Contemplated Spouse: Stevens, Irigaray, and the Feminine, by Lisa Williams

Paramour and Paragon: Wallace Stevens, the Muse, and the

Journey Towards a New Poetry

I shall whisper

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

It will undo him.

Wallace Stevens, “The Plot against the Giant”

In “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage,” one of the first poems in Wallace Stevens’ 1923 collection Harmonium, Stevens evokes a muse eager to part from tradition. He gestures to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the poem’s opening lines, but he clearly intends for his muse to break free of this static image. Rather than standing elegantly poised on a clamshell, Stevens’ muse appears on “the first-found weed” (4).^[1] She avoids the grandiose settings that accompany Botticelli’s traditional muse and also prefers anonymity: “She scuds the glitters, / Noiselessly, like one more wave.” A far remove from the goddess of antiquity who rests serenely at the center of “sea-green pomp,” Stevens’ muse is “paltry,” discontented, and eager to go to work. She is imagined as a “scullion of fate,” capable of wiping the slate of the world clean. She clears the way for Stevens at the start of his journey towards the creation of a new poetry. Tired of the “salty harbors” of fifteenth century Italy, she guides Stevens to the the “high interiors of the sea” where the world exists as it is, free of the over-used metaphors that conceal it.

Stevens’ poetic project is outlined best in his 1942 poem “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” in which he claims the poem provides the opportunity for seeing the world in a new way: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea” (330). Stevens’ ultimate goal, the first idea, is the world before predication. In a letter to Henry Church, Stevens explains: “if you take the varnish and dirt of generations off a picture, you see it in its first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and dirt, you are a thinker of the first idea” (426-427). Stevens’ poetry is, then, an attempt to portray the act of thinking the first idea more than it is ever a statement of it. Throughout his canon, which begins in 1923 and ends with his death in 1955, Stevens mediates between reality and the imagination in an effort to mend the rift that has separated these two realms. In “Imagination as Value,” an essay from his 1951 collection The Necessary Angel, Stevens argues that the imagination “enables us to live our own lives” by importing the “unreal into what is real” (735). Decidedly for Stevens, reality is not enough, but neither can he rely solely on his individual faculty of imagination. Throughout Stevens’ journey toward “the first idea,” the unvarnished world, he is accompanied, aided, and occasionally thwarted by his muse.

Although in the opening poems of Harmonium Stevens resorts to traditional evocations of the muse, his muse takes on many forms throughout the collection. She is often a representational figure, a woman through whom and for whom the poem is conceived, but she is also simply the feminine. Whether conjured as “femininity,” real women, or the most fecund image of the eternal mother, the feminine is a device as much as a subject or theme in Stevens’ poetry, because through it he works out the problematic of Being.^[2] Like the Romantics, his predecessors, Stevens refers to the feminine as the maternal or the excessively material.^[3]As such, the feminine is one of Stevens’ most constant tropes. Stevens’ earliest works reflect a poet steeped in a tradition that evokes the feminine in the form of a mythical muse who offers the poet truths from an otherworld. As in “The Plot Against the Giant,” the muse’s phonemes and her sex are inextricably linked in a language that only the male poet can translate because she is his projection. In other early poems, “Infanta Marina,” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” for example, Stevens imagines her dressed in the typical clothes of an ancient goddess of the imagination. Although he often mocks her “in magnificent measure” (as he does in “Monocle”) as “Mother of heaven” or “regina of the clouds” (10), he cannot be a poet without her. In “Last Looks at the Lilacs,” for instance, the muse is “the divine ingenue” and “companion,” who, residing in “this hymeneal air,” scorns traditional poetic forms (39). Stevens’ muse is, then, his connection to the elements, to the material world, but she and the truths she possesses exist in the realm before language.^[4]

The uniqueness of Stevens’ muse is portrayed in his very traditional invocation, “To the One of Fictive Music,” which appears towards the end of Harmonium. As “Sister and mother and diviner love” (70) she is an image of the eternal woman, a member of “the sisterhood of the living dead,” but she is, again, an unadorned muse in contrast to tradition. She is “most near [. . .] and of the clearest bloom.” On her gown there is “no thread of cloudy silver,” and her crown is “simple hair.” Indeed, her simplicity appears to be central to her ability to answer Stevens’ plea and “give back to us what once you gave: / “The imagination that we spurned and crave” (71). Stevens, so acutely aware that the language, the poetry, the “music” which describes the world is also that which inevitably “separates us from the wind and sea / Yet leaves us in them” (70), envisions a muse who will repair the damage that language has caused. This goddess of or figure for the imagination will “endow” the poet, through his “feigning with the strange unlike,” with the ability to find himself in the “difference heavenly pity brings” (71).^[5] The truth that exists in difference, a major concern for Stevens throughout his poetic career (most notably in the later poem “Notes”), is here enabled by the muse. She, as representative of the eternal feminine, is adorned by the “fatal stones” that signify an earthly realm but is also labeled as “unreal.” She is both of the world and beyond it and, therefore, able to reveal the world as more than the “gross effigy and simulacrum” and thus only the reflected image of the men who describe it.^[6]

The ability to reveal the world underneath layers of predication that Stevens attributes to his muse whatever her manifestation continues throughout his early poems. From the traditional mythical image, she becomes a more tangible muse when she is cast as real women. As Susanna in “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and the woman in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” she embodies poetry or mediates imagination and reality for the male poet. Whether evoked as the traditional muse or a lover, “she” is at the center of the poet’s creation. As Stevens focuses on the act of the creation of poetry or the “decreation” of the myths that define existence for the subject of his poems, he continually returns to the figure of woman as the object through which truth is exposed.^[7] In “Six Significant Landscapes,” she is a contrast to the “Rationalists, wearing square hats” (60), literally boxed in by their rigid thoughts. Used to represent night, she is described as “Obscure / Fragrant and Supple” (59). She is not a real woman but an opportunity for meditation: “Night, the female [. . .] Conceals herself.” The truth, if there is any, appears as a brief glimmer “Like a bracelet / Shaken in a dance.” Truth is revealed to the poet as he gazes, often erotically, at a woman.

Difference, for Stevens, is found through woman and the comprehension of the mysteries of her dance.

Stevens, while using the feminine again and again throughout his poetry, when referring to real women is sometimes sexist and misogynist. He adopts a privileged masculine stance, for example, when he links the grotesque form of the old woman in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” to the most grossly material. In “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” he sneers at his chosen representative of religious intolerance. His masculine authorial stance is also evident in “Sunday Morning” when he occupies a female vessel in order to express a cyclical and traditionally feminine view of life and death. Although this woman is given a voice, in most of his early poetry women are nameless or silent as their voice is taken by the male poet. According to Mary Arensberg, Stevens’ early poetry and his repeated use of women in it reflects a “muse-attachment” (24). Through woman, Stevens envisions the “fiction of otherness” that allows him to add the unreal to the real (24). The feminine is often a frightful and destructive entity in many of the Harmonium poems and in some later poems as well. In “Madame La Fleurie” (published in the 1954 collection The Rock) Stevens imagines “a bearded queen,” his mother, who waits to devour his knowledge, to “feed on him, himself and / what he saw”(432). This is, again, not a real mother but an image of the “phallic mother.”

