SOURCE: "Wrestling with the Mother and Father: 'His' and 'Her' in Adrienne Rich," in Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life, edited by Nancy Owen Nelson, University of North Texas Press, 1995, pp. 54-63.

[Below, Flowers ponders the significance of Rich's substitution of the "experiential, subjective, personal" feminine pronoun she for the "analytical, objective, universal" masculine pronoun he in her poem "Afterward," elucidating the consequence in relation to both feminist criticism specifically and literary criticism in general.]

On a summer Texas day twenty years ago, a footnote to a poem shifted the geography of my mind. I have been wrestling with the issues this footnote raised ever since. The poem was Adrienne Rich's lyric "Afterward":

    Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand
    At last believing and resigned,
    And none of us who touch your hand
    Know how to give you back in kind
    The words you flung when hopes were proud:
    Being born to happiness
    Above the asking of the crowd,
    You would not take a finger less.
    We who know limits now give room
    To one who grows to fit her doom.

The footnote simply said that "her doom" was originally "his doom." Rich explained this change in a note to "The Tourist and the Town":

The pronouns in the third part of the poem were originally masculine. But the tourist was a woman, myself, and I never saw her as anything else. In 1953, when the poem was written, some notion of "universality" prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect, "personal." In this poem, and in "Afterward" in A Change of World, I have altered the pronouns not simply as a matter of fact but because they alter, for me, the dimensions of the poem.

What Rich was saying to me is that she took a poem that was originally universal ("his") and simply by changing one pronoun ("his" to "her") made it "merely" subjective, personal, and political. When the pronoun is masculine, "We who know limits" is all humankind; when the pronoun is feminine, "We who know limits" are the other women now giving room "To one who grows to fit her doom." With "his" now "her," would the poem last beyond the feminist politics of the times within which it was written? Had Rich limited the long-term impact of the poem—its life?—by packing it in the fiery passion of the political moment rather than the salt and ice of the universal human condition?

More to the point: would I, in my role as teacher and literary critic, ever make such a "his" to "her" move, knowing how it would limit the impact of my voice? It seemed unthinkable, for I had worked most of my life to move out of the circumscribed realm of the mother, with its swamps of subjectivity and endless round of chores and dependencies upon the male, into the rock-like realm of the father, with its clear, cool, dispassionate atmosphere (so I imagined) and its world of books rather than babies. What hard labor it had cost to fly out of "her" nest and up into "his" tower. And once in the tower, what dangers of falling were all around.

I remember during my first semester as an assistant professor, one of my colleagues asking me how I felt knowing that I had taken a job that might otherwise have gone to a man who had to support a family. I remember considering submitting articles under non-gendered initials—except that I had the misfortune of having "B. S." as those initials. I remember … but these sorts of things happened to many of us who lived through this time.

Some dangers were more subtle. My first semester, a number of female graduate students asked me to help found a consciousness-raising group. In the heady early days of feminism, these CR groups formed the living cells of what became a new body of thought leading to action. Small and without media scrutiny, intimate and honest, these groups did just what they were called—they raised consciousness. We discovered that our most private fears were shared, that, for example, we all felt we had gotten into graduate school by some kind of fluke and that we would sooner or later be unmasked as the charlatans that we were. But I was not in graduate school any more, I was the one professor in a group of students who might take a course from me. Feminist solidarity?—or conduct unbecoming a professional? What would it mean for my academic reputation that my female students were hearing my most intimate fears as a woman? Soon I observed that my male colleagues were "Dr. Smith" and "Professor Jones," and I was "Betty Sue."

Other dangers were more subtle yet. As a five-year-old, sitting in the front row of the Methodist Church in Abilene, Texas, I whiled away the sermons of Dallas Denver Denison (some names are worse than "Betty Sue") by looking at the stained glass windows. My favorite was the one of Mary and Martha. Mary, the attentive student, was sitting at the feet of the Lord, and Martha was standing in the doorway holding a tray. I could almost hear her complaint because it echoed what my mother would say to my father: "Why don't you tell her to come help me in the kitchen?" And then the words of the Lord: "Martha. Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her."

I was determined to choose the "good part," not the serving tray—the world of teachers and students, which I identified with the master in the living room (fathers) and not the mothers in the kitchen.

     Nervy, glowering, your daughter
     wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.
     (from Rich, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law")

But in my first year as an assistant professor, I was appointed to seventeen committees as the "token woman." And I spent countless hours counseling female students, including three who were suffering sexual harassment (as we later learned to call it) from senior professors in my college—what to do? I quickly realized that the job of female literature professor involved so much counseling that I needed to know more about psychology and so began a formal study of the subject. And then one day the associate dean of my college said, "Every minute you spend with a student is a minute you're not spending doing your research." And I was told that seventeen committees was fifteen more than my assistant professor colleagues had been asked to serve on. I was not so different from my mother after all, "careful and troubled about many things." And what was "that good part" that would not be taken away from me? My research leading to tenure? Should I turn away all the young women who were trying to find their voice so that I could write feminist literary criticism? So I could find my own voice of authority? So I could forget "her" problems and enter "his" universal world? What was my work in the world?

