Chapter 2
Woman with the Nerves of a Panther :
Adrienne Rich
.Adrienne Rich is a radical feminist poet, critic and thinker who has
distinguished herself as a poet of ideas among contemporary women writers of
the United States. The distinguishing quality of her poetry is that it.documents
the image of woman in American society as it evcjlves through varying phases.
In addition to this it traces her own growth as a person and poet. It is much
more than aesthetic pleasure that is rendered through her poetry even though
her early poems were lauded just for this quality by outstanding literary men
like W.H..Auden. What gives that special touch to Rich's poetry through the
years is her rare insight into the basic problenls of human culture that have
generally been overlooked. This poet "sworn to lucidity:' to borrow her own
words in portraying one of her women personae, perceives those problems with
clarity and with a "will to change" the decadent culture suggests alternatives
which may turn out to be crucial.
Referring to the moulding of her poetic consciousness, Rich, in an
autobiographical piece admits that she grew up believing in poetry and in all
art as the expression of a higher world view. The attitudes and the historical
currents that surrounded her, the aesthetic ideology that pervaded the milieu,
contributed to the burgeoning of the poet in her ("Blood, Bread and Poetry : The
Location of the Poet" 524 - 25). However she has confessed that her style of
writing was influenced by male poets: by the men she read a s an undergraduate
such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, John Donne, W.H. Auden, Mac Niece,
Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats ("When We Dead Awaken" 94).
It may appear incongruous that a committed feminist like Rich could be
influenced by the conservative rhetoric of the "male oppressor." Rich was taken
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to rask for writing poetry "within the parameters of the establishment press"
(Perloff, "Private Lives" 131-32). But it should be pointed out that at the
beginning of her poetic career, she found it difficult to find a model among
women whose writings would guide her. Rich records that the times were such
that the women poets who had written poetry of distinction were still buried by
the academic literary canon ("BBPLP" 527). In the poetry of Sappho, Christina
Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Elinor Kylie and Edna Millay, Rich detected a
"peculiar keenness and ambivalence." But she discovered that the woman poet
most admired a t the time was Marianne hloore who was "maidenly, elegant,
and hscreet" ("WWDA 94). To Rich such poets did not seem to have much
inrrinsic worth of their own.
\Tomen's writing failed to have an identity of its own since it was mascul~ne
approval that determined literary worth. Women seemed to be striving to write
like men and in this it was difficult for them to be successful since they were
tn-ing to give expression to an identity which was different from their own.
Thus it was for want of a woman model that Rich was made to cast her poetry
in the masculine modes. In this context it has to be pointed out that later when
she found her literary ancestors among women like Susan B.Anthony and Jane
Addams, she quoted them rather than the men who had influenced her earlier.
Even as she acknowledges her indebtedness to the male poets in fashioning her
style, Rich comments on "the indefinable dream-like quality ofpoetry" in which
you put what "you don't know you know" ("WWDA 94).
However, Rich has avowed that Yeats taught her more than mere craft.
M'hile there were many voices warning the North American artist against
"mixing politics with art" it was Yeats' poetry that emboldened her to uphold
the theory that poetry can root itself in politics. Ironically enough, it was again,
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his poetry that made her believe for a time that politics let1 only to bitterness
and abstractness of mind, made women 'shrill' and hysterical and resulted ir, a
waste of beauty and talent. Rich states that in those days it was not possible for
her to know the heights scaled by women poets. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
anti-slavery and feminist poetry, H.D.'s anti-~varand woman-identified poetry
and the radical work of Muriel Rukeyser were still buried by the academic
literary canon" and a s such there was nothing to counter Yeats' argument that
politics can be detrimental to women ("BBPLP" 527). *4nywayit led her to make
an exhaustive study of women poets buried in the past and investigate the
reasons for very few women achieving eminence.
When Rich set out on her poetic career as a young undergraduate student
she gave due importance to the rules of workmanship. She composed poems
taking care to blend the subject matter with the form of diction and her graceful,
"feminine" style was acclaimed by many critics. Auden, in his foreword to
A Change of World, Rich's first volume of poetry, commended her craftsmanship
and her obvious love of the medium. Quoting T.S. Eliot's words Auden stated
that craftsmanship is "the most promising sign" in a young poet since it is "the
evidence of a capacity for detachment from the self." In addition to a talent for
versification it includes a n intuitive grasp of subtle matters like "proportion,
consistency of diction and tone and the matching of these with the subject matter"
(126). However Auden was not ready to give full credit to Rich for the emotional
appeal of her first volume of poems even though he was delighted with their
"modesty." Modest and understated as these poems are, they are. . . more
interesting than Auden's comments suggest," observes Albert Gelpi ("Poetics of
Change" 130-31).
During the political upheaval that took the 1960s by storm in the protests
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against the Vietnam War, the struggles to liberate blacks and in the wake of
the Counterculture, the United States witnessed the rebirth of the Feminist
Movement. In the title poem of Leaflets Rich speaks about the political turmoil
of this period, the anti-war movement of which she was a part: "Life without
caution / the only worth living" (Poems Selected 116).Like many other women
activists who were fighting against war and fighting for the rights of minorities,
blacks and underprivileged people, she became aware of the secondary roles
that women were forced to play in patriarchal society. Thus when the Feminist
,
Movement took shape: Rich, with her heightened awareness and keen sensibility,
was at the head of it. Perhaps it was a totally unforeseen change that happened
in the life of the young poet who had been endeavouring to lead a life conformed
to conventions and established ways. Rich herself communicated the idea in
the celebrated lines: "How did we get caught up fighting the forest fire, i we,
who were only looking for a still place in the woods?" ("Ghazals" 8/8/68, Poems
Selected 127). Eventually Rich proved herselfto be a committed activist waging
untiring warfare against the man-made distinctions and discriminations which
resulted in making relationships unwholesome in patriarchal society.
Rich, whose first volume of poetry was extolled as the voice of conformity,
in spite of the fact that indignation and dismay surging in her mind can be
traced in the poems, was aching to communicate many things which were sure
to invite disapproval and adverse criticism. But her "natural reticence" together
with her "polemicism"precluded her from writing openly (Perloff, 'Private Lives"
136). She evolved a strategy of her own to tackle the situation and formalism
was a part of it. This made it possible for her to handle her materials with
assured safety a s if she wore "asbestos gloves" ("WWDA 94).
The poem "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" is remarkable for its subtle use of
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formalism. In fact the poem provides an early glimpse of the feminist in Rich.
The protagonist in the poem, Aunt Jennifer is endowed with an imagination
which creates the design of tigers that are proud and know no fear of man. But
this is in sharp contrast to the lady's own lifestyle "ringed with ordeals she was
mastered by " (4). Rich ventures to speak about the massive weight of Uncle's
wedding band which sits heavily upon -Aunt Jennifer's hand and will continue
to remain there even when she is dead. But she deliberately presents Aunt
Jennifer as a person a s distinct a s possible from her own youthful self. Aunt
Jennifer is also distanced from the poet "by the formalism of the poem, by its
objective, observant tone" ("WWDA" 94). The deliberate detachment with which
Rich tackles the subject is an effective device to save her own self from adverse
criticism.
Another strategy employed by Rich, particularly in her early poetry, is
the use of the persona of a man. The poems "Why Else But to Forestall This
Hour" (A C h a n ~ eof World), "The Loser," "Antinous" and "The Roofwalker"
(Sna~shots)illustrate this. In "Why Else But to Forestall This Hour" which
indicates the tone of her early poetry we get the picture of a very cautious man
who "stayed out of the noon day sun, kept from the rain, 1 Swam only in familiar
depths" and was very careful not to take any risk -- a man who has "outmisered
death. But one cannot help wondering whether the poet is not being a bit
mischievous when she professes that she "swam only in famlliar depths." Putting
on the guise of a man what she does is just the opposite: swimming in unfamiliar
depths.
The stance taken by the poet in "Storm Warnings" is, interestingly, that
of a passive onlooker (3).She lives in "troubled regions," predicts winds walking
overhead and some zone of unrest moving across the land. She puts on the
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mask of a person who is preparing to take the necessary steps of defence against
the season and this allays any idea we may have that she is waiting for the
storm to come. It is the guise of a man that Rich uses in "The Roofwalker" too.
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs. . . (15)
But even then she knew how "with a shade of difference" she could be
more effective speaking boldly in her own person as a woman about the naked
man fleeing across the roofs.
The foreshadowing of the main concerns of Rich's mature work can be
perceived in the early poems themselves. by the keen insight of a critic. Gelpi
draws our attention to the sense of imminent doom in "Storm Warnings," the
imperfect nature of the relationship between man and woman in "An Unsaid
Word," the lack of communication in "Stepping Backward," the metaphysical
scepticism of "For the Conjunction of Two Planets" and the fact of mutability in
"A Change of World" ("Poetics" 130 - 31). "Storm Warnings" also alerts us to
the precariousness of one's situation that the "shattered fragments" of customs
and practices cannot avert. In "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" the protagonist's
proclivity for rebellion and longing for independence are quite conspicuous.
These are themes with which she is preoccupied later in her career too.
In The Diamond Cutters, her second anthology, Rich introduces the theme
of homelessness which has special significance in feminist poetics. Homelessncss
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with its accompanying ache of filial nostalgia is reflected in "The hIiddle Aged"
which Vendler calls the first perfect poem of Rich" (1G5),
For to be young
Was always to live in other people's houses
Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,
Was ours at second-hand and not for long
. . . They were so kind,
Would have given us anything, the bowl of fruit
Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs
We must call ours: but twenty years of 14ving
They could not give . . .
6)
From the time she wrote Snapshots of a Daughter - in - Law, autogenesis
is a theme in her poetry. Rich, in her determination to recreate the female self,
is convinced that woman can be born again by her own agency. She is optimistic
that woman can give birth to her own revived self. Erica Jong has observed
that the great number of extraordinary poems of Rich never flinched from dealing
with "sexuality, hunger, motherhood, loneliness, blood and revolution in both
the personal and the public sense" (171).
Considering the intellectual climate of those days it required remarkable
courage on the part of a woman poet to write without using masks. Identifying
herselfas a female poet was something 'criminal' like "cas$ndtoo bold a shadow
or smashfndthe mould straight off' which would heap social ostracism on her
("Snapshots" 12). Rich did not keep in check her ideas and aspirations for long.
