'Literary texts call into question many of our essentialist ideas about gender' (Bennet and Royle). Examine a selection of poems in the light of this comment.

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

in itself was dispiriting for men who assumed that they would be able to fit back in to normal life upon returning home. It is no wonder that Ivor Gurney sees the unwelcoming Blighty as ‘a grim-faced black garbed mother…a work-house matron’ (lines 16-18). The country has become feminine – or has feminine become masculine? If so, then can we look to poetry to prove that masculine has become feminine? I believe so. I looked at Herbert Read’s My Company and Siegfried Sassoon’s Repression of War Experience, and to me these presented two important aspects of what brought about the change that overcame so many men entrenched in the battlefields.

Men broke down in the trenches. This is a well-known fact, and is a common subject in the poetry of writers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The condition was known as shell-shock and affected thousands of men, yet by those in charge it was given little credit as a real problem, simply a coward’s way out. The effort required to not break down under the horrifying circumstances, was immense. Added to this was the sheer helplessness engendered by being imprisoned in the trenches, which involved little physical activity. In the first 32 lines of Sassoon’s poem this internal struggle is reported: it is a forceful, determined, mock-cheerful attempt to hold his memories at bay. He sees a moth, the

‘silly beggars [who] blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame –

No, no, not that, - it’s bad to think of war,

When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;

And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad…’

                                                                Lines 2-6        

He continues to repress the memories that surface sporadically, until the last stanza, separated from the main body of the text, where he imagines

                        ‘You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;

                        You’d never think there was a bloody war on!...

                        O yes, you would…why, you can hear the guns.

                        Hark! Thud, thud, thud, - quite soft…they never cease  -

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

                        Those whispering guns – O Christ, I want to go out

                        And screech at them to stop – I’m going crazy;

                        I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.’

                                                                Lines 33-6

His complete lack of control is emphasised here, he cannot go out, he is totally passive, a role typically assigned to women, and notably it is hitherto mainly in women that hysteria is reported. However, inactive in the trenches, the common soldiers could be said to have embodied the position of a woman in the necessity for them to be submissive and for the lack of opportunity to make a difference to their surroundings. Add to this the obligatory repression of true emotions and it is no wonder that trench warfare caused hysteria and break downs.

However, it was not only the common soldier who underwent a redefining of manhood, or alternatively a feminisation. The officers too were cast in new roles: now they were not simply military leaders at army school. They were responsible for the lives of the men under their care, and it became much more than leadership. It has been said that in many ways, officers played a maternal role to their men. This is illustrated particularly well in Read’s poem, where he describes how his love grew for his company. ‘I cannot tell’, he says, ‘what time your life became mine’ (lines 4-5). He suggests that it might have been on a cold night ‘when rum was mighty acceptable,/ and my doling gave birth to sensual gratitude.’ (Lines 13-14) The subtle use of the birth metaphor, commonly used to describe literature itself, creates the impression of a bond between mother and child.

‘In many acts and quiet observances

You absorbed me:

Until one day I stood eminent

And I saw you gathered round me,

Uplooking.’

                                                Lines 18-22

This bond is sacred, and the all-encompassing feeling that this officer has is much closer to that of a mother than of a father. The ‘uplooking’ of the men paints a picture

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

in my mind of children looking up at the mother figure. This poem also contains a homo-erotic element whereby when the poet imagines his man lying on the wire

                        ‘And first his lips

                        The worms will eat

                        It is not thus I would have him kiss’d

                        But with the warm passionate lips

                        Of his comrade here.’

                                                Lines 51-55

Again this is common of war imagery, and is reminiscent of the type of relationship encouraged between men in the Greek and Roman armies. On the other hand, most essentialist ideas about gender in more modern, western literary theory have taken heterosexuality to be their standard, so applying this would suggest yet another change of attitude portrayed in men’s writing, brought about by the conditions of warfare.

Biological metaphors are frequently used to describe art and its creation. But their interpretation differs widely depending on the gender of the writer, and they often serve to highlight differences between men and women, not to reconcile the two. The poem I am looking at is The Author to her Book by Anne Bradstreet, which makes use of the childbirth metaphor. Susan Stanford Friedman in her essay Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor shows how

‘linguistically inscribed separations echo religious ones, which in turn resonate through the childbirth metaphor. God’s punishment of Adam and Eve…has provided divine authority for the sexual division of labor. Adam’s labor is to produce the goods of society by the “sweat of his brow”, an idiom that collapses man’s muscular and mental work. Eve’s labor is to reproduce the species in pain and subservience to Adam.’   

