Natalie’s Blog

An Overview of Acheson’s “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy“

War literature is often read as art that excludes those who have not come into direct contact with warfare from fully understanding its devastation.  Trilogy, as Susan Acheson argues, seems exclusive or esoteric to only those unwilling to surpass archaic binaries.  In “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy,” Acheson maintains that H.D. restructures religion, largely by drawing upon classical texts, to cope with the mass destruction of World War II.  Acheson’s theoretical frame is somewhat difficult to pinpoint, but can probably be claimed as a combination of comparative and revisionary.  Along the way of showing H.D.’s overhaul of religion and the notion of purpose in life, Acheson illustrates Trilogy as a text that re-envisions history as cyclical, not linear; collaborative, not univocal, and androgynous, not patriarchal.  Thus, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, Acheson’s framework also crosses into the realm of feminist criticism.

Acheson tells us that Trilogy acts to assuage people’s apocalyptic anxieties.  Death is inevitable and often closer than we would like to think, but it also “contains a promise of life” (188).  Acheson examines H.D.’s challenge to Revelation’s message that history is a linear, finite plot mapped by God.  That said, Trilogy can be somewhat confusing in its insistence on both a massive shift from contemporary trends and a return to old values; it contains both romantic sentiment and revolutionary fervor.  However, Acheson reminds us throughout this article that H.D. was not fully embracing any one previously established philosophy, but rather, she sought to combine different stories and parts of history.  And H.D.’s main means of doing so was language, the tool that Acheson claims wards off a finite ending.  When Trilogy does come to a close, it is with a nativity story.  Besides putting a story of birth at the end of this epic, H.D. subverts traditional notions of finality with formal strategies: she incorporates space, silence, openness, and destablization to make the reader uncomfortable applying any closure to the reading.

From the beginning, Trilogy disrupts order and closure in language by posing a question that is never answered– it pans out as a rejection of the need to find neat, tied-up answers and judgments.  Judgment, in fact, is not “one like a Son of Man”’s power, as Revelation says, but that of “an unbalanced neurotic woman,” as The Flowering of the Rod lyric 12 shows (196).  The Walls Do Not Fall 8 also articulates that her true power lies in being able to “pass judgment / on what words conceal.”  Acheson suggests that Trilogy shows H.D.’s interpretation and slight subversion of Freud’s belief that women should deal with their supposedly inherent penis-envy by becoming mothers, as H.D. has “the Lady” carrying an “unwritten volume of the new” in Tribute to the Angels 38.

Further revising well established texts, H.D. believed that Revelation, because it contains multiple mass destructions, should have been placed at the beginning of the Bible, and that Genesis should follow it as a re-creation of Earth.  H.D. developed this idea from H. S. Bellamy’s The Book of Revelation is History.  This view is said to be echoed in Trilogy, which begins with apocalypse and ends with rebirth in an ox-stall.  Bellamy’s book is not the only one from which H.D. gathered materials for her revisions.  She was also a fan of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s The Secret of the West, from which H.D. derives much of her revisionary mythopoesis of Atlantis.  Atlantis represents “a lost unity between past and future, Europe and America, dream and history” (Acheson 198).  H.D. saw these shattered connections manifested in the war around her.  That broken vision speaks to her desire to unite opposing binary poles in a fluid realm of being instead of continuing to see people’s relationships severed in aggressive forward motion.

“Build an ark” is a phrase Merezhkovsky uses, referring to a means by which future people will remember knowledge cultivated before them.  H.D. adopts that term in Tribute to Freud and generates a similar notion in Trilogy, a work that advocates an androgynous Christ who, as Merezhkovsky believes it should be, will make “ecstasy” the purpose of life.  Acheson continues to describe a Merezhkovsky stance that H.D. read and took to heart, that “[t]he threat of war is…a result of a religion that substitutes pity for love” (200).  This stance is directly related to the male-female relationship H.D. presents in Trilogy.  Instead of being separated as in the patriarchal Pisces culture, Mary and Kaspar are united by myrrh in The Flowering of the Rod.  The “new sense of woman” in Trilogy emerges from the union of Mary and Kaspar.  This couple’s existence dismisses default patriarchal power because, while they are meant to generally be seen as equal, Mary is actually slightly Kaspar’s superior: the new sense references the scent of her flowers, which provide the basis for his ointment.  However, Mary does not exploit this power; she speaks to Kaspar as an equal, showing the eradication of the competitive split between man and woman.  With the acceptance of the contribution of both genders, H.D. writes over an old story to make one that serves as a more viable coping mechanism.  Ultimately, Acheson makes the case for Trilogy as a text that poses love, unresolved and undissolved, as a reliable religion and stimulus for life.

