Gilbert, Sandra M.
GILBERT, Sandra M.
Pseudonym: Rosette Lewis. Also has written as Sandra Ellen Mortola and S.M. Gilbert. Nationality: American. Born: Sandra Ellen Mortola, New York City, 27 December 1936. Education: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, B.A. (high honors) in English 1957; New York University, M.A. 1961; Columbia University, New York, Ph.D. 1968. Family: Married Elliot Lewis Gilbert in 1957 (died 1991); one son, two daughters. Career: Associate professor and professor of English, University of California, Davis, 1975–85; professor of English, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1985–89. Since 1989 professor of English, University of California, Davis. Awards: Eunice Tietjens memorial prize, Poetry, 1980; NEH fellowship, 1980–81, 1999; Rockefeller Foundation Humanities fellowship, 1982; Guggenheim fellowship, 1983; fellow, School of Criticism and Theory, 1984–96; Charity Randall award, International Poetry Foundation, 1990; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center residency, 1991; University of California President's fellowship, 1991–92; Union League prize, Poetry, 1995; Paterson prize, 1996, for Ghost Volcano; Bogliasco Foundation residency, 2000; Soros fellowship, 2000. D.Litt.: Wesleyan University, 1988. Member: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1997. Agent: Ellen Levine Agency, 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1801, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. Address: 53 Menlo Place, Berkeley, California 94707, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
In the Fourth World: Poems. University, University of Alabama Press, 1979.
The Summer Kitchen: Poems. Woodside, California, Heyeck, 1983.
Emily's Bread: Poems. New York, Norton, 1984.
Blood Pressure: Poems. New York, Norton, 1988.
Ghost Volcano: Poems. New York and London, Norton, 1995.
Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1999. New York, Norton, 2000.
Other
Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1973; revised edition, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, with Susan Gubar. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1979.
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth-Century, vol. I, The War of the Words, with Susan Gubar. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1987.
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. II, Sexchanges, with Susan Gubar. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1989.
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. III, Letters from the Front, with Susan Gubar. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1994.
Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy. New York, Norton, 1995.
Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama, with Susan Gubar. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Inventions of Farewell: A Millennial Book of Elegies. New York, Norton, 2000.
Editor, with Susan Gubar, Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1979.
Editor, Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York, Penguin, 1984.
Editor, with Susan Gubar, Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. New York, Norton, 1985.
Editor, with Susan Gubar, A Guide to the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York, Norton, 1985.
Editor, Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf. London and New York, Penguin, 1993.
Editor, with Susan Gubar and Diana O'Hehir, Mothersongs: Poems for, by and about Mothers. New York, Norton, 1995.
Editor, with Wendy Barker, The House Is Made of Poetry: Essays on the Art of Ruth Stone. Carbondale, Souther Illinois University Press, 1996.
*Critical Studies: By Chandra Mukerji, in Contemporary Sociology, 19(4), July 1990; by Beth Williams Baldwin, in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 33(2), 1990; by Marilyn May, in D.H. Lawrence Review, 23(1), spring 1991; by Margot Norris, in Comparative Literature, 43(2), spring 1991; "Learning to Read the Mother Tongue: On Sandra Gilbert's Blood Pressure" by Kevin Clark, in Iowa Review (Iowa City, Iowa), 22(1), winter 1992; "The Textual Mother As Unmothered Daughter" by Elizabeth L. MacNabb, in West Virginia University Philological Papers (Morgantown, West Virginia), 38, 1992; "Blindspots of an Old Dream of Equality: Liberal Feminism As Exclusionary Practice in 'No Man's Land'" by Vara Neverow-Turk, in Studies in 20th Century Literature, 17(1), winter 1993; by Elaine Showalter, in London Review of Books (London), 16(20), 20 October 1994; by Diane Wakoski and by Lisa Alther, both in Women's Review of Books, 12(10–11), July 1995; "Fighting for Herland: The Sex Wars of Gilbert & Gubar" by Paul Dean, in New Criterion (New York), 13(3), April 1995; "Sentences of Self and Blood and Sea: The Poetry of Sandra M. Gilbert" by Diane Raptosh, in RLA (West Lafayette, Indiana), 8, 1996.
Sandra Gilbert comments:
I am both a poet and a critic: in fact, though I started my writing life as a poet, I would have to confess that I achieved my earliest widespread recognition as a critic and specifically as a feminist critic. Yet in many ways, despite my intense commitment to verse, I think my career as a feminist literary critic has reflected my aesthetic ambitions as well as my political and theoretical interests. After all, I don't just believe that, as we used to say in the Women's Movement in the seventies, 'the personal is the political.' I also believe that 'the personal is the poetical.' At the same time, I want in poetry to find what visionary poets have always sought: the extraordinary in the ordinary, the numinous and luminous in the quotidian.
Where such a desire will lead me is something I am still struggling to understand.
* * *Sandra M. Gilbert's reputation as a feminist in the fields of English literature and in women's and gender studies knows almost no equal in the United States, acknowledging, of course, the equally indispensable role played by her coauthor, Susan Gubar. The wonderful scholarly books of Gilbert and Gubar—Shakespeare's Sisters and The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, along with their trilogy No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century—are required reading in many literature courses these days. Most feminists growing up in the academy during the late 1960s treasure the works of these two important women.
Given her established reputation as a feminist literary scholar, I do not envy Gilbert the task of launching herself as a poet. The public's expectations for her achievement are probably much too high. The ambition to excel in a line of creative work in a manner akin to her scholarly achievements may well have given her pause. As she knows all too well, women writers only lately have come to think of themselves as "conscious subjects in the world." They need to be possessed by their poems, and, to borrow from Mary Kinzie, it is necessary to remember that writing poetry is risk taking, a precarious venture of discovery in which very often the poet is still unfolding meaning as she parts from the poem. Until her fifth volume of poetry, Gilbert's poetic accomplishments benefit from being considered as provisional and still in the making. Poets, Kinzie writes in A Poet's Guide to Poetry, "stand upon the given in order to peer over into the unshaped but unfolding present." A close reading of the forms of their verse can help to fill out the partial presence they struggle to materialize in verse, something that is especially true in the case of Gilbert.
Gilbert has been writing and publishing poetry since the late 1960s. Her poetic accomplishments inevitably invite comparison to those of the best American women poets of the period and to her literary ancestors—Sylvia Plath, Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove, Adrienne Rich, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Compared to the poems of these writers, her poetry is pale. She has less technical command and a considerably more limited range, and she wants the genius that marks their imaginations. Her poems lack the precision of language that distinguishes the verse of Moore, Bishop, or Plath, nor do they have these poets' particularity of image. Although she has a love of music and writes movingly of her husband's devotion to Wagner, she does not possess the sense of rhythm and music that pervades Plath and Bishop's poetry. If readers expect to find a strong feminist bent in her verse similar to that of Adrienne Rich, they will again be disappointed. She is not a writer of political advocacy, nor does she share the lesbian agenda that is characteristic of Rich's poetry at its best. Gilbert certainly calls on her feminist traditions, even naming one of her five volumes of poetry Emily's Bread, thus evoking the two nineteenth-century poets, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, whom she greatly admires. She has crafted a volume of poetry, The Summer Kitchen: Poems, set in women's space and capturing a woman's voice and perceptions as well as experience. Christina Rossetti's brilliance found in "Goblin Market" has opened a vein of poetry to Gilbert, who similarly creates a grotesque and eerie mood in her book In the Fourth World as she catalogues the night creatures who appear to her in dreams and seem to hover just under appearances in her daylight world.
Gilbert's finest volume to date is Ghost Volcano, which demonstrates a much grater command of the poetic medium. In it she chronicles her mourning as she writes with an astonishing honesty and acute sense of loss about the wrongful death of her husband at the hands of surgeons, which left her a widow in 1991. In the collection she takes her place alongside the great male writers of elegies and numbers with Emily Dickinson in her ability to treat death and mourning in a singular fashion.
Gilbert is at her best when she sets forth familiar domestic subjects and offers a fresh understanding of them, at once both personal and universal. It is the candor behind her expressions of feeling that are memorable. Most of her poetry is written in a free verse that is almost prosaic. Throughout her career she plays with stanzaic form and gains her emotional effect by the play of enjambment and hard stops created by the way form and syntax strain against each other or coincide. She uses figurative language and conceits but does so only lightly. Similarly, her reliance on alliteration or onomatopoeia or even on unusual diction or demotic speech is limited.
Gilbert's are poems of intimacy and feeling, as shown by titles like "The Dream Kitchen," "The Dressmaker's Dummy," "Daguerreotype," and "'Fallen Woman.'" Her subjects are drawn from painting or music, and she also selects more unlikely and fresher subjects—the cocktail hour or a traffic jam or that of "Getting Fired, or 'Not Being Retained.'" Other poems are drawn from nature or call up occasional moments imbued with feeling, lyrical impulses hidden just beneath the surface of things. A sense of terror or uncertainty predominates her world in the early volumes In the Fourth World and Emily's Bread. She often opens a poem with a declaration of the hour or with a title that captures the place. Familiar figures from her personal and professional life are named in her poems, and their importance to her is evident and their place in the scheme of things is assumed but not demonstrated through her evocations of them. When Gubar or her husband, Elliot Lewis Gilbert, or one of her daughters is mentioned in a poem, there is, before Ghost Volcano, little effort to capture the person, to make the person real to the reader.
