October 1, 2025 - English Studies

“Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett: Summary and Critique

“Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett first appeared in 2019 as Chapter 6 of his book Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease.

Introduction: “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

“Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett first appeared in 2019 as Chapter 6 of his book Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease, published by NYU Press. In this chapter, Bennett examines the Smithsonian’s “Birth of Biotech” exhibit, particularly its framing of recombinant insulin as both a scientific triumph and a symbol of American progress. By analyzing the use of a child’s image alongside biotechnology, he shows how cultural memory, nationalism, and capitalism are intertwined in the representation of medical innovation. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s “cyborg manifesto,” Bennett situates diabetes management technologies—such as insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitors, and artificial pancreas prototypes—as extensions of the human body that blur the boundaries between organism and machine. He highlights how these devices create a “cyborg consciousness” in which survival depends on technological integration, yet also exposes patients to corporate exploitation, rising costs, and the burden of constant self-surveillance. The chapter is significant for literature and literary theory because it extends cyborg theory beyond science fiction into lived medical practices, illustrating how metaphors like “progress,” “purity,” and “miracle” shape illness narratives and public discourse. Bennett’s work underscores the importance of reading medical technologies as cultural texts that reveal the biopolitical dynamics of hope, risk, and consumerism.

Summary of “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

✺🌸 Birth of Biotech, Memory, and “Progress” (Bennett, 2019)

Reads the Smithsonian’s 2013 “Birth of Biotech” exhibit as a national myth that sacralizes recombinant insulin as American ingenuity while sidelining public institutions and complexities of risk.
The child-with-syringe image sutures care, futurity, and capitalism—suggesting a seamless path from lab to self-care even though the photo predates recombinant insulin.

Key move: exposes how “progress” functions as a god-term organizing memory and policy talk, pairing hope with unease.
“Progress…won the day,” yet the display “quietly underscores” anxiety and omission (Bennett, 2019).

✺🌼 Cyborg Manifestations: Bodies-Machines Informatics (Bennett, 2019)

Mobilizes Haraway to show everyday diabetes management as cyborg life: pumps/CGMs make the body–machine boundary porous and data-saturated.

Diabetes subjects become experts performing continuous self-surveillance in and beyond the clinic.
Quote (via Haraway, as cited by Bennett): “we are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism” (Bennett, 2019).
Literary payoff: the “cyborg” shifts from sci-fi trope to analytic for lived embodiment, discourse, and power.

✺🌷 Insulin’s “Miracle” and Its Lexicon of Risk (Bennett, 2019)

Insulin’s 1922 debut reframed narratives from fatalism to manageability, but also spawned a grammar of routine, vigilance, and new dangers (e.g., hypoglycemia).
Public euphoria eclipsed hesitations—insulin as a “precious but flawed miracle” (Bennett, 2019).

Management discourse mixes agency (“activated patient”) with ever-present uncertainty.

✺🌺 From Animal to “Human” Insulin: Technobiopower & Marketing (Bennett, 2019)

Recombinant “human” insulin celebrated as purification and abundance, yet initially no clear health superiority over porcine/bovine forms; it narrowed consumer choice and intensified hypoglycemia for many.
Bennett tracks a shift from patient to consumer, where adopting the “new” becomes moralized (“living in the past”).

“Technobiopower” names the nexus of surveillance, individualized responsibility, and market expansion (Bennett, 2019).
Ad rhetoric manufactures urgency: “He’s four years old. And already he’s living in the past” (Bennett, 2019).

✺🌻 Pumps, CGMs, and the Hybrid Loop: Promise with Discipline (Bennett, 2019)

Pumps offer granular dosing and mobility; CGMs heighten temporal awareness—yet both demand relentless testing, calibration, site changes, and alarm management.
Hybrid closed-loop systems automate more tasks but still require carb entry and vigilance—producing the feeling of “unconscious control” without relinquishing labor.
Community voices reveal ambivalence: “I do not want to be a walking cyborg” (Bennett, 2019).

Clinicians worry about over-reliance; users worry about cost, reliability, sleep disruption, privacy, and DKA risk.

✺🌹 Evergreening, Price Spikes, and the Cost of Being Ill (Bennett, 2019)

Insulin prices soared; patent “evergreening” sustains profits and blocks true generics, forcing trade-offs (medicine vs. mortgage).