With both breasts and a penis, the phallic mother resides in the subconscious as the most feared and desired object. As death and that which returns us to nothingness, she represents the loss of identity. Yet she also nostalgically represents the place of all knowledge before the fall into language that forms our identities but at the same time separates us from ourselves.^[8] Although Stevens is torn between these two manifestations of the feminine in his early poetry, a negative portrayal of the mother is a rare occurrence in the late poems. In The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Rock, when Stevens imagines the mother or evokes woman, he seems to be providing a commentary on her presence in the early poems. He comes to terms with someone or something he has courted for a very long time. In “The Auroras of Autumn,” “the mother’s face” is “the purpose of the poem” (356). In other poems from The Rock, for instance, such as “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” and “The World as Meditation,” “The Sail of Ulysses” and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” he envisions, as Mary Arensberg suggests, “‘the lover that lies within the self’ and the illusion of an imagined self in another” (40). Stevens weds male and female, or becomes them both, in an effort to create an androgynous world where the absence and desire that have propelled his poetry are destroyed. In order to come to terms with the ambivalence he feels towards the feminine, Stevens uses woman, occupies her, and speaks through her. To rectify the initial split into difference that necessitated the fall into language, Stevens attempts a union of masculine and feminine and, therefore, a union of the self and the other.

In “‘A Curable Separation’: Stevens and the Mythology of Gender,” Arensberg suggests that Stevens’ use of the feminine passes through three stages: the first is a memory of a union with the “mother’s face and body,” a pre-Oedipal existence before the fall into language; the second is the “muse-attachment” in which an object relation with women like Susanna allows Stevens to imagine otherness; and the third is a “resolution of narcissistic wholeness” in poems like “The Rock” in which Stevens expresses the desire to repress the memory of the initial splitting of the sexes and move towards androgyny (24). According to Arensberg, Stevens’ poetry is stamped with a “fetal imprint” and propelled by the desire for a return to the eternal feminine or mother. When looking at the use of the feminine throughout Stevens’ canon, most critics agree that a troubled resolution with the feminine does take place in the late poetry.

In “‘Sister of the Minotaur’: Sexism and Stevens,” Jacqueline Vaught Brogan notes a rejection of the feminine figure in the early poetry that becomes a reception of her in poems like “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Like most critics, she interprets Stevens’ use of the feminine in terms of the Jungian anima. That is, Stevens explores his feminine side through an archetypically feminine voice that will allow him to fuse self and other into a complete being. More importantly, however, the resolution of his two sides will give him the poetic instrument he needs to sing and see beyond the structures of language. Through the feminine, Stevens also allows himself another poetic stance. As Brogan argues, Stevens questions rather than orders the one “too easily gone, subject to changeÊÐ a sign of the mutability of our best linguistic orderings” (21). In “A Woman with the Hair of a Pythoness,” Barbara M. Fisher argues, however, that “a Jungian reading simply cannot account for the striding poet-singer [. . .] in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’” (47). Fisher contends that Stevens’ female figures push his complicated poetry far beyond the interpretations Jung’s tired archetypes can provide. Nevertheless, for Brogan the feminine remains an abstraction in Stevens’ poetry. Even when Stevens acknowledges the feminine in the late poetry as mother or lover, it still appears to be in some aspect that which he considers to be his feminine side.

While Brogan prefers a linguistic rather than strictly psychoanalytical approach to Stevens’ work, the complex but repetitious nature of his treatment of the feminine warrants and blossoms under this sort of analysis. In “Imaginary Politics: Emerson, Stevens, and the Resistance of Style,” Daniel T. O’Hara explains that all of Stevens’ female figures are tropes for “the lost thing” that poetry recovers by allusively embodying (68). The “lost thing” is, of course, the elusive mother and a pre-Oedipal union with the maternal. For O’Hara’s analysis, he turns to Julia Kristeva, who writes in Black Sun: “The depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing [. . .] the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated” (13). Indeed, the sadness, struggle, and desire of mourning the damaged maternal attachment are the forces behind Stevens’ poetic imaginings throughout his oeuvre. Whether invoked and embodied as muse, silenced or beckoned, appropriated or exiled, the feminine in all its many forms is the figure through which Stevens finally bids “farewell to an idea” in “The Auroras of Autumn”(355).^[9]

While Julia Kristeva’s work is certainly conducive to my study and will be returned to throughout it, I intend to evoke another French feminist theorist for my examination of Stevens’ desire for “the lost thing.” Luce Irigaray’s quest to expose the woman lurking in the margins and shadows of discourse makes her work especially amenable to an examination of Wallace Stevens’ use of the feminine as a bridge between the imagination and reality. Throughout her works, Irigaray reveals the methods employed by the “fathers,” the patriarchal practitioners of logic, for using the feminine to secure their privileged positions and to help them master the natural world as they push it and women outside of discourse. Stevens continually returns to the theme of the mother, to a woman who guides him through the layers of language and infuses his imagination with the ability to find the real in the unreal, but at the same time he buries her. He struggles with the initial forgotten exile of the mother that renders unsatisfactory the masculine discourse mythically based on the father. That Stevens senses this is evident in his poetry, but seen through the speculum Irigaray provides, his struggle is exposed. Irigaray attempts to cure and alter masculine discourse by exposing the woman that it has continually covered over and buried alive.

In a sense, Stevens and Irigaray are on similar quests; it may be surmised that Stevens is only limited by his time and place. Thus, it is also the nature of Irigaray’s work that makes her extremely appropriate to juxtapose to Stevens: rather than criticize and coldly interpret, she dialogues with the masculine subject. In her early works like Speculum of the Other Woman, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, and This Sex Which Is Not One, she playfully and deceptively exposes the methodology through which phallic discourse constructs the feminine as lack and relegates it to the material rather than the active world of culture and society. She argues that society’s murder of the mother entails an appropriation of the generative process in which birth is reconstructed through language, and that afterbirth and amniotic fluid become troublesome, repressed links to the natural world. As Judith Butler explains in her essay on Irigaray, “Bodies that Matter,” the feminine is reduced to the womb, a dark terrifying place, the site of the destruction and dissolution of the self:

“Inasmuch as certain phantasmatic notions of the feminine are traditionally associated with materiality these are specular effects that confirm a phallogocentric project of autogenesis” (149). In other words, the mother is necessary but forgotten. The womb is necessary but also forgotten as the masculine subject creates himself through language. He creates a sort of language-body that will not fall victim to the destructive powers of the phallic mother. The feminine is present in language as that which must be elided; it is represented as an abstraction, a disparate entity that cannot be accounted for in masculine discourse, as the ethereal and mysterious, or as the material world. As she exposes the unconscious fantasies driving the writers she deconstructs, Irigaray’s writing style is also consistently poetic.

In other works, Irigaray adopts the voice of the unrepresented woman she is attempting to unveil. She strives in works like The Marine Lover of Frederich Nietzsche, Elemental Passions, and The Forgetting of Air of Martin Heidegger to create an equal but different voice, which also becomes the voice of a lover. Through new relationships between the sexes, Irigaray demonstrates that there will be no cure for masculine language if the sexes are not “face-to-face” in difference; it is not enough to incorporate male and female into an androgynous whole. In Sexual Subversions, Elizabeth Grosz explains the exclusiveness of the deceptively equalizing gesture of androgyny:

In complementarity (such as the advocates of androgyny, on the one hand, and conservative proponents of the sanctity of the nuclear family, on the other hand, illustrate), one term is taken as given, in need of completion or complementarity, while the other is regarded only insofar as it serves to satisfy this need. (105)

For Irigaray, then, any arguments for an androgynous revision of the relations between the sexes are invalid because they inevitably favor the masculine subject. Irigaray does, however, imagine a complementary relationship when she discusses the notion inspired by Emmanuel Levinas of “face to face,” but this type of true complementarity can only be achieved if female subjectivity is allowed into discourse.^[10] Thus, Irigaray and Stevens are linked in the likenesses of their strivings, and they seem to evolve together when they are put “face-to-face.” Strikingly, Stevens not only uses the very term “face to face” in “Notes,” he also turns to the angel, as does Irigaray, as the being through which the boundary between the real and the imaginary and men and women can be reimagined. Stevens as poet is uniquely able to see beyond the stable and “fictional” constructs of language. As he treats the feminine lovingly or cruelly, he lays his psyche bare, and in so doing provides insight into the unconscious of Western culture, which Irigaray would not only suggest covers over the feminine but is the feminine. Stevens’ poetry is an excellent staging ground for the major tenets of

Irigaray’s feminist epistemology. Irigaray, as feminist philosopher, is the most appropriate guide for understanding Stevens’ need to return to the feminine.

