Chapter Four: Adrienne Rich and the awakening of women's political consciousness:
Adrienne Rich has dedicated her life to achieve change in the political and national trend. Her poems are chiefly concerned with the waking of feminine consciousness. She wants to make women aware of the destruction caused by male oppression. The disregard shown to women in patriarchal society is the cause of her anger. Also, she feels that women have been historically doomed. However, she has a desire and hope that a better future waits for women. Rich's means to fulfill her desires is language. She believes that the true purpose of language is to give a sense of personal and communal fulfillment. So, she intends to reconstitute language and restore its power. Through her poetry, she desires to bring about a new world where the emotions, wisdom, identity and unity of women are recognized and valued. She says, 'I was writing at the beginning of a decade of political revolt and hope and activism '. Even before I named myself a feminist, or a lesbian, I felt compelled to bring together, in my understanding and in my poems, the political world' ('Blood, Bread and Poetry' 247-248).
Although there were many voices warning Rich against mixing politics with art, it was Yeats' poetry that encouraged her to support the theory that poetry 'can root itself in politics' (243). However, Rich believed for a time that politics led only to bitterness and abstractness of mind, made women 'shrill and hysterical' and resulted in 'a waste of beauty and talent' (243). Rich states that in those days it was not possible for her to know the accomplishments of women poets: 'Elizabeth Barrett Browning's anti-slavery and feminist poetry, H.D.'s anti-war and woman-identified poetry and the radical work of Muriel Rukeyser were still buried by the academic literary canon' (244). So, she began to study women poets buried in the past and investigate the reasons for the lack in the number of women who could achieve success.
Like many other women activists who were fighting against war and for the rights of minorities, blacks and oppressed 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 great awareness and sensibility, was at the head of it. She often deals with the idea in the lines written in the last 'Ghazal' in her book, Leaflets: 'How did we get caught up fighting the forest fire, / we, who were only looking for a still place in the woods?' (5-6). Since Rich professes to be a committed feminist, one finds that even her personal poems are political.
By the end of the 1960s, the women's movement declared that 'the personal is political' (qtd in 'Blood, Bread, and Poetry' 248). This statement became a keystone of radical feminist theory and opened a new way of perceiving truths and freeing women from personal or private lives they were destined to lead. For Rich, it was very important because the question of women's role and men's roles had been rejected in other political movements. She writes: 'Women were now talking about domination, not in association with economic exploitation, militarism, colonialism, imperialism' alone, but in terms of their own immediate reality, as they experienced it within the family, 'in marriage, in child rearing, and in the heterosexual act itself' (248). Thus, she is convinced that liberation would be achieved only through breaking the barrier that separated private from public life. 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 at four years old I beat the wall with my body
that act is in me still (38-42)
Rich believes that poetry is a constructed body of language that inspires political and social change. Throughout her poetic career, her main focus has been the politics of the body. Especially in her early poetic career, she examines female identity as it is socially, politically, and legally defined by marriage. She employs a closed metrical form and rhyming scheme in order to emphasize that the female body is trapped within society and marriage.
During the stage in her poetry when she writes Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968, Rich's psychological and political break with patriarchy deepens further. She refuses the characterization of women as objects and explores the female body as a site of conflict, such as the battleground of the Vietnam War. In Leaflets, the war, particularly the Vietnam War, appears more as imagery than as direct subject. For Rich, the notion of 'enemy' is connected to the notion of 'other': just as the Vietnamese are considered the enemy and the other, women also have suffered the same classifications. For her, if we can internalize the pain of war, the war, the enemy, and the abuse done to human bodies will become more real to us and provoke change. In this poetry book, she aims for people to feel the pain of war so that they can see the 'other' not as an enemy but as another human being and to see women not as 'others' but as equals.
In 'Demon Lover' and 'Nightbreak,' Rich identifies with the enemy
by portraying him or her as a lover. In 'Demon Lover,' she brings the Vietnam War into our homes, communities and even our dreams:
I dreamed about the war.
We were all sitting at the table
in a kitchen in Chicago.
The radio had just screamed
that Illinois was the target (56-60)
In 'Nightbreak,' Rich includes dream-like images and relates the battlefield of war to everyday life by identifying with the Vietnamese and by depicting her own body as the site of war:
In the bed the pieces fly together
and the rifts fill or else
my body is a list of wounds
symmetrically placed
a village
blown up by planes
that did not finish the job (25-31)
Rich's use of spacing in 'Nightbreak' and in other poems in Leaflets emphasizes the prevalent tone of division and the lack of communication which result in the use of the words 'enemy' and 'other.' She insists that we must unite, communicate with eachother and see one another as human beings rather than as 'enemies' or 'others.' Even though people are divided, it is not acceptable to describe others as 'the enemy' because, for her, there is no enemy:
The enemy has withdrawn
between raids become invisible
there are
no agencies
of relief (32-36)
Rich is convinced that communication plays a vital role in breaking down the barriers between lovers, countries, enemies, and even genders. Rich not only identifies the enemy as lover, but also she insists that we must find our capacity to love and use our creative imagination to make 'the pieces fly together' (25). Greenwald points out that, for Rich, the "true enemy" is not the Vietnamese people, women, or minorities, but the 'war machine and patriarchy itself' (100). Also, she believes that we can eliminate the lies told to people about the Vietnam War and the historical misrepresentations of women and minorities only through language.
Thus, in Leaflets, Rich's imagined body is the site of war and the enemy is her lover. Through language, she focuses our attention on the
body, the power of love, and the necessity of communication. She sees that the female body is a political entity more viewed as 'object' than as 'subject.' During the war, it is much easier to hate our enemies when we refuse to see them as human beings. So, by depicting the imagined body in these poems, she aims to bring the pain of the war to everyday life, and as a result, to urge people to be lovers rather than enemies.
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. For Rich, Curie is a living example from history of the worth of woman. Woman is capable of engaging in quests for power successfully and making a name for herself through her own efforts. Marie Curie is a famous scientist. She was a two-time Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of radium, radioactivity, and other important scientific discoveries. She won Nobel Prizes in both chemistry and physics, making her the only person ever to win Nobels in two different fields, and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Tragically, Marie Curie died in 1934 from aplastic anemia, caused by her constant exposure to radiation. Her life's work essentially killed her (Shmoop Editorial Team).
Rich speaks about this tragedy in 'Power,' and thinks both about Curie's unique position as a woman scientist, but mostly about the sad irony that her powerful work brought about her unexpected death. Although she must have been aware of the cause of her misery, she persisted to the very end. When she died, she was a notable woman who had made her mark in this world. The source of her suffering 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 (19-22)
Thus, through the example of Marie Curie, Rich wants to encourage women to challenge the difficulties of life and to achieve success in all fields, even impossible ones such as politics. At her time, women were not allowed to hold political positions or even to share in political activities. They were thought to be incompetent and unskilled. The woman who tried to enter political life was called 'hysterical.' This injustice annoyed her so much. So, she urges women to try hard till the last breath in order to survive and get their proper place.
'Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev' celebrates the leader of a women's
mountaineering team that died 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 makes it an exclusive field for men. Rich has appreciated women who proved themselves to be daring enough to break through the gender- based role system:
Every cell's core of heat pulsed out of us
into the thin air of the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountain which has taken the imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and minute (42-46)
This poem presents an example of women's relationships that allow the unity of love and power. Although the team has failed to reach their goal, Rich celebrates their attempt to achieve success in society (Keyes 59).
This poem is a straight forward monologue said by Shatayev after her death. The poem is named for her, but she represents the whole group. At first, Shatayev recalls their loyalty to each other: 'for months for years each one of us/ had felt her own yes growing in her/ slowly forming as she stood at windows waited' (9-11). She compares this experience with marriage. She asserts that women's achievement is not possible within their relationship with men. Then, she remembers a climb with her husband: 'when I trailed you in the Caucasus' (21). Rich's use of 'anyone' in 'Now I am further / ahead than either of us dreamed anyone would be,' (22-23) indicates that the traditional division of love and power in marriage affects both men and women badly. Through their loyalty and love for each other, women are 'further ahead.' This love is different of the self-sacrificing love expected of women as wives and mothers. Here, there is unity of love and power. Each woman experiences the self-affirmation and achievement in community. Rich doesn't call for the self-affirmation of the individual woman. Instead, she urges women to work together and support each other. She explains this point by imagining Shatayev's diary:
In the diary as the wind began to tear
At the tents over us I wrote:
We know now we have always been in danger
Down in our separateness (59- 62)
She wants this experience to be a model for the community of women (Keyes 60).
