The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath 0754655350, 2005033635, 9780754655350, 9781315237640

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Dedication
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Introduction
1 Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine Self-Elegy
2 Lethe's Shore: Mary Shelley's Sacred Horror
3 Eating Eternally Deeper: The Posthumous Voice in Wuthering Heights
4 Emily Dickinson as the Unnamed, Buried Child
5 Rossetti's Late Suitors: The Death Lyrics and the Speaking Body
6 Hooks and Ladders: Sylvia Plath's "The Rabbit Catcher"
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE POSTHUMOUS VOICE IN WOMEN’S WRITING FROM MARY SHELLEY TO SYLVIA PLATH

Lon E. Ussery in memoriam

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath

CLAIRE RAYMOND

First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Claire Raymond 2006 Claire Raymond has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Raymond, Claire The posthumous voice in women’s writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath 1.English fiction – Women authors – History and criticism 2.Voice in literature 3.Dead in literature 4.English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 5.American poetry –Women authors – History and criticism I.Title 823’.00923 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raymond, Claire. The posthumous voice in women’s writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath / by Claire Raymond. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-7546-5535-0 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature— England—History. 3. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature —United States—History. 5. Death in literature. 6. Feminism in literature. I. Title. PR830.W6R38 2006 820.9’9287--dc22 2005033635 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5535-0 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgments Permissions Introduction

vi vii 1

1 Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine Self-Elegy

31

2 Lethe’s Shore: Mary Shelley’s Sacred Horror

69

3 Eating Eternally Deeper: The Posthumous Voice in Wuthering Heights

95

4 Emily Dickinson as the Unnamed, Buried Child

127

5 Rossetti’s Late Suitors: The Death Lyrics and the Speaking Body

169

6 Hooks and Ladders: Sylvia Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher”

187

Conclusion

219

Bibliography Index

235 249

Acknowledgments At the inception of this book, when it was a dissertation, my dissertation advisor and committee at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York were unusually inspirational and supportive. Professors Meena Alexander, Anne Humpherys, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Joseph Wittreich were exemplary mentors, and I am most grateful to them. Professors Anne Humpherys and Wayne Koestenbaum encouraged me to develop the dissertation into a book, and for their continuing help I am so thankful. Anne also offered practical advice as I developed the book, for which I am deeply appreciative. I am grateful to Ann Donahue, of Ashgate, for her patient and sustained support of this project. The librarians of Rockport Public Library in Rockport, Maine, were inimitable in their support of my research, turning a small-town library into a university library through their assiduous application of interlibrary loans. Alison Vander Zanden helped at Bates College Library. Ruth Homrighaus helped to scrupulously prepare the manuscript. Thanks also to my husband, Mark Raymond, who assisted with footnotes, and to my little son, Yanni, who went to preschool at a tender age so that I might have a few mornings a week to write. This book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Claire and Louly, and to the memory of Lon E. Ussery—“memory eternal.” All mistakes are mine.

Permissions Part of chapter 4 appeared in modified form as the essay “Emily Dickinson as the Un-Named, Buried Child,” The Emily Dickinson Journal (2003).

Introduction The Flesh - Surrendered - Canceled - / The Bodiless - begun Emily Dickinson, “Departed - to the Judgment” How can a dead woman speak? Why does she have to be dead in order to be able to speak? Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry

In a gesture at once apologetic and absolute, Peter Sacks places the elegy in what he terms an exclusively “male domain” in The English Elegy.1 If traditional elegy, that positionally ultimate text spoken by the male poet for a fallen friend, is crucial to patriarchal discourse, then what I will call the “feminine self-elegy”—a troped posthumous elegy in which a dead speaker mourns herself—is an ironic turn on the form’s discourse of mastery. The elegy narrated by a dead speaker for herself is ironic in the way that Walter Benjamin defines irony: it tears down a given form, what Sacks calls “male” elegy, to make a space for a new form, a feminine selfelegy, that differs from male elegy only in its ironic emphasis on the privateness and privation of the speaker presented as at once dead and bereaved. Reevaluating Sacks’s influential work on the elegy from a vantage of some twenty years, I not only point to the difference of feminine self-elegy from what Sacks calls traditional male elegy but also distinguish the formal gesture of selfelegy from the mourning poem, the sentimental memorial that is located in current critical discourse under the conceptual rubric of the Romantic poetess. 2 The importance of this second distinction is that it makes room for my disengagement from biographical readings of the writers on whom this book focuses—Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath—and allows me to look at the formal implications of a rhetoric that places a narrator’s fictive death before her text’s narration. Such a trope may very well parallel the biographical fact of posthumous publication, yet the ultimate mimesis of text and life remains all the more ironic and transgressive in its inverted and proleptic bearing. The aesthetic of anticipatory self-elegiacs seizes the ambiguous rhetorical orientation of posthumous acclaim in order to subvert the traditional claims of elegiac commemoration and recuperation. The term female elegy has been proposed by Patrick H. Vincent in his analysis of the conflation of the persona of the tragic poetess with the oeuvre of the woman writer.3 Vincent’s female elegy differs, however, from what I am reading as the

2

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

rhetoric of a feminine self-elegy, diverging from it in much the same way that Toril Moi differentiates between female and feminine.4 The feminine self-elegy stages stereotypical markers of femininity, of which it then makes ironic use, while it is the female gender of the historical woman who wrote that is the crux of Vincent’s discussion of female elegy. Focusing on the subversive formalization of femininity staged by the feint of elegy spoken by a dead narrator for herself, I argue that the decision to structure a text through a voicing of death that emphasizes the bodilessness of the dead feminine voice—a problematizing of topos itself—shifts the ground of the project of elegy and reclaims it (not unproblematically) for a feminine speaker. Strikingly, in this self-elegy, the configuration of a feminine narrator who posthumously inscribes her work directly counters the theorization of the feminine as that which privileges presence, unmediated experience, and biography.5 The rhetorical posthumous voice arrives belatedly at the scene of a tragedy—the narrator’s premature death, a death placed before her text—but ironically uses this textual construction of death, this belatedness as temporal and physical exclusion, to steal into the “exclusively male” place of elegy in a way historically unavailable to the female mourning poem. Problematizing the pastoral topos, the self-elegy both invokes and ironizes the male tradition of elegy. The poem in which a speaker elegizes her own, characteristically anonymous, death does not merely dramatically question the role of the tragic poetess, a role it may at once mock and mourn: it also queries the exclusion of the feminine narrator and subject from the public claims of elegy as that genre in the English tradition that marks the poet’s canonical placement. The feminine self-elegy asks the elegy to expose within its generic conventions the very questions of rhetorical abjection that the critic Mieke Bal has voiced: “How can a dead woman speak? Why does she have to be dead in order to be able to speak?”6 The posthumous voice exposes how the aesthetic terms of traditional male mourning distinguish the elegiac genre from the poetry of sentimental mourning and enforce the constricting commonplace of the female mourning poem, practically requiring the Romantic woman writer—as Vincent rightly points out—to author the female elegy. The feminine self-elegy, in contrast to the female mourning poem, presents a privative strategy of mourning that encodes a recognition of woman’s exclusion from elegy’s discourse of mastery. One might argue that the self-elegy is a critical vestige of Enlightenment feminism, of Mary Wollstonecraft’s sublime use of JeanJacques Rousseau’s terms for arguing against his notion that women are naturally decorative and concerned with self-decoration. For in the self-elegy, the woman writer recognizes, criticizes, and uses the consuming and consumed image of the tragic woman poetess: the self-elegy is a way of deploying the paradigm of selffashioning precisely to point out the surreal and scandalous dislocation of the feminine from the discourse of linguistic mastery. The English elegy’s traditional goal, as Sacks contends, is to bring itself into line with an exclusively male aesthetic tradition, to act as a reassertion of self

Introduction

3

against death’s anonymity. Invoking a direction of “currents” leading from the scene of grief to the elegy’s accomplishment of form, Sacks explains: “The objective of elegy is to displace urgent psychological currents into placid, aesthetically organized currents of language. […] They may not ‘break up their lines to weep.’”7 With the latter remark, Sacks allusively grounds the male elegy’s formal displacement of grief on the aesthetic espoused in William Butler Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli.” “Lapis Lazuli” inaugurates its aesthetic organization by anathematizing (a pejorated) feminine language, opening with a rejection of what “hysterical women say.”8 If Yeats’s opening line calls to mind Jennifer Summit’s argument that the English canon is defined by its exclusion of women’s texts,9 it is crucial to note here the specifically fracturing motif of Yeats’s feminization of a speaker who “break[s] up [a] line to weep” (line 15)—to note, that is, the conflation of women with broken textual lines. While Julia Kristeva aligns the feminine with the revolutionary language of the “pre-symbolic,” a linguistic force that is, in effect, a breaking up of the formal aesthetic, the technique of the posthumous voice that writes the feminine self-elegy works within symbolic discourse by inflecting the symbol of death with irony.10 This gesture of a performative femininity as an address of one’s own death destabilizes the link between feminine rhetorical voice and the Kristevan semiotike, the poetics of the body, the bodily force that fractures formal codes. I argue against the conflation of women’s writing with a writing of the body, then, and instead point to the feminine self-elegy as exemplary of a formal control and mastery that, in alluding to the masculine code of elegy, claims rhetorical writing, and particularly metaphor, as feminine authorial gestures. What is striking in the feminine self-elegy is the problematizing of the body as performed absence, an absence pointing to some implicit violence. The feminine self-elegy, I suggest, makes use of woman’s cultural placement with death and otherness, woman’s culturally conceived alterity, to argue for an aesthetic of spareness and formal mastery that claims its alterity as its source of power. As Elisabeth Bronfen persuasively theorizes in Over Her Dead Body, an aesthetic based on male consumption of the image of woman’s dead body enforces woman’s symbolic alliance with death.11 But this alliance is used ironically in the feminine self-elegy to textualize a recognition of the illicit cultural construct of the feminine speaker’s anonymous existence, her impossible double aspect of inhabiting the “bond of the body” and “No body.” 12 Diana Fuss’s recent theorization of the genre of the “corpse poem” exemplifies in many respects the entrenched position of the aestheticization of woman’s dead body so well diagnosed by Bronfen.13 The corpse poem illustrates quite graphically the poetics of the body, writing the grotesque, dead, speaking body; contrast this to the disembodiment of the posthumous voice, which dislocates death from the corpse, placing a complex anonymity in the elegy. If John Milton’s “Lycidas” is a poem that is finally anonymous, the trope of the posthumous voice distinguishes the feminine elegy precisely in its presumption of beginning in anonymity. 14 The

4

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

feminine self-elegy is not finally anonymous; rather, it is always already anonymous, written to mourn the feminine speaker’s anonymity. One outcome of what Sacks recognizes as the one-way course of male elegy’s “currents” is that it obviates what Walter Benjamin reads as irony’s selfinterrupting habits. To make use of the posthumous text as a symbol of death is to turn the trope of irony to stage and reverse a feminine speaker’s interdiction from the masculine discourse of the traditional elegy. Here, the feminine speaker begins with an admission of her status as always already dead, or erased as a speaker in patriarchal culture, and from this elided status returns to the very place of public oratory, which she then ironizes by performing her own elegy—her selfinterruption in which she points to her illicit, culturally given “death” before male elegy’s claims. The trope is illicit not only in the obvious sense that the speech of the dead is out of bounds but also in the implicit sense of pointing to the scandalous stroke of woman’s exclusion from the canon; it is a writing unwritten, commenting on its placement in erasure by the pose of having been written by the dead. The one-direction current of male elegy’s transference of grief into a formal aesthetic is complicated in the feminine self-elegy through the troped posthumous narrator’s beginning her self-elegy from the space of death and then recursively writing toward an ascetic point of a belated recognition of audience, audience written here as that which arrives too late. It is a drama, then, in which the feminine speaker stages her audience. The feminine self-elegy at once invokes and denies mourning for a speaker whose speech is placed as belated, whose speech formalizes the trauma of belatedness. Not pre-symbolic, the feminine self-elegy is a formal place where writing observes the symbolic, at once participating in and acknowledging the implicit incompleteness of symbolic discourse. Indeed, the selfelegy’s deployment of irony reveals an instability in traditional male consolatory rhetoric. In its brevity and opacity, for example, Emily Dickinson’s troped posthumous poetry has been said to participate in the pre-symbolic writing described by Kristeva, involving itself in the way that the feminine breaks up the symbolic order.15 I counter, however, that a meta-symbolic rather than presymbolic discourse drives the genre of the privative feminine self-elegy, of which Dickinson was a great practitioner. Far from being unstructured and fragmented, Dickinson’s poems with dead speakers follow a strict, cauterized meter and use the weightiest tools of the symbolic, frequently invoking the terms “Beauty,” “Eternity,” and “Infinity.”16 The poems’ handling of these terms is ironic, detached, cool. Rather than dismantle symbolic discourse by fragmenting it, Dickinson’s poems impose on themselves a sensual asceticism that places emphasis on symbol at the expense of example, in effect bending the symbol through an “internal difference,” or remarking the symbolic with the feint of irony (Fr320, line 7).17 In Dickinson, the elegy spoken by the self for the self, inherently anonymous, ironizes the underlying traditional masculine elegy, commenting ironically on the idea that loss can be recuperated meaningfully in text.

Introduction

5

The self-elegy gives its text as a theater that can never recuperate what has been lost outside of it, yet it offers its own form of consolation—as Dickinson playfully frames it, a sort of singing oneself to sleep. 18 The troped posthumous voice formally pushes text to sustain an aesthetic apart from the masculine discourse of elegiac recuperation. The feminine self-elegy presents a symbolic system in which the consideration of the gesture of marking text overrides the always problematic impetus to bring the “real” into text.19 Here, the aesthetic does not contain loss, as Sacks insists elegy does. Instead, a feminine self-elegy marks the intractability of the attempt to contain loss in text and privileges the aesthetic mark of the text itself as self-justifying and justified. If Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems do not break up their lines to weep, then, her terse lyrics instead occupy what Luce Irigaray hints is a blind spot of the symbolic order, the meta-symbolic.20 “Beauty” and “Truth” are called up in Dickinson’s troped posthumous poem “I died for Beauty” (Fr448), for example, but they work to empty out a paternalistic system of exchange in which the quality of beauty is separated from the particular “adjustments” of the body, denoting beauty’s hollow currency. Similarly, in its use of the symbol of the moon, Plath’s Ariel, rather than fragmenting and breaking up the symbolic order, ironizes the work of the symbol. The moon as a marker of femininity does not console or illuminate Plath’s troped posthumous speakers. On the contrary, the moon’s evocation portends survival at the cost of meaning, a vacant state of having “nothing to be sad about,” a dislocation of the use of the performed-as-feminine body in text (“Edge,” 17).21 Plath’s moon ravels the attempt to link the feminine to the moon, the cycles made famous by Yeats, whom Plath idolized.22 In the poem “Edge,” Ariel’s moon, far from breaking up, hardens into a rigid “hood of bone” that stands above and asserts the unchanging, genderless terms of death (18). Putting in place a complex scene of anonymity, one in which the speaker is posed as if addressing herself, the self-elegy uses the stereotypical markers of the feminine—that which is always already unnamed, or unsignified in the symbolic order—to query precisely the construct of the feminine, to disrupt the alignment of the feminine voice with anonymity. Kristeva’s notion of the feminine as that which is definitively bound by the paternal law, held back by the masculine symbolic order—a positional definition— assumes that it is the work of symbol to hold back feminine speech. Following Judith Butler’s critique of Kristeva, however, and particularly Butler’s argument that femininity cannot be conflated with heterosexuality’s task of reproduction, with its positional implication, I suggest that Kristeva’s theorization of feminine language cannot explain the work of the posthumous voice in women’s writing. In contrast to Kristeva’s theorizing of a feminine semiotike as that which fragments and breaks up the symbolic, the posthumous voice uses the symbolic order to inscribe a self-elegy that comments on the daughter’s disinheritance from male elegiac tradition.23 In the text troped posthumous, the feminine is not held back by the symbolic order, but is held back as a symbol, as one symbol among many,

6

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

which the feminine narrator masterfully governs in a poem that uses the terms of the symbolic order to object to its speaker’s dislocation from symbolic discourse. In a staged irony, the feminine self-elegy’s speaker inhabits that very space of textual authority the loss of which she mourns. The reader formally completes the scene of mourning by re-placing the poem’s dead speaker into symbolic discourse. If Bronfen theorizes woman’s body as always already dead in the cultural symbolic of woman, the disembodied posthumous voice dislocates this death from the body and points to the way woman’s voice is dead in that patriarchal symbolic discourse whose apotheosis is canon formation.24 While Kristeva allies her concept of semiotike with feminine speech, a maternal element of unindividuated fluency that precedes symbolic language, the disembodied posthumous voice uses metaphor to structure a self-elegy that definitively remains intent, the metaphor of speaking from the space of death marking a gesture that cannot be completed in text except by the inscribed-asbelated audience. The posthumous voice uses the work of metaphor in what Paul Ricoeur theorizes as its tensive quality: it works to instate feminine voice as a complex symbol of voice withheld.25 Inasmuch as it directs away from culture, the invocation of death as a topos allows the troped posthumous speaker to observe the violence that attends the inscription of feminine interdiction by ironically reinscribing that very interdiction in the space of death, the vanishing point of the symbolic order. Butler’s theorization of the instability of gender allows for the feminine speaker’s reflection of the radical inappropriateness of her a priori exclusion from the field of male elegiac discourse. The feminine speaker’s death before the elegy she speaks for herself takes that mark of femininity par excellence—complete passivity, a death before death—and bends it in a way that strikes the patriarchal code that insists on woman’s interdiction from elegy. If Luce Irigaray argues that there is a “blind spot” to the old wish for symmetry between female and male, the trope of the posthumous voice locates voice in that blind spot, revealing the scandal of the paternal metaphor, exposing the improper or unreal code of the alliance of the symbolic order with masculine speech.26 If death is woman’s place, but elegy, the words spoken by men for other men, is an engine of cultural reproduction, a way of preserving male power, as Bronfen argues, then the elegy spoken by the dead woman for herself places itself precisely in this blind spot of patriarchal discourse. Responding to male elegy as a site at which the rupture of death is resisted and the culture of masculine hegemony is passed on, the feminine self-elegy uses woman’s culturally inscribed prior claim to death to dismantle the patriarchal code at this very site. If Sacks’s male elegist re-places the dead man mourned with mournful text—the current of grief channeled into the aesthetic— then the feminine self-elegy makes use of woman’s cultural conflation with the object, her preternatural assignment to the role of symbol—a role utterly linked with what Bronfen describes as woman’s cultural image as the site of death—to turn the current of elegy. For the feminine self-elegist begins with the aesthetic

Introduction

7

Bronfen identifies—the symbol of the dead woman—and, writing her own elegy after her death, structures a scene of unresolvable mourning, a grief that resists closure. In this resistance to closure, the feminine self-elegy troubles the aesthetic of woman as death. It does not present a language prior to or beneath the symbolic order, for it necessarily turns on the symbolic status of death, deploying a speaker whose speech is placed rhetorically as following (or indeed as following from) her death. At the same time, the structurally uncloseable grief of a speaker elegizing herself resists woman’s cultural assignment as death’s symbol, for an always incomplete gesture of mourning oneself points to an equally incomplete death. In Plath’s troped posthumous poem “Crossing the Water,” for example, the already dead speaker prescribes a turn from semiotic fluency—the water—and stages her self-elegy as that which crosses over, as it were, the semiotike that Kristeva links to the onomatopoeic element of speech.27 The pre-symbolic fluency of water is crossed out in favor of a system of ironic symbols: “cut-paper people” (1–2). Here, the symbolic system of cut-paper people, with its feminine links to the nursery’s paper dolls, is introduced as the meta-symbolic, as rarified symbols that act as copies of copies. Rather than staging a repression of the maternal, or the nursery, the poem rejects an alliance of its rhetoric with the quotidian materiality of maternity, with the feminine voice as the positionally subterranean. In this poem that allies being with awe-fulness, equating existence with a gaze of “astounded souls,” the movement of the boat, the vehicle of the poem, asserts, instead of a Kristevan fluent semiotike, its own cut-and-dried aesthetic, coding its voice feminine through a subversive alliance with the nursery’s paper dolls while asserting a symbolic system of cut-paper artifacts. “Crossing the Water” clearly tropes writing as the cutting of paper: writing itself makes “cut-paper people.” In this poem, sensually evocative description is explicitly crossed off the speaker’s list in a gesture of refusal to confuse writing with the body, a rejection of Kristeva’s conflation of the semiotike with femininity.28 “Crossing the Water” catalogs what is not fluent, not onomatopoeic, commanding instead a terrain of cut paper—paper on which writing is cut—as what the feminine voice performs. Not only does Plath’s “Crossing the Water” stage writing as an atropic act, a way of cutting lives, but this production of the symbol is the only reality that the poem claims. Writing, as that act which cuts paper, privileges the aesthetic of the text over any other system of exchange: its “cut-paper people” and lilliputian “Cold worlds” are important only for their formal qualities, their outlines (7). “Crossing the Water” expresses, then, its notion of what Dickinson called a “Bald and Cold” truth by emphasizing the insignificance of the features of people and worlds, setting them instead into symbolic forms (Fr341, 9). Paring away and shrinking space until a world is small enough to shake from an oar, Plath’s poem engages Dickinson’s detached miniaturism, where Worlds scoop their Arcs And Firmaments - row -

8

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing […] Soundless as Dots, On a Disc of Snow.29

These self-elegies heighten the symbolic force of a word by paring away its manifestations in the world of the everyday, a gesture implying the posthumous stance of the speaker, defining her as a speaker kept apart from the everydayness of being alive. If “Crossing the Water” can be read as a self-elegy for the proleptically dead speaker who posthumously narrates the poem, it is an elegy aggressively anonymous. It takes as a given that the life of the speaker did not matter. By contrast, Sacks’s traditional male elegy is a lament against the disturbed order of things, man’s death presented as a disruption of nature, drawing from Theocritus’ depiction of nature mourning Daphnis. In the English elegy, male death is also presented as a disruption of culture. From Milton’s “Lycidas” through Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais and beyond, the commonplace turn of elegiac consolation is toward the restoration of the dead man to a proper place in significance, inscribing his name in cultural memory in a lasting sense.30 Though it does so only laboriously, even Tennyson’s In Memoriam, an exhibition of the Victorian preoccupation with mourning, reaches the consolation in the final lines of its final section that there is “one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves”—an order restored after the death of the hero.31 Reading Plath’s “Edge” in contrast to traditional male elegy, one is struck by how radically the poem presents the mourned woman’s death as part of the expected order of things. The speaker assumes that no elegy is due the perfected woman except the very poem that presents her confession of her complete anonymity in death. This self-elegy in fact underscores the orderliness of the feminine speaker’s elision. Of the woman’s disappearance from public discourse, Plath’s self-elegy bluntly points out that nothing unusual has occurred: “The moon has nothing to be sad about, / […] She is used to this sort of thing” (17–19). The shocking revelation of the feminine speaker’s death as preexisting her utterance is this poem’s drama. Her death has always come before her poem’s inscription. The order of things is not disturbed by the woman’s death but rather is reassured by it.32 Importantly, Plath’s posthumous fame cannot be guaranteed in a reading of “Edge.”33 Instead, the construction of elegy at the site of the disappearance of the feminine is Plath’s ironic inscription of a name (as a masterful poet) that she did not have when she wrote “Edge.” In staging the ironic scene of a speaker recognizing and mourning her own anonymous death, then, the self-elegy “Edge” inscribes a scene of unresolvable mourning, a scene in which the interdicted voice of the feminine speaker mourns its death, which is asserted before, prior to, text. The feminine voice here is not held back by symbols. Rather, it uses them to

Introduction

9

unsettle the illegitimate cultural production of woman as symbol, or as object of exchange.34 In withdrawing the feminine body from the text, in not writing the body, the disembodied posthumous voice dislocates the use of woman as object of exchange and insists on her right to speak unlinked from playing a role as death’s symbolic marker—insists, that is, on the complex terms of death for the feminine speaker. While A. Alvarez famously commented that some of Plath’s Ariel poems seem to have been written after her suicide, my goal in reading Plath’s deployment of the trope of the disembodied posthumous voice as paradigmatic of the technique is to shift the ground away from biography.35 Forefronting an awareness of Plath, Dickinson, Brontë, and Shelley as adept at rhetoric, highly skilled in the deployment of trope, I want to emphasize the formal innovation achieved by their use of the disembodied posthumous voice, a gesture that takes up and radically alters the rhetorical technique of prosopopeia. Quintillian, following Cicero, defines classical prosopopeia as impersonization, one example of which would be the putting of language into the mouth of the dead, or “bringing the dead back to life.”36 I want to distinguish the self-elegy from prosopopeia. Susan Gubar, writing on Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” as an example of prosopopeia, points out that “Lady Lazarus” depicts a woman speaking after death.37 In line with Quintillian’s definition of prosopopeia, Plath’s poem is spoken by a Lady Lazarus dramatized for her ability to undo death: she can speak precisely because from death she has returned to life. This return memorably involves a regaining of the erotically charged body. The lady describes her revivification as a recuperation of embodiment (16–20): Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty.

The poem’s hook is the narrator’s ability to bring her body back to life and to speak through that utterly resurrected body, the body of a smiling, still young, woman. By contrast, the trope of a disembodied posthumous voice, a self-elegy, places rhetorical voice as a spectral other that haunts text. The disembodied posthumous voice, unlike prosopopeia, uses the space of death as that in text which resists mimesis, erodes the body’s figuration in text. It rhetorically marks the inscription of the dead voice—not the dead returned to life but the dead in death sustained— metaphorizing the sustainment of feminine voice in that place of interdiction coded as death.

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The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

The Topos of Death: Homelessness My understanding of the trope of the posthumous voice concerns a narrator’s claim to speak from death as from a disembodied space, a disturbance of topos. The trope of the posthumous voice takes prosopopeia, a given patriarchal technique of rhetoric, and reverses it: here, the living do not conjure the dead to speak; rather, the dead speaker conjures the living into audience. From a trauma metaphorized as an unending posthumousness, the disembodied posthumous voice creates a feminine speaker who has surpassed a history of trauma, but not, as Plath’s Lady Lazarus undoes her martyrdom, by bringing the corpse back to life. Rather, the disembodied posthumous voice places in text a linguistic rebuttal of the feminine speaker’s interdiction without revivifying the figurative narrator. The energy of the posthumous voice adheres to a rejection of the domestic scene of the corpse, the corpse as the edge of domesticity. The troped posthumous voice asserts itself uncannily after the implied disappearance of the corpse, after the last paraphernalia of domestic life has been put away. If Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” responds to Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” by making a textual presentation of woman’s speaking body, “Lady Lazarus,” in its selfconsciously over-the-top theatrics, posits a limit to the premise of woman’s poetics of the body. Between “Lapis Lazuli” and “Lady Lazarus”—the male poet hushing the “hysterical” feminine voice and the woman poet claiming the hyster as a poetics—another kind of text is buried: the disembodied, posthumous–voiced elegy written, for example, by Plath in the less famous lyrics of Ariel.38 These lyrics are kin to the self-elegy written by Dickinson in her dead child–voiced poems. They are also like the elegy for Catherine Earnshaw Linton that is Emily Brontë’s lyric novel Wuthering Heights, inasmuch as all these woman-authored texts take up the culturally assigned space of vacuity that is not woman’s body but her name. And Wuthering Heights, as an extended elegy for a daughter dead young, has crucial points of similarity with the self-elegy for an incested daughter, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda. In their almost unbearable imposition of violence on the daughter as a speaker, Wuthering Heights and Mathilda, I want to argue, collapse the premise of the erotic of feminine suffering. The violence implicit in their trope of the disembodied voice calls up and complicates the traditional gesture of male elegy, of recuperating meaning through text. Grouping the above works as feminine self-elegy, I point to the way that they ask us to mourn what the speaker herself cannot completely mourn, her own voice’s elision couched in the circular or self-referential frame of self-elegy. The works of feminine self-elegy that I interpret in the following chapters are connected by the achievement of a form that resists the exclusion of the feminine voice from elegiac tradition, but that resistance is presented with a recognition of what has been lost already by the interdiction of the feminine from the canon, making text a highly ambiguous site of recuperation.

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A technique of rhetoric in which the narrator’s death structurally precedes her text, the disembodied posthumous narrator speaks from a space of death in which the corpse has been put away.39 Beatrice Guenther has defined this space as the “limit of mimesis.”40 The disembodied posthumous voice is not an address from the grave nor a poem spoken by a corpse nor a description of suicide.41 Instead, it invokes a topos that arrives after the corpse has been erased. The technique marks a formal recognition both of the elision of the feminine from traditional masculine elegy and also of the need for mourning this elision. Deploying the disembodied posthumous voice, Dickinson uses the phrase “The Bodiless - begun,” implying that which resists mimesis. In the trope of posthumous narration, death is invoked in order to hold in place a trauma that one might call the trauma of metaphor, metaphor’s continuous gesture toward another site, metaphor’s unresolvability. In the feminine self-elegy, no identifiable Christian afterlife is expected. (In part for this reason, I exempt the work of Christina Rossetti from my reading of feminine self-elegy.) In its poetics of death, the voice persists as ambiguous residue, assuring the speaker of nothing except the inscribed text itself.42 I am understanding metaphor here—the metaphor of speaking from the space of death—along the lines of Ricoeur’s idea of metaphor’s resistance to figuration, its status as a figural trope that inherently troubles emblem, or concrete image.43 Unlike the corpse poem, the trope of a disembodied posthumous voice pushes the inherent ambiguity of metaphor—that rhetorical gesture’s adherence to neither term of the comparison it performs—to sustain a departure from the quotidian trappings of the female mourning poem. If I categorically distinguish the feminine self-elegy from the female mourning poem, acknowledging the feminine status of the posthumous narrator is important, because the trope of posthumous speech places oratory in the one place where the “impossibility” of woman’s speech, as Luce Irigaray terms it, is dislocated.44 If woman’s speech can only imitate patriarchal discourse and the topos of death acts as a space resistant to mimesis, as Irigaray suggests, then the space of death provides a topos for feminine speech that, skillfully finessed, resists the mimetic gesture by which Irigaray defines feminine voice. Invoking death as the limit of being, the voice posed as posthumous becomes a way of worrying, resisting, the act of mimesis. For indeed, how can a speaker imitate the bodiless dead—or, as Mieke Bal puts it, “How can a dead woman speak?” Doesn’t the concept of written-speech-asmimesis here nearly collapse? The posthumous voice dramatizes the gesture of the dead who, not brought back to life, are not brought back into the topos of public oratory—that is, the gesture of the dead who are feminine. In this self-elegy, a radical skepticism inflects the stereotype of the feminine. The femininity of the speaker communicated by the stereotypical passivity of the speaker’s status as dead is reflexively questioned by literalizing the premise that the feminine is what is dead. If the feminine voice must be “dead” in order to speak, as the trope of a disembodied posthumous voice implies, then the concept of the feminine as dead is

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paradoxical. Indeed, Bal’s second question, “Why does she have to be dead in order to be able to speak?” in part answers her first question, implying that the illicit dislocation of a feminine discourse from public discourse must be mourned for its very incorrectness. I suggest that the feminine self-elegy performs this mourning. The speaker’s death before her text ironically performs a complex textual maneuver of mourning the speaker’s lack of public voice by emplacing her voice in a spectral publicity of self-elegy, a rhetorical gesture that implicates audience as the reader whose arrival will make public the private self-elegy. By going to the site where woman is both put and put away—the site of death—and removing the feminine body from that very theater where, as Bronfen convincingly argues, it is most desired—death’s theater—the disembodied posthumous voice ironically uses the trope of speaking death as a technique to turn away the masculine gaze from woman’s dead body. 45 Concurring with Bronfen’s claim that woman, for man, is death, my reading of the disembodied posthumous voice looks at the way that some women writers use the topos of death given to them by a culture that allies woman with nonbeing and, from this marginal position, inscribe and make clear the very genderless quality of that ontological condition that is the insolvable infection of being with nonbeing. The posthumous voice uses the resistance to mimesis imposed by the feint of troping death’s speech to carry the metaphor of a voice that survives death. In her poem beginning “Ample make this Bed” (Fr804), for example, Dickinson invokes an architecture of posthumous persistence as a space containing transience, a topos of departure. Dickinson commands her reader, “Ample make this Bed,” and her well-made bed is not only a deathbed but also a theater that playfully and forcefully erases the utility of any other bed in which the living are born, make love, sleep. It is a bed whose amplitude inheres in its implicit shrinking of the quotidian meaning and usefulness of other beds. If one follows Gaston Bachelard’s interpretation of architecture as the “ultimate degree of metaphor,” then one interprets Dickinson’s poem as establishing an alterior work for topos: it structures metaphor, the ambiguously made bed envisioned as a place in which to “wait” for a revelation that would undo metaphor—indeed, that would undo the paternal metaphor, based as it is on the distance between signifier and signified.46 Dickinson’s Fr804 posits an architecture of postponement, drawing on the concept of a judgment day in a way similar to that by which Walter Benjamin invokes the Hebraic tradition of a perfect, unbroken language spoken before the fall: both act as metaphors that indicate the end of metaphor. In Dickinson’s troped posthumous poem, the speaker addresses the reader from the bed after burial. The metaphor of speaking death centers a trauma of voicelessness that is the text’s fulcrum point: voicelessness is structured into the metaphor of speaking from death as that place which finishes voice. The posthumous voice, then, uses metaphor as the direction toward a death left undescribed to imply a never-completed motion that itself becomes text’s telos. It is death as this space of incompleteness, a sort of radical homelessness or

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bodilessness, that the posthumous voice tropologically indicates.47 Indeed, homelessness is an explicit thematic in Mathilda, and one might describe the entire plot of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as Cathy’s attempt to take possession of the Heights, to become not homeless.48 The implicit message of these characters’ removal from home as a precondition to their tales’ tellings is that the daughter’s only owned space is that of death. Similarly, the disembodied posthumous voice’s gesture toward a topos-less inscription, a scene of writing that engages no topos except the existence of the text itself, argues for this very homeless quality of the feminine speaker. Linking the lack of a name—or marker in patriarchal discourse—with homelessness, Dickinson suggests that death buys a woman’s name in her poem that queries “Death’s Gifts” (Fr644, 10). Death buys the ability to claim possession of the feminine speaker’s authority, a topos that she commands. Death is written similarly in Shelley’s Mathilda as a space in which the terror of the father at last will have been removed, allowing the daughter a home. Death, in the disembodied posthumous voice, does not signify the grave but rather indicates a metaphorical engagement with topos. It depicts the denial of proper topos for the feminine speaker. In the feminine self-elegy, death at once marks this lack of topos for canonical speech and also is deployed as an alterior topos, not of the corpse and not of the angel but rather a topos-as-departure, an engagement of text as that which radically always already marks absence but is itself what Derrida calls “trace,” something preexisting utterance, outlasting the absence of the body, the body’s fatal quality of disappearance. Death as a topos of refuge is engaged ironically by the feminine elegy. It will only be a safe house if the daughter/narrator can place her body’s knowledge, or historical memory, into an expiative text, a text that in turn requires the narrator’s body’s banishment from the scene of inscription. The problem of the body, then, is implicated in the self-elegy, which dramatizes a feminine narrator’s embrace of anonymity and bodilessness as a way of critiquing anonymity, or the feminine voice’s lack of claim to cultural centrality. This rhetoric, which poses itself as claiming no topos, in fact asserts its claim on central, traditionally male topoi of pastoral elegy and the making of the poet’s name. Sacks implicitly locates the problem, or rather the absence, of woman’s place as elegist as a problem of the body when he writes, figuratively, that loss is the mother of elegy, connecting the lack of feminine canonical voice with a lack of topos. 49 Woman’s body is subsumed in the genre, as the mother’s loss—either the loss of her or the loss that she endures—prefigures elegy but is not itself elevated to elegy, instead remaining as epitaph or memorial, codes of mourning closely linked to the body, the corpse. Sacks’s assumption that mourning and the mother concur through the pre-textual figuration of maternity—that loss mothers text— indicates the problematic way that mourning for woman is done by reifying her, by eliding the difference between the feminine and the female. The strategy of the trope of the disembodied posthumous voice, by contrast, is a performance of mourning that dredges up feminine voice from figuration, clarifying the feminine

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The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

guise of loss as a guise doubly marked by genre, such elegy mourning the daughter’s inadmittance to canonical topoi. In an extreme recuperative strategy to reclaim the speaker’s voice, the selfspoken elegy is fathered by the father’s eradication—by the text’s posthumous claim—inasmuch as posthumousness assumes the father’s earlier banishment from the field of the text’s performance, the text placing itself after the father’s dispersal.50 At the site of the very apotheosis of what Irigaray terms woman’s “inter-diction”—the place of formal public honor, such as the English elegy—the posthumous voice removes itself from that Oedipal drama that Sacks argues structures elegy (and honor).51 The trope of the posthumous voice in women’s writing mourns what Irigaray interprets as the interdicted feminine voice by staging a scene of elegy after the father, posthumously. It gains as its ground an outcast space, the topos of death, a topos for mourning the interdicted feminine voice. 52 The father rather than the mother is the figure subsumed here on the way to the articulation of loss. The trope of the posthumous voice suggests that the dead, unnamed daughter, the unsigned in patriarchal discourse, is removed from a concern for origin, unlinked from the father’s always already signed name. Coming rhetorically after the father, the posthumous stance formalizes its relationship to the language of patriarchy, at once placing itself outside the tradition and superceding the male tradition of elegy by re-placing it.

Born after the Father Playing on the meaning of posthumousness, the disembodied trope of a posthumous voice establishes its stance vis-à-vis genre as that which remarks on the traditional male elegy and also destabilizes the terms of pastoral conventions. The posthumous voice, marking a turn at the brink of readership, may be allied with Tilottama Rajan’s theory of works self-exiled, or outcast, from genre, which she calls “textual abjects.”53 Wuthering Heights is an exemplary case, a novel that has been interpreted as realistic, Gothic, Romantic, or all of these at once. In the critical consensus, Wuthering Heights remains estranged from genre as such, outcast if admired.54 Similarly, Dickinson’s poems were interpreted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson not as poems but as something else, as too “delicate” to be poems, while Helen Vendler described Plath’s poem “Daddy” as containing tantrums of tone, an unsettling shifting of tone that Vendler linked to a blurring of genres.55 I suggest that the nearly aphoristic quality of Dickinson’s poems or the abrupt and multiple stylistic and tonal shifts in Plath’s poems, like the generic complexity of Brontë’s novel, add to rather than subtract from the achievement of the works. If Wuthering Heights has drawn critical attention to its elided generic boundaries, the disembodied posthumous voice used by Shelley, Plath, and Dickinson similarly shifts the ground of elegy to an inscribed gesture of facing

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death without traditional pastoral consolations. Their rhetoric marks a formal stoicism, excising the closing turn of traditional elegy, in which the living speaker separates himself from the dead. In the feminine self-elegy, this turn is not performed, or it is performed as refused, for here, the speaker is the dead one. The elegiac turn of separating from the dead, then, is subverted. I want to link this merging of the speaker and the dead with the Oedipal structure of mourning on which Sacks meditates. I suggest, however, that the feminine self-elegy rejects the Oedipal structure expressive of the importance of origin and name. Mary Shelley’s Mathilda exemplifies the post-Oedipal strategy of a speaker’s posthumous perspective, a stoical presentation of the speaker’s outcast status. Here, I use the term post-Oedipal to indicate a dismantling of the claims of literary genealogy that anchor male elegy. Shelley’s novella takes as its starting point the destruction of textual origin—in terms of Jacques Lacan’s theorization of language spoken always “dans le nom du père,” the decimation of the father—effected through the revelation of the father’s fall into incestuous desire.56 It is posed as a posthumous text in which the dead daughter-as-speaker has no origin to which to return, for the father in Mathilda, in whose name text is inscribed, remains nameless. The father has collapsed into incest, his desire pointing backward toward his daughter, the novella’s posthumous speaker. Mathilda’s name recursively writes over the nameless father as she is revealed to be the inscriber of the story of her death. Turning from the riddle of origins, the trope of the posthumous voice here shapes a text not anti-Oedipus but rather after Oedipus, debunking that myth of origin that paternity strives to fix in place. I suggest that the trope of the posthumous voice assumes that paternity as a structure has disrupted the speech of the daughter-as-narrator and that this disruption is rhetorically marked by a speaker posed as dead before inscribing text. This trope both founds itself on and reveals the problematic of speaking in the name of the father. The trope of the posthumous voice implies that the father has had to be gotten past before the speaker could frame her speech. Etymologically staged after the father, the after-narrative aspect of the posthumous narrator’s position gestures inevitably to a displacement of paternity. Insisting on its posthumous status as that which is born after the father’s absence is established, the posthumous voice is post-Oedipal, no longer concerned with the father’s claim on the speaker and illustrative of the aftermath of the father’s overwhelming desire for the child.57

Voice In the phrase “trope of the posthumous voice,” I intend the term voice to signify the author’s gesture of implying a speaker in text. Categorically, I am not confusing the speech of the body with the written text. On the contrary, I read the posthumous voice as a trope, a tactic, that emphasizes the difference of speech

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from inscribed text. Voice here indicates text as performance. The inscribed text narrated by a dead speaker is self-consciously a feint, a technique of rhetoric that is paradigmatically presented as a rhetorical tool.58 The trope of the posthumous voice shapes a poetics from the spectral status of voice, that which, as Slavoj Zizek contends, somehow survives its own death.59 In shaping the narrator’s voice as disembodied aftereffect, an ability to speak that comes only after the narrator’s bodily erasure, the trope of the posthumous voice evokes and extends Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, or that which is left over unsaid at the end of a sentence, at the end of a life.60 For the posthumous narrator is staged as being able to write her story only after her disappearance, radically dislocating speech from writing by making dramatic use of what Derrida theorizes as the additional character of writing—its quality of difference from, rather than imitation of, oral speech.61 If, as Derrida argues, the spoken word is privileged above written text, the trope of the posthumous voice, in seeming to disavow voice as the representation of embodiment, initiates the supervising premise of textual voice as the negation of body. This gesture interestingly plays on Hélène Cixous’s claim that woman’s writing only “keeps on enabling,” that it is voice “without barrier or death,” for the posthumous voice presents the specter of the unending voice while it also clearly demarcates a space of silence—death— always around that voice.62 Voice is forefronted as pretense, the pretense of speaking from bodilessness, a paradoxical topos of claiming no ground for oratory.

Bodiless Begun Elisabeth Bronfen argues, as I have mentioned, that the image of woman’s dead body informs a major aesthetic in Western literature and art; she proposes that woman’s role as symbol, or object of exchange, leads to the commodification of woman’s death—indeed, to the commodification of woman as death.63 Bronfen’s focus on the corpse, the body, reflects the larger concern in feminist criticism with the body as it is contextualized. In her view, the social order is created over the dead body of woman. The persuasive claims made by Bronfen concerning woman’s role as the marker of death in symbolic discourse are essential to my consideration of the disembodied trope of the posthumous voice. Departing from her exposition of the body as symbol, however, I am interested in elucidating the way that the trope of a disembodied posthumous voice posits a space of death indicated as a direction rather than a graphic site of burial or a corpse’s revelation. This tactic of writing a speaker who implies that she must be dead and bodiless before she can speak, in distinct contrast to the poetics of the dead body discussed by Bronfen, may be interpreted as disengaging a feminine writing of the domestic topos of the grave. The female elegy that Vincent discusses, for example, relies on an eroticization or domestication of the dead body of the narrator.64 The corpse, the grave, mark the edge of domesticity but are still within domesticity. But in the

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disembodied posthumous voice, death is troped as that which is outside the grave, past the grave, and after domesticity. By calling the self-elegy that Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath write “feminine,” I am not so much indicating the woman-authored status of their oeuvres as noting that their works, by the self-conscious deployment of coded feminine props, dramatically interpret themselves as feminine. The speakers in these works preemptively read themselves as being read as feminine speakers and write in response to that proleptic self-reading. Inasmuch as women are read differently, this difference in reading affects, or even effects, the rhetorical strategies of woman-authored texts. The already dead narrators of these authors’ feminine self-elegies are coded by stereotypical markers of material femininity— by being dressed in “gossamer” clothing, by dying in childbed, by holding babies, albeit dead babies. But the self-elegy brings up these settings of the feminine only to empty and ironize them. Paradigmatically, Dickinson’s lyric “Because I could not stop for Death” (Fr479) takes up the markers of the beautiful bride—her tulle tippet, her gossamer gown, her sexualized but unavailable body—only to put them down in order to meet the violently cold ending of the poem, in which the speaker, immobilized as a gaze, is locked in a death of absolute isolation, a place in which gender is dissolved. Such a dead speaker stages a dislocation and derealization of the feminine in text by first signifying a stereotypical materiality, such as the bride or the nursing mother. After the self-consciously stereotyped feminine body has been displayed in the feminine self-elegy, it is hollowed out by the symbolic of death. The bride marries death, the mother kills the babies she then folds to her emptied breasts, the adoring daughter is victimized by incest, the angelic-looking corpse of the young bride is encrypted in a necrophilic’s wet dream. This writing of death, then, is a mourner’s encounter with the residue of the construct of the feminine. Deploying a disembodied posthumous voice, the woman writer points to and elides the emblem of the beautiful corpse that Bronfen codifies. What is gained by this paradoxical topos of bodilessness? As a narrative gesture, it erases the father by assuming an erasure of birth, an erasure of a living speaker, positing a speaker, as Dickinson puts it, “as if [she] were not born” (Fr1066, 4). Interpreted in Lacanian terms, the disembodied posthumous voice marks a feminine narrative that refuses to sign itself as interdicted by the paternal metaphor, the rhetorical stance of posthumousness posing a countering “no” to the father’s earlier interdiction of feminine voice.65 If Kristeva reads the feminine as a positional status, a culturally constructed stance of passivity or even abjection before the masculine hegemonic law, I suggest that the posthumous voice uses this culturally given position of the feminine to derealize the very category of femininity, placing it at the uncanny remove of the limit of mimesis.66

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Irony If the posthumous voice uses the distinction between the sustained metaphor of death and the tradition of male elegy that seeks to bring closure after death to make its ironic turn, here I would like to draw some parameters around that irony. Friedrich Schlegel describes irony as “eine permanente Parekbase,” a phrase I suggest applies to the disembodied posthumous voice.67 As Schlegel describes irony, it need not present itself as joke or parody. Of irony, he writes: There are ancient and modern poems which breathe in their entirety and in every detail the divine breath of irony. In such poems there lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet’s own art, virtue, genius.68

Applying this description of irony to the trope of posthumous voice, one might say that what is being made unimportant in the troping of death are those things that make up a life. In Plath’s poem “Stopped Dead,” for example, a “birth cry” and a “squeal of brakes” are indistinguishable: life itself collapses between them, and it is a life in which a penny and a pearl are of the same value, a drastically deflating economy (1–2, 21–2). Schlegel’s notion of “a permanent parabasis” implies, in structural terms, a text’s ongoing disruption of its own dialogue. Walter Benjamin also describes irony as a formal gesture, defining irony as a text’s continual selfinterruption: “The ironization of form […] represents the paradoxical attempt to construct the edifice by de-constructing it and so to demonstrate the relationship of the work to the idea within the work itself.”69 The disembodied posthumous voice interrupts its own inauguratory metaphor of speaking from the space of death in just this way: the dead person begins speaking and in speaking performs a text that is posed strategically, dramatically, as interrupting death. Presenting elegy spoken by the dead narrator for herself reflects at once how the feminine speaker is denied public voice and how in her posthumousness she is denied elegy spoken by anyone except herself. At the same time, it demonstrates the verbal mastery of the very elegy she is belatedly granted. This elegy in turn ironizes the lack of public recognition of the speaker’s mastery as a speaker. The feminine self-elegy, then, ironizes the project of elegy—to displace grief—by pointing out the way that the feminine speaker was already dead in patriarchal discourse, mourned at her inception. Søren Kierkegaard also describes irony as an emptying of personality. He writes of irony that “it has the movement of turning back into itself which is characteristic of personality, of seeking back into itself, terminating in itself— except that in this movement irony returns empty-handed.”70 In the self-elegy, the speaker posed as speaking her own elegy after her death ironizes the parameters of personality, exposing masculine elegy’s claim of consolatory rhetoric, which depends on the construct of personality that is maleness. The elegy spoken by the

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dead narrator for herself empties the field of personality, revealing the always constructed edifice of personality and of gender. Personality, as the premise of self-ownership, is that very topos that the feminine speaker, as self-elegist, cannot claim. The feminine speaker performing her own elegy uses irony, then, as a continual dislocation of topos, asserting its interruption at the very place of her erasure. In her study of Plath’s oeuvre, Christina Britzolakis suggests a link between the problem of unresolvable mourning and the lack of elegiac topos, or the lack of a space for mourning the always already dead feminine speaker. She aligns Plath’s “grave cave,” symbolizing the maternal womb, with the Platonic khora, the enigmatic field of linguistic production, the space out of which speech occurs, or the “nurse of being.”71 She uses the term “theatre of mourning” to describe the frame that Plath’s poems establish for their performance of lament. Britzolakis’s insight that Plath looks for the symbolic material of the maternal in the topos of death points to an important distinction in how I am understanding this gendering of linguistic material in contrast to Kristeva’s influential theorization of the Platonic khora (a distinction that itself reflects Kristeva’s key interpretive move in reading the Platonic text). The fundamental stratagem of the posthumous voice in women’s writing is to identify this pivotal place, the khora, as a site of resistance by aligning the khora with the silencing space of death, using it as a topos from which to speak. In effect, the feminine self-elegy scandalously links what Derrida theorizes as the “trace,” writing that is written before speech, with the Platonic khora, the enigmatically silent space of speech, implicitly claiming for feminine utterance a topos that supervises canonical topoi rather than being interdicted from them. Britzolakis’s idea of a theatre of mourning, then, can be read as theorizing an alterior topos for the performance of elegy, a topos unlike the pastoral of traditional elegy. Returning to khora as Plato presents it, we may argue that khora appears not at all as an element of flux or as a preverbal substratum. Rather, it is given as having the qualities of place, a place qua place, the locus through which forms move, relocated into copies.72 Contrary to Kristeva’s insight into the maternally material pre-symbolic, khora may also be defined as a place where metaphor occurs. The trope of the dead woman speaking uses this silent (or, by the symbolic order, silenced) arena of and for the production of metaphor cannily and uncannily, engendering itself as voice and as trope in the act and art of selfmourning. Using the place that is only a place, the posthumous voice posits a speaker whose definitive quality is that she speaks compellingly by surviving the dismantling of what would seem to be her topos. First she seems to speak from death, but she interrupts that death by speaking; the topos of the address is radically distanced from the speaker, and this distance becomes itself the topic of the self-elegy, marking it with the rhetorical tool of irony as a poem without a topos.

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A place like Plato’s khora, uninhabitable and always inhabited, is used as topos in the elegy spoken by a dead speaker for herself. In Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed,” for example, the trajectory and impetus of the poem is both the posthumous bed’s production and the preservation of that ineluctably ambiguous bed as a space, a topos, for the poem’s performance (1–2, 7–8): Ample make this Bed Make this Bed with Awe […] Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise Interrupt this Ground -

In other words, the masculine inscriber, the sun, shall not be allowed to erase the feminine-made space of the bed, which is the made space, the topos or performative ground of the poem.73 Here, Dickinson posits a feminine speech of formalized structure in contrast to a masculine speech of exteriority and formlessness, the “noise” of the sun. The “yell” of the sun lacks precisely the structured quality of Dickinson’s well-made bed. The posthumous voice in Dickinson’s poem inherits and alters the concept of the Platonic khora. Forefronting the role of topos as such in the lyric, the troped posthumous narration here derealizes that quotidian marker, the bed. Dickinson’s ample bed invokes the domestic scene, but that scene is emptied, turned inside out, by the poem’s permutations on the theme of a bed. First it presents a bed in a house, then a deathbed, then a grave, and finally an ambiguous, undefined space in which both the speaker and the reader, whom the speaker commands to “wait” in the bed with her, are held. This alterior topos differentiates Dickinson’s rhetoric from prosopopeia. While Paul de Man writes persuasively that the threat of prosopopeia is that the speaking dead will silence the living, Dickinson’s poem pulls the living reader into the space of the dead, commanding the reader to make a bed in which, by the poem’s close, it would be quite terrifying to rest. The reader is pulled into the speaker’s death by the trope of the posthumous voice, which profoundly implicates the reading audience as the necessary final strophe of the elegy. Dickinson’s willingness to impose this violence on her reader is striking, and it lays claim to feminine selfelegy’s being that which both mourns and critiques the masculine ideal of elegiac recuperation in text, emphasizing an awareness of the limits of what occurs when a text is read—that is, an awareness of readership as the end of the text. Just as the quotidian, or domestic, scene of mourning, the terrain that Vincent calls the “female elegy,” is rejected in the feminine self-elegy, so also an emptying of male elegy’s traditional markers categorizes this trope of the posthumous voice. The feminine self-elegy brings up and then displaces, or alters, the pastoral conventions.74 Plath’s poem “Ariel,” for example, which gestures back to Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” in staging the emptying of the

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pastoral, depicts its elegist/elegiac subject as engaged on a route of departure from topos. The initial gesture of both poems—to describe a ride with a horse through ripe fields—turns, so that the poems both end in indeterminate spaces, deflecting or leaving behind the pastoral consolations that the poems initially invoke when they paint pastoral scenes and engage the rhetoric of a dialogic frame. In Dickinson’s poem, the “Fields of Gazing Grain” not only are surpassed, gone past, by the speaker but are also presented in tension rather than in accord with the speaker’s project of elegizing herself (11). Dickinson’s voyeuristic fields’ gaze has been read as a threat by Daneen Wardrop.75 I suggest that the fields’ threat to the speaker is not so much a sexual threat as a performance’s threat, the gazing fields presenting an audience that observes the speaker’s destruction as a speaker, quite in contrast to the traditional male use of a pastoral scene as a place for the speaker’s recuperation from and containment of the rupture of death. Likewise, the “furrow” that “splits and passes” in Plath’s “Ariel” (6–7) not only indicates the speaker’s motion away from the pastoral scene but also dismantles the pastoral scene itself: the rural earth here is depicted as falling apart (splitting) and departing (passing). Unlike traditional masculine elegy, context, or as Jay Leyda puts it, “center,” has been stripped by the posthumous voice.76 No specific person is commemorated, only the speaker herself, as an anonymous marker in the topos. And at the same time, the pastoral location of the poem, its center, is presented as inimical to the self-elegist, not at all a scene of regeneration. Not simply context but specifically pastoral context and content is presented and then emptied out in the disembodied troped posthumous elegy. Just as in “Because I could not stop for Death” the speaker leaves behind the pastoral fields, implicitly counting herself out from the pastoral, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, interpreted as an extended elegy for Cathy, removes Cathy from the heath that would seem to offer her consolation. Cathy’s longing to return to the “heather on the heath,” her longing for pastoral consolation, is a desire the novel violently denies: she is traumatically kept from the very pastoral space that the novel painstakingly preserves as a vision of her illicit heaven.77 Brontë’s novel closes with an image of Cathy’s grave’s uneasy tension with the pastoral, noting the impossibility of Lockwood, the belated mourner, writing an epitaph on her gravestone.78 Similarly, in Shelley’s Mathilda, the daughter’s escape to the heath ends in her death by exposure. Not only is the pastoral landscape insufficient to support Mathilda’s self-elegy, it actively turns against her: Mathilda dies specifically because she goes out into the landscape to gather flowers of “fancy.”79 Far from receiving consolation from immersion in the pastoral, she receives only a second death, a “real” death, after which her voice persists as aftermath to write out the self-elegy of the daughter otherwise elided from discourse. Centering on a dead feminine voice denied the public elegy of the male tradition, the feminine selfelegy writes its text as an alterior elegy, disclaiming the ground of the pastoral.

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The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

Going past the fields and the horses—that is, going past the pastoral—the feminine self-elegy grounds itself on deferral of topos, or perhaps deferral as topos. One may deploy Rajan’s idea of a textual abject, in its nuanced theorization of the interplay between text and reader, in order to interpret not only Mathilda but also Dickinson’s unpublishable status during her lifetime as signs of feminine texts consciously working at the edges of the claims of pastoral conventions, bending generic expectations to reflect cultural violence against feminine voice.80 Rajan’s theorizing allows us to understand even Plath’s most famous lyrics as textual abjects if one looks at the ambiguous way in which Plath left them and at their ambivalent reception during her lifetime.81 The unpublished manuscript of Ariel, left intestate, parallels the poet’s name, which legally remained Sylvia Hughes, an ambiguity signifying perhaps a desire at once to reject and retain the mark of the male poet’s name, this double gesture inscribing the impasse of the woman poet who must proleptically elegize herself because she assumes that no one else will properly do that work. As Rajan persuasively argues, the textual abject signifies a generic impasse and troubles its relationship to audience.82 The textual abject can also be read as a technique, a way to query genre, to evoke at once the genre of elegy and the feminine speaker’s displacement from it, emphasizing the interdiction of the feminine from the discourse of elegy by performing an eloquent elegy as if spoken by and for the dead woman. The narrator speaking her own elegy, then, performs a permanent parabasis, as Schlegel phrases it, tearing away the illusion that elegy as inscription recuperates loss by forefronting dramatically woman’s premature absence from the scene of performing canonical text. But in tearing away the comforting illusion that writing recuperates loss, the disembodied troped posthumous speaker also strongly underscores and mourns for that lost illusion by putting in its place another illusion, that of the writing of the dead. In the posthumous voice, death interrupts the speaker, who in turn interrupts death. This is perhaps the sort of thing that Schlegel meant by his term eine permanente Parekbase—a text constantly interrupting its own interruptions.

Between the Lines: A Disembodied Topos If we read between the lines of Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body and Sacks’s The English Elegy, or rather if we read the line connecting the two books, we may conclude that the body of woman is always available as an object to be mourned but that elegy, the naming of honor and the honoring of name, mourns the male master-as-speaker, mourning him not only as body lost but also as speaker lost to death. While Bronfen eloquently argues that woman’s dead body is the founding image of the Western aesthetic and Sacks apologizes for the masculine bias that his reading of the Oedipal conflict embedded in melancholy gives to his seminal conceptualizing of the genre of elegy, I suggest that the feminine self-elegy,

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23

neither a poetics of the body nor a staging of Oedipal drama, is lost in their interpretive rubrics. In the self-elegy, the ironic turn on the passive mode of Vincent’s Romantic poetess, who welcomes death, marks a poem of aggressive self-naming, in which the troped-as-disembodied posthumous speaker declares her fitness for the task of authoring formal elegy and also her fitness for being honored as the subject of such elegy. She does not seek death, but commemoration. Such a poem rejects feminine conscription as object subsumed into materiality. Instead, it asserts the feminine speaker’s claim to place herself as canonical speaker, master. This resistance to subsuming the feminine under a rhetorical claim to represent the body makes the disembodied trope of the posthumous voice in women’s writing a place difficult to theorize in the context of Kristevan notions of woman’s reproductive identity. I shift focus to the idea of feminine modes of rhetoric, which are not more body than male traditions and which also do not fit under the aegis of what Carolyn Dever terms the “dead angel voice” of Victorian womanhood. The dominant stroke of the feminine self-elegy, I argue, is its formalization of the desire to be read properly, to enter canonical discourse. The bodiless, here, does not signify passivity, but rather a rejection of cultural terms of femininity as embodiedness.83 The gesture of claiming a disembodied topos for elegiac discourse, then, resists current cultural concepts of woman’s hyperembodied or reified status without rejecting the concept of femininity as such. Distinguishing the cultural from the bodily is obviously a difficult task, as Sacks indicates when, supplementing his discussion of the male elegy by citing Emily Brontë’s poem “Cold in the earth” (“Remembrance”), he reads Brontë’s poem as mourning the loss of the mother’s body. Mourning here is being weaned as only an infant is weaned. By contrast, I suggest that the poem also may be read as an ambiguous statement about the death of the self, the speaker claiming that the tomb is “already more than mine” (28).84 Brontë’s speaker states that the tomb of the mourned other belongs more fully to the speaking self and that only this priority of ownership of the “tomb” allows Brontë’s speaker to mourn in text. Like Orpheus, she has already claimed the space of death, and she speaks from it.85 That from which Brontë’s poem’s speaker dramatically depicts herself as being weaned, then, is not the mother’s breast, but the patriarchally inflected premise of elegy’s consolation—the consoling narrative of traditional elegy. Strikingly, the gesture of the disembodied posthumous voice intimated in Brontë’s “Cold in the earth,” dislocating a positional passivity, draws in the reader. The reader, in reading the self-elegy, bears witness to the daughter’s lost chance to speak while alive.86 In the posthumous voice, the speaker heightens, or makes explicit, the ghostliness of her speech by implicitly responding to another silenced voice, that of herself as living, embodied speaker. This implicit, even hidden, sense of eclogue allows the speaker to dramatize the place of the reader in the posthumous performance. Here, the reader bears the contrapuntal declamation that persists after the elegist’s signature’s erasure. In eclogue, we would speak next. In

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the feminine self-elegy, the reader is inscribed as implicit answerer, or performative necessity, an intimate bond asserted by the evocation of the dialogue as that which the text then leaves as in medias res, awaiting the audience. The disembodied posthumous voice performs, then, in a highly privative “theatre of mourning,” the eclogue of the self mourning the self, which the audience is invited to hear and, in the formal code of traditional pastoral, participate in by hearing. The ghost in the machine, the patriarch’s unheard but still present interdiction of the feminine speaker, haunts the text troped posthumous. But the disembodied trope of the posthumous voice in women’s writing also haunts the patriarch. Judith Butler speaks of a gaze turned onto the authority of masculine language as a moment that “suddenly exposes his autonomy as illusory.”87 In just this way, the trope of a disembodied posthumous feminine voice reveals the blind spot of the paternal metaphor’s alliance of woman and death, of femininity and silence. What Dickinson calls “The Things that Death will buy” (Fr644, 5)—a chance for the feminine speaker to center text, to inhabit center stage—have been gained by the posthumous voice in Shelley’s, Brontë’s, Dickinson’s, and Plath’s work. Each of these writers makes an entry, albeit a posthumous entry, into the center of the very canon that Summit persuasively argues is built on the exclusion of women writers. The gesture of laying down the feminine body before the text—an always already dead body in the Western aesthetic, as Bronfen suggests—enacts a dollish sacrifice, a simulacular sacrifice, in which the body’s banishment from voice is ironically staged. Posthumousness as rhetorical device swerves away from, or deflects, the patriarchally inflected gaze in order to open a privative space in which the narrator engages questions of ontology, querying the limits of being by writing into that presumptive margin of being, death. Here, the gaze of the disembodied dead daughter suddenly strikes the patriarchal structure, or system of exchange, that insists that the daughter be always already seen. The feminine self-elegy is at once highly privative and ironically marked by the expansion of audience-granted voice inscribed into text. The trauma of having one’s voice taken away from audience is structurally revealed and repealed in the self-elegy, which stages an annihilation of voice by presenting inscription as superior to voice—superior because of inscription’s inherent claims on audience, its implicit silencing of audience. The disembodied posthumous voice, staging a feminine speaker who speaks her own elegy, develops a scene of mourning that ironizes its origin in the pastoral dialogue, a radical elegiac gesture.

Notes 1 Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 12–13. In The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), Nadia Seremetakis presents an ethnographic study of feminine mourning and oral elegy in rural Greece, linking the

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2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16

25

classical elegy with both the Eastern Orthodox Church and Western masculine elegiac tradition. She postulates that the thrinos sung by skilled but not professional women mourners in Inner Mani is a tradition that split off centuries ago from the song of professional male mourners, which became codified as the written elegy, the epitaphios logos (169–71). See Patrick Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics, and Gender, 1820–1840 (Hanover, NH: U of New England P, 2004). Patrick H. Vincent, “Lucretia Davidson in Europe: Female Elegy, Literary Transmission and the Figure of the Romantic Poetess,” Romanticism on the Net 29–30 (2003) . See also Mary Loeffelholz, “‘Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?’ Or, Poetry in the Domestic Tutelary Complex,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 (1997): 271–93. Toril Moi, “Feminist, Female, Feminine,” The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997) 104–16. For another assessment of the female elegy, see Melissa Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997). Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 133. Sacks, 145–6. William Butler Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli,” The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983) 294–5. Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 2–7, 203–10. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984). Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992). Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), quoted in Michèle Richman, “Sex and Signs: The Language of French Feminist Criticism,” Language and Style 13 (Fall 1980): 62– 80; Emily Dickinson, Fr260. In citing Dickinson’s poetry, I refer to The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), identified, as is the common practice, parenthetically by poem number preceded by (Fr) and followed where necessary by line numbers. I have also consulted Franklin’s 1998 variorum edition. Diana Fuss, “The Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30.1 (Fall 2003): 1–31. Here, I am referring to Stanley Fish’s famous reading of “Lycidas.” See “‘Lycidas’: A Poem Finally Anonymous,” Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983) 319–40. See Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) 51–2. See, for example, comments by Archibald McLeish, “The Private World: Poems of Emily Dickinson,” Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 150–53. Thomas H. Johnson’s subject index presents a persuasive cataloguing of Dickinson’s allegory of abstractions.

26

17

18 19

20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing See Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960). See also “I died for Beauty” (Fr448), which cordons off the terms of its aesthetic, pointing out the dangerous proximity to meaninglessness of even the aesthetic for which the “Poet,” another of Dickinson’s symbolic terms writ large, had given up her life. “[T]he Grave and I - / Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep, / Our only Lullaby -” (Fr394, 22–4). Here, I am referring to the Lacanian notion of the “Real,” which is taken up by Slavoj Zizek and Elisabeth Bronfen in their respective theorizations of voice and the dead woman’s body. See Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed. (1992; New York: Routledge, 2001) 20–23, 113–20, and Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 52–3. See also Alan Sheridan, “Translator’s Note,” Ecrits: A Selection, by Jacques Lacan (New York: Norton, 1977) ix–x. Luce Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974) 11–129. Irigaray writes partly in response to Jacques Lacan’s notion of language spoken dans le nom du père. Lacan argues that fatherhood is the primary template for all symbolic discourse, for, at birth, the child is claimed by the mother through the body, but the father’s claim upon his progeny must be enacted through the symbolic gesture of naming them his own. By the terms nom du père and non du père, Lacan establishes the mechanism of the paternal law: the father names and the father denies, and this naming and denying governs linguistic production and use. See Ecrits, 285–90. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (1981; New York: Harper, 1992). Unless otherwise noted, references to Plath’s poems will be to this edition. Sandra Gilbert, “In Yeats’ House: The Death and Resurrection of Sylvia Plath,” Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. Linda Wagner (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984) 204–22. See also Plath’s poem “The moon and the Yew Tree,” which Christina Britzolakis characterizes as an example of the “Plathian moon-muse” in Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 107. Judith Butler offers an extended criticism of Kristeva’s notion of the feminine voice. Butler’s criticism focuses on Kristeva’s heterocentric notion of femininity as grounded ineluctably in maternity. See Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999) 101–104, and Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 25–8. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 33–35, 76, 141, 143, 209. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979). Irigaray, 11. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 26–27, 29, 40–42. Kristeva did not in fact arrive at the concept of semiotike as an answer to querying what marks feminine writing. Julia Kristeva, address, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, October 2004. Fr124, 8–9, 12–13. See also Zeiger, 5. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., “Epilogue,” lines 143–4, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969) 988.

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32 Indeed, Elisabeth Bronfen reads woman’s death as that which in effect precedes culture, that on which culture is built. See Over Her Dead Body, esp. 225–51. 33 Plath’s posthumous fame cannot be guaranteed, that is, unless we join Ted Hughes in attributing the supernatural power of prophecy to Plath. See Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of “Birthday Letters” (New York: Norton, 2001) 36, 39. In any event, Plath’s posthumous reputation as a major poet is still strenuously contested. For a highly ambivalent reading of Plath, see George Steiner, “Dying Is an Art,” The Reporter, 7 October 1965, reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman (London: Faber, 1970) 211–18. See also Seamus Heaney, “The Indefatigable Hoof-taps,” TLS, 5–11 February 1988, and Joyce Carol Oates, “The Death Throes of Romanticism,” Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath, ed. Paul Alexander (New York: Harper, 1985). 34 Ellen Pollak points out that woman’s double role as symbol and symbol maker shifts the ground of textual origin. See Incest in the English Novel: 1684–1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003) 129–61. My reading is that the posthumous voice as trope questions the construction of woman as symbol in the first place. 35 “In a curious way, the poems read as though they were written posthumously.” See A. Alvarez, “Sylvia Plath,” The Review 9 (October 1963), quoted on the back cover of the Harper edition of Ariel. 36 Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, 9.2, 29–31, Loeb edition, trans. H.E. Butler (1921; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986) 391. 37 Susan Gubar, “Prosopopeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 191–215. 38 Tim Kendall has pointed out the way in which Plath’s quieter lyric poems are critically ignored in favor of poems like “Daddy.” See Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 2001). 39 Maurice Blanchot coins the term “Death’s space” and calls death’s space “free from time.” I am not using the term “space of death” as Michel Ragon does to signify the tomb, the grave. For Blanchot, as Edmond Jabes notes, the space of death as it enters writing is space variously as “non-present, non-absent.” He continues, “It tempts us in the same way as what we encounter only in situations not longer there except at the borderlines,” or as “a language reduced to its interior aspect.” See Blanchot, The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 47; Ragon, The Space of Death, trans. Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1983); and Jabes, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) 75–6. See also Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982) 158–9. 40 Beatrice Martina Guenther, The Poetics of Death: The Short Prose of Kleist and Balzac (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996) 14. 41 See Fuss, “The Corpse Poem.” In a related reading of aspects of the posthumous, Marjorie Worthington has explored the “posthumous posturing” of suicide drama in the work of Carole Maso in “Posthumous Posturing,” Studies in the Novel 32.2 (2000): 243– 63. 42 The tradition of metaphor as that gesture of figural language which signifies the unknown may be located in Christian typology; however, the trope of the posthumous voice differs from this tradition of Christian writing (which is elegantly exemplified in some of Rossetti’s death lyrics) inasmuch as in the self-elegy no afterlife at all is drawn.

28

43

44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52

53

54 55

56

57

58

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing For a discussion of Christian analogy, see Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 17–22. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor. For a discussion of Dickinson’s resistance to figuration, see Joanne Feit Diehl, “Ransom in a Voice,” Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, ed. Suzanne Juhasz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983) 156–75. The claim is that woman is “outside ontology.” Irigaray, 183. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, vi–vii. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969) 64. Such a homelessness may be read as a feminine statement, inasmuch as woman’s lack of owning land, like owning a topos, has been theorized in feminist literary history. See, for example, Summit, and Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986). Mary Shelley, Mathilda, The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 176; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale and Richard J. Dunn, Norton critical edition (New York: Norton, 1990) 256. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Mathilda and Wuthering Heights will be to these editions. Sacks, 12. Sacks, 15. Sacks, 8. For a discussion of the commonplaces of mourning open to women writers, see Elizabeth Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 (Hanover, NH: U of New England P, 1998) 53–125. Tilottama Rajan, “Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Textual Abject,” Wordsworth Circle 24.2 (1993): 61–8. Rajan’s term becomes especially relevant to my project through her application of it in her reading of Shelley’s Mathilda. See “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 43–67. On the problems of classifying Wuthering Heights, see David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic, Blackwell Guides to Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) 212–16. For Higginson’s reservations about Dickinson’s poetry, see The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958) L261, 265, and Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, 1980) 219– 27. On Plath, see Helen Vendler, “An Intractable Metal,” Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath, ed. Paul Alexander (New York: Harper, 1985) 1–12. See note 20. Jacques Lacan’s theorization of speech dans le nom du père is also reflected in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998) 12, 34, 48, 113, 148, 263, 281. On this latter point, see Jürgen Habermas’s theorizing about the true trajectory of the Oedipal complex in The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984–87). Jennifer Summit complains about the use of “voice” when applied to the theorization of women’s writing, pointing out that the term leads to confusion as to the difference between written and spoken words and showing that the written text resists the assignment to gender, while the spoken word is always connected to a body. Summit, 8. Problematically, however, gender cannot always simply be read by looking at the speaking body. Gender of the spoken “voice,” then, may be no more fixed and

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60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73

74

29

transparent than any gendered authority in text. For theorization of visual and genetic gender in determinacy, see Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone, 1996). See Renata Salacl and Slavoj Zizek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), especially Zizek’s essay “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” 90–126; see also Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 1–2, 116–19. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) 1–27. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 20, and Derrida, “The First Session,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992) 131–40. See also Mladen Dolar addressing the Derridean topic of voice in “The Object Voice,” in Salacl and Zizek, 7–31. Cixous and Clément, 64–5. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, x–xv, 3–13. Vincent, The Romantic Poetess; Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 395–434. On women writers employing the topos of the domestic and the quotidian, see Stuart Curran, “The I Altered,” Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988) 185–207. Lacan, Ecrits, 199. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43–5. See Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 179. Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum Fragment 42, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, quoted in de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, 163–84. Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Duetschen Romanntik, quoted and trans. in de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, 182–3. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971) 242n. Britzolakis, 172–5; Plato, Timaeus, 51 a, b, trans. Francis M. Cornford (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). See Plato, Timaeus, 51 a, b: “That which is duly to receive over its whole extent and many times over all the likenesses of the intelligible and eternal things ought in its own nature to be free of all the characters. For this reason, the mother and receptacle of what has come to be visible and otherwise sensible […] we call it a nature invisible and characterless […] and very hard to apprehend.” For a reading of Dickinson’s heliotropes, see Antoine Cazé, “‘Tropic Show’: or Dickinson’s Heliotropes,” Emily Dickinson Journal 11.1 (2002): 33–48. Cazé does not deal explicitly with Dickinson’s lyrics’ evocations of death. Through Paul de Man’s reading of the sun as the epitaph inscribing, reading, and effacing paternal “eye,” however, I link Dickinson’s heliotrope with the grave into which the sun is definitively not allowed to write. See de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 75. Sacks persuasively uses “Lycidas” to explore the persistence of the pastoral elegy in the English tradition. Sacks, 96–117. See also C.A. Patrides, ed., Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983).

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75 Daneen Wardrop, Emily Dickinson’s Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1996) 70. 76 Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1960) 1:xxi. 77 Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 97. 78 Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 256. 79 Shelley, Mathilda, 241–4. 80 Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda.” 81 While Susan Van Dyne examines Plath’s last poems as a show of strength that Ted Hughes, by changing the order of the poems in Plath’s Ariel manuscript, somewhat subverted, Erica Wagner points out that many of the last poems were rejected by the very magazines where Plath usually found places for her poems. Plath’s journals detail her understanding of audience as an essential parameter of textual performance. See Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993) 50, 164, and Wagner, 24. 82 Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 45–6. 83 Judith Butler in recent essays makes a similar, sociologically based argument for the revision of gender as essentialism. See Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 84 Emily Brontë, “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!” (“Remembrance”), The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C.W. Hatfield (1941; New York: Columbia UP, 1995) 222–3. 85 Sacks, 15–16. 86 One may interpret ellipses of confession in Shelley’s Mathilda, or Bronte’s enigmatic depiction of Cathy as either a ghost or a figment of men’s imaginations, or Dickinson’s use of the dash in her poems’ lines, or Plath’s truncated terza rima, as expressive of a silenced contrapuntal voice that stands before the explicit gesture of the posthumous voice. For a reading of the role of the reader as addressee in text, see Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 175–83. 87 Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii–xxviii.

