[In the following essay, Hicok explores “Bryn Mawr's crucial significance to [Moore's] development as a poet.”]

In an August 1921 letter to her friend Bryher, Marianne Moore wrote that her experience at Bryn Mawr gave her “security in my determination to have what I want.”² She described to Bryher the “intellectual wealth” she had received there as not something that could be “superimposed,” but something that must be “appropriated” (Selected Letters, p. 178). This statement is perhaps Moore's strongest and most direct youthful declaration of literary ambition and points to the central role that Bryn Mawr played in her career. Despite Moore's claim, Bryn Mawr's crucial significance to her development as a poet remains largely unexplored, with the notable exception of Patricia Willis' discussion of the Bryn Mawr letters. Willis argues that it was at Bryn Mawr that Moore “became wise in the ways of success and adversity, praise and criticism, hard work and the private consolation of having done one's best.”³

Further inquiry into Moore's experience at Bryn Mawr provides a fruitful starting point for new readings of Moore's poetry that emphasize her strong feminist voice and offer ways in which we might reconsider the cultural history of women's poetic production. Many of America's major women poets, for instance, attended women's colleges, including Emily Dickinson, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Sylvia Plath. As Gail McDonald's work on Pound and Eliot suggests, focusing on a poet's education can illuminate an artist's definition of self and work, particularly at a time, as McDonald argues, when the future of poetry itself became tied to the academy.⁴

Moore, who graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909, was among the second generation of women to enter college in America.⁵ This generation was particularly interesting according to Lynn Gordon, as it represented a “transitional” one between Victorian and modern America.⁶ Moore's letters home during this time reveal that Bryn Mawr combined what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called a “female world of love and ritual,” a nineteenth-century concept, with twentieth-century ideas of the New Woman, the strong, independent young professional women who were emerging from women's colleges at the beginning of the century.⁷ The college campus of Moore's years at Bryn Mawr was a place where “female separatism, social activism, and belief in a special mission for educated women characterized [the students'] activities.”⁸

Bryn Mawr's radical feminist president M. Carey Thomas fostered close ties among women because she felt that they provided support for women in their pursuit of professional careers. Ritual practices, such as tea ceremonies and May Day celebrations, according to Virginia Wolf Briscoe, helped women create a sense of community on the Bryn Mawr campus.⁹ These close relationships were combined with an emphasis on academic rigor and individual achievement. By encouraging women to consider their lives in terms of “purposeful social, civic, and professional activity,” Bryn Mawr brought “women's culture into the public sphere.”¹⁰

Moore's letters home and the writing which she published at Bryn Mawr during these years indicate that she benefitted from Victorian female culture even as she rejected those aspects of the culture that warned women about the dangers of going to college. Moore's early writing also demonstrates that her sense of herself as a modern professional woman developed at Bryn Mawr, and it was there that Moore tried out new kinds of writing, published, and began to establish herself within an avant-garde tradition. In short, it was at Bryn Mawr that Moore—to borrow Gail McDonald's phrase—“learned to be modern.” Learning to be modern for Moore meant that she must create space for the female artist within the male-dominated avant-garde, and this is what she set out to do in her Bryn Mawr writing. It was the crucial mapping of this territory that paved the way for the stunning poetry of Moore's 1924 Observations, with such poems as “Black Earth” (1918) and “Peter” (1924)¹¹ that strongly convey the sensuality and power of the “new woman.”

Moore's letters home to her family during her Bryn Mawr years represent a detailed cultural document of this period in the history of the women's college, as well as insight into the important role that family members played in the support of college women. When Moore entered Bryn Mawr in 1905, she sent letters to her family several times a week. The letters were passed round robin among the family members—Mrs. Moore, Marianne, and Marianne's brother, Warner, who was already at Yale. While communication at that time was not as fast as electronic mail, postal delivery was much quicker than it is today, so if Moore posted a letter to her mother from Bryn Mawr in the morning, she could expect Mrs. Moore to receive the letter one hundred forty miles away in Carlisle by the afternoon post. Moore could count on a fairly immediate response, then, from her mother when she solicited her advice about college life, as she often did. The effect of this immediacy when reading through the Bryn Mawr letters is to be privy to a lively conversation between mother and daughter that seems at times to be taking place in the same room.

Moore's mother, Mary Warner Moore, provided constant encouragement while her daughter was away at college. Criticism of this relationship has focused almost exclusively on the mother-daughter bond, while ignoring its cultural context. Such an approach tends either to treat the relationship sentimentally or see it as oppressive or limiting to Moore's life and work.¹² But as Patricia Ann Palmieri has argued, supportive families and extremely close mother-daughter relationships were important to a woman's academic success at this time. As she writes of Wellesley, “academic women … came predominantly from close-knit, middle class families noted for the love and support they gave their bright daughter.”¹³

Certainly this was true of the Moore household. Moore's mother had separated from her husband (who had suffered a nervous breakdown) and moved back into the home of her father, a Presbyterian minister in Kirkwood, Missouri. Marianne was born at the manse on 15 November 1887. When John Riddle Warner died seven years later, Mrs. Moore moved her family to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and began teaching English at the Metzger Institute for Girls and raising her children alone. The family became intensely close during these years and remained so even after Warner married. For Moore and her mother, the four years at Bryn Mawr were the only prolonged period of time when they were apart. Mrs. Moore encouraged her daughter, counseled her, gently criticized her work, steadied her flightier tendencies, and provided a strong moral framework for her life and work. Most of all, she encouraged her daughter to cultivate her intellect. She surrounded both of her children with books and intelligent conversation and set an example of female independence for Marianne.

