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Greeny World Domination 142
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w _____ ____ 1 4 222 "Patriachalism, Progeny and Pain: w
D // | \ 11 44 2 Adrienne Rich and the Prison D
* || ____ | || | 1 444 222 of Marriage" by fastjack *
G || || \ / | || | 1 4 2 issue #142 of "GwD: The American Dream G
w \\___// \/\/ |____/ 111 4 222 with a Twist -- of Lime" * rel 05/05/05 w
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"Snapshot of a Daughter-in-Law" is Adrienne Rich's poem of the burden of
domesticity and the feelings of helplessness she suffered through during her
marriage. Rich examines her marriage through her poetry to give herself the
voice she lacked as a mother of three and homemaker in the 1950's. Rich
herself recounts the experience in _Arts of the Possible_ by saying "I had a
sense that women didn't talk to each other much in the fifties-not about their
secret emptiness, their frustrations" (Rich 19-20). Her writing throughout
1958-60 in "Snapshots" was "...a longer looser mode than I'd ever trusted
myself with before" (Rich 23). Outside of the realm of traditional formality
in her verse, such as that used in "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" she was able to
express frustration in a more compelling, more truthful way. The poem moves
through several parts, 10 "stanzas" in all and explores a variety of themes.
Stanza 1 is about loss of beauty and tradition. Rich's voice in this seems to
be addressing herself and her mother simultaneously. She speaks of "You,
once a belle in Shreveport with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time" (Rich 1-3). Her mother, a
southern belle, is unable to leave behind the traditions of old. Her dresses
remain fixed, flowing antebellum styles that emphasized femininity through use
of binding corsetry, awkward shoes and acres of lace. Her mother's skin was
like that of a peach flower and surely like that of a peach, easily bruised,
needing to be carried softly in padded containers, wary of bruising from the
sharp edges of the world.
In the second and third parts of stanza 1, Rich's voice seems to speak
more of her present situation. She moves from the past of her mother's life
and into hers, still keeping her mother involved. Her mother's mind "molders
like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor,
fantasy" (Rich 7-9), bringing to mind parlors of southern women gossiping
about who did what at the latest cotillion or box social. Those days are
gone, yet surely her mother remembers all the whispered half-truths, giggled
innuendos that marked southern social life. More than her mother however,
Rich is "crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime
of your life" (Rich 10-11). Both Rich and her mother should be in the prime
of their life, her mother causally remembering the gold of her past, while
Rich should be enjoying her role as a mother and homemaker. Both of them
instead are cut by that "knife edge" that is the reality of "mere fact".
Instead of being able to enjoy what she has accomplished according to societal
norms, the poet has become nervous and angry in her repetition of daily
chores, doing the dishes and going her own way in the last two lines of
stanza 1.
Stanza 2 takes on a decidedly darker note. It is filled with imagery of
depression, self-mutilation, schizophrenia and disassociation. The poetry
begins with the daughter-in-law "Banging the coffee-pot in the sink" (Rich 14)
like a child slamming doors to express rage at its parents that cannot be
articulated. Immediately "she hears the angels chiding" (Rich 15) her to do
things that are decidedly un-angelic. Rich's angels command her to be
selfish, to give in to lust and gluttony and to forgo her care for others as
she is the only one worth saving. They tell her to cast off the shackles of
marriage and run to be truly free.
Hearing angels could be seen as an entry into a dissociative state, which is
characteristic of deteriorating mental health. These dissociative states are
"an altered state of consciousness akin to physical and emotional anesthesia"
(Strong 2) and are often characteristic when the sufferer feels powerless or
out of control of their life. Rich writes "Sometimes she's let the tapstream
scald her arm, / a match burn to her thumbnail, / or held her hand above the
kettle's snout / right in the wooly steam." (Rich 20-3). The infliction of
physical pain is common as a method to control mental anguish. Researcher
Armando Favassa argues "Cutting...gives people a way to manage inner
states, converting chaos to calm, powerlessness to control" (Strong 43).
Self-mutilation, like poetry, is a secret language; difficult to understand or
comprehend from the outside without training in finding meaning. Stanza 2
ends with Rich noting that the only part of her that retains the capability of
feeling pain is her eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul, the witnesses
to her station in life, the way she is able to observe her loss of feeling and
self and yet the pain they feel is that of irritation caused by grit, not the
deeper pain she knows in inside of her.
