The “Interrupted Story”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Fairy–Tale Aesthetics

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Notes

¹ See also Susan McCabe, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994).

² Bishop’s use of the dreamscape here is reminiscent of Freud’s conceptualization of dreamwork. In his outline of psychoanalysis, he describes the quality of the dreamscape thus: “The evidence of the share taken by the unconscious id in the formation of dreams is abundant and convincing. (1) Memory is far more comprehensive in dreams than in waking life. Dreams bring up recollections which the dreamer has forgotten, which are inaccessible to him when he is awake. (b) Dreams make an unlimited use of linguistic symbols, the meaning of which is for the most part unknown to the dreamer. … (c) Memory very often reproduces in dreams impressions from the dreamer’s early childhood of which we can definitely assert not only that they had been forgotten but that they had become unconscious owing to repression. This is the explanation of the help – usually indispensable – afforded us by dreams when, in the course of the analytic treatment of the neuroses, we attempt to reconstruct the early life of the dreamer“ (49). See Freud, An Outline of Pyschonalysis, Trans. James Strachey (Norton, 1949).

³ As Helen Vendler remarks in her study of the intersection between the domestic and the otherworldly in Bishop’s work, there is a “vibration […] between two frequencies – the domestic and the strange” (32). As she describes, “the fact that one’s house always is inscrutable, that nothing is more enigmatic than the heart of the domestic scene, offers Bishop one of her recurrent subjects” (33). The domestic is supposed to be familiar, Bishop’s work recognizes this, but Bishop’s poetic powers are not put into making it truly familiar – her energies are always devoted to the fact that the domestic is forever strange, forever out of reach, forever a “fairy house” as in “Jeronimo’s House.” See Vendler, “Domestication, Domesticity, and the Otherworldly,” Elizabeth Bishop; Her Art, Eds. Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (U of Michigan P, 1983): 32–48. Also, see Bruno Bettelheim on sets of three siblings, which he reads as representing the three parts of the human psyche, the ego, the superego, and the id (102–103).

⁴ Ellis has called attention to the stove’s presence as a magical object throughout Bishop’s work. “In Bishop’s writing,” he notes, “domestic stoves frequently double as memory stores, recalling the past with a shuddering, violent immediacy” (94). He refers to the stoves in “The Baptism,” “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” and “Sestina,” as well as Bishop’s painting of a stove which depicts the stove as bricked like a house with the word “Magic” stenciled on the front (93–94).

⁵ As Jack Zipes notes in his chapter on “The Rationalization of Abandonment and Abuse in Fairy Tales: The Case of Hansel and Gretel” in Zipes: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry, the version of the story with which most readers from the late-nineteenth century until today are familiar was the 1857 final version of the tale which includes “all of Wilhelm’s stylistic and thematic changes” (42). One of those stylistic changes was to make the “mother” in the tale into a “stepmother,” perhaps to assuage the fearfulness of the children’s actual mother wanting to get rid of them; however, the Grimm tale still refers to the “stepmother” as a “mother” at certain points, blurring the line between the two. See Zipes, Zipes: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (Routledge, 1997).

⁶ According to Quinn, the draft in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box is one from “the mid- to late-fifties” (EAP 310n).

⁷ Many of the figures whose children’s fictions Bishop admired had also lost a parent early in life, a loss which resurfaces in the obsessive return to childhood that permeates their work. As Jackie Wullschlager explains, such figures as Hans Christian Andersen and Edward Lear “lost parents when they were very young and then […] created in their work wish-fulfillment versions of childhood they had missed” (70). Bishop can be viewed as likewise working through her past in her work about childhood, although her return to childhood tends to rehash the pain of her losses rather than to fulfill wishes that remained unrealized.

⁸ In her annotations to Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, Alice Quinn dates the poem thus using Bishop’s letters, Millier’s biography, and Lloyd Schwartz’s essay “Annals of Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil,” which appeared in The New Yorker on September 30, 1991. In a letter to Robert Lowell written on September 19, 1965 quoted by Quinn, Bishop describes her and Lilli’s shared nostalgia for “the North”: “I miss the north very much occasionally – and Lilli and I had one long nostalgic conversation all about bulb plants, birch trees, hay-lofts, etc. – Apparently, ‘Up in the hay!’ is an old Danish expression for having a wild good time. She also goes on about trolls in a way that reminds me of Auden” (Bishop [EAP] 333n). In passages also cited by Quinn, Schwartz describes being shown this manuscript of the poem, along with another (also illustrated), by Lilli, and Brett Millier notes that the poem was “[a]mong the objects Elizabeth left for Lilli[, … the poem depicting their] common nostalgia; the different, yet reminiscent, chill of the mountain air; and the painful compromises their love involved; and the sheer joy of their intimacy. (LM, p. 368)” (EAP 334n). See EAP 140 for the original reproduction of the manuscript in question.

