minot My Husband’s Back 105
woman who will recognize their nobility and become their compass in a world of
chaos. When all is not perfect, some couples may give up rather than help each
other through rough spots. Others unrealistically hang on to fantasy, even in the
face of abuse. The ability to see beauty and faithfulness in small things, like a
husband’s back as he leans in to build a fire, may indeed signify true love. The
speaker of Susan Minot’s poem is weary, perhaps sick herself, overwhelmed, since
the baby has the flu — never an easy time. Sometimes weekends seem longer than
any workweek, and the opening line “Sunday evening” communicates the drain–
ing awareness that the weekend is over and rest has not come. We get the feeling
that everything has gone wrong this weekend, the “pot of burnt rice” metonymi–
cally standing in for a series of botched efforts typical of a bad spell. It is cold, and
apparently the family depends on a woodstove for heat. Noticing her husband’s
back, the speaker suddenly moves into a moment of peace.
The moment is one of infinite simplicity. The speaker refers to a sort of
chaos that until this point has caused her to be confused and overwhelmed: “the
giant world which swirls . . . suddenly ceases to spin” as she gazes at her hus-
band’s back while he bends to a simple task. His back is “animal and
gamine” — an odd image. The word animal implies the sheer physicality of what
he does; he carries out the primitive, concrete action of bringing fire to his
family. The word gamine is feminine — memorably applied to the actor Audrey
Hepburn — referring to a boyish child who roams the streets, a vulnerable but
independent image signifying one who must scratch for the basics of life, having
no one to turn to for help. To see one’s husband as “animal and gamine” is to see
him at a basic level. This is no handsome prince but a man who endures and
does what must be done. Perhaps the speaker has really traveled the world; per-
haps she has done so only in imagination. But the sight of her husband’s back
brings a moment of clarity in the midst of whatever it is that she is dealing with:
global tragedy, domestic frustration, cosmic gloom. Matthew Arnold suggests
that all we have in the midst of lost faith, war, and confusion is the communion
between human beings that we define as love. Perhaps the speaker of Susan
Minot’s poem comes as close as any to describing how such love might work to
dispel despair. Issues of definition arise, as they so often do when we talk about
love. Whether or not our culture places too much or not enough faith in the
power of love, this poem is indeed powerful.
Asked to identify which poem was written by a man and which by a woman,
no reader would fail to choose correctly. The speaker of Matthew Arnold’s
“Dover Beach,” though, intellectual rather than domestic, could as easily be a
woman. However, Susan Minot’s voice is female, and the details of her poem
could only be spoken by a wife. Perhaps it is stereotypical that a man would be
building the fire, but the imagery challenges the macho image; the wife loves
her husband as much for the vulnerability of his “firm and compact . . . young
man’s back” as for anything manly about it. Her desire to “crawl on it forever” is
beautifully physical. Her huge, confusing world has become compressed into
this one point, and she is struck by sudden, passionate contentment. Matthew
Arnold’s confusing world is similarly compressed as the speaker suggests that he
and his love be true to one another, although the world is still very much with
us in Arnold’s poem. Ending with the violent image of war lends a pessimistic
tone to “Dover Beach” in contrast to the “one point” of destination in Minot’s
106 Love
final sentence, which leaves us on a note of peace. Perhaps it is dangerous to
place too much pressure on love, but it may be enough to treasure moments here
and there when appreciation for our communion with another person shines
through in flashes of rare clarity.
MELANCHOLY LOVES: POEMS (p.526)
EDNAST.VINCENT MILLAY
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where,
and Why (p.526)
In 1923, the year this poem was first published, Edna St.Vincent Millay became
the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was suffering
from the debilitating illness that would plague her for the remainder of her life,
contributing to alcoholism and drug addiction. One biographer states bluntly
that in 1923 Millay was dying. She also married that year, on the same day she
underwent major abdominal surgery. Although hers was an open marriage from
the beginning, with each partner free to have sexual affairs with others, some-
times even engaging in group sex, perhaps these milestones explain why the
poem’s “unremembered lads” may not be coming to her bed with such fre-
quency and why she feels that her summer is over, like “a lonely tree in winter.”
She was only thirty- one, but she had already lived intensely, with many lovers,
both male and female, and perhaps she was at a watershed year in her life.
She had burst onto the literary scene in 1912 at age twenty, when she submit–
ted the poem “Renascence” to a literary contest. Called “Vincent” by her family,
the poet used that name to submit the poem, causing editors to think at first that
she was a man, a misidentification she flirtatiously played to the hilt. Although
“Renascence” came in only fourth, it became wildly popular, and the recognition
it received gained her the support for an education at Vassar College, which she
embraced with characteristic passion. A pantheistic outpouring in rhyming cou–
plets and unwavering iambic tetrameter rhythm, “Renascence” both made the
writer’s reputation and ran counter to a modernism that would soon replace such
emotional, structurally formal poetry and judge it as trivial and subjective, filled
with invitations to affective and pathetic fallacies. Like the later movie genre
tagged “chick flick,” her poetry came to be thought of as feminine and thus infe–
rior. Millay told an interviewer that she wanted to write in a way that would help
readers see that “[l]ife can be exciting and free and intense.” Her passionate render–
ing of this credo in both her life and her work made her a popular voice for young
people in the “Roaring Twenties” decade of the early twentieth century. She was
regularly pursued by what today we would call paparazzi, as much for her beauty,
charisma, sexual freedom, and bohemian political activism as for her poetry.
While her popularity as a poet waned for several decades, two literary biographies
that came out in 2002 have revived interest in Millay in the twenty- first century.
The cliché of being “in love with love” seems apt when considering Millay’s
poetry and her lifestyle choices. In the sonnet by Millay in this cluster, the
auden Funeral Blues 107
speaker remembers the experiences of love — the lips, the arms, the midnight
cry — but not the individual human beings who have been her lovers. Unlike
John Keats’s “Bright Star” (p.517) — in which the speaker evokes the image of a
real woman’s breast rising and falling underneath her lover’s head forever — the
objects of Millay’s passion are plural “unremembered lads” — anonymous, face-
less, and temporary. The poet, if the poem is autobiographical, misses the pan-
theistic sensuality and oneness with all nature and humanity that she had earlier
described in “Renascence,” but her experience of love is fragmented and fre-
netic, and ultimately unsatisfying. Nevertheless, readers can accept her pain as
real, as only emptiness can be, especially as we recall that she is physically in real
pain at this point in her life and may even be close to death. Perhaps, in the early
1920s, she misses something she has not yet experienced but will soon find in
her unconventional but supportive marriage. However, she has no way of know-
ing that this future will happen.
