[In the following essay, Brogan explores Adrienne Rich's contention that Bishop's lyric voice “explores issues of outsiderhood and difference.”]

In her 1983 review of Elizabeth Bishop's posthumously published Complete Poems, Adrienne Rich calls for new readings of Bishop, sensitive to her understanding of “outsiderhood” and “difference.”¹ Rich acknowledges that her view of Bishop as an outsider who “was critically and consciously trying to explore marginality, power and powerlessness” (BBP 135) came late, after years of difficulty with Bishop's poetry. As a young poet “looking for a female genealogy,” she failed to find in Bishop's polished, reserved work a model for the boldly personal, politically engaged feminine aesthetics Rich herself would later define. Rich ascribes her earlier short-sightedness to her own urgent need for an unequivocably “clear female tradition,” a need that could not accommodate that tradition's veiled, “often cryptic” expression in Bishop's work (BBP 125).

It is hardly surprising that a poet like Rich would find Bishop's cooler, more guarded poetry difficult to claim for a “clear female tradition.” What is more striking is the realization that Bishop's handling of “marginality”—which Rich now identifies as Bishop's engagement of the defining concerns of a women's tradition—is largely responsible for the neglect of her work by some younger poets—and, until very recently, feminist critics—committed to defining a distinctly female voice. Bishop's feminist readers have been troubled by the lack of a direct, explicit presentation of gender issues and by the absence of a strong, central, explicitly female voice in her poetry, a voice like that of Rich's when, toward the end of a cycle of love poems, she acknowledges, “I am Adrienne alone” (DCL 34).² Bishop carefully hides the gender of her speakers, creating an unobtrusive, reticent poetic persona, quite unlike Rich's own experiment with the androgynous voice, which still retains a boldly central stance in the poem: “I am here”; “I am she: I am he”; “I am the androgyne” (DW 24, 19). Diving into the wreck of history to cut away obfuscating myth, Rich's androgyne, usurping the masculine role of quester, draws the poem about himself/ herself. In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” Rich associates her movement into the self-proclaiming “I” (from the oblique “she” of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”) with a literary coming into one's own (OLSS 44-45). Her poetic persona arrogates the traditional lyric voice, now radicalized by its definition as female: “I am an American woman” (PSN 238), “I am a woman in the prime of life” (WC 19), and daringly invoking the stance of poet as divine creator, “I am I” (PSN 225).³

Bishop's speakers, by contrast, hover at the edges of a scene, often physically peripheral to the center of interest. Compounding her lyric reticence is the frequent choice of the plural voice, which mutes the focus on self. Less than a quarter of the poems Bishop published from 1936 to 1976 refer to an “I.” When the “I” does appear, it is typically elusive, receding quickly from view. In “At the Fishhouses,” for example, we are suddenly alerted to the poet's presence thirty-two lines into the poem when another figure “accepts a Lucky Strike.”⁴ When, almost twenty lines later, the speaker's first-person pronoun finally appears, it is an “I” scantily elaborated, who observes the sea from the shore and, unlike Rich's questing poet-diver, imagines immersion. “In the Waiting Room” is the only poem in which Bishop names herself (“you are an Elizabeth”), but the second-person address takes an outsider's stance in relation to the self—a self-presentation strikingly different from Rich's “I am Adrienne alone.”

Focusing on Bishop's definition of an unobtrusive, ambiguously gendered, peripherally positioned lyric voice, I would like to pursue Rich's suggestion that Bishop's work explores issues of outsiderhood and difference. Bishop's mapping of lyric voice offers, I will argue, a critique of the way literary authority is often constituted through the construction of a gendered hierarchy, and through the marginalization or appropriation of otherness.⁵ The question of lyric positioning is, in Bishop's work, inextricably linked to her self-positioning in relation to literary tradition. Bishop's famed elusiveness, the marginal stance she assumes within the space of the poem, relates to her resistance to the centrism integral to the Transcendentalist tradition she claimed for herself.⁶ While she recognized herself as an essentially Romantic poet, an inheritor of the Emersonian sublime, Bishop rejects the strong, central, implicitly masculine voice that marks the Romantic lyric, a voice that tends to objectify, dominate, or internalize its subjects. Her alternative to the masculine, centrally positioned lyric self is a voice that is socially or geographically marginal, often plural, and sexually ambiguous. In looking at Bishop's choice of a marginal lyric stance and her resistance to sexual specificity, I will also briefly touch on how her lyric positioning relates to a thematics of outsiderhood. Bishop's choice of the outsider's stance, as well as her rejection of a strong, central female voice, suggests that we need to remain open to forms of revisionism in women's writing that resist easy location in Rich's “clear female tradition.” The portrait of the female poet that emerges in Bishop's poems invites us to consider a revisionism more radical than the simple transposition of female for male, the valorization of the opposite side of a hierarchical gender dualism. To read Bishop's decentered, sexually ambiguous voice as an evasion of female identity is to miss the deeply subversive implications of her project.

