What does it mean to speak for a non-human? The following thesis addresses this question by looking at how prosopopoeia—the trope that confers a human voice on a non-human speaker—operates in poem sequences by three poets: Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood and Louise Glück. Prosopopoeia, this thesis argues, is a ;;two-faced” trope. It promises to advocate or speak for the non-human figure in a way that resists anthropocentrism; however, the trope’s promise is inevitably compromised by its own appropriative flipside. In the very act of giving voice the poet cannot but appropriate the non-human other because the poet can only confer voice within a framework of human speech, human thought and humanising anthropomorphism. This thesis demonstrates the inevitability of such appropriation by showing how each poet’s distinct approach to speaking for the non-human cannot, ultimately, move beyond such anthropocentrism. Furthermore, attempts to forestall appropriation do not retrieve prosopopoeia’s promise. While Levertov’s failure to engage with her own appropriation makes her prosopopoeias problematic, Atwood’s self-reflexive acknowledgement of appropriation creates the new problem of the narcissistic foregrounding of the self. Even the meta-self-reflexive interrogation of the narcissism of self-reflection that Glück undertakes, rather than diminishing this problem, instead traps the poet in a closed circuit of narcissism that leaves no room for the alterity of the non-human other. There is, however, one figure who embodies hope for salvaging prosopopoeia’s promised challenge to anthropocentrism: the reader. This thesis concludes that a real possibility for deconstructing anthropocentrism and acknowledging alterity can be retrieved in the reader’s singular encounter with the otherness of the text.
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The Two-Faced Trope: Prosopopoeia in Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood and Louise Glück
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