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The Muse of Indifference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Eric C. Walker
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Abstract

This essay is about the pressure on the words poetry and marriage to pair off homologously, to behave isomorphically, and about the forms of resistance to that pressure, examples of which I locate under a term, indifference, that in Romanticism is coupled with conjugality to signify not apathy but recalcitrance. Reading Austen, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schlegel, and Barbauld, I adopt indifference to describe writing that works in fugitive ways outside the forensic boundaries of marriage culture, which constrain marriage writing whether it is epithalamic or anticonjugal. I then argue that Marianne Moore's “Marriage” (1923) and Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband (2001) do not write narrowly for or against marriage as, outrageously, freedom's necessary form but, more widely, write against the foundational grain of a pervasive marriage culture that would preempt the subjects and forms of writing, as well as the question of freedom.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 197 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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