Chora in Hell: The Sewer Venus, Sexual Politics, and Williams's Improvisation "Rome" (1924)

From Cristina Giorcelli and Maria Anita Stefanelli, eds., The Rhetoric of Love in the Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams

(Rome: Edzioni Associate, 1993).

William Carlos Williams wrote the Improvisation "Rome" sporadically while in France, Italy, Austria, and then back in New Jersey during and after his 1924 "sabbatical" to Europe. Yet it has drawn not nearly as much commentary as other better-known texts of Williams's that were influenced by his trip, In the American Grain (1925) and A Voyage to Pagany (1928). Indeed, "Rome" was not even in print until 1978.¹

I propose to discuss Williams's text by exploring four interrelated topics: 1) Williams's ideas about the complicated links between gender and genius, with help from the theorist Julia Kristeva; 2) the role Williams's study of Greek vs. Roman cultural traditions played in his developing theories of the purpose of his writing, especially the Improvisations; 3) the reason why Williams was so interested in the role Venus played in Roman mythology; and 4) the ways in which Williams used his text "Rome" to explore an understanding of the importance of New World history that may supplement the insights of In the American Grain. The most difficult task of the essay will be to show the connections between gender and geography—between Williams's meditations on genius and his investigation of the tension linking "centers" and "provinces" in culture in the Old World and the New.

Hysteria vs. Genius

We know from Mike Weaver's study of Williams that early in his career Williams was strongly influenced by Otto Weininger's book Sex and Character,² which was published in the U.S. in 1906 during Williams's last year in medical school. Weininger made several claims about psychology, gender, and creativity that proved especially reassuring to Williams during his period of personal and professional uncertainty after he graduated from medical school. Following Nietzsche, especially Thus Spake Zarathustra,³ Weininger gave privileged roles to males in the creation of both science and art. His book must set some sort of record for gathering the most sexist clichés per page about the different intellectual capacities of men and women, based on their different experiences of their bodies and inherited differences in mental capacity. Women could not be "geniuses" because they lacked the capacity for abstract thought; their thought-processes were in Weininger's view characterized by what he called "henids," an undifferentiated mass of sense perception and emotion. Men, in contrast, had the power to abstract, reason, order, evaluate critically, and then—in a select few—shape works of genius.

Weaver argues that as Williams matured as a writer he retained Weininger's belief that men and women had different psychologies but reversed Weininger's categories and the values attached to them. In letters to the British periodical The Egoist in 1917, for example, Williams wrote:

Man is the vague generalizer, woman the concrete thinker, and not the reverse as he [Weininger] imagined. Man is the indulger in henids, and woman the enemy of henids, [...] Thus the male pursuit leads only to further pursuit, that is, not toward the earth, but away from it—not to concreteness, but to further hunting, to star-gazing, to idleness. [...] Female psychology, on the other hand, is characterized by a trend not away from, but toward the earth, toward concreteness, since by her experience the reality of fact is firmly established for her. [...] Woman is physically essential to the maintenance of a physical life by a complicated and long-drawn-out process.⁴

Weaver does not explain why Williams would have reversed Weininger's evaluation of male and female psychologies, except to imply that perhaps a decade of work as a baby doctor between 1906 and 1917 influenced him. Of course, to a contemporary reader Williams's position as stated above may very well only appear to be a reversal: in the above quotation Williams the pediatrician suggests that women's thoughts are "concrete" and down-to-earth because their essential task is the continuance of the species. Williams...