in the skin of another

365 Pages·2012·5.26 MB·English

Dottorato di ricerca
in Studi iberici ed Anglo-americani
Scuola di dottorato in Lingue, culture e società, ciclo 24°
(A.A. 2010/2011)

I S A
N THE KIN OF NOTHER

Anne Michaels’, Sujata Bhatt’s and Adrienne Rich’s Dramatic Monologues as
Embodiments of Painter Paula Modersohn-Becker

SETTORE SCIENTIFICO DISCIPLINARE DI AFFERENZA: L-LIN/11

Tesi di dottorato di Monica Pavani matricola: 955644

Coordinatore del dottorato Tutore del dottorando

Prof. Enrica Villari Prof. Gregory Dowling
To my father, to my brother.
To the memory of my mother.

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IN THE SKIN OF ANOTHER

“I am not ashamed that again, as before, it is your images,
your words almost, with which I attempt to express myself,
as if I wanted to make you a gift of your own possessions.
But so it is, Clara Westhoff, we receive many of our greatest treasures
for the first time when they come to us borne on the voice of another”

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Westhoff

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Contents

Acknowledgements 4

PROLOGUE
A Room of Mirrors 6

CHAPTER ONE
The Novel(s) Behind the Poems 21

CHAPTER TWO
Still Life Translated Into Poems:
Embodying Paula Modersohn-Becker 151

CHAPTER THREE
Cracks in the Mask:
the Dramatic Monologue as a Looking Glass 295

EPILOGUE
The Dream of Translatability:
Translation as a Clear Glass 321

Bibliography 355

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Acknowledgements

“I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”

Alfred Tennyson, from “Ulysses”

This has been a long and rewarding research. Besides allowing me to enter Anne Michaels‟,
Sujata Bhatt‟s and Adrienne Rich‟s dramatic monologues as if they were worlds I could
temporarily inhabit, I was given the opportunity to experience in the first person German painter
Paula Modersohn-Becker‟s journey into art and life as if I were the protagonist of Midnight in
Paris by Woody Allen, who is given access into the lively Paris of the Twenties (even though I
mostly journeyed into the first decade of the twentieth century…).
My greatest debt is to professor Gregory Dowling, whose personal generosity, passion for
poetry, competence and inventiveness were invaluable to me. In him I found the perfect
interlocutor with whom to discuss my ideas about poetry, which often needed to be clarified by
dialogue before taking a comprehensible shape in words. I want also to acknowledge my debt to
professor Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, whose constant reassurance and enthusiasm encouraged me to
pursue this line of research; to professor Francesca Bisutti for inviting me to explore the
merging of literature and visual arts; to professor Elide Pittarello, whose courses provided me
with innumerable clues so as how to let pictures speak within literary texts; to professor Patrizia
Magli for giving me precious suggestions as regards the connection between word and image
and for fostering my reconstruction of the Parisian artistic milieu that exerted such a decisive
influence on Becker‟s painting; to professor Shaul Bassi for widening my view of the processes
of „incorporation‟ and „embodiment‟ within post-colonial literature; to Riccardo Held, for
discussing with me my interpretation of Rilke‟s Requiem; to John Phillimore, for always having
the right book among his Old World Books; to professors Maria Grazia Ciani and Margherita
Losacco from the University of Padova, for asking me to translate Adonais by P. B. Shelley and
therefore allowing me to perceive better the difference between the „I‟ of the poet and the „I‟ of
the speaker.
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My heartfelt thank you also goes to Anne Michaels and Sujata Bhatt, whose willingness to
share with me the joys and pains of their creative life I consider the expression of long-lasting
friendship. A most special thank you to Verena Borgmann at the Museum Paula Modersohn-
Becker in Bremen for assisting me in my research and showing me paintings which were not on
exhibit. For a similar reason I am extremely grateful to Wolfgang Werner, who showed me his
personal collection of paintings by Becker. I will never forget the warm welcome that Heinz
Thies and his wife gave me and Sujata Bhatt within the Haus Paula Becker in Bremen. Far from
being just the keepers of the house, they are amongst the truest “resuscitators” of Paula Becker.
Thank you also to Bhatt‟s husband Michael Augustin for guiding us over his mobile phone in
our trip to Worpswede on a summer day undermined by pouring rain…
I also wish to express all my gratitude to my dearest friends, for being there and
enthusiastically sharing my passion for poetry. I can always feel their closeness even when I‟m
journeying far in my imagination: Letizia, Elena, Christina, Paola, Livia, Morgana, Ornella,
Giorgia; Elisa, Giancarlo and Agnese; Paolo; Carola; Alessandro; Giulia and Giulio; Renza,
Paolo and Elisa; Emilia; Davide; Philippe, my “fratello Filippo Lippi;” Sylviane; Sylvie; John
and Sally; Luciana; Elio and Andrea; Barbara; Federico; Miriam, Filippo, Roberta, Gianluca; a
special thank you to Marco and Giulio for asking my collaboration to „give life‟ to a character
on the stage; Lorenzo & Sara, with whom I have been constituting an indivisible threesome
since the day they were born, and Guido, as I do not think that I can do without him.

