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In Mary Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, A Fiction, which is really truly a hybrid memoir, she writes of her own love for her friends, and fleeting happiness.
“I follow a fleeting good, an ignis fatuus; but this chase, these struggles prepare me for eternity—when I no longer see through a glass darkly I shall not reason about, but feel in what happiness consists.”
(-Wollstonecraft, from Mary, a Fiction)
And from her unfinished novel, Maria, Or, the Wrongs of Woman, which she was writing at the time of her death, ten days after giving birth to her daughter, Mary (Godwin) Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1797. In this unfinished novel, Maria, is a woman kept in an asylum; her husband committed her for hysteria.
“A magic lamp now seemed to be suspended in Maria’s prison,
and fairy landscapes flitted round the gloomy walls, late so blank.
Rushing from the depth of despair, on the seraph wing of hope,
she found herself happy.
—She was beloved, and every emotion was rapturous.”
(Wollstonecraft, from Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman)
Today is May Day, and so I feel hopeful: my dachshund-pointer, Sophie-Bea turns 13 years old sometime this month, or the next. I watched her sitting in the backyard today and wrote this poem. It may seem like a strange combination or association, but Mary Wollstonecraft was a double-Taurus, and we are now in the “season of Taurus,” and my dog is Taurean, and I, like Mary Wollstonecraft, and my dog, were all born in what is known as the “Third Lunar Mansion” with the moon in Taurus. I used all of the words from the two quotes from Wollstonecraft to help me articulate my emotions around my love for Sophie-Bea.
A magic(-ical) moon in Taurus,
at that degree between Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft,
I share their possessive tendencies
toward appreciating good and beautiful things. We were born
in the third lunar mansion
as though we possessed a genie’s good will
and an instinct to follow a glowing lamp
lit us up led us along
that path of the will o’ the wisp,
now it’s fleeting,
this good fortune and not one of us (well, maybe Rousseau)
languished in its light. I tend to think that the little pleasures
birdsong, a lake swim, hearing the foxes in the woods
under a full moon, or the heart-wrenching call of the loons,
or watching my beloved dachshund-pointer recline in the grass,
her hind legs splayed frog-like,
sniffing the spring air,
all seemed so good for a few years.
We hiked and swam, romped through meadows;
she followed butterflies and splashed into the waves
at the ocean. But these days, these perfect days
of joy and unrelenting freedom, at times of crisis, or illness,
I now realize they turned out to be an ignis fatuus
a meandering marsh fairy leading me along a lovely
sunlight dappled forested path to an unknown meadow, or glade.
My dog is equally enchanted,
and we just keep going, no intentions of
ever returning to the car
or wherever we have to be.
It started with a funny cough. But this
merely suspended our runs through the land trust preserve,
and brisk beach walks in November.
She fainted once, then in the fall,
her lungs filled with fluid; she went into congestive heart failure.
In delirious optimism, or denial, we chased
remedies and recipes for low-sodium diet for her.
I started cooking for my dog. Sweet potatoes,
chicken (no salt), grilled asparagus, turkey, salmon fillets,
and kale—surprisingly, she loves green vegetables,
and cucumber slices (and fish).
In the summer heat of a Maine heat wave,
I filled the kiddie pools in the yard, and she waded.
We visited my mother by the river, and Sophie-Bea
lounged in the marsh, a healthy curve to her back,
she reclined like an empress in a salty breeze
while I swam. She watched me
From the riverbank, occasionally wading into the water
herself to cool her round belly.
Perfect days like this I find myself singing to myself,
“How do you solve a problem like Maria’s?”
All of my favorite things—and my lovely little dog
In one place: the river, the seaweed,
the hummingbirds swooping as I rinse off in the shower—
And she seems comfortable, breathing easy,
meanders like a four-legged elf along the shore,
Her black spots on her white body almost resemble
a longer version of a cartoon “Snoopy,”
But with an elegant Elizabeth Taylor
from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” feminine self-assurance
She knows where’s she’s going, and what she wants to do.
These small pleasures I cherish watching her.
