Adrienne Rich
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| English Poet | ||
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| Adrienne Rich | ||
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| Born | May 16, 1929 | |
| Died | ||
| Themes | ||
| Nationality | American | |
| Influences | ||
| Influenced | ||
| On the ciricculum in | 2008 - 20013 | |
| Appeared on past paper | 2010 | |
| note | ||
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Contents |
Question Frequency
Appeared on past papers: 2010 Higher Level Leaving Cert
Poems
Essays
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Main Themes
In her poetry, Rich deals with the following themes: Relationships, The personal and the political, women in a patriarchal society and outside forces
Relationships
Rich is perhaps best known as a feminist writer and many of her poems deal with the oppression of women by men. Marriage, in particular, is viewed as a tool by which women are kept under the thumb of men. ‘Aunt Jennifer's Tigers, for instance, describes a woman who has been oppressed and restricted by marriage. Marriage is presented as ‘a massive weight’ that troubles this woman: ‘The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand’. Marriage is an ‘ordeal’ that has ‘mastered’ this lady; that in some sense has ruined her life.
‘From A Survivor’, too, emphasises how women can be mastered or controlled by their husbands. The speaker suggests that her husband’s body was ‘the body of a God’ and that it had ‘power’ over her life. Similarly, in ‘Trying To Talk With A Man’, the speaker again suggests that her husband might have dominated her life: ‘Your dry heat feels like power/ your eyes are stars of a different magnitude’. 'Living In Sin’, too, touches on this topic. (The couple in this poem, of course, are not technically married but are merely living together). It is the woman in the relationship who does all the work, who makes the bed and tidies the apartment: she ‘pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found / a towel to dust the table-top’.The man with whom she’s living, meanwhile, seems to contribute little to the upkeep of the household. This can be taken as yet another instance, therefore, of a woman being dominated or controlled by man. It is another poem in which Rich emphasises the fundamental inequality of marriage and of relationships between men and women.
‘The Roofwalker’ is another poem that presents marriage in a negative light. In this poem the speaker realises that her marriage has been a terrible mistake, that she has wasted a great deal of time and energy creating a life that is not suited to her:‘Was it worth while to lay- / with infinite exertion / a roof I can’t live under? The life she has made for herself, this seemingly comfortable existence that centres on a happy marriage and healthy children, is a life she was pressured into:‘A life I didn’t choose / chose me’.Now she is prepared to leave this life behind, to abandon the comfortable structure of her marriage and brave the world beyond this comfortable shell. She will become, she says, ‘like naked man fleeing / across the roofs’. It is important to note, however, that Rich does not have a completely negative view of marriage and relationships. There is also room in her poetry for straightforward romance and love. In ‘From A Survivor’, for instance, she emphasises that her husband’s body is ‘as vivid to me / as it ever was’ suggesting the deep love she felt for this man who is now tragically dead.‘Trying To Talk With A Man’ also stresses the deep emotional bond that existed between Rich and her husband with its deeply moving litany of memories and intimate moments that the couple shared: ‘whole LP collections, films we starred in / playing in the neighbourhoods, bakery windows / full of dry, chocolatefilled Jewish cookies / the language of love-letters’.
The Personal and The Political
One of the most well known aspects of Rich’s poetry is the way it blends political and personal concerns. Again and again she finds unexpected parallels between her personal traumas and political events that take place in the wider world.This technique is used in an especially moving way in ‘Trying To Talk With A Man’.The disintegration of the couple’s relationship is depicted against the backdrop of the violence and fury of a nuclear test:‘Out here in the desert we are testing bombs / that’s why we came here’. As we read the poem we realise that external violence of the nuclear test is a metaphor for the internal or emotional violence of the couple’s break-up: ‘talking of the danger / as if it were not ourselves / as if we were testing anything else’.
A similar technique is used in ‘Our Whole Life’, where the burning Algerian fleeing his decimated village comes to serve as a symbol for the great wrong done to women over centuries of male-domination. Rich sees a parallel between this distant political atrocity and her personal struggle with language as a woman and as a poet. The Algerian man was oppressed by the French colonisation of his country and forced to speak ‘the language of the oppressor’. Similarly, Rich has been oppressed by male domination and forced to write and speak in a language designed to reflect and express the experiences and world view of men rather than of women.
