Lexi Rudnitsky: Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight" and "The Middle of The Air"

University of Tulsa
Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight" and "The
Middle of the Air"
Author(s): Lexi Rudnitsky
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 237-257
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20541064
Accessed: 12-09-2016 00:19 UTC
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Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics:
Muriel Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight"
and The Middle of the Air
Lexi Rudnitsky
Lexi Rudnitsky, a budding scholar and poet, was at work on a biography of

Muriel Rukeyser when she died suddenly of a cardiac arrhythmia in 2005,
at the age of 32. This article was accepted for publication after (but without
knowledge of) her death, and could not benefit from her final revisions. It
has been edited, as lightly as possible, by David Goldstein, a friend of Lexi's
and a former member of the University o? Tulsa's English faculty, in consulta
tion with Lexi's husband. [The editors of Tulsa Studies in Women s Literature
request the reader's forbearance with any errors in the current text.]
1.
In 1935 Muriel Rukeyser, then twenty-one-years old, won the Yale

Younger Poets Award for her first book, Theory of Flight. The young poet
attended flight school in order to write the title poem, a sprawling medita
tion on the implications of the airplane for the future of literature, politics,
and sexuality. Her critically acclaimed poetic debut inaugurated what
many predicted would be a brilliant career. Ten years later, in the summer
of 1945, Rukeyser's first play, The Middle of the Air, which developed and
extended many of the ideas proposed in her earlier work, was performed
at the University Theater in Iowa City, Iowa. The play never made it to
Broadway, and although she rewrote it numerous times over the follow
ing years, it was never published or performed again. One damaged copy
now sits shuffled among miscellaneous papers in the Berg Collection of
the New York Public Library, and six other copies?in various stages of
revision?are housed in the Library of Congress.1 The play remains undis
cussed in contemporary criticism.
Both the poem "Theory of Flight" and the play The Middle of the
Air mount an assault on technophobic literary traditions that treat the
machine as fundamentally hostile to literature. Rukeyser, of course, was by
no means the first poet to challenge pastoral, Romantic, and transcenden
tal notions of poetry that critiqued the excesses of industrial civilization.
Her direct predecessors Walt Whitman, whom she refers to as one of her
literary "pillars," and Hart Crane embrace industrial and mechanical inno
vations in their poetry.2 Rukeyser pays homage to these poets in "Theory
of Flight," explicitly turning "thus to Whitman" and implicitly invoking
Crane.3 Indeed, Louise Kertesz devotes an entire chapter of her book The
237
Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser to a detailed comparison of "Theory of
Flight" and The Bridge, arguing persuasively that certain lines in Rukeyser's
poem are direct allusions to Crane's.4 Furthermore, several of Rukeyser's
contemporaries in the 1930s shared an interest in technology. According
to Estelle Novak, who coined the term "Dynamo School," this new group
of poets, including Rukeyser and others such as Sol Funaroff, Kenneth
Fearing, and Horace Gregory, "manifested an interest in dynamic rather
than static poetry, thereby rejecting Imagism, and in the machine as a
source for imagery, thereby associating itself with Futurism."5 However,
despite the fact that a certain number of her predecessors and contempo
raries wrote about technology, Rukeyser may have been the first woman
poet to take on such themes.6 And she was, more importantly, among the
first to invoke the discourse of technology to stake out a protofeminist
position.
But "Theory of Flight" and The Middle of the Air are not simply about
technology in a generic sense: they are about the technology of flight.
In writing about the airplane, Rukeyser was deliberately entering into a
specific debate over the significance of this invention. Decades before
Rukeyser, poets and writers on the left and right had begun to write about
airplanes, and a substantial literature already existed by the time she tried
her hand at it. From H. G. Wells, W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Franz Kafka,
and William Faulkner on the one hand to W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis,
Gabriele d'Annunzio, and F. T. Marinetti on the other, writers had con
sidered the airplane in a range of different ways: miracle of modern tech
nology, tool of political hegemony, advertising gimmick, science-fiction
fantasy, vehicle for daredevil stunts, death-machine, etc.7 Furthermore,
in the period when Rukeyser was writing, poets were publishing entire
collections, such as John Williams Andrews's Prelude to Icaros (1936), and
anthologies, such as The Poetry of Flight (1941), devoted to the subject of
aviation. Rukeyser's work, however, stood out from many more popular
accounts in that it looked at both the destructive potential and the Uto
pian ideal of the airplane. A review that appeared in The Nation, which
criticized Prelude to ?caros for its sentimental depiction of the airplane,
made exactly this point:
Mr. Andrews is interested in flying for the sensations it gives him, for the
drama of its invention, and for its appeasement of romantic escapism. On
the day I first read the poem the news came that fifty noncombatants had
been killed in an aerial bombardment of Madrid. There is no indication
in the poem that the airplane has such potentialities. One concludes that
Mr. Andrews has not seen all round his subject, as did, for example, Muriel
Rukeyser in her "Theory of Flight."8
At the other extreme from romantic writers like Andrews were those who
238
not only recognized the airplane's destructive capabilities but celebrated
them. The Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, who was himself a pilot and
later became a Fascist, dedicated an entire book to the subject of aviation,
Forse che s?, forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No). And the Futurists, most
famously F. T. Marinetti, wrote many an "aeropoem" and manifesto that
glorified the new technology for its military might (p. 269). Marinetti's
Futurist Manifesto (1909) notoriously anticipated Fascism: "We will glorify
war?the world's only hygiene?militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn
for woman" (p. 50). For Marinetti, the airplane's speed, phallic sleekness,
and destructive potential perfectly embodied these values. Marinetti also
insisted that the airplane made possible a new poetics. In the Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), as Jeffrey Schnapp has pointed out,
the propeller of an airplane actually dictates a new set of poetic conven
tions. The machine thereby replaces the poet as the purveyor of poetic
discourse.9
Although Rukeyser's interest in machines has been compared with that
of the Futurists, it is impossible to know whether she had read Marinetti
before writing "Theory of Flight" and The Middle of the Air. But even if she
was not aware of his work, she was all too familiar with the Fascist agenda
that he later promoted. The Fascists had appropriated the airplane as a
symbol of virility and military force and flaunted that symbol all over the
world. Mussolini went to great lengths to publicize that he was a pilot, and
the Fascist regime frequently issued photographs of II Duce in the cockpit.
In 1933, Mussolini's Minister of Aeronautics, ?talo Balbo, led twenty-four
seaplanes in formation across the Atlantic in a spectacular display of Fascist
power and achievement. The delegation stopped in several places, includ
ing Chicago and Rukeyser's hometown of New York, where Balbo spoke
to a cheering crowd in Madison Square Garden.10 The Middle of the Air
depicts similar demonstrations?such as the one in Chicago where a pilot
invokes "air power" (1.4.1), and the one in which he is hailed, according
to one skeptical onlooker, as "[o]ur king, our hero, our young g-d" (1.1.5).
Meanwhile, America's most celebrated aviator, Charles Lindbergh?on
whom the pilot of The Midde of the Air is loosely based?praised the Nazi
aviation program while visiting Germany in 1936 and continued to be
sympathetic to Nazism and Fascism after the war began in Europe.11
The relationship between poetry, airplanes, and Fascism was not acci
dental. Mussolini himself declared that flight is "the greatest modern
poem,"12 while his son, Vittorio, practiced this new poetics, describing
an aerial bomb that "opened up like a flowering rose" as it struck a group
of Ethiopian villagers.13 If Fascism, as Walter Benjamin argues, "expects
war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been
changed by technology," then Rukeyser seeks to reverse this approach and
239
instead (like Benjamin's Communists) "responds by politicizing art."14
This involved recasting the airplane as an instrument for political, sexual,
and poetic liberation, a project she boldly began in "Theory of Flight" and
developed more explicitly in The Middle of the Air.
2.
"Theory of Flight," an ambitious, sprawling, beautiful, frustrating, irrev

