I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: Penelope did this too. And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day And undoing it all through the night; Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight; And along towards morning, when you think it will [...]
Tag Archives: feminist
Circe’s Torment
I regret bitterlyThe years of loving you in bothYour presence and absence, regretThe law, the vocationThat forbid me to keep you, the seaA sheet of glass, the sun-bleachedBeauty of the Greek ships: howCould I have power ifI had no wishTo transform you: asYou loved my body,As you found therePassion we held aboveAll other gifts, in [...]
Circe’s Power
I never turned anyone into a pig.Some people are pigs; I make themLook like pigs. I’m sick of your worldThat lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;Undisciplined lifeDid that to them. As pigs, Under the care ofMe and my ladies, theySweetened right up. Then I reversed the spell, showing you my [...]
Circe’s Grief
In the end, I made myselfKnown to your wife asA god would, in her own house, inIthaca, a voiceWithout a body: shePaused in her weaving, her head turningFirst to the right, then leftThough it was hopeless of courseTo trace that sound to anyObjective source: I doubtShe will return to her loomWith what she knows now. [...]
Haraway Revisited
Reading Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” again gets me to thinking (again!) about the importance of language. While language has been important since “Aristotle still ruled,” it has taken on an increased significance since the beginning of the move from atoms to bits. The language of western civilizations has been interwoven with the dualities [...]
Jane Flax’ Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory”
Jane Flax suggests that western culture is in a state of transition. Caught between Enlightenment ideas and those precipitated by historical events like the atomic bomb and the Holocaust — or postmodernism. Flax focuses on the general question of constituting the self, while her specific analysis is on gender relations. She examines gender constructions and [...]
Shedding Light on Edna’s Suicide
The final page of The Awakening finds Edna stripping off the clothes that are a symbol of the shackles that bind her to her pre-awakened existence. With these shackles removed, she feels free: “How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its [...]