Here, Rich mentions another example of great women. In this poem, she urges women to unite in order to be powerful enough to face the difficulties put on their way. Since they are together, they can do what one woman cannot. Although the women in the team know well that they may die, they insist on completing the journey together. Even if they die, they will die for a purpose. This death is much better than the desperate life they live. The spirit of connectedness and communication overwhelms them. So, they believe that their doom is in their separateness. Rich wants all women in the world to be one in the face of injustice.
Rich, like the radical feminists in general, points to patriarchy as 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' (Rich, 'Anti-Feminist Woman' 101).
For Rich, the 'claim to personhood, the claim to share justly on the products of human labor, to participate fully in decision-making and to speak for ourselves in our own right' are very important (Rich, Of Woman Born xviii). Rich considers that 'a complete emancipation / from all the crippling influences of fear' ('Culture and Anarchy' 148-49) is possible only if opportunities are available for women 'for the full / development of her forces of mind and body' (145-46). In that case, she will possess 'the most enlarged freedom of thought and action' (147). Rich's anger turns from her own experiences to women far back in history who struggled for a voice and for their basic rights. 'THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE / of a movement / for many years unnoticed / or greatly misrepresented in the public press' (125-28). The poet describes this difficult process as 'The awakening of consciousness' (Rich, 'When We Dead Awaken' 176) and comments on its effect on women's poetry and the sense of victimization in their work. 'I think we need to go through that anger and we will betray our own reality if we try' for an objectivity, a detachment,' (176) she says, challenging women's tendency to repress their anger. This is a liberating concept for women as Rich not only refuses to accept the limitations of repression, but turns the argument around, making feminist anger not only acceptable but also desirable.
Explaining why she is a feminist, Rich states that she feels endangered by men, the embodiments of the patriarchal idea. She insists that she cannot have real liberation until all women have the chance to discover and show their own abilities. She considers herself as being 'terribly over-privileged,' 'a token woman' who has freedom for many reasons such as education, class, race, money and privileges of all kinds. Power that is denied to the majority of women is offered to the token women by the society. (Rich, 'The Anti-Feminist Woman' 104). However, the problem this woman encounters is that she becomes isolated within the female community because of the male perception of her as an extraordinary woman. They tend to consider her as different from themselves.
Rich herself feels that she is an outsider and this may be the source of her power. Thus, it is her outsider's eye that enables her to see the real condition of women. Also, she asserts that it is impossible to be an insider in an institution overwhelmed by masculine consciousness (Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry 6). In the field of politics too, this is exactly what has happened. After long years of calling for recognition, woman has made her way into the political field of life. As Simone de Beauvoir has been pointed out in the introduction to her work The Second Sex, even though woman is said to be liberated, her position is not very different from that of the liberated negro; the master class still wishes to 'keep them in their place' (12).
The few women, who have succeeded in getting access to politics, are restricted to the back rows and have no significant role to play in decision-making. In her poem 'Divisions of Labor,' Rich declares:
Women in the back rows of politics are
still LICKING thread to slip into the needle's eye
TRADING bones for plastic
SPLITTING pods
for necklaces to sell to the cruiseships
producing immaculate First Communion dresses (7-12)
Rich points out that lately more women are entering the professions, but they are still fewer than men. However, she constantly reminds women that 'no woman is liberated until we all are liberated' ('What Does a Woman Need to Know' 15). She speaks about the principle of the feminist movement that each woman's selfhood is precious, and that self-denial and self-sacrifice must give way to 'a true woman identification, which would affirm our connectedness with all women' (15).
According to her, it is patriarchal restrictions that separate women and deprive them of power. Rich suggests that the sexuality of women
is based on the desire to regain the joyful mother-daughter relationship. It is a right that is taken away from woman so early in her life: 'too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman's heartbeat / heard ever after from a distance' ('Transcendental Etude' 62-63). She is convinced that the power of the female energy results in the possibility of woman to move freely in the community of women. (Rich, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality And Lesbian Existence' 215). Thus, when women support each other, it will be possible for them to experience 'many more 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' (217).