This article thoroughly exemplifies H.D.’s revisionary mythopoesis, which is certainly helpful in understanding H.D.’s partiality to the palimpsest.  Acheson also makes us privy to the kinds of materials H.D. was reading before and during writing Trilogy.  We also find evidence of H.D.’s feminist ideology at play.  Most importantly, Acheson suggests to us a way to view H.D.’s treatment of death and resistance to indisputable finality.  We might ask how her Christian re-vision intersects with her Moravian background, and what that suggests about texts that discuss Moravianism, like The Gift or any work that involves her mother, a devout Moravian.  Further, I am curious how, if at all, her response to apocalyptic fears affected the reception of Trilogy so soon after World War II.  And as we begin Tribute to Freud, I would like to know more about how H.D. received that psychoanalyst’s patriarchal opinions and reconciled them with her own feminist inclinations.

Work Cited

Acheson, Susan. “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy.” Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture, 12.2 (1998 June): 187-204.

from p. 118:

There was no use remembering the treasures, the cold, sweet uplifted arm of some marble Hermes, the tiny exquisite foot and bird-like ankle of some Aphrodite. Those things were being buried and all they could do was to watch, to stand in little groups and knots and after all with the volcano belching its filth over them, they were all one, must be all one, fear, terror, the obstinate courage that refused its terror made them one, facing bright hawks in an odd grey poisonous noon that swooped and swooped and we all said, “it can’t be them, it’s us, it must be, flying so low,” but it was them, insinuating themselves, what courage, what dastardly beauty of destruction. “Baby-killers.” Gods, men, flying high, flying low, “ours” were as brave of course, better, braver, better altogether, but not so tight, not so hard, not so devastating in their cruel cynicism. Baby-killers. Little Willie, big Willie, newspapers making all life on one level, but how could we help it? How could we help it? O thank God, I’m here, didn’t go back to America. How could we help it. “Delia.”

Well I just committed the English major cardinal sin by quoting more than I have time to close-read (and it wasn’t easy to trim the quote to just this much), so I’m hoping other people will step in after I post this. For me, this was the ultimate war passage in the novel. Notes on Thought and Vision makes me quiver imagining the possibilities of fulfillment when you connect intellectually, spiritually, and otherwise with other humans. In that text, and I think at times in Asphodel, H.D. seems to advocate the unmatched elation one can receive from human company and love. On p. 118, the pendulum sways drastically to the other side and war emerges as this massive thing that connects and affects us all but in horrifying ways. It’s the kind of torture that’s so damning, you lose touch from your very basic foundation, like a geographical (and I suppose communal, cultural) sense of where you are. London is almost unrecognizable in this scene, and the narration conveys people’s inability to take control of that. Notes on Thought and Vision is a fairly optimistic text, I think, because it, counterintuitively at times, explains step-by-step how to achieve (literally) mind-blowing connections and fruitions. But in the midst of the evil that is war, people’s power is limited– “all they could do was to watch.”

Maybe I should leave it at that. But I have to wonder, is H.D., while certainly establishing the crushing and irrevocable effects of war, also rewriting it as something fascinating and seductive? Before my quote, about six lines from the top of the page, H.D. uses volcano imagery, and after ED, I can’t help but think of volcanoes as massively destructive but also gloriously fertile. Also, having read Wilfred Owen, I’m drawn to read the us-them conflict on the battlefield as one that moves toward being ineffectual because all the soldiers are fighting for more than themselves, for a higher loyalty that to some extent they’re forced into and don’t have a lot of say about. They’re all risking their lives for something that reigns over them, whether they will it or not. And that’s terrifying, but also like (pardon the awful reductive cliche) a car accident, something you’re fixated on because it’s so destructive. So I wonder if in Asphodel H.D. viewed war in a similar vein– something that devastates and wipes out the essential components of a culture/city/tradition, and leaves behind ruins with which to reframe geographical and cultural identity. Now I’m bleeding into the comment I just made on Nathan’s post, “H.D. and Stateless,” but really, when talking about H.D., I’m finding it futile to try and separate concepts. She’s just too fluid and inclusive.

