The Last Clear Narrative

In Working Note, Rachel Zucker states, "In labor with my second son (my first labor without an epidural) I lost all modesty for the first time since my girlhood and went to a place I never knew existed. The pain of the contractions eclipsed everything around me, erased my sense of relatedness, and stranded me in a space of complete “I.” At the same time, my physical body became a process rather than subject and was not then subject to the rules of feminine propriety or vanity. I was an “I” without self-consciousness, perspective, language."

A link to the essay: http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_7_200/current/new_writing/zucker.htm

Over the summer I read Zucker's second collection of poems, The Last Clear Narrative, and this idea of "propriety" was brought up throughout the entire book. The Last Clear Narrative is an "autobiographical stance about the particulars of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood." The collection is most obviously about Zucker's experiences in motherhood. But, what I found most interesting is that Zucker looks at motherhood, an stereotypical feminine act according to our society, as a loss of feminine propriety or vanity.

The two poems in The Last Clear Narrative that I read in the summer that brought me back to this idea of lost propriety or women as a property to traditional norms were, "[propriety]" and "[property]."

You can view these poems from this link: http://books.google.com/books?id=W6JeQPbKk2sC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

(pgs 14 &15)

Propriety, by definition means the state or quality of conforming to conventionally accepted standards of behavior or morals. Following this title, Zucker states "in French the word 'propre.'" Propre is a reference to Rousseau's concept in philosophy, amour propre or "self-love." This concept denotes a self-love that depends on others' opinions and arose with concept of society. Self-love renders human beings incapable of being happy within society. While "amour de soi" is amour propre's opposite, in which the concept denotes the primitive and is associated with "wholeness" and "happiness." Propre can also mean "clean" or "house trained," which can be seen as a symbol of what women represent.

This reference is significant in shaping "[propriety]" because Zucker as a mother struggles with the question of, "how can I love myself if the definition that society has always provided for me (amour-propre) has been taken away from me through pregnancy?" Therefore, if self-love is dependent on society and Zucker does not fit the feminine propriety and vanity than how can she exist? This makes it impossible for any pregnant woman to exist because not only has Zucker lost this femininity, but she has lost everything ("self-consciousness, language, and perspective") that goes along with it.

"[property]" deals with similar symbols associated with the typical housewife mentioned in "[propriety];" however "[property]" takes the concept a step further by making woman the property of the household and of the family. In the second to last line, Zucker states, "when not at home,/the house/privacy/the story demands/looms, idle hands, what's a woman         ?." Therefore, because the woman is seen as property of the house, Zucker questions how she can be seen outside of this structure and still exist. Do we, in our society, have a place for a woman with idle hands? Loom also sits heavily in this question because loom on the surface of "[property]" can mean the question of "what's a woman" appears as a shadowy form in society, but it also references the domesticated housewife and the apparatus that is used by these women in households to make fabric by weaving thread and yarn. Ultimately, Zucker investigates the existence of women without their stereotypical language or perspective (the home and motherhood).

Each of these poems creates a dichotomy by juxtaposing either women with men in "[propriety]" or "you" (or the lack of ownership of the woman self) with husband and home in "[property]." Both poems also obviously disregard the "you" of women, by message and visually by the strikeout within the text. This series of dichotomy's contribute to Zucker's experience of the physical body as a process. Rather than the body being a subject where a person or thing is being discussed, described, or dealt with, the body becomes a series of actions or steps to achieve a particular end. The body becomes a type of object or machine.

Overall, "[propreity]" and "[property]" combine ephemeral lines with 'the attempt to make a narrative out of experience that is stripped of narrative, context, point of view is critical to the process of healing, because it is too frightening to remain in that location of perfect “I.”' They contribute to the larger project to create "the last clear narrative."

These poems are packed with a lot more than I have mentioned above. I would like to know if anybody finds anything else within the poems interesting in terms of motherhood as unfeminine? Does any one think motherhood is a loss of femininity versus the 1950's definition of motherhood being the ultimate act of femininity?