Section Two: Poetry and Personal Tension
Within the arts, poetry in particular, identity development, recognition, or expression is integral to the discussion of otherness within or outside of humanity. The feeling of otherness often creates a division between the one experiencing otherness or labeled, by oneself or society, as other. However, in one interesting twist, Frank O'Hara demonstrates how a person's lack of confidence in his or her identity can create fissures which people can manipulate through liberal application of doubt. In “Poem,” O'Hara states, “once I destroyed a man's idea of himself to have him” (9). Although this phrase most likely refers to causing a man to doubt his place in heteronormative society in order to take advantage of that doubt for his own pleasure, it could also refer to a more universal doubt and raise the questions: what are the ways people feel the otherness within their identities, and how do they reconcile their otherness with societal expectations?
O'Hara's answer might best be taken from his poem “Yesterday Down at the Canal”: “how can anyone be more amusing than oneself/how can anyone fail to be” (66). However, most people do not walk down the streets on their lunch hours, buoyed by their certainty of personal amusement or satisfaction. Ammons indicates that “the anxious calm down occasionally and want to turn away from the boredom of coming down and the boredom of anxiety by taking an interest in something: even, sometimes, taking a little interest in something displaces the anxiety, refocuses the attention, puts the mind off itself” (118-119). Taking the mind off of itself is a difficult undertaking for people suffering from disorders that emphasize intense or obsessive self-reflection and analysis. As Rimbaud notes, “I is an Other” (as cited by Dr. Nick Halpern, personal communication, 2 August 2011). One interpretation of this oft-debated sentence is that poets feel their otherness more acutely than the majority of society or the arbiters of societal expectations while their works also represent or connect with the otherness within every human being. In their constant search for identity or desire to create identity, people can confront a separation from the rest of society. “We all know people who are not their authentic selves” (Halpern, personal communication, 2 August 2011). However, attempting to be one's authentic self may cause some people increased tension because their authenticity may be more fluid than societal guidelines prefer, or their presentation of authenticity drifts outside of or sharply opposes societal norms. One may feel his or her otherness more acutely when afflicted with maladies associated with depression or anxiety.
Despite that being diagnosed with a mental illness or condition that affects emotional or mental processes is extremely common, people with anxiety disorders or depression continue to represent an other to the expected guidelines and functions of social normality. For many people, the stress of discovering or performing normalcy is anxiety-inducing. Situations that are supposed to be normal, particularly artificially constructed situations where people are outside of their regular environments or comfort zones, induce anxiety in those people who find “being normal” an act of constant performance. Not everyone understands the spiky danger beneath presumed normalcy. "That's why White Russians are so sinister..." (Halpern, personal communication, 19 July, 2011). As Emily Dickinson noted in her poem that begins “Much Madness is Divinest Sense --,” the majority opinion rules in situations about what is considered normal behavior. Performance requires control, and control can be fragile, rigid, and frightening, as well as exhausting, to have to maintain constantly.
If one uses tricks of control, such as elaborately intricate descriptions as delay tactics to ease into uncomfortable situations or topics or to provide touchstones of reality, those tricks can often become performances or traps for the individual. For example, creating lists of descriptions of the relationships of objects to each other through strings of prepositional phrases can trap one into a never-ending litany of listing that no longer serves to delay uncomfortable truths or situations; instead, those lists of potentially normal objects and situations not only reveal the potential anxiety beneath, they no longer work to remind the speaker of his or her place in the world. Like when one says a word over and over until it loses meaning or context, the tricks one uses to keep situated in the real world, to ward off isolation, or to defend against increased panic lose their power. They become thickets of thorny words through which the speaker and reader must battle to get to the anxiety beneath. Elizabeth Bishop's works not only depict various situations that most people would consider normal, but people with social anxiety would consider agonizing, her poems also demonstrate how animals can be constant and comforting touchstones, not only grounding one in reality, but also grounding one within oneself, which may be far more important.
Attempting to follow the rules of social niceties can be an agonizing experience for people with various social anxiety disorders or other maladies, attitudes, or points of view that cause one to feel out of touch with seemingly arbitrary societal rules of engagement. Many people have a laissez-fair attitude about social interaction and use a combination of laid-back personality and confidence to cover social gaffes. However, because they so often feel hemmed in by social constraints or face-to-face interaction with other human beings, people for whom such interaction is agony are often intimately aware of, and horrified by, when they make mistakes, causing them to obsess over past mistakes and shiver in tense anticipation of making future ones. Because of the control indicated by her precise punctuation and word choices, Elizabeth Bishop probably feared the humiliation of social mistakes when she had to be with people; "When someone puts in a lot of commas, you feel the person's anxiety to be correct” (Halpern, personal communication, July 19, 2011). Because she could not control situations of social interaction, Bishop controlled the environment of her poems.
When the speaker returns to the fishhouses in “At the Fishhouses” (64-66), she has to talk to an old man who had been a friend of her grandfather. Although some people might read this as a nice way to connect with someone who knew her grandparents and a way to connect with some positive memories of the past, I viewed the man's existence as a necessary evil, someone with whom the speaker had to observe social niceties even though she alternately wanted to delay and rush to the water, her memories, and the truth or knowledge. Even attempting to objectify the man as another interesting part of the landscape cannot disguise that she has to speak to him and interact with him. Some people who dislike social interaction are excellent “people watchers,” as they can easily be interested in the affectations or environment a person creates through clothing, mannerism, and speech patterns; that is, they can be interested, so long as the person does not engage them. Their interest is more objective, involving spectatorship and not involvement. Sometimes objectifying a person through listing of visual cues can remind the speaker/thinker/observer that other people are also real. Small children and people with varying types of attitudes or mental illnesses can forget the reality inherent in other human beings: for them, sometimes they feel like they are the only people who are “real.” In other situations, cataloging the visual aspects of other people within their environments serves to further distance the observer from those people. In “At the Fishhouses,” even the intimacy of providing a Lucky Strike does not appear to span the distance between the speaker and the old man, as she continues to describe him as just another aspect of the environment.
The word “waits” is important: the man “waits for a herring boat to come in” (65) even as the act of speaking to the man is a verbal form of waiting. Waiting is boring; it also serves as a delay tactic. Small talk is difficult for people with social anxiety. Delaying the inevitable moment of contact can make it worse. Because they fear saying the wrong thing, they will often attempt to guide the conversation to topics in which the other person is interested, not because they care about the other person, but so that person can do the majority of the talking. As Lindsey Neves noted, about social interaction, "you tell yourself when you meet new people, 'don't say anything weird'" (personal communication). However, for a person for whom engaging in social rituals is difficult, for a person who feels her otherness sharply, engaging in those social rituals within a conversation in which one has no control is doubly confusing and frustrating, which may make the individual exhibit even more socially-inappropriate behaviors, such as a evidence of an eagerness to be elsewhere. Therefore, the speaker just “waits” for the man to be finished with the conversation, or the boat to come in, or to make some suitable excuse to head “down at the water's edge” (65). For Bishop, white space indicates her speaker/self's jump from social interaction. The reader does not see her make some polite excuses to extract herself from the conversation. Instead, first she is listening to the waiting old man, next she is by the water. Many people with social anxiety issues wish they could automatically use white space to transition out of interactions in the way “At the Fishhouses” does. For Lowell, his “Skunk Hour” gives up the pretense entirely by saying, after several failed attempts the expected small talk: “My mind's not right.”
Social expectations that can induce anxiety do not only involve interaction. Sometimes anxiety is heightened merely by being in a room with others and not knowing what to do or how to act, for fear that someone is watching and judging. For the six-year old girl in Bishop's “In the Waiting Room” (159), her anxiety forces her to finish the National Geographic, even though the contents horrify her, because she “was too shy to stop.” Similar to the narrator in “At the Fishhouses,” the situation of waiting is a catalyst for a situation that sharpens the otherness the girl feels. She became immersed in something that horrified and embarrassed her with its imagery, but she kept on turning the pages because to stop abruptly would indicate that what she had been doing was wrong. As noted, control and being “right” are very important to people with forms of social anxiety. The same woman who so carefully contains her lush descriptive elements within controlled punctuation would have been concerned enough to finish a magazine she found distasteful for the fear of doing something wrong, or worse, being publicly exposed doing something socially unacceptable. If the child were older, perhaps ten or eleven, the shyness that forced her to complete the magazine might have been inspired by a fear of appearing too immature to handle the content of the magazine; the six year-old speaker labels her reaction shyness.
