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2 The censoring of queer voices, whether through keeping them out of parades, not giving them equal air time, or not publishing their work in main-stream journals, is a subtler, more invidious violence. Biddy Martin writes that such censoring "is a helpful reminder of the high stakes in symbolic orders...[W]e are constantly threatened with erasure from discursive fields" (95). We prefer not to see violence.
3 In her review of Andrea Dworkin's Mercy, Cindy Jenefsky claims "that speaking from that place of pain is transformative...it is the necessary location from which one learns about oppression and learns what is necessary to overthrow it" (6). Bell hooks agrees that representations of violence demand action: "I say remember the pain because I believe that true resistance begins with people confronting pain, whether it's theirs or somebody else's, and wanting to do something to change it" (215).
4 Of course, following Laura Mulvey, we could say that given its scripted and performative qualities, s&m also "demands a story" (14). But I distinguish between physical representations of violence and written representations of violence.
5 Of her own life, Robinson writes in her memoirs, "Through life the tempest has followed my footsteps; and I have in vain looked for a short interval of repose from the perseverance of sorrow" (18).
6 Sentimental poems may be the most difficult to define. Loosely following M.H. Abrams's definition of sentimentalism as "an excess of emotion to an occasion, or in a more limited sense, to an overindulgence in the 'tender' emotions of pathos and sympathy" (171), I read "All Alone," "The Shepherd's Dog," and "The Deserted Cottage" as sentimental poems. I understand these poems as calculated to produce a compassionate response within the reader, and, therefore, as sentimental.
7 I realize that this labeling on my part may be a violent move, a force of appropriation. However, I think it is useful in order to understand the multanaeity of positions within Robinson's work since I cannot (in the space of this paper) individually examine each poem of Lyrical Tales. Of course, the boundaries also blur. The comic and the sentimental poems are also political critiques.
8 Although "All Alone" opens Lyrical Tales, "The Widow's Home," the sixth poem in the volume, sounds like a preface to the first poem. Written in blank verse, "The Widow's Home" tells the story of a young mother and her little boy who eager await the homecoming of her husband, his father, not knowing he has died. "The Widow's Home" itself has not degenerated to the state of the cottage of "All Alone," but the presence of a similar story in such a small volume emphasizes the frequency of the situation (men's conscription leading to the destruction of home and family) and Robinson's critique of it.
9 We could also read this moral biographically. Given Robinson's abuse in the press, she may be warning her critics of the possible repercussions of slander.
10 Robinson, then, firmly roots herself within the tradition of abolition poetry. Simiarly, I read "Deborah's Parrot" as coming from the misogynistic tradition of finding wife abuse entertaining. Yet Robinson more freely plays with the latter, older, more established tradition than the former. Capitulating to tradition, "Deborah's Parrot" is comic--but it is also threatening.