Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Unit 3 Answers

GUÍA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE

GRADO
TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA
INGLESA
UNIT 3 | ANSWERS TO POEM

Comentario de Textos Literarios en

Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Isabel Castelao, Jesús Cora, Dídac Llorens

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES : LENGUA,
LITERATURA Y CULTURA 1/7
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers

TEXTUAL COMMENTARY AND CRITICAL PRACTICE

Self-assessment exercises: Elizabeth Bishop

1. Pauses, intonation, stresses (and the form of the verse)

Bishop's reading of her poem sounds like a story, a

personal anecdote that seems to be a personal story that
has a special significance to her as part of her personal
experience. The poem sounds as if she were confiding on the
reader. The reader becomes a confidant of this personal
experience. In fact the poem is a narrative poem that is
written in free verse, with no rhyme or fixed meter or
rhythm (the text is a series of four-, three- and even two-
beat verses of varying length), so the poem is not
constrained by strict formal rules that would make it very
"poem-sounding", i.e. more artificially poetic. Quite on
the contrary, the poem sounds like a story any person would
tell a friend in the course of an intimate conversation.
There is a perfect correspondence between form and content.

IMPORTANT NOTE: J. A. Cuddon explains that free verse "[…]

has no regular meter or line length and depends on natural
speech rhythms. In the hands of a gifted poet it can
acquire rhythms and melodies of its own. […]" J. A. Cuddon,
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary
Theory. 4th edition, revised by C. E. Preston (London:
Penguin, 1999) p. 331.

2. Prose summary

Through the first-person voice, the poetic "I", the poem

describes the speaker’s moment of recognition of her
identity and place in the world as a woman. The moment
occurs while she is in the waiting room of a dentist.
“Elizabeth’s” self-recognition as a woman unfolds as the
poem progresses, and is prompted (=ocasionado) by certain
sensory experiences: looking at photographs (in a National
Geographic number) of erupting volcanoes, of explorers Osa
and Martin Johnson, of bare-breasted African women and
their children, and hearing a cry of pain. This
identification with other women, especially her aunt, is
strong, but it is not a comfortable awareness of her female
reality. The speaker description of what her feelings on
this moment of identification suggest vertigo, confusion,
disorientation even other bodily reactions. While something

2
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers
important has clearly happened to shape the young speaker’s
self awareness, that awareness is neither clear nor stable
and the poem expresses her confusion as much as it does her
new-found sense of self.

IMPORTANT NOTE: these moments of special significance,

awareness or "revelation" in the experience of the poetic
persona in a poem or a character in a novel are usually
known as "epiphanies", the term that James Joyce, the Irish
author, used in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916). Cuddon quotes the crucial passage in which Joyce
uses this term. Here's a partial quotation of that
citation:

The triviality made him think of collecting many

such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By
an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual
manifestation [Cuddon's italics], whether in the
vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was
for the man of letters to record these epiphanies
with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are
the most delicate and evanescent of moments. […]

J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and

Literary Theory. 4th edition, revised by C. E. Preston
(London: Penguin, 1999) p. 277.

The experience of the poetic I in Bishop's poem can be

defined as an "epiphany" that she has in the waiting room,
so this is a convenient term to be used from now on.
Another possible term is "moments of being", used by
Virginia Woolf to express these moments when reality seems
to be more intense and a kind of revelation takes place in
the heightened consciousness of an individual.

COMMENTS

It is interesting how many of the poem’s references to the

‘real’ world turn out to be unreliable. The ‘real’ NG copy
“Elizabeth” is supposedly reading does not contain the
photographs she mentions; also, Osa and Martin Johnson were
active in the 1920s and therefore would not have been featured
in a NG issue from 1918. Lee Edelman’s article in the selection
of essays on “In the Waiting Room” (see link below) discusses
the poem’s questionable “literality”. See also the worksheet for
UNIT 3 on the poem in the virtual course. Selection of articles
on “In the Waiting Room”:

3
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/waiting.ht
m

In this sense, it is interesting to note that as we grow older,

we are able to reinterpret and understand in a better way
experiences that we had when we were children; this is what the
poem actually reflects as the narrator is the older speaker
telling an experience she had when she was a little girl (the
speaker, we cannot really say it is Elizabeth Bishop herself;
remember that a poetic speaker or poetic I can be as fictional
as character in a novel). But it is also true that memory is
unreliable, even false, and sometimes we jumble different
memories together, and we also tend to project some of our adult
ideas onto our recollections of our younger selves in order to
construct a better, cleverer, more interesting version of
ourselves. Either the fictitious character of the experience or
a faulty memory, if the experience was real and
autobiographical, may also account for the inaccuracy of the
references to the National Geographic number and the references
to Osa and Martin Johnson. At any rate, what is important is the
text and understanding how it works and the commentary
possibilities it offers.