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PROLOGUE
A Room of Mirrors

When one tries to piece together German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker‟s short but very
prolific journey into life and art at the beginning of the twentieth century, one undoubtedly
enters a room of mirrors. Not only is it impossible to speak of her without taking into
consideration the influence of other artists and friends on her, but especially if one – as is my
personal experience – has discovered her by reading poems by living women poets such as
Canadian Anne Michaels (1958), Indian Sujata Bhatt (1956) and American Adrienne Rich
(1929), the room of mirrors widens and becomes more and more articulated, like a labyrinth.
This research aims at exploring the reasons for a multiple fascination: why does Paula
Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) after her death haunt Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) as a
ghost that can find no peace in the hereafter? and, what is more, why does her experience as a
woman artist go on haunting three women poets of the present time, who have written poems –
and series of poems – in the first person, giving voice to her?
As can be inferred, this research is to be considered either a ghost story or, from a more
mystic point of view, the account of successful embodiments, which are equally revelatory of
the past as of the present. In the interstices between the real story involving various characters as
well as Paula Becker and the parallel figures created by the poems, the form of the dramatic
monologue (that is to say the poetic expression which best allows possible embodiments)
perfectly serves as a way of entering a slippery yet vital theme, that is to say the one of “Love as
the condition of personality, and vice versa,” as John Bayley defines it in his book The
Characters of Love (265). According to him, it is inevitable that treating such a subject requires
the form of the embodiment: “Love is not a theme that can be penetratingly explored,
compassionately revealed, and so forth. It cannot be revealed at all: it can only be embodied”
(265). And the ability to use literature as a form of embodiment depends on the author‟s attitude
towards his or her own characters. As Bayley remarks, “that author, if fact, is best on love who
best loves his own creations” (7). It seems a truism but it is not, as “The writers whom we
admire to-day do not appear to love their characters, and the critics who appraise their books
show no sign of doing so either. […] Characters, it seems, are no longer objects of affection.
The literary personality has gone down in the world.” Bayley‟s book is dated 1960 and maybe it
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is not by accident that, starting from the Seventies, three poets undertook the experience of
embodying Paula Modersohn-Becker‟s art and life by using the form of the dramatic
monologue. Becker‟s painting was not certainly so renowned at that time but what struck the
three poets is that at the base of her experience was the principle that “art is like love,” as “the
more one gives, the more one receives” (The Letters and Journals 315). At the end of the last
century there seemed to be a form of poetic experimentalism which tried to concentrate less on
purely intellectual issues and was keener on undertaking the human adventure to embody some
other artist‟s personality. The form of dramatic monologue that each time is chosen for this
particular purpose does not aim to be explicitly avant-garde, but in fact it turns out to be so, due
to its deepest need not only to give life to Paula Modersohn-Becker but to represent her as
truthfully as possible on the page.
Bayley himself underlines the danger of creating a language for reflecting on a work of the
imagination which is fundamentally different from the language of the work itself (268), and so
the present study attempts to approach its subject with a language which does not sound too
constrictive or classificatory, but rather aims to enter the poems as if they were places, places of
the imagination where besides Paula Becker a certain number of characters, seen from the
outside and the inside, can be met along the way. A similar approach has directed the translation
of the poems included in the Epilogue. The most successful ones are not only mirrors of reality,
but also a possible expansion of it.
Literature then, and poetry in particular, come to fulfill one of its most important functions,
that is to say to give back to the reader not only some figures of artists portrayed in their time,
but also some unknown or invented chapters of their life, as well as possible links and hints to
the present time. As Emily Dickinson well said in her poem [657], “Possibility” is “A fairer
House than Prose – / More numerous of Windows – / Superior – for Doors.” Like the language
of the poems, the language of this study tries to open as many windows and doors as possible,
without closing them in any definitive interpretation. The poems are read using as critical guides
some of John Bayley‟s and Isobel Armstrong‟s works. Both critics in fact see the poem as the
expression of the poet‟s inner division and the result of an unsolved struggle between “a
manifest and a latent content, a conscious and unconscious desire” (Armstrong 10). Bayley goes
even beyond this affirmation and in The Uses of Division (1976) says that the division itself can
be a fundamental and relevant aspect of the work of art. The critic‟s aim therefore consists in
detecting it, not in bringing it to a supposed latent or hinted at unity:

