Filling Station ESSAY criticism

Title:Critical Essay on "Filling Station"

Author(s):Sarah Madsen Hardy
Source:Poetry for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith and Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 12. Detroit: Gale
Group, 2001. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type:Critical essay

Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station" is a poem about a filthy gas station, inspired by some place the

poet presumably stopped to refuel her car in the course of her many travels. The poem's speaker is a
traveler who finds nothing less than universal love--evidence that "somebody loves us all"--in a row
of carefully arranged oil cans at the fillingstation. Thus the word "filling" in the title comes to stand
for much more than filling the gas tank up at the pump. Rather, the filling station is a place of
emotional replenishment and fulfillment. Through her description, Bishop transforms the mundane
experience of stopping for gas into one that evokes the simple and yet profound comfort of home
found in an unexpected place. This essay will explore how Bishop uses her position of traveler to
redefine the most fundamental concepts of home.
Just as she breaks down other dichotomies fundamental to the idea of home, she breaks down that
between 'us' and 'them'--the traditional family and the strange, diverse people who populate the wide
world.
"Filling Station" first appeared in Questions of Travel, a 1965 collection that focused largely
on Bishop's experiences traveling in Brazil. In the collection's title poem, Bishopposes a series of
questions, a self-interrogation about her motivations for wandering the world.
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
She concludes the poem by juxtaposing these questions of travel with a question about travel's
opposite, staying home: "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" By adding the
phrase "wherever that may be?" Bishop opens up the issue of exactly what home means and where
one can find it.
In a number of poems in Questions of Travel, Bishop seeks to answer a final question--what is home
anyway? A close reading of the poems reveals that being away from her own home offered Bishop a
release from conventional ideas of domesticity that were largely oppressive of women. Bishop rejects
these conventional ideas in favor of freer, more open and hopeful ones. This is a form of seeing
anew--"seeing the sun the other way around"--that travel allows.
As one might guess, Bishop's relationship with her own first home was a troubled one. Her
autobiographical story, In the Village, offers a glimpse into this poet's childhood, spent with a
widowed and mentally ill mother. It also expresses a deep ambivalence about the forever-lost Nova
Scotia home from which she was taken at age six, when her mother was institutionalized. Bishop was
then taken to Worcester, Massachusetts, to be raised by her grandparents. She spent most of her adult
life traveling and through her writing about strange and foreign places, she sought to find the home
that she had lost. ("I lost my mother's watch. And look! My last, or / next-to-last, of three loved
houses went," she writes in "One Art," a poem about the "art of losing.")
Home is not just something that Bishop has loved and lost, however. Her relationship with the idea of
home is further complicated by the fact that she was such a quietly unconventional
woman. Bishop was an independent, intellectual lesbian in an era of social conservatism, when the
idea of home was inextricably tied to a woman's role as wife and mother. Her refusal of these roles is
evident in her depiction of the home presented in"Filling Station" and other poems. Furthermore,
there is a long tradition amongst American women poets of writing sentimental poetry about the
pleasures of hearth and home; the literary establishment has not taken that poetry
seriously. Bishop writes unsentimentally and critically about the concepts held dear in this earlier
tradition. The redefined concept of home Bishop generates in her poetry challenges both literary and
social conventions.
One of the most fundamental, commonly held ideas of home is that it is what separates indoors from
outdoors, and, by extension, culture from nature, and humans from animals. Against this common
conception, Bishop often seeks instead to blur the distinction between indoors and out. In her
poem, "Squatter's Children," which also appears inQuestions of Travel, she envisions a home in the
torrents of rain that engulf two dirt-poor children who refuse to answer their mother's call to come in
out of the storm. The transcendent grandeur of the "rooms of falling rain" contrasts with their desolate
human environment. The home provided by nature offers them rights and agency, despite their lowly
status as "squatters," people who do not own or rent their own homes: "wet and beguiled, you stand
among / the mansions you may choose." In "Song for the Rainy Season," she describes a house that
merges with its environment.
Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog . . .
beneath the magnetic rock . . .
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint of waterfalls cling.
She celebrates the moist natural life forms that invade this house in the rainy season as a testament to
its loving inclusiveness.
House, open house . . .
to the membership of silver fish, mouse,
bookworms,