erent, lyrical, prosaic, overwrought poem, comprises seven parts, nine sub
sections, and 950 lines. Since the following analysis will draw upon all of
the various parts, but not necessarily in sequential order, it is worth briefly
discussing each of the sections at the outset. The "Preamble," in which
Rukeyser lays bare her intention to create a new poetics, is followed by
"The Gyroscope" section, in which she demonstrates that flight has made
possible an altogether new perspective. In the third part, "The Lynching
of Jesus," Rukeyser casts Jesus as the original revolutionary, and then uses
his example to discuss the persecution (and prosecution) of contemporary
figures, such as the Scottsboro boys, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Throughout
the poem Rukeyser emphasizes the importance of "antithesis," "opposites,"
and "counterpoint," and thus it is not surprising that the fourth section,
"The Tunnel," depicts flight's underside, leading the reader down into the
squalor of coal mines and subway stations (pp. 43-49).15 The fifth section,
"The Structure of the Plane," describes the invention of the airplane with
unbridled optimism (pp. 50-52), while the sixth section, "Night Flight :
New York," depicts a series of mock air raids and warns against the misuse
of this new technology to make war (pp. 56-58). Finally, the concluding
section, also called "Theory of Flight," seeks to "reconcile" the incongrui
ties of the previous sections by acknowledging the many competing ver
sions of what flight has come to mean: "Flight is intolerable contradiction"
(p. 59). In the end, however, Rukeyser unveils a new theory of flight that
calls for a protofeminist poetics and political dissent.
In the opening lines of the "Preamble," Rukeyser announces that her
project is an experimental one: "Earth, bind us close, and time ; nor, sky,
deride / how violate we experiment again" (p. 33). The entire "Preamble"
functions as a sort of preparation for take-off, an elaborate justification of
why she is writing a poem about flying, and why such a task is uniquely
suited to a woman poet. Rukeyser had reason to be defensive. In 1935, a
woman writing about technology?and claiming it as a female preroga
tive?was not a common endeavor. Citing a skeptical review of Theory
of Flight that appeared in Spectator in 1936, Eloise Klein Healy notes that
Rukeyser's innovation was not encouraged among women poets: "many of
Rukeyser's detractors attacked her for what would have been praised in a
male poet."16 Similarly, Adrienne Rich has suggested that Rukeyser's early
240
work was neglected because "she would not trim her sails ... to an idea
of what a woman's poetry should look like."17 Indeed, the publication of
Theory of Flight marked the beginning of a career in which Rukeyser was
alternately attacked either for being too feminine or not feminine enough.
On the one hand, she was criticized for seeming "hysterical," for "gushing
forth girlish wisdom," for being an "innocent young woman who talks so
noisily," and for resembling "the girl on last year's calendar."18 On the other
hand, she was reprimanded for taking on unfeminine subjects.
What is perhaps most striking about the reviews of Rukeyser's work is
the degree to which the classification "woman poet" is deemed a deroga
tory epithet. Oscar Williams, in a review entitled "Ladies' Day," half-heart
edly seeks to dispel such preconceptions: "As a starter, I should object to
the classification 'women poets,' which is slightly unfair if we are to judge
them by the same standards as we judge any poetry, which we do."19 But
Williams remains skeptical of female bards, hypothesizing, "Perhaps so
many have appeared because most of the publishable male poets are in the
armed services" (p. 534). Louise Bogan also assumes that the designation
"woman poet" is a pejorative one: "Even granted that no more critical
blame should be attached to bad women poets than to bad men poets, the
overtones and implications of second-rate feminine verse are somehow
particularly pervasive."20 In fact, Bogan, who, in the words of May Sarton,
was notorious for being "rather mean to women poets in general,"21 lays
out rigid guidelines about what "feminine verse" can reasonably hope to
accomplish:
The chief virtue of women's poetry is its power to pin down, with uncanny
accuracy, moments of actual experience. From the beginning of the record,
female lyricism has concerned itself with minute particulars, and at its best
seems less a work of art than a miracle of nature?a flawless distillation, a
pure crystallization of thought, circumstance, and emotion.22
Rukeyser, who clearly did not follow this formula, was summarily dismissed.
"Muriel Rukeyser," Bogan scoffed, "is the one woman poet of her genera
tion to put on sibyl's robes, nowadays, truly threadbare and unconvincing
garments."23 (Rukeyser turned this logic against Bogan, joking that Bogan
herself failed to live up to standards of femininity: "There is a treatment for
Bogan's trouble?sex hormone can be injected," she wrote in an undated
letter to May Sarton.24)
Even as late as the 1970s, Rukeyser was still being criticized for over
stepping the prescribed bounds of her gender. In response to one such ad
hominem invective, Rukeyser commented:
Well, one of the attacks on me for writing that Hariot book [The Traces of
Thomas Hariot] spoke of me as a she-poet?that I had no business to be doing
this and I was broken for a while and looked out the window for a while. And
241
then I thought, yes, I am a she-poet. Anything I bring to this is because I am
a woman. And this is the thing that was left out of the Elizabethan world,
the element that did not exist. Maybe, maybe, maybe that is what one can
bring to life.25
It is precisely this consciousness of herself as a "she-poet"?a consciousness

that she insisted upon from the outset?that makes Rukeyser's ruminations
on the political and metaphorical implications of flight so innovative and
important.
In a sort of dedication for "Theory of Flight," which occurs during the
"Lynchings of Jesus" section of the poem, Rukeyser apostrophizes women
of previous generations for whom the possibility of being a "she-poet . .
. did not exist": "And to all you women, / dead and unspoken-for, what
sentences" (p. 39). Yet the poem is unquestionably written to women of
present and future generations who have the capacity to change their
status, in part by writing their own sentences. The most powerful speakers
in "Theory of Flight"?usually represented as a collective, as in lines like
"[w]e bear the bursting seeds" (p. 59) and "many lips / have fastened on
us" (p. 33)?are distinctly female.26 Flight becomes a means of liberating
women from conventional trappings of gender:
Fortuitously we have gained loneliness,

fallen in waste places liberated,
relieved ourselves from weakness' loveliness :
remain unpitied now, never descend
to that soft howling of the prostrate mind. (p. 33)
Due to the fortuitous invention of a new technology, women are able to

eschew traditionally feminine qualities that were once imposed on them?
dependence, weakness, loveliness, softness?and create instead a different
identity. The star of Venus, perched in the night sky, becomes a symbol of
this new ideal: "pale early Venus is signature of night / and wish gnawed
clean by plans precurses flight" (p. 33). Venus embodies womanhood (as
goddess o? love) and the written word (as "signature"). But to reach her
starry heights?and to write as "liberated" women?the speakers of the
poem must convert their abstract wishes into concrete plans, or rather,
their plans must become planes with which to fly. In the second section of
the poem, Rukeyser insists that the consummation of desire requires look
ing up from plans, presumably toward airplanes in the sky:
But this is our desire, and of its worth. . . .
Power electric-clean, gravitating outward at all points
moving in savage fire, fusing all durable stuff
but never itself being fused with any force
homing in no hand nor breast nor sex
for buried in these lips we rise again,
bent over these plans, our faces raise to see. (p. 35)
242
For women to "rise" up against the tyrannies of "breast" and "sex," they
must use their power?"electric" and otherwise?to take flight.
The new outlook that flight affords?in which everything is "seen /
uniform from a distance" (p. 38)?makes possible equality among the
sexes. From a topological perspective, "pointed," phallic structures become
"rounded," feminized ones:
dramatic Gothic, be finally rounded now

pared equal to the clean savannahs of space,
grind levels to one plane, unfold the stones
that shaped you pointed, (p. 42)
Rukeyser embodies her egalitarian aspirations in the image of a womanly

figure?"the long curves of will's ambition" (p. 35)?and entreats her read
ers to take advantage of their newfound potential: "Cut with your certain
wings; engrave space now / to your ambition : stake off sky's dimensions"
(p. 33). Significantly, the acts of cutting and engraving here recall the act
of writing. Throughout the "Preamble"?and the poem as a whole?the
desire to fly is equated with the desire to make a mark?that is, to write.
Moreover, Rukeyser directs our attention not only to the fact that the
poet can learn to fly, but also to the fact that the plane can learn to write:
"watch the clean sky signed by the flight of planes."
Taking up the formal considerations of this new "skywriting," Rukeyser
develops something of an ars po?tica. The poem, which she compares to a
spinning gyroscope and a moving airplane, is "live force contained / in a
sphere of rigid boundary" (p. 36). Although the section "The Structure of
the Plane" purports to be a close look at principles of engineering, it also
functions as a description the poem's form:
"To work intelligently" (Orville and Wilbur Wright)
"one needs to know the effects of variations
incorporated in the surfaces. . . . The pressures on squares
are different from those on rectangles, circles, triangles, or ellipses . . .
The shape of the edge also makes a difference" (p. 50)
The choices one makes in designing an airplane, then, are similar to those
in drafting a poem. Rukeyser playfully illustrates the "ellipses" by making
use of one, and thereby implicitly compares the calculated use of punc
tuation to the calculations one makes in building a plane. Moreover, the
emphasis on the "shape of the edge" seems to be a defense of the poem's
deliberately jagged and frequently enjambed lines, as demonstrated in the
following passage:
Study communications, looking inward, find what traffic

you may have had with silences : looking outward, survey
what you have seen of places :
243
many times this week I seemed
to hear you speak my name
how you turn the flatnesses
of your cheek and will not hear my words
then reaching the given latitude
and longitude, we searched for the ship and found nothing
and, gentlemen, shall we define desire
including every impulse toward psychic progress? (pp. 35-36)
Rukeyser visually represents the silences, which correspond to unheard

female desire ("you / . . . will not hear my words") and which contrast with
the definition of desire articulated by "gentlemen." As she noted in an
interview, "I care very much about the air and the silence let into a poem,
and I would like to work ... on ways of making this visual. Certainly, the
placement of a poem on the page can do most of it, but many readers do
not take that meaning to be what it is, metric rest" (qtd. in Packard, p.
130).
Apostrophizing the reader in a moment of lyrical abandon, Rukeyser
justifies the poem's experimental form and syntax: "O be convinced with
out formula or rhyme / or any dogma ; use yourselves : be : fly" (p.
58).27 Thus flight becomes synonymous with discursive freedom. Here and
throughout the poem Rukeyser uses the colon to separate objects in a list.
For example, in the opening lines of the poem she writes:
we deified
the waning flesh : now, fountain, spout for us,
mother, bear children : lover, yet once more :
in final effort toward your mastery, (p. 33)
Like Whitman's use of lists, this trademark use of colons serves a democ
ratizing function, suggesting that the catalogued items are somehow
equivalent. Deploying unconventional punctuation?and at times no
punctuation at all (she claims there is "unity in knowing / all space in one
unpunctuated flowing," p. 35)?is one of the ways that Rukeyser under
scores her egalitarian politics.
Rukeyser understands flight as an essentially creative activity, compar
ing the sky not only to a blank sheet of paper but also to a canvas. She
describes fliers, for example, as those who "paint trees in flame" (p. 34).
In fact, she posits that art is foundational to flight, citing Leonardo da
Vinci's early sketches that detail the mechanics of flight, which she calls
the "blue-print of birth" (p. 34). D'Annunzio used these same sketches to
argue that aviation was an Italian invention and thereby fosters national
ist pride.28 Rukeyser clearly counters this logic?whether or not she had
d'Annunzio in mind?when she writes, "Leonardo's tomb / not in Italian
earth / but in a fuselage" (p. 34). The artistry of the airplane, for Rukeyser,
244
lies in its ability to disintegrate divisive national borders that lead to war.
As one of the fliers in the poem?"a man whose country is air"?remarks:
"If I fly, / why, I know that countries are not map-colored, that seas belong
/ to no one, that war's a pock-marking on Europe ..." (p. 48). Rukeyser
believed flight presented an opportunity to view the world as a "unified
unbroken" whole. On the other hand, nationalism?and its logical culmi
nation in Fascism?was a travesty of Leonardo's intention:
Leonardo engraved on the Florentine pale evening