I was first interested in this book because Pineda is discussed as being an Asian American author who deals with mixed-race issues and father-son relationships.  A number of people in our class, myself included, have taken Asian American Literature but with a focus on women authors.  I’m really interested in feminist issues, but I’m looking for ways to broaden what I read, so I thought this might work as a good transition for me.

What I really appreciated was Pineda’s treatment of human relationships.  He really explores the connection between lovers, between enemies, between parent and child, between strangers, between rescueer and rescuee, between reader and poet, and others.  Sometimes he removes himself from a relationship that seems biographical and writes about himself and someone else in the third person, and sometimes he’s in it with them.  That technique is one of the ways he plays with interpretation.  Some of his poems explore the level of significance in accurate memory, accurate historical accounts, accurate communication, etc.  I’d like to mention that I’m not yet sure what I think he does with gender, especially in terms of patriarchy and patriotism.  I think there’s probably a lot to say about that, but as I’m trying to get out of my comfort zone a bit, I’m going to discuss other things in his writing.

“Willoughby Spit” is the first poem I came to that really peaked my interest.  A third person narrator tells of a man whose car loses power and slows to a halt in the middle of a tunnel, naturally incurring the wrath of drivers around him.  Being caught in an intermediary place amplifies the tension that builds until the person just wants to shoot forward and leave the past behind.  The tone of the poem shifts a lot, e.g. from the exhaustion that causes the car to stop working, the the stress of being the focus of all this negative attention, and especially the uncertainty about what lies ahead, when one will move there, but slight hope that comes with it.  The poem seems to function at least in part to convey the complexity of being a combination of cultures, especially when Pineda invokes boats on water, the substance that adjoins two continents, which presumably the central character in the poem can’t even see:

. . . When the wrecker arrives, traffic backed up
past Willoughby Spit where, in this early morning, the thin boats tied

to the docks hint at some freedom for those stalled on the bridge.
The silhouette of the fleet across the bay starts to move,

maybe en route to somewhere faraway, where life is
inconvenienced by more than this. . . (7-12)

I also really like that he explores ways of remembering and rewriting history, especially when tragedy makes that necessary for humans to move on.  In “A Few Word on Rome, <em>or</em> The Neighbor Who Never Waves,” the speaker tells a story and then asks,

. . . Who cares
if it never happened?  This story of madness never hurt

anyone, not even Shelley, who would have loved
what they have done to him. . .  (5-8)

The rest of the poem reimagines the story in different ways.  That kind of writing always captivates me– it’s like turning a gem over in your hand and witnessing all the different forms it takes depending on how the light hits it.  Pineda has another poem, “In the Romance of Grief,” which ends with another point about what I think Pineda does: “Perhaps this world survives its losses / through its forgetting” (16-17).  I’m really attracted to the power he places in humans to change what has happened, is happening, and will happen to them.

Another funny thing about him is that I don’t really think his use of sound is what’s most interesting about his poetry, but the attention he pays to his figures draws me into the language.  Also, he seems to do very thoughtful things with form, and I could sit and think about that forever.  I think these things Pineda does to reconsider stories/history render his poetry itself a longer lasting subject for the reader to consider.  And that skill with which he resonates his work throughout my memory convinces me that he is a poet worth reading.

–Natalie

In our H.D. reading for yesterday, “Loss” was the poem that reminded me most of ED.  As I’ve indicated at other times, one of the most prominent qualities I see in ED is her continuous attempt to lure us into her world and, to borrow Prof. Emerson’s words, to get us “to stay a while.”  I don’t generally see H.D. that way, but in the special instance of “Loss,” I did pick up on some of that sentiment.  Besides the titular theme that is easy enough to find in ED’s poetry, I think H.D. does some formal things to engage us in a style similar to ED’s.  The second stanza, first line, “The heavy sea-mist stifles me” uses 3-4 “s” sounds that I think onomatopoetically “stifle” and/or hold back the reader in vocalizing the sounds.  The rest of the stanza is fragmented by a dash at the ends of lines two and three.  I think fragmentation and/or varied manifestations of thought are pretty standard H.D., but can be named as a Dickinson trait too if you think of the variants she included in her manuscripts.  And then of course they both use dashes for distinct purposes.

