Secular Decreation: Acts of Undoing in Priscilla Becker's Internal West

Abstract

In the collected journal entry excerpts gathered in Gravity and Grace (1952), twentieth-century French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil introduces her concept of “decreation.” Here, “decreation” refers to an act of renouncing the self—of undoing the self (physical or otherwise) in order to allow room for the desired object: God’s love. By reading the American poet Priscilla Becker’s collection Internal West (2001) in relation to Weil’s “decreation,” this thesis will examine how Internal West’s exploration of disembodiment embodiment finds Becker’s speaker undergoing her own secular form of “decreation” in order to bring herself closer to her own desired object: an interruption between the inner self and the external world as mediated by the body.