Chapter 1

Spectral Gardens: Pastoral Tradition and Feminine SelfElegy In The Oaten Flute, which Celeste Marguerite Schenck praises for reinvigorating critical attention to the elegy, Renato Poggioli pushes a reading of the convention of the pastoral elegy not only to contain the concept of a “pastoral oasis,” as in Dante’s Commedia, but also to frame a way of generically rereading prose works, fitting them into a genealogy of the pastoral.1 His posthumous elasticization of the boundaries of the convention (The Oaten Flute was published under the auspices of A. Bartlett Giamatti ten years after Poggioli’s untimely death, Giamatti’s gesture itself marking an uncanny repetition of elegiac convention) drew criticism for what some argued were too-subtle interpretations of the conventions of the genre.2 But Schenck’s Mourning and Panegyric points out that Poggioli’s sharpening of our awareness of the gestures of the pastoral in the context of works that obliquely deploy the conventions demonstrates their vitality. Schenck contrasts Poggioli’s more elastic interpretation of elegiac codes with, for example, Ellen Lambert’s rigid definition of pastoral elegy, a definition so confining, suggests Schenck, as to limit participation in pastoral elegy to Theocritus alone.3 In contending that Shelley’s Mathilda, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Dickinson’s child elegies, and some of Plath’s Ariel poems participate in and comment on the formal parameters of the pastoral elegy, my argument inherits the terms of reading practiced by Poggioli and Schenck, in that, in finding gestures of elegiac conventions in the works, I put pressure on the parameters of the conventions. Needless to say, none of the works on which I am writing are full participants in the pastoral elegy. The alterations of the elegy that I read in Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath mark the formal code of elegy as commentary by difference, shaping these writers’ self-elegies as feminine texts. These writers’ deployment of some terms of the pastoral elegy in what I am calling a feminine self-elegy is the formal gesture by which I interpret a writer positioning herself as at once outcast from the canon and able to overturn that outcast status.4 Lambert locates responsibility for the shifting of the meaning of elegy to that of a poem about death in English literature, while Schenck links mourning and death to the pastoral from the beginning, claiming that even “in early Greek pastoral poetic ceremonies, the orphic protagonist(s) either decry a loss or voice a

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consolation.”5 From Virgil to Moschus to Milton, the tradition presents the younger poet-shepherd lamenting the dead voice of another male figure, although, strictly speaking, Lambert is correct in noting that only relatively recently has the word elegy come to mean exclusively a poem commemorating and lamenting the dead. While it would seem that I am applying the term elegy, in “feminine selfelegy,” in the later and latter sense of the word—the sense in which elegy is simply a poem of mourning, a poem about death—I argue in this chapter that part of what distinguishes the works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath from female elegy is their conceiving of the possibilities of their own canonicity, their works’ address and alteration of some critical motifs of the pastoral elegy. In particular, I point to Schenck’s argument: What survives the demise of pastoral conventions, characters, symbols, is pastoral’s initiatory function as a mode in which the young careerist demonstrates his fitness for the literary life. Either he invokes a ceremonial frame for his self-presenting utterance, or else, by means of sophisticated parody, he refuses the conventional symbols of poetic immortality and exposes the celebratory tone of such pastorals as hollow.6

In other words, what survives Milton’s elegy for the elegy is the initiatory function by which the male poet bids his entry into the canon. If, as Schenck contends, a poet like Hart Crane ironizes the commonplace of the elegy in his poem “The Bridge,” Crane’s vision of the hollowness of the initiation at once puts him in conversation with Dickinson (for whom he wrote an elegy of sorts) and establishes and preserves his place as a writer of the male elegy, one who critiques the tradition from within, making a bridge between himself and earlier male poets.7 Strikingly, Crane’s elegist invokes a heroics of the battlefield in the very place of the pastoral: […] Thou, pallid there as chalk Hast kept of wounds, O Mourners, all that sum That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme! Cowslip and shad-blow flaked like tethered foam Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring8

Here, the heroic images of war intermix with the pastoral “cowslip,” mocking the conventions of the genre while by no means distancing the concerns of male power and privilege, all that is fought through and for in wars, from the center of the poem’s enterprise. Crane’s mixing of the heroic and the pastoral may be said to collapse the distinction Lambert makes between the pastoral, or mourned, death and the heroic, or envied, death, but that very collapse strengthens and preserves the male domain of this English elegy.9 The passage underscores, then, Peter Sacks’s theorizing of the male elegy as a literary act that codifies and preserves masculine codes of honor and privilege in

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the face of death, blurring the very boundary that Lambert places between the pastoral and the heroic death.10 While the classical pastoral elegy and epic poem contrast sharply and strictly in content and form, in English literature after Milton the pastoral elegy serves the function of commemorating precisely the honor and name of the male figure elegized and, reciprocally, honoring the implicit figure of the male elegist himself. Indeed, Schenck identifies a thematics of initiation as the essential stroke of the pastoral.11 But in contrast to Crane’s image of holding hands with Walt Whitman, the feminine self-elegy approaches the pastoral conventions without a hand to hold. The self-elegy written by Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath is not elegy primarily in the sense of being a work about death and mourning—is not simply elegy in the more recent sense of the word. The self-elegy achieved by these women writers evokes pastoral elegy. In these works, a woman dead before her prime is dramatically mourned by a speaker whose eloquence answers the silencing of the other woman’s voice, a voice that is belatedly revealed to be the same as the voice of the speaker. Here, the convention is altered by the feminization of both the elegist and the subject of the elegy. The subversion of the conventions on which I focus is that rhetorical gesture of inscribing an elegist who claims to elegize herself from the space of her death; this altering of Sacks’s male elegy not only troubles the topos of the pastoral but also, I suggest, forefronts the interdiction of the daughter-as-speaker from the canon, staging this interdiction in an allusive move that posits an always belated audience whose performative reading will restore the topos of the feminine elegist. I read the prose works Mathilda and Wuthering Heights and some poems of Dickinson and of Plath as self-elegies because they formalize the initiatory structure of the pastoral, altering that structure to expose the woman writer’s exclusion from the master–apprentice dialogue, shifting the structure to pose a scene in which the dead speaker is elegized by herself. A self-elegy at once recognizes woman’s isolation from the canon and imagines the speaker placing herself either in the canon or in some other alterior lineage in which her literary genius is recognized and, as it were, immortalized, couched against death. The process becomes a privative ritual of self-initiation outside the genealogy of male canonical discourse. The apparent ungendering of the speaker, for example, that opens a poem in which Dickinson claims poetic genius for her speaker, “This was a Poet” (Fr446), also encodes that poem’s reading of the relationship between feminine voice and elegy, inasmuch as the poem places itself as a commemoration of another poet. Dickinson’s poem’s use of the pronouns “This,” “It,” and “Ourselves” not only ungenders the poet and the speaker but also links that effacement of gender with an implicit understanding of the monumentalizing effect of elegy, its making of its subject and its elegist into literary items. Dickinson’s poem’s use of “This” and “It” makes the poet not only neither male nor female but also not human, an object apart. But this extrahuman status suddenly collapses in the poem’s third stanza, which assigns a masculine “He” to the poet and states that the male poet “Entitles”

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the feminine speaker to “Poverty” (12–14). While it is highly possible that Dickinson uses the “He” (“The Poet - it is He -”) to refer to herself, claiming for herself poetic immortality, such an interpretation slips into reductive readings in which we focus on Dickinson’s appropriation as a woman writer of a male persona in her poetry as if this were a simple reversal and consequently ignore the more nuanced argument about gender that her poem makes. For Dickinson’s poem describes a male poet taking away a feminine speaker’s elegiac rights. The male poet described in Fr446 does not write about just anything. He writes elegies: he “Distills” “Attar” from what has “perished,” and he “Arrest[s]” the “familiar species,” placing elegy in a pastoral, the terms of which the male poet commands (3–5, 6, 7, 9). Given the poem’s resonance with others of Dickinson’s in which she describes a speaker who imagines herself having riches of poetic genius, it seems likely that here Dickinson inscribes for her feminine speaker the elegiac rights of a male speaker, gaining for her speaker a male poet’s power by making this implicit argument against the gendered code of traditional pastoral elegy. (The force of Dickinson’s poem’s argument is in its questioning of the necessity of a speaker’s being masculine in order to attain canonicity, or poetic immortality “Exterior - to Time” (17). Strikingly, the poem’s final stanza suggests that the current speaker will “Rob” the male poet of his “unconscious” “Portion,” his uncritical assumption of his own superior position as male elegist (14, 15). Dickinson’s speaker leaves the male “Poet” curiously awash in self-regard, the phrase “Himself - to Him - a Fortune” suggesting that the male poet has drifted solipsistically into a bloated selfsatisfaction while the wily feminine speaker “Rob[s]” from him the “Attar,”—the essential or necessary poem (15, 5). The aggression and violence implied in Fr446 point to the elegy as the crux of the male poet’s claim to canonicity, to poetic fame “Exterior - to Time.” That Dickinson may claim such status for herself is at once the point here and also beside the point. This gesture inherently evokes the speaker’s premature exclusion from other elegiac traditions, for in her self-elegies she makes her speaker the mourned and the mourner, establishing lineage as empty frame. The reader is inscribed into the self-elegy, inasmuch as the eclogue structure of the pastoral invokes audience as witness, participant. The self-elegy is written, however, only as if read, never as speech; it is not the corpse or ghost speaking but rather always already text self-aware of its presence as text—anticipating readership, invoking readership.12 Implicitly, the feminine self-elegy invokes audience as witness to complete the performance of elegy posed categorically as existing only as text, as trace. Here, the performed-as-speech tradition from Theocritus and Virgil is stripped away, and the spare poetics of self-consolation, what Beatrice Guenther calls the “limit of mimesis,” replaces the eclogue with spectral writer and reader. If Luce Irigaray argues that woman only uses language by imitating, or mirroring, male language, I connect her argument with the convention of what Sacks calls the male elegy to establish a way that women

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writing the self-elegy develop a mode of mourning that neither entirely mimics the terms of the male elegy nor fails to contend magisterially with its pastoral conventions. If the feminine self-elegy mirrors back the speaker mourning for herself, this mirroring is not, as Irigaray would contend, merely imitative of male elegy. 13 Rather, it addresses itself in a manner at once privative and dramatically directed to an audience, albeit a belated audience. Only the belated audience for the self-elegy, the reader, makes meaningful the reflexive gesture of inscribing mourning for oneself as if from the space of one’s death. The audience is called upon to perform and complete the aborted mourning of the speaker elegized by her own voice. This formal address of the codes of elegy asserts the woman writer’s capacity to actively appropriate and alter the terms of that very male canon that resists her claims to it. In disagreeing with Irigaray’s argument that women can only mirror male language, I am suggesting that the act of mirroring the terms of an established literary convention allows the woman writer of the self-elegy to alter and comment on the conventions. Here, allusion is used as an active mirror, an awareness of the frame of tradition and of how the angle of what is placed before the mirror of text will change the language. Indeed, for the woman writer historically denied canonical place, the pretense of mirroring conventions of the male elegy performs an implicit commentary: by pretending to remark upon the passing of herself as on the passing of a genius, the troped posthumous feminine speaker reconfigures the very literary terms by which her exclusion is marked and generated.14 This formal appropriation of the gesture of apprenticeship—an ironic apprenticeship to oneself—in the feminine self-elegy comments on the underlying exclusion of the feminine from the canon, the canon built, as Schenck argues, on apprenticeship and mastery as interdependent terms.15 In Virgil’s Fifth Eclogue, as in Moschus’s Lament for Bion, the elegizing of the male precursor is the driving force of the poem’s inherent claims for its significance. Dialogue scenes at once linking elegist, audience, and elegized are also, importantly, scenes in which the dead man is granted fame by a surviving younger male poet. Terms of master and apprentice are highlighted and ironically hollowed in the feminine self-elegy, in which the speaker poses as her own master. Dickinson’s “It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon” (Fr843) marks the feminine speaker’s encounter with the pastoral elegy by its specification of noontime, the time of elegy. 16 In Dickinson’s poem, the elegist is depicted as confronting her own failure of voice, paradoxically, through her eloquent speech. Rather than staying in the noon hour, Dickinson’s elegist confesses her betrayal of that noon hour and its “distinct” red flower. She depicts herself as having failed the pastoral moment, having failed to seize the noon hour, the poetic blossom “distinct and Red” (2). In the feminine speaker’s return to the pastoral moment, however, although the noon “Sun” is “in place” for her speech, the poetic flower is gone and the speaker’s claim on pastoral time and ground, or topos, is self-termed a “fraud” (9). The fraudulence of the encounter between the feminine voice and the pastoral ground, strikingly, is turned by a sort of extended zeugma in which the speaker and

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the flower are modified by “Great Nature’s Face,” which passes “infinite” by them both, passively bequeathing infinity onto both the dying flower and the speaker (19–20). The speaker’s ignoring of the flower becomes the way that she expresses her understanding of nature as a frame for absence, a mortal frame—an understanding that the flower in its rapid mortality grants, and an understanding precisely of the gloomy terms of Theocritus’ elegy. It is this spectral figured speech, the “distinct and Red” flower, that provides the instrument through which the “infinite” enters the topos of the feminine pastoral as groundless ground, infinity signified by a lack of topos, and lack of topos indicated by the bodiless status of Dickinson’s feminine speaker. Dickinson evokes the pastoral uncannily to pull away the topos—to pull the ground from under the flower, effectively leaving the poem without a topos, or rather with departure from the pastoral as both the momentum and spectral topos of the poem. Here, the flower is estranged, a spectral figure dislocated from placement in nature. Dickinson’s poem is not, strictly speaking, set in a garden, but in the symbolic aftermath of the dismemberment of that garden, that pastoral terrain. Her speaker encounters the pastoral as absence or aftermath, marking her departure from it not only through the death of that one red flower but also through all the previous deaths of “much Flowers of this and further Zones” that “Have perished in [her] Hands” (13–14). Rather than being in the ground, these flowers all uncannily float upward, without topos, anchored only by the rhetorical grounding of the speaker’s hands, which are, importantly, the writer’s implement. The speaker calls her initial unwillingness to recognize the transience of all natural things “fraudulence,” as if this turn were the reason for the vanishing of the pastoral topos her poem evokes. But the very reversal that the poem performs suggests that in the poem’s space the speaker comprehends the transience of nature, undoing her fraudulent status as elegist and making her an elegist of nature as absence. She achieves this authenticity by recognizing, belatedly, the transient life of the “Single […] Red” flower. This success, far from reinstating the pastoral topos that opens the poem, revokes topos altogether. Dickinson’s speaker closes with the suggestion that the moment in which the speaker experiences the “infinite” is a moment of apophasis in which the speaker does not know the essential “single Flower of the Earth”; in this very failure is the infinite apprehended by the outcast speaker (17, 20). The poem’s technique of apophasis brings a rhetorical frame to the crisis of feminine speech in the canonical discourse of the elegy. From what topos, then, is Dickinson’s elegist speaking? The center of her poem, which she calls the “single Flower of the Earth,” remains “unapproached.” I suggest that the poem demonstrates an ascetic poetics that formalizes a lack of topos, or a topos of lack. This aporia, the unapproached “Zone,” is the topos of the poem. The poem, importantly, places itself when it invokes the pastoral, linking itself with the male tradition of elegy rather than with the nineteenth-century female mourning poem. But it also troubles the pastoral, first placing its feminine

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speaker as a “fraud” in that pastoral zone and then intimating the fraudulence of the zone itself, that is, the unreality of pastoral consolatory rhetoric, the illusion that human beings are placed in nature, given ground there. In another poem, Fr846, Dickinson similarly imagines the “dejected Lutes” of the tradition bathed in a transient rain, again interposing against the pastoral consolations of traditional male elegy a cleansing force that problematically produces a space in which vanishing occurs, a rhetoric that proleptically declares itself as “signed […] away” (13–16). I want to distance Dickinson’s troubling of topos from the Victorian ideal of femininity as bodilessness by pointing to the way that Dickinson deploys the rhetoric of homelessness, or the lack of topos, for a speaker who speaks powerfully despite having nowhere stable from which to address audience.17 In response to male elegy, she draws on the pastoral conventions to depict woman’s outcast status from that topos, her groundlessness as a speaker, her categorical homelessness. In evoking a disembodied topos, Dickinson indicates a lack of access to canonical topoi rather than a decorous feminine bodilessness. The pastoral terrain portrayed as unapproachable by the feminine speaker indicates that canonicity, as instated through elegiac discourse, seems unapproachable for her—an anxiety expressed by Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath that Jennifer Summit would argue is precisely a recognition of the obscurity facing popular women writers after their deaths. (As Summit argues, what is barred the woman writer is not popularity and publication in her day but rather canonical status.18) The feminine self-elegy evokes the pastoral topos to show woman’s lack of access to the male elegy, the center of canon formation, what Dickinson describes as that “Same Locality - / The Sun in place” (Fr843, 8–9). In creating a poetics shaped around a lack of topos—which must also respectively be shaped around a lack of audience, topos and audience being twin engines of rhetorical success—the feminine self-elegy creates a formal alteration of the male elegy. Plath’s Ariel, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Shelley’s Mathilda, and much of Dickinson’s oeuvre, far from simply commenting on the exclusion of the feminine from the canonical trope of the male elegy, forge a poetics of feminine voice that marks the pose of the feminine as stoic—a refusal of the consolatory rhetoric of the male elegy, a risky dislocation and staged recuperation of topos and audience from the scene of elegy. This stoical rhetoric of writing without a secure ground from which to address audience connects these womanauthored texts, all of which at once insist on their own outcast status and have also (with the exception of Mathilda) worked their way in to the English canon.19 This uncanny cultural artifact—the woman writer predicting her crossing from outcast to canonical writer by inscribing a masterful, feminine, and dead speaker, turns on Shelley’s, Brontë’s, Dickinson’s, and Plath’s sophisticated reworking of the motivations behind the exclusion of woman from that master–apprentice relationship that drives elegy. As Sacks argues in The English Elegy, the erotic core of the elegy places what seems to be a gendered boundary around the genre.

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But the erotics of self-elegy query the usefulness of eros for a woman speaker whose first desire as a writer is to be granted canonical topos at all. Here, the desire to be read is conflated with and subsumes the erotic desire for the other, or the desired other as audience. In the feminine self-elegy, positing a disembodied posthumous voice that addresses an absent audience from an unapproached topos shifts the cultural ground of the oxymoronic ideal of female bodilessness. It constructs a rhetoric around not bodilessness but audiencelessness, lack of proper topos. The revocation of these grounds transposes them, reclaiming audience, topos, and voice in the space of a textual performance that indicates a belated reader. Bodilessness, here, is a feint that deploys a culturally acceptable feminine mode to point to the scandal of woman writer’s deprivation of canonical topoi, her culturally enforced status as a writer of the quotidian. Lack of proper audience is synecdochically indicated by the master trope of the speaker’s bodilessness. Audience and topos—who is addressed and from where—are central to canonical concerns, guideposts to a work’s self-placement. I argue that the disembodied posthumous voice, rather than evoking a ladylike bodilessness, uses a feminine vernacular of the bodiless to recuperate the ground and the audience of woman’s writing for canonical performance. If the feminine self-elegy makes of its speaker at once the apprentice who mourns and the dead poet-master who is mourned, the form implicates an always belated audience as its addressee inscribed.20 The coming-after-death audience is what the elegist who is posed as elegizing herself from the space of death commands. We are called to witness not only that the poet has died but also that no one has mourned her properly, no one has given due to her poetic genius, and so she has had to mourn herself, performing posthumous persistence as that extreme gesture necessary to define her proper place as a masterful speaker. Inasmuch as we read the self-elegy, we enter the dialogue between the speaker and her address of death. This dialogue is privative, presenting a lyric that addresses us cryptically about those very terms of a death that must stand as metaphorical, insofar as the speaker survives her death as voice. Our access to this privative scene of inscription is written into the feminine self-elegy, a rhetorical context in which we are called on to read performatively the incomplete mourning of the self-elegy. The compulsive cultural return to the authors about whose self-elegies I am writing—to Wuthering Heights, to Dickinson as the belle of Amherst, to Plath’s suicide, and to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a novel thematically linked to Mathilda)—and the way in which these literary items have become cultural items all point to the unresolvable tension with audience that these writers put into play. An uncanny, belated sense of cultural responsibility for the works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath sets them apart. Our response to these writers, as if to an invocation of duty, remarks on the dialogic frame implicitly put in place and altered by their appropriation and alteration of the elegiac code. In the feminine self-elegy, the pastoral dialogue is reinterpreted as that which takes place not only between the mourning self and the self mourned but also between the improperly mourned, uncanonized woman

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writer and the always belated audience who, in reading the writer’s self-mourning performance, implicitly completes that otherwise unheard mourning.

Elegy and Feminine Voice While Lambert clarifies that elegy mourns a shepherd as opposed to a hero, linking elegy with anonymous death, with mourned rather than envied death, pastoral elegy’s work of mourning the powerless is complicated in English tradition. Sacks argues that elegy in the English canon defines a process by which a male apprentice poet signals his entry into the canon, signals his mastery.21 Far from being removed from the formation of any patriarchal system, then, the elegiac draws heavily on its concern with mastery. The veneer of the simple shepherd points to an ironic recognition of the powerful place of the male subject elegized and the male poet elegizing. Indeed, William Empson argues that pastoral is about the veneer, that it memorializes power, not anonymity.22 If Esther Schor, writing not primarily about the elegy but rather about mourning, describes the English elegy after Milton as becoming feminized, Sacks’s contention that the English elegy is a male tradition counters Schor’s argument.23 Drawing a formal distinction between the female mourning poem and what I am calling the feminine self-elegy turns on the way that the feminine self-elegy deploys the conventions of that pastoral elegy, which in the English canon becomes male elegy, while the female mourning poem, as Schor argues, follows what she describes as investigating death and mourning through sentimental terms, making mourning women’s work. (If Schor’s equating of the sentimental with femininity is a highly problematic move, it is also unmistakably the thesis implicit in her well-received book.) Elisabeth Bronfen’s masterful demonstration of the cultural connection between the conceptualization of woman and death points to the way that women as appointed mourners can be read as characteristic of Victorian culture, while the male elegy remains the core of canon formation. The feminization of death, which Schor argues is a historical development, Bronfen links to embedded cultural concepts of woman’s body and of woman as body. 24 In my reading of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath, I emphasize the ironic use of woman’s status as the “bearer” of the dead to gain themselves entry into the canon by using the terms of pastoral elegy, a male prerogative. Rather than arguing that these self-elegies feminize mourning, I argue that the self-elegy acknowledges what Julia Kristeva has defined as the positional status of the feminine and then dislocates that gendering in mourning, writing a formal elegy that at once participates in and critiques the role of pastoral elegy as an engine of male canon formation.25 The self-elegy in Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath does not so much feminize elegy as dislocate the erotic course of the conventions, shifting their gendering. These four authors resist the confining code of female elegy; their feminine self-elegies do not so much mirror what Sacks calls male

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elegy as appropriate and alter the conventions, commenting on the male prerogative, revealing mourning’s power structure. The feminine self-elegy, then, is not feminine in essentialist terms but rather in its revisionist account of elegiac codes. I apply the term “feminine” to the selfelegy written by Shelley, Dickinson, Brontë, and Plath to indicate the selfperceived outcast status before the English canon that heavily informs their work, a use of the term that I derive by contrasting Kristeva’s notion of the feminine as a positional quality to Summit’s argument that canon formation is that which is defined by its exclusion of the positionally feminine text. In an interview, Plath recalled being critiqued for “beginning [a poem] like [John] Donne but not ending like Donne.”26 This inability to finish like Donne indicates a problem for the woman writer. Her challenge is not how to be published and read, not how to begin, but rather how to end, how to attain the status of the masterful writer who puts away her apprenticeship, gaining a canonical place in which she is still read posthumously. Such positional femininity, then, is not an essential quality adhering to the woman writer’s work. Rather, it indicates a selfassessed status with regard to the English canon, a canon that, as both Summit’s and Sacks’s books indicate by intertextual conversation, is shaped by the genealogy of male apprenticeship, a canon Summit argues is built by exclusion of women writers, however successful in their day, and Sacks indicates is carried forward by male commemoration of the male dead. The dilemma for the woman writer who wants to be read as a master poet is suggested by Plath’s account of beginning but not ending like Donne. Had she ended her poem just like Donne, it would have been a gesture of imitation, Irigaray’s mirror in which woman’s language is effaced before patriarchy. At the same time, not to finish like Donne means that the woman writer is excluded from the canon, not called a master poet, not kept in the canon. Ending a poem or lyric novel or indeed a career at once like and not like Donne, or rather like and not like the male masters of the canon, is the task of feminine self-elegy. This task is addressed formally through the deployment of pastoral conventions in ways that question the consolation of place and topos, what Summit evocatively calls “lost property.” The self-elegies of Shelley, Dickinson, Brontë, and Plath at once invoke and exhaust pastoral conventions, not ending like the male canonical performance, with its assurance of the continuation of a male line of speakers, but rather frighteningly consolidating a continuation of death, a breathtaking placing of ontological certainty as limited exclusively to text. In looking at the feminine self-elegy as participatory in the formal terms of traditional elegy, I retain an awareness of the importance of Theocritus’ pastoral elegy as that which remarks on the death of the shepherd as a mourned, not envied, death, and I also place my consideration of the genre of elegy as a mode marked and remade by Milton’s “Lycidas.” If the Milton of Paradise Lost influenced Mary Shelley (who placed her first work beneath Milton’s haunting epigraph, “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?”), and if Emily Brontë, as

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Gilbert and Gubar exhaustively argue, drew on Milton’s epic, Mathilda and Wuthering Heights also reflect a response to “Lycidas,” that apprentice work by which Milton instated himself in the line of canonical English male poets. Shelley’s and Brontë’s interpretations of “Lycidas,” the English appropriation of the pastoral elegy, suggest the woman writer’s distance from a chance to place herself in the canonical line of male poets. In not claiming for the posthumous feminine speaker even the ghost of a chance that she, as the mourner and the mourned, will be remembered as elegist or as master, the feminine self-elegy also may be read as reflecting Theocritus’ pastoral elegy, a model of elegy mourning unheroic death, death placed in namelessness. If the connection of the term “elegy” with a work exclusively concerned with mourning death was solidified in the Romantic era, Mathilda and Wuthering Heights, all about death, also implicitly engage and gesture back to the Theocritan pastoral elegy. An ambivalence about the discourse of heroism, then, can be read in Shelley’s and Brontë’s prose works and in Dickinson’s and Plath’s ironic appropriations of pastoral elegy. By “ironic appropriations,” I indicate a recognition of the difficulty of a daughter’s apprenticeship. If, for example, Mathilda invokes the pastoral retreat, Poggioli’s argument that Dante’s Commedia contains a “pastoral oasis” is resonant for my reading of Mathilda.27 The links between Shelley’s novella and Dante’s character Matelda have been well documented by Jean de Palacio.28 Recalling the links Palacio draws between Dante and Shelley, I turn to Poggioli’s reading of the pastoral in Dante, his finding the Virgil of the Eclogues as Dante’s guide through Earthly Paradise.29 Poggioli links Dante’s Matelda with the girl of the traditional pastorela, a girl who is approached by the poet and in making love to whom the poet closes his pastorela in ecstatic consummation.30 While Poggioli points out that Dante and Matelda share a consummation of purely “spiritual joy,” the link between the love-object girl of the pastorela, Dante’s Matelda, and Shelley’s Mathilda is striking. Shelley wrote Mathilda with an awareness of Dante’s deployment of the pastoral, sharply focusing her novella as a response to that section of Dante’s masterwork that invokes the conventions.31 But Mary Shelley’s character Mathilda does not experience a consummation of spiritual joy. Instead, Shelley’s Mathilda dies from gathering illusory flowers of fancy. This pointed irony, nihilistic in its refusal of both pastoral and Christian consolations, marks Shelley’s Mathilda as a work heavily implicated in responding to conventions of the pastoral elegy. Poggioli connects Dante’s Matelda to the conventions of the pastoral through Virgil’s Eclogues and also through Dante’s reference to Proserpine, who, while gathering flowers beside her mother, was seized by Pluto and brought to the underworld.32 The pastoral of Proserpine is a troubled one: she inhabits a noman’s-land between death and life that finds a brief parallel in Theocritus’ Daphnis’ oration of his own lament, his description of his own going down to death.33 But when Daphnis dies, nature mourns him, and the pastoral consolation is

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achieved. Proserpine, on the other hand, remains a figure who disrupts mourning’s consolation in concert with nature, who insists on insolvable, unending mourning in which nature is implicated but never permitted to finish its mourning for her: winter itself is blamed on her sojourns in the underworld. Poggioli’s connecting Dante’s pastoral with Proserpine finds its parallel in Shelley’s comparison of her character Mathilda to Proserpine, both references problematizing the frame of the pastoral, inasmuch as Proserpine resists the consolation of pastoral mourning by resisting both natural death and nature’s completed mourning for her.34 Poggioli’s persuasive argument for the “pastoral oasis” of Dante’s scene with Matelda brings to the forefront those issues of topos and apprenticeship that shape my reading of the formal mark of the feminine self-elegy. For the struggle presented in Shelley’s allusion to Dante’s pastoral oasis, her Mathilda who responds to his Matelda, by invoking the pastoral, stages the attempt of the initiate, Mathilda, to gain a topos and audience for her elegy. That Shelley’s elegiac prose attempts to present itself as mourning the incestuous father but collapses into an elegy mourning the daughter/speaker points to the problematic status of the daughter-as-initiate, the woman writer’s inheritance of the pastoral elegy. Shelley’s Mathilda cannot play successful initiate to her father’s master, even though the couple seek a pastoral retreat in response to the father’s crisis in London. For the father’s mastery encroaches onto the daughter’s personhood through her sexuality, as Shelley’s allusion to the pastorela suggests, onto her capacity to speak or authorize language in her name. The daughter, Mathilda, is an empty, flattened character, as Tilottama Rajan points out, preternatural in her passivity.35 I would argue that Shelley wrote Mathilda’s uncannily passive character precisely to demonstrate the annihilating effect on the daughter of the father’s incestuous attention. Shelley’s Mathilda is an important performance in that it connects incest with the erosion of the daughter’s voice, the erasure of the daughter’s authority, showing how the daughter-as-speaker is damaged by the trauma of incest. Shelley’s Mathilda invokes the pastoral elegy’s initiate/master configuration and reveals it to be an impossible configuration for the daughter-as-speaker. That Mathilda was written as a revision of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Cave of Fancy points strongly to Shelley’s work’s connection to the pastoral mode.36 It also points to Shelley’s critique of woman’s place in the pastoral, the structure of apprentice/master that creates the canon. Shelley’s character, Mathilda, positioned as an initiate, attempts to speak the elegy for her father, but it is such a troubled and troubling task—to elegize the incestuous father—that Mathilda the initiate effectively reconstellates the genre of the pastoral elegy, speaking her own elegy. Mathilda becomes both master and initiate, author of the text in which she mourns herself, an initiate already mourning for the death of her mastery, mourning for her always prematurely disrupted status as master. One may argue that Shelley appropriates the spectral figure of her mother as a “master” figure to her own apprentice: Shelley’s text revises the mother’s text, posing in textual terms the dialogue extolled by Socrates as spoken between men.

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But the violent nature of Shelley’s revision of her mother’s text suggests problems with the mother’s role, implying that the daughter’s apprenticeship as a writer may only be conducted through her relationship to other texts. The struggle for a topos from which to speak is strikingly presented in Mathilda’s allusions to Dante, for Dante’s Matelda meets the poet on campagna santa, holy ground. The ironized use of topos by which “holy ground” becomes “sacred horror” is surely Shelley’s point in invoking the pastoral oasis as the topos of Dante’s Matelda. The sacred horror of Mathilda’s experience of incest can only ironically be contrasted to this model of campagna santa, but I wish to push beyond the obvious irony of incest occurring allusively on holy ground to open a discourse on the problem of topos in the selfelegy. The way in which the topos of the feminine self-elegy is problematic goes to the heart of the canonical function of male elegy. Strictly speaking, what would be that topos from which the disembodied voice of a dead woman addresses audience? As I have indicated, the posthumous voice is not the corpse poem and not prosopopeia.37 It is, then, a mode of address that does not claim the grave as its topos and also does not, in the way of Christina Rossetti, claim the rooms the living live in as places for its speaker’s speech to haunt. Instead, the feminine selfelegy spoken by a disembodied posthumous voice makes the radical gesture of placing itself in a pastoral topos from which the speaker is always already alienated. This turning from nature as a consolatory topos in Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath comments on the disjunction between the feminine voice and nature. In these authors’ self-elegies, the feminine speaker is not comforted by nature or mourned by it. Nature’s disconsolation places the feminine voice in a series of ironic displacements that culminate in the uncanny claim of text itself as its own topos. If Dickinson’s “It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon” invokes the pastoral convention of the noon hour, for Dickinson’s speaker, “Nature” too contains a “fraud” (9–10). The fraud is indicated at first glance as death itself—the disappearance of the flower in a reversal of Hyacinth’s rebirth in nature. Nature’s containing death, the subject of classical pastoral and the meaning of the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” (death’s persistence even in idyllic nature), Dickinson calls an aspect of “fraud,” but she also castigates the speaker as the one to “blame” for not staying with the flower until its death, implicating her speaker in the fraud of death and making death revelatory of the fraudulence of natural existence. Dickinson’s speaker describes herself as holding many “Flowers” in their deaths, the rhetorical work of the elegist, but also accuses herself of not being there when it counted for this particular red flower—the flower of pastoral noon, male elegy—that blooms and drops without her (12). Dickinson then reverses the terms, ultimately abandoning the speaker’s self-blame and claiming that “Great Nature’s Face / Passed infinite by Me” (19–20). Nature mirrors the speaker’s abandoning act. These two abandonments trouble the pastoral topos in which the undescribed, untypologized force behind death is drawn as a blank. The text’s inscription of the

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term “infinite” becomes that very moment at which the collapse of topos is signified as the gaining of topos. Pastoral nature, which passes by Dickinson’s elegist, here ironically makes her an elegist, an elegist who recognizes nature as a scene of disappearance for the speaker, an elegist who elegizes the transience of nature rather than placing her elegy in nature. Nature, in the pastoral tradition inherited from Virgil, is supposed to console the elegist. But the feminine self-elegy presents a speaker not consoled by her understanding of nature’s complicity with death. Mathilda finds nature insufficient to console her after the radical destruction that love—the force that kills Daphnis in Theocritus’ elegy—has worked on her. Here, the terms of the natural are pressured against the unnatural mode of incest, for instead of being in love with someone who cannot reciprocate her love (the cause of Daphnis’ death) Mathilda is the object of a love that kills: her father’s incestuous passion and the memory of it. The idea of being destroyed not by one’s own feeling of love but rather by a love external to oneself, an incestuous passion forced onto the passive, entirely undeveloped character of the daughter in Shelley’s Mathilda, is presented as a gesture that takes the pastoral in a different direction, remaking the tragedy of unrequited love. Daphnis dying of love is displaced by the incestuous father, whom Mathilda the daughter cannot mourn even in rustic retreat, so uneased is her memory of her father’s incestuous desire. Shelley, in making her Mathilda a figure who is threatened by seduction, a figure in danger of precisely the not-spiritual kind of initiation, returns to the pastorela model with which Poggioli persuasively links the Matelda passage from Dante. The drama of Mathilda inheres in the threat, embedded in Dante’s “Christian pastoral,” of the young girl being silenced after sexual rather than poetic initiation.38 Rather than being initiated through dialogue that brings her into the poetic tradition of initiation, the young shepherdess, as Poggioli indicates, is initiated sexually. She does not become an apprentice poet through the dialogue of initiation but rather is a figure through whom poetic consummation, and consummation more broadly, is achieved by the male speaker, the master of the genre, the writer of the elegy. By signaling this turn on the pastoral, that is, by naming her character after Dante’s Matelda, which in turn invokes the pastorela, Shelley deploys the pastoral convention with a difference. For Mathilda’s speaker, of course, is Mathilda, not the father. Here, the male figure rather than the young girl is silenced. Mathilda, the daughter-as-speaker, presents as disastrous the pastorela’s terms of the shepherdess’s initiation. In the impossible performance of the father’s elegy, or rather by the collapse of his elegy as she tries to perform it, Mathilda performs an ironic self-elegy, elegizing herself after her death. The terms of the father’s “love” are so debased, so violating of the daughter/speaker, that the pastoral dialogue allusion indicates her isolation. By having the speaker, the daughter Mathilda, address a spectral Woodville whose readership is indicated as an active presence in Mathilda’s performance of text, Shelley invokes pastoral convention. For Woodville alone Mathilda claims to

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speak her confession. Mathilda is framed, then, as a dialogue in which answer to the first speaker, implicitly Woodville or audience, is withheld. Likewise, Mathilda’s attempt to make a tomb’s inscription for her drowned father—the text of Mathilda itself—ironically turns on the daughter, so that she writes her own death, inscribes her own tombstone. Woodville, as the daughter’s addressee, returns to the city, and the anticipated audience, always coming after Woodville, is implied as only a spectral scene of recuperation for Mathilda’s text. Woodville is called on to answer in Mathilda’s pastoral dialogue, but he does not answer. I want to argue that Shelley’s apparent failure to complete the terms of the pastoral elegy is rather a success, a bending of the convention to point to the daughter’s interdiction from the canon, the impossibility of her asserting her name, her place in the canon. As an apprentice, Mathilda is disallowed the rite of passage of male elegy and instead composes her own elegy, a self-elegy in which her death precedes her entry into mastery of her craft. In Mathilda, nature enforces the daughter-as-speaker’s death, causing her to speak her own elegy. Nature turns on the daughter-as-elegist much in the way that the father turned his gaze of incestuous desire on the daughter. Rather than allowing her to distance herself from her father’s death, nature enforces the daughter’s emergence into that death, enforces the terms of dissolution of the feminine voice imposed by incest. Mathilda’s status as posthumous performance, however, reverses nature’s disinheritance of the daughter, putting in place an unnatural posthumous persistence. As an apprentice work, Mathilda hardly suffices to put Mary Shelley in the canon, as Rajan makes clear. But as a commentary on the difficulties of the daughter’s attempt to perform the apprentice work and become a master, Mathilda is an unacknowledged success, placing the conventions of the pastoral elegy on an edge where the daughter’s attempt to recuperate from the incestuous father becomes her death, an impossible performance. The daughter’s ability to elegize herself in Mathilda heavily draws on Mary Shelley’s allusion to the conventions of classical pastoral elegy. Mathilda describes a speaker wounded to death by love, like Daphnis. The daughter is not a victim of her own desire, however, but of her place in the father’s priapic gaze. This placement of the daughter is evocatively rendered as impacting her voice. Mathilda writes of herself as the object mourned, a turning of the pastoral elegy that suggests above all else a broken dialogue. This disrupted relationship to audience, signified by an audience posed as always already belated and the self the object mourned, is the symbolic death mourned in Shelley’s Mathilda. The unenviable position of the speaker of this novella, who predicts her own oblivion, at once evokes Daphnis’ speech as he enters death and makes that gesture new by placing the speaker after her death, a position that resists the consignment to oblivion, inasmuch as her death contains her primary performance as a speaker.

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The Cave of Fancy: A Maternal Pastoral Robert Polhemus, noting that Mathilda is Shelley’s revision of her mother’s fragment, The Cave of Fancy, suggests that Lot’s incestuous paradigm is that cave from which Mary Shelley draws her revision of her mother’s Platonic cave.39 While my reading of Mathilda is at variance with Polhemus’s argument that the incested daughter gains authority through participating in incest, I too find the cave of Wollstonecraft a crucial motif buried in Mathilda. Wollstonecraft’s cave of fancy is the site of the pastoral initiation inherited from Theocritus and Virgil and, as Schenck contends, from Plato. But Wollstonecraft’s inability to complete The Cave of Fancy signifies the impasse of the daughter as initiate, an impasse that Mathilda signally explores. Inasmuch as Mathilda, far from having sexual intercourse with her father, flees from her incestuously besotted father, the specter of Lot’s cave and its swallowing of the daughter is rejected in Shelley’s revisionary text.40 The cave to which the fleeing daughter retreats in Mathilda is the one cave where she might truly gain authority: not Lot’s cave, in which sexual intercourse with her father will gain her nothing but a route to suicide, as Shelley makes clear, but rather the pastoral cave, in which male poets assert their verbal mastery, or authority. Into the cave where Wollstonecraft, the genius mother, failed to complete the fragment, the twenty-two-year-old Mary Shelley sets the initiate, Mathilda. By its link to Wollstonecraft’s pastoral motif of the dialogue of initiation as much as through its evocation of Dante’s Matelda’s pastoral oasis, Shelley’s Mathilda draws on the cave of the pastoral, the cave in which elegy is performed, to reform Wollstonecraft’s The Cave of Fancy, exposing the problem of the structure of initiation for the daughter’s rhetorical voice. The mother’s cave, then, is the center of Mathilda, and here the mother’s uncompleted revision of the gendered structure of authority is addressed, albeit rather pessimistically, by the daughter. In Mathilda, Shelley replaces a male pastoral centerpiece, the cave, with a female cave not just to show ways that daughters as initiates are in trouble but also, I want to suggest, to link the The Cave of Fancy with the Sibyl’s cave and with the Platonic khora, to invoke, then, a feminine topos that could allow real authority.41 Mathilda, returning to Wollstonecraft’s cave, returns to an imagined site of female authority that Shelley uses to displace the site of male authority. Shelley appropriates the khora as mythical site of the fertility or production of language in Mathilda, as in her introduction to The Last Man, to suggest a renovation of topos for feminine speech.42 Shelley’s Mathilda alters the terms of the pastoral, focusing on the speaker’s problematic relationship to audience. She addresses audience as if from the space of her death. The topos in which the daughter can speak, then, becomes aligned with the khora insofar as it acknowledges and formally reproduces that distance or undecidability in language which Derrida calls différance. Far from a Kristevan khora that places feminine speech in the body, the khora as topos in the rhetoric of a disembodied posthumous voice acknowledges a mournful

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displacement of speaker from speech, a distance preceding writing and partly recuperated in writing. The speaker’s remoteness in Mathilda is evoked as a troubled historical relationship to the pastoral as a formal convention marked by gender. Though it would seem scandalous (and perhaps this scandal is part of my point) to compare Milton’s seminal pastoral elegy, “Lycidas,” to Shelley’s almost unpublishable incest narrative (Mathilda, written in 1820, was not published until 1959), the comparison is fruitful because Shelley engages the very terms of the pastoral to which “Lycidas” appeals. If it has been claimed that “Lycidas” is the elegy of the elegy, the poem that ends the pastoral, this burial of the convention seems to have given rise to revenants—including Mathilda—in which the convention rises with a difference. And if the implication of Milton ending the elegy is that Milton refuses to remain an apprentice, the implication of the elegiac revenant after Milton may be read as a refusal of the structure of mastery and apprenticeship. If the daughter in Mathilda cannot be an apprentice in the structure of the pastoral elegy that the novella invokes—if Shelley’s Mathilda must stand, as Dante places Matelda, in the symbolic space of the seduced who never gains access to the mastery of speech (and Shelley ensures her speaker’s cultural placement among the silenced by having her speaker rhetorically positioned as only able to “speak” after death)—then the speaker’s address to her belated audience harnesses ironically the terms of the elegy through which it mourns. Here, the speaker tries to mourn the father, but the father is so grotesque a figure, with his priapic incestuous longing, that he bends the erotic force of the elegy and cannot be mourned. The Matelda/Mathilda figure, the daughter, resists a grotesque incestuous seduction by troubling the structure of apprenticeship. Placing her text rhetorically after her death, Shelley’s speaker in Mathilda at once mocks the terms of the elegy—the dialogic structure—and also mourns her displacement from the conventions, ironically strengthening the elegy by reinvigorating it with an ascetic renunciation of traditional pastoral consolation. If the prose form of Mathilda perhaps signifies its author’s awareness of the speaker’s insecurity to claim a place in the lineage of poets, in Shelley’s case this feminizing of self-doubt is easily linked to biography, to her life as the wife of a poet who was assured of his own gifts. In reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as participatory in the genre of the pastoral, however, I suggest that Brontë draws a dialogic frame in prose not as a recognition of her exclusion from poetry but rather as a way to reframe the proper language of the rustic. Brontë’s Heathcliff’s transmutation from almost inhuman “other” to rustic to gentleman and back to almost inhuman other pulls at the pastoral presentation of the shepherd reabsorbed into nature. If we draw from the inscribed “diary” scene in which Cathy and Heathcliff clothe themselves in the dairy woman’s cloak (17), we may interpret Heathcliff as the shepherd/rustic, as he who performs the duties of the rustic and the herder. The punitive status of Heathcliff’s role as rustic, however,

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places Cathy’s inscription of their bucolic pleasures sharply outside the consolatory. Initiated by Heathcliff’s punitive rusticity, Cathy is destroyed by her attempt to leave Heathcliff. She specifies that she cannot marry Heathcliff because it would degrade her, a declaration stringently punished in Wuthering Heights’s pastoral terms; Cathy dies, Daphnis-like, of unsatisfied desire. While Brontë’s novel’s focus on nature is often read in biographical rather than literary terms, I want to place her deployment of landscape as part of what Poggioli terms the pastoral of the wilderness, an allusive move.43 Brontë deploys the convention of the dialogue, framing her novel as the conversation of Lockwood and Ellen Dean, the former rusticating and the other a rustic. But the initiation of Cathy by Heathcliff is the implicit dialogue of the novel, a drama refracted through Cathy’s Daphnis-like death. As in Mathilda, in Wuthering Heights, the attempt to mourn a departed male figure (Heathcliff cut off from Cathy), which would then allow the feminine protagonist/speaker to move beyond her apprenticeship, is marked as an effort that results in the feminine protagonist/speaker dying herself. The works become selfelegy, emphasizing the impossibility of the daughter-as-speaker moving past apprenticeship, the impossibility of her gaining mastery in the male dialogue structure. In both novels, nature turns against the feminine protagonist/speaker who claims a virtuoso connection with nature, Mathilda claiming to be nature’s nursling and Cathy claiming to be able to breathe only if the wind on the moor is coursing through her room.44 Mathilda first appears to her father as sort of supernatural shepherdess, while Cathy takes her pivotal romp on the moor clothed in the “dairy woman’s cloak,” but both speakers are punished by this very connection with nature.45 Mathilda is killed, exposed, when she stays outdoors all night gathering imaginary flowers for her father’s imaginary tomb, and Cathy is killed when her bond with that wilder nature that Poggioli characterizes as Romantic pastoral is broken.46 The feminine speaker attempting to participate in the conventions of pastoral elegy, then, is figuratively rejected, Orpheus-like, dismembered by her attempt to participate in pastoral elegiac conventions. Through the pastoral terrain (altered to a Romantic wilderness), Shelley and Brontë figure the place of the feminine in the demarcation zone between what Lambert calls the mourned and the envied death. If Milton’s “Lycidas” inscribes the male poet’s mastery in elegy, and if the anonymity of the elegized death in the English tradition is eroded by elegy’s role of making and marking the name of the elegist, Shelley and Brontë evoke conventions of the pastoral, its dialogic frame, to query the master–apprentice structure in which male writers become canonical. Inscribing prose texts in which the elegist is posed as truly anonymous— because she is elegizing herself, dead even before her own authority—the feminine self-elegy, which I am reading as Shelley’s and Brontë’s master trope, at once returns to Theocritus’ gloomy implication of death as erasure and resists that erasure, posing the scene of self-erasure, the self-elegy, in the wider frame of the

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speaker’s insistence on her speech, which survives her. The youthful deaths of Mathilda and Cathy are finally anonymous inasmuch as both characters are subsumed under the aegis of their own disappearances. Mathilda and Wuthering Heights trigger such critical disagreement about their generic placement partly because the novels contend with and collapse the conventions of the pastoral elegy, evoking scenes in which the feminine speaker is initiated only to be outcast. In Mathilda and Wuthering Heights, death is not placed in nature, as in Theocritus’ Idyll, nor made of nature, as in Milton’s “Lycidas.” Rather, this feminine troping of death posits itself as caused by a hostile nature conventionalized as a masculine pastoral idiom that specifically denies to the feminine initiate passage beyond the apprentice performance. As Schenck persuasively argues, handling of audience is the central crisis embedded in pastoral elegy. 47 If Schenck locates Plato’s Phaedrus as a pastoral of initiation, in that dialogue, the shift from oral to written commemoration is theorized. Derrida’s undermining of the privilege of spoken language in his reading of Plato pivots on the problematizing of audience that Phaedrus implicates as reading’s risk. The feminine elegist denied audience for her speech while alive can claim audience as a belated privilege precisely by what Derrida calls the “trick” of writing.48 This trick aspect of the trope of the posthumous voice is clear: we are asked to believe that the speaker addressing us after her death inscribes her own elegy, a trick par excellence. Schenck, however, draws from Derrida’s reading of Phaedrus to conclude that in addition to seeing writing as a mnemonic trick, Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus provides the “model for an initiatory scenario: a younger aspirant by an older seduced, a place, a time in literary terms prescribed, initiation by means of argument ritually established.”49 The pastoral initiation scene so critical to Schenck’s reading is evoked by Shelley’s Mathilda. The daughter’s initiation is obviously problematic, however, and the abortive initiation/seduction invokes incest, violence. The father’s incestuous passion abruptly ruptures the trope of initiation. The dialogue of Mathilda and her father is abrupted and the entire pastoral model of initiation and seduction questioned in the brief scope of Shelley’s sui generis performance, Mathilda. In the self-elegy, a site of original inscription, as opposed to speech transcribed, remarks pastoral elegy as that which survives through inscription. In this feminine appropriation of the pastoral elegy, the speaker mourning herself relies on the trope of inscription, an implicit comment on the shift of the pastoral mode from the direct address. If Derrida lifts writing from its Platonic denigration through the concept of the “trace,” the feminine self-elegy of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath is highly aware of the loss of voice implied by writing and uses this loss to indicate another, deeper loss—that of audience—that troubles the woman writer outcast from the canon.50 The feminine khora as that on which what is written is written here is invoked as an ungrounding topos, a commonplace that marks feminine “speech” as always already text. Replacing male elegy’s pastoral cave with the khora, Kristeva’s theorization of khora as a sort of maternal site of verbal

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plenitude is effaced. Instead, writing as trace that precedes speech is selfconsciously framed in the self-elegy to structure an uncanny topos in which text is its own topos, a gesture that implicates the feminine speaker’s earlier lack of topos, her groundlessness as a speaker. The position of the self-elegy as that which can only be performed when read always already inscribes a reader into the text. By citing Phaedrus as exemplary of the pastoral, Schenck implies that pastoral elegy historically mourns the shift from spoken to written text. The feminine selfelegy dramatizes this shift from spoken to written text as a place to insert a difference, the woman poet mourning the silencing of her voice by commanding the terms of inscription (rather than speech). The feminine self-elegist’s use of inscription as transgressive to the mode of classical pastoral, with its inheritance of the spoken dialogue, resists the natural premise of “voice.” The feminine self-elegy, by using a disembodied posthumous voice, dramatizes its inscribed quality, its existence as text, to distinguish itself from inherited codes of male elegy, which gesture back to a tradition of speech. The feminine self-elegy forefronts inscription as its only way to address audience, since the form is predicated on the proleptic death of the speaker who mourns herself, performing her apprentice work only after her death. This use of inscription also recuperates the mourning of inscription’s displacement of speech that occurs in Phaedrus and reverses the terms, implicitly celebrating the gift of inscription as that which allows belated address. Here, the initiate into death is not the daughter-as-speaker who addresses us from the already mastered space of death. Rather, the audience is positioned as being initiated into the scene of that unconsoling death that the speaker indicates. The reader is initiated in this deathliness of inscription. The speaker’s belated relationship to audience places audience in the dialogic frame of the pastoral. For if, as Paul de Man specifies, the latent threat of prosopopeia is that the dead would speak and silence the living, the threat of the disembodied posthumous voice is that the audience is initiated into the unconsoling terms of mourning a death that is always known too late.51 In the feminine self-elegy, the audience is placed in the role of initiate, pulled into a chilling, implicit dialogue with the dead speaker.52 In Wuthering Heights and Mathilda, audience is staged in a recurrent structure of dialogue that calls on the reading audience to take the place of a specified fictive audience, while, as I have suggested, the formal implication of Plath’s and Dickinson’s self-elegies is always already that of a reader inscribed as the necessary element for the text’s performance. Wuthering Heights’s Nelly Dean is an audience who fails Cathy, who is inimical to her, insofar as Nelly does not sympathize with Cathy and also procures from Cathy her disastrous confession that marrying Heathcliff would degrade her. Similarly, Woodville abandons Mathilda to her death. Here, the rhetorical appropriation of and challenge to male elegy’s conventions appear, for, as Empson argues in Some Versions of the Pastoral, the English pastoral is characterized by power masquerading as unenvied.53 Brontë violently alters this class-bound, male

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pastoral by punishing Cathy’s distaste for Heathcliff’s rusticity and by making Nelly Dean, the rustic, the arbiter of punishment in the novel. The text’s dialogue, significantly, is engaged as an echoed conversation between Nelly Dean and Cathy. If Heathcliff, Cathy’s “impatient” companion, induces her to “appropriate the dairy woman’s cloak” (17), Nelly is Cathy’s companion in the scene of dialogue, the uncloaked “real” rustic. In Wuthering Heights, then, as in Mathilda, the father/master is evicted from the pastoral elegiac scene, but in Wuthering Heights a woman replaces him, becoming the partner of the daughter-speaker in pastoral dialogue. Like the dairy woman’s cloak in which Cathy robes herself, the pastoral elegy is evoked by Brontë to show the limitations of the form for the feminine speaker. A double initiation scene is drawn as palimpsest across the dialogue of Cathy and Nelly: that scene in which Nelly Dean plays the rustic who draws the novice Lockwood into the spell of the pastoral retreat. Lockwood, unlike Cathy, survives his initiation and closes the novel by invoking Cathy’s tomb. Turning away from her, returning to his own life, Lockwood makes the proper gestures of elegiac closure: I sought and soon discovered the three headstones on the slope next the moor—the middle one grey and half buried in heath—Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf, and moss creeping up its foot—Heathcliff’s still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.54

Lockwood completes the conventions of the pastoral by closing the novel with a brief epitaph, drawing the scene of the grave as a gesture toward the elegiac convention of describing the monument the elegist will offer to the mourned, and then turning away from the dead. Cathy’s erasure and enclosure in the subsuming landscape marks the mourned, unenviable death of the feminine participant in the pastoral elegy of Wuthering Heights. If Lockwood completes the gesture of elegy, his lack of authority in the novel also signifies Brontë’s reworking of the pastoral, inasmuch as it mocks the authority of the feigned rustic. Lockwood’s gesture of standing at the tomb already ravels its invocation of the pastoral moment when the elegist describes the monument he will build for the dead. Here, Cathy’s name is eroded from her tombstone. Even as Lockwood stands before the tomb and evokes the tomb, “grey and half buried in heath,” the feminine name is already drawn as anonymous, effaced, wiped out (256). Recalling Lambert’s distinction between the envied and mourned death, one notes that Cathy’s unenviable death evokes Orphic dismemberment. Schenck links elegy to Orpheus, claiming that “nothing less than Orphic success in literary terms—immortality or fame—inspires that range of poets from Theocritus to

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Milton to make the literary gesture that is the writing of an elegy.” Similarly, if Stanley Fish argues that “Lycidas” is finally a poem that immortalizes John Milton (rather than Edward King), the pastoral elegy becomes in English tradition a place to make oneself—the poet writing the elegy—envied. Can Lambert’s definition of the elegized death as mourned, not envied, be retained as a tool useful in reading the feminine self elegy?55 Lambert concludes her study of the elegy by reinstating the power of mourning the other as the source for the elegist’s success.56 She argues that Milton’s “Lycidas” succeeds not because it ironically encounters Milton’s own fear of death but rather because it straightforwardly encounters Milton’s recognition of the loss of the other as the irreparable loss. Lambert places the power of the pastoral elegy as an engine of canon formation in the male poet’s public grief for the loss of the male other, “dead ‘ere his prime.” This focus on the prime of manhood, just as Lambert argues, makes male elegiac discourse a way of regretting virility stopped. The feminine self-elegy asserts itself as that which cannot mourn the other precisely because the feminine other is disallowed the very markers of male power whose loss are mourned by the English elegy, Sacks’s male elegy. The mourned not envied death is the stuff of the feminine self-elegy, a return to Theocritus. In Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death” (Fr479), the speaker meets pastoral conventions on the ground of her power’s absence. The poem begins with an enforced, unchosen otium, a “leisure” that merges into labor, just as a nineteenth-century woman of means would have experienced the duress of enforced purposelessness.57 Leisurely, Dickinson’s speaker is taken on a passive journey, from which she surveys the pastoral fields. The speaker’s address of audience concurs with Theocritus’ Daphnis’ address of audience before he begins his journey into death—a poem, then, of transitus. Unlike Daphnis, however, who addresses audience before he dies, Dickinson’s speaker is poised as addressing audience after her death. Her elegist in Fr479 does not chose otium but rather has accepted her leisure in the same way that she accepts the ride with death. The speaker has not chosen her pastoral retreat. The speaker poses herself as troubled before elegiac conventions: her enforced otium becomes her labor. This belated address of audience is the crucial alteration of feminine elegy that I am terming “self-elegy,” because, as is clear in Dickinson’s poem, the poet-asspeaker refers to no other death but her own. Here, death may be the elder who initiates the speaker into his rites, but death vanishes as the speaker closes the poem by looking past death, looking perhaps at a Christian afterlife, perhaps at an existential vacuum, an empty “Eternity” (24). The “Fields of Gazing Grain” see the speaker, an active nature that does not in the least mourn the speaker’s death (11). Quite unlike Theocritus’ model, and departing from pastoral conventions, nature continues its course in Dickinson’s poem entirely unaffected by the poet’s death. In a similar shift of pastoral elegiac conventions, the cause of the mourned one’s death is only passively related to eros. Logically, Dickinson’s speaker dies because

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she had formerly refused to die: because she resisted an erotic economy driven by the vernacular of death, she is consumed by death. The initiate in Fr479 is violently taken into a scene that violates pastoral conventions by translating the speaker into her death before she begins to address audience. Dickinson’s speaker turns the lack of an other to mourn for her back onto her audience: the audience is positioned as if mourning the speaker, and the speaker becomes the one mourned. However, in that apparent stroke of humility in which audience is given the role of performance—the reader is given the role of the “elegist” or mourner for the dead woman on whom the poem focuses—the proposition of elegy is itself reversed. For just as Paul de Man describes prosopopeia as always carrying with it the threat of the silencing of the living, in Dickinson’s interrupted pastoral, while in its rigorous facelessness not deploying prosopopeia, she directly supplants the audience’s chance to mourn by proleptically performing the ritual of mourning at once for and by the speaker. The speaker whom we are put in a position to mourn has always already mourned herself, silencing our belated speech. The violence embedded in the trope of self-elegy, then, affects both speaker and audience. Audience, here, is forcefully engaged, drawn into a dialogue that the speaker has commanded as a terrain she will not cede. The canon as male lineage is disrupted in the feminine self-elegy by the speaker’s claim to speak of and for herself, a violent assertion of self implicitly necessary to counter the male canon’s dismissal of the feminine speaker.

Audience’s Eye The speaker in the self-elegy does not envision herself specifically separated by death from others. Rather, she envisions herself always already separated from others, gaining audience only by a masterful revelation of this isolation. The isolation is not social isolation, as Dickinson indicates with her phrase “interdicted Land” (Fr310, 6), but rather topological, the result of a lack of proper topos. The feminine speaker cannot assert her claim as elegist except by evading those domestic and quotidian topoi that Stuart Curran has influentially argued are central to Romantic women’s writing.58 The centering of the Romantic female mourning poem in domestic topoi evicts the woman writer who wants to enter the elegiac tradition, insofar as the question of the name is effaced in domestic topoi. In Curran’s terms, the self, the speaking “I,” is not altered in the feminine discourse of self-elegy; the feminine speaker is not presented as essentially different from a male speaker. Rather, the audience is altered, and the “eye” that reads the feminine speaker is implicitly drawn as belated in its reading of the feminine self-elegy. In this way, the feminine voice itself is revealed as an audience construct, an effect of the “eye” that reads, or as Slavoj Zizek would say, “hear[s] you,” rather than an altered speaking self, an “I.” The feminine self-elegy alters audience, and that

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alters all. The cultural construction of what constitutes a proper topos for a gendered speaker is questioned by the feminine self-elegy, particularly as the form turns on and highlights the elided name of the speaker. If Milton’s “Lycidas” is a poem finally anonymous, the drama of the poem is the struggle against anonymity. By contrast, Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” begins and ends with a speaker’s anonymity. It is a poem truly anonymous, in which there is never a struggle for the speaker’s name but rather always already an engagement of mourning for the speaker’s proleptically effaced name. Here, anonymity is given. The speaker’s enforced otium, her leisure that is labor, parallels her namelessness. The subject mourned in Dickinson’s poem is not the speaker’s bodilessness, not her body’s death. Rather, her namelessness, which preceded her death, is mourned. Namelessness and lack of topos are not inherent in the “I” of the speaker but linked to the “eye” of the audience, the inscribed reader as gaze. The feminine self-elegy defines its topos as that of departing from the pastoral, passing the fields and the noon sun. The self-elegy remarks on this unmarked quality of woman’s public status, her lack of a name to link into the lineage of canonical poets. It formally implicates the reader’s “eye” as that which might interdict feminine voice by depriving topological ground, as it were, refusing to “hear with [its] eyes” some places of feminine discourse. Audience is also inscribed in the feminine self-elegy as that which completes the performance of recuperation of the feminine speaker as elegist: the audience as belated gift is necessary to complete the text. If, for example, Wuthering Heights can be read as a self-elegy for Cathy, the heightened emphasis on the role of audience—the power of audience that is staged repeatedly in the novel, particularly in the person of Nelly Dean, Cathy’s interlocutor who alters her fate—must be understood as central to the novel’s poetics. The reader is placed as the one whose reading completes the performance of self-elegy. This rhetoric evoking a spectral audience at the scene of elegy is central to my theorization of feminine self-elegy as opposed to the female mourning poem. Just as Lockwood’s reading of Cathy’s diary allows the story to begin, the role of a belated audience is central to self-elegy’s project, its evocation of the dialogue linking it to eclogue, but eclogue in which the spectrality of inscription pushes audience into an always belated arrival. If, for example, Wuthering Heights unfolds through a series of pivotal audience–speaker scenes, performances in which Cathy laments herself or someone else laments Cathy, the staging of the dialogue scene not only structures the novel but also suggests that Cathy’s ghost, the waif who appears at the entrance to the labyrinth, sets in motion the audience of Lockwood before Nelly Dean, through which the spectral voice of Cathy will be posed in its mode of self-mourning. For Lockwood, Nelly Dean interprets Cathy’s performance of self-mourning, her despair and entrapment. In the scene in which Cathy asks Nelly if she ought to marry Linton, Cathy voices the double selfhood of audience in self-elegy as if it were a theory of ontology: “There is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the

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use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?”59 Instead of assuming the Christian afterlife, Cathy situates her posthumous persistence in the dialogue, the dialogic frame of her relationship with Heathcliff; only the dialogue with the other has reality, implies Cathy. This dialogue-as-ontological-structure evokes the convention of pastoral elegy. For if one follows Cathy’s metaphor of her “loves”— her love for Linton like foliage in summer, that for Heathcliff like “eternal rocks beneath”—she places her voice in the pastoral, places herself as that pastoral elegist who, Orpheus-like, conjures the trees and rocks into a relationship with her.60 Her performance of her self-elegy conjures a pastoral landscape, drawing the Orphic motifs of the rocks and the trees as if into audience, which in turn predicts the motif of Orpheus’s dismemberment, Cathy’s body and voice dismembered by a disastrous pregnancy and childbirth. In suggesting that Wuthering Heights may be interpreted as Cathy’s self-elegy, I point to the troubled conditions of her original mastery. If Wuthering Heights is presented as Cathy’s extended self-elegy by those opening scenes in which Lockwood reads Cathy’s words, this scene establishes Cathy as a master, depicting Lockwood as audience. Lockwood as audience models an always belated arrival at the scene of Cathy’s death, I suggest, to mourn the death of her status as verbal master elided by her textually real death. By our engagement of the famously insolvable mysteries of the novel, we become initiates to the place, the fictional moor, which stands, as Poggioli argues, as the pastoral landscape, a wild place resisting modernity’s encroachment.61 Like Lockwood, we play audience to the belated mastery of the girl-ghost who arrives to claim her mastery twenty-five years after her burial. Evocative of Brontë’s placement of the dialogue with the other as textual and ontological core, the dialogic structure underlying Plath’s troped posthumous poems has encouraged readings of her last work as if it were addressed to Ted Hughes.62 While this address may well be part of the power of her work, I suggest that the speaker in Plath’s troped posthumous poems may more purely be read as the initiate, evocative of the pastoral convention of the poet as apprentice. We may remove an hypothetical “Ted Hughes” and read strictly for the implicit dialogue structure in Plath’s last poems. Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” in particular participates in some of the conventions of the pastoral elegy, the poem opening with the initiation of a speaker new to a “place” that resists her, a “place of force.” Enforcing the place of force, the rabbit catcher seeks the speaker, and seeks her in her death, which will shape the drama of the poem. But the speaker is not innocent of the shape of her death. Like Theocritus’ Daphnis, Plath’s speaker approaches her death consciously, aware of what is coming. Unlike Daphnis, the speaker in “The Rabbit Catcher” is already positioned from the place of death when she narrates the terms of her death. The pastoral, then, is evoked not only by Plath’s poem’s depiction of terrain but also by the dialogic structure of the initiate and the master that formally codes the poem. If the rabbit catcher seems the master of the poem, at the poem’s end, the

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ascendancy of the speaker is articulated, the speaker revealed to be the elegist of her own otherwise unmourned death. If one reads the rabbit catcher as a rustic who earns his living from the land—who earns his living from killing what lives on the land—and the speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” as an elegist, the relationship between Plath’s elegist and the rabbit catcher is not only that of hunter and prey but also that of fellow hunters. Like the rabbit catcher who is a rustic who kills, Plath’s elegist is a speaker who tropes her own death, earning her poetic energy from that death. The poem’s rabbit catcher is a pastoral figure, but a violent one. The speaker, addressing him, at once points to the power of his lifestyle, at variance with the other “places,” civic spaces that are not places of “force,” and evokes a gendered tension in this rustic retreat. Hughes, in a belated poetic response to Plath’s poem, explicitly describes his sense of communion with and understanding of that rabbit catcher, a rural man trying to feed his family off the land. Hughes’s poetic response to Plath’s poem interprets the scene of Plath’s poem securely in a pastoral landscape. Hughes implies that Plath fails to understand the code of this landscape, that her poem fails to catch the nobility of the rabbit catcher, focusing instead on his violence. He effectively attempts to recuperate the male pastoral with his response to Plath’s earlier poem.63 I suggest that Plath does understand the code of the pastoral that she deploys and alters in her poem but that she expresses the feminine speaker’s outcast status from that tradition. The speaker of Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” speaks as a dead elegist performing her own elegy as a way of revealing the violence implicit in those very natural cycles that the classical pastoral reads as idyllic. Plath’s poem does not destroy the convention but rather opens it to another register of mourning. “Even in Arcadia I am” here becomes clearly articulated as the speech of death. In the feminine self-elegy, the speaker mourns her own death as part of the violence of that very idyllic nature to which the male elegist looks for consolation. If Andrew Marvell implies that woman is the thorn in the side of the bucolic, the feminine self-elegy presents itself as capable of voicing death, locating not woman but death as that fatal “I” who also is in Arcadia. This violent edge of the elegist demarcates feminine self-elegy from what Patrick Vincent reads as the female elegy. 64 For the very salvages of “female” writing—emotive and tender phrases—are reversed in the self-elegy performed by Dickinson and Plath. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” as in “The Rabbit Catcher,” the elegist does not describe any emotion nor enunciate emotive ejaculations, despite the intensity of the experiences that anchor the poems—riding in the carriage with death, being hunted to death. Indeed, even the lushness of Theocritus’ pastoral, a lushness repeated with a difference in Milton’s “Lycidas” and Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” is absent from Dickinson’s and Plath’s self-elegies. Instead, nature is marked as a formality from which to address audience. The speaker’s displacement from nature or within nature, then, evokes what William Empson describes as man’s misplacement in nature, but it does so

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ironically by showing just how seamlessly encased in the natural is the feminine figure mourned.65 In contrast to the classical pastoral elegy, the feminine self-elegy depicts nature’s smooth acceptance of the feminine figure’s disappearance, the feminine speaker mourning a loss of elegiac topos that precedes text. Dickinson’s mortuarial bride rides seamlessly out of her life, which death caught. The fields watch her death and are undisturbed, the children note her passing and continue playing. In the self-elegy as Dickinson and Plath write it, there is no “Daphnis who guarded the sheep in these fields”—that is, the speaker was never that Daphnis, never had a role in the world or a claim on topos. The simultaneous depiction and rejection of the feminine figure’s being subsumed into nature is precisely the point made by Dickinson’s and Plath’s stringent poetics of death.66 In both Plath’s and Dickinson’s handling of the disembodied posthumous voice, the speaker’s continuation past her death is the mark of the poem’s evocation and alteration of the terms of the pastoral. The decidedly unnatural posthumous persistence of the elegist in the troped posthumous poem hollows out the pastoral convention to which the poet gestures.

Covert Versions of Pastoral This gesture toward the pastoral elegy, significantly, marks the poet as engaged with the question of canonicity as verbal mastery. Her self-elegy establishes her death as the death of a master poet, but it places this self-recognition in the unnatural space of posthumous persistence. In the self-elegy, the elegist’s conventional turn from the dead cannot be performed, inasmuch as the elegist is elegizing herself. Instead, the turn becomes an ambiguous, ambivalent continuation of passage, a “turn” of a head no longer human—as Dickinson writes, “the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity” (Fr479, 23–4), or, as Plath writes of a rabbit’s head caught in a trap’s surcingle, a trap which fantastically becomes the mind of a man, a “mind like a ring / Sliding shut on some quick thing / The constriction killing me also” (“The Rabbit Catcher,” 28–30). Dickinson and Plath, here, separate their speakers from nature in a way that marks a rupture with the pastoral. In the closing couplets of “Because I could not stop for Death” and “The Rabbit Catcher,” the speaker does not become a horse or a rabbit, but rather differentiates herself from the game of the pastoral, performing and recognizing an alterior gaze. In her inability to turn from the dead because she herself is the mourned object, the feminine speaker in these self-elegies invokes animal nature as that unknowable terrain that cannot console, that cannot truly support a turn from death. The horse trapped in its bridle of death, the rabbit in its strangling trap engage the uncanny otherness of nature, an antipastoral, or a landscape that does not comfort and make a home for the human speaker. The speakers of these feminine self-elegies close their poems without the human consolation of a name

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and also without nature’s sympathetic consolation. The turn of the self-elegy is a turn—as Dickinson’s Fr479 intimates—toward an undescribed space of unknowability, a space that, as Plath indicates, is devoid of self, of that superfluous “me also.”67 I am not arguing that Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath follow all the conventions of the pastoral elegy (clearly, this is not the case), but it is important to recognize that their evocation of some of the pastoral elegy’s key gestures and their altering of these gestures implies an awareness of the role that the elegy plays in the English canon. Schenck identifies elegy as the male poet’s self-establishing gesture, moving himself from apprenticeship to mastery. 68 Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath deploy and alter the conventions, displacing death in nature, approaching death through initiation ritual, through interpose of dialogue. Plath’s Ariel is less confessional poetry than a poetry of initiation, a one-sided dialogue whose participation in the mourning ritual is estranged from the answering voice. The answering voice, however, is implicitly written into Plath’s Ariel—just as it is written into Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems—as the reading audience itself, that which comes too late but also, in coming, resolves the speaker’s proleptic erasure from canonical performance. The feminine self-elegy approaches what Poggioli defines as the Romantic “elegy of the self,” but it alters elegy’s erotic current to emphasize desire for an absent, belated, or withheld audience rather than for a beloved; or, here, the audience is the beloved, long withheld. In self-elegy, eros is emptied, and the ascetic turn of the form engages writing as its own end, the self-elegist desiring audience in the same way that the male elegist desires the dead. The centrality of Cathy’s writing to Wuthering Heights, for example, the novel’s template being Cathy’s childhood inscription, is coverted by the novel’s emphasis on Cathy and Heathcliff’s passion, an emphasis on Cathy’s sexual and romantic desirability. If the traditional pastoral elegy, what Sacks calls the male elegy, subsumes the erotic into the verbal, Wuthering Heights subverts this trope and subsumes the verbal under cover of the erotic. Brontë uses the cultural acceptability and palatability of the erotic feminine figure—of the eroticization of what is deemed feminine suffering—to write a heroine whose erotic pull is forefronted but who reaches for Lockwood as audience through inscription, through linguistic mastery—the childhood bed and diaries performing a language that signifies outside the erotic. Brontë’s novel stages the erotic feminine story of Cathy as a heroine so attractive that both Heathcliff and Linton sacrifice themselves for her, a woman whose youthful death in childbed seals her in the highly sexualized and gendered roles of fertile, desired sexual object and child bride, in order to cover the linguistic and rhetorical virtuosity of the text itself. Cathy’s erotic, compelling femininity is staged to allow Brontë’s compelling mastery of the pastoral elegy, the language of mourning deeply worked into landscape, and I suggest similar readings of Plath, Dickinson, and Shelley. If in writing Wuthering Heights Brontë was not writing her own elegy but rather staging Cathy’s ghostly presentation of her story as a

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formal inscription of Cathy’s self-elegy (just as I have argued that Shelley’s Mathilda writes her own elegy rather than Mary Shelley elegizing herself through the character of Mathilda), then it is no less true that Dickinson’s and Plath’s lyric poems must also be read as staged presentations of the genre of self-elegy. I want to emphasize, then, the performed aspect of the self-elegy, in which the feminine speaker engages audience by noting her lack of audience and grants herself literary immortality ironically by noting that no one else will do so. Distancing the work of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath from the sentimental genre and the confessional, I emphasize the implicit inscribed audience as the crux of self-elegy, the writer using the address of the dead for rhetorical purposes, a technique opposite confessional, biographically explicable texts. While Plath’s suicide, following so soon after her writing Ariel, seems to mark that work with sincerity, it is important to note the obvious: that Plath wrote “Edge” before she committed suicide and before her husband’s gesture of “saving” Ariel in manuscript made Plath famous as a suicide. “Edge” ironically addresses audience as always belated for the ascetic, spare feminine text, noting that the approved feminine gesture of sentimentality, or, as Curran describes it, the focus on the quotidian, is linked to the gesture of offering the breast, indicated synecdochically by Plath’s rendering of the dead woman’s withdrawn “pitcher of milk” (11). “Feminine” etymologically indicates the breast, the offering of milk from the breast. I want to close by suggesting that it is this aspect of the feminine, linguistically appropriated by Hélène Cixous as “white” writing, that Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath turn from. The “pitcher of milk” in the self-elegy is closed, and the elegist turns her language and her gaze toward an audience she casts as definitively belated, too late to receive the maternal milk of a living speaker. The self-elegist instead deploys a rhetoric in which the genre of male elegy is feminized not through an altering of the “I,” or the speaking self, but rather through an alerting of audience, the reading “eye,” to the long-term enforcement of anonymity in the code of quotidian topoi for women writers. Their memorialized deaths will never be envied, will be set outside the English appropriation of heroism’s residue. The audience, not the speaker, arrives belatedly in this configuration, missing out on the speaker’s “news,” which is not simply the news of nature but also the feminine speaker’s ability to tell it. In this sense, the feminine self-elegy as Shelley, Dickinson, Brontë, and Plath create the genre fits with Judith Butler’s paradigm of gender as a category of interpretation rather than of essential being. The feminine self-elegist places her audience as that which will come only after her death, in exchange for which postponement she gets a canonical place rather than a popular readership that vanishes at her death, that fate Summit so persuasively links to women’s writing. The posthumous voice answers this tradition of the elision or suppression of the feminine from or within canonical texts by writing as if the feminine speaker were always already disembodied. The self-elegist ironizes the requirements of canonicity, envisioning her text as that

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which stuns and silences audience, and in this gesture ends the trope of apprenticeship, that engine of male elegy that drives the canon. The self-elegist places the perception of the femininity of her writing onto the audience and, separating her speaker from audience through the rhetorical deployment of death, insists on the scandalous and artificial nature of woman’s outcast status vis-à-vis the English canon. The audience, here, just as Paul de Man fears, is silenced by the speaker, a reciprocal violence answering the tradition of silencing woman’s voice in canonical discourse.