Another interesting thing I noticed, maybe less clearly like ED, was the beginning of the fifth stanza: “I am glad the tide swept you out, / O beloved,” which I guess is an apostrophe, as she speaks to someone who is not there, but what was interesting to me was that it is the addressee’s absence that in fact sparks the subject matter and title of the poem.  Even if she’s glad the addressee has gone and escaped, she clearly is still holding onto their spiritual presence.  And finally, general mentions of being “hemmed” and “want[ing] you back” also sent me back to ED.  Did anyone else pick up on ED similarities in this poem or others?

Reconceiving the Maternal: H.D.’s Early Years of Motherhood

In the early- to mid-1920s, H.D. put a sizable amount of her ideas to text in such highly biographical works as Paint It Today, Asphodel, and Heliodora.  At that time, she was closely interacting with two significant women in her life, Bryher and H.D.’s own mother, Helen Wolle Doolittle, as the three of them traveled extensively.  H.D.’s young daughter Perdita, born 1919, was juggled between nurseries and the three aforementioned women, her primary mother-figures, creating a fluidity in guardianship that Perdita would later recall as actually a pleasant part of her life.  As surrogate mothers, Bryher and Helen also served as oscillating sources of dependence for Perdita’s biological mother, who had mixed memories of both women.

H.D.’s reunion with her mother in Europe seems to have triggered some complicated reassertions of how any two-person relationship functions.  H.D. was sensitive about her childhood, particularly about her inability to belong, even beyond other children’s taunts that she was too tall.  Helen always had trouble fitting her daughter into her plans, whether they included a certain dress that needed to be altered to accommodate Hilda’s height, Moravian rituals from which her daughter desired her attention, or later making Hilda value the United States as a strong and ultimately superior place in her history.  However, H.D.’s feelings toward her mother were not entirely resentful.  Helen served as another caretaker for Perdita, and while H.D. spent much of her literary career positing ways she and Helen differed, H.D. sometimes blamed herself for being unable to fill the expectations Helen had set.  In psychoanalysis sessions, Freud concluded that H.D. was continually searching for people and ways to compensate for the neglect her mother imparted.

Bryher was H.D.’s companion for the last forty-plus years of her life, and the two had a unique dedication to one another.  They met when Bryher, overcome with admiration for H.D.’s work, found H.D. and nursed her back to health from dire illness.  As they grew closer, H.D. would vent to Bryher about Helen’s inability to understand her daughter or accept their differing interests.  In their romantic letters, Bryher provided heartfelt advice to H.D. on a myriad of subjects from raising Perdita to travel to gossip.  In addition to being an emotional vessel, Bryher bought H.D. expensive clothing and drinks, and facilitated much of H.D.’s luxurious lifestyle.  Thus, Bryher emerges as someone who supported H.D. in several ways, becoming a comparable stronghold to a mother-figure.

Also like a mother to H.D., Bryher, according to friends, was overbearing.  Barbara Guest states that when H.D. and Bryher were at the Riant Chateau at Territet (their residence for a relatively long time in their travels), “there was a daily schedule of writing, then Bryher’s tap at H.D.’s door, ‘Ready?  Fido [Bryher]’s waiting’” (146).  Such a role is noteworthy in considering the poem “Flute Song,” part of the book Heliodora.  The poem is likely based at least somewhat on young Perdita interrupting H.D. as H.D. writes.  However, Guest’s information on Bryher’s position in H.D.’s life compels me to extend the meaning of the lines

Little scavenger away,
touch not the door,
beat not the portal down,
cross not the sill,
silent until
my song, bright and shrill,
breathes out its lay.

Perhaps here H.D. is mediating the poles of the independent-dependent binary; while Guest presents her in many senses as a dependent of Bryher, Bryher’s actions as a schedule-regulator may stem from Bryher’s own need for H.D. in her life, or from Bryher’s possible need to be needed by H.D.  Thus, H.D. may have viewed Bryher at her door as a child-like interruption.  Furthermore, H.D.’s own mother Helen was so dedicated to music as part of her Moravian heritage that the musical invocation in the poem may also speak to its author’s sentiments of disrupting her mother’s spiritual activities.