Irigaray’s writings are difficult to summarize because they evade any notions of the typical. As she attempts to find a space for the female voice in discourse, she departs from usual methods. Irigaray draws widely from the patriarchal tradition of philosophical concepts for sources to dismantle, but she often cites neither the author or the work directly. For instance, while Irigaray is most profoundly influenced by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, directly attacking his theory of female subjectivity (or lack of it), she rarely mentions him directly.^[11]Since Irigaray is herself first a psychoanalyst, her method is to psychoanalyze every facet of phallic discourse, from religious and cultural laws, to myth, philosophy and psychoanalysis itself. Like Kristeva, she attempts to uncover the maternal that acts as material substratum for all of patriarchy’s constructs. As Grosz explains, however, while Kristeva uses psychoanalysis to “understand the speaking subject, Irigaray uses it to articulate a culturally (rather than psychically) produced unconscious, a repression in texts, knowledge and institutionally regulated practices” (102). Through Lacan’s concepts, Irigaray psychoanalyzes the imaginative and the creative works of societyÊwith an ear for the silencing of the female voice.

What follows, then, is only an outline of Irigaray’s major concerns, influences, and objectives. The depth of her undertaking will become clearer in later chapters when I interpret Stevens’ poetry through her. Here, I will only introduce the concepts that are the foundation of her system. For instance, Irigaray examines Freud’s theory of sexual development, which is the basis of Lacan’s theories. Throughout her works, she continually returns to Freud’s notion of the death drive which seems to epitomize the male subject’s troublesome relation to the mother. While I will examine this concept below, it will become clearer when I interpret in a later chapter the death drive as it appears in Stevens’ early and great poem “Sunday Morning.” I will also, in the following pages, attempt to provide a very condensed version of her first major work Speculum of the Other Woman in order to illustrate her method of deconstructing the patriarchal touchstones of Western discourse. Most importantly, I will introduce her theory of how the feminine becomes figured as secondary, an inadequate reflection of the masculine, and how this figuration is projected onto real women in society. To understand Irigaray’s philosophy, it is first necessary to be familiar with her use of Lacan’s concept of the imaginary, which she elaborates in Speculum of the Other Woman. The imaginary, or unconscious fantasies, that drive masculine discourse is based on the male body. In addition, the masculine imaginary’s creationsÊÐ myth, philosophy, and poetryÊÐ depend on a return to the maternal body of woman. In her indispensable study of Irigaray, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Margaret Whitford explains that Irigaray looks “for the unconscious phantasies that haunt discourse” (34). The feminine emerges, as it clearly does in Stevens’ canon, as something with which the male writer seems to be obsessed. This is, not surprisingly, the mother. For Irigaray’s portrayal of the unconscious fantasies that manifest in the creative works of society, she is indebted to Lacan’s account of the mirror stage and its role in the formation of subjectivity. In the mirror stage, Lacan argues, the development of the child’s ego is dependent on its identification with an image of itself seen in a mirror:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipationÊÐ and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedicÊÐ and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (4)

The subject’s identity is self-imposed and fictional. The fragmentation the child senses is appeased only by the validation of wholeness its reflected image allows. According to Irigaray, all of Western discourse is structured around a subject like the fictional ego and is founded on the sort of specularization that Lacan, and Freud before him, propose. Through discourse, the male subject then projects his ego on to the world. As Whitford explains, the world becomes “a mirror which enables him to see his own reflection wherever he looks” (34). Lacan acknowledges that the infant is supported by something as it gazes into the mirror. However, Irigaray assumes that this “something” is probably the mother. In This Sex Which Is Not One, she likens woman to that part of the mirror which allows the image to be clearly reflected: “those components of the mirror that cannot reflect themselves: its backing, its brilliancy” (151). Woman is the support for the processes of the male imaginary but is herself not represented. She is not even seen as the male creates a fiction of identity that not only alienates his mother, but also alienates him from himself.

In Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, Elizabeth Grosz explains that the imaginary is “a psychical projection of the body, a kind of map of the body’s psychosocial meaning” (43). The ego, or that part of the psyche that controls thoughts and behavior and mediates external reality, is for Lacan the product of the internalization of otherness (43). The ego is based on a dialectic in which the other, the mother, is consumed by the self. Central to Irigaray’s concerns, however, is the manner in which “the imaginary” is reflected in creative works, including psychoanalytical works. Margaret Whitford states that “the Freudian account of the (bodily) ego and its relation to more intellectual activities in (unconscious) Phantasm is explicitly assumed by Lacan under the explanatory concept of the imaginary” (65). What Freud describes as unconscious phantasy, Lacan describes as imaginary. So, as Irigaray psychoanalyzes Freud in Speculum, she also psychoanalyzes Lacan; she shows their complicity in misunderstanding the differences between the sexes as she illustrates the arbitrariness of symbolic law.

Irigaray demonstrates that both Lacan’s theory of the formation of the masculine imaginary and Freud’s notion of the structure of ego-development exclude the female sex. In the first section of Speculum, she reveals that Lacan is thinking of a male child when he devises the mirror stage: “the specular conditions do not work in such a way as to allow a play of couples [. . .] They are signs of a specular process / trial which favors a flat mirror as most apt to capture the image, the representation” (77). As the title of Irigaray’s work suggests, a flat mirror does not reflect the female sex organs, which would be invisible to it, and so, under this gaze, the female sex is non-existent or lacking. Returning to Freud, Irigaray notes that he excludes the female through his notion that in the childish imaginary the production of a child is equated with the production of feces. Therefore since Freud’s model of sexuality is male, and the fantasies anal, the role of women in childbirth is again not recognized. As Irigaray argues, the subject must master production or reproduction:

Therefore, in place of the feces [. . .] will be substituted the image, the specular production-reproduction [. . .] The mirror will idealize the product that it has introduced both into the field of optics and into an economy of reproduction. (95)

According to Irigaray, Freud’s anal stage continues to underlie his theories as he finds it necessary to master reproduction. As Whitford explains, “sexuality and thinking, in an imaginary operation, have become equated both with each other and with one and the same bodily activity” (66). The “hole” in the theories of sexual development is that woman is displaced by the theories of sexuality Freud can master. Freud creates a model of development, but Irigaray argues that he only adapts an already existent imaginary, merely confirming concepts of feminine passivity and validating the repression of women that he, as masculine subject, requires. This Freudian model is in turn adopted by Lacan.

While Irigaray’s concept of the imaginary is informed by Lacan’s, she departs from him when she genders her version. For Irigaray, the imaginary is either male or female. Like the idealized male body, the male imaginary is characterized by unity, solidity, and linearity. The female imaginary is pluralistic and fluid. Since the imaginary is an unconscious and invisible structure that can be viewed externally in myth or in other works of the imagination, it becomes important to the development of gendered cultural production for Irigaray to reveal a female imaginary. Such arguments concerning a “female” imaginary have led to accusations of essentialism by many critics, but rather than prescribing for the feminine some irrational voice, as would the masculine, essentialist imaginary, Irigaray attempts to claim a voice that has eluded definition.