Bennett reframes insulin from “Lazarus effect” to hostage economy—patients conscripted into choice architectures designed by oligopolies.
Quote: companies price insulin by “the value” it brings—Bennett shows how such value talk masks engineered scarcity (Bennett, 2019).
Activist lexicon (“evergreening,” “single-payer”) becomes rhetorical equipment for reform.

✺🌼 Literary/Theoretical Stakes: Metaphor, Narrative, Biopolitics (Bennett, 2019)

Tracks how tropes—progress, purity, miracle, fatalism, agency—organize museum labels, ads, policy, and patient forums.

Argues for reading devices and data as cultural texts: narratives of ease conceal labor; “epidemic” can mobilize resources and stigmatize.
Quote: tropes are “places where you trip… breakdowns… are creative” (Bennett, 2019).
Contribution: a method for situating illness narratives in political economy—extending cyborg/disability rhetoric into chronic-care infrastructures.

✺🌸 Conclusion: Cyborg Hopes, Collective Futures (Bennett, 2019)

Technology widens horizons but without structural change reproduces inequity; activism must target markets and policy, not just devices.
Calls for shifting from individualized “activated patient” myths to community-centered health imaginaries.
Change is incremental but possible when lived experience and critical vocabulary circulate together.

Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

🌸 Theoretical Term / Concept 🌸	🌼 Example from Cyborg Dreams 🌼	🌺 Explanation 🌺
🌷 Cyborg Manifesto (Donna Haraway) 🌷	Bennett cites Haraway’s claim that “we are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism,” applying it to insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors.	Diabetes technologies illustrate Haraway’s cyborg heuristic, blurring human/machine boundaries. Patients live as cyborgs, dependent on devices for survival.
🌹 Technobiopower 🌹	Recombinant “human” insulin marketed as superior though not always medically better; patients pressured into adopting it to avoid “living in the past.”	Bennett adapts Foucault’s biopower: technologies both sustain life and discipline patients, binding them to surveillance, market logics, and consumer subjectivity.
🌻 God Term: Progress 🌻	Smithsonian’s “Birth of Biotech” exhibit consecrates recombinant insulin as national “progress,” pairing child’s image with biotech machinery.	Following Richard Weaver, Bennett shows “progress” as America’s god term—structuring memory, obscuring risks, and legitimizing corporate capitalism.
🌸 Fatalism vs. Agentic Subject 🌸	Humulin ad: “He’s four years old. And already he’s living in the past.”	Fatalism frames older therapies as dangerous; the “agentic patient” trope insists on constant vigilance, creating moral pressure to adopt new technologies.
🌼 Tropes and Tropological Tripping 🌼	Haraway: “Tropes are places where you trip… breakdowns… are creative.” Bennett notes CGM malfunctions or insulin price hikes as such “trippings.”	Tropes like “miracle,” “purity,” or “progress” carry contradictions. Failures expose fissures, opening spaces for critique, resistance, and new meaning-making.
🌺 Miracle / Precious but Flawed Miracle 🌺	Discovery of insulin in 1922 hailed as miraculous, yet created new risks (hypoglycemia, strict routines).	Insulin transformed lives but introduced new disciplines. Bennett shows miracles as culturally constructed, simultaneously redemptive and burdensome.
🌷 Evergreening 🌷	Corporations extend patents by tweaking insulin formulas, blocking generics; Humulin marketed as “living in the future.”	A capitalist strategy of innovation without novelty. Patients are trapped in cycles of dependence, framed as choice, while corporations profit.
🌹 Unconscious Control Fantasy 🌹	Hybrid closed-loop systems advertised as effortless, yet require carb entry, calibration, vigilance.	A recurring fantasy in medical rhetoric: technology will manage the body “automatically.” In practice, labor intensifies, sustaining the myth of ease.
🌻 Surveillance & Datafication 🌻	Pumps and CGMs produce endless data streams; patients must monitor, calibrate, and adjust constantly.	Medical devices enact surveillance biopolitics, producing subjects who internalize responsibility and normalize corporate capture of health data.
🌸 Child-as-Metonym 🌸	Smithsonian exhibit photo of a boy injecting insulin; Eli Lilly ad with child framed as “living in the past.”	Children embody futurity and national hope; their images sacralize technology while masking timelines, risks, and market exploitation.

