27 pages • 54 minutes read
The Glass Essay
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Background
Literary Context
"The Glass Essay” joins a large body of literature that confronts, reinforces, and plays with the various myths surrounding the three Brontës. Emily Brontë was born in 1818 and died in 1848. She had one brother, Branwell, and was one of five girls in her family. Two of her sisters died early on in her life. Her other two sisters, Charlotte and Anne, wrote poems and novels. Charlotte is the author of multiple novels, including Jane Eyre (1847). Anne is the author of two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Emily published one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), in her lifetime. She spent most of her life in a tiny English town called Haworth, where her activities centered on writing and traversing the moors.
Elizabeth Gaskell published her skewed biography of Charlotte and her family, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in 1857. According to Juliet Barker’s biography The Brontës (2010), Gaskell’s text established Charlotte as a “long-suffering victim of duty,” Emily as the “wild child of genius,” and Anne as the “quiet, conventional one.” In 1961, Sylvia Plath wrote a poem, “Wuthering Heights,” that alludes to the disquieting elements attached to Emily and her novel. A couple of decades earlier, Rachel Ferguson played with the Brontë myth in her lighthearted novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1940). Many authors have reinterpreted Charlotte’s novel, Jane Eyre. Daphne du Maurier turned it into a murder mystery in Rebecca (1938), while Jean Rhys transformed Jane Eyre into a comment on colonialism in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In “The Glass Essay,” Carson uses Emily to address intense feelings of disappointment, rage, desire, and imprisonment.
As the title, “The Glass Essay,” indicates, Carson feels comfortable mixing genres and forms. Many contemporary authors share Carson’s affinity for transgressing categories. Jenny Boully’s 2002 work, The Body: An Essay, calls itself poetry despite its subtitle. Boully’s book has no essay and features only footnotes. Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book, Citizen, combines lyrics, prose poetry, essays, and graphics. In 2012, Paul Legault published a whimsical English-to-English translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry called The Emily Dickinson Reader (2012). For 21st-century authors like Carson, genre and forms are malleable. Like several modern writers, Carson feels free to manipulate genres according to her own needs.
Historical Context
"The Glass Essay” was published in 1995 and reflects the visibility of women’s rights and gender equality. The speaker addresses the mainstream popularity of feminism when she notes the newspaper’s coverage of a “rally for International Women’s Day” (Line 583). The speaker’s mother disapproves of the celebration and taps “one furious finger” (Line 580) on the offending article. Then, like now, women disagreed about the utility of feminism. The mother tackles the changing cultural norms when she attributes rape to the revealing bathing suits in the Sears Summer Catalog. The speaker is outraged: “Why should women be responsible for male desire?” she asks (Line 592). The contentious exchange between the speaker and her mother shows the conflicting attitudes about sexual assault, and different perspectives across generations.
To further appreciate Carson’s poem, some background about the Brontës is needed. Carson does not provide a lot of basic information about Emily and her family, a choice that both assumes the reader is already familiar with the Brontë family, and deploys Emily as an enigmatic figure. However, unlike Carson’s depiction of the author, Emily did not exist in a vacuum. Her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, were popular writers like her, and all three women published poems and novels under the masculine pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Along with their brother Branwell, the sisters created complex and imaginary worlds called Glass Town and Angria.
Carson excludes these details to maintain a mystique around Emily in her poem. The purpose of the poem is not to present an accurate picture of Emily, but to use the myth of Emily to explore an array of intense thoughts and emotions. However, Carson does not perpetuate untruths. Instead, by bringing up rumors like Emily’s supposed abortion, and by omitting the names of the quoted biographers and critics, Carson’s poem draws attention to how much of what people know about Emily amounts to unverifiable hearsay and gossip.
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