Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Serpent's Tail
- 1 Irony: Teiresias's Gaze
- 2 Irony II: This Is Not a Pipe
- 3 Women: Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives
- 4 Eros: The Mischief Maker
- 5 Prosody: White Noise
- 6 Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind
- Conclusion: Out Far and in Deep
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
3 - Women: Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Serpent's Tail
- 1 Irony: Teiresias's Gaze
- 2 Irony II: This Is Not a Pipe
- 3 Women: Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives
- 4 Eros: The Mischief Maker
- 5 Prosody: White Noise
- 6 Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind
- Conclusion: Out Far and in Deep
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
You don't catch a woman trying to be Plato.
Robert Frost, “A Masque of Reason”Jesse Bel. Can you interpret dreams? I dreamed last night
Someone took curved nail scissors and snipped off
My eyelids so I couldn't shut my eyes
To anything that happened anymore.
Robert Frost, “A Masque of Mercy”In Frost's “A Servant to Servants” the speaker describes her mad uncle. He was kept at home with his family, but within the house was another “house” made of hickory-wood bars, a cage to keep him safe and to keep others safe. He tore all his furniture to shreds, so, undisguised, his cell proclaimed clearly its only function as a cage. Oddly, he stripped himself naked but carried his suit of clothes carefully over his arm, as if on his way somewhere. He lived, animal-like, in a bed of straw and tore at things with his teeth. The man “went mad quite young,” and although he may have been bitten by a mad dog, the speaker believes it more likely that he was “crossed in love…. Anyway all he talked about was love” (11. 104-8). The other prominent figure in the speaker's memory is the bride, her mother, brought into the madhouse where “She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful / By his shouts in the night.” The new bride witnesses the madness, she is in her role as bride an embodiment of the cause of his madness, and she is, as the speaker's mother, a propagational source of madness.
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- Information
- Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite , pp. 86 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994