Wrestling with the Selected Prose of Adrienne Rich is no mean
exercise, but the 20 very different pieces on language and feminism
coalesce with her attentive coaching - Foreword, reflective
headnotes, expanded footnotes - into a campaign for cultural
"re-vision." Prefacing an appreciation of Emily Dickinson, she
observes that the conventional critic searches "obsessively for
heterosexual romance as the key to a woman artist's life and work";
free of such constraints, Rich finds that the metaphorical "Owner"
of Dickinson's "Loaded Gun" is no man - or (knee-jerkers beware)
woman - but Poetry. The business of the essay, significantly, is
interpretation, not rhetoric, and like most of the collected others
- originally prepared for literary or education forums (1966-78) -
it retains its individual secular identity. In the collective
context, of course, each also supports Rich's increasingly visceral
conviction that male-dominated society, with its
venereally-diseased ethics of objectification, quashes the
"life-expanding impulses" of men and women both. Problematically,
however, she argues for "a politics of asking women's questions,"
for "defining a feminist consciousness," visiting the sins of the
"patriarchy" on its scions by excluding them from her crusade for
radical reorientation. As her perspective changes with time, so
does her focus: the feminism that informs her sympathetic
identification with Anne Bradstreet or her close reading of Jane
Eyre becomes, in effect, the subject of the later entries, and at
her most polemical she confuses gynephobia (fear and hatred of
women) with Medicaid fraud as the conditioner of unnecessary
Caesareans. Language, raw or refined, is the "material resource" of
"re-vision": at the "bedrock level" of her thinking - on teaching
basic writing to open-admissions students - "release into language"
confers "power"; in an introduction to the work of Judy Grahn,
"Poetry is. . . a concentration of the power of language." Rich
examines three other modern poets - Anne Sexton, Eleanor Ross
Taylor, Natalia Gorovenskaya - as well as the constraints of sexism
on education, lesbianism, motherhood (does it force us to "become
obedient to a social order we know is morally bankrupt"?), always
with her poet's care for words. "The journey of my thought. . . is
not linear," she warns at the outset. And the challenging end is
only a beginning. (Kirkus Reviews)
At issue are the politics of language; the uses of scholarship; and
the topics of racism, history, and motherhood among others called
forth by Rich as "part of the effort to define a female
consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which
refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity."
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