Department of English Languages and Literature - Courses

Ideological adaptation: aunty Jennifers Tigers auntie Jennifers Tigers aunty Jennifers tigers flick across a screen, \nBright common topaz denizens of a creative activity of green. They do non fear the custody beneath the tree diagram; They pace in sleek chivalrous currentty. Aunt Jennifers fingers speed through her woolen One power say that this is a poem which takes a certain ideologic position. It is clearly a feminist poem which is faultfinding of the male realness for terrifying and oppressing Aunt Jennifer -- causing her to create an transposition world of independence, unitary which she could not tolerate early(a) than imaginatively or aesthetically. The desolating effect of patriarchy argon assumed and exposed, in three quatrains. \nThe poem has some ideologic assumptions and implications of its own, further, which render it, potentially, something little than -- or at least other than -- a strong expression of the evils of patriarchy. The struggles f or humans race of so more in a harsh world, and the dusky conflicts of bondage and freedom humans wrick with on so m any planes, ar reduced to sexuality conflict. The grammatical genders ar polarized, so Aunt Jennifer is totally victimized and the absent-minded Uncle, represented l adeptsome(prenominal) by his wedlock band, the figure here of the oppression of customs and law, is implicitly alone guilty -- though of what is not certain (fear, in the first stanza, implied slavery, in the second, ordeals in the third). The point is however that Rich has herself created an ideological structure which silences or excludes much of human experience. Children, hunger, war, disease, the struggles of the spirit, racial and unearthly injustice and oppression, are dissolved into the tragedy -- which it is on one level -- of an apparently upper-middle-class char who could express her intrust for freedom only in her art. Now, I am not saying that that is not a tragedy. fur ther it is a bedevil tragedy, one that is constructed so that it looks as if it were the touch on conflict and underground standing in the way of Aunt Jennifer and human fullness. We do not whop what terrors Aunt Jennifer had to constitute with, nor why her friends and relatives did not, if she was so terrified, step in. in all we see is the gender difference -- an out-and-out(a) difference, unproblematical in any way. All hearty context, in Aunt Jennifers personal and internal world and on the broader human plane, cryptically vanishes. \n