[MUSIC] Lowe and Ransom's claims that this poetry lacks intellect are particularly ironic in Millay's case because her sonnets explicitly address the issue of women's intellectual equality. In fact, her popular sonnet, you will be sorry for that word serves as a veritable response to Ransom and the new critics. You will be sorry for that word! Give back my book and take my kiss instead. Was it my enemy or my friend I heard? What a big book for such a little head! Come, I will show you my newest hat, and you may watch me purse my mouth, and prink! I shall love you still, and all of that. I never again shall tell you what I think. I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly. You will not catch me reading any more. I shall be called a wife to pattern by; and some day when you knock and push the door, some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy, I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me. >> The poem is playful but leveling in its critique of dominant gender and sexual ideology. The husband's word against his wife is cheerful and well-intentioned. What a big book for such a little head. In contemporary terms, we might call this a micro-aggression. A casual, seemingly benign exchange that makes women's subordination plain. This husband is no tyrant. But, his paternalism is a betrayal of the modern companion at marriage, which presupposes a partnership of equals. This man loves his wife, but he does not respect her. He has married her, but he does not consider her his intellectual equal. Written in the wake of women's suffrage, the poem is a testament to the unfinished business of women's equality. Was it my enemy or my friend I heard, Millay's speaker asks. A question that highlights how the ongoing battle for women's rights and equality will need to be fought at home as well as on the streets. Millay's response to her husband's insult is surprising. She does not counter his prejudice, but instead plays into his feminine fantasies. Give back my book and take my kiss instead, Millay's speaker responds. Come, I will show you my newest hat. And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink! This cunning performance of femininity, sweet and sly, as Millay puts it, is also a bravura display of the reason and intellect that she is being denied by and now withholding from her husband. Millay, we can plainly see, is the better reader in this marriage. Like Ransom, her husband remains duped by the prettiness of Millay's little girl things. Although critics today largely reject Ransom's misogyny, there is still substantive debate about whether Millay's sonnets are sentimental. For instance, in her landmark feminist study, Sentimental Modernism, Susanne Clark defends the work of Millay and her contemporaries against the new critics. Clark demonstrates how invectives, like Ransom's, were motivated by broader anxieties over the literary academy's changing cultural status. According to Clark, quote, the modernist's new critics used aesthetic anti-sentimentality to make distinctions, to establish a position of authority against mass culture. Mass culture was a feminized enemy, they saw as powerful and dangerous. However, although Clark revalues Millay's poetry, she nonetheless agrees with the new critics that it is sentimental. Clark emphasizes Millay's emotional expressivity and accessibility, values, which she claims, placed Millay in direct opposition with modernism's difficult poetry. Clark writes, in the age of Elliott, defined by the failure of relationship and the anti-heroics of the poetic loner, Mallay was writing most of all about love. She was writing in a way that invites the reader in, that makes community with the reader and tries to heal alienation. Clark's sentimental modernism is thus strikingly similar to Lowell's feminine movement a half century before. Like Lowell, Clark considers Millay to be emblematic of a sentimental tradition, extending back to the 19th century and running counter to modernism. But it's difficult to reconcile this sentimental vision of Millay, with the fierce intellectualism that runs throughout her poetry. My reading of, You will be sorry for that word, did not highlight connection or community within Millay's poetry, but rather a struggle for power and freedom. [MUSIC]
