Confronting The Male History

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) is one of the most famous poetess, critic and essayist in America. Both her productive works and the appraises from literature field have proved that she is not only an outstanding poet in America but also a "strong poetess" according to the term proposed by Harold Bloom. To be one of those strong poets, she has displayed both her artistic craft and poetic thoughts which is different from her precursors. But the question is:in what way has Rich achieved such poetic authority both psychologically and aesthetically?This thesis, taking her poetry collection A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 (simplified as A Wild Patience and abbreviated as WP here after) as a case study, in light of Bloom’s misprision theory, mainly focuses on this problem and explores the way Rich becomes a prestigious strong poetess and gains her authority by "defeating" her powerful rival represented by the male history. The first and foremost step to evolve from an ephebe to a strong poet is to define one’s precursors, which is the standard and touchstone in one’s poetic career. If to wrestle with and defeat one’s precursors is the only way to develop one’s authority in the poetic field, to find his or her forefather is prior to anything else at the moment. As suggested in The Madwoman in the Attic:The Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, in Rich’s case, what confronts her is not only the strong male precursors before her age in the history, but also the ubiquitous patriarchal system constructed on the rich soil of male-dominated culture. Therefore, the author of this thesis first gives a detailed analysis on Rich’s anxiety of belatedness (Bloom,1997:xxv) and then discusses Rich’s competition against the male history in A Wild Patience. The author points out that Rich’s misprision of male history mainly involves three aspects:the isolation from the male language, the surpassing of the traditional female images and the counter sublime of the mainstream culture with Bloom’s revisionary ratios of Kenosis, Tessera and Daemonization respectively. Finally, the thesis ends up with the conclusion that by the adoption of the above-mentioned strategies as the defense mechanism to deal with her anxiety, Rich gains the authorship as a female poet and marches towards the road of a strong poetess.