The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies

By Tanis MacDonald

Introduction

Introduction: Who Could Not Sing: Elegy and its (Female) Discontents

Tanis MacDonald

A daughter’s duty to care for her dying father and properly mourn his death is a commonly assumed cultural and familial obligation. If, as W. David Shaw suggests, we “want elegies to fit our desires,” the desire that drives the female elegist is the desire to delineate, and perhaps dismantle, the fidelity demanded by the father’s death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781554584024

Tanis MacDonald

Tanis MacDonald is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Rue the Day (Turnstone Press, 2008), and the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (WLU Press, 2006). Her book The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies was a finalist for the 2012 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.

Book preview

The Daughter’s Way

The Daughter’s Way

Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies

Tanis MacDonald

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacDonald, Tanis, 1962–

The daughter’s way: Canadian women’s paternal elegies/Tanis MacDonald.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55458-362-1

1. Elegiac poetry, Canadian (English)—History and criticism. 2. Feminist poetry, Canadian (English)—History and criticism. 3. Canadian poetry (English)—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Canadian poetry (English)—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Death in literature. 6. Fathers in literature. 7. Loss (Psychology) in literature. 8. Grief in literature. 9. Mourning customs in literature. 10. Fathers and daughters in literature. 11. Paternalism in literature. I. Title.

PS8145.E4M32 2012         C811′.54093548         C2012-900185-6

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Electronic monograph in PDF format.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-401-7 (PDF). —ISBN 978-1-55458-402-4 (EPUB)

1. Elegiac poetry, Canadian (English)—History and criticism. 2. Feminist poetry, Canadian (English)—History and criticism. 3. Canadian poetry (English)—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Canadian poetry (English)—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Death in literature. 6. Fathers in literature. 7. Loss (Psychology) in literature. 8. Grief in literature. 9. Mourning customs in literature. 10. Fathers and daughters in literature. 11. Paternalism in literature. I. Title.

PS8145.E4M32 2012a       C811′.54093548         C2012-900186-4

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© 2012 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Jove’s Daughter and a portion of Self-Portrait reprinted from Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay, edited by Dean Irvine (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998), with permission of the publisher.

No Man’s Nightingale, Absence, Havoc, The Love-Song of Jenny Lear, Love-Song II of Jenny Lear, and portions of A Winter, The Beauty of Job’s Daughters, Some Ghost & Some Ghouls, and Playing reprinted from Poems Twice Told: The Boatman and Welcoming Disaster, by Jay Macpherson (Oxford University Press, 1981), with permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front-cover image by Erica Grimm Vance: Whatever you hear from the water remember (2006), encaustic and steel on board (42″ × 30″). The artist’s work can be seen at www.egrimmvance.com. Cover photo by Mike Rathjen. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Part One    The Daughter’s Way

Introduction    Who Could Not Sing: Elegy and Its (Female) Discontents

1    Elegy and Authority: The Daughter’s Way

Part Two    Daughters of Jove, Daughters of Job Canadian Modernism’s Bloody-Minded Women

2    Jove’s Daughter: Dorothy Livesay’s Elegiac Daughteronomy

3    So Much Militia Routed in the Man: P. K. Page’s Military Fathers

4    Absence, Havoc: Jay Macpherson’s Rebellious Daughters

Part Three    Differently Conceived Nations The Mourner’s Journey

5    Do What You Are Good At: Margaret Atwood’s Authorizing Elegies

6    The Pilgrim and the Riddle: Anne Carson’s The Anthropology of Water

7    Gateway Politics, Grief Poetics: West Meets West in Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour

Part Four    Furies and Filles de la Sagesse Language and Difference at Century’s End

8    Signature, Inheritance, Inquiry: Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches

9    Elegy of Refusal: Erin Mouré’s Furious

Conclusion: From the Water

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgements

The work of turning a series of questions into a book requires the attention and good will of many people over a numbers of years, and I must thank those who provided me with their assistance, scholarly and personal, during the years that I thought about, researched, composed, and revised this book.

