Notley, The Descent of Alette

The Descent of Alette is an absolute relief; Alice Notley delves into the female epic gloriously in her symbolic, engaging contemporary plot that leads the heroine Alette down below the subways into the underground, “ “into an unknown” “unlit world” ” (41), where she traverses the caves alone until, finding strength by embracing herself as an owl, flies upwards to defeat the tyrant, finally surfacing where “ “‘The light has been made new’” ” (147). As extremely meaningful and intriguing the world of Alette is, what makes this collection succeed as an epic is not the outcome of the story, but the function of the form; as poetry, this book was something completely face-slapping different, by the end of it you feel as bewildered and enlightened as Alette does when she finally encounters not the brightness of the surface above the subway, but what the light brings: “ “all the / lost creatures” “began to” “emerge” “Come up from” “below the subway” / “From the caves &” “from the dark woods” “I had visited”… “I watched through” “tears of clarity” “many forms of being” / “I had never” “seen before” (148).
Just as Alette begins lost in Dante’s dark woods, descending the many caves of the Inferno under the subway, so does she rise like Dante to an understanding similar to his vision of God at the height of his journey in the Paradiso: “already I could feel my being turned— / instinct and intellect balanced equally / as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars— / by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars” (XXXIII, 143-46, Ciardi Tr). In a moment of truth, Dante realizes his soul is in unison with the movement of God’s love, and in the end of Alette’s journey, she has a similar understanding of wholeness, of everyone rising in one motion together: with “tears of clarity”…/ “Whatever,” “whoever,” “could be,” “was possible,” “or / had been” “forgotten” for long ages” “now joined us,” “now / joined us once more” “Came to light” “that morning” (148). While Dante journeys to understand the Divine Love of God, Alette journeys to understand herself and her gender, before freeing the world of the gender bias induced by the tyrant’s reign over society. The use of quotation marks are a breakthrough in themselves from other styles of male poetry, creating a new “spoken” structure that is hereby specifically female in The Descent of Alette.