Early in her career, Bishop linked the insistence on centrality of voice with masculinity and aggression. In “Roosters” (1941), from her first volume, North & South, “we” are awoken by the “horrible insistence” of cock cries. “Combative” roosters commandeer subject hens with their militaristic parading and insistence on ownership:

At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock
Cries galore
come from the water-closet door,
from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,
where in the blue blur
their rustling wives admire,
the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare
with stupid eyes
while from their beaks there rise
the uncontrolled, traditional cries.
Deep from protruding chests
in green-gold medals dressed,
planned to command and terrorize the rest,
the many wives
who lead hens' lives
of being courted and despised …

(35)

As the poem progresses, the aggression implicit in the roosters' possessiveness and vanity breaks into open warfare. The roosters begin to fight in midair, their metallic feathers that fall in flames invoking the image of warplanes. Bishop sent a draft of “Roosters” to Marianne Moore who, disapproving of the jingly rhythm, repetitions, and indecorous details, revised and retyped the poem, giving it the new title, “The Cock.” Bishop wrote back: “I cherish my ‘water-closet’ and other sordidities because I want to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism. … That's why, although I see what you mean … I want to keep as the title the rather contemptuous word ROOSTERS rather than the more classical COCK; and I want to repeat the ‘gun-metal’. (I also had in mind the violent roosters Picasso did in connection with his GUERNICA picture.) … I can't bring myself to sacrifice what (I think) is a very important ‘violence’ of tone. …”⁷ The violence that Bishop locates in the territoriality of the roosters is founded on a gendered structure of oppression at home, in which the females are “terrorize[d]”—subjected first to submission, finally to death (they must fall with their “husbands”). The repetition of the word “first” (“the first crow of the first cock”) underscores the roosters' insistence on their own precedence. In attempting to establish themselves as prior they relegate all others to a position of secondariness.

The cries of the males, Bishop takes care to point out, are “traditional,” implicating both societal and literary convention. The poem suggests that in becoming authorized as traditional, one voice gains monopoly over other voices, establishing itself as the dominant, central voice through the suppression or marginalization of other (here, female) voices. “Roosters” reveals the basis of Bishop's antipathy for the self-aggrandizement of a centrist (identified as masculine) poetic stance. Each rooster maniacally insists on the focal position of his own existence; each cry of “‘Here!’ and ‘Here!’” pulls the world around it, a self-locating that gives the cock the right to “tell us how to live”:

each one an active
displacement in perspective;
each screaming, “This is where I live!”

(36)

The stance of the roosters may be read as a brutally comic version of the Emersonian “central man.” Emerson envisions the process of symbolization as a remapping, an energetic, willful reorganization of a silent (silenced, feminized) landscape in which the (male) seer/sayer arrogates a central position: the poet “unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it.”⁸ The roosters' voice, which accompanies grotesquely “heroic” combat, similarly remaps the landscape; each cock's solitary, self-announced “I” becomes one of many “glass-headed pins” “marking out maps like Rand McNally's,” the mapping of “war-projects,” as Bishop explained to Moore. The angry question, “Roosters, what are you projecting?” suggests the image of a projection map, the planning of war, as well as the externalization of an internal, eroticized violence (“deep from raw throats / a senseless order floats / all over town”). The roosters' projection, their insistence on defining a perspective determined by an aggressively central self, dramatizes the potential oppressiveness of an Emersonian poetic topography. Each cock's cry of “This is where I live!” parodically invokes Emerson's metaphoric connection in “Nature” between the establishment of a home and the achievement of centrality and dominion over nature (“Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world. … Know then, that the world exists for you”).⁹

In “Roosters” Bishop identifies the self-assertive cry, which in usurping a central position attempts to displace all other “perspective,” as the “traditional” masculine voice. The ultimate rejection of the roosters' cry—“and what he sung / no matter”—at once identifies the cock song as a poetic voice and undermines the validity of such a stance. The self-centering “Here!” is linked to both aggression and the silencing of peripheral voices (the hens “admire,” but they have no voice of their own).

