Marianne Moore and a Psychoanalytic Paradigm for the Dissociated Image

Abstract

A hallmark of modernist poetry is the dissociated image-the evening sky once Eliot has compared it to a patient etherized on a table-as opposed to images with more conventional shared relations of time, or place, or logical type.1 The modernist basis for the reader's intuitive perception of similarity-in-difference, to use Aristotle's criterion for a good metaphor, is a likeness typically limited to psychological and cultural connotations. Given this focus on psycho-cultural meaning, critics should consider carefully the psychoanalytic history of dissociated images in a poetic canon, if only to understand better in modernist poetry the complex crucial relation between autobiography and cultural criticism. By explaining the key stylistic developments of dissociation as a defense mechanism in a modernist's canon, the psychoanalytic critic brings to light those underlying fantasies which are, for readers as well as for writers, both private and cultural. Marianne Moore chose almost to specialize in the juxtaposition of unrelated naturalistic surfaces, often to picture vividly in the mind's eye one close-up detail: the fronds above a cat's eye, for example, as compared in Peter with katydid legs. Moore's concern for surface description fractured by such dissociated images, cut her speaker's ego off from an outside world of characters. Consequently, this ego also would not address directly past literary personalities. Whereas Ezra Pound created Personae, T. S. Eliot Police in Different Voices, and William Carlos Williams The Tempers, Moore restricted herself mostly to diffuse observations of natural objects and scenes. In tableaux of dis-