The Femininity of the Self-Elegy How does the disembodied posthumous voice in Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë stake the elegist’s claim on audience for a speaker deprived of canonical audience? Or, why is this rhetorical turn “feminine”? In turning to the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus as a locus classicus contextualizing speaking and writing, I focus on the frame—the discussion of love—that opens and closes this dialogue that Schenck argues is exemplary pastoral. The dialogue identifies love and lovers as its topic but begins with a speech written by Lysias and read aloud by Phaedrus.69 The dialogue’s parallel of love and writing implicitly connects bad love and writing, writing as a sort of bad lover. The dialogue’s conclusion presents the philosopher, the one who loves wisdom, as an intellectually virile man who participates in spoken dialogue with another man, enacting good love.70 In contrast to the virile spoken knowledge of the philosopher, Socrates describes the writer as at best playing with scraps of memory to comfort his old age.71 This virile speech, master and apprentice conducting a dialogue that makes of the apprentice the master’s soul-child, a “legitimate offspring” with memory “inscribed” on his soul, then, is heavily marked by gendered roles.72 In Phaedrus, the virile dialogician is contrasted to the writer implicated in sterility. The philosopher fathers the immortal soul of his apprentice. And as the bad lover is described as making the beloved “feminine”—that is, weak in battle, weak in intellect, disrobed of property and legal offspring—writing is implicated as a feminizing act, an act that weakens memory.73 The Platonic concept of knowledge as memory—of knowledge as one’s memory from the soul’s life before the embodied, earthly life—means that an act that weakens memory is an act of absolute sterility. Strikingly, by parallel structure, the early part of Phaedrus affects our reading of the closing of that dialogue, implying that writing (and what is written) are like the bad lover who weakens his beloved, causing in the lover memory loss, sterility, femininity, while speech is the act of the good lover, who strengthens his beloved. The addressee of the spoken dialogue becomes utterly entwined with the figure of the beloved of the good introduced earlier in the discourse in Socrates’ spoken rebuttal to Lysias’ writing. In Socrates’ speech espousing the benefits of love, spoken dialogue is extolled as virile.74

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If writing in Phaedrus is the feminine counterpart to speech—writing which, unlike speech, does not produce soul children but is its own end—it is worth noting the way that writing metaphorically enters the heart of speech in Phaedrus. For the dialogue describes speech as “inscribing” wisdom in the soul and fathering “legitimate” children, both terms invoking, paradoxically enough, writing.75 Similarly, the hidden or embedded scene of writing is a commonplace of nineteenth-century women writers.76 The femininity of the act of writing is doubled when the woman writer represses even the public statement of her having written, doubly encoding that secrecy of language use that Socrates implies is the feminine fault of writing. While I certainly do not argue that Socrates connects writing with women, the connection in Phaedrus of femininity with the act of writing is clearly made by the structural and allusive moves of the dialogue. But the metaphorics of writing are precisely the problem if we consider metaphor as that which crosses from one thing to another. For the ideal and controlled audience for Socrates’ philosopher is an apprentice, a true lover of the lover of knowledge, while writing’s audience is uncontrollable. It is this slippage of audience, this capacity for writing to cross over, to find any audience, that marks writing as an illegitimate (or dangerously subversive) frame for speech. Audience is always already inscribed as the risk of inscription. The feminine self-elegy uses this metaphoric aspect of writing, its ability to claim no audience and all audiences. For the disembodied trope of the posthumous voice, audience is addressed as one whom the speaker missed because her feminine position prevented her from making direct address in speech. It is this double recognition and use of writing as an implement to address and redress audiencelessness that demarcates the feminine self-elegy from female elegy. Exclusion from the Socratic ideal dialogue of speech describes the position of the feminine as that which cannot be lodged in memory, and the rhetorical gesture of the posthumous voice turns on the very connections of language, name, and memory on which Socrates focuses in Phaedrus. Here, the Platonic notion of knowledge as memory is critical to understanding Phaedrus’s depiction of writing as secondary. 77 Socrates criticizes writing as a trick, an illusory aid to memory in contrast to real knowledge, memory the speaker must have to heart. The implication that writing is memory’s eraser, coupled with Phaedrus’s parallel earlier suggestion that the bad lover makes the beloved effeminate, lodges femininity in the place of erased memory, which for Socrates is the place of writing. The feminine self-elegy, I want to suggest, intensifies and draws on this definition of writing as a trick in order to query the cultural apparatus of memory and mourning as it is impacted by notions of gender. The audience of the troped posthumous voice is necessarily tricked: if we believe that the speaker is dead when she speaks, we have been fooled, since the dead do not speak, but if we do not believe the speaker is dead when she speaks, we have not understood the text,

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which asserts that its speaker is dead when she speaks. The trope, then, mandates a trick possible only in writing, which Socrates defines as itself “ghostly.” Writing the pose of a disembodied posthumous voice codes the feminine selfelegy as a message about cultural memory.78 For if the woman writer was never heard to speak while alive, how can writing her self-elegy serve as an aid to anyone’s memory? Her speaker is always already presented as forgotten, a selfelegist because she lacks the cultural centrality to be elegized, to be remembered by another speaker. The terms Socrates puts forward regarding memory and forgetting, speaking and writing, are invoked and subverted in the feminine selfelegy, revealing woman’s cultural place as that which is always already forgotten. The woman was forgotten through speech before she could speak, but in the rhetoric of the self-elegy the speaker forces remembrance of herself through writing. She rhetorically chooses the place Socrates assigns to forgetting— writing—and uses the persistence of writing as trace to resist her elision before canonical discourse, as cultural memory. The very metaphor of the forced seed that Socrates uses to critique writing is used here as its strength.79 What is written from the rhetorical perspective of the dead woman interacts with Phaedrus as exposition of the terms of public discourse. The woman writer presenting the rhetoric of the always already dead feminine speaker claims the scene of writing to be the scene of death—claims the ghostliness of writing, the less-than-satisfactory fact of not having an apprentice while one is alive. Here, writing is not so much a guilty pleasure as a self-consciously deployed scene that overturns the terms of fertility and virility that shape Phaedrus and its discourse around writing. Writing, in the trope of the posthumous voice, is harnessed as that which stops fertility. The posthumous speaker does not engender; the trope dislocates the code of fertility embedded in Phaedrus and, according to Schenck, embedded through Phaedrus in the pastoral tradition. Obviously, in Plath’s “Edge,” physical reproduction as fertility is critiqued by the allusion to the mother who kills her children, but I want to suggest that the self-elegist’s disembodied posthumous voice critiques the aesthetic of virility and fertility embedded as metaphors in Socrates’ notion of speech and speaker, the virile philosopher making soul children through his spoken words. The feminine self-elegy invokes text as the carrier of the ghostliness of writing and as that paradoxically embodied space into which speech vanishes. Speech as fertility is critiqued by this rhetoric of the self-elegy, which posits the speaker’s death as a prerequisite for her performance in text, a tactic that lodges embodiment solely in the body of text. The tactic of self-elegy paradoxically intensifies the relationship with audience, making of the reading audience an active apprentice, a fellow ghostly dialogician. The self-elegy engages audience as its necessary carrier, its progeny, using the very ghostliness of writing to draw audience into the role of completing the selfelegy by reading it—a role like the active participation of the apprentice whom Socrates envisions bearing the legitimate child (memory) of the spoken words of the philosopher.

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If Socrates describes speech entering memory through the metaphor of inscription, writing reasserting its bodily claim at the very heart of his almost disembodied definition of the fertility of speech, the disembodied self-elegy in women’s writing makes an answer of sorts to Phaedrus, inasmuch as the trope of the disembodied posthumous voice engages the lack of present audience as a way of tightening the bonds with future audience, pulling the reading audience into a dialogue in which our belated presence is vital to the rhetoric of the text’s performance. While the disembodied posthumous voice was not, of course, written by Plath, Shelley, Dickinson, and Brontë to rebut the claims made in Phaedrus, the philosopher’s terms of writing and speech—femininity and virile fertility—are marked in the coded rhetoric of a disembodied posthumous voice. Here, the woman writer’s disembodied posthumous voice takes on Socrates’ presentation of virile spoken dialogue as an almost bodiless answer to the earthbound acts of writing and procreating, coding writing as ghostly, sterile, but also, significantly, asserting an ontological claim that posits distance even within the ideal spoken male dialogue. The self-elegy asserts a quality of language as that which cannot bridge entirely those losses of mortality that elegy addresses. The disembodied posthumous feminine speaker addresses an audience of readers always already belated, separated from her by death, as a way of noting her lack of proper audience, or canonical placement, and also of asserting an ontological premise of lack or incompleteness as central to the momentum of discourse, written or spoken. Returning to Derrida, I point to the implication in his reading of “Logocentrism” that the very status of being written, which Socrates calls “ghostly,” is elegiac.80 The poetics of death in the posthumous voice remark on language’s incompleteness and push beyond notions of feminine and masculine, using the status of the feminine to expose problems in the ontological assumption behind dialogue and ideal speech. It is not only that the feminine disembodied posthumous voice marks woman’s place outside discourse but also that the trope of self-elegy points to a gap in the premise of discourse itself, points to the illusion that mortality can be eased by virile love and virile discourse. This ontology of unease that rests on the written word, the text, as a sort of grave of being marks a feminine counterpart to the Western canonical formula of a virile dialogue between men as the ideal form of speech, even as inherited by written elegy. Here, elegy as canon formation is critiqued and salvaged—strangely, salvaged by that feminine voice definitively outcast from the canon.

Notes 1 2

Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974). See Marguerite Celeste Schenck’s responses to Poggioli in Mourning and Panegyric (State College: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989) 184n: “The student of the pastoral does

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5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12

13

14

15 16

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The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing better to imitate the methods of William Empson, Harold Toliver, and Renato Poggioli […] who have resurrected pastoral as a useful, vital critical category.” See Schenck, 184n. By the terms canon and canonicity, I mean that monolithic male-dominated canon that has been up for debate for a good while now. See Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). See Ellen Zetzel Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1976) xv–xxxiv, and Schenck, 18. Schenck, 18. See Hart Crane, “To Emily Dickinson,” The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1966) 128, quoted in Susan Daly, ed., Language as Object (Amherst: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, in association with the U of Massachusetts P, 1997) 52. Hart Crane, “The Bridge,” Complete Poems, 93–4. Lambert, xix–xxiv. Peter Sacks’s theory of influence between poets effectively reads the pastoral elegy as less radically divorced from codes of masculine behavior than Lambert suggests in her distinction between pastoral and heroic. See The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 1–37. “The writing of elegy is a literary gesture signifying admittance of the poet-initiate to the sacred company.” Schenck, 15–16. Tilottama Rajan, referring to Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, describes the text as “aware” of itself as text: “Insofar as these texts raise the question of their reading, reading itself emerges as the site of a constant crossing between textuality and referentiality.” The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 168. Luce Irigaray’s argument about mirroring does not touch on the elegy. What I take from her argument (easy to do because the claims in The Speculum of the Other Woman are so wide reaching) is that women’s writing cannot escape male discourse, male language. My suggestion is that the trope of mirroring can be used to mirror back the self, encasing a speech of self-reflexive dialogue that evades male discourse precisely through the privative gesture of mirroring back the terms of the self as if from the space of death, an imaginary time of no self. See The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974). Jennifer Summit’s Lost Property makes an extremely extensive and persuasive argument regarding woman’s outcast status from the canon. Indeed, Summit suggests that the canon is defined by its exclusion of women. “The exchange shared by the two contestants is pastorally cited.” Schenck, 23. See also 34, 50–53. Lambert identifies the noon hour as the setting of the classical pastoral and contrasts this time with Milton’s use, in “Lycidas,” of morning and evening and with Gray’s use of dusk. Lambert, 187. See also 6–7, 78, 160–61, 193. Despite the Victorian ideal of the bodiless woman, which Mary Poovey (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft,

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19

20

21

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23 24 25 26

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Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984]) exhaustively links to modes of literary production, I interpret the disembodied voice as a rhetorical doubleedged sword. What Poovey has interpreted as the ideal of bodily restraint emphasizes and highlights the reification of the feminine rather than a bodiless woman. The emphasis on the body that must be restrained acts to reify rather than elide that body, focusing the feminine as a conceptual entity synecdochically indicated by the body. Indeed, Summit’s argument in Lost Property is that the canon is defined by its exclusion of women. An interesting parallel to this definition is R. Clifton Spargo’s observation that the exclusion of women defines the pastoral from Marvell and Milton on, a certain misogyny creating the English elegy as that very male tradition which Sacks comes persuasively to term the male elegy. See Lost Property, esp. 4–5, 16, 18, 19, 21, 205, 211, and Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004). Recently, a striking increase of critical material on Mathilda has been published, predicting, perhaps, that this work of Shelley’s may follow the rehabilitated steps of Frankenstein. See, for example, Pamela Clemit, “Frankenstein, Mathilda, and the Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft,” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 26–44; Robert Ready, “Dominion of Demeter: Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Keats-Shelley Journal 52 (2003): 94–110; Lauren Gillingham, “Romancing Experience: The Seduction of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (Summer 2003): 251–69; and Mitzi Myers, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin Shelley: The Female Author between Public and Private Spheres,” Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000) 160–72. My argument about the inscription of a space of audience into text is heavily indebted to Tilottama Rajan’s work on Romantic poets’ use of the trope of projecting audience. See The Supplement of Reading. The use of the pastoral elegy, then, to seem to mourn a simple shepherd when in fact mourning a public personage complicates Lambert’s proper distinction between envied and mourned death. Similarly, while Lambert usefully points to the classical elegy as a “meter, not a mood,” this definition again is almost immediately undercut, for any translation of the convention to a language not Greek alters the meter inevitably. Lambert, xix; Sacks. Empson emphasizes the false front of pastoral’s code of rusticity. He pointedly describes the mode as that which elucidates and strengthens class distinctions. See Some Versions of the Pastoral (London: Penguin, 1995) 9–26. Stuart Curran also defines pastoral’s doubleness, suggesting pastoral can only be written from the city. See Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 100, 111. Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994). Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992). See Toril Moi on Kristeva in Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002) 160–71. Sylvia Plath, interview with Peter Orr, BBC, October 30, 1962, in Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath, videocassette (Winstar Home Entertainment, 2000).

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27 In his reading of Rousseau, Poggioli argues that the post-Romantic pastoral conventionalizes a “wilder nature”—a different typology of nature from the classical pastoral. Poggioli, 180–81, 151. 28 See Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: Contribution aux études Shelleyennes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969). 29 Palacio, 131, 133–7. 30 Poggioli, 136–8. 31 Poggioli, 150–51. 32 Poggioli, 136. 33 Theocritus, The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J.M. Edmonds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1924). 34 William Keach draws attention to Mathilda’s comparing herself to Proserpine gathering flowers. See “The Shelleys and Dante’s Matilda,” Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney, ed. N.R. Havely (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) 60–70. Not only does Mathilda compare herself to Proserpine, but the figure of Proserpine also comments problematically on the link between the feminine and the pastoral, the girl a figure who neither completely dies nor can be completely mourned, a liminal figure who pulls all of nature into liminality. 35 Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 43–67. 36 Rajan describes The Cave of Fancy as suggestive of a “neoplatonic framework […] a purgatorial cave.” See The Supplement of Reading, 171. 37 Diana Fuss, “The Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30.1 (Fall 2003): 1–31. 38 See Poggioli, 105–34, 135–52. 39 Polhemus inserts Shelley’s Mathilda into his totalizing thesis of what he terms a “Lot complex.” See Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 125–41. By contrast, I read Mathilda in terms of Shelley’s ironic depiction of daughterly devotion to an abusive father, in which the biblical Jepthah’s daughter, significantly, is mentioned. Lot’s daughters’ self-sacrifice is implied in Shelley’s revelation of the incested daughter’s abject placement in society. That Polhemus links a daughter’s engaging in sexual intercourse with her assumption of authority may seem a move authorized, if you will, by Lacan’s subtler discourse on the phallic pen, but it is not a thesis that can withstand the actual implications of incest for daughters. Leaving aside post-Freudian readings of sexual abuse, even in the biblical context to which Polhemus returns, Lot’s daughters sacrifice of their virginity to their father is a formal suicide, a suicide enunciated in parallel terms by the story of Jepthah’s daughter. Mieke Bal articulates the suicide of Jepthah’s daughter in Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988). 40 “Starting back with horror, I spurned him with my foot”; “I sprung up and fled.” See Mary Shelley, Mathilda, The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 202. 41 Here, I refer to speech as authority, as opposed to the authority of eliciting male sexual desire argued by Polhemus in Lot’s Daughters (1–15). 42 The introduction to The Last Man establishes a female authority for the text, but the novel itself seems to disperse this authority, or to make it irrelevant, set belatedly as it is

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45

46 47 48

49 50

51

52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

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in a destroyed world. See Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994). See Poggioli, 166–81. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale and Richard J. Dunn, Norton critical edition (New York: Norton, 1990) 96, 97–8; Mathilda, 216. Mathilda calls herself a “nursling of nature’s bright self.” The daughter is initiated by the father, who interrupts her pastoral retreat, discovering her in rustic garb, a “tartan rachan […] hair streaming on [her] shoulders,” having just rowed herself across a lake. See Mathilda, 187. See also Wuthering Heights, 17. See Mathilda’s death scene, Mathilda, 243–6; Poggioli, ch. 8. Schenck, 26–8. See Jacques Derrida, La Pharmacie de Platon, La Dissémination (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1972) 69–180, quoted in Schenck, 26; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 7, 9. Schenck, 28. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, quoted in Alan Bass, “‘Literature’/Literature,” Jacques Derrida: Critical Thought, ed. Ian MacLachlan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 14– 23. Cathy Caruth importantly correlates this quality of belated knowing to traumatic knowledge. See Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 64, 131–32n. The audience is assumed by the mourning speaker through the tradition of classical elegy, which posits audience in the way that the Eclogues posit dialogue as the frame for the elegy’s audience. See Virgil, The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, 1999), esp. Eclogue V. See Empson, 9–26. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 256. Schenck, 28. See also Stanley Fish, “‘Lycidas’: A Poem Finally Anonymous,” Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983) 319–40. Lambert, conclusion. “My labor and my leisure too,” Fr479, line 8. Stuart Curran, “The I Altered,” Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988) 185–207. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 64. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 64. Poggioli, 180–83. Plath wrote her poem “Wuthering Heights” as an obvious nod to Bronte. See The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (1981; New York: Harper, 1992) 167. Ted Hughes, “The Rabbit Catcher,” Birthday Letters (New York: Farrar, 1998) 144–6. Birthday Letters is a compilation of poems written as estranged elegies for Plath, commemorating her birthday when she is dead. Patrick Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics, and Gender, 1820– 1840 (Hanover, NH: U of New England P, 2004). “The human creature is essentially out of place in the world.” Empson, 151. For an extended discussion of the elision of the feminine figure, see Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002).

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67 What I want to point to in both the poems is the ending of apophasis. Rather than choosing consolations of name or of nature’s sympathy, the poems indicate a topological disappearance, the last lines specifying a dissolution of self that reflexively questions the project of elegy. 68 Schenck, 50–53. 69 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W.C. Helmbold and W.G. Rabinowitz (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1956) 231–35. 70 Plato, Phaedrus, 278. 71 Plato, Phaedrus, 275. 72 Plato, Phaedrus, 271, 276. 73 Plato, Phaedrus, 240–41. 74 Plato, Phaedrus, 276. 75 Derrida argues that the “trace” may be understood to precede spoken language, not secondary and ghostly, but primary. See Of Grammatology, 18–26. 76 See Margaret Reynolds, “Speaking Unlikenesses: The Double Text in Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death’ and ‘Remember,’” The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio UP, 1999) 3–21. 77 In Phaedrus, writing is described as a “ghost” of memory, memory as spoken knowledge. Socrates asks, How can writing, which only reminds us of what we already know, be of equal worth to speech, which is what we know? The Platonic notion of knowledge as that which we remember from our time as souls not yet fallen to earth is critical to understanding Socrates’ critique of writing as that which can dispense with memory, writing as that which replaces memory, for if memory is the connection of the mind to the real, then writing disconnects the mind from the real. 78 I am drawing, of course, from the centerpiece argument of Derrida’s Of Grammatology: the debate over the primacy of speech, Derrida’s revision of that metaphysics, and his notion of the “trace.” See Of Grammatology, 9–26, 39, 50, 69–73. 79 The forced seed metaphor again underlines the terms of virility that frame Socrates’ discussion of writing and speaking. See Plato, Phaedrus, 276. 80 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 12.

Chapter 2

Lethe’s Shore: Mary Shelley’s Sacred Horror An uncanny sense of return, a weight of foreknowledge, is built into Mary Shelley’s novella Mathilda. The novella opens and closes with the scene of its eponymous narrator’s death. Mathilda’s death, placed before the text, travels through it, giving a spectral momentum to the work’s otherwise static drama. Insofar as Mary Shelley’s Mathilda was first drafted as the speech of a soul in purgatory (The Fields of Fancy being Shelley’s recuperation of her mother’s fragment The Cave of Fancy), Shelley’s later decision to shift the narrator’s voice to an ambiguously coded topos of the posthumous voice importantly changed the generic placement of the novella. For a soul speaking from purgatory, as in The Fields of Fancy, adheres to the traditional Catholic concept of purgatory as one place of afterlife, while Mathilda establishes a trope of the posthumous voice by rejecting the traditional religious and patriarchal territory of afterlife defined by terms such as purgatory. This shifting of the ground of posthumous address is the essential stroke of the posthumous voice. In Shelley’s case, the highly codified tradition of the Catholic notion of purgatory is rejected in favor of the ambiguous presentation of death as an unknown topos evoked solely for its metaphoric potential. In other words, the traditional trappings of the Church, including the certainty of knowing what happens after death, are exchanged for an open topos of death in which all that is given is that the speaker speaks from an outcast space. Death here is a sign of subversion. The way in which the entire drama of the novella Mathilda is the story of how the speaker dies—her experience of her father’s transgressive desire related to explain the uncanny topos of the narrator’s address, her address of audience from death—resonates with the general idea of purgatory as a place of prolonged purgation, but it does not resonate with the traditional Catholic view of purgatory that Shelley was using in The Fields of Fancy. Unlike the earlier draft, Mathilda uses a posthumous voice to identify its theme as that of aftermath rather than resolution. Although the narrative describes temporal events, it emphatically does not unfold in time. The expected abjection of death in Mathilda is played on and played with, death providing a rhetorical platform from which the daughter-as-speaker lays bare the terms of her silence in life. Using death to overturn that silence while seeming to accept it, the ambiguity of the topos of death as it is deployed in Mathilda resists

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the narrative of the soul’s eventual release and uncannily parallels the novella’s resistance to generic placement. Tilottama Rajan has commented on the curious lack of action in Mathilda, ascribing this static quality to the novella’s being a “textual abject,” a text that does not intend an audience and cannot be seen as fitting itself into a genre.1 Explicitly problematizing audience, Mathilda asserts that her eponymous narrative’s presentation depends on her death before the narrative’s onset: “In life I dared not; in death I unveil the mystery.”2 As the novella presents its terms, the reader’s access to Mathilda depends upon disengaging the premise of body from that of voice, for Mathilda as narrator haunts the text from which she is exiled. In Slavoj Zizek’s terms, the “spectral” aspect of a narrator’s voice, belying the primacy of presence, makes all written text uncanny.3 Tightening the screws of the uncanny aspect of narrative voice by explicitly staging the absence of a self upon which textual voice is implicitly predicated, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda pushes this spectrality of voice to make a point, I suggest, about a daughter’s powerlessness, expressed by a belated or disrupted relationship to audience. If Mathilda is without agency, it is no great surprise to realize that she is dead when she tells her tale. Mathilda uses the trope of the posthumous voice to stage its own déjà vu. In this chapter, I look at Mary Shelley’s Mathilda as exemplary in presenting the rhetorical problem of how to voice the feminine agency interdicted in language spoken dans le nom du père, as Lacan describes it. The economy of agency in the text as Rajan understands it, its melancholy cryptic reserve and static abjection, needs some reexamination. Sophia Andres, for example, sees in the novella a specific narrative challenge to the very type of the abjectly embodied figurative equation of woman and corpse—passive, silent, and dead but beautiful—that Elisabeth Bronfen argues is so central to the dominant working of the aesthetic tradition. Andres contends, “By transforming […] painterly, static representations of women into narrative, dynamic images in Mathilda, Shelley breaks the silence of passive female figures, giving them, and by extension her readers, the voice to resist the dominant tradition, the power to become agents of change.”4 What Andres and other recent readers of Mathilda are responding to are questions generated by the text’s uncanny placing of drama into the field of narrative performance. Here, the narrative’s being told is the drama: the fact that the daughter tells the tale posthumously balances the verbal character of the incest she reports. The narrator’s staging of her abject deprivation of agency points to the way that Mathilda can be viewed in terms of its own rhetorical function and interpretive import, even though most attention to the novella has focused on biographical or psychological readings.5 The stillness of the novella, its troped posthumous status, like the inherent stasis of paintings, evocatively links the posthumous voice (and by extension the aesthetic that kills woman with its gaze) to a moment of aesthetic opening. By means of its allusive matrix, the text “shatters,” as Diana Edelman-Young notes, “the dominant ideology.” 6 It shatters the limits of genre controlled by the

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dominant aesthetic, as Milton’s “Lycidas” had done in epitomizing the elegiac tradition, by proleptically seizing the topos of the pastoral elegy, which lies behind the genre of the sentimental novel upon which Shelley’s Romantic text turns, and by “breaking” through a radical ironization of voice, as Andres writes, an ironization of the silence of woman excluded from the elegy, as we see in Bronfen and in Sacks, by all but her image in death.7 In this chapter, I will read Mathilda as a troped posthumous performance, looking precisely at how this “lyric novella,” as Rajan refers to the text, intercepts masculine typologies for death, forgetfulness, and purgatory. 8 Beyond biography and psychology, beyond psychobiography, it is important to situate Mathilda in its proper rhetorical context, a context very much aesthetically and allusively coded, especially in regard to key topoi of Romanticism. Following the text’s allusive background, which must begin with Dante’s Matelda from the Purgatorio, I suggest that Mathilda engages the Dantean river Lethe as a way to trope upon the very current of grieving language that Peter Sacks defines as the force of traditional elegy. 9 If Sacks reads the current of elegy as remembrance, then Shelley ironizes self-elegy as forgetfulness, as Lethe. Mathilda’s circulatory system is this trope of Lethe, a recursive current of the tension between remembering and forgetting loss. Following Rajan’s idea of Mathilda as lyric novella, then, it may be read as an extended elegy in which the narrator elegizes herself, troping Lethe as the current that carries the posthumous narrator’s memory of sin—venial sin, inasmuch as the incest story is consistently presented as a daughter’s knowledge of rather than her act of sin—and reinscribes the persistence of memory as elegy. The 140-year delay in the publication of Mathilda fits with the work’s titular allusion to, thematic of, and history of being spoken from purgatory. Deferring audience, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, completed in 1820 and unpublished until 1959, predicts its purgatory in oblivion.10 That does not necessarily mean that Mary Shelley intended the delay. Shelley sent the manuscript to her father to publish in May 1820. When Godwin refused, she asked for its return. Whether she could have anticipated his refusal to publish the work remains a question.11 Certainly, the novella’s subject of father–daughter incest, together with the text’s dominant rhetorical strategy of being posthumously postured, shape a drama of patience, of suffering and lasting it out. The novella thematizes a lack of audience as a strict result of corrupted, indeed vitiated, family bonds.12 By locating her novella in the terrain of familial destruction, Shelley pressures the novella’s topic of incest not only to reflect its Romantic precursors but also to become exemplary of the worst sort of tragedy, a tragedy that ends a family.13 Mathilda’s allusions to Dante form a dialogue with both Godwin and Percy Shelley, readers and interpreters of Dante, concerning the problem of paternity. I suggest that Mary Shelley’s innovation in writing Mathilda is to effect a blurring of the boundaries between the dead child and the bereaved parent. While she frames the text as a deathbed confession written to mourn a father, her novella instead reveals a daughter’s lament of her self, a narrator’s self-elegy. 14 That the drama was

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originally framed explicitly as spoken by a soul in purgatory gives the text a liminality not lost by the shift into an implicit troped posthumous narration. The allusive image of Dante’s river Lethe, which runs through Mathilda, inscribes the text as a lyric elegy bound up in a novella. Here, the pastoral elegy’s evocation of water is, ironically, the water of forgetfulness. Mathilda’s dominant trope is that of posthumousness, of having been written by a newly dead heroine from the space of her death: it stands, then, as a self-elegy, the use of the posthumous voice giving rhetorical structure to the work’s mourning. Just as incest may emblematize betrayal, so also the gesture of posing a narrator as dead prior to her text implies a drama of almost unbearably privative, circular mourning. The novella presents a sacrificed daughter’s elaborate act of self-mourning, gesturing toward a ritual lament like that of Jepthah’s daughter in the Bible. 15 But Shelley’s Mathilda also uses its topic and its rhetoric to imply a state beyond common mourning, a seizure of the consolatory water of traditional elegy to become not commemorative but the amnesiac water of Lethe. Shelley’s originally drafted soul speaking from purgatory, with its strong allusion to Dante, also guides the published text of Mathilda, as the novella meditates on a child’s state of insolvable mourning over the collapse of paternity described in paternal incest. The drama of Mathilda at first glance seems to be set as its eponymous heroine’s deathbed confession. Shelley left ambiguous, however, whether the confession is written from the deathbed or after the death. The novella does not safely locate its heroine in death; that is, it is not a letter written by a living woman and then discovered after her death. Nor does it locate its heroine in life. Instead, the narrator’s placement is like that of purgatory, for the novella is structured according to a reading of death as a space that does not offer release from suffering. The narrator is also threatening to the living, speaking from death as an interloper into the peace of the living, using the space of death as a textual mode from which to impugn the incestuous father, whom the text explicitly praises. Mathilda begins and ends with the scene of its narrator’s coming death and concerns itself only with the reason for her death. Mathilda’s telling of her tale gains a topos, a space, for the otherwise dislocated narrator’s death. The novella opens from an uncanny vista, describing a midwinter’s early sunset (175): It is only four o’clock; but it is winter and the sun has already set: there are no clouds in the clear frosty sky to reflect its slant beams. […] I live in a lone cottage on a solitary wide heath: no voice of life reaches me. […] The frost has been of a long continuance.

The speaker says “I live,” but she also says “no voice of life reaches me.” Unable to hear the living while also unable to rest quietly with the dead, this narrator produces language but cannot receive it: she talks but cannot hear. Specifically, she cannot hear the voices of the living. Her mode of speaking, then, somewhat similar to de Man’s understanding of prosopopeia, puts into play a “succession of

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voiceless tropes,” of which the most ironic is the long, symbolically determined silence of the novella’s publishing history, its textual abjection.16 Mathilda writes her confession from what is evoked as the perspective of one newly dead. An uncanny darkness has already enclosed her as she begins to write. The novella maintains itself imagistically and rhetorically on this uncanny edge, neither set in the place of the living nor the usual grave—or silence—of the dead. Mathilda begins her eponymous story in the posthumous voice, making of death an uncanny topos from which the text proposes its authority. Inhabiting a border territory, narrated according to a newly dead Mathilda’s recumbent point of view, Shelley’s Mathilda is framed by its narrator’s death. Mathilda’s body, its depletion and burial, haunts the text. Troping the speech of the dead, Mathilda the novella resists abjecting Mathilda the character, even though she occupies the abject space of an incested daughter. This topos of a disembodied death separates voice as a mode of agency from the daughter’s body, whose agency has been damaged by the father’s incestuous desire. Unlike classical prosopopeia, which brings the dead to the place of oratory, in effect raising them, Mathilda uses the trope of the posthumous voice as a way of eliding the body in text. Indeed, Mathilda establishes the very possibility for her narrative by first feigning her death. By pushing the narrator into her borderline retreat after faking her suicide, the novella establishes its hermeneutic, a mode of interpreting history that remains that of rejecting history as narrative, marking death as a fraudulent ending for a daughter always already dead in the paternally inflected symbolic order in which public speech occurs.17 In Mathilda, the daughter’s death is caused by incest. After her father’s collapse into incest and suicide, Mathilda fakes suicide. Mathilda is a self-consciously troped posthumous text; it observes its narrator’s proleptic death, staging her fake suicide, which precedes her textually real death as meta-performance. Describing her feigned suicide as her escape to the house on the heath where she later really dies, or rather stages a second death as that death that is real in her text, Mathilda writes: “I left my guardian’s house and I was never heard of again; it was believed from the letters that I left and other circumstances that I planned that I had destroyed myself. […] Soon all trace and memory of me was lost” (219). The usual markers of life, of being among the living, do not apply to Mathilda. She hides herself on the heath by feigning her suicide so that no one will look for her and then reveals herself by writing out the narrative of her actual death, a gesture of self-elision and self-recuperation that mandates she construct an entirely liminal narrative, detailing a life hidden and hedged in both topographically and socially. This holographic act of Mathilda’s feigning death in order to set the stage for telling the tale of her “real” death establishes the trope of posthumousness that is the rhetorical strategy and dramatic engine of the novella. Mathilda’s authority appears in the liminal space, the border territory, that opens across her barren moor home after she has, by feigning her death, already assumed the point of view of the

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departed.18 Mathilda’s second and, as it were, real death further clarifies this rhetoric of the posthumous voice at work in Mathilda. The work is not framed as something picked up after Mathilda’s death. Rather, it is placed in the space of its narrator’s accomplishment of death. It does not deploy prosopopeia but uses narrative to stage the dramatic elision of the daughter’s “polluted” body from the spectral persistence of her voice as text; opposite to prosopopeia, it dramatizes the always already dead daughter’s outcast status from the place of public speech. The elision of the daughter’s polluted mask is the telos of Mathilda; its goal is to get rid of the perceived problem of the daughter’s visibility.19 Its use of the posthumous voice signifies a tale that cannot be told without rupturing its own narrative stance, hiding its narrator’s conspicuous absence. Mathilda exemplifies Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of irony, that of a text interrupting its own goals. The impossibility of Mathilda’s narrative stance follows from and expresses the aporia put in place by the father’s cutting of paternal ties and forging of sexual ties to his daughter. Withholding Mathilda’s voice until after her death, the narrative’s trope of posthumousness implicitly condemns the father, for it is the narrator’s implied ability to speak back after her death that dramatizes precisely the unspeakable position into which the survival of incest places the living daughter. Refusing to accept her father’s confession of sexual desire for her not only as part of a life that can be lived but also as part of a confession that can be heard, Mathilda confesses her grief in a text predicated on her death. This script of death enacts the simultaneous erasure of Mathilda’s body and emplacement of a topos of homelessness. The body’s disappearance into death here figures the homelessness of the child whose family ties are vitiated by incest. If the narrator becomes homeless because of the father’s fall, she uses that topos of homelessness-as-bodilessness as a space from which to describe the father’s fall. The narrator’s figure, placed out of view by her death preceding the text, focuses the father’s incestuous desire. His desire redraws the significance of Mathilda’s body, making her body an outcast zone. By writing her heroine as preemptively dead, Shelley indicates the irreversibility of Mathilda’s homelessness, a placelessness enforced by the father’s abjecting gaze.20 In Mathilda, the narrator’s implied body marks the vanishing point where abjection and sublimity intersect, that is, the place where the abject, sexually abrogated daughter’s body cedes to the hidden, buried body whose only trace is the corpus of a confession, the text of Mathilda. Mathilda’s body, or the desire that has been shunted toward it, haunts the text of Mathilda, prolonging its outcast status. The novella’s publication history—its sojourn in purgatory—continues this work of the metaphor of the outcast. From its rhetoric of retreat, Mathilda’s deployment of the trope of the posthumous voice puts Mary Shelley’s novella into conversation with some works of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. For Mathilda responds to and complicates the image of the incest victim who is silenced by death, Beatrice

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Cenci, whom Percy depicts in his play The Cenci.21 Mary Shelley develops a trope of the posthumous voice that grants her incest victim, Mathilda, a subtler revenge than that had by Beatrice Cenci. While Cenci kills an incestuous father, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda implicitly condemns an incestuous father by demonstrating how the daughter’s forgiveness of him structures an impossible narrative: a narrative spoken by a dead woman. From its initial intimation of decorous deathbed letter, the narrative swerves into the illicit writing of the dead. Mathilda presents its heroine/narrator in process of erasing all traces of herself. It gives scant overt explanation as to why a young woman who has gone to such lengths to hide herself should, posthumously, wish to become unheimlich, uncovered—why she should wish to “unveil” her incest history. The novella, significantly, does not address the question of the motivation for its own existence except insofar as it places Woodville, the daughter’s confessor/interlocutor, as a witness to the father’s fall. If we allow that Mathilda may be read as part of an encrypted conversation with Percy Shelley, then we may ask if Mary Shelley’s heroine preserves this trace of her self and her history, her confession’s revealed text, even as she claims that she wishes to erase all traces of herself, in part because Mathilda’s urge is to revenge herself on her father differently from the way that Beatrice Cenci does. To say that Mathilda may be read as responding to Percy Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci is not to say that Mary Shelley’s novella is subsidiary to Percy Shelley’s drama but, rather, to place them as partners in an intertextual conversation.22 Mathilda’s gesture of self-revelation enacts a justice akin to Beatrice Cenci’s act of parricide, for Mary Shelley’s novella situates the father’s betrayal as the first in a chain of signifiers, the culmination of which is the erasure of the father and the daughter, their bodies submerged under the liquid sign of Lethe, the turning of the waters of elegy to the water of forgetfulness. I do not suggest that Percy Shelley be inserted into the place of Woodville, audience for the daughter’s tale, nor that “Godwin” be that name given the nameless incestuous father. Rather, I note that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda delineates a psychologically accurate portrait of a young daughter’s betrayal that argues against Percy Shelley’s more mythic imagery of an incested daughter’s almost superhuman courage in seeking revenge.23 Like The Cenci, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda demands that its audience engage the question of the consequences of paternal power abused. Placing her philosophical meditation on the uncanny stage of Mathilda’s unsafe houses, Mary Shelley draws a subtle portrait of what it means to destroy someone who does not complain, who obligingly vanishes and then recurs as text. Mathilda’s very willingness to forgive her father in the text of Mathilda acts as an engine that incriminates him in a narratological reading of the text. Mathilda’s explicit claims of forgiveness contrast ironically with the text’s strong clues that the father cannot be forgiven, particularly the novella’s performed-as-posthumous status. The necessity of the daughter’s death indicates

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the unforgivable status of the father’s desire. Her act of revenge against the incestuous father is submerged in the body of Mathilda. The daughter’s repeated protestations of forgiveness for her father’s incestuous confession point to the impossibility of that very forgiveness of the father they profess, insofar as they formalize a disembodied, disowned authority. The reader is the crucial tool of her text, separating the overt claims of the text from the claims of its fabula. Not only the troped posthumous aspect of the novella but also its allusions incriminate the incestuous father. Mary Shelley’s commentary on male authority brings us back to Dante. While she was writing Mathilda, her husband translated canto 28, lines 1–51 of Dante’s Purgatorio.24 In 1819, moreover, Mary Shelley translated The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci at Percy’s request while he was writing The Cenci.25 Betty T. Bennett comments insightfully on the importance of the Shelleys’ mutual involvement with each other’s work, and I wish to draw attention more specifically to their tacit alluding to each other’s work. Bennett details the couple’s working relationship around the time of Clara’s and William’s deaths: After Clara’s death, Percy Bysshe Shelley began to dramatize The Cenci. The Shelleys collaborated on this project in several ways. Mary Shelley translated into English Relazione della morte della famiglia Cenci sequita in Roma il di II Maggio 1599, the original Italian manuscript from which Percy Bysshe Shelley worked, for intended publication with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tragedy […] Following William’s death, Percy Bysshe Shelley continued working on The Cenci, [and] Mary Shelley began her own story of incest: Matilda, the story of a father’s annihilating incestuous love for his daughter.26

Percy Shelley, fluent in Italian, did not need his wife to translate the manuscript of The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci.27 Her performance of the translation, then, may be read as part of a conversation between them, his asking and her answering. Mathilda continues that conversation. Presenting her translation of The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci, Mary Shelley remarks of the passages she deleted that “The details here are horrible and unfit for publication.”28 Her completed translation of the manuscript is studded with blanks, which, she explains, signify passages too painful to translate. These omitted details have to do with Beatrice’s rape at the hands of her father, for Shelley’s sentence preceding the gap she refuses to translate reads, “Francesco often endeavoured by force and threats to debauch his daughter Beatrice who was now grown up and exceedingly beautiful,”29 while the sentence following the omitted text reads, “Beatrice, finding it impossible to continue to live in so miserable a manner sent a well written supplication to the Pope, imploring him to exercise his authority in withdrawing her from the violence and cruelty of her father.”30 Apparently, then, Mary Shelley found the details of the incestuous rape literally illegible, in the sense of being unwritable or intolerable to write.

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Mary Shelley’s response to the Italian story of incestuous rape, a response of eliding any physical description of incestuous assault, offers insight into her way of writing Mathilda, a story of incest into which no physical assault is inscribed. In Shelley’s Mathilda, not only incest as an act but also the effects of the father’s incestuous desire are pushed aside into suicide notes and deathbed confessions, into marginal texts. Here, the connection to Rajan’s deeming Mathilda a textual abject is perfectly clear; just as Mathilda pushes her revelation of incest to the edge of legibility, Mary Shelley pushes Mathilda to the edge of publishability. Mathilda stages and performs a writing of text outside genre, placing the unacceptable— incest—into a verbal code that is text marginalized, or further encrypted, within the novella’s text as a whole. Not strictly epistolary, Mathilda instead uses the gesture of the letter to denote the moment of textual elision as the precise space of greatest drama. Indeed, Shelley’s husband’s request that she translate graphic material that disturbed her may have influenced the way in which she brought Mathilda to its final form, with its elision of physical acts. Even the oddly autobiographical description of the daughter Mathilda as a figure of light—Percy Shelley called Mary Shelley a child of light—presents this daughter as if her figure were already disembodied, made of light instead of flesh.31 Shelley, then, responds to her husband’s request for a translation of an incest story by developing an aesthetic of erasure, an aesthetic built on the omission of just such physical details as abound in the Italian history of the family of the Cenci. Mathilda works by eliding the heroine’s body from a text that is all about that body’s vulnerability. It relentlessly sweeps past Mathilda’s bodily life, always striving toward her death, which figures as her body’s point of departure. The impetus is to express and overcome the horror of incest—the father’s illicit gaze on the daughter’s body. Mathilda dislocates its narrator by using a disembodied posthumous voice, which mandates the narrator’s death before her text, and the novella dislocates its reader by insisting that the text is meant only for Woodville to read (245), so that all we who are not Woodville read Mathilda as belated witnesses. Our very act of reading Mathilda follows Woodville’s implied relinquishing of that text: he lets a belated audience enter the encrypted incest story. Importantly, Rajan asks whether Mary Shelley intended Mathilda to reach any audience at all.32 Her insight turns on her discernment that an author’s intention for a text may only partly be read in the author’s recorded actions concerning the body of the completed text.33 Rajan contends that gestures in the text itself may reveal the author’s wishes regarding the text’s target audience—or lack thereof. Extending Rajan’s reading, I suggest that Mathilda significantly carries forward an intertextual conversation between Shelley and her husband, deflecting audience beyond them while also significantly posing belated audience as necessary for the completion of the conversation, the recognition of it as conversation. The Shelleys’ work of translating Dante in proximity to Mary Shelley’s writing of Mathilda surfaces as a locus classicus in Mathilda when the incestuous father

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warns his daughter not to read Dante. This interdiction against reading Dante figures centrally in the novella’s drama: it marks the moment that the daughter begins to cross from innocent child (innocent in the sense of one who does not yet know) to recipient of unwanted sexual desire. Once Mathilda’s father has discovered his sexual desire for his daughter but before he reveals this desire to her, he asks Mathilda to read the still-open Dante that her dying mother had been reading sixteen years earlier, hoping that a reminder of the dead mother will freeze his ardor for the daughter. The father then abruptly admonishes Mathilda not to read, crying “No, that must not be: you must not read Dante!” (195). Here, the crystallization of the father’s connecting his romantic love for his wife with his illicit passion for his daughter finds voice in his command that the daughter not read what the mother once read. The dramatic development of the novella finds its crux in the father’s response to the possibility of his daughter reading translated Dante, perhaps reading the very passage from Purgatorio in which Matelda gathers flowers, which was translated by Percy Shelley during the time when Mary Shelley was writing Mathilda.34 By stopping his daughter from reading Dante rather than protecting her from taking up her mother’s place (as he initially seems to be doing), Mathilda’s father prevents her from reading the text into which she is written. His action exposes her to a dangerous situation, inasmuch as it prevents her having a timely insight into and escape from his incestuous attention.35 For Matelda is the character in Purgatorio who has come through sin.36 The daughter’s safety, Mary Shelley suggests, could have been preserved had she been allowed to read Dante, the book from which her mother was also prematurely and fatally called away. In suggesting that Percy Shelley’s act of translating Dante in proximity to Mary Shelley’s writing of Mathilda implicates his translation in the conversation that Mathilda stages about the dangers of a daughter’s missed reading of Dante, I am not arguing that he interpreted Dante for Mary Shelley’s incest drama.37 Mary Shelley recorded her own thorough knowledge of and repeated return to Dante. She did not need Percy to lead her through Dante. Rather, one notes that Mary Shelley’s husband’s translation of Dante effectively witnesses Mathilda’s Dantean allusions and that this witnessing is echoed in the conversation that triangulates to include readers who implicitly survive Woodville.38 This belated reader in effect supercedes Woodville and Percy and by doing so recuperates for Mathilda’s narrative its merely apparent submission of authority to Woodville. The reader is written into the scene of Mathilda; it is the reader who belatedly allows the interdicted daughter at last to sign her name as her text, her name critically synonymous with her text. The structurally crucial witness to the scene of the daughter’s aborted reading of Dante is Mathilda’s reader, not only the Percylike Woodville but also, importantly, the much delayed readership of ourselves, who are inscribed in the novella as catching up the text where he left it. We are the uncanny target audience, targeted as belated.39 In Mathilda, we are written in as

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witness to Percy and Mary’s intertextual conversation about the history of the family of the Cenci as it discourses on power and the fall and the family of origin.

The Daughter’s Name Percy and Mary converse over the name and figure of Dante’s Matelda, a woman in purgatory who helps to lead the pilgrim to Beatrice.40 Matelda’s beauty and innocence are shadowed by the questions of why she is in earthly paradise and why she is associated with Lethe, the river that erases the memory of sins when one drinks from it. If Beatrice is innocent, unknowing, purity given face and voice, Matelda is purity that has come through something, that once knew something. Mary Shelley’s knowledge of Dante’s Purgatorio was intimate; she returned to reading Dante as a means of consoling herself after her children’s’ deaths.41 It is striking, then, that the heroine of her novella should be named Mathilda after a passage from Purgatorio that Percy Shelley translated. For if Mary Shelley did not need her husband to find her place in Dante, by naming her character Mathilda she did not rely upon but rather signified her husband’s work. By its title and by its heroine/narrator’s name, Shelley specified that her novella Mathilda meditates on purgatory as that condition of having been exposed to sin but not having committed sin. In this interpretive move, Mary Shelley revealed that her take on Matelda differed radically from her husband’s. In his interpretive translation from the Italian, Percy Shelley turns Dante’s vision of Matelda’s regained innocence into an image suggestive of desire, emphasizing Matelda’s liminal status. He describes her as an approachable woman: A solitary woman! and she went Singing and gathering flower after flower With which her way was painted and bespent. ‘Bright lady, who, if looks had ever power To bear true witness of the heart within, Dost bask within the beams of love, come lower Towards this bank. I prithee let me win This much of thee, to come, that I may hear Thy song.’42

He focuses on the seductive aspects of Matelda: her beauty, which he admits may or may not signify inner goodness, and her solitariness, suggestive of a vulnerability to approach. Matelda in Dante sings a song that the pilgrim wishes to understand. But Percy Shelley, in his translation, emphasizes the speaker’s desire to hear her song sensually. This slight tilting of emphasis from intellectual understanding to sensual hearing, as well as the topographical suggestion that the

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woman come “lower” instead of simply more near to the speaker, portrays a Matelda of the border, an inhabitant of earthly paradise in the Augustinian sense, in which lush flowers and beautiful women are associated inextricably with sin. While I point to Percy Shelley’s emphasis on the seductive quality of Matelda’s appearance, it is important to remember that the character Dante is also confused about Matelda’s role, while the poet Dante writes from an understanding of the revelation that Matelda’s love is divine love, a revelation that eventually comes to the character. Percy Shelley’s siding, as it were, with emphasizing the sensual aspect of Matelda’s song is interesting, however, in light of the use that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda makes of Dante’s revelation that Matelda’s love is divine, not sensual. For this is the very transformation that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda yearns for in her father—his losing the sinful scrim of lust from his eyes and seeing his daughter as someone whose love for him is not sensual. Perhaps Percy’s powerful translation encouraged his wife to fully deploy the possibilities of her novella’s allusion to Dante. If Dante’s Matelda represents the active life of the soul, then her go-between status, passed back and forth between the Shelleys, fits. If Percy Shelley’s fascination with the possibility of innocence in the apparently damned is explored through the character of Beatrice Cenci in his drama The Cenci, Mary Shelley’s novella Mathilda, which also extends Dante’s notion of purgatory, presents a sophisticated interpretation of the state of mind of a woman who has known but not committed sin. While Percy Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci kills her father, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda bears the self-claimed sin of engendering her father’s desire for her. Unlike Beatrice Cenci, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda does not, while alive, revenge herself on her father. Her text is her revenge.43 In Percy Shelley’s Cenci, the daughter’s name, Beatrice, comments poignantly on the moral status of the girl who kills her father after he rapes her. Similarly, Mary Shelley’s naming her heroine Mathilda after a character from Dante who may stand for innocence regained was a resonant choice.44 Persistently, Mary Shelley presents her heroine as unable to escape the effects of sin committed against her. She plumbs the impact of a father’s betrayal by shaping a text whose use of language is framed by the problematic of authority. By Mathilda’s admitted difficulty in conveying her story—evinced by her confession that she cannot confess until she is dead—Shelley deftly signifies the conjunction of aphasia and trauma, producing a drama that breaks this silence.45 Mary Shelley’s portrait of a daughter who becomes suicidal as the result of incest conflicts with her husband’s interpretation of Beatrice Cenci as an injured young woman stoically and even nobly fighting off the evil embodied in her incestuous father. Indeed, Julie Carlson has described Mathilda as a trauma narrative.46 Mary Shelley’s portrait of the crippling impact of incest on the daughter’s strength of character stands in contrast to her husband’s depiction of a powerful daughter who acts according to the dictates of justice, killing the father who has raped her simply because that is what justice asks of her.

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In Mathilda, character is determined by memory: the daughter’s memory of her abandoning father haunts her childhood, while her memory of her incestuous father erases her adulthood. Shelley uses the inscription of forgetfulness, the irruption of Lethe into the tropological play of the novella, to imply the force of memory. She writes memory as forgetfulness, ironically indicating the force of inscription—of writing as what is remembered.

Lethean Elegy To extend and complicate Carlson’s reading of Mathilda as a trauma narrative, I turn here to a consideration of the motif of Lethe—of forgetting sin—in Mathilda. I have noted the evocation of water as one of the formal gestures of elegy. Expanding my discussion of Lethe, I will focus on the way that Mary Shelley uses the motif of Lethe to turn the elegiac waters into waters of amnesia, turning the elegy into a self-elegy. Mathilda’s continued protestations of love for her father after he has confessed his incestuous passion and her fatal sense of herself as the guilty party turn on the figure of the waters of Lethe alluded to by the heroine’s namesake, Dante’s Matelda, who picks flowers by Lethe.47 Jean de Palacio seminally delineated the important evocations of Lethe in Shelley’s Mathilda, while Sophia Andres recently picked up on the novella’s motif of liquid, noting fluidity as the trope of the gaze in the novella.48 I not only trace the allusions to Lethe but also link them to the murderous paternal gaze as that unending moment troped in Mathilda that stages the trauma of paternal abuse disrupting the daughter’s speech. Mary Shelley invokes Lethe not only to express her parity with male writers—Dante, Percy Shelley—but also to stage the continual moment of the abused daughter overcoming the amnesia of trauma through trope, through her mastery of metaphor. If alluding to Dante is a way of coding trauma—the incest trauma and its attendant amnesia—Shelley also encodes Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which in its turn recalls Ovid’s Philomel, as key textual sites in which a sexually traumatized daughter “speaks” through allusion to textual fathers. Shelley’s innovative take on this allusive scene is that her character, Mathilda, directly implicates the structure of patriarchy as that which kills her, in contrast to Shakespeare’s Lavinia, who, killed by her father, pointedly blames men other than her father for her fate. Mary Shelley’s allusions to Lethe structure Mathilda, inscribing the way that the daughter’s access to symbolic discourse takes place through the circular trope in which the killed self is signified and then recuperated, in which forgetting and remembering are presented in recuperations that occur belatedly, posthumously. Immersed in and immersing the novella, Lethe becomes the current that signifies Mathilda’s self-elegy, its pull to forgetting the father’s guilt of incest acting as the tide the text repeatedly turns. That is, the water of elegy here becomes the water of

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who is forgotten, not elegized—the abject incested daughter—a turn Shelley harnesses in protest, using the male elegiac convention of water to protest the daughter’s abjection. In effect, Mathilda’s figural body is written as part of Lethe, for she is written as taking in the father’s sin. Rather than merely picking flowers by Lethe’s banks, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda seems to contain the waters of forgetfulness, for Mathilda’s unending sense of responsibility for her father’s incestuous desire, her forgetting of his role as the perpetrator of incestuous confession, has caused the argument to be mistakenly made that Mathilda is seduced rather than assaulted, that is, that she somehow desires to be desired.49 Rather than an indication that she wanted her father’s incestuous attention, the fact that Mathilda shoulders her father’s guilt after he has confessed his desire for incest reveals that she is unable to remember the degree to which her father has betrayed her, a traumatic amnesia of interpretation. She continues to feel as if she had caused her father to want her because she tropologically has drunk the Lethean waters (reserved for venial sinners) and has forgotten her father’s mortal guilt in requesting incest. I argue that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda embodies rather than merely stands beside Dante’s Lethe, inasmuch as she takes her father’s guilt into herself, containing his sin. Mary Shelley’s evocative descriptions of Mathilda’s body envision the daughter’s body as containing the father’s corruption, just as Dante’s Lethe carries away sins, albeit venial ones. Since Mathilda never blames her father for his desire for incest, she retains her belief that she, like the water of forgetfulness, must contain his sin, which she has not committed. Mathilda, expounding on her sense of guilt after her father confesses his desire for her, uses the metaphor of a poisoned embodied voice to describe the condition of her soul, especially interpreting this poisoned body as water that has become too bitter to drink: “Unlawful and detestable passion had poured its poison into my ears and changed all my blood so that is was no longer the kindly stream that supports life but a cold fountain of bitterness corrupted in its very source” (229). She experiences her body as a contaminated cistern, rigidly containing the poison of paternal semiotic that has been poured into her. She states that she must keep within herself this poison and by keeping her secret multiply the poison’s effect within her: “I was on earth the sole depository of my own secret. I must shrink back before the eye of man lest he should read my father’s guilt in my glazed eyes” (216, emphasis added). Mathilda describes her body as both the container of poison and the cause of the poison she is forced to contain. She takes into herself the poison of her father’s incestuous confession, and, uncannily, her father’s priapic gaze transmogrifies into her blindness, her glazed eye, the eye that Andres suggests is the sign of the liquid gaze in Mathilda, transferring to the daughter the father’s sin. Strikingly, given Mathilda’s narration of her eponymous novella, the implication of her imagined bodily deformity is that her voice becomes an unacceptable voice. Interdiction of her voice results from swallowing her father’s

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sin. She says of her body and voice, “So horrible to my own thoughts did this form, this voice, and all this wretched self appear; for had it not been the source of guilt that wants a name?” (239). Mathilda interprets her father’s speaking his incestuous wish as an act which causes her voice to be ruined. Just as his desirous gaze at her body causes her eyes to “glaze,” to become blind with tears, so also his speaking his desire causes her to become mute, or deforms her voice. His confession of desire for her is dramatized as that act which renders Mathilda silent—a complicated silence to be sure, broken by the very text that calls attention to that silence. Mathilda’s voice, ironically, is interdicted in this text, which not only bears her name but is also narrated by her. Mary Shelley’s use of the posthumous voice crucially shapes Mathilda, insofar as her allusions to Lethe combine forgetfulness with a proleptic, or precocious, posthumousness. Only the narrator’s unstated but demonstrated ability to speak across the boundary of her death rhetorically enables us to read Mathilda after the father’s fall into incestuous desire has vitiated the daughter’s living voice. Mathilda’s dramatic deferral of the revelation of her text, the decision that grants the novella its uncanny posthumous voice, contains her voice until after her body has been vitiated through death. The voice is read only after the body has been buried, elided, an originary scene of the trope of the posthumous voice, with all its Lethean echoes. The purgatory that once held Mathilda’s narrative in Shelley’s first draft of her novella becomes the sustained space of a death metaphorizing the impossibility of the daughter’s resolution of the incest trauma. For it is precisely at those moments when Mathilda most clearly remembers her father’s incestuous desire that she most deeply blames herself for causing this desire. Every time Mathilda approaches remembering her father’s lust for her, she drinks again from the waters of Lethe and forgets his responsibility in the matter. Perhaps the daughter, Mathilda, repeatedly forgets the destructive impact of the father’s fall into incestuous desire in order to retain her position as the liminal guardian of innocence, the go-between, the active life of the soul. Her only purchase on innocence, in the sense of not knowing, is in pretending that her father’s attempt at incest did not fundamentally alter her filial role, that rhetoric of public “voice.”

Lethe and the Posthumous Voice Only the dead drink from the waters of Lethe; only the dead may be allowed to forget their sins. Lethe, then, figures centrally in Mathilda precisely because it deploys the trope of the posthumous voice. In this novella, the heroine forgets, or expiates, the sin of incest committed against her by forgetting, or expiating, both her body, with which she dramatically does away, and also her understanding of the father’s culpability. Shelley’s Mathilda is the story of a young girl’s self-willed death: it not only aims toward the death of its heroine but also tropologically deploys the heroine/narrator’s posthumous voice.

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The heroine’s death both saturates and drains the text. Following the father’s explicit announcement of his incestuous desire, the daughter sheds tears that are described as unending. She becomes a sign of Lethe, turned into the river Lethe by the father’s poisoning “liquid eye,” the gaze she wishes could be purified. The father’s culpability is troped as his illicit gaze at the daughter’s body, a gaze Andres calls “petrifying.”50 Mathilda, then, in the patriarchal depiction of hell, evocatively raises the question of whose sins are forgotten when the waters of Lethe are consumed. Dante’s Purgatorio contends that the saved forget their own sins as those sins gradually are washed away through Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which drains down to hell.51 Shelley’s Mathilda instead forgets her father’s sin by assuming it to be her own. She makes of her body a Lethe that contains and, through her death, disposes of the sin of her father, so that he might be saved by her.52 Indeed, her last thoughts as she is dying are that she will rejoin her father (246). While this desire to rejoin her father could be read as proof that she wanted him to incest her, I find the opposite interpretation stronger. Approaching her death, Mathilda imagines that her father’s posthumous eyes should have changed to shine with “the soft lustre of innocent love” (241). The father’s “killing gaze” here is specifically invoked as that which must change.53 The explicit wish to rejoin the father coverts and contains the daughter’s interdicted longing for his purgation. The daughter’s wish that her father purify himself of his sexual desire for her, like her insistence on her own “pure heart,” emphasizes Mary Shelley’s radical revision of the Myrrha myth.54 Mary Shelley makes clear that Mathilda, her Myrrha, wishes for a father who does not desire her, who will “be again a father to [her]” (204).55 She overturns the myth of Myrrha, inasmuch as Mary Shelley’s Myrrha-like Mathilda rejects rather than solicits her father’s advances. The daughter’s forgetfulness of the father’s culpability, then, functions as a trauma response at the same time that it overturns the myth of Myrrha.56 While Shelley alludes to the Greek myth of incest, her deeper engagement is with Dante. She presents the morally marked space indicated by Dante’s Matelda of knowing sin (in the sense of being exposed to sin rather than committing sin). Here, the parallel between the reader and the incested daughter becomes uncomfortably close. For in reading Mathilda, we too are implicated; we “know” the sin. Shelley inscribes the reader’s implicated position to structure her exploration of the daughter’s position as one against whom the sin of incestuous lust is directed. Mathilda’s final reenvisioning of her father as purified of his desire for incest unmistakably engages the trope of the river of Lethe as a cleansing river but makes of Mathilda’s own body that cleansing river. Significantly, Mathilda’s text can be interpreted as a site of purgatory, inasmuch as it exposes and attempts to purge the father’s fall into incestuous desire. Here, the daughter’s text performs and becomes the father’s purgatory. Mathilda’s desire is to rejoin her father only after she, enacting through self-immolation the trope of the river Lethe, has drained away through her sacrificed body—the narrative that figures it—her father’s sin. The

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narrative stands in place of the body. It does not write the body; rather, it comes after the body, performing the trope of Lethe through the linguistic sign of the textual abject.

The Art of Lethe If Mathilda performs a post-traumatic narrative, depicting an aftermath, then it is not surprising that it is a story about forgetting, a text that grapples centrally and dramatically with the threat of silence. Cathy Caruth has theorized a relationship between trauma and forgetting, arguing that a definition of trauma is the forgetting of the traumatic event afterward. Caruth presents the idea of a trauma-induced leave-taking from memory.57 The uncanny forgetfulness that haunts and shapes the text of Mathilda could, then, be read as characteristic of a post-traumatic mind. Shelley’s novella explores the young girl’s obsessive forgetting of the trauma of paternal abuse as she repeatedly conjures up loving images of her father, images manufactured in opposition to the textual facts of his betrayal of her. The waters of Lethe, by the banks of which Dante’s Matelda picks flowers, may be the waters within which Mathilda’s father drowns himself. These waters ultimately transmogrify into the engulfing heath where Mathilda dies (214, 246). The undulant topography of the heath and Mathilda’s suffering, her willingness to be buried in the heath “as waters cover over the sea” (246) clinch the allegorical parallel to Lethe as the novella emphasizes the literal and metaphorical drownings that shape the drama and also inform the rhetoric of Lethe and forgetting that govern the drama. The ability of the daughter to forget her father’s transgressive desire and to say, as she is dying, that “Oedipus is about to die” (176), as if she had been the perpetrator rather than victim of incestuous desire, highlights her radical amnesia. The heath that buries the daughter finally acts in Mathilda as Lethe, for it covers the place where Mathilda believes the sin of incest has located itself: her body. If Lethe functions in Dante to cleanse the saved of their venial sins, in Mathilda the victim’s forgetfulness after surviving trauma cleanses the father by dirtying the daughter. Drawing upon and revising Dante’s notion of Lethe, Mathilda explores the psychic cost of forgetting. Mary Shelley writes her character Mathilda’s willful forgetfulness of her father’s guilt over and against Percy’s Beatrice Cenci’s unremitting memory of incest, revising her husband’s depiction of the narrative consequences of paternal betrayal. Mary Shelley’s novella asks the reader to consider the nature of the difficulties of post-traumatic speaking, for Mathilda is unable to tell her story until she is dead. In Percy Bysshe’s Cenci, by contrast, the raped daughter’s act of parricide speaks loudly. The act of parricide may or may not impugn Beatrice Cenci, may or may not make her guilty of a crime worse than her father’s, but Beatrice Cenci never blames herself for her father’s raping her. In this way, she is the perfect opposite of Mathilda, honest and brutal while Mathilda

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is forgiving and forgetful. Mathilda’s forgetfulness, her thorough involvement with Lethe, demonstrates Mary Shelley’s nuanced depiction of what Caruth defines as the post-traumatic narrative. Rajan importantly describes Mary Shelley’s writing as participatory in a family of texts: Wollstonecraft’s, Godwin’s, and Percy Shelley’s.58 The intertextual relationship between Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, her husband’s translation of Dante, and his drama, The Cenci, frames Mathilda in the uncanny structure of being a response to a third, uncited text. For Mathilda does not explicitly mention The Cenci. Rather, it implicitly responds to Percy Shelley’s text, arguing with his vision of what constitutes bravery. Mathilda contradicts the image of the courageous Beatrice Cenci in Percy Shelley’s play by presenting in her stead the slow, methodical self-mortification of a defeated daughter who has suffered but not committed sin. Mathilda gets her revenge through text, however, a lasting response to betrayal. While Rajan argues that Mathilda is “unreadable,” or bypasses the reader, I interpret this trauma narrative as circling back precisely to recuperate the damaged site of audience.59 Here, audience is cast as a place of damage—that very gaze that observes in the narrator’s “glazed eyes” the father’s guilt of incest. But audience also witnesses the father’s murderous gaze as it is refracted in the daughter’s illicit self-elision. The narrator’s effort to erase her body in Mathilda is paralleled by the narrative’s effort to erase its tracks, to appear as if it evoked no audience when it specifies the role of audience as witness. If the drama of the story, the father’s collapse into incest, is staged off-stage in the father’s letter written after his oral confession, the crypt within a crypt quality of Mathilda derives from the narrative’s strategy of pushing the father’s description of his incestuous urge into a letter that turns out to be effectively posthumous (207–11). Rhetorically poised on the boundary of death, Mathilda’s posthumous confession also writes itself on the margins of authority. Audience is addressed as always already belated, too late to recuperate the daughter’s fate as a living speaker. Significantly, however, in the temporal frame of the text as read object, the audience cannot arrive too late. Rather, the implied reader renovates Mathilda’s position as authoritative speaker, saves her authority. Uncannily, Elizabeth Nitchie played just this role when she brought out the manuscript by editing it for publication, performing that act at which Godwin failed. Mathilda, explicitly posed as a private text, is also privative, a narrative that deprives its heroine/speaker of any redemption except in text. The fabula presents the accomplishment of its narrator’s destruction. Mathilda’s story demonstrates the incested daughter’s defeat, the impossibility of her situation. Contradicting itself, the novella also pushes the scene of redemption to the meta-textual level of the belated reader’s encounter with the text. Ambivalence has been read in the incest plot of Shelley’s text, yet unlike the reading offered by Audra Dibert Himes, for example, I interpret Mathilda’s internal contradictions as a tactic of rhetoric, as not at all a manifestation of the character Mathilda’s ambivalent desire, but rather as Shelley’s tactic of revealing the father’s guilt without stating it. Such textual

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complicity invokes the reader as the third party inscribed as interpreter of the enigmatic form. It is not the incested daughter who desires, but the reader who wants to decode the story; desire, in this encryption of guilt, becomes the mechanism of reading. Mathilda portrays the father’s guilt as resulting in the daughter’s untenable narrative position, her inability to speak. Shelley stages the fracture within memory that might occur after a betrayal by depicting a fracture in her novella, a frame in which the betrayed daughter voices her forgiveness and her continued filial devotion to the father even as the drama of the text reveals that the implications of his incest are unforgivable, troping an immersion in Lethe as the daughter’s mental suicide engendered by forgetting the father’s guilt. I differ from Himes, then, in that I do not read the character Mathilda as ambivalent. On the contrary, I read the text Mathilda as divided across the rhetorical edge of the narrator’s death, and amnesia, a rhetorical device deployed to pull the reader into the text’s drama and into its trauma to encode in rhetoric traumatic amnesia after incest. Though Mathilda’s death occurs before the staging of the narration, her effort to forgive the father is written out, exposed, in this toomuch-protesting epistle, while a condemning of the father evinces in the novella’s rigorous revelation of the unforgivable results of his incestuous passion. The fissure between Mathilda’s internal narrative, a make-believe story that she tells herself when she says that her father is a good father, and the narrative of the text of Mathilda, which portrays the same father as a man so vicious he does not even get a name, tears the novella Mathilda into two parts: the text that discourses with Dante and Percy Shelley and the narrative that makes its telos its own disappearance. This split between Mathilda’s abject storyline, a tale of its heroine’s self-effacement, and the novella’s polished, densely allusive surface is revealed through the heroine’s efforts to die, a goal she achieves precisely through interaction with Dante’s paradigm, from exposure while imagining herself as if she were Dante’s Matelda gathering flowers.60

An Innocent Death Mathilda’s death links Mathilda’s posthumous persistence to Mary Shelley’s allusions to Dante’s Matelda and also to Percy Shelley’s translation of Dante.61 Mathilda gestures to these other texts in part to signify its uncanny persistence as a text, its ability to survive its own pose of invisibility. Not only does Mathilda summon Dante’s Lethe as an active force in its drama, but Mathilda also describes her story as “a sacred horror” (175), designating it a secular relic. This sacrificed daughter’s story garners reliquary aspects, culminating in the daughter’s text’s survival, a survival uncannily written into the novella. Mathilda’s eponymous narrator’s posthumous voice, its status of coming after death, dramatizes not only the impossibility of Mathilda’s survival after learning of

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her father’s desire for incest with her but also the rhetorical challenges of her attempt to confess for him, to incorporate his confession into her voice. Mathilda, by deploying a posthumous voice, circles back on itself to demonstrate the labyrinth of the daughter’s effort to escape the impact of incest. Mathilda subverts the patriarchal ideal of a good daughter through the very rhetoric of internal contradiction that allows Mathilda’s self-sacrifice to be self-written. By both staging a narrator’s death before her text and also invoking literary fathers, Mathilda puts the male writers referenced in the place of the dead, calling upon them to authorize the text, but it also puts Mathilda herself in the place of the dead, displacing the male authors from their canonical perch by insisting that Mathilda’s authority overrides the interruptions of quotes from and moments of deference to male authors, real and fictional. The trope of the posthumous voice here subverts prosopopeia; it ironizes the premise of feminine submission by inserting a feminine narrator into the dual role of orator and deceased, justifying her authority in the turning of prosopopeia to privative self-elegy.62 Recall that Mathilda dies from the after-effects of gathering visionary flowers: “This night hurried on the last scene of my tragedy,” she reveals (242), alluding to the night she spent on the heath, a reverie of gathering flowers to present to her father. Here, Mathilda goes into the pastoral scene for recuperation and instead is killed by the pastoral, inverting traditional elegy. Not only does her death invoke the feminine speaker’s disinheritance of the privileged topos of male elegy, but also Mathilda’s forgetfulness, her loss of herself in reverie, brings the trope of Lethe, a mechanism for forgetting, not remembrance, crucially into play in Shelley’s novella. Forgetfulness kills Mathilda, inasmuch as her exposure while imagining she picks flowers for her father causes her final illness. The river Lethe, then, runs through the landscape of Mathilda, not only surfacing at Mathilda’s close but also influencing the novella’s governing trope of posthumous speech, which lodges memory in the space of death. Mary Shelley’s conversation with Dante’s and Percy Shelley’s texts makes clear that she recognizes a threat to women who gather the visionary flowers of language.63 Although her encounter with literal and literary fathers may prove lethal to Mary Shelley’s heroine, however, it does not, as it were, prove fatal to Mary Shelley’s Mathilda. Extending Rajan’s conceptualization of Mathilda as a lyric novella, I suggest that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda be read as a lyric self-elegy.

Notes 1

See Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 43–67. While I largely agree with Rajan’s insightful reading of Mathilda, I explore the possibility that the novella’s abjection might be read as a purposeful tactic of its author, a rhetorical maneuver that

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eschews narrative, perhaps in order to imply that narrative works with the very paternal forces that Shelley’s novella of paternal incest attempts to ravel. 2 Mary Shelley, Mathilda, The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 176. 3 Slavoj Zizek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’: Or, the Invisible Master,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salacl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 90–126; Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed. (1992; New York: Routledge, 2001) 1–2, 116–19. 4 Sophia Andres, “Narrative Challenges to Visual, Gendered Boundaries: Mary Shelley and Henry Fuseli,” Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (Fall 2001): 258. 5 See Andres, 257–9; Diana Edelman-Young, “Kingdom of Shadows: Intimations of Desire in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 120–23. Both Andres and Edelman-Young offer useful summaries of Mathilda’s brief interpretive history, whose biographical and psychoanalytical foci their own essays attempt to move beyond. 6 Edelman-Young, 122. 7 See Balachandra Rajan, “‘Lycidas’: The Shattering of the Leaves,” in Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983) 267–80; Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) 110–40; and Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 12– 13. 8 Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 43. 9 Shelley, Mathilda, 241; Sacks, 145–6. When Dante first sees Matelda, who in some way presides over Eden, he thinks she is a girl in love; for this reason, Poggioli connects Matelda with the pastorela. In Dante’s Purgatorio, Matelda’s role as the one who “baptizes” souls after Lethe speaks to the ambiguity of Mathilda’s role in Mary Shelley’s novella. Dante places Matelda as a foil to Beatrice, perhaps suggesting that Matelda deals with “baptizing” souls after Lethe because, unlike Beatrice, she has something she needed to forget. Significantly, Dante realizes that what he thought was Matelda’s sexual love instead is a pure, divine love. This is the very change that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda wishes to effect in her relationship with her father. See Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Jean and Robert Hollander (New York: Anchor, 2004) canto 33, lines 128–35. For a discussion of Shelley’s Mathilda and Dante, see Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: Contribution aux études Shelleyennes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969) 39–47. 10 The first published version of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda was edited by Elizabeth Nitchie and published in Studies in Philology, extra series 3 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1959) 1-80. 11 For a fuller discussion of Shelley’s effort to publish Mathilda, see Elizabeth Nitchie, Mary Shelley: Author of “Frankenstein” (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1953) 211–17. See also Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 48–50; Terence Harpold, “‘Did You Get Mathilda from Papa?’: Seduction Fantasy and the Circulation of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 49–67; and Kerry Ellen McKeever, “Writing and Melancholia: Saving the Self in Mary Shelley’s ‘The Mourner,’ Romanticism on the Net 14 (May 1999) .

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12 Shelley began to write her story of father–daughter incest in a deep depression following the deaths of her small daughter and son. See Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 171–4. 13 Katherine C. Hill-Miller offers that “on one level,” Shelley “wrote about incest because she, like other Romantic writers, was simply intrigued by it.” See “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father–Daughter Relationship (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1995) 102. Not only Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and The Cenci but also Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini and Byron’s Manfred, for example, point to an incest thematic among the younger Romantics, a thematizing of “desire […] antithetical to and subversive of social requirements” shared, as Maggie Kilgore notes, with the Gothic novel. See The Rise of The Gothic Novel (New York: Routledge, 1995) 12. 14 See U.C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979) 88–119. 15 Judges 11.28–40. For a reading of the lament of Jepthah’s daughter, see Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 41–68. 16 De Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 80. On Mathilda as textual transformation of “static” and “silent” representations of women, see Andres, 257–82. 17 For an argument from the field of psychology showing how incest demonstrates an extreme form of patriarchal power, see Judith Lewis Herman, Father–Daughter Incest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981). 18 Mathilda’s narration specifically frames her confession through her death. She strikingly positions both herself and the revelation of her text in the space of death, saying, “In death I unveil the mystery” (176). 19 Rajan comments on the ambivalence of Mathilda’s identity as “Polluted” because of the incest secret. My reading is that the daughter’s abjection holds sway over the narrator, inasmuch as she chooses death. See Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 44. On Mathilda’s ambivalence, see also Audra Dibert Himes, “‘Knew Shame, Knew Desire’: Ambivalence as Structure in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after “Frankenstein,” ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997) 115–29. 20 On the murderous gaze of the father, see Bronfen, “Killing Gazes, Killing in the Gaze: On Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salacl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 59–89. On “the father’s petrifying gaze,” see Andres, 269. 21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, Norton critical edition (New York: Norton, 2002) 138–201. 22 Mathilda is a subtle meditation on the nature of the abuse of power, the very thematic taken up in The Cenci. Indeed, Mathilda invokes the trope of tacit intertextuality when she states that Woodville may write “a poem in which I am to figure” (233), saying this precisely in the space of a text where she is shaping Woodville into a figure of the most useful sort, an audience. 23 On the uncanny psychological accuracy of Shelley’s presentation of the impact of incest, see Hill-Miller, 100-104.

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24 Richard Holmes, Shelley: the Pursuit (New York: Dutton, 1975) 611, 620. After Percy Bysshe’s death, Mary, as editor of her husband’s posthumous work, published a fragment of Percy Shelley’s translation under the title “Matilda Gathering Flowers.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Matilda Gathering Flowers,” Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G.M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970) 727. 25 Mary Shelley also began but did not complete a translation of Alfieri’s Mirra, a play whose obvious thematic resonance with Shelley’s Cenci mirrors Mathilda’s allusion to that ancient Greek myth. Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998) 47, 50; Judith Barbour, “‘The Meaning of the Tree’: The Tale of Mirra in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after “Frankenstein,” ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997) 98–114. 26 Betty T. Bennett, 47–8. 27 Sunstein suggests that Percy felt Mary’s gift for drama would enable her to write the play The Cenci, which he ultimately wrote. It apparently was her favorite of his works. Sunstein, 164. 28 Mary Shelley’s translation appears in the context of Percy Shelley’s complete works and is available in the Julian edition. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (1930; New York: Scribner’s, 1965) 160. See also Mary Shelley’s translation of The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci, ed. Betty T. Bennett, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 10, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1992). 29 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works, 159. 30 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works, 160. 31 Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley (New York: Penguin, 1988), rev. of Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley (1952). 32 Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda.” 33 Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 47. 34 Percy Shelley’s translating of Dante in proximity to Mary Shelley’s writing of Mathilda sets Mathilda’s scene of reading Dante into an intertextual nexus. The fictional daughter’s aborted access to Dante, her reading interdicted by the transgressive father, alters and comments on the scene of the husband’s proleptic taking of Dante in the act of translation. The Italian for “translation” is traduco, literally meaning “to lead something away from itself.” 35 In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the mutilated, mute daughter Lavinia tells of her rape and tongue-removal by indicating Ovid’s Philomel. Shakespeare’s drama sets a precedent for Mary Shelley’s incorporation of the aborted reading of Dante as central to her incest drama. Mathilda’s interrupted reading of Dante is crucial to her story’s revelation, because it stages a scene in which considerations of sin and damnation are put aside by the transgressive father. He cuts off the daughter’s access to Dante’s book in this scene, which uses that book to signify the father’s involvement in sin. See William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2.4, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, 1974) 1034. For the story of Philomel, see Ovid, The Metamorphoses, book 6, lines 440–674, ed. G.P. Gould, trans. Frank Justice Miller, Loeb edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984) 318–35. 36 Dante Alighieri, The Purgatorio, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor, 1957) canto 28, 291.

