A Reason for "Punishment"
“Punishment”
“Punishment,” written by Seamus Heaney, causes the reader to feel sympathy for the tortured girl whose body was found in the depths of the bogs of Germany and was displayed in the 1975 P.V. Glob book, The Bog People. In this book, Heaney encountered a photograph of this woman’s body, which inspired him to write this moving piece. According to the online publication of Archaeology, the “bog bodies” have been recovered (quite accidentally) “during peat cutting activities in northwestern Europe, especially in Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark,” and the bodies “date from 8000 B.C. to the early medieval period.” Although the fates of the persons whose bodies were discovered in the bogs are not known, classical scholars believe that the Roman, Iron Age people of northern Europe may have been a wide variety of the victims. Some may have been sacrificed to celebrate military victories while others may have been executed as punishment for a number of crimes. According to the documentary, Archeology: Prehistoric Inhabitants, “the bog, to the Celtic people, was not an evil place, but a holy one,” archaeological specialist from the documentary also speculate that many of the bog people may have been “sacrificed during times of desperation.” Many of these bodies are still well preserved because they were immersed in and essentially protected by the peat that they lied buried in for thousands of years. Scientists have found that “[w]hen a body is placed in bog peat, sphagnum prevents bacteria from growing, and the body can become mummified” (Deem 16). According to NobelPrize.org, Heaney, a man of both Irish and Gaelic roots, relates to this particular bog-person, who is known as the Windeby Girl. Heaney has mixed feelings for the Windeby Girl however, a feeling that remains constant within Heaney, and a feeling that Heaney works to stir within the reader is sympathy. “Sympathy” is defined as a relationship between persons wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other. The requirements for sympathy are minimal. It only requires that one must be able to recognize that all human beings have the same capacity to feel emotion, and it requires that both the sympathizer and the victim have experiences that cause a specific and shared emotion or emotions. The common emotion allows the sympathizer to understand the victim’s pain. When a reader examines a piece of writing, he “engages in an act of imagination or make-believe [ . . . ]” imagining “that [he] is a part of the represented world. Emotion is a response that is both part of the imagination, and a result of the vividness of the imagination”(Lewis and Haviland-Jones 126). Therefore, if a reader does have an emotional response to the work, his experience caused him to sympathize with the character that he read about, just as Heaney wishes to do in this work.
The first reason that I conclude that Heaney intends to create sympathy for the Windeby Girl is essential to understanding the poem. The Windeby Girl was believed to be violently murdered by her tribe. She may have been an adulteress or a criminal or just an unfortunate soul who was selected to be sacrificed during a time of need. Heaney intends to create sympathy for the Windeby girl by showing that she was a victim of an entire society in conflict with itself. Archeological evidence supports the theory that she may have been a victim of sacrifice as “ritual killing increased when the Celtic world came under stress from the systematic attack by Rome [ . . . ]” during this time (Cremin 59). Ancient Celts sought for success in war “by means of ritual sacrifice” (Davies 21). When a reader reads about a person who has been made a victim of a society, the reader will imagine himself in the main character’s place (in this case, the Windeby Girl is the main character); the reader will imagine that he is experiencing the events described. During this internal experience, the reader will also associate emotions with that experience such as pain, anger, rage, or humiliation. The emotions allow us to understand the Windeby Girl’s reality as the emotion “provides a concrete experience of an intangible mental state” (Opdahl 67). Therefore, the reader is able to understand and feel the Windeby Girl’s pain, and has thus, sympathized with her. One does not have to “experience the violence or violation directly, but those who witness it----that is, see or hear about it from others [ . . . ]” to be traumatized (Weingarten 42). Though the reader has not experienced being stripped, shaven, tarred, and bound to the railings of his own city, the reader can experience the bog woman’s torture through the utilization of his imagination. Heaney sparks the reader’s imagination, and takes the reader into a world in which the Windeby Girl was tortured and killed before a willing crowd, possibly an entire town or village. Although she was an adulteress, her punishment was cruel and unjust. Heaney confirms that he finds her punishment unjust when he calls her his “poor scapegoat” (line 27). When the reader identifies the Windeby Girl as a martyr and comprehends the extreme manner in which she was punished, he develops sympathy for her, and as such, accomplishes Heaney’s goal.
