Papers on Language and Literature: Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia in Brazil

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Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia in Brazil

Axelrod, Steven Gould

Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil more or less continuously from 1951 to 1966 and then intermittently to 1971. The country functioned as a necessary escape from the deprived and anxious world of her early childhood in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. Yet her new life was haunted by her past. Although Brazil permitted her to think, to feel, and to experience in ways that were novel for her, that very difference impelled her to reapproach the old, to release from repression some of the memories that had seemed too painful to face in North America. Moreover, Brazil represented a restoration of the comfort she had experienced only fleetingly as a child. The country therefore assumed a complex symbiotic relationship in Bishop's imagination with its climatic, cultural, and psychological opposite, the North Atlantic. In Brazil, Bishop began to construct, for virtually the first time, literary texts that evoked scenes from her Nova Scotian past. Her physical journey south initiated a parallel aesthetic journey north.

Although Bishop had alluded to Nova Scotia in a handful of texts written prior to her arrival in Rio de Janeiro on November 30, 1951,1 she recurrently and at times obsessively reconstructed Nova Scotian landscape and memory in texts written over the next twenty years in Brazil. These include some of her most intense stories and poems. In tropical Rio Bishop found that the summer "mildew" magically transformed itself into the "mildew" of "old books and old papers" and old memories, and that in such an atmosphere her long-lost "Uncle Neddy" might suddenly be "here" ("Memories of Uncle Neddy," Collected Prose 228-29). From places like Petropolis and Ouro Preto she could assert of Nova Scotia so convincingly that we feel it too: "Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it" ("Poem," Complete Poems 176). Freud argued that the homelike and the unhomelike have an eerie tendency to include each other ("The `Uncanny"' 224-- 26). In Bishop's texts the far and the near similarly intertwine in what Thomas Travisano has aptly termed "the homely exoticism of childhood" (168). For the childhood home was never closer, never more familiar, and never more strange than in Brazil.

If Bishop's stay in Brazil was colored by her Nova Scotian memories, the memories were equally informed by the ambiguities of her Brazilian experience. Just as she was somewhat remote as a visitor in Brazil, reluctant to speak Portuguese and to mingle with others (Fountain and Brazeau 178-79), so she was remote as a traveler to her Nova Scotian past, skittish about people, events, motives, and emotions. She wished to conduct her journey back into her psychic landscape as though behind a thick transparent pane, so that she might not see too much or feel too intensely. Renee Curry has suggested that Bishop wished to be "in" but not "of" Brazil2 and in a similar way Bishop wished to visit the past only on certain conditions of mastery and safety. She maintained an almost Hemingwayesque reserve. She wanted to protect her present self-gifted, fragile, and egotistical-- against the encroachment of all environments, geographical or recollected. Although it might be argued that Bishop's lack of intimacy with Brazil and its people reflected a late colonial strategy, it must be noted that she withheld herself from her own personal past in a very similar way.

Homi Bhabha has stated that the object of colonial discourse is "at once an object of desire and derision," arising in part out of both "phobia and fetish" (67, 72). Bishop in effect colonized her past, much as she attempted to colonize and to control her present. Her colonizing urge had less to do with nationality than with opportunity; it was her acquired and habitual method to secure a self that was perpetually threatening to unravel. Although we can easily see that she made remembered people, places, and events into objects of desire, phobia, and fetish, we may find it more difficult to detect derision. Nonetheless, I believe some impulse like derision exists in her drive to miniaturize: for example, the aerial view in "Cape Breton"; the finger-- sized church steeple in "In the Village"; the doll-like cousin, clutching his tiny lily, in "First Death in Nova Scotia"; and finally the entire Nova Scotia landscape reduced to a picture the size of a dollar bill in "Poem."3 In a sense, Bishop's colonial project toward her own past revised and reversed Emily Dickinson's approaches toward the domestic spaces of her childhood. Whereas Dickinson represented herself as "the slightest in the house" (Poem 486), Bishop depicted the houses themselves as small. Whereas Dickinson wrote that the past made the present "mean" (in both senses) (Poem 1498), Bishop implied that the Brazilian present made the Nova Scotian past mean (in both senses). Because the houses of the past loomed so large in Dickinson's conception, she found that she "dared not enter" them again (Poem 609). Because Bishop systematically reduced and made "other" the people and places of her Nova Scotian childhood, she found herself able-at least for a while in Brazil-to wedge open the doors of a dystopic past.

Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil by boat in November 1951, for what she thought would be a brief holiday. By fall 1952 she was living in Petropolis with Lota de Macedo Soares, euphoric because of some combination of Brazil, cortisone, and love. In that condition of well being, according to biographer Brett Millier, Bishop was "suddenly... writing about her childhood. She found it odd that she should have `total recall' about Nova Scotia in its geographical mirror image, Brazil; but she did. And what she recalled came out in prose" (252). In rapid succession Bishop composed "Gwendolyn" and "In the Village," autobiographical short stories based on writing begun and abandoned manyyears before. She subsequently composed three additional prose memoirs, "Memories of Uncle Neddy," "Primer Class," and "The Country Mouse." But to say that Bishop was "suddenly" writing about her childhood in Brazil and that "what she recalled came out in prose," though literally accurate, does not quite capture the full drama of Bishop's approach to the cathected past. She had begun her journey backward even before arriving in Brazil, and she explored the terrain in the medium of poetry as well as prose-much as her friend Robert Lowell did. After a summer spent in Nova Scotia several years before moving to Brazil, Bishop wrote a handful of seemingly impersonal landscape poems set in the province: "At the Fishhouses," "The Bight," and "Cape Breton." These poems were followed, in Brazil itself, by the prose narratives already mentioned and by a series of domestic poems4 set in the Nova Scotian past: "Manners," "Sestina," "Exchanging Hats," "Sunday, 4 a.m.," "First Death in Nova Scotia," "The Moose," and "Poem." I would like to retrace this poetic journey, considering first the pre-Brazil poem "Cape Breton" (1949), and then the Brazilian texts "In the Village" (1953), "First Death in Nova Scotia" (1962), and "Poem" (drafted 1963 and published in 1972), to highlight how Bishop began to inch her way into her Nova Scotian recollections in the years just prior to her move to Brazil, how she both confronted and evaded those memories from the vantage point of the Southern hemisphere, and how she finally attempted to put such memories behind her.

"Cape Breton," published two years before Bishop's move to Brazil, adopts a touristic and even an intrusive aerial view of the Nova Scotia landscape, providing a series of visual images of psychological distance, avoidance, and desire (Complete Poems 67-68). The poem remains high above a terrain it represents in images of mist, maze, map, puzzle, and severed connections. The roads are lines going nowhere, like the lines of yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story; the buildings are "closed" or "invisible" (67). This place, once known too well, now resists intimate contact. The poetic subject may view this childhood landscape again but only through a Randall Jarrell-- like separation of hundreds of feet of airspace. Although she does not wish to bomb the map-like terrain below her (or at least does not ostensibly wish to do so), she does wish to penetrate the land with her gaze. But she does not want to be penetrated in turn. She is willing to name the features of the landscape that baffles and intrigues her, but not the land's inhabitants-and certainly not the mother, the individual most likely to help her understand the puzzle. Nor will she even use the firstperson pronoun.

For most of its length the poem remains counterpoised between the poem it echoes, Moore's "The Steeple-Jack," and the poem it anticipates, Lowell's "Waking Early Sunday Morning."5 But Bishop's text climaxes with an image that appears in neither its precursor nor its inheritor text: "a man carrying a baby," who gets off a bus and walks toward "his invisible house beside the water" (68). This is, I believe, the key image of the poem, its last and greatest puzzle. It almost demands that we ask, Where is the child's mother? Who is this man carrying the child? The "invisible" house can tell us nothing, being yet another of Bishop's many inscrutable interiors, places "where we cannot see" (67; cf. "Sestina," "Arrival at Santos"). Hidden in these discursive gaps and visual scotomas are the images or imagoes that resist articulation: the sundered family, the avoidant or departed mother, the displaced child, and the poem's unspoken and unseen "L" Once the poem has marked the space of this absent mother-daughter dyad, mist and an "ancient chill" reenvelope the scene, occluding the view (68).