Because of their desire for, and lack of, control in social situations, many people with social anxiety are also concerned about other places where they lack control of their surroundings. The situation in “The Moose” is a perfect example of how someone with anxiety might react to losing control: she is not the driver of the bus, she did not create the bridge, and when she finally decides she can release enough control to sleep, the driver stops. However, the lines that most succinctly and precisely depict the importance of anxiety and control within Bishop's poems are
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way. (170)
For many people with specific phobias or anxieties, pre-emptive worry becomes a coping strategy. Although the speaker has been documenting the people and places she sees on the trip thus far, the notation about the bridge indicates that she has been thinking, underneath---like the alcohol in a White Russian---about the bridge. She may have been looking at the fog, watching the lone traveler hug relatives, and otherwise peering out the window, but she knew the bridge was coming up. For someone who relishes or requires control, she probably has looked at the map from point A to point B. That bridge loomed in the future of the trip. Perhaps she had been half holding her breath in hopes the loose plank would not give way and half holding her breath in hopes it would. Either way, those lines demonstrate the need for control and how lack of control is fearful and something about which to be anxious. For people in step with societal definitions of normalcy, that a bridge will maintain is a truth to be taken for granted. Instead, bridges, or any potentially dangerous situation, can create great anxiety in people who do not trust or understand societal norms. For many people suffering from panic attacks, just knowing that something should not logically cause them distress does not help ease the situation. The truth may be comforting for some people, but difficult events can still feel like disaster, as is evidenced in “One Art” (178). In addition, bridges represent transitions from places, states of mind, beliefs about being. Control is rigid. Being anxious is unpleasant, but it is also familiar. Being thrust into a new situation, by way of a metaphorical or literal bridge, means that the anxious person has to discover new ways to cope or to create the illusion of control because the rigidity of the old ways may not work.
Even symbols which might provide hope or comfort to those with different attitudes or mental environments do not have the same connotations for people with anxiety and control issues. For most people, the house is a symbol of normalcy, the family, the goals and aspirations of a normal person. For someone who has no family and/or also does not participate in heteronormative relationships, houses can simultaneously represent one's abandoned, but still longed for, hopes of contentment, as well as one's potential resentment toward being “other” in a society that not only embraces but propagandizes the mythic happiness of house and home. The regionalism “safe as houses” (173) in “The Moose” suggests the isolation one can feel when surrounded by societal pressure to perform within the majority definitions of normal. Houses represent normalcy, the object or environment that cannot be and cannot contain the dangerous or those actions or attitudes labeled as deviant. In reality, houses are scary. Not haunted houses, just houses in general; they could be haunted, but they would not have to be----houses have doors, and doors are the items behind which "monsters/people/bad guys" hide, through which people insist upon walking backwards, and to whom moviegoers must yell "don't go in there!" Franz Wright recognizes the danger of houses, as he notes in “Night Said” by mentioning “There's murder in the house” (22) and calls the house “shrieking,” “catastrophic,” and “unwithstandable inside” (22). Unlike “safe as houses,” Wright expresses relief in his “out-of-the-house experience!” in “Time to Stop Keeping a Dream Journal” (34). Houses are not safe, and someone with certain anxiety concerns, as well as an unfortunate childhood, like Elizabeth Bishop, would realize that. This line, this regionalism, is another code: for most readers, “safe as houses” is a cliché that continues to evoke safety or serenity. For other readers, the line could be a foreboding foreshadowing: houses are not safe, thus, perhaps, the moose is not as safe as the bus travelers would have us believe, either.
