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Article Excerpt
There be thy mirrour in men. (85/554) (1)
There have been two different critical traditions on Pound's conception of the feminine. Several critics underscore Pound's positive attitude towards woman despite his denigration of the feminine; for example, Christine Brooke-Rose and James J. Wilhelm argue that Pound is not anti-feminist nor masculinist. According to Brooke-Rose and Wilhelm, Pound stood against both binary oppositions and the Christian trinity that had excluded the feminine from Western discourse. Others point out that Pound's view of woman is ambiguous and, sometimes, contradictory. Examining Pound's "The Serious Artist" (1913) and Canto 85 in The Cantos, Salah el Moncef contends that the poet through "amalgamation" becomes a selfless reflector of "many men's" voices (134). (2) Robert Casillo gives an insightful discussion of Pound's confused and ambivalent conception of the feminine, linking Pound's doubled notion of the Orientalism (3) of the Near East, his anti-Semitism, and the feminine in terms of a paradoxical combination of infertile-nothing and carnal-excess. (4) Maintaining that the Orient was implicitly identified with the feminine in Western scholarship and literature, Casillo argues that "the Near East stands for the paradoxical license and barrenness, the darkness and confusion, of demonic matriarchy" (273, 277).
Introducing the notion of the fluidities (5) to current critical traditions, this essay will attempt to reread Pound's gender matters through the lens of psychoanalysis. As Pound disliked Freudian psychoanalysis, it is true that there have been some tendencies among Pound scholars to oppose psychoanalytic readings. (6) Discussing Pound's persistent oscillations between feminine and masculine, however, I argue that his poetry and poetics are deeply intertwined with the feminine, and his "entry into the symbolic" is unstable, because he could not completely succeed in repressing the feminine in himself. In this respect, my use of the term "the entry into the symbolic" is deeply influenced by Lacan's dissident daughter Irigaray to the extent that she criticizes Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis for their masculinism in Speculum. Generally, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, "the entry into the symbolic" means the child's entry into language and subjectivity. Rather than the child's entry into the symbolic, in my use of this term, I will emphasize the exclusion of woman and her objectification by way of her becoming a mirror for masculine subjectivity. In this essay, I will make a case for employing French feminist approaches in seeing Pound's gender matters. I will find a blurring of normative heterosexuality in Pound's poetic writings by analyzing his appropriation and deployment of the fluidities--his experiments with gender in his use of personae--in his early poems.
Personae as Pound's Appropriation of the Feminine
As Eli Goldblatt points out, "men can be 'penned in' by the 'male defined masks and costumes' with which women have long contended" (38). Quoting Rachel Blau Duplessis's remark on "strong male bonding relations," in Pound, Goldblatt explains in detail George and Mary Oppen's meeting with him: "When they met Pound in Rapallo in 1930, the Oppens were 'bothered' by the way Pound seemed interested only in talking to George, and so together they resisted Pound as a 'father'" (52-53). Duplessis says further: "There were two of us [the Oppens], and in Pound there is no feminine" (53). Avoiding a psychoanalytic reading of Pound's gender dynamics, Goldblatt suggests "a cultural investigation" (35). Although Goldblatt's scheme is limited, some of his observations are useful. First, Goldblatt notes that "[p]erhaps there was a feminine in Ezra Pound that even his close associates could not see"; moreover, for Goldblatt, the Eleusinian Mysteries function as the yin to the Confucian yang, and these mysteries (7) "represent a female element in the Cantos and as such form the center of Pound's Muse worship as well as his misogyny" (53). (8)
Whereas Goldblatt suggests gender as "a cultural conception that Pound explored with ferocious care," Paul Smith offers a broader range of psychoanalytic readings of Pound in gender issues, not restricted to "gender as a theme to be found in a particular canon" (35). (9) Seeing Pound's poetics as totalitarian, Smith argues that "the radical heterogeneity that the crossing of the symbolic with the semiotic entails"--Joyce's practice of what Kristeva terms significance(96)--is opposed to signification, "the simple (Poundian) fixity of position that the bonding of signifier and signified entails." (10) Presenting Joyce as opposed to the Poundian practice, signification, Smith argues that Joyce "is more concerned with the disrupting of that coincidence within the actual process, the theatre perhaps, of language" and is "for process against fixity, for language against sight" (96-97).
Certainly, Smith is quite correct that later Pound was the ardent pursuer of the bonding of signifier and signified. Yet, as he points out, Pound began his career with the impassioned concern for poetry "as an art of verbal music" a la Swinburne (7). In Smith's introduction of the early Pound, young Pound was interested in the autonomy, primacy, and reflexive quality of poetic language under the influence of the Decadents. Thus, the early Pound's concern for poetry as "an art of verbal music," as Smith properly defines, can be seen as originating the soft or feminine in Pound, and Pound's transition from soft to hard (11) is, in other words, "the move from the melopoeia of the early poems" to "the issuing of priestly directives in the later work"; "Pound acts as the paternal Moses-figure, a law-giver who is...
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