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Ideas too big for a little woman: why Alcott’s representation of acceptable femininity is a betrayal of independent women.

Don’t you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties which make leisure sweet when it comes, to bear and forebear, that home may be comfortable and lovely?…Work is wholesome…good for the health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence’,1
says Marmee, which characterises the moralistic tone of Alcott’s novel. She preaches the need for the girls to be able to provide a haven for their future families, to become ‘angels of the hearth’ and necessarily enclose themselves in the domestic sphere. This is a very narrow view of what constitutes ‘power and independence’, particularly when one considers Alcott’s own life and the independence that she had as a single, self-sufficient woman. I read this view of a contented repression as a betrayal of Alcott’s own ideals, and I shall explore how and why this is the case in this essay.

The repressed and repressive view of what constitutes acceptable femininity that Marmee espouses and epitomises is generally presented in the novel as the ‘right’ way to be, despite the fact that married contentment couldn’t be further from Alcott’s own experiences: ‘Alcott herself remained vigilantly single her entire life.’2 While ‘vigilantly’ might be stretching the point, it is true that Alcott herself never subscribed to the expected conventions of marriage and family, which is why one might expect her to allow her characters the same freedom. Meg’s desire to move into her own domestic sphere, exemplified by her ‘castle in the air’3 is largely influenced by the girls’ idealisation of their mother and the domesticated femininity that she represents. ‘Marmee’ is what ‘keep[s] the home pleasant and the domestic machinery running smoothly’4, and she leads by example, teaching and preaching a restricted view of femininity that generally points towards marriage, because ‘to be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing that can happen to a woman’5. She goes on to say ‘better old maids than…unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands’6, which, far from suggesting that marriage is not essential, reinforces my point – Marmee would rather her daughters missed out on the ‘best and sweetest thing that can happen to a woman’ than degrade themselves or act in an ‘unfeminine’ way.

It has been suggested that Beth is the personification of Marmee’s old-fashioned way of femininity, that Alcott is suggesting that it cannot survive the social upheaval and family fragmentation of this time, and therefore has to sicken and eventually die (as Beth does in Good Wives) in order to make way for a metaphorical ‘new way’, represented by the vibrant, unconventional Jo. This view rests on the claim that Jo’s unconventionality is presented as a good thing in the text and is being used by Alcott to teach her young readership a new way to ‘be’ in an age of alienation and hard work. While it is possible to construct such an argument, I find it essentially flawed because Alcott presents Jo as at her most contented within her self and most praised by those around her when she is at her most submissive, peaceable and selfless – i.e. when she is most like Beth. Meg praises Jo for keeping her temper, (‘I am so glad, Jo,’7) and Jo herself says that ‘to be independent and to earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart’8. Alcott says that
There are many Beth’s in this world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no-one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.9
This suggests that the Beths of the world make it a better place and provide solace and sweetness for those around them, which is why I disagree with the view that the old feminine ways are dead or dying and the idea that Jo’s wild ways are better. This is also why the fact that although Jo wishes to be independent this does not undermine her desire to earn praise by being acceptably feminine, because ‘by some strange attraction of opposites’10 she is closet to Beth of all her sisters and therefore is most influenced and guided by her.

There are moments where the problems with the ‘angel of the hearth’ philosophy that Marmee and Beth epitomise are shown, and many critics have commented on these as examples of Alcott’s undermining of this kind of submissive femininity. The most seized upon moment is Marmee’s confession to Jo that ‘I am angry nearly every day of my life’11. This is used as proof that Marmee is unhappy within this ‘repressive domesticity’12, that Alcott is therefore against this repression, and that through Jo she is arguing that a new kind of femininity is emerging and should be encouraged. However, this one moment is not enough to overturn the narrative view of the rest of the novel where Marmee is happy apart from not having her husband by her side, and domestic contentment is a shared goal.

Furthermore, I would argue that the scene between Jo and her mother actually disrupts the idea that Jo represents a new way of being a woman in the world. Some critics have suggested that Alcott criticises Marmee for being submissive while praising Jo for being tomboyish (and by extension, masculine and independent). I disagree with this reading of Jo because she is condemned by other characters in the book innumerable times for being ‘boyish’ or ‘manly’ -‘I detest rude, unladylike girls…don’t Jo, it’s so boyish!’13 Her ‘gentlemanly manner’14 is accepted (although not acceptable) while her father is away, so long as the ‘manly’ things she does are for the good of the family – for example taking on the more physically demanding household tasks or earning a living. While she is presented as the ‘black sheep’15 of the family for being such a tomboy, it is worth noting that ‘Jo’s pilgrimage of moral development takes place almost wholly in interior spaces – both literal and symbolic’16 which, I think, illustrates that even if one was inclined to read the text as encouraging young women to develop outside of their pre-assigned gender and societal roles, this view cannot be sustained because even in Alcott’s most wayward character this development remains within the confines of her family. The thrust of the book follows Jo’s emotional journey as she learns how to control her ‘quick temper, sharp tongue and restless spirit’17 and learn ‘not only the bitterness of remorse and despair, but also the sweetness of self-denial and self-control’18. This last sentence undermines the idea that Marmee is an example of frustrated womanhood, because it is she who preaches the ‘sweetness’ of such subjugation. It also worth briefly noting that in order to please her mother and to believe that she is serving God, Jo must overcome her ‘restless spirit’, which implies that she must settle down -within the constraints of ‘Bunyanesque self-denial’19 and acceptable femininity.

The way in which Alcott shows Jo growing up and into her predefined gender role is what makes me believe that Alcott betrayed her own opinions in writing Little Women. It is easy to assume that Alcott wrote Little Women to please an assumed audience of young girls, and therefore wrote the book more from economic necessity than a desire write a moralised bildungsroman. But, an ‘experience as a female domestic [servant] taught Alcott a lesson in the inequity among male and female roles and unfair treatment of the nineteenth century women under the patriarchal society,’ and instilled an ‘unending rage against the cultural limitations imposed on female development’20, which means that her seeming encouragement to women to accept domestic roles and the intrinsic inequality therein is particularly odd. One can imagine a single woman perhaps idealising marriage and the domestic sphere as a romantic contrast to the necessity for her to support herself, but Alcott’s choice of spinsterhood and ‘ambivalence about the cult of feminine altruism and its domestic context’21 argues against such idealisation on her part. She also wrote sensationalist fiction under several pseudonyms,22 which earned her far more money and sold better than the ‘moral pap’23 that she called Little Women. Moreover, Alcott’s sensationalist fiction ‘examine[s] the darker side of human nature and criticize[s] [sic] the Victorian ideal of femininity as unrealistic and false. Her subversive sensational stories…defied nineteenth-century values of womanhood’24, which further shows that she did not believe what she preaches in Little Women. Strickland argues that ‘by writing and reading thrillers, women could pretend to be the femme fatale; a woman that owns herself and her sexuality. She [Alcott] uses her power for her own gain and to undermine the patriarchy’25 of society, which does not sound like the author of Little Women, a novel that perpetuates patriarchy and female submissiveness.

