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Adrienne Rich, Location
and the Body
Mary Eagleton
Published online: 03 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Mary Eagleton (2000) Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body,
Journal of Gender Studies, 9:3, 299-312, DOI: 10.1080/713678003
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Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2000
Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body
MARY EAGLETON [1]
ABSTRACT This article offers a new reading of Adrienne Richs essay Notes toward a Politics of
Location (1984), one of the key documents in feminist discussions of locatedness. Its focus is the specic
location of the body and it responds to Richs exploration of the body, her body, as female, as white,
as Jewish and as a body in a nation. Taking as its starting point Richs concern with the relation between
the pronouns I and we, the individual and the collective subjects, the article explores the signicance
of interconnectedness as a political and aesthetic impulse in Richs work. Through considerations of
femininity, race, the Holocaust and national identity, the article illustrates how Rich situates her body
as personal and sentient, on the one hand, public and responsible, on the other. Though conscious of
critical theory, the articles aim is to read Rich in relation to her own words and those of other writers,
particularly George Steiner and Virginia Woolf.
The Problem of Pronouns
And so even ordinary pronouns become a political problem (Rich, 1987,
p. 224) [2]
Adrienne Rich has always maintained a cautious distance from critical theory. She states:
Theorythe seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the treestheory can be
a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over
and over. But if it doesnt smell of the earth, it isnt good for the earth (pp. 213214).
Yet in her writing, especially her three volumes of essays (1979, 1987, 1995a), she has
shown a keen awareness of critical issues and has produced at least three essays that have
entered the feminist canon and are constantly referred to in critical and theoretical
arguments: When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision (1971/1979)particularly
relevant to debates in feminist literary theory; Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian
existence (1980/1987) particularly relevant to debates on sexuality; and the essay I
want to consider in this article, Notes toward a politics of location (1984/1987) which
has proved to be a key document in feminist, post-modern and post-colonial discussions
of locatedness.
A sense of the located has emerged as a strategy for negotiating the many pitfalls in
constructing individual and collective feminist subjects. The politics of location recognises
ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869 online/00/030299-14 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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300 Mary Eagleton
the dangers of generalising statements about the position of women, of speaking for
other women as if their positions are identical to ones own (Mohanty, 1992; Simmonds,
1997). Rosi Braidotti usefully summarises this aspect:
But this recognition of a common condition of sisterhood in oppression cannot
be the nal aim; women may have common situations and experiences, but
they are not, in any way, the same. In this respect, the idea of the politics of
location is very important. This idea, developed into a theory of recognition of
the multiple differences that exist among women, stresses the importance of
rejecting global statements about all women and of attempting instead to be as
aware as possible of the place from which one is speaking. Attention to the
situated as opposed to the universalistic nature of statements is the key idea.
(Braidotti, 1994, p. 163)
The term situated recalls Donna Haraways work on situated knowledges and her belief
that feminism should beware of constructing the world in terms of global, transcendent,
unaccountable theories (Haraway, 1991, pp. 183201). This is not to suggest, however,
that internationalism is impossible as long as we follow Haraways neat aphorism that the
only way to nd a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular (Haraway, 1991, p. 196).
To understand the place from which one is speaking involves us in an on-going,
never-to-be-nalised analysis. We are all located in multiple ways; these locations intercon-
nect with intricate patternings; and, though certain locations may be to the fore at specic
moments, a whole range of determining factors will always be operating. What constitutes
a location changes and is constantly reformed while earlier locations can be remembered
and reconstructed in different ways. Thus, Richs understanding of location brings together
geography, history, several identities, memory and process:
I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history
within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying
to create. (p. 212)
On numerous occasions, Rich reformulates that list, mixing and matching different
identities.
The issue of locatedness and the problem of the subject, that other major theoretical
debate of recent years, intertwine and, in both Richs work and politics of location
writing generally, this double perspective is often expressed through what we might call
the problem of pronounsI, the individual subject, we, the collective subject and the
relations between. The importance of saying I and we alongside the difculty of saying
I and we has been a refrain throughout the work of Rich:
The difculty of saying Ia phrase from the East German novelist, Christa Wolf.
But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isnt there a
difculty of saying we? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us. Two
thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say I; there is no
collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through. (p. 224)
As she comments in her poem, Sources (19811982).
those who feel destined, under gods eye
need never ponder difference
(1986, p. 12)
It is those of us imbued, for whatever reason, with a sense of deep unease about our own
subjectivity and our relationship to others who remain preoccupied with it. In a typically
careful way Rich has explored a number of pivotal responses to the designations of I
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Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body 301
and we. In When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision, she explains her development
as a writer and the problem she had in creating a personal voice in her poetry. She tells
of writing for the rst time in the late 1950s about her experiences specically as a
woman but still using the pronoun she rather than I; I carried an authority which at
that time she felt she could not claim. When writing the 1971 essay she continued to feel
anxious about I since this I had by then become the sign of a chosen womanedu-
cated, white, middle-classand also a token woman, the woman men would tolerate,
even romanticize as special (1979, p. 38). Like Virginia Woolf, Rich remembers how
this I excludes other women who cannot go to lectures or poetry readings. In her 1991
poem In Those Years, she reects on the time when
we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible.
The claim that the personal was the only life/we could bear witness to is immediately
attacked by the great dark birds of history which, powerful and indifferent, invade our
personal weather. The I that ends the poem sounds plaintive, in danger of becoming
irrelevant if it fails to connect with we and you in the movement of history.
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I.
(1995b, p. 4)
I here is almost a woeful bleat. The difcult relationship between I and we, those
respective stories of solitude spent in multitude (1986, p. 78), comes to a precarious state
of balance in one of her more recent essays, Someone is writing a poem (1993). Rich
indicates how she depends on a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an I can
become a we without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to
which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images (1995a, p. 85). In this
comment there is a sense of tremulous poise, delicate, vibrating; a notable qualication
as the common language exists only partly; but still an attempt to relate both what is
other, strangers and what is intimate, heartbeat, memories, images.
The above is only an indication of Richs responses on this topic, not an exhaustive
study, but it helps us to see a particular feminist history and some sense of the twists and
turns of feminist discussions on the issue of locatedness. There is a move from the
encouragement to claim an I, a subjecthood, certain rights; to an awareness of
difference, how one persons rights might be the next persons further exploitation; to
a position where any collective identity as women is radically questioned; to a sensitively
gauged aspiration for a new relation between I and we. It is being reduced to I (my
italics), cut off from a wider consciousness that disturbs Rich in In Those Years. But to
talk of Richs and feminisms history of the problem of pronouns is not to suggest a
trajectory of steady improvement leading to some happy ending. We are still very much
in the midst of this debate and Richs title, Notes toward indicates her own sense
of hesitancy and contingency. As she tells us, the notes are about struggle, movement,
accountability, precisely a lack of an ending. Her personal uncertainty is an echo of the
complex and irresolvable debates on subjectivity and locatedness that have generally
preoccupied feminist thinking in the last fteen years: the impossibility of location, of ever
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302 Mary Eagleton
adequately encompassing the human subject; the danger of privileging certain locations;
we as an act of appropration; the incipient self-dramatisation of I; the dangerous
eradication of we as a common feminist identity and social critique [3].
In reviewing Richs essay I want to look more closely at how Rich explores the
problem of pronouns with relation to one specic locationthe body. In trying to place
herself, Rich has to move both outwards and inwards, outwards to social structures,
power groups and political relationships and inwards to her own psyche, desires,
conscience. Her body, that location which is both public and private, is the borderland
between. Richs siting of her body in relation to the most pervasive political problems
sexism, racism and anti-Semitismand one of the largest political structuresthe
nationconstantly transfers her from I to we, while the sensations and the ethical
responsibilities of those situations repeatedly return her to I. In this discussion I shall be
mindful of critical theory but I do not want to subject Richs words to too many of the
theoretical abstractions she clearly loathes. Whether my words will act as a revivifying
dew or smell of the earth is, however, very doubtful.
The Female Body
Elizabeth Grosz describes the body as neitherwhile also being boththe private or
the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctive or learned,
genetically or environmentally determined (Grosz, 1994, p. 23). Our problematic
pronouns I and we could be appended to this list; indeed, one could say they underpin
all the dualisms listed here. The body is intensely I, me and mine while also being
we, in and of the world. It is and, yet, hovers indeterminately between. How to work
across the I and we is the problem of every location and the body as an elaborate sign
system, always open to reinterpretation, is a particularly fraught interface. Bodies can be
dened in terms of common identities but they also tend to slip away from the grasp of
those identities. Rich writes not about bodies but specically this body, my body, using
a personal pronoun which, as she says, plunges me into lived experience (p. 215). That
phrase, particularly the emphatic verb plunges, suggests intensity, depth. Yet what
follows in this section of her essay (pp. 215216) is, initially, composed, almost coolly
distant in tone: for instance, the mention of scars, disgurements, discolorations,
damages, losses is followed by a rather blandly low-key, as well as what pleases me
(p. 215). There is no heavy charge of emotion. Despite the promise of plunges me into
lived experience, most of the bodily descriptions are not in fact depth but surface,
immediately visible to an attentive observer or fairly readily discerned by anyone
spending time with Rich. She speaks of her body as if outside it. Her list of bodily
features can read, rather unnervingly, like the report of an autopsy: white skin, marked
and scarred by three pregnancies, an elected sterilization, progressive arthritis, four joint
operations, calcium deposits, no rapes, no abortions (p. 215). In one sense she
emulates John Bergers oft-quoted description of woman as simultaneously the surveyor
and the surveyed. As Berger says, the woman turns herself into an objectand most
particularly an object of vision: a sight (Berger, 1972, pp. 46 & 47). Bergers context is
an erotic male/female relationship in which the woman, taking on the male role of
surveyor, polices herself so as to produce the appropriate female role of surveyed. But
Richs position is not eroticised and both the surveyor and the surveyed are coded as
female. Grosz remarks: If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they
are the centers of perspective, insight, reection, desire, agency (Grosz, 1994, p. xi). The
body that Rich observes in that dissociation from the self is also the body that feels and,
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Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body 303
hence, what she ultimately sees is not an object but a palpable, experienced body
produced in history and culture.
