Elizabeth Bishop and the Tragedy of Desire

There's a tendency in vulgar Freudian criticism to transform images of verticality into dramas of male sexual desire, and I usually shun such reductive readings, but I'm having trouble avoiding it with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth." The narrative involves a sub-surface creature who periodically emerges from the depths, strives to a great height, and attempts to pierce the moon (which he believes "is a small hole at the top of the sky"); his only possession is one liquid tear. Without excessive effort, this narrative can be seen to resemble the sexual act.

If one accepts the poem as a sort of metaphor for sexual energy and desire, the first task is to probe the aspects that most challenge this reading to determine if they represent some new and interesting recognition about desire. The most intriguing intersection of the perplexing and the obvious is the idea that the Man-Moth fears rather than desires the moon; that is, the moon is simultaneously marked by both fear and desire. That the moon is taken as a hole in the sky "proves" that the sky is "quite useless for protection." In this sense, the poem emphasizes the fearful desire to prove one's own vulnerability.

But this is a great repressed desire which most of us do not recognize: "Man, standing below him, has no such illusions." Human beings overtly desire invincibility, and the ego is comprised of that desire. The Man-Moth, by contrast, appears as a sort of tragic outcast, but, like Oedipus, he is a figure that transgresses a fundamental restriction. In this case, his desire to prove his vulnerability reverses the gains provided by the individuation process: self-consciousness, autonomy, and power. The Man-Moth's desire represents the impossible reunion with the mother, a reintegration with the universe, the extinction of self.

But he is unlike Oedipus in that he ultimately fails to accomplish his attempted transgression. Bishop's poem dramatizes the Man-Moth's failure to escape individuation, suggesting that one of our great repressed desires is a drive to erase the self that cannot be satisfied. Freud's concept of the death drive seems particularly useful here. The Man-Moth's residence deep underground suggests that there may be an aspect of our psychological makeup that continually attempts to undo that which protects us as discrete beings.