Tag Archives: Virginia Woolf

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

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In the poem “Diving into the Wreck”, Adrienne Rich describes a dive into the ocean, from the boat, then to a ship wreck. During the beginning of the poem, she mentions that she is not diving into the wreck with a team of people, but she is doing it alone. Then she mentions the ladder, which is a literal passage way from the boat, into the ocean. She explains that “The ladder is always there/hanging innocently/close to the side of the schooner./We know what it is for,/we who have used it” (13-18). The ladder on the boat is a metaphor for a passage way into the wreck, it is what she needs to start her journey. She repeats “we” to show that yes she is alone, but not really alone, because people have taken this dive before. People have attempted to record the dive into the wreck, and they’ve all done it alone. This is why she must take the journey alone, without a team.

Diving into the wreck is a symbol of going into the past. Rich is attempting to change the future of women, but in order to do that, she must first “see the damage that was done” (55). The wreck itself is the history of women during male dominated times. This history, where the damage occurred, is the key to the answer of why the myths of gender roles exist today. Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is also in a sense a dive into the wreck. She was one of the people to journey into the wreck, and is why Rich is not completely alone. Similarly to how Rich was journeying into the past to discover why certain myths exist today, Woolf was also going into the past, attempting to deconstruct why there still existed this gender consciousness, which inhibited both men and women to write to the best of their ability.

The voice of Rich shifts between “I”, which was prevalent in the beginning and middle of the text, to “we”, being used toward the end. When Rich makes it to the wreck she states: “I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair/streams black, the merman in his armored body./We circle silently” (61-64). Rich did not meet another male, nor is she both male and female. With switching to “we” instead of “I”, she is conveying that she is not thinking like women nor a man, but she is thinking like both, mixed together. This notion of being both male and female, or thinking objectively, can be traced back to the ideas and desires of Woolf for men and women in literature to come together in unity. Because in the wreckage, or within history, you can find man’s attempt to exert their superiority, and women’s sense of inferiority. The inhibitions in both sexes is the book of myths. It is what hinders society progression in both writing, and in general life.

Virgina Woolf “A Room of One’s Own”

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In this section of “A Room of One’s Own” the author analyzes the works of several female writers during the sixteenth century and notes that, “by some strange force, they were all compelled when they wrote, to write about novels” (P66). She goes on to derive several possible explanations as to why women chose to express their ideas through this specific medium – the first of which ties into her original claim that women need money and her own space to write fiction. Considering how middle class women were never able to write with a peace of mind as they never had a room of their own to write in, novels were seen as a hardier form of writing that could withstand all distractions.

Another reason as to why women may have been compelled to write novels may have been because of the malleability and sense of freedom that this gave them. The author makes note that the writings of male novelists were based on a sentence that was current at the time and that women needed to find an alternative way to write that would fit their own original perspectives. The author praises Jane Austen who “devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.” (P 77) She makes the point that the lack of tradition and inadequacy of tools gave women the freedom to create something of their own, steering away from the form that males established for themselves.

I find it interesting that Woolf suggests women should ignore men and write freely. In the last section she explains how women shouldn’t rebel against the “common sentence” used by name writers, but that they should ignore it and rest upon their own free thoughts. It gives off this notion that she believes men and women are equal in the sense that they have equal intelligence – they’re just different kinds of intelligence. Since women are innately different from their male counterparts in the way they feel and value, they must also write differently and form their own styles in order to be true to themselves and their own distinct experiences.