The Iowa Review
Volume 22
Issue 2 Spring-Summer
Article 24
1992
Erasing the Maternal: Rereading Elizabeth Bishop
Patricia Wallace
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Recommended Citation
Wallace, Patricia. "Erasing the Maternal: Rereading Elizabeth Bishop." The Iowa Review 22.2 (1992): 82-103. Web.
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Erasing theMaternal: Rereading
Bishop Patricia Wallace
Elizabeth
... a
erasure
an erasure to be pres
perfect
disappears along with what is erased. For
we
ent
was there; we must see the traces
must know that
for us,
something
of the
erasure:
on the
or
in
indentations
is
the
Erasure
page
blottings, blurrings,
landscape.
we crave to 'be'?in
the
forceful writing of loss, absence and rejection. Because
in works, in writing ?we
body,
mere blank space.
Stephen Owen,
IT ISRAINING
months
HERE,
can never view such erasures
Remembrances:
dispassionately,
as
of the Past in
Experience
Literature
Classical Chinese
The
I am rereading after some
of Uncle Neddy,"
which
in the rainy season: "It is raining in
in upstate New
Elizabeth
York.
"Memories
story,
Bishop's
in
in Rio
with
Brazil,
begins
Bishop
remote
Rio
de Janeiro,
from mine
raining,
raining,
raining." How
warm
air
the
of
world
the
rain fall
the
seems;
hot, sticky
Bishop's
tropics,
on a
never seen. I feel as if I were
a
ing
landscape I have
reading about
a
to
some
as
see
am.
dream-land.
I
And
the
I
dream,
story unfolds,
degree,
I remember
the opening description
of rain from my earlier reading of this
me
in
it
of Bishop's unforgettable
reminds
sestina, the
story,
part because
one set in the Nova
Scotia of her early childhood,
beginning
"September
rain falls on the house." Although
"Memories
of Uncle Neddy"
begins and
ends
in Brazil,
most
of the story
childhood
Bishop's
landscape.
Nova Scotia and Brazil?form,
is also about
and
memory,
the two landscapes of the story?
Together
David Kalstone
says, the kind of montage
childhood
Bishop experienced as "a fact of her daily life"while she lived in Brazil.
a
in the rainy season is the "now" of Bishop's
story, in which
portrait
of her uncle as a child has just returned from the framer. The portrait
of the past which
the memory
invades the present
represents the "then,"
Rio
and forms
the story's real subject: "And Uncle Neddy,
that is, my Uncle
to him, exotic setting, Uncle
is here. Into this wildly
Edward,
foreign and,
come
has
from
the
But I had forgotten
framer's."
from
back,
just
Neddy
is one of a pair. His
my earlier reading of the story that Neddy's
portrait
82
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"one
together with
in one big crate." Bishop is three pages
of his younger
sister's, my mother,
iden
of this second portrait,
existence
the
into the story before disclosing
as
tified first as Neddy's
sister, and then, only parenthetically,
younger
of
the
the mother's
How had I forgotten
presence
portrait,
"my mother."
"Aunt Hat,"
widow,
had shipped
it from Nova
Scotia
in the story? I think now that I forgot because
in the way Stephen Owen
erases her, but erases her imperfectly
erasure
of loss."
"forceful
is
the
where
writing
that memory,
the story
suggests,
not to be
her father,
are the facts of Bishop's biography
forgotten:
after her birth. She moves
dies eight months
Thomas
William
Bishop,
to
Great Village, Nova Scotia, the home of her maternal
with her mother
These
is hospitalized
several times for mental break
is permanently
Bishop is five, Gertrude Bulmer
her death in 1934. Many years later, in a letter to
Her mother
grandparents.
downs and, in 1916, when
until
institutionalized
Anne
Stevenson,
Bishop
wrote
"I didn't
simply,
and the pull of
in
the poems and
is always
memory
or image, for
A
stories which
call up Bishop's childhood
figure,
landscape.
one
in the
she wrote
of the memoirs
the nature of that memory
appears in
? as
as a young child, she wrote
the slate on which,
1960s, "Primer Class,"
it
"What I liked best about the slate was washing
her letters and numbers.
Memory,
to be
the pain of memory
cannot be evaded?this
which
see her again."
somehow
evaded,
at work
it
sink, or in the watering
trough, and then watching
streak would
like clouds, and then the very last wet
grow
off at the kitchen
dry. It dried
tinier and tinier,
the slate was
description
and thinner
then suddenly
dry, dry." How
and thinner;
pale gray again and dry,
of erasure,
suspends the process
how
it was
gone
and
this
thoroughly
the
holds
long Bishop
remains barely percep
streaks before her. The trace of memory
persistent
as it thins to the point of evaporation.
even
tible
Just such traces of
erased appear in Bishop's work at its most personal.
memory
incompletely
most
of those erasures concern the maternal.
The
haunting
"ancestor
in "Memories
of Uncle Neddy"
Bishop calls the pair of portraits
on this story,
In Brazil in the 1960s, when Bishop was working
children."
those
she was old enough to be the parent of those images in the portraits,
now
I
own
And
uncle.
mother
and
versions of her
rereading
youthful
83
I hadn't
notice what
two portraits
before ?the
are mirror
images. Neddy
crossed in front of [his left]"while shehas "her
standswith "his right leg...
to
left leg . . . crossed over her right one." She, too, has followed
Bishop
isGertrude Bulmer,
Brazil, this "little sister," unnamed here, who
Bishop's
about nine years old in the portrait,
and now, in the story's pres
mother,
"a small bustle and a gold
ent, "dead for over forty years." She wears
Her
brooch."
other
"is dark blue, white-sprigged,
the bustle and
with
"
a sort of 'bertha.'
two
and
frills
white
purple,
making
dress
additions
She holds
a doll. Of
the cheeks
of both
her face Bishop
says only, "The tintype man has tinted
a clear
the doll and my mother
pink." My mother? who
from "Memories
of Uncle Neddy,"
like the last wet
streak on
disappears
the slate suddenly
gone.
Fainter
and fainter.
Barely
there. But
there.