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37 It has been widely suggested that Woodville is modeled on Percy Shelley. See, for example, Sunstein, 173. Mathilda establishes a structure of postponing a womanauthored text’s publication until a male writer of genius has effectively claimed the text as his own. Woodville’s role of taking, or losing, Mathilda’s confession, and the way that his character’s actions dramatically govern the presentation of the text’s nonpublication, seem to me quite significant. Percy and Woodville act as witnesses in a text and in a marriage. 38 Mathilda claims that she is writing only for Woodville and apologizes to him for writing “as if for strangers.” She projects a wider audience as a prop, a device, upon which to structure the proper writing of her text. She thereby reserves a ghostly space for her future readers, who must inhabit this “as if” subjunctive. Shelley, Mathilda, 176. 39 Keying off the thematic of Woodville’s departure from Mathilda, Ranita Chatterjee argues that Mathilda’s suicidal urge is caused at least as much by Woodville’s abandonment of her as by her father’s sexual interest in her. See “Mathilda: Mary Shelley, William Godwin and the Ideologies of Incest,” Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after “Frankenstein” (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1997) 144. 40 Dante, 282–91. 41 Betty T. Bennett, 47. 42 Percy Shelley, “Matilda Gathering Flowers,” lines 40–49, Shelley, Poetical Works, 727. 43 From more recent work in the psychology of trauma survival, one learns that the recipient of abuse often valorizes the violator. For example, Judith Lewis Herman notes “the paradox observed repeatedly in abused children [that] they cling tenaciously to the very parent who mistreats them.” Trauma and Recovery, 107. Mathilda offers only explicit adoration of her incestuous father, eulogizing him even as she effectively commits suicide in despair over what he has done to her. I argue that the trajectory of Mary Shelley’s novella implicitly condemns the transgressive father. 44 Mathilda’s ambiguous moral status, unsteady because of her repeated selfrecriminations, was commented on by Godwin, who told Maria Gisborne that Mathilda’s “protestations at the beginning of the book, that she has not to reproach herself with any guilt” are insufficient, for “in proceeding” with reading the book, he continues, “one is apt to lose sight of that protestation.” Frederick L. Jones, ed., Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1951) 44. 45 Mathilda describes her desire to write almost as an hedonistic urge to which her fatal bodily condition renders her vulnerable: “Perhaps a history such as mine had better die with me, but a feeling that I cannot define leads me on and I am too weak both in body and mind to resist the slightest impulse. While life was strong within me I thought indeed that there was a sacred horror in my tale that rendered it unfit for utterance, and now about to die I pollute its mystic terrors” (175–6). 46 Julie Carlson, “Fancy’s History,” European Romantic Review 14.2 (2003): 163–76. 47 Palacio, 39–47. 48 Palacio, 133–7; Andres, 268–70, 276. 49 For examples of the seduction argument, see Harpold; Sunstein, 172; and Susan M. Bernardo, “Seductive Confession in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Gender Reconstructions: Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture, ed. Cindy Carlson, Robert L. Mazzola, and Susan M. Bernardo (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 42–52. Kerry Ellen McKeever has argued against Harpold’s interpretation in “Naming the

Lethe’s Shore

50

51 52 53 54

55

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57 58 59 60

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Daughter’s Suffering: Melancholia in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” Essays in Literature 23.2 (1996): 190–205. The text continually gestures to Lethe: “A perpetual stream from my eyes” (203) and even “Let the liquid lustre of thine eyes be quenched” (204) are interpretable as allusions to Lethe. Dante, 282. Betty T. Bennett has noted the secularized “religious loss-redemptive model” of Mathilda. Betty T. Bennett, 53. Bronfen persuasively describes the paternal gaze as murderous in her essay “Killing Gazes, Killing in the Gaze.” Polhemus strikingly claims that Mathilda wishes for her father’s “emasculinization,” as if her desire not to be incested were a desire to take from the father his sexuality—as if the father’s sexuality of necessity and entirely were directed at the daughter. See Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 125–41, esp. 138. It is important here to recall that the story of Myrrha was a myth with which Mary Shelley was obviously familiar following her translation of Alfieri’s Mirra. See Sunstein, 155. For a thorough reading of the relationship between Mathilda and the myth of Myrrha, see Barbour. For the story of Myrrha, see Ovid, book 10, lines 298– 502, pp. 84–99. There are numerous examples of Mathilda’s attitude of forgiveness toward her father. She converts his guilt into her guilt, saying, “Oh Father, accept the pure heart of your unhappy daughter” (217). She doggedly fastens on the prelapsarian time during which she did not know that her father desired her, remembering that “during the first months of my father’s return I had enjoyed ages of pleasure,” the exaggerated time-frame of “ages” here indicating the allusion to an Edenic innocence (244–5). Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 57–8. Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 44. Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda,” 45. Mary Shelley’s Mathilda imitates Dante’s Matelda in the most significant selfdetermined act of her narrative. While her involvement in incest is a passive, victimized interaction, the denouement toward which her narrative drives is that of Mathilda’s death. Her death strikingly conjures up and builds upon the scene of Dante’s Matelda gathering flowers. The difference is that Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, gathering only imagined flowers, flowers she sees in a reverie, stays out in the cold, the exposure killing her. Of her fatal reverie, Mathilda relates, “I pictured to myself a lovely river such as that on whose banks Dante describes Mathilda gathering flowers […] And then I repeated to myself all that lovely passage […] I particularly mark this night for it was that which has hurried on the last scene of my tragedy” (241–2). Richard Holmes states that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Question” also grew out of Shelley’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 28, lines 1–51. Both Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and Percy Shelley’s “The Question,” then, find their “spot whence I had come,” that is, their point of origin, in these lines from Dante. Holmes, 611. Paul de Man has commented on the way in which prosopopeia implicitly silences the living in allowing the dead to speak. In Mathilda, the peculiar twist of the trope of the posthumous voice is to allow the dead to speak in such a way that the text’s narrator

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claims the only posthumous stance. Although his death predates his daughter’s, the father in Mathilda nevertheless plays the role of the living speaker silenced by the inverted language of his dead daughter. See de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 78. 63 Tilottama Rajan comments on how Godwin deprives Wollstonecraft of the “visionary”: “he does not grant her the privilege of prosopopeia or prophecy, and thus enlist the reader into a visionary company.” Mary Shelley may be interpreted as commenting on this textual deprivation, the father taking from the mother the visionary flower. See The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 182.

Chapter 3

Eating Eternally Deeper: The Posthumous Voice in Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë could not have read Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, which remained unpublished until 1959. Yet Brontë deploys a posthumous voice, I suggest, as her interpretation of that Romantic aesthetic in which Shelley worked, echoing Mathilda’s rhetoric of the daughter’s auto-elegiac speech. Notably, Brontë positions herself as a reader of Byron, not only incorporating Byron in the Byronic character of Heathcliff but also positing a complex authority for feminine voice by an implicit allusion to the frontispiece of Morre’s Life of Byron, which Brontë copied out in an image known as “The North Wind.” In her novel’s recurrent reference to the wind off the moor, Brontë translates the pictorial into the linguistic and appropriates this emblem of the north wind, which appears on the front of the famous poet’s biography, for the implicit source of her heroine’s suppressed voice. Cathy’s voice is linked to the wind off the moor, insofar as the heroine claims to need to breathe that wind to survive, a claim that evokes Byron as a source for the suppressed authority of Cathy’s voice. Wuthering Heights dramatizes the problem of the interdiction of feminine authority in contrast to Byron’s male privilege, his direct access to the authority of canonicity, for Brontë’s novel stages the crossing out of the undomestic, or not quotidian, feminine voice—Cathy’s voice. As masculine name, Byron’s canonical status secretly feeds feminine speech, but the figure of the north wind, as Cathy’s voice, is an emblem obviously vulnerable to figural dissolution. In much the same way that Shelley pushes the mark of the voice of the feminine narrator into a theater of near nonexistence in Mathilda, Cathy is placed as the almost voiceless “other” of whose story the text is revelatory. In sounding out the problematic of femininity, voice, and authority in this chapter, I will apply a Bakhtinian model to argue that Brontë’s character Cathy is the authority for the story that is explicitly told by Lockwood and Ellen Dean, I suggest that the connection between Byron and Cathy’s “voice” signifies Cathy, the waif, persisting as voice in text in Wuthering Heights, her presence disrupting narrative even as it suggests narrative. The waif’s voice is the suppressed voice of the other that organizes the novel. Wuthering Heights itself is often interpreted as being directed by a force outside its author’s control. Variously, the novel has been interpreted as a mystical,

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Miltonic, or primitive text. Charlotte Brontë inaugurated this tradition of reading Emily when she framed her sister’s posthumous position by contending that Emily was possessed by a “gift” of which she was not “always master.”1 Along similar lines, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar read Wuthering Heights as a rewriting of Paradise Lost, while J. Hillis Miller claims for the novel an “over-rich” status and Q.D. Leavis interprets it as a work of untutored genius, full of “false” starts.2 David Cecil, who seminally praises the work as unique among Victorian novels, interprets it as a kind of stage for mysticism, again locating its agency in an alterior force, that of mysticism.3 Recent feminist criticism has tended to focus on Cathy’s oppressed position in the novel, reading her as marginalized. Such readings of Cathy as displaced within the novel that she focuses, as not being a “master” of the novel that tells her story, however, perform the compulsion to site the power of Brontë’s novel as inevitably alterior, absurdly beyond its own author.4 I want to suggest that such readings reflect the structure of the novel, which implicitly marks Cathy as the posthumous narrator whose authority drives the explicit narrative of Lockwood. Embedded in the feminist critical argument that notes Cathy’s displacement and marginalization is the gesture of locating the novel in a patriarchal structure that marginalizes women’s writing. This old habit of locating the force of Brontë’s novel outside of Brontë’s control reciprocally turns on readings of Cathy as a character whose voice is marginal. But just as Brontë works through allusion not to dislocate authority from herself but continually to stage the problem of authority, so also is Cathy’s authority posited in terms of allusion, Lockwood’s narrative alluding to Cathy’s suppressed but finally masterful voice. Through the character of Cathy, the novel queries what is at stake in the loss of feminine authority, or voice as mastery. Brontë’s richly allusive novel and its heroine’s character incorporate a complex array of sources as an overarching formal mark, a rhetoric that both formally indicates the problem of woman’s interdicted authority and also mourns that interdiction. Precisely because none of its allusions tie up the novel, Wuthering Heights tropes a formal textualization of mourning’s mode as that which cannot be traced back to one source, one solution. Brontë’s novel formalizes a decentering, centerless feeling, to which critics respond with a variety of interpretations. Wuthering Heights expresses thematically and formally the absence of a safe site of origin to which the heroine, Cathy, may return. I interpret this absence of origin as reflected both in the character’s suppressed voice and in the novel’s insolvably rich allusive code. The novel’s multiple allusions put into text that experience of being unable to reach an originary source, an impasse before origin. Brontë’s array of allusions, a signification of intertextual conversation, prevents return to any one source of origin, a technique I link to the feminine self-elegy, a way of rejecting patriarchy’s claim on the control of origins, dislocating precisely what is perceived as the center and the margin of discourse. Not only is Wuthering Heights haunted by literary fathers, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, it is also haunted structurally: it structurally reproduces haunting. It

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pushes allusiveness until that becomes a form of haunting and of mourning.5 The allusive habit of the novel tropes an overextension and collapse of the symbolic order, or of the paternal metaphor, effecting its control of the way that literary fathers enter Brontë’s text. But the “over-rich” allusive turns also indicate the interdicted feminine narrator’s exclusion from the inheritance of male canonical texts, her exclusion from speaking in that lineage Lockwood easily assumes. A collapse of paternity is focused through Cathy, whose death stands before the text, her inaugurative appearance and disappearance motivating the text. If its allusive tour de force paradoxically creates the illusion that the responsibility for Wuthering Heights lies somehow outside Emily Brontë, the question of who narrates the novel is no less critically fraught. The novel’s quality of being dictated by someone other than its surface narrator derives from a multidirectional allusiveness and also from the implicit role of Cathy as the authority for this tale of her death and posthumous persistence. Posing the problem of posthumous narration, Brontë’s novel puts the explicit narrators— Lockwood and Ellen Dean—in the position of readers interpreting the posthumous Cathy. Lockwood reads Cathy’s posthumous voice by interpreting her cryptic inscriptions in her childhood bedroom at the Heights, signifying Cathy as the ghost narrator of the novel.6 Wuthering Heights’s pervasive sense of being controlled by an outside source, then, turns on its staging of inconclusive living narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, who, like the novel’s tricksy allusive gestures, cannot lead us all the way through the labyrinth. Brontë’s deployment of the disembodied posthumous voice presents its narration as something always already interpreted, in effect previously read. Cathy’s childhood inscriptions, introduced into text by Lockwood, also are the text into which they are read, marking a mise en abyme of interpretation in which the narrator inscribes the position of the reader. In reading Cathy’s inscriptions, Lockwood presents the voice of the waif, interpreting her story and signing it under the code of the masculine narrator, his name covering for the ghostly feminine voice behind the text. Wuthering Heights, then, at once comments on and deploys the narrative technique of a posthumous voice through Cathy’s expiatory death and the recuperation of her voice as the authority of the novel’s text. Just as Brontë’s Miltonic and Biblical allusions lead everywhere and nowhere, in effect subverting the patriarchal texts to which she alludes, so also the authority of Lockwood alludes to Cathy, the waif who appears before him at the novel’s outset and haunts him with her story. There is always a voice behind a voice in Wuthering Heights: it is a novel in which narrative is haunted by narration, haunted by the voice of the other. This very self-interpretive positing of narration is also the crucial gesture of a disembodied posthumous voice. I will argue that Lockwood and Ellen Dean stand in for the reader, interpreting Cathy’s troped posthumous voice. We read Lockwood reading Cathy, “hearing” her posthumous voice.

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The Authority of the Outcast Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphonic narration, I suggest that Cathy, as the embedded voice of the other, is the implicit authority of Wuthering Heights, her ghostly voice “eating deeper eternally,” signifying that that which eats into narrative becomes text. In suggesting that in Wuthering Heights the voice of the Bakhtinian other is Cathy’s disembodied posthumous voice presenting the story of the outcast waif, I focus on Brontë’s manipulation of the terms of femininity and voice, her refusal to consign her heroine’s voice textually to the same fate—to aphasia, burial—that Cathy is given in the novel’s fabula. The allusiveness of the novel at once places authority away from Brontë and demonstrates her masterful command. In a rhetorical parallel, the novel is authorized by Cathy’s posthumous voice, which claims authority by deferral. Wuthering Heights is polyphonic in Bakhtin’s sense of representing what it seems to repress: Cathy’s version of her story. Cathy’s voice persists in Lockwood’s narration if we read that narration according to Bakhtin’s theorization of the author as a scene of drama. Brontë places Cathy as an authority, a speaker cut off and excised, through whom the disembodied posthumous voice guarantees the text. The novel’s first dramatic scene, the scene of the waif’s appearance, is the place where authority in Wuthering Heights is dramatically set. Here, the image of the waif is converted into narrative. J. Hillis Miller hints toward a polyphonic narration when he writes that Wuthering Heights presents a story told “over and over” by a “series of narrators,” indicating the novel’s circular narration and Lockwood’s uncertain hold on his role as narrator.7 Lockwood acts as Cathy’s signatory, coverting under the sign of the male name the text’s feminine and posthumous authority. In Wuthering Heights, the feminine, posthumous voice, the Bakhtinian other, works into the center of the text’s narration precisely through Cathy’s name’s ability to haunt the text, her name’s mark that eats into the text presented under a man’s nominal narration. Here, alterior feminine authority is presented as always already posthumous. Lockwood’s narration derives voice from the conversion of allusion. His presence and Nelly Dean’s presence allude to Cathy’s absence, point to her not being there to tell her own story. But this allusion depends in turn on the spectral pressure of Cathy, the waif, behind the text’s major narrative passages. Cathy’s words “eat Eternally deeper” (10). Indeed, Frank Kermode recognizes that as a child Cathy proleptically inscribes the template of the novel.8 Her original inscriptions eat through Lockwood’s tale, through his horrific dream that guarantees he will write out the details of the story of Cathy’s traumatic and short life and her posthumous persistence. Drawing from Bakhtin’s theorization of “the other’s discourse” that penetrates the telling of a text’s story, I interpret the pivotal scene of the waif Cathy’s confrontation with Lockwood as the inauguration of the novel proper (16–17). Here is the entry to the labyrinth, the scene in which, implicitly, Cathy, as the

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other—the dead, alterior speaker—reenters the room of her inscriptions, pulling in Lockwood to act as signatory for her troped posthumous tale. Strikingly, before his dream of the waif, Lockwood threatens to “set [his] signet” on any creature that attacks him (6). Of course, Cathy’s waif attacks him. He sets his signet on her, signing her story with his name. Cathy appears as a waif at the scene of her childhood inscriptions, and in this opening scene the waif inaugurates her authority, an authority the living child lacked. The waif’s appearance at the novel’s outset breaks the window between the moor and the house; it is that act of violence which allows the encrypted story to be told.9 This engagement of the waif’s posthumous voice locates the novel’s authority. Rather than keeping the waif out of the room of her texts, Lockwood’s dream brings her into that room.10 Lockwood stacks the books against the waif and fights the waif by cutting her wrist against the window glass: he claims to have kept the “fiend” out, but in effect she has come in. Cathy’s waif’s appearance early in Wuthering Heights ruptures and motivates the narrative. Following Bakhtin’s theory that “the other’s discourse gradually, stealthily penetrates the consciousness and the speech of the hero,” I point to Cathy as Lockwood’s other. Her story becomes Lockwood’s task as he translates the waif’s tale, the “other’s discourse,” into public text. Lockwood is male and privileged, Cathy female and dead. Cathy, the heroine, is locked out of discourse, made the other, the term waif signifying “outcast,” a state of perpetual otherness. The troped posthumous authority of the waif steals into Lockwood’s easy access to narration, however, his privileged position as male and moneyed contrasted to her status as feminine and waif.11 Lockwood not only reads Cathy’s writing before he dreams, but his reading of her troped posthumous voice is the narrative’s mechanism. Lockwood is posed in the continual act of reading Cathy’s posthumous voice. In Bakhtinian terms, Cathy is the other, but these roles are also mutable in Brontë’s complex novel: the polyphonic structure of Wuthering Heights contrasts Cathy’s feminine waif to Ellen Dean, emphasizing that what places Cathy outside discourse is not simply her femininity. Instead, it is Cathy’s incompatibility with any domestic scene, with quotidian femininity: incompatibility with that very quotidian that Stuart Curran argues is the center of female Romanticism makes Cathy alterior.12 Lockwood frames the sensible domestic Ellen Dean’s telling of the tale, but, as Kermode points out, the tale is always that which Cathy, as a child, proleptically wrote down in template form by the names Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton (15). Cathy has, as it were, already written the outline of the novel that Ellen Dean and Lockwood read.13 The reader is inscribed in Wuthering Heights by the characters of Ellen Dean and Lockwood, underscoring the novel’s keen sense of the elusiveness of authority. 14 Just as Mary Shelley’s character Mathilda is posed as narrating the text Mathilda that will be given to Woodville, who implicitly brings it out, Cathy directs Wuthering Heights to audience through Lockwood, who is inscribed as performing audience.15 Cathy’s alterior femininity doomed her in life, and in death

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her posthumous narration is occulted behind Lockwood’s name; but also, reciprocally, Cathy’s alterior status makes her the locus of desire—not only Heathcliff’s and Linton’s sexual desire, but also Lockwood’s and the reader’s desire. The reader’s desire is to get the story from the “other,” the outcast whose very outcast status makes her the guardian of the story that ravels the domestic order. Unlike Nelly Dean’s sensible gossip, Cathy’s unsilenced, unstill impetus works through the novel’s second half to resist closure, resisting clean, finished readings of Wuthering Heights. The conversion of allusion into narrative structures the text of this feminine self-elegy, which works as a formal gesture of allusiveness, as if performed only for a male audience, a Woodville or a Lockwood. Forefronting the privilege of male audience, the disembodied posthumous voice posits a feminine authority that inscribes its control of male audience. Reading Brontë’s novel through the structure of apprenticeship, the Bakhtinian model allows us to interpret it as structured around the trauma of Cathy’s voice’s foundational interdiction. Indeed, Lockwood’s reading of that elided voice enunciates the persistence of the voice of the other in Wuthering Heights.16 For Cathy’s struggle to speak legitimately while alive is coded into the troped posthumous voice, a rhetoric that points to the impossible situation of the feminine speaker who chooses a topos outside the quotidian domestic realm so ably guarded by Ellen Dean. But if the novel’s drama buries Cathy’s body, its narration calls up the waif’s voice, that is, calls Cathy’s voice from alterity into authority: this posthumous “speaker” carries the authority of inscription. The novel we read alludes to—is authorized by—the bedroom text that the waif returns to and claims.

Eating Deeper Following Kermode’s argument that Cathy has already written the novel’s fabula as a child, one notes the effect of inscription in Wuthering Heights, the capacity of words to “eat deeper” in Brontë’s novel. The inscription above the lintel and the inscription in the bed control the novel, giving Wuthering Heights the sense of already having been written before it was written. The inscription of a name, Earnshaw, over the door predicts who will own the house, and the inscription of names in a bed predicts who will be born and who will vanish, with Heathcliff the link whose name is erased without surviving progeny. An appetitive quality attends inscribed words in Wuthering Heights: they eat deeper, making themselves manifest, as the inscribed text is privileged over the spoken. Cathy’s writing in her childhood books and her inscription of the names eat their way into the novel. The words that eat deeper in Wuthering Heights parallel the violence that the drama enacts upon the body of its heroine. Cathy’s body is violently consumed, eaten into text—her foot bloodied by Skulker, her mind destroyed by pregnancy, even her waif form sliced at the wrist. Cathy is swallowed into words, the violence of text.

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She becomes a disembodied voice as the waif turns figure into trope, the image of the waif consumed into the linguistic energy of Brontë’s text. The novel, then, moves from epitaph and image to elegy, from what is carved or pictured to what is written. It moves from the first appearance of the waif—who is introduced as a carver of names—to the last scene of Cathy’s unquiet grave, with its carved name already eroding (256). To Kermode’s crucial insight that Cathy’s childhood writing proleptically inscribes the drama of Wuthering Heights, I would add that the scene in which Cathy’s ghost appears stages the posthumous Cathy supervising the memorial scene of the child Cathy inscribing her names into the chamber (15–16).17 It is the camera obscura, the small dark room where the waif begins the text’s haunting, this room where the moor enters the house.18 The waif in the novel’s inaugural scene is posited as a vanishing point: her appearance and disappearance organize Wuthering Heights’s drama. The question of what it means for the waif to be “let in” to the room of her inscriptions, to repossess her writing, turns on the role of confinement in Wuthering Heights. Her itinerary through various confining textual rooms elucidates a struggle for authority—not Brontë’s struggle for authority, but her splendid tropological display of the haunted nature of feminine authority as such. When Lockwood reads Cathy’s “select library,” which has been used for a “not altogether legitimate purpose” (that is, it has been used as a sort of personal journal), the speaker whom the scene conjures has a troubled authority. The child Cathy writes as an aggrieved prisoner of sorts, and the belated context of her gaining authority—we assume that no one outside the family has read the “diary” until Lockwood does twenty-five years after its inscription—speaks to her status as one imprisoned, confined, abject. Yet in this scene and in its companion scene of the ghost’s arrival, the child Cathy, as writer and as waif, has authority and is Lockwood’s master, initiating him into the mode of the pastoral elegy, into the otium he takes up for the year of the tale’s telling. That Cathy is introduced to the novel as a master, not a novice, establishes Brontë’s alteration of the pastoral convention. Cathy is the master who has died before the novel begins, and her status as the master is deftly shown by Brontë’s introduction of her as a speaker to whom Lockwood listens enthralled—a powerful author, a diarist who engenders dreams that conjure a ghost. As both ghost and diarist, Cathy’s language is her power. In these two early scenes, Cathy is presented not as an initiate but as a verbal master by whom Lockwood is enthralled, almost as if her posthumous voice had an Orphic power; Cathy’s dismemberment by death and injury by Lockwood himself does not quiet his need to hear her story, nor does it quiet her virtuosic ability to harness a posthumous voice. Cathy’s authority is also presented as problematic, however, her status as a master undercut by the fact that her death is nearly a quarter-century old when the story begins. In life, Cathy was recognized as anything but a master (although the gift the child Cathy asked for was a whip).19 At

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best, the living Cathy’s power—her ability to win the wealthy Edgar Linton—is ascribed to her having the bonniest eye in the neighborhood. The mastery of Cathy’s language, then, is only established in these opening scenes, in which Lockwood plays audience to her verbal mastery in her diary and her waif’s speech. The problem of Cathy’s verbal mastery is located in the daughter-as-speaker’s physical constriction, a constriction not having to do with bodilessness but, on the contrary, with control, containment, and constriction of that body that reifies femininity. It is against this reification that Brontë codes her feminine speaker, Cathy, a disembodied self-elegist. Indeed, while it has been argued that Cathy is displaced in Brontë’s novel, a stricter interpretation of Cathy’s itinerary is that she is confined in the novel.20 As Lyn Pykett notes, the child Cathy is confined as punishment, and this confinement is the setting for her childhood writing. Cathy is confined in sickbed while she courts her husband and confined in childbed when she dies. Confinement underwrites the novel: while the waif opens the novel by insisting “Let me in,” the living Cathy’s cry would surely have been “Let me out.” Why, then, does the waif return to be let in if Cathy’s tragedy in life was an excess of confinement? Following a Bakhtinian reading of the novel, I posit that the waif asks to be let in to the scene of her writing in order to gain authority over her childhood inscriptions. She returns to authorize her story, to enter her already written text as its author. This entry of the waif, the dispossessed daughter-as-speaker who returns, displays a terror of authority as such, of the confining power of text. The scene of the waif reclaiming her childhood inscriptions is the scene of the novel itself. It stages the drama of authority, for the waif returns not simply to mourn her damaged self. She returns to the site of what Kermode rightly calls the novel’s template to release the novel as auto-elegiac performance. The novel follows only from this inaugural scene of the waif’s appearance. The scene of the waif’s interruption of Lockwood’s reading her story exposes an author’s confinement in text, commenting not simply on feminine voice but on textual voice per se while also drawing links between the problem of feminine voice as privative and the problem of text as privative—as Socrates complains in Phaedrus, you cannot ask a written text a question, and you cannot ask it to explain itself.21 Text, here, is presented as a feminine mode of dialogic engagement, for it figures a way out of the confinement of the feminine, that constrained, restrained body. But inscription confines voice. It is a confining medium, framing a scene, keeping from view other scenes, other perspectives. Brontë codifies the feminine voice as the voice of text, as that which sets in motion unanswered questions. She frames her novel as dialogue scenes, a pastoral supplementing the ideal male code of verbal mastery with an alterior feminine code of a written rhetoric that persists masterfully in the place of its own suppression.22

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The Image of the Waif Brontë’s waif returns, then, not to yield the text, but to guard it. Unlike the living Cathy, who unwisely confesses herself to Nelly, Cathy’s waif encrypts her confession, bringing privative writing to the high-water mark of Wuthering Heights. Here is the paradoxical remark of Wuthering Heights: the waif not only releases herself through the story but also sustains herself through that dramatic interruption of revelation that her appearance performs at the novel’s outset. Dramatically, the waif prevents Lockwood reading further, but audience, or Lockwood, is also imprisoned by the story—Lockwood imprisoned in the haunted room and then in a sickness, an enforced otium, while hearing Ellen Dean tell the tale. The waif at once causes Lockwood’s readerly curiosity and repeals his access. This interrupting waif translates as image the uncanny aesthetic property of the photograph, what Roland Barthes calls its link with death.23 Rather than drawing Nancy Armstrong’s conclusion that photography influences Wuthering Heights because Brontë draws from the same north country mythology (and its effacement by the burgeoning British empire) as kitsch nineteenth-century photographs like the Colleen Bawm, I suggest that Brontë’s novel pushes the aesthetic opportunities of the photograph to produce the structure of unresolvability that guides her novel.24 She uses the unknowability of the story behind any photographic image to mark her novel with a phantasmagoric, never rerealized image of the waif. Strikingly, Brontë’s waif veers from the stereotype to which Armstrong alerts us— Brontë’s waif is not a winsome pretty girl but a fierce clawing creature whose image haunts the span of the novel in which she appears in much the same way that Barthes theorizes that the photograph haunts the living subject with the image of his death. This aspect of the nascent art of the photograph reflected in Brontë’s use of the waif’s image is a skillful working of the aesthetic possibilities of the materials of her culture.25 Brontë realizes the negative capability of seeing Cathy and Heathcliff and their love, strongly suggested to persist past death, in the aesthetic of revenance that is the photograph’s, the always posthumous quality of the photograph.26 Brontë’s novel taps the photograph’s aesthetic, posing mourning as a reaction to the formal violence embedded in the photograph’s shifting of the temporality of perception. If Armstrong links Brontë’s novel with the early photograph, making a persuasive case that Brontë writes with an awareness of the photographic image of the waif as an already nostalgic reference point, my argument is aligned with Armstrong’s cultural studies interpretation, but I wish to emphasize Brontë’s development of a rhetorical tactic that evokes the photograph as aesthetic form rather than content. The nineteenth-century photograph Colleen Bawm sentimentalizes the typology of the wild young girl whom Brontë resists sentimentalizing ironically by inscribing into her novel the implicit uncanniness of the photograph as an aesthetic event.27 Brontë rebukes the sentimental possibilities of her story by subversively tapping the very medium that codifies nostalgia: the

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photograph. She resists a nostalgic viewpoint, evoking the photograph as reference point for the aesthetic mode that shatters nostalgia by revealing the death behind nostalgic consolation. As a photographic image persists as image and resists narrative completion, maintaining itself as a stroke of apprehension, the waif appears as a temporal disjunction. If Wuthering Heights may be placed where Armstrong places it, as a requiem for a vanishing culture, it borrows and alters that tool of cultural hegemony, the photograph, which Armstrong notes effects the “effacement of indigenous cultures,” an effacement “that occurs when the simulation cannot be distinguished from the authentic object.” But Brontë also questions precisely this concept of the “authentic object.”28 For inasmuch as we are never permitted entry into the “authentic object” of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love, Brontë formalizes a resistance to nostalgia, translating the aesthetic possibilities of the photograph—its ability, in one stroke, to suggest narrative and withhold narrative completion—into the inscription of a waif who appears at the novel’s outset like an image before an aperture that rapidly shuts. What Armstrong refers to as the “authentic object,” I want to point out, aligns with that notion of an embodied femininity that controls theories of une écriture féminine; I suggest that this problem of an authentic, a “real” body, is precisely the mark of the feminine that Brontë’s novel troubles, and troubles in part by using the waif’s image—bodiless body—as a sort of photographic palimpsest across text.29 Like a photograph, the image of Brontë’s waif ruptures the temporal frame of the narrative into which it is set, confusing twenty years ago with now, rupturing the temporal frame.30 The waif’s station in the frame of the window codes image in text as always already fabricated. Resisting the impulse to align “Emily Brontë” with the “authentic object,” a mythic mysterious virtuosity, I locate the power of the waif’s image as Brontë’s staging of artifice, as that which rejects the sentimentality of the artifact and rejects the feminine body as an artifact. The waif disturbs the gaze of the male speaker but also supplies our appetite for a novel that resists nostalgic exhaustion.

A Poetics of Privation If, as I have argued, the role of the waif’s image at the novel’s outset is to prevent a clear, direct revelation of the waif’s story, or of Cathy’s history, I want to connect the role of privative writing—related to what Tilottama Rajan terms textual abjection—to the problem of presenting femininity in discourse.31 Brontë’s image of the waif seems to me an apt marker for resistance to revelation. (The privative quality of Brontë’s novel can hardly be overemphasized. Its aesthetic is a mode violent to direct confession.) The room that Cathy-as-waif haunts, the conduit to the moor, stages a crisis of feminine topos. For if the story Cathy wrote is safe in the room Heathcliff guards, it is also locked in that room, a story imprisoned in the

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space of masculine guardianship until the waif riskily returns to seize the story, to launch the drama of Wuthering Heights. In its turn, the story’s being told— Lockwood’s eliciting it from Nelly Dean—confines the waif again, burying her at its conclusion.32 Voicelessness and confinement, then, interact in Wuthering Heights to structure the novel’s solution of posing the first Cathy as an implicit posthumous narrator. A series of confinements structures the novel as it circles into that pivotal moment when Cathy loses her voice in the aphasia of childbed mortality.33 By posing herself as able to resist the confinement of burial, the waif reclaims the text of her room within a room, and Cathy’s confinements in the rooms of childhood, childbed, and burial are recuperated by her posthumous appearance at the novel’s outset. But the fabula reburies the waif, reasserting the terms of confinement. In Brontë’s novel, the interdiction of feminine voice is dramatized as enforcing selfelegy. In releasing her story, the waif also protectively seals its mysteriousness, interrupting Lockwood’s reading. Cathy’s wish to return to her childhood bed is not, then, simply a wish to claim a scene of her own authority, but specifically a desire to encounter and manipulate the terms of confinement, which contrapuntally define feminine voice in Wuthering Heights. The waif comes to reclaim that language written by Cathy on top of and in contrast to the words of textual fathers, published male authors. The books in Cathy’s childhood bed may well be patriarchal texts, but they have Cathy’s writing all over them. Lockwood relates (16): Catherine’s library was select and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for legitimate purpose; scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen and ink commentary, covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left.

Cathy claims the books for her own purposes, writing in them in clear transgression of their male authority. Lockwood imposes the interpretation that the girl’s writings are “diaries” (16).34 I suggest instead that the books showcase Cathy’s habit of linguistic transgression, or conversion, a tactic that is the engine of Wuthering Heights. Into these published books Cathy places her writing, which she privileges over the men’s already published, printed words. Her writing in the books pulls the wildness of the moor into the house—describing the moor, the children’s romp on the moor, in the very place of male authority, the books of male authors. While it has frequently been argued that Cathy’s feminine text, her writing, is “marginalized” in Wuthering Heights, I wish to point to the complex interaction between confinement and the release of text. For to call Cathy’s writing marginal misses out on the way that her writing centers the novel—a Bakhtinian other’s or outcast’s voice that works its way into the center.

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True, the feminine text, Cathy’s writing, is confined as a hand-written, unpublished “secret” document and the feminine ghost marginalized as a waif, etymologically an outcast, but the terms are also importantly reversed. The child Cathy’s writing is visualized as enclosing male-authored texts—not marginal to them but containing the male-authored words—while the ghost Cathy’s arrival also confines Lockwood in a prolonged retreat, that otium necessary for the hearing of her story. The ghost traps the reader, Lockwood, in her story. Troping the feminine body as that which is confined, the novel also imposes on its inscribed-as-male reader a kind of confinement, a series of enclosing strategies. Reading, we are made to feel the enclosure that presses the child Cathy and the waif Cathy into the very strategy of posthumous performance that turns the terms of confinement onto the audience, releasing the waif’s story by shifting the burden of confinement onto the audience. When Cathy writes about her and Heathcliff’s caper on the moor, using maleauthored books as if they were blank pages, Brontë troubles the contiguity of male authors with her feminine character-as-writer. Although Lockwood states that Cathy’s writing in the books has not been “legitimate,” meaning to ally her writing with illegitimate progeny (like Heathcliff, perhaps), Cathy’s use of the books has been etymologically legitimate: she writes in them. Cathy engages language in the name of these textual fathers by enclosing masculine language with her own words. She wishes to return to this scene of a female authority that writes over male authority both as a dying woman and as a dead waif. Indeed, this return is achieved textually by Brontë’s use of the posthumous voice as a metaphor for the inscription of text. Cathy’s writing is not marginal but rather enclosing, making of textual inscription a gesture that invokes an extraordinary control of audience, invokes Lockwood and Ellen Dean caught up in interpreting the text of the inscription, the import of the waif’s appearance, and the paraphernalia that persists in the wake of Cathy’s premature death. The figure of the waif standing before her text marks a limit of figuration, as figure becomes text. The waif’s textual impetus is to push away from the body of figuration and into trope—to be transfigured into the metaphor of voice (textual voice always already posthumous, the metaphor of text). Brontë, through the presentation of Cathy’s body, takes up and then rejects various figures of Victorian stereotypes of feminine voicelessness and silence. Cathy enacts the beautiful dead woman, as Ellen Dean says of Cathy’s corpse: “No angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared; and I partook of the infinite calm in which she lay […] while I gazed on that image of divine rest” (127). Ellen Dean here swallows, partakes of, the beauty of Cathy’s dead body, and the novel itself swallows the image of the waif, using the waif’s image to establish its aesthetic mode.35 But this stereotypical figure, the beautiful feminine corpse, cedes to the innovative trope of the disembodied posthumous voice in the novel. The feminine body is swallowed into the feminine gaze, Ellen Dean taking in Cathy and producing a version of her story. Ellen Dean, not Linton or Heathcliff, “partakes” of the mark of the

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posthumous feminine and converts this mark into text. For the beautiful corpse of Cathy dissolves into the trope of posthumous inscription that authorizes the novel. The figure of Cathy is violently atomized by Brontë’s script and becomes a trope by which voice, disembodied, reclaims text. Here is Brontë’s articulation of the pressure of authority. Cathy, appearing as a waif, figures the shift of the author as such into the disembodied gesture of the text, as momentum. As if predicting Derrida’s theorization of the author’s death as the boundary of text, Brontë writes authority itself as a form of posthumousness. The scene in which the waif attempts to enter the room that contains her writing also importantly specifies and clarifies a problem of feminine narrative. It stages the author proper returning to the frame or outline of her story and fighting to govern that narrative even though the feminine name has always already been elided from authority. The waif, Cathy, who appears at Lockwood’s window as the novel begins, inaugurates the novel by staging the scene of the author visiting her written text. Through the appearance of the ghost Cathy, who knows Wuthering Heights’s tale and can tell it, Cathy signifies that she will secret the narrative under the sign of Lockwood’s masculine name, just as she secrets her childhood inscriptions into books that at first glance appear to have contained only texts published by men. The ghost who begins Brontë’s novel transforms the scene of authority, establishing narrative momentum as a kind of haunting. The ghost, Cathy, slips away, but the power of her presentation to Lockwood puts into play the possession that drives Lockwood’s narration, that on which his “signet” is set, under cover of which Cathy tells her story.

Child’s Play The waif in Wuthering Heights presents the very figure of the author—of an author as such—rising up from her written work as if conjured. The ghost child Cathy is a waif, an outcast, and it is with the scene of this outcast’s incomplete homecoming that Brontë graphically figures the threatening relationship between text and reader that motivates this trope of the posthumous voice. 36 The waif Cathy returns because Lockwood has read her text. This scene shows the terror of the answered desire to know the authority of a text and dramatizes the mechanism of the trope of the posthumous voice. Just as Kermode suggests, the texts already written by the child Cathy define the story of Wuthering Heights. The authority of the novel, however, is the waif who appears at the window and interrupts the reading of those very originary texts the child had written. The ghost-child appears at once to release her text and to interrupt its reading, perhaps even to warn against the desire to interpret. The ghost of the child Cathy is not called upon by Lockwood to substantiate the authority of the tale he is about to tell, as would be the case were Lockwood making a gesture of prosopopeia. Rather, the girl ghost comes of her own accord. Notably, she comes not to illuminate or to elucidate her writing but to

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occlude the scene of that writing, to make it almost unbearably privative, to stop the reader at the entrance. The scene of the waif’s return differs, then, from classical prosopopeia. Inasmuch as the waif Cathy is that dead speaker who controls the living speaker, Lockwood, it is a figure of an inverse prosopopeia. The ghost Cathy returns because Lockwood has read her texts, her names proleptically inscribing the novel, and not because he has asked for her to return. The ghost borrows Lockwood’s masculine sign, his name, to cover her narration but also she insists on entering the house of the patronym, and her childish strength is formidable. Indeed, it is clear that the ghost does enter the house, does reenter the room of its own writing, a speech of the dead enforced on the living. Wuthering Heights, then, turns abruptly from the possibilities of redemption afforded by finely structured patriarchal hells, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Instead, the novel describes the impossibilities of a young woman’s life couched in the rhetorical feint of a troped posthumous voice, a gesture that implies the heroine’s voice’s previous interdiction. Like Dickinson’s late-nineteenth-century dead child speakers, Brontë’s Cathy’s power is stymied, but her posthumous authority, launched by her possession of Lockwood, guides the novel in which she appears. As the pressure behind Lockwood’s explicit narration, the ghost who enters Lockwood’s dreaming mind in turn controls Lockwood’s performance of the role of reader. Reading Wuthering Heights is always a belated experience, because the novel stages Lockwood and Nelly Dean already reading Cathy’s posthumous voice, the novel using this reading of the posthumous voice as a tool for altering interpretation of feminine text. Explicitly, Cathy’s life and death seem unredeemed, but the text generated by the fuguelike shifting of Cathy’s names presents a redemption precisely through that language which evokes purgatory— the technique of the trope of the posthumous voice. Cathy, who dies with childbed’s taint, hardly reappears as a saint.37 Instead, in Wuthering Heights, the confining of Cathy’s body occurs together with a persistent recuperation of her story, framed by Cathy’s posthumous voice as that for which Lockwood and Nelly Dean encode audience. The novel accepts a confinement of Cathy’s body in burial only to resist the closure of that burial, to circle back to the encrypted locus of her authority. As I have suggested, Brontë’s waif returns not to yield her story’s text but rather to safeguard it—but the waif releases herself through the story, the dramatic interruption of which her appearance performs at the novel’s outset. The waif stands before the scene of authority she cannot enter except by the feint of presenting feminine voice as an always already read construct of submission. The waif’s performance of her own outcast status, a graphic scene, motivates the novel, which then produces the waif’s only home: that text in which feminine authority in fact is granted central place, undoing the submission of feminine silence by placing the drama of feminine voice’s elision in the theater of male elegy.

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Epitaph into Elegy If the inscription in the bed matches the inscription above the door in its power to determine, or close, lives—in its epitaphic power—the writing of the child Cathy gestures instead in the direction of elegy, the use of elegiac writing to keep open a life’s story, to keep going the discourse of loss—elegy as a rhetoric commemorating and resisting the finality of an ended life. In her childhood writings, Cathy is already mourning the confinement that works to destroy her; the child Cathy’s writing is a proleptic self-elegy for the “hearty lass” on the moor. Written across other writing, Cathy’s childhood inscription at once covers the other’s writing and adds to it, forming a metonymic scene of elegy, the loss of the original subsumed into the mourning for the original. Cathy’s troped posthumous authority works through the surface narrator, Lockwood, making metaphysical the physical template of her childhood writing in the books. In the terms of narratology, one would say that Cathy focalizes the novel from beyond the grave.38 I have argued, however, that in the pivotal scene of Cathy’s ghostly appearance before Lockwood, Cathy as ghost authorizes the inscription of Wuthering Heights. Here, Brontë’s risk with trope, with the metaphor of Cathy as the dead inscriber of the novel, pushes to its edge the work of figuration. The moor’s wind works as a figure resistant to figuration, for if the moor and the space of death merge in Cathy’s description of death’s space as “incomparably beyond,” both spaces signifying limitlessness, or what Beatrice Guenther nicely calls the “limits of mimesis,” they also, as I have shown, signify the life of Byron, the famous name of the male writer.39 Brontë’s interest in the wind off the moor connects to her copying out the frontispiece from Morre’s Life of Byron, “The North Wind.”40 In the uncanny connection between Cathy’s voice and the wind off the moor, Brontë claims the male poet’s scene of success—that his life becomes biography—and recopies it, making the north wind a source of voice that she uses in Wuthering Heights. The cold wind off the moor feeds Cathy authority, feeds her voice as the authority that enters through the open conduit of the bedroom at the Heights. The novel works through the trope of Cathy’s voice, sustaining a site of resistance to paternity, resisting the fixing of proper name in favor of the indeterminacy of metaphor. Resisting the completed confession, the solved mystery as analog to the patronym, the novel favors the sustained haunting presence of the waif’s image as figuration that constantly dissolves into trope as verbal momentum.41 The room containing the childhood inscriptions, then, unstably figures the site of the girl’s resistance to the father’s control of naming. I say “unstably” because the room cannot be counted on to keep out the moor and also cannot be counted on to protect the child, to keep her from entering the net of demands placed over her as wife. Vulnerable to entry, the bedroom at the Heights cannot resist the waif’s presence as dissolution, the dream of the waif effecting a dissolution of figuration, making the wind the complex figural sign of Cathy’s posthumous voice. This

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significant but always unfigured wind is depicted as the force that feeds Cathy’s voice both as a living child and as a posthumous waif. Indeed, Lockwood links the dream of the waif to the wind, linking the branch blown by the wind to the waif’s body, signifying the novel’s play with the cross-contamination of metaphor and metaphysics. The wind off the moor, the north wind, is the force of posthumous Cathy and also suggests that posthumous Cathy is imagined, her presence illusion.42 If the frontispiece to the Life of Byron feeds Cathy a wild, Byronic authority by proxy, this is surely an encrypted feast. In confinement, Cathy can only yearn for the wind, not command it. Linking herself to Byron, she describes the moor’s wind as if it were her own breath, insisting that it could restore her. To Ellen Dean, Cathy says: “Oh! If I were but in my own bed in the old house! And the wind sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let me feel it,—it comes straight down the moors. Do let me have one breath!” (96). Clearly, it is not the bed or the room that could restore Cathy’s voice, but rather the wind from the moor. This breath troped as spirit acts as a source of Cathy’s writing and speech. The cloistered room in effect dissolves into the moor; it is this bringing of the moor into the room, a dissolution of the room, that the waif at last effects. Cathy’s bed in Wuthering Heights, then, cannot be read as a site of the safety of childhood, for Cathy’s childhood was not very safe. Rather, the bed is the site of Cathy’s inscriptions, her way of transgressively bringing the moor into the house. The heath is not, as Steinitz suggests, a scene of displacement for Cathy. It is the locus classicus, the novel’s telos and focus. The bed to which Cathy, dying, yearns to return is desired because it opens to the moor. In this bed, Cathy inscribes those permutating names that metonymize her struggle against speaking in the name of the father, her struggle to speak in the alterior voice. Indeed, from the moor, Cathy haunts Heathcliff and Linton, effectively driving out both her brother’s and Edgar Linton’s paternal claims to their homes, replacing their ownership with that of her daughter, who bears her name, accomplishing the novel’s plot. The moor is presented as the source of her authority. If the childhood bed to which Cathy yearns to return, in which she believes her strength would be recovered, may be read as the site where the moor and Cathy’s authority cohere, the novel brings the moor into the house occupied by our “audience” of the text, disrupting generic boundaries. Here, genre itself is implicated as confinement. Cathy’s loss of access to the moor, or rather to its winds, moves her into ever narrower strictures, bodily confinements structured to silence her.43 This immolation is balanced by the control that the heroine’s posthumous voice effects across the text, marking it as her ironically inflected field of discourse. Bodily and generic confinement are contrapuntally exposed against the release of storytelling, the skill of maintaining an always partially told tale. The pregnancy that undoes her powers of speech also roots Mrs. Linton to a room in a house in which she is so self-estranged that she cannot recognize her own face. 44 Of her reflection in the mirror of that aphasiac room, Cathy says, “It’s

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behind there still. And it stirred. Who is it?”—to which Nelly replies, giving the game away: “There is nobody there. It was yourself, Mrs. Linton, you knew it a while since” (96). In other words, Mrs. Edgar Linton has become nobody and knows she has suffered that fate. Cathy’s pregnancy becomes a silent room, an alterity to the room at Wuthering Heights in which she once proleptically inscribed the novel that immolates her body. This impasse of describing one’s own erasure is precisely the aporia staged and resolved by the disembodied posthumous voice. But the erasure of the self in a disembodied posthumous voice is obviously incomplete, inasmuch as speech continues the speaker’s presence. The speaker, then, is doubled in an unresolvable scene of mastery and apprenticeship, caught up in the metaphorics of maternity. Brontë preemptively stages the lost mother, the first Cathy, together with a recuperation of Cathy as the waif, a deeply motivated solution to the loss of the maternal core. Here, the lost mother is the narrator who knows the whole story. She is recuperated not by her biological daughter, however, but by the spectral authority of the waif, the outcast who comes in by disrupting the very terms of exterior and interior. Implicitly, what has been outcast in Wuthering Heights is not the biological mother but the speaking mother, the mother of the text, the always already dead mother (in male canon formation) who would permit the daughter’s speech. It is this loss that Nelly Dean falsely soothes just as she disastrously counsels Cathy on her marriage prospects.45 The novel stages a troubled verbal maternity in which the waif recuperates herself as the dead daughter who speaks. In the Grange’s aphasiac room, the room of maternity, the posthumous voice is dramatized. Here, Ellen Dean interprets Cathy’s strength as uncanny; of Cathy, Ellen Dean says, “I soon found her delirious strength much surpassed mine” (98). Significantly, when Cathy becomes uncanny, she becomes able to effect her future merely by speaking out loud what her future will be. Her speech becomes the powerful uncanny language of the troped posthumous voice, the feminine selfelegist. Cathy describes her posthumous homecoming to her “narrow home out yonder,” a journey “by Gimmerton Kirk.” She proleptically establishes the terms of the posthumous voice, terms that circle back to the beginning of the novel to be performed as read by Lockwood. Before she is dead, Cathy’s speech claims the power of the ghost: “But Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I’ll keep you. I’ll not lie there by myself; they may bury me twelve foot deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest until you are with me” (98). Heathcliff, true to Cathy’s prediction, does try to lead the posthumous Cathy home, as evinced by Lockwood’s dream and by Heathcliff’s posture in death, events occurring before the window of Cathy’s childhood bed. Describing her posthumous homecoming months before her death, Cathy claims the uncanny power of the posthumous trope by seizing audience—both Heathcliff and the reader of Wuthering Heights who reads Heathcliff reading Cathy (as told by Nelly Dean through Lockwood). This gesture of seizing audience is the pivotal mark of the posthumous voice, which differs from the sentimental mourning poem by

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emphasizing the way that the feminine speaker of the self-elegy possesses, inscribes, her audience.

Self-Elegy Wuthering Heights marks a textual posthumous coda to the girl Cathy’s overwhelming failure while alive to control the intricate and oppressive system of marriage and patrimony that forms the subtext of the novel. Childhood writing as posthumous performance effects the novel, which charts Cathy’s bodily confinements. In the novel’s first dramatic scene, Brontë graphically depicts the figure of the narrator, the waif who appears at the window. This ghost girl interrupts the reading of the originary texts that the child Cathy had written. The ghost becomes bodiless entering text and does not reappear in Brontë’s novel except as rumor, rumor as text. It is Bronte’s forefronting of the textual, what Socrates calls its “ghostly” quality, as a scene of elegiac dialogue that I wish to emphasize. For Wuthering Heights stages scenes of audience and speech as dialogic structure. Commenting on Emily Brontë’s elegiac poem “Cold in the earth” (“Remembrance”), in which the mourning speaker puts herself in the place of the dead, proleptically claiming the grave as her own, Sacks interprets “weaned” as indicating an implicit specter of the lost mother, a love from which one is literally weaned.46 I argue, however, that when the speaker of the lyric refers to “that tomb already more than mine,” the trace of the lost maternal is radically transfigured into the lost ability of the self to speak. The grave becomes the space of the speaker’s lost speech.47 The poem structures an enclosed space within which the lost speaking self is recovered by a rhetorical swap with what was once buried. Confinement, figured as the grave, marks the lyric as a space that must rework its own verbal containment to allow the lyric to be spoken. The aphasiac self is given and recovered dramatically in the lyric, the lyric staging its own recovery as text. Similarly, Wuthering Heights performs the recuperation of a dead speaker’s voice, framing a self-elegy. Brontë’s poem, like Wuthering Heights, radically makes the mourning daughter also the mother in the sense of being the originary source of the story, the one who is mourned and a shifting of the material metaphoric premise behind the pastoral’s dialogue. Brontë’s novel is handled from the perspective of a confinement that Cathy proleptically seizes, the escape of the posthumous, and it places Cathy’s body in a room of maternal confinement, a source point or mother lode. But Wuthering Heights resists the endpoint of her completed burial. The fecundity of the story is precisely its untapped quality, the unreachable space of Cathy as a narrator of whom we might ask questions. This dialogue mimics the always incomplete conversation between mother and child rather more than the male pastoral scene of dialogue between fellow male poets.

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Inasmuch as Wuthering Heights places Lockwood in sickbed while he hears Cathy’s tale, giving him a mirroring confinement, a weak imitation of Cathy’s harrowing pregnancy and death, the confinement of maternity that the novel powerfully draws circles back as formal rhetoric as the novel’s troped posthumous mode. While Edgar and Heathcliff battle each other over who will keep owner’s rights to Cathy, including the right to name her, Cathy keeps, in the boundaries of the muteness and inanition caused by her fatal pregnancy, the capacity to inscribe her own elegy. The novel performs the disembodied posthumous voice as an always already interpreted, or read, strategy—a structure in which the impossibility of completing discourse is indicated in contrast to male elegy with its premise of consolation through aesthetic completion of dialogue. Here, dialogue is always circular, incomplete and also prematurely completed, finished before it is begun. Wuthering Heights looks back to the scene of Cathy’s body immured in confinement, immured in the grave on the moor, and even as Cathy’s spectral gaze protects the privative nature of her story, the waif’s uncanny bleeding (20) adds to the text of the bed, inaugurating the novel’s highly privative mode of revelation. Here is a scene of a loss that reaches the limit of figuration, a ghost who bleeds.

The Bleeding Waif If the child Cathy writes all her names into her childhood bed as if already aware of her life and death, this posthumous trope is clarified by the waif’s return to the scene of her writing. Cathy’s inscriptions into the bed where Lockwood reads them mark a miscarried posthumous voice, an attempt to formulate herself as a name and as a writer.48 It is only the waif’s return that allows the living child’s inscriptions to become the novel. I look, then, at the crisis of transition from the living child Cathy to the aphasiac pregnant wife whose death produces the waif, for here is Brontë’s reading of feminine discourse as that which is pressured to subsume itself into the body, into biography. In the Gothic image of the bleeding waif (20), Brontë signifies not only the impossibility of the position of the feminine speaker in masculine discourse—a waif who bleeds presenting a contradiction in terms—but also alerts us to the dangers of figuration for the feminine narrator, echoing John Locke’s denigration of the flowers of language.49 As Paul de Man points out, figural language cannot be avoided. Brontë’s recognition, however, is of this very illicit alliance between the feminine and the figural. In the image of the waif, she dislocates the figural, pointing to its collapse as a ghost’s blood. This waif’s blood cannot get rid of the figural, which de Man rightly argues cannot be done, but instead signifies the always imprecise quality of figural language. Brontë’s waif’s age implies that posthumousness transfigures her character precisely at that point at which the feminine is shunted out of discourse—at the place of sexual maturity, or loss of virginity—revealing it as a hollow marker

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parallel to those totem stones that the novel’s initial snowstorm utterly covers. For if Cathy’s pregnancy, a clear sign of lost virginity, is the novel’s crisis, then drawing terms from Jacques Lacan’s biologically metaphoric theorization of language we see that the pregnancy also provides the stage on which Cathy rejects language dans le nom du père and recuperates a troped posthumous mode that rejects the patriarchal system into which she has married.50 Edgar impregnates Cathy with his linguistic system, which causes her death in a toxemia-like fever, as if she had bodily rejected Edgar’s linguistics, Edgar’s paternal metaphor.51 Edgar’s very vacuity enables him to father his language onto Cathy, to imprint onto her body and inscribe into her name his body and name. As a dominant father in Wuthering Heights, Edgar means nothing and does nothing other than father Cathy’s daughter. His status as patriarch of the Grange, however, writes itself into Cathy and makes her the sickly wife of the Grange. As the sickly wife of a well-to-do landowner, Cathy loses her language—or her “few words.” Language for her has been damaged by her removal from the moor, by her marriage, which dislocates her from the moor. The novel connects words with topos, implying that the troubled condition of Cathy’s relationship to language is an underlying lack of proper topos: “Oh I am burning! I wish I were out of doors […] Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills” (97, emphasis added). Cathy perceives that her initiation into Edgar’s typology of speech is fatal. His “few words” cause her brain fever. Her escape from the violence of the paternal metaphor violently requires her death and her trope of speaking death. Cathy gets to the heather on the hills by dying and being buried, her posthumous voice returning to present “herself” through the masterful narrative strategy of the text in which she dies. Death, here, recuperates a static identity of belonging to the moor, to that outcast space. If Edgar kills Cathy by fathering his name and language onto her, Heathcliff does not father any paternal name onto her. Quite the opposite, Heathcliff stands for the dead son, the one never granted patronym: he provides an opening into the language of death, the troped posthumous voice outside all possible paternal metaphors. Cathy can use that always already dead name, Heathcliff, to achieve the alterior posthumous voice, for if Heathcliff is a dead letter name, a replacement for the dead son, Cathy can speak in Heathcliff’s name in that dead letter voice in which voice is always already inscription. Heathcliff’s presence in the novel may acquiesce to the requirement of the paternal metaphor that a woman not speak or write in her own name, but as Cathy’s dead letter voice is subsumed into Heathcliff as fate, as fatality, her authority circles back to claim the novel as posthumously posed performance. The posthumous voice, in playing with the metaphorics of feminine submission and subsummation into landscape, risks complying with the patriarchal injunction that woman not author her own text.52 Brontë’s double erasure of the feminine narrator, Cathy, the Bakhtinian other who motivates the

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narrative, places Heathcliff as the guarantor of Cathy’s troped posthumous voice, the motivation of narrative from the space of death that Lockwood reads. Just as the Lacanian paternal metaphor indicates a site impossible to reach, a point not of origin but of the illusion of origin, and this metaphor is both erased and carried by Heathcliff, Heathcliff remains unspeakable in the discourse between Wuthering Heights and the Grange as the son already dead. Heathcliff marks language in the name of the dead son, a posthumous ground where Cathy also speaks. Cathy, then, is drawn as a space, rather like the moor, which is enframed by the masculine mode of claiming landscape—or name, or body. The space of Cathy enacts a transfiguring path, much as her narrated walk through the graveyard verbally transposes her living self and Heathcliff into the mode of the afterlife.53 Much as for Dickinson’s posthumous speakers, the grave for Cathy is not the containing place of death. Instead, they “pass by” the grave to indicate that open territory troped as the ambiguous space of the moor, or death, in Wuthering Heights. The dying Cathy refers to herself as “incomparably beyond” (150), but this phrase does not seem to invoke a religious conversion. Rather, Cathy, at the threshold of posthumousness, reinstates the insolvable desire for finding an origin that the novel invokes as its unreachable telos. The impossibility not only of returning through mourning to the lost origin but also of even decoding what is the lost origin is formalized by Brontë’s orchestration of the posthumous voice as that which tropes what it resists, the silencing by death of the feminine narrator. As a site of resistance to the quotidian domestic, Cathy’s grave resurfaces at the novel’s close to ravel the warmly drawn scene of the daughter’s domestic happiness.54 The end of Wuthering Heights, with the quietly unquiet graves, disrupts domesticity. In an effective double negative, Lockwood asserts that he could not imagine that Heathcliff, Edgar, and Cathy did not sleep quietly (256). An uncanny home, Wuthering Heights resists domesticity. Contrary to Steinitz’s argument that Cathy’s home is her girlhood room, it seems clear that Cathy’s home, in the sense of her locus of control, is the moor onto which she is “displaced.” Just as her girlhood room never gave her safety, Cathy’s girlhood writing in her “diary” is not a scene of unambiguous power. Lockwood penetrates easily enough into that cloister. Instead, the moor itself is marked as Cathy’s “home,” in that it provides the wind that lets her breathe; the waif as a free-floating text, an unpinned and unsolved anxiety, floats on the moor “these twenty years” and more, haunting the novel with her alterior story. Cathy’s powerful authority, then, resides in her posthumous claim to author the lives of the other characters in the novel.55 It is not Cathy who is displaced, but she who displaces.

Virginity and Voice If the waif’s appearance at the novel’s outset is the hinge of my argument that the novel is posed as Cathy’s posthumous voice read by Lockwood, I want here to

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look more closely at the waif. At the onset of her final illness, Cathy describes her sense of self-estrangement as a sort of rupture of childhood, a loss of Romantic childhood’s virgin mental space. She says (97): [S]upposing at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger; an exile, and outcast, thenceforth.

Here, she sees herself as a child prematurely torn not only from the Romantic psychological terrain of childhood’s newness but also from the sexual virginity of childhood, imagines herself converted “at a stroke” to a wife. This violent conversion of sexual experience is quite different from a gradual development into maturity. In striking contrast to Wordsworth’s paradigmatic image of the blessèd babe, the Romantic child as intact reservoir of psychological purity, Cathy describes herself as ruptured. To focus on the perhaps enigmatic way that Cathy’s entry into sexual experience is given a traumatic, premature valence, I want to look at the way that virginity and its loss constitute Cathy’s voice. Mieke Bal reads the connection between virginity and voice as inflecting the kind of speech, the kind of gesture, that a woman can perform.56 Woman’s ability to speak and to be heard turns on the cultural machinery of virginity, that is, on virginity’s interpretation, its culturally assigned meaning, argues Bal. Cathy’s loss of virginity takes away her voice in stages of increasing aphasia, a loss that begins when her confession to Ellen Dean divides her from Heathcliff. This fallen language—language that produces the opposite of its intention—occurs precisely when Cathy decides to become not a waif but a wife. But just as Cathy is presented first as a waif, I want to point to the way that she also is characterized as always already a wife, confined in being wifely even when she is a child. From the scene of discovery of Cathy’s writing, Cathy’s voice is inscribed in masculine confines, enframed in wifeliness, presented as that which is penetrated and determined by males. Lockwood discovers her writing by invading a room Heathcliff had theretofore kept inviolate (15).57 Spending the night as an unwelcome guest in Heathcliff’s house, Lockwood enters the penetralis of the house. The room in which Lockwood sleeps metonymically functions as the site that elides Cathy’s mature sexuality, her motherhood, and this room is simultaneously a symbolic marker of that motherhood, since it contains her prescient inscriptions of her daughter’s name. Into the bed that Heathcliff and Cathy shared as children, the fatal outcome of Cathy’s entry into adult sexuality is written. Lockwood penetrates Cathy’s childhood virginity in a meta-linguistic rape of private text that forces the waif to reassert the privative nature of her story by appearing and counter-enforcing her text as enigma.

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If the Heights’ room and the bed mark a vanishing point of comprehension, the room also contains a clear explanation of Cathy’s fate as a wife. Entering the site where Cathy’s powerful, asexual child self coexists, metonymically, with her powerless, aphasiac adult self, the third Cathy, the ghost, does not clarify questions we might have about her. Rather, as I have noted, the appearance of this ghost significantly interrupts our chance to contemplate the writing in the bed and in the books. The image of the waif prevents Lockwood’s reading further in the child’s private “diaries,” that very text the reading of which would likely solve the mystery that the novel, Wuthering Heights, does not resolve. As a consummation of self into landscape, the waif enters the room of her story to protect the story from penetration, to keep the penetralia unpenetrated. Not only does this gesture of protecting her text, of keeping private her inscriptions, elucidate the writing in the books as having been written in order to protect the vulnerable child, but the waif’s appearance also acts as a rupturing force that paradoxically protects the child’s secrets. Here, the self-elegy may be read as formal violence that paradoxically preserves the mode of the self, replacing silence and death’s erasure with a violent textual persistence. While it has been argued that in this scene of the waif’s appearance Cathy’s ghost wishes to come home, given the roughness of Cathy’s childhood, the ghost’s return fits uneasily with a heartwarming homecoming.58 Instead, the ghost’s childlike appearance may be read as resistance to a site of new invasion. The childlike specter of the waif indicates a premature enforcement of Cathy’s entry into sexuality, a trauma encrypted in posthumous repetition. Clearly, Lockwood’s penetration of Heathcliff’s secret space also penetrates Cathy’s secret space. The bleeding flesh of the ghost girl Cathy suggests a trauma prior to the grown Cathy’s childbed mortality. The troped posthumous aspect of Wuthering Heights marks a recurrence: an embedded, encrypted trauma that rewrites itself as a public haunting. The difference between Cathy’s power as a posthumous performer, when she is a waif, and Cathy’s vulnerability and powerlessness as the wife of Thrushcross Grange almost tears in half Brontë’s novel. If the novel holds, the body of its heroine does not. Her uncanny posthumous presence contains the division between the two houses and places a division along the line of sexual experience, asserting a disembodied authority behind the text because the elided body represents a repeal of the rupture of the living Cathy’s virginity. Cathy’s crossing from a writer to one who is written about occurs along this axis of her entry into the adult sexuality of childbearing—her loss of virginity that moves her from envisioning herself renamed outside the paternal order to bearing into the paternal order a self-elision that problematically irrupts into a renamed self, a daughter named for her.59 Decades after her death, Lockwood encounters not only Cathy’s name but also that of her daughter. The inscriptions of names that Lockwood discovers in Cathy’s childhood bed have been preserved by Heathcliff, who keeps intact the room as if it held Cathy’s virginity until the waif herself

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returns to that site and reclaims it in the scene that sets forth the drama of the novel. But Heathcliff’s preservation of Cathy’s childhood writing, which allows that template to become Wuthering Heights, also signifies a buried motif of Wuthering Heights. For Cathy’s sexuality, from childhood fusion with Heathcliff to adolescent game-playing with Edgar to traumatic loss of Heathcliff to death through bearing Edgar’s child, follows the shape of a fugue with relation to her use of language, her inscription of the text of Wuthering Heights. Just as Bal traces female virginity as a marker for authority, Cathy’s ability to speak and to write, to sign a name, is connected to her successful evasion of adult sexuality. When Lockwood goes into the caesura of Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s childhood lair, he invades the one place where Cathy avoided adult sexuality except as text, the inscription of her names pointing to her relationships with Heathcliff and Linton. Cathy’s writing in the space of the bed, like the writing on the house, has a highly determinative speech-act capacity. Inscriptions in Wuthering Heights exude the eerie possibility of miracle, and the miracles are all terrible. Heathcliff arrives to fulfill the dead son’s name, and the living son, Hindley, is abandoned to dissipation. Cathy writes out her life in secret books, and it contains a tragedy that only the violated, bleeding specter of herself as a child-ghost can figure forth. The inscription of the name Earnshaw hangs threateningly above the heads of the young lovers, Hareton and Catherine, whose idyll fails to close out the novel, preempted by the view of Cathy’s restive grave site. Lockwood’s invasion of the child’s writing, then, is a performative reading, one that elucidates and conjures the broken figure of the waif, the ruptured child. The shift into troped posthumous narration occurs when the ghost visits Lockwood, therefore, not merely because the waif Cathy returns to the scene of her writing but also because Lockwood enacts the violent desire to know and control the waif, the desire that drives forward the novel. This crux of desire—the reader’s desire to catch the waif, to understand her bond with the moor and with Heathcliff—pulls together the disparate threads of my concern with how Cathy’s bodily confinement pushes her voice outside the paternal metaphor and into the troped posthumous voice. For the violence of Cathy’s imprisonments demand the reciprocity of her troped posthumous voice, demand the scene of her waif claiming control over the telling of her tale. The violation of her text is placed against the privative, unresolvable quality of the novel. In the initial scene of the girl ghost’s return to her childhood room and bed, the irruption of Lockwood’s violation of the child’s texts launches the confined, or buried, waif’s insistence on telling her tale, the novel’s drama. The waif confronts the outsiders—Lockwood and implicitly Nelly Dean, her readers. Inasmuch as the characters who survive Cathy derive their strength and liveliness from connection with her (Hareton has her eyes, her daughter her name, Heathcliff her soul), Cathy persists as the character capable of writing this book-length elegy for Cathy. The novel becomes Cathy’s extended self-elegy.

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The violence that Lockwood does against the waif indicates precisely the effort to take away her ability to write. He tries to cut off her writing hand, scraping her wrist against broken glass. Lockwood, like the attackers of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, very nearly cuts off the hand of the waif.60 The violence of this Wuthering Heights scene is remarkable, as is the waif’s tenacious resistance. Lockwood recounts (20): The intense horror of nightmare came over me, I tried to draw back my arm, but, the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in, let me in!” As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro until the blood ran down and soaked the bed clothes: still it wailed, “Let me in!” and maintained its tenacious grip.

The child ghost’s insistence is on speaking and, through language, gaining the terrain of her authority. She repeats the phrase “Let me in” despite Lockwood’s torture of her. The physical similarity of his torture of Cathy’s ghost to Lavinia’s lopped-off hands, and by proxy to Ovid’s Philomel’s lopped-off tongue, bears noting. Significantly, it is the ghost’s maintenance of her grip on Lockwood, a grip that enthralls the novel, that places Cathy as the ghostly writer of the novel signed by Lockwood’s name. The waif’s tenacious grip and persistent voice, “Let me in,” control the scene. The waif’s writing hand that Lockwood attempts to sever is the very hand that insists on holding him and writing through him. Like Lavinia, whose stumps point to other texts to tell her story, and like Philomel, who sews her story, Cathy’s waif uses her aggrieved hands to hold on to her reader, to seize and possess him, to write her story through Lockwood. This waif’s writing hand is the hand that insists on reentry to the scene of writing, and this is the hand, I suggest, that is posed as inscribing the text.61 The ghost resists Lockwood’s attempt to keep her out of the room of her text and also resists his attempt to cut off her writing hand. After this spectral trauma, which replays and predicts the earlier traumata (textually later) in Cathy’s life, the ghost turns the tables through the persistence of its voice, the insistent cry of “Let me in!” Presenting persistent voice as a way of being let in, that is, exposing the trick of text, the waif Cathy’s homecoming is inscribed as inscription; she comes home only to the text in which she comes home. The hearty lass on the moor at first glance seems to stand antithetically to the waif who is assaulted by Lockwood, as he draws her wrist over and over the glass, staining the bedclothes with tropological ghost blood. The narration of the novel, however, a narrative of persistence, indicates the waif’s ultimate strength. The child Cathy is physically strong, while the waif Cathy is linguistically strong. The waif, attacked, continues to speak. Her drama is told through this persistence of a voice, which redoubles its strength the more it is resisted. I interpret the waif’s homecoming as a turn to text: the feminine inscriber, the writing hand, persists in

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its task of turning voice into inscription. Lockwood invades Cathy’s childhood writing in a meta-linguistic rape of text that evokes the waif’s appearance, which reasserts the privative nature of her story, enforcing a textual code of enigma. The waif points to a danger of feminine discourse, to the way that the feminine is interdicted from canonical discourse, while also revealing the scandal of assuming that feminine voice, a rhetorical act, is essentially different from male canonical performance. Brontë’s allusive tour de force gestures to male authorities, which are then cast off. At Thrushcross Grange, refusing books, Cathy writes, as it were, on her body, but this bodily writing in its turn is textual, a meta-symbolic project in which Brontë uses a narrator’s posthumous reclamation of narrative to lay bare the scandal of the interdiction of the feminine from the scene of discourse. If Wuthering Heights encrypts the power of Cathy’s posthumous voice dramatically by cutting off that voice at the beginning of the narrative—even though it is that very voice which, through the enfolded timeline of the novel, carries the text—the novel forefronts the topos of textuality, the home of feminine voice as text. Continuing to speak, the waif insists on her right to gain entry into the room that contains her writing, this textual room. Cathy’s death, by coming effectively before the novel, encrypts the threat she presents to patriarchy. By troping Cathy’s voice posthumous, the authority of Cathy only implicitly controls the novel. The ghost of the threat that Cathy holds over patriarchy stays alive in this novel that explicitly buries her. Wuthering Heights’s final note focuses on Cathy’s ambivalently legible tombstone. The culmination of the rhetoric that casts the loss of female virginity as the loss of voice implies Cathy’s simultaneous attainment to motherhood and to death. But Cathy’s posthumous voice, of which Wuthering Heights poses Nelly Dean and Lockwood as the first readers through whom all subsequent readers read, represents the repeal of the loss of virginity, a return to intactness through text’s uncanny containment of the body’s damages.

Notes 1

2

Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë], “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights,” Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 327. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 248–308; J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982) 42–72; Q.D. Leavis, “A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights,” Lectures in America (New York: Pantheon, 1969) 85–138. For recent interpretations of the thematics of religion in Wuthering Heights, see Marianne Thormahlen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999); Lisa Wang, “The Holy Spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Poetry,” Literature and Theology 14.2 (June 2000): 160–73; and Emma Mason, “‘Some God of Wild Enthusiast’s Dreams’: Emily Brontë’s Religious Enthusiasm,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 263–77.

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David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London: Constable, 1934). See, for example, Rebecca Steinitz’s reading of the diaries as marginalized texts in “Diaries and Displacement in Wuthering Heights,” Studies in the Novel 32.4 (Winter 2000): 407–19. Toril Moi has commented on the problematic aspects of Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of woman-authored texts as somehow “victimized.” See Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1985) 57–69. More recent feminist readings of Wuthering Heights include Kate Flint’s “Women Writers, Women’s Issues,” The Cambridge Companion to The Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 170–91, and Michelle Masse, “‘He’s More Myself Than I Am’: Narcissism and Gender in Wuthering Heights,” Psychoanalyses/Feminisms (Albany: State U of New York P, 2000) 135–53. Lockwood reads these inscriptions; they are, then, always already interpreted in the novel. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale and Richard J. Dunn, Norton critical edition (New York: Norton, 1990) 15-16. Unless otherwise specified, all Wuthering Heights citations refer to this edition. J. Hillis Miller, 62. Frank Kermode, “A Modern Way with the Classic,” New Literary History 5 (Spring 1974): 415–34. On vulnerable barriers of doors, windows, and gates in Wuthering Heights as sites that cannot keep the wilderness out of the civilized space, see Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Holt, 1953) 187–208. For readings of Lockwood’s dream, see Carol Jacobs, “Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation” Boundary II (Spring 1979): 49–71. Cathy, then, may be read as beginning from the position theorized by Luce Irigaray as woman’s place outside discourse, or woman’s voice as interdicted. But Brontë, troping the voice posthumous, works Cathy’s voice into the center of the novel, making the voice the novel’s inscribed authority. See The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974) 183. Stuart Curran, “The I Altered,” Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988) 185–207. Curran seminally argues that women’s writing in Romanticism differs from male writing because of women’s choice of topoi—quotidian domestic topoi. Curran is at pains to place woman’s topoi on a par with male topoi. I suggest that such equivalences are doomed because of the centrality of the name to the concept of authority, or verbal mastery, and the definitional elision of the name from the domestic scene. This reading of Wuthering Heights, and indeed the trope of the disembodied posthumous voice as formal gestures that inscribe audience into the text, is indebted to Tilottama Rajan’s The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990). See especially page 4 of the introduction: “This move [of making the reader a constituent of the text] is theorized into a crisis of signification.” In “He’s More Myself Than I Am,” Masse reads this undecidability as a fusion between Cathy and Heathcliff, a position from which I am somewhat diverging in suggesting that Heathcliff covers for Cathy, a sort of “beard,” allowing her to love the moor by seeming to love a man. On Brontë’s fascinated attachment to the ground of the moor itself, see

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Angela Leighton, “The Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 66–7. Mathilda states that her novel is for Woodville only, but obviously if we read the novel we have gotten it from Woodville. The posthumous voice is played out by the masculine speaker acting as cover for the posthumous feminine narrator. See Shelley, Mathilda, 176. Leavis, for example, argues that we must suppress one part of the novel in order to read another part, as if the novel were in a struggle with itself. Kermode, 419–20. Van Ghent, 187–208. Gilbert and Gubar have heavily theorized the meaning of this whip. See Gilbert and Gubar, 264–66, 268, 270, 274, 275, 279, 285, 293. Steinitz, 407–19. Lyn Pykett convincingly reads the novel as a plot of “increasingly confined spaces,” a reading I follow, although my own interpretation does not involve Pykett’s stress on reading Wuthering Heights as a Gothic novel. See Emily Brontë (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989) 77. “If you ask [written words] a question they go on telling you the same thing over and over.” Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W.C. Helmbold and W.G. Rabinowitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) 275. Here, I refer to Schenck’s connecting Platonic dialogue with pastoral. See Marguerite Celeste Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric (State College: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989) 19–31. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993) 77. Nancy Armstrong importantly presents an argument for Brontë’s awareness of the photograph to argue, as I am arguing, that Brontë was definitively not “detached from history and uncontaminated by political concerns.” Armstrong’s impetus goes toward unpacking the nostalgia of empire in Brontë’s novel, while my reading queries the aesthetic work of Brontë’s novel, emplacing that aesthetic—of a novel which resists confession, resists revelation and explanation—precisely in what Armstrong calls “the materials of the 1830s and 1840s out of which Emily Brontë made that novel and with which it carried on a relationship.” See “Imperialist Nostalgia and Wuthering Heights,” Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, ed. Linda Peterson (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003) 430–50, esp. 431. In this argument, I am following the gesture established by Sarah Kofman of tracking metaphors of the camera as a way of retheorizing the shift into the modern. For Brontë’s novel’s camera obscura, one may reconsider the bed in Wuthering Heights, with its tiny aperture into and out of the moor, into and out of the Wuthering Heights house. See Kofman, Camera Obscura, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), and Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 15–16. The later-nineteenth-century spirit photograph, for example, was meant to take a picture of the souls of the dead visiting the living. A recuperative strategy, the spirit photograph arguably preyed on the pocketbooks of the bereaved, but it also expressed an instinctive command of the aesthetic vocabulary of the photograph. That is, it linked the simultaneous permanence and transience of the photograph with the narrative of bereavement itself. For a concise introduction to spirit photography, see Alison Ferris, ed., The Disembodied Spirit (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003). Nancy Armstrong, 445.