In winter, I know, it will be the opposite:
the freezing cold temperatures and storms,
the storms I used to love for all of their dramatic appeal—
the warmth of the woodstove — Instead, these stormy
wintry nights feel like an exhausting prison. I turn on the humidifier,
I make the air as breathable as possible for her. She struggles.
I worry and prepare for the worst.
February, my favorite month, becomes a nightmare of sorts,
and I think I’ve lost her. But, like the forest, this heart disease
of hers is a weird unpredictable experience. She tells me,
“I’m happy.” She flits about the house, playful with her toys,
interested in new foods, and charming new side of her emerges
nearly like a marsh fairy. Suddenly, my dachshund-pointer
is cheery again, the worst is over: it’s spring again; she’s pointing.
She’s in the yard, looking for birds, or squirrels,
but not chasing anything.
She walks calmly.
She traverses the woods
soft-stepped, a sure-footing,
and doesn’t take her chances
with more than a trot through the yard in the rain.
This rare time of year we see the pond
through the trees, and feel grateful for these warm,
sunny landscapes – patches of blue buds of green and
red on the trees. My dog is nearly thirteen-years-old,
either this May or June—
(hard to say because she was a rescue)
but she was definitely born under the influence of Taurus!
One of her most defining characteristics,
besides strong neck and shoulders, her independence!
When not on her 50’ long “training leash” in the yard
(a precaution, post-diagnosis)
She flitted through the woods like a wood frog or songbird,
or fairy. She’d disappear, and reappear
with black legs—evidence of her visit to the Bog of Eternal Stench
in the black ash seep just beyond Fern Gully here at Nixie’s Vale.
I forgave the eternity of bog aroma because I love her—
and lavender coat conditioner works quite nicely.
When we swam out deep
Together, that first August of 2009,
in the lake I knew like the back of my own thigh, I knew
She was a keeper—my soulmate,
the kind of dog with a pointy-dachshund face and a round
curvy torso, wagging full-bodied, and could jump six feet into the air
from a standing position—
Unusual and completely unexpected.
I had known the gloomy days of post-traumatic stress, months,
no, years of the gloom I could not quite pierce (even with my herbal remedies)
Until I found my dog. No, I don’t think my dog was a “crutch,”
as one psychologist suggested.
We found our footing together;
she was recovering from whatever horrible trauma in Arkansas,
I think she was a recovering model for Purina,
or a hunting school failure, abandoned
on a highway in Hot Springs. Together, in my house in the vale,
our walls came down. Some nights, she slept-walked into the closet,
and climbed into my laundry basket,
I’d go and turn the light on, and wake her; she’d look around,
disoriented. The longer she
She’d go without sleep-walking, for months—
this happened late at night, she did so without
ever once making a noise—not a bark, not a yip,
no sound uttered from her throat.
It was as if her ululative instincts were inhibited,
or dysfunctional; she could not ululate.
We formed a language in other ways;
I made hand gestures, and she mouthed my hand
While we walked side-by-side. In the night,
she began making little sniffy noises, huffs, and sighs
until a year had gone by, and she finally, for the first time, barked!
And then it was as if a window had opened.
Her personality shined through in the second year—so see-through
We were transparent to one another.
She knew my secrets, and I knew hers.
Her expressions
Just a look and I could read her eyes;
we talked a myriad of miscellaneous trivia her news of the woods
The kinds of conversations you can only have
with a dog who already knows your past
by smelling all that permeates your skin
your bedsheets your clothing and your wall is blank glass
The two of you together—dog and woman—
might as well be mother and daughter,
Or confidantes, or two lovers, as weird as that may sound—
at least, two souls darkly
Aware of one another’s dreams and nightmares;
we wake the other up when the images
Come rushing in the night like a thunderstorm, or howling wind.
I guess she is a part of me from every vulnerability
and the parts that we cannot eat, or climb under to make a den,
Or swim through to cool our bellies, we shall make do with,
she and I know the depths
We go to avoid death. Of more than one occasion,
this dog has simply saved my life, and then
Saved the lives of others, who never knew her name,
or cared. She also helped small children
Overcome their cynophobia (and their parents,
delighted, stood back and let them pet her)
Sophie-Bea took this responsibility very seriously—
on her back, motionless, full submission
Not to interfere, I stepped aside to let her shine.
