Representation and Woman's Voice in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison, Medbh Mcguckian and Susan Howe
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Woman's Borderline Figure: Representation and Woman's Voice in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison, Medbh McGuckian and Susan Howe Kim Robinson A thesis submitted in confonnity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Phiiosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto April 1, 2000 O Kim Robinson National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 ofcanacia du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibfiographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Your fi.@ Votre dfërmce Ovr tïi~Nme rélelrence The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sel1 reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfom, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/^ de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts f?om it Ni la thése ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or othewise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Acknowledgernents 1 would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Dr. J. Fdward Chamberlin, for his guidance and support throughout the writing of this dissertation. His keen eye for empty jargon and his exhortation to "tell it in my own words," enabled me to tnxst rny own voice. Kis work on Carribbean writers and his example of committed scholarhsip have inspired my research and writing. 1 would like dso to th& my thesis cornmittee, Heather Murray, Mary Nyquist, Michael Dixon, and particularly, the Extemal Examiner Leslie Sanders, for their perceptive and provocative insights. 1 would also like to thank the Graduate Fnglish Department at the University of Toronto for granting me four years of financial assistance in the form of a University of Toronto Open Fellowship. My personal thanks are extended to my family: to my three daughters, Ramona, Tess and Ava, who gave me the inner strength needed to complete the thesis, and especially to my husband, Don McBrearty, who supported and encouraged me above and beyond the caii of duty. in addition, there are friends, such as Jennifer Gustar and Sheila Gray, whose insight and penchant for debate not only stimulated my research, but provided me with the requisite humour to sustain the endeavour. Table of Contents Introduction Woman's Borderline Figure: Representation and Women's Voice in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison, Medbh McGuckian and Susan Chapter One Lorna Goodison's ConfLicting Signais................. .... ................*............... -40 II "Mother, the great Stones got to moven - Woman's Tongue Easing Possibility into Language ............................................................... -83 Chapter Two The Private and Public in Medbh McGuckian's Poet Introduction - McGuckian's Shore Lyrics or Displacing Woman's "Proper" Place .................................................................................................. 105 11 The Brush of Her Authority - McGuckian's Private Language Publicly Staged.................................................................................................. 1 15 III Dreamworks as Intervention - Woman's "Flitting" Figure .............. 143 N Woman as National Trope - McGuckian's Poetry "Wait[s] around after goodbyes" .................................... .... ........ 1 57 V Engfis WIrish - McGuckian's "Double-Stranded Wordsn..................... 168 Chapter Three fistoric Stutter in Susan Howe's Poetry Introduction - Bearing Witness ........................... .................................... 176 iI Triggering Morphologies - Colonial Stutter into Linguistic Nom.................................................................................................................... 191 III Conversion - The Absent Centre ............................................................ 222 IV Haunting the Pantheon of History - "Susan Howe's" Stutter Ulto Song .......................................................................................................... ..235 Afterword - Poetry for the Next Miiienium? ......................................................... ,250 Bibliography ........................................ ......................................................................... 253 Kim Robinson 2 Women's Borderline Figure: Representation and Woman's Voice in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison, Medbh McGuckian and Susan Howe Ia the past decade or so much has been made of the border shifts taking place in the world at large and in the (only slightly!) srnalier hemisphere of the literary world: borders are being crossed, taken apart, reinventeci. A quick glance at various journals from the mid-eighties on reveals titles such as Crossings, Boundary, Zone, Frontier that call attention to the change in temperament of certain ideas. Some critics would call it an "epistemological revolution," citing the impact in the last fom years or so of MWsrn, structuralism, postmodernisrn, post-coloniaiism and feminism. In mos t of these theories the debate has centered on the notion of the author, of an authorizing textual presence, and of the authority traditionaliy granted therein. This in turn has often led to debates around what constitutes identity, gender, the subject. Some of the effects of these theories have informed the last two or three decades of poetry on one level or another. One outcome of the ongoing debate over what constitutes the subject is that the conventional notion of "voice" in poetry is challenged. For many cntics and poets alike, the authority of the poem rests in the voice of the poet. In much lyric poetry today voice has generally been read as the thing which remains authentic to the poet, the element which originates and is original to the writer. Predominantly inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, this notion holds the first person "1" close to the author, read as his (sic) persona1 and unique voice. I-Ience, even if the voice is attached to a poetic persona, like Yeats's "Crazy Jane," and not the author per se, this persona, as Kim Robinson 3 Jonathan Cuiier points out, "none the less fulfills the u-g role of the individual subject, and even poems which make it difficult to construct a poetic persona rely for their effects on the fact that the reader will try to construct an enunciative posture" (170). Read in this way, voice remains attached to the author's presiding consciousness or "character. " Needless to Say, here on the cusp of the millenium, terms like authentic and original have become taboo, complicated as they are by what they take for granted. So, for instance, the borders of voice in poetry are patrolled bya prion' ideas of literary tradition which often assume the voice and readership to be male. Moreover, voice often irnplies a monologic discourse, meanhg that the poem emanates from the voice of a single, unitary speaker. This kind of assumption runs contrary to some of the epistemological "revolutionsn we have undergone, in which the subject and the unified speaking voice are frequentiy destabilized. The approaches to voice, as applied to the lyric, are culture-specific in the ways they are used and ïnterpreted. A brief look at how voice has been conceived at various stages in Iiterary history reveds a fluctuating relatiooship between persona and poet, sometimes closely identming the two, sometimes holding them quite emphaticaily apart. For Wordsworth, for example, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" taken from "emotion recoilected in tranquilityn (266) was a crucial facet of poetry- making, and one that kept the poet's individuality interwoven with the speaking subject. Wordsworth's defuiition of the speaker of a poem and the language he uses as "a man speaking to menn (255), became one of the founding ideas for Romantic poetry, reinforcing a close identity between poet and persona. Kim Robinson 4 But this kind of identification is not the only literary nom for the lyric. If we turn to some of the courtly lyrics of the Renaissance or Medieval periods, for instance, Our relationship to the lyric "In is different from that of the Romantic tradition, Iargely because the conventions of each period are different. John Burrow writes that in the Middie Ages, the "In would not be understood as the poet himself, nor as any other individual speaker, but as a lover, a penitent, a sinner or a devotee of the Virgin;" the fuliy dramatic "In which requires the reader "not to identifj. with, but to identify the speaker" (67-8). In the Renaissance, the lyric voice was often identified as directed performance. John Stevens in Music and Poetry in the Euly Tudor Court observes how early lyric poetry of the Renaissance is best seen through the context of the courtly "game of love" in which the lyrics were often Sung. Of course these statements oversimple the periods, making no dowance, for example, for the intensely personal lyrics of some religious poetry. My point, however reductive, is simply that, as readers, we should not take the lyrical "In for granted. It must be read against the cultural context of its time and thus against the conventions the audience assumes. Even the generalized