Deconstructing Phallogocentrism in Rich’s Poems

As a continuum that approaches the limit where we can hear Her voice independent of male discourse, A Wild Patience celebrates a new consciousness as Rich attempts to build an Amazon Utopia, a no-man’s land free from a phallocentric language structure, a female utopia fantasy – Her playground.

Rich’s poems in A Wild Patience (1981) is a call to action for women’s self-representation and self-creation; we must rewrite what has been lost in our history; “the book of myths/in which our names do not appear”. In departing from her past adherence to a male-orientated poetic process, A Wild Patience is the product of a turn to genuinely female aesthetics, calling for a purely women-centered vision and an authentic female art form in her poetry. This collection deals so intimately with the language of language, and Rich conveys an acute awareness of the way in which grammar and punctuation, the rules that govern our use of language, are also patriarchal tools. From Rich’s conservative voice in A Change of World to her radical revolutionary voice in Diving into the Wreck and finally, to the development of a playground of L’ecriture Feminine in A Wild Patience, we can see Rich’s individual continuum; it is a journey, a process, an evolution, that seeks to approach the limit where we can hear Her voice, independent of male discourse.

First and foremost, Rich elevates poetry out of all the literary genres as the best space for Her collective resistance against exclusionary language binaries. This notion is immensely valuable as it underpins the way in which she chooses to manipulate form; she often writes with an absence of grammar and punctuation. Feminist poets argue that poetry’s tradition of concentrated insights and brevity of form makes the most appropriate and malleable medium for women to challenge a language that has always locked them out; “they shut me up in prose”. Consequently, Her expansions of form are an outright act of resistance against oppressive binary language; it is when she stretches his language thin, that she can be heard. Each active decision to betray the logics of language is another hole dug in this process of excavation. Whether it be the absence full stops in ‘Coast to Coast’, or the large gaps – the “shattered language” – in ‘Heroines’, each action carves out more space for Her monkey bars, Her seesaw, Her slippery dip – Her playground. Let us be patient for this construction site to flourish; for in this quarry, Rich plants her landscape.

When we examine Rich’s early writing in A Change of World, we can detect a conservative voice that conforms to the scientific language of logic and formalism. Thus, it is evident that the male literary canon has in fact shaped the origins of her work; she is both the daughter of the male tradition, of her teachers, of her professors, and her publishers – a tradition that asks us all to be rational, marginal and grateful. Rich, among many others, had no alternative but to be an obedient daughter to her male masters in order to gain the approval of male judges who held the power to publish and accredit her work. As a result, women writers are forced to internalize the standards of the masculine culture and imitate established modes of construction/ With all this in mind, when we look to Rich’s female voice in A Wild Patience we can truly admire her development and departure from her previous linguistic passivity. Her journey typifies that we cannot go “forever in men’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs”; we cannot remain unaware captives of a male-centered discourse.

In moving towards a utopian state of the female voice, Rich attempts to authentically present female reality as it is, not as it has been represented by male literary writers and critics. In ‘The Spirit of Place’, Rich represents Dickinson with her own words as a female writer rather than how she is defined and interpreted by the male critics. Rich addresses Dickinson to rescue her from all intrusions and the oversimplified, trivialized picture that male experts have created; “I would cover you/from all intrusion…close the door/on the rooms you’ve left behind”. This tribute that Rich pays to Dickinson is a testament to the ongoing feminist continuum; the imagery of “rooms” left behind is symbolic of Dickinson’s contribution to not only the continuum, but also the progressive excavation of patriarchal literary traditions. Rich also pays homage to her ‘mother-in-law’ and ‘grandmothers’ which is further indicative of her deeply held belief in the necessity for bonding and community among women; this is the very foundation of Her playground. Through uplifting female solidarity, Rich reminds us that in our plight to cultivate Her voice we must always be “hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other”.

A Wild Patience heralds a rejection of institutionalized forms of representations which certify corresponding institutions of power. The expansion of Rich’s poetic voice to include feminist issues and women’s experiences ultimately take shape in her unconventional use of form, thus exposing the fallacy of masculine formalism. Rich depicts this in her fragmented form of ‘Heroines’, illustrating how we can unify the fragments of the female experience through an artistic vision;

“yet still you speak in the shattered language of a partial vision”.

The construction of gaps in the place of punctuation in both ‘Heroines’ and ‘Images’ establishes Rich’s attempt to take back language – words, sounds, rhythm, and grammar. In doing so, Rich challenges grammatical conventions and therefore strips down part of what governs our binary language. This is powerful subversive act as it acknowledges that if language is inherently phallocentric, then so must its elements; grammar and punctuation are masculine in nature as they dictate how we construct meaning. Rich exemplifies these ideas in her recurring “grammar” motif that we see in ‘For Julia in Nebraska’; “rendering grammar by the heat/of your womanly wrath”, and in ‘Images’; “I was mute/innocent of grammar”. Subsequently, Rich expresses that the first step to construct Her voice within an exclusionary language system is to deconstruct and subvert the very elements that govern its operation – grammar and punctuation.

The inextricable link between language and imagery is a fundamental reason why a phallocentric language will always misrepresent Her and Her reality. Rich’s ‘A Vision’ captures this relationship between language and the constructed image; “the words created themselves’. Hence, in ‘Turning the Wheel’ Rich conveys that the images of women delivered through history by medium of “textbooks, museum labels and cultural myths” are false images propagated by male agents. Consequently, A Wild Patience calls us women to be the interpreters, participants and practitioners of our history; we must not stand by idly as detached observers, but instead, we must strip bare the binary language system to empower our voice, and of course, our playground.