Heritage of Hunger: Famine, Self-Starvation, and Narrative-Building in Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic”

In Ireland, the Famine remains a trauma that poses difficulties of history and representation for writers attempting to address its presence in national and cultural memory. Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” while not typically read as engaging with the Famine, presents a unique possibility for such representations as an invented narrative rooted in a fundamentally Irish context. Boland’s work often features voices that were historically precluded from literary and national traditions, leading her to construct “imaginative” narratives that feature women’s voices as they engage with memory and trauma. Boland has written several poems more explicitly addressing the Famine, but “Anorexic” is not typically counted among them. I argue, however, that “Anorexic” can be read as such a narrative when interrogated as a response to the prevailing masculine, nationalistic narratives that characterise how women have been historically represented in Famine writing.