>> From the library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Jason Steinhauer:
Well good afternoon.
My name is Jason Steinhauer.
I am a program specialist
at the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
Before we begin today's
program, please take a moment
to check your cell phones,
and other electronic devices,
and please set them to silent.
I'll also make you aware this
afternoon's program is being filmed
for placement on our website as well
as our YouTube and iTunes playlists.
I encourage you to
visit our website,
loc.gov/kluge to view other
lectures delivered by current
and past Kluge Center scholars.
Today's lecture is presented
by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholar center on Capitol Hill
that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world
to stimulate and energize one
another, to distill wisdom
from the library's rich
resources, and to interact
with policy makers and the public.
The center offers opportunities
for senior scholars,
post doctoral fellows and PhD
candidates to conduct research
in the Library of Congress
collections.
We also offer free public
lectures, conferences,
symposia and other programs.
And we administer the Kluge prize,
which recognizes lifetime
achievement in the study of humanity
in which we will award
in 2015 this fall.
For more information about
these and other events,
please sign our email
list on the way out,
or visit our website, loc.gov/kluge.
Today's lecture is titled
Publicity, Celebrity, Fashion:
Photographing Edna
St. Vincent Millay.
Our speaker is Sarah Parker, now
concluding her tenure as an Arts
and Humanities Research Council
fellow at the Library of Congress.
Sarah's research focuses
on the poet and playwright,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, a
celebrated American writer
and winner of the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry in 1923.
Her research draws on the Edna
St. Vincent Millay papers held
in the Library of Congress
Manuscripts Division.
These papers include correspondence,
diaries, notebooks, photographs,
scrapbooks and family papers
relating to Millay's life,
family and literary career.
Including her daily life
at her steeple top farm
in Austerlitz, New York.
And incidentally I received a call
from Austerlitz, New
York this morning.
The Millay house there
wishes that they could join,
and they invite you
all to visit them
at their facility in Austerlitz.
In her talk today, Sarah will
discuss photographic representations
of Millay, and show how Millay
consciously used her public image
to promote her career
and to suddenly subvert expectations
surrounding the poetess.
A word about the fellowship
that Sarah holds.
This is a truly wonderful
partnership between the Arts
and Humanities Research
Council of the United Kingdom
and the Library of Congress.
The program allows early career
scholars, funded by the AHRC
to undertake short-term research
here at the Kluge Center.
Since the inception
of this partnership,
the center has welcomed
more than 200 scholars
from British universities,
funded either by the Arts
and Humanities Research
Council or the Economic
and Social Sciences
Research Council.
It has enriched the scholarly and
intellectual life of the center
and the library and for this
collaboration we are very grateful.
Dr. Sarah Parker is an
impact research fellow
at University of Sterling
in Scotland.
She is the author of
the Lesbian Muse
and Poetic Identity: 1889 to 1930.
And her other publications
include Fashioning Michael Field:
Michael Field and Late
Victorian Dress Culture,
an article in the Journal
of Victorian Culture.
Whose Muse: Sappho,
Swinburne and Amy Lowell,
an Algernon Charles
Swinburne unofficial laureate,
and A Girl's Love: Lord Alfred
Douglas as Homoerotic Muse
in the Poetry of Olive
Kristoff, Women Cultural Review.
She is currently working
on her second monograph entitled
Picturing the Poetess: Women Poets,
Celebrity and Photography.
And this is the subject
of her research
which brings her to
the Kluge Center.
So, please join me in
welcoming Dr. Sarah Parker.
[ Applause ]
>> Dr. Sarah Parker: Thank
you, and I just wanted to begin
by thanking the Kluge
Center, the HLC
and the Library of Congress itself.
It's been such a stimulating
environment for this project,
and also a shout out to
prints and photographs,
particularly who have been
so helpful with my work,
and whose collection I'll
be showcasing in this talk.
And also to add that
if you can't see one
of these screens then do move
now because photographs are going
to be quite important in this talk.
And can everyone hear me as well?
Okay, good.
So, in March 1928, the Ladies Home
Journal featured a quiz entitled,
Can You Name These Modern Poets?
Accompanied by photographs
of the poets featured.
One of these was Edna
St. Vincent Millay,
one of the most famous women
poets of the 20th century.
To a considerable degree, this
fame was due to the circulation
of her photographic image.
Millay was not simply
a celebrated poet.
She was a mass media
celebrity whose image appeared
in countless publications,
including newspapers,
literary journals and magazines.
She was photographed by the
most celebrated photographers
of her day including Arnold
Genthe, Man Ray, Herman Mishkin,
Carl Van Vechten and Bernice Abbot.
So in this talk today
I want to focus
on these photographic
representations,
asking what they mean in
terms of why did constructions
of poetic identity, so what do
we expect a poet to look like
and who qualifies as a poet is,
what I mean by poetic identity.
Ideas of gender and why the
literary and aesthetic culture
of the early 20th century, and
I'm going to discuss these images
in fairly chronological order
and identify the various
personas and phases of Millay.
By looking at Millay in
relation to modernist aesthetics,
the 19th century poetess, fashion
history, gender and performance,
I aim to trace the myriad ways
in which Millay used photography
to construct a flexible and
changeable poetic identity.
Paying attention to her photographic
representations enables us
to unpack the mythology of Millay
and to trace the construction
of an iconic celebrity
poet, whose self-fashioning
and performance style continued
to influence later 20th
century women poets.
So some of you will know,
Millay's career began with a poem.
In 1912 when she was 19,
Millay entered a poetry
competition in the Lyric Year.
Her long poem, Renascence,
didn't win the competition,
but was included in a published
volume that emerged along
with the winning entries.
And it was quickly
agreed that Renascence was
in fact the best poem in the book.
And speculation about the
author E. Vincent Millay grew.
For example, the poet Arthur
Ficke wrote to Millay,
that so not knowing her
identity, wrote to her that,
"No sweet young thing of 20
ever entered a poem precisely
where this one ends.
It takes the brawny
male of 45 to do that."
