Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet XLI” is a demystified picture of women’s sexuality detached from fantasies. In hushed tones just prior to a sexual encounter, the poem attends to the strength of a woman’s sexuality, regardless of her feelings towards her partner. Refusing to fall back to an acceptable justification, such as future love or procreation, Millay rejects an optimistic or reparative meaning to her drives. The sonnet reveals that, as women are undone to be the space of man's becoming through sex, a space is created for a heterosexual and female sinthomosexuality.
Intoning to her unnamed lover, Millay expresses her desire to “bear [his] body’s weight upon [her] breast,” while apologizing for the “needs and notions of [her kind]” women (Millay 601). The reader—and indeed, the lover—may be surprised to learn that the “needs and notions” of women apparently do not include any semblance of a need “for conversation when [they] meet again,” (ibid). Millay is under no illusions about sex. This “frenzy” will no more lead to a relationship or even an acquaintance between the pair than to any self actualization or constitution. She will be “undone” by this “treason / Of the blood against [her] staggering brain,” and remains coolly unperturbed by her looming unraveling (ibid). She is frankly detached from the promises for which sexual relations must bear the burden, and this negativity quashes even the promise of another encounter. Rather than justifying her sexuality by orienting it in relation towards a future with her lover, Millay rejects any justification for her libido, save maybe for the “propinquity” of a handsome man (ibid). She is cleaved in two by her drives—her desire to feel his weight cuts against the social repression of her sexuality and her personal disdain for him.
“Sonnet XLI” is a frank identification of what Edelman and Berlant, in Sex, or the Unbearable, call the “negativity” inherent to the encounter which “exceeds and undoes the subject’s fantasmic sovereignty,” while producing as symptom “a sense of non-coherence [and] self-resistance,” (2, 29). The real negativity of this encounter is evinced from the outset via her “distress,” her reticence, her apologizing for her needs. It even seems that Millay has a questionable degree of agency in her decision. She is “possessed” by the “fume of life designed / to clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,” and not fully in control of herself (Millay 601). This embracing of negativity is the “sex without optimism” that Berlant and Edelman describe, a refusal to value the encounter through an orientation towards a future in order to “repair the subject’s negativity into a grounding experimental positivity,” (3, 5). Optimism is, therefore, a kind of misrecognition which that tries to cover over the negativity of sex in order to stabilize the subject (ibid 9). Millay certainly refuses this ordering fantasy which would orient her towards an always-deferred future, refusing even to justify her desire with the hope for a future encounter. The sonnet’s encounter cannot be misrecognized as a part of something greater—it is certainly not love, a fling, or even affection—Millay denies herself and her partner even a tentatively hopeful fantasy.
In making “the intrinsic negativity of the social apparent” Millay becomes what Edelman terms a sinthomosexual. Sinthomosexuals, in “denying the appeal of fantasy, refusing the promise of futurity,” make possible a real encounter with an available and “unthinkable jouissance,” (Edelman 35, 39). Importantly, Edelman’s sinthomosexuals are always abjected as queer in “a culture that places on queerness the negativizing burden of sexuality, (Edelman 149). Often represented as a male homosexual the sinthomosexual is condemned for tearing away the procreative meaning that is assigned to sex. Though fiction is sparsely populated by any women free of a fantasy, due to a cultural assumption that the “needs and notions” of women are “‘naturally’ bound more closely to [...] reproduction, and domesticating emotion,” (Edelman 165), Millay’s “Sonnet XLI” [makes] it plain,” that she does not have any patience for these presumptions (Millay 601). Rather than closing herself off in a preconceived acceptable justification, she opens herself towards the encounter with this available jouissance and, with it, towards the abjection to which the sinthomosexual is always consigned. Far from being repelled by this proximity to the abject, Millay seems to surrender to it’s negativity. While Edelman says that the negativity of the encounter is a profound shock to the subject, Millay’s own undoing is not the least bit shocking to her. Berlant is quick to part with Edelman on this point, instead saying that people more often “find [their undoing] comic, feel ashamed of it,” a description which is much more apt for Millay’s sojourn with negativity (Berlant & Edelman 8). How fitting that both women agree on this point.
Women have never been as free to pretend that they can be made whole through sex. Luce Irigaray notes that, for women, sex usually amounts to “defloration of herself as woman,” (Irigaray 211). Figured as a passive “beloved woman” to an active male lover, woman is denied her love and desire as an active female lover (ibid 205). This denial of her passion is, of course, most apparent in the sexual act. The sexual encounter has never approached a being space where woman can fool herself into believing that she can attain wholeness. Instead, “he sends [her] down to the depths so that he can rebound into the transcendent,” (ibid 208). In return he attempts to shield her from the abject that he cast her so near, whether through marriage or a son. The fantasy of a child only serves to wallpaper over the undoing, the loss of identity that the beloved woman has undergone. Moreover, through this fantasy, she is assimilated to the sameness of a “still undifferentiated maternal-feminine” that is the basis for a man to create his identity (ibid. 98). This optimistic view for the man is in fact radically negative for his beloved woman, who risks having her identity overwritten as “wife” or “mother,” possessed by the undifferentiated maternal-feminine, and judged in terms of the product of the encounter: the child. Try as she might to maintain her optimism, undoing was always her lot unless she by chance happened to naturally match the sameness that he assimilates her to, as impossible as that would be. Even when cast into a seemingly hopeful futurity, the beloved woman is “inordinately cut off,” and cannot even “mourn [her] impossible identity” (ibid. p.202). Even as mother, she can only reconstitute, again and again, her own virginity to be despoiled (ibid. 198). The beloved woman is repeatedly used to serve as the site for her lover’s self mastery, and just as often deflowered as a woman. Left as if a corpse or an animal. There is no room for her to unfurl herself, no ground on which she can stand to build herself outwards.