The last two lines of the poem echo the barrenness and loss implied in
words like ghosts, sigh, unremembered, winter, lonely, vanished, silent, and gone.
It is not so much that she is no longer in love but that she feels a life of love is
over for her. For a poet who began with unrestrained emotion and the image of
renaissance, this poem is strikingly pessimistic. The final words — no more — offer
no hope of resurrection. We might look up the words posed in question 5 of
“Thinking about the Text” in a scholarly source like the Oxford English
Dictionary to consider their connotations. The word wistful implies longing and
expectancy, whereas nostalgic looks back to the past. Certainly longing is evident
in the poem, but there seems to be little expectancy. Most readers will agree that
the poem’s tone is nostalgic and perhaps sentimental. It seems unlikely that the
speaker’s revelation that she has had many lovers implies that she regrets her life.
If we choose to inject biography, it is clear that, although she married, Millay
continued to have many lovers after this poem was written. Her assertion that
“summer sang in me” makes the poem seem bittersweet, its sadness mingled
with memories of at least having experienced human touch. If indeed it was
written when the poet was very ill, the tone seems appropriate.
W.H.AuDEN
Funeral Blues (p.528)
Ironically, the poem byW.H.Auden that begins with the agonized plea “Stop
all the clocks” is best known to current readers from a dramatic reading in a
movie, while its first publication (in part) also can be found in a dramatic setting,
Auden’s 1936–1937 play, written with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6.
Only the first two stanzas of the poem appear in the original play, an absurdist
critique of empire, with a warped sort of motherhood and sibling rivalry setting
the tone. Unexpectedly, a sensitive mountain climber seems to cause his manip-
ulative, exploitative brother to die, and it is this representative of empire who is
mourned by the first lines of the elegy, causing the mother to finally give her
introverted son — the mountain climber — the mother’s love he desires.
Exploration of the North and South Poles and expeditions to climb Mount
Everest and other Himalayan mountains (including one famously called K2)
108 Love
were used in the early twentieth century for propaganda purposes, much like the
Olympic Games. Thus, the poem originally satirized the public mourning that
often takes place when such symbolic deaths occur. (Readers will recall the
aftermath of the events of September11, 2001.) While Auden’s poem has come
far from its original context and has been published under various titles, its revi-
sions speak to Auden’s writing process, and its earliest context helps readers catch
the ironic tone of the opening lines and perhaps appreciate its transformation.
The exploration trope is also interesting when considering the achingly passion-
ate line (which does not appear in the original context): “He was my North, my
South, my East and West.” Unlike the counterfeit, jingoistic dirge of the play, the
elegy in its final form transforms empty ritual into raw reality.
So, beginning with the blunt, understated, highly ironic images from his
satirical modernist play, Auden moves in the last two stanzas of “Funeral Blues”
to the eloquent passion later readers recognize from the movie Four Weddings
and a Funeral. In the film, actor John Hannah, playing a gay man whose long-
time lover has died suddenly, begins with the words, “Perhaps you will forgive
me if I turn from my own feelings to the words of another splendid bug-
ger, W. H. Auden.” Many viewers have found Hannah’s reading profoundly
moving, so much so that subsequent readers tend to mimic his intonations and
accent when they recite the poem. Viewing Hannah’s performance (available on
YouTube) could add much to readers’ experience of the poem’s depth. However,
because students tend to handle biographical context in an overly simplistic way,
instructors need to head off attempts to trivialize or dismiss the poem as “merely”
about the author losing one particular person to death or to the breakup of a
relationship. Nor should they understand the poem only as it appears in the
movie. The intense grief expressed in the poem does not have to be spoken by a
lover, although it captures well the committed love of one man for another. If we
show the funeral scene from the movie, however, we might have students look
up the word bugger in the Oxford English Dictionary and discuss the affectionate
beker Morning Poem 109
at funerals because many mourners appreciate the honesty of his words and
prefer the reality of grief over platitudes that deny its intensity.
PABLO NERuDA
The Song of Despair (p.529)
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, widely known as the people’s poet, published “The
Song of Despair” at only twenty years of age. The poem offers a fascinating mix
of despair and attachment, revel and lament, revolving around rich metaphors
of the sea, divers, shipwrecks, and falling, among others. Indeed, the speaker
seems to be just as passionate about his lover’s absence as he remembers being
about her presence, and his lament for her spans almost contradictory images.
Descriptions of abandonment, such as “Deserted like the wharves at dawn”
(line 3), suggest that she is no longer in his life, but his mention that his desire
was “terrible and brief’ and “difficult and drunken” (lines 31–32) hints that the
affair might have mutually burned out.
Readers get a strong sense of the turbulence, almost volatility, of this love, and
the sometimes contradictory depictions showcase how fraught the speaker’s emo–
tions are. Throughout, Neruda’s speaker repeats the line, “In you everything sank.”
This refrain has multiple valances, ranging from the more positive “falling” in love,
to the idea that she might be a vessel for his desires, to a deep sense of loss, in that
what sinks is taken away or gone forever. His lover is both the holder of his “destiny”
and a “pit of debris” (line 43) that “swallows” everything, much like the sea. The
“moist hour” he refers to certainly echoes the poem’s water- based imagery, but it
likely also suggests that he misses her most keenly when he’s drinking — an idea
reinforced by the line about their “drunken” passion and the remark that he “raises
[his] song to [her]” (line 22) as one might raise a glass in toast. The poem, his song
of despair, summons her like a ghost at night in order to retell the story of their
relationship. In that sense, even if the affair itself was fleeting, his passionate mourn–
ing persists, as reflected in the lines, “Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your
tombs, / still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds” (lines 33–34). Put another
way, what houses their love is dead, but somehow life remains. And it still hurts.
