Resurfacing Female Identity via Language in Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck

Abstract

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) is a representative poet of American women’s poetry. The subject of female identity is a dominant theme of American feminist poetry and Rich plays the leading role in search of this identity. Rich couldn’t find herself as a woman writer in the language she uses because it is a symbolic masculine language; therefore she introduced a new possibility of actualizing the female identity through the restructuring of this language. Thus, the objective of the study is to trace the semiotic aspect of language in Rich’s Diving into the Wreck to see the role of this Semiotic aspect in subverting the fixed-meanings of the symbolic language, which in turn leads to the resurface of the buried female voices within this language. It explores too Rich’s poetic discourse concerning the restructuring of female identity by the means of language. The study employs Kristeva’s concept of The Semiotic and The Symbolic in analyzing Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) to regain the feminine elements within the patriarchal language through the signifying process. Since Kristeva thinks that language can be the means for the subject to gain identity, so the application of her concept of The Semiotic and The Symbolic is relevant here. Rich utilizes the image of ‘Diving’ into history to show the need for a language that resurfaces the long-silenced voices of women in order to help them prove their own female identities far of the oppressive patriarchal discourses. The study concludes that Rich in ‘Diving into the Wreck’ exhibits a transformative understanding of the status of women reclining on the restructuring and resurfacing of female identity through the way of using a unified unbiased language.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p245