Bishop, it should be emphasized, questions both terms of the Emersonian definition of the poet as “central man,” understanding the dangers of any system of exclusivity and hierarchy, whether based on gender or on positioning. The claim to centrality traces a hierarchical map that effectively marginalizes that which lies beyond the defined center. Because one's centrality both creates and depends on the peripheral positioning of others, the threat of the excluded must be suppressed through subordination and silence (the condition of the hens who revolve around the roosters). “Roosters” exposes the flaw in an Emersonian model of poetic representation. In expanding the self to incorporate the “Not-Me” into the “Me,” the Emersonian poet eradicates the very otherness he claims to speak for, his representation a narcissistic magnification of his own self. By multiplying the roosters so that each comically cancels the central stance of the other's “I,” Bishop suggests that a central poetic position exists only as imposition, and is ultimately untenable.

In contrast to the rooster's aggressive self-definition, the narrative voice of the poem remains vaguely defined, marginal to the central action of the roosters: the “we” referred to directly only once at the beginning of the poem recede, surfacing briefly for an angry direct address to the roosters (“Roosters, what are you projecting? / … what right have you to give / commands and tell us how to live”), to return through the indirect suggestion of personal sorrow at the poem's end, when the “cocks are now almost inaudible.” The gender as well as the relationship of the “we” is unclear, although the plot of sad awakening casts the poem as an alba, suggesting two lovers—possibly, given Bishop's own affectional choices and the strong male/female polarization of the poem's opening, both women. The oblique presence of the lovers distinguishes them positively from the uncontrollable egotism of the cocks. Yet any simple opposition between male aggression and female pacifism is overturned by a blurring of outside and inside. The put-upon “we” violently awoken in the “gun-metal blue dark” of what is presumably a bedroom are clearly linked to the dominated, more submissive hens in the “blue blur” outside. Less obvious but more ominous is the resemblance between the lovers and the roosters themselves. The cocks' cries of “‘Here!’ and ‘Here!’” remind the speaker of her own morally compromised location: “here where are / unwanted love, conceit and war” (emphasis added). The line between enemy and self breaks down, as the speaker acknowledges the potential for a rooster-like violence that is not gender-specific. The plot of (male) friendship and betrayal that unfolds in the relationship of Christ and Peter described in the poem's second half may also have poisoned the intimacy of the poem's (female?) lovers: “how could the night have come to grief?” As Susan Schweik has argued in her reading of “Roosters,” the “latent private strain” between the lovers “implicates the woman speaker in psychic structures of conflict, violence, and betrayal formerly reserved for specifically male or vaguely generalized others.¹⁰

In resisting a clearly gendered voice, Bishop accomplishes two things: she undoes the male/female dichotomy that characterizes the hierarchical world of the roosters and suggests that character traits (such as propensities for violence or forgiveness) transcend gender. The very implication that “we” share with the roosters an impulse toward aggression breaks down the singularity and exclusiveness that each rooster's voice attempts to legislate. In recognizing difference while also overturning clear boundary distinctions between, in the poem's final words, “enemy, or friend,” the poem's “we” make their most positive turn away from the violence the roosters represent. The plurality of the speaking voice aligns with this rejection of a self-dramatizing, singular “I,” which maintains its superiority by imperialistically remapping the terrain with itself as center. Evident in North & South and continuing throughout her career, the tendency toward plural voice resists lyric self-aggrandizement as well as evades the reductive, dangerously oppositional structure of a gendered dualism.

“The End of March” (1975), a late poem in which the narrative voice modulates between “we” and “I,” provides a particularly interesting case of Bishop's use of the plural voice because of the connection it establishes between plurality, marginality, and outsiderhood. The poem, which reflects back on the many images of temporary, vulnerable enclosures that abound in Bishop's work, is important to an understanding of her handling of positioning or placement. Throughout Bishop's career we find a tension between nostalgia for the securities of home and the sense of enclosure as dangerously static or narcissistically self-validating (as in “Roosters,” where the aggressive possession of one's own place (“This is where I live!”) links to the assumption of a single, central perspective and dominion over others). Bishop moves, however, toward an acceptance of her position as that of the outsider; the inside or central position, though temptingly protected, becomes seen as increasingly threatening to her authorial voice.

An icy offshore wind creates a barrier between the beach-walkers and the sea, the traditional source of inspiration in the genre to which “The End of March” belongs, the American shore ode.¹¹ The desired but unattained end of a cold beach walk, a “proto-dream-house, / my crypto-dream-house” (179) appears as a coffinlike “crooked box.” While the dream-house lures with the promise of a shell-like enclosure, the retirement it offers veers dangerously close to a cessation of all work (she would “retire there and do nothing”), and possibly of life. The poem hints that the sanctuary provides a security that will prove nullifying. Turning away from the house, turning back to the beach, the speaker is rewarded with a landscape suddenly illuminated:

The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
—a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints …

(180)

Harold Bloom has suggested that the “lion sun” refers us to Wallace Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in which his “incessant use of the same figure” “culminates”: “The great cat must stand potent in the sun.” Bloom observes that Stevens's “lion tends to represent poetry as a destructive force, as the imposition of the poet's will-to-power over reality,” while Bishop's lion sun has “something better to do than stand potent in itself. The path away from poetry as a destructive force can only be through play, the play of trope.”¹² Play enters the poem through the “long shadows” that tease the lion sun, a vision only possible when “we” turn away from the dream house and, so to speak, turn the other cheek to the harsh landscape (“On the way back our faces froze on the other side”). The gesture of self-exposure (very different, as Bloom notes, from violent self-imposition) and acceptance of the outsider's position are rewarded by the momentary opening out (the rocks “threw out” their shadows) of a previously ungenerous, “indrawn” landscape.