Rich coins the term 'lesbian continuum' in 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' to call for a more inclusive type of identity politics. It signifies something more than physical sexuality; it is 'an energy. . . omnipresent in the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional or psychic' (218). In her poem 'Culture and Anarchy,' she states that it is only fair that those who share identical interests should be together: 'Yes, our work is one / we are one in aim and sympathy / and we should be together' (167-69). In this poem, she opposes Matthew Arnold's emphasis on the civilization that men have built up. She celebrates the power of women as she does in 'Transcendental Etude.' She quotes from the writings of nineteenth century suffragettes and as Martin has suggested, the poem 'juxtaposes past and present in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of female friendship, female community and female vision' (218).
Rich often expresses the end of male civilization in her poems (Jong 172). In 'Waking in the Dark' she states: 'A man's world. But finished / They themselves have sold it to the machines" (154-55). She asserts that the world will be much better if it is controlled by the community of women. She is convinced of the potential power of collective female energy, which, unlike masculine energy, is very productive. She predicts the amazing 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 (47-51)
In these lines, she suggests that the only way for women to face the excesses of patriarchal civilization is to unite and support each other.
Ostriker sees that Rich, as a feminist, focuses on the idea of an enemy explicitly or implicitly (117). In 'The Phenomenology of Anger' the woman persona dreams of killing the enemy. Though it is obvious that Rich is dissatisfied with the male-dominated world which offers only oppression and tyranny, it is not proper to describe her as a misandrist. In 'From an Old House' she states: 'If they call me man-hater, you /would have known it for a lie' (part 5, 1-2). In 'The Phenomenology of Anger' she discloses her dream:
I would have loved to live in a world
of women and men gaily
in collusion with green leaves, stalks,
building mineral cities, transparent domes,
little huts of woven grass (part 8, 6-10)
In A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, Rich depicts the images of her grandmothers, Mary Gravely Jones and Hattie Rice Rich through her poems. It is clear that these images are based on real characters. In her poem, 'Hattie Rice Rich,' her paternal grandmother is presented as a victim of patriarchal practices:
in your dark blue dress and straw hat . . .
Shuttling half – yearly between your son and daughter
Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone. (5-7)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All through World War Two the forbidden word
Jewish 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 (13- 18)
Also, the poem 'Mother-in-Law' deals with the life of a mother-in-law which is full of complex feelings. The mother-in-law, who appears to have been leading a miserable life for some years on Placebos and Valium, realizes that something unpleasant has occurred in her family. She is obsessed with the thought, 'They think I'm weak and hold / things back from me' (43-44). In her search for the truth, she asks her daughter-in-law: 'What are you working on now, is there anyone special, / how is the job /do you mind coming home to an empty house' (3-5). According to Helen Vendler, such 'casual and even prying questions are not the common coin of our mothers' more formal era' (380). Instead, the lack of understanding was overwhelming their lives. But, the daughter-in-law has a reflexive consciousness which stands in the way of their relationship.
The daughter-in-law knows well that the truth will be unpleasant. Rich expresses the severe mental disorder experienced by the daughter-in-law in the lines, 'I envy / the people in mental hospitals their freedom' (27-28). She realizes that she is obliged to reveal the truth even though it is unpleasant: it will not make their lives better. So, she says, 'Your son is dead / ten years, I am a lesbian' (48-49). The mother-in-law's fantasies are broken, and the daughter-in-law, with her mixed feelings of defiance, depression, isolation and a sense of political failure, poses a number of questions:
Mother-in-law, before we part
shall we try- 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 (51-55).
