Accept & Advocate Womanhood: Adrienne Rich s Selected Poetry & Prose

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1 Accept & Advocate Womanhood: Adrienne Rich s Selected Poetry & Prose Dr. Anne Angeline Abraham Associate Professor, Dept. of English Bishop Moore College, Mavelikara Kerala India Abstract An important American poet and activist of the twentieth century, Adrienne Rich s poetry and prose works explore socially relevant and self-probing topics, including feminism and lesbianism. Her essays have become theories of feminist criticism. She criticizes patriarchal domination and celebrates womanhood. Rich accepts her triply marginalized position of being a woman, a Jew and a lesbian. She examines her life as a woman in a patriarchal society, explores her roots of being a Jew, unlike her father and exercises her lesbianism by writing and living her own life. She overcame her marginalized state by writing about it. She is known as a celebrated poet and an activist who dared to defy the norms and live her life as a woman in her own terms. This paper delineates the works of Adrienne Rich as a woman who celebrates womanhood by accepting her multiple situations and advocates her womanhood by being a radical, lesbian feminist writer who is sure of her own place in the world. Keywords: lesbian, radical feminism, womanhood With more than twenty volumes of poetry and five outstanding books of prose to her credit, Adrienne rich is one of the most important poets of contemporary America. Her identity as a political activist and a radical, lesbian feminist poet has given her worldwide renown

2 Rich was born as the eldest daughter of a strict disciplinarian pathologist, Arnold Rich and a concert pianist, Helen. Her father made her write poetry and taught her the craft of writing poetry while her mother taught her music when she was home schooled till the age of nine. It was only later on in her life that she appreciated and wrote poetry for her own sake. Rich learnt about the holocaust only when she was eighteen as her parents were quite indifferent to it. She tried to learn about the Jewish culture once she was in college. Her only outlet was writing poetry while she was seeking her Jewish roots. She met and married a Jewish Harvard economist, Alfred H. Conrad, against the wishes of her parents and this symbolized her breaking away from her father s dominating influence in her life. Her husband s family gave her a sense of belonging to the Jewish culture which was missing in her own family. By then, she published her first volume of poetry, A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters. Following the successive birth of her three sons, she hardly had time for herself or for writing poetry which frustrated her greatly. After eight years of literary silence, she published a volume, Snapshots of a Daughter- in- Law: Poems and she began dating her poems since then. She narrates her strenuous life as a wife, mother and poet and she lashes out on male domination and writes on behalf of all women writers. In her next volume of poems, Necessities of Life: Poems , Rich s personal issues are now viewed against the larger background of the civil rights and the antiwar movements. She became more actively involved in her commitment to fight for the marginalized and the neglected people. She used her poetry as a medium to reach out to her audience and establish a connection with them. In 1970, she ended her seventeen year old marriage and soon after, lives through her husband s suicide. The Will to Change: Poems made her overcome her personal struggles and she became more concerned about the political and social events of her society. The volume, Diving in the Wreck: Poems reveals her poetic career as a strong woman, fighting for the rights of women and exploding in anger at the subjugation of women. In 1976, she 252

3 met her partner Michelle Cliff and she published the book Of Woman Born which examines the institution of motherhood. She wants a common language for all women as is evident in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems , regardless of creed and color and she openly accepts and declares her lesbian love in Twenty-One Love Poems. Her prose work entitled On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose , Rich brilliantly advocates feminist politics and the lesbian experience. She identifies with all women, of all races. In her essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, she boldly defies all common ideas about heterosexuality and lesbianism. Having fought for women and lesbian rights, Rich now joins progressive Jewish organizations to fight for their rights. Through this act, Rich tries to reclaim her Jewish heritage and culture which her father had denied. She does this explicitly in a compelling, twenty three part poem named Sources which was later published in the volume, Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986). She finally talks about her Jewish heritage which her family had vigorously denied. She manages to track down her Jewish heritage and who she actually is. Her rigorous self exploration helps her to identify with her culture and in turn with her own self. She retraces her roots and her life. In the poem, the poet is returning to her house in Vermont after sixteen years and is seeing her past in a new perspective. She thinks of her source of power and seeks her own identity. She knows she is a Southern Jew, split at the root (36-37) but she acknowledges this and sees it as her strength: Everything that has ever / helped me has come through what already / lay stored in me (24-26). She believes that her strength lies in her identity as a person in her own right. She accepts that her experiences have made her the person that she is today: There is a whom, a where that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given in the beginning we grasp whatever we can to survive. (56-59) 253

