by Lanae Celeste

Created on: May 25, 2008   Last Updated: May 26, 2008

What, exactly, does it mean to be a woman? How does one's sense of self become inextricable from that definition? In one of her later poems, "In the Waiting Room", Elizabeth Bishop explores these questions by examining her own life, from her pre-women's suffrage childhood to half a century later, during the peak of the Women's Rights Movement when this poem was penned. She undertakes her analysis not by writing chronologically, but rather by collapsing her life's experiences into a single memory from when she was a young girl. This technique allows her to draw a parallel between the moment she first discovered the implications of being a woman to the 1970's, an era when the definition of "womanhood" was once again being rewritten. However, despite the advances for women championed by feminists in the 70's, Bishop questions whether any true and fundamental shift in women's societal role has actually occurred. Throughout "In the Waiting Room", she endeavors to find her own definition of gender, rejecting society's indoctrinated beliefs and questioning their validity. She enables the reader to slip easily into this dense subject matter of her poem by employing several deceptively simple poetic techniques.

Perhaps the most immediately striking feature of Bishop's work is its child narrator describing the seemingly innocuous event of waiting at the dentist's office while her aunt is in the patient's room. It is the winter of the year 1918 in the town of Worcester, Massachusetts. In this setting, the memory revolves around the narrator reading a National Geographic magazine. Bishop writes in uncomplicated, declarative language like "It was winter. It got dark / early." (lines 6-7) that mirrors her age at the time this memory took place even though the narrator's juvenile observations are filtered through the lens of the adult poet's mature interpretation. This allows the reader to immediately connect with what is being said, without having to first decipher dense language, thus allowing the underlying theme of the poem to have more of a personal and emotional impact. Indeed, being unrestricted by overly wrought language allows the narrator's emotions to burst off of the page, catching the unsuspecting reader off-guard. The narrator's tone also boils down the enormous issue of gender identity to its essence, allowing us to explore Bishop's theme at its core, without becoming entangled in murky gender politics.

Aside from tone, Bishop also uses iambic trimeter, which

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