Citation
Hassan, Mohamad Fleih
(2017)
Restructuring female identity through the Kristevan approach in Adrienne Rich’s selected poetry.
Doctoral thesis, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Abstract
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), a radical feminist poet in the United States, was
credited with her power of using language as a medium to give voice to women who
are marginalized by patriarchy. Thereby, female identity became a recurrent theme
in her poetry. However, Rich’s discourse of female identity has been highly
radicalized due to her extreme attitudes towards patriarchal thought. Hence, her
poetry has been approached within the confines of the Queer theory. Thus, the first
objective of this study is to explore the role played by the signifying system of the
symbolic language in depriving women of their own female identities in the light of
the patriarchal discourse of identity formation in Rich’s early poetry. The second
objective is to examine the articulation of the semiotic elements in Rich’s poems and
their role in disrupting the symbolic signifying system of language, which would
lead to the circulation of new meanings that reflect women’s needs and desires and
help in re-structuring female identity. The third objective is to explore Rich’s
discourse of desire in selected poems in light of Kristeva’s concept of Abjection in
order to resituate the female desire in relation to the dominant heterosexual thought
as an active, and transgressive variable in the reconstruction of female identity. The
study relies on Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), utilizing the
concepts of The Semiotic and The Symbolic to explore the power of the semiotic in
troubling the symbolic system of signification. Kristeva thinks that the Semiotic and
the Symbolic aspects of language are completing each other in the signifying process
of the speaking subject. Moreover, the study relies again on Kristeva’s Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), to deal with the abject representation of
female desire as a transgressive force for the heterosexual thought. Selections of
Rich’s A Change of World (1951), A Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963),
Necessities of Life (1966), Diving into the Wreck (1973), and The Dream of Common
Language (1978) are chosen for the study to cover the different stages in Rich’s
career. The study concludes that the articulation of the semiotic elements ‘maternal
emotions and drives’ into the symbolic system of signification will generate new
signifying system that helps in circulating a new discourse of female identity formation. Moreover, it concludes that Rich’s re-orientation of female desire was a technique to turn female desire into an active and transgressive variable in the reconstruction
of female identity.
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