Beloved women, of course, still try to be optimistic about sex. Regardless of its feasibility, the social realm and cultural imagination are both replete with women holding out hope for a fecund future. A future relation seems like it simply must be possible, just dependent on this or that thing: virginity, beauty, a docile nature, a certain joie de vivre, some certain thing that will finally clear the way to a relation. She just needs to “want what he wants or to nourish [herself] on his desires,” (ibid. 213). There must be some meaning, some rhyme or reason to it all, some place, some identity to be elaborate with and through her lover. Due to an imbalance in male power and men’s desire for the same undifferentiated maternal-feminine, any identity imparted to her would amount to an assimilation and calcification.
The “female lover” is Irigaray’s attempt at redeeming sexual optimism. Seeking her own place from which to elaborate and identity, not through a child but through an indefinite cycle of union and return to self; the advent of the female lover is only occasioned by a heretofore unheard of relation between the sexes (ibid. 200). This fecund relation is not established by simply refusing the paralyzing optimism that her partner provides, but by the “remolding of the world, of discourse: another morning, a new era in history, in the universe,” (ibid. 140). Even in refusing a frozen-over, male-defined identity, Irigaray’s female lover cannot drop an attempt at optimism. She can neither find a home in his discourse nor find a place in the other, so she resolves to terraform the world of sexuate relations rather than confront the negativity of the encounter.
For her part, Millay is utterly disinterested in pursuing a promise of identity as either his beloved woman or a self-actualized female lover. She refuses to “suspend the present” (Irigaray 28) by orienting it towards “a future anterior, by way of the life [she] will have lived,” opting instead to make peace with the negativity of the sexual relation (Berlant and Edelman 3). Neither does Millay look to the female lover’s promise of a perpetual becoming; she will be “[left] once again undone,” and no development of any kind will have been made (Millay 601). The female lover is occasioned by a love between the sexes, and Millay cannot even manage to “scorn with pity,” much less love him. Rather than a lover or beloved, Millay is simply a woman as Irigaray understands them—her jouissance does not come in the form of a male infant and no sexual relation yet exists to facilitate her becoming. Like Irigaray’s woman, Millay “[faces] that [she] never had the option of maintaining [her] composure around that which never provided us the clarity and assurance that seemed to be its promise,” (Berlant and Edelman p.20). Instead, she enacts the negativity of opening onto the encounter with “an otherness that undoes our image of the self,” (ibid 34). She is at ease with how treasonous her desire is. Though she provides a nominal disavowal of this desire, instead pinning the blame on her sex and the “fume of life,” it provides scant cover given the imminence of the act (Millay 601). Aware that her lust is abject, aware that she is in violation of the sexual norms to which “[her] kind” is assigned, Millay disregards the ordering fantasy that is expected of her. Her lover does not suit her, but then "the other never suits us simply,” (Irigaray 78). She does not seek to assimilate the other to herself, and she denies him the easy opportunity to assimilate her into the undifferentiated feminine-maternal. Refusing the position of the female lover or beloved, Millay makes apparent the negativity inherent to the encounter. Though Edelman maintains that the sinthomosexual is always abjected as queer, “Sonnet XLI” establishes a thoroughly heterosexual sinthomosexuality.
Despite her “staggering brain,” Millay understands intuitively that a woman will be trapped and frozen in her attachment to her partner "Unless, at every opportunity, we ourselves take the negative upon ourselves. Which would amount to [...] giving us control over the debts we lay on the future," (Irigaray 120). Sexual optimism, only a mirage even for men, is impossible for Millay, for any women, to maintain in good faith. The sexual act has only ever amounted to a loss of self, a deflowering, a plunging into the abyss, or an assimilation to sameness. As the basis for the creation of a male identity, woman has never been afforded the privilege to construct her self in the other, has never been offered a repair other than a domicile and a son. Unless she resigns herself to being an object of men’s love, woman is abject in refusing the call of futurity, and is assigned to sinthomosexuality. Millay, for her part, makes apparent her unmitigated scorn for these orientations towards an always-deferred future and embraces the negativity of the encounter. Without regard for her heart, which is notably absent from the text, she transgresses against not only her self and the supposed “needs and notions,” of her kind, but against the very logic and meaning of sex. She will bear his weight upon her breast, but she will not bear the weight of his fantasy.
Berlant, Lauren Gail, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Duke University Press, 2014.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke, Cornell University Press, 2014.
“Sonnet XLI.” Collected Poems, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harper Perennial, 2011, p. 601.
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