Contemplated Spouse: Stevens, Irigaray, and the Feminine, by Lisa Williams

Paramour and Paragon: Wallace Stevens, the Muse, and the

Journey Towards a New Poetry

I shall whisper

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

It will undo him.

Wallace Stevens, “The Plot against the Giant”

In “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage,” one of the first poems in Wallace Stevens’ 1923 collection Harmonium, Stevens evokes a muse eager to part from tradition. He gestures to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the poem’s opening lines, but he clearly intends for his muse to break free of this static image. Rather than standing elegantly poised on a clamshell, Stevens’ muse appears on “the first-found weed” (4).^[1] She avoids the grandiose settings that accompany Botticelli’s traditional muse and also prefers anonymity: “She scuds the glitters, / Noiselessly, like one more wave.” A far remove from the goddess of antiquity who rests serenely at the center of “sea-green pomp,” Stevens’ muse is “paltry,” discontented, and eager to go to work. She is imagined as a “scullion of fate,” capable of wiping the slate of the world clean. She clears the way for Stevens at the start of his journey towards the creation of a new poetry. Tired of the “salty harbors” of fifteenth century Italy, she guides Stevens to the the “high interiors of the sea” where the world exists as it is, free of the over-used metaphors that conceal it.

Stevens’ poetic project is outlined best in his 1942 poem “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” in which he claims the poem provides the opportunity for seeing the world in a new way: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea” (330). Stevens’ ultimate goal, the first idea, is the world before predication. In a letter to Henry Church, Stevens explains: “if you take the varnish and dirt of generations off a picture, you see it in its first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and dirt, you are a thinker of the first idea” (426-427). Stevens’ poetry is, then, an attempt to portray the act of thinking the first idea more than it is ever a statement of it. Throughout his canon, which begins in 1923 and ends with his death in 1955, Stevens mediates between reality and the imagination in an effort to mend the rift that has separated these two realms. In “Imagination as Value,” an essay from his 1951 collection The Necessary Angel, Stevens argues that the imagination “enables us to live our own lives” by importing the “unreal into what is real” (735). Decidedly for Stevens, reality is not enough, but neither can he rely solely on his individual faculty of imagination. Throughout Stevens’ journey toward “the first idea,” the unvarnished world, he is accompanied, aided, and occasionally thwarted by his muse.

Although in the opening poems of Harmonium Stevens resorts to traditional evocations of the muse, his muse takes on many forms throughout the collection. She is often a representational figure, a woman through whom and for whom the poem is conceived, but she is also simply the feminine. Whether conjured as “femininity,” real women, or the most fecund image of the eternal mother, the feminine is a device as much as a subject or theme in Stevens’ poetry, because through it he works out the problematic of Being.^[2] Like the Romantics, his predecessors, Stevens refers to the feminine as the maternal or the excessively material.^[3]As such, the feminine is one of Stevens’ most constant tropes. Stevens’ earliest works reflect a poet steeped in a tradition that evokes the feminine in the form of a mythical muse who offers the poet truths from an otherworld. As in “The Plot Against the Giant,” the muse’s phonemes and her sex are inextricably linked in a language that only the male poet can translate because she is his projection. In other early poems, “Infanta Marina,” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” for example, Stevens imagines her dressed in the typical clothes of an ancient goddess of the imagination. Although he often mocks her “in magnificent measure” (as he does in “Monocle”) as “Mother of heaven” or “regina of the clouds” (10), he cannot be a poet without her. In “Last Looks at the Lilacs,” for instance, the muse is “the divine ingenue” and “companion,” who, residing in “this hymeneal air,” scorns traditional poetic forms (39). Stevens’ muse is, then, his connection to the elements, to the material world, but she and the truths she possesses exist in the realm before language.^[4]

The uniqueness of Stevens’ muse is portrayed in his very traditional invocation, “To the One of Fictive Music,” which appears towards the end of Harmonium. As “Sister and mother and diviner love” (70) she is an image of the eternal woman, a member of “the sisterhood of the living dead,” but she is, again, an unadorned muse in contrast to tradition. She is “most near [. . .] and of the clearest bloom.” On her gown there is “no thread of cloudy silver,” and her crown is “simple hair.” Indeed, her simplicity appears to be central to her ability to answer Stevens’ plea and “give back to us what once you gave: / “The imagination that we spurned and crave” (71). Stevens, so acutely aware that the language, the poetry, the “music” which describes the world is also that which inevitably “separates us from the wind and sea / Yet leaves us in them” (70), envisions a muse who will repair the damage that language has caused. This goddess of or figure for the imagination will “endow” the poet, through his “feigning with the strange unlike,” with the ability to find himself in the “difference heavenly pity brings” (71).^[5] The truth that exists in difference, a major concern for Stevens throughout his poetic career (most notably in the later poem “Notes”), is here enabled by the muse. She, as representative of the eternal feminine, is adorned by the “fatal stones” that signify an earthly realm but is also labeled as “unreal.” She is both of the world and beyond it and, therefore, able to reveal the world as more than the “gross effigy and simulacrum” and thus only the reflected image of the men who describe it.^[6]

The ability to reveal the world underneath layers of predication that Stevens attributes to his muse whatever her manifestation continues throughout his early poems. From the traditional mythical image, she becomes a more tangible muse when she is cast as real women. As Susanna in “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and the woman in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” she embodies poetry or mediates imagination and reality for the male poet. Whether evoked as the traditional muse or a lover, “she” is at the center of the poet’s creation. As Stevens focuses on the act of the creation of poetry or the “decreation” of the myths that define existence for the subject of his poems, he continually returns to the figure of woman as the object through which truth is exposed.^[7] In “Six Significant Landscapes,” she is a contrast to the “Rationalists, wearing square hats” (60), literally boxed in by their rigid thoughts. Used to represent night, she is described as “Obscure / Fragrant and Supple” (59). She is not a real woman but an opportunity for meditation: “Night, the female [. . .] Conceals herself.” The truth, if there is any, appears as a brief glimmer “Like a bracelet / Shaken in a dance.” Truth is revealed to the poet as he gazes, often erotically, at a woman.

Difference, for Stevens, is found through woman and the comprehension of the mysteries of her dance.

Stevens, while using the feminine again and again throughout his poetry, when referring to real women is sometimes sexist and misogynist. He adopts a privileged masculine stance, for example, when he links the grotesque form of the old woman in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” to the most grossly material. In “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” he sneers at his chosen representative of religious intolerance. His masculine authorial stance is also evident in “Sunday Morning” when he occupies a female vessel in order to express a cyclical and traditionally feminine view of life and death. Although this woman is given a voice, in most of his early poetry women are nameless or silent as their voice is taken by the male poet. According to Mary Arensberg, Stevens’ early poetry and his repeated use of women in it reflects a “muse-attachment” (24). Through woman, Stevens envisions the “fiction of otherness” that allows him to add the unreal to the real (24). The feminine is often a frightful and destructive entity in many of the Harmonium poems and in some later poems as well. In “Madame La Fleurie” (published in the 1954 collection The Rock) Stevens imagines “a bearded queen,” his mother, who waits to devour his knowledge, to “feed on him, himself and / what he saw”(432). This is, again, not a real mother but an image of the “phallic mother.”

With both breasts and a penis, the phallic mother resides in the subconscious as the most feared and desired object. As death and that which returns us to nothingness, she represents the loss of identity. Yet she also nostalgically represents the place of all knowledge before the fall into language that forms our identities but at the same time separates us from ourselves.^[8] Although Stevens is torn between these two manifestations of the feminine in his early poetry, a negative portrayal of the mother is a rare occurrence in the late poems. In The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Rock, when Stevens imagines the mother or evokes woman, he seems to be providing a commentary on her presence in the early poems. He comes to terms with someone or something he has courted for a very long time. In “The Auroras of Autumn,” “the mother’s face” is “the purpose of the poem” (356). In other poems from The Rock, for instance, such as “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” and “The World as Meditation,” “The Sail of Ulysses” and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” he envisions, as Mary Arensberg suggests, “‘the lover that lies within the self’ and the illusion of an imagined self in another” (40). Stevens weds male and female, or becomes them both, in an effort to create an androgynous world where the absence and desire that have propelled his poetry are destroyed. In order to come to terms with the ambivalence he feels towards the feminine, Stevens uses woman, occupies her, and speaks through her. To rectify the initial split into difference that necessitated the fall into language, Stevens attempts a union of masculine and feminine and, therefore, a union of the self and the other.

In “‘A Curable Separation’: Stevens and the Mythology of Gender,” Arensberg suggests that Stevens’ use of the feminine passes through three stages: the first is a memory of a union with the “mother’s face and body,” a pre-Oedipal existence before the fall into language; the second is the “muse-attachment” in which an object relation with women like Susanna allows Stevens to imagine otherness; and the third is a “resolution of narcissistic wholeness” in poems like “The Rock” in which Stevens expresses the desire to repress the memory of the initial splitting of the sexes and move towards androgyny (24). According to Arensberg, Stevens’ poetry is stamped with a “fetal imprint” and propelled by the desire for a return to the eternal feminine or mother. When looking at the use of the feminine throughout Stevens’ canon, most critics agree that a troubled resolution with the feminine does take place in the late poetry.

In “‘Sister of the Minotaur’: Sexism and Stevens,” Jacqueline Vaught Brogan notes a rejection of the feminine figure in the early poetry that becomes a reception of her in poems like “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Like most critics, she interprets Stevens’ use of the feminine in terms of the Jungian anima. That is, Stevens explores his feminine side through an archetypically feminine voice that will allow him to fuse self and other into a complete being. More importantly, however, the resolution of his two sides will give him the poetic instrument he needs to sing and see beyond the structures of language. Through the feminine, Stevens also allows himself another poetic stance. As Brogan argues, Stevens questions rather than orders the one “too easily gone, subject to changeÊÐ a sign of the mutability of our best linguistic orderings” (21). In “A Woman with the Hair of a Pythoness,” Barbara M. Fisher argues, however, that “a Jungian reading simply cannot account for the striding poet-singer [. . .] in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’” (47). Fisher contends that Stevens’ female figures push his complicated poetry far beyond the interpretations Jung’s tired archetypes can provide. Nevertheless, for Brogan the feminine remains an abstraction in Stevens’ poetry. Even when Stevens acknowledges the feminine in the late poetry as mother or lover, it still appears to be in some aspect that which he considers to be his feminine side.

While Brogan prefers a linguistic rather than strictly psychoanalytical approach to Stevens’ work, the complex but repetitious nature of his treatment of the feminine warrants and blossoms under this sort of analysis. In “Imaginary Politics: Emerson, Stevens, and the Resistance of Style,” Daniel T. O’Hara explains that all of Stevens’ female figures are tropes for “the lost thing” that poetry recovers by allusively embodying (68). The “lost thing” is, of course, the elusive mother and a pre-Oedipal union with the maternal. For O’Hara’s analysis, he turns to Julia Kristeva, who writes in Black Sun: “The depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing [. . .] the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated” (13). Indeed, the sadness, struggle, and desire of mourning the damaged maternal attachment are the forces behind Stevens’ poetic imaginings throughout his oeuvre. Whether invoked and embodied as muse, silenced or beckoned, appropriated or exiled, the feminine in all its many forms is the figure through which Stevens finally bids “farewell to an idea” in “The Auroras of Autumn”(355).^[9]

While Julia Kristeva’s work is certainly conducive to my study and will be returned to throughout it, I intend to evoke another French feminist theorist for my examination of Stevens’ desire for “the lost thing.” Luce Irigaray’s quest to expose the woman lurking in the margins and shadows of discourse makes her work especially amenable to an examination of Wallace Stevens’ use of the feminine as a bridge between the imagination and reality. Throughout her works, Irigaray reveals the methods employed by the “fathers,” the patriarchal practitioners of logic, for using the feminine to secure their privileged positions and to help them master the natural world as they push it and women outside of discourse. Stevens continually returns to the theme of the mother, to a woman who guides him through the layers of language and infuses his imagination with the ability to find the real in the unreal, but at the same time he buries her. He struggles with the initial forgotten exile of the mother that renders unsatisfactory the masculine discourse mythically based on the father. That Stevens senses this is evident in his poetry, but seen through the speculum Irigaray provides, his struggle is exposed. Irigaray attempts to cure and alter masculine discourse by exposing the woman that it has continually covered over and buried alive.

In a sense, Stevens and Irigaray are on similar quests; it may be surmised that Stevens is only limited by his time and place. Thus, it is also the nature of Irigaray’s work that makes her extremely appropriate to juxtapose to Stevens: rather than criticize and coldly interpret, she dialogues with the masculine subject. In her early works like Speculum of the Other Woman, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, and This Sex Which Is Not One, she playfully and deceptively exposes the methodology through which phallic discourse constructs the feminine as lack and relegates it to the material rather than the active world of culture and society. She argues that society’s murder of the mother entails an appropriation of the generative process in which birth is reconstructed through language, and that afterbirth and amniotic fluid become troublesome, repressed links to the natural world. As Judith Butler explains in her essay on Irigaray, “Bodies that Matter,” the feminine is reduced to the womb, a dark terrifying place, the site of the destruction and dissolution of the self:

“Inasmuch as certain phantasmatic notions of the feminine are traditionally associated with materiality these are specular effects that confirm a phallogocentric project of autogenesis” (149). In other words, the mother is necessary but forgotten. The womb is necessary but also forgotten as the masculine subject creates himself through language. He creates a sort of language-body that will not fall victim to the destructive powers of the phallic mother. The feminine is present in language as that which must be elided; it is represented as an abstraction, a disparate entity that cannot be accounted for in masculine discourse, as the ethereal and mysterious, or as the material world. As she exposes the unconscious fantasies driving the writers she deconstructs, Irigaray’s writing style is also consistently poetic.

In other works, Irigaray adopts the voice of the unrepresented woman she is attempting to unveil. She strives in works like The Marine Lover of Frederich Nietzsche, Elemental Passions, and The Forgetting of Air of Martin Heidegger to create an equal but different voice, which also becomes the voice of a lover. Through new relationships between the sexes, Irigaray demonstrates that there will be no cure for masculine language if the sexes are not “face-to-face” in difference; it is not enough to incorporate male and female into an androgynous whole. In Sexual Subversions, Elizabeth Grosz explains the exclusiveness of the deceptively equalizing gesture of androgyny:

In complementarity (such as the advocates of androgyny, on the one hand, and conservative proponents of the sanctity of the nuclear family, on the other hand, illustrate), one term is taken as given, in need of completion or complementarity, while the other is regarded only insofar as it serves to satisfy this need. (105)

For Irigaray, then, any arguments for an androgynous revision of the relations between the sexes are invalid because they inevitably favor the masculine subject. Irigaray does, however, imagine a complementary relationship when she discusses the notion inspired by Emmanuel Levinas of “face to face,” but this type of true complementarity can only be achieved if female subjectivity is allowed into discourse.^[10] Thus, Irigaray and Stevens are linked in the likenesses of their strivings, and they seem to evolve together when they are put “face-to-face.” Strikingly, Stevens not only uses the very term “face to face” in “Notes,” he also turns to the angel, as does Irigaray, as the being through which the boundary between the real and the imaginary and men and women can be reimagined. Stevens as poet is uniquely able to see beyond the stable and “fictional” constructs of language. As he treats the feminine lovingly or cruelly, he lays his psyche bare, and in so doing provides insight into the unconscious of Western culture, which Irigaray would not only suggest covers over the feminine but is the feminine. Stevens’ poetry is an excellent staging ground for the major tenets of

Irigaray’s feminist epistemology. Irigaray, as feminist philosopher, is the most appropriate guide for understanding Stevens’ need to return to the feminine.

Irigaray’s writings are difficult to summarize because they evade any notions of the typical. As she attempts to find a space for the female voice in discourse, she departs from usual methods. Irigaray draws widely from the patriarchal tradition of philosophical concepts for sources to dismantle, but she often cites neither the author or the work directly. For instance, while Irigaray is most profoundly influenced by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, directly attacking his theory of female subjectivity (or lack of it), she rarely mentions him directly.^[11]Since Irigaray is herself first a psychoanalyst, her method is to psychoanalyze every facet of phallic discourse, from religious and cultural laws, to myth, philosophy and psychoanalysis itself. Like Kristeva, she attempts to uncover the maternal that acts as material substratum for all of patriarchy’s constructs. As Grosz explains, however, while Kristeva uses psychoanalysis to “understand the speaking subject, Irigaray uses it to articulate a culturally (rather than psychically) produced unconscious, a repression in texts, knowledge and institutionally regulated practices” (102). Through Lacan’s concepts, Irigaray psychoanalyzes the imaginative and the creative works of societyÊwith an ear for the silencing of the female voice.

