Objects Matter: An Object-Oriented Reading of Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons

Abstract

This article argues that although Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons has reached considerable achievements in terms of the visibility of women poets in the Irish literary landscape, her project expressed and reinforced the Mary Robinson moment of the early Celtic Tiger. The present ecologically endangered era calls for a critical reappraisal and a questioning of the subject-object dichotomy that lies at the heart of its argument. Many, if not most of the difficulties pointed out by Boland’s readers and the criticisms levelled at her work have as their point of departure the constitution of a feminine poetic subjectivity and the subsequently problematic nature of objects and nature created by the very gesture. While attributing subjectivity, and therefore agency, to women in poetry was certainly an indispensable breaking away from various forms of political and religious authority, new conceptual frameworks such as the new materialisms and object-oriented ontology have emerged since, that de-correlate agency from subjectivity, thus re-thinking altogether the status of objects. Drawing mostly from Timothy Morton’s application of object-oriented ontology to environmental matters, I show how reading Object Lessons without the subject-object distinction addresses some of the criticisms directed at Boland and highlights the ecological value of her poetic and prose work.