Flanner, Hildegarde

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FLANNER, Hildegarde

Born 3 June 1899, Indianapolis, Indiana; died May 1987

Daughter of Frank W. and Mary-Ellen Hockett Flanner; married Frederick Monhoff, 1926

Sister of author Janet Flanner (Genêt), Hildegarde Flanner attended Sweet Briar College, Virginia, from 1917 to 1918, and then the University of California at Berkeley until 1923. She lived in California after her marriage to Frederick Monhoff in 1926.

Flanner's first book of poems, Young Girl (1920), published when she was twenty-one, won the Emily Chamberlain Cook prize at the University of California. In addition to books of poetry, she published several plays (Mansions, 1920, and The White Bridge, 1938), essays on poets and poetry, and articles about the Southwest.

Poems written out of Flanner's own experience or about other women are extraordinary but rather few in number. Two of these are found in the aforementioned Young Girl. In "Dianthus" the narrator recalls that her grandmother, who picked Dianthus (commonly called Sweet William), "Did Vergil into French / And then had seven children." "I shall not pick you, / Dianthus," the narrator concludes. "Discovery" tells of a girl whose aunts have praised her "mild" and "gentle soul," but who finds, when looking in a mirror for this phenomenon, "a joyful little sin"—a female body with sexual desires. The subtle, understated rejection of traditional female roles in "Dianthus" and the open, honest treatment of female sexuality in "Discovery" are rare to poetry of this period; both poems portray the realistic, feminist persona of a kind that Edna St. Vincent Millay and other women poets of the 1920s were to choose.

Flanner's one-act play Mansions is another feminist work. Lydia, twenty-seven, and her younger brother Joe are dominated by their Aunt Harriet, who is trying to make Lydia like herself, a recluse dedicated to the memory of all the old, dead men of the family, and to making Joe follow their profession. Lydia is resentful and rebellious in a childlike manner, until Joe, who is mysteriously dying, teaches her one must have one's own work—that she must be strong and leave her aunt in order to live her own life.

If There Is Time (1942) contains successful poems involving women and the female experience. In "Hawk is a Woman" and "Rattlesnake," wild creatures are the ostensible subjects, but they become metaphors for human behavior. The two poems are actually attacks on certain kinds of women—they are hate poems, revenge poems—but they are strong and powerful. "Never Ask Why," which uses the same metaphorical technique, is on the surface a poem about cruelty in nature—a lion killing a doe—but on another level it expresses rage and sorrow for the helpless condition of women, for the use of them as sexual objects: the doe is "gentle meat"; "the riding lion" feeds on her "soft loin."

Flanner's poetic subjects include nature, love, city and surburban life, patriotism, and religious faith. Her prosodic techniques range from free verse to traditional forms. Critical reception of her work has been as varied as her subjects and styles; at her best she is, as one critic put it, "right and honest."

Other Works:

This Morning (1921). A Tree in Bloom and Other Verses (1924). Time's Profile (1929). In Native Light (1972). The Harkening Eye (1979). A Vanishing Land (1980). A Christmas Keepsake (1983). For A Clean House (1984). Brief Cherishing: A Napa Valley Harvest (1985). At the Gentle Mercy of Plants: Essays and Poem (1986). Different Images: Portraits of Remembered People (1987). Poems (1988). The Berkeley Fire: Memoirs and Mementos… (1992).

Various short stories, "Arrived" on The Ahsahta Cassette Sampler (audiocassette, 1983), "What Is That Sound?" (broad-side, 1986), "Bamboo: An Honest Love Affair" in Roots and Branches: Contemporary Essays by West Coast Writers (1991), and "A Vanishing Land" in Natural State: A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing (1998).