Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia in Brazil

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2001 by Axelrod, Steven Gould

In the cold, cold parlor

my mother laid out Arthur

beneath the chromographs:

Edward, Prince of Wales,

with Princess Alexandra,

and King George with Queen Mary.

Below them on the table

stood a stuffed loon

shot and stuffed by Uncle

Arthur, Arthur's father.

Since Uncle Arthur fired

a bullet into him,

he hadn't said a word.

He kept his own counsel

on his white, frozen lake,

the mart-topped table.

His breast was deep and white,

cold and caressable;

his eyes were red glass,

much to be desired.

"Come," said my mother,

"come and say good-bye

to your little cousin Arthur."

I was lifted up:and given one lily of the valley

to put in Arthur's hand.

Arthur's coffin was

a little frosted cake,

and the red-eyed loon eyed it

from his white, frozen lake. (125)8

As in most of Bishop's texts, the emotional work is accomplished here through images-in this case tactile and visual ones. The scene is suffused by coldness and by a whiteness that seems to me not only what Renee Curry would call a sign of privilege but also a sign of anesthetized feeling and lack of nurture. Thus we, along with the child, observe the "cold parlor"; the "white, / cold" breast of the loon; the white lily; the coffin like a "frosted" cake; and (perhaps in parody of Mallarme's ice-bound swan in "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui") the loon on a marble table that resembles a "white, frozen lake." The gelid Nova Scotian landscape has invaded the home and its affections, taking them over-antithetically revising both the warm hearthside of Whittier's Snow-Bound and the voice of Eliot's The Waste Land who avers that "winter kept us warm" (Eliot 37). This winter keeps us cold indeed. Bishop's text offers a de-idealized portrait of an icy family triad. The mother, as in "In the Village," is the text's powerful agent, officiously laying out Arthur's body and directing her daughter to take leave of her cousin. On a psychological level, the mother might be said to be laying out the daughter, who is in fact hoisted into the casket to join her specular image, the cousin. The place of the absent father is occupied by Arthur's father, who, in a syntactically ambiguous phrase, fires "a bullet into him." The pronoun seems to refer to little Arthur, the narrator's double, but more plausibly refers to the loon. It is a distinction without much difference, however, since the immobilized loon figures little Arthur. The daughter, intuiting the hostile wishes of both mother and father-- figure, yet still identifying herself with them both, finds her own erotic wishes disordered, in a paradigm familiar from Freud's "Mourning and Melancholy" (249-52 and passim). She "desires" the red eyes and wants to "caress" (to devour, Freud might say) the body of the loon, a bestial image comprising her dead redhaired cousin, the parents who are lost to her, her own lacking self, and death itself. Thus, the poem presents to us a familial triad composed of murderous parents and dead child. The coldness of this tableau contrasts to the warmth of the royal portraits (though both are similarly imaged in red and white). Ironically the family grouping pictured on the wall-father, mother, son, and daughter-in-law-appears to be more vital and intimate than the actual mother, father, and daughter grouped in the room. It is also curious that the same "ingenu and porcine Edward VII" who stares down on the dysfunctional family in Lowell's "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow" (Life Studies 63) also witnesses this domestic scene, linking the two texts under the sign of the royal gaze, like the vacantly staring eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.9 Bishop's poem concludes in this fashion: