Defenestration of Prague by Susan Howe

First published: 1983

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poem

Defenestration of Prague is a complex interweaving of various perspectives and commentaries on the nature of being female in a world of patriarchal institutions. Primarily the poem is about the life and times of Hester (or Esther) Johnson (1680-1728), an Englishwoman who became the mistress of Jonathan Swift (1668-1745), the Irish satirical poet and Anglican bishop. Hester, or Stella, as she was known to Swift, remained Swift’s mistress and housekeeper throughout her adult life. Their relationship was kept a careful secret over the years, which is part of what the poem explores.

The poem is divided into many separate units of discourse, each varying its mode of articulation as the subjects of women and gender oppression are scrutinized. The poem has a wide range of formal strategies, from loose-knit fragments of memory and historic allusion to the fully fleshed lyrics of “Speeches at the Barriers,” which develop certain of the basic themes of the poem, to the dramatic episodes of the second part of the poem, “The Liberties.”

Though a narrative in the general sense of a story, the poem also experiments in telling a tale from multiple points of view anchored in the poet’s own personal examination of female suppression. Hence, the story is told by a narrator who is herself anxiously engaged in the process by which even the terms to be used are sifted for their meanings, their historical and etymological content. What serves as evidence is a composite of widely scattered forms of personal testimony—not only from the bits and scraps of Hester Johnson’s few lyrics and comments but also from other writers, male and female, who have versions of the story or parallel situations to report.

Susan Howe’s finished version achieves two goals simultaneously: to study the life of one woman whose existence is utterly eclipsed by the fame and influence of her male lover, and to argue that such a case is not unique to one century or culture but unfolds a principle underlying much of Western existence. There is a third, more tentative purpose in telling this story: to indicate in hazy outline something of the battle that rages between self and soul, as encoded in these images of men and women participating in a relationship fraught with tension, conflict, and unequal privilege. Howe’s concern is how such lives turn out to be keys to understanding the lopsidedness of cultural life and the chaos that rages behind conventional historical assumptions.

The work is divided into two main parts. The first, entitled “Defenestration of Prague,” has mainly to do with Hester Johnson’s voyage to Ireland to join Swift and to look after her inherited properties there. The experience of the voyage and arrival in Ireland, a kind of wilderness, is equated in the narrative with other women’s adventures trekking to frontiers in colonial America. The second part, “The Liberties,” is concerned with the nature of Johnson’s relationship to Swift and with analogous relations between powerful patriarchs and their mistresses, wives, or daughters. In particular, Howe comments on the situation of Emily Dickinson, who remained housebound much of her adult life while writing brilliant but unpublished poems. Lines and phrases of Dickinson’s poems come into the text at various moments. In the “Book of Cordelia,” a dramatic masque compares the crises of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter, and Stella as they confront the emptiness of their lives as victims of sexual inequality. Like other of William Shakespeare’s victims, Cordelia achieves liberation only through death, as does Stella. Hence the title of the second part is “The Liberties”: It recounts the women’s final moments of life as they escape from the bondage of being female.

Forms and Devices

Form is the principal achievement of this work; its use of quotation, echoed paraphrase, fragmentary allusion, song, balladlike narrative, prose introduction and critical commentary, and scholarly apparatus constitute a new texture and structural diversity for the long poem. Through these varying modes of telling a story, the life of one woman is elevated to an archetype of the plight of female nature in Western life. The flow of discourse is disrupted internally by the ever-changing locus of a voice, which appears to emanate from different sources of information provided by the poem. The reader is at once in the thoughts of the poet herself, in the character’s mind, seeing through the perspective of invisible witnesses, or reliving aspects of Hester Johnson’s experience through analogous situations stated in poems, letters, and historical data. This kaleidoscopic array of media for telling the life of one person opens the narrative to epic universality without heroizing the subject. The poem tackles one of the essential debates of modern time, the revisioning of history through examination of so-called peripheral evidence. Here is a rare instance of a poem taking up a leading issue of academic debate, the reconceiving of the past through a nexus of contending viewpoints and unused facts in what has been called “new historicism.” The poem shoulders part of the burden of such revisionism without proposing a full-scale argument of its own. It is a poem foremost, an argument secondarily.

Howe’s narrative method is derived from other long poems, chiefly from the work of the poet Charles Olson, whose open poetry specialized in discontinuous narrative using myth, association, and line fragments to establish a “field” of reference informing an event or situation in his verse. Such openness dissolved formal boundaries between poetic language and the surrounding world of prose reality. The new poem was porous and subject to the influences of other texts and realities, which it incorporated into its flexible structure. Such are Howe’s working principles as well.

Howe has been grouped with certain other poets in a movement called “language” poetry, which emphasizes composition as a process and human expression as ambiguous and chaotic. Though she draws attention to the accretive and aleatory patterns of writing poetry, she will not stray beyond a certain “meaning” boundary in breaking down language to its nonsemantic detritus of syllables and punctuation, as have other “language” poets. Also evident is the dense verbal conciseness of Emily Dickinson, whom Howe reveres here and elsewhere in her work, and the wordplay of Gertrude Stein, who not only punned on the associative relations among words but also exploded conventional syntactical relations. Both Dickinson and Stein helped to establish a feminine poetics and literary tradition from which Howe derives her own mode of composition.

Howe is not, however, a militant or doctrinaire feminist in this poem. Her views on the life of Hester Johnson are too complex to comply with any orthodoxy on either side of the gender debate. Instead, she assimilates into her historical views the attitudes of Jonathan Swift (from whom she quotes liberally) and of Shakespeare, with whom she is evidently in sympathy for part of her argument. Howe’s method of telling one woman’s story is both to establish the principle of sexual inequality and its damage to women and to note the ambiguous forces that perpetuate the oppression of females in patriarchal societies. Men are not lumped together as villains; social institutions and cultural habits are criticized more emphatically than are particular figures or social groups.

Howe’s phrase for describing the terms in which people live their lives is “endless PROTEANL inkages,” where the social ambiguity of evil and oppression is pointed up. The social rules constitute a heritage without firm beginning or end; they change according to the vagaries of social evolution. Thus the limits placed on behavior and access to privilege form an endlessly changeful framework of linked causes, the linkages of her ambivalent phrase. It is this protean state of things that Howe strives to reproduce through her intertextual narrative, which affirms and distorts the causality of the poem’s events as a way of mimicking social history itself.

Defenestration of Prague uses a large rectangular page that gives the poetry ample room to explore open structures. Some of the poems are composed of loosely suspended lines featuring large gaps to underscore textualized silences, pauses, abruptly severed lines of thought, or the fragmentation of words themselves. Howe thus reminds the reader that her thinking is a process of digging down through history to learn the experience of a woman whose silence and obscurity make her largely inaccessible to the author.