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We take for granted that the work of art represents a solution, a confluence and a harmony –
getting the statue clean away from the marble, as D. H. Lawrence called it – and again the
obvious truth in such metaphor is not what is here in question: what matters, rather, is the
extent to which disunity and division may themselves have become aspects – indispensable
and irremovable ones – of the artistic whole. (12)

Instead of reading the contradictory and divided contents of any work of literature as one of
its possible limits, or just as its surface hiding a deep cohesion, the critic, according to Bayley,
should be ready to face the inner division as its real necessity, since the same inalienable
meaning certainly could not be conveyed by a coherent text: “The point would be how such a
literature works on us, and how we work upon it, finding what accident rather than intention put
there, and perceiving ourselves how contradictions enlarge and emancipate the world of
experience it offers” (12).
Therefore not only the critic, but the reader too, should not look for a solution of contrasts in
the text, but on the contrary, they should go in search of signs of incongruence as they signal the
great depth of what the author had to say which could not be expressed in its entirety through
logic:

To possess an „inside‟ a work of literature must display as a part of its achievement
some kind of reticence, and the tensions of reticence; and these are a sure indication
of powers unresolved below the surface, unresolved in what they suggest to us and
the impression they make, but effective and triumphant at the level of artistic
exposition. (13)

Not only Michaels‟, Bhatt‟s and Rich‟s poems have therefore been read according to this
view but also Rilke‟s Requiem for a Friend, dedicated to Paula Becker, which is to be
considered the unavoidable source of inspiration of the three poets‟ dramatic monologues. One
can say that each poem strives to achieve wholeness but in fact results in an orchestration of
inner conflicts and contradictions and cannot but take the form of an inescapable fragmentation.
A text, in fact, in Armstrong‟s words, “is endless struggle and contention, struggle with a
changing project, struggle with the play of ambiguity and contradiction. This is a way of reading
which gives equal weight to a text‟s stated project and the polysemic and possibly wayward
meanings it generates” (10). The more a poem remains mysterious to the reader after all the
possible inferences have been made about it, the more such poem is to be considered a work of
art. This is why, commenting on T. S. Eliot‟s affirmation that Shakespeare‟s Hamlet was “most
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certainly an artistic failure,” Bayley completely reverses the judgement by choosing the opposite
approach:

The success is in presenting a play which retains its mystery in idea while wholly and
prodigally spending its material in action. Hamlet is, so to speak, superficial at the highest
level. That Shakespeare did not „know‟ Hamlet is certain; but that he grasped what was
involved must be equally the case, and the turmoil of what was involved, which the artist
does not have to get straight or make up his mind about, settles out at the point of maximum
effect. (15)

Paula Modersohn-Becker was certainly an attractive subject from this point of view, because
as a woman painter all her life she struggled with an inner division between her family duties
and her art. It was surely harder for her with respect to W. B. Yeat‟s edict quoted by Bayley, that
“the intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work,” for at least two
reasons. First, because the struggle for a woman artist does not only concern the “intellect” but
also the body, which is a fundamental source of artistic expression; and secondly because
Becker was not interested in “perfection,” but rather in finding a way to reveal the inner and
most secret life of the subjects and objects that she painted. And, as Becker very well knew,
such an intent does not include perfection among its possible results.
Yet her conflict between art and family duties seemed to be close to being solved at the end
of her life, which unfortunately came too soon to give her the opportunity to ascertain if she
really had come to a profitable solution. The poems where she is given voice achieve their
utmost emotional effect when they do not try to „mend‟ Becker‟s division or to take position by
fostering one side or the other of the conflict but dare to dwell within her sharpest
contradictions.

What seems fundamental, therefore, is the poets‟ effort to embody Paula Becker, their attempt to
undergo the same experience that the painter and the group of artists surrounding her entered
into by influencing one another. Different codes of expression, and a conception of art as a form
of disinterested love which could be freed from some of the social and family constraints,
attracted Becker and the other artists of her milieu to the same core of a truth which they felt had
still to be fully unveiled. Not only was failure part of their great success in the respective arts,
but it was also the reason why they so needed one another despite the clashes of opinions,
misunderstandings or serious quarrels over personal or artistic matters which often threatened to
distance them from one another.
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