She thrives in the company of admirers.
In solitude, during isolation, we do not despair.
We take solace in the slope of the yard,
The birdsong and sunshine, a reason for living—
she reclines on the deck.
A phoebe swoops and lands on the back of my chair.
Up close, I make eye contact, and wish
This is an on omen. Sophie-Bea glances over briefly,
the seraph-like bird flexes her little wings
And is off again. I sip my tea and make a wish
about this day, but of course I know
I can only hope she will still feel content
and comfortable tomorrow and in the days that follow.
Today I found out she will not eat liver
(another thing we have in common)
What she will eat, and when, is a mood-dependent lunar thing.
She knows herself.
Now that the sun and the planets are in the sign of Taurus,
I feel happy, and hopeful.
She is breathing easy tonight, this May Day,
and was able to walk about her beloved yard.
And inspect the perimeter of every corner of her territory.
These small victories
Conjure an emotion in me that stir that magical lamp
and I again call upon the genie, if he, or she,
Might still be listening, and if the genie was willing to make note:
my list consists of her happiness
All these spring afternoons, for her,
I wish for easy breathing, birdsong, and breeze-sniffing:
and dreaming butterfly meadows
and grassy beds on the riverbank rapturous.
Poetics. When I began to study poetics, I did not fully appreciate what contemporary poetics examines. It’s not simply the “form” of poems. It’s critical theory.
Cruel optimism. When I read Sappho’s poetry in Early Modern Poets class last fall, I encountered the idea of “cruel optimism” in the Sapphic principles of the unattained attachment and the significance—or imperative of the absent “object of desire,” even before reading Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011). In her tenacious dissection of her term, “cruel optimism,” which she defines and illustrates by way of several expressions, for example, an attachment to a “cluster of promises” for an “impossible” identity, outcome, potentiality, ‘sheer fantasy,’ or ‘toxic’ situation, (Berlant, 2011) and examples as shown with poetry, e.g. John Ashbery’s poem, “Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse,” (“We were warned about spiders, and the / occasional famine.” […] “He came up to me.”) in which the poetics of attachment play out before and after the critical action in the line, “He came up to me.” (For the full poem by John Ashbery, visit the Language Hat blog post here.)
Anyone hooked on the twenty-first century trend of “mindfulness” and “living in the moment” must read Berlant’s work on “cruel optimism,” as Berlant interrogates the notions of the “present” as found in lyric poetry; when we study lyric poetry, we take for granted that the present holds weight and meaning. Berlant challenges the present as it operates on other levels in the poetics of attachment: 1) She writes, “one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection as a way of thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling.” (Berlant, 2011) To this, I reflect on early modern poets including Queen Elizabeth I herself, and Sir Philip Sidney, whose lyric poems projected happiness onto the object of their desire whether it was a physical person, such as “Stella” in “Astrophil & Stella” or the queen’s youth in her sonnet, “When I was fair and young.”
Secondly, Berlant asserts 2) that the poetics of attachment by way of “cruel optimism” create “a fake present moment of intersubjectivity” (Berlant, 2011) in which the object of desire, such as an ex-lover, a lost cause, a ghost—is absolutely absent. Thus, the “cruel optimism” is of a “potential occupation of the same psychic space” to allow an imaginary scenario to exist for the poet/writer. (Berlant, 2011) Thirdly, this functions as a projection onto 3) an “impossible identity,” open-ended meanings, “boundary-dissolving,” (Berlant, 2011) a myriad of poetic osmosis happening between the speaker and the addressee, whose identity may even be imaginary and unrecognizable to the real person or muse who inspired the poem.
Holding the magnifying lens to Berlant’s work, we find an inverted focus on the “other” as this imaginary, affected attachment, nearly artifice. And we find the speaker, the “I” and the “self.” In Judith Butler’s work, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” (2001) the poetic accountability of these two bookend identities, or interpersonal perspectives, come into focus. The “self” and “the other” are constructions of the poem; these could be anything (as in Margaret Cavendish’s 17th century dialogue poems, in which she imagines a conversation between a man and a tree, for instance, or her own “self” interrogating her “barren” fertility problems and casting these as the “other”), not necessarily two individual human beings as subjects. Recognizing the ‘other’ is “subjected to that norm and agency of its use,” as Butler explains. (Butler, 2001) She writes, “I am compelled and comported outside myself,” and “the subject of recognition is one for whom a vacilliation between loss and ecstasy,” as it is the “possibility of the ‘I’ and the knowing of the ‘I.’” (Butler, 2001.)