She found it inevitable that she should give vent to her feelings and thoughts
in forceful language, merging her own voice with that of the persona. Even
though her early poems had been acclaimed for their "formal structure, quiet
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tone and modest concerns" Rich did not derive much satisfaction from them
("\\lVDA" 95). It is said that by the time her second b001i The Diamond Cutters
and Other Poems n a s published, she was already dissatisfied with the poems
of her first book. They seemed to her "mere exercises" for poems she had not
written ("WWDA" 95).
Rich realized that it was essential to write about the actual experiences of
women boldly and overtly. "To take women's esis~enceseriously as theme and
source for art was something (she) had been hungering to do ... all (her) writing
Me" ("BBPLP" 536). This led her to dispense with the habit of using masks in
her poetry and to bridge the gap between "the mind that creates and the (wo)man
who suffers." Snapshots of a Dauphter
-
in - Law. which is considered her
breakthrough volume of poetry was the pioneering work in which she put it
into practice, writing "openly as a female poet" (Ostriker, Writine: Like a Woman.
106).Although she had not found the courage to use the pronoun "I,"the woman
in the poem always being "she," the title poem of Snapshots was the first she
wrote openly a s a female poet. Speaking about the impact this experience had
on her life she says what an extraordinary relief it was to write The Snapshots.
In Rich's own words, "It released tremendous energy in me, a s in so many other
women, to have that way of writing affirmed and validated in a growing political
community. I felt for the first time the closing of the gap between poet and
woman" ("BBPLP" 535-36). In her new-found freedom, breaking all inhibitions,
she writes with force "directly and overtly as a woman out of a woman's body
and experience." From the time she wrote Snapshots, Rich declares her feminist
concerns invariably in all her poems with a commitment that can be found only
in a dedicated activist. It has been observed that from this stage in her career
as a poet, Rich has become involved in the "problems of growing up female and
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especially female artist in America" (Kagner 226).
-4s Martin suggests, Snapshots marks the beginning of "a personal and
political pilgrimmage: subsequent works describe the stages of the journey"
("From Patriarchy" 1S1). The title Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law is significant
in itself because we have to take the poems as informal pictures of "actual lived
experience" and not a s the products of imagination. The title poem is made up
of ten pictures of woman as "daughter-in-law." carrying out the roles which
have been cast for her by the male-dominated society. Among them one is a
woman who finds it difficult to accept the established parameters and conform
to her allotted role. But she is unable to resist and rebel even though she is
haunted by voices which exhort her to do so. Following their advice, she would
like to kill "the angel-in-the-house"image she has acquired but she cannot
bring herself to do so.
Banging the coffee pots into the sink
She hears the angels chiding . . .
.......................
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.
The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,
a match burn t o her thumbnail (9).
She is torn between desire for a liberated female self on the one hand and
the voice of conformity on the other. She feels the agony so much that "she
thinks she is going mad" ("WWDA 97). The harsh experiences of life she has to
go through are so many that "nothing hurts her any more." But in spite of all
her aspirations and love of independence, the reality that she confronts is "cach
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morning's grit blowing into her eyes" ("Snapshots" 9).
.inother woman presented in the title poem is a woman of intellect. Rich
writes: "-4thinking woman sleeps with monsters. /The beak that grips her, she
becomes." There is eternal conflict within her between the culture of tradition
that she has imbibed and the new ideas of emancipation she has acquired.
The picture of Corinna, the young singer, is really pathetic because neither
the t ~ o r d snor the music of her song are really her
0 ~ ~ 1It
1 .is
like the song of a
caged bird, "poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before 1 an unlocked door, that
cage of cages." She is less than a bird; no wonder she is being referred to a s a
"tragical machine."
The poem in fact provides us with a peep into the lives of women destined
to exist "behind closed windows blankening with steam." Yet their inherent
love of independence prompts them to dream about what they might have been
if chances had not been denied to them. But Rich also presents certain
outstanding women in the poem "images of resistance and achievement" as
Gelpi terms them, women like Dickinson and Mary Wollstonecraft who herald
the image of fulfilment ("Poetics" 134).
Dickinson, Rich writes, found time for literary pursuit even in the midst
of innumerable houeshold chores:
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat
writing, My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum, ("Snapshots"
10).
It is, again, Dickinson who figures in the poem, "I am in Danger- Sir--"
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\Toman masculine in single-mindedness
for whom the word was more
than a symptom
-
a condition of being (27)
\Vollstonecraft ~ h sketched
o
out the feminist movement in England in
her 1-indication of the Rights of Woman is another prominent figure in Rich's
gallery of gallant women. She was a heroic soul who fought courageously for
the rights of women. But all she gained for her daring efforts was being labelled
"harpy, shrew and whore" ("Snapshots" 11).
Patriarchal society has always been willing to recognize mere talent in
women--"glitter in fragments and rough drafts." Women hear their "mediocrities
over-praised." They know that every lapse on their part would be forgiven. But
the same society would not be prepared to forgive women so easily if they dare
to "cast too bold a shadow 1 or smash the mould straight off ." It is a grave crime
indeed and would be punished with "solitary confinement, tear gas, attrition
shelling. 1 Few applicants for that honor" (12).
For the first time in her writing career, in "Snapshots," Rich challenges
the language of the past, quoting the masters, Cicero, Horace, Campion,
Diderot,Johnson, and Shakespeare, as the "flattering, insulting, condescending
enemies of women's intellect" (Ostriker, Writing 107). Martin states that
S n a ~ s h o t records
s
the resentment and dismay experienced by Rich and other
contemporary women writers like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, due to their
conflicting roles a s women and a s serious artists ("From Patriarchy" 179).
s Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, and
Regarding Rich's references in S n a ~ s h o t to
other autonomous women, Martin suggests that this is an indication of the fact
that the poet was already working within a feminist framework that enabled
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her "to recognize and reject self-destructive emotional responses" (179). It is a
male-dominated universe where female subjugation is the harsh reality that
has been depicted in Snapshots. Rich seems to suggest that 'it is the fault of
sociery, and not of women, that they are underlings'.
It is clear that there are striking differences between Rich's first two
volumes of poetry and her third--Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. The poet
has by now, shaken herself free of all binding rules of convention and has
emboldened herself to take woman's existence seriously as the theme of her
poetry ("BBPLP" 535). Rich realizes that tremendous energy is being released
in her and after Snapshots, nothing inhibits her intensity or integrity. A radical
change has come over her way of writing poetry too, by the time she wrote
Snavshots. Her stylistic development is perceptible, marking the significant
shlft from formal to freer verse forms. Instead of the well-arranged and measured
stanza form for which she was praised in her early works, irregular stanzas
comprising lines of indefinite length make up the Snapshots rolume. It is not
the form that matters to her any longer, but ideas. Like "a scream from a
mouth that has just been ungagged," she speaks with fervour on a number of
issues around her (Ostriker, Writing 118).
-4s Rich had anticipated, this paved the way for critics to launch attacks
on her poetry. They found Snapshots "bitter," "personal" and accused Rich of
having "sacrificed the sweetly flowing measures of (her) early books for a ragged
line and a coarsened voice" ("BBPLP" 533). But no adverse criticism could deter
her from the path she had chosen. From this stage onwards, her feminist
concerns become more well-defined. By now she has made her choice about the
voice to be adopted in writing. The voice that won the approval of the patriarchal
society was "the voice of girlishness, erotic pining, winsome coyness, religious
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subn~issivenessand sentimental motherhood. the voice of the nineteenth century
woman poct" flendler, "All Too Real" 32). But Rich, like a number of other
women poets who are noted for their heightened awareness of womanhood such
a s Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Sexton, and Plath, repudiated it and chose the
voice of autonomy, maturity a n d power.
-4s a poet, Rich tries to "see deeply. think clearly and speak plainly" ahout
the past, present and future prospects of women's lives (Schreiber '32). But
Rich, like a number of other feminists, is conscious of the limitations of the
language a t her disposal. I n patriarch21 C?C;~+:-,
2:
Epezdzr r..-intr2
. .... o s t Tornen
are excluded from the production of language and the generation of meaning
which have been monopolized by men. In order to fight against the enforced
silence of "the second sex," women's experience and perspective should be
validated and women's claims for the right to name should be restored. --kcording
to Rich, "in a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression,
is violence" (OLSS 204).
In "The Burning of Paper instead of Children" she asserts: "This is the
oppressor's language / Y e t I need it to talk to you" (41). Rich, like other feminists
such a s Cixous, Irigaray a n d Spender, h a s always been i n pursuit of a n effective
tool with which to encode feminine experience from the perspective of a woman.
I t wasnt completeness I wanted
...........................
No, not completeness :
but I needed a way of saying
(this is what they are afraid of)
t h a t could deal with these fragments
I needed to touch you
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with a hand, a body
but also with words
I need a language to hear myself with
to see myself in
a language like pigment released on the board
blood-black,
veined with contradictions
bursting under pressure from the tube ("Tear Gas," Poems Selected
140)
Ostriker has suggested that it is subsequent to her having written
&
Snapshots that Rich started questioning the idea of language and the value of
poetry. When she felt the urge to give expression to personal truths ,and to
communicate realities which had not gained recognition as such, she had to
undergo the inner conflicts of a "thinking woman" who had imbibed the culture
of the patriarchal society. Literature, from her point of view, was corrupt or at
best, upheld values alien to her own, and it became necessary for her to be a
"thief of language," a female Prometheus." From her muted state of existence,
in order to make herself audible she has to get her values across to the society
and get them recognized and validated.
Ostriker states that what Rich does with this problem comes in three
stages, corresponding to her phases of self-reconstruction, political engagement
and feminism. According to Ostriker, Rich hits dead ends in the first two phases,
but begins to discover an alternative in the last. Rich seems to suggest that
self-reconstruction is inevitable for a woman poet and that without it she is not
likely to get recognition. Dickinson, the gifted poet was considered as "just
another eccentric woman poet" even by Thomas. Wentworth Higginson, the
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literary critic, who, she had hoped, would be her mentor (Writing 112). Rich's
Necessities of Life takes as model Dickinson's retreat from "the air buzzing
with spoiled language" to the house in Amherst.
and in your half-cracked way you chose
silence for entertainment
chose to have it out at last
on your own premises ("I am in Danger-Sir" 27)
In Leaflets and The Will to Change the poet re-enters the world with the
desire to use language for healing but is repeatedly defeated. In her poem
"Cartographies of Silence" Rich analyses the polemics of silence. She tries to
bring home the point that silence cannot be equated with absence; it is presence
of a kind which has not yet gained recognition:
Silence can be a plan
Rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
It has a history
a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
..........................
