Anne Keefe

Projecting the Body: Ekphrasis and the Uncanny Pose

Many 20th century poets turn to ekphrasis in the face of an uncanny image, using the mode as a strategy to work through discomfort in the confrontation with something both familiar and strange. Using Freud’s original definition of uncanny in his 1919 essay, this paper will explore ekphrasis as a mode to develop a feminist understanding of the uncanny, revealing the ekphrastic poet’s power to project a verbal interpretation onto the  reader’s understanding of uhe visual, thus forcing the reader to take in dissonances and grapple with the conflicting relationships between subject/object, artist/model, gaze/glance, male/female, and so on. Specifically, this paper will examine the complex interconnection of the uncanny, desire, and the material body in response to Eavan Boland’s “Woman Posing,” an ekphrastic poem based on the drawing of Mrs. Badham by Ingres. Unlike John Ashbery’s famous ekphrastic poem “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” on Parmigianino’s overtly uncanny self-portrait in which we see the body distorted by means of the distorted mirror, Boland’s poem reflects on an image that requires subtle attention to detail to reveal its uncanny nature. Indeed, the space of the ekphrastic poem allows Boland to reveal the uncanny position of the woman’s pose, an awkward arrangement of limbs and clothing which is always somehow not right, suggesting a disconnect between the material body and the person of Mrs. Badham herself. Boland calls into question the relationship between representation and artifice, suggesting the painter’s role as master in arranging and stylizing the model, selecting the background, interpreting the facial expression—in other words, exhibiting a kind of possession and control of the woman as if she is non-human—a doll, a clockwork woman not unlike Freud’s automaton.  As the speaker questions the image, the reader is lead to see Mrs. Badham positioned outside of the domestic space in which Boland expects to encounter her, and a feminist argument regarding Mrs. Badham’s location in terms of both class and gender is revealed. Freud’s discussion of the heimlich/unheimlich distinction and the relationship between the uncanny and the familiar, comforting space of the home is disrupted by Boland’s ekphrasis, which insists on imagining the domestic familiar in the face of the strange representation. Here, the reader is forced to deal with the contradiction between the visual and the verbal, a dissonance emphasized by the poem rather than repressed, a confrontation with the uncanny that exposes the lack inherent to the fantasy of self and other.

Anne Keefe is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary poetry at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, where she teaches creative writing and literature in the English department. Her doctoral research focuses on ekphrastic poetry, gender, and desire. She completed her MFA in poetry at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004. Her poems have appeared in Potomac Review, Cream City Review, The Southeast Review, and Prairie Schooner.