Rebecca
RESINSKI QUEERING AND UNQUEERING MYRRHA IN
FRANK BIDART'S DESIRE
The story of Myrrha takes pride of place in Desire, an award-winning volume of poetry
published by Frank Bidart in 1997. In "The Second Hour of
the Night," the longest of the poems in Desire,
Bidart retells Ovid's tale of Myrrha and her disastrous
love for her father, Cinyras. Myrrha's love and her fate
become for Bidart a meditation on the power of desire.
But some readers see Myrrha's incestuous love as more
particularly emblematic of gay desire (e.g., Greenwell,
In Posse Review 11): one forbidden love stands in for
another. Although the object of Myrrha's desire is not a
member of the same sex, he is a member of the same
family; Myrrha's love is made problematic because of a
similarity between subject and object. With familial
homogeneity substituted for sexual homogeneity, Myrrha
becomes an avatar of a same-sex lover.
Although Bidart's text certainly allows for such
queering, a reading of Myrrha's predicament solely as an
exploration of gay desire would be incomplete. For Bidart
challenges an audience to see the underlying similarity
of all desire--gay, straight, and otherwise. Bidart's
desire is a force that lays all low: whether one's desire
focuses on an object allowed or disallowed by society is
largely a matter of luck. In Bidart's terms, everyone is
Myrrha or potentially Myrrha. If we believe Bidart, we
all could be queer. Queer Myrrha is not that queer at
all.
At the close of his rendition of Myrrha's story, Bidart
offers Myrrha as a mirror into which readers are invited
to look and see themselves. To allow readers to view
Myrrha compassionately and even empathetically, Bidart
must decriminalize her: in the final analysis, she and
her actions cannot be heinous. In this respect, Bidart
must depart somewhat from his Ovidian touchstone, in
which we can find a markedly ambivalent presentation of
Myrrha. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid's subordinate narrator, Orpheus,
sings the story of Myrrha, and at the beginning of his
song Orpheus warns listeners away from the contaminating
content of the tale (Met. 10.300). But by the end of the story
Ovid's more sympathetic voice seems to rise over
Orpheus', and Myrrha attains some moral stature. Ovid
thus licenses his readers to side either with or against
the impious Myrrha. Bidart aims to defuse the negative
pole of Ovid's ambivalence. He uses the opening portion
of "The Second Hour of the Night" to present desire as a
kind of fate, and this allows a reader to see Myrrha from
the outset as a victim rather than offender. Bidart's
Myrrha is further victimized by her nurse, Hippolyta, who
rescues her from death but then uses her to take revenge
on Cinyras (who had previously caused the death of
Hippolyta's father and brother). Myrrha gains moral force
as she unwittingly plays into Hippolyta's dark
machinations and faces her own inexplicable desire. In
making sure that Myrrha is not monstrous, Bidart
decriminalizes desire.
Abstracts
Index