A Queer Childhood Memory

Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”

Elizabeth Bishop in 1934, age 23

I’ve written a few posts now about how critics often overlook male/male desire in poetry, even when we know the poet was queer. That obliviousness to queer readings happens with lesbian poets too—as evidenced by one of Elizabeth Bishop’s most famous and anthologized pieces, the 1975 poem “In the Waiting Room.”

Bishop’s lesbianism and her relationships with women are well known, and often serve as a basis for discussions of her poems, like “One Art.” The interpretations of “In the Waiting Room,” I’ve managed to track down, though, insist that the poem is about supposedly universal human values and awareness, either simply ignoring the (fairly obvious) lesbian reading, or else explicitly rejecting it. “While there is a quiet, even suppressed presence of homoeroticism in some of Bishop's work— most notably in some uncollected poems—…” Elizabeth Dodd writes,  “for…‘In the Waiting Room,’  a study of lesbian awakening does not appear to be the most fruitful reading of this poem.”

—

Substack contributions allow me to write about poetry; there’s not a lot of call for essays about poetry at most venues! So if you like posts like this, consider becoming a contributor so I can write more such! It’s $50/year, $5/month.

—

It's ironic that Dodd opposes “lesbian awakening” and “the larger awareness of humanity in general,” because I’d argue that the poem is precisely about challenging and examining that dichotomy. The “waiting room” is a metaphor, in part, for waiting to find oneself, or to enter into one’s identity. the emotional uncertainty and power of the poem is in the dawning recognition both of sameness and of difference—of the way that you can belong to a universal humanity, and to particular categories of humanity (like woman) only through a precarious particularity.

In The Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

The poem is a memory from 1918, when Bishop was almost seven years old (she was in fact born February 8, 1911.) Though Bishop does not fill us in on all the details of her background, her father died when she was an infant, exacerbating her mother’s mental illness. That led to her mother’s institutionalization when Bishop was five, about a year before this poem was set. Bishop was raised by various aunts and uncles in New England, including one uncle who started abusing her when she was eight—or a year after the events in “In the Waiting Room”.

The poem, then, is set in a period (or a waiting room) between major personal life traumas. The action it narrates, though, is quiet and notably undramatic, at least externally.

Bishop’s aunt takes her to a dentist in February 2018 while the aunt gets her tooth worked on. Elizabeth, the child, finds a National Geographic in the waiting room and reads it. She finds some of the content disturbing, especially photos of topless women (“Their breasts were horrifying.”) The anxiety sparked by the nudity is connected in her mind to her aunt’s small cry of pain from the dentist’s office. She has a sudden awareness of herself as both part of humanity and as an isolated individual—an awareness that she experiences as vertiginous, or as a sense of falling off the world. The poem ends with her returning to herself, and to her self, though with a sense that that self is more fixed, and more uncertain, than it was when the poem began.

The poem is partially about growing up, or about negotiating the child’s recognition that she will grow up and be a woman like (or perhaps not like) her Aunt Consuela. The recognition is sparked by the images of breasts in National Geographic—and breasts in National Geographic are in fact an almost clichéd trope of adolescent sexual awakening for young boys.

Bishop is not a boy, and perhaps for that reason finds the images disturbing and embarrassing. But she’s also fascinated by them, her mind circling and circling the differences the magazine emphasizes and details as part of an educational and colonial project, or as an education in colonial markers of difference.

Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.

Osa and Martin Johnson were photographers and adventurers, and also a married couple. Their images emphasize the racial/cultural distance between the waiting room and Africa; “Long Pig” is a reference to cannibalistic practices, which of course white explorers exaggerated or made up for the (cannibalistic) consumption of a racist Western audience. The poem’s language captures a sense of prickly disorientation through the spiky repeated “k” sounds in “black, naked women with necks” and then the rolling assonance, “r’s” and “w’s” of “wound round and round with wire.”

The child’s focus of special dismay and disjunction is on the naked breasts, which fill her with horror, but also with shyness. It’s notable, though, that the breasts are framed (in various senses) by the Johnsons, whose image of partnership and heterosexual normality contrast both with their eroticized photos, and with Elizabeth’s own parentless present.