In walking the beach, Bishop's figures re-enact the earlier movement of the

… sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

Following the lion sun's steps, the beach-walkers retrace a literary tradition (the American shore ode) that includes Whitman and Stevens (whose “paw-prints” or self-inscriptions may loom “big” and “majestic” to poets engaging this tradition). In representing “the poet's will-to-power over reality,” the lion sun figures Stevens's “central man,” his version of the “sovereign” Emersonian poet who “stands on the centre.”¹³ The playfulness of the lion sun, however, differs from the gentler teasing of the “long shadows” because of its implicit violence: the poem's speakers have already encountered a man-sized, sodden ghost, a “thick white snarl” of kite string awash at the edge of the water. By turning away from the dream house, the beach-walkers position the lion sun, representative of masculine power, the dominion over nature or otherness, and a centrist or Emersonian stance, “behind” the more delicate lights of the “multi-colored” stones.¹⁴

The move away from the singular sun of masculine tradition to the many, variously colored lights of a more oblique sublime finds a parallel in the modulation of voice: the poem's “we” turns into an “I” when the “crypto-dream-house” is considered, but reverts back to the plural when that isolating retirement is rejected. Recent work by feminist critics has identified the choice of the plural voice as a characteristic revisionist technique of women writers. Margaret Homans, for example, argues that Dickinson's poetic technique of splitting into two selves (as in “Abdication—/ Me—of Me” or “Ourself behind Ourself”) constitutes an effort to dismantle the “unitary self” and the self-other dualism inherent in the Emersonian tradition. Homans sees the same criticism of Romantic egotism underlying the move toward a collective voice in contemporary poetry by women.¹⁵

Bishop's use of the plural speaker engages this subversive tactic of self-multiplicity, defeating the expectations of a genre that traditionally emphasizes the singularity of the poet-speaker. “Exchanging Hats” (1956), written in the middle of her career, supports the view that the resistance to sexual specificity in Bishop's poetry is motivated by a desire to subvert conventionally restrictive understandings of gender division. The poem, as many critics have noticed, forwards Bishop's most direct attack on a reductive sexual dualism:

Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady's hat,
—oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist
in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.
Unfunny uncle, you who wore a
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can't you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora?
Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
their vast, shady, turned-down brim.

(200-201)

Sexual identities, represented by gender-specific dress, are manipulable, inconstant, and fluctuating with “the tides of fashion,” conventional, as the jingling of “costume” and “custom” suggests. Bishop hints, in references to the outmoded “crown” and “miter,” that political hierarchies are similarly unnatural, existing as cultural impositions validated through false claims to universality. One's “true” identity remains indeterminate: we never discover what lies in the uncle's magic black fedora. Affirming that mysterious “slow changes” rather than a fixed identity shape the self, the poem comically uncovers a knowledge confronted only in darkness and secrecy: the fictive nature of an unambiguous, unitary sexual identity.

The experimental “transvestite twist” of the aunts and uncles relates to the “fantasies of transvestism” that Sandra Gilbert finds in modernist literature. Gilbert argues that male and female modernists handle in markedly different ways the imagery of clothing and its relation to sexual identity. Finding in the work of male writers a dichotomy between a sexually fixed true self and the possible falsification of costume, Gilbert observes that “feminist modernist costume imagery … implies that no one, male or female, can or should be confined to a uni-form, a single form or self.” Women writers have attempted ‘to define a gender-free reality behind or beneath myth, an ontological essence so pure, so free that ‘it’ can ‘inhabit’ any self, any costume.”¹⁶ Bishop's resistance to a strongly defined feminine voice, which has troubled women writers who prefer to center their work in specifically female experience, can be seen as an expression of this implicitly feminist effort to discover an identity that moves beyond a rigid gender dichotomy and notions of a naturally gendered identity. The “we” who speak in “Exchanging Hats” escape through their multiplicity the conventional gender definition that the aunt and uncle, each repressed by a “straight”-jacketing sexual code, receive. Through a sexually indefinite plurality they elude confinement in what Hélène Cixous calls “a two-term system, related to ‘the’ couple man/woman.”¹⁷

Significantly, in the most explicitly autobiographical of Bishop's poems (the only one in which she names herself: “you are an Elizabeth”), the move from the singular to the communal protagonist provides the central drama of the poem. “In the Waiting Room” (1971), the opening poem of Bishop's last volume, dramatizes the discovery of a gendered self and the shaping of a poetic subjectivity by circling back to the poet's childhood to re-envision that moment when the child first finds her voice.