While the Windeby Girl’s status as a scapegoat is important in accomplishing Heaney’s goal, Heaney knows that emphasizing her humanity is also a necessary element for causing a reader to sympathize with her. We have all, most likely, seen the dehumanization that occurs on the news. The victim is described more as a “case” or a “headline” than as a person. The symptoms are technical, not descriptive. It is hard to sympathize with a mere “case number” or a “headline.” On the other hand, it is much easier for a reader to sympathize with someone that he can relate to as a human being like himself. Heaney works to do just this. It has been said that humanization is a “sickness of the soul [that] might well be called the ‘Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse’” (Montagu and Matson xi). Heaney intentionally highlights the most human attributes of the Windeby Girl with vivid descriptions to remind the reader that the bog-woman was once human though her body is ancient. When the reader imagines “her shaved head / like a stubble of black corn” (17-18), he may wonder whether the hair growth occurred postmortem. As many know, hair growth is a characteristic restricted to the living, however, hair and nails do shrink away from the once living part of the scalp and cuticles, causing the hair and nails to appear longer. As the inquiring reader understands this, he begins to understand the Windeby Girl’s mortality. By realizing this common thread, the reader understands that this girl was also once a living person, not merely a photograph or a concept. With this basis, the reader is able to relate the pain that he has felt before and expect that the Windeby Girl must have felt the same pain. However, the reader understands that the Windeby Girl must have experienced much greater pain than he ever has because she died in the pain of torture. The reader has now compared his own experience in pain to the Windeby Girl’s pain, and he has thus sympathized with her. In other words, because the reader is aware of the Windeby Girl’s mortality, he is better able to appreciate the pain that she must have endured.
Once Heaney has established the humanity of the Windeby Girl, he drives the point home by empathizing the gore of her punishment. That is, once the reader has come to recognize the humanity of this victim, Heaney impresses the reader with the thoroughly inhumane punishment that she was subject to. When an author exposes a reader to great amounts of gory details, the reader’s imagination is immediately triggered. The reader begins to visualize the graphic descriptions described in the story. When the reader imagines these wounds and injuries, he relates his own experiences with injury, and he recalls those sensations, perhaps causing him to wince or recoil. Heaney tries to impose sympathy for the Windeby Girl on the reader when he describes “her blindfold [as] a soiled bandage” (19), and when he compares the girl’s possible before and after appearances. Heaney describes her before her gruesome torture as a “barked sapling” (14), and he describes her after as an “oak-bone, brain-firkin” (16). Heaney strikes the reader with a strong visual image of a woman with a bloody bandage over her eyes, with her various bones and brain exposed. The image painted here is a disturbing one, and it is an image that causes the reader to wince in sympathetic pain. Heaney forces us to visualize her grotesque form, while reminding the reader that this woman is human, which causes the reader to feel all the more unsettled. The reader will imagine the pain of having his eyes gouged out. He will imagine the limitless pain that undoubtedly ushered in the Windeby Girl’s death as her brains were bashed in and her bones were broken. As the reader imagines this pain and associates it with the emotions stirred in himself as he does such, he has experienced the pain that so greatly affected the Windeby Girl, thus sympathizing with her. Because of this reaction, we know that Heaney accomplishes his goal: he causes the reader to sympathize with the Windeby Girl. However, there may be some who believe that Heaney’s goal is not to create sympathy for the Windeby girl. They would argue that by speaking to the Windeby Girl endearingly, Heaney intends to invoke sympathy for himself. They might argue that when a reader observes an author looking onto his loved one’s torture and violent death, a reader would sympathize with the author, not the loved one. For it is he, after all, who must now live without his beloved. So, some may say, it is with “Punishment.” In “Punishment” one feels as if Heaney has experienced this loss, although the reader knows that Heaney was not born until thousands of years after the actual time of Windeby Girl’s death. Nonetheless, a reader with some sense of imagination can sympathize with Heaney. It is as if Heaney and the Windeby Girl are separated lovers, and Heaney is identifying her maimed body. The reader observes Heaney speaking tenderly to the Windeby Girl. As Heaney begins to address her directly, in the second half of the poem, the reader becomes aware of an eerie sort of infatuation. Heaney laments, “you were flaxen-haired, / undernourished, and your / tar black face was beautiful” (25-26). Immediately, the perceptive reader senses the closeness that Heaney feels toward the Windeby Girl. The mood of the poem is almost romantic. This, some might say, causes the reader to sympathize with Heaney, not the girl, for it is Heaney who is left without his love. He is distraught and alone, surely he deserves the reader’s sympathy. As most have experienced the loss of a loved one in some sense or another, the reader draws upon those experiences and the emotions that accompany them and understand how Heaney must have felt. Either of these methods will lead a reader toward experiencing the Windeby Girl’s pain, which fits the definition of sympathy. For these reasons, some may be of the impression that Heaney intends to create sympathy for himself, not the Windeby Girl.
