Rediscovering Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck”: Unveiling an Androgynous Poetic Voice

I had read “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich before, but I believe I really heard it and felt it for the first time in American Lit. class the other day. After reading Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in my Women’s lit class a few years ago, I have become interested in women’s struggle to find a unique voice and language within the historically male dominated canon. How do women write differently from men? How are certain forms of writing and even certain words themselves oppressive or unsuitable for women? How far have women come in the history of writing and language? How much of history can be revised to include women? How much of woman’s voice can be recovered? Having pondered these questions since my first reading of “Diving into the Wreck,” I came to the poem with a new perspective.

I see Rich’s dive to explore the wreck as a metaphorical dive into the past in order to understand the present and the future—to understand her present as woman and her future as just human. When she begins the poem with “First having read the book of myths” and ends the poem with “a book of myths/ in which/ our names do not appear,” I hear “first having read a biased history written by men…a history in which women’s names do not appear.” This book of myths is only one of three items she takes with her on the dive. The other two items include a camera and a knife. The camera I interpret as her poetic perspective ready to capture her visions and discoveries for future use. The knife for me is less clear, but possibly her words as weapon to cut away the myths or just the representation of the fact that this dive won’t be easy and possibly dangerous. She also wears a “grave and awkward mask”—the mask being her poetic persona and the adjectives grave and awkward representing her sense of the seriousness of her topic but also her humility in her attempt to explore this huge “wreck” of history.

Also interesting is the fact that she says she has to “learn alone.” This exploration is “not like Cousteau with his assiduous team.” She does not describe a team of women diving into the wreck together, but just herself with her book of myths, her camera, and her knife. To me this indicates that she feels the need to understand herself first before she can begin to place herself in the context of this historical wreck. By the end of the poem she has evolved from just a single woman to a universal human: “I am she: I am he”; “We are, I am, you are.” As Alice McDermott says in After This, “we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat” (62)—this same sunken wreck of a boat. Rich discovers that there is a need not only to recover and document her personal connection to the past as a woman, but also to recover the all inclusive, true history, which has been buried in myth, for the benefit of both men and women.

Towards the end of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf comes to the conclusion that the “great mind is androgynous” (98), a “man-womanly mind” (99) that incorporates both the male and female. This is the ultimate type of writing and language that Rich realizes she is seeking in the past. Strangely reminiscent of Whitman in her line “I am she: I am he,” she seems to embrace the idea of the poet, the writer, the artist as ultimately the speaker and demystifier for men and women alike. Also, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf says that when women “face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women” (114), only then will women’s discourse finally be fulfilled. I believe this point is also the essence of Rich’s point in “Diving into the Wreck.” She dives alone to uncover the reality of history with women, but also history without the divide between men and women—“to discover the wreck and not the story of the wreck/ the thing itself and not the myth.”

Lust, Caution and the Empty Promise

Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee as an adaptation of a short story by popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang, begins in Japanese-occupied Shangai in 1942 with a scene of women playing a game of mahjong with their hostess, Yee Tai-tai. Most of the women are the wives of collaborationist Wang government officials, but one, Mak Tai-tai (Tang Wei), is supposedly the newcomer and wife of a successful Hong Kong businessman. These rich women gossip and complain about the war, the lack of good food and cigarettes and diamonds while outside their luxurious apartment in Shanghai people are starving and dying in the streets—in one scene the dead are thrown in carts like the carcasses of dead animals to be disposed of. These Chinese women with their curled hair, fedora hats, knee length trench coats, cigarettes, and painted nails seem to have come right out of Casablanca. Lee makes sure to capture this rubbing together of East and West not just in this scene with the women who don Chinese style dresses with Westernized hair playing this Chinese game while smoking cigarettes, but out on the streets as well with Western cars driving past man-pulled taxis.