What would appear to be the best symbol of the known and the safe and the normal would be one's own identity. Instead, one's identity is often the most fluid and most feared of all of the supposedly normal concepts of reality. Bishop, in her guise as the young speaker in “In the Waiting Room” demonstrates the surrealism that emerges when one is confronted by the questions surrounding identity. In an instant, she connects not only to her “foolish aunt,” but also to the women in the National Geographic. Despite the supposed or societally expected norm of knowing oneself, the speaker “knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen” (160). The connection and questioning simultaneously explores the constraints of being female as well as the constraints of being human with her question “What similarities...held us all together or made us all just one?” (161). She questions why she is herself and not her aunt or someone else or everyone else; she wonders how she has come to be herself or why she should be anyone. These questions of identity cause anxious probing in many works. In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Alice has many questions about her own identify and strength, but at one point she has a lovely debate with herself if she is not, in fact, someone else entirely. In addition, Wislawa Szymborska's “Astonishment” echoes the questions Bishop sets forth, this time in the role of a dog.
Animals are important in Bishop's work. Often, animals are easier for people with anxiety to relate to than people. One can interact with an animal without social performance anxiety, and research has demonstrated the calming effects animals have on people with anxiety. In addition, animals have differing connotations and norms than just being non-object non-humans. They also symbolize normalcy in a way that transcends human societal expectations by always containing and maintaining the wildness within. In “The Moose,” dogs are mentioned three times: as a supervisor of the traveler getting ready to go on a bus trip, a dog giving a single bark, almost as a declaration of “all's well,” and in the echo of the Grandparents' home, when the dog is curled up in a shawl. These three examples demonstrate dogs as normalcy far beyond the social idea of conversation as normalcy or houses as normalcy. In “At the Fishhouses,” the highly personified seal serves as a foil to her awkward interactions with the old man; although she may be amusing herself to think the seal is interested in her or interested in music, the speaker is able to engage with the seal in ways she cannot with the old man. In addition, the seal is the gatekeeper for the truth, the water, and the understanding that the truth, like one's identity, is fluid and not able to be controlled or defined. Bishop's excessive control, her cage of punctuation, demonstrates her need to control herself and the fear of doing something socially unacceptable in public. Some of her need for control could have been a result of depression, a natural social anxiety, and also a reflection of being homosexual in a time when that lifestyle was against public norms and societal mores. Combined, her great control suggests fear and a fear connected to identity.
If the moose in “The Moose” (169-173) is supposed to represent the speaker by being female, it can represent the fear of the speaker's self, her natural identity, even an innate wildness that must be constrained by rules and tricks and performance. Similarly, in the 1942 movie Cat People, the protagonist feared the monster within herself, whether that monster was her sexuality, her femininity, or an aggressive nature hidden by society's expectations. Many scholars have examined “the monstrous feminine” in literature as an exploration of fear of self combined with the constraints of society. However, Bishop may be using the moose in “The Moose” as a way to comfort herself: the moose is viewed by the other bus riders as benevolent, or at least “safe as houses” (173). However, like the anxious rider fearing the loose plank of the bridge or the person for whom houses do not represent safety or normalcy, lovers of horror movies may recognize that the moose for which the poem was named was not the real danger. Instead, one stanza indicates an animal connection that lurks beneath the surface of the poem and perhaps beneath Bishop herself:
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods
hairy, scratchy, and splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture. (171)
Modern readers familiar with horror movies or traditional monsters would immediately make the connection between that stanza and foreboding. In addition, they would be waiting for the moose to amble back into the woods and then get eaten by a werewolf. The repetition of the word moonlight, the word “hairy” and even the reference to a metaphorical lamb, something a wolf would eat, indicate darkness and anxiety that is not fulfilled by the poem itself. In fact, “The Moose” is several poems, but two in particular. It is a comforting poem of wonder at the natural world for some people; for others, it represents the need for control and a sense of unfulfilled foreboding.
Bishop's poem “Manners” (121-122) appears to demonstrate a child's indoctrination into societal niceties, particularly to speak to people, offer everyone rides, and speak nicely. However, the narrative of the poem cycles down to the importance of considering animals in one's behavior as another mode of polite or appropriate behavior. The grandfather comments on the bird's manners, and they walk when the mare is too tired to carry them. This consideration for animals can develop into a consideration of animals, particularly when considering humans is too difficult because of the anxiety produced by human-human interaction. Discussions of animal ethics often include the discussion of where to draw the line in the human/animal debate, particularly because the very Cartesian divide between humans and animals is incorrect: the debate should be about human animals versus nonhuman animals, as humans are animals. Bishop's poems often demonstrate recognition of the connection between humans and animals beyond a utilitarian one.
