A Solitary Tree's Fight for Individuality and Autonomy: A Discussion of Edna St Vincent Millay's Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree

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entirely fruitless attempts to break free - remains bound by the collective identity of women. Therefore, this paper will start off negotiating the boundary between the individual and the group; it will then focus on the accomplishments and failures of the protagonist’s attempts to escape conformity, paying special attention to society’s role in restricting women’s selfdevelopment; and finally, it will attempt to account for Millay’s motivation to write this poem the way she did.

As a first step, I will illustrate that Millay’s protagonist in Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree is part of the collective society of women and thus can function as a representative of that group. This approach will provide a basis for drawing conclusions on whom this poem addresses and will thus allow us to speculate about Millay’s intended messages, to which we will come back at the end of this paper.

As the attentive reader may easily have recognized, Millay’s heroine opposes the traditional role of women of her time; however, at the same time Millay does not describe her as someone completely different from everyone else, but has her displaying numerous traits that are considered to be typically feminine. One example of such a widespread female property is women’s stereotypical fear of spiders, which the protagonist shares as we read on page 608: “No less afraid than she has always been / Of spiders up her arms and on her face.” Another property she has in common with lots of other women is her function within the family; she is to carry a heavy burden, supporting her husband and providing stability for family life. This aspects is nicely symbolized in sonnet III, where Millay describes her carrying a heavy load of fire wood, “set[ting] her chin / forward, to hold the highest stick in place” (608), which reflects the heroine’s ability to cope with the situation: She has done this task innumerable times before, she knows exactly how to deal with the ballast, she knows perfectly well which movement is necessary to prevent the sticks from falling down. These findings may be used to suggest that she is nothing more than a typical woman of that time; we will see in the following, however, that her personality cannot be reduced to simply being a woman in general.

Yet what is it that makes Millay’s protagonist special and distinguishes her from other women? To begin with, let us have a look at a characteristic feature of women communities: talk. Women love to gossip and - unlike men - discuss all kinds of problems with their friends. The protagonist in Millay’s Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree used to participate in that kind of talk earlier (“She told, in secret and with whispering,” 614), but when her neighbors come around chattering shortly before her husbands death, she refuses to open the

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door (Millay, 613). This shows her retreat from society as a whole (talking about others) as well as from her former mates (talking with them) - or, as Irene Fairly puts it, “the wife avoids all occasions for bonding with others through talk” (Fairly, 59). Thus she is not simply a woman behaving the same way all women do (if there is any such behavior at all), but rather is an individual rejecting certain conventions. Additionally, in sonnet III we find a metaphor that reflects the protagonist’s disapproval of the prospect of ending up like ma ny other women; “ nor thinking to return [...] to find [...] a brown, shriveled apple core” (Millay, 608). In her view, women who sacrifice their whole lives for their family shrivel like an old apple core that supplies others with its nourishing substance; the metaphor matches, associating the apple core containing seeds with women’s biological ability to give birth. As far as she herself is concerned, however, she dislikes the idea of having to realize some day that she has become nothing like a shriveled apple core; instead, she tries to escape, hoping that she will never need to return again ¹ . Although the apple- metaphor fits nicely, it points out that contrast is crucial for the context of individuality among equals, as can also be read in Laura Brady’s The Reproduction of Othering. She expresses the distinction between the individual and the group in terms of individual and collective identity, emphasizing the significance of metonymy: “Metonymy [...] is characterized by contiguity: the sharing of an edge or a boundary. [This] delineates a separation as well as common ground” (Brady, 24). Brady’s idea can easily be ascertained by the window screen in sonnet XII: The window screen is the dividing wall as well as the connecting link between the heroine’s confining home and the outer world. A further example of a metonymy that illustrates the protagonist edging onto collective identity is the apron in sonnet XI, which again displays similarity and contrast simultaneously: An apron separates people from their environment, it shields them from the outer world, while at the same time it connects not only everyone wearing an apron as member of the apron-wearing group, but also brings together what lies in front and what stands behind, i.e. wearer and environment. Considering that an apron symbolizes domesticity, it unites women as being housewives and thus makes the woman wearing it part of the collective identity; conversely, its shielding function also separates them from one another again.

¹ Fairly offers another approach to the apple core symbol: According to her article, this image indicates „a failed fruiting“ (66). However, I do not approve of her suggestion, since a new tree may already grow from one single seed; its growing does not require the presence of an entire apple (or an entire apple core respectively). So I do not see why this “shriveled apple core” ought to refer to any kind of infertility etc.; one of its seeds might actually have fallen onto ground before the apple core came to end up in the shed. Apparently there is no reason

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The previous examp les show that Millay’s protagonist is a representative of the large entity of women, sharing common ground, but even though she is an individual whose behavior and thoughts differ from those of other women. Accordingly, given that her attempts of breaking free represent pretty unconventional behavior and as such are a central theme of the poem, I will concentrate on those as a next step and analyze the landmarks in the process of gaining freedom.

First and foremost, the protagonist has left her husband and his household, which is a decisive step for her development of an autonomous self: She managed to escape from her marriage as well as from the home she used to be confined to; that is, she manages to escape from her incarcerating situation by abandoning both her husband and her housewifely duties. The latter are symbolized by the apron buried under the snow (Millay, 616). The apron having disappeared from her life implies that she is no longer embedded in the collective identity of housewives on the one hand, thus has managed to escape this conformity; on the other hand, this also means that she can no longer rely on its protection and has to face life alone now, without women friends and without husband, which turns out to be not an easy task as we will see in the following paragraph.

Notwithstanding her success in terms of acquiring freedom so far, she does not seem to have the strength to maintain her newly gained independence and to pursue her freedom further. Instead, her husband’s approaching death sets her back, which is indicated in her returning “into his house again” (Millay, 606) and picking up her housewifely duties once more: Cleaning up the kitchen after the grocer’s man had been there, she finds herself engaged with the “dull, familiar task” (Millay, 611).

Furthermore, the poem also suggests that already overcome obstacles seem to recur again and again; the protagonist seems to be thrown back to her starting point when the apron emerges again in early spring: “April thawed it back to sight, [...] here was spring, and the whole year to be lived through once more” (Millay, 616). Spring for her is not the time of renewal, which would actually suit her new situation, but for her spring is just the beginning of another year, of another war to be fought again; the season when “most grafting is done” (Rothenberger, 2), and so the season when she needs to fight hard to offer resistance to society’s influences on her personality.

to rule out the possibility of having a tree grown from one of the seeds while the apple core lies in the shed;

therefore, I prefer the above interpretation.