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

how Moore extends and retracts, extends and again retracts the feelings of her poem. She will envision a scene, be filled with it, and make us passive in looking at it ... she will then turn against this instinct for beauty and mock it with words that require from us, as well as from her, an active intellectual evaluation. (162)

(10.) Moore added this explanation in 1951, itself an indication of how far away from her combative origins she moved during her career.

(11.) For example, one can trace in such poems as "Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight," "To a Snail," and "In the Days of Prismatic Color" the history of Moore's concern that her delight in invention, compression, and complexity will make her poetry needlessly obscure.

(12.) Cynthia Hogue argues that the struggle for power against which Moore is writing in "Marriage" is women's struggle against "the institution that symbolizes for Moore the hierarchization of the sexes and the concomitant attempt to contain women in marriage and motherhood" (95). Hogue bases her claim that this is a poem of protest against women's subjection on a perceived identity between the narrator and Eve, because they share "linguistic facility" (97), and on a monolithically sympathetic reading of Eve. When the poem notes Eve's "petrine fidelity," for example, Hogue writes:

This model of "petrine fidelity" can see enough of her husband but not of herself. As the etymology of petrine connotes, she is petrified in marriage into "a statuette," "the logical last touch / to an expansive splendor," the decorous objet d'art shaped by an economy of masculine reflexivity. (98)

For this reading to work, however, one has to overlook the meaning of petrine: "of, relating to, or characteristic of the apostle Peter." Thus the poem links Eve's capricious abandonment of her husband to Peter's cowardly betrayal; for Moore, a devout Christian, this is an association it would be impossible to whitewash.

(13.) Adam is not, in this poem, a reliable judge of character, but there is evidence that he is not wholly wrong in this estimation of Eve. See Hadas's persuasive reading of an earlier (1923) version of "Marriage," in which she argues that Moore originally had Eve confuse marriage with an idealized childhood. On the basis of this reading, Hadas asks "Could it be that [Eve's] 'innocent' heart rises with the expectations of what she will get by marriage, by returning to weak dependency? One suspects that Moore certainly thought so" [155].

(14.) My reading of the tone of this passage agrees with Taffy Martin's. She writes: "The poem offers neither a death blow nor an alternative to the institution but a depressing version of half success" (23). To which I would only add that although the portrait of marriage is certainly depressing, I think the adjective does injustice to the energy of the verbal clash.

(15.) Between 1925 and 1929 Moore was editor of the Dial and published no new poetry until "Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play" in 1932.