Notes on The Glass Essay

Afer a recommendation from Bored Dominatrix, I've finally managed to read Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay".


I’ve spent a considerable time mulling over this poem. It certainly required immense effort on my part and I’ve had to read thoroughly more than 5 times. Needless to say, I really enjoyed the challenge.

For now I am going to post my thoughts in the form of questions and then attempt to answer them later.

Law: Is this the real name of her ex-boyfriend? If not, why is he called Law? Is he an allegory for something larger?

She: Is Carson afraid of turning into her mother? Why?
Why does she call Emily as “this”? Does this foreshadow the confusion in her
own head between reality and fiction?
If she is afraid of turning into Emily Bronte, then why does she address Emily asking for meat?

Three: Who is the third woman in the room? The ghost of Emily or something else?
Why does she use the glass metaphor? Under what context? Does she mention whether the glass metaphor appears in Wuthering Heights or other works by Emily?
The poem is brimming with entrapment imagery.
Heathcliff’s calling Catherine: pathos or violence?
Why is hanging dead puppies important to Carson? Is it because she wants to act out such a violence to those around her (her mother, Law) but feels helpless knowing she can’t do it?

Whacher: “bars of time, which broke”: imprisonment imagery
If freedom for Carson being away from her mother? What does Carson want? Doe she wasn’t freedom or entrapment?
Videotape: meaning? In her mind or literal meaning?
Nude#1: Is this Emily or Carson?
What is the significance of the scorpion? Is it more harmful to Charlotte, Emily or Carson?


Kitchen: pain devil Vs. plain devil
The kitchen an important setting in both Wuthering Heights and in Emily’s life; Thus it is important to Carson too.
Imagery: steel cage of sheets (like Emily’s dungeon)
Connection with Law and Carson’s mother: she dislikes them both
13 nudes: unlucky number, all the nudes are cruelly trapped in some way or another.

Hero: Is the hero her father or Emily or herself?
Mother is reduced to the status of creature.
Charlotte as voice of reason, Carson also despises reason.
Like the Bronte, Carson likes shadows: gothic.

Hot: Importance of spying and surveillance (Villette, Hamlet)
Resentment against mother for keeping watch over the house and her.
This time she is IN a room with hanged puppies: did she hang them? Is she afraid of them?
Are there scorpions in the mother’s rooms?

Thou: Does Carson mean Emily’s loneliness or her mother’s? Is her mother Emily?
Imagery: ropes/thorns
Soul tapped in glass: Emily’s alter-ego? Carson’s alter-ego?
Finally attempts to separate herself from Emily: “I am my own nude”
Nude #7: Like amniotic sac in a pregnant woman.
Voice “be very careful” is mothers? Is it the voice of womanhood?
How did her melodrama suddenly end and why does Carson portray the end this way without an explanation?
The arrival of Nude#13: arrival of Carson’s mania
The nude “walked of the light”: Satan (Paradise lost)? Will the nude come back? Is this nude evil? Will the nude never rest?

Inconclusive.