A Companion to

TWENTIETH-CENTURY

POETRY

EDITED BY NEIL ROBERTS

8

Poetry and Gender

Edward Larrissy

I

One still encounters the complaint that the word `gender', as used in literary

theory, is a misnomer for `sex'. This complaint is based on the traditional usage

whereby `gender' is a grammatical term, referring to the inflections of nouns

and adjectives in certain languages - German and French, for example. While sex

is certainly a topic that raises its head in literary discussions of gender, the latter

word is used precisely because it implies, with its overtones of grammar, a social

or conventional organization or structuring of sexuality. One reason why the topic

of gender has been so productive of theory and controversy is that it has naturally

become intertwined with many of the theories of human society and signification

produced in this century. Yet all theories of gender, even those which see our

perceptions of sexuality as socially determined, refer to sexual difference - to the

binary categorization of male and female, or (and they are not the same thing)

masculine and feminine. However, this does not mean that all the theories to

which we shall refer see a stable binary categorization as truthful or illuminating.

But it is always a topic of debate, even when rejected in favour of more subtle

representations of gender difference. The importance of this point may be gauged

by the readiness with which theories of gender employ the word `difference', or

seek illumination from theories where `difference' is a central concept. A crude

but instructive way into the topic of poetry and gender would therefore point out

that it demonstrates the relevance of gender difference, however conceived, to

the study of poetry. Thus, it would entertain the possibility that, whether for

social or biological reasons, or both, men and women write about different things

or in different ways. To put it another way, gender difference, as it influences writing,

may be studied under the headings of content and form, always bearing in mind

the ultimate artificiality of this division, to which I shall give provisional credence

in what follows.

The persistence of the great binary is also evident in the way one can categorize

types of theory in relation to it. Thus, much of the most vital work on gender and

literature has been more or less overtly feminist, and has been chiefly preoccupied

with describing or theorizing women's (or `feminine') writing. In the process, theories

about men's (or `masculine') writing have been generated; and more recently there

has been a relatively autonomous growth of interest in this question. In seeking illumination

for the study of poetry, then, I shall first examine salient points in the voluminous

tradition of theorizing which orients itself chiefly in relation to women's

writing, or the feminine, and then go on to look more briefly at work on `masculine'

writing.

II

An obvious way in which the content of women's writing might be expected to differ

from that of men's would be by virtue of the experiences it records. Men's and women's

biological experiences are different. Historically the differences have been emphasized

and supplemented by marked differences in upbringing, education and pursuits. It is

understandable that Jan Montefiore, in her lucid book on Feminism and Poetry, should

use the phrase `Poetry and Women's Experience' as a subtitle for her introductory

chapter (Montefiore, 1987, pp. 1-25). To the extent that the point is still valid in the

second half of the twentieth century, it might be worth considering poems such as

Sylvia Plath's `Morning Song' or `Cut' as examples of a domestic women's poetry. But

the statement of domestic location or occupation is hardly interesting in itself. Most

readers would claim that there is far more to Plath's rendering of female experience

than this: that she manages to convey with absorbing complexity the experience of a

woman interacting with her environment while at the same time undergoing a period

of intense suffering. This would be true of the poems mentioned, and the point could

be amplified by a reading of some of Plath's more sexually explicit poems - `Poppies

in July', for instance, in which the speaker refers to the flowers as `little hell flames',

as `wrinkly and clear red like the skin of a mouth', and as `little bloody skirts'. Here,

as Montefiore (1987, p. 17) observes, the speaker luridly evokes the power and danger

of sexuality through associations of whorishness, lipstick, menstruation and deflowering.

The poem ends with the speaker's wish that she could distil the opiates of the

poppies, and thus find tranquillity without their frightening redness (`But colorless.

Colorless.'). This, as much as anything, makes it seem natural to regard the poem as

a representation of female experience. But equally important, as Montefiore points

out, is the traditional association of women's sexuality with flowers. Women's writing

is bound to operate in relation to traditions which have been predominantly shaped

by men, and this complicates any account of women's poetry which privileges the idea

of experience.

