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

Style, Spring, 1995 by Irene R. Fairley

These last two sonnets, especially, display a view of gendered discourse and status relations. In sonnet 16, the wife is distressed at the prospect of "the hideous industry" of a funeral with "crowds of people calling her by name / And questioning her, she'd never seen before." In the only direct speech of the whole sequence, she responds to the doctor, "I don't know what you do exactly when a person dies." Funerals belong to the public sphere at which men preside. Public discourse is male discourse. The closing image that develops over the last five lines of the sequence compares the wife to someone entering a room where her husband "speaks before a crowd," surprised by the difference of his public demeanor. In this final image of extreme difference and distance, Millay strikingly portrays the acquired roles of her society: men are comfortable in the formal public sphere, women in the private. Both spheres, Millay suggests, have their problems.

Given these features, the combination of gendered subject and language, a troubles-talk mode set in a domestic sphere, a questioning of middle-class institutions, and unrelenting pejoration of the male, it is understandable that many critics recoiled from this sequence with its radical agenda.

Millay's Innovative Sonnets

Millay's sequence gives us subjective reality and may be seen as an early example of this direction, much like Virginia Woolf's lyrical prose experiments that explore the subjectivity of consciousness. "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" can be compared to a journal, a private genre that records the woman's activities, thoughts, and feelings. Millay's narrative shares many of the features of expressive discourse, which typically includes diaries, journals, confessions, autobiographies, group manifestos, and constitutions, as well as much of the language of ordinary conversation.(6) This is discourse in which the "reaction of the self is displayed" (Kinneavy 60). Self is the focus and dominant subject as the language presents thoughts and feelings that clarify the relationship between the Self and Others and the World (435). Referents are highly subjective, and emphasis is usually on the evaluation of experience from the single perspective. Often the self is proclaimed after a rehearsing of dissatisfactions, or a listing of abuses that serve to justify the move to independence. Kinneavy explains that "in expressive discourse the authentic I emerges clearly, indeed [s]he is partly born in the discourse" (433).

In Millay's story, the speaking self is represented not with the more usual first person, but with the third-person pronoun. Frequently the sequence follows an associative logic and structure. At points the woman becomes lost in her thoughts, and we come in contact with the self below the surface. Millay manages this closeness to persona despite the third-person filtering by making use of questions, ellipses, and exclamations that signal the woman's thoughts much as they do in free indirect style in prose(7). The narrative is personal, internal, and, as we shall see, revelatory.