Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Heather Cass White

"I should like to be alone;

why not be alone together?"

Below the incandescent stars

below the incandescent fruit,

the strange experience of beauty;

its existence is too much;

it tears one to pieces

and each fresh wave of consciousness

is poison. (73)

In both situations Eve is somewhat at a loss; her positive desire to be alone is met with a wily countersuggestion, and the prospect of the actual union, "the strange experience of beauty," is both alluring and "poison." There are several reasons for her ambivalence, the first of which is intrinsic to her: even in this poem she is the object of suspicion, "the central flaw / in that first crystal-fine experiment, / this amalgamation which can never be more / than an interesting impossibility." As the smooth shading of "that first crystal-fine experiment" into "this amalgamation" shows, Eden and marriage are closely allied in this poem, each an experiment, each doomed because of Eve's presence as "the central flaw."

Her "flaw," however, is complicated, and has more to do with the strictures of marriage than with an original sin on her part. The poet establishes this connection right before introducing Adam into the poem by noting that Eve is "constrained in speaking of the serpent-- / shed snakeskin in the history of politeness / not to be returned to again-- / that invaluable accident / exonerating Adam" (73). The "history of politeness" is an unusual description of the context in which the first fall occurred; we might have expected the history of knowledge, or presumption, or sin. Instead, Moore frames her discussion of Eve's trespass as an issue of manners: Eve's in trying what the snake suggested, Adam's in doing what his wife urged. That Moore calls this trespass an "accident" implies that it need not have been Eve who made the mistake; Adam, had he been as alive as his wife to the demands of social intercourse, might have done the same. It also suggests that what was lost in the first fall was not only marriage's innocence but also its politeness; the first marriage, we are to gather, involved a species of courtesy that we can now only imagine.

What has replaced this original courtesy, the poem suggests, is a struggle for power and an adherence to forms without an animating desire for spiritual unity. [12] A long passage in the latter half of the poem, immediately preceding the onset of Adam and Eve's talk, paints an intimidating picture of marriage:

"Married people often look that way"--

"seldom and cold, up and down,

mixed and malarial

with a good day and a bad."

"When do we feed?"

We occidentals are so unemotional,

we quarrel as we feed;

self lost, the irony preserved

in the Ahasuerus tete-a-tete banquet"

with its small orchids like snakes' tongues,

with its "good monster, lead the way."

with little laughter

and munificence of humor

in that quixotic atmosphere of frankness

in which, "four o'clock does not exist,

but at five o'clock

the ladies in their imperious humility

are ready to receive you;"

in which experience attests