Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Helane Levine-Keating

Critical Essay by Helane Levine-Keating

SOURCE: "The Bright Shadow: Images of the Double in Women's Poetry," in Sexuality, the Female Gaze, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society, edited by Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers, Susquehanna University Press, 1992, pp. 166-84.

Levine-Keating is a poet and educator who is coauthor, with Walter Levy, of Lies through Literature (1991). In this excerpt, she analyzes Levertov's depiction of "the double" in two poems, asserting that this second self is a positive representation of female creativity and nonconformity.

Until recently, little attention was paid to the presence of the double or shadow in literature by women. In the last decade, however, feminist critics have begun to recognize and explore women's poetry and fiction in which the double appears. For example, [in Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, 1981], Annis Pratt found that the feminine shadow represents all that is socially conformist to women. In contrast, in my own...
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