So a short bio was published with
Renascence saying that was this was
by a young girl, but Ficke
wouldn't believe that.
And Millay replied in
characteristic style,
"I simply will not be a brawny male.
Not that I have an aversion
to brawny males, oh contraire,
oh contraire, but I
cling to my femininity."
And she signs off, "P.S. the
brawny male sends his picture.
I have to laugh."
So this anecdote shows that even
in the early stage in her career,
Millay was aware of the
complex relationship
between her gender and
her poetic vocation.
And she's proud to prove that
she is not a brawny male,
and she uses her photograph
to flirtatiously invite further
admiration from Ficke that will turn
out to be useful to
her later career.
And she used a similar
tactic to pique the interest
of The Lyric Year's
editor, Ferdinand Earle.
So, she sent him a playful,
physical description that reads,
"You would perhaps be interested
to know that I have red hair,
am five feet four inches in
height, and weight just 100 pounds."
And she sends this
along with a photograph,
which he actually asked to keep.
So, at the same time though,
Arthur Ficke's assumption
that a sweet young thing of 20
cannot write such powerful poetry,
of course suggests that at the very
cusp of her career, Millay was going
to have to contend with and manage
expectations surrounding gender
and ideas around poetic ability.
So the Association of Women with the
Muse which is something I've worked
on in previous projects, was an
ongoing challenge that was faced
by women poets, well
really throughout history,
but I particularly
focused on the idea
of the muse and the 19th century.
And this is really
summarized as the assumption
that women inspire poetry, but
they don't necessarily write
it themselves.
So women are the muse,
but not the poet.
And for being photographed,
a woman poet risked further
becoming enshrined in ideas
that she was an object
rather than a subject.
But nevertheless, a number of
canny women poets both in the 19th
and 20th century began
to work out strategies
for negotiating this dilemma
by forging a visible,
professional identity.
Self-fashioning as a woman
of letters for example.
And exerting control over the
image so the image might circulate
and turn them into this object
that they were at least going
to have some control over what kind
of objects they were going to be,
the object moving towards
being a self-fashioning subject
in her own right.
And this really relates to the wider
study that I'm currently working on,
where I'm looking at numerous
examples of women poets,
self-fashioning across the 19th
and into the early 20th century.
So, Millay, like her
19th century foremothers,
realized that her photographic image
did have the potential to entrap her
in narrow stereotypes of
the woman poet as muse,
but it could also be
used to her advantage
in order to publicize her work.
Millay's celebrated poem eventually
lead her to go to Vassar in 1913,
and it was during this time that her
most famous photograph was taken.
So in the spring of 1914, Millay
was invited to visit her publisher,
Mitchell Kennerly's country
estate in Mamaroneck, New York.
Here she is photographed by
Arnold Genthe, who was famous
for capturing celebrities such
as Isadora Duncan and Greta Garbo
and for documenting the 1906
San Francisco earthquake.
So Millay was photographed
by Genthe as you can see,
standing beneath the
blossoms of a magnolia tree.
Her face averted, her fingers
brushing the lower branches.
And this was the image that
launched Millay's career.
In Nancy Millford's words, becoming,
"the blaze that marked an era
in American poetry as her own."
So why did Genthe's photograph
serve as such an iconic image
of the poetess at this time?
Firstly because it resonates with
some key aesthetic preoccupations
of the early 20th century.
Including orientalism,
paganism and Hellenism.
Genthe spent his early career
photographing San Francisco's old
China Town and apparently he
cropped out English language signs
and non-Chinese people in order to
make his images look more authentic
and to tie in with ideas
to deal with orientalism.
And I think we can see traces
of this orientalism quite subtly
in Genthe's photograph of Millay.
So the delicate blooms
and interlaced braces
of the magnolia tree
resemble the cherry blossom,
an important symbol in Japanese art.
And I thought when I was
writing this, I can't tell people
in D.C. what the cherry
blossom means.
Such symbolism also
links the young Millay
to the favorite orientalist trend
in modernist poetry of this time.
So several 20th century poets
were inspired by the brevity
and the symbolism of the
Japanese haiku for example.
In April 1913 Arthur Ficke
himself sent Millay his book,
Twelve Japanese Painters.
A volume inspired by the
Ukiyo-e, a school of artists.
In the same year, Ezra
Pound composed one
of the most famous haiku of
all In a Station of the Metro.
So Genthe's image of
Millay resonates
from such imagery drawn
from Ukiyo-e.
It captures the mood
of Ukiyo-e, too.
Which has been characterized
as capturing delicacy,
sorrow and a sense
of transient beauty.
Genthe's image also suggest the
new freedoms of the female body
in the early 20th century,
which is optimized by dancers
such Isadora Duncan, Loe
Furla and Martha Graham.
So Duncan was a key figure within
both modernism and feminism,
and she suggested new possibilities
for the female body of its time.
So, according to Elizabeth Francis,
"Duncan's dances were events
through which her viewers
recognized themselves as modern.
They were also shocking
because Duncan performed the
female body differently in a period
when the transformation of womanhood
was both a source of anxiety
and a central element of
radical theories of liberation."
So in this sense, Duncan's work
in dance resembles Millay's
work in poetry at this time.
Millay's lyrics, particularly
those published in A Few Thicks
from Thistles of 1920, equally
sought to capture the new
and the modern, the fleeting light
of the city of late night parties,
of multiple lovers, and these poems
shocked as much as they delighted
in their frank expression
of subjects previously thought
unsuitable for women writers,
such as free love, promiscuity,
active female sexual desire,
and the pleasures of
roaming the city.
So when we compare Genthe's
photograph of Millay to his images
of Duncan and her dance
troupe, we can observe some
of the striking parallels
between them.
So for example in this
image Genthe photographs one
of Duncan's dancers beneath a tree,
her arms up raised towards the
branches, implying a kind of pagan,
nature worship and also I think kind
of erotic nature worship as well.