In Bishop's description, Uncle Neddy's portrait depicts him with cheeks
or a doll's. He looks rather more
as a
like his sisters than like
"pink
girl's
His sister's portrait,
Uncle Neddy."
shows a
despite bustle and brooch,
child whose
"black hair is cut short all over . . . and she looks almost more
like a boy
is a variant of
(like father/mother)
a
an
clear division,
the slash suggesting
the
male/female,
opposition where
one
term
But
of
dominates
the
other.
here
and
elsewhere
presence
Bishop
dissolves
portrait
than he does." Brother/sister
into a composite,
into confluence. Neddy's
or substitute for that of the mother's,
as
replace
Bishop's
of her uncle covers over, in the story, the memory
of her mother.
boundaries
apparent
seems to
memory
But she is there,
showing
In one of her late poems,
Amazon"
meet,
Tapaj?s,
idea of two "coming
in Neddy's
through
pink
cheeks.
"two great rivers,
the place where
celebrates "the idea of the place,"
the
"Santerem,"
Bishop
together."
There,
Even
if one were
in such a
landscape:
tempted
to
literary interpretations
such as: life/death,
male/female
right/wrong,
?
such notions would
have resolved, dissolved,
in that watery,
dazzling
straight
off
dialectic.
in a dialectic:
in "Memories
dissolved
of Uncle
coming
together,
Brazil-Nova
Scotia, present-past,
uncle-mother,
male-female,
Neddy,"
Two
pain-longing.
84
Bishop wrote "Memories of Uncle Neddy" in the late 1960s although she
withheld it from publication until 1977when her uncle's wife had died.
names ?the
altered family members'
consistently
(In her fiction Bishop
in fact, her Uncle Arthur,
of this story was,
"Uncle Neddy"
but of course
not have
the name change itself would
the story's source within
disguised
her
this
lie
several
other
of memory,
Behind
story
prose works
family.)
in Brazil,
is "In the Village"
also written
the most
important of which
(1953). The Nova Scotian village which was Bishop's early childhood
in "Neddy"
it
landscape of both stories, although
"In the Village"
surfaces in and through
the present of Rio.
evokes the
even
Nova Scotia of Bishop's childhood with a kind of radiant immediacy,
as the story
renders her mother's
final breakdown.
The figure of
obliquely
home
is the dominant
the mother,
referred
to
as "she,"
only
from "In the Village"
disappears
as
suddenly andmysteriously as she disappeared from the child Elizabeth's
life. In that story,
the child Elizabeth
ceal;
they
shut
the grandmother
is around. They
the door
on
their
and aunts
stop their sentences when
cover or con
in
speak
phrases which
conversations.
This hiddenness
and
the act of erasing the
mother
like
appears only as fragments,
"story" of the mother
the broken china the family unpacks from the mother's
trunks. But the
of
the
mother
leaks
this
and
memory
story
through
through Bishop's
silence
surrounding
herself. The
the mother's
madness
become
like the bottle of perfume also found in those trunks, which "leaked
writing
and made awful brown
odor Bishop writes,
stains," but of whose
"Oh,
marvelous
else!" The pain of the mother's
dis
scent, from somewhere
where
stains memory
like the "sad brown perfume" spotting the folded
trace
the
of her inmemory?she
who was to be forever "some
else" ?also
fills Bishop with
the scent her absence leaves is
longing;
appearance
linens. Yet
marvelous:
"the wonderful
smell of the dark-brown
stains.
Is it roses?"
The most
as
trace of the mother
appears in Bishop's writing
unforgettable
in the remarkable opening of "In the
the scream, which,
hovers
Village,"
in the pure skies of
Bishop's primal world
of
that
great story:
opening
as a
"slight
stain." Here
is the
85
the echo of a scream,
over that Nova
Scotian
hangs
a
it
it;
village. No
slight stain in
hangs there forever,
to those of
those pure blue skies, skies that travelers compare
on
too dark, too blue, so that
seem to
Switzerland,
they
keep
a little more around the horizon?or
it
is
around
the
darkening
?
rims of the eyes?
the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm
on
over
the
fields of oats; something darkening
trees, the violet
A
scream,
one hears
as the
scream
sky. The
hangs
in memory?in
the past, in the present,
that, unheard,
It was not even loud to begin with,
those years between.
came there to live forever?not
loud, just alive
haps. It just
the woods
and waters
aswell
like
and
per
for
ever.
Maternal presence in "In theVillage" ispartially displaced (as it alsowas in
Bishop's
life)
to her
grandmother
and aunts,
and to the landscape
of Great
Village. But these displacements do not fill the blank in the center of the
story,
which
beth
in the trunk, the perfume
the space of the mother.
The clothes
stains the contents,
the little ivory embroidery
tool the child Eliza
to
absconds with
and buries in order "to keep it forever," all belong
as a
reac
that space. As does the scream, originating
particular,
hysterical
was all wrong.
tion
in
dress
She
become,
memory,
screamed."),
("The
mother
the
the
mother
the
mother,
tongue.
country,
synecdoche:
The
dazzling
coexists with
clarity of both
a sense of what
landscapes
is hidden,
and objects
uncertain,
in "In
the Village"
one
of
full
peril. At
point in the story the child Elizabeth wakes in themiddle of the night to
a fire;
ringing
red flames are burning
church
me;
bells
she feels as if the fire were
the wallpaper
beside
"in the room with
the bed.
I suppose,"
she
I suppose: the apparently offhand,
gesture
self-shielding
of her mother's
the echo, learned unconsciously,
tongue,
sometimes
hovers on the margins
of Bishop's writing.
the scream which
writes,
seems
And
"I shriek."
to cover
then in "Memories
of Uncle
Neddy,"
when
her memory
is stirred by
the portrait (by bothportraits, I believe), Bishop recalls first the episode in
Neddy's life "when his foot got scalded."Neddy has often told her this
was born, and
the
story of an event which
happened before she
Bishop
writer
she choose it because it is a story
chooses it as a starting place. Does
86
of pain, of a stoical response to pain vocalized
thus: "On that occasion he
one
scream"? Does
she remember
had only given
the story as she remem
bers it because of the scream? "Old stories," Stephen Owen writes of Chi
nese poetry,
the surface of new stories."