Contribution of “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett to Literary Theory/Theories

🌸 Posthumanism / Cyborg Theory
- Extends Haraway’s claim that “we are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism” by grounding it in everyday diabetes tech (pumps, CGMs), showing the lived cyborg beyond sci-fi (Bennett, “Cyborg Dreams”).Reframes the human–machine boundary as a chronic, routine dependency (“life apart from these technologies is inconceivable”) to theorize the mundane posthuman (Bennett).
- Uses museum display and advertising to show how cyborg embodiment is culturally authorized and sentimentalized via the child’s body (Bennett).

🌺 Biopolitics / (Techno)biopower
- Coins and operationalizes a diabetes-specific “technobiopower”: devices sustain life and conscript subjects into surveillance, self-discipline, and market routines (Bennett).Demonstrates how algorithmic care and datafication relocate clinical power into domestic time (“constant vigilance,” calibration), extending biopower into intimate rhythms (Bennett).
- Quote: insulin becomes a “precious but flawed miracle,” revealing power/knowledge’s ambivalence (Bennett).

🌷 Rhetorical Theory / Tropology
- Models “tropological tripping” (after Haraway) as a critical method: where “breakdowns” in tech rhetoric (CGM lag, pump failures, cost spikes) open analytic leverage (Bennett).
- Dissects god-terms (“progress”) that organize museum memory and erase risk (“The Birth of Biotech”) (Bennett).
- Shows how tropes—miracle, purity, progress, futurity—naturalize corporate aims while scripting patient conduct (Bennett).
- Quote: tropes are “places where you trip… breakdowns… are creative” (Bennett quoting Haraway).
🌼 Narrative Theory / Medical Humanities
- Tracks genre shifts from fatalism → “happily-ever-after” cure tales post-1922, exposing how miracle narratives mask labor and risk (Bennett).Reads ad copy (“He’s four years old. And already he’s living in the past.”) as a conversion narrative that manufactures the future-oriented consumer subject (Bennett).
- Repositions chronic illness stories as time-disciplining plots (meals, alarms, calibrations), complicating “ease of management” scripts (Bennett).
🌹 Memory Studies / Museum & Display Theory
- Close-reads the Smithsonian exhibit’s juxtaposition (boy + biotech machinery) to theorize mnemoscapes that retroactively produce cause-and-effect myths (Bennett).
- Shows how national memory consecrates biotech as American exceptionalism, suturing scientific “progress” to civic futurity (Bennett).
- Quote: exhibits foster “faith… in technological advancements” even as “risk murmurs throughout” (Bennett).

🌻 Science & Technology Studies (STS) / Sociology of Expectations
- Situates recombinant insulin and hybrid closed-loop systems in an “economy of promise,” where hype (“game changer”) coexists with user labor (carb entry, finger-sticks) (Bennett).
- Analyzes failure, lag, and calibration as socio-technical frictions, not bugs, revealing the labor of making technologies “work” (Bennett).
- Maps platformization of care (cloud CGM) and emergent data governance questions (Bennett).
🌸 Disability Studies / Critical Medical Ethics
- Rejects a nostalgic “natural” body by showing that for many, the “natural state” is lethal; technology is access and survival (Bennett).
- Exposes intra-community moralism (Type 1 vs. Type 2 shaming) as ableist discipline reproduced by techno-rhetorics of responsibility (Bennett).
- Centers affordability as an accessibility axis: price renders tech “out of reach,” reframing cure/management as a justice problem (Bennett).
🌺 Political Economy / Marxist Cultural Critique
- Names insulin evergreening as accumulation strategy: “innovation without novelty” that blocks generics and manufactures scarcity (Bennett).
- Reads Humulin’s marketing and synchronized price hikes as ideological practices that convert dependency into brand loyalty (Bennett).
- Quote: users feel firms are “holding my kid ransom,” translating exploitation into a potent cultural metaphor (Bennett).