Moore became part of an extended female family in Carlisle after meeting the Norcross family. The Reverend George Norcross was pastor of the Presbyterian Church that the Moore family regularly attended. His wife, Louise Norcross, and their four daughters (three of whom had graduated from Bryn Mawr), formed a kind of enchanted circle in the lives of Mary Warner Moore and her daughter.¹⁴ Moore writes of them in her 1963 essay “Education of a Poet”: “We were constantly discussing authors. When I entered Bryn Mawr, the College seemed to me in disappointing contrast—almost benighted.”¹⁵ Mary Norcross, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, tutored Moore in the fifteen difficult Bryn Mawr entrance examinations in mathematics, ancient history, physiology, Latin, English, French and German.¹⁶ When Moore passed them all, Mrs. Moore wrote exuberantly to “Uncle Fangs”¹⁷ (one of Marianne Moore's pet names): “I am rich—oh so rich no one can estimate the amount of our riches!”¹⁸ As had Moore in her letter to Bryher, Mrs. Moore equates intellect with “wealth.” Moore experienced this kind of self-affirming and exuberant support for academic achievement from women on all sides. This family support followed her to Bryn Mawr, and despite her claim that college initially seemed “benighted,” reinforced her drive towards excellence.

M. Carey Thomas has argued that women, like men, “find their greatest happiness in congenial work.”¹⁹ Moore's mother shared in a similar discourse when she admonished her daughter in a letter dated 17 April 1907, for not working “lovingly enough” (VI:13a:05). Mrs. Moore's advice to her daughter about work reinforced the college's philosophy that women, like men, should find a “purposeful … professional activity” for their lives. Moreover, such an activity could be an act of love:

Your work, writing,—and I fear studying—you don't do lovingly enough. As Tina did with her kittens, you turn them all off too early. One who works lovingly doesn't work by the clock, but looks only to see if there be not yet one thing more that he can do.

Moore responds to her mother's letter on 22 April with renewed energy to work hard, “feeling once more prime,” as she puts it (VI:13a:05). And Mrs. Moore follows up the next day with further encouragement:

Don't think your writing was but a spurt and then out forever. It would be queer if it should gush continually. Your first story was ripening many months before it fell; and if you just drudge away, Petty, at dull lessons, unconscious cerebration will work for you all the while and bring forth a golden apple every now and again.

(VI:13a:05)

Mrs. Moore's metaphors offer more than just reassurance. They are part of a language between mother and daughter that expands Moore's perception of her place as a woman in the world. The dominant view of women outside Bryn Mawr's walls was that study was bad for women, that women had “‘limited energy’” which should be used for reproduction, so that, if they used up this energy, they would damage their “‘female apparatus,’” in the words of one prominent physician.²⁰ Moore wrote on 19 January 1908 that her friend Marcet Haldeman had left college on the advice of S. Weir Mitchell, the Philadelphia society physician whose prescriptions for “nervous” women Charlotte Perkins Gilman criticized in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Moore reported that Dr. Mitchell had told her friend that “college was a great nervous strain on her and not as good for her as quiet un-college-populated spots” (VI:14:02).

Moore received similar advice when she sought the help of a chiropractor during her first year at Bryn Mawr, and on 17 December 1905, she reported on her latest visit:

Dr. Pennock riles me almost beyond endurance attributing every ill quirk and turn to college work. At all times, my blood is being used for the brain and therefore cannot be distributed.

(VI:11b:12)

In an earlier letter, dated 5 November 1905, she had written:

Dr. Pennock is very much opposed to college for women for she thinks they are not strong enough and that there's too much strain. I took great satisfaction therefore in giving her the statistics in regard to the Freshman class's health. I also said that Miss Thomas had told us; that the health of classes had in every case been better when they left than when they had entered.

(VI:11b:11)

Such medical opinions, adopted here by a female doctor, reinforced the classic oppositions that were typical of Victorian constructions of masculinity and femininity. Smith-Rosenberg states that Victorian doctors believed that the human body was “a closed energy system, [which] allocated scarce energy resources governed by rigid, biologically determined and gender-linked priorities.”²¹ According to this theory, women were ruled by their reproductive organs, men by their heart and brain. “The woman who favored her mind at the expense of her ovaries,” Smith-Rosenberg writes, “would disorder a delicate physiological balance. Her overstimulated brain would become morbidly introspective. Neurasthenia, hysteria, insanity would follow. Her ovaries, robbed of energy rightfully theirs, would shrivel, and sterility and cancer ensue.”²²

Mrs. Moore's metaphors for her own daughter's creative processes upset the binary divisions of this medical discourse that aligned women with reproductivity and men with productivity. Mrs. Moore equates creativity with mothering, an intellectual and creative process, rather than with childbirth, a biological process. Women can mother children—or, in the case of Tina, kittens—but they can also mother texts, lovingly bringing them to maturity. Moore can produce works of art with the same love, attention, and care as she can produce children, not out of her body, but out of her mind. The language of Moore's mother and Thomas' statistics (which Moore takes delight in repeating to Dr. Pennock) establish women as a source of authority, an authority that allows Moore to counter medical “wisdom” and push forward, “feeling once more prime” and, as she put it in her letter, “willing to work like a horse for a year and a day.” Here the authority that passed from mothers to daughters—or for that matter from female college presidents to female students—counters Victorian notions of femininity and motherhood.

While these letters reflect Moore's tremendous desire to become a writer, she also explores this ambition in her fiction writing of this period. During her junior year, for example, Moore published one story in Tipyn o'Bob, Bryn Mawr's undergraduate literary magazine, that deals with ambition and the obstacles that challenge it.²³ Written in the form of diary entries, “Pym” relates several days in the life of Alexander Pym, who wants to be a writer against the wishes of his Uncle Stanford, who would like him to read law. When the story begins, Alexander is working for his friend Cob, who is also an editor. Cob pressures Alexander to write to certain “requirements,” a task that Alexander finally finds impossible. As with many of Moore's short stories, this one seems to have many connections to issues with which she was dealing at college. Using male characters instead of female for the sake of authenticity was not unusual at this time. Moore was, after all, in the habit of referring to herself by using a male pseudonym with her family: all of her family nicknames are male, and her mother quite often referred to Marianne as Warner's “brother.” At any rate, in this story, as Patricia Willis has suggested, Moore seems to enact the struggle of her own Bryn Mawr career.²⁴

Moore's teachers and sometimes her peers complained of obscurity in her writing. Moore reports that one professor told her with exasperation: “Please a little lucidity! Your obscurity becomes greater and greater.”²⁵ And just before Moore wrote “Pym,” an editor of the Tipyn o'Bob had told her that a recent story “showed that she was afraid of making her point and that she should ‘be obvious rather than too subtle, to be understood’” (Letter to family, 14 October 1907, VI:13b:11). In a letter about “Pym,” Moore writes to her mother on 24 October:

Between lectures I scratch, in the hope that every “little bit helps”—and I have written, what I like better than anything I have ever writ before, a thing called “The Nature of Literary Man.” Perhaps, “Pym.” It expresses nothing but a series of individual impressions in “my latest style” and is crystal-clear. If it doesn't come out, I shall not know what to think. It is what James calls the record of “a generation of nervous moods” but has a satisfactory solution.

(Selected Letters, pp. 27-28)

The terms “impressions” and “my latest style” link Moore to Henry James, a writer Moore greatly admired, whom she mentions at the end of the letter. As Willis has noted, James was very much a presence on the Bryn Mawr campus, having lectured there on Balzac in 1905 and given the commencement address in June of that year. In October 1907, William Morton Fullerton, who later became Edith Wharton's lover, gave a lecture on James, which Moore attended. Bryn Mawr students read and discussed James's work “for pleasure.”²⁶ Willis notes that the words “crystal-clear” seem to have come from a remark by M. Carey Thomas made after Fullerton's talk about James in which she said that James's “earlier books were ‘absolutely crystal-clear.’ But that in his later style his ideas were the obstacle, that the complicated nature and the vast amount of what he had to communicate made lucidity impossible. …’” Moore repeated Thomas' comments in her 17 October letter to her family, and by 24 October, she had adopted Thomas' phrase to describe her own writing in order, perhaps, to explain her difficulty with lucidity and elevate her dilemma to the realm of literary drama. As she said in her 5 April 1908 letter:

Writing is all I care for, or for what I care most, and writing is such a puling profession, if it is not a great one, that I occasionally give up. You ought I think to be didactic like Ibsen, or poetic like “Sheats” [Shelley/Keats?], or pathetic like [J.M.] Barrie or witty like Meredith, to justify your embarking as selfconfidently as the concentrated young egoist who is a writer, must.

(Selected Letters, pp. 45-46)

Moore's story establishes a further connection to Henry James by including his niece, Peggy, a close friend of Moore's at college. Many of her letters suggest, in fact, that she had quite a “crush” on James. The open expression of love between women was not unusual during this period, and Moore's letters home during her years at Bryn Mawr are full of detailed accounts of various “crushes,” or “smashes” as they were sometimes called, that she had while in college. Although there were certainly male teachers at Bryn Mawr during Moore's time, women had very little social interaction with men on campus. Even for formal dances at the college, the young women would invite other Bryn Mawr women as their guests and present them with flowers.²⁷ As Solomon has argued, women's colleges at this time allowed for a broad range of close relationships between women.²⁸

Sometimes these friendships became intertwined with strong competition among women for powerful positions on campus. Moore seems to have had a crush at one time on Margaret Morison, who was an editor on the “Tip,” for example. Morison had acted for a brief time as a mentor for Moore, criticizing and encouraging her work. But the competition seems to have ended when Morison resigned from the magazine and Moore took her place as an editor, an event that Moore relates rather triumphantly in a letter home dated 7 April 1907 (VI:13a:05). Such female friends might also act as an inspirational muse to an aspiring author. That is the role that Peggy James seems to play in “Pym.” At the beginning of the story, Alexander, while trying to write the required work for Cob, gazes at a painting hanging in his rooms:

I rest my eye fixedly upon my portrait of the unknown lady in the green dress. I watch an occasional diagonal of firelight splash a path across her dark slippery hair, across the zig-zag light parts in her dress, and over her hands. My words, I realize, are coming unusually well. …

(Complete Prose, p. 12)

According to Willis, Moore had in mind John White Alexander's painting “A Quiet Hour,” which she had admired at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1905.²⁹ This painting, in turn, reminded Moore of Peggy James's dark “‘slippery hair.’”³⁰

“A Quiet Hour,” painted in 1901, might be said to represent the dominant nineteenth-century view of women. There is so little tension in this woman's body, in fact, that she resembles the drapery that covers her. The painting might even be used to illustrate how ill-suited women are for study. The woman in the painting is dozing over her book, eyes closed, one arm lying languidly at her side, another falling over the open book, which is, suggestively, blank. The mossy green drapery falls off her arm, exposing one shoulder. She kneels submissively before a bed or divan, draped in the same mossy green, a perfect Victorian representation of female passivity. Despite the woman's passivity, however, or perhaps because of it, the painting acts as an inspiration for the writer, the unknown woman becoming a kind a muse, spurring Alexander to produce words that “are coming unusually well.” In the description of the painting, that muse has a certain sensual, if not erotic, quality, a quality which the woman shares with Moore's description of Peggy James when she calls her, in a 27 October 1907 letter home, a “fascinating … darkling garnet of a person. …” (VI:13a:11).

At the end of the story, Alexander leaves Cob to return to Uncle Stanford, but there is no indication that he has given up on his ambition to write. When he leaves his room, he takes only two objects with him—his rug and the portrait of the unknown lady in green. The inspiration of friendship becomes a portable possession, an idea of friendship that was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. In a 12 February 1907 letter, Moore had written about her various entanglements with friends (VI:13a:03), and Mrs. Moore had written back, encouraging Moore to think of one of her friends as “one of [her] flesh and blood belongings” (VI:13a:03).

Mrs. Moore's consideration of friendship in terms of possession echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson's account of male friendship in his essay titled “Friendship,” which Peggy James had recommended to Moore in a letter the summer before “Pym” appeared (16 June 1907, V:50:03). In Emerson's view, which shares characteristics with the “female world of love and ritual,” friends are described as being “a delicious torment” to each other:³¹

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish,—all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons.³²

A few lines later, Emerson describes this union in terms of possession: “Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,—a possession for all time.”

