[In the following essay, Edelman discusses the possibility of presenting a literal reading of “In the Waiting Room.”]

I always tell the truth in my poems. With “The Fish,” that's exactly how it happened. It was in Key West, and I did catch it just as the poem says. That was in 1938. Oh, but I did change one thing. …

—Elizabeth Bishop¹

Time and again in discussing her poetry Elizabeth Bishop insists on its fidelity to literal reality. “It was all true,” she affirms of “The Moose,” “it was all exactly the way I described it except that I say ‘seven relatives.’ Well, they weren't really relatives, they were various stepsons and so on, but that's the only thing that isn't quite true.”² In her attempts to “place” her poetry by means of such comments, Bishop reproduces a central gesture of the poetry itself. For that poetry, in Bishop's master-trope, takes place beneath the aegis of “geography,” a study of places that leads her, invariably, to the question of poetic positioning—a question that converges, in turn, with the quest for, and the questioning of, poetic authority. Even in the casual remarks cited above, Bishop undertakes to authenticate her work, and she does so, tellingly, by fixing its origin on the solid ground of literality—a literality that Bishop repeatedly identifies as “truth.”

But what does it mean to assert that a poem is “true,” is somehow literal? Is it, in fact, ever possible to read such an assertion literally? Or, to put it another way, for what is such an appeal to literality a figure? Against what does it defend? These questions must color any reading of Bishop's poetry precisely because that poetry insists on the figural subtlety with which it represents the world. “More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors,” Bishop writes in “The Map,” the poem she placed first in her first book of poems.³ And that poem provides a key to the landscape of her poetry by directing attention to issues of textuality and trope. The truth that interests Bishop from the outset is not the truth of history or fact per se, but the more “delicate” matter of representation, the finely discriminated “colors” that lead back to the functioning of poetic coloration, or trope. If Bishop, as map-maker, “colors” her world, she has less in common with the sort of Stevensian literalist of the first idea as she presents herself at times, than she does with Stevens's sublimely solipsistic Hoon, who calls forth a world from within himself to find himself “more truly and more strange.”

To make such a claim about Bishop's work, however, is to displace truth from its relation to literality. To link the ability to see “truly” to the ability to make reality “more strange” is to make truth itself a stranger term—and one more problematic. For truth now comes into alignment with trope, literal and figurative effectively change places. Bishop's remarks about the literal origins of her poetry become significant, in this light, less for their assertions than for their qualifications: “that's exactly how it happened … Oh, but I did change one thing”; “it was all exactly the way I described it … Well, they weren't really relatives.” Like the poetry itself, Bishop's characterizations of that poetry question the relationship between literal and figurative, observation and invention, perception and vision. All of which is to say that Bishop's is a poetry conscious of the difficulty and the necessity of reading, conscious of the inevitable mediations of selfhood, the intrusions of the “I,” that make direct contact with any literality—with any “truth”—an impossibility.

But critics, for the most part, have refrained from seriously reading Bishop's readings of reading. They have cited her work, instead, as exemplary of precise observation and accurate detail, presenting us with an Elizabeth Bishop who seems startlingly like some latter-day “gentle Jane.” David Kalstone suggests something of the problem when he notes that “critics have praised her descriptive powers and treated her as something of a miniaturist. As mistakenly as with the work of Marianne Moore, they have sometimes asked if Bishop's is poetry at all.”⁴ It is indeed significant that Moore and Bishop, two of the most widely praised female American poets of the century, have been championed for their careful observation, their scrupulous particularity, their characteristic restraint. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out in The Madwoman in the Attic, these are qualities less often associated with lyric poetry than with prose fiction.⁵ They define the skills necessary for success in a genre that historically has been more hospitable to women, perhaps because its conventions, themselves more social and domestic, rely upon powers of perception and narration that coincide with traditional perspectives on women as analysts of emotion, on the one hand, and as busybodies or gossips, on the other. If few would reduce Bishop to the status of a gossip, many have noted the distinct and engaging quality of the voice that seems to emanate from her work—a voice described by John Ashbery as speaking in “a pleasant, chatty vernacular tone … calmly and unpoetically.”⁶ It is this “unpoetic” voice—Robert Lowell called it “unrhetorical”⁷—in combination with her alert and disciplined eye, that has led critics to read Bishop's poetry, in John Hollander's words, “almost as if she were a novelist.”⁸ Viewing it as a species of moral anecdote, even admirers of Bishop's work have tended to ignore the rigor of her intellect, the range of her allusiveness, the complexity of her tropes. Instead, they imply what Anne Stevenson, in her book on Bishop's life and work, asserts: “Whatever ideas emerge have not been arrived at over a period of time but perceived, it would seem, in passing. They are the by-products of her meticulous observations.”⁹