scheming toward wings, as toward an alchemy
transferring life to golden circumstance.
Following him, the war planes travelling home,
flying over the cities, over the minds
of cities rising against imminent doom.
Icarus' passion, Da Vinci's skill, corrupt,
all rotted into war : (p. 58)
Rather than helping to make war, the airplane's ability to traverse vast
distances with unprecedented speed could instead reveal the world's intrin
sic "unity" and "wholeness." As she famously remarked, "It isn't that one
brings life together?it's that one will not allow it to be torn apart" (qtd.
in Packard, p. 171). Rukeyser maintains that the airplane is not inherently
destructive, but rather, as her use of the term "birth" and other maternal
metaphors suggest, potentially life-giving. Likewise, poetry should not
be limited, as T. S. Eliot had written, to shoring up fragments; it has the
capacity to keep things whole.
It is the new technology of the airplane, and not outdated "hieroglyphs,"
that will make possible a poetics of the future. Rukeyser eschews, on the
one hand, "old" and "dusty" poetry that is mired in tradition, and, on the
other hand, the Modernist alternative that revels in "broken things" (p.
33). Instead the poet looks forward to "chromium clear" poetry:
Distinguish the metaphor most chromium clear

for distant calendars to identify :
Frail mouthings will fall diminished on old ears
in dusty whispers light from extinctest stars
will let us sleep, nor may we replica
ourselves in hieroglyphs and broken things
but there is reproduction for this act
linking flight's escape with strict contact, (p. 33)
In addition to flying and writing, "this act" refers to sexual "contact,"

which, of course, leads to "reproduction." Associated with reproduction
and not production, the new poetry thereby becomes feminized. "Mother"
is repeatedly apostrophized, pregnant women populate the poem, and birth
imagery abounds: "produce the widenesses / be full and burst their wombs,"
245
Rukeyser commands, "make children over the world" (p. 34).
In Rukeyser's poetic universe, even the highly technical description of
the mechanics of flight can somehow recall insemination:
On the first stroke of the piston the intake valve opens,
the piston moves slowly from the head of the cylinder,
drawing in its mixture of gas and air. On the second stroke
the piston returns, the valve closes. The mixture is compressed.
(p. 51)
And a description of a diver jumping from a plane can become an allegory

of birth: "the next moment's water" suggests the water breaking; the direc
tive to "[s]ever the cords" of the parachute conjures an umbilical cord (p.
46).
Throughout the poem, preparation for takeoff is equated with "desire"
and flight with consummation. Then, in the final sequence of the poem,
as Rukeyser prepares to land the plane, and thereby end the poem, contact
with the runway seems to suggest sexual climax:
Master in the plane shouts "Contact" :

