The Language of the Body: Allusions to Self-Experience in Women's Poetry

The author uses the work of 2 female poets to explore women's representations of self and body in their art. In these works, one can see how woman's ambivalent relationship with the body impedes the ability to know what can only be known through grounding in one's experience. Sylvia Plath, in her 1962 poem “Three Women” (S. Plath, 1981), uses the frames of 3 disparate women, each standing at the uneasy precipice of motherhood, to express her multiplicity and deep ambivalence regarding the body-self. In contrast, Adrienne Rich's work reflects a greater peace with the body, embodying the ongoing conflict between body becoming mind and mind becoming body. Poetry invites the reader into the text through the use of anomaly and disjunction, which deconstructs ostensible meanings and invites personalized and affectively charged readings. Rich's work, most particularly, invites the reader toward the kind of transformative journey referred to by Bion as “transformations in ‘O.’” In this way, poetry, like analysis, helps to fragment occluded meanings, facilitating new, more cogent interpretations and integrations, thereby facilitating the task of becoming.