The scream of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you (Dream 17-18)
"Images for Godard sees "language as city" a place out of touch with reality.
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In "-A \-alediction Forbidding Mourning" she writes: "RIy swirling wants \-our
frozen lips. / T h e grammar turned and attacked me" (44). "The Burning of Paper
Instead of Children" juxtaposes the idea of book-burning by two schoolboys,
\ ~ h i c hhas shocked a liberal neighbour, against the literal burning of Jeanne
d'-bc and the napalming of Vietnam" (Ostriker, Writing 113). Rich projects
through the poem other kinds of burning such as slavery, poverty, injustice and
sexual loneliness. She asserts that "there are books that describe all this / and
they are useless" (42). I t is the semi-literate language of a child t h a t is more
agreeable to Rich than formal language. However a new possiblity opens before
her and this is what we see two years later in the title poem of Diving into the
W k . I t is different from any poem Rich has written before. Instead of
remaining "trapped in stasis and analysis" the poet makes a positive move. She
undertakes a female quest, "a female form of heroism," according to Ostriker.
She uses "revisionist" language here, inventing a n altered symbolism out of
the past (Ostriker, Writing 114) finding it necessary to "choose words t h a t even
you I would have to be changed by" ("Implosions" 34).
The quest for the identity of woman in a male-oriented society is a n
important feature of the poetry of Rich. In "Diving into the W r e c k the quest is
made manifest since the theme of the poem is directly t h a t of a quest and the
woman in the poem empowers herself to undertake this adventurous task. In a
n u m b e r of o t h e r p o e m s s u c h a s "The Demon Lover," "The S i s t e r s , "
"Transcendental Etude," "Prospective Immigrants Please Note" and "Integrity,"
the same theme of quest is dealt with even though it is not foregrounded a s in
"Diving".
What prompts her to set out on such a quest is her eagerness to have a
comprehensive vision ofthe universe and a specific understanding ofthe essence
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of her own life. Probably it is "that American specificity" of Rich which critics
hare pointed out as a lovable trait in her (Hacker 465). that makes her set out
in search of her being. But it seems to her that "a lifetime is too narrow 1 to
understand it all, beginning with the huge I rockshelves that underlie all life"
("Transcendental Etude" 87). In "Double Monologue" written in 1960, she says,
Since I was more than a child
trying on a thousand faces
I have wanted one thing: to know
simply as I know my name
at any given moment, where I stand (Snapshots 33)
It is the same idea with which she is preoccupied in "Readings of History."
another poem composed in the same year. Here we find the poet investigating
the past in an effort to perceive the present better, endeavouring to "locate
herself in the historical flux" (Martin 178).She finds herself at a loss when she
is confronted with history. It is a s if "whales ofbiographies" are there to consume
her, a s it happened to Jonah, the Biblical character. She boldly "pares away the
layers of social conditioning, ritualized roles and programmed responses in order
to locate the core of self, the essentials of her existence" ("From Patriarchy"
179).
"Prospective Immigrants Please Note" manifests the spirit of adventure
that is indispensable in heroic souls. In this poem Rich makes explicit the choices
that are before us, the prospective immigrants
-- either we can go through the
door to the unknown territory or not go through it at all. It is always a t the cost
of running a risk that one has to take the former decision. Rich is conscious of
the fact that if we continue to remain where we are, if we continue to keep the
status quo, it is possible to lead a smooth existence, maintaining our attitudes,
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holding our positions and thus living 'worthily' and dying 'bravely.' But the
price one will have to pay, the loss one will have to incur by choosing not to
undertake a journey to the unknown territories is inestimable. Nevertheless
Rich reminds us that "The door itself 1 makes no promises. I It is only a door"
(17.It is said that the opening of the door to the future which seems to be the
choice made by the poet, signals Rich's ~villingnessto take risks. to experience
confict and acute anxiety and to tolerate ambiguity (Martin,"From Patriarchy"
179). This means the rejection of dream-life, emergence into clarified
"percep(tion) of life as being open-ended and commitment to make a "viable,
full life" in the present (Martin 179). The poem also reminds the reader at the
threshold of liberty "how we dread what we desire" (Ostriker, Writing 108).
Rich is keenly aware of the lack of a literary tradition which is a drawback
women suffer from. Nothing was told us "of origins, nothing we needed I to
know, nothing that could re-member us" ( "Transcendental Etude" 89). It
demands considerable courage on the part of the explorer to undertake the
quest in spite of the risks involved, and even without any preconceived idea of
her destination. As Milford observes, "to open fresh territory comes hard and is
against the grain of any age" (199). In "Origins and History of Consciousness"
Rich establishes a parallel between dreaming and "walking into clear water
ringed by a snowy wood 1 white a s cold sheets" (Dream 7). She transmits to us
the numbness experienced by the bare feet while walking in the snow which is
soon replaced by a feeling of relaxation as her feet touch water :
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the n e t . . . (7)
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In "The Demon Lover" it is the manifestation of the quest that we find.
Gelpi has pointed out that in the poem the one referred to as "'he"' is the 'other'
: both the animus and the man who in refusing to recognize her animus
compound her own sense of division" ("Poetics" 146). An accommodation with
him is not easy, either internally or externally: "If I give in it won't 1 be like the
girl the bull rode, I . . . but to be wrestled like a boy. . ." (31).Here her contention
is not to be a man but a whole woman and to be taken fully into account as
such. But circumstances project the adversary before her: both the "man within"
and the masculine lover are against her. The latter has become a demon because
he clings to the essential dichotomy between mind and body which results in
the simple distinction between man and woman ("Poetics" 146).
The poem "Orion" which appears in Leaflets is noteworthy since it depicts
the projection of a masculine personality as the poet's "fierce half-brother" or
"Other" (29). In a footnote to the poem Rich indicates that the constellation
Orion is named after a mythical hunter of gigantic size and great beauty. The
poet makes a wilful gesture determined to assimilate the other into her own
selfhood: "as I throw back my head to take you in 1 an old transfusion happens
again" (29).
In the poem "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," which is a "hypnotic
poem" according to Gelpi, the poet projects herself a s a woman whose animus is
the archetypal poet. As the poet denotes in a footnote, the poem is based on a
motion picture "Orphee," written and directed by Jean Cocteau which is a
modernized version of the classical legend of Orpheus who descended to the
underworld to recover his dead wife Eurydice, written and directed by Jean
Cocteau. In the film Death is depicted a s a woman riding in a Rolls Royce,
guarded by motorcyclists. She comes for Orpheus and carries him through a
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mirror into the underworld on the other side. This poem is significant in that
here she tries to affirm her selfhood to which she gives a definition: a woman in
the prime of life, with certain powers which, nevertheless are, severely limited
by the so-called authorities who rarely make their appearance. She is a woman
with "the nerves of a panther." "a woman with contacts among 'Hell's Angels,'
which, ironically is the name of a motorcycle club in Oakland. California, "a
woman feeling the fulness of her powers I at the precise moment when she
must not use them I a woman sworn to lucidity." She sees through the mayhem,
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind I on the wrong
side of the mirror" (43).
The poem makes it clear that Rich cannot forbear to place herself in the
position of the legendary character Eurydice who obediently follo\vs Orpheus,
her loving husband out of the underworld. She is aware of the fulness of her
powers and is rebellious with those "authorities whose faces [she] rarely see[s],"
"who are responsible for limiting those powers. Unlike the legendary character
Eurydice she would keep Orpheus a t her mercy, make him "walk backward
against the wind Ion the wrong side of the mirror" and rather be his Death.
It is on an uncompromising quest that Rich sets out in her endeavour to
comprehend the meaning of a woman's life and the real nature of the selfhood
of a woman. It is not possible to find traditions which are viable for the modern
woman in the past and she has, of necessity, to discover the meaning of her life
for herself (Martin,"From Patriarchy" 179). But she thinks that it is possible to
reconstruct a tradition from the ruins of the past:
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised, dripping and brought into the sun
It is not my own face I see there, but other faces,
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even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us . . .
. . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life . . . ("Twent5--OneLove Poems" 81)
It is interesting to reflect that Rich's quest for identity can be said to be
equal and opposite to similar quests we find in patriarchal literature. Ostriker
points out how from the great Greek master Homer onwards, quests in Western
male literature orient themselves either heroically outward toward conquest
or spiritually upward toward transcendence. When heroes like Odysseus,
Hercules, -4eneas and Dante descend, it is to hell and we see them re-ascend.
Rich's heroine in "Snapshots," is envisioned as an aerial new woman:
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
a t least as beautiful a s any boy
or helicopter (12)
In "Diving into the Wreck" quest of a different nature is found where the
diver goes down into water "to explore the wreck 1 . . . to see the damage that
was done / a n d the treasures that prevail" (54). The sea can be something more
than meets the eye. As Ostriker suggests, it can be the poet's personal past, her
subconscious or the ethnic consciousness. It is her "element," her identity, which
she does not have to combat. As she strokes the beam of her lamp slowly along,
she finds herself facing "something more permanent / than fish or weed / the
thing I came for" which is nothing other than the wreck itself (54). By now Rich
has reached the maturity of outlook which emboldens her to be assertive. Her
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stance is clear since she is confident that her feet are on firm ground; she is
standing "somewhere actual," "handing the power glasses back and forth 1
Looking at the earth, the wildwood 1 where the split began" ("\Taking in the
Dark" 5 2 ) .
Ostrdier points out that the poem "Diving"suggests "a place. a scene, where
our iron distinctions between perceiver and perceived, subject and object. he
and she, I and you dissolve" (Writinc 114). The woman persona who dives into
the depth of the ocean in search of her roots "to explore the wreck," finds her
deepest self amid the damage and the treasures. On reaching the scene of the
wreck, realization dawns on her that her deepest self is no longer "I" but an
androgynous being: "-4nd I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams
back, the merman in his armored body I . . .I am she : I am he" ( 5 5 ) . There is
finally a pluralistic identification of the woman persona with the wreck itself:
We are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass (55)
It is no longer "I" but "We" who persist in the effort. According to Martin,
"in the depths of the sea, diving into the wreck, she completes the circle of life,
resolving the tensions between mind and matter, male and female, subject and
object." Confronting the waste and destruction of the "wreck of which she is a
part, 'the drowned face,' "the hidden cargo 'inside barrels I half-wedged and left
to rot,' the poet accepts the wreck and learns what she can from it as a necessary
prelude to beginning again" ("From Patriarchy" 185). The way the poem
concludes is quite significant:
We are, I am, you are
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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
(551,
Here Rich suggests unequivocally that injustice has been done to women.
