Angelina Ward Grimke — страница 7
fatally attractive woman, the lover may wonder if she is the only lover. Second, considering "the only white bones." The "I" is anxious about race positioning. Here it is worthwhile to reconsider the entire erotic narrative as an allegory of writing, of the artistic act, where the addressee is the work of art and the speaker is its creator. With that consideration forefront, the tinge of anxiety about being the only white artist to create the black masterpiece, to "paint a (black: "leaf brown…shadowed") Mona Lisa" is evident enough. But even if the poem is not an allegory of writing, but rather a lesbian love poem, directed at a fatally attractive black woman, who may by her fatal attractiveness be suspected of having brought many lovers to their "death" in her, or even literally to their death over her, the lover may wonder if she, the lover, is the only one with a reason to think of herself as white, having "white bones." The bones have a chance to live on, in a sense, too, longer even than the slow end of the "ever-widening circle" which eventually must always exhaust itself "at the marge," but "wavering back and forth, back and forth." (They will of course, however, eventually dissolve, leaving no notable trace.) This wavering is a deepest disturbance of the "unrippled waters," for the disturbance goes down nearly as deep, or altogether as deep, as the bones themselves, left where the "I" will have "deeply drowned," depending on whether you attribute the wavering to the refraction of light through disturbed water or to the motion of the bones disturbed by the moving water. So while Grimk? may have been drawn to "paint a Mona Lisa" as a black artist, Grimk? may have wavered, or been aware of necessarily appearing to waver, in her sense that she could not be considered a black artist but one with "white bones." Interpretations of poems may allow no certain conclusions about their meanings, just as some paintings allow no complete account of their subjects. The Mona Lisa is a case in point: Traditionally, art historians say that Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo commissioned a portrait of his third wife, Lisa di Antonio Maria di Noldo Gherardini. But the tradition of the name M(ad)o(n)na Lisa de Gioconda is doubtful, as Da Vinci customarily kept the names of his models in his notebooks, and that name does not appear. Moreover, Leonardo kept the painting himself for several years after completing it–an unlikely event in the history of a commissioned portrait. Computer technology has even demonstrated that the Mona Lisa may be "morphed" into a perfect match with Da Vinci’s own self-portrait, leading some to some wild speculation that the artist crafted a deliberately disguised self-portrait, or a portrait of his narcissistic "ideal of beauty" in some conscious way. (See "The Morphing of Mona: a Computer Detective Solves the Mystery of the Identity of the ‘Real’ Mona Lisa," a seven and a half minute video produced by Lillian F. Schwartz at Bell Labs, 1990.) Another wild theory, based solely on the evidence that Da Vinci’s mother’s name was Lisa, claims the painting is an image in which the son flatters the mother with a portrait "as she must have been" in the lovely April of her prime. The concept of projective identification, however, may provide a more direct answer, and one that would account for both the idea that the painting is a self-portrait and a portrait of the mother, in suggesting that the self is always result of an introjection of the mother and that mother herself is subject to the projection of the self onto her; and that later, any lover’s object is in the same predicament; and that for the artist, the work of art is always a projection of the self, however complicated by the history of introjection and projection that self is; and that for the partisan of some group with which one identifies, such as women, African Americans, lesbians, artists, one is always in a precarious relationship of mutual self-projection with those groups; and that for the viewer of the painting, or the reader of the poem, one is in a related predicament, projecting one’s self-image and all its investments and received projections onto the object, which, as an artifact, a communicative event directed at least potentially at us, projects all its freighted projections upon us, subjecting us, though we go willingly, to its vision. I want this poem to be a work of art, to be poetry. I want this poem to be an African American poem. I want this
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