’s "A Mona Lisa"–A Kleinian Reading, By Joe Aimone Essay, Research Paper
Joseph Aimone
The following reading, while it will begin in territories of
inquiry that may be common ground for many readers, also adventure into dark corners of
psychoanalytic thought associated with Melanie Klein and the "object relations"
school of such thought, which may be very foreign, and highly counterintuitive to
many readers, even those well schooled in psychoanalytic reading. I make this forewarning
not to demand that readers suddenly come to understand and accept the ideas involved, but
rather to excuse them their revulsion. Kleinian thought is hard to take, though the case
is made by better theorists than I am that her legacy is in fact a perfectly faithful and
entirely clinically useful application of certain aspects of Freud’s own thought,
with no substantial additions. That was Klein’s position on her relation to Freud,
and it is often enough the position of anyone who makes use of her thought. Psychoanalytic
thinkers who do not accept Klein’s view of her position vis a vis Freud often take
issue in depth and at great length with the conclusions a Kleinian will draw. I do not
propose to mount a defense against such disagreements in advance, though it may be
fruitful to answer in a constructive dialogue after I have offered my interpretation of
the poem. And I am confident that a fully elaborated Lacanian reading would greatly
enlarge the scope of psychoanalytic reading of this poem, and that a general mutual
accounting of Lacanian and Kleinian views, which many clinically based Kleinian
psychoanalytic theorists (Thomas Ogden, for one) find not to be in significant conflict,
would offer enriched possibilities for the interpretation of literary works and
psychoanalytic topics of all sorts, including this poem. (One might imagine the importance
of the visual elements of the poem as crucial starting points.) And of course there is
more to theoretical reading than psychoanalysis and more to the reading of literature than
theoretical reading. But, as Robert Frost put it, "You’ve got to start out with
inadequate knowledge."
Is this a lesbian love poem? We can assume the beloved is female only because of the
poem’s title, and we identify the speaker as female only by extra-textual knowledge.
If we read the poem with the assumption that the speaker is male, no immediate
inconsistencies arise, though, as we shall see, the nature of the erotic relation embodied
in the portrayal, the human emotion it draws upon for its power, is a terrifying thing.
Is this love poem somehow especially African American? That is, does it talk about
race? The answer will certainly be an affirmative, from the superficial evidence of the
frequency of the word "brown" to the self-doubting and anxious racial
identification of the speaker with "white bones" at the end, as Grimk?’s
father had married a white Bostonian and her upbringing was certainly tinged with
"white."
The fact that the term "lesbian" is even still in circulation is somewhat
remarkable, given that the more or less equivalently derived term (derived, that is, from
Ancient Greek textual sources) "platonic," which has been at times code for
"queer," has not. Angelina Ward Grimk? is a lesbian poet, both in the less
strict sense–being a poet who is a lesbian, who might thus be expected to have gender
issues and identity politics associated with the female homosexual in a (very often)
hostile culture–and in the sense of being like Sappho, the earliest textually
recorded reported female poet of female homoerotic themes, a poet whose poetry appeals to
the heterosexual male libido. And it appeals not just in the sense of a dependent
imploring aid but in the common sense in which we reverse the power relation implied in
the meaning of appeal, "asks," and find it referring instead to
"moves" or "draws." Moreover, Grimk? is a Sapphic poet in the sense
that her poetry is admired for its beauty as much as for its other cultural achievements,
whatever attitudes toward those achievements have been. Sappho’s poetry has been,
through the centuries, admired often not mainly for how it embodies the specifically
gendered desire it is clearly pregnant with, but for how it carries out an irresistible
appeal to the assent of taste. Grimk?’s, at its best, has that species, if not that
rank, of power of that kind.
Yet her case is in certain ways profoundly more complicated than Sappho’s. That
sheer beauty, which attempts to seduce any reader of poetry, is inseparable from both the
lesbian lover’s purpose, to seduce the beloved, and the lesbian advocate’s
agenda, to seduce the otherwise-than-lesbian-gendered reader into identification with the
Sapphic lesbian and consequent tolerance for the lesbian to pursue her object. And Grimk?
