Adrienne Rich's Cartographies: Maps and Mapping in the Poetry and Prose

Abstract

Abstract:This article traces the importance of maps as key metaphors in Adrienne Rich's poetry and prose. In her early work of the 1950s through 1970s, she critiqued maps as emblems of received knowledge that carry prejudicial assumptions about gender, race, and class. Then, in the 1980s, she began to reclaim this object by envisioning alternative cartographies that play with the assumptions underpinning systematic methods of inquiry. Rather than pretending to offer a factual, indisputable picture of the country's spatial properties, Rich's later maps underline the sheer variety of data they contain (historical events, private memories, myths, cultural practices), and continually remind us that the information they present is subjective and provisional. By the end of her career, maps no longer symbolized an established authority requiring our submission; instead, she viewed them as a tool that could always be reinvented to apprehend the social world responsibly.