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28 Nancy Armstrong, 445. 29 Just as Cixous’s and Kristeva’s complex theorizations of femininity and voice locate an “authentic” body at the very least in childbirth, so also Armstrong locates an “authentic” culture that mythically precedes industrialization. I suggest that Brontë’s handling of Cathy and Cathy’s waif at once calls up these locus classicus points of authenticity—the maternal body, the ur-culture of the folk—and erodes them with an aesthetic that suggests the maternal body never was as fecund as the maternal voice and that the authentic culture only appears so after it is violated by industrialization. For some basic arguments around écriture féminine, see Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980) 245–64. 30 Nancy Armstrong, 448, 450. The photograph also locks and preserves a moment, at once resisting and putting in place a narrative whose fulfillment will never be revealed in that image. Writing on Lady Clementina Hawarden, Alison Chapman describes the collapsed space of the photograph in “Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Literary Influence and Technologies of the Uncanny,” Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestation in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreup (London: Palgrave, 2000) 115–17. 31 Tilottama Rajan, “Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Textual Abject,” Wordsworth Circle 24.2 (1993): 61–8; Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 43–67. 32 The contiguousness of land ownership to power in the history of women’s claim to authority is precisely the parallel troped upon in Wuthering Heights. See Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 2–7, 203–10. 33 Lockwood describes Cathy’s childhood bed as intimate spatial sequestering: “a singular sort of old fashioned couch, very conveniently designed to obviate the necessity for every member of the family having a room to himself. In fact, it formed a little closet, and the ledge of a window, which it enclosed, served as a table” (15). 34 On the nature of these “diaries,” see Steinitz, 409–14. Steinitz goes along with Lockwood’s questionable use of the term “diary,” and, indeed, only Lockwood calls Cathy’s writing in the books “a proper diary.” 35 See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) 305–21. Cathy’s waif-ghost is also, as I have pointed out, comparable to the ghostly child “angels” in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron. See Victoria C. Olsen, From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003). 36 On the “latent threat” of prosopopeia, that the dead will silence the living, see Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 80. 37 As does the character in Milton’s sonnet “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint,” in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957) 170. 38 See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997) 142–60. 39 Beatrice Martina Guenther, The Poetics of Death: The Short Prose of Kleist and Balzac (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996).

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40 See Leighton, “The Poetry,” 56. 41 Daniel Cottom reads Heathcliff as the ontological center of Wuthering Heights. If Heathcliff fails Cathy, one may say then that this signifies an instability of being. See “I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff,” ELH 70.4 (Winter 2003): 1067–88. 42 The wind off the moor is also Lockwood’s first interpretation of the waif. When he hears the waif knocking, he thinks it is the wind pushing at a branch (96). 43 The early signs of Cathy’s losing power within the household of her marriage are linguistic. For example, she is unable to persuade Linton to accept the return of Heathcliff as a joyful occasion. When she tells Edgar Linton, “for my sake, you must be friends now” and asks if she may bring Heathcliff indoors, her husband answers, “Here? Into the parlor?” Similarly, she is unable to dissuade Isabella from fancying Heathcliff, unable to convince Linton to allow Heathcliff to visit the house, and unable to impart to Nelly Dean that she is truly unwell and in immediate need of care (73, 94). 44 Pregnant, Cathy argues that she must return to Wuthering Heights to regain her strength, and her request is flatly denied, as if she had not spoken at all. The aphasia that begins to enclose Cathy once she crosses the threshold into Thrushcross Grange becomes absolute silence during her maternity. Mieke Bal, arguing that various schools of interpretation epitomize maternity as the apotheosis of muteness, locates a common point in speech-act theory and psychoanalytic theory. Both schools of thought gloss maternity as the opposite of language. The maternal act in its ideal, Bal explains, is the opposite of the speech act in its ideal. As Cathy’s pregnancy advances, she moves to the domain in which accepting the imprint of Edgar’s name, bearing his child, is her only form of communication. Maternity seals her in silent confinement. See Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 133. 45 On the idea that the mother’s voice lies implicitly behind the accomplished text, see Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003) 65–93. 46 Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 15. 47 Emily Brontë, “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!” (“Remembrance”), line 28, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C.W. Hatfield (1941; New York: Columbia UP, 1995) 222–3. 48 Here, I am agreeing with Steinitz that the child’s powerlessness is exemplary. I note, however, that after her death Cathy gains power and then turns the novel toward her desire to place the landscape of Wuthering Heights, the Grange, and even the moor under the her daughter’s control, her namesake. Indeed, if pregnancy forces Cathy’s voice back into her body, acting like a signet of her name impressed into her body, and this tropic doubling causes her death, her daughter, her namesake, inherits the Heights and the Grange, while Cathy’s grave, with her name engraved thereon, inherits the moor. See Steinitz, 412. 49 For a reading of Gothic Brontë, see Pykett. 50 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 200. 51 Language spoken dans le nom du père does not, according to Lacan, mean that the father himself, as source of referent, has any content. Instead, it is the very hollowness of the conceptual father, the hollowness of the signifier—in Wuthering Heights the vacuity of Edgar Linton—that allows language to be written and spoken through the

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paternal metaphor. The father function, then, engenders but is itself empty. Cathy blames Heathcliff for killing her: she insists to Heathcliff, “You have killed me and thriven on it” (125). But it is Edgar Linton who impregnates Cathy, and, given the exact correspondence between the time of Cathy’s pregnancy and the time of her fatal illness, this pregnancy apparently kills her. In Brontë’s novel, the feminine text inhabits the masculine name: inasmuch as Lacan’s notion of the paternal metaphor is that of a language built around a gap, Heathcliff’s fatherless name is the erasure of an absence. Lacan, Ecrits, 198. “It’s a rough journey, and a sad heart to travel it; and we must pass by Gimmerton Kirk to go that journey. But Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I’ll keep you” (98). Cathy’s uncanny quality, her ability to merge herself into Heathcliff, means that she cannot keep house. It is this uncanny production of the self outside the domestic, known space of the novel that marks Cathy’s alterity. Cathy’s incapacity to find a home, to be at home, by contrast to Ellen Dean’s housewifely skill, reveals itself in Cathy’s ability to create in others a knowledge of herself, to make, as it were, herself the home of the male beloved and of the reader. Cathy’s capacity to forefront the feminine voice outside the quotidian may be read as Brontë’s riposte against the genteel, feminine novel of the domestic culture of the quotidian. On feminine Romanticism, see Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 197–204; on the poetics of quotidian values, see Curran, “The I Altered.” Posthumously, Cathy damns Hindley, punishes Edgar, and makes her daughter and her namesake a true mistress of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange (143, 130, 239). Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 41–93. Lockwood’s violation of Heathcliff has been noted by, among others, Nancy Armstrong, 431. Steinitz, 410. Irigaray writes that in the economy of language dans le nom du père, woman cannot give birth to a daughter, for this would only repeat the woman’s own ontological vacancy. See Irigaray, 40–46. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2.4, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, 1974) 1034. It is worth noting the similarity of this scene not only to that of Titus Andronicus’s Lavinia but also to that of the German fairy tale “The Maiden Without Hands” collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The waif Cathy insists on retaining her hands, on not being maimed. Problematically, the waif is already dead before she gains the strength to preserve herself intact. Lockwood’s scraping of the wrist against glass is not the only charged violence enacted against Cathy in the novel. The mangled, almost removed hand of the waif calls to mind the girl’s foot, almost removed by Skulker, as well as the almost removed voice, the aphasia, that pregnancy causes Cathy before ending her life. See “The Maiden Without Hands,” 1812 and 1857 versions, in Jack Zipes, trans., The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002) 176–85.

Chapter 4

Emily Dickinson as the Unnamed, Buried Child At Emily Dickinson’s funeral, Emily Brontë’s poem beginning “No coward soul am I” was read, this proxy connection of the two poets merging the textual and the material, signifying posthumous voice as double inheritance.1 Brontë’s theatrically reproduced “voice” carried Dickinson into that posthumous terrain that Dickinson’s oeuvre paradigmatically indicates and achieves. Critics have long noted Emily Dickinson’s predilection for writing poems in a “posthumous voice,” using a “rhetorical structure,” as Jerome McGann explains, that “pretends to be spoken by a person already dead.”2 Dickinson’s “voice” may very well be considered the exemplary case of the rhetoric of a posthumous voice in women’s writing. She made the posthumous speaker her signature, placing her elegist in the space of death. Yet what is achieved by and at stake for women’s writing and for Dickinson’s poetic voice itself in the strategic use of this rhetorical structure, this trope of the posthumous voice? In this chapter, I consider Dickinson’s frequent use of the dead child speaker, a rhetorical device that locates speech as the crisis of femininity.3 Rather as Dickinson’s posthumous-voiced poetry would be read only when the poet herself had become a “person already dead,” Dickinson’s many child-voiced poems open her writing to being persistently marketed as literature for children.4 I begin my reading of Dickinson with a consideration of links between the child speaker and the dead speaker to query how these roles locate her work as gendered. I want to link the two audiences she finds—as a poet marketed to children and a poet only posthumously, belatedly, known—with her implicit linking of the voice of the daughter to a performance of deferral. Her poetry stages the crisis of the feminine as an impasse of apprenticeship, an impasse overcome strategically by altering the daughter-speaker’s topos, shifting the ground of the lyric from the quotidian, domestic space to that alterior space that Beatrice Guenther calls “the limit of mimesis.”5 The literary history of Dickinson’s posthumous publication lends an uncannily fitting irony to her deployment of the posthumous voice as performative reading, but Dickinson’s voice is also characteristically that of a dead child, a voice that inscribes audience as a place of determined responsibility, asking audience to recuperate the child’s losses. Her audience is invoked as that which makes possible the prematurely silenced child’s speech. While current

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feminist readings of Dickinson’s child voice claim that she comments on the place of women in nineteenth-century society, I would argue that in taking up expressly the voice of a dead child, Dickinson’s particular version of the textual abject, she pressures the question of whether the articulation of voice can be resolved by contextualization. Contextualizing Dickinson in relation to the modes of selffashioning available to women in nineteenth-century American culture at once explains the child voice and avoids confronting Dickinson’s use of that voice to dismantle the gendered discourse into which she, as a writer, found herself written.6 Portraying Dickinson as a writer of sublime nursery rhymes, a 1930s collection, Poems for Youth, presents the poet as if she unambiguously found voice in the sphere of childhood.7 This image of a Dickinson-for-children may reflect what Jonathan Morse refers to as “the perennial image of the poet as fey vestal and cute little girl.”8 Excluded from the gently admonitory Poems for Youth are the many Dickinson poems that incorporate a child speaker who, at a tender age, is imagined as being already dead. The Dickinson marketed posthumously to children has no place for these dead children and their posthumous voices, voices of a singular eloquence that disturbs that durable, popular image of an Emily identified with a “cute little girl” poetic persona. The question of voice, or of mastering rhetoric, that haunts so much of Dickinson’s death-laden poetics is perhaps only halfanswered, then, when read in the context of a historicized feminist aesthetic or in regard to the nineteenth-century “cult of mourning” and the place of the “poetess” within such sentimental discourse. Giving voice to the dead child, often the dead daughter, Dickinson’s poetry amplifies and focuses the problematic of woman’s voice, its social, cultural, and aesthetic expression, into an interrogation of the predicament of voice. Her characteristic topos of “death in the house,” as Robert Lowell put it, should be understood as engaging death in the father’s house, which is the theater for performance as text.9 She addresses us as the daughter kept out of the house of canonical discourse but subverts the terms so that the daughter’s voice, in its uncanny posthumousness, comes into the house, putting death in the house. Here, the traditional rhetoric of elegy’s claiming canonical voice, its building of a male “house,” is questioned. Dickinson’s dead daughter voice articulates an interdicted site that focuses all that is suppressed, abbreviated, and discounted about woman’s voice and about Dickinson’s occupation of that writerly space. The dead child voice decenters the traditional modes of poetic self-identification and coheres instead in the poet’s vision of abjection and the overturning of abjection. By a rhetorical structure, the speech of a child already dead, Dickinson cites and deconstructs abjection, using a permanent child’s-eye view to evoke radically premature burial. A condition of stymied force typifies these troped posthumous lyrics, a perspective of entrapped insight. Powerfully observant, Dickinson’s dead speakers cannot do anything with their knowledge.

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Consider, in “I took my Power in my Hand” (Fr660), Dickinson’s assumption of the narrative stance of a buried child who does not leave the legacy of a name.10 Dickinson dramatically opposes this defeated child to the biblical David, whose juvenile prowess secured his name. The comparison of the lyric’s speaker with David implies by analogy that the poem presents a child’s perspective, a child’s powerlessness, asking, “was myself - too small?” (8). While David secures himself a name, the speaker of Dickinson’s poem remains nameless, implicitly killed in a battle for which her feminine “power” was insufficient, her brief lyric form too “small” to enter masculine elegiac discourse. Strikingly, Dickinson’s rhetoric of the dead child speaker transposes a narrator’s premature death, like a lyric’s extreme brevity, into “a Name” (Fr644, 8), a formal elegy at once proper and ironic in which the dead speaker elegizes herself. In readings of the poems “’Twas just this time, last year, I died” (Fr344), “Because I could not stop for Death” (Fr479), and “Ample make this Bed” (Fr804), I will suggest that Dickinson writes the child’s voice as a mode of claiming and recuperating the spent self, a critique of domination refracted through the prism of the voice deemed too small. Dickinson’s dead daughter–spoken poems engage a palpable erasure of the self both as name and as body. The poems intimate a residue of loss in the place that becomes text, the text elegizing its own speaker and also its own status as text, as trace. Dickinson’s dead child–voiced poems deploy a speaker who attends to the trauma of death not by coming through that trauma but rather by inhabiting it, making home by accepting homelessness. In “The grave my little cottage is” (Fr1784), for example, Dickinson ironically withdraws the sentimentality of the notion that the dead child awaits her parents in heaven. The speaker in this poem continues to practice housekeeping in preparation for Judgment. While the traditional belief about being raised on Judgment Day holds that the dead sleep the sleep of death until that day, Dickinson’s out-of-bounds speaker is not asleep. Uncannily, her poem facilitates the corporeal aspects of the grave, its function as a boundary between bodies seen and the unseen. Inhabited by a dead, still-speaking child, the domestically charged grave persists as a border territory. The unnamed, buried child speaker positions herself across its threshold. She is not named, but in narrating her poem she names things difficult to name. She is dead but not silenced. She is a child who has skipped adulthood and gone straight to eternity.

Nameless Child Elizabeth Petrino draws attention to the nineteenth-century custom of choosing not to name a delicate child until the child grew old enough to have a good chance of survival. She refers to the profusion of gravestones carved during the nineteenth century for babies who were never named or were named only in private. Privately named infants were considered “too delicate, too precious to have that name mentioned in public.”11 As such, they were buried without their given names

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engraved onto their tombstones. In graveyards, children who died nameless are indistinguishable from children who may have been privately named, the private and the absent name both signified by tombstones memorializing only a family’s patronomial child.12 In poems using the posthumous voice, Dickinson claims for her child speakers the place of such a dead child, who, buried without a name, denotes a linguistic space without a mark. This undefiled child—too delicate to be named—parallels the troped posthumous child speaker whose topic is her own nominal erasure. Even if the speaker may once have been named, that is, implicated in an authorial gesture, this implication in the process of naming has been erased in the moments prior to the poem’s staging, just as a privately named infant’s name is effectively erased at burial. Placed radically in the space of the patronym, the unnamed, buried child also, in its secured namelessness, subverts the father’s capacity to name the child, making explicit the vacuity of the patronym. It is this momentous erasure of identity that anchors Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems. Extrapolating from the child’s-eye view found in many of Dickinson’s lyrics, Petrino examines Dickinson’s participation in the child elegy popular in midnineteenth-century women’s poetry. Such poems, Petrino points out, are typically placed in the mouth of the grieving, bereaved mother, who may wonder about the child’s experience of death but does not herself speak from the place of death.13 Petrino’s examination of the considerable similarities between Dickinson’s poems spoken by dead children and the child elegies of the widely published Lydia Huntley Sigourney implies that only by ignoring the other women elegists of Dickinson’s day can one argue that Dickinson’s poems showcase the use of child speakers primarily to subvert woman’s place in patriarchal culture.14 Petrino shows that Dickinson’s elegies written in a child’s voice “adopt and revise” the conventions of the nineteenth-century child elegy by refusing an easy consolation to those who mourn.15 This consolation is withheld by the dead speaker’s determination to acknowledge the absolute severing that death accomplishes. Dickinson’s speaker uses death as a metaphor for the ultimate locked door, what Beatrice Guenther calls the “limit of mimesis.” Dickinson’s dead child–voiced poems show how little a mother can do for her child in the face of death. Not speaking through, in response to, or together with their mothers, Dickinson’s dead child speakers speak for themselves, mourning themselves. Inasmuch as the popular nineteenth-century child elegist typically wrote poems taking the mourning mother’s point of view, Dickinson may be read as entering into a conversation with these other women poets. In Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s “Death of an Infant,” for example, one locates a version of the nursery tongue in which Dickinson’s child-voiced poems are spoken. “Death of an Infant” details the graphic, physical losses the child suffers at the hand of death: he loses his pretty blush, his clear gaze, his innocence, and his inchoate efforts toward speech. But the child does not lose his smile.16 If death, the mourning mother asserts, “set[s] / The seal of silence—” the mouth still continues to express itself through a smile (11–

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12). Language, or communication, is retained by the dead child’s corpse. Like Sigourney’s mourned infant, Dickinson’s buried child speakers also suffer the near total erasure of personality, losing a name (if they had ever gained one) as well as the ability to move and to be seen. Unlike Sigourney’s dead infant, however, Dickinson’s dead child speaker retains the ability to control symbolic discourse, developing an elocution so spare that it hedges its bets against silence and gains an entry into the field of symbolic discourse. To mark the transition from that topos granted feminine discourse, the body, to the troped posthumous feminine speaker’s illicit claiming of symbolic or masculine topos, Dickinson’s unnamed, buried child speaker takes as its point of departure that mouth on which, in Sigourney, a seal of silence has been set. This infant mouth, disembodied, becomes the symbol that has not lost the ability to communicate. Petrino notes the theatricality of the dead child’s smile in Sigourney’s poem.17 This silenced mouth’s smile, as vanishing point, structures Dickinson’s space for performance. Here, the “flesh” is “Cancelled,” and performance of posthumous speech begins, the performance marked as the child’s claiming of rhetorical power. Dickinson poses her dead child speaker as the child of child elegists, appropriating the popular bathetic object of her more published, popular contemporaries. She places her speech, as it were, in a child’s always demanding mouth, implicitly asking that the other women writers feed her, a child still postponing adult gender determinations, a poet still postponing the finality of publication. In Dickinson, the unnamed, buried child’s abjection, the implicit abjection of the small, dead, unnamed child, marks a vanishing point that structures eloquence and threatens to legitimate a language of the abject, which Julia Kristeva aligns with the positionally feminine in discourse. Before reading Dickinson as a practitioner of une écriture féminine or a poetics of the body’s fragmentation, however, it is important to recognize the excluded status of the dead child’s body, tacitly erased in Dickinson’s poems. In the poem “I cried at Pity - not at Pain” (Fr394), for example, the dead child speaks the poem from a disembodied space of death, a topos where all that remains is the speaker’s ability to mourn herself. Her self-elegy culminates in the poem as she sings herself to sleep. This self-elegy implicates a maternal abandonment of the child speaker, placing it quite at odds with a Kristevan reading of the material fluency of pre-symbolic, maternal discourse.18 Dickinson’s child-voiced poems of self-mourning reveal a significant blind spot in Kristeva’s theorization of plenitude and feminine speech. For Dickinson’s poems trope the mother as a privative and necessary voyeur looking onto the scene of the daughter’s entry into a self-reflexive field of symbolic discourse, a discourse in which the daughter-as-speaker is always already dead, nameless, and deprived of canonical topos. Dickinson’s child-voiced self-elegy is structured on an assumption of audiencelessness that in turn replaces Sigourney’s mourning mother with the dead child speaker. If, in Dickinson’s appropriation of the child elegy, her use of the

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dead child’s voice is more than a tool to argue against the confines placed upon women, this posthumous voice problematizes Kristevan readings that link the feminine with the maternal or material. Dickinson places the premature death and erasure of the child as a condition of gaining audience: neither the pre-symbolic semiotike nor the symbolic order guaranteed by the father’s name theorize the selfreflexive symbolic system that poses the child mourning her death in a performance for readers. Unlike child elegies spoken by an angel child, Dickinson’s children do not console their parents. In Dickinson’s self-elegy, the child’s death only has meaning as a performance in text. Slavoj Zizek uses the phrase “I hear you with my eyes” to indicate such a poetics of death: “When the gaze qua object is no longer the elusive blind spot in the field of the visible but is included in this field[,] one meets one’s own death.”19 In Dickinson’s posthumous voice, the speaker signifies her status as the dead by seeing herself speaking. She sees herself, sees her “voice” in text, in an authorial gesture at once playing on the inherent spectrality of voice and placing the spectral voice, marking the field of text as that which recuperates proleptic submission to death. The problem engaged by this disembodied posthumous voice, then, is not femininity per se. Rather, it describes the aftermath of that very trauma—voicelessness—whose resolution traditional femininity forbids. The trauma of voicelessness, in the sense of canonical performance interdicted, is a trauma inflicted by femininity, by the cultural construct of feminine performance. If we follow Slavoj Zizek’s and Elisabeth Bronfen’s terms, we might say that the imprimatur that a woman be always already seen makes it difficult for her to speak unless she comments on seeing herself. This rhetoric of death also subverts the cultural construct of daughter as that which is seen. Writing in the voice of a dead child, Dickinson takes up radical questions of victimization and domination, questions relevant to the daughter buried without a name. Dickinson’s poem “For death - or rather” (Fr644) explicitly envisions death as the expensive purchase that gains the daughter the “Name” withheld by her parents (8). The role of the traditional daughter, who will not carry the father’s name unless she confines herself to his house for perpetuity, mirrors the unnamed, buried child’s situation with regard to her place in paternity as naming. The child’s-eye view that Dickinson gives to many of her lyrics’ speakers pressures the confines placed on daughters in a patriarchal culture.20 Consider the auto-elegiac poem “’Twas just this time, last year, I died.” Petrino reads this poem as an example of a piece spoken from the child’s point of view, and one notes that the speaker of the poem, narrating after her death, concerns herself with childish things, with Christmas stockings and Santa Claus.21 Dickinson’s reference to Christmas obliquely raises issues of the sacrificed child, and the poem takes the point of view of a sacrificed child. By the use of death as a topos, of a child speaking from the space of death, the poem does not merely tell about a dead child but addresses us from the abject position of the sacrificed child. This unnamed, buried child does not address us from a Christian heaven. Rather,

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she presents herself in the aftermath of death by presumptively taking her father’s name on her headstone. This child artfully takes over the role of her own father, engendering herself as posthumous progeny—a speaker who survives her death as persistent trace—a speaker who as posthumous trace outlasts her father. Denied individuation in life, this child posthumously claims a lineage that stops with herself. The speaker, unnamed, carries the patronym first into its posthumous, after-the-father place of address. The unnamed, buried child as a speaker at once appears to reject her claim to authority, eschewing her right to inscribe her name across her text, and to gather to herself a larger claim, that of taking over the authorship of patronym, her family’s lineage. In her death, she claims authority over the family, implied in “’Twas just this time, last year, I died” by the dead child speaker’s stocking’s grandly elevated placement. Here, the unnamed, buried child’s first-ness in death marks a priority of position from which she dictates the terms of her family’s audience, her family as audience submitting to the terms of her text. The dead child speaker’s tombstone, anonymous except in bearing her patronym, carries or writes the family name into “Eternity” by reaching death first. The dead child speaker seizes the father’s claim to authority over the family name. In seizing death first, the child puts away the father, marking her own speech as a posthumous speech, a fatherless speech. The buried child’s lack of the trappings of selfhood, a forfeiture metonymized as the loss of personal name, guides the lyric “’Twas just this time, last year, I died,” implicitly raising the question of whether the abject buried and nameless child is beneath or above those who have shut her into her set-apart place, with her “stocking […] too high” (18). If, as Petrino explains, the nineteenth-century elegized child was often presented as bearing a holiness codified by early death, here, Dickinson’s child speaker retains an untoward knowledge of and interest in commanding the world of the living.22 Dickinson’s unnamed, buried child speaker inverts the question not of who has the right to speak but rather of who may legitimately be read. Presenting her desire to be read by the living, the dead child speaker implicitly silences those who have allowed her anonymity in death. Just as Susan Dickinson, after Emily’s death, described her sister-in-law as too sensitive to bear the gaze of the public, babies buried without names were considered too delicate for their names to be known outside the family house.23 Susan’s phrase evoking Emily’s problematic embodiment—that “mesh” too “rare”—signifies Dickinson’s alliance with the unnamed babies, buried before they had toughened enough to be publicly named. By claiming for her poems the point of view of such dead innocents, Dickinson not only poses the dead daughter’s namelessness as an implicit erasure of the father’s naming capacity, she also protects her speaker from a father’s improper attentions. One of a father’s improper attentions, in the context of nineteenth-century mores, would have been to name a child publicly if the child was still too delicate to bear the weight of public attention, too delicate to be expected to live.

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In the context of Dickinson’s unnamed, buried child speaker, the reading public stands as a sort of paternal eye whose improper gaze Dickinson’s anonymous speaker postpones, placing her text after her death. The understood delicacy of the unnamed, buried child contrasts with and abuts the use of the dead child as a sacrifice in “’Twas just this time, last year, I died.” The child’s abjection as anonymous dead body whose “will” is “held” by a nonnegotiable “something” works against the dead speaker’s near deification, too “high” to reach those quotidian objects belonging to the child’s surviving family. The “something” that holds the child’s will is a force that seems paternal, phallic, characterized as a “thing” in contrast to the dead speaker’s lack of things. This “thing” forces the child down in a recumbent position, the prone posture not only of death but also of humiliation and even, perhaps, of sexual violation. The child’s bodily humiliation, the terrifying confinement in the coffin, is answered at the lyric’s close by the child’s assumption of height, both moral elevation and view, a heightened ability to see. The lyric recasts a crossing from the domestic routine of burial into an undomesticated space of death as an uncannily omniscient point of view that the speaker is revealed to have achieved as the poem closes. Rhetorically suggesting that she might be too high, too powerful, for the childish things her family still enjoys, the speaker rejects the abject’s role, using the space of death to obviate the living family. Audience, the child’s family, is at once invoked and dismissed, written into the lyric as improper. The anonymous reader, then, is written into the lyric as the proper if belated audience, the audience that subverts the child’s abjection. Dickinson, like the unnamed, buried child speaker of some of her poems, did not achieve a public name for herself while she was writing her poetry. Whether or not she desired this little burial really cannot be known. Strikingly, she told Thomas Wentworth Higginson of her decision to keep herself to herself (even after death) by describing that decision as a rebellion against her father. Dickinson wrote to Higginson concerning her decision not to have molds made of her hands and face nor to sit for a portrait as a way of preserving some relic of her self past death. In choosing not to have her body replicated, Dickinson directly contradicted her father’s wishes. She also, I suggest, sustained a poetics of reaching the edge of figuration, of disembodying death. She chose the anonymity of bodilessness, if not explicitly of namelessness. Of this decision, she wrote Higginson: “It often alarms Father, He says Death might occur and he has Molds of all the rest, but has no Mold of me. […] But I forestall the dishonor” (L411).24 The “dishonor” is perhaps that of bodily revelation, or of giving her body, as symbol, over to her father. Petrino argues that this letter describes Dickinson’s desire to immortalize herself in poems rather than molds.25 Inasmuch as one may read a rejection of emblem in Dickinson’s poetics of death, this rejection of that self figurable in molds may be half the import of the letter. Another interpretation is that her letter presents to a paternal figure, Higginson, Dickinson’s wish that her father not claim a physical piece of her, especially not when she has been forced into the most

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powerless of positions, that of the dead. The body of the dead speaker, here, is withheld, kept too “high” to touch, unlike molds on the parlor mantel that anyone (except perhaps a child) might reach. By this decision to preserve herself without the usual adult trappings of monument—bust cast, head cast, or hand cast—Dickinson recuperates for herself the purity of the child who dies without ever having been named, the child of whom not even a verbal cast has been made. The missing name, the name the unnamed, buried child never receives, releases her from the confines of the father’s power to name, since he never takes up the paternal prerogative to name the child. The daughter buried without a name achieves an unindividuated status parallel to that of anonymous speech. The unnamed, buried daughter, in dying with only a paternal name, avoids becoming fully inscribed in the paternal family. Buried only in the patronym, the unnamed, buried child as speaker keeps private her own unseen signature, a site of resistance, this ungiven private and particular name. Much as she largely exempts herself from trying for publication, in refusing to make “molds” of her body Dickinson recuperates for herself the purity of the child who has not been marked in a family, having never been publicly named. She removes her posthumous self, in mold, from her father’s ownership. Dickinson’s decision to preserve herself in death not through adult mortuarial statues but through lyric poems kept unpublished enacts a precise return of herself and of her body to the topos of the delicate infant who has died so young as to have preserved absolutely its anonymity, a kind of linguistic purity.

Crossing: The Transitus Some of Dickinson’s child-spoken, troped posthumous poems describe being hidden inside a room or space willingly entered or perhaps forced into as punishment, “shut […] up in Prose” (Fr445, 1). As the lyric progresses, however, the small enclosure that the child’s body inhabits segues irresistibly to the grave, either because the space is revealed to have been the grave all along or because the entrapment anticipates the tomb. The door the children bolt tight in “We dont cry Tim and I” (Fr231), for example, is a precursor to the grave, a space into which children retreat for safety from adults, finding themselves inextricably caught. The child’s physical powerlessness is turned round by the child’s direct address of audience, inscribed as God the father, a fair and proper audience. In “’Tis true they shut me in the Cold” (Fr658), the child asks God to forgive those who have hurt her, ironically raising the question of revenge by seeming to reject it. Similarly, in “I cried at Pity - not at Pain,” the buried child speaker implicates her audience in a stinging critique of the mourning adult. The bathos of the poem’s close, in which the child describes weeping herself into the sleep of death, inserts a self-referential melodrama. Here, audience is called upon to recuperate the child’s bodily erasure, her entrapment in proleptic death.

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The dramatization of audience in the poems above occurs precisely along the axis of violence: the audience soothes the violence of the trapped child and also violates this speaker. The audience sees the speaker seeing herself. The audience recuperates earlier violence against the speaker by again violating (reading) her. The belated, posthumous audience also witnesses the dead child speaker’s retribution against an earlier audience that failed her. Beginning with the abject, the nameless dead child, Dickinson’s dead child lyric overturns the child’s abjection by asserting the child’s ability to console herself in death with her own voice, reinterpreting the parameters of elegy by inscribing a space for the reader in the scene of mourning. The child weeping herself into a sleep of death is hardly an empowering motif. Still, Dickinson uses it to explicitly formulate the self-elegy that structures her troped posthumous poetics, and she thus becomes powerful in her oeuvre. The eclogue-like structure in which the speaker mourns herself gives a spectral status to the mourner. The mourned child is also the one who “sobbed [herself] almost to sleep,” making the mourner a disembodied voice: no other mourner is allowed at the scene of “I cried at Pity - not at Pain” (23). In textualizing the act of seeing herself speaking, mourning herself in elegy, the speaker cryptically encloses another anonymous and postponed audience whose readership alone secures the text’s performance. The eclogue-like division into mourned and mourner structures a revelation that closes the poem, with the speaker having crossed through the grave, gone past or escaped the grave. The duality of “the Grave and I” depicts the speaker’s surpass or departure from the site of burial (22). The space of death is given as that which cannot be part of the domestic, quotidian scene; death demarcates the edge, approachable only by trope. Death works as a metaphor, a direction gestured toward in the inscribed poem, and also becomes, in the theater of the poem, the topos that supervises the lyric of self-mourning: implicitly, what is mourned is a loss of voice, a condition before death. The power to sing oneself to sleep, to speak one’s own elegy, is not presented in Dickinson’s dead child–voiced poems without irony. The powerlessness of the speaker who needs to sing her own elegy because no one else will so honor her also shapes Dickinson’s child-voiced poems. Recall that in “I took my Power in my Hand” the speaker’s powerlessness implicitly contrasts to the triumph of the biblical David. The power of Dickinson’s dead speaker, then, remains indirect, couched in reversals by which the seemingly powerless child asserts her power to see—and not only to see but uncannily to supervise her own posthumous persistence, her voice, to see herself “in the mode of hearing,” which Zizek flags as critical to the “logic of power.”26 This power of critically observing the world, a power aligned with choosing the space of death as topos—not only for memory but also for oratory—sharply distinguishes Dickinson’s dead child speaker from the child speaker of sentimental mourning poems, in which the child is given voice only to comfort the mourning parents.

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As in the mourning poems of her contemporaries, Dickinson’s dead children sometimes begin to describe the grave with the language of domesticity. 27 If they begin with a feminine knowledge of household chores, however, this scene is radically emptied by the poems’ close.28 The trope of the posthumous voice effectively erases the domestic space-as-body, claiming that its dead speaker has become bodiless. It stages an erasure of the domestic scene by making the poem a theater for crossing through the grave, denoting the grave as that last marker at the edge of domesticity. This trope foregrounds and dismisses the body, calling irresistibly to mind the moment of crossing, the rite of passage when the narrator died, her body at that moment housing the drama of death’s invasion. Her bodily self as vanishing point, however, is enigmatically present behind the text, always threatening to undo the text, to make it silent. It is a gesture parallel to the one Paul de Man reads in prosopopeia, the threat that the dead, in speaking, will silence the living.29 In the disembodied posthumous voice, however, the power of the trope inheres in its implicit and prescriptive erasure of the speaker’s body before the text: the speaker herself orates under threat of her own bodily return, a return of the body that would silence the troped posthumous, disembodied “voice” of text. While de Man recognizes the threat implicit in prosopopeia, in the feminine poetics of the trope of the posthumous voice that threat is reversed. Here, it is the return of the paternal gaze, which always only sees the daughter-as-body, that threatens the a priori dead speaker with silence. This threat of the paternal gaze is codified as the threat of the speaker’s own body, her body synecdoche for the act of seeing. The disembodied posthumous voice is implicitly threatened by the wrong audience, an audience marked as the paternal gaze that seeks the daughter’s body and always already sees the daughter as only a body. In Dickinson’s poem “’Twas just this time, last year, I died,” for example, the dismissal of the body is essential to establishing the address of the poem. The dead child’s body, when it is “carried by the Farms,” is hidden from us by the coffin that encloses it (2). But this body is also shockingly revealed to us, inevitably violated by the reader, in the very heart of its passage from life to death, as it changes from an unknowing child to one who knows what it is like to die. The interior space of the coffin is given to the reader through the deft detail of the sound of the corn, and this sensual evocation places the reader uncannily in the child’s body. The child’s body is hidden and given in the same gesture. Testifying to her death, the speaker describes herself being carried in a coffin from town to the site of the burial (1–4): ’Twas just this time, last year, I died. I know I heard the Corn, When I was carried by the Farms It had the Tassels on -

The poem’s dead child speaker testifies to a passivity, an entrapment, and, importantly, to the difficulty of speaking about prostration and entrapment. In

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exchange for letting this dead child speak, Dickinson offers up not only the phantasmagoric image of the child’s sacrificed body, the body carried in a coffin through ripe fields, but also enforces the child’s body’s erasure in the performance of the poem. This erasure of identity is itself the performance of the poem; its drama inheres in the edgy enactment of its speaker’s departure. The carried child takes on the role of messenger, her voice carrying back to her still-living parents a chilling description of her death. The motif of crossing away from town in the prone position of the dead also appears in “Because I could not stop for Death,” Dickinson’s masterpiece. Here, the troped posthumous speaker first passes the “School, where Children strove / At Recess - in the Ring” (9–10). The dead daughter speaker begins her dismissal of the living world by passing through the ring of childhood, the schoolchildren’s circle. The speaker observes the spectacle of childhood, but she observes it only while she takes leave of it. It is a first step of her leave-taking from the material trappings of selfhood, of identity, an anti-Romantic quest. “Because I could not stop for Death” is a poem putting away childish things, and it finally identifies all things as childish. The speaker “puts away” her work and her play; she puts away the school, the fields, her bridal clothes. At last, she puts away the grave. The poem stages this disavowal, or renunciation, of what it implies are the trappings of daughterhood, the carrying of the paternal name. The speaker “puts away” domesticity, including the grave, and even including that suitor, death himself. She has surpassed even this suitor by the poem’s end, addressing the poem’s close from the highly privative space of something called “Eternity.” Allen Tate’s influential reading of the poem as a courtship, then, follows the ride with death but misses that the speaker addresses her reader from the space of having surpassed this ride with death.30 Her putting away of the things that make a daughter is effected through the ride with death. Reclaiming a topos of death as a space for inscribing self-elegy is the poem’s telos, Dickinson’s deconstruction of the materiality of femininity strongly and economically predicting Judith Butler’s work of raveling the rubric of gender.31 Importantly, Butler’s notion of the gaze of the abject striking the paternal order is indicated in Dickinson’s poetics of the gaze. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” the “Fields of Gazing Grain” watch the speaker as she vanishes (11). Having passed them, she cannot look back at them at first, cannot return the gaze. The unilateral way in which she has lost the gaze fixes the speaker in the role of the sacrifice. From the sphere of childhood, she moves to the grave, a paternally marked space, inasmuch as the unmarried daughter’s grave is marked by her father’s name. The speaker enters a death implicitly placed before the “Eternity” that closes the poem (24). She is delivered by death’s circular journey back to her father’s name. But the poem then moves past the grave, past the paternal metaphor, and places the speaker as one continuing toward an unknown space, “toward Eternity.” The poem’s restitution of the daughter’s gaze, her ability to see and surmise, which closes the poem, indicates

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the role of the disembodied posthumous voice in subverting the abject place of the voice of the daughter in patriarchal symbolic systems. Here, the daughter’s gaze closes the poem. The corpse crossing by a field ready for harvest establishes the momentum, after the child’s burial, as an inevitable departure from the domestic margins, a departure from the fields and the grave. Implicit in the image of the ripe field is the force of the ripening sun, which Paul de Man interprets as the eye that reads the tombstone.32 The sun marks and reads, so this same eye that reads the poem could also threaten its posthumous persistence. In a unilateral stroke, Dickinson’s poem attempts to surpass the sun, the de Man-ian paternal gaze, in the line “We passed the Setting Sun” (8). Dickinson’s poem, then, passes out of the sphere of this paternal sun, aligning the paternal eye with the realm of the quotidian, the fields that are harvested, the embodied dead who are buried; and, in a surprising reversal, it puts the feminine speaker in a place to control the masculine gaze of the sun. Dickinson’s poem reveals the domesticity inherent in the paternal law and attempts to place the speaker beyond that domestic space. The most uncanny gesture of Dickinson’s dead child speaker is that of passing the sun—a feat that at once exempts her from the diminishing light of a “Setting Sun” and also places her ahead of the metaphor of the sun, ahead of the heliotrope (12). But then the poem turns on the speaker. The sun is revealed to have passed the speaker—“Or rather - He passed Us.” The spectrality of metaphor here confronts the poem in which metaphor is the sole engine, threatening to undo the poem unless its rhetorical skill can surpass the sun, surpass, that is, the catachresis always threatened in heliotrope.33 Distinguishing proper names from metaphors, Jacques Derrida maintains that the sun is symbolic of the difficulty of metaphor itself. He argues: “There is only one sun in this system. The proper name, here, is the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor, the father of all figures. Everything turns around it, everything turns toward it.”34 The sun’s unique ability to be only a proper name, only the sun, is undercut by its placement within metaphor. Derrida continues: “No reference properly being named in such a metaphor, the figure is carried off into the adventure of a long, implicit sentence, a secret narrative which nothing assures us will lead us back to the proper name.”35 Dickinson’s poem incorporates this ambivalent aspect of the sun, which seems to father metaphor but then cannot hold its place as anything other than a marker within metaphor. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” the sun as a catachrestic gap at the center of metaphor—an empty father—turns back the dead child speaker’s attempt to metaphorically enter adulthood through her marriage with “Immortality”—that is, through her fiat of this self-elegy, the poem that outlasts the paternally marked tombstone (4). In this poem, the sun is scandalously drawn as catachrestic, while the speaker surpasses its collapse. If the initial movement that inaugurates “Because I could not stop for Death” is stopped dead, turned back, by the sun, which reverses the momentum of the “I” who has been riding the poem she speaks, it is, I suggest, to enforce her

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confrontation with what Jacques Lacan calls the “paternal metaphor.” For when the masculine sun passes by the daughter who is being taken into her anonymous, low burial house, the speaking daughter becomes the hidden or buried child. At that crux, the transcendent bridal garments of gossamer and tulle fail her, and she resumes the task of the unnamed, buried daughter, the child whose task is to stay in the uncanny home of the family grave and bear the paternal name on her headstone. At the same time, an evoked grown woman’s nakedness, the seethrough gossamer of her gown, contrasts with the child’s body, protected by the heavy architecture of the grave. The lyric spoken by an unnamed, buried daughter protects by making inscrutable the daughter who at first glance seems abject, penetrated by death. The dead child speaker cannot be taken in by an audience’s gaze, inasmuch as the grave places her out of the sun. After the line inscribing a reversal in the speaker’s view of the sun, the bridal trappings of the poem proven inadequate to clothe the speaker in the garments of adulthood, the speaker reverts to housekeeping in a grave whose diminutive dimensions, only a “Swelling of the Ground” with its “Cornice - in the Ground” evoke the doll-like proportions of the child’s body and the child’s dollhouse, making the speaker a child keeping a play house and replacing the endangered, naked woman (17, 20). In the final movement of Dickinson’s “Because I could not Stop for Death,” the speaker passes out of childhood, definitively away from the father, completing her self-elegy with great authority. The speaker’s “surmise”—her gaze at the horses’ heads’ direction— pulls the poem away from the grave, past the grave. She at last surpasses the sun in a chase that the lyric frames as the speaker’s triumph. A pattern of chase, struggle, and triumph is marked. As in “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord” (Fr338), Dickinson’s poem envisions the speaker in an “Everlasting Race” (11) with the paternal force. A formalized turning of gaze in these texts lets the speaker enter the “Race” and also win it. The paternal sun need not be read as triumphant. Instead, I suggest that Dickinson uses the sun to elucidate or even illuminate the poem, her tour de force of metaphor, to let us see her seeing herself speak. In Dickinson’s oeuvre, the unnamed, buried child speaker demands a radical restitution. In exchange for her willing disavowal of a physical space in the living world—in exchange for acceptance of both the elision of her body and the absence of her own name—she demands an uncompromised hearing before audience: she demands to be judged fairly, interpreted not as a father’s child but as a master of metaphor, a poet. Dickinson’s dead-daughter-spoken poems tender the elision of the child’s body and the erasure of the child’s own name in exchange for an inclusion of the dead daughter’s voice within the space of public lyric, that is, within the still patriarchally inflected sphere of canonical audience. The unnamed, dead daughter, as speaker, performs a restitution of self exactly where the poem envisions its speaker’s posthumous destiny, the definitively anonymous text of self-elegy.

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Death Don’t Apply to Me: Emily Dickinson’s Taboo As Wayne Koestenbaum, poet and critic, writes of Emily Dickinson’s poetic persona, “death don’t apply”: that is, death does not limit her speaker’s voice.36 But how does death not “apply” to Dickinson’s speaker? Does death not apply to her speakers as an applicant applies for a job—that is, is death out of a job regarding Dickinson’s poetic persona? Certainly, death does not silence her posthumous speakers. On the contrary, death releases the unnamed speakers of the troped posthumous poems to speak their self-elegies. Taking a cue from Koestenbaum’s insight into Dickinson’s exceptional status, in the following section I will develop from Judith Butler’s unpacking of Jacques Lacan’s linguistic extrapolation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of exogamy to suggest that Dickinson’s poetics of death uses the rhetorical space of death as a scene of reversal, emplacing a taboo that forbids the daughter’s silence before the Lacanian paternal law.37 I will shift, then, from considering the child’s voice to focusing on the gendered voice as the daughter’s voice. I will suggest that “death don’t apply” to Dickinson’s speaker because death marks for her a shifting of topos that permits feminine self-elegy. Ironically, given Butler’s recent trend toward theorizing an undoing of gender, this chapter turns to Butler’s theory of the always performed quality of gender to consider the way that the different reception of women’s writing effects different rhetorical strategies from women poets, even (or especially) Dickinson, in their approach to canonical discourse.38 I begin with Koestenbaum’s poetic reading of Dickinson’s speaker as impervious to death to ask what is at stake in taking up the rhetorical space of death. In particular, I will ask how Dickinson’s deployment of the dead daughter’s voice troubles Lacan’s elision of the boundary between the law of death and the law of the father. Through readings of poems Fr519, Fr454, Fr479, Fr396, and Fr448, I will look at how the dead speaker is deployed as a way of renaming, after the father’s name, the anonymous feminine speaker of her own elegy. I will query how Dickinson’s handling of the posthumous voice pits the applied force of death against the father’s law, Lacan’s non du père. Butler contends that because gender identities are inherently unstable, always performed, woman’s role as object of exchange cannot, as Claude Lévi-Strauss claims, support the structure of culture. Instead, the Lévi-Straussian object of exchange must be not woman as such but only the symbolic of gender, a mutable code. Butler’s poststructuralist critique also suggests that the concept of the non du père, Jacques Lacan’s linguistic extrapolation of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological insight, reflects not a paternal law but rather an ambiguously gendered taboo.39 Butler’s work follows Derrida’s insight that a sentence will always be deferred, the signifier never completely reaching the signified. She allows us to interpret this deferral of meaning as a structure that, far from supporting the inscription of the symbolic order as paternally mandated, links to an instability of gender: gender, like language, is only always performed.40 Butler’s interpretation of Lévi-Strauss is

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useful to call upon in reading Dickinson’s posthumous-voiced poems, for, inasmuch as these lyrics take up the rhetorical challenge of the dead daughter’s voice, Dickinson’s poetics predict Butler’s late-twentieth-century dismantling of gender codes. Commenting on the Lacanian paternal metaphor, Butler implies that the Lacanian law of the father is simply a law against fixed meaning, its only imperative an always residual quality, a deferral of complete meaning.41 Dickinson’s oeuvre may be said to emblematize a poetics of deferral, marking the gendered speaker as enforcing deferral onto the feminine speaker; at the same time, the gender of the speaker is collapsed by linguistic meaning’s deferral, the very femininity of the speaker that enforced her deferral until after death as a speaker collapsing in the topos of the poem, the after-death space. The inscribed poem, for Dickinson, not only is that “trace” that in Derridean terms bears meaning in writing as différance, completed meaning always deferred, but it also displays the speaker as herself deferred, as inhabiting a space of deferral.42 In the self-elegy in Dickinson, the speaker’s existence as a speaker uncannily awaits the completion of text, a completion accomplished only when text is performed—read by audience—in the seizing of audience the poem rhetorically inscribes. Needless to say, the space of this completion is drawn rhetorically as that of death. Here, the gender of the speaker is both crucial and immaterial, a reading of gender aligned with Butler’s late-twentieth-century revisions, inasmuch as the central place of gender in the work’s symbolic is at once determinative and simulated. Dickinson’s dead child speakers, by troping silence and submission, reveal gender to be a fantastic performance, much as Butler proposes. But Dickinson’s child-voiced elegiac poems also put pressure on what may be at stake in the performance of gender, emplacing reversals of power as moments when the fabric of everyday discourse is opened to revelation. Dickinson’s dead child–voiced lyrics lay bare power structures. In focusing on the dead daughter’s voice in Dickinson’s oeuvre, then, I read her as specifying a query of the daughter’s voice, querying its interdiction by demarcating the position of the daughter as an a priori dead speaker before the father’s law. Dickinson sets up dramatic reversals of proper and improper discourse, legible and abject language.43 Her troped posthumous poems hinge on this reversal: “death don’t apply” to the speaker whose master trope is reversal. Spoken after the father is put away, the dead child– voiced poems stage his implicit erasure, his “soft Eclipse,” inasmuch as they stage an imagined time after the erasure of names (Fr225, 5). Butler’s reading of gender instability illuminates Dickinson, for Butler allows us to replace an instability of identity where the father’s interdiction, the Lacanian non du père, would seem to stand. It is this very indeterminacy of gender and of language that metes out the inevitable distance between the signifier and the signified, the gap of différance. Butler allows us to argue that the father’s “no” only mimics the unreachable quality of the real, that Kantian noumen

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unassimilable to interpretive discourse. I offer that Dickinson’s dead speakers, in the spare poetics of her characteristic self-elegy, reveal how textual inscription allies its meaning not to the father’s “no” but to the task of posthumousness, to the task of being born after the father, or to surmising what may be born after the father, posited as that Kantian “real” that resists interpretive structures. The task of posthumousness, then, is the task of recording the core instability of the self, a self lodged in mortality as unknowability. This record of transience places the troped posthumous text outside the paternal attempt to stabilize meaning through engendering. Instead, Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems engage a meditation on the infection of being with nonbeing. My argument here is not so much that Dickinson unsexes language as that she uses language to unmask the rigorously performative nature of gender in text by placing the poem under the rubric of death as that “real” that subsumes gender.44 Through her interpretation of Lacan, Butler confronts in particular LéviStrauss’s notion of the incest taboo. Butler implies that the reenvisioning of the gap between signifier and signified as an engine of language that is allowed by Derrida’s concept of différance can be used to alter our concept of the incest taboo, or the law of exogamy (which Lévi-Strauss argues is a foundation of culture). This argument suggests that Lacan’s law of the father, an interdiction that apparently holds the signifier and signified at an impasse, is not the cause of différance. On the contrary, gender difference is elided by the continual instability of symbolic meaning theorized in Derrida’s concept of différance.45 The incest taboo, for Lévi-Strauss, holds in place an exigency of exogamy: by giving the women of one’s family to men of other families, one builds a social structure. Butler, however, argues that the exchange of women merely engenders culture by creating categories, which are in themselves unstable.46 The paternal function in Lacanian theory (linked to Lévi-Strauss’s concept of exogamy) represents death as a terminus whose edge creates symbolic expression.47 But if Lacan links the father’s law with the law of death, Butler’s unpacking of the paternal metaphor as itself based on performance uncouples the law of the father with the “no” of death. Instead, death is allied with that very mutability of identity that undermines the father’s authority. This undermining of the father is where I situate Dickinson’s space of death, a rhetorical space that supervises the patronym rather than vice versa. The always unstable perception of the real that Dickinson’s oeuvre displays also indicates an instability of gender categories, revealing their merely linguistic quality. If, as Butler argues, the paternal law does not create discourse in the symbolic order—if instead an instability of identity works to demarcate the shifting, exposed boundaries of the self written into text—then placing voice in the rhetorical place of the nameless dead, a place staged outside culture but also pointed toward culture, subverts the father’s merely positioned power over language. Language as such is bounded by a “no,” a limit, but this “no” is not necessarily the father’s exclusive possession. If the father’s legislative power is a misprision of death’s

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imposition of limits, writing as if from a space of death undermines the naming capacity of the father. Here, death becomes the symbolic space of namelessness, that topos of utterance that is produced after the father, positioned posthumously. 48 In one sense, the dead daughter as speaker invokes the father’s unending claim on the daughter’s speech, staging his ability to write the patronym on her tombstone. She speaks from her death as if from that space that the father has utterly marked. I offer, however, that this assumption of the ground of the father’s name may also be interpreted as negating the meaning of the father’s name, as pointing to his name as dead ground. I would suggest that the father’s desire to be the one who names is revealed as a destructive force by the disembodied posthumous voice of the daughter. For if Lévi-Strauss reads the incest taboo as holding in place those familial and gender structures that name the daughter-asspeaker as the father’s legitimate possession, the incest taboo enforcing the patronym, then psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman would disrupt or delegitimize this connection. Herman disturbingly contends that “incestuous abuse is indeed an inevitable result of the patriarchal family structure.”49 In other words, the structure of gender as cultural construct enforces not the non du père but rather the father’s “yes”—his unlimited or merely self-limiting expression of ownership of the daughter. What is forbidden in patriarchy, then, is the daughter’s rejection of the father: what is forbidden is the daughter’s “no,” her negation of the father. The disembodied posthumous voice is a rhetorical maneuver that negates the father’s legislative capacity over the daughter’s text, constituting the daughter’s “no” to the father. Indeed, Dickinson writes that “‘No’ is the wildest word,” and I want to interpret her insight as revealing a recognition of the iconoclastic stroke of the daughter’s “no” (L562). The royal “we” who “consigns” Dickinson’s “no,” I suggest, is the daughter who breaks the taboo of contradicting the paternal “yes.” This paternal forbidding of the daughter’s “no” manifests linguistically as the imposition of the patronym. By writing from the rhetorical space of death, Dickinson implicitly evokes with the tombstone the patronym on the daughter’s tombstone, but her dead speaker poses herself in a topos of death as a negation of the father’s terms of naming, the scene of a kept daughter providing a pivot for the application of the law of the father. In the anonymous self-elegy staged not at but teleologically beyond the gravesite, the always already dead daughter-as-speaker may be interpreted as naming herself by the language of her poem, a self-elegy that replaces her patrilineal name. Her “name” becomes not the patronym on the tombstone but the metaphoric language of her text. Dickinson’s troped posthumous speaker voices this forbidden “no”—the daughter’s “no” that refuses the father—inasmuch as Dickinson’s disembodied posthumous speaker mobilizes death as a rhetorical site sustaining Derridean différance, a deferral of completion of meaning. The posthumous-voiced poem uses a topos that allows speech, which will always fall into that riddle framework established by the “Everything I say is false” clause.50 Insofar as we cannot believe

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the speaker is truthful about her posthumous condition but can believe that she is truthful in lying about her posthumous condition, the posthumous speaker resists patriarchal codes of truth as completion. The rhetorical space of death from which the dead daughter speaker speaks is the symbolic, or not real, death that Luce Irigaray describes when she argues that woman is “interdicted.”51 But this symbolic death is pointedly undone, or rather changed in meaning, by the metaphoric speech Dickinson deploys in the tricky rhetorical space of death. Her posthumous speaker’s “death” was that of being silenced, but we are told of this death by the speaker herself, who performs speech as inscription, her speech recuperated in that “trace” Derrida theorizes as coming before speech. In Dickinson’s poem Fr519, for example, the central question of the secret contents of the “letter to the World”—the “News” that “Nature told”—is never answered; only the question is written. The “News” is encrypted into a riddling indeterminate pronoun, a “This.” “This” could refer to any number of things, among them the poem itself. The speaker implies that her letter would have told all had the world been in correspondence with her. Indeed, the speaker seems to imply that the lost correspondence between the speaker and the world is nature’s news: the news of death, absence, loss, missed connections. In other words, the “trace,” the inscribed “letter” that the speaker claims as belonging to her in a time before the poem, is what the poem at once describes the absence of and partly recuperates. The Derridean trace, as that which comes before speech, is deployed here as that which is also lost before speech and recuperated by the ambiguous ground of text as mourning’s theater. In Dickinson’s cryptic poem, the riddle lies on the surface. The disclaimed declamation of the letter itself becomes the “This”—the ironic performance that takes as its subject the speaker’s very audiencelessness, her reliance on the always already previous existence of the trace, the letter, to grant her belated audience. In exchange for having been barred from correspondence with her countrymen, barred from canonical discourse, the poem’s speaker claims for herself a capacity to articulate into futurity all of nature (1–4): This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me The simple News that Nature told With tender Majesty

The specifics of this “simple News” are precisely what has been denied not only the “World” but also the world to come, inasmuch as the poem encrypts its news. The riddle of the poem inheres in its refusal to give up that “News,” an absence that the poem performs by its riddle form. This “letter” obviates the possibility of a reader finishing the letter’s contents and setting it aside.52 The lyric’s refusal to reveal its occulted news preserves the lyric in a perfect tense, always evoking a

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letter that, because it can never be read and answered, will never be set aside, will continually persist as trace. In precisely this sense of being unanswerable, “death don’t apply” to Dickinson’s dead speaker. From the abject space of death, the speaker ironically addresses the living as lacking.53 As topos, death—a marginal persistence in a space that goes beyond the domestic edge of the grave—becomes normative. Death here functions as a chilly home base. The rhetoric of a speaker who stands in the space of the aftermath of death may be read as formulating a response to a lack of ownership of the culturally central topoi of the father’s house and the church. But also, this rhetoric may be read as a rejection of the validity of the very central placement of paternal genius, a questioning of the properness of the father’s placement at the center of the discourse of the name—of his claim to legislate the terms of death. The troped posthumous speaker’s power, then, inheres in her ability to persist as voice in that space of death, to outlast the parameters of the father’s name. Dickinson’s poem beginning “I rose - because He sank” (Fr454), for example, explores how a speaker already eerily familiar with what it is like to die guides a man through the gate of mortality. The speaker exhibits an expertise, a practice of death, a thorough knowledge of that very abjection that she subverts through her evocation of her own physical rising. How it is that the lyric’s speaker already knows about death well enough to lead the poem’s “He” through his death is not explained in the poem. The speaker’s firsthand knowledge of death, however, is the central, hidden drama of the poem, for it is the application of this knowledge to the scene of the man’s death that lifts the speaker into lyric utterance, the “Hymn” that overwhelms and elides the “Him” as the poem’s closing gesture (20, 23). The poem describes a common experience of nineteenth-century daughters, that of watching at the sickbed of a dying parent. Here, however, the dying man’s loss of power unexpectedly gives the observer strength: “I rose - because He sank,” the poem begins (emphasis added). That Dickinson watched at her mother’s sickbed is both complained about in her letters and finally rejoiced in.54 Dickinson writes of her dying mother, “[W]hen she became our Child, the affection came,” indicating the same recognition of death’s gifts explored in the lyric noted above, a lyric about a man’s death. Dickinson also wrote, however, that she “never had a mother”: she places the mother curiously in absentia, or outside power structures (L475). The daughter does not rise because the mother sinks; she does not rise above the mother, but becomes the mother’s nurturer. Describing her mother’s decline, Dickinson imagines herself and her mother as finding each other by burrowing from their respective burial places toward each other, a scene quite unlike that described in Fr454. This recuperation of a mother’s love through the loving capacity of the daughter takes place within the static scene of both mother and daughter being permanently underground. Dickinson writes of herself and her mother that “mines in the same ground meet by tunneling.”55 No one is rising, no one is sinking: both women are tunneling. She places the intimacy

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her mother’s dying allows as a treasure in the feminine underground shared by mother and daughter. When the mother is dying, the daughter meets her underground through those lovingly, mutually burrowed tunnels. The effort to meet in this subterranean landscape is great, and also, as mines can be, greatly rewarding. By contrast, the speaker’s assumption of power in “I rose - because He sank” is cast as a surprise event, an effortless levitation. The speaker rises when the “He” sinks, as if they were both on a seesaw. The lyric’s speaker relates her surprise: “I thought it would be opposite” (2). She does not plan to take power and is surprised by her own nascent strength. Her chance to become powerful, to rise because he is dying, or sinking, inheres in her ability to acquaint him with her own premature or proleptic knowledge of an abjection that he is forced to experience only in dying. The speaker says: “I told him Best - must pass / Through this low Arch of Flesh -” (12–13). The phrase “low Arch of Flesh” not only conjures up images of a prostrate body bent low to get under the arch of its own mortality but also poses a sort of antithesis to Saint Peter’s presence at the holy gates. The speaker of this poem casts herself as a fleshly foil to Peter, standing guard over the “low Arch of Flesh” through which the dying man must bodily pass even if “He” is part of the company of the elect—of the “Best.” The speaker assumes a place analogous to Saint Peter’s and ushers the “him” through this low arch, the body’s death. The poem dramatizes a rising of feminine voice, the drama of the speaker’s voice’s birth through that same “low Arch” that ushers out the masculine object of the poem. While Sabine Sielke argues that Dickinson actually acknowledges a deformity of her own body in this poem, I suggest that the poem, on the contrary, describes the abjection, or sinking, of the speaker’s other, the “He.”56 The poem’s dying “He” is handed the prostrate position deftly and quickly, while the speaker leaves behind her formerly abject position. She rises to the occasion, lifts her voice to orate her ascension, this ascension itself that of raising her voice. In Dickinson’s poem, a recognition of the interdicted ground of the feminine speaker’s lyric topos reflects the gender-inflected power imbalance of the paternal order. Along similar lines, Butler suggests that Lacan’s notion of language spoken dans le nom du père is built on the basis of a flawed assumption of gender as fixed identity, arguing that positions within narrative production are not inherently gendered, but rather are fixed according to power imbalances within which gender is typically but not essentially implicated.57 It is Dickinson’s genius to indicate that the reciprocal rising and sinking are terms of power linked through a dualistic reciprocity. Neither the feminine nor the masculine in this poem must hold the place of the abject—the low Arch—but one of them must occupy that space. The poem, then, pushes beyond gender considerations and explores power’s structure dislocated from gender. Dickinson’s poem about the rising of a feminine speaker into song as she views a masculine body being abjected, then, powerfully suggests the spectral, transient code of gender. The dominant becomes the abject; the abject becomes the

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dominant. The lyric crystallizes the impossibility of speaking from the place of the abject, implying the unreality of that code of gender which places the feminine as the abject. The lyric can be spoken only when its speaker rises from abjection, replacing her abject position onto the masculine body that, in life, resisted such a “low” placement. If we accept the shifting, mutable category of gender in text and stop there, we fail to theorize the residue of the abject, which persists in Dickinson’s poem precisely as the engine of the poem’s drama. The abject or suffering body in this uncanny poem, separated from gendered codes but retained as the residue of textual transformation, is a space held still while the sufferers trade places. Here, Dickinson displays the abject as the unspeakable, investigating abjection and unspeakability as terms only casually linked to gender. Cathy Caruth theorizes that the structure of symbolic discourse makes abjection unspeakable, holds the place of the trauma victim in a mute space that can only be described by an observer, even if that observer is the victim himself remembering the trauma.58 The position of the abject that the survivor of trauma—for example, a dead speaker—inhabits makes it difficult for her to also assume that stance of authority necessary for legitimate, legible utterance. A dichotomy asserts itself implacably, making illegible the direct speaking of abjection. Inasmuch as it turns on an explicit shift of power, Dickinson’s Fr454 returns us to the question of how the abject position can be indicated in discourse, gesturing toward the problematic that Caruth pinpoints as the abject voice. This problem, in turn, returns us to query the role of the incest taboo as codified by Lévi-Strauss. For Lévi-Strauss identifies the incest taboo as a prohibition against fathers retaining their daughters in their own households. The father-kept daughter, or the daughter kept home with the father, moves into the place of the abject in the configuration of Lévi-Strauss’s exogamic structure. The speaker of Fr454 implicitly takes the point of view of the daughter kept home to attend the mortality of the parent. But poem 454 attends to a man’s death, emphasizing gender, and so it is fair to read the poem not as autobiography but as a meditation on the impact of paternal death on the daughter as a speaker. Here, paternal death releases her voice. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Kinship Structures, Lacan argues that fatherhood, like language, possesses by deferral.59 In this conceptual framework, death, by signifying the rupture of the paternal role, opens a space for confusion around the father’s name’s ability to possess. If death arbitrates the law that controls symbolic discourse as a law of deferral, Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems use the symbolic of the crisis of death to take the kept daughter’s point of view as a topos that itself is deferred. Instead of the father controlling the terms of this deferral, in Dickinson’s subversive scenario the daughter supervises her own linguistic translation into the space toward which that deferral in language points. The textual deferral is used to position the daughter as speaker after the paternal metaphor has been elided by death’s rupture. The daughter’s abjection is at once

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indicated and elided by the stroke of performance’s deferral, or the performance of deferral. Specifically, the dead daughter’s role as one speaking from abjection is subverted by Dickinson’s poems’ resistance to naming, by their insistence on avoiding the catachresis of the vocabulary of named places, named people, and on adopting instead a discourse in which metaphor is the primary defining strategy. Dickinson’s dead speakers name themselves through metaphor. The speakers achieve self-ownership in the brief lyric space, but a kind of self-ownership that definitively engages deferral of its own achievement. To define this deferral, I wish to suggest, one need not only read the terms of Christian afterlife but should also consider the language of the dead speaker’s poem as itself embodying the movement of deferral in the space of the poem: the poem becomes that textual space in which the speaker’s self-naming, or self-ownership, occurs. The achievement of self-naming is placed into the lyric space of the poem, the poem becoming the speaker’s signature. A rhetoric engaging abjection and overturning abjection drives Dickinson’s poem Fr396, in which the speaker’s body becomes fragmented and vanishes in the poem’s space. The speaker’s identity becomes the metaphor of “Being” as consumption (1–8): I took one Draught of Life I’ll tell you what I paid Precisely an existence The market price, they said. They weighed me, Dust by Dust They balanced Film with Film, Then handed me my Being’s worth A single Dram of Heaven!

The speaker is atomized before our reading eyes, made into her separate particles of dust, an abject body of death that is then medicated by a precise dose of “Heaven.” Alongside the image of the speaker’s atomization described in the text, the dashes atomize the text. Strikingly, the text encodes itself as a reversal of atomization arguably more convincing than the jigger of salvation that ends the poem. Just as the dissolution of speaking body into a single “Dram” makes eerily whole the turn of disembodiment, the dashes knit back the poem they atomize (8). The economy of this atomization, in which death has a market value, is marked as a dangerous exchange. The speaker disarticulated into particles of dust might just as well remain so fragmented, except that the poem as text, as “Dram,” closes the lyric, sealing into a formal whole the speaking subject. Dickinson’s characteristic ellipses, or dashes, make of the poem a formal risk and restitution, the poem becoming itself just what the speaker “paid” for. The poem enacts a formal stroke

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that overturns the speaker’s abject status, a graphic text, the stitches of which set the speaker whole again after submitting to death’s linguistic law of différance.60 One may also read the topic of atomization as an inscription of the daughter-asspeaker’s endangered voice. In Fr396, each dash, in articulating the breath’s break in the speaking of the line, stages a point at which the line is silenced, while each renewed line regains voice, building the poem. While Dickinson’s historical position, in the frame of Lévi-Strauss’s incest taboo, was apparently that of a daughter whose father kept her home with him, her posthumous-voiced lyrics place speech at the margin between the abject cultural position (in Lévi-Strauss’s terms) of the kept daughter and the ascendant position of the rhetorician whose metaphoric speech dramatically recognizes the illusory trappings of the daughter’s trap, performing an oratory that inscribes in its own body the surpassing of the trap of the daughter’s namelessness. The silenced abject rises by performatively inscribing her own ascent, regaining precisely that voice whose absence made her abject and signified her abjection. In Fr396, the “they” who weigh the disarticulated speaker and administer her medicinal “Dram”—that is, the completed “Dram” of the text read—may be interpreted as the audience. The speaker’s disarticulation before audience is redeemed by the poem’s being read: the very “they” who threaten her with disarticulation remedy the danger into which Dickinson’s speaker has placed herself. The audience is written into the poem as that which threatens her with dissolution and then redeems the threat. The poem opens with the speaker’s willingly drinking a potion for “life,” but this life has to be paid for with another kind of life, and that payment is meted out in terms of audience-performer reciprocity. Here, the daughter-as-speaker “drank” a formal, professional, not quotidian language and was rewarded with the threat of her silence before the patronym. Her restitutive speech is dramatically remembered through her relationship to audience, the “they” that will receive the poem as an intact whole. Daneen Wardrop, attending to this characteristic drama of abjection, abrogation, and triumphant overcoming in another Dickinson poem, Fr479, reads a narrative of a veiled scene of rape. As in Fr396, the speaker’s bodily intactness is implicitly threatened. Wardrop notes the use of verbs connotative of violation in that poem.61 The poem, however, strikingly lacks a description of physical violation. Instead, it focuses on moments of interlude, gaps of intimation. As in Fr454, Dickinson’s poem’s speaker has been surprised at the opening of her own lyric. This element of surprise marks the blurring of the violation that sets the poem going—the speaker’s being atomized or carried away by death—with the implicit violation of audience, which redeems the first violation. Fr479 stages this surprise and gets its dramatic rush from the surprise: “Because I could not stop for Death - / He kindly stopped for me” (1–2). Dislocating the poem’s scene from that of rape, the social encounter that surprises the speaker into putting away her childish things contains a chaperone. The speaker tells us: “The Carriage held but just Ourselves - / And Immortality” (3–4). Immortality, as audience, here plays the

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role of the watcher, making sure the deathly suitor does not touch the speaker until he has built a home, a proper married woman’s domicile, for the girl—albeit his house has its “Cornice - in the Ground” (18). The speaker of “Because I could not stop for Death” is somehow overwhelmed and taken away in the poem, but that is not the same as being raped. Rather, this poem inscribes a stereotypical bridal narrative, complete with feminine self-renunciation and the sheer bridal gown. Wardrop considers the “Fields of Gazing Grain” as spaces of voyeurism indicative of sexual perversion.62 By contrast, I interpret those watchful fields as signs of the force of normative culture.63 The fields of gazing grain inscribe the audience into the poem. Dickinson’s poem portrays the speaker being abducted by the most suitable and unsuitable of suitors, following Herman’s interpretation of the father’s claim over the daughter as normative, not perverse, in patriarchal culture. Audience, metonymized by the fields, watches the daughter’s abduction. Indeed, it is that audience, inscribed as always already belated—that space “Immortality” also held in the carriage—which represents the speaking daughter’s belated protection from the father’s abducting law, from his unlimited right over her voice. Here, Dickinson predicts that it is accurate to replace the authority of the father as governor of linguistic production with that of death, an exchange performed before the shifting audience of the contemporary culture, the “fields of gazing grain,” for the belated posthumous audience, “Immortality.” The speaker shows us that she is taken to a fatal home (21–4): Since then - ’tis Centuries - and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity -

Home as fate is surpassed as the site of the grave is surpassed, driven past, and the horses continue on an otherwise undescribed route. The speaker describes this courtship as fruitless, a circular, eternal journey. In this inverted courtship, she is involuntarily brought back, brought home, by a turn toward death. A daughter kept home, perhaps, to attend the father as he approaches death would share with the speaker of Dickinson’s poem a premature turn toward death. Although in Fr479 the suitor does not sexually abrogate the speaker’s body, her body is, by implication, seen naked through the gossamer and tulle. She appears stripped, unprotected. But this speaker’s death trap is not necessarily sexual invasion; rather, it is the invasion of sight, the daughter’s inescapable role as the one who is seen by the father’s gaze.64 The daughter-speaker is powerless to control her own actions or to choose her own field of operations while she remains so dangerously visible. The courtship in the poem is revealed to be a violating journey, because, while leaving the speaker physically unmolested, it takes her to the very place—the house of the father and his death—away from which a more typical suitor would

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have taken her. The tombstone connotes the space of the father, because it is here that the daughter’s paternal name claims her, the patronym on the tombstone. Dickinson’s transposition of “Death” with the father suggests that the “no” is performed by the father only as if it were his own law, death a father who stops for his daughter. The father, in Butler’s reading of Lacan’s Lévi-Straussian linguistics, performs death illicitly by imitating the deferral of completed meaning in language. Inasmuch as Dickinson’s troped posthumous lyrics are not, for the most part, corpse poems, the poems pivot around a gap that is not a corpse. Instead, and importantly, the poems place the deferral of their speaker’s oration, her posthumous stance as she speaks, as a gesture outside the father’s control. Dickinson exposes the illicit nature of the alliance between death and the paternal linguistic function, for in Dickinson’s death lyrics, death does not stand still as a symbolic father, but rather begins or sets in motion an endless chain of interruptions and counter-interruptions. Her rhetoric harnesses a series of selfinterruptions to suggest a link between unfixable meaning and the law of death that is quite in opposition to Lacan’s linking the father’s law with that of death. The drama of Fr479, then, inheres in the poem’s speaker’s interrupted status, her being stopped before she speaks her poem. But then she does perform the poem in this uncanny interrupted space. Elsewhere, I have addressed the poem’s deployment of pastoral otium; here, I address the poem’s presentation of woman’s work, what Dickinson called her “business.” The speaker’s work “stopped” by death is the stroke of violence that opens the poem. This violence is placed in the caesura of what the speaker was doing that she could not but did stop, but the violence also causes that break. The poem frames what the speaker was doing that she could not stop by marking the poem itself as the rhetorical place of the speaker’s original “work.” Much as Walter Benjamin’s chapter “A Berlin Chronicle” describes the author’s loss of a mnemonic chart of his life, the essay’s text effectively replacing the chart whose loss the essay describes, so also does Dickinson’s poem Fr479, as text, perform that task at which the speaker was interrupted at the poem’s opening.65 The violence is placed at the lyric’s opening, and indeed the violence is the lyric’s opening—it is the poem itself that breaks the speaker’s writing of poetry, that task encompassing her labor and leisure. The poem stages how the feminine speaker’s voice is taken from her by a “death” from which she then recuperates voice, placing the erasure of her voice in death’s topos. She reinstates voice by inscribing its erasure. The activity the speaker could not stop, I suggest, was writing the lyric verse. Death stops this work. But the description of that loss itself becomes the new verse. The verse contains its violence as momentum: the speaker, inflicted by a stance of death, alters stance into force, motion. She interrupts what she was writing before performing her death-as-violence, a violence that releases her text from the greater violence of being unread. What she could not stop doing was

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writing the lyric in which she confronts and vanquishes her daughterly aphasia. But writing the lyric also stops the lyric, giving it an ending. The poem confesses that the speaker’s role was that of the daughter whose labor and leisure entailed no power in the public world. Strikingly, then, the speaker casts her self-elegy into the space of an “Eternity” that both closes out the apparently powerful figure of death and recasts the lyric as finally achieving for the daughter-as-speaker the power of adult, or canonical, utterance. The surpassing of the grave and the leaving behind of the courtly suitor, death, serve to stage dismissals of the speaker’s child role, the daughter’s apprenticeship. In the final couplet, her understanding of her situation is anything but puerile. The poem’s posthumous voice recuperates the illegible speech of the abject, the speaker whose labor and leisure were powerless in the public world. The poem works by transposing a violation into an impossible mode whose illegibility is dramatized: the speech of the bodiless dead. This trope takes place within the legible if specular space of inscribed oratory. It dramatizes the impossibility of speaking abjection by placing in the lyric a theatrical elision of the very speaker whose voice sustains the poem’s performance. Dickinson’s poem’s speaker, the bride, suggests that the father’s name, as the patronym on the tombstone, becomes ultimately meaningless in the space of the poem, because after death the gaze of an “Eternity” meets the speaker’s gaze, her face implicitly following the direction of the horses’ heads. In other words, the father’s appropriation of the suitor’s role is itself superceded by the speaker’s alliance with an ungendered and ungendering death. As “Immortality,” audience performs a site of death that supervises the lyric. Shifting Derrida’s terms, one could say that audience is that which borders the poem: the poet’s death is framed by audience. Dickinson’s poem dramatizes and makes explicit what Derrida has pointed out is implicit in that structure through which text is authored. In poem Fr479, audience is written into the lyric as the chaperone and destiny that comes with death. Audience is posed by the speaker of Dickinson’s troped posthumous poem, a performance in which audience sees the speaker seeing the audience as the speaker tells how, taken in courtship to be returned to her father’s home, there to remain until his name is written over her body in death, she claims an audience to supervise and subvert her abjection. The speaker goes past the patronym on the tombstone, developing a language that disregards the name of the father. The poem works by inscribing audience as immortality, as after the patronym. The daughter as speaker, then, makes a different compact with her audience, at least in Dickinson’s terms, always structuring audience as belated, a late developmental stage. Indeed, Paula Bennett argues that the child speakers of many of Dickinson’s lyrics mark a particular developmental stage for the poet.66 She argues that Dickinson managed, in time, to overcome the position of the child and to speak with a mature voice. Along similar lines, I suggest that while the voice of the imprisoned child and the child already dead when she speaks is a persistent

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motif in Dickinson’s oeuvre, the powerlessness of that child is overturned in many of the dead daughter–voiced poems. In the space of each lyric itself, the poem becomes a theater for staging the revelation of the illusory nature of the daughteras-speaker’s powerlessness and for undoing it. Dickinson’s dead child speaker may be read, then, not only as a stage in the poet’s development but also as a way of staging development within the compact space of each lyric. “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” (Fr764), for example, presents a keenly perceptive exploration of what it means to be a kept daughter. Infusing the poem with a subtle threat of vengeance, the progression of the images suggest the way that a “Life” becomes a gun that discharges. The loaded gun must obey the master, even if it would be capable of annihilating the master. The lack of “the power to die” (24)—the figure of the gun that can kill but cannot die—is parallel to the imprisoned daughter, who can use her powerful words only if the father/master chooses to hear her speak. Her verbal mastery is cast as if without audience. It can kill, but only if someone chooses to pick up the text and read it. Like the gun’s stasis in indeterminacy, the kept daughter’s passage into adulthood is withheld, and the feminine poet’s passage into mastery—or into recognition as a master poet—is withheld until an always belated audience arrives. Until the audience sees the poet’s writing, letting her “discharge” her verbal power, her death will be unmarked, incomplete. Performatively, Dickinson’s lyric becomes the gun’s discharge, making in its own space the conditions for the speaker’s translation from childish promise to powerful delivery, from apprenticeship to mastery. The loaded gun that symbolizes a powerful force controlled by a master expresses the fate of the kept daughter, who, while never assaulted, has been held in the symbolic position of availability to the father but allowed none of the wife’s adult social power. As Barbara Mossberg interprets, Dickinson writes from the rhetorical place of the daughter, taking a daughter’s position regarding linguistic production. I am not as interested in Dickinson’s biographical experience, however, as I am in her genius for articulating daughterhood in a patriarchal culture and connecting daughterhood with insolvable apprenticeship. Dickinson’s child-voiced poems alert us not only to the challenge of speaking as a daughter but also to how that language is different from other rhetorics of femininity. Here, the speaker’s goal is that “death” inflicted on the writer by audience, in the way that Derrida theorizes an author’s death as the boundary of the text. The speaker wants to die—that is, to be read. For if the boundary of the text is only meaningfully asserted when the text is read, and if in this reading the author is rendered posthumous, or positioned as dead before his text, it is this power to die—to be read—toward which Dickinson’s speaker motivates herself and in which she often places herself, an assumption of posthumousness, of death, that translates into an assumption of being read as an author, a masterful writer. As the owned gun metaphor implies, Dickinson’s poems using dead speakers raise the question of agency. Like the gun that discharges powerfully but never of

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its own volition, the troped posthumous poem questions its own agency; the disembodied dead speaker is an illegitimate, outcast speaker, without a clear topos from which to launch her authority. The question of agency, of who is speaking and by what authority, plays hide-and-seek in the dead child–voiced poem. As Cristanne Miller clarifies, Dickinson’s lyrics’ frequent use of the ambiguous “it” effects this eluding of a stance of agency, or of claiming narrative responsibility for text.67 In the same way that the word “it” occults the specific object, the troped posthumous narrator occults the legislative task of a narrator in text. Distancing the claims of agency, the unnamed posthumous speaker resists the paternal metaphor by putting in play a problematically passive engagement of inscription as performance. For the dead speaker dramatically draws on stereotypical images of feminine passivity. At the core of the troped posthumous poem is an aporia, a dead speaker. While this narrative of passivity seems demure, a gap in the place of a speaker produces an impenetrable grammar, a defense or even an offense against the paternal metaphor. The placement of the speaker in an indeterminate space of death—like the use of the indeterminate pronoun “it”—gains for the poem a distinctive and distancing lack of agency. Fr764 positions itself as awaiting the moment when audience, its master, will discharge the text by reading it. Following Miller’s important point that Dickinson’s poems not only deploy an ambiguous “it” but also address a shifting “you,” I suggest that the troped posthumous poem’s apparent lack of agency implicates the reader. The reader becomes the shifting “you” called upon to enter the troped posthumous elegiac text; agency devolves onto the reader. The reader is written into the scene of selfelegy, taking up the agency of the poem’s performance. The dead speaker, then, is not so much passive as rather appropriately ghostly, haunting the reader, forcing the reader to enter the poem as a witness whose reading is posed as the poem’s sole performance. If, as I am arguing, Dickinson uses the rhetorical space of death to press her poetic project beyond the limitations of gendered codes of speech, it is important to note, as Petrino has documented, that Dickinson’s decision to use the point of view of the dead child in her lyrics clearly resonates with other woman-authored nineteenth-century mortuarial poems.68 Dickinson rather elliptically participated in the discourse of women’s poetry in the nineteenth century, inasmuch as she decided to some degree to stay out of it, decided, that is, not to alter her idiosyncratic poems to fit conventional standards for women’s poetry. Instead, her dead child–voiced poems pointedly reject the gentle physicality of the nineteenthcentury child elegy.69 Notably, Dickinson’s dead speakers do not inhabit the external, mortuarial world.70 Instead, Dickinson’s dead speakers describe the experience of death that goes on after that last trace of earthly existence, the domestically marked grave. Indeed, the ethnologist Nadia Seremetakis theorizes the grave as the edge of domesticity; the grave is part of the domestic scene, its boundary.71 Dickinson’s self-elegies push past the grave, past the edge of

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domesticity, a gesture that distinguishes them from mortuarial poems. Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems consider the space of the grave as quotidian territory and invoke an imagined topos always in departure from that domestic space. Lyrics such as Fr448 consider what happens when the grave with its gravestone’s patronym has been surpassed. When the speaker confesses that “I died for Beauty - but was scarce / Adjusted,” the overturning that begins the poem—that is, the speaker’s immediate dislocation of topos—also reflects the subversion of the patriarchal code of the daughter’s namelessness, her nominal erasure before the father’s name. Dickinson effects an abrupt shift of topos by placing her speaker in the feminine mode of mourning but then dislocating her speech from the grave as the last remnant of domesticity. Rather than the grave, an uncomforting space of unknowability is indicated by the poem’s placement of feminine adult utterance in parallel with erasure. This parallel is chilling, because it juxtaposes the adult woman’s silence against the assumption of a child speaker’s ability to speak, dramatizing a child speaker’s ability to begin the poem that ends with the adult feminine speaker’s “letting go” of her text into silence. “Letting go” of speech, the adult voice achieved in the space of Dickinson’s self-elegies, demarcates the theoretical impossibility of woman’s voice as it is theorized by Irigaray. The poem’s ending in the erasure of moss invokes a high-speed-chase excitement, as we hope the speaker will finish the poem before the moss covers her lips, or before her status as an adult woman silences her. Evoking the image of the name on the tombstone through the synecdochic suggestion of the stereotype of moss on the tombstone, Fr448 highlights and collapses the difference between spoken and written word. The daughter’s exclusion from public speech becomes her self-generated inclusion in inscribed text. The speaker’s life given up for a concept, “for Beauty,” has an always earlier status as inscription generated by reifying capitalization, that is, by the implicit quotation marks that make speech inscription and emphasize the object status of the word.72 The emphasis in Fr448 on the framing symbolic term “for Beauty” parallels the speaker’s translation into text, her containment in the spectral quotation marks of inscription. The poem points out the problematic contrast of spoken voice and inscribed text and presents in its text the surpassing of spoken voice—the lips erased, the capital terms “Beauty” and “Truth” altered of value— by inscription. By that very poem that persists, which we read as Fr448, the speaking lips are covered up by the encroaching “Moss” of text. If “I died for Beauty” ascribes to burial an implicit marriage between the one who died for beauty and the one who died for truth, it also describes burial before marriage. It is a text in which the mortuarial nuptials transfer to the speaker the ability to inscribe the “Beauty” for which she dies. The idea implicit in this poem that marriage, or rather consubstantiation with the beloved, is a marker of adulthood underlies Dickinson’s child-voiced poems’ moments of transformation. Dickinson’s reinterpretation of the Victorian notion of marriage as the marker of

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attainment of adult womanhood rewrites marriage as consubstantiation, a getting into bed with the beloved, who may be another woman or a deity. That Dickinson’s oeuvre uses the role of wife as a metaphor for election (see, for example, poems Fr225 and Fr818), a term for surpassing mortality, may be read as ironic, but it also remains central to the poems, marking the trope of consubstantiation with the beloved as that turn which makes the speaker an adult, a master of her text. The revision of the daughter’s, or child’s, voice in favor of an adult voice is the drama of the dead child–voiced poems, which end, I suggest, with the troubling severance, or silence, of adult feminine voice. In Fr605, Dickinson’s speaker rejects the role of being buried as a daughter, the line “I am alive - I guess -” indicating that the speaker refuses to be buried under the patronym, “marked [by] Girlhood’s name” (21). Instead, the speaker places herself in another birth, not engendered by the naming father (28). The role of the bride, then, becomes that marker applied to nontraditional marriages, rebirth configured as marriage with a deity or perhaps with another woman. But it is still the role of bride that Dickinson’s dead child speaker claims to free her from her father’s mark, or name: Dickinson’s dead daughter speaker disclaims the mark of the patronym in a union with the deity or the other woman, which does not generate a new patronym. In Fr448, the poem stages the erasure of grave and corpse. The poem is positioned as that which is inscribed after the explicit erasure of its speaker. The poem is positioned after speech and inscription have both been erased, the lips and the names covered up. But this absolute erasure of all discourse, logos and trace, is pointed to by the poem, which itself persists as alterior trace, anonymous. The “Bretheren” ironically are indicated as those who bear nothing, no sign, no progeny, who enter death’s night stripped (9–12): And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night We talked between the Rooms Until the Moss had reached our lips And covered up - Our names -

This poem moves not into but rather through the territory of the grave. The poem dramatically erases the mark of the grave, that moss troping erasure. The authority of its posthumous narrator inheres in her ability to dramatize the vanishing point at which removing herself from the gaze of the audience structures her speech. By contrast, the commonplace of the graveside poem is the exterior of the grave, the part of the dead that the living can still see and read. While Dickinson clearly participates in what Elisabeth Bronfen interprets as the union of woman and death in patriarchal discourse, her turning from the grave to question what comes after marks her poetics as posthumous, born after the father, after the patronym on the grave has been erased.73 The poem is not spoken by a corpse, but rather by a speaker whose body has already been disarticulated, erased, covered up.

