A Jelly-Fish
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Background
Literary Context
While Moore is known as a quintessentially modernist poet, “A Jelly-Fish” is one of her earliest poems and is a vivid bridge between her great 19th-century influence, Dickinson, and the radical modernist style she would later adopt. The poem’s formal features, which typify Dickinson, include the short line length, use of caesura, and rhyme. In terms of content, Dickinson’s poems also used animals to symbolize a desired state of unity with nature, and a counterpoint to implied human or humanmade faults, as in: “Civilization – spurns – the Leopard! / Was the Leopard – bold? / Deserts never rebuked her Satin / Ethiop her gold.” As these lines show, however, Moore’s tone is, in other ways, entirely different, refusing to anthropomorphize the jellyfish and instead merely describing, with extreme precision, how it appears to an unidentified human observer whose only characteristic is their desire to reach out for the creature. The uncertain status of this observer places the poem as a forerunner of modernism. While behind “The Leopard” lies Dickinson the poet, expressing her convictions about female oppression and spiritual longing, Moore’s “you” seems to exist only in relation to the creature observed; this “you” occupies a dubious position in the moral universe of the poem. A negative view of mass consumerist society was a key feature of high modernism, expressed by Eliot in lines such as “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men” (“Journey of the Magi”). The “you” in “A Jelly-Fish” could be seen as a forerunner of this critique of consumerism, with the arm’s continual grasping alluding to the mechanisms that propel a consumerist society and potentially reduce individuals to no more than the sum of their ever-changing desires.
Historical Context
The first decade of the 20th century—during which Moore moved from the Midwest to Pennsylvania, attended Bryn Mawr college, and began writing poems—was one of rapid economic expansion. U.S. cities such as New York and Philadelphia were growing rapidly, helped by the benefits of widely available electricity and improved transport links. Figures such as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan were able to amass extraordinary wealth by dominating their competitors in market sectors such as oil and electric power. The natural world was seen as a resource that, with the help of science, could be exploited at every turn by capitalist endeavor. Moore herself was an indirect beneficiary of this state-driven capitalism: Following her graduation from Bryn Mawr, she gained employment as a teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution set up for the dubious purpose of integrating Native Americans as “useful” economically productive citizens—a process that is routinely euphemized as “assimilation.”
If this was a case of necessity for the young poet, it does not mean she was satisfied with the status quo of her times. From her college days onwards, she was active in the suffrage movement that culminated in women’s right to vote being enshrined nationally in 1920. Bethany Hicok points out that Bryn Mawr and other all-female colleges were important in creating a new kind of women who were unafraid to voice their opinions on society, art, and culture (Hicok, Bethany. “To Work ‘Lovingly’: Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr, 1905-1909,” Journal of Modern Literature, 2000). “A Jelly-Fish” is nothing like the feminist call-to-arms of Moore’s poem “Marriage,” or the poetic manifesto of “Poetry”; but the young poet was undoubtedly conscious of being at odds with her mechanized, male-dominated industrial society. In a poem all about observing and grasping at something beyond reach, there is clear symbolism for the desire for a pure form of expression that makes sense of a corrupted and confusing capitalist world. At the time the poem was written, this society was still five years away from the mass carnage of World War I, out of which modernism would bloom as a wider artistic response.
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