Rich's Essential Essays

Abstract

anger, that everything in our society conspires to make a thinking woman sit down and shut up. I still experience the awe I felt as an insecure young wife, mother, and teacher, watching this woman barely ten years older than I, resolutely and eloquently probing the tight connection between dysfunction in society and her own divided self. In one of her most famous early poems, “Diving into the Wreck,” the poet descends to “the deep element” to investigate what she calls “the wreck and not the story of the wreck, / The thing itself and not the myth . . . . to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” The metaphor here is a brilliant successor to T. S. Eliot’s metaphor of society and self as “The Waste Land.” Rich implies that the history of civilization, American history, the poet’s family history, her personal life, her psyche—all these intricately nested phenomena—can be understood as a “wreck.” A woman who could evoke the history of malaise in our society, along with the suppressions stored in our individual and collective subconscious, by using the simple metaphor of a submerged wreck, was the kind of poet I thought I might want to become. Rich’s essays, like her poetry, were indeed essential reading for my generation of feminists, suckled on Betty Friedan’s