Marianne Moore, the James family, and the politics of celibacy

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Linda Leavell

Despite her filial devotion, Moore did not leave college expecting to spend her adult life with her mother. When she returned home to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, she enrolled immediately in a local commercial college and a year later, after learning typing and stenography, sent out applications. She accepted a clerical position at Melvil Dewey's resort in Lake Placid, New York. There she met a number of young men and was not altogether joking when she wrote home, "I have 7 suitors. What do you think of that? They are all dandies" (Selected Letters 82). But when her position was eliminated for financial reasons after three months, she refused an appealing job offer in New York City and returned home to live with her mother. Marianne Moore and Mary Warner Moore lived together for another 37 years, until the latter's death in 1947. During that time neither engaged in a courtship or, for example, took vacations without the other. They regarded themselves as committed life partners.

Moore came of age in a world--albeit a distinctive one--in which the conduits of intellectual authority were often women. Although she may never have had a sexually intimate relationship, she did participate in what Rich has defined broadly as a "lesbian continuum" that can include many forms of "primary intensity between and among women" (217). Until the age of 30 Moore took such intensities for granted. The Moores' small circle of friends in Carlisle consisted almost entirely of well-educated single women who lived with their mothers or with both parents. These women did not disdain marriage, but neither did they envy their married siblings. At Bryn Mawr, then under the progressive leadership of M. Carey Thomas, Moore encountered many classmates and female professors who did not expect to marry. Some of these professors, self-proclaimed bluestockings, did disdain marriage.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed to the limitations of the homosexual/heterosexual binary that "emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation'" (24). Although gay-affirmative critics are sometimes willing to "queer" anyone who resists the heterosexual norm, Moore resisted not just heterosexuality but the homo-/heterosexual binary itself. Most of Moore's closest adult friends, both male and female, had same-sex partners, and the norm of her youth was homosocial, if not heterophobic. I find no evidence for regarding Moore's celibacy as an example of what Sedgwick calls "homosexual panic" (182-212). More useful is the position taken by Richard Howard. "The history of Modernism," he writes, "is precisely the history of those figures whom we initially read as if they had no erotic charge--like Henry James, like Virginia Woolf, like Santayana--and whom we ultimately, learning to read better, come to find suffused with erotic life." He finds Moore to be "not only no exception to this law ... but a thrilling example of a writer charged with erotic energy, sometimes with specifically sexual energy" (10).