On 'Power"
Judith McDaniel
In her two most recent books Adrienne Rich explores the potential for women's power. . . . The complexities of this power are inherent in the story of Marie Curie, who discovered the vital properties of uranium, and who died from radiation poisoning, "denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power." Marie Curie did not know--literally--how to handle power. Once again Rich's poetic image--the woman holding in her "suppurating" fingers the test tube of uranium, source of energy and death--unites the abstract and political difficulties of power.
From Reconstituting the World (Spinsters, Ink., 1978).
Joanne Feit Diehl
The opening poem in The Dream of a Common Language describes a similar revising of myth--again the hero is a woman and the treasure is not simply scientific knowledge, but knowledge of self as the poet describes an attempt to reach into the earth for the sources, the origins of woman's distinctive power. Rich first combs through the "earth-deposits" of "our" (female) experience of history to discover the amber bottle with its bogus palliative which will not ease the pain "for living on this earth in the winters of this climate." The second gesture of the poem is toward a text and model: the story of Marie Curie, a woman who seeks a "cure," denying that the "element she had purified" causes her fatal illness. Her refusal to confront the crippling force of her success and to recognize the deadly implications of original discovery enables Curie to continue her work at the cost of her life. Denying the reality of the flesh, the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends, she presses on to death:
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Here, in the poem's closing lines, Rich uses physical space and the absence of punctuation (an extension of Dickinson's use of dashes) to loosen the deliberate syntactic connections between words and thus introduce ambiguities that disrupt normative forms. The separation between words determines through the movement of the reader's eye--the movement past the "wounds" where it had rested the first time--the emphasis on the activity of denial and its necessary violation. The second "denying" carries the reader past the initial negativity of a woman's denying self-destruction by extending the phrase "denying / her wounds" into "denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power." Denial is an essential precondition for the woman inventor's continuing to succeed; what she is denying, of course, is the inevitable destruction of self in her work, as well as the knowledge that her power and her wounds share a common source. Like Curie, this book's later poems inform us, the woman poet must recognize a similar repression of her knowledge that what she is doing involves a deliberate rejection of the borrowed power of the tradition, the necessity of incurring the self-inflicted wounds which mark the birth of an individuated poetic voice.
From Feminist Studies (1980).
Mary J. Carruthers
The first section, "Power," is about the sources and frustrations of women’s power. As she has often done before, Rich uses the life of a dead woman (Marie Curie, Elvira Shatayev) as a moral exemplum of woman under patriarchy, fragmented and cut off from the sources of her own power yet grasping towards it. Thus, Marie Curie "died a famous woman denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power." Her voice in these poems is meditative and homiletic, rising to a moral pitch which, while sometimes troubling to reviewers, is nothing new to American poetry. Rich would surely prefer that we think of Bradstreet and Dickinson, but I often also hear Robert Lowell in these poems.
from "The Re-Vision of the Muse: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Olga Broumas." The Hudson Review 36.2 (Summer 1983)
Gertrude Reif Hughes
While patriarchal history chronicles victories and victors, feminist history registers a record of resistance, and thus it may be called a history of enemies. This is not to say that feminist history doesn't celebrate women's power. Emphatically it does, particularly in the hands of Adrienne Rich. But it also serves to expose oppression and oppressors--a mission that Emerson failed to consider when he mused on the lessons history offers. Increasingly in her career of writing and reading, and reaching her audiences to think with her "how we can use what we have / to invent what we need," she has undertaken to tell the stories of women's oppression and women's resistance. She has unearthed evidence of resources depleted by all kinds of abuse, including non-use. She has uncovered also a record of heroic resilience. Because it is a history of survivors, the record that Rich retrieves for her readers inspires a more tragic recognition of powers than the history of inexhaustible capacity that Emerson celebrates. It awakens consciousness of our passion for survival, yes, but also of the counterforces against which that passion somehow prevailed and must continue to prevail.
To enable women to identify and resist these counterforces, Rich is committed to working like the backhoe in "Power," the poem that opens The Dream of a Common Language
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
The amber bottle that the backhoe turns up has sobering, even sinister, implications. When the poem continues, it becomes clear that it is a souvenir of the disease it was used to cure as much as it is a momento of healing. For Rich goes on to muse how Marie Curie--that patriarchally endorsed Uncommon Woman of Science--could be killed by the destructive power of her own discovery because she could not acknowledge that "her wounds came from the same source as her power."
Far from indicting Curie for this fatality, Rich mourns her and indicts her killer, the seductive, destructive forces of patriarchal competitiveness. In this first poem of The Dream of a Common Language and in the final one, "Transcendental Etude," Rich presents the lure of prima donna performance as a virulent enemy to achieving the dream of any commonality at all.
From Jane Roberta Cooper, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich. (University of Michigan Press, 1984).
Charles Altieri
[The task of "Power"] is to reverse traditions expectations of the role of myth in poetry. The first lines echo Kore myths as the poet thinks of a bottle of medicine unearthed from a construction site. Rich, however, quickly shifts from medicine to the making of medical cures, from passivity to activity, and hence from mythic associations to a specific historical figure, Madame Curie, whose legacy can take concrete form in discursive language. Curie is not quite a model. Instead she establishes a different kind of authority. The poet need not locate single models from the past but can try to construct a sense of community with a variety of women who appear in memory. Even the differences that prevent the past from passing on models become potentially productive by demanding a reciprocal dialogue. Sympathy with another's problems can lead to understanding features of one's own condition, and efforts at self-definition can become instruments for appreciating the problems oppressing others.
