Critical Blog of Andrea Powell Wolfe’s journal article: Chasing the “Coloured Phantom”: Gender Performance as Revealing and Concealing Modernist Ideology in Millay’s Sonnets”
Andrea Powell Wolfe, in her journal article “Chasing the Coloured Phantom…”, critically examines Enda St. Vincent Millay’s public persona and how she personifies many of modernist ideologies through her love sonnets —in particular, “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”.
Millay was undeniably aware —she deliberately and carefully constructed her persona as a challenge against the sexual politics of her time. Millay was the epitome of femininity, intelligence, and sexuality of New Womanhood. In her public appearances she presented herself as an excessively feminine and highly sexualized being, in fact, she insisted on only wearing long flowing dresses, which in her own words were, “more like negligee than dresses” (155). The effect of her intentional cultivation of feminine sensuality along with the context of her poetry “indicated that she understood her femininity in terms of a type of sexual subjectivity traditionally only available to men” (155)—Millay lived on her own terms, disregarded assumed gender roles, and flaunted her unrestricted sexual freedom in the public eye.
This woman was the embodiment of the unconventional psychosexual dynamics of Free Love—a delicate balance between male prerogative and conventional femininity—explicitly expressed by the interpersonal content of her poetry. Unlike other modernist poets of time, like Pound and Eliot, stressing depersonalization in poetry, Millay most often wrote in the first person, stamping her poetry with her personality—in this way “Millay [did] not acknowledge the separation of life from art” (156).
A living image of bohemian ideology, I cannot help but feel deeply connected and mesmerized by her and the other women poets emerging in the 1920’s—unapologetic, witty, beautiful, and bold. What sets Millay apart from other female poets like Loy and Stein is her duality manifested in her love sonnets. Undoubtedly, her use of traditional sonnet forms was yet another mechanism deliberately chosen to challenge gender roles. She exploits the traditional to produce her own particular unconventional ideology, simultaneously managing to embody the modernist image of the disconnected, isolated human being.
In “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” I felt power beneath Millay’s words—as a woman claiming her sexuality, expressing her desire for freedom, and blatantly rejecting the notion that she needs anything other than sexual satisfaction from her lover. However, Wolfe argues that “beneath the flippant tone [of her love sonnets] lies discernible elements of loneliness and yearning for that which the speakers cannot achieve—a meaningful human relationship” (156). Maybe. It isn’t clear whether or not these are Millay’s hidden feelings or if maybe Wolfe is projecting her own feelings from a sense of detachment between people who only “share sexual, and thus, bodily experiences” (156). According to Wolfe, the irony of Millay’s sonnets “is that while they perform a celebration of free love, bold sexuality, and female desire, they reveal female speakers who long for more than just sexual contact” (156). Maybe, maybe not. The impression I got from “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”—was a speaker performing on several levels. On the one hand she portrays a sexually and emotionally free female, disconnected from her lover on any level other than purely sexual; yet, one the other hand I also sensed slight vulnerability underneath her aggressive tone. However, one can view this self-imposed detachment in two ways. One would be as a way to subdue the complexities of love; thus, by “disconnecting” emotional attachment and sexual satisfaction she maintains an image of New Womanhood in controlling the natural human impulse to seek a deeper, more meaningful relation of interpersonal sentiment and mutual dependency. It could either be a woman at odds with her subjectivity and outward self-projection as a necessary means for self-protection or, on the other hand, Millay may be genuinely capable of absolute unrestricted sexual freedom void of any unsatisfied longing for a deeper emotional connection. Personally, I felt a little of both—probably because I am a little of both—not fully capable of unrestricted sexual, yet closed off from sentimentality. Maybe my own particular blend of scorn and pity has created an indifference to the entire notion. Whatever the case, the last stanza continues to resonate something deep within me:
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, –let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Wolfe, Andrea Powell. “Chasing the ‘Coloured Phantom’: Gender Performance as Revealing and Concealing Modernist Ideology in Millay’s Sonnets.” Journal of American Culture 32.2 (2009): 155-164. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.