Bishop, of course, has encouraged such misreadings by characterizing her poetry as “just description” and by emphasizing its grounding in the literal.¹⁰ I have suggested that this assertion of literality must itself be interpreted as a figure, that it defines for Bishop a strategy of evasion the sources of which this paper will attempt, in part, to trace. But the critical reception of Bishop, with its complicity in her reductive self-definition, with its acceptance of her willful evasions and its misprisions of her irony, exemplifies an interpretive blindness, which is to say, an ideological blindness, that enacts the very problems of reading on which Bishop's poetry frequently dwells. Readings that appropriate Bishop either to the company of poetic observers and reporters or to the ranks of moral fabulists, readings that place her in a clear relation to the literal reality her work is said to register, have the odd effect of seeming, instead, to be already placed or inscribed within that work, within her meditations on the way in which questions of placement and appropriation necessarily inform the very act of reading. No text better demonstrates the intricate connections among these concerns, or better locates the uncanny nature of her poetry's anticipation of its own misreadings, than does “In the Waiting Room,” the poem with which Bishop introduced her last published volume, Geography III. A reading of that poem, which is a poem about reading, and a reading that interrogates the various readings of the poem, may suggest something of what is at stake in Bishop's reading of reading and show how “In the Waiting Room” effectively positions itself to read its readers.

First, however, … I shall read very carefully (or try to read, since they may be partly obliterated, or in a foreign language) the inscriptions already there. Then I shall adapt my own compositions, in order that they may not conflict with those written by the prisoner before me. The voice of a new inmate will be noticeable, but there will be no contradictions or criticisms of what has already been laid down, rather a “commentary.”

—Elizabeth Bishop¹¹

Commentaries on “In the Waiting Room” tend to agree that the poem presents a young girl's moment of awakening to the separations and the bonds among human beings, to the forces that shape individual identity through the interrelated recognitions of community and isolation. More remarkable than this unaccustomed critical consensus, however, is the degree to which its readers concur in identifying the poem's narrative or “plot” as the locus of the interpretive issues raised by the text. It is significant, in consequence, that critics have felt themselves both able and obliged to summarize the “story,” to rehearse the events on which the poem's act of recognition hinges. Helen Vendler, for example, recapitulates the plot as follows: “waiting in a dentist's office, reading the National Geographic, feeling horrified at pictures of savages, hearing her aunt cry out in pain from inside the dentist's room, the child feels vertigo.” Michael Wood directs attention to this same central episode when he describes “In the Waiting Room” as a poem in which “an almost-seven-year-old Elizabeth Bishop is horrified by the hanging breasts of African women seen in a copy of the National Geographic, and hears her own voice when her aunt cries out in pain.” Similarly, Sybil Estess focuses on this narrative relationship when she writes that the child's “encounter with the strange pictures in the National Geographic is simultaneous with hearing her aunt's muffled cry of suffering.”¹²

These redactions would seem to rule out the possibility of hidden textual complications by the uniformity with which they define the poem's critical events. Yet when I suggest that there is something unusual and telling about the uniformity of these summaries, I anticipate that some will wonder why it should be considered odd that accounts of the same text should focus on the same significant episodes. What, one might ask, is so strange about critical agreement on the literal events that take place within the poem?

One response to such a question might begin by observing that the text itself seems to undermine the stability of the literal. Certainly the poem appears to appropriate—and to ground itself in—the particulars of a literal reality or truth. Bishop takes pains, for instance, to describe the contents of the magazine read by the young girl in the waiting room. Not only does she evoke in detail its pictures of volcanoes and of “black, naked women,” but she specifies the particular issue of the magazine, identifying it as the National Geographic of February, 1918. But Bishop, as Jerome Mazzaro puts it, “tampers with the actual contents.”¹³ While that issue of the magazine does indeed contain an article on volcanoes—lavishly titled “The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes: An Account of the Discovery and Exploration of the Most Wonderful Volcanic Region in the World”—it offers no images of “Babies with pointed heads,” no pictures of “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire” (p. 159). In an interview with George Starbuck, Bishop, responding to the critics who noticed the factual “error” in her text, declared: “My memory had confused two 1918 issues of the Geographic. Not having seen them since then, I checked it out in the New York Public Library. In the February issue there was an article, ‘The Valley of 10,000 Smokes,’ about Alaska that I'd remembered, too. But the African things, it turned out, were in the next issue, in March.”¹⁴ Bishop's clarification only underscores her insistence on literal origins—and her wariness of her own imaginative powers. For the curious reader will discover what might have been suspected all along: the “African things” are not to be found in the March issue of the National Geographic, either. In fact, that issue has no essay about Africa at all.

