The collection ends with an essay, “The Gender of Sound”, which examines the ancient Greek patriarchal ideas about male and female voices. It’s a long poem, and there’s a lot in it, including her prickly relationship with her mother: “The Glass Essay” is more about what the love affair changed in her, and how its ending alters her perception of herself, and her interaction with the world. It’s not about her ex being the Heathcliff to her Cathy in fact the ex lover is a shadowy, insubstantial figure. Carson reflects Wuthering Heights onto her own life to examine alienation, isolation, and disconnection.
Wuthering Heights uses the break down of relationships to examine the break down of social orders, and the resulting break down of identity, and all the violent emotions that accompany it. Carson, however, knows that Wuthering Heights is not a romance. A poem like that should collapse under it’s own hubris and self-indulgence. She even quotes Emily’s poetry with in her own poem, and gets away with it. The woman wrote a break-up poem comparing herself to Emily Bronte and made it work. It was at this moment, when I was in the opening stanzas of the poem, that I realized that Anne Carson is a Force to Be Reckoned With.
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