Deconstraction essay

¶ … Deconstruction

Louis Bogan refers to the restrictions and constrictions on the female soul in the poem "Women." The poet uses the motif of wilderness to represent freedom and therefore begins the poem with an assertive thesis, "Women have no wilderness in them." Moreover, sexual imagery permeates the poem and so Bogan comments not only on restrictive social roles but to sexual freedom as well. The tone of "Women" is overtly bitter, bordering on nihilistic as Bogan closes her verse by suggesting women turn their backs on traditional social roles and perhaps on life itself. "They should let it go by," is the last line of the poem, indicating either a more relaxed attitude toward life or dramatic self-abnegation.

Freedom, yearning, and journeys are interrelated themes in "Women." Bogen explores each through carefully chosen diction related to a central motif of wilderness. Wilderness is that which is wild, untouched by "man." Thus, wilderness suggests virginity, innocence, and the freedom of being able to roam free like wild animals do. Women, notes Bogan, are more like cultivated land. Their bodies have been moulded into whatever shape or form men would like, and men reap the rewards yielded by the land. Moreover, the word "wilderness" has a distinctly female connotation as the suffix "ness" echoes feminine word endings such as in "governess." Women should be "wilder" also becomes one of the poet's main arguments in "Women." Therefore, the first line of the poem is its most telling, mainly via the use of the powerful word "wilderness."

In the second stanza, Bogan refers again to agriculture as a sign of gender oppression. "They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass" implies being out of touch with the cycles of life, namely menstruation. The word "cropping" is also a double-entendre as it refers to shearing and also to "crops." In the fourth stanza, the poet returns to the word "crop" by stating "They cannot think of so many crops to a field." Women, notes the narrator, "do not hear." They tune out, buffering themselves and isolating themselves, cutting themselves off from the world. Moreover, women "do not hear / Snow water going down under culverts / Shallow and clear." The sexual imagery in stanza two is palpable: "going down" refers to cunnilingus especially as the poet uses the term "under culverts" to explicitly signify the vagina. Culverts are tunnels, often underground. The use of winter imagery also denotes iciness, numbness, and coldness of heart. The vaginal imagery of the second stanza mirrors that of the first. In contrast to the icy imagery used in stanza two, the poet refers to the "tight hot cell" of a woman's body in the first stanza. A tight hot cell is the vagina as well as the egg cell that contains the potential of life.

Sexual imagery becomes more phallic in subsequent stanzas. In the third stanza, the narrator refers to "stiffening" and then in the fourth, to "clean wood" and to "love." However, sexuality is not the core theme of "Women," which underscores ennui and depression as primary lenses through which women encounter the world. Returning to the theme of freedom, the poet starts off the third stanza with a line about journeys and how women "wait" when they should embark. The line vaguely invokes Homer's Odyssey in which faithful wife Penelope waits twenty years for her husband to return home from his journeys after the Trojan War. Moreover, the poet builds up to a central nihilistic vision when she claims that women "use against themselves that benevolence / to which no man is a friend." No matter what a woman like Penelope does, her kindness is a product of constrictive social roles like marriage. Women restricted to conventional social roles must be "content...to eat dusty bread" while feeding their husbands the cream of the crops.

Women neglect themselves in their subservience to men, suggests the narrator. When "They cannot think of so many crops to a field," they overlook their own need for physical gratification. Here, the words "crops" and "field" refer to three layers. First, crops in the field are literally cultivated vegetables and are in stark opposition to the wilderness the poet refers to in the first line -- and thesis statement -- of the poem. Second, crops denote hairs on the "field" of the pubic mound. A woman who does not give thought to crops to a field denigrates her sexual desires. Third, crops to a field symbolize children: the yields of seeds planted in the womb of the earth.

One of the most powerful lines of "Women" is "Their love is an eager meaninglessness." An oxymoron and an emblem of psychological tension, the phrase "eager meaninglessness" encapsulates the mood of the poem. A love that is "eager" is desperate and clinging. To cling to that which is empty and lifeless is a "meaningless" endeavor. The contradiction inherent in the phrase "eager meaninglessness" refers to the conflicting social roles and identities a female possesses. She is either "too tense, or too lax," according to the narrator. The narrator, moreover, is gender-neutral and an outside observer who refers to women in the third person plural throughout the poem.