I owe a debt of thanks and acknowledgement to the many generous conversations I had with various scholars over the years this book was in development. Some of these conversations were limited to the page as I read the work of scholars of contemporary elegy whose books were so important to the generation and sustenance of my ideas. The works of Jahan Ramazani, W. David Shaw, and Melissa F. Zeiger were instrumental to this book, and I recommend their works to all readers who are interested in reading more about the dynamics and difficulties of the contemporary elegy.

Initial research into the paternal elegy as written by Canadian female poets was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2003–2004. Further research into Dorothy Livesay’s paternal elegies in the Archives at the University of Manitoba was funded by a Research Grant from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2007. Wilfrid Laurier University also supported me with a Book Preparation Grant in 2012. I thank the people in the WLU Research Office and the University of Manitoba Archives for their assistance, as well as Paul Tiessen for our many conversations about Livesay. Cailen Swain at Oxford University Press and Brian Lam at Arsenal Pulp Press supplied prompt assistance in securing permission for me to republish portions of work by Jay Macpherson and Dorothy Livesay. Everyone at Wilfrid Laurier University Press was tremendously helpful, and I especially wish to thank Lisa Quinn for her calm, cool, and collected advice, and Leslie Macredie for leading me to the paintings of Erica Grimm-Vance, whose art adorns the cover of this book.

For her supervision and application of perspicacious logic during my doctoral study, I thank Smaro Kamboureli. Jamie Dopp was the longest-standing member of my committee, and I thank him for his kindly eye and for his consistency. Misao Dean leaped to my rescue and onto my committee on short notice. Ingrid Holmberg of the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria was marvellously willing to read poetry and quiz me on Ovid and Homer. Thanks also to Lynnette Hunter, Professor of Rhetoric and Performance in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis for serving as external examiner for my dissertation defence.

Thanks are also due to scholars whose discussions and recommendations were so valuable in the early days of my research. I thank Eric Miller for all our discussions about Anne Carson’s work, Dianne Chisholm for telling me about Zero Hour, and Iain Higgins for his patience and generosity. The students in my graduate seminars on the Canadian elegy, taught at Wilfrid Laurier University in the winter sessions of 2007 and 2009, kept me thinking about these texts, and their thoughtfulness and curiosity went a long way to convincing me of the resilience of my ideas. Special thanks to David Bentley at the University of Western Ontario for his work with modernist poetry, his editorship of the journal Canadian Poetry, and for smiling the first time I said the word elegy to him.

Parts of this book were presented and discussed at numerous conferences and seminars, most frequently at the annual meeting of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, but also at University of British Columbia in 2002, and at the Poetics and Public Culture conference in honour of Frank Davey at the University of Western Ontario in 2005. I’d like to thank Ian Rae for his support of my work with Anne Carson’s texts, and the organizers, recommending readers, and audience members of all of these conferences for their support.

Parts of the book are revised versions of previously published essays, and I wish to thank the editors and anonymous readers of those publications for their roles in encouraging this work at an early stage of its development. Early versions of some of these chapters appeared first in the following scholarly journals and I thank the editors of these publications for their interest and support: Chapter Two as ‘The Battle Done’: Reading the Military Father in the Poems of P. K. Page in Canadian Poetry 53 (2003): 71–86; Chapter Three as "Absence, Havoc: Gothic Mourning and Daughterly Duty in Jay Macpherson’s Welcoming Disaster" in Studies in Canadian Literature 34.1 (2009): 58–80; Chapter Six as The Pilgrim and the Riddle: Father–Daughter Kinship in Anne Carson’s ‘The Anthropology of Water’ in Canadian Literature 176 (2003): 67–81; and Chapter Seven as "Gateway Politics: West Meets West in Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour" on pages 25–40 in the anthology The Last Best West: An Examination of Myth, Identity and Quality of Life in Western Canada, edited by Anne Gagnon, W. F. Garrett-Petts, and James Hoffman, and published in 2009 in Vancouver by New Star Books.

