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In The Waiting Room Essay

Decent Essays

“In the Waiting Room” can be argued to be both the most discussed poem and the best poem of Bishop’s. To her horror, the “Elizabeth” in the poem discovers that she is an “I” and “one of them” (PPL150). This thought, which is precipitated by numerous things, especially Aunt Consuelo’s “oh!” and the “horrifying breast” of the women in the waiting room’s copy National Geographic, plunges her into despair about society’s order (PPL 149). In a way, this poem expresses both the awakening of oneself as a person and the awakening to their sexuality. “Elizabeth” is terrified of things that are associated with women, breast, a cry of pain, and as such she is forced to realize that she is a woman as well and, potentially, has the same fate as them. …show more content…

Ostriker encourages the readers not to be shy as Bishop “both yearns for and fears the erotic, experiences it as actual or potential pain, and produces screens to disguise the experience” (241). These early works and their position on her childhood provide insight into Bishop’s life, especially of her love of women, despite being indirectly about her sexuality. As such, these hidden ideas in her poems should be explored by the readers because it helps us to better understand her. The poems Bishop had published later in life, namely “Insomnia,” “The Shampoo,” “One Art,” and finally “Sonnet,” deal more with her reluctance to expose her sexuality than discovering it as she does in these earlier poems.
Of the fourpoems listed above, “Insomnia” is the most concealed in terms of sexuality. Without proper insider knowledge, this poem could easily be overlooked, but its use of the term “inverted” signals to people that she is talking about her lesbian identity (PPL 54). Without the in-group knowledge, Bishop can hide her discussion of sexuality in this poem which is otherwise freely discussed. The last stanza imagines the “world inverted” where “you love me” and ultimately states that Bishop wants a world like this (PPL 54). Ideas of gender roles and how they interact with sexuality causes Bishop to hide her true thoughts and feelings and only in an inverted world can she thrive. Still, as Harrison points out the tone in this poem is “both bitter and defiant.

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