The Pink Guitar (Writing as Feminist Practice):Rachel Blau DuPlessis

The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice is a collection of essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis based around the idea that the cultural contexts women operate in, specifically those of language, “are formed and reinforced gendered human beings, produced in the family, in institutions of gender development, in the forms of sexual preference, in the division of labor by gender, especially in the structure of infant care, in the class and conditions of the families in which we are psychologically born, and in the social maintenance of the sexes through life’s stages and in any historical era.” (3) In other words, DuPlessis is interested in examining representations of women in literature, in the hope of destabilizing power structures and allowing other voices to be heard—specifically, the under-represented voices of women. But this is only the surface of what DuPlessis is working toward.

Not only is DuPlessis questioning the representation of women in literature and in writing, she is also questioning the manner in which women are forced to represent themselves through writing. DuPlessis posits that because the English language is a history of repressions and silencing, each individual word carries narratives that the female writer is not really a part of (and never was), and thus does not relate to. Males and females read the symbols, connotations, and myths of language differently, and thus, women do not utilize language in the same way that men do—and, problematically for women, the way that is typically acceptable in academia.

The title of the book comes from the Wallace Stevens poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” which reads, “Things as they are/are changed upon the blue guitar.” The Pink Guitar, then, represents a filtering of language and the world through a feminist aesthetic (Not the feminist aesthetic, DuPlessis often reminds the reader. She resists the idea of the writer as elitist, as power-holder, and doesn’t wish to claim that authority. Thus, she uses the indefinite article to represent the possibilities of other feminine asthetics.) and it’s true that The Pink Guitar, stylistically, has a unique form.

At times, the writing is borderline paratactic, and like a lyric poem DuPlessis often eschews normal language structures and syntax. Much of her writing is jumpstarts and sentence fragments, especially in earlier sections like “For the Etruscans.” The style can be daunting initally, but it doesn’t take the reader long to slip into the rhythm. At times it’s almost like reading an Ashberry poem, in that it’s more important to follow the flow of the essay than to become overly concerned with an individual component that doesn’t fit exactly into place. Another reason for these components that don’t always fit, or point like an arrow to some narrative conclusion, is that DuPlessis—and she makes the claim that this is a part of feminine aesthetic, and it’s certainly true for writing that labels itself as post-modern—is interested in process as informative of product. Another word for this mode of writing is “diaristic,” which DuPlessis traces back to other female writers such as Virginia Wolf. Here’s how DuPlessis explains her rationale for this style of writing in one of the latter sections, “Otherhow”:

I struggle to break into the sentences that of course I am capable of writing smoothly. I want to distance. To rupture. Why? In part because of the gender contexts in which these words have lived, of which they taste. (144)

And here’s how she describes her actual mode of writing:

Poems “like” essays: situated, breathless, passionate, critical. A work of entering into the social force of language, the work done everywhere with the social force of language...(147, ellipses added, italics original to text)

In terms of the writing that she examines, DuPlessis has a strong affinity for the modernist movement, and has some respect for what poets like Pound, Eliot, and Williams were trying to accomplish. But an important problem with their attempted rewriting of the rules of language—of their attempt to drain significance from language—was that they were still exclusive of other voices. Or, in other words, DuPlessis writes that:

Destabilizing language, form, narrative has historically been the task of both modernist and post-modernist innovation. But there is a central problem with these two twentieth-century movements of linguistic and formal critique. The problem is Gender Politics. Modernism has a radical poetics and exemplary cultural ambition of diagnosis and reconstruction. But it is imbued with a nostalgia for center and order, for elitist or exclusive solutions, for transforming historical time into myth.

DuPlessis wanted more from the modernist movement, not least an acknowledgement that the literary cannon is a history of power, surrounded by the shards of other repressed or silenced voices. In part, I think some of the modernists might have agreed with this. In the Cantos Pound writes about “twenty gross statues and old books,” (paraphrase), referring to the worthlessness of European history, and Eliot is intimating both Europe and memory when he writes about the lilacs spring from the dead land. But, this was somewhat disingenuous of both poets, as they both utilized Eurocentric myths in their poetry in order to convey meaning, and Pound wrote sort of a double whammy with his “Portrait d'Une Femme”, when he compares a woman to the Sargasso Sea. In part, what DuPlessis is doing is pointing out the disingenuity of the modernists, who had ideals similar to hers, but failed to live up to them.

Of the modernists, DuPlessis is most interested in H.D., and cites her work throughout The Pink Guitar, specifically turning to passages in H.D.’s memoir referring to Pound. DuPlessis does this as a means of mapping some of the gender relations in the modernist movement. One of the interesting points DuPlessis raises concerns the importance of the muse in modernist literature. Obviously, the muse was a woman, but DuPlessis interrogates what characteristics make up the muse—silence, beauty, and inspiration, among others. For H.D., writes DuPlessis, the muse was a problematic figure, because a female muse for a female writer doesn’t have the same effect as it would for a male writer, who modeled the muse after a fantasized female representation. And what’s more, the qualities of the muse are qualities that are expected from women in general, and it’s easy to see why those might be detrimental qualities for a female writer to possess. And to further complicate the situation, Pound wanted H.D. to be his muse, which of course, could only come at the cost of her own writing.

By the latter chapters, DuPlessis begins to focus less on H.D., and more on Susan Howe, who interrogates language structures in different ways, such as punning, and the use of palimpset, a term DuPlessis credits to H.D., and means one text layered over another, so that both are visible as separate entities, but also create a new, jumbled text. Howe views text as an object, and everything about the object—whether intentional, such as font and format, or unintentional, such as pen marks and notations—is significant, and altered by its physical appearance.