Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1. trend

   • 2nd wave of feminism
     • acquisition of personal voice, and control over the female body
   • postmodernist trait
     • engagement with history and identity (away from universalism)
     • lang as social construct in the hands of men
       • struggle to find a female lang

2. theme

   • political poetry
   • anti-woman woman
     • complex identity as poet/wife
   • awareness of women's historical oppression and powerlessness
   • new woman against patriarchal values

3. style

   • formalism in early poetry
   • anger
     • rebellious woman resented with commitment to patriarchal patterns they were contributing to reproduce
   • discarded early finished, polished style, abandonment of poetry as careful craft
     • adopted fragmentariness
   • academic, in the tradition of Eliot and Pound
   • home decried as myth perpetuator of patriarchal structures
   • imagery of destruction and death
   • imagery related to body
   • silent rebellious woman, active but linguistically quiet

4. devices

   • mythical empowering figure
   • fragmentary form: snapshots as a photograph, still moment
     • reveals a female state of mind
   • free verse, yet instances of metrical regularity and end-rhyme
   • title: being named after a social role
   • collective heritage: Beauvoir, Dickinson, Woolf, Wollstonecraft
     • female creativity (loaded gun)
   • appropriation of male elements: quester, outdoor scenarios
   • flying woman as a form of resistance
   • "I" avoided, instead "you" for daught/law also addressing a collectivity
     • polivocality, assuming voices of silenced women

5. influence

   • male forms: Frost, Wallace, Yeats