Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and feminist literature

Adrienne Rich and the Tigers
Introduction
Adrienne Rich wrote in the American Feminist tradition that emerged in the first half of the 20th century with works like The Awakening and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which arrived at mid-century to take the literary themes circulating among 20th century American women writers and distill them into the ideological expression that became known as Feminism. Other women like Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine and Feminist activist, would help to advance the Women’s Movement, and poet Adrienne Rich emerged from within this movement as its poetic voice. In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” Rich explores many of the themes discussed in feminist literature and shares similar tropes with other stories of oppressed women who find the weight of their wedding ring (a symbol used in “Tigers”) to weigh heavily on their hands—whether they are the kitchen-confined woman described by Friedan or the woman who slays her husband after years of mental abuse in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. The Feminist tradition flows through the works of Adrienne Rich, author, poet, and feminist and lesbian activist. This paper will describe Rich’s life, background, beliefs and works to show how she represented the feminist activist and how her words and symbols helped to convey the feelings and ideas of Feminism.
Cultural Background
One of the recurring themes of feminist literature is the concept of the woman who is oppressed by her matrimonial life and feels crushed by her husband’s presence, which serves as a kind of patriarchal shadow hovering constantly over her and blocking out the sun and light of life. Chopin describes this experience in both The Awakening (in which the female protagonist engages in an affair with a man who, ultimately, backs away, leaving the heroin forlorn and suicidal) and “The Story of an Hour” (in which the female protagonist sits in her room, suffering from an unspecified malady that surprisingly goes away the moment she learns that her husband has been in an accident and died). In each case, the woman’s sense of freedom is connected to the abandonment or ending of marriage vows. Woolf emphasized the need that women have for their own space, free of male dominance, in “A Room of One’s Own,” and for Friedan, this concept of liberation from masculine tyranny was depicted in her rejection of stereotypical images of women as domesticated sex kittens (Horowitz) there to serve the “male gaze,” as Mulvey later defined it, cook the man his dinner and bear the man’s children. Friedan likened this kind of existence to a sort of indentured servitude, with the woman’s freedom only coming after the marriage had ended, either through death or through nullification (divorce or separation). Steinem would go on to celebrate the courage of women who defied patriarchal systems, who used the outcome of Roe v. Wade to assert their independence and ownership of their bodies by having abortions and talking proudly about it (as Steinem herself did), and essentially eradicating any sense of reliance upon or subservience to the masculine identity—a hook that really can be found in literature dating all the way back to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who dispenses with husbands the moment they fail to recognize her sovereignty (Leicester). The Feminist Movement became aligned with lesbian activism and took up issues such as “reproductive rights,” even pushing Old World institutions to recognize their positions (Ruether). Judith Butler would also strive to define “gender identity” in the midst of a new revolution in terms of how women viewed themselves as opposed to how they traditional culture defined them as male counterparts.
Rich’s Life
Rich herself aligned with these issues and ideas. Born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Rich was encouraged by parents to pursue self-expression through the poetic form. She attended a girls’ academy which introduced her to “fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned” (Martin 174). Rich honed her poetry writing skills in college and her first book of poems, A Change of World, was picked by poet W. H. Auden as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Flood). Rich was then awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at Oxford but chose instead to travel Europe and seeing the Continent.
Rich then married Alfred Conrad in 1953, a man who taught economics at Harvard. As Flood notes, the marriage was not exactly born of romance or even of love but rather of what Rich described as a naïve attempt to “disconnect from my family. I wanted what I saw as a full woman’s life, whatever was possible.” Rich and Conrad would go on to have three boys together before the end of the decade. With the arrival of the 1960s, however, Rich’s life would begin to radically change—just as the socio-political environment of the U.S. would shift in a radical direction. The Women’s Movement would spring into action in the coming years like Athena out of the head of Zeus. This is when Rich started to question her identity as a woman, wife and mother in earnest.