It is quite certain that there has been some foul play which accounts for the
names of women not being in the book of myths. \Then the identity of the woman
persona merges with that of the community there is no perceivable difference
between "1"and "you" or "I" and "We." Consequently the nature of the quest
undergoes a "sea change" and in place of the quest undertaken by a lone woman
it assumes larger proportions and becomes a communal concern.
In this connection the feminist concern to revise the myths which have
been spread by patriarchy becomes relevant. In the critical theory of Rich,
re-writing or re-vision is central (Humm, Feminist Criticism 181).Rich is aware
of the pernicious effect myths can have on the collective unconscious and thereby
on individual human psychology. She states that "until we can understand the
assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves" ("WWDA
90). In order to liberate the community of women from the crippling influence
of these myths and legends she sets out to "re-vise" them or re-interpret them.
It is, in fact, a part of her endeavour to "smash the mold straight off" ("Snapshots"
12). With the clarity of vision of "an outsider," which Humm counts remarkable
about the poetic genius of Rich, the poet examines the myths of old such as the
concept of the "feminine mystique" and the mission of womanhood being "fulfilled
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motherhood and succeeds in finding the manipulations of the dominant group
that distort truths to accommodate their interests.
Rich points out that one of the most pernicious myths propagated by
patriarchal society is regarding motherhood. It is as though o n 1 those women
who give birth to children are worthy to be named "won~en"
i ~ h e r e a sa woman
who does not give birth to a child is no better than a cipher, she is "barren." In
her classic prose work on the institution of motherhood, Of \\-oman Born :
Rlotherhood a s Experience and Institution Rich discusses in detail all the
assumptions about motherhood which she proves to be unwarranted. She
indicates that in the case of many women motherhood was not their choice but
was thrust upon them, by a society whose norms they were forced to follow. In
a review of Of Woman Born, Margaret -4tw00d observes that "to question the
institution (of motherhood) at all -- that set ofbeliefs which requires mothers to
be at once both superhuman and sub-human -- is to evoke the most primeval
and the most threatening fears going around, fear of rejection by one's own
mother" (255).
The following lines clearly indicate Rich's realistic attitude to motherhood
which is totally devoid of any trace of glorification:
I didn't want this child
You're the only one I've told.
I want a child maybe, some day, but not now
....................................
. . . this child will be mine
not his, the failures, if I fail
will all be mine . . . We're not good, Clara,
a t learning to prevent these things,
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and once we have a child, it is ours
(" Paula Becker to Clara \VesthoffUDream 42)
In the title poem of Necessities of Life, she depicts a woman's life which
was "wolfed almost to shreds" (19). She goes on to describe how "scaly as a dry
bulb 1 thrown into a cellar / I used myself. . .I sometimes more like kneading
bricks in Egypt. I \That life was there, was mine" (19). She speaks about the
possibility to enter the world again, or to resurrect. as a cabbage, a n eel.
something sturdy and slippery a t once, which, according to Vendler, is an
androgynous imagery :
So much for those days. Soon
practice may make me middling-perfect. I'll
dare inhabit the world
trenchant in motion a s an eel, solid
a s a cabbage-head. I have invitations :
a curl of mist streams upward
from a field, visible a s my breath (19)
Commenting on these lines, Vendler reflects that they tell what every
depleted mother must feel when the haze and stumbling ofphysical and psychic
tiredness finally llft after a decade of babies ("Ghostlier Demarcations" 307).
All such lines point to the fact that motherhood is something far from an
experience of fulfilment in real life.
Rich has projected the patriarchal concept of "the feminine mystique" also
shorn of all illusions. The image of the feminine mystique propagated by
patriarchy was made to appear a s it was lived by women whose "lives were
confined by necessity to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children made into
a religion, a pattern by which all women were to live or deny their femininity"
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(Friedan 43). Rich made it clear that a life-time of unending household chores
cannot bring about fulfilment in a person. Performing all those "loving humdrum
acts I of attention to this house" undeniably consumes a lot of time and energy,
but it is drudgery which goes unheeded and unrecognized ("Toward the Solstice"
Dream 71).
Transplanting lilac suckers
washing panes, scrubbing
wood-smoke from splitting paint,
sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
of the spider aside,
and so much yet undone,
a woman's w o r k . . . (Dream 71)
Rich insists that women should be aware of the hollowness of the existing
myths. Women should take the existing myths in their stride realizing fully
that "the nursemaid sitting passive in the park / Was rarely by a changeling
prince accosted . . ." ("Ideal Landscape" 2-3). They should be aware of the fact
that perfection is neither the male prerogative nor within their easy reach as it
is often made to appear :
Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,
Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered.
Now and again when most we sought perfection,
Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.
The human rose to haunt us everywhere,
Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear ("Ideal Landscape"
ARP 5 )
Insights of psychoanalysis and anthropology have revealed that myth
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represents and defines human consciousness. The collnection between myth
and subjectivity has been pointed out by Montefiore (40). The act of "re-vision"
is fundamental in Rich. She considers it "the act of looking back, of seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction . . . an act of
survival" (OLSS 35). Spreading myths which will serve to be of utility to the
dominant sex and ensuring the subjectivity of the less powerful one is part of
the process of acculturation. The phenomenal significance of the recasting of
myths denoting a shift in consciousness has been recognized widely. Ostriker
sees such revisionary myth making a s "a project to raid the sanctuaries of
existing language, the treasuries where our meaning of 'male' and 'female' have
been preserved" ("The Thieves" 71)
It may be observed that a significant feature of Rich's mature poetry is
the dispensation of dichotomy which is an essential feature of patriarchal
nomenclature. In Rich. as Ostriker points out, what we find is the merging of
the subject and the object, the male and the female, and the persona and the
poet. In her long poem "Living Memory" which is pitched against the Vermont
landscape, Rich introduces a fugal thread of Vermont narratives, stories of
women who lived at physical, intellectual, emotional extremity and of "a man
they said fought death 1 to keep fire for his wife for one more winter, leav(ing) 1
a woodpile to outlast him." Then in an abrupt, totally unexpected move, Rich
shifts the focus of the poem by identifying herself with the speaking subject of
the poem, the woodcutter's wife: "I was left the legacy of a pile of stovewood /
split by a man in the mute chains of rage." (138).
In "Divisions of Labor" we get the picture of a woman "sitting / between
the stove and the stars" (Time's Power 45). The poet goes on to elaborate how
she singed her fingers in snuffing out the candles of pure theory : "Finger and
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thumb : both scorched: 1 I have felt that sacred wax blister my hand." We are
rather taken aback by the sudden turn taken by the poet. Probably it is her
eagerness to identifi herself with other women which develops along with her
growing sense of identity a s a woman that prompts her to adopt such a course.
Her poem "Women" projects three images ofwoman as "my three sisters" (Poems
Selected 109). The sisters are sitting on dark volcanic rocks and the poet says
that in this light, for the first time, she can perceive who the!- are : "My first
sister is sewing her costume for the procession. /She is going as the Transparent
Lady I and all her nerves will be visible." The second sister is also sewing "at
the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely." She hopes that at
last this tightness in her chest will ease. Her third sister is depicted as gazing
at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea. Even though her
stockings are torn she can be called beautiful.
Rich has written a number of first person poems which are brilliant in
their articulation of an identity in relation to an alter ego. She uses 'the Other'
as a defining presence who enables her to discover her own identity. Montefiore
draws our attention to "The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen a s One" and "Diving
into the Wreck" as poems belonging to such a category (161). It is possible to
include Rich's poem "Transit" also in this group. The relationship between the
cripple, the reflective self of the poet and the skier, her imaginary sister, the
emblem of self-reliance, confidence and achievement is projected here. The
cripple is full of admiration for the skier who is an expert in her craft. The
latter is portrayed as walking towards the mountain "free-swinging in worn
boots" (93). The cripple is painfully aware of her limitations and attempts to
establish bonds of sympathy and even identification with the skier. Apparently
it gives her some consolation to think that the two of them are kindred spirits.
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She reminds herself how they spent the Summer of 1945 together. climbing
Chocorua. The skier symbolises for her the dreams she had in life--"who I might
once have been," but which have been shattered by circun~stances.So she is
interested in watching that "alter ego" of hers as she moves swiftly through the
snow, her strong knees carrying her with ease. Rich has portrayed a realistic
picture of the skier seen through the admiring eyes of the cripple:
How she appears again through lightly-blowing
crystals. how her strong knees carry her,
how unaware she is, how simple
this is for h e r . . . (93)
&Accordingto ;Utieri, in the two characters in the poem, the cripple, the
reflective self of the poet and the skier, the emblem of worldly self-confidence,
the two basic roles that Rich must reconcile as the constituents of the freedom
she pursues are staged (182). He defines freedom as "the reconciliation of cripple
and skier, each aware of the power and limitation of the other" (183). Rich
becomes reconciled to the cripple in herself, makes it an access to other psyches,
and makes the access a source of self-knowledge and basis for community with
other women.
As a person sworn to find the core of her self and establish the selfhood of
woman which is free of the conventions and regulations of society, and one in
quest of her identity, Rich had been preoccupied with her Jewish origin ever
since her adolescence (Gelpi, "Two Ways" 283 ). She makes a statement of the
dilemma that she faces in the 1960 poem "Readings of History".
Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew
Yankee nor Rebel, born
In the face of two ancient cults,
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I'm a good reader of histories
(Snapshots 39)
The phrase "split at the root" sounds like a knell throughout her long
poem "Sources" (Gelpi, "Two Ways" 283). Rich has also written an essay entitled
"Split at the Root: .kn Essay on Jewish Identiby" exploring the theme of her
Jewishness. Split at the root between a father, an "assimilated" Jew and a
mother, a white Southern Protestant, neither of whom had strong convictions
in their respective religions, alienated from both Southern and New England
values, Rich ponders on the dilemma of her identity in the widening historical
gyre : the oppression of women by men, of the poor by the privileged, of blacks
by Klansmen, of Indians by Yankees, of the Jews by the Nazis (Gelpi, "Two
Ways" 282).
In her husband, Rich found a Jew of a different kind from her father. but
neither of them were ardent believers in their religion. It is said that it was the
alienation experienced by her husband that led to his death in the end (Gelpi
283). This led her to think of her father and her husband a s tragically akin:
they were both "deracinated Jews whose sense of identity a s men was defined
by the anti-semitism of their culture." Rich is determined to establish an identity
of her own which is distinctly different from that of her father or of her husband
since she wants to give specificity to her own roots and would willingly reject
the deracination they embraced. Her identity takes root, "paradoxically, in her
admission of and separation from both father and husband" (Gelpi, "Two MTays"
283). Her psychological probe reaches past paradox, past the empowering and
constricting contention with the masculine, to a founding sense of self as a
Jewish woman. I n Rich's own words, "this drive to self-knowledge, for woman,
is more than a search for identity" ("WWDA 90). She advocates a change in the
concept of sexual identity which is inevitable to ascertain that the old political
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order would not reassert itself. Komen writers have to gear themselves up to
face" the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography" which is pet
to be explored. Finding "a language and images for a consciousness we are just
coming into, with little in the past to support us" is as difficult and dangerous
as "walking on the ice" according to Rich ("\VRDAn 91).
From the time Rich professes to be a committed feminist. we find that
even her personal poems are political. But she asserts that even before she
named herself a feminist, or a lesbian, she felt impelled to bring together in her
poetry the political world and the supposedly private world ("BBPLP" 534).
The women's movement that was gathering momentum by the end of the
1960s declared that "the personal is political" (Foreword. BBP viii). It became a
keystone of radical feminist theory and opened up a new way of perceiving
truths and freeing women from inhibitions regarding the so-called personal or
private lives they were destined to lead. They started to connect domination
not in association with "economic exploitation, militarism, colonialism, and
imperialism alone, but in terms of their own immediate reality, a s they
themselves experienced it within the family, "in marriage, in childrearing, and
in the heterosexual act itself." Regarding this new development Rich states
that "breaking the mental barrier that separated private from public life felt in
itself like a n enormous surge toward liberation" ("BBPLP" 535). For a woman
who was aware of her plight in society and home, every aspect of her life was
"on the line:' In "Tear Gas" Rich writes:
The will to change begins in the body not in the mind
My politics is in my body: accruing and expanding with every
act of resistance and each of my failures
Locked in the closet a t four years old I beat the wall with my body
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that act is in me still (Poems Selected 140).
"In a world where language and naming are power," says Rich, "silence is
oppression, is violence" (OLSS 204). Feminists have been clamouring over the
monopoly which men have had on the process of naming the world. They want
to secure for themselves the right of renaming the world in relation to
themselves. They point out t h a t even a n experience that exclusively relates to
o n s may not
women like motherhood is given certain romantic c o ~ l ~ ~ o t a t iwhich
be acceptable to a large number of women who have gone through it.
When gender injustice in all forms were taken up and crusaded by the
women's movement, issues which had been dismissed as trivial and unworthy
of mention were brought to public attention. Aspects of l ~ f esuch a s "rape by
husbands or lovers, . . . the woman beaten in her home with no place to go, the
woman sterilized when she sought a n abortion, the lesbian penalized for her
private life by loss of her child, her lease, her job" which had been looked upon
as matters of private life and ignored a s such, were brought to the foreground
("BBPLP" 535). The significant contribution made by women to every economy
in the form of work in the home which is unpaid and often unrecognized was
brought home by the feminists. Rich has made woman's work the theme of
many a poem written by her. It is typical of housework t h a t no matter how
much work has been done there remains "so much yet undone" a s she points
out in "Toward the Solstice" (Dream 71).
"Coast to Coast" is another poem in which Rich speaks about the "old
servitude" to which women have been subjected :
. . . In grief and fury bending
to the accustomed tasks
realms of dust
the vacuum cleaner plowing
the mirror scoured
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grey webs
behind framed photographs
brushed away (.4 Kild Patience 6)
Rich reflects that in the cross-over between personal and political the
women activists were also pushing at the limits of experience reflected in
literature ( "BBPLP" 535 ).
About the nature of change that has come over her poetry in the course of
her development, the poet herself has said that from poems about experiences
she wrote poems that are experiences, poerus that "contribute to her knowledge
and experience even while they reflect and assimilate it" ("Poetry and
Experience" 89).A significant factor in the svolution of her poetry is that the
earlier "absolutist approach" has given wag' to the "process of discovery" (Wagner
229). This is indeed a striking change in approach the poet has come to adopt in
her later poety. For one thing, she realized how great a "gold mine" the
unconscious can prove to be to an imaginative poet. She became "increasingly
willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one
voice of a single idea" (Rich, "Poetry and Experience" 89).
According to feminists the theory of single reality or the patriarchal concept
of there being only the single male view of the world which Mary Daly refers to
as "monodimensional reality" is a strategy to enforce the silence or invisibility
ofwomen in language. They consider a pluralistic view of reality more plausible
and acceptable. The production of feminist meanings undermines the concept
of monodimensional reality since it provides incontestable evidence of the
existence of more than one reality. Feminist meanings are about a redistribution
of power, a reclaiming of the right to name and an end of silence; it is undeniably
political in nature. But such an activity is indispensable in the face of what the
estabIishment has been doing over the ages
--
procuring female silence,
eliminating any alternative to the accepted norms and criteria.
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Spender speaks about the necessiry of having a new way of knowing.
which she terms "cerebration," if women are to have their own voice instead of
echoing men. In trying to produce knowledge about women which is consistent
with their experience one has to begin with the understanding that the personal
is political. Rich is of the view that "fen~inismis the place where in the most
natural, organic way subjectivity and politics have to come together" ( "Three
Conversations" 114 ). With such an awareness feminists have begun to work
towards encoding their own meanings and to rename the world from their own
perspective.
Rich has asserted that there is no point in writing that type of poems in
which "women are all beautiful and preferably asleep" (116).It is such an image
she ridicules in the lines in "Snapshots": "Dulce ridens. dulce loouens ( latin for
"sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking" ), 1 she shaves her legs until they gleam 1
like petrified mammoth-tusk" (10). She holds the view t,hat poems can be
validated only if they are resourceful enough to change the conditions which
keep women in servitude. She contemplates the kind of poetry women would
. have written in an altered state of consciousness had they been "free of the
dreck of the past, of the stereotypes, of the projections, of all the ways in which
women have been used a s aesthetic objects" ("Three Conversations" 116).The
women personae in Rich's poems are remarkably self-sufficient and self-reliant.
In 'Transcendental Etude" we find her glorifying woman or the female principle
in the following lines:
. . . with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
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with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound:
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows. (90)
Woman gifted with the spider's genius "To spin and weave in the same
action 1 from her own body, anywhere -/even from a broken web" is celebrated
in "Integrity":
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails
emptied that kettle one last time
are these two hands
and they caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat here through this hot
misblotted sunlight, critical light
imperceptibly scalding
the skin these hands will also salve (92)
In fact Rich has a special fascination for the great heroines of the past who
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have left their mark in some field or other; she has carefully secured a place for
them in her poems. Besides women activists, luminaries in the fields of science,
astronomy and mountaineering figure in her poems. It has been pointed out
that in many of her poems Rich seems to "juxtapose the past and the present"
and we see some of her poems resonating with voices of the past (hlartin.
-4merican Triptrch 218). In "I Am in Danger Sir-! the poem in which she
"resurrects" Dickinson, the title is actually a sentence in a letter from Dickinson
to Higginson. "Setting up a kind of dialogue between her own poetry and the
quoted excerpts of their writing, Rich explores the limits of her empathy"
(Schreiber 22). In "Snapshots" she introduces Wollstonecraft by quoting her
s the Education of Daughters :
words in T h o u ~ h t on
'To have in this uncertain world some stay
which canot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence.'
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good (11)
Wollstonecraft was not satisfied with seeing her reflection in a man's
eyes; nor was she willing to accept male definitions of reality. She exhorted
women to become educated which would enable them to take responsibility for
their own lives ("From Patriarchy" 177). Rich adds in her poem the tragic destiny
of those bold women like Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller who attempted to
be self-determining: they were labelled "harpy, shrew and whore" ("Snapshots"
11).
In "Power" the title poem of the first section of poems in The Dream of a
Common Language Rich writes about Marie Curie whose name has become
synonymous with success and power. As far a s Rich is concerned, Curie is a
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living illustration from history of the worth of woman. Woman is capable of
engapng in quests for power successfully and making a name for herself through
her own persistent efforts. But Curie's life was one of suffering too: the element
that she succeeded in separating and purifying became the cause of her misery.
Even though she must have been aware of the cause of the cracked and
suppurating skin of her finger ends and the source of the cataracts on her eyes.
she held on to the very end until she could no longer hold a test-tube. When she
died, she was a n illustrious woman, one who had made her mark in this world.
but the source of her wounds and the source of her power were one and the
same.
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power ("Power" 73)
"Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev" celebrates the leader of a women's
mountaineering team that perished in a storm on Lenin Peak in 1974. Patriarchy
has had the monopoly to determine what part women shall play and what part
they shall not. The adventurous nature of mountaineering is supposed to mark
it out a s an exclusive field for men. Rich has been appreciative of the women
who proved themselves to be daring enough to break through the gender based
role system; she commends women who take part in adventurous projects like
climbing hills:
When you have buried us
ours does not end
into the unfinished
told your story
we stream
the unbegun
the possible
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Every cell's core of heat
into the thin air
pulsed out of us
of the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountain
which has taken
the imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and lninute
a s those we underwent
to bring each other here
choosing ourselves
whose every breath
is somewhere
each other
and this life
and grasp
stdl enacted
and further foothold
and continuing (75)
The poet who lamented "any woman's death diminishes me" ("From an
Old House in America") is particularly interested in recording and eulogizing
the achievements of women of all times and cultures. She hopes that it would
contribute to the building up of the selfhood of woman and also affirm "the
solidarity and empowering of women" (Foreword, BBP vii). In "Planetarium"
she extolls the achievement of Caroline Herschel, who, by helping her brother,
William, the discoverer of Uranus, "became a superb astrononler in her own
right" according to Rich. Here too the tendency to identify with the subject may
be perceived. Rich lets us know how Herschel achieved glory by discovering
eight comets in her ninety eight year old life:
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
.................... .
An eye,
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'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
....................
encountering the NOVA
..................................
