Mihaela Mudure

 

 

Adrienne Rich or the Ambiguity of Desire

 

 

This article is a close reading exercise on one of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems. My exercise focuses on a love poem without title “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)” which expresses, a woman’s love for another woman.

Adrienne Rich, is the well-known author of Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, a … seminal[1] essay which claims that homophobia is deeply inscribed in our cultural patterns. From this perspective, the lesbian woman does not exist in the social/ cultural texture of society. The lesbian is the woman who can live without a man, or according to the “compulsory heterosexual patterns” woman is defined, precisely, by her relation to man. While submitting women to this categorization according to a dominant sexual orientation, patriarchy has also tried, for centuries, to fragment female bonding because one important source of female power has always been female solidarity. Or this solidarity, called by Adrienne Rich the “lesbian continuum,” may have physical connotations at one extreme of the “continuum”, therefore, it may also mean lesbianism, whereas at the other end of the continuum it may be purely sentimental and communal.

Adrienne Rich, the theorist and the militant, is also a very renowned poet of feminine beauty. What distinguishes her as a poet of the female body is her perspective, her vantage point. Female beauty is seen, from the point of view of a female lover, joyous and glorious in its entirety. The traditional dissection of the female body by male gaze is replaced by a tactile enjoyment of the depths, of the contours, and of the surfaces of the body of the beloved. Our close reading of the poem has led us to the claim that there is a discrepancy between the surface structure of the poem (a same-sex love confession) and the deep structure of the poem dominated by the male symbol of the sun. In spite of the author’s intention, we claim that the text reveals the ambiguity of a desire-type, the unexpected ambiguity of a personality. “Politically incorrect,” the poem shows that lesbian poetic identity has its own contradictions which are due to the pressure of the “compulsory heterosexuality”, but also to the inner instability of this identity. Lesbian poetic identity is not, therefore, complete in itself, separate, independent, and fully assertive through a particular aesthetic of its own. It is rather a space of tendencies and inclinations, influenced by the dominant sexual orientation[2].

The poem is characterized by the author herself as a floating poem, a movement that is particularly sensuous and enticing, a movement that slowly, gently can take one away from reality. It is the movement of the reader’s seductive foreplay. On the other hand, this is an “unnumbered” poem, therefore, it escapes from the monotonous reality of a sequence, a possibly boring increasing array, and it gets a much more tempting status: the status of a singular, unique marker of the un-conscious.

The poem has a circular structure, it begins and ends with the same premonitory line “Whatever happen with us…”. This motto reinforces the idea of life as a sequence of unpredictable accidents which can only be counteracted by the stubborn steadfastness of feelings. Between the initial and the final line desire unravels itself. For a reader that is not fully aware of the author’s desires, it may not even be very clear that this is lesbian lovemaking. Your “tender, delicate/love making” or “Your traveled, generous thighs” do not clearly suggest two women having sex. Even “your touch on me, firm, protective, searching/ me out…” can still fool a very cautious or prudish reader who does not want to venture too much among possible varieties of lovemaking. It is only clear that the two lovers avoid, even refuse the phallic penetration and they also avoid a fixed and repetitive hierarchy of love gestures. Both lovers perform on each other. “My tongue” as well as “your tongue” brings pleasure and fulfillment. “Your nipples” do not passively accept the amorous touch, their dance is, on the contrary, “live” and “insatiate”. The phallus is replaced either by the tongue, or by the tongue and the fingers:

 

… Your traveled, generous thighs

between which my whole face has come and come –

the innocence and the wisdom of the place my tongue

has found there –

 

Or:

 

… your strong tongue and slender fingers

reaching where I had been waiting years for you

 

The speaking organ becomes an instrument of pleasure and there is no “shame,” no resistance, no hesitation in accepting this amorous posture. The logos ceases to be the ontological space where the world is ordered, or re-ordered. The logos is ordered by desire and it does not create the world, it creates pleasure, an elusive space between the two lovers. The desire for the female loving partner is not an instrument for egocentric male self-representation. Rather desire becomes a signifying relation, namely, it is signs, forms and symptoms which restore a link with the unconscious and, particularly, with a deferred attribution of signification to which we will come again. But before this, we intend to exhaust the lesbian field of signification in the poem.

The revelation of lesbian desire is slow, gradual. The prudish reader may keep his worst premonitions afar for some time. Probably the first signifier of a new kind of desire and sexuality is the lyrical ego’s attitude towards woman’s internal lack, her inside space waiting to be filled. In this respect, it is also unusual for a reader unaccustomed to lesbian desire and poetry that the inside space of woman should not arouse anguish. This is probably one of the clearest hints that the poem celebrates lesbian desire. That inner space found by the lover’s tongue is all “innocence” and “wisdom.” The combination of “innocence” and “wisdom” is celebratory for lesbian desire constructed, in this line, as inevitable and sinless. Sameness is clearly celebrated in the last lines which are also an irrevocable call for the two lovers to assert their status quo, to get out of the closet:

 

… your strong tongue and slender fingers

reaching where I had been waiting years for you

in my rose-wet cave – whatever happens, this is.

 

The inside feminine cave is rose, vital, flourishing and wet, full of desire and streams of joy. The Freudian or Lacanian theory “demand” that dark interior space awaiting for the phallus, begging for the phallus to signify it by possessing it. On the contradictory, with Adrienne Rich, this intimate interior space is celebrated with gusto and energy, vibrantly and vivaciously. It is sufficient in itself and it does not call for any Master.

