Adrienne Rich's poems in The Fact of a Doorframe dramatize the conflict between what patriarchal society forces women to be and what they are. In her early poems, such as “Aunt Jennifer's Tigers,” she uses tight rhyme and careful control as she struggles to keep the conflict beneath the surface. However, her later poems, such as "Rape" and "A Woman Dead in Her Forties," are less cautious in their investigations to explore women's issues and leave behind Rich's past subtleties in the form. Ultimately, after Rich is able to find her unique voice and the voice of women around the world, she is able to reach her full potential as an artist and revolutionary. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Rich's early career poems, such as "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (4) and "At a Bach Concert" (5) written in 1951, possess a restrained visual rhythm and little use of enjambement. Both have exactly sixteen lines, although the former has three stanzas and the latter has four. The restrictive nature of the forms of these poems is very representative of Rich's personal struggle to respect the constraints of patriarchal society. The tone of "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" reflects this sense of restriction, using the binary opposition of Aunt Jennifer, bound by the boundaries of marriage and tigers, free and independent. Tigers “do not fear the men under the tree;/ they walk with chivalrous certainty.” By emphasizing the tiger's fearlessness and certainty, Rich's speaker accentuates Aunt Jennifer's uncertainty. The speaker tells the reader that tigers are fearless but does not include Aunt Jennifer in this description, leading the reader to believe otherwise. This binary opposition is further focused in the second verse where Rich uses enjambment to create tension and draw attention to the closing lines of the verse: "The enormous weight of Uncle's wedding ring / It leans heavily on Aunt Jennifer's hand" . This line especially accentuates the weight of domination and loss of self in marriage. The uncle owns the aunt as much as the band. Aunt Jennifer is not her person; it was bought and will belong to her husband until his death. The next stanza begins with her death, describing her dead hands as "terrified," yet another reference to Aunt Jennifer's antonymic relationship with the fearless tigers of the first stanza. The second line of this stanza, which describes her hands as "still ringed by the trials by which she has been dominated," clearly references her marriage as her master, making her a slave under his dominion. The final couplet, "The tigers in the panel he made / Will continue to rear, proud and fearless" gives the poem a cyclical nature, thus bringing the reader's attention back to the fearlessness of the tigers, further accentuating Aunt Jennifer's confined fear . life. However, the boundary pushing subject of the poem, the distant voice, and the traditional form with rhyming couplets make the poem anything but revolutionary. This poem has turbulent undertones with its language of oppression and fear, yet the narrator of distances gives Rich permission to deny these ideas as his own. As a woman trying to fit into a man's world of writing, Rich is careful to color her world within the lines that have been preset. Later in his career, Rich begins to take a bolder and edgier approach to his work as he becomes more overtly political. In “Rape” (105-106), written in 1972, Rich explains how physical rape is only the beginning of the all-encompassing rape that women face when they decide to stick outcomplaint in a male-dominated system. It is not only the attacker who rapes the woman, but the system that distrusts her, questions her and scolds her. The first verse that begins "There's a cop who's both a thief and a father: / he comes from your neighborhood, he grew up with your brothers, / he had certain ideals" assumes that the woman being spoken to knows the law, she grew up around him and knows him. There is some opposition presented in the first line between the words wanderer and father. The word tramp immediately conjures up images of someone sneaking around, shrouded in darkness, who can't be trusted. An intruder enters a house uninvited, like a rapist enters a woman. Just drawing a correlation between the cop and the offender causes feelings of distrust towards someone who should be trusted. However, the next description of the cop is the father, who ideally personifies the idealistic average Joe with a family to protect. This direct opposition divides the reader between distrust and trust. Yes, this poem is directly related to “Aunt Jennifer's Tigers” in its use of binary opposition, yet in this poem Rich immediately directs his readers' attention to this. By placing this man, this cop in the immediate vicinity of the victim, the reader knows that this man is an immediate part of his world, and just as the rapist has infiltrated his world, the cop has entered his comfort zone. The closing verse, "You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge, / On horseback, with one hand touching his gun" features an image in which the policeman stands over the woman he addresses the orator, elevated not only by the fact of riding a horse, but by his position of authority. The policeman approaches her as a classic fairy tale hero would on horseback, gallantly advancing to the damsel's rescue. Yet, even in his