Moreover, these friendships, in the context of the intellectual environment of the women's college, were closely aligned with ideas of work, so that it was believed that such friendships could sustain one in the hard work of the world. Mrs. Moore expresses just such an idea in an 11 January 1908 letter: “When you turn missionary to the outside world,” she writes,

then maybe those you love will go in with you shoulder to shoulder comrade fashion, and you and they co-operate, in big things and little. … Those who press forward in the fight together, never thinking about the impression they are making on each other, and speak right out the feelings that are uppermost, oftentimes find out when peace and quiet come, that love sprang up with each for the other, all unconsciously to either, and lo! They are bound together forever.

(VI:14:02)

Mrs. Moore's language here suggests that the boundaries between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of friendship and love are permeable, easily crossed by those who were engaged in important work, who were “comrades” together. Her language also suggests that female friends, when engaged in useful work in the world, can form an edenic community, bound together through love and work.

Although at first glance “Pym” seems a rather conventional story, staying as it does safely within the confines of Victorian fiction, if we read it alongside Moore's exchange of ideas with her mother about ambition and friendship, it seems rather to be testing the boundaries of literary ambition and the range of relationships which Moore experienced within the female community of Bryn Mawr. Women acted all roles to each other within this community—they were competitors, lovers, and friends. There were no men at the dance.

“Pym” was one of many stories which Moore published in the college's literary magazine that explored the nature of ambition, friendship, and work, and, as she began to write verse, similar concerns dominated the images that she chose. One poem in particular, which Moore published in her senior year in The Lantern, seems to distill Moore's immensity of desire in the image of the jellyfish.³³ “A Jelly-Fish” marks the beginning of Moore's mature work. It is altogether different from any of the occasional verse she had written before this, and she included a shorter version of it among her Complete Poems:

Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-coloured amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.

In the poem, the hand reaches for something that remains out of range, out of reach, elusive, even dangerous. In her junior year, in her comparative anatomy notebook, Moore drew a detailed jellyfish.³⁴ She had studied these creatures and knew that jellyfish sting and paralyze the prey that wander into their tentacles. This knowledge would not have been lost on Moore, since the precise observation of animals became a hallmark of her poetry.³⁵ Jellyfish are dangerous objects for which to reach. That Moore was aware of her desire as a social taboo—women should not want too much—may have been behind the choice of the stinging jellyfish in her poem.

“A Jelly-Fish” was not published again until Moore's book O to Be a Dragon in 1959. Interestingly, the title poem of that volume returns fleetingly to the tone of passionate desire struck in her early poems:

                                        If I, like Solomon, …
                                        could have my wish—
          my wish … O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
          Felicitous phenomenon!(36)

In the 1959 version of the jellyfish poem, she ends halfway through with the two lines, “You abandon / Your intent—.”³⁷ In its later version, the grasping hand, unable to accept another defeat, withdraws immediately; the effort is quickly taken up but quickly abandoned as well. In the 1909 version, the hand is undaunted by the object shriveling away from it and tries a second time. This time the jellyfish floats away, clouding the water with its defensive ink, but the repetition of the attempt suggests that the hand may keep reaching indefinitely for the desired object.

Moore seems to have begun “A Jelly-Fish” in a notebook which she kept for her imitative writing course at Bryn Mawr, taught by Georgina Goddard King. Willis has suggested that King was an important link to modern writers for Moore. King knew Gertrude Stein and Alfred Stieglitz personally, for example, and Moore's notebooks suggest that she herself was discovering some of these modern writers, for at one point she writes in the margins, “Ezra Pound—at all costs!”³⁸ In the same notebook, she tried out a few lines of “A Jelly-Fish.” As early at 1909, it seems, Moore knew that her identity as a poet was tied up with what was modern in poetry, even though she was calling her writing at this point, rather wryly I think, “my hobby.”³⁹

Certainly Moore was aware of the marginality of the female artist, and she confronts this issue directly in a story published in the Tipyn o'Bob in June 1909, the month she graduated from Bryn Mawr. “Wisdom and Virtue” considers for the first time the role of the female artist as a professional woman, a woman who can take charge of her life and support herself financially. The story concerns a meeting between the painter, Miss Duckworth, and her uncle, a smugly satisfied man who owns a publishing concern. Mr. Duckworth visits his niece in her apartment and studio. The place is probably New York City, since there are many references to “Bohemian” lifestyles and customs. Moore had just taken her first trip in January to New York, a city that was to become the focus of her desires until she and her mother moved to their apartment at 14 St. Luke's Place, in 1918, in order to be closer to the artistic community that would advance Moore's career. As the last line of her 1921 poem “New York” suggests, she saw the city as, in Henry James's words, “’accessibility to experience’” (Complete Poems, p. 54).

In “Wisdom and Virtue,” Moore explicitly addresses the marginality of the female artist in this story, perhaps in anticipation of what she would find when she left Bryn Mawr in search of work. First, we find out that Mr. Duckworth has visited his niece only when “the fact of his niece's existence had occurred to him” (Complete Prose, p. 26). In Mr. Duckworth's world, the narration tells us, “pious women, clever men, and obedient children, were the order of things” (p. 27). Yet Moore asserts the possibility of rethinking this world to include professional women, and particularly, the female artist. Miss Duckworth's apartment is comfortable and even elegant. She has a maid, who brings in fresh flowers. There is a drawing room with a Turkish rug, and the apartment overlooks the “smoky” city on one side and the river on the other. The curtains on the windows are “silky.” The furnishings of the apartment and the quiet assuredness of Miss Duckworth suggest the life of a relatively successful, single, professional woman. In many ways, the description of the apartment, at least in terms of the comfort and success that it conveys, matches Moore's description of Thomas's “Deanery” at Bryn Mawr in letters home to her family. Against her uncle's smugness, Miss Duckworth defends the life she has chosen.

Clearly, “feminine professionalism” and success mystifies her uncle. He must criticize and trivialize Miss Duckworth's achievements. About one of her paintings he comments, “‘Rather a puddle, I should say. It takes art to get art out of things like that.’” Even when one painting of a man particularly interests Mr. Duckworth, he must end his praise with a criticism that connects stylistic quirks to Miss Duckworth's gender: “‘His hands sag down on his pockets too much and his elbows stick out,’” Mr. Duckworth says. “‘It's like a woman to construct the thing that way’” (p. 29).

The significance of Mr. Duckworth's implied insult that women cannot create good art is reflected in Miss Duckworth's anxiety about her own signature on a painting:

“What is that?” [Mr. Duckworth asks.]

“That?” Miss Duckworth bent down. “That is my signature.” A small reddish device lay scrawled against a purple oblong. “It's an earthworm, rather like one, don't you think? Suppose we go.” Her eyes reverted to the worm and a settled gloom appeared to descend upon her.

(p. 29)

Miss Duckworth has signed her painting, claiming it as her own, but she has to “ben[d] down” to see the signature. The signature is rather like an earthworm, a silent, primitive, and earthbound creature. Miss Duckworth seems to sense the significance of the earthworm and its relationship to the representation of the female artist, for a gloom “descend[s]” upon her. The words “bent down,” “reverted,” and “descend upon,” all work to pull the artist down to the level of the earthworm. However, Moore recuperates some of Miss Duckworth's power by the end of “Wisdom and Virtue.” As the door closes on her uncle, she says, “‘Gloomy, Janus-headed man. Wisdom palls upon him’” (p. 30). Miss Duckworth stands alone in her apartment after the door closes, a defiant smile flashing across her face. The reader is left with the surety that the word “wisdom” cannot be applied to Mr. Duckworth. It is Miss Duckworth who combines both wisdom and virtue, radiating the same strength of character associated with the new woman, a strength that we find in many of the poems of Observations.

Moore conveys the strength, defiance, and independence of the new woman in three poems which she wrote between 1918 and 1920 and published in Observations—“Radical,” “Black Earth,” and “Peter.”⁴⁰ These poems, which strongly define Moore's sense of work and independence as an artist, are representative of the stance taken up in many other poems in this collection. In this early phase of her career, as Slatin has argued, Moore seeks to establish an identity as a poet by setting herself apart from other modern poets,⁴¹ while Cristanne Miller argues that Moore's “stance” during these early years is “more belligerent than modest.”⁴²

Moore's 1919 poem “Radical,” for instance, is about a carrot that survives “… with ambition, im- / agination, outgrowth, / nutriment, / with everything crammed belligerent- / ly inside itself.”⁴³ The carrot stuffed with all of these qualities might be compared to Moore's description of her own studying at Bryn Mawr in an amusing letter which she wrote to her brother on 17 January 1908: “Gadzooks!” she wrote, “How I am pouring ‘learning’ into myself!” (VI:14:02). Linda Leavell has suggested that “Radical” might be read as a “self-portrait,”⁴⁴ since the carrot's color is described as “fused with intensive heat to / color of the set- / ting sun …,” and Moore was, of course, a redhead. In addition, as Leavell points out, she was “at the time emerging as a ‘radical’ artist.”⁴⁵ Since Moore was a biology major in college, she undoubtedly meant “radical” in the sense of rooted or from the root, as well. Such a sense is suggested at the end of the poem, when the voice of the carrot tells the farmer to, “dismiss / agrarian lore” and in the final two lines states a new wisdom: “that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible / to hinder.” The carrot, in other words, stays rooted, determined that its own way of growing will take it to the source—that is, to what is important. One is tempted to compare this wisdom about the carrot to Moore's letter to Bryher that defines her growth at Bryn Mawr in similar terms:

At Bryn Mawr the students are allowed to develop with as little interference as is compatible with any kind of academic order and the more I see of other women's colleges, the more I feel that Bryn Mawr was peculiarly adapted to my special requirements.

(Selected Letters, p. 178)

The voice at the end of “Radical” is a modern one, able to dismiss the body of traditional information about a subject, the “lore,” and substitute a different knowledge, the knowledge, I would like to suggest, of the new woman.

But perhaps the strongest representation of the stength, defiance, and independence of the modern woman might be found in two animal poems of Observations—“Peter” and “Black Earth,” which Moore placed just before “Radical.” “Black Earth,” for example, opens with hese powerful lines:

Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
          no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub—
          merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view was a renaissance; shall I say
          the contrary?

(Observations, p. 45)

these lines, the poem's speaker, an elephant, takes sensual pleasure in its own independence and defends its actions as just as natural as those of the hippopotamus or the alligator. Slatin suggests that Moore's reference to the hippopotamus here is to T.S. Eliot's poem “The Hippopotamus,” in which case Moore may be claiming here the same authority for herself to write as Eliot claims.⁴⁶

Throughout the poem, the speaker holds in tension seemingly contradictory or “contrary attitudes”—“Now I breathe and now I am sub- / merged.” But Moore characteristically complicates the matter by breaking the word “submerged” into its components at the line's end: thus suggesting not only the impetus to join or to unite, but also to “lose or cause to lose identity by being absorbed, swallowed up, or combined.” By splitting the word, Moore is perhaps doubly emphasizing the sense of drowning and losing one's identity. As a woman poet, this would be a particularly resonant theme for Moore. Women writers were typically patronized and their art devalued, as Miss Duckworth's encounter with her uncle in Moore's “Wisdom and Virtue” proves. Even though Ezra Pound encouraged, nurtured, and was instrumental in getting Moore published, he could as easily succumb to relegating Moore to the margins. When grouped with Mina Loy in one review, for example, Moore became one of “these girls.”⁴⁷

But in “Black Earth” the elephant takes pleasure in its own individuality and difference:

                              … The sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used
to it, it may
remain there; do away
          with it and I am myself done away with, for the
          patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
there to begin
with. This elephant skin
          which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of
          the cocoanut, this piece of black glass through which no
                                        light
can filter—cut
into checkers by rut
          upon rut of unpreventable experience—
          it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
hairy toed. Black
but beautiful, my back
          is full of the history of power. Of power? What
          is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never
be cut into
by a wooden spear. …

(pp. 45-46)

The elephant's “patina of circumstance,” which it wears on the skin it inhabits, makes clear that the subject of the poem is both individual and historical, a subject who can both act and be acted upon by historical circumstance. Such a sense of self was very much a part of the politically charged environment of Bryn Mawr in the early part of the century. As a subject of history, then, the elephant embodies power struggles of all kinds by those who faced persecution because of gender, race, or religious faith. The African references, for example, in the section that begins “Black / but beautiful, my back / is full of the history of power,” were not lost on Ezra Pound, who asked Moore in a letter whether she was “a jet black Ethiopian Othello-hued, or was that line in one of your Egoist poems but part of your general elaboration and allegory and designed to differentiate your colour from that of the surrounding menageria?”⁴⁸ Pound is baiting Moore here. Are you one of us? he seems to be asking. Moore rises to the bait in her reply: “‘Black Earth,’ the poem to which I think you refer, was written about an elephant that I have, named Melanchthon; and contrary to your impression, I am altogether a blond and have red hair” (Selected Letters, p. 122). Yes. I am one of you, Moore seems to reply.

The racial overtones that Pound reads into “Black Earth,” however, are more complex. Cristanne Miller has noted that Moore's “efforts to overturn racial stereotypes” are an important part “of the politics of her poetry,” as are her efforts to resist gender stereotypes.⁴⁹ Miller argues that “Moore marks race and gender in two ways” in her work:

through a directly political attempt to overthrow widespread hierarchical stereotypes (generally through negation: “The Negro is not brutal”), or through an indirectly political (occasionally romanticized) attempt to create new space or recognition for stigmatized people and qualities (a maternal black male hero, or unmaterialistic African desert tribe).⁵⁰

Her use of the African reference in “Black Earth” might be considered in terms of Miller's second category, an “attempt to create new space.” Moore recognizes that in the history of power there have been those who have had diminished access to it, but it is important to remember that she used this category, as Pound suggests, as a “general elaboration and category” in order to “differentiate [her] colour from that of the surrounding menageria”—that of other poets. In “Black Earth,” Moore uses color to identify her difference and signal the revival of some new entity, one that emerges out of history.

A further layer is added to the poem's historical connections in Moore's reference to Melanchthon. Moore had a little carved elephant, which she had named Melanchthon after the Reformation leader Philipp Melanchthon, who, as Leavell has pointed out, “was Martin Luther's collaborator, friend, and humbler, more diplomatic complement.”⁵¹ As usual with Moore, several layers of reference are associated with this name. This Reformation leader had taken the Greek name, Melanchthon, in place of his original name, Schwarzerd, which is German for “black earth” (Selected Letters, n. 1, p. 122). Melanchthon's involvement in educational reform was probably of significance to Moore. By using the name, Moore may also be suggesting that the lesser-known Reformation leader had his role in the “history of power” and so too might Moore have her place within her chosen field.

Like the elephant in “Black Earth,” the cat in “Peter” revels in his own individuality and sensuality, creating space simply by being himself. Peter is “strong and slippery,” and he does as he pleases:

                                                                                … Springing about with
                                                            froglike ac-
curacy, emitting jerky cries when taken in the hand, he is
                                                            himself
          again; to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair would
                                                            be unprofit-
          able—human. What is the good of hypocricy? It
                    is permissible to choose one's employment, to abandon
                                                            the wire nail, the
                              roly-poly, when it shows signs of being no longer
                                                            a pleas-
ure, to score the adjacent magazine with a double line of
                                                  strokes. He can
          talk, but insolently says nothing. …

(p. 52)

Moore's choice of words here participates in the feminist discourse that she heard at Bryn Mawr. It is “human” to allow oneself to be “caged” by a “domestic” life, and it is distinctly “unprofitable” for women, as Moore argued in many letters home to her family. But it is not the life for Peter. He takes such pleasure in what he does, in fact, that one might ask if this is what it means to “work lovingly.” What is significant for Peter is that “It is permissible to choose one's employment,” a freedom not available to most women of the period, for even of the four percent of women who attended women's colleges at the time, there were many restrictions on what an educated woman could do.

Peter has a “disposition” that “affront[s],” because, as the speaker tells us, “an animal with claws wants to have / to use / them.” That Moore associates “claws” with ambition—and uses it as a metaphor for her own work and chosen profession—is evident in a letter which she wrote to her brother on 18 October 1915. Other writers and artists whom Moore had met in New York were encouraging her to move there, among them Alfred Kreymborg, who had already been publishing Moore in his radical little magazine Others. Kreymborg had instructed Moore to, in her words, “direct my claws to New York” (VI:21:11).

In the version of “Peter” that appears in the Complete Poems, Moore has changed the line to: “an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them” (p. 44). Although the change / suggests / a / phrase / common / to / educational / reform—opportunities for women—it seriously alters the meaning and power of the line. In the earlier version, Peter's claws are not a question of opportunities. The emphasis is on desire. “He wants / to have / to use / them.” Notice the line breaks, how the verb “wants” can be combined with both the infinitive “to have” and the infinitive “to use.” In other words, Peter wants to have those claws, and he wants to use them. Moore changed the whole of “Peter” to free-verse form rather than syllabics when she published it in the Complete Poems, and the second version does not break the line at all. The difference is dramatic. As Rachel Blau du Plessis has argued, Moore's syllabics were part of her “feminist poetics.” Moore invented a unique form, an American original, in her use of the syllabic form and thereby “created a ‘tradition’ and then worked in it.”⁵² She described her method to Pound in the same letter in which she responds to his reading of “Black Earth.” She tells Pound that her verse is “an arrangement of stanzas, each stanza being an exact duplicate of every other stanza.” The form, she told him “has been a matter of expediency, hit upon as being approximately suitable to the subject” (Selected Letters, p. 122). The originality and startling look of “Peter” on the page seems to fit its subject extremely well, in a way that the free verse form of the Complete Poems does not at all.

“Peter” in its early version is powerful. We have the spirit of the cat, leaping about with “froglike ac- / curacy, emitting jerky cries when taken in the hand.” In fact, Peter here seems a fair representation of Moore's own poetry, which she described to Pound: “My work jerks and rears and I cannot get up enthusiasm for embalming what I myself, accept conditionally” (Selected Letters, p. 123). Moore was discouraged at this point about her ability to publish her work, and so she had retreated into a stance of appearing to desire it less, although, as Cyrena Pondrom has argued, this stance was probably more a disguise than a reality.⁵³ Although the description of her work seems somewhat negative in this letter to Pound, in “Peter” Moore turns it into a strength. Peter, like Moore's poetry, is playful, hard to pin down.

The poem “Peter” ends with a final celebration of Peter's fierce independence:

                                                                      … To
leap, to lengthen out, divide the air—to purloin, to pursue,
          to tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way
                                        —in your perturba-
                              tion—this is life; to do less would be nothing but
                                                                      dishonesty.

(p. 52)

Something of Peter's defiance, his independence, the suggestion that to be less than he is would be dishonest, can be seen in a letter to Marianne from her mother dated 20 October 1905. Moore had written to her mother to ask her advice about some difficulties that she was having with a friend at school. Mrs. Moore wrote back, counseling Marianne to “use your power lovingly and generously, [to] command those who intrude upon you,” always, of course, keeping in mind that such power comes from “on High.” These are powerful words. Mrs. Moore counsels her daughter to “command” her subjects. It is not an easy path, she reminds her daughter, “but be patient[;] you are only winding around to a higher point” (VI:11b:10). Mrs. Moore suggests a path for her daughter that can turn around, subtly, a position of disadvantage to one that comes out in the end to “a higher plane.” That path is the one which Peter follows in Moore's poem. Far from the Victorian ideal of true womanhood, in which a woman might be expected “to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair,” Peter does not accept such “hypocrisy.” He “command[s]” his subjects and in so doing shares some of the characteristics of life and work that Moore had learned at Bryn Mawr. Her experience there taught her that to work lovingly and “to use [one's] power lovingly” meant that one must take time, one must be true to one's principles, and, when one has claws, one “wants to have to use them.”

Notes

1. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use quotations from the following authors and collections. Marianne Moore and Mary Warner Moore: permission to quote from the unpublished letters of the Moores is granted by Marianne Craig Moore, Literary Executor of the Estate of Marianne Moore (all further rights to use of this material reserved); permission to quote from the Marianne Moore Archive is granted by The Rosenbach Museum and Library. Research for this essay has been supported by the Susan B. Anthony Center at the University of Rochester under its Travel and Research Grants and Mount St. Clare College under its Faculty and Professional Development Funds.

2. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, eds. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 178.

3. Patricia C. Willis, “The Owl and the Lantern: Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr,” Poesis LXIII (1985), p. 96.

4. Gail McDonald, Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. vi. In addition to McDonald's work on poetry and higher education, other writers have concentrated on fiction writers and their college experiences. Susan J. Leonardi's Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (Rutgers University Press, 1989) looks at the way in which the women's college experience of such popular British writers as Dorothy Sayers and Vera Brittain before and after the First World War influenced their narrative practice, particularly their attempt to find representation for the educated New Woman and her college experience. Shirley Marchalonis' College Girls: A Century in Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 1995) examines fiction written from 1865 to 1940 that explicitly deals with the lives of “college girls.”

5. According to Barbara Miller Solomon, women of the second generation attended college between 1890 and 1910. See In the Company of Educated Women (Yale University Press, 1985), p. 95.

6. Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 1.

7. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), pp. 53-76.

8. Gordon, p. 1.

9. Quoted in Gordon, p. 36.

10. Gordon, p. 39.

11. John Slatin dates the composition of this poem 1919 or 1920, although it was published for the first time in Observations (1924). See “The Town's Assertiveness: Marianne Moore and New York City” in Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet, ed. Patricia C. Willis (National Poetry Foundation, 1990), p. 66.

12. Marilyn Brownstein's article, for example, relies on a rather uncritical reading of Julia Kristeva to discuss this relationship in semiotic terms, removing it entirely from the cultural sphere. See “The Archaic Mother and Mother and Mother: The Postmodern Poetry of Marianne Moore,” Contemporary Literature 30:1 (1989), pp. 13-32. She repeats this argument in her preface to the otherwise useful publication of a small selection of the family correspondence in “Marianne Moore (1887-1972)” in the anthology The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 323-352. For other discussions that briefly refer to the importance of Moore's relationship with her mother, see Jeredith Merrin's “Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop,” in Columbia History of American Poetry, eds. Brett C. Millier and Jay Parini (Columbia University Press, 1993). In this essay, Merrin argues that Moore's and Bishop's positioning as poets may have been the result of the “creatrix” behind the scenes (pp. 343-369). For an earlier study, see Laurence Stapleton's Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance (Princeton University Press, 1978). Stapleton says of Mrs. Moore's death in 1947: “It was the end of an extraordinary relationship for which I can think of no comparison” (p. 148).

13. Patricia Ann Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (Yale University Press, 1995), p. 61.

14. Charles Molesworth, Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (Atheneum, 1990), p. 9.

15. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (Viking, 1987), p. 572.

16. See Patricia Willis' “Comment” in the Marianne Moore Newsletter V (1981), pp. 2-4 for a good summary of Bryn Mawr's academic requirements during this period.

17. “Fangs” refers to the name of a dog in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (Selected Letters, p. 4). It is one of many names that Moore was given by her family, which as she explained in a letter to Bryher included also “a weasel, a coach-dog, a water-rat [from Wind and the Willows], a basilisk and an alligator” (Selected Letters, p. 137). Only those who were closest to the family received nicknames. Mary Norcross, probably the closest friend, was sometimes called “Rustles” and “Beaver.” These pet names were a signifier for community and, outside the family, were used only with other women. The use of noms de plume was typical of the letters between intimates in Victorian society, according to Smith-Rosenberg (Disorderly Conduct, p. 55). Often one woman would take the name of a man and the other the name of a woman. The use of pet names in Moore's family similarly crosses gender boundaries fairly fluidly, at least in one direction. Moore was often referred to by her mother and brother with the male pronoun.

18. Letter from Mary Warner Moore to Marianne Moore, 4 October 1905, Rosenbach VI:11b:10. This and all other letters quoted in this essay are housed in the Marianne Moore Papers at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. I will refer to them in parentheses in the text by their folder numbers, as above.

19. Quoted in Barbara M. Cross, ed. The Educated Woman in America 25 (Teachers College Press, 1965), p. 174.

20. This was the opinion of Dr. Edward Clark, whose popular book Sex in Education, published in 1873, still held sway in the medical community when Moore was at Bryn Mawr. He is quoted in Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women, p. 56.

21. Smith-Rosenberg, p. 258.

22. Smith-Rosenberg, p. 258.

23. “Pym” is reprinted in Complete Prose, pp. 12-16.

24. Willis, “Comment,” p. 8.

25. The professor was Miss Fullerton in Moore's letter to her family dated 20 March 1907; quoted in Willis, “The Owl and the Lantern,” p. 91.

26. Willis, “MM on the Literary Life,” Marianne Moore Newsletter 5:1 (Spring 1981), p. 6.

27. Willis, “The Owl and the Lantern,” p. 88.

28. Solomon, pp. 98-101.

29. Willis, “MM on the Literary Life,” pp. 7-8.

30. Willis, “MM on the Literary Life,” p. 8.

31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” Emerson's Essays (Apollo Editions, 1961), p. 142.

32. Emerson, p. 139.

33. Marianne Moore, “A Jelly-Fish,” The Lantern, XVII (1909), p. 110.

34. Willis, Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse (The Rosenbach Museum and Library, 1987), p. 35.

35. One of Moore's earliest readers, Glenway Wescott, attributed Moore's carefully observed poems to “a novel intelligence, a strange sensibility, [and] a unique scholarship.” See “Concerning Miss Moore's Observations,” The Dial, LXXVII (January 1925), p. 2.

36. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1967), p. 177.

37. Such revisionary chopping was not unusual for Moore. Moore's epigraph to her Complete Poems (1967), “Omissions are not accidents,” tempts one to read these revisions or “omissions” as instructive, perhaps even revealing. The most extreme example of Moore's revisionary chopping was her poem “Poetry,” which, when it was published in Observations in 1924, was thirty-eight lines long. Moore cut it to four lines when it was reprinted in her far from complete Complete Poems.

38. Willis, Vision into Verse, p. 6.

39. Moore wrote home to her family in February 1909 about King, calling her “the best teacher I have had here (for my hobby—) she reads the best things and criticizes with tremendous point and acuteness and gets you in a fever of enthusiasm which is no small achievement in as inert and ‘wise’ a community as this” (VI:15a:03).

40. Moore chose not to include “Black Earth” and “Radical” in Complete Poems, and she radically altered the form of “Peter.” For that reason, I will quote only from the out-of-print Observations. “Black Earth” had also appeared in Poems (1921), Moore's first volume of poetry, which was published by H.D. and Bryher without Moore's knowledge. It was then republished as “Melanchthon” in 1951.

41. John Slatin, The Savage's Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), p. 7. Slatin identifies the early phase as 1915 to 1920.

42. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 32. Miller's book is an important contribution to Moore studies, as she argues for another look at Moore as a poet of authority rather than as the one of humility that has dominated Moore criticism. Miller focuses on the early poetry, and relies for her readings on the earlier versions of the poems, as I do, rather than on the later ones that Moore sometimes radically revised for her 1967 Complete Poems and, in so doing, destroyed some of their power. Although Miller does not focus specifically on Bryn Mawr, she does quote in her first chapter a group of the Bryn Mawr letters in order to show Moore's engagement in social activism and suffrage while she was a student. In Chapter 4, “Your Thorns are the Best Part of You: Gender Politics in the Nongendered Poem,” Miller provides an excellent discussion of gender and the development of Moore's authority.

43. Marianne Moore, Observations, (The Dial Press), 1924, p. 48.

44. Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 42.

45. Leavell, p. 42.

46. Slatin, pp. 78-80.

47. In his review, “Marianne Moore and Mina Loy,” Ezra Pound commented that “these girls have written a distinctly national product” (p. 47). This review, which appeared originally in the Little Review in March 1918, was reprinted in Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Tomlinson (Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 46-47.

48. Ezra Pound, Letter to Marianne Moore from London, 16 December 1918, in The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New Directions, 1971), p. 143.

49. Cristanne Miller, “Marianne Moore's Black Maternal Hero: A Study in Categorization,” in American Literary Theory, I (1989), p. 787.

50. Miller, pp. 807-08.

51. Leavell, p. 155.

52. Rachel Blau Du Plessis, “No Moore of the Same: The Feminist Poetics of Marianne Moore,” in the William Carlos Williams Review XIV (1988), p. 8.

53. In her revisionary reading of Moore's relationship with H.D., Cyrena Pondrom argues convincingly that, contrary to popular opinion, Moore herself initiated the publication of her first volume of poetry, which Bryher and H.D. published without her knowledge as Poems in 1921 (pp. 371-402). Pondrom argues that after repeated unsuccessful attempts to get her work published in a volume, Moore retreated “into a posture that publication for her work would be premature” (p. 376). See “Marianne Moore and H.D.: Female Community and Poetic Achievement” in Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet, pp. 371-402. Pondrom's essay looks at Moore's poetry in the context of female community.