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

(4.) Christopher Ricks (12-24) persuasively argues that Eliot does not share his readers' perfect confidence that the women's talk is not worth listening to; in the course of making this argument, however, he provides a detailed history of how consistently and vindictively Eliot's readers have understood the lines about women and Michelangelo to confirm what "everyone" knows: women talking about literature must be trivial and fatuous.

(5.) Which should not obscure the considerable self-assertiveness of devoting one half of a two-paragraph review to Eliot's treatment of a female character.

(6.) The writers she names as examples are "Machiavelli, Sir Francis Bacon, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Doctor Samuel Johnson...in a special way different from the admirableness of Wordsworth or of Hawthorne."

(7.) Not only was it her longest and most difficult, but it was also the only long poem of this period that Moore reprinted unchanged in all subsequent collections of her work. There are two commonly conjectured biographical sources for Moore's interest in marriage at that particular time. One is the marriage between her friend Bryher and Robert McAlmon, of which Moore disapproved (see Bergman 248-250 for a discussion of her feelings about the match). The other is a possible proposal to herself from Scofield Thayer, editor of the Dial and Moore's friend and consultant when she took over the editorship (Newlin 220-222).

(8.) I am indebted to John Slatin's reading of the distinct formal periods in Moore's work (esp. 1-17) and to Margaret Holley, who provides a chronology of Moore's publications (195-202).

Reading the poem in this self-reflexive way, I will intersect at certain points with a history of critical readings of "Marriage" as Moore's most "feminist" poem. There are a number of recent critics who read "Marriage" not only as a manifestly critical and ironic consideration of a cherished cultural institution but as Moore's definitive statement on women's oppression by patriarchal culture (see for example Durham [240-41], Keller [228-36], Joyce, and Hogue [95-98]). Such readings tend to sympathize with the poem's Eve and excoriate its Adam. As I will show, the poem does not support an uncritical judgment in Eve's favor; more importantly, reading the poem exclusively as a critique of gendered power cannot account for its almost anarchic interest in linguistic play and texture--for the way the poem moves in and Out of its subject at unpredictable intervals. In order to more fully highlight and investigate these elements, my analysis will treat a critique of social institutions both as one of the poem's sub jects and as its chief figure for Moore's relationship to poetic conventions as themselves "institutions."

(9.) In doing so, my argument will add to an established minigenre of Moore scholarship: descriptions of the strange movement of "Marriage." See for example Bonnie Costello, who writes: "as the language rises and falls, strokes and bites its subject, as Adam's view of Eve is set against her view of him, the poem's dialectical structure shuttles across its linear advance" (175). See also Hadas, who observes