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing (38-39)
A striking feature that is integral to Rich's mature poetry is her will to
change. It is a determination to change her own self, her fellom;-beingsand the
world around herself. In fact, Rich cannot accept either a public or a private life
not motivated by the will to change ( Ostriker, Writing 108). Robert Boyers has
remarked on the title of her work, .A Will to Chance that it is an emphatic
declaration of the centrality of will in the poet's life and work (148). He suggests
that in any consideration of her poetry, this 'will to change' should serve as
primary focus (149). It presupposes a definite way of life, with certain distinctive
features. Of these the significant ones are a decision to work through one's
problems, to be attentive to one's needs and to the shifting demands of one's
environment and companions and a growing commitment to social reality.
Rich, like the radical feminists in general, points to patriarchy a s the
primary cause of the oppression of women (Gatlin 130). She defines patriarchy
as "any kind of group organization in which males hold dominant power and
determine what part females shall and shall not play, and in which capabilities
assigned to women are relegated generally to the mystical and aesthetic and
excluded from the practical and political realms" ("Anti-Feminist Woman" 101).
Explaining why she is a feminist, Rich states t h a t she feels endangered
psychically and physically by men, the embodiments of the patriarchal idea.
She is afraid that the female principle is in danger within the confines set by
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patriarchy ("Anti-Feminist" 104).
Rich shares with the other freedom fighters the view that the individual
family unit is a t the core of patriarchy, and as such the most effective way to
attack patriarchy would be to rebel against the established pattern of individual
family unit. She asserts that it is unfair to confine women to the accepted roles
of "mothers and muses for men" ("\TTDAl" 98). According to Rich there is no
justification for equating woman with "privacy, home and domesticity. . . and
subjectivity" and man with "achievement, aggression (and) outer world ("Three
Conversations" 110). She holds the view that being enslaved to age-old
conventions, customs and practices, women have turned out to be their own
enemies. They have become the custodians of these traditions. The conventions
of established society have made them submissive and acquiescent and even
when they encounter disparities and blatant injustice it is not in their nature
to protest.
Rich who had been eager to lead a "full 1ifenentered into marriage in her
early twenties and before she was thirty had three children. About the time her
third child was born she felt she had either to consider herself a failed woman
and a failed poet or to "find some synthesis by which to understand what was
happening to her" ("RWDA 95). She says that she was frightened by the sense
of drift she was experiencing, "of being pulled along on a current" in which she
seemed to be losing the will and energy she had experienced earlier. Soon she
realized that she was undergoing "the female fatigue of suppressed anger and
the loss of contact with her own being." She found herself writing very little
and she knew that this had something to do with "the discontinuity of female
life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly
undo, small children's constant needs" ("WWDA 95). Rich came to the conclusion
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that sexuality, work and parenthood could co-exist in men but that the demands
made on a woman who wanted to play her roles in the traditional wag' were so
many that she would soon find herself leading a marginal existence. Rich's ten
portraits of woman as daughter-in-law reveal the inner conflict endured by
women who try to be submissive and conform to the role expected of them.
However, in depicting the fragmentary nature of the lives ofwomen in her
poem "One Life" she does not present married life in the worst light:
. . .We had more than half a life,
I had four lives at least, one out of marriage
when I kicked up all the dust I could
before I knew what I was doing.
One life with the girls on the line during the war
............................
One life with a husband, not the worst,
One with your children, none of it
just what you'd thought.. .
(Time's Power 43)
Nevertheless a significant fact about Rich's poetry is the total absence of
references to romantic love and marital bliss. She considers romantic love a
myth. She does not dismiss it altogether but says that it may occur accidentally
like a car crash. In ".4utumn Equinox" Rich portrays a young girl who rushes
into marriage with a professor, a scholar and "the least aciduous of men,"
prompted by "a woman's love for men of intellect, I A woman's need for love of
any kind." The description of the wedding picture in the bureau drawer is
interesting indeed:
. . .I
see myself again,
Correct and terrifed on our wedding-day ,
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Wearing the lace my mother wore before me
And buttoned shoes that pinched. . .
While aunts around us nodded like the Fates
That nemesis was accomplished . Lyman stood
S o thin and ministerial in his black ,
I thought he looked a stranger. In the picture
We are the semblance of a bride and groom (Poems Selected 24)
She goes on to tell us that in this manner she became his partner "in a life
/Annual academic." The noises, scenes and events of the campus in their dull
monotony were intolerable to the young bride even though for her husband
Lyman, "The world was all t h e distance he pursued / From home to
lecture-room, and home again." The girl-bride soon gets fed up with the "grave
and academic street" was eager to move away from the academic world and see
"finer things (she) had not seen, things that could show with pride 1 Beneath
that silver globe." Seeing the steel engravings of the marvels of the world
framed in black oak which were kept in Lyman's study as if declaring that
"Such was the right and fitting role of marvels,"she felt rebellious.That night
when she was half asleep she wept aloud. In response to the queries of her
'loving' husband she replied "I'm sick, I guess-- I I thought that life was different
than it is." It is nothing other than disillusionment in marriage that is portrayed
so convincingly by Rich through these 1ines.The woman persona continues to
ponder over what is given and what is received in marital relationship. Gradually
both the male and female partners get over the phase of disillusionment and
are ready to take things in their stride.
The woman persona takes upon herself the task of exhorting young lovers
who talk of giving their hearts to each other that they must be aware ofwhat is
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given and what is received. Since then years have passed and the man and
woman who were once young are "old like nature." They have become "as
unselfconscious a s a pair of trees, 1 Not questioning, but living" resigned to the
thought t h a t " even autumn I Can only carry through what spring began."
However, reflecting on the vast gulf that yawns between the rosy dreams and
the stark reality regarding marriage she makes a vivid observation, "Lye finish
off I Not quite a s we began" (26).
Rich who does not cherish any romantic notions regarding marriage is
even reluctant to admit that marriage provides life-long companionship. The
male partner often tends to be no better than a parasite on woman as she
portrays in "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff" : ". . . he feeds on us, i like all of
them." This leads her to make another revealing statement: "R4arriage is lonelier
than solitude" (Dream 43). Rich can only feel pity for the imperfect relationship
that exists between the sexes in the patriarchal culture, which leaves the world
more or less orphaned and this prompts her to make the profound observation
which is noteworthy for the beauty of the lines charged with meaning :
The irreducible, incomplete connection
between the dead and living
or between m a n and woman in this
savagely fathered and unmothered world ("From a n Old House"
63)
She is prepared to take up a n exhaustive study of life, positing herself on
firm ground and scrutinizing where exactly the split between the sexes began :
I wish there were somewhere
actual we could stand
handing the power-glasses back and forth
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looking at the earth, the tvildwood
where the split began ("Vaking in the D a r k 52)
Rich cannot help noticing the disparity that exists between the rosy notions
regarding marriage and the harsh realities of life. The wedding ring which is a
symbol of life-long trust and avowed faith is seen worn by the adulterer in her
poem "When We Dead ,4waken." In the same poem she speaks about the feeling
of loneliness a n d the misery of isolation entering into the mind of the
woman-partner in the course of years and how it affects married life: "The fact
of being separate I enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture I - a chest of
seventeenth-century wood." This will naturally be followed by a number of
failings on the part of the woman-partner: ''you give up keeping track of
anniversaries . . ." (2.12). But this is in a way an advantage to her; she can be
honest to herselE "you begin to write in your diaries I more honestly than ever"
*
(4RP 60).
Rich deals with the theme of failure in marriage in "A Marriage in the
'Sixties' ":
Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock,
May have a t last a perfect hour of talk that
language aches for; still - two minds, two messages (15)
In her poem " R W the woman persona says, addressing her husband, "yes,
I find you I overweening, obsessed, and even in your genius I narrow-minded."
The images that she retains in her memory of her husband are his face turned
awkwardly from the kiss of greeting and his lips curling at what displeases
him. Failure of communication is a serious obstacle they have to confront very
often: "When language fails us, when we fail each other 1 there is no exorcism.
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The hurt continues. Yes, your scorn / turns up the jet of my anger . . ."
(m
Patience 49).
The poet seems to suggest that for the failure of marriages men alone are
not ro be held responsible: her woman persona is ready to admit her own fault
in a candid manner: ". . . and absolute loyalty was never in my line / once
having left it in my father's house . . " Perhaps the woman's immaturity has
something to do with the failure of marriage. In "Autumn Equinox" we find
that her woman persona has no inhibition, whatever, in "talk[ing] husbands,"
just in the same vein a s she makes "bargains or phiolosophizes" in her
neighbourly talk over the fence with other women (Poems Selected 23).
Faithlessness in marriage which leads to unhappiness and misery is dealt
with in "The Perennial Answer." There we find the woman persona confessing.
. . . I never clung
One moment on his breast. But I was young
And I was cruel, a girl-bride seeing only
Her marriage a s a room so strange and lonely
She looked outside for warmth. . . (Poems Selected 35)
Rich's persona is so eager to assert her independence that she is not willing
to share anything with a male partner who has ever been overweening and
jealously possessive. Even when she admits with some reluctance that she
dreamt of him often, she wants him to remember that he can have no claim on
those dreams which are exclusively her own: "If I dream of you these days / I
know my dreams are mine and not of you." Yet she is well aware of the fact that
it is not all too easy to sever the bond that exists between the two of them. Rich
calls it "older and stranger than ourselves / like a translucent curtain, a sheet
of water / a dusty window" ("From an Old House" 65).
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The dead end of male civilization is dramatized again and again 111 Rich's
poems (Jong 172). In "Waking in the D a r k she states: "A man's world. But
finished 1 They themselves have sold it to the machines" (50). With great
confidence Rich asserts that if the community of women is in control of the
world it will be managed in a much better way. Rich is convinced of the potential
power of collective female energy, which, unlike masculine energy, is
constructive in nature. She becomes eloquent in visualizing the explosive
possibilities of the collective energy of women in "Hunger":
Of what it could be
to take and use our love.