Because every idea has such deep roots in the texts and arguments that preceded it, I also owe a debt of gratitude to the professors who taught me as an undergraduate student, those stalwart scholars who showed no signs of being daunted by my ignorance, or perhaps more dauntingly, by my zeal. The late Dr. Clement Wyck, in whose Milton seminar at the University of Winnipeg I first read Lycidas, deserves special praise for his calm demeanour and unshakable belief that my mind would rise to meet his expectations. Neil Besner, Keith Louise Fulton, Dawne McCance, Dennis Cooley, and Mavis Reimer taught me how to ask questions. Brenda Austin-Smith rolled up her sleeves and taught me how to sustain an argument.

Finally, I am grateful for my friends and family: Frances Sprout, Chris Fox, and Karina Vernon who made everything fun during the Victoria years; my mother for always displaying my books on her coffee table; and my father for teaching me to have eclectic reading tastes. I am lucky that my partner, John Roscoe, has an unflappable nature and the proven ability to convince me that a walk in the woods is good for the brain.

Part One

The Daughter’s Way

Introduction

Who Could Not Sing

Elegy and Its (Female) Discontents

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme

……..

Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well,

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,

Begin and somewhat loudly sweep the string.

— John Milton, Lycidas

To Build the Lofty Rhyme: Muses, Nightingales, and Female Elegists

I blame it on Milton. And given the opportunity, who would not?

More specifically, I credit an early encounter with Milton’s Lycidas with awakening my questions about consolation as a possibility and the elegy as a genre, and for eventually nudging me towards thornier questions about female elegists, literary mourning, and father–daughter kinship. There may be irony to be found in this kind of beginning—a very homosocial elegy written by one young man for another young man in the seventeenth century as the spark for feminist questions about the political energy of melancholia in late-twentieth-century elegy—but sometimes the question that will not go away is the question that can be followed like a ball of string through the labyrinth of literary history.

Milton’s poem, with the epigraph the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately drown’d … on the Irish Sea, 1637, has become an important example of the endurance of elegiac convention in the Western canon despite the fact that it is an immature work compared to almost all of Milton’s other poetry and certainly has neither the scope nor the poetic power of Paradise Lost. In fact, Milton’s use of elegiac convention in Lycidas has been deemed so stylized that its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind, as Dr. Johnson famously declared as early as 1790 in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (226), but even so, these conventions have retained a remarkable hold upon the contemporary imagination. Lycidas is considered by elegy theorists to be the gold standard, a kind of precedent text that demands attention for its crystallization of the poetic command to which all subsequent elegists must listen: sing for your dead, if you are human. Mourning in this poem is an imperative underscored by a question that rings with incredulity: who would not sing for the dead? This uncomfortably necessary question has become indispensable to the rhetoric of elegy for the way, among other things, that it does not let the reader off the hook. The implicit answer is that no listener, no bystander, no callow young reader would dare to dishonour the dead by refusing to sing, or by extension, refusing to acknowledge the importance of singing for the dead. This injunction carries weight even in the classroom where Lycidas is often encountered as assigned reading. While it would not be accurate to say that the injunction necessarily inspires mourning, it can and does inspire a resistance to mourning that connotes the need for the question itself. Part of the poem’s strange appeal is its demanding, almost accusatory, tone, and its influence on contemporary elegy lies in its appeal to affect and its still resonating inquiry into the demands of mourning.

