In “Marrying the Hangman”, an allegorical tale based on a historical story [1] forms the basis of an extended metaphor; for the gendered treatment of individuals in society, with particular attention given to the oppression of women. In response to this oppression, the female voice is used as a tool for empowerment. The poem also engages with issues of history. It disputes normative, patriarchal, and impersonal histories, and privileges alternative, subjective but personal stories. The latter give voice to individual, anonymous struggles that are obscured by the former.
The poem begins with an unnamed “she” (Atwood Ln 1). By refraining from naming her explicitly, the poem steers clear from traditional narratives (despite the story being itself historically significant), which are typically only interested in “who”, “what”, and “when”. Instead, the anonymous female protagonist, located loosely in time and space, comes to embody a generic and universal experience of womanhood. Her namelessness, which is symbolic of the elimination of her personal identity, is only the first in a series of multiple denials the woman experiences: apart from the denial of her freedom, she is further denied her sight, her selfhood, her right to desire, and, finally, her body.
It is sight, and more specifically the sight of her body, that is first denied to her. The prison lacks mirrors, and without mirrors, the woman finds herself living “without the self” (Atwood in 8). The poem suggests that in being denied sight of her own body, the woman is divorced from her body, and hence her “self” (8): the body that she cannot see is the body that she does not possess, or cannot own. She requires an external voice to be her mirror. She can only access her body through the mediation of a secondary body (a man), a repossession of the self that is ultimately rendered unsatisfactory, for it takes place through the very sacrifice of that self through offering it up in marriage. This futility is further emphasised in the extended metaphor of the prison, where both reader and persona find that in marrying the hangman she has only “left one locked room for another” (83). A further denial of the body is seen in the denial of desire, where it is not the act of stealing that is the woman’s crime, but it is her “desire” (30) that is “not legal” (30). Hence the denial of sight and desire represent women’s powerlessness, and contribute to a larger denial of her entire body, which she does not possess because she uses it to barter for an incomplete and abject freedom through marriage.
The use of metonymy in the poem metaphorically enacts violence against the female body when it dismembers and represents the woman through her body parts: her “wrung neck” (14), “swollen tongue” (14), and “throat” (23, 24) emphasises the lack of recognition she is given as an individual and self. Even the body that she offers to the man in transaction is not whole, but a butchered amalgamation of body parts. She promises him “nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, / thighs, eyes, eyes” (61-2). These terms emphasise the sexual function of her body, especially through words like “nipple” and “thighs”, and renders the body utilitarian and functional. In sequence, the body parts bear no direct relation to each other, and instead form a grotesque pastiche of a female body, where nipple is connected to arms, and thighs to eyes, further reinforcing the unnaturalness and perverseness of viewing a woman in such terms. In offering parts of her body alongside bread and wine, the elements of Holy Communion, the poem makes an ironic comment by comparing the base act of sexual oppression to the holy act of intimate communication. The imprisoned woman becomes part of the Eucharist, the body of Christ, sexualising the latter in a sacrilegious manner that throws into relief the baseness of the sacrifice the woman is forced to make. Yet even as she promises him her body, the final part of this promise is “eyes” (62), repeated twice for emphasis. More than possessing the woman, the man desires her to “watch him / while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if / possible” (68-70). He needs her to bolster his sense of self even as she needs him to save her life. The effect is one of pathos and of shared oppression.
The sense of female oppression also arises through poetic form, in the rigid constraints and sense of fatalism the poem begins with. The poem starts out with the line “She has been condemned to death” (1), the heavy repetition of the “de” sound drumming in the judgment that has been passed. “Death” continues to resound through the stanza, finally culminating in the line “There is only a death, indefinitely postponed” (5), where the weight of the sentence falls heavily, evoking a dreadful sense of fatalism. This sense of inescapability also comes through in the short, repetitive sentences that accrete: “A man / may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a / woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present / time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape” (1-4). The sentence prior to another determines, more or less, what the next entails, and the constant repetition of sentence structure, and key words such as “hangman” culminates in a thick, unbreakable chain of cause-and-effect, with each sentence maintaining an inescapable grasp on the sentences before and after it. One observes this in the second stanza: To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self. She is
living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and
on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice
comes through darkness and has no face. This voice
becomes her mirror. (7-12)
The echo of the phrase “to [...] is to [...]” (7-8) seduces the reader into a surreal internal logic of the stanza; self-less-ness morphs imperceptibly into selflessness, and her finding the hole in the wall naturally leads to what is on the other side – the “voice.” The word “voice” (10) is then carried ponderously into the next sentence—“The voice” (10)—and the next—“This voice”.
