If she’s an artist
& comes close to genius,
the very fact of her gift
should cause her such pain
that she will take her own life
rather than best us.
& after she dies, we will cry
& make her a saint.95
Anne Sexton’s “Sylvia’s Death” mourns the loss of her friend but envies Plath’s decision “to lie down . . . into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.”96 In the verse collection The Plath Cabinet, Catherine Bowman links the preserved lock of hair and the paper dolls to the airless cabinet in which women poets have been canonized. Plath’s posthumous life has extended much longer than her lived life.97
For quite some time, Ted’s sister Olwyn, a literary agent, acted as lioness at the gate of the Plath estate. Now Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes—the sole survivor of the little family, because Nicholas hanged himself in Alaska in 2009, at the age of 47—guards a treasure trove that has remained controversial.
Yet for some readers the fantasy that Plath has somehow survived is still hard to relinquish. Not that long ago, the London Review of Books published a review of the complete Plath letters, teased on its cover as “Sylvia Plath at 86.” Its author, Joanna Biggs, concluded by imagining that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about “a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect.” She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties. . . . She is baffled by but interested in MeToo. . . . She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror[.]98
6
Speculative Poetry, Speculative Fiction
A DECADE OF FERVENT ACTION, the seventies was also an era of intense speculation: speculation in the etymological sense of looking at things from a distanced, theoretical perspective and speculation in the fantasizing sense of what if—what if things were different, better, or (even) worse. In these years, while Adrienne Rich and other activists were writing a poetry of speculation, many of their colleagues began producing feminist science fiction that was more speculative than the hard-core work their male counterparts were publishing. Both in poetry and in fiction, aspirational women began examining and deploying the ancient genres of dystopia and utopia.
Though we wouldn’t have said so at the time, it’s no exaggeration to say that we suddenly understood ourselves to be living in a dystopia—that is, in the literal sense of the Greek term, in “a bad place.” In a moment, in the blinking of an eye, everything that had once seemed “normal” and “normative” appeared fantastic. For women who came to feminism in the seventies, the history that we had been taught in school and that had seemed, though bloody, inevitable, was the history of a patriarchal system that—if you thought about it as had Kate Millett and Susan Sontag—was a nightmare from which we were trying to awake.
The cold hillside of the Cold War on which we awoke seemed to us as dystopian as the history we were trying to escape. While the Vietnam War raged on, while the conspiracies of Watergate unfolded in a country where most of the promising (male) leaders—JFK, MLK, RFK—had been assassinated, there were virtually no female leaders, certainly not at the national level. In 1970 there was one woman in the Senate (Margaret Chase Smith); there were a mere eleven women in the House of Representative (2.1 percent of the membership); and no women were on the Supreme Court. And in private life, women’s bodies were sexualized as never before: micro-miniskirts left us unable to bend over at drinking fountains without exposing our underwear. Complemented by tights or knee-high boots, our daily dress made us look like the sexy aliens that male sci-fi writers had long fantasized as inhabitants of extraterrestrial worlds in which creatures gendered female existed only to serve and service men.
How had this happened? Most of us had never studied women’s history. “History” was the chronicle of male heroes and villains, of wars and colonizations. When women were part of it, they existed as prizes, like Helen of Troy or Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. “History,” said Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, a book we now read with revisionary fervor, “tells me nothing that does not either vex nor weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. It is very tiresome.”1
We knew that there had been a suffrage movement, and that women got the vote only after the First World War. Most of us, though, didn’t know that for centuries women couldn’t own property, that their children “belonged” to their husbands, and that a husband could beat his wife with impunity using a “whip or rattan no bigger than [his] thumb in order to enforce . . . domestic discipline.”2 And on and on. What we hadn’t known could, and eventually did, fill volumes of the women’s history feminists were beginning to research.
But then, there was what we yearned for and longed to bring into being. A utopia, an ideal world of liberation and equality. A world in which the old imaginings of gender were understood to be what they really were—fictions. A world no longer shaped by “the quarrels of popes and kings” or of masculinist presidents and misogynistic dictators. A good world but, given the etymology of utopia (derived from the Greek eu-topia, “good place,” and the Greek ou-topia, “no place”), a seemingly impossible world.
THE METAMORPHOSES OF ADRIENNE RICH
When Adrienne Rich thought back to the period that had transformed her life, love, and art, she wondered, “What is the connection between Vietnam and the lovers’ bed? If this insane violence is being waged against a very small country by this large and powerful country in which I live, what does that have to do with sexuality and with what’s going on between men and women, which I felt also as a struggle even then?”3 For this always self-reflective poet, the turmoil of one revolutionary decade—the sixties—had engendered the transfigurations of what she experienced as an even more revolutionary decade: the seventies.