In my work with the Gothic (or the EcoGothic, and Romantic-Gothic) women writers of the 1790s and early 19th century, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley, I search for this very phenomenon: where does the writer recognize her own “I” and situate herself apart from the “other” or conversely, portray herself as the other? This is, as I understand Butler’s work, a kind of poetic accountability (or accountability of poetics). The functionality of the “I” (for example, the female Gothic “I” or the lyrical “I” in contemporary poetry, or in Millay’s sonnets, her “I”) transgresses the boundaries of the “I” and confronts the liminal space around the “other.” At times, when we are hunting for the “other,” we find a convergence of the “I” with the “other” in this liminal space, a dissolving of boundaries, much the way Lauren Berlant talks of attachment poetics. When the poet or speaker, (or poetics scholar) is held accountable, these confrontations and central questions around self and otherness act as a frame of reference to position the other in relation to the self (or vice versa).
(my “Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster, on the Eve of her Wedding”) LCS Mixed Media watercolor in my art journal
Interiority, or interior subjects, then become dependent on this relationship, and in some cases, the self (as “I”) is relying on the conventional norms of the other (as “you”) so that the poem has some basis in a hypothetical singularity. “The notion of singularity is often bound up in existential romanticism and a claim of authenticity.” (Butler, 2001) What strikes me about Butler’s work is a call to authenticate the “self,” in relation to other living beings (mostly human), in a way that seems reminiscent of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and other Romantics, especially women writers in Romanticism (and even dark Romanticism, e.g. Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley). I find myself making connections between the 18th century philosophical writings of literary critics and writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and J.J. Rousseau, and the literary critics and sociologists like Berlant and Butler—specifically on the subject of the “self” and the “other,” and the problem of attachment, a favorite subject of both J.J. Rousseau and M. Wollstonecraft! So, it would seem we are still troubled by attachment poetics, and still perplexed by the recognition of the “self” and the “other” two hundred years later.
In short, as a poet, I am guilty of crafting poems on the fragile, filamented, fragmented scaffolding of “cruel optimism.” (See my poem, “Capes and Daggers,” Fish Anthology 2019) In fact, I confess it’s a favorite tactic. Berlant’s interrogation of “cruel optimism” further disrobes the idea of the “affective attachment,” and positions the poet (or speaker) as the ‘wearer’ of the thing, effectively “wearing of the subject” and being “worn.” I love this idea of wearing the attachment like a garment but also wearing it down, the way a spirit must wait until the affected speaker is weary, vulnerable, and ready to be possessed—by desire, by this cruel optimism to a “proximate location” to, as Berlant alludes, the “good life.” (Berlant, 2011) Possession, both as a state of being, and as affective attachment, and possessiveness, as a trait, or quality, seem like a fitting mode that suspend “the cruelty of the now,” (Berlant, 2011) by building a fantasy scaffolding on the promise of an imminent happiness (reconciliation, reunion, resolution, miracles, once was lost but now found, etc.) I would love the opportunity to examine specific poems and apply Berlant’s model of “cruel optimism” to analyze how poems given an imaginary voice to the voiceless (ie. an absent actor). What about Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets (those she’s written as a widow grieving her husband’s death)? Or, as a parallel example, it would be useful to create case-studies on several poets from different periods.
Cruel optimism seems to champion a kind of identity theft and reclamation at the same time. Poetics of attachment don’t work to retain or retrieve that identity all at once, but incrementally, in fragments, almost like a reversed Petrarchan blazoning. The speaker, by analogy, throws pieces of that impossible identity at a moving target, like a blindfolded knife-thrower releases daggers at a costumed assistant, spinning around on the wheel of death/transformation. No one ever really knows much about the knife-thrower’s assistant; in Berlant’s work, this is the “faceless universal subject of self-referentiality” (Berlant, 2011) as the action of the poem is not necessarily real; it may be illusion, the illusion of attachment, ultimately, an illusion of the ‘American dream.’