ROBIN BECKER
Morning Poem (p.531)
Robin Becker’s “Morning Poem” offers a different take on love from that of the
other poets. Rather than taking place by the sea or located on a spiritual plane,
the site of Becker’s love story is an everyday bed — more specifically, in a bed on
110 Love
a morning when other responsibilities await. Readers of William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet might recall that morning is often figured in literature as a time
when love, or at least love’s magic, must end. Morning is something to be feared
or avoided. Like the lark heralding the dawn, the “real world” is always waiting
to disrupt and intrude on the lovers. This outside world, in the case of Becker’s
speaker, consists of “traffic,” a ringing phone, a morning crankiness, and the
depression that “wakes with [them]” — all of which she expects, but nevertheless
hopes to forestall, in favor of dreams.
When she says that “depression wakes with us,” the speaker references the
inevitability of mourning whatever was lost in the night, the surety of regret, as
well as her struggle to feel otherwise. Even knowing that “nothing lasts,” the
speaker confesses that she would try to hold her lover back in time, try to recap-
ture the night and hold the morning at bay, try to become again who she used to
be. The poem ends with a formulation similar to its beginning: “Lie. It’s morn-
ing” (line 15). By writing the lone word “Lie,” she is directing her lover to both
tell an untruth and remain in bed. This second reminder that “It’s morning”
differs slightly from the first, in that Becker’s speaker has herself owned up to
what she wants and what she is able to do. The morning can look a bit different
now that they are awake and lying, rather than just listening.
For Becker’s narrator, morning is a time of ending, and she longs to extend
the comfort and intimacy of the previous night. This pleasant remembering
depicts a very different nighttime than Neruda’s emerging lament or Millay’s
ghosts. The narrator in “Morning Poem” is still possessed of her love, where the
other poems depict a love that is lost. Becker’s narrator is looking into a future
where “nothing lasts,” wanting to avoid for as long as possible the moment when
Millay’s narrator has realized that summer “sings no more.” In a sense, these
poems could be understood as three of the five stages of grief. Becker’s poem
exhibits denial, as her narrator asks her lover to lie to her. Neruda’s narrator is
caught up in a raging storm of emotion, knowing that the love will not return.
Finally, Millay’s narrator has reached a quiet acceptance, quietly mourning
something she almost doesn’t remember.
SEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS: POEMS (p.533)
JOHN DONNE
The Flea (p.533)
“The Flea,” a well- known love poem by John Donne, rehearses a man’s specious
argument in favor of a liaison with a woman he desires. His argument rests on the
reasoning that, because a flea has bitten both of them, their mingled blood makes
them “more than married.” Being at such an advanced stage in their relationship,
he argues, they should go ahead and consummate. In response, she moves to kill
the flea, which hints at her resistance to his proposition; but he implores her to
spare its life, for in doing so, she would also spare both of theirs: “Oh stay, three
lives in one flea spare,” Donne’s speaker proclaims. The flea, he explains further,
houses their love and, in holding both of their blood, also serves as their “marriage
marvell To His Coy Mistress 111
bed.” She kills the flea anyway and replies that neither of them is weaker for the
act. He agrees, and his rejoinder is that such a fact proves she ought to have
“yielded” to him. He turns her argument on its head by observing that the flea’s
death is no greater a loss of innocence or honor than a love affair would be.
Donne employs a rich variety of metaphors throughout, such as comparing
a flea to a vessel with “living walls of jet” (line 15) that is also a “marriage temple”
and “marriage bed.” Blood, one of the poem’s central terms, comes to stand in
for sexual intercourse. It was a common belief at the time that blood was
exchanged during sex, so this comparison is particularly apt for the historical
period. Phrases like “pampered swells” and early references to sucking make
much of the poem a kind of seduction, as the speaker describes the flea’s bites in
almost sensual terms. Although the speaker’s argument is unlikely to have been
persuasive by logic alone, it’s not unthinkable that the humor and cleverness at
work here might succeed where argumentative mastery would not. In killing the
flea, however, the recipient of the speaker’s attention shows herself not easily
won over. She meets him measure for measure. Readers might speculate, then,
on whether the rhetorical performance reflected in the poem might be enough
to convince her to relent or whether she might pen a new response of her own.
ANDREW MARVELL
To His Coy Mistress (p.535)
As involved in his way with the political issues of the middle years of the seven–
teenth century as Sir Walter Raleigh was with those around its beginning,
Andrew Marvell wrote prose satires and metaphysical verse much admired and
ultimately recovered for a twentieth- century audience byT.S.Eliot. Up until
that time, Marvell was best known for having served as secretary to the blind poet
John Milton. In a poem about Milton’s composition of the epic poem Paradise
Lost, Marvell reacts to Milton’s writing process, describing his amazement as he
watched the complex structure and lines of the epic take shape before his eyes.
Therefore, as a reader in his own time, and later as an influence on early-
twentieth- century writers, Andrew Marvell is a poet’s poet. Some readers of
Marvell’s lyric poems have speculated that his deceptively light touch, applied to
what they see as his profound insight and skilled technique, came as a result of
his years as a tutor. Even the most devoted readers of Andrew Marvell therefore
concede that to skim the surface of his poetry is to miss an undercurrent that may
run counter to the poem as it first appears. Some critics who have examined “To
His Coy Mistress” in close detail maintain that the poem sends ambivalent, even
confused, messages about love and that its ideas do not bear up under logical
scrutiny.
The speaker’s purpose in “To His Coy Mistress” is to persuade his reluctant
audience to give up her virginity to him without further delay. His logic seems to
be that if more time existed, then waiting would make sense, but since there is
little time, they should not wait to make love. But the conclusion does not neces–
sarily follow. It would be just as logical — or as illogical — to say, “Since there’s so
little time, we shouldn’t waste it having sex. I think I’ll take that trip to pick up
rubies in India before they are all gone.” Good authority holds that the poet’s
112 Love
argument “affirms the consequent” or commits the “fallacy of the converse.”
Although some students might know these terms for logical fallacies and enjoy
taking a rhetorical analysis further, one could use their interest as a resource rather
than expecting all students (or all literature instructors, for that matter) to identify
examples of faulty reasoning by name.