Bryher and H.D. spent a significant amount of time apart, during which they wrote a series of letters upholding their romantic relationship.  Like the distance H.D. held from her mother, Bryher’s separation from H.D. allowed H.D. to free herself from mother-like supervision and “assert her claims to freedom” (Guest 151), for both Helen and Bryher maddened H.D.  Helen’s tangents about proper life in America drove H.D. to scream and roll on the floor that her mother did not understand her.  As Bryher and H.D.’s relationship progressed, Bryher would bring up unpleasant anecdotes from H.D.’s past or from the war, making H.D. “[act] much like a candidate for the strait jacket,” as Robert McAlmon recounted (Guest 152).  McAlmon also spoke of constant bickering between H.D. and Bryher, which he believed to be the result of Bryher’s controlling nature.  He held that Bryher would gradually upset people, ultimately becoming the one person left to comfort them.  Brigit Patmore too has noted that Bryher was a power-hungry person who stifled H.D.’s individual beauty, causing H.D. to refrain from some social interactions.  Of course, as Guest reminds us, McAlmon and Patmore’s accounts are biased because McAlmon was divorced from Bryher, and evidence shows Patmore to have been in love with H.D. and likely jealous and/or resentful of Bryher.  Still, as readers we face the paradox that these highly troubling times for H.D. probably enabled some of her most introspective and compelling writing.

Around this time, H.D. asked Patmore to see if Cecil Gray could offer financial support for Perdita, as H.D. could not support herself and her daughter without Bryher’s money.  Gray was in a mediocre financial state, but Guest reports that even after Bryher legally adopted Perdita, H.D. communicated to a dismissive Bryher that Gray should be considered with respect (155).  H.D.’s feelings may be seen in a letter to Bryher in which H.D. compares herself to a wild horse withheld: “I don’t want to run amuck but if the gates clang too too tight I shall one day, in spite of myself, simply jump the fence and perhaps never come back” (Guest 155).  It was at this point that Bryher suggested that they, with Helen, travel to Egypt.  A handful of months that adjoin 1922 and 1923 were flooded with much sporadic traveling, but Egypt was the highlight, certainly for H.D., who includes a rendition of this trip in her book Palimpsest, which she dedicated to Bryher.  Enrapturing experiences in Egypt paved the way for one of H.D.’s epics, Helen in Egypt, in which the poet-speaker ruminates on, among other things, history and palimpsestic causation.  Amid such meditations, H.D. was surrounded by two women of conflicting maternal value to both her and to her infant daughter.  All of this unfolds in her writing, rendering her work a palimpsestic manifestation of motherly influences.

Work Cited

Guest, Barbara.  Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World.  Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984.

Natasha Trethewey’s book Native Guard (2007) is a collection of poems that very tightly document history.  Throughout my reading this book, I felt like I was interacting with a very dense skeleton.  A lot of her poems are easily seen as ghost-like because they talk about death, abuse, war, and other past events that prompt despair.  But the framework of her poetry starkly contrasts the transparent and fleeting qualities of a ghost.  Trethewey is truly skilled in form, often employing couplets or tercets with gentle rhymes laced through, echoing her representation of the under-the-wire yet undeniable remnants of history that survive and/or taper off.  I strongly recommend that everyone look at her poem “Myth,” in which she brilliantly presents both a discussion and formal representation of (un)consciousness, repetition, containment, and escape.  It’s a poem I feel would be more valuable to read on one’s own before reading about it, so I’ll discuss others.

“Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971,” as the title suggests, questions the selectivity of what is preserved in a photograph.  This poem is written in tercets with a subtle rhyme scheme, ABA CBC DBD EBE FBF, retaining about the same amount of consistency as I think the poem suggests a photograph might.  Within the poem, she brings in images of “food rotting / in the refrigerator” (5-6), a “landscape [that] glistens beneath a glaze / of ice” (7-8), and “iced trees, each leaf in its glassy case” (10).  This cold and still preservation of different artifacts fascinates me with the strangeness of what/how we can and/or choose to preserve.

The title section (or long poem?) pays tribute to the African American soldiers in the Civil War.  Trethewey puts forth touching sonnet-memories of African American soldiers in the Civil War.  I think this section is especially gripping because it makes  you remember an essential group of people in this war that is probably too often associated with but a few key white players.  These poems are especially interesting because they recreate the same ideas she conveys in her other poems (like “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971″) that have completely different speakers and settings.  For example, in the “August 1864″ section of “Native Guard,” she writes,

“…Tending the gardens,
I thought only to study live things, thought
Never to know so much about the dead.
Now I tend Ship Island graves, mounds like dunes
that shift and disappear.  I record names,
send home simple notes…” (6-11)

“…I’m told
it’s best to spare most detail, but I know
there are things which must be accounted for” (12-14).