In 'Culture and Anarchy' the poet goes beyond the relationship of
two women into a kind of dialogue with a variety of women's voices from the past. It is noticed that her concept of freedom is extended throughout her evolution as a poet. Rich encourages present-day women to be worthy of their 'foresisters,' and learn from their history to make the lives of their ancestresses better ('What Does a Woman Need to Know' 15). Jan Montefiore has remarked that Rich always emphasizes the 'network of influence between women', the links between the 'fore mothers' from whom we inherited our thoughts and ourselves as daughters aware of our inheritance' (58). In 'Heroines,' she portrays middle class women of the nineteenth century who did not have to face the difficulties of life such as poverty, illiteracy or ill-health resulting from exposure to bad surroundings: 'You are spared . . . death by pneumonia . . . the seamstress' clouded eyes / the mill ' girl's shortening breath' (10-15). However, they weren't able to lead full lives because the law deprived them of the right to property, the right to equal pay with men and the right to vote or to speak in public. Those 'heroines' are her predecessors who had qualities of courage, clarity and energy and they were daring enough to protest against injustice. Rich writes:
You draw your long skirts
deviant
across the nineteenth century
registering injustice
failing to make it whole (92-96)
Rich employs the same technique of calling up women from different times and different parts of the world in her later poetry too. In 'Letters in the Family,' there are monologues of three different women, each in her own crisis – one writes from the Spanish Civil War, one from behind the Nazi line in Yugoslavia and the third from South Africa. The third letter is written by a mother to her children. She says that her present ordeal makes it impossible for her to reveal her current place. She and her companions hide under bushes during daytime and move at night guided by stars. She thinks that her children are not supposed to know her place in order to be safe. She can only reveal her anxiety for them. Rich concludes the poem expressing the mother's hopes of a reunion with her family. According to Langdell, this poem examines the role of women in war (184). Rich believes that the contributions of women have been neglected during wartime.
As her career progressed, Rich refused to continue to tell the lies that she felt she was required to tell in order to gain recognition among her fellow male poets. Instead, she considers the poem as 'an instrument for embodied experience,' seeking to produce a new female poetry in which 'secrets are laid open and wishes, too long silent, find their voice' (What is Found There 13). In 'Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet,' Rich explains this progression in her work:
To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience, to take women's existence seriously as theme and source for art, was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing life. It placed me face to face with both terror and anger [']. But it [also] released tremendous energy. (249)
As Craig Werner notes in his overview of Rich's career, Rich made women's experience her central theme, particularly once she began to 'test her perceptions against the ambiguous personal experiences which had motivated her political development' (3). Rich's work that deals with her childhood past or children's literature, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, tends to demonstrate this 'political focus,' concentrating on 'the historical origins and contemporary operations of patriarchal culture'
(3). She examines how the historical origins and contemporary procedures of patriarchal culture affect female development and identity at both the personal and cultural level. According to Alice Templeton, she seeks, for example, to examine her own girlish writing and reading practices in an effort to understand how 'ways of writing and reading have gender-related political effects [' and how] feminist ways of writing and reading can overturn oppression by providing creative ways of participating in culture' (2). In addition, Rich states in 'Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman,' that 'No true political poetry can be written with propaganda as an aim, to persuade others 'out there' of some atrocity or injustice' (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 251). She is convinced that only the individual perspective can clarify the issues: 'As poetry, it can only come from the poet's need to identify her relationship to atrocities and injustice, the sources of her pain, fear, and anger, the meaning of her resistance' (251).
Rich's sequence, 'Twenty- one Love Poems' deals with the difficulty of speaking and the reality of female suppression and silence. It explores the intersection of the personal and the political. In the following passage she discusses the 1960s and her belief that the personal was political:
That statement was necessary because, in other political movements of that decade, the power relation of men to women, the question of women's roles and men's roles, had been dismissed–often contemptuously-as the sphere of personal life. Sex itself was not seen as political. Except for interracial sex. Women were now talking about domination, not just in terms of economic exploitation, militarism, colonialism, imperialism, but within the family, in marriage, in childbearing, in the heterosexual act itself. ('Blood, Bred, And Poetry' 248)
Alice Templeton examines Rich's work in terms of feminist poetics and the dialogue between feminist thinking and poetic practice, and makes some comments concerning dialogue as a 'reflexive, reciprocal' event (63). Templeton uses the idea of dialogue to argue for a public conversation with social and political spheres. In the third chapter of her book, Templeton addresses the poems in The Dream of a Common Language and mentions the power of dialogue in particular: 'Because it is reciprocal, open-ended, inclusive, and constantly revisionary, feminists have perceived the dialogue as a legitimately powerful relation' (63).