Rich notes in her essay written in the 1980s, looking back on the transformation that began in the 1960s, that it was her experience as a mother that initialized her radicalization (Flood). John O’Mahoney writes that during the 60s, Rich experimented with poetry, taking it in a new directional—a much more personal direction, exploring themes that resonated in feminist literature: themes of identity, oppression, the meaning of womanhood. Her book of poems published in 1963 entitled Snapshot of a Daughter in Law, used free meter and a highly personal perspective and tone to express “what it is to be a thinking woman within the social restrictions of family and marriage” (O’Mahoney). However, this initial move to embrace feminist ideas and represent them in poetry was not met with much enthusiasm from critics. Rich lamented later that “I was seen as ‘bitter’ and ‘personal’; and to be personal was to be disqualified, and that was very shaking because I’d really gone out on a limb” (O’Mahoney). She was stung by the criticism and stepped back from this exploration of themes. Nonetheless, the wave of feminist thought overtaking the socio-political culture of the West in the 1960s and 1970s would continue on, carrying her along in spite of the early objections from literary critics who disapproved of Rich’s exploration.
In the same decade of social change and revolution, Rich began mingling with more and more poets, teaching at Columbia University and engaging with “radical ideas flooding the campus, in particular the anti-Vietnam movement and women’s liberation” (O’Mahoney). Her work started being published in feminist journals. Her activism soon included going to Black Panther fundraisers as she sought to support minorities of all stripes and colors. Her husband initially supported her activism but as it increased in its radicalization, he felt that she was losing her mind (O’Mahoney). The marriage suffered as a result, and each began engaging in affairs of their own. By the beginning of the 1970s, Rich had left the house and was living on her own. That same year, Conrad would shoot himself: he had become depressed and took his own life. The impact of this event caused Rich to shut herself off from all men.
It was then that Rich began to identify as a lesbian: “The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs,” she stated in her writings (O’Mahoney). This identification coincided with the emergence of lesbianism as a celebration of female sexuality and independence that was taking place in the socio-cultural and socio-political backdrop of the West at the time. Rich would state: “There was so much being questioned, so much up for grabs…I don't think the phrase ‘lifestyle’ was even being used. There was a women’s movement, in which arts were exploding along with politics. It wasn’t as simple as falling in love - though falling in love always helps” (O’Mahoney). Published in 1971, her collection of poetry entitled The Will to Change showcased this transformation and this push back against the system of oppression that the Feminist Movement had defined as its antagonist.
Rich’s own poetry explored this antagonism. In her 1973 collection entitled Diving into the Wreck, Rich writes, “the only real love I have ever felt/ was for children and other women/ everything else was lust, pity,/ self-hatred, pity, lust”—a dissection of her former life as wife and mother and a celebration of her new life as lesbian and activist. She is here showing that she is charting a new course for her emotions—one that is freed by the dissolution of her matrimonial bonds, just like Chopin’s character’s sought freedom through the dissolution of theirs. Rich embraced lesbianism and would go on to describe that “her first full-fledged act [as a lesbian] was to fall in love with a Jewish woman” (O’Mahoney). That relationship ended soon enough and Rich began a new one with Michelle Cliff, a novelist and editor at W. W. Norton; the two women begin editing the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom in the 1980s and the two stayed together for the rest of the century, moving from the East Coast to the West Coast to enjoy the privacy that Cliff desired (O’Mahoney).