There is little suggestion in the novel that Jo should persevere in her ‘manly ways’, either from society, from herself, or from the authorial voice: even when we might expect Alcott to intervene in the story and take Jo’s part she does not. The narrative voice frequently interjects with opinions and comments,26 and Alcott cannot break the narrative up in this way without realising that her readers are going to assume that she is present in her novel, and therefore to feel that her moralising and encouragement towards marriage is a form of betrayal. This idea of betrayal is particularly noteworthy in Jo’s ambitions to write because this is where Jo’s story most closely parallels Alcott’s own experiences27, and yet the authorial voice is quite patronising and dismissive of Jo’s writing, calling her book ‘only half a dozen little fairy tales’28, which immediately diminishes them and their importance. Moreover, Jo’s eventual ‘financial independence [in Good Wives] is domesticated, her stories transformed into payments for the butcher, a new carpet, groceries, and gowns’29, which reiterates that a woman earning her own money is only acceptable if it is used to further the creation of an idealised and romanticised domestic space, a haven for the hard-working men. Alcott herself
carefully constructed her role as a writer born out of economic necessity, portraying herself as the perfect Victorian woman, who sacrifices her own needs for those of her family. Thus, she negotiates the autonomous and self-fulfilling act of writing as merely work to support herself and her family, simultaneously denying her ego and selfhood30.
She then constructs exactly the same role for Jo; Jo writes partly for her own pleasure, but this is mostly ignored and her writing is presented as an economic necessity; ‘in time I may be able to support myself and help the girls’31. This highlights the clear parallel between Alcott and Jo, and makes it all the more surprising that Alcott does not allow Jo the freedoms that she enjoyed.

Alcott does not present the girls as perfect; but in their receptivity to Marmee’s domesticity and their willingness to ‘conquer themselves’32 they represent a form of the ideal woman – one who is aware of her own failings and attempts to rectify them with the help of parent, God and, eventually, husband, as Marmee does. Marmee’s own failings are an interesting example of patriarchy at work in the novel, she is aware of her temper and it is through Marmee’s awareness of ‘how much I owe him’33 (Mr. March) that she attempts to conquer her anger and ‘is ashamed to do otherwise before him’34. It has been argued that Mr. March’s absence is what leaves Jo free to become ‘the man of the family’35, but as Murphy argues, his physical absence from the text does not stop him being the ‘primary agent of trivialization [sic]’36 – it is he who uses the phrase ‘little women’37 which both exemplifies Victorian ideals of childhood (where children are just miniature adults) and belittles their efforts to be ‘grown-up’ women. Jo, originally at least, does not want to be a woman, little or otherwise, and her repeated expression that she ‘can’t get over [her] disappointment in not being a boy’38, is another point of contention with the presentation of domestic bliss as ‘the best and sweetest thing’39 that a woman could and should wish for. In fact, Jo regularly takes part in ‘boyish’ activities through her friendship with Laurie, she baldly states ‘I am not a young lady’40 and engages in acts of transvestism which are a far cry from the femininity urged by her mother and sisters.

This has lead some critics to argue that Jo is gay, a reading I find slightly ridiculous in the context of the time the novel was written and published. Quimby argues that the
cross-gender identification with a brother or male peer…explores a range of male-identified behaviors [sic] that generally direct [Jo’s] plot away from the expected trajectory of the girlhood narrative… Jo’s refusal of normative girlhood identifications and desires…she wants to be the man of the family, not the little woman; she wants to be a soldier, not a seamstress; and she wants to be like Laurie, not have him41.
However, the assumption that Jo’s wanting to be like Laurie rather than wanting him in a heterosexual sense is as neat an opposite as soldier/seamstress or man/woman is absurd. Firstly, Laurie’s relationship with all the girls is platonic, not just his relationship with Jo and all the girls specifically think they are too young for romantic involvement regardless of their personal desires, and secondly the above idea only holds water if one agrees that Jo does move away from the ‘expected trajectory of…girlhood’, and I would argue strongly that she does not. Jo may be a ‘wild girl’42, but she is a girl nonetheless, and one who ultimately does conform to gender expectations; ‘I’ll be as prim as I can and not get into any scrapes’43. Her tomboyish-ness and her wish to ‘marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family’44 stem more from a desire to keep her already fragmented family together than any potential lesbian leanings. Jo’s transvestism would be remarkable, especially given that she sells her hair45, if it were not for ‘The Pickwick Portfolio’46 where all of the girls adopt masculine personae. Their willing transvestism for the purposes of fiction places it firmly in the realm of play and make-believe; there is little seriousness behind it, which negates the idea that Jo actually wants to be a man, despite her fierce protectiveness of her sisters.

In fact, the women in the play are defined through their relationships with men rather than each other, which underlines the inescapable patriarchy of the novel, despite it having a female author. Jo is defined through her relationship with Laurie, Marmee through her relationship with her absent husband, and Meg through her blossoming relationship with Mr. Brooke. Marmee’s complaints stem from having given up her husband to her country47 and therefore having to ‘to keep his little daughters safe and good for him’48, the implication being that everything she does with and for the girls is actually for her husband. Jo’s relationship with Laurie not only encourages her tomboyish ways, but brings out her most feminine side: Jo’s statement that ‘he’ll…keep us from being sentimental…we can do so little for him, and he does so much for us’49, almost exactly echoes Marmee’s wish to please Mr. March, and hints at a heterosexual desire in Jo to please Laurie because he is a man. Furthermore, even in her writing, where she is sometimes at her most independent, Jo models herself on Laurie, ‘his contributions [to The Pickwick Portfolio] were excellent, being patriotic, classical, comical or dramatic, but never sentimental. Jo regarded them as worthy of Bacon, Milton or Shakespeare, and remodelled her own works with good effect, she thought’.50 Alcott’s snide addition of ‘she thought’ implies that not only does Jo have a skewed view of what is great writing (it seems unlikely that Laurie’s talents really match Shakespeare’s!) but that her efforts to rewrite her own work in a more masculine way are bound to fail.