With this in mind we are prepared for the warning that Alfred Corn offers the unsuspecting reader. He notes that, just as the picture essay Bishop describes “is not to be found in the February 1918 National Geographic,” so “Anyone checking to see whether Miss Bishop's aunt was named Consuelo probably ought to be prepared for a similar thwarting of curiosity.” In the face of this, one might well pose the question that Corn then frames: “If the facts are ‘wrong,’ why did Bishop make such a point of them in the poem?”¹⁵ Or, to put the question another way, toward what end does Bishop attempt to appropriate a literal grounding for her poem if that poem insists on fracturing the literality on which it positions itself? Whatever answer one might posit in response to such a question, the very fact that the poem invites us to ask it, the very fact that the poem revises simplistic conceptions of “fact” or literality may answer objections to my remark that there is something strange about the critics' agreement on the literal events that take place within the text.

But a new objection will surely be raised, accusing me of conflating two different senses of the “literal,” or even of using “literal” in a way that is itself not strictly literal. While there may be questions, the objectors will insist, about the text's fidelity to the facts outside of it—questions, that is, about the literal truth of the text—those questions do not prevent us from articulating literally what happens within that text. Whether or not Bishop had a real Aunt Consuelo, there can be no doubt, they will argue, that Vendler and Estess and Wood are correct in asserting that, literally, within the poem, and as one of its crucial events, Aunt Consuelo cries out in pain from inside the dentist's office. And yet I intend not only to cast doubt upon that central event, but to suggest that the poem itself is less interested in the event than in the doubts about it, and that the critics' certainties distort the poem's insistence on confusion.

My own comments, of course, must repeat the error of attempted clarification. So I will approach this episode at the center of the text by way of my own brief summary of what occurs before it. The young girl, sitting outside in the waiting room while her aunt is in the dentist's office, reads the National Geographic “straight through,” from cover to cover, and then, having closed the magazine, she begins to inspect the cover itself.

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.

(p. 160)

To gloss this passage as the young girl hearing “her aunt cry out in pain” is surely to ignore the real problem that both the girl and the text experience here: the problem of determining the place from which this voice originates. Since the poem asserts that it comes from “inside,” the meanings of “inside” and “outside” must be determined, their geographical relation, as it were, must be mapped. The difficulty of making such determinations, however, springs from the overdetermination of meaning in this passage. The voice that cries out and, in so doing, sends the young girl—later identified as “Elizabeth”—plunging into the abyss that constitutes identity, disorients not by any lack of specification, but by the undecidable doubleness with which it is specified.¹⁶ The child recognizes the voice at once as Aunt Consuelo's and as her own. Any attempt to fix a clear relationship between these two alternatives, to label one as the ground upon which the other appears as figure, must presuppose an ability to penetrate the text, to get inside of it and thereby determine what it signifies by “inside.” The critical consensus that attributes the cry of pain to Aunt Consuelo does, of course, precisely that. It refers the literal sense of “inside” to Aunt Consuelo's situation inside the dentist's office and thereby implies an interpretive model that rests upon an ability to distinguish the inside from the outside, the literal from the figurative. It suggests, moreover, that the literal is the textual “inside” on which the figural “outside” depends, and, therefore, that critical understanding must proceed by piercing or reading through the confusions of figuration in order to recover the literal ground that not only enables us to “place” the figural, but also allows us, by so doing, to keep the figural in its place.

Bishop's geography, however, persistently refuses the consolations of hierarchy or placement; instead, it defines itself as the questioning of places—a project emblematized by the way in which Bishop tropes upon the volume's epigraph from a geography textbook of 1884. She appends to its confident litany of answers to questions about the world (“What is the Earth? / The planet or body on which we live. / What is the shape of the Earth? / Round, like a ball” [p. 157]) a series of inquiries that seek to evade the reductive literalism of such an Idiot Questioner:

In what direction is the Volcano? The
Cape? The Bay? The Lake? The Strait?
The Mountains? The Isthmus?
What is in the East? In the West? In the
South? In the North? In the Northwest?
In the Southeast? In the Northeast?
In the Southwest?

