Life & Background
Rich was born in Baltimore in 1929 and educated by her father, a pathologist who supervised her reading, before Radcliffe. W.H. Auden selected her first book for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1951 and praised its neatness and modesty — a judgement she later cited as evidence of what was expected of women poets. She married and had three sons by thirty, and the conflict between that life and her work produced Of Woman Born. From the 1960s she was active against the Vietnam War and in the civil rights movement, and from the 1970s in lesbian feminism, living with the writer Michelle Cliff. She accepted the National Book Award in 1974 jointly with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all women, and refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997 over the administration's politics. She died in 2012.
Diving into the Wreck
The speaker prepares alone for a dive: reads the book of myths, loads the camera, checks the knife-blade, puts on the body-armour of black rubber and the awkward mask, and goes down the ladder without a crew, unlike Cousteau with his assiduous team. The descent is described as a physical struggle — learning to turn the body without force in the deep element. She comes to see the wreck itself and states her purpose precisely: she came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail, and to explore the thing itself and not the myth. At the wreck she becomes both figures on the ruined prow, the mermaid and the merman, carrying a knife, a camera, and a book of myths in which their names do not appear.
The poem is an allegory of feminist re-reading: the wreck is the received cultural record, the book of myths is the tradition that omitted women, and the diver goes to examine the evidence directly rather than accept the account. Its refusal to settle into a single gendered speaker — I am she, I am he — is what made it central to feminist and later queer criticism. Rich's prose supplies the theory: Of Woman Born distinguishes motherhood as institution from mothering as experience, and Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence argues that heterosexuality is enforced rather than natural, proposing the lesbian continuum as a way of describing women's bonds beyond the sexual.
Why Rich Matters
Rich is both a major American poet and a foundational feminist theorist, and the two bodies of work are examined together. Compulsory Heterosexuality is among the most cited essays in gender studies, and When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision gave feminist criticism its programme of re-reading the tradition with fresh eyes. Her public refusals of honours make her a standard example of the poet as political actor.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Change of World1951
- Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law1963
- Diving into the Wreck1973
- Of Woman Born1976
- The Dream of a Common Language1978
- Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence1980