As Julia Kristeva stated in the Stabat Mater, the maternal image of the Virgin Mary does not provide an adequate model of maternity, therefore with the Virgin as a role model, the maternal body is reduced to silence. Moreover, she apparently implies interrelations between desexualizing and silencing women (Kristeva 145). Thus, the name of the poem doubly attacks the Catholic rules—if women are reduced to be mothers, a homosexual love act is an act of disobedience, and the detailed description if the act with “thighs” and “back” and “your breasts and belly” (Dorcey 1120) emphasizes that the scene in the poem is purely lustful, it is an act of desire and passion, what contradicts the religious model. The line “Blood on our thighs” may have two …show more content…
off. (Dorcey 1121)
With this closing lines, Dorcey suggest “the possibility of a society which re-creates itself from the ruins of an outdated cultural and value system” (Schrage-Früh, “‘My Being Cries Out to Be Incarnate’: The Virgin Mary and Female Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry” 136). But her hopes probably will never be fulfilled. As Moane writes:
. . . rapid social change does not necessarily imply marked psychological change. In the case of homosexuality, for example, it is apparent that fear and prejudice is alive and well in Irish psyches and society, despite important legislative changes, the unprecedented inclusion of lesbians and gay men in progressive social agendas, and increasing depiction of lesbians and gay men in art and culture. (431)
With this poem, the author shows that violence, unreal idealized expectations of the woman and prejudice towards the lesbians are related. From the lines “she was always— / no one would have though— / always a quiet girl” (Dorcey 1121) “one infers . . . the indictment of those ideologies that propound the image of the woman as docile, quiet and asexual by making it responsible for violence against women” (González, “Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Galicia and in Ireland: An Introduction”