ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, I briefly noted that in 1938 Virginia Woolf argued in Three Guineas that women were positioned outside a masculine patriotism that had appropriated English identity. More recently, in his broad survey of twentieth-century poetry from Hardy to Hughes, John Lucas concludes that ‘“Englishness” turns out to be a largely, or even exclusively, male affair’ (Lucas 1986: 8). Jane Dowson also makes the point that unified concepts of nation, as of gender, exclude women (Dowson 1997: 245). That nationality is an issue of gender becomes a common theme in contemporary women’s poetry, explored, to take examples from the anthologies considered below, by Carol Rumens in ‘A Lawn for the English Family’, Eva Salzman in ‘The English Earthquake’, Maura Dooley in ‘Apple Pie in Pizzaland’, and Carol Ann Duffy in ‘Translating the English, 1989’. The querying of what it means to be English or British is underlaid by the extent to which national identity has always been localised and gendered. Women are explicitly included but implicitly excluded, like ‘foreigners’ as Anne Rouse puts it in ‘England Nil’, her sonnet about macho football supporters ‘representing their country’ on the Continent: ‘You’ve been Englished, but you won’t forget it, never.’ The over-association between country and male violence is also emphasised in Jo Shapcott’s ironically titled ‘Motherland’, in which the speaker decides a none–too–distant history161 of nationalism, patriarchy, and colonialism has made national identity a matter of ‘rotting pride’: ‘England. It hurts my lips to shape / the word.’
