Savage Beauty

I’ve been gobbling up Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Apparently Millay’s poetry is not much respected now by students of modernism. Not only did she not embrace free verse, she was, some say, slavishly metrical, and repetitive and clichéd in her use of imagery. As one critic puts it, “her formalism defined her voice” rather than the reverse. She is not easily situated in relation to avant-garde contemporaries, and perhaps it is in part because of this that the tales of Millay’s bisexual promiscuity have come to overshadow the writing. For detractors there is something tired and predictable even about the scandal.

But I’m fascinated by Millay’s journey from poverty and isolation in rural New England to cosmopolitan glamour and fame, at least as Milford presents it, as well as her formidable ego, her charisma and captivating voice, her health issues (including struggles with alcohol and then morphine addiction), and especially her many complicated relationships – with her tough-edged, devoted mother, her artistic but less brilliant younger sisters, her free-spirited husband, Eugen Boissevin, a Dutch aristocrat, and numerous lovers, including her first, who was entirely imagined. Milford constructs her portrait with reference to hundreds of letters, notes, diaries, interviews, and drafts, balancing admiration and sympathy with a subtle sense of what is grating (and amusing) about Millay’s constant self-dramatization.

I’m particularly entertained by Milford’s representation of Millay’s refusal to take on household responsibilities after she got married. As a girl Millay had cared for her sisters while her single mother worked as a traveling nurse so she knew just how all-consuming domesticity could be. In 1925 Millay and her husband bought and had renovated a 500-acre farm in upstate New York. Steepletop, as they named it, became their main place of residence. (It is now the site of the Millay Colony for the Arts.) Talking to a female reporter there following the tremendous success of her sonnet sequence Fatal Interview (which sold 33 000 copies in the first ten weeks after its publication), Millay remarks:

I have nothing to do with my household… Eugen does all that kind of thing… I don’t interfere with his ordering of the house. If there is anything I don’t like, I tell him. I have no time for it. I want to go into my dining room as if it were a restaurant, and say, ‘What a charming dinner!’

…It’s this unconcern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman’s time and interest. Eugen and I live like two bachelors. He, being the one who can throw household things off more easily than I, shoulders that end of our existence, and I have my work to do, which is the writing of poetry.

In the same interview, Millay claimed that her popularity was a consequence of the accessibility and the musicality of her forms and the general appeal of her themes: love, death, nature. My poems are, she said, “about emotions, about experiences common to everybody.” And she disavowed the impact of her sex on her writing: “A woman poet is not at all different from a man poet.” Her pointed detachment from mundane and typically female affairs appears to be consistent with these universalist ideals: she kept her mind on grander matters. However, the journalist, who had been invited to stay overnight at Steepletop, did not fail to observe that Boissevin’s household duties included the task of putting his wife to bed immediately after dinner. Milford makes explicit the reporter’s unspoken judgment: “Here was a woman nearly forty, a successful, productive author who now earned the money upon which Steepletop was run, being put to bed like a child.” The biographer respects Millay’s feminism even as she recognizes its element of bravado and the ensuing ironies.

Savage Beauty also includes dozens of Millay’s poems. The influence of the Romantics is apparent in many of them, giving credence to the modernist critics who feel she was out of step with her moment. Her first major work, for instance, “Renascence,” was described by an early fan as “the poem most like a Pre-Raphael painting.” But when I read her more risqué pieces I’m tempted to look back further, to the Restoration.

Millay’s sonnet “What lips my lips have kissed,” in particular, bears comparing to Rochester’s “Disabled Debauchee.” Both poems regard youthful promiscuity through the veil of nostalgia. Millay’s speaker, sitting alone on a rainy night, is stirred “with a quiet pain” to muse on “unremembered lads that not again / Will turn to me… with a sigh” and likens her sense of loss to that of a tree in winter, aware – presumably at some deep cellular level – that an earlier phase of blossoming has passed: “I only know that summer sang in me that in me sings no more.” Rochester’s speaker makes a mock-epic analogy between his impotent self and a bent and somewhat demented old admiral since both experience passion vicariously. The spent rake tempts others into pleasures no longer available to him in much the same way that the veteran daydreams of his valiant past when gazing on ships at a distance: “Transported, [he] thinks himself amidst his foes, / And absent yet enjoys the bloody day.”

Where Rochester represents change as a violent phenomenon – a consequence of victories and defeats (whether social, sexual, or military), Millay points to nature as the source of cycles of decay and thus embeds the promise of renewal. Time is more complexly entangled in the seventeenth-century poem since it is a future worn-out version of himself that Rochester’s speaker aligns with the aged officer who is “[d]eprived of force, but pressed with courage still”: indeed it would seem he employs this double movement – both forward and back in time – expressly in order to detach himself from the first heat of his desire.

Yet both poets arrive at a similar place. Both celebrate the erotics of memory as they turn away from the material world – with its specific and embodied relationships – and towards affects - unconscious washes of feeling - and language and imagination.

