“THE Viper's Traffic-Knot”

Abstract

This essay charts a history and theory of celibacy. Redressing the scholarly and popular tendency to read celibacy as “closeted” homosexuality, I disarticulate the history of celibacy from the history of homosexuality. Despite Michel Foucault's much-recited lesson that “there is not one but many silences,” queer theory continues to read celibacy as the sign of another practice: homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name” or the “impossibility” of lesbian sex. Mapping celibacy across sexuality studies' major conceptual grids (homo/hetero, acts/identities, fantasy/practice, friendship/homosexuality), this essay attempts to articulate an affirmative content for celibacy. Reading Marianne Moore's last single volume of original work, Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Elizabeth Bishop's memoir of Moore, “Efforts of Affection” (1979), I elaborate a definition of celibate temporality in relation to recent work on queer temporality. Under both these rubrics, time is an ideological force that regulates sex: for example, the “old maid” is “late” according to a trajectory of normal sexual maturation that must pass through marriage. Moore's Tell Me, Tell Me offers a depathologized temporal model of celibacy by unfolding a life narrative that does not punish the “old maid” for being developmentally “late.” Celibacy is usually understood as pure potential: its future is unwritten, unacted on, leaving open the threatening possibility that celibacy can take on any sexual character. Rather than see the celibate as desiring something lacking or as embodying a disjunction between desire and practice, Moore's volume posits a coextensive desire and practice, suggesting a theory of celibate desire.

A Peculiar Kind of Particularity: Plants and Animals in Marianne Moore’s Early Poetry

“…50 While Crane was certainly unaware of the link between jelly-fish and 'hysterical virgins' when he made this complaint to Allen Tate in 1927, remarks like this have contributed to what Benjamin Kahan has identified as the 'stigmatized model of celibacy' that has dominated Moore studies for nearly a century. 51 To cite just one example, Sandra Gilbert wrote that Moore has the 'genius of an amoeba'-'an entirely self-sufficient, apparently asexual creature'-thereby reinforcing Lewis' idea that 'a woman [is] a lower form of life', too 'mesmeric' to process sensory stimuli and too 'flaccid' to publish sexual material. 52 While the question of jelly-fish sexuality was more or less settled with Abbé Trembley's 1740 discovery that medusae produce sexually while their polyp offspring produce asexually, a phenomenon later known as the 'alternation of generations', the question of Moore's sexuality was certainly up for debate during her years at Bryn Mawr.…”