Adrienne Rich Essay Research Paper

Adrienne Rich Essay, Research Paper

“ What I know, I know through doing verse forms ” Passion, Politics and the

Body in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich Liz Yorke, Nottingham Trent University,

England This paper is mostly extracted from my book Adrienne Rich, which is to

be published by Sage in October this twelvemonth & # 8230 ; What I have tried to make for the

paper is to track one yarn explored by the book, which I feel tallies through the

whole span of Rich & # 8217 ; s thought, a yarn which links desire, passion, and the organic structure

– to political relations, to activism, and to the authorship of poesy. Writing poesy, above

all, involves a willingness to allow the unconscious speak & # 8211 ; a willingness to

listen within for the susurrations that tell of what we know, even though what we

know may be unacceptable to us and, sometimes, because we may non desire to hear,

the susurrations may be virtually unhearable. But to compose poesy is to listen and

ticker for important images, to do hearable the interior rustles, to make

deeper inward for those elusive intuitions, detections, images, which can be

released from the unconscious head through the creativeness of composing. In this

manner, a author may come to cognize her deeper ego, below the surface of the words.

Poetry can be a agency to entree suppressed acknowledgments, a manner to research

hard apprehensions which might otherwise be buffeted out of consciousness

through the fear-laden procedures of repression & # 8211 ; through turning away, denial,

forgetting. She identifies here the impulse to political relations and protest as emerging

from our unconscious desires, a sort of cognizing originating within the organic structure which

impels us towards action to acquire our demands met. When the verse form reminds us of our

unmet needs it activates our thrusts, our libido & # 8211 ; towards what we long for

-whether that is single, societal, communal or planetary. Rich offers here a

basic premiss of her idea, that we need to listen within for this linguistic communication of

the organic structure, this manner of knowing, . Indeed, our lives depend on such ways of

knowing: & # 8216 ; our tegument is alive with signals ; our lives and our deceases are

inseparable from the release or obstruction of our believing organic structures & # 8217 ; . ( 1 ) In the

1960ss Richworked difficult to make a poesy and a linguistic communication which would make out

to others, which would let Hera means to let go of her ain passion into

linguistic communication, and so to hammer an militant will for extremist alteration: The will to

alteration begins in the organic structure non in the head My political relations is in my organic structure, accruing

and spread outing with every act of opposition and each of my failures Locked in the

cupboard at 4 old ages old I beat the wall with my organic structure that act is in me still ( 2 )

Rich engages straight with the battle to let go of herself from a colonising

linguistic communication, the & # 8217 ; alleged common linguistic communication & # 8217 ; , & # 8211 ; a patriarchal linguistic communication that utters

the old book over and over & # 8217 ; , an abstracting, Manichaean linguistic communication that splits

head from organic structure and tames and disembodies both poesy and passion -a linguistic communication

that violates the unity and significances of its talkers, delegitimates its

underprivileged users and disintegrates individuality and coherency & # 8211 ; whether of

persons, groups, races or whole civilizations & # 8211 ; the shriek of an bastard

voice It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself How do I be? The

transmutation of such silences into linguistic communication and action becomes an underlying

subject which becomes more and more compelling, and her poesy gives voice to a

deep hungry yearning for & # 8216 ; traveling & # 8217 ; words, instead than words which fail to

recognise, understand or joint the significances of & # 8216 ; bastard users Let me

hold this dust, these pale clouds sullenly lingering, these words traveling with

fierce truth like the blind kid & # 8217 ; s fingers or the new-born baby & # 8217 ; s mouth

violent with hungriness ( Meditations for a Savage Child ) Merely the corporal word

speaks from these deepnesss of cardinal desire and what she actively apprehends

through her senses & # 8211 ; a relation, context bound ever-changing truth & # 8211 ; is newly

called into being each minute. From the & # 8216 ; wildness & # 8217 ; of the unblocked,

impassioned, embodied word a new position may be created, different accents

may be given value, new figures may jump into focal point and so the land displacements.