🌷 Affect Theory
- Tracks ambivalence—hope, dread, vigilance, shame—as the affective atmosphere of chronic care under technocapitalism (Bennett).
- Museum awe, ad tenderness, alarm fatigue, cost anxiety: affect is how power adheres to bodies and decisions (Bennett).
- Quote: “enthusiasm marks the public transcript… the hidden transcript is often one of suspicion” (Bennett).
🌼 Semiotics / Visual Culture
- Interprets the child-as-metonym (exhibit photo, Humulin ad) as a sign for national futurity that legitimates biotech and obscures timelines (Bennett).
- Unpacks color/placement (BW child vs. colorful machine) as semiotic cues staging progress, purity, and causality (Bennett).
🌹 Ethics of Care / Communitarian Theory
- Shifts from the atomized “agentic subject” to communal frames—advocacy, regulation, universal access—arguing care is infrastructural, not merely individual virtue (Bennett).
- Proposes linguistic resources (“evergreening,” “single-payer”) as public tools to re-narrate obligations (Bennett).

Examples of Critiques Through “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

🌸 Literary Work 🌸	🌺 Critique Through Cyborg Dreams 🌺	🌻 Reference from Bennett 🌻
🌷 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 🌷	Shelley’s creature anticipates the “cyborg” as an assemblage of flesh and technology. Through Bennett’s lens, Frankenstein illustrates how cultural anxieties around science mirror contemporary fears of recombinant insulin and hybrid closed-loop systems. Both narratives link “progress” to unease.	Bennett critiques the Smithsonian’s Birth of Biotech exhibit, noting how the child with syringe enshrines “progress” while muting risk—similar to how Frankenstein’s monster embodies both promise and dread (Bennett, Cyborg Dreams).
🌹 Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto 🌹	While Haraway theorizes the cyborg abstractly, Bennett grounds it in chronic illness. Literary critics can use his extension to rethink Haraway’s claims in terms of lived embodiment, showing how technologies like insulin pumps produce “cyborg consciousness” as an everyday condition.	“We are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism” (Haraway, cited in Bennett). Bennett reworks this as materialized in diabetes management.
🌻 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 🌻	Huxley’s dystopia commodifies life through pharmaceuticals. Bennett’s account of “evergreening” and insulin pricing parallels this, exposing how markets conscript patients into consumption cycles. Both texts critique how corporate logics redefine what it means to live.	Bennett: companies price insulin based on “the value it brings,” turning survival into hostage economics (Bennett, Cyborg Dreams).
🌸 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 🌸	Ishiguro’s clones live as biomedical resources; their lives are structured by care systems that sustain yet exploit them. Bennett’s concept of “technobiopower” illuminates this paradox—where bodies are both preserved and disciplined by medical innovation.	Bennett: recombinant insulin narrowed choice and bound patients to market logics, illustrating how technobiopower manages life while reducing agency (Bennett, Cyborg Dreams).

Criticism Against “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

· 🌸 Overreliance on Haraway’s Framework

Critics may argue that Bennett leans too heavily on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, using it more as a metaphorical anchor than interrogating its limits.
By foregrounding Haraway, other posthumanist or disability-centered frameworks may be sidelined.

· 🌺 Technological Determinism Risk

The chapter sometimes frames pumps, CGMs, and hybrid closed-loop systems as almost inevitable extensions of the body.
This could underplay patient resistance, alternative care practices, or communities that reject such integration.

· 🌻 Limited Patient Voices

While Bennett cites community discussions and ads, the dominant lens is rhetorical analysis of institutions (Smithsonian, Eli Lilly).

Critics may claim that the actual lived narratives of diverse diabetic patients (race, class, global South contexts) remain underrepresented.

· 🌷 Focus on U.S.-Centric Contexts

The analysis centers primarily on American biotech, museums, and pharmaceutical markets.
This could be seen as limiting the universality of “cyborg” politics in chronic illness management.

· 🌹 Ambivalence on Agency

Bennett critiques the “activated patient” trope, yet at times reproduces the idea of patients as passive recipients of technobiopower.
A critic might ask: where is the space for patient creativity, refusal, or collective resistance?

· 🌼 Economic Analysis Not Fully Developed

While “evergreening” and insulin pricing are addressed, the critique of pharmaceutical capitalism might appear descriptive rather than deeply theorized through Marxist or political economy traditions.

· 🌸 Museum and Ad Rhetoric as Over-Determined

Some may find Bennett’s close readings of museum exhibits and advertisements compelling but overly speculative, assigning ideological weight that the curators or designers may not have consciously intended.

· 🌺 Insufficient Engagement with Disability Studies

Though Bennett gestures toward disability politics, critics might note that the chapter does not fully integrate insights from disability activism and scholarship, especially regarding autonomy, access, and justice.

Representative Quotations from “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett with Explanation

🌼 Quotation	What Bennett is doing / why it matters
✨ “Diabetes is a chronic condition, one marked by its relationship to time (chronos), and technology functions to alleviate the unknowns that dwell in one’s future.”	Frames diabetes through temporality: devices (pumps, CGMs, artificial pancreas) promise to manage uncertainty over time, linking care to futurity and risk.
🌸 “In Haraway’s words, ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.’”	Imports Haraway to ground a posthuman reading of diabetes tech—situating patients within machine–organism hybrids and opening political questions about bodies and care.
🌺 “To separate the person with diabetes from modern medical innovations is to invite their demise.”	Pushes past metaphor: for many, tech isn’t optional but life-sustaining—tightening the ethical stakes of access, affordability, and design.
🌻 “Insulin was a ‘precious but flawed miracle.’”	Complicates triumphal narratives: insulin saves lives yet produces new risks, routines, and dependencies—inviting a more ambivalent history of ‘progress.’
🌷 “[S]uffice it to say for now that a ‘technobiopower’ had emerged in the United States around diabetes technologies.”	Names a power formation where bodies are managed through surveillance, data, and markets—tying clinical life to consumer capitalism.
🌼 “Despite all its advantages, the closed-loop system demands a more activated patient, not one prone to apathy and neglect.”	Counters fantasies of ‘automation’: hybrid systems still require labor, literacy, and vigilance—so technology can intensify, not erase, self-management.
🌹 “I do not want to be a walking cyborg.”	A patient’s refusal captures ambivalence toward embodiment-with-devices, reminding us that ‘cyborg’ is lived, negotiated, and sometimes rejected.
💠 “The once affordable medication climbed 300 percent in less than a decade…”	Pivots from devices to economics: dramatizes the pricing crisis as a political failure with life-or-death consequences.
🌟 “…the revitalization and extension of patents through the practice of ‘evergreening.’”	Gives a critical keyword for advocacy: shows how incremental tweaks sustain monopolies and foreclose generics (‘biosimilars’) in insulin.
🪷 “If only someone listens.”	Ends on a rhetorical plea: centers lived experience as a resource for transforming policy, narratives, and care infrastructures.

“What the Living Do” by Marie How: A Critical Analysis

Introduction: “What the Living Do” by Marie How

“What the Living Do” by Marie Howe first appeared in her 1997 collection of the same name, and from the first line it announces itself as a work of startling simplicity that conceals within it the inexhaustible depths of elegy. This is a poem written for her brother John, claimed by AIDS, yet it refuses the grandiose and the rhetorical; instead, it immerses itself in the clogged kitchen sink, the Drano’s acrid smell, the spilled coffee on a Cambridge sidewalk. Such details, seemingly banal, become the very theatre of survival, the testament of what remains when the dead are remembered through the unendurable persistence of the everyday. “This is what the living do”—the refrain hovers between sorrow and exaltation, a chant of grief transfigured into a hymn for the common life. The reason for its enduring popularity is not sentimentality but rather Howe’s gift for locating the sacred in the utterly ordinary, the moment when one glimpses oneself in a window and is “gripped by a cherishing so deep” that life itself, even in its chapped faces and unbuttoned coats, becomes a form of astonishment. The poem survives, as her brother does not, because it embodies the terrible beauty of continuing.

Text: “What the Living Do” by Marie How

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Annotations: “What the Living Do” by Marie How

