I, Being born a Woman and Distressed is a poem written by an outstanding American poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay. She, with the help of the narrator, introduces the theme that concerns the hardships of being a woman in the society that is ruled and dominated by men. The feminist tone reveals the woman’s inner feelings towards the societal double standards and her craving for equality.
In the first line of the poem Edna St. Vincent Millay introduces the narrator: “I, being born a woman and distressed”. (Millay) It is a woman and she delivers it to the reader in a very confident and self-assured manner by using a pronoun ‘I’ at the beginning of the poem. It means that she is not embarrassed of who she is and even proud of being a female. However, there is a thing that bothers her. She is “distressed / By all the needs and notions of [her] kind”. (Millay) Saying these words, the narrator means that, as every human being, specifically, a woman, she has some certain needs and wants. In the line three and four, she reveals the very source of her distress – she is very strongly attracted to a man and experiences sexual desire. Unfortunately, she cannot express her passion, as she informed us earlier, she is a woman. Here the narrator conveys her dissatisfaction with the double standards. The society expects her, and every woman, to be delicate, modest, decent and humble. Every woman is raised as a lady that has certain musts and must nots, rules and duties to follow and obey. The society, ruled by men, takes no care of the fact that females as well as males have similar needs, also sexual. Also, in both the third and fourth lines appears a pronoun ‘your’ that is referred to a male. For this very moment, the reader understands that the whole poem is addressed to the members of the opposite sex.
The narrator’s strong sexual desire is expressed in only one line: “To bear your body’s weight upon my breast.” (Millay) Although, in the poem is presented the ardent disagreement with social stereotypes concerning women and their behavior within the society, the narrator avoids to say directly that she wants to have sex with a man. Instead, she uses a metonymy and plays with associations. She distinguishes herself with a noun ‘breast’ and a man with a noun ‘weight’. The fact that ‘weight’ is “upon her breast” creates an image of sexual intercourse. So, that is also a visual imagery that appeals to the sense of sight of the reader and helps to imagine the actions in the poem. It should be mentioned that in the position the narrator describes the man is above her. It overlaps with her seeing the society that is dominated by males. The woman is presented as the one, who knocks under and accepts his body.
The next four lines Edna St. Vincent Millay devotes to the description of orgasm. That is why the reader can make a conclusion that all in all she made love with the man that attracted her. As in the previous lines, the narrator avoids the notion ‘orgasm’ and describes it with every possible metaphors and epithets. She calls it “fume of life” and it overwhelms her not only physically, but also on the mental level: “clarify the pulse and cloud the mind”. (Millay) The author compares orgasm with the nature that undergoes some kind of natural disaster. The fastened pulse is the wind gusts and the bleared the mind is the overclouded sky. After such a storm the nature as well as the narrator of the poem feels “undone” and “possessed” at the same time. The author uses imagery to convey the feelings caused by orgasm appealing to the senses of the reader.
In the lines nine and ten, after a sexual intercourse, the narrator admits that no matter how she tried to fight with her desire, her body betrayed her rational mind and she surrendered to the lust. She calls that accident “a poor treason / Of my stout blood against my staggering brain.” (Millay) And once again, the narrator avoids naming things with their real names. She uses metonymy ‘blood’ to talk about temptation and ‘brain’ meaning her mind. The author evades straightforwardness, because she is woman and was brought up as a delicate lady and cannot openly talk about her sexual desires.
However, the narrator is not upset because of this betrayal. Vice versa, she feels satisfied and says to a man: “I shall remember you with love.” (Millay) On the other hand she announces to him that this is not a good reason to make love with him again or even talk to him – what she felt does not matter: “I find this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation when we meet again.” (Millay) The word frenzy is used to explain that what happened between her and a man was just caused by an instinct – a biological need.
The narrator turns the situation in her favor. She behaves in a way men usually do – use and abandon women. She is proud of her deeds that can be understood from the usage of pronoun ‘I’ in the eleventh and thirteenth line. She puts it at the beginning of the lines as well as she puts herself before a man. With such an example the author wanted to show that there must be certain equality between a female and a male. Edna St. Vincent Millay gives men an opportunity to imagine what a used and “undone” woman usually feels after an intercourse with a confident and pitiless man.
Millay’s decision to uses a sonnet as a form of her poem can be viewed as sarcasm. Sonnets are known to be poems about love and beloved. Millay turns it in a poem about lust and sex – the usual companions of love. Stacy Hubbard mentions in her article: “[] she both yields to poetic convention and walks away from it.” (Hubbard) She also tries to write a sonnet from the woman’s perspective and in such a way to reveal what ‘love’ can result in.
Works Cited
Hubbard, Stacy Carson. "Love’s "Little Day": Time and the Sexual Body in Millay’s Sonnets". Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “I, Being born a Woman and Distressed”. The Norton Introduction To Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W W Norton & Co Inc., 2014. Print.