4 She recognizes and accepts who she is, at last. She is happy that she is now free to acknowledge her roots. She examines her relationship with her father and her husband, both men who were important in her life to a certain extent as she evolved as a poet and as a strong woman. She portrays her father as authoritative and stern and her husband as intensely private and reticent. Both men were dead now and she is at peace with herself about them as she addresses them in her poems. In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose : Rich writes about her lesbian life: Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range- through each woman s life and throughout history- of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace 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; if we can also hear it in such associations as marriage resistance - we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of lesbianism (51-52). Rich redefines lesbianism to include all women relationships like sharing their inner potentials, receiving and giving mutual support in the community of women against all kinds of atrocities, and suggests that only then would they ever be able to realize the great expanse of women. She proposes a scale with heterosexuality on one end and lesbianism on the other and proposes that most women fall somewhere in the middle. She maintains that lesbianism is a broad category that includes all forms of connection among all women

5 Rich has come to terms with her identity as a Jew, a lesbian and her relationship is with all women. In both Time s Power: Poems and An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems , Rich explores America and the disruptive happenings in it. She tries to include the sufferings faced by all Americans, irrespective of color or nationality. She mentions the exploited, abused and marginalized people of America and empathizes with them. She recounts with horror the shooting of two lesbians and recalls the terror of war on unassuming citizens and innocent children. She laments the atrocities of her country in the last decade of the twentieth century. Rich, as a political poet, is seen at her best as she questions the cruelties of a war ridden and terror stricken world and urges her readers to react against it. She uses her poetry to lend the political aspects of the world around her to the personal aspect of every citizen. Women needed to have a world of their own, a history and sexuality that were theirs to identify and to be bold and open in their life choices. Rich realizes that she has come to terms with herself as a woman and she expresses this in her published works. In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose , she specifically delineates her role: To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman s body and experience, to take woman s existence seriously as theme and source for art, was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing life.... But it released tremendous energy in me, as 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 (182). Adrienne Rich found her true place in the world as a radical lesbian feminist who demanded equal rights for women and who was committed to the cause of dismantling all forms of patriarchal notions. She uses her published works and activism as a means to this end. The biographer Amy Sickles, in her book entitled Adrienne Rich, sums up her life beautifully: 255

6 Rich became an outspoken member of the Women s Liberation Movement... in which small groups of women met to explore the political aspects of personal life.... Much of Rich s work... reflected this major philosophy of the Women s Movement- that the political could be discovered within the personal, and that the community was more powerful than the individual. (65) Rich thus is able to identify her triply marginalized location as a woman, lesbian and a Jew and she is able to express her views through her prose and poetry. She strongly believed that only a women centered community, which includes all women, could change and challenge the norms of the patriarchal society. She uses her writing to state these facts and is applauded for it. The transition of Rich s thinking from individual concerns to political and social concerns and from a woman poet to a lesbian, political poet can be traced through her works. She is at terms with her multiple identities of a radical, lesbian, feminist and American Jew and most of all, as a woman who is an integral part of a larger community of women who are here to stay

7 Works Cited: Rich, Adrienne. A Change of World. New York: Harper, An Atlas of the Difficult World. New York: Norton, Blood, Bread & Poetry: Selected Prose New York: Norton, Diving into the Wreck. New York: Norton, Necessities of Life: Poems New York: Norton, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose New York: Norton, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems New York: Harper, The Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations. New York: Norton, The Diamond Cutters. New York: Harper, The Dream of a Common Language. New York: Norton, The Will to Change: Poems New York: Norton, Time s Power: Poems New York: Norton, Twenty-One Love Poems. New York: Norton, Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems. New York: Norton, Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, and Albert Gelpi, eds. Adrienne Rich s Poetry. New York: Norton, Adrienne Rich s Poetry& Prose. New York: Norton, Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. New York: Longman, Gould, Jean. Modern American Women Poets. New York: Dodd, Mead, Sickles, Amy. Adrienne Rich. U.S.A: Chelsea,