What we might do is ask why so many readers love the poem despite our
conviction that we would not be swayed by its argument. The answer would
undoubtedly lie in its appeal to our emotions and the overwhelming beauty of
its style, but even these can be called into question. The issues hidden within
“To His Coy Mistress” are best discovered by close reading, something the class
can do together. Even the title may confuse students who have never heard the
word coy or who assume that the word mistress implies that she is already his
illicit lover, a reading that throws her reluctance to make love into a different
light. The woman addressed is assumed by the speaker to be a virgin, and her
remaining so until marriage is the expectation of Puritan English society in the
1600s, though birth and marriage records call into question any universal adher-
ence to prohibitions against premarital sex. If Marvell’s speaker is meant to be
the poet himself, an issue in itself, he is calling for a woman to sin or at best to
marry. He assumes that she will be persuaded to do so by hyperbole, flattery, fear
of death and decay, and violently erotic images rather than by logic.
The poem has three major sections, though the rhythm and sense often
provide a sense of closure at the end of four lines and the rhyming couplets at
the end of two. The first major section elaborates on the first premise of Marvell’s
argument, what he would do if there were world enough and time, and the final
couplet (lines 19–20) sums up his warrant for this action, that she deserves it and
he desires it. The second premise, that time prevents such a love, is described in
the next section, again ending with a couplet that sums up and gives a warrant
for his assertions by citing the finality of the grave (lines 31–32). The final section
deals with the third part of the syllogism, with the word therefore appropriately
used in its first line. He goes on to explain to her, repeating the word now at
intervals, that he has proven his point and now is the time to take action. He ends
with a couplet that sums up the urgency of these last lines, proposing that though
they cannot stop time, they can make it go faster, and this conclusion warrants
the rushing violent images of this final part of the poem. The couplet that ends
each part of his argument contains an opposition. The poem has a sense of des-
peration about it, with its images of violent birds of prey devouring time rather
than allowing time to devour them, tearing pleasures through iron gates. He
proposes that the lovers refuse to be victims, that they turn violently on the
enemy, making love a frantic defiance of death.
Although some readers may see a threat toward his coy mistress in the last
section, others may note that he does not propose that he should direct his vio-
lent energy toward her but that they do these things together, pooling their
“strength and . . . sweetness” (lines 41–42). And she seems ready to participate,
if we are to believe his description of her body in lines 35 and 36. Students who
have read Plato’s Symposium may wonder from lines 41 and 42 if Marvell’s read-
ing of classical literature has included Aristophanes’ description of divided
human beings seeking their other halves because he saw the original humans as
round balls. Despite his fierce images, directed against time and death, the
hoagland What Narcissism Means to Me 113
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: ARE MILLENNIALS
NARCISSISTS? (p.538)
TONY HOAGLAND
What Narcissism Means to Me (p.539)
Poet Tony Hoagland’s “What Narcissism Means to Me” is an almost conversa-
tional foray into American life. The speaker is at a barbeque with friends and
even discusses the qualities of a fine steak. But when Hoagland writes that
“Narcissism is the system / that means the most to me” (lines 5–6), his narrator
is not necessarily exhibiting the qualities of a narcissist. After all, he’s listening to
his friends’ opinions and noticing their emotional responses. He seems far less
concerned with his love for himself than he is with the love of other people. One
of the poem’s characters, Sylvia, calls narcissism a “heroic achievement in posi-
tive thinking,” a comment that comes across as a little bitter. Her point may be
that contemporary society is invested in convincing us that we aren’t good
enough — not smart enough, not attractive enough, not youthful enough, and so
on. This would make any form of self- love a remarkable kind of achievement.
The poem’s narrator recalls a time when he thought he could live without
love, and most read this as a memory about someone else’s love for him. While it
might be tempting to assume that in order to be loved, one must be worthy, practi–
cal experience suggests this is not necessarily the case. How many wives or hus–
bands return to an abuser out of love? How many children persist in loving
absentee parents? The qualities of such love, however, might well be different. The
poem concludes by referencing steak cooked rare, and such a reference touches
on some of the ways the speaker is thinking about the vulnerabilities of love and
life — narcissism perhaps being one of the most obvious self- protections of all.
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
brooke lea foster, The Persistent Myth of the
Narcissistic Millennial (p.541)
emily esfahani smith and jennifer l. aaker,
Millennial Searchers (p.544)
114 Love
olson whitehead, How “You Do You” Perfectly Captures
OurNarcissistic Culture (p.547)
steve kelley and jeff parker, You Know the Great Thing about
Selfies? (p. 551)
Brooke Lea Foster’s “The Persistent Myth of the Narcissistic Millennial” takes to
task researchers and others who are quick to assume that “selfies” and social
media mean that millennials are more narcissistic than their predecessors.
“Selfies,” she notes, are just as much about vanity as anything else and are not a
clear predictor of a narcissistic personality. Twenge and Kluger are two oppo-
nents she critiques for misrepresenting the difference between millennials and
others. The main charges she levels at Twenge have to do with Twenge’s meth-
odology and her use of the 40-question Narcissistic Personality Index to measure
narcissism. Foster points out the ambiguity of several of the questions and cri-
tiques the validity of the comparison Twenge wants to make. Foster finds Kluger
somewhat persuasive, at least at times, but she also recognizes in his lament
about Generation Me a song similar to what’s been sung with every generation
past. She believes that without more concrete data to back up the assertions,
there is little actual evidence to suggest true narcissism is on the rise.
Foster does make a distinction between narcissism as a disorder and its use as
a “catchphrase,” noting that the term comes to stand in for vanity or a measure of
overconfidence. Ultimately, Foster is not persuaded that millennials are any more
narcissistic than any other group of people and observes that what might code for
“narcissism” is a whole lot like the kind of swaggering, unwavering confidence
we see in every generation of young people making their way in the world.
