Abstract

Autumn

Blue

Blue Guitar

Capable Imagination

Central, The

Colony/Colonization

Comic, The

Decreation

Description

Dump, The

Escapism

Big is Beautiful: Wallace Stevens and the “Fat Girl”

Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am your world.[1]

Wallace Stevens, "Bantam in Pine Woods"

Fat Girl: In the works of Wallace Stevens, the term “fat girl” appears exclusively in the last canto of the poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.”  The author defines her as follows: “The fat girl is the earth: what the politicians now-a-days are calling the globe which somehow, as is revolves in their minds, does, I suppose, resemble some great object in a particularly blue area.”[2] Sarcasm aside, the essence of the fat girl metaphor is in reference to the earth. However, this rich metaphor seeks to do more than simply call Mother Nature a full-figured gal. In order to properly examine its’ abstract symbolism, it is necessary to examine the “fat girl” as a symbol of opulence, in the context of her feminine traits, and as a symbol of the threatening unknown.

Fat Girl as a Symbol of Opulence

Stevens’ “fat girl” metaphor summons up images of Italian Renaissance paintings of fleshy women lounging amid a copious array of nature’s bounty. This is luxurious symbolism for a world ripe for the picking. In the poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” nature overtakes what has been made by man: “The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, / . . . It took dominion everywhere.”[3] When the fat girl sits around the house, she really sits around the house.

How did Stevens arrive at this metaphor? One possible answer comes from his home life, especially in relation to his only child, Holly. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” was published in 1944 when Holly was eighteen years old. Her adolescence proved to be awkward not only for herself but for her parents as well.  At sixty, Stevens was ill-equipped to be the father of a teenager. This was true of Elsie as well, who had recently undergone a menopausal transformation, which had “shaped her into someone who looked like an old maid.”[4]

The task of assisting Holly through the developmental stage of “Identity Versus Role Confusion”[5] fell, unfortunately, to Wallace, who had bigger things on his mind. At the advent of her puberty, Stevens had made some dramatic changes in his life in order to focus his creative ability through meditation and abstinence from sensual pleasures. Although he had no intention of harming her, these personal changes made him seem remote and unapproachable at the very time when Holly needed his attention most: 

To make up for the loss she felt, Holly began overeating. Instead of growing to be more like the delicate creature her mother had been in her adolescence, she became like her father in one of his obese periods. This was painful both to her and to her father.  While he would have wanted to dress her in things that flattered her beauty so that he could see her, in reality, completing a picture he kept in his imagination, her bulk frustrated his desire.[6]

Indeed, in a 1935 letter to Rosamund Cary, Stevens coldly intimated that his daughter was roughly the size of the Statue of Liberty.[7]

To further complicate things, Holly was also becoming a young woman. Her budding sexuality was troubling to Stevens. Rather than acknowledging this rite of passage, “it was easier for all involved that instead of his openly acknowledging Holly’s coming into womanhood, she was kept and seen as a precocious child with mature interests. . . . Just as he had wanted to keep Elsie his ‘Little Girl,’ so he wanted to keep Holly a little girl.”[8] However, Holly’s maturation into a young woman was unavoidable.

Thus, Stevens found himself in the company of the “fat girl” every day. Harold Bloom notes that the “fat girl” image is more tender than most of Stevens’ metaphoric references to the earth: ”The earth, affectionately addressed as “Fat girl,” is enough and more than enough, as curiously she could never have been in Harmonium and as she was not to be again during the final phase of the group of poems called The Rock.”[9] This intimacy implies a relationship that was not there before or after “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Perhaps Stevens had the image of his beloved, chubby daughter in mind when he instilled this warmth in the hymn to the fat girl.

Fat Girl as Female

Wallace Stevens, as a poet, continually sought to build a world view based in reality and experienced in the realm of the imagination. For this reason, he balked at ecclesiastical explanations for the world and existence. He sought to create a religion of reality by writing “poetry to find the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God . . . the good in what is harmonious and orderly . . out of delight in the harmonious and orderly.”[10]

Just as the church is taught to be the bride of Christ in the Christian tradition, for Stevens’ church, reality was the bride of the imagination. This marriage takes place metaphorically in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” under the division entitled “It Must Give Pleasure” of section IV: “There was a mystic marriage in Catawba, / At noon it was on the mid-day of the year / Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda”[11]

“Bawda” is one of the fat girl’s aliases. This name is a play on the word “bawd,” which is defined as “a female pimp,”[12] and implies that she is sexually inviting.