I was young—a very naïve twenty—when I first read these lines. Despite my confusion over the copious classical allusions that loomed in the latter half of the poem, Milton’s resonant prosody combined with the skill of the professor—the generous and patient Dr. Clement Wyke at the University of Winnipeg—made it nearly impossible for me to squirm away from the uncomfortable demands of Lycidas. (I had also agreed to lead a seminar on it in an effort to keep my head above water in a course in which I was the youngest and least experienced student. Do this poem, my older and wiser fellow seminar participants said when the sign-up sheet came around. It’s short. Dr. Wyke said nothing, though now many years later, I imagine that he must have laughed, inwardly at least. Short? It was Milton.) Who would be hard-hearted enough, arrogant enough not to sing either a dirge or a hymn of praise for someone so emphatically dead, dead ere his prime? The question dared me to resist at the same time that it promised that resistance would usher in the darkest of fates. Trapped between the command to sing and the intimation of a dire fate bereft of human consciousness if I did not sing, I could not help but be aware of the rhetorical force of these lines as they reinforced social and philosophical injunctions to mourn immediately, plangently, and properly. Affect may have been the initiatory force, but social obedience was the currency. Though I chafed against its rigours, I could not fully extricate myself from the elegiac contract: the lyrical assertion that those who hear of death may not ignore the necessity for mourning, even if they do not enter into it themselves. Such an elegiac contract lurks on in contemporary expressions of the command to mourning, such as Arthur Miller’s in Death of a Salesman: attention must be paid (56).

But back in my Milton course, even after I accepted the necessity of observing the rituals of mourning and of engaging with the poem’s insistence and inquiry, Milton trapped me again by introducing the problem of gender a mere handful of lines later with the lines about the Muses’ role in mourning. These Sisters of the sacred well, spiritual embodiments of the font of inspiration, the daughters of Jove and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, were powerful female figures of artistic inspiration; they played their instruments and inspired song from the lips of humans, but did they sing for Lycidas? Did Milton’s command to Begin refer to the sweeping of the string alone or also to their singing, those unheard female songs? Was this then a matter of who would not sing or a matter of who could not sing? Was it even a case of not hearing what was being sung? How else to think about the role that these female figures played in the dynamic of mourning?

More than a decade passed after that course before I read Jay Macpherson’s No Man’s Nightingale, the lyric sestet that serves as the epigraph to her Governor General’s Award–winning collection The Boatman, published in 1957. Macpherson’s nightingale suggests a reply to Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale as well as to Milton’s designation of the nightingale as Sweet bird that shunn’st the noise of folly / Most musical, most melancholy! in 1645’s Il Penseroso. Macpherson’s nightingale as a kind of female mourner is complicated by her reference to the Greek myth of Procne and Philomel as it intersects with the bird as shrouded in secret yet singing and thriving, not quite Coleridge’s merry nightingale but something akin to it. This was another piece of the puzzle about women’s mourning songs and their complex relationship with elegiac convention. If Macpherson’s bird, who announces herself as no man’s nightingale, is a symbol of a female elegiac mode, it prompts as many questions as it initially appears to answer. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Sir, no man’s nightingale, your foolish bird,

I sing and thrive, by Angel finger fed,

And when I turn to rest, an Angel’s word

Exalts an air of trees above my head,

Shrouds me in secret where no single thing

May envy no-man’s-nightingale her spring.

Macpherson’s impersonation of a nightingale in this tiny dramatic monologue adds another piece to the puzzle of women’s voices in the elegiac mode. Both poet and nightingale do sing: no ambiguity there. Macpherson’s bird also leaves no question about her spiritual allegiance. She is no man’s nightingale: fed by the Angels themselves, a touch of divinity is granted to her voice, beyond male—or human—intervention. Where Milton’s Muses inspire the male voice only to accompany it, Macpherson’s nightingale sings and thrives, fed by Angelic divinity and protected from worldly envy by a leafy canopy spread by a single mysterious Angelic word.

The mystery deepens when set against Macpherson’s classical allusion. Procne’s weeping song (the traditional nightingale’s sob) signifies grief over the rape of her sister and the betrayal by her husband, as well as acting as a warning to men about the power of sisterhood. However, there is a degree to which Procne—as man’s nightingale—is a cautionary figure who mourns in male service, regretting the end of her marriage, the death of her son, and her own foolishness in believing in Tereus’s fidelity. What is the difference here between grief and remorse? The lightness of Macpherson’s tone in No Man’s Nightingale disguises its serious intent and double meaning. Macpherson embraces the nightingale’s song as female, but refuses the notion that the nightingale sings for the ears of men. For what, then, does Macpherson’s no-man’s-nightingale mourn, and why must an Angel’s word / shroud [her] in secret? What, for instance, are the consequences of being envied against which this nightingale has been safeguarded?