is out to seduce the white reader as well, into a cross identification that claims
equality for an African American poetry, even under the strain of the Sapphic burdens and
her own personal conflicted racia background. Her mixed blood heritage, the particularly
harsh circumstances of her father’s birth as the bastard sone of a slaveholder by a
slave and the failed marriage of that father to a white man woman, all may add more weight
to the racial agony of a divided, uncertain and often hypocritical nation felt as a
personal condition, as well, as her poetry digests that circumstance. "A Mona
Lisa" provides an excellent example of her work at her most artful and graceful
bearing up under the triple load of being black, being a poet, and being a lesbian, in a
way that seems effortless
Let us first take up the title. Why "Mona Lisa"? The Mona Lisa is a unique
signature of the achievements of the Western heterosexual male art object to command
attention, admiration, respect, and even love. And the Mona Lisa smile seems to hide the
secret of Western Civilization, or the secret(s) all women keep or may keep from men (such
as the answer to the questions "Who is really the father?" or "Are you
ready?" or "Are you pregnant?" or even "Do you love me?"), or the
secret the artist always withholds from the audience, or the principle of all secrets that
makes them intrinsically provocative. (Admittedly, the secret may simply be that the model
had bad teeth, and Da Vinci simply by accident or design, made that smile an emblem of so
much possible speculation.) Further, the Mona Lisa is often regarded as a uniquely superb
technical masterpiece in a particular Euro-centric patriarchal cultural legacy–it has
no equal, in a tradition that has no equal, and it demonstrates that the tradition has no
equal even were there no other evidence, the argument runs. So Grimk?’s use of
"the Mona Lisa" as a flattering commonplace to her beloved, a metaphor much in
circulation, a way of saying, "This poem is about a woman as beautiful as the Mona
Lisa," may not be all there is to the matter. Her choice may involve, conjure, all
the subterranean resonant anxiety of the straight Euro-male’s expected reaction to Da
Vinci’s mysteriously smiling dame. And as male readers have found Sappho’s eros
an appealing moder for their own, so may male readers of Grimk?’s poem, Grimk? may
have implicitly intended to claim. Furthremore, Grimk? may be suggesting that she,
Grimk?, as an artist, is Da Vinci’s equal, in "painting Mona Lisa," a
woman the equal of a man, and a black the equal of a white, a lesbian the equal of a
heterosexual, a black lesbian the equal of the white man responsible for the
greatest work of art in a certain male history, the Renaissance, in the cultural
surround of Grimk?’s own work, the Harlem Renaissance.
Thus framed, the poem, like the painting leads us to the diptych structure of the poem,
its two parts. The upper half consists of a series of four statements of desire: "I
should like…" The lower half consists of three questions: "Would I…? Or…?
Would my…?" The poem is divided, like the human face, the face of the Mona Lisa,
into unwavering eyes above and a lower half expressing the profoundest resonating doubts.
Human beings, unless conditioned to do otherwise, meet eye to eye rarely–it is an
anxiety producing situation to stare back at a stare, usually, as we check surreptitiously
as to whether the other person is in fact paying us attention we may want or need or
not–to answer a question, to know if we have been understood, to find out if we are
being watched, etc. Staring contests are contests of aggression, not just contests of
concentration. But certain pairs of humans stare endlessly into each other’s eyes:
mother and child, and lover and lover. Usually we study the lower half of the face for the
attitude, the expression (raised or lowered eyebrows notwithstanding), the meaningful
content of the face we encounter, (and, indeed, we study the lower half to recognize of
the identity of the other person, for the lower half of the face is much more distinctive,
given its role in expression, than the upper.) Of course, our ideas about what those
expressions mean is inflected by our suppositions about how we are attended to,
suppositions gained by looking at the eyes, whether or if so where they wander, how intent
they seem, and so forth, just as the tone of voice is a constant contributor to the
understanding of the spoken word. (Hence concealing either the eyes or the lower half of
the face is usually sufficient disguise, at least as to individual identity, if not other
presumptions we must say we regret we make as if reflex unless they are deliberately
resisted.)
But certain pairs of humans stare nearly endlessly into each other’s eyes: mother
and child, and lover and lover. (The possibility that the appeal of the Mona Lisa’s
beauty may be matriclinous rather than sexual may seem at first a contrary indication, but
a psychoanalytic view, especially a Kleinian, or "object relations" one, could
easily explain their equivalence.) The Mona Lisa’s face, with its enigmatic lower
half, that smile, drives the viewer to study the eyes, which, since the painting directs
their gaze at the viewer, never waver, suggesting love or an irrepressible and unending
aggressiveness, even a threat of death. Either one would be compelling: Love invites us to
enjoy it, and so we would stare and stare, even to the edge of doom. But the threat of
aggression provokes us to wariness, to continuing to watch the aggressor’s eyes, for
to drop one’s eyes is to lose the advantage of surveillance, of knowing when the
other has shifted attention and may be about to act aggressively or may have dropped guard
enough to allow a successful assault. And the equivalence of the end, love to the end or
death in the end for dropping eye contact or death itself so tempting as to appear to us
as love, comes through clearly as we proceed through the sequence of assertions of desire.
