-Adrienne Rich
Back in teenagedom, she was the first one who taught me that female friendships are necessary beyond girlhood, that women can love other women and even love themselves as such. As intuitive as that may seem now, it was not. Before her, I thought that being female was a maladjusted adornment to my masculinely serious thinking. What a drag. In my perfect educational system everybody is given "Of Woman Born" to read in middle school.This book gave me a discourse to express my diffuse frustration and unrecognized anger against normal motherhood and the atrocity of normal (male) Women's Health.
As much as I owe her, my problem with Adrienne Rich's feminism is that it is perhaps too wholesome, too coherent. However, I was rereading "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" and the same three lines that years back struck me as oddly non-belonging are the ones that today fascinate me:
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammooth-tusk.
The satyrical way in which she ridicules the sweet woman who obsessively shaves made me see another Adrienne Rich, less all-loving and more contradictory. She didn't love all womanhood, she only loved the womanhood that knew itself. She wanted the self-ignorant woman to pass away, to become extinct as a prehistorical animal: she dreamt of a time where the only place for exhibited women is the museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment