"This is my room": Modernist women's poetic self -disclosures.
Item
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Title
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"This is my room": Modernist women's poetic self -disclosures.
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Identifier
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AAI3083671
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identifier
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3083671
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Creator
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Hoff, Ann K.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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In the early twentieth century, critics accused women writing their personal experiences of being overly "sentimental." Many women poets dissociated themselves from such accusations by composing impersonal poetry, yet many still wrote about the self through poetic experimentation. Such poems still await readings as autobiographies, for few critics have questioned autobiography theorist Philippe Lejeune's statement: "whereas there exist thousands of autobiographies in prose, we can count on one hand the autobiographies in verse" (On Autobiography 128). This dissertation discusses experiments in poetic autobiography by Gertrude Stein, Hilda Doolittle, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elizabeth Bishop.;Influenced by the cubist interest in geometry as well as by Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1913), which established modern logic, Stein opted to write an autobiography in the form of what the poem calls "a persuasion," or a geometric proof. Instead of narrative, "Lifting Belly" presents events and personality traits as axioms, or accepted truths, to demonstrate the personality. Helen in Egypt captures the duality of H.D.'s bisexual life and career as no other of her texts is able to do. Characters Helen and Achilles represent the male and female sides of a bisexual identity. Their quest to "translate" their unity mirrors H.D.'s pursuit of the autobiographical mode that would best express her bisexual experience. Millay's Fatal Interview recounts her affair with poet George Dillon, and is full of intimate details, which the sonnet's traditional universal speaker only minimally obscures. Reception of Fatal Interview ranges from praise to disdain, but collectively indicates that critical discomfort with poetic self-disclosure arises from the view that the act is culpably feminine. Elizabeth Bishop's ongoing conversation with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell about what level of self-disclosure is appropriate in poetry makes her own poetic autobiographies especially interesting. In "First Death in Nova Scotia" and "Sestina," Bishop creates an autobiographical pact which withholds information from readers, placing them in a powerless position, which mimics her own as a child. Her poem "In the Waiting Room" affords a pedagogy for teaching autobiography theory's crucial components.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
