The Glass Essay

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Network of Prisons

In “The Glass Essay,” the speaker moves from one prison to another. Wherever she is, she’s likely to feel trapped. The theme of imprisonment links to the presence of Emily Brontë. “This is my favorite author” (Line 18), says the speaker. Yet Emily does not seem to bring the author pleasure—instead, she is plagued by anxiety. “Whenever I visit my mother / I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë” (Lines 20-21), confides the author. Emily does not offer the speaker an escape from her situation but a portal into another kind of prison. Like the speaker, intense feelings and longings beset Emily. The speaker says, “Her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, / vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, / locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls” (Lines 150-152). The poet-speaker and the poet-Emily are linked in this imprisonment.

Emily does not serve as an escape from the oppressive domesticity of her mother’s house; instead, she serves as a means to further the theme of imprisonment. “Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,” thinks the speaker (Line 159). For the speaker, Emily is imprisoned by, among other things, her imagination, her writing, the moor, the mystical Thou, and her antisocial personality. The speaker is imprisoned by, among other things, the memory of her ex-partner, her matter-of-fact mother, her moor, her imagination, her visions, the past, and Emily.

The speaker cannot seem to let go of Emily. It is like she is possessed by her or chained to her. The misspelling of whether, brushing the carpet, and additional details about Emily's life and work arrest the speaker. Emily is constantly on her mind. She uses an Emily quote to describe her last encounter with Law, “That was a night that centred Heaven and Hell, // as Emily would say” (Lines 305-306). Sometimes, the speaker parrots the behavior of Emily’s characters. As Heathcliff cries in a dramatic moment in Wuthering Heights, the speaker falls on her knees and cries. Often, the speaker’s actions and feelings are confined and determined by Emily. In the final stanzas, however, Emily dies. Her death seems to free the speaker. The final Nude is “the body of us all” (Line 1019), a concluding vision that suggests a less suffocating and more inclusive frame of mind.

Emily and the speaker are not the only prisoners. The speaker’s mother and father are prisoners, with the mother restricted by her backward opinions and the father confined to the hospital. The name “Law” also implies a form of imprisonment, as prisons house alleged lawbreakers. While Law is not imprisoned, the name suggests strict rules and judgments, and jail is an inevitable consequence of his name.

The Pain of Love

Law suggests the theme of imprisonment, but his name also drives themes of love and pain. For the speaker and Emily Brontë, pain and love are nearly inseparable. Love represents torment and intense feelings. In Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, Catherine says her love for Heathcliff “resembles the eternal rocks beneath / a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (Lines 261-62). When Law ended their five-year relationship, the speaker felt her “heart snap into two pieces” (Line 278). She was “so cold / it was like burning” (Lines 279-80). Borrowing a phrase from Emily, the speaker says their last night together “centered Heaven and Hell” (Line 305).

Love is a matter of extremes for the speaker. The violent feelings manifest in the speaker’s beleaguered Nudes. In Nude #2, the speaker sees a woman “caught in a cage of thorns” (Line 438). In Nude #3, there is a woman “with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead” (Line 442), and this woman tries to “wrench it out” (Line 444). The visions relate to Law and their breakup since they are a product of the speaker’s meditations, which are supposed to help her cope with the emotional fallout. As the Nudes link to her love for Law, they are caustic and hellish.

The harm of love also connects to Emily’s relationship with Thou. At first, the speaker presents Thou and Emily as a rather sweet couple. “Thou woos Emily with a voice that comes out of the night wind,” says the speaker (Line 831). Later, the speaker portrays Thou and Emily in the context of “master and victim” (Line 891). For most of the poem, love is damaging, imbalanced, and relatively sensational.

A place in the poem where the forceful portrayal of love relents occurs when the speaker’s mother visits her father in the hospital. “Marriage is for better or for worse” (Line 622), the mother tells the speaker matter-of-factly. The mother does not view love as a dramatic event, but as a quiet obligation. Each week, she travels 50 miles (100 miles both ways) to visit her husband in the hospital. She does this without fuss or complaint. When she sees her husband, she’s cheerful and loving, “Hello love, she says” (Line 672). Unlike the speaker and Emily, the mother demonstrates a less outwardly theatrical and more sustainable type of love.

A Space for Women’s Voices

"The Glass Essay” is the first work in Glass, Irony and God. The last work is an essay (a traditional essay written in prose) called “The Gender of Sound.” The piece details the manifold ways that female sounds were policed, monitored, and portrayed. She tells how Ernest Hemingway terminated his friendship with Gertrude Stein “because he could not tolerate the sound of her voice.” Focusing on Ancient Greece, Carson tells about laws designed to keep women silent, norms that portrayed women as unable to maintain confidentiality, and how some “women’s festivals included an interval in which women shouted abusive remarks or obscenities or dirty jokes at one another.” At these women’s festivals, “men were not welcome.”

In “The Glass Essay,” the voices of women permeate the poem. The three women—the speaker, the speaker’s mother, and Emily Brontë—have the space to say what they want. Their environment is free of males, whether they want it that way or not. There are three women at the kitchen table. Heathcliff, Law, and the speaker’s father are elsewhere—central to the women’s lives, yet on the periphery. When their voices appear, they appear in relation to the women. Law’s voice appears in the poem when the speaker documents their final encounter. Heathcliff’s voice is present in the poem, but only because Emily created him. Due to dementia, the voice belonging to the father resembles an animal, with “snarles and syllables and sudden wild appeals” (Line 678).

Conversely, the theme of women’s voices reinforces particular tropes. The voices of the speaker and Emily are emotional and dramatic. They speak with abandon about love and their feelings. The speaker confesses, “I had become entirely fascinated with my spiritual melodrama” (Line 975). According to one critic, Emily finds herself “on the brink of a potentially bathetic melodrama” (Line 485). The curses and emotions that these women throw around resemble Carson’s descriptions of the women-only carnivals in Ancient Greece.

However, at first, the women do not speak. No sounds come out of them at all. The speaker introduces herself, her mother, and Emily as “three silent women at the kitchen table (Line 26). Throughout the poem, the mother is not voluble, as the speaker quips, “My mother has a way of summing things up” (Line 67). The stoic mother adds another layer to the theme of voices. The multidimensional voices in “The Glass Essay” demonstrate that women, too, can communicate in a variety of ways.