Sheela-na-gig

Bawn Area

The sheela-na-gig is a “female exhibitionist figure” carved in stone and found most often in the walls of medieval Irish and British buildings, usually castles or churches. Over one hundred are known to exist in Ireland, roughly twice the number as in Britain. They typically show grimacing old women holding their vulvas. Their purpose and symbolism is unknown, although various theories include warnings against the sin of lust; warding off of evil (hence functioning like a gargoyle on a church); fertility symbols; and charms to assist with childbirth (Manning).

Our sheela-na-gig at Kilcolman is modeled on a sandstone carving found buried in a dungeon (in the seventeenth century or before) at Glanworth Castle, Co. Cork. Glanworth was the second-most-important center of the Roche family, after Castletownroche, Co. Cork.

The date and ultimate provenance of the Glanworth specimen is unknown. Another sheela-na-gig figure is known from Castletownroche, and one has been found in the wall of the tower house at Fantstown, near Kilmallock, Co. Limerick. The Fantstown specimen is located in the north-eastern corner of the tower house and is evident as one approaches the main doorway.

This sheela-na-gig greets a visitor entering the main gate of the bawn, or outer-wall enclosure of the castle complex. We imagine that Spenser or the previous occupants of the castle, such as Sir John of Desmond, intended the sculpture to ward off evil, including enemies. Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth, had a son with the poet and could also have appreciated any association of the sculpture with the pains of childbirth.

Literary Connections

When night falls over the newlywed couple in Spenser’s wedding poem, “Epithalamion”, the speaker calls out on various demons of the night (including the Irish “Pouke”) not to disturb them in the comfort of their castle, as they make love (“Epithalamion” 334-52). According to Hugh MacLean and Anne Lake Prescott, “Spenser’s strategy” at this “liminal moment of sexuality,” a time of “transition and initiation,” is “to evoke and then shoo away grotesque fantasy figures” (641). For similar reasons, the poet earlier compares his bride to Medusa (“Epithalamion” 190) who “astonisht” onlookers at her wedding (with a pun in astonisht on turning to “stone”). Read one way, their alarm at her charm is a means of dispelling any potential ill will that the townspeople might bear towards the bride, for they clearly admire her beauty, as well. Read another way, Spenser is himself frightened by specters of female sexuality; it is something that must be overcome if he is to prosper and flourish in Ireland.

The most famous hag in Spenser’s oeuvre is surely the witch Duessa (her name, implying duplicity, is also an Irish name, meaning “little black one”), who is stripped and whose shame is exposed in Book I.viii of The Faerie Queene:

Such as she was, their eies might her behold,
That her misshaped parts did them appall,
A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old,
Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told.

Her crafty head was altogether bald,
And as in hate of honorable eld,
Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
Her dried dugs, lyke bladders lacking wind,
Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind. (FQ I.viii.46.6-47)

She is monstrous, with animal-like feet and other “filthy feature” that is “open showne”(stanzas 48-49). The imagery comes from the Bible (cf. Isaiah 3.17, 24) and other places and again presents to the reader a haunting specter of female sexuality gone bad, since Duessa had earlier appeared as a beautiful seductress. Her scabbiness here indicates age and disease, including syphilis or perhaps leprosy, a disease that afflicted the unfaithful Cressida in medieval legend. She is allowed to wander off into the wilderness by the heroes of holiness Arthur and Red Crosse Knight, from whence she will later return to cause more confusion. Duessa is not a sheela-na-gig, but like the one we’ve posted next to Spenser’s bawn gate, she represents a grotesque portrayal of female sexuality. She must be grappled with, comprehended and evaded if the Englishman is to prosper in Ireland.

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheela_na_gig (accessed 11/29/12) [Wikipedia entry on sheela-na-gigs]

Dr. Thomas Herron

Bibliography:
Jørgen Andersen, The Witch on the Wall: medieval erotic sculpture in the British Isles (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1977): 130, 146.

Barbara Freitag. Sheela-na-gigs: unraveling an enigma (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004).

Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012): 263-4.

Hugh MacLean and Anne Lake Prescott (eds), Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. 3rd ed. (NY: Norton, 1993).

Conleth Manning, The History and Archaeology of Glanworth Castle, Co. Cork: Excavations 1982-4. Archaeological Monograph Series 4 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2009): 91-3 and back cover.

Judith Owens, “The Poetics of Accommodation in Spenser’s ’Epithalamion,’” Studies in English Literature 40.1 (2000), 41-62.

Rory Sherlock, “Newly Recorded Figurative Carvings on Tower Houses in County Limerick.” North Munster Antiquarian Journal 44 (2004), 15-23: 15-16.