Within the arts, poetry in particular, identity development, recognition, or expression is integral to the discussion of otherness within or outside of humanity. The feeling of otherness often creates a division between the one experiencing otherness or labeled, by oneself or society, as other. However, in one interesting twist, Frank O'Hara demonstrates how a person's lack of confidence in his or her identity can create fissures which people can manipulate through liberal application of doubt. In “Poem,” O'Hara states, “once I destroyed a man's idea of himself to have him” (9). Although this phrase most likely refers to causing a man to doubt his place in heteronormative society in order to take advantage of that doubt for his own pleasure, it could also refer to a more universal doubt and raise the questions: what are the ways people feel the otherness within their identities, and how do they reconcile their otherness with societal expectations?
O'Hara's answer might best be taken from his poem “Yesterday Down at the Canal”: “how can anyone be more amusing than oneself/how can anyone fail to be” (66). However, most people do not walk down the streets on their lunch hours, buoyed by their certainty of personal amusement or satisfaction. Ammons indicates that “the anxious calm down occasionally and want to turn away from the boredom of coming down and the boredom of anxiety by taking an interest in something: even, sometimes, taking a little interest in something displaces the anxiety, refocuses the attention, puts the mind off itself” (118-119). Taking the mind off of itself is a difficult undertaking for people suffering from disorders that emphasize intense or obsessive self-reflection and analysis. As Rimbaud notes, “I is an Other” (as cited by Dr. Nick Halpern, personal communication, 2 August 2011). One interpretation of this oft-debated sentence is that poets feel their otherness more acutely than the majority of society or the arbiters of societal expectations while their works also represent or connect with the otherness within every human being. In their constant search for identity or desire to create identity, people can confront a separation from the rest of society. “We all know people who are not their authentic selves” (Halpern, personal communication, 2 August 2011). However, attempting to be one's authentic self may cause some people increased tension because their authenticity may be more fluid than societal guidelines prefer, or their presentation of authenticity drifts outside of or sharply opposes societal norms. One may feel his or her otherness more acutely when afflicted with maladies associated with depression or anxiety.
Despite that being diagnosed with a mental illness or condition that affects emotional or mental processes is extremely common, people with anxiety disorders or depression continue to represent an other to the expected guidelines and functions of social normality. For many people, the stress of discovering or performing normalcy is anxiety-inducing. Situations that are supposed to be normal, particularly artificially constructed situations where people are outside of their regular environments or comfort zones, induce anxiety in those people who find “being normal” an act of constant performance. Not everyone understands the spiky danger beneath presumed normalcy. "That's why White Russians are so sinister..." (Halpern, personal communication, 19 July, 2011). As Emily Dickinson noted in her poem that begins “Much Madness is Divinest Sense --,” the majority opinion rules in situations about what is considered normal behavior. Performance requires control, and control can be fragile, rigid, and frightening, as well as exhausting, to have to maintain constantly.
If one uses tricks of control, such as elaborately intricate descriptions as delay tactics to ease into uncomfortable situations or topics or to provide touchstones of reality, those tricks can often become performances or traps for the individual. For example, creating lists of descriptions of the relationships of objects to each other through strings of prepositional phrases can trap one into a never-ending litany of listing that no longer serves to delay uncomfortable truths or situations; instead, those lists of potentially normal objects and situations not only reveal the potential anxiety beneath, they no longer work to remind the speaker of his or her place in the world. Like when one says a word over and over until it loses meaning or context, the tricks one uses to keep situated in the real world, to ward off isolation, or to defend against increased panic lose their power. They become thickets of thorny words through which the speaker and reader must battle to get to the anxiety beneath. Elizabeth Bishop's works not only depict various situations that most people would consider normal, but people with social anxiety would consider agonizing, her poems also demonstrate how animals can be constant and comforting touchstones, not only grounding one in reality, but also grounding one within oneself, which may be far more important.