By the 1970ss, a committedness to jointing adult females & # 8217 ; s experience will supply

women’s rightists with the stuff land for political administration. The refusal to

limit political positions to those produced within a male-defined civilization

brings a new focal point on adult females & # 8217 ; s bodily specificity: Women & # 8217 ; s & # 8217 ; lives and experiences

are different to work forces & # 8217 ; s, and so adult females & # 8217 ; s & # 8217 ; specific, body-based

experiential-perceptual Fieldss will besides be different. The undertaking for feminism

became one of & # 8216 ; hearing & # 8217 ; adult females into address ; of returning to the Hagiographas of adult females

in history to research their biologically grounded experience so as to organize

politically. In Of Woman Born, we find Rich pointing to the female organic structure as a

important resource for an spread outing consciousness: of adult females & # 8217 ; s subjugation female

biological science & # 8230 ; .has far more extremist deductions than we have yet come to

appreciate. Patriarchal idea has limited female biological science to its ain narrow

specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biological science for these

grounds ; it will, I believe, come to see our animalism as a resource, instead

than a fate. In order to populate a to the full human life we require non merely command

of our organic structures ( though control is a requirement ) ; we must touch the integrity and

resonance of our animalism, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal

land of our intelligence. ( 3 ) This stance was to name Forth a chorus of

critical disapprobation. Elaine Showalter, in her of import essay & # 8216 ; Feminist

Criticism in the Wilderness & # 8217 ; , was to see Rich & # 8217 ; s accent on & # 8216 ; confession & # 8217 ; and the

organic structure as & # 8216 ; cruelly prescriptive. She remarks: & # 8216 ; there is a sense in which the

exhibition of bloody lesions becomes an induction ritual rather separate and

disconnected from critical insight. & # 8217 ; ( 4 ) Back to the organic structure: essentialism and the

political undertaking Many saw Rich & # 8217 ; s scheme as biologistic and essentialist, and

hence unhelpful to the cause & # 8211 ; but how far is composing which explores female

specificity to be condemned? To Hester Eisenstein, & # 8216 ; the position of adult female as a

ageless “ kernel ” represented a retreat from the basically

emancipating construct of adult female as agent, histrion, and capable, instead than

object & # 8217 ; . ( 5 ) And yet, as Diana Fuss has suggested, & # 8216 ; essentialism can be deployed

efficaciously in the service of both dreamer and materialist, progressive and

reactionist, mythologizing and resistive discourses. & # 8217 ; ( 6 ) The conceptualization

of our ain organic structures is non some sort of fixed absolute, but instead, is a concept

that is being continually reformulated, and whose significances may, for good or ill,

be culturally engendered. The female organic structure is of class ever already mediated

in and through linguistic communication. How we understand our organic structures is continually being

shaped within the psychical and societal significances go arounding in civilization, merely as

our position of ourselves is constructed in relation to specific temporal and

geographic contexts. We all may internalize disparaging and hassling myths and

messages to our go oning hurt. However, & # 8216 ; the organic structure & # 8217 ; as such is far from

being a construct, & # 8216 ; beyond the ranges of historical alteration, changeless and

accordingly outside the field of political intervention. & # 8217 ; ( 7 ) To take such a

position is itself finally reductive and deterministic in that it refuses the

really possibility of political intercession. In Braidotti & # 8217 ; s words: & # 8216 ; a women’s rightist

adult female theorist who is interested in believing about sexual differences and

the feminine today can non afford non to be essentialist. & # 8217 ; Neither can adult females

afford to disembody sexual difference in any undertaking concerned with female

subjectiveness. As the & # 8216 ; threshold of subjectiveness & # 8217 ; and & # 8216 ; the point of intersection,

as the interface between the biological and the societal & # 8217 ; , the organic structure is the site or

location for the building of the topic in relation to other topics. ( 8 )

Rich was ab initio drawn to the organic structure of adult female to explicate her strategic

response to misogyny with what Braidotti was subsequently to name & # 8216 ; the positive undertaking

of turning difference into a strength, of confirming its positiveness & # 8217 ; . ( 9 ) but was

subsequently to retreat from this flight of her idea. I think she could hold

trusted the intelligence of her earlier political inherent aptitudes. & # 8211 ; But lets explore

this charge of essentialism more deeply: In Of Woman Born, Rich is clearly non

proposing that adult females are born to be female parents or that our biological science is our fate