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In the staging of the poem, the moss has already covered the speaker’s lips when she begins her poem’s telling. The poem is positioned in the synecdochical space of the name erased by moss on the gravestone. In other words, the poem itself tropes the moss that silences and erases, placing itself after the erasure of the father’s name and before the feminine speaker’s attainment to public discourse, an attainment granted her only through the gesture of mandating her sacrificial body, her “[dying] for Beauty.” The moss evocatively erases the name of the speaker, her patronym. The lips and the name change place and are negated by the poem’s belated-as-inscribed status. The speaker of Fr448 finishes her self-elegy’s performance as on a razor’s edge, cutting the closing line just before the moss transforms spoken elegiac performance into written, posthumous discourse. The poem is rhetorically positioned in a narrow and risky space between the speaker’s symbolic selferasure—her dying for Beauty—and the erasure of the self effected by death. The posthumous stance, then, evokes that dangerous public relations maneuver of posthumous publication through which Dickinson herself risked her oeuvre. This trope of the posthumous voice as a mode of joining an other in ecstatic waiting similarly informs Dickinson’s poem Fr804. I close with a reading of this poem’s invocation of the speaker’s transformation in the space of death. The opening line of Fr804, “Ample make this Bed,” hypothetically could be spoken by a living narrator, a command given, perhaps, during housekeeping chores. As the poem progresses, however, the reader’s certainty that the speaker is currently living begins to erode. As the poem develops, the place of the bed, marking the topos of a cozy, safe sleep, begins to garner attributes of death. The first climax of the poem is unquestionably the climax of death, followed by second harrowing: “In it wait till Judgment break / Excellent and Fair” (3–4). The poem’s second line, “Make this Bed with Awe -,” shifts its focus from a scene of housework to a different context for the word “Bed” (2). While a bed in a bedroom could simply be desired for its “Ample” size, to make a bed “with Awe” is a symbolic act. One might make a bed with awe, for example, if making a marriage bed. For the maker of the bed to then be asked to get into the bed she has made and “In it wait till Judgment Break” pulls the poem categorically away from the domestic quotidian (3). No longer is making the bed the gesture of bridal attendants preparing a bridal bed. Instead, this getting into the bed until Judgment Day is a way of entering death. The poem’s second stanza continues its enunciation of the formal qualities of the bed: “Be it’s Mattress straight - / Be it’s Pillow round -” (5–6). This couplet does not describe but rather dictates the contours of the bed. The speaker of Dickinson’s lyric envisions her well-made bed as a space within which she will make that crossing as from the childhood of death into the adulthood of eternal life. In this ample bed, the speaker and her addressee, her beloved as the inscribed reader, will cross from oblivion into the waking at Judgment Day, “Excellent and Fair” (4). The poem places itself in the topos of death. The uncanny resonance of

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the poem depends on the evocation of the fearful space of death and the comforting space of a bed shared with a beloved, the lyric’s spectral addressee, who is also the always waiting audience. The speaker’s entrapment in a mortal, paternal house structures for her a maze whose navigation turns her toward the unknown: Judgment Day. Perhaps the deathbed is the space in which the daughter can command “Ample make this Bed,” framing death as a “fine and private place” where some embrace. The topos of the poem is death, but not death as a fixed event or a grave. Rather, Dickinson’s speaker uses the trope of the posthumous voice to make death open in the poem as an expanse, a direction. The inscription of the poem itself becomes the well-made bed and turns both speaker and reader—we readers as her addressed audience—toward Judgment, scandalously linking Christian Judgment Day with love’s consummation and also with the judgment performed by the reader, the audience of the text. The reader is written into this ample bed of the lyric as the one who makes the bed for the speaker. Addressed, told to make her bed, indeed we make her bed: we make her literary reputation. The violent rupture in the center of the lyric’s bed holds the implicit drama of the poem. The first stanza leaves open the question of who will get into that bed and wait until Judgment Day: will it only be the speaker or also the reader? Do we read ourselves into death by reading Dickinson’s self-elegy? The ambiguity of the poem pulls the poem open. The statements that close the poem, however, parallel those at its opening. It begins “Ample Make this Bed - / Make this Bed with Awe / In it wait” (1–3), while it ends “Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise / Interrupt this Ground -” (7–8). The interdiction of interruption recloses the bed, signifying that it will not be the reader but only the speaker who will confront a terrifying proleptic posthumousness. The poem’s second stanza soothes the terror evoked by the first stanza, presenting the bed as both safe and inescapable, inevitable. An act of dictation, the posthumous frame of the poem highlights its always already inscribed status. Body is occulted, and the inscribed text becomes the place of the body’s disappearance, the Derridean “trace.” Dickinson incorporates audience in a way that evokes the performative space of the read text, that bed that becomes ample only in garnering, gathering audience. The more who read Dickinson’s poem, the more ample that bed, the ground of the poem, the ground that the poem is. Reading the poem, we are placed in the inscribed bed—that is what the poem asks us to accept—but we are also asked to make the bed, to complete the speaker’s performance of her selfelegy by reading it. My suggestion that the poem begins from a child’s perspective turns on the poem’s imperative statements, which evoke a small child’s demands, and also on the poem’s insistence that the bed must be a space for growth—that the speaker will not simply be waiting in the bed but will become fully herself in that waiting. The bed will have to be ample to contain her growth. In death, she will get into the bed that she, a child, has dictated into existence, but she will emerge from the bed as an adult. The bed is a vehicle for crossing, for emergence. The mastery of the

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speaker, then, is bound up in threefold terms of sexual mastery or maturity, spiritual election, and authorial mastery, or gaining canonicity, all evoked as occurring in the lyric space. The specter of the buried, nameless child, then, haunts “Ample make this Bed” only insofar as the poem could be spoken through the mouth of a newly dead child, addressing the mother as she prepares the child for burial. Just as the commonplace nineteenth-century poem of a mother mourning a child often centers around the scene of the child’s final bed, Dickinson’s lyric takes as its setting a bed in which the speaker will wait for Judgment Day. The poem’s structure imitates a child’s incantatory demands when trying to fall asleep (1–4, 7– 8). Indeed, the copy of the poem sent to Susan Dickinson is marked with a child’s writing, and R.W. Franklin suggests that the poem is marked by Susan Dickinson’s child.74 The poem reads, at least in Susan Dickinson’s interpretation, as a poem appropriate for sharing with a small child. Poem 804 performs a crossing over, however, pulling the scene of a child watching its mother prepare its bed into the vision of the crossing from death to Judgment. Here, the poem executes a crossing from childhood into adulthood. The trauma of the child’s death, unsettled and unsettling, is balanced against the poem’s self-recognition as great, or canonical, writing that awaits the arrival of a belated, proper audience to justify the amplitude or awe already achieved in the poem’s inscription. Just as the anonymous child speaker asks her mother to prepare for her an eternal bed that finally will be wide enough to hold an adult, an “Ample” bed, so the poem is also posed as awaiting its audience, the ample awe at last accorded the poet. This speaker’s time of crossing from childhood to adulthood, from apprenticeship to mastery, will occur in the space of the poem, also evoked as the space of death. Dickinson uses the posture of the unnamed, buried child in this lyric to stage an entry into adulthood, into full authority, or mastery of discourse. The speaker’s authority anticipated in this poem specifically entails “Fair”-ness: the chance to be heard and judged according to one’s gifts (4). As Dickinson asks us to consider in “For Death, or rather,” the economy of the father holds the daughter in check through her desire to be included in the transactions of life—marriage, birth, house-holding. By contrast, if the daughter trades her lively economy for a lethal one, she gets a name, or readers for her lyrics, which perform as self-elegies. Dickinson’s posthumous poetics use death as a privative force that exposes the illicit conjunction of the father and the name. Death’s gifts are technically uncertain. But rhetorically, in Dickinson’s posthumously canonical oeuvre, they are assured. As Dickinson asks us to consider in Fr644, the deployment of the posthumous voice is a gesture embedded in an economy of topological struggle, a gamble through which the feminine speaker forfeits one engagement, that with the domestic scene, in favor of an uncertain “gift,” that of a topos more expansive than the domestic quotidian. In Fr644, if the speaker trades her lively economy for a lethal one, she may get a “Name”—a tombstone or a belated audience for her self-

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elegy. This exchange, which gives the speaker the things that death will buy, is mysterious not so much because death is an unknown entity as because death changes life’s economy abruptly. “For Death, or rather - / For the Things ’twould buy -” begins with a typical capitalist exchange, a purchase, but becomes a scene of renunciation, an almost mystical mode of earning deferred bliss, finally a “gift” as in a gift economy. In Fr644, what at first was purchased becomes at poem’s end a gift. Death’s gifts, in Dickinson’s posthumously canonical oeuvre, replace the father’s name. Dickinson subverts the father’s taboo against the daughter’s speech to a taboo against the daughter’s acceding to silence. Exposing the illicit conjunction of the father and the name, the taboo placed before Dickinson’s dead child–spoken lyrics is a taboo against submission to the daughter’s silence. Emily Dickinson was a daughter who, famously, did not leave her father’s house, insofar as Dickinson’s father and brother did not follow Lévi-Strauss’s exogamic law of bartering away “their” Emily.75 Instead, Emily, object of exogamy kept home, wrote out the very deferral of elegiac discourse that her posthumously famous oeuvre uncannily performs. She uses as her characteristic topos the margin of death, putting the narrators of some of her most accomplished lyrics in the place of the nameless dead. In her father’s house, Dickinson created a body of work whose central premise is deferral, deferring narrative identity through a language that refuses to close on one meaning, a rhetoric that places the feminine speaker always belatedly into the performative space. The term “performative space” is not specific enough, however, for Dickinson’s rhetoric did not so much move woman-authored poems into the public sphere of nineteenth-century readership, where Paula Bennett has amply demonstrated that they already were, as it crushed the “berries harsh and rude” enclosing a public sphere that pushed women’s poetry into quotidian, domestic topoi, excluded from canonical topoi.76 In shattering the domestic image of the grave as woman’s place, Dickinson’s self-elegies instate a topos of death’s aftermath as a place of resistance to the father’s name. The oeuvre insists on a status of feminine self-elegy in which the feminine speaker invokes her own death as cause for the highest rhetorical achievement. It is not a poetics of the body but rather a poetics of putting away the body, of reaching the edge of figuration. Recalling Irigaray’s contention that the feminine speaker is the always already silenced speaker—that there is no such thing as a woman’s voice in the symbolic order —I suggest that Dickinson’s dead child–voiced poems take as their starting point a fatherless topos and from imagined posthumousness inaugurate a language whose self-reflexive trope, self-elegy, forms a symbolic discourse independent of the paternal metaphor, based on a recognition of gender as performed. Woman’s exclusion from the tradition of elegy is critiqued by Dickinson’s formal self-elegy.

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Notes 1 2

Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992) 3. Jerome McGann, “The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method,” New Literary History 12.2 (Winter 1981): 281. Robert Weisbuch applies the term “posthumous voice” in the context of a number of Dickinson’s poems, and earlier, in 1938, Ivor Winters had noted Dickinson’s “numerous poems” that attempt to express the “experience of life after death,” the experience of “posthumous beatitude.” See Weisbuch, Emily Dickinson’s Poetry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972); Winters, “Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Judgment,” Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 31. See also April Rose Selley, “Satisfied Shivering: Emily Dickinson’s Deceased Speakers,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 37.2–3 (1991): 215–33. 3 On Dickinson’s use of the child’s voice, see Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, “Emily Dickinson’s Nursery Rhymes,” Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, ed. Suzane Juhasz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983) 45–66, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “The Voice of the Child,” Emily Dickinson (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988) 178–200. 4 Melissa Zeiger discusses the woman-authored child elegy in Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Cornell UP, 1997) 62. 5 Beatrice Martina Guenther, The Poetics of Death: The Short Prose of Kleist and Balzac (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996). 6 Mossberg, for example, has extensively analyzed Dickinson’s poetry as a means of resisting the terms of nineteenth-century womanhood. Nevertheless, Dickinson’s remaining in the role of the child comes dangerously close to replicating another trope of nineteenth-century femininity, that of the angel child, dead before reaching maturity, a sign of its proximity to God. Dickinson’s ironizing of this angel child’s role does not so much refuse the terms of nineteenth-century womanhood as take up one mode of that prescribed feminine, the dead angel voice, and reveal the harshness of its implications. See Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, Emily Dickinson: When the Writer Is a Daughter (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982). 7 Dickinson, Poems for Youth, ed. Alfred Leete Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934). For other examples of Dickinson selected and illustrated for children that suggest the ongoing cultural currency in reading Dickinson as a nursery poet, see Emily Dickinson: A Letter to the World, ed. Rumer Godden (New York: Macmillan, 1968); I’m Nobody! Who are You? Poems of Emily Dickinson for Children, ed. Richard B. Sewall (Owings Mills, MD: Stemmer House, 1978); and Emily Dickinson: Poetry for Young People, ed. Frances S. Bolin (New York: Sterling, 1994). 8 Jonathan Morse, “Bibliographical Essay,” A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, ed. Vivian R. Pollack (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 258. 9 See Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Noonday, 1987) 204. 10 For Dickinson’s poetry, this chapter refers to The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), identified parenthetically by poem number preceded by (Fr), as is the common practice. I have also consulted Franklin’s 1998 variorum edition.

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11 Elizabeth Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 (Hanover, NH: U of New England P, 1998) 103–4. 12 Michel Ragon, The Space of Death, trans. Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1983). 13 Petrino, 93. 14 Petrino, 53–96. 15 Petrino, 56. 16 Lydia Huntley Sigourney, “Death of an Infant,” Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, ed. Paula Bernat Bennett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 6. 17 Petrino, 77. 18 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984). Kristeva’s notion of pre-symbolic fluency as the maternal material of speech finds an echo in Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay on rhythm in the womb. See “The Echo of the Subject,” trans. Barbara Harlow, Typography, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989) 139–207. 19 Slavoj Zizek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’: Or, the Invisible Master,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salacl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 94. 20 Mossberg comments on Dickinson’s prolonged engagement of the terrain of the rebellious daughter in Emily Dickinson, 1–13. I do not assume, however, that because Dickinson did not marry and have children she did not grow up. Rather, I am reading Dickinson’s deployment of the child voice as a rhetorical strategy, a use of rhetoric to expose and alter the terms of precisely that patriarchal code that marks woman’s maturity as marrying and having children. 21 Petrino, 100. 22 Petrino, 83. 23 In the obituary she wrote commemorating her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson said of Emily: “her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world […] The mesh of her frame was too rare.” See Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, Open Me Carefully (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998) 266. 24 Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958). For references to Dickinson’s letters, I follow the conventional practice of citing them by their editorially assigned number preceded by the abbreviation (L). In referencing her letters, however, I am drawing on these texts not so much as biography but as other forms of writing to be read along with the poems. In this gesture, I am following Jacqueline Rose’s approach to Sylvia Plath, her treatment of all of Plath’s writings as equally written, none of which she takes as innocent of the possibility of audience in its inception. See Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992). 25 Petrino, 97. 26 Zizek, “I Hear You with My Eyes,” 95. 27 Petrino, 95. 28 In “Because I could not stop for Death,” the speaker’s clothes are feminine—gossamer and tulle. But these are the “trappings and the suits” of femininity. The bridal body of the speaker is elided by the poem’s recurrent gestures of departure. The speaker departs from scene after scene and finally is revealed to have departed from her body, to have become only a gaze observing, as we read the lyric’s close: “the horses’ Heads / were toward Eternity -.”

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29 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984). 30 Allen Tate, “Emily Dickinson,” Emily Dickinson, ed. Richard Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963) 16–28, esp. 22. 31 That Butler clarifies gender as “performative” in turn defines gaze—the seeing of performance—as that which asserts and contains gender. See Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999) 163–80, 173. 32 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 75. 33 For a reading of Dickinson’s heliotropes, see Antoine Cazé, “‘Tropic Show’: Or Dickinson’s Heliotropes,” Emily Dickinson Journal 11.1 (2002): 33–48. 34 Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) 243. 35 Derrida, “White Mythology,” 243. 36 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Milk of Inquiry (New York: Persea, 1999) 112. 37 See Guenther. 38 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 39 Butler, Gender Trouble, 71–2; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J.H. Bell and John von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969). 40 The distinction Butler draws between “performative” and “expressive” describes precisely that way that the symbolic order may be interpreted as connected to paternity only if one already assumes that paternity can be known outside of symbolic constructs. See Gender Trouble, 180. 41 Butler, Gender Trouble, 55, 59, 70–72. 42 Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 86. 43 Concerning Dickinson’s poetry as a critique of woman’s traditional cultural and social place, see Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women—A New Tradition (New York: Harper, 1976); Paula Bennett, My Life, a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics (Boston: Beacon, 1986); and Helen McNeil, Emily Dickinson (New York: Virago-Pantheon, 1986). 44 Anna Shannon Elfenbein, “Unsexing Language: Pronominal Protest in Emily Dickinson’s ‘Lay this Laurel,’” Engendering the Word, ed. Temma F. Berg, Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Jeanne Larsen, and Elisa Kay Sparks (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989) 208–23. 45 Butler, Gender Trouble, 51–2. 46 Butler, Gender Trouble, 83–99. 47 Derrida implies in “White Mythology” that death is the residue at the text’s margin and in the deferred center of the text’s meaning, and one may develop from Derrida’s argument to suggest that death, as a concept, performs its own privation, aligned not with the privative discipline of the father but rather with the privative condition of language as such, its constant lapsing into catachresis. See also Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 34–50. 48 This deferral is expressed through the metaphor of the Christian afterlife. For a discussion of the biblical language of Dickinson’s poetry, see Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987) 131–8. Jerome McGann’s important reading of the textual history of “Because I could not stop for Death” highlights the poem’s Christian commonplaces, although other criticism draws

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attention to Dickinson’s complex manipulation of such received religious topoi in relation to nineteenth-century social and cultural contexts. See McGann, “The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method,” New Literary History 12.2 (Winter 1981): 278–84, and Jane Donahue Eberwein, “‘Is Immortality True?’: Salvaging Faith in an Age of Upheavals,” A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, ed. Vivian R. Pollack (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 67–102. Herman suggests that the part of the incest taboo that forbids fathers keeping their daughters for themselves is broken as a matter of course in patriarchal cultures—indeed, that the real taboo may be that of forbidding daughters from abandoning their fathers. Without perhaps intending to do so, Herman overturns the cornerstone of Lévi-Strauss’s cultural theory that fathers generally give up their daughters. See Father–Daughter Incest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981) 202–3. See Phyllis Gorfain, “Play and the Problem of Knowing,” in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor Turner (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986) 222–3. Luce Irigaray makes the argument that woman cannot speak at all in the language of the father, that she only speaks by mimicry of male language. See The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974). While Butler jettisons such theorization of the feminine in text by jettisoning concepts of gender as specious, I am interested in reading in Dickinson a rhetorical boundary, as it were, between Irigaray and Butler, a language in which stereotypical markers of the feminine are taken up by the speaker but from a topos of alterity, a topos of death’s space as that which allows the coded feminine speaker to shatter the name of the father by placing her speech after the erasure of this name, the tombstone’s eroded lettering. The troped posthumous poem, then, becomes the inscription of the speaker’s identity, a self-naming by the rule of metaphor. For a decentering of Dickinson’s omissions in light of the recovery of her own manuscript conventions, the textual presence of her absences, see Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). While my reading draws on Kristeva’s formulation of the abject, the dead as those cast out of culture, I justify using Kristevan theory in such close conjunction with Butler’s partial rejection of Kristeva’s notion of the feminine inasmuch as I do not read Gender Trouble as a wholesale attack on all aspects of Kristeva’s linguistic theories. Kristeva’s notion of the abject, for example, considers precisely those power structures that overwhelm gender configurations. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982). On Dickinson’s mother’s death, see Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, 1980) 89. Sewall, 89. Sabine Sielke, Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997) 41. Butler, Gender Trouble, 99. Caruth’s theorization of the problematic utterance and inscription of trauma touches tangentially on my reading of Dickinson, for where Caruth suggests that post-traumatic speech observes formal codes unconnected to interior emotion, a sort of always already translated text, I am not arguing that Dickinson, the historical person, is a trauma survivor. Rather, I argue that she takes on the complex task of speaking from the space

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65 66 67

68 69

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of abjection, which Caruth identifies with trauma. See Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 50–54. Julia Kristeva seminally interprets Lacan’s concept of nom du père in Revolution in Poetic Language, 47. The semantic and syntactic economies governed by Dickinson’s characteristic uses of the dash are interpreted by Cristanne Miller, 49–54, and Cameron, 25–6, as well as Paul Crumbley, Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997). Daneen Wardrop, Emily Dickinson’s Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1996) 70. Wardrop, 90. Nadia Seremetakis theorizes fields and graves as parallel structures partaking of a household metaphorics, siting graves as both of the domestic and at the edge of the domestic. The fields and graves hold the boundary of the culture, beyond which is wilderness and the unknown. See The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 185–7, 206–7. Elisabeth Bronfen writes on the murderous force of the paternal gaze in “Killing Gazes, Killing in the Gaze: On Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 59–89. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 3–60. Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun, 41. Cristanne Miller writes: “Her multiple and overlapping uses of ‘it’ in a poem, and her mid-poem changes of a speaker’s gender or gender association mark a disinclination to ‘appropriate’ meaning” (179). On the question of female authorship, authority, and agency in Dickinson’s era, see Petrino, 163–200. Petrino, 53–95, esp. 56, 83. Gilbert and Gubar, for example, place Dickinson in the context of the “gothic narrative of the living burial” that is one of the conventions of women’s mortuary verse in the nineteenth-century “Poetess” tradition. See The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 627. Compare Dickinson’s work to Felicia Hemans’s poems “The Grave of a Poetess” and “The Child’s Last Sleep,” both in Records of Women, with Other Poems, ed. Paula R. Feldman (1828; Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999) 84–6, 141–2. An important influence on Lydia Sigourney and thus on the American tradition of the child-elegy, Hemans’s mourning poems established the conventions of sentimentally figuring and, in fact, picturing the woman and the dead child that would become so commonplace as the century progressed. On nineteenth-century mourning images of dead women and children, see Carol Christ, “Painting the Dead: Portraiture and Necrophilia in Victorian Art and Poetry,” Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 133–51; Henck van Setten, “Album Angels: Parent–Child Relations as Reflected in 19th Century Photos, Made after the Death of a Child,” Journal of Psychohistory 26.4 (1999): 819–34; and Alison Ferris, ed., The Disembodied Spirit (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003). Diana Fuss, “The Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry (Fall 2003): 1–31. Strikingly, in The Last Word, Seremetakis sees women as the guardians of this edge of domesticity.

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72 Cristanne Miller describes Dickinson’s capitalization as both evoking earlier English and American usage and also giving the words “symbolic referentiality.” See Cristanne Miller, 58–9. 73 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992). 74 See R.W. Franklin’s commentary on poem 804 in Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999). 75 For a reading of Dickinson’s home life, see Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001). 76 Paula Bennett, general introduction and introduction to Emily Dickinson, NineteenthCentury American Women Poets, 176–8.

Chapter 5

Rossetti’s Late Suitors: The Death Lyrics and the Speaking Body Because they are nearly contemporaneous, Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems ask to be read in conversation with Christina Rossetti’s death lyrics, even though, as I hope to show, Rossetti’s death lyrics do not participate in the generically altering work of the self-elegy. 1 In this chapter, I would also like to broaden the conversation to contrast the feminine self-elegy written by Brontë, Shelley, and Plath with Rossetti’s death lyrics, poems that place speech in the mouth of a newly dead narrator.2 The richness and brilliance of Rossetti’s work makes Rossetti’s death lyrics poems easily strong enough to adumbrate by contrast the formal implications of the feminine self-elegy, in which the speaker’s voice is presented as disembodied posthumous persistence. Drawing on Mary Arseneau’s important work on Rossetti’s faith, I suggest that Rossetti’s poetry’s sometimes implicit invocation of Christianity places her work in contrast to the religiously skeptical afterlife depictions in the troped posthumous works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath. Rossetti’s poems’ intellectually sophisticated struggle with questions of sin and redemption present the terms in a tradition that Wuthering Heights, for example, with its placement of heaven on earth and perhaps in the bodies of lovers, eschews. The typology of Christian afterlife is eschewed or skewed in the feminine self-elegy, which definitively presents death as a topos unknown except for its provision of oratorical space for the speaker. This elision of the Christian afterlife is significant not so much theologically as formally. In the feminine self-elegy, the formal implication of a topos set apart from traditional religious consolation, a topos unknown and unknowable, places feminine voice outside of gender structures. While Saint Paul argues that in Christ there is “neither male nor female,” the tradition of Christianity is clearly patriarchally marked. Rossetti may ironize and problematize this typology, but she does not elide it.3 By contrast, the disembodied speech of feminine self-elegy posits a topos outcast from the framework of Christian afterlife.4 If Rossetti’s oeuvre, as Antony H. Harrison persuasively argues, focuses a concern with the futility of passion and romance, often expressed in implicit contrast to concerns of sin and the eternal soul, nowhere does Rossetti more clearly present a cynic’s view of romantic love than in her poems rhetorically placed in the

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mouths of women newly dead who are explicitly or implicitly addressing old suitors.5 In Rossetti’s “After Death,” for example, a suitor visits the fresh corpse of a woman just deceased and longs for her whom in life he ignored. The poem is exemplary of Rossetti’s deployment of a lush cynicism.6 It is spoken in the voice of the dead woman, but it does not envision a grotesque speaking corpse. Rather, the voice is anchored by the corpse, spectrally connected to the quite undisappeared body of the dead woman who speaks the poem. In Rossetti’s lyric, the moment in the poem’s drama that asserts the power of the speaker coincides with the very event that we might assume would entail a loss of power: the passage into death. But the power of the woman speaking after death is a power still utterly connected to her body’s beauty, which the suitor views. Rossetti’s “After Death,” like Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems, rejects the comfort of an afterlife in which the living can communicate with the dead. In “After Death,” the afterlife is characterized by a radical disorientation between the dead and the living. While Dickinson’s “The Soul selects her own Society” (Fr409) could be interpreted as defining Dickinson’s rejection of the female mortuarial forms popular in the late nineteenth century—poems that stage reunions through the emblems of corpse, grave, or angel—Dickinson’s poem eerily turns on its inclusion of audience in the society of the dead speaker. The dead communicate with the living, but the living cannot communicate with Dickinson’s dead speaker. Dickinson’s dead speaker pulls the reader into the topos of death. By contrast, Rossetti’s “After Death” and “Remember” focus the irony of the dead woman’s triumph over her errant suitor at the scene of her laid-out corpse, an irony dependent on the impossibility of the dead reaching the living. Both Dickinson and Rossetti alter the sentimental graveside poem by pointing out the illusory nature of the desire of the living to contact the dead, then, but Dickinson draws the living as audience for death, while Rossetti pushes the living audience into a recognition of the distance between the dead and the living. This ineradicable rupture of death Rossetti, unlike Dickinson, figures in the image of the body. Susan Conley clarifies the work of the female body as figure in Rossetti’s death lyrics. Rossetti’s focus on the female body’s beauty and that beauty’s unreachable status in death marks her death lyrics as formally different from the feminine selfelegy, which is not concerned with the body’s desirability but rather with the speaker’s desire to tie audience to her performance, which un-figures the figure. In their deployment of a disembodied posthumous voice, Plath and Dickinson, Brontë and Shelley differ from Rossetti in part because they take up the topos of death as a way to jar the lyric out of the frame of the domestic; the female body’s desirability is not central to their discourse. While the domestic scene is a locus of control and safety for Rossetti’s death lyrics, the troped posthumous works of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath dramatize a collapse of the domestic. Rossetti, in teasing the space of death as a topos for feminine utterance, does not push the trope to contain a rejection of feminine decorum or the domestic scene as a feminine space, under the rubric of which beauty and desirability are lodged. The decorum of the

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feminine voice anchored in the feminine body maintains an edgy domesticity in Rossetti, keeping the poems in a domestic space, the corpse as the edge of domesticity. Though she does not depict a grotesque speaking corpse, her posthumous feminine voice is anchored by the corpse. Indeed, the desirability of the woman in “After Death,” like the speaker’s former coquettish character implicit in “At Home,” focuses those poems, even though the woman’s desirability is ironically engaged as death-bound. The feminine stroke of the poems is not, in Kristevan terms, positional. Rather, it is operational: the body’s beauty effects memory and forgetfulness among the dead woman’s survivors. Here, femininity codes physical effect. Arseneau places Rossetti in the context of strong female familial alliances, while Alison Chapman refers to Rossetti as especially well mothered, “an eternal daughter—securely feminine.”7 In this respect, Rossetti differs from women writers who use the disembodied posthumous voice: Rossetti’s death lyrics do not draw on a stance of having been outcast from the maternal, feminine discourse of the body, the body’s beauty and the decorum of the body’s beauty. Strikingly, Chapman uses the term “eternal” daughter, which I take to signify Rossetti’s drawing of the afterlife as a space in which the femininity of the daughter is reiterated by her body’s beauty even when dead and also articulated by the feminine trappings of her burial—the flowers, the errant suitor who at last returns. Indeed, Chapman straightforwardly reads Rossetti as participating in the cult of the beautiful woman’s corpse theorized by Bronfen: “Elisabeth Bronfen […] persuasively argues that femininity is the metonym for death, absence, grief and loss[,] for in the dominant representational scheme the feminine signifies both the ground and the vanishing point of the Symbolic Order.”8 Rossetti’s poems “After Death” and “Remember” signify their intent to remain within the domestic order, the after-death scene implicitly linking back to the before-death reality of the woman’s role as desirable body. To take up Barbara Johnson’s interpretation of the concept of “mother-tongue” as linked to the mother’s allowing the child to speak by giving the child her voice, one might suggest that perhaps Rossetti does not write using the disembodied posthumous voice because she draws on a powerful mother tongue, a strong, conscious alliance with woman’s embodied power, a selfawareness of her place in feminine discourse.9 If in Rossetti the injunction to forget dissipates the link between the dead and the living, Dickinson’s troped posthumous lyrics, by contrast, attempt to instate the space of death as superceding life’s space, to pull audience into the speaker’s space of death as an enforcement of memory: she insists we remember her speaker as a speaker. Dickinson, pitting “Death’s Gifts” against the “Gifts of Life,” asserts the topos of death as that which becomes memory. Dickinson’s “For Death - or rather” (Fr644) presents death as that which offers goods, exchanging her speaker’s death for life, implicitly drawing her reading audience into a marketplace in which death becomes memory. The role of barter in Fr644 presents the daughter-as-speaker as a sort of prostitute figure, trading herself in so that she may speak and speaking from

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death’s space as elision of other knowledge. The rejection of what Stuart Curran terms “quotidian” feminine topos puts Dickinson in dangerous terrain. By contrast, Rossetti’s dead speaker does not ask the living audience to become dead with her, nor does she use death’s space as metonymy for prostitution, taking up death’s topos as a way to speak when denied other grounds.10 If Rossetti’s dead speaker marks death’s topos as a feminine, indeed virginal, turn from male desire, the speaker’s feminine status in Dickinson is positional, codified by the speaker’s being lodged in a system that demands she prostitute one aspect of herself, her desirable life, to gain something that she wants—“Death’s Gifts”—including, significantly, a chance to address audience as an author, to have a “Name” (10, 8). Rossetti’s feminine dead speaker does not trade herself in; her feminine speaker’s body’s desirability is not traded for a chance to speak but is pointedly withheld from the economy of desire and withdrawn from memory. The corpse here is the beautiful corpse theorized by Bronfen, but Rossetti uses the moment of death as an ascendance that at long last allows the suffering woman to put others in their place. She employs what Bronfen assumes would be the woman’s most physically passive status, her corpse time, the time of her “laying out,” to subvert the power imbalance that caused her suffering while alive.11 Rossetti implicitly joins the enforced passivity of the woman speaker while alive with the extreme passivity of the exposed corpse, but she transgressively allows these two apotheoses of passivity to cancel each other out. In the death lyrics, the woman-as-corpse becomes powerful. The power is not quite that of the living dead, but, as Angela Leighton suggests, “thin lines are Rossetti’s favourite places”: Rossetti’s dead speakers gain power in death, bearing a transitional revenance.12 In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the woman’s power as corpse is the power of taking away her body from the lover. Her death puts her body out of his reach. In “After Death,” a suitor who did not love the woman speaker is fixed in his place by the loss of access to the woman’s body. The corpse, an emblem, also functions as a boundary and oscillates between boundaries, shifting from the space where the suitor could have touched her but instead abandoned her to the place where the suitor cannot touch her but must look at her. The undertow of violence that guides Rossetti’s Goblin Market surfaces similarly in “After Death” as the corpse’s violation of the male gaze: he must see the woman’s corpse. Here, the corpse uncannily focuses his desire in a way that the living woman could not. In Rossetti’s “After Death,” the woman’s body has power only when its sexual capacity has been put away. Unlike those troped posthumous poems in which Dickinson uses the topos of death to establish her speaker in a place of power over the reader, Dickinson’s dead speaker insisting on her desire to be heard and remembered, the feminine speaker of Rossetti’s poem does not push the power of the dead speaker beyond the ability of the beautiful corpse to allocate male desire. Rossetti’s “After Death” and “Remember,” then, strongly align with Bronfen’s theorization of the female corpse as the locus of male desire but paradoxically suggest that woman’s power is greatest when she can be viewed as an untouchable

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corpse. Only in her “laid out” position as corpse can the speaker command the flower of the desirous, “warm” gaze that the male suitor withheld from the living woman; but she can command this desire because her sexual possibility is foreclosed. Desired at last, she cannot be had. In “After Death,” Rossetti uses an aesthetic obviously and rather bitterly linked to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of a desirable woman as a woman: “looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful […] A woman without parallel.”13 While Christina Rossetti implicates this aesthetic in the woman speaker’s pointless death, she does not remove that aesthetic from her lyrics. Rossetti’s death lyrics, inflected by irony, sustain the emblematic quality of woman’s corpse as a site over which the rights of speech are fought. Strikingly, the goal of the feminine dead speakers in “Remember” and “After Death” is the return of the male gaze to the woman’s body. Rossetti’s dead speaker in “After Death” and, more gently, in “Remember” engages this control of the male gaze, the pyrrhic gaining of male desire after female sexuality has vanished. Differing from Rossetti’s death lyrics by a conversion of the scene of sexuality to the scene of oratory, the self-elegy in Dickinson, Plath, Brontë, and Shelley focuses the feminine speaker’s unnatural hunger to speak, to address audience. Rossetti’s dead speaker, on the other hand, presents herself as satiated, as looking back at an audience that she can afford to shed. Angela Leighton, reading Rossetti’s “Echo” as an imaginatively posthumous poem, suggests that the poem typifies Rossetti’s imagination as “always […] posthumous to life.”14 Notably, the site of posthumousness is invoked in “Echo” as a means of organizing the loss of passion, the loss of sexual desire: life is given as that scene in which the feminine speaker would attract suitors. This mood of the backward glance also marks the feminine speakers of Rossetti’s death lyrics as newly dead and specifically contemplating their new distance from the hunger of the living. (“At Home” is centered around a dinner table.) In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the newly dead speaker is both no longer hungry and no longer desirous. Rather, she is newly able to cause and notice insatiable hunger or desire in the living. In “After Death,” the speaker’s deadness itself engenders the other’s desire for her, while in Dickinson’s selfelegies it is the speaker who is hungry for her audience. In Goblin Market, the heroine’s power inheres in her ability to strategically deploy her body as an object of the other’s hunger. Lizzie gains the authority of the poem by using her body to subvert the claims of death and of hunger, feeding her body’s juice to the feminine other because she herself is not hungry. In this difficult poem, death is the first allusion, the poem creating an economy in which to eat is to die. Lizzie is pictured as fat enough to resist eating; her very fingers are “dimpled” (67).15 But Laura has a Siddal-like emaciation, a preexisting hunger, perhaps even an opiate-induced sweet tooth, that pulls her to eat. Laura’s hunger is not predicated on previous eating but rather on previous starvation, in contrast to Lizzie’s plumpness, her “dimpled” fingers evoking a very well fed toddler’s hands. The state of hunger, of the feminine body’s elision—the state that Dickinson and

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Plath use as a topos for self-inscription—is evoked in Goblin Market as the locus of an ascetic aesthetic that must be renounced if daughterly virtue is to be retained. In Goblin Market, the fat Lizzie is virtuous because she resists hunger for Goblin fruit, well fed earlier by mother’s milk. Indeed, the maiden’s work is to eat the most fattening foods, to gather “honey,” “milk,” white-flour cakes, butter, and cream (200–210). In Rossetti’s poem, the fall is not simply into hunger, but rather into hunger for a specific kind of food. The way to keep a maiden’s hunger at bay is to keep her fat on butter, cream, white cakes—the maternal element of creamy white substances, like breast milk. Only when Lizzie allows herself metaphorically to reach Laura’s emaciation, to “weigh no more,” can she enter the goblin economy of hunger and desire (322). Lizzie’s plumpness, her quality of already having been well fed, is emphasized in the passage describing the goblin men’s attack: their juice lodges in her “dimples,” while her neck quakes like “curd” (435–6). Following Chapman’s line of argument that Rossetti is an “eternal” daughter, well-mothered, I suggest that Rossetti’s Lizzie can resist the goblin men’s fruit because she is fat with mother-milk, her body emblematically drawn as a fat toddler’s, her hunger proleptically appeased by a generous mother. The abundance of mother’s milk also silences Lizzie, however, who in the end “utter[s] not a word” (430). It is Laura who, once grown, tells the story of the goblin market.16 In other words, while Rossetti’s poem suggests the danger of the trope of the posthumous voice, using the figure of Laura as the hunger artist who eats masculine discourse and deploys the dangerous terms of death to cast her speech, the poem also critiques this disembodied approach to discourse.17 In placing speech through Laura’s “hungry mouth,” Rossetti implies that what is “honey to the throat,” or what allows beautiful speech, is “poison in the blood” (492). After the trauma of Goblin Market’s gorgeous famine, it is Laura, a revenant of sorts, and not Lizzie who retains linguistic power, Laura who tells the story. This crucial difference between the death lyrics and the feminine self-elegy is the emphasis that Rossetti’s posthumous posturing places on the body as revelatory. By contrast, the afterlife in Plath, Dickinson, Brontë, and Shelley is not fleshed out. The rhetorical position of self-elegy as always already intended for readership, a conversation with its targeted-as-belated audience, claims as its uncanny topos this scene of being read as its only afterlife. The afterlife is not fleshed out in the feminine self-elegy, because the “death” mourned in the selfelegy is the death of the speaker’s capacity as a woman to address audience from canonical topos—not the death of the speaker per se but rather the too-early death of her access to central topoi and audience. By contrast, death is an empowering topos in Rossetti’s death lyrics because it offers the speaker a noli me tangere status: untouchable to her audience, she claims the omniscient view of a hypothetical afterlife. The trope of the posthumous voice in Brontë, Shelley, Dickinson, and Plath deploys the topos of death as a direct claim on audience, an

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invocation that draws audience close. In reading the self-elegy, the audience is inscribed in this topos of death. The topos of death in the feminine self-elegy, then, invokes an epistemology of radical doubt. The disembodied posthumous voice finds audience by contaminating audience with death, a turn that ironically engages the terms of elegy, traditional male elegy as that turn which pushes against the contamination of life with death. The self-elegy in Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë claims death’s topos as that which will allow a generic, formal alteration of elegy, permitting the feminine voice to enter the male domain of traditional elegy. 18 This critical deployment of audience as at once belated and crucially participatory in the genre demarcates the rhetoric of the feminine self-elegy from the corpse poem and from Rossetti’s death lyrics. If the self-elegy calls on the audience to participate in mourning the speaker’s lost topos—her chance to address audience through the canonical gesture of elegy—it does so by invoking the space of death as a marginal topos that in effect becomes central because the posthumous voice pulls audience into that fictive space with its address. This almost violent approach to audience, indicated meta-narratively by Mary Shelley’s Mathilda’s attempt to persuade Woodville, her audience, to commit suicide and suggested in Susan Dickinson’s comment about Dickinson’s poem Fr124—that after reading that poem’s first stanza she goes to the fire to get warm but “never can”—is the crucial gesture of the feminine self-elegy, which uses the speaker’s self-mourned death to implicate audience in mourning and in fear of what not mourning means.19 The deployment of death as a topos for the address of audience in the disembodied posthumous voice importantly shifts the speaker’s relationship with audience, making the relationship to audience the drama of the work. By contrast, the audience of Rossetti’s death lyrics is implicitly cast as onlooker, observer of someone else’s relationship with the speaker; reading Rossetti’s death lyrics, we are not threatened with the undertow, not pulled into death’s space ourselves. I agree, then, with Arseneau’s revaluation that Rossetti’s interaction with Christianity in her poetry is a source of strength in the poems, a strenuous engagement with the complexities of Christian dogma.20 Certainty of the existence of salvation, even if one remains uncertain of one’s own salvation, alters the topos of death as a tool of rhetoric. In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the implicit belief in a paradigm linking salvation and afterlife guides the poems; the audience can read the failure of the survivors to properly mourn the speaker from the stable topos of the dead speaker’s having reached a place from which she can observe the survivors she addresses with detachment. The stability of the dead speaker’s place of address has links to Rossetti’s belief system, I suggest—to her adherence to a structure of faith rather than of skepticism. The effect of that stability in the role it allocates to reading audience differentiates Rossetti’s death lyrics from the selfelegy, which rhetorically strives to destabilize the terms of symbolic and real death—to destabilize the place of address, the speaker’s and the audience’s places.

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Rossetti’s “After Death,” spoken by a dead woman whose capacity to speak hovers above her own corpse, centers around the dead speaker’s body, its beauty synecdochically indicated by the rushes and the rosemary. While Susan Conley argues that the poem uses irony to criticize the male figure, placing her argument against other readings of the poem as an unappetizingly self-sacrificing performance of the feminine voice, it seems to me that the poem goes beyond irony and directly questions the value of the male lover’s love in the first place. The man who “did not love [the dead speaker] living” sweetens her cup with his belated display of grief, but, as Conley points out, what can this sweetness be worth now that the speaker’s beautiful body, the focus and locus of romantic love, is dead? The irony of the poem, I want to suggest, is not what Conley reads as the dead woman’s sharp commentary on her lover’s belatedness but a wholehearted questioning of the value of sexual desire centered on the beauty of the female body. With its couched placement of the terms “sweet,” “warm,” and “cold,” the poem suggests, as Harrison argues that Rossetti’s entire oeuvre suggests, that romantic love is not worth very much to begin with.21 That Rossetti, a sometime model for her brother’s paintings, is intensely aware of the role of female beauty as the sacrificial core of romantic love and that she questions this role strongly in her poetry may not be surprising. Rossetti centers the death lyrics on the fraught question of the woman speaker’s body’s beauty and what that beauty means for the speaker. The death lyrics harness a rhetoric that exposes romantic love. This center of romantic love, of the beauty of the woman that draws the desire of the male lover but never results in happiness for the woman, places the loss of woman’s body to death as the mourned “thing in itself” that focuses the death lyrics. Rossetti’s death lyrics center on the woman as object of romantic love, and her richly drawn domestic scenes emphasize, using irony, the hollowness of this role. By contrast, the self-elegies of Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë emphasize the always earlier terms of the death of the feminine speaker as speaker and mourn this rather different loss, deploying a dead speaker to draw attention to the feminine speaker’s metaphorical “death” as speaker before her actual death, to mourn the loss of canonical topos for feminine oratory that precedes any real bodily death. Developing from Harrison’s reenvisioning of Rossetti’s thematic of, as he puts it, the conflict between “amatory and aesthetic” claims, I want to look at the death lyrics through that lens of romance from which the speaker has ironically disengaged.22 Conley notes that “Poems such as ‘Song,’ (‘When I am dead, my dearest’), ‘Remember,’ and ‘After Death,’ are melancholy songs of lovers sundered by death, replete with decorative imagery and stylized archaisms.”23 In my reading of the poems, however, the lovers are not sundered first by death but rather by a betrayal that is then made permanent by death: the male lover who failed to love the woman while she was “living” first sunders the lovers, and death merely underscores and makes permanent his betrayal.24 Death, here, fixes human

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frailty in an amber permanence that Rossetti captures in her adumbrated painterly death scenes. If Dickinson’s troped posthumous poems use death as a dramatic engine, a central force, what anthropologist Robert Hertz describes as an “active and contagious nothingness,” death is not active for Rossetti.25 In her “After Death” and “At Home,” human failings are sealed in death, made clear and permanent in death through the evocation of romantic passion as emblematic of the human capacity to betray. But the role of death is rather subsidiary to the human drama, acting something like a frame to set the scene of human failing. Despite the absence of clear Christian connotations in Rossetti’s “After Death,” death exposes the Christian belief that the wages of sin are death—that human sin comes before death both temporally and causally. The role of death in the drama of Rossetti’s death lyrics, then, is to clarify a permanent ethical meaning of human action. Conley notes that in Rossetti’s death lyrics “death becomes an opportunity for the dead woman to exercise power and control.”26 I suggest that the use of death as a source of power differs in Rossetti’s death lyrics from the self-elegy of Plath, Dickinson, Shelley, and Brontë, insofar as Rossetti’s death lyrics retain an emphasis on the body’s voice, while the formal gesture of writing a speaker whose death precedes her text’s inscription is that turn which makes of the rhetorical device of “voice” a scene of what is written, estranged from the body. Feminine self-elegies emphasize their status as inscription to turn the speaker’s silence while alive into a rhetorical “voice” as trace that persists posthumously. By contrast, Rossetti’s death lyrics eschew evocation of their own textual status: crucially, for Rossetti’s death lyrics, the gaining of rhetorical voice is not what death accomplishes. The disembodied troped posthumous voice puts pressure on the division between what Derrida identifies as the metaphysics of the primacy of speech and the subsidiary role of writing. In the self-elegy, the disembodied posthumous voice becomes a tool through which the woman denied public voice— a chance to address central ontological and cultural issues—subversively privileges the scene of text, the topos of the written word, as her mode of claiming a belated cultural centrality. This gesture claims mastery through the always already occulted “trace,” the Derridean “trace” that comes “before being.”27 In Rossetti’s death lyrics, the efficacy of writing as that which conveys the thoughts of the dead is not dramatized. Rather, her death lyrics dramatize posthumous thoughts hovering over a dramatically rendered body-as-scene. Occulted trace is not exposed as “a dissimulation of itself”; instead, the dissimulation is sustained by the rhetoric.28 The self-elegy in Dickinson, Plath, Shelley, and Brontë, on the other hand, dramatizes itself—its presence as inscription—by evoking inscription, a topos in which the rhetorical voice of the dead is never presented as disinvested from the scene of the inscribed text. In the self-elegy of Plath, Dickinson, Brontë, and Shelley, the controlling drama is the speaker’s assumption of the role of inscriber, that drama by which the belated audience of readership is invoked in the text, using to the fullest extent the

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ghostly musculature of inscribed speech. I do not mean that the speakers are figuratively depicted in the act of writing. Rather, inscription as route to gaining voice is the drama of the self-elegy. What Derrida calls the “absence of an other here and now” is directly staged by the self-elegy, so that the moment when we read the self-elegy is performative, the moment when the trace evokes its history always already instituted. By contrast, Rossetti’s death lyrics assume the strength of the speaker’s voice and dramatize the speaker’s gaining of erotic power through her death, which transfigures her into sign. The speaker is not depicted as the inscriber, but as the inscribed. The triumph of the speaker of Rossetti’s “After Death” is not over us, the reading audience, but over the lover who betrayed her while she was alive and mourns her in a sensual “deep silence” after her death. Here, the speaker’s rhetorical gifts serve the purpose of exposing the man’s failure, not her own success. The drama of the poem is placed between the man and the woman, and we, the readers, are called on to observe her posthumous triumph over him, the man’s becoming “warm” precisely as the speaker turns irrevocably “cold.” The man’s belated sexual heatedness, his “warmth,” contrasts with the speaker’s ice-maidenly coldness, doubly placing her as the virtuous woman who was not “love[d]”—was not made love to—while “living.” Our role as readers is to consolidate the speaker’s position as a virtuous woman. Dickinson’s missed marriage poem, “The Soul selects her own Society,” by comparison, replaces the speaking body with an inscribed union; in the poem, there is no room where any body is laid out for view. Instead, the rejection of masculine others by the feminine “Soul,” while couched in the mortuarial trappings of a “low Gate” and “Valves of […] Stone,” turns on the living audience of the reader (6, 11–12). Only in our reading of the poem is the speaker’s refusal of others experienced. Strikingly, while the speaker of Rossetti’s “After Death” will feel “sweet” observing the betrayer weep regardless of an audience for her experience of sweetness, Dickinson’s “Soul” will only chose her “One” when a reader reads the poem, for the one she chooses implicitly is the reader already written into the poem. The only scene established in Dickinson’s poem is that of the reader reading the text in which the speaker rhetorically chooses the reader. Dickinson’s romance, if you will, is with the reader, who is always already engaged as a posthumous mate, a “One” who comes too late and comes right on time, entering the stone valves of the mortuarial scene, which inscription, as Derrida suggests, is the engravature that is the text.29 Dickinson’s “Soul” selects her reader, inasmuch as the selection is couched in the terms of posthumousness, the “low Gate” around the grave, the “Stone” “Valves” of the gravestone itself. While clearly Dickinson’s poem implies a history of betrayal, of attention being paid the speaker too late—the emperor kneels on the mat after the speaker is dead, and the chariots pausing at the gate evoke hearse and mourners—in Dickinson’s subversive poem, the speaker elects herself to rhetorical triumph, placing herself posthumously in a position to reject others through the power of her verse. By contrast, Rossetti’s “After Death”

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invokes a specific person’s memory, not a generic cultural recognition of the deceased speaker. If Rossetti’s speaker’s triumph in “After Death” is the maidenly virtue that carries her “cold” to the grave, Dickinson’s speaker’s triumph is her rhetorical deployment of subversion, the written poem’s insistence on overturning the terms of the primacy of male speech by emphasizing its awareness of its own written-ness. Here, the narrative of a romantic betrayal is subverted into a narrative of text as its own triumph. The triumph of Dickinson’s “Soul” is to urge the link of the text with the reader—a posthumous link—as the only desirable society. That Dickinson’s “Soul” lacks a body at once evokes Victorian images of the disembodied angelic feminine and rejects them, making of the disembodied speaker a desirous force whose claims on the reader are anything but angelically self-effacing. Rossetti’s death lyrics, by contrast, focus on the passively held bodyin-death. Indeed, Conley notes that Rossetti’s death lyrics mount an “exclusive focus on the grave, the place of the body.” 30 They make use of the body as a synecdochical marker for obscurity, dissolution. That Rossetti’s dead speaker also uses death as a means to power is striking. As Conley asserts, the death lyrics perform a turnabout, a volte-face, in which the speaker who seemed powerless becomes powerful through her ability to command and observe the terms in which her body is mourned. The imagined-as-dead speaker in “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”) gestures toward an oblivion specified as a dissolution of language. As Conley points out, the dead speaker in Rossetti inhabits “a vision of death especially bleak […] in which the destruction of the dead body [… extends to] a figurative destruction of thoughts.”31 The absolute oblivion of a dead speaker who addresses audience as if immediately after her death, implicitly addressing audience from the place of the corpse or of the grave, follows from the bodycentered rhetoric of Rossetti’s death lyrics. Her dead speaker does not count on language to alleviate death’s oblivion and makes no compact with audience to perform with her a resistance to posthumous closure. Instead, the dead speaker speaks fairly soon after death, and speaks specifically to redress or close a particular social situation, asking us to observe a posthumous closure to a troubled relationship. If Mathilda’s speaker would seem to fall into this romantic posthumous category of harnessing death as a female’s redress to a wronging lover, I will diverge from Ranita Chatterjee’s reading of Mathilda to assert that Shelley’s selfelegist is primarily addressing audience regarding the isolated terms of her own death rather than Woodville’s betrayal of her.32 While Chatterjee argues interestingly that Woodville’s abandonment of Mathilda, more than her father’s sexual desire for her, causes her death, I suggest that Woodville is described as the target audience for the text in order to ironically establish Mathilda, the daughteras-speaker, as the audience’s responsibility. For, indeed, Woodville does abandon her, never to return. Mathilda’s bodily death synecdochically merges with the gathering of imaginary flowers that the daughter dies trying to perform. At the time of

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Mathilda’s death, she is already fictionalized, placing herself in a realm of imaginary flowers (albeit the imaginary flowers cause a “real” exposure that causes Mathilda’s death). But in this slippage from the imaginary to the bodily real and then to the imaginary body (flowers as imaginary body), the body’s death becomes an imaginary space. In Mathilda, little of death is linked to the corpse or grave that anchor Rossetti’s death lyrics as images. If Woodville is inscribed as the audience, putting in play our imaginary recuperation of his failure, no other gesture in the text except our implicit arrival as readers recuperates Woodville’s abandonment of Mathilda. We do not so much observe his abandonment of her as participate in the drama, arriving precisely according to the terms of his departure. If the “voice of forgetting” is the center of Rossetti’s death lyrics, remembering is the center of the feminine self-elegy. It uses language as a site of memory, a posthumous voice that insists on the audience remembering the speaker.33 In the self-elegy in Plath, Dickinson, Brontë, and Shelley, the audience’s engagement of the text becomes the performance and also the telos of the text. To be read by an audience that remembers the feminine speaker at once as elegist and as master who is elegized becomes the textually complete and completed feat of this disembodied posthumous voice. In the feminine self-elegy, the place of the speaker’s mnemonic status is rhetorically drawn as the text itself. By contrast, Rossetti’s death lyrics engage the body’s dying beauty, the futility of the body’s beauty. Dickinson’s and Shelley’s elegists are unconcerned with the female body’s beauty (although Mathilda is once described as beautiful in her father’s eyes, by the time of her death she is only described as marked by grief, and Woodville is certainly not attracted to her romantically), while Plath’s and Brontë’s elegists empty the commonplace of the beautiful woman’s death. In Plath’s “Edge,” for example, the anonymous “perfected” woman embodies an “illusion,” but this illusion of the feminine body’s beauty has not engaged a lover. Instead, it has destroyed the woman as speaker: it is the very illusion that she must punish in her poem. As rhetoric, “Edge” is not a specific complaint against anyone. (Unfairly, Plath’s poetry bears the weight of our overabundant knowledge of her marital circumstances.) Instead, “Edge” complains against the everydayness of woman’s elision from public discourse, from canonical discourse, and connects this elision with the illusion of woman as beauty. In “Edge,” the perfected woman’s body accomplishes nothing more than a cursory glance from the sinister moon. But the poem itself, its self-aware status as text, protests the perfected woman’s silencing by clarifying the sinister nature of desire that coalesces around woman’s body. Whereas Rossetti’s death lyrics expose the illusion of romantic love as a hollow topos, Plath’s self-elegy “Edge” violently attacks and revises the deployment of woman’s beauty as metonymy for the engine of her language. In “Edge,” the body hardens into a carapace that the text, like the sinister moon, disowns. Rossetti’s feminine dead speaker, by contrast, achieves the triumph of the poem “After Death” because the woman’s bodily presence effects the man’s inconsolable grief. To speak after death in Rossetti’s death lyrics is to mark the

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absence of lasting meaning in male romantic desire for woman, but beauty in itself is not cast as an illusion dangerous to women. The sensuous detail of Rossetti’s poems mark their complicit interaction with the problem of sensuous beauty, its transience. By contrast, Heathcliff’s and Edgar Linton’s love for Cathy is anything but fleeting. What is fleeting for Cathy is authority, a brief capacity to write that is couched in the double privacy of a bedroom diary scribbled in books filled with others’ words. Similarly, Dickinson’s elegist situates authorial desire in place of romantic desire, fulfillment withheld from the feminine speaker. Rossetti’s death lyrics, then, do not contend centrally with the problem of writing for an audience aggressively engaged as belated. In turning to Rossetti’s poem “Up-Hill,” I want to connect her topos of the body with the allusion to a traditional Christian framing of the afterlife, a frame in which audience is engaged on time and in time for salvation.34 If Rossetti’s death lyrics assume a topos of secure afterlife for the speaker that allows her to draw meaning from observing the body’s decay, the poem “Up-Hill” continues this work. Presenting a speaker who has somehow surpassed death, “Up-Hill” engages the implied terrain of the body that Conley considers chilling in the death lyrics focused on a female corpse. If her Anglo-Catholic faith, as Arseneau argues, shaped Rossetti’s approach to the afterlife, in the death lyrics this influence does not necessarily contradict Conley’s reading of the centrality of woman’s body to Rossetti’s aesthetic. The body as the focus of Rossetti’s death lyrics need not imply a lack of faith in Christian afterlife but may rather underscore such faith, the transience of the body sharply contrasted to the implicit stability of soul’s afterlife. “Up-Hill” evokes the body’s lying down in the “bed” of death, or earth, a terrifying event that the poem connects to the Judgment. The image of the afterlife in “Up-Hill” is at once obscure and also clearly defined in terms of the behavior necessary to go up that hill. The struggle to lead the pious life is an uphill struggle to the very end, the speaker confers. While Isobel Armstrong points to the ambiguity of the consolation offered at the poem’s end—arguing that “beds for all who come” could perhaps mean simply graves in which to rot—and contends that the poem makes ambiguous the very existence of the Christian afterlife, it seems that the poem’s structural engagement of the terms of verticality and labor militates against such a reading.35 Despite some obscure passages, the poem’s premise of an afterlife is not uncertain: indeed, accepting on faith the promise of the afterlife despite its necessary obscurity is the very point of Rossetti’s “Up-Hill.” The promise of Judgment itself makes for the obscure and ominous tone of the poem: the afterlife, which must be accepted on faith, points to the uphill mental struggle to keep one’s faith. This uphill battle, indeed, is the structuring assumption of the poem. The term “up-hill” controls the poem, and I suggest that the ominous feel of the poem does not emanate from its speaker’s doubting a Judgment Day but, on the contrary, from the speaker’s theologically correct recognition of the awesome quality of the Judgment. In contemporary culture, the

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image of the Judgment has been bowdlerized, but in Rossetti’s milieu the Judgment is awful, full of awe. Rossetti’s stern poem engages this very forbidding quality in a theologically sensitive manner rather than indicating a doubt of afterlife per se. The speaker does not suggest that the body may rot and become nothing, that there is no divinity and no afterlife. What the speaker suggests is that the thought of the afterlife should terrify the faithful, struggling in the uphill battle to remain faithful. The very ominous quality of the poem that Isobel Armstrong reads as proof that it subverts a Christian doctrine of the afterlife may be read as underscoring the poem’s devout wrestling with the very awesome concept of that seat of Judgment which centers the notion of the Christian afterlife. And while Rossetti’s vision of the Christian afterlife is not cheery (nor should we expect it to be), the stern quality of her death lyric does not signify doubt of the reality of the Christian afterlife. Rather, “Up-Hill,” in theologically correct terms, expresses a recognition of the awesome fear of the afterlife, fear of the Judgment. In contrast to Rossetti’s “Up-Hill,” Dickinson’s downhill poem “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord” (Fr338) engages that territory of the body’s downhill trajectory in death, its swoon into burial and oblivion, and accepts that the outcome of death is dizzily uncertain. “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord” is certainly a poem of faith—a poem in which the speaker’s submission to the divinity is marked as complete and her self-control given away—but the reward for this submission is also uncertain, an uncertainty that makes the submission truly self-sacrificing. Dickinson’s poem is spoken by a living speaker anticipating death, while Rossetti’s “Up-Hill” is voiced as if by an omniscient speaker addressing us from that ominous “inn” with beds for all. I want, however, to contrast the poems because of their contrasting structural work. Just the opposite of Rossetti’s “UpHill,” Dickinson’s Fr338 argues that rather than determining one’s way oneself— rather than working one’s way uphill to the Judgment—one careens downhill to a fate that only the Deity controls. If Rossetti’s “Up-Hill” gracefully assures the reader of the difficulty of reading death, or that the uphill road of living in the faith will exhaust the traveler, Rossetti’s death, or “inn,” displaces bodily life only “when the slow dark hours begin,” suggesting a frightening stillness and blindness, a middle space between death and life. Dickinson’s “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord,” by contrast, views the way to Judgment as “partly, down Hill,” implying that the fall into death that precedes Judgment is erotic—not nullifying but magnetizing. In “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord,” the terror of death is evoked by the image of being yoked to horses that are rapidly careening down a steep hill. The speaker’s willingness to ride this way is presented as a willing self-sacrifice. The speaker highlights her loss of control, her terror in approaching death, but resists a complete loss of self in the cryptic stanza that reads (9–12): But never I mind the steepest And never I mind the Sea -

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Held fast in Everlasting Race By my own Choice, and Thee -

The odd competitive relationship between the speaker and God presents death as an enigmatic prize that the speaker chooses. The speaker’s pleasure in submission charges the poem’s undertow of mourning, its reading of death as irrevocable loss. Rossetti’s “Up-Hill” signifies death without sentimentality but also without a visceral fall—that “partly, down Hill” portion of Dickinson’s soul’s journey. In “Up-Hill,” the traveler is the sum of the expenditure of her labor, her effort against the moral gravity of the fall. The speaker in Rossetti’s poem at once presents a specter of consciousness in burial and reassures her reader that such conscious burial can be survived, that the death of the body can be survived by the life of the soul. The architecture of the poem at once calls on Christian typology of the difficult road to salvation, the rough and steep path, while also implicitly drawing that difficult road as the very thing that undoes the body’s sinking into burial, the downhill trajectory that Dickinson’s poem depicts as erotic and thrilling. Dickinson’s “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord,” then, invokes the same journey to the Judgment as Rossetti’s “Up-Hill,” but the poems contrast the terrain, Rossetti’s envisioning the uphill struggle of the faithful to remain faithful and Dickinson’s envisioning a sort of roller coaster ride in which the speaker’s power is utterly surrendered to her “Lord.” Dickinson’s “partly, down Hill” aspect of the path to the Judgment may be read as the direction the body takes entering the grave, but the downhill trajectory is really open-ended, signifying dizziness, vertigo, a loss of bodily control, a swoon, a sexual encounter. By contrast, in the uphill climb to the Judgment, Rossetti’s speaker retains firm control of the trajectory of the journey described, making the journey to death a hard but certain path. The fall and the struggle to resist one’s postlapsarian condition are indicated in both poems: their shared landscape is the hill, uphill or downhill, that as incline makes solid and real the trajectory of the fall. But Rossetti’s poem indicates a controlled struggle to resist the impact of the fall, to walk uphill, the poem’s speaker deploying the posthumous mode for the sake of educating others, while Dickinson’s headlong poem typifies the engagement of the experience of the self (what Renato Poggioli calls the “pastoral of the self,” a Romantic terrain), a sweep down that hill.36 The speaker of “Tie the strings to my Life, My Lord” is peremptory—“Rapid! That will do!” (4)—and self-involved, entirely absorbed in the headlong, graphic swoon, dangerous and thrilling, of mortality. The poem’s speaker is self-sacrificing rather than self-effacing, surrendering herself to the power of a “Lord” whose will is unknown. The thrill of the poem is the evocation of this ride that violently, rapidly estranges the speaker from her home. I suggest that Dickinson’s “Lord” is posed as the audience of the poem, the poem establishing a reciprocal template in which the reader carries the speaker’s voice into the “judgment” of being read. The addressed reader ties the strings of

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the poet’s life. In direct contrast to Rossetti’s speaker in “Up-Hill” and her speaker in “After Death,” Dickinson’s speaker in Fr338 poses herself as ceding control to her “Lord”—to her audience—giving herself to her audience. By contrast, Rossetti’s uphill speaker retains a space of ascendancy over the audience, not merging performatively into the act of being posthumously read. The audience of “After Death” is not submitted to but is assumed to be sympathetic to the speaker and addressed as if in the control of Rossetti’s speaker. Rossetti’s dead speaker establishes control over audience, while Dickinson’s self-elegist risks everything for and through and with reading audience, invoking the audience as the speaker’s “Lord,” or her “One,” pulling audience into the space of death in a risky gesture that the audience either accepts by reading the text or rejects by putting away the text, tying the strings (as Dickinson tied up her fascicles) and dropping it. Although this ceding of power to a belated audience is rhetorical, the effect is to make the poem’s performance as read a dramatic scene of discovery, for—as is made clear in Fr338—the meaning of the speaker’s sacrificial departure from her life and her home can only appear when adumbrated against our recognition of that departure. The departure gauges its meaning, as trajectory, against audience: the departure occurs in the poem as it is read. By contrast, Rossetti’s “Up-Hill” imparts information to audience for its own good; according to the poem’s rhetoric, the speaker’s information’s relevance does not depend on its being read. The structure of faith alters Rossetti’s relationship to audience. If Dickinson’s Fr804 envisions a glorious awakening at Judgment, it also implies that only at Judgment will the poem’s lovers’ love, outcast from traditional Christian mores, be revealed as divine. Perhaps scandalously, the poem compares the image and structure of Judgment Day’s awakening to sexual awakening, hardly fitting in the category of orthodox Christian doctrine. Rossetti’s death lyrics, by contrast, cannot be argued to wholly elide salvation and election as structures governing death. A placement of Christian afterlife effects a lessening of the posthumous speaker’s dependence on language to produce and perform her persistence, undoing the pressure on the speaker to engage her posthumous existence exclusively through language. The poem’s inscription, in Rossetti, is a means to address God, an exercise of piety and engagement with the divinity. In the disembodied posthumous voice deployed by Plath, Shelley, Dickinson, and Brontë, on the other hand, the speaker’s access to the divinity is problematized, and pressure is put on the inscription itself, the scene of the text and the text as scene, to contain rather than attain the speaker’s afterlife. Language, here, appears not as a means to communicate with a strictly Christian divinity but rather as a container of divinity. The disembodied posthumous voice lodges the limits of afterlife in the space of text itself. A text’s self-aware status of being inscribed as opposed to spoken emerges as central to the project of self-elegy.

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Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16

Rossetti’s justly ascendant reputation is indicated by recent works of Rossetti criticism. See Susan Conley, “Rossetti’s Cold Women: Irony and Liminal Fantasy in the Death Lyrics,” The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio UP, 1999) 260–84, and Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000) 28–45, 131–56. Rossetti and Dickinson, both born in 1830, were not unknown to each other, although obviously Dickinson would have known of Rossetti first, Rossetti’s fame in the 1860s being secure. Rossetti was sent a book of Dickinson’s poetry shortly before her own death in 1894. See Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). “There is neither male nor female; ye are all one in Christ.” Galatians 3.28. Rossetti remarked on this very outcast quality after reading Dickinson’s posthumously published first book, interpreting it as a work of scandalous genius. See Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992). Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988). My reading of these lyrics develops from that of Susan Conley in “Rossetti’s Cold Women.” Arseneau’s main thesis, convincingly detailed in Recovering Christina Rossetti, is that Rossetti’s work is anchored by alliances with her sister, mother, and maternal aunts. See also Chapman, Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. Alison Chapman, “Father’s Place, Mother’s Space,” The Culture of Christina Rossetti, 237. For an overview of Rossetti scholarship focusing on the corpse poem, see Margaret Reynolds, “Speaking Unlikenesses: The Double Text in Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death’ and ‘Remember,’” The Culture of Christina Rossetti, 3–22, and Conley, 260–84. Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003) 67–71. Although it has been argued that Rossetti retreats to the corpse scene in order to escape the Victorian parlor, I suggest that the corpse scene is not radically disoriented from the parlor. See Conley, 274. Angela Leighton contrasts “the admiring family drawingroom” to “the grave.” See “‘When I’m Dead, My Dearest’: The Secret of Christina Rossetti,” Modern Philology 87.4 (1990): 143. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) 3–13. Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 170. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 149. Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1997).Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Goblin Market will be to this edition. All citations to Rossetti’s poetry are to The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904). “Laura would call the little ones / And tell them of her early prime / […] Would talk about the haunted glen / the wicked quaint fruit merchant men / Their fruits like honey to the throat / but poison in the blood.” Goblin Market, lines 548–9, 552–5.