master on the ground : "Contact!"
he looks up : "Now?" whispering : "Now."
"Yes," she says. "Do."
Say yes, people.
Say yes.
YES (p. 60)
This act of landing?"the meeting of flight and no-flight" (p. 35)?is fig
ured as a sexual encounter, replete with physical contact, whispering, and
rhythmic repetition of "now" and "yes." The last lines recall Molly Bloom's
final monologue in James Joyce's Ulysses, which concludes with Molly's
recollection of her first sexual encounter with her husband.29 Furthermore,
the language of this final passage borrows from the wedding ceremony,
only the traditional vow "I do" becomes the command "Do," the ostensible
subject of which is "people." Significantly, it is the woman who issues this
command?calling others to action rather than avowing her own wifely
duties?and it is also she who is airborne, while the man "looks up," await
ing her arrival. In the final line, Rukeyser enacts the command to "Say yes"
by actually saying, "YES," and the poem thereby fulfills itself in a moment
of triumphant affirmation.
In his preface to Theory of Flight, Stephen Vincent Ben?t, who selected
the book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, wrote:
I do not intend to add, in this preface, to the dreary and unreal discussion
about unconscious fascists, conscious proletarians, and other figures of straw
which has afflicted recent criticism with head noises and small specks in
front of the eyes. But I will remark that when Miss Rukeyser speaks her poli
246
tics?and she speaks with sincerity and fire?she does so like a poet, not like
a slightly worn phonograph record, and she does so in poetic terms, (p. 5)
While Ben?t may have had his own agenda, he nonetheless offers an
important insight: Theory of Flight manages to combine sharp political
critique with virtuosic aesthetic achievement. Much later in her career,
Rukeyser reflected, "But I'm a person who makes, much more than a per
son who protests . . . and I have decided that whenever I protest from now
on ... I will make something?I will make poems, plant, feed children,
build, but not ever protest without making something" (qtd. in Packard,
p. 172). Long before she had articulated this as a conscious goal, she had
already begun to work toward realizing it.
3.
Although Ben?t insisted that Theory of Flight was the work of a poet and
not a propagandist, The Middle of the Air is the work of both. Rukeyser, a
staunch antifascist, appears to have begun composing the play in 1942,
the same year that she went to work for the Office of War Information.
The play, perhaps as a result of her commitment to the war effort, can be
excessively preachy, making all too obvious the implications of ideas that
receive more subtle treatment in "Theory of Flight."
At some basic level, The Middle of the Air is a commentary on "Theory of
Flight": the female protagonist is, after all, a young poet writing about air
planes, not unlike the young Rukeyser, who herself attended flight school
before publishing her long poem. Like "Theory of Flight," The Middle of the
Air theorizes the relationship between politics, sexuality, and technology.
But the play takes many of the ideas hinted at in the poem and brings them
to their logical conclusions. Ten years had passed between the publication
of Theory of Flight and the performance of The Middle of the Air, and in
that time Rukeyser had personally witnessed the onset of the Spanish Civil
War, seen the rise of Fascist and Nazi regimes across Europe, and joined the
war effort in her own country.30
The Middle of the Air was greatly anticipated. In the 4 October 1944
New York Times, Broadway producer Herman Shumlin announced that
he had acquired a new play, which he called "a poetic drama of a serious
turn."31 Later that month, the New York Sun published an interview with
Shumlin in which he mentioned the play as first on the list of important
new dramas: "I have a play by Muriel Rukeyser called The Middle of the
Air' and it's something that's very stimulating. It's entirely in poetry and I
think it will be a remarkable departure. ... It would require a large-scale
production and I'll look for people of stature in the theater for the cast. I'm
very excited about it."32
247
By July 1945, however, Shumlin had "indefinitely postponed" the
production, according to the New York Times, due to "the necessity for a
rewrite job that undoubtedly will take some time."" Rukeyser managed to
organize an alternate production of the play, directed by Hallie Flanagan,
later that summer at the University of Iowa. The play ran from 31 July to
4 August, and although the Daily lowan claimed that it was "the cause of
much controversy" and "one of the most talked about productions ever
presented on the University theater stage,"34 it did not make it to Broadway
and was never published or performed again. Local newspapers, which
were the only ones to cover the play, gave it generally favorable reviews
and explained its modest popularity by claiming that it was too sophisti
cated for a commercial audience. One reviewer applauded the University
theater "for DOING THE PLAYS THAT BROADWAY WOULD NOT
DARE TO DO."35 Another reviewer wrote, "As I sat watching the action
and listening to the singing beauty of her lines, I couldn't help but feel that
perhaps this WAS great theater, but then came to a fore the thought again
that it may be too far ahead of its time, that the theater-going public was
not yet ready to accept it."36
The play's limited success may not have been entirely due to its experi
mental nature. From its inception, it seems, The Middle of the Air was a
problematic venture. The first passing reference to it appears in a letter to
May Sarton written in September 1942, in which Rukeyser laments that it
is "going very slowly indeed."37 Nonetheless, she kept at it, and two years
later, on 25 June 1944, as she was nearing its completion, she again wrote
Sarton: "The last pieces of the play are beginning to fall into shape. I wish
I were reading it to you. Nobody has seen a bit?not a line!?of it; and I
am in it over my ears. I love all the people in it. I have many times of wild
excitement about the whole thing, and the feeling of being many eyes and
people at once, in and around the place where these things happen." She
then adds: "But I long for you to know this thing?it may all stink, it may
not be a play."38 The extreme shift within the course of a few sentences
from being "in love" with the play to fearing that "it may all stink" may
have been more than impulsiveness. This wild fluctuation may, in fact,
reflect Rukeyser's awareness that The Middle of the Air?her first full
length play?was a very important and yet deeply flawed work. The plot
is contrived, the characters flat, and the dialogue often didactic. However,
as a document o? how Rukeyser worked out her ideas about poetry?and,
in particular, how she used flight as a metaphor for literary, political, and
sexual liberation?it is a bold and innovative work. The very crudity of
the language in some cases makes it all the more useful as evidence: the
dialogue between characters often expresses a thinly veiled version of her
political?and poetical?beliefs.
Written during World War II, The Middle of the Air dramatizes the strug
248
gle over what and how the airplane should signify. As the character of the
flight instructor points out, it explores the question of what "flying could
mean" ( 1.4.11 ). The key dilemma of the play is not the airplane's ontologi
cal value. Rather, it is best summed up by the question that Anne, a young
poet who learns to fly, poses to Laramie, a pilot famous for completing "the
most spectacular flight since the invention of the plane" (1.1.5): "How are
you using it? How?" (2.8.5). After Anne learns that Laramie finished his
flight in record-breaking time only because he failed to fulfill his patriotic
duty of gathering intelligence, she stutters in disbelief: "But?the flight .
. . stood for something," though she is unable to say what (1.3.8). Only
much later does Anne come to terms with the fact that the flight did, in
fact, stand for something, something that directly contradicts her own
idealism.
As newspaper accounts were quick to observe, The Middle of the Air
contains many of the features of a typical "love story."39 But what stands
out about the romance between Anne and Laramie is the way in which it
is mediated by airplanes. Anne falls in love almost at first sight, describing
Laramie in erotically laden language that seems to have as much to do with
his recent flight as it does with him: "I shivered as he passed, a deep strong
shudder, like excitement, like hope, finish [sic] a flight like that?to take
those chances, believing in every instrument, every wind, in the outcome!
Yes. . . ." (1.1.5). (Anne's oft-repeated exclamation "Yes!" recalls the sexu
ally charged conclusion to "Theory of Flight"). But what really wins over
Anne is Laramie's offer: "Shall I teach you to fly?" which, in the context
of a late-night assignation, takes on erotic overtones (1.1.13). As Laramie
beckons Anne, "and now I begin, begin to know the shadow under your
breasts; come; come; come?Now under the trees," the stage directions
