Comtemporary Women ...

Adrienne Rich 

"The moment of change is the only poem"

  

Adrienne Rich was born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was the most well known writers for the women authors during the 19th century. She married Alfred Conrad, an economist at Harvard. After having three sons before the age of thirty, Rich gradually changed both her life and her poetry. The content of her work became increasingly confrontational - exploring such themes as women’s role in society, racism, and the Vietnam war. She broke away the tight verse forms and neat metric patterns that marked much of her early work to produce a free verse style. In 1970, Rich left her husband, who committed suicide later that year, "to do something very common, in my own way".

 
 It was in 1973, in the midst of the feminist and civil rights movements, the Vietnam War, and her own personal distress that Rich wrote Diving into the Wreck. She had a collection of exploratory and often angry poems, which garnered her the National Book Award in 1974. Rich first rejected the prize as an individual but later accepted the award on behalf of all women and shared it with her fellow nominees. Within this poem, Rich continued to explored both the exterior and interior self. 

 

"Diving into the Wreck" is an amazing adventure poem, in her poem, Adrienne is talking about her journey of life, she takes us on a voyage underwater, sea creatures, sunken treasure, dead bodies, and mysteries abound. Rich began by telling about her childhood as she goes about saying "first having read the book of myths" and "the ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner".  Then she is about to go on her journey by describing about the ocean and the creature that she has created: " the mermaid whose dark hair stream black, the merman in his armored body". I don't think there is a matter of what sex of the author is attributed in this poem, for she is talking about man and woman as the same time. Yet she did say that woman is little nervous and afraid of the man society for she is not use to it (mermaid dark hair - stream black), and man is more powerful, (merman in his armored body). Though she had overcome her experienced and become stronger, she can now become both: "I am she: I am he". 

Rich also went on to explore a lesbian relationship. She introduces lesbianism as a sense of desiring oneself, choosing oneself, primary intensity between women. She also represents some interesting perspectives on men as individual as a group. For example, in her work, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", she discusses men as a group and generalize on their power and status in society. 

Adrienne Rich in her story “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” states that women were less than men in the term of physical and she also claimed that women were attached to men. They were very oppressed but that is reality. Men are: “control of law, theology, and science; or economic nonviability within the sexual division of labor”. She also  says, “Some of the forms by which male power manifests itself are more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexuality on women than are others. "Yet each one I have listed adds to the cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men are inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive components of their lives”. She basically is stating that women are forced to be with men in this society whether they choose to or not due to the power and control that men hold in our culture.