The questions raised by this short lyric articulate the conundrum encountered by the female elegist as both privileged and tied to an unenviable task, touched by the ineffable and shrouded by difficulty. The ambiguities and paradoxes of Macpherson’s poem suggest that to sing and thrive as a female elegist requires a complex series of lyric, linguistic, and social negotiations. Macpherson’s poem does not suggest that female access to the elegiac tradition is easy; indeed, it will take an act of appropriation to loudly sweep the string and build the lofty rhyme in female terms. In fact, the nightingale’s (and, putatively, Macpherson’s own) address to Sir ironizes claims of independent feminist power that the poem might imply. But certainly in having the bird/poet speak back to Keats, who in Ode to a Nightingale envies the bird her forest, and even suggests that forgetfulness, rather than relentless obdurate memory, is her milieu, Macpherson is speaking back to centuries of male elegiac tradition as it has been drawn from poems like Milton’s Lycidas.

Milton’s poem and Macpherson’s were published more than three centuries apart: Milton’s elegy for his Cambridge fellow student Edward King in 1638, and Macpherson’s lyric in 1957. In placing them alongside each other here, I am aware of a number of disjunctions that the comparison invites: the authors are separated not only by time, but also by geography, by gender, and by genre. But do such differences draw razor-sharp distinctions between the works, or do they, as I think, exist as voices in a debate about the functions of elegiac convention and appropriation? Seventeenth-century England appears to be a long way from Canada’s modernist period until we think about Macpherson’s British childhood and her career as a Romance literature specialist; add to that Macpherson’s acknowledgement in University of Toronto Quarterly that Lycidas was a poem that obsessed her from an early age, and the distance—historical and geographical—between the two poets seems a little smaller. In terms of readership, Milton’s widely studied elegy has the weight of hundreds of years of scholarship behind it, while the lack of attention given Macpherson’s poetry since the 1960s makes it an exemplar of Canadian literary neglect. Then there is the question of genre: can we even call Macpherson’s No Man’s Nightingale an elegy, and if so, in whose terms? For whom or what could this nightingale mourn? While the Angel may be protecting the nightingale from the wrath of men, it is equally possible that the Angel may be protecting the world from the song of the nightingale. She sings (or sobs as Auden writes of his nightingales as prostitutes doing in Song of the Master and Boatswain) and thrives as Macpherson maintains, but how should we read her femininity, her grief, and her robust song together?

Part of the aim of this book is to consider such questions about the female elegiac mode as they appear in Canadian poetry written by women. This volume will focus on how Canadian contemporary female elegists refuse to be the foolish bird dwelling within and promoting the masculine tradition of mourning, and instead produce elegies that assert a variety of feminist positions that are negotiated within and beyond the parameters of the male elegiac tradition. To begin, we must consider the influence of Milton’s Lycidas as the example through which women’s adoption and adaptation of elegiac tradition may be read against the long-held literary investment in a profoundly male homosocial dynamic within the elegy.

Between Men: Elegiac Homosociality

Lycidas is by no means the only or—some would argue—even the best elegy in the British literary tradition, but it presents a starting point from which a stream of profoundly homosocial elegies has issued, each becoming canonized in turn. Elegiac production in the nineteenth century deserves a special mention for it produced, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais in 1821 for John Keats. Similarities between Milton’s elegy and Shelley’s are numerous and have been explored elsewhere, but the youth of both elegized men is worth noting, as is Shelley’s prominent exhortation O, weep for Adonais, he is dead, a command that bypasses Milton’s inquiry entirely to instruct the reader in a rather aggressive manner. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. written in 1850 for Arthur Henry Hallam also elegizes a young man, Tennyson’s close friend and brother of my love, fellow poet and Cambridge scholar Hallam. Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis (1865) for Arthur Hugh Clough also sets up a brotherly relationship between poet and elegiac object and demonstrates Arnold’s debt to Lycidas in his use of the pastoral elegiac convention. The poet and the lost friend appear in Thyrsis in the personae of two shepherds, Thyrsis and Corydon respectively, who compete in a singing contest, a competition that underlines the elegiac injunction to sing of the lost friend after his death. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale (1868) for Charles Baudelaire also addresses the elegized man as brother and even alludes in its title to Catullus’s Poem 101, an elegy for Catullus’s brother killed on the battlefield.