In another take on the current population of millennials, Emily Esfahani
Smith and Jennifer Aaker argue that millennials are actually less concerned with
material possessions than generations before. The trend is reversing away from
narcissism and “flakiness.” Rather than focusing on wealth, Smith and Aaker
explain, millennials are interested in living meaningful lives that contribute posi–
tively to society, including careers in medicine or public service. Using evidence
from previous studies, the authors make an important distinction between “mean–
ing” and “happiness,” noting that happiness is more “ self- oriented” — being a
“taker” — whereas meaning is associated with being a “giver” or having an other-
oriented life. Having a meaningful life does not necessarily mean that one is
happy, but meaning is associated with an important kind of fulfillment. Connecting
“Millennial Searchers” with Foster’s work on the “narcissistic millennial,” it’s clear
that the kind of meaningful lives Smith and Aaker discuss are not narcissistic. By
their definitions, narcissism would be more closely linked with happiness and, by
extension, a focus on economic prosperity over giving to others.
Colson Whitehead’s “How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic
Culture” argues that phrases like “you do you” are tautophrases, like “it is what it
is,” that serve to self- justify and shut down opportunities for reflection or nuance.
He implicitly connects such tautophrases to narcissism by arguing that such
phrases empower the individual, regardless of “how shallow that individual is”
(p.549). One might argue, in keeping with Whitehead’s point, that a term like
“whatever” could count as a tautophrase, since it suggests an individual’s complete
lack of concern for something outside him- or herself. In some ways, “it is what it
hopin The Story of an Hour 115
is” could be read as an avoidance of the status quo and a rejection of the possibility
of enacting change. On the other hand, one might see it as also an embrace of the
inevitable, enabling us to purposefully direct our energies elsewhere. Toward the
end, Whitehead more seriously critiques tautophrases like “haters gonna hate,”
using sarcasm to imply that these phrases reflect a broader acceptance of people
doing terrible things. “Haters gonna hate” essentially negates the possibility of
meaningful critique. Don’t like drone warfare? Haters gonna hate. . . . “You do
you” he sees as similarly destructive because it allows us to excuse those actions
under the guise of people acting out their natures. Whitehead’s final point about
the scorpion and the frog is that we have the potential to be either — there isn’t one
nature or self that controls our actions. His hope, then, is that we choose our best
self, and preferably the one that doesn’t drown us all in a bout of narcissism.
The cluster closes with panels of the comic strip Dustin, created by Steve
Kelley and Jeff Parker. In it, we see a middle-aged couple criticize a millennial as
he takes multiple selfies in front of a fountain. Kelley and Parker depict the argu–
ment that millennials are obsessed with themselves, much more so than older
generations — supported by the fact that the couple notices the millennial, but he
doesn’t even glance their way. Since this is an illustrated work instead of a written
essay, Kelley and Parker rely on the viewers’ existing understanding of different
generations to make their point. The creators draw the couple in matching white
sneakers and track suits, stereotypical hallmarks of an older generation; by
contrast, the young man holds a smartphone with a selfie “click,” which is a mil–
lennial hallmark. The comic’s dialogue calls to mind what Foster would call “the
persistent myth of the narcissistic millennial” (p. 541). Difficult to ignore, how–
ever, is the contrast between the millennial’s unflagging smile and the older man’s
disparaging comment. The Dustin comic calls to mind the character of Sylvia in
Hoagland’s poem, who calls self-love a “heroic achievement in positive thinking”
(p. 540). The millennial may be absorbed by his phone, but the comic leaves us
wondering if to be optimistically full of self-love is such a bad thing after all.
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: WHY MARRY? (p.554)
KATE CHOPIN
The Story of an Hour (p.555)
“The Story of an Hour” was published after the author’s death in 1904. Readers
today are often as disturbed by Mrs.Mallard’s emotions as Chopin’s early readers
were. Today, we hear students complain that if she felt so confined in her marriage,
she should have just left. Readers at its first publication would have understood her
unquestioning loyalty to her marriage while she knew her husband was alive but
would have chided her for not adapting to her lot as a married woman. They might
also point out that to be alone did not mean she would have the power to make
her own decisions. Most widows, even if their financial means were considerable,
would have found their husbands’ estates in the hands of male executors.
It is interesting, however, that Kate Chopin’s working title for her novel The
Awakening was A Solitary Life. To Chopin, the very real difficulties — even
116 Love
dangers — of being a woman alone in the nineteenth century were more tolera-
ble than the emotional confinement of most marriages. Divorce was inconceiv–
able to most women around the turn of the twentieth century, although Chopin
had less reason to be fearful of women’s freedom than most. Her great- great-
grandmother had been the first woman in St.Louis to receive a legal separation
from her husband and had gone on to raise her five children and run a shipping
business alone. Kate Chopin grew up surrounded by such strong women and in
1882 became a widow, with six children, after twelve years of marriage.
Furthermore, her marriage was characterized by an unusual amount of freedom,
with Oscar Chopin apparently not complaining about her smoking, riding street-
cars, and walking alone through the streets of New Orleans, actions that scandal-
ized “respectable” people.
“The Story of an Hour” may have its model more in the club women of
St. Louis than in the Creole society of Louisiana. In either place, Louise
Mallard may have been uncomfortably recognizable, as she would be in some
circles today. Married people sometimes fantasize about the death of a spouse,
but the thought seems not to have occurred to Mrs.Mallard until the events of
the story.
Students sometimes harshly judge the protagonist of this story, seeing her as
shallow and selfish, ignorant of the true meaning of love. To do this, however, is
to miss Chopin’s point that love cannot compensate for lack of freedom.
Mrs.Mallard has been unaware of this, but we see her, after her initial grief at her
husband’s death, beginning to awaken. We see her as if she were a child sobbing
in its sleep, her thoughts in suspension, with the joy of being her own person
approaching her as if it were an outside force about to possess her. This happens
to a great extent because she is a woman bound by cultural restraints, but it is not
entirely gender specific. She feels free, we are told, because she will no longer be
oppressed by “that blind persistence with which men and women believe they
have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow- creature” (para. 14). Within
their cultural milieu, both partners in the marriage are trapped, even if they love
each other. Like the stories of Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry, this Kate
Chopin story depends on ironic circumstances for its action. This leads us to
assign blame to a twist of fate or to the constraints of nineteenth- century marriage
itself rather than to any of the characters.