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, votes, viruses (Dream 12)
What she suggests in these lines is that a nurturing ethos is the proper
antidote to t h e excesses of p a t r i a r c h a l civilization (hIartin,"From
Patriarchy"l84). Ostriker is of the view that Rich's stance as a feminist has
depended on the idea of an enemy explicitly or implicitly (Writing 117). In
"The Phenomenology of Anger" the woman persona even dreams of killing the
enemy. Though it is obvious that Rich is dissatisfied with the pathetic state of
the male-dominated world which has nothing other than oppression, tyranny,
"gangrape, lynching and pogrom" to offer, it is not proper to stamp her a
misandrist. By the time Rich writes A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far
her attitude has undergone a sea change and in place of the "obscure boiling
anger" we see the mellowed temperament of patience ("Three Conversations"
109). In "From a n Old House" she explicitly states: "If they call me man-hater,
you /would have known it for a lie" (65).The utopian vision she cherishes also
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bears testimony to this trait in her. In "The
Phenomenology of Anger" she
projects her dream:
I would have loved to live in a world
of women and men gaily
in collusion with green leaves, stalks,
building. . .
little huts of woven grass (58)
In fact it was two men who played a major part in moulding her personality
and career in actual life. In the autobiographical essay "When Ke Dead Awaken"
Rich recounts how she was brought up by her father Arnold Rich as a prodigy
and educated by him from the books in his library to be a poet: "So for about
twenty pears I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and
made me feel I was indeed 'special"' (93). Later in her life she came to look upon
paternal authority as a form ofpatriarchal oppression and tended to resist it. It
was in bold defiance of her father's vehement opposition that soon after
graduation from Radcliffe, she rushed into a marriage with Alfred Conrad, an
economist who taught at Harvard. Yet she was conscious of the intimacy that
existed between her father and herself. In "After D a r k an elegy for her father,
she writes:
Faintly a phonograph needle
whirs round in the last groove
eating my heart to dust.
That terrible record ! how it played
down years, wherever I was
in foreign languages even
over and over, I know vou better
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than vou know vourself . . . (24-25)
She narrates how she felt self-maimed and stopped singing for a whole year
and how on getting "a new body, new b r e a t h and children of her own, she
trained herself to forget to listen to the words of her father but hour, one morning
she woke up "and knew myself your daughter." The lines addressed to her father
remind us of the bond that existed between Cordelia and Iirng Lear. Rich's line
"Now let's away from prison--" (25j brings to our mind the words of Lear to
Cordelia when they are both captured prisoners and are near death: "Come,
let's away to prison" (Ihne Lear 5.3.8).
The bond that existed between Rich and her husband was a deep one too.
She married Conrad when she was just a fresh graduate from the university in
the face of fierce opposition from her father, hoping that it would liberate her
from "that most dangerous place, the family home" (Gelpi, "Two VVajrs" 280).
Conrad encouraged her career and provided her the necessary help to write in
the midst of domestic routine. We see her addressing him, a s spousal partner
in "A Marriage in the 'Sixties' " written in the year 1961. There is another
reference to her husband in her poem "Like This Together" composed in 1963-
- "Sometimes a t night I you are my mother. . . Sometimes 1 you're the wave of
birth . . ." (23). Her poems "For the D e a d and "From a Survivor", both written
in 1972, two years after his suicide, are addressed to him and in these poems
the poet gives expression to her sense of loss with nostalgia:
The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men and women in those days
I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
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.............. ...............
Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special
.............................
Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead ("From a Survivor" 59--60)
In "For the Dead" Rich says that she dreamed she called him on the
telephone to say "Be kinder to yourself' but being sick he would not answer.
She says: "The waste of my love goes on this way 1 trying to save you from
yourself" (60). Gelpi has observed that it was the alienation experienced by
Conrad that led to his death ( "Two Ways" 283 ).
It is found that Rich's poetry is most powerful when it is most subjective.
Liberating itself from all masculine traditions, it flows freely, as it were, from
her personality with an authenticity of its own. Her poetry, like that of Anne
Sexton and Sylvia Plath, incorporates within it elements of her personal history.
Thus there are references in her poetry to her close relatives which can hardly
be taken for imaginary. In "The Desert as Garden of Paradise" it is her father
who figures: "Arnold the Jew my father 1 told me the story (of Ahmad the Arab)"
whom he met in the latter's "walled garden" (Time's Power 28). "Xter Dark," a
requiem for her father, is particularly touching a s we know it to be a realistic
portrayal of h e r relationship with her father, a poem characterized by
ambivalence : ". . . old tree of life I old man whose death I wanted" (24).
Indeed there are quite a number of poems in which the poet tends to be
autobiographical. In "Solfeggietto" she shares with her readers the nostalgic
thoughts about her childhood days when she had piano lessons given by her
mother and she was struggling with the strange notations : "Piano lessons the
mother and daughter I . . . worked out in finger-exercises 1. . . -- Did you think
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mine w a s a virtuoso's 'nand 1" (132-133)
Rich narrates in a n autobiographical piece how her mother, who was
once a n aspiring pianist a n d composer started teaching her to play Mozart on
the piano when she was just four years old. The music lessons could not be
continued for long since the child developed psychological problems -- "facial
tics, eczema in the creases of her elbow and knees and hay fever" ("M'hat Is
Found there 184). This prose narration makes it explicit that reference to the
piano lessons t h e daughter takes from her mother in "Solfeggietto" is definitely
taken from her real life.
When Rich portrays the images of her grandmothers, Mary Gravely Jones
and Hattie Rice Rich through her poems in -4 Wild Patience Has Taken Me
This Far, it is obvious t h a t they are based on real life characters. I n her poem,
"Hattie Rice Rich," her paternal grandmother is presented a s a victim of
patriarchal practices
i n your dark blue dress a n d straw hat . . .
Shuttling half - yearly between your son and daughter
Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone.
....................... ..............
All through World War Two the forbidden word
" J e w i s h was barely uttered in your son's house;
your anger flared over inscrutable things.
Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed
. . . sobbing
your one brief memorable scene of rebellion ("Hattie Rice Rich" A
Wild Patience 38)
In the same vein Rich writes about her grandmother in her prose narrative
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"Split a t the Root":
My father's mother, who lived with us half the year. was a model of
circumspect behaviour, dressed in dark blue or lavender, retiring
in company, ladylike to an extreme . . . A few times, within the
family, I saw her anger flare, felt the passion she was repressing"
(231).
It is the perfect blending "of emotions, of autobiographical confession. of history
and social events" that renders these poems of Rich extraordinary (Humm.
Feminist Criticism 196).
Rich has written a number ofpoems dealing with spec& woman-to-woman
encounters. These poems can be brought under two categories -- one, dealing
with women who are intimately connected with her private life and the other.
dealing with essentially public figures who are distanced from her temporally
and spatially. The poem "Rlother-in-Law" which can be brought under the
former category offers intensely complex feelings.
The mother-in-law, who appears to have been leading a desolate life for
some years on Placebos and Valium, has an intuitive realization that something
unpleasant and tragic has occurred in the family. She is obsessed with the
thought, "They think I'm weak and hold I things back from me . . ." In her
eagerness to get a t the truth, however unpleasant it might be, she queries her
daughter-in-law : "What are you working on now, is there anyone special, I how
is the job /do you mind coming back to an empty house" (A Wild Patience 31).
Such "casual and prying questions," as Helen Vendler remarks, "are not the
common coin of our mothers' more formal era" (33). We find the lack of
understanding looming large in their midst. But "the daughter-in-law's reflexive
consciousness produces a sense of difference," and according to Altieri, this is
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what stands in the way of their relationship (Altieri 185).Rich brings out the
severe mental turbulence ex-erienced by the daughter-in-law in the lines, ". . .
I envy I the people in mental hospitals their freedom." She realizes that she is
bound to divulge the truth even though it is far from pleasant: it would brighten
neither her mother-in-law's life nor her own. So she tells her the truth in all its
harshness -- "Your son is dead / ten years, I am a lesbian" (32).
The mother-in-law's fantasies are shattered, and clearly enough, even the
remote possibility of establishing intimacy between the two women is ruined
for good. The daughter-in-law,in a complex state of mind, compounded of feelings
of defiance, depression, isolation and a sense of political failure, poses a number
of questions :
Mother-in-law,before we part
shall we tn- again ? Strange as I am,
strange as you are ? what do mothers
ask their own daughters, everywhere in the world ?
Is there a question ?
-Ask me something (A Wild Patience 32)
However the theme of Rich's poetry is not confined within the bounds of
her ego. In "Culture and Anarchy" the poet goes beyond the relationship of
two women into a kind of halogue with a variety of women's voices from the
past. We find a n extension of her concept of freedom in her evolution a s a poet.
Rich exhorts present-day women to be worthy of their "foresisters," learn from
their history, and look for inspiration to the ancestresses
(m9). Jan Montefiore
has remarked t h a t Rich always emphasizes the "network of influence between
women, the links between the 'fore mothers' from whom we inherited our
thoughts a n d ourselves as daughters aware of our inheritance" (60). In
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'.Heroinesnshe portrays middle class women of the nineteenth century who did
not have to put up with the severe adversities of life such a s poverty. illiteracy
or ill-health resulting kom esposure to unhygienic surroundings: 'You are spared
. . . death by pneumonia
. . . the seamstress' clouded eyes 1 the mill - girl's
shortening breath" (-4 Wild Patience 33). But they were incapable of leading
full lives because the law denied them the right to property in a world where
property was everything, the right to equal pay with men. and the right to vote
or to speak in public. Those "heroines" are her predecessors who were endowed
with qualities of courage, clarity and energy and they were daring enough to
protest against the injustice that was meted out to them. Rich writes:
You draw your long skirts
deviant
across the nineteenth century
registering injustice
failing to make it whole (A f ild Patience 35)
Rich employs the same technique of summoning women from different
times and different parts of the world in her later poetry too. In "Letters in the
Family" we see monologues of three different women, each in a crisis of her
own--one writes from the Spanish Civil War, one from behind the Nazi line in
k7ugoslavia and the third from present-day South Africa. The third letter is
written by a mother to her children. She says that her present plight makes it
impossible for her to disclose where she is at the moment. She and her comrades
hide under what bushes they can fmd during daytime and make their way at
night steered by stars. She cannot say where they are, what weeds are in bloom
or what birds cry at dawn; she thinks that the less her children know, the safer
it is. But she cannot but disclose her anxiety for their well-being-- Matile's
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earache, Emma's lessons--everythingis her ioncern even though she is far away
from them. Rich concludes the poem expressing the mother's hopes of a reunion
with her family: "At the end of this hard road I we'll sit all together at one meal
I and I'll tell you everything . . ." (Time's Power 23-24)
This is perhaps one of the very few poems in which Rich delineates
mother-child relationship. In "Snapshots" she has depicted a mother and
daughter; through subtle strokes she has suggested the essential difference
between them. The mother is still in her prime but reminds one of the famous
line by Diderot on women, "You all die at fifteen," of which Rich has written
elsewhere in the poem (11).This lady was ". . .once a belle in Shreveport. I with
henna-coloured hair, skin like a peach bud." She has become a different woman:
Your mind now, mouldering like wedding cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
-.>.,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life (9)
Her daughter also has to carry out almost all the domestic chores just like
her, but the impact of the changing times is obvious in her because she is moving
in another direction: " . . . your daughter I wipes the teaspoons, grows another
way" (9). Perhaps like Dickinson who once stated "I never had a mother" (qtd.
in Of Woman Born 229), this daughter also feels "deviant and gets apart" from
the kind of life led by her mother.