Given Bishop's insistent questioning of places, we can say that in a very real sense those commentators who put themselves in a position to identify Aunt Consuelo as the source of the cry of pain in “In the Waiting Room” take the words out of Bishop's mouth in taking the cry out of “Elizabeth”'s. Their need to locate the place from which the cry or voice originates places the question of the voice's origination at the origin of the textual problem in the poem. That is to say, it locates the poem as an effect of the voice's origination, enabling them to read it as a fable of humanization through identification, a lesson in the sort of Wordsworthian “primal sympathy” that shapes “the human heart by which we live.”

But within the poem itself the voice is contextually located, and since the logic of poetry allows some truth to post hoc ergo propter hoc, this location determines the voice itself as an effect—as, specifically, a reading-effect. The cry that the text tells us comes “Suddenly, from inside,” comes, within the text, after “Elizabeth” has finished reading the National Geographic and is scrutinizing its cover. To understand that cry, then, and the meaning of its place—or, more precisely, of its displacement—requires a more careful study of the scene of reading that comes before it and, in some sense, calls it forth.

Evoking herself as an almost-seven-year-old child sitting in the dentist's waiting room, the “Elizabeth” whose memory constitutes the poem offers off-handedly, in a parenthetical aside, the assertion that governs the whole of the passage preceding the cry: “(I could read)” (p. 159). However casually the parentheses introduce this simple statement, both the statement itself and the simplicity with which it is presented identify a claim to authority. For the child, that authority derives from her mastery of the mystery of written language and from her concomitant access to the documents of culture, the inscriptions of society. Just as she has mastered reading, and as reading allows for a mastery of culture, so reading itself, for the young “Elizabeth,” is understood as an exercise of mastery. The child of whose ability to read we are assured implicitly assumes the readability of texts, since reading for her is a process of perceiving the real and stable relationships that exist between word and image, past and present, cause and effect. The juxtaposition of photographs and captions, therefore, is transparently meaningful for “Elizabeth.” From her position as a reader, outside of the text, she can readily decipher the fixed relationships that are delineated within it.

But the critical moment in the poem is precipitated at just the point when this model of reading as mastery comes undone, when the division between inside and outside breaks down and, as a result, the determinacy of textual relationships is called into question. Though only in the course of reading the magazine does “Elizabeth” perceive the inadequacy of her positioning as a reader, Bishop's text implies from the outset the insufficiency of any mode of interpretation that claims to release the meaning it locates “inside” a text by asserting its own ability to speak from a position of mastery “outside” of it. For this reason everything that “Elizabeth” encounters in the pages of the National Geographic serves to disturb the stability of a binary opposition. The first photographs that she recalls looking at, for instance, strategically define a sequential process:

the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.

(p. 159)

Not only do these images undo the central distinction between inside and outside, but they do so by positing an excess of interiority that displaces itself onto the exterior. In other words, the inside here obtrudes upon the outside and thereby asserts its claim to mastery by transforming the landscape and showing how the exterior, how the landscape itself, is composed of interior matter.

The inside/outside dichotomy is reversed and discredited at once, and the effect of this maneuver on the theory of reading is to imply that the textual inside masters the reader outside of it far more than the reader can ever master the text. Or, more precisely, the very distinction between reader and text is untenable: the reader finds herself read by the text in which she is already inscribed and in which she reinscribes herself in the process of performing her reading. Since “Elizabeth” asserts that she “carefully studied” these photographs, it is worth noting, too, that not only do they disrupt the opposition between inside and outside, but also, insofar as the “ashes” in the first picture produce the “rivulets of fire” in the second, they disrupt the natural or logical relationship ascribed to cause and effect.

Inasmuch as Bishop's version of the National Geographic for February, 1918 corresponds to the actual issue of that magazine only in that both include images of volcanoes, her imagined periodical must function as a sort of exemplary text contrived to instruct young “Elizabeth,” and us, in the difficulty of reading. Toward this end the photograph of Osa and Martin Johnson, though it seems less violently subversive than Bishop's Dickinsonian volcanoes, plays a significant part. The Johnsons, in the first decades of this century, achieved fame as a husband and wife team of explorers and naturalists, and in her autobiography, I Married Adventure, Osa Johnson provides information that may have inspired, and certainly sheds light on, the rest of the items that Bishop chooses to include in her magazine. But the photograph of the Johnsons themselves does more than allude to one of Bishop's likely sources. Her portrait of husband and wife focuses attention on the particulars of their clothing, and the most significant aspect of their clothing is the fact that it is identical. Both appear “dressed in riding breeches, / laced boots, and pith helmets” (p. 159). (I might add that there is a picture of Osa and Martin Johnson in which she appears in such a costume, but her husband, interestingly enough, does not wear an identical outfit.) In terms of Osa's autobiography, this image metonymically represents her transformation from a typical Kansas girl of sixteen, dreaming of weddings and weeping “with all the persecuted little picture heroines of the day,” into an adventurer able to hold her own in a world of cannibals and headhunters.¹⁷ Osa underscores this transformation precisely in terms of clothing in two passages from I Married Adventure. The first time that her future husband calls on her at home, Osa's brother causes her to “burst out crying” (IMA, p. 78) by telling her that Mr. Johnson has joined with cannibals in eating missionaries. When her caller arrives, Osa is still upstairs crying and, as she tells us, “With women's clothes as complicated as they were in that day, even with Mama's help, it was nearly half an hour before I could get downstairs” (IMA, p. 78). Later, after they are married and she has agreed to join Martin on expeditions into the realm of the cannibals, he describes to her the sort of clothing that they will need to take along:

“And some denim overalls and huck shirts,” Martin said, following me into the kitchen.

“For me?” I asked.

“For both of us,” he replied.

(IMA, p. 103)

The identical outfits in which Bishop envisions the Johnsons in her photograph, then, point emblematically toward the subversion of the hierarchical opposition of male and female, an opposition into the nature of which Osa Johnson will peer when, like Lévi-Strauss, she confronts the role of women in “primitive” cultures as linguistic and economic objects of circulation and exchange. The structural anthropologist's insight offers a valuable point of reference here because “Elizabeth,” after perusing the picture of the Johnsons, encounters in her text disturbing images that illuminate la pensée sauvage. (It is important to note, moreover, if only parenthetically, that “Elizabeth,” for whom reading is at once a discipline of mastery and a mode of mastering her culture, occupies herself in reading a magazine devoted to geography and ethnology—discourses that imply a troubling relationship between the reading of cultures and the assertion of an ethnocentric form of cultural mastery.)

Bishop now presents the young “Elizabeth” with a textual impasse that resists appropriation by her system of reading as mastery and in so doing challenges her confidence in the very readability of texts: “A dead man slung on a pole /—‘Long Pig,’ the caption said” (p. 159). Dividing image and caption, picture and text not only by means of the linear break, but also by the dash—a mark of punctuation that dialectically connects and separates at once—Bishop emphasizes the apparently absolute undecidability of the relationship here. Some element of error seems necessarily to have entered into the working of the text. Has “Elizabeth” mistakenly interpreted the photograph of a pig as that of a human corpse? Has an editor carelessly transposed captions so that the photograph of a corpse has been identified as that of a pig? What “Elizabeth” faces here, of course, is the fundamental “error” of figurative language that creates the difficulty in trying to locate the literal as the ground from which the figural can be construed. The pole on which the dead object—be it corpse or pig—is slung serves as the axis of meaning on which the trope itself seems to turn. Like a dash, or like the slash that marks a fraction or a mathematical ratio, the pole establishes the polarities that it also brings together. For “Elizabeth” only the discrepancy matters, the difference that cannot be mastered or read. But anthropologists—or those familiar with Osa Johnson's autobiography—will be able to read this figural relationship more easily than does “Elizabeth,” since they will recognize what the phrase “Long Pig” metaphorically connotes.

Describing her first expedition into a “savage” society, Osa recalls that she and her husband were warned that “‘those fellows on Vao still bury their old people alive and eat long pig’” (IMA, p. 115). And later, remembering the dismay of the captain who, at their insistence, ferried her husband and herself to Vao despite such admonitions, Osa writes, “If we were reckless enough to risk being served up as ‘long pig’ by the savages of Malekula, that was our lookout, not his” (IMA, p. 115). “Long Pig,” then, names man when he ceases to be human, when he enters into a system of signification which he no longer masters from an external position of privileged subjectivity, but into which he himself enters as an object of circulation. The metaphoric labelling of a “dead man” as “long pig” has the effect of exposing the metaphoricity of the apparently literal or natural category of humanity itself.¹⁸ Far from being a presence controlling language from without, humanity is understood to be figural, another product of the linguistic system.