The occasion of the poem is a trip to the dentist's office with “Aunt Consuelo,” taken three days before the speaker's seventh birthday. While the aunt is inside the office, the child, in the outer waiting room, reads the recent National Geographic with a mixture of curiosity and fear. The images come to the child as violently unsettling: dark, ashy volcanoes that suddenly erupt; explorers in militaristic garb; black women and babies with distorted bodies; a dead man, the prey of cannibals. The series of photographs prepares for the central action of the poem, when the child loses a sense of clear ego boundaries, and inner and outer space become confused:

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo's voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

(160)

Images of inner and outer space—the interior space of the poem and the external world, the division of the interior setting into inner and outer rooms, the inside and outside shots of the volcano—mirror the speaker's confusion about the boundaries of the self. The merging of self with other is experienced as a frightening loss of consciousness, an engulfment by a “big black wave.” The child attempts to recover herself by reminding herself of her age and coming birthday, but finds that her personal specificity only circles back to an identity with others: “I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them” (160).

Fifteen years before the appearance of “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop published a prose account of the trip to the dentist's office, part of a memoir of her childhood years in Worcester. An important difference from that earlier, perhaps more strictly factual, account is the inclusion of the magazine's photographs. In the earlier version, the young Elizabeth never opens the magazine but stares at the cover and reads the date, February 1918. The series of photographs that Bishop describes both anticipates the child's disorienting shift in identity (the erupting volcano figuring the child's erupting self-realization) and introduces the issue of intercultural violence. Photographed in Africa, the white explorers Osa and Martin Johnson are outfitted “in riding breeches, / laced boots, and pith helmets,” an almost military garb that underlines the implicit aggression of their project to investigate a “primitive” culture. Their powerful position is reflected, as Lee Edelman has observed, in the stance of the child herself, whose reading of the National Geographic grants her the ethnographer's illusion of “mastery.”¹⁸ Imaging the objectification of the human (a dead man becomes an object to be consumed) and, more specifically, the circumscription of women and children, whose bodies are distorted by cultural convention, the photographs work to undermine the child's initial sense of mastery and induce the vertigo that leads to the cry of pain. Particularly fascinating to the reading child are the naked bodies of the women, whose “awful hanging breasts” are mentioned again later in the poem, breasts that remind her of the mature female body she will acquire. Thus, the child's confrontation with her own self (“what it was I was”) foregrounds her simultaneous discovery of her undeniably female identity and the cultural objectification of the female, an objectification that ironically she enacts herself in reading the National Geographic. Elizabeth thus finds herself, as inheritor of both her own culture's imperialism and the transcultural history of female objectification, both privileged voyeur and, distressingly, object held up to vision.

The child's splitting of the self, through this double identification, into multiple selves is forecasted in the phrasing of the earlier prose account:

I felt … myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I, I, I, and looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs. “You're in for it now,” something said. How had I got tricked into such a false position? I would be like that woman opposite who smiled at me so falsely every once in a while.¹⁹

The recognition of a newly found and inescapable identity (“I, I, I,”) introduces a frightening multiplicity of self; the “three strangers” the young Elizabeth views with panic are both the “two men and a plump middle-aged lady” and the strange triple I that composes her self—a self so strange that it is experienced as an alien place in which one dwells (“How strange you are, inside looking out”). The child vaguely understands that she's “in for it”: inside her own body, as well as inside a larger human community (the values of which define how she experiences her own body as well as the bodies of others).

The condescension with which she views the prospect of shared identity (how awful to be like “that woman opposite”) translates in the poetic version as a distaste for her aunt, whose description as “a foolish, timid woman” recalls common, derogatory caricatures of women. The child's attempt to distance herself from the aunt may reflect, given her new, subliminal awareness of the cultural construction of gender, a repugnance for a stereotypic, misogynistically framed female identity. Unlike the prose account, however, the poem valorizes the recognition of connectedness by associating interpersonal merging, however terrifyingly disorienting, with the valuable acquisition of voice (the cry, “the family voice / I felt in my throat” is not heard in the memoir). The child's finding of voice marks a discovery of a poetic self. She inherits her voice when she loses a sense of herself as rigidly defined, individual, unrelated to others: the identification with her aunt (whose name is changed from Jenny to “Consuelo” to introduce cultural difference as well as the idea of consolation or sympathy) extends to the photographed black women, and finally to an empathy with humankind: we are, strangely, “all just one.”

