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Anna Girgenti

The Displaced Female Writer: Travel and Gender in Elizabeth Bishop and Gjertrud
Schnackenberg

Prominent French feminist critic of the late twentieth century, Hélène Cixous, writes in

her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “woman must write her self: must write about women and

bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away… Woman must put herself into

the text—as into the world and into history— by her own movement” (875). Cixous emphasizes

the role of the female writer not to carry on tradition but to revise it, to claim her place in it.

Cixous and other twentieth century feminist critics, such as Adrienne Rich, encourage women to

write from their bodies, to distinguish themselves from male authors in their style and

perspective (Cixous 878). Cixous categorizes this type of writing as “escriture feminine,” a

uniquely feminist style of writing absent from the overwhelmingly male-dominated literary

canon. Of course, the world of female writing is as diverse as male writing, and a number of

female poets occasionally fall outside the category of “escriture feminine.” Twentieth century

poets Elizabeth Bishop and Gjertrude Schnackenberg are part of a new wave of women writers

focused on travel, particularly following the Second World War. Although their poetry is the

revision of history Cixous calls for, it often fails to take an entirely feminine perspective; their

work is like a woman dressed in men’s apparel, blurring the line between genders and

dismantling the thick barrier between male and female poetry.

Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” written after her 1935-

1937 travels through Europe and Africa, depicts the experience of travel as both enlightening and

disappointing. In both her poetry and her travels, Bishop has ventured into what has been

traditionally a man’s world and, like a female politician in a pantsuit, chosen not to speak in a

traditionally feminine voice from a feminine perspective. Such a choice would not be unnatural
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for Bishop, who was not a traditionally feminine woman herself— raised parentless, accustomed

to travel from childhood, a lesbian poet caught between the late-modernist era and post-

modernism. Bishop was often in the position of outsider, a position that would shape her poetic

voice and make the process of categorizing her difficult for literary scholars. In her 1984 article

for The Boston Review, “The Eye of the Outsider,” Adrienne Rich comments on Bishop’s

condition of “outsiderhood”, a “condition which most people spend… great energy trying to

deny or evade, through whatever kinds of assimilation or protective coloration they can

manage.” Bishop’s “protective coloration” is her poetry, in which, as a non-feminine female, she

passes as male to earn her place in the literary canon.

Both Bishop and Schnackenberg write about their travels as physical and intellectual,

religious journeys, a concept in Western literature traditionally associated with male characters

and writers (ie. Homer’s Odyssey, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, Hemingway’s The Sun Also

Rises). Bishop and Schnackenberg’s travel poetry is ambitious because it attempts to do the job

of the male poet, rather than revise male poetry or write distinctively “escriture feminine.” “Over

2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” is an account of a religious pilgrimage, a quick

overview of visits to distant countries and holy places. The poem’s title is a reference to the

Bible, and the speaker’s journeys are a sobering revelation that reality, unlike the images in the

Bible, is imperfect and often unsettling. The illustrations in the Bible, “when dwelt upon… all

resolve themselves” while the speaker’s travels include harsher views of reality:

I saw what frightened me most of all:


A holy grave, not looking particularly holy,

The grave is “an open, gritty, marble trough… yellowed as scattered cattle teeth,” and each of

Bishop’s descriptions of her travels is equally as realistic, pairing the beautiful with the

undesirable, shattering the Bible’s perfect romanticized illustrations of the places she visits: “The
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fat old guide made eyes” at Volubilis, where “there were beautiful poppies/ splitting the

mosaics.” Schackenberg’s “A Gilded Lapse of Time,” which details the speaker’s travels through

Italy, is equally as ambitious as Bishop’s work, with its swift movement between places, its acute

historical allusions and its highly stylized form and structure.

Schnackenberg’s journey, like Bishop’s, is religious and centered around a particular

monumental text— Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poems are similar enough to assume Bishop’s

influence on Schnackenberg. In both cases, the physical act of travel, a religious pilgrimage,

leads to intellectual enlightenment and a questioning of one’s own faith. Schnackenberg connects

Dante’s journeys through the realms of hell, purgatory, and paradise with her own journeys to

Byzantine churches and Dante’s tomb. In making this connection, Schnackenberg literally places

herself, the speaker, in the space previously occupied by a man. In their travel poetry,

Schnackenberg and Bishop need not explicitly assert their femininity because their status as

women alone is enough to make their work radical, given its usurping of literary techniques and

subjects historically reserved for men. Bishop places herself in a traditionally male role when she

speaks of her time “in the brothels of Marrakesh” where “the little pockmarked prostitutes/

balanced their tea-trays on their heads/ and did their belly-dances; flung themselves/ naked and

giggling against our knees,/ asking for cigarettes.” Schnackenberg also places herself in a male

role as she literally rewrites the Italian words written by Dante:

Where I copied out your verses by hand


In a foreign language, and as I wrote I could see
Those rhymes throb down the length of the page (Section 15, lines 7-9)

Bishop and Schnackenberg are part of a crucial shift in female literature, in which women

begin to leave the domestic sphere, entering into the world of travel largely reserved for men.