Once settled in Brazil, however, Bishop almost immediately peered inside those heretofore "closed" or "invisible" Nova Scotian houses. She evoked the loss of the mother most explicitly in the story "In the Village," though the narration is actually anything but direct (Collected Prose 251-74). Rather, the text concentrates on a shifting series of auditory and visual details that may seem to contribute to what Victoria Harrison benignly calls "the making and remaking of subjectivity" (110), but which also reflect what Susan McCabe calls the "numb detachment" of short-circuited mourning (8). Most prominent among these details is the mother's scream, which marks her final descent into mental illness as well as her daughter's immersion into perpetual grief:

A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon-or is it around the rims of the eyes?-the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky. The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory-in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever-not loud,just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightening rod on top of the church steeple, with your fingernail and you will hear it. (251)

We note here a synesthetic fusion of auditory and visual imagery and a set of almost compulsive tropic displacements: the scream becomes a darkening stain, then "too blue" skies, violet flowers, and "darkening" night.6 The scream, that is, immediately changes from a physical phenomenon to an endlessly replicating series of psychic and textual signs. It resounds through the narrator's thoughts and feelings, not so much "around the horizon" as "around the rims of the eyes." It resonates in her ear from the church's steeple, which she reduces in fantasy to the size of a human fingernail-a miniaturized version of the omnipresent death knell in Dickinson's "I felt a funeral in my brain" (Poem 280). Beyond its psychic reverberations, the scream resonates through the text as a series of endlessly deferred metonyms: stain, sky, flowers, church bells, and even the mother's sanatorium address, which, like a stain, "will never come off (272). Bishop's narrator and her diagesis are haunted by the scream, which figures not only her mother's despair but more importantly her own. The scream is the signature of the daughter's wreck, her plunge from intermittent maternal care into parentlessness, solitude, and the wish to forget-a future life figured in the text as "broken china" (256). It is her own "unheard" scream, perhaps more than the mother's, that perpetually lingers.7 "I suppose I shriek," the narrator says of her childhood self when a characteristically Bishopian fire breaks out, devastating the landscape of the past (268).

"In the Village" emphasizes Nova Scotia's excess of stasis, which contrasts to the excessive mobility of Brazil's "too many waterfalls" and "too rapidly" rushing streams ("Questions of Travel," Complete Poems93). The Nova Scotian skies are "too dark, too blue" and the scream too enduring, "alive forever." The surfeit of fixed and painful emotion in the Nova Scotian scene reflects, first of all, the absence of the father, which is barely registered (McCabe 10). Perhaps even more centrally, it involves the fort-da of the mother's repeated leavings and returns (Collected Prose 252), and by her alternation of formalized care with self-absorbed indifference, broken only by her rebuke to her daughter, "Stop sucking your thumb!" (267), an oral aggression that may screen, as Lorrie Goldensohn suggests, a history of negative or hostile touching (179 and in conversation). Finally, the emotional matrix is completed by the mother's forced departure, which feels like an abandonment. "In the Village" condenses this complex of losses into the sensuous image of the scream. At its sound, the narrative tells us, "the child vanishes" (253). She mentally withdraws or physically runs away. In another sense, her childhood self dies at that moment; or, more accurately, it goes underground, in the sense of Lowell's "always inside me is the child who died" ("Night Sweat," Life Studies 68).

The haunting scream is ultimately answered or replaced by a "clang" from the blacksmith's shop, where the child has retreated (Collected Prose 252). In the shop, "the horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons ... to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting" (253). This set of images seems even more polysemous than the scream. It suggests tactile sensations of gory mutilation and suffocation. It also communicates the child's anger ("protesting") and perhaps a Plathian sense of her danger potential ("hissing"). But the horseshoes also offer a benign portent of good fortune. And they provide a potentially consolatory image of pain and anger being converted into craft or art-a motif that recurs, as we shall see, in the painting metaphors of "First Death in Nova Scotia" and "Poem."

We observe here not a successful repression or suppression of memory but a momentous failure to repress. The silenced scream immediately returns to consciousness. At first it sounds very faintly, like "a bell-buoy out at sea," as neutral as the elements, too frail to be heard for long, as if marking a grief that (as Faulkner would say) is only temporary. But the very word "frail," resonating with the mother's and the daughter's vulnerability, seems to restore the scream to full strength. The story ends with the narrator pleading for the horseshoe sound to cover over the scream again-unless the "beautiful sound" has an ambiguous referent. The power of "In the Village" inheres in its titanic resistances. It converts overwhelming feelings of pain and anger into a haunting textual sign, a scream, and then ambivalently attempts to substitute for that sign a less cathected but more multivalent one, a pounding of horseshoes. As Bishop's stay in Brazil lengthened, she continued to make textual travels home, in such poems as "First Death in Nova Scotia" (Complete Poems 125-26). In one of her poems about Brazil, she had asked, "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?" ("Questions of Travel," Complete Poems93). But she did make the imagined place her home, and her home the imagined place. As so often, Bishop wished to unsettle binaries such as those of imagination and perception, poetry and prose, homelike and unhomelike, here and there. She had ended the poem about Brazil by problematizing its own question: "Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?" (94). Wherever that may be, indeed, since Bishop's inscribed texts, and her life text as well, continually testified to the precariousness of home, to its figurative and often literal positioning on unsteady posts in the sea or on the slippery slopes of a hillside. "First Death in Nova Scotia" focuses once more on that early, unsheltering home, which she again treats as an object of desire and repulsion. This text, however, projects maternal and paternal absence onto another loss that is equally shocking but less immediately threatening: the death of a cousin. In some ways the poem resembles a Lowellian family elegy like "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow." But whereas Lowell's text stumbles in its effort to re-incorporate the child's psyche, plaintively asking "What in the world was I wishing?" (Life Studies 62), Bishop's text barricades itself entirely within the child's sensibility. If Lowell's poem preserves itself from anguish through adult forms of irony and distance, Bishop's poem preserves itself by strictly adhering to the child's uncomprehending gaze, viewing family members as strangers in a play. The poem begins,

