Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:39:25.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“O Canada!”: The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David R. Jarraway
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A general reluctance to engage the issue of lesbian identity in Elizabeth Bishop's work has understandably been conditioned by her own longstanding reticence. An approach that theorizes about the nonreferential, hence inarticulable, contours of Bishop's project, however, discloses a more eroticized aesthetic practice—one conceivably enabling the vital exploration of transgressive sexuality that perhaps goes without saying. What arguably forges the link between theory and practice is Bishop's experience of loss. The unspeakableness of mother loss due to insanity, mediated poignantly by the curtailment of Bishop's Canadian childhood, formerly provided the invitation to enclose Bishop's writing explicitly within a lifelong travail of itinerant displacement. Recent psychoanalytic theory, by contrast, foregrounds a more challenging loss that divides her writing between reality and the real and thus implicitly opens it up to a spectral lesbian poetics beyond what her canonical “American” identity readily permits readers to see and to say.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 2 , March 1998 , pp. 243 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Pref. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1974.Google Scholar
Battaglia, Debbora “Problematizing the Self: A Thematic Introduction.” Rhetorics of Self-Making. Ed. Battaglia. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 1–15.Google Scholar
Bishop, Elizabeth The Collected Prose. Ed. and introd. Giroux, Robert. New York: Noonday, 1991.Google Scholar
Bishop, Elizabeth The Complete Poems. 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, 1986.Google Scholar
Bishop, Elizabeth One Art: Selected Letters. Comp. and ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, 1994.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Castle, Terry The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Copjec, Joan “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason.” Copjec, Supposing 16–44.Google Scholar
Copjec, Joan, ed Supposing the Subject. New York: Verso, 1994.Google Scholar
Cornell, Drucilla “What Is Ethical Feminism?” Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange? By Seyla Benhabib et al. Introd. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 75–106.Google Scholar
Costello, Bonnie “One Art: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 1971-1976.” Schwartz and Estess 109–10.Google Scholar
Crane, Hart The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane. Ed. Weber, Brom. Garden City: Anchor, 1966.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques “‘Eating Well’: or. The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Trans. Peter Connor and Avilal Ronell. Who Comes after the Subject? Ed. Cadava, Eduardo and Connor, Peter. New York: Routledge, 1991. 96–119.Google Scholar
Dickinson, Emily The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Johnson, Thomas H. Boston: Little, 1960.Google Scholar
Diehl, Joanne Feit Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee “Plasticity, Paternity, Perversity: Freud's Falcon. Huston's Freud.” American Imago 51 (1994): 69–104.Google Scholar
Farwell, Marilyn R “The Lesbian Narrative: ‘The Pursuit of the Inedible by the Unspeakable.‘” Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Cay Studies in Literature. Ed. Haggerty, George E. and Zimmerman, Bonnie. New York: MLA, 1995. 156–15.Google Scholar
Fountain, Gary, and Brazeau, Peter Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.Google Scholar
Goldensohn, Lorrie Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Grosz., Elizabeth “Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity.” Copjec, Supposing 133–13.Google Scholar
Grosz., Elizabeth Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Gunn, Giles Thinking across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect. and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Google Scholar
Harrison, Victoria Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Jarraway, David Rev. of Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, by Brett C. Millier. Journal of Canadian Poetry 10 (1995): 140–14.Google Scholar
Jarraway, David “Saint Elizabeth.” Rev. of One Art: Selected Letters, comp. and ed. Robert Giroux, and Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau. MLA Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter 22.2 (1995): 30–32.Google Scholar
Kalstone, David Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Ed. Robert Hemenway. Pref. Hemenway. Afterword by James Merrill. New York: Noonday. 1989.Google Scholar
Kalstone, David Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Lehman, David “‘In Prison’: A Paradox Regained.” Schwartz and Estess 61–74.Google Scholar
Lensing, George S “Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop: The Way a Poet Should See, the Way a Poet Should Think.” Wallace Stevens Journal 19 (1995): 115–11.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Marilyn May The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Marilyn May, ed Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993.Google Scholar
McCabe, Susan Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. University Park: Penn State UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millier, Brett C Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
Ostriker, Alicia “I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens.” Wallace Stevens Journal 19 (1995): 234–23.Google Scholar
Page, Barbara “Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism.” Wallace Stevens Journal 19 (1995): 166–16.Google Scholar
Parker, Robert Dale The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.Google Scholar
Sanger, Peter “Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia.” Antigonish Review 60 (1985): 15–27.Google Scholar
Schor, Naomi Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Lloyd, and Estess, Sybil P., eds Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.Google Scholar
Travisano, Thomas J Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989.Google Scholar
Twichell, Chase “Everything Only Connected by ‘And’ and ‘And’: The Skewed Narrative of Elizabeth Bishop.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 8 (1985): 130–13.Google Scholar
Vendler, Helen “Domestication, Domesticity, and the Otherworldly.” Schwartz and Estess 32–48.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Cary, and Jonathan Elmer. “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs.” Boundary 2 22.3 (1995): 141–14.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Žižek, . New York: Verso, 1992. 211–21.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. New York: Verso, 1994.Google Scholar