This coming Sunday, February 21st, the Farnsworth Museum in Maine is hosting a special event to honor Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s free and open to the public.
One of the few helpful aspects of social distancing and self-isolation during this horrible time of the COVID-19 has been taking the time, in solitude, to read, write, organize, create, sketch, and to revisit old favorite hobbies, and passions, like art. Back in March, when my university transitioned to online courses, and my state governor issued a Stay-at-Home order, I felt reasonably “ok” with that, since I felt it was a good time to focus on my graduate study, which requires a lot of reading and writing. Last fall, two of my faculty advisors asked me a difficult philosophical question about why researching the topics I’d proposed was important to me–personally--and my answers then seemed flaky, e.g. “I am Lady of the Lake!” So, I have been thinking about how to answer those questions. It seems like I should be prepared to answer thoughtfully.
In May, I received Honorable Mention for my poem, “My Glacial Erratic,” in the 2020 Fish Poetry Prize, judged and selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. My poem will appear in the 2020 Fish Anthology, coming out later this summer. (That’s with Fish Publishing, which holds a number of writing contests each year, based in Ireland.) Since then, I’ve written new poetry, and started drawing images that go with my poetry, and some of it is inspired by recent coursework. Selkies, mermaids, the Irish merrow, bog-women, the Lady of the Lake, and other supernatural female figures in literature (Romanticism as well as other periods, particularly Gothic literature and Arthurian lit) have captured my imagination.
Enter art journaling. To work through some of my ideas, I’ve returned to art journaling, which is something that I used to do as a teenager, and in my early 20s. It’s now summer, and I’m still self-isolating, and spending a great deal of time at home, on my own, creating. I’ve started working in a blank canvas art journal (Jane Davenport’s supplies). One thing that art journaling allows is for storytelling and concept mapping.
It never occurred to me to use my art (and poetry) to think critically about my proposed research, or to answer philosophical questions about my interdisciplinary research. I’d been approaching it methodically, seriously–with critical annotations, a working bibliography, term papers as building blocks, outlines. Now I’m approaching it differently, and I’ve got images of mermaids, selkies, bog-women, and memories of Ireland in my head.
Part of that’s influenced by the research I did on Traditional Ecological Knowledge of seaweed harvesting in Ireland for a term paper. Part of it’s inspired by a Celtic Studies class I’m taking led by Dr. Sharon Blackie. I read her book, Foxfire, Wolfskin, and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women (September Publishing, 2019) which I loved.
There’s something very liberating about making art. And it’s a good exercise to pick up a different tool–any tool–whether it’s a paint brush or fountain pen–but a physical tool, one that can be held in the hand to transmit ideas from the mind to the page. I love color. I’ve always responded emotionally to color. As a kid, the gift of a set of colored pens delighted me more than dolls or toys. I made art consistently throughout my teens, twenties, and early 30s but then paused while I focused on other projects (teaching, writing and editing, and founding a coalition–didn’t leave much time for art-making.) I still love art supplies and colored pens. Recently, I’ve become quite smitten with art supplies by Jane Davenport, an Australian artist and designer, known as an “Artomologist,” a play on her nature photography, and particularly her love for ladybugs, and other insects. I’ve also really enjoyed her books, such as Marvelous Mermaids. Jane Davenport has a series of art tutorials on Youtube, and I’ve really enjoyed rediscovering my love for making art, partly inspired by her wonderful books, tutorials, and using some of her supplies. The “Mermaid Markers” are some of my favorite supplies, a water-reactive brush pen, like a watercolor alternative, that’s been fun to use. But my absolute favorite thing of hers is the fountain pen, an INKredible pen.