And such new age ideas were linked
by Greenwich villages to free love,
so embracing nature also
meant embracing the body
and that meant embracing bodily
pleasure beyond the cultural
strictures placed upon them
such as marriage and monogamy.
And as the fashion historian
Deborah Saffel has shown,
such bohemian ideas
were often expressed
and embodied through dress.
So Duncan was particularly
inspired by ancient Greek dress.
This is Duncan herself in the
collection, and as you can see
in Genthe's photographs she
often wears a draped Greek robe
or toga or sheton.
Not sure how to say that one.
So, though Millay is
dressed more conservatively
in Genthe's photograph, I
think we can see a similarity
in their bound hairstyles,
which are remarkably similar,
and Duncan writes about wearing
her hair rolled and coiled
in a loose knot at the nape of
her neck, in Hellenic style,
which she bound with a
fillet, or Greek headband.
So Genthe's images of Millay
and Duncan will cause
similar photographs
of the modernist poet
HD or Hilda Doolittle.
Who was photographed in Greek guise.
So such Greek images confirmed HD's
reputation as the modern Sappho,
and in his review of
HD's book, Heliodora,
Louis Untermeyer characterized HD
as "A wood nymph lost in modernity,
a Greek marvel faintly
flushed with life.
A delightful, but detached
anachronism."
So I propose that Genthe's trying
to project a similar image of Millay
in his photograph by portraying
her an ethereal dryad wandering
in the forests.
But, although this image, the
Genthe image, promotes the idea
that we have just happened
upon this nymph like poetess,
Millay was in fact, highly
conscious of the role
that she was adopting here.
So I want us to focus on
Millay's outfit in the photograph,
a simple button-down linen
smock with a white collar.
Millay had recently
purchased this outfit
from Wannermaker's Department
Store in New York and was eager
to wear it, writing to her family,
"I have paid ten dollar fifty
for a tan linen, tailor cutie, so
becoming with a white muslin collar,
spring dress that I really
need to wear to college."
So the tone here is playful as
Millay's letters tend to be,
but I think it's significant
that she purchases this dress
knowing just how cutie she will look
in it.
And the emphasize so becoming
reads like a sarcastic version
of the rhetoric of a fashion
magazine, such as Vanity Fair
in which Millay's work and image
would later frequently appear.
So the illusion of artlessness
cultivated by this dress
in Genthe's photograph, is
complicated when we learn
of Millay's ironic self-awareness,
the sense that we get
in her letters home.
So youthful, minimalist, cute,
this outfit is nonetheless
a carefully planned costume.
Millay is shrewder than she
looks in Genthe's image.
She knows there are benefits
to playing the [inaudible].
And this self-awareness
is later clear to see
in Millay's writings
for Vanity Fair.
So from 1919 onwards, Millay
began to write short pieces
under the pseudonym of Nancy Boyd.
Millay's Boyd pieces often take
a satirical look at the events
and images that shaped
her own career.
So, in one Boyd piece she writes,
"Why is it that the girls of so many
of our best families, the hope
of our land as you might say,
insist upon getting all safety
pinned up in several yard
of mosquito netting and standing
about somebody's gold links
while Arnold Genthe takes
their photograph?"
So here you can see how
Millay is sending up her own
by then iconic photograph turning
Kennely's into somebody's golf links
and referencing her own ethereal
pose as unpoetically standing about.
And the mosquito netting is an
interesting detail as Millay did
in fact wear mosquito
netting as a veil
when marrying Eugen
Boissevain in July 1923.
So she actually then goes
on to fulfill her own
ironic prophecy there.
So, Millay was clearly aware
that the artifices employed
to create the appearance of
ethereality which was necessary
to the poetess image demanded by the
public were often absurd in reality.
So else when Millay includes
a portrait of herself inspired
by Nancy Boyd, so she's
writing as Nancy Boyd
but seeing Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and in a café quote,
"eating enormous plate of
sauerkraut and sausages."
Which Boyd declares
was such a shock.
"I had always imagined
her so ethereal."
So here Millay delights in
deflating mythology surrounding the
disembodied, delicate woman poet.
By indulging in an ironic parody
of her own celebrity persona.
Millay's self-awareness to the point
of self-dissection is also apparent
in her unpublished
self-portrait poem,
which was written in
the spring of 1920.
So Millay and her friends
John Bishop
and Edmund Wilson challenged
one another each evening
to compose self-portrait poems.
This is Millay's, and I
haven't included it on the slide
because I think it would
be too small to see
so I'll just read it to you.
Hair which she still
devoutly trusts is red.
Colorless eyes, employing
A childish wonder
To which they have
no statistic Title.
A large mouth, Lascivious,
Aceticized by blasphemies.
A long throat, Which will
someday Be strangled.
Thin arms, In the summer-time
leopard With freckles.
A small body, Unexclamatory,
But which, Were it the fashion
to wear no clothes, Would
be as well-dressed As any.
So this description asserts a
subtle confidence in the value
of this small body, which would
be as well dressed as any naked.
There are also darker
undertones to the description.
So, as Cheryl Walker, the critic
who's done some very interesting
work on Millay if you want
to pursue reading more.
Cheryl Walker notes that the
reference to strangling here hints
at violence directed towards the
female body, and there is something
in her words, "disturbingly
clinical about Millay's description
as though her body were were part
of a department store inventory."
So, this itemizing blazon in the
poem contributes to the sense
as it moves downwards and listing
the hair, the eyes, the mouth
and if you see it on the page,
it's in this very slender line
as if Millay had chopped
herself into little pieces
and was offering them up to
the reader's gaze one by one.
Millay's self-portrait poem
echoes a letter to her family,
written after being photographed
by Genthe a second time.
And unfortunately the photographs
from this session have been lost.
I hope to discover
them somewhere one day.
So she writes, "besides
having beautiful hair,
an extraordinarily forehead in
spite of the freckles and impudent,
aggressive and critical
nose and mysterious mouth,
I have artistically and
even technically an usually
beautiful throat."
So here Millay views
herself with detachment.
She notes her flaws.