While an escape seems to be offered to the woman, the fatalistic tone set out in the first stanza continues on into the third, by which point the “may” (2) that had earlier suggested the woman’s only escape has turned into repeated “must[s]” (14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24). The stanza breaks up into short sentences, listing a string of imperatives: she “must marry the / hangman” (14-5), she “must / create him” (15-6), and so on and so forth. The repetition of “must” creates a sense of urgency and desperation, highlighting the wretchedness of the woman’s position. Furthermore, the threat of her death is continually brought to the forefront, through the macabre image of “wrung neck and swollen tongue” (14), and through the alliteration that continues into “will be willing to twist / the rope around throats” (22-3). This intensifies the gruesome “twist[ing]” motion and further highlights the woman’s desperation. Hence while an “escape” (2) seems to be granted to the woman, the poetic form suggests that it is one that actually forces her into a corner.
However, despite the series of denials and atrocities that is committed against the body, and the sense of oppressiveness conveyed through poetic form, a sense of empowerment is granted to the woman through her voice. It is her voice that seeks out the other across the hole in the wall, and her voice that actively “create[s]” (16), “persuade[s]” (16), and “transform[s]” (22) the male prisoner into her hangman, hence ensuring her escape from death. In a conflation of the aural and spatial, the woman’s voice becomes a hand that “reaches / through the wall, stroking and touching” (31-2), simultaneously a substitute for and a promise of the physical tangible body that has been denied to her. Although her voice cannot free her, it nevertheless has agency and power insofar as she can “promise” (63), transact, and make deals. Where the body is oppressed and denied, the woman finds she may reclaim power – albeit a partial and imperfect one – through the voice.
The voice is further significant in terms of stories that women can tell: stories that do not have a place in mainstream history. The woman who uses her voice by promising her body only enables her to enslave herself once more; however, the poem offers a more empowered use of the voice as a means of female mutual affirmation. Telling or speaking, and more importantly writing, become acts through which women’s experiences are recognised and made sense of, where women “tell stories / about [their experiences] so [they] can finally believe” (54-5).
In the poem, the personal story becomes part of a larger shared history of women, conflating women’s experiences, and creating a sense of solidarity in these experiences of oppression:
...They are horror stories and they have not happened to me,
they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. (45-9)
Personal stories of the persona’s friends morph from stories external and unrelated to her, to stories that could potentially apply to her, and finally, to stories that become her own experiences as well. This forges a deep sense of unity between them. Parallel sentence phrases here serve a very different function compared to the beginning stanzas of the poem. The poem opens with the lines, “A man / may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a / woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present / time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape” (1-4). The repeated parallels in sentence structure may be seen in the phrases “A man may [...] a woman [may]” and “But [...] there is no [...] Thus there is no”. These parallels suggest equations and rules, which delineate a strict order and way for things to be done. Furthermore, the lines serve to enforce rigidity by delineating ‘either/or’ situations – the man may either become a hangman or he dies, and the woman may either marry a hangman or she dies. However, in the subsequent lines describing the shared experiences of the women, parallel phrases now enact a multiplicity of possibilities and a fluid shifting of situations, breaking away from a normative, patriarchal history to one arguably more ‘feminine’ in its fluidity, where the feminine is later explicitly linked to fluid, amorphous elements such as “water, night, willow” (95). Stories told by women are simultaneously personal and shared, individual and communal. In a world where women “live without mirrors” (7) and “without the self” (8), the voice that can act as a mirror (and hence restore a semblance of self) does not merely include the male voice, which perpetuates oppression by creating more hangmen, but also the female voice, which seems to offer support and community.
