엘리자베스 비숍의 연가—성적 정체성 감추기와 드러내기

Abstract

Based on a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s love poems, which have been relatively neglected in the Bishop research, this paper examines how she reveals her private feelings for her lover(s), and at the same time how she conceals her desire. Bishop has often been recognized as a poet with a restrained tone, a keen eye, and modest attitudes toward the objects of her observation. Moreover, her shyness and reticence seem to keep her privacy and sexuality in the closet. This study, however, attempts to explore her desire for revealing her intimacy, espe- cially her sexual identity, and her anxiety about openly dealing with it. The poet’s ambivalence about expressing her sexual and personal identity imparts her seemingly cool and calm poetry with ambiguity, complexity, and contradic- tions. In reviewing Bishop’s published and posthumous works— “Insomnia,” “The Shampoo,” “Crusoe in England,” “It is marvelous to wake up together,” “Breakfast Song,” and “Vague Poem,” this study not only delves into the poet’s deep emotions, but also discusses what codes, modes, and techniques Bishop employs to remain elusive about her private life and sexuality. In the course of analyzing some love poems published before her death and after her death, this research will ascertain the differing degrees of openness in the poet’s private feelings toward her lover. Even her posthumous works, which raise controversy among Bishop scholars regarding her likely opinions about publication of her unpublished/uncollected materials, do not deal with her privacy or sexuality without subtle devices of self-protection or rhetorical complexity. Therefore, readers will exercise their own special hermeneutics to search for covert and implied meanings in her ambiguous works, and will be more intrigued by a fragmentary phase of the poet’s life obliquely reflected in her love poems.