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17 Leighton makes a similar point when she argues that “the whole energy and inspiration of the work drive towards more temptation, more fruit and more poetry.” See Victorian Women Poets, 138. 18 Leighton, Victorian Women Poets. See also Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985). 19 Shelley, Mathilda, 232, 236–7; Farr, 156–7. 20 Arseneau has insisted on Rossetti’s status as a major Victorian poet and effectively argued that Rossetti’s religious life and its expression in her poems, far from damaging the work, provides its strength. See Mary Arseneau, introduction, Culture of Christina Rossetti, xiii–xxii. 21 Harrison importantly argues that Rossetti’s poetry was a “medium [in which she] challenged what she perceived as the values of her particular historical era, as well as discuss[ed] basic conflicts inherent in amatory and aesthetic experience.” Antony H. Harrison, 140. This challenging, I suggest, is particularly enacted in the death lyrics. 22 Antony H. Harrison, 140. 23 Conley, 265. 24 “After Death,” lines 12–14, Rossetti, The Poetical Works, 293. 25 Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). 26 Conley, 265. 27 “The movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, produces itself as its own occultation. When the other is announced as such, it presents itself as a dissimulation of itself.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 69. 28 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 68. 29 “The sun becomes the eye that reads the text of the epitaph.” Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 75. 30 Conley, 269. 31 Conley, 269. 32 Ranita Chatterjee, “Mathilda: Mary Shelley, William Godwin and the Ideologies of Incest,” Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after “Frankenstein,” ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997) 130–49. 33 Conley, 268. 34 In referring to the traditional Christian afterlife here, I mean broadly the Anglican Protestant view. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I am sensitive to the multiplicity of ideas about the afterlife and judgment under the general rubric of Christianity. The concept of judgment and of saved and damned souls, however, influences Catholic and Protestant thought alike. For readings of Christian typology, see Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker, eds., The Sacred Image East and West (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995), and Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987) 132–8. 35 See Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993). 36 Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974) 166–81.

Chapter 6

Hooks and Ladders: Sylvia Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” The Greek myth says: one cannot create a work unless the enormous experience of the depths—an experience which the Greeks recognized as necessary to the work, an experience in which the work is put to the test by that enormousness—is not pursued for its own sake. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus

When her daughter, Sylvia, was still a child at home, Aurelia Plath’s “Bible” was a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.1 It was not, of course, R.W. Franklin’s authoritative version, but a version more similar to Alfred Leete Hampton’s collection. Aurelia Plath’s ambiguous presentation of Dickinson as at once sacred, her oeuvre a Bible, and wayward, her words a replacement for the Bible, was presumably an attempt to show that she transferred the gift of poetry to her daughter, a lineage through which Dickinson, mediated by Aurelia, reached Sylvia Plath. But if Aurelia Plath’s use of the word “Bible” suggests the way that text functions as a go-between, enacting ties between mother and a child, Plath’s poetry seeks to disrupt the linguistic maternal, to specify instead an opposite gesture in poems whose aesthetic draws on the trope of maternity only to mark an ascetic space dislocated from the quotidian maternal trappings of comfort, care, and material satiety. If Emily Dickinson’s poems were Sylvia Plath’s nursery reading, then it is perhaps no surprise that her poem “The Rabbit Catcher” irresistibly calls to mind the nursery library, specifically the children’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice’s philosophical rabbit inaugurates the tricky movement of “The Rabbit Catcher,” but, like Aurelia’s anecdote about Plath’s inheritance from Dickinson, the tradition that the poem’s feminine speaker invokes is elusive. In Plath’s poem, the white rabbit that leads Alice and her readers “down, down, down” navigates the rabbit hole of maternity. 2 But “The Rabbit Catcher” also catches the death of its speaker, for the poem’s very dramatic and structural emergence is based on its speaker’s apparent sublimation into death. Like Alice’s white rabbit, Plath’s rabbit talks, commenting on the metaphorics of posthumousness, a troped posthumous voice its fabular hunter cannot trap. While “The Rabbit Catcher” has often been read as a depiction of a marriage gone bad, in this chapter I argue that Plath’s use of the dead, nonhuman voice is a way of

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querying abjection, an exploration that supervises the details of her biography.3 Rather than focusing on biographical messages in the poem, I want to argue that the poem’s already dead speaker’s complaint—a look at hunting from the perspective of the prey—goes beyond confessing a wife’s troubles and presents the difficulty of the feminine speaker as such in the place of elegy. It presents, that is, how the pastoral elegy becomes a “place of force” for the feminine speaker.

A Beautiful, Silken Rabbit If the “place of force” that opens “The Rabbit Catcher” may be read as an invocation of text as theater, it is also a place charged with longing, the longing in elegy for the dead. This reading particularly follows if one accepts Peter Sacks’s thesis that in the elegy longing is always erotically charged. Jacqueline Rose applied her interpretation of Lacan’s gendered theory of semiotics to analyze the poem as encoding lesbian erotic longing, and Ted Hughes, Plath’s widower and literary executor, responded to Rose’s interpretation of the poem by calling it “grounds for homicide.”4 Hughes and Rose in effect repeat the scene of the poem, revealing how the “place of force,” the masculine tradition of elegy, guards itself against interpenetration with the feminine, the genre of elegy becoming a place of force that keeps out the feminine speaker, the woman mourning herself or, perhaps, another woman.5 Inasmuch as Hughes’s complaint against Rose turns on his claiming that she slandered “[his] children’s mother,” it turns on his reclaiming Plath’s maternity, inserting himself into Rose’s reading of “The Rabbit Catcher” implicitly by placing himself as the father to Plath’s children, Plath the poet reinscribed as “[his] children’s mother.” The intensity of the terms with which Hughes sequesters Plath’s maternity—invoking murder to defend the spectral maternal body—insists on his place as her children’s father and indicates the poem’s engagement of the problematic of maternity and parentage, a knot into which Rose, Plath, and Hughes are all knotted by Hughes’s startling invocation of a “homicide” involved in the reading of this poem. Erica Wagner has written on the extraordinary ambiguity of Ted Hughes’s role as Plath’s literary executor and, in the popular lore of their marriage, her executioner. Wagner makes the case that Hughes played a crucial part in bringing to the public the poems of Ariel, which remained in manuscript at the time of Plath’s death, even as he paternalistically changed that manuscript.6 If we read Hughes as if he were connected to the hunter in “The Rabbit Catcher,” a reading encouraged by his response to Rose’s analysis of the poem, then we must also pay attention to the way that that poem insists audience be reached through the hunter’s hands, to the masculine rule over the pastoral. The hunter, arguably, is written into the poem to perform the role of impresario to the rabbit’s voice. Strikingly contrasting the rabbit catcher, who attacks, to a shepherd, who guards, Plath’s poem marks the pastoral and the pastoral elegy as a scene of

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violence, a “place of force” for the poem’s speaker. In linking maternity, death, and poetic achievement, “The Rabbit Catcher” may well point to Ted Hughes, but it also clearly points beyond Ted Hughes, indicating an assumption that the rabbit, at once the poem and its speaker, must go through the hands of the hunter in order to reach the public. In Plath’s poem, the dramatic way that the feminine self-elegy must confront the pastoral as a site of violent pressure in which the speaker memorializes herself stages the limits of the genre for the feminine speaker. My reading of “The Rabbit Catcher” queries precisely this aspect of “force”: the poem’s assumption of the necessity of the hunter’s presence for the lyric triumph of the rabbit. This assumption mobilizes the poem’s troped posthumous subversion of the hunter’s control over the rabbit. I suggest that “The Rabbit Catcher” can be read as an elegy spoken by the rabbit’s disembodied voice, the speaker and subject already dead at the poem’s outset. Here, the longing of the speaker is for herself as a prematurely killed voice; she longs for her speaking self, always already killed in patriarchal discourse. Significantly, the rabbit appears intertextually marked as a “doe with young,” the poem’s rabbit resonating strongly with the image of a pregnant rabbit that appears in a letter Plath sent her mother six years before writing the poem. If Ted Hughes corresponds to the poem’s rabbit catcher, this connection can be traced best through the interlocking texts of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which I will discuss later in the chapter) and Plath’s letter’s reading of Hughes as master of his landscape. This landscape, which “The Rabbit Catcher” carefully evokes, is that of Hughes’s home turf. In the 1956 letter to her mother, Plath depicts Hughes as the master of the territory, writing: I wish you could see your daughter now, a veritable convert to the Brontë clan, sitting upstairs in Ted’s room. […] last night Ted and I hiked out at sunset to stalk rabbits. Ted, a dead eye marksman shot a beautiful silken rabbit, a doe with young.7

The pregnant rabbit whom Hughes kills during the apotheosis of his and Plath’s romance and during Plath’s pivotal introduction to his home on England’s moors becomes a symbol of sacrifice and escape in the text of Plath’s poem. In “The Rabbit Catcher,” the boundaries between a human speaker who observes a pregnant female rabbit being killed and the pregnant rabbit itself blur. In Plath’s poem, that “beautiful silken rabbit” of the letter speaks. In the letter, Plath depicts Hughes as the master of the landscape in which he hunts, while the poem evokes a similar scene of a hunter, a landscape, and a rabbit. The poem grants the prey voice, however, and this voice, called back from speechlessness, ravels the hunter’s mastery. The hunted rabbit’s death seals the poem but also opens it, a death reached after a series of birth pangs, a death troped through maternity (30). The pregnancy of the “silken rabbit, a doe with young,” shot by Ted’s marksman “eye,” bears its progeny six years later. The implied offspring of the doe, the poem itself, tricks the rabbit catcher, inasmuch as each

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time we read the poem, we pull the rabbit from the trap. The poem’s speaking voice evokes this pregnant rabbit, chased into a trap, because one reads Plath’s letter and her poem as texts that link up through the image of the “doe with young” and the “dead eye marksman.” It is worth mentioning, moreover, that Plath drafted the poem when her son was a few months old; she had just been pregnant three times in as many years, and thus the memory of giving birth and of being pregnant was presumably fresh in her mind. Susan Van Dyne’s subtle and extensive exploration of links between Plath’s biography and her poetry makes just such connections. Indeed, Van Dyne identifies in Plath a “poetics of maternity.”8 My reading of “The Rabbit Catcher,” however, relies on the intertextual connection between Plath’s earlier letter and her later poem, as well as on both Plath texts’ confrontation of Lawrence. I choose this intertextual method because Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” is a poem so highly literate, not only allusive to D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, especially the chapter entitled “The Rabbit,” but also significantly self-consciously aware of its deployment of words as a space necessarily independent of biography.9 Much as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” respects the lost knowledge of the nature of the sacrifice at the poem’s center, the words that the “me” of Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” speaks from the trap grant a sort of fleeting sanctuary at the edge of death (30). If the speaker’s language emerges aligned with the tropological vanishing of her body, it is to indicate the always already lost quality of history’s presence, the cenotaphic aspect of biography. Just as Plath’s letter about Hughes the hunter is aimed to the audience of her mother, her poem inscribes a space for a reader, making pivotal the role of the reader of this self-elegy. Only the reader coming upon the scene of the dead rabbit’s escape can take the lyric text from the hunter. The speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” articulates, then, an escape that goes back through the hunter and his trap to the reader. The rabbit catcher generates the poem by chasing and killing the rabbit, for the hunter and the death he offers, like Dickinson’s evocations of death’s “gifts,” yield to the poem’s speaker a problematic entry into canonicity. While Plath’s use of the thematic of maternity to symbolize selfhood has been widely noted, I locate the importance of her deployment of the maternal gesture not in the poem’s symbolic terrain but in its rhetorical use of the ascetic turn of maternity.10 Through the labyrinth of the rabbit’s escape from selfhood, the poem circles back to the underworld of aphasia, Plath’s orchestration linking what Mieke Bal describes as maternity’s aphasia with the nonhuman voice of the rabbit. At odds with a Kristevan reading of the maternal as the pre-symbolic strata, however, “The Rabbit Catcher” uses the trope of maternity as a compensatory strategy, a highly symbolic artifice, setting up a labyrinth that leads both to and away from speechlessness.11 Here is no pre-symbolic Kristevan semiotike, but rather a symbolic landscape of aphasia that the rabbit’s discourse, the poem, masters by structuring the arena of speechlessness not as pre-symbolic strata but, on the contrary, as a space from which the always dead speaker casts the poem’s pastoral topos.

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The poem locates a mastery of topos in its speaker’s ironically performed aphasia. “The Rabbit Catcher” tells us that the experience of aphasia alters topography: “The absence of shrieks / Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy” (17– 18). This “absence of shrieks” changes the poem’s pastoral “place,” making a “hole” in its temporality, its “day.” The “absence of shrieks,” an ambiguous sign either of the suppression or perhaps of the refusal to cry out, alters the place of elegy through the interdicted feminine voice by altering the lyric’s temporal setting, its “day.” The troped posthumous poem bends back the expected temporal division between the elegist and the dead, making the elegist the already dead speaker who, troublingly, must perform her own elegy. This mastery of the rule of metaphor is effected by the poem’s handling of the trope of the posthumous voice, which mandates a perspective of elegy by forefronting the as-yet-unrecognized death of the poem’s performer. A litany of verbal constrictions and violations “drum into use” the language of the poem, to borrow Plath’s phrase, separating the poem’s text from its proleptically posthumous speaker.12 It is this curiously antagonistic relationship between the poem and the speaker—manifested in the statement that the poem is “a place of force,” a place dangerous to its own speaker—that dramatizes the split of voice from body in “The Rabbit Catcher.” If, as Tim Kendall notes, “The Rabbit Catcher” is a troped posthumous poem, it is important to add that Plath’s speaker takes up the place of the nonhuman, the rabbit, as that which merges into the space of death, pushing the posthumous voice to contain a meditation on the pastoral from the point of view of the hunted in a landscape that very traditionally shelters mourning.13 “The Rabbit Catcher” queries the edge of legibility with this gesture of the nonhuman speaker. Aligning itself with nursery-tale animals who talk, the lyric that uses this device risks a loss of voice on the stage of adult readership. As in Dickinson’s unnamed, buried child lyrics, the problematic of authority in lyric voice is highlighted in the drama of Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher.” Plath’s troped posthumous “The Rabbit Catcher” memorializes its own speaker. This self-recuperation is placed through a slantwise technique of allusion to sites of mourning—extreme unction, death at sea. But these quotidian markers for mourning are exposed, in turn, as insufficient sites for elegy. An implicit “unreeling” of those quotidian symbols that the feminine speaker has been granted occurs in the poem (8, 30). The poem, then, presents the kinds of mourning traditionally allowed feminine speakers and exposes their inadequacies for her grief. The poem confronts the question of how an elegist claims authority if not through appropriation of cultural markers of elegy. By contrast, Keats’s recuperation of voice in the place of mortality in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example, occurs through the invocation of classical Greece.14 Approaching the problem of voicelessness, that “foster child of silence,” Keats grants himself a not uncomplicated claim to the classical tradition. “The Rabbit Catcher” instead stakes its elegiac claim through paralepsis: not allowed a claim to the classical tradition, the speaker gestures toward quotidian referents of mourning,

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which are placed beside the poem’s revelation of their inadequacy, depicting selfmourning as the speaker’s response to being cut off from the classical tradition, or what Sacks defines as the male tradition of elegy. This feminine anonymous elegy, or self-elegy, critiques the inadequacy of the quotidian accoutrements of mourning—the priest’s comforting presence, the widow’s tales—and sets beside them a radical complaint of a loss of voice, a loss unassuaged by the forms of refuge permitted women. Implicitly, it is the quotidian or domestic scene that binds the speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher.” Plath’s speaker brings up and rejects the very consolation culturally allowed the female mourning poem. In this rejection of the quotidian, Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” like Dickinson’s self-elegies, achieves its topos. Both Dickinson and Plath stage a rejection of the nursery scene, its shifting props of unnamed infants and talking rabbits, as inadequate or improper to the elegy that the feminine speaker narrates for herself. The feminine elegy uses these domestic markers ironically to structure a self-mourning scene that disinherits its own feminine emblems as always already performed. Without recourse to a classical tradition as its basis for elegy, the self-elegy uses rhetoric as its own compensation, much in the way that Keats invokes classical antiquity in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to evoke a spectral, empty village. That is, the longing of mourning, its always unanswered desire for recuperation, is structured into the self-elegy to create a distance—an empty village, as it were—in the place of the speaker’s feminine, quotidian culture. The empty village in the feminine elegy indicates that the poem’s speaker has no other tradition, or inheritance, to claim. Developing from Jennifer Summit’s reading of women writers’ lack of access to the classical canon as definitive of woman’s marginal position vis-à-vis the canon, I wish to emphasize in reading the femininity of the self-elegy in the oeuvres of Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath that these writers make use of the interdicted position of the feminine to frame an ontological query that pushes beyond an expression of feminine privation.15 The self-elegy stages the speaker observing her entrapment in the quotidian, commenting on it and framing that enclosure in the poem’s rhetoric, surpassing the quotidian enclosure of feminine rhetorical voice. Indeed, the self-elegist claims her understanding of the cultural mechanics of deprivation as her privileged view of the mechanics of mourning, her exquisite schooling in privative poetics. She speaks from the privative, anonymous place of already knowing separation from any culturally significant name. Death does not cut her off. Rather, she uses the topos of death to examine the precedent of feminine interdiction, what Dickinson terms the “interdicted Land” (Fr310, 6), the text in which the speaker mourns her always already anonymous self. If, as Ted Hughes suggests in his “The Rabbit Catcher,” a poem that responds to Plath’s poem, Plath’s impetus in “The Rabbit Catcher” is that of deploying the voiceless, the animal, as a totem of sacrifice, it is worth considering that Plath’s poetics of death conduct a querying of abjection and voice, of the relationship between elegiac voice and aphasia.16 The structure of “The Rabbit Catcher,” by

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repeatedly forcing the speaker into the place of speechlessness, confronts the labyrinth of confession, confronts the problematic of language as a site, or mark, of history that incompletely empties history.17 “The Rabbit Catcher” dramatizes a struggle of feminine elegy by rejecting the quotidian markers of the female mourning poem while positing that generic “place” of male elegy as threatening to the feminine speaker. The birth pangs of childbearing in Plath’s poem may well trope the feminine as that which reproduces without name; however, this nameless burial in the pastoral landscape is precisely what the poem militates against. The rabbit’s, or speaker’s, desire, which drives the poem, is a desire for the chance to be read, to perform the poem’s elegy as if it were spoken for a recognized poet, even as the poem dramatizes that its already dead subject is the anonymous, unrecognized speaker herself. The rabbit that runs through Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” is the speaker’s language tracing her shedding of desire into text, signing the self not in the same way that the mother gives birth but, quite by contrast, in the opposite way. For the rabbit’s name is written all over this elegy if we read the rabbit as that which inscribes itself out of anonymity and into the identified subject of self-elegy, the highly self-conscious stylistic device of the troped posthumous voice, in which metaphor serves as name. This desire motivating the poem is the desire to write one’s way out of the trap of the feminine quotidian. “The Rabbit Catcher” connotes inscription as the unique tool that may release the entrapped rabbit whose great run is the poem. This trajectory of desire works against the static figure of the hunter in the poem. The hunter stands at the trap. His “mind like a ring” shuts the poem, simultaneously killing the speaker and, by shutting off her live voice, the rabbit’s run, preserving the poem’s text (28). But of course, it is the speaker who gives him a “mind like a ring.” The figure of the hunter/husband that ominously echoes through the poem is written to act as its principal audience, passive and static despite the violence attributed to him. The poem’s circularity predicates text on the condition of a violent guarantee, the hunter’s presence ensuring the completion of the poem. Elisabeth Bronfen describes Plath’s writing as a “rhetoric of aporia,” indicating the absence of a guiding self in the late poems.18 This apparently absent self could also be described as a speaker whose incorporation of the landscape she inhabits is complete: this landscape is text. The ultimate trap for “The Rabbit Catcher,” then, is not the hunter. The poem’s most feared trap is aphasia, and the route it takes out of aphasia is the posthumous voice, a tropological labyrinth that “The Rabbit Catcher” formally aligns to maternity, those “snares” set close “like birth pangs” that lead to death (16). “The Rabbit Catcher” uses the maternal paradigm to achieve a lineage of the self formed from moments of absorbing landscape, moments that at first appear fragmentary but finally cohere at the poem’s close in a poetics of disappearance as self-consummation. I do not mean consummation in the sense of being consumed but in the sense of consuming.19 The speaker anteleptically, as it were, takes command of the landscape of the poem through which she depicts herself being chased. This emptying of the self, ascesis, as a way

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of claiming the landscape into which the self is emptied occurs in the juxtaposition of the opening and closing phrases, “it was a place of force” and “the constriction killing me also,” which transfer to the poem the landscape’s power by means of the speaker. The troped posthumous voice in “The Rabbit Catcher” places the speaker’s death before the text; her death is belatedly revealed as preceding the poem, enabling the speaker to command the landscape in which she is buried. It relocates the speaker’s voice strategically. Indeed, the poem reads like the voice of someone being strangled, its imagery narrowing into a trap, its rhyme scheme tightening into the final stanza’s triplicate rhyme—“ring,” “thing,” and “killing”—which leaves a speaker, a self, a voice, extraneous and unimportant, a left-over being called “me also” (28–30). But this residue, the “me also,” is of course the poem. The poem’s title, “The Rabbit Catcher,” maps the poem’s role of catching the speaker’s elusive voice, her aphasiac voice torn off. The speaker speaks to claim that she cannot speak: “The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, / Tearing off my voice” (2–3). Paradoxically, she tells of her own aphasia. Plath’s speaker could be referring to a past muteness, a state of speechlessness now overcome. Since she brings her muteness into the center of the text, however, opening the poem with a confession of having had her voice torn off, her voicelessness is highly dramatized. Aphasia is not behind the text, but rather a front-and-center concern of the poem. The narrator speaking the poem is the aphasiac whose voice has been torn off. The violence of the metaphors “tearing” and “gagging” that describe the removal of the speaker’s voice suggest that the use of the past tense in “It was a place of force” is a feint, for the metaphors describing and structuring the place are so violent as to make perfectly clear that “It” is still a place of force. The pastoral topography of the poem is the place of force that at once threatens the speaker and also forces her voice out, forces her to speak. Fittingly, then, the words describing voicelessness—“gagging” and “tearing”—are both gerunds, suggesting that the speaker’s voice suffers the ongoing condition of being torn off and of gagging. The poem’s text follows the trajectory of a voice. Through the labyrinth of “The Rabbit Catcher,” the voice torn off turns. The speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” is speaking with a voice that has been violently taken away from her and also violently shoved into her, gagging her. How does she harness such a voice to communicate anything at all? She too is a rabbit catcher, a catcher of the rabbit of her own voice, of her own elusive language and the tropes it figures. The feminine speaker of the poem is chasing her own language. She describes that chase in the text of her poem.20 The torn-off voice, the text of the poem, survives the death of the speaker due to the violent separation of the voice and the “me also,” the division that seals the poem. As the rabbit and the speaker’s torn-off voice merge in “The Rabbit Catcher,” the poem portrays the hunter and the land on which he hunts as forces that ensnare the doe with young. Juxtaposed against the nonspecific way that the “place” is denoted—called simply “It” and “there”—the specific violations of the place

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reveal a pastoral scene dangerous to the speaker. The landscape presented in “The Rabbit Catcher” tears the speaker, gags the speaker, blinds the speaker, and also tastes malignant to her (2–4, 11). It is the landscape of male English elegy, the Romantic pastoral, on which the speaker chokes. The rabbit in “The Rabbit Catcher” runs into land aggressively not her own. The carefully noted physical accoutrements of the place, its gorse and its perfumed thickets, its sea and its light, grant a topography only of inscription to the speaker. “The Rabbit Catcher” establishes itself as a riddle, then, asking why the death of the rabbit charts a necessary balance to the rabbit’s great run, or why only the rabbit’s death establishes the rabbit’s claim to the topos of pastoral elegy, the topos of the poem.

A Place to Get To “The Rabbit Catcher” travels deeper into or beneath the pastoral landscape, entering the world beneath it, the rabbit’s burrowed underworld. The objects of the natural landscape shift, becoming symbolic markers of the speaker’s death trap, which, as Susan Gubar suggests in her reading of Plath’s use of Holocaust poetry, is also Plath’s speaker’s illicit escape.21 The “gorse” turns into candles, “yellow candle-flowers” (6–8). The gorse, here, enacts an “extreme unction,” blessing the speaker while she enters the ever-narrower paths of bodily death and/or of giving birth (8). The flowers become markers of death, sites of extreme unction. Extreme unction, the sacrament administered just before death, predicts the “yellow candleflowers,” prayer candles traditionally lit to remember the dead. The act of extreme unction here doubles back through the candles lit for the dead, not only signifying the deaths of earlier victims of the rabbit catcher but also joining with them the poem’s speaker, whose proleptic death before the poem tropes the voice posthumous in text. The aboveground geography described in the poem withdraws as the speaker reveals that she already speaks from the place of death, the place of burial. The speaker tells us, “There was only one place to get to” (11). This statement of isolation, of there being only one place, highlights the potency of place and elliptically references the death Plath elsewhere describes as “the one / Death.”22 The place introduced in the first line of the third stanza is not a different place from the “place of force” that opens the poem. The winnowing away of options until only one place is left to get to is enacted by the enclosing structure of text, moving from the generic violence of the wind to the originary violence of the trap’s ring. The “place to get to,” then, is only the same “place of force”—a burial in it, perhaps a burial in the conventions of male elegy. The labyrinthine turns of the poem and the verbs “shutting” and “killing,” however, structure a geography of constriction, a threat of voicelessness that the poem overcomes (15, 20, 30). The metaphor of constriction, the womb’s path “narrowed into a hollow,” and its illicit double, the tomb, that hollow at the end of all paths, re-place the expansiveness of

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aboveground, traditional pastoral (13). Instead of the landscape opening as a site of comfort, the landscape of Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” linguistically closes into the narrowing options the poem grants its speaker. The poem’s suppressed screams of pain—“the absence of shrieks”—translate the unspeakable body into the aesthetic, the poem (16), and it is the poem as aesthetic object that at last constricts the speaker, the poem’s conclusion at once marking the speaker’s accomplishment of text and indicating the end of the speaker, inasmuch as the speaker is contained in text. Moving through the violence of generic landscape, of pastoral landscape, however, marks an ambivalent code, a rhetoric that seems designed to outsmart attack. For inasmuch as Plath’s poem expresses the desire to be read, the realization of this desire contrasts to the death of the poem’s speaker, a death whose drama is the story that the poem tells. The poem derives its deathly anguish from the address to the rabbit catcher, who desires the speaker’s/rabbit’s death. Although the speaker, like the titular rabbit catcher, chases a rabbit of her own, the rabbit catcher holds the place of the hunter in the poem. The first step of the speaker’s execution, uncannily tied to the execution of her self-elegy, is the poem’s revelation that the “place of force” tears away from the speaker her voice, preparing her as prey. Since the rabbit catcher is the speaker’s only way to reach a reader, the rabbit must engineer a way to push her voice past him from the underworld from which she anteleptically controls the ground of the poem. The poem begins with the rabbit catcher’s land, his generically marked place of force, taking away the voice of the prey, the place of force of masculine elegy tearing off the feminine speaker’s voice in that place. The poem then stages a subterranean recuperation of voice, depicting the landscape itself as being altered by the speaker’s suppressed voice, which she places strategically underground, in the underworld, altering from below the aboveground landscape that preemptively declared the burial of the feminine elegist’s voice. The inverted metaphor of the maternity of death establishes “The Rabbit Catcher” as a poem that uses the maternal gesture to enframe a meditation on the uncertain desirability of birth. Structured like a journey toward an end that is the fulfillment of the speaker’s destiny, the poem meditates on the very futility of claiming a destiny—of claiming a self, a name. The maternal act, in creating something that implicitly escapes, draws together the apparently contradictory goals of “The Rabbit Catcher”: the death of the self, the verbal revelation of the self. Drawing on maternity as organizing trope, this poem, which seems to be all about a trap, and which ends in a trap sliding shut, performs an escape each time it is read. For if the speaker tells us that neither she nor her landscape can speak, despite the suffering she and her landscape share—a suffering that causes the speaker’s landscape to cry out even as the speaker is stifled—this doubling of landscape and speaker intensifies the claim that the pastoral landscape, or the convention of male elegy, is a place of force. The poem-as-place’s force, however, derives from the speaker herself, harnessing her aphasia to inscribe a radically

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altered pastoral. Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” is a self-elegy in which the feminine speaker tears a “hole” in the masculine tradition, a hole in the male topos. The place of force of “The Rabbit Catcher” is also this forceful poem itself. The place is belatedly revealed to get some of its force, its definitive generic quality, from the speaker. The poem’s retroactive restructuring of place via the speaker’s aphasia, her “absence of shrieks,” demonstrates feminine elegy’s claim to tear apart masculine elegy only to reinscribe a feminine elegy no different from the “exclusively male domain” identified by Sacks. Through its use of irony as self-interruption, the circular scene in which the speaker introduces herself as dead and commands an inscription of her own elegy marks the self-elegy as feminine only in its economy of “interior difference.” It recognizes and uses a dislocation that always occurs in text, what Derrida theorizes as différance, or a continual deferral of completion of meaning, as also the way that gender is inscribed in text, troping gender as always incomplete and unstable. If I suggest that in Plath’s poem the violence of the “place of force” is caused by the poem’s formalization of the suppression of voice, the absence of the speaker’s voice puncturing the landscape, putting into it a “hole,” the performance of the poem, seen through this “hole,” is guaranteed by violence, or by its recognition of violence.

Suppression, Pressure, Grace The gagged voice, then, that voice forced back into itself, seems not to have vanished, but rather to have burrowed underground. From underground, the voice has altered the ground itself. The torn-off voice has altered “the hot day” by tearing into the day the hole of the voice’s own preternaturally manifest absence. The riddle of how the speaker who tells us she has no voice can speak to tell us that she has no voice may be answered if one allows that this troped posthumous voice tears a hole in the landscape in which it has been buried. This violently torn hole is also the gap through which the poem reaches audience, the self-elegy inscribing an always unfinished metaphor, and, from this edge of figuration, the end of the generic land. Like the paradoxical lives of the dead that spool into the sea in Plath’s poem (4), the self-elegy formalizes anonymity and aphasia, reversing anonymity and aphasia through textual form. In “The Rabbit Catcher,” the topography of the end of the land is dramatized as that precipice after which trope itself, metaphorized as spooling, takes over. Like the absence of the speaker’s cries, trope materially alters text-as-landscape, an encoded reform.23 In “The Rabbit Catcher,” those “lives of the dead” that, “spreading like oil,” hide in the sea surround the poem’s landscape (4). These surrounding signs significantly carry the trope of the posthumous voice in the poem, for the spreading oil, transfiguring drowning victims into an elusive or unbounded trope, inasmuch as oil spreads, describes the transformative quality of trope. Figured as oil, perhaps the oil used for extreme unction, the dead here have lives. But, like the paradoxical “lives of

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the dead,” oil, as a figure, is slippery, without contour or definition. Oil “unreels”: it does not hold as emblem. “The Rabbit Catcher” evokes the “lives of the dead,” which, like oil, are slippery, as the elusive figural aspect of language to suggest that the uncontainable lives of the dead may speak, have textual persistence. In their paradoxical “lives” that “unspool,” the poem’s dead become a sort of tropic attar, expressed through extreme suffering. The lives of the dead that spread like oil are the allies of the speaker, demonstrating a way of moving outward from the trap of death, a way of continuing to manifest voice as trope after death. The terrible cohesion of the speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” with the rabbit catcher’s landscape is eased by this prefiguring of escape through trope, this escape through the circles of spreading oil. Oil seems to be a device of figure, but it unreels, evades graphic emblem. Spoken through the troped posthumous voice, Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” closes inside the hunter’s trap, but it also— obviously—evades the trap and reaches its audience. The riddle of “The Rabbit Catcher,” then, is that the rabbit is the speaker of the poem, but the rabbit catcher has already killed the rabbit before the poem was spoken. This poem stops abruptly inside the trap, its telos. The entire poem rests on the vanishing point of the rabbit’s death; the telos, or form, of the poem builds from or is structured by that enclosing death. The speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher,” in curt lines, describes her death precisely as mental space occluded: “A mind […] / Sliding shut […] / The constriction killing me also” (28–30). The poem ends at this point of thoughtlessness, the punctum of death. But the death of the speaker by mental “constriction” casts its shadow back across the expanse of the poem. The death of the speaker is a place of inescapable narrowness, of diminishment, which adumbrates the wide and ranging landscape of the poem—the land, the sky, the sea. The land, the sky, the sea all collapse into the focal point of a death, even as the death trap is the place from which inscription dramatizes its success, reflexively reopening the poem’s text from its closing line. “The Rabbit Catcher” begins and ends with the rabbit’s/speaker’s death, that force that gags the mouth. An answer to the speaker’s unusual capacity to speak from across the boundary of death—fully revealed only in the final line of the poem—is that the text of the poem is complicit with the rabbit catcher. The generic claims of elegy join the rabbit catcher in a pursuit of the speaker’s voice until the rabbit catcher and the poem’s text both at once catch the voice—the rabbit in its trap, this ironic self-elegy. The text of the poem, expressive of and contending with the formal claims of traditional elegy, is the trap itself, inasmuch as it formalizes the rabbit’s death. The poem’s trap, through the trope of posthumous speech, becomes also a trap door, or a trope door, a way for the feminine voice to escape its hunter and reach audience, its own canonicity. 24

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Voice Torn Off If, as Derrida argues, in text there is reserved the place for its author’s death, then the troped posthumous speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” speaks of her own voicelessness—her own death—through the trick of inhabiting this liminality of language, this place in discourse usually reserved for the object.25 Plath’s poem’s speaker casts herself as an object by first casting herself off as the rabbit caught. The text of the poem, the hunted rabbit, is itself the author’s voice “torn off,” a written text. Plath’s poem makes specific material use of this general implication of authoring written text, for the speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” speaks about her own voicelessness and death by deploying the trick of inhabiting this liminality of language, the place within discourse usually reserved for the object of desire (Derrida’s “l’objet petit a”) toward which language tends.26 The speaker casts herself as an object of desire by casting herself as always already leaving the text we read as she speaks it.27 The trauma of having one’s voice torn from one, the risk of writing, is figured textually in the posthumous voice. “The Rabbit Catcher” makes explicit the image of a voice torn from an embodied speaker. In the poem’s aftermath, the speaker, knowing that the rabbit catcher desires her body dead, tricks him into talking to the audience instead of her corpse, her voice. That the traps lining the path toward the rabbit’s death are depicted as birth pangs indicates the double movement of this lyric posed from the perspective of a dead speaker. The voice torn off by the place of force narrates “The Rabbit Catcher,” inasmuch as the author’s voice torn off is the text of the poem and the “place of force” is the theater of readers, the performance of read text. In a poem troped posthumous, the trauma of tearing away the writer’s voice is forefronted, given a place of honor. The phrase “me also” in the poem’s last line, then, exemplifies the dangerous exchange that Plath’s poem’s speaker orchestrates (30). The poem establishes that the rabbit catcher is the only possible recipient of the voice of the poem’s speaker and that he desires the annihilation of the speaker. The only way for her to be read, then, is to enter the rabbit hole of death separated from her voice. The speaker becomes a secondary object, a “me also,” while her text gains supremacy over the rabbit catcher, finessing apart his blunt hands that catch the corpus. Finesse is the defining gesture of this poem’s rhetoric; the text slips through expectations and must be read retroactively, from the telos of the trap’s closing shut. The well-made box of the poem also works as a trap. In this poem, the rabbit/speaker and the rabbit catcher are caught together, both caught in their relationship: “Tight wires between us / Pegs too deep to uproot” (26–8). The rabbit’s inability to escape by fleeing the scene before she is killed is given as an unquestioned historical fiat. The rabbit also tricks her killer, the rabbit catcher, however, into carrying her voice, the poem, as his loot.28 In “The Rabbit Catcher,” then, the escape hatch is the trap. The speaker’s only place from which to speak, the site of her death, is also the textual margin from which the speaker

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moves to center her voice. Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” by casting its speaker’s death as a moment of self-estranging maternal triumph, deploys the marginal topos of death as a place from which to speak that self-elegy which self-consciously claims for its anonymous speaker a canonical place. In “The Rabbit Catcher,” the pastoral landscape kills the speaker’s body. From the tropological trapdoor, the speaker’s voice emerges to sign her text as self-elegy. The dead speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” claims the pastoral in which she is killed retroactively. Since we obviously only engage the scene of the poem by reading the poem, however, the triumphant persistence of the posthumous speaker’s voice is from the beginning inflected through the poem’s text. What comes through the trap is not, after all, the dead body of a rabbit, but a vivid text, the poem as inscription that the rabbit catcher takes to the audience. As that audience, we are uncannily called to enter the poem each time we read it. The trap and the escape it represents here is that liminal space between a hostile landscape signifying the lack of audience for feminine self-elegy—a constricting landscape that kills the speaker whose death invokes precisely the necessity of feminine elegy—and the self-elegy itself. The speaker’s death, cast as preceding the performance of the poem, makes the telos of the poem the trap, but the rabbit’s disembodied voice speaks from the trap, ironizing it. Audience, then, is the “hole” written into the poem.

A Doe with Young If we read Plath’s poem “Medusa” alongside “The Rabbit Catcher,” the contrast elucidates the ways that tropes of maternity, as a place of ceding and recasting the self, inform Plath’s poetry.29 Maternity and birth pangs function in these poems as metaphors through which a speaker theatrically divides herself into a dead body and a voice inscribed, a text. Carolyn Dever connects Derrida’s theorization of the “trace” with the absent mother in text.30 In Derrida’s claim that the trace, inscription, reveals an absence of origin, Dever locates a maternal absence.31 Plath’s poetry, however, would ironize what Dever identifies as the Victorian commonplace of the absent mother by using inscription—the written poem—as the very scene in which the father’s collapse is made explicit. Marking the paternal body as the site of a collapse of the symbolic order, Plath mobilizes this exposure of the father not only through her famous father poems, “Daddy” and “The Colossus,” but also and perhaps more persuasively through her reclaiming of the maternal as a site of origin that does not collapse but persists in the way that the Platonic khora persists, as a topos for metaphor. She uses the metaphor of maternity as an engine that delays the fall into catachresis.32 If Dever locates her reading of the mother as absent origin in Victorian tropes of maternity, Plath’s locus classicus of maternal statement, “Nick and the Candlestick,” claims the mother specifically as a supervisor of the “last of

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Victoriana.”33 Plath’s “last of Victoriana,” a phrase indicating the mother’s attempt to comfort her child with domesticity, gestures to the inscription of the mother as a performance that Plath will remake on the brink, or at the end, of the Victorian dichotomy of the fallen woman and the angel of the house. As guarantor of woman’s division into body and “angel,” the phallic inscriber, the patronym, is examined precisely by the self-elegist’s implicit claim that she performs her own elegy because no other poet will elegize the feminine speaker.34 Her anonymity as a feminine speaker turns round to strike the tradition of masculine elegy, to make the feminine self-elegy that place of force which forces its way into the genre. The speaker claims a space for audience in this poem, which, in turn, will always find its audience belatedly. Taking inscription as that which is always already posthumous, Plath’s twist on the self-elegy in “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Medusa” is to narrativize the way that the feminine speaker retains the position of the daughter in confronting her own death. To inscribe her elegy, then, she turns from the father by turning to herself, elegizing her own erasure from the scene of inscription. Plath’s recuperation of the khora as a site of legitimate metaphoric work resonates strongly in “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Medusa,” both poems troping an enclosed space that seems to threaten burial and silence but produces metaphoric virtuosity. Plath’s “Medusa,” for example, turns from the address of the masculine other. Instead, it addresses the speaker’s mother as dangerous and powerful, ending in the terrifying and paradoxical assertion that between the speaker and the Medusa there is no boundary, “nothing between us” (41)—that they are the same. The Latin term for jellyfish is “medusa,” and “Aurelia,” Plath’s mother’s name, is the Latin name for the genus of the common moon jellyfish. As in “The Rabbit Catcher,” then, the poem feints toward autobiography only to remake personal history into text, into etymology. Only the aesthetic object, the text, is given privilege, even as autobiography is used up to secure this privilege. The apparent familiarity of the speaker of “Medusa” with the physical experience of childbirth signifies a stereotypical image of feminine production to situate its speaker, who then proceeds to dislocate the very stereotypical femininity she has put in place. “Medusa” significantly stages the struggle of the daughter to discover a powerful but not monstrous feminine voice. It closes by deploying the trope of the posthumous voice. The ancient Greek myth of that gorgon called “Medusa” describes two scenes of the Medusa’s death. In one version, the Medusa is killed by Perseus. Perseus does not see the gorgon but mirrors her face in his shield, cutting off her head without directly looking at her. In another version of the myth, Athena kills the gorgon, and that is why the image of Medusa’s face appears on Athena’s shield, her aegis. In order to speak, the daughter Athena first kills the gorgon, a figure whose maternity is posthumous, as Pegasus rises from the gorgon’s life-giving blood.35 Since the speaker of Plath’s “Medusa” is coded feminine, I suggest that the speaker engages the place of Athena in the myth that describes Athena’s killing

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Medusa. If we read Plath’s poem from the perspective of Athena, then the speaker’s aegis, her shield, is central to the metaphoric structure of the poem. Athena’s aegis is doubly emblematic because it displays the face of the silencing gorgon who, vanquished, becomes a protector. Text, the inscription of the trope of the posthumous voice, subsumes history as the text becomes the speaker’s shield, or aegis. The version of the Greek myth to which Plath’s “Medusa” alludes describes a daughter confronting a monstrous mother.36 Through this confrontation, the poem attempts to recuperate maternity as linguistic trace, referring to Plath’s own mother through a cryptic reference to the Latin for jellyfish, specifically locating the mother by etymology and, indeed, remaking the mother as etymology, as trace that is present, not absent, using the site of the mother’s etymological position to justify the daughter’s recuperation of inscription. “Medusa” both exposes and renovates the fallen mother. Hélène Cixous describes the devalued status of motherhood when she develops Michelet’s observance that “the woman who is extolled is not the fertile mother adorned with her children, it is the Virgin and Beatrice who dies young and childless.”37 Cixous reads the denigrated position of motherhood as endemic to the symbolically abject space of the female body. Plath’s “Medusa” takes on the complicated task of altering the image of the powerful virgin daughter into an image of an equally powerful daughter who is herself a mother. To subvert the complex role of the power of the virgin daughter, Plath’s “Medusa” twists into a paradoxical conclusion, the cryptic statement that there is “nothing” between the mother and the daughter. Rose comments that this bitter and discomfiting final line of the poem is at once an effort to banish the Medusa-mother and also an admission that the mother and the daughter are not so different.38 Following Rose’s line of thought, I suggest that the very links between the speaker and the Medusa forge the power of the poem, complicating the otherwise clichéd confrontation of virginal femininity with monstrous maternity. In Plath’s poem, subverting the Greek myth, the daughter confronting her mother is herself a mother. While the speaker of “Medusa” refuses to reenact the Medusa’s possessive maternity, insisting that she will “take no bite of [Medusa’s] body” (34), she cannot escape the Medusa (12). For this Medusa “paralyzes” by strangling the daughter with a gaze likened to an “X-ray” (31). The paralysis freezes the daughter: so looked on, she cannot breathe. The Medusa is a mother who gives paralysis and death. The poem’s speaker addresses us from the space of that death, from the position of having already seen the Medusa. The speaker of “Medusa” tropes the poem posthumous when she states that the paralysis the Medusa’s gaze causes is a state of being “dead.” The speaker of Plath’s “Medusa” is rendered “dead”—suffocated by Medusa’s paralyzing gaze— before the poem begins. Here, Paul de Man’s reading of prosopopeia as a trope that implicitly threatens the living with silence because it allows the dead speech is an important key to reading Plath’s “Medusa” as an exploration of paralysis,

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muteness, and the posthumous voice. For Plath’s poem takes the trope of prosopopeia as it is used in classical rhetoric and radically alters it. The poem’s opening lines insist that the already dead speaker is not invoked by the living, indeed not brought back to life at all. The speaker specifies her unwillingness to engage the Medusa’s mask, her unwillingness to perform prosopon—maskmaking—in the very poem that entirely engages the Medusa mask: “I didn’t call you / I didn’t call you at all” (21–2). The reverse of classical prosopopeia occurs here: the speaker does not call, or invoke, the mask; rather, she is called by the mask, invoked by the Medusa’s gaze to perform her own troped posthumous elegy. Differing from classical prosopopeia, the speaker of Plath’s poem has not invoked the figuration of an inhuman other.39 The mask-making in Plath’s poem is explicitly dangerous to the speaker: the mask will be the Medusa’s paralyzing face, which kills the speaker. The speaker has not invoked this mask; it has forced itself on her. Plath’s poem does not, strictly speaking, use prosopopeia. Rather, it develops a trope of the posthumous voice in contrast to classical prosopopeia. Much as Barbara Johnson suggests that “we,” the readers of Plath’s poetry, take on the role of Aurelia Plath in our capacity as audience and threat, it is structured into “Medusa” that the audience, the reader, and the paralyzing Medusa perform the same gaze that paralyzes the poem’s speaker.40 The speaker’s voice performs a gesture of inscription that is the troped posthumous voice that signs the poem in paralysis, the fixed text. The mask that the poem makes is not the mask of the dead but rather that of the living audience, the Medusa, staring at the poet’s posthumous inscription. “Medusa,” as noted above, is a poem spoken by a woman who has already looked at the gorgon, who has already been paralyzed, who speaks from the space of death. The speaker has taken the extreme unction of the Medusa’s communion wafer, the sacrament given at death—that terrible bite of her body that it is death to taste. The gesture of the poem, then, is for the dead speaker to write the poem elegizing herself—herself, that is, after she has received the Medusa’s gaze. The daughter vanishes in this poem precisely where the Medusa’s mask fills the poem. There is a parallel here to the theater of Plath’s own suicide, inasmuch as her youthful death has tended to erase from the public imagination her status as a mother, tending instead to fix her in a Eurydice-like role, a young bride killed.41 The speaker of “Medusa” encrypts herself into the symbolic of death. Ironically, this fluent crossing over into death is achieved by accepting the monstrous Medusa’s mothering gaze—by looking at the Medusa and being paralyzed, receiving her gift, death’s gift. But the Medusa’s gift is a death that does not silence feminine inscription but authorizes it as a mode of subverting the paternal metaphor. “Medusa” confronts abject maternity, but the monstrous maternity of the Medusa is revealed as a feminine mode that the poem’s speaker both deflects and uses, making use of that very posthumous status of inscription which Medusa, with her risky gaze, permits the feminine speaker.

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“Stabat Mater” In “Stabat Mater,” Julia Kristeva considers some key parameters of the representation of maternity in Western culture.42 She describes the simultaneous presence of body and absence of language symbolically ascribed to the maternal act, calling maternity the “un-nameable that one imagines as femininity, as nonlanguage, or body.” 43 By contrast, notes Kristeva, the Virgin mother, “crystal wombed,” remains the “virgin daughter, a guardian of paternal power.”44 Perhaps responding to the frustrating emblem of the Virgin, a woman who gives birth to the divine Logos but never claims its authorship, Plath’s poem “Medusa” denigrates the Virgin Mary.45 The speaker of Plath’s poem asks, “Who do you think you are? A communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?” (32–3). “Medusa” scandalously compares the Virgin to the Medusa. The Medusa metonymizes a disembodied voice: “Tremulous voice at the end of my line” (17). The umbilical cord, “old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,” is of course the telephone line, the vocal chord that connects the mother and daughter across the Atlantic ocean. The poem’s tragedy is the failure of its two principle characters to sustain a relationship based solely on voice. They fall from Logos. The poem’s symbolic system of exchange uses the act of inscription, the line of the poem, as the way, the daughter’s own elegy, to recuperate language. Here, the inscribed self-elegy recuperates the fall from Logos, the loss of the feminine speaker’s voice, which comes before the poem, marking the poem as a self-consciously belated renovation. In Plath’s poem, the Medusa does not speak. If the Medusa paralyzes the poem’s speaker, the Medusa itself is portrayed as lacking language: her ears are described as “cupping the sea’s incoherences,” and her tongues “hiss,” producing an incomprehensible, animal sound. The “unnerving head” of the Medusa remains, then, locked out of discourse in a gesture opposite to the daughter-speaker’s bodily paralysis. The Medusa-mask that rises spectrally across the text of Plath’s “Medusa” is a screen that effaces the daughter-speaker’s face. Her own face encrypted, the speaker is freed to speak outside the boundaries of acceptable feminine discourse—ironically enough, outside the writing of the body. Here, following Pierrette Daly, I read the écriture féminine as another mode of the feminine quotidian, the body as part of the domestic scene.46 The daughter’s powers of speech in the poem overwhelm the Medusa’s paralyzing phalluses. In a reversal of prosopopeia, Plath’s posthumous speaker uses the Medusa’s face—that specter of posthumous speech—as her shield from the space of death caused by the Medusa. The mask of the Medusa, just as in the Greek myth of Athena’s aegis, shields Plath’s feminine speaker, allowing the troped posthumous poem to be inscribed. In Plath’s “Medusa,” the speaker, unlike the virgin Athena, is not able to kill the gorgon. Instead, the speaker of “Medusa” grants the Medusa the power to kill her. But she deprives the Medusa of the power to render mute this speaker who receives and dies from the Medusa’s paralyzing gaze. Clearly echoing Athena’s

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mythic triumph, the Medusa’s head in Plath’s poem is tricked by the speaker into providing an aegis for the speaker, from which the poem confronts the phallocentric language, or snakes, that make up the poem’s background noise. The poem “Medusa” presents Athena’s shield with the face of the Medusa as its protecting emblem. Indeed, the poem is the speaker’s shield, her aegis, upon which she inscribes Medusa’s face as the emblem of her triumph.47 Plath’s “Medusa,” then, signifies the Greek myth of Athena’s aegis. The terror of the Medusa, suggests Plath’s “Medusa,” is not her femininity, nor even her maternity. Rather, her allegiance to the silencing phallus makes the Medusa dangerous. The poem’s speaker enters text by erasing her body’s fecundity, killing the fetus with Medusa’s X-ray gaze, the toxic X-rays both revelatory and fatal. This use of the fatal mother as the protector of the daughter’s speech is bizarre, scandalous. It indicates the extreme position into which woman’s interdiction from elegy places the feminine speaker.

Thresholds In arguing that pregnancy is the threshold of culture and nature, Kristeva elucidates the figure of pregnancy, the child inscribed within the mother’s body, as presymbolic.48 In other words, for Kristeva, the pregnant woman’s body becomes a site of the unspeakable: The unspoken doubtless weighs first on the maternal body: as no signifier can uplift it without leaving a remainder, for the signifier is always meaning communication or structure, whereas a woman as mother would be, instead, a strange fold that changes culture into nature, the speaking into biology. Although it concerns every woman’s body, the heterogeneity that cannot be subsumed in the signifier nevertheless explodes violently with pregnancy.49

In the place of maternity, the symbolic order breaks down, the maternal body a site where the signifier and the signified collapse into one semantic gesture. Kristeva’s essay argues that maternity is a sort of catachresis that inters metaphor. If, however, the paternal metaphor that makes speaking from the place of the female body impossible finds its linchpin, perhaps, in the maternal body, Plath’s “Medusa” predicts Judith Butler’s critique of Kristeva’s blurring together of the feminine and the maternal.50 Kristeva, arguing that “silence weighs heavily on the corporeal and psychological suffering of childbirth, and especially the selfsacrifice involved in becoming anonymous in order to pass on the social norm,” uses this merging of silence, suffering, and the feminine to fix an apotheosis of the crisis of woman’s relationship to language, the semiotics of maternity.51 Butler, by contrast, points out the way that the Lacanian, poststructuralist system in terms of

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which Kristeva explores maternity predetermines the outcome of aligning the feminine with the pre-symbolic. Indicating the difficulty of aligning the feminine with the pre-symbolic, Kristeva considers the split between mother and daughter as part of the maternal labyrinth: “Among things left out of the [Catholic] virginal myth there is the war between mother and daughter, a war masterfully but too quickly settled by promoting Mary as universal and particular.”52 The Virgin marks the place of the mother who remains a virgin and who retains the position of being “guardian of paternal power.”53 The Medusa’s gaze, in Plath’s poem, has the power to create a way of speaking outside the paternal metaphor for the daughter who receives the mother’s violent gaze and who persists as voice despite the annihilation of the mother’s gaze. Using the trope of the posthumous voice as the engine of the poem, Plath’s “Medusa” militates against a notion of une écriture féminine as presymbolic. Instead, Plath’s poem uses Medusa’s paralyzing gaze to effect that symbolic recourse that is speaking from the space of death, speaking after the decapitation of that phallic snake, paternal metaphor—a decapitation effected by the troped posthumous voice of the daughter as narrator of her own always belated elegiac poem.

Beyond the Medusa In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous explores the grotesque rendering of the female body—the gorgon—and the possibilities of the gorgon’s response. She invokes the power of the female gorgon as an image to revive women’s writing through a hypothesized écriture féminine, a language women do not borrow from men but create themselves—writing by “emplacing” their bodies into inscriptions.54 Plath’s “Medusa” hovers on the edge of this female writing the body but, I suggest, turns from it.55 Where Cixous emphasizes the strength of the female body as a topos capacious of linguistic production, her emblem a Medusa who has the last laugh, the posthumous speaker of Plath’s “Medusa” turns away from the laughing female body and toward the creation of a static, “perfected” or posthumous textual space. While men, as “blunt, clumsy stumblers,” are removed from Plath’s renovation of the feminine elegy, the woman’s body in Ariel’s troped posthumous poems also becomes less than human. Rather than drawing the mother, that beekeeper who implicitly centers Ariel’s beekeeping poems, as a laughing figure like the Medusa of Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa,” Plath develops the image of a woman who takes the gesture of crossing, the transition of metaphor, as telos, her formal goal.56 Not surprisingly, given Plath’s imagery in “Medusa,” as texts of feminine fertility, the beekeeping poems are quite ambiguous. Plath’s “Wintering,” for example, depicts the mausoleum, an obvious marker of grief, as the scene of the loss of the feminine speaker that she, as dramatic elegist, haunts (41).57 It seems, then, that reading the Ariel poems as a

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triumphant finding of what Hughes calls the “voice of the true self,” as a writing of the maternal body, is possible only by suppressing the poems’ cumulative force of elegy, of elegizing that very voice that, as Hughes indicates, the poems always belatedly “find.”58 I read Plath’s beekeeping poems as self-elegies, poems that use “trace” in the Derridean sense to evoke origin as an a priori loss of voice, inasmuch as inscription encodes voice in text. The trace also significantly replenishes itself through signs as the persistence of text before audience. In Plath’s “Wintering,” for example, the woman figured as the bulb gives up its body for the flower: the bulb always already prepares for its own form’s vanishing.59 The telos of the bulb is to vanish into flower. Importantly, the emergence into textual flower is couched in terms of patience, a self-conscious recuperation of trope from Locke’s (admittedly ambiguous) denigration of flowery, feminine language. Evoking Dickinson’s ample bed in which the posthumous speaker will wait for judgment, Plath’s “Wintering” does not depict but rather predicts a narrative triumph that itself is drawn in allusive terms, that is, by gesturing toward Locke’s metaphor for metaphor, the flower of speech, that space outside text in which the bulbs will flower and the bees will fertilize new flowers.60 This flowering in “Wintering” evokes metaphor as language’s flower. While Locke reads metaphor as a weakness in writing, a feminine, lapsed language that leads away from clear ideas, Plath’s beekeeping poems use flowers as the metaphor of posthumousness, a privative pleasure. Evoking Paul de Man’s argument that literature and philosophy infect each other through trope, Plath’s beekeeping poems use the trope of the bees’ ingestion of flower—an ingestion of trope—to sting the reader with a revelation of the way that the poem swallows its metaphors to inscribe flight, indicating the disappearance of metaphor as discontiguous with the end of text. The female body is the crucial metaphor in the beekeeping poems, but the poem’s maternal images predict and are predicated on the disappearance of that body, the vanishing of bulb into textual flower. Claiming an explicitly feminine space, the poems also inscribe the imperfections of the quotidian domestic as topos: “Winter is for women,— / The woman, still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut” (42–4). The woman cannot leave off knitting the domestic scene, or it will vanish. These lines describe a woman preparing for the body’s disappearance: the woman is knitting a skin, which, as clothing, is made to be shed, and she is rocking a cradle of walnut, a nut whose shell must be shed in order to release its meat, its kernel. These metaphors come from the imagery of the feminine, but their teleology is to inscribe its disappearance, a collapse of the category, of the dichotomy between masculine and feminine. Although in “Wintering” the determination of the bees to persist during winter is like the determination of the expectant mother, a “time of hanging on” (22), when Plath’s bees revive it is not to give birth to babies but to their own flight. It is the woman’s mind, the engine of metaphor, that will be “flying” (50). This “last

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badge of victory” is the bees’ telos.61 Here, Plath’s metaphorics diverge from Dever’s theorization that the mother’s body must be “exterminated” to allow for her hallowed place, a gesture Dever links by proxy with the “angel” voice granted the posthumous woman.62 For in Plath’s maternal metaphorics, the body is not, to borrow Dever’s term, exterminated. Rather, it becomes a means of crossing, a metaphor always in transition, crossing from the derealized space of the feminine body written as a cultural site of damage to the ambiguous waiting space in which the work of metaphor is realized. Dickinson’s ambivalently desired Judgment Day becomes, in Plath’s secular poetry, a “cauldron of morning,” a violent feminine space that is inscribed as the always unreached end of metaphor.63 In Plath’s “Ariel,” the speaker becomes “the arrow” not by inhabiting but by moving through the space of maternity: “The child’s cry / Melts in the wall” (24– 5). In other words, Plath’s derealized maternal space—a “wall” into which “melts” a “child’s cry”—is the inscribed poem, which makes use of the metaphor of maternity precisely to disengage that dichotomy Dever reads between the body of the mother as the fallen sexual body and the disembodied posthumous mother who can be venerated. Plath’s post-Victorian poetry—“the last of Victoriana”—dredges up and attempts to reject this dichotomy by reinscribing the maternal as mode rather than static emblem. The dramatized scene of the feminine speaker’s inscription of her self-elegy, performed in “Edge,” “The Rabbit Catcher,” and “Ariel,” confronts the Victorian dichotomy of bodiless angel and fallen female body and rejects the terms, instating instead a mode of trajectory, of flight, that eludes the paternal metaphor’s insistence on the stasis of the feminine, or, in Bronfen’s poststructuralist terms, the feminine as object of exchange. In the texts of Shelley, Brontë, and Dickinson that I have considered, motherhood and the bodily interrogation it entails remain outside the space of legible discourse. Brontë clearly suggests in Wuthering Heights, for example, that pregnancy and motherhood bring aphasia.64 Kristeva similarly writes in “Stabat Mater” that only the virgin “guards the father’s language.”65 In Plath’s beekeeping sequence, however, this loss of the virgin’s right to speak from the place of the father’s house is theoretically replaced by the mother’s right to speak from the place of her own house. In Plath’s “Wintering,” in the hollow “heart of the house,” the father is represented as a dissipated inscription—a “Sir So-and-so” whose empty gin bottles litter the basement (7–10). In this poem’s topography, in an entirely female house, a winter house perhaps already a mausoleum, the nom du père has been worn down to the cipher title of “Sir So-and-so.” Father’s phallic bottles are all emptied out. Here, Lacan’s theorization of the hollow phallus is followed to its logical conclusion: the hollowed phallus is rendered incapable of engendering any paternal metaphor and dwindles into an onomatopoeic hiss, “Sir So-and-so.” The cipher title of “Sir So-and-so” recalls the hiss of snakes around Medusa’s head, as, in

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“Wintering,” the place of the father’s house is the place of asininity, its subterranean static a hiss like the Medusa’s snakes. Investigating a language spoken dans le nom du père, where the father’s name is reduced to an asinine “Sir So-and-so,” Plath’s poem mocks the privilege of the paternal metaphor.66 Instead, in Plath’s winter house, a feminine mausoleum, the paternal metaphor has become an used-up bottle of gin, a substance already consumed into material sibilance, a hiss. In a striking reversal, the paternal ability to name is buried in that very onomatopoeic substrata to which Kristeva assigns the feminine. As Linda Wagner-Martin points out, Plath’s bee poems express enormous anxiety about the viability of a feminine voice speaking from the place of the maternal house.67 But at least they try the possibility. Cixous writes, “Flying is a woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly […] flight, stealing away.”68 The flight the bees make at the end of the beekeeping sequence is a flight of escape from the “mausoleum.”69 The flight of the bees, however, has another inscription, for the mausoleum, the “wax house,” is also the bees’ house, akin to Dickinson’s ample bed, the bed well-made, the poem, which then becomes a theater for awaiting Judgment Day, or the time of metaphor’s closure. The wax house that the bees build and the queen bee governs is analogous to the poet’s work of rooms, her oeuvre, suggests Wagner-Martin.70 The asceticism of Plath’s vision, then, does not align entirely with Cixous’s notion of language as a revolutionary site of female plenitude or of woman’s prodigious eroticism. Instead, Plath’s use of the trope of the posthumous voice, an ultimately subversive rhetorical gesture, evokes the liminal. The poems connect maternity and ascesis to collapse the boundary between the interdiction of feminine voice and the cultural acceptability of a feminine writing of the quotidian, domestic topoi, and the writing of the body. Plath’s troped posthumous “Wintering,” by contrast, resists any telos but that of the production of text. This gesture of recuperation inscribes a feminine elegy, an elegy spoken by the already dead narrator for herself, in which she stages and then renounces the quotidian. As a response to the violence that, Cixous rightly claims, has been leveled against the female body by our phallocentric culture, the trope of the posthumous voice in women’s writing does not give place to a newly safe female body. Instead, the feminine self-elegy alters a tool of traditional masculine rhetoric, prosopopeia, to mobilize a linguistic response to marginalization. Remembering Tilottama Rajan’s theorization of a textual abject, I note that the genreless text expresses mourning, self-placed outside the discourse of generic resolution. It witnesses an always already performed violence, giving the self-elegy as proper scene of mourning for the elided feminine voice. Plath’s deployment of the trope of the posthumous voice does not reflect a triumphant transcendence. On the contrary, it is a formal recuperation of voice that mourns, or incorporates, the loss of voice. The posthumous voice, then, expresses an ontology of indeterminacy into which maternity is inscribed as pointless self-sacrifice, given the nonbeing that is placed behind all things. This tropological gesture, however, must be performed to keep

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“the piston in motion.”71 The piston in motion is the trope as engine of rhetoric, the poem written for its own sake, without hope of transcendence.

Feminine Poetics I have argued that “Medusa” posits a surprising gift from the monstrous feminine, that the Medusa’s paralyzing gaze grants a troped posthumous voice that permits a feminine system of symbolic discourse, always entailing an ontological tension, Paul Ricoeur’s tensive quality of metaphor. To close, I look at how Plath’s poems “The Rival” and “The Other” suggest an unexpected alliance between the feminine speaker and the feminine other who seems to annihilate her.72 The poems indicate where a feminine narrator’s speech begins once she has placed her death as if before her text. In Plath’s “The Rival,” for example, the rival gives something to the speaker: “Your first gift is making stone out of everything. / I wake to a mausoleum; you are here” (6-7). The rival kills the speaker, placing her in a mausoleum, but also solidifies the speaker’s presence as recuperated linguistic trace. The mausoleum, a miraculous, graphic trance to which the speaker awakens, at once entombs and memorializes, indeed glorifies, the speaker, whose grand mausoleum contains “everything.” If the speaker sees everything around her fixed in stone, a universe made mausoleum by the rival, the speaker herself is not turned to stone but instead continues to see and speak. By means of this feminine other, the speaker achieves language that outlasts stone. What Shakespeare’s sonnet more directly claims—“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of Princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme”—the rival, Plath’s poem implies, by making everything marble, or miraculously transforming the speaker’s quotidian world into a mausoleum, gives the lyricist.73 The poem accepts the difficult challenge of elegy, that is, to “outlive” other forms of memorial. Plath’s poem “The Other” presents an apparently annihilating rival to the speaker. This “other,” however, merges with the speaker, the poem’s second stanza blurring the question of whether the “White Nike” is the speaking “I” or the “You” who “comes in late” at the poem’s opening (1–2). That the “other” comes in late implies her earlier presence in the life of the speaker, suggesting even that the speaker has needed her and that she has come too late. Just as the rival makes stone of “everything,” the other’s very willingness to confess “everything” allows the lyric “The Other” to be written. The speaker’s gesture of capturing the “other,” which the poem gives in the astonishing image of the hunting trophy—“I have your head on my wall” (17)—not only links “The Other” back to “The Rival,” that poem which ends with the rival depicted as a sort of big-game cat “Walking about in Africa” (17), but also depicts the mouth through which the poem is spoken as that of the captured rival. Like an Orphic head, the “other,” her head on a wall, here speaks.

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The mouth of the “other” dominates Plath’s poem “The Other.” It “wipe[s] [its] lips,” “confess[es],” swallows “sticky candies,” “sucks,” and “smiles” (1, 7, 16, 24, 31). This very active mouth of the other implicitly allows the lyric to be spoken. The speaker is posed as posthumous, inasmuch as the poem tells us that a “glass” held before her remains “cold,” unmisted by breath (26), but this cold glass of the other, held “between myself and myself,” draws the lyric’s speech from the posthumous narrator (27). In other words, the rival allows the already annihilated speaker to produce writing that is “exact.”74 The other draws into posthumous perfection the lyric performance of the speaker. A mirror between the vulnerable gaze of the mourned one and the invulnerable speaker who mourns, this partitioning of “myself and myself,” at least in text, saves the speaker, allowing the poet’s gaze to look past the occluding paternal metaphor. In Plath’s “The Other,” the other’s “womb of marble” turns out to be shared by the speaker, inasmuch as her uncanny fertility, so to speak, is the production of a text that outlasts “marble” and “gilded monuments.”75 Moreover, she writes self-elegy that outlasts other monuments from the space of a proleptically enforced death. The other, the rival, grants the lyric speaker a division of herself into a history elided by death and a powerful voice that outlasts its own mausoleum, that persists as text, as self-elegy.76 Plath’s self-elegies, following this odd image of a “womb of marble,” strengthen a feminine mode of elegy, a highly symbolic discourse in which the recursive self-elegy is traced. Here, feminine bodies are figured as mechanisms through which transfiguration is effected—a figuration of the limits of figuration. As Carolyn Walker Bynum puts it in writing of the poetics of medieval female sainthood, “In such piety, body is not so much a hindrance to the soul’s ascent, as the opportunity for it.”77 Plath’s dramatic and apparently last poem, the self-elegy “Edge,” is accordingly not spoken by a narrator who ignores the body, for figuration in the poem centers on a woman’s body. Rather, the poem reveals a reliquary body, ironically envisioning the incorruptible posthumous body of a mother who kills her children. This poem, first entitled “Nuns in Snow,” invokes the Catholic tradition of relics to figure death and yet remains verbally fluent.78 The perfected woman’s ability to use her annihilation as a topos for intact inscription, or verbal reliquary, is staged in “Edge” through the scene of the incorruptible body of a young mother, returning the woman to virginity necessary for a woman’s consecration.79 By presenting the young mother’s body as incorruptible, “perfected,” the poem proposes that the woman’s maternity is transitory. It portrays the woman’s two dead children as bodies whose deaths return to her a properly virginal status, incorruptible, perfected. Of course, the logic here is in one sense skewed. The fact that the woman has killed her two children as well as herself would hardly argue in the Vatican for her canonization. In the symbolic order of the poem, however, it is the world of the flesh, not the feminine but the fleshly world of husband, pregnancy, breastfeeding, that has damaged the young mother, worn her out. The

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paternal metaphor—which she as wife and mother has used and been used by—has used her up. Her exhaustion, metonymically represented by her feet saying “‘We have come so far,’” presents the terminus of the paternal metaphor (8). Her revocation of her children’s bodies as well as of her own body is cast as an act of asceticism before the gaze of the paternal metaphor, which, as Bronfen makes clear, feeds itself on the emblem of woman’s dead body. Playing with tropes of sainthood, the young woman in “Edge” kills her children as self-punishment, just as female saints have submitted to bodily tortures in their ascetic approach to sainthood.80 The poem revolves around gestures of renunciation, of taking it all back: “She has folded / Them back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden stiffens” (12–14). The poem also tells us that “it is over,” that it is “empty” (8, 11). In this high-stakes asceticism, the young woman’s death and her children’s deaths mark the only gestures sufficiently compensatory to balance and renounce her previous involvement with the paternal metaphor. The poems of Ariel formalize this ascesis of the self through the maternal metaphor. In the poem “Kindness,” the speaker makes a startling ontological claim couched as a question: “What is so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit’s cry may be wilder / But it has no soul” (6–8).81 Here, the contiguity of the “real” and the wild, a mainstay of Wordsworthian discourse, is undercut by the interpolation of a quality of “soul.” The child’s still inchoate voice is granted the mark of the “real,” perhaps, but given a new twist. For the “real” thing, the child’s cry, itself is melted in the telos, the formal mastery, of Ariel’s title poem. The melting of the maternal topos, metonymized as the child’s cry, specifically establishes the speaker’s selfelegy. The child’s cry melts in the stanzaic wall of the mother’s poem. The melting of the real, then, is necessary for the creation of the unreal artifact, the poem.

Notes 1 2

3

Aurelia Plath, introduction, Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963, by Sylvia Plath, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper, 1975). Sylvia Plath, “The Rabbit Catcher,” The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (1981; New York: Harper, 1992) 193–4. Unless otherwise noted, references to Plath’s poems will be to this edition. For Alice’s white rabbit, see Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ed. Hugh Hughton (London: Penguin, 1998) 17. For the biographical context of “The Rabbit Catcher,” see Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: Simon, 1987) 205; Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Boston: Houghton, 1989) 244–5; and, more recently, WagnerMartin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) 125–8; Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of “Birthday Letters” (New York: Norton, 2001) 209–11; and Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage (New York: Viking-Penguin, 2003) 166–73.

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See Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 135–43. Rose’s reading and the subsequent controversy is considered in detail in Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994) 178–83, esp. 185. 5 Rose anchors her reading in the poem’s second line, “The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,” arguing that the hair in the mouth suggests autoeroticism, which she connects to lesbianism. See Rose, 138. 6 Wagner, 24. Wagner claims that many of the poems published in Hughes’s version of Ariel had been rejected by literary journals when Plath herself, still alive, sent them out. The unhappy idea that Hughes’s name shepherded Plath’s last poems, upon which her reputation largely rests, into the public arena can only be analyzed as a cultural artifact. Diane Middlebrook argues in Her Husband that Ted Hughes split himself into a benign editor of Plath’s work; she suggests that he was, perhaps, a bad husband, but he was a good editor. I see the situation as more complex. Still, it remains compelling to note that he received the unpublished Ariel manuscript as Plath’s posthumous performance. Hughes also cut “The Rabbit Catcher” from Plath’s own list of “book” poems that would come to be published as Ariel. See Plath, The Collected Poems, 295. 7 Plath, Letters Home, 268–9. 8 Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993) 129–78. 9 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Framer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (New York: Penguin, 1995) 234–43. Plath mentions reading D.H. Lawrence in her journals, especially Women in Love. See The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor-Random House, 2000) 274, 337, 342. Middlebrook and Britzolakis connect Plath’s poem with Lawrence’s poem “Rabbit Snared in the Night,” and Marjorie Perloff compares it to Lawrence’s “Love on the Farm.” See Middlebrook, Her Husband, 168–9; Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 105; Perloff, “The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of The Sylvia Plath Canon,” American Poetry Review 13 (1984): 12. 10 Critics as divergent as Sandra M. Gilbert and Ted Hughes have concurred on Plath’s poetic embrace of maternity. Gilbert claims that “this liberating sense of oneness with life was Plath’s predominant attitude toward childbirth and maternity.” Sandra Gilbert, “‘A Fine, White Flying Myth’: Confessions of a Plath Addict,” Sylvia Plath: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989) 60. Hughes, the father of Plath’s children, explicitly argues that Plath’s experience of maternity made her a great poet, as if gravidity yielded gravitas: “The birth of the first child seemed to start the process. All at once she could compose at top speed and with her full weight. Her second child brought things a giant step forward. All the various voices of her gift came together.” Hughes, “Sylvia Plath,” Poetry Book Society Bulletin 44 (February 1965): 1. 11 Helen Vendler describes Plath’s genius as being precisely that which gives formal voice to the “wild states of feeling which in the rest us remain so inchoate that we quail under them, speechless.” Here, Vendler specifically links Plath’s poetic gift to aphasia, to speechlessness, as if Plath’s oeuvre were a sort of uncanny twin to the inability to speak. See “An Intractable Metal,” Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath, ed. Paul Alexander (New York: Harper, 1985) 12.

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12 Plath, “Three Women,” The Collected Poems, 180. 13 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 2001) 99. While Kendall argues that the rabbit of “The Rabbit Catcher” “survives” its own demise, it seems more accurate to say that the rabbit/speaker of the poem persists only as text. In other words, the text of the poem’s speaker survives that death which the rabbit/speaker crucially does not survive. 14 David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 52–84. 15 Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 12. 16 Ted Hughes, “The Rabbit Catcher,” Birthday Letters (New York: Farrar, 1998) 144–6. 17 Kristeva theorizes the mother as the other, theorizing the maternal space as that upon which silence always already attends. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 326. While I will not follow that theory as a structural premise of language as such, it seems important to note its cultural currency, its reflection of a Western culture that marks maternity with aphasia. 18 Elisabeth Bronfen, Sylvia Plath (Plymouth, UK: Northgate House, 1998) 75–6. 19 Plath’s reputation as one who overdoes it, who has “tantrums” of style and who illegitimately claims the Holocaust as a subject of her poetry, may be linked interestingly to Guinn Batten’s theorization of Keats and Coleridge as poets who thematize consumption and then are critiqued as over-consumers. The gagging image in “The Rabbit Catcher” strongly evokes the danger of orality and the necessity of orality in the lyric poem. See The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and the Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Durham: Duke UP, 1998) 215–20. 20 My choice to identify the speaker as feminine warrants explanation. The speaker’s hair, long enough to be blown across her mouth, gestures toward the stereotyping of femininity that I have mentioned as part of the gesture of the feminine self-elegy. Similarly, the poem’s metaphor of birth pangs stereotypes the feminine, merging it with knowledge of childbirth. The speaker relies upon these constructs to frame her narrative. The poem gestures toward femininity—long hair—as an imposer of a sort of quarantine on speech. The blown hair articulates the poem’s first labyrinth, as Rose points out. See Jacqueline Rose, 138. 21 Plath’s poetic persona, according to Gubar, is linked to that of one who goes to the underworld: in her words, “Plath-Eve arrives at Hades.” “Prosopopeia and Holocaust Poetry in English,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 195. 22 “Roped in at the end by the one / Death with its many sticks.” Plath, “Totem,” lines 33– 4, The Collected Poems, 265. 23 On aphasia following trauma, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 60–63. 24 Here, it seems that Plath’s poem attempts to engage Blanchot’s notion of “the depths” as the space the writer encounters that both forms the work and also stages the impossibility of its inscription. See “The Gaze of Orpheus,” trans. Lydia Davis, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 1999) 437. 25 Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies,” The Ear of the Other, ed. Christine Mcdonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 38.