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” was written in 1951—and marks the beginning of Rich’s career as a poet. It also foreshadows many of the themes that she would explore in her feminist writing and later in her activism as a feminist and lesbian. The poem’s power lies in its use of symbolism and the tropes of traditional feminist genre, as already established by Chopin and Woolf. Thomas Byars notes that
Rich’s own remarks on this poem are an important starting place; she discusses how even in a formal and consciously distanced poem of her early period, she can discover clear (if latent) feminist concerns. Perhaps most interesting, however, is the fact that the needlework tigers, like Rich’s poem itself, are ineffectual as rebellion, because the very means of their rebellion are inscribed in the oppressor's language, and thus reveal an unhealed split in the psyche of the oppressed. (37)
Rich describes the hands of Aunt Jennifer as “terrified” and “ringed with ordeals she was mastered by”—a suggestion that marriage is more of an act of subjugation and oppression than of love and commitment. The tigers that Aunt Jennifer weaves into the fabric that she sews resemble the desire of the emerging feminist—the desire to be free above “the men beneath the tree,” free to “go on prancing, proud and unafraid” (Rich). The tigers represent the fierce freedom that sits in the oppressed woman’s breast. The woman is shackled by the wedding band, just like a slave is shackled by chains. And just like the woman in Glaspell’s Trifles spends her time knitting and sewing in a discrete and separate act of escaping from her husband’s presence, Aunt Jennifer takes up the needle to weave for herself a pattern that represents her inner desires: she is one with the tigers who prance in the trees, unafraid of the men below who seek to capture them. Aunt Jennifer’s tigers are thus a symbol of the feminist spirit that was about to break free in the mainstream American consciousness in the years following the publication of Rich’s early poem.
By reflecting this desire on the part of womanhood to be free and independent of masculinity, Rich was foreshadowing the wave of feminism that would appear in the 1960s and 1970s, and she was foreshadowing her own activism in that movement, as Byars has pointed out: “The tigers display in art the values that Aunt Jennifer must repress or displace in life: strength, assertion, fearlessness, fluidity of motion. And the poem's conclusion celebrates the animal images as a kind of triumph, transcending the limited conditions of their maker’s life” (Byars 40). However, the tiger itself also doubles as a masculine image: “not only masculine, but heroic figures of one of the most role-bound of all the substructures of patriarchy: chivalry” (Byars 40), and this problematic because Rich uses that word “chivalric” in the poem to describe the tigers’ certainty. Does it mean that Rich sees Aunt Jennifer assuming masculine characteristics or rather qualities that have been possessed by the male patriarchy for centuries? This could be. Byars indicates that the “chivalric certainty” of the tigers “is a representation by Aunt Jennifer of her own envisioned power”—but, nonetheless, Aunt Jennifer is participating in her own submission to male dominance by weaving her discontent in a passive manner (in cloth) rather than in an active and defiant stance—in public, where real waves might be made. Rich’s poem can thus be viewed as a cautious first step towards radicalism—because an “assertion against the patriarchy is here imagined only in terms set by the patriarchs” (Byars 40) and not quite in terms set by women themselves, as they would go on to do so throughout the coming Women’s Movement. Indeed, Rich herself would distance herself from this early hesitancy and make her stance known in public, outside of passive knitting and cautious poetry. In other words, Aunt Jennifer’s tigers serve as an early announcement of things to come, but one that is still yet willing to exist within an accepted framework of speech and symbol. Once Rich herself would abandon the safety of that framework, her own life and orientation would change dramatically.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Adrienne Rich was an American poet whose identity and poetry was situated within the American Feminist Movement that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century. Her own poetry and writings used the tropes and symbols of the American feminist literary tradition established earlier in the century by writers like Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf, and her beliefs reflected the attitudes and questions of identity put forward by writers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinhem. She became a feminist and lesbian activist, the latter following the death of her husband in the early 1970s. She described her lesbian identity as being an expression of true love, something she never found within the confines of traditional marriage or in heterosexual love. In her poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” she describes a woman whose knitting reflects her own inner desire for freedom from the heavy weight of the wedding band and foreshadows the direction that her own life would take.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY:
Routledge, 1990.
Byars, Thomas. World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the
“Jubilation of Poets.” Kent State University Press, 1990.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” VCU.
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/hour/storyofhour.html
Flood, Alison. “Adrienne Rich, award-winning poet and essayist, dies aged 82.” The
Guardian, 29 Mar. 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/29/adrienne-rich-poet-essayist-dies
Horowitz, D. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Leicester, H. Marshall.