Thus, sexual fertility is one of the fat girl’s most alluring traits. She is ripe with the potential for reproduction. In the poem, “The Comedian as the Letter C,” the main character, Crispin, is overwhelmed by this characteristic: “That earth was like a jostling festival / Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, / Expanding in the gold’s maternal warmth. / So much for that.”[13]A few cantos later, Crispin experiences a plum that Stevens describes as “good, fat, guzzly fruit;”[14] just the sort of tawdry thing Madonna might be seen slurping down in a video.

Stevens saw the dichotomy of life. He understood his poetry as a feminine characteristic within himself and he sought to be more in touch with it.

From his youth Stevens had felt that the “other” associated with “writing verse” was female, “lady-like.” In describing the central importance of the irrational element in poetry and, more generally, in life, Stevens was also announcing that he had now become one with the “other” -- the female, night, imagination -- and that it moved him beyond what he could understand: “You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound; and you do in fact know. Your knowledge is irrational. In that sense life is mysterious; and if it is mysterious at all, I suppose that it is cosmically mysterious."[15] Thus, in Stevens’ world, the female represents a reality that irrational knowledge, clearly a male trait, is to be grounded in.

Much has been said about the opposite nature of the sexes. Men are generally characterized as dreamers and women as stabilizers.  Thus, it is fitting that Stevens chose female images to represent reality and male images for the imagination:

This female “sense” depends on the male concept to determine her character, as the sunlight defines the way we feel about the roses. As with the green globe in blue space, the male principle provides the context within which the female sense appears. But conversely, the male principle depends on the female for its particular and sensuous immediacy.[16]

In the poem, “Holiday in Reality,” Stevens reiterates this point: “each had a particular woman and her touch / After all, they knew that to be real each had / To find for himself his earth, his sky, his sea.”[17]

Finally, the “fat girl” is maternal. Stevens’ relationship with his mother surfaces in this imagery in “the transformation of a desire unspoken in childhood to merge again with the mother, earth, nature. In Stevens’ case it become a yearning for identification with a more abstract female.”[18] The “fat girl” appears in canto III and canto V of “The Auroras of Autumn” as a comforting mother who “invites humanity to her home and table.”[19] Furthermore, in the autumn of Stevens’ life, she comforts him by making “that gentler that can gentle be.”[20]However, this gentle mother has a dark side as well.

Fat Girl as the Unknown

The “fat girl” is a mysterious woman. Although she is affectionate, generous, and inviting, she can also be threatening. Helen Vendler’s discussion of the fat girl dissipates any myths of a premature Eden in Stevens’ metaphor:

Earth is to be no terra paradise, no very varnished green, but a green and fluent mundo, incarnated in a terrestrial Muse. Stevens’ mode of address to the interior paramour is neither primitive nor worshipful like his address to the One of Fictive Music; rather by turns it is idyllic, ironic, peremptory, tender, and detached. . . . [21]

Stevens’ world is not one of childish simplicity and trust. She is a giant that cannot be dominated by the trickery of three young girls in “The Plot Against the Giant.” She is all reality, including what is unknowable and beyond understanding.

Furthermore, in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the fat girl appears as a dominating “monster” that the narrator seeks union with:

That I may reduce the monster to

Myself, and then may be myself

In the face of the monster, be more than part

Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be

Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one,

And play of the monster and of myself.[22]

The monster appears again in “The Bouquet” as a being ”that has everything and rest, / And yet is there, a presence in the way.”[23]Like the giant, this monster is unyielding and difficult to make a union with, as the frustrated narrator of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” discovers.

Finally, the “fat girl” is a threatening symbol who maintains her corpulence by feeding on the dead bodies of her children. In “Madame La Fleurie,” a geriatric Stevens finds his earth mother to be a betrayer who offers no solace in the face of his impending demise:

Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.

His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew. . . .

His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,

In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light. [24]

She is the great eraser of life, the consumer of all things, the one ever-lasting thing in the face of fleeting life.

