Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"The I of each is to the I of each, a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself": Marianne Moore's Strategic Selfhood

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.1998.0019

1080-6601

Kirstin Hotelling,

Music History and Culture

“The I of each is to the I of each, a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself”: Marianne Moore’s Strategic Selfhood Kirstin Hotelling (bio) Although poets such as Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson share Marianne Moore’s well known aversion to self-indulgent poetry, it is Moore’s unmatched ability to proffer moral standards without recourse to a fleshy, lyric “I” that has made her, for feminist critics, the most difficult and diversely read poet of this century. Grounding feminist principle in autonomous self-definition, and the autonomous self in female sexuality, the most vocal feminist critics of the past thirty years have largely contributed to what Taffy Martin terms the “myth” of Marianne Moore: 1 the popular conception of a self-protective, well mannered eccentric who flirted coyly with her peers, dutifully went to church, and wrote reticent poems with what Louise Bogan called “her delightful innocence of approach.” 2 In some ways, of course, Moore was all of these things; however, in search of autobiography, political purpose, and sexual frankness, the majority of feminist critics through the mid-1980s glossed over the intricate and often paradoxical ways in which Moore was also none of these things at all. As Elizabeth Bishop once wryly reminisced, Moore “was rather contradictory, you know, illogical sometimes. . . . You could never tell what she was going to like or dislike.” 3 In the last ten years, several critics have sought to remedy, or complicate, this portrait of Moore, but it lingers tenaciously. 4 Undoubtedly this is due in part to Moore’s own cape-bedecked complicity in fostering this persona within the public spotlight of her later life. Cristanne Miller notes that this [End Page 75] stereotype of Moore was so firmly entrenched by midcentury that even her close friend Bishop encouraged it, at least in part; Bishop’s memoir, “Efforts of Affection,” and especially her poem “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” frequently construct an “image of the poet as quaintly harmless.” 5 At the same time, recent feminist scholarship on Bishop often endorses, and thus inadvertently strengthens, the image of Moore as archaically prim and private in an effort to position Bishop as a different—namely autobiographical—poet. Within Moore criticism, this myth appears, at once innocently and insidiously, in readings that emphasize her observational prowess at the expense of her moral and political integrity, or in analyses that describe her difficult technique as self-protective armor, a “shield that [Moore] constantly hides behind.” 6 Moore’s poems are marked by stunning concrete descriptions and a shifting, restless, even reticent “I,” but to dismiss or praise her work as masked or object-oriented is to ignore the biting satire and subversive coils of language that make her work so radical, as both modernist and feminist. The power of Moore’s observations cannot be grasped in isolation from her refusal of the stable lyric “I,” for, as Swenson once asked, who “of us is able to be such an acute instrument for the objectification of sensual perceptions and states of mind as she, without emphasizing self as subject?” 7 Swenson’s question implies that it is exactly the tension created by Moore’s remarkably precise observations and her simultaneous undermining of the “I”/eye from which they emanate that marks Moore’s most puzzling, and rewarding, poetic. That poetic, with its vital relevance to the currently shifting parameters of American feminist criticism, is the focus of this essay. In the following pages, I will draw from Moore’s poetry and archive to suggest that she developed a style of authorship based on the self as strategy, an adjustable lens through which to view the world without demanding a look in return. In an effort to establish the contemporary currency of Moore’s feminist method, I employ the work of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler to show why Moore came to believe that . . . The I of each is to the I of each, a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself 8 or, as Moore phrased it in 1955, “The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most conscious aim.” 9 Exploring...