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

Style, Fall, 2000 by Martin Bidney

So identification comes to represent not only a flight to safety [...] but also being swallowed up by and in another person. [...1 Infantile dependence includes not only the factor of identification which originates before birth, but also the factor of oral incorporation from the breast which is added to identification after birth. These two mingle and alternate. Identification with the mother is felt to be both the mother swallowing the infant and the infant swallowing the mother. All relationships are felt as both a mutual swallowing and a mutual merging, and [the traumatized or love-frustrated child] is never quite sure at any given moment whether he feels most as if he is being swallowed or doing the swallowing.(315) [9]

Fairbairn' s analysis suggests that what Bishop describes is a mutual engulfment of child and mother-figure, a surge equally rising up from inside the child and coming down from outside, like a rising voice or volcanic fire and a lateral and descending wave. Annihilation is the threat to be mastered. But mastery is made harder when the impulse toward "flight from all objects" that might engulf a person turns out to mean yet another kind of flight--from the unacceptable likelihood that one might oneself have an identity resembling that of the loved but hated, so-often-unavailable caregiver.

As "In the Waiting Room" suggests, Bishop's epiphanist-persona typically must cope with two contrasting psychological terrors: (1) floods, eruptions, armored cars--vertical or lateral incursions indicating a dissolution, a swallowing of the love object and a being-swallowed by her (two inseparable dangers that imply each other); and (2) the equal trauma of a sense of oneself as separate, isolated identity--an identity either deadened by deprivation, by the possibility of being annihilated, or, alternatively, repelled by the deadening likelihood of being "one of them," one more in a world of inadequate love objects.

III

Four of Bishop's epiphanies show the terrifying psychological dilemma-- dissolution versus deprivation--with great vividness and force. The first appears in "Some Dreams They Forgot" (146), a sonnet about a nightmare arising from unnatural, violent motions:

The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly,

or could guess from where. They were black, their eyes were shut,

and no one knew what kind of birds they were. But

all held them and looked up through the new far-funneled sky.

(II. 1-4)

Burnt and blinded, the falling birds seem to have been shot up from a fiery eruption, deadened by a chaotic surge arising like an overwhelming rage from within the epiphanist's psyche. In Bishop's epiphanies, violent upward and downward motions often imply each other, for, as here, the annihilating vertical impulsions can come either from within or without, or both.

Also, dark drops fell. Night-collected on the eaves,

or congregated on the ceilings over their beds,

they hung, mysterious drop-shapes, all night over their heads,

now rolling off their careless fingers quick as dew off leaves.