Line / Excerpt	Annotation (Simple English)	Device(s)
“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.”	She speaks to her brother Johnny. The clogged sink shows daily struggles.	Apostrophe 👤, Symbolism 🔧
“And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called.”	Chores pile up; life continues in small frustrations.	Imagery 👃🍽️, Realism 🏠
“This is the everyday we spoke of.”	She recalls conversations with Johnny about ordinary life.	Memory 🕰️, Refrain 🔔
“It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.”	Nature’s beauty (sky, sunlight) contrasts with indoor discomfort.	Personification 🌌, Imagery ☀️
“For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do.”	Simple acts (driving, groceries falling) symbolize the fragility of life.	Symbolism 🛒, Refrain 🔔
“And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.”	Everyday events (coffee spill, buying a hairbrush) remind her that she is alive.	Imagery ☕, Repetition 🔁
“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”	Short fragments mimic breath and daily actions.	Fragmented Syntax ✂️, Realism ❄️
“What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.”	Johnny called it yearning; he gave it up in death. Contrast between living and dying.	Contrast ⚖️, Ellipsis … 💔
“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.”	Human desire for renewal, love, and connection. Endless yearning.	Anaphora 🌱, Repetition 🔁, Symbolism 💌
“But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:”	Reflection becomes a moment of revelation; she cherishes her imperfect life.	Metaphor 🪞, Juxtaposition ❤️❄️, Epiphany ✨
“I am living. I remember you.”	Final declaration: to live is to remember. Life and memory coexist.	Paradox ⚖️, Closure 🔚

Literary And Poetic Devices: “What the Living Do” by Marie How

Device	Example	Explanation
Alliteration 🎶	“won’t work”; “We want”; “bag breaking”; “walking, when”	Repetition of the same initial consonant sound in successive words adds rhythmic emphasis and mimics the poem’s physical, lived motion.
Anaphora 🌱	“We want the spring… We want whoever to call…”	Repeating “We want” highlights insatiable human longing for renewal, contact, and more life.
Apostrophe 🌸	“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days…”	Direct address to her deceased brother creates intimacy and a conversation with absence.
Closure 🔚	“I am living. I remember you.”	Ends by tying survival and memory together, offering a firm, resonant finish.
Colloquial Diction 👜	“buying a hairbrush”	Plain, everyday vocabulary roots the poem in ordinary speech and experience.
Contrast ⚖️	“What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.”	Sets life’s desire against the finality of death, sharpening grief’s edge.
Ellipsis …	“What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.”	The sense of an unfinished thought enacts the inexpressibility and rupture of loss.
Epiphany ✨	“I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep… I am living.”	A sudden, transformative realization of the miracle of being alive in ordinary time.
Fragmented Syntax ✂️	“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”	Abrupt, breath-like fragments mirror bodily movement and the mind in grief.
Imagery (Olfactory) 🌿	“Drano… smells dangerous”	Smell detail grounds the scene in the gritty textures of daily life.
Imagery (Visual) 🌅	“The sky’s a deep, headstrong blue”	Vivid color and quality of light amplify the ordinary day’s stark beauty.
Juxtaposition ❤️❄️	“blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat”	Sets imperfect, rough details beside profound cherishing to reveal beauty in the ordinary.
Metaphor 🪞	“glimpse of myself in the window glass”	Reflection becomes a figure for sudden self-awareness and living presence.
Paradox ♾️	“I am living. I remember you.”	Life and grief coexist; to live fully is to carry memory of the dead.
Personification 🌌	“sky’s a deep, headstrong blue”	Grants the sky a willf

Themes: “What the Living Do” by Marie How

🌸 The Sanctification of the Ordinary: In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, the clogged sink, the broken grocery bag, the spilled coffee—all these details of banality become sacraments of survival. Howe knows, as Whitman knew, that the commonplace is never merely common, that to name the ordinary is to redeem it. When she writes, “This is what the living do,” she affirms that existence does not reside in heroic deeds but in the stubborn endurance of the daily. The “headstrong blue” sky pouring light through the window is not a metaphor for transcendence but a reminder that life itself resists reduction. Howe’s genius lies in this transfiguration of the mundane into the sublime, so that the cracked syntax of chores and errands becomes a liturgy of presence. This theme asserts that the act of living, in all its frustrating interruptions, is the miracle we too often overlook.

🌿 Grief as Continuance: “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe is at once a lament and a testament: it speaks to her dead brother John while insisting on the survivor’s stubborn persistence. To address him—“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”—is to refuse silence, to enact an intimacy across the abyss of death. The poem’s rhythm is fractured, like the heart that utters it, yet it insists: “I am living. I remember you.” Memory is grief’s extension into life, and grief itself becomes a mode of continuation. Here Howe aligns herself with Dickinson’s paradox: to mourn is to live twice, once for oneself and once for the absent beloved. This theme recognizes that grief is not opposed to vitality; rather, it is its condition. To remember the dead is not to deny life but to deepen it, transforming mourning into an ongoing testimony of being.