In Ghost Volcano, however, something different and utterly life changing has occurred, enabling Gilbert to write with an urgency and depth of feeling largely missing from her earlier poems. Her husband of more than thirty years has died, and his death, at age sixty-one, is obscene in her eyes. She uses memory and desire to recall and evoke him again and again so that she can recover him in some manner, making her feel less remote from him and less lost than she felt when he began to die abruptly on an operating table while she and her daughter were out shopping, at the surgeon's orders, in order to "distract themselves" during what should have been an ordinary surgery. Gilbert spent more than three years writing a memoir, Wrongful Death, detailing with brutal realism her husband's death at the hands of the medical profession.
In Ghost Volcano, amid formal elegiac poems, she interweaves in five sections the "Widow's Walk" poems, which appear throughout the volume, forming what she calls "a narrative of the stages of grief" that she was struggling through during the period. The volume also contains more formal elegies. One series of meditations, "Kissing the Bread," celebrates a custom practiced in the household of her mother but passed on to her from her Sicilian relatives and linking Christian and Jewish customs that celebrate life and death. Another poem sequence reflects on her husband's Jewish heritage and commemorates the 1,000 Jewish zealots who killed themselves at Massada rather than face conquest by the Romans. Two other sections, "Water Music" and "Calla Lilies," broaden the scope of the collection with musings on nature, water, and symbolic flowers, mining them for their mythopoetic elements and placing the death of her husband in a larger context. The lyrical poems carry personal significance but also universal feelings about the temporariness of life, the uncertainty of religion, and the desire to understand and know. Hovering behind Gilbert's elegies are Tennyson's In Memoriam and other elegies or elegiac sequences by Walt Whitman, John Milton, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning. Dylan Thomas, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and James Dickey, to name but a few, have all written poems memorializing someone they deeply loved, be it a father, daughter, student, or child killed by a firebombing in London, but women writers have traveled this terrain less frequently.
Gilbert's volume is unmistakably the elegy of a woman, and the great force and influence behind it is Dickinson, a poet so accustomed to visitations to deathbeds that her poems breathe and speak these visits. Gilbert's poems are those of a woman who is at once a wife, a companion to her husband, the mother of three children, and a teacher who practiced the same profession as her husband. She will not accept what she sees as the false comfort of religion; her world is a dangerous one with dark forebodings, a world in which religious zealots practice mass suicides and Halloween comes around yearly, spooking children with the idea of ghosts. Gilbert does not believe in ghosts, and she cannot be certain that there is a metaphysical sphere holding her loved husband. She does not share her husband's Jewish faith, for which she will not make an apology, and she refuses to believe that had she shared his religion she could have found greater comfort. He was scared at the thought of dying, she and he had their share of quarrels, and she is honest enough to acknowledge them. She fears that he has traveled so far from her—farther than the farthest star—that she does not know any other way of finding consolation and affirming his life than to keep him alive by the force of her memory and the power of her words and her chronicle.
Gilbert thus continues her imaginary conversations with her husband, and she revisits the places they have been. She looks down on one of the rock faces on Mount Rainer as she flies over it with a friend and sees in it the cold and implacable death mask of her husband. One of the most vivid and memorable poems in the collection is "February ll, 1992: At the Art Institute of Chicago," in which she calls forth her visit with her husband to see Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in near proximity in the Art Institute to van Gogh's painting of his screaming yellow bed and of the anguished "bloodied eyes" depicted in his self-portrait. Another equally brilliant poem incorporating the world of painting is "December 1, 1993: Paris, Looking at Monet," a poem about Monet's yellow irises and water lilies and their place in the life of Gilbert and her husband over the course of their marriage and during its aftermath.
I opened by suggesting that Gilbert's poetry is provisional, requiring an active reader who can enter into her poems, inhabit them, and keep working to complete the meanings she hints at on those occasions when her ultimate meaning is still unknown to her. Ghost Volcano leaves fewer moments undecided and succeeds by making the reader complicit in the poet's quest. The stakes are high. On Gilbert's part, her very life depends on keeping alive the man who is dead; on the reader's part, anyone who has lost someone vital to his being has a stake in her success.
—Carol Simpson Stern