This paper uses Object Relations theory to think about the dynamics governing the production of cultural identity in Irish Studies. Arguably women’s writing is positioned within Irish studies in what Luce Irigaray terms “the place of the mother”. The mother within the nuclear and patriarchal determined family is allocated the function of object through which the other members of the family derive their own identity. When a woman writer inscribes her subjective presence then she disrupts the production of other’s identity, and challenges the dynamics of a family structure that need to rely on her absence from it. Such refusal to be simply an object is often met with resistance. This paper argues that Eavan Boland’s collection The Lost Land alters Boland’s object use within the cultural context of Irish studies, and it examines so moth the criticism attaching to it accordingly.