Reading and Seeing Women’s Life Writing Through Adrienne Rich in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alison Bechdel’s 2012 autography Are You My Mother? makes visible the power of a feminist poetics of revision. In this graphic memoir, Bechdel uses women’s writing and texts, and the intertextual, intersubjective relationships they engender, to show and tell the story of the subject as revisable. To tell the story of such a revisable self, a self revised through reading and writing, is a form of feminist practice, and to tell it in comics is to render that practice uniquely visible. Close attention has yet to be paid in readings of Are You My Mother? to another feminist lesbian woman writer who was preoccupied with the process of re-visioning the subject through reading and writing: Adrienne Rich. Rich is a touchstone for Bechdel’s parallel self-narratives of erotic discovery and development as an artist and a writer. Bechdel learns re-visioning the subject, through writing and revising, as a feminist practice, from Rich. Evidence of this process and practice may be found in Bechdel’s intertextual engagement with Rich’s work along with the artist’s comments on Rich, as well as archival materials such as drafts of Are You My Mother? and letters to her mother, Helen.