The Glass Essay

The first section of the poem, "I," starts with the speaker waking up at 4:00 a.m. with an ex-boyfriend, Law, on her mind. The personal mood of the first three stanzas, the title of the section, and the immediate presence of an I suggest the work is confessional, so Anne Carson is the speaker. However, Carson is a somewhat enigmatic figure who often writes about personal matters. Men in the Off Hours (2000) includes poems about Carson’s mother and father. Her 2010 work, Nox, centers on the death of her brother. In a 2004 interview with The Paris Review, Carson replied evasively to a question about the personal nature of “The Glass Essay,” saying, “I see it as a messing around on an upper level with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level.” The abstruse answer indicates that the speaker is not conclusively Carson, so the speaker should remain the speaker.

In Line 11, the speaker introduces her mom. In the next section, "SHE," the speaker talks about her mom and Emily Brontë with straightforward diction. “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,” confesses the speaker (Line 21). The image in Line 23 elaborates on the transformation using less simple language like ungainly and stumping.

“Three silent women at the kitchen table,” states the speaker (Line 26) as the third section, "THREE," begins. The three women are the speaker, the mother, and Emily Brontë, who she simply refers to as “Emily” for most of the poem. Emily died in 1848—around 150 years before Carson published “The Glass Essay.” The speaker includes Emily as one of the three women, because her spirit pervades and haunts the poem. The speaker relies on Emily to help her sort through her feelings and escape her mother’s humdrum atmosphere. In Stanzas 9-17, the speaker juxtaposes the mundane concerns of her mother with a violent passage from Wuthering Heights.

The speaker often incorporates passages from The Collected Work of Emily Brontë. The number of Brontë excerpts pulls the poem into the genre of criticism or essay, mixing categories and genres in the same poem. At certain moments in the poem, the speaker analyzes Brontë like she is writing a report or personal essay, analyzing her work while drawing connections to her own life. The poem, which intertwines these observations with the past and present, has the word essay in its title, hinting at the analysis at the core of the poem.

In Stanzas 18 and 19, the moor reinforces the glum mood of the poem, and recalls the famous moors of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Looking out the window, the speaker spots “dregs of snow” (Line 59) and notices a spot “where the ground goes down into a depression” (Line 61). The mother does not help to alleviate the negative atmosphere, as in Stanza 20 where she criticizes the speaker’s psychotherapy. In Stanzas 21 and 22, the speaker reveals that her mother “never liked Law much” (Line 68) and had previously referred to him as “a taker” (Line 76).

In Stanza 23, the speaker departs from her mother’s clipped idiom and uses a simile to depict love as “a wheel rolling downhill” (Line 74). This image recalls an image from earlier in the morning. As the speaker read an emotional excerpt from Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff is mad with heartbreak, the speaker also falls on her knees and “sobbed” (Line 79). Like the speaker’s mom, the author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, adds to the troubled atmosphere of the poem.

In Stanza 26, the speaker returns to the theme of psychotherapy and tries to defend the practice. “It isn’t like taking an aspirin” (Line 82), says the speaker. The mother maintains her negative outlook, but the section ends on a slightly positive note, with the speaker announcing that she will prevail, while the mother agrees, grinning.

In the next section, “WHACHER,” the speaker thinks about the word whacher, which is how Emily spells whether in one of her poems. Repetition drives these stanzas, as whached and whacher occur often. The speaker says Emily “whached God and humans and moor wind and open night” (Line 97). Emily then “whached the bars of time, which broke” (Line 99). The violent imagery is a hint that whached and whacher mean whacked and whacker. For the speaker, Emily was someone who hit and confronted concepts and truths with her writing; she was violent, and that violence is  a theme that runs throughout Carson’s poem.

In Stanza 34, the speaker suggests whaching might link to “emotions of sexual union” (Line 109). Later on, the speaker delves into Emily’s supposedly nonexistent sex life. In Stanza 35, the speaker mentions “Thou” (Line 113) for the first time. Near the end of the poem, the speaker expands upon Emily’s relationship to Thou. It is as if the speaker foreshadows sex and Thou, deploying a technique that is often found in novels and adds another layer to the mix of genres in the poem. Like a novel, Carson’s poem has characters (the speaker, the mom, Emily Brontë), a setting (her mother’s house on the moor, which is also the setting for Wuthering Heights), and multiple plots (the narrative of the speaker, the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, and Emily’s biography).