Although it can be seen how some may argue that Heaney intends to create sympathy for himself, those who argue this position are misguided. Even when Heaney speaks lovingly and sorrowfully to the Windeby Girl, he fully intends to invoke sympathy in the reader for her, not himself. When a reader reads a work by an author who is telling the story of his loved one’s gruesome torture and violent death, he will first and foremost find his attention drawn to the victim of the torture, as such acts are unwaveringly appalling events. Although the reader most likely will not have experiences of having himself been a victim of such torture, most likely he has experiences in which he has felt the same basic emotions. Shame. Fear. Hopelessness. Pain. The reader will tap into these experiences in which he has felt these emotions, and he will be able to relate to the Windeby Girl through those common emotions. The reader will then be struck with a sense of injustice and sorrow for the Windeby victim, which is by definition, sympathy. This is the true reaction that Heaney intends to create in the reader. When he says to the Windeby Girl, “you were flaxen-haired, / undernourished, and your / tar black face was beautiful” (25-27), the reader is expected to feel sympathy for the girl. Furthermore, Heaney admits that he
would have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings. (37-40)
When Heaney sorrowfully confesses this, it is almost as if he is assuring the reader that he does not want the reader’s sympathy directed toward himself. If he were given the chance, he “would have cast... / the stones of silence” (30-31), for “[he is] the artful voyeur” (line 32). “Voyeurism” is defined as an opportunity “to look at thoughts and secrets of the heart that we ordinarily would not be permitted to see,” such as the secrets of death and dying (Shneidman 5). Although Heaney is bestowed with this privilege, he still admits that he would have betrayed her by refusing to oppose her punishment. Heaney grew up in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles.” The Protestant British, at this time, occupied Heaney’s homeland and caused a great deal of resistance and opposition within Ireland. Irish Catholics resented the British so much that if a Catholic woman was discovered to be dating a British soldier, she could be executed. Officials typically would punish such women by tarring her face, beating her, and handcuffing her to the city’s railings, for a town of voyeurs to observe. Perhaps this is why the Windeby girl struck a chord so deeply within Heaney. Heaney looks upon the Windeby Girl sorrowfully acknowledging the similarity between the ancient Windeby Girl and the Catholic women of his time. Though Heaney did not agree with the punishment of the women of his time, he did not stand against their deaths. Perhaps Heaney saw the Windeby Girl as an ancient version of “the Troubles” he grew up in, troubles that he, only one person, was not strong enough to fight. Heaney takes the reader into the Windeby Girl’s reality in which she was utterly alone, without even a single voice to speak out against her cruel punishment. Heaney’s experiences with social injustice bring the Windeby Girl’s punishment to life in the vivid colors of his past, allowing the reader to experience and thus sympathize with the Windeby Girl. Because of this, I hold my position that Heaney intends to create sympathy for the Windeby Girl in “Punishment.”
