The male muse.
Item
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Title
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The male muse.
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Identifier
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AAI9521321
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identifier
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9521321
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Creator
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Ungar, Barbara Louise.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Angus Fletcher
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Date
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1995
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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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The dissertation analyses poetic creativity by reversing the gender of the traditional poet-muse paradigm, and focuses on the work of Emily Dickinson as a case in point. Part One, "The Shape-Shifter," traces a history of the muse, demonstrating that this figure for the imagination never has been stable in gender or number, though its forms generally progress from the divine, impersonal, and external to the increasingly secular, personal, and interior. Traditional gender assumptions--the poet is male, the muse female--are critiqued as detrimental both to women writers and to impartial judgment of their work. Winnicott's theory of transitional objects provides a more flexible paradigm for the muse, supporting the argument that the muse's male emanations are both more ancient and more common than has been heretofore acknowledged.;Part Two reads Dickinson's oeuvre from the perspective of the male muse, providing a poetical, rather than biographical, account of her relationship to her unknown"Master," chronicling the evolution of this muse-figure as her erotic desire for an external love object is transformed into the source of an internalized spiritual and creative power. This process is demonstrated through close reading of some of the hundreds of poems categorized--according to the evolution of Dickinson's muse--as poems of the Master, marriage, renunciation, pain, Calvary, death, resurrection, grace, and the divine guest. In the mystical tradition, Dickinson employs metaphors of marriage to one absent to describe a love both personal and abstract. Ultimately, when the muse is completely interiorized, indistinguishable from the poet in a state of visionary transport, divinity is perceived as ubiquitous, as in "The Only News I Know.".;Concluding on the note of the mysticism of Dickinson's invocation of the male muse raises the question of gender in a new, non-thematic fashion, in its relation to poesis, the coming into being of the poem. Gender here is dematerialized and belongs to the making of the poem as a mystical object, which suggests that "gender" should be understood in the sense of "genesis," the procreative power of giving form and shape, or the "engendering" of the poem.
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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.