That sequence of assertion all occur in the subjunctive, "I should…" There
is an ambiguity here between several situations of desire. The hypothetical: "If I
could, I would" is not an unidiomatic construction to place upon "I
should." But the counterfactual, "I would, though I can’t," has a
special poignancy for expressing a forbidden, that is, a desire forbidden in a
hetero-archic anti-lesbian society, while it is an equally idiomatic construction to place
upon "I should." Finally, the hortatory, "I ought to" is not only
idiomatic, but carries with it the implication that the thing to be done is to be done out
of conscience, a superego matter, thus always necessarily gaining its force in part from
the death drive. This strikingly appropriate grammatical triple engine phrase drives the
poem through the phases of desire.
In the first phase, the "I" is a tiny thing, a thing that creeps, a baby love
or a (perhaps deadly, perhaps demonic) snake in the grass, as threatening in the beginning
as it will be threatened in the end, moving slowly through the "long brown
grasses." Now the hint in line three that these grasses are the lashes of the eye, as
line seven will (perhaps) confirm, is what allows us to imagine that the I is something
quite small, small enough to look into eyes as if they were pools past lashes large enough
to be "long brown grasses" crept through. But there is a hint of death, or
suffering at any rate, and an implication in race issues even here. The tiny "I"
is lashed by the grasses, creeping through them. This is just the faintest suggestion of
getting past the question of slavery, associated with the fearsome homonym
"lashes," enough to make the "I" tremble.
That the "I" should not tremble but "poise" is then the obvious
thing for the "I" to desire. It is not "pose," but "poise,"
a confident and even artful stance against the fear of eyes so large and deep as to have
not just a "brink," but a "very brink," an edge of the edge, with
precipitous possibilities of self-loss, a version of the infant fear of falling, which is
one of the few human fears modern biologists regard as "instinctual" in the
strict sense of the term, near it. And by line six, the color of the pools is now clear:
"leaf brown," and "shadowed," suggesting both the struggle to find an
affirmative descriptor for African American skin colors, for "leaf brown" is
beautiful, as are "shadowed eyes," but also hinting at the death drive hiding
inside the erotic compulsion drawing the "I" onward, for fallen, dead leaves are
brown, and waters of that color would be quite fearful, suggesting decay beyond death
itself, which may be the shadow that covers the attractive eyes, perhaps as attractive as
they themselves are.
Having wanted to "creep," to approach unawares and thus gain advantage, and
having wanted to be brave enough to "poise" before the entrancing but dangerous
eyes, the I now "should like to cleave," to cut in two, to split. The vocabulary
is violent and the topology is also correspondingly Kleinian, reflecting infant fears of
part-objects in the schizoid phase, which involve ingestion, splitting, projection, and so
forth. The "I" hear is facing the primal fear of death as the infant encounters
it. But cleaving is, of course, done with a blade, also identifying the "I" then
as phallic. The desire to identify with the phallic mother by being introjected by her
seems clear, with telling details: the process is soundless, suggesting both the sharpness
of the cleaving edge and the poise of the "I." Furthemore, the
"unrippled," utterly undisturbed world of the pool is clearly a sign for the
situation which that emobodies the "autistic-contiguous position" (see Thomas
Ogden’s The Primitive Edge of Experience for a fair account of this concept)
of the psyche, inside the womb. This is fantastic, pre-oedipal omnipotence: this magical,
phallic, identificatory re-entering of the mother’s body, a body which appears in the
form of the beloved’s eyes (and it should be noted that babies first recognize
mothers eyes of all the facial features, understandably, as they signal the place of
attention), metaphorized as pools, is summed up by the fact that though the waters
"glimmer," emit light but only faintly, they remain "unrippled."
And were it not enough to have these hints of death and infant fears, extractable by
way of placing the poem under the strain of a Kleinian psychoanalytic interrogation, the
final stage of desire is much more explicitly self-destructive: "I should like to
sink down / And down / And down…" One must note implication that the reiteration of
the monotonous "and down" implied by the three periods is actually endless, for
that is how one does not merely drown, but "deeply drown," drown in a way beyond
the normal ken of drowning.
This Mona Lisa is a dangerous woman, or at least her eyes are, and at least for
"I"’s like this. Her beauty, strangely grotesque at times, produces a
series of stages of desire that resonate with the entire repertoire of schizoid fears of