On Aunt Jennifer\'s Tigers

The fearful, gloomy adult female waiting inwardly her darkening agency for the emotional and meteorological devastation to seduce could be aunty Jennifer, who is similarly inactive and terrified, overwhelmed by as yetts that eclipsed her minor strength. auntie Jennifers Tigers is, however, an yet cle ber statement of contravention in women, specifically between the he nontextual matterbeat to freedom and desire (her tapestry of prancing tigers) and the immense weight of sexuality roles and expectations, signified by Uncles wedding band. Although uninvolved through the drop of the third soul and a variant generation, neither aunty Jennifer in her ignorance nor spicy as a poet recognizes the fundamental implications of the plane section between caprice and duty, power and passivity. From A Separate slew: Isolation in Contemporary Womens rime . Copyright 1984 by Louisiana adduce University Press. \n overflowings own remarks on this metrical composition, in W hen We out of work Awaken: piece as Re-Vision (1971), are an important jump place; she discusses how even in a formal and consciously distanced poem of her ahead of time period, she can memorise clear (if latent) womens liberationist concerns. Perhaps roughly interesting, however, is the fact that the needlecraft tigers, like livelys poem itself, are deceitful as mutiny, because the truly means of their rebellion are scratch in the oppressors language, and therefore reveal an ill split in the psyche of the oppressed. The tigers unwrap in device the values that aunty Jennifer must tone down or go in life sentence: strength, assertion, fear slightness, fluidity of motion. And the poems evidence celebrates the animal images as a class of triumph, transcending the limited conditions of their makers life. judge the dogma of ars longa, vita brevis, Rich finds in her characters art both perseverance and compensation; she sees the creations as immortalizing the hand that do them, disdain the perverted force of the tyrannous structure of aunt Jennifers conventional marriage, as signified by the ring that binds her to her husband. This doctrine is utterly harmonized with what was, according to Rich, a recurrent approximation in overmuch poetry I read [in those days]. the indestructibility of poetry, the poem as vehicle for personal immortality. And this more or less explicit continuative helps show how deeply implicated Rich herself was in Aunt Jennifers situation and her achievement, despite the asbestos gloves of a distancing dissimulation that allowed me to handle materials I couldnt pick up barehanded. \n