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aunt jennifer tigers Essay

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Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
By Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers stride across a screen
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on striding, proud and unafraid.

• The first stanza sets the setting for Aunt Jennifer’s dream world for her and her tigers (Aunt Jennifer represents all women who are caught under the oppressive hand of a …show more content…

What does she intend to illustrate? How does the poem illustrate this point/s?

•I believe she meant to illustrate a narrative of a woman, Aunt Jennifer, under the oppression of a male. This is illustrated in the 2nd stanza when Rich describes Aunt Jennifer’s hand as being too heavy to pull the needle through the wool because of the “massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band” (7, 633). This “massive weight” is man’s control over his wife and the wedding band is a symbol of his control. This idea is also supported in the third stanza when Rich describes Aunt Jennifer dead being still “ringed with the ordeals she was mastered by” (9-10, 633). Overall the poem illustrates oppression by stating in the first stanza what she really desires and then describing how she is oppressed and held back by the male in her life.

“For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is no way passive…Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate, nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is

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