"repeat themselves beneath
sounds are conflated
in "In the Village";
they ring out and converge.
the
other
and
the
scream,
clang of Nate the blacksmith
as his anvil
shatters form;
shapes iron into horseshoes. One is sound which
one is the sound of work,
creates
of the work which
form. Both belong to
Two
One
is the mother's
in nature
originating
landscape. Ambiguous
(like the leaking per
scream is
it suggests madness.
terrifying and incomprehensible;
fume), the
But it also suggests the open possibility
of sound existing before the acqui
Bishop's
sition of words,
like the monotonous,
nonsensical
sound Vir
rhythmic,
croons
to
in
's
Woolf
Mrs.
To
her daughter Cam
the Light
ginia
Ramsay
Homans
the
sound
calls
the
house,
Margaret
mother-daughter
language,
to the
issuing from and returning
body. The rhythms of poetry are like
such sound?bodily,
communicative.
non-verbal,
powerfully
reading through the collection of Bishop's papers at the college where
I teach, what
is all those drafts. Twenty
strikes me most
years spent work
on "The Moose";
or
exact
the
left
for
blanks
the
word
ing
phrase, the lines
into those poems!
scratched out and revised, the work
If the
that went
Yet
it communicates
of her writing
lies in part in what
without
power
?an
its deeply reverberating
in the
words ?in
lies
rhythms
equal part
exactness of her language,
in the formal shape which
contains and reveals
her feeling. No wonder Nate's
clang is the other of the primary sounds in
"In the Village,"
for it is the "beautiful
sound" of shaping, of creating
in "Uncle Neddy,"
the twin portraits
the scream and the clang
a
of "In the Village"
form
of them is "the pure note: pure and
pair. Which
in
describes
her
Notice
how her
story's central moment?
angelic," Bishop
form. Like
description
floats,
ambiguously,
Clang.
The pure note:
between
the two:
pure and angelic.
all wrong.
She screamed.
The
dress was
The
child vanishes.
87
the shapeliness and accuracy of Bishop's work,
Say that the formal control,
be what Julia Kristeva
calls "the father tongue" ?the
blacksmith's
might
clang suggesting aworld of work affiliatedwith the blacksmith, the tin
smith (Uncle Neddy's
with her Nova Scotia grandfather who
occupation),
a builder and contractor.
had been a tanner, with her paternal grandfather,
of the irrational,
the deep apprehension
Then say that the incompleteness,
waves which
the shifting
indeterminate
aspect of language
(those shock
a part of the
experience
reading), equally
In
be
called
the
mother
tongue.
might
Bishop's writing
in shifting relation,
intertwined.
interactive,
follow
a first
In Waiden,
Thoreau
writes,
"there
is a memorable
of reading Bishop,
these tongues are
interval
between
the
the language heard and the language
language,
spoken
one
a sound, a tongue, a dialect
is commonly
read. The
transitory,
merely,
and we
learn it unconsciously,
like the brutes,
of our
almost brutish,
of that; if that is our
mothers.
and experience
The other is the maturity
and the written
mother
tongue,
this is our father
to be heard
significant
to
order
speak." Thoreau's
"almost brutish"
transitory,
too
tongue, a reserved and select expression,
we must be born
again in
by the ear, which
him
memorable
interval separates
from the
it suggests
voice affiliated with
the mother;
a "select expression" which
cannot be
into
the
body
implicit flight
the tongues which
heard by the body's ear. In Bishop's work,
Thoreau
into
coexistence
each other. Their
here separates flow
undoes Thoreau's
and
pure note?"pure
angelic"?is,
hierarchy;
Bishop's
ambiguously,
an
from
to the maternal
is never
tongues. Her connection
elected, in some
fully severed; the separation forced upon her by loss ?and
never
own
form
of
sense, through Bishop's
exile, travel?is
complete. The
of
the
of
that
connection
that
and
leak
power
pain
separation
through the
both mother
and father
In her memoir,
"The Country Mouse,"
she
pages of "In the Village."
as
not
from
the
maternal
renders her subsequent
separation
landscape
as the threat of extinction.
rebirth but as literal sickness for home,
*
Boston grandparents
removed her
eight, Bishop's paternal,
In her
in Nova
Scotia.
and her home
from her maternal
grandparents
not
in
event
1963
but
in
written
account of this
"The Country Mouse,"
When
she was
published until after her death, she writes
88
she felt she had been "kid
napped,"
bare feet,
"to be saved from
in order
suet
a life of poverty
and provincialism,
school slates, perhaps even from the
unsanitary
puddings,
r's of my mother's
family." From unstable
slates and inverted
school
speaking?unsanitary
inverted
to rescue her. From
thinks
family
maternal
landscape of Great Village,
in
order to socialize her.
Bishop
forms of writing
and
father's
r's?Bishop's
the behind-the-times,
the paternal
grandparents
out-of-time
"kidnap"
What does the child Elizabeth learn in the house of her father (her father's
realities of money
and class: a chauffeur meets
father)? She learns the social
comes home with
them at the train, a schoolmate who
asks,
Bishop
'"
"
'Who lives in that part of the house?
"Social consciousness,"
Bishop
"had struck its first blow." She learns the compulsory
writes,
identity dic
war is on; in school she is forced to
tated by the nation-state
sing war
(the
to the
to be an Ameri
want
songs and pledge allegiance
flag ?"I didn't
a
can." Bishop's
adult response to this was to become
traveler). And she
learns the social reality of gender inways she had been protected
against in
Nova
Scotia:
"there
seemed
to be much
more
to
a 'little
being
girl' than I
to
depress me." These realities,
had realized; the prospect was beginning
so unlike the seamless world of Great
require that she think of the
Village,
. . .There
a
was
in
different
"The
house
and
world,
herself,
way.
gloomy.
was
in the air."
ominous,
threatening,
lowering
something
sees herself suddenly "in the long
in "The Country Mouse,"
Elizabeth,
mirror: my ugly serge dress, my too long hair, my gloomy
and frightened
too much of this moment
to think of the "mir
Is it making
expression."
ror
the child experiences
when
herself as separate
stage," that moment
from the mother's
this moment
with
body? Lacan identifies
language
moment
it
is
the
because
the
child
when
differentiates
himself
acquisition,
an unmediated
connection
the mother's
with
(and communication)
as separate
in
shock
of
the
the
self
presence.
experiencing
Bishop,
in this memoir,
of words.
follows
the
Here,
long after the acquisition
see
to
moment
Elizabeth's
the world
her
follows
attempt
through
from
But
... to
as
eyes ("I reached gingerly over
get his eyeglasses"),
(grand)father's
in the paternal
ifwith
that vision she saw herself separate and unacceptable
as is the moment
is suffused with
order of things. This moment
pain,
which
concludes
this memoir,
where
the specific
setting?the
dentist's
89
office ?literalizes
the larger pain the passage expresses.
later
Bishop would
as her poem "In the
this experience
Room."
in
the
Here,
Waiting
conclusion
of "The Country Mouse,"
the emphasis falls on the "absolute
rewrite
. .
room when "I felt.
in the waiting
she experiences
"
here are
'You are
says to her
"Something"
Bishop's).
myself" (the ellipses
"
....
are
to
and
be
forever.'