I’m also attracted to how Trethewey poses the effects of human interactions.  Like the sometimes seemingly obscure way history is preserved, the connections we form and sever with people open and close unique possibilities.  Trethewey conveys how effortlessly mistakes may flow from order, like when the speaker of “Letter” “dash[es] a note to a friend” (1), mentioning an errand, “except / that [the speaker] write[s] errant, a slip between letters” (3-4).  The speaker creatively imagines the shapes of the speaker’s handwriting into things like “the O / my friend’s mouth will make when she sees / my letter in her box” (7-9).  Leaving with a chilling message, the speaker reminds us “how suddenly / a simple errand, a letter-everything-can go wrong” (15-16).

The paradox of writing a recommendation for this book is that I’m trying to celebrate the way it remembers detail and history that others have forgotten, but I struggle to accurately recreate those qualities of her poetry to you.  Her genius is simply too intricate and varied to convey in this recommendation, so if any of the above qualities appeal to you, I can’t see you being sorry with exploring this book.

Romantic Friendships Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America

“Romantic friendship” is a term that usually refers to same-sex relationships in which the friendship is intense enough that it may surpass the platonic level.  The first well-known critical piece to discuss nineteenth-century romantic friendships was Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America” (1975).  Lillian Faderman followed that article with an extensive book, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981).  Faderman’s renowned research project states that correspondence between women in that time period almost always included language that today seems sexually suggestive, and so we must consider these friendships as potential love relationships.  Furthermore, Faderman argues that romantic friendships were considered a whole different class of relationships that were socially acceptable and even encouraged until around World War I.  Because of the critical authority vested in Faderman’s piece, I discuss information mainly from that book as well as a more recent response which objects to some of Faderman’s claims.

One key question to raise in discussing romantic friendships is: how much sexual activity is required for a relationship to be considered “romantic?”  There have likely been plenty of “friendships” throughout history that were emotionally strong enough to rival romantic partnerships but were never consummated, just as many marriages and sexual relationships have involved little emotional connection.  While sexual activity was, as far as we can tell, less common in the nineteenth century than today, Faderman holds that in the nineteenth century, women having sexual relations with each other was not forbidden.  The complacency the general public had with female same-sex relationships was largely the result of sexism-few people took seriously the notion that something worthwhile might come of a situation in which there was no man because women’s sex drives were overlooked.  Romantic friendships were also encouraged as a means to keep women out of “men’s sphere,” as William Alger specifies in The Friendships of Women (published 1868) (Faderman 162).

As Faderman states, same-sex relationships between women were not generally considered a threat in the nineteenth century because most people believed women had sex for only two reasons: to procreate or to please their husbands.  However, pushing women out of “men’s sphere” often led them to embrace the new sphere they made for themselves.  Some women eventually resisted marriage to men because that would mean giving up any work they, the women, were doing and giving up their individual statuses as a “New Woman.”  Faderman does not specifically state Dickinson as one of those women, but she fits the criteria.  In the twentieth century, as Faderman articulates, premarital sex became more common for women, subsequently likening them to men and creating a public threat.

Interestingly, while Faderman rejects the cut-and-dry notions of sexuality-either a woman is or is not a lesbian-critic Marylynne Diggs objects to Faderman’s seemingly clear delineation of when same-sex relationships became unaccepted.  Diggs sees the entire nineteenth century as a time in which there was a very fluctuating struggle to define love and friendship.  Furthermore, Diggs suggests that this struggle did not end abruptly as she cites Martha Vicinus’s statement that so-called romantic friendships were consistent through the twentieth century.  Vicinus also states that lesbian relationships were common much earlier in Europe and Asia than historians initially believed.  Thus, this preoccupation with pin-pointing the recognition of same-sex relationships to the nineteenth century may be a uniquely American tendency.

Overall, Diggs argues that the categorization of nineteenth-century same-sex relationships as romantic friendships allows scholars to neglect the pathologizing and general feeling of disapproval of same-sex relationships prior to the twentieth century.  Diggs specifies that general sentiments we reference from the nineteenth century are a manifestation of “the profound cross-fertilization between advice literature, scientific discourse, and popular fiction.”  Items such as advice manuals prescribed an appropriate life for women courting and marrying in the nineteenth century, and language in those manuals suggested a commonly felt need to limit homosexual relations.  Margaret J. M. Sweat’s “Ethel’s Love Life” (1859) is a key example of nineteenth century fiction that portrays the obstacle female same-sex relationships set up for heterosexual marriage.