This implicit failure, and the fact that even Jo’s published writing is unpaid undermines the one thing that might have made Jo independent or a role-model for young women who want to escape their pre-defined gender roles. Alcott does this throughout the novel and not only does she not undermine a limited view of domestic femininity, but at some points she actively encourages it. For this reason, I find Little Women as a novel to be a betrayal of Alcott’s own views and, without being melodramatic, almost a negation of her own freedoms.

Works Cited:

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, Penguin Popular Classics, London, 1994.

Arac, Jonathan: The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2005.

Foote, Stephanie: Resentful Little Women: Gender and Class Feeling in
Louisa May Alcott, College Literature, 32.1, 2005, pp.63-85. Viewed online at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college _literature/v032/32.1foote.html, 17/11/07.

Murphy, Ann B: The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in
“Little Women”, in Signs, Vol.15, no.3, The Ideology of Mothering: Disruption and Reproduction of Patriarchy, University of Chicago Press, Spring 1990, pp.562-585. Viewed online at: http://links.jstor.org/sici? sici= 0097-9740%28199021%2915%3 A3%3C562%3ATBOE EA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 18/11/07.

Quimby, Karin: The Story of Jo: Literary Tomboys, Little Women and the
Sexual-Textual Politics of Narrative Desire, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10.1 (2003) pp.1-22. Viewed online at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and _gay_ studies/v010/10.1quimby.html, 17/11/07

Strickland, Margaret: Like a Wild Creature in its Cage, Paced That Handsome
Woman’: the Struggle Between Sentiment and Sensation in the Writings of Louisa May Alcott, Domestic Goddesses. Ed. Kim Wells, 1999. Viewed online at: http://www.womenwriters.net/domestic goddess/strickland .htm, 20/11/07.

This essay is concerned with the verbal subjugation of women in Othello and Hamlet, and seeks to justify that Desdemona and Ophelia should be given a chance to speak – hence the soliloquies that are filed under ‘fiction’. However, in keeping with their domination by men in the plays, these soliloquies have to take place in an after-life space, where they have knowledge of their own stories and are allowed to finally speak without fear of the repercussions – the worst has happened and they are dead so there is nothing more to fear. The three main areas I will address are: firstly, the fact that sound and sight are closely linked to falling in love in these two plays, but that there is sometimes a gender divide between whether sight or sound is the more attractive sense. Secondly, the fact that Desdemona and Ophelia do not know a lot of their own story during their lives in the play impacts on their speech, and this lack of knowledge often prevents them from speaking at all. In my soliloquies I have assumed that they know full possession of the facts, and so have addressed this lack of knowledge in Ophelia and Desdemona’s new speeches rather than in this essay. Thirdly, while the importance of repressive cultural and religious norms cannot – and will not! – be ignored, I will argue that the silencing of these women has a lot to with their specific physical beauty, causing them to be objectified. In the introduction to her book Daughters Wives & Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640, Joan Larsen Klein asserts that ‘woman’s voice was usually confined to home, family and neighbours’1, and it is for this reason that I felt the need to give Desdemona and Ophelia a voice outside of this domestic sphere. Desdemona does not fit neatly into these domestic ideals of ‘subjection, obedience, silence, chastity’2, because she is part of ‘a soldier’s life’3 and therefore cannot conform to normal ideals of domesticity and maternity because she is living outside of them. In contrast, Ophelia is living under the patriarchal thumb of her father and the king, and to some extent Hamlet, so she has no space to form an identity of her own and has opinions imposed upon her. She conforms totally to ‘subjection, obedience, silence, chastity’, and therefore deserves time and space to speak her own mind without fear of the consequences. Women in Shakespeare’s time could not ‘speak their mind fully and openly in ordinary conversation’4 and so need a soliloquy to be able to speak freely.

Sound and sight in Othello and Hamlet are significant because there is often a gender split in how people’s senses cause them to fall in love. Broadly speaking, Desdemona and Ophelia are wooed with ‘words of so sweet breath composed’5 – sound not sight – whereas Hamlet and Othello fall in love with ‘the power of beauty’6 the visual rather than aural beauties that the women possess. This fascinates me because the women do not get much chance to speak in the play whereas the men clearly do. Silence was directly equated with virtue and chastity in Shakespeare’s time, ‘an open mouth and immodest speech [were] tantamount to open genitals and immodest acts’7, which shows that a talkative woman was perceived to be adulterous. Furthermore, ‘disallowed speech… is a sign of sexual transgression’8 so speaking without permission or directly contravening a husband’s or father’s order to remain silent advertised a supposed sexual transgression to the wider world. It is worth noting then, that despite Ophelia being accused of ‘wantonness’9 and Desdemona being directly called a ‘whore’10, neither woman is especially talkative. Although both written and spoken words are important in both plays, the fact that women are attracted to the ‘saying deed’11, whereas men are attracted to ‘the beautified’12 highlights the different ideals that cause problems in these relationships.

Desdemona does not speak a great deal onstage and yet Othello calls her ‘free of speech’13, and Ophelia who is silent for much of the play is warned against being ‘most free and bounteous’14. This imagery of freedom as a negative thing for women is continued for much of the two plays. Polonius says he will ‘loose my daughter’15, which suggests that Ophelia is a literal prisoner of her father’s whim; not only must she obey his command and act as bait in Polonius’s investigation into Hamlet’s madness, but she physically cannot go somewhere he does not want her to. She is more like a caged pet or hunting dog pursuing prey for a master than a woman with her own mind. Desdemona however is called ‘free of speech’ in a list of her good qualities, suggesting that Othello himself does not mind her being talkative – provided it stays within the realms of courtesy. While Othello is aware that his stories won Desdemona’s love, he also asserts that ‘she had eyes and chose me’16 which illustrates the importance that men place on the visual. Desdemona herself says that she ‘saw Othello’s visage in his mind’17 and that she loved his speech not his looks.

However, there is a serious suggestion in Othello that Desdemona’s ‘nature [errs] from itself’18, because, as John Swan wrote in Speculum Mundi in 1635,‘I know not which lead more unnatural lives, obeying husbands, or commanding wives’19. Desdemona is referred to as ‘our great captain’s captain20’, suggesting that she rules Othello, but more than that, that as a soldier he obeys her (as a ‘superior office’) without question or complaint, or even much thought. This would have been viewed as dangerous because women were seen as ‘the pathetic obverse of the male‘21 and as ‘inferior or lesser or incomplete man’22 and the implication then is that women should recognise their natural subordination to men. Although Desdemona does not speak a great deal, what she does say causes trouble: by being ‘half the wooer’23 and dropping hints she gets what she wants – Othello – which leads to her own destruction. To my mind, it is doubtful wherther Othello would have dared propse to Desdemona without such keen encouragement from her, and consequently her words are vital to the play. However, it is worth pointing out that it is her father, Brabantio, who accuses her of being ‘half the wooer’ and all of her ‘hints’ are only reported to the audience, by men. Desdemona herself only speaks in her own defence at the her father’s command.