⁹ Such a practice of encoding her poetry, particularly poetry written explicitly for a limited female audience, was part of Bishop’s esthetics from her earliest writing. In an early poem titled “I introduce Penelope Gwin,” written, like the much-later “Dear, my compass” poem, for the eyes of another “girl” only (the poem was unpublished until recently), Bishop again uses the layering of text and image, of personal and cultural mythology, to get her point across. Most likely written in the late 1920s when she was a pupil at the Walnut Hill Boarding School for girls and apparently sent to one of her classmates, the poem playfully foretells the coded confessionalism that Bishop would later use to look more closely at the public and private identities of the female artist, the lesbian, and the girl. Alice Quinn notes that the poem was “[t]entatively dated ‘late 20s?’ by the Vassar archive” and that it was “most likely written at Walnut Hill” (244n). Quinn conjectures that “I introduce Penelope Gwin” is probably one of the “‘two or three comic poems’ Bishop refers to in a letter dated January 22, 1975, to her lifelong friend Frani Blough Muser, who attended the same summer camp in adolescence, the same boarding school, and the same college.” In the letter, Bishop describes having received the poems, along with several copies of The Blue Pencil (Walnut Hill’s student magazine) published during 1928–1929, from a Walnut Hill classmate, Judy Flynn, to whom Bishop notes she had sent the poem when a teenager. On another note, Bishop was very interested in the relationship between her writing and the visual arts. In a 1966 interview, for example, she noted, “I think I’m more visual than most poets. Many years ago, around 1942 or 1943, somebody mentioned to me something that Meyer Shapiro, the art critic, said about me: ‘She writes poems with a painter’s eye.’ I was very flattered. All my life I’ve been interested in painting. Some of my relatives painted. […] I’d love to be a painter” (Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop [CEB] 24). See Conversations with Elizabeth Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Monteiro (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996).

¹⁰ Jonathan Ellis aptly notes that “What is unusual is the uneasy balance Bishop strikes between ‘nostalgia for northern things’ and desire for northern flesh. She devotes five stanzas to haunting memories of Nova Scotia and just one stanza to love in the present” (85). In my view, this balance is struck by the blending of fantasy and reality through allusions to the fairy tale and to the personal past. See Jonathan Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth; Elizabeth Bishop (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006).

¹¹ See also Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991): 139–40, 232–35.

¹² In a 1978 interview with Elizabeth Spires, Bishop would recount this story: “I remember my mother taking me for a ride on the swan boats in Boston. Mother was dressed all in black – widows were in those days. […] A swan came up and she fed it and it bit her finger. Maybe she just told me this, but I believed it because she showed me her black kid glove and said, ‘See.’ The finger was split. Well, I was thrilled to death!” (CEB 126).

¹³ Echoing this event, an animal’s bite in Bishop’s juvenilia short story “The Last Animal” results in the near death of a young boy’s father. The father, who had provoked the animal into biting him, becomes infected with blood poisoning and nearly dies. The child, who had loved the animal, in turn loses his innocence after realizing that the animal can be dangerous; he forgets to feed it because he is concerned about his father, and the animal dies because of the boy’s neglect. See; Elizabeth Bishop, “The Last Animal,” Vassar Review 25 (April 1934): 3–5, 18–19.

¹⁴ Though these drafts are undated, Quinn notes that “there is general agreement (among scholars and the Vassar archive) that both were written in the mid-1970s” (EAP 347n). Quinn also lists the following references to swans in Bishop’s archive: her “review of Wallace Fowlie’s ‘Pantomime: A Journal of Rehearsals,’ which was published in Poetry in January 1952,” her interview with Spires, the several drafts of “Swan-Boat Ride,” Bishop’s notebooks dated 1934–1936, and the Key West notebooks from the 1940s (EAP 346–47n). See also “A mother made of dress-goods,” EAP 156–57.