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

She quotes the gospel of John:

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.’ (ibid.)  

From this, she shows that ‘the power of the Word became the paradigm of male creativity, indeed the foundation of Western patriarchal ideology.’ (ibid.)

Although men use the childbirth metaphor, it tends to emphasise the fact that men create, whereas women procreate. Joyce, for example, writes to his wife:

‘thinking of the book I have written, the child which I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried I your womb the children you love, and of how I had fed it day after day out of my brain and my memory’ (ibid, p.79)  

In some ways this would seem to draw

‘together the labor of women and men. But at the same time, Joyce evokes the distinction between the mind and the body, between his wife’s procreativity and his own creativity. His comparison replicates the sexual division of labor and reinforces the mind-body split permeating the patristic tradition that influences his own Jesuit background.’

Stanford Friedman also recounts the advice given to Ellen Glasgow by a ‘literary man’ that instead of writing she should ‘go back to the South and have some babies. The greatest woman is not the woman who has written the finest books, but the woman who has had the finest babies’ (ibid, p.75). Even Mary Shelley reinforces this mutual exclusivity between ‘maternity and creativity’ (ibid, p.75). In Frankenstein, a man attempts to procreate, as Stanford Friedman points out, ‘doing with his brain

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

what women do with their bodies, a point Shelley emphasises with her pervasive analogies between his work and the stages of woman’s “confinement”’ (ibid, p.87). The result of Shelley’s creation, as with Dr Frankenstein’s procreation, is Stanford Friedman opines, the expression of Shelley’s ‘essentialist fear that the patriarchal separation of creativities is necessary.’ (ibid, p.87)

The symbolism of phallus as pen or paintbrush, and thus the source of creativity, creates marginalisation of women writers, what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as an ‘anxiety of authorship’ (ibid, p.73). Replacing the phallic metaphor with one of childbirth is dangerous because it ends up excluding men from the process of creation. The debate seems to be irresolvable, but poems by women who successfully combine maternity and creation are a defiant challenge to essentialist, phallogocentric and patriarchal ideas. Anne Bradstreet, a 17th century poetess, was a strict Puritan who moved from England to Massachusetts with her husband, Governor Simon Bradstreet. She suffered from illness and found it hard to adapt to her new home, yet is not a rebellious or stridently feminist writer. On the contrary, her poetry is said to speak ‘of a woman of high intelligence and ideals who was very much in love, and had unconditional faith.’ She lived in a highly patriarchal society, yet her poem The Author to her Book is a strong statement that creativity is very much within a woman’s capabilities, and ‘unites motherhood and authorship into a new whole’. It is a truthful, somewhat harsh, analogy to mothering: ‘Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain’ (line 1), ‘my rambling brat (in print) should mother call’ (line 8). There is a modesty and self-criticism towards her writing as perhaps towards her mothering, described by Shira Wolosky in The Art of Poetry as ‘modesty of apparently immense restriction…the poem in its overt rhetoric…thus announces itself as unequal to its task.’ However, she also points out that

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

‘the text offers at the same time a counterrhetoric in its figural command. The very accomplishment of its elegant and highly controlled analogy belies the denial of ability which it proclaims. Apparently observing female restrictions, the poem converts them into prodigiously crafted poetic figures.’ (ibid, p.125)

 Susan Stanford Friedman sees in the poem that

‘tenor and vehicle become indistinguishable as the poem becomes a definition of mothering children as well as books. Pride and modesty, joy and irritation, love and hate, represent the feelings she has as both a mother and author towards the intertwined labors that fill her with ambivalence…’

The idea of this work as art remains to the fore: ‘exposed to public view, / Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge.’ (lines4-5) Her creation requires an upbringing, a process of devoted input to ‘thy blemishes amend’ (line 12); after all, she says, it is her own. Her protective attitude produces the warning: ‘In this array, ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam. / In critics’ hands beware thou dost not come.’ (Lines 19-20) ‘Especially prominent’, says Wolosky, ‘are puns on poetic construction itself: the “halting” metrical feet whose “joints” are stretched; the “rubbing off” of printer’s spots; the “rags” which go into paper-making.’

It is suggested by Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy that Bradstreet might have been attempting to ‘undermine the masculine authority structure of her own culture.’ It is not applied specifically to this poem but the line ‘If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none…’ (line 22) supports this statement. Bradstreet may have been emboldened to write like this by the example of Queen Elizabeth I, says Fithian Guruswamy, the queen being an outstanding example of a woman who subverted every expectation of

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

her gender. However, the use of the childbirth metaphor is a celebration of a woman being a woman, a creator and pro-creator, and not a woman in a man’s place.

