A woman in a patriarchal society such as ours, Rich has said, "in which males hold dominant power and determine what part females shall or shall not play," is defined by powerlessness. In her poetry Rich probes the effects of such a society on women and moves toward personal and political ways of breaking out of it. An early poem, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," examines the life of a woman dominated, indeed "terrified by men." Creating in her needlepoint tigers a vision of masterful and assured life, Aunt Jennifer cannot escape the powers that confine her: her hands even after death are "still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by." "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" explores the lives of women whom men "dominate, tyrannize, choose, or reject," women who gain identity only through their relationships to men. The poem presents the consequences of such powerlessness: minds "moldering like wedding-cake" …; energies turned inward or erupting angrily at other women; women who either die as complete adults at fifteen or are labelled and dismissed as "harpy, shrew and whore." "Time," Rich reminds us, "is male" and selects for praise women who are beautiful and nurturing, who shave their legs and iron their clothing—and that of others…. (p. 34)
But Adrienne Rich does more in her poetry than merely examine the consequences of powerlessness. "What it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman … is perhaps the major subject of poetry from here on," she has said. A number of Rich's major poems deal with this process of discovery—with woman's search for an authentic self and a freely chosen life. Both the themes and the imagery of these poems reflect the author's concern with the subject of power.
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