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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Heather Cass White

As an early example of her response to the charged status of women's conversation as cultural artifact and poetic subject, Moore's review of T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations is instructive. In Eliot's first book of poems Hawthorne's "d--d mob of scribbling women" is still very much present, except that it has become a mob of chattering women. Women get to speak (or at least cry or laugh) in five of the book's 12 poems. The emblematic nature of their conversation is striking in "Portrait of a Lady," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and "Conversation Galante" in particular.

In the first poem, a young man makes three visits to an older woman's drawing room; each time he visits, she attempts to draw him further into intimacy, conversational and perhaps otherwise, than he is willing to go. The young man who narrates the poem, and whose half self-reproaching, half coldly contemptuous reflections are the medium of the "portrait," says nothing back to her. Instead, she speaks into a void; the one-sided conversation "slips / Among velleities and carefully caught regrets / Through attenuated tones of violins" (18). If the youth recognizes his callowness in refusing to respond to her overtures ("youth is cruel, and has no remorse / And smiles at situations which it cannot see") his is nonetheless the privileged viewpoint. Her talk is, finally, too cliched, too cloying to be taken seriously, and the speaker wonders "if she should die some afternoon, ... should I have the right to smile?" (23).

"Prufrock's" famous refrain "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" is perhaps the most direct instance of what women's talk stands for in educated, cosmopolitan poetry of the time. The room in which the women are talking is a drawing room; outside, Prufrock stands and observes the social life for which he feels himself unfit by his age and his timidity, and from which he is divided by a cold, sleeping, city fog. Despite his sure knowledge of his defects, however, Prufrock, in Stephen Spender's reading, "is like an eel at the bottom of a tank. He knows the depths and the darkness which the deceived creatures who swim around in their artificial light do not know" (34). Certainly the most deceived creatures in the poem are the women, who think they display their culture and wit by "Talking of Michelangelo." In fact, as the poem's perspective makes clear, they present what Hugh Kenner calls "a simple contrast of conceptions: talking women, and a heroic visionary" (7). The only women in the poem worth listening to are mermaids, who do not say but sing. Prufrock does not think they will sing to him, but in any case he has an edge over them for, as Spender argues, "alongside all this negativeness of statement there is the paradoxical nature of the life of the dream or imagination [:] if ... I have walked on the beach and envisioned them in imagination ... then in imagination they have sung to me" (34). The reactions to this poem by readers as canny as Spender and Kenner indicate not only that the misogyny is and was legible in nonfeminist readings, but also that it is intrinsic to the poem's consideration of life and art. [4]