This body resists certain familiar constructions of the female body. It is not a
glamorous body, an object for mens sexual gratication, or a body elevated as a religious
or aesthetic icon. It is also not the desiring body. That sensuous body is hinted at in the
references to certain bodily parts, vulva and clitoris and uterus and breasts (p. 215), but
the terminology is clinical and we do not learn here, as we do in Richs poetry, what the
sexed body has meant for Rich [4]. It is a body which has biological functions but it is
not limited to them. Though Rich mentions arthritis, sterilisation, operations, this is not
a medicalised body. Rather it is a body on which time and events have left impressions
and some of those impressions have been through medical interventions. It is not the
castrated body of traditional psychoanalysis, nor the body of energies, forces, pulsations
but, rather, a body of material substance with skin, teeth, bones. As an aging body and
a damaged body it is vulnerable, not the body at the center (p. 212), solid and
authoritative but neither is it the post-modern body, mobile, ludic and transformative.
It is not without irony that Richs Notes toward a politics of location with its organic,
carefully placed body appeared at about the same moment as Donna Haraways A
Cyborg Manifesto with its technological, ubiquitous body (Haraway, 1991, pp. 149181)
[5]. When Haraway produces her chart of transitions from the comfortable old
hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks, she challenges the terms of Richs
discourse. Thus, organism is replaced by biotic component, depth, integrity by
surface, boundary, co-operation by communications inhancement; indeed, woman as
cyborg is not whole but endlessly fragmented, a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
postmodern collective and personal self (Haraway, 1991, pp. 161163). Haraway labels
Rich a radical feminist, links her with Susan Grifn and Audre Lorde and views their
oppositional ideologies as comprehensible only within the cyborg world (Haraway,
1991, p. 174). This glaring catch-22cyborg if you do and still cyborg if you
dontfollows a cursory and distinctly ill-at-ease footnote where Haraway qualies her
critique: But all these poets are very complex, not least in their treatment of themes of
lying and erotic, decentred collective and personal identities (Haraway, 1991, p. 247).
Quite. Richs concern about the technological does not indicate a nai

ve idealisation of
the body. On the contrary, she wants her body to take her back to the material, away
from lofty and privileged abstraction, back to particularityto reconnect our thinking
and speaking with the body of this particular living human individuala woman
(pp. 213, 214). In so doing, she rejects not only high theory but alsoand this is
somewhat strange for a poetmetaphor in favour of a soberly literal view of her body
and its relation to institutions and historical events.
Rich could read her body like a text, knowing the history of every mark and scar and
it would be an intimate text; she could move from sight to touch so as to feel and
remember. What she does, though, is to place her body in a public arena of history, class,
race and anti-Semitism, the arena of we. Her body has been well-nourished since before
birth which together with the twice-yearly dental treatment indicates middle-class status.
Time spent typing has had negative effects but this time has been controlled by her own
time-table rather than an employers. She has not been a victim of sexual violence,
whether criminal or socially sanctioned; hence no rapes and a sterilisation which was
chosen not enforced. However, most signicantly, as this section develops, the precise
tabulation of body marks or events gives way to larger, less fathomable questions about
the meaning of a white body and a Jewish body. The body takes on a different register,
less particular, more emblematic, more directly engaged with the central political issues
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304 Mary Eagleton
of the age. The location for this change of perspective is this white skin, that body
covering which Rich presents to the world and which determines the places it has taken
me, the places it has not let me go (pp. 215216). Towards the end of this section, Rich
moves to suppositions about different times and places, specically the Second World
War and incidents in Europe, and confronts the possibility of no address, no location
and no body at all (p. 216). At that momentous point a lacuna opens up and this
threatening space prompts Rich to reassert immediately a distinct and explicitly placed
identity: But I am a North American Jew, born and raised three thousand miles from
the war in Europe (p. 216). Lois McNay comments on the body in a way similar to
Grosz: It is neither pure object since it is the place of ones engagement with the world.
Nor is it pure subject in that there is always a material residue that resists incorporation
into dominant symbolic schema (McNay, 1999, p. 98). This is Richs predicament.
Though in this section of the essay she, at rst, assumes a position approximating
scientic rationality, viewing and, apparently, commenting at a distance on the body in
question, this position cannot be maintained, partly because she is both the knowing
subject and the object under examination, both feeling and looking. It is also partly
because the issues she raises of race and anti-Semitism are located in contexts from which
Rich cannot remain distantthe details of her birth and the mass extermination of the
Jews during the Second World Warjust as her body continues to give expression to an
unaccommodated material residue.