🌹 Yearning and Insatiability: In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, yearning emerges as the most human of hungers, endless and unappeasable. She writes, “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.” Here desire is portrayed not as romantic aspiration but as a relentless condition of existence, a refusal ever to be satisfied. This yearning, which her brother “finally gave up,” is both tragic and luminous: tragic because it leads inevitably to loss, luminous because it is the engine of life itself. Howe touches the Emersonian impulse that to live is to desire without end, to reach toward an impossible plenitude. The poem makes clear that such insatiability is not weakness but strength—the will to continue in a world where absence defines presence.

🌼 Self-Awareness and Cherishing: “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe culminates in a moment of startling epiphany: “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass… and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep… I am living.” Here the theme is not narcissism but self-recognition as existence itself. To see one’s own “blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat” and to love it is to discover the inexhaustible gift of being. Howe elevates the shabby particulars of the self into revelations of vitality, echoing Whitman’s celebration of the imperfect body as divine text. This cherishing is not vanity but gratitude, a recognition that survival is both privilege and responsibility. In Bloom’s terms, this is Howe’s clinamen, her strong misreading of elegy: she writes not only of the dead but also of the living self as a fragile, beloved figure. The theme insists that self-awareness, in its rawest form, is the highest affirmation.

Literary Theories and “What the Living Do” by Marie How

Theory	Application to the Poem	References from the Poem
New Criticism 🌸	Focuses on the poem’s language, imagery, and structure without outside context. The repetition of “This is what the living do” functions as a refrain, reinforcing the central theme of survival through ordinary acts. The fragmented syntax—“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”—creates rhythm and reflects the texture of daily life.	“This is what the living do.” / “Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”
Psychoanalytic Theory 🌿	Reads the poem as a working-through of grief and unconscious desire. Addressing her dead brother Johnny—“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”—acts as a therapeutic dialogue with absence. The yearning for “more and more” suggests an insatiable desire rooted in loss and Freud’s notion of mourning and melancholia.	“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days…” / “We want more and more and then more of it.”
Feminist Theory 🌹	Howe writes in a voice that elevates domestic, everyday tasks (dishes, groceries, coffee spills) traditionally dismissed as “women’s work.” By sacralizing the ordinary—“the crusty dishes have piled up”—she resists patriarchal hierarchies that privilege heroic or public acts over the private sphere.	“The crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber…” / “buying a hairbrush”
Reader-Response Theory 🌼	The poem invites readers to insert their own experiences into the litany of ordinary acts. When Howe writes “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass… I am living. I remember you,” the reader feels both the affirmation of life and the burden of memory, recognizing their own reflections of grief and survival.	“I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass…” / “I am living. I remember you.”

Critical Questions about “What the Living Do” by Marie How

🌸 Question 1: How does Howe sanctify the ordinary in her elegy? In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, the ordinary becomes luminous, almost sacramental, precisely because it resists transcendence. The clogged kitchen sink, the dangerous smell of Drano, the spilled coffee—all are beneath the register of traditional elegy, yet they become its central liturgy. Howe insists that “This is what the living do”—a phrase that is less lament than credo. In Bloom’s sense, she performs a revisionary act, wrenching the grandeur of mourning into the sphere of domestic banality, and thereby enlarging it. The sanctification lies not in metaphor but in the refusal of metaphor; the sink remains a sink, the groceries remain broken in the street. This radical literalism elevates the poem into a hymn of the everyday, where life is measured not in triumphs but in interruptions. Howe redeems the ordinary by naming it, reminding us that survival itself is a kind of sacred persistence.

🌿 Question 2: What role does grief play in shaping the voice of the poem? “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe begins as direct address to her dead brother John—“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”—and never releases that intimacy. Grief here is not merely subject matter but the structural rhythm of the poem: fractured, halting, interrupted. The syntax breaks into fragments—“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”—as though thought itself were staggered by loss. Yet grief does not paralyze; it propels. The voice is both burdened and liberated by remembering. In Bloomian terms, this is Howe’s agon with death: she wrestles against the silence left by her brother’s absence, and the poem emerges as her victorious utterance. Grief shapes the voice into a paradox: intimate yet public, broken yet enduring, mourning yet cherishing. To grieve, Howe reminds us, is not to relinquish life but to deepen one’s claim upon it, carrying the dead within every breath of the living.

