Bitch by Carolyn Kizer
"Bitch" by Carolyn Kizer is a satirical poem that explores the complexities of female emotions in the context of a former romantic relationship. The speaker engages in a comic monologue that reflects both her outward politeness to her ex-lover and her inner turmoil, represented metaphorically as a "bitch," or female dog. This dual dialogue reveals a spectrum of feelings, from hostility and resentment to moments of affection and self-deprecation, as the speaker grapples with her ambivalence toward her past connection.
The narrative unfolds in a single, thirty-four-line stanza where the speaker initially warns her inner self to control its aggressive instincts when encountering the ex-lover. As pleasantries are exchanged, the inner self's response shifts, highlighting the speaker’s struggle between maintaining composure and the desire to reconnect. Kizer's use of satire serves not only to critique societal expectations of women's behavior but also to provide an introspective look at the speaker's conflicting emotions. The poem ultimately raises questions about identity, social dynamics, and the internal battles women face when negotiating their histories with men. Through its humor and poignant observations, "Bitch" invites readers to consider deeper themes of gender roles and emotional complexity in relationships.
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Bitch by Carolyn Kizer
First published: 1984, in Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women
Type of poem: Satire
The Poem
The speaker of Carolyn Kizer’s “Bitch” provides a satiric account of a typical encounter between her and a former lover during the unspecified period since the end of their relationship. In a single, thirty-four-line stanza, the speaker engages in a comic monologue that displays a quintessentially ironic duality: the speaker’s two simultaneous but divergent dialogues, one consisting of the speaker’s external conversation with her former lover and the other of silent admonitions, threats, and explanations to her inner self, represented in the poem as a female dog, or “bitch.”
Over the course of the monologue, the reader learns the range of the speaker’s intensely ambivalent feelings toward the ex-lover, from vicious hostility to cowed devotion to dismissive self-deprecation. Throughout the conversation with the ex-lover, the speaker masks her true feelings with unfailing politeness.
The speaker’s initial hostility whenever she and her former lover meet reveals itself in the immediate warning she gives to “the bitch inside [her]” not to start “growling”; while once the man may have been a “trespasser,” she says, he is now merely an “old acquaintance.” The conflicting feelings suggested by this conversation with her inner self are quickly dramatized: The speaker offers a first pleasantry, but “the bitch starts to bark hysterically.” However, as the pleasantries continue, “a kind word” from the man produces a dramatic change in the reaction of the inner self: “she begins to whimper./ She wants to snuggle up to him.” Now the roles are reversed as the speaker must threaten the “bitch” not to be too approachable.
The shift in the inner self’s reaction to the man, producing a consequent, if not as dramatic, shift in the speaker, doubles the layers of ambivalent emotion the speaker feels toward her former lover. Now she must explain, in apparent defense of her inner self—of her own forgetfulness of “the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal”—that a thoughtful word has simply reminded the “bitch” of her former devotion and of the man’s past “small careless kindnesses.” While these seem, momentarily, more important than what produced a strong but hidden enmity, the speaker maintains an external equilibrium, against both anger and forgiveness, as the pleasantries with her former love continue.
She instructs her inner self—herself—that she was not right for the man, dismissing herself as “too demonstrative, too clumsy,/ Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.” At that, the speaker utters some last, cheerful but hurried words of good-bye as she drags the “bitch” off “by the scruff,” perhaps in fear of any further weakening of her will—perhaps, too, in shameful discomfort at her inner weakness.
Forms and Devices
Kizer’s feminist poetry is often discursive, directly addressing those issues in male-female relations and of gender roles and characteristics that were at the core of late twentieth century feminist thought. On other occasions, as with “Bitch,” she abandons discursiveness in favor of narrative and dramatic representations of relational and emotional issues as they play themselves out in brief encounters or over long periods of time. In “Bitch,” Kizer approaches the narrative in the form of a satiric-quasi-dramatic monologue. Although the satire is in the gentler Horatian mode, without bitter anger or invective, it offers, perhaps, even more compassionate understanding for the subject of the folly it exposes than is typical for that mode. Kizer, the satirist, is not here ridiculing some “other”; rather, she is incisively poking fun at the very women whose lives she has championed.
The fundamental element of the poem’s satire is the representation of its speaker’s inner self as a “bitch.” The word has dual meanings. Most immediately, the word suggests men’s historical characterization of what they have perceived as harsh, complaining, even angry women as bitches, much as the inner self in the poem seems to be in her initial reaction to the former lover, or in a milder but shrewder sense, as the speaker might be characterized when excusing her inner self’s sudden obsequiousness on receipt of a kind word.
Kizer satirizes not only the male use of the word but also female acceptance of it, by playing off its original meaning in reference to a female dog, a dog that might “whimper” and “snuggle up” to its master, even one that has mistreated it. Kizer’s appropriation of the derogatory term from its male owners to stand as the title of the poem satirizes in itself the implicit victimization men claim when characterizing a woman as a bitch.
Kizer further satirizes women like her speaker in the ironic contrast between the polite banality of what the speaker actually says to her former lover and the tumultuous inner dialogue that simultaneously takes place. While the notion of split selves—external and internal—may be commonplace, it is represented in the poem to particular comic effect because of the breadth of the split and because the emotional extremes are expressed in doglike behavior. Unique locutions evincing the split self also produce comic effects, such as “I say, as I say” and the near personification of “My voice says. . . .”
The inner dialogue with the “bitch” is balanced by the outer dialogue with the former lover, and the speaker recounts both in something close to a dramatic monologue. There is no apparent silent interlocutor other than the reader to whom the speaker addresses herself, as is usually present in the form, but in the manner of dramatic monologue, the reader learns much about the speaker from the way in which she purposely and inadvertently reveals herself while speaking. These revelations are manifold. They emerge from the direct narrative account, from the separate dialogues with her inner self and her former lover, and from the final, subtle, but odd redirection of the speaker’s voice that takes place in the final three lines.
Whereas the speaker’s remarks to the “bitch” through most of the poem have always been part of the dialogue during the encounter with the former lover, in the final three lines they become, instead, part of the narrative account of the incident: “You gag/ As I drag you off by the scruff,/ Saying, ‘Goodbye! Goodbye! Nice to have seen you again.’” This displacement of the silent interlocutor from the reader to the inner self makes uncertain precisely to whom the speaker has been addressing herself, to what end, and to what ultimate conclusion on the part of the reader about the speaker.