I Sit and Sew by Alice Dunbar-Nelson - Essay Example

Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "I Sit and Sew A Close Reading The poem "I Sit and Sew" is an archetypal example of a poem which contrasts traditional women's roles with those of men. A poem that depicts a 'typical' woman's act of sitting and sewing, the text indicates the forced passivity and frustration of a woman in war-time, who is unable to do anything to alleviate her desire to do something constructive instead of being made to sit passively. The most striking aspect of the structure of the poem is the refrain "I sit and sew," which is outside the otherwise constant rhyme scheme. The poem's stanzas all follow the rhyme scheme aabbccd. In this, Dunbar-Nelson echoes the repetitive tasks that a woman has to undergo as part of her gendered identity. Like the tasks of sewing, washing, cooking, etc., the rhyming couplets of a poem echo the 'scheme' of tasks that a woman must perform day in and day out, without reprieve. The refrain, although it is identical each time, does not rhyme with any other line or exist as part of a couplet. This seems to indicate that although it is a repeated emotion that the narrator feels very often, it is nevertheless not repetitive like the chores she has to do. Its repetition instead indicates that it is a powerful emotion that she feels again and again, an emotion that does not find an outlet and remains bottled up inside her. The first stanza contains a striking juxtaposition of the "useless task" of sewing with the tasks that men have to perform, which are instilled with grandeur and dignity, and are located in the public/political sphere, whereas the woman is confined to the domestic/personal sphere of existence: The panoply of war, the martial tread of men, Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death, The lives of men are played out against a grandiose backdrop, suggested by words such as "panoply," "martial," and "grim-faced." In contrast, the woman is obviously relegated ton being one of the "lesser souls" who cannot participate in the all-important tasks of war and politics. The word "pageant" in stanza two may be compared with the word "panoply" in the first stanza. While the men are out creating history, women seem to be destined to play pre-determined roles in a pageant or masquerade which does not allow them to determine their own identities, but rather to passively sit back and accept the roles that a patriarchal agendas has created from them; they are defined by someone else's ideal of what they should be like. The first stanza also indicates that women's tasks are full of passivity. The verbs that are used to describe women's actions - "sit," "sew," "aches," etc - are all passive verbs that can be performed while staying in the same position. By contrast, the "martial tread" of men suggests that they are constantly moving forward. They are active while women are passive. Curiously, the appearance of men is described in considerable detail - their faces are grim and their eyes are stern. The woman, contrastingly, is not described at all in terms of her facial expression. It is as if the poet wants to present an external view of men, and an internalized portrait of a woman's thoughts and actions. It is clear that this is a woman's monologue, and that she is only capable of seeing herself as a fragmentary creature; it is only her hands that are described, and only in terms of being "tired." This stanza opens and closes with the refrain, suggesting that the woman's life is circumscribed on every side by reminders that she is supposed to remain passive. The opening lines of the next stanza suggest a burst of passion when the woman says fervently that her "heart aches with desire," but this fire has already been quenched by the "but" that immediately precedes it in the last lines of the previous stanza, reminding her that her task is to sit and sew, to remain passive and obedient. In the second stanza, the tone changes quite dramatically. Whereas the first stanza describes the actions of men in terms of a grand and solemn martial quest, the second presents a grotesque vision of "wasted fields" and "writhing grotesque things" that were "once men." The transferred epithet "wasted" is ascribed to fields, whereas it refers to the wasted actions of men who attempt to perform heroic tasks but are actually destined for death. From this vantage point, the lines in the first stanza that personify "Death" as being out of the purview of brave men now seem ironic, because even though the men thought they were too grand for death, it has been lying in wait for them all along. This stanza continues the alliterative repetition that was initiated at the beginning of the poem with the phrase "sit and sew." The alliteration in "holocaust of hell" again draws attention to the act of mindless repetition that is war, where more and more people are killed for no apparent purpose. This is a very significant paralleling of the mindless acts that women are expected to perform with the futility of war. Both are equally purposeless, but acts of war are ingrained with seemingly meaningful political ideologies. The poet, however, through her juxtaposing of the acts, portrays the reality behind the acts. The stanza ends with the pathetic fallacy of "fields of woe," which represents the grief and despair that the woman feels as she contemplates the scene at the battlefield. There is irony in the tone, because even though she knows war is futile and meaningless, she would still rather be there, living an active life (albeit dying a useless death) instead of existing meaninglessly within the passive confines of the world that she is being forced to inhabit. Her despair at the situation is reinforced by the repetition of the refrain "I sit and sew"; each time