The poet's commitment as a feminist motivates her t o deal with women's
culture and emotions. The omnipresent threat of "male dominion," colonization
and rape of the land which she perceives through the lens of native American
history, the intellectual activist mission that a woman has to embrace, the
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:.',
,\
complexity of experience and the daily heroism of women ever!~vhere continue
to be her themes (llandelbaum 367). Even though with the passing of years
Rich has become more mature in her outlook and less sanguine about the mind's
freedom to exercise choice without fetters of any kind, the radicalism of her
vision continues to be as strong a s ever. Rich wants her readers t o be aware of
the violence inflicted against the minds ofwomen in the male-dominated culture,
the need to be freed from its hold, the risk that is involved in the process of
overcoming the internal impediments and the pain that will have to be endured
(Ostriker, Writing 108).
In Of Woman Born Rich states that woman who was once placed on a
pedestal and adored has been brought down to chattel status, shorn of real
value. Rich thinks that it has something to do with "the force of the idea of
dependence on a woman for life itself' which has been haunting masculine
sensibility (11).The domineering ways of men for centuries have influenced
the life style and behaviour of women in such a way that they have accepted
submission as a way of life. It is about such an acquiescent form of life that she
writes in "Autumn Equinox".
Now we are old like Nature: patient, staid,
Unhurried from the year's well worn routine,
We wake and take the day for what it is,
.....................
Not questioning, but living. . . (Poems Selected 26)
The poet condemns the patriarchal tendency to look down upon woman
as a "womb or a mere tool, thus denying her the right to be recognized a s an
autonomous individual. She points out that woman's status as childbearer has
been projected into a major fact of her life; terms like "barren," or "childless"
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have been used to deny her any further identity (Of Woman Born 11)
Rich denounces the tendency on the part of men to consider women a s
their possessions. In her poem "Mother-Right" she describes how man looks
upon the woman and child a s well a s "the grass. the waters underneath the air"
as his possessions. "The man is walking boundaries 1 measuring
He believes
in what is his" (Dream 59). But Rich suggests that the woman is trying to make
for the open in her attempt to escape from the stifling hold of man.
Like feminists all over the world, Rich raises her voice for complete
authority that woman should have over her own body. There was a time when
Rich believed that the re-possession of woman over her body would have more
far-reaching influence on human society than "the seizing of the means of
production by workers" (Introd, Of Woman Born xvii). It is her ardent hope
that when every woman becomes the presiding genius of her own body, her
potentialities would develop to the maximum and that visions and thoughts
would come forth from her which would contribute to sustain, console and alter
human existence. In such a society sexuality, politics, intelligence, power,
motherhood, work, community and intimacy would develop new meanings and
t,hinking itself would undergo drastic transformation.
Later Rich brought in the idea that along with the free exercise by all
women of sexual and procreative choice, certain other claims should also be
recognized. The "claim to personhood, the claim to share justly on the products
of human labour, to participate fully in decision-making and to speak for
ourselves in our own right" are no less important (Introd. Of Woman Born
Rich considers that "a complete emancipation / from all the crippling
influences of fear" is possible only if opportunities are available for women "for
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the full / development of her forces of mind and body." In that case. "the most
enlarged freedom of thought and action" will be within her reach and she will
possess the right to her own person ("Culture and Anarchy" -1Wild Patience
10).
In the set up of a society where a woman does not have to expend much of
her energy constructing a viable existence, it will be possible for her to lead a
&ee life and achieve success. Rich is of the view that
until all women have
access to their potential, she herself can have no real liberation. She considers
herself as being "terribly over-privileged, "a token woman" having extraordinary
kinds of freedom for varied reasons such as education, class. race, money and
privileges of all kinds. Power that is denied to the majority of \yomen is offered
to the token women by the society. There is the danger of token women being
isolated from the wider mainstream of female community ("The Anti-Feminist
Woman" 104). The male perception of her as an "extraordinary" woman
influences the perception of the female community in general and they tend to
consider her a s different from themselves; she too ceases to identifv herself
with women a s a fellow being. Thus her "outsider's eye" which could be her real
source of power and perception comes to be blurred. And Rich maintains that it
is impossible to be a n insider i n a n institution fathered by masculine
consciousness
6).
In the field of politics too, this is exactly what has happened. A4fterlong
years of clamouring for recognition, woman has made her way into the political
realm of life. Even though woman is said to be emancipated , her position is
not different from that ofthe emancipated negro, as has been pointed out by de
Beauvoir. The master class still wishes to "keep them in their place" a s she
observes in the introduction to her seminal work The Second Sex (xxvii). The
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few women who hare succeeded in getting access to politics, are restricted to
the backrows and hare no sigluficant role to play in decision-making. Revolutions
may come into being but the women will have nothing to do with them; they
will neither be capable of doing anything in support of them nor can they prevent
their outbreak. Women in the backrows of politics are "still licking thread to
slip into the needle's 1 eye. . . producing immaculate First Comn~uniondresses"
or doing some mechanical work ("Divisions of Labor" Time's Power 45).
Rich points out that lately more women are entering the professions, even
though they are still vastly outnumbered by men in upper-level jobs. However
she exhorts women to remember the early insight of the feminist movement as
it evolved in the late sixties: "no woman is liberated until we all are liberated."
She speaks about the insistence of the feminist movement that each woman's
selfhood is precious, that the feminine ethic of self-denial and self-sacrifice must
give way to "a true woman identification, which would affirm our connectedness
with all women"
8).
Rich thinks it necessary on the part of modern woman to make demands
of men who have for centuries restricted the lives of women (Martin, "From
Patriarchy" 157). Even though she professes that she is no man-hater, she is
not prepared to bind herself to the reality of the situation that exists in sexist
society which is sterile, and has no reverence for life or the female principle.
She makes her stance clear when she declares:
". . .
I cannot now lie down /
with a man who fears my power / o r reaches for me as for death" ("From an Old
House" 69).
The poet, in her characteristic outspoken manner, admits that the only
real love she has ever felt has been for children and other women. She condemns
all other forms of attachment a s "lust, pity, self-hatred .
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. ." In
a chapter
captioned, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" Rich professes
herself to be a lesbian and suggests that heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs
to be recognized and studied a s a political institution (BBP 3.5).
Rich seems to think that in delineating the image of the new woman, who
is not ensnared by the concept of "the mystique of motherhood excavating the
past and unearthing ancient cultural forms will open up new possibilities
(Martin, An American Triptrch 199). -4 study of the women of the past, the
ones who first came and settled in America will make clear the futility and
meaninglessness of those wasted lives. Those women who were washed up on
the continent to be fruitful had to exhaust all their energy doing hard work.
They were "faceless torsos licked by fire." Yet when something went wrong,
they were the ones who were blamed. The American woman of the past in
Rich's poem knows that the sons she would bear would ride away from her and
that her daughters would meet with a destiny similar to her own "into the
arroyo of stillbirths, massacres / Hanged as witches, sold as breeding -wenches3'
("From an Old House" 66).
According t o Rich, the mother-child bond is the most basic of human
relationships. She is of the view that the blissful mother-child union and the
acute joy it gives last only for a short duration. According to her, it is the
manipulations of patriarchy t h a t deprive woman of her association with
fellow-women even in her infancy and keep women as separate entities devoid
of power and strength. Rich even suggests that the mature sexuality of women
is based on the desire to recapture the joyful mother-daughter relationship. It
is actually the birthright that is being stripped from woman so early in her life:
"too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman's heartbeat I heard ever after
from a distance" ("Transcendental Etude" 88). Rich quotes the words of Susan
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Cavin: "the original deep adult bonding is that of woman for woman" and states
that unless woman is free to maintain the reality ofwomen's passion for women,
she will feel lost (qtd. in BBP 49). She will be convinced of the potential power
of female energy only if it is possible for her to move freely in the community of
women. It should be within the accepted parameters to choose women as allies
and life companions if women desire so. Thus it will be possible for women to
experience "many forms of primary intensity between and among women,
including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the
giving and receiving of practical and political support"
a51).
What Rich means by "lesbian continuum" has a range of meaning far
beyond the clinical sense that is attached to the term "lesbianism:' It signifies
something more than mere physical sexuality; it is "an energy. . . omnipresent
in the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional or psychic" (BBP 53). In
"Culture and Anarchy," she states that it is only fair that those who share
identical interests should be together: "Yes, our work is one 1 we are one in aim
and sympathy / and we should be together" ("A Wild Patience 13). In this poem
she offers a contrast to Matthew Arnold's emphasis on the civilization that men
have built up. She celebrates the power ofwomen as she does in "Transcendental
Etude." She quotes extensively from the writings of nineteenth century
suffragettes and a s Martin has suggested, the poem "juxtaposes past and present
in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of female friendship, female
community and female vision" (An American Triptvch 218).
Rich deplores the fact that women do not have the right to exercise free
choice in decision-making, even in the expression of their sexuality, in the
present social context. Moreover, most women are not even aware of the fact
that they are denied their rights. For example, a young girl brought up in
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patriarchal tradition is not sufficiently equipped to think about her options,
her relations with men or women. She is likely to have distorted notions
regarding the concept of "lesbianism since she cannot have heard of it apart
from the taboos that surround it. Besides, the established ideas regarding
sexuality presuppose that primary love between the sexes is normal and that
women need men a s social and economic protectors for adult sexuality and for
psychological completion. According to Rich, women should train themselves
not to conform to conventions or resign themselves to what they have made of
their lives. She exhorts women community to realize that what may appear
simply as "the way things are" could actually be a social construct, advantageous
to some and detrimental to others. She asserts that instead of accepting these
social constructs readily, women should resort to criticizing and altering them
(BBP 176).
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