What
follows
you
you areyow
you
going
you
the child Elizabeth's
earlier glimpse of herself in the mirror
is this: "Then I
and utter desolation"
ill. First
became
came
in her father's house
Living
mother
and then asthma."
eczema,
silences
and disconnects
connection
the mother
to the
The
force
country.
makes her ill (a "whole chorus throbbing
Adrienne Rich writes,
teaches us "that it is un
tongue,
of that silence and disconnection
at our ears / like
midges,"
the homesickness
natural,/
the child Elizabeth's
her from
for a woman").
The child in "The Country
Mouse"
of the father's house,
resists its language
own silence. The writer
her
masters
the
father's language,
through
Bishop
a
so
awriter worth
and
becomes
she also resists it, and so becomes
writer;
resists
the structures
an affiliation with
the mother
reading. Through
country
in
and the mother
her
tongue, Bishop preserves
writing
even as she
a
forges
style I have often felt to be "reserved"
that in "Primer Class,"
remember
the
school
writing
slate, Bishop
enjoyable precisely
"It was wonderful
expressions,
an image for memory
in
as a young
child who
found
for its instability,
its shifting,
indeterminate
where
describes
expression:
(Nova Scotia)
an
instability,
or "select."
(I
I found
herself
to see that
the letters
and that the same letter had different
each had different
expressions
at different
times.")
InWorcester,
in her paternal
does what
house, Bishop
grandparents'
women
learn to do in the house of the father: she listens. Like
the
Beppo
Boston bull terrier
she most closely
(the occupant of the house with whom
tone of voice rather than
she
understands
This
"by
identifies)
by words."
ability
Robert
door
to understand
Frost
called
tone is, of course,
"the
indispensible
sound of sense," a sound
that cuts off the words."
The
child Elizabeth
to poetry;
like "voices
listens with
it iswhat
behind
a
the ear of
the body,
the same ear which will make her a poet.
ear is the
("The
only
true writer
and the only true reader," Frost also
to
said.) Her capacity
to
create
to
understand
and
to
nonverbal meaning
her connection
belongs
90
the maternal:
to the scream,
to the voices
to the croonings
of aunts and grandmother
whis
aunt in "In the Vil
of her maternal
behind doors,
or her maternal
in the story "Gwen
(as recollected
grandmother
lage"
in
her lap and sang her "watery" Baptist hymns.
rocked her
dolyn"), who
in her poem, "At
reenacts this maternal
form of communication
(Bishop
she sings just such Baptist hymns to a seal. Yes, a
when
the Fishhouses,"
pering
seal.) But
"The Country
Mouse"
describes
Bishop's
exile from
the mater
nal, and her painful inability to speak her feelings in this house of the
at table. One
of conversation
"I rarely spoke," she writes
day, sit
to contribute"
and offered
she decided "I had something
ting at dinner,
"
a
aunt
of
in
Nova Scotia bought
'The last time my
shoes, they cost
pair
father.
female ("my
three dollars.' Everyone
Scotia?distinctly
laughed." Nova
?
in this house, appears inadvertantly
ridicu
translates imperfectly
aunt")
at
nonsense.
conversation
the
din
"I
about
lost
lous,
my courage
making
ner table,"
Bishop
writes,
"and
I have never
regained
are so often
prose pieces of Bishop's
painful.
flashes of the humor of her poems (as in, for example,
These
it."
there
are
her description
of
In them
Beppo "punishing himself" for his puddle of vomit on the floor?"it was
all his own
very much
In "The
sense of
idea, his peculiar Bostonian
guilt"),
I find them sometimes wrenchingly
subdued.
but
is
the humor
sad.
even
"I felt myself
Mouse,"
aging,
Country
Bishop writes,
its struc
The reserved and select language of that house ?with
dying."
tures of dominance
her deepest
feelings.
not afford expression
of
(nation, class, gender) ?does
It offers no words for her experience. Bored and lonely,
she lay at night "blinking my flashlight off and on, and crying." In this
comical piece, the pulse of the flash
often heart-breaking,
intermittently
a
a nonverbal
seems a
for
rhythm.
signal in the form of
signal
help,
light
"At
Louise
the
At this point in her memoir
poet
Bogan:
Bishop quotes
a
into
ears."
Isn't
little
dance
this
tears/ Run
your
couplet
midnight
around the edges of meaning? Isn't it a kind of rhyme disruptive of logic,
expressive
breaking
of the unspecifiable pain Bishop remembers feeling? It is language
as sound connected
to the maternal.
through reserve, poetry
In "Transcendental
Etude"
Adrienne
Rich
writes:
91
At most
we're
allowed
a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman's
voice
singing
to a child
else is too soon,
against her heart. Everything
too sudden, the
that woman's
wrenching-apart,
heard ever after from a distance,
heartbeat
the loss of that ground-note
echoing
or in
we are
happy,
despair.
whenever
Once Robert
idiom this way: "the seemingly
Pinsky characterized Bishop's
restrained yet relaxed sentences,
in practice,
flexible
startlingly
framing
the diction
of a respectable,
alert American
educated but not
tourist,
but very
pedantic,
sophisticated
from this account
omitted
what's
But
quiet about that sophistication."
is the unpredictable,
sometimes disrup
to commu
tive way Bishop unsettles meaning,
the power of her rhythms
to suggest
nicate unspoken
that aches and burns, to
longings,
something
evoke what we hear from voices behind doors, or from far in the back of
the bus as it travels through the night. This power in Bishop's work has its
as her power
in the mother
to
sen
tongue,
simultaneously
shape
tences "restrained
to her mastery
of the father's
yet relaxed" belongs
source
tongue.