What follows, then, is only an outline of Irigaray’s major concerns, influences, and objectives. The depth of her undertaking will become clearer in later chapters when I interpret Stevens’ poetry through her. Here, I will only introduce the concepts that are the foundation of her system. For instance, Irigaray examines Freud’s theory of sexual development, which is the basis of Lacan’s theories. Throughout her works, she continually returns to Freud’s notion of the death drive which seems to epitomize the male subject’s troublesome relation to the mother. While I will examine this concept below, it will become clearer when I interpret in a later chapter the death drive as it appears in Stevens’ early and great poem “Sunday Morning.” I will also, in the following pages, attempt to provide a very condensed version of her first major work Speculum of the Other Woman in order to illustrate her method of deconstructing the patriarchal touchstones of Western discourse. Most importantly, I will introduce her theory of how the feminine becomes figured as secondary, an inadequate reflection of the masculine, and how this figuration is projected onto real women in society. To understand Irigaray’s philosophy, it is first necessary to be familiar with her use of Lacan’s concept of the imaginary, which she elaborates in Speculum of the Other Woman. The imaginary, or unconscious fantasies, that drive masculine discourse is based on the male body. In addition, the masculine imaginary’s creationsÊÐ myth, philosophy, and poetryÊÐ depend on a return to the maternal body of woman. In her indispensable study of Irigaray, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Margaret Whitford explains that Irigaray looks “for the unconscious phantasies that haunt discourse” (34). The feminine emerges, as it clearly does in Stevens’ canon, as something with which the male writer seems to be obsessed. This is, not surprisingly, the mother. For Irigaray’s portrayal of the unconscious fantasies that manifest in the creative works of society, she is indebted to Lacan’s account of the mirror stage and its role in the formation of subjectivity. In the mirror stage, Lacan argues, the development of the child’s ego is dependent on its identification with an image of itself seen in a mirror:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipationÊÐ and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedicÊÐ and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (4)

The subject’s identity is self-imposed and fictional. The fragmentation the child senses is appeased only by the validation of wholeness its reflected image allows. According to Irigaray, all of Western discourse is structured around a subject like the fictional ego and is founded on the sort of specularization that Lacan, and Freud before him, propose. Through discourse, the male subject then projects his ego on to the world. As Whitford explains, the world becomes “a mirror which enables him to see his own reflection wherever he looks” (34). Lacan acknowledges that the infant is supported by something as it gazes into the mirror. However, Irigaray assumes that this “something” is probably the mother. In This Sex Which Is Not One, she likens woman to that part of the mirror which allows the image to be clearly reflected: “those components of the mirror that cannot reflect themselves: its backing, its brilliancy” (151). Woman is the support for the processes of the male imaginary but is herself not represented. She is not even seen as the male creates a fiction of identity that not only alienates his mother, but also alienates him from himself.

In Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, Elizabeth Grosz explains that the imaginary is “a psychical projection of the body, a kind of map of the body’s psychosocial meaning” (43). The ego, or that part of the psyche that controls thoughts and behavior and mediates external reality, is for Lacan the product of the internalization of otherness (43). The ego is based on a dialectic in which the other, the mother, is consumed by the self. Central to Irigaray’s concerns, however, is the manner in which “the imaginary” is reflected in creative works, including psychoanalytical works. Margaret Whitford states that “the Freudian account of the (bodily) ego and its relation to more intellectual activities in (unconscious) Phantasm is explicitly assumed by Lacan under the explanatory concept of the imaginary” (65). What Freud describes as unconscious phantasy, Lacan describes as imaginary. So, as Irigaray psychoanalyzes Freud in Speculum, she also psychoanalyzes Lacan; she shows their complicity in misunderstanding the differences between the sexes as she illustrates the arbitrariness of symbolic law.

Irigaray demonstrates that both Lacan’s theory of the formation of the masculine imaginary and Freud’s notion of the structure of ego-development exclude the female sex. In the first section of Speculum, she reveals that Lacan is thinking of a male child when he devises the mirror stage: “the specular conditions do not work in such a way as to allow a play of couples [. . .] They are signs of a specular process / trial which favors a flat mirror as most apt to capture the image, the representation” (77). As the title of Irigaray’s work suggests, a flat mirror does not reflect the female sex organs, which would be invisible to it, and so, under this gaze, the female sex is non-existent or lacking. Returning to Freud, Irigaray notes that he excludes the female through his notion that in the childish imaginary the production of a child is equated with the production of feces. Therefore since Freud’s model of sexuality is male, and the fantasies anal, the role of women in childbirth is again not recognized. As Irigaray argues, the subject must master production or reproduction:

Therefore, in place of the feces [. . .] will be substituted the image, the specular production-reproduction [. . .] The mirror will idealize the product that it has introduced both into the field of optics and into an economy of reproduction. (95)

According to Irigaray, Freud’s anal stage continues to underlie his theories as he finds it necessary to master reproduction. As Whitford explains, “sexuality and thinking, in an imaginary operation, have become equated both with each other and with one and the same bodily activity” (66). The “hole” in the theories of sexual development is that woman is displaced by the theories of sexuality Freud can master. Freud creates a model of development, but Irigaray argues that he only adapts an already existent imaginary, merely confirming concepts of feminine passivity and validating the repression of women that he, as masculine subject, requires. This Freudian model is in turn adopted by Lacan.

While Irigaray’s concept of the imaginary is informed by Lacan’s, she departs from him when she genders her version. For Irigaray, the imaginary is either male or female. Like the idealized male body, the male imaginary is characterized by unity, solidity, and linearity. The female imaginary is pluralistic and fluid. Since the imaginary is an unconscious and invisible structure that can be viewed externally in myth or in other works of the imagination, it becomes important to the development of gendered cultural production for Irigaray to reveal a female imaginary. Such arguments concerning a “female” imaginary have led to accusations of essentialism by many critics, but rather than prescribing for the feminine some irrational voice, as would the masculine, essentialist imaginary, Irigaray attempts to claim a voice that has eluded definition.

As Irigaray stresses the visible aspects and mythic creations of the imaginary, the mirror stage becomes secondary in importance for her. Whitford notes as she traces the sources for Irigaray’s particular concept of the imaginary, that the term is also found in the works of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who writes in Air and Dreams, “thanks to the imaginary, imagination is essentially open and elusive” (1). The imaginary, for Bachelard, is not fixed in reality: “we could say that a stable and completely realized image clips the wings of the imagination” (2). In both The Marine Lover of Friederich Nietzsche, and The Forgetting of Air of Martin Heidegger, Irigaray takes her cue from Bachelard and focuses on an element, like air or water, that Western philosophers seem to overlook or fear, likening it to the silenced woman or the feminine. Knowledge cannot be obtained objectively or without the distortion of the imaginary until the preference for a particular element, for example earth over water, is overcome. Although Irigaray is influenced by the malleability of Bachelard’s imaginary, she argues that there can never be a separation of knowledge from the imaginary, and that the supposed “Universal” of psychoanalysis and philosophy is male. In Sexual Subversions, Elizabeth Grosz argues that in the symbolic order, through which the imaginary is exposed, “women take up a place [. . .] only as variants of men” (126). Thus, the symbolic will also need to be altered.

After psychoanalyzing the psychoanalysts, Irigaray moves to the philosophers. In This Sex Which Is Not One, she explains that since philosophy is the foundation of Western discourse and that psychoanalysis is within the boundaries of philosophy it is absolutely necessary to start from the beginning:

The philosophical order is indeed the one that has to be questioned, and disturbed, inasmuch as it covers over sexual difference. Having failed to provide an adequate interpretation of the sway philosophical discourse holds over all the rest, psychoanalysis itself has committed its theory and practice to a misunderstanding of the difference between the sexes. Psychoanalytic practice and theory certainly pose a challenge to philosophical discursivity, but they still might be reincorporated into it to a large extent ÐÊas indeed they are ÐÊif it were not for the ‘question’ of female sexuality. So it is both because psychoanalysis still constitutes a possible enclave of philosophical discourse [. . .] that I have wanted this ‘dialogue’ with a male philosopher. (160)

In other words, she demonstrates that psychoanalysis, rather than being radical, merely repeats ideas that have been in existence since antiquity. Decidedly, the conversation she establishes with the philosophers is the most unique feature of her work. In This Sex, she writes that her plan is to “have a fling with the philosophers” (150). This word choice is important as she attempts to insert a woman into discourse who is not reduced to the maternal. To dismantle the linguistic structures of the philosophers, she lovingly manipulates their texts. She is also not bound by time, space, or chronology. In Speculum, for instance, she works backwards to show the repetition of “sameness” on which phallic systems are based.

Just as Irigaray is both indebted to Lacan and critical of him, she is also highly indebted to Jacques Derrida as well as critical of him. Indeed, her major tenets depend on the “destabilization” of the system of binary opposites for which Derrida is responsible (Grosz 27). Western metaphysics is based on a system of binary oppositions, such as good / bad, mind / matter, man / woman. As Elizabeth Grosz explains in Sexual Subversions, the opposed terms are not equal: “one term occupies the structurally dominant position and takes on the power of defining its opposite or other” (27). These terms are simply positives and negatives of each other, but “the first term is given the privilege of defining itself and of relegating to the other all that is not it.” According to Grosz, Derrida demonstrates “that the positive term gains its privilege only by disavowing its intimate dependence on its negative double: far from identity or presence generating difference or absence through negation, they can be seen as vitally dependent on their opposites in ways that cannot be acknowledged.”

Recognizing that these identities depend on the difference of the other makes arbitrary the privileged side. While Irigaray focuses on sexual difference to bring out the subordinate term and uses it as a way to argue for women’s subjectivity, Derrida often refers to difference, or diffŽrance, as another name for woman and uses woman as a trope for writing. In Gynesis, Alice Jardine suggests further that for Derrida, the “hymen” is a signifier of undecidability and woman a metaphor for “that which dances across the secure territories of truth, unsettling them” (191). Derrida, much like Stevens in his poetry, attempts to lead readers beyond sexual identity. Whitford notes, however, that while while Derrida sees “man and woman” as “effects of the play of difference,” Irigaray sees Derrida as colonizing woman’s space (128). Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysical identity has had the effect of disconnecting the deconstructor from embodiment. Either sex, as Whitford explains, could adopt “masculine or feminine” categories, and women who are still less in the patriarchal society are once again “elided” (129). If to enter philosophy as a woman means leaving embodiment behind, this is yet another form of exclusion. Women’s bodies and sex are once again excluded.

Derrida was not the first philosopher, of course, to note the arbitrariness of categories of sex and their connection to the Pythagorean table of opposites. In the introduction to her seminal work, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that the duality of self and other is as old as humanity’s need to understand its place in the world: “the category of the Other,” she writes, “is as primordial as consciousness itself” (xxviii). While most ancient cultures display a fundamental duality in their mythologies, this has not always been expressed as a division of male and female. While these divisions were not always gendered, masculinity became the universal defining category; the feminine came to represent the negative half of the dichotomy, all of the weaker, inessential elements opposed to the masculine, essential ones. With masculinity as the One, the privileged form in this system of representation, femininity is the Other.

Although Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference differs greatly from de Beauvoir’s, it is helpful and accurate to suggest that thinking of woman as the Other in feminist terms is owed to de Beauvoir. Her work falls short, however, because steeped as her writing is in the often misogynistic phenomenology of Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir believes that sexual difference should be ignored and that freedom is a disembodied and gender-neutral transcendence. In The Ethics of Eros, Tina Chanter writes that de Beauvoir is problematic because she suggests that women must overcome their materiality by identifying with masculine ideals and aspirations (48-49). For Irigaray, reimagining and acknowledging sexual difference is of the utmost importance. Rather than playing with the foundations of symbolic discourse as they are, she believes that just as the imaginary is changeable so are these laws.

Irigaray argues that woman is not represented by the feminine Otherness created by the system of binary oppositions and adhered to by de Beauvoir. As defined in masculine discourse, woman is, according to Irigaray, “other of the same,” not simply Other but the being onto which the onerous aspects of masculine existence are projected in order to be transcended. With Freud’s notion of the unconscious to guide her, Irigaray claims that “other of the same” is a metaphor for the cultural position of femininity (Grosz 107). The symbolic order of discourse, she suggests, is hom(m)osexual (with play on the French word homme) inasmuch as it favors the male sex and represses the female. In this economy, the masculine can exist only with others who are modeled on himself and are his mirror reflections (Grosz 107). According to Grosz, it is possible to regard women as not having the masculine privilege of unconscious fantasies because they are, in effect, the unconscious. Rather than come to terms with her origin or her death drive, woman must adopt the characteristics of the complementary other. She must represent origin and tend to the death drive for the masculine subject. Woman is, therefore, objectified, and, in a Marxist fashion, is exchanged as a commodity within this masculine economy between men. The result of the Oedipus complex for her is to be moved from being daughter to being mother, from her father’s house, to her husband’s. She does not desire because, as object of desire, she is not allowed to; she is the object through which the masculine subject is reunited with the mother and the object through which the masculine subject safeguards the fiction of his wholeness.

The “other of the same,” which functions in a system of sameness Irigaray exposes, is based on the male body and the appropriation of the generative process of the female. In Speculum, as she weaves her way back to Plato, Irigaray attempts to undo what Whitford calls the “founding gesture” (102) of Western philosophy located in Plato’s cave myth from Book VII of the Republic. As Whitford explains, Plato’s myth exemplifies the most important act of philosophy: “the downgrading of the body, allocated symbolically to women, and the effects of this: the split between ideal and material, sensible and intelligible” (102). In other words, Plato’s need to favor an ideal world over the real world becomes the idea on which Western philosophy is based. This idea is restated, for instance, as Descartes’ cogito. Another important act generated by the cave myth is the relegation of women to appearance, non-truth, and all of the other forms of otherness woman signifies in philosophy. Irigaray exposes the primacy of specular philosophy that depends on what it can seeÊÐ on its projectionsÊÐ in order to establish Universal truths.

The ideal world, indeed Plato’s entire epistemology, is based on the morphology of a whole male body that may be seen; anything that cannot be seen does not exist. In Plato’s ideal birth, man is torn from the womb / cave, his eyes turned perpetually toward the sun or the seen.^[12] The world is Other in the sense that it is a copy, but the cave is the “truly Other,” what Irigaray calls the “other of the other” because, as Whitford explains, its materiality does not figure in either the ideal or sensible world (104). In Speculum, Irigaray argues that everything is reduced to a sameness that all men can see, comprehend, and reduce to their common language:

nothing can be named as ‘beings’ except those same things which all the same men see in the same way in a setup that does not allow them to see other things and which they will designate by the same names, on the basis of the conversation between them. Whichever way up you turn these premises, you always come back to sameness. (263)

In language, then, woman either eludes representation or she is objectified and identified only in reference to man. She is not represented as a woman but as not-man. Her apparent (specular) lack (of a sex) represents her symbolic weakness in Plato’s imaginary and the Western imaginary of which Plato is the father. With no access to language, woman is a symbol for various forms of otherness in masculine discourse from non-truth to nothingness and death.

Essentially, the womb, a synechdoche for woman, is a container and the material support for the creations of the masculine imaginary. More importantly, as woman is reduced to the maternal and repressed, the masculine subject takes over and incorporates the female leaving woman outside the scene of creation. Irigaray explains that in Plato’s conception, the mother is responsible for inadequate copies of the ideal and perfect world created by the father:

Real ‘nature’ is unveiled on the path up to the heavens, not on the track back into the earth. The mother. That place connected still with artful conception, haunted by magicians who would have you believe that . . . The cave gives birth only to phantoms, fakes, or, at best, images . . . Engendering the real is the father’s task, engendering the fictive is the task of the mother Ð that ‘receptacle’ for turning out more or less good copies of reality. (300)

The real world, and the natural birth that also symbolizes the unavoidable death of the subject, must be repressed, but Irigaray insists that the maternal cannot be and is not really excluded because man, inevitably, cannot engender alone. The maternal has been subsumed by the masculine.

This exclusion of the material, and maternal, from phallic constructions leads to the complicated psychoanalytical theory of the death drive that seems to establish in social models a foundation of violence and destruction. Ultimately, women represent death for men because in the psychoanalytical model they represent castration. As Whitford explains in “Irigaray, Utopias, and the Death Drive,” since the ego is based on a fiction of wholeness, “death is that which fragments, castrates, and separates Ð it is the fear of fragmentation or annihilation against which the ego defends itself” (390). Castration as dismemberment represents the death of the subject, but the death drive can also be interpreted as the drive toward an imaginary and lost wholeness with the mother. This complex amalgamation of death and creativity is attributed to woman and makes her a source of ambivalence. As a category, the feminine makes death comprehensible. Whitford explains that the female subject, then, dwells in death without ever really dying as the male subject protects himself against fragmentation by locating death in woman (390). She preserves his unity as she does his rationality by being other.