Margaret Cavendish says that ‘we oftener enslave men than men enslave us. They seem to govern the world, but we really govern the world, in that we govern men’24. Iago says that Othello’s ‘soul is so enfettered to her love that she may make, unmake, do what she list, even as her appetite shall play the god with his weak function’25 and Othello says of Desdemona that she ‘might lie by an emperor’s side and command him tasks’26, which again highlights the danger of her feminine wiles making Othello love her when she should be guided and lead by him; ‘a good wife is the crown of her husband’27. Her ‘appetite’ suggests that she is fickle and easily moved, and his ‘weak function’ is a feminine trait and makes him seem less of a man (to a Shakespearian audience) – certainly less fit to command an army, and it casts aspersions on his manhood and ability to perform sexually. However, religious teachings of the time say that ‘whatsoever they say of the imprudence of women, if men would take sometimes advice of those whom God hath given them for helps in the government of their affairs, happily it had succeeded better with them’28, which suggests that Desdemona being ‘captain’29 of Othello should not necessarily be seen as such a bad thing. Many of the books written for women around this time time offered contradictory advice, which means that women were expected to be guided by their husbands and play things by ear, as it were, not learn them by rote.

The use of mirror imagery was a common trope in Renaissance writing for women: ‘the link between women and the mirror is… ancient commonplace’30. The woman should be a mirror wherein her husband can see reflected her grace and humility – and he will consequently love her and not be physically violent. Many ‘handbooks’ on marriage and maidenly life suggest reflecting your own goodness is the best way to cause your husband/brother etc to be good. However, in Hamlet and Othello this idea gets subverted. Ophelia cannot help but mirror Hamlet and follow him into madness, because she is so suppressed by patriarchal norms. She is so used to asking men what she should think and how she should act that she copies like a child – indeed Polonius tells her at one point ‘think yourself a baby’31. While I do not think that Ophelia’s madness is a direct result of Hamlet’s madness, I strongly believe that Ophelia is impressionable and biddable, and that Hamlet’s madness opens up madness as a possible route for her to escape down, something that she would perhaps not have fallen prey to without Hamlet. She is prevented from any kind of will of her own, and so becomes a mirror to those around her: she reflects the advice and views of her father and brother in rejecting Hamlet’s letters and presence, and eventually the madness of Hamlet effects her too, rather than her good qualities reflecting onto the men. Desdemona however, perhaps feels that as Othello’s mirror she cannot simply be submissive and gentle because Othello has to command an army. Desdemona therefore has to be cunning and strong, a tactician and solider, a ‘fair warrior’32 rather than ‘gentle’ in order to best serve her husband.

Stimpson notes that ‘women [are] objects of male desire and dependent on that desire for their status, livelihood, even their lives’33 which shows that women had to pander to male desire for self-preservation. Desdemona is at first reliant on her father for her status and livelihood, when she defects to Othello she has status as the general’s wife and the livelihood that goes with that, but, ultimately, Othello can and does take her life when he believes she has transgressed. Ophelia, too, is entirely reliant on her father and brother for protection, and when she tries to move away from them and believe that Hamlet loves her she is held back by her male relatives “for her own good”, and is driven mad and to ‘wilfully seek her own salvation’34. Perhaps the problem being portrayed here is that while it is fine for men to be ruled by women in small and insignificant matters in their private lives (‘ ’tis as I entreat you to wear gloves, or feed on nourishing dishes’35), when women’s control over men moves into a public space the men feel emasculated and have to reassert their dominance in the only way left – through superior physical strength, and, ultimately, violence.

Ophelia rarely speaks onstage, and when she does it is at her father’s command or for his ends. She answers a direct address to her as it right and courteous, but does not volunteer to speak further. A lot of Ophelia’s responses to male speech are questions, she is often unsure of how to answer and tentative in replies.36 Her other lines are mostly acquiences to her father’s will: ‘I shall obey’37, or vocal contemplations of her ineptitide: ‘I do not know, my lord, what I should think’38. In her madness she could gain a freedom from convention that allows her freeer speech, but she is only given songs and verses to speak that no-one understands. Ophelia’s wild appearance in IV.v discredits what she says anyway, her appearance undermines her speech because she is visually ‘mad’. She enters ‘distracted…her hair down, singing’39, so not only does she visually represent madness but she cannot speak, only sing. In Othello the same is true but this works in a different way: Desdemona’s appearance remains chaste and pure and virtuous even when Othello believes her to be a whore, she has ‘whiter skin…thank snow, and smooth as monumental alabaster’40. It is this gap between appearance and realtiy that enrages Othello and causes him to refuse to listen to Desdemona’s defence of herself, even when she directly says ‘I never did offend you in my life, never loved Cassio41’, whereas in Hamlet is it Ophelia’s mad appearance that means that people do not listen to her and take her looks as proof that ‘she is divided from herself and her fair judgement’42.

Both women are almost always referred to with the epithet ‘fair’, constantly drawing attention to their physical attractiveness. Desdemona’s ‘fairness’ clearly takes on another layer of meaning because it is a direct contrast to Othello’s ‘blackness’, but the audience/readers are explicitly told several times both Desdemona and Ophelia are beautiful, and this is why Othello and Hamlet fall in love with them. Roderigo in Othello comments on Desdemona’s ‘beauty’43, and Othello calls her ‘fair lady’44 and explains that he loves her because she exemplified a womanly virtue – pity. Du Bosc (again, writing slightly after Shakespeare’s time) elevates pity to great heights, and implies that it is a great virtue for women to feel pity but that it is also an intrinsic part of their nature: ‘pity is so natural to them, and their inclination is so powerfully carried to mercy, that even the Furies themselves could not choose but weep and lament the disaster of Orpheus’45. Gertrude says that Ophelia’s ‘good beauties’46 are the cause of Hamlet’s madness, as with Othello, Hamlet’s obsession with what he perceives to be the gap between sight and truth sends him mad. Ophelia is beautiful and seems virtuous yet he is convinced that she is a whore.