In this exchange there is considerable sustenance for Rich's hopes to overcome several dichotomies, especially that between private and public lives. As a community forms with the past, and as sympathy produces self-knowledge, it is possible to imagine poetry as a form of action. In poems one aligns oneself with other women and one tries to dramatize one's capacity to take power through and for them. If Curie died "denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power," then one can use her life to see how the two aspects might be united. And one can use one's sympathy as the contrastive term directing and dignifying the poet's quest to explore her own wounds as potential sources of power. Her project can depend not on a fantasized self but on grounding the imagination in history and then testing oneself against its realities. Once we have this historical consciousness, it is possible to give poetic voice a concrete focus. Instead of a person's being absorbed within scenes, scenes become challenges to the poet to produce a discursive poetic framework adapting them to the concerns of a society. Now Rich's greatest liability becomes an important source of strength. Her obsession with victimhood and her various forms of self-staging become states she can offer within a version of Augustine's confessional community.
From Self and sensibility in contemporary American poetry. Copyright © 1984 by Cambridge University Press.
Joanne Feit Diehl
The opening poem in The Dream of a Common Language describes a similar revision of myth--again, the hero is a woman, and the treasure is not simply scientific knowledge but also knowledge of self, as the poet describes an attempt to reach into the earth for the sources of woman's distinctive power. Rich first combs through the earth deposits of "our" (female) experience of history to discover the amber bottle with its bogus palliative that will not ease the pain "for living on this earth in the winters of this climate." The second gesture of the poem is toward a text and model: the story of Marie Curie, a woman who seeks a "cure," denying that the "element she had purified" causes her fatal illness. Her refusal to confront the crippling force of her success and recognize the deadly implications of original discovery enables Curie to continue her work at the cost of her life. Denying the reality of the flesh, "the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends," she presses on to death:
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Here, in the poem's closing lines, Rich uses physical space and the absence of punctuation (an extension of Dickinson's use of dashes) to loosen the deliberate, syntactic connections between words and thus introduces ambiguities that disrupt normative forms. The separation between words determines through the movement of the reader's eye--the movement past the "wounds" where it had rested the first time—the emphasis on the activity of denial and its necessary violation. The second "denying" carries the reader past the initial negative of a woman's denying self-destruction by extending the phrase "denying her wounds" into "denying her wounds came from the same source as her power." Denial is an essential precondition for the woman inventor's continuing to succeed; what she is denying, of course, is the inevitable sacrifice of self in work as well as the knowledge that her power and her wounds share a common source. Like Curie, this book’s later poems inform us, the woman poet must recognize a similar repression of her knowledge that what she is doing involves a deliberate rejection of the borrowed power of the tradition, the necessity of incurring the self-inflicted wounds that mark the birth of an individuated poetic voice.
From Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Copyright 1990 by Joanne Feit Diehl.
Christopher T. Hamilton
Adrienne Rich's poem "Power," which provides a moving and sympathetic account of Marie Curie, is significant not only for its overt portrait of a famous female scientist, but also for its implicit criticism of male power misused. The poem contrasts two lives - one, a dedicated scientist who sacrifices self for the world; the other, an implicit, nondescript male "doctor" who exploits others for personal gain. The poem's construction of gender is complex and indirect and is embedded in the central symbol of the first five lines: a bottle of tonic that has been unearthed by a backhoe.
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
From this point, the poem shifts direction and concentrates on the life of Marie Curie. Students are frequently confused as to the purpose of these opening lines. What relationship do they bear to the rest of the poem? Why the sudden leap to Made Curie? Why the title, "Power"? Even most published critical studies have failed to illuminate these lines. For example, in her study The Aesthetics of Power, Claire Keyes remarks that "no explicit connection is made between the artifact and Marie Curie, except to suggest that neither the tonic in the bottle nor Curie's radium has especially cured humanity's ills," and thus concludes that the "poem's abstractions make it less effective than it could be" (164). Alice Templeton's commentary on the poem in The Dream and the Dialogue fails to elucidate the lines as well, as the critic concentrates only on Curie and suggests that the bottle represents a kind of "buried history" (75), though what this history is, Templeton does not make clear.
Given what we know of Rich's feminist poetics of the early 1970s, the bottle of tonic is likely a symbolic reference to quackery, an indirect analogy to charlatans who looked for opportunities to exploit others for financial gain, and ultimately for power. The lines referring to a tonic that can cure fever and melancholy hark back to the language of those peddlers and self-styled "physicians" who confidently claimed that their medicines were the answer to everything from scarlet fever to sexual impotence. A common feature in many towns in the 1870s was a type of male "doctor" who preyed on the sick, capitalizing on their vulnerabilities to make a quick reputation and a quick dollar before moving on to extort more money in other towns and cities.
Instead of having "no explicit connection" to the rest of the poem, then, the lines are significant in that they help Rich contrast the nature of male and female power, something that she had been (re)considering in several works from the 1970s. The portrait of Marie Curie, as idealized or as incomplete as it might be, is offered as a point of comparison. Males, who see the world as a place to gain power through capitalistic aggressiveness, competition, and financial exploitation, are ultimately self-destructive. Ironically, what is left of their life is the artifact, the bottle - a curiosity and potential museum piece; and what is buried and forgotten is the man who peddled his product for immediate and selfish financial gain.
This explanation of the poem makes "Power" more significant than critics have noted, because it becomes another example of Rich's perception of the differences between male opportunism and female devotion to work. Rich's poem revisits history to reconstruct two opposing views of power, one illegitimate and self-centered, the other legitimate because selfless.
WORKS CITED
Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.
Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994.
from The Explicator 56.3 (Spring 1998)
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