Adrienne Rich
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The essay by Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, makes a great deal of use of the common fund of ideas that make writing possible. However, she uses most of them in order to revise how she believes women writers need to feel and write in order to overcome the silencing of their voices and the domination of their writing by the dominant male culture. According to Rich, women are drench in the tradition of the common fund and their revising of attitudes and voice in their writing is more than just necessary for writing that is distinctly female, it is necessary for survival of their collective identity, “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” (Rich 603).In order to revise her own style and attitudes against this conventional common culture, Rich alludes to classics of literature by women and men. Initially, she uses the play of Ibsen entitled When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen’s allusion is rather apropos because he is one of the few male author’s who writes with empathy toward women. From Hedda Gabler to A Doll’s House,
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art came from men. Any women who contributed to the collective common fund were women whose anger was concealed and whose words were written always with one eye on the fact that the words were to be heard by men. She points to the works of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf in order to demonstrate that women have become more complex and more aware of their cultural oppression at the hands of men since their time of writing. However, in order to revise their type and style of writing, Rich argues that she herself struggled to write something that had the “I” voice, something that was not intimidated to use the “Me” and reveal the “egotism” as exhibited and encompassed by women. As she notes, “There was nothing over in the environment to warn me: these were the fifties, and in reaction to the earlier wave of feminism, middle-class women were making careers of domestic perfection, working to send their husbands through professional schools, then retiring to raise large families”(Rich 609).
In other words, for a woman to define or revise her common fund identity in this era, she had to do so on her own. According to Rich, the common fund of literature only gives women a picture of themselves as they exist as the fantasies of men.
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Approximate Word count = 1309
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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