19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gwen HarwoodIn The Park
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Philosophical Context: Wittgenstein's Effect on Harwood
When they moved to Tasmania, Harwood received from her husband a philosophical treatise work, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written during World War I and translated into English in 1922, the work attempts to clarify the connection between words and the reality that they ostensibly refer to. The treatise's concise form contains numbered and prioritized declarative statements rather than arguments. It has since become one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.
Wittgenstein's writing influenced the content and imagery of Harwood’s poems in several ways. The section on the picture theory of language, or the picture theory of meaning, stands out as a potential influence on Harwood’s writing, particularly the moment between the woman and her former love in “In the Park.” Wittgenstein's theory refers to the wide gap between verbal and nonverbal modes of expression and the importance of statements connecting to real-world images. In Harwood's poem, we see that the surface conversation between the man and the woman bears little resemblance to the reality of their emotional states; what they say is ruled by social expectations and convention, while they are unable to express what they really mean and feel.
Additionally, Wittgenstein was interested in the truth conditions of language, or the conditions under which a sentence could be true—even if these conditions are not necessarily the current reality. This concept relates to what-if's Harwood's poem introduces: The man's explicit thought that he could easily have been trapped in the woman's position, and the woman's glimpse into her life's possible other path as the man's partner.
Authorial Context: The Limits of Biographical Interpretation
As is often the case with women writers—and to a much lesser degree with men—there is a tendency for critics to read Harwood's work through a biographical lens. While it may be helpful to examine pieces like Harwood’s autobiographical essay “Lamplight Presences” (1980) for her feelings about her own life and to see connections between her personal experiences and the people and situations in her poems, focusing on biographical explanations is in the end both limiting and dismissive—the idea that an author based everything she wrote on her own life suggests that she was incapable of the imaginative and empathic leap to write about fictional events.
In "Lamplight Presences," Harwood wrote about her feelings of dislocation in her adopted home: “Tasmania has always given me a feeling of exile. When I got off the plane here 35 years ago, a voice told me, this is beautiful, but not your place. Some of this sense of isolation appears in “In the Park,” but the poem's setting is a park that could be in any city, and its characters are not necessarily transplants or expatriates—nor would the woman in the poem describe her environment as "beautiful."
Similarly, it is tempting to point to the maternal disaffection of the poem as stemming from Harwood's own unhappiness in domesticity. Harwood came from a line of strong women, including her feminist mother, a teacher and community organizer, and her grandmother, who earned her own living until age 80. However, Harwood also wrote that she found homemaking fulfilling: “I like the domestic scene because it springs from early childhood. I love cooking and reading and just caring for a family," adding her belief that some measure of immortality comes from having children. Thus, simply viewing poems like “In the Park” and “Suburban Sonnet” as the diaristic revelations of Harwood herself is both inaccurate and over-simplistic. Rather, what is interesting about these works is not their biographical ties to their author, but their honest exploration of the painful sacrifices of motherhood and marriage’s negative impact on creativity—topics not typically addressed by 20th century women authors.