And what was the world in which I was working? I was in the same department as my male colleagues—but we seemed to be in utterly different worlds.

Which was the "real world" of a literature professor in a large, research university? What did it mean to teach human beings, especially women, and not just texts? What was the function of criticism: Knowledge for its own sake? To lead readers to a greater appreciation of a poem? To make students better readers and writers and so more effective as workers and citizens and leaders? To increase the capacity for joy through art? To serve my university by enhancing my reputation as a critic, thereby adding to the reputation of the university? Was the best thing I could do as a professor to close my door and read and write? After all, that is what had drawn me to the profession in the first place.

There must be ways, and we will be finding out more and more about them, in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united. But in those earlier years I always felt the conflict as a failure of love in myself. (Rich, "When We Dead Awaken")

Now, here, in the middle of this article, I also am wrestling with the mother and the father. The energy of relation moves me in the direction of service—I want what I am saying to be of some use to you. I'm afraid I haven't said enough about Adrienne Rich's poetry, to share my admiration for her work and her life. I feel I should go to the kitchen and make some literary criticism and come back with a tray of it for you. In our profession, the mothers serve the fathers in us all.

But the voice that speaks with this desire is not the voice of the professional critic. The professional critic was not invited to this party. Instead, as the editor of this book says, "each woman is concerned with telling how the pursuit of literary study has, in a real sense, shaped her perceptions of her self and her work."

So what happened when I pursued the poetry of Adrienne Rich, the poet who changed "his" to "her"? First I went "Diving Into the Wreck":

     I am she: I am he
 
     whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
     whose breasts still bear the stress
     whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
     obscurely inside barrels
     half-wedged and left to rot
     we are the half-destroyed instruments
     that once held to a course
     the water-eaten log
     the fouled compass
 
     We are, I am, you are
     by cowardice or courage
     the one who find our way back to this scene
     carrying a knife, a camera
     a book of myths
     in which
     our names do not appear.

Yes, that was what I was up to—plotting a new course, asserting my identity apart from the old myths, uniting the male and female within:

     if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light
     and hear them talking a dead language
     if they ask me my identity
     what can I say but
     I am the androgyne
     I am the living mind you fail to describe
     in your dead language.
     (from Rich, "The Stranger")

The image of the androgyne was compelling, for it seemed to offer a way beyond the polarized dualities of creation and relation that so plagued my work. True there was no androgynous pronoun to take the place of the polarized "his" and "her"; true there was no history or literature of androgyny to speak of and so nothing to ground it in. The androgyne was the vision of a future, not a clue to what had shaped us. No wonder female writers like Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich were drawn to it.

But then Rich moved more fully into "her," repudiating the androgyne in both her poetry and her prose:

     There are words I cannot choose again:
     humanism androgyny
 
     Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence
     before the raging stoic grandmothers: their
     glint is too shallow, like a dye
     that does not permeate
     the fibres of actual life
     as we live it, now …
     (from Rich, "Natural Resources")

As Rich put it, "The very structure of the word replicates the sexual dichotomy and the priority of andros (male) over gyne (female)" ("The Kingdom of the Fathers").

I could see Rich's point about androgyny, but I only half agreed with her about the raging grandmothers. I could not join with enthusiasm the more separatist feminists who were trying to find a new female voice, because the voice I knew when I honored the grandmothers was a voice of relation. At that point I began a long journey, a dialogue between the world of the past and the world of the future, mediated by whatever fullness of consciousness I could gather in the present. I could see my profession through that dialogue, knowing that whatever it would be in the future could not be a mere continuation of the past. Certain freedoms began to emerge.

One had to do with polarization, the tendency of the mind to turn difference into opposites. I began to emerge from the world of duality when I read a simple story in Irene de Castillejo's Knowing Woman about a woman who dreamed of her soul as a young girl. De Castillejo, a Jungian analyst, was familiar with Jung's dictum: "If, therefore, we speak of the anima of a man we must logically speak of the animus of a woman, if we are to give the soul of woman its right name." But what de Castillejo saw was that the female psyche was not set up as the mirror image of the male psyche—that difference was not opposition in spite of what our child minds might have concluded. I once was talking with a six-year-old nephew about a boxer we had seen on TV. He said. "Boys are strong, aren't they?" I said, "Yes." And then he added, "Girls are weak, aren't they?" I could see his thought process at work, its primitive logic: if boys are opposite from girls, and boys are strong, it follows that girls are weak.

We see this oppositional "logic" in much of literature: if men are logical, women are emotional; if men are logos, women are love. The left brain that writes is fascinated by the mystery of the Other. "Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched," says Rich, "we cannot know ourselves" ("When We Dead Awaken").

Understanding "the assumptions in which we are drenched"—that has come to be the passion that motivates my life as a literary critic. I say it a slightly different way—understanding the myths that have made us, the stories we tell about who we are. Like Rich, I have come to see this activity as a combination of poetry and politics. Deconstructing the stories we tell about who we are is political, for it involves wrestling with both the mother and the father of our culture. Seeing the new stories that might be emerging—or helping to give birth to them—falls into the realm of poetry, of mythos. Analysis is useful in the destruction of the old; but mythos holds the energies of vision that create the new.

