“If any man were to see you, you’d be done for, and so would your mother and father and your grandfather, the religious scholar-and I’d be done for more than anyone because it’s I who agreed to this and helped you.”

This line from “The Women’s Swimming Pool” makes a clear distinction that the obeying of traditional Islamic values was imperative for a young woman such as the narrator, who is presumed to be Hanan Al- Shaykh. Islamic traditions and customs were to be followed and it is evident from the very get-go when the narrator mentions the religious attire that she was obligated to wear. However, there is this constant mentioning of the narrator’s thirst and being overly hot. Consequently, she dreams of the vastness of the sea, which is symbolic of her yearning to rebel against the conservative Islamic values that she is expected to uphold. She asks herself: “What were its waters like? What color would they be now? If only this week would pass in a flash, for I had at last persuaded my grandmother to go down to Beirut and the sea…” The contrast between the views of her traditional grandmother and those of the people in the Westernized city of Beirut depicts the two conflicting world of the narrator.
For the entirety of the story, Hanan’s longing to assimilate to Western customs is prevalent. However, this all changes in the very last few lines. “For the first time her black dress looked shabby to me. I felt how far removed we were from these passers-by, from this street, this city, this sea.” After having embarked on this long journey to find the sea that she had dreamt of, the narrator did not come to the conclusion that Beruit was where she belonged. Instead, she comes to the realization that she is not currently a part of modern culture. Though she may be physically in the city of Beruit, Hanan is cognizant of the fact that, in the time being, the traditional values imposed upon her by her family are still a part of her.
The contrast of traditional values and Western values depicted in “The Women’s Swimming Pool” was a common theme in Eastern Literature. This was seen in Rabindranath Tagore’s “Punishment”. Tagore challenged the preconceived traditional belief of the time that men should overpower and control women. Similarly to Tagore’s writing, Hanan’s “The Women’s Swimming Pool” depicts this struggle and desire to dissent from what was expected of society.

In her poem “Driving into the Wreak,” Adrienne Rich uses a lot of passionate imagery to describe a lonely character’s adventure under the sea. The words and phrases she choses to use are so descriptive and compelling that it makes the reader feel as if he or she is taking the dive themselves. In this poem, the third stanza really stood out to me and it goes, “I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My fliippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.” I like Rich’s choice of diction when she says “immerse” because the word is generally used when describing things that are submerged in liquid. The word in this line makes it feel as if the diver is swimming in air. Now the lines following, “the blue light the clear atoms of our human air,” brings a sense of comfort and familiarity of the human world. This is a stark contrast to the when the diver is about to go under water where it says, “I go down. My flippers crippled me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder.” The phrases “cripple me” and “crawl like an insect” really emphasizes the awkwardness of moving from land to sea. It is evident that the diver naturally is not comfortable in the ocean world as he or she is in the human world.

Having read “A Room of Ones Own” it is clear that Virginia Woolf was a great inspiration to Rich. It seems to me that a lot of Woolf’s anger towards sexual difference in power influenced Rich’s perspective on the issue and manifested her own sense of anger. In “A Room of Ones Own,” Woolf says, “but it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail.” The ideas of gender roles and women’s inferiority are reoccurring themes throughout Rich’s poems. Take “From and Old House in America” for example. This is a story about a man and wife and their struggles during the western movement in the early 19^th century. In the last two lines of part 5 it says, “or between man and woman in this savagely fathered and unmothered world.” What this is referring to are the sins of men for driving their masculinity and the sins of women for being passive to this force.

The best way I can describe Rich’s poetic style is super organized. “Driving into the Wreak” is neatly broken into stanza that are between 8-18 lines long; “Cartographies of Silence” and “From an Old House in America” are written in lines of pairs; and “Twenty One Love Poem” are actually twenty one difference love poems from I-XXI. Reflecting on “From an Old House in America,” I think Rich wrote this poem in lines of pairs to symbolize the equality that should be between a man and woman. Another neat thing that Rich does in “Driving into the Wreak” is that she uses a colon in line “I am she: I am he.” I believe she uses this punctuation to illustrate that there isn’t a definitive separation between man and woman but rather a balanced coexistence between the two sexes.

I would hardly count “Twenty One Love Poems” as actual love poems; they’re more like sad poem if you ask me. Instead of there being descriptions of passion, infatuation, and yearning these poems are filled with loneliness, helplessness, and violence. The first three lines really surprised me as it states, “Wherever in this city, screens flicker with pornography, with science-fiction vampires, victimized hirelings bending to the lash.” I couldn’t help but wonder how does “pornography” and “science-fiction vampires” relate to love? I suppose Twilight might be able to answer that one…

A major shift in personas occurs in Rich’s “Driving into the Wreak,” where it says, “This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreak we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he.” It is quite confusing to understand but it seems to me that the diver has somehow become a mermaid slash merman during his/her time underwater. If you notice, the diver starts describing himself not as “I” but as “we”. Going back to the idea of gender equality, the diver is a representation of how man and woman are one.