The homosocial and determinedly fraternal dynamic of these poems underscore the position of the elegy in the nineteenth century as the literary offering of one young man’s lament for the untimely and unjust death of another young man. Female elegists existed prior to the twentieth century; how could they not given that women’s mourning work is so profoundly tied to the care and cleaning of the dead? But with the exception of the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, the work of female elegists who wrote prior to the twentieth century has been given comparatively little scholarly attention. Even in the twentieth century, critical ideas, such as Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence, reinforce homosociality as absolutely necessary to the elegy, asserting a father–son dynamic in which a young writer makes himself over into a strong poet by explicitly or implicitly elegizing his mentor (5). The elegy between men traditionally moves through a declaration of personal grief to angry political statement to philosophic/spiritual declaration, relying heavily upon the truths discovered through melancholic profundity to complete the elegiac discovery of the self through the media of art and philosophy. There can be little doubt, as Bloom himself asserts, that this movement is careerist, but Bloom also excuses such careerism as a rite of passage that every strong poet must pass through in order to assert his individual genius in the tide of tradition.

Bloom’s reading of the ephebe’s claim of mastery as a cultural and literary tradition reminds us that no discussion of politics in the elegy, feminist or otherwise, should begin without first considering how mourning becomes a rhetorical claim in poetry. Ronald Schleifer, in Rhetoric and Death, asserts that the rhetoric of mourning is itself a work of mourning, and while this statement seems impossible to refute, it is important to distinguish the rhetoric of mourning as work as an idea unto itself and not necessarily subservient to Sigmund Freud’s conception of the work of mourning: that is, a work that strives for, and is often guided towards, a psychological completion or curative effect. Schleifer’s suggestion that the rhetoric of mourning takes as its task the recovery of voice in the face of death (221) seems appropriate to consider in terms of the elegy as a literary artifact of mourning, but on the other hand, the recovery of voice suggests an initial pathological loss of voice that sits ironically beside the voluble narrators of the canonical elegies just discussed, and seems specifically aimed at the elegies by the movement towards confessional lyric popularized in mid-twentieth century American poetry. Although much good feminist work has been done in the last thirty years to re-appropriate the female voice in literature, this book will concentrate less on recovery of voice and more upon the female voice’s contribution to debates about death, power, and subjectivity that drive the elegy.

Despite its initial dependence upon annotating affective grief, inquiry—such as Milton’s Who would not sing?—lends the elegy a peculiar but unmistakable vitality. Abbie Findlay Potts, in her 1964 study The Elegiac Mode, makes an eloquent and mischievous argument for what she calls the elegiac imagination and its boundless questing energy: Restless and challenging, [the elegiac imagination] makes and unmakes ethical codes, ritual, and liturgy. It rearranges even as it disturbs the patterns of civil government and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Although its themes are the puzzles of life and the riddle of death, it settles down neither in the tavern nor in the churchyard (2). Potts’s emphasis on the play of order and chaos is important to understanding the inquisitive energy of the elegy, and her terms are unmistakably equivocal. An elegy makes and unmakes ways of reading and regarding death; it rearranges (i.e., creates order of various degrees) even as it disturbs civic and liturgical law. The meta-conceptual challenge to elegiac convention itself constitutes an elegiac convention. In the mid-twentieth century, Potts reads nineteenth-century elegies as less sorrowful than skeptical, more concerned with revelation than with affective closure (2). The Sisters of the sacred well invoked by Milton’s swain in Lycidas take on new life in Potts’s reading as she playfully names the muse of elegy Elegeia, and claims that Elegeia imbues the human elegist with an unflagging energy for the performance of sorrowing, challenging, questioning (11). Drawing from Aristotle’s Poetics, Potts pinpoints the discovery, or anagnorisis, of the elegy as the poem’s most necessary feature, noting that this revelation can be read through the display of feelings aroused by memory, by reason or inference, fictitiously by false reference or intended deceit or—best of all—out of the nature of previous events or antecedent discoveries (37). Using Potts’s elegant theorem, we might say that the revelatory energy that drives the female-authored elegy in the twentieth century comments on the previous event of male elegiac history and the antecedent discovery of the difference between refusing to sing and having song refused for reasons of gender.