Therefore, the masculine subject is drawn to the feminine by desire. In Lacan and Literature: Purloined Pretexts, Ben Stoltzfus explains that the subject desires the mother but creates imaginative works because this union is forbidden and because through creation, he can delay his death:

The goal of the subject’s desire is to meld once again with the mother but the law forbids it. This 'death’ of the subject that submits to the greater power of the Symbolic has as its consequence the fragmentation of the self and its alienation into language and fabulation. Despite this symbolic death the desire of the organism to live and to die in its own way and in its own time persists. Writing, speaking, reading, playing, and living are thus an affirmation of life as a deferral of death. (13)

Focusing on death rather than life, however, continually separates the masculine subject from the object of his desire. Irigaray psychoanalyzes the death obsession in society, but she also argues that woman must have access to her own death drive and desire. To escape the dialectic that forces the appropriaton of the Other by the self, Irigaray envisions a “face to face” relation between the sexes. She suggests the sexes should greet each other with wonder so that they will continually be new and prevent a fixed and objectifying relation from taking hold.

Wallace Stevens clearly anticipates Irigaray’s belief that the language used to describe the relations between the sexes and the imagined world and the world of reality should be free-flowing. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray finds a source for altering the dialectic within which the sexes perceive each other, ironically, in Descartes who describes a first encounter with an object as one of surprise and wonder. She writes, “wonder marks a new place, and the movement of the spirits tends toward this new place of inscription to strengthen and conserve it” (77). Wonder is a “purely cerebral impression” that does not change anything to “positive or negative” (78). Like Irigaray, Stevens senses the need for this wonder as well as the power of the feminine to disrupt the symbolic. In the following chapters, I will explore Stevens’ struggle with the feminine through Irigaray’s works and the major roles she argues the feminine plays in the masculine imaginary. I will first examine the role of woman as the substratum for works of the imagination as this is perfectly demonstrated in Stevens’ early poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier” (chapter two). I will then look at woman as a device as well as representative of the ambivalent relation to the maternal that is evident in “Sunday Morning” (chapter three). This third chapter will also encompass my major discussion of the death drive although this “instinct” is an underlying one in most of the poems I analyze. Through Stevens’ celebrated poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” I will then illustrate Irigaray’s concept of woman as “other of the other,” “other of the same,” and as object of exchange between men (chapter four). And I will end my study, as Irigaray and Stevens conclude their works, with a discussion of the face-to-face relation between the sexes and the angel as it appears in both their works (chapter five). I forego a conclusion because, like Irigaray and Stevens, I feel that a new relation between the sexes must remain in the process of becoming. Thus, I hope as an epilogue this chapter will shed light on further areas of study.

“Concealed imaginings”: Stevens, Irigaray, and the Body of Susanna

And they said then, “But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

As Mary Arensberg and Harold Bloom before her note, much of Stevens’ early poetry from “To the One of Fictive Music” to “The Idea of Order at Key West” is characterized by a “muse-attachment.”^[13]That is, the poet tries to articulate otherness through a relation to the muse. In “Peter Quince at the Clavier” (1915) Stevens creates one of his most erotic muses in the figure of Susanna. As is typical for Stevens, “Peter Quince” is a poem about poetic creation, but it is retold through the Apocryphal story of Susanna and the elders, the story of the attempted rape of Susanna by the elders, her trial for adultery, and her vindication through Daniel. Although most critics focus on the poem’s structure and musical allusions, Stevens also envisions the primal scene of origin, or perhaps of all creation, where, according to Arensberg, a “brief glimpse of female sexuality” (32) leads to the discovery of truth. While “Peter Quince at the Clavier” illustrates only one of three uses of the feminine Arensberg sees in Stevens’ poetry, it can serve to portray many of Irigaray’s major points and to introduce the themes that would preoccupy Stevens throughout his poetic of career.

“Peter Quince at the Clavier” is obviously wrought in a framework of “sameness” as Stevens gestures toward patriarchal figures and texts. Borrowing for his poet / creator the name “Peter Quince” from the stage manager in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stevens beckons his poet-father Shakespeare and, like Shakespeare, links eroticism to imaginative creation. In addition, Stevens’ use of the Apocryphal story as the illustrative device through which he reimagines the drama of the creative process is another gesture to patriarchal authority. In the Apocrypha, Susanna, wife of Joakim, a wealthy Babylonian, is accused of adultery by two elder judges who, presiding over cases at her husband’s house, have spied on her in her garden and lusted after her. They scheme to force her to have sex with them one evening when Susanna is bathing. When she refuses them, they accuse her of adultery. The townspeople believe the judges and allow them to sentence Susanna to death. The young judge Daniel, however, arrives on the day she is to be killed and condemns the people for convicting Susanna without proof. He separates the elders, questions them, and proves that they have lied about her. The elders are then put to death. Significantly, the story in the Apocrypha ends not with praise for Susanna’s fidelity but with Daniel’s celebrity and reverence for law. Clearly, female sexuality is the center of the narrative, but the woman is elided in the process of judgment, making creation an exchange between the male players in the drama. Stevens repeats this elision in the final section of his poem: Susanna is abandoned while the metaphorical music of her sexuality is lifted to the realm of the symbolic where it plays on “the clear viol of her memory” making a “sacrament of praise” (74). In “Musing on Susanna’s Music,” Mary Nyquist argues that viol also connotes the “vial”: “Susanna is contained by the poem as a reproducible verbal artifact” (326). In other words, the appropriation of her subjectivity and sexuality allows the masculine imaginary to give birth to its own creations.

Stevens mimics the Apocryphal story’s objectified and displaced use of Susanna in his poem, but as muse, she also serves to mediate the real and the imaginative worlds. Her body allows a return to the eternal feminine that represents the source of creativity and poetry. As representative, Stevens’ poem “Peter Quince” reveals woman as Irigaray defines her within the masculine imaginary. Susanna is silenced in Stevens’ poem, as she is in the Apocryphal story. The poem also perfectly illustrates Irigaray’s argument that the masculine imaginary’s creations are specularly based. As Nyquist suggests, desire “becomes associated with the mind’s as well as the body’s eye” (313). That is, although Stevens tries to articulate desire through the sound of music, he resorts to articulating it through the effects of gazing at Susanna. Furthermore, she is unrepresented and is used, finally, as a symbol for death or for the transcendence of it both in the Apocrypha and in the affirming last stanzas of Stevens’ poem. The “constant sacrament of praise,” as Stevens calls Susanna’s music, is the music of the cycles of life and death through which he attempts to overcome the stifling binarism that separates the real and the imaginary. His use of woman, however, proves he is still ensnared in this system. While the world he imagines is a progression from the Platonic Forms, Stevens demonstrates the need to project death onto the body of woman. As Irigaray explains in Speculum, “Woman will assume the function of representing death (of sex/organ), castration, and man will be sure as far as possible of achieving mastery, subjugation, by triumphing over the anguish (of death)” ( 27). The creation of the poem is a deferral of death, for the poet gazes at the eternal, or maternal, feminine, but he does not dwell there and therefore lose the subjectivity he has gained by his original separation from it. The poet enters Susanna’s walled garden and sex only metaphorically, which perpetuates the rift. The desire for sexual union creates the poem but is continually repressed: woman becomes only the material support for an idea.

The eternal feminine is present at the beginning of the poem as, seated at his instrument, Quince begins to play his imaginative flight on the clavier. Blue is Stevens’ color for the imagination in later works like “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (published in 1937), so the wearer of “blue-shadowed silk” is here the muse. Arensberg suggests that his personification of the muse through Susanna is a “double vision” of Stevens’ interior paramour (29), a “real” muse as well as a vision of the anima Stevens often evokes. The woman he imagines at the beginning of the poem is an abstraction. She is obscured because she exists in a world beyond language that the poet can only access through a conflation of thought and music:

Just as my fingers on these keys

make music, so the self-same sounds

on my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

And thus it is that what I feel,

Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,

Is music. (72)

Nyquist points out that Stevens “strives after another condition” when he attempts through music to reach beyond language (312). However, as poet he must return to the tools of his trade. For instance, Stevens uses analogy and a real woman to embody his muse. As proprietor of a world existing before language, a truly poetic world, Susanna is the poet Quince would like to be.

As Irigaray suggests, the muse, whether internalized or projected, is a mirror of and for the male poet. Stevens constantly opposes the internal and the external as he then articulates his ineffable and primitive desire through the retelling of the Apocryphal myth and the musical expression through which Stevens tries to expand his metaphorical world. In Musing the Obscure, Ronald Sukenick calls the poem “a key board [sic] impromptu in which each of the four sections resembles a’movement’ whose metrical tempo helps set its mood” (69). The first section introduces the metaphor of music and desire; the second and third musically portray the drama of Susanna and the Elders; in the fourth, a poem is created after the poet has left the garden scene. The piece is played both on and by the characters as each is represented by an instrument, given an instrument, or, in the case of Susanna, is music personified.

The musical metaphors at the end of the first section take Quince out of the abstract and into a sensual expression of his desire for the muse. As Quince’s dream unfolds, he is represented by the “red-eyed elders,” who, by the end of the first section, are in the garden watching Susanna (72). His ideal desire becomes “like the strain / Waked in the elders by Susanna”; their erotic gaze makes “The basses of their beings throb/ In witching chords” (72). Stevens distinguishes between the “bass” and “bawdy” desire of the elders and the idealized desire of the poet, but in either case, through conflating types of desire, he subverts the traditional notion of the muse (74).^[14] Peter Quince, like the elders, wants to ravish his muse, an intriguing but necessary reaction to the Other according to Irigaray:

“The other must therefore serve to mirror the one, reduplicating what man is assumed to know already as the place of (his) production. ‘She’ must be only the path, the method, the theory, the mirror, which leads back, by a process of repetition, to the recognition of (his) origin for the’subject’” (23).

In other words, Susanna as muse mirrors Quince the poet and allows him to see his origin.

As a means through which Quince can become the poet the muse represents, Stevens equates Quince’s and the elders’ desire for Susanna. That is, he imagines a sensible union with the muse to take the place of the ideal one. Muse made flesh, Susanna is a ready metaphor for the poet’s attempt to represent the symbolic return that is necessary for the symbiotic reunion between man and woman which will fuse self and other and create a primordial whole. Desire makes the elders’ “thin blood / Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna” (72); sensuality is raised to the level of the mythic or transcendent, or at least opens a door to it. For instance, Quince’s gaze on the eternal feminine in the poem is framed by “songs” of transcendence. Susanna is poised delicately between the poet’s allusion to God in the first section and Quince’s final revision of god-like immortality in the last.

Interestingly, the largest section of the poem, or movement of the piece, is devoted to the poet’s description of Susanna in her bath, a solipsistic image of female sexuality. Susanna unknowingly evokes the desire at the center of the creative process; however, the image Stevens creates opens itself to further symbolization. Susanna represents the suggestion of sexual union with the muse. Contained as she is by the walls of her garden, she represents the female sex organ, or more precisely for the masculine imaginary, the womb. The mystery that is the female sex, the dark continent as Freud calls it, is beautifully captured by Stevens’ enigmatic description of Susanna:

In the green water, clear and warm,

Susanna lay.

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed,

For so much melody. (73)

Fluid, “feminine” symbolism abounds in the scene of otherness. Susanna is silent, a part of the water in which she bathes, inseparable from her garden. She is Other as she appears to possess secrets expressed in a language impossible to translate except through Quince’s poetic devices. She “speaks” outside of language so that it is necessary for the male poet to articulate for her. According to Nyquist, Stevens represents Susanna “as someone who appears to enjoy the fullness and simplicity of a prelapsarian kind of self-originating desire” (313). She is perhaps being itself at this instance, but more specifically, Susanna is a floating signifier (313). Using Claude Levi-Strauss’ term, Nyquist does not suggest that Susanna means nothing, but since she represents nothing she is “free simply, erotically, to be” (314). She can reflect, then, whatever Quince requires her to reflect. The musical references and the language throughout the section refer to her sex and to her self-pleasure: “she stood / In the cool of spent emotions [. . .] She walked upon the grass, / Still quavering” ( 73 ). Susanna’s autoeroticism provides a literary echo for Irigaray’s definition of the female sex in This Sex Which Is Not One: woman’s sex is “already twoÊÐ- but not divisible into one(s)ÊÐ that caress each other” (24). The female sex is self-sufficient, and also, to return to the mirror, unseen. Thus, as Susanna touches herself, she is completely representative of otherness. Since she is a construction of the symbolic order, she is not a subject but is meant to be an object of pleasure through which men touch themselves.

Susanna remains in the garden as Quince makes the essential movement towards the creation of his poem. He must repress his desire for the mother/muse. To make it apparent that in the subconscious of language the need for a continual return to the eternal feminine negates true sexual fulfillment, the poet prevents a union with the muse violently and noisily. Susanna’s revery is interrupted by the crash of cymbals and “roaring horns” which represent the lustful invasion of the elders (73). The sensible world invades the ideal world of the imagination, and they are once again divided. The elders gaze at Susanna, but she has not been aware of them: “A breath upon her hand / Muted the night. / She turnedÐ” ( 73 ). That Susanna is first kept ignorant of her status as the object of an erotic male gaze reveals that the woman Quince longs for does not exist in reality; she is his creation and an expression of his narcissism.^[15] Stevens’ third section is a brief interlude in which the woman Susanna, made finally aware of her objectification, cries. Susanna’s maids lift their lamps to reveal “Susanna and her shame” (74). The elders’ desire is an assault repeated by the female chorus of the “simpering Byzantines” who flee, closing the scene suddenly and transforming the music of Susanna’s garden into a “noise like tambourines” (74). Stevens awakes from his dream with dramatic stops, writing Susanna out of discourse and himself out of the garden. According to Arensberg, the poet imagines a scene of origin he can only enter symbolically (30).

Stevens’ departure from the primal scene is indeed abrupt, portraying no link other than the metaphoric between the world of the eternal feminine and the structured masculine world.^[16] Quince’s musings turn immediately to universals and to a world in which truth is elusive:

Beauty is momentary in the mindÊÐ

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal. (74)

While Stevens believes that truth is fleeting, he captures it in “the flesh.” The “portal” as opening suggests the female sex or the womb and the truth contained there. In the next stanza, Stevens locates beauty in the cycles of life and does away with the notion of heavenly transcendence by creating his own philosophy of transcendence and, in his own way, conquering death. He writes: “So gardens die, their meek breath scenting / The cowl of winter, done repenting. / So maidens die, to the auroral celebration of a maiden’s choral” (74). Stevens constructs a truth through which he may defer the nothingness of death. Death is creation both in “Peter Quince” and in its companion poem “Sunday Morning,” where death is the mother of beauty.

In the last stanza of the final section of the poem, Stevens transforms the elders’ Apocryphal death into a song of praise for the death he conceives. The link of death and desire develops in the poem as a kind of conceit that transfers death, finally and symbolically, onto Susanna:

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings

Of those white elders; but, escaping,

Left only Death’s ironic scraping. (74)

The music created by Susanna’s solitary presence, an edenic image of the female body in nature, inspires the bold, vulgar lust of the elders. The elders are condemned in the poem as they are in the Apocryphal story, but the death evoked in the poem is simply a reminder of their mortality, not an execution. In “Peter Quince” transcendence is achieved through a symbolic union of poet and muse, self and Other. Through the path of intercourse, the muse ( death / castration ) will be conquered by a demonstration of prowess; immortality will be achieved. But for the poet the result will be far more than psychologically symbolic: he will gain the power to create.

The artist, the male subject, attains his immortality at the expense of Susanna’s personhood, affirming, as Irigaray argues in Speculum of the Other Woman, that woman suffers because she is not symbolized (105). Susanna’s music is immortal, but as an abstraction Susanna is not allowed the transcendence she enables. Irigaray suggests that the male poet suffers in turn for his oversight or over-emphasis on sight. A poet like Stevens suffers in his attempt to expose the real through the feminine because he can only write what he can see (in the structure of language). Irigaray addresses this point in a later work, Elemental Passions: “My child of night, you have known nothing but a cold dark womb, how can I console you? Even your tears are black. They lack the cool candor of liquid, the simplicity of drops of water. They are drowned in ink. In the poison of a bitter knowledge” (23). Stevens, like most modern poets, is aware of language’s inability to communicate the real. Nevertheless, as Irigaray argues, they inevitably create a self and indestructible body for themselves out of words. Later, in Stevens’ more phenomenologically-steeped poetry (1942-1954), he will lament the limited nature of his search for the rational in the irrational. According to Irigaray, his success would be limited precisely because, as in “Peter Quince,” he uses woman as the material for his poetry.

“Sure Obliteration”: Death and the Maternal Body in “Sunday Morning”

Eternity, that is the music of one who senses and fears decline. And, for passing beyond life how busily he is at work at this moment. To leave his body behind and fly away unburdened, isn’t this always and forever the point of his creation?

ÐLuce Irigaray, The Marine Lover of Frederich Nietzsche

As in “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” death and the feminine are inextricably interwined in “Sunday Morning,” another Harmonium poem written at about the same time.^[17] The two poems examine the same themes, and Harold Bloom calls “Peter Quince” an “erotic grace note to the greater poem,” (35). Sexuality, creation, and death are again combined in “Sunday Morning,” but their treatment here is not as erotic as it is in “Peter Quince.” In “Sunday Morning,” Stevens wants to master life and death. In addition, he wants to return to the earth the meaning that is taken away by “silent Palestine” and the “grave of Jesus,” the Christian symbols of an other - worldy permanence. Thus meaning emerges from the void created as life and death become the same thing. The woman in the poem is not objectified by a lustful gaze. However, she loses her subjectivity as she becomes the poet’s site for the destruction of the idea of heavenly transcendence. Unlike the poet in “Peter Quince,” the poet of “Sunday Morning” is not halted by female otherness. The subversion of a heavenly paradise for an earthly one is achieved through Stevens’ appropriation of the feminine in the poem. The woman is the material support for Stevens’ creation of a new type of religion and the feminine a trope for his project of demythologization, peeling back the myths of creation to reveal the first idea. As the poem progresses, Stevens adopts the female voice and displaces feminine creative power. He also attempts to usurp divine power of creation and to give birth to himself or a god-man who chants his “boisterous devotion to the sun.” In the seventh section of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens imagines ideal men in whom the human, the earth, and the divine are mingled and for whom reality and the imagination are one.^[18] However, it is the “other” woman, Irigaray’s unrepresented woman in discourse, who is finally revealed at the poem’s conclusion as the dew that represents the point between life and death and persistently clings to the god-man’s feet.

While Bloom claims that the dreaming woman of “Sunday Morning” is the first instance of Stevens’ muse or interior paramour, he notes there is something “curiously embowered” about her (27). That is, although the poem seems to be a woman’s meditations on the meaning of religion, the woman is an aspect of Stevens himself (28). She is an externalized vision of his inner feminine, but she is also representative of something abstract. Stevens imagines the duality of heaven and earth through the immobile woman’s consciousness. He rattles around in her outline, moving through the body and mind of the woman to overturn the Christian hierarchy, or the heliocentric Platonic universe, that separates man from the Earth. By supplanting heaven with an earthly eternal, he attempts to mend the rift he sees in the idea of an otherworldly paradise. The real and maginary worlds are one, not separated as they are now by a “dividing and indifferent blue” sky (54). To return to the idea of woman as muse, the woman performs a function similar to Susanna’s. She represents the unknowable, a mediator between the poet’s world of language and the pre-discursive world. As the feminine and, therefore, counterpoint to all that is rational, Stevens’ muse leads him to realms that he could not reach without her. In “Sunday Morning,” however, in order to return to the earth and to the irrational through a re-valuation of myth, Stevens, like Nietzsche, must also revalue the idea of woman.^[19]

To pursue Bloom’s and many critics’ notion that the woman, Stevens’ muse in the poem, is his anima, or inner feminine, she must also be viewed as internalized and therefore incomplete. That is, she is as much the “woman in the poem” as she is the Virgin Mary in the third stanza or the maidens of the sixth stanza. Stevens does not merely figure woman but the feminine in various manifestations. Stevens’ muse is in shreds as, in her materiality, she is used as anything needed to serve the poet’s creation of himself and his identity.

Merely to illustrate Stevens’ use of the feminine as the material for the creation of his poem, however, would be somewhat facile. Like the Christ’s virgin mother, the woman is only the vessel through which Stevens gives birth to himself and his god-men. Since she enables the birth, the woman is an essential, indeed, primary element of Stevens’ project. However while his emphasis is on the maternal, he reveals his ambivalence towards it as he attempts to get back to the first idea. His proclamation that “Death is the mother of beauty” in the fifth section effectively represses the female body in the poem (55). For example, it is only after death is attributed to the feminine that Stevens’ god-men are born. They are born more from death than woman. Therefore, when Stevens transforms the idea of death into origin, he can also “devise our earthly mothers” (55). As destroyer and creator of life, the maternal in “Sunday Morning” is representative of the “phallic mother,” the masculine fantasy of maternity. As was stated in the introduction, the phallic mother is not a woman or a body at all but the image of an all-powerful completeness towards which the poet is drawn and which he fears at the same time.

I. Savage Sources

The phallic mother is the earth-mother muse, a figure who threatens the male poet with the obliteration of his identity and, of course, recurs in the poetic tradition. In Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1881), for instance, the poet hears his mother whisper the “delicious word death” (168). He imagines the sea as an “old crone rocking the cradle” (182) who fuses “the thousand responsive songs at random” (177) into one and forms his identity: “the sea whisper’d me” (184). Although, Bloom marks Whitman’s poem as “the single poem [. . .] that pervades Stevens’ work” (13), Stevens’ use of sun-imagery and of a Dionysian “savage source” for the god-men in the seventh stanza reveals an equal indebtedness to Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche calls Dionysus a “fighting hero and entangled [. . .] in the net of the individual will” (1001). He represents the earth, air, fire, and water and the end of individuation because individuation is “the origin and prime cause of all suffering.” A representative of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, Dionysus wills his own disappearance so that he can come back (DoumouliŽ 420).^[20] The god annuls the opposition between life and death in order to open the way for a new immortality, as does Stevens in “Sunday Morning.” Dionysus is also both masculine and feminine. Indeed, aspects of Dionysus and the religious rituals surrounding him permeate Stevens’ poem. The emphasis on Spring can be seen as an allusion to Dionysian festivals celebrated between the end of December and the start of Spring (LŽvy 310), and, of course, the orgy of dancing and chanting men evokes the bacchanalian. More importantly, however, it is the emphasis on death as creation and on being mother of one’s self that reveals Nietzsche’s philosophy as the source for Stevens’ poem. “Sunday Morning” is a poetic restatement of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.^[21]In it, Nietzsche glorifies the temporal rather than the eternal and also stresses the importance of an acceptance death:

Indeed, there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators. Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence. To be the child who is newly born, the creator must also be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birth given. (87)

Since an affirmation of death is, indeed, the climax of the work, these lines epitomize the poet’s motivation in “Sunday Morning.” Through death the poet gives birth to himself, and through death he advocates a poetics of temporality that breaks down the illusion of stability that Christianity would sustain. Woman, however, is imprisoned as the poet soars toward freedom.

As Dionysus stands between life and death, he represents, for Luce Irigaray, an ancient struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal religions. In The Marine Lover of Frederich Nietzsche, she argues that when new gods were created, the matriarchy was subsumed under patriarchal law. This struggle, she believes, is evident and still exists in the symbolic economy of discourse. Thus, in “Sunday Morning,” the maternal principle is contained before the god-men are born.

Irigaray discusses the need to project death on to women throughout her work. However, in The Marine Lover, a work that, through Nietzsche, responds to Stevens’ poem, Irigaray shows that Nietzsche’s need to create himself does not result in the subversion of hierarchies; rather, he propagates hierarchy as he starts from a foundation of feminine appropriation. In Marine Lover, Irigaray replies to Nietzsche through the voice of the feminine, a lover who is kept in death as she is exiled from the realm of discourse: “And the fact that your unique necessity is death is what keeps us apart. Whereas you finish all (female things) off by wrapping them in an airy shroud, I leave them open so they can go on breathing” (30). Inserting the feminine into the text in this way, Irigaray both interprets the phallocentric fear of woman evident in their language and opens up a space for women in it.

Becoming master of the self, then, belongs to the realm of fantasy where the phallic mother presides. If woman is represented in the symbolic economy as castrated and, by transference, as castrating, then woman is not represented at all; she is symbolically non-existent: because she is castrated, she represents castration and the threat of nothingness. Thus, woman in her cultural signification as death functions as the site where the void that threatens existence can be overcome through the Other. She occupies an ambivalent position because she tends to death as it is projected on to her, but she is also the visual proof that this lack (or death) is unavoidable. In Marine Lover, Irigaray argues that woman, as the castrated one, is relegated to the role of protecting men from their own death:

Predicatable insofar as she is an object in general, the/a woman remains external to the objective. From this outside position she grounds its economy ÐÊ by being castrated, she threatens castration. Glimpsing that she may sub-tend the logic of predication without its functioning having anything properly to do with her, leads to the fear that she may intervene and upset everything: the death of the subject would be nothingness. A ground rises up, a montage of shapes disintegrates. The horror of the abyss, attributed to woman. Loss of identityÊÐ death. ( 91)

In other words, if woman was allowed into discourse the entire system would crumble. The only death woman experiences is the never-ending death of her subjectivity as she is continually used to support the philosopher’s creation of himself through language. As anything other than the maternal, woman is a threat to masculine identity. As Margaret Whitford observes in “Irigaray, Utopia, and the Death Drive,” “the fantasy of the maternal-feminine, the woman as container [. . .] immobilizes the woman, who is not allowed to come alive or be sexual in other than male terms” (391). Woman is relegated to the maternal. She exists for man and in this position must be repressed before he can gain access to language. In the Platonic model of the cave, for instance, she must be abandoned before the father can give birth to the sun.

Nevertheless, woman is desirable because she is distant, absent, a muse. Like death she is unrepresentable, but she is present as a boundary and an excess. In the masculine fantasy of the phallic mother, she represents a lost wholeness, a place where all desires are satiated. This wholeness, however, also means annihilation. Indeed for Stevens, the union with the mother represents annihilation, a brave symbolic leap, but one he makes after supplanting her creative powers by his own. In “Sunday Morning,” the union with the maternal is also figured as a perennial, sexual union of maidens and young boys. Stevens’ vision, with its emphasis on repetition in the temporal, is indicative of the death drive, which Elizabeth Grosz describes as the “compulsion to repeat” (Jacques Lacan 151). Repetition is a form of control over the maternal body performed symbolically through relations with women, which represent merely a return to the mother and an attempt to attain wholeness. On the other side of death, then, lies sex. Thus in “Sunday Morning,” Death “causes” the maidens to continually “stray” with the boys (55). The drive to repeat also signifies the impossibility of satisfying desire. In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray explains that the need to seek the satisfaction of desire through women is a symptom of the desire to master everything: “the desire to force entry, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his ‘origin’” (25). Woman, Irigaray argues, is merely a tool for the eradification of uncertainty.

The death drive, for Freud the strongest motivating force, is formulated around the maternal body. Like woman, the death drive is contradictory. It disintegrates and it freezes; it breaks things into fragments and prevents fragmentation. Although the ego protects itself from this fear of fragmentation or annihilation, there are aspects of woman that are not represented and thus elude its entrapment; they survive in the symbolic as excess. The self is always pressed by that which it excludes, identified as “the Real” by Lacan or “the abject” by Kristeva. For Kristeva, the abject is that part of the subject which cannot be objectified. In the subconscious, the abject is placed on the side of the feminine opposed to the paternal rule and is associated with the maternal body. The connection of the maternal body to the natural world alienates it from the father’s language. The self, however, cannot deny its corporeal reality and its death and is thus threatened by pressure from these outside forces. For Irigaray, this excess that eludes representation is female desire and female sexuality; man’s identity seems to depend, then, on his projecting death on to woman. In Marine Lover she argues that in the male imaginary it is always the woman who is fragmented:

She nourishes. Or yet: she suffers, ails, enjoys, she even threatens. SheÊÐ affected by a predicate without an object. she ÐÊobject of predication. The almost inverted project of predication: an absolute subject subjected to predication in the absolute [. . .] She sub-sists ‘within herself’ beneath discourse. As that which has been called prime matter. (92)

Irigaray’s conceptualization of woman as predicate is another way of saying she is not a subject. The maternal body is that which “subtends” language. In Sexual Subversions, Grosz explains that maternity is not the function of a woman but a disembodied, social, presignifying, space-time (96-97). Woman remains in an uncertain position.

An ambivalence towards the maternal body that is indicative of the fear of death and the need to appropriate the maternal body in order to distance it is the motivating force behind “Sunday Morning.” The need for wholeness, for a return to primary narcissism, in which the subject is not separated from his desire, is accomplished for Stevens through the use of the female body. As Ellen Mortensen explains in “Woman’s Untruth and Le FŽminin: Reading Luce Irigaray with Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger,” “woman’s femininity has always already been appropriated as the negative counterpart to the masculine economy of truth” (214). While Plato devalues the eternal feminine because of her primordial connection with temporal sensuous nature, Nietzsche sees the relation to the feminine as a possibility for a new creative force (215). This Nietzschean influence is evident throughout both Stevens’ early and late work as woman is continually associated with difference. She is a trope for the move towards difference in his poetry, accomplished first in “Sunday Morning” by Stevens’ move inside the female body.

II. Undoing the “old catastrophe.”

Stevens describes the woman in the poem in deeply sensual and exotic imagery. She rests in the “Complacencies of the peignoir”; “pungent oranges” and the “bright, green wings” of the cockatoo on her rug separate her from the religion she is avoiding at what is the hour she should be in church. Stevens dramatizes a conflict in the feminine psyche as she “Feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe” (53): religion. She is a point of difference between the metaphysical and the phenomenal realms. To transport her to the world of religion, the poet mimes a walk across the water “Over the seas, to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.” Her warm sensuous world, representative of the earthly and the sensible, is juxtaposed to the cold, dead world of religion. The religious world is “ancient,” silent, and entombed. This world, based on blood and sacrifice, has none of the appeal of the brightness and pungency of the female world Stevens envisions.

Like “Peter Quince,” the form of “Sunday Morning” is a well-wrought whole. Stevens returns in the last section to the scene he has set in the first section, but in the central six sections, he moves downward through the body and consciousness of the woman. In the second stanza the poet asks, “Why should she giver her bounty to the dead?” (53). Bloom suggests that “bounty” means “consciousness” or sensibilities (30). Therefore, the poet asks why she should not find solace in earthly things rather than their supposed transcendental ideal: “In any balm or beauty of the earth, / Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?” (53). In this stanza, as in others, Stevens restates Zarathustra’s claim that, after the death of god, “To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth” (Nietzsche 13). The poet claims, “Divinity must live within herself” (53). In other words, the divine must be found in the human form and its connection to the earth rather than in a divine being that separates the individual from it.

The poet, then, adopts a feminine voice and replaces the rational with the hysterical. He appeals to his religion as do the Bacchantes to Dionysus:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights. (54)

An excess of “gusty emotions,” a kind of hysteria typically linked to the feminine and the absolute opposite of reason, is that which connects the poet to the natural world. Furthermore, the woman will remember “All pleasures and all pains,” unlike the Christian whose pains are mercifully taken away by their religion and who forgets the bodily aspect of existence (54). The woman and the poet through her are returned to a natural cycle or circle; “The bough of summer and the winter branch” are “the measures destined for her soul.” As the poet occupies a feminine space, he adopts a feminine way of knowing, but, as Irigaray suggests in Marine Lover, this is a tactic of play, a simulation. When the poet speaks through the woman’s voice, he does so from a masculine position incorporating the feminine for his own purposes but leaving woman out. He uses woman in the manner of that which is “not.” As hysteric, she cannot speak what she does not know; thus he speaks for her.

Occupying a feminine space, Stevens affects a type of symbolic castration. He is opening himself up to death in order to embrace totality. Irigaray argues, however, that such a move would not undermine the speaking position as subject: “if castration is equivalent to death, then the other is equivalent to the same. Or else perpetuates the alternation of everything and nothing. Fulfilling the master’s desire. Which he can dress up differently, according to the historical moment” (81). That is, the male subject is secure but a space for woman is not allowed through this play of sameness. Rather than undermining the position of mastery sought by the subject, Stevens’ poet solidifies it by incorporating everything within the subjective will and reducing everything to an unconscious same. For Stevens, as for Nietzsche, reality is based on what he can see.

Stevens continues his subversion of the eternal by the temporal, the heavenly by the earthly, in the third stanza. He reinterprets the evolution of the gods from Jove to Christ in a downward motion that mimics the poet’s move through the woman’s body. The movement here not only repeats his meditation on the human and the divine, but also foreshadows the way the maternal will be used in his new religion. That is, the gods do not exist without some relation to the maternal body. Jove, the sky god who “had his inhuman birth” (31) and was not “suckled” by woman or supported by the land, is alienated from the human and treats his “hinds” as possessions. The next god Stevens describes is Christ whose difference is marked by his “virginal” birth. He represents a “commingling” of the human and divine that is a “requital to desire” (37), a remedy for Stevens’ nostalgia for wholeness. But Christianity is a failure symbolized by the “dividing and indifferent blue” sky (45). It has only separated the human and divine, and it has devalued them both. Stevens’ mythoclasm in this stanza serves to replace Christ with man; his blood will “come to be / The blood of paradise” (41). When man esteems what he can see more than what he cannot, he will succeed in appeasing his desire: “the sky will be much friendlier then than now, / A part of labor and a part of pain” (42-43).

