Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

 

Adrienne Rich [1929-2012]

This is the last of a three-part series on gender discrimination. The first two parts [Women in Indian Democracy and Gender bias in a land of goddesses] touched upon certain aspects of the discrimination in India. This concluding part looks at the issue from a wider perspective with a feminist poem as the substratum.

Adrienne Rich’s poem Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers presents an old lady who has been oppressed by a patriarchal system. She is an unhappy wife and hence, obviously, an unhappy woman. Her discontentment is caused by her husband who put the “massive weight” of the wedding ring on Aunt’s finger. From the day that ring was slipped on, Aunt has been “mastered” by “ordeals”.

The poem was written in 1951. America, Rich’s country, wasn’t quite progressive yet in those days especially in matters related to women’s liberties. All women were expected to marry soon after school and live a life of subordination.  Even a faint suggestion of divorce would be frowned upon. [It’s quite a different matter that Adriene Rich was a divorcee and her husband of 17 years, a Harvard-trained economist, was driven to suicide by the separation.]

The tigers in the poem mentioned above are creations of Aunt Jennifer on a “screen” that she is knitting. The tigers are brave, self-assured and energetic. Aunt is the exact opposite of all that. She is terrified, despondent and enervated.

The tigers represent what Aunt Jennifer would like to have been. The tigers belong to her heart. They are still prancing there wildly. They are caged there, however.  By an insensitive patriarchal system. And they will continue to be caged within the Aunt’s heart until her death. Even when she lies dead in her coffin, that wedding ring will be there on her finger as a symbol of all the ordeals she endured in her married life.

To release the tigers within oneself is the ultimate meaning of personal freedom. This was the last thing that a woman in the America of the 1950s could do. As hinted earlier, every woman was expected to marry soon after school. Getting a husband was more important for a woman in those days than getting a college degree or a job. Even the media focused on a woman’s role in the home. If a woman wasn’t engaged or married by her early twenties, she was in danger of becoming an ‘old maid’. Those women who chose employment over marriage were considered selfish, putting themselves before the needs of their family.  

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters,” Adrienne Rich wrote in another poem. Marriage wrecks the thinking woman, kills the tigers in her heart.

Unlike Adrienne Rich, Aunt Jennifer endured the massacre of her personal tigers, the suffocation of her soul.

Which is better? Aunt Jennifer’s endurance or Adriene Rich’s emancipation?

Personal freedom is important. No one should have to live a life that is surrendered to another individual. If marriage doesn’t let you live your life with an optimum degree of personal freedom, it is better to get out of that bondage. Marriage is not bondage; it is a bonding. It should help both the partners to grow into the fullness of themselves.

But that growth demands certain sacrifices from both the husband and the wife. Absolute personal freedom is impossible in any relationship. If you want absolute personal freedom, don’t marry. Live your life as you choose without bringing another individual into it. “I feel more helpless with you than without you,” Adrienne Rich wrote somewhere. That’s the problem. Marriage and every such close relationship is meant to empower you further, not to make you fell more helpless. If it does make you feel helpless, check whether you are in the wrong place before blaming the other person.

I accept the basic tenets of feminism. Personal freedom is of vital importance to both man and woman. Life without personal freedom is sheer slavery. But we need to remind ourselves that our inner tigers can be potential monsters to our partner. It is not only a thinking woman that sleeps with monsters. A thinking man does too.

PS. ‘This post is part of #CauseAChatter with blogchatter’ #gendertalks