Science

I’ve just started to dip my toes (a bit warily) into the work in cognitive science and literature.

Because of my interest in reading, I’ve been more aware of studies (mostly from  neuoroscience rather than cognitive science) that look at what happens in the brain when we read; my reading here has been primarily works directed at popular audiences (like Stanilas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain ).  Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction was my first sustained encounter with an approach that tries to combine cognitive psychology and literary interpretation.

I’m not close to being finished with the pile of books I need to read to catch up with this conversation, but I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit skeptical.

Zunshine’s book is fascinating and, as many have noted, takes a truly interdisciplinary approach.  Her close readings are engaging and her explanations of the terms of cognitive science are clear without seeming overly simplified. But I’m not sure I actually learned anything new about the novels she examined.  Does adding the idea of metarepresentation really add to our understanding of Lovelace as either an unreliable narrator, or a character who lies even to himself?  It’s true that having terms like metarepresentation and source tags help us break down particular moments in the narrative, and help explain our attraction to the novel in the first place (which is, of course, her argument). Ultimately though, I didn’t find myself reconsidering any of the interpretive lines of thought already existing around Clarissa. On the other hand, I found myself very convinced by her discussions of how she has used these ideas in her classroom. Giving students the terms—the idea of source tags and levels of metarepresentation—makes a great deal of sense in for texts like Clarissa, or her other key examples, Lolita and Mrs Dalloway. 

For me it is always a small step from how we presents ideas in the classroom to how we present ideas to the wider community. So I have found myself wondering whether interdisciplinary approaches like this could and should be used to articulate the ongoing significance of the humanities? (Or maybe they are and I haven’t been reading the right books? Suggestions welcome!)  I say this knowing that my students (not students studying primarily literature, but in a general education writing course), who, when asked during one particular unit to consider the significance of reading, are quite convinced by assertions that the “brain’s synaptic connections are coevolving with an environment in which media consumption is a dominant factor.” * They are less convinced by Frederick Douglass’ (to my mind quite moving) account of learning to read, or the claim Azar Nafisi makes that “what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”**

I’m not saying I LIKE this fact, or that I think it isn’t a misperception about literature and literary conceptions of the world that in itself might stand to be corrected (I do my best!). But if we are using interdisciplinary approaches--and in particular the new sciences of the brain and theories of the mind--should we be doing so simply to create more ‘readings’ or should that energy be directed at other objects / objectives?

As I was working on this over the last few days, an exchange in the Stone came to my attention.  Some of these issues are articulated there much more gracefully! 

*N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention:  The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” in Profession (2007): 192.  

** Reading Lolita in Tehran, (New York:  Random House, 2003, 2007), 3.

Mazes

Haywood’s Fantomina drew me into British eighteenth century. The protean Fantomina herself seems to stand in for the instability of the period’s texts and reading experiences--and the  mysterious quality of those experience. Is Fantomina more pleased by the strength of her genius or the prospect of renewed amorous attentions? And to which pleasure is the reader drawn? What did it feel like to read prose in 1724?  How might prose fiction be particularly useful for women to read or to write?  

In the years since, my scholarship has centered on issues of readerly freedom and readerly constraint.  How much freedom do readers have and how might readers benefit from reading within prescribed reading positions, or from externally constructed lenses or filters? What is a modern reader and when and how did she/he emerge? 

I have spent the last few years teaching writing, in a topics-oriented program; my class is designed around problems of media change and media history, broadly construed.  Occasionally, I prompt students to write about and discuss their own reading habits.  There usually is a clear correlation between students who describe themselves as avid readers and students who are accomplished writers--a surprise to no one, I think! What is a surprise, though, is that even among students who admit that they read infrequently, who describe reading as a chore, or mention the many ‘unnecessary details’ of much of their assigned reading, there is a sadness for lost reading habits and a sense that they would be smarter and better thinkers if they had a better foundation built upon the habits of print reading (the habits, not necessarily the print). Their habits and their sense that such habits have larger consequences is, of course, confirmed by recent studies on the nation’s reading habits performed by the NEA.  All of this is to (vaguely) gesture toward the connections between habits of reading and the big educational picture--not to mention the possible roots of our culture’s anti-intellectualism and increasing suspicion about the project of public education--in attitudes about reading.  And all of this is note additionally, of course, that we are in a very eighteenth century sort of moment as we debate and work out these connections and experience the transition away from--or profound changes in--print culture. 

As Danielle above, “The eighteenth century’s privileging of the self and the social over domestic relations provides a provocative point of comparison and contrast for our own transitional moment.”  I have leapt rather quickly into the present (perhaps a reflection of my teaching, which holds me fairly firmly there), but the questions of how the eighteenth century can shed light on this historical moment--and the problems of the mazes that connect past and present--remain key and  I hope we will discuss them more here. 