Within women’s writing, marginalised in itself from mainstream literary tradition, is lesbian writing, embodying two of the biggest disruptions to essentialist patriarchal gender theory: homosexuality and femininity. In more recent, liberal literary history, it has become as accepted and valued as any other type of literature, but much of it is a far cry from the male-dominated, phallogocentric creations that were seen as the ‘norm’. Monica Wittig maintains that ‘lesbianism as…a theme…cannot even be described as a taboo, for it has no real existence in the history of literature.’ Poetess Carol Ann Duffy has become an admired and established name in British poetry, and my final poem is Warming Her Pearls. Duffy does not attempt to conceal her sexuality in this poem: we are aware that both the desiring and the desired are female. This in itself is crucial in ‘deconstructing the heterosexual matrix which stabilizes phallogocentrism.’ Liz Yorke, in Constructing a Lesbian Poetic for Survival, identifies the ‘transcendant “I” of lyric poetry [which] presents itself as a free subjectivity and at the same time denies/conceals its heterosexual masculinist bias.’ (ibid.) She goes on to explain that love poetry is traditionally written as ‘I’ to ‘you’,

‘gender-neutral language [which] acts as a mask which allows the presumption of heterosexuality to go uncontested: “masculist traditions of interpretation assume that the poet or speaking subject is male, and the beloved object is female, unless there is internal evidence to the contrary.” [she cites Diana Collecott]…these conventions have …functioned to perpetuate the exclusivity of heterosexual norms in all their inequity. Lesbian writing needs to contest these sites of gender neutral language, and this means resignifying differences and desires in gender-specific language.’ 

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

Warming Her Pearls is a beautiful love poem about the repressed desire of a maid for her mistress. The mistress is presumably heterosexual, given that she is pictured ‘dancing with tall men’ (line11), and maybe we are meant to presume that the pearls themselves were a gift from a lover, as jewellery often is. The setting of the poem is in a former era: there is a maid and mistress, a carriage, a looking-glass. This makes the content of the poem a more direct subversion of traditional gender roles – the relationship between women, the woman speaker, the female erotic – all are out of place in a setting which is reminiscent of the male-dominated Romantic period.

The speaker is in a subordinate position, yet she is empowered by articulating her emotions. The pearls, too, are a potent image, and it is she, this maid, who makes them living, not, as Eavan Boland says the ‘fixed object of Keats’ poem [The Eve of St Agnes]’ Duffy, like Keats, makes the pearls an erotic symbol – not, however, between a man and a woman, but between two women, a throbbing ‘rope’ (line 8) of ‘slow heat’ (line 7), the one thing that connects their two very different worlds. The distance between these women is expressed by the speaker lying in her ‘attic bed’ (line 10) while the mistress in her gown of ‘silk/ or taffeta’ (lines 5-6) dances ‘with tall men… [in] her French perfume’ (lines 11-12). But their connection is emphasised in the thought that she will be ‘puzzled by my faint, persistent scent/ beneath her…milky stones.’ (Lines 11-12) While the characterisation and the line ‘slack on my neck, her rope’ (line 8) seem to reinforce the sense of a power relationship, the use of ‘milky’ resonates with maternal imagery, and by implication a stronger and more equal bond between two women.

The explicit eroticism narrows the gulf that separates the two by the power of the imagination. ‘All day I think of her’ (line 4), ‘my slow heat entering/ each pearl’ (lines 7-8) , ‘She’s beautiful. I dream about her/ in my…bed’ (lines 9-10), ‘my red lips part’ (line 16), ‘I see/ her…Undressing…slipping naked into bed’ (lines 17-20),

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

‘All night…I burn.’ (Lines 23-24) This imagery is loving, longing, suggestive of a total dependence. At the same time, the importance of the pearls, which mean so much to the mistress that she needs them to be warmed throughout the day, raise the status of the maid as someone who is depended upon. The brushing of the hair is another picture associated in my mind with mothering, and maybe this suggests the dependence of the mistress upon this girl.

Duffy creates the possibility of an inter-dependent relationship between women, she paints the desire of one woman for another, she gives a traditional symbol of heterosexual love an important role in female relations and she empowers a subordinate woman by giving her a voice. In every way, she overturns essentialist presuppositions of gender roles.

