Self-Portraits of the Artist As a Child Enclosed
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 The Vastness of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits of the Artist as a Child Enclosed Matthew John Burgess Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/178 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE VASTNESS OF SMALL SPACES: SELF-PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST AS A CHILD ENCLOSED by MATTHEW J. BURGESS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 MATTHEW J. BURGESS All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nancy K. Miller _______________________________________ _____________________ _______________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi _______________________________________ ______________________ _______________________________________ Date Executive Officer Nancy K. Miller ___________________________________________ Wayne Koestenbaum ___________________________________________ Sondra Perl ___________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract THE VASTNESS OF SMALL SPACES: SELF-PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST AS A CHILD ENCLOSED by Matthew J. Burgess Advisor: Professor Nancy K. Miller A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects—the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud’s theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that “the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a new way.” Gaston Bachelard’s exploration of space and poetic reverie is also foundational, and I situate Freud’s “child at play” within Bachelard’s spatial topography in order to examine the ways in which enclosures facilitate the discovery and development of the child’s creative capacity. The paradoxical relation between smallness and vastness is a central theme in this dissertation; as the child imagines a world of her own within the small space, spatial constraints dissolve or vanish. My first chapters consider representations of childhood space in the work of two British memoirists at midcentury, Virginia Woolf and Denton Welch, and in the third chapter, I analyze lyric self-portraits by three American poets of the postwar period: iv Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton, and Robert Duncan. Others have suggested that childhood enclosures are symbolic of “womb” or “cave,” but these interpretations fail to capture the complexity of meanings at play within these scenes. I argue that this recurring figure is less about a lost union with the maternal body or some atavistic memory of the beginning of history; rather, for the author tracing the origins of her creative vocation to childhood, the small space is where the artist is born. v Acknowledgments Vast gratitude to Nancy K. Miller for guiding me through this process from beginning to end. No one could ask for a more generous and insightful “Doktormutter.” To Wayne Koestenbaum, who issues the most fabulous permission slips, two imaginary parting gifts: a silver exclamation point hovering within a darkly lit Fernando Pessoa diorama, and a walnut-sized replica of Walter Benjamin’s childhood desk. To Sondra Perl, thank you for reigniting my love of memoir and for being such a gracious reader. And to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “courage-teacher,” for turning arts-and-crafts into a transformative doctoral seminar and for showing me the pedagogical value of silence, among a hundred other things: we miss you. Thanks to the many excellent teachers I’ve had at the Graduate Center and beyond: Rachel Brownstein, Joseph Wittreich, Richard Kaye, L.S. Asekoff, Robert Viscusi, Ron Padgett, Jeffery Conway, Frank Lima, Mollee Merrill, and Bruce Paterson. Sincere appreciation to my Brooklyn College colleagues for cheering me on, and to my students, who are the most surprising teachers-in-disguise. Friendships formed in and around the GC have been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement, especially Karinne Keithley Syers, Sara Jane Stoner, Simone White, Zohra Saed, Stefania Heim, Emily Moore, Rowena Kennedy Epstein, Erica Kaufmann, Tahneer Oksman, Molly Pulda, Dominique Zino, Scott Henkle, Jason Neilson, Miciah Hussey, Helena Ribeiro, and Jack Shuler, who handed off Union Street like an Olympic baton, just in time. vi A special thanks to James Lecesne, for his unrelenting faith in the impossible; to Brian Blanchfield, poet of the ivy wall, for introducing me to the work of Denton Welch; to Adela Winter, for letting me place her genie bottle in the Preface; and to the urban family, for your humor, steadiness, and solidarity. To the Burgess clan, who always gives me green lights to keep going, even if it means elsewhere, my gratitude forever. And to Rez, who gave me a room of my own in Berlin to write these chapters, and who magically appeared (as love does) at the finish line. I dedicate this dissertation to you. vii Table of Contents Preface: Rising in the Mind…………………………………………………...…………..1 Introduction: A Shelter for Daydreaming………………………………………...……….8 Chapter 1: A Small Space of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” ………………………………………..………20 Chapter 2: Out of the Dream Closet: Denton Welch’s Serial Künstlerroman …………………………………………….……56 Chapter 3: Lyric Self-Portraits of the Artist: Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton and Robert Duncan …………………………...…………100 Conclusion: The Small Space in Time and Place …………………………………...…129 Epilogue: All About My Mother, or A Closer Reader……………………….…………144 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………………163 viii List of Illustrations 1 Denton Welch with his dolls’ house, 1946 99 2 The Denton Welch Dolls’ House, Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood 99 3 Alison Bechdel, from Are You My Mother? 132 4 Alison Bechdel, from Are You My Mother? 152 5 Alison Bechdel, from Are You My Mother? 157 6 Jeanette Winterson, Cover, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 159 7 Alison Bechdel, Cover, Are You My Mother? 159 ix Rising in the Mind: A Preface For nothing was simply one thing. –Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse I could locate the earliest stirrings of this project at various points on a timeline. I might recount the making of my own childhood spaces—there I am, five years old, tucking a sheet under a stack of books to make a hideout in the bedroom I shared with my older brother—but this is not my memoir. This dissertation examines scenes of childhood enclosure in mid-twentieth century self-portraits of the artist, and I remember the passage that sparked my interest in these small spaces. With a glance at my undergraduate transcript, I can reconstruct a specificity that may be, in part, fictitious: a twenty-one year-old Matthew Burgess, shoulder-length hair, earnest and closeted, reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory in a leafy alcove at the University of Virginia: “It was the primordial cave (and not what the Freudian mystics might suppose), that lay behind the games I played when I was four. A big cretonne-covered divan, white with black trefoils, in one of the drawing rooms at Vyra rises in my mind, like some massive product of a geological upheaval before the beginning of history” (22-23). I had a vague notion of what “the Freudian mystics might suppose” and the details of the furnishings were lost on me, but I was dazzled by Nabokov’s language and transported by his descriptions. He continues: With the help of some grown-up person, who would use first both hands and then a powerful leg, the divan would be moved several inches from the wall, as to form a narrow passage which I would be further helped to roof snugly with the divan’s 1 bolsters and close up at the ends with a couple of its cushions. I then had the fantastic pleasure of creeping through that pitch-dark tunnel, where I lingered a little to listen to the singing in my ears—that lonesome vibration so familiar to boys in dusty hiding places, and then—in a burst of delicious panic, on rapidly thudding hands and knees I would reach the tunnel’s far end, push its cushion away, and be welcomed by a mesh of sunshine on the parquet under the canework of a Viennese chair and two gamesome flies settling by turns. A dreamier and more delicate sensation was provided by another cave game, when upon awakening in the early morning I made a tent of my bedclothes and let my imagination play in a thousand dim ways with shadowy snowslides of linens and with the faint light that seemed to penetrate my penumbral covert from some immense distance, where I fancied that strange, pale animals roamed in a landscape of lakes. (23-24) This passage offered the double-thrill of visiting a distant Russia while simultaneously transporting me to my childhood home in California. “That lonesome vibration so familiar to boys in dusty hiding places” struck a chord—as a boy I believed I could hear the planet spinning—and the image of a bed transforming into a mountain landscape reminded me of my own early reveries. What impressed me, too, was the recognition that something so small and seemingly insignificant could be represented in the text, and I was beginning to identify what I was attracted to: a lyrical voice, the detailing of the personal and the particular, and autobiography.