She assigns characteristic to her
features and adopts a criteria
that defines her throat
as both artistically
and technically beautiful,
whatever that means.
The vulnerability of the throat
on which Genthe chose to focus
on this occasion, Millay writes
that "Genthe made me lean forward
and lift back my head and
photographed my throat."
The vulnerability of her
throat, recalls her suggestion
that she might be strangled
in this self-portrait poem.
And I found this image
which shows Millay.
This is photographed by Eugene
in one of their home albums,
but you can see though
that she often liked
to show off her amazing throat.
So Millay's throat is quite
literally Genthe's target here.
And meatier accounts of Millay's
readings also repeatedly focus
on her throat.
So, this is of course
the traditional locusts
of the Lyric Voice, but it
is also significantly a sight
of vulnerability, suggesting
the potential
and perhaps the fetishization
of the potential for that voice
to be strangled or stifled.
As her self-description shows,
Millay was enthusiastically
complicit
in marketing her various parts.
Her sense of being a product
for sale was further intensified
by the location of her work
and image in fashion magazines.
We can therefore see how Millay
became adept at viewing herself
as a product, assessing
her various selling points
and emphasizing them
in her representations.
In this sense, she
is an ideal figure
for demonstrating the art critic
John Berger's assertion that,
"Women watch themselves
being looked at.
This determines not only most
relations between men and women,
but also the relation
of women to themselves.
The surveyor of woman
in herself is male.
The surveyed female, thus she
turns herself into an object,
and most particularly an
object of vision, a sight."
So from her early experiences
of this sensation surrounding the
Genthe photograph, Millay learned
to commodify her image,
becoming an expert
at turning herself into a sight.
And as her celebrity grew, she
became increasingly conscious
of the role her image played
in promoting her poetry.
And she adapted that image according
to the demands of the
changing market.
So, I now want to move
onto a crucial aspect
of Millay's appearance,
which is what Millay wore.
As the it girl of 1920s America,
Millay's sartorial
decisions embodied Greenwich
Village bohemianism.
Her bobbed her marked
her out as a new woman
and associated her the flapper
image that took hold in the1920s.
She owned dresses by Paul
Parre and Mariano Forchuni,
and I've included some
examples here.
Both of whom were popular designers
for the New York avant garde.
Breaking away from the
corseted, restricted designs
of the late 19th century.
The designers took inspiration
from antique and Eastern designs
with an emphasis on
drapery, freedom of movement
and wide kimono inspired shapes.
And in the middle there
you've got Duncan's daughters
or members of her troupe.
Who were in Forchuni gowns as well.
So Millay was exceedingly fond
of the kimono particularly,
and for example, in October 1920,
Millay requests that her friend,
Witter Bynner, who
was going travelling,
"bring me whatever is the
Chinese equivalent for kimono.
And you musn't neglect it until
you get back here and then try
to fool me with some dish
toweling from Vanteen's."
This is the Vanteen's catalogue.
Vanteen's was a shop in New York,
which sold imported oriental goods.
So Millay's letters suggest that
although her tastes were indeed line
with Greenwich Village
fashion crazes,
she sought to distinguish
herself by the authenticity
and quality of her garments.
She was not going to
accept goods from Vanteen's.
And we can observe some of these
oriental influences when looking
at Millay's dress and shoes,
which are held in the Smithsonian.
So, you can see the intricate
beading on the slippers
and the gold embroidery
of the silk caftan,
verifying Millay's
commitment to artistic dress.
Linking her to artistic
and aesthetic dress crazes
of the later 19th century and to
Greenwich Village Bohemianism.
As early as 1917, Millay
realized the impact
that clothing could
have on her audience.
And she writes to her family
of attending a reading
for the wealthy Mrs.
Hooker and her guests.
"My trunk hadn't come and so she
dressed me up in something of hers.
A gown with a train and hanging
about six inches on the floor all
around made out of three
rainbow colored scarves,
and family I discover I have
nothing to give readings in.
I must have long dresses,
trailing ones.
The short ones won't do.
If Norma hasn't done anything with
the green chiffon and rose scarf,
then that dress ought to be
made up very long and drapy.
More like a negligée
than a dress, really.
Very graceful and floaty."
That was want I wanted
for this talk,
but unfortunately unobtainable.
So, the impact of Millay's dramatic
dress is described in accounts
of her live readings that she
gave throughout her career.
And I've been reading hundreds
and hundreds of these in library.
Over and over again, the
same things are said.
Here's a couple of examples.
So, a report from her 1925 reading
of Bode in College in Maine,
states that she wore a robe
of gold and bronze and green
and her voice was a
bronze bell as she read.
Back and forth she moved by turns
gray and gay, pompous and flippant.
Her robe, because it was traced with
gold threads woven into its pattern,
whispered and chimed
faintly against the floor.
If Ms. Millay had not been a poet
she could easily of been an actress.
And elsewhere the Boston Sunday
Globe reported, I think this is
of the same reading, "she wore
a loose flowing gown of gold
and bronze without the semblance
of a girdle, her sleeves bound
at the wrist no larger than a
ring, flared above the elbow.
But what is the use of trying to
describe the way her gown fell
to the top of her gold
slippers and her trick
of flicking the train
out back of her?"
So as these accounts suggest, on
stage Millay channeled the persona
of the poetess as priestess,
chiefly through her wardrobe
of dramatic costumes.
Millay was consistently
referred to as a poetess,
so it should say I use the
term throughout consciously
over girl poet.
Sometimes, but mostly a
poetess or a girl poetess.
So this is a term that
raised certain expectations
in her audience.
A poetess was expected
to be delicate,
enchanting and above all, feminine.
Continuing a tradition of
popular 19th century poetesses
such as Letitia Elizabeth
Landon or LEL,
Felicia Hemons and
Francis Sgt. Osgood.
All of whom were associated
with domesticity,
sentimentality and
romantic effusion.
So through her dramatic costumes
and theatrical use of her body
and voice, Millay sought
to embody the poetess
in her live performances.
Unfortunately this
led her body itself
to be collapsed with
her poetic work.
