Adrienne Rich & the Power of Denial

Adrienne Rich is generally considered one of the great poets in the feminist canon. Her poetry often examines the routes to empowerment and/or ways in which agency is denied to women. "Power" is no exception, and there are volumes of criticism analyzing its poignant storyline from a feminist standpoint. What also makes it a powerful* poem, though, is that Marie Curie's sacrifice provides insight when viewed from an endless number of disciplines. In particular, the way in which Marie Curie draws is empowered and successful through her denial of parts of her reality is a psychological phenomenon with numerous applications in the modern social world.

The last stanza of "Power" summarizes perfectly the relationship between Marie Curie and her denial. She denies "her wounds" (15) and that "her wounds came from the same source as her power" (17). There are, therefore, two layers to Curie's denial. On the one hand, she is denying her pain altogether. She refuses to acknowledge that she is slowly becoming incapacitated in any way. This is the first level. On the other hand, she is also deliberately ignoring the source of her incapacitation because her pain comes from her empowerment. That which makes her stronger is also killing her. This is the second, more complicated level of her denial because for her to stop denying the source of her pain is to accept that her empowerment was not without significant cost. This paradoxical relationship between dehabilitation and empowerment can be rationalized as a trade-off. More than a this, though, the example of Marie Curie that Rich constructs reflects similar processes that happen in end of life care settings. 

Sylvia Plath & the Institution of Marriage

Sylvia Plath is known as a confessional poet. In particular, much of her poetry revolves around the emotional toll of family relationships, such as she experiences as a wife and mother. Though the poems are of course not all exactly the same, for the most part they do all feature speakers where some component of the poem is related to their feelings or state of mind. "The Applicant" is interesting in that the speaker is less an individual and more a kind of collective that addresses the poem's subject

It's clear from the first line of "The Applicant" that the applicant is a man applying for the position of husband. In that same stanza, the speaker lays out the criteria for applicants, "our sort of a person" (1). They must "show something's missing" (6), meaning that people, specifically men, are expected to be unfulfilled until married, until they find wife, "a hand / To fill [theirs] and willing / To bring teacups and roll away headaches" (10-12). This description is also the first introduction to the wife, a character whose compliance "is guaranteed" (15). She is "A living doll" (33). Unlike the man, who at the very least has the autonomy to apply for marriage, the woman in this paradigm is merely a hand, a doll, something to fill the man's "hole" (37), his "last resort" (39). Based on this construction of the wife, "The Applicant" takes on another dimension. Though it seems at first like the man is applying for marriage due to his own autonomy, by the last stanza it is clear that in reality the speaker of the poem is trying to construct the model of marriage in a way that will convince the man that he needs it, that he will be fulfilled by it. The speaker is trying to compel the man into marriage through a series of  symbolic images. The first of these is the woman's hand, the second is the "waterproof, shatterproof" (23) suit, and the last is the living doll that's to be his wife. These constructions, ideas about marriage's purpose and what's expected in a marriage form what sociologists call the institution of marriage. Through "The Applicant," Plath reflects an image of marriage as an institution during the 1950s in America, a subject which has also been discussed at length in sociological research.

Andrew Cherlin chronicles the evolution of the American institution of marriage into the 20th century in "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage." Cherlin's contention is that the institution of marriage in the United States has so far existed in three stages. The first is the "institutional marriage" which refers to the pre-World War II idea of marriage as a compulsory business transaction (Cherlin 851). Though there are remnants of this idea in "The Applicant," especially in the title, in the poem Plath is speaking more to the second stage, the "companionate marriage." The companionate marriage is the idealized, "single-earner, breadwinner-homemaker marriage that flourished in the 1950s" (Cherlin 851). This is the dynamic Plath refers to when she juxtaposes the applicant's suit against the "living doll" (33) that "can sew... can cook / ...can talk, talk, talk" (34-35). Though, as Cherlin points out, the companionate marriages were an improvement over institutional marriages in that spouses were "supposed to be each other's companions-friends, lovers-to an extent not imagined by the spouses in the institutional marriages of the previous era" (851), the strict definitions of the homemaker and breadwinner roles could be oppressive, such as in "The Applicant." The subject of the poem is asked to marry not just the woman but also the suit because the suit represents his role as the man and the provider. The suit is "black and stiff" (21); it constricts the speaker as does his role, metaphorically speaking.  