In conclusion, the “fat girl” encompasses Wallace Stevens’ great vision of reality, and in the end consumes her partner: the imagination. She is a merciful black widow muse who sustains, allures and inspires, yet claims her victory in the end. Stevens’ great task that he set for himself was to obtain “a mother tongue / With which to speak to her, the capable / In the midst of foreignness, the syllable / Of recognition, avowal, impassioned cry.”[25] It was also among his greatest accomplishments.

Works Cited

Biehler, Robert F. and Jack Snowman. Psychology Applied to Teaching. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithica, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

Ehrlich, Eric, Stuart Berg Flexner, Gorton Carruth, and Joyce M. Hawkins. Oxford American Dictionary.  New York: Avon, 1980.

Leonard, J.S. and C.E. Wharton. The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Later Years 1923-1955. New York: Morrow, 1988.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.  New York: Vintage, 1990.

Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969.

[James Baker]

Feigning with the Strange Unlike

Fiction

First Idea

Grotesque, The

Imagination

Journalism

Large

Lingua Franca

Major Weather

Marriage

Metaphor

Mind of Winter

More Than Rational Distortion, The

Musing the Obscure

Nothing That Is (There), The/ Nothing That is Not There, The

Paisant Chronicle(s)

Poverty/Poor

Pressure of Reality

Resemblance

Rock, The

Scholar, The

Spring

Summer

Sun, The

Supreme Fiction

the the

Tragic, the

Vulgate of Experience

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives two primary meanings for vulgate: common or colloquial speech, and as the standard accepted reading or version of any text. The phrase "vulgate of experience" occurs only once in the poetry of Wallace Stevens in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." The word vulgate occurs twice in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction."

In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," it is used in the meaning of "common or colloquial speech." Canto IX begins with these lines: "The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back. / Does it move to and fro or is it of both / At once?" Later in the same canto, this is said of the poet:

It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks. He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general, To compound the imagination's Latin with The lingua franca et jocundissima.

Sukenick states that this entire canto is questioning whether the poem fluctuates between the nonsense or "gibberish" of poetic language or the nonsense of common speech or whether it is both at once. Another line in the canto calls the poet "this hot, dependent orator, / The spokesman at our bluntest barriers." In one of Stevens' letters, he explains that "our bluntest barriers" means "our limitations" (435). Sukenick explains the canto in this manner:

He [the poet] articulates meaning for us, for the vulgate. He is the exponent of the vulgate by virtue of his peculiar form of speech, a speech that tries to reach meanings beyond speech itself ("only a little of the tongue"). He rather seeks the nonsense of the vulgate and tries to articulate it, to combine--as in the "imagination's Latin of the last line--the learned language of the imagination with the vulgate, which is both the common language ("lingua franca," a jargon once used among different Mediterranean nationalities; also "franca" as free) and the most pleasant one ("jocundissima"). (151)

More frequently, however, "vulgate" is used as it in the phrase "vulgate of experience" in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." The poem itself begins with the line containing this phrase: "The eye's plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience." Here the phrase refers to what the eye sees or perceives, in other words, perception, without the imagination acting upon it or the mind thinking about it. It is reality stripped of its fictions and illusions. The data received through the senses is the usual, common version of experience. This idea, in fact, occurs numerous times in this poem and in many of Stevens' poems.

It is important to point out that "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" presents reality as existing somewhere between the "vulgate of experience" and the mind as they fuse with one another; sometimes one is dominant, sometimes the other. The older Stevens, in particular, seems to long for the bareness of reality, stripped of its fictions. However, sometimes it is too stark. In the fourth canto of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," he says that "the plainness of plain things is savagery, / As the last plainness of a man who has fought / Against illusion."

Stevens distinguishes between the object itself, the object simply perceived by the senses, and the object acted upon by the imagination or the rational mind. In Canto V, he speaks of "Reality as a thing seen by the mind, / Not that which is but that which is apprehended." This reality, he says paradoxically, is "Everything as unreal as real can be, / In the inexquisite eye," the eye which does not clothe objects with the fictive covering of the imagination. Stevens then ponders how the self, "the chrysalis of all men," became divided. He asserts that "one part / Held fast tenaciously in common earth," "common earth" being the vulgate.