The White Body and the Jewish Body
Several of the difcult questions raised in this section about the relationship between the
body and identity and between individual and collective identities, turn on the issue of
bodily presence or absence. Born into a racist and segregated society, Richs body was
dened as white before it was dened as female: the labour ward was segregated as
was the morgue. In Split at the root: an essay on Jewish identity (1982), she remarks,
some white persons did not even want blood transfusions from black donors, as if some
essence of blackness would dilute or contaminate (p. 112). Far from being a tabula rasa,
the body is already subject before birth to a range of cultural meanings. The familiar
do-you-want-a-girl or do-you-want-a-boy questions might be the rst spoken words
with respect to identity while the demarcations of space, white wards and Black wards,
indicate an institutionally established set of cultural presumptions based on the presumed
racial identities of the parents. In the de-segregated but still racist society of Richs
maturity, locations are no longer labelled Whites or Blacks but the distribution of
Black and white bodies throughout institutionshospitals, schools, prisons, museums
will still be profoundly marked by race. Curious patterns of racial visibility and invisibility
emerge. Whiteness and its status as superior is normative and invisible; Blackness is
visible as a sign for race, indeed, becomes a synonym for race. Steeped in what Rich
terms white solipsism, white feminists have neglected race with relation to Blacks and
have remained, until fairly recently, blindly unaware that whites have a race at all (1979,
p. 306). Iris Marion Young indicates the paradoxes of presence and absence, visibility
and invisibility that ensue. A subordinate group is invisible at the same time that it is
marked out and stereotyped while dominant groups, present in signicant numbers in
any position of power, need not notice their own group being at all; they occupy an
unmarked, neutral, apparently universal position (Young, 1990, p. 129). As Richard
Dyer succinctly puts the same point: The invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in
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Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body 305
white (which is to say dominant discourse) is of a piece with its ubiquity (Dyer, 1997,
p. 3).
Rich poses the question White, female; or female, white (p. 215). What are the
relationships between identities; how is the whiteness female and the femaleness white;
how does the white relate to Black and the female to male; what, if any, are the
priorities? In entering a racially segregated labour ward, race is forced upon one as the
prime determinant but, elsewhere, Rich is conscious of being involved in a tactical
negotiation through a maze of identities. In Split at the root she writes:
It would be easy to push away and deny the gentile in methat white southern
woman, that social christian. At different times in my life I have wanted to
push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman;
I am a lesbian. If I call myself a Jewish lesbian, do I thereby try to shed some
of my southern gentile white womans culpability? If I call myself only through
my mother, is it because I pass more easily through a world where being a
lesbian often seems like outsiderhood enough? (p. 103)
The politics and the ethics of identity come into collision. Are we to see woman and
lesbian as having prime, fundamental status while Jew and white southern are
secondary and examples of a burden of inheritance laid upon an unwilling Rich? But,
equally, Jew could become prime as a defense against the white southern, while that
same white southern could be used, in other circumstances, as a defence against
homophobia. Multiple identities, possibly complementary, possibly competing, possibly
clashing are in play. If we compare with Richs earlier listing (see p. 318 above) we can
see that no matter how many identities are claimed or how carefully they are congured,
difculties escalate rather than lessen. One never knows who one is; one can never know,
already, all ones identities or hold them in some perfect political and psychic synthesis.
To select identities is necessarily ideological, questionable, often a nervous activity. Yet
avoiding the process of selection is impossible; we all have too many identities even to
comprehend, let alone list. The paragraph quoted above is followed by:
According to Nazi logic, my two Jewish grandparents would have made me a
Mischling, rst-degreenonexempt from the Final Solution. (p. 103)
just as in Notes toward a politics of location she refers to herself as a Mischling (p. 216).
The enormity of that identity takes us to a specic time and place and marks an
entitlementreally Jewish, in Nazi logic Jewish enough for the Final Solutionbut it
also marks a difference. This Mischling was in Baltimore, not Prague or Amsterdam, or
Lodz, in fact three thousand miles from the Final Solution.
I want to look a little further at this point at the signicance of entitlement and
difference with respect to Richs Jewish identity. At the start of her essay Rich uses the
terms happened and happens, in each case highlighted and inected with irony
through the use of inverted commas. She shows how the term can be evasive; her earlier
belief that she was a feminist who happened to be a white United States citizen has
come in for some stringent re-education (p. 210). Or it can be blind to a signicance, for
example the copy of Marxs The German Ideology which is lying on Richs table. In the
section on her Mischling identity, two sentences begin with a sense of happenstance: Had
it been not Baltimore. Had I survived Prague (p. 216). The body is subject to the
whim of locations, imponderable twists of fate that lead to doom or survival. In the
memories and writing of Holocaust survivors and their children, the body that survived
is wounded, sometimes physically, always by a harsh emotional legacyguilt at surviv-
ing, a depressing sense of destiny, unworthiness, helplessness, masochism, a burden of
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306 Mary Eagleton
responsibilitysurvived for what? [6] George Steiner opens his essay A kind of survivor
(1965) with this paragraph:
Not literally. Due to my fathers foresight (he had shown it when leaving
Vienna in 1924), I came to America in January 1940, during the phony war.
