She's Got the Power

Abstract

The blazon is a poetic form characterized by a lyric catalogue of the admirable physical features of the poet’s beloved. Reading this catalogue as a form of dismemberment, Nancy Vickers and Patricia Parker argue that the blazon exists as a tool for controlling and objectifying the beloved. Under Vickers’ argument, the male poet’s act of dismembering the female beloved protects him from the transformative dismemberment that Actaeon suffered at Diana’s hands (Vickers, “Diana” 273). Meanwhile, Parker explores how the blazon is utilized as a tool for figurative rape, assault, and commodification (Parker 132). Both argue that the blazon features an oppressive power dynamic in which a controlling male-dominant order (defined by its embodiment in the male poet-as-Actaeon) dismembers the female beloved-as-Diana’s physical body, making her into a voiceless, powerless object. And yet, this oppressive power dynamic does not escape subversive forces, as demonstrated by Dahlia Ravikovitch’s “Clockwork Doll.” 2 Ravikovitch’s poem subverts the blazon’s oppressive power dynamic through a three-step process: resistance via movement, partial physical liberation, and empowerment through transformation. Ravikovitch’s doll actively resists the blazon’s oppressive power dynamic by literally moving. Because this movement defies the power dynamic’s rigid constraints, it brings about partial liberation from that power dynamic. This partial liberation, in turn, allows Ravikovitch’s doll to empower herself by co-opting dismemberment and its transformative power, removing her from the blazon’s power dynamic. Because the poet catalogues the doll’s physical features, “Clockwork Doll” demonstrates that it is a blazon. In identifying Petrarch’s adaptation of Ovidian myth as the model for future blazons, Vickers indicates that the poet-as-Actaeon “cannot allow [the beloved-as-Diana] to dismember his body; instead he repeatedly, although reverently, scatters hers throughout his scattered rhymes” (“Diana” 279), a process Parker relates to the act of taking inventory (131). In “Clockwork Doll,” the poet takes inventory of the doll’s physical features: “And my hair was golden, my eyes were blue, / and my dress was the color of flowers and all, / and a sprig of cherries was tacked to my hat” (Ravikovitch lines 12-14). Though not particularly complex, this analysis places “Clockwork Doll” firmly within the tradition of the blazon, a tradition it will subsequently subvert.