As you begin to read Conjugal, sexual images flash inside your head. "He is bending her around the bedpost. No, he is bending her around the tripod of his camera...he is finding her nipples there...and his buttocks move in and out of the wall." It all sounds so sexual and explicit. Some of it is direct, while some of it is indirect. At first, I took the meaning of "bending" the wrong way. I thought, "Okay, this obviously stands for having sex..." But the indirect references threw me off. "It is as if he is teaching her to swim. As if he teaches acrobatics." Those lines gave me a push in a different direction.
When another one of Edson's poems, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was suggested to have meaning inside this poem, everything changed. The line, "He is bending her around something that she has bent herself around," made more sense to me. The bending isn't sexual intercourse, it's the husband driving his wife more "insane" over something already in her mind. He isn't literally teaching her how to swim, or acrobats, or actually using a camera. He is trying to mold her into what he thinks she should be, almost as if he was a teacher, teaching her to be someone else. "And it is such a private thing they do." The husband fitting his wife into a mold of the perfect woman is kept secret between the two spouses. Outsiders wouldn't see the corruption, only the couple. "He is convincing her," she's not being forced, just slowly persuaded.
"He is forming her into the wallpaper. He is smoothing her down into the flowers there. He is finding her nipples there. And he is kissing her pubis there." Forming her into the wallpaper seems to be a way of showing her uselessness, showing that she is purely for look, only a "trophy wife." She has lost her power of being her own person and is now useless as someone she is not. The flowers in the wallpaper represent her fragile femininity. The wife may have formed into her husband's ideals, but she lost herself along the way.
-Ariana Allison
Hi Ariana,
ReplyDeleteYou really get to the heart of this poem in your response.
I totally agree with you here:
“But the indirect references threw me off. "It is as if he is teaching her to swim. As if he teaches acrobatics." Those lines gave me a push in a different direction.”
Yes me too. Seems like he is choosing what he wants her to know. Both of these sports have something to do with flexibility and fluidity-- seemingly desirable feminine traits.
You also write:
“The wife may have formed into her husband's ideals, but she lost herself along the way.”
Yes. He also seems a little ashamed of this whole process, if you ask me. Both of them are trapped in this power structure. He has a little more movement “in and out” of the whole thing but he too, trapped.
Also, the same thing I wrote to Shebly, applies to you—the whole second paragraph, I was saying, “yes…yes…yes….” You made lots of great points!
Good stuff= 9