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

As the girl reads, the epiphanic motions resume; a rising voice within her precipitates a complementary motion of falling:

came an oh! of pain

Suddenly, from inside,

--Aunt Consuelo's voice-

not very loud or long.

I wasn't at all surprised;

even then I knew she was

a foolish, timid woman.

I might have been embarrassed,

but wasn't. What took me

completely by surprise

was that it was me:

my voice, in my mouth.

Without thinking at all

I was my foolish aunt,

I-we--were falling, falling,

our eyes glued to the cover

of the National Geographic,

February, 1918.

(II. 36-53)

Bishop combines two terrors here: the sensation that the girl is inseparable from her disliked "foolish" aunt (their voices and even their eyes the same) and the sensation of an unstoppable "falling." The feeling of oneness, as a dissolution of separate identities, is a fall, an experience of being whelmed by chaos.

and you'll be seven years old.

I said to myself: three days

I was saying it to stop

The sensation of falling off

the round, turning world

into cold, blue-black space.

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

(11. 54-65)

These lines show that losing one's identity is not the only, or ultimate, horror: being an "I," an ego, a separate entity, is also a fear one scarcely dares to face, for it means being "one of them." The speaker tries to arrest the dissolution of identity into chaos by forcibly recalling her consciousness of being a separate self. Yet limited, discrete selves are likewise revealed to be highly questionable, perhaps contemptible, like her aunt (called "foolish" twice). This is the epiphanic moment when the speaker knows that nothing stranger can ever happen to her.

The mystery of identity, of the terror of its loss and the equal terror of its recapture, remains:

Why should I be my aunt,

or me, or anyone?

What similarities--

boots, hands, the family voice

I felt in my throat, or even

the National Geographic

and those hanging breasts--

held us all together

or made us all just one?

How--I didn't know any

word for it--how "unlikely" [...]

How had I come to be here,

like them, and overhear

a cry of pain that could have

got loud and worse but hadn't?

(II. 76-89)

These lines indicate that her disorientation is complete: the menace of identity-dissolution is incomprehensible, but so is the unexplainable stopping of the cry of pain before it might have overpowered the girl completely. Yet it is this very thought--the thought of utter inexplicability--that finally does overwhelm her, in an epiphanic lateral-and-downward fiery-and-watery plunge:

The waiting room was bright

and too hot. It was sliding

beneath a big black wave,

another, and another.

(II. 90-93)

Although the girl of course does not die (she and her aunt are soon outside in the cold, slushy night), the death-menacing epiphany of a rising of fiery rivulets and a rising voice, followed by a double falling or blacking out, first into blue-black space and then under repeated big waves of blackness, is paradigmatic for all of Bishop's epiphanies. In them, dreadful rounded objects-"and those awful hanging breasts"--will continue to accompany the overpowering vertical and lateral motions. Bishop's paradigm epiphany dramatizes the dread of being either distinguishable or indistinguishable from "family," particularly from the disappointing mother-figures evoked by the "foolish [. . .] woman" Aunt Consuelo and the nightmarish breasts. This double dread is the mysterious, horrifying sensation that Bishop's varied epiphanies poetically convey in all its forms and degrees of psychological recuperation.