Intertextuality

The poets (and scholars based on my research) who I will discuss in this essay have chosen to re-examine and transform the tradition--the scholars by studying the texts again in their original languages and contexts, and the creative writers by re-imagining the lives of women in the Bible--to discover the "creative power, dignity, and goodness" of women in their texts. Their work on the character of Eve, the archetypal woman in Western thought, as she appears in the Genesis accounts of creation and in the varied interpretations of her, illustrates the many dimensions of this feminist re-envisioning of women's place in the Bible and in women's understanding of their place before God and the rest of humanity. Perhaps the best way to begin this study of Eve is to look at some of the "canonized mythology" of Eve. Scripture scholar Phyllis Trible explains the difficulty that Genesis passages about Eve pose for modern women: "Throughout the ages people have used this text to legitimate patriarchy as the will of God. (Dr. Bullon was telling us this too in our Arthurian Romance) They maintained that it subordinates woman to man in creation, depicts her as his seducer, curses her, and authorizes man to rule over her." The poetry of Eve presents a similar picture. A poem by Ralph Hodgson, published in 1924, gives us a little taste: As the serpent begins his assault on Eve-- "to get even and / Humble proud heaven"--Hodgson asks the reader to Picture that orchard sprite, "Eve, with her body white. Supple and smooth to her Slim finger tips.

Wondering, listening. Listening, wondering. Eve with a berry half-way to her lips." When she succumbs to the serpent's wiles, the poet cries out: "Oh, had our simple Eve / Seen through the make-believe!" In Hodgson's poem "Eve" is presented as not merely naive but actually stupid; the Fall is for her no more than a loss of "sweet berries and plums."

Emily Dickinson's poem, "A Narrow Fellow In The Grass": One answer for Melville might be, potentially, the work of poetry. It too, like a bullet, might have the capacity to enter into us, penetrating to the quick, compact and forceful, painful, too, but carrying with it a revelatory disenchantment. These are a critic's reflections, no doubt, and not properly a historian's, but they suggest material for a historical investigation. The penetrating powers of a work of poetry would not be a matter of religious transcendence, of truth in any moralizing or spiritualizing sense. Melville's bullet does its work "around the church of Shiloh, / The church so lone, the log-built one," and though that church echoes to the prayers of the dying, the bullet's powers of revelation are of a different order. As a statement about the incisive power of a cold realization, as that dark epiphany can be found in the work of art, Melville's line reminds me of Emily Dickinson's "Zero at the Bone," another phrase of the Mumler era. (Dickinson, 459).

There is some of this bullet-like indeception in Looking Askance, though I wish there were more. Leja's most affecting chapter concerns Helen Abbott, the brilliant young scientist who so profoundly misread Claude Monet's paintings at the first American exhibition of French Impressionism. Arguing that Monet's pictures represent the delusiveness of life's pleasures and the finality of cold extinction, with all life tending toward the gray inanimate zones of Monet's distances, Abbott is another denizen of Leja's world of deceptions. She refused to take Impressionism at face value and saw beneath the surface, or what she imagined was beneath the surface, making her a kindred spirit, whatever her differences, to all the other disbelievers that populate Leja's pages.

Leja treats Abbott's case with marvelous and sensitive specificity, allowing the idiosyncrasy of her project its due. Yet perhaps the structure of Looking Askance, with its scrupulously democratic allotment of chapters to high and low figures alike, establishes too much of an equivalence between Abbott's project and those of other figures, even ordinary painting scratchers, in the vast culture of deception. Perhaps instead, writing in 1886, the year of Emily Dickinson's death, Abbott was akin to Dickinson, her opinion like Dickinson's to be respected all the more for the strangeness and inaccessibility of its nonetheless lucid formulations. Perhaps what Abbott asked of an artist and of an interpreter was not to meditate on deception or on truth but to show us, with all possible force, how to be undeceived.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring And Fall": In the century since Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest and brilliantly original poet, died in 1889, his small but powerful body of poetry has undergone a great transformation in critical reception. Work never published during his lifetime and widely condemned as eccentric and unreadable when first published in 1918 has earned Hopkins his reputation as a major poet.

That Gerard Manley Hopkins shared this view is evident in the number symbolism that he weaves into his poetry to be experienced by the listener or reader. Numbers were very real for Hopkins; in his father's book he recounts his experience with "the very fantastic and interesting" circumstance of "apparition" or "spectral numbers" (CN 20). The works that illustrate numerical structure and meaning are the Virgin Mary poems, which, taken in chronological order, show the development of Hopkins's verbal and numerical style and complexity. Certain key words or constructions are repeated according to the numbers from one to twelve. These repetitions conform to what Hopkins calls "altering" and "oftening" and "over-and-overing," similar to the repeated tune or melody in music (J 106). The first of the Virgin Mary poems, "Ad Mariam" (26), is one of the poems he dismissed as the "little presentation pieces" written during his seven-year poetic drought (SP 72). The number symbolism in the poem begins with the duality in the word "Spring," which occurs twice, as a noun in the second line and as verb in the second-to-last line. The verb form of "spring" forces the reader back to the beginning in a circular motion, in order to glean this active meaning and to explore and "explode" both connections. The double meaning in "spring" is a typical Hopkins construction in which both noun and verb meanings reverberate in the same word (P xxxii); in fact, in the simplest terms, inscape can be seen as the noun and instress as the verb (P xx), and the beauty is in both the symmetry and dichotomy. Thus May-Mariam's inscape includes her