Though Bishop's text, then, has challenged the stability of distinctions between inside and outside, male and female, literal and figurative, human and bestial, young “Elizabeth” reads on from her own position of liminality in the waiting room until she confronts, at last, an image of women and their infants:

Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.

(p. 159)

Osa Johnson may again have provided Bishop with the material that she incorporates here into her imagined magazine. In her autobiography Mrs. Johnson refers to the Malekulan practice of elongating the head: “This was done by binding soft, oiled coconut fiber around the skulls of infants shortly after birth and leaving them there for something over a year. The narrower and longer the head when the basket contrivance was removed, the greater the pride of the mother. That her baby had cried almost without ceasing during this period of distortion was of no concern whatsoever” (IMA, p. 151). The autobiography, however, does not refer to the elongation of the women's necks, and in the photograph that Osa Johnson includes of a Malekulan woman and her infant—a photograph in which the child's head is indeed “wound round and round with string”—the mother does not wear the rings of wire that are used to stretch women's necks in some tribal cultures. Bishop willfully introduces the symmetry that characterizes her images of women and children so that both here suffer physical distortion by objects “wound round and round” their bodies. This assimilation of women to the status of children takes place simultaneously with the recognition made by the young “Elizabeth” of her own destined status as a woman, of her own inevitable role, therefore, in the sexual economy of her culture. She reads the burden of female sexuality here as the inescapability of distortion, as the enforced awareness of one's body as a malleable object. Anatomy itself loses the authority of any natural or literal grounding; instead, it becomes one more figure in the language of the culture.

As woman is reduced to a figure trapped in the linguistic circuit, so her body becomes a text on which her figural status is inscribed. The culturally sanctioned, which is to say, the patriarchally determined, markings of female sexuality are thus understood as diacritical marks, and Bishop, significantly, evokes these linguistic markings, these metonyms of woman as erotic signifier, specifically in terms of constraint. Moreover, her particular vision of constriction as the patriarchal writing of woman's sexuality on her body takes the form of a wire wound about the woman's neck, an image that conjures the garrote—an instrument of strangulation that prevents the victim from uttering any cry at all. If the necks of the women in the photograph are bound by these wires “like the necks of light bulbs,” then what they illuminate for “Elizabeth” is her fate as a woman, her necessary implication in the system of signs she had thought to master by being able to read. Now, for the first time, she reacts to the text, acknowledging an emotional response to the naked women: “Their breasts,” she says, “were horrifying” (p. 159).

The horror that “Elizabeth” feels betokens her perception of the monstrosity, the abnormality that informs the given or “norm” of sexuality. Sexuality itself, she has discovered, is always constituted as a system of signs that must operate through the substitution of figures; consequently, it is neither a “natural” system nor an inevitable one. Yet within the patriarchal system the “normal” figurations of female sexuality take the form of literal disfigurations. Woman herself becomes a creation of man since, as Simone de Beauvoir recognized years ago, one is not born a woman: as a linguistic construct who figures through disfiguration, woman is the monstrous creation of the patriarchy. And what most horrifies “Elizabeth” as she focuses on the breasts of these disfigured or monstrous women is her recognition of the fundamental affinity she shares with them. In a sense they speak to her in the words that Mary Shelley gave to the monster that she imagined as the product of a wholly masculine gestation: “my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance.”¹⁹ It is finally this resemblance, which is to say, the relationship of metaphoric interchangeability, that horrifies “Elizabeth.” At last she must recognize fully what is at stake in the dismantling of binary oppositions, for the reader and what she reads collapse into one another as “Elizabeth” finds herself located by the text, inside the text, and as a text.

Yet in neutral, uninflected tones she continues:

I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.

(p. 159)

The very blandness of this account, following her admission of horror, testifies to an effort of denial or repression as “Elizabeth” seeks to master herself by affirming her difference from the text and, thus, her ability to master it through reading. She studies the cover, the margins, and the date in order to construct a frame for her reading experience that will circumscribe or contain it. The burden of her task here is the desperate need to contextualize the text so as to prevent her suffocation, her strangulation within it. The “yellow margins” that she focuses on represent her margin of security to the extent that they define a border, a yellow or cautionary zone distinguishing the inside from the outside. But the security of such a reading of the margin falls within the margin of error as soon as one recognizes the complex dynamic involved in the positing of such a frame. In a brilliant analysis of these problems in her essay “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Barbara Johnson cites Derrida's contention that “frames are always framed.”²⁰ What this means in terms of “Elizabeth” and her reading of the National Geographic is that the act of framing arises as a response to her disturbing recognition that the text refuses to be delimited or framed. Thus her framing of the text is itself framed by her terrifying awareness of the text's unframability. As Barbara Johnson comments in her analysis of Derrida, therefore, “the frame thus becomes not the borderline between the inside and the outside, but precisely what subverts the applicability of the inside/outside polarity to the act of interpretation.”²¹

