Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2205012
Jocelyn Heath
Abstract This essay proposes a new reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Prodigal”—traditionally read as a parable of the poet’s own alcoholism—as a deeply veiled account of the multiple exiles faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in Bishop’s era: geographic through ostracism and psychological through internalized homophobia. Using evidence established by Bethany Hicok of embedded “code” language for homosexuality by lesbian writers at Bishop’s alma mater Vassar College, the essay argues that the same such codes appear in “The Prodigal” and offer an alternate reading for the protagonist’s exile and self-castigation. Bishop’s known use of gender inversion is one such code used to distance her writer-self from a personally challenging subject. The argument also draws on Lorrie Goldensohn’s analysis of cage and lightning imagery as confinement and insight, respectively. Finally, the essay explores the intense and grotesque physical imagery of the barn and its inhabitants to delve into the conflicted experience being queer while struggling with internalized homophobia as a means of understanding how multifaceted the experience of exile was for the LGBTQ+ community in this era. We observe how deeply distanced from autobiography such content had to be to avoid danger to the writer.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2211250
B. Hamamra
Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis depicts a fluid and elusive subjectivity that resists fixed gender norms and highlights the endless search for meaning and identity. According to Selina Busby and Stephen Farrier, “the majority of Kane’s work can be situated within a queer frame” (142). Busby and Farrier contextualize Kane’s theatrical oeuvre within the framework of queer theory and its societal implications, arguing that her plays emerged at a specific historical and cultural juncture. “This historical moment was the 1990s, the same period in which queer became increasingly powerful on the street as a form of protest and in the academy as a subject (Butler’s key text for queers, Gender Trouble was published in 1990)” (143) By examining Kane’s plays through a queer theoretical lens, Busby and Farrier highlight the theme of fluidity of identity that pervades her texts:
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245
A. L. Moore
The precise sense of the “Madness” from Emily Dickinson’s frequently anthologized poem “Much Madness is divinest Sense” may be more specific than previous explications of the poem have allowed; in fact, one may interpret such madness in the literary poetic context as an allusion to Horace’s impressionistic and somewhat quirky conceit of the mad poet as expounded upon in Ars Poetica. In Horace’s time, writing during the Augustan age in Rome, theories concerning the poet’s inspired madness were ubiquitous. The notion of a divinely inspired poet both afflicted and blessed by madness (μανία) certainly preceded Horace, dating back to Hellenistic antiquity and said to date back to Democritus (Hadju 32). In her paradoxical poem, as a reclusive and largely uncelebrated “poetess” of her time, Dickinson alludes to the mad poet conceit in the opening line, lending much of the gravity of the Western poetic tradition to her own declaration of artistic license. Dorothea Steiner has commented that “[w]hile madness was ‘divinest sense’ in a poet, it was considered an aberration in a ‘poetess’” (59). Certainly Dickinson herself living in a patriarchal, Puritanical era would have been regarded as something of an aberration by many of her peers—“a mad lady who put words together in an interesting way” (Greene 68), but the traditional classical notion of a divinely inspired poetess was not unprecedented https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245
艾米莉·狄金森（Emily Dickinson）经常选集的诗歌《许多疯狂是最神圣的感觉》（Much Madness is divinest sense）中对“疯狂”的确切理解可能比之前对这首诗的解释更具体；事实上，人们可以将文学诗歌语境中的这种疯狂解读为霍勒斯在《诗歌艺术》中对这位疯狂诗人的印象派和有点古怪的自负。在霍勒斯的时代，在罗马奥古斯都时代写作，关于诗人受启发的疯狂的理论无处不在。受上帝启发的诗人既受疯狂折磨又受其祝福（μαγία）的概念肯定早于贺拉斯，可以追溯到希腊化的古代，据说可以追溯到德谟克利特（Hadju 32）。在她的自相矛盾的诗中，作为她那个时代的一个隐居的、基本上不受欢迎的“女诗人”，狄金森在开场白中暗示了疯狂的诗人自负，将西方诗歌传统的严肃性赋予了她自己的艺术许可宣言。Dorothea Steiner评论道：“虽然疯狂在诗人身上是‘最神圣的感觉’，但在‘女诗人’身上却被认为是一种失常”（59）。当然，狄金森本人生活在一个父权制的清教徒时代，会被她的许多同龄人视为一种失常——“一个以有趣的方式把单词组合在一起的疯女人”（格林68），但传统的古典观念中受神启发的女诗人并不是前所未有的https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677
Biswarup Das