– far from it. Bing a good female parent is most decidedly non a natural,

biologically determined given & # 8211 ; Rich is at strivings to emphasize that & # 8216 ; We learn, frequently

through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization those qualities which are

supposed to be “ unconditioned ” in us: forbearance, selflessness, the

willingness to reiterate infinitely the little, everyday jobs of socializing a human

being & # 8217 ; . ( 10 ) In no sense is any biologically essentialist premise made that

adult females possess in their natures the qualities of nurturant lovingness. In Rich & # 8217 ; s

idea, as we have seen, it is a quality learned merely with trouble, frequently at

the cost of a serious loss of ego: , particularly the ego of the author: As she

points out: & # 8216 ; ..it can be perilously simplistic to repair upon

“ nurturance ” as a particular strength of adult females, which need merely be

released into the larger society to make a new human order. ( 11 ) Biology has

non endowed adult females with an indispensable muliebrity, there is no biologically given

kernel that determines that the female parent will be a nurturant health professional, or be

virtuous and loving towards her kids. To show Rich & # 8217 ; s statements, as Janet

Sayers did in her book, Biological Politics, as grounded in & # 8216 ; the jubilation of

female biological science and of the indispensable muliebrity to which it purportedly gives

rise & # 8217 ; , is to earnestly misread her work. ( 12 ) Rich & # 8217 ; s statements, instead, connote

that the maternal organic structure, as she sees it, is lived: it is bound up in its

specificity with the kingdom of the societal and the political and is a important

site of battle in which psychoanalytic, sexual, technological, economic,

medical, legal, and other cultural establishments contest for power. Sayers

addresses her ain failure to give due acknowledgment to the importance of

psychoanalytic theory in her ulterior book Sexual Contradictions ( 1986 ) , yet

continues to reprobate Rich ( as she does Irigaray ) for the wickedness of essentialism

and, in so making, compounds the slippages of her place. Rich is once more

criticised for & # 8216 ; confirming a peculiar cultural representation and image of

muliebrity & # 8230 ; of adult female as a plenty of gender & # 8217 ; & # 8211 ; which seems to me to lose

the point on a expansive graduated table. ( 13 ) Sa

yers reductively dismisses Rich’s comprehensiveness,

complexness and multidimensionality, in concentrating on a fragment of a much larger

statement when she states flatly that & # 8216 ; adult females & # 8217 ; s supposed

“ complicated, pain-enduring, multipleasured animalism ” barely seems

a really hopeful footing on which to construct opposition to their societal

subordination & # 8230 ; & # 8217 ; ( 14 ) Well no, it wouldn & # 8217 ; t be, if that were really what Rich

was suggesting. I turn to a fragment from Integrity, from A Wild Patience to

illustrate something of the complexness to be found in the poesy This infusion is

from & # 8216 ; Integrity & # 8217 ; , collected in A Wild Patience: Anger and tenderness: my egos.

And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, non mutual oppositions. Anger and

tenderness: the spider & # 8217 ; s mastermind to whirl and weave in the same action from her

ain organic structure, anyplace & # 8211 ; even from a broken web. ( 15 ) In my book I argue how Rich

moves beyond dualism in her poesy & # 8211 ; an statement I can non travel into & # 8211 ; but here

& # 8216 ; Experience & # 8217 ; can be both private and public, personal and political & # 8211 ; choler and

tenderness, despite being contradictory emotions, need non be reciprocally sole

footings. A tension-filled struggle may populate and take a breath in a adult female & # 8217 ; s organic structure as

different facets of her experiencing, yet it is built-in to the procedures and

battles of being female. Merely as the image of the spider spinning and weaving

at the same time suggests the indivisibility of these polar antonyms, so excessively

civilization and nature, subjectiveness and objectiveness, societal and psychological, organic structure

and head, are inter-implicated with each other & # 8211 ; in Rich & # 8217 ; s non-dichotomous

apprehension of the head / organic structure. These few lines point to a radically

insurgent procedure. Identifying herself and other adult females who fall short of the

fostering ideal adult female & # 8211 ; Rich transgressively restores to linguistic communication that which had

been silenced and delegitimated within a patriarchal civilization and tradition. Her

culturally unacceptable choler becomes acknowledged and empathically recognised,

instead than condemned. To deeply accept her ain split & # 8217 ; selves & # 8217 ; ( and those of

other adult females ) is to formalize and to transform her centripetal experiencing, her

self-pride, her sense of her ain power, the significance of her being. Womans

have long been engaged in a vigilant and demanding procedure of conveying to

critical consciousness the contradictions, ambiguities and inflictions of our

diverse experience so as to make a kingdom where such incoherencies can go

rendered witting and apprehensible within linguistic communication so that they may be thought.