The experience of merging attaches to the vicarious sharing of pain, and specifically to the sharing of a woman's pain. The two voices become one with a cry that, as many critics have noticed, recalls the scream of the poet's mother in the autobiographical short story, “In the Village.” The mother's scream, which heralds her final slipping into insanity, erases the identity of the child: “She screamed. The child vanishes” (253). In the poetic recasting of this scene, the aunt replaces the lost mother, and at the sound of their shared cry, the child loses herself only to find, through the “mother”-daughter merging, a larger sense of self that extends beyond rigid individuation. In commenting on Bishop's poem, Alicia Ostriker has noted the applicability of Nancy Chodorow's argument that a girl's unbroken pre-oedipal identification with her mother forms the basis for a disposition toward empathetic bonding and community in general.²⁰ While the child Elizabeth moves from her moment of shared identity to a realization of interhuman connectedness, however, it must be emphasized that Bishop's poem does not represent interpersonal merging as particularly easy or natural for the emergent female poet. Chodorow tends to locate ambivalent struggle for girls less in bonding than in the process of individuation: difficulty arises in separating from, rather than in identifying with, the m/other. Consonant with her rejection of a revisionism that simply valorizes the opposite term of a hierarchical gender dualism, Bishop resists the comforts of any notion of an authentic female identity defined by a tendency toward empathy. In viewing the photographs Elizabeth comes to a recognition of her own female sexuality at the same time that she confronts both the cultural construction of the feminine and her complicity in the objectification of what is other. As in “Roosters,” the speaker of “In the Waiting Room” does not completely escape implication in the very violence the poem condemns.

Elizabeth's similarity to both victims and aggressors, the “unlikely” connection that both induces the child's vertigo and gives her voice, holds out a possible alternative to an aggression rooted in the belief in absolute difference. The return to individual separateness at the end of the poem marks a return to war:

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

(161)

In Bishop's original account of her experience in the waiting room, no mention of war is made, although the memoir discusses the war earlier (using the same sentence, “The War was on”). By directly referring to the war only indirectly introduced earlier in the poem by the 1918 date, Bishop underscores the intercultural aggression that informs the National Geographic's photographs, which emphasize cultural opposition: Osa and Martin Johnson's heavy, almost armored, dress preserves their absolute separateness from the naked Africans they encounter, a separateness the child cannot maintain.

Many critics have noted that the poem's photographs do not in fact appear in the February 1918 issue of the National Geographic, a situation made more puzzling by Bishop's assertion in an interview that she had actually read the March issue and had mistaken the date; the photographs, however, do not appear in either issue. The February issue, however, becomes more interesting when we consider not what it lacks but what it does contain: articles on war and photographs of uniformed soldiers. (The entier year of National Geographic issues features heavy coverage of wartime activities, along with numerous photographs of troops and weapons.) In transposing the ethnographic photographs for war scenes, Bishop exposes the violence of an identity authorized by the myth of absolute otherness. The link between the impulse toward aggression and the divisiveness of rigid self-definition that Bishop establishes here echoes the similar tactic in “Roosters,” in which the “we” woken by cock cries are set against the self-centeredness of the “very combative” roosters.

“In the Waiting Room” conflates the eruption of a self-consciously female self with the discovery of cultural and sexual objectification. Female identity is defined here less as outsiderhood than as the blurring of inside and outside, which is mapped as the marginal zone of the waiting room, positioned between the outside world and the inner office. While the figure of Elizabeth occupies, in contrast to the voices of “Roosters” and “The End of March,” a poetically central position, the poem works to undermine any clear opposition between what is positioned as central (Elizabeth, her own culture) and as marginal (the aunt, the strangers, other cultures).

This blurring of boundaries finds reflection in “Santarém,” published in 1978, seven years after the appearance of “In the Waiting Room.” In “Santarém” Bishop comments on her rejection of a restrictively gender-coded self:

Of course I may be remembering it all wrong
after, after—how many years?
That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;
more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile
in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,
grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.
I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.
Two rivers. Hadn't two rivers sprung
from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four
and they'd diverged. Here only two
and coming together. Even if one were tempted
to literary interpretations
such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female
—such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

(185)

“[T]wo / … coming together” rather than “diverg[ing]” recalls Bishop's favored plural, sexually ambiguous voice. “Santarém,” although spoken by a singular voice, sets a more fluid self against the rigid gender division that the poem locates in patriarchal biblical tradition (appropriately, a church appears later in the poem divided by a “crack all the way down” its tower). As Joanne Feit Diehl, who notes the significance of Eden as the original site of “sexual differentiation,” points out, Bishop's rejection of sexual dualism revises both the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the “hieratic distinctions of self-other” central to Emersonianism.²¹

The poem's speaker, as traveler, maintains a peripheral, outsider's relation to the scene described, a position strongly contrasting that of the Portuguese conquistadors in the earlier “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” who install themselves as the rightful possessors of a New World they attempt to refashion in Edenic terms. Bishop's career-long predilection for the outsider's perspective leads me to qualify Diehl's view that in her work Bishop “recovers herself as center of a self-made world.”²² Rarely do Bishop's poems, even those most strongly revisionist, reposition her centrally; more characteristically, they emphasize the degree to which “self-made” worlds tend to be, as both “Brazil, January 1” and “Roosters” illustrate, worlds made narcissistically and oppressively in the image of the self. Her resistance to a central poetic stance, which celebrates the poet's will-to-power and ascendancy over what becomes defined as marginal, may constitute Bishop's strongest critique of her Emersonian inheritance. “In the Waiting Room” illustrates how deeply perspective and identity are culturally constructed rather, than self-made, a recognition that gives the poem its subversive edge. Similarly, “Roosters,” in acknowledging how one may participate in the very mechanisms of violence one abhors, avoids the simple opposition of a female or sexually neutral utopia to a male world of aggression. “Santarém” approaches an alternative, ideal vision, yet the poem stubbornly resists a utopian casting: some of Santarém's endearing oddities—the blue eyes and oars—are the legacy of cultural imperialism and slavery, the violent impositions of earlier travelers.

As a memory, “Santarém” marks a form of return that questions the very possibility of return (“Of course I may be remembering it all wrong”); the speaker's acknowledgment of uncertainty suggests that meaning, like identity, is continually renegotiated. In invoking (only to disavow) an Edenic analogy, the poem reflexively considers the nature of nostalgia: the desire for return to the original home and the yearning for the unambiguous, “true” self that a point of origin would authorize. As Janice Doane and Devon Hodges have argued in Nostalgia and Sexual Difference, the impulse to recover a lost “‘natural’ grounding principle” reflects the need to establish a “stable referent” for sexual identity, a referent that Bishop's poetry consistently rejects.²³ “Santarém” collapses clear identic distinctions (“male/female”), however, even as it washes away a reductive and falsely absolute moral vision (“right/wrong”). The poem defines, in Diehl's words, an “alternative Eden” only in the sense that it carefully evades, in foregrounding fluidity and change, the terra firma that the concept of an original home offers. Water, whose “dazzling dialectic” undoes the either/or of the Edenic home, dampens the soil of Santarém (“The street was deep in dark-gold river sand”), erodes the foundations of buildings, and ultimately carries the poet away (“Then—my ship's whistle blew. I couldn't stay”).

The traveler departs bearing a “small, exquisite,” “empty wasps' nest” that, being made of paper, represents the beautiful, if always provisional and transient, house of Bishop's own writing.²⁴ The speaker carries with her the appropriately “empty” nest, symbol of the enclosure always left behind, as she leaves the golden Santarém. As “The End of March” suggests, outsiderhood has its sublime rewards, not the least of which is the avoidance of a roosterlike insistence on a self-aggrandizing possessiveness: “This is where I live!” Not in the secure possession of a homeground but in the condition of outsiderhood, Bishop locates the fluid, sexually indeterminate voice with which she undermines a dualistic, hierarchical conception of gender, and the central, masculine self of the Romantic tradition.

Notes

1. “The Eye of the Outsider: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 125. When referring to Rich's volumes I use the following abbreviations: BBP (Blood, Bread, and Poetry); DCL (The Dream of a Common Language [New York: Norton, 1978]); DW (Diving into the Wreck [New York: Norton, 1973]); OLSS (On Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Selected Prose 1966-1978) [New York: W. W. Norton, 1979]); PSN (Poems: Selected and New [New York: Norton, 1975]); WC (The Will to Change [New York: Norton, 1971]).

2. For example, Alicia Ostriker, arguing that “the muting of the female throughout our literature requires a poetry able to assert the female self,” regrets Bishop's lack of a clearly gendered voice as an inhibition that her successors need to overcome (Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America [Boston: Beacon Press, 1986], pp. 54-55). Joanne Feit Diehl clears ground in arguing that we can read Bishop's lack of a clear female poetic identity as a revisionist tactic (“At Home With Loss: Elizabeth Bishop and the American Sublime,” in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, ed. Diane Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985], pp. 123-37). I share Diehl's view that sexual ambiguity in Bishop subverts the hierarchical male/female dualism central to Western and in particular to Emersonian tradition. Our readings diverge on the issue of Bishop's investment in the centrism of American Romanticism. I argue that Bishop's critique of sexual dualism extends to a critique of the Emersonian vision of the central poet (whether defined as male, female, or transsexual) as a conception of poetic authority that rests upon priority and exclusion.

