Good Ol' Fred Wrestles His Anima: Women in the Poetry of Fred Chappell

FEATURED AUTHOR—FRED CHAPPELL Good ?G Fred Wrestles His Anima: Women in the Poetry of Fred Chappell Rita Sims Quillen Throughout Fred Chappell's poetry, his wife Susan has remained a primary figure addressed and referenced in poem after poem—the poet's own personal goddess, his Muse, and the specified audience for many poems. The Susan rendered is a kind of Superwoman, in a way, possessing qualities and a character that the poet seems to feel he lacks. She is the Ideal. A young man raised in the South has no trouble at all putting women up on a pedestal, and for previous generations, a certain type of veneration of women and an idealization of them was de rigueur for the proper upbringing and refinement of the young male. It would be tempting to dismiss Chappell's treatment of Susan as simple oldfashioned Southern chivalry (which many modern women see as sexism). But nothing about Chappell's poetry is simple. An examination of Chappell's Midquest (LSU Pressl981) and Spring Garden (LSU Pressl995) reveals a much more complex and interesting point of view. Susan is portrayed not so much as an individual but as an icon—a representative Woman who epitomizes the sublime, the anima (the intuitive and creative "soul" of all mankind, according to Jung,) and the ideal Good, which men, especially Appalachian Good Ole Boys, can never achieve. Critic Henri Bremond discusses the term anima and animus and their relevance to poetry in his book Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Critical Theory (Folcraft 1971): "animus, rational knowledge; and anima, mystical or poetic knowledge." (109). Only by merging the two does the poet create. He loses himself in the anima and is reborn, making a "triumphant return.... Purified, tranquillized, spiritualized ..." by the blending of the two (185). The struggle between reason and spirit, between the rational and the mystical, and between masculine animus and feminine anima is at the heart of the struggle of the "suffering artist," suspended between the two realms, a little uncomfortable on either side. From the opening poem in Midquest, "The River Awakening in the Sea," the poet establishes Susan as his primary pivot point for life and 43 poetry. He awakes beside her, reaches for her, and feels pulled into something larger and stronger than he is. The tiny beautiful river in the poem, serving as the symbol of his Midquest persona Ole Fred, plunges into the vast beauty and terrifying sublime that is the sea, Susan. As critic Meyer Abrams writes in Natural Supernaturalism (Norton 1971): ...the beautiful is small in scale, orderly, and tranquil, effects pleasure and is associated with love, while the sublime is vast (hence suggestive of infinity), wild, tumultuous, and awful, is associated with pain, and evokes ambivalent feelings of terror and admiration (98). Many Southern boys of Chappell's generation (or the current one, for that matter) might apply that last phrase, "evokes ambivalent feelings of terror and admiration," to women! The same phrase might also be used by many poets to describe the scary power of imagination and the sharp pain of delivering a searing poem—hot, dripping, and bloody—out onto the white page. The identified persona of the poet, Ole Fred, cannot write without Susan, without the anima, yet it's unseemly for a mountain man to be so enthralled, so at the mercy of the feminine. If he were the typical Good Ole Boy, Ole Fred might turn away, go get into some identifiably masculine pursuit, such as shooting up road signs or breaking beer bottles in the Food City parking lot, and wait for the feeling to go away. Instead, Ole Fred clings to Susan, calling her to stay close by his side as he travels, like Dante, through mid-life on the downhill to Death. "Let us join hands, descend/this star-bathed hill/. ...We are locked like chain/ " (Midquest 46-48). Susan stands beside him throughout each section of Midquest in poems set on Stillpoint Hill, as the poet surveys the literal and metaphorical landscape and holds her hand. The goal here is what Abrams describes as the ultimate goal of the Romantics: "higher unity...or a recovered paradise...