Resurrecting the Female: A Critical Analysis of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems

Abstract

The history of women's struggle for self-determination and an authentic identity has been a persistent one. Their autonomous identity has long been threatened by the control exerted by dominant social ideologies. The desire for a free and empowered self-gathered momentum after the birth of Radical Feminism in the first half of the twentieth century. Under the banner of radical philosophy women writer's adopted searching queries and strategic shifts in confronting masculine myths and stereotypes regarding their gender. Poetry became a suitable genre to question the imposed identities. As a result, a reactionary " identity poetics" came into being across Europe. Poets like Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich undertook a poetics that largely dealt with rediscovering female identity. However, Rich, while moving through different theoretical perspectives, established lesbian identity as the only possible political identity that could release a woman from all patriarchal clutches. Therefore, the paper attempts to analyse Rich's poetic quest and culmination of her search for a radical lesbian identity. The paper foregrounds it's theoretical background in feminist criticism. Besides, Rich, being herself a theorist, provides a foundational basis for her own critical concepts.