In this stanza, Stevens seeks the Other in himself, for mastering the self directly must be done without any relation to the Other. This is accomplished through an Hegelian move toward absorbing the Other; as Stevens moves through the woman he appropriates her.^[22] In the third stanza, while the reference to the Virgin Mother of Christ is present, she is, again, merely a vessel and a receptacle for God’s creation. The Nietzschean move Stevens makes, then, is to absorb the other in order to give birth to himself in the fourth stanza, to relegate her to death and therefore probe her lack of subjectivity for the source of his origin. As Bloom points out, the third stanza is “reductive and undoing” (31). Through a deconstruction of the meaning of religion the poet reaches the desired point of identification between the human and the divine. Stevens imagines an earthly divinity in the second stanza and dismantles religious edifices in the third. The god-men are not yet born, but like Jove and Christ, they will be born of woman in a way that denies her the gift of life and the power of creation. The virgin’s body provides the means for the commingling of the human and the divine, but the creative power is attributed to the father, then the sun/son. The feminine evoked through the personification of “Death” as the “Mother of Beauty” (55) is a vessel as well and the material for Stevens’ poetic creation. The woman in the poem can be seen in two ways: metaphorically, she is a vessel and a location for the poem, but she is also a midwife for Stevens who, by appropriating the creative power of the feminine, creates himself in the guise of the god-men of the seventh stanza.

Although, unlike Susanna, the woman of “Sunday Morning” is given voice in the fourth and fifth stanzas ÐÊthe voice of doubt and the expression of a need for the eternalÊÐ it is clear, as Bloom suggests (29), that Stevens is arguing with himself. Again, like Nietzsche, Stevens sees Chrisitanity as an error and equates it with the feminine.^[23] The woman is torn between her desire for the sanctity of religion and the temporary contentment of the things of the earth. As muse or interior paramour, the woman is a bridge between an earthly and heavenly paradise in these two stanzas. In the fourth stanza, Stevens once again stresses an earthly eternal as opposed to the haunts, chimeras, and remote sanctities of Christianity. The voice of the woman in the poem reflects:

I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

of misty fields, by their sweet questionings. (54)

The temporal is enough, but when the birds are gone, she asks where she will find the permanence she desires: “where, then, is paradise?” (50). She must constantly have a visual symbol of transcendent reality. The poet responds that no metaphysical reality has endured as long as earthly reality in its temporality. Indeed, this temporality is itself a fixed entity. “There is not any haunt of prophesy,” the poet claims, “That has endured / As April’s green endures” (57). Spring is the guarantor of rebirth and the memory of it, or “the remembrance of awakened birds,” should be enough to sustain her (54). In addition, “her desire for June and evening” should replace the longing she gives over now to the “isle / Melodious, where spirits gat them home.”

In the fifth stanza, however, the woman’s doubt returns. She remarks, “But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss” (61-62). Her anxiety seems to be anxiety about the inevitable fact of death that Christianity assuages through the idea of eternal life. Stevens elides this desire for “bliss” with the troubling proclamation that “Death is the mother of beauty” (63). Although this affirmation of death seems contrary to the Christian notion of eternity, it is only through this death that rebirth can occur. In the third book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche claims that: “all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us” ( 220). Just as things recur, so do people. So, Stevens asserts, from death “Shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires” (55). Like Dionysus who stands at the center of the Eternal Recurrence, death must be accepted and destruction willed in order for there to be recurrence and the immortality Nietzsche espouses (DoumouliŽ 423-424). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proclaims, “the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust” (101). There is an eternity in the acceptance of the never-ending cycle of life.

For Stevens, Death is more important than birth. Leonard and Wharton assert in their Nietzschean reading of “Sunday Morning,” that Death is not the guarantor of eternal bliss but the condition that makes earthly life and “the present more precious” (109). Sukenick says that death in the poem means change, and that change alone guarantees fulfillment of our desires (65). In the first line of the sixth stanza the poet asks, “Is there no change of death in paradise?” (76). The necessity of change is a persistent sentiment in Stevens’ work, perhaps most notably in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” when he writes, “The freshness of transformation is / The freshness of a world” (344). In the process of destroying myths, for instance, Stevens can get closer to the source of origin. Change allows difference to occur and permits a decentering of meaning.^[24] Death, then, keeps life moving toward change; as Sukenick explains, death causes the repetition of desire after desire has been satisfied (65). Thus, the poem’s main thrust illustrates Freud's assertion that the death drive is the strongest motivating force in the psychological model. While death appears to be the opposite of life, in reality, it is its precondition.

Always pressured by that which is unrepresentable, the self can never achieve the stasis of death, which would be equivalent to immobility. Thus, the death drive preserves life by maintaining psychic fragmentation and separation. Whitford explains, however, that the sexual drives are akin to the death drive because they “unbind,” they “preserve life [. . .] in the form of destruction and division by breaking up stasis” (391).^[25] Whitford adds that because the death drive permits creation to be born from destruction “it can be seen as eros” (390).^[26] Thus, woman is important to the male subject as that through which man preserves and continues his life. Sex and death are intertwined, then, in the critical fifth-stanza of “Sunday Morning.” The change that is essential to Stevens’ mythoclasm is represented by the erotic union of the maidens and the boys each spring. Woman as the embodiment of death is split into both the threat of annihilation as well as the representative of nostalgic wholeness. Although, as the poet observes, “She [death] strews the leaves / Of sure obliteration on our paths,” it is to these “littering” leaves the maidens stray when they taste the “plums and pears” the boys pile up “on disregarded plate” (55). In other words, sexual union is predicated by the utter destruction that evokes the poet’s symbolic rendering of the death drive. The immortality Stevens imagines is the cycle enabled by the body of woman, as maidens, by definition, are waiting to fulfill their role in the masculine order of discourse. Maidens die symbolically as they are relegated to the maternal; although as maidens they were already defined as “for-man,” they disappear in the poem when they become the device through which man can achieve eternity. These maidens will be replaced by others in the next year. The maternal occupies a place of ambivalence for the god-men, who, like Dionysus, must create themselves. This becomes clearer in “Sunday Morning” at the end of the sixth stanza:

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. (55)

The poet finds solace in the “bosom” of death and from this position is able to conceive or construct an acceptable simulacrum of his womanly birth. He must frame his mother in order to create himself. Decidedly, this is the most important move if he is to create the gods. But the body he would devises is, as Irigaray argues, in Marine Lover a “language-body” that serves to keep the maternal body at a distance and under the control of the subject. Stevens signifies that he is giving birth to himself through language, not through the power of womanÊÐ the mystery of woman leaves him speechless about his own origin. Irigaray believes herein lies the real death (of woman):

(The) evil begins at birth--the birth of your language. You have to go farther back than the point where you saw the light of day. To set your coming into daylight within this language-malady, does that not already mean acceding in your decline? Believing that what gives you life is an obstacle to life? And wanting to be engendered from a language-body alone? (65)

Thus, because masculine discourse exludes the feminine, its existence becomes problematical and can only be mastered through language. In Womanizing Nietzsche, Kelly Oliver explains that woman or the female body becomes “just so many metaphors, metaphors that no longer have anything to do with that body” (110). Through linguistic representations the male subject can distance himself from the female body and have mastery over its mystery. As with the phallic mother, woman suffers under the weight of masculine fantasy. Irigaray writes, “you believe that those guardian women are always pregnant. And sit down to await what of you is about to be born” (39). Likewise, the mothers in “Sunday Morning” are “waiting sleeplessly” (55). The maternal body must stand ready in the masculine imaginary as the material for their creations. Woman is kept safely contained as death in her threatening aspect and as the maternal, continually awaiting the return of the male.

The appropriation completed by the act of containing the earthly mother in the language of the sixth stanza leads to the virile orgy of the seventh. Birth is subsumed into the broader whole Stevens contructs of men who “perish” (103). The god who is “Naked among them, like a savage source” is Dionysus, whose ambivalent relation to origin defines the ability of these men to create their own origin and meaning (95). The “ring of men” become master of everything as the phenomenal world passes through their bodies and is created through their voices; everything is turned into language:

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills. (96-100)

Allowing the men to define existence by what they see (and say), Stevens fulfills Zarathustra’s desire “that everything be changed into what is thinkable for man, visible for man, feelable by man” (Nietzsche 86). The division, created by Christianity, in which the natural world is Other, is rectified by the ability of the men to incorporate and become the Other. The men create themselves and their god, and they give their devotion to the sun, which is, as Irigaray points out, a very traditional source. Although Stevens seeks to overturn Platonic ideals, he returns to the sun; he bases his poetics on a masculine symbol that pulls his glance upward and guarantees sight while blinding him to other things. Indeed, Irigaray argues in Speculum, the Sun is the Father and “procreator of all” while “the other, and the move from the female one to the other, are forgotten” (259-260). There is always something left out of discourse.

The troublesome element of the last stanza is, then, the dew which serves as predicate for the god-men when it manifests “upon their feet” (105). The dew is that which unites the “heavenly fellowship” of the men, “whence they came and whither they shall go” (56). In a letter to L.W. Payne, Jr., Stevens explains that the dew is a symbol for the absence of defining values in existence: “Life is as fugitive as dew upon the feet of men dancing in dew. Men do not either come from any direction or disappear in any direction. Life is as meaningless as dew” (250). Bloom states that the dew is a synechdoche used throughout Stevens’ poetry for fecundity (34). The dew thenÊÐ as meaningless and at the same time fecund ÊÐ is a feminine symbol and represents another split of representation. That is, the dew is a reminder of mortality and creation and an assurance of immortality as it is figured in “Sunday Morning.” That the feminine dew is “meaningless” also suggests that it is representative of something outside language. Although Stevens has attempted to master everything, something escapes his discourse and penetrates the language-body he conceives. The dew represents woman as she is not defined by masculine discourse and thus a continuing struggle between the matriarchal and patriarchal power. The dew is a rectifying ambivalence for Stevens, indicative of a quest for signification through the feminine that eludes him. For fluidity remains in Stevens’ poem as the dew rises gently and mysteriously. It is borne through the night but burned away by the over-powering sun.

In the final stanza, Stevens brings back the woman of the poem from her dream and restates, as Nietzsche would say, that god is dead:

The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay. (56)

The death of god frees the earth from the defining structure of religion. Released from the detrimental idea of heaven, the material world in which we live is now “an old chaos of the sun,” an “old dependency of day and night,” or “island solitude, unsponsored, free, / Of that Wide water, inescapable” ( 56). The multiple ways of viewing the earth create a sense of its newfound but ecstatic meaninglessness. The turning of the “Or” also suggests an evolution and a possibility of recurrence that founds meaning in change and in the temporal. Stevens imagines a reversal of signification in which the inescapable “wide water” is as void of meaning as it was once the transport to the home of the gods. Inevitably, however, this is merely a reversal of hierarchies. The religion the poet imagines and Christianity are too similar, particularly in the forgotten role of the feminine in the creation of the male god. Stevens alternates one idea of immortality with another, never leaving Irigaray’s circle of the same in which immortality depends on the appropriation of the Other. The significant move Stevens attempts to make in “Sunday Morning” is to break free of the oppositional thinking that divides the human from the divine. The death of religion allows Stevens to define his own being, to create god-men. Nevertheless, woman remains a value to be denigrated.

In Marine Lover, Irigaray argues that Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence is a failure because he never leaves the circle of what he can see. Woman defies his appropriating gaze. In “Sunday Morning,” woman remains “other of the same,” representative of change, death, eternity, and fertility. In the second stanza, Stevens’ first destructive gesture is performed through the incorporation of the woman’s voice which encompasses the seasons, “The bough of summer and the winter branch.” To such a notion Irigaray responds that woman does not flow according to the male subject’s time-frame:

And thus (I) come and go, change and stay, go on and come back, without any circle. Spread out and open in this endless becoming. And without one direction ever being more important than another, without my ever wanting one more than the other. (14)

For the feminine, there is no season that is more important than another. While the male subject’s Dionysian heritage may be he impetus for his will to return back every spring, it is woman who continuously allows the subject to be. As maiden, woman helps the boys repeat their drive toward narcissistic wholeness. As maternal body, woman performs her most important and most denigrated role.

The male subject’s ability to create himself, the ultimate goal of destroying the Christian myth of origin depends on the appropriation of maternal power. In Marine Lover, Irigaray argues that the philosopher, however, conveniently forgets his debt to the mother and his origin:

and your whole will, your eternal recurrence, are these anything more than the dream of one who neither wants to have been born, nor to continue being born, at every instant, of a female other? Does your joy in becoming not result from annihilating her from whom you are tearing yourself away? (26-27)

God-men are born from the fantasy of a conflation of death and woman: a woman outside discourse and therefore no threat to the language-body they have created. By reversing the order, by making the negative positive, these god-men keep their maternal birth, more a threat to them than the death they affirm, at a distance. Nonetheless, the affirmation of death is a simulation, a play at being castrated and speaking from the point of view of the castrated Other. This is not to say, however, that Stevens has allowed the woman in his poem to truly speak. Stevens merely plays with woman, using her as a trope for difference and a position he can occupy in order to displace meaning. Woman is also present as the one who evades representation; and, therefore, like death, she is that which makes life worth living. Irigaray writes, “She it is who attracts as she moves away [. . .] The death that must dress life up to make it desirable” (40). Stevens is driven to master all he can see through the appropriation of that which he cannot. Woman is imprisoned in the death that drives him to repeat and keep the circle moving.

Nevertheless, meaning emerges in “Sunday Morning” from the void created as life and death are fused. At the end of the poem, Stevens soars symbolically over the earth, and his clean freedom is represented by aimless flight:

Casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (56)

Although the poet preaches a love for the earth, he wants to soar above it, freed from meaning and master of everything. Irigaray argues, however, that the notion of an †bermensch is a way to deny the other. By focusing on death and eternity in their so-called celebration of the body of the earthly, Stevens’ god-men, like the †bermensch, seem to flee that which they are compelled to reevaluate. Oliver suggests that for Irigaray, the “eternal return is born out of resentment [of woman]” and “appropriates and yet rejects the other ÊÐ the feminine, the body, the earth” (107). The poet flees the mother by imprisoning her, by denying her the power of creation, and by forcing her to represent the death that gives his life meaning. In “Speaking of Immemorial Waters,” the first section of Marine Lover, Irigaray illustrates the place of woman in this economy:

Nothing of the other is retained but the footstep, and the hole that opens up beneath the feet [. . .] All that remains of the other is a taut rope that plays with the void by keeping it always at an even distance. (17-18)

This “other” woman is present in Stevens’ poem; she is the persistent dew that represents for the poet the symbiosis of life and death.

No World for her Except the One She Sang: Appropriating the Woman’s Voice in”Idea of Order at Key West”

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,

The old age of a watery realist,

Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes

Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age

That whispered to the sun’s compassion, made

A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,

And on the clopping foot-ways of the moon

Lay grovelling.

Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C”

Stevens’ treatment of the woman in his 1934 poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” marks a shift from his evocations of the eternal-feminine throughout Harmonium, his 1923 collection of poems. The woman he imagines is described as the “maker of the song she sang” (105). Unlike Stevens’ earlier female figures, those silent and often passive muses, the singer by the sea is externalized, dynamic, and vocal. Yet she is not a real woman but something akin to a conjuring, and her presence as exile from reality becomes clear at the end of the fifth stanza, when under the gaze of the narrator she is reduced to voice: “there never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and singing, made” (106). Although her singing is the focus of the poem, the singer is silenced as the effect of her song is articulated by the male poet. In this guise, the nameless woman by the sea is like Susanna, a feminine representation of truth, the poetic imagination, and the embodiment of the knowledge of origin and death. In the role of “single artificer” (36), however, she seems more than a muse; she is the poet’s double.