At one point in the recent feminist re-visioning of early history, it was popular to speak of early matriarchal societies. The archeological evidence for such early cultures has been shown to be problematic—but one image from that conversation about "the matriarchy" has remained with me as a vivid and useful one. It was said that the reason we couldn't find unequivocal evidence of a period of matriarchy was that we were looking for cultures in which queens reigned instead of kings. But that's a polarized, patriarchal way of looking—it's not that a matriarchy would be the polar opposite of a patriarchy, with a queen on the throne instead of a king, but that it would be a different paradigm altogether, one of co-rulership.

With this complex image as a background, I asked the question: what would a methodology look like that was not simply a replacement of "his" by "her"? What if the move to replace the analytical, objective, and universal by the experiential, subjective, and personal is simply a move along the same continuum, like replacing "king" with "queen"? What would an entirely new methodology look like, one that lay outside this bipolar construct?

I have no immediate answer to this question—simply two responses. The first is represented by this article, which, like the other essays in this book, is written in an experiential, subjective, and personal mode. So little has been done from "her" end of the continuum that we have a limited idea of the possibilities or of what new ways of seeing might arise out of this more subjective practice. Even where the methodology has been "objective," as in much feminist criticism, the very act of looking at literature through feminist eyes has led us to put quotation marks around "objective" and "universal." Probably, were we to explore the subjective and personal in greater depth, we would be led to add quotation marks around those adjectives, also. For example, if we remained conscious that "the personal is political," we would be tempted to say "personal," adding the quotation marks to highlight our awareness of the always, already existing interconnectedness of the self with others.

In other words, a methodology that highlights "her" within the bipolar construct changes the nature of the poles. I came to appreciate the more separatist aspects of Rich's feminism through understanding this principle.

      … and we still have to reckon with Swift
      loathing the woman's flesh while praising her mind,
      Goethe's dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
      and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—
      of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
      centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
      and we still have to stare into the absence
      of men who would not, women who could not, speak
      to our life—this still unexcavated hole
      called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.
      (from Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems)

But my second response to the question of methodology is to suggest a different model, one that lies outside current bipolarizations but takes the tendency toward bipolarizations into account. My name for it at the moment is "dialogue," and I mean by this, putting disparate elements into a "working community" with each other and seeing what happens. I'm still groping towards this, but my experiments on the edge of the discipline lead me to feel there is treasure in the area, even if I have not found it in a usable form.

Let me give an example. One of the major assumptions in which we are drenched, to use Rich's phrasing, is what might be called "the economic myth." Material reality is bottom-line reality, and we look at history and literature through the lenses of class and power. We have great difficulty, for example, reading religious literature from within its own assumptions. But what if we consciously created an economic myth—a story about the future of the world, say, which was held as a fiction but used in planning?

Two years ago I joined a team of twenty people, most of them economists, to write global scenarios—the future of the world for the next thirty years. The project was sponsored by a multinational corporation as part of its planning cycle. What made it interesting to a literary critic experimenting with methodological boundaries was the fact that we were to create two equally plausible fictions about the future. These fictions would then be disseminated to company managers worldwide as a way of holding the corporate culture together—but also as a way to think about the future in common without falling under the illusion that we could know what that future might be.

During the time I was writing these stories, the company also sponsored scenario-building for the future of South Africa. Participants in South Africa came to the table to work on "fictions" who had never worked on politics together, and the four stories they created led the participants to adopt a common vision for change. Meanwhile, back in London, three of our team members began talking about the changes that occurred in their thinking about reality from working with the stories. To put it too simply, but briefly: they began to see that while the scenarios we had created were equally plausible, enough people "believing" in one could push events toward that story's conclusions. The dialogue of economic fact and narrative fiction began to result in a view of reality that was much more pliable and that reflected more of the "subjective" mind that looked "out" upon it than the team members had originally thought possible.

"This book is about desire and daily life," says Rich in the preface to What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics:

I began it because I needed a way of thinking about poetry outside of writing poems: and about the society I was living and writing in, which smelled to me of timidity, docility, demoralization, acceptance of the unacceptable. In the general public disarray of thinking, of feeling, I saw an atrophy of our power to imagine other ways of navigating into our collective future.

"To imagine other ways"—that to me is the power of literature, the essence of the dialogue between readers and poets. Even when literature seems to reflect our experience almost exactly, we are led to see that we are not alone in our sorrow or joy—and in seeing that community of experience, we are seeing "another way."

But I think there are other ways of imagining our roles as literary critics, also. What if our dialogue were not only with literature but from literature—looking through literature at culture? What if we taught our students and our culture to hold the stories we tell about who we are as stories rather than as beliefs? Perhaps we could learn how to listen to each other and how to welcome different stories while searching for common threads. And perhaps as we wrestle with the bipolar categories of mother and father, creation and relation, that have shaped our thinking, we can begin "to imagine other ways of navigating into our collective future."