Chasing the “Coloured Phantom”: Gender Performance as Revealing and Concealing Modernist Ideology in Millay's Sonnets

As accounts of her poetry readings and pas- sages in her personal letters indicate, Edna St. Vincent Millay deliberately and carefully con- structed her persona as a woman willing to chal- lenge the sexual politics of her time. Regarding gender role conventions of the 1920s and 1930s, Davida Pines claims that even within the context of the "sexual revolution," most Americans were "conservative in their approaches to female sex- uality" and believed "that men were naturally more aggressive, women naturally more passive, specifically in relation to sexual behavior" (10). Millay undermined these prevailing assumptions by presenting herself to the world as feminine, often to the point of excess, yet willing to play the traditionally aggressive masculine role in love re- lationships. Even the nickname that Millay used for herself, Vincent, ingenuously compounded the mystery surrounding her gender identity. Cer- tainly, Millay was fully aware of the value of this androgynous persona that both critics and the public so eagerly accepted and consumed and, in- deed, performed it brilliantly to build a very pub- lic literary career. Suzanne Clark claims that she "would appear in a long gown for readings, her voice dramatic, her form girlish and attractive, more like a diva than like the gray-suited male poets" ("Uncanny" 5). In a letter to her family, in fact, Millay insists on having the appropriate outfits in which to perform poetry readings: "I must have long dresses, trailing ones . . . more like a negligee than a dress, really- very graceful and floaty" (76). Clearly, Millay understood, and, as a matter of course, manipulated, the construction of gender as a performance. Her dresses marked Millay as feminine and sexualized, for instance, while the content of her poetry, often interpreted as autobiographical by members of her authence, indicated that she understood her femininity in terms of a type of sexual subjectivity traditionally only available to men; indeed, Millay seems to have depended on the seeming contradictions between her appearance and her words to complete the effect of the persona of a sexually and emotionally independent woman hailing from the notoriously radical Greenwich Village.1 For better or for worse, however, Millay's highly performative poetic career and her sensationalized lifestyle, which she did not seem to shelter from the public eye, worked to exclude her from consideration as a "high" modernist during her lifetime. Not only is Millay's work atypical of modernism in that it usually takes the form of the Petrarchian sonnet and because it, according to Mary B. Moore, "overturns gender assumptions like Pound's ... by representing a female poetic speaker who expresses complex intellectual, moral, and literary experiences" (195), but it also blurs the line between life and art, a line traditionally valued by modernists contemporary to Millay. As Andreas Huyssen explains, for example, the use of the first person "I," even for the sake of establishing a persona, indicated for the modernists in the early part of the twentieth century "a lapse into subjectivity or kitsch" (46).2 Indeed, in contrast to Eliot and Pound, for instance, Millay writes frequently in the first person and makes few efforts to maintain distance from her poetry; on the contrary, she stamps it with her personality: "Millay's poetry . . . does not acknowledge the separation of life from art" (Clark, "Uncanny" 4). Furthermore, Millay's poetry was immensely popular during her lifetime. Because of her insistence on performing, Millay became, in fact, an icon of popular culture, which, although now regarded as "always [having] been the hidden subtext of the modernist project" (Huyssen 47), was felt as a very real threat to "high" modernism during Millay's literary era.3 According to Jean Gould, "People everywhere jammed lecture halls to hear [Millay]. She [performed] in a network series of poetry readings, an unheard-of venture in radio entertainment. …