Twenty years ago, I filled a portfolio while taking a watercolor painting class at College of the Atlantic. Prior to that, I was a writing-art double major (or English major, art minor) at St. Lawrence University, where I studied art and art history quite seriously. For at least ten years, from high school through college, at four different schools, I loved making art. I incorporated art visuals into my poetry projects and liked making books. Then, in 2004, while in grad school at COA, I was living in a small cottage with a 15-year-old water heater, which leaked badly, flooding my little home, and saturating all of my possessions. My draft master’s thesis, which I’d meticulously organized into piles and chapters, along with my notes and data on my living room floor, floated in ankle-deep water on a soggy shag carpet. Even my old Dell laptop was submerged. One of the fatal losses that really crushed me at the time, three full art portfolios containing all of my art from more than four years in studio art classes–drawings, paintings, photography, self-portraits, watercolors, some of which I’d planned to frame someday (when not working on my master’s thesis). All of my art disintegrated. It was so shocking and sad, I focused on other things, like completing my master’s degree, and moved forward with other projects, and left my ruined art and love for making art, in the past. I still sketched with pastels and colored pencils, and used graphics design in my work…but I took a break from painting (a hiatus?) that seemed to last years.
In recent years, I’ve rediscovered my love for Kettle Cove State Park (southern Maine), and I have been lucky enough to swim in that small cove over an eelgrass meadow, where I swam and toddled around as a baby more than thirty-five years ago. Recently, I swam at high tide, in the wake of the New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer this June.
Every time I swim there, I am flooded with sensations, poems, ideas, and epiphanies. I’m rediscovering myself. I’m reinventing myself. Below is a weird “inner self-” portrait I painted, using watercolors and real Maine eelgrass, which coiled and wrapped around my neck and arms as I swam at Kettle Cove in June.
I collected a few blades of eelgrass, which were floating in the water, and coiled around my wrists as I swam to shore. It also washes ashore along with rockweed, so it’s easy to find there. I incorporated the eelgrass into my art journal.
Now, twenty years after my watercolor class in spring 2000 at COA, I’ve picked up my paint brushes again. I’ve started making art again, almost on a daily basis, for the past month. At some point, during the process of social distancing, self-isolating at my home in the Lakes Region of Maine, I felt inspired to start sketching some drawings of symbols and seaweed as part of projects, like the one I did for Folklore and Environmental Policy class. Then, I started sketching ideas for other aspects (inspired by literary works by Romanticism-era writers like Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft) while I organized a strategy for doing my graduate research. That led to the idea of starting an art journal that’s connected to the research I’ve been doing as a student in the Interdisciplinary PhD program. I’m a poet and “ecoheroine,” researching the Eco-Gothic and Arthurian lit in a tenacious pursuit of deep Romantic ecology of wetlands. Please see more of my work at my portfolio: https://www.blueheroneditor.com/
All of these images and photos are mine. Please don’t share my images. My art is work-in-progress. Thank you!
“The Invocation of Mary Shelley”
I contemplated the lake: tempted to swim, I stood on the shore in pitchy moonlight, a cascade of shadows in shapes of trees that tricked the eye into seeing some gigantic being, a monster from my past. To escape that memory of hell, I dropped my cloak, and retreating like an innocent-accused into her prison cell, I plunged into the calm, cool water. Whispering a poem as though it were prayer, it seemed that a fallen angel was quick to answer me. Bright flashes of lightning suddenly revealed clouds previously invisible in a black sky; the quiet storm illuminated the lake for several minutes until a dark, lacy veil descended like the faint sketches of an artist, crossing out first lines and drawing a new design, a pentimento of seasons. Summer rains had ceased; the cold miserable fall torrents replaced them, and my placid heart became agitated and weary. Wind licked waves and levitated them from their usual occupation. To my horror, a few curled into dorsal fins, a beast of prey in a troubled sea; I swam away, and slunk ashore, breathless with the thrill, and afraid.
Thunder erupted. Exhilarated, I pulled my shawl around my shoulders and watched the storm bestow a sublime, terrific power. Was I the only thing that beheld this beautiful scene? The frogs, I imagined, long had buried themselves with the worms in the earth. A loon wailed like a banshee. Once my eye recovered from the repeated flashes of lightning, I again retraced my path to the cottage where I took refuge in the most perfect solitude. Upon that vindication I sought from the judge, who bore witness to the depraved deeds of that dæmon, I passed whole days on the lake, often alone, or with a friend, listening to the loons, writing letters and allowing nature to restore me. On many an afternoon, I have seen this lake writhe and turn with the heart of a tempest, reflecting in some manner, the true passions of my nature, the fury and fears of a woman, whose airy singular voice, overwhelmed by danger, could not conquer violence, nor any nightmare, amid the crash and hollow cries of the nightly winds through tall pines.
It was a dreary day in November, many years later, when I tore up the papers that beheld his handwriting—that wretch who loomed like a hangman behind my back, transforming every staircase into a scaffold. I’d discovered the papers in a basket, and accordingly destroyed them, and placed them in the woodstove. I assembled some small branches and built a fire in the stove, watching the flames consume the haunted remnants of that evil spirit. Let those be the last words that fixed my fate to ruin. Here, in this bright cottage in a vale, I became my own protectress. This little wood became my hiding-place. In a nearby land preserve, I walked with my dog in meadows full of white flowers, alive with butterflies and wildness, that radiant sister to innocence. I became an advocate for Nature. It may seem a trifling service, lest I accomplish any small thing to prove myself worthy, at least I will be kind to my fellow creatures, and delight in every fortunate chance to row my little boat upon that lovely lake, or to swim in those glistening afternoons. To its powers of restoration, I owe my happiness. In spring, the ice melts, and a cool mist rises from the lake and flits about the forest; the sun sparkles on the lake, flickering through bare trees, allowing a glimpse of the water from my kitchen window. By late May, rains drench a lush green canopy. It bursts into birdsong. The woods become a fairy-land—rich in berries and nuts for the sparrow, wood frog and deer. -LCS
In the flash fiction experiment above, I was drawn to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s sublime imagery in her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, and her metaphor of the lake. When her hero/protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, rows across the lake, he sees his beautiful native land of Geneva, and he’s filled with a sense of relief–until he suddenly sees the gigantic creature, climbing a mountain in the distance, and Victor is again consumed by conflicted feelings of guilt, horror, fear, regret, and self-loathing. The lake seems to reflect his best and worst feelings about himself. I borrowed the lines, “I contemplated the lake,” “I took refuge in the most perfect solitude,” and “I passed whole days on the lake,” directly from Shelley’s novel, and kept those particular lines in mind as I wrote this flash fiction piece about a time, a dozen or so years ago, when I took refuge on a lake in Maine. There was in fact a “monster” of sorts, but not the kind that Victor reanimates in his apartment. The rest of my flash fiction piece is my own writing although I did experiment with a writing style that aspires to invoke the spirit of Mary Shelley, and a bit of her mother, too, Mary Wollstonecraft, especially in the line, “I became my own protectress,” even though neither Wollstonecraft nor Shelley ever penned that line. Both advocated for the idea of women becoming a “protectress” rather than looking to a man to fulfill that role. (See Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)
Water is a strong element in Mary Shelley’s writing; she seems to use the water element–whether mist, ice, snow, rain, lakes and the river–to convey human emotion. The type of water she uses and the condition of the weather seems to match the emotional condition of her characters.
©Leah C Stetson, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2024
Just a little full moon lunar eclipse poetry…
Lunatic
Those devoted to hunting Big Foot
Under the dark New Moon in Aries,
The full-bodied nighttime hunts,
When lunatics lurk and veer
Toward some fallen staccato,
In the black ash jungle
of their father’s youth.
Half-cocked, half-blocked
By an impatience to prove it.
They head for dark. They duck.
They dive. Winds whistle and howl.
Tree branches lumber low
Like large hairy arms.
They set the trap.
They wait.
‘Shall each beast have his mate?’
Pondered Shelley’s tall Monster;
Wolfman couldn’t contemplate
His cursed life without her;
And Lovecraft’s lone Outsider
Didn’t go to the dinner party.
It’s an unusual girl, a fighter,
Firefly-eyed and moonstruck,
Who sends the invitations.
And then she’s late;
Hence the ruckus.
Wearing her strangeness
Like a charm necklace:
Shark teeth, broken
Turquoise rings,
And a paua shell heart.
She waits by the gate,
Inhaling wild grapes,
Plump on tangled vines.
She dodges dragonflies
As they metamorphize
Into fantasies, her prize
Mate of another kind.
LCS
The Adventures of Fen Fatale ~ Ecoheroine 