Desdemona has a ‘greedy ear’47 according to Othello, and is over-bold and neglectful of her household duties, in order to hear all of his story. Desdemona mostly speaks when she is bidden directly by her father or the Duke apart from when she begs not to be sent to her father’s house while Othello is at war with the Turks in Cyprus. For a woman who doesn’t get much chance to speak or defend herself, it is interesting how obsessed Desdemona is with Othello’s speech and story, she is willing to ‘with haste dispatch’48 her chores and housekeeping in order to return and hear him speak further. Ophelia’s ears are also mentioned; she is warned against having ‘too credent ear’49, for fear that Hamlet’s speeches of love, which are ‘forward not permanent, sweet not lasting’50 will cause her to open her ‘chaste treasures’51. Laertes’s dire warnings about the inconstant nature of mens’ love strike rather an odd cord because although the urging to keep her virginity is commonplace and inextricably linked to family honour, there is no sign that Ophelia has any intention of transgressing, indeed she exemplifies the ‘maiden never bold’52 which Brabantio believes Desdemona to be. So submissive is Ophelia that she asks ‘what should I think?’53 of her father, rather than attempting to build an opinion for herself. The title quotation refers to Ophelia54, she is also told ‘you do not understand yourself’55 without any chance to speak in her own defence.

When Ophelia does try to defend herself, in III.i, she is reduced almost exclusively to questions and prayers. Hamlet disabuses her of the idea that he loves her ‘you should not have believed me…I loved you not’, and tries to confuse her by refusing to accept back the love-tokens he has previously given her. Ophelia tries to defend herself ‘you know right well you did’ but Hamlet verbally attacks her and is explicitly and inappropriately sexual in his language: ‘why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?…I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice…’56 which is territory Ophelia is not happy in. Hamlet then returns to his preoocupation with the visual, syaing ‘god hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’57. He not only universalises Ophelia to represent all women but then says that their duality and wantonness ‘hath made me mad’58. Ophelia has a relatively long speech (a whole 12 lines!) where she, too, equates Hamlet’s visual madness with his mental state, ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form…quite, quite, down!’59. However, she is also aware of what he says, even though it is like ‘sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh’60, and it is only when Hamlet is mad (as in the reported scene when he appears in her chamber ‘all unbraced’61) that physical appearance becomes important to Ophelia. Furthermore, the visual is related to herself more than to her feelings about Hamlet, she says ‘O woe is me, t’have seen what I have seen, to see what I see!’62 which demonstrates that madness can be ‘read’ on the body despite it being in the mind. Therefore, perhaps Desdemona should be able to ‘read’ in Othello’s body that he has bid ‘farewell to tranquil mind’63, but moreover, Othello should be able to read in Desdemona’s body that she is chaste.

When women do not speak, however, other problems ensue. Silence is assumed to hide what is known in the mind, and the separation between thought and speech, between speech and meaning is another factor in the destructive events of these plays. Furthermore, it means that when women do try to speak in their own defence men are not ready to listen, with deadly consequences. Emilia dies ‘speaking as I think’64 in order to exonerate Desdemona, but she does die, also killed by her husband for disobedience, after demanding that he ‘speak, for my heart is full’65. As Desdemona lies dying Emilia entreats her ‘speak again!…O sweet mistress, speak!’66 but it is too late, and Desdemona choses to acquit Othello with her last words, the ultimate submission to male authority. Emilia tries to force Iago to admit his sins, to speak himself, but when he refuses she speaks for him, and says although it is ‘proper I obey him’67 these are exceptional circumstances and she must speak to make sure Iago is punished for his crime. Iago ‘will neber more speak word’68 when an explanation is most needed, highlighting the disparity between what people choose to say and what people choose to hear.

Thomas Overbury, writing just after Shakespeare in 1614 says that ‘she [the ideal wife] leaves the neat youth telling his luscious tales…yet her kindness is free enough to be seen, for it hath no guilt about it’69. This puts Desdemona in the wrong, she does not leave the Othello telling his exciting tales, she is entranced and attracted by them. However, the point about freedom of guiltless kindness is useful to an analysis of Desdemona’s character because it puts her rather forward defence of Cassio above suspicion, suggesting that Othello’s susceptibility to Iago’s slanderous speech has more to do with himself than with any transgression on Desdemona’s part. In the same way, Hamlet’s accusation of Ophelia that her “wantonness” ‘hath made me mad’70 is a ridiculous accusation given that everything we see of sane Ophelia on stage screams chastity, obedience and submissiveness. Hamlet and Othello, who were so beguiled by beauty and virtue early in the plays, are to blame for seeing things that are not there in their virtuous women. By placing too much importance on sight and not enough on their other sense, especially sound (Ophelia and Desdemona both attempt to defend themselves through speech) Othello and Hamlet directly cause the deaths of both women.

To conclude then, Ophelia and Desdemona cannot win. If they speak they are thought unchaste. If they remain silent they are called whores. If they try to defend themselves they are ignored. Speech is not the woman’s perogative in either Hamlet or Othello, and transgressive women are punished. In short, men’s perceptions of women and of what is appropriate behaviour for women
not only stifles women and removes from them their chance to speak, but also ultimately causes themselves harm. If Othello had listened to Desdemona’s denial that she was ever adulterous with Cassio, or indeed had remained true to his original speech that he will ‘see before I doubt’71 then he would not have committed murder and Desdemona would have lived. If Hamlet had not been so wrapped up in his own problems that he was aware of the damage her was doing to Ophelia’s mental health by rejecting her then her entreaties to him to explain himself might not have been in vein, and she might not have killed herself. If men listened when women spoke and did not discourage women from speaking then these plays would a lot less exciting, but Desdemona and Ophelia would not die, and, dare I say, the world would be a better place.

Cavendish, Margaret: Essay is Called What?, quoted in The Cultural Identity
of Seventeenth Century Woman.

Du Bosc, Jacques: The Complete Woman, France, 1632, quoted in
Daughters Wives & Widows.

Greenblatt, Stephen, with Cohen, W, Howard, J and Eisaman Maus, K (eds):
The Norton Shakespeare, Norton Books, New York and London, 1997.

Keeble, N. H (ed): The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: a
reader, Routledge, London, 1994.

Klein, Joan Larsen (ed): Daughters Wives & Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1992.

Newman, Karen: Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991.

Overbury, Sir Thomas: A Wife, published in London, 1614, quoted in
The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth Century Woman.

Stimpson, Catherine R: Introduction to Fashioning Femininity.

Walen, Denise A: Unpinning Desdemona, Shakespeare Quarterly, 58.4, 2007,
pp.487-508. Viewed online at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ shakespeare_quarterly/ v058/58.4walen.html

This essay seeks to explore the common assumption that the use of ‘I’ automatically means that the poet is putting themselves into the poem, and how this affects a reading of Simon Armitage’s work. It will explain what we mean by ‘true’ in a poem, why it is easy to impose the poet onto the poem, and what that does to the poetry. I want to explore how Armitage’s use of an explicit ‘I’ works differently in his Sympathy sequence from Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid where the ‘I’ is a constructed character and in the Book of Matches sequence (from Book of Matches) where the ‘I’ is, or could be, Armitage. I will also discuss whether, or why, it matters, and whether one can appreciate and understand the poems distinctly from an understanding of Armitage’s biography.