In The Dream of a Common Language, Rich uses such dialogue as ' a thematic center and often as a structural model to convey a feminist conception of poetry as a participatory, creative experience that affirms the interdependence of self and others' (63). According to Templeton, Rich does not mean The Dream of a Common Language to be poetry that is a statement of feminist political themes addressed to the conventional reader. Thus, the entrance of dream-like visions of a poem into a more realistic vision of the lover has significance. Templeton sees dialogism as
upholding the major 'themes' of this work such as 'the need to claim one's own power, the desire to love without victimizing either oneself or others, and the determination to realize these desires or dreams in the present' (63), all from a distinctly political and feminist attitude.
From Rich's feminist perspective, Templeton says, dialogue has a liberating, political role as well as an affirmative personal one. The result is a greater awareness of self, loneliness, community, life, and death. The poems in The Dream of a Common Language can be classified into five stages. The first stage lies in the sense of communal dialogue in which the 'we' with which the lyric 'I' identifies is defined first in context of community. The next stage begins in Poem II, in which subjectivity becomes key. The third significant stage begins with the poem 'THE FLOATINGPOEM, UNNUMBERED' which creates the power of lyric self in the presence of another. This results in greater awareness not only of self as subjective being, but also of other selves and of life. The fourth stage is silence and a keen awareness of mortality, as the lyric selves become aware of their loneliness and their need for creative expression. This silence comes to represent various forms of death both physical and metaphorical, and then moves to the hope that one finds toward the end of the poem. Thus, the fifth and final stage addresses this hope through dialogue.
In Poem XI she places herself and her lover in a feminized landscape of volcanoes. Here, she uses the imagery of Emily Dickinson where she attributes to them the Adam-like role of naming or renaming the world: 'never failing to note the small jewel-like flower/unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her' (9-10). In Poem XIII, she imagines a country where she and her lover can be free together, one where 'rules break like a thermometer' (1) and there are 'no language/no laws.' (3-4). These poems seek to show their idealized vision of woman through their absolute assertion, or by demonstrating the power of Rich's poetic will. In Poem XI she achieves this effect by emphasizing the urgency of her desire: 'I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain/ … I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path' (5,7). And in Poem XIII she emphasizes her idealized vision by expressing it in a series of simple declarative sentences: 'We're out in a country that has no language/' we're chasing the raven… /we're driving through the desert' (3,4,8).
In these poems, the speaker sees her lover as a mirror and a lamp with visionary and redemptive qualities which lead her both to a vision of a repressed female past and to a new sense of women's potential resources. Yet, these utopian visions do not reflect the conditions of the world as it is. There is an exception in the FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED. Here, Rich does not describe her lover as an object of vision anymore. Instead, she shows her in action. The two women are both in action; coming, dancing, touching, and reaching. Here, the poet emphasizes the necessity of communication among women in order to be powerful. As Craig Werner says: ''THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED' provides an emblem of a process of communication
denied by received languages' (95).
Despite Rich's hope for a better future, the tone of 'FLOATING POEM'is somewhat elegiac. As Margaret Dickie comments: 'a peculiar hollowing out of the present happening, an obsessive attachment to the future, a denial of the present or perhaps an eagerness to haunt the present with the future' (152). Although 'FLOATING POEM' is more real than Rich's utopias, it indicates how she faces difficulties when she tries to live by her ideal of woman in the world as it is. For example, In Poem IV, Rich describes how in the course of a normal day, 'the early light of spring/flashing off ordinary walls,' (1-2) an old man calls her 'Hysterical' (7) for asking him to hold the elevator. And in Poem V, she recognizes that the books in her own apartment 'could crack open/to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes of monsters' (1-2).
The struggle for power between the person in distress and the person in power is evident in Rich's poem 'Rape.' Scarry's first chapter 'The Structure of Torture' indicates the setting of interrogation where torture is the main method of expressing one's power over the victim. The difference between the victim and the interrogator is not only that the latter is free of physical pain, but also free 'of the pain originating in the organized body so near to him' (36). This is an example of a binary where the advantage belongs to one and not to the other. The victim in the poem can be imagined in a torture chamber where a struggle for power takes place. The poem begins:
There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.
