"Equality War: Or, the War of the Oppressed"
Kellsey Potts
With
all of the incredible poems we have worked through this semester, choosing a
theme to focus on and write about was no easy task. There are so many different
ideas to mess around with, and a plethora of pieces to select from. In the end,
I decided to thread together the idea of the “equality war,” or the war of the
oppressed. This is a common theme in many of the poems we read over the
semester, and one that is always fascinating to write about. The ones that I
was most intrigued by were those about misogyny, and the brushing off of those
with medical conditions.
There
were a lot of poems that had to deal with the placement and treatment of women
in certain time periods. To begin with, I re-read Brooks’s “A Bronzeville
Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.” I
posted about this poem recently: In my post, I described how the poem made me
feel, and then went on to talk about some of the imagery in the piece. “It's
a ballad/elegy about the woman associated with the Emmett Till case (in which
14 year old Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman). We follow the
story of a white American woman caught in a horrible marriage. It starts out
with fairy-tale-like imagery (she, the ‘milk-white maid,’ Emmett, the ‘Dark Villain,’
and her husband, the ‘Fine Prince’). … she contemplates her encounter with the Dark Villain. We see
as she tries to justify what happened, and watch as small inklings of guilt
creep in until it consumes her … She is suddenly sickened by what had happened.
She begins seeing the red of blood everywhere she looks: her child's cheek, her
husband's mouth, it metaphorically creeping across her shoulders. She sees the
monster her husband is, and as he kisses her, ‘She did not scream. / She stood there. / But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,
/ And its perfume enclasped
them-big, / Bigger
than all magnolias.’”
So
this woman, who played a part in the murder of Emmett Till, is trying so hard
to hold together this idea of a fantasy life that she’s put together for
herself. She hits her breaking point as her murderous husband kisses her, but
can’t do anything about it. Fellow student Francisco Leal made a great point as
to why she couldn’t. He points out that the stanza that begins with “She
made the babies sit in their places at the table. / Then, before calling Him,
she hurried / To the mirror with her comb and lipstick. It was necessary / To
be more beautiful than ever. / The beautiful wife. / For sometimes she fancied
he looked at her as though / Measuring her. As if he considered, Had she been
worth It?” is actually a metaphor for how society back then treated such
injustice. Specifically, he says, “She is a
housewife, living her life in the confines of her home under the domineering
eyes of her husband … The complacency and submissive role of the house wife
could quite possibly be a metaphor for how society … just sits on the sidelines making sure everything is all
‘hunky dory’ like nothing bad is actually happening in the world.” That is to
say, because of her role in the home and society, she is trapped. So she makes
breakfast, puts on her lipstick, and kisses her husband like the good wife she
is supposed to be.
But
the Bronzeville Mother is not the only woman we read about who is stuck in a romantic
situation she doesn’t want to be in, and who is too scared to do anything about
it. Ezra Pound’s rhymeless sonnet “The Garden” is another example of this
oppressed-woman theme. This poem discusses the divisions of the classes and the
consequences that occur because of it. There is, obviously, the theme of the
woman stuck in a place she doesn’t want to be, because society has put her
there. I discuss this in my post, saying “One part of her yearns to make her
own choices and speak to whom she wants, but the other part is terrified of
what society has done and will do to make sure she never listens to the first
part of herself.”
What
makes it different, though, is that it talks about these oppressions from the
view of the upper class – as opposed to the lower classes, which is what one
would expect. They are written about, but the focus of the poem is upon an
upper-class woman struggling with her role in society, and is a critique of
this separation. Fellow classmate “Ballin Sinsberg” made a great comment about
this. This person wrote “In the second stanza, The poem sets up the lower
class. The first line in the second stanza, ‘And round about there is a
rabble,’ shows that in the situation the speaker is observing, which is in a
royal garden in the UK, has turned into a public display of some kind, and I'm
not sure absolutely sure what … and we know that they are in an exclusive
garden but are ‘the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor,’
actually mobbing in the garden or is it metaphorical for what Pound believes
will happen in the future. In the third stanza, Pound brings the woman's
separation from society back with the line ‘She would like someone to speak to
her,’ which shows the upper-class as weak again...” What Sinsberg is saying is
that Pound has written this stanza not only as a critique of the separations,
but also as a warning of consequences.
Pictured above: The Sunken Garden at Kensington, the Garden that Pound speaks of.
And
these consequences don’t necessarily have to be societal: they can also be
medical. In my post about “The Garden,” I mention anemia. Pound writes that
this woman is suffering from “emotional anaemia.” I did a little digging, and
discovered that the Oxford English Dictionary described it as “a condition in
which there is a deficiency of red cells or of haemoglobin in the blood,
resulting in pallor and weariness.” So this woman appears to be very pale,
tired, and drained. And Pound says it's not her choice to be that way – ‘In her
is the end of breeding,’ Back in that day and age, Britain was very strict
about only marrying within your class. I concluded that “Unfortunately, because
there weren't a lot of higher class people, it meant there was a small pool
from which to choose your spouse, so inbreeding was a huge problem, and was the
cause of many medical conditions -- including anemia.”
Anemia
is not the only medical condition that occurs in the oppressed. The bigger,
more prevalent one is depression. Depression is a legitimate medical condition
that went largely unrecognized until very recently, and the usual method of
treating it was “Deal with it or we’ll lock you up.” When talking about
depression in poetry, there are hardly any other authors that come to mind
before Emily Dickinson does. Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral In My Brain” is a
documentation of this very issue, written in classic 8, 6, 8, 6 meter: It reads
as Dickinson’s descent into a mental breakdown that has been kickstarted by her
depression. She was an isolated person who never really had much contact with
the outside world due to many medical issues – mainly depression, but according
the LA Times, “… a study postulates that Dickinson may have had
a mild form of manic depression, with periods of high poetic creativity
coinciding with exuberant periods that bordered on mania.” Poetry
was her only outlet: in the same way that Spenser’s sonnet #75 speaks about
writing “in the heavens,” her poetry lived far beyond her death, but only
started living after she died alone after years of being locked away as a
result of her society refusing to recognize or understand her legitimate
medical conditions.
In
conclusion, there is an insane amount of poetry that we studied dealing with
the idea of oppression and the chase for equality. It was documented in medical
books (anemia and depression), in newspapers (Emmett Till), and in history
books (women’s suffrage). It’s incredible how very recently it was that the
tides began to turn; and although they are not totally turned yet, I can only
hope that it is eons better than what these poets dealt with.
References:
References:
Oxford English Dictionary:
LA Times:
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