victimized state, the neighborhood father who grew up with her family keeps his hand on his gun to represent his distrust of the woman. The gun also doubles as a phallic symbol, loaded and ready with its bullet to penetrate another person against their will just like the rapist. The speaker continues: “You barely know him but you must know him:/ he has access to machinery that could kill you” once again echoing the image of a rapist in the policeman, his very presence forces him to “know” him. Here the double meaning of knowing comes into play, with the idea of ​​knowing someone biblically, once again clearly creating a dichotomy between the policeman as knight in shining armor and as a man capable of unspeakable horrors. This unspeakable horror is exactly what the policeman wants the woman to discuss. The speaker continues “his hands type the details / and he wants them all / but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.” Even though the policeman is supposed to be the valiant rescuer, he enjoys the woman's pain, her hysterical attacks, as the rapist most likely did in the act of raping her. The use of the word 'like' which, as we know, can also have a sexual connotation, sexualizes the act of dictating the event, making the policeman a dark and evil figure similar to the rapist. Here, Rich takes a closer look at the revictimization that occurs in the narrative of the event itself and in society's distrust of women who turn to authorities in these situations. What makes this tale worse for the victim here is not simply the retelling, but the policeman's satisfaction. he derives from it how “he knows, or thinks he knows, what you imagined; / he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted. The policemanseems to think he knows better; he assumes he knows this woman and mentally categorizes her as "crazy or a slut." Rich doesn't use such foul language; however, the stench of such labels hangs in the air. Rich uses repetition in the final stanza to further this point and to show the fear and desperation the woman feels. In this stanza the speaker continues, “he has access to the machinery that could make you set aside”; focusing once again on the mechanisms available to the policeman, on the power that society has given him. The speaker continues from here with more repetition saying "and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, / and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, / your data sounds like the portrait of your confessor, / you will swallow it, you will deny it, you will lie while come home? The simplest hypothesis to draw is that the policeman is indeed her physical rapist, but I think Rich is stating something more than that here. He is saying that the policeman, symbol of the very system established to protect people, he is just as guilty as the perpetrator and just as guilty of rape in the way he traffics her Rich has come a long way from “Aunt Jennifer's Tigers” to “Rape,” abandoning rhyme and making overtly, politically charged statements about the treatment of women. women However, she still sticks to clean stanzas and is removed from the situation, distancing herself from the victim by making her another person, without ever fully entering into the poem. It is later in her career that Rich fully realizes her potential as an artist for speak for those for whom one does not speak, to go further, become more explicit, more political. Rich finds her voice and begins to talk about the issues, including herself in them. In “A Woman Dead in Her Forties” (154-159), a deeply moving eight-part poem that Rich notes took three years to write, Rich finally overcomes safety and includes herself, using the first person and abandoning the stanza and all the established forms of saying the unspeakable. The poem is a journey through illness from beginning to end, in this case what I interpreted as a threnody for her dead friend. Rich begins the first poem with an immediate, punchy hook: “Your breasts/ cut away The scars/ blurred as they should be/ years later. Rich dove violently into this poem by immediately and mercilessly approaching the mastectomy. The voice has no mercy for the reader, just as the disease had no mercy for the woman, his friend. The speaker wants her readers to feel that pain, that slice and knows that the most effective method is not to mince words. He continues to describe a group of friends happily topless as the woman also uncomfortably removes her top, revealing her scars. “I barely look at you/as if my gaze could burn you/even though it is I who have loved you,” the speaker says in a tone that reveals her shame and cowardice for not having been able to face this disease both literally than literally. figuratively with her lover. The speaker continues: “I would like to touch with my fingers/ where your breasts were/ but we never did such things.” In a relationship where touches and hugs are so familiar, Rich fails to embrace this new landscape change. In the fifth part of the poem, Rich's speaker once again confronts her friend: "You played heroic, necessary games with death," almost trying to provoke some sort of reaction in her friend, wanting her friend to give up to fear, showed emotion, did something different from what he is doing. The speaker goes on to say: “I wish you were here tonight I want/ scold you/ Don't accept/ Don't give in/ But I mean your courageous/ blameless life, you dean. from the.