Nevertheless, the very consciousness of this fact may enhance women's writing, a

point made by Marianne Dekoven in relation to a much-anthologized poem by H. D.

102 Edward Larrissy

(Hilda Doolittle), a co-founder with Ezra Pound of Imagism. `Sea Rose', like `Poppies

in July', makes use of the traditional flower imagery, this time in the time-honoured

form of the rose, emblem of feminine beauty. But the opening lines of the poem

contain what Dekoven calls `a jarring invocation' (Dekoven, 1999, p. 189):

Rose, harsh rose,

marred and with stint of petals,

meagre flower, thin,

sparse of leaf

Dekoven comments on the way in which the vocabulary employed here contradicts

`the opulence, the concupiscent lushness, of conventional images of the rose' (ibid, p.

190). She places this observation in the context of a discussion which demonstrates

the innovativeness of modernist writing, especially modernist writing by women, in

subverting gender stereotypes. `Sea Rose' is a very good example, since it is so fully

at one with the Imagist injunctions about brevity, concision and rhythmic accuracy.

Indeed, its language could be seen as referring to these ideals, and thus, by its mingling

of topics, as suggesting a new, modern female sexuality.

`Experience' is a broad term, of course. It can suggest the relative amorphousness

of unreflective response; but it can also point to the direction taken by a life, or given

to it. Autobiographical writing, in the widest sense, is an obvious example of the

shaping of experience; and so is any writing that seems to be offering a view about

the emergence of identity. For many women critics and writers it is important to keep

in mind the way in which writing can offer a means of reflecting on female identity.

Montefiore (1987, p. 18) gives the example of a poem by Alison Fell, `Girl's Gifts',

which offers a glimpse of a girl's relationships with older women, and by implication

of the importance of these relationships to the forming of a woman's identity. Equally

relevant would be a poem such as Denise Levertov's `Hypocrite Women', which reflects

on the weaknesses to which mature women may be vulnerable. Considerations such

as these predominate in the mode of criticism to which Elaine Showalter, in her essay

`Towards a feminist poetics', has given the name `gynocritics': that is to say, criticism

which focuses on women's writing and on the value it has for the writer (Showalter,

1979, p. 25).

Toril Moi has analysed the inconsistency, imprecision and confusion to which

an emphasis on experience, such as is to be found in Showalter's essay, may be

prone: the text tends to be ignored, becoming merely a transparent medium for

experience; theory is overtly rejected as `male', but ends up being reintroduced

in a haphazard fashion (including via the work of male theorists) (Moi, 1985,

pp. 76-7). But, as Moi concludes, `what “knowledge” is ever uninformed by theoretical

assumptions'? A major part of the constitution of feminist criticism over the

past thirty years or so has been strongly theoretical, not least in the shape of that

body of work which can be encapsulated in the phrase `French feminism'. Furthermore,

theory assumes that experience cannot even be relied upon to understand

Poetry and Gender 103

itself. A major topic addressed by theory is ideology: that is to say, the socially

dominant forms of thought which may be providing an unconscious shape and

structure to what seems like the freedom of experience. Feminist theory addresses

this topic; and French theory, in particular, may have a special interest for the

student of poetry, since it lays a strong emphasis on types of language use which

could be called poetic.

For the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective (1978), whose work was

accomplished in the 1970s, but whose influence is still discernible, the study of

the gender ideology of texts must work in tandem with the broad social critique

and analysis offered by Marxism. In particular, they draw insight from the work

of the French Marxist literary critic Pierre Macherey, a follower of Louis Althusser.

The traditional Marxist view is that the dominant forms of thought in any

society reflect the interests of the dominant social class. These interests will take

their specific shape from the dominant mode of economic production in that society.