Earlier female poets, most notably Emily Dickinson, often relied on historical and literary texts
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as well as their own imagination as sources for their writing. Beginning around 1940, during

World War II, travel for non-recreational purposes became increasingly mainstream for women,

and female poets joined the ranks of their contemporary male poets (Eliot, Pound, Auden,

Hayden, Lowell, etc.) whose travels influenced their work. In their poetry, Schnackenberg and

Bishop compare their own experiences of travel with their knowledge of literature, and the result

is an intellectual and religious awakening. Schnackenberg’s awakening is literal, as she describes

herself waking from a dream in the last several lines of “A Gilded Lapse of Time”:

Or else it was Gabriel lifting to my lips


A tablespoon of golden, boiling smoke
So wounding to my mouth I turned my back

On the source of poetry, and I woke. (Section 20, lines 37-40)

In this final section of the poem, Schnackenberg is punished for a guilt she feels throughout her

travels, which she refers to as “the guilt of our callings,” “the guilt of poetry” (Section 9). Her

emotions are intertwined with her travels, as she is impacted by her visit to each location and her

supernatural experiences. But, like Bishop, her experiences are at once original and intertextual,

weaving through and building off of religious texts.

Schnackenberg is a master of post-modern intertextuality; we can expect to find subtle

allusions to previous poets buried throughout her work. The image of the speaker, presumably

Schnackenberg herself, breaking a beehive apart with a branch in the final section of the poem is

strikingly similar to a line in Bishop’s poem: “Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges/ of the

pages and pollinates the fingertips.)” Bishop is referring to the motion of opening a Bible, and

she compares the gilt on the edges of the pages to pollen, much like the bee’s “yellow powder”

in Schnackenberg’s poem. Schnackenberg recognizes her guilt in breaking open the hive, or the

sacred text, and she is punished for her irreverence. Bishop’s travels are a different kind of
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awakening altogether, a type of awakening experienced by almost every traveler. Bishop realizes

that literature, in this case, the Bible, can stimulate an unrealistic, romanticized view of certain

places, resulting in a feeling of disappointment upon visiting such places and finding them

ordinary or unsacred. Bishop addresses this issue again in “Questions of Travel,” in which she

questions the necessity of travel as a writer to gather experiences. Bishop, of course, concludes in

favor of travel, as it is for her an experience of growth. While her awakening in “Over 2,000

Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” passes at the surface as gender-neutral, it is implicitly

feminist.

Bishop and Schnackenberg are women experiencing for the first time the sharp

distinction between literature and experience. History itself is flawed, “lapsed” as

Schnackenberg’s poem’s title suggests, and often dull or incomplete, not as satisfactory as

literature containing “over 2,000 illustrations and a complete concordance.” Cixous argues that

women have been “driven away” from literary history, and what she means is that women have

been made stagnant. Schnackenberg and Bishop write themselves into literary history through an

alternate approach; they take on the voice of the masculine writer, the traveler. They not only

revisit and revise past literature but also physically travel to and interact with its geographical

locations in the name of many past female poets unable to travel outside the domestic sphere.

The act of travel requires versatility, however, and “the price of external assimilation is internal

division” (Rich). Externally, in their poetic voice, style, and vision, Schnackenberg and Bishop

assimilate into the male-dominated world of travelling poets, resulting in division within the

internal group, the spectrum of feminist critics. The poets find themselves displaced, even

isolated within the world of feminist criticism because they fail to explicitly distinguish their

feminine identity in their work.


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Rich poignantly describes this dilemma of the displaced female writer: “Often, the

‘exceptional’ or token outsider is praised for her skill and artistry while her deep and troubled

connections with other outsiders are ignored. (This is itself part of the imperative to be

assimilated.)” Writers such as Bishop and Schnackenberg are accepted into the male canon and

praised for their talents, but their connections to other feminist writers are hushed. Bishop

promoted the idea that men and women do not write differently, although many feminist critics

disagreed. May Swenson was among the first to write to Bishop urging her to allow her work “to

appear in a new ‘scholarly and significant’ anthology, ‘The Women Poets in English’”

(Marshall). Bishop responded: “’Why not Men Poets in English? Don’t you see how silly it is?’

… ‘I don’t like things compartmentalized like that. . . . I like black and white, yellow and red,

young and old, rich and poor, and male and female, all mixed up’” (Marshall). A few years later,

Adrienne Rich also solicited Bishop to publish her poetry in an anthology of female poets, and

Bishop again refused.

Both Bishop and Schnackenberg ignore the pressure to write in a uniquely feminine voice

or to write out of their bodily experience, but they are nonetheless feminist poets. Writing

exceptional poetry while being a woman may be itself a feminist act. Later in Rich’s career, she

and Bishop “shared a reluctance to join what Bishop called the ‘School of Anguish,’ and a

determination to keep the specific details of their intimate lives private” (Marshall). Bishop

resists the popular confessional poetry of the modernist era, as does Schnackenberg several

decades later. Although their voices are not confessional or personal, their poetry is often full of

emotion. As Eliot puts it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent:” Poetry is not a turning loose of

emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from

personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to
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want to escape from these things” (paragraph 17). Of course, events in Bishop and

Schnackenberg’s lives, the death of Schnackenberg’s husband, for example, and Bishop’s

homosexuality, depression, and alcoholism, influenced their work, but neither woman seems

particularly concerned with personal details. Instead, they moved outward, finding inspiration in

places and texts outside their personal lives, ascribing to Eliot’s traditionally male conception of

creativity and intertexuality: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him

will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (paragraph 12).

Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Print.
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Cixous, Hélène. "Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs. Vol. 1.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 875-93. Print.

Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Sacred Wood (1919)." Ed. Lee

Morrissey. Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi (2005): 29-34. Web.

Marshall, Megan. "Elizabeth and Alice: The Last Love Affair of Elizabeth Bishop and The

Losses Behind ‘One Art’" The New Yorker (2016). Web. 15 Dec. 2016.

Rich, Adrienne. "The Eye of the Outsider." The Boston Review (1983). Web. 15 Dec. 2016.

Schnackenberg, Gjertrud. "A Gilded Lapse of Time." Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. 137-75. Print.

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