In the cold, cold parlor

my mother laid out Arthur

beneath the chromographs:

Edward, Prince of Wales,

with Princess Alexandra,

and King George with Queen Mary.

Below them on the table

stood a stuffed loon

shot and stuffed by Uncle

Arthur, Arthur's father.

Since Uncle Arthur fired

a bullet into him,

he hadn't said a word.

He kept his own counsel

on his white, frozen lake,

the mart-topped table.

His breast was deep and white,

cold and caressable;

his eyes were red glass,

much to be desired.

"Come," said my mother,

"come and say good-bye

to your little cousin Arthur."

I was lifted up:and given one lily of the valley

to put in Arthur's hand.

Arthur's coffin was

a little frosted cake,

and the red-eyed loon eyed it

from his white, frozen lake. (125)8

As in most of Bishop's texts, the emotional work is accomplished here through images-in this case tactile and visual ones. The scene is suffused by coldness and by a whiteness that seems to me not only what Renee Curry would call a sign of privilege but also a sign of anesthetized feeling and lack of nurture. Thus we, along with the child, observe the "cold parlor"; the "white, / cold" breast of the loon; the white lily; the coffin like a "frosted" cake; and (perhaps in parody of Mallarme's ice-bound swan in "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui") the loon on a marble table that resembles a "white, frozen lake." The gelid Nova Scotian landscape has invaded the home and its affections, taking them over-antithetically revising both the warm hearthside of Whittier's Snow-Bound and the voice of Eliot's The Waste Land who avers that "winter kept us warm" (Eliot 37). This winter keeps us cold indeed. Bishop's text offers a de-idealized portrait of an icy family triad. The mother, as in "In the Village," is the text's powerful agent, officiously laying out Arthur's body and directing her daughter to take leave of her cousin. On a psychological level, the mother might be said to be laying out the daughter, who is in fact hoisted into the casket to join her specular image, the cousin. The place of the absent father is occupied by Arthur's father, who, in a syntactically ambiguous phrase, fires "a bullet into him." The pronoun seems to refer to little Arthur, the narrator's double, but more plausibly refers to the loon. It is a distinction without much difference, however, since the immobilized loon figures little Arthur. The daughter, intuiting the hostile wishes of both mother and father-- figure, yet still identifying herself with them both, finds her own erotic wishes disordered, in a paradigm familiar from Freud's "Mourning and Melancholy" (249-52 and passim). She "desires" the red eyes and wants to "caress" (to devour, Freud might say) the body of the loon, a bestial image comprising her dead redhaired cousin, the parents who are lost to her, her own lacking self, and death itself. Thus, the poem presents to us a familial triad composed of murderous parents and dead child. The coldness of this tableau contrasts to the warmth of the royal portraits (though both are similarly imaged in red and white). Ironically the family grouping pictured on the wall-father, mother, son, and daughter-in-law-appears to be more vital and intimate than the actual mother, father, and daughter grouped in the room. It is also curious that the same "ingenu and porcine Edward VII" who stares down on the dysfunctional family in Lowell's "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow" (Life Studies 63) also witnesses this domestic scene, linking the two texts under the sign of the royal gaze, like the vacantly staring eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.9 Bishop's poem concludes in this fashion:

Arthur was very small.

He was all white, like a doll

that hadn't been painted yet.

Jack Frost had started to paint him

the way he always painted

the Maple Leaf (Forever).

He had just begun on his hair,

a few red strokes, and then

Jack Frost had dropped the brush

and left him white, forever.

