Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

This porcupine-quilled, complicated starkness-

this is beauty--"a certain proportion in the skeleton which gives the best results."

One is at a loss, however, to know why it should be here,

in this morose part of the earth--to account for its origin at all;

but we prove, we do not explain our birth.

HEATHER CASS WHITE teaches at the University of Rochester. She writes about modern and contemporary American poetry.

NOTES

(1.) There is no pronoun in the poem to indicate that its addressee is male rather than female. Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, however, that

the opening line is taken from a Hardy novel called A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which an earnest young woman writer of a poorish medieval romance finds herself more interested and provoked by her unknown (male) reviewer than in a letter from her apparent fiance.... Using Moore's source makes a palimpsest of a literary and a quasi-romantic relationship. (21)

That the "you" addressed in this context is male seems reasonable to me, given the likely gender of her critics. David Bromwich argues:

Every reader, I think, will feel that the person addressed in this poem is a man ... together with the authority of "bow you out," [the phrase "my flesh beneath your feet"] points to a sexual undercurrent that is apparent throughout the poem. (71)

(2.) My argument with respect to this poem, and to Moore's understanding of conversation generally, has affinities with Robert Pinsky's. Of "To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity," Pinsky writes: "The poem is indeed about conversation that does not take place, words that are withheld, language as a social weapon that goes unused except in Moore's powerful imagination" (14). Pinsky's larger concern is to show that

Repeatedly and characteristically, Moore's poems construct an elaborate social presence that contrives to disguise or protect, just as manners sometimes do in life. Moore's ambivalent attraction toward the idea of communal life expresses itself, then teasingly cancels itself, characteristically, in a conversation that is not conversation. (14)

(3.) See, for example, Cristanne Miller: Moore's poetic

authorizes itself through inclusiveness, an assumed commonality of interest that does not claim universal insight or conclusive knowledge...Moore's poetic is remarkably engaging and interactive, suggesting an aesthetic of correspondence, conversation, and exchange rather than one of mastery. (3, 18)

As we will see, the opposition presumed here between "conversation" and "mastery" is in fact directly at odds with a substantial part of Moore's usage of the term. Robert Pinsky provides a more useful formulation when he writes:

From a feminist perspective, Moore's declining to reproduce something like the social art of conversation in her poems, even parodying that art by an autocratic system of apostrophe and quotation, is a way of refusing the realm stereotypically assigned to women of intelligence and force: polite conversation, the little room in which Jane Austen's heroines must exercise their wills. (21)