"Controlled Panic": Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies

Martin Bidney (mbidney@binghamton.edu) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at State University of new York-Binghamton. He is the author of Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination (1988), Patterns of Ephainany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning (1997), and 70 articles.

Notes

(1.) In "Shelters," Estess finds "The Sandpiper" and "At the Fishhouses" epiphanic (50-51, 53-59), as I do also below. In "Toward the Interior," she agrees with me in finding "The Fish" epiphanic (50), but her remarks on "Cape Breton," aiming to show that "it also demonstrates epiphany, even if in a manner and voice quite understated" (50), are less convincing. Apart from Estess's essays, I find no titles focusing on epiphany in books and articles on Bishop during the last thirty-five years.

(2.) The second and third criteria are borrowed from Nichols 28.

(3.) Bishop's recurrent epiphanic motif of tears owes much to her metaphysical poet-mentor, George Herbert (Powers-Beck).

(4.) Costello uses "mastery" in a purely aesthetic sense, to note devices helping Bishop "master plurality and flux" (5).

(5.) Interestingly, the National Geographic photos reproduced by Powell (173-74) as likely sources for Bishop's poem show two women with wire-wound necks and one with wire-wound neck and lower arm, but the latter's bare breasts are unconstrained.

(6.) Among the most thoughtful and complex interpretations of this poem to date are those of Edelman and Shigley, whose feminist-deconstructive readings show how the lyric performs a "dismantling of binary oppositions" that would make woman "the monstrous creation of the patriarchy" (Edelman 104; see also Shigley 139-40). Powell's excellent study, with its reproduced photos as likely sources for the poem, also suggests "a more overtly 'feminist' vision than is often attributed to Bishop," "a critique of the cultural objectification of women's bodies and of acculturated gender roles" (172). A feminist critique of patriarchies is thus crucial to a complete reading of the poem. Yet maternally related terrors are also not only strikingly present in the poem but--given their obsessive recurrent appearance elsewhere (as in the "cold hard mouth" and "rocky breasts" of "At the Fishhouses," the horrible spawning of polliwoglike island-prisons in "Crusoe's England," the evil witch motif of "Sleeping Standing Up," and t he heartless solid sea that wants one to fall and die in "The Unbeliever")--seem even more central to the deepest levels of Bishop's imaginative feeling throughout her career. Powell, incidentally, brings citations from Rilke into a more general view of the poem's implications of a "polyphrenic self' and a "sacrificed child" (161, 170); this link may suggest parallels between Bishop's and Rilke's fears of dissolution and fragmentation (see Kleinbard passim).

(7.) Diehl, noting that Bishop read Klein's "A Study of Envy and Gratitude" (12), applies Kleinian object relations theory to Bishop's attitudes toward Marianne Moore as "literary mother" (13, 106-10, and passim).