This East meets West scenery and tension is apparent to all especially in scenes like the one where a screening of Penny Serenade is interrupted by a Japanese propaganda film. Under the surface, however, the tension is even greater. Ms. Mak is actually Wong Chia-chi, a Cantonese country girl who joined a group of Chinese resistance fighters. Four years before the scene with the women in Shanghai, Chia-chi, who is a student at Hong Kong University, is recruited for a part in a patriotic play by the handsome Kuang Yu Min (Wang Lee-hom), who is the director of a student theatre company. Moved by the reaction of the audience to their play, the troupe, persuaded by Kuang, decides to form their own resistance movement with the aim of assassinating a Chinese traitor, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-wai).

The plan consists of Chia-chi impersonating the wife of a well-to-do Chinese importer-exporter who seduces Mr. Yee and lures him out into the open where they can assassinate him. Chia-chi almost succeeds in luring Mr. Yee into the house, but he is too cautious to go in. The next thing they know, he and his wife are moving to Shanghai, and the operation has to be temporarily aborted. Three years later, Kuang who has joined a larger resistance group in Shanghai finds Chia-chi and convinces her to do it again. Mr. Yee has also moved up and is working for the Wang government’s secret service, torturing and murdering resistance fighters. The stakes on both sides are higher. Chia-chi agrees to do it, knowing that some how her body is the only way to this man, and so she transforms herself once again into the glamorous Mak Tai-tai and the world of chatty rich women and parlor games hoping to get closer to Mr. Yee.

It is ironic that the newcomer, the inexperienced actress, the innocent country girl who has to be taught by one of her fellow resistance fighters how to have sex in case she needs the knowledge with Mr. Yee, is the one chosen to play the role of the glamorous seductress, Mrs. Mak. She is the virginal sacrifice of the movement sacrificing her body and soul for its cause. However, her motivation for making such a sacrifice is ambiguous. There seems to be no deeply felt anger for those who betrayed China. If anything, she is driven by an unspoken love and admiration for Kuang, who is passionately wrapped up in his pride for his country and his anger for the loss of his brother to the war. He seems to care for Chia-chi at the beginning, but not more than the resistance itself. As the leader of the small resistance group, he probably chose Chia-chi for what he saw as the honorary lead role in this real-life play. In his mind, giving her this important role in a cause so dear to him was a way of showing his love. However, the consequences of this decision and his love reach far beyond what he could ever imagine.

Mr. Yee has lost little of the lust he had begun to develop for Mrs. Wak in Hong Kong, and when they meet again in Shanghai, he soon arranges for them to be alone together. Yee’s driver drops “Mrs. Mak” off at an old hotel and hands her the key to the room where Mr. Yee is waiting for her. He soon dispels the notion that he sees Chia-chi with any emotion other than lust. He begins their sexual relationship by ripping away her dignity. He tears off her clothes, pushes her, beats her, and makes the sex as painful and cold as possible on the dusty bed of the hotel room. She is shocked and instantly hardened like a soldier going through boot camp. However, also like a soldier, in her pain she forms an emotional connection to the inflictor.

As the movie progresses, Mr. Yee softens and the sex becomes less lust-making and more love-making. Although she never asks about his work, he begins to trust Chia-chi more and shares information about his job—tying her irreconcilably to him but also giving her more power. Meanwhile, Chia-chi is in turmoil because she realizes she is beginning to have feelings for the man whom she is helping to assassinate. At a meeting with one of the resistance leaders, she relates the pain and sexual humiliation Mr. Yee has caused her, but she also warns that he is worming his way into her heart—suggesting that soon she will not be able to betray him. The resistance leader doesn’t want to hear about her heart or her pain. While Kuang sympathizes with her and kisses her in an attempt to show how much he cares for her, it is too late. Chia-chi can no longer separate acting from real life. While in her mind she is still Chia-chi, resistance fighter, in her heart she is becoming Mrs. Mak, Mr. Yee’s lover.