One subversive aspect of “Elizabeth” 's response to the photograph of the women remains to be considered. The breasts that “Elizabeth” describes as horrifying may horrify not only because they link her to the disfigurations and constraint that mark female sexuality in patriarchal cultures; they may horrify as well because they evoke an eroticism that undermines the institution of heterosexuality—the institution that determines sexual difference as well as its inscriptions.²² Adrienne Rich has recently discussed Bishop in terms of “the lesbian writing under the false universal of heterosexuality,” but here in “In the Waiting Room,” and at the other crucial points throughout her career, Bishop covertly discredits that “false universal” and its ideology. After acknowledging her emotional reaction to the breasts of the naked women—in an earlier draft they are said not to horrify her, but rather to fill her with awe—“Elizabeth” explains that she continued reading because she was “too shy to stop.”²³ This shyness surely corresponds to the fearful embarrassment that expresses desire in the very act of trying to veil it. Too shy, then—which is to say, too inhibited or constrained—to stop or to linger over these pictures, “Elizabeth” reads the magazine “straight through” because doing so, in a sense, marks her reading as “straight.” It prevents the embarrassing discovery of her emotional investment in the “naked women” and of her unsettling response to their breasts—a response that shifts between horror and awe.²⁴

But by silencing the voice of her own sexuality, by succumbing to the constraint of shyness and framing the text in order to distance herself from the desire that it unleashes, she locates herself, paradoxically, inside the text once more. For her constraining shyness merely reenacts the cultural inscriptions of female sexuality that the magazine has presented to her in terms of silencing and constraint. Because her reading has alerted her to the patriarchal and heterosexual foundation on which the ideology of binary oppositions rests, and because it has suggested to her the inevitability of her reduction to the status of a figure in that cultural system or text, “Elizabeth” directs her attention to the magazine's cover in an obvious effort to cover up, to deny or suppress the insights that her reading has uncovered. In the act of foregrounding the cover she undertakes to frame the text as a literary object, to reduce its provenance by underscoring the literary status of its discourse. Such a framing has the same effect as the framing achieved by the bracketing of a word or phrase by quotation marks: it produces the detachment of irony. But the irony of “Elizabeth”'s attempt here to position herself ironically with relation to the text is that irony introduces once more the elements of subversion and indeterminacy that are precisely the elements of the text that she fears and from which she seeks to detach herself.

This, then, is “Elizabeth”'s situation after her exercise in reading: sitting in the dentist's office while her aunt receives treatment inside, she looks at the cover of the National Geographic and tries to hold on to the solid ground of literality outside the abyss of textuality she has discovered within it. In doing so, she silences the voice of her own internal desire and conforms to the socially determined role that her shyness forces her to play. At the same time, however, she recognizes, as a result of her reading, the inadequacy of the inside/outside polarity that underlies each of her tensions—tensions that mount until they no longer admit of repression or constraint: “Suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain.”

With this we come back to where we began—back to the question of the voice and the question of the place from which the voice originates. But we return with a difference to the extent that the critical desire to locate or to define or to frame any literal “inside” for that voice to emerge from has been discredited as an ideological blindness, a hierarchical gesture. There is no inside in this poem that can be distinguished from its outside: the cry emanates from inside the dentist's office, and from inside the waiting room, and from inside the National Geographic, and from inside “In the Waiting Room.” It is a cry that cries out against any attempt to clarify its confusions because it is a female cry—a cry of the female—that recognizes the attempts to clarify it as attempts to put it in its place. It is an “oh!” that refuses to be readily deciphered because it knows that if it is read it must always be read as a cipher—as a zero, a void, or a figure in some predetermined social text. Those critics, then, who read the poem by trying to place the cry, effect, instead, a denial of that cry which is a cry of displacement—a cry of the female refusal of position in favor of dis-position. As a figural subversion, it wages war against the reduction of woman to the status of a literal figure, an oxymoronic entity constrained to be interpreted within the patriarchal text. It is against that text that the cry wages war, becomes a war cry to unleash the textuality that rips the fabric of the cultural text. To conclude, then, is only to urge a beginning, to urge that we attend to this cry as a cry of female textuality, a cry that links “Elizabeth” to her “foolish” aunt and to the tormented mother in Bishop's story, “In the Village.” In this way we can approach the poem's cry, in Stevens's words, as the “cry of its occasion” and begin to engage the issues of gender and constraint that are so deeply involved in Bishop's story of “oh!”