This means that the way any society thinks about itself and the world will, to a

significant degree, be independent of individual will and will thus be unconscious.

Fredric Jameson uses the phrase The Political Unconscious as the title of one of his

books, and he is indebted for his detailed analysis to Macherey, who employs the

image of a broken and distorting mirror to convey the selective blindness of ideology.

There are two overlapping ways in which this conception is of use to socialist-

feminist criticism of the kind practised by the members of the Collective: first, in

providing the conceptualization of the general ideology of a society; and second,

in suggesting that attitudes to gender are shaped in like manner by selective blindness.

My own book on modern poetry, Reading Twentieth Century Poetry: The Language

of Gender and Objects, though not of a notably feminist cast, emerges from the

same kind of theoretical ambience, in that it attempts to add some of the insights

of Marxism to certain observations about gender. It argues that the concentration

of the appearance of objects in much twentieth-century poetry, from Pound to Heaney,

can be seen in terms of the Marxist concept of alienation, but it supplements the

point by adding that this concentration is also seen by many male poets as an

arena for self-conscious virtuosity, and even as a sign of masculine virtue (Larrissy,

1990).

There is another obvious way in which the notion of ideology is relevant to the

question of gender, and that is because of its use in the phrase `patriarchal ideology'.

This may sound like a dogma. Yet, by its very nature, it cannot merely be an

external body of imposed thought. For a dominant ideology infects those whom

it oppresses. Much feminist poetry has been concerned not just with an attack on

the presumptions of patriarchy, but with `consciousness-raising' for women. This

concern may overlap with the emphasis on women's experience; but it may also give

evidence of an awareness of the complex problems involved in the attempt to assert

the value of women's experience. Claire Buck notes, for instance, that Denise Riley's

poem `A note on sex and “the reclaiming of language” ' explicitly addresses `the

dangers of assuming any kind of authenticity about women's experience or about

104 Edward Larrissy

a utopian ideal that postulates an essential femininity undistorted by patriarchal

impositions' (Buck, 1996, p. 95).

III

But many feel that patriarchal ideology cannot convincingly be explained solely

in terms of capitalism or any other particular socio-economic formation. The search

for the roots of sexual oppression has seemed to necessitate a profound engagement

with psychological theories. Among these, it is the work of Freud which has

been most conducive, albeit quite indirectly, to radical thinking. In Britain, Juliet

Mitchell made a plea for the serious consideration of Freud in her Psychoanalysis

and Feminism (1974) on the basis of the rigour of his analysis, however unpalatable

it might superficially appear. But she herself acknowledges the importance of

Jacques Lacan in fostering a sympathetic reappraisal of Freud's work. The attraction

of Lacan for theorists of gender, including feminists, can be epitomized in the

crucial reorientation involved in his special use of the term `phallus' instead of

the Freudian `penis'. This modification is intended to convey that the valuing of the

penis represents a social consensus rather than a biological imperative. Nevertheless,

this is a notoriously question-begging ruse; and feminist theorists in France have

been happy to develop it in ways that make the consensus seem not at all normative

or natural. At the same time they have developed another facet of Lacan's psychoanalytic

thought: namely, his insistence on the linguistic basis of unconscious

mental formations.

Lacan's use of the term `phallus', and for that matter his concentration on

language, is inseparable from his account of the central feature of the Freudian

narrative, the Oedipus complex. Freud deduced that the first object of desire, for

both boy and girl child, was the mother. In the Oedipal stage both children

must consciously renounce this desire in deference to the prior claim of the father,

a claim asserted and maintained by his possession of the penis desired by the

mother. The boy must defer satisfaction of his desire until maturity permits

him to be the father in another relationship; the girl must accept that, by virtue

of her lack of the penis, her role will be to take the mother's place at maturity.