As one can see, Heaney is successful in creating sympathy for the Windeby Girl. Once a reader fully understands the context in which the Windeby Girl’s death is significant, the reader is able to appreciate the validity of Heaney’s dubbing her as a “scapegoat.” Furthermore, by focusing on her humanity he reminded us that she too was mortal. The reader is reminded that the Windeby Girl is not just an archaeological artifact, but rather she was a living, breathing person with the same capacity to feel that he, the reader feels today. By focusing on the gore of her torture and death, Heaney forces the reader to visualize and experience this girl’s pain with her. Finally, the reader’s sympathy for the Windeby Girl is even more deeply enforced with Heaney’s confession that he would have stood silent with her accusers, even though he felt that her punishment was unfounded. Because of the social and cultural tensions of the time, Heaney confesses that he too, if given the chance, would likely be guilty of condemning her to death, if only simply because he would not oppose it. By understanding these crucial elements, the reader can perceive the exact aloneness that the Windeby Girl must have felt before she was laid to rest in the bogs.
Works Cited
Archaeology: Prehistoric Inhabitants. Dir. Bertrand Morin. Perf. John Rhys-Davies. Videocassette. The Learning Channel, 1994.
“Bodies of the Bogs.” Archaeology. 2005. Archaeology Institute of America. 5 April 2005
.
Cremin, Aedeen, The Celts. New York: Rizzoli, 1998.
Davies, Nigel. Human Sacrifice: In History and Today. New York: Dorset, 1988.
Deem, James A. Bodies From the Bog. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Heaney, Seamus. “Punishment.” Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 2nd ed. Eds. John Schilb and John Clifford. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2003. 1306-1307.
Lewis, Michael and Haviland-Jones, Jeanette, eds. Handbook of Emotions 2nd ed. New York: Guilford, 2000.
Montagu, Ashley and Matson, Floyd. The Dehumanization of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Opdahl, Keith M. Emotion as Meaning: The Literary Case for How We Imagine. London: Associated UP, 2002.
“Seamus Heaney- Biography.” Nobel Prize.org. 17 Feb. 2005. 5 Apr. 2005 .
Shneidman, Edwin. Voices of Death. New York: Kodansha, 1995
Weingarten, Kaethe. Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal. New York: Dutton, 2003.
“Punishment,” written by Seamus Heaney, causes the reader to feel sympathy for the tortured girl whose body was found in the depths of the bogs of Germany and was displayed in the 1975 P.V. Glob book, The Bog People. In this book, Heaney encountered a photograph of this woman’s body, which inspired him to write this moving piece. According to the online publication of Archaeology, the “bog bodies” have been recovered (quite accidentally) “during peat cutting activities in northwestern Europe, especially in Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark,” and the bodies “date from 8000 B.C. to the early medieval period.” Although the fates of the persons whose bodies were discovered in the bogs are not known, classical scholars believe that the Roman, Iron Age people of northern Europe may have been a wide variety of the victims. Some may have been sacrificed to celebrate military victories while others may have been executed as punishment for a number of crimes. According to the documentary, Archeology: Prehistoric Inhabitants, “the bog, to the Celtic people, was not an evil place, but a holy one,” archaeological specialist from the documentary also speculate that many of the bog people may have been “sacrificed during times of desperation.” Many of these bodies are still well preserved because they were immersed in and essentially protected by the peat that they lied buried in for thousands of years. Scientists have found that “[w]hen a body is placed in bog peat, sphagnum prevents bacteria from growing, and the body can become mummified” (Deem 16). According to NobelPrize.org, Heaney, a man of both Irish and Gaelic roots, relates to this particular bog-person, who is known as the Windeby Girl. Heaney has mixed feelings for the Windeby Girl however, a feeling that remains constant within Heaney, and a feeling that Heaney works to stir within the reader is sympathy. “Sympathy” is defined as a relationship between persons wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other. The requirements for sympathy are minimal. It only requires that one must be able to recognize that all human beings have the same capacity to feel emotion, and it requires that both the sympathizer and the victim have experiences that cause a specific and shared emotion or emotions. The common emotion allows the sympathizer to understand the victim’s pain. When a reader examines a piece of writing, he “engages in an act of imagination or make-believe [ . . . ]” imagining “that [he] is a part of the represented world. Emotion is a response that is both part of the imagination, and a result of the vividness of the imagination”(Lewis and Haviland-Jones 126). Therefore, if a reader does have an emotional response to the work, his experience caused him to sympathize with the character that he read about, just as Heaney wishes to do in this work.