Notes

1. Cited in Wesley Wehr, “Elizabeth Bishop: Conversations and Class Notes,” Antioch Review, 39, No. 3 (Summer 1981), 324.

2. “The Art of Poetry XXVII: Elizabeth Bishop,” An Interview with Elizabeth Spires, Paris Review, 23, No. 80 (Summer 1981), 62.

3. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 3. All subsequent citations of Bishop's poetry will be to this edition. Excerpts from “In the Waiting Room” from The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright ^©1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Copyright ^©1971 by Elizabeth Bishop. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

4. David Kalstone, Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 13.

5. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 545-49.

6. John Ashbery, “Second Presentation of Elizabeth Bishop,” World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (Winter 1977), 10.

7. Robert Lowell, “Thomas, Bishop, and Williams,” Sewanee Review, 55, No. 3 (July-Sept. 1947), 496.

8. John Hollander, “Questions of Geography,” Parnassus, 5, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1977), 359.

9. Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966), p. 31.

10. Cited by Robert Pinsky, “Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979,” The New Republic, 181, No. 19 (November 10, 1979), p. 32.

11. Elizabeth Bishop, “In Prison,” Partisan Review, 4, No. 4 (March 1938), p. 8.

12. Helen Vendler, “Recent Poetry: Eight Poets,” Yale Review, 66, No. 3 (Spring 1977), 418; Michael Wood, “RSVP,” New York Review of Books, 24, No. 10 (June 9, 1977), p. 30; and Sybil Estess, “History as Geography,” The Southern Review, 13, No. 4 (Autumn 1977), 853.

13. Jerome Mazzaro, “The Poetics of Impediment: Elizabeth Bishop,” Postmodern American Poetry (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 193.

14. George Starbuck, “‘The Work!’: A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop,” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 318.

15. Alfred Corn, Georgia Review, 31, No. 2 (Summer 1977), 535.

16. The name of the young girl, Elizabeth, will be placed within quotation marks throughout this essay so as to work against the tendency on the part of too many critics to conflate this “Elizabeth” with the author of the poem. There is, of course, an autobiographical element here. But that autobiographical element is not a simple correspondence and must not be used to reduce the complexities of Bishop's poetic argument by authorizing a naïve translation of “Elizabeth” as Elizabeth Bishop herself.

17. Osa Johnson, I Married Adventure (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1940), p. 69. Subsequent references will be to this edition, indicated parenthetically in the text, and abbreviated as IMA.

18. The National Geographic of October, 1919 includes an article by John Church entitled “A Vanishing People of the South Seas” that discusses “long pig” as “the Marquesan's somewhat startling description of the human victim intended to grace his feast” (p. 277). Although there is no photograph of a dead man slung on a pole, there is a picture captioned “A Scene Posed by Marquesan Natives Showing the Killing of a Victim to be Used for Sacrifice and ‘Long Pig.’”

19. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (New York: Signet, 1965), p. 125.

20. Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 128.

21. Barbara Johnson, p. 128.

22. For a discussion of this issue see Helene Vivienne Wenzel's remarks on the work of Monique Wittig in “The Text as Body/Politics,” Feminist Studies, 7 (Summer 1981), 278.

23. Adrienne Rich, “The Eye of the Outsider: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” Boston Review, 8 (April 1983), p. 16. For a more detailed reading of the inscriptions of lesbianism in Bishop's work see Norma Procopiow's essay “Survival Kit: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” The Centennial Review, 25, No. 1 (Winter 1981), 1-19. Permission to quote from Bishop's manuscript material was granted by the Vassar College Library.

24. In the context of repressed sexuality it is appropriate to point out that the perusal of the National Geographic constitutes, particularly in literature of the period between the second decade of the century and the nineteen sixties, a topos of sexual curiosity. As one of the few socially sanctioned periodicals that included pictures of naked people, it played a significant role in the satisfaction of voyeuristic desires (primarily of men). An important literary instance of this topos occurs in William Carlos Williams's Paterson I. Bishop's poem responds to Williams's very different reading of the National Geographic—and of woman—in his work.