Adrienne Rich’s cave also sends us, ironically, to Plato’s cave. For Plato, the cave is a space of signification which allows humans (men, of course, because for the ancient philosophers women could not be signifying agents) to contemplate the pale shadows of Ideas as reflected upon the walls of the cave. Rich celebrates the cave in itself as a place of joy and climactic reunification of the two female bodies. The cave is not longer that terrible space situated in the entrails of the earth where one fearfully penetrates in order to get a somehow approximate glimpse of Ideas. The cave is celebrated in itself, as a possible space among many other spaces, without inhibitions of anxieties. Adrienne Rich is in the same spiritual family with Hélène Cixous who replaces the phallus with a laughing vagina and who opposes the hierarchical masculine love gestures relying on a passive vs. active partner with the feminine economy of “luminous parataxis” [3]. Rich also reworks the patriarchal interpretation of the cave which excludes women from the process of signification. Like Luce Irigaray, who continues to locate the feminine desire in the looking glass, but from the other side, Adrienne Rich also looks from the other side. Namely, she looks at the cave from the inside and as a privileged space of pleasure and desire which she shares with her lover.

Apparently, this poetic floating space which is Adrienne Rich’s poem is dominated only by femaleness. The first line already warns us that:

 

Whatever happen with us, your body

will haunt mine -…

 

The last verse tells us that: “… whatever happens, this is.” There is something of an ineluctable destiny, an inescapable commitment in this amorous predestination. The lyrical ego admits and recognizes her inclinations as unavoidable constituent elements of her identity puzzle.

The lesbian body permeates the whole poem. The text seems to be the effort of an exceptionally representative member of the lesbian linguistic community that tries “ to materialize, generate and circulate meaning that arises from bodily self-knowledge” (Wright, 452). Through Rich, the “lesbian ‘sex’ that needs symbolic representation” (Wright, 452) makes an exceptional statement in the history of the poetical discourse.

However, it seems to us that, upon close reading, the self-legitimation aimed at by Adrienne Rich is undermined by the writer herself. There are spaces in the text where the poetical matter revolts against lesbianism and the lesbian identity becomes problematic, not at all separated from some heterosexual attractions. The following lines are relevant in this respect:

 

your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond

of the fiddlehead fern in forests

just washed by the sun.

 

The intimate lovemaking of the two partners is compared with the leaves of the ferns from the forest. Or according to Nadie Julien’s Dictionary of Symbols the fern is a plant of Saturn and it en-genders serenity (302). What kind of serenity? The serenity of the placid acceptance of an imposition, the “serenity” of the spleen and inadaptability? According to Julien, “Saturne se rattache au complexe de sevrage et à ses conséquences” (352). Therefore, Saturn is attached to the complex of separation, weaning, severance from previous habits or addiction. Should there be severance from previous heterosexual habits because of some accidental cause? Rape? Brutal male lover? In astrology Saturn represents fatalism, will, meditation (351-352). Therefore, the discreet fern which grows in the feminine depth of the humid forest – a true sanctuary (Chevalier, 35), or a matrix (Chevalier, 36) – suggests at least some identity problem of the lyrical ego. We should also add the subtle parallel of symbols: the cave and the forest. The forest offers the vegetal shelter that the cave offers in stone. But both the indecisive ferns which suffer because they have to give up an identity, or they have given up an identity and the temptingly feminine forests, they are all washed by the all-powerful, overwhelming sun, a powerful symbol of masculinity (Chevalier 237-243), and, within the poetic economy of this text, a vigorous symbol of heterosexuality. Also it is clear from the text that all these identity quests are framed by the powerful masculine symbol of the sun which makes possible everything that exists in our world. The sun represents man, the father, the authority, the rule. Think of its association with the monarch, with the father of the country in so many cultures. The French or the Egyptian examples are notorious in this respect[4]. It is not so easy to escape from the “compulsory heterosexuality” and Adrienne Rich’s poem, although intended as a song of the songs to feminine same-sex love, betrays a certain ambiguity and tension both of the poetical meanings as well as of the lyrical ego’s identity quest.

Adrienne Rich is a writing subject who knows her own body, who wants to write through the experience of her own body in order to separate from a dominant way of life and legitimate same-sex love. That there is much more ambiguity between heterosexual desire and lesbian desire, this is an idea that Adrienne Rich’s floating and unnumbered poem betrays in spite of itself. Of course, for political purposes this is not an idea to be likened by lesbian militants, and Rich is one of them. But beyond the accidents of the author’s personal agenda or identity, this beautiful same-sex love poem shows that identities are fluid, they respond to each other, they are more connected than policies would want them to be. Tolerance is, therefore, inevitable not only because we are different, but because we are much more identical than separate, and different.

 

 

References

Rich, Adrienne. “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Tradition in English. Eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York and London: Norton, 1985, p. 2037.

*

Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. Dicţionar de simboluri. Vol. III P-Z. Bucureşti: Artemis, 1995.

Cixous, Hélène. Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous. Ed. Susan Sellers. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Irigaray, Luce. “The looking glass, from the other side” This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catharine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, pp. 9-33.

Julien, Nadia. Le Dictionnaire de symboles. Alleur: Marabout, 1989.

Wright, Elizabeth. Feminism and Psychology. A Critical Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, [1992] 1996.

 

 

Annex

 

(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)

 

Whatever happens with us, your body

will haunt mine – tender, delicate

your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond

of the fiddlehead fern in forests

just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs

between which my whole face has come and come –

the innocence and the wisdom of the place my tongue has found

there –

the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth –

your touch on me, firm, protective, searching

me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers

reaching where I had been waiting for you

in my rose-wet cave – whatever happens, this is.

Notes

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