We left France, where I was born and brought up, in safety. So I happened not
to be there when the names were called out. I did not stand in the public
square with the other children, those I had grown up with. Or see my father
and mother disappear when the train doors were torn open. But in another
sense I am a survivor, and not intact. If I am often out of touch with my own
generation, if that which haunts me and controls my habits of feeling strikes
many of those I should be intimate and working with in my present world as
remotely sinister and articial, it is because the black mystery of what
happened in Europe is to me indivisible from my own identity. Precisely
because I was not there, because an accident of fortune struck my name from
the roll. (Steiner, 1970, p. 140)
Though Steiner speaks in the history and tradition of a European Jew, there is a similar
sentiment here to Richs naming of Baltimore against Prague, Lodz, Amsterdam. The
dilemma is again one of presence against absence. As Steiner makes clear, it is the very
fact of not being there that is related to the preoccupation with being there. Yet, at the
same time, Steiners play on the term survivor is also about entitlement and difference;
he cannot claim to be a literal survivor of the Holocaust but in another sense he is a
survivor, impaired by his closeness to catastrophe. Not there and yet, there; not literally
a survivor and yet, a survivor. Like Rich, Steiner too uses the term happened,
explaining how an accident of fortune struck my name from the roll but, once more,
that accident of fortune has an awful fatefulness about it, a heavy obligation. Somehow
the accident of fortune is not enough to obliterate the irrational feeling that you should
have been there, were destined to be there. For Steiner, that sense of obligation is made
all the more intense through his physical and familial proximity to the events in Europe.
The issue of presence against absence, entitlement against difference is further inected
in the problem of proximity against distance and this is manifest in both geographical
termshow close were you to those eventsand in relational termshow close were
members of your family? [7]
Steiner claims:
The idea that Jews everywhere have been maimed by the European catas-
trophe, that the massacre has left all who survived (even if they were nowhere
near the actual scene) off balance, as does the tearing of a limb, is one which
American Jews can understand in an intellectual sense. But I dont nd it has
immediate personal relevance. The relationship of the American Jew to recent
history is subtly and radically different from that of the European. (Steiner,
1970, pp. 143144)
Richs problem is how to honour that difference while questioning that her position is
solely intellectual. Particularly through her father and husband, the disaster nds a
more immediate personal relevance. Her sentence, But I am a North American Jew,
born and raised three thousand miles from the war, distinguishes her from the Jews of
the Final Solution and the separating is, in this instance, ethical not tactical. It springs
from a concern not to presume a we or to claim an unjust entitlement. The struggle is
to establish the legitimate connections while making the necessary distinctions so that one
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Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body 307
does not slide into taking equivalencies for grantedidentifying with an experience is not
the same as having an experienceor, on the other hand, becoming indifferent.
In Richs poetry of this period the pain of her own body has become a source for
understanding the pain of others and for nding a route through the ethical dimensions.
In Contradictions: tracking poems (19831985) she returns three times, explicitly, to the
relation between her bodys pain and the pain on the streets (1986). In poem 11, her
body, recently operated on and drugged, is confusedly mixed with a massacre, the pain
on the streets and the dying and the dead (p. 93). In poem 19 she rejects that merging:
If were in danger of mistaking
our personal trouble for the pain in the streets dont listen to us
(1986, p. 101)
In the nal poem of the sequence, poem 29, the relation becomes subtle, imprecise but
promising:
the bodys pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur
(1986, p. 111)
Rich was born in 1929, the same year as Anne Frank but her pain and Anne Franks
pain are not the same. It is not that there is no connection between Rich and Anne
Frank; it is not that there is every connection between Rich and Anne Frank. Rather,
there is a blurred edge between Rich as a Jew at the time of the Second World War,
a Mischling, rst-degreenonexempt from the Final Solution and her childhood three
thousand miles away from Anne Franks hiding place in Amsterdam.
The Body and the Nation
In Richs childhood game of writing her address as an ever-expanding series of locations,
issues in relating I and we, the personal and the collective, the local and the universal
are graphically indicated:
Adrienne Rich
14 Edgevale Road
Baltimore, Maryland
The United States of America
The Continent of North America
The Western Hemisphere
The Earth
The Solar System
The Universe
(pp. 211212)
Just as the possibility of no address perilously challenges Richs sense of identity, so here
each line in this most full of addresses presents a problem of identity and a problem of
the uncertain relationships between those identities. The child may see herself as
insignicant in face of these larger and more dominant forces and respond with a feeling
of awe at the magnitude of the universe. Or she may feel condently rooted at the centre,
the locus from which everything expands. What in the child can be a necessary defense
against vulnerability can become in the adult the arrogance of believing ourselves at the
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308 Mary Eagleton
center (p. 223). Such a position is to emulate Dickens Mr Dombey for whom the
Copernican revolution appears never to have happened and, thus, the self-aggrandising
individual becomes, in their own mind, the pivot around which the world rotates.