Social
in "The Country
the grandparents'
world
Mouse."
social laws govern
the use of language,
teach us to be
Likewise,
can
"select." But each speaker and writer who
learns those laws
also break
them, can creatively reshape language through her local, specific, distinc
laws govern
much
of
a master of its
tive usage. The writer
is a "master" of language,
Bishop
as
social and formal nature
imagine this witty,
gifted poet
(who would
someone who has never
conversation
regained her courage "about making
at the dinner
I believe
table"? Though
is in constant,
her). But her mastery
to what can't be mas
relation to the disruptive,
the unspecifiable,
shifting
tered. This,
Art";
centers
What
always
92
is the subject of her astonishing
of course,
its central
rhyming pair?master/disaster?comes
of Bishop's
life and writing.
"One
out of the
deepest
of course. A maternal
is
Madness,
presence which
stains the skies of childhood,
else." A scream which
can't be mastered?
"somewhere
late villanelle
but whose
of the cloud
stain is so embedded
of bloom
in the deep blue of those skies
("the color
on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of
oats")
are
the flaw can't be separated
and perfection
that imperfection
composite;
is the pain of loss
can't be mastered
from the beauty. What
(although
art
of losing"). What
can't be fully mastered?
"One Art" is about "the
to form, forever both here
not
remains incomplete,
what
fully accessible
the maternal
and "elsewhere"?is
the mother
sound,
tongue.
Mastery
itself seems to be affiliatedwith theworld of the father,with the power to
bring (or sometimes force) things into shape (the blacksmith's shop,
and contract
tin shop, the paternal family business?building
enabled Bishop's
this power is part of what
survival; that
ing). Learning
that she saw
around her took such distinct shape?
the objects in the world
Neddy's
those objects so distinctly
aworld
way of mapping
touch with
what
defies
and could describe
and a life. But
it, with
in
the maternal
them
Bishop
which
a
so
exactly?created
this power remains
resists a single
in
shape.
The power of themother tongue in herwork is like the "oh! of pain" the
child Elizabeth hears in "In theWaiting Room," the poem inwhich she
The cry of
"The Country Mouse."
that concludes
the memory
not
version
of the experience;
here, in the
appear in the earlier
pain does
takes the sound to be the voice of her
poem, it is central. At first Elizabeth
rewrote
aunt but
"What took me/
then, she writes,
by
completely
That disruptive
that it was me: I my voice, in my mouth."
it "the
breaks through categories of distinction.
Bishop calls
I felt in my throat." The family voice,
the "oh!" of pain,
one of the streaks,
the slate of Bishop's memory,
Each time it is erased, it reappears.
the maternal.
On
shiny
was
surprise/
"cry of pain"
family voice/
the scream.
as a tearstain,
is
*
It reappears, under
opens the Brazilian
erasure,
in "Memories
sea is "blurred with
of Uncle
rain";
Neddy."
As
that story
is damp. Rain
everything
frames" and
is "seeping in under the french doors and around the window
the sea may rise to "the base of the apart
"at flood tide," Bishop writes,
to do." Rain brings on mold
as it's been known
ment
and
building
seems
on
at
in
this
work
asthma.
mildew,
Something
brings
Bishop's
Some
is not in the writer's
control
story which
(not under her mastery).
an
wetness
insistent
recalls
like
which
also
the
leaks
rain,
through
thing
93
the flood of birthwater s.A flood of memory prompted by the family por
into her Nova
traits sends Bishop back
and loss. What
leaks
to
landscape, subject
change
structures,
seeps like rain
in the second portrait,
the
Scotia
the story's
through
is the memory
embodied
the doors,
through
erased mother.
of her uncle and his sister arrived in Brazil, Bishop
the portraits
she "can't stop thinking about him." Am I to believe she can stop
thinking about her mother, whose portrait she has also unpacked from the
After
writes
she turn the memory
crate? Does
in the direction
by the portraits
too
of the mother
is too powerful,
evoked
of Uncle
because the memory
Neddy
to be framed as a story? Or is it that the memory
of her mother,
disruptive
a
even when
constant
remains
of
her
world, whereas
part
packed away,
she is surprised to find herself remembering Uncle Neddy? And finding a
as David
connection,
Kalstone
astutely
suggests,
with
Neddy's
life
"blighted by drink and irresponsibility" and her own "anarchic side." For
this connection
Frames
the story can provide
a workable
frame.
are an issue in "Uncle
foot wide,
The portraits
arrive in frames "a
Neddy."
with
gritty paint." Bishop
repainted
glittery,
"
"narrow,
dulled,
'modern,'
carefully
gold ones,
and
painted
them with
replaces
that she has "reduced"
them to "the scale suitable for hanging
explaining
in apartments."
she needs to reduce the power
those "ancestor
Perhaps
children"
have over her, to dull the memories
they invoke, memories
which
threaten
these portraits
not
to stay
safely within
the gap between
narrow
amastered
"then"
past. The ancestors of
and "now." "[Y]oung
and
us but a
uncle appears to her "with nothing
between
Bishop's
amem
is
of
old-fashioned
The
of
like
varnish
glaze
varnishing."
"glaze"
a variant on a
brane, or awindow?it's
recurring set of images in Bishop's
all of which
she sees. But sometimes
work,
thinly separate her from what
clean,"
the mediating
element cracks, or vanishes.
(In her story, "Gwendolyn,"
she watches
the funeral of her childhood
friend through the window,
gaz
shut invisibily inside it forever, there,
ing at the coffin "with Gwendolyn
alone on the grass by the church door"; in that moment
feels
completely
to the back door, out
herself there, shut up forever, and she runs "howling
still weeping,
after
among the startled white hens, with my grandmother,
me.")
94
The
unpredictable
power
of memory
can remove
the glaze
of var
in
the portraits
the past in place. Therefore,
unpacking
It is the
is a potentially
"Memories
of Uncle Neddy"
activity.
dangerous
from, doesn't write much
about, that
portrait Bishop deflects attention
nish
that holds
the more
to the present. The
threat of memory
"glittery
powerful
at
in an
of
of
the
mother
hovers
the
the
memory
story,
gritty"
edges
a
an
as
out
of
reach.