In Stanza 36, the speaker introduces another character, Emily’s sister, Charlotte Brontë. In 1828, Charlotte noted, “Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet” (Line 14). This image of ordinary domesticity causes the speaker to assess Emily’s life. To do so, she quotes unnamed biographers who portray her existence as “stunted” (Line 120) and “wracked by disappointment” (Line 121), contrasting with the “whached” (Lines 97-100) of her earlier musings. Once again, the diction and tone sound more like a critical evaluation, or an essay, than poetry, and the language is more prosaic than poetic. In Stanzas 42 and 43, the speaker describes Emily’s “little raw soul” (Line 134) as “skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel” (Line 136). Such vivid imagery pulls the work back into traditional poetry.

In Stanza 44, the speaker returns to the informative diction of an essay. The speaker says Emily did not have friends, a job, or a romantic life, and that she died at 31 years old on her couch “on a winter afternoon” (Line 142). In Line 148, the speaker lets Emily speak for herself, citing a diary entry from 1837 where Emily sounds content in her simple routine. Emily’s optimistic voice juxtaposes with the bleak tone of the speaker and Emily’s pitying biographers.

While Emily seems satisfied to the speaker, her critics wonder why prison imagery fills her poems. “Why all this beating of wings?” (Line 156) one asks, , as the speaker contemplates the “many ways of being held prisoner” (Line 159). The speaker traverses the moor and tackles the theme of prisons and different manifestations of constraint. Recently, the speaker’s mother told her, “You remember too much” (Line 172), as the speaker asserts that one type of prison is remembering, which cannot be forgotten.

In Stanza 52, the speaker revisits her past with Law. These memories shackle and oppress the speaker. “When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die” (Line 208), confesses the speaker. To cope, the speaker meditates, and disquieting visions, or “Nudes” (Line 216) as she refers to them, come to her as “naked glimpses of [her] soul” (Line 215). The speaker has a hard time escaping the Nudes and her past, saying, “It pains me to record this” (Line 224).

Instead of speaking further about her suffering, the speaker turns the spotlight back on Emily, who is a handy way for the speaker to avoid talking too much about herself and becoming overly confessional. The topic that dominates Stanzas 73-81 is Charlotte’s preface to Wuthering Heights. The speaker compares the preface to “someone carefully not looking at a scorpion crouched on the arm of the sofa” (Lines 229-30). The scorpion simile suggests that Charlotte will not address the venomous power inside Emily.

The speaker is less timid. She engages with the symbolic scorpion and Emily’s intense individuality. According to the speaker, the harsh atmosphere of the moor “taught Emily all she knew about love and its necessities” (Line 258). The moor gave her “an angry education” (Line 259) that infected her spirit and her writing.

In Stanza 86, the speaker uses a violent simile and wonders how Heathcliff and Catherine managed to stay “together and apart” (Line 268). The appearance of the tempestuous lovers leads the speaker back to her and Law. From Stanza 87 to the end of the “WHACHER” section, the speaker focuses on her last fraught encounter with Law. The combination of pleasure and sorrow makes the speaker recall a line from Emily, “That was a night that centred Heaven and Hell, as Emily would say” (Lines 305-06).

The next section, “KITCHEN,” preserves the poem’s melancholy and violent tone. Her mother’s kitchen is “quiet as a bone” (Line 319), While the fridge is “always crammed” (Line 324). Although the speaker is not addressing her turbulent breakup or Emily, the intensity persists in her relationship with her mother.

A May Day song about a girl who gnaws and claws a mutton bone leads the speaker back to Emily. In Stanzas 108-23, the speaker further addresses Emily’s fabled toughness and the tortured Heathcliff. The anecdotes about Emily are violent. She supposedly encouraged her dad to whip her brother and then, as a teen, cauterized a dog bite herself.

The speaker calls Heathcliff a “pain devil” (Line 360), as she recalls his agony at mishearing Catherine; in the novel, Heathcliff hears Catherine say, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” (Line 356). He runs off before he can hear her add, “So he will never know how I love him” (Line 363), and this misunderstanding imprisons him, leading to his death. Words and misunderstandings confine people as well.

After wondering why Emily compares herself to an “iron man” (Line 384) in a poem, the speaker’s mother brings her back to the present. The “KITCHEN” section ends quietly and without conflict, with the speaker asking her mom, “What’s for supper?” (Line 397).

