Q: Are the painterly images and themes in "The Glass Essay" effective as narrative devices? [Addition: How do they intermingle with the theme of Emily Brontë?]
A: In "The Glass Essay"[1], which is part of her 1995 work "Glass, Irony and God"[2], Anne Carson confronts the reader with the situation and the thoughts of a possibly imaginary speaker and with the aftermath of being abandoned by a lover. Throughout "The Glass Essay", Carson makes very frequent use of painterly and very visual images, she makes the reader feel her writing and live through the flashbacks, memories, feelings of emptiness and desolation that her speaker experiences.
The text at hand forms a combination of autobiographical allusions to Carson's personal background, quotes from works of Emily Brontë and detailed descriptions of the mental processes of and reality around the speaker who is never clearly revealed as being female, but who generally appears to be a woman by stating "she liked the idea of me having a man" (p. 3) or "it was not my body, not a woman's body" (p. 38). Though being written in prose, the text is widely arranged in short stanzas of three lines each. This concept occasionally breaks up, however, when external quotes are inserted or in the first stanza of the text's last chapter "thou" (p. 31-38).
The essay is subdivided by 9 short headlines, each consisting of only a single word, in detail "I" (p. 1), "she" (p. 1), "three" (p. 2), "whacher" (p. 4), "kitchen" (p. 13), "liberty" (p. 16), "hero" (p. 21), "hot" (p. 27) and finally "thou" (p. 31). The subordinate textual parts each start with the corresponding headline word, with only two exceptions, the first being "I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast ..." (p. 21) under the headline "hero" and the second "The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness." (p. 31) under the headline "thou". When taking a closer look at the context and at possible ways of interpretation, a connection seems plausible. The term "hero" links the idea "of Emily Brontë's little merlin hawk Hero / that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table" (p. 23) and the speaker's father, a veteran and "former World War II navigator" (p.24) who now "suffers from a kind of dementia / ... / first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer" (p. 23). Both the bird and the father are reliant on the care of others, both depend on being fed instead of symbolizing the freedom the act of flying and, therefore, their nature once included. Their former pride is displaced with the pity of others. Furthermore, a second link can be made between the father and the superior being referred to as "Thou". The desire "to have a
friend to tell things to at night, / without the terrible sex price to pay" (p. 32) , just as Emily Brontë had her "Thou", the contrast of the father who was once so admirable and who now only causes compassion, using "a language known only to himself, / made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals" (p. 26) instead of talking to her, these unfulfilled needs are an enormous strain on the speaker. The fact that "hero" and "thou" are not mentioned as the first words of the subsequent textual passages could hint at the problems that the speaker has relating to her father as a former hero on one hand and his decline on the other and to the superior being that was there to talk to Brontë in the night but does not come to talk to the speaker when she needs someone to talk to.
Analysing the imagery and the virtually visual methods Carson applies in her narrative, the striking fact about the images she uses is their relevance to the speaker's current state of mind. They vary from quiet, almost idyllic images when she tells that "on the edge of the moor our pines / dip and coast in breezes / from somewhere else" while the speaker is losing herself in a daydream about her time with her lover Law to violent and grotesque images such as "woman on a blasted landscape / backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch. // Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption / like the top half of a crab" while the speaker is telling about nightmarish visions, likely to be caused by grief and resentment.
The overall tone and the dominating mood of the images remains rather negative, corresponding to the speaker's momentary attitude. She is still "thinking // of the man who / left in September" (p. 1) and spends her nights alone, feeling as if "night drips its silver tap / down the back" (p. 1) , a very cold and uncomfortable thought, while she longs for her own "Thou". She is about to visit her mother "on a moor in the north" (p. 1), but this plain and neutral expression is altered when the speaker reveals that "Spring opens like a blade there" (p. 1), carrying across the allusion of both beauty and fright, of fascination and dangerous quickness. When she arrives at her mother's home, she feels "as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass" (p. 2), the location suits the setting, she "can see dead leaves ... / and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth" (p. 3), even "black open water comes // curdling up like anger" (p. 3). When she goes out to walk in the moor, she feels that "the bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April / carve into me with knives of light" (p. 7). This scenery, seen from a different viewpoint, could be calm and peaceful, soothing and quiet, but that is not what the speaker intends to feel, she does not want to be soothed, she appears to bathe in her suffering with strange delight, to enjoy pain as it is.