In his 1912 poem “The Listeners,” the English poet Walter de la Mare1 (1873–1956) presents a “lonely Traveller” (20)2 who comes to a house in a forest at night but fails to meet anyone. His3 knocking “on the moonlit door” (2) and repeated callings remain unanswered. Finally, he departs, asking the “phantom listeners” (13) inside the house to tell the house dwellers that he “came, and no one answered,/That [he] kept [his] word” (27–28). Readers and scholars have interpreted “The Listeners” in several ways.4 However, an important issue about the poem has nonetheless been overlooked. Studied closely, it becomes evident that the story of the Traveler betokens the nothingness one inescapably comes across in the world. In 1943, thirty-one years after the poem’s publication, the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 80) painstakingly dealt with the human experience of nothingness in his magnum opus Being and Nothingness. Intriguingly, the various ways de la Mare’s Traveler encounters nothingness bear striking parallels with the ones Sartre presents in his work. As such, the motif of nothingness becomes a curious issue in the poem. However, before exploring the motif of nothingness in “The Listeners,” it is necessary to mention that nothingness is never present in the world. It is because the world’s constituents, which Sartre calls matters, are wholly positive (Manser 47). They are positive for being self-contained, timeless, and without differentiation. However, they are also inert, making the world meaningless (Spade 76–85). The world acquires meaning as human consciousness is projected on it. Now, the meaning formed in this way is phenomenal, infusing the positive world with negations. It is because consciousness is negative by nature. Instead of being situated in itself, consciousness belongs to the matter it is aware of and changes by shifting from one object to another. Sartre states, “[consciousness] is not what it is and is what it is not” (Sartre 21). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677
英国诗人沃尔特·德拉马雷（Walter de la Mare1，1873-1956）在其1912年的诗歌《听众》（The Listeners）中描绘了一个“孤独的旅行者”（20）2，他晚上来到森林中的一所房子，但没有遇到任何人。他敲着“月光下的门”（2），不断的呼唤仍然没有得到回应。最后，他离开了，让房子里的“幻影听众”（13）告诉房子里的居民，他“来了，但没有人回答，/他遵守了诺言”（27-28）。读者和学者对《听者》有多种解读。4然而，关于这首诗的一个重要问题却被忽视了。仔细研究，很明显，旅行者的故事预示着一个人在这个世界上不可避免地会遇到的虚无。1943年，在这首诗出版三十一年后，法国思想家让-保罗·萨特（1905–80）在他的代表作《存在与虚无》中煞费苦心地处理了人类的虚无体验。有趣的是，de la Mare的《旅行者》遭遇虚无的各种方式与萨特在其作品中呈现的方式有着惊人的相似之处。因此，虚无的主题成为诗歌中一个奇怪的问题。然而，在探索《听者》中的虚无主题之前，有必要提到的是，世界上永远不存在虚无。这是因为萨特所说的世界的组成部分是完全积极的（曼瑟47）。他们是积极的，因为他们是独立的，永恒的，没有区别。然而，它们也是惰性的，使世界变得毫无意义（Spade 76-85）。当人类意识投射到世界上时，世界就获得了意义。现在，以这种方式形成的意义是非凡的，给积极的世界注入了否定。这是因为意识本质上是消极的。意识不是位于自身，而是属于它所意识到的物质，并通过从一个物体转移到另一个物体而改变。萨特指出，“[意识]不是它是什么，也不是它不是什么”（萨特21）。https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2022.2146478
Weina Fan
Previous research regarding Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” mainly concerns who is the real poet or speaker in the poem. James L. Potter argues that the poet in the poem is Edward Thomas in that Frost is “mocking Thomas’ habit of fretting over choices, present and past” (52). R. F. Fleissner proposes that Frost’s “poetic intent was clearly enough to promote Thomas only, not himself (or also himself)” (22). In contrast, Larry Finger claims that the true poet is Frost despite that Frost did write the poem “with Edward Thomas in mind” (76). Similarly, David Ketterer claims that Frost, as the speaker of the poem, hints at “his life and identity” (78). Furthermore, Henry Hart notes that the poem “drew on an experience Frost had while walking in the woods near Plymouth, New Hampshire, before he had even met Thomas” (176). The debate seems to be focused on the identity of the speaker, namely, that of the speaking “I” which, in a Lacanian sense, is only the ego of Frost. In this article, I seek to read the poem in terms of the Lacanian subject through which I aim to invalidate the debate regarding the identity of the speaker, be it Thomas or Frost, and to delve into Frost’s unconscious. The Lacanian subject essentially differs from the Cartesian subject in that the former is the subject of the unconscious which is “structured like a language” (Lacan, Four Concepts: 203). Lacan further distinguishes that “the subject of the enunciation is definitely not to be confused with the one who takes the opportunity to say of himself I, as subject of the utterance... The I, as it appears in any utterance, is nothing more than what we call a shifter” (Lacan, My Teaching: 85). On the other hand, the subject of the statement, as Bruce Fink argues, “corresponds to the level of the ego, a constructed self taken to be the master of its own thoughts” (Fink 43). In this light, the debate concerning whether Thomas or Frost is the real speaker is of little significance since the “I,” as a shifter, represents only the ego of Frost which takes on various forms. Whether Frost wrote the https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2146478
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2022.2164169
Joseph St. John
The Old English verse passage known as Genesis B , a translation from Old Saxon that has been preserved in the Junius 11 manuscript, 1 retells the apoc-ryphal angelic rebellion and Adam and Eve’s lapse that forms part of the Book of Genesis. The passage, which modifies its biblical source in significant ways, 2 comes to a close with Adam and Eve’s extra-biblical expression of remorse and regret immediately following their lapse, in lines 765 b-851, before God’s arrival on the scene. 3 This paper focuses on Adam’s extra-biblical expression of remorse and repentance. It proposes that the poem’s expression of this theme is influenced by Job 38.16. Allusion to this verse from the Book of Job, I argue, serves two functions. In the first place, it affirms Adam’s readiness to undergo penance. Secondly, it suggests that Adam and Eve may only be saved through Christ. This second point transpires from the Christian exegetical tradition relating to Job 38.16. I
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2184246
D. D. de Villiers
Although there are a handful of compelling readings – among which I would single out those of Ellen Levy and of Heather White and Luke Carson – of Marianne Moore’s “Armor’s Undermining Modesty,” none of them properly account for the significance of the opening lines, which stop short of clearly representing the speaker’s defensive reaction to an assumed “pest.” From the tone we might infer relative calm and restraint; indeed, part of the poem’s appeal lies in the knowing, mildly ironic quality of the voice, which seems sure-footed despite the eccentricity of its steps. Even so, the poem indeed does develop from a moment of misidentification – “At first I thought a pest/ must have alighted on my wrist” (lines 1–2) – that may also have involved annoyance, perhaps even recoil or brief panic. That this misidentification and the defensive attitude implicit in it are key themes is clear enough; nevertheless, the reader is left in the awkward position of having to entertain the speaker’s reflections in the wake of an error. Moreover, nothing in the speaker’s approach suggests an explicit attempt to recover trust, even though her tone and attitude may inspire confidence. In fact, it is precisely because of this refusal – which accommodates her frank concessions to irony – that the speaker does come across as being invested and in earnest. She does not speak from some moral high ground or enclave of virtue. Yet it is difficult for the reader to accost her; it is as if each statement – decisive enough when considered in isolation – turns out to have been born of accident or coincidence. Here I am mindful of the readings of Levy (70–71) and of White and Carson (77), both of which provide ample evidence of the poem’s continual generation of new intratextual connections by means of homophony, pun, oxymoron, rhyme, alliteration, and so forth, since such inflections complicate the thematic thread. The poem’s procedure, then, is aligned with its interest in contingencies, even though it knows itself to be driven, like the reader, by the desire for https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184246
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2205576
Douglas Schaak
In a move reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s maddening tendency to toss his famished readers a few crumbs of interpretive sustenance, Herman Melville offers his readers the tantalizing postscript in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After 15,000 words of not giving us what we are craving—namely, a satisfying clue to Bartleby’s identity or behavior—the narrator relates “one little item of rumor” (Melville 73) that might hold “a certain suggestive interest” (73). The morsel we are given is that “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration” (73). The scholarship devoted to the postscript has examined at length both the Dead Letter Office and the dead letters themselves. What seems to have gone unnoticed, however, is the significance of the “suddenly removed” part of this revelation. In what follows I argue that the postscript is of tremendous importance because the possibility of Bartleby’s being suddenly removed from his DLO job is the key to understanding his unusual behavior. Although the narrator downplays the DLO revelation with disclaimers, he acts on that information as if it were true. As such, it is fair for readers to treat this “rumor” as accurate biographical information. Thomas Mitchell says that “Bartleby ... reveals nothing about himself ” (330). He certainly reveals very little, but due to this sparsity what Bartleby does reveal is magnified. In his final office conversation with the narrator, Bartleby states simply, “I like to be stationary” (69). Because Bartleby tends to state things negatively, his naming a specific preference is noteworthy. The first thing the narrator says upon meeting Bartleby is “a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold” (45). He then offers a stream of observations that reinforce Bartleby’s stationary existence: “he never went anywhere” (50); “He was a perpetual sentry in the corner” (50); “Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery” (59); “Bartleby remained standing at the window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries” (64); “Bartleby would remain standing immovable in the middle of the room” (65), and so on. In addition to these observations, Bartleby’s own words express his desire https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205576
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577
Kewei Chen
