They point to the possibility, at least, of a shift in awareness, if not for the woman in the hotel room then for us as readers. An especially interesting moment occurs in the poem’s second stanza, where the detached, objective report of the poem’s opening lines shifts into a more personal, subjective mode - “it feels like,” “I can imagine” - and the third-person “she” becomes the more intimate “you.” The experience of looking at the woman’s silent face, “more silent than this painting, or any / Painting,” brings about this change of perspective: “it feels like the sad, blank hull / Of a ship is passing, slowly, the stones of a wharf / Though there is no ocean for a thousand miles.” These lines, suggesting the slow work of inner experience and of seemingly impossible change, run counter to the stasis of Levis’s imagined, unknowable ending. These are incredibly intimate portraits, yet we are implicated as witnesses, voyeurs - invited into the scene directly in the painting, by the suggestion of a hallway in the foreground, and vicariously in the poem, through the speaker who describes and imagines for us. Is this, in part, why we’re told her body “fails,” because it does not communicate conventional femininity, a message that the “acceptable” shoes and “one good flowered dress” are to convey, ostentatiously, instead? Would this woman feel differently in good economic times or is part of what she is experiencing a difference, an apartness, based on gender?Īnd then there is our own position as viewer-readers. Is this a woman? Her strong features - the angular, stubbornly “silent” face the broad shoulders, drawn down and together “as if that could help” the solid build - keep me looking. This woman seems alienated from herself, too, or at least from some ideal self-image. The poem registers alienation more complexly, through images of vulnerability and loss (the “flagrant” moths at the asylum, the reduction of the house to a satchel and a check resting on “bare knees”) words like “looking down,” “apart from everyone,” “sad,” “blank,” and “silent” evoking shame halting rhythms and irregular pauses and the indifferent, unrecognizing natural and human worlds of “Kansas” (the normative center?) from which the poem’s speaker imagines an escape for the woman before abruptly returning her, alone and still half undressed, to the hotel room. In the painting, this feeling is created by the use of queasy half-tones and an eerie off-centeredness, the woman’s body wedged into a corner of the narrow space and seeming to collapse in on itself. It shows how much can be gained from historical context, as well as what remains elusive about Hopper’s painting and Levis’s poem.The feeling of alienation in both of these works intrigues me. In this process, Levis acknowledges the pleasures – and limits – of imagination.Ĭomment by Michael Staub - Octo 3:43 pm |Edit This What had been elusive about the painting, and then imagined by Levis in his poem, returns to the unknowable. She has remained “for forty years” – from the 1930s to the 1970s when Levis wrote this poem – both unmoved and unmoving. “No one” can know who this woman in Hopper’s painting is. At last, she has a chance to make a better life for herself.īut having invented this tale, Levis lets it unravel. Holding a check in her hands for the house and everything else, she plans to leave her hometown forever. The woman has come to sell her mother’s home and everything in it. According to Levis, the painting concerns a woman whose mother has been committed to a mental hospital. The poem by Larry Levis invents a story, filling in the painting’s many blanks. (Think of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.) Beyond this sketch, the meaning of Hopper’s painting remains ambiguous and mysterious. Home foreclosures were rampant.įrom where does this woman in the painting by Hopper come? To where is she headed? The painting appears to be about a person in transit (and transition) at a historical moment when many Americans were being forced to abandon everything they had ever known. Bank failures numbered in the thousands, and countless Americans saw their entire life savings vanish almost overnight. Americans who still managed to hang onto their jobs often had their salaries slashed – sometimes in half. Unemployment stood at 16% – on its way to a staggering 25% in 1933. The year 1931 was an especially difficult one for the vast majority of Americans. “Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931” by Larry LevisEdward Hopper’s oil painting of a young woman alone in a hotel room with a piece of paper on her knees and her possessions in suitcases captures the lonely uncertainty of the early depression era.Click here to read: Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931 by Larry Levis
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