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| Brazil, January 1, 1502 |
| 作者Author / Elizabeth Bishop 依莉莎白•碧沙普 |
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Study Questions
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| Study Questions |
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| 1. What is the tone of the speaker? Does the speaker changes her tone in the poem? Does she speak like the European tourist, who visits Brazil for the first time like the Conquistadors in 1502? Or, does she speak for the "Nature" or the little Indians and criticize the tourists or Christian colonizers? |
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Like a tourist first being in Brazil, the speaker in "Brazil, January 1, 1502" speaks in surprising tone. Elizabeth Bishop intentionally links the speaker to Conquistadors with the title suggesting their invasion in 1502. The epigraph of Sir Kenneth Clark's Landscape into Art implies that the speaker's descriptions about Brazil are likely the "embroidered nature" and "tapestried landscape" that are subjective representations due to the speaker's expectations. However, the Nature is out of her expectations. The speaker finds that the rain forest keeps on surprising her with unknown plants. Therefore, the speaker describes the forest as "fresh as if just finished / and taken off the frame" (Bishop 91). Although the "Nature" is "embroidered" as the speaker's or Conquistadors' art in this poem, there is always something too "fresh" to show that the "Nature" should be frameless.
As the speaker mentions at the beginning of the second stanza, the unfamiliar "Nature" is like "a simple web" which traps the speaker just like how it trapped Portuguese invaders in 1502. The speaker's tone is still surprised by the nature views and creatures, but she at the same time becomes self-critical of her and of course the Conquistadors' descriptions of the "feathery detail" of Brail (Bishop 91). As Henneberg Sylvia mentions in "Elizabeth Bishop's ‘ Brazil, January 1, 1502' and Max Jacob's ‘Erabissement d'une communaute au Bresil'," Brazil is a "New World nature seen through the lens of Old World myth." In this poem, Bishop "ridicules" her representations of Brazil .
Later in the third stanza, the speaker clearly criticizes the Christians, who invade Brazil arrogantly with violence. Her critic of Christians is, in Goldenshon's terms, "self-correcting" and "self-mocking" (Goldenshon 197). Bishop's speaker knows that she has the same desire with the Christians colonizers. In Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, Bonnie Costello points out the speaker's awareness of her desire for mastery. Costello argues that "the desire for perceptual and cognitive mastery over the particulars of nature persists in the contemporary beholders" (Costello 149). It is what the title, "Brazil, January 1, 1502" implies. The little Indian women "calling to each other" in strange voice of bird are like strange plants and creatures living in the "Nature," which is weird, but "not unfamiliar" under the speaker's descriptions. Although the speaker criticizes Christians and makes the "Nature" surprising and be heard, she does not speak for them. The voices of "little women" are still not recognizable. Moreover, they "retreat(ing)" "behind" the foreground that is "embroidered" and "tapestried" by the colonizer-like speaker (Bishop 92). |
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| 2. The "Nature" and creatures are gendered in "Brazil, January 1, 1502." Does Bishop's speaker create the contrast between masculinity and femininity for any purpose? Why does the speaker emphasize the femininity of the "Nature," the "female" "lizard," and the "maddening little women"? |
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Bishop's speaker creates the contrast between masculinity and femininity right at the beginning of "Brazil, January 1, 1502." The "Nature" is personalized as a woman who "greets" the speaker as "she must have greeted" the Portuguese invaders in 1502 (Bishop 91). In the speaker's expectation, she must please the invaders although she in fact surprises them with strange plants. Contrast to the feminine "Nature," the speaker, like Portuguese invaders, suggests the masculine power. The "Nature," as the matter of fact, is the object of the speaker and the Portuguese invaders' observations and desires. They are like male "lizards" watching the "female one" whose "wicked tail straight up and over, / red as a red-hot wire." The "tail" as "red-hot wire," clearly, is sexually connotative. Likewise, the little Indian women are sexually attractive to the invaders. The speaker's representations of female landscape and creatures echo with the epigraph quoted from Sir Kenneth Clark's Landscape into Art . The speaker's description of the female "Nature" is her art. In Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, Bonnie Costello points out the reason why Bishop's speaker purposely emphasizes the femininity of the "Nature:" "if the landscape appears as art, art and nature are both approached in term of a prior construction of the feminine as specular and erotic object" (Costello 145).
Although Bishop's speaker shows the contrast between the invaders as the masculine power and the "Nature" as the feminine power, she neither victimizes the invaders, including the speaker and the Portuguese and Christian colonizers, nor the invaded "Nature" and Indians. Some critics like David Bromwich have the same interpretations with Robert Lowell. In Lowell 's letter to Bishop on January 4, 1960, he praised this poem as one of Bishop's most beautiful works. Lowell appreciated Bishop's describing Christians as victims of their desires. Bromwich even interprets the Christians in this poem as "victims of their own conquering perspective" (Bromwich 170). However, other critics like Victoria Harrison and Bonnie Costello argues that neither the invaders nor the "Nature" and Indians are victims. Harrison argues that the relation between the colonizer and colonized, like the relation between male and female, is not simply contrastive. In Elizabeth Bishop: Poetics of Intimacy, she mentions, "colonization and victimization are hardly so historical simple" ( Harrison 159). What Bishop's speaker presents in "Brazil, January 1, 1502" is the power struggle between the "Nature" and the invaders. |
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