indicate "Sound of a plane, passing overhead" (1.2.5).
For Laramie, flight becomes an expression of virility. He describes the
experience of being airborne as being "over it and pure, with the mere
brilliant mountains under me, or coming to cities, lying like women made
of light. Over the snow. Over the clay-land" (1.4.12). In the pilot's seat,
Laramie imagines that he has dominion "over" (a word he repeats three
times) ornamental women who lie passively under him. As in "Theory
of Flight," flight is equated with the ultimate consummation, and the
airplane becomes an object of desire: "How soon can I have her?" Laramie
asks of a plane. "She's a beauty" (1.4.5). And Laramie's flight instructor
fantasizes about being "in her," that is, inside the plane (1.4.9). Moreover,
Anne's feminine wiles and transformative powers are expressly compared
to those of a plane. According to the flight instructor, Laramie "loved
machines, any machine that would get him out of there?a car, a plane,
anything that would take his whole life and change it. Like Anne ..."
(1.2.2). Thus Anne, like the airplane, becomes a vehicle through which
249
Laramie can escape his provincial past.
In the opening scene of The Middle of the Air, the Greek Chorus?incar
nated as a psychiatrist?announces that the play will concern itself with
forging a relationship between flight, poetry, and sexuality.40 On the day
that Laramie touches down from his heroic journey, the psychiatrist asks,
"Have you written a poem for it, Anne? I should think that this day
should be full of everything you've loved?all flying, all poetry" (1.1.4).
Anne does manage to write a poem, but she stops writing altogether soon
thereafter.41 The psychiatrist recognizes the potential for this kind of con
flict between Anne's two great passions: "You've wanted planes, you've
wanted poetry. You wanted them combined. Can you combine them?"42
Emphasizing the revolutionary implications of such a task, Anne nonethe
less responds affirmatively: "It would take a new life: Yes. I think I can"
(1.1.15). Like the twenty-one-year-old author of "Theory of Flight" who
attended flight school to write a poem about airplanes, Anne is determined
that her "new life" will involve flight?not merely as a metaphor, but as a
literal fact. She achieves this first by marrying a pilot, then by learning to
fly?and with remarkable success.
Although the airplane draws Anne and Laramie together at the outset,
it ultimately forces them apart. Like the pilot in "Theory of Flight" who
sees the world as a unified whole for the first time, as Anne learns to fly,
she gains consciousness of the world around her and becomes increasingly
critical of Laramie for using his hero-status to promote his own quest for
power. Laramie remarks on this change to his brother: "Toward the end of
the trip I could feel her pulling away from me?not from me?but from my
idea of flight." His brother responds: "She's got her own idea of flying and
what it should be used for. Don't forget she's a flier too" (1.4-4). In a brief
moment of sensitivity, Laramie asks: "Could that kind of trouble, worry, I
mean that drawing away fro [sic] me, have anything to do with the birth"
(1.4.5). (Anne, we have just learned, is pregnant.) But he immediately
seeks to undo the potentially feminizing influence of childbirth by turning
the event into a fantasy of male domination: "A son. I'll have a son, G-d"
(1.4.5). Laramie's vision is never realized: by the end of the scene, Anne
has had a miscarriage, aborting Laramie's designs for a male heir to carry
on his legacy.43
Eventually, Anne's idea of how to use flying becomes irreconcilable with
Laramie's, and she is forced to confront him: "This way, hating the people,
using flight for your purposes not for theirs makes conflict and more lone
liness. We have been separated" (2.7.4). Laramie, in a desperate attempt
to win back Anne's affection, futilely harks back to their early romance
when the airplane and sex were indivisible: "DO you know anything pure,
my darling, but flight and our long nights?" (2.8.2). But Laramie's notion
of purity, which, it later turns out, involves purging America of "Negroes,
250
Jews and other bad elements," is diametrically opposed to Anne's ideals
(2.9.5).
Anne never accuses Laramie of being a fascist, but it soon becomes clear
that he is rapidly turning into one. Laramie's flight instructor, for example,
criticizes a speech he delivers, taking issue with its militaristic tone: "The
others were exciting, not speeches?you know what people want, you
show them a life of danger. But that one?it sounded like something else.
That kind of talk about air power . . . cities to be sacrificed . . . claiming
the air" (1.4.10). The rhetoric of the speech unmistakably echoes fascist
propaganda.
As the play progresses, Laramie is increasingly controlled by his spon
sor, aptly named "King," who has fascist tendencies and boasts "iron rules"
that discriminate "[a]gainst women" (1.4.5).44 According to the flight
instructor, "everything he feels about flying and everything he means to
do with flying" is anathema to principles of democracy (1.4.11). King
entices Laramie with promises of power and glory, and at the same time
ridicules the "weakness" of those who want a government "of the feeble, by
the feeble, for the feeble" (2.9.10). Under the direction of King, Laramie
not only uses flight to usurp power illegally, but he uses Anne's poetry to
that end as well. After the gangsters Luigi and Falcone have "fixed it up
a little" (2.8.9), Laramie allows them to broadcast Anne's poem on the
radio as part of a propaganda campaign to liberate America from "the
stranglehold of the inferior peoples ... I who have been choking off the
best blood of the country!" (2.9.5).45 In one fell swoop, Laramie has taken
the two most sacred things in Anne's life?poetry and flight?and used
them toward an end that she finds repugnant. This violation is figured as
a sort of rape?another indication that poetry and flight are intertwined
with sexuality?in which Anne impotently protests that the poem is "[n]ot
to be touched" (2.8.5).
At the end of the play, as Laramie seeks to use the military force of
thousands of planes to crown himself as "a shining hero," he is intercepted
and assassinated by an antifascist mob (2.8.4). Killed "under the plane's
wing," he becomes a symbol of the consequences of living under the wing
of fascism (2.11.2). In an undated letter to May Sarton, written during a
feverish period of composition, Rukeyser underscores the symbolic and
dramatic significance of the assassination's setting:
I have been working like crazy, very happy and it is sailing along, with strokes
of G-d that make me very humble. Like suddenly I solved the whole mean
ing of the second act that I had been too slavish and dumb to see and now
the assassination at the airport simply is the Park scene, all developed and
instead of passing by Laramie mutely without an appeal, it is knitted up and
converges on him to kill him because he hasn't accepted it in the park or
anywhere else. (Letters to Sarton)
251
If the climactic scene at the airport reveals the "whole meaning" of the
play, then the play functions to some degree as an allegory of the demise of
fascism. In a symbolic act of violence, the masses wrench the airplane from
those who seek to use it against them, reclaiming it for the good of "the
people." They thereby fulfill the commandment?"Say yes, people"?first
articulated in "Theory of Flight."
After Laramie's death, Anne assumes the mantle of the heroic pilot,
but she radically redefines the role. "We must learn to use our power," she
explains, "not to misuse it, not to give it over into other hands" (2.12.6).
Even as her fascist nemeses describe "the propellers of thousands of planes
. . . beginning the war-chant of a new age," Anne insists that planes can
instead aid the cause of peace and democracy (2.9.5). As the character of
Laramie suggests, Rukeyser well understood the destructive potential of
the airplane. However, rather than reject the airplane outright as a symbol
of a political program she despises, Rukeyser uses her female protagonist to
reappropriate it, turning the airplane against fascism, and suggesting that
it can function as a great equalizing force.
Interestingly, Rukeyser notes the inextricable link between her own
desire to reclaim the airplane and other "machines of process," and her
identity as a woman and poet. In the preface to Willard Gibbs (1942), a
biography of the famous physicist that seeks to forge connections between
science and poetry, she writes:
When one is a woman, when one is writing poems, when one is drawn
through a passion to know people today and the web in which they, suffering,
find themselves, to learn the people, to dissect the web, one deals with the
processes themselves. To know the processes and the machines of process:
plane and dynamo, gun and dam. To see and declare the full disaster that the
people have brought on themselves by letting these processes slip out of the
control of the people.46
Rukeyser sought to restore the airplane to "the people" by placing a woman