The resistance soon pays the price for caring so little for Chia-chi’s heart. While the resistance was ignoring her heart, Mr. Yee was nurturing it. He buys her a ring—a seeming symbol of his possession of her, but he lets her pick out the stone and setting. Still with the resistance fighters in her mind, she arranges for them to be at the jewelers when she takes Mr. Yee with her to pick up the finished ring. As they look at the ring on her finger, Chia-chi sees the happiness and love, if this man is capable of that, on his face and she cannot go through with it. With tears in her eyes, knowing it means her own death and probably that of her resistance friends, she whispers “go now” in order to prevent his assassination. He flees from the store before the assassins get there.

In the next few scenes of the film, we learn that the Chia-chi’s friends never showed up to assassinate him because they were caught first. They were tortured into revealing all of the names of those involved with them including Chia-chi and her cover as Mrs. Mak. All of this is related to Mr. Yee after the incident at the jewelers. As usual protocol, they are to be shot. Mr. Yee orders the execution, not with malice as would have been expected of him earlier, but with a reluctant sense of inevitability that he cannot escape who he is even if he has learned what it is to love. As his head security officer leaves the house with the orders to execute them all, Mr. Yee goes and sits on the bed where Chia-chi had slept during her stay with him. All of her stuff has been removed so that the stark white bed looks emptier than ever. Mr. Yee sits on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, tears forming in his eyes. When he gets up and leaves, the camera lingers on the empty, white bed—the film’s parting shot symbolizing Chia-chi’s death but also the void left behind in Mr. Yee’s heart and the empty promise of the resistance.

Inspired

I’ll admit that I haven’t written blogs over the past few weeks because I’ve felt, for lack of a better word, uninspired. It’s not that the authors I was reading from T.S. Eliot to Faulkner to Plath were uninteresting; I just felt no need to add words to a page saying what everyone else had already said about them. The nagging question of “what makes them uniquely American” and the need to relate them to one another and the American experience has been driving me crazy over the past month as we’ve gone through what seems like a laundry list of 20th century writers (39 in fact). I feel overwhelmed when I sit down in front of the computer, stare at the blank page, and try to decide who and what and how any and all of these writers are important to American literature, to the American mind, to me as an American.

I guess I’ve waited until my senior year to take my big survey courses because I hate the speed. I simply read to finish—hence the lack of inspiration. What can you do? It has to be done. There isn’t time in this world, much less a three hour once a week English class, to spend a week just on Sylvia Plath. I want to savor the words, but I have to swallow them in one bite instead.
All of this is to say, that today, finally, I feel like writing. This I owe entirely to Alice McDermott. I went to a “chat” she held on campus. My incentive, besides the fact that I admire her use of language and description in the two pieces of hers that I have read, Child of My Heart and After This, was to learn how she begins to write fiction. I often freeze before beginning to write, as mentioned above, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of ideas scrambling and colliding in my head. How to choose from the chaos?

McDermott didn’t exactly address that question, but what she did say gave me hope. She demystified writer’s block as a romantic idea and instead replaced it with a realistic trudge through language. Words have to be written, thrown away, and rewritten. They are sometimes bad, sometimes pointless, but eventually right. Writing takes practice—something I’ve always been told but finally understand (especially in the context of fiction). I’m often afraid of imperfection in my nonfiction and literary analysis papers, but I am even more afraid of failing at an attempt to write fiction. I’ve been duped by the romantic ideal of sudden inspiration. I keep waiting for the day when I hear a story, see a person, visit a place, etc. and get that sudden burst of inspiration that will guide my whole story.

McDermott also surprised me by saying that her characters are not taken from any specific reality; they are only real in the context of the novel. Of course the characters are combinations of anyone and everyone she has encountered in her life and the setting is built around her own experience as a Long Island resident and an Irish Catholic. In that way she says it is autobiographical. All writing is autobiographical—a notion I have always believed and was extremely excited to hear her confirm.

To me autobiography is power. No one knows your life and experiences like you—you are the expert in this area at least. Autobiography means the chance to express the world through your own eyes—a world which is uniquely yours yet at the same time humanity’s common property. All literature seems to struggle with this: Are we individuals or are we the same? Do we have a duty only to ourselves or do we have a duty to humanity? Do we move forward linearly and form our own unique historical place, or are we just a part of a cycle repeating the same themes and questions of the past?