Attempting to follow the rules of social niceties can be an agonizing experience for people with various social anxiety disorders or other maladies, attitudes, or points of view that cause one to feel out of touch with seemingly arbitrary societal rules of engagement. Many people have a laissez-fair attitude about social interaction and use a combination of laid-back personality and confidence to cover social gaffes. However, because they so often feel hemmed in by social constraints or face-to-face interaction with other human beings, people for whom such interaction is agony are often intimately aware of, and horrified by, when they make mistakes, causing them to obsess over past mistakes and shiver in tense anticipation of making future ones. Because of the control indicated by her precise punctuation and word choices, Elizabeth Bishop probably feared the humiliation of social mistakes when she had to be with people; "When someone puts in a lot of commas, you feel the person's anxiety to be correct” (Halpern, personal communication, July 19, 2011). Because she could not control situations of social interaction, Bishop controlled the environment of her poems.
When the speaker returns to the fishhouses in “At the Fishhouses” (64-66), she has to talk to an old man who had been a friend of her grandfather. Although some people might read this as a nice way to connect with someone who knew her grandparents and a way to connect with some positive memories of the past, I viewed the man's existence as a necessary evil, someone with whom the speaker had to observe social niceties even though she alternately wanted to delay and rush to the water, her memories, and the truth or knowledge. Even attempting to objectify the man as another interesting part of the landscape cannot disguise that she has to speak to him and interact with him. Some people who dislike social interaction are excellent “people watchers,” as they can easily be interested in the affectations or environment a person creates through clothing, mannerism, and speech patterns; that is, they can be interested, so long as the person does not engage them. Their interest is more objective, involving spectatorship and not involvement. Sometimes objectifying a person through listing of visual cues can remind the speaker/thinker/observer that other people are also real. Small children and people with varying types of attitudes or mental illnesses can forget the reality inherent in other human beings: for them, sometimes they feel like they are the only people who are “real.” In other situations, cataloging the visual aspects of other people within their environments serves to further distance the observer from those people. In “At the Fishhouses,” even the intimacy of providing a Lucky Strike does not appear to span the distance between the speaker and the old man, as she continues to describe him as just another aspect of the environment.
The word “waits” is important: the man “waits for a herring boat to come in” (65) even as the act of speaking to the man is a verbal form of waiting. Waiting is boring; it also serves as a delay tactic. Small talk is difficult for people with social anxiety. Delaying the inevitable moment of contact can make it worse. Because they fear saying the wrong thing, they will often attempt to guide the conversation to topics in which the other person is interested, not because they care about the other person, but so that person can do the majority of the talking. As Lindsey Neves noted, about social interaction, "you tell yourself when you meet new people, 'don't say anything weird'" (personal communication). However, for a person for whom engaging in social rituals is difficult, for a person who feels her otherness sharply, engaging in those social rituals within a conversation in which one has no control is doubly confusing and frustrating, which may make the individual exhibit even more socially-inappropriate behaviors, such as a evidence of an eagerness to be elsewhere. Therefore, the speaker just “waits” for the man to be finished with the conversation, or the boat to come in, or to make some suitable excuse to head “down at the water's edge” (65). For Bishop, white space indicates her speaker/self's jump from social interaction. The reader does not see her make some polite excuses to extract herself from the conversation. Instead, first she is listening to the waiting old man, next she is by the water. Many people with social anxiety issues wish they could automatically use white space to transition out of interactions in the way “At the Fishhouses” does. For Lowell, his “Skunk Hour” gives up the pretense entirely by saying, after several failed attempts the expected small talk: “My mind's not right.”
Social expectations that can induce anxiety do not only involve interaction. Sometimes anxiety is heightened merely by being in a room with others and not knowing what to do or how to act, for fear that someone is watching and judging. For the six-year old girl in Bishop's “In the Waiting Room” (159), her anxiety forces her to finish the National Geographic, even though the contents horrify her, because she “was too shy to stop.” Similar to the narrator in “At the Fishhouses,” the situation of waiting is a catalyst for a situation that sharpens the otherness the girl feels. She became immersed in something that horrified and embarrassed her with its imagery, but she kept on turning the pages because to stop abruptly would indicate that what she had been doing was wrong. As noted, control and being “right” are very important to people with forms of social anxiety. The same woman who so carefully contains her lush descriptive elements within controlled punctuation would have been concerned enough to finish a magazine she found distasteful for the fear of doing something wrong, or worse, being publicly exposed doing something socially unacceptable. If the child were older, perhaps ten or eleven, the shyness that forced her to complete the magazine might have been inspired by a fear of appearing too immature to handle the content of the magazine; the six year-old speaker labels her reaction shyness.
