Poets and Paintings March 22, 2013 Where Light Looks: Edward Hopper

Lowe 1 Conner K. Lowe Professor Jordan LTMO 190N: Poets and Paintings March 22, 2013 Where Light Looks: Edward Hopper and Ekphrasis “The whole answer is there on the canvas. I don’t know how I could explain it any further,” was only one of Edward Hopper’s opaque responses to the unyielding question: what does it mean? (Junker 13) The problem with his roundabout responses is that they implicitly deny the viability of any one meaning or narration of his paintings, which is exactly what they invite so evocatively. From his female figures to the austere barns and lighthouses of Cape Cod bathed in sunlight, Hopper’s portrayals of America have coalesced to form the basis of the world’s perception of the country throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They have remained so prominent for the American identity that films, literature, and the American Dream itself have been attempting to define and redefine themselves through his depictions of land and cityscapes, as well as those who inhabit them. But what brought Hopper’s paintings to their long reign of cultural influence on the American identity? Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York on July 22, 1882, making his entry into adulthood perfectly coincide with that of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. This was a time of turbulent change in the ways Americans lived their lives, as the turn of the century brought with it overly-abundant new forms of technology, such as electric lighting (Levin, Intimate 3). Hopper’s interests in art grew from a young age and were unceasingly fed by encouragement and support from his parents who helped him enroll in the New York School of Art in 1900, where he studied under the realist painter Robert Henri (Levin, Intimate 16, 33-41). His studies there influenced his work as a painter immensely and ultimately pushed him to focus on realist portrayals of the rural and urban, as well as the public and the private American worlds. However, unlike members of Henri’s retrospectively titled “Ashcan school,” whose Lowe 2 works portrayed “the emergence of a modern, vibrantly democratic nation,” Hopper’s works focused on the everyday lives of Americans and the places they knew (Haskell 48). His cities are dark and unpopulated, or bright with a morning gleam that suggests a vibrant absence. Barbara Haskell synthesizes the effects of his works on viewers when writing, “As in a dream, . suggestions of familiarity establish a mysterious intimacy between Hopper’s paintings and viewers, who read their own experiences and emotions in his images” (48). Even nearly sixty years after Hopper’s death in 1967, his works still captivate and influence modern viewers much as they did during the time of their creation. However, much as the beginning of the twentieth century brought with it technological developments that created niches for artists such as Hopper, the beginning of the twenty-first century and its burgeoning changes have left the America Hopper knew behind. But still his presence in the American psyche is strong. Since the time of Hopper’s death, a growing trend within the world of poetry has led to a vast amount of literature written for and about his paintings in a never-ending endeavor to tell their stories. In fact, entire books of poetry, including Triangles of Light by James Hoggard and Edward Hopper: Poems A Bilingual Edition by Ernest Farrar, have sprouted out of his paintings. However, this poetic mode has a long history in which artists have struggled for years to understand the complicated interactions of the verbal with the visual. This is ekphrasis. In his extensive work revolving around the history of ekphrastic poetry, titled Museum of Words, James A. Heffernan most acutely describes ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (3). However, ekphrastic poetry carries with it a long history dating as far back as Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad, and carries with it several inescapable themes that are pertinent to the poems inspired by Hopper’s work (Heffernan 1). Robert D. Denham notes that Nighthawks alone has generated over thirty-seven poems, most of which narrativize the suggested action within the paintings, setting the stage for the naturally Lowe 3 “paragonal,” or confrontational, relationship between the visual and the verbal, the paintings and the poems (Denham 3, Heffernan 1). Most poems do that which Hopper himself denied: tell a story. This is partially due to Hopper’s style itself. As his career progressed throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s his focus moved increasingly toward the internal life of the city and its solitary figures, particularly those of women, in which they still appeared “as parts of the whole scene rather than in leading roles” (Goodrich 69). These figural paintings drive the desire for narrative while also inherently inserting themselves into gender issues that are reflected in their portrayals of private female