So, one reviewer stated
her, "Millay's poems are
as well turned as her
own slim ankle."
Just as Millay's work was associated
with her physical appearance,
her poems were often interpreted
as personal revelations
coming from the woman herself.
And in this sense, Elisa
Zellinger has argued
that Millay elicited
a similar response
to her earlier 19th
century foremothers,
whose poetry was also
frequently understood
as providing public access to
their inner private emotions.
And this poetess tradition takes
its inspiration from Sappho
of ancient Greece,
the first woman poet.
Famed for her lesbianism,
particularly nowadays.
But too in another myth,
eventually committed suicide due
to unrequited love for
the fisherman Fionn.
So Sappho is repeatedly
depicted in paintings
and other artistic works
performing her last song
on the cliffs before
jumping to her death.
And so her poetry is there
inextricably associated
with the display of her body.
And this image of the
dramatic improvisitries,
it developed in Madam Distiles'
Corrine, which images the woman poet
as a captivating, public performer.
And here she is dressed
up as her own character
in this painting by Vigee Le Brun.
So this imitation of Sappho as
we can see here in this painting,
went beyond poetry and into
the realms of self-fashioning.
So, for example the 19th
century poetess, LEL,
dressed up in Sapphic costume
and wore her hair a la Sappho,
although I've never been able
to figure out quite what sort
of hairstyle that would be.
Felicia Hemmens was also
aware of the pressure to play
up to the poetess image
writing to one of her friends,
"If I were in higher spirits, I
should be very strongly tempted
to do something very strange amongst
them in order to fulfill the ideas,
I imagine they entertain
of that altogether foreign
monster, a poetess."
So Hemmens's wry comments, to
me anticipate Millay's jest
about the need to wrap oneself
in mosquito netting in order
to fulfill what was is expected
of the unconventional poetess.
And like Hemmens, Millay
chaffed under the pressure
of her own popularity, complaining
of feeling like a prostitute
at one heavily attended
public reading.
So this sense of sexualized
self-exposure can be traced
in the work of many earlier
19th century woman poets
who often conceptualized
their literary fame as a kind
of dangerous denudation
before the public gaze.
But self-exposure was at least
in Millay's case also part
of the carefully constructed
performance.
And it's worth remembering, and
so you remember that review saying
if she hadn't been a poet she
could have been an actress.
In fact she was an
actress as well as a poet.
Millay had performed
in plays at Vassar.
She had written plays for
the Province Town Players
and collaborated with them, and
here is one delightful still I came
across from her in a play called
The Bonds of Interest in 1919.
And this is her performing
in a pageant at Vassar.
This one's a bit blurry.
So taking her inspiration
from the theatre
and from her own acting career,
clothes for Millay were
really more akin to costume.
And her apparently
spontaneous gestures
and off the cuff remarks during
readings were often rehearsed
and repeated at the
next public readings.
So this is what I have
come across in my work.
The reviews across America.
She is doing the same things
and saying the same thing,
and they're constantly delighted
at what they think is this
fairly spontaneous performance,
but it's clearly not.
And we can see this for example
in the readings that I've quoted
to you, the reference to the
dramatic sweep of her robe,
and the trick of flicking
her train behind her.
So that reviewer clearly can see
that this is a constructed gesture.
And Millay's clothes of
course played a crucial role
in this performance.
They were her props, creating a
distance from the everyday self
and projecting an image
of the iconic poetess,
guaranteed to hold her
audience spellbound.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in
very interesting piece on Millay,
describe her as a female,
female impersonator.
Although conscious of
femininity as a masquerade,
she nonetheless manipulated
its conventions in order
to forge a public poetic identity.
Through her performance
of hyper femininity,
Millay simultaneously draws on
and interrogates the tradition
of the 19th century poetess.
And in her live readings
she dramatizes the poetess's
authenticity, rendering it
theatrical in the process,
and her choice of clothing was
crucial to the demonstration.
Her capes, and sweeping
robes cultivate the aura
of the poetess while revealing
that identity to be a performance.
But in their emphasis on Millay as
female, female impersonator however,
Gilbert and Gubar overlook
a significant facet
of Millay's self-presentation.
She also played with masculinity.
So this is Vassar again.
So in 1915, while at Vassar,
Millay played the role
of the young poet March Banks,
in George Bernard Shaw's Candida.
As she wrote to her family, "I felt
perfectly at home in the clothes.
People told me I reminded them of
their brothers, the way I walked
around and slung my legs
over the arms of chairs,
etc. Somebody thought
I was really a boy."
So in this final section
of the talk,
I now want to explore the
construction of female masculinity
in Millay's later photographic
images.
An androgynous persona that
has been overlooked by critics
and biographers, I think that's
perhaps because it undermines
that early image of the
feminine [inaudible],
which launched Millay's career,
and which is so well-known.
So as mentioned already, Millay
clearly enjoyed dressing up.
Viewing clothes as theatrical
play things that enabled her
to adopt various and
flexible identities.
However, though these roles
were often markedly feminine,
Millay also experimented
with more masculine personas.
So, for example and hopefully
you can see this one,
during a trip to Albania in
1921, Millay was photographed
in traditional Albanian
dress including trousers
that she describes
in a lot of detail
on the back of the photograph.
And these images are strikingly
similar to the portrait
of Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips.
And Millay was often compared
to Byron in the press.
And indeed they share
some similarities,
a high level of celebrity
being one of those.
And of course a scandalous love
life that fascinated the press
of their respective times.
And they were also
clearly not adverse
to co-opting exotic
cultural identities in order
to increase their mystique
and sex appeal.
I think that's what
they're both doing here.
So, through donning
Byron's Albanian dress,
Millay adopts two layers of finesse.
So she's playing with both
gender and authenticity here.
And in doing so, she signals her
affinities with this sexual outlaw,
Lord Byron, who's rumored
bisexuality echoed her own risqué
public image.
So, Millay continued to play
with masculine identities
in her photographs of the
later 1920s and the 1930s.