By ‘true’ I mean that it is often tempting to assume that a poem is ‘about’ real life, real people and real happenings; that a poem had a direct inspiration that, if the reader could trace the poem back to its ‘source’, would clarify or explain the whole poem. This supposes that the poetic ‘I’ is traceable back to the poet himself. David Kennedy observes in new relations that

poets have chosen to question the relationship between authenticity and artifice in a poem and our assumptions about it. They do so by locating – or asking the reader to locate – the voice of an individual poem on a sliding scale between the apparent self of the poet and an explicit character2.

This judgement is particularly applicable to the poems in the Sympathy sequence because Armitage constructs two separate and very distinct characters in these poems, and allows them both to speak in ‘their’ voice. Neither voice is ‘the apparent self of the poet’, the judgemental nature of the first and the semi-fictionalised happenings of the second preclude that kind of label, but there is clearly something of Armitage in the poems, even if it is just his criticisms of the people he is speaking through. Neither voice is an identifiable character either, and yet nor are they universalised ‘everymen’ because the events described are so specific, as I shall discuss in depth later on.

Kennedy refers to the voice of Armitage’s poems as the ‘narrator’3 and I find this term very useful. The voice of the ‘Book of Matches’ series could well be Armitage’s own, and I think that he tries quite hard within the apparent casualness of this carefully constructed ‘self’ to make the reader feel as though he is the voice of the poem and he is talking directly to the reader in this Northern ‘true’ voice. However, what many of his poems are doing is effectively narrating tiny episodes (which may or may not be autobiographical) and then giving an opinion, a further question, a slight unsettling that makes this ‘bloke-in-the-pub’ persona fall slightly short of truth. The illusion of being the poet’s mate is stretched just a little too far when the reader is made to be complicit in the voyeurism of Sympathy, the bullying of ‘squashed tomato ’ed’4 the birth-marked child and to feel as though they are intruding into the parents’ grief and fear.

Kennedy says earlier in new relations that ‘contemporary poetry seems to have divorced the authentic from the personal’5, but I would suggest that the opposite is true with Armitage’s poetry; at the very least a blurring of the boundaries has occurred. In order for a poem to be ‘authentic’ one looks for something personal, something true to the poet’s life. By finding something in a poem that tallies with what one knows of a poet’s background, biography, politics, one ‘authenticates’ the poem. O’Brien notes in The Deregulated Muse that Armitage ‘incorporates vocabulary and references, as well as the sense – the tone – of a particular cultural climate (northern, youthful, seemingly classless)’6, but although this makes it difficult not to read the voice of the poems as Armitage’s own, it does not mean that it is. One is more likely to read the poem as true if one can ‘authenticate’ a poem in this way, and although this should not mean that one takes the poem more seriously, with more empathy, I find that it invariably does. However, one must bear in mind that ‘authenticating’ or verifying the literal accuracy of a poem does not necessarily clarify it or provide answers as to whether the ‘I’ in the poem is the poet or not. It might make it easier to assume that it is, but it proves nothing.

Armitage’s poetry is very easy to authenticate in this way because the ‘I’ of his poems could easily be Simon Armitage; for example in ‘Strike two’7 Armitage could feasibly be 28, as the anthology in which it is presented was published when he was 30. It is these small, and somewhat unhelpful, truths that lead the reader to extrapolate and take all of Armitage’s easy-going poems to contain not just ‘a’ truth but ‘the’ truth of Armitage’s own experience. Clearly, the age of the speaker is neither proven true nor especially useful to an appreciation or understanding of the poem, and should not be a substitute for close-reading, but it immediately becomes more tempting to assume that the whole Book of Matches sequence is autobiographical in a literal sense (“self-writing”) when one can get this kind of hold on Armitage-the-man within the poems. Armitage clearly has a constructed and conscious idea of the poetic self and the self in the poems, but because his ‘poetic strategy is garrulous evasion’8, pinning him down becomes so difficult that although it is fascinating, it detracts from, more than it enhances, a reading of his poetry.

The carefully observed details of ‘lowest common denominator detail from life in modern Britain’9 make it hard to believe that they are fictional imaginings, and in some ways it does not matter whether Simon Armitage has two clocks ‘in the same bedroom’10 or not. However, when it comes to an analysis of his poetry it matters whether the reader believes Armitage’s anecdotes to be true or not. If they are true then the poetry utilises everyday events that have happened in order to explore bigger ideas or suggest that the reader considers more than is explicitly discussed in the poem.

From a short sequence of dramatic monologues, Armitage’s ‘Sympathy’ poems contain a very interesting use of the poetic ‘I’. They are difficult to authenticate or classify because they each begin with a voice which is judgemental, detached and written in standard English, whereas the majority of the poem is written in what is probably much nearer to the poet’s voice, in phonetically rendered northern accented words. In ‘After the verdict’11, the second ‘Sympathy’ poem, Armitage throws you straight into it, so that the reader, too, is ‘suddenly there on the courthouse steps.’ Because the ‘murdered man’s twin…said nothing, just calmly unbuttoned his jacket and shirt, revealing a vest’ the reader is at a loss as to what is happening in this narration. This immediately creates a point of contact between poet and reader, but is also distancing: the poet has the power of information which the reader wants to gain. I use ‘information’ as if this poem were true, because I feel that the direct voices of this poem invite the reader to believe it is based on real happenings. There is no direct use of an ‘I’ in the first part of the poem, rather the poetic voice is a bystander. While I disagree generally with Kennedy’s suggestion that ‘the poet is as much recorder as maker’12, in this instance the poetic voice could indeed be read as recording events. However, what I feel Kennedy fails to address is the craft of a poem that commentates.

The quoted Bible passage in this poem ‘in red, it read Matthew, 5:38’ is You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth’ but the unquoted verse 39 goes on to tell the Christian ‘if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’13. The way that only the first part of the verse is quoted speaks volumes about the mental state of ‘the murdered man’s twin’; he wants revenge and is prepared to ignore Biblical teaching to attain it. However, the way that the character takes his revenge, ‘it weren’t lead shot what peppered ’is stupid ’ead…loaded up with ashes instead’ perhaps shows a recognition of verse 39 – he does not take ‘an eye for an eye’ because that would mean killing the murderer. Although he is clearly not ‘turning the other cheek’ his vengeance has a certain poetic justice to it.

