| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系 === 89 === Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), an American woman poet, frequently uses the theme about boundaries between the self and others in her poems and prose pieces. She usually probes into the issue from the aspect of the difficulties to situate the self when confronting others. For example, how to enter the world of others, how to identify with others, and how to deal with a sense of alienation that comes from boundaries of understanding between the self and others. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the issue of “boundaries between the self and others,” from which to explore Bishop’s concepts about constructing self-identification when confronting unknown others. Besides the parts of “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” this thesis will develop with three chapters to study people’s inner struggle and disorientation when confronting others.
Bishop often takes clips of her childhood experience as sources and backgrounds of her poems and prose pieces, which are presented through a narrative of the child speaker, a perspective of a child to show relationship between a child and adults. Chapter one uses poems and prose pieces about Bishop’s childhood experience, “In the Village,” “The Country Mousse,” and “In the Waiting Room,” as the examples to explore boundaries between a child and adults, and problems about the boundaries. For instance, the boundaries form a sense of alienation between the child and adults, and the sense of alienation disorients one’s self-identification. Following the discussion about the issue of alienation, chapter two explores human vulnerability, the fear about the inability to connect others, by analyzing Bishop’s allegorical poems: “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” and “The Man-Moth.” Because of the fear, one turns to avoid contact with others and becomes self-incarcerated, which forms a vicious circle that one becomes even more alienated from others. In chapter three, Bishop’s poems about “traveling to the otherworld”-- “Questions of Travel,” “The Riverman,” and “Manuelzinho”─will be used to study her search for connection with others in an alienated relation between the self and others. Because travel itself is the movement crossing beyond geographical boundaries, it becomes Bishop’s metaphor to cross boundaries between the self and others. Although it is not an affirmation of the frailty of boundaries between the self and others, travel symbolizes an attempt to decrease the distance between the self and others, an attempt to connect with others.
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