What's So Ordinary about Stevens' "The Ordinary Women"?

"The Ordinary Women," the ninth poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, is often overlooked compared to its much-anthologized neighbor "The Snow Man." Yet "The Ordinary Women" is at least as revealing of the range of concerns addressed by Stevens' early poetry, particularly now that modernist studies is turning its attention to "the ordinary." Whereas "The Snow Man" centers on Stevens' familiar interest in the relationship between the mind and external reality, "The Ordinary Women" addresses a topic closer to the level of everyday life: the emergence of film as a new art form. The poem was first published in The Dial (July 1922) as one of six poems grouped under the title "Revue." Each of these poems shares the linguistic exuberance of "The Ordinary Women," but most of them—especially "Bantams in Pine-Woods," "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"—have acquired a firmer place in the Stevens canon. It may be time to restore "The Ordinary Women" to its rightful place in this set by considering how shrewdly it raises questions about the relationship between low and high culture that are central not only to Stevens' whole oeuvre, but also to literary modernism in general.

The ordinary and the everyday are topics of growing interest in modernist studies and have been the subject of several recent monographs (see Randall; Phillips; Olson). In Modernism and the Ordinary, Liesl Olson describes the ordinary as "a mode of organizing life and representing it" characterized by affective traits of inattention or absentmindedness (6-7). The ordinary is, perhaps counterintuitively, "what is most difficult to discover," precisely because it is made up of those things that ordinarily escape our notice (Blanchot 12). Moreover, applying critical attention to the ordinary seems to dissipate its ordinariness. Trying to pin it down may be akin to trying to turn on the light in a room quickly enough to see what the dark looks like.

There is, however, a tradition of intellectual inquiry known as "everyday life theory" for which denaturing the ordinary by applying critical attention to it is a necessary, even emancipatory move. For thinkers like Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, the inattention that characterizes the ordinary is a form of ideological mystification. Analysis of routine or habitual practices, and their attendant objects, discourses, and institutions, can disclose the ideological underpinnings of even the most innocuous phenomena, adding up to a vast illusion whereby an historically contingent social formation passes itself off as natural and inevitable. It is rarely appreciated just how well everyday life theory aligns with the critique of popular culture pursued by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and other German theorists who would later form the Frankfurt School. The clearest link between these bodies of thought is that each draws part of its impetus from the humanism of the early Marx. For these thinkers, popular culture as a feature of everyday life colludes with bourgeois ideology: mass production is the procedure by which popular culture is made, as well as its hidden subject. By the 1920s, the United States was at the vanguard of global capitalism, and the vertical integration characteristic of Fordist manufacturing was also evident in the film industry.

In his essay "The Mass Ornament," Kracauer anticipates both everyday life theories and the work of the Frankfurt School by arguing, "the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch's judgments about itself" (75). In other words, the ordinary is a better guide to the character of an epoch than its products of critical reflection—specifically, the ordinary as embodied in popular culture. This is an aspect of the ordinary that has been largely ignored in existing studies of the topic. Other modernist writers have found figures for the ordinary in the feminine, the habitual, and the domestic (see Felski); in what follows, I will show that Stevens adds popular entertainment to this list.

Stevens was inclined toward giving his poems ironic titles, seeming to delight in putting a proposition at the...