The fact that the speaker of this part of the poem is not named apart from as ‘the murdered man’s twin’ gives the first voice a somewhat voyeuristic tone; this man is only of note because something awful happened to his twin, he is not worth noting in himself. However, because Armitage is such a clever poet, the simple language and conversational tone of the opening of the poem also allow Armitage’s implicit criticisms of this kind of intrusive press coverage and a society that has a kind of blood lust to come through. The title of the sequence, ‘Sympathy’, hints at the same kind of freak-show enjoyment that people get from being sympathetic to people who have suffered. The sheer banality of the term, the lack of real feeling behind it and the fact that the opening voice is so bland and does not offer any real sentiment drives home the emptiness of the supposed sympathy. Furthermore, the kind of sympathy that Armitage explores here is distancing. By being ‘sympathetic’ one removes the need to actually engage with the pain these people feel or to do anything about it.

There is no formal rhyme scheme in ‘The verdict’14 but the odd embedded rhymes of ‘stupid ’ead…ashes instead’ subtly catch the ear and make those lines stand out. The disjointed rhyming couplet at the end gives the poem a finished off feeling despite it being part of a longer sequence of poems of the same title. What’s worth noting is that it doesn’t matter whether this actual event took place or not, there is enough truth in this poem, enough human experience at the loss of a ‘bruvver’, that the literal facts cease to matter – and it certainly doesn’t matter whether the truth of this experience is from Armitage’s imagination or reality. The speaker is clearly not Armitage himself, but the Northern vernacular links it back to Armitage because in some ways, this ‘Northern’ writing feels more true to at least part of himself than the RP ‘proper’ English of the opening speaker. Armitage has ‘a concept of language not as a rich inheritance or an instrument but as something that exists only in the mouths of its speakers’15, and therefore has to put his words into people’s mouths on the page.

The opening voice of the third poem in the ‘Sympathy’ sequence, ‘Remember the case’16 is similar to the second, in diction and syntax at least. There is more genuine feeling in this voice because the ‘birth-marked girl’17 engenders more real sympathy than the ‘murdered man’s twin’18 because the man commits a crime for which he gets ‘three year’ in prison, while the child is innocent. There is an almost broadsheet/tabloid split between the two halves of these poems, and the italicised speech of the second halves make them less real, somehow, less in-your-face, despite the diction being more true-to-life for Armitage. However, there is still the same tabloid sensationalism underneath the somewhat insipid words: ‘Remember the case’ suggests that the press ran a sympathy-seeking story about this child which, again, was really exploitative and voyeuristic rather than genuinely sympathetic.

I find the second half of both poems more difficult, and the phonetically rendered speech of ‘when she were born’19 and ‘what they’d givved us’20 falls down in some places by becoming pantomimic, which obscures the delicate sadness of the words, particularly in ‘Remember the case’ where the child sees her own face for the first time in the ‘turned-off TV…screen’21 while her father, the speaker of the second half of the poem, wishes that ‘while she slept that bloody patch of rare steak raw flesh might transfer and blemish me for me sins’. The rhyming couplets that end these poems are slightly unconvincing after the almost-prose of the rest of this section of the poems, and become a little over-sentimentalised in ‘Remember the case’ where the end of ‘punish me, not ’er’ sounds rather melodramatic compared to the language of the rest of the poem.

Armitage is showing his craft as a poet and putting some of himself back into the persona he has imagined for the purposes of the dramatic monologue section, but in some ways I think the poem would have been more successful if he had maintained the illusion that he labours to create by phonetically rendering a Northern accent for these characters. By doing so he implies that he is merely giving these characters the words they already have and that his poetic craft plays no part in writing them, but he destroys this illusion with the ending rhyming couplets. Once again these poems need to be heard in a Northern accent for the rhyming couplet at the end to actually rhyme, in my London accent ‘air’ and ‘year’22 are quite distinct sounds, but in a Northern accent they rhyme well.

These poems make for an uncomfortable close reading. The fact that they begin with an ambiguous voice but one that is not specifically Northern or working class but then move into this phonetically rendered first person speech means that the slightest biographical knowledge of Armitage’s Northern roots means that one is inclined to read the second part as in some way ‘truer’ than the first because it might be closer to how Armitage himself speaks. However, the fact that we know Armitage to be a clever poet means that to read him into the working-class Northern voice he writes in here is impossible, not only because of the events described. This means that certain assumptions about class and geography are confronted: the voice at the beginning of the poem, which is likely to tally more close to the reader’s own is somewhat condescending and voyeuristic, and we become complicit in that smug, middle-class ‘sympathy’ for the pain described, which becomes more about pity and a weird kind of superiority, than any genuine feeling.

The sequence of poems at the beginning of Armitage’s 1993 collection Book of Matches is a series of mini autobiographies, snatches of his life, that ultimately come together to paint a picture of a life. Within this sequence of poems there are some sonnets, but it the odd 15-line poems, sonnets with an afterthought, that often grab the attention.23 They jerk the reader out of a comfortable rhythm and really hammer home the last ‘extra’ line. In the first poem of the book the word ‘madness’ is alone on its own line, right at the end of the poem.24 The very short, simple poem is clearly a fabrication – not even a writer as eloquent as Armitage could actually ‘say the story of my life…before I’m bitten by the flame’25! However, the ‘dates and places…cast of names and faces, those who showed me love…the changes I made, the lessons I learnt’ could feasibly be real memories from Armitage’s life. The last four lines have something of the rhyming couplet about them; ‘sadness’ and ‘madness’ rhyme, and if the lines were broken differently then the rhythm of them would fall into a neat couplet. The fact that Armitage has chosen not to do that in this poem makes that last ‘madness’ even stronger: not only do we as readers suddenly get the feeling that this warning ‘don’t try this on your own’ is speaking directly to us, but the rhyme hidden in the middle of the line makes ‘madness’ resonate even more. Kennedy says that Armitage’s poems often ‘wind down to a vaguely assertive shrug’26, but I would argue that this poem ends with a more aggressively assertive punch. Kennedy’s statement is more relevant to the ‘Sympathy’ sequence of poems that I have already discussed.