Women in a Patriarchal Society
The poetry of Adrienne Rich documents the struggles and difficulties that women endure in the modern world. Many of these difficulties are the result of the nature of the society in which we live. Rich suggests that this society of ours is inherently biased towards the male. The consequence of this for women is that they are never given the opportunities to actualise their potential or even communicate their true feelings and desires. One of the fundamental problems as Rich perceives is the very language that we use. It is designed to promote the male and his values and needs, often at the expense of the female. In the poem ‘Our Whole Life’ the speaker states that ‘Our whole life’ is a ‘translation’. Women, it seems, are obliged to speak a language that does little more than provide support for a system that is inherently opposed to their empowerment. Whenever they seek to communicate their messages are ‘rendered into the oppressor’s language’ – i.e. that of the male.
It is not, however, the case that Rich is suggesting that men are consciously dominating women through the language that they use. The problem is really a lot more insidious and complicated than that. Rich is conscious of the fact that the words and phrases we use in everyday speech have a history, their meanings were established long before we came to speak them. And it is Rich’s belief that at the root of language and the values that we take to be given and eternal, lies an origin, a point of origination where roles were first established. The whole notion of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman has a history, yet it is a history that extends so far back in time that it is almost impossible to determine where it all began and who is ultimately responsible for the roles that we adopt in the modern world.
In ‘Diving Into The Wreck’ Rich uses the dive into the dark depths of the sea to symbolise her efforts to penetrate the murky waters of history in order to see what lies at the bottom. She has read about what might be there in a ‘book of myths’ but she wants to find out for herself. What she finds is a ‘wreck’, an old ship that is battered and broken, but ‘whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies/ obscurely inside barrels’. It seems that this ship is a symbol of the origins of who we are and how we understand ourselves. Down here with the wreck the speaker of the poem seems to lose all solid notions of what it means to be a woman. Her gender becomes ambiguous and gender- definitions become fluid and vague. The suggestion seems to be that the roles of men and women in society have a history, they are not established in fact, are not absolutely intrinsic to who we are. If we can get back to the origins, to the beginning, when these definitions were first established we might be able to re-define and redetermine roles. Why, the poet asks, should we live our lives according to definitions that we had no role in creating, that were established way back before we were even born. ‘Diving Into The Wreck’ suggests that there may be possibilities of rediscovering and re-learning who we are, if we are willing to try:
We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear
One woman who did have the courage to re-define the role of women in society was Marie Curie, the Polish scientist who was responsible for advances in nuclear power due to her development and refining of the element radium. However, Curie was to pay a heavy price for her work. In ‘Power’ Rich details the terrible afflictions that Curie suffered because of her long-term close contact with radiation,‘the cataracts on her eyes/ the cracked and suppurating skin of her fingers’. The poem looks at how this woman died ‘denying/ her wounds came from the same source as her power’. Rich seems to be suggesting that the notion of ‘power’ is dangerous and that, perhaps, it is ultimately defined to support and perpetuate the position of the male in the world. Though not critical of Curie, the poem appears to be a critique of the dangers that are involved in seeking to partake in games of power when the rules are determined and defined by a patriarchal culture. It is possible to read the poem as an indictment of the values that adhere in the world. The poetry of Rich suggests that there are alternative ways of understanding ourselves and perhaps it is important that we reassess the way in which we define what is of value.
Outside Forces
In ‘Our Whole Life’ Rich refers to ‘the oppressor’s language’ though she never explicitly mentions who the oppressor is. This idea of an outside force, something that is potentially dangerous and capable of impacting in a negative manner upon our lives, is present in a number of Rich’s poems. In her early work Rich sometimes gives the impression that she is at the mercy of elements that she can’t quite control. In ‘Storm Warnings’, for example, Rich portrays the weather as a powerful force that threatens her fragile home. All she can do is close the windows and lock the doors against the storm that is brewing outside. As the poem points out, even with our fancy technologies and our weather reports, we are unable to control the weather. We might be able to predict what is going to happen, but we are ultimately powerless to prevent it happening. Time and the fall of dark at night are two other forces that we are unable to control. But there are also elements of our own selves that we are at the mercy of. As Rich points out,‘Weather abroad/ And weather in the heart alike come on/ Regardless of prediction’. By this the poet seems to be talking about the depressions and moods that we suffer throughout our lives. These are not of our choosing, and we are helpless to determine when they will occur. This notion of an external force is also at play in ‘The Uncle Speaks In The Drawing Room’ which contains the speech of a rich man whose lifestyle is put under threat by the presence of an angry mob that has congregated in the square outside his apartment. We are never made aware of this mob’s grievance but the implied presence of the mob remains a potent force in the poem. Again there is a suggestion that the world contains elements that are beyond our control, no matter how wealthy and powerful we might be. Change is a fact of life and the uncle who speaks in the poem seems wilfully blind to the reality of the growing social unrest that is taking place.
