Abstract
This chapter looks at modes of triangulation that are explicitly social and cultural. Both Meadowlands and The Beauty of the Husband include the perspectives of third parties who have a stake in the marriage: both are also full of “canonical” touchstones and reference-points. Glück’s sequence includes a series of “parables,” and invokes the paradigmatic marriage of Penelope and Odysseus. Carson’s narrator-wife is a classical scholar whose extra-diegetic commentary is excessive, pushing triangulation toward parody.
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, ll. 646–649
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Notes
- 1.
“Moore’s quotation of Bacon, so aptly placed for rendering the symbol of love into an image of social greed … applies as much to a style of writing and speaking as it does to the life style of prospective husbands and wives,” suggests Hadas (1977).
- 2.
The word nostalgia, meaning “longing for home,” is of seventeenth-century coinage: nostos, Greek for “homecoming,” is closely associated with Odysseus’s ten-year journey back from the siege of Troy.
- 3.
In the Odyssey, it is of course literally the case that “no child on that island had / a different story”: their fathers all went with Odysseus to fight the Trojan War, and shared his nostos with him.
- 4.
The husband’s voice, whenever it figures in the sequence, is in dialogue with his wife’s; in the three “Circe” monologues and in “Siren” his mistresses address him directly.
- 5.
In Chap. 2 this insight is Carol Bernstein’s, à propos Meredith’s admixture of first- and third-person voicing in “Modern Love.”
- 6.
In some religious traditions, this is formalized by a husband’s prerogative to divorce his wife simply by saying, “I divorce you” three times in front of witnesses.
- 7.
In tango XXV Ray sings a line from a tango song and remarks to the husband that tango frees you up sexually, as well as being good for the digestion. In this way he becomes aligned with the author of the sequence, since it is she who has decided to call its constituent poems “tangos.”
- 8.
In canto XXIII Ray tells the wife as he is getting off work that she can walk him home because he doesn’t have any other plans: “No date no wait no fate to contemplate” (BH, 105).
- 9.
This phrase is cited from the back cover of The Beauty of the Husband, where we are informed that “A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.”
- 10.
Tango I, where Carson compares the word marriage to a wound that “gives off its own light,” cites Marcel Duchamp’s teasingly opaque description of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” as a “delay in glass” and then asks, on her fair reader’s behalf, “What is being delayed?” Her answer, “Marriage I guess,” suggests that she is citing Duchamp as a delaying tactic in light of her own woundedness.
References
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Erickson, Darlene Williams. 1992. On ‘Marriage’. In M[odern] A[merican] P[oetry] S[ite], ed. Cary Nelson and Bartholomew Brinkman. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/marriage.htm. Orig. pub. in Illusion is more precise than precision: The poetry of Marianne Moore. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Glück, Louise. 1996. Meadowlands. New York: HarperCollins. Ecco paperback edition pub. 1997.
Hadas, Pamela White. 1977. Marianne Moore: Poet of affection. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Excerpted on MAPS, ed. Nelson and Brinkman. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/hadas.htm.
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Hedley, J. (2018). Telemachus’ Burden. In: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_8
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