Inversion and the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

Whatever the reason, lesbianism was often seen as vampiric, monstrous, and even predatory. Bishop alludes to some of these socially deviant qualities in her work, creating characters that often possess traces of such features, especially in relation to the night. Many of her subjects and speakers are night creatures, suggesting the secrecy, inverted living habits, and even monstrousness which has been strongly associated with lesbianism. This paper aims to examine several such texts in order to discover how and to what extent Bishop encodes homosexuality into her poetry. In fact, Bishop struggles to resolve social definitions of homosexuality as narcissistic and disorderly. The myth of Narcissus, or at least his mirror, surfaces throughout her work and threatens her subjects with homosexual self-recognition which (in the tradition ofNarcissus) leads to self-destruction. Dangerous mirrors, narcissism, inversion and deviant subjects are all parts of Bishop's subversive homosexuality. These images are also indicative of Bishop's tension between her own lesbianism and her disapproving culture. She is haunted by Freud's interpretation of homosexuality as narcissistic, as well as society's definition of the lesbian as a creature of darkness -- a monster and an "invert." . . . It was not until 1973 that "the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders" (Faderman 132). Bishop lived and wrote with an everpresent understanding that her sexuality, like that of all inverts in the early and middle part of the century, was a threat to her identity. Unless closeted, and for all intents and purposes she was, her mental and emotional health would be publicly challenged. This is not to say that Bishop's work reflects sexual shame or self-loathing: she feels restricted by cultural definitions of sexuality and it is apparent in her work. I do not suggest that Bishop believes that she is narcissistic or mentally sick. I do suggest, however, that Freudian theories and public opinion about lesbianism certainly influences the way she writes about sexuality and self-discovery. [From Introduction]