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

(8.) Though such psychoanalytic implications are deducible from Bishop's epiphanies themselves, biographical data confirm them:

These are the facts of Bishop's biography not to be forgotten: her father, William Thomas Bishop, dies eight months after her birth. She moves with her mother to Great Village, Nova Scotia, the home of her maternal grandparents. Her mother is hospitalized several times for mental breakdowns and, in 1916, when Bishop is five, Gertrude Bulmer is permanently institutionalized until her death in 1934. Many years later, in a letter to Anne Stevenson, Bishop wrote simply, "I didn't see her again."

(Wallace 83)

McCabe adds, "Though personal loss is often not explicitly confronted in Bishop's poems, I argue that it pervades them" (95). McCabe rightly supports Kalstone's detection of the "clearly confessional" aspect of Bishop's poems (82), its "autobiographical strength" (citing Kalstone 10). Stevenson adds, "The divisions that tore at Elizabeth Bishop were multiple, but most of them can be traced back to the bleak uncertainties--and some certainties, too--of her early childhood" (17). For exploration of these problems in Bishop's prose, Lombardi's chapter "'In the Village': Madness and the Mother's Body" (192-217) is valuable. Doreski says, "The early death of her father, and the insanity and institutionalizing of her mother, prompted Bishop to explore, even to exploit" a "sense of 'being not quite all there"' (71). Harrison writes of the "terror" of the "confusion of boundaries" in Bishop's work (54), but though "object-relations theories" are said to "hover behind" many of Harrison's readings (16, 213 n13), they a re not foregrounded.

(9.) The earlier quoted Guntrip passage and part of this one are also cited in Layton and Schapiro ("Introduction" 11-12).

(10.) Parker (20) finds here "anxieties over creativity and pregnancy," just as she finds in "The Weed" (see below) terror of both "poetic power" and "pregnancy" (8).

(11.) As Curry points out, however, a fuller exegesis of the poem as a whole reveals in the eventual, ostensibly male bonding with Friday a coded lesbian autobiographical reminiscence that partly counteracts this nightmarish solitude (after "ten stanzas tortuously descriptive of despair" [86]).

(12.) Parker notes that "when we recall how Bishop makes fun of the cloud's and the gull's security, then we might suspect that the unbeliever [...] gains something that in their assurance they miss" (23). Travisano's point that the unbeliever should merely wake up from his incapacitating "timid self-absorption" (48) is too simple; in Bishop's epiphanies dreams tell deep truths.

(13.) Citing "The Fish," "The Prodigal," "Going to the Bakery," and "Sonnet," Goldensohn says, "For the whole of [Bishop's] life, it was worth observing how the world's light fractured into color over oil and water" (81). Doreski calls "The Fish" a "genuine epiphany" but thinks Bishop may have feared that it settled "into sentiment instead of expanding into true wisdom" (41).