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26 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 334–5. See also Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982) 11–52. 27 Derrida arguably draws on Lacan’s reading of the status of the object in his discernment of the deferral and emplacement of the author’s death in text. See Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 3. 28 Uncannily, Hughes surfaces as precisely the person who found Plath’s Ariel in manuscript and brought it out. The uncanniness of his role as executor ripples through the two poles of Plath criticism deconstructively read by Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman. Malcolm approaches her topic of writing on Plath from the place of seeing the dissonance between those who villainize Hughes and those who exonerate him. What I wish to point out is the cultural place of the male poet and that of the female poet, a polarity that problematizes the feminine inscription of a place of force, a textual place that insists on its cultural centrality. See Malcolm, 3–12. 29 Plath, “Medusa,” The Collected Poems, 224–6. 30 Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 117–21. 31 Of the trace, Derrida writes: “the trace is not only the disappearance of origin—within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 61, quoted in Dever, 118. 32 In this interpretation of Plath’s reclaiming of the khora, I am indebted to Christina Britzolakis’s reading. See Britzolakis, 195–201. 33 “Love, love, / I have hung our cave with roses, […]— / The last of Victoriana.” Plath, “Nick and the Candlestick,” lines 31–34, The Collected Poems, 241. 34 It is interesting here to consider Ted Hughes’s book, Birthday Letters, as an elegy for Plath. The poems seem to read as apologias, however, honoring the dead by apologizing, and in that sense veer from the formal aesthetic of elegy. For critical interpretations and reviews of Birthday Letters, see Jacqueline Rose, “The Happy Couple,” The Guardian, 1 February 1998; Seamus Heaney, “A Wounded Power Rises from the Depths,” Irish Times, 31 January 1998; and Katha Pollitt, “Peering into the Bell Jar,” New York Times, 1 March 1998. 35 H.J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (1928; London: Methuen, 1958) 29–30, 110–11, 271–3. 36 Plath’s 1958 poem “Perseus” indicates that she was well aware of the Medusa myth before she wrote “Medusa.” See “Perseus: The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering,” The Collected Poems, 82. Her taking the role of Athena, then, is a conscious turn from the position of Perseus. Gender attributes shift unstably in the early stanzas of “Medusa.” The imagery describing the speaker includes tropes of masculinity. For example, the speaker has a powerful “water rod” (19). The mythological figure of Medusa contains attributes of both the female and male bodies: the Medusa is described as a “placenta,” a “blubbery Mary,” but also as grotesquely masculine and phallic, emitting a “cobra light” and “hissing” like an “eely tentacle” (lines 25, 27, 33, 40). The mother and the daughter are each capable of imitating the power of the father, but each is also tied to an abject powerlessness, and the two are connected by their reproductive bodies. The Medusa-

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mother ties the speaker to her through an “old, barnacled umbilicus” (14), a gruesome image of an umbilical cord never cut. The poem suggests, however, that it is not femaleness itself that robs the mother and daughter of power. Rather, “Medusa” suggests that the Medusa-mother’s subservience to masculine modes of power reduce the daughter, denigrating her. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 32. Jacqueline Rose, 183. Quintillian makes clear that the orator invokes the inhuman—the dead, the city—to give mask to the words which the orator will then command. In Plath’s poem, the speaker initially cannot control the figuration—the Medusa’s head—which instead comes into her poem, as it were, against her will. See Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, 9.2, trans. H.E. Butler, Loeb edition (1921; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986) 29–31. Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003) 65–93. Of Aurelia Plath, Johnson writes, “We have met the enemy and, whether we like it or not, she is us” (93). Malcolm speaks of Plath in The Silent Woman, for example, as a figure forever young. See Malcolm, 7–10, where she notes her view of Stevenson’s Bitter Fame. Varying depictions of the scene of Plath’s suicide, moreover, tend to center around the question of how Plath managed to protect her children from the gas she used to kill herself. The descriptions that attempt to exonerate Plath tend to emphasize her youthfulness, implicitly suggesting that motherhood was itself an unfair burden to place on her. By contrast, the descriptions that seek to excoriate Plath tend to emphasize her maturity, fixing her as a failed mother. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. León S. Roudiez, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 160–86. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 162. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 163. Plath’s “Mary’s Song” and “Nick and the Candlestick,” as well as her “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” by contrast, present the Virgin as the maternal paradigm of gentleness who is ineluctably powerless against the always stronger forces of war, paternity, and fallen maternity. See Plath, The Collected Poems, 153–4, 196–7, 208–9. Pierrette Daly, Heroic Tropes: Gender and Intertext (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993). Here, Plath interestingly alludes to W.H. Auden’s “Shield of Achilles.” See W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976) 454–5. Obviously, Plath’s speaker in “Medusa” ambivalently bears the head of Medusa as her aegis. But Plath’s poem, like Auden’s, uses the materiality of the poem itself, its being on a page, to represent the mythic shield. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 182. Kristeva reads the bodily aspect of maternity as a focal point of the metaphorics that present women as creatures more of the body than are men, a distinction replicated from the Lacanian system of linguistics upon which her theorization of maternity is based. “Stabat Mater,” 182–3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999) 101–19. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 183.

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52 Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 183. 53 Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 163. 54 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981) 260. For an argument linking Cixous and Kristeva, see Daly, 138–47. See also Jardine, Gynesis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 162, 172. 55 Plath seems to recognize the problematic of the aesthetic of the dead woman’s body as it is theorized by Elisabeth Bronfen: the poem “Wintering” works to remove the feminine speaker’s body from text as figure, so that we are left reading the body’s absence. On the presence in absence of inscription, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60, and Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) 389–401. 56 For a reading comparing and contrasting Plath’s and Cixous’s theorizations of femininity (which importantly emphasizes the allusive and philosophical aspect of Plath’s poetry in contrast to biographical readings of her work), see Marilyn Manners, “The Doxies of Daughterhood: Plath, Cixous, and the Father,” Comparative Literature 48.2 (1996): 150–71. 57 “Wintering,” The Collected Poems, 218–19. 58 Ted Hughes, introduction, The Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath. 59 “Her body a bulb and the cold and too numb to think.” Plath, “Wintering,” line 45, The Collected Poems, 219. 60 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton, 2 vols. (London: Dutton, 1961) vol. 2, bk. 3, ch. 10, 105–6, quoted in de Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor,” Aesthetic Ideology (1996): 34–7. 61 Plath, “The Swarm,” line 41, The Collected Poems, 217. 62 Dever, 20. 63 Plath, “Ariel,” line 31, The Collected Poems, 240. 64 On the connection between Plath and Brontë, see Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2003) 280–84. Hughes also wrote a poem connecting Brontë and Plath, and Plath’s poem, “Wuthering Heights,” strikingly responds to Brontë’s novel by responding to its landscape only. See Hughes, “Wuthering Heights,” Birthday Letters, 59–61; Plath, “Wuthering Heights,” The Collected Poems, 167. 65 Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 160–86, esp. 163. 66 Mary Shelley’s Mathilda’s aristocratic father suggests strikingly Plath’s dissipated, powerless “Sir-So-and-so.” Both nameless fathers suggest a collapse of the paternal metaphor. 67 Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, 128. 68 Cixous and Clément, 57. 69 Plath, “Stings,” line 60, The Collected Poems, 215. See also Cixous, 258. 70 Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, 128. 71 Plath, “Years,” lines 12, 25, The Collected Poems, 255–6. Plath’s poems return again and again to the moment at which the vacuity behind the “scene” is revealed. In “Little Fugue,” the complications of a life are described as “empty and silly as plates” (line 17, 188); in “Apprehensions,” the reality waiting for the speaker is given as very nearly outside figurative speech—“Cold blanks approach us: / They move in a hurry” (lines 19–20, 195); in “Getting There,” the telos the speaker desires is already devalued in the

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lines “It is so small / The place I am getting to” (lines 44–5, 249). And in “Wuthering Heights,” any spiritual connection with the posthumous Emily Brontë is put off by the speaker’s idea that going out into the “eternity” of the space above the moors would be “like being mailed into space, / A thin, silly message” (lines 23–4, 167). The “thin, silly message” at once devalues the poem itself—undercutting severely the idea that the poem has its own worth, since the poem is the “thin, silly message” mailed “into space”—and, in admission of the speaker’s silliness, her transitoriness, pit themselves against this erasure, or erosion. The impetus to ascesis is not answered by paradise but by nothingness. Plath, The Collected Poems, 166–7, 201–2. Shakespeare, Sonnet 55, lines 1–2, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1759. Plath, “Mirror,” lines 1–3, The Collected Poems, 173–4. Here, the inability of the “other” to have children, her stone womb, transposes to the speaker of the lyric, who reveals herself to have a “womb of marble”—that is, to have the ability to give birth to language that competes with and perhaps outlasts marble mausoleums, the “gilded monuments.” I am developing the notion of a tessera joining two women, apparent rivals, in completion of a grand text from Ilana Pardes’s reading of Rachel and Leah, in which Pardes suggests the two sisters form a tessera that allows Rachel’s “voice to rise from the dead to speak on behalf of exiles.” See Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 78. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone, 1999) 194. Van Dyne, 171–5. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 204. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131. Plath, “Kindness,” The Collected Poems, 269.

Conclusion

Trance and Translation: The Posthumous Voice as Unfinished Business To write is indeed the only way of keeping or recapturing speech since speech denies itself as it gives itself. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Trauma, as framed in the posthumous voice, is at once an obvious and elusive sign. Death is a mark of trauma, the last scene of the loss of self, but unlike confessional posttraumatic narratives, the trope of the posthumous voice does not present its narrator as having come through trauma and survived. The narrator is posed as specifically not having survived trauma. But the speaker’s persistent voice, her ability to persist despite her death as voice, frames death as a legible topos. From the topos of death, the feminine speaker manages to do exactly what will alleviate her abjection: she manages to speak an elegy for herself, writing herself into canonicity.1 In this closing chapter, I look at the connection between the aesthetic formalization of trauma and the trope of the posthumous voice, querying how this poetics of a highly privative scene of mourning formally inscribes trauma while resisting trauma’s abjection. Unlike biographical writing, the speaker’s death stands for a trauma that persists as residue in the trope of a posthumous voice: the effect of the persistence of the speaker’s trauma unexpectedly allies itself to inscription. The speaker as victim is evoked by the trope of the posthumous voice, but the trauma narrative in which a victim overcomes her trauma is not delivered by this rhetoric. Instead, the placement in abjection of the dead speaker is itself destabilized. Through her ability to control the formal technique of sustained metaphor, the abject speaker, the speaker occulted by death, shows that her abjection is mistaken, improper, unreal. Her speech at once formalizes trauma and dislocates her outcast status as trauma victim. The posthumous voice, then, jars the placement of the feminine speaker in abjection, inasmuch as the body’s dismissal queries what made the feminine speaker abject in the first instance, pointing to the always performed quality of femininity and suggesting the performed quality of trauma’s textualization.

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To elucidate what I mean by the performed quality of trauma’s textualization, I want here to return to Dickinson’s poem in which an absence of audience is ironically addressed: “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me -” (Fr519, 1–2). This mode of address points to the way that the posthumous voice shifts the ground from victim to victor, a translation accomplished without reinstating the speaker in the place of embodied orator, that is, without using prosopopeia. This subversion of the terms of abjection in turn questions the placement of the feminine speaker in the category of the abject. The narrator, through her juxtaposition of the ongoing “is” and the severing “never,” reveals that she occupies the place of the posthumous. The “World” has never addressed her, she informs us, and now, in her proleptic death, it never can address her. In seeming to humble herself by writing to the “World” that cast her out, prematurely placing her voice in the space of death, the poem’s speaker gains the linguistic upper hand. For in the frame of the lyric, it is she who writes, while the world is placed in an unending silence of “never” writing. The speaker is implicitly presented as having died before her text, since the world can no longer address her, but by this death she gets the last word in a letter that continuously, in the space of itself, “is.” The speaker’s simulated sacrifice is balanced by her insistence on the letter’s continuous existence. Forefronted is the poem’s command of its terms: submission, here, rewrites itself through a rule of metaphor as the mark of the real. The speaker submits herself to an audience that does not yet exist, and this very stroke of proleptic submission, of inscribing audience into the poem, marks the poem, the linguistic, made thing, as real in contrast to a derealized “World,” an audience yet to be. The speaker of “This is my letter to the World” marks a temporal fiat, a line that has spatial implications, insisting that the “countrymen” and the “World” will remain silent while the unaddressed speaker at last uncannily writes an elegy for her own proleptic placement in death. In this poem, the world’s very inattention to the speaker places her prematurely in posthumousness, a space that cannot be addressed. That unaddressable quality becomes her mark of triumph. She commands her audience precisely at the point where she had seemed dispossessed. The lyric’s concise rhetorical maneuver turns the speaker’s trauma of being unaddressed to face the audience and inscribe the silencing of that audience. Dickinson’s speaker’s lack of address, both a homelessness and a deprivation of audience, is not survived or gotten past in the poem. Rather, the speaker’s abjection in her audiencelessness is itself revealed to have been a misreading, a mistake of the audience, before which the speaker playfully prostrates herself only to enforce the audience’s ultimate prostration before her text, and the audience’s belatedness highlights the power of the always artificial poem. Writing as a scene is inscribed into “This is my letter to the World,” an ironic elegy that undercuts the privilege of living voice. The trauma of voicelessness is at once written and undone in this poem framing an always belated audience.

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The trauma at once embedded in and revealed by the posthumous speaker, then, is that of a proleptic death, a posthumousness that arrives too early, before the speaker could begin to speak. If we accept Cathy Caruth’s interpretation of trauma as that which definitively comes too soon, too early, before the victim could prepare herself for it, this trope of posthumous speech follows the implicit structure of trauma.2 The untranslatability of trauma, a scene of the annihilation of self, is written into the encrypting structure of the troped posthumous lyric or narrative, inasmuch as the death the speaker inhabits is given as always already premature, a death that comes in fact before its speaker speaks, making text the ambiguous site of the speaker’s erasure and self-presentation.3 The text troped posthumous trades on what Slavoj Zizek terms the inherent ghostliness of voice. The rhetoric of a posthumous voice points to that moment at which the speaker was denied the possibility of speaking as an embodied, living figure.4 The self-annihilation that Paul de Man reads in autobiography is here given a formal etiquette, the form of the riddle.5 For the posthumous speaker stages the destruction of her voice in the very text that conceals and repeals this destruction. By not describing her life, by not taking the direction of autobiography, the speaker separates the posthumous voice from any mask-making, prosopon, and also from autobiography. Bodily death here is not presented graphically but rather functions textually as a sign pointing to an unreachable locus of death, a metaphor for the state of being without audience, of being unaddressed. The trauma of being unaddressed, without audience, then, is that trauma always written into the text troped posthumous. It is an ironically presented trauma, because each reader of a text deploying the posthumous voice comes to that rhetoric as audience.

No Angel at the Sepulchre The posthumous voice turns abruptly from what Carolyn Dever identifies as the voice of the dead angel in Victorian portraits of femininity, taking this ideal of disembodied womanhood ironically to instate a bodiless speaker who speaks of overwhelming desire—the desire to be heard, to be read.6 The angel at the sepulchre, with its striking graphic of the feminine ideal of stasis and transparency, does not align with the posthumous voice. 7 Instead, in the self-elegy, the drama of speaking death formally stages the loss of voice as itself the trauma that haunts the speaker, and the scene of this loss in turn is haunted by the speaker by her recuperation of a public voice. The angel voice Dever references does not perform this illicit crossing, moving into the sphere of the living by demanding of them their attention and even capitulation. The trope of the posthumous voice takes the scene of the gesture of self-elision and removes its consolatory offering. At the sepulchre it places no angel but a speaker whose insistence on writing her own elegy lays bare an unwillingness to accept the terms of self-elision, playing at the

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boundary of the effacement required of the feminine in a linguistic system marked by the name of the father. A self-aware exposure of the ontological premise of loss as constitutive not only of text but also of reading text, indeed of any action in the symbolic field, distinguishes the feminine self-elegy from Dever’s “dead angel voice.” The feminine self-elegy investigates the illicit placement of woman as death, angel, or tragic poetess. It reveals the scandal of this placement and seeks to recuperate the interdicted ground of feminine voice from the site of its position not so much of alterity as of subterraneanness. The Kristevan semiotike, as a position for speech, is exposed as an inaccurate theorization by the posthumous voice in women’s writing, as incorrectly positioning woman in the place of the object. The trope of the posthumous voice at once denotes the alliance between the feminine and the discourse of trauma, which is intimately related to the discourse of the subject–object distinction, and dislocates or troubles this alliance, pointing out the problem of writing the feminine contiguously to the traumatic, to the body’s vulnerable materiality. The rhetoric of the posthumous voice uses the structure of traumatic utterance to expose the terrain of the abject as that which contains the feminine only as performance; the alliance of what is buried with the feminine, pushed to its logical extreme by the trope of the posthumous voice, decodes itself. The tactic of writing as if from the place of trauma as a feminine position in the posthumous voice indicates the very illicit quality of this alliance; the contamination of the feminine, which Robert Hertz seminally describes as the abject terrain of the left hand, is exposed as an improper alliance in the trope of the posthumous voice. By revealing the arch, or almost camp, stylistic linkages between the writing of trauma and the coded feminine voice, the posthumous voice effects an unlinking of trauma and the feminine position. Indeed, Judith Lewis Herman explicitly describes the identity of “contamination” that buries the victim of trauma, relating this status of the contaminated abject to veterans of wars and using the word “contamination” to signify the cultural coding of victim status. But the identity of contamination is also that of the feminine.8 The posthumous voice locates this double blow to selfhood by deploying the formal terms of traumatic utterance. Pointing not to the social construct of trauma but to the social construct of the interpretation of trauma as abjection, Herman writes of trauma victims that they “discover an appalling disjunction between their actual experience and social construction of reality.”9 The untranslatability of trauma, then, occurs in the linguistic frame of the social impossibility of the abject trauma victim’s speaking a culturally legible text. The abject subject position is precisely that which cannot speak: to speak of trauma, the speaker has to leave behind the abject position. Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s errant disciple, makes a similar point in his clinical diary, arguing that the subject position of the trauma victim is definitively impossible to sustain.10 The posthumous voice, as sustained metaphor, tropes this pressure to leave behind the traumatized self by dramatizing the pose of the speech

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of the dead, those always left behind. Here, the speaker has left herself behind in order to speak. The form of ongoing translation in this narrative gesture, then, inscribes the aporia of trauma as a rhetorical tool for unpacking the aporia of the feminine voice, for exposing what Luce Irigaray terms the impossibility of woman’s speech as a construct dependent upon an identity of injury. Exposing this link between the injured and the feminine as an absurdity, a premise only reasonably borne out in the trope of the posthumous speaker—the impossible performance—the feminine dead speaker ironizes her poetics of death. Caruth theorizes posttraumatic text as that which inscribes a leave-taking, arguing that trauma-inflected speech definitionally contains and sustains amnesia, or takes leave of the site of trauma as mnemonic ground, surviving “without knowing it.”11 Shifting Caruth’s argument to suggest that trauma is perhaps not so much impossible to remember as impossible to speak, I suggest that the posthumous voice formalizes linguistically the “appalling disjunction” of which Herman writes when she describes trauma survivors unable to speak of their memory. It is the dramatic play of the credibility of the speaker that must be lodged against the complaint of the victim which makes the trauma-inflected text a space of risky aporia. The apparent difficulty of remembering trauma may be seen as revealing an impossibility of speaking from the place of trauma victim—the abject whose words are culturally constructed as illegitimate, illegible, even illicit. As a poetics, a narrator’s proleptic recourse to the space of death parallels the trauma victim’s placement as abject, as outcast.12 The posthumous voice exposes the inadequate premise of femininity as a site of injury by sustaining its narrator in the place of trauma, an unending death. In withholding explicit confession, the posthumous voice tropes a death of the speaking self to imply that which cannot be gotten beyond, that which persists. It is anti-confession, not posttraumatic but still in its trauma. Much as de Man insists on a certain tautological structure to metaphor, the posthumous voice presents a narrator speaking from the space of death who insists that her topic is the very stasis of death in which she persists as voice. 13 Here, voice carries full circle the presentiment of self-annihilation and refutes it, the text resisting the annihilation of its speaker. In this poetics of death, the posthumous voice replaces what Walter Benjamin, like de Man, reads as the thing that the symbol kills with the symbol of death, a mise en abyme of metaphorization in which death represents what is already dead.14 Here, death as a topos for speech, a space, an architecture of directionality, is a marker pointing outside itself. The feminine voice’s command of the rhetoric of the dead speaker, then, uses the implied terrain of trauma, the body’s deposition, to point away from trauma, to point to possibilities for feminine voice outside of the abject, the injured. By contrast, the explicit posttraumatic confession presupposes that its speaker has gotten beyond the trauma she reveals. Such a text is no longer really presented in the place of trauma but after it, like travel writing after the trip.

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The self-elegy uses a metaphor of death that circles back to find that what it metaphorizes, a trauma that erases the self, was already dead. The metaphor of posthumousness, then, goes back to kill the original, the speaker before she was dead, only to reveal that in this sustained metaphor the original was in any case already dead, the feminine always already silenced in canonical readings of text. Neil Hertz, for example, discusses de Man’s critique of metaphor as tautology—a crossing over that never stops—in which the two compared entities are always ambiguous and unstable.15 Hertz comments, moreover, on the recurrent feminizing of the dead object to which the metaphor returns.16 Indeed, that metaphor which kills the original, as Hertz notes, retains a feminine gendering. In de Man’s terms, the metaphor kills what it represents. But in the self-elegy, the metaphor of posthumous speech represents the proleptically killed feminine voice as performance in text. Engaging a complex interaction between the passive, dead narrator and the active, spectral voice, the posthumous voice works as a metaphor translating a formal structure for the problem of speaking trauma from the unthinkable space of the annihilated self to the public space of the published lyric.

Taking Leave Tilottama Rajan theorizes the textual abject not only as that which resists placement in genre but also as text the author at once wishes to publish and wishes to keep private.17 A similar simultaneous pull to reveal and conceal is given formal shape in the text troped posthumous, which at once contains and disrupts the trauma of the speaker’s having been silenced. The posthumous voice dramatizes that gap of an irreconcilability between trauma and speaking to which Caruth ascribes the term “amnesia,” a site that resists translation, resists disclosing itself. The history of the public reception of the works of Brontë, Dickinson, Plath, and Shelley with which this book has been concerned reflects their status as disruptive of genre. These works self-consciously contain the conflict between woman’s cultural placement allied with death and the vivid charge with which their texts claim feminine speakers. The image of the tragic poetess, the writer of the female elegy identified by Patrick Vincent, is left behind in the self-elegies of Dickinson, Plath, Brontë, and Shelley. In the stead of the tragic poetess, these writers inscribe a speaker who definitively marks the edge of text, decoding the drama of her own death, presenting it in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. The rhetoric of the self-elegy, then, holds in place an entranced, or unresolved, turn of the abject into metaphor— a revelation of the metaphoric, performed quality of abjection—that, by contrast, is historically annihilated by straight confession. The posthumous voice tropes a liminal corridor where the uncanniness of language as such is indicated, a liminality persisting as residue in text. The

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posthumous-voiced text, like a translation, is a theater in which is framed a text’s departure from its origin. The self-elegy leaves behind its speaker’s interdiction. In the trope of the posthumous voice, the self written into text is fully traced, completed by death and put away. Here, the problem given theatrical play is not how the body intrudes into text but rather how the body recedes from text while text persists. The posthumous voice assumes a history of the body’s fragmentation, its dismemberment. A type of translation, then, because it places together the fragmented pieces of traumata that persist after the narrative pressure of explicit confession has been put away, the self-elegy exposes some key problems with the poetics of the body being linked to feminine writing. The poetics of the body that Diana Fuss theorizes in her idea of a corpse poem are not, as I have argued, the task of the posthumous-voiced lyric. While Carolyn Walker Bynum has written of the symbolic work of the body of the female saint as a site of violent erasure, and while this sense of the body’s fragmentation finds common ground with the trope of the posthumous voice, inasmuch as the trope formalizes a way out of abjection by confronting abjection, this trope also importantly poses a transformation—of the violence embedded in the cultural iconography of woman as death—into a feminine poetics that acknowledges and linguistically repairs that violence.18 The posthumous voice insists on a relationship to language that acknowledges the disarticulation of signs by rearticulating sign as metaphor. Benjamin indicates a similar gesture of translation when he writes of the translator’s project that the translator pulls back together a system of signs dispersed by crossing between languages. The fragmentation of the feminine self caused by an illicit objectification in the symbolic order is indicated and altered in the posthumous voice through a rhetoric structurally like the gesture of translation, acknowledging implicitly the impossibility of recuperating the original text: “Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match each other in the smallest details: in the same way, a translation must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification.”19 That is, the translator places together words so that the words will signify analogously to the way that the words in the original text signified. The writer using the trope of the posthumous voice is also a translator: she takes the unspeakable text of trauma, an “Element of Blank” (Fr760, 1), and then places the fragmented pieces of that knowledge together, reassembling a textual mnemonic that is a corpus without a corpse. The trauma that causes the staged “Infinite” of pain (Fr760, 6) is linked to the trauma described as “the Bodiless” (Fr399, 6), as a way, I argue, of acknowledging the dismemberment of the feminine self under the gaze of the symbolic order, or the law of the father, while also insisting on the unreality of that dismemberment, insisting on the speaker having surpassed, gone past, the aphasia that Irigaray calls mimicry. The posthumous voice is both uncanny, without origin, and originary, depicting the origin as a speaking voice that has no link to any embodied self, making the text its own scene of origin. The intertextual connections between Shelley, Brontë,

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Dickinson, and Plath, however, point back to an origin in the Romantic image of the dead woman that Mary Shelley radically highlights and makes her own, rewriting it in the characters of Elizabeth and Euthanasia, the female emblem of death that retaliates and re-marks the text.20 In this sense, one may read Shelley as tapping this originary supervision and subversion of the links between death and femininity. As a rhetorical device, the posthumous voice presents the text of trauma, figured as the death of the self, as the original story. The posthumous voice, then, without recitation of history as autobiography, emplaces the death of the self as a phantasmagoric trauma that lays bare the structure of speaking from the traumatic space of an always previous interdiction of one’s voice. In the trope of the posthumous voice, metaphor kills the original trauma, that is, the loss of voice always already connected to the feminine narrator. Where one leaves behind the ghostly familiarities—the speaking corpse, the angel at the sepulchre—the posthumous voice inaugurates its claim as elegy. It does not mourn the vanished body but rather enigmatically mourns the banished voice in the mode of traditional elegy mourning the poet from whom the speaker claims the inheritance of eloquence. But here the buried poet and the speaker are not separated by the turn of traditional elegy. Rather, they are radically conflated, marking a feminine ironization of traditional elegy. In the self-elegy, feminine voice returns as surplus and posthumously inscribes an elegy for its own interdiction. The posthumous voice asserts itself as a kind of translation, making of the narrator’s illegitimate, mortuarial voice an intact text, an originary feminine text. The posthumous voice stabilizes itself as remainder, as inscribed text. Slavoj Zizek writes of the “trauma of voice,” arguing that voice always breaks from and breaks the self—that voice is always spectral.21 The trope of the posthumous voice focuses this aspect of voice as emergency, voice as emergence.22

Short-Circuiting Mimesis All speakers are, in a sense, posthumous, as Robert Pogue Harrison states: “[We] speak with the words of the dead.”23 The posthumous voice plays on the inherently posthumous quality of all written language, using this aspect of text, however, to give structure to the problem of feminine voice as voice that persists only as text.24 It uses the implicit posthumousness of writing to which Harrison alludes to conceal and encode the posthumous position of the feminine in culture as itself a site that inscription can address. If Harrison describes all language, even speech, as the “words of the dead,” the self-elegy places the feminine in that double space of inheritance and interdiction. Writing of the feminine voice that “in the beginning was the end of her story, from now on she will have one dictated to her: by the man, the father,” Irigaray describes a space for the posthumous voice as that which persists as narration after the end of the story. 25 The posthumous voice takes as its dictate Irigaray’s claim

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that “in the beginning is the end of her story,” but the feminine elegy, or self-elegy, resists the story told by the father. Not replacing this erased story, it mourns as elegy the premature closure of the speaker’s story. It mourns the impossibility of her telling “her story,” even the story of the end of her story, from a canonical topos. The text troped posthumous uses its dramatic recognition of the gap within language, the space between signifier and signified, as Derrida theorizes writing’s always posthumous quality, to galvanize text. If the gap between the speaker’s vanished body and the troped posthumous voice is a space through which a charge crosses, it uses the way that the symbolic order indicates an object mourned, an always previous loss, as that which only can be read as gendered if gender is an interpretative move. Claiming a field of loss, or absence, outside of discourse, the edge of text, the posthumous voice dislocates the illicit conjunction of the feminine and death. It poses the feminine as that which supervises the ontological terms of discourse from the ironically privileged vantage point of the outcast.

A Precedent Death When Zizek writes of the uncanniness of gazing at oneself gazing, he draws on Derrida’s theorization of the prohibition against seeing oneself seeing. The deathlike gaze of seeing oneself seeing is the emblem of the trope of the posthumous voice. Zizek describes this stopped moment of the aesthetic: “Is the voice not at the same time that which undermines the subject’s self-presence?” 26 In the trope of the posthumous voice, that very moment of gazing at oneself gazing stages an imposition of death across the text that pretends to elude death. That is, the feminine speaker is posed as surveying the terms of the very ontological structure in which masculine discourse attempts to immure her. In the trope of the posthumous voice, violence is behind us rather than before us as we read.27 The rupturing trauma, a death that inevitably occurs offstage, is the narrator’s always earlier death, a death that takes precedence. The ruptured border, a mark of trauma or violation, transmogrifies in the context of the trope of the posthumous voice into a space of conjunction between a traumatic, if you will feminized history and the double of that abject, a disembodied, self-asserting voice. Here, the masculine gaze has already murdered the speaker qua speaker; already, the scene of interdiction has been enacted, and the speaker poses herself delivering her self-elegy after its interdiction. The feminine self-elegy frames by way of refusal the demand of the paternal metaphor to gaze over the daughter’s text or, as Irigaray suggests, to write the daughter’s text, upon whose “borrow[ed] signifiers” she cannot make her mark or remark.28 The border of the author’s mortality, which Derrida contends surrounds any text, marking the edge of the text, circles back into the text troped posthumous. The mark of death, as an implicit edge to text, is subverted, the narrator’s death

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taking the rhetorical place of the implied death of the author so that the author becomes an escape artist of sorts—escaping from the marginalized female mourning poem and into the canonical self-elegy, an escape feat to which certainly Dickinson’s and Brontë’s posthumous reputations—and arguably also Plath’s and Shelley’s—attest. The narrator troped posthumous is written as an outcast of mortality—already dead, she still writes, still persists in the symbolic order. The supplement of reading, of being read, provides the mechanism for her self-elegy. Here, the rupture over which the text is written also signifies what Zizek calls the “trauma of voice.”29 The self-elegy reveals the feminine speaker’s already accomplished death as that which lets the audience at last judge her interdicted speech, inasmuch as it aligns the problem of feminine voice with the broader ontological problem of voice. The trope of the posthumous voice, then, alters the annihilated or abject speaking self into a narrator’s privative gesture of self-elegy. As Dickinson’s lyric “The Soul selects her own Society” (Fr409) implies, the already dead speaker poses herself as rejecting life—using the “low Gate” (6) around her grave to keep out those who arrive belatedly, after the speaker’s death and the mourning for it are done. Such “supplementary logic,” for Derrida, implies the way that the death of the author ensures the text, the absence of the author preserving the capacity of the text to be read, to describe itself against the boundary of the author’s absence. By contrast, the enigma of the posthumous voice is that in this trope the death of the narrator guarantees the text’s legibility. The posthumous narrator performs a boundary that implicitly dislocates given terms of legitimate, legible speech. Indeed, how can the dead be posed to speak without mocking the notion of literary immortality upon which the Western canon rests? The context that frames the posthumous voice in the works I have interpreted is not only the obvious cult of the tragic poetess or of the dead angel voice identified by Patrick Vincent and Carolyn Dever, respectively. Framing the troped posthumous feminine speaker is Mary Wollstonecraft’s theory of the construction of feminine silence, the constructed quality of that silence. The troped posthumous text is written in awareness of the act of its being read, that is, in awareness of the necessity for a community of readership to create text. In staging its own audiencelessness, the self-elegy emphasizes precisely the illicit nature of the interdiction of feminine voice, its exclusion from canonicity, as illegitimate.

Reading the Posthumous Zizek’s theorization of the trauma of voice, then, usefully glosses the posthumous voice, for in this trope voice itself is made the place of trauma, the place that contains trauma or where trauma stays. The narrative of a dead woman speaking remains at the limit of legibility, at the limit of legitimacy. In the posthumous

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trance, voice as trace persists after nothing else about the speaker persists. Using the place of death as topos, the troped posthumous text builds an utterance of uncanny power, subverting the definition of illegitimate, or illegible, speech. The illegitimate, illegible text par excellence is that of the dead woman, but the posthumous voice as trope transforms this text of a dead woman speaking into legible self-elegy, placing itself in the very center of canon formation, the place where the male tradition of elegy recuperates the death of the other man. The posthumous voice in women’s writing, then, is also an illegitimate tactic, scandalously making use of the sacred text of veneration for the dead to stage the woman mourning her death as a speaker in the field of symbolic discourse, a death placed before her writing. Of the illegitimate, illegible text, Derrida argues that the “unreadable” text is always a gesture of momentum, or of departure: “The unreadable is not the opposite of the readable but rather the ridge that also gives it momentum, movement, sets it in motion.”30 The trope of posthumous speech is out of bounds and illegible in the sense of being incredible, impossible to read credibly. It encodes a meditation on the charged gap between topos and voice, playing on the concept of unreadability. This trope proleptically seizes the dead woman’s speech as that which no man would touch, a speech at once interdicted and protected. As it has been argued that “Lycidas” is more concerned with John Milton than with its subject, Edward King, the trope of the posthumous voice posits a narrator mourning herself, at once erasing and reinstating herself.31 She must mourn herself because the specific nature of her loss is her audiencelessness—her not receiving the cultural place that would grant her the formal mourning gesture of being elegized. The speaker’s mourned deprivation is precisely that her interdicted speech made her proleptically anonymous in the first place. Dickinson succinctly frames this exchange of body for voice (Fr399, 5–8): The Flesh - Surrendered - Cancelled The Bodiless - begun Two Worlds - like Audiences - disperse And leave the Soul - alone -

The speaker inaugurates her speech through the body’s disappearance. This selfelegy, from its topos of the “Bodiless - begun,” describes and inscribes the true audience arriving. Indeed, the poem performs the audience’s arrival. But the audience that it recognizes is the ontological premise of the empty universe. Here, the supplement of reading is both the professed and implicit edge of the text.32 The audience at once is written out, “dispersed,” and called into the center, the chilling place of the soul “alone.” This inscribed arrival of audience seizes the reader: we become that audience claimed by the privative performance of the posthumous voice, a definitively belated speech read by a definitively

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belated audience. In the poem’s rhetoric, to read the poem we must occupy the discomfiting position the speaker also plays, seeing herself speak. Following Lacan, Zizek suggests that one who acts outside the paternal law is both psychotic and free, and he links psychosis to the feminine.33 Lacan argues that all language is spoken and written in what he terms the nom du père, and it is worth remembering that he describes this term as itself a metaphor: “It is a signification that is evoked only by what we call a metaphor, in particular the paternal metaphor, the signifying function that conditions paternity, what religion has taught us to refer to as the Name-of-the-Father.”34 Lacan emphasizes the metaphoric quality of his contention, calling it the “paternal metaphor.”35 Zizek, then, conjures the feminine as the spectral psychotic, echoing Irigaray’s contention that women can approach the symbolic order only as hysterics. My suggestion is that the theory of femininity as symptom, as insanity, reveals a blind spot in the idea of the paternal metaphor. The feminine trope of posthumousness participates in the symbolic order by claiming that space of the non du père, the conclusion of his interdiction being his swallowing of his progeny, his daughter, into the silence Irigaray claims for the feminine speaker. The daughter’s response, a reinstatement of self—her self-elegy—uses the metaphor of death’s voice in effect to reflect the catachrestic fall of the paternal metaphor. The posthumous voice uses the traditional discourse around elegy to sustain and legitimize its complaint against the daughter’s interdiction from text, in text. The sustained posthumous speaker highlights the vertigo of written speech, “Death,” as symbol, presenting the absolute rupture of a legible history of the self. This topos of homelessness, a trauma-haunted topos, presupposes a woman writer’s lack of direct access to canonical claims. The posthumous voice approaches this aporia radically, however, beginning from the very place of the outcast, the lost property, and overturning that placement by destabilizing the boundaries of legible and illegible text, legitimate and illegitimate discourse. Laying claim to no domestic topos, the disembodied, troped posthumous narrator instead engages the remote and uncanny aspect of language, a poetics working the limits of legibility. The posthumous voice uses the gap already in language, or already inserted between language and the real, as its topos. That is, it uses the implied and inscribed reader to imply a “non-sensuous similarity,” as Benjamin calls it, a metaphor apart from semiotic rhythm.36 Dickinson’s dashes shape a privative selfelegy, pointing toward that which is left out of text, and Brontë writes Cathy as the heroine whose allure inheres in her inaccessibility, while Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher” shows an always departing speaker, and Shelley’s Mathilda is written about forgetfulness, about Lethe. These works, then, contain an arguably neglected aspect of women’s writing, the feminine self-elegy that, far from writing a text of bodily plenitude, stages a mourning for the interdicted feminine voice. As Irigaray and Bronfen make clear, it is the role of woman in the Western aesthetic to perform death. The posthumous voice in Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson,

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and Plath, however, instead of performing the erotic of woman’s body’s death, mourns the trauma of that enforced feminine performance. Rajan’s theorization of the supplement of reading, then, guides my reading of the disembodied posthumous voice, inasmuch as the troped dead speaker ineluctably calls on the living reader to perform her text, staging the premise that no other performance except the reader’s reading of the text occurs. That is, the woman writer deploying the rhetorical tool of posthumous speech already reads herself, already interprets the way that women’s writing is interpreted, and inserts her text into that scene of culture-as-reading. Of canonical Romantic texts, Rajan suggests that “they create a relationship with speaker, audience, and situation, and ask us to consider not simply the structure of signs but also the life of signs.”37 This implementation of life in signs is made radical in the troped posthumous text, which asserts that life exists only in signs. The readers written into, or implied in, the key texts read in this book— Shelley’s Woodville, Brontë’s Lockwood, Dickinson’s “Master,” and Plath’s rabbit catcher—share a masculine portrait in order, I suggest, to mark them as an audience for the feminine speaker’s mastery of the trope of text, her command of the rule of metaphor, her entry into the canon. If Shelley’s and perhaps Brontë’s novels can be read as Romantic texts, I read the self-elegy in Dickinson and Plath as responding to these earlier Romantic models in their approach to inscribing the implied reader. Rajan argues of Romantic texts that in them “the pressures of derealization […] often coexist with a strongly affirmative conception that invites the reader to bridge the gap.”38 In the self-elegy, posed as if performed by the dead speaker only for herself, the reader is ironically called on the fill the gap, to complete the textually “perfected” elegy for the feminine speaker by reading, belatedly, this same privative self-elegy. The posthumous assumption to canonicity of Dickinson and Brontë, and even of Plath and Shelley, points to the way that we, their readers, are written into their texts, the evocation of eclogue here calling us to complete their self-elegies by reading them as part of the emerging Western canon. A dramatized self-elision, this trope in which a narrator elegizes herself, coverting all aspects of a self but voice, metaphorizes the status of voice in text: it is a speech translating from the unspeakable place of Irigaray’s cultural feminine, the margin, into the public domain, the center of a belatedly canonical elegy. When Mary Shelley’s Mathilda appears to her incestuous father as a figure of light or when Plath’s supplicant in “Stings” rises as a flame, a “red comet,” the feminine elegy instates itself, as public privation, into the canon. Bronfen asserts that “writing, as an instrument of division and loss, is, because it occurs over the body, also the means to gap or assuage loss, in search of ‘regaining’ totality and wholeness.”39 But is writing always strictly occurring “over the body?” Isn’t it also something that eschews the body? Both qualities of text bear consideration. In this study, I have tried to point to a rhetorical tool that some women writers deploy, turning from a notion of a poetics of the body, or of its conceptual cousin, the feminine quotidian, to suggest another approach to

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theorizing gender in voice. If the feminine voice is always already interdicted, Dickinson reminds us that loss is never replaced by anything but itself (Fr647, 1– 4): To fill a Gap Insert the Thing that caused it Block it up With Other - and ’twill yawn the more -

Here, Dickinson interprets the “division” of writing as its own “gap” and also its own “assuage.” The posthumous voice locates itself at the site of a gap, woman’s illicit cultural role as death, and fills this divisive space with writing, another mode of division. The trope of the posthumous voice in women’s writing mourns woman’s interdiction from symbolic discourse by “Insert[ing] the Thing that caused it,” placing elegy into the space of woman as death’s symbol, the ground zero of woman’s objectification in the symbolic order, and evoking parity with what Peter Sacks terms traditional male elegy. At this site of self-elegy, Shelley, Brontë, Dickinson, and Plath re-mark the feminine speaker as a rhetorician whose rule of metaphor exposes gendered codes. Unlike the Oedipal structure that Sacks reads in male elegy, feminine self-elegy ironizes origin as name and as convention. In this sense, the rhetoric is post-Oedipal, placed after the Oedipal struggle, for identity has been abandoned in favor of an ontology in which one’s origins and the gendered identity encoded into the idea of origins are dismantled, alienated before the longer gaze of a posthumous persistence.

Notes 1

2 3

Here, one notes the persistence of the technique of the posthumous speaker by calling to mind the recent popular success of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). Sebold’s dead speaker describes a trauma of rape and murder that she does not survive but from which she does recover. This sentimental journey to death through the harsh terrain of child rape is unlike the trope of the posthumous voice in Dickinson, Brontë, Shelley, and Plath, because Sebold’s book depicts a resolution in posthumousness, while the texts I have read in this book work precisely by keeping taut and vibrant the unresolved tension of the speaker’s disinheritance from the topos of legible elegy. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 16–19. Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 179– 80; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).

Conclusion 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

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Slavoj Zizek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’: Or, the Invisible Master,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salacl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) 90–126. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 67–82. Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 21. Here, I am referencing Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph “The Angel at the Sepulchre” (1869). For a reproduction of Cameron’s print, see Alison Ferris, ed., The Disembodied Spirit (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003) 45. Here I am comparing the Kristevan concept of the abject, which draws heavily from Robert Hertz’s conceptual analysis of left and right, with the psychological condition of a feeling of humiliation attendant upon abusive conditions. If the Kristevan concept is analytical while Lewis Herman’s noting feelings of humiliation and debasement in trauma survivors is descriptive, I think it fair at some junctures to join the heuristic tools of Kristevan theory and Lewis Herman’s more practical psychological assessments. As if by way of a return to Hertz, I link the concepts of the Kristevan l’abjecte and Lewis Herman’s trauma survivor by pointing to the similar symbolic work of abjection and trauma in determing who falls outside normative bounds. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic, 1992) 66–7. Ferenczi, 179. Caruth, 64. Judith Lewis Herman argues that mending the effects of psychological trauma is a process of reengaging through narrative a traumatically negated, or “killed,” self; much as the current term “survivor” implies, the person who has come through extreme trauma has come through a sort of death. Father–Daughter Incest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981) 99. De Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, 163–84. De Man, writing on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” proposes that “All these activities—critical philosophy, literary theory, history—resemble each other in the fact that they do not resemble that from which they derive […] They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They kill the original by revealing that the original was already dead.” See Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968) 69–82, and de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 85. Strikingly, de Man applies very similar logic to his reading of metaphor as such when he writes in “The Epistemology of Metaphor” that “Metaphor gives itself the totality which it claims to define, but it is itself the tautology of its own position.” See Aesthetic Ideology, 38. See Neil Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” 1989, The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. John Bender and David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990) 100–24, and “More Lurid Figures,” Diacritics 20.3 (1990): 2–27. Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” 124. Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26 (1994): 43–67.

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18 Carolyn Walker Bynum writes on the hagiography of female saints whose bodies become the site of their spiritual warfare against temptation in Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone, 1999). If it seems, then, that I am aligning the trope of the posthumous voice with an edge of masochism, I do so only inasmuch as the trope picks up a cultural sanction of feminine masochism. The formal gesture itself, the trope of posthumousness, necessarily stands apart from any actual masochism. 19 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations, 78. 20 The plague in The Last Man has also been read as feminine vengeance. See Barbara Johnson, “The Last Man,” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) 258–66. 21 Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed. (1992; New York: Routledge, 2001) 1–8. 22 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken, 1985) 16. 23 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 149–51. 24 Anne Williams reads Irigaray’s imitative writing in Speculum of the Other Woman as staging mimesis as the way that woman writes. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 200. 25 Luce Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974) 43. 26 Zizek, “I Hear You with My Eyes,” 103–4. 27 This situation plays on Derrida’s observation that the author dies into his text. See The Ear of the Other, 15. 28 Irigaray, 71. 29 Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 23. 30 Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller (New York: Continuum, 1979) 117. 31 Stanley Fish, “‘Lycidas’: A Poem Finally Anonymous,” Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983) 319–40. 32 Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 15–35. 33 Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 31–67. 34 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 199. 35 Jacqueline Rose brings much of the Lacanian “paternal metaphor” to bear in her feminist reading, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992). See also her “Introduction—II,” Feminine Sexuality, by Jacques Lacan, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982) 30–57. 36 Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 335. 37 Rajan, The Supplement of Reading, 11. 38 Rajan, The Supplement of Reading, 2. 39 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) 145.

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Index abjection, 14, 22, 69–70, 74, 81, 90n19, 131–2, 146–9, 165– 6n58 the feminine and, 147–8, 202 Kristeva on, 131–2, 233n8 metaphor and, 224 textual, 73, 77, 104, 128, 209, 224 trauma and, 219–20, 222–5 afterlife, Christian, 11, 52, 164– 5n48, 169, 181, 186n34; see also purgatory Alfieri, Vittorio, 91n25, 93n55 Alvarez, A., 9 Andres, Sophia, 70, 71, 81, 84, 89n5 anonymity, 3–4, 5, 8, 13, 41, 54, 59, 143–4 aphasia, 116, 124n44, 190–1, 214n17 apophasis, 36, 68n67 apprenticeship, 35, 39–45, 40, 41, 46–53, 55, 58, 60–1, 154; see also master-apprentice relationship Armstrong, Isobel, 181–2 Armstrong, Nancy, 103, 123n29, 123n30 Arseneau, Mary, 169, 171, 175, 181, 185n7, 186n20 Athena, 201–2, 204, 215–16n36 audience, 4, 20, 23, 38, 52–3, 56–7, 65n20, 70, 174–5, 229–30; see also under specific authors

self-elegy and, 53–7, 59, 177–8 speaker and, 46, 50, 59, 63, 67n52 trauma and, 220–1 authority, 6, 95–103 canonicity and, 95 feminine, 42, 46, 66–7n42, 95– 103, 123n32 gender and, 46 masculine, 46, 76 pastoral and, 51 posthumous, 108 speech as, 66n41 Bachelard, Gaston, 12 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 95, 98–9, 100, 102 Bal, Mieke, 2, 11–12, 66n39, 116, 118, 124n44, 190 Barthes, Roland, 103 Batten, Guinn, 214n19 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 4, 12, 18, 152, 223, 225, 230, 233n14 Bennett, Betty T., 76, 93n52 Bennett, Paula, 153, 161 Blanchot, Maurice, 27n39, 214n22 bodilessness, 2, 9, 10, 13, 16–18, 22–4, 38, 54, 64–5n17, 74 body, the, 3, 9, 13, 16, 103; see also bodilessness death and, 16, 54 feminine, 6, 13–14, 16, 22, 39– 40, 39–40, 103, 106, 202, 206, 209 poetics of, 131, 225

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Britzolakis, Christina, 19, 26n22 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 3, 6–7, 12, 16– 17, 22, 26n19, 27n32, 39, 70–71, 93n53, 132, 157, 171–2, 193, 208, 212, 217n55, 230–31 Brontë, Charlotte, 96 Brontë, Emily, 1, 9, 17, 24, 29n86, 33, 37 Byron and, 95, 109, 110 canonicity and, 37 “Cold in the earth” (“Remembrance”), 23, 112 death in, 180 mastery of the elegy, 58 Milton and, 40–41 Morre’s Life of Byron and, 95, 109, 110 pastoral and, 48–9, 101 Plath and, 208, 217–18n71, 217n64 poetry of “No coward soul am I”, 127 “The North Wind”, 95 reputation of, 228 Romanticism and, 95, 231 Wuthering Heights, 10, 13, 14, 21, 31, 37, 38, 50–1, 95–125, 230 allusiveness of, 96–7 as alternative pastoral, 102 aphasia in, 124n44, 208 authority in, 96–103, 107, 108, 109, 119, 120, 181 Bakhtinian reading of, 98–9, 102, 114 body in, 100, 103, 106, 108 Byron and, 95 Cathy as posthumous narrator, 96 Cathy’s childhood in, 107–8 confinement in, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112–13,

118, 122n20, 123n33 daughter-as-speaker in, 102 disembodied voice in, 101 domesticity in, 125n54 erotics of, 58 femininity in, 96–103, 113– 15 feminist criticism of, 96 figure of the north wind in, 95 haunting of, 96–7 initiation in, 51 inscription in, 100–102, 109, 121n6 interpretations of, 95–6 maternity in, 112–13, 116, 117, 120, 123n29, 124n44, 208 Milton’s Lycidas and, 40–41 mourning in, 96–7 narrative in, 95, 96, 98 north country mythology and, 103 pastoral and, 47–8, 49, 112– 13, 113–15 the paternal in, 97, 118 photography and, 103–4 pregnancy in, 114, 124n44, 208 privation in, 104–7 prosopopeia in, 107–8 self-elegy in, 54–5, 58–9, 100, 112–13, 117–18 sexuality in, 115–20 trauma in, 119 virginity in, 113, 115–20 voice in, 96–103, 105, 106, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 115– 20, 117–18 voicelessness in, 105, 106 waif in, 102, 103–4, 105, 106, 107–8, 113–15, 115– 20, 124n42

Index writing in, 105–6, 109, 118 Butler, Judith, 6, 29n83, 141–2, 165n51 critique of Kristeva, 5, 26n23, 165n53, 205 on gender, 59, 138, 141–3, 147, 164n31, 164n40 interpretation of Lacan, 141–3, 147, 152, 205–6 on the masculine gaze, 24 Bynum, Carolyn Walker, 211, 225, 234n18 Byron, George Gordon, 90n13, 95, 109, 110 canon, the, 36, 37, 40, 42, 53, 57, 59–60, 62, 64n4, 88, 95 elegy and, 39–40, 52, 58, 175 formation of, 6, 39–40, 42, 48, 52, 229 posthumous voice and, 230, 231 women writers and, 13–14, 19, 23–4, 31–2, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39–45, 62, 63, 64n14, 65n18, 161, 180, 192, 228 Carlson, Julie, 80, 81 Caruth, Cathy, 67n51, 85, 148, 165– 6n58, 221, 223, 224 catachresis, 139, 200, 230 Catholic Church, 69 Cazé, Antoine, 28n73 Cecil, David, 96 Cenci, Beatrice, 74–5, 80, 85–6 Chapman, Alison, 123n30, 171, 174 Chatterjee, Ranita, 92n39, 179 Christian typology, 27–8n42 Christianity, 41, 186n34 Cicero, 9 Cixous, Hélène, 16, 59, 123n29, 202, 206, 209 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 214n19 Colleen Bawn, 103 confinement, 105, 106, 108

251 Conley, Susan, 170, 176, 177, 179 consolation, 15, 43–4, 56–7, 68n67 “corpse poem”, 3, 11, 175 corpses, 172 Cottom, Daniel, 124n41 Crane, Hart, 32, 33 Curran, Stuart, 53, 59, 65n22, 99, 121n12, 172 Daly, Pierrette, 204 Dante, 31, 41–3, 87 Lethe, 72, 82, 84 Matelda, 41–3, 46, 47, 71, 79, 81, 85, 87–8, 89n9, 93n60 Shelleys’ translation of, 76–9, 77–8, 91n34, 93n61 Daphnis, 8, 41–2, 44, 45, 52, 55, 57 daughter-as-speaker, 15, 33, 42, 45, 50, 51 daughterhood, 42, 81, 202, 230 David, 129 De Man, Paul, 20, 28n73, 50, 53, 72, 93–4n62, 113, 137, 139, 202–3, 207, 221, 223, 224, 233n14 death, 2–3, 10–16, 18, 27n39, 48–9, 50, 52–3, 54, 69, 69–70, 175, 230; see also under specific authors anonymity and, 2–3, 8, 41, 143– 4 audience and, 174–5 of the author, 227–8 envied versus mourned, 51, 65n21 the feminine and, 11–12, 16, 39– 40, 48, 172, 226–7 heroic versus pastoral, 32, 33 nature and, 43, 45 poetics of, 63, 223 trauma and, 219 woman and, 3, 12, 39, 157, 225, 230–31

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Derrida, Jacques, 68n78, 154, 164n47, 178, 199, 215n27, 228, 229 différance, 16, 46, 141, 142, 143, 144, 197 reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, 49 “trace”, 13, 19, 49–50, 68n75, 142, 145, 177, 200, 207, 227 Dever, Carolyn, 23, 200, 208, 221– 2, 228 Dickinson, Emily, 1, 4–5, 9, 11, 14– 15, 17, 29n86, 33–4, 37, 38, 127–67, 132–5, 154, 185n2, 185n4, 187 abjection and, 128, 131, 146–9 agency in, 154–5 audience and, 52–3, 134, 135–6, 153, 154, 159 body in, 137–8 burial in, 156 canonicity and, 37 child elegies, 131–2, 166n69 child speakers in, 153 as children’s poet, 127, 128 corpses in, 157 daughter-as-speaker in, 171–2 daughterhood and, 139, 148–9, 154, 156, 160, 163n20 dead child poems, 10, 31, 127, 129, 129–35, 140, 154, 155, 161, 166n69 dead speakers in, 154–5 death in, 129–35, 135–6, 137–9, 141–2, 141–4, 146, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 155, 160–61, 171–2, 182–3 desire for immortality, 134–5 development of, 153–4 domesticity in, 137–9, 155–6 entrapment in, 135–6, 137–8 femininity and, 138, 162n6 feminist criticism of, 128 funeral of, 127

gaze in, 138 gender in, 141–3, 147–8 graves in, 129–30, 135, 137, 155–6, 157, 178 heliotropes of, 28n73, 139 homelessness in, 129 image of the sun in, 139–40 inscription in, 156 Judgment Day and, 129, 158–9, 160, 208, 209 letters of, 163n24 marriage in, 156–7 the maternal in, 131, 146–7, 160 metaphor in, 139–40, 149 at mother’s sickbed, 146 mourning poems and, 136–7 naming in, 132–3 nature in, 52 obituary of, 163n23 otium (leisure) and, 52, 54, 152 the paternal in, 132–5, 138–9, 143, 148–9, 160 patriarchy and, 156, 163n20 patriarchy in, 132–5, 138–9, 141–4, 154 patronym in, 133, 144, 146, 152, 153 poetic persona of, 141 poetry of “Ample make this Bed” (Fr804), 12, 20, 129, 158–60, 207, 209 “Because I could not stop for Death” (Fr479), 17, 20– 21, 52–4, 56–8, 129, 138– 40, 150–53, 163n28, 164– 5n48 “For Death - or rather” (Fr644), 13, 24, 132, 160, 160–61, 171–2 Fr124, 175 Fr341, 7–8 Fr396, 141, 149–50

Index Fr399, 229 Fr479, 141 Fr605, 156–7 Fr846, 37 “I cried at Pity - not at Pain” (Fr394), 131, 135, 136 “I died for Beauty” (Fr448), 5, 26n17, 141, 156–8 “I rose - because He sank” (Fr454), 141, 146–7, 148, 150–51 “I took my Power in my Hand” (Fr660), 129, 136 “It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon” (Fr843), 35–7, 43–4 “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” (Fr764), 154, 155 Poems for Youth, 128 “The grave my little cottage is” (Fr1784), 129 “The Soul selects her own Society” (Fr409), 170, 178–9, 228 “This is my letter to the World” (Fr519), 141, 145–6, 220 “This was a Poet” (Fr446), 33–4 “Tie the strings to my Life, my Lord” (Fr338), 140, 182–4 “‘Tis true - they shut me in the Cold” (Fr658), 135 “‘Twas just this time, last year, I died” (Fr344), 129, 132–4, 137 “We dont cry - Tim and I” (Fr231), 135 posthumousness in, 127, 132, 143, 178 public name of, 134

253 publication and, 22, 127, 158 rape in, 150, 151–2 rejection of female mortuarial forms, 155–6, 170 religious topoi in, 164–5n48 reputation of, 228 resistance to figuration, 28n43 resistance to naming, 149 Romanticism and, 231 self-elegy in, 58–9, 131–2, 140, 141–2, 144, 153, 158, 160– 61 self in, 129, 143 tombstones in, 144, 152, 153 unnamed children in, 129–35 voice and, 127, 132, 156 Dickinson, Susan Huntington, 133, 160, 163n23, 175 Discourse; see also language canonical, 62, 180 feminine, 11–12, 113, 120, 131 femininity and, 104, 113, 120, 180 masculine, 113 maternal, 131 patriarchal, 11 public, 11–12, 62, 180 symbolic, 3, 4–6, 9, 26n20, 27n34, 81, 131, 232 “the other’s”, 98–9 disembodiment. See bodilessness domesticity, 16–17 eclogue, 23–4, 34, 54 écriture féminine, 103, 131, 204, 206; see also women’s writing Edelman-Young, Diana, 70–1, 89n5 elegy, 13, 22, 28n74, 31–2, 64n10; see also self-elegy; under specific authors alterations of the, 31, 37, 40, 57– 63, 175

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canon and the, 31–2, 39, 39–40, 52, 58, 175 child, 130, 131, 131–2, 166n69 classical, 24–5n1 conventions of the, 14, 41, 45, 49, 50, 55, 57–63 critique of the, 31–2, 39–40 English, 2–3, 8, 28n74, 39, 52, 65n18, 195 erotics of the, 37–8, 58 female, 1–2, 16, 20, 56, 61 femininity and the, 33, 39, 39–45 gender and the, 34, 37–8 ironic appropriations of the, 41 male tradition of the, 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 10–11, 14–15, 18, 21, 23, 32–3, 35–6, 39–40, 43, 50, 52, 58, 65n18, 88, 112–13, 161, 175, 188, 192–3, 195, 197, 201, 229, 232 misogyny of the, 65n18 questioning of the, 128 tradition of the, 1, 2, 4, 10, 23, 34, 71, 226; see also elegy: male tradition of the Empson, William, 39, 50, 56, 65n22 epic poetry, 33 escape, 228 exogamy, 141, 143 father, the, 26n20, 42, 44, 47; see also paternal, the; under specific authors eradication of, 14, 15, 17 gaze of, 90n20, 93n53 incest and, 74 name of, 15, 70 feminine, the, 5, 17, 95–103, 202, 208, 221–4 the abject and, 147–8 authority and, 46 death and, 11–12, 48, 172, 226–7 as embodiedness, 23

exclusion from elegaic tradition, 11 female versus feminine, 2 figuration and, 113 insanity and, 230 Kristeva’s notion of, 4–5, 131–2 the maternal and, 205–6 moon as marker of, 5 pastoral and, 66n34 performativity of, 3 positionality of, 39–40, 131 self-elegy and, 60–63 speech and, 127 stereotype of, 11 Ferenczi, Sándor, 222–3 Fish, Stanley, 52 forgetting, 62, 72, 81–3, 88; see also memory Franklin, R.W., 160, 187 Freud, Sigmund, 222 Fuss, Diana, 3, 225 gaze alterior, 57 masculine, 12, 24, 103, 227 maternal, 206 of the Medusa, 204–5, 206, 210 paternal, 74, 81, 84, 90n20, 93n53 gender authority and, 46 instability of, 6 pastoral and, 47 performative nature of, 141–3, 147 voice and, 28n58–59, 231–2 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 31 Gilbert, Sandra, 40–1, 96, 121n5, 166n69, 213n10 Gisborne, Maria, 92n44 Godwin, William, 71, 86, 92n44, 94n63 gorgon, 201–2, 204, 206

Index Gray, Thomas, 8, 56, 64n16 Greece, 24–5n1 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 125n61 Gubar, Susan, 9, 40–41, 96, 121n5, 166n69, 195 Guenther, Beatrice, 11, 34, 109, 127, 130 Hampton, Alfred Leete, 187 Harrison, Antony H., 169, 176, 186n21 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 226 Herman, Judith Lewis, 92n43, 144, 151, 165n49, 222, 223, 233n8, 233n12 Hertz, Neil, 224 Hertz, Robert, 177, 222, 233n8 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 14, 134 Hill-Miller, Katherine C., 90n13 Himes, Audra Dibert, 86–7 Holmes, Richard, 93n61 homelessness, 10–14, 28n47, 37, 74, 220, 230 Hughes, Sylvia. See Plath, Sylvia Hughes, Ted, 27n33, 29n30, 55–6, 188–9, 207, 213n6, 213n10, 215n28, 217n64 Birthday Letters, 67n63, 215n34 as master of his territory, 189 as Plath’s literary executor, 188 “The Rabbit Catcher” of, 192 Hunt, Leigh, 90n13 hysteria, 10, 230 incest, 15, 42, 44, 44–6, 90n13, 141, 143–4, 148, 165n49; see also under specific authors inscription, 49–50, 63; see also writing Irigaray, Luce, 5, 6, 11, 14, 26n20, 34–5, 40, 64n13, 121n11, 125n59, 145, 156, 161,

255 165n51, 223, 225–7, 230–1 Jabes, Edmond, 27n39 Jephthah, 66n39 Johnson, Barbara, 171, 203 Keach, William, 66n34 Keats, John, 190, 191, 214n19 Kendall, Tim, 27n38, 191, 214n13 Kermode, Frank, 98, 100, 102, 107 khora, 201 Kristevan, 46–7, 49–50 Platonic, 19–20, 46, 200 Kierkegaard, Søren, 18 King, Edward, 229 knowledge, 60–61, 67n51, 68n77 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 141 Kofman, Sarah, 122n25 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 4, 123n29, 163n18, 165n53 on abjection, 131–2, 233n8 khora, 19, 46–7, 49–50 on the maternal, 190, 204, 208, 214n17, 216n49 notion of the feminine, 4–5, 17, 23, 26n23, 39–40, 131–2 semiotike, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 26n28, 132, 190, 222 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 66n39, 141–3, 152, 188, 205–6, 215n27 nom du père, 15, 26n20, 70, 114, 124–5n51, 141, 147, 208–9, 230 notion of the “Real”, 26n19 the paternal and, 114–15, 124– 5n51-52, 140, 141–2, 143, 148, 208, 230 Lambert, Ellen, 31–2, 33, 39, 48, 51–2, 64n10, 64n16, 65n21 language, 46. See also discourse feminine, 20 masculine, 20

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woman and, 34–5 Lawrence, D.H., 189, 190 Leavis, Q.D., 96, 122n16 Leighton, Angela, 172, 173 Lethe, 71, 72, 81–3, 83–5, 85–7, 93n50, 230 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 141–2, 143, 144, 148, 152, 165n49 Leyda, Jay, 21 Locke, John, 113, 207 Lot, 46, 66n39 Lowell, Robert, 128 “Maiden Without Hands, The”, 125n61 Malcolm, Janet, 215n28, 216n41 Marvell, Andrew, 56 Maso, Carole, 27n41 Masse, Michelle, 121–2n14 master-apprentice relationship, 33, 35, 39, 42, 55–6; see also apprenticeship canon formation and, 48 exclusion of woman from, 37–8 in Plato’s Phaedrus, 60–61 maternity, 7, 13, 116, 131–2, 190, 202, 203; see also mother aphasia and, 208, 214n17 Kristeva on, 204–5 monstruous, 200–203 McGann, Jerome, 127, 164–5n48 Medusa, myth of, 201–6, 208, 210, 215–16n36 memory, 60–63, 68n77 metaphor, 3, 6, 12–13, 27–8n42, 113, 208, 210, 223–4, 225, 230, 233n14 Christianity and, 27–8n42 of death, 18 paternal, 17, 24, 205–6 trauma of, 11 Michelet, Jules, 202 Middlebrook, Diane, 213n6

Miller, Cristanne, 155 Miller, J. Hillis, 96, 98 Milton, John, 32, 33 “Lycidas”, 3, 8, 28n74, 40–1, 47, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 64n16, 71, 229 Paradise Lost, 40, 96, 108 mimesis, 11, 17, 34, 109, 127, 130, 226–7 Moi, Toril, 2, 121n5 Mortality; see death Mossberg, Barbara, 154, 162n6, 163n20 mother, 13, 14, 200–203; see also maternity mourning, 8, 13–14, 19, 22, 56, 96, 209 elision of the feminine and, 11 feminine, 24–5n1, 156 for the interdicted female voice, 230 self mourning, 24 theatre of, 19, 24 mourning poems, 1, 2, 11, 36, 39, 53, 54, 136–7, 166n69, 192, 193, 228 muteness; see voicelessness Myrra, myth of, 84, 91n25, 93n55 naming, 22, 26n20, 68n67, 144 nature, 8, 43–5, 52, 66n27 animal, 57 consolation of, 43–4, 56, 68n67 death and, 43, 45 feminine figure and, 57 idyllic, 56 man’s misplacement in, 56 speaker/audience relationship and, 56–7 Nitchie, Elizabeth, 86, 89n10 Oedipal drama, 14, 15, 22–3, 232 Orpheus, 23, 51–2, 55

Index Orphic, the; see Orpheus Ovid, 81, 91n35, 119 Palacio, Jean de, 41 parabasis, 18, 22 Pardes, Ilana, 218n76 pastoral, the, 2, 13–14, 19, 21, 31– 68, 64n16, 65n22; see also rustic, the; under specific authors alterations of, 57–63, 101 audience and, 34, 38 authority and, 51 conventions of, 20–1, 22, 24, 40, 41, 45, 47, 49, 50–51, 55, 57–63, 101 dialogue of, 38, 51 English, 50 the feminine and, 36, 42, 66n34 feminine voice and, 39–45 gender and, 47 versus the heroic, 64n10 maternity and, 46–53 nature and, 43–5 Platonic dialogue and, 122n22 Romantic, 48 tradition of, 21, 56, 62 of the wilderness, 48 pastorela, 41, 42, 44, 89n9 paternal, the, 15, 17, 24, 26n20, 71, 205–6, 217n66, 230. See also father, the patriarchy, 81, 141–4, 151 Paul, 169 Perseus, 201 Peter, 147 Petrino, Elizabeth, 129–30, 131, 132–3, 134, 155 Philomel, 81, 91n35, 119 photography, 103–4, 122n25, 122n26, 123n30 Plath, Aurelia, 187, 201 Plath, Sylvia, 1, 14–15, 17, 19, 22,

257 24, 29n86, 33, 55–7, 187– 218, 206–12 abjection in, 187–8, 192 absent mother in, 200–203 anonymity in, 197 aphasia in, 190–91, 192–3, 194, 196–7, 213n11 ascesis in, 193–4, 212 audience in, 199 authority in, 191 biography of, 188, 190, 201 body in, 207, 211, 217n55 Brontë and, 208, 217–18n71, 217n64 burial in, 195 canonicity and, 37 children’s literature and, 187 compared to Dickinson, 191, 192 compared to Keats, 190, 191–2 consolation in, 192 death in, 180, 189, 191–2, 196– 7, 198, 199–200, 211, 217n55 elegy and, 195–8 entrapment in, 199 escape in, 190, 195, 198, 199 father in, 217n66 feminine in, 209 Hughes and, 55–6 John Donne and, 40 khora and, 200–201 letters of, 189–90 the maternal and, 187, 188, 193, 196–7, 200–203, 205–6, 207, 208, 209, 211–12, 213n10, 216n41 metaphor in, 191, 200, 207 mourning in, 191–2 muteness in, 203 the nonhuman in, 187–8, 191 paralepsis in, 191–2 the pastoral and, 188–9, 195, 195–7, 200

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“Perseus”, 215–16n36 poetic persona of, 214n21 poetry of Ariel, 5, 9, 10, 20–21, 22, 29n30, 31, 37, 58, 59, 188, 206–9, 213n6, 215n28; see also specific poems “Ariel”, 208, 212 beekeeping poems, 206–9 “Crossing the Water”, 7–8 “Daddy”, 14, 27n38, 200 “Edge”, 8–9, 59, 62, 180, 208, 211 “Kindness”, 212 “Lady Lazarus”, 9, 10 “Medusa”, 200–206, 210, 215–16n36, 216n47 “Nick and the Candlestick”, 200–201 “Stopped Dead”, 18 “The Colossus”, 200 “The moon and the Yew Tree”, 26n22 “The Other”, 210–11, 218n75 “The Rabbit Catcher”, 55–7, 187–201, 208, 214n13, 214n20, 230 “The Rival”, 210 “Wintering”, 206–9, 217n55 “Wuthering Heights”, 67n62 posthumous fame of, 27n33 posthumousness in, 191, 197, 203, 209 pregnancy and, 189–90 readings of, 188 reputation of, 214n19, 228 Romanticism and, 231 self-elegy in, 58–9, 189, 197–8, 201, 207–9, 211 selfhood in, 190, 193–4 speaker in, 191 suicide of, 9, 38, 59, 203,

216n41 trauma in, 199 use of Holocaust poetry, 195, 214n19 voice in, 187–8, 189, 191, 192– 3, 194, 197–8, 199–200, 203, 209, 213n11 Plato, 46; see also Socrates khora, 19–20 Phaedrus, 49–50, 60–1, 68n77, 102 Pluto, 41 poet as apprentice, 55 male, 58, 109 Poggioli, Renato, 31, 41–3, 44, 48, 55, 58, 66n27, 89n9 Polhemus, Robert, 46, 66n39, 66n41, 93n54 Pollak, Ellen, 27n34 Poovey, Mary, 64–5n17 prosopopeia, 9, 10, 20, 50, 53, 72, 73, 93–4n62, 107–8, 137, 202–3, 204, 209 Prosperpine, 41–2, 66n34 purgatory, 69, 71, 72, 84 Pykett, Lyn, 102, 122n20 Quintillian, 9, 216n39 Ragon, Michel, 27n39 Rajan, Tilottama, 14, 22, 42, 45, 64n12, 65n20, 70, 71, 77, 86, 88–9n1, 90n19, 94n63, 103, 121n13, 209, 224, 231 reader(s); see audience Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 11, 210 Romanticism, 65n20, 71, 90n13, 95, 99, 121n12 Rose, Jacqueline, 188, 213n5, 214n20 Rossetti, Christina, 11, 43, 169–86, 185n2, 185n4

Index beauty in, 170–72, 176, 180, 181 body in, 173, 179–81 Christianity and, 169, 175, 177, 181, 183, 184 corpses in, 171, 172–3, 185n10 cynicism of, 169–70 dead speakers in, 172, 176 death lyrics of, 176–7, 179–81 family background of, 171, 185n7 female body in, 170–1 femininity in, 171 Goblin Market, 172 Judgment Day and, 181–4 poetry of “After Death”, 170, 171, 172–4, 176, 177, 178–9, 180–81, 184 “At Home”, 171, 177 “Echo”, 173 “Remember”, 170, 171, 172– 3 “Up-Hill”, 181 on romantic love, 169–70, 176, 177, 180 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2, 66n27 rustic, the, 47, 51, 65n22; see also pastoral, the Sacks, Peter, 1–6, 8, 13–15, 22, 23, 28n74, 32–3, 35–40, 52, 58, 64n10, 65n18, 71, 112, 188, 192, 232 Schenk, Celeste Marguerite, 31–3, 46, 49–50, 51, 58, 60–1, 62, 122n22 Schlegel, Friedrich, 18, 22, 74 Schor, Esther, 39 Sebold, Alice, 232n1 self, 2–3, 24, 53, 68n67, 222–33 self-elegy, 1–5, 8, 10–13, 15, 17–18, 20–24, 188, 192, 201, 209, 219–20; see also under

259 specific authors audience and, 53–7, 174, 177–8, 180 bodilessness and, 180 critique of elegy, 39–40 death and, 175, 224, 230 distinction from death lyrics, 174–5, 177 distinction from female elegy, 61 distinction from mourning poem, 39, 54 femininity of the, 60–63 inscription and, 177–8 memory and, 180 mimesis and, 226–8 mourning poems and, 193 pastoral tradition and, 31–68 performance and, 59, 180 posthumous voice and, 180 Seremetakis, Nadia, 24–5n1, 155, 166n63, 166n71 Shakespeare, William, 210 Titus Andronicus, 81, 91n35, 119, 125n61 Shelley, Clara, 76, 79 Shelley, Mary, 1, 9, 14–15, 17, 24, 31, 33, 37, 69–94, 226 Alfieri’s Mirra and, 91n25, 93n55 allusions to the classical pastoral elegy, 45 canonicity and, 37 children’s deaths and, 76, 79, 90n12 Dante and, 41, 47, 71, 79–80, 81, 87–8 The Fields of Fancy, 69 Frankenstein, 38, 65n19 Godwin and, 71, 86 involvement with Percy Shelley’s work, 76, 86, 87, 88, 91n24, 91n34, 93n61 The Last Man, 46, 66–7n42

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male writers and, 81 mastery of metaphor, 81 Mathilda, 10, 13, 15, 21, 22, 29n86, 31, 37, 44–5, 48, 50, 65n19, 67n45, 69–94, 92n38, 92n44–45, 93n52, 175, 230 abjection and, 73, 74, 77, 81, 88–9n1, 90n19 audience and, 70, 78–9, 86 authority in, 73, 76, 80 body in, 74, 77, 82, 84–5 canon and, 88 The Cenci and, 90n22 confession in, 86, 90n18 Dante and, 87 Dante’s Matelda and, 41–3, 44, 71, 79–80, 81, 87–8, 91n34, 93n60, 93n61 daughterhood in, 74, 81–3, 83–5, 88 death in, 74, 87–8, 90n18, 179–80 elegy and, 81–3 father in, 51, 75–6, 77, 81–3, 83–5, 92n43, 93n54, 93n56, 217n66 forgetting in, 83–5, 85–7, 88 forgiveness in, 75 Frankenstein and, 38, 65n19 gaze in, 83–5 incest in, 44, 66n39, 71, 73– 7, 80, 81–7, 88, 91n35, 93n60 intertextuality with Percy Shelley’s works in, 77 Lethe and, 71, 72, 81–3, 93n50 Milton’s Lycidas and, 40–41 myth of Myrra and, 84, 91n25 narrator’s death in, 73, 77, 87–8 pastoral conventions and, 49

Percy Shelley as model for Woodville, 92n37 Percy Shelley’s The Cenci and, 74–5, 80, 85–6 Percy Shelley’s translation of Dante and, 86, 87 posthumous voice in, 122n15 Prosperpine in, 66n34 publication of, 71, 73, 77, 86, 89n10, 92n37 purgatory in, 84 reader and, 78–9, 86–7 self-elegy in, 58–9, 71, 179– 80 Shakespeare and, 81 sin in, 81–3, 83–5, 91n35 suicide in, 73, 92n39 trauma in, 81, 84, 85–7 as trauma narrative, 80 as troped posthumous performance, 71 voice in, 82–3 writing of, 77–8, 90n12 Milton and, 40, 47 pastoral and, 48–9 presentation of death, 69 reputation of, 228 Romanticism and, 231 translation of The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci, 76–7, 79 Wollstonecraft and, 42–3, 86 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 71, 76–9, 86 Adonais, 8 The Cenci, 74–5, 76, 79, 80, 85– 6, 90n13, 90n22, 91n25, 91n26 Laon and Cythna, 90n13 “Matilda Gathering Flowers”, 91n24 as model for Woodville, 92n37 publication of, 91n24 “The Question”, 93n61

Index translation of Dante, 76–9, 86, 87, 91n34, 93n61 Shelley, William, 76, 79 Sielke, Sabine, 147 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 131, 166n69 “Death of an Infant”, 130 Socrates, 42, 60–63, 102 Spargo, R. Clifton, 65n18 Speaker; see also voice audience and, 46, 50, 59, 67n52 bodilessness of the, 54, 59 feminine, 2, 53, 59 posthumous, 100 speech, 49–50 as authority, 66n41 femininity and, 127 versus writing, 60–63, 156 Steinitz, Rebecca, 115, 124n48 Summit, Jennifer, 3, 24, 28n58–59, 37, 40, 59, 64n14, 65n18, 192 Sunstein, Emily, 91n27 Tate, Allen, 138 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 8 Theocritus, 8, 31, 34, 36, 40–42, 44, 46, 48–9, 51, 52, 55, 56 translation, 221, 222–3, 224, 225 trauma, 67n51, 81, 92n43, 165– 6n58, 219–34, 233n8, 233n12 audience and, 220–21 posthumous voice and, 219–34 textualization of, 219–20 untranslatability of, 221, 222–3, 224 typology, 27–8n42 uncanniness, 70, 75 Van Dyne, Susan, 29n30, 190 Vendler, Helen, 14, 213n11

261 Vincent, Patrick H., 1–2, 16, 20, 23, 56, 224, 228 violence, 56, 227 Virgil, 34, 43, 46 Eclogues, 35, 41, 67n52 virginity, 202 virility, 60, 62, 63, 68n79 voice, 15–16, 63, 95–103, 105, 106, 223; see also under specific authors disembodied, 10, 11, 14–15, 16, 18, 24, 43, 63, 77, 137, 180 feminine, 7, 9, 10, 13, 26n23, 37, 39–45, 53, 108, 157, 169, 175, 222, 223, 226, 228, 230 gender and, 231–2 Lethe and, 83–5 writing and, 28n58–59, 49–50, 61–2 voicelessness, 105, 106, 124n44, 220, 228 Wagner, Erica, 29n30, 188, 213n6 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 209 Wardrop, Daneen, 21, 149–50 Weisbuch, Robert, 162n2 Whitman, Walt, 33 Winters, Ivor, 162n2 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2, 42–3, 46, 69, 86, 94n63 The Cave of Fancy, 46 feminine silence and, 228 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, 64n12 woman commodification of, 16 death and, 3, 12, 27n32, 39, 157, 225, 230–31 embodiment and, 22, 39–40, 64– 5n17 language and, 34–5 nonbeing and, 12 as object of exchange, 9, 16

262

The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing

Pre-Raphaelite ideal of, 173 as symbol, 9, 16, 27n34 women’s writing, 26n28, 59, 96, 225, 230, 232; see also écriture féminine; écriture féminine Wordsworth, William, 116 Worthington, Marjorie, 27n41 writing, 7; see also écriture féminine; inscription Derrida on, 49 feminine, 26n28, 59, 96, 206, 225, 230, 232; see also écriture féminine femininity of the act of, 61

ghostliness of, 62, 68n77, 227 loss of voice and, 49–50 versus speech, 49–50, 60–63, 156 as “trace”, 49–50 “trick of”, 49, 61 voice and, 61–2 Yeats, William Butler, “Lapis Lazuli”, 3, 10 Zizek, Slavoj, 16, 26n19, 53, 70, 132, 136, 221, 226, 227, 228, 230