Both Adrienne Rich in her essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" and Richard Rodriguez in his essay "The Achievement of Desire" address ways in which the majority society shapes the way members of some minority express themselves. Rich talks about the way women's self-expression is controlled by a male, patriarchal social vision, and though women may be a majority in numbers, they are a minority in terms of those who seek to express themselves in poetry or other writing. More than this, of course, they are treated as an oppressed minority even if their numbers make them a majority. Rodriguez writes about his own experiences in school as the son of Mexican immigrants. Just as women are taught their place in a patriarchal school system and society, so are Mexican children taught that they are different from the majority society. Both women and Mexican immigrants also experience a certain disconnect between public and private careers--the woman has to be one person at home and another if she is to succeed as a writer, just as Rodriguez had to share one set of interests at school and another at home, trying to keep the two separate. Both writers analyze issues of separateness. The essay by Rodriguez is more cogently written and more expressive in its use of language, and while Rich's essay conveys much about the problems she sees in society, it is less clearly shaped as an essay.
Adrienne Rich discusses what she calls "re-vision," which does not mean rewriting but rather a look back at earlier writing and expression by and about women in the changed spirit of the age, an age which now recognizes the value of women as earlier ages did not. She finds evidence of the exploitation of women in such a re-vision, and she finds that this idea has been expressed by others, notably Henrik Ibsen in his play When We Dead Awaken, specifically concerning the use that the male artist and thinker makes of the woman. She discusses ...