a mistaken way of life, and she advises young girls that their "beauty must pass / Like a lovely white clover that rusts with its grass" (971). When women's beauty fades, in other words, rich men look for beauty elsewhere. Thus the lady advises girls to stay away from "barstools," a symbol of the lush life she had. Instead, girls should "marry you young / Or be left--an old barrel with many a bung" (971). The lady sees herself as barrel, aware that she had no awareness when she was younger of the consequences and the social inevitability of being marginalized as a used-up wo man, what might be called a used-up sex object, a creature with "toadstools for tits and a face full of weeds" (971). The poet reports that the "house raised a cheer" (972) but that the bar tender called the police to have her removed from the premises.
The social life and emotional experience of Kennedy's lady are memories of loss and regret and a decline in fortunes. But they are also social constructions of received wisdom in ways that tend to "prove" the character of the lady was conceptualized by a male poet. In this regard, Cameron and Coates cite three theoretical explanations for why women deviate less than men from the so-called "prestige standard" (143-4) of language behavior: that women are more socially conservative than men; that they sense the social implications of speech behavior more strongly than men do; and that they are not subject to the pressure of adopting the vernacular. Cameron and Coates say that insufficient attention has been given to the social content of women's language and that theorists assume that the vernacular itself is a male province. Meanwhile, standards of social conservatism and innovation are set in relation to men, not women, and it is on that basis that (for example) linguistic conservatism is attrib uted to women; thus the skunk lady's breach of decorum is meant to shock and amaze, as well as move toward sadness. Ther...