Edna Millay

Hello to all of you, 
We will do a presentation on Edna Millay on Wednesday, Oct 31st
We have picked one poem we're going to talk about, which is “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”
Here are the main ideas we have found, feel free to comment and give us your opinion!
Jani & Annabelle

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed
I, being born a woman and distressed 
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again. 


Theme of independence versus submission
In the first verse “ I, being a woman and distressed” the author emphasizes a sort of burden, not that she is not proud of being a woman, but of what it means to be a woman in society and what society itself expects from women, stressing the sorrowfulness about it. Not only because she is a woman but also because of her personality, as we will see. Woman are expected to behave in a passively way and normally they don’t have the same freedom as men do. 
In the second verse “by all my needs and notions of my kind” as we can see, “my needs” she means her personal needs. She is not the kind of woman that likes to be passive, she cherishes her freedom. We get the idea that she is not only referring to herself in this poem, but also to all women, and also to what really it means to be a woman in general, especially in that time, in 1923.

The role of being a traditional woman - expectations
In the third and fourth paragraph she is saying she expects the man she is with, to find the woman he wants, but that explains she is not the one. She doesn’t want to be a traditional woman, the woman that man is looking for, and in the fifth verse “to bear your body’s weight upon my breast:” we interpreted this verse as a sexual reference of the typical position man has when doing sex (the man being on top). So she is saying she doesn’t want to be that kind of woman.
We can also notice that she's ironising the image of the woman by mentioning those expectations. Edna Millay is a voice for all the women who were touched by this phenomenon at in the 20th century. There is a game of power, Edna Millay shows that the character represented, or herself, isn't a traditional woman, doesn't have to be inferior to men, etc.

Contraction of feelings – love and sex
It looks like she is in love with him but she doesn’t want to show it, she doesn’t want to give in to her feelings, because if she does that, she will become submissive and weak, and passive, and she won’t think straight, because she knows he will treat her just like a woman and not like an equal partner and then she won’t be a free woman. And in the end she seems to be sarcastic about it, because she says “I shall remember you with love”, “my scorn with pity – let me make it plain”…So this means she is saying goodbye, not only because she is going to get married (and maybe this man she is getting married with, will treat her equally) but also because she doesn’t want to be the woman her lover wants her to be, the woman he is looking for. We had the feeling that she is indeed in love with this man but if she gives in to her feelings she won’t be able to control the feeling of passivity, so she prefers to have sex with him with no emotions. But she also says that if they meet each other again, when she is already married, they won’t have any kind of conversation about their feelings, only sex with no emotions