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.”