After This answers these questions in its own way. It is all about relationships, but it also has personal revelations. It is about a community facing the Vietnam War with a “we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat” (McDermott 62) mentality, but it is also about how the war affects each individual differently. In the chat, McDermott said that she wanted to show the rhythm of war inside and outside the circle of this family, the Keanes. Rhythm is a very appropriate word. The Keane’s story begins with the sound of the long-eye-lashed “piano player upstairs” (24) in the background as Mary and John conceive their first child, Jacob—their “baby grand” (27). The novel also ends with a long-eye-lashed boy playing the piano at the wedding of their youngest child, Clare.

In this rhythm, McDermott suggests that there is something cyclical about life, yet she also repeats over and over again the fact that “time was marching on,” (56) indicating that each moment, like the scene in the car at the beach or the scene in the basement during the storm, needs to be savored because it will soon disappear into the past; life will move on; the family will change as everyone grows older, and that moment can never be returned to again. There is a sense throughout the novel of moving ahead full speed to the future, leaving behind remnants of the past—the old church, the courteous gentlemen and helpful department store attendants (according to Pauline), World War II veterans (to be replaced by Vietnam veterans).

Ultimately, however, McDermott ends with the idea of life as cyclical—the idea that “you could not have one [the future] without the other [the past]” (277). Earlier in the novel John realizes, when contemplating the links between his son Jacob and the boy he met in World War II, that “there was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves, some pattern across the years that would convey assurance” (129). Assurance of what, I wonder? Assurance that lives do not end with death—that we live on somehow in others? I find myself asking this same question, and like John, I find every connection between different pieces of literature, different classes I take, different people I meet both thrilling and comforting because it suggests that we (humanity past, present, and future) are all in this together; we are not alone after all. This theme has occurred countless times in the literature I read, and this striving for connection is the reason I am an English major.
At the end of the novel, McDermott, in describing the boy playing the piano, writes:

“Then there was a kid like this, who played in a trance, eyes closed, transformed, transported, inspired (that was the word)—not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that was already there, that had always been there, in the air, some music, some pattern, sacred, profound, barely apprehensible, inscrutable, really, something just beyond the shell of earth and sky that had always been there and that needed only this boy, a boy like this, to bring it, briefly, briefly, to [the priest or listener’s] untrained ear.” (278)

There is little to say after a paragraph like that. It describes perfectly the essence of art and its importance to humanity—the essential link between us all. Inspiration—that is the word.

Fullfilling the Promise: Race and Gender in Ante-Bellum America

It has always seemed strange to me how easily Americans compartmentalize their “morals” and “values” into paradoxical categories. On the one hand, Americans boast of a nation built on the idea that “all men are created equal” as written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, many Americans supported slavery and saw blacks as inferior including Thomas Jefferson who in Notes on the State of Virginia declared “I advance it…that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” So the “men” in the Declaration apparently meant “white” men only. Of course the word “men” also does not include women who suffered a more subtle inequality than blacks, but one that was just as unfair.
After reading works like “David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles,” Margaret Fuller’s The Great Lawsuit, Frederick Douglas’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, or Elizabeth Drew Stoddards “Lemorre v. Huell,” it seems hard to argue that these African American and women writers are inferior to white men. So where does this blindness to the apparent talents and abilities of both African Americans and women come from? I guess it was easy for white men, who held all governmental offices, ran the countries corporations, and sat on the boards of most universities to assume this status quo existed because they were in some way superior to women and African Americans or in a Social Darwinian sense—the fittest. That argument may seem logical until you think about the fact that they have slaves and they have wives because they cannot seem to figure out how to survive without them. Take away the oppression of African Americans and women; erase history and put them all on a level playing field, and then see how the status quo looks.
Erasing history may be impossible, but there have been steps taken to change the future status quo. The Civil War, the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments, the Civil Rights Act, and various other governmental acts have been the most obvious legal steps to equality. The legal reality, however, is still ahead of the cultural reality. American culture has improved dramatically from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglas, Margaret Fuller, and even Martin Luther King Jr., but it is not there yet. These great figures just mentioned would be astounded to know that we now will have for the first time either a woman, Hillary Clinton, or an African American man, Barak Obama, as the democratic presidential nominee. However, the sad fact is that these candidates are so unique for their identities as either female or black. If all were equal, it wouldn’t be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton is a woman, and Barack Obama is a black man. When we get to the day when a woman is just a candidate and a black man is just her opponent, or when a voter doesn’t have to check whether she is female or male or whether she is white or black, then maybe we will truly understand what equality means.