Because of their desire for, and lack of, control in social situations, many people with social anxiety are also concerned about other places where they lack control of their surroundings. The situation in “The Moose” is a perfect example of how someone with anxiety might react to losing control: she is not the driver of the bus, she did not create the bridge, and when she finally decides she can release enough control to sleep, the driver stops. However, the lines that most succinctly and precisely depict the importance of anxiety and control within Bishop's poems are
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way. (170)
For many people with specific phobias or anxieties, pre-emptive worry becomes a coping strategy. Although the speaker has been documenting the people and places she sees on the trip thus far, the notation about the bridge indicates that she has been thinking, underneath---like the alcohol in a White Russian---about the bridge. She may have been looking at the fog, watching the lone traveler hug relatives, and otherwise peering out the window, but she knew the bridge was coming up. For someone who relishes or requires control, she probably has looked at the map from point A to point B. That bridge loomed in the future of the trip. Perhaps she had been half holding her breath in hopes the loose plank would not give way and half holding her breath in hopes it would. Either way, those lines demonstrate the need for control and how lack of control is fearful and something about which to be anxious. For people in step with societal definitions of normalcy, that a bridge will maintain is a truth to be taken for granted. Instead, bridges, or any potentially dangerous situation, can create great anxiety in people who do not trust or understand societal norms. For many people suffering from panic attacks, just knowing that something should not logically cause them distress does not help ease the situation. The truth may be comforting for some people, but difficult events can still feel like disaster, as is evidenced in “One Art” (178). In addition, bridges represent transitions from places, states of mind, beliefs about being. Control is rigid. Being anxious is unpleasant, but it is also familiar. Being thrust into a new situation, by way of a metaphorical or literal bridge, means that the anxious person has to discover new ways to cope or to create the illusion of control because the rigidity of the old ways may not work.
Even symbols which might provide hope or comfort to those with different attitudes or mental environments do not have the same connotations for people with anxiety and control issues. For most people, the house is a symbol of normalcy, the family, the goals and aspirations of a normal person. For someone who has no family and/or also does not participate in heteronormative relationships, houses can simultaneously represent one's abandoned, but still longed for, hopes of contentment, as well as one's potential resentment toward being “other” in a society that not only embraces but propagandizes the mythic happiness of house and home. The regionalism “safe as houses” (173) in “The Moose” suggests the isolation one can feel when surrounded by societal pressure to perform within the majority definitions of normal. Houses represent normalcy, the object or environment that cannot be and cannot contain the dangerous or those actions or attitudes labeled as deviant. In reality, houses are scary. Not haunted houses, just houses in general; they could be haunted, but they would not have to be----houses have doors, and doors are the items behind which "monsters/people/bad guys" hide, through which people insist upon walking backwards, and to whom moviegoers must yell "don't go in there!" Franz Wright recognizes the danger of houses, as he notes in “Night Said” by mentioning “There's murder in the house” (22) and calls the house “shrieking,” “catastrophic,” and “unwithstandable inside” (22). Unlike “safe as houses,” Wright expresses relief in his “out-of-the-house experience!” in “Time to Stop Keeping a Dream Journal” (34). Houses are not safe, and someone with certain anxiety concerns, as well as an unfortunate childhood, like Elizabeth Bishop, would realize that. This line, this regionalism, is another code: for most readers, “safe as houses” is a cliché that continues to evoke safety or serenity. For other readers, the line could be a foreboding foreshadowing: houses are not safe, thus, perhaps, the moose is not as safe as the bus travelers would have us believe, either.
