Abstract
Probably to their credit, critics of Stevie Smith have not labored long in attempting to align her with a particular critical agenda. Rather, she's been most consistently read as liminal, resistant, ambivalent, and eccentric. (1) What makes her vexing for our curricula (to which courses does she properly belong?) has made her fascinating for Julie Sims Steward and Kristin Bluemel, who have fruitfully focused on the tensions, symmetries, and contradictions between her drawings and her poems; for James Najarian, Sheryl Stevenson, and William May, who have been sensitive readers of Smith's polyvocal intertextual innovations; and for Catherine Civello and Laura Severin, who have explored Smith's fiction and poems with a view to her engagement with popular culture and her representation of childhood as a means of subverting conventional gender concepts (particularly those concerned with domestic femininity). Approaching her from a poststructuralist perspective, many of her readers have noted some aspect of her gender- and genre-bending play with notions of subjectivity, identifying Smith as a prescient postmodernist and a challenger of patriarchy. While these may be persuasive arguments, it has nonetheless remained difficult to locate Smith within the galaxy of gender politics and feminism. Smith's most prolific critic, Romana Huk, observes, for instance, that Smith's work has been difficult to appropriate for feminist revisions of literary modernism because her critiques, parodies, and retellings of narratives often resolve themselves in less than clearly alternative terms, and even incorporate what appear to be traditionalist statements about women without employing what we recognize as irony. (Poetic 148) In the absence of classic irony, I propose to sharpen our understanding of Smith's feminism by attending to a classical motif to which she often figuratively returns in her poems: that of Narcissus and Echo. (2) Her work dwells on the metamorphosis both in the myth and of the myth, which has accumulated new and gendered meanings. And like Ovid's locus amoenus, Smith's scenes of narcissistic gazing are sites of disruption, familiar territory in which something dangerous is hiding. Indeed, the danger inheres in the well-worn assumptions that the myth has been made to serve, especially Christian and Freudian accounts of desire, worship, creation, childhood, and motherhood. Smith reveals that these psychoanalytic and religious frameworks, which seem utterly opposed, are both invested in the Narcissus narrative in similar ways: they preemptively erase Echo from the picture, they posit narcissism as a fundamentally feminine trait, and their concepts of childhood reproduce Narcissus's own infelicitous confusion of self and reflection. Against these shared contrivances of feminine and childish both Christian and secular narratives produce (even as they also disavow) a fragile fiction: the coherent adult male ego. It is not surprising that Smith scents both the instability and deep irony beneath these gendered constructions of adulthood, nor that some of her most withering critiques are aimed at dismantling them. Whether the child is cast as a narcissist in tidy contrast to a putatively selfless parent or is understood merely as a visible reflection of a parent's virtues, Smith explodes the self-serving fictions--demonizing and idealizing alike--into which adults write children. She undertakes this by mocking the poses of humility and subjection that disguise facile sexist fantasies of self-righteousness, and by reintroducing Echo into the Ovidian scene and teasing out her parodic potential. The children in Smith's poems collude with her various incarnations of Echo to subvert and ironize the pernicious repetitions of the Narcissus story in culture. Myth and worship In his 1914 essay On Narcissism: An Introduction, Freud postulates that while all infants pass through a phase of primary women tend to develop an intensification of the original narcissism, a phenomenon unfavorable to the development of a true object-choice (88). …
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