Adrienne Rich and Richard Rodriquez
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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 rewritin
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at fact because they can be "thwarted and silenced" (Rich 607). In seeking the means for her own expression, she read the older women poets and noted "their particular keenness and ambivalence" (Rich 607). She says her own style was formed first by the male poets she was reading in college, and form them she learned craft. At the time, she rode a wave of feminism to try to "have it all," meaning a home and family and a career, yet she finds that the mixture cannot be maintained as she had hoped--as women often hope, because they have been trained to think this is possible.
One thing that Rich discovered was that she had not been writing about experiencing herself as a woman, a subject she either could not write about or had been avoiding. One of the reasons why she avoided the topic was because she had been taught to view poetry as something "universal," which also meant nonfemale. To be female was to be specific, and to be universal was to appeal to and address both males and females, both male and female experience. To address only female experience, it was thought, was to limit expression and communication to part of the population rather than to all of it. This applied to Virginia Woolf as well, for though she might a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Richard Rodriguez, Woolf Rich, Achievement Desire, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Dead Awaken, Anthony Petrosky, Olympian Shakespeare, Bedford/St Martin's, majority society, society women, dead awaken, virginia woolf, Henrik Ibsen, rich essay, david bartholomae anthony, mexican immigrants, express themselves, york bedford/st, petrosky eds, bedford/st martin's, reading david bartholomae, anthony petrosky eds, york bedford/st martin's, bedford/st martin's 1999,
Approximate Word count = 1415
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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