Loosened Tongues and Antecedent Discoveries: Contexts for Female Elegies

Why does a woman’s plaint (lament), as we shall see with Hamlet’s Ophelia and Freud’s conscientious women, typically come across as mere chatter and thus less dignified than the ranting of a Hamletian nobleman (or Tassian poet), whose maddened vituperations are attended to and readily given a status of truth? And why aren’t there more women speaking out this truth then, and why is it that when a melancholic woman speaks, her loosened tongue is not granted the same extraordinary virtue and wisdom as a man’s?

— Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia

Feminist theory teaches us that literary history is never apolitical, and the history of the elegy is no exception. Juliana Schiesari’s important study on the gendering of melancholia in Renaissance literature and culture asks the question that remains largely unanswered in contemporary elegy studies: What can we make of the cultural importance and literary place of a female work of mourning? Schiesari’s question about the value and cultural negation of melancholic female speech is a concern as germane to contemporary feminist poetics as it is to Hamlet. Although Schiesari refers to literary characters rather than elegists or their speaking personae, her tart indictment of a sexist elegiac history resonates in the twenty-first century, rhetorically and politically. British culture, and by extension, the British-influenced settler cultures in the United States and Canada, have long considered Schiesari’s melancholic woman’s … loosened tongue as so much chatter rather than a source of philosophic and spiritual truth. Schiesari’s identification of the extraordinary virtue and wisdom granted to melancholic men and summarily denied to mourning women in Renaissance literature demands contemporary application. Schiesari affirms the need to define melancholia as potentially creative rather than pathological: to become melancholic one would need some access to cultural production, that is, what [Luce] Irigaray calls ‘access to a signifying economy’ (65) in order to create out of the feeling of loss some valid way to articulate that loss, that ‘painful dejection,’ meanfully (66). The elegy is, among other things, such a method of cultural production, and I adopt Schiesari’s question in order to contend that virtue and wisdom can be granted to the female elegist who speaks through productive melancholia.

Recent elegy studies have positioned Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Amy Clampitt, Margaret Atwood, and Lola Lemire Tostevin as poets who have served as elegists for people passed and for worlds vanished. However, the history of elegy has, in part, been a non-history of its female discontents, as the discovery of the kinds of feminisms or proto-feminisms that can be read in women’s elegiac writing is still new territory. After Potts’s sly inference about the muse of elegy in 1964, Celeste Schenck articulated the challenges of the feminine elegiac mode in her 1986 article, Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-constructing the Elegy, first published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Schenck suggests the serviceability of a methodological compatibility of feminism and deconstruction (14) to reclaim the intellectual and affective force of the elegiac contract. Melissa F. Zeiger’s Beyond Consolation (1997) responds to and reconfigures Schenck’s theory in order to challenge the Orphean assumptions of the elegiac mode in her examination of Rich, Hacker, and Lorde as American female elegists whose literary work of mourning is steeped in political exigency. Zeiger’s study is groundbreaking not only for elegy studies, but also for feminist studies and illness discourse. She begins with a feminist refusal of consolation, situating the ongoing affectionate relations with the dead established by women’s elegies as a vital step towards recognizing affinity, disarming suspicion and engaging in a strategic dialogue about misogyny and tradition that in Zeiger’s terms can barely be said to have started (25).

Zeiger’s view of the elegy as a strategic dialogue between the living and the dead and, indeed, between two (or more) states of mind available to the elegist herself is intriguing for its suggestion that the elegy performs affect with a healthy dose of intellect.