Although some readers might wish to know something of Mrs.Mallard’s life
before or to hear the family’s reaction to her death, the story’s length seems
appropriate to its title and its theme. It might, anticipating a Hemingway story
about marriage, be called “The Short, Happy Life of Louise Mallard,” since her
time as a free woman is so brief. The brevity of the story nevertheless allows us
to see Mrs.Mallard as a dynamic character and to follow her quickly changing
reactions first to her loss, then to her freedom, and finally to the loss of freedom
that leads to her death. Some students will imagine that Mrs.Mallard is thinking
about having a love affair or spending money without having to ask her hus-
band’s permission, but we should encourage them to go beyond such easy
answers. Many students have experienced unwanted control from boyfriends or
girlfriends. Although the status of women and the constraints of marriage have
changed, even today, when in relationships, we sometimes intrude into areas our
partners would prefer to keep private, feeling that even their thoughts belong to
hopin The Story of an Hour 117
us. We want to control their movements and to tell them how they should feel.
It is this intrusion that she is now freed from, and it is her autonomy, her self-
determination, that she anticipates. The loss of her newfound self precipitates
her death, and the reader understands the irony when the doctor says she has
died of joy at her husband’s return.
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
laura kipnis, Against Love (p.558)
meghan o’rourke, The Marriage Trap (p.565)
bob morris, Gay Marriage? How Straight (p.568)
In “Against Love,” Laura Kipnis cites a range of evidence to support her claim
that our current understanding of love is a social fiction. Monogamous love, she
argues, belongs to a fairly recent set of cultural expectations that we need not
fully buy into. In light of recent social, economic, and political concerns with
regard to single parenthood, domestic partnerships, even polygamy, Kipnis’s
argument is a timely contribution to conversations about what today’s families
look like. Using historical references from as far back as the Greeks, Kipnis main-
tains that our predecessors had very different understandings of marriage,
romance, and love. Though she mentions some disagreement among historians,
she implicitly asks her audience to accept her reading of history as the most
accurate. She also discusses divorce trends, adultery, and midlife crises as further
evidence of monogamous love’s problematic confinements. With an almost
celebratory tone, she calls adulterers and the like “a rebellious breakaway fac-
tion” interested in emancipation. The implication here is that if love were all it
was cracked up to be, people would not be trying to “escape” the domestic bonds
of marriage. Adulterers, “our home- grown closet social theorists,” are her evi-
dence that people yearn for alternative lives and loves. They are Kipnis’s argu-
mentative link between love, desire, and economics. But critical readers may
wonder about those who bear the brunt of others’ choices within these domestic
confines.
Students will also likely pick up on Kipnis’s rich, figurative language, includ-
ing her frequent use of metaphors. Metaphors serve a variety of functions for her
argument, including the addition of humor and sarcasm to her often- biting
analysis; but they also provide an underlying framework demonstrating that the
issue of love is rooted in social, economic, and material concerns. “Assembly
lines” and “miracle sponges,” for example, conjure up images of mass produc-
tion and television marketing campaigns. Our obsession with domestic love, she
suggests, is also rooted in and sustained by our capitalist economy and our habits
of consumption. Kipnis argues that in early childhood we learn to exchange
obedience for love, a transaction that sets the stage for sacrifices and adjustments
in future relationships.
Critical readers might notice that alternatives to Kipnis’s model of monoga-
mous love seem limited, if indeed marriage is indelibly intertwined with other
institutions. Kipnis’s extended quotes from Chuck and Steve reveal that even the
most permissive of relationships have rules that potentially subjugate one partner
to the other. Her argument implies that we ought to rethink how we define love
118 Love
(and the role of sex), but it is not clear what such a redefinition entails within
our current economic system. As a social institution wrapped up with other
economies of power, modern intimacy’s reworking might entail a reworking of
life as we know it. It is possible that she imagines change should happen within.
Individuals would need to make the choice to think of intimacy differently and
refuse to buy into a lifetime of “subjugation.”
In her review of Laura Kipnis’s book Against Love, Meghan O’Rourke notes
that Kipnis has indeed noticed a curious trend: even as the number of divorces
increases, people keep getting married (and remarried). Praising Kipnis for
bringing the issue of marriage to the table, O’Rourke readily concurs that marital
love is something society should honestly and publicly discuss, though she is
much less ready than Kipnis to dismiss monogamy out of hand. O’Rourke clearly
agrees with the claim that monogamous relationships require a kind of labor,
though by calling them “exhausting” enterprises, she takes a bit of the sting out
of Kipnis’s critique. She also finds some value in the “work” required by relation-
ships, implying that the labor of love can be mutually beneficial. Though gener-
ous with Kipnis’s book, O’Rourke maintains the underlying claim that Kipnis
has too readily dismissed the more satisfying and enduring aspects of monoga-
mous love. While her tone is much less biting, O’Rourke uses a mix of wit and
sincerity that effectively blunts the other’s argument and allows her to success-
fully occupy a middle ground. She writes, for example, that “Kipnis’s vision of a
good relationship may sound pretty vague.” Given that O’Rourke’s point is just
that — Kipnis’s vision is vague — her sentence structure here demonstrates one
of the ways in which readers may be led to identify O’Rourke as more neutral.
Students may connect the neutral, accommodating tone to the genre of review
writing. What is at stake in how O’Rourke presents Kipnis’s arguments?
O’Rourke’s move nicely prepares readers for the conclusion, in which she calls
Kipnis’s book both “wittily invigorating” and potentially commonplace. She
explicitly questions Kipnis’s equation of marriage with capitalism’s “chokehold”
and suggests instead that such critiques have been around for nearly as long as
marriage itself. Readers may also ask what assumptions underlie O’Rourke’s cri-
tiques or what critiques O’Rourke misses or leaves out.
Bob Morris’s “Gay Marriage? How Straight” is a timely look at potentially
unvoiced concerns in the LGBTQ community about the implications of a mar–
riage norm. Morris suggests that, for many, the legalization of same- sex mar–
riage puts them in a complicated position. Much of the gay community prides
itself on the ability to define and redefine what love, family, and relationships
can look like. Morris explains that the current emphasis on marriage, while a
significant civil right, potentially means losing the freedom to define the nature
of one’s relationships. He further remarks that, besides the marriage issue, there
are other strengths and potential contributions the gay community has to offer.