The first reason that I conclude that Heaney intends to create sympathy for the Windeby Girl is essential to understanding the poem. The Windeby Girl was believed to be violently murdered by her tribe. She may have been an adulteress or a criminal or just an unfortunate soul who was selected to be sacrificed during a time of need. Heaney intends to create sympathy for the Windeby girl by showing that she was a victim of an entire society in conflict with itself. Archeological evidence supports the theory that she may have been a victim of sacrifice as “ritual killing increased when the Celtic world came under stress from the systematic attack by Rome [ . . . ]” during this time (Cremin 59). Ancient Celts sought for success in war “by means of ritual sacrifice” (Davies 21). When a reader reads about a person who has been made a victim of a society, the reader will imagine himself in the main character’s place (in this case, the Windeby Girl is the main character); the reader will imagine that he is experiencing the events described. During this internal experience, the reader will also associate emotions with that experience such as pain, anger, rage, or humiliation. The emotions allow us to understand the Windeby Girl’s reality as the emotion “provides a concrete experience of an intangible mental state” (Opdahl 67). Therefore, the reader is able to understand and feel the Windeby Girl’s pain, and has thus, sympathized with her. One does not have to “experience the violence or violation directly, but those who witness it----that is, see or hear about it from others [ . . . ]” to be traumatized (Weingarten 42). Though the reader has not experienced being stripped, shaven, tarred, and bound to the railings of his own city, the reader can experience the bog woman’s torture through the utilization of his imagination. Heaney sparks the reader’s imagination, and takes the reader into a world in which the Windeby Girl was tortured and killed before a willing crowd, possibly an entire town or village. Although she was an adulteress, her punishment was cruel and unjust. Heaney confirms that he finds her punishment unjust when he calls her his “poor scapegoat” (line 27). When the reader identifies the Windeby Girl as a martyr and comprehends the extreme manner in which she was punished, he develops sympathy for her, and as such, accomplishes Heaney’s goal.
While the Windeby Girl’s status as a scapegoat is important in accomplishing Heaney’s goal, Heaney knows that emphasizing her humanity is also a necessary element for causing a reader to sympathize with her. We have all, most likely, seen the dehumanization that occurs on the news. The victim is described more as a “case” or a “headline” than as a person. The symptoms are technical, not descriptive. It is hard to sympathize with a mere “case number” or a “headline.” On the other hand, it is much easier for a reader to sympathize with someone that he can relate to as a human being like himself. Heaney works to do just this. It has been said that humanization is a “sickness of the soul [that] might well be called the ‘Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse’” (Montagu and Matson xi). Heaney intentionally highlights the most human attributes of the Windeby Girl with vivid descriptions to remind the reader that the bog-woman was once human though her body is ancient. When the reader imagines “her shaved head / like a stubble of black corn” (17-18), he may wonder whether the hair growth occurred postmortem. As many know, hair growth is a characteristic restricted to the living, however, hair and nails do shrink away from the once living part of the scalp and cuticles, causing the hair and nails to appear longer. As the inquiring reader understands this, he begins to understand the Windeby Girl’s mortality. By realizing this common thread, the reader understands that this girl was also once a living person, not merely a photograph or a concept. With this basis, the reader is able to relate the pain that he has felt before and expect that the Windeby Girl must have felt the same pain. However, the reader understands that the Windeby Girl must have experienced much greater pain than he ever has because she died in the pain of torture. The reader has now compared his own experience in pain to the Windeby Girl’s pain, and he has thus sympathized with her. In other words, because the reader is aware of the Windeby Girl’s mortality, he is better able to appreciate the pain that she must have endured.