She
trace,
appears
just
evaporating
incompleteness
and memory.
streak on the slate of writing
she,"
Bishop wonders
"[D]id
"
one
for
"have
Did she,
of the little-girl mother,
dress,
only the
dress-up?
presents
did she?
. . .
is 'perfect,' finished.
"We only forget what
writes,
are the scars of some
in our life
something
incompletion:
stutters. Something
is not content simply to be and to have been, but must
try to be again, and never successfully and finally." Traces of erasure are like
Stephen Owen
Our repetitions
scars, the scars of stories
that keep
repeating
themselves
in
Bishop's
work.
of Uncle Neddy"
its larger frame "Memories
repeats versions of
or finished.
stories
can't
be
which
stories,
forgotten
primary
Within
Bishop's
Stories which
of
tell, in one way or another (and sometimes
comically),
or
of a loved person or object, of abandonment
the disappearance
engulf
the woman's,
child's survival,
the
of loss. And of survival ?the
ment,
Her
writer's.
sometimes
Her
reinscribes
floods,
shipwrecks,
and drowning,
and
baby.
as
it in the story, was
remembers
library,
Bishop
its
of
for
books
about
the sinking of the
collection
interesting
this form of catastro
She and her uncle shared a fascination with
Uncle
chiefly
Titanic.
a
work
Neddy's
"in the dining room, facing his place at the table, hung a chromo
the iceberg, the rising steam, people strug
graph of the ship going down:
in full color." Among
everything,
Bishop's maternal
gling in the water,
Giroux
tells us, was a great grandfather,
her editor Robert
ancestors,
"master and part owner of a sailing vessel lost at sea off Cape Sable Island."
phe:
And
of course
scapes, Nova
the sea is part of what
Scotia and Brazil.
defines
Bishop's
two central
land
95
it seems, appearance
in
floods, and babies. Their incidental,
Shipwrecks,
some
in
form
"Uncle Neddy"
older, unfinished
repeats
story.
incomplete
In one of Bishop's
first published works
of fiction,
"The Farmer's Chil
are
and in the cold
pushed outside by their mother,
"a very bad
"at
raft
and
later
called
this
they play
shipwreck."
Bishop
she was right.
story," and, measured
against the standard of her work,
dren,"
four children
But
its very failures of expression
relief. This is the game the children
the stutter
into
of repetition
a
"the baby,
play: there's
shipwreck,
to be
Gracie Bell" is imagined
the
initials G.B.
drowning
("Gracie Bell,"
are those of
One
Gertrude
of her older
mother,
Bishop's
Bulmer).
to
to
out
swim
brothers pretends
her rescue, while
another calls
"over and
throw
over 'Now the ship is sinking inch by inch!Now the ship is sinking inch
"
by inch!' The older brother lifts the baby in his arms, and turns "firmly
treading water
"Grade Bell
back,
with
tiny up-and-down
shrieked and he repeated,
then, Bishop
steps." And
'I'll save you, Grade Bell.
writes,
. . ."Who
is saving whom
I'll save you, Gracie Bell'.
here? Is the older
?
brother in this story a version of Bishop rescuing one who
shrieks, G.B.
of mental breakdown
Gertrude Bulmer?from
the wreckage
and from the
flood of time?Or isBishop the baby, imagined to be drowning, the baby
who shrieks? Is she both?
In "Memories
story of a flood and a baby resur
this time because forgotten.
Like
(a version of the oh! of pain), this
of Uncle
another
Neddy"
is in need of rescue,
faces, another
baby
incident of Neddy's
scalding
times: how earlier in Nova
is, Bishop
says, a family story told to her many
Scotia the river had flooded (as in the "now" of the story the sea threatens
to flood the apartments
of Rio), warning
had been given,
and "in the
the earlier
excitement
of rescuing
grandmother
forgot
older
children,
the latest baby
the clock,
(later my
the cow
aunt),
and horse, my
and my
grandfather
had dashed back into the house to find her floating peacefully in her
wooden
The
cradle,
bobbing
baby bobbing
over
in the water:
the kitchen
floor."
cradled by amniotic
fluid,
surviving
hap
pily in that element. The baby forgotten by the (grand)mother, in need of
rescue.
But
rescue
isn't without
story of the forgotten-then-rescued
96
In "Uncle
consequences.
ends
baby
parenthetically
Neddy"
the
"(but
after
? an
this the poor baby had
acute disease of the
erysipelas)."
Erysipelas
an
the
of
and rescued. I
skin,
inflammation,
consequence
being forgotten
eczema and asthma, so fierce in her childhood
think of Bishop's
that they
onset occurred when
her from attending
her
school, whose
prevented
father's parents "rescued" her from the maternal
of
Nova
Scotia
ground
and from
the unstable
mother's
tongue.
*
Of course in the storywithin "Uncle Neddy" the baby floating peacefully
And of course the
danger of drowning.
one
in
waters
amniotic
is
of both safety and
image of the baby-self bobbing
constriction:
such is the ambivalence
toward the maternal many daughters
in her cradle was
feel. For Bishop,
lar her mother's
in imminent
was
ambivalence
of her early childhood?in
particu
from Bishop's
and
life?this
insanity
disappearance
In her work
and powerful.
the
especially unresolved
to that
voice
the maternal
and
body
indispensible
given
maternal
the conditions
memory,
It is a composite,
carries shifting meanings.
memory,
source
of
of
comfort
threat.
the
and
feared and desired,
can be read as one ver
account of a nightmare
in "Uncle Neddy"
Bishop's
tin shop "blocked
sion of the maternal body: she sees the door of Neddy's
by a huge horse, coming out. The horse filled the doorway, towering high
teeth in a grin. She whinnied,
all her big yellow
it
I felt the hot wind
shrill and deafening;
coming out of her big nostrils;
This is the night mare, her big yellow
almost blew me backwards."
teeth,
over me
and showing
Too
her shrill whinneying.
big,
she fills all the space and blocks
any exit.
