In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement note that Michelet and Freud u22both thought that the repressed past survives in woman; woman, more than anyone else, is dedicated to reminiscenceu22 (5). Whether or not this is true of woman, that expectation of her—as keeper of the past—has perhaps subsisted in the deepest realms of the collective unconscious. From the work of Cixous and Clement, Julia Kristeva and Angela Leighton, I ultimately deduce that there are two perceptions of time: manu27s time has been associated with the straight, the linear, the historical, and the prosaic; womanu27s time has been associated with the circular, the cyclical, the monumental, and the poetic. Each time has its obstacles to overcome: manu27s time is stubbornly rooted in patriarchal language; womanu27s time is dizzyingly enigmatic. The struggles between these two times manifest themselves in the poetry of perhaps the two most canonical American women poets, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. In the corpus of each, I find a common mode of operation that attempts to reconcile manu27s and womanu27s time, to varying degrees of success. Emily Dickinson uses the language of linear history to stretch its boundaries; she experiments with the nature of time and memory as related to trauma, beginning to question and reform historical memory (menu27s and womenu27s) and our experience of it in poems such as #1458, u22Timeu27s wily Chargers will not waitu22; #563, u22I could not prove the Years had feetu22; #33, u22If recollecting were forgettingu22; and #312, u22Her - u27last Poemsu27—.u22 Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, is not as certain that the two can be so easily reconciled. Determined to establish her place in literary history and lay claim to posterity, but terrified that doing so will take away her present voice, Plath often represents woman—sometimes literally, as in u22All the Dead Dears,u22 and sometimes metaphorically, as in u22The Courage of Shutting- Upu22—as a potential museum, a live body always in danger of drying out and immobilizing, being admired as she is, frozen in the present moment, but denied future evolution. Through close readings of the poetsu27 afore-mentioned works and others, in conjunction with the frequent application of critical/theoretical scholarship in feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and postcolonial veins, I will explore the attempted reconciliation of manu27s and womanu27s time in four chapters: u22The Thrust of Manlinessu22 concerns the limitations of linear time, including entropy, atrophy, and the charge of feminine reminiscence; u22Morning Glory: Cycles and Resurrectionu22 outlines the advantages of a circular perspective, including possibilities for change and resurrection; u22Secretaries of Aporia: Recording without Meaningu22 explores the limitations of cyclical time as encased in linear time, particularly in the literary charge to detail without explaining; and u22The Time of Traumau22 underlines the historical and political implications of both the burden of reminiscence without return and the study of womenu27s poetry in linear time.
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