Once Heaney has established the humanity of the Windeby Girl, he drives the point home by empathizing the gore of her punishment. That is, once the reader has come to recognize the humanity of this victim, Heaney impresses the reader with the thoroughly inhumane punishment that she was subject to. When an author exposes a reader to great amounts of gory details, the reader’s imagination is immediately triggered. The reader begins to visualize the graphic descriptions described in the story. When the reader imagines these wounds and injuries, he relates his own experiences with injury, and he recalls those sensations, perhaps causing him to wince or recoil. Heaney tries to impose sympathy for the Windeby Girl on the reader when he describes “her blindfold [as] a soiled bandage” (19), and when he compares the girl’s possible before and after appearances. Heaney describes her before her gruesome torture as a “barked sapling” (14), and he describes her after as an “oak-bone, brain-firkin” (16). Heaney strikes the reader with a strong visual image of a woman with a bloody bandage over her eyes, with her various bones and brain exposed. The image painted here is a disturbing one, and it is an image that causes the reader to wince in sympathetic pain. Heaney forces us to visualize her grotesque form, while reminding the reader that this woman is human, which causes the reader to feel all the more unsettled. The reader will imagine the pain of having his eyes gouged out. He will imagine the limitless pain that undoubtedly ushered in the Windeby Girl’s death as her brains were bashed in and her bones were broken. As the reader imagines this pain and associates it with the emotions stirred in himself as he does such, he has experienced the pain that so greatly affected the Windeby Girl, thus sympathizing with her. Because of this reaction, we know that Heaney accomplishes his goal: he causes the reader to sympathize with the Windeby Girl. However, there may be some who believe that Heaney’s goal is not to create sympathy for the Windeby girl. They would argue that by speaking to the Windeby Girl endearingly, Heaney intends to invoke sympathy for himself. They might argue that when a reader observes an author looking onto his loved one’s torture and violent death, a reader would sympathize with the author, not the loved one. For it is he, after all, who must now live without his beloved. So, some may say, it is with “Punishment.” In “Punishment” one feels as if Heaney has experienced this loss, although the reader knows that Heaney was not born until thousands of years after the actual time of Windeby Girl’s death. Nonetheless, a reader with some sense of imagination can sympathize with Heaney. It is as if Heaney and the Windeby Girl are separated lovers, and Heaney is identifying her maimed body. The reader observes Heaney speaking tenderly to the Windeby Girl. As Heaney begins to address her directly, in the second half of the poem, the reader becomes aware of an eerie sort of infatuation. Heaney laments, “you were flaxen-haired, / undernourished, and your / tar black face was beautiful” (25-26). Immediately, the perceptive reader senses the closeness that Heaney feels toward the Windeby Girl. The mood of the poem is almost romantic. This, some might say, causes the reader to sympathize with Heaney, not the girl, for it is Heaney who is left without his love. He is distraught and alone, surely he deserves the reader’s sympathy. As most have experienced the loss of a loved one in some sense or another, the reader draws upon those experiences and the emotions that accompany them and understand how Heaney must have felt. Either of these methods will lead a reader toward experiencing the Windeby Girl’s pain, which fits the definition of sympathy. For these reasons, some may be of the impression that Heaney intends to create sympathy for himself, not the Windeby Girl.