National Geographic provides Elizabeth with an intentional message of racial difference, and an unintentional message of heteronormative difference. Her family is not the family in the images. At the same time, she is in the image—because she is (or will be) a woman, who can be gazed at, and because she is the intended/unintended viewer, who finds women’s breasts, and women’s, fascinating, embarrassing, exciting.

She is too “shy” to look away, she says, despite being horrified. But for those aware of Bishop’s queerness (including Bishop herself!) the confused mix of embarrassment, repulsion, and fascination seems like, if not a lesbian awakening, then a tremor of lesbian identity. The images have something to say to her about herself, even if she (a proudly precocious reader) can’t entirely understand yet.

What she hears is not a confirmation of queer identity, but a confused cry which focuses her on her inability to confirm her identity.

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me,

Those last lines speculate about who Bishop could be, or how she might feel. She’s not “embarrassed”—but is that because she does not feel the emotion, or is it because she is not herself? The enjambment of “but wasn’t. What took me,” read in isolation, is a statement of non presence; she is not there, and then she is taken away from that not-self.

The disjunction here is in part the disjunction between Bishop, the older poet, and Elizabeth, the memory; she is two, doubled, herself looking forward and herself looking back. The “timid, foolish” aunt is also the “timid, foolish” adult poet, who is speaking through, and spoken through, the child.

Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling….

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?

Elizabeth, in the poem, is trying to figure out why she is a woman, and/or what kind of woman she is. She is and is not the Black, naked women in the images. She is and is not her aunt, who is adult, foolish, and timid. She is and is not the adult (foolish and timid?) poet, Elizabeth Bishop.

This uncertainty of self, the child’s effort to sort out why she is related to this person but not to that one, is not solely about queerness or lesbian identity and desire. But it’s certainly implicated, or sparked, in part by a sense of difference connected to sexual selves and sexual desire. It is “those awful hanging breasts” which return as the cathexis which “held us all together/or made us all just one?” Aunt Consuela’s quiet “oh! of pain” suggests a common female embodiment in open mouths and lips. Elizabeth in the poem hears that cry as one of discomfort, but an adult poet might also hear it as echoing other sensations—as per Lonnie Johnson and Victoria Spivey’s double entendre “Toothache Blues,” released in 1936, 18 years in child Elizabeth’s future, some 40 years in adult Elizabeth’s past.

“In the Waiting Room” is a poem of possibilities and of limitations. Bishop looks back at her younger self, who is perched on the verge of knowledge, sexuality, trauma, selfhood. “I scarcely dared to look/to see what it was I was,” the young Elizabeth says, glancing around furtively at the legs and boots around her, afraid to lift her head higher to see the older Elizabeth leaning over her. The National Geographic opens onto the world, but also onto the future—a future which, the older Bishop knows, will include a desire for women which must be hidden, wrenching abuse at the hands of a supposedly normative family, and global travel (to Brazil, not to Africa) in pursuit (in part) of sexual freedom.

The child’s fear, embarrassment, uncertainty, disorientation, and self pride are the result of her sudden forced sense of the way that who she is depends on her sense of who other people are. She is defined, and defines herself, in relationship to a range of identities—child, adult, woman, orphan, desired, desirer, Black, white. Selves, potential, actual, crash over her, pulling her out of, or into, who she is.

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.

The line, “another, and another” is referring to the wave overtaking the waiting room. But it can also refer to Elizabeth herself, or her selves; she is “another, and another”—two people, or two women, the child and the adult, the woman looked at or the woman looking, the marginalized person and the person figured as normal, right, or white (notice that the wave is “black”, like the people in the National Geographic.)

“The Waiting Room” isn’t about lesbian identity or awakening, solely. But it’s also not about becoming part of some universal human community. Rather, it’s about the way that people—even, or especially, young people—are interpolated into universal human community via the painful, embarrassing, titillating, strange (“I knew that nothing stranger/had ever happened” leveraging of particularity.

Bishop is who she is supposed to be and not who she is supposed to be; she is the right gendered body and the wrong gendered body. The world, via National Geographic, speaks to her, and not to her; it puts her in the world and on the “yellow margins” of the world. The sense of belonging to universal humanity is contingent on the creation of differences between ages, races, nations, genders, and desires. Bishop, child and adult (“I—we”) is and is not the strange, queer self she is, or is supposed to be.