エイドリアン・リッチの初期の詩における「自己」と「他者」の関係についての一考察

Abstract

One of the themes which appear in Adrienne Rich's poems repeatedly is the relation between oneself and others. In her poem "After Dark" (1964), she shows what her attitude toward others is by declaring 'I grow protective toward the world.' This attitude seems very positive though it is not clear how she will be protective toward "the world" which ought to be quite different from oneself, sometimes opposite to it. Is such a positive attitude also recognized in her early poems? If not, what has made her change? To answer these questions I examine some of her early poems in her first two books. In these poems she recognizes that it is very difficult to bridge the fence between oneself and others, but she also finds the necessity to communicate with each other by trying to overcome the difficulty through compassion and the recognition that all human beings are imperfect. She says that we are a sort of tragi-comic stumblers. What is left for me to do is to trace the process, in her later poems, by which she came to have a feeling that she grows protective toward the world.