Although it can be seen how some may argue that Heaney intends to create sympathy for himself, those who argue this position are misguided. Even when Heaney speaks lovingly and sorrowfully to the Windeby Girl, he fully intends to invoke sympathy in the reader for her, not himself. When a reader reads a work by an author who is telling the story of his loved one’s gruesome torture and violent death, he will first and foremost find his attention drawn to the victim of the torture, as such acts are unwaveringly appalling events. Although the reader most likely will not have experiences of having himself been a victim of such torture, most likely he has experiences in which he has felt the same basic emotions. Shame. Fear. Hopelessness. Pain. The reader will tap into these experiences in which he has felt these emotions, and he will be able to relate to the Windeby Girl through those common emotions. The reader will then be struck with a sense of injustice and sorrow for the Windeby victim, which is by definition, sympathy. This is the true reaction that Heaney intends to create in the reader. When he says to the Windeby Girl, “you were flaxen-haired, / undernourished, and your / tar black face was beautiful” (25-27), the reader is expected to feel sympathy for the girl. Furthermore, Heaney admits that he
would have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings. (37-40)
When Heaney sorrowfully confesses this, it is almost as if he is assuring the reader that he does not want the reader’s sympathy directed toward himself. If he were given the chance, he “would have cast... / the stones of silence” (30-31), for “[he is] the artful voyeur” (line 32). “Voyeurism” is defined as an opportunity “to look at thoughts and secrets of the heart that we ordinarily would not be permitted to see,” such as the secrets of death and dying (Shneidman 5). Although Heaney is bestowed with this privilege, he still admits that he would have betrayed her by refusing to oppose her punishment. Heaney grew up in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles.” The Protestant British, at this time, occupied Heaney’s homeland and caused a great deal of resistance and opposition within Ireland. Irish Catholics resented the British so much that if a Catholic woman was discovered to be dating a British soldier, she could be executed. Officials typically would punish such women by tarring her face, beating her, and handcuffing her to the city’s railings, for a town of voyeurs to observe. Perhaps this is why the Windeby girl struck a chord so deeply within Heaney. Heaney looks upon the Windeby Girl sorrowfully acknowledging the similarity between the ancient Windeby Girl and the Catholic women of his time. Though Heaney did not agree with the punishment of the women of his time, he did not stand against their deaths. Perhaps Heaney saw the Windeby Girl as an ancient version of “the Troubles” he grew up in, troubles that he, only one person, was not strong enough to fight. Heaney takes the reader into the Windeby Girl’s reality in which she was utterly alone, without even a single voice to speak out against her cruel punishment. Heaney’s experiences with social injustice bring the Windeby Girl’s punishment to life in the vivid colors of his past, allowing the reader to experience and thus sympathize with the Windeby Girl. Because of this, I hold my position that Heaney intends to create sympathy for the Windeby Girl in “Punishment.”
As one can see, Heaney is successful in creating sympathy for the Windeby Girl. Once a reader fully understands the context in which the Windeby Girl’s death is significant, the reader is able to appreciate the validity of Heaney’s dubbing her as a “scapegoat.” Furthermore, by focusing on her humanity he reminded us that she too was mortal. The reader is reminded that the Windeby Girl is not just an archaeological artifact, but rather she was a living, breathing person with the same capacity to feel that he, the reader feels today. By focusing on the gore of her torture and death, Heaney forces the reader to visualize and experience this girl’s pain with her. Finally, the reader’s sympathy for the Windeby Girl is even more deeply enforced with Heaney’s confession that he would have stood silent with her accusers, even though he felt that her punishment was unfounded. Because of the social and cultural tensions of the time, Heaney confesses that he too, if given the chance, would likely be guilty of condemning her to death, if only simply because he would not oppose it. By understanding these crucial elements, the reader can perceive the exact aloneness that the Windeby Girl must have felt before she was laid to rest in the bogs.
Works Cited
Archaeology: Prehistoric Inhabitants. Dir. Bertrand Morin. Perf. John Rhys-Davies. Videocassette. The Learning Channel, 1994.
“Bodies of the Bogs.” Archaeology. 2005. Archaeology Institute of America. 5 April 2005
.
Cremin, Aedeen, The Celts. New York: Rizzoli, 1998.
Davies, Nigel. Human Sacrifice: In History and Today. New York: Dorset, 1988.
Deem, James A. Bodies From the Bog. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Heaney, Seamus. “Punishment.” Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 2nd ed. Eds. John Schilb and John Clifford. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2003. 1306-1307.
Lewis, Michael and Haviland-Jones, Jeanette, eds. Handbook of Emotions 2nd ed. New York: Guilford, 2000.
Montagu, Ashley and Matson, Floyd. The Dehumanization of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Opdahl, Keith M. Emotion as Meaning: The Literary Case for How We Imagine. London: Associated UP, 2002.
“Seamus Heaney- Biography.” Nobel Prize.org. 17 Feb. 2005. 5 Apr. 2005 .
Shneidman, Edwin. Voices of Death. New York: Kodansha, 1995
Weingarten, Kaethe. Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal. New York: Dutton, 2003.