The poetic form itself also deals with issues of telling history, and the subjugated position of women within normative and patriarchal accounts of history. The tone of the poem is factual, distant, and unemotional, borrowing much from the tone of historical texts. The poem begins with a perfunctory and unsentimental statement, which is followed very systematically by the choices generally available to an individual. As mentioned earlier, parallel sentences (“a man may [...] a woman” and “there is no [...] thus there is no”) suggest equations and rules which delineate a strict order and way for things to be done. The world that the reader is led into is one that is where logic seems to rule, and all things have their proper place, very much similar to historical accounts in which facts are rearranged into coherent structures, and causality is sought and emphasised. However, the poem is simultaneously set apart from the “history” (6) it claims to be, for it lacks the specificity of facts, and is written in the present tense. In offering up the poem as a rewriting of “history”, the poem is able to undermine the historicity that it imitates, as well as offer an alternative manner of encapsulating the truth of history, through metaphors and stories.
To begin with, the poem undermines the accuracy and reliability of history as it is conventionally told. Within the factual and authoritative historical tone of the poem, where parallel sentences follow and delineate a logical structure to the discourse, slippages in logic begin to occur.
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self. She is
living selflessly [...] (7-9)
Through a play on semantics, living “without the self” becomes a state of “living selflessly,” two similar-sounding, yet vastly different, statements. One is a subjected disembodiment, and the other is an act of unselfish sacrifice. In these lines, the poem points towards the dangers of semantics, and in the twisting of words in history: despite the seeming façade of accuracy and logic, accounts and ‘facts’ can be twisted to tell different histories, with the apparent facticity of history itself concealing such atrocities. Furthermore, normative history is not only to be questioned in terms of its accuracy, but in terms of its acts of violence against women in particular. History is shown to be one that falsifies and violates female experience, when their oppression and subjugation is re-interpreted (arguably by the patriarchy), retold, and resold as one born of personal choice and submission.
In the place of normative History, the poem offers an alternate history that is allegorical and metaphorical, ‘ahistorical’ in terms of its lack of particular and factual details, but nonetheless historical in representing the shared experiences of the oppressed. The poem presents a personal perspective of history by interlocking a tale that happened in the eighteenth century with vignettes of the persona trading stories with her friends in contemporary times. Time is fluid in the poem, with tenses changing almost arbitrarily from present to past and back to present again. The woman “uses her voice” (31), and the hangman “cleans up the leftovers” (65), thus locating them within the same temporal plane as the contemporary women who “sit at a table and tell stories” (54). Yet even within the contemporary world, tenses are not set in grammatical stone: in stanza six there is a tense shift from “they tell” (44) to “she said” (51). These distortions of temporality create a sense of timelessness of the experiences being talked about, marking them as continually relevant.
Significantly, as this alternate history unfolds, the initial unrelenting and rigid prose of the poem begins to give way, opening up to a multiplicity of voices that fragments and augments the main narrative. The movement away from certainty and logic breaks down what one could call the “old order”, creating alternate spaces in which such unconventional accounts come to be recognized and thus empowered. The first alternative account is presented in the sixth stanza: ... The trouble was, she said, I didn’t Have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m
Blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. (51-3)
The placement of “I didn’t” and “I’m” at the terminal positions of the lines leaves the female self free-hanging, enacting the sense of bewilderment and the instability of the situation she found herself in. Like her, readers are placed in a position where we do not know what happens next, except that it happens to her, thus creating a sympathetic resonance between the reader and the female speaker. True enough, what happened, and who “it” was, remain ambiguous; however, in placing this direct account within the main thrust of the poem, it is exactly this sense of knowing- that-one-does-not-know, or the sense of increasingly coming to terms with one’s situation, that the poem privileges. In order for empowerment, the poem seems to suggest that one must first recognize, or paradoxically “see” one’s “blind[ness]”.
The poem is also punctuated by short stanzas, which present to the reader different voices from the original story of the hangman. These voices become directly accessible to the reader. Unlike the main narration that occurs outside these pockets of dialogue, in these pockets, coherent sentence structure breaks down into individual words: He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple.
She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread,
thighs, eyes, eyes. (59-62)
The conversations between the woman and the hangman, conducted through the hole in the wall, are reduced to simple, and paradoxically concrete and abstract, terms. Concrete images such as “walls” and “ropes” are qualified by their absence, and abstract ideas of freedom and domestic life are conveyed in minute, symbolic images of “a house”, “a table”, and “an apple”. The woman’s language is even more limited than the hangman’s, for it omits even determiners. Both woman and hangman, oppressed by the system, have their voices limited in the same way the “blind” female friend has her sight limited, and with the woman here further constrained than the hangman. The breakdown of sentence structure enacts this oppressive regulation. Conversely, however, the breakdown of structure also suggests a freedom away from the logical and fully comprehensible, for the incomprehensibility of their experience can perhaps only be conveyed by a breakdown in coherent language.
While the general sense of what is said above remains rather clear (the man promises the woman freedom and domesticity, while the woman promises her body in exchange), by the end of the poem, their conversation is reduced to a highly cryptic string of words: He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time,
knife.
She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly,
cave, meat shroud, open, blood. (93-6)
Their dialogue becomes enigmatic, depending not on direct links, but rather loose associations between individual words, to gain any form of meaning. The repetition of “t” sounds in the words the man utters evokes gunfire: “foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, / knife”. These words suggest concepts which are loosely associated: a foot is enclosed in a boot, which suggests an army uniform. Terms alluding to man-made civilisation (“city”, “roads”) seem to be buttressed by violence, through war or fighting images such as “boot”, “order”, “fist”, and “knife”. In contrast, the woman offers terms that begin with the natural, and end with the primordial: her body is linked not to civilisation, but to nature. Her hair becomes associated with “rope hair”, and her belly with the “earth”, transforming her into a quasi-mystical figure, almost akin to an ancient fertility goddess. A gentler rhythm arises, following the trochaic, running rhythms of “water” and “willow”, and this slow pace is enforced by the multisyllabic phrases of “rope hair”, “earth belly”, and “meat shroud”, which are also full of long, dragging vowels.
His words suggest activity associated with the up-keeping of civilisation; her words suggest not passivity, but a deeper sense of power associated with elements that are natural and primordial, and which have preceded civilisation itself. The figure of the woman at the end of the poem is more powerful, conveying a vision of what could and ought to be. The poem also suggests, ultimately, a deeper, un-renounceable connection between the two genders, which are only seemingly slanted as polar opposites: an eye-rhyme runs from “foot” and “boot” through to “blood”, while “roads” shifts into “rope”, strengthening a sense of connection forged not through reason, but through sensory links, both aural and visual.
It is significant that meaning can be obtained from the cryptic lines seen above, but only by engaging with the text in a mode that departs from what is logical and “objective”. Instead the poem places significance on the fragmented and subjective. If one interprets this turn of the poem as providing an alternative mode of reading and constructing history, then the poem suggests that history is not simply a coherent stringing up of “facts”, but more truthful accounts may be fragmented and incoherent, forged out of an amalgamation of subjective and sometimes non-“believ[able]” (45, 56) stories that are told. The process of telling history is as much about the interpretation as it is about the “facts”, and perhaps more so. Hence female oppression as depicted in “Marrying the Hangman” is irretrievably linked to the telling, or not-telling, of female experiences within normative history: if one is unable to play a part in how histories are constructed and told, one is unable to engage with how meaning is made, and inevitably, how one is then positioned within the world. Consequently, female empowerment is only possible by re-engaging with history as it reclaims the female voice, as the poem itself performs.
Teng Yen Lin is a writer and artist who has married the two (books and art) in some of her past installations. Her interests lie in nonsensical literature, children’s literature, and all things imaginative in nature.
[1] The allegorical story of the hangman is based on a true story of Jean Cololère and Françoise Laurent in Canada in the mid 18th century. Based on the laws of the time, one could escape a death sentence if by becoming a hangman if one were a man, or if one were a woman, by marrying one. Laurent evaded her death sentence by persuading Cololère to become the hangman, and subsequently marrying him (see footnotes of “Marrying the Hangman” in Poetry Foundation).
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. “Marrying the Hangman.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 8 Feb 2012.