Adrienne Rich (Essay Date October 1972)

SOURCE: Rich, Adrienne. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." In Adrienne Rich's Poetry: Texts of the Poems, the Poet on Her Work, Reviews and Criticism, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, pp. 90-8. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

In the following essay, originally published in the journal College English in October, 1972, Rich encourages readers to reexamine texts by and about women in order to come to a new understanding of women as artists and individuals.

Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken is a play about the use that the male artist and thinker—in the process of creating culture as we know it—has made of women, in his life and in his work; and about a woman's slow struggling awakening to the use to which her life has been put. Bernard Shaw wrote in 1900 of this play...