3. First of all, it’s a very dramatic and also a very precise

image: it is easy to visualize and evokes just what one
imagines an erupting volcano looks like. Within the context
of the poem, the image is rather more complicated. We could
argue that there is a sexual component in the image.
Certainly, erupting volcanoes are almost a cliché for
sexual passion and it may well be that “Elizabeth” feels a
stirring sexuality (after “carefully studying the
photographs” in NG), but the volcano image is connected to
the rest of the poem in other ways too. The colour black
re-appears in three more associative contexts: the breasts
of African women (“black, naked women”, l. 28), as part of
the speaker’s sensation of falling off the world “into
cold, blue-black space” (l. 59), and, echoing the initial
volcano image, it accompanies the speaker’s final vision of
herself in the waiting room, which was “bright / and too
hot. It was sliding / beneath a big black wave” (ll. 90-
92). What are we to make of this? If we accept that the
poem is partly ‘about’ identity, then the initial volcano
image, interweaving and mutating as it does throughout the
poem points to the young speaker’s confusing sensations and
the sudden awareness of ‘who’ and 'what' she is – or may
4
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers
get to be – in relation to the world, the waiting room, and
other people, especially other women. Identity for
“Elizabeth” is presented as terrifyingly unstable, as mere
flux – just like the lava from an erupting volcano in this
confusing feeling of identification with other women,
especially her aunt, and her sense of her own self as an
individual.

4. The image of the explorers Osa and Martin Johnson is part

of the early sequence of the speaker’s identificatory
journey. As a snapshot (=foto instantánea), it does not
initially enable the reader to say, oh yes, this is the
woman and this is the man: both are wearing the masculine
attire used in safari explorations typical of the age and
(for an American-English speaker) their names might not
make it easy to differentiate the man from the woman.
Already the reader is being introduced to uncertainty about
identity and gender; a woman is masculinized in her attire.

5. This image of "A dead man slung on a pole –'Long pig,' the
caption said", certainly unpleasant and disturbing, refers
to the name, the euphemism, some tribes in the Marquesas
Islands, Papua New Guinea and other locations in Polynesia
used to call dead human bodies that were destined to be
eaten in cannibal rituals. 1 It precedes the image of the

1
In the context of 1918 and much of the first half of the 20th century,
following a negative tradition that began when Europeans established first
contacts with Caribbean and American cultures in the late 15th and 16th
centuries, the attention dedicated to those rituals by anthropological
studies and magazines such as, possibly, The National Geographic reflected a
discourse that was used ideologically to emphasize the difference and
Otherness, i.e. the inferiority and savage nature, of those tribes as
compared to the assumed civilization and cultural superiority of West (these
theoretical concepts is studied in Unit 5). The real practice of ritual
cannibalism of those peoples in New Guinea and Polynesia, and, as it has
recently been argued in recent years, also the early white peoples of Europe
remains the object of heated anthropological debate. In the context of
Bishop's poem, this reference points to the almost seven-year-old girl
"discovering" the Otherness of other human groups as compared with Western
culture, but at the same time their common humanity, her identification with
them, especially women, and the confusion it creates in her. The age of the
speaker, three days short of seven years is significant because at that age
children become more aware of their own bodies, the similarities and
differences with those of other children and those of adults (see:
http://www.pbs.org/parents/childdevelopmenttracker/seven/index.html). It is
questionable that a seven-year-old would understand the meaning of "Long
pig", but the poem suggests that the text of the magazine explains what it is
and the speaker says that she read the text, certainly, fear and disgust
5
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers
“babies with pointed heads” (l. 26) and the “black, naked
women with necks/wound round and round with wire” (ll. 28-
29), which are practices related to different standards of
beauty belonging to other cultures that may be shocking
form a Western point of view. The image of the man and the
also disturbing detail of the women’s necks, constricted by
wire, may well arouse strong feelings in the young speaker:
disgust, revulsion, fear and terror for the former (note
that the man is dead and it seems that according to the
magazine he is going to be eaten!) and more fear,
revulsion, and terror related to the latter (the bound
necks suggest restriction of movement, pain, torture…). The
image emphasizes the impression, the strangeness that other
human groups and their customs cause on the seven-year-old,
her identification with them as humans, but also her
feeling her own difference from them.

6. The images of mothers, the women with the stretched necks

wound by wire and the "horrifying breasts" (l. 31) evoking
the effect of breast-feeding the babies mentioned earlier
(l. 26), suggests “hostility to compulsory
heterosexuality”, later expressed in "you are one of them.
/ Why should you be one, too?" (ll. 62-3) and:

would be a natural reaction to the information; at any rate, certainly adult

English-speakers do understand the word and this does create an effect when
reading the poem. See the following internet sites:
http://news.discovery.com/human/early-humans-cannibalism-jewelry-110706.html
and
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0410_030410_cannibal.html.
6
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers

Why should I be my aunt,

or me, or anyone?
What similarities–
Boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts–
held us together
or made us all just one? (ll. 75-83)

as the girl both identifies with the black mothers ("What

similarities– /[…]/ and those awful hanging breasts– / held
us together / or made us all just one?"), and at the same
time she also rejects such identification and expresses her
desire to be different from them ("Why should I be […]?").
Lines 62 and 63 suggest that she rejects motherhood, which
is, obviously, the indefectible result of "compulsory
heterosexuality" (especially in the days before
contraceptives). Thus, Bishop not only makes the speaker
imply a rather precocious hostility towards compulsory
heterosexuality and a “male right of access” (if we use
Rich's terms), but also a questioning of traditional
women’s roles in general. These are not cute pictures of
mothers cradling smiling babies in their arms but something
else entirely.