Because institutions like marriage can be so restrictive, heterosexual and same-
sex couples alike might struggle for the agency to manage their lives as they
seefit.
What is important to note is that there is no unified marriage front. As
Morris explains, some couples have jumped at the chance to marry and receive
legal recognition of their relationships. Others, however, see the media focus
120 Love
the only African American student, at an exclusive prep school. Few readers, no
matter their age, could withstand the logic of such a relentless and conscienceless
enemy pretending to be a trustworthy friend.
A case may be made that Othello’s tragic flaw is jealousy or credulity, but we
cannot ignore the obvious issues of ethnic difference. In Shakespeare’s day,
African slavery had not yet reached the depths of degradation it would achieve
in later centuries. It is interesting, however, that Othello almost casually throws
in the fact that he was enslaved at one point. And characters such as Iago and
Roderigo engage in racial slurs when referring to Othello. The animal imagery
of the play further invites the audience first to think of Othello as bestial and later
to question the assumption that blackness should be equated with evil and besti-
ality. It would be surprising if a character such as Othello failed to internalize
assumptions about his difference from his Italian wife (and his English audi-
ence). Both his age and his racial difference mark him as an unlikely object of
Desdemona’s desire in his own eyes. Therefore, Othello is already primed to
expect her to reject him eventually. Once Iago convinces him that she is capable
of impurity, it seems logical to Othello that his beautiful young wife would throw
him aside for the attractive Cassio. The irony, of course, is that she is brave, pure,
and passionately in love with her husband. His tragic flaw may be that he does
not feel worthy of the love he has stumbled across, that he fails to see his own
true value.
It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
Readers may be surprised that Othello’s love can turn so quickly to hate. But he
feelsbetrayed. Because he cares so deeply, fearing that “chaos” would accom–
pany his loss of her love once he has it, the loss is more profound and the depth
of his hatred more intense. Even acknowledging this, he still seems to love her,
even as he kills her, viewing her death as his duty. He wants to make her soul
right with God, so that his killing of her will not result in the loss of her soul,
but he kills her anyway when he thinks she is unrepentant. Perhaps we can ques–
tion the depth of Othello’s love, since Desdemona seems to love him more
loyally and maturely. The chaos of Othello’s feelings is evident in the lines
Shakespeare gives to him in the final scenes of the play. Jealousy causes Othello
to kill both his beloved and himself: he is utterly destroyed by his belief in Iago’s
lies. Jealousy makes its victim mad, taking away his logic and self- control.
Gossip and slander hurt not only individuals but families, perhaps even placing
nations in danger as their leaders are plunged into the chaos of emotion and
rash action. And the purveyor of gossip is eventually silenced and punished,
gaining nothing that he sought and losing as much as his victim loses. If the final
resolution of the characters’ fates is seen as Shakespeare’s commentary on jeal–
ousy, the playwright seems to characterize it almost as a force of nature that
sweeps away both the innocent and the guilty in its path. The filching of
Desdemona’s and Cassio’s good names gains Iago nothing. Othello gets no
happy ending and learns his lesson too late. Desdemona, who has harmed no
one (unless we hold her disobedience as a daughter against her), is tragically
dead despite her innocence. Emilia and Roderigo are less innocent but are
victims nevertheless. We are left with the typically Shakespearean tragic ending:
dead bodies litter the stage, and life goes on without the protagonist and those
he loved best.
shakespeare Othello 121
ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE PLAY
a. . bradley, The Noble Othello (p.661)
millient bell, Othello’s Jealousy (p.666)
jeffrie g. murphy, Jealousy, Shame, and the Rival (p.674)
One of our “Making Comparisons” questions asks students to consider how their
understanding of the play squares with the critical essays’ classifications of
Othello’s jealousy as psychological or philosophical. The question explains that
Jeffrie Murphy focuses on jealousy as having a psychological basis, arguing that
jealousy is “the fear that one will lose the love of a person with whom one is psy–
chologically identified.” He later adds shame into the mix of jealousy. Millicent
Bell, however, seems to think Othello’s jealousy has more to do with philosophy,
with appearances and reality, with the distinction “between seeming and true
seeing” — indeed, with the very nature of truth itself. Because the culture of the
twenty- first- century reader is permeated with the “common sense” of pop psychol–
ogy, student readers may understand Murphy’s psychological analysis more at first
reading than they do Bell’s discussion of philosophical and legal perceptions of
reality. However, it will pay off to consider Bell’s arguments in some detail.
Othello becomes jealous because he believes the “evidence” that seems to be
piling up before his eyes. We can easily see how a person’s insecurities and self-
esteem issues can warp his perceptions, but to reduce Othello to a Jerry Springer
caricature, as some inexperienced readers tend to do, does disservice to the depth
of Shakespeare’s play and to readers’ understanding of how expectations shape
relationships in general. It is more difficult but more interesting to examine dif–
ferences in worldviews, in the very nature of how we understand men, women,
and the universe to work. Iago skillfully manipulates Othello’s perceptions (with
a little help from circumstances) so that he undergoes a sort of false epiphany, a
conversion experience in which he suddenly sees everything from an altered
perception. His sense of reality is shaken off its foundations, and he finds himself
in a world where a different logic makes sense to him. Such shifts in reality may
happen more often than we like to think. A line can be crossed in a person’s brain
where completely reasonable actions make sense, if only for a time.
Our excerpt fromA.C.Bradley’s analysis of Othello’s character begins in
the middle of his essay, and it would be good to read to students a sentence from
the paragraph that immediately precedes it: “Othello’s nature is all of one piece.
His trust, when he trusts, is absolute.” Whatever Othello does, he does it with
100percent of his being. While Bell focuses on intellectual changes in Othello’s
worldview and Murphy focuses on underlying reasons for his behavior based on
psychoanalytic concepts, Bradley takes a more traditionally humanistic view,
arguing that it is important to see that Othello is not stupid, misogynistic, or
cruel by nature. Iago has everyone fooled, and Bradley insists that “any man”
would have been devastated by the information that Iago presents to him as
truth. Bradley maintains that Othello is not an “essentially jealous man” and that
up to a certain point “there is not a syllable to be said against Othello.” Bradley’s
vocabulary echoes Genesis: “The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall.