The poems that make up the Book of Matches sequence are single moments that are of no great significance to the wider world. There is no immediate suggestion that the reader should identify with Armitage’s memories, observations, thoughts, but that is their charm. They are so quotidian that they can become universal while remaining personal; ‘thunder and lightning hardly ever upset me’27 or ‘some unimportant word or phrase runs through my head’28 are totally banal statements, but put with the rest of their poems they speak volumes about the speaker’s life and experience of the world. The reader can identify with them not because they speak of shared experiences per se, but because they speak of individual experiences that are shared through the writing of these poems. Armitage offers up ‘his life’ in bite-size chunks, easily digestible, and it quickly becomes immaterial whether these small things actually happened or are imagined, or a combination of the two. Certain things almost any reader can work out to be true with a minimum of biography; Armitage probably was ‘twenty-eight’29 when he wrote the second poem ‘Strike two’30, and he does have a fringe in the cover photo of him, but whether he lets it ‘flop where the wind blows, northside or south’31 is utterly irrelevant – what is important is that this persona who Armitage has cultivated is care-free and relaxed in this poem. It is this person’s life that we are being offered and that is what intrigues – it could be truly Armitage or it could be entirely made-up, but I am inclined to mostly read it as somewhere between the two. These poems are presented on the page with a kind of ‘make-of-that-what-you-will shrug’ that one can imagine the persona writing about in a later poem. They are irregularly broken into stanzas and look very small on the page. There are problems with this persona that Armitage creates though, because if it is him, or a facet of him at least, then the speaker’s passivity jars with the careful construction of these poems. Indeed, if the persona is ‘left to myself and my own devices’32, and is passive enough not to straighten his hair in the wind, then it is questionable from his apparent passivity and laziness whether these poems would get written at all, let alone within a relatively formal structure and cohesive sequence.

Ultimately, these are presented as disposable poems. By this I mean that not only are they short in form and actual number of words, but that the ideas contained in them are fleeting not permanent, Armitage does not seem interested in pinning down life’s great mysteries, rather in exploring the minutiae and leaving the expanding and extrapolation to his readers. The fourth poem in the sequence ends ‘and then the rest’33, inviting the reader to imagine the continuation of what has been a very short and quite simple meandering through what kind of ‘love scenes’ the speaker likes best. The ‘I’ in this poem is very conversational and says ‘no, that’s a lie’ in response to an unvoiced (and probably unformulated) question, and when the speaker does get round to what they actually look for in a love-scene, ‘the turn of a head or a pale blue eye’ he has already moved on with the poem and does not dwell on it. Furthermore, the title of this sequence, ‘Book of Matches’ suggests something disposable, that one might – or might not – pick up after a meal, a drink, a date – something more important. The matches become the poems; to strike once, use to light or illuminate something else, and then throw away.

These poems, then, are matches. They are small and unassuming, but it is only by using/reading them that the reader can either burn/destroy or light/illuminate a bigger, stronger, harder idea. The poem that begins ‘Mother’34 illustrates this point: on the surface this poem is about the physical necessity of ‘a second pair of hands…[to]…measure windows, pelmets, doors, the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors’, but ultimately this poem explores the speaker’s relationship with his mother – the ‘spool of tape…unreeling years between us.’ The mundane task of measuring a house is subsumed by the last line ‘to fall or fly’ which suddenly opens up the world of possibilities offered by the ‘endless sky’. By ‘striking’ (i.e. reading) this poem, the reader illuminates a lot more than a simple task; it examines the ties between mother and son, ‘something has to give’ eventually but the mother still holds onto to ‘the last one-hundredth of an inch,’ unwilling to let go of being an ‘anchor’. The son ‘space-walk[ing] through the empty bedrooms’ has finally reached ‘breaking point’ (both literally on the tape-measure and metaphorically in his relationship with his mother) and has to let go and set off alone ‘to fall or fly’.

In ‘Thunder and lightening’35 a young boy encounters lesbian love between ‘the parish spinsters’ as he walks the long way home from school, and Armitage beautifully captures a child’s confusion and acceptance of ‘that new, unlikely love’. The speaker of the poem, as with all of these ‘match-poems’ is, I think, meant to be read as Armitage. The opening statement epitomises the calm and matter-of-fact persona that speaks through these poems; ‘thunder and lightening hardly ever upset me’, and then Armitage skilfully shifts the time frame with ‘not now, not then’ and launches into the real story of the poem. ‘Book of Matches’ serves as an over-arching title to the whole sequence, but the first line of each poem becomes a kind of signpost to the rest of the poem in the absence of individual titles. Thunder and lightening are often things that people find frightening, because they seem random and are shocking. The fact that the speaker in the poem is not scared of them prepares the reader for the calm way that the boy in the poem accepts that two women ‘came together and fell below the horizon of the windowsill’.

This poem begs the question of how time affects reading and writing: the self of a poem, however truthful it was at the time, leaves the poet at the time of writing. As the poet ages they will move and grow further away from whatever ‘self’ was in the poem at the time. An adult writing a child’s perspective is always going to struggle to not make their child-self carry elements of their world-wise adult-self with them, however well they remember what being a child was like, and I think this is demonstrated in ‘Thunder and lightening’. The description of the woman who ‘raised both arms, surrendered’ is a poet’s, not a child’s.

In conclusion, then, whether or not the voice of the poem is the voice of the poet should not make a difference to our reading of it, and certainly should not detract from an appreciation of it. However, due to the nature of a society where nothing is secret and people’s lives are minutely scrutinised by the media, it is all-too-tempting to read the poet and the poet’s life into the poems. I do not necessarily think that this is a bad thing, in fact if done carefully, a knowledge of a poet’s life, origins, politics etc could well enhance and deepen an understanding and therefore enjoyment of the poems. I do think, however, that one must be careful not to sacrifice a reading of the poem for a reading of the poet. Psychoanalysis and gossip do not enhance a poem. There is also a danger that finding out that one disagrees with a poet then detracts from one’s enjoyment of the poems, and this is a shame. T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semitic wife-beater, but he could still write. Knowing Armitage’s opinions and trying to put him into the poems, to put his voice into the poem’s voice can be a very satisfying way of understanding the poems, but it can also mean that the subtleties of the poem get overlooked, and that they (and he) become unnecessarily pigeon-holed and labelled – as Male, as Northern, as working-class, as university-educated, as Whatever – which means that one is then almost forced to read the poems through that narrow lens, rather than reading them as separate and complete entities.

Works Cited

Armitage, Simon: Book of Matches, Faber and Faber, London, 1993.

The Universal Home Doctor, Faber and Faber, London and
New York, 2002.

Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid, Faber and Faber, London and New York, 2006.

Kennedy, David: new relations: the refashioning of british poetry 1980-94,
Poetry Wales Press, Bridgend, 1996.

O’Brien, Sean: The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and
Irish Poetry, Bloodaxe, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1998.

O’Brien, Sean (ed): The Firebox. Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945,
Picador, London and Basingstoke, 1998.

Noel-Tod, Jeremy: Allegory and a low-key intimacy, review of The Universal
Home Doctor and Travelling Songs, in The Guardian,
October 12th 2002, (viewed online at: http://books.guardian .co.uk/reviews/poetry/0,,810060,00.html on 10/04/08)