Stanza 3 changes gears into a meditation about nightmares, reproductive
freedom, female empowerment and internecine conflict between women. Rich
states, "A thinking woman sleeps with monsters" (Rich 36). The thinking she
does during the day when performing domestic duties has begun to bleed over
into her dreams. Her subconscious is now at the fore and the monsters she
sublimates during the day are able to move freely throughout her sleeping
hours. "The beak that grips her, she becomes" (Rich 37) brings to mind the
mouths of baby birds feeding from the beak of their mother. Those beaks, her
children, become the ties that bind and hold her in the nest unable to fly
free as a bird can.
Reproductive rights and the ability of a woman to control her destiny as she
would her womb surface in line 31. The reader sees "the female pills, the
terrible breasts" (Rich 31) and knows that it talks about motherhood. This
line has some interesting parallels with Eliot's _The Wasteland_, wherein two
women speak: "It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. / (She's had
five already, and nearly died of young George.) / The chemist said it would be
all right, but I've never been the / same" (Eliot 159-62). Is Rich speaking
of abortion and breast milk that would never be drunk by a child? More likely
she is speaking of Norethindrone, the first female contraceptive invented two
years before "Snapshots" was started, and which gave women an unprecedented
amount of sexual freedom. When Austrian-American Carl Jerassi created
"The Pill," he gave women control over the thing that had been the
responsibility of men: pregnancy.
Rich takes female empowerment themes farther with her invocation of Boadicea
in line 32. Boadicea, the legendary female warrior who led her people in
revolt against Gaius Caligula, a sexually depraved and corrupt man, is
pictured crouching beneath orchids and foxheads. The warrior woman's power is
concealed beneath a decidedly feminine floral arrangement. The ability of a
woman to be powerful is further evidenced in the translation of Bodicea's
name: She who brings victory.
From her examination of what could be possible for a woman to achieve Rich
shows the reader what she sees currently among women: "Two handsome women,
gripped in argument, / each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream / across the
cut glass and majolica / like Furies cornered from their prey" (Rich 33-6).
Women, who have so much power hidden under the orchids of potential fail to
use it, instead they squabble and bicker. Ad feminam is defined as "Appealing
to irrelevant personal considerations concerning women, especially
prejudices," and Rich brings the point home to her readers. She takes the
knives that other women have stabbed her in the back with and drives them
right back into the source. There seems to be puzzlement in Rich's voice in
stanza 3, comparing women to Furies and noting that the knives they stab one
another with are rusted, which is indicative of old fights. The last lines of
the poem further underline this as Rich calls women "ma semblable, ma souer!"
(Rich 39), (my similar, my sisters) is a desperate cry to unity.
The author continues on in this vein in stanza 4, with the admission that
women, and Rich herself see this disunity in each other. That women know the
gifts that lie dormant in them fail to come to fruition is a spiritual thorn,
continually being sharpened by frustration. Rich knows that in herself as
well as others they remain tied to domestic tasks, sedentary lifestyles
"Reading while waiting/ for the iron to heat, / writing" (Rich 43-4) and
failing to strike while the iron is hot, when change should happen. The
reader would be remiss not to notice that what Rich is writing is "My Life has
stood-a Loaded Gun-" (Rich 45), and that she is like that loaded gun: Ready
to go off and cause damage, to burst free as bullet leaves a chamber. Jellies
that sit static in a pantry, yet still have the energy to boil and scum, to
continue chemical reactions and putrefy, emphasize the motion implied in the
gun. The writer is "iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird" (Rich 48) to
show again that she wants to fly free, but instead continues to be weighted
with the tedium of "dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life"
(Rich 49).
Stanza 5 is a short stanza about what Rich is supposed to do, and what she is
supposed to present to the world: she is supposed to have a sweet smile and a
sweet laugh, to shave her legs to be beautiful to her husband. The act of
shaving makes her legs shine like a mammoth tusk, and like a mammoth tusk she
should be as delicate and unreachable as a museum exhibit. She is also a
prisoner of the old concepts of groomed beauty as surely as the tusk is a
prisoner of the velvet ropes that hold it on a pedestal.
Stanza 6 gives Rich's feminine side a chance to shine through. In the first
part she shows us Corinna who is able to play the lute. Corinna is Rich, with
her gift of music equaling Rich's gift for words. Of course the gift, the
power of this talent is still seen in a man's eye. Her gift is a pale
imitation of what men are. "...Corinna, following in the footsteps of men,
cannot call her music her own, just as a woman writer attempting to imitate
the masters denies her own literary voice" (Dixon 3).