The adult Rich cannot console herself with a xed identity or a position at the centre;
she has to come to an understanding of the larger constructs, not only the 14 Edgevale
Road and Baltimore which presumably she understood in some way as a child.
Though in her poetry, nation in the form of rural locations where she has lived is often
described with loving detail, the political locations termed The United States of
America and, more widely, The Continent of North America and The Western
Hemisphere have been difcult for Rich. Born a US citizen, she is both innocent and
accountable (p. 145); another essay is entitled, pertinently, North American tunnel
vision (1983) (pp. 136155). Like any politically aware member of a powerful, econom-
ically colonising nation she can benet from certain advantages while being ashamed of
that facility, can appropriate others, even with the best of motives. For example, when
writing on Nicaragua, Rich is equivocally placed: I could physically feel the weight of
the United States of North America, its military forces, its vast appropriations of money,
its mass media, at my back; I could feel what it means, dissident or not, to be part of
that raised boot of power, the cold shadow we cast everywhere to the south (p. 220). She
acknowledges the oppression while knowing she is part of it just as, elsewhere, she
criticises the intellectual vanguardism of First World feminists while also travelling to a
Nicaraguan conference carrying in hand an agenda from US feminism to which we
expect that society to answer or be written off (p. 157). A caustically self-critical tone is
strong in that sentence. In this context the wish to throw off responsibility for ones
nation is understandable and Rich is particularly attracted to Woolfs famous statement
from Three Guineas: as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country.
As a woman my country is the whole world (Woolf, 1938/1993, p. 234). Yet, a page
after quoting Woolf, she rewrites those words: As a woman I have a country; as a
woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or
by saying three times As a woman my country is the whole world (p. 212). She has
to admit as impossible womens unproblematic disassociation from a countrys national-
istic and militaristic fervour in favour of some kind of international, all-female pacism.
To attempt such a dissociation would be to give in to a false transcendence, an
irresponsibility towards the cultures and geopolitical regions in which we are rooted
(p. 183) and, equally, to abrogate feminisms own responsibility for North American
cultural chauvinism (p. 162).
A closer look at the context of Woolfs stirring words somewhat undermines their
aspiration, just as Rich constantly undermines her own speaking position by questioning
her privilege. For each writer, too, the body proves both to be the wayward element and
the ground for a battle between the rational and the emotional. Fixed in every feminists
mind as the pacist, internationalist slogan, commentators have tended not to notice the
lines that immediately follow Woolfs statement:
And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some
love of England dropped into a childs ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm
tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring
nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her
to give to England rst what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole
world. (Woolf, 1993, p. 234)
Though in the preceding pages Woolf has explained how instinct and emotion can be
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Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body 309
replaced by reason, so that each pretence to patriotism and English superiority is
undercut by advice on careful thought and conscientious research, yet the irrational
continues to surface, here in a plangent, lyrical memory of an English upper-middle-class
childhood. Woolf is all too aware of the dangers in the emotion; she calls it obstinate
having, presumably, resisted the promptings of reason. Yet, at the same time, she is
deliciously enveloped by a nostalgia for childhood places, sounds, moods. The juxtapo-
sition of pure and irrational hints at how easily pure emotion can give way to the
impure, how a pure love of country might stray into the politically reprehensible.
Woolfs solution to the dilemma is no solution at all; indeed, what does that nal point
mean about giving peace and freedom to England rst? Is Woolf proposing a nationalist
form of pacism in place of the internationalism of the slogan so as to accommodate her
recalcitrant emotion? Is she suggesting, improbably, that it is possible or desirable to
orchestrate some kind of pacist domino-effect around the world starting with England?
The obfuscation is a sign of Woolfs unease and exposes the difculty in reformulating
ones most entrenched national allegiances. Elaine Scarry comments how the body itself
can exhibit what she calls loyalty to these political realms, including the nation. That
loyalty is likely to be permanently and deeply there, more permanently there, less easily
shed, than those disembodied forms of patriotism that exist in verbal habits or in
thoughts about ones national identity (Scarry, 1985, p. 109). Woolfs words would seem
to lend some credence to that view. Englishness might not provoke any particular
gestures but it does provoke for Woolf both an intellectual and political quandary as well
as a bodily apprehension of Englishness. This is expressed specically in an aural form,
the sound of English voices, and, possibly, in a sensation of maternal presence in the
murmuring nursery rhymes. These bodily affects exist alongside, indeed dispute with,
her rational disavowals. However strongly Woolf evokes reason and the mind, something
deeper, irrational, more bodily makes itself felt [8].
