Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity

Joanne Feit Diehl

Published by Princeton University Press 1993

Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore

The Psychodynamics of Creativity

Joanne Feit Diehl

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400820863

Overview
Contents

About this book

This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to-woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a far-reaching critical approach as she shows that Bishop, mourning her separation from her natural mother, strives to balance gratitude toward Moore, her literary mother, with a potentially disabling envy.

Diehl begins by exploring Bishop's memoir of Moore, "Efforts of Affection," as an attempt by Bishop to verify Moore's uniqueness in order to defend herself against her predecessor's almost overwhelming originality. She then offers an intertextual reading of the two writers' works that inquires into Bishop's ambivalence toward Moore. In an analysis of "Crusoe in England" and "In the Village," Diehl exposes the restorative impulses that fuel aesthetic creation and investigates how Bishop thematizes an understanding of literary production as a process of psychic compensation.

Author / Editor information

Joanne Feit Diehl is Henry Hill Pierce Professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination (Princeton) and Women Poets and the American Sublime (Indiana).

Reviews

Diehl's monograph on the psychodynamics of Bishop's relationship with Marianne Moore, her formidable predecessor and mentor, offers an intriguing reading of the literary mother and daughter. . .

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
INTRODUCTION: The Muse’s Monogram Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER ONE. “Efforts of Affection”: Toward a Theory of Female Poetic Influence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	10
CHAPTER TWO. Reading Bishop Reading Moore Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
CHAPTER THREE. The Memory of Desire and the Landscape of Form: Reading Bishop through Object-Relations Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
CONCLUSION: Object Relations, Influence, and the Woman Poet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117

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