Adrienne Rich Feminist Analysis

Written by Adrienne Rich in 1972, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision” is a classic feminist text. Based loosely around a discussion of a major theme in the Ibsen work of the same title, Rich postulates that women are for the first time truly awakening into the full consciousness of their beings. this slow movement towards awareness, culminating in her essay, can be organized, through three texts, as an evolution of the ideas surrounding that journey. Three writers from this course can be categorized as feminist writers - or rather, “proto”-feminist writers. When viewed together, these texts can illustrate a sort of timeline of development described in Rich’s essay. Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Fuller wrote …show more content…
However, her invitation to the global community comes as an overt feminist declaration. Her words are forceful - Woman, “ . . .as the other half of the same thought, the other chamber of the heart of life, needs now take her turn in the full pulsation of life.” (Fuller). Fuller’s prose is haphazard and almost directionless- a direct refutation of what she called “the masculine style”(Fuller). Her experimental writing style is, in and of itself, a statement. She is no longer bound by the accepted masculinity of the literary community’s rules. Language that “ . . .has trapped as well as liberated . . .” women, has instead become a vehicle for Fuller to explore the contradictions and justifications of the past. Fuller has not yet moved into the quieter (and slightly more accusatory) introspection of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, but has moderated the stridency of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”. The urgency of feminist thought, though, is still apparent - only now, Fuller can emotionally argue for equality with unassailable logic. She feels comfortable in this wider world, advocating for rights that are inalienable to all men. Fuller is so confident in her own feminist identity that she is able to explore some of the global intersectionality of the movement, without losing ground. At one point Rich writes of the disenfranchised woman who has been left out of the …show more content…
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the protagonist has recently had a child. Due to the hysterics her husband (a doctor) believes were brought on by the birth, she is kept under close supervision, and disallowed from writing, under the guise of becoming well. Rich asserts that even as “[i]t’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.” For our narrator, even her surroundings give evidence to the . “[T]he lame uncertain curves [of the wallpaper pattern] plunge off at outrageous angles . . .”, she writes “[and] destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”(Gilman) She is filled with “the press of ideas” and her slow descent into madness is only a direct byproduct of her own struggle to become truly free. Here, feminist thought is developed further into the individualized realm. No longer this abstract ideal of equality of thought or ubringing, “The Yellow Wallpaper” reduces the scale to an intimate rejection of societal and familial strictures.To be a woman, she writes, is to constantly “do work that others undo.” Our narrator’s own choices are undone until her last and final one, when her release of the woman behind the paper (her own inner self) brings about her acceptance of madness. On some level, “The Yellow