In Canto VI, this reality is "naked Alpha," not the "hierphant Omega, / Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals." The vulgate is "the infant A standing on its infant legs." In Canto IX, Stevens longs for the "poem of pure reality"

Untouched By trope or deviation, straight to the word, Straight to the transfixing object, to the object At the exactest point at which it is itself, Tranfixing by being purely what it is, A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye, The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek nothing beyond reality.

In Canto XIV, Professor Eucalyptus seeks god in New Haven "with an eye that does not see beyond the object." Canto XXI contrasts the romantic isle of Cythere with one which is "close to the senses." It is "the clear."

"Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," too, has examples of the concept of the "vulgate of experience." In the first canto of "It Must Be Abstract," we are told that "you must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it." In the six th canto, we are told that "it must be visible or invisible, / Invisible or visible or both: / A seeing and an unseeing in the eye." In Canto VIII, Nanzia Nunzio represents a stripped-down reality, as she literally strips herself of "bright gold," of her "stone'studded belt," and her necklace, saying to Ozymandias to clothe her in the "final filament," for "a fictive covering / Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind." In the first canto of "It Must Give Pleasure," Stevens says that "to feel the heart / That is the common, the bravest fundament, / This is a facile exercise." However, he then states the difficulty of seeing without fictions or rational thought:

 

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven.

After relating the story of the Canon Aspirin who imposes order on everything he sees, we are told this is not the way to get to reality:

But to impose is not To discover. To discover an as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible.

What Stevens wants is "to find the real, / To be stripped of every fiction except one, / The fiction of an absolute."

In the poem "The Rock," the rock is the image of reality seen without the imagination. When the poet composes a poem, he covers the "rock with leaves." "The fiction of the leaves is the icon of the poem." "The poem makes meanings of the rock, /Of such mixed motion and such imagery / That its barrenness becomes a thousand things /And so exists no more. Stevens then proceeds to define the rock as "the gray particular of man's life"; it is "the stern particular of the air, / The mirror of the planets, one by one, / But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist." Finally, "The rock is the habitation of the whole, / Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A / In a perspective that begins again at Point B."

Another poem in which we see the concept of the "vulgate of reality" is "Questions and Remarks": the grandson "sees it as it is," not "with so much rhetoric." "It is the question of what he is capable, / It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2." The grandson, then, simply perceives, without surrounding what he sees with fictions or "rhetoric."

Certainly in "The Snow Man," to see "the frost and the boughs / of the pine-trees crusted with snow," the "junipers shagged with ice, / The spruces rough in the distant of the January sun," in other words, to "have a mind of winter," this is to be at ground zero, back to the "vulgate of experience." To "have a mind of winter" is to be "nothing himself," to be capable of beholding the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

In "The Man on the Dump," Stevens notes "how many men have copied dew for buttons, how many women have covered themselves / With dew, dew dresses," and he comments upon how "one grows to hate these thing except on the dump." The dump is back to bare reality, cleansed of our projections. It is the place where "everything is shed." It is "what one wants to get near"; it is "the the."

In "Credences of Summer," Stevens says that the "rock cannot be broken. It is the truth." When the rock is devoid of leaves, says Stevens in "The Plain Sense of Things," "we return to a plain sense of things," the "plain sense of it, without reflections." In "Notes on Moonlight," moonlight, "like a plain poet revolving in his mind / The sameness of his various universe, / Shines on the ' mere objectiveness of things." What the moon evokes, what its "property" is, is " to disclose the essential presence." What Stevens finally wants is "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself."

In Stevens' poetry, then, we see many references to the "vulgate of experience"; it is the rock, the "inexquisite eye," "the plain sense of things"; it is "the the." It is reality stripped bare, the world as sense data only.

Works Consulted

Brown, Lesley, ed. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on  Historical Principles. New York: Oxford U P, 1993.

LaGuardia, David. Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination  of Wallace Stevens. Hanover: Brown U P, 1983.

Rieke, Alison. "Stevens in Corsica, Lear in New Haven. New England Quarterly Mar. 1990: 35-59. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. New York: New York U P, 1967.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1969.

[Shirley R. Conn]

Winter

X