What would appear to be the best symbol of the known and the safe and the normal would be one's own identity. Instead, one's identity is often the most fluid and most feared of all of the supposedly normal concepts of reality. Bishop, in her guise as the young speaker in “In the Waiting Room” demonstrates the surrealism that emerges when one is confronted by the questions surrounding identity. In an instant, she connects not only to her “foolish aunt,” but also to the women in the National Geographic. Despite the supposed or societally expected norm of knowing oneself, the speaker “knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen” (160). The connection and questioning simultaneously explores the constraints of being female as well as the constraints of being human with her question “What similarities...held us all together or made us all just one?” (161). She questions why she is herself and not her aunt or someone else or everyone else; she wonders how she has come to be herself or why she should be anyone. These questions of identity cause anxious probing in many works. In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Alice has many questions about her own identify and strength, but at one point she has a lovely debate with herself if she is not, in fact, someone else entirely. In addition, Wislawa Szymborska's “Astonishment” echoes the questions Bishop sets forth, this time in the role of a dog.
Animals are important in Bishop's work. Often, animals are easier for people with anxiety to relate to than people. One can interact with an animal without social performance anxiety, and research has demonstrated the calming effects animals have on people with anxiety. In addition, animals have differing connotations and norms than just being non-object non-humans. They also symbolize normalcy in a way that transcends human societal expectations by always containing and maintaining the wildness within. In “The Moose,” dogs are mentioned three times: as a supervisor of the traveler getting ready to go on a bus trip, a dog giving a single bark, almost as a declaration of “all's well,” and in the echo of the Grandparents' home, when the dog is curled up in a shawl. These three examples demonstrate dogs as normalcy far beyond the social idea of conversation as normalcy or houses as normalcy. In “At the Fishhouses,” the highly personified seal serves as a foil to her awkward interactions with the old man; although she may be amusing herself to think the seal is interested in her or interested in music, the speaker is able to engage with the seal in ways she cannot with the old man. In addition, the seal is the gatekeeper for the truth, the water, and the understanding that the truth, like one's identity, is fluid and not able to be controlled or defined. Bishop's excessive control, her cage of punctuation, demonstrates her need to control herself and the fear of doing something socially unacceptable in public. Some of her need for control could have been a result of depression, a natural social anxiety, and also a reflection of being homosexual in a time when that lifestyle was against public norms and societal mores. Combined, her great control suggests fear and a fear connected to identity.
If the moose in “The Moose” (169-173) is supposed to represent the speaker by being female, it can represent the fear of the speaker's self, her natural identity, even an innate wildness that must be constrained by rules and tricks and performance. Similarly, in the 1942 movie Cat People, the protagonist feared the monster within herself, whether that monster was her sexuality, her femininity, or an aggressive nature hidden by society's expectations. Many scholars have examined “the monstrous feminine” in literature as an exploration of fear of self combined with the constraints of society. However, Bishop may be using the moose in “The Moose” as a way to comfort herself: the moose is viewed by the other bus riders as benevolent, or at least “safe as houses” (173). However, like the anxious rider fearing the loose plank of the bridge or the person for whom houses do not represent safety or normalcy, lovers of horror movies may recognize that the moose for which the poem was named was not the real danger. Instead, one stanza indicates an animal connection that lurks beneath the surface of the poem and perhaps beneath Bishop herself:
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods
hairy, scratchy, and splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture. (171)
Modern readers familiar with horror movies or traditional monsters would immediately make the connection between that stanza and foreboding. In addition, they would be waiting for the moose to amble back into the woods and then get eaten by a werewolf. The repetition of the word moonlight, the word “hairy” and even the reference to a metaphorical lamb, something a wolf would eat, indicate darkness and anxiety that is not fulfilled by the poem itself. In fact, “The Moose” is several poems, but two in particular. It is a comforting poem of wonder at the natural world for some people; for others, it represents the need for control and a sense of unfulfilled foreboding.
Bishop's poem “Manners” (121-122) appears to demonstrate a child's indoctrination into societal niceties, particularly to speak to people, offer everyone rides, and speak nicely. However, the narrative of the poem cycles down to the importance of considering animals in one's behavior as another mode of polite or appropriate behavior. The grandfather comments on the bird's manners, and they walk when the mare is too tired to carry them. This consideration for animals can develop into a consideration of animals, particularly when considering humans is too difficult because of the anxiety produced by human-human interaction. Discussions of animal ethics often include the discussion of where to draw the line in the human/animal debate, particularly because the very Cartesian divide between humans and animals is incorrect: the debate should be about human animals versus nonhuman animals, as humans are animals. Bishop's poems often demonstrate recognition of the connection between humans and animals beyond a utilitarian one.