As Irigaray stresses the visible aspects and mythic creations of the imaginary, the mirror stage becomes secondary in importance for her. Whitford notes as she traces the sources for Irigaray’s particular concept of the imaginary, that the term is also found in the works of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who writes in Air and Dreams, “thanks to the imaginary, imagination is essentially open and elusive” (1). The imaginary, for Bachelard, is not fixed in reality: “we could say that a stable and completely realized image clips the wings of the imagination” (2). In both The Marine Lover of Friederich Nietzsche, and The Forgetting of Air of Martin Heidegger, Irigaray takes her cue from Bachelard and focuses on an element, like air or water, that Western philosophers seem to overlook or fear, likening it to the silenced woman or the feminine. Knowledge cannot be obtained objectively or without the distortion of the imaginary until the preference for a particular element, for example earth over water, is overcome. Although Irigaray is influenced by the malleability of Bachelard’s imaginary, she argues that there can never be a separation of knowledge from the imaginary, and that the supposed “Universal” of psychoanalysis and philosophy is male. In Sexual Subversions, Elizabeth Grosz argues that in the symbolic order, through which the imaginary is exposed, “women take up a place [. . .] only as variants of men” (126). Thus, the symbolic will also need to be altered.

After psychoanalyzing the psychoanalysts, Irigaray moves to the philosophers. In This Sex Which Is Not One, she explains that since philosophy is the foundation of Western discourse and that psychoanalysis is within the boundaries of philosophy it is absolutely necessary to start from the beginning:

The philosophical order is indeed the one that has to be questioned, and disturbed, inasmuch as it covers over sexual difference. Having failed to provide an adequate interpretation of the sway philosophical discourse holds over all the rest, psychoanalysis itself has committed its theory and practice to a misunderstanding of the difference between the sexes. Psychoanalytic practice and theory certainly pose a challenge to philosophical discursivity, but they still might be reincorporated into it to a large extent ÐÊas indeed they are ÐÊif it were not for the ‘question’ of female sexuality. So it is both because psychoanalysis still constitutes a possible enclave of philosophical discourse [. . .] that I have wanted this ‘dialogue’ with a male philosopher. (160)

In other words, she demonstrates that psychoanalysis, rather than being radical, merely repeats ideas that have been in existence since antiquity. Decidedly, the conversation she establishes with the philosophers is the most unique feature of her work. In This Sex, she writes that her plan is to “have a fling with the philosophers” (150). This word choice is important as she attempts to insert a woman into discourse who is not reduced to the maternal. To dismantle the linguistic structures of the philosophers, she lovingly manipulates their texts. She is also not bound by time, space, or chronology. In Speculum, for instance, she works backwards to show the repetition of “sameness” on which phallic systems are based.

Just as Irigaray is both indebted to Lacan and critical of him, she is also highly indebted to Jacques Derrida as well as critical of him. Indeed, her major tenets depend on the “destabilization” of the system of binary opposites for which Derrida is responsible (Grosz 27). Western metaphysics is based on a system of binary oppositions, such as good / bad, mind / matter, man / woman. As Elizabeth Grosz explains in Sexual Subversions, the opposed terms are not equal: “one term occupies the structurally dominant position and takes on the power of defining its opposite or other” (27). These terms are simply positives and negatives of each other, but “the first term is given the privilege of defining itself and of relegating to the other all that is not it.” According to Grosz, Derrida demonstrates “that the positive term gains its privilege only by disavowing its intimate dependence on its negative double: far from identity or presence generating difference or absence through negation, they can be seen as vitally dependent on their opposites in ways that cannot be acknowledged.”

Recognizing that these identities depend on the difference of the other makes arbitrary the privileged side. While Irigaray focuses on sexual difference to bring out the subordinate term and uses it as a way to argue for women’s subjectivity, Derrida often refers to difference, or diffŽrance, as another name for woman and uses woman as a trope for writing. In Gynesis, Alice Jardine suggests further that for Derrida, the “hymen” is a signifier of undecidability and woman a metaphor for “that which dances across the secure territories of truth, unsettling them” (191). Derrida, much like Stevens in his poetry, attempts to lead readers beyond sexual identity. Whitford notes, however, that while while Derrida sees “man and woman” as “effects of the play of difference,” Irigaray sees Derrida as colonizing woman’s space (128). Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysical identity has had the effect of disconnecting the deconstructor from embodiment. Either sex, as Whitford explains, could adopt “masculine or feminine” categories, and women who are still less in the patriarchal society are once again “elided” (129). If to enter philosophy as a woman means leaving embodiment behind, this is yet another form of exclusion. Women’s bodies and sex are once again excluded.

Derrida was not the first philosopher, of course, to note the arbitrariness of categories of sex and their connection to the Pythagorean table of opposites. In the introduction to her seminal work, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that the duality of self and other is as old as humanity’s need to understand its place in the world: “the category of the Other,” she writes, “is as primordial as consciousness itself” (xxviii). While most ancient cultures display a fundamental duality in their mythologies, this has not always been expressed as a division of male and female. While these divisions were not always gendered, masculinity became the universal defining category; the feminine came to represent the negative half of the dichotomy, all of the weaker, inessential elements opposed to the masculine, essential ones. With masculinity as the One, the privileged form in this system of representation, femininity is the Other.

Although Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference differs greatly from de Beauvoir’s, it is helpful and accurate to suggest that thinking of woman as the Other in feminist terms is owed to de Beauvoir. Her work falls short, however, because steeped as her writing is in the often misogynistic phenomenology of Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir believes that sexual difference should be ignored and that freedom is a disembodied and gender-neutral transcendence. In The Ethics of Eros, Tina Chanter writes that de Beauvoir is problematic because she suggests that women must overcome their materiality by identifying with masculine ideals and aspirations (48-49). For Irigaray, reimagining and acknowledging sexual difference is of the utmost importance. Rather than playing with the foundations of symbolic discourse as they are, she believes that just as the imaginary is changeable so are these laws.

Irigaray argues that woman is not represented by the feminine Otherness created by the system of binary oppositions and adhered to by de Beauvoir. As defined in masculine discourse, woman is, according to Irigaray, “other of the same,” not simply Other but the being onto which the onerous aspects of masculine existence are projected in order to be transcended. With Freud’s notion of the unconscious to guide her, Irigaray claims that “other of the same” is a metaphor for the cultural position of femininity (Grosz 107). The symbolic order of discourse, she suggests, is hom(m)osexual (with play on the French word homme) inasmuch as it favors the male sex and represses the female. In this economy, the masculine can exist only with others who are modeled on himself and are his mirror reflections (Grosz 107). According to Grosz, it is possible to regard women as not having the masculine privilege of unconscious fantasies because they are, in effect, the unconscious. Rather than come to terms with her origin or her death drive, woman must adopt the characteristics of the complementary other. She must represent origin and tend to the death drive for the masculine subject. Woman is, therefore, objectified, and, in a Marxist fashion, is exchanged as a commodity within this masculine economy between men. The result of the Oedipus complex for her is to be moved from being daughter to being mother, from her father’s house, to her husband’s. She does not desire because, as object of desire, she is not allowed to; she is the object through which the masculine subject is reunited with the mother and the object through which the masculine subject safeguards the fiction of his wholeness.

The “other of the same,” which functions in a system of sameness Irigaray exposes, is based on the male body and the appropriation of the generative process of the female. In Speculum, as she weaves her way back to Plato, Irigaray attempts to undo what Whitford calls the “founding gesture” (102) of Western philosophy located in Plato’s cave myth from Book VII of the Republic. As Whitford explains, Plato’s myth exemplifies the most important act of philosophy: “the downgrading of the body, allocated symbolically to women, and the effects of this: the split between ideal and material, sensible and intelligible” (102). In other words, Plato’s need to favor an ideal world over the real world becomes the idea on which Western philosophy is based. This idea is restated, for instance, as Descartes’ cogito. Another important act generated by the cave myth is the relegation of women to appearance, non-truth, and all of the other forms of otherness woman signifies in philosophy. Irigaray exposes the primacy of specular philosophy that depends on what it can seeÊÐ on its projectionsÊÐ in order to establish Universal truths.

The ideal world, indeed Plato’s entire epistemology, is based on the morphology of a whole male body that may be seen; anything that cannot be seen does not exist. In Plato’s ideal birth, man is torn from the womb / cave, his eyes turned perpetually toward the sun or the seen.^[12] The world is Other in the sense that it is a copy, but the cave is the “truly Other,” what Irigaray calls the “other of the other” because, as Whitford explains, its materiality does not figure in either the ideal or sensible world (104). In Speculum, Irigaray argues that everything is reduced to a sameness that all men can see, comprehend, and reduce to their common language:

nothing can be named as ‘beings’ except those same things which all the same men see in the same way in a setup that does not allow them to see other things and which they will designate by the same names, on the basis of the conversation between them. Whichever way up you turn these premises, you always come back to sameness. (263)

In language, then, woman either eludes representation or she is objectified and identified only in reference to man. She is not represented as a woman but as not-man. Her apparent (specular) lack (of a sex) represents her symbolic weakness in Plato’s imaginary and the Western imaginary of which Plato is the father. With no access to language, woman is a symbol for various forms of otherness in masculine discourse from non-truth to nothingness and death.

Essentially, the womb, a synechdoche for woman, is a container and the material support for the creations of the masculine imaginary. More importantly, as woman is reduced to the maternal and repressed, the masculine subject takes over and incorporates the female leaving woman outside the scene of creation. Irigaray explains that in Plato’s conception, the mother is responsible for inadequate copies of the ideal and perfect world created by the father:

Real ‘nature’ is unveiled on the path up to the heavens, not on the track back into the earth. The mother. That place connected still with artful conception, haunted by magicians who would have you believe that . . . The cave gives birth only to phantoms, fakes, or, at best, images . . . Engendering the real is the father’s task, engendering the fictive is the task of the mother Ð that ‘receptacle’ for turning out more or less good copies of reality. (300)

The real world, and the natural birth that also symbolizes the unavoidable death of the subject, must be repressed, but Irigaray insists that the maternal cannot be and is not really excluded because man, inevitably, cannot engender alone. The maternal has been subsumed by the masculine.

This exclusion of the material, and maternal, from phallic constructions leads to the complicated psychoanalytical theory of the death drive that seems to establish in social models a foundation of violence and destruction. Ultimately, women represent death for men because in the psychoanalytical model they represent castration. As Whitford explains in “Irigaray, Utopias, and the Death Drive,” since the ego is based on a fiction of wholeness, “death is that which fragments, castrates, and separates Ð it is the fear of fragmentation or annihilation against which the ego defends itself” (390). Castration as dismemberment represents the death of the subject, but the death drive can also be interpreted as the drive toward an imaginary and lost wholeness with the mother. This complex amalgamation of death and creativity is attributed to woman and makes her a source of ambivalence. As a category, the feminine makes death comprehensible. Whitford explains that the female subject, then, dwells in death without ever really dying as the male subject protects himself against fragmentation by locating death in woman (390). She preserves his unity as she does his rationality by being other.

Therefore, the masculine subject is drawn to the feminine by desire. In Lacan and Literature: Purloined Pretexts, Ben Stoltzfus explains that the subject desires the mother but creates imaginative works because this union is forbidden and because through creation, he can delay his death:

The goal of the subject’s desire is to meld once again with the mother but the law forbids it. This 'death’ of the subject that submits to the greater power of the Symbolic has as its consequence the fragmentation of the self and its alienation into language and fabulation. Despite this symbolic death the desire of the organism to live and to die in its own way and in its own time persists. Writing, speaking, reading, playing, and living are thus an affirmation of life as a deferral of death. (13)

Focusing on death rather than life, however, continually separates the masculine subject from the object of his desire. Irigaray psychoanalyzes the death obsession in society, but she also argues that woman must have access to her own death drive and desire. To escape the dialectic that forces the appropriaton of the Other by the self, Irigaray envisions a “face to face” relation between the sexes. She suggests the sexes should greet each other with wonder so that they will continually be new and prevent a fixed and objectifying relation from taking hold.

Wallace Stevens clearly anticipates Irigaray’s belief that the language used to describe the relations between the sexes and the imagined world and the world of reality should be free-flowing. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray finds a source for altering the dialectic within which the sexes perceive each other, ironically, in Descartes who describes a first encounter with an object as one of surprise and wonder. She writes, “wonder marks a new place, and the movement of the spirits tends toward this new place of inscription to strengthen and conserve it” (77). Wonder is a “purely cerebral impression” that does not change anything to “positive or negative” (78). Like Irigaray, Stevens senses the need for this wonder as well as the power of the feminine to disrupt the symbolic. In the following chapters, I will explore Stevens’ struggle with the feminine through Irigaray’s works and the major roles she argues the feminine plays in the masculine imaginary. I will first examine the role of woman as the substratum for works of the imagination as this is perfectly demonstrated in Stevens’ early poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier” (chapter two). I will then look at woman as a device as well as representative of the ambivalent relation to the maternal that is evident in “Sunday Morning” (chapter three). This third chapter will also encompass my major discussion of the death drive although this “instinct” is an underlying one in most of the poems I analyze. Through Stevens’ celebrated poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” I will then illustrate Irigaray’s concept of woman as “other of the other,” “other of the same,” and as object of exchange between men (chapter four). And I will end my study, as Irigaray and Stevens conclude their works, with a discussion of the face-to-face relation between the sexes and the angel as it appears in both their works (chapter five). I forego a conclusion because, like Irigaray and Stevens, I feel that a new relation between the sexes must remain in the process of becoming. Thus, I hope as an epilogue this chapter will shed light on further areas of study.

“Concealed imaginings”: Stevens, Irigaray, and the Body of Susanna

And they said then, “But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

As Mary Arensberg and Harold Bloom before her note, much of Stevens’ early poetry from “To the One of Fictive Music” to “The Idea of Order at Key West” is characterized by a “muse-attachment.”^[13]That is, the poet tries to articulate otherness through a relation to the muse. In “Peter Quince at the Clavier” (1915) Stevens creates one of his most erotic muses in the figure of Susanna. As is typical for Stevens, “Peter Quince” is a poem about poetic creation, but it is retold through the Apocryphal story of Susanna and the elders, the story of the attempted rape of Susanna by the elders, her trial for adultery, and her vindication through Daniel. Although most critics focus on the poem’s structure and musical allusions, Stevens also envisions the primal scene of origin, or perhaps of all creation, where, according to Arensberg, a “brief glimpse of female sexuality” (32) leads to the discovery of truth. While “Peter Quince at the Clavier” illustrates only one of three uses of the feminine Arensberg sees in Stevens’ poetry, it can serve to portray many of Irigaray’s major points and to introduce the themes that would preoccupy Stevens throughout his poetic of career.

“Peter Quince at the Clavier” is obviously wrought in a framework of “sameness” as Stevens gestures toward patriarchal figures and texts. Borrowing for his poet / creator the name “Peter Quince” from the stage manager in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stevens beckons his poet-father Shakespeare and, like Shakespeare, links eroticism to imaginative creation. In addition, Stevens’ use of the Apocryphal story as the illustrative device through which he reimagines the drama of the creative process is another gesture to patriarchal authority. In the Apocrypha, Susanna, wife of Joakim, a wealthy Babylonian, is accused of adultery by two elder judges who, presiding over cases at her husband’s house, have spied on her in her garden and lusted after her. They scheme to force her to have sex with them one evening when Susanna is bathing. When she refuses them, they accuse her of adultery. The townspeople believe the judges and allow them to sentence Susanna to death. The young judge Daniel, however, arrives on the day she is to be killed and condemns the people for convicting Susanna without proof. He separates the elders, questions them, and proves that they have lied about her. The elders are then put to death. Significantly, the story in the Apocrypha ends not with praise for Susanna’s fidelity but with Daniel’s celebrity and reverence for law. Clearly, female sexuality is the center of the narrative, but the woman is elided in the process of judgment, making creation an exchange between the male players in the drama. Stevens repeats this elision in the final section of his poem: Susanna is abandoned while the metaphorical music of her sexuality is lifted to the realm of the symbolic where it plays on “the clear viol of her memory” making a “sacrament of praise” (74). In “Musing on Susanna’s Music,” Mary Nyquist argues that viol also connotes the “vial”: “Susanna is contained by the poem as a reproducible verbal artifact” (326). In other words, the appropriation of her subjectivity and sexuality allows the masculine imaginary to give birth to its own creations.