Queerness has been a staunch presence throughout Tennessee Williams’ dazzling oeuvre. Compared with his famed plays, his achievement in short fiction is critically underrated. Gore Vidal deems Williams’ short stories as the “true memoir” of the writer, the candor of which even surpassed his autobiography (xxii). Dennis Vannatta argues that while Williams “failed to deal honestly... in his plays with the issue of homosexuality,” this subject has become “frequently and directly dramatized over the remainder of his short-fiction career” (x). Michael S. D. Hooper notes Williams’ short fiction as a parallel endeavor alongside the playwriting: Unlike his commercial theater where sexual expressions are “diluted,” Williams’ early short stories “tackle gay experiences head on” (96-97). The studies above unanimously pinpoint Williams’ short-fiction, less trammeled by censorship, as an unfading asset for unraveling his sexual politics imbricated with material minutiae. “Portrait of a Girl in Glass’ is critically considered the basis for the fulllength play The Glass Menagerie (1945). Tom Wingfield—the first-person narrator—is a young poet who works at a warehouse as the breadwinner to support his mother and sister, after his father’s desertion years ago. His sister Laura Wingfield quits business school and idles away her life among an “infinite number of little glass ornaments” left behind by their estranged father (Williams 98). The overbearing mother pushes Laura toward marriage by forcing Tom to bring home a gentleman-caller—also his fellow worker— named Jim Delaney. While Laura starts to enjoy his company, Jim inadvertently reveals his engagement to another girl. The visit ends in the mother’s disappointment. Afterwards, Tom leaves his hometown and becomes a drifter, yet still haunted by the memory of his sister. This essay focuses exclusively on “Portrait” as a self-contained text as I probe into the story’s intertextual entanglements with Gene Stratton-Porter’s potently homoerotic novel Freckles (1915). By extricating the homoerotic elements embedded in and mediated https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577
{"title":"Queer Attachments in Tennessee Williams’ “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”","authors":"Kewei Chen","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577","url":null,"abstract":"Queerness has been a staunch presence throughout Tennessee Williams’ dazzling oeuvre. Compared with his famed plays, his achievement in short fiction is critically underrated. Gore Vidal deems Williams’ short stories as the “true memoir” of the writer, the candor of which even surpassed his autobiography (xxii). Dennis Vannatta argues that while Williams “failed to deal honestly... in his plays with the issue of homosexuality,” this subject has become “frequently and directly dramatized over the remainder of his short-fiction career” (x). Michael S. D. Hooper notes Williams’ short fiction as a parallel endeavor alongside the playwriting: Unlike his commercial theater where sexual expressions are “diluted,” Williams’ early short stories “tackle gay experiences head on” (96-97). The studies above unanimously pinpoint Williams’ short-fiction, less trammeled by censorship, as an unfading asset for unraveling his sexual politics imbricated with material minutiae. “Portrait of a Girl in Glass’ is critically considered the basis for the fulllength play The Glass Menagerie (1945). Tom Wingfield—the first-person narrator—is a young poet who works at a warehouse as the breadwinner to support his mother and sister, after his father’s desertion years ago. His sister Laura Wingfield quits business school and idles away her life among an “infinite number of little glass ornaments” left behind by their estranged father (Williams 98). The overbearing mother pushes Laura toward marriage by forcing Tom to bring home a gentleman-caller—also his fellow worker— named Jim Delaney. While Laura starts to enjoy his company, Jim inadvertently reveals his engagement to another girl. The visit ends in the mother’s disappointment. Afterwards, Tom leaves his hometown and becomes a drifter, yet still haunted by the memory of his sister. This essay focuses exclusively on “Portrait” as a self-contained text as I probe into the story’s intertextual entanglements with Gene Stratton-Porter’s potently homoerotic novel Freckles (1915). By extricating the homoerotic elements embedded in and mediated https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"142 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41889688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2200156
Subhadeepta Ray, Goutam Karmakar
Abstract This paper studies the intricate treatment of the abstract and dogmatic order of imperial, racial, and religious morality, and the issue of ethical commitment in the concrete and fleeting relationships between individual subjects in Joseph Conrad’s debut novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895). The novel is set in the Malay Archipelago, where the fading years of the imperial absolutism of Europe give way to conflicting trade and political interests. A pessimistic philosophical outlook in Conrad’s text shows how all the overindulgent narcissistic moral orders accommodate hate and self-interest motivated conspiracy, and simultaneously violate ethical demands of the Other in human contact.
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