea is important, as it compares unity with women with death and decadence.  It depicts images of women that were created as projections of anxieties, which were used as evidence for a need to control women.

  This idea is pursued in ‘Act of Union’, which is part of the North collection, from 1975. Here, Heaney develops his definition of gender constructions and a power shift is seen as the struggle for power between the sexes begins. Heaney now defines masculinity in his poetry as the dominant gender; ‘an unequivocally dominant masculine figure, who explores, describes, brings to pleasure and compassionates a passive feminine icon’3.

This poem, like others from the North collection, rehearses a narrative for rape and sexual violence, on behalf of the masculine figure. The poem expresses the possessive and dominant nature of rape with an analogy to the invasion of Ireland, which helps the reader to understand the submissiveness of women, in terms of Ireland. It also depicts female imagery as the landscape, which helps convey the idea that women are objects for possession, and the man is there cultured, conscious and literate to take control of it, and put it, or her to use. These representations of both masculine and feminine qualities, outlined in ‘The Tollund Man’ and ‘Act of Union’ unify Heaney’s contrasting definitions, which show that representations of femininity and masculinity in literature can be seen in terms of contests for power and possession. This is due to the fact that in both definitions there is a different gender capacitating the power.

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‘The Tollund Man’, expresses Heaney’s original gender representations, where the female is portrayed as the dominant being, and her possession is the man. As a result of fear, this poem shows how a fear of women has repressed men into submission. The poem works to justify this theory through a representation of a dominant woman and an introverted male figure. Firstly, the domination of the female over the exhumed male in the poem is presented in part one, stanza four:

                

“She tightened her torc on him

                And opened her fen,

                Those dark juices working

                Him to a ...

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