In the Waiting Room

I decided to do my final post on Elizabeth’s Bishop “In the Waiting Room”. This poem really captured my attention because it involves plenty of thinking to decipher what she is trying to illustrate to her readers.

“In the Waiting Room” is poem that that is told in third person by a young girl in Worcester, Massachusetts. This girl goes to the dentist with her aunt and is sitting outside in the waiting room. While she is in the waiting room, she begins to read a National Geographic magazine that is showing “horrifying” images of “naked women with necks wound round and round with wire” and children “with pointed heads wound round and round with string”, but she “was too shy to stop” reading on. When she closes the magazine and looks at the date on the magazine, which reads February 1918, the day World War I began. Suddenly she hears her aunt yell a “not very loud or long…oh!” The girl then realizes that it was her who said that and how that remark reminded her of her “foolish” aunt. As she kept on reading, she felt as if they were falling and she needed to remind herself that she was going to be seven years old in three days, in order to get control of her emotions. She was trying to relate to the people she was reading about telling herself that she is “an I…an Elizabeth…one of them”. After coming to self-realization, she can no longer look at anyone in the room in the same light as she had before. She began looking at the “different pairs of hands lying under the lamps.” There seemed to have been a room full of women at the dentist’s office. After taking a glance at them and thinking about the women portrayed in National Geographic, she began to question herself again and what similarities she had with everyone in that office. She thought it was ‘unlikely’ what had held them together. She could not find a better term in order to describe what she was feeling. She wondered how she had “come to be [there], like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse and hadn’t?” All of a sudden, she came back to reality and got out of her head, she was aware again of the waiting room and that World War I was happening. It was a slushy and cold winter night in Worcester, Massachusetts February 5, 1918.

This text is quite complex. I had to do some historical background of the author in order to fully understand how I should be viewing this poem. When you first read “In the Waiting Room”, it comes of as a story of a young girl in a dentist’s waiting room reading a magazine that she makes her view her world differently. When I first read it, I could not fully grasp what she was trying to portray to the audience. I did not know where she was going with comparing the magazine’s images to the reality around her. I also did not know anything about the repeated date, February 5, 1918.

After figuring out the dates and background, I found out that in this poem the young girl struggles with her identity because she is a female. Now it is time to see this poem in its figurative and metaphorical form instead of the literal interpretation. There is a young six year old girl who is sitting in the waiting room of the dentist’s office waiting for her aunt. She is looking at a National Geographic magazine that is showing images of minorities in other countries, women, children, and black people. She was seeing how terrible those women and children were being portrayed; the women had wires wound upon their long necks and their breast were “horrifying”. She also saw babies who’s heads were pointed because they had strings wrapped around their heads. She also saw an interesting picture of “a dead man slung on a pole – ‘Long Pig’”. Knowing that Elizabeth Bishop was a feminist, you can see why she put a man in her poem as dead. The girl shut the magazine and noticed the date in back, February 1918. She remembered that World War I had started that day. This made her frustrated to see how people were mistreated. Maybe she even wondered why everyone was not considered equal. Out of know where, she hears a familiar “oh” of pain in the air. She thinks that it was her aunt but it came from inside her too. She felt pain for these people she was seeing in the magazine. She could not wrap her head around these horrifying images. She tied in the sound of her aunt’s actual pain, due to the procedure, to her emotional pain with the people. She shows how she is so much like her “foolish aunt”. She felt hopeless also because of the war happening. It interesting to see that she reminds herself, that in three days, she would be seven years old. Deep down inside she sees this pain and feels that she wants a change to happen. Maybe with her saying that she is turning seven, it is illustrating that she is getting a little closer to being able to air her opinions on the situation of inequality amongst women. She felt like an outcast and a no one because she realized she was a minority. She reminds herself that she does have an identity. She is “an I…an Elizabeth”, but she also sees that she is “one of them.” She can barely lift her head to look around the room. She noticed that there were “different pairs of hands lying under the lamp.” The lamp symbolizes the sun and how, like the cliché, there are many different people under the sun. She saw this symbolism, but came back to notice that there is no equality amongst all these people under the sun. She tried to find the positive again by comparing herself to her aunt: “boots, hands, [and] the family voice.” She also compared herself to the women in National Geographic with “those awful hanging breast”. All these things held women together, so she thought. They were all ‘unlikely’ similar. She remembered the cry of pain, that “could have got loud and worse but hadn’t.” She could hear the cry of women and how they wanted to be equal, but their yells were not being heard by the government. She felt them all being swept under “a big black wave”, the wave being those that did not want to give women rights to anything. They did not have enough power to overcome these people. The young girl stepped out of her mind and fell back into reality. She fell back into the dark cold reality of that February 5, 1918 day in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The interpretation of “In the Waiting Room” is vital to understand in order to receive the proper message that Elizabeth Bishop is trying to portray. Bishop is expressing herself as a young girl who is screaming for equality. She feels so small and helpless in a world being run by men. She also does not understand the war and why men have to be against each other. This poem is also a cry for peace along with equality for minorities. Her pain is tangible in every part of her writing. She wants to be afloat and not drowning in the dark waves of injustice that are swallowing her.