Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose Essay Questions

How does the evolution of Adrienne Rich's poetry parallel the development of her life?

Adrienne Rich had a life that escalated in its progressiveness from start to finish. She was born into a traditional family in 1929 with a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother, and her early life was typical for a woman in that age. She grew to adulthood and married a Jewish man, an economist named Alfred Haskell Conrad, and became a mother; this led her to begin to write about female experience. In the 1960s, however, she separated from her husband (who, soon afterward, shot himself) and declared her identification as a lesbian. She became partners with Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff, and her political views grew more liberal and outspoken as she grew older. She become increasingly involved in political activism, and she died an influential figure in 2012.

Her poetry directly parallels the trajectory of her life. She began by writing books of poetry that celebrated beauty and imagination. As she grew older, however, her work increasingly called for social reform and tried to stand up for oppressed minorities. By the time she died, her literary work had evolved from the light, imaginative fantasy of her youth to powerful calls for social reform and advocacy for women and the LGBTQ movement.

Explain the meaning of the poem "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" in light of Adrienne Rich's career and themes.

This poem seeks to reject tradition. The opening stanza is this:

"Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty."

So far, the nature of these tigers is unclear, but the reader learns from the context of the rest of the poem that these "tigers" are intended to represent the liberated woman, who has been emancipated from the chauvinistic rule of men. The next stanza reads:

"Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand."

The poem's meaning is beginning to take shape. This "Aunt Jennifer" is a woman who feels trapped by her marriage, hence "the massive weight of Uncle's wedding band." The image of the tigers is an image that she is crafting in her knitting, which she uses as her vicarious escape from the harsh realities of her stifling marriage. These fantasies suggest an unhappy mind, which is fully brought to light in the third stanza:

"When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid."

This final set of lines is full of both hope and despair. The author implies that Aunt Jennifer will never be able to escape her marriage: when she dies, the binding ring will still be on her finger. The tigers that she created, however, will be forever free, "proud and unafraid." This tapestry could also be a representation of the work of the feminist: she might not ever live to see the result of her efforts, but she is planting seeds that will go on and have an impact on the rest of the world's future.