"Controlled Panic": Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies

Style, Fall, 2000 by Martin Bidney

To illustrate Bishop's increasing control over the contending forces of identity dissolution and deadening isolation, I shall arrange the epiphanies studied here in a non-chronological sequence. The Bishop epiphanist-persona, I shall show, becomes psychologically less vulnerable by employing three techniques of mastery. (1) Spatial distancing or miniaturizing offers a sense of control. Using this technique, one can view the hostile sea from the secure vantage of a wader rather than the vertiginous perspective of a sailor on a shipmast, or one may contemplate a miniaturized volcanic landscape from the safety of an airplane. (2) The technique of conceptual framing through partial allegorizing or the suggestion of a philosophic framework places the threats of solitude and chaos in a coherent poetic context. (3) The exercise of compassion or imaginative empathy for a fellow sufferer, in such a rare epiphany as "The Fish," may transform vulnerability into visionary victory. In speaking of Bishop's interrelated (sp atial, conceptual, and empathetic) types of psychological "mastery" [4] or "control," however, I do not want to imply that less terrifying poems are better ones. No matter how skillful the framing or moderating tactics in any given case, the surging or whelming and fragmenting or isolating forces must remain powerful if the epiphanies are to be intense, mysterious, expansive. Whether hopeful or horror-stricken, all the epiphanies I look at here are aesthetic triumphs.

II

Bishop's paradigm epiphany, "In the Waiting Room" (159-61), shows the threat of chaos (fiery surges) and the contrasting but equal threat of constriction (rounded shapes) combining to initiate a child into epiphanic terror and wonder: "I knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened, that nothing / stranger could ever happen" (II. 72-74). As the persona recalls reading a 1918 issue of National Geographic while she was waiting for Aunt Consuelo at the dentist's, the paradigmatic upbursting epiphanic motions revive with remembered photos of an eruption:

the inside of a volcano,

black, and full of ashes;

then it was spilling over

in rivulets of fire.

After the eruptive surges come horrible constricted, rounded shapes--pith helmets, string-wound heads, wire-wound necks, light bulbs, terrifying breasts. The doubled use of doubling, "round and round" repeated, conveys the obsessive, hypnotic horror of the circles:

(II. 17-20)

Osa and Martin Johnson

dressed in riding breeches,

laced boots, and pith helmets.

A dead man slung on a pole

--"Long Pig," the caption said.

Babies with pointed heads

wound round and round with string;

black, naked women with necks

wound round and round with wire

Their breasts were horrifying.

like the necks of light bulbs.

(II, 21-31)

Why rounded breasts are horrifying is left unexplained, for they recall a trauma prior to the child's acquisition of language. [5] They indicate that not only the obvious and very real patriarchal torments [6] but also Mother-related childhood terrors infuse the nightmare.