Edna St. Vincent Millay's gendered language and form: "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree."

Style, Spring, 1995 by Irene R. Fairley

Although part of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harp-Weaver (1924),(1) Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" was regarded by many critics as inferior and still tends to receive less attention than Millay's other sonnet sequences. However, I believe it is the one that is thematically most imaginative and most inventive within the genre. As they narrate a woman's inner struggle, these sonnets merge women's speech in its various forms, from gossip to story telling to diary, and as such represent an important development. To achieve her dramatic purpose, Millay uses a range of sonnet structures, but she also experiments with form. Millay's sonnets have been identified as "reflective in theme" (Sterner 112). I will argue that here she develops sonnets that are reflective in form in order to reveal the process of a woman's emerging self-knowledge.

Because the sequence combines a language and perspective that is female, critics of the time dismissed it.(2) Louis Untermeyer pronounced it "dull" (158). The female voice that Millay gives us, especially in this sequence, rankled critics such as John Crowe Ransom, who blatantly describes her language as deficient in "masculinity" (98) and therefore lacking in interest for the "intellectual adult male" (99). Accounting for Millay's critical treatment, Clark explains, "the alienation of affection and the personal which was modernism was bound to reject Millay, as it rejected in a larger sense the claims of women and sentimentalism to power and value" (72).(3)

Some critics faulted Millay for her choice of conventional forms. Yet in "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" Millay does not always follow conventions. Avoiding a formal framework, a classical or philosophical opening, she begins in medias res (or in medias mess). Far from the expression of ideal love more characteristic of sonnet sequences (including others by Millay herself), this one presents the chores of an estranged wife who returns to care for a dying husband, finally to attend to his burial. The seventeen sonnets explore -- for those who decode the graphically detailed language-themes of separation and identity. Millay describes the woman's earlier sense of suffocation within the marriage, and she goes further by showing the woman as alienated also from the community of neighbors and service people.

Feminist critics in the 1970s rediscovered Millay's female voice, her domestic images and themes.(4) While this sequence has been recognized as "one of the most striking portraits of a wife's situation in twentieth-century American poetry" (Dobbs 97), it remains underestimated in assessments of the genre. For instance, Jean Gould regards Millay's narrative as lacking "the appeal or the pure artistry of her intimate yet objective personal sonnets, or those written out of deep philosophical conviction, as the other two sequences were" (129). Most critical attention still goes to "Fatal Interview" and "Epitaph for the Race of Man," but I find Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" the sequence that is truly groundbreaking. As I hope to show, its meaning as well as its structure have not been adequately explored or evaluated. Critics have tended to see the wife as victim, but attention to the reflective sonnets that expose the woman's thoughts and revelations provides a rather different reading.

Gendered Language and Cultural Codes

Sonnet I opens with "So," the frequently used conversational starter and goes on to introduce a narrative focused on relationships and feelings, especially fears. Details of domestic life, of women's nonverbal world, unfold. Kitchen is the center of this world. Readers need to follow the significance of the seemingly inconsequential details, such as a recovered apron, a pantry out of order, a neglected kitchen, the whistle of a tea kettle. This is no aerial view. Millay places us at ground level, reading the sawdust for clues, later the carpet. (Much the way women interpret domestic clues, seemingly extrathematic details, to discover a wife's story as in Millay's friend Susan Glaspell's drama, Trifles.(5)) In the opening lines, Millay informs readers that there will be no suspense in the usual sense; we are told that the sick husband dies.

So she came back into his house again

And watched beside his bed until he died,

Loving him not at all....

Furthermore, Millay encodes a discourse characteristic of all-women groups: "troubles talk" (see Tannen, You 49-61). In this sequence such talk about people and feelings is shared by the narrator with the reader as the discourse unfolds. The wife avoids all occasions for bonding with others through talk. Readers need to carefully decode to understand the psychological significance of her hiding from neighbors bearing jellies in sonnet 8. Their visit may be regarded as an offer to console, to engage in troubles talk, and perhaps also to offer advice along with jellies. Much depends here on awareness of what is customary among women, the communicative conventions of all-woman talk.