Dangerous Liaisons

At an academic job interview several years ago I was asked what had drawn me to the study of eighteenth-century literature in the first place. I wasn’t prepared for such a personal question. I blame it on Dangerous Liaisons, I said, referring to Stephen Frears’ 1988 film (based on the 1985 play by Christopher Hampton based on the 1782 novel by Choderlos de Laclos) which I had seen two or three times the year it came out and which I had glimpsed again at the gym a few days before. The movie was my first exposure to the period, I said (probably true), and I was instantly gripped by the intelligence and cruel wit with which the libertine protagonists, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovitch), pursue their sexual intrigues, by their insight into and unflinching honesty about their motivations in playing their private game-turned-war together, and by the tragic ending, gorgeously encapsulated in matching images of mounds of snow stained red after a duel and bloody smears across a face that has, until this final, violent démaquillage, always been impeccably painted and utterly implacable.

Several years later I took a course on gender and authorship in the British writing of a slightly earlier period. Encountering England’s “merry monarch” Charles II, sexual satirists like Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, and William Wycherley, and historical courtesans like Lady Castlemaine breathed new life into the glamorous European court culture of my imagination. I eventually wrote a Master’s thesis exploring female libertinism in the Restoration. Some of my early research questions were undoubtedly inspired by my initial Hollywood-mediated view of the period. It was clear that male writers like Rochester and Wycherley identified strongly with aristocratic notions of libertinism but weren’t women like Behn and Castlemaine libertines too – the predecessors of the Marquise? And how did status affect historical ideas and practices of sexuality? (What difference did it make, for instance, that Wycherley and Behn were not thoroughbred nobles like other court writers?)

As I explained to my interviewers, similar concerns with the relation between status and sexuality have persisted through my doctoral (now book) project on intimate settings in eighteenth-century writing, especially insofar as I am interested in how noble codes and practices of intimacy are passed along and/or modified as the elite private space of the closet begins to find a home beyond the court. I was pleased. I had managed to improvise a coherent little narrative of the evolution of my research in response to a question that took me by surprise. Well done, I thought, but I didn’t get a callback.

After watching the film again last week I have to say that it really does represent much of what I find satisfying about the historical and cultural period I study, but that the reasons I came up with at the interview only just begin to explain it. It is true that Dangerous Liaisons gives a fresh (old) perspective on the passion and elegance and trauma of male-female relations and the double binds faced by women who dare(d) to seek autonomy within them. But it struck me during this recent viewing that there is much more to it than that. To begin with, while some of the intimate duos that form or transform over the course of the film are interesting in and of themselves (especially that of Valmont and Merteuil), they are, without exception, all more interesting in terms of their impact on (a) the individual participants and (b) the larger social network to which they belong. While sexuality is the medium the two former lovers use to make other men and women their pawns, power is the ultimate object. Physical pleasure is incidental. Merteuil and Valmont’s shared aim, at first, is quietly to wreck havoc on the lives of selected targets from within their elite circle. Then, more complexly, the competition becomes about the degree of self-control each can exert as they confront their own unwilled and unwanted desires for intimacy: Who can dance longest in the flames of attraction without being burned by love? The film’s emphasis on both the personal stoicism demanded by and the social consequences of dangerous liaisons (thus the frequent close-ups of faces and bodies at war with themselves and long shots of audience members regarding one another at the opera house or concert hall) reflects an orientation of the period as a whole that appeals to me. The couple and especially the family have dominated the twentieth-century social imaginary but that is starting to change, especially in the context of the proliferation of digital media. The eighteenth century’s privileging of the self and the social over domestic relations provides a provocative point of comparison and contrast for our own transitional moment.

Finally what probably appeals to me most about Dangerous Liaisons as a representation of the eighteenth century is its theatrical Baroque aesthetic. The ordered intricacy of the plot, which repeatedly circles back to the growing tension between the central characters, is everywhere mirrored in the film’s lush visual and aural landscape. The players are all elaborately coiffed and powdered, and their gestures shaped by layer upon layer of embroidered fabric in luscious colours. The same swirling symmetrical patterns cover the heavy furniture they perch or lounge upon, or where they prepare to pounce. The gardens have mazes, and the interiors are often en filade, each room giving way to the next. At one point, after a heated confrontation with the Vicomte, the Marquise retreats to a mirrored gallery where her frazzled visage appears in infinite regress before she plants a smile and slips away to meet a lover waiting in a hidden boudoir. The original score by George Fenton and contemporary incidental music from Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel slows and swells with the same combination of restraint and excess. Ditto the rhythms of spoken language. (Some critics did not like John Malkovich’s self-conscious staccato delivery but to my ear this audible artifice is apt, especially when punctuated by moments of uncontrolled rage or pain.) Director Frears, like an artist of period he seeks to represent, makes character, narrative, and theme subordinate to – or rather co-ordinates of – style.

Ultimately I think it’s this ordered intricacy and the keen sense of correspondence between the conceptual and the material that draws me to the literature and art of the long eighteenth century. My modern hunger for psychological depth and complexity is not left wanting, yet these features are ultimately inseparable from the myriad formal and visible structures by which they are unfolded.

Coming Soon!

Observations on the eighteenth century . . .