These different paths taken by boy and girl child are both motivated by the sense

of a figurative castration relative to the father. As we have seen, Lacan's development

of this idea involved his use of the term `phallus', to emphasize that the valuing of

the penis was a social convention. But this symbolic status of the phallus is entirely

bound up with the child's entry into the symbolic structures of language and

culture, which occurs at the same moment as the Oedipal stage - which could

indeed be seen as an aspect of the Oedipal stage. For Lacan, the phallus is the

crucial signifier of difference, and in apprehending this, the child apprehends also

the character of linguistic symbolism - which relies on substitution and deferral

of meaning - and of the symbolic order of society, in which the role of the father

Poetry and Gender 105

is fundamental. This complex of ideas Lacan sometimes refers to as the Symbolic,

or the Symbolic Order. It is to be contrasted with what he terms the Imaginary:

the pre-Oedipal state in which the child enjoys an illusion of unity and plenitude

which derives from its undisturbed relationship with the mother. The transition

from Imaginary to Symbolic is also the moment when the unconscious is precipitated,

for the child now has to repress its desire for the mother. Lacan's emphasis on

linguistic phenomena in the unconscious registers the fact that the primal repression

which inaugurates the unconscious is the same phenomenon as entry into the

Symbolic.

IV

For the French feminist Hélčne Cixous, Lacan's concept of the phallus is a prime

example of pervasive patriarchal phallocentrism, which is founded in `patriarchal

binary thought'. She gives examples of the typical binaries which overlap with and

support the binary of masculine and feminine:

Activity/passivity

Sun/Moon

Culture/Nature

Day/Night

(Sellers, 1994, p. 37)

The list goes on to include terms which hint at Cixous' analysis:

Head/Heart

Intelligible/Palpable

Logos/Pathos

(Ibid., p. 37)

The second term, associated with the feminine, is inferior in relation to the first. The

first is privileged in a `hierarchy' (ibid., p. 38) which finds stability in this structure.

To this stability Cixous opposes the insecurity of difference, which is heterogeneous

and does not organize itself around stable structures. In this she reveals her indebtedness

to Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism and to his concept of différance.

Derrida's thesis is that the illusions of logocentrism are founded on the notion that

discourse can organize itself securely around certain privileged terms which are identified

with the truth, and can thereby give an accurate and unified representation of

the truth. But Derrida insists that the character of language is bound up with difference,

multiplicity and deferral of meaning. This means that logocentric discourse,

when analysed, is found not to achieve its goal, and indeed is forced to depend on the

use of the supposedly inferior or subordinate term. The demonstration of this effect

106 Edward Larrissy

(and not destruction or pulling apart) is what is meant by deconstruction. Derrida

believes that the attributes of language which can be summed up in his coinage différance

are revealed by writing (écriture). For this reason, écriture is his model of language

- as opposed to voice. Adherence to the idea of voice can lead, and has routinely

led in Western culture, to the buttressing of logocentrism, with its illusions of unified

meaning and intention.

Cixous' indebtedness to Derrida is particularly obvious in her adoption of the term

écriture féminine (`feminine writing'), which allows itself the freedom of the play of difference.

Yet one should not think of this as female writing, even though the French

adjective is ambiguous: Cixous is ostensibly referring to a particular orientation which

historically has been easier for women to adopt, but which in principle is also available

to men. In support of this idea, she asserts that she believes in bisexuality. This

is not a bisexuality which would merely reinstall the binary, nor the representation

of a unified being, but what she calls `other bisexuality' (Sellers, 1994, p. 41): the presence

of both sexes in different ways in each individual. Nevertheless, Cixous can sometimes

sound as if she has returned to a familiar kind of mysticism and mystique of

the female. Such is the claim of Toril Moi, who concludes that Cixous' `vision of female

writing is . . . firmly located within the closure of the Lacanian Imaginary: a space in

which difference has been abolished' (Moi, 1985, p. 117). This unexpected conclusion

can hardly be quite what Cixous had intended, however; and it remains the case

that the idea of écriture féminine is seen as a fertile and suggestive contribution to

feminist theory. However, its potential relevance to the theory of poetic language is

arguably capable of being treated alongside the arguments of other French feminists.

So it will be convenient, before examining this possibility, to consider the work of

Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

Irigaray, more than Cixous, reacts in quite detailed and specific ways against

Lacan. But this is partly because the development of her thought was so profoundly

shaped by his. She criticizes his conservatism in a section of her `Psychoanalytic

Theory: Another Look' (Irigaray, 1985, pp. 60-7). But her training as a psychoanalyst

means that she has much to contribute to the discussion of psychoanalysis

in general; and her intellectual ambition has issued in wide-ranging philosophical

debate.

Irigaray's most influential work, Spéculum de l'autre femme (1974; tr. 1985, Speculum

of the Other Woman) refers to the mirror used by doctors for internal examination of

women, but also comments on the way Lacan had used the image of the mirror to

represent a stage in the development of the child's self-consciousness: a child whom

he assumed to be male. The mirror image also refers to the mimetic logic of representation,

which she equates with an ideology of monolithic identity, and which she

implies has dominated Western culture from Plato onwards. Her term for this ideology

is `the logic of the Same'. It is easy to see how notions of différance might be

invoked as applied to this logic, and indeed Irigaray, like Cixous, displays the influence

of Derrida. The best-known image by means of which she seeks to convey the

nature of feminine difference is that in which she offers an alternative image to that

Poetry and Gender 107

of the phallus: the lips of the vagina. This image implies that women's sexuality is

`always at least double' - at least; and indeed predominantly plural: for `woman has

sex organs more or less everywhere' (Irigaray, 1985, p. 28). This plurality runs deep: woman

is `other in herself', and not least in `her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions

leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory

words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever

listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully-elaborated code in hand' (ibid.,

p. 29). As in the case of Cixous, feminine language sounds like certain Romantic and

post-Romantic definitions of poetic language.

Julia Kristeva has made poetic language the subject of an important work, La

Révolution du langage poétique (1974; tr. 1984, Revolution in Poetic Language). Its broad

linguistic basis is an analysis of what she calls the `signifying process' (Kristeva, 1986,

p. 91), in the study of which she discerns two trends: one, the semiotic and the

other the symbolic. She believes these trends do indeed correspond to two interacting

aspects of signification. The semiotic is a preliminary ordering of the pre-Oedipal

drives, which are gathered in what she terms the chora (the Greek for a womb), a term

used by Plato in the Timaeus for a formless receptacle of all things. For Kristeva, the

semiotic chora is `an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation'

(Kristeva, 1986, p. 93). Her definition of the symbolic follows closely Lacan's description

of entry into the Symbolic Order: once this has occurred, the semiotic will be

subject to repression, and will make itself felt only as a pressure on symbolic

language: in rhythmic play, in redundancy, contradiction, nonsense, discontinuity and

gaps. Poetic language has been a practice where this marginalized aspect of language

in general has been allowed limited license. But the symbolist poets Lautréamont and

Mallarmé are studied by her in Revolution in Poetic Language as exponents of a `signifying

practice' which gives unprecedented expression to `the semiotic disposition'.

Neither of these poets is a woman; and for Kristeva, while `the feminine is defined

as marginal under patriarchy' (Moi, 1985, p. 166), it is, partly for this very reason,

only a patriarchal construct, a way of conceiving the marginal. In fact, Kristeva

believes that a subversively marginal position of avant-gardism is patently as open

to male as to female writers, even though, as John Lechte points out, the `unnameable,

heterogeneous element is called “feminine” in Kristeva's writings of the mid

seventies' (Lechte, 1990, p. 201).