Woolfs (1992) nal text, Between the Acts, originally published in 1941 and produced
under the pressure of war when the possibility of invasion and loss of a national identity
seemed very close, illustrates a complex working of the concept of nation. England is
still identied with militarism, jingoism, cruel superiority and social divisions but we see
also England as history, culture, language and landscape and, though these large
concepts are repeatedly confounded by Woolf, they are not emptied of signicance; the
satire may be trenchant but without invalidating the object. Gillian Beer describes the
novel as a comedic threnody (Beer, 1996, p. 170). Bungled amateur dramatics,
desultory conversations about cesspools and characters just this side of caricature exist
along with a profound lament for what might soon be overturned. In face of this crisis,
we is most fully substituted for I (Beer, 1996, p. 72) and, as in Three Guineas, the
creation of that communityas, indeed, the rejection of itis often written on the
body. Thus, in the mirrors that end the pageant, the audience sees Ourselves!
Ourselves!. In a movement of intense carnival, cutting through the distinctions of Man
the Master and Brute, civilised and savage, human and animal, the bodies are
exposed in shattered, distorted, defenceless reections. But the megaphonic voice from
the bushes brings them back to a sense of shared responsibility through what might be
seen as an Old Testament admonishment against arrogance, hypocrisy, self-interest,
dishonesty, complicity with violence and a New Testament appeal to kindliness, sensi-
tivity and principle. The music which ends the pageant saves the audience from the edge
of appalling crevassesan audience which is still composed of the heterogeneous orts,
scraps and fragments but is also believing that they crashed; solved; united (Woolf,
1992, pp. 16570).
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310 Mary Eagleton
Woolf is driven by need and hope, not idealism, in her creation of a national
community but she remains clear-eyed about the continued existence of the regressive
meanings of nation. Giles, enraged and frustrated, pointedly rejects any sense of
commonality with the homosexual and masturbatory, William Dodge:
We? said Giles. We? He looked once, at William. He knew not his name; but
what his left hand was doing. It was a bit of luck that he could despise him,
not himself. (Woolf, 1992, p. 100)
Giles sees William as a toady (p. 55); William, full of self-loathing, sees himself as a snake
in the grass (p. 67). It is precisely this monstrous inversion of a snake choking on a toad
that Giles encounters during the interval of the pageant and stamps to death in a bloody,
sticky, orgasmic release (p. 89). For Giles, the muscular, the hirsute,
the virile (p. 95), aggressive masculinity, love of violence, repressed homoeroticism,
unarticulated and confused anxieties will nd their full expression in the forthcoming war.
Conclusion
In Richs polemical essays, nation is rmly placed, chiey as an oppressive political and
economic entity realised in the nations government. Rich refers to my governments
proven capacity for violence and arrogance of power (p. 210); nations as pretexts used
by multinational conglomerates to serve their interests (p. 212); the nation as the voice
of Cold War rhetoric; earlier we saw the nation as the raised boot of power in
Nicaragua. Against this, she describes forces of resistancefeminists, Communists, Civil
Rights and anti-racist workers, the Palestinian Resistance, the pacist movement, the
anti-apartheid movement and so onand, in so doing, consciously chooses a wide range
of international examples. But, as in Woolf, reason and emotionor, to use Richs
terms, brain and heartare in dispute and their incompatibility provokes for Rich too
a bodily sensation in a state of arrest:
I do not any longer believemy feelings do not allow me to believethat the
white eye sees from the center. Yet I often nd myself thinking as if I still
believed that were true. Or, rather, my thinking stands still. I feel in a state of
arrest, as if my brain and heart were refusing to speak to each other. My brain,
a womans brain, has exulted in breaking the taboo against women thinking, has
taken off on the wind, saying, I am the woman who asks the questions. My heart has
been learning in a much more humble and laborious way, learning that feelings
are useless without facts, that all privilege is ignorant at the core. (p. 226)
Like Woolf, Rich worries about the refractory nature of heart/emotion, its reluctance to
be schooled. Feelings lure the white eye back to the centre, to its accustomed place of
privilege. Yet, the brain is also problematic, at one moment acting out of accord with the
heart while also being the source of exultation, the route to becoming the thinking,
speaking subject, the woman who asks the questions. Paradoxically, it is the brain
(reason) that is most affective and expressive; the heart (emotion) toils painstakingly.