Uncle Neddy (Bishop's dream double) has his "escape cut off by the fearful
hot breath
female body, whose
dream suggests amonstrous
to blow
into
the
backward
whose
past,
Bishop
huge body blocks
animal."
The
threatens
any exit from that past. The threat of this body must be deflected and
erased.
In contrast
"attendant
posed
. . .On
horse" who
brown
rump is like a brown,
glossy globe of the whole
to the underworld.
His ears are secret entrances
His nose is sup
to feel like velvet and does, with
ink spots under milk over its pink.
is enormous.
world.
from "In the Village"
of the
this description
inNate the blacksmith's
patiently waits
shop: "He
there's
His
each temple
is a clear glass bulge,
like an eyeball,
but
in them are
97
the heads
of two other
little horses
real
colored,
brightly
of
His
silver
blue.
alas, against backgrounds
untouchable,
him
around
and the cloud of his odor is a chariot in itself."
hang
(his dreams?),
and raised,
trophies
This
animal
to the
but to daydream
and
nightmare world
is
of a horse. While
he is enormous,
his enormity
threat. He is marvellous,
placid, controllable
(the des
belongs
he is a dream
reverie;
entirely without
cription ends with
not
into the "shafts of his
His odor is
his backing
wagon").
are
his nose feels like velvet. The details of Bishop's descriptions
the specifics of gender. James Merrill
recalls a
important,
including
a chariot,
always
call from
telephone
poem "The Moose."
his
friend,
Merrill
David
"I mention
writes,
at night,
the kitchen where
in her shawl,' David
corrects,
household
'Tucked
to talk about
Kalstone,
the stanza
a
dog sleeps, tucked
the smile audible."
Bishop's
that evokes a
in his shawl.
the night mare is just one version of the maternal
appears
body which
in Bishop's work
in many
forms ?as
the
comforting
dog in her
(like
or
as
the
and
shawl,
yet "Per
grandmother's
"grand, otherworldly"
lap),
? "
'Look! It's a
and as desired.
fectly harmless"
(in "The Moose":
she!'"),
is
the unspecificable
The maternal
like
which,
aspect of Bishop's writing
But
the letters formed by Bishop's
childhood hand in "Primer Class," can have
at
times."
It exists in her work
different
expressions
right
exactness
mater
I
her
distinctive
and
that
the
say
alongside
clarity.
might
"different
nal iswhat
is unreadable
in Bishop.
For how
do we
read the traces of the
memory which
appear as the scream, or as the apparently margi
nal detail of a poem or story? How do we read her incomplete presence in
"Uncle Neddy";
her portrait, Bishop
tells us, is "unsigned
and undated,
an
a doubt the
itinerant portrait painter."
the work of
probably
(I haven't
mother's
was the work
and undated,
of an
unsigned
on
loved to insist
accuracy. But these literal
Bishop
details suggest something missing
that's inseparable from other, less speci
to me
It seems possible
that maternal
fiable causes.)
memory
appears
in part, she did not want us to read it. At
in Bishop because,
unreadable
real portrait was
itinerant painter.
some
what
level,
98
of the mother
the memory
calls "pure recollection,
do not want to communicate
Bachelard
alone, we
details.
precisely
Its very core, however,
seems
to have
existed
for her as
to us
image that belongs
it; we only give its picturesque
to
is our own, and we should never want
the
it." In "Uncle Neddy" we get the "picturesque
dress, the doll, the shoes. But the
portrait ?the
we can come any closer.
Bishop
disappears from the story before
never
to
is
does.
there
tell.
tell all
She
tell all there is to tell about
details"
portrait
doesn't
of the mother's
For all of Bishop's descriptive
accuracy, her careful and attentive eye, her
are aspects of her
are concealments.
and omission
Reticence
clarity, there
terse
in England":
"Fri
of Friday in "Crusoe
description
style. (Take the
was nice, and we were friends. / If only he had been
was nice. /
Friday
day
awoman!"
asked her?
James Merrill
Seeing the poem before publication,
?
a
more
"if
be
bit
about
there
couldn't
he
says
Friday? She
"idiotically,"
there used to be?lots more!
rolled her eyes and threw up her hands: Oh,
then
it seemed
. . .
the poem
long
already
[sic]. And wasn't
are
marked
with
concealment,
by
especially
landscapes
enough?")
toward and protect.
their hidden
spaces the poems both gesture
"Cape
the
is one of the most
of
such
Breton"
where
poems,
suggestive
landscape
But
Her
into the mist. Bishop wrote
this poem after a trip
verges on disappearance
to
in 1948, following
visits to Nova Scotia in the summers of
Cape Breton
a return to her maternal
1946 and '47, visits which marked
landscape for
the first
time
in many
years.
Like
"At
the Fishhouses"
suggests the resonance
period, "Cape Breton"
life and work;
from this landscape in Bishop's
are unclear:
boundaries
The
silken water
is weaving
and mystery
from
the same
which
emanate
it is a place of waters
where
and weaving,
equally in all directions.
under the mist
disappearing
now and then
lifted and penetrated
one
shag's dripping
serpent-neck,
by
the mist
and somewhere
incorporates
of a motorboat.
rapid but unurgent,
the pulse,
to me not
only
landscape suggests
it suggests this landscape is also a body, one
secret interiors, with a core which
resists description.
the
"Whatever
with
to
aban
been
of
have
meaning,"
"appears
Bishop writes,
landscape had
it back, in the interior/ where we can
doned/
unless the road is holding
. . ."In the often
not see/ where
are
remarkably
reputed to be.
deep lakes
The pulse heard from within
amotorboat
but a heartbeat;
this watery
99
detailed
and
"occasional
see
the
of this poem, where we
specific description
exactly
or the "little white
churches" which
small yellow bulldozers"
into the matted
"dropped
is
held
back.
something
appear
hills/
like
lost quartz
arrowheads,"
As "Cape Breton" unfolds,
the poem spins deeper and deeper into its inter
its passengers,
in the fourth stanza, a small bus discharges
this
iors. When,
iswhat
follows:
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
in a snowfall of daisies,
its poverty
establishes
which
to his
invisible
house
beside
the water.
the snowfall of daisies, the house
parent and child, the small meadow,
aworld
are the elements of a dream world,
water:
these
the
safe, peace
by
aswell as
to
interior,
ful, lovely, and hidden. This world belongs
Bishop's
to Cape Breton's. But even here some portion of the landscape remains out
of sight, out of reach. A man carries a baby to his "invisible house." And
The
in
is the mother?
