Back to Table of Contents
"For my argument," writes Zeiger, " it is crucial that Aids and breast cancer elegists have shown the way toward a productive engagement with a poetic genre freighted with ideology, oppression, and a tragic past"(167). In Beyond Consolation, Melissa F. Zeiger retraces and reconfigures women's representation within a masculine pastoral tradition. Zeiger's theoretical apparatus emerges out of psychoanalytic and deconstructive methodologies; these serve to expose the relevent themes of lack, absence, loss, and mourning, which Zeiger points to as the "origin of all linguistic performance or cultural construction" (11). Though she quotes Derrida repeatedly, her central stake seems to support canonizaton, albeit under different terms, and authorship. The 'death of the author' becomes, for Zeiger, the death of the "white male author-ity," and its regulatory machinery: "the specific theorization of elegy has proved to be one of the most productive undertakings of post-structuralist poetics" (3). Zeiger posits two models that have dominated the discussion of elegy: (1) "an anxiety-of-influence" model derived from Harold Bloom, and (2) "a work-of-mourning model" based on Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (3). Though Zeiger invests in these models as part of her own examination of the elegy, she sees them as limiting understanding, and not offering much beyond their mere rejection.
The author emphasizes literary-historical continuities in elegies, through a re-examination of elegiac poems, and the elegiac generic tradition, mainly drawing on the masculine pastoral traditon in English poetry (Shelley, Swinburne, Hardy, Berryman), but beginning with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As the author notes, female figures abound in canonical English elegies, "occupying constantly shifting roles as enabling or threatening adjuncts to the poetic process. Although the proliferation and multiple functioning of female figures in the traditional English elegy may serve to consolidate male literary authority, the sheer excess of these figures tends to betray an insecurity at the heart of that authority" (11). The Orphean myth serves as the exemplar for all English elegists, beginning with Milton, and moving into the nineteenth century. The myth of Orpheus, Zeiger argues, highlights misogyny, "manliness," as well as the poet's own "strength of will" (11).
In Chapter Three, "The Fading of Orpheus," Zeiger examines the "crucial and constitutive place" of women elegists, and their "writings on the dead" during the seventeenth century. One of "the few-then sanctioned" genres for women was poetry written for dead children (62). In Zeiger's estimation women's elegies permitted them a closer and more affectionate relationship to and with the dead.
The author connects Aids elegies with women's pioneering work during the seventeenth century. Later in the chapter, Zeiger introduces H.D's non-elegiac poem "Eurydice" in order to reveal some of "difficulties" as well as "possibilities" for a feminist re-working of the myth of Orpheus: "Eurydice in this poem offers what might be properly called a feminist reading of her situation, understanding Orpheus's act as a narcissistic appropriation, a repossession of the woman's being as part of his own" (65). Anger is no sophistication, though. In the chapters that follow, Zeiger examines elegiac poems written by women suffering the painful realities associated with breast cancer and poems written by "Aids-threatened gay men" (18). She attempts to reconcile the separation between contemporary writing and traditional forms, by showing the differences between them as contingent on the particular author.
The final chapter, "Women's Breast Cancer Poems," problematizes the position of women in predominantly masculine traditional and canonical works of poetic elegy. Zeiger examines the taboo of breast cancer, and its associations with Aids discourse as subgenres. She argues that, while Aids elegies hold more currency in terms of cultural crisis, "breast cancer poems" are an unrecognized subgenre that deals with still tabooed subject matters (although it is all too fashionable to delegate breast cancer to represent manageable, mediatized taboos, and Zeiger takes a certain comfort in not problematizing the representational status of her taboo of choice), relegated and regulated by medical discourse: "[t]he topic of breast cancer raises urgently, then, the question of how women's discourse can be voiced, and especially in culturally sanctioned forms like poetry" (139). The author somehow reinforces the victim position of breat-cancer sufferers by dismissing the Aids taboo, and making Aids part of a generally accepted public discourse nowadays. The reconstitution and reconfiguration of female subjectivity in poetic elegy is the central concern of Zeiger's project. As such, the subgenre of the breast cancer poems is one location of cultural crisis (aside from Aids discourse) where Zeiger believes social transformation is made politically possible. All of Zeiger's critique of the silencing of women's voices by patriarchal culture is not directed at rupturing that historical silencing, but rather perpetuates it by not providing a distinct possibility for breast cancer elegies to emerge as actual texts. While claiming the opposite, the author, in fact, is "othering" women even more (hers is a voice that says that women have none). Maybe this unhappy effect is due to a lack of irony Zeiger displays with regard to the tragedy of others, in this case, the multifarious aspects of male elegy.
The weakest link in the book is the analogous relationship betweeen Aids elegies and women's breast cancer poems. It is arguable that the politics of both, though they may share "affinities," are radically individual, both publicly and privately. Equivocating, and thus, equalizing these different sufferings, undermines their power of subjective expression. This is somewhat ironic, given Zeiger's emphasis on recuperating women's voices.
Kimberly Olynyk
University of Western Ontario