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The painting "Poet's Pub" by Alexander Moffat (1980), although produced many years after the scene which it represents, functions as a powerful piece of iconography regarding the Scottish literary scene. A group of poets including Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Edwin Morgan, George Mackay Brown, and Norman MacCaig are gathered round a pub table, pints in hand, and in some cases pipes in mouth. The pub in question may be Milne's Bar in Edinburgh, as the history and mythology of the Scottish Renaissance identify it as the scene of many poetry- and whisky-fuelled evenings. The maleness of the assembled company is inescapable, and in it we may read the maleness of the Scottish literary community. There are no women in the foreground of the picture, but blurred and indistinct female figures may be distinguished, appropriately enough, on its margins. A female figure with long hair and bare arms slumps, her head propped up on her hand, at a table to the left of the group. At the door of the pub on the extreme right of the picture another indistinct woman leans against the doorpost. And towards the centre of the background of the picture is a roughly painted female figure dressed in what appears to be a Greek tunic which has slipped from her shoulders to expose her breasts. She is waving a Lion Rampant. Presumably this is the Scottish muse, her attentions somewhat divided on this particular occasion. She too is out of focus, a blur when compared to the crisp lines denoting the poets at their table, and although this may not have been to the forefront of the artist's mind, her blurred outline reveals the fuzzy contours which the nation's political situation forces upon its figurehead.
In the "Scottish Literary Renaissance" of the early twentieth century, we see for the first time something resembling a Scotland-aswoman figure shared among contemporary authors and texts. In the work of male writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a female figure linked to the Scottish land is very important. Although, as we have seen, there are instances of Scotland being represented as a woman in pre-twentieth century literature, they are fairly sparse and cannot be said to constitute a tradition as...