リッチの第7詩集 Diving into the Wreck --雑草はタールに花咲く--

Abstract

In her poems written before Diving into the Wreck (1973) Adrienne Rich had already gone deep into herself because she had felt her own self split between the self who wrote poems and the self who was defined by society and she had wanted to grasp her true identity. Here, society means patriarchy, that is, according to Rich, 'any kind of group organization in which males hold dominant power and determine what part females shall and shall not play, 'and in which women's identity could not be preserved. It might be said that women had been "sleeping dead" for a very long time. Women's relationship with men is not only an individual matter but also a seriously political one. Rich says that technological capitalism, which is the product of patriarchy, has brought devastation to the earth, which has become dangerous to all living things, men themselves included, so that women 'can no longer afford to keep the female principle enclosed within any male-induced notion' of what is woman. In this report I discuss the three poems, "Trying to Talk with a Man, " "When We Dead Awaken" and "Incipience" from her seventh book, Diving into the Wreck. I try to make clear the process of her searching for her identity, her view of the relationship of women with men and her efforts as a feminist to transform 'world society' and 'human relationships.'