Academy and the Female Legacy: A Critical Study of Adrienne Rich’s Selected Prose

Abstract

Through varied significant and strategic ways male, the patriarch has been able to keep captive not only the physical but also intellectual and psychological potential of a female being.And this hegemonic ideology got strengthened and promoted via social structures. As a consequence, significant ways and means of discrimination and disempowerment of the female race got embedded in the very foundations of these socio-political institutions. In this connection, the Academy embodies a symbolic significance along socio-historical lines. As an important cultural institute, the academy has been pivotal in shaping, generating and disseminating knowledge and other cultural artefacts. Throughout the ages, under the colossal impact of androcentrism, it has been the bastion of masculine power and privilege. Female writers and theoreticians across cultures have attempted a critique of the academy for its biased role in gatekeeping female agency. Adrienne Rich, an acclaimed theoretician, has attempted an exhaustive analysis of this cultural institution in promoting gender discrimination and entrapment of the female gender. Therefore, the present paper is an attempt to critically analyse Rich's radical critique of androcentric knowledge -its structural and operational components. This paper analyses the strategies Rich recommends for a feminist re-evaluation of the academy. Besides feminist theorising, the paper makes judicious use of Rich's own theoretical pronouncements as articulated in her seminal books, “Blood, Bread and Poetry” and “On Lies, Secrets and Silences”