in the pilot's seat. From early on, Rukeyser sets the stage for the idea that
the enterprise of flying is particularly well-suited to women. When Anne
learns to fly, for example, spectators marvel at her native ability: "Never
saw anyone take to the air as Anne did," notes Laramie. "Air is Anne's ele
ment." Laramie's brother agrees, further underscoring her natural gift: "She
flies as birds fly?purely" (1.4.5). Rukeyser thereby establishes that women
not only have the ability to fly but that they may even have the ability to
do it better?more "purely"?than men.
In her capacity as woman, poet, and aviator, Anne plays a special role
in putting the airplane to proper use and preventing it from being used
against "the people." As the Greek Chorus-cum-psychiatrist remarks:
I was thinking that, as we talk about poetry, [sic]
we see its possibility like this:
252
We live on the ground. Or slowly, in primitive boats,
go up cliff-sided rivers. The poet in a plane
looks at that field, that river. Hangs there, seeing.
Little of this is written. Not the scene from the air?
not painted, or set down?or from poetry.
Our time is all to be spoken for. Our opening age,
to be sung, to be fought for: the entrance of a theme.
A woman might do this. A woman concerned with the future.
(2.6.4)
After Laramie's death, Anne emerges as the archetype of the new pilot
hero: one who uses flight to empower the masses, to stake out new ground
for women, and to revolutionize poetry. Thus, her triumph not only reveals
her as a woman concerned with the future; it suggests that a woman is the
future.
4.
One of the luminaries in The Middle of the Air notes in passing, "If we are
free at all, we are free to choose a tradition" (1.3.10). In "Theory of Flight"
and The Middle of the Air, Rukeyser does precisely this. Entering into
the debate over the metaphorical implications of the airplane, Rukeyser
locates herself within a tradition while simultaneously transforming it. In
these two works, she defies technophobic literature, undermines the fascist
appropriation of the airplane, and denies that the airplane is a symbol of
virility and "scorn for woman." In the end, she demonstrates poetic, revo
lutionary, and feminist possibilities for the discourse of flight.
To postmodern readers and third-wave feminists, Rukeyser's version of
women as inherently progressive and peaceful may seem quaint. Such a
perspective implies an essentializing notion of women that most feminists
have long since rejected. But it is important to remember that Rukeyser
was writing at a time when the cause of women's liberation?even on
the Left?was systematically ignored and when the themes and forms of
"women's poetry" were seriously circumscribed.
It is a testament to Rukeyser's legacy that a range of prominent modern
and contemporary feminist poets credit her for making possible a new
poetics. Anne Sexton, calling her "Muriel, mother of everyone," used
Rukeyser's work to justify her own confessional practice.47 To Sharon Olds,
Rukeyser introduced a poetics of sex and female desire.48 Adrienne Rich,
on the other hand, has invoked Rukeyser as an example of a righteous
political poet (pp. 66-67). And Stephanie Strickland, in her hypertext
sequence True North, looks to Rukeyser as a model of a woman who strug
gled to integrate science and technology into poetry.49 Seen in these terms,
the "experiment" that Muriel Rukeyser first undertook in the opening lines
253
of "Theory of Flight"?and further elaborated in The Middle of the Air and
subsequent works?proved an extraordinary success.
NOTES
1 Although I originally discovered the play at the Berg Collection, this essay will
rely on a copy of the play supplied by James Park Morton, a member of the origi
nal cast in Iowa City, since we know that this version?replete with handwritten
emendations?was the one actually performed. All references to the play will be
cited from this copy parenthetically by act, scene, and line.
2 Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996), p. 26.
3 Rukeyser, "Theory of Flight," Theory of Flight, ed. and foreword by Stephen
Vincent Ben?t (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), p. 39. The poem is
printed without line numbers, and none are here given. Subsequent page references
will be cited parenthetically in the text.
4 Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1980), pp. 1-44.
5 Estelle Gershgoren Novak, "The Dynamo School of Poets," Contemporary
Literature, XI (1970), 526-27.
6In "Women and the Left in the 1930s," American Literary History, 2, No. 1
(1990), 154-55, Barbara Foley contends that Furanoff and other "[m]ale poets of
the left" associate "the promise of technological advance" with "male strength."
7 See H. G Wells's The War in the Air (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1908) and
Tono Bungas (London: Macmillan, 1909); Franz Kafka's "The Aeroplanes at
Brescia" (1909), in Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken
Books, 1947), pp. 221-30; Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail," With the
Night Mail (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1909); F. T. Marinetti's "Futurist
Manifesto" (1909), Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. R. W Feint
(Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1991); subsequent references will be cited paren
thetically in the text; Gabriele d'Annunzio's Forse che s?, forse che no (1910; rpt.,
Milan: Mondadori, 1982); Wyndham Lewis's "Vorticist Manifesto," Blast, 1, 20
June 1914, 1-20; W. B. Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death," The Wild
Swans at Coole (Churchtown: Dundrum Cuala Press, 1919); William Faulkner's
"All the Dead Pilots," These 13 (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith,
1931); W H. Auden's "Journal of an Airman," The Orators (London: Faber and
Faber, 1932); Steven Spender's "The Landscape Near an Aerodome," Poems
(London: Faber and Faber, 1933), and "To Poets and Airmen," Ruins and Visions
(London: Faber and Faber, 1940); C. Day Lewis's "The Conflict," A Time to Dance
and Other Poems (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), and Sagittarius Rising (London:
P. Davies, 1936); Archibald MacLeish's The Air Raid (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and Co., 1938); and Richard Eberhart's "The Fury of an Aerial Bombardment,"
Burr Oaks (London: Chatto and Windus, 1947).
8 Philip Rice Blair, Rev. o? Prelude to "Icaros," by John Williams Andrews, The
Nation, 2 January 1937, p. 25.
9 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," Modernism and Modernity, 1, No. 3
(1994), 153. It is not a coincidence that Marinetti was "[s]itting on the gas tank of
254
an airplane" when he first "sensed the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited
from Homer" (Marinetti, p. 92), nor that the logic of Futurist poetics "was revealed
to [him] when [he] was in an airplane" (p. 96). The speed, height, and distance
achieved by the airplane offer the Futurist poet a totally "new point of view" that
allows him "to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines of the
ancient way of thinking" (p. 96).
10 Max Gallo, Mussolini's Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles
Lam Markmann (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 234. Downtown Chicago still
boasts an avenue bearing Balbo's name.
11 In an August 1944 letter to Hallie Flanagan, who directed the only produc
tion of the play, Rukeyser explains that although her protagonists, Laramie and
Anne, were originally modeled on Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow
Lindbergh, the characters soon took on identities of their own: "It was strange to
hear about Mrs. Morrow ... I don't know her at all, nor any of the family. My
people started from them; I felt as I arrived at the writing that I had to put them
aside; however, it is a wonderful startle to know that Mrs. Morrow is anything
like the mother." See Letters to Hallie Flanagan, Box 3, Folder 1, Hallie Flanagan
Papers, *T-Mss 1964-002, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts.
12 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo e Duilio Susmel, 36 vols.
(Florence: La Fenice, 1954), XV, 15.
13 John G?nther, Inside Europe, war ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940),
p. 242. Benito Mussolini's speech "II Volo," or "Flight" (1920) continues to develop
