In “Degas’s Laundresses,” Eavan Boland brings to life in words an oil painting by artist Edgar Degas. Although in the title of the poem Boland does not specify which of Degas’s several paintings of laundresses she intends the reader to reference, it can only be “Laundresses Carrying Linen in Town.” The proof lies in the lines, “Your wrists basket your waist. / You round to the square weight” (l. 17-18), which clearly describe the posture and gesture of the women in the painting. Though the effect of the poem may be heightened by the reader’s familiarity with the painting, Boland makes it possible to fully enter the scene even without a tangible reference. Boland’s use of the second person and innovative word choice bring an immediacy to the painting unachieved by Degas himself. Where Degas seems to treat his subjects purely with an aesthetic eye, Boland investigates the circumstances underlying the single moment captured in the painting.
“Laundresses Carrying Linen in Town” is a somber painting. Its predominant tones are brown and dark yellow. Two women face away from each other, both leaning to compensate for the weight of their baskets of laundry. Their skirts are gray and brown; one woman’s blouse is brown, while the other woman wears a blouse that is light-colored but not as light as the white sheets she carries. Both wear their hair up, away from their faces. One woman’s face is mostly hidden, and the other woman’s expression is inscrutable. The relationship between the two women, other than their shared occupation, is ambiguous. In fact, both the painting’s composition and its color scheme seem to place the women visually at odds with each other; the woman on the left wears a light-colored blouse against a dark background, while the woman on the right wears a dark blouse against a yellow background. The women are not engaged directly with the artist (or, by extension, the viewer). Degas renders the painting with a formality and distance that serve as the artistic equivalent of third person voice.
In contrast, Boland chooses to interact with the painting’s subject far more than Degas seems to have done. Addressing the women in second person, she reaches beyond the aesthetic of form to conjecture about the women’s day-to-day experience. Yet she approaches her subjects with an ironic awareness that the poet’s watchful presence is perhaps no less intrusive or perceptive than the artist’s has been. In comparing the laundresses to “Aphrodites / [rising] out of a camisole brine” (l. 2-3), Boland seems to be poking fun at the artistic and poetic tendencies to glorify women in cliched ways and for the wrong reasons. The laundresses are being reborn in the sanctity of their work, as shown in the poet’s use of “dawn” as both adjective and verb through a clever line break: “You rise, you dawn / roll-sleeved Aphrodites” (l. 1-2). The language of the first two stanzas is whimsical, describing the women “silking the fitted sheets” and”seam[ing] dreams” (l. 5, 7) and showing how the “whiff and reach of fields” “freshes” from the clean laundry (l. 9). Overall, the second stanza approaches hyperbole in its romanticizing of the laundresses’ work:
You seam dreams in the folds
of wash from which freshes
the whiff and reach of fields
where it bleached and stiffened. (l. 7-10)
The repetition of sounds through assonance, consonance, and alliteration, as well as the slant end rhymes of “folds” and “fields,” lull the reader into a pleasant complacency.
After presenting these nearly intoxicating images and imagining what “pleasure of leisured women” (l. 13) might be occupying the laundresses’ minds as they work, Boland brings the reader into the single moment captured by the painting. She abruptly introduces the hidden gaze of Degas, simultaneously transforming herself-as-poet from mere observer into someone attempting to interact with the women. “Wait. There. Behind you,” she warns them (l. 19), seeing a vulnerability in their rounded shoulders and single-minded distraction. Refusing to dismiss the intrusion of Degas as merely the harmless presence of an artist capturing a scene, Boland refers to him an interloper, “[a] man… / watching you” (l. 20-22). Even the seemingly innocuous setting-up of easel and materials is viewed with suspicion, indicated by the poet’s word choice: the artist is “staking his easel” and “slowly sharpening charcoal” (l. 26-27) as though preparing weapons. Boland induces a sense of urgency in the reader through the staccato rhythm of lines 19-20 (“Wait. There. Behind you. / A man. There behind you”) and by the repetition and sparse punctuation of the command, “Whatever you do don’t turn” (l. 21, 23-24). In the stanza immediately following, a tension exists between reassuring assonance and sharp consonant sounds: “See he takes his ease, / staking his easel so” (l. 25-26).
Boland asks the reader to consider the artist’s intent toward the laundresses. Is he trivializing their lives by viewing them as objects for his artistic use? Is the male gaze automatically threatening? How should the laundresses regard the artist’s casual trespassing on their lives? The artist sets up his murderous tools in order to capture a moment in time, as if pinning down a butterfly for his collection. Boland underscores this intent in the last lines of the poem, comparing the artist’s “mind” (i.e., his purely intellectual view of the scene before him) to the immortalizing trap of the painting: “it’s your winding sheet” (l. 36). This finality is further emphasized by the slant rhyme of “sheet” with “weight” (l. 18).
In an interview with students at Youngstown State University, Boland admits that her feelings about painting are ambiguous: “It still seems something like a symbol of the way art can prey, and fix and fetter as well as liberate and make living…I think there is a very real way in which art can fix and restrict life” (Greenway). Boland’s critique of the artist as predator in “Degas’s Laundresses” hinges on the need for awareness of the complexity of life; the artist or poet must acknowledge that the moment frozen forever is not the representative moment. Boland’s aim as a poet is not to imprison an experience for leisurely viewing but to offer up possibilities. “Degas’s Laundresses” demonstrates Boland’s view that Degas, by capturing a scene in a purely aesthetic manner, may have missed the chance to convey a greater understanding of the moment he preserved for posterity.
See Degas’s painting of the laundresses at www.oldmasterpiece.com . Works Cited Boland, Eavan. “Degas’s Laundresses.” Outside History. New York: Norton, 1990. 119-120. Greenway, William. Eavan-Mail: Distance Learning with Eavan Boland.” Youngstown State University. (n.d.) Accessed 10 April 2004 at http://www.as.ysu.edu/~english/4896.html
