Embodying Paula Modersohn-Becker 151
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Dottorato di ricerca in Studi iberici ed Anglo-americani Scuola di dottorato in Lingue, culture e società, ciclo 24° (A.A. 2010/2011) IN THE SKIN OF ANOTHER Anne Michaels’, Sujata Bhatt’s and Adrienne Rich’s Dramatic Monologues as Embodiments of Painter Paula Modersohn-Becker SETTORE SCIENTIFICO DISCIPLINARE DI AFFERENZA: L-LIN/11 Tesi di dottorato di Monica Pavani matricola: 955644 Coordinatore del dottorato Tutore del dottorando Prof. Enrica Villari Prof. Gregory Dowling To my father, to my brother. To the memory of my mother. 1 IN THE SKIN OF ANOTHER “I am not ashamed that again, as before, it is your images, your words almost, with which I attempt to express myself, as if I wanted to make you a gift of your own possessions. But so it is, Clara Westhoff, we receive many of our greatest treasures for the first time when they come to us borne on the voice of another” Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Westhoff 2 Contents Acknowledgements 4 PROLOGUE A Room of Mirrors 6 CHAPTER ONE The Novel(s) Behind the Poems 21 CHAPTER TWO Still Life Translated Into Poems: Embodying Paula Modersohn-Becker 151 CHAPTER THREE Cracks in the Mask: the Dramatic Monologue as a Looking Glass 295 EPILOGUE The Dream of Translatability: Translation as a Clear Glass 321 Bibliography 355 3 Acknowledgements “I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” Alfred Tennyson, from “Ulysses” This has been a long and rewarding research. Besides allowing me to enter Anne Michaels‟, Sujata Bhatt‟s and Adrienne Rich‟s dramatic monologues as if they were worlds I could temporarily inhabit, I was given the opportunity to experience in the first person German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker‟s journey into art and life as if I were the protagonist of Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen, who is given access into the lively Paris of the Twenties (even though I mostly journeyed into the first decade of the twentieth century…). My greatest debt is to professor Gregory Dowling, whose personal generosity, passion for poetry, competence and inventiveness were invaluable to me. In him I found the perfect interlocutor with whom to discuss my ideas about poetry, which often needed to be clarified by dialogue before taking a comprehensible shape in words. I want also to acknowledge my debt to professor Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, whose constant reassurance and enthusiasm encouraged me to pursue this line of research; to professor Francesca Bisutti for inviting me to explore the merging of literature and visual arts; to professor Elide Pittarello, whose courses provided me with innumerable clues so as how to let pictures speak within literary texts; to professor Patrizia Magli for giving me precious suggestions as regards the connection between word and image and for fostering my reconstruction of the Parisian artistic milieu that exerted such a decisive influence on Becker‟s painting; to professor Shaul Bassi for widening my view of the processes of „incorporation‟ and „embodiment‟ within post-colonial literature; to Riccardo Held, for discussing with me my interpretation of Rilke‟s Requiem; to John Phillimore, for always having the right book among his Old World Books; to professors Maria Grazia Ciani and Margherita Losacco from the University of Padova, for asking me to translate Adonais by P. B. Shelley and therefore allowing me to perceive better the difference between the „I‟ of the poet and the „I‟ of the speaker. 4 My heartfelt thank you also goes to Anne Michaels and Sujata Bhatt, whose willingness to share with me the joys and pains of their creative life I consider the expression of long-lasting friendship. A most special thank you to Verena Borgmann at the Museum Paula Modersohn- Becker in Bremen for assisting me in my research and showing me paintings which were not on exhibit. For a similar reason I am extremely grateful to Wolfgang Werner, who showed me his personal collection of paintings by Becker. I will never forget the warm welcome that Heinz Thies and his wife gave me and Sujata Bhatt within the Haus Paula Becker in Bremen. Far from being just the keepers of the house, they are amongst the truest “resuscitators” of Paula Becker. Thank you also to Bhatt‟s husband Michael Augustin for guiding us over his mobile phone in our trip to Worpswede on a summer day undermined by pouring rain… I also wish to express all my gratitude to my dearest friends, for being there and enthusiastically sharing my passion for poetry. I can always feel their closeness even when I‟m journeying far in my imagination: Letizia, Elena, Christina, Paola, Livia, Morgana, Ornella, Giorgia; Elisa, Giancarlo and Agnese; Paolo; Carola; Alessandro; Giulia and Giulio; Renza, Paolo and Elisa; Emilia; Davide; Philippe, my “fratello Filippo Lippi;” Sylviane; Sylvie; John and Sally; Luciana; Elio and Andrea; Barbara; Federico; Miriam, Filippo, Roberta, Gianluca; a special thank you to Marco and Giulio for asking my collaboration to „give life‟ to a character on the stage; Lorenzo & Sara, with whom I have been constituting an indivisible threesome since the day they were born, and Guido, as I do not think that I can do without him. 5 PROLOGUE A Room of Mirrors When one tries to piece together German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker‟s short but very prolific journey into life and art at the beginning of the twentieth century, one undoubtedly enters a room of mirrors. Not only is it impossible to speak of her without taking into consideration the influence of other artists and friends on her, but especially if one – as is my personal experience – has discovered her by reading poems by living women poets such as Canadian Anne Michaels (1958), Indian Sujata Bhatt (1956) and American Adrienne Rich (1929), the room of mirrors widens and becomes more and more articulated, like a labyrinth. This research aims at exploring the reasons for a multiple fascination: why does Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) after her death haunt Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) as a ghost that can find no peace in the hereafter? and, what is more, why does her experience as a woman artist go on haunting three women poets of the present time, who have written poems – and series of poems – in the first person, giving voice to her? As can be inferred, this research is to be considered either a ghost story or, from a more mystic point of view, the account of successful embodiments, which are equally revelatory of the past as of the present. In the interstices between the real story involving various characters as well as Paula Becker and the parallel figures created by the poems, the form of the dramatic monologue (that is to say the poetic expression which best allows possible embodiments) perfectly serves as a way of entering a slippery yet vital theme, that is to say the one of “Love as the condition of personality, and vice versa,” as John Bayley defines it in his book The Characters of Love (265). According to him, it is inevitable that treating such a subject requires the form of the embodiment: “Love is not a theme that can be penetratingly explored, compassionately revealed, and so forth. It cannot be revealed at all: it can only be embodied” (265). And the ability to use literature as a form of embodiment depends on the author‟s attitude towards his or her own characters. As Bayley remarks, “that author, if fact, is best on love who best loves his own creations” (7). It seems a truism but it is not, as “The writers whom we admire to-day do not appear to love their characters, and the critics who appraise their books show no sign of doing so either. […] Characters, it seems, are no longer objects of affection. The literary personality has gone down in the world.” Bayley‟s book is dated 1960 and maybe it 6 is not by accident that, starting from the Seventies, three poets undertook the experience of embodying Paula Modersohn-Becker‟s art and life by using the form of the dramatic monologue. Becker‟s painting was not certainly so renowned at that time but what struck the three poets is that at the base of her experience was the principle that “art is like love,” as “the more one gives, the more one receives” (The Letters and Journals 315). At the end of the last century there seemed to be a form of poetic experimentalism which tried to concentrate less on purely intellectual issues and was keener on undertaking the human adventure to embody some other artist‟s personality. The form of dramatic monologue that each time is chosen for this particular purpose does not aim to be explicitly avant-garde, but in fact it turns out to be so, due to its deepest need not only to give life to Paula Modersohn-Becker but to represent her as truthfully as possible on the page. Bayley himself underlines the danger of creating a language for reflecting on a work of the imagination which is fundamentally different from the language of the work itself (268), and so the present study attempts to approach its subject with a language which does not sound too constrictive or classificatory, but rather aims to enter the poems as if they were places, places of the imagination where besides Paula Becker a certain number of characters, seen from the outside and the inside, can be met along the way.