에이드리언 리치와 존재의 지도

Abstract

Adrienne Rich has been seeking out the conditions of woman's existence from her first collection of poetry A Change of World to the recent one The School Among the Ruins. More than anything else, she has looked into the ways in which various, arbitrary patriarchal values indoctrinate women to be subjugated to social conditions of living and also reproduce the same social criticism of so called ‘unnatural’ women. Thus calling the patriarchal language "the oppressor's language," she tries to resurface women's feelings and emotions which have been rigorously repressed and tightly capped beneath the social roles of a good wife, dedicated mother, and obedient daughter. Naturally, due to her clear identification of women's issues and her lesbian sexuality, Rich's poetics of existence has been defined as woman-only or woman-centered one. Particularly, when she published The Dream of a Common Language, many critics celebrated the collection as the epitome of her gender-based poetics and argued that Rich completed her vision of a female-based world in which men is excluded. I find this kind of critique to be rather limiting Rich's poetics than illuminating because automatic association of her sexual identity as a lesbian with her lesbian feminism only makes her poetics very exclusive. Since Walt Whitman, despite the suspect of his homosexuality, is not regarded as a poet of homosexuals, and Emily Dickinson, despite her solitary life, is not viewed as a poet of exclusive life, Rich should not be limited as a poet of women-only owing to her lesbian sexuality. Thus in this paper I try to review the nature of Rich's lesbian feminism and re-examine her vision of "common language." First, I will point out "common language" not as an alternative language but a radical perception that leads us to recognize our self as twosome and identify our 'self' as "we." Then I will present a reading of "The Twenty-One Love Poems" as embodying Rich's vision of "common" existence. Looking at Rich's lesbian feminism in a fresh viewpoint, I hope to suggest the inclusiveness of Rich's poetics of existence.