In trying to get beyond Adornos terrible dictum, No poetry after Auschwitz, Steiner
doubts the efcacy of the rational, [f]or it is by no means certain that rational discourse
can cope with these questions, lying as they do outside the normative syntax of human
communication, in the explicit domain of the bestial (1970, p. 164). How to speak the
unspeakable; how to nd, as Elaine Scarry suggests, a language for pain. Steiners act of
optimism is to look to the role of record and imagination (1970, p. 157) [9]. He reasserts
the rational and historical analysisthe duty not to forget, the duty to ask questions and
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Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body 311
nd outalongside the potential to imagine backward, to enter hell by act of imaginat-
ive talent (1970, p. 165). The rational mode is strongly present in Richs essay as it is
in much politics of location writing. The project demands self-reexivity, a deliberate and
conscientious unpicking of determining factors, a willingness to be searching. In an
interview with Audre Lorde, Rich bemoans her association with the rational but, like
Steiner, reclaims the term by redening it and linking it with a progressive politics [10]:
[O]ne of the crosses Ive borne all my life is being told that Im rational,
logical, coolI am not cool, and Im not rational and logical in that icy sense.
But theres a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine,
I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. Im afraid of it all
slipping away into: Ah, yes, I understand you. So if I ask for documen-
tation, its because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has
created, that racism has created. (Lorde, 1984, p. 104) [11]
The rational, a careful hearing of chapter and verse, prevents a too-easy consensus.
Here the focus is the difference between Black and white; earlier it was the difference
between Jews close to the Holocaust and Jews removed from it. Just as Rich wants to
ground the body, she prefers the detailed, factual evidence of the rational to free-oating
abstraction (p. 214). She revises any imprecise sentences and asks: When, where, and
under what conditions has the statement been true? (p. 214). In so doing, she illustrates
Rita Felskis comment: feminism does not so much negate reason as engage in more
diversied forms of discursive argumentation and critique which can take into account
previously repressed aspects of personal and social lifeemotion, desire, the body,
personal relations (Felski, 1989, p. 71).
But Steiners reference to imagination is equally relevant to Rich. While Rich wants
the heart to learn from the brainfeelings are useless without factsthe brain, is, in
turn, deeply affected by the heart and her essay writing is infused with other modes
lyric, meditative, utopianand emotions of loss, longing, indignation, determination.
The impulse towards relation and connectedness is the underlying structure of Richs
work and, hence, the constant oscillation across binary divisionsI and we, the
rational and the emotional, ones own pain and the others pain, horror and hopefulness.
The dynamic is also between past and present. Richs work necessarily looks backthe
rewriting, the re-visioning, the self-citing, the self-critiquingbut, equally, the writing
with its constant questioning and ardent, compelling rhythm drives the reader forward
to a different future. Appropriately, Rich ends her essay with a question about pronouns,
about identity and relationWho is we?but, just as characteristically, she poses the
question in terms of an ambiguous conation of a collective subject and a singular verb
and, then, refuses to accept that there is any easy resolutionThis is the end of these
notes, but it is not an ending (p. 231).
NOTES
[1] I should like to record my thanks to Liz Yorke and Ann Kaloski who have greatly helped me with their
comments on Rich and, in Anns case, on an earlier version of this essay.
[2] The reference is to Richs essay Notes toward a politics of location (1984) which is included in her
collection, Blood, Bread and Poetry: selected prose 19791985. As I shall be referring extensively to this essay
and others in the collection, I shall reference only by noting the page number(s) so as to keep this text
uncluttered. References to other texts will follow the accepted practice.
[3] See Bordo (1993) for a critical engagement with deconstructive concepts of the subject. A slightly earlier
version of her chapter, Feminism, postmodernism, and gender-scepticism, appears in Nicholson (1990)
which contains a good selection of essays on this topic.
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312 Mary Eagleton
[4] See, for example, the sequence, Twenty-one love poems in Rich (1978).
[5] The genesis of Haraways essay is complex but she dates its origin around 19831984.
[6] There is a formidable body of imaginative writing that would testify to this. See Anne Michaels (1997)
and Joseph Skibell (1998) for recent examples.
[7] Steiner speaks movingly of the terrible legacy which he feels European Jews of the rst half of the
twentieth century passed to their children. Note also the signicance of the psychotherapeutic work on
children of the Holocaust and, of course, Richs dialogue in poetry and essays with her father.
[8] Hermione Lees (1996) discussion in her biography of Virginia Woolf of the houses Woolf lived in
provides an illuminating link at this point. Both the feeling and some of the details here are reminiscent
of Woolfs memories of her childhood summer home, Talland House.
[9] Steiner quotes Adorno and discusses the problem of representation after the Holocaust in Silence and
the Poet, ibid, pp. 3654. Note Richs reference to Adorno and her discussion of Irena Klepsz as a
survivor in History stops for no one, (1995a). See also Griselda Pollock (1996) for a comparable
discussion in the context of art about representation of the Holocaust.
[10] We can see here how Rich, often too readily associated by critics with a radical-feminist anti-rationalism,
is, in fact, much more open to the possibilities of a rational discourse at the service of radical politics;
in so doing she heralds later feminist debates on a strategic use of the rational.
[11] See Anderson (1997) for a related discussion on Rich and the rational.
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