The woman in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” able to transform the chaotic sea into “the self / That was her song” (106), becomes for Stevens an idealization of the poet. In his essay “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens describes the poet as both the truth and “part of what is real” (682) with the ability to be “master of our lives” (685). As he circles the horizons of the real and unreal, the poet has moments of “victory over the incredible, a moment of purity that does not become any the less pure because, as what was incredible is eliminated, something newly credible takes its place” (676). In other words, he can alter his perceptions of reality through the powers of his imagination achieving momentary glimpses of truth. Thus, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the poet turns “The meaningless plungings of water and wind” (105) into a profound and ordered scene in which the sea is “portioned” and the night tilts “in the air” (106). The quest for truth Stevens attributes to the poet, and the ability to make the tumultuous natural world conform to logos is, however, also decidedly male. In “The Virile Youth,” after making the statement that “The centuries have a way of being male” (675), Stevens describes the poet as a younger Miltonic figure who possesses the imagination of the son still bearing the “antique imagination of the father” (675). Such nods to patriarchal figures are the foundation of Stevens’ poetic identity, placing him in a realm of phallic sameness. And while Stevens also attempts to create a new poetic identity and a new poetics, he retains the poet’s “masculine nature” (685). Why then is the poet figured as a woman in “The Idea of Order at Key West”? Why, rather than articulate the truths the poet possesses directly, perhaps with the use of the first person “I,” does Stevens bounce them off his feminine Other while he and his male companion, “the pale Ramon,” only watch?

Stevens is, of course, the maker of the poem and the maker of the singer. In “‘Sister of the Minotaur’: Sexism and Stevens,” Jacqueline Vaught Brogan argues, she is “a figure for Stevens himself [. . .] and the way he sings” (14). Not reduced to a representation of the earth-mother as is the feminine in “Sunday Morning,” the singer by the sea is a compelling figure for a discussion of Irigaray’s notion of “other of the same,” woman as she is for man. She is a reflection of the male subject and, finally, an object of exchange between the narrator and “pale Ramon” who work out meaning between them but through the woman singer. In a recent Lacanian analysis of the poem, Brooke Baeten explains the woman as a mirror image of Stevens’ poet: the mirror image engenders “a sense of confidence within the self, and it is just such a process that the male poet undergoes as the poem [. . .] progresses” (24). Baeten concludes that the woman is significant “not for what she is, but for what she reflects” (25). This analysis is certainly in accordance with Irigaray’s theory in which Lacan’s mirror stage is the foundation of her deconstruction of the fiction of male subjectivity to provide the possible construction of a female one. Baeten concludes, however, that in Stevens’ reflection he sees his own inadequate voice as male poet equal to that of the stunted voice of woman. At the end of the poem, he can only conceive of the idea of poetry, not the truth he seeks as poet. Neverthelesss, as “other of the same,” the woman’s voice is silenced by the male poet who refracts what he will off of her to create a fantasy of wholeness that is dependent on that which is excluded (the woman). The poem also permits a discussion of the “other of the other,” Irigaray’s conception of the woman not yet allowed into discourse, for when Stevens silences her he leaves her beyond discourse. Stevens is only able to sense the “rage to order” because he will not hear what the “other” woman says.

In the first four stanzas of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the woman is indeed Other: enigmatic and all-powerful. She contains chaos as she mingles her voice with it. Then, in the fifth stanza the male narrator communicates what the woman singer supposedly orders. In this way, he projects his idea of poet onto the woman. Read against Irigaray’s theory of the construction of male subjectivity in Speculum of the Other Woman, the stability of Stevens’ poetic identity clearly requires a reflection of itself : “if this ego is to be valuable, some ‘mirror’ is needed to reassure it and re-insure it of its value. Woman will be the foundation for this specular duplication, giving man back ‘his’ image and repeating it as the ‘same’” (54). Whatever Otherness the woman possesses is lost to the poet’s need to repeat himself. In The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietsche, Irigaray restates her argument that woman is contained in the words and image of the male subject in a way that resonates with the trapped singer of Stevens’ poem: “your words reasoned all the better because within them a voice was captive” (3). Stevens creates the woman singer, and he also silences her, not only in a metaphoric attempt to demonstrate his own feelings of impotence as a poet, as Baeten argues, but because his poetic identity depends on the appropriation of the Other. Woman must be the guardian of nothingness, of death, of fluidity; in her maternal role, she must signify his lack, raise him into the symbolic, and then be forgotten.

It must not be overlooked, of course, that Stevens does venture into the realm of nothingness. He casts what Arensberg calls a male-feminine “plumb line to the timeless realm of primary process thinking, and the mother’s face” (24). In other words, Stevens risks the dissolution of identity not only by bringing the lost maternal into the symolic but by attempting, in a sense, to cross over to this realm.^[27] However, when looked at through Irigaray’s mirror, Stevens’ poetics demonstrates a need to suppress what he feels is feminine. According to Brogan, he suffers from a “schism within himself” that is culturally based, and a part of his need to follow, while adding to, the patriarchal tradition of poetry (4).^[28] Throughout Harmonium, Stevens explores the feminine, imagining a new muse to accompany him on his quest for an American sublime, but he finally suppresses the muse. In “Sunday Morning,” for example, the feminine is effectively obliterated; she is the dew on the feet of the new god-men who create themselves with no need for the maternal. Stating “Death is the mother of Beauty,” Stevens attempts to master his death and his origin in a Dionysian gesture that allows him to create meaning for himself as he creates himself. While “The Idea of Order at Key West” retains an ambivalent attitude toward the feminine and its role in poetry, the poem represents a turning point in Stevens’ canon towards an acceptance of the feminine in his later works. The feminine is a central component of the 1936 collection, Ideas of Order, in which “The Idea of Order at Key West” is included, but Stevens represses it again as he does in Harmonium.

To come to terms with the feminine in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and the way it is carried along throughout Stevens’ work, it will be helpful to look first at another poem from the same collection. While “The Idea of Order at Key West” may be the greatest poem of this collection, “Farewell to Florida” sets the tone for the work as a whole.^[29] Florida, a state of mind and synechdoche for desire is completely rejected as Stevens attempts to push past his longing for the feminine that has tempted or seduced him in his earlier works (Bloom 110). The feminine principle is a destructive entity or a siren that leads the poet astray:

Her mind had bound me round.

.......................

Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,

Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,

Her days, her oceanic nights, calling

For Music, or whisperings from the reefs.

How content I shall be in the North to which I sail

and to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand. (97)

The certainty he longs for resides in the solid North and in the Father’s “violent mind” (98). Only the “virile” language of the father can master existence and save the poet from the loss of idenity he senses in the feminine South. As Bloom asserts, Florida is the feminine mind, the mind of Harmonium that is revived in Ideas of Order. For although Stevens repeats his willful assertion to “go on, high ship, go on, plunge on” (98), the ambivalence of his wish to leave the mythic mind of the south is evident in its continual reappearance in Ideas of Order. His desire for a return to the maternal which must be repeated in the psychological fantasies constituting ego development informs the body of Stevens’ work.

“The Idea of Order at Key West” represents the most powerful return of the feminine at this point in the development of Stevens’ canon. The woman in “Key West” is a complicated figure, a personification of the poetic imagination: muse and poet. Juxtaposed to the mind of Florida that must be the singer’s mind, she is a frightful figure when as Other she signifies everything the violent mind cannot encompass. She sings “beyond” (that ever - enticing word of Stevens’) “the genius of the sea” (105).^[30] As muse, the woman singer of “Key West” is a version of the “Sister of the Minotaur” who “half-beast and somehow more than human” accompanies the virile youth (675). The singer can be seen as “the truth of that imagination of life” that the poet expresses when her words become his (685). It follows, then, that as muse the woman singer is appropriated by the poet and absorbed into his being. Her otherness is incorporated into his sense of self in the gender exchange that Stevens imagines in “Key West.” As Irigaray argues in Speculum the feminine is the embodiment of truth. Truth, like the definition of woman in masculine discourse is elusive, veiled, and waiting to be discovered by man:

The ‘subject’ sidels up to the truth, squints at it, obliquely, in an attempt to gain possession of what truth can no longer say. Dispersing, piercing those metaphorsÊÐ particularly the photological onesÊÐ which have constituted truth by the premises of Western philosophy: virgin, dumb, and veiled in her nakedness, her vision still naively ‘natural,’ her view point still resolutely blind and unsuspecting of what may lie beneath the blindness. (136)

Truth, like woman, inevitably waits to be described by the male philosopher / poet. The woman singer is the truth beyond speech. Objectified by the narrator’s gaze and Stevens’ dependence on it in the specular, she is contained in that pre-discursive, fantastical world beyond speech. From the poem’s alluring opening stanza, it is clear that the woman singer in “Key West” represents the pre-Oedipal realm before language. She is present but “beyond” and her song appears to make the sea struggle in an attempted mimesis :

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. (105)

Her poetry, however is not mimesis. It is not a traditional attempt to comprehend the truth of the natural world. Through his complicated rhetoric, Stevens sets a scene in which the twoÊÐ water and woman ÐÊ sing together dissonantly. That is, the poet describes two entities, the woman and the sea, that echo each other. Space and sound, “motion” and “constant cry” are combined to produce, for the reader, the effect of place and experience.^[31] In the second stanza the narrator appears to be puzzled as he seeks the true source of the song:

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word. (105)

Although the narrator claims to be able to hear her, he says her song is not “medleyed sound.” He is uncertain: “It may be that in all her phrases stirred / The grinding water and the gasping wind” (105). The chaotic sound of the sea and the woman are one and indecipherable, and the poet decides at the end of the stanza, that “it was she and not the sea we heard” (14). The woman singer’s voice, however, is lost in the excessive materiality of Stevens’ figurative sea, and, therefore, the truth she embodies is something she cannot truly articulate.

According to Arensberg, Stevens’ vision of truth is, again, like Nietzsche’s, feminine and veiled.^[32] For Arensberg, the poem exchanges gender masks between poet and muse, blurring the lines of sexual difference. Stevens’desire to have the woman is a desire to be the woman and is an expression of the desire for nostalgic wholeness the poet seeks at the end of “Key West” (35). Stevens’ “rage to order,” in the final stanza, is an attempt to master everything including the feminine “fragrant portals [. . .] of ourselves and of our origins” (106). In order to possess truth (as woman), he must be the truth or appropriate it (as woman) in a continual exchange of gendered masks. Finally, as Arensberg suggests, Stevens submits to the “Orphic mastery and femininity of truth” (35). Yet while the poem can be seen as the poet’s failure to master anything, an idea which will be taken up later, this continual exchange of the poet’s mask for that of the female singer reveals that the woman functions as Irigaray’s “other of the same” for the poet and an object of exchange.

The masculine identity that is constructed out of language is constantly pressured by the forces of the unknown. In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” another of his essays on the imagination in The Necessary Angel, Stevens acknowledges, “It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality” (665). Although he may not have ego development in mind in his conception of “the pressure of reality,” Stevens’ words suggest Irigaray’s re-reading of the Lacanian fantasy of subjectivity. Wholeness is a fantasy that must be repeated, and woman as “other of the same” can never fully satisfy his desire although she is imprisoned in the role of object of desire. As Irigaray explains in Speculum, the role of woman (for man) is multi-facted:

She is the reserve of ‘sensuality’ for the elevation of intelligence, she is the matter used for the imprint of forms, gage of possible regression into the naive perception, the representative representing negativity (death), dark continent of dreams and fantasies, and also eardrum faithfully duplicating the music, though not all of it, so that the series of displacements may continue, for the ‘subject.’ (141)

As truth, as “other of the same,” the woman’s role in “Key West” becomes signifier for the music the poet wants to hear. He cannot submit to the truth of the woman because there is no woman present. The speaker does not hear the singer because she is silenced. Becoming a part of his idenity, his feminine side in a Jungian reading, she loses her own identity ÐÊif she ever had one.

As she is appropriated, the woman is nothing more than the negative, the underside of the male subject. Brogan argues that the feminine voice is “simultaneously created, disclosed in the portals, and repressed” (14). If, however, as Baeten suggests, the woman is significant for what she reflects, she is also significant for what she contains. That is, as the silver backing of the mirror, as the support for the whole image the poet creates for himself, the woman also keeps something back. She takes or contains the things his language-body cannot hold. In the fourth and longest stanza of “Key West,” Stevens struggles to comprehend the meaning of the woman singer’s voice:

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound

Repeated in a summer without end

And sound alone. But it was more than that,

More even than her voice, and ours, among

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres

Of sky and sea. (105)

As the poet struggles to find the answer to the question in the third stanza, “Whose spirt is this?” (105), he gives himself over to the feminine mind of Florida, the summer mind. Overcome by the sea, this is a place with no limits or boundaries; the movement of the water is without a concrete meaning. It is a mythic place where the poet imagines himself as indistinguishable from either water or woman.

Yet the poet’s ride on the tumultuous wave of either sea or sound is broken with the slight structural difference that sets off the form of the fifth stanza. Unlike the other stanzas of the poem, the poet’s deduction that “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing” (34-35) is offset by white space. The poet then projects an overtly masculine or masterly description of the effect of the woman on the place as if to suggest that the white space itself signifies the instance of the exchange of masks. The white space marks the point at which the male poet translates the meaning of the female poet’s song:

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. (35-39)

The woman is then the master of both time and place, transforming what were the sea and world into controllable entities, but the poet controls her. She possesses a power that, as Baeten rightly argues, is not allowed woman who, without possession of the phallus, cannot be a “maker” (27). In Irigaray’s language as well, the woman is of course excluded from the masculine economy of discourse because she is characterized by her lack. She serves as the matter on which meaning is erected by the poet.

The woman’s inability to participate in the language she helps create is further demonstrated in Stevens’ vision in the poem. After the poet makes the woman singer the “maker,” he reveals that “there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” (41-42). She is frozen in his gaze. Objectified and reduced to voice, the woman becomes Echo in his narcissistic fantasy of wholeness. While he sees himself in her, she has no identity except her voice, which serves only to whisper his truths to him. In Marine Lover, Irigaray uses the myth of Narcissus to demonstrate the place of woman in discourse:

I was your resonance. Drum. I was merely the drum in your own ear sending back to itself its own truth. And, to do that, I had to be intact.

I had to be supple and stretched, to fit the texture of your words. My body aroused only be the sound of your bell. (3)

Attached to the world of appearances and not to the world of the Platonic Forms, woman is dressed up according to the male subject’s wishes. She is, “Today [. . .] this woman, tomorrow that one. But never the woman who at the echo, holds herself back. Never the beyond you are listening to right now” (3). Indeed, it is only the poet who hears her and only he who can communicate what she says.

In her role as muse, then, the woman singer loses her voice as it is appropriated by the poet. Nevertheless, Stevens’ poem becomes problematic at this point. When he silences his muse, he turns to his male companion, “Ramon Fernandez,” asking him to “tell me, if you know” ( 43). The presence of this figure, a real critic though Stevens’ denies he was thinking of him at the time of the writing of the poem adds to the effect of the projection of meaning on to the poem. While Stevens may be alluding to the poet’s power to order the world for the reader, both “makers” seem to fail; neither knows why she orders the world. This is only an idea of order that the poet creates but one which he craves:

[. . .] when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. (106)

The poet has turned from the woman leaving her in the natural world. As she contains the chaos and, perhaps, the death that threatens his fantasy of subjectivity, the poet’s identity is stable and secure. She represents the world of becoming, where she is left, while he exists in the world of Being and Idea. He can only exist in a “world of words” as Brogan suggests and in a language-body. The fluid, the temporal, is projected on to the feminine. The poet’s abrupt turn to the “pale Ramon” announces his failure as maker (106).^[33] He does not create a truth; he only repeats what he wishes to hear. Moreover, the complexion of the poet’s companion suggests a weakness and that for these two men truth is beyond their grasps. Truth can only be had in the form of the Other.

Although Stevens ventures into the realm of the Other, calling her into his poem, he reverts to an economy of sameness that leads to his failure truly to hear the woman striding on the beach. His “rage to order,” the “maker’s,” or masculine, rage to order everything prevents him, in the last stanza, from allowing her into discourse:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. (106)

As in “Sunday Morning” and “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” poetry represents for Stevens’ a means of forging the meaning of life and death. He demonstrates a constant longing for a union with the maternal that will provide him with the truths the fall into language prevents. Although he attempts to repress the feminine in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” this can only be accomplished by breaks and by sudden appeals for reason to the other male present. Indeed, it is as if meaning is worked out between the two men on the body of the woman. Nevertheless, the poet can only express the need for order, not order itself. In “Sunday Morning” another “lapse” is evident when the poet, in an icy effort to distance himself from the maternal, suddenly states that “Death is the Mother of Beauty.” In “Peter Quince” the poet breaks abruptly from Susanna’s story to a meditation on the meaning of Beauty and the immortality to be achieved by poetic creation.

Inevitably something is left behind in these desperate escapes. The structural gap at the beginning of the fourth stanza of “The Idea of Order at Key West” and the turn to Ramon suggest a sort of linguistic edifice that is betrayed by Stevens’ struggles in the first four stanzas. That is, Stevens struggles to bring into language that which has been left out, but his instrument inevitably fails him. As Brogan argues, the voice he represses cannot “coincide with the phallic and verbal structures Stevens professes to order in his words” (13). What she calls the “white writing” in Stevens’ poems is the subversive trace of the feminine. It is Irigaray’s “other woman” whose presence undoes the male subject’s rational endeavor. In Speculum, Irigaray states:

Thus the ‘object’ is not as massive, as resistant, as one might wish to believe. And her possession by a ‘subject,’ a subject’s desire to appropriate her, is yet another of his vertiginous failures. For where he projects a something to absorb, to take, to see, to possess [. . .] as well as a patch of ground to stand upon a mirror to catch his reflection, he is already faced by another specularizaton. Whose twisted character is her inability to say what she represents. (134)

Stevens’ project is thwarted by his urgency to order, by his need to repress, the feminine voice he hears speaking to him. His constant need to make her “other of the same” guarantees that he will never hear from her the truth he seeks. His fear of allowing her into language, since that will destroy the language-body he creates for himself, keeps him within a circle of sameness, a constant struggle with forces that cannot be reduced to one. If, as Arensberg suggests, Stevens does attempt to find truth through a fusion of the two sexes, it is this tendency that prevents him from escaping the language he so clearly perceives that separates him from the maternal. Only the acknowledgement of sexual difference that would allow the “other woman” to speak would remedy Stevens’ “rage to order.” Until then, the “other woman” Irigaray gives voice to in Marine Lover can speak for the woman singer on the beach: “Go on, I am singing your memory so that you do not fall into some abyss of forgetfulness” (3). It is the fear of falling into the abyss that Stevens’ rage to order holds at bay. Irigaray suggests, however, that it is only in forgetting that truth may actually be found and only in letting the woman speak that the poet’s “rage” may be assuaged.

Epilogue: Irigaray and Stevens Face to Face

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off

And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am

The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

Wallace Stevens

Wonder at what is reborn from the heart’s depths through a new conception. She would be regenerated by returning, with him, to a time before the fixed, mortal due date of her birth? Taken back to the acceptance of her life by the lover and accompanied on this side of, and beyond, a given day of reckoning.

Luce Irigaray

Stevens’ early poetry reveals a complicated relation to the feminine that cannot be easily interpreted as a masculine need to master reality and order existence. Although he attempts to do so in the works that are the focus of this study, his failure, so readily diagnosed through Irigaray’s philosophical and psychological interpretations of patriarchal texts, must also be read as self-conscious on his part. Reading Wallace Stevens’ poetry in Luce Irigaray’s mirror reveals a poet well ahead of his time in terms of literary theory. His poetic quest not only anticipates the deconstructive texts of Derrida but also feminists like Irigaray, HŽlne Cixous, and Kristeva who sense that the revitalization of language depends on the reintroduction of woman into discourse. Stevens’ constant need to return to the feminine, whether in the form of earth-mother or mysterious muse points him towards a cure: the “face to face” relation of Penelope and Ulysses in “The World as Meditation” (1952) or the angel figure that is a preoccupation of much of Stevens’ late poetry.

To look at Stevens’ poetry in Irigaray’s mirror is to see the masculine imaginary unclothed. Stevens uses the feminine in traditional ways as he struggles to revitalize the exhausted metaphors of patriarchal language, but as his poetry progresses, he also opens up a space for the other. In this mode, Irigaray would look at him with pity, perhaps, but as also a companion in the struggle ÐÊ if he would only hear her (the voice of the other woman). Indeed, for French feminists the poet is an important figure. In The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Irigaray describes the poet as the figure who displaces the symbolic:

The poet begins by transpropriating into his native tongue the foreignness of the foreigner. The otherness of the other? He thus keeps open, by showing it, the gap between them. But he leaves expression of the contents of this remaining-open to the gods, and to men. The celestial fire, which passes through him and thus is given to mortals, will permit them to discover its truth.The poet is illumined by the flash of divine light. His look remains open on that which does not disclose itself to him. The flash of divine light opens the opening of the look. But he no longer catches sight of that which can appear in this look. The sight of familiar things, things which showed themselves to him, is masked by the brilliance of the god and by the nostalgia for the origin in which men cover them. (115-116)

Irigaray could be talking directly to Stevens, whose frustration throughout his poetry stems from the evasiveness of truth and his inability to express the seen in terms other than those of divinity or the desire for union with the maternal.

Julia Kristeva also discusses the role of the poet in Revolution in Poetic Language, where she writes that, according to psychoanalysis, “poets as individuals fall under the category of fetishism” (65). As Elizabeth Grosz explains in Sexual Subversions, fetishism is in psychoanalytic terms the denial of maternal castration. The girl recognizes her own lack when she sees the mother’s “castration,” a figure for the mother’s lack of power in the masculine-ordered world; the boy’s move to the symbolic law of the father is founded on his perception of the mother as castrated and his wish to deny the possibility of his own lack (57). Thus, if the boy denies the castration of the mother, he replaces it with a fetishÊthat allows him to maintain a relationship with both father and mother. In Kristeva’s terms, the poet as fetishist displaces the semiotic, or maternal, by the “thetic”: the mirror stage and the castration complex are the “theses” that precede the organization of the symbolic and allow the subject to form a fiction of subjectivity (Grosz 45). Artists are not psychotic, of course, because they only “symbolise [sic] the thetic” (Grosz 57). Kristeva explains, “The very practice of art necessitates reinvesting the maternal chora so that it transgresses the symbolic order” (65). Poetic language moves through the thetic stage, “through its truth [. . .] to tell the ‘truth’ about it” (60). In this way, Stevens can be said to stage and restage the thetic, exposing its function. Nevertheless, this is where Kristeva departs from Irigaray: Kristeva believes that although the poet can transgress the limits of the symbolic he cannot abolish the problems. The poet can symbolize a lost maternal but not bring it back into discourse (Grosz 60). Irigaray maintains, however, that if the symbolic can be exposed in this way, it can also be altered.

Inevitably in poems like “Peter Quince,” “Sunday Morning,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” a gap transpires in the discourse. As Irigaray reveals, the poet exposes these gaps but does not close them. Stevens continually reimagines the scene of creation, reinvests the maternal, and envisions the role of the feminine in language, but then he makes an abrupt jump that leads to the construction of another masculine text. Nonetheless, as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens opens a space for otherness, for the “other of the other.” Like Brogan, B.J. Leggett notes the gaps in Stevens’ texts, which, Leggett says (paraphrasing Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production) reveal “inherent contradictions of the ideologies incorporated into the text” (86). The absences in the text, Leggett explains “always reveal the presence of ideology at the margins of the work since what cannot be said directs what is said.” The conflict between the masculine and feminine apparent throughout Stevens’ early work is “a sign of otherness in the work,” a relationship, as Leggett explains, with that which is not and that which happens at the margins (87). Arensberg sees the feminine in Stevens’ works as both the figures within the text and, like otherness, a construct outside the text (29). Stevens’ particular method for subverting the order of discourse reveals that he senses the lost maternal at the heart of the problem of language. However, his early desire for and simultaneous need to repress the feminine exposes an ideology at work perhaps only in Stevens’ unconscious.^[34] At the very least, Stevens opens a place for the feminine in language by exposing its power, giving voice to a so-called feminine side, if only ultimately to appropriate it and use it as a trope, as he does in “Sunday Morning,” for escaping the language and law of the father.

Stevens’ most subversive and formidable act is to question the ability of language to capture the truth.^[35] That which has been the fodder of the philosopher becomes clearer as Stevens’ poetic language destabilizes traditional notions. In a later poem, “the Man on the Dump” (1938), the poet laments a world so tired in its metaphors that the “blowing of day [. . .] puffs like this or that” and even the dew smacks “like water in a can” ( 185). The poet asks, “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the” (186). He longs to escape the over-predication of the world that prevents him from actually seeing it. In, the “Latest Freed Man” (1938), another poem from Parts of a World, the poet is “Tired of the old descriptions of the world” (187). Escaping the truth that is no longer truth, the poet feels the freshness of being “without a description.” It is perhaps in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), however, that Stevens expresses his true poetic project. Again, the poet addresses the revitalization of life and language: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea” (330). That “first idea” is, perhaps, a nostalgic reference to the pre-Oedipal, or the semiotic that Kristeva states the poet displaces. Linguistically, however, Stevens states that the poet “evade[s] us by capturing in language that which is of us yet beyond us”:

the speaker

Of a speech only a little of the tongue?

It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

The peculiar potency of the general,

To compound the imagination’s Latin with

The lingua franca et jocundissima. (343)

The poet seeks a speech counter to the logical, rational, and no longer effective (for the poet) order of the father. Earlier in this section, the speaker of the poem has asked, “Is there a poem that never reaches words [. . .] ?” (343). This cursory discussion of one of Stevens’ most important poems helps to underscore Irigaray’s contention that these revelations, these flashes of divine light that can never be formulated into (phallic) language, are momentary, if they appear at all, and immediately susceptible to the desires of the poet that keep him from his desires for the maternal and for God.

“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is also replete with the feminine, here figured as “the contemplated spouse” (342) and appearing in this poem as Eve, Nanzio Nunzio, Bawda, and “the Fat Girl.”^[36] She is here the muse, the reason for the poem, and mirror of the masculine self. As Nanzio Nunzio, she says “Speak to me that which spoken, will array me / In its own only precious ornament” (342). She is the feminine representation of reality dependent on the poet for expression and dressed up according to his needs. But in the last section of the poem, under the heading of “It Must Give Pleasure.” Stevens describes her as:

Fat girl , terrestrial, my summer, my night,

How is it I find you in difference, see you there

In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? (351)

She is a lost thing, forever altered by the violence of naming. The poet is himself compelled to name her “flatly” but resists sensing that poetry must result from feeling (351). Stevens’ language, which so interestingly presages Derrida’s diffŽrance and the sexual difference imperative to Irigaray, leads to the question of whether this poet of the lost maternal is actually envisioning real woman and a place for woman in discourse. Is he seeking the truth sexual difference will allow in language Ð woman as other than the maternal? “The contemplated spouse” can easily be interpreted as reality feminized, objectified, passive, ready to be predicated, or, indeed, as Stevens’ feminine side that most critics see as the culmination of his thought on gender.^[37]

Nevertheless, while Stevens’ poetry may seem to allow the feminine to enter into discourse, the necessity, in some way, to subsume it under the category of masculinity, to sublimate the muse, for instance, so that his “major man” may emerge, finally prevents difference. In actuality, he performs a rather blatant act of “saming.”^[38] As his other half, or complement, the feminine is seen as a negative counterpoint to his active side: the feminine is on the side of the moon, a most denigrated figure in Stevens’ poetry and opposite the sun, a central figure in his early work. He may see, in difference, the fat girl, but is this the sexual difference Irigaray sees as essential to the revitalization of language? True revitalization of language can only be accomplished, according to Irigaray, by creating images of divine women and allowing the female sex into discourse. Relations between men and women must be completely reimagined, relations between mothers and daughters must be resymbolized, and there must be a place for woman in discourse besides that of the maternal and, as such, a container or place for men.

In the Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray explains that until the negative place of woman in discourse is recognized, she will remain a product of the discourse: “since her status as envelope and as thing(s) has not been interpreted, she remains inseparable from the work or act of man, notably insofar as he defines her and creates his identity with her as his starting point or, correlatively, with this determination of her being” (10). Making woman the male subject’s complement is as destructive as making her bend to his will; using her to complete his subjectivity rather than helping her to define her own keeps the male subject in sameness. In “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (1950), Stevens imagines a space for two, but it must be presented as oneness:

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence. (444)

Though he evokes the feminine with the image of the shawl, he creates a neutral space “out of the central mind” from which he accepts the order: “that which arranged the rendezvous.” He allows a place for otherness, but by acceding to his will to master, he gives his divine light, as Irigaray would predict, to God: an idea greater than himself, a source “of this same light,” and a nostalgia. Rather than allow a place for difference, he uses the feminine in a way that alters and amplifies his poetic voice. Brogan states that rather than repress the feminine as he does in “The Idea of Order,” here Stevens allows it to temper his masculine will to order: the feminine “does not undermine his poetic authorship [. . .] [but] gives expression to what is beyond control, beyond order, beyond dominance in our actual lives and thereby endows with significance that little which we can order in words” (17). Nevertheless, when Stevens leaves experiences in the beyond he expresses a weakness. He gives up, in a sense, to the passivity the feminine enables rather than attempt a powerful reenvisioning of it. Again, the inability to imagine a space for the Other confirms Kristeva’s idea of the poet rather than Irigaray’s. The feminine is not granted the power radically to change language.

In The Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray states that sexual difference is the most pressing philosophical issue of our age (5). Opening discourse to sexual difference can “counteract a nihilism that merely affirms the reversal or the repetitive proliferation of status quo valuesÊÐ whether you call them the consumer society, the circularity of discourse [or] [. . .] the unreliability of words” (5). Thus for Irigaray, it is essential to note that the feminine cannot be the complement of the masculine until it has been recognized as sexually different. Currently, she writes in “Belief Itself,” “man and woman, meets only his or her image. Only doubles are present and represented, only reproductions, kinds of negatives, reduced prints” (41). Irigaray’s solution for dismantling the binary opposition of man and woman is very fitting for this study because it is also Stevens’ chosen image for a mediator between the human and divine, the reality and the imagination. For Irigaray, only the angel “Can give light and expansion” to the mirroring effect of the sexes” (41). Indeed their mutual use of the angel is, as Mary Doyle Springer notes in her essay “A Relativity of Angels: Wallace Stevens and Luce Irigaray,” a startling similarity (153). Irigaray, like Stevens, uses angels in their traditional capacity as messengers but also wrests them from the fate of a worn out image. They become a way to imagine a “third term” or space that explodes dualities and bridges a gap, producing a kind of spirituality on earth (164). Stevens gives the angel the power (earlier granted the muse) to mediate between heaven and earth, but the angel reflects more of earth’s reality than heavenly paradise. In “Evening Without Angels” (1934), Stevens has no use for angels who are separate from the earth:

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged

Above the trees?

And why the poet as eternal chef d’orchestre? (111)

In this as in other poems, his reimagining of angels is also a repositioning of the human and divine. The poet asks in this poem, “Was the sun concoct for angels or for men? / Sad men made angels of the sun” (111). With the forceful image of the sun, Stevens perhaps evokes a Nietzschean will to power but one that allows humanity the potential men themselves gave to a transcendent being. Here again, the poet is the maker of order. Although treated with disdain here, the angel becomes the metaphor for the movement between two realms, a “necessary angel” that allows a new vision of the earth.

In the same way, Irigaray imagines angels as the model for a new image of sexual difference. The angel’s flight between two realms passes through the limits of the masculine and feminine as they are defined in society. In the essay “Belief Itself,” Irigaray explains that the angel allows a way to rethink the boundaries dividing the sexes because they are not restrained by boundaries: they are allowed “free passage” (36). Irigaray begins, in “Belief Itself,” by analyzing the fort-da game played by Freud and his grandson Ernst and also Derrida’s critique of it in The Postcard. Freud observes that the little boy symbolically plays a presence-absence game by throwing a spool (for thread) tied to a string through the veil of his bed, making it appear and disappear. In Freud’s account of the game, he makes little of the curtained bed, but Irigaray sees the veil as the womb, the maternal that is not written into Freud’s text. By making himself, through projection, appear and reappear, Ernst seeks to control the maternal which remains outside of representation: “She must be thrown over there, put at a distance, beyond the horizon, so that she can come back to him, back inside him, so that he can take her back, over and over again reassimilate her, and feel no sorrow” (Irigaray 31). Later in the essay, Irigaray elaborates the theme of the angel that is introduced in Ethics of Sexual Difference, stating that the mediator between presence and absence, the veil, must be given back to the angel who can bring messages from the beyond. The angel is able to go between the veils, making it unnecessary to push the maternal aside in order to form male subjectivity:

Awesome call or recall that circulates so swiftly and lightly an annunciation of more weight than any coded message, moving to and fro between the first and last dwellings that are withheld from present visibility or readability, to be deciphered only in the next world. From beyond the angel returns with inaudible or unheard of words in the here and now. Like an inscription written in invisible ink on a fragment of body skin, membrane, veil, colorless and unreadable until it interacts with the right substance, the matching body. (36)

The angel like the muse brings messages from the realm beyond language. With their ability to pass beyond or through the veils of birth and death so highly coded, angels represent a metaphor for a new way to inscribe relations between the sexes. The angel passes through the veil of the womb, “through which there once took place and perhaps will again take place the sympathy between two bodies capable of mutually decoding one another” (36). Indeed, as Irigaray writes in “Sexual Difference” (the first essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference) “A sexual or carnal ethics would require that both angel and body be found together. This is a world that must be constructed or reconstructed” (17). Like Stevens’ “necessary angel” in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” (1949) through whose sight we “see the earth again” (423), Irigaray’s angel allows the sexes to view each other for perhaps the first time.