You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,
on horseback, one hand touching his gun. (1-5)
After reading the title, the reader expects the poem to depict the incident, but the opening begins with a police officer described as a 'prowler and father,' (1) handling 'his gun' (5). The fourth stanza helps the reader see what the victim is looking at:
And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family
whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,
his hand types out the details
and he wants them all
but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best. (16-20)
This description of the interrogator's eyes as glittering shows the victim's fear of this man who can be seen as a threat similar to the actual rapist. The notion that her 'hysteria' (20) pleases him reinforces the tense situation where the woman continues to suffer. There is no feeling of safety or relief. The notion of the officer as 'pleased' by her hysteria arouses sympathy for the victim.
'Rape' is an example of the silencing nature of pain associated with
violent male domination. The word 'hysterical' is relevant to Rich's investigation of the female relationship to the human body. Helene Cixous says, 'the great hysterics have lost speech' and 'they are decapitated, their tongues are cut off and what talks isn't heard because it's the body that talks, and man doesn't hear the body' (49). Hysteria, as Rich might agree with Cixous, can be seen as the inability to speak. So, the human body attempts to express itself through hysteria. A great sense of silence results from a situation where there is no dialogue between the victim and interrogator. But, Rich presents the victim's inner thoughts: 'your details sound like a portrait of your confessor, /will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?' (29-30). The question of whether or not she will swallow indicates that she will not tell the details of the crime. In other words, just to get out of the interrogation room, she would deny the events of the crime.
The women's movement urged many women to reevaluate the limits of personal politics and come to revolutionary conclusions. Rich is one of those women. She was a successful poet before the emergence of the women' liberation movement, but it was the birth of that movement that gave force and brilliance to her poetry. In 1976, Adrienne Rich came out as a lesbian with the publication of 'Twenty-one Love Poems.' It was in this time period that Rich also began to give voice to her radicalizing political consciousness through more theoretical political essays which deal with her personal experience and her experience in the women's liberation movement. The result was Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in 1976, and perhaps her most influential essay, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,' published in 1980. Like many other feminist theorists of the time, Rich's political understanding of women's oppression was rooted in patriarchy theory and identity politics. For example, she ends Of Women Born by saying:
The repossession by women of our own bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers. . . We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world, women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence'a new relationship to the universe. (238)
In this passage, Rich states many ideas of the radical feminist movement, comparing the struggle for women's liberation to workers' struggles for economic justice, despite the fact that the majority of women are workers. The passage also reflects the dominance of identity politics in this period and, in particular, the idea that since the personal was political, one needed only to change one's personal life to bring about broader political change.
The adverse reaction against women's liberation movement urged Adrienne Rich to question the movement's political principles, and her own political conclusions. One major influence of Rich's changing political consciousness was her introduction to Marx. In the 1986 reprint of Of Women Born, Rich included a new introduction in which she writes that she would no longer end the book with the passage quoted above. While she continued to be a persistent advocate for women's freedom and control of their own bodies, she saw this fight as a catalyst for broader social transformation, which she argues
can only happen hand in hand with, neither before nor after, other claims which women and certain men have been denied for centuries: the claim to personhood, the claim to share justly in the products of our labor, not to be used merely as an instrument, a role, a womb, a pair of hands or a back or a set of fingers; to participate fully in the decisions of our workplace, our community; to speak for ourselves, in our own right. (xvii-xviii)
By giving voice to the personal and political struggles and aims of the movement, feminist writers transformed the consciousness of millions of women, and fundamentally transformed the world of literature. The triumph of the women's liberation movement made the voice of many who had been marginalized heard by the universe. Writers and activists of the feminist movement successfully made the personal very public, challenging the world to recognize the tempting nature of women's oppression, demanding a public voice, and refusing to be imprisoned within the confines of domesticity from which they had escaped.
Rich is one of the feminists who contributes in the waking of women's political consciousness. She attempts to correct the wrong information given to women concerning the limits of their power. Her poems concentrate on women who live within the confines of patriarchy. She often speaks to them and encourages them to break down these confines, get out to see the real world and share in changing this world. She is convinced that women must fight for their political rights such as the right to vote, have seats in parliament, and hold other political positions.