Metamorphosis would be at the root of her experience in these years. Like the feminist science fiction writers whose works we explore later in this chapter, she would find herself yearning to imagine a world “changed, changed utterly” (as Yeats wrote about an earlier rebellion) by insurrection.4 For her, the awakenings that marked the cresting of feminism’s second wave were simultaneously political, poetical, and personal. And they inspired a newly engaged speculative poetry that struggled against dystopias while imagining utopian revisions of culture.
Political: Rich’s increasing commitment to public issues in this period has been widely documented. In 1966, she and Alfred Conrad moved to New York with their three young sons. Conrad had come to chair the economics department at City College; Rich taught for a while at Columbia and then joined the radical SEEK program, also at City, where she taught language arts mostly to underprivileged African American and Puerto Rican students. Both were involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Conrad, the coauthor of the groundbreaking article “The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South” (1958), was at least as outspoken in his rage against the “militarism, callousness, and the racism of this society” as Rich was in her increasingly polemical poems.5
Together the couple hosted gatherings of activists in their Central Park West apartment, and together, too, they participated in protests against the war in Vietnam. Conrad supported his wife’s work in SEEK; he was “deeply impressed” with the “maturity and realism” of her students, Rich wrote to the poet Hayden Carruth, one of her principal confidants.6 And Conrad’s fierce support of the fight to achieve an open admissions policy at City led to his resignation, in May 1969, from his position as chair of the economics department. Wh
ile he had always been sympathetic to his wife’s ambitions, however, he was taken aback by the intensity of the feminist commitment whose outlines she had first sketched in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.”
Poetical: As Rich rejected the domesticity of the fifties, she began writing the associative, testimonial verse that was to make her name. To an interviewer in the nineties she explained that as her public and private worlds began to fall apart and re-form, she had to “find an equivalent for the kinds of fragmentation I was feeling, and confusion.” She was drawn to the ghazals of the Urdu poet Ghalib, where she “found a structure which allowed for a highly associative field of images”; she was also “going to the movies more than I ever have in my life” and was powerfully influenced by, for instance, “Godard’s use of language and image in films.”7 In fact, according to Hilary Holladay, in 1971 she ghostwrote a book on horror movies and “said that if she’d had to choose a different career path, she might have written film criticism.”8
Personal: both Rich’s commitment to public politics and to poetic revision accompanied what she herself called a “re-vision” of her private life. Her marriage to Conrad had never been perfect; there were, as one commentator puts it, “infidelities on both sides,”9 but the compact had been definitive. Now, as her professional and political life widened, Rich’s personal life began to change and, from Conrad’s point of view, fall apart. Depressed for much of the sixties—she had long suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and now developed a fear of stairs—she went into psychotherapy with the existential psychoanalyst Leslie Farber (author of a noted volume, Ways of the Will), who became, for a while, the most important person in her life.
By the end of the sixties, she decided to move out of the Central Park West apartment, leaving her sons with Conrad, so that she could live on her own in a small studio nearby. In October 1970, Michelle Dean tells us, she wrote to Hayden Carruth that “Alf & I [are] talking a lot, in the car on leaf-strewn roads, or by the stove evenings”; yet soon she noted that “I feel Alf is in bad trouble—I can’t help him anymore & I am trying at best not to provide damaging occasions for him.” Then, Dean adds, the “same day she wrote the letter, Conrad wrote a check for the gun” with which he would soon shoot himself not far from the couple’s Vermont vacation home.10
Conrad’s suicide was “shattering for me and my children,” Rich always remembered. “It was a tremendous waste. He was a man of enormous talents and love of life.”11 At the same time, this act of personal violence symbolized for the poet not just the rift between one individual couple but what Rich herself had begun to consider an almost unbridgeable gulf between the sexes. As Hayden Carruth remembered, “she was becoming a very pronounced, very militant feminist,” so much so that “Alf came to me and complained bitterly that Adrienne had lost her mind.” Later, after Conrad shot himself, Carruth added that he thought “Alf was a very disappointed person, who, as Adrienne became more celebrated, became more depressed.”12
As for Rich herself, after her husband’s death she reportedly cut off almost all contact with male friends and for many years sought only the company of women, increasingly taking on the role of a prophet for feminism and eventually coming out as a lesbian.13 “She got swept too far,” complained her sometime friend Elizabeth Hardwick. “She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems.”14 But the “extreme and ridiculous poems” spoke to a generation of young women and swept them too to new, far-out places. For arguably, after Conrad’s suicide, the political, poetical, and personal fused in Rich’s literary career, re-creating her as a public intellectual who channeled the anger of her generation.