3. Rich has more recently moved away from this celebration of the singular female “I,” which she has come to see as a mirroring of the solitary male poetic self, toward a collective female voice (that nevertheless maintains a dominant, central stance within the poem). For a discussion of the turn to female community as a form of Romantic revisionism in Rich's work, see Lynda K. Bundtzen's chapter in this collection.

4. Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), p. 64. All further citations from Bishop's poems refer to this edition; page numbers will be given in parentheses.

5. Bishop's redefinition of poetic authority shares the resistance to binary oppositions and to the appropriation of otherness that Susan Stanford Friedman, in this collection, traces in H. D.'s revisionist Künstlerroman, HER.

6. In a letter to Anne Stevenson, Bishop writes that she and Robert Lowell “in very different ways are both descendants from the Transcendentalists” (Stevenson, “Letters from Elizabeth Bishop,” Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 1980, p. 261).

7. Letter from Bishop to Moore, October 17, 1940. Quoted by Candace W. MacMahon in Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography 1927-1979 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), p. 149.

8. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 1, 31. For an important discussion of the implications for women writers of a Romantic poetic model, in which the male poet stands over and against a female silent landscape, see Margaret Homans's Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).

9. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 44.

10. See Schweik, “An Oblique Place: Elizabeth Bishop and the Language of War” in her forthcoming book, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). The implicit connection between the speaker and the roosters has also been noted by Alfred Corn, who observes that the poem “begins to hint that the ‘we’ … might have participated in a form of violence comparable to the roosters’” (“Elizabeth Bishop's Nativities,” Shenandoah 36.3 [1986], 145).

11. Harold Bloom has noted that “The End of March” represents “another great poem of the American shoreline to go with Emerson's ‘Seashore.’ Whitman's ‘Out of the Cradle …’ and ‘As I Ebb'd …,’ Stevens's ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ and Crane's Voyages I” (“‘Geography III’ by Elizabeth Bishop,” New Republic, February 5, 1977, p. 29).

12. Bloom, “Foreword,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, eds. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. XI.

13. Emerson, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 5.

14. I am grateful to Langdon Hammer for the suggestion that Bishop's “long shadows” echo Dickinson's poem 764 (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson [Boston: Little Brown, 1960]). If we read the “long shadows” that the transformed rocks throw out as a reference to Dickinson (“Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn—/ Indicative that Suns go down—”), then the poet's exilic vision aligns not with authorial centrality, but with the subversive eccentricity of a feminine tradition, shaped by writers who have stood outside the legitimated descent of authority through a line of literary sons. The descending of “Suns” in Dickinson may seem foreboding, indicating as it does “That Darkness—is about to pass—” but Dickinson often associates the sun with male power and the night with female creativity: her “Presentiment” can be read as referring to the opening into possibility rather than to the coming of death; see, for example, Dickinson's poem 106. In creating her dream-house, which is also a house of solitary writing, Bishop may have had Dickinson's own “retirement” in mind, a self-enclosing that nevertheless represents a radical literary unhousing, a critical turn away from the Emersonian tradition that Bishop accomplishes as well.

15. Homans, Women Writers, pp. 209-12, 232-34. For other discussions of plurality in women's writing, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Woman Writers [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985]) and Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language. Both Nancy Chodorow's theory of female development and Luce Irigaray's substitution of a subversive female multiplicity for phallic singularity have been influential to critics who argue for the revisionist force of the plural voice in women's writing. See Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) and Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

16. Gilbert, “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 195-96.

17. Cixous, “Sorties,” trans. Ann Liddle, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), p. 91.

18. Edelman, “The Geography of Gender: Elizabeth Bishop's ‘In the Waiting Room,’” Contemporary Literature (summer 1985), 187.

19. Bishop, The Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), p. 33.

20. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, p. 70.

21. Diehl, Coming to Light, p. 131.

22. Diehl, Coming to Light, p. 135. In Diehl's view, the recovery of a central position is necessary for “a woman poet who would face the Romantic imagination's insistence upon the poet as central man” (p. 135). I would argue that Bishop subverts her Romantic inheritance not only by positing a self that moves beyond sexual dualism, but also by deconstructing hierarchies based on center/margin, inside/outside oppositions.

23. Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 8.

24. Bishop makes the connection between the wasps' nest and writing paper explicit in the earlier “Jerónimo's House,” in which the delicate clapboard house is compared to a “gray wasps' nest” marked with “writing-paper / lines of light” (34).