V

The writings of the French feminists might lend themselves to the claim that there

were `feminine' and `masculine' poetic forms and uses of poetic language, although,

as we have seen, it would require considerable qualification to make use of Kristeva

in this way. Jan Montefiore has sketched the outlines of an Irigarayan analysis of poetry,

and consistent with the work of Irigaray herself, has suggested that there are actual

differences between men's and women's poetry. Referring to love poems by Edna St

108 Edward Larrissy

Vincent Millay and Christina Rossetti, she notes that `whereas the [male] Imaginary

poem enacts a fantasy of plenitude, of an Other who creates and grants one's own identity,

these women poets begin with the premise that love is, for whatever reason, not

fully returned, and satisfaction is not granted even in fantasy' (Montefiore, 1987, p.

136). This finding is congruent (though not to be equated) with an undoubted tendency

among critics both of Romantic and twentieth-century poetry to see women's

poetry as less egotistical than that of men, and for women writers and critics to look

to a tradition of women's writing, marked by differences such as these. Yet it might

be that differences of this kind, which are not necessarily a matter of language only,

are historically determined, and do not require Irigaray's theories to explain them.

Montefiore focuses on `ambiguity' and `contradiction' (ibid., p. 158), which are wellworn

terms in the analysis of poetic language. But it emerges that poetic language is

not really the object of Montefiore's analysis. For instance, in discussing Adrienne

Rich's sequence, `Twenty-One Love Poems', Montefiore notes the references to `the

paradoxes of language encountered by the lovers, notably the distance between

experience and its articulation, the difficulty of speech and the need for an honest

response' (ibid., p. 165). But this is a matter of language as subject matter in the

poem. Montefiore does not claim (it would certainly be an implausible claim) that

Rich's use of poetic language is remotely avant-garde or subversive. Furthermore,

addressing the content of the poems, Montefiore concedes that `I am not clear that

these problems, as presented in the poems, are really specific to women' (ibid., p. 166).

But this is not to surrender the struggle: the strength of women's poetry, for Montefiore,

must lie in `oppositional engagement' in the `struggle to transform inherited

meanings' (ibid., p. 179). In so far as this is a matter of language and form, feminist

criticism may seek to demonstrate that this struggle makes itself felt in the language

and texture of avant-garde poetry such as that of Gertrude Stein or H. D.; or that the

adventurous use of language by more recent poets, such as Sylvia Plath, Veronica

Forrest-Thomson or Medbh McGuckian, provides instances of feminine writing. But

many critics and readers agree with Montefiore that feminine writing, according to

any meaningful definition, is always a relative condition, the product of a transformative

struggle with inherited forms. Montefiore herself offers the relevant example

of a type of innovation which, though formal, is not linguistic: Stevie Smith, she

claims, transforms well-known fables and fairy-tales in an ironic fashion which

amounts to a characteristically feminine social critique (ibid., pp. 45-6). Marianne

Dekoven makes a different but related point, which now enjoys wide acceptance,

about formal innovation in the twentieth century: that if we define `the salient formal

features of Modernism' we find `that women writers were just as instrumental in developing

these forms as the great male writers' (Dekoven, 1999, p. 175). This recognition

was one of the motivations behind the compiling of a widely disseminated

anthology, Bonnie Kime Scott's The Gender of Modernism (Scott, 1990). Another

motivation, however, was the recognition of the importance for modernism of

ideas about gender, both at the thematic and the formal level, in the works of

male as well as female writers.

Poetry and Gender 109

VI

If there is anything specific to women's writing, it seems natural to ask whether or

not there is a specifically male (or masculine) type of poetry. The claims made

about twentieth-century male poets have tended to link their anti-Romanticism with

their misogyny. Thus, Dekoven cites Pound's vorticist manifesto as `characteristic of

Modernism's self-imagination as a mode of masculine domination' and puts it in

the context of modernist advocacy of `firm, hard, dry, terse, classical masculinity,

over against the messy, soft, vague, flowery, effusive, adjectival femininity of the

late Victorians' (Dekoven, 1999, p. 176). She explains this rhetoric largely in terms

of `fear of women's new power' at the turn of the century (ibid., p. 174), although

in my own book, I suggest that it is still very much at work in the latter half

of the twentieth century (Larrissy, 1990). Nor, of course, is the rhetoric merely a

foundation for criticism. It is present in a profound way within the poetry: a complex

but readily apprehended example can, I think, be found in William Carlos Williams's