big moths; with a wall
for the mildew's ignorant map.
Closely associated with the distinction between indoors and outdoors is that between cleanliness and
dirt. Conventionally, home is idealized as a place of cleanliness, a shelter where one can leave the
mess of the outside world behind, both literally and figuratively. However, Bishop instead associates
the particular loving and welcoming quality of home with being dirty.
In "Song for the Rainy Season," she writes of a house "darkened and tarnished / by the warm touch /
of the warm breath / maculate, cherished." In "Filling Station," she makes this point even more
emphatically. "Oh, but it is dirty!" the poem begins. Throughout this poem Bishop stresses the filth of
the place: "oil-soaked, oil-permeated / to a disturbing, over-all / black translucency." The proprietor,
referred to as "Father," "wears a dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit," and the sons are "greasy."
While the speaker professes a conventional feeling of disturbance at this mess, the imagery of the
poem suggests that the oil is the medium that binds the scene's disparate elements into a loving
harmony. The "dirty dog" is "quite comfy" on a wicker sofa--a homey term for a domestic image of
mixing and mingling. And the wicker itself is "impregnated" with grease. The filling station is not a
place of separation, but of happy and productive union between elements conventionally best thought
kept separate.
In "Squatter's Children" and "Song for the Rainy Season," Bishop blurs the distinction between a
home and the outdoors, but in "Filling Station" she makes the even more unusual move of blurring the
distinction between a home and place of commerce. Commerce, with its goal of making money, is
often conceived of as "dirty" and heartless. It is also traditionally considered a man's realm. This was
especially true in the early 1960s when Bishop wrote the poems in Questions of Travel. It was the
woman's job to create a home as a place of comfort and refuge for her man at the end of a working
day. The fillingstation is a refuge of sorts, but who has created it? A father and his sons run
the station, which seems, on the surface, to be a place of business. "Do they live at the station?" the
speaker wonders, noting domestic touches such as a doily draped on a taboret and a begonia. This
seems like something that a woman might do.
Perhaps Bishop sees here, through the imagined woman's physical absence, the specter of her own
lost mother. But Bishop is careful to leave the question open as to whether this family station includes
a mother. While a home is conventionally a woman's realm (and she is the one responsible for
keeping it clean), in "Filling Station" an explicitly masculine space is imbued with a loving and
beautifying touch that may or may not be that of a woman. "Somebody embroidered the doily. /
Somebody waters the plant, / or oils it, maybe. Somebody / arranges the rows of cans . . . " Her
repetition of the gender-neutral word "somebody" emphasizes the prospect of release from the
traditional idea of women's domestic role. It is possible that the father and sons imbued the place with
its atmosphere of nourishing, nurturing dirtiness--and, for Bishop, this is a liberating possibility.
Indeed, as Bishop blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, nature and culture, commerce and
home, she also blurs that between masculine and feminine. In "FillingStation," she celebrates
traditionally feminine qualities--the loving, supportive, and aesthetic touch--in a context that
completely defies traditional notions of femininity--a filthy gas station. What she emphasizes is the
warm touch itself, not the gender of the person creating it. This touch messily blurs and connects, like
the oil that is everywhere. In the poem she envisions the filling station as a kind of home that is free
of roles that constrict behavior along the lines of gender, but where the role usually occupied by wife
and mother, that of loving nurturer, is still preserved and valued.
"Filling Station" shares with "Squatter's Children" and "Song for the Rainy Season"the value of
openness. Instead of portraying homes where people are safely closed in from the
world, Bishop imagines homes where the world comes in and is embraced. This is how the nurturing
love suggested by the embroidered marguerites on the dingy doily and the cans lined up to say
"ESSO--SO--SO--SO" come to transcend the bounds of the family that runs the filling station and
touch the heart of a random traveler stopping to buy gas.
Bishop sees these nurturing touches as evidence not that someone loves her family, but that
"somebody loves us all." Just as she breaks down other dichotomies fundamental to the idea of home,
she breaks down that between "us" and "them"--the traditional family and the strange, diverse people
who populate the wide world. The fact that a traveler can happen upon a new kind of home at
a filling station is reason enough not to just stay home--wherever that may be.

Source Citation
Hardy, Sarah Madsen. "Critical Essay on 'Filling Station'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith
and Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 12. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10
Apr. 2012.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE
%7CH1420035681&v=2.1&u=asuniv&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w