Stevens mimics the Apocryphal story’s objectified and displaced use of Susanna in his poem, but as muse, she also serves to mediate the real and the imaginative worlds. Her body allows a return to the eternal feminine that represents the source of creativity and poetry. As representative, Stevens’ poem “Peter Quince” reveals woman as Irigaray defines her within the masculine imaginary. Susanna is silenced in Stevens’ poem, as she is in the Apocryphal story. The poem also perfectly illustrates Irigaray’s argument that the masculine imaginary’s creations are specularly based. As Nyquist suggests, desire “becomes associated with the mind’s as well as the body’s eye” (313). That is, although Stevens tries to articulate desire through the sound of music, he resorts to articulating it through the effects of gazing at Susanna. Furthermore, she is unrepresented and is used, finally, as a symbol for death or for the transcendence of it both in the Apocrypha and in the affirming last stanzas of Stevens’ poem. The “constant sacrament of praise,” as Stevens calls Susanna’s music, is the music of the cycles of life and death through which he attempts to overcome the stifling binarism that separates the real and the imaginary. His use of woman, however, proves he is still ensnared in this system. While the world he imagines is a progression from the Platonic Forms, Stevens demonstrates the need to project death onto the body of woman. As Irigaray explains in Speculum, “Woman will assume the function of representing death (of sex/organ), castration, and man will be sure as far as possible of achieving mastery, subjugation, by triumphing over the anguish (of death)” ( 27). The creation of the poem is a deferral of death, for the poet gazes at the eternal, or maternal, feminine, but he does not dwell there and therefore lose the subjectivity he has gained by his original separation from it. The poet enters Susanna’s walled garden and sex only metaphorically, which perpetuates the rift. The desire for sexual union creates the poem but is continually repressed: woman becomes only the material support for an idea.

The eternal feminine is present at the beginning of the poem as, seated at his instrument, Quince begins to play his imaginative flight on the clavier. Blue is Stevens’ color for the imagination in later works like “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (published in 1937), so the wearer of “blue-shadowed silk” is here the muse. Arensberg suggests that his personification of the muse through Susanna is a “double vision” of Stevens’ interior paramour (29), a “real” muse as well as a vision of the anima Stevens often evokes. The woman he imagines at the beginning of the poem is an abstraction. She is obscured because she exists in a world beyond language that the poet can only access through a conflation of thought and music:

Just as my fingers on these keys

make music, so the self-same sounds

on my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

And thus it is that what I feel,

Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,

Is music. (72)

Nyquist points out that Stevens “strives after another condition” when he attempts through music to reach beyond language (312). However, as poet he must return to the tools of his trade. For instance, Stevens uses analogy and a real woman to embody his muse. As proprietor of a world existing before language, a truly poetic world, Susanna is the poet Quince would like to be.

As Irigaray suggests, the muse, whether internalized or projected, is a mirror of and for the male poet. Stevens constantly opposes the internal and the external as he then articulates his ineffable and primitive desire through the retelling of the Apocryphal myth and the musical expression through which Stevens tries to expand his metaphorical world. In Musing the Obscure, Ronald Sukenick calls the poem “a key board [sic] impromptu in which each of the four sections resembles a’movement’ whose metrical tempo helps set its mood” (69). The first section introduces the metaphor of music and desire; the second and third musically portray the drama of Susanna and the Elders; in the fourth, a poem is created after the poet has left the garden scene. The piece is played both on and by the characters as each is represented by an instrument, given an instrument, or, in the case of Susanna, is music personified.

The musical metaphors at the end of the first section take Quince out of the abstract and into a sensual expression of his desire for the muse. As Quince’s dream unfolds, he is represented by the “red-eyed elders,” who, by the end of the first section, are in the garden watching Susanna (72). His ideal desire becomes “like the strain / Waked in the elders by Susanna”; their erotic gaze makes “The basses of their beings throb/ In witching chords” (72). Stevens distinguishes between the “bass” and “bawdy” desire of the elders and the idealized desire of the poet, but in either case, through conflating types of desire, he subverts the traditional notion of the muse (74).^[14] Peter Quince, like the elders, wants to ravish his muse, an intriguing but necessary reaction to the Other according to Irigaray:

“The other must therefore serve to mirror the one, reduplicating what man is assumed to know already as the place of (his) production. ‘She’ must be only the path, the method, the theory, the mirror, which leads back, by a process of repetition, to the recognition of (his) origin for the’subject’” (23).

In other words, Susanna as muse mirrors Quince the poet and allows him to see his origin.

As a means through which Quince can become the poet the muse represents, Stevens equates Quince’s and the elders’ desire for Susanna. That is, he imagines a sensible union with the muse to take the place of the ideal one. Muse made flesh, Susanna is a ready metaphor for the poet’s attempt to represent the symbolic return that is necessary for the symbiotic reunion between man and woman which will fuse self and other and create a primordial whole. Desire makes the elders’ “thin blood / Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna” (72); sensuality is raised to the level of the mythic or transcendent, or at least opens a door to it. For instance, Quince’s gaze on the eternal feminine in the poem is framed by “songs” of transcendence. Susanna is poised delicately between the poet’s allusion to God in the first section and Quince’s final revision of god-like immortality in the last.

Interestingly, the largest section of the poem, or movement of the piece, is devoted to the poet’s description of Susanna in her bath, a solipsistic image of female sexuality. Susanna unknowingly evokes the desire at the center of the creative process; however, the image Stevens creates opens itself to further symbolization. Susanna represents the suggestion of sexual union with the muse. Contained as she is by the walls of her garden, she represents the female sex organ, or more precisely for the masculine imaginary, the womb. The mystery that is the female sex, the dark continent as Freud calls it, is beautifully captured by Stevens’ enigmatic description of Susanna:

In the green water, clear and warm,

Susanna lay.

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed,

For so much melody. (73)

Fluid, “feminine” symbolism abounds in the scene of otherness. Susanna is silent, a part of the water in which she bathes, inseparable from her garden. She is Other as she appears to possess secrets expressed in a language impossible to translate except through Quince’s poetic devices. She “speaks” outside of language so that it is necessary for the male poet to articulate for her. According to Nyquist, Stevens represents Susanna “as someone who appears to enjoy the fullness and simplicity of a prelapsarian kind of self-originating desire” (313). She is perhaps being itself at this instance, but more specifically, Susanna is a floating signifier (313). Using Claude Levi-Strauss’ term, Nyquist does not suggest that Susanna means nothing, but since she represents nothing she is “free simply, erotically, to be” (314). She can reflect, then, whatever Quince requires her to reflect. The musical references and the language throughout the section refer to her sex and to her self-pleasure: “she stood / In the cool of spent emotions [. . .] She walked upon the grass, / Still quavering” ( 73 ). Susanna’s autoeroticism provides a literary echo for Irigaray’s definition of the female sex in This Sex Which Is Not One: woman’s sex is “already twoÊÐ- but not divisible into one(s)ÊÐ that caress each other” (24). The female sex is self-sufficient, and also, to return to the mirror, unseen. Thus, as Susanna touches herself, she is completely representative of otherness. Since she is a construction of the symbolic order, she is not a subject but is meant to be an object of pleasure through which men touch themselves.

