2.5–Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

Link to Full Text

https://poets.org/poem/diving-wreck

Poem Overview

Critical Context:

Martin Jay, an influential literary theorist and critic, writes of images and spectatorship in the poem. Primarily contending that Rich’s work is about what he calls “aesthetic spectatorship,” Jay explains makes the overall claim that the piece is about dismantling the supposed safety of distance:

“Diving into the Wreck” has often been understood as a feminist manifesto, the obsolete myths to be discarded being those of patriarchy – books where women’s names are not written – and the wreckage that of traditional gender relations. But Rich’s hunger for more direct experience, her desire to mingle with the victims and lose her privileged identity as a survivor, even to become one with the never animate “half-destroyed instruments” of the ship, can also be understood to express a widely shared impatience with the safety of spectatorial distance. It betrays a yearning to conflate historical returns to previous wrecks with the vertiginous experience of being in an actual one here and now. (99).

Read Jay’s article here: DOI: 10.1163/156851600510444

Soghre Nodeh and Farideh Pourgiv, who write on the intersection of literature and psychology, finds Rich’s poem to be an occasion of the vastly important field of “ecriture feminine” (or women’s writing), which can be loosely defined as a style of writing that aims to express women’s experiences, subjectivities, and identities in ways that challenge traditional, male-dominated literary forms and norms. Below is the claim they make regarding on “the traces of feminine writing”:

From the 1960s onwards, women’s writing starts a dynamic phase which combines the strengths of their previous conservative writings with such themes as the conflicts between women writers‟ love of their craft and its discrepancies with family obligations, the conflict between “self-fulfillment and duty.” Moreover, in this period we confront with such concepts as“anger and sexuality,” as sources of female power (Showalter, 1977, pp. 34-5). Such burst of radical themes, modes  of expression and writing in women‟s writing, as opposed to the dominant male patterns of expression and masculine aesthetics and modes of writing, could be traced in Adrienne Rich‟s writing. In a society where language becomes an instrument in the hands of the males, Rich undergoes a risky project through which she evades the “discourse that regulates the phallocentric system” and uses feminine writing or “ecriture feminine” (Cixous 1975, p. 353).

Read Nodeh’s and Pourgiv’s article here: DOI: 10.9744/kata.18.2.33-41

Major Themes 

Gender and Reclaiming Women’s Experiences:

The poem delves into the struggle for female identity and the reclaiming of women’s history and experiences. One argument about the diver’s journey is that it symbolizes the search for some sort of stability, even a stable and lasting truth, as well as increased self-awareness, all in a world dominated by inherited, patriarchal narratives.  While so many of the poems’ lines/phrases connect with gender (mermaid, merman, for instance, as well as ??), one point undoubtedly worth noting is its conclusion, in which the speaker is carrying “a book of myths in which our names do not appear.” Rich’s words call up one of the most famous articulations of women’s places in literature: Virginia Woolf’s search, in A Room of One’s Own, for the missing books that women never got the chance to write as well as the women’s histories that never were told. “But what I find deplorable,” Woolf writes, “looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night” (Room). There is a massive amount of scholarship on such issues–library searches for women’s history, Woolf, blank spaces, missing histories, etc. will produce several results.

Images, Surface and Depth:

Remember that the speaker is carrying a camera, a point that in itself can open many avenues of interpretation. How connected is the image captured by the camera to what is really there? Can an image get beyond the surface? Does it show (or not) the depths of our lives? How dependent are we on those images, and how can humans maneuver the place of “the surface” in related to our deeper lives? Rich’s reference to “the thing itself” could be useful here. While her next words are about “the story of the thing,” she is still after the real that lurks under the surface. Does the photograph show us that real?  Or a picture of the real??

For more on the study of images. see scholarly works by W.J.T. Mitchell and Roland Barthes, particularly Barthes’ Camera Lucida. One particular point Barthes makes that might prove relevant: every image is a reminder of death. Basically, Barthes argued that a photograph, by capturing a moment in time, is a form of memento mori—essentially, a reminder of death. Each photograph is a document of a past moment, and as such, it signifies both the presence of the subject at a specific time and their inevitable absence as time progresses.

Exploration and Discovery:

The literal dive into the wreck, while continuing to escape certainty in regard to its definitive meaning, has been interpreted in myriad ways. Some contend it represents the speaker’s deeper exploration of the past and related acts of remembering.  Others have connected the journey to “the wreck” with a female subject’s personal and public history (which can include narratives of self, the experience of being embodied, and presentations of gender and sexuality). No matter what symbolism we attach to the wreck, what does appear certain is that the speaker seeks to unearth the realities that lie beneath the surface, particularly in relation to those who lives go unnoticed (under the “surface,” so to speak).

Loss and Recovery:

One reading of the wreck is that it signifies both personal and collective loss. ‘We are the half-destroyed instruments,” Rich writes, as well as “I came to see the damage that was done.” Through such references to destruction and dame, Rich indicates that by examining the remnants of the past, she wonders whether recovery is possible (and in fact even desired) as well as how those who have suffered loss both heal from the loss and, nonetheless, carry it with them into their present and future. Note: looking at collective loss in the poem opens up into several areas; here are two of the most readily apparent:

• • The cultural history of the poem. The piece was published in 1973, and thus is usefully read in connection with the cultural upheavals of the 1960s in America.
  • A return to Woolf’s “black spaces on the shelves” and “the books not written.” Rich wonders about all that has NOT been said regarding women, their lives, their bodies, and their silences (chosen or not).

Bonus content: Lecture on “Diving into the Wreck”

(see 37.09 for discussion of Rich’s poem)