This invitation to transform thought, I would reason, constitutes a really

different undertaking to that envisaged by Sayers. From being framed within

essentialist injunctions that insist that adult female & # 8217 ; s nature is to foster, adult females

may now travel from a place of disempowerment and self-castigation towards a

greater sense of unity & # 8211 ; a dianoetic displacement has occurred that significantly

licenses new designations to be made, different places to be taken up, new

inner and outer positions to be considered, and therefore a new hereafter may go

imaginable, other potencies may be rendered possible. I want to go forth the

1970ss behind and pick up my statement around the organic structure in a ulterior chapter of

the book & # 8211 ; during the 1880ss Rich begins to see the & # 8216 ; nucleus of radical

procedure & # 8217 ; as & # 8216 ; the long battle against lofty and privileged abstraction & # 8217 ; , and

urges a close focal point on materiality, on geographical location and voice. ( 16 ) the

demand to turn up the historical and societal minute & # 8211 ; the context, the precise

location in clip and infinite, the & # 8216 ; geographics & # 8217 ; of a peculiar statement & # 8211 ; the

& # 8216 ; When, where, and under what conditions has the statement been true? & # 8217 ; . ( 17 ) She

brings us back to & # 8216 ; the geographics closest in & # 8211 ; the organic structure & # 8217 ; and in so making, Rich

plants out her scheme to convey feminist theory & # 8216 ; back down to earth once more & # 8217 ; . ( 18 )

Theory & # 8211 ; the visual perception of forms, demoing the wood every bit good as the trees –

theory can be a dew that rises from the Earth and collects in the rain cloud and

returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn & # 8217 ; t odor of the Earth, it isn & # 8217 ; T

good for the Earth. ( 19 ) In seting her instance for a focal point on stuff bodily

difference, Rich subtly returns to Lacan & # 8217 ; s barely crude expression for

understanding sexual difference, in speculating her political relations of location. She

expands on her earlier efforts to counter the laterality of the Phallus through

an accent on the sexual specificities of the female, but now high spots race

as every bit of import in the building of individuality. ( 20 ) Possessing Black or

white skin coloring material assigns & # 8216 ; my organic structure & # 8217 ; to a peculiar societal position and place

within the specific cultural hierarchy ( North American ) operating in a particular

vicinity ( Baltimore ) . Merely as in Lacan, this appellation begins in babyhood: Even

to get down with my organic structure I have to state that from the beginning that organic structure had more than

one individuality. When I was carried out of the infirmary into the universe, I was

viewed and treated as female, but besides viewed and treated as white & # 8211 ; by both

Black and white people. I was located by colour and sex every bit certainly as a Black

kid was located by colour and sex & # 8211 ; though the deductions of white individuality

were mystified by the given that white people are the centre of the

existence. To turn up myself in my organic structure means more than understanding what it has

meant to me to hold a vulva and button and womb and chests. It means

recognizing this white tegument, the topographic points it has taken me, the topographic points it has non

allow me travel ( 21 ) However, non like Lacan, this is accessibly written, Rich & # 8217 ; s

linguistic communication ever declining the enticement to surge skywards into elevated

theoretical abstraction. In this transition, with its silent, unreferenced reverberation of

Lacanian theory, possessing whiteness and possessing the Phallus are straight

comparable in the sense that they have been designated a superior place at

the Centre of the regulative patterns of North American civilization. And so, though

it is necessary, it is non plenty for feminist theory simply to recognize and

affirm the specificities of the feminineness of the organic structure as a countering scheme

– tegument coloring material, racial background, cultural and other locational differences all

affair, in that they function to distinguish one organic structure from another and to

organise diverse organic structures towards functioning the powerful jussive moods of

heterosexism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and white male laterality in

whatever signifier it manifests itself. In the class of my book, I try to place

the complexness of these poetic and political schemes in action & # 8211 ; the

interweaving of that & # 8216 ; geographics closest in & # 8217 ; , the history & # 8211 ; with the emerging

& # 8216 ; truths & # 8217 ; of dreams, desires, genders and subjectivenesss. For her, it is as

of import to analyze the single dream life as it is to turn to the political relations,

for even the dreamlife is situated within and emerges out of unconscious

experience which, of class, besides has a history. Inescapably personal but besides

political, dreams are bound to their historical minute of production. Bing

infinitely capable to re-interpretation, they are themselves an reading.