So in portraits by Herman Mishkin,
Carl Van Vechten, and
Bernice Abbott.
So in all of these, I call these
the suit and tie portraits.
So, in all of these, Millay
weasr a smart suit jacket,
a shirt and a tie.
Her hair is cropped.
And in Mishkin's portraits
particularly, I'll just go back
to that one, she appears
strikingly androgynous.
So, Millay was not alone
in cultivating female masculinity
during the 1920s and the 1930s.
And Bernice Abbott's photographs
in particular chronical
the expatriate community
of female artists, writers
and journalists in Paris,
who often dressed in
starkly masculine fashions
and wore their hair short.
So, this is Abbott's
photograph of Jane Heap.
Thelma Wood, be still
my beating heart.
Sofia Beech and Princess
Eugenie Murat.
So, the style and bearing of
these women is simultaneously an
expression of artistic
freedom, a hallmark of modernity
and a subtle signifier of
lesbian and/or bisexual identity.
And as Terry Wiseman notes,
writing about these photograph,
they are framed by their
own terms of definition.
They take control of
the camera's gaze,
particularly in Murat's
photograph, as you can see here.
She's just really staring
down the viewer there.
And it's worth noting that
Abbot's images arose naturally
from her sitters.
They wore their own clothes, and
they were not posed by Abbott.
And so they were really very
much in control of the process
and in collaboration with Abbott.
Evidence from the archives suggests
that Abbott photographed Millay
on at least two different
occasions, 1929 and 1940.
And a letter that I have discovered
here in the archive reveals
that Abbott herself proposed
the first photoshoot.
And that she and Millay
had a closer relationship
than has been suggested
by biographers.
So on February 11th, 1929 when
Abbott was considering a return
to New York and setting
up a photographic studio
there, she writes to Millay.
"Dear Edna, I have just seen
Margot Schuller, and in the course
of our conversation we were
discussing yourself, herself,
myself, photography,
etc. Which brings me
to the point of such a proposition.
I hope you remember me from the
hectic days of New York and Paris
and at least a few beautiful
dances we have had together."
So, Margot Schuller mentioned
here, was one of Millay's lovers.
And so, what we can see
Abbott doing here I think,
is building on a network of same sex
attachments between women in order
to gain a prominent
client for her business.
And there's also a hint of desire
there on Abbott's part too.
So, she's reminding Millay
of the beautiful dances
that they had together in Paris
in order to arouse her interest
and seduce her into
agreeing to the photoshoot.
And Paris was of course
a well-known venue
for exploring female same-sex
desire during the 1920s,
and Millay participated in
that world enthusiastically.
Befriending the society
hostess Natalie Barney.
And the painter, Romaine Brooks,
who you can see here
painted both by Brooks.
And so she attended Barney's
famous lesbian salon in Paris.
So, like Abbott's photographs,
Brooks's paintings also chronicled
the lesbian world of Paris
in the 1920s and 1930s, and
frequently portray women
who exhibit strikingly
masculine styles.
But as Laura Doan has noted
in her very interesting book,
Fashioning Sapphism, masculine
dress was indeed actually just very
fashionable across the
board in the 1920s.
So, for example in
1924, the daily express
in the UK praised the
ultra masculine cut
of the latest tailor
made suits for women
and the "manish high
white collar of stiff
but exquisitely fine white linen."
So as Doan observes, this vogue
of masculinity enabled figures
such as Radclyffe Hall famous
for the Well of Loneliness,
and Una Truebridge, to covertly
express gender ambiguity
and lesbian identity.
While also being the very height
of fashion in their times,
and I would suggest that a similar
meaning also permeates Millay's suit
and tie portraits.
The images are reproduced
in the press at the time.
These are the popular images
of Millay at that point,
and so on one level, we can read
Millay's tailored clothing and suit
and tie as simply chic, but
looking at this long side,
her well documented bisexuality,
this also lends a significance
to her androgynous portrayal.
And in this sense, Millay's
masculine persona signified
by her nickname Vincent, which
was what most of her family
and friends referred to her by,
and embodied in her endogenous
photographs of the 1930s can be read
as a covert, yet knowing
expression of her sexuality.
And as Nicky Hallet notes,
and this is in a discussion
of Romaine Brooks's
paintings actually,
but I feel it's applicable
to Millay here too.
The adoption of masculine styles
by lesbian and bisexual women,
need not play into pejorative
stereotypes of inversions,
the ideas that same-sex desire came
from having a male
soul and a female body.
But may instead reflect
a playful self-aware
and self-critical engagement
with such stereotypes.
Hallet writes, "Brooks portrays
the lesbian use of the cliché,
so the fact that lesbians did
often choose such sartorial style,
is itself part of the
subject and the artistic play
with ideas of self-realization."
The lesbian subject is already
part of her own self-reference
as an agent she has already
engaged with dominant modes
of self-expression, and has
chosen to appropriate them,
subvert them, or ignore them.
So I think we can reinterpret
Abbott's photographs of Millay
in light of these observations.
So, these images set up a
scenario where by the sitter,
Millay and the photographer Abbott,
participate in playing clichés
and signifiers of lesbian
identity of the time.
But, despite the prevalence
of these images,
Millay's androgynous
persona is often overlooked.
It is played down by the
interviewers in the 1930s
for example who still
insist on portraying Millay
as a fragile young thing,
and describe her as a girl
in nearly every interview.
A journalist might play
down Millay's androgyny
because it is potentially
threatening especially when combined
with her childless states which
is also frequently mentioned
by journalists.
Her open marriage, and really it was
a fairly secret, but Eugene was fine
with Millay doing exactly
what she wanted,
and her formidable career success
which crouched out on her husband.
And age is also a factor here.
So, in contrast to
the boyish androgenue,
Millay could no longer
really be categorized
as a girl simply playing
with boyishness.
So her masculinity as a masculine
mature woman had some more troubling
implications that interviewers
and journalists might
wanted to play down.
And this down playing of Millay's
female masculinity is not confined
to the early 20th century.
