An Open Letter To The Moon Analysis

Scholars have long attempted to justify the prevalence of the occult in Guiney’s works without damaging the legacy of her self-professed Catholic faith. In her memorial-biography of Guiney, Alice Brown asserts that while Guiney was definitely “Christian in belief, she was pagan in the listening nerves of her” (Brown 507) a statement with which Brown says Guiney agreed (506), but never fully asserts how or why that is the case. Henry Fairbanks says much the same in his biography of Guiney, reaffirming Guiney’s Christian faith while calling her reverence for nature “pagan-primitive” (Fairbanks 45-46). According to Fairbanks (and contradicting Brown’s account), Guiney protested these analyses of her work, arguing that her “sympathy with the mythic-mysterious” was merely a love of nature, rather than pagan (46), though …show more content…
For, while antimodernism offers a provocative aperture through which we can analyze Guiney’s works, I believe that in certain cases—as in “An Open Letter to the Moon”—it is absolutely essential to also examine the gender biases of those antimodern elements. If we read “An Open Letter” plainly, we perceive a quirky, if passionate, ode to mythology and a lament for times gone by. However, when read taking gender into account, “An Open Letter” becomes a powerful, hopeful, antimodernist dream wherein women come together to reawaken and rediscover the authority and agency of their own inherent, cosmic, pre-civilized, womanhood. Ironically, in reaching back past modernity, past civilization, into an age when the world concerned only men, women, and the cosmos, Guiney finds the potential for women to be powerful, reckonable, and fierce because of their femininity, not despite of it; which is, by all accounts, a very modern notion after