19 pages • 38 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopThe Shampoo
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop (1946)
“The Fish” is one of Bishop’s most famous poems, appearing in many authoritative anthologies. As with “The Shampoo,” “The Fish” creates an exacting image of the animal in the title. The speaker says the fish’s “brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper.” The poem tackles themes of nature and violence, and it includes an obscure narrator that hardly discloses anything about who they are. “The Fish” expands upon the theme of relationships that is also present in “The Shampoo.” With the latter, the relationship centers on the two people and nature. In the former, the primary relationship involves the speaker and the fish they catch.
“In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop (1971)
The “I” that’s obscured, minimized, and transcended in “The Shampoo” finds itself in the spotlight in “In the Waiting Room.” In this poem, the subtle, confessional qualities of “The Shampoo” become overt as Bishop explicitly documents a personal moment from childhood in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. As her aunt receives treatment, the speaker, Bishop, looks over an issue of National Geographic and hears her aunt scream. The aunt’s yell and the pictures in the magazine push the speaker to grapple with the identity subsumed by their close friend and nature in “The Shampoo.” In “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop admits, “I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them.” Denied the heavenly, enchanted atmosphere of “The Shampoo,” the “too hot” waiting room in “In the Waiting Room” forces the young Bishop to confront her singular identity.
“An American Poem” by Eileen Myles (1991)
Eileen Myles and Elizabeth Bishop were both born in Massachusetts and attracted to women. While Bishop wrote about her relationships in a somewhat covert style, Myles discusses her identity openly and freely. She has no problem asserting her “I” or her sexuality. Myles embraces the overtly confessional kind of poetry that Bishop criticized. In “An American Poem,” Myles flatly declares, “I became a lesbian.” Yet the two poets aren’t entirely different. As Bishop shows in “The Shampoo,” she, like Myles, can use personal diction that might make the reader feel like they’re reading a private document.
Further Literary Resources
Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein (1917)
Like Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, the early 20th-century American writer, shunned labels. She lived most of her life in a committed relationship with another woman, Alice B. Toklas, yet she didn't identify as a lesbian. Unlike Bishop, Stein didn’t feel pressed to conceal her partnership. In terms of their lives, Stein seemed to feel more comfortable asserting the identity she chose not to categorize. In terms of their poems, both poets documented their relationships with women through metaphors. In “The Shampoo,” the speaker describes the wonder of washing their friend’s hair through natural phenomena. In Lifting Belly, Stein’s book-length erotic poem, the speaker presents their union with their partner through the metaphor of a raising stomach.
The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963)
Bishop went to Vassar with Mary McCarthy. They two started a literary magazine together, and McCarthy went on to become a successful novelist. Her book, The Group, was provocative and successful. It followed the intimate lives of women at Vassar. McCarthy based the characters on the women she went to school with. McCarthy used Bishop as inspiration for the character Lakey, who lives in Europe with a “foreign woman”—an allusion to Lota. “This was why Lakey had stayed abroad so long. Abroad people were more tolerant of Lesbians,” says the narrator. As “The Shampoo” indicates, Bishop didn’t like to draw attention to her personal life, so she didn’t appreciate McCarthy’s novel.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics Of Identity” by Atar Hadari (2020)
A poet and translator, Atar Hadari explores the link between Bishop’s identity and her somewhat elusive poetry in his article. Hadari sees intolerance towards lesbians as reinforcing Bishop’s inclination to conceal her identity in her life and poetry. For Hadari, the “habitual subterfuge had slipped” in “The Shampoo,” which is why The New Yorker and The New Republic, two prestigious literary magazines, rejected it. Hadari views “The Shampoo” as an example of Bishop’s strategy of “not quite saying while still saying” something about her romantic relationships with women. Despite the bias, Hadari applauds Bishop for accomplishing much more than other less-marginalized poets.
Listen to Poem
Hear the distinguished poet Henri Cole explain the context of “The Shampoo,” supply a brief interpretation of the poem, and read the poem out loud in a clear, gentle voice.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