Poetry from the last hundred years or so has become more overtly subversive of gender stereotypes, for the obvious reason that the traditional Western patriarchal society has undergone penetrative questioning and in many ways been uprooted. This is a result of events which have created opportunities for members of both sexes to undertake new roles, and meant that attitudes to expression through literature (and other media) have become far more tolerant. At the same time, it is hardly fair to say that it is only in modern history that artists have questioned essentialist gender theory - as we can see from the example of Anne Bradstreet, a pioneer of women’s writing. Even in the First World War, that essentialist code was still strong and reversal of roles more surprising and more subversive than in literature today, where we do not judge by the same standards and expectations.        

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

Bibliography

The New Poetry edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley

Published 1993 Bloodaxe Books

Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory – Second Edition by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle

Published 1999 Pearson Education Limited

Speaking of Gender edited by Elaine Showalter

Published 1989 Routledge

Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing edited by Joseph Bristow

Published 1992 Routledge

The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem by Shira Wolosky

Published 2001 Oxford University Press

Never Such Innocence: Poems of the First World War edited by Martin Stephen

Published 1993 Everyman

Ivor Gurney selected and edited by George Walter

Published 1996 Everyman

:

Queer Theory and Publication Anxiety by Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy Early American Literature; 1/1/1999

Making the difference: eroticism and aging in the work of the woman poet by Eavan Boland (excerpt from Object Lessons) The American Poetry Review 3/1/1994

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

Poems used:

Monsoon Girl by Harry Clifton The New Poetry p.174-5

My Company by Herbert Read:

You became
In many acts and quiet observances
A body and soul, entire.

I cannot tell
What time your life became mine:
Perhaps when one summer night
We halted on the roadside
In the starlight only,
And you sang your sad home-songs,
Dirges which I standing outside you
Coldly condemned.

Perhaps, one night, descending cold,
When rum was mighty acceptable,
And my doling gave birth to sensual gratitude.

And then our fights: we've fought together
Compact, unanimous;
And I have felt the pride of leadership.

In many acts and quiet observances
You absorbed me:
Until one day I stood eminent
And I saw you gathered round me,
Uplooking,
And about you a radiance that seemed to beat
With variant glow and to give
Grace to our unity.

But, God! I know that I'll stand
Someday in the loneliest wilderness,
Someday my heart will cry
For the soul that has been, but that now

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

Is scatter'd with the winds,

Deceased and devoid.

I know that I'll wander with a cry:
"O beautiful men, O men I loved,
O whither are you gone, my company?'

2

My men go wearily
With their monstrous burdens.
They bear wooden planks
And iron sheeting
Through the area of death.

When a flare curves through the sky
They rest immobile.

Then on again,
Sweating and blaspheming--
"Oh, bloody Christ!"

My men, my modern Christs,
Your bloody agony confronts the world.

3

A man of mine
          lies on the wire.
It is death to fetch his soulless corpse.

A man of mine
          lies on the wire; And he will rot
And first his lips
The worms will eat.

It is not thus I would have him kiss'd,
But with the warm passionate lips
Of his comrade here.

4

I can assume
A giant attitude and godlike mood,
And then detachedly regard

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

All riots, conflicts and collisions.

The men I've lived with
Lurch suddenly into a far perspective;
They distantly gather like a dark cloud of birds
In the autumn sky.

Urged by some unanimous
Volition or fate,
Clouds clash in opposition;
The sky quivers, the dead descend;
Earth yawns.

They are all of one species.

From my giant attitude,
In a godlike mood,
I laugh till space is filled
With hellish merriment.

Then again I resume
My human docility,
Bow my head
And share their doom.

Repression of War Experience by Siegfried Sassoon

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;

What silly beggars they are to blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—

No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war,

When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;

And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad

Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts

That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand,

Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen,

And you're as right as rain...

                             Why won't it rain? ...

I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night,

With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,

And make the roses hang their dripping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are,

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,

Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,

And every kind of colour. Which will you read?

Come on; O do read something; they're so wise.

I tell you all the wisdom of the world

Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet

You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,

And listen to the silence: on the ceiling

There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;

And in the breathless air outside the house

The garden waits for something that delays.

There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,—

Not people killed in battle,—they're in France,—

But horrible shapes in shrouds—old men who died

Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls,

Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

      *       *       *       *       *

You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;

You'd never think there was a bloody war on! ...

O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns.

Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft ... they never cease—

Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out

And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy;

I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

The Author To Her Book by Anne Bradstreet

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.

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Modes of Reading                                                                Lisa Regan

In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy The New Poetry p.232

  

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