the metaphor of flight as poetry: "Unexpectedly, from the low rumble of the people,
mixed up in the darkness of the taverns, the lyrical flight of the greatest modern
poem took off. And this poem is still ours, is still Italian, born miraculously like the
Divine Comedy, amidst the struggle of contending factions, and above everything
and everyone, master of space and time, clear and on fire like the air of dawn"
(Mussolini, p. 15, my translation).
14 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 242.
15 This section was likely influenced by The Bridge, A Poem (New York: H.
Liveright, 1930) in which Hart Crane takes the reader from the elevated heights
of the Brooklyn Bridge into the underworld of the New York City subway.
16 Eloise Klein Healy, "Muriel Rukeyser," Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the
United States, ed. Sandra Pollack and Denise Knight (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1993), p. 464.
17 Adrienne Rich, "Beginners," How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? ed.
Ann Herzog and Janet Kaufman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 68.
18 Clement Greenberg, "Poetry Continues," The Nation, 21 June 1941, p. 730;
H. M., "Poetry of the Left," Poetry, 48 (1936), 220; Michael Roberts, "Passion and
Poetry," The Spectator, 156 (1936), 806; Randall Jarrell, "Verse Chronicle," The
Nation, 8 May 1948, p. 512.
19 Oscar Williams, "Ladies' Day," The New Republic, 23 October 1944, p. 534.
Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
20 Louise Bogan, "Verse," New Yorker, 21 October 1944, p. 91.
21 May Sarton, Selected Letters 1916-1954, ed. Susan Sherman (New York:
255
Norton, 1997), p. 332.
22 Bogan, "Verse," New Yorker, 3 November 1951, p. 150.
23 Bogan, 1951, p. 151.
24 Rukeyser, Letters to May Sarton, Folder 13, Henry W and Albert A. Berg
Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.
25 William Packard, ed., The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from the New York
Quarterly (New York: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 175-76. Subsequent references will be
cited parenthetically in the text.
26 However, following in the tradition of Whitman, who takes on the identity
of a slave, savage, prostitute, etc. in "Song of Myself," the speakers in "Theory of
Flight" metamorphose over the course of the poem, taking on the voices of various
different characters: female and male, black and white, collective and individual,
confessional and omniscient, etc.
27 Despite its internal logic, Rukeyser's refusal to adhere to commonplace syn
tactical practices often infuriated contemporary critics. A reviewer for The Partisan
Review, for example, wrote: "Everything has its good side; the befuddlement of Miss
Rukeyser's syntax rendered her lines less and less meaningful?a keen relief!"; see
R.S.R, "Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl," Partisan Review, 10 (1943), 472.
Nonetheless, Rukeyser staunchly defended her use of punctuation against editors
and critics: "I had a rubber stamp made?'Please believe the punctuation.' I have
needed that very much in dealing with printers" (qtd. in Packard, p. 165). The
stamp is, in fact, impressed upon her various manuscripts.
28 Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux,
2002), pp. 30-38.
29 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 768.
30 Rukeyser had traveled to Spain in order to report on the antifascist Olympics
when the war in Spain broke out. A young man whom she met on a train during
her travels, and with whom she promptly fell in love, remained in Spain and was
killed in combat.
31 Sam Zolotow, "'Soldier's Wife' Arrives Tonight," New York Times, 4 October
1944, p. 25.
32 Ward Morehouse, "Broadway after Dark," New York Sun, 13 October 1944, p.
28. Rukeyser contested Shumlin's characterization of the play. According to "Gossip
of the Rialto," in the 12 November 1944 New; York Times, p. X2, "Miss Rukeyser
says, 'It's not a poetic drama' and that it doesn't have verse in the accepted sense.
It depends, she says, on language and music for its poetical effects."
33 "Premiere Tonight of 'Alice in Arms,'" New York Times, 31 January 1945,
p. 26.
34 Helen Huber, "Members of Play Audience Give Reaction," The Daily lowan,
4 August 1945.
35 Paul Engle, "Broadway Wouldn't Dare," The Daily lowan, 5 August 1945, p.
2.
36 Ron Tallman, "The Play in Review: 'The Middle of the Air' Is a Vital Thing,"
The Iowa City Press Citizen, 1 August 1945.
37 Rukeyser to Sarton, September 1944, Berg Collection.
38 Rukeyser to Sarton, 25 June 1944, Berg Collection.
39 "Final Play Opens July 31," 25 July 1945, Box 3, Hallie Flanagan Papers, *T
256
Mss 1964-002, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts.
40 The figure of the psychiatrist lends scientific weight to the connections
between art, flight, and sexuality. Freud himself, in his book Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 75-76,
asserts that the dream of flight represents a repressed sexual fantasy:
But why do so many people dream of being able to fly? The answer that psycho-analysis
gives is that to fly or to be a bird is only a disguise for another wish, and that more
than one bridge, involving words or things, leads us to recognize what it is. When we
consider that inquisitive children are told that babies are brought by a large bird, such
as the stork; when we find that the ancients represented the phallus as having wings;
that the commonest expression in German for male sexual activity is v?geln ['to bird':
Volgel is the German for 'bird']; that the male organ is actually called Vucello [the bird]
in Italian?all of these are only small fragments from a whole mass of connected ideas,
from which we learn that in dreams the wish to be able to fly is to be understood as
nothing else than the longing to be capable of sexual performance.
41 "I haven't been writing poems, since that day," Anne laments later in the play,
referring to the day on which she met Laramie (2.6.3).
42 In the final script, Rukeyser scrawled the word "wanted" over the typescript
"cared about," implying that Anne's desire for both planes and poetry is sexual in
nature.
43 The death of this child cannot but recall the 1932 kidnapping and murder of
the Lindbergh baby.
44 Earlier in the play, Laramie is facetiously crowned "king" by the psychiatrist,
who is the first to note his increasingly demagogic behavior (1.1.5).
45 Luigi and Falcone's Italianate names may be xenophobic allusions to their
Fascist allegiances.
46 Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (Connecticut: Ox Bow, 1942), p. 12.
47 Anne Sexton, "Postcard to Muriel Rukeyser," 1967, Henry W and Albert
A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public
Library.
48 Sharon Olds, "Preface," The Orgy, by Rukeyser (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press,
1997), pp. xi-xii,
49 Stepanie Strickland, True North (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1997),
pp. 41-42.
257

Lexi Rudnitsky: Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight" and "The Middle of The Air"

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Lexi Rudnitsky: Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight" and "The Middle of The Air"

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University of Tulsa

Lexi Rudnitsky, a budding scholar and poet, was at work on a biography of

In 1935 Muriel Rukeyser, then twenty-one-years old, won the Yale

"Theory of Flight," an ambitious, sprawling, beautiful, frustrating, irrev

It is precisely this consciousness of herself as a "she-poet"?a consciousness

Fortuitously we have gained loneliness,

Due to the fortuitous invention of a new technology, women are able to

dramatic Gothic, be finally rounded now

Rukeyser embodies her egalitarian aspirations in the image of a womanly

Study communications, looking inward, find what traffic

Rukeyser visually represents the silences, which correspond to unheard

Leonardo engraved on the Florentine pale evening

Distinguish the metaphor most chromium clear

In addition to flying and writing, "this act" refers to sexual "contact,"

And a description of a diver jumping from a plane can become an allegory

Master in the plane shouts "Contact" :

Rukeyser sought to restore the airplane to "the people" by placing a woman

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