Rich claimed to dislike the confessional strain in American poetry, preferring the pronouns “we” and “you” to “I.” Yet it was the personal crisis of “shattering” grief that left an indelible mark on both her poetry and her politics. Rarely openly autobiographical, she mostly “told all the truth but told it slant,” in a Dickinsonian manner.15 Or to put the matter another way, as she implied in a late verse, she wrote her story into her poetry in invisible ink, which can be read only when held over a deciphering flame.16
Diving into the Wreck, her landmark 1973 collection of poems, was certainly a record of her feminist awakening; but the book’s power also arises from its sorrowful yet angry gaze at the wreck of her husband’s life, her marriage, and, in her view, the institution of patriarchal heterosexuality that forged the connection between “Vietnam and the lovers’ bed.” Indeed, if Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was a kind of self-elegy, mourning the death of the fifties while dreaming of renewal in the sixties, Diving into the Wreck was an elegy for the fifties marriage of Adrienne Rich and Alfred Conrad that sought to describe what the title poem calls “the ribs of the disaster”17 the couple confronted in the sixties and seventies.
Wrote Margaret Atwood in the New York Times Book Review, “When I first heard the author read from it, I felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument,” and she concluded that it was “one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it, but what you think about yourself.”18 Tellingly, Rich’s imagery of diving and discovering in her title poem parallel Atwood’s similar imagery in Surfacing, as though both writers intuited the theme of deep exploration into a patriarchal past that marked so much feminist thinking in this decade.
In a 1972 issue of Commentary, Rich’s psychotherapist Leslie Farber published an essay titled “He Said, She Said,” in which he marveled at the ways in which “the new feminism has thrown into question all those institutions under whose auspices men and women through the centuries have sought to combine their lots or join their fates.”19 An interventional analyst who actively engaged with his patients, he might have gained this grasp of seventies feminism from discussions with one of his patients—Adrienne Rich. For as she awakened from the dreams of heterosexual “true romance” that had shaped the marriage plans of her generation, Rich bore witness to seeing with increasing clarity the oppressiveness of the “institutions under whose auspices” she had been living all her life. Even while obliquely exploring loss and grief, Diving into the Wreck analyzes the changes she and her generation had undergone and also reiterates—to use the title of the book she published just before this one—her own “will to change.”
“The tragedy of sex / lies around us, a woodlot / the axes are sharpened for,” Rich wrote in “Waking in the Dark,” as she recorded her sense that she was dwelling in what had been “A man’s world. But finished.”20 What exactly constituted her vision of “the tragedy of sex”? Few of the poems in Diving are as specific about this matter as a passage in a slightly later poem, “From an Old House in America,” in which Rich broods on the history of the family vacation house in Vermont near which Conrad shot himself in 1970. Here is a traumatic “he said, she said” dialogue more dramatic than those Leslie Farber examined in his 1972 essay.
But can’t you see me as a human being
he said
What is a human being
she said
I try to understand
he said
what will you undertake
she said
will you punish me for history
he said21
By the time Conrad shot himself, Rich was enraged at history, which she had come to see as a dystopian narrative of the culture that had always defined woman as secondary. In “Trying to Talk with a Man,” she came to see all men as beings whose “dry heat feels like power,” whose “eyes are stars of a different magnitude.”22 Vision and re-vision became obsessive themes in her work, as did fury at what she saw when, in Blakeian terms, the “doors of perception were cleansed.”23 “Underneath my lids another eye has opened / it looks nakedly / at the light,” she wrote in “From the Prison House.” And in “The Stranger” she imagined herself as an androgyne, with “visionary anger cleansing my sight / and the detailed perceptions of
mercy / flowering from that anger.”24
Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” at the center of the volume with that name, allegorizes with dreamlike intensity the quest for truth and rebirth at the heart of her feminist project. She begins this speculative account of a voyage that Jung would define as a night sea journey with three crucial acts of preparation: she reads “the book of myths” that shape her world, she loads “the camera” so she can record what she sees, and she checks “the edge of the knife-blade” that may either protect her or enable her to dissect what she discovers (italics ours). Then, imagining herself as a lone diver, she steps away from the reality of twentieth-century New York, attires herself in diving gear—“the body-armor of black rubber / the absurd flippers / the grave and awkward mask”—and descends into what is symbolically the dark ocean of the collective cultural unconscious to examine “the wreck” in which she discovers the drowned body of a man and a woman.25
As she enacts her journey downward and inward, Rich suggests that the poem itself is identical with her descent into the underworld. “The words are purposes. / The words are maps.” Magically, her writing of the poem becomes a way of plunging deeper into the tragedy of sex that turned her own marriage into a shipwreck. “I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail,” she declares, as she notes that she is seeking to understand “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” Arriving at the reality of the wreck and circling its debris, she ultimately discovers that she is not just the mermaid and merman swimming “into the hold,” she is also a victim of the calamity, as is her male counterpart.26 It is not just the traditional married couple but the tradition of heterosexual coupledom that has drowned:
Still Mad Page 17
