"You're Nobody 'Till Somebody Cares"

            As Wednesday’s Dickinson facilitation group gleaned from Dickinson’s poetry, Dickinson has an “obsession with her own flaws and the flaws of humanity.” She seems to have a low level of respect for her self-image and self-worth. She pines for the day when she can find someone as lowly, alone, and different as herself to couple with. She exclaims (you can almost hear her pleading with the fates in this poem and can hear her strained wishing, hoping, and praying for her chance at ‘couplement’—or, rather perhaps, an intense friendship with Sue, her sister-in-law):

XXVII

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

            For Dickinson (and for Sexton as we soon shall see), otherhood is a mode of living that separates oneself from the joys of love, care, and compassion associated with romantic relationships UNLESS one can find another other to whom to couple oneself.  Dickinson admits that it is “dreary to be somebody,” but would she say that if she didn’t already have such a close attachment to her significant other, Sue? Would she be proud of her identification as a nobody unless there was a nobody with her? I don’t think so. Just like Frank Sinatra said, I bet she feels like she’s “nobody ‘till somebody loves [her].” In fact…

            It is this desperation for ‘couplement,’ a feeling to which I can testify I have felt in my lonely days of singlehood, that drive her to write poems like this one:

XI

My river runs to thee:

Blue sea, wilt welcome me?

My river waits reply.

Oh sea, look graciously!

I’ll fetch thee brooks

From spotted nooks,--

Say, sea,

Take me!

Take me! She even says that she will “wait [in] reply” for his answer to her pleas to be chosen as his couple. “Her river runs to thee”—she desperately wants to be chosen by this addressee of the poem. Even though she has chosen to lead a reclusive life, I still think even the recluse (I hate to call her that; it has such a negative stigma attached to its meaning) wants to feel human compassion, wants to be chosen as worthy (especially in their patriarchal culture) for wifehood, and just wants recognition for her worth and value. Who doesn’t want that?

            Furthermore, Anne Sexton builds upon this idea of the other not being able to find worth and value in life unless he/she is chosen for ‘couplement’ or can be taken as a normal, acceptable member of society. In her poem, “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three Eyes,” Sexton describes the fate of the unusual others in our world (even though these others are separated from the norm stream of people by their physical deformities):

The bird who cannot fly

Is left like a cockroach.

A three-legged kitten is carried

by the scruff of the neck

and dropped into a blind cellar hole.

A malformed foal would not be nursed.

Nature takes care of nature.

            She goes on to say, “The unusual needs to be commented on…” (Sexton 60). This is why One-Eye and Three-Eye receive so much more mothering, affection, and interest from their mother than their two-eyed sister. Even today, unusual is beautiful—beautiful in the sense that it attracts attention. Normal isn’t. Normal is routine. It’s boring. Perhaps even the so-called normal can be othered because it is so non-unique, so attainable, so unexciting? But, what is normal anyway? Even when One-Eye is chosen for couplehood, her concept of otherness then merges to coincide with our own (physical deformities are other), and she takes in her sisters because,

They were to become her Stonehenge,

her cosmic investment, …

They were to become her children,

her charmed cripples, her hybrids—“ (Sexton 65).

            And, this is why I have added the link for this particular Twilight Zone episode. In this episode, a woman (who is, ironically, absolutely gorgeous and goes on after her debut on this show to star as the daughter in The Beverley Hibillies) is othered because she lives in a society where facial deformities are normal. She wants desperately to be accepted in the society and not join the clan of others separated from the normal world. She undergoes facial surgery multiple times to try to obtain normal status. And the surgery fails…time and time again. She is perpetually stuck as an other. Although her otherness is based on physical ‘deformities’ like Sexton’s woman, how is Dickinson any different in her otherhood? She is a recluse, something obviously abnormal and indicative of otherhood. Personality, mode of living choices, and physical aspects can be just as othering.

            So, what is the kind of other we should strive to be in order to get coupled (I don’t agree with this statement—we should be happy with ourselves and only couple with a person who loves and embraces us for who we are—but I am simply making this argument for argument’s sake)? Other and the concept of normal changes like the whim of the winds. Is the recluse normal? Not now, but could she be? Is a three-eyed person normal? Not now, but who’s to say she won’t be soon? Is the facial deformity expressed in The Twilight Zone normal? In the Twilight Zone, yes…but that’s the Twilight Zone—everything is ass-backwards in that world. But, what’s to stop us from making such facial deformities normal in our own Eastern Time Zone world? If normal, and therefore by default other, is a fickle concept that can change on a whim, who’s to say that Dickinson, Three-Eye, and the facial deformities from “Eye of the Beholder” might become our benchmark for normal? We live our life on a continuum, one end as other and one as normal. But who decides those two benchmarks? Who decides when they change? How do we cope with those benchmarks and where we fit in between? That, my friends, is the ultimate struggle.

Sexton, Anne. Transformations. New York: First Mariner Books, 1999. Print.

Dickinson, Emily. The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Modern Library, 2000.      Print.

The Twilight Zone: Eye of the Beholder Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Frank Sinatra's You're Nobody 'Till Somebody Loves You" : The song to which I owe the title of this blog