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.