the phrase is repeated, the tone seems more urgent and forceful. The second stanza also presents a subtle shift in power. While in the first stanza it is suggested that men are the active and powerful ones, in the second stanza the woman feels "pity" for them. The position of feeling pity for someone suggests that the person experiencing the emotion is more powerful than the person at whom the emotion of pity is directed. The fact that the progress of emotion from helplessness in the first stanza to pity in the second stanza takes place within the narrative framework of the speaker's monologue also suggests that in some ways it is the act of reflection while sewing that has allowed her to examine her emotions and her situation objectively. The device of the transferred epithet/pathetic fallacy is continued in the third stanza with the image of the "idle patch." While patchwork-quilt making may be considered a creative act, the speaker finds no solace in her creativity. She feels instead that she is being idle and useless, her creativity serving no apparent purpose. The verb "dream" is used again as she reflects on the dream-like state of her existence. For the first time, she seems to actively question the situation that she has been forced into, by asking a deliberate question and thereby taking on a more proactive stance: Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch, When there they lie in sodden mud and rain, Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain The idea of the "homely thatch" is again juxtaposed with the horrific backdrop of men dying in the mud and the rain. The image of the house conveys a sense of being protected, whereas the men are out facing the worst of fates. Nevertheless, the words "patch" and "thatch" also convey a sense of fragmentation. The home that the woman is in is not complete, both because of the absence of the man and because of her fragmented sense of self and her inability to do what she yearns to do. Stanza three also returns to the image that the poem began with - that of a woman sitting and sewing, and contemplating her situation. In some ways, the poem uses the device of starting from point A, moving to point B, which is a point far away from point B, and then returning to point A with a different sense of what the original point is like. Point B here is the battlefield, which is contrasted and compared (both are meaningless contexts in which to live) with point A. on a broader level, the anguish of the individual is also worked out within the larger framework of social conventions: the poem refers to traditional roles that men and women are expected to play in a patriarchal society. The return to the original scene in stanza three is again informed and in some ways dominated by the traumatizing scenes on the battlefield, which the woman thinks of and which are brought to life by her imagination. The poet also continues her technique of juxtaposing men's existence with women's to bring out the contrast between the two. The word "pitifully" in the phrase "pitifully calling me" points to the fact that the men, even though they are away from their women, can somehow sense the latter's pity, and concur with it. The fact that they seem to be calling the women to them also suggests that men feel the absence of women as much as women feel the absence of men. Like the home, the battlefield is also a traditional space that is reserved for one gender only. The gendering of spaces is seen as unnatural as the men and women yearn for each other, but are not allowed to open their respective spaces out to each other. However, for all the overt contrasts that are visible between men and women, the underlying tone suggests that there is a conceptual and thematic similarity between the two seemingly disparate existences. Both are informed and directed by the absence of the other sex. The third repetition of the word "dream" towards the poem's closing is significant, for the woman's imaginings do not constitute some "roseate dream," but are rather very real thoughts instilled with warmth and immediacy. Two significant words in the third stanza are "Christ" and "God." The first word, "Christ," brings to mind the image of the Christian crusader who has traditionally been a man. The speaker subverts the institution of religion by suggesting that Christ has overlooked the importance of women in fighting the Christian fight. Religion, like society, had excluded women from the public sphere, and this exclusion may mean that the objectives of the institution may never come to fruition unless the presence of women is acknowledged. The final refrain "God, must I sit and sew" again makes a reference to God, but here the woman seems to be swearing in frustration rather than actually making an appeal to God. The interrogative sentence structure is used again to assert the image of the speaker as someone who has finally found the strength to question her situation. She is no longer passive, and the refrain "I sit and sew" is no longer uttered in an assertive statement, but rather as part of a questioning of the process of the gendering of human existence. Interestingly, although the voice in the poem is that of a single woman, the speaker refers to men in the plural. This suggests that she is an Everywoman of sorts, and that her thoughts and emotions are not hers alone, but rather representative of the feelings of all women. The narrative form of the monologue is well utilized to suggest the growth of a woman's sensibility. Although she does not physically move from her location, she moves from the position of being static to an active ideological position from which she can question hitherto accepted conventions of society that violate and distort the world of the individual, and the relations between the two sexes. Read More