7. This is a very important section of the poem and the most

complex, but a close reading of the lines reveals what
happens and the calculated effect that the text produces in
the reader. The text actually says: "Suddenly, from inside,
/ came an oh! of pain / –Aunt Consuelo’s voice– / not very
loud or long." These three lines make us think that it is
Aunt Consuelo who voices her pain inside the dentist's room
sitting on the chair while the dentist works on her teeth.

But notice that the first verse only reads "inside", not
"inside the dentist's room". Then the text clearly says it
was "–Aunt Consuelo's voice–". This is followed by the
speaker's reflection about her Aunt: "I wasn't at all
surprised; / even then I knew she was / a foolish, timid
woman. / I might have been embarrassed, / but wasn't […]".
This seems to confirm our suppositions that the "oh!" was
her aunt's cry of pain, and it is clearly devised to work
like that. However, what follows changes the whole
interpretation (pay extra careful attention to the
underlined words): "[…] What took me / completely
by surprise / was that it was me: / my voice, in my mouth."

7
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers
The speaker now says that it was herself who uttered the
exclamation of pain. It is the speaker who exclaims in pain
at seeing the National Geographic pictures. So the
exclamation came from inside her. Actually, this makes us
hesitate and wonder if we have read the text correctly or
wrongly, and, certainly, the natural reaction is to go back
to "Suddenly, from inside". When this line is re-read, the
textual strategy becomes clear: there is no indication that
the "oh!" sounds inside the dentist's room. The text is
devised to provoke the same kind of confusion and surprise
in the reader's as the one the speaker felt at that moment
when she heard herself exclaim "oh!" in a voice that was
very similar, if not identical, to that of her aunt
Consuelo (this is not far-fetched at all for we all have
similar voices to our parents, brothers, sisters, and close
relatives, especially those that belong to our same sex; it
is part of being genetically related). She is surprised to
recognize her aunt's voice but realizing simultaneously
that it is actually her own voice sounding very much like
her aunt's. This is what prompts the speaker's
identification with her aunt in the following six lines and
then the really uncomfortable, anxious identification with
other women. The speaker is outside the dentist's room
within which we are led to think that Aunt Consuelo emits
her cry of pain. There is an outside / inside movement
characteristic of the entire poem that gives expression to
the young speaker’s attempts to understand her growing
sense of who she is in relation to her surroundings and the
outer world in general – Worcester, the dentist’s waiting
room, grown-up people, people in other parts of the world,
Aunt Consuelo, the “round, turning world”… But at this very
moment, the distinction outside / inside, her aunt /
herself collapses and the speaker becomes one with her aunt
in a very intense experience, an epiphany, that has a
shocking effect on her: this powerful identification with
her aunt and with other women, but also the powerful
rejection of this identification and the imperious need of
being different from them (even the rejection of being a
mother, a the traditional role of women). These feelings
are so intense that she actually feels anxiety, even panic
and she passes out and loses consciousness briefly for a
while as the text indicates later in lines 90-93 (the four
lines before the final group of five verses that close the
poem), and line 94. This overpowering experience together
with the lights and the heat in the waiting room get to her
and she blacks out for a matter of seconds ("It was sliding
/ beneath a big black wave, / another, and another" (ll.
91-93), and then she regains consciousness: "Then I was
back in it" (l. 94).

8
 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)
Unit 3 Answers
On the other hand, this intense wave-like sensation felt by
the speaker, the heat and her brief passing out, when she
powerfully identifies with her aunt, could also be
interpreted, as the speaker's first, precocious experience
of powerful lesbian desire that results in an intense
orgasm (in this sense, sexual intercourse is also a form of
'being one' or 'being intimately united' with somebody
else).

8. The stress falling on "she" in “she was/a foolish, timid

woman” certainly implies a differentiation with the speaker
(“I am not/a foolish, timid woman”) and a criticism of the
aunt for accepting her traditional female role (being
"foolish, timid"). This explains her anxious desire not to
be like her aunt.

IMPORTANT: this verse is also important as it also clearly

indicates that the speaker is older and she is remembering
what she felt as a little girl of nearly seven years of
age: "even then I knew she was / a foolish, timid woman".

9. The line “I was my foolish aunt” (l. 49) brings us back to

the question of identity – it is perhaps not so easy after
all to differentiate oneself from other women, other
potential role models. Perhaps the speaker fears she too
will end up like Aunt Consuelo. The next line – “I – we –
were falling, falling” – suggests a pan-identificatory
process, typical of a very young person trying to make
sense of who she is.