Bishop - In the waiting room PDF

Preview

Summary

Analyse og tolkning av diktet In the waiting room. Notatene er tatt fra både forelesning, seminar og egenstudier, og disse ble brukt til eksamenslesing....

Description

Elizabeth Bishop – In the Waiting Room

Analysis 







Deals with one specific episode from childhood + her memory of this episode o An epiphany o Episode recreated as meeting between her past and present self o Focuses on the experience itself, not what actually happened-> experience as reexperienced o The strange happening in the domestic – the moment of insight taking place in mundane dentist’s office (simplicity of language and prosaic phrases that label time + place suggests that the otherness is just beneath the rational and domestic) Meter and rhyme (form) o No set rhyme scheme or meter – free verse  Effect for meaning: subject and theme (identity, human connection, womanhood) is so big and universal that it’s impossible to restrict it in a form with a set rhyme scheme and meter o 7-syllable basis? o v/, iamb -> switches o 5 stanzas  First 2 quite long, but gets shorter  Elizabeth asks the big questions, but unable to answer them  Gap between stanzas – reflect inability to answer – silence instead of answers  Short and clear lines, rather matter-of-fact Images o National Geographic – symbol?  Exposes her to people/things that exist far outside of her own reality, makes her ask big questions  Meta image o Women with necks like lightbulbs (simile)  Cultural – but ethical right? Cultural ethics o “Long pig”  Dead man slung on a pole o The waiting room (symbol)  Boredom – childhood  Waiting to become an adult, a woman  Shared experience of femininity – collapse of exotic + local together Speaker’s attitude and tone o Curious – many existential thoughts o Child-like, childish carefulness o Awakening o 2 Elizabeths: the 7-year-old + the older one recounting the experience o A blur between the perspectives of child + adult -> affects both “I’s” -> creates the rhetorical strength o Disoriented in her own memory

o

Simplicity of child’s speech

Interpretation 

Themes o Identity and one’s place in the world  Poem presents a young girl’s moment of awakening – the forces that shape individual identity  E wondering who she is, how similar she is to her aunt or to other foreign women  What defines her, what shapes individual identity?  First imagining she is her aunt, then an individual, then one of everybody else o Connection with other humans  What connects all the humans in the world? 77-83  Poem dramatizes the moment when the speaker discovers both her separation from + her connection with other human beings  Gains awareness of other alternative worlds – strange, alluring, frightening, but just as valid as one’s own  National Geographic -> vital role in the child’s awakening and distress  Critiques the notion of exotica fostered by such magazines  Shows the little girl at the exact moment when she discovers that she is not alone  Must recognize that she is like other people  Shows the frailty of hierarchical myths regarding “primitive” cultures o Womanhood  Not that great difference between the young girl + the women and children in Nat. Geo  Part of her growing up -> coming to terms with what it means to be female in her own culture and in the world at large...