Rich calls here for the necessity to be argus-eyed, to be cognizant that bounds,

boundaries, boundary lines & # 8211 ; whether to feminist theory, to political relations, to poetry or to

dream & # 8211 ; can run even at this deepest image-making degree of the mind: When

my dreams showed marks of going politically right no boisterous images get awaying

beyond boundary lines when walking in the street I found my subjects cut out for me knew

what I would non describe for fright of enemies & # 8217 ; usage so I began to inquire. ( 22 )

Accountability, duty & # 8211 ; inquiring these profound inquiries & # 8211 ; & # 8216 ; What is

losing here? how am I utilizing this? & # 8211 ; becomes portion of the originative procedure & # 8217 ; . ( 23 )

I agree with Rich when she claims that & # 8216 ; poesy can interrupt unfastened locked Chamberss of

possibility, reconstruct numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire & # 8217 ; . ( 24 ) If desire

itself becomes boundaried within the systems and coercions of corporate

capitalist economy, our power to conceive of becomes stultified. If the poet & # 8217 ; s & # 8216 ; themes & # 8217 ; are

delimited through the fright of & # 8216 ; enemies & # 8217 ; use & # 8217 ; , and even her function as informant

inhibited through fright of rejoinders, so the critical function of the revolutionist

author to cognize words, to utilize words, to trust on words to conceive of and to convey

the necessity to make a merely, humanist society, may be undermined. As Rich

suggests A verse form can & # 8217 ; t free us from the battle for being, but it can

uncover desires and appetencies buried under the roll uping exigencies of our

lives, the fancied wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as

our ain. It & # 8217 ; s non a philosophical or psychological design ; it & # 8217 ; s an instrument

for corporal experience. But we seek that experience or recognize it when it is

offered to us, because it reminds us in some manner of our demand. After that

rearousal of desire, the undertaking of moving on that truth, or doing love, or

run intoing other demands, is ours. ( 25 ) & # 8216 ; The wick of desire & # 8217 ; ever undertakings itself

towards a possible hereafter & # 8211 ; and, in this radical art & # 8216 ; is an chemistry

through which waste, greed, ferociousness, frozen indifference, “ blind

sorrow ” and choler are transmuted into some swamping acknowledgment of the

what if? & # 8211 ; the possible. & # 8217 ; ( 26 ) However, the cognition that comes from out of our

corporal experience is, in Rich & # 8217 ; s work, inextricable from the linguistic communications in which

it is spoken, thought, imaged, dreamed. It is a subject which recurs and repeat

throughout Rich & # 8217 ; s work to day of the month & # 8211 ; our concrete demands, the passionate urgency of

our desires, the strength of adult females & # 8217 ; s diverse struggles & # 8211 ; these are identified

and identifiable, merely as our differences can be identified and are identifiable

as continually in procedure and are ever to be held up to inquiry. Taking

nil for granted, keeping a continual watchfulness against taking anything

presumed to be & # 8216 ; true & # 8217 ; at its face value, Rich invariably inquiries the premises

of her ain idea, working critically with the linguistic communication she uses. If & # 8216 ; linguistic communication

is the site of history & # 8217 ; s passage & # 8217 ; , so it is besides for Rich the site for

oppugning that history of experience ; for measuring the inflictions and

disaffections that are the result of domination ; for plumbing the deepnesss and

analyzing the complexnesss of what constitutes individuality. Throughout these four

decennaries, Rich has found herself construing and re-interpreting the

contradictory societal worlds of our lives ever critically witting of the

workings of power & # 8211 ; non merely & # 8216 ; genitive, exploitatory power & # 8217 ; but besides & # 8216 ; the

power to breed, to make, to convey Forth Fuller life & # 8217 ; . ( 27 ) These are big

purposes, suiting the work of this major feminist theoretician and radical poet.