Caught Between Two Women

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Caught between Two Women

Literary critics Deborah Pope and Sandra Gilbert have studied the tension between two “types” of women, one wholesome, charitable and domestic, the other artistic, glamorous and non-nurturing. In poems such as in Denise Levertov’s poem “In Mind,” there is a dramatization of the tension between the housewife or mother, on the one hand, and the artist, on the other with biological and artistic creativity generally presented as mutually exclusive for the female artist.

The critic Amanda Helak seems to agree with the above literary critique when she offers up her theory that the speaker’s mind in this poem is divided into two women. One is ideal but dull, “she has no imagination,” while the other, although more interesting, is unkempt and mean. The speaker, then, is a woman struggling with her own identity as she has two personalities within her that are very different, even polar opposites, and there are problems with both.

The structure of the poem highlights this theme of the tension between the two women or personalities. The tone is at first uplifting of “innocence,” fragrant aromas, and cleanliness, but it shifts after the fourth stanza into “turbulent,” an old woman wearing torn rags, and ends in the gloomy and harsh: “but she is not kind.” In fact, this is the only one-lined stanza in the entire poem which serves to emphasize this key difference between the two personalities. The structure of two lines per stanza also represents the speaker’s two opposing thought processes. The symbolism seems to be that of the Angel and the Devil.

The imagery in the poem also serves to emphasize the all-encompassing symbolic theme in the poem. And this is also where Amanda Helak’s analysis parts ways somewhat with Deborah Pope and Sandra Gilbert. For where Pope and Gilbert theorize