spaces. This, too, is analogous with a primary issue of ekphrasis. The power relations between the visual and the verbal are highly charged with those that create “a duel between male and female gazes,” and other dominating visual perceptions of the world (Heffernan 1). How do viewers see these women? and how do the poems affect those views? The act of seeing itself becomes increasingly important with a background of twentieth century episteme, as it controls the way in which the paintings and the world are perceived by those who see. The gaze, or simply the ways in which we look, is thus concurrently controlled by the paintings and the poems. The lines between the visual and the verbal, which are often conceptualized as separate entities, become increasingly blurred as they strive to interact with one another. How are different perceptions of Hopper’s paintings expressed differently in words? What, then, occurs when these two forms are temporally removed from one another? By exploring several contemporary ekphrastic poems derived from Hopper’s paintings and interpreting their representational scopes in comparison to the paintings themselves, as well as other poems, it becomes apparent that all commonly invoke themes of dominance and subordination relevant to American gender issues. As the American imagination shifts throughout time, it still carries with Lowe 4 it a visual history that has largely been composed by Hopper; not only did his paintings play a vital role in the perceptions of twentieth century America, but clearly they still have a cultural importance that is shaping and reshaping what America means. The Gaze and Gendered Ekphrasis Art is most readily defined as the “display, application, or expression” of a skill “as the result of knowledge or practice” (OED). Within this definition, artwork becomes a means for the expression of knowledge, or, put more simply, is a communicative act; thus, whether verbal or visual art, its study and interpretation is grounded in the general theory of semiotics. As sentient beings, we interpret the world through visual and verbal signs which contain cultural meanings created by social, political, and historical hierarchies (Foster ix). The subject (or “I”) engages with objects within these bounds, and brings with him/her preconceived notions of the world that help to shape his/her understanding thereof. Thus, visual art, which inherently depends on the optical dimension of communication, is objectified and makes use of the ways in which we look at it. This look is the gaze. The gaze has commonly been used within art-historical interpretation to discuss the ethical issues surrounding the act of looking at particular works; however, its use becomes increasingly complicated when one considers its connotations. Margaret Olin explains that “gazing” suggests “a long, ardent look” and brings to mind the pleasure associated with the act of looking, whereas use of other terms, such as “beholding,” “peeping,” and “scrutinizing,” each connote a different relationship between the subject and object (208-209). Philosophically speaking, the theory of gaze becomes even more complex in the search to understand the affects of looking, as its definition has been worked and re-reworked by Sartre, Lacan, and other more contemporary philosophers (Bryson 87). However, despite the conflicting definitions of the gaze, each primarily focuses on the power of social, political, and historical insinuations created within Lowe 5 the scope of visuality. In his chapter titled “The End of the Theory of the Gaze,” James Elkins approaches the complications of the term and sees it as being composed of three separate facets: gendered, psychoanalytic, and positional. These, he argues, are individually insufficient, and each forms an important (re)understanding of visuality (Elkins 5-6). One of the most common portrayals of ethical looking comes out of Laura Mulvey’s foundational essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Here Mulvey concretizes the term “the male gaze,” which carries with it connotations suggesting the constant objectification of women on the male’s part. She writes, "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female," (Mulvey 837). The “scopophilic” pleasure in looking is always sexually charged from the male perspective, which denies the female voice any viability in modern narrative. While prevalent in almost all narrative, this sole perception of ethical looking can be incredibly limiting. Margaret Olin suggests that "The returned gaze, according to theorists seeking to restate Bahktin's literary theories in visual terms, rescues the beheld's sense of self" (217). A returned look thus forces a dialogue in which the dominant gazer must listen to the voice of the subordinate. Beyond the fact that they both regard visual art, the gaze is similar to ekphrasis in that they both blend the lines between the visual and verbal; both assert that you cannot have one image without language, language without image.

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