Romantic Specters

I wonder if a new dimension to “reader-response” theory might be that not only is a text’s “meaning” contingent on the perspectives of its diverse readers, but even a single reader’s perspective is multiple and contingent on the many occasions of her reading. For such I’ve found this quarter, that I’ve found new avenues in works I’d previously thought shut for me.

Gluck, for example. How I have resisted this work. And how I have been chided. I resist her thin complaining, her pressed, solitary speaker (yet multiple also, in its array of dramatis personae), yet always this solitary experience in extremis: the bitter slice of “Love Poem” (Marshland 90), in which love seems analogous to pain: love and pain are often viewed as corollaries, but in this poem no peak intervenes between valleys. Such an atrophied definition of love, this. These blurred yet insistent “you”s and “me”s in the poems, the hazy details serving, strangely, to amplify the impression that I, as a reader, have stumbled into a painfully private and pressing conversation. Gluck struggled for years with anorexia nervosa, and her struggle infuses these early poems: as to take on the voice of Jeanne D’Arc, to accept to be “transformed to fire” (78): a distrust of flesh runs through these poems, and flesh’s corollaries: desire, love, passion, plenitude. But I risk pathologising the poems.

Yet the new avenue: Re-reading these poems, particularly in House on Marshland, I felt as if I were reading “fleshed” moments from some fiction by Hawthorne, as if these poems could have been written by Hester, describing her interactions with Dimmesdale, or else written by the wife (Elisabeth) of that minister (Mr. Hooper) who wore the black veil. In this imagination, for example, the “large solitary blossoms” of japonica (98), carried by a “you” to the speaker, after the rain has stopped and “[s]unlight/ motioned through the leaves,” this brings a stark association: “But death/ also has its flower,/ it is called/ contagion…”: and the speaker accepts this “contagion” as “a gift”; this imagination also finds fascination in the dramatic situation of "The Murderess" (69), which leaves us certain that at least one horrific murder has occurred, but uncertain of the details: has a mother murdered her daughter? a mother murdered a man (or men) who violated her daughter? All of the above? I find in these poems a “gentle but unconquerable obstanancy,” as Hawthorne described Mr. Hooper’s refusal to lift his black veil, even for his wife: these poems are too obstinate to lift their black veils. Such mystic imagination is part of Romanticism writ large: as if such fervent optimism in the human spirit ushers in un-reason, nightmares, the other side of the coin of “soul.” So these poems for me expanded from isolated delirium into, well, a tradition of delirium…. What is so different about the experience of reading romantic/gothic fiction: Hawthorne, Poe, perhaps even The Virgin Suicides? Perhaps even Amee Bender and Judy Budnitz. Flannery O’Connor? Why do I find these tales of human horror such much more intriguing and palatable than Gluck’s specters? Perhaps I find it just too frightening and too claustrophobic to read this kind of work from the isolated lyric perspective.