The gracious royal couples

were warm in red and ermine;

their feet were well wrapped up

in the ladies' ermine trains.

They invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court.

but how could Arthur go,

clutching his tiny lily,

with his eyes shut up so tight

and the roads deep in snow? (125-26)

A partially completed painting or a little doll, Arthur nearly disappears from the page. He is invited, on a fantasy level, to be a page-an attendant in a royal portrait and possibly even a sheet of printed text. But the poem asks, in an irresolution characteristic of Bishop, how can he achieve this transformation from organic death to enduring artistic life when he-and implicitly his double, the poet-is so small and powerless? His "eyes shut up so tight" (126), little Arthur bears more resemblance to artistfigures like the "Man-Moth" and the "Unbeliever" (Complete Poems 14, 22) than he does to the staring royal couples on the wall. He lives in, or is metonymically figured as, a place where "the roads" are "deep in snow" (126), a landscape with interrupted connections like the one in "Cape Breton." Little Arthur and Nova Scotia itself, with its snowy roads so distant from the "watery, dazzling dialectic" of the Amazon ("Santarem," 185), constitute images of inaccessible and fixed emotions, broken attachment bonds, the vanished childhood self, and the solitude of the subject who inscribes "the smallest," invaluable page.

Immediately after leaving Brazil for good, Bishop published one of her last North Atlantic poems, the self-reflexively titled "Poem," which she had begun composing almost a decade earlier (Complete Poems 176-77). This text seems to be a goodbye to the Nova Scotia topos, deflecting attention from childhood to adult perspectives and from the excruciating content of memories to the poetics of memory. Resuming the metaphorics of visual representation implicit in "Cape Breton" and "In the Village" and quite explicit in "First Death in Nova Scotia," the adult narrator of "Poem" comes upon a tiny landscape painting, a "minor family relic," only the size of an old-style dollar bill (176)10 As she inspects the painting, in the manner of a tourist or a detective, she discovers both content and medium. The scene "must be Nova Scotia," she decides, a locus of painful recollections condensed into the houses"' "awful shade of brown." Yet increasingly her focus moves from represented scene to the medium of representation: a "gray-blue wisp" of paint suggesting a steeple; "two brushstrokes" representing cows; an iris "fresh-squiggled from the tube"; a "half-inch" of blue sky; "a specklike bird" that may actually be a flyspeck. The poem demystifies the painting's mimetic claims, insisting on its status as paint on canvas, re-seeing a traditional realistic text in a postmodern areferential manner. Or, more accurately, the poem oscillates between mimetic and self-reflexive ways of regarding text, a liminal position suggesting Bishop's own ludic space, suspended between epistemological and linguistic projects. Just as medium and scene merge and separate, so do painting and poem. "This little painting" seems an ironic trope for this little "Poem," with the gently mocked painter implicitly figuring the poet who herself has a painterly eye. The painter's "storm clouds" may even parodically suggest the emotional storm clouds that are the poet's preoccupation and aversion. For a moment, the poet's identification with the painter becomes complete: "Heavens," she exclaims of the depicted scene, "I recognize the place, I know it!" (176). Their "visions" coincide.

The narrator then recalls her aunt giving her the painting years before:

Would you like this? ...

Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George, he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother when he went back to England. (177)

Thus the mysterious, distant figure of the mother-whether she is the aunt's or the narrator's is not entirely clear-appears one last time in Bishop's Nova Scotia series. The reference to her here echoes and completes her absence in "Cape Breton" and her demanding and self-absorbed presence in "In the Village" and "First Death in Nova Scotia." "Poem" concludes by transferring its gaze from the ambiguous and elusive mother-figure to the never-known great-uncle, who is an artist like herself, and then to scenes of artistic creation and flora and fauna. The need is to catch a last glimpse of the domestic scene with a maternal figure at its center, but then to move quickly on, to try to forget. As in so many of the Nova Scotia texts, the weather in "Poem" is "cold"-"crisp and shivering" (176, 177). And the landscape turns strange. It comes to resemble a stage set, featuring elms that will be "dismantled" and geese that will disappear (177). The natural scene, Nova Scotia itself, is finally but a mirrored backdrop for the drama of the disappearing mother, the performance of absence.

Bishop's Nova Scotian texts are remarkably poignant and wrenching. They are so "live," so "touching in detail," as "Poem" says of the little painting. Yet they possess a limited range. The "I" of "In the Village" and "First Death in Nova Scotia" is a suffering witness, aware of her hurts but not of her privileges and impositions. She is the unwanted and abandoned little girl, but not the subject who grows up to know what it is to want to abandon someone herself. Bishop's Brazilian constructions of the Nova Scotian familyscape powerfully combine insight with blindness. They suggest that leaving and entering home are mutually implicated motions; that one never leaves as completely nor enters as deeply as one might think; that seeing much does not facilitate seeing all; that constructing a memory, like grieving a loss or understanding a motive, is always a partially unsuccessful endeavor; and that our cognitive, affective, and aesthetic structures sooner or later leak. These texts make it hard to discriminate between categories that tend to turn into each other: art and life, life and the memory of it, a cry of pain and its evasion, the safety of houses and the coldness of blueblack space.

I thank Rise B. Axelrod, Cathy Cucinella, Renee Curry, and Lorrie Goldensohn for their help and encouragement with this essay.

1The stories The Baptism" (1937) and "The Farmer's Children" (1948) both appear to be set in Nova Scotia, though they lack the representation of self and personal memory that marks the Nova Scotia texts Bishop composed in Brazil. Several poems, mentioned below, also preceded the move to Brazil, but they too makd their autobiographical dimension.

2Curry entitled her panel at the May 1999 International Elizabeth Bishop Conference at Ouro Preto "Elizabeth Bishop: 'In' But Never `Of Brazil."

3Lorrie Goldensohn notes asimilar "habit of distance or occlusion" in Bishop's poems of Brazil (207).

4For a brief history of the North American "domestic poem," see my Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP, 1990) 59-70. For a study of domesticity, strangeness, loss, and joy in Bishop's poetry, see Helen Vendler's "Domestication, Domesticity, and the Otherworldly" (Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 32-48).

5Moore's "The Steeple-Jack" includes a similarly distanced and foggy North Atlantic landscape with little white "church" and "schoolhouse" (Moore 7). Lowell's "Waking Early Sunday Morning" mentions "white china doorknobs" on poles that must reflect

"the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob" in Bishop's poem; and it evokes a similar ambience of Sunday angst in a North Atlantic village (Lowell, Near the Ocean 19; Bishop, Complete Poems 68). In Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (Ed. Robert Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), David Kalstone has convincingly shown that Moore, Bishop, and Lowell maintained a thick fabric of inter-dependency and ambivalent regard .Joanne Feit Diehl has further illuminated Bishop's psychological and creative relationship to Moore in Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), and Thomas Travisano has recently examined many of Bishop's thematic interconnections with Lowell in Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999). Finally, Brett Millier quotes these suggestive lines from an unpublished Bishop poem: "Marianne, loan me a noun! / Cal, please cable a verb!" (314).

61n a similar sequence, Nova Scotia itself, evoked from the vantage point of its obverse negation Brazil, becomes momentarily displaced by a third geographical signifier, "Switzerland."

7Compare the scream of "In the Waiting Room," which similarly emanates from a "voice" belonging ambiguously to the narrator's aunt or to the narrator herself (Collected Poems 160).

90ne might also compare the gaze of the "red-eyed loon" in "First Death in Nova Scotia" (125) to the "red fire" of the skunks' "moonstruck eyes" in Lowell's "Skunk Hour" (Life Studies 90), written several years earlier. Clearly Bishop and Lowell were in imagistic dialogue for much of their careers. Bishop's attempt at a poem in the manner of Life Studies inevitably included elements-depending on how one wishes to interpret such tropic replications-of homage, Bloomian antithesis, or postmodern parody and pastiche.

10jacques Lacan emphasizes the close approximation of pictorial representation and the self as object of the gaze, as being who is looked at: "I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture" (106). Bishop's repeated imaging of the Nova Scotian scene as map, stained picture, or painting suggests that it is the remembering subject, and her ontological anxiety as object of the world's gaze, that is at issue in such recollections or reconstructions.

WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.

The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

Curry, Renee R. White Women Writing White: H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Whiteness. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1955.

Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, 1971.

Fountain, Gary and Peter Brazeau. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.

Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 14. Trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth P, 1955. 237-58.

. "The `Uncanny"' (1919). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 17. Trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth P, 1955. 217-56.

Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1973). Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959. Near the Ocean. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Mallarme, Stephane. "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" (1885).

Poems. Ed. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1965. 82. McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics ofLoss. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994.

Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems. New York: Macmillan/Viking, 1967. Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1988.

STEVEN GOULD AXELROD is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His books include Robert Lowell Life and Art (1978) and Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990). He is currently working on a book about mid-twentieth-century American poets.