Ireland’s feminine iconography. Creation and re/construction of a nation in feminine

Abstract

In the course of centuries, the Irish cultural imagery has been saturated by feminine symbols –specially allegorical constructions of the nation– that through their ideological power, they have attempted to make hidden the realities of real women, keeping their voices quiet and denying their bodies and identities form the public sphere: since precolonial sovereign goddesses, through medieval heroines from vernacular literature, the aisling poems of an ethereal woman from 18th Century or the colonial construction of Hibernia's image as a symbol of Ireland, to the nationalist icons such as Dark Rosaleen, Cathleen Ní Houliham or Mother Ireland, including the catholic imagery of the Virgin Mary. The restrictive symbolic roles imposed over Iris women have promoted an unreal ideal and in many cases, an ideal that is unfeasible with repercussions which are current in present-day..