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, Ibsen’s work is often a critique of how male dominated culture has formed woman, often into a form that greatly undermines their unique contribution and identity. By using a male to illustrate something that goes against the norm of the common culture dominated by males, Rich is already on her way to revising common conceptions regarding women and their voices as writers, “Ibsen shows us that no degradation ever devised or permitted is as disastrous as this degradation, t...