In the first of this series of posts on poetry (May 12), the pleasure of interpretation is compared to working a puzzle, playing a game, or solving an elaborate code. What is puzzling about "The Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor Window"(see previous post)?
It might appear at first glance to be about a suicidal woman at the moment of decision--whether to let go or climb back up--because it fits the popular image of a "jumper" from an urban skyscraper or high rise. But is she really suicidal or is this image a metaphor of hanging by a thread from her life circumstances? Why is she described as "her father's son"? Why is she depicted as a kind of earth mother ("She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of/herself")? Why is it the 13th floor?
Is this a social commentary on a poor, urban, Indian welfare mother? Is it about women in general caught between victimization by nature and society on one hand and self-empowerment on the other? Is it about mother nature hanging in the balance between destruction and recovery? Is it about the universal human experience of being caught among the conflicting forces of chance, fate, and choice? One pleasure of interpretation is discovering the multiple dimensions of meaning and their interconnections.
At one level the poem encompasses all of the above interpretations. But, at another, it poses an unresolved (perhaps unresolvable) question: to what extent is the poor, Indian woman a victim of class, race, and gender oppression and to what extent is she a free agent capable of taking responsibility for her own life? To what extent is mother nature doomed to destruction by human exploitation and to what extent is she capable of resiliency, recovery, and renewal despite human destructiveness? To what extent is human fortune and misfortune the result of mere chance in a random universe, to what extent of pre-determined fate, and to what extent of our own free will and effort?
The first two questions situate us in the center of contemporary political debates about government and community support vs. personal responsibility or about environmental crisis vs. environmental resiliency. The third is an enduring philosophical debate going back to the beginning of human thought. Your interpretation may vary depending upon your political and/or philosophical beliefs. To the extent that one takes pleasure in controversy and debate, the openness of poetic interpretation can provide hours of enjoyable and stimulating argumentation.
Another pleasure in interpretation is uncovering so-called "hidden meanings." One highly speculative method of doing this is through psychoanalytic theory. "The Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor Window" might bring to mind the Freudian theory of a universal "death wish." Whatever one might think of this theory it is consistent with Freud's notion of the "pleasure principle." It seems counter-intuitive to associate death and pleasure, but the counterpart to the pleasure principle is avoidance of pain, and death is sometimes, at least in fantasy, a relief or escape from pain. Life circumstances or mental pain (depression) can somethimes be so unbearable that death becomes desirable.
Not only is the dangling woman, whether suicidal or not, flirting with death, but the poem repeatedly references her desire for escape, whether it be into fantasy ("She thinks she will be set free"), memory ("When she was young she ate wild rice..."), dreams ("That's what she wants/to have another child to hold onto in the night, to be able to fall back into dreams"), or nature ("She thinks of...waterfalls and pines...moonlight nights, and cool spring storms"). It also repeatedly hints at the pain of her life: "13th floor," "tenement building," "the two husbands she has had," "dizzy hole of water," "asphalt," "worn levis," "dangling,""cats mewing and scratching at the door," "scream," "cry," "lonliness," "discordant," "teeth break off." Sleep, dreams, oblivion, and death seem perferable to the waking reality of daily suffering.
Images of falling (into death, sleep, dreams, darkness) contrast with images of getting "up," pulling "up," folding "up," and climbing "up," just as the universal death wish is in a continual conflict with the life force, Eros, and the desire for power. Read this way, the poem becomes an allegory of the human psyche in constant tension between the desire for oblivion and the desire for consciousness.
Interpreting poetry through various theoretical lenses, whether psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminsim, or deconstruction, is the most intellectual level of pleasure afforded by the study of poetry.
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