Rich continues to use a bird as a symbol showing it "Poised, trembling and
unsatisfied, before / and unlocked door, that cage of cages," (Rich 60-1) and
although the door is not bolted it forms a prison nonetheless. Her
"fertilisante douleur", her pain is absolute and paralyzing and she is kept
there by preconceived ideas of "love" and "natural action". Nature has shown
her the household books, the ledgers of what should be done that she never
bothered to show to men, and this knowledge continues to hold Rich, no matter
how she struggles or hurts.
Stanza 7 begins with a quotation by "a woman" that Rich does not name. The
reader could assume that it is the voice of Rich taken from outside the poem
to make a point. The quotation tells the reader that one must have something
rock solid to cling to in life, in order to make it bearable. The author had
her life as a housewife, but it was her life as a writer that she was able to
keep as something that was the bedrock of life. Rich, by remaining in her
life of domestic toil is only partly brave or good and understands only part
of her world. She is conflicted by her desire to fly and the need to stay as
taught by society. Rich, however, in trying to reconcile these two parts of
her soul is trying to understand her life whereas "Few men about her would or
could do more," (Rich 75). The backlash because she tries to understand and
make vocal her problems with this life causes those outside of her to label
her with hateful names.
Rich begins stanza 8 with a quote, presumably from _Enlightenment_ writer
Denis Diderot. In it Diderot states that she/women will die at fifteen which
was considered a marriageable age for young women. Eyes, the window to the
soul, are being closed and then blanketed with steam. The eyes are obscured
in two ways, doubling the sense of loss that Rich must have felt at the time.
She goes on to write that "all that we might have been,/ all that we
were-fire, tears, wit, taste, martyred ambition-" (Rich 81-3). These fine
things are tamped down in order to make a new life with a man, but still they
stir at the bottom of memory, waiting to come to the fore of life. The
daughter-in-law has sacrificed her ambition and passions to the "normal" life
that she was always told to have, and this becomes more apparent as mid-life
with flagging and possibly sagging bosom reminds her of what was.
Stanza 9 gives the reader further insight into Rich's conception of the male
dominated world. Even time is a male, prone to slip into his cups while
looking at women as invalids or saluting only their beauty, never their minds.
Their body is what matters to time and history although their bodies are weak,
only for display. Time only praises half-hearted attempts by women and sees
them as slatterns who are to be forgiven for simple transgressions. Of
course, as Rich is quick to point out, those who dare to cast off that mold or
to strike out on their own must fear retribution. The author brings the
horrors of war into the household as graphic examples of what waits for women
who "cast too bold a shadow", confinement, tear gas, shelling. It is
interesting that Rich uses as punishment those things that men typically use
against other men, taking the post World War II violence that many of them may
have brought home with them and opening the home makers life to them.
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" ends with Rich giving in to some of her
thoughts of escapism and perhaps a small jibe at the longer form she used in
the poem. It begins with "Well, / she's long about her coming, who must be /
more merciless to herself than history" (Rich 108-10). The poem draws to a
close and Rich is telling the reader that she is the one who has to deal with
all of these conflicting emotions, and that nothing history can say about her
will ever equal the conclusions she had to reach by herself. One startling
shift in her voice is the change from a bird wanting to be free to a
helicopter. The reader could see a bird gracefully flapping to gain altitude
and fly away whereas a helicopter literally beats the air into submission with
its rotors. A helicopter flies not by working within the natural realm as
birds to, but by rising through sheer force. A helicopter is a mechanized,
powerful, masculine thing. Rich's cargo is not a nebulous promise but
something real and concrete, that can be held and delivered. Most importantly
she calls the promise "ours" (Rich 122) showing that she was able to escape
and so can other women.
-Works Cited-
Bunch, Bryan. _The History of Science and Technology: A browser's guide to
the great discoveries inventions and the people who made them from the
dawn of time to today_. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2004. (p 565).
Eliot, T.S. _The Wasteland_. Michael North ed. New York: Norton Critical
Editions, 2001.
Miller, Dusty. _Women who Hurt Themselves: A book of Hope and
Understanding_. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Rich, Adrienne. _Arts of the Possible_. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,
2001.
Scott, Manda. _Dreaming the Eagle_. New York: Bantam Dell, 2003.
Southam, B.C. _A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot_ sixth ed.
Orlando: Harcourt and Brace, 1996.
Strong, Marilee. _A Bright Red Scream: Self Mutilation and the language of
pain_. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
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Issue#142 of "GwD: The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime" ISSN 1523-1585
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