Ironically, the “LIBERTY” section does not bring the speaker much freedom. Waking early, the speaker announces, “I am free” (Line 407), although the imagery in the following stanzas seems to contradict that freedom. After describing the frozen moor, the speaker returns to the arresting visions of the Nudes. The impaled and beset women symbolize the speaker’s condition. Law, her mom, the moor, and the legend of Emily plague her. The Nudes, too, hold the speaker captive. Dr. Haw asks why she does not look away. The speaker’s inability to answer indicates that she has no choice but to look at them.

Thoughts of jail lead the speaker to discuss one of Emily’s poems about a woman in jail. The woman says, “A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me / And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty” (Lines 473-74). The speaker wonders “what kind of Liberty this is” (Line 475). Citing unnamed critics, the speaker connects liberty to death. Referencing additional unnamed critics, the speaker points out the “potentially bathetic melodrama” in Emily’s work (Line 485). Not for the first time, Emily’s life absorbs the speaker, as the speaker pulls a quote from Charlotte, who said Emily’s verse is not “at all like the poetry women generally write” (Line 513). The nuanced discussion on Emily reinforces the essay-like elements of the poem.

The next section, “HERO,” only briefly mentions Emily. After a contentious back and forth about sexual assault and feminism, the speaker compares her mother’s hunched posture to Emily’s “little merlin hawk Hero” (Line 583). The analogy turns the cantankerous mom into a quirky pet.

The speaker and mom visit her dad at the hospital. The speaker’s dad suffers from a type of dementia, and it’s hard for her to witness his struggles. The speaker explains that her dad fought in World War II, contrasting the image of her dad as a “tall proud father, former World War II navigator” (Line 622) with that of a man ruined physically and mentally by dementia.

The central theme of this section is heroism. The father’s current diminished state contrasts with his past strength, youth, and glory. The speaker can’t let go of her heroic evaluation of her father. She ends the section by discussing the photograph of him and his flight crew on her fridge at home.

The speaker’s mother isn’t deprived of heroic qualities, as earlier, the speaker linked her mom to Emily’s hawk “Hero.” The speaker points out that her mom visits her dad once a week. In the context of the section, the mom’s dedication to her dad is laudable, if not heroic.

The penultimate section, “HOT,” ties together the themes of violence, anger, and desire. Stanzas 232-237 recount a dream about an older woman who can’t control her house with light bulbs. The dream symbolizes the speaker’s lack of control over her situation. The repetition in Lines 755-57 highlights the speaker’s discontent, where “I want” and “Slam” appear three times. The speaker’s failure to get what she wants makes her curse her former partner.

The speaker’s curses lead to a discussion on Emily’s curses, and the two poets’ lives intersect once again. The speaker is still trying to understand what engendered Emily’s passionate intensity. The speaker says, “The more general consensus is that Emily did not touch a man in her 31 years” (Line 796). Returning to the theme of sex, the speaker wonders if a lack of sexual contact left Emily vengeful for the life “withheld” (Line 801) from her, or if anger was just a sort of natural “vocation” (Line 803) for her.

The final section, “THOU,” continues the theme of sex. Earlier, the speaker mentions Emily’s relationship with an entity named Thou. Now, the speaker expands upon this being, observing that “Thou woos Emily with a voice that comes out of the night wind” (Line 831). Emily and Thou are one “without the terrible sex price to pay” (Line 838), and the speaker describes Emily and Thou’s nonsexual bond as “childish” (Line 839). The speaker recalls two specific childhood memories of her parents connected to sex that left an impression on her, and once again she feels as though she cannot free herself from the past.

The prison theme infiltrates Emily and Thou’s relationship too. The speaker cites an entire poem by Emily in which she takes on the role of Thou, remarking that, “It is chilling to watch” (Line 888). The role reversal in this poem collapses the boundary between master and victim, or jailor and prisoner.

Seeing her life through the lens of Emily’s work, the speaker wonders if the Nudes are her way of gaining or disavowing a Thou. The speaker provides the odious details of additional Nudes. “I had become entirely fascinated with my spiritual melodrama” (Line 895), confesses the speaker. Soon, the Nudes stopped. Their absence implies liberation, as the speaker observes, “I lived my life” (Line 917).

Before the poem ends, a final Nude arrives. Unlike the other Nudes, this Nude does not symbolize the speaker. The Nude is neither the speaker’s body nor another woman’s body—instead, it comprises “the body of us all” (Line 1019) as it is cleansed of its flesh. The poem concludes with a theme of universality, that somehow, someway, every person struggles with the violence and desires of the flesh, and the emotional stripping of heartbreak is a “necessity” (Line 1018) of the human experience.