In Adrienne Rich's poem, "Amnesia," I do
not believe it to be a feminist poem. Usually the theme of feminism
includes a sense of a woman's oppression by a man or male-dominated society, for
example.
Defined, Dictionary.com notes that feminism
is:
...the
doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of
men
This poem gives me to
believe that a man is involved and a woman hurt:
Becoming a man means
leaving
someone, or
something—
The poem is
entitled, "Amnesia," which along with the following lines, indicates that the speaker is
hurt and trying hard to forget:
I almost trust myself to
know
when we're getting to that
scene—
call it the snow-scene in Citizen
Kane:
the mother handing over her
son
The trust the speaker is
trying to develop within herself is a battle against memories of separation—she gives us
the image of a boy leaving his mother. My first inclination when reading this poem was
that the woman's father had left when she was young. However, with the lines mentioned
above, and the speaker's reference to memories ("a picture of the past") and growing up
("the putting-away of a childish thing"), the poem could refer to a son leaving his
mother. In the movie Citizen Kane, the main character dies looking
at a snow-globe, trying to capture the past—a vision of his home—obscured by the falling
snow inside the globe: the past is hidden from him. It also points out that the one left
behind is also trying to see the one lost, looking
out through that same snow, having been "left
behind."
If this poem were about feminism, it would
criticize some kind of male behavior against a woman because she is
a woman: inferior in some way. The sense I get in this poem is not inequality, but a
loss of love—of being left behind—which is what Kane experiences in a way, when he is
sent away. The result still speaks of loneliness, and that is what I sense here: it has
to do with a loss of someone loved who has gone away.
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