W.H. Auden’s poem “Miss Gee” explores and explains this man’s feelings on the place of the individual in twentieth-century society and the lack of the individual’s ability to proceed against, or even just separate from, their society’s direction. Through the poem’s probing of the individual Auden showed how the intrusion of society into any one person’s most sacred and personal truths do strip the soul of an inherent voice and sense of self. More thoroughly though, Auden displayed the tragedy of one not able to incorporate herself into the whole. The character Auden described was “killed” distinctly within and partly because of society and its lack of awareness of her.
“Miss Gee” deals with a woman alone in the expanse of society. In the opening verse Auden begins by telling us specifically where Miss Gee lived: not just the area, but the actual address. He then describes her physical attributes in exacting detail, a squint, her lips, and posture. The colors and style of her raiment, and the picture he paints of her on a bicycle, invoke an image of a frail, almost girlish woman. Because she lived, “in a small bed-sitting room,” we assume that she was alone. She spends much of her time knitting items to sell at the Church Bazaar and support herself. By the time we read the sixth of twenty-five short verses and, “And said: “Does anyone care,” we have a complete description of Miss Gee.
The simple, sing-song, abcb rhythm Auden utilized allowed him to immerse the reader in vivid characterization without overwhelming the reader with superfluous adjectives or similes or metaphors. The rhythm itself carries the reader effortlessly through the poem, just as Miss Gee is carried along by her life. Auden has her continually bicycling, even in her dream, and, “The days and nights went by her,” as one without any control over life. Miss Gee’s apparent lack of power is especially visible in her dream. Imagining herself freed from constraint, as the Queen of France, she is able to dance with the Vicar of Saint Aloysius. The vicar is the head of the Church in which she sells her knitting, a symbol of the society which envelops her. When he becomes a raging bull Miss Gee is unable to escape from him; her outdated mode of transportation is unable to keep pace with society’s advance.
Her inability to interact with society is delineated in verses ten through twelve. Still cycling, Miss Gee goes to Church in the bleak landscape of winter “with her clothes buttoned up to her neck.” The clothes serve to both hide and protect her from the world of “loving couples” with whom she cannot communicate: they do not speak to her and she cannot face them. Even in Church she sits in a “side-aisle” and does not take part in the evening service, she is only there as an outsider. In the thirteenth verse her supplication, conspicuously not directed toward a deity, is an expression one would expect from a young girl trying desperately to find acceptance. The manner in which Auden abruptly changes the setting away from the Church leaves us to assume her ‘prayer’ of acceptance by society is ignored.
Society’s lack of awareness of Miss Gee is also represented by her encounter with the doctor. He tries to see her but cannot; after turning aside he admonishes her for not being more responsible for herself. Again Auden abruptly shifts the scene with the same resulting effect. Miss Gee is left unanswered and, apparently, alone. What is more despairing is that her condition and problems are minimalized by her culture through the doctor’s conversation of them over dinner, describing the situation to his wife as, “a funny thing.” The mysterious, sinister nature of cancer is similar to the pervasive affects of societal influence. Inescapable, like a “hidden assassin,” those who cannot effectively participate in their world are killed by it. The pressure to create, to be productive, to be a cog in the industrial machine Auden saw as the twentieth-century could consume a person from the inside out – like cancer.
It is interesting to note Auden wrote that winter made the trees look like “a wreck,” which is the same word he used to describe Miss Gee in the hospital. Also like in the winter, she is shown wrapped within her clothes. To the last she was not open to the world, but hidden from it. After her death she is laid open to all and immediately the world laughs at the sight of her. It is perhaps worse than that, even, because she causes laughter among students, presumably not yet mature adults but still wise enough to see Miss Gee’s faults. Society is not satisfied with merely exposing her, however, adn she must be ultimately cut in half before anything valuable is gained from her existence. Auden finally made Miss Gee valuable to society by making her a bad example for the medical students. She was an example of monstrosity, of the ill-effects of being apart from society. She was laughed at, marveled over, and then destroyed.
Just as she wheeled through life on her bicycle, she was wheeled towards death and further utilization by the Anatomy department. Bureaucratic society managed to incorporate her fully in the machine. In the end she is hung from the ceiling, stripped of humanity, useful only as a tool. The dissection of her knees leads us to believe she will eventually by picked completely apart, leaving no trace of herself in the world.
“Miss Gee” explicates W.H. Auden’s sense that the perceived place of the individual in twentieth-century society was becoming less important. She was unable to locate herself within her surroundings and suffered from her inability to communicate with the world. “Miss Gee” is also a diatribe on society’s uncaring attitude towards the individual. There is a sense that Auden felt Miss Gee was not to blame for her predicament.
Notes from my professor:
Grade: B
This is Ok as far as it goes, but in presenting Miss Gee as so much a victim of society I’m not sure you are following Auden’s own emphasis in the poem. It’s certainly true that she suffers from social isolation and the brutal imagery at the end suggests her victimization by the mechanism of the medical system. But most of the poem is really trying to say what sort of a person she is, and you don’t look closely enough at her psychology, which is one central thing in the piece. Clearly one thing Auden is suggesting is that Miss Gee’s life is miserable because she is repressing her sexual feelings — the imagery of her dream of the Vicar makes that clear. Auden at this period actually believed that physical illness was caused by psychological traits — and in particular that unacknowledged sexual desire could cause cancer.
What you say fits in all right, but you’ve left some definite gaps in your reading of this.