This is not, as she says, a return to the maternal, which is already coded by the symbolic, nor is it a place completely other “from which that other place would be relegated for good” (36). In other words, in order to refashion subjectivity, the symbolization of the maternal cannot be elided; it must be restructured, so that women can have access to this place. Before moving to the neutral place Stevens imagines, women must be given access to a relation to the maternal that does not depend on their being the maternal. This, Irigaray stresses throughout her works, is accomplished through a reimagining of a female divine, going back into the existing myths to bring out the divine images of women that already exist. Angels are mediatrices for Irigaray as they are for Stevens:

come down and go up, go up and come down in a vertical mediation, like that of the veil over the stage, which they claim is primary, and which, on this occasion would go from highest to lowest, a structure permitting the movement to and from, back and forth from heaven to earth, going from one to the other through the various containing layers, but upon which, apparently, nothing is inscribed. (36-37)

As Springer points out, Irigaray’s angels and Stevens’ angels are also similar because they are only defined by gestures that then become models for human behavior. This same sort of motion is described by Stevens in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” The angel cannot be frozen by metaphor because it is in perpetual motion:

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud.

Serenely gazing at the violet abyss,

Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and

On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,

Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,

Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied? (349)

Seemingly, if the poet can imagine such a flight for the angel, he must be able to imagine this flight for himself. The flight of this angel brings to mind the flight of the pigeons at the end of “Sunday Morning” whose undulations are not weighted down by centuries of predication. They continually float between the two realms. In “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” the necessary angel that later becomes the title for Stevens’ collected essays on the poetic imagination, likewise frees the earth from predication. The angel’s “being and its knowing” allows us to “see the earth again”:

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,

And in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,

Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,

Myself, only half of a figure of a sort ? (423)

The angel is evasive, as is every other bearer of truth in Stevens’ poetry. Elusive, the angel never rests but floats precariously between transcendence and immanence. This is also the case for Irigaray’s angels: “truth” is fragile and susceptible to the urge to predicate.

Irigaray’s solution is that men and women must seek to be angels for each other. This is a gesture that displaces the duality of heaven and earth, man and woman, mind and body. In “Belief Itself” she describes the (human) angels in a face to face position:

guarding and calling the divine presence between them. They do not go in one single direction [...]. Face-to-face, they stand in almost timid contemplation, intent on something that has yet to come, yet to be situated, not yet inscribed, written, spoken. They shelter what may take place because they are two and are turned toward one another. Coming from opposite directions, to meet one another, they halt the return from sameness to sameness before any determination or opposition of presence or absence can be made. (44)

In this meeting, there is no need to master the Other in the self. Man and woman, then, transgress “the matrix of idealization” (45). It may be said that this is Stevens’ goal as well.

Throughout his poetry, Stevens sees the relation between the sexes as somehow involved in this transgression. In “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” man and woman come together “Out of all the indifferences, into one thing” (444). Stevens also evokes the maternal in order to seek the truth she holds. He recognizes the need to subvert the discourse of the father and seeks to displace it through the maternal, yet he fails until he, as Brogan points out, relinquishes his will to mastery [see Brogan insert page number]. Stevens is more in line with Irigaray, however, when he imagines the sexes in the face-to-face relation of Penelope and Ulysses in “The World as Meditation” (1952)^[39] :

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,

Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,

Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend. (442)

Springer points out that in this poem the woman creates a space for herself and matches the male subject’s, Ulysses,’ “savage presence” with her own “barbarous strength” (Springer 163). It is as if by the end of his poetic career, Stevens has found the strength to reverse the order. The masculine figure returns to the creative woman who is a “dear friend,” not mother, and whose strength is equal to his own. While the problematics of place may still confuse whether Stevens can indeed envision the feminine in terms other than container, Penelope’s place seems to be her own.^[40] Ulysses and Penelope are both enriched by the waiting; and the woman is creative. The “other woman” once imprisoned beyond language in “The Idea of Order at Key West” is finally allowed to speak the poet’s name Ð and perhaps he hears her.

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^[1] Throughout this study, my citations of Stevens’ poetry and essays will be taken from Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997).

^[2]In “Notes,” the earth is “Fat Girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night” and when he names her, it is as “my green, my fluent mundo” (351). The feminine is figured as excess.

^[3] See Paul Morrison, “Fat Girl in Paradise: Stevens, Wordsworth, Milton, and the Proper Name,” for further discussion of the contradictory tradition Stevens inherits in regard to the feminine. In contrast to the Romantics, Morrison notes Stevens is influenced by Milton who sees the feminine as secondary (83). Also see Harold Bloom’s Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, in which he compares Stevens’ muse to Walt Whitman’s (14).

^[4] In Modernisms: A Literary Guide, Peter Nicholls states that in Baudelaire’s work we find the origin of a relation to the feminine found in later modernisms, which allows the poet to escape the world of culture / commerce. Discussing Baudelaire’s “To a Red-haired Beggar Girl” he writes, “the girl may be sexy, but she is self-presence incarnate” (3). He argues that through the objectification of the girl, Baudelaire creates a poetic persona that enables a separation from the world: “Baudelaire’s way of making a representation of the feminine [is] the means by which to construct an ironically anti-social position for the writer” (3).

^[5] In Modernism and the Other: Stevens, Frost, and Moore, Andrew Lakritz writes that the modern poet is peculiar for the sense of “impotence” he/she feels: “From Stevens to Frost to Moore, we can find a progression of poets who are increasingly skeptical about the claim that humankind are the masters of their world, the makers of that world” (8). Lakritz contends that the modern poet achieves a dialectical relation to nature so that the relation to language is one of attempting to speak otherness. Language and nature or otherness are in a reciprocal relation (4-5).

^[6]^{6
Lakritz argues the feminine also takes a central role in the poetry of
Robert Frost. In Frost’s poems of ruin for example, Lakritz suggests, “to
get the rural life right, one must know the feminine, and the feminine is
coded [. . .] as the very structure of the poetic” (107).}

^[7] In The Fluent Mundo, Leonard and Wharton define decreation as a “counter -creativity, the destruction of poetic structures for the sake of simple disclosure” (2-3). The object of decreation is, they argue a Kantian “thing-in-itself”: “decreative reality establishes itself beyond phenomenal experience and beyond the language used in shaping that experience” (3). Poetry becomes, for Stevens, an active seeking of reality unmediated by philosophical concepts, or the discourses that have clouded our vision of reality.

^[8]See Marcia Ian’s Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism, and the Fetish for an analysis of the “phallic mother” and, specifically, her place in modernity. The phallic mother arouses contradictory feelings. However, as Ian argues, she represents the wish for an end to contradiction (9). Flowing with milk and semen, she “stands like a screen between us and our prehistory” (13). She is the beginning and the end as she is “Death’s mirror image.” Since the phallic mother resides like this in the subconscious, Ian notes that real mothers are also prevented from moving about in the cultural landscape. They have no “subjectivity or sadness of their own” (13).

^[9] My inspiration for this study on Stevens and the feminine comes from Wallace Stevens and the Feminine, a collection of essays edited by Melita Schaum that first appeared in the the 1988 Fall edition of the Wallace Stevens Journal. While this is not the entirety of criticism devoted to the feminist questions to which Stevens’ work gives rise, it is the most complete and concentrated.

^[10]In Time and the Other, Levinas writes, “The face-to-face with the Other, the encounter with a face that at once gives and conceals the Other, is the situation in which an event happens to a subject who does not assume it, who is utterly unable in its regard” (78-79). The Other is in front of the subject but cannot be solidified because Levinas suggests the “face-to-face” is the “accomplishment of time.” This is “the encroachment of the present on the future,” but it is an intersubjective relationship and not “the feat of the subject alone” (79).

^[11] Irigaray was a member of Lacan’s Freudian School in Paris, but she was dismissed in 1974 when Speculum of the Other Woman was published.

^[12] In the dialogue Plato writes, “suppose someone forcibly dragged him out of there, up that steep, rugged incline, and didn’t let go till he’d dragged him clear out to the light of the sun” (176). The cave-dweller would suffer pain for a while but would grow accustomed to the light until the sun becomes “himself by himself in his own place” (176). Concluding that the sun is the “giver of seasons and years” and the cause of all “he used to see,” the cavedweller will think back on his fellow prisoners with “pity” (177).

^[13]^{Bloom briefly
discusses the muse as the woman in “Sunday Morning” (see Wallace
Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate 28-29). However, his description of
her suits the argument I am introducing here. Bloom writes, “Like all her
later manifestations in Stevens, she is a reductionist, a seeker after the
First Idea” and so she is not content with the illusory present (29).}

^[14] In “Apollonian and Dionysian in “Peter Quince at the Clavier” B.J. Leggett suggests that Stevens offers a vision of the union of the Apollonian and Dionysian artist Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy, particularly when Quince is compelled by music toward figurative speech (50). Although Leggett refers to Nyquist, he takes a different stance when he suggests that Stevens’ primary use of “like” is the moment of Quince’s transformation into the ideal artist. The desire for Susanna as music is the intoxicant that makes the transformation possible.

^[15] In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey describes two contradictory aspects of the “pleasurable structures of looking”: “the first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen” (441). The subject must both separate itself from the object and identify with the object “through fascination with and recognition of his like” (441).

^[16] Nyquist notes a lapse and failure of language when Stevens resorts to conventional poetic techniques after the initial failure of music to express his desire (312). I would also call Stevens’ leap out of the dream and back into a metphor a lapse as it underscores Stevens’ inability to express otherness without using the analogy of the female body. These lapses occur again and again in Stevens’ poems, particularly those I am looking at in this study.

^[17]See Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (35). In Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens, A. Walton Litz calls “Peter Quince” a prelude to “Sunday Morning,” the poem he calls “the grand summation of Stevens’ education as a man and as a poet, and a “rehearsal for that Ôgreat poem of the earth’” Stevens hoped to write (44).

^[18] Although “god-men” is my conception, the †bermensch, Overman, is “the autonomus human being who would refound culture” (Singer 134). That is, once the gods are dead the Overman can be born, as divinity is returned to the human. We may also find in the idea of a god-man the germ of Stevens’ “major man.” In “Notes,” Stevens writes:

The major abstraction is the idea of man

And major man is its exponent, abler

In the abstract than in his singular. (336)

The major abstraction is a common man, so the major man is the common man reinfused with the imagination or the divine.

^[19] Lawrence Hatab explains that Nietzsche seeks to give the ultimate value to time and becoming: “the world has been devalued because of the negative value given to time and becoming, because time is a terror, a force ultimately destroying the individual [. . .] Nietzsche seeks to affirm the world by affirming time, change and flux, by penetrating its Ôtranscendent’ levels” (120). Essentially, for Stevens, woman is a way to revalue time and flux. Nietzsche also names truth woman. In “Nietzsche Was no Feminist,” Debra Bergoffen explains that “Nietzsche’s project is one of transvaluation, specifically that of the transvaluation of the Western tradition” (233). He retrieves woman as truth, Bergoffen argues, in the sense of woman as flirt, “between the myth of Iseult with its absolutes of love and fidelity and the myth of fickleness” (234). With the death of god, there are no “anchors,” and truth as woman becomes again a sense of play and openness.

^[20]^{“The doctrine that
the same events, occurring in the same sequence and involving the same
things, have occurred infinitely many times in the past and will occur
infinitely many times in the future”} Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 243.

^[21] Harold Bloom reads the “savage source” as Zarathustra himself, “prophet of the Over-man” (34).

^[22] See Leonard and Wharton, The Fluent Mundo (107).

^[23]Lentricchia suggests that “renunciation of the worldly is the feminine way in Stevens’ culture, and it is also the way of the poet who [. . .] defines his writing against the economic” (154). Lentricchia sees the woman as also representative of the upper class. Also see Derrida’s “The Question of Style” in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche. eds. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall. Uiversity Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998. 50-66.

^[24] See Andrew Lakritz’s Modernism and the Other (62-65) for a further discussion of langauge and change. The actual content of what Stevens took for the real, Lakritz argues is the “constant attempt to rethink the real in language that jostled, displaced, and refigured conventional representations” (63).

^[25] See Richard Boothby’s Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return To Freud, particularly chapter four (71-97).

^[26] In An Outline of Psychoanlysis Freud writes, “After long doubts and vacillations we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct. (The contrast between the instincts of self-preservation ond of the preservation of the species, as well as the contrast between ego-love and object-love, fall within the bounds of Eros)” (20).

^[27] Bloom, too argues that Stevens “takes the Oedipal risk, as Keats and Whitman did, and invokes the muse as his actual mother and as the other women of his family” (46).

^[28] In Ariel and the Police, Frank Lentricchia notes that Stevens, a success in both the “masculine sphere” of business and the “feminine sphere of poetry” expressed both “the ease with which that contradiction [of his dual career] could be sustained and of the inescapable discontent of an existence in which schizophrenia is normalized as the structure of daily life” (147). This issue is also taken up by Patricia Rae who writes, in The Practical Muse that Stevens’ hope for the imagination is that it be Ôintrepid’ and Ôvital’ and that it have an active role in making the world better (110). She argues that Stevens takes to task those who consider poetry an effeminate practice and in line with “feminine intuition” because the poet withdraws from the world. By instilling it with masculinity, Stevens hopes to bring the poet back into the world (110-111).

^[29] See Bloom, The Poems of Our Climate (93).

^[30] Bloom writes, “To sing beyond the genius of the sea is to defy the poetics of Whitman, who found the muse his mother to be his oceanic sense and who identified his father with the shore” (98). Again, Stevens seeks to go beyond this duality, bringing his mother to shore in a sense.

^[31] Harold Bloom suggests that the woman’s singing “transcends the genius loci”: “I take it that the title refers us to the genius or spirt of place at Key West” (The Poems of Our Climate 96).

^[32] In “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure,” J. Hillis Miller writes, “Truth is, for Stevens too, evasive, veiled, feminine, and dwells at the bottom of a well. The revelation or unveiling of what has been hidden brings the truth momentarily into the open, out of Lethean forgetfulness, and displays it” (39).

^[33] Stevens mentions Ramon Fernandez in two letters. In a letter to Bernard Heringman he writes, “Ramon Fernandez was not intended to be anyone at all. I chose two everyday Spanish names. I knew of Ramon Fernandez, the critic, and had read some of his criticisms but I did not have him in mind” (798). In a letter to Ranato Poggioli Stevens again denies he had the critic in mind:

I simply put together by chance two exceedingly common names in order to make one and I did not have in mind Ramon Fernandez. Afterwards, someone asked me whether I meant the man you have in mind. I had never even given him a conscious thought. The real Fernandez used to write feuilletons in one of the Paris weeklies and it is true that I used to read these. But I did not have him in mind. (823)

However, Fernandez’s status as critic implies that the poet in “The Idea of Order at Key West” is turning to an authoritative male figure for an analysis of the woman’s poem.

^[34] In The Clairvoyant Eye, Joseph Riddel notes (in his discussion of “The World as Meditation” [1952]) that “desire is satisfied only by knowing the proximate, never the ultimate, satisfaction” (247). Loren Rusk adds, “A sense of attainment would halt the desire that keeps art and love alive. It would immobilize the Ôever-changing’ allure of the beloved and end the delight of aspiring” (15). Thus, psychically, the desire for the eternal feminine is temporarily satisfied by real women, but never completely.

^[35] See Introduction to this study, notes 5 and 6, pages 4 and 5.

^[36] In Ariel and the Police, Lentricchia writes that although Stevens inhabits a masculine world of commerce, he is drawn to “the fat girl” : “The fat girl seems real: not a literary device, not what anyone wants her to beÊÐ she’s a fulfillment that can be wished for” (27). He creates many men: the major man, canonical men, central men, but the feminine is the object of Stevens’ desire.

^[37] See my introduction to this study pages 8 and 9.

^[38] In “The Essentialism Which is Not One,” Naomi Schor defines saming as denying “the objectified other the right to her difference, submitting the other to the laws of phallic specularity. If othering assumes that the other is knowable, saming precludes any knowledge of the other in her otherness” (65).

^[39] Stevens uses the term face-to-face in “Notes” when describing the marriage between Catawba and Bawda:

They married well because the marriage-place

Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.

They were love’s characters come face to face. (347)

^[40] Rusk also argues that Penelope creates a space for herself and “recreates Ulysses constantly” rather than objectifying him: “Penelope composes in the sense of selecting and putting together impressions of external reality to constitute her world” (17). She also argues that that Stevens through Penelope, the “counterpart to the poet” (16), “offers not merely hope but the glimmering sense of a fulfillment which like desire, recurs constantly” (17). In other words, at the end of his poetic career and through the face to face relation he imagines, Stevens sees a possible fulfillment to desire through a reconfiguration of the relation between the sexes.