Elizabeth Bishop's Stories of Childhood: Writing the Disaster

Abstract

The sight of columns of numbers, Elizabeth Bishop writes in her memoir “Primer Classs,” always induces the traumatic recollection of early math instruction: “a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful, goes through my diaphragm” (Prose 3). She compares the effect to the sight of a large dorsal fin cutting the surface of the water. The memory is potent and, like the mother's scream in “In the Village,” permanent: ”It is a memory I do not even have to try to remember, or reconstruct; it is always right there, clear and complete (Prose 4).