There is a silver lining, as Cherlin continues past the companionate marriage of "The Applicant" and into the third stage, the "individualized marriage." This version of marriage, Cherlin contends, is deinstitutionalized, meaning the rules society places about what a marriage should look like and what it means are relaxed or nonexistent (848). This means that the subject in "The Applicant" wouldn't feel compelled to listen to the speaker. If he didn't want to think about marriage, or wear a suit he wouldn't have to. Similarly, the woman would be a living human, not a doll, with agency. The result, Cherlin concludes, is that the compulsory feeling of marriage has eroded making it instead "a marker  prestige and personal achievement" (848).

Gwendolyn Brooks & Positive Integration

Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black person to win a Pulitzer Prize is therefore well known for her artful approach to complex subject matter.  This poem, "The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men," is no different. In the vein of many in the twentieth century, here Brooks is reacting to war, but what's interesting about this sonnet is it goes further than just war. "The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men" uses the context of WWII to examine the impact of the racial integration of the armed forces in the United States. 

Contrary to the prevailing opinion at the time, scrambling the contents of the "box for dark men" (10) and the "box for Other" (10) didn't destroy the fabric of society. This is the focus of  "The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men." The poem begins with the speaker examining the white troops' ideas about what it means to be a soldier. Then, there's a shift that coincides with the arrival of the "Negroes" (4). The white soldiers are "perplexed" (4) and the poem changes focus from the white soldiers' precision and "formula" (1) to images of boxes to explain the result of desegregation. In the speaker's eyes, this desegregation, the arrival of the black soldiers was almost a non event beyond the white soldiers' initial confusion; the speaker remarks, for example, that "neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled / and there was nothing startling in the weather" (13-14). In fact, the calm transition the speaker depicts could be said to be a positive development. In the face of having to work alongside their black counterparts, the white soldiers start to see how much energy

"The Young Housewife," Gender, & Sexual Expression

"The Young Housewife" is a particularly good example of William Carlos Williams' well known use of imagism, where he weaves an entire implicit narrative into a single moment; the subject of the poem, the young housewife, has her story told through the way she's framed by other objects. We see her through the eyes of an empowered and voyeuristic speaker, whose perspective exemplifies the sociological phenomenon known as group dominance, the process of which is illustrated by the way the poem's images objectify and constrain the housewife.

From the beginning, there's a clear power differential between the speaker and the housewife. She's "behind / the wooden walls of her husband's house" (2-3) while the speaker is in a car, free to move around. In the 2005 study conducted by Alicia Gonzales and Gary Rolison, they explore a similar power dynamic, specifically the way that race, gender, and socioeconomic status correlate to access to sexual capital. In this study, sexual capital is defined as the "freedom of a liberated body and imagination, as well as how expressive and adventurous we are with our sexuality" (Gonzales and Rolison 725). The study's data comes from 3,159 responses to the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, a questionnaire about "adult sexual attitudes and behaviors in the United States" (719). The responses were compared against the respondents' social group and environment, for example their gender, socioeconomic status, and/or level of religiousness. The researchers found that overall, compared to the white, male control group, women have less sexual capital, meaning they're "less likely...to enjoy or explore avenues

Langston Hughes, Lynching, & the Intersection of Race and Gender

"Silhouette" by Langston Hughes is a bitterly poignant look at the way the sexualized, post-Civil War narrative exposes the intersection between race and gender for a very specific purpose. Hughes' audience in this poem is not the black community, though they would certainly still be able to appreciate the speaker's virulent tone. Instead, "Silhouette" is directed at white Americans and has very gender specific messages.


To white men -- the speaker is pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in "how Dixie protects / it's white womanhood" (9-10). This is the speaker addressing the most popular idea at the turn of the century, that, as Robert Nowatzki writes, "black male victims of lynching were punished for raping white women" (161). Though this fear was unsubstantiated and though only about a quarter of black men who were lynched were accused of rape or a related crime, as black men began to gain legal equality, the narrative of "Negro domination" (Nowatzki 161) gained strength. It was an effective story. Casting white women as the victims of black male brutality solidified white male power on all fronts, Not only was this excuse used to violently subdue any black men whose franchise was threatening, but it also deprived white women of any agency they might claim by painting them as "gentle" (1) and in need of masculine protection. It's the hypocrisy in this hysteric narrative that the speaker in "Silhouette" is satirizing when he tells the "southern gentle lady" (1) about the lynching. The speaker is questioning how hanging "a black man / to a roadside tree" (5-6) is protecting anyone, but he's also questioning the implied vulnerability of white womanhood -- whether the lady is in need of any protection in the first place or whether this is really more an issue of "Dixie" (9) protecting itself.