18 pages • 36 minutes read
Sleeping with the Dictionary
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Symbols & Motifs
Night
The night is a central motif in “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” While the night is characterized as “dark” enough to need to turn on a “bedside light” in order to read, it is not a frightening darkness. Rather, the darkness is a place where a sexual, or “nightly,” act can occur. The darkness provides space to be uninhibited—to feel free to act on erotic desires. Furthermore, the erotic acts that take place before sleep grant the poet a kind of “night vision” allowing them to turn words into poetry. Night and darkness are linked not only to sex and dreaming, but also to poetic craft.
Size
Another motif in Mullen’s poem is the fixation on size: The speaker is a size queen, per say. There are a number of adjectives that refer to the generous size of the dictionary: “big,” “heavy,” and “thick.” These words are also commonly used when referring to large male sexual organs. Double entendre causes the words to refer to both “dick” and “dictionary.” This motif is developed by including a more stereotypically feminine word that relates to size: “ample.” Ample frequently refers to a woman’s bosom, but Mullen uses it before “block of knowledge”: the dictionary. This gives the dictionary not only male characteristics, but also female ones.
Physicality
The physicality of the printed book in conjunction with the sexual experience is another motif in “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” The above discussion about size is linked to the embodied experience of reading a physical dictionary. In the 21st century, most people use virtual, online dictionaries, but Mullen’s speaker refers to a print edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. In addition to its extreme size, or “bulk,” it has “thin sheets,” or many thin pages. “Sheets” is clearly a pun on bedding as well as sheets of paper.
However, the dictionary is more regularly connected to the body rather than the bed in the poem. It is referred to as a “denotative body of work.” Denotative is the actual definition of a word—a word read without double entendre. For instance, “body of work” denotes a collection of words. However, “body of work,” can connote a human body; this is certainly the case in Mullen’s poem. The connotative meaning includes multiple, deeper, or implied meanings of a word. It is the physical human interaction, in Mullen’s poem, that offers another layer of meaning to the physical item of the dictionary.
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By Harryette Mullen