(As
rereading Bishop now, I can't help thinking, where
are
her late poem, "Pink Dog,"
Bishop can't help asking the dog "Where
an
in
Is
invisible
she
she
childbirth?
babies?
Did
die
pres
your
waiting,
")
ence
in the invisible
meadow
with
flowers,
"rapid but unurgent"?
Has she been erased into the landscape:
the
is
Is it her heartbeat which
the house by the water?
the landscape is
Are the traces of the maternal what
house?
holding back?
"an ancient chill is rippling
the dark
In the last line of "Cape Breton"
in what
I think of as a companion
brooks." This chill reverberates
poem
same
Here is also a place where
land
"At
the
Fishhouses."
from the
period,
and water
one whose
beauty bears "some melancholy
sees on an andent capstan. The entire landscape
meet,
those Bishop
as the sea the poem
lines:
omable
so
powerfully
describes,
It is likewhat we imagine knowledge to be:
dark,
100
salt, clear, moving,
utterly
free,
concluding
stains," like
is as unfath
with
these
from
drawn
the cold hard mouth
of the world,
forever, flowing
our
knowledge
from
the rocky breasts
and drawn,
and since
derived
is historical,
flowing
and flown.
In his discussion of the literary friendship between Bishop and Robert
David
Lowell,
Kalstone
tells us that when
Lowell
first read "At
the Fish
wrote
that the word
"breast" in
(in The New Yorker), he
Bishop
in its context
the poem's close seemed "a little too much
perhaps; but I'm
comments:
Kalstone
"What
probably wrong."
[Lowell] picked up, of
houses"
course, was
presence
the flicker
behind
drama, of a vestigial
implacable female
. . ." The
trace
an
(hidden but present) of
of human
the scene.
stains this poem and
female presence
enduring
ripples the
to come in touch with
it can cause your bones
surfaces of Bishop's work;
to
to ache" and your hand "to burn"
The
"begin
("At the Fishhouses").
"ancient chill" rippling the dark brooks also burns; it
becomes
potentially
not
in the
maternal
of
erotic
but
the
the
memory
only
ripple
body and the
world.
and unfixable
are some of the
hidden interiors, wetness,
fire ?these
warmth,
Ripples,
a
traces in
erotic, of a desired female body. As in her
Bishop of maternal
the
poem "The Shampoo" where
appear while
"rings around the moon"
or
a
in
the
hair
of
"dear
the
"O
washes
elusive
with
friend,"
Breath,"
poet
its "equivocal"
association of breast and ripple. As in "Song for the Rainy
at Samambaia,
Season" (set in Petropolis,
the name of the house
Brazil,
oh
shared with Lota de Macedo
Bishop
begins "Hidden,
Soares), which
hidden/ in the high fog/ the house we live in."Hidden, the house with
its brooks
house
warm
and waterfalls
lies wrapped
open house/
lies open ("House,
of the warm
touch/
remembered
moment
breath,
of "In
aunt
the Village" when
her younger
(her
room to reassure her about the fire.
into Elizabeth's
comes
sister)
into bed with Elizabeth,
"says
The men have to go; my grandfather
barn full of hay, from heat lightning.
mother's
"in a private cloud"; hidden,
the
to the white
it
houses
"the
dew");
Or as in the
maculate
cherished."
Gets
to go to
sleep, it's way up the road.
It's probably
has gone.
somebody's
It's been such a hot summer there's a
lot of it. The church bell stops and her voice is suddenly loud inmy ear
over my
shoulder
. . .
Wagons
rattle by.
'Now
they
are going
down
to the
101
river to fill the barrels,' my aunt ismurmuring
against my back. The red
on
flame dies down
the wall,
then flares again." In such a moment,
the
murmur
voice
of
the
female
female
with
the
Like
merges
rhythmic
body.
in "In the Village,"
other moments
this one makes
the house aworld
of
women:
aunts, sewing lady. The men are gone to fight the
grandmother,
fire. In the red flame on the wall,
the hot summer, the heat lightning,
the
as
were
a
voice
it
female
if
female
touch,
murmuring
experienced
powerful
erotic makes
itself felt, makes
itself heard.
Eros and memory,
like fire and water,
both generative
and des
potentially
most
are
tructive. For Bishop,
the
forms of both
linked to the
powerful
maternal
the
mother
the
mother
country,
tongue.
body,
At
returns to the por
of Uncle Neddy"
Bishop
of
mine?in
traits?the
frame
her story and
the child Neddy
which
and his
seem to be "about to start out." The
little sister might
appear,
portraits
an as yet unfulfilled,
in the
of
then, as beginnings
signs
(here,
ending),
the end of "Memories
con
"I am going to hang them here side
open possibility.
by side," Bishop
In spite of
tinues, "above the antique (Brazilian antique) chest of drawers.
on and on, at the invisible
the heat and dampness,
look
they
calmly
Tropic
at the extravagant
of Capricorn,
out the southern
rain still blotting
same
to
portraits continued
hang side by side in the rooms of
room of
turn up in the
life; after she left Brazil they would
Bishop's
living
the last of her "houses," her apartment on Lewis Wharf
in Boston. Mirror
ocean."
The
and mother,
fear and desire, clang and
images. An unseparable pair. Uncle
In the watery,
and father tongues.
dialectic of
scream, mother
dazzling
intertwined.
Bishop's writing,
"I love having
the pictures,"
Bishop wrote
think
mother
and father."
girls
they're my
her aunt
in 1957.
"The
little
Acknowledgements
in aVassar multidisciplinary
seminar on feminist scholarship?
Colleagues
and Mary L. Shan
Miriam Cohen,
Eileen Leonard, Deborah Dash Moore
102
an earlier draft of this essay and contributed
valuable suggestions
ley?read
women
are
scholars in disciplines
and criticisms. The fact that all of these
than my own made
and exciting.
daunting
other
All
quotations
from Bishop's
their
insights
poetry
into Bishop's
and prose
are from
work
especially
the two collec
tions, Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1921-1919 and Elizabeth
Bishop: The Collected Prose.
103