His fall is never complete, but he is much changed.” This quotation from
Bradley is a striking one, because the critic’s worldview becomes clear: character
122 Love
is something essential to a person, and even in his most fallen state, Othello is a
noble man for whom the audience may feel “mingled love and pity.” He is
Everyman. For Bradley, analyzing Othello brings out issues of evaluation.
Bell’s use of a scene from one of the filmed versions of Othello aptly illus–
trates her point that the play can best be understood as a matter of Othello’s per–
ceptions of truth: “The movie’s powerful language of the visible provides — delusively
even to us, though we know Othello is deluded — that ultimate visibility which
goes beyond the evidence Iago has manipulated to ‘prove’ that Othello’s love is a
whore.” Viewing this filmed version with a class, instructors should warn students
that this scene is not really taking place and that it is important to remember that
Cassio and Desdemona do not really roll around in bed together. Bell states, “It
is appropriate to the preoccupation of the play with a general epistemological
crisis that the issue of proof is expressed as a legal question.” It might be interest–
CONTEXTS FOR RESEARCH: SOCIAL DISRUPTION,
PERSONAL ANXIETY, AND “DOVER BEACH” (p.678)
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Dover Beach (p.679)
The son of a famed headmaster of the English preparatory school Rugby,
Matthew Arnold found himself in the midst of debates about social, political,
and intellectual issues from the beginning of his life. In his prose, he tackled
arnold Dover Beach 123
educational and literary issues directly. He felt that education would change
society by changing the middle and lower classes, bringing culture to “the little
ploughboy” who would eventually hold the reins of political power. In his thirty-
five- year tenure as an inspector of schools, Arnold was in a position to put his
philosophies into action.
As a literary theorist, Arnold favored the accessible diction and “high serious-
ness” that he thought would uplift the reader. Religion was losing its power to
transform, and he believed literature should possess qualities that would allow it
to fill the gap. He wanted to bring “culture” to the class he called the “Philistines,”
people like those described by William Wordsworth as dulled by “getting and
spending.” For Arnold, culture could be defined as an awareness of the art, litera-
ture, philosophy, and so forth of Western civilization coupled with a mind
unwilling to blindly defer to authority. These issues are reflected in his best-
known poem, “Dover Beach,” in which a speaker proposes that human beings
hold on to each other in lieu of a retreating faith in God.
The last half of the nineteenth century, and perhaps all of the twentieth,
witnessed the ramifications of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Darwin’s book
appeared in 1859 to a storm of controversy, eight years before “Dover Beach” was
published. We might ask students to consider how Arnold’s poem addresses
issues related to debates about Darwinism. Because students usually get a kick
out of it, we like to use Anthony Hecht’s irreverent parody “The Dover Bitch” to
compare the earnest “high seriousness” of Arnold’s text with the irony of a
twentieth- century reinterpretation of the same scene.
In “Dover Beach,” the sea serves as an extended metaphor for faith, as the
poem explicitly states. Arnold saves this statement of his theme for the third
stanza, however, using an inductive method to prepare readers for his point. The
opening stanza describes the sea itself — specifically the English Channel sepa-
rating England from the continent of Europe. As the speaker calls his compan-
ion to the window to look at the sea, he asks her to listen to the effects of the
waves on the shore. He ends by saying that a “note of sadness” is evoked by the
ceaseless sound.
In the second stanza, the poet takes us back to ancient Greek drama for an
allusion to Sophocles’ same reaction to the sound of the sea. He refers to lines
656 to 778 of Antigone. Because the play appears on page 923, students could
turn back to it and read the passage for themselves. Sophocles specifically refers
to tragedy’s reverberating consequences through the generations of a family like
that of Oedipus. In Christian theology, the equivalent is the proverb that the sins
of the fathers are visited on the children. The sea in Antigone is “a great mount-
ing tide / driven on by savage northern gales, / surging over the dead black depths
/ roiling up from the bottom dark heaves of sand.” The sea’s “moaning / echoes”
bring to mind human grief. All this stuff keeps getting dredged up, Sophocles
says. The sea does not keep still about family secrets. Arnold universalizes the
allusion.
Though the speaker has gone from sadness to misery, the third stanza
makes the story literally worldwide. Faith once rolled up on every shore like the
sea at high tide, hugging the hips of the land like a sash wrapped around the
earth’s body. But just as the sea rolls out at low tide — or as a woman might
slowly unfurl her clothing for the night — faith is going away, leaving our souls
124 Love
as bare as the rocks on the shore or the unprotected body of the woman. This
brings the speaker of the poem to his final point. Because we are now vulnera–
ble without the authority of religion to make us feel safe, we have only our
human love.
We discover at this late point that the speaker addresses someone he loves,
probably a woman. The sounds of the ocean echo like the sounds of warfare as the
speaker thinks of vulnerable humans alone “on a darkling plain” withoutthesure
expectations faith once provided. Although the speaker calls someone to the win–
dow in the first stanza, revealing that the poem is a dramatic monologue overheard
by us as he addresses another character whose voice we do not hear, we know little
about the relationship. Anthony Hecht’s parody “The Dover Bitch” assumes that
this is a good way to get someone into bed, especially if the speaker is a soldier
going off to war. Knowing something of Arnold’s philosophy, we assume that he
has higher motives. He is suggesting obliquely to his readers that we need to rely
on our own critical thinking and goodwill toward our fellow human beings rather
than on authority. His vision of the world intensifies the value of love. The speaker
wants to be in a relationship in which lovers are true to each other. Issues of
definition may come up in class discussion about exactly what Arnold means by
this. Students might enjoy writing their own scenarios for a soap opera about
thiscouple.
The poem begins in the present tense, and the imperative sentences that
invite the speaker’s companion to the window and urge her to listen increase
thesense of immediacy. But by the end of the first stanza, he raises the issue of
eternity. At this point, he moves into the literary past “long ago” for a few lines
before leaping back to the present again before the second short stanza is over.
In the third stanza, his movement back and forth in time is like the tide he
describes. Finally, in the last stanza, he proposes a plan for the future, in view of
the present condition of the human world, which he elaborates upon more fully.
Misery is eternal; faith sufficed for a time as a counter to it; now faith is gone and