In the 2001 biography
by Daniel Mark Epsteen,
he finds Millay's 1930s
photographs threatening to the point
of dismissing them entirely.
He writes, "There are
hundreds of photographs.
The most widely known and
reprinted are the most misleading.
From the severe Mishkin portraits
of the twenties when Vincent
and page boy gentlemen's
coat and neck tie,
looks like Rupert Brook
needing a hair cut.
To the most awful and
enshrined of all,
the last Bernice Abbott
portrait of Vincent.
This was not, nor was it ever
Edna St. Vincent Millay."
So Epsteen goes on to speculate
that Millay chose to be portrayed,
and this is in his words, "as a
nun, a librarian or a lady lawyer"
because she did not want to run
the risk of appearing too alluring
in public and attracting attention
to her sexually adventurous
personal life.
But for me, this contradicts
Millay's publicity strategies
as we've seen sensual femininity
was something that she projected
in other press photographs, and
that she actively sought to embody
in her live performances,
and any scandal surrounding her
personal life was actually more
likely to increase her appeal
and mystique for the public.
That's what she was
known for from the days
from A Few Thickes or Thistles.
Epsteen concludes that Millay would
not have written her celebrated
sonnets if she had
been so attractive.
"If she had looked
like Edith Sitwell,
Edith Walton or any other Edith..."
Sorry to any Ediths out there.
"If she had resembled a
Lole or Emily Dickinson,
if she had not had the
effect on men that she had,
she would not have written the
sonnets that are now in discussion."
So, the fact that such
opinions were published in 2001,
underlines the uncomfortable
relationship
between women writer's appearance
and their later reception.
So put in basic terms, I think
that a glamorous image may
help a woman poet to survive
into posterity albeit
in a limited way saw
as a beautiful muse
or as a romantic icon.
While less appealing images of
that same poet may be suppressed
as not true to this idealization,
and in this context photographic
images become effectively a
battleground of interpretation.
So Epsteen disallowable of
Millay's androgynous persona reads
like an anxious attempt to ward off
queer interpretations of her life
and work to enshrine as
the sexy muse of the series
of discerning male admirers.
But the problematic nature
of Epsteen's comments aside,
his observations are
correct in one sense.
He's right that along
with Genthe's portrait,
the androgynous photographs
of Millay are among the
most frequently reproduced,
even of biographers and critics
are curiously silent about them.
So with this junction open up here,
between the ethereal girl
poet portrayed by Genthe,
Millay's floaty persona in
her dramatic public readings
and the austerity of
her dress and bearing
in these later photographic images,
why did Millay play the poetess
in performance and the androgynous
poet in her later photographs?
Was she expecting and negotiating a
different audience for these images?
The audience for her
public readings,
or was this simply a
new face of Millay?
And I think that we can perhaps
look at Millay's business like look
as a way of negotiating aging.
So by the 1930s Millay knew that she
could no longer play the androgenue
and so instead projected a
more professionalized image.
Cheryl Walker has recognized the
aging provided a real challenge
for Millay and she compares her
to Madonna in her insistence that,
"Her body was somehow
independent from the frames
in which others sought to
bind its significance."
But Walker concludes that
Millay's strategies were ultimately
unsuccessful, citing Gene
Uttermyer's unflatting description
of Millay in 1942.
Her hair, which she wore in a long
page boy cut was now shades later
than the red-gold locks
of her girlhood.
The face under that batch
of yellow hair had changed
almost unbelievably.
It had not aged but ripened
with its flush cheeks,
it reminded me of a wizened apple.
Nice one, nice one there.
So, Walker argues that Uttermyers's
description recalls the narrative
of the aging starlet, whose body,
"eventually becomes the
rejected toy of her audience."
In a desperate attempt to
regain her former glory,
the aged star apes her own youth
with tragic and grotesque results.
And her attempts to prolong
her girlhood only serve
to undermine her former glamour
and haste her inevitable decline.
However, I think that Walker's
reading is a bit too simplistic
here, particularly given
that Millay's success
continued later in life.
Her 1939 volume, "Huntsman,
What Quarry?"
sold 60,000 copies within one month
and was really a huge success.
As were many of her
later publications.
She was still heavily photographed,
taking place in a delightful
photoshoot for Town
and Country Magazine in the 1940s.
And I therefore want to end
by proposing an alternative
to this narrative of
the waning star.
That Millay was in fact actively
playing with her image to the last,
rather than constantly
rewinding to her girlhood.
In this sense, she can indeed
be compared to Madonna,
or as I like to think Kate Bush
with her recent triumph
return to the stage.
But she can be compared to
Madonna not in terms of the tragedy
of the aging starlet, but in terms
of her amazing capacity
of reinvention.
In this talk alone we
have seen Millay transform
from ethereal androgenue to bohemian
flapper to inspired improvisitries
into the androgynous poet
business woman of the 1930s.
In the 1940s, Millay becomes
the sage like Grand Dame.
Reflecting her confirmed
status as one
of the most successful
poets of the age.
Consider for example Alfred
Eisenstutt's 1941 portrait.
A mature Millay gazes confidently
at the camera knowing humor
in her eyes, and a smile
playing on her lips.
She looks witch like and
stately in her dark suit,
and unlike in Genthe's image where
she turns away from the camera,
all the uneasy intimacy of
some of Abbott's portraits,
she looks relaxed and
self-assured here.
This image does not
speak of the fading star,
but of the confirmed
doyen of the poetry seen.
And to conclude, another
fascinating image of Millay arose
from the 1942 photoshoot
by New York's National Broadcasting
Company, which was arranged
to promote her dramatic
poem, the Murder of Lidice.
The photograph shows Millay
standing in front of the painting
of a rather sardonic clown.
This painting appeared
by Walter Coon,
was purchased by Millay in 1938.
And she wrote to her
lover, George Dillon,
"I have bought a painting
by Walter Coon.
One of the clown ones.
A beauty. The terms being one
million dollars down and a ball
and chain around my ankle
for the rest of my life."