Susanna remains in the garden as Quince makes the essential movement towards the creation of his poem. He must repress his desire for the mother/muse. To make it apparent that in the subconscious of language the need for a continual return to the eternal feminine negates true sexual fulfillment, the poet prevents a union with the muse violently and noisily. Susanna’s revery is interrupted by the crash of cymbals and “roaring horns” which represent the lustful invasion of the elders (73). The sensible world invades the ideal world of the imagination, and they are once again divided. The elders gaze at Susanna, but she has not been aware of them: “A breath upon her hand / Muted the night. / She turnedÐ” ( 73 ). That Susanna is first kept ignorant of her status as the object of an erotic male gaze reveals that the woman Quince longs for does not exist in reality; she is his creation and an expression of his narcissism.^[15] Stevens’ third section is a brief interlude in which the woman Susanna, made finally aware of her objectification, cries. Susanna’s maids lift their lamps to reveal “Susanna and her shame” (74). The elders’ desire is an assault repeated by the female chorus of the “simpering Byzantines” who flee, closing the scene suddenly and transforming the music of Susanna’s garden into a “noise like tambourines” (74). Stevens awakes from his dream with dramatic stops, writing Susanna out of discourse and himself out of the garden. According to Arensberg, the poet imagines a scene of origin he can only enter symbolically (30).

Stevens’ departure from the primal scene is indeed abrupt, portraying no link other than the metaphoric between the world of the eternal feminine and the structured masculine world.^[16] Quince’s musings turn immediately to universals and to a world in which truth is elusive:

Beauty is momentary in the mindÊÐ

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal. (74)

While Stevens believes that truth is fleeting, he captures it in “the flesh.” The “portal” as opening suggests the female sex or the womb and the truth contained there. In the next stanza, Stevens locates beauty in the cycles of life and does away with the notion of heavenly transcendence by creating his own philosophy of transcendence and, in his own way, conquering death. He writes: “So gardens die, their meek breath scenting / The cowl of winter, done repenting. / So maidens die, to the auroral celebration of a maiden’s choral” (74). Stevens constructs a truth through which he may defer the nothingness of death. Death is creation both in “Peter Quince” and in its companion poem “Sunday Morning,” where death is the mother of beauty.

In the last stanza of the final section of the poem, Stevens transforms the elders’ Apocryphal death into a song of praise for the death he conceives. The link of death and desire develops in the poem as a kind of conceit that transfers death, finally and symbolically, onto Susanna:

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings

Of those white elders; but, escaping,

Left only Death’s ironic scraping. (74)

The music created by Susanna’s solitary presence, an edenic image of the female body in nature, inspires the bold, vulgar lust of the elders. The elders are condemned in the poem as they are in the Apocryphal story, but the death evoked in the poem is simply a reminder of their mortality, not an execution. In “Peter Quince” transcendence is achieved through a symbolic union of poet and muse, self and Other. Through the path of intercourse, the muse ( death / castration ) will be conquered by a demonstration of prowess; immortality will be achieved. But for the poet the result will be far more than psychologically symbolic: he will gain the power to create.

The artist, the male subject, attains his immortality at the expense of Susanna’s personhood, affirming, as Irigaray argues in Speculum of the Other Woman, that woman suffers because she is not symbolized (105). Susanna’s music is immortal, but as an abstraction Susanna is not allowed the transcendence she enables. Irigaray suggests that the male poet suffers in turn for his oversight or over-emphasis on sight. A poet like Stevens suffers in his attempt to expose the real through the feminine because he can only write what he can see (in the structure of language). Irigaray addresses this point in a later work, Elemental Passions: “My child of night, you have known nothing but a cold dark womb, how can I console you? Even your tears are black. They lack the cool candor of liquid, the simplicity of drops of water. They are drowned in ink. In the poison of a bitter knowledge” (23). Stevens, like most modern poets, is aware of language’s inability to communicate the real. Nevertheless, as Irigaray argues, they inevitably create a self and indestructible body for themselves out of words. Later, in Stevens’ more phenomenologically-steeped poetry (1942-1954), he will lament the limited nature of his search for the rational in the irrational. According to Irigaray, his success would be limited precisely because, as in “Peter Quince,” he uses woman as the material for his poetry.

“Sure Obliteration”: Death and the Maternal Body in “Sunday Morning”

Eternity, that is the music of one who senses and fears decline. And, for passing beyond life how busily he is at work at this moment. To leave his body behind and fly away unburdened, isn’t this always and forever the point of his creation?

ÐLuce Irigaray, The Marine Lover of Frederich Nietzsche

As in “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” death and the feminine are inextricably interwined in “Sunday Morning,” another Harmonium poem written at about the same time.^[17] The two poems examine the same themes, and Harold Bloom calls “Peter Quince” an “erotic grace note to the greater poem,” (35). Sexuality, creation, and death are again combined in “Sunday Morning,” but their treatment here is not as erotic as it is in “Peter Quince.” In “Sunday Morning,” Stevens wants to master life and death. In addition, he wants to return to the earth the meaning that is taken away by “silent Palestine” and the “grave of Jesus,” the Christian symbols of an other - worldy permanence. Thus meaning emerges from the void created as life and death become the same thing. The woman in the poem is not objectified by a lustful gaze. However, she loses her subjectivity as she becomes the poet’s site for the destruction of the idea of heavenly transcendence. Unlike the poet in “Peter Quince,” the poet of “Sunday Morning” is not halted by female otherness. The subversion of a heavenly paradise for an earthly one is achieved through Stevens’ appropriation of the feminine in the poem. The woman is the material support for Stevens’ creation of a new type of religion and the feminine a trope for his project of demythologization, peeling back the myths of creation to reveal the first idea. As the poem progresses, Stevens adopts the female voice and displaces feminine creative power. He also attempts to usurp divine power of creation and to give birth to himself or a god-man who chants his “boisterous devotion to the sun.” In the seventh section of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens imagines ideal men in whom the human, the earth, and the divine are mingled and for whom reality and the imagination are one.^[18] However, it is the “other” woman, Irigaray’s unrepresented woman in discourse, who is finally revealed at the poem’s conclusion as the dew that represents the point between life and death and persistently clings to the god-man’s feet.

While Bloom claims that the dreaming woman of “Sunday Morning” is the first instance of Stevens’ muse or interior paramour, he notes there is something “curiously embowered” about her (27). That is, although the poem seems to be a woman’s meditations on the meaning of religion, the woman is an aspect of Stevens himself (28). She is an externalized vision of his inner feminine, but she is also representative of something abstract. Stevens imagines the duality of heaven and earth through the immobile woman’s consciousness. He rattles around in her outline, moving through the body and mind of the woman to overturn the Christian hierarchy, or the heliocentric Platonic universe, that separates man from the Earth. By supplanting heaven with an earthly eternal, he attempts to mend the rift he sees in the idea of an otherworldly paradise. The real and maginary worlds are one, not separated as they are now by a “dividing and indifferent blue” sky (54). To return to the idea of woman as muse, the woman performs a function similar to Susanna’s. She represents the unknowable, a mediator between the poet’s world of language and the pre-discursive world. As the feminine and, therefore, counterpoint to all that is rational, Stevens’ muse leads him to realms that he could not reach without her. In “Sunday Morning,” however, in order to return to the earth and to the irrational through a re-valuation of myth, Stevens, like Nietzsche, must also revalue the idea of woman.^[19]

To pursue Bloom’s and many critics’ notion that the woman, Stevens’ muse in the poem, is his anima, or inner feminine, she must also be viewed as internalized and therefore incomplete. That is, she is as much the “woman in the poem” as she is the Virgin Mary in the third stanza or the maidens of the sixth stanza. Stevens does not merely figure woman but the feminine in various manifestations. Stevens’ muse is in shreds as, in her materiality, she is used as anything needed to serve the poet’s creation of himself and his identity.