The (Over) Confidence Man

I find myself anything but confident after reading this book, which may have been Melville's goal. I could hardly tell which character was which as the confidence man constantly changed disguises and talked to the other characters, who, for the most part, lacked names. I was overloaded with allusions--classical, biblical, periodical, etc., which thankfully were explained by the Norton critical edition of the text I was reading, but unfortunately so dense themselves that they only confused me more. By repetition, however, I did understand that Melville was toying with American confidence and optimism. As the Norton text suggests, I also could see the confidence man as a devil figure or an Emersonian figure--not to suggest that Emerson is the devil, but merely that both figures use confidence to their advantage. The biblical devil can take on many disguises, quote scripture to his advantage (twist truth), and play to human weakness. In this book, the confidence man uses his understanding of human character to play to the vulnerable spots of his victims, whether it be their gullibility, hubris, optimism, sense of duty, or greed, and trick them into putting confidence in him. Emerson, like the confidence man, is an agent of this false confidence that Melville is condemning. Melville seems to be going back to the Puritans, to the day of the original sin and fallible man, warning America about excessive optimism and confidence similar to Hawthorne's warning about human confidence in stories like "The Birthmark." One of the most striking passages/images in the book (I can't quite bring myself to call it a novel) is when the confidence man is describing his thoughts upon his supposed visit to the world's fair hosted in the Crystal Palace: "As I dwelt upon that shining pageant of arts, and moving concourse of nations, and reflected that here was the pride of the world glorying in a glass house, a sense of the fragility of worldly grandeur profoundly impressed me"(47). In this passage he wonders at the confidence that humanity can have in such a fragile world. In a similar way, Melville wonders at the extreme confidence exuding from the thoughts of the Transcendentalists especially in America—a country so young that it has hardly had time to prove itself. I don’t think that Melville means to imply that confidence in all forms is bad, just over-confidence or blind optimism—everything in moderation, as the saying goes, is not bad advice.