🌹 Question 3: How does Howe’s refrain “This is what the living do” define human desire?

In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, the refrain “This is what the living do” carries with it an Emersonian grandeur disguised in domestic garb. Life, as Howe presents it, is not a heroic striving but a yearning—“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass… We want more and more and then more of it.” This desire is insatiable, a hunger for renewal, for love, for contact. Her brother, she says, “finally gave up” this yearning, but the living cannot: their desire multiplies endlessly. Bloom would call this a strong misreading of elegy: instead of lamenting desire’s futility, Howe celebrates its excess. The refrain becomes a chant, defining the human condition as restless wanting, the refusal of finality. It is both tragic and redemptive: tragic because it guarantees loss, redemptive because it guarantees persistence. Human desire, for Howe, is the pulse of life itself.

🌼 Question 4: What is the significance of self-recognition in the poem’s closing lines?

The climax of “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe occurs not in grand revelation but in a moment of self-recognition: “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass… and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep… I am living. I remember you.” This is a Bloomian clinamen, a revisionary swerve in the tradition of elegy. Instead of focusing solely on the absent beloved, Howe locates grief’s culmination in the surviving self. The “blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat” are not noble images but ordinary imperfections; yet in them she perceives the miracle of existence. Self-recognition here is not vanity but gratitude: to see oneself alive is to affirm life against the pull of death. The closing lines enact a paradox: she lives, yet she remembers; she cherishes herself, yet she honors her brother. The significance lies in this doubleness, where mourning and vitality become inseparable companions.

Literary Works Similar to “What the Living Do” by Marie How

🌸 “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Like Howe’s poem, Bishop’s villanelle sanctifies the losses of everyday life, turning the act of “losing” into both discipline and elegy.

🌹 “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
Shares Howe’s focus on the ordinary rhythms of existence, where the mundane (a tired musician) transforms into a deeper reflection on survival.
🌼 “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
Mirrors Howe’s elevation of domestic tasks—Hayden’s father polishing shoes, Howe’s dishes piling up—as acts filled with love and unspoken grief.
🌺 “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
Parallels Howe’s blending of mortality and life, where the everyday carriage ride (Dickinson) and clogged sink (Howe) illuminate the inevitability of death through the lens of living.

Representative Quotations of “What the Living Do” by Marie How

Quotation	Context	Theoretical Perspective
“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”	Opens with direct address to her deceased brother; establishes intimacy through the mundane.	Psychoanalytic Theory 🌸 – Mourning as dialogue with absence, working through grief.
“And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous”	A domestic image that highlights both frustration and fragility of survival.	New Criticism 🌿 – Close reading of imagery; ordinariness becomes symbolic of life’s messiness.
“This is the everyday we spoke of.”	Remembrance of shared conversations, grounding memory in the banal.	Reader-Response 🌹 – Readers project their own ordinary routines into the text.
“It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue”	Contrasts beauty of the natural world with small domestic discomforts.	Ecocriticism 🌼 – Sky and sunlight act as forces of vitality, shaping human emotion.
“For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking”	The fragility of life revealed in trivial accidents of daily routine.	Symbolism 🌺 – Groceries breaking as emblem of precariousness and survival.
“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”	Fragmented syntax mirrors lived reality; ordinary actions gain weight.	Structuralism 🌻 – Syntax and rhythm reflect the fractured texture of life after loss.
“What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.”	Direct contrast between her brother’s surrender and her persistence.	Existentialism 🌷 – Yearning defines human condition; death marks its refusal.
“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass… We want more and more and then more of it.”	Universalizes desire; longing becomes endless and insatiable.	Post-Structuralism 🌾 – Desire as endless deferral, never fully satisfied.
“I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass”	Epiphany of self-recognition; cherishing life despite imperfection.	Feminist Theory 🌵 – Elevates female domestic and bodily presence as worthy of reverence.
“I am living. I remember you.”	Closing affirmation binds survival and grief into one.	Phenomenology 🌼 – Consciousness of being alive inseparably tied to memory of the dead.

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Day: October 1, 2025