“Dress Up! Dress Up and Dance at Carnival!”

Abstract

The body in many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems remains tantalizingly elusive, an elusiveness that proves both seductive and frustrating. In her work, the body emerges as ambiguous and problematic as it slips between metaphoric and metonymie representations often occupying liminal spaces.¹ Within an ontological and epistemological matrix, Bishop’s poetics of the body explores the intersection of gender, sex, and sexuality with ways of knowing and being. Whether explicitly or implicitly, Bishop posits the body as the “thing” that can bolster or fell the subject, subjectivity, and our understanding of both, and in so doing, she also challenges disciplining structures. Paradoxically, with Bishop, the poems that most strongly suggest body often lack direct and material description of that body. Instead, these poems depict the body through its overdetermination (“In the Waiting Room”), the distorting reflection of a mirror (“The Gentleman of Shalott”), a description of a bodily process (“O Breath”), a blurring of gender lines (“Exchanging Hats”), or the abject body of a dog (“Pink Dog”).