Adrienne Rich Essay Research Paper — страница 3

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not a natural, biologically determined given – Rich is at pains to stress that ‘We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization those qualities which are supposed to be "innate" in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socialising a human being’.(10) In no sense is any biologically essentialist assumption made that women possess in their natures the qualities of nurturant caring. In Rich’s thought, as we have seen, it is a quality learned only with difficulty, often at the cost of a serious loss of self:, especially the self of the writer: As she points out: ‘..it can be dangerously simplistic to fix upon "nurturance" as a special strength of women, which need only be

released into the larger society to create a new human order.(11) Biology has not endowed women with an essential femininity, there is no biologically given essence that determines that the mother will be a nurturant caregiver, or be virtuous and loving towards her children. To present Rich’s arguments, as Janet Sayers did in her book, Biological Politics, as grounded in ‘the celebration of female biology and of the essential femininity to which it supposedly gives rise’, is to seriously misread her work.(12) Rich’s arguments, rather, imply that the maternal body, as she sees it, is lived: it is bound up in its specificity with the realms of the social and the political and is a crucial site of struggle in which psychoanalytic, sexual, technological, economic, medical,

legal, and other cultural institutions contest for power. Sayers addresses her own failure to give due recognition to the importance of psychoanalytic theory in her later book Sexual Contradictions (1986), yet continues to condemn Rich (as she does Irigaray) for the sin of essentialism and, in so doing, compounds the slippages of her position. Rich is again criticised for ‘affirming a particular cultural representation and image of femininity…of woman as a plenitude of sexuality’ – which seems to me to miss the point on a grand scale.(13) Sayers reductively dismisses Rich’s breadth, complexity and multidimensionality, in focusing on a fragment of a much larger statement when she states categorically that ‘women’s supposed "complicated, pain-enduring,

multipleasured physicality" hardly seems a very hopeful basis on which to build resistance to their social subordination…’ (14) Well no, it wouldn’t be, if that were actually what Rich was proposing. I turn to a fragment from Integrity, from A Wild Patience to illustrate something of the complexity to be found in the poetry This extract is from ‘Integrity’, collected in A Wild Patience: Anger and tenderness: my selves. And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities. Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius to spin and weave in the same action from her own body, anywhere – even from a broken web.(15) In my book I argue how Rich moves beyond dualism in her poetry – an argument I cannot go into – but here ‘Experience’ can be both

private and public, personal and political – anger and tenderness, despite being contradictory emotions, need not be mutually exclusive terms. A tension-filled conflict may live and breathe in a woman’s body as different aspects of her experiencing, yet it is integral to the processes and struggles of being female. Just as the image of the spider spinning and weaving simultaneously suggests the indivisibility of these polar opposites, so too culture and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, social and psychological, body and mind, are inter-implicated with each other – in Rich’s non-dichotomous understanding of the mind / body. These few lines point to a radically subversive process. Identifying herself and other women who fall short of the nurturing ideal woman – Rich

transgressively restores to language that which had been silenced and delegitimated within a patriarchal culture and tradition. Her culturally unacceptable anger becomes acknowledged and empathically recognised, rather than condemned. To profoundly accept her own split ’selves’ (and those of other women) is to validate and to transform her sensory experiencing, her self-esteem, her sense of her own power, the meaning of her existence. Women have long been engaged in a vigilant and exacting process of bringing to critical awareness the contradictions, ambiguities and impositions of our diverse experience so as to reach a realm where such incoherences can become rendered conscious and intelligible within language so that they may be thought. This invitation to transform