New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian Vie ...

proves illusory, resulting in what can be considered a Lacanian mirror stage, wherein speakers look to the environment for connection even as they foreground the béance. Briefly, the mirror stage derives from the crucial moment in a child’s development from 6 to 18 months of age, in which he or she attempts to identify with his or her image in the mirror as a representation of ego formation. To resolve the aggressive tension of seeing the other in the mirror, the subject looks to his or her reflection. Just as the infant tries to differentiate its jumble of body parts from the unified whole seen in the mirror, the subject attempts to reconcile his or her own inherent split, which results from being cut off from self-knowledge through the presence of the unconscious. According to Lacan, “The mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual dual relationship” of the subject (Le Séminaire. Livre IV 17). Because the subject inhabits the symbolic, explains Lacan, he or she becomes divided by speech (Écrits 269). This also explains how the subject becomes separated from the fantasy of nature, inhabiting a symbolic divide with an imaginary world devoid of language. “In man,” writes Lacan, “the imaginary relation has deviated, in so far as that is where the gap makes itself felt” (Seminar. Book II 210).

Because the speakers’ inherent self-division and their separation from nature in the New England poetry examined here remain predicated on perception, visual manifestations of the béance set in motion considerable rhetorical movement around formative tension in the verse. In this respect, the speaker becomes (to pun a phrase from a Stevens’ poem included in this study) “a pupil / Of the gorgeous wheel” (Collected Poetry 99, ll. 26–27). The experience of the landscape consistently reveals the speaker’s separation from it, a demonstration of the Lacanian “gaze,” wherein the subject looks at an object but remains displaced from a reciprocal visual acknowledgment, providing a site in which to better understand the misperception, or méconnaissance, of the subject’s self-splitting. As Lacan describes the gaze through the invention of his own speaker, “You never look at me from the place at which I see you” (Seminar. Book XI 103). Ultimately a manifestation of the subjective division as experienced in the mirror stage, the gaze in