Merely to illustrate Stevens’ use of the feminine as the material for the creation of his poem, however, would be somewhat facile. Like the Christ’s virgin mother, the woman is only the vessel through which Stevens gives birth to himself and his god-men. Since she enables the birth, the woman is an essential, indeed, primary element of Stevens’ project. However while his emphasis is on the maternal, he reveals his ambivalence towards it as he attempts to get back to the first idea. His proclamation that “Death is the mother of beauty” in the fifth section effectively represses the female body in the poem (55). For example, it is only after death is attributed to the feminine that Stevens’ god-men are born. They are born more from death than woman. Therefore, when Stevens transforms the idea of death into origin, he can also “devise our earthly mothers” (55). As destroyer and creator of life, the maternal in “Sunday Morning” is representative of the “phallic mother,” the masculine fantasy of maternity. As was stated in the introduction, the phallic mother is not a woman or a body at all but the image of an all-powerful completeness towards which the poet is drawn and which he fears at the same time.

I. Savage Sources

The phallic mother is the earth-mother muse, a figure who threatens the male poet with the obliteration of his identity and, of course, recurs in the poetic tradition. In Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1881), for instance, the poet hears his mother whisper the “delicious word death” (168). He imagines the sea as an “old crone rocking the cradle” (182) who fuses “the thousand responsive songs at random” (177) into one and forms his identity: “the sea whisper’d me” (184). Although, Bloom marks Whitman’s poem as “the single poem [. . .] that pervades Stevens’ work” (13), Stevens’ use of sun-imagery and of a Dionysian “savage source” for the god-men in the seventh stanza reveals an equal indebtedness to Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche calls Dionysus a “fighting hero and entangled [. . .] in the net of the individual will” (1001). He represents the earth, air, fire, and water and the end of individuation because individuation is “the origin and prime cause of all suffering.” A representative of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, Dionysus wills his own disappearance so that he can come back (DoumouliŽ 420).^[20] The god annuls the opposition between life and death in order to open the way for a new immortality, as does Stevens in “Sunday Morning.” Dionysus is also both masculine and feminine. Indeed, aspects of Dionysus and the religious rituals surrounding him permeate Stevens’ poem. The emphasis on Spring can be seen as an allusion to Dionysian festivals celebrated between the end of December and the start of Spring (LŽvy 310), and, of course, the orgy of dancing and chanting men evokes the bacchanalian. More importantly, however, it is the emphasis on death as creation and on being mother of one’s self that reveals Nietzsche’s philosophy as the source for Stevens’ poem. “Sunday Morning” is a poetic restatement of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.^[21]In it, Nietzsche glorifies the temporal rather than the eternal and also stresses the importance of an acceptance death:

Indeed, there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators. Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence. To be the child who is newly born, the creator must also be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birth given. (87)

Since an affirmation of death is, indeed, the climax of the work, these lines epitomize the poet’s motivation in “Sunday Morning.” Through death the poet gives birth to himself, and through death he advocates a poetics of temporality that breaks down the illusion of stability that Christianity would sustain. Woman, however, is imprisoned as the poet soars toward freedom.

As Dionysus stands between life and death, he represents, for Luce Irigaray, an ancient struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal religions. In The Marine Lover of Frederich Nietzsche, she argues that when new gods were created, the matriarchy was subsumed under patriarchal law. This struggle, she believes, is evident and still exists in the symbolic economy of discourse. Thus, in “Sunday Morning,” the maternal principle is contained before the god-men are born.

Irigaray discusses the need to project death on to women throughout her work. However, in The Marine Lover, a work that, through Nietzsche, responds to Stevens’ poem, Irigaray shows that Nietzsche’s need to create himself does not result in the subversion of hierarchies; rather, he propagates hierarchy as he starts from a foundation of feminine appropriation. In Marine Lover, Irigaray replies to Nietzsche through the voice of the feminine, a lover who is kept in death as she is exiled from the realm of discourse: “And the fact that your unique necessity is death is what keeps us apart. Whereas you finish all (female things) off by wrapping them in an airy shroud, I leave them open so they can go on breathing” (30). Inserting the feminine into the text in this way, Irigaray both interprets the phallocentric fear of woman evident in their language and opens up a space for women in it.

Becoming master of the self, then, belongs to the realm of fantasy where the phallic mother presides. If woman is represented in the symbolic economy as castrated and, by transference, as castrating, then woman is not represented at all; she is symbolically non-existent: because she is castrated, she represents castration and the threat of nothingness. Thus, woman in her cultural signification as death functions as the site where the void that threatens existence can be overcome through the Other. She occupies an ambivalent position because she tends to death as it is projected on to her, but she is also the visual proof that this lack (or death) is unavoidable. In Marine Lover, Irigaray argues that woman, as the castrated one, is relegated to the role of protecting men from their own death:

Predicatable insofar as she is an object in general, the/a woman remains external to the objective. From this outside position she grounds its economy ÐÊ by being castrated, she threatens castration. Glimpsing that she may sub-tend the logic of predication without its functioning having anything properly to do with her, leads to the fear that she may intervene and upset everything: the death of the subject would be nothingness. A ground rises up, a montage of shapes disintegrates. The horror of the abyss, attributed to woman. Loss of identityÊÐ death. ( 91)

In other words, if woman was allowed into discourse the entire system would crumble. The only death woman experiences is the never-ending death of her subjectivity as she is continually used to support the philosopher’s creation of himself through language. As anything other than the maternal, woman is a threat to masculine identity. As Margaret Whitford observes in “Irigaray, Utopia, and the Death Drive,” “the fantasy of the maternal-feminine, the woman as container [. . .] immobilizes the woman, who is not allowed to come alive or be sexual in other than male terms” (391). Woman is relegated to the maternal. She exists for man and in this position must be repressed before he can gain access to language. In the Platonic model of the cave, for instance, she must be abandoned before the father can give birth to the sun.

Nevertheless, woman is desirable because she is distant, absent, a muse. Like death she is unrepresentable, but she is present as a boundary and an excess. In the masculine fantasy of the phallic mother, she represents a lost wholeness, a place where all desires are satiated. This wholeness, however, also means annihilation. Indeed for Stevens, the union with the mother represents annihilation, a brave symbolic leap, but one he makes after supplanting her creative powers by his own. In “Sunday Morning,” the union with the maternal is also figured as a perennial, sexual union of maidens and young boys. Stevens’ vision, with its emphasis on repetition in the temporal, is indicative of the death drive, which Elizabeth Grosz describes as the “compulsion to repeat” (Jacques Lacan 151). Repetition is a form of control over the maternal body performed symbolically through relations with women, which represent merely a return to the mother and an attempt to attain wholeness. On the other side of death, then, lies sex. Thus in “Sunday Morning,” Death “causes” the maidens to continually “stray” with the boys (55). The drive to repeat also signifies the impossibility of satisfying desire. In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray explains that the need to seek the satisfaction of desire through women is a symptom of the desire to master everything: “the desire to force entry, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his ‘origin’” (25). Woman, Irigaray argues, is merely a tool for the eradification of uncertainty.

The death drive, for Freud the strongest motivating force, is formulated around the maternal body. Like woman, the death drive is contradictory. It disintegrates and it freezes; it breaks things into fragments and prevents fragmentation. Although the ego protects itself from this fear of fragmentation or annihilation, there are aspects of woman that are not represented and thus elude its entrapment; they survive in the symbolic as excess. The self is always pressed by that which it excludes, identified as “the Real” by Lacan or “the abject” by Kristeva. For Kristeva, the abject is that part of the subject which cannot be objectified. In the subconscious, the abject is placed on the side of the feminine opposed to the paternal rule and is associated with the maternal body. The connection of the maternal body to the natural world alienates it from the father’s language. The self, however, cannot deny its corporeal reality and its death and is thus threatened by pressure from these outside forces. For Irigaray, this excess that eludes representation is female desire and female sexuality; man’s identity seems to dep