Un-Ideal Husband
Wooing Woefully in the June 2015 Poetry.
For as long as marital misfortunes have cursed couples, they’ve sparked poems. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath draws on a wealth of experience to speak “of wo that is in mariage”: “sith I twelve yeer was of age,” she explains, “housbondes at chirche dore I have had five.” Chaucer’s general idea (and specific language) inspired Robert Lowell centuries later. In his poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” a wife laments: “Gored by the climacteric of his want, / he stalls above me like an elephant.”
Continuing this grim tradition, woeful wooers populate the June 2015 Poetry. Victoria Chang’s “Mr. Darcy” revises the fairy-tale ending of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, wherein protagonist Elizabeth Bennett finds not only true love, but also a fortune—all care of the handsome Mr. Darcy. What if, Chang suggests, Lizzy were simply out for Darcy’s dough?
In the end she just wanted the house
and a horse not much more what
if he didn’t own the house or worse
not even a horse how do we
separate the things from a man the man from
the things….
With a perfectly placed stanza break, Chang marks a separation between “we” and “separate,” just one moment when the form of “Mr. Darcy” becomes inseparable from its content. Separation—and its opposite, conflation—are key to this poem, which features sets of words just barely distinguishable from one another. “House” chimes with “horse” and “worse”; “rein” turns into “rain” and “prince” into “prints.” Usages, too, slip and slide, so that words constantly overspill their definitions and contexts: a mention of a man “running away” yields to an image of “running” water. After alluding to Cinderella’s windows, the speaker says that she went window-shopping, but to no avail: she didn’t want to buy a window. Her meaning then skids further—she appears to be shopping for men. Which, naturally, raises a question:
when
do you know it’s time to get a new
man one who can win more things at the
fair
She’s out for the latest model of man—one whose sole distinction is the ability to “win” (note the echoes with “window” and “when”) more things, whatever those things may be.
Throughout “Mr. Darcy,” a lack of punctuation permits the conflation of whole thoughts. Here, the resulting ambiguity lets two different meanings develop at once:
when I wave to a man I
love what happens when another man with
a lot more bags waves back
What is Chang saying here? One possibility is: “when I wave to a man I love, what happens when another man with a lot more bags waves back?”; the other, “when I wave to a man, I love what happens when another man with a lot more bags waves back.” The first sentence questions materialism and the second takes it for granted; without punctuation—in poetry, an essential agent of “separation”—there’s no way to know which meaning Chang intends. Turning superficial, the sentence implies, is as easy as a grammatical slip.
Chang isn’t the only Poetry contributor revising old romantic tropes. In Danniel Schoonebeek’s fantastical and ill-fated “republic of husbands,” one woman is “the wife of every man in / the village.” In traditional narratives, by contrast, women who avail themselves of many men render themselves unmarriageable (see the doomed “wide-legged girl” in Monica Youn’s poem). “The Dancing Plague” also tweaks the very concept of romantic love, which relies on singularity, on a unique bond: instead, multiple husbands love one woman, and they express that love in tandem. The bullhorn of an invading army of “hostiles” “had a strange effect on the husbands,” Schoonebeek writes; they each “began daydreaming of his wife.” One thinks:
“Quitting time is worthless to me
so long as the work I do in the gasworks makes me think of my wife’s jawbone.”
And all together the husbands said: “The jawbones of my wife,
they beat both the same, like when I watch a train leave the kingdom,
and all I can see is the pistons beating away in the smoke.”
And when the hostiles entered the gasworks the husbands were dancing.
When the husbands speak of their wife together, all uttering the same words, their jawbones all “beat…the same,” just like their wife’s. The men then dance, feet beating the floor. This image—of two opposing instruments making repeated, symmetrical movements—resounds throughout the poem. When the “hostiles” at last find the woman, their war clubs
had a strange effect on the wife,
who began daydreaming about a man who wasn’t her husband.
She thought of cutting his hair in a sunflower patch in the village.
The time should be dusk, she thought, and the shears,
they should flash once in her hands like a scythe.
She thought there should be two swarms of no-see-ums,
one smoldering around each of her hands.
In this scene of hair-cutting—an allusion to a Biblical moment of female power, Samson’s salon treatment at Delilah’s hands—the shears’ blades, visual echoes of jawbones and pistons, prepare us for still another symmetrical image, “two swarms of no-see-ums” surrounding each hand. (The scene also lends significance to the piston imagery: perhaps the men thought of a departing train because they sensed their wife was, in a sense, leaving their company by dreaming of yet another partner—or because a woman with so many partners is always leaving one for another, whether literally or metaphorically.)
What might these many two-sided images suggest? Do they represent coupling? Or do they hint at the double-sidedness of the poem’s action, the tendency of each plot element to repeat? The bullhorn of the hostiles has a “strange effect on the husbands,” and the war clubs have a “strange effect on the wife”; the husbands daydream, and the wife daydreams; the husbands dance, and the hostiles dance; everyone—alas!—dies. Poetry’s fairy tales, whether revised or new, offer no easy outs for lovers.