In terms of literature, Faderman focuses on how censorship evolved, which bolsters her argument of the increasing unacceptability of romantic friendships.  Censorship of female relationships increased as time progressed.  For instance, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862) had explicit female sexuality that was not censored, but Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) was censored even though the sexuality in that book was less obvious.

Diggs never specifically mentions Emily Dickinson, but Faderman argues that Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s attempts to conceal the close relationship between Emily and Sue Dickinson reflect Faderman’s argument of the clear shift from accepted romantic friendships in the nineteenth century to the realization and disapproval of underlying sexuality in the twentieth century.  Faderman’s readings suggest that Emily felt no need to mask her powerful feelings for Sue, which would reflect the nineteenth century’s acceptance of such relationships.

Sometimes a romantic friendship developed into a “Boston marriage,” “a long-term monogamous relationship between two otherwise unmarried women” (Faderman 190).  Such relationships were often recognized as partnerships with the same strong support system as heterosexual marriage.  Faderman discusses how some women formed Boston marriages after the death of their fathers or husbands freed them from households dedicated to men.  Women who could not live together communicated much like Emily and Sue did, through letters.

Faderman’s, Diggs’s, and others’ research contribute to better understanding social perceptions of same-sex friendships and romantic relationships.  However, the paradox of this field of study is that the more one researches, the more one must come to terms with the fact that many relationships or aspects of them have always been concealed for various social reasons.  Thus, to some extent everything we state about the social acceptability of these relationships is based on information that had been purposefully disguised.

Works Cited

Diggs, Marylynne.  “Romantic Friends or a ‘Different Race of Creatures’?  The Representation of Lesbian Pathology in Nineteenth-Century America.”  Feminist Studies 21.2 (1995): 317-340.

Faderman, Lillian.  Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1981.

I would have liked to finish that discussion I walked out on yesterday (jeez, Obama) about whether and to what extent poetry is for the poet or a wider audience.  It’s something I think about a lot as a reader, and usually I fall on the side of the audience–because I believe that perhaps the most important thing literature can do is forge intense connections among people in a way little else can.  That’s not to say that I don’t value writing as a tool for the individual to become more in touch with her/himself.  I absolutely think writing is a rewarding act for oneself, but usually I think that kind of writing has more limits than the kind that you revise to make accessible to other readers.

That actually leads me to the biggest risk I found in “The Lotus Flowers”–the specificity of the setting and occasion.  It basically becomes a narrative–it feels like that especially on p. 81, four lines from the bottom of the page, till the end of the poem.  I almost felt like it was too specific description and not enough context for me to jump in.  To put it harshly, I never understood why this particular gathering was worth writing or reading about.  Maybe that isn’t important, maybe Voigt wrote this poem so that the reader can connect with it having little to no understanding of Voigt’s own history.  I hope so, but I just haven’t gotten there yet.  I’d be interested to hear where the class discussion went on this topic and/or to hear what anyone else thinks about audience and risks.

One of the Frost poems I got really into was “Two Tramps in Mud Time.”  The idea of uniting vocation with avocation is something that plagues/captivates me regularly.  This poem urges me to continue evaluating that, particularly in the last four lines:

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

If we take seriously the notion that everyone’s career should be what he/she really loves, then we would almost definitely have to sacrifice services we take for granted.  (Off the top of my head, those services, or generally undesirable career tracks I can think of, might include housekeeping or funeral arranging.)  I don’t at all want to be utilitarian and suggest that some people have to do the grunt work while others get the white collar careers, because I believe that everyone should do exactly what makes her/him come to life.  Additionally, I believe that if we lived in a perfect world where everyone did what he/she is most passionate about, we would function as a community with more harmony.

I think Frost really strikes out against utilitarianism when he uses the phrase “common good” in the midst of lines 13-16, and that makes him a little more accessible to me:

The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

But I don’t see the utopia where everyone does what they want emerging in our world anytime soon.  I suppose what attracts me to this poem is that I’m hoping to find something in it that shows he isn’t oversimplifying the complications of reconciling human desires and human necessities to form human purpose.  Perhaps the simplicity of his example of men in the woods away from capitalism and even family (at least in the context of this poem) is telling of how much unnecessary confusion Frost believes we bring to this conflict.  But if that isn’t what he’s doing, I think I’m once again at a loss with Frost to really believe he isn’t that grandfather/Hallmark card figure.