`For Elsie' (Larrissy, 1990, pp. 81-4). Dekoven adds a useful qualification, however,

when she notes that `masculinist misogyny . . . was almost universally accompanied

by its dialectical twin: a fascination and strong identification with the empowered

feminine' (Dekoven, 1999, p. 174). Whatever about the `almost universally', this is

certainly the case with a number of important modernist poets. Dekoven herself

cites Yeats as a rather obvious example of such ambivalence. Gloria C. Kline in

her The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman (Kline, 1983) had pointed

to the mixture of exaltation and subjugation involved in Yeats's attitude. Readers

and critics had always been more or less aware of the importance to Yeats of the

traditional female personification of Ireland; and Maud Ellmann (1986) and

C. L. Innes (1993, pp. 93-108) offered valuable insights into the extent to which

the boundaries between masculine and feminine could become eroded in his

work. Elizabeth Cullingford (1993) showed how perceptions such as these could

be understood in relation to Yeats's place in history; and in my own book on

Yeats I seek to demonstrate that his ambivalent understanding of woman is interwoven

with everything that is essential to his artistic thought and practice, and with

the changes they undergo (Larrissy, 1994). Thus his doctrine of the Mask (to take

but one example) is indebted to his sense of women's self-presentation, but is

also something the male poet may learn from as a way of gaining power over

women. This specific ambivalence is woven into his occult theories and into his

sense of what is the appropriate poetic style and tone: the commanding rhetoric

of many of his middle and later poems, for instance, is something he thinks of

as masculine. Furthermore, he is capable of writing in the spirit of a number of

different positions in the spectrum suggested by this ambivalence, ranging from

complete identification with woman to overt misogyny. Nor is the misogyny

itself simply to be rejected as unpalatable. Yeats was not the kind of poet who

shied away from confronting the part played in life by hatred; and he was

110 Edward Larrissy

Poetry and Gender 111

inclined to think that there was a fundamental antipathy between the sexes

which was inextricably interwoven with fundamental attraction: `Love is like the

lion's tooth' (`Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers').

A broadly comparable ambivalence is to be found in Eliot. Readers have always

commented on lines about `female smells in shuttered rooms', about the presentation

of Grishkin or the woman in `Hysteria', and Tony Pinkney (1984) has documented

the pervasiveness of misogynist overtones in Eliot as a central piece of evidence in a

psychoanalytic study. Maud Ellmann has connected fear of woman with the fear of

what undermines and `confuse[s] . . . the sense', and has demonstrated the connection

of such fears with the development of Eliot's fragmentary and suggestive poetic, which

deliberately embodies the contagion even as it expresses the anxiety (Ellmann, 1987,

pp. 106-7). In this regard, the general tendency of Eliot criticism is comparable to

that of Yeats criticism: namely, to emphasize the extent to which gender images

become an opportunity for experimental identification and projection, and thus

encourage innovative poetry. Similar conclusions have been drawn about Heaney

(Haffenden, 1987; Larrissy, 1990, pp. 148-58) and about another `misogynist', Larkin

(Clark, 1994, pp. 220-57). It does seem that, whether the subject be men's or women's

poetry, critics are achieving a broad measure of agreement around the notion that

gender identifications provide an opportunity for a profound exploration of the

human. They can do this because they are a matter of culturally determined roles and

dispositions, rather than of biology. Indeed, recent theorizing, notably the work of

Judith Butler (1990), has tended to move on decisively from the argument about sex

and to promote the concept of gender as performance. This would appear to be a

notion with considerable potential for critics and readers of poetry.

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Acheson and Romana Huk (eds), Contemporary

British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (pp.

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Press.

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