An Ancient Gesture

Published in 1949, Millay’s poem anticipates elements of Postmodernism, a literary movement that would not officially arrive until later in the 20th century. Yet Millay’s work features a few Postmodern hallmarks such as playfulness and intertextuality. Postmodern authors, like Kathy Acker, often incorporated outside texts into their work, and Millay’s work incorporates Homer’s text The Odyssey. She engages with the poem playfully by creating a speaker who identifies with Penelope and appears to speak for her. She also plays with language by spelling Odysseus as Ulysses, as if she were referring to James Joyce’s classic Modernist novel Ulysses. In Joyce’s text, the chapters take their names from episodes in The Odyssey. The final chapter is “Penelope,” told from the female character Molly Bloom’s perspective, a larger-than-life woman who has been mostly silent while the male characters take center stage. Molly identifies as Penelope, and her soliloquy, like the speaker’s in “An Ancient Gesture,” is intimate and emotional, critically one of the most revealing chapters in the narrative.

Millay’s work also points toward Modernism and its emphasis on individuality and its doubts about grand ideas and progress—a suspicion shared by Postmodernists. In “An Ancient Gesture,” the notion of work comes across as futile as the process of weaving continues infinitely and never produces a finished product.