Disturbances of the Archive: Repetition and Memory in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry

Abstract

This chapter takes as its starting point the letters written by Elizabeth Bishop to her psychoanalyst Dr Ruth Foster in 1947, newly discovered and deposited in Bishop’s archive at Vassar College. It offers new information about Foster’s background and psychoanalytic training, providing a brief contemporary context in relation to psychoanalytic circles in New York, dispelling the idea that Foster was a Kleinian analyst, and suggesting why Bishop later thought the analysis had failed. The chapter goes on to read the letters as suggesting that Bishop was working out something very important about the relationship between repetition and remembering in her writing at this time and through her therapy. The letters offer new information about the origins of ‘At the Fishhouses’ and ‘The Moose’; however this material is looked at in this essay again less as revelation than as indicating the ways Bishop uses memory and description to create what Luce Irigaray has called ‘temporal space’.