"Plunder" or "Accessibility to Experience": Consumer Culture and Marianne Moore's Modernist Self-Fashioning

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

—Moore, "Of Beasts and Jewels"

Elizabeth Bishop's anecdotal essay about Marianne Moore, "Efforts of Affection," cannily reveals aspects of her friend and mentor that made Bishop "realize more than I ever had the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve" (Bishop, Prose, p. 140).¹ Moore's "originality" and her "alienation" are crucial to her construction of a poetic persona, a private and public self-fashioning that thoroughly encompassed her career as a writer. Integral to this self-fashioning and to her female subjectivity in the competitive scene of male modernism are Moore's animal identities. Moreover, her artistic self-fashioning was irreconcilably linked with competing claims of consumer culture, the marketplace of animal by-products and fashionable paraphernalia that were, and still are, markers of female status and economic privilege posing as signs of taste and cultural discernment.² She coveted the animal natures she claimed as her imaginary possessions; those natures came to signify the profound originality of her poetry and also an alienation from her own human natureand conventional constructions of the female as artistthat became her stock in trade as a groundbreaking modernist. Crucial to any argument about Moore's self-fashioning is her agency, or the lack of it, in constructing herself for her readership, in her poetry and in her public performances. This includes her self-consciously created style for photographers and her lifelong interest in fashion and consumer goods. Moore, throughout her career, was caught between her self-critical acuity and an apparently unreflective consumption of fashion, especially fashion depending upon animal by-products. The issue must be treated as a paradox, as she both does and does not exhibit agency in her choices about self-fashioning.³

The questions she raises about animal natures and her conflicted ethical position about her obligations as an "imaginary possessor, / ... 'lit with piercing glances into the life of things' " (CP, p. 48) are forcefully expressed in poems from the teens to her late work, through the innumerable creatures in her complex menagerie who stand in for Moore's identity as she promotes her brand of modernism. "Peter" (1925)⁴ the cat, for instance, "can see the virtue of naturalness, / that he does not regard the published fact as a surrender" (CP, p. 44). Several poems from Moore's early period, particularly "Critics and Connoisseurs" (1916) and "The Monkeys" (1917), show how her menagerie began to signify her unique stance as a modernist. In the 1921 poem "New York," its central subjectthe fur trade and consumer cultureis entwined with Moore's national and artistic identity.

By 1924, the animal natures signifying Moore's modernist originality are fully realized in "An Octopus," where her "imaginary garden" ("Poetry" [1919]) is elaborately grounded in the rich natural habitat of Mt. Rainier. The actual garden of the mountain becomes visionary as she depicts a mountain goat in its environment, "the ermine body on the crystal peak" (CP, p. 73). Moore's self-fashioning continued to depend upon animal natures well into the final phases of her career. But as her sentiments and arguments became more overt in her late poetry, she increasingly chose direct statement over modernist ambiguity, linguistic gaps, and enigma. The compression, ambivalence, and modernist difficulty of "New York" and "An Octopus" give way to transparent commentary and light moments of identifying herself with her menagerie, such as that depicted in "The Wood-Weasel" (1942): "Well, / this same weasel's playful and his weasel / associates are too. Only / Wood-weasels shall associate with me" (CP, p. 127). She turns to playful fable in "The Arctic Ox (or Goat)" of 1958, where her explicit example of proper consumption of animal products compromises...