Though Millay complains
about the cost here,
the painting was clearly a
symbol of her wealth and status
at this point in her career.
Of the fact she had one
million dollars to spend on art,
and had recently completed yet
another successful reading tour.
The prominence of the painting in
this promotional photograph suggests
that she was more than happy to
show off this expensive purchase.
And it actually appears
in more than one image
of her during this time period.
But beyond a symbol of Millay's
success, I want to suggest
that this painting provide an
act image for Millay herself.
Who stands in the foreground
looking comically stern and flicking
through sheets of her poems.
The clown looks out at us,
the viewer with a painted face
and a silly hat with weary eyes.
This is the position of
Millay, the photographic image.
Ready to play, to put on
the mask and the makeup
but never quite falling for any
of the artificial identities
she adopts.
Instead Millay viewed such
identity with an ironic detachment
that enabled her to
constantly reinvent her image.
Millay was a chameleon who used her
image flexibly throughout her career
to play on and to subvert
her expectations surrounding
the poetess.
She did this not only through
her poetry and writings,
but also her photographic
images, her dress
and her public performances.
In doing so, Millay took active part
in reinventing female poetic
identity in the 20th century.
And she goes on to
influence numerous other poets
such as Anne Sexton and Andrea Rich.
Millay became an object
through posing for the camera,
but she controlled that
performance from beyond the frame,
playing with her identity
to the last.
Yeah so if there's any
questions I'd be happy to...
>> [Inaudible] I find your
focusing on one aspect
of Millay is really rather...
I think you're imposing
the notion of 20th century,
21st century millennial
ethics, whatever they are,
on a woman who was born within
three years before the end
of the Victorian era.
Sure, she was extremely promiscuous.
But none of the names were
anything that she ever wrote.
We know about this from
other people, not from her.
She was extremely, extremely,
extremely private person
who did not wished things.
We know, she was a brilliant woman.
A brilliant woman, she spoke
five languages fluently.
And she was a bit continued
with as many
of the standards of
the previous ages.
She was a strong, she
believed in standards.
Well, strongly believed in
standards so that when the,
while she was against, she was
for promiscuity she also believed
in strict standards of poetry,
and is why she despised
the modern poets.
The, and my question is how can
you possibly explain in your terms
that when, funny when Edna Wilson
came to her in the late forties,
and asked her with a contract
for a very lucrative pathology
of her poems, for which she was only
asked to provide a sentence or two
for the background
of all those poems.
She categorically denied,
refused it.
Even though she was at the time,
destitute and needed the money,
and why also did she publish all
the time under the name Nancy Boyd
when in fact she could have
gotten over three times the amount
of money publishing
under her own name?
>> Sarah Parker: So as
far as I understand it,
to deal with her being a very
private person and not wanting
to spread information about her
private life through a biographical
through using a pseudonym.
>> [Inaudible]
>> Sarah Parker: Other than
simply disputing that on the basis
that I think you profoundly
misunderstood my argument here I
don't think there's really any
that I can respond to that,
but I agree that she was
intended to be a private person.
I don't think that undermines
many of the things I said
about the self-fashioning
that she engaged
in through photography
and her public image.
I think those two being private, but
also performing her body and image
in that way, those two things don't
have to be mutually exclusive.
Does anyone else have any questions?
>> She for a long time
was sort of not forgotten
and there's been this
real resurgence.
There have been a number
of biographies
in the last three or four years.
What do you attribute that to?
She did have this period of time
in the fifties I would
say when no one read her.
>> Sarah Parker: It almost seems
to have bump things up over time.
So that you find your
article every few years,
and I hope there's resurgence and I
hope that I'm kind of part of that
or I feel like I'm coming
on the back of that.
What one of the things
I would say is to do
with her not being a modernist or an
avant garade poet in a time period
that has very much in
terms of scholarly work,
it really has focused
on the avant garde.
She's writing traditional poetry.
As Suzanne Clark's book,
Sentiment to Modernism,
attributes that really that's
the reason she's been forgotten
according to Clark, that's writing a
poetry that doesn't necessarily fit
with modernist work that's been
published around her at the time.
Another thing that
I think is gender,
and those two things interconnect.
So, you've got anthologies
like the gender of modernism
and Millay doesn't make
it into the anthology,
where as James Joyce does.
So, in that time period
in the 1990s when a lot
of female modernist
writers are being,
people are taking an
interest in them.
Millay gets forgotten again
because she doesn't quite fit
in with the modernism side.
I think there are two reasons.
In the UK, particularly as well,
I think that she's
just not as well know.
So that's why I'm delighted
to be here in the U.S
where people have actually hear of
her and are enthusiastic about her.
>> I don't know what your whole
project because I haven't talked
to you yet, but I was curious about
the sort of, we talked briefly
about [inaudible] that she gets in
her book about the self-fashioning
of female masculinity
and photography recently,
very recent history, but
then we also see as far back
as Queen Elizabeth fashioning
as almost a military
figure in her portraiture.
I was curious if your project
ties her into a historical lineage
of women who have played
with self-construction,
clinging to femininity
without sacrificing the
masculinity, or switch those.
>> Sarah Parker: Certainly
I hope to.
Another figure that I'm looking
at in my project in Charloette Mue
who very much was on the one hand
played with female masculinity
but on the other also had a sort of,
they describe as the maiden persona,
or was self-consciously was playing
up to be the quiet, shy spinster,
but also it shapes over into
she certainly wasn't emphasizing
her femininity.
So a lot of figures I look at really
are flexible enough to be able
to know when to emphasize
their femininity and when
to attend some kind of androgyny.
And as I say, there could be useful
things by doing either of those but,
I think a lot of the figures I'm
looking at is their ability to move
between those different categories
that enables them too often,
reach a high level of fame
or to increase their
reputation through publicity.
If you get stuck in
one mold or another,
I think that often
works to a disadvantage.
I am interested in
different manifestations
of female masculinity, but it's
more the flexibility of gender
that I'm hoping to focus on.
>> [Inaudible]