Emergence of an American Literature

In 1820 in the Edinburgh Review, English critic Sidney Smith poked fun at every American's national pride (or at least every American concerned with the intellectual reputation of his or her country) when he said: "In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?" As a modern American, I can brush this statement off easily because I know that the four corners of the globe do in fact read American books, but in 1820's, when this statement was made, it probably had a greater impact on the intellectuals of the day. That statement, and others like it, were only fuel for the fire, however, because many of the canonical writers in American literature came from this period between the 1820's and 1860s--writers like Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, and Dickinson.
F.O. Mathiessen called this period the "American Renaissance." Whether it was a "Renaissance" in the true meaning of the term, is up for debate, but what is certain is that this was a time when American writers thought seriously about what it meant to be American, the American character, America's past, and America's future. Writers like Irving and Cooper set the stage for the American scene with uniquely American backdrops and characters.
If Irving and Cooper laid the foundation for the American common man, Emerson laid the foundation for the American intellectual. In "The American Scholar," Emerson emphasizes the need for what he calls "Man Thinking." This type of scholar is self-reliant. He or she uses the past only to support the creation of a new future. Thoreau takes self-reliance a step further in “Walden.” He sees Americans as already giving in to social pressure and the materialism that goes along with it. His suggestion to finding truth and happiness is to go back to the basics of life, to live simply off the land. Both of these authors fall into the Transcendental tradition that focuses on going beyond the material world, but at the same time respecting nature as the reflection of that “beyond.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum during this time was the Gothic tradition, which focused on internal truth rather than outward truth, and the supernatural rather than the natural. Writers like Hawthorne and Poe explored the American Psyche. In stories like “The Birthmark,” Hawthorne warns against the tragic flaw of combining the Puritan inherited desire to seek perfection with an excessive faith in reason. He also warns of excessive self-confidence and individualism that seems to have become inherent in Americans since the Revolution. In these moral tales, Hawthorne reminds Americans that even though the Puritans sought perfection, they understood that humans are innately sinful and imperfect. Poe, on the other hand, may not have sought to teach Americans a moral lesson, he also explored the psyche’s extremes, suggesting the fragility of the human mind to worldly pressures.
Emerson and Thoreau explored how to have a healthy mind, Hawthorne and Poe explored the development of unhealthy minds, and Whitman embodied the healthy American mind that fulfilled Emerson’s optimism and defied Hawthorne’s pessimism. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman embraces notions of self-reliance and self-acceptance. His idea of self-reliance is seen in his confidence to create his own style of poetry, which follows Emerson’s warning to create rather than imitate. He also embraces self-acceptance, rather than attempting to achieve perfection, as Hawthorne warns against.
These writers take major steps in defining the American and establishing distinctly American literature. The definition of an American, according to these writers, is a combination of what an American should be and what an American shouldn’t be. An American should be self-reliant, confident, independent, in touch with nature, and intellectually independent. An American shouldn’t be materialistic, arrogant, or obsessed with perfection. The problem with these two sides of the definition is that there is a fine line that separates them and sometimes they overlap. For example, an American shouldn’t be arrogant, but should be confident and independent. Although arrogant is not the same as confident, many see Whitman, for example as arrogant, while others see him as just confident. The American definition is therefore somewhat fragile and contradictory meaning that many more authors will have to tackle this evasive idea.

Puritans to Revolutionaries: A Note on Anne Bradstreet

Lots and lots of religion.
Of course, what else can you expect from the Puritans who came to America to escape religious persecution? Ideas of total depravity, God's grace, Providence, and the elect are prevalent throughout works by Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards. Among all the talk of God's glory and grace, there are a few suprising elements. My favorite of the Puritans is Anne Bradstreet who, unlike Mary Rowlandson, blends her love for God and role as a believer with insights about her role as a woman in this time period. In the prologue she defends, although humbly, her skill as a poet and right to step out of the domestic mold and define herself as an artist. I found one line particularly interesting: "Men can do best, and women know it well." I like to think that this line is somewhat akin to the reverse of modern day men telling their wives, "No, that doesn't make you look fat." Like smart boyfriends and husbands, Bradstreet is telling men what they want to hear. Given the time, however, she may be saying this in complete seriousness, and only asking that women be given at least some credit for their artistic talents. I also particularly like Bradstreet's poem to Queen Elizabeth where she acknowledges that women have the ability to become as successful leaders as men: "Millions will testify that this is true. She hath wip'd off th' aspersion of her Sex, That women wisdom lack to play the Rex." Even in "The Author to her Book," which seems typically female because of its reference to her poetry as her "offspring," it is distinct because she points out that her work/offspring has no "Father." Her work may be flawed, as she humbly admits, but by pointing out he lack of the father figure, she claims her work as hers alone without the influence of men.
Bradstreet is undoubtedly Puritan in all of her works. “The Author to her Book” shows the Puritan idea of natural depravity and human fallibility as she admits her work’s flaws. In “Upon the Burning of Our House,” she sees the burning house as Providence and praises God for his sense of justice and his power to both give and take away. Overall I was definitely taken in by the seemless combination of Bradstreet's Puritan ideals and her feminist ideals.