Landscape and Female Desire: Elizabeth Bishop's "Closet" Tactics

Abstract

The ancient premise that earth is has everywhere shaped attitudes toward land, toward women, and toward dominance of both by men. As Carolyn Merchant argues in The Death of Nature, Women and nature have age-old association - affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language, and and that links women's history with history of environment and ecological change (xix, xx). Central to what Merchant calls scientific revolution, revising identification of woman-as-earth has become crucial to critiques of imperialism. Louis Montrose, for example, has drawn attention to the gendering of New World as feminine, and sexualizing of its exploration, conquest, and settlement (2), just as much earlier Annette Kolodny had shown how in various documents, ranging from colonial promotional tracts up to 1960s ecological protests, we can find versions of probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: an experience of land as essentially feminine - that is, not simply land as mother, but land as woman, total female principle of gratification (4). Not surprisingly, then, current landscape studies, ecocriticism, and a renewed interest in nature writing often converge with feminism in probing role of gender in imaginative and political appropriations of natural world and sexual other. Gender, power, landscape, and desire come together in a particularly compelling way in poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), who lived in a variety of settings not always of her own choosing. Descriptions of place, imagined and real, pervade her writing, and titles of her slim collections in themselves indicate significance she attached to geography: North & South (1946); A Cold Spring (1955); Questions of Travel (1965); and Geography III (1976). Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop was virtually orphaned: her father died when she was infant, and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness when Bishop was five years old - after which child never saw her again. Bishop was then shuttled back and forth between her maternal grandparents' modest farm home in Nova Scotia, her prosperous paternal grandparents' house in Massachusetts, and residences of various aunts and uncles. Educated at a private Massachusetts school and Vassar (at both places she was known as solitary yet gifted), she seemed destined to be a poet, especially once she befriended Marianne Moore - known for her innovative poetics and pose as a selfless observer of natural world. During her lifetime, Bishop was characterized as a poet's poet, and she herself did not want to be grouped with poets; at same time, however, she considered herself a feminist, and her travels and homes were frequently shared with women - particularly with Lota de Macedo Soares with whom she had intimate relationship during her sojourn in Brazil from 1952 to 1967. In recent years, attention to Bishop's work has steadily increased, partly because of interest that feminists have taken in all women writers, and especially reticent and idiosyncratic. Equally important, however, may be our increasing appreciation of combination of restraints and deceptive strategies employed by earlier 20th-century poets like Bishop. In following essay, therefore, I wish to contribute to this re-discovery by exploring ways that Bishop employs landscape description to challenge imperialist and androcentric tradition and thus revalue, even if only obliquely, perspective and imagination of woman artist, including love - familial, friendly, and erotic - of women